The Stone Dweller's Curse: A Story of Curses, Madness, Obsession and Love

by Jacqueline Henry

  The house had just sat there, devoid of life, as empty as her life.

  Deidre stared through the windscreen at the front door. There was no one to help her with this, no one to open the door and accompany her inside that silent house. No one to take her hand and usher her over the threshold, guide her through the emotional minefield waiting to explode in her face.

  Her stomach churned as she stepped out of the car, her legs shaking as she stepped up to the front door. Taking a deep breath, preparing herself, she slipped the key into the lock and turned, opened the door and stepped inside. Easy. The lounge room opened up on her right, sunlight pressing against the closed blinds filling the room with a warm muted light, the air still, silent; an aberration in itself. There was always noise in this house, always a radio playing in the background or a loud tv on in a room somewhere, any sound to combat the tinnitus ringing in Douglas Hart’s ears.

  Now there was only stillness and dry, dusty air.

  She closed the door behind her.

  ‘Dad,’ she called out quietly. A little louder. ‘Dad.’ Why was she doing this when she knew there’d be no answer? It was morbid, emotional self-flagellation. She stepped further down the hallway. ‘Dad!’ she called again, louder, a black swirling hole of grief lurking at her back. She could feel its pull somewhere deep inside her, drawing her in.

  ‘Dad!

  She’d avoided this for so long, this dark unknown depth, becoming adept at concentrating her thoughts, focussing, allowing herself to enter only certain avenues of reflection. Avoiding the fact that Douglas Hart was gone, that she was alone in the world, a loose thread floating in the breeze.

  ‘Dad!’

  No reply. He was gone and he wasn’t coming back.

  She was alone.

  Patricia Hart died in a car accident when Deidre was eight years old. Twenty five years later Deidre had trouble remembering her mother. A photographic portrait of Patricia Hart, enclosed in a heavy silver frame, sat on her father’s bedside table. The photo had been taken in 1983 in the months after Deidre’s birth, the era showing in the permed hairstyle and striped taffeta dress Patricia had worn that day. Patricia had still been a young woman then, the smile on her face expressing the surety she felt of a lifetime that was stretching out before her. After her death, Douglas Hart would stare at that photo, tears in his eyes and say how he’d never seen, or known, a more beautiful woman.

  Since she was a young girl, since that first declaration from her father on the eve of her mother’s funeral, Deidre had always had trouble living up to that beauty built up in her father’s mind’s eye. She could never and would never live up to the immaculate grace of the woman contained within that silver frame, never changing, never making mistakes, never growing older, ageing to perfection like a fine wine in Douglas Hart’s memory. Deidre tried. She tried. And she failed. She saw it in the mirror every day; her mother’s fine bone structure overshadowed by her father’s dark, heavy brows, shapeless straight lines like hedges at the boundary of her wide forehead. Deidre plucked until the swollen flesh bulged over her eyes. It was like trying to weed clover from a field. She grew her hair long to compensate, to balance it out. When she was thirteen years old, the wife of one of her father’s friends commented that she was quite hirsute. Deidre had to look the word up in the dictionary. After some time she found the word, discovered the meaning, grew her hair even longer and hid behind it as she swam through a particularly long and deep teen depression.

  Douglas tried to compensate for the loss of her mother for the rest of his life, overprotective and fearful of her safety, her happiness. He fought her battles and made her decisions, the big ones: which car to buy, which bank and superannuation fund to choose, which tax agent to use. Deidre accepted it, spoon-fed, comfortable, if not happy, contented in the years that drifted by, just her and her dad.

  Her friends were growing up, a couple had been married, another was unmarried but pregnant. It was time for Deidre to find her own life, be her own person. It was time for her to step out from under shade of Douglas Hart’s overprotective love. In her early twenties Deidre moved out of the home she’d grown up in all her life to a dingy, two bedroom terrace in Rozelle with a girlfriend she’d met through work. She lived an active social life, trussed her long lank hair into various styles, dressed in the fashion of the day and went out to the pubs and nightclubs. It didn’t take long to realise that the only thing that had changed was her address. She still found herself sitting at a table or standing near the wall, alone in the shadows while the world around her danced and chatted and flirted, her isolation broken occasionally by any drunk/sleaze/weirdo that spotted her like an empty car space at Christmas time. She didn’t know what was wrong with her, unable to connect, banal and awkward in social situations and usually struck dumb.

