Haunts

by Stephen Jones

  “I’ve always looked for you out there,” she said softly, voice a despairing melody. “In the dark. I’ve wondered what you were like.”

  “What do you mean?” I finally replied, lost.

  She never answered and I watched her disappear into the mansion, with a final wave, and what I would describe in a script, if I had to tell the actress what to convey, as veiled desperation.

  *

  The next morning, I slept so deeply I didn’t even hear the car that sped up my driveway. It wasn’t until the knocking that I finally awakened.

  When the detective spoke, I felt the earth die.

  “A breakin?” I repeated in a voice that had to sound in need of medical attention.

  He explained the missing piece was valuable, purchased in London, at auction. The chauffeur had told the police the owner of the house was a collector, but gave no further details.

  “It was a gift. She gave it to me.” I explained.

  “She?”

  “Aubrey.” I could still see her plaintive eyes, desperate for connection. “The woman who lives there.”

  He said nothing.

  Asked if he could see it.

  I nodded and took him to my living room, where it leaned against the big sofa. He slowly, silently, unwrapped it and my world began to vanish.

  The poster was full-color, gold-framed.

  It was from the 1930s, and the star was a stunning brute named Dan Drake; unshaven and clefted. His beautiful co-star was Isabella Ryan, and she was held in his embrace as the two stood atop Mulholland Drive, windblown; somehow doomed. Behind them, a stoic L.A. glittered, morose precincts starved of meaning. Though striking, no splendor could be found in its image, merely loss. The movie was titled City of Dreams, but I’d never heard of it.

  Isabella’s eyes and dress were mystic blue; her flowing dark hair and pale skin more regal than the platinum locket adorning her slender neck.

  From any angle, no matter how inaccurately observed, she not only resembled Aubrey, she was her.

  It was shocking to me in a way I’d never experienced, and I nearly felt some cruel director zooming onto my numbed expression for the telling close-up.

  Both stars had signed at the bottom.

  To everyone who ever loved. Yours, Dan Drake.

  Beside his, in delicate script was:

  I’ve always seen you out there. You’re in my dreams. Love, Isabella Ryan.

  She seemed to be looking right at me, disguising a profound fear.

  *

  Charges were never brought against me, and the sunken-faced detective said I’d gotten off easy, that my neighbor, still unnamed, didn’t want trouble and was giving me a second chance. The Royal only wanted the poster back, nothing more. For me, this generosity stirred further mystique, intolerable distress.

  *

  It’s futile to determine who I’d actually spent the evening with; I don’t believe in ghosts unless they are of the emotional variety; aroused by séances of personal misfortune, you might say.

  But this thought brings no peace, no clarity.

  I looked up City of Dreams in one of my movie books and found it: 1942, MGM. Black and white. Suspense. 123 minutes. There was a related article about Isabella, an airbrushed studio photo beside her husband, the obscure composer Malcolm Zinner. Zinner was bespectacled, intense. It appeared their marriage had been loveless.

  The book said she’d had a nervous breakdown, but then don’t they all? She’d never done another movie after City of Dreams, despite promising reviews, and died in a plane crash, in 1953. The book said her real name was Aubrey Baker.

  Truffaut said that film is truth, twenty-four frames per second. Mine seems to be moving rather slower these days, my heart circling itself. I feel drenched by confusion: a lost narrative. I am drawn to unhealthy theory and wonder if perhaps I am dying.

  Maybe I’ve just seen too many movies.

  My ex-wife used to say the thing about irony is you never see it coming; that’s how you know it’s there. Also, the bigger it is, the more its invisibility and caprice. She used to talk like that, in puzzles. I’m not sure what she was getting at, but there you are.

  All I know is a movie poster with a long-dead beauty had been the most genuine thing I could remember in a lifetime of misappropriated and badly written fictions; it seemed a bad trend. Not even a particularly worthwhile plot, but I was never much good at that part.

  Meanwhile, the Royal, it appears, is out there somewhere, hidden by lawyers; filtered and untouched. Bereft, bled by abuse and event; disfigurations of neglect.

