The House That Jack Built

by Graham Masterton

  'Which book?' he asked her (or thought he asked her).

  'Any book. Life is like any book. That's why I took all those pills.'

  'I still don't know what you mean.'

  'You will, Morton. You will.'

  He opened his eyes and he hoped he was dead, but he wasn't. He was still alive, still transfixed, still in appalling agony. He took a deep, gurgling breath, and then he screamed, and screamed again, and he could hear his scream echoing around the house. Where the hell was Brewster? Why was Brewster always late?

  He tried to calm himself down. He had only succeeded in hurting himself even more; and making himself feel more helpless and frustrated.

  He tried to think about anything else except pain. Like, what were the odds against his falling through three floors, and finishing up pierced by this pipe? I mean, what were the odds? A million-to-one. A billion-to-one. Yet here he was, so accurately impaled that he could only believe that God had done it on purpose.

  He wondered if he tilted himself sideways, the pipe would bend sideways, too. If it fell over horizontally, then he could crawl off it. But when he leaned to the left, only half an inch, the pipe touched his heart and he went into such an agonising spasm that he bit right through his lower lip and clenched his fists until his fingernails punctured the palms of his hands.

  It took him over a minute to recover. When he did so, he was still trembling and sweating, and now he was convinced that he was going to die. He whispered 'Our Father…', or tried to, but somehow he got it all mixed up with the 23rd Psalm. 'Give us this day our daily bread… for thy rod and staff, they comfort me…'

  He heard a scurrying noise. Then another.

  'Forgive us our trespasses… as we forgive them who trespass against us… and spreads a table in the sight of mine enemy…'

  It was hard for him to see. He was deeply shocked and half delirious, and apart from the pale reflected sunlight that penetrated the alcove from the hole in the ceiling through which he had fallen, the cellar was utterly dark.

  But he heard another scratching, scurrying noise, and then a rustling sound, as if somebody were dragging sacks across the floor; and he didn't need to glimpse much more than a wriggling rug of brownish-grey fur to know what was happening. The rats in the cellar had gathered around him. He could smell them. He could see their beady jet black eyes glittering in the shadows. They were lapping up the blood that had trickled down the pipe, and one or two of them were already venturing up to the pipe itself and following the blood to its source.

  Morton bellowed in panic and disgust. The rats flinched, as if he had hit them with a stick, and some of them scurried away. But they soon came back again, sniffing and chittering and crawling all over each other in their eagerness to lick up his blood.

  One of them managed to scramble up the heating pipe and bite into Morton's left foot. He was hurting so much already that he scarcely felt it; but even when he swung his foot backward and forward, the rat clung on, pirouetting heavily with every swing.

  Another rat jumped up and bit at his ankle, and then another dug its teeth into his heel. He kept on swinging his feet, and every swing was torture, but the rats refused to let go, and soon he was doing nothing more than heaving great festoons of rats from one side of the pipe to the other, like a man wading through thick grey seaweed.

  It hurt so much that he couldn't understand why he didn't die. Maybe he was dead, and this was Purgatory, where he would have to swing impaled on a pole, eaten alive by rats, until somebody prayed for his soul, and he was saved. He tried to think of somebody who might pray for his soul, but the only person he could imagine doing it was Audrey, and she was dead already.

  'Life is like a book,' she told him.

  'Yes, Audrey, but which book?'

  'Any book. Don't you understand?'

  Any book? What did she mean? Maybe she was trying to say that when you were born, it was like opening a book, and you lived your life from page to page, and when you died the book was snapped shut. But he still didn't get it.

  A huge rat jumped up and dug its teeth into his chest. Another scrambled onto his shoulder. An even heavier rat clawed its way up his back, its claws digging into his skin, and perched itself on top of his head, like a terrible parody of a trapper's hat.

  Morton twisted his head around and around but the rat dug its claws into his scalp and he couldn't dislodge it. Then another rat bit into his upper lip, and another bit into his cheek, and then he was wearing a living, swaying mask of greasy sewage-smeared fur.

