Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

  EXORCIST VISITS WINTHROP PARK “HAUNTED” HOUSE

  Oct. 31, 1970—Just over a year ago, the name of a certain house in Northwest Washington became a place of nightmares. Draper House. Built by the architect Julian Marlowe in the 1800s, a man known for his bizarre architectural style known as “marlowisms,” which involved numerous entries to rooms so that someone in the dining room could get to the bedroom, for example, without ever going through the kitchen or living room. Marlowe is of course most famous for the Edith Glasscock House in Newport News, Virginia, which the reclusive Miss Glasscock had him develop over a period of twenty-five years. Draper House’s most famous residents were Addison and Verena Standish, from the 1880s to the turn of the century. According to Fay Randolph, the noted “exorcist” of Manhattan whose recent book of essays, By Demons Possessed, was published to international acclaim. Draper House’s murky reputation began long before the recent tragedies of the young women’s deaths.

  “The house was built on swampy ground; a well, in fact, runs beneath it. Its first occupant was a lady of the evening named Rose Draper, and it is said that in her brothel -- for politicians primarily -- blackmail and knavery were the rule. She died violently, as do all original residents of such houses, and her death was similar to the famous Fatty Arbuckle case early in this century, although I believe the instrument of death in that case was a broken champagne bottle. In the case of Rose Draper, it was a rather simple kitchen utensil: an apple-coring knife. They say her ghost claps at night, the clap being her alarm that the place is about to be raided, and the clap also being a reference to the disease which she carried to her death.

  “The illustrious Verena Standish, daughter of Horace Ashton the famous robber baron, and her husband, the less distinguished Addison Standish, bought the house in the late 1800s when Addison was set his sites in the political world. With them, they brought their two children, and a governess, and here is where the evil qualities of the house came into play. The story goes that the governess went mad and murdered the children in a most grisly fashion. Mrs. Standish herself felt much to blame, apparently because, as a popular diversion of the time, she became intrigued with spiritualism, thinking it a lark. Upon the deaths of her only children, she took an entirely different view, and believed that her playing at table-rappings and ghosts had brought something out of the house, something that was there waiting for such a moment.

  “Then, for a stretch of perhaps seventy years, the house lay fallow. Families moved in and out, at one point it became three or four apartments. Then the neighborhood of Winthrop Park began to tarnish, and the less desirable elements began to occupy the neighborhood and, in time, the house. Who knows what evil has been there in the past decade? We know of these hippies who tortured and murdered girls, but who knows what may have drawn them in? Were they, after all, as their defense attorneys argued unsuccessfully just this summer, pawns of their drug habits? And if so, what showed them the way? What brought them here?”

  Mrs. Randolph possesses the cherubic face of the eternal child. It is hard to believe that this soft-spoken woman wearing her fair isle sweater and kilt is the same exorcist who cast demons out of the Isaacson twins in Brooklyn two years ago. Sitting with her in her suite at the John Quincy Adams Hotel, one wonders if she enjoys spooking reporters on Halloween.

  “Tonight,” she says, “I will enter the house and call upon the spirits. I don’t believe in the devil, not at least in person. But I do believe that evil exists, I do believe that there are places on this earth where spirits are caught outside the flesh, the same way they are caught, more often, within the flesh. And tonight at Draper House, I will find out their meaning, and if they are, as I believe, evil, I will vanquish them from the house.”

  FAMED EXORCIST DIES IN FIRE

  Nov. 1, 1970—Fay Randolph, forty-three, author of the recent New York Times bestseller, By Demons Possessed, died last night in a fire in her hotel room in Washington, D.C.… believed to be started by the cigarette she was smoking when she fell asleep…

  Rachel scanned the rest of the headlines:

  THE “SCREAMING HOUSE

  -- with the subhead: Neighbors Heard Girls’ Cries Of Terror, But Did Not Find It Unusual For Winthrop Park

  MAN ARRESTED IN SEX CULT SLAYINGS

  WITNESS COMES FORWARD—ESCAPED CLUTCHES OF ALLEGED “KNIFE RAPIST”

  SUSPECT SETS SELF AFIRE

  CIRCUS OF DEATH: MORE BODIES UNCOVERED IN WINTHROP PARK

  8.

  Rachel groaned as she folded the photocopies in half and hurriedly stuffed them into her purse; she’d read them later when her stomach wasn’t feeling so upset—much later. She wrote into her date book (without which she would never accomplish a thing):

  1. Make list for housewarming party.

  2. Get Hugh to look at VW.

  3. Groceries: nothing that can’t be microwaved.

  4. BANK! BANK! TAKE OUT LIFE SAVINGS! (at least 200 bucks)

  5. Call to invite people: re: housewarming party: Labor Day weekend.

  6. Set up appt. with dctr? Or wait? Re: sphere.

  9.

