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

by Douglas Clegg

  Then I noticed a movement back by the lamp near my bed. Just a blur. My vision followed the movement in the mirror.

  What was it? I found that I could not take my eyes away from the mirror. It was the old sort, with an oval and beveled glass, which distorted the edges of what it reflected.

  Was it a sparrow trapped in the room? What moved so frantically at my bed?

  I could see Hildy in the chair, her head lolling back a bit against the blanket she’d propped as a pillow. I told myself that I was just imagining things. I was fine. There was no one and nothing else in the room.

  Then I saw the blurred thing again, only this time it was in the bed, and I realized, suddenly, that there were two indentations in the bed-mine, that I had just left—and this blurred thing, this smudge of something, next to where I’d been sleeping off my fever. I quickly glanced back, nearly toppling over in the process, to see what was on the bed, but the bed was empty. Then I checked the mirror.

  A little girl sat in the bed. A little girl with a round face and long dark curls, and eyes that seemed impossibly small. I watched her in the mirror, to see if I really saw her. I kept repeating something to myself—perhaps even aloud—something about the girl not being real, that she was imaginary, just like the jaguar and the two-headed giraffe. But she sat there, her head resting on one of the pillows. Not watching me. Not watching anyone. It was as if it was her bed, and she lived in the mirror all the time.

  When I turned around she was right behind me. Her hollow eyes. The look of yearning and pain within her flesh.

  In the blink of an eye, it was not a little girl at all.

  Now, after the memory returned to me, I can look back on what I saw and know that it was probably induced by the venom of those insects within me. But then all I knew was fear, and the heat beneath my skin that seemed to steam as I saw it.

  It was, very simply, a wisp of smoke hanging in the air. Smoke and a voice, which said in a man’s voice, “Esteban, you belong to us.”

  I dropped the pitcher to the floor. It shattered at my feet, and the smoke dissipated. I felt the full force of fever hit. Hildy jumped from the rocking chair and grabbed me up in her heavy arms. She brought me back to the bed, scolding me for getting out of it.

  I spent the rest of the night huddled in a corner of the bed, staring at the pillow, my teeth chattering from fear and fever.

  A slight indentation remained along one of the pillows in my bed, as if the little girl still lay there, beside me. I even imagined that I could hear her breathing.

  My fever burned, and what—of my body—was not swollen was on fire. Every ounce of my being ached and felt as if the bones wanted to tear from my flesh.

  Yet, after an hour or two of this, I became very detached from my body, and felt as if I were watching this little boy toss and turn in yellow jacket-inspired fever. I saw the nurse, with her round fish eyes and her cold Watch Point manner, as she hesitated to put the cool, damp hand towel on the boy’s forehead. I watched myself—the boy—open his eyes briefly, looking as if he was fighting to wake from a dream.

  And knowing that, somewhere in the room, the little girl waited for me. I didn’t know why, or what she wanted, or who she was.

  All I knew was that I didn’t want her to come near me again.

  13

  Cali glanced up from the diary. Jack had been sitting in the settee across from her chair, tea tray balanced precariously on his lap, as he watched her with a look of such expectation that it was like having to tell a little boy on Christmas Eve that there was no Santa Claus. But she said it anyway: ‘The diary is interesting, but I get a sense that Esteban Palliser is mad, mad as in crazy. And he was a hundred years old when he wrote this all down?” Jack nodded. “Most of it.”

  “What a great document to have,” she said, and then added, “but I don’t see the point. Is there the ghost of Matilde Gravesend here? And if that’s what we’re after, why even worry about portals?’ Jack seemed to be listening as he poured a cup of tea out into one of the small china cups, but Cali had a vague sense that he was already somewhere else. “I don’t think Matilde Gravesend is lurking nearby. I think this house is an energy. I think, as a portal, it lets in all kinds of...”

  “Energies?” Cali set down the book on the elegant walnut table beside her chair and rose. She walked over to Jack and took a cup and a spoon. “Mmm . .. English Breakfast. My favorite.”

  “We’re the only caffeine addicts here, apparently, you, me, and Mira,” Jack said. When he looked at her again, he had some sadness etched along his sleepy eyes.

