House of Many Shadows

by Barbara Michaels

  Culver’s eyes left her face; she deduced, from his expression, that he saw someone coming. There were also two pedestrians at the far end of the street, behind Culver. Meg felt a surge of gratitude and relief; the town was not so indifferent as it appeared.

  Culver cursed her under his breath and walked away. Meg turned—she had not dared turn her back on Culver— and saw a tall, gray-haired man approaching. She remembered his name—Stoltzfuss. It was a memorable name. He owned the Antique Barn at the far end of town.

  “Everything all right?” he asked.

  “It is now. Thank you.”

  “Just happened to be passing by,” Stoltzfuss said.

  “And those two gentlemen too?” Meg indicated the other pedestrians, who had stopped several hundred feet away, as if in conversation.

  “We didn’t want to butt in if you were having a nice private talk.”

  “Oh, wow,” Meg said, with feeling.

  Stoltzfuss grinned. He had a craggy, attractive face and the ruddy complexion of a man who spends a good deal of time outdoors. He was probably in his late fifties, but Meg could see why Culver wouldn’t choose to tangle with him. But then she imagined Culver would avoid an encounter with anyone over twelve.

  “Wonder if you’d like a ride home,” Stoltzfuss said. “I’m going to Cartersville, right past the house, if you’re ready.”

  “You’re a liar,” Meg said, smiling. “But I’ll accept, with thanks.”

  A few minutes later they were on their way out of town in Stoltzfuss’s truck. He kept insisting he really did have to go to Cartersville, to pick up some antiques. Meg decided she had handled Culver correctly; she had aroused his animosity, but she had gained the goodwill of the town, and that was worth quite a lot. She told Stoltzfuss what Culver had suggested. He shook his head.

  “Doesn’t surprise me. Tell you what, I’ll just telephone Fred Zook over at the state police barracks. He knows about Culver, but I’ll ask him to keep close tabs on the fellow.”

  “Can’t they arrest him or evict him or something? I’d feel a lot better if he were someplace else.”

  “You and a lot of other people. But you can’t run people out of town unless they break the law. Some folks would say that was a shame,” he added, with his slow smile. “Me, I’m an old-fashioned Jeffersonian democrat. Freedom is darned inconvenient at times, but it’s worth it.”

  “Right on,” Meg said.

  Stoltzfuss insisted on coming in with her and checking the house. He asked when Andy was due back. Meg said she didn’t know, and Stoltzfuss looked concerned.

  “Tell you what, if he doesn’t get back today, give me a call.”

  “I don’t want to bother anyone—”

  “It makes for no trouble,” Stoltzfuss said cheerfully. “We Dutch gotta stick together, ain’t? Don’t tell me you’re not one of us, with a name like Rittenhouse. We’ll just keep an eye on Culver, make sure he doesn’t hike out this way. He’s the only one you have to worry about. The rest of us are honest—except when it comes to buying antiques.”

  II

  After a quick lunch Meg started on her sampler. Copying the pattern was easier than she expected, thanks to the precision of the stitches. She made a pencil copy first and then went over it in colored ink, indicating the colors. Matching the lovely, time-faded shades would be the most difficult part, Meg knew; she meant to mix paints until she got a close approximation, and then try to find equivalents in embroidery silk. That would probably mean a trip to a large town, so she wouldn’t be able to start embroidering right away, but in any case she would have to practice before she started the actual sampler. She covered scraps of cloth with crooked stitches, cursed her clumsy fingers, and tried again. The project became increasingly absorbing; she could hardly bear to tear herself away from it long enough to eat.

  Andy returned that evening. Meg thought she heard the characteristic sound of the car, but although she waited for a knock or a hail, none followed, and she concluded she had been mistaken. Then, when she was getting ready for bed, Meg saw the light in the caretaker’s cottage.

  She thought immediately of Culver; but after she had watched the light for some minutes she decided he wouldn’t be so careless or so indirect. The antiques in the house were what he wanted. Andy must have returned, then.

  Meg reached for the phone and then changed her mind. Andy had a lot of nerve; he might at least have called to make sure she was still alive and undamaged. The more she thought about it, the madder she got; and although she slept soundly, undisturbed by dreams or premonitions, she was still angry when she woke up in the morning.

  The wall of white fog that enveloped the house didn’t improve her mood, but by ten o’clock the sun was out and the puddles in the yard were steaming energetically. Meg was still annoyed, but she was beginning to get worried, and when she heard footsteps on the porch she ran to the door and flung it open before Andy could knock.

  He looked terrible—sunken eyes, bristly chin, and a general air of exhaustion. Meg’s relief was so great she started to scold him.

  “Where have you been? Why didn’t you tell me you were back? What did you find out?”

  “Not much.” Andy headed like a homing pigeon for the kitchen. “But I have a new respect for genealogists. It’s the most frustrating damned pursuit. I didn’t come over last night because I—because I didn’t want to wake you up.”

  Meg decided not to challenge this statement. It was a lie, of course. Andy must have seen her lighted window, as she had seen his. But she was learning how to handle Andy. A direct accusation would only infuriate him. If she kept quiet he would break down eventually and tell her what was bugging him.