  He tried to shout out, but a narrow-nosed rat bit into his tongue, and then thrust its head into his mouth. He tasted sick and sewage and blood.

  A book, she said, and at last he understood.

  THURSDAY, JUNE 24, 1:04 P.M.

  Brewster Ridge slewed his TransAm to a halt outside Valhalla, grabbed his briefcase, and ran up the steps to the front door. Morton was going to kill him. He knew that Morton was going to kill him. He had promised himself that he would never give Morton the chance to criticise him for anything any more: not for lateness, nor over-optimistic surveys, nor wrongly identifying termites or parasites or wood-boring beetles. Morton had already complained about him to Leonard Braun, their senior executive surveyor, and Leonard had given him the same sort of look that he had given Ray Philips, Brewster's fellow junior, a week before Ray Philips had found himself out of residential surveying and into utensil control (in other words, clearing tables at St. Andrew's Cafe).

  Brewster found the front doors of Valhalla unlocked, and that was one relief. At least he wouldn't have to ring the doorbell and wait for Morton to answer. Apart from that, he didn't particularly like the look of Valhalla's bell-pull: a snarling bronze beast that almost dared you to put your hand on it.

  He stepped into the entrance hall. He had worked for Braun Bannerman for less than a year, and he had never visited Valhalla before, although he had heard about it. It was featured prominently in Carole Rifkind's book on American residential architecture, and there was a view of its south elevation on Mr. Braun's office wall, next to his framed diploma and a photograph of his late Doberman with its tongue hanging out.

  Mr. Braun had said that he ought to assist Morton in his survey 'because they don't build houses like Valhalla any more, just like they don't breed men like Jack Belias any more'.

  Brewster didn't know what that meant, not exactly, anyhow. Brewster was 27 years old and black and extremely lanky. He looked like Eddie Murphy if Eddie Murphy had suddenly grown serious and ten inches taller. He could have been a brilliant basketball player except that he had always hated basketball. He was Poughkeepsie born and bred, and remembered Poughkeepsie in the days when it was safe to walk around at night. His father worked for the railroad, and was devoted to the railroad, and in many ways his father's appreciation of physics and mechanics and fine old-fashioned engineering had influenced his choice of career.

  He walked into the entrance hall and looked around. Valhalla had looked enormous, as he sped towards it down the drive, but this was something else. His father's whole house could have fitted into this hall, with plenty of room to spare. He crossed the marble floor and his footsteps echoed. He turned around. This was really something else. Huge, grand, and falling down. It put him in mind of Citizen Kane.

  'Morton, are you there?' he called; and his voice echoed, and changed, until it sounded as if he had called out something else altogether.

  Brewster wasn't surprised that there was no reply. He knew how quickly Morton worked, marching from room to room with his cassette-recorder, prodding the walls with his ballpen, chipping off woodwork with his penknife, jumping up and down on suspect floors. He was probably halfway finished already, up in some attic, testing the copper on the roof.

  He was also probably showing his annoyance that Brewster was so late. This time, however, Brewster had an excuse that was almost legitimate. His wife Gala had called him from the clinic to say that she was pregnant, after two years of trying.
<
br />   'Morton, it's Newt! I'm sorry I'm late!'

  Still there was no reply. Brewster walked along the corridor and opened the doors to the ballroom. He stepped inside, and stopped for a moment, looking around him in amazement. He had seen some enormous private residences, up along the Hudson River Valley, but Valhalla was something else. This house hadn't been built simply for comfort. This house had been built as an overwhelming declaration of its owner's wealth and self-importance. From the coat of arms in the hallway to the stratospheric ceiling in the ballroom, every feature of it was designed to make the visitor feel intimidated, and to enhance the stature of the man who had constructed it.

  Brewster didn't like it at all. He never liked houses that were deliberately unwelcoming; and Valhalla was positively bullying.

  'Morton?' He called. 'Morton, listen, I'm real sorry to be so late! Just give me a clue where you are!'

