Then there was the house, Daddy’s place of lodging, the run-down mansion in the woods, a remarkable home that Tad came to think of as the logical extension of a remarkable man. What better place for a man as eccentric as Daddy than a building as bizarre as he was? Getting to the house in the clearing was sometimes a difficult task. Although Tad felt that after the first few visits he began to have a clearer idea of the best route to take from his own home to Daddy’s, finding it was sometimes nearly impossible. He would often become lost on the way there, sometimes for hours at a time. These were incredibly frustrating experiences for him. He would be sure, absolutely positive that he had started out heading in the right direction. He would look for landmarks, making mental note of trees or rock formations that looked familiar. He would think he was getting close. And the clearing with the house in its center would simply refuse to appear. It was as though it was a sentient being, hiding from him, toying with him, making a conscious effort to frustrate him. And it would frustrate him. He would walk through the forest cursing under his breath, thinking that he’d been walking steadily due north for the past hour, when he would pass the same rock face for the fourth time. Ironically enough, sometimes he would only find the place after he had finally given up searching and decided to head for home. Only then would the trees thin and he would emerge at the bottom of the basin, the long rend in the trees with the house standing tall in its center. Sometimes he was unable to find it at all, and he would spend hours wandering listlessly, miserably lost, searching first for Daddy’s house, then the way back home.
There were times when he arrived at the house and there was nobody around, and he took advantage of these opportunities to explore. Daddy’s mansion served as the best and most remarkable combination clubhouse/lost-and-found that any boy could want. For one thing, the rooms seemed virtually limitless. In addition to the multiple stories above ground, there was also an extensive network of basements and subbasements. When Daddy had spoken of not knowing what to expect from room to room, he hadn’t been exaggerating. Some of the rooms were in a state of disrepair and neglect, similar to those where Tad had been entertained on his first visit. There were rooms with graffiti and dirty limericks spray painted on the walls. Piles of overturned and demolished furniture. Broken glass. Then he would come to a room that was exquisitely decorated, with paintings on the walls depicting breathtaking landscapes, cabinets loaded with antique silver service, brilliant crystal chandeliers. There was a banquet hall with a fireplace large enough for him to walk into without bending over, and a solid oak table with enough matching chairs to seat forty.
He found what had to be the tea room, a small chamber with a cozy sort of low alcove on one side and a pair of shuttered windows looking out on the woods to the eastern side of the house. There were a number of seats set directly in the walls around a circular stone table with a chess board inscribed in its surface. Tad imagined it would be nice to sit there and enjoy a cup of the Pumpkin Spice in the early morning and watch the sun rise through the window. There was a kitchen and an adjoining scullery, both with floors made of polished flagstones, and cabinets containing every cooking implement Tad had ever seen, and a good many he hadn’t. He did note, however, that there was no refrigerator, nor for that matter, any dishwasher, microwave, toaster, or any other similar device; the house didn’t seem to be furnished with the modern convenience of electricity. The light sources in the outer rooms were the many windows; beyond that, there were few places where candles didn’t seem to be readily available. That was one of the few constants. If it could be said that there was a motif consistent throughout Daddy’s domicile, it was the presence of the candles.
The doors of many rooms were locked, particularly on the upper floors. Since Tad had first seen it, it had been in the back of his mind to get a closer look at the massive glass portal that looked out like an eye over the woods. Unfortunately, it seemed to be inaccessible. All his wanderings on the upper floors failed to locate it. What Tad found instead, however, helped to explain Daddy’s ability to appear in strange and unusual costume. Everywhere there were rooms dedicated to the storage of period clothing, the most extensive wardrobe imaginable. He would open a door to find a whole gallery of garments on long dusty racks, hundreds of outfits on hangers or thrown into careless piles on the ground. It was like the world’s largest Halloween costume warehouse. The sheer variety of what was available was staggering. Nestled together he would find all the necessary trappings to instantly create a Roman centurion, an Egyptian pharaoh, a medieval monarch. A Green Beret. A Mongol warlord. There were rooms with mounds of accoutrements heaped in piles like treasure in a dragon’s lair, any of the accessories that could possibly be needed to completely authenticate the image. Tad could easily have spent hours looking through it all. Nor were these the sort of outfits that might be purchased at the local drugstore. They were all expertly crafted, with attention paid to the minutest detail. Had Tad been the sort of person who liked to play dress up, he would have been infinitely entertained. Standing alongside the costume racks were others hung with outfits for both men and women, the sort of which might be worn to formal gatherings, both in recent times and dating back to half a century before, dinner jackets, tuxedos, cocktail dresses. Even ball gowns. Clothes for every conceivable occasion. And every conceivable mood.