  The law of averages brought a couple of boyfriends into her life, short-lived affairs, uneventful, fizzling out like a firework that never went off, the fuse never really catching light. Most of the time they’d been a submission on her part to her friend’s expectations.

  Deidre stared at the hallway carpet, her raw eyes blinking, her head thumping. She picked herself up from the floor where she’d crumpled, wet sodden tissues falling from her lap, and walked stiffly down the hallway to the bathroom, her head floating above her shoulders like a helium-filled paper bag. The bathroom mirror confronted her and she groaned, running the cold tap and splashing water on her face. Her eyes burned and she rubbed them hard with a towel, massaging them before looking at herself in the mirror again, at the reflection she always wished looked a little bit better, starting first and always with those eyebrows. She knew the names of the beautiful women who’d worn heavy eyebrows; Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn and of course, Brooke Shields; all stunning women, the strength of their innate beauty enough to carry the weight of those brows. Her dark hair, which she wore long in compensation for her eyebrows, hung with just a whisper of a wave, just enough to make it look consistently untidy and uncombed, hanging over her shoulders in limp rats tails. Deidre had spent hours staring at herself in front of this mirror, comparing, searching for some redeeming beauty hidden in the high, wide forehead, or the face, that although thin, had no chiselled artistry to it. She didn’t consider herself to be warthog ugly, people didn’t turn away from her gasping with repugnance, but nor did she stop them in their tracks overawed by her stunning splendour. She was just average, bland even, as bland as her personality. Dreary Deidre. Maybe they were right. You’re a Hart, Deidre, she remembered her mother saying, and she’d never been sure if she’d meant it in a good way or a bad way.

  Deidre turned away from her reflection and headed numbly towards the kitchen.

  Everything was as it had been the last time she was here. She’d tidied up all the plates, cups and saucers, thrown out the garbage. The house was clean, apart from the dust, and full of her father’s possessions. And a lot of her mother’s too she thought, standing at the kitchen counter looking at the racks of souvenir spoons hanging on the wall. After her mother had died it had been her job to keep them maintained. Even after she’d moved out, on her weekly visits she would occasionally pull them down from the wall while sitting at the kitchen table with Douglas, polishing them over coffee and a catch up.

  ‘Now what?’ she muttered to herself, looking around, where did she start? All these things had to go, the accumulation of her father’s life.

  She wandered down the hallway towards his bedroom and opened the door. Dust danced and swirled through a shaft of light breaking in through the side of the blind. Douglas Hart’s watch and the book he’d been reading sat on the bedside table beside Patricia’s silver framed picture. Deidre had slipped his reading glasses into his pocket at the funeral home, just in case he needed them. Just in case.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, nervous about the job confronting her. Her eyes slid to the small tv sitting on a side table against the wall, the remaining surface of the table cluttered with papers, pen
s, pills, three books, and a small silver city of coin towers.

  ‘I don’t have to do it all today,’ she said to the empty room. ‘A bit at a time. I opened the door and came inside. That’s a start. I got that far,’ she said to the empty room.

  She felt ok. She felt purged.

  ‘We’ll just take this a step at a time. There’s no rush.’

  A mob of green plastic bags stood about the room at the foot of her father’s bed, the wardrobe now empty of clothes. Switching the tv on for background noise she had proceeded to systematically start at the left of the wardrobe and work her way through to the right, determinedly refusing the think of the task she was undertaking. She wasn’t discarding her father, they were just clothes, clothes that other people could wear. All that remained now was the shoes, boxes, suitcases and bags on the floor of the built in wardrobe that stretched the width of the room.