  He went through to the library. On the left-hand side of the room, just below the window, the floor had completely collapsed, and there was a gaping hole in the parquet that was big enough to drop a sofa through. He looked up, and saw that the ceiling had collapsed, too, almost as if that imaginary sofa had fallen right through to the cellar from the floor above. He could just imagine the expression on Morton's face when he saw that. Morton thought that the art of building sound domestic residences had been lost before the turn of the century.

  He found himself at the foot of the secondary staircase. 'Morton!' he shouted, and his voice echoed, 'Morton, it's Brewster… I didn't mean to be late but Gala's having a baby!'

  He stopped and listened, but even this news didn't provoke a reply. There was only one thing he could do, and that was to start his own survey and hope that he ran across Morton while he was doing it. He hunkered down on the library floor and clicked open his briefcase. He took out a large legal-sized notebook, a flashlight and a tape measure.

  He was still rummaging through his papers looking for a copy of Valhalla's blueprints when he heard a thick gurgling noise, apparently coming from the large, ragged hole in the library floor. It sounded like a cistern emptying, or a sink that was suddenly unblocked. Brewster stood up and cautiously approached the edge of the hole, testing the strength of the floorboards with every step. He had seen houses in which entire floors had collapsed as soon as they were trodden on, and he didn't fancy the idea of a short cut down to the cellar.

  He heard another gurgle. This time, it didn't sound like a cistern or a sink or anything else mechanical. It sounded like a large animal, struggling for breath. Brewster hesitated. The floor creaked ominously underneath him. He took one step nearer the edge of the hole, then another, and this time the wood crumbled wetly, and he almost fell through.

  As he tilted forward, however, he glimpsed something down in the cellar. Something grey, and hunched, like an old motheaten fur coat hanging over a dressmaker's dummy. Except that it couldn't have been a coat, because it shifted and wriggled as if it were alive. Rats. Jesus. A whole heap of nothing but rats, nearly six feet high.

  Except that it couldn't have been nothing but rats, because two or three of them lost their footing, and dropped down into the darkness, revealing for one single hideous instant the face of an agonised man, scarlet with blood, both eye-sockets empty, and his mouth crammed with a huge brown rat, its hind claws scrabbling at his chin as it tried to force itself further and further down his throat.

  THURSDAY, JUNE 24, 5:54 P.M.

  They returned from a day trip to the Vanderbilt Mansion to find Walter Van Buren waiting for them in the garden of Pig Hill Inn, accompanied by a tall and serious young black man.

  Mr. Van Buren was sitting in the shade of a large oak, sipping iced tea.

  'They told me you'd be back around six,' he said, standing up and shaking their hands. 'This is Mr. Brewster Ridge, he's one of the surveyors from Braun Bannerman.'

  'Well?' asked Craig, impatiently.

  'I regret we have some bad news,' said Mr. Van Buren.

  'How bad? Don't tell me the foundations are rotten.'

  'It's not the house, Mr. Bellman. Well, not directly. There was an incident earlier today, when Mr. Ridge and his colleague Mr. Walker were conducting their survey. Mr. Walker fell through the floor, I'm afraid, and was killed. Of course the police were informed but it was clearly a tragic accident.'

  'I'm very sorry to hear that,' said Craig. He took hold of Effie's hand. 'Please accept our condolences.'

  'Thank you,' Walter Van Buren nodded. 'Morton Walker was a very close friend of mine, and a first-class surveyor, too. We're going to miss him.' He paused, and took a minuscule sip of tea. Then he said, 'The reason I'm here is to ask you if you still wish to continue with your plans to purchase.'

  Craig frowned. 'Why shouldn't I?'

  'I just thought that under the circumstances, you ought to be given the opportunity to back out. Some people are not especially happy to buy a house where a tragedy like this has taken place.'

  'I doubt if there's an old house anywhere that hasn't seen its share of tragedy,' Craig replied. 'I'm very sorry to hear about your friend, but that doesn't change my mind about wanting to buy.' He turned to Brewster. 'He fell through the floor? Which floor?'

