by John Langan
This was insane. I stood up, caught myself from falling over, and said, "What the hell is going on?"
Roger's face was white as the proverbial sheet, whiter, even. He had dropped his book and was gripping the arms of the recliner as if he were an astronaut and it the rocket rushing him into orbit. His eyes were focused on a scene whose reflection on his face—it was the look of someone seeing something at the limit of his ability to process. I said, "Roger!" Nothing. Pushing through the cold, I half-staggered over to him. I shoved his shoulder. "Roger!" He started, his eyes fluttering. He opened his mouth. I said, "Roger."
The air was clear. The black flakes had melted out of it, the charred stench dissipated. It was still cold, but the cold no longer was streaming into the room.
"I'm fine," Roger said, his voice's shakiness betraying him.
"Don't lie to me," I said, "you're not fine, and neither am I. What the hell just happened?"
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"Just now—I saw—I smelled—I felt like—like I don't know what—like the house was moving in all sorts of strange ways. It looked like you were—like something was happening to you, too."
I could see him trying to decide what to say, even as he was processing my words. He settled on, "Why, I was only having a little nap with my eyes open. That's all."
"Then why were your hands clutching this chair like you were afraid it was going to throw you off?"
His cheeks flushed, and I knew I was right. I added, "What was it? Some kind of mini-stroke?" which was completely unfair. Roger was very worried about the possibility of something happening to his mind as he grew older, stroke, Alzheimer's, senility. To suggest that his worst fear might have come true was hitting below the belt. I didn't care. I was frightened and I was annoyed. He was lying to me, trying to hide something, the way he'd been keeping things from me this past semester, to the point of ruin. If I stepped on his toes now, I wasn't inclined to feel too badly about doing so.
The mini-stroke remark did the trick. The flush on his cheeks went from embarrassment to anger, and he snapped, "No, I did not suffer a TIA, although I'm happy to note it's the first explanation that occurred to you."
"So tell me what happened," I said. "Look—we were both just in the middle of something very strange. I saw—these flakes, like snow, only black—like bits of charcoal—and I smelled burning, like overdone meat. I felt—the entire house felt like it was drifting through space."
Roger shook his head. He took a breath. He said, "All right. I was rereading chapter 35 of Bleak House—that's the chapter where Esther discovers her bout with smallpox has scarred her face. From the corner of my eye, I saw something on the window over there," he pointed, "across from me. The window appeared to—to shimmer—for the barest of instants, you understand, and only from the corner of my eye. When I looked directly at it, the window was as still and as solid as those to either side of it. I would have dismissed it as a trick of my eyes, and returned to Esther, except that I noticed a second peculiarity. In the windows to the right and left of that one, I could see the interior of the living room reflected. There you were, curled on the couch, and there was the stereo, with the kitchen door beyond it. The middle window, however, where I should have seen myself, was a blank. It was as if the windowpanes had been painted black. I could not understand how this could be, what combination of factors should rob the window of its reflection."
He took a second, deeper breath. "This was unusual, to be sure, but intriguing. As I sat there considering the problem of the window, trying to estimate what combination of the angle of the room's lights and my angle of vision would be necessary to produce such an effect, I became aware of something else. There was a presence on the other side of that window, someone staring in at me as I was staring out. While not an everyday occurrence, this sensation was not unprecedented. There have been instances where I've known there was a student waiting outside my office. Even at the possibility that a stranger was gazing in at us, I was neither especially worried or threatened. I assumed it to be a late-night walker whose curiosity had been piqued by the sight of the lighted windows. Honestly, I thought that, once the peeping-Tom realized he had been discovered and I was peeping at him, he would beat a hasty retreat.
"The longer I stared at the window, I noticed that I could in fact distinguish something within it. Not our secret admirer's face, no—this was so faint as to be all but impossible to see, faint and small, as if I were seeing it from across a great distance. There was a kind of opening, an archway, which gave onto a long corridor. In that corridor, there was a figure—it was too far and too dark for me to discern much about it except that it was holding its hands out to either side, stumbling forward—its left hand trailing along a wall, its right suspended in space. The entire scene—it was so distant, so hard to see I'm not positive I saw it correctly—if I saw anything at all. I squinted, trying to bring it into focus, and, as I watched the figure lurching along, my heart was moved by a tremendous pity mixed with a tremendous dread. I can not say whence the twin emotions had their origin, but their descent was immediate and overpowering. I could not move. I could only sit staring through the presence on the other side of the window at this distant figure, whom I believe were one and the same, although I am not sure why. It felt as if hours dragged by—hours of pity and dread—before you shook me free. For which I am most grateful." He smiled tightly.
"My God, Roger," I said. "What just happened?"
He shook his head. "I cannot say. Simultaneous hallucinations?"
"Did that feel like a hallucination to you?"
