Houses Without Doors

by Peter Straub

  Standish raised his eyebrows in curiosity, and Wall indulged him. “Something over six hundred. Six hundred and thirty-nine, to be exact.”

  “And mine was the only one you considered?”

  “Oh, you had some competition,” Wall said. “There is always a period of several months while things sort themselves out. We do take what we consider to be more than usual care.” He smiled with the same slow ease, and looked nothing like the son of a gamekeeper. “If you’re finished, we could peek in at the library. Then I’ll let you get the rest I’m sure you need. Unless you have some questions?”

  Standish looked down at his plate. Most of the wonderful meal seemed to have consumed itself. “I guess I can’t help wondering when I’ll have the chance to meet the Seneschals.”

  Wall stood up. “They’re not in the best of health.”

  “The woman who greeted me said that Mrs. Seneschal—”

  Again Wall stopped him with a look that told him not to trespass.

  “Let us try that troublesome door, shall we?”

  Standish stood up. For a moment his head swam and he had to steady himself on the back of his chair. Some words that Robert Wall said to him vanished like everything else into gray fuzz, and then his head cleared and his vision returned. “Sorry.”

  “Do you feel all right?”

  “Just a little spell. I missed what you said, I’m sorry.”

  Wall opened the door through which Standish had entered the dining room. “All I said was, you must have heard this mysterious person incorrectly. There is no Mrs. Seneschal.”

  Standish passed by Wall, and the deep grooves like scars in his face came into focus.

  “It’s Miss Seneschal. She and Mr. Seneschal are brother and sister. Edith’s two surviving children.”

  “Oh, I was sure—”

  “Simple mistake for a weary man.”

  Wall gestured down the length of the flagged corridor. “Unlike most of our guests on the first night, you already know this way quite well, don’t you?” He set off in the direction by which Standish had come. “Yet another sign of our good judgment in selecting you.”

  They walked on a few paces, Wall striding like a youthful and well-exercised man.

  “You’re married, aren’t you, Mr. Standish?”

  They turned right at the statue of the woman shrinking back.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Children?”

  “Not yet,” Standish said, the skin at the back of his neck prickling. He thrust away from him the vision of a lighted window in a Popham apartment house, a drawn shade behind which two people, one of them a faithless wife and the other a faithless friend, clased at one another in bed. Wall was looking at him inquisitively, and he added, “Jean is pregnant—expecting in two months.”

  “So we’d better get you home safe and sound before that, hadn’t we?”

  Standish nodded vaguely.

  They turned right again, past the reaching boy.

  “In any case, this is what you’ve come all this way to see. Let us try this puzzling door.”

  They stood before the tall narrow wooden door. Wall’s face was a shadow beneath his handsome gray hair—entirely unwillingly, Standish saw Jean folding herself into Wall’s arms, rubbing her face fiercely against his chest. Jean often made a fool of herself with handsome men.

  “Seems to work normally.” Wall turned his shadowy face toward Standish. “Perhaps you turned the knob the wrong way.”

  He had not turned the knob the wrong way. For an instant it was as if Jean, or her shaded had witnessed his humiliation, and Standish felt a ferocious blush leap across his face like a rash.

  Wall stepped inside and flicked a switch. Warm bright light filled the doorway. “Come in,’ Mr. Standish.”

