by Peter Straub
He turned away from the vicar and began inspecting headstones again. Capt. Thomas Hopewell, 1870-1898. An angel leaned weeping back from an open book. A marble woman shrank back from grief or death, her face over her hands—he recognized the statue as the twin of one at Esswood. Behind him he felt, with senses suddenly magnified, the exasperation of the vicar. He waited for the man to come thundering after him, and then realized that the vicar’s manner was that of a man with a secret.
The soft heavy tread came up behind him. ‘‘Local family, is it? Might I ask which local family?”
“Of course.” Standish stopped moving and turned around to the sagging red face. Behind the vicar he caught a glimpse of a marble monument atop a child’s grave—a small boy reaching up with outstretched arms. This too was a copy of a statue in Esswood’s “secret” corridor. “The Seneschals.”
The vicar actually licked his lips. His entire manner had changed in a moment, along with the atmosphere between himself and Standish. “That’s really very interesting, that is.”
“Good.” Standish turned away to inspect the name on the base of the monument of the grieving woman, sodden. He fought the impulse to giggle. “Where are they buried, then?”
“Prominent family, of course.” The vicar scuttled up beside him. “You’d say, the prominent family in our little corner of the world. You’re putting up with them, are you, Mr. Sedge? In Esswood House?”
“That’s right.”
“Quiet over there, is it, Mr. Sedge?”
“Yes, it’s very peaceful,” Standish said.
“I daresay.” The man licked his lips again. Standish was startled by the sudden realization that the vicar looked frightened.
“I think it’s strange that I don’t see any of their graves. Edith’s children, I mean—the three who died so young.”
“Strange? I should think it is strange. And what about Edith herself? Miss Edith Seneschal, who became Mrs. Edith Seneschal, now surely you would think she would be buried here as well. Wouldn’t you, Mr. Sedge?”
The man was peering at him with his head cocked and his lips pursed. Rusty brown stains like stripes covered his cassock.
“And her husband too, don’t you think? The Honorable Arthur Seneschal, a dim figure granted, a willing partner one might say, very willing I’d wager, in all his wife’s ambitions, you’ll be wanting to see his headstone as well, won’t you?” There was a venomous lilt in his voice, and Standish had the feeling of some unspoken complicity between them.
“What’s wrong with you?” he said.
“He wonders what’s wrong with me,” the vicar said to the air. “Mr. Sedge is curious, isn’t he? The odd fact is, there hasn’t been a Sedge in Beaswick since seventeen—what was it now?” He darted over the low grass to a tilting headstone. “Seventeen eighty-nine, I thought it was that. Charles Sedge. A bachelor, by the way. An only son. He’d be amused by your story. He’d be especially amused that you claim to be staying with the Seneschals.” The vicar astonished Standish by leaning over the tombstone and braying: “This fellow claims to be a Sedge—long-lost American cousin, Charles! Wants to pay his respects. Says he’s putting up at Esswood House. Wants to find the graves of Edith’s children. Can you give him any assistance, Charles?”
He straightened up. An unhealthy mirth had turned his face an ever darker shade of red. “Or perhaps I heard the name wrong? Did you want to say that your name is Titterington? Or Cooper? You couldn’t be a Beaswick Sedge, in any case, could you? They were all dead by the time you claim your family arrived in America. And no descendant of a Beaswick Sedge would walk through the doors of Esswood House.”
Standish said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Are you accusing me of lying?”
“I’m accusing you of ignorance,” the vicar said. “I wonder where you really are staying. I wonder where you really are from. If you don’t know that we would refuse to give burial to any Seneschal, you have no connection to Beaswick. Which makes me wonder what it is that you are doing in my churchyard, telling me tales about staying at Esswood House.”
