Harrow: Three Novels (Nightmare House, Mischief, The Infinite)

by Douglas Clegg

  “All right, I’ll tell it to me straight: I got debts. Lotsa debts. My ex keeps getting more, and what she doesn’t get, my damn and mostly useless Lawyer from Hell seems to get. And the IRS. I can’t shake ‘em. So I have to take this. I have to take this, and maybe I can make something out of it, so I won’t just be wasting a week or two. I’ll be making it work for me. (Isn’t that how it’s supposed to go? You make things work for you?)

  “Well, it’s almost October, and it’s almost time to head up to Harrow, the house up on the Hudson. I’ve been to Poughkeepsie twice, but never to Watch Point. I hear there are some good antique stores there, so maybe I can buy some stuff for my little hovel. Ha ha ha. What a laugh.

  “I put the initial 5K in the bank, but I have a feeling my ex’ll be coming after that, so I may have to transfer it to a different bank. I hate the idea that she might come after my money, sometimes I feel like that’s all she does. Reminds me of my mother, who only wanted money from me once I was old enough to make any, and I am so tired of supporting these women and watching them live like queens while I exist on barely enough to scrape a good meal together.

  “Went to the store and bought some more mousetraps because I’m getting a little tired of my nightly visitors. I was playing with one of the mousetraps, and those little suckers come down hard (in this case, on my benighted finger). I wonder what would happen if you put mousetraps all over someone’s body and just snapped them all at once. I don’t mean like five or six mousetraps, I mean maybe two hundred or more, and just had them on nipples and fingers and nose and toes and even genitals, how would it feel? Not like I’m going to try it in this lifetime, but it would be interesting, since sometimes pain feels good if it’s all over and not limited to one specific place. I’ve killed maybe three of the mice with the traps this past month, and each time I feel a little sad for their sorry little lives, and the way they have to scrape around for their bits of peanut butter and cheese and cracker scraps, and then they go—through their own greed, mind you—to their deaths in the steely jaws of the God of Snapping Jaws, the mousetrap.

  “I wonder if we’re not all like that. Scraping by. Scraping and scraping. Getting our bits of food and crumbs from some other table, and then when our greed becomes too great, we have to go toward our miserable fates.

  “All right, it’s a pitiful way to look at existence, but now I know that there’s no God. (Don’t fool yourself; if there is a God, he’s bad and mean, because who would set their creations down in this world? I ask you? It must be a God of Snapping Jaws, with the mentality of a cruel four-year-old, sending us to this shit-hole of human existence, not some kind of loving queerish God who thinks that love, love, love runs everything.) I ask you, now that I know there’s no God, what’s the point of any of it? I was thinking about the people on the train, the one that crashed, and I keep thinking: What were they thinking when the train started to lurch? Were they afraid? Actually, I doubt they had time for fear. That whole animal fight-or-flight mechanism must’ve kicked in, and they probably just reacted for the next twelve seconds, before they ran head on into the God of Snapping Jaws.

  “I really like that idea. The God of Snapping Jaws would make sense. Perfect sense! And I can see Snapping Jaws (which is what I’ll call him) just making the world work the way it does. I mean, you’re born helpless into who knows what kind of family that molds you and spits you out, even though I will admit my folks were pretty damn good, and they taught me good things, and important things, but every family—you know this if you’re sneaking in and reading my journal or if I ever publish this thing, which I very well may do—every family has their own form of damnation for their kids. And Snapping Jaws set it all up. So you’re born into this miasma, and you grow up with these crazy ideals (doing good, helping people, taking care of business, and such), but of course, if Snapping Jaws runs the universe, than this is a big joke on you! Because the universe is not about doing good or helping people. I mean, Catherine de Medici knew it when she was looking down at the slaughter of the Huguenots. The rich people on the Titanic knew it, as they watched their lower-caste members in steerage drown. Anyone who has ever watched someone of lesser strength die has seen the Snapping Jaws universe at work. I’m not fond of ol’ Snapping Jaws. He’s a big, bad boogeyman, and his metal teeth come down hard and out of nowhere for the recipient. But if this is the way the world works, then it is just the way things are. It’s like the way bugs will take over—the world is for them, for the mandibles and the snapping jaws, for the metal teeth and the exoskeletons among us.

