The Writing on the Wall: A Novel

by W. D. Wetherell

  The Writing on the Wall

  Souvenirs (1981)

  Vermont River (1984)

  The Man Who Loved Levittown (1985)

  Hyannis Boat and Other Stories (1989)

  Chekhov’s Sister (1990)

  Upland Stream (1991)

  The Wisest Man in America (1995)

  The Smithsonian Guide to Northern New England (1995)

  Wherever That Great Heart May Be (1996)

  North of Now (1998)

  One River More (1998)

  Small Mountains (2000)

  Morning (2001)

  This American River (2002)

  A Century of November (2004)

  Soccer Dad (2008)

  Yellowstone Autumn (2009)

  Hills Like White Hills (2009)

  On Admiration (2010)

  The Writing on the Wall

  a novel

  W. D. WETHERELL

  ARCADE PUBLISHING • NEW YORK

  Copyright © 2012 by W. D. Wetherell

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-744-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Vasily Grossman

  1905-1964

  One

  HAUNTED house, haunted woman, haunted country, haunted hills.

  The match was perfect enough to make Vera smile for the first time that summer, the first time all year. In the dark, stooping, she reached for the key her sister had left under the lilac closest to the porch. The moon found it before her hand did, a nickel with a silvery nose. The house groaned when she applied it to the lock, but halfheartedly, as if it were tired of scaring, having done it for so many years. A creaking floorboard under her shoe, a film of cobweb against her cheek, the garlic smell of wood rot, and then she was in, there was nothing the house could do but accept her, saving its scarier tricks for later.

  Jeannie had told her where the switch was for electricity, but she had neglected to write it down, and she was too exhausted to search. Exhausted from decisions, not big ones, nothing major, but the dozens of minor ones needed to get herself onto the plane in Denver, fly across the continent, drive north three hours from Boston and find her way here. She could sleep now—for the first time in months her heart sent permission to her head. She groped her way down the entrance hall, found moonlight again, used it to climb steep stairs to the bedrooms. The largest had a mattress on the floor, a light cotton blanket, and, centered on the pillow, Jeannie’s welcoming little joke, a Snickers bar, the kind they always begged for as kids.

  It was Jeannie’s vacation house—their “shack” they were calling it, Tom’s fixer-upper, a place they could go to when the pressures of the city got too great. Built in 1919, it had stood empty for the past sixteen years, taxes had gone unpaid, and the town was more than happy to sell it to them cheap. It was a forgotten kind of place, with no ski areas nearby to jack up prices, no pretty lakes, just a shallow stream running toward Canada which gave Tom visions of learning how to fish. Our “retreat” was the other term they used, without saying what they were retreating from, though Vera knew that the news of the world hit them hard. Terrorists wouldn’t find them there, even if they took New York— and in the meantime, Tom could do his fishing, Jeannie could have a garden, and anyone who needed solace more than luxury was welcome to borrow it anytime they wanted.

  “You can have it for two weeks,” Jeannie told her when she called in June. “Three weeks. Right into August if that’s what you need. We won’t be able to get up there until after Paris and maybe not even then.”

  “I’d like to stay thirty days,” Vera said. The precision was deliberate.

  “There’s no furniture yet. The yard is a jungle, I haven’t touched the garden, and the vines look like they’re gobbling the house. But it’s interesting enough inside. Whoever built it must have had lots of birds-eye maple, because the floorboards, when we peeled the linoleum off, turned out to be gorgeous. Will Dan be coming?”

  “No. Just me.”

  “He must be busy with his contracting again, good for him.”

  That was always Jeannie’s way, to supply the white lie herself.

  “I can’t emphasize that enough,” she said, when the silence went on a little too long. “How much work it all needs. The worst is the walls. They’re plaster, original probably, but the wallpaper is straight from hell. The front rooms have something that resembles knotty pine, and whoever lived there in the Sixties put up something in the hall that looks like what wedding presents come wrapped in, this hideous white velvet with blood-colored veins. Stripping it off is going to be a major ordeal.”

  “Let me help.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Let me do it.”

  It surprised her, the quick and powerful way the asking surged through her throat.

  “Strip the wallpaper?”

  “I’m terrible with tools, but I’m sure I can do it.”

  “It would take months.”

  “I’ll work hard.”

  “Uh, Vera? It isn’t easy.”

  “I know what you’re thinking, that Dan is the carpenter and I’m just a teacher. But I’m not so klutzy I can’t strip wallpaper.”

  “We’ve already talked to someone in town, an old French Canadian who does anything.”

  Surprising, how much she needed Jeannie’s yes—enough so she brought out her most powerful argument, the one there was no refusing.

  “It will do me good. To have something like that to focus on. It’s what I need right now. I’ll do a good job for you, I promise.”

