House of Echoes: A Novel

by Brendan Duffy

  “Can’t have that, can we, Bub?” Ben said, though he was grateful for the compliment. Bub yawned but had the good manners to cover his mouth with a pair of little fists. “This one’s flagging. Let’s put him in for a nap.”

  Bub’s room was just across the hall from Ben and Caroline’s. It was an airy room painted a springtime yellow.

  “Dream good dreams, buddy.” Ben placed Bub carefully into his crib and clipped the baby monitor to his belt. He ushered Ted into the hall and closed the door behind him.

  “Is this Charlie’s room?” Ted was peering into the room next to Bub’s. A single wall was painted blue, and a fish tank hummed against it. The floor was littered with the remains of an elaborate block structure.

  “It’s sort of a death trap. We make him clean it regularly, but it never takes.”

  Ted walked along the perimeter of the room and examined a jar on the floor. “He likes his creatures, doesn’t he?” He held it up to the light from the windows and saw that it was filled with faintly green water and bubbles of small gelatinous eggs. “How’s Charlie doing, Ben?”

  “Really well. He loves the forest. Moving up here’s been good for him,” Ben said. He rapped on one wall that was built entirely of wood and studded with closet doors, display cases, drawers, and cupboards. “This room and Bub’s were originally one enormous room,” he said. “It must have been used as a parlor or a sitting room, because it was way too big for a bedroom. But we wanted the boys close to us, so we had the contractors add a wall of cabinetry here. Perfect for storing toys—in theory, at least. You’ll like this.” He stooped to open one of the larger cupboards, crawled into the compartment, and closed the door behind him.

  After waiting for a few moments, Ted opened the door and peered into the empty compartment.

  “What the—”

  “Some of the cupboards open into both rooms,” Ben said, surprising Ted from the door to the hallway.

  Ted reached into the cupboard and tapped open the door on the other side.

  “That’s pretty cool. They’ll have fun with this when Bub’s older.”

  When they left Bub’s room, Ben sent Ted downstairs while he checked on Caroline. The curtains in their room had been drawn, leaving the room dark and the air close. When he whispered Caroline’s name, she didn’t respond, though this didn’t necessarily mean she was asleep. He left the baby monitor on her side table and shut the door gently behind him when he left. He hoped she’d be out of bed by the time they returned: Even under the best circumstances, it was going to be hard to show Ted that he had everything under control.

  Ted said that he wanted to see the lake before heading over to the farmhouse. They walked upslope from the Crofts until the land leveled out and they could see the wild fields stretch across the plateau to the forest and the mountains beyond them. It was a relief to leave the house. “The locals call this the Drop,” Ben told Ted. “The lawyer who showed us the place said that the fields used to go right up to the mountains, but the forests have reclaimed a lot of that territory.”

  “How much of this land do you own, Benj?”

  “All of it up to the mountains.” He pointed and spread his arm across the landscape. “The mountains are part of a state preserve. Then we own everything downslope until just before the county road. About a thousand acres is what they tell me,” Ben said.

  Ted shook his head.

  “We got a good deal on the place, though. It’s not as extravagant as it sounds.”

  “So you keep telling me.”

  “We can take this path to the lake.” Ben indicated a trail between two clusters of hardwoods that skirted the edge of the south woods. “Caroline has an idea that we could eventually grow all our own food up here.”

  “That’s a lot for her to take on, isn’t it?”

  “That’s probably a couple years away. But it’s something that’ll appeal to our guests, too,” Ben said. “You know, all organic, locally grown food. They can actually look around at the crops or maybe take classes on starting their own gardens. People love stuff like that these days, don’t they?”

  “What’s that?” Ted had stopped walking and was shading his hand against the glare from the afternoon sun. Ben followed his gaze about a quarter mile to a tall and thin figure in white just inside the tree line on the far side of the lake. “What’s he doing?”