  “It’s funny,” Cali said, blowing lightly over the surface of the cup to cool the tea. “I’ve always wanted to believe that there was a place like this. A place where things happened. Sort of a crossroads. But I’m not convinced this house is it.” She went back to the chair, but instead of sitting back down, she looked around at the books that were stacked rather messily on the beautifully carved bookshelves. “It’s too perfect for a haunting.”

  “And that makes it bad?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s just that it has been my experience that whatever residue the living leave behind—after they’ve died—is more likely to be in the cities, on street corners, in the subway. You know”—she turned around—”places with the most life.”

  “Harrow has held a lot of life,” Jack said. He leaned over, setting the tea tray on the floor with a bit of a clatter. “And then there’s the rooms off the cellar.”

  “Rooms?”

  “Sure. That’s the rest of the tour. I figured I’d gather everybody just before lunch and we’d see the artifacts. Or at least what’s left. I think they indicate state of mind.”

  “State of mind of Justin Gravesend,” Cali said.

  “No.” Jack grinned. Damn, he was always grinning like a Cheshire cat. “State of mind of Harrow.”

  The dog began barking, practically howling, out in the yard, and Cali and Jack looked at each other. Cali broke up laughing.

  “The howling of the hellhound,” Jack said, amusement in his voice. “Must be an omen.”

  14

  The gray sky spat rain. Spiderwebs up in the frame of the large front door had pearls of water along their edges. Mira stood on the front stoop, her hair stuffed up in her sweatshirt s hood, a look of fury on her face. “Look what the fucking cat dragged in,” she said to her father when he came running out to see what the barking was about.

  Behind Mira, Conan barked and ran around, his tail going a mile a minute, a snarl on his face that was nearly comical.

  Nearby, the antlered head of a deer lay on the driveway.

  15

  “It’s in the shed now,” Jack said, coming into the kitchen from the pouring rain, his dark hair slick and thin against his scalp. He shook off the rain from his leather jacket with a shiver. “I guess I’ll what—bury it tomorrow? Or something? What do you do with a deer head?”

  “Mount it, I guess,” Cali said. Then she added, “That was a joke, by the way.” Then, “There’s a woodshed?”

  “Just a shed. No wood to be had. Just out back here.” Jack pointed beyond the small window with the blurry glass that went from the kitchen out to the backyard. As an afterthought, he opened the window slightly. An icy breeze swept through the hot kitchen—it was a bit of a relief to Cali.

  The kitchen was long and wide and held far too much empty space. Jack had already pointed out where an enormous floor-to-ceiling fireplace had once been in it. It had been converted to more of an industrial kitchen when the school had opened, and all the long rows of metal shelfing and sinks had been torn out and taken by the school just after Ivy Martin had bought the place. It was not the gorgeous place that Jack had described of its heyday; instead it was just long and wide, and now had a fairly normal-sized range near the kitchen door, a large double-doored Amana refrigerator, and a fullsized freezer next to it. A wooden butcher’s block table served as the breakfast area, and this was covered with cheap blue placema
ts that looked like they’d been bought secondhand from a local diner.

  Cali had just finished off an English muffin and a poached egg—cooked superbly by Jack—and was ready for something else. She eyed the pot of marmalade as if it were gold. “Another muffin?” she asked.

  “Coming right up,’’ Jack said. He reached over to the package of muffins, wrestling with it a bit before getting another muffin out and popping it into the toaster.

  ‘That’s just sick,” Mira said. She went to check the water boiling on the stove. “Sick sick sick.”

  “It’s the locals,” Jack said. “It’s still hunting season or thereabouts, and I guess Frost’s taxi driver felt the trophy should go to him.” “Glad they didn’t leave the venison,” Cali said.

  “Sick sick sick,” Mira said. “Cutting off a deer’s head and leaving it out there.”

  “Some people collect antlers,” Chet said. “I used to know men who went and picked up the carcasses out on the roadside just to get the antlers and say they’d shot the deer.” He had just come down from his morning shower, looking shaved and handsome and sparkling, and Cali watched as Mira pretended not to notice him.

