Houses Without Doors

by Peter Straub

  Soon he reached the bottom of the staircase. The corridor seemed both like and unlike the one he knew. Just ahead was a tall door and a dim hallway. Everything seemed a little darker and dirtier than he remembered. He could not be certain that he was in a new part of the house until he had hurried down to the end of the corridor and found a blank wall where a statue of a boy should have been. He turned the corner and saw another, smaller flight of steps leading down to a concrete floor.

  He stopped moving. Now it seemed to him that he had turned both right and left, blindly, several times without paying attention— his stomach had led him. He had a vague impression, like an image from a dream of corridors branching off in an endless series of stone floors and dingy concrete walls. He felt a flutter of nausea. He turned around. A dark hallway extended past thick wooden doors and ended at a T juncture. He groaned. For a moment the sense of being lost overwhelmed his hunger. He backtracked down the hallway and tried the nearest door. It was locked.

  The next door opened into a room filled with irregular thin white things, bits of kindling. Dusty frames containing dead moths and butterflies hung on the wall. High in the opposite wall was a little window like a window in a prison cell. The air smelled dead. Standish peered into the room and recognized that the objects piled on the floor were bones. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of skeletons had been dismembered here. He suddenly remembered the story of Bluebeard’s wife, and the ache in his head instantly became a red-hot wire of pain. Standish looked up and down the corridor and took a step into the awful room.

  Skulls with long antlers lay in a corner. Standish walked nearer to the piles of bones. Many of them looked like the bones of animals. The faded colors of butterflies in a frame caught his eye, and he noticed a handwritten label taped beneath the glass. Nile Expedition, 1886. He began breathing again. Some cracked old Seneschal who fancied himself a naturalist had brought back these bones and butterflies from Africa in a crate.

  He left the roomful of bones and hovered in the corridor. He could not retrace his steps through the series of rights and lefts he had unthinkingly taken. Opposite the bone room were two more doors, and Standish stepped up to one of them and opened it.

  Things he could not see moved out of sight—he had an impression of fat little bodies diving behind the stacks of newspapers and magazines that filled the room. He imagined that malevolent eyes peeked at him, and thought he could smell fear and hatred. His eye snagged on the headline of a Yorkshire Post that lay on the floor, as if one of the little creatures had dropped it. pregnant wife, lover tortured then beheaded. Grisly Discovery on Huckstall Slag Heap. From somewhere quite near came a sly, breathless tick tick tick of sound that might have been laughter.

  Standish stepped back. The entire room seemed poised to strike at .him. He backed across the threshold and slammed the door. Standish felt light-headed, scared, unexpectedly brave—his discovery of this part of Esswood could not be accidental. He had been intended to find his way here. There were no accidents, no coincidences. He was supposed to be here. He had been chosen.

  He tried the other door on that side of the corridor, and found it locked. Standish moved to the end of the corridor and went slowly down the steps.

  A lower, narrower hallway led to an open door to a tiny cement room in which a greasy armchair two feet high sat beneath a hanging light bulb. On the far side of the chair was another door. Standish stepped inside. To one of the cell’s concrete walls had been taped a reproduction of a painting in the Fountain Rooms— a small dog scampered before a carriage drawing up to Esswood. Standish crossed the room and opened the other door. Beyond it was a dark chamber that contained a huge squat body with a Shiva-like forest of arms that snaked to every part of the low ceiling. Gauges and dials decorated the furnace, and beyond it other machines leaned against the far wall: penny-farthing bicycles, a row of axes in descending sizes like a hanged family, a sewing machine with a treadle, a vacuum cleaner with as long limp neck and a distended bladder.

  This was the library’s rhyme, Standish saw. Up there, subtle spiritual things breathed and slept in file boxes; here, dirty things pumped out heat.

  He went deeper into the basement. Standish peered into rooms filled with dolls and broken toys, with five cribs and five baby beds and five black perambulators as high off the ground as a princess’s carriage, with musty folded sheets and blankets, with faded children’s books, wooden blocks, and stuffed animals. He came to an ascending staircase and looked back to see the flaring nostril of a rocking horse through an open door. He had found “Rebuke’s” rooms of broken babies and their toys.

  The unfamiliar stairs took him up past row after row of wine bottles in tall cases like bookshelves, then transformed themselves into a wide handsome set of stairs with an onyx balustrade that led him into the splendor of the East Hall.

  Breakfast had been laid on a fresh white tablecloth. Standish sat down and lifted the golden cover. The smoked corpse of a fish regarded him with dead eyes. Standish slid onto his fork a pasty mess that looked as hairy as a caterpillar. He put the paste in his mouth and bit down on a pincushion. Small sharp bones stung every square millimeter of his palate. Other slender bones slid between his teeth. He spat onto the golden plate.

  ELEVEN

  Soon after, under the eyes of the great-great-great-great-grandfather and the pointing god, he nudged the bones lodged between his teeth with his tongue and made notes to himself on a legal pad. If truly no accident or coincidence in universe, then narrative is superseded for everything is simultaneous. To be here is to be within Isobel’s poetry, literally and metaphorically, for world without coincidence is world which is all metaphor. It is childhood once again. Key to the nonsense poems. Syntax the only source of meaning.

