Houses Without Doors

by Peter Straub

  Little Eddie had been rather tentatively lowering one foot, but as soon as Harry finished speaking he buckled in the middle and thumped his bottom on the floor. Harry’s chair (Maryroses’ chair) sickeningly tipped over, but landed soundlessly on a neat woolen stack of layered winter coats.

  Moving like a robot, Little Eddie slowly sat upright on the floor. His eyes were open but unfocused.

  “You can stand up now and get back in your chair,” Harry said. He did not remember leaving the stool, but he had left it. Sweat ran into his eyes. He pressed his face into his shirtsleeve. For a second, panic had brightly beckoned. Little Eddie was sleepwalking back to his chair. When he sat down, Harry said, “Close your eyes. You’re going deeper and deeper into sleep. Deeper and deeper, Little Eddie.”

  Eddie settled into the chair as if nothing had happened, and Harry reverently set his own chair upright again. Then he picked up the book and opened it. The print swam before his eyes. Harry shook his head and looked again, but still the lines of print snaked across the page. He pressed the palms of his hands against his eyes, and red patterns exploded across his vision.

  He removed his hands from his eyes, blinked, and found that although the lines of print were now behaving themselves, he no longer wanted to go on. The attic was too hot, he was too tired, and the toppling of the chair had been too close a brush with actual disaster. But for a time he leafed purposefully through the book while Eddie tranced on, and then found the subheading “Posthypnotic Suggestion.”

  “Little Eddie, we’re just going to do one more thing. If we ever do this again, it’ll help us go faster.” Harry shut the book. He knew exactly how this went; he would even use the same phrase Dr. Mentaine used with his patients. Blue rose—Harry did not quite know why, but he liked the sound of that.

  “I’m going to tell you a phrase, Eddie, and from now on whenever you hear me say this phrase, you will instantly go back to sleep and be hypnotized again. The phrase is ‘Blue rose.’ Blue Rose. When you hear me say ‘Blue rose/ you will go right to sleep, just the way you are now, and we can make you stronger again. ‘Blue rose’ is our secret, Eddie, because nobody else knows it. What is it?”

  “Blue rose,” Eddie said in a muffled voice.

  “Okay. I’m going to count backward from ten, and when I get to ‘one’ you will be wide awake again. You will not remember anything we did, but you will feel happy and strong. Ten.”

  As Harry counted backward, Little Eddie twitched and stirred, let his arms fall to his sides, thumped one foot carelessly on the floor, and at “one” opened his eyes.

  “Did it work? What’d I do? Am I strong?”

  “You’re a bull,” Harry said. “It’s getting late, Eddie—time to go downstairs.”

  Harry’s timing was accurate enough to be uncomfortable. As soon as the two boys closed the attic door behind them they heard the front door slide open in a cacophony of harsh coughs and subdued mutterings followed by the sound of unsteady footsteps proceeding to the bathroom. Edgar Beevers was home.

  6

  Late that night the three homebound Beevers sons lay in their separate beds in the good-sized second-floor room next to the attic stairs. Directly above Maryrose’s bedroom, its dimensions were nearly identical to it except that the boys’ room, the “dorm,” had no window seat and the attic stairs shaved a couple of feet from Harry’s end. When the other boys had lived at home, Harry and Little Eddie had slept together, Albert had slept in a bed with Sonny, and only George, who at the time of his induction into the Army had been six feet tall and weighed two hundred and one pounds, had slept alone. In those days, Sonny had often managed to make Albert cry out in the middle of the night. The very idea of George could still make Harry’s stomach freeze.

  Though it was now very late, enough light from the street came in through the thin white net curtains to give complex shadows to the bunched muscles of Albert’s upper arms as he lay stretched out atop his sheets. The voices of Maryrose and Edgar Beevers, one approximately sober and the other unmistakably drunk, came clearly up the stairs and through the open door.

  ‘‘Who says I waste my time? I don’t say that. I don’t waste my time.”