  He was gorgeous, and it made Cali wish she were a few years younger just so she could’ve caught his attention. He was definitely eye candy.

  She thought of Det: Det was not eye candy, but he did care for her. He probably genuinely loved her, but it was a misplaced love, and there really was no trust between them. She needed to think of him more—she knew this. She should love Det, but something within her resisted. Love should be more logical.

  Mira looked over at Cali. “Don’t you think it’s sick?” Mira seemed to have some kind of excitement in her face, as if the deer head itself was not what was getting to her.

  Cali shrugged. “I’m not fond of hunting, anyway. Bunch of men get drunk, go in the woods, and shoot animals who can’t shoot back. Not much sport there.”

  “I would’ve thought you’d love it,” Mira said, quasi innocently. Cali cocked her head to the side slightly, trying to figure that comment out. Mira hastily added, “Because of your gun.”

  “You’ve got a gun?” Chet asked.

  Cali nodded. “Guilty. It’s something I carry purely because of my part-time job. It can get dangerous out there. In the world. When you get press for helping cops solve homicide cases.”

  Mira laughed. “Sorry. The way you said it sounded funny.”

  Jack came over to the table with a big bowl of cornflakes and a glass of milk. He drew a chair back and sat down. His rangy frame seemed ill-suited to the small wooden chair. “New York seems safer than ever to me these days.”

  “It is,” Cali said. “I got pulled into an alley once and nearly beaten up by the relative of someone I suppose I helped put behind bars. Nothing really happened. But it shook me up. And then a friend”—she didn’t want to talk about Det to them, and some little warning bell within her knew that it was because she wanted Chet not to think of her as being attached to anyone—”got me a gun. It’s just a Sig Sauer. I’ve never used it, except in target practice.”

  “Wow,” Chet said, his eyes lighting up. “I hope nobody decides to go psycho and steal your gun and shoot all of us in our sleep.”

  Jack held his spoon midair, milk and limp cornflakes dripping from it. ‘Thank you for that thought, Chet.”

  “Maybe it’ll be the ghost of that deer,” Mira said. “Coming back for revenge on Frost and his cabdriver.”

  “I used to hunt,” Frost said, coming into the kitchen behind Chet. He had a neatly pressed yellow shirt and a silky blue tie and looked as if he was heading to either an office or to church. “It isn’t much sport. My father used to drag me and my brothers off the farm when we were too young to hold a rifle very steady and put up a salt lick out in the woods for deer. Always made me feel bad. And I hate gamey meat. Some years were bad for the farm. To save on groceries we ate venison and wild duck all the time, and I got skinny because I just wouldn’t eat either one. Wild game has a taste I don’t like.”

  “It’s yours, you know,” Jack Fleetwood said. ‘The head. Should you want a trophy to hang up in your den.”

  Frost ignored him. Then, “God, I slept well last night.” “Me, too,” Chet said. “Better than in a long time. It was so ...” “Quiet,” Cali added for him. “I’m so used to city sounds and sirens that I don’t think I realized how quiet it was.”

  “Any ghosts on film, Jack?” Frost asked as he walked over to the fridge and opened the door, peering in. “No,” Jack said. “No ghosts anywhere.”

  16

  They all went through the various videotapes that Jack had recorded and checked in the night; Chet went around and took notes on the EMF meters but found nothing beyond what might be considered ordinary fluctuations; Frost insisted that Cali explore more of the house with him, and when they opened one of the bedroom doors, there was Ivy Martin, curled up, snoring lightly, her bedcovers thrown from the bed, her flannel nightgown around her neck. She shivered in her sleep. Cali went to the windows and secured each of them, and then took one of the covers from the floor and laid it across Ivy’s form. She seemed so small and vulnerable, as opposed to the lanky ice queen she had seemed the previous night. Frost remained in the doorway of the room, as if afraid to enter. Once they were back in the corridor, he whispered to Cali, “Mira told me she’s in love with a ghost,” but then would not elaborate on it.