  Jeannie was six years younger—she’d never had to beg her before. Quickly, almost too quickly, she reversed course and said yes. Why of course she could help, that would be wonderful. They could leave scrapers for her and putty knives and stripping solution and a stepladder and a big garbage can to put scraps in and rubber gloves and bandages in case she nicked herself and plenty of food and wine, and it would all be ready for her when she arrived, she could go right to work.

  “You won’t have to worry about a thing while you’re there.

  Really—not a thing. It’s grunt work though, really messy. How strong are your wrists?”

  “Once I finish I can hang the new wallpaper. Have you picked any out?”

  “After stripping? That’s double the work.”

  “Downstairs then. You can hire your Frenchman to do upstairs.”

  “There’s a website with old Victorian wallpaper and we found a soft peach color that complements the floor. Tom’s doing the math on how much we need. But we’ll order it and have it waiting with everything else.”

  “Thank you, Jeannie. Jeannie? Really, thank you.”

  “You know how much aggravation you’ll be saving us? I’ll send you directions. Basically, you drive north on the interstate, then fall off the
map. Don’t argue with me, but we insist on paying for your flight ... That merger I told you about? It’s back on again, so I have to be going.”

  She said goodbye abruptly, without asking about Cassie, and the absence of that kept Vera holding the phone for a long minute after she hung up. “She’s well, thanks,” she said to the mouthpiece. As well as can be expected. If she can stand thirty days then so can I.

  Maybe that’s what the chocolate on the pillow was for—an apology, a gesture of support. Certainly Jeannie had kept her promise about supplies. In the darkness, boxes and cartons made a maze she had to thread her way through before going upstairs. She glanced at the walls on the way up, traced her hand along the paper, but it was too dark to really see. Beside the candy was a penlight she used to find the bathroom; after undressing, she fell against the mattress as if she’d been pushed. Two layers of exhaustion worked on her, and the upper one, the one that came from the flight and long drive, was wonderfully smothering, the way it kept the bottom layer from having its way. She fell asleep quickly, dreamed of silly things, then, well before dawn, woke up to moonlight touching her face.

  It burned, that was the odd thing, white as it was. She lay there until it touched her throat, then, restless, wrapped the cotton blanket around her shoulders and ventured carefully out into the hall. The walls weren’t square and reliable, but slanted at unexpected angles, like baffles, keeping her from walking straight more than a few steps at a time. One turn brought her to a door with frosted glass in the upper panels. A closet, she decided, but when she opened it she came to a pool of moonlight so dense and liquid she stepped back in alarm.

  There she found a little balcony, a platform big enough for a single chair, set above the porch just below. Someone must have built it to have a quiet spot where they could be alone over the hubbub of visitors, and this pleased her, to have discovered one of the house’s secrets so quickly. The railing was wobbly and rotted, but it gave her enough confidence to take the three steps needed to peer down.

  The ground mist rose into the moonlight, and toward the top were milky tongues that licked in toward the house. Back home the mist hardly ever rose above the sage, but here it seemed brewed from an enormous kettle, smelling of greenness and the lightest spice of fir. An enormous pine tree fronted the porch, but the fog hid its trunk and only the needles were visible, like pins holding the mist up. Jeannie had told her about the wild pea vines, and it was true, they climbed the porch and coiled around the railings, not eating the house so much as holding it ready to eat, shifting and turning it to just the right angle.

  She could hear Tom’s trout stream across the road, a purposeful rushing, and an owl, very distant, calling to a hoarser one that roosted much closer. She shivered as she listened, her new kind of shivering that had nothing to do with the damp. In March, she had been hurled out from the world by a single phone call and she wasn’t down yet. Even on the flight east, after she had said goodbye to Dan, taken her seat, closed her eyes during takeoff. The plane didn’t need to climb, she was already up there, and the entire flight had seemed a gradual downward slant, and yet never did she land. Even landing it didn’t land. Even in Boston she wasn’t down. And now here she was, climbing porches in the moonlight, on the way up again, her landing further off than ever.

  She had spent the flight staring out the window, though her neighbors, absorbed in the movie, glanced sideways at her and frowned. It was an exceptionally clear day, the view should have been wonderful, and yet it was marred by something it took her most of the flight to understand. The land below looked tired and old—there was a graying agent in the air creating the effect of an exhausted giant sleeping with its mouth open; the lakes, its eyes, rheumy and clouded; the highway, its lips, crusted over with spittle; its hands, the valleys, listless and pale. The longer she stared, the more coma-like the effect seemed, and it made her angry, enough so she wanted to ring a bell or trip an alarm. “Wake up Detroit!” she wanted to shout, when the pilot mentioned it was under them. “Wake up Syracuse!” The pilot came back on to warn of turbulence, but the only thing shaking was her heart.

  She turned around to take the house in, what she could see above the mist. Behind the porch the eaves rose at an angle so sharp it suggested a fierce-looking steeple. Under the edges drooped a trim of gingerbread so rotten it was impossible to understand why it hadn’t dropped off. The single window had only one shutter, hanging out at a lopsided angle from the glass. Now, as she watched, it seemed aware of her presence, because, with no wind stirring, it creaked sideways on its hinges and smacked the window with a bang.