  Brewster swallowed. 'As a matter of fact, he fell through three. From the third-storey corridor to the music room, from the music room to the library, from the library through to the cellar.'

  'Jesus,' said Craig. 'How much damage did he do?'

  'He dropped onto a disused heating pipe. He was impaled. He must have suffered a great deal of pain.'

  'Yes,' said Craig, doing nothing to disguise his impatience. 'But how much damage did he do?'

  'Excuse me? You mean, to the house?'

  Craig turned to Walter Van Buren and said, 'Are you sure you commissioned the right surveyors?'

  'Braun Bannerman are excellent surveyors,' snapped Walter Van Buren, 'and Mr. Ridge here is one of their best.'

  'It's all right, Walt,' said Brewster. 'I can understand Mr. Bellman's concern.' He glanced at Effie, and she could tell that he was making a considerable effort to keep his temper. In recent years, she had seen that look on the faces of Craig's business associates many times. Maybe she had just grown accustomed to his boorishness, taught herself to ignore it. Maybe he had always been that way, and that was an integral part of what made him so attractive. Maybe she had a thing for brutes. Craig had been making love to her every night this week, and often in the morning, too, with a ferocity that she found frightening, breathtaking, but flattering, too. He swore at her; he told her that she was a whore. But he made love to her as if he wanted to drive her through the mattress and into the floor.

  Brewster opened his briefcase and took out a blueprint. 'Mr. Walker fell through the floor here, and here, and here. There's an area of dry rot extending along fifty or sixty feet of the flooring of the upstairs corridor, and at this point the rotten timber was unable to carry his weight. Unfortunately the dry rot had spread through the vertical timbers to a thirty-foot area of the floor below, and he dropped right through that, too. The library floor as you've probably seen for yourself suffers severe wet rot.'

  'So how much is it going to cost to repair all of this falling-through?' asked Craig.

  'If you were thinking of buying this property, Mr. Bellman, you would have had to replace all of these areas of flooring in any case, and maybe much more besides.'

  'You can cut out the rot, though, can't you?'

  'It depends how extensively it's spread, sir. You have a form of dry rot known as Merulius lacrymans, or weeping fungus. It's been caused by water penetrating from the roof. It starts off as white threadlike growth on the surface of the wood, but then it penetrates the ussues and destroys them. Later it forms this thick reddish growth which is a reproductive structure, a fruit body, which produces spores, like a reddish-brown powder… and this powder can be carried all around the house by insects or birds or rats or even air currents. First of all you have to deal urgently with all
of your leaks and water penetration. Then you have to think about removing all diseased timber, and treating the whole of the rest of the property with fungicide.'

  Craig was staring down at his shoes, his head bowed. For a moment, Effie thought that he was going to give in, that he was going to say forget it, a house riddled with dry rot and wet rot, a house with broken windows and only half a roof and a pervasive atmosphere of doom and decay. Not to mention the feet that one of their surveyors had been killed in it, only just today.

  But he looked up after a while and said, 'Okay… give me the most pessimistic scenario you can, and then put a price on it.'

  Walter Van Buren finished his iced tea. 'You have the passion, don't you, Mr. Bellman?' he said, and his voice was almost regretful. 'That house has hypnotised you, just the way I was afraid it would.'

  'Passion?' Craig replied. 'It's not a question of passion, Mr. Van Buren. It's a question of finding out who you really are. You said it yourself: Valhalla is a very big house for a very big man. You think that's arrogant? Let me tell you this: most men go through life without understanding even a fiftieth part of what they can really do. They think small, they do small things, they live in small houses. They're small, Mr. Van Buren; even though they could be big. That's why I want Valhalla so much. Valhalla isn't just a house. It isn't just a place to live. It's me.'

  Effie watched him as he spoke. He surprised her, yes. He embarrassed her, too. But he talked with such determination that she found herself laying her hand on top of his sleeve, in a gesture of affection and affirmation. She felt his warmth; she smelled his skin. She loved him. He was like a different man.