“Why shouldn’t I be staying at Esswood House? I am staying there—I’m a guest, I was invited—”
“Nobody is staying at Esswood House. I very much doubt whether anyone is still living in Esswood House. There are a couple of students hired to discourage intruders and keep the place clean, but they’re not local people—not even Lincolnshire folk.” He looked down at a flat grassy grave and rustled the folds of his cassock. To Standish it looked as though the vicar were dancing inside his body, whirling about in furious glee. “You needn’t think I’m so stupid I can’t see, that I’m such a blockhead I didn’t know what you were immediately I saw the cut of your jacket.” A joyful defiance filled his eyes. “I know someone like you would appear— someone from a tawdry American magazine, some bit of trash you’d call a newspaper—but it never in my most ambitious dreams came to me that when a jackal like you appeared you would claim to be looking for the graves of Edith’s children.”
“But that’s what I am looking for!” Standish shouted.
Now the vicar was virtually twitching. “Then you’ll need directions to Esswood House, won’t you? I saw how you came up— I saw your car. You didn’t come from the house. You drove from the village.”
Standish thought of protesting that he had lost his way. Instead he said, “What’s the quickest way to get to the manor?”
“Aha! Truth! The unfamiliar guest, truth, has entered our conversation. To reach Esswood House you proceed straight back the way you came until you reach the hummock, then turn right, not left, and proceed directly on past the Robert Wall—”
“The what?”
“The Robert Wall—it’s only a local name, needn’t be alarmed. I thought the gutter press would be less easily startled. Won’t fall down on you, the old wall’s been standing on the boundary of the Seneschal estate for four centuries.”
“Why is it called the Robert Wall?”
“Because, I suppose, a man named Robert built it. He wanted to keep the Seneschals in, didn’t he?”
Standish began walking away. He brushed past the vicar without looking at him. The vicar stepped back on a grave and laughed. “You’re going to discover their secret, is that what you’re going to do, Mr. Sedge?” Standish heard him laughing as he walked past the ugly church.
TWELVE
Two days later, at the end of the afternoon, a sentence at the top of the page jarred him back into the waking world.
I have found my vagrant, my scholar-gypsy with cornflower eyes.
It was a surprise to see Isobel stoop to the conventional period mush of “cornflower eyes,” but the young woman from Massachusetts had found a soul mate, someone with whom she could take long walks and discuss literature. I have found my vagrant—Standish remembered the mad creature who had materialized on the outskirts of Huckstall, shuddered, and continued reading. Isobel found the vagrant an untutored genius, a lone figure in the world, without wife or child. At the bottom of the page Isobel had written Matter for another tale. The “vagrant” promptly disappeared from the manuscript.
Standish read for the rest of the day. The library faded away around him and he wandered through the Land with Isobel. The details of her days did not vary much, but Standish found the similarities to his own routine very pleasing. In Isobel’s descriptions of writing, eating, strolling around the house and its grounds, an unstated purpose, some transformation, hovered just out of sight. Whatever the young woman looked at burned in her vision. The long pond simmered, the far field was a green hide nailed to the sun. The library was an oven, a volcano, and poetry was lava. Every surface shimmered and gleamed, everything trembled with the pressure of the force beneath it.
Until nearly eight o’clock Standish remained immersed in Isobel’s memoir, not so much reading as being read. His boyhood and the other, more real world that existed within or beside this one took shape around him, and with it came the memory of
Popham, the feelings and atmosphere of the wonderful and terrible time that had really begun when in his Burberry on a blazing day he had tracked Jean to another’s apartment and really ended with the nurse who was not a nurse and the bloodied sheets around a discarded utterance, a non-noun, an aborted word in a deleted sentence. There was a truer self within him, and he had felt it struggling to be born.
A superstitious vicar in. a stained cassock could not hope to understand it.
When he looked up and noticed that it was nearly dinnertime, Standish was aware of a tremendous glory, like the beating of a great pair of wings, in the air around him. For a moment, the library seemed charged with an absence, not an abrupt withdrawal, but the anticipatory, trembling absence just before the appearance of a radiant and necessary being.
This time Standish took the longer route to the dining room. He moved almost ceremoniously to his chair and lifted the cover from the veal in its sauce. Beside the gold-rimmed glass on the tablecloth was a bottle, streaky with dust, of Château Lafite Rothschild 1862.