  The day proceeded from gray to grayer; Cali read some more of the tomes Jack had laid out for each of them in the library and Mira shouted at some point that it had stopped raining—”Finally!” she said. “I hate this weather!”

  17

  The rain subsided by three, and the sun came out for the few hours left of daylight. The afternoon even warmed slightly, and Chet discovered something mainly because he wanted to see the deer head in the shed. The shed was about the size of one of the house’s bathrooms, and Chet had a strange feeling that it had perhaps once served as an outhouse, although it did not seem that old. But it did stink—maybe it’s the deer, he thought. Behind the head, which had been unceremoniously dumped into a pile of newspapers that lay atop a wooden crate, Chet saw what seemed like a real treasure. It was some gym equipment left over from the school; he managed to coerce Mira and Cali into playing a light game of softball—they each got gloves and Chet used his bare hands with the ball. They played around the driveway because it was too muddy anywhere else.

  “You like baseball?” he asked Mira, who had a funny look on her face the entire time they played. Her lips were scrunched up a little, and her hair kept falling over her face when she got up to bat. “Sure,” she said, swinging the bat perfectly. “Keith Hernandez. He’s one of my faves.”

  “I’ve always been partial to Cal Ripkin, Junior,” Chet said. “Since I was a kid. I just want to be him so bad, but I know I’m not. But in my dreams I am.”

  “In my dreams, I’m Angela Bassett,” Cali said. She stood out as far from the little scratch of chalk that served as first base as possible. “Angela Bassett crossed with Sigourney Weaver, crossed with maybe ...” She let the thought fade as she tried to think up who else she wanted to be in her fantasy life. Then, “Ever play love child?”

  Chet laughed. “No. What’s that?”

  “It’s great. My sister and I play this all the time. Mainly on the subway. It can be a very rude game, but it’s always fun. It’s where you look at people and identify who they might be the secret love child of. Like, someone might look like the love child of Michael Jackson and Madonna.”

  “A two-headed monster!” Chet said. “So, okay. You’re the love child of Angela Bassett and Sandra Bullock.”

  “Ah,” Cali said. “A same-sex tryst. Too complementary. You’ve got to put a little sulfuric acid in it. Okay, and you, Chet, look like the love child of... this is tough ...”

  “Brad Pitt and Matt Damon,” Mira said, too quickly, and then looked down at her catcher’s mitt. “Maybe.”

&n
bsp; ‘That’s good, but you’re going to make his head get so big, he won’t fit through the front door. And I don’t want to have to imagine Brad and Matt conceiving,” Cali said. She looked at Chet, squinting as if trying to reconfigure him. She swung the bat, preparing for Chefs pitch to her. “I’ll go with ... Jamie Lee Curtis and the Lion King. Sure.”

  “Ah, beast lust,” Chet said.

  “I’m the love child of...” Mira began, but Chet interrupted.

  “Wait, that ain’t fair. I don’t think you get to choose for yourself in this game,” Chet said. Mira pouted a bit. Then he pitched the ball, and Cali took a good, strong swing. The ball went up straight into the air.

  Mira caught the ball and thumbed Cali out, her third time at bat, only her first time in which she actually hit the ball. (“I was always more of a field hockey kind of girl,” Cali said.)

  The game played out a bit like charades, because there was more exaggerated movement than there was actual play. Cali was awful at catching the ball, and her pitching was worse. Mira was a bit sharper with her pitch, and she nearly hit the ball through one of the front leaded-glass windows, but it missed it and bounced off the wall of the house. Chet seemed in fine form: He moved with the grace of a young lion, and for purely entertainment purposes, he spat and scratched his butt until both Cali and Mira started imitating him. Chet managed to crack the bat when he hit what should’ve been a homer. The ball flew up into the trees somewhere and was lost.

  Eventually, Conan, after much scrambling and rolling in the mud, found the ball and retrieved it but would not return it to them, but that was after Cali and Chet had searched for it, and Cali had fallen in the mud. Chet had lifted her up, and something had happened between them without either one of them being sure what it was. To Cali, it felt like an uncomfortable reminder of something missing from her life; to Chet, it felt like the warmth he longed for.