  Silently she poured coffee, which Andy accepted with a nod of thanks.

  “I’m about ready to call it quits,” he muttered. “Two days wasted… I didn’t find Anna Maria. There are plenty of women with the same or similar names; but none the right age.”

  “And the crest on the button? You were going to look for that, too.”

  “Same damned thing. The design is worn down; details are hard to make out. There were hundreds of petty little dukes and counts in eighteenth-century Europe. I found some possibles, one from France and three from Germany— or rather, from the mess of little countries that later became Germany.”

  “The majority of the settlers in this area were German or Scotch-Irish,” Meg said.

  “That’s no help. I could go on guessing for months. I’m ready to call a halt.”

  “You really mean it? What happened, Andy? Something is bothering you.”

  “Well…” Andy gloomily contemplated his coffee.

  “Hell, I might as well come clean. I didn’t exactly tell the truth. I did come to the house last night.”

  “I didn’t hear you knock. Did you lose your key or something?”

  “I never got that far. I was ambling along, battered but not bowed; temporarily discouraged, but not disheartened, when all of a sudden… It was like running into a wall. I couldn’t go any farther. I felt sick. Literally sick; the sweat was pouring off me, I was shaking, and my heart was beating so hard it felt as if it were going to pound a hole in my chest. I had a roommate in college who had severe anxiety attacks. He said it was like walking along and suddenly coming face to face with a monster—the worst monster you can imagine, slimy and fanged and dripping venom—ready to attack you. Only there wasn’t any monster. There wasn’t any cause for him to be afraid; and that was the most terrifying thing of all. Now I have a faint idea of what he was talking about.”

  If he was acting, he was doing a magnificent job. Even the memory of the sensation dilated his eyes and brought a sheen of perspiration to his face. Meg was shaken.

  “Fear?” she asked.

  “That’s too simple. Believe me, I was in no mood to analyze what I was feeling, but it was more than fear. I did not want to go into that house. It was as if I knew there was something in there that I couldn’t stand seeing, something th
at would drive me right off my rocker.”

  “Something in there… I’ve had that feeling too. But it wasn’t frightening, not to me.”

  Andy leaned back with a sigh and mopped his face with his sleeve.

  “I meant to ask if you’ve had any more visions. Sorry I got preoccupied with my own miseries.”

  “Nothing happened. Except the day you left…”

  Meg described the feeling of anticipation that had greeted her when she returned from town.

  “I wasn’t afraid,” she concluded. “I felt more—well, more regretful. Sorry it wasn’t me They were waiting for.”

  “I hope it isn’t me,” Andy muttered. “Oh, hell, Meg, don’t you see how crazy this is? There’s no pattern to it.”

  “But that is what convinces me,” Meg said earnestly. “If we saw a pattern at this point, I’d suspect we were making it ourselves—twisting the evidence to fit the theory. The fact that we don’t understand these experiences proves they’re genuine!”

  Andy smiled faintly. “I don’t know what fascinates me more, the illogic of your reasoning or the inconsistency of your attitude. You switch sides so often it makes me dizzy.”

  “You’re not exactly the soul of consistency yourself. Whose idea was this anyway?”

  “You’ve got me there. Okay; we’ll go on with it. But not right this minute. I need therapy. I’m going to eschew psychic research and go back to scraping walls. See you later.”

  “Okay. Did you find out anything about another house on this site?”

  “I didn’t have time.”

  Meg decided it was better to leave him alone. As she passed the master bedroom on her way to the attic she saw that he was scraping so vigorously that scraps flew like snow. She did not stop or speak, although she was tempted to join him; there was something therapeutic about controlled destruction of that sort.

  Meg poked around in the attic for a while. In the back of her mind was the hope that she would find another windfall like the chest—another clue to the time of Anna Maria Huber; but she knew the futility of the hope. Few of the objects in the attic seemed to be older than the mid-nineteenth century. Meg’s reading was beginning to help; she recognized some of the pieces as similar to illustrations in certain of her books, though she was far from being certain of their value or authenticity. Finally she gave up all pretense at work and settled down in a warm corner with a pile of old magazines.

  Meg skipped lunch, as she often did, but by late afternoon her stomach was growling and she had had enough nostalgia. She glanced in the bedroom on her way downstairs. Andy wasn’t there. He was not in the kitchen either. Meg finally found him in the library. He was so absorbed in the book he was reading that he didn’t hear her, and at the sight of the lurid orange cover on the paperback she let out an exclamation of disgust.

  “You do read the most awful tripe, Andy! Where did you get that?”

  Unabashed, Andy leaned back in his chair and smiled at her.

  “Some former tenant must have been a mystery fan. There’s a whole shelf of old paperbacks. Great stuff. Nonfiction and the occult, as well as the masters of detective fiction. This one is about a real case—a Pennsylvania murder, in fact. The killer was a poor feeble-minded neurotic who thought the victim had hexed him. That’s one way to take off the curse—kill the witch.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind.” Meg sat down. “Maybe I owe you an apology. You’re doing background reading on the eighteenth century?”