  “(Bugs are king, he sez. Roaches thrive, sez I. Every time I see a fly I think of Lord of the Flies, and I think of the boys on the island all fighting, and I think of Snapping Jaws, and I think of how the smallest of the world will be the greatest and how the greatest—these men and women who walk on two legs—will one day bow down and be covered with wriggly maggots after Snapping Jaws gets them in his trap.)

  “My mother used to say the world was full of givers and takers, and I thought maybe I should be a giver because there were too many takers. But I know from my voices that there’s no point in being a giver. No one cares. You can’t save anyone on this planet, not with Snapping Jaws running the show.

  “Why am I writing this today?

  “Well, I think I have some kind of edge with Snapping Jaws. Between the money and the contract, and the invitation to this house. I think this is where the voices want me to go. I think this is the point in life when the universe opens up and shows you the way to your destiny. I don’t think you can avoid what’s meant for you. What Snapping Jaws puts in your path, you’ve got to take care of—it’s there for you, not for anyone else.

  “If you miss it, you’ll end up in those metal jaws.

  “All right, since I’d been thinking about this, I went out and did something good for someone else. I just needed to; it’s part of my balance. I left a larger-than-usual tip with the waitress at the diner at breakfast, but that wasn’t really it. What I did was, I saw this kid crossing traffic against the light. Traffic was all over the place, whizzing by him, and he was maybe nine or ten and obviously not too smart. (I often wonder if when kids do these insane things, if maybe they’re not long for the world anyway; I mean, you can save them once, but twice? Three times? When does it stop before they just off themselves, and all you’ve done is delay the inevitable?) I went out and held my hands up to the cars, and this one, this truck, was bound and determined to speed up even though he probably didn’t see the kid. So I grabbed the kid up and scrambled to the other side of the highway.

  “No one will know that happened. No one needs to know. The universe knows. I rescued him, right then, from old Snapping Jaws. And that’s good. Because Snapping Jaws doesn’t believe anyone does that kind of stuff.

  “And if you can come up against Snapping Jaws, then you can do anything.

  “That’s where the voices have helped. That’s where I’ve learned. That’s why I’ve been picked to go to this house.

  “I’m here to defy the way the universe goes.

  “I’m here to change the course of human history.

  “The voices that have been within me, they’re evolution.

  “When I go to that house, I know it will be the beginning of the true millennium. No, I’m not so egotistical as to think that I’m some kind of Second Coming or anything. I’m talking about others, too. I can’t be the only one given an ability like this, and if there’s something more to life than Snapping Jaws, then that means there’s a Will somewhere here that has let me in on one of the secrets. Others have to be in on it, too. That Foundation, it has other people coming to this house.

  “I’ll bet we’re all meant to meet.

  “I’ll bet we’re destined to be part of each other’s lives, and maybe when we all get together, it’ll be like the spark at the first flint that man ever held in his hand.

  “It’s evolution of the species, and I’m one small part of it, one small pa
rt, a spark in a great darkness.

  So I sez to myself, sez I: over the river and through the woods to the haunted house I go.

  PART TWO

  PALACE OF NIGHT

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1

  Cali had to take the PATH train from the Grove Street stop in Jersey City into the City in order to get her car. On the brief train ride, she sat beside an older woman with a large amount of gray hair, quite beautifully curved and twisted into a Danish on the side of her head. Don’t forget to eat something, Cali made a mental note. Maybe a Danish. Lots of coffee.