  Excellent, she decided—for the second time that night she nearly smiled. Show me more of this, use your best tricks, frighten me out of my numbness, though to find numbness is exactly why I’ve come. Generations had lived and died there, the house reached back into time, so why shouldn’t it be haunted, if only by rusty hinges, rotten joists, corroded pipes. Dan would have loved tackling these, he should have been the one to come. She could bring nothing to bear on the house except slow mindless work with her fingers, wrists, and arms, and yet maybe it was this that would make the house friendlier, coax it into her favor, calm all its fret.

  She remained on the secret platform until she started shivering again, this time from cold. With it came exhaustion, and it was the deeper layer this time, the one that sleep could do nothing against. She went back inside to her mattress, pressed with her slipper until it slid away from the moonlight, and into the darkness let herself fall.

  The difference in time zones worked in her favor—she slept much later than she did at home. The sun touched her face as the moon had, then moved across the floor to the nearest wall. When its light filled the room she got up, searched through her suitcase for a sweatshirt, tugged it down over her jeans. A midnight arrival was no way to start with the house. It needed to be approached in daylight, from a feeling of energy and strength. She went downstairs determined not to look at anything—she pressed her hands to her eyes like blinders—and then she was outside crossing the yard to the road, walking purposefully toward the sun.

  It was a modern enough road, with two smooth lanes and absolutely no traffic. A hundred yards past the house a sign announced the village was three miles off, and beyond that on the crest of a little rise stood a smaller green sign that she fixed on as her goal. When I touch it I’ll turn around.

  The fog lifted through the trees, and the energy of this made the leaves toss sideways and dance. From the wet grass on either side of the road came a cinnamon scent from flowers that were new to her, with spiky blossoms only partially unfurled. There was an iron smell, too, from the mud in the gullies. Black-eyed Susans grew everywhere, with purple nettles and tough-looking gorse. Flowers had always been her joy in life, wildflowers especially, so this, she decided, is where she would come during breaks in work.

  The sign turned out to be farther away than it looked. She walked for another ten minutes, and what she found when she got there surprised her considerably.

  You are standing on the 45th parallel it read, in dignified bronze script. Halfway between the Equator and the North Pole.

  And this time she did smile—tentatively, surprised at herself, but finally letting it have its way. What amused her was to think that Jeannie’s house lay a quarter mile closer to the Arctic than it did the tropics, and how this must explain the feeling, so strong when she arrived during the night, of sliding toward the planet’s edge.

  Irony was good for her—joined with the sunshine it sharpened her vision so she could see things plain. She turned and faced the direction of the house. It lay centered in a frame made by the steep hill behind it and the winding trout stream across the road—bigger than it seemed up close, boxier, uglier, squatting with a hasty, improvised look on its overgrown scrub of an acre, despite the fact it had endured there almost a century. The sharp eaves she had stood under during the night were plainly visible splitting the house in two, only now it seemed less like a steeple
than a stubby guided missile ready to be launched from the metal gambrel of the roof. The siding, with the sun slanting against it, was a chocolate color fading toward leather, though many boards were in the process of dropping off. The chimneys, all three of them, tilted toward the roadside, and the one that sagged furthest pressed against a rusty TV antenna that was almost bent in half.

  Lower, partly obscured by trees, was the porch, with screens blackened from mildew and totally opaque. The bay windows, bulging out on either side, seemed like the turrets of a battleship ready to blast anything approaching from the road. And that was what the house suggested, seen from the distance—great fragility and great strength, so she simultaneously felt surprise that it was there in the first place and certainty that it had been there forever.

  “Quaint,” Jeannie had called it, when all other adjectives failed. But it was the exact opposite of quaint.

  Well beyond the house, just before the road curved out of sight, was a smaller, even shabbier, house, but it was too far away to tell if it was occupied. The hill directly behind Jeannie’s was steep and rocky, cutting off any view toward the west, but the hills on the sides sloped more gently, so perhaps a sunset sometimes managed to sneak through. The fields around the house were open, but overgrown and swampy, and it was impossible to tell whether anyone cared after them. The forest started at the base of the hill, with thicker, more serious looking trees than the handful clustered around the house.

  There was something Western in the landscape that surprised her, at least if you faded out the green. Not so much where she and Dan lived, but the high northern tier of Montana where they had gone on camping trips when Cassie was little. Jeannie had warned her that she would find the sky small and claustrophobic compared to what she was used to, but it wasn’t that way at all, and to the northeast, across the stream, the hills uncoiled toward Canada, widening the horizon. In walking back to the house she noticed two parallel tracks worn deep into the meadow grass, reminding her of trails left by pioneers back on the prairies. Had wagon wheels cut them? She taught middle school science, not history, but she was reasonably sure the settlers who came here first had not used covered wagons.