  “I suppose you think you’ve done a good day’s work when you spell a bartender for a couple of hours—and then drink up your wages! That’s the story of your life, Edgar Beevers, and its a sad sad story of W-A-S-T-E. If my father could have seen what would become of you …”

  “I ain’t so damn bad.”

  “You ain’t so damn good, either.”

  “Albert,” Eddie said softly from his bed between his two brothers.

  As if galvanized by Little Eddie’s voice, Albert suddenly sat up in bed, leaned forward, and reached out to try to smack Eddie with his fist.

  “I didn’t do nothin’!” Harry said, and moved to the edge of his mattress. The blow had been for him, he knew, not Eddie, except that Albert was too lazy to get up.

  “I hate your lousy guts,” Albert said. “If I wasn’t too tired to get out of this here bed, I’d pound your face in.”

  “Harry stole my birthday car, Albert,” Eddie said. “Makum gimme it back.”

  “One day,” Maryrose said from downstairs, “at the end of the summer when I was seventeen, late in the afternoon, my father said to my mother, ‘Honey, I believe I’m going, to take out our pretty little Maryrose and get her something special,’ and he called up to me from the drawing room to make myself pretty and get set to go, and because my father was a gentleman and a Man of His Word, I got ready in two shakes. My father was wearing a very handsome brown suit and a red bow tie and his boater. I remember just like I can see it now. He stood at the bottom of the staircase, waiting for me, and when I came down he took my arm and we just went out that front door like a courting couple. Down the stone walk, which my father put in all by himself even though he was a white-collar worker, down Majeski Street, arm in arm down to South Palmyra Avenue. In those days all the best people, all the people who counted, did their shopping on South Palmyra Avenue.”

  “I’d like to knock your teeth down your throat,” Albert said to Harry.

  “Albert, he took my birthday car, he really did, and I want it back. I’m ascared he busted it. I want it back so much I’m gonna die.”

  Albert propped himself up on an elbow and for the first time really looked at Little Eddie. Eddie whimpered. “You’re such a twerp,” Albert said. “I wish you would die, Eddie, I wish you’d just drop dead so we could stick you in the ground and forget about you. I wouldn’t even cry at your funeral. Prob’ly I wouldn’t even be able to remember your name. I’d just say, ‘Oh, yeah, he was that little creepy kid used to hang around cryin’ all the time, glad he’s dead, whatever his name was.’ ”

  Eddie had turned his back on Albert and was weeping softly, his unwashed face distorted by the shadows into an uncanny image of the mask of tragedy.

  “You know, I really wouldn’t mind if you dropped dead,” Albert mused. “You neither, shitbird.”

  “…realized he was taking me to Allouette’s. I’m sure you used to look in their windows when you were a little boy. You remember Allouette’s, don’t you? There’s never been anything so beautiful as that store. When I was a little girl and lived in the big house, all the best people used to go there. My father marched me right inside, with his arm around me, and took me up in the elevator and we went straight to the lady who managed the dress department. ‘Give my little girl the best,’ he said. Price was no object. Quality was all he cared about. ‘Give my little girl the best.’ Are you listening to me, Edgar?’’

  Albert snored face-down into his pillow; Little Eddie twitched and snuffled. Harry lay awake for so long he thought he would never get to sleep. Before him he kept seeing Little Eddie’s face all slack and dopey under hypnosis—Little Eddie’s face made him feel hot and uncomfortable. Now that Harry was laying down in bed, it seemed to him that everything he had done since returning from Big John’s seemed really to ha
ve been done by someone else, or to have been done in a dream. Then he realized that he had to use the bathroom.

  Harry slid out of bed, quietly crossed the room, went out onto the dark landing, and felt his way downstairs to the bathroom.

  When he emerged, the bathroom light showed him the squat black shape of the telephone atop the Palmyra directory. Harry moved to the low telephone table beside the stairs. He lifted the phone from the directory and opened the book, the width of a Big 5 tablet, with his other hand. As he had done on many other nights when his bladder forced him downstairs, Harry leaned over the page and selected a number. He kept the number in his head as he closed the directory and replaced the telephone. He dialed. The number rang so often Harry lost count. At last a hoarse voice answered. Harry said, “I’m watching you, and you’re a dead man.” He softly replaced the receiver in the cradle.