  She glanced about the rest of the train compartment and wondered what everyone did, all those people who didn’t feel the “tell” of things. That’s what her grandmother had called the ability. “It’s the tell,” Nana had said, her hair also beautifully gray and long, her eyes small but enlarged whenever she put on her thick glasses. “Your great-grandmother had the tell, and I have it, and you have it now. It’s a special ability, but no one will understand it, and no one will believe you. Not in this world. But in the next, they’ll understand it.”

  “Do I need it in the next world?” Cali asked. “In heaven?”

  Her grandmother had smiled, nodding. “Of course. Things don’t end with death, baby. All the problems you have here, they just keep going on and on until you work at them yourself. That’s why death solves nothing for nobody. But in the next world, you’re going to help some people out who need it the most. In this one,” her grandmother sighed, “well, in this world, I don’t think there’s any help for anybody.”

  Her grandmother had died when she was twelve, and Cali probably missed that old lady more than anyone in the world. Mainly because Nana had understood. Nana knew things that Cali wished she could ask her about, too, but of course it was too late. Nana was off to whatever the next world was.

  If there is a next world.

  2

  She got off the train at Christopher Street and went to grab a cup of coffee at a Starbucks on Greenwich Avenue, and gobbled down two Krispy Kreme jelly donuts as well, feeling like a bad kid sneaking into the cookie jar. With the sweetness in her mouth and the buzz of the strong coffee, she made it down to the garage where she kept her car.

  Cali kept her Honda Civic at the city-owned lot that abutted the Hudson River, and it was always a hassle getting it out. Sometimes the battery was dead, because it had been sitting so long, but when she arrived and put the key in the ignition it started right up. A good omen. The car was from ‘95, but only had fifteen-thousand miles on it, owing to her lack of using it. She’d had it since she was fresh out of college. She had bought the car on an outrageous payment plan, which her first few jobs had barely covered; she had worked two jobs simultaneously to cover her car and her dinky little first apartment in Bayonne. She loved her Honda, and even the old smell of it made her feel good. And free. She had always felt trapped by public transportation, in the snaky underbelly of the PATH trains or the New York subway.

  The car was like freedom.

  Except in the city itself.

  Traffic on the Westside Highway was bumper-to-bumper, but once she got beyond the city there was practically no one on the road. She went on up the Hudson and stopped for another cup of coffee at a deli in Sleepy Hollow, home of the Washington Irving story about the headless horseman.

  Stopping in Sleepy Hollow had seemed appropriate if she was going to spend a couple of weeks in a haunted house. Part of her thought it would be a blast, and creepy, but in a good way. Part of her felt as if she were an idiotic subject in a big experiment. And part of her, she had to admit to herself, was happy to get away from Det for even a few days after the night when the lust monster had somehow gotten the better of her (or had it been Gloria Franco?) and away from the movie in her brain of Gloria Franco’s murder, and the child-entity she had somehow seen near Gloria, the impression she had that the murder was part of a larger ritual.

  It took another hour and a half out of Sleepy Hollow to make it to the turnoff to Watch Point. The leaves on the trees at the side of the highway had already begun turning to deep reds and flashy gold, and a comfortable chill set in as the afternoon wore on—the air was fresh and clean. Cali felt her head clear of all her troubles, all her thoughts.

  She stopped at what seemed to be the only stoplight in all of Watch Point. The town was not untypical for the smaller villages along the Hudson River. Because of narrow old streets, and shop fronts that practically came up to the edge of the car, the town was laid out in a grid around a green common, and she had to make a series of annoying one-way-street turns to get on Packet Hill Street, which led out to the train station; and then she took a few more lefts, missed one major turn, and within minutes felt lost, and in the smallest burg in America.

  A teenage girl was walking a border collie with a curly fan of a tail. Cali pulled over and rolled down her window. “I’m looking for Matheson Avenue.”

  The girl, a dark, stormy little thing with what might’ve been purple bangs that hid her eyes almost as well as her sunglasses did, scowled. Her lemon yellow sweatshirt hood was pulled over the rest of her scalp, although Cali could still see some purple hair sticking out. “It’s closed off. At least the way you’re going. There aren’t any houses up there. Well, maybe one, but you don’t want to go there.”