  “This happened in 1923.” At the sight of her astonished face Andy’s grin widened. “Amazing, isn’t it? Yet I don’t know why we should be surprised. Look at the nuts who believe in Black Magic today.”

  “Including present company.”

  “Now, now, let’s not be too hard on ourselves. Serious scholars are interested in the occult as a manifestation of unknown scientific principles. Nobody but an egomaniac would claim we know everything about the universe. There’s a difference between that approach and the contortions of neurotics who paint themselves red and try to raise the devil in a suburban basement.”

  “They get more results than we do, though.” Meg leaned back in her chair. The afternoon sunlight was warm and she felt pleasantly tired. “Maybe we aren’t going about it the right way.”

  “We’re doing all we can.”

  “Are we? I was thinking, Andy. Practically all the manifestations have occurred when we were together. You’ve felt things, and so have I; but I haven’t seen anything except when you were with me.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Andy dropped his book and sat up straight.

  “Well, maybe it takes both of us. Not just together, but actually touching. Wasn’t there some kind of physical contact whenever we’ve seen one of the visions?”

  “Hmmm.” Andy scratched his chin. Though light in color, his beard was heavy. He looked thoroughly disreputable. “I guess you’re right. So what are you proposing? Not a seance, I hope.”

  “No, not exactly. Just—well, just open our minds and try to see what we get. And if something comes, don’t panic, keep cool, and see if we can’t control it.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “I don’t blame you for having cold feet, after your experience last night,” Meg said persuasively. “But is there any reason to believe we’re dealing with something evil or dangerous? I don’t believe in the devil or in Black Magic. Neither do you. If these things are not illusions, they are only pictures—pictures out of the past. Maybe something more than pictures—a lingering trace of personality, spirit—call it a ghost, if you like. But I don’t feel any evil. The old man, the girl—they don’t threaten us. I know they don’t.”

  Slowly Andy shook his head. “Your feelings aren’t evidence, Meg. Why make such a big thing of this? Is it that important to you?”

  The question hit Meg like the shock of an electric current, focusing her unconsidered motives. It was important to her; she had not realized how important until this moment. Not only did she believe wholeheartedly in the visions, but she wanted to see more of them. It was the girl, of course—the slender blurred figure in blue, and the gay, precise pattern of her sampler—that had caught at Meg’s imagination. The sampler was a physical link, stretching across two and a half centuries; the fabric her fingers touched had been held by hands long since dissolved into dust.

  She had no intention of telling this to Andy. He would either laugh or express disgust.

  “Please, Andy,” she said softly. “Please? It can’t do any harm to try.”

  She put her hand on the table, like a propitiatory offering—palm up, fingers gently curved in appeal. Andy eyed it with all the enthusiasm he might have shown a dead fish. But the mute challenge was too much for him. Probably, too, his curiosity was aroused. Slowly his hand slid across the table till his fingers touched Meg’s.

  Although she had suggested the experiment, Meg was the one who almost lost her cool when the image came. She had not expected such a quick response. Perhaps she had really not expected any response. But the shapes began to form only seconds after their hands were joined.

  The distortion was disturbing enough to make her feel physically queasy. The shadow room was just a little askew in all dimensions, and the overlapping of illusion and reality made it difficult to distinguish the two. Meg forced herself to concentrate. The image shifted and wavered, and then took on a distinctness far superior to anything she had yet seen.

  The room was the same one they had seen before, with a fireplace flanked by settles, and a braided rug on the hearth. This time Meg could make out the objects on the mantel. They were an odd combination of elegance and crude simplicity. A brown pottery jug stood next to a figurine that could only be Meissen—a shepherdess, delicately pastel, with two white lambs at her feet. A silver bowl with a finely chased design rubbed elbows with a copper kettle.

  There was a fire in the fireplace. Above the flames hung a large black pot, suspended on iron rods. An animal—a small dog or a l
arge cat—lay curled up on the rug. Its plushy black form was rolled into such a tight ball that she couldn’t tell exactly what it was.

  Only then did Meg allow herself to look at the human figures. The girl was sitting on one of the benches by the fire, her golden head bent over her sewing… Or was it sewing? It was hard to tell exactly what she was doing, for she wasn’t moving. She was frozen, like a still picture projected onto the air.

  There was no sign of the old man, but a third personage had entered the scene. It was bent over the fire, as if in the act of stirring the contents of the kettle. The face was hidden, but from the costume—a long dark dress and white cap—and the shape of the bowed back, Meg thought it must be an elderly woman, a servant, probably.

  There wasn’t much else to be seen. A window in the wall to the left—small, narrow-paned, and dark, as if it were night outside—a tall cupboard on the right, the shelves filled with dishes. Yes, Meg thought, it must be night in that other place—that other time. The only light in the room came from the fire. That was why she couldn’t see more; the corners of the room away from the fire were obscured by shadows. And it was utterly still. Even the flames were as motionless as if they had been carved out of glowing red stone.