"Not having hallucinated a great deal, I am hardly an expert in the varieties of such experiences," he said, "but no, no it did not. I would very much like it to have been one."
"Me, too."
"The thought that it might not have been I find—unnerving."
"Yeah," I said, "it scares the crap out of me."
I wanted to discuss whatever you'd call had happened to us, but I had a hard time finding the right words—adequate words. I knew the house's history—not as thoroughly as Roger, but well-enough to know there was nothing in it to explain both of us—how would you describe it? Being touched by the paranormal? You see what I mean? Some things you go through, and the only way to approach them is in words that sound so ridiculous they basically shut you up. I can't imagine how you can write about this kind of stuff. I'd think the problem of language alone would be insurmountable.
Despite this, despite the sheer absurdity that assaulted us when we opened our mouths to speak, we did our best to talk about the possible causes for what I christened Our Mutual Weirdness. At one point, I started shaking and couldn't stop, the way you do when the flu overtakes you. Roger came over to me and held me until the fit passed, which must have been at least ten minutes. He remained pale for the rest of our discussion, as if he'd lost a pint of blood.
We threw out things like radon almost immediately. Neither of us knew that much about it, but we were reasonably sure its effects did not include incredibly vivid hallucinations. Roger wondered if we'd shared some manner of psychic encounter, but the details didn't seem to support that, either. (Or, not exactly—I explained my awareness of the house.) I leaned toward the ghostly, which Roger didn't like but agreed appeared the more likely answer. Nothing about the house's past, though—nothing we knew of—suggested a former inhabitant hanging around.
Roger had told me the house's pedigree late one night—it was the night I agreed to move in there. We were lying in bed, and I made some kind of remark. I can't remember what it was, but in answer, Roger related the house's history. It was, he said, "rather mundane." He said, "The house is one of the original dwellings built by the Huguenots when they settled here. A fellow named Jean Michel lived in it with his family. The house he raised was decidedly more modest than what stands there now. Like the other buildings on Founders Street, it was built of fieldstone, and occupied roughly the space of what is now the front parlor an
d hallway." He might have been delivering the voice-over for a PBS special on historic houses. He went on, "What you might call the house proper did not appear for another one hundred and fifty years, when Michel's great-great-grandson, Roderick Michel Sears, decided to renovate the ancestral home to something more in keeping with his status as the town's richest man. He brought in a small army of workers, and what had been another in a series of stone houses became the biggest and grandest house in the area. Since its construction, the house had been known as the Michel house; following Sears's transformation, it became the Sears House; although one local wit dubbed it the Taj Michel.
"That's the extent of the place's history, really. Thomas Belvedere summered there in 1953; there's evidence he started his 'Dark Feast' paintings during his stay. When the last owner, a woman named Nancy Milon, died in a nursing home in Florida in 1958, there were no relatives who wanted to move into the house, which was already falling into disrepair. The Huguenot Historical Society made a move to purchase it for a museum, but this fell through for reasons I don't know. The house was subdivided into ten apartments and rented to students at the college; this was the sixties in Huguenot, so you can be sure its walls witnessed their fair share of surreal experiences. By the time Joanne and I arrived in town, the place was in decay. Its upkeep was a constant and formidable task, and since it was being rented to students, the owners didn't trouble themselves over it much. We bought the place for a song, and a fairly cheap tune at that. In all our renovations and repairs, however, we failed to turn up anything out of the ordinary, no secret passages, no corpses sealed up in the walls, no Indian burial ground in the basement."
How strange is it that we didn't think of Ted right away? Well, that I didn't. Despite my inability to relegate Roger's cursing Ted to the past, not once did it occur to me that the night's strangeness might be the result of him pronouncing, "Let our blood no longer be true."
We went up to bed not long after deciding we weren't going to figure out what had happened to us right away. Sitting in the living room, all that space around us, I felt exposed, terribly visible and vulnerable, and I'm pretty sure Roger did, too. In bed, huddled under the covers next to Roger, wasn't much better. Sleep kept its distance, and while I was lying awake with nothing but my thoughts and the sound of Roger's snoring to distract me, there was the house around me. Not like I had in the living room—this was more the normal sensation of it I had—the normal abnormal, as opposed to the terrifying abnormal—the awareness of it at the ends of my nerves, as if I'd been outside in the freezing cold and just stepped into a hot room. Except now, I knew that feeling as one end of a scale that reached I didn't know how far: at least into the uncomfortable—the profoundly uncomfortable—and possibly well beyond. I didn't expect I'd sleep before dawn, if at all, but as I lay feeling the house around me, I seemed to flow out into it, and then it was late the next morning.