  Ben realized that he was staring at his own son, standing on the high stump of a broken tree. He stood in a patch of sunlight, and its glare off the boy’s white T-shirt and the fact that he stood at the top of a four-foot pedestal of dead wood gave Charlie the illusion of height and ethereality.

  “Just playing,” Ben said. “You know how kids are.” But he had no idea what Charlie was doing. His son faced the dark forest, utterly still, as if waiting for something.

  “Is it safe for him to be there?”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?” Ben asked. They were far from the house, but Ben could still see the tops of the Crofts’s towers. Technically, this was still within the perimeter he’d confined Charlie to. “We make him carry a whistle in case he runs into any trouble.”

  “Does he spend a lot of time out here on his own?”

  “School starts in September.”

  “Right, right.” Ted nodded and didn’t say anything else, but Ben still heard the things his brother left unasked. Charlie was too quiet for an eight-year-old. Too serious. They’d had him tested in the city, and while it seemed that every other kid they knew had an ADHD diagnosis or was somewhere on the autism spectrum, Charlie was never labeled as anything more than “unusually interior.” He’d even seemed oddly unmarked by the long night he’d been locked in the furnace room.

  But at least he was interested in something up here. Spending all day in the forest had to be better than sitting alone in his room, as he had in the city.

  Ben cast a last glance at Charlie, the white of his shirt just visible through the trees. So still, Ben thought to himself. He wondered how his son had ever learned to be so still.

  November 24, 1777

  Dearest Kathy,

  The bitterest of cold weather has fallen upon us. Game is nowhere to be found, as the conditions are too severe for both hunter and prey. William White has lost two fingers, and Matthew Armfield may lose an ear after yesterday’s venture to the northern fields in search of deer.

  The last of the horses has been slain and its meat eaten. Now we must make do with griddle cakes and porridge made from last season’s grain, but our stores have dwindled terribly.

  George and Bennett Townsend set out for the ruins of Swannhaven at first light in search of supplies that the Iroquois might have overlooked. Father thought them fools, but it is true that, save for some strange sounds from the forest, we have not seen the Indians since their attack. Nevertheless, George and Bennett left hours ago and there has been no sign of them. The sun has fallen behind the mountains, and we fear they shall not return to us.

  For our family, we have fared better than many. Emmett is sick, and you know how difficult the cold is for him. James has lost some weight, as we all have, but I now see beneath his childhood face the handsome man he will become. And our Jack is the bravest of the men, and no Iroquois hatchet can match the acuity of his wit. He keeps the men strong and can coax a smile from even Goody Smythe.

  But as much as Jack keeps our spirits high, and Father’s sermons keep our resolve strong, we worry about the winter, and we worry about the war. The fall of the fort at Ticonderoga still weighs upon us, and before the snows we learned the ill news that the British army that took New York has now seized Philadelphia from General Washington. Does the general still live? The men whisper of old rumors that more of the king’s armies march on us from Quebec. I wonder if Boston has fallen, as well. I fear for you, sister.

  The only solace is that it is difficult to think beyond the hunger that gnaws at us. Worries of the war pale beside the imperatives of our empty stomachs. The world has never seemed more far a
way. Pray for us, dear sister, as I shall pray for you.

  Your Bess

  14

  “It’s weird that she held on to this place for all those years, isn’t it?” Ted asked. He’d insisted on taking the McLaren, and he drove too fast for the country roads. Every turn was executed too suddenly for the loose surface. “God knows there were times when she could have used the cash.”

  “We’ve had the place on the market for months without a nibble. Grams didn’t want us to do anything with the farm but sell it, but she probably knew it wasn’t worth anything. Turn left up here.”

  Ted took the curve and Ben winced at the cloud of dust and gravel he saw billowing in his passenger-side mirror.

  “Remember the funny way she would talk?” Ted said. “All those old expressions? ‘Keep up the light, Benjamin. Keep up the light, Teddy.’ I kind of remember her telling us stories about a farm. The way the crops needed to rotate, how the hens clustered together in their coops, how cows would need to be marched back to the barn on a frosty night. How hard the winters were. Despite everything, I always assumed that she’d give everything to Mom, you know?”