  Standish followed him into an enormous room which seemed at first to contain a disappointingly small number of books. Most of the room consisted of vast empty space. Bright white Corinthian columns shining with gold leaf at top and bottom stood before curved recesses ranked with books. Books spanned the library beneath classical murals. Almost immediately he realized that there were thousands and thousands of books, books on shelves all around the massive room, books reaching nearly to the barrel-vaulted ceiling as ornate as a Wedgwood china pattern, books and manuscript boxes everywhere, in every molded, flowing section of the huge room. Chairs and chaises of red plush with gilded arms stood at intervals along the walls, and a massive chair sat before a wooden writing desk in the middle of the room, on the center rosette of a vast peach-colored Oriental carpet. Over the mantle of the marble fireplace on the left side of the library hung a large portrait of a gentleman in eighteenth-century clothes and white wig looking up from a folio propped on the library’s writing desk. The library’s walls, and the section of the high-vaulted ceiling not covered with ornate plaster palmettes, husks, arabesques, and scrolls, were painted a cool, almost edible color hovering between green and gray that seemed lit from within. The entire space of the library was filled with radiant light that came from no visible source. Standish had spent much of his life in libraries without seeing one like this. He wondered if he really could walk through it—it seemed too good to use, like some delicate clockwork toy or Faberge egg.

  “Rather good, isn’t it?” Robert Wall was leaning back against one of the pillars, his arms crossed over his chest. “It’s a Robert Adam room, of course. One of his most successful, we think.”

  “What are those columns made of? I thought they were painted, but—”

  “Alabaster. Striking, isn’t it? As good as anything at Saltram House. They look freshly painted until you see those delicate veins in the stone.” In his ambiguous face was a full understanding of just what Standish was feeling.

  Wall pushed himself forward and stood up. “Now I must take you through the main entrance and point you up the staircase. It’s a little late to creep through the servants’ corridor. Though I daresay in the old days the servants’ corridor saw a great deal of surreptitious movement.”

  Standish smiled before he understood what Wall meant. Wall led him out through an archway set between two of the alabaster columns, then through a pair of ornately carved wooden doors and into another high vast room that seemed cold and museum-like after the library.

  Before them, across an expanse of dark carpet and through the middle of a double row of stiff chairs like soldiers, was another set of carved doors.

  “Dining room can be reached through there,” Walls said, indicating the far doors, “and the main staircase which takes you up to the Inner Gallery and the Fountain Rooms is directly ahead of you. Until we meet again, then. We will see to your car tomorrow. Don’t give it a thought.”

  The two men began to move down past the soldierly chairs.

  “I can’t help but wonder what happens to the place once Edith’s children die. Who inherits the place?”

  “I’m afraid there’s no proper answer to that.”

  “What does that mean? That you can’t tell me?”

  Instead of answering, Wall opened the door at the far end of the uncomfortable room, and stood waiting for Standish to go through. For a moment he reminded Standish of the landlord of The Duelists.

  “I’m sorry if that was an awkward question.”

  “I’m sorry if you didn’t like my answer. But if you want to know anything else, ask away. You may have three questions.”

  “Well, I guess I’m curious about Isobel. I mean I know she died here, and I guess I always assumed that she had some illness. Do you remember anything about it?”

  Wall continued to hold the door and look down at Standish. His expression had not changed in any way.

  “Did she have influenza?”

  “Is that your second question?”

  “Well, I know there were influenza epidemics around then.…Do you remember Isobel at all? I’ve never even seen a picture of her.”

  “That is your third question. Of course I remember Isobel. It was a great
loss for all of us when she died. Everyone here cared for her deeply.” He motioned Standish through the door, and followed him out into the great hall. “She died in childbirth, to answer your real question. I’m rather surprised that you should not have known.”

  “I didn’t even know that she’d had a child,” Standish said.

  “The child died too.” Wall smiled and stepped away. “You do remember how to get back to the Fountain Rooms?”

  When Standish reached the top of the wide staircase he turned to look back down at Robert Wall, but the entire first floor of Esswood was dark. He heard a burst of female laughter from beneath him, as if it had risen up the stairs like smoke.

  In the bedroom he undressed and discovered that the sheets were delightfully cool and the bed just as firm as he liked a bed to be. He heard the lights in the Inner Gallery click off. Far away a door closed softly.