  7

  Harry caught up with his father the next afternoon just as Edgar Beevers had begun to move up South Sixth Street toward the corner of Livermore. His father wore his usual costume of baggy gray trousers cinched far above his waist by a belt with a double buckle, a red-and-white plaid shirt, and a brown felt hat stationed low over his eyes. His long fleshy nose swam before him, cut in half by the shadow of the hat brim.

  “Dad!”

  His father glanced incuriously at him, then put his hands back in his pockets. He turned sideways and kept walking down the street, though perhaps a shade more slowly. “What’s up, kid? No school?”

  “It’s summer, there isn’t any school. I just thought I’d come with you for a little.”

  “Well, I ain’t doing much. Your ma asked me to pick up some hamburg on Livermore, and I thought I’d slip into the Idle Hour for a quick belt. You won’t turn me in, will you?”

  “No.”

  “You ain’t a bad kid, Harry. Your ma’s just got a lot of worries. I worry about Little Eddie too, sometimes.”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s with the books? You read when you walk?”

  “I was just sort of looking at them,?’ Harry said.

  His father insinuated his hand beneath Harry’s left elbow and extracted two luridly jacketed paperback books. They were titled Murder, Incorporated and Hitler’s Death Camps. Harry already loved both of these books. His father grunted and handed Murder, Incorporated back to him. He raised the other book nearly to the top of his nose and peered at the cover, which depicted a naked woman pressing herself against a wall of barbed wire while a uniformed Nazi aimed a rifle at her back.

  Looking up at his father, Harry saw that beneath the harsh line of shadow cast by the hat brim, his father’s whiskers grew in different colors and patterns. Black and brown, red and orange, the glistening spikes swirled across this father’s cheek.

  “I bought this book, but it didn’t look nothing like that,” his father said, and returned the book.

  “What didn’t?”

  “That place. Dachau. That death camp.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I was there, wasn’t I? You wasn’t even born then. It didn’t look anything like that picture on that book. It just looked like a piece a shit to me, like most of the places I saw when I was in the Army.”

  This was the first time Harry had heard that his father had been in the service.

  “You mean, you were in World War II?”

  “Yeah, I was in the Big One. They made me corporal over there. Had me a nickname, too. ‘Beans.’ ‘Beans’ Beevers. And I got a Purple Heart from the time I got a infection.”

  “You saw Dachau with your own eyes?”

  “Damn straight I did.” he bent down suddenly. “Hey—don’t let your ma catch you readin’ that book.”

  Secretly pleased, Harry shook his head. Now the book and the death camp were a bond between himself and his father.

  “Did you ever kill anybody?”

  His father wiped his mouth and both cheeks with one long hand. Harry saw a considering eye far back in the shadow of the brim.

  “I killed a guy once.”

  A long pause.

  “I shot him in the back.”

  His father wiped his mouth again, and then motioned forward with his head. He had to get to the bar, the butcher, and back again in a very carefully defined period of time. “You really want to hear this?”

  Harry nodded. He swallowed.

  “I guess you do, at that. Okay—we was sent into this camp, Dachau, at the end of the war to process the prisoners and arrest the guards and the commandant. Everything was all arranged. A bunch of brass hats from Division were going to come on an inspection, so we had to wait there a couple days. We had these guards lined up, see, and these skinny old wrecks would come up and give ‘em hell. We wasn’t supposed to let ‘em get too near.”

  They were passing Mr. Petrosian’s little tar-paper house, and Harry felt a spasm of relief that Mr. Petrosian was not out on his tiny porch, working on his case of beer. The Idle Hour was only a few paces ahead.