  Waiting for her train home in the Farragut West station, Rachel felt spooked. The subway platform was deserted, although she heard footsteps from above the escalators, and the lone wind that seemed to herald the next blue line train. It’s those articles about the house. She boarded the train, thankful that there were a handful of people on it, tired workers, some tourists probably heading back to their motels from the Smithsonian. She closed her eyes and tried to think calm thoughts, but her mind kept coming back to those headlines, Screaming House, Devil Worship, Chamber of Horrors.

  Shit, I’ll have to thank Sassy personally for giving me a few more nightmares.

  Keeping her eyes shut, she reached up with her fingers and kneaded her temples. Stay away migraine, stay away migraine, migraine you do not exist, you do not have power over me. Headache, I rebuke you!

  She heard the conductor call out on the intercom, “DuPont Circle Station, this is a blue line train to Friendship Heights.”

  Rachel saw, sitting in front of her, staring at her, a man she thought she knew. He was tall and slender, wearing a black shirt that stuck to his ribs. He leaned forward in his seat, his hands clutching the bar above the seat in front of him. His skin was shiny and dark, and his face seemed almost reassuring as if he recognized her, also. On his head he wore a black top hat. His eyes crinkled up into small slits, and he grinned, broadly, and she knew that grin, and she felt hot and cold, chilled, when she remembered where she knew him from: the day she sat at the card table at Mrs. Deerfield’s crib, when the face with the teeth came down for her, this was the face of the man from the clamoring place. He spoke without opening his mouth, and he said, “Let’s pretend, Rachel, that you are the mommy.”

  Rachel gasped; she felt like she’d just flicked her tongue across a live wire.

  But another voice came over the wire, the train’s intercom, the conductor’s voice again, “This is Woodley Park Station, Woodley Park,” and Rachel realized that she had not opened her eyes yet, not actually, because the man in the black tank top was becoming a static of squiggly lines on a purplish background, and Rachel opened her eyes to normal life and a normal world in which a little boy, standing in the aisle with his mother and sister, leaned over and tugged at her sleeve, saying,

  “Hey lady, lady, is this the stop for the zoo?”

  10.

  So she had a nightmare that night.

  But the nightmare wasn’t about a Screaming House; wasn’t concerned with a man who had materialized in her mind’s eye on the Metro; she did not dream of spheres bursting from her belly.

  The nightmare was about her father.

  He was lying in the hospital bed—she’d never even seen him in that bed, he hadn’t wanted her to see him, he hadn’t allowed his favorite girl to see him once the end was just two months away. His eyes were sunken as if the fluid had been sucked out of them, his skin was past
y, his lips moved slowly with great effort. Thrust between his lips: a lit cigarette. “Old habits die hard,” he said, coughing. “Took out my lungs, sweetie.”

  His chest was burst open as if he’d swallowed a grenade. Gray tendrils of smoke curled between his dripping ribs.

  I know this is a dream flashed through her mind.

  And I want this dream to end.

  Now.

  Her father lay in the hospital bed.

  To avoid looking at the smoldering cavity beneath his neck, Rachel concentrated on his face. Skin brittle as dead leaves. Cracked at the mouth. Cigarette burning orange at the tip. Smoke exhaled through flared nostrils. Voice like gravel underfoot. “Can’t have everything in this life, Rachel. You have your work, and I’m proud of what you’ve done, but you can’t deny your body, you can’t deny the destiny of every woman to bring life into this world, sweetie, it’s only natural.”

  As he spoke, the light in the room dimmed, and she watched the smoke rise through the shadowy air, rise and curl and dissipate.

  “No,” Rachel said. She was surrounded by darkness.

  “What?”

  “This isn’t you. You never said that.”

  “Rachel?” he asked.

  “You always wanted what was best for me.”

  “Scout?”

  Rachel awoke suddenly—she’d been sitting up in bed, leaning on her elbows.

  The fan whirred in the doorway to the bedroom. Perspiration tickled the back of her neck.

  “Scout?” Hugh asked again.

  “Dreaming,” she murmured sleepily.

  “Woke up just now. With you staring at me. Like you were scared of me.”

  “Bad dream. About daddy. Really bad. But I don’t know why.”

  Hugh hummed the theme from Jaws. “Nose shark will come and eat up all the bad dreams.” He reached over to her, hugging her, kissing her nose, falling off to sleep himself. He smelled like Ivory Soap; sweat; shampoo; an old T-shirt; baby powder.

  Rachel lay there in bed holding herself to her husband, shaking as if from cold.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  BLOODMEMORY

  1.

  Hide me! Oh, hide me! Mattie pulled her trash bags of invisibility tight around her face. The heat was unbearable, the sound of her own breathing was like a lion’s roar in her ears, the plastic of the bags was smothering.

  She had drunk her last bottle of wine—she’d panhandled her ass off up in Adams-Morgan for just a couple of bucks, and then went and blew it on Thunderbird. But she needed it, and bad; the cheap wine slowed down the images fluttering in her head, the loop of film replaying the scene over and over, the scene that she’d kept so carefully hidden, even from herself, the real reason why she was afraid to go into the Screaming House. Ever again.

  It was all coming back to her, all the memories, all the terrors, but most