  FIVE

  Standish and a number of other men were being held captive in a large bare cabin with a plank floor and rough wooden walls. Armed guards in brown uniforms lounged against the walls, idly watching the prisoners and speaking to one another in low unintelligible voices. At one end of the huge wooden room was a low raised platform where a man whose gray hair had been shaved close to his bullet head sat behind a desk. Stacks of pages lay on the surface of the desk, and the man examined papers one by one before transferring them from one stack to another. He was dressed in a baggy gray suit and a wide florid necktie, and the points of his shirt collar turned up. Like the uniformed guards, he looked bored. The faces of all the men, the guards and the official behind the desk, were broad, fleshy, masculine, roughened by alcohol and comfortable with brutality and death. Through windows cut into the sides of the building Standish saw snow falling steadily onto a white landscape. At irregular intervals a man holding a rifle and bundled into a heavy dark coat and a fur cap struggled past the windows, gripping the leashes of two straining dogs. All of these men were at ease with the cold and the perpetual snow. They were at ease with everything they did. The atmosphere was of unhurried bureaucratic peace.

  Fearful, Standish stood in the middle of the room with the other captives. All but he wore colorless woolen garments that resembled pajamas. Standish knew that in time he too would be stripped of his jacket, shirt, tie, trousers, and shoes, and be dressed in the woolen pajamas. There was no possibility of escape. If he managed to get outside and evade the guards and the dogs he would die of exposure.

  The shoulders of his fellow prisoners were bent, their heads cropped, their faces shadowy. They had reconciled themselves to death; in a sense they were already dead, for nothing could move or touch them, nothing could jar them out of their apathy.

  Standish experienced the purest dread of his life.

  The man at the desk was selecting the order in which Standish and his fellow prisoners were to be executed. There was no possibility of pardon. Sooner or later this bored extermination machine was going to snuff out each one of them. There was nothing personal about it. It was business: a matter of moving papers from one stack to another.

  The man at the desk looked up and uttered a monosyllable. One of the guards straightened up; walked toward the group of prisoners, and seized one man by the elbow. The prisoner got to his feet and allowed himself to be pulled toward the door. Nobody but Standish watched this. The guard opened the door and handed the prisoner almost gently to a man in a dark coat and fur hat. This second guard pulled the prisoner away into the snow, and the door closed.

  Standish knew that the prisoner was going to be beheaded. Somewhere out of his range of vision was a wooden chopping block and a basket that caught the severed heads.

  He glanced toward the door, and knew that one of the guards would shoot him if he even touched the knob.

  Standish paced around the middle of the room under the eye of the guards. Some of the other prisoners were also walking aimlessly around the room, and Standish avoided looking at them closely. Some of the men sat on the floor, their backs bowed, and some curled up on the planks as if asleep, hiding their faces in their hands. Standish did not want to see their faces. If you saw one of the faces—

  —then you saw it tumbling off the block, its eyes and mouth open, the brain still conscious, still recording and reacting to the shock, the terrible knowledge…

  Standish realized that he was not dreaming. Somehow he had ventured into this wretched country, been captured, condemned to death, and transported to this penal outpost with these degraded men. He looked wildly around, and the two nearest guards watched him closely. Standish forced himself to walk slowly up to one of the cabin’s walls. He placed his hand on the cold wall. A swift continuous draft flowed into the room from the gaps between the boards.

  The Official called out another name, and in the blur of sound Standish heard st and sh. He blood thinned. A languid guard pushed himself off a wall and walked toward him. Standish could not move. The guard advanced, looking at him expressionlessly. Standish opened his mouth and found that he could not form words. He saw large black pores on the guard’s stony face and a long white scar, puckered like a vertical kiss, running from his right eye to the middle of his cheek.

  The guard brushed past Standish and grasped the upper arm of a man in gray pajamas just behind him. The guard began to jerk the man toward the door. As they passed Standish, the prisoner lifted his head and looked directly into Standish’s face. His eyes were black and flat as stones. Standish stepped backward, and the guard pulled his prisoner away.