  It’s been two months now, since that evening by the pool, and still no sign of the Royal, who remains at large in elite silence. I suppose I’ve given up thinking we’ll ever actually meet, barring the extreme twist.

  Sometimes, I find myself staring at the handwritten invitation, which I saved, though I have no idea who really wrote it. I stare until the words lift from the paper and fly away, scattering grammar into sky; an image Vittorio De Sica might have sparked to.

  *

  After considerable search, I finally found a copy of City of Dreams at a specialty video store, which had to track it down for me. When I watch Aubrey, despite her astonishing beauty, I keep thinking she looks trapped; not by bad dialogue or plot, but an apprehension of her life to be. Its imminent ruin.

  Today, I tried to tell my agent why the dumb script I’ve been working on is late, and when he heard all of what had happened, he sighed and said writers were always getting themselves in crazy messes. He said he thought I’d probably seen Isabella’s movie when I was a kid and forgotten about it.

  He nearly accused me of drinking, again, and wondered if maybe I’d had too much one night, wandered around the Royal’s house and seen the poster; decided I had to have it, succumbing to stupid nostalgia. To bring back my only good childhood memory; going to the movies. The rest had been loveless, terrifying; an ordeal that lasted for endless seasons of pain.

  I’m sure he’s right. I do drink when I get lonely. I could take many evenings out of your life failing to convey the dread and hurt I often feel. I’ve had nights where I stared pointlessly, out at the world, and thought that no one could ever love me, just as, it seems, Isabella watches it from her lurid, heartbreaking poster, searching for the one face out there, in a heartless city, who will truly care.

  Bunuel said every life is a film. Some good, some bad. We are, each of us, paradoxes in an unstated script; pawns who wish to know kings, souls divided, hearts in exile. We’re all tragic characters, one way or the other; the vivid Technicolor glories, the noir hurts, the dissolve to final credits.

  Fellini believed movies were magic, itself, awakened by light. That theaters were churches, dim and velvet; filled with incantation. All I know is that when you feel lost and wounded, movies always welcome you, like a friend, inviting you to forget the painful truth; embracing your most lightless fragilities, the sadnesses which bind you.

  To dream of better things.

  Life pales.

  <>

  *

  A House on Fire

  TANITH LEE

  TANITH LEE was born in North London. She did not learn to read—she is dyslexic—until almost age eight, and then only because her father taught her. This opened the world of books to her, and by the following year she was writing stories.

  She worked in various jobs, including shop assistant, waitress, librarian, and clerk, before Donald A. Wollheim’s DAW Books issued her novel The Birthgrave in 1975. The imprint went on to publish twenty-six more of her novels and collections.

  Since then Lee has written around ninety books and nearly 300 short stories. Four of her radio plays have been broadcast by the BBC, and she also scripted two episodes of the cult TV series Blakes 7.

  Her recent books include Greyglass and To Indigo from Immanion Press, and ongoing reissues of The Birthgrave and StormLord trilogies from Norilana Books, along with a short story collection, Sounds an
d Furies. Another recent collection, Disturbed by Her Song from Lethe Press, was short-listed for the LAMBDA Award for gay, lesbian, and transgender fiction.

  In 1992 she married the writer/artist/photographer John Kaiine, her companion since 1987. They live on the Sussex Weald, near the sea, in a house full of books and plants, with two black-and-white overlords called cats.

  “I think the idea for this story was with me for about eighteen months before I took the opportunity to write it,” recalls Lee. “The idea’s basis came from John—a suggestion of juggling the traditional concept of ghost-haunts-house. I then figured out the method of death(s), and the only possible title instantly arrived.”

  Edwin Marsh Onslowe strangled his mistress, Mrs. Violet North, in the early February of 1885. In order to conceal the crime, he then set a fire in her otherwise unoccupied and remotely situated house, which accordingly burned to the ground during the night. As their elicit affair had been scrupulously hidden by both parties, Onslowe was not even suspected of having anything to do either with the fire itself, or with the demise of Mrs. North. The latter was in fact judged carelessly and accidentally to have burned to death. Some time later, however, Edwin Onslowe presented himself at a police station and freely confessed to arson and murder. He was subsequently found guilty and hanged.