  “Whatever Mom got was a lot more than she deserved,” Ben said. By long-established habit, Ben had sheltered his brother from the details of his most recent conversation with their mother. All Ben had told Ted was that she’d finally signed the lawyer’s documents and that Grams’s estate was officially settled. “Here we are, on the right.”

  “Where?” Ted slid his Ray-Bans onto his forehead.

  “Slow down. See the post?”

  Ted pulled off the road just short of a crumbling stone gatepost. The ghost of a gravel path extended beyond it, barely discernible under the cover of wild grass. The low-slung remnants of a house sat a few hundred yards from the road. “So that’s it, huh?” Ted asked. He turned the McLaren up the drive and pressed it forward in a crawl. The grass came up to the windows, and Ted arched in his seat, trying to see what he was driving over.

  “I didn’t know this car could move so slowly.”

  “I don’t think the owner expected me to take it on safari. Can we walk from here? I don’t even know if I’m still on the gravel.”

  Hudson was the first one out of the car. He dove headlong into the grass, sending a trio of chickadees chattering into the sky.

  Ben waited while Ted checked his hair in the mirror, as if they’d arrived at a gallery opening instead of a derelict ruin. When he was ready, they lifted themselves from the car and looked at their grandmother’s house. It was a small two-story stone saltbox with a single chimney and only a gesture of a roof. Its windows were narrow maws, their glass long gone. Its door lay on its side by the front steps.

  The interior was cool and smelled vaguely of rot. The timbers supporting the second floor had collapsed it into the first. Patches of shingles from the roof were spread across the floor between thatches of ferns and other plants. Beams skewered what must have been the house’s little sitting room, some of them embedded in what remained of the wood-plank floor.

  “It’s smaller than I thought it would be,” Ted said, picking his way through the debris. He climbed over a pile of fallen masonry to the kitchen area. “Looks like they left a lot behind.” He pointed to a brown wedge that was crushed under a timber beam. A bed of rusted springs was visible through the gauze of rotted fabric.

  A couch, Ben thought.

  The last time he’d been here, Ben had spent only a minute inside. Now that he took the time to look, he saw corroded pots and pans in the space where the kitchen had been. Fragments of shattered dishes covered one end of the floor. Pieces of broken chairs lay on the ground, alongside the empty husks of ruined oil lamps.

  “Why would they leave all this here?” Ted asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ben said. It seemed odd, now that he thought about it, that a family with so little would leave behind so much. For a moment the ruined farmhouse felt eerily like the Crofts: a place where possessions were left abandoned by suddenly absent owners.

  “Why’d they move away from here, anyway?”

  But Ben hardly knew anything about his grandmother’s young life. His mom had said something over the phone about “demons in the wood and devils at the door,” but she’d only been trying to ensnare him in conversation.

  “Did you get down to the cellar the last time you were here?” Ted asked.

  “I didn’t see a way down other than jumping through the hole in the floor.”

  “Here’s something, I think,” Ted said. He pointed to a small alcove in the wall that was obstructed by tree branches and fallen timbers from the ceiling or roof.

  Ted tried to maneuver a beam out of the way, and Ben grabbed its other side to help him.

  “It’s light,” Ted said.

  “It’s rotted,” Ben said. “Don’t look down.”

  Ted looked down and dropped the beam onto the ground, where it landed in a cloud of powdered wood. He’d disturbed a nest of termites, and they welled out of the hollowed-out timber. Ted brushed his hands off on his pressed pants. “You enjoyed that, didn’t you, Benj? I’m not exactly dressed for manual labor.”

  “Are you ever?”

  Ted peered into the cavity in the wall. “The steps look like they’re stone, so they should be safe. Might be something interesting down here.” He squeezed between a broken beam and a sapling that had taken root in the floor.