  “Anyhow, one of these guards, one of the worst ones, suddenly decided he’s going to run for it. He takes off, runnin’ like crazy toward the woods. What do I do? I ask. Nobody knows what the hell to do. Shoot him, somebody says. So I shot him in the back. That was all she wrote.”

  Now they had reached the screen door that led into the Idle Hour, and the smells of malt and hops filled the air. “See you back at the house,” his father said, and disappeared through the screen door like a magician.

  8

  After Harry had read a hundred pages of Murder, Incorporated, his favorite murderers were Louis “Lepke” Buchalter and Abe “Kid Twist” Reles. They were dependable professionals. A kind of black light surrounded them and made them glitter. Lepke Buchalter and Abe Reles looked out at the world from the shadows of their hat brims. They lived in shadowy rooms and peered out through the curtains. They appeared on a dark corner before their terrified victim, did their work, and walked away, turning up their coat collars.

  Suppose you had some kind of job that took you around the country, like a salesman’s job, Harry thought as he read away the afternoon in the porch swing; suppose you had a job that took you from one town to another. Suppose you killed someone in each one of those towns, carefully and quietly, and hid the bodies so it would take people a long time to find them. Your work would never be done.

  9

  “Blue rose,” Harry said.

  Little Eddie sagged openmouthed against the cane of his chair, his hands loose in his lap.

  It had worked. Harry looked around as if he expected applause, and did feel that all the things in the attic looked back at him with warm approval. It was nine-thirty at night; he and Eddie, alone in the house, occupied the attic in perfect safety. Harry wanted to see if he could put other people under and make them do things, but for now, for tonight, he was content to experiment with Eddie.

  “You’re going deeper and deeper asleep, Eddie, deeper and deeper, and you’re listening to every word I say. You’re just sinking down and down, hearing my voice come to you, going deeper and deeper with every word, and now you are real deep asleep and ready to begin.”

  Little Eddie sat sprawled over Maryroses’ cane-backed chair, his chin touching his chest and his little pink mouth drooping open. He looked like a slightly undersized seven-year-old, like a second-grader instead of the fourth-grader he would be when he joined Mrs. Franken’s class in the fall. Suddenly he reminded Harry of the Ultraglide Roadster, scratched and dented and stripped of its tires.

  “Tonight you’re going to see how strong you really are. Sit up, Eddie.”

  Eddie pulled himself upright and closed his mouth, almost comically obedient.

  Harry thought it would be fun to make Little Eddie believe he was a dog and trot around the attic on all fours, barking and lifting his leg. Then he saw Little Eddie staggering across the attic, his tongue bulging out of his mouth, his own hands squeezing and squeezing his throat. Maybe he would try that too, after he had d
one several other exercises he had discovered in Dr. Mentaine’s book. He checked the underside of his collar for maybe the fifth time that evening, and felt the long thin shaft of the pearl-headed hat pin he had stopped reading Murder, Incorporated long enough to smuggle out of Maryrose’s bedroom after she had left for work.

  “Eddie,” he said, “now you are very deeply asleep, and you will be able to do everything I say. I want you to hold your right arm straight out in front of you.”

  Eddie stuck his arm out like a poker.

  “That’s good, Eddie. Now I want you to notice that all the feeling is leaving that arm. It’s getting number and number. It doesn’t even feel like flesh and blood anymore. It feels like it’s made out of steel or something. It’s so numb that you can’t feel anything there anymore. You can’t even feel pain in it.”

  Harry stood up, went toward Eddie, and brushed his fingers along his arm. “You didn’t feel anything, did you?”

  “No,” Eddie said in a slow gravel-filled voice.

  “Do you feel anything now?” Harry pinched the underside of Eddie’s forearm.

  “No.”

  “Now?” Harry used his nails to pinch the side of Eddie’s bicep, hard, and left purple dents in the skin.

  “No,” Eddie repeated.

  “How about this?” He slapped his hand against Eddie’s forearm as hard as he could. There was a sharp loud smacking sound, and his fingers tingled. If Little Eddie had not been hypnotized, he would have tried to screech down the walls.