  “I’m looking for a place that used to be a school. Called Harrow,” Cali said, somewhat exasperated by this stony reception from a local.

  The girl raised her sunglasses slightly, squinting her eyes at Cali. “Harrow? That’s where you’re going?”

  Cali nodded.

  “It’s on the other side of town,” the girl said, then pursed her lips together. She slipped her sunglasses back down on her nose and shook her head solemnly.

  “If you could just point me in the right direction?”

  The girl pointed up the road. “Go left there, then take a sharp right. When you come to the fork, take the middle.”

  “Middle of the fork?”

  “That’s right. The middle,” the girl said, dragging her pooch off a tree he’d been liberally spraying. Then she shouted, “You don’t want to go there. It’s a bad place. It’s dangerous.”

  The middle of the fork. Cali drove forward, following the girl’s directions, and in fact, she came to a three-pronged fork, with a middle, only it was really a second turn off the left fork. She took it and saw before her a sign for Matheson Avenue, which looked, as the girl had said, as if it should’ve been closed down. It was cracked and full of enormous craterish potholes, and what wasn’t crater was mud and gravel, so that driving to the avenue involved going at five miles per hour as she negotiated the twists and turns. The street she next turned onto—another left—was called Jackson Street and had the distinction of being so tree-lined that it was as if she were entering a primeval forest. Within about a mile, that was exactly what it was—giant pines and thickly vined undergrowth turned with the narrow road up a low slope.

  Breaking through the trees, she got a view of the house.

  3

  What she saw made her gasp. She had read briefly about Harrow, the boy’s school that had once been a private home, but she had no idea quite how magnificent it would be. It was like an eclipse of the sun—it was that much of a block to the horizon. It held sway over the land around it.

  Fleetwood s book had made it out to be more of a convoluted English manor house, with a few architectural eccentricities.

  In fact, it was a dragon of a house.

  Two large towers rose from the back of the house and made her think of a castle; the house beneath it was long and large, a villa of a house; she had been told that part of it had burned and, indeed, there were crumbling walls, and even from a distance she saw the scorched landscape around it.

  A stone wall surrounded the manse, and signs were posted all around its periphery warning trespassers to keep out.

  “Good God,” she said, aloud. “If I were a ghost, this is where I’d go.�
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  4

  “You came up Jackson?” Jack Fleetwood said, taking her bags from the trunk. “That’s the long way. If you had taken a right on Matheson and then a left on Tryon, you’d have cut ten minutes off. Watch Point is walking distance that way. It’s a major hike from where you drove in.”

  “I got a good view of the place. It’s something.”

  “It is,” Jack said, and then walked toward the front door. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a dog began barking, and Cali nearly jumped out of her skin. She glanced to the left, and a black-and-white blur was coming toward her at lightning speed. She stood perfectly still, and for a moment thought of reaching for her shoulder bag and pulling out her gun, but the dog slowed and then sat down right in front of her.

  He looked up at her face. As if he already knew her.

  “That’s Conan,” a girl said, also from nowhere—but nowhere turned out to be down a narrow path to the left of the large circular driveway.

  It was the girl with the purple bangs, and the border collie that looked up at her with both a solemn and soulful look was, indeed, a dog that could easily be thought of as Conan the Barbarian. Cali opened her mouth, not understanding, but then, she got it. Fleetwood has a teenage daughter. This is her. Some joker.

  If dogs could grin, this one did, with a full set of shiny white teeth, and between those teeth, a squeaky ball, which the dog squeaked a few times to emphasize that he owned it.

  The girl turned past them both and headed off in the direction of another house, on the other side of the drive. She whistled, and Conan turned his head slightly toward her. Then he looked up at Cali. She was sure he was saying: 7 want to play ball, but I guess I better go.