In the same vicinity as the costume storage department (as he liked to think of it), he found a large circular room with a mirrored ceiling and a loop of circular mirrors set in the wall at face level. The rest of the room was composed of row upon row of shelves, on which sat a messy tangle of stage makeup and beauty products. Some of them were labeled, and had the modern, contemporary look of having been purchased recently; others looked decades old. Among the products that were easily identifiable- eye liners, mascaras, rouges, and cold crèmes- were many others that weren’t, unmarked tubes and clear bottles filled with colored goop of a consistency that reminded Tad of the paint preferred by Daisy for her art projects. It was like a combination actors’ dressing room and debutantes’ boudoir.
He found a chamber that was like a homemade version of a padded cell. There were throw pillows lining the floor and walls that seemed to have been bolted down, and others lying loose in piles; bedspreads, sheets, quilts, comforters. Feathers, lying knee high in places. Empty wine bottles on the floor. He found an unadorned room full of wire cages, some hung from the ceiling, others on the ground, their doors flung open. Some of them lined with newspaper, ancient dried feces clinging to them. Some old bones, yellow with age, scattered about. Not human, thankfully. The bones of some fowl, like a chicken, only much larger. What could only be blood stains on the floor, long since congealed, separated from the plasma, the color of rust. He found a room like a study, with a metal desk and a row of filing cabinets. The cabinets were full of glass beads. A room like a gallery in a museum, with exhibits under glass, but what was in the cases made no sense. In one of them an umbrella, in another what looked like an old handkerchief. Walking through Daddy’s house was like walking through a dream made real. Again and again this is what Tad kept coming back to, it’s like walking through a dream. It was that unpredictable and that abstract. In the same way that a dream jumbles together the random thoughts that a sleeper has had during the day, now dredging up episodes from their past, now premonitions of their future, now the desires of their heart that their conscious mind cannot admit or grasp, this was the blueprint for Daddy’s house. It was a safe house and a breeding ground for the bizarre.
Tad never felt truly alone there, even when he seemed to be by himself. Just as he had sensed the house and felt it growing nearer, there in the woods before he’d ever seen it, being inside was like being within the belly of a whale. The house was alive, and it had moods, as surely as those of the surrounding woods. He had only to tune himself in, he found, to quiet his own thoughts, and he could hear it, always on, always humming to itself, low and tunelessly, like an electric generator. He never saw any other o
ccupants other than Daddy and Stitch, but he sometimes felt the presence of many other entities about, the sensation of being followed in his wanderings by curious eyes. He didn’t mind the feeling. It did not frighten him. It was not as though the house was haunted, but rather that events that had taken place here, or the people that had passed through, had left some residue or impression that was slow to fade. He felt that important things had happened here, at times, that the house carried within it the collective history of many souls. In places the air was heavy with these events and personalities. In this place many stories had their beginnings and their endings. He could almost see them, could almost reach out and touch them. But he did not know how. The method was a mystery to him, as the house itself, and its proprietor, were a mystery.
He thought that Daddy had been truthful when he had said that many of the inner workings of the place remained unknown to him. The best evidence of this was that much of the house seemed to be unoccupied and unused. To know if he was in a place that saw much traffic, if any at all, he had only to look at how well kept each room was. By the heavy layer of dust that blanketed much of the upstairs, and the absence of footprints, he guessed that a good amount of the activity was restricted to the first floor. Unsurprisingly, the rooms that showed the most recent use were the makeup and costume rooms. The kitchen and tea room, the banquet hall, and the other rooms on the first floor whose primary purposes were less easy to identify all seemed to be occupied. Tad had no doubt that there were animals of some kind in the house. Apart from the droppings, there were paw prints everywhere, some that he identified as rodent, others that had to be feline and canine. There were some of these last two that were of a truly alarming size. Daddy’s explanation of how they came to be there notwithstanding, the many broken windows, not to mention the lack of a working front door, would probably account for the animal occupation; conceivably anything, or anyone, for that matter, could wander in at any time. Home security hardly seemed to be a priority for the occupants.