  Standish turned around and saw a baby lying on a blanket that had been folded on a small table against the opposite wall. The baby jerked its hands toward its face, then froze. The baby’s hands drifted down to its sides as slowly as if the baby were underwater. It was a new baby, red-faced, only a few days old. It wore coarse woolen baby clothes of the same material as the prisoners’ pajamas. The baby seemed to gasp for air. Standish took a step forward, and the baby’s arms jerked spasmodically toward its head. Puffy, swollen-looming pads of flesh covered the baby’s eyes.

  One of the guards shouted at Standish, who stopped moving and pointed at the baby. “I want to pick it up. What can wrong be with that?”

  The man behind the desk carefully placed the paper in his hand down on a neutral space on his desk and uttered a short series of monosyllables that caused the soldier to lower his rifle and retreat to the wall. Standish swallowed.

  The official turned his head to look at Standish. His eyes were the color of rainwater in a barrel. ‘This not your baby,” the official said in a slow, heavily accented voice. “Possible you understand? This baby not your baby.”

  And then Standish understood that he had lost everything. He was to be beheaded in this ugly country, and the baby gasping on the table was not his baby. Black steam filled his veins. He groaned, at the end of his life, and woke up in a sunny bedroom at Esswood.

  SIX

  “Got it wrong again,” said Robert Wall. It was half an hour later. Carrying two pencils, a legal pad, and his copy of Crack, Whack, and Wheel, Standish closed the door from the servants’ corridor and came near the table. Two places had been set. Golden domes with handles covered the plates. “You are indeed a fellow who prefers the less-traveled road, Mr. Standish.”

  “I guess I am,” Standish said.

  “As your tastes in literature would indicate. Let us see what is beneath these covers, shall we?”

  They raised the golden domes. On Standish’s plate lay an entire dried-out fish with bulging eyes.

  “Ah, kippers,” Wall said. “You’re a lucky fellow, Mr. Standish. We’re a bit shorthanded here just now, in fact I’m off to Sleaford in an hour or so to interview some prospective help, and you can never be sure what they’ll serve up at breakfast. Last week I had porridge four days running.”

  Standish waited until Wall had separated a section of brown flesh from the kipper’s side, exposing a row of neat tiny bones like the bars of a marimba, and inserted it in his mouth. When
he tried to do the same, bristling bones stabbed his tongue and the inside of his cheeks. The fish tasted like burned mud. He chewed, glumly tried to swallow, and could not. His throat refused to accept the horrible wad of stuff in his mouth. Standish raised his napkin to his mouth and spat out the bony mess.

  “And now,” Wall was saying, lifting the cover from a dish that stood between them. Standish prayed for real food—scrambled eggs, toast, bacon.

  “This is good luck,” Wall said, exposing a pasty yellow-white partially liquefied substance. “Kedgeree.” He began loading it enthusiastically onto his plate. “An aquatic morning, this. Do help yourself.”

  “Do you suppose there’s any toast around here?” Standish said.

  “Beside your plate.” Wall gave him a surprised look. “Under the toast cover.”

  He had not even seen the second, more elongated golden lid next to his plate. He lifted it off and uncovered a double row of brown toast in a metal rack. Between the rows of toast stood a pot of orange marmalade and another of what looked like strawberry jam, each with a golden spoon. Standish ladled marmalade onto a wedge of toast.

  “Something amiss with your kipper?”

  “Wonderful, great,” Standish said,.

  “I hope you had a comfortable night?”

  “Fine.”

  “No trouble sleeping? No discomfort of any kind?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Very good.” Wall paused, and Standish looked up from smearing jam on another triangular wedge of toast. “There is one matter I must discuss with you. It’s of minor importance, I’m sure, but I didn’t want to bring it up last night.”

  “Oh?” Standish held the jam spoon in one hand, the triangle of toast in the other.

  “There seems to be some confusion about the circumstances under which you left your first teaching position. Popham College, was it?”