“Can we walk around town?” Meg asked. “What a wonderful place!”
“Yes, we’ll have a look around. Now, for God’s sake, quit enthusing. Every antique dealer in town knows about that attic of Sylvia’s; I’ve been offered bribes by ten different people just for a look at the place. Keep your mouth shut and your eyes open.”
Meg thoroughly enjoyed the morning. The casual friendliness of pedestrians and shopkeepers seemed genuine, and very pleasant, after the detachment of the city. She knew she had to thank Andy for some of the warmth with which she was greeted; everyone called him by his first name. He was accepted as “one of us” by the old families, and the newcomers respected him as a genuine native. Some of the shops were owned by recent immigrants from other states, who were cashing in on the lucrative antique craze, but most of the names were solid Pennsylvania Dutch—Schlegel, Klees, Konig, Kloof.
With Meg’s pleasure went an increasing awareness of her ignorance. She knew enough about antiques to distinguish Chippendale from Hepplewhite, but that was about it; she had never realized how complex the field was. The Pennsylvania Dutch antiques were totally unfamiliar to her. By following Andy’s advice, to keep her mouth shut and her eyes open, she discovered that sgraffito ware had designs scratched onto the surface through the coating of glaze; and that slipware had free-hand patterns of birds and tulips dripped directly onto the molded clay through a spout in a pot. She heard about painted dower chests and bride boxes, toleware and showtowels; and she realized how much more she needed to know. Her head was spinning when Andy suggested they stop for lunch. There was, it seemed, a hotel in town.
“Too damned quaint for words,” Andy said. “But it’s good home cooking; almost as good as yours.”
Meg thought it was better. The chicken pot pie, followed by homemade peach ice cream, restored her spirits considerably, and Andy reassured her when she deplored her lack of knowledge.
“You’ll pick it up fast,” he said confidently. “Don’t flip; if Sylvia decides to sell the stuff in the attic she’ll have to hire an appraiser. It won’t be your responsibility.”
They had coffee on the veranda of the hotel. After a while Andy excused himself and went inside to talk to the innkeeper, who was an old family friend. Meg sat rocking back and forth, mindlessly content as a cat in the mellow autumn sunlight. Gradually, however, she began to feel a vague uneasiness. Looking around, she saw that one of the pedestrians had stopped and was standing on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. He was staring directly at her.
He was tall and painfully thin. A long cavalry-style moustache drooped disconsolately over his mourn; the ends were ragged and damp, as if he had been chewing on them. His filthy sleeveless shirt displayed long bare arms with stringy muscles. Large holes in his garment framed a set of bony ribs.
As Meg’s eyes met his, he stepped back a pace, but instead of retreating he turned toward the steps and mounted them. Meg knew who he was. He was almost a caricature of a Bohemian, and the paint smears on his dirty garments betrayed his profession. She also understood why Sylvia’s former protege had not finished a canvas in eight months. It was one thirty in the afternoon, and the man was so drunk he couldn’t walk straight.
Culver came up the stairs in a series of zigzag staggers and advanced on Meg. She was alone on the veranda, and she felt her pulses quicken. There could be no danger, not in broad daylight, not from this scurvy specimen; but his mere presence was unpleasant. He planted himself squarely in front of her, fists on his hipbones, and smiled.
“How nice mat we should meet so unexpectedly,” he said, in a high-pitched, surprisingly precise voice. “The old protege and the new! It helps to be related to the old bitch, doesn’t it?”
“She supported you for almost a year,” Meg said, rocking.
Culver scowled. “One year! I’d still be there if it wasn’t for you.”
“I had nothing to do with your being evicted.”
“Oh, no?” Culver seemed to think this a devastating retort. He repeated it with relish. “Oh, no?”
Meg continued to rock. She found the movement soothing. It seemed to annoy Culver. He made a grab for the arm of the rocking chair, missed, and almost lost his balance. For a moment Meg was afraid he was going to topple into her lap, but he caught himself and stood swaying. His eyes had gone blank.
“Lousy rotten deal,” he mumbled, staring off into space. “Like always. No fair. I always get a lousy, unfair deal… Thanks to you,” he added, focusing his eyes on Meg and scowling. “This time I know who’s the one. You did it. Told her lies, just so you could get in and get me out.”
Meg had to make a conscious effort to keep on rocking. She was beginning to be frightened. The street seemed so deserted. Were small towns as bad as cities in their fear of getting involved? She was only too familiar with Culver’s type; he was a city specimen himself. Not drunk; high on some drug, self-pitying and weak, seeking a scapegoat in the manner of all weaklings who refuse to take the responsibility for their own failures. Dangerous, all the same, in the artificially induced courage of drugs.
She was about to abandon dignity and let out a loud yell when the door opened and Andy appeared. He didn’t pause; his brows drew together and he started toward Culver. Simultaneously a fourth person made her appearance. Meg didn’t see where she came from; she ran to Culver and caught his arm. She was as round as he was thin; rolls of fat wobbled as she moved. She wore shorts and a scarf tied around her heavy breasts like a halter. Her eyes were so heavily made up they looked like the artificial eyes of a doll.
