by Peter Straub
Standish passed into the dark study and saw in his mind the eyes of the woman who had come into his room with her dead baby: he imagined Isobel locking him in her arms, clamping him into her stony embrace, all that desperation pouring itself into a romantic mold and overflowing it.
He ran down the staircase, seeing everything as it had been seventy-odd years earlier. These old men were two generations nearer, and what went on beneath their gaze was a deliberate mockery. Earlier Seneschals had lived quietly, buried their dead, improved the library, and hidden their afflicted. Unfortunates like the late Mr. Sedge had fed their awful appetites. Through Isobel’s eyes Standish saw the riot with which Edith had replaced the secretive old order. Imaginary throngs sprawled over the furniture, talked ceaselessly, raided the wine cellar, stripped the kitchen of its food. They dirtied the sheets and stained the carpets and filled every room with a blur of sound and smoke and color. Chattering, impudent ghosts—full of spurious accidental “life,” some of them diseased, some of them coughing .into their fists, some of them as drunk as Jeremy Starger, some as prissy as Chester Ridgeley, some men always pawing at woman’s breasts, touching touching, some women glancing always at men’s fly buttons, in secret touching, like Jean Standish on the other side of an upstairs window in Popham. In the East Hall he saw them standing in pairs, twisting their hands together, their lips moving in their endless clever talk-talk, never dreaming what dreamed about them from behind the walls and waited.
You have been chosen, said “Robert Wall.”
He gasped in the sudden heat as he trotted down the stairs. His clothing felt hot and confining, and he yanked the blazer off his shoulders and tossed it aside as he reached the bottom step. Standish ran over the gravel to the side of the house and ducked into the trellis.
A hot swarming smell, sharply sexual, surrounded him. From behind the interwoven green walls and ceiling came a steady intense live buzz of sound, as from a hive. Standish burst out of the trellis, expecting to see a swarm of bees or wasps dancing over the terrace, but the air was clear and hot and empty. The intense, sizzling noise continued, coming from everywhere at once. Popham: the sweat dripping down his forehead. Standish paused and wiped his face on his sleeve. Imaginary guests looked up from their lawn chairs and tilted beards and sharp eyes at him and pretended to flick dust from the sleeves of their perhaps too carefully selected garments. He turned from their whispers as Isobel had done and trotted toward the iron staircase. Large dark splotches rose up out of his body and printed themselves on his shirt. Beneath the thin distracted heat-sounds emanating from real insects and the faint susurrus of leaves from the grove beyond the pond, there endured the buzzing of a hive, as of busy indifferent traffic at the back of a man in a Burberry raincoat in Popham, Ohio, on a night as hot as this. A week before she said she was pregnant. And expected him to believe the magpie was his. He reached the staircase and ran down the terraces in the sun.
At the bottom he could see with Isobel’s eyes the slight figure of a beautiful boy, in a cream shirt perhaps, open at the neck perhaps, watching with tilted head from the top of the rusting staircase. No gamekeeper’s boy, for old William lived without woman or get. Standish pretended to be indifferent to the traffic on the Popham street outside the apartment of a man whose name he would never permit even now to enter his mind except in disguise as when the eye fell upon the wrapper of a CERTAIN cough drop or in suchlike contact, as if you loathed a gentleman named Park and on a business trip to Gotham found yourself in Central.
Try not to think of a white bear. Standish had grown very good at not thinking of white bears.
The buzzing humming hive-like noise of the Popham street became louder at the bottom of the terraces.
Standish began moving more slowly toward the grove of gestural trees at the right of the long pond. It was from here that the hive-like sound came, and as he passed between the first of the trees Standish imagined that this sound underlay the earth everywhere, that it was an impersonal world sound, not to be noticed anymore, like the word Park unless you were in Central.
The twisting trees were oaks, hundreds of years old. Long ago they had been deformed by some process equivalent to foot-binding. The limbs rolled out and splayed into labyrinths around their thick dwarfish bodies. His ferocious beloved had stood here, watching him.
Standish gazed through the branches to the green rise of the fields, dotted with fat unmoving sheep.
Nothing is known once only, nothing is known the first time. A thing must be told over and over to be really told.
Before him, invisible except as a fold in the landscape from even the topmost terrace, the trees continued down a slope and gathered so thickly that he could not see the bottom of the slope. He began to move downhill. Eighty years ago when these trees were young, there would have been paths through them; now the branches had grown together. Standish had come down ten or twelve feet, but the locked trees would not allow him to go farther. He circled sideways, searching for an entrance to the web, and finally he moved back a bit toward the pond and got to his knees and crawled beneath the locked branches.