  Question: toys dolls beds, etc. seen by Isobel, as in “Rebuke.” What happened to the children that use them? Why “broken”? How many children did Edith Seneschal have?

  Must ask Seneschals about siblings.

  Could the secret be some horrible family disease?

  Standish thought a moment, then wrote another line.

  Research in churchyard?

  He looked down at the pad for a moment, then ripped off the sheet and wrote a few words on the next. This too he tore off, and took it outside the library door and laid it on the carpet. When he returned to the desk he looked at his guardian spirits and decided that he had spent enough time on the poems for the morning. B.P. was what he wanted to read.

  With a happy sigh he pushed the poems aside and pulled the bulkier prose manuscript toward him. He began reading on page 26, where he had broken off the previous night. For some twenty minutes Isobel’s handwriting squirmed before him on the page. Then time ceased to be a linear sequence of events, and Standish entered the Land with Isobel.

  ——

  The young woman from Massachusetts found herself growing fonder of the house each day. A happy accident had led to her meeting her hostess, E., the well-known patroness of the arts, in Boston; and when E. had asked to see the young woman’s work—and been impressed by what she described as its “bravery”—she had invited her new friend to join her at her estate. So the young woman felt an initial gratitude to E., but the speed with which she worked, once introduced to the Land, warmed this emotion to love. She found herself writing both prose and poetry more easily than ever before in her life, coming into her own voice a little more surely every day. And after readings in the West Gallery during the evenings, she was praised and applauded by writers whom she had earlier known only as revered names. Encouraged, she began to jettison from her work nearly everything that made it resemble the poetry of her own time.

  ——

  That’s my girl, Standish thought.

  ——

  The young woman from Massachusetts spent her mornings writing in the Fountain Rooms, took lunch with E. and the other guests, and in the afternoon wandered through the Land—her name for Esswood. The physical world excited her nearly to euphoria. She felt
that Esswood’s beauty called to her, spoke to her, welcomed her. In the afternoon guests not busy writing played croquet, bathed in the pond, read by themselves in the library or the East Hall, or read to one another beneath sun umbrellas on the great terrace overlooking the pond and the far fields. Dinners were lavish: gourmet meals and great wines. The young woman declared a preference for loin of veal with morel sauce, and did not object when the Land teasingly offered it to her every night for a week. The wines too were ambrosial. On her first night the guests were given a 1900 Château Lafite Rothschild, and on the second night, an 1872 Château Lafite Rothschild. On the third night the guests were given an 1862 Lafite Rothschild, reputedly the greatest vintage of the past hundred years, and considered likely to surpass all other wines for the next hundred as well.

  The young woman’s euphoria was more substantial than that given by wine, more permanent than could be provided by good company, and more profound even than that found in artistic progress. The feelings the young woman began to associate with the Land were not overtly religious, but were intensely spiritual—a force like music or disembodied spirit seemed to inhabit every aspect of the estate. What was most remarkable about the web of feelings linked to the Land was its release of gaiety. Not naturally high-spirited, the young woman joined the other guests in play—charades and tableaux and laughing conversations.

  The young woman found herself indulging a previously unsuspected taste for practical jokes: she used her “secret” corridor to move unseen about the house, and delighted in disarranging a fellow poet’s papers or effects, and in appearing like a specter in their rooms at night, then vanishing.’

  ——

  Riveted to the pages before him, Standish felt his heart slam against his ribs.

  ——

  Although she had never taken any great interest in children, the young woman felt that much of the Land’s strange and tender appeal to her was due to her hostess’s two surviving children.

  ——

  Again, Standish’s heart nearly stopped.

  ——

  E.’s calm was all the more remarkable in the light of her children’s fates. She had married a second cousin with the same surname, a man uninterested in either the arts or country life and far more devoted to French brandy, Italian women, and the House of Commons than to his family: yet he had given her five children, three of whom had died in their earliest years. The two living children, R. and M., endeared themselves to the Land’s young guest by their quiet, sweet, rather stricken charm: they had little energy, for they too were supposed to have contracted the disease that had killed their siblings. This awful disease, it was rumored, had been transmitted to the children by their father, and was something of a family curse; a family secret, too, for the exact nature of the disease was not known.

  Both children tired easily, and were often inordinately hungry— it was a symptom of the disease that to sustain even low levels of energy, the sufferer had to take in large quantities of food, though what sort of food remained a mystery. The children were always fed in private. Despite their special diet, little R. and Little M. seemed to be wasting away before the young guest’s eyes. The sister more so than her brother: while he could still appear to be something like a normal child, she was weaker by the day. He was pale; she was pallid, even waxen. At times the poor child’s skin seemed damp and oddly ridged, or pocked, or swollen, or all three at once, and so white as to be almost translucent—as if she were in the process of changing into another kind of creature altogether.

  ——

  Standish looked up and saw that the light in the library had grown rich and golden. His watch said that was one-thirty. He was half an hour late for lunch. Numbly, he got to his feet.