Do you know what's truly bizarre in all this? When I woke up the next morning, I was—not happy, exactly—it was more that I was relieved. For a long time, I'd been—well, you might say concerned about my mental well-being. After all, ask any doctor what the diagnosis is for visions so real you can walk around in them, and you're going to get some form of psychosis. That, or a brain tumor. Now—now, the same thing had happened, and it had happened to someone else, as well. Okay, Roger's and my experiences hadn't been exactly the same, but you see what I mean. For as troubling as the prospect of such things' reality was, there was comfort in the thought that my mind was in better shape than I'd feared.
In the days that followed, Roger dug in the village's archives in search of any clues to the Mutual Weirdness. (I was busy finishing my summer classes.) He turned up next to nothing, and what he found was tenuous at best. According to the goings-on-in-town column of The Huguenot Trumpet—basically a glorified gossip column that had a surprisingly long run, (most of the nineteenth century)—a couple of the workers Roderick Sears brought in for the expansion of the house into its present form were of "mysterious origin," given, the columnist wrote, "to strange manners and practices." What those manners and practices were, the writer didn't specify, but the description sounded to me like a bored columnist trying to inject some life into his otherwise boring report by appealing to American xenophobia. Out of curiosity, I wondered who those guys had been, what work they'd done on the house, but we couldn't find out. The columnist probably invented them.
The only other piece of possibly relevant information Roger found was in one of Thomas Belvedere's letters. Two years after his stay in the house, Belvedere wrote about the "unusual" sensations he'd experienced while living in it. He didn't go into any detail as to the nature of these sensations—although he said they were "not unconducive to a certain kind of inspiration"—in that letter or any other. Roger went so far as to call the curator of special collections at Stanford, where Belvedere's papers are, to ask her to check. She did, and found nothing. By this time, I'd turned in my final grades, so I joined Roger in consulting Belvedere's paintings, especially the "Dark Feast" series, which he began during his stay at the house, and completed shortly after. Have you seen them? I've never been that crazy about Belvedere—too much a Jackson Pollock-wannabe—but I studied those four paintings like they were the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I didn't like them any better when I was done, but there was one, the second, that was interesting. The background is a series of black and royal blue squares, done in a kind of checkerboard effect. On top of that, Belvedere painted the silhouette of a house in lots of wavy white and yellow lines. Inside the house, so to speak, there are all these loops and swirls in dark green and purple. Belvedere arranged the background, the checkerboard, and the silhouette to suggest windows. The outline of the house wasn't an exact match to ours. There were enough angles missing and added that I could understand how no one had made the connection between the painting and the house. (No one had; I checked.) It was the house, though. Looking at it spread out across the pages of the library book on Belvedere, I had no doubt that this was my house. That wavy outline, the absent and extra windows and angles—they weren't exactly how the house felt to me, but they were like it, if that makes any sense. After about a day and a half of studying that painting, staring at it until it was burned onto the backs of my eyes, I had no doubt whatsoever that Thomas Belvedere had undergone something similar—parallel—to our experiences when he'd stayed here.
Of course, since I didn't have anything more than the painting and that line in his letter, my conviction wasn't much use. I e-mailed Belvedere's biographer, hoping that she might know something. Maybe there was a letter that wasn't in the archive, or someone had mentioned something in an interview. No luck. I went so far as to write to Belvedere's widow—she's still alive, ninety-four years old and living in Provincetown. She replied right away, but only to say that she was done answering questions about her late husband, and if I wanted to know anything about him, I should contact his biographer.
So there I was, with what seemed like reasonably good evidence that at least one other person had undergone a strange experience in the house, and nothing to do about it. I had this picture of Thomas and Viola Belvedere that I'd photocopied from his biography. It wasn't very big—about the size of a standard photo. Sometime during the first few days of my research, I'd taped it to one side of the computer screen. More and more of the time I was supposed to be devoting to following the leads I'd found, I spent staring at that picture, as if the answer I was searching for was encoded in its black-and-white depths. The photo had been taken in the spring of 1955, about a year after Belvedere's summer in the house. He and Viola were at a reception at Princeton. I don't know if you've seen a picture of Belvedere. He was medium-tall, skinny-running-to-fat, which you noticed in his stomach, straining his shirt-fronts long before the rest of his body caught up with it. For most of his life, he affected a long mustache—not quite a handlebar, but heading in that direction—and a crewcut. Not a good combination, if you ask me, but I th
ink it was his attempt to add distinction to what was otherwise a plain face. Viola was much more interesting looking, these strong features—dark eyes, Roman nose, full lips, sharp chin. On its own, any one part of her face would have been too much; together, they held each other in balance. She was ten years older than her husband; although in this picture, him wearing a dark suit with a narrow tie that looks as if it's slowly strangling him, her in a black and white dress that looks as if it had been shipped directly from The Dick Van Dyke Show, you wouldn't guess there was more than a year between them either way.