——
After dinner he took the main staircase to the upper floor. The sound of absent laughter filled the air of the little study; so did the odor of malt whiskey, from both the glass he had spilled two nights before and the one he carried before him, aiming it like a key at the study’s opposite door. He emerged into the Inner Gallery. He thought he heard a small agile body skittering out of sight behind him—dodging back into the shadows. No, the vicar of Beaswick would not, would never, understand. A folder of papers nestled between his elbow and his ribs.
He was not drunk. He was not. He was moving in a straight line down the gallery between the big panes of glass and the looming paintings, and he could have touched his nose with his finger. On his right side English horses grazed in a painted field; on his left, the Seneschals’ windows glowed pale yellow, and in their bedrooms two Seneschals, male and female created he them, lay separate or entwined in their beds or bed. Standish heard sounds from the courtyard, and stepped nearer the windows and looked down. A glittering shower of diamonds, lava, golden blood, shot upward and flew apart before falling back to earth. This eruption resolved itself into a fountain illuminated by lights sunk into the gravel around its base.
Esswood was taking him in, accepting him, using him, as it had used and accepted Isobel.
He placed the folder on the bed, undressed, and went into the bathroom. A flushed, radiant demon filled with blood gazed at him from the mirror. Standish brushed his teeth, his eyes held by the gleaming eyes of the demon in the mirror. Froth bubbled comically from his lips. He rinsed his mouth with cold water, spat into the sink, looked once again at his demon’s eyes, then splashed his face with cold water.
His cock stuck out before him in the mirror, rigid as a ruler and curved slightly upward. A translucent drop appeared at its tip.
Standish masturbated over the pretty blue-patterned sink, as he did so fantasizing that he stood in the grove of twisted, gestural trees in cool night air. A certain woman stood by the edge of the long pond, outlined by the silver moonlight so that her naked body was a curved pane of pure black. He could feel crushed leaves, small twisted roots, and rounded stones beneath his feet. Cool air prickled the skin on his arms. The hieratic figure by the pond stepped forward. Her eyes shone white in the blackness. Standish gasped, for he actually was out in the cool night beside the pond, not in the bathroom of the Fountain Rooms. What he felt—the chill, the leaves beneath his feet—was what he felt, not a fantasy, and the beloved woman, who with her shining eyes and outlined body seemed half a tiger, moved forward again. His body uttered a massive Affirmation, a million nerves slammed one door shut and threw another open, and gouts of semen shot out of him like the water from the fountain and flew into the darkness. Standish instantly felt drained, as if he had lost a quart of blood. The terrifying figure before him seemed to be smiling in acceptance of his offering. He closed his eyes in terror and fell down in a faint—
—but opened them in the bathroom where he had propped himself against the sink with locked arms. A final cloud of white semen oozed across the pattern of blue flowers. The gooseflesh was fading from his arms. He shook his head and looked at himself in the mirror. His face was tired and ordinary, white with shock. He splashed his face and swished water around in the sink. He felt as if he had just stepped out of a roller coaster.
In the bedroom, he buttoned himself into clean pressed pajamas which had been laid out on the bed. His cock felt hollowed out. When he got into bed he first smelled, then saw, the glass of malt whiskey he had placed on the bedside table. Unhesitatingly he picked up the glass and swallowed half the contents. A ball of warmth began to grow like a seed in his stomach. Now he felt light, nearly boneless. The folder fell from his hands onto his chest. Just before he fell asleep he realized that he had not looked to see if the Seneschals had turned off their lights.
——
But they had turned them off when he awakened several hours later. Once again he had the feeling that someone was in his room, but this time the alien presence was not frightening. His bedroom was utterly dark, without even the faint haze of yellow on the louvers of the shutters. From the presence in the room flowed a sense of unhappiness, even of rage, too powerful not to be felt.
That she had returned at all spoke of how much she needed him.
“I know you’re here,” he said softly.