“Come on, Frank,” she panted, tugging at him. “Come on, let’s go, huh?”
“You took the words right out of my mouth, Mrs. Culver,” Andy said.
“You know I’m not Mrs. Culver,” said the woman— girl, Meg mentally revised. She couldn’t be more than twenty.
“I know, but Sylvia doesn’t,” Andy said. The girl giggled. She shifted her weight so that one ample hip protruded, and looked coyly at Andy from under her gummy lashes.
“That old bitch,” she said unoriginally. “She wouldn’t a let us live there if she knew we wasn’t married. I told you before, call me Cherry.”
All at once Meg wanted to laugh. Andy’s expression, as he studied Cherry and considered her invitation, was one of the funniest things she had ever seen.
“Look, Cherry,” Andy said finally. “Why don’t you exert your unquestioned charms on handsome here and persuade him to move on? He’s gotten all he’s going to get out of Wasserburg; the only thing he’ll get from now on is trouble.”
“You keep out of this,” Culver shouted. “We’ll stay here as long as we want to. This is a free country!”
Andy sighed. “Okay, I tried. Beat it, Culver. Scram. Leave. Go away. Split.” He folded his fingers into a fist and looked at it thoughtfully.
Culver backed away. With Cherry guiding him, he wobbled off down the street.
Meg drew a deep breath. She meant to make a gracious remark about Andy’s appearance at the strategic moment, but his smug expression aggravated her.
“Why didn’t you tell me that revolting couple was still in town?” she asked. “No wonder you warned me about locking the house! You might have been more definite.”
“I knew Culver was hanging around,” Andy admitted. “But he’s nothing to worry about. All talk and no action.”
“That’s probably what they used to say about Lizzie Borden.”
“Slander, nasty slander. Lizzie was acquitted, free and clear, by the state of Massachusetts.”
“What does Lizzie Borden have to do with this?”
“You were the one who brought her up,” Andy pointed out. “Forget about the Culvers.”
“I found the dishes, Andy.”
“What dishes?”
“The ones with the daisy pattern. You missed a few pieces.”
“Oh, yeah. They really had a fun time in the kitchen. You should have seen it.”
“I didn’t have to see i
t.”
Andy looked at her closely. “What bothers you so much about a few pieces of broken china? For God’s sake, Meg, don’t be so damned oversensitive. That’s the sort of feeble malice people like Culver enjoy. Be thankful they smash dishes instead of heads.” And then, as Meg stood silent, he took her arm, adding, “Let’s go home and get to work. You think too much. As Caesar said of Cassius—”
“‘Such men are dangerous.” Men… The trouble with women is they don’t think enough.“
II
Andy had tried to prepare Meg for what she would find in the attic, but the reality overwhelmed her; it was beyond anything she could have imagined in her wildest fancies. To begin with, the singular noun was an error. The attic was not a single room but a series of rooms, large and small. Meg had to deal with a large loftlike chamber, as big as the drawing room downstairs, and several smaller areas, some as tiny as closets, others the size of a normal bedroom.
The large room was filled with furniture, not only from wall to wall but from floor to ceiling. Chairs were upended on top of tables, dismantled bed frames lay atop sideboards. Meg removed a few of the smaller pieces but soon realized she could not go any further without some sort of master plan. Some of the objects were too heavy for her to handle alone, and they were so intricately balanced that an injudicious move might bring a heap of wood tumbling down on her. It was also a question as to where she could put the furniture after she moved it. The other rooms were almost as full.
The furniture was only part of the problem. The attics held the accumulated discards of generations, heaped into miniature hills of miscellany. Broken toys and piles of books. Trunks filled with old clothes. Tottering pyramids of magazines, yellowing sheet music, warped records. Household appliances, including two treadle sewing machines, a cherry pitter, and three meat grinders. Meg didn’t see any coffins, but she wouldn’t have been surprised to find one; every other object the human animal needs or wants between the cradle and the grave was represented. And there were whole sections she couldn’t even see, they were so barricaded by piled-up boxes.
Meg spent the first few minutes staring and swearing. Then the place began to cast its insidious spell. She was not immune to the lure of buried treasure, and this was an antique hunter’s paradise. The current craze for nostalgia gave value to every article. Meg’s interest was not solely commercial. She found it all fascinating, from the moth-eaten cloche hat that came clear down over her eyebrows to the sheet music, which included hits by Victor Herbert and patriotic songs from the First World War. The attic was a pleasant place; it was dusty but dry, and there was plenty of light from the dormer windows. Meg cleared off a rose velvet settee and wasted the first morning reading old Saturday Evening Post issues.
On a sunny afternoon several days later, she finished an Edgar Rice Burroughs serial in a crumbling issue of Argosy and closed the magazine with a sigh, followed by a long, luxurious stretch. The stuffy warmth of the attic made her sleepy, but as she gazed drowsily around, a faint twinge of conscience pricked through the lazy content that had held her. There was quite a bit of furniture in the attic. Maybe it was time she got to work.