  She pulled a suitcase out and hoisted it onto the bed, flicked the latches and opened it up. Empty. She threw the shoes in. The boxes on the wardrobe floor contained decades of accumulated tax returns, mortgage payments, car registrations and various utility bills, none of it in any kind of order. A brown leather briefcase sat pressed hard up against the back wall of the wardrobe, hidden behind the boxes like a dirty secret. She lifted it up and placed it on the bed, the leather worn and battered, stained and discoloured, the corners of the flap curled and hard at the edges. She unbuckled it, eased the stiff flap backwards and looked inside.

  Loose sheaths of paper and a squat, fat, black bound book sat in the first of the two compartments, the back slot holding two metal containers sitting atop a bundle of cloth. Deidre pulled the sheath of papers out, quickly flipping through them. Invoices and letters, official, old fashioned documents with lots of swirly indecipherable writing. There were drawings on the back she realised. Hand drawn maps with place names and descriptions of terrain, pencil drawings of headlands and valleys, sketches of boulders and rocks, caves and holes in the ground. Two old black and white photographs. The first was of two boys, one a toddler, the other a slightly older boy dressed in long pants and stuffed into a tight fitting jacket. He’d moved at the wrong moment, his face turning away from the camera, smudging the outline of his head, giving him an ethereal, ghostly appearance. Deidre turned it over. There was a stamp on the back, Stuart Harris, Photographer, 12 Market Street, Lerwick. The other photograph was of two men. They looked destitute, unkempt, their clothes, the identical jackets they wore old and well worn, their dark baggy trousers patched at the knees. They both wore caps on their heads, half their faces in shadow. Neither smiled. They were standing in front of a small stone building. It looked shambolic, rocks, debris, rusting tools, old buckets and wooden boxes lay all over the yard, lying in piles and stacked against walls. A dirt heap commandeered a large section on the right side of the photograph.

  She thought of Clark Sheldon, ‘you have an entitlement to a property in Scotland,’ he’d said, and she still remembered her first flashing thoughts at the sound of those words; large family estates and fairy tale castles where she could go salmon fishing and hunting for deer on horseback. Not this. She hadn’t imagined this.

  ‘My God, is this Hart Croft?’ she muttered to the empty room, studying the photo, appalled by the image. Was this where she came from? Was this where her roots began? It cried of extreme poverty. She placed the photos and the sketches back in the satchel. This was something she would go through later, think about later. There was a house to be cleared out.

  All the suitcases and bags she could fit in the car she dropped off at the Salvation Army. What was left of the afternoon she spent sorting through cupboards; crockery, bowls, pots, pans, sheets, towels, tablecloths. Deidre looked around, dismayed. Sandwich makers, electric mixers, a crock pot. A juicer. A small portable electric oven. Three toasters and two kettles still in their boxes, unopened. They crowded the benches and the kitchen table. There was so much to do. She’d run out of boxes and bags.

  Her stomach growled.

  ‘Time to go, I think. I’m getting tired,’ she said, arching her back before heading back to her father’s room to turn the tv off.

  The satchel sat there on the bed like an old dog waiting for her return. She switched the tv off looking at the briefcase. Thoughtfully, she placed her hand on the satchel. Hart Croft. The picture of the two men had been drifting through her mind all afternoon. She opened the stiff leather flap, the leather creaking, buckled down for so long it had almost petrified into the closed position. Bending the leather back, she held it in place for a moment before stretching the compartments open and pulling the wad of papers from the front pocket. She glanced through them, absently sitting on the edge of the bed, her eyes scanning an invoice, hand written, from Walters Store, Merchant. Delivery of one drum of paraffin. The next sheet was thicker, typed, dated July 19th 1928. It came from Inverhall Lunatic Asylum in Aberdeenshire, addressed to Mr and Mrs Hart of Hart Croft, Erdin Valley, Unst. Shetland.