Then there were the lower levels of the house. There might have been multiple points of entry; he didn’t know. The way he discovered was a set of stairs at the rear of the scullery that led down to the cellar. When Tad descended these for the first time, stepping cautiously down into the earthy dark below, another one of his many questions was answered. Here there were stores sufficient to last Stitch and Daddy a lifetime, and many others besides. The cellar was a dim room with a dirt floor and many rows of shelves, standing about six feet high, made of split logs planed smooth. On the shelves was an abundance of food and food products, carefully stored. There were gunny sacks hung on hooks from the walls, full of potatoes and onions, corn and beans. There were rows of wooden bins filled with many kinds of grain. He opened one and lifted up a handful of millet, letting it run through his fingers like sand. He found others with rice, wheat, sorghum, and many kinds of nuts, still in the shells. On the shelves were hundreds of jars of preserves, pickles, dried and canned fruits. There were dried strips of cured meat wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. By the smell of the meat he knew it for venison. There were wooden racks set back against one of the walls, on which rested innumerable bottles of wine. Though Tad knew nothing of wine and its vintages, he could see by the labels that some of them were nearly a century old. There were casks sitting near from which the thin, sweet smell of ale emanated, hanging in the stillness like smoke.
The more Tad looked around, examining this bounty, the more he found himself thinking that Daddy wasn’t responsible for such carefully maintained stock. He didn’t know how he knew this. He just knew. It was a sense he got, a notion that came into his mind that he immediately accepted as fact. The man was simply too unorganized. Then who stowed all this down here? Stitch? Someone else? He also took note of the fact that there didn’t seem to be any store bought supplies. There were no labels. And that could mean that all the vegetables and things were grown somewhere close by. He found himself wondering again how much land, if any, Daddy actually owned. He examined closely the strips of dried flesh in their brown paper.Were Daddy or Stitch hunters? Was it someone else entirely who’d slain these deer and known how to skin and cure them? The answer to each question led only to a host of others.
The storeroom led to other rooms, and lower levels. A doorway on its far side opened into a narrow hall with a dirt floor leading off into the dark below. With no electricity, any further than this required the assistance of a candle, even in the middle of the day. No natural light penetrated beyond this point. It had taken a lot for Tad to nerve himself up to go any further than this stage, even with the torch that he’d procured to light the way. Because this is the basement, the underground, one of the dark places, where all the secrets are kept. This was true of anyone, but he felt this should be especially true with people like Daddy. This was where the revelation would come that would explain it all. The secrets of the man’s existence. The woods-dwelling hermit with the dilapidated mansion who spoke in many voices and whose very presence could affect the rules of time that Tad had always accepted as immutable. He felt as he stepped into the dark opening, the torch sending the shadows fleeing before him, that he would not be surprised by anything. Because if stepping into this house is indeed like stepping into a dream, then it follows that anything is possible. Anything at all could be down here. What would he do, he wondered, if the first thing that he saw was a mass grave? He was thinking about the Cask of Amontillado, that he’d read in school the past semester. How many of Daddy’s friends and relatives had been locked away down here, sealed off brick by brick? For that matter, had the man ever even had any friends and relatives?