Yet Meg knew she hadn’t really wasted the time. The leisurely, mindless interlude was just what her nerves needed. She hadn’t had a hallucination since the day she arrived. At night she slept soundly and dreamlessly. She had seen nothing of Andy, and she hadn’t missed him; the idea of being alone in the big empty house didn’t bother her a bit. Now she was beginning to get a little bored with puttering. She was rested and relaxed and ready to work.
A glance at the sunny, dust-streaked window made her decide to put off the work for one more day. It was already late in the afternoon, and the weather appeared to be glorious. She had spent the days inside the house, which was foolish; the fine weather wouldn’t last indefinitely.
Meg walked straight down the stairs and out of the house without even stopping to wash her hands. The air had a summer warmth, but the leaves were beginning to turn; scarlet and gold and rust boughs stood out like splashes of paint against the green of the pines. As Meg strolled across the lawn she wondered what Andy was doing. He had called once, to see if she needed any groceries, but she had not felt conversational that day, and Andy had been brief and businesslike. She hadn’t even seen his cottage, except as a square of yellow lighted window, visible from her bedroom at night. Now she headed for the row of trees that hid the caretaker’s place from the big house.
It was a pretty little house, lacking only a thatched roof to be a perfect replica of an English cottage. Meg didn’t go in. The doors and windows were wide open and she could hear the sound of rapid staccato typing. She smiled to herself as she retreated. If Andy wasn’t writing a book, he was giving a good imitation of it. His typing sounded like a practiced version of the good old four-finger method rather than the smooth rattle of a professional; in fact, it was almost too fast to be wholly convincing. Even as she thought this, the typing slowed and stopped. Meg’s smile broadened. The author’s momentary inspiration had run out. It would be followed by a long, desperate silence, as he stared hopefully at his unfinished page and groped for a new idea.
Meg knew better than to intrude. She didn’t feel like company, not Andy’s, at any rate; his personality was too undependable, abrasive one moment, cheerful the next. She didn’t want to risk her gentle, relaxed mood. Slowly she strolled across the lawn toward the summerhouse, which stood in a ring of birches—slim silver-and-gold trees, with their yellowing leaves and white trunks.
She explored the grounds and the nearby woods for another hour and then started back toward the house. It was almost time for the daily cocktail Sylvia had allowed her. She would sit on the veranda and admire the sunset. She opened the front door and had taken two steps across the hall before she heard the sound.
Music. It was a piano, and the tune was familiar—a Mozart minuet, precise and delicate.
Meg’s first thought was that someone had entered the house while she was out. She had not locked the door. It had seemed ridiculous to do so on such a bright, peaceful day.
There was a piano in the house—a concert-sized Bechstein grand. Meg had tried it; it was sadly out of tune. She remembered that, reasoning calmly, and at the same moment she knew that the notes still echoing through the hall were not made by a piano. Like a piano, and yet different… less resonant, softer…
Meg made a convulsive, groping gesture with both hands. The sounds stopped. They did not end, they were cut off, as if a door had closed.
Meg sat down on the stairs. Her heart was beating too fast, but it slowed after a short time. Rising, she went into the drawing room and approached the piano.
It was a fantastic piece of furniture. The original owner had not been content with the simple elegance of black or brown wood. The piano was gilded. The heavy legs were carved with lions’ heads and bunches of fat, aggressive roses, and more roses adorned the music rack. Meg was not much of a pianist; but once, years ago, she had learned that very Mozart minuet. As she struck the yellowed ivory keys, the notes sounded—dissonant, because of the instrument’s need of tuning, faulty because of her lack of skill…
No. No piano, not even an instrument in perfect tune, could emit such sounds as the chords she had heard. They must have been made by a smaller, older ancestor of a modern piano—a spinet or harpsichord. There was no need to wonder why an intruder or unexpected guest might entertain himself by playing the harpsichord. There was no such instrument in the house.
Another hallucination.
There was no reason why Meg should be surprised at the idea. The doctors had warned her that the hallucinatory sounds and sights would fade gradually, in intensity as well as in frequency of occurrence. The fact that she hadn’t had one for some days didn’t mean they were over. Then why couldn’t she accept it?
Standing motionless in the silent room, Meg tried to figure it out. The sounds had seemed so real! Never before had she felt the slightest doubt th
at her senses were tricking her; never had she believed for an instant in the j reality of what she saw or heard. Yet on this occasion she had thought, first of all, that a real intruder must be playing a real instrument.
The doctors hadn’t warned her about this development. Maybe it didn’t mean anything; maybe this was a unique case, If not… Meg twisted her hands together. Hallucinations were bad enough when she could recognize them for what they were. If she was unable to distinguish reality from illusion.
A sound from the doorway startled her. Whirling around, she saw Andy.
“How long have you been there?” she gasped.
“I was looking for you. What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. I went for a walk and…” Meg stopped, j “Never mind. Nothing. Would you—would you like a drink? I was about to sit down on the veranda and admire the sunset.”
“You never told me you could play the piano,” Andy said. “What else do you know besides Mozart?”
Meg felt the color draining from her cheeks. Then she remembered. She had played the minuet—badly, but she had played it—on the Bechstein. With an effort she got control of herself. She was behaving like a fool, and Andy was staring. It would never do to let him realize how badly she was shaken.
House of Many Shadows Page 4