  ‘Dear Mr and Mrs Hart, we are in receipt of your letter dated June 12th 1928. We have taken long consideration of your concerns but unfortunately we stand by our decision that it is in the best interest of the patient that he receive no communication with you at this time. George currently enjoys a stable condition and our concern is that any interference to this status quo may disturb his mental stability. Yours sincerely, Dr Jonathon Pearce.’

  Deidre turned the page over to see a hand drawn map populated with names and crosses, triangles and squiggles. The page had been well-used, the paper embossed by overuse. Standing, she moved closer to the window, catching the last of the late afternoon light, squinting to read the writing. Swabbie Bog. Betarra. Ayres Kame. ‘Ayres Kame,’ she muttered, movement causing her to look across at the old satchel sitting on her father’s bed. She watched as the recalcitrant flap of the old leather briefcase fought against this new unnatural position, inching slowly upwards, the inside of the flap catching the sunlight. She could see something written there, the word pressed down, etched into the leather. She stepped over to it, pulling the flap into the last rays of light.

  ‘Chimney,’ she said to the empty room, reading the word. Deidre stood looking at it, thinking of the building in the photograph, the two faces looking out at her. A strange feeling swept over her, like an old memory she couldn’t quite recall.

  She put the papers back in the satchel and snapped it closed.

  It was time to go home.

  Friday Night, One Week Later – Annandale

  The tv cast moving shadows across the dark room repeating the images of the racial flare up that had happened in the city last Sunday. Deidre changed the channel, tired of hearing about it, the media blowing every other small incident that had happened over the past week out of proportion, adding more hot air to an already overinflated balloon.

  The heat hadn’t helped, three days in the high thirties. Two floors above street level she could allow the window to be open wide allowing what little breeze there was to drift in, the heat still unrelenting.

  Tensing, she uncurled her legs, placing the glass of red wine she’d almost finished onto the coffee table. Reaching for the remote, she turned the volume down, hearing a lot of shouting outside. A lot of anger. A hot Friday night in inner-west Annandale, five kilometres from the city of Sydney and one block away from the Happy Beggar pub.

  Deidre had lived here for the past three years after moving out of the terrace in Rozelle, and despite the occasional loud drunk and usual weekend fights, things had been pretty quiet.

  Glass smashed outside and she jumped, more voices joining in the fracas. She stood up, tiptoeing hurriedly across the darkened room to the window, tripping over something in the darkness.

  ‘Shit!’ she yelped, tumbling forward, knocking her head hard on the window sill as she went down, flashes of light blistering from the back of her eyes as she righted herself on the floor. An immediate thumping ache bounced through her skull and she rubbed her forehead, kicking
the object of her sudden discomfiture out from under her legs.

  The old briefcase she’d brought home from her Dad’s house last weekend lay there in the shadows like a beaten dog. Deidre righted herself to a sitting position, regarding this archaic detritus that had landed on her living room floor. She’d dropped it there last weekend with the intention of going through it but it had been a busy week at work and she’d come home late most nights, had dinner and fell asleep in front of the tv.

  A heated discussion pressed in from outside and Deidre got onto her knees, rubbing her forehead, peeking over the windowsill, investigating the continuing drama on the street below. A group of people stood on the pavement on the other side of the road pointing at a parked car, shattered glass on the pavement sparkling in the streetlight. A frantic assessment of her car parked in the street below assured her it was safe. Usually having to park a block away, she’d been lucky to get a space so close. The loud talking continued on the street, followed by a quick push and shove before the tension dissipated and the group parted ways, two of the party returning to their unit block, the remaining three walking down the street and out of sight.

  Deidre picked up the briefcase and placed it on the coffee table, turned the lamp on and sat contemplating the bag. The lump on her forehead throbbed and she absently rubbed her finger against it, recalling the contents of the briefcase; a couple of old photographs, old papers and drawings. Who did it belong to anyway? Why was it here? What had possessed her to bring it home? Why hadn’t she thrown it in the pile with all the other debris left over from her father’s life? Why hadn’t her father thrown it out? She supposed he’d acquired it from his father. Why was this ugly lump of leather being passed down through the generations like an aberrant gene?