  The reason he gave for his confession has, ever since, remained the subject for perplexed debate.

  —Derwent’s Legal Mysteries

  THE HEAT OF THE FIRE on his face—

  It was burning. Burning…

  *

  Traveling up on the train through a fading afternoon into the first encroachment of dusk, he was a little excited. More at the element of adventure, of course, than at seeing Violet again. She was hardly any longer a novelty.

  In fact they had met five years before, and from the very start had carried on their rather intermittent affair in just this way, which was that of subterfuge. It had been for her sake. A married woman with a great amount to lose, she had had to be persuaded, or to persuade herself. Besides, their earliest meetings took place in spying, gossipy London, in a succession of small hotels somewhere between the Strand and the Hibernian Road.

  To each of these they went separately, meeting near the agreed venue, pretending thereafter to be a married couple bound for Charing Cross Station and the boat train, and having to break an arduous journey in order to rest for three or four hours. Edwin, this scenario in mind, would always arrive with a pair of spurious bags—the other luggage having “already gone on ahead.” No doubt that would have been quite enough to sustain their ploy. They were never challenged, treated with unsuspicious courtesy, and served tea at the end of their sessions. However, Edwin had instantly enhanced the little play.

  Both he and she were to dress in modest clothes rather unlike their generally more elegant garments (for Violet, through her legal husband was rich, and Edwin, if hardly wealthy, still quite well off). Edwin, too, might employ a wig, even a false moustache. These he would apply, and later slough, in some convenient if chancy doorway or alley found en route. They would, each of them, talk in less polished accents and more hackneyed terms, as befitted apparel and hotel.

  They would keep this up from the moment of publicly meeting until the bedroom door closed fast on their supposed siesta. Which was, evidently, the exact opposite of restful. Emerging after, they would continue their roles, mildly genteel little nobodies, until they parted, then without any visible sign of affection or even of ever having known each other, somewhere in the warren of streets.

  Violet herself seemed to enjoy their game. Sometimes she would, once inside the hotel bedroom, dissolve in laughter, muffled initially by his hand, and then his eager mouth.

  Certainly to begin with, Edwin was ardent, enticed by Violet’s body—she was then just twenty-one years of age. But over the succeeding half-decade he must admit their liaison sank, for him at least, to a habit—one he might not much miss if given up. Nevertheless, the “game” always amused him.

  He was playing it, naturally, when he journeyed out of London on the train. He sat in a second-class carriage, not overly full at that time of day or year, and watched the thick smoke and steam of passage drift by, and the wildlands of the more southerly northwest come and go between, in gathering afternoon, sunset and dusk. He was attired as a poorish office clerk, who liked to go walking in the country should he get a vacation. The inn he meant to stay at, too, just outside Pressingbury, was precisely the sort such a person would choose. Edwin had gone to some pains, as ever in his Violet episodes. But this, admittedly, had been a more complex project, made necessary by her having taken possession of some big old country house.

  Violet had sent him a short letter, addressing him by the invented name of Mr. Harbold. She was newly in the house, and would he not come up in February. Then they could discuss the “important business” at hand.

  Edwin, accepting the invitation with slight, if not completely tepid interest, had no notion what the “business” was, if indeed it were anything more than another code in their game. The faint irksomeness of the trip was offset for him by playing once more in disguise. He would stay tonight at the inn, then go off on his “little walking tour.” The second day and night he would spend with Violet, returning from her new house directly to the town, and thence to London.

  Violet’s husband, Henry Augustus North, was at this time in India. More than fifteen years her senior, he had been there now almost a quarter of a century, in a mercantile rather than a military capacity. Now and then, of course, he was in England, as he had been when first they met. But now, as then, he never stayed long. The climate of England did not agree with North. Just as, Violet had convinced him, that of India, even untried, would never agree with her.