The first rooms had little to offer. The doorways on either side of the hall opened on modest sized chambers with low ceilings that seemed more than anything else like cemeteries for old furniture. The floors were unfinished, splintery wooden boards, on which rested many couches and futons, small beds and oversized arm chairs. There were bunk beds and end tables, even the plastic wreckage of what looked to have once been an inflatable chair. Everything was in poor condition, he saw, holding the torch above his head and looking down on the scuffs and stains. There was mud tracked on the upholstery of some, cushions ripped open on others. Stuffing and feathers were strewn along the floor. From their colors and styles, the furniture looked to have been gathered from several different eras. At first glance, it seemed as though they had all been haphazardly tossed down here, but then he began to see that there was a certain logic to their arrangement. In one of the larger rooms he found proof that seemed to support his theory. The couches, beds, or whatever else seemed to have been placed in loosely formed circles. It looked as though at some time in the past a powwow or party of some kind had taken place here. There was further evidence, he saw, keeling and holding the torch down near the ground, away from his body. He felt as though he were searching for clues to the lifestyle of some ancient culture, long since departed from the earth. Here there were more empty receptacles and evidence of people having gathered. Trash littered the floor, beer mugs encrusted with filth, cigarette butts, small brass coins from countries he didn’t recognize, beads and plastic trinkets, a guitar pick, flakes of silver and gold confetti. The bones of small animals. A discarded syringe. Evidence of some event, or many events, that had taken place here in the past beneath Daddy’s house. Here too he found that if he schooled his mind to stillness he could sense, could almost feel the presence of the guests long since departed, could hear their bawdy laughter and the clink of glasses. They had seated themselves in straggling circles on the bones of the molding furniture and made merry, in their fashion. But who were they, and where had they come from?
He went deeper, further along the passage, as the grade now plunged steadily downward, leaving the drinking rooms, as he thought of them, and coming after a few minutes and a few hundred yards to its end. He felt a rush of cold air as he neared the opening, a chill draught gusting toward him from an unseen source. Nothing stirred
as he stepped out, into the blackness. And here there was darkness of a sort that Tad had never experienced before. For as far back as his mind could carry him he’d known darkness of different kinds, that of his bedroom, say, in the middle of the night, when he’d lain awake with his eyes having long since adjusted, and he could make out the shapes of his desk, and his dresser, and the toys and clothes scattered across the floor, and the red digital readout of his clock a foot away. He’d known the darkness of the woods in late October, when he’d stood on the back porch of the house looking out toward the hillside, past the giant oak, when the first hint of winter stole across the ground and the clouds blotted the moon and stars, and he could feel the night terrors standing near, frozen to statues like participants in a children’s game, waiting for his imagination to give them life. These were the forms of darkness that he’d known, but now he realized that they had been pale imitations of the true darkness, the kind that is so complete and total that you can only find it in places beneath the earth. Such a darkness was this that now confronted him. It was not merely the absence of any and all light. It was the impossibility of any light, forever, always. He stepped forward, holding the torch in front of him but rather than dispel the blackness, it seemed as though it caused it to rush in around him, to crowd him and push him back, like a wall, unseen and mobile, fully aware of his presence and hostile.
There was a time, not long ago, when Tad would have called it a day at this point and fled back up the passage. After all, he was, by his own admission, still much more boy than man, having thirteen summers to his credit, this being the fourteenth. But no ordinary summer, this. This was the Summer in Between, and while his eyes saw nothing, even when other parts of his anatomy, or perhaps his psyche, perceived a threat, he did not retreat. Not immediately, anyhow. He stood, and felt the darkness feel its way about him, and pass through and probe him, seeping into his pores, and he stood without moving, with his eyes open, seeing nothing, and he tried to open the portals of all the other senses, and just be there, fully in the moment. And then he turned to his left and began to make a slow circuit of the space, keeping close to the wall, placing one foot in front of the other like a man on a tightrope, holding the torch before him. He could sense the vastness of the place. He felt himself to be in a kind of hall or gallery. On his right, away from the wall, he began to pass stone columns, the height of which he could not begin to guess at or see with the feeble light from his torch. He wanted very much to shout out; this place must have great acoustics, but decided against it. No need to wake the dragons from their slumber. Not now. He let out a bemused chuckle. He was thinking how little time it can take for the limits of ones reality to alter and expand. How a month ago he’d been stuck in Mr. Crisp’s Algebra class taking the final exam, bored to tears, doodling on his desk in the back of the room, looking out on the meticulously manicured grass of the practice field and dreaming about the months to come. Endless hours lazing in the shade by the Willow Road and bounding through the trees on a mission the very structure and objective of which was known to he alone. But how quickly things had changed, and strange, he thought, how quickly he had come to accept those changes, the restructuring of his daily life.
Woods Page 13