  The steps were dark and slippery, and Ben kept a hand against the wall for balance. The cellar was smaller than he’d thought it would be. The ceiling had caved in on the far side of the room. Decades’ worth of rotting leaves and other vegetation along with this season’s fresh additions made the floor feel soft underfoot.

  Ted was right in guessing that they’d find something down here. There was enough clutter around the room for it to remind Ben of his own basement. The difference was that he could tell that this house’s former inhabitants had kept the space orderly. Wooden milk crates were stacked along the walls, holding everything from folded clothing to sewing materials to empty mason jars. So much left behind, Ben thought. Every object that remained was an unanswered question.

  “Knew there’d be something,” Ted said. He showed Ben a wooden fire engine, its once-red paint faded to pink. “Wheels still work.” Ted spun them around the screws they were fastened to. “You want it for the boys?”

  “Sure.” Ben doubted Charlie would be interested in the homemade plaything, but Ted’s enthusiasm surprised him and he didn’t want to quash it.

  “I can’t believe how little we know about these people,” Ted said. “Do you ever wonder about them? Were they happy? Did their dreams come true?” He looked around the room as if trying to pull clues.

  “Not if their dreams included living in a house with a roof.”

  “Who’s going to remember them if not us, Ben?” Ted asked. “Don’t you care?”

  “I guess,” Ben said. These people were gone, but their blood pulsed through his body with every beat of his heart. Compared to that, this place and these things were inert and meaningless.

  “Who’s going to remember us when we’re gone?”

  “Christ, Ted,” Ben said. He should have known his brother’s sudden sensitivity had a heart of narcissism. “Little young for a midlife crisis.”

  “What I mean is—family—we’re supposed to be there for each other, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “I know I can depend on you, Benj,” Ted said.

  Ben walked to another set of shelves, feigning interest in the contents of a mason jar.

  “And you can count on me. For anything.”

  “Okay, Ted,” Ben said. “Good to know.”

  “But I’m serious,” Ted said.

  Ben turned to his brother and saw the earnestness on his face.

  “No matter what it is,” Ted said. “I’m here to help.”

  “I get it,” Ben said. He tried to keep the annoyance out of his voice. “I do.”

  �
��Okay,” Ted said after a few long moments. He resumed looking through the shelf he was in front of. “This must have been hers, don’t you think?” He handed Ben a faceless rag doll clothed in a yellow dress.

  “Must have been,” Ben said, though it could have been anyone’s. He was just glad for a change in subject.

  “Anything over there?” Ted asked.

  “Old newspapers, some empty jars, old clothing, blankets and linens, that kind of thing.” The closeness of the damp space was beginning to remind Ben of a mausoleum. He could envision skulls in the shadows of the wall and decaying bodies underfoot.

  Ted pulled a folded bundle from a crate and shook it open, sending a cloud of dust into the air.

  “Quilts,” Ted said. The one he’d unfolded was composed of faded triangles of assorted fabrics. “Maybe her mother sewed this. God, I don’t even know her mother’s name.”

  Ben walked over and shook another quilt free of dust. “Here’s your answer,” he said after he looked at what he’d found.

  Ted held the quilt taut and used the flashlight app from his phone to better see it. The quilt was a yellowing white except for light-blue patches that had been inscribed with names. “Her mother’s name was Emily,” he said. He was looking at the lowest branches of a family tree. “Grams was born in 1924. And she had a brother, did you know that? Owen, born 1928. This goes back to 1721. Jonas Lowell and Clara.”

  “They both died in 1777.” Ben was still holding the quilt in front of him so Ted could see it. “Do we have any cousins?”

  “Not as far as I can tell,” Ted said.

  Even from his poor vantage point, Ben could see that the Lowell family tree was an unusually narrow one.

  “Not Lowells, anyway, assuming Grams’s brother didn’t have any kids.”

  The sun had fallen behind a bank of clouds or the house’s crumbling walls, leaving the cellar in near darkness.

  “You want to take this topside?” Ben asked him. “If you want to see the rest of the property, we should do it before the sun goes down.”