  Edwin left the train at Pressingbury Halt. By then he was tired and hungry, buoyed up only by his disguise (he now was Mr. Harbold) and the play he would carry on at the inn to safeguard Violet’s reputation. He walked the two miles to his lodging as twilight closed on the landscape. Edwin paid no attention to the beauty of the scenery, the steep boulderings of hills changing to the black furred backs of giant beasts, the eerie sparkle of a white waterfall, the glittering litter of the cool late-winter stars. It would be a longer walk tomorrow to the isolated property. And Violet would be demanding. (Rather like her husband, Edwin had not seen her for several months.) As he reached the inn and traipsed inside, Edwin did wonder, briefly, if tomorrow’s might be, after all, the last time he spent with her.

  As it happened, he had met a young woman only the week before, at the races. Iris Smithys was less high up the social ladder than Violet North, but only nineteen, with perfect figure, unmarked skin, and dancing eyes full of a sudden heat when they had met his own. Yes, truly, this might well be the last occasion he and Violet played any of their little games. They must, both, then, make the most of it.

  *

  “Edwin—my very dear—! How wonderful that you’ve arrived!”

  She had grown old. In less than seven months her summer had been shed from her. Her flesh seemed dry, to see, to touch… No, this was absurd. She was not yet twenty-seven … Unless, as sometimes the female sex did, she had lied.

  “Violet. More lovely than ever,” he murmured, holding her close in the clandestine hallway.

  “Alas no, my dearest. I’m not at my best, I know. It’s been a troubling while. I wanted not to bother you with any of it until I had some knowledge of where I stood.”

  Alarm took a grip on Edwin, replacing the annoyed repulsion he had felt on viewing her drabness.

  In spite of all Edwin’s care—had old North discovered the adultery? Was he perhaps even now storming towards England across the ocean, polishing a pistol as he prowled the decks?

  Her reply rushed the blood from Edwin’s cheeks.

  “We are to be divorced,” said Violet, and burst into such a torrent of tears, it was as if a fountain had been turned on inside her eyes.

  Edwin clamped
himself in iron control.

  “Are you in any danger, Violet?” He meant, naturally: Am I in any danger?

  To his bemused relief she shook her head. “No, no—my very dear… Oh Edwin, it’s been such a dreadful strain—yet now, perhaps, at last, something wonderful may come from it!”

  Edwin was in several minds on this, but he followed Violet meekly into a large morning room that led off the hallway. He had seen no servants either within or without the house, and when presently Violet informed him she had dismissed them all for three days of holiday, he was unsurprised if perturbed. Obviously, to keep even the most trusted and loyal retainer on the premises during Edwin’s sojourn would be unwise. But how, servantless, they were to manage he partly dreaded. He thought she would have no culinary skills beyond the making of a pot of tea, or the peeling of an apple.

  But Violet was all enthusiasm. She ushered him to a chair and brought him, on a tiny tray, a glass of sherry and a plate of biscuits, with the oddly jaunty air of a silly child acting. Even so, her gloom seemed abruptly to have left her. She looked in the firelight (had she lit the fire?), softer and less unappealing as her face relaxed. “You see,” she said, sitting on a stool at his feet, “this may come to be the best thing in the world, my love.”

  Gravely Edwin waited. “Yes?”

  It was then, for the very first, the house made its presence known to him.

  Edwin, as noted, was—despite his earnest game-playing—not especially observant, and particularly not of anything that was not animate. That is, a human being might attract his attention, either for some extreme of conduct, fair or foul, or likewise physical appearance. Even a dog or horse, or large bird, might also gain his regard, if sufficiently aggravating, smelly or threatening. The earth, however, unless in quake or eruption, could never do so. Not even the sea itself, unless he had been on it in the midst of a storm, something that so far he had sedulously avoided. The world was only shapes, lights and shadows, weather, and potential stupid accidents and assaults such as pitfalls or rabid sheep. Meanwhile all static objects, which must necessarily include the architecture of any building, whether a temple of the ancient Greeks, a pyramid of the uncanny Egyptians, or a slum behind a stable (rather resembling the place he had grown up in before a legacy came his way) had less impact on him than music on a stone.