And then William Standish nearly fainted, for a slight form paler than the rest of the room separated itself from the darkness and advanced a minute distance toward his bed. Until that moment Standish had inhabited a world of suppositions, hypotheses, imaginings, and fancies—but the figure shyly advancing toward the bed was a proof, a confirmation. His mouth went dry.
The pale figure drew nearer. Now he saw that she was holding something before her with both arms. It was a baby. His heart moved with sorrow. He could see the top of the figure’s head, and her hair falling in long smooth wings. Her paleness gave her an ^substantiality like transparency. She looked faded, worn away, like cloth that had been rubbed against a stone. Above its wrapping he could see only a portion of the child’s face, a waxen nose and lifeless eyes. The woman slowly began to left her head as she continued coming toward him. He saw her wide forehead, her thick eyebrows, the bridge of her nose—his emotions jammed together like a traffic accident. Taller, thinner, plainer, more intense than his beloved, this was the woman whom he had seen looking up at him from beside the long pond. Later she had appeared in the library window, looking down at him. She was Isobel Standish. Isobel was awkward and willful, sensitive in all the wrong ways. He realized that he more or less disliked her on sight.
She needed his help.
As if this were all that she had come to tell him, Isobel Standish turned away and began to melt back into the darkness with her baby. “Don’t go,” he said, and groped for the switch on the bedside light. Sudden stabbing light froze everything in the room into place, as if the candlesticks and the heavy press and the blue sofa had come to life in the dark and now had to pretend to be inanimate again. The woman with the dead baby had vanished. Standish heard water splashing in the courtyard and a loud rasping sound that was his own breathing. He began to shake.
There was no point in trying to get back to sleep. Standish threw back his covers and got out of bed. He rushed to the window and peered through the slats of the shutters. The Seneschals’ windows flashed like a signal and went dark again.
He could still feel the cool air on his bare skin, the prickly roughness of the leaves beneath his feet, and how the being had called him, how it had smiled and hungered.…White dots appeared before his eyes. He sat down. Then he lifted his left foot and saw that the sole was black with dirt. Small dark particles clung to his skin. His blood actually seemed to stop moving. He lowered his foot. Here and there on the carpet were dusty footprints the size of his feet.
For a moment Standish knew beyond doubt that flabby white creatures moved all
around him in the dark house, searching for his traces, needing him: he could hear the grown sick babies crawling in the secret corridors and the Inner Gallery.
Once chosen …
Standish jumped up and turned on another light. He picked up the folder. Birth of the Past, he thought—that was an Esswood title. He sprawled on the blue sofa to read until morning.
THIRTEEN
Isobel’s handwriting had degenerated into a nearly illegible scribble. Entire paragraphs tied themselves up into private code that insisted on staying private. Lying on the blue couch, almost too frightened to read, too frightened not to read, Standish recognized the signs of great emotional pressure. The young woman from Massachusetts, now no longer quite so young, had returned to the Land. In the three years of what she thought of as her “exile,” her work and her marriage had deteriorated. She had written nothing worthwhile since leaving Esswood, and had ceased to tolerate the attentions of her husband. She felt that her appearance had deteriorated, leaving her with limp hair, dull eyes, and a sunken face. It was as if she had been cut off from some necessary nourishment. In great pain she had written to her “savior,” “the gardener of her soul,” and begged to be invited back. Of course, E. had written, we have been waiting for you. The husband had apparently decided not to oppose her going, and indeed must have known by his wife’s raptures that to try to keep her from going would be to end his marriage. Martin Standish, as astonishingly complaisant as ever: perhaps he had thought to save his wife’s sanity by giving her Esswood once again. After seven weeks’ travel, the young woman collapsed into E.’s arms at the train station and soon was driven up the gravel drive between the trees. A small brown-and-white King Charles spaniel yapped at the wheels of her carriage. She wept the instant she saw the Palladian facade. She was home again. We have needed you, E. said to her. That night, she ate loin of veal with morel sauce and felt health and strength returning to her body. In honor of her homecoming, E. said, they drank an 1860 Château Lafite Rothschild. The life she had needed, the one that gave life back to her, had again taken her into its arms.