  He knew that he had not even begun to assimilate what he had read. He would have to understand what Isobel had written even more than Isobel had understood it. This seemed crucial: Standish had heard the music too, and he had experienced Isobel’s euphoria the first time he had stepped out into the Land in daylight. But Isobel had taken everything at face value. The words timeless, eternity, gaiety, children, disease, transformation swirled through Standish’s head. Specter, laughter, disembodied spirit.

  An idea of the morning presented itself to him with even greater force, and he walked on complaining legs to the great door. When he opened it he saw an ignition key on the carpet.

  ——

  After lunch, groggy from veal and wine, he opened Esswood’s great front door and inhaled fragrant summer air. For an instant he pictured the two living children, little R. and little M., seated on the marble steps. Then he saw the car on the drive and gasped. It was a Ford Escort, painted turquoise.

  Standish flew down the steps, noticing that the car was far cleaner than the one he had driven from Gatwick to Lincolnshire. He was sure that it was a different car. When he reached the drive he walked up to it and touched its warm smooth, well-waxed hood. It was a different car. Like everything else that had been taken into the Land, it shone and sparkled.

  Standish got in behind the wheel and fit the key into the ignition.

  It took nearly an hour to find the local church. When Standish finally forced himself to stop and ask for directions, he found that he could scarcely penetrate the harsh, slow-moving local accent. Trying to make sense of the garble of lefts and rights given him by two grudging men outside a pub, Standish wound up on Beaswick’s High Street, where teenagers stared at his car and mumbled remarks he did not have to understand to know were obscene. The town was gray and dirty. Overweight woman with piled-up hair and flaming faces peered into the car. Then, as suddenly as slag heaps and flares had turned into thick forest, the ugly little sweetshops and tobacconists’ became open fields and desolate marshes.

  Eventually he saw a six-foot heap of grass and earth bristling with thick roots at an intersection and remembered that one of the hostile men before the pub had told him to turn one way or the other at a “hummock.” Perhaps this was a hummock. Far away stood a farmhouse. Two swaybacked horses stared gloomily at him from the middle distance. On the other side of the hummock a hill led up to a small gray church and a graveyard of tilting headstones. On the crest of the hill above the church stood a beehive-shaped windmill he had seen before. He was three minutes from Esswood: he could have walked across the field to get to the church.

  Standish drove up onto the wet grass before the stone church and left the car to walk around to the graveyard.

  On the other side of the church was a smaller, even uglier stone building like a cell with curtained windows. Standish walked between the two buildings to the cemetery gate.

  Enclosed by a waist-high iron fence, the cemetery covered an acre of sloping ground and contained several hundred graves. The oldest headstones, those directly before Standish, resembled wrinkled old faces, sunken and blurred beneath a pattern of shadows and scratches. Standish began to move down the middle of the graveyard. None of the stones bore the name Seneschal. Other names recurred again and again—Totsworth, Beckley, Sedge, Cooper, Titterington. He kept moving slowly through the cemetery.

  A door slammed behind him, and someone began working toward him through the graves. Standish turned around to see a black-haired man in a long buttoned cassock approaching with one hand upraised, as if to stop traffic. The vicar’s heavy red face sagged as if against a strong wind, and he leaned forward, ducking his head, as he hurried toward Standish.

  “I say, I say.”

  Standish waited for the man to reach him.

  Close up, the vicar presented a hearty smiling manner that seemed a disguise for some other, more bullying quality. He was in his late fifties. The odors of beer and tobacco enveloped Standish as the man came nearer. He spoke in the harsh accent of the village. “Saw you from the vicarage, you know. Don’t get many strangers here, don’t get accustomed to strangers’ faces.” A big yellow smile in the red face, as if to balance what might otherwise have been simple rudeness. “American, are you? Your c
lothes.”

  Standish nodded.

  “Interested in our Norman church? You’d be welcome to a walk round inside, but it makes me a bit uncomfortable to see a man I don’t know walking about our little, um, our little garden of souls here. Seems irregular.”

  “Why?”

  The vicar blinked, then showed Standish his false smile. “You might think our ways are odd, but we are just a tiny little bit of a community, you know. Just paused on your way through, did you?”

  “No.” The vicar irritated Standish so profoundly that he could scarcely bring himself to talk to the man.

  “Came all this way to do grave rubbings. We’ve nothing to interest you in that line, sir.”

  Standish frowned at the vicar. “I wanted to see if I could locate any family graves. My name is Sedge, and my people came from this village.”

  “Ah. Well, now. You’re a Sedge then, are you?” The vicar was squinting at him, half-smiling, as if trying to make out a family resemblance. “Where did you say you were from in America?”

  “Massachusetts,” Standish said. “Duxbury, Massachusetts.”

  “You should find Sedges right the way through this little cemetery. When did your people arrive in America, then?”

  “Around eighteen fifty, .maybe a bit earlier,” Standish said. “I traced us back right here to Beaswick, and a local family invited me to stay with them, so I wanted to see if I could find any of their people here too. I’m curious about them.”