SIXTEEN
Beneath his hands was a smooth brown carpet of crumbling leaves and loose pebbly earth that felt as if it had passed through the digestive system of an enormous insect. The dwarf oaks formed a kind of low arched entrance, though Stan-dish saw none of the patches of light through which Isobel had moved on her way to the clearing. The darkness increased as he worked his way forward, and he found himself moving wearily through an intermittent night. After a time Standish knew he was lost. He had inadvertently crawled away from the path to the clearing. His knees were wet, and his hands were gritty. Standish collapsed onto the damp earth. Sweat steamed from his body. He lay his head on the backs of his hands. The earth hummed and moved in almost impalpable tremors like the shifting of an animal’s hide. The forced himself back to his knees.
Perhaps five minutes later the darkness modulated into mild gray, and soon after that sunlight began to pierce the locked arms of the trees. Blotches of light struck the ground. His back heated. The hive noise had grown louder, more dense, many voices working together to form one great voice. Then Standish was where Isobel and the gipsy had followed the boy Robert, for the interlaced fingers had separated above him and he was looking down at his squat square headless shadow.
The sizzling noise had ceased—he was at its center. Standish grunted himself up onto his feet. His knees were filthy and soaked, and his shirt was dark with sweat. He stood on the far edge of a circle of trees surrounding a round clearing perhaps fifteen feet in diameter, like something stamped out of the woods by a giant machine. Long soft grass blanketed the clearing. At its center stood the three mounds Isobel had seen. They were barely distinguishable from one another and the ground beside them. They have no headstones, they need none, we know their names.
Standish exhaled, understanding everything at last, and heard the sound instantly disappear into the louder but still inaudible sound of the soul-traffic that was the noise of the hive. Magick, Isobel had written, using the old spelling, and for once she had been right. It was magick. It had always been a sacred place, probably, for that was one way to put it, but now it was more so because of the people they had used and buried here. Edith was not buried here, and neither were any of her children-, for none of them were dead. Others were.
Standish went through the grass and stood before the mounds. With a groan he threw himself down onto the mass grave. Against his cheek the grass felt like the long cool hair of his beloved. He spread his arms and embraced the grave. The sun poured down on his back. He groaned again, and gripped the silken grass with his fingers. Down in the soil with Isabel lay a lost child who screamed for release with all the others, screaming like a pale creature pressed against a window.
What power a lost child has, what a lever it is, what a battery of what voltage.
Standish pushed himself off the grave. He made a feeble effort to brush the dirt an
d broken leaves from his trousers. Then he wiped his dirty hands on the sides of his trousers and gazed up at the birds wheeling overhead. They had the proud wingspread of predators, raptors. Esswood’s center kept shifting, widening out as one thing rhymed with another in the poem it was. Standish turned from the grave toward the circling wall of trees. Directly before him was the path on which Isobel and her lover had followed young Robert Seneschal to the clearing. In the earth beneath the twined branches he could see the marks of his own passing. He lowered himself to his knees, which cried out in pain, and began to crawl back into the woods.
In what seemed half the time of the trip to the clearing, light began to reach him and the trees separated and he was looking at the slope leading back to the pond and the first terrace. He stood and walked up the slope, now and then grasping a branch to pull himself forward.
SEVENTEEN
At the top of the iron staircase he walked across the burning grass toward the trellis. A crowd of languid ghosts raised their teacups and from the corners of their eyes watched him pass. Standish slipped into the trellis. Fat green leaves, dark as spinach, cupped the trembling liquid of the sunlight. He entered the house through the unbolted kitchen door and moved toward the stairs to the pantry and dining room. Beside these enclosed stairs was a door he had not tried earlier. It opened onto the basement stairs.
Downstairs, he turned toward the furnace room, retracing backward his earlier route through the basement. Doors stood open in the stone passageway, and he passed the room filled with stuffed tigers and dusty plush dogs. All the doors he had opened remained open. Standish hurried along.
He turned through the open door of the concrete cell with its small worn chair. In the picture on the wall the playful dog scampered at the carriage wheel. Standish went through the second open door and proceeded past the black furnace to the far wall to the family of axes.
He took the largest axe from its bracket, hefted it, replaced it in the bracket, and took the next largest. This one felt less likely to tip him over. He carried the axe back into the corridor.
From the furnace room he trotted up the short flight of steps toward the two locked doors he had tried on his earlier trip to Esswood’s basement.
At the top of the steps he came out into another dark corridor. Here were four closed doors. Standish walked toward the first, swinging the axe beside him as he went. This was the second locked door he had tried, beside the room stacked with old newspapers. He twisted the knob. The door was still locked. Standish stepped backward, lifted the axe over his head, and swung it at the middle of the door.
The head of the axe sank into the wood. Standish yanked it out and swung again. Sweat blinded him. He rubbed his eyes with a dirty hand and smashed the axe into the door again. Finally the door began to splinter, and after several more swings Standish was able to put his arm through a hole in the wood and turn the knob from the inside. A knife of raw wood cut into his arm, and blood bubbled happily from the wound and ran down his arm.
Standish opened the door.
He had expected big dollhouses, cut away on one side to allow a child access to every room, but these were actually miniature Esswoods, larger than he had expected and identical to their model down to the water stains dripping from the corners of the windows. They were actual houses, doll bungalows, lined up like houses on a suburban street. High on the wall above, like the sun in a suburban sky, hung another reproduction of the painting in his sitting room— the capering dog, the rolling carriage. A low light burned in each third window from the right. Standish’s breath caught in his chest. It was as if three little people were due home from work any minute now. The floor was a mess of small white bones—chicken bones— so dry they snapped when Standish stepped on them.
The stairs before the miniature houses were of marble, cut by craftsmen who had been extravagantly paid for their silence. He looked into one of the windows and saw tapestries two feet long and carpets three feet square, and ornate red and gold chairs a foot high. There would be golden plates three inches across, and golden forks half the size of his little finger, and little wineglasses that would snap in his hands. And did they sleep on beds, or had Edith ordered them pallets woven from soft wool? And had they screamed at night in pain and terror, and had Edith come down to comfort them?
That was not very likely, Standish thought. Their mother had been like God in the heaven of the picture above their houses, loved or hated but invisible—vanished into the sky.
Before Edith’s generation, had there been other Seneschals who occupied the little hoyses, afflicted Seneschals who lived concealed from everyone who came to the great house around them? That was likely, for in the twentieth century the only man Edith had found to marry had been her unsatisfactory second cousin, who likewise had found no one but Edith to marry him.
And had any of Edith’s illustrious guests ever known or suspected her secret? That was even more likely, Standish thought, for after a time all who came were scribblers like Y., D., and T., and eventually no one at all came: no cars, no carriages for little dogs to follow. And think of what they had written! Henry James and his mad governess who arrived at a remote house to care for two afflicted children, E. M. Forster and his tale of people living in a great hive, Eliot’s wasteland and hollow men…Many of Esswood’s guests had walked part of the way into knowledge. Isobel had gone farther than any of them, and Isobel had never left.
It’s better never to leave Esswood, Standish remembered.
He stepped back, raised the axe, and brought it down on the first little house. The thin plaster wall crumbled like stale bread, and little paintings in little frames amid little chairs and a little bed fell from a guest bedroom into the West Hall. Another blow smashed the main staircase into splinters and toothpicks. Another shot miniature books from miniature shelves, and cleaved the portrait above the mantle. The floors broke apart like kindling, and the foot-high furnace fell into clanking sections of pipe. The library’s vaulted ceiling shattered into a rain of candy. Standish swung his axe again, and the contents of a kitchen cabinet exploded upward into the ruins of the dining room. A table three feet long slid down a tilting floor and crashed into a miniature sink. Matchstick bones and tissue butterflies flew up like tinder. The East Hall disintegrated, and the bedrooms of the East Wing splattered against the wall. It took Standish nearly an hour to smash the first little house into a heap of broken shreds and shards from which protruded a length of bookcase, a porcelain sink, a little book bound in Moroccan calf, and the curved wooden corner of a window frame. Then he moved on to the second house, and a little more than forty-five minutes later, to the third.
When that one was destroyed too he threw his shirt behind him. His arms felt as if he had been rowing through heavy seas, and his back was one vast ache. Standish dropped the axe, and it smashed a patterned china teacup to powder. He picked up the axe again and discovered from a sharp stab of toothache in his right palm that he had developed a blister the size of an orange. He settled the axe handle into the blister and felt the sharp awakening presence of pain.
The other locked door stood across the cement corridor. Stan-dish spared both the axe and his hand and kicked at the stile beside the lock. The door rattled in its jamb. He kicked again with the flat of his foot, then drove the whole strength of his leg against the lock. It broke with a loud snap like the breaking of a bone, and the door flew open on its hinges. Standish dragged the axe into Isobel’s ultimate room.
There was no window: the light came in with him. He wiped sweat from his forehead and waited for his eyes to adjust. A dry tock tock tock that sounded faintly like frightened laughter came to him from the corridor.
At last Standish could see that he had broken into an empty room. He was not sure what he had expected—nothing as overt as skeletons or a chopping block, but something that would shake him. The floor sloped toward a central drain. Before the back wall the cement floor was scuffed, as if a heavy piece of equipment had stood there a
long time. There were long faint scratches in the floor. Finally Standish saw what appeared to be a series of oblong frames on the wall to his left. They reminded him of the framed butterflies in the bone room, and as he stepped nearer he saw that the frames contained photographs.
There were six of them, ordinary snapshots of unremarkable couples. From what Standish could see of the clothing worn by the two people in the first photograph, it had been taken in the late twenties or early thirties. In the third photograph, the man wore the uniform of an American army officer. Thereafter the men reverted to suits. The women next to the first two men wore veils; all the other women wore large-brimmed hats, or had turned their faces from the camera, or were in shadow. Two of the photographs had been taken on the first terrace of Esswood House, and two had been taken on the path that circled the long pond—shadows of the twisted oaks turned the woman’s face to darkness. Then Standish recognized the face of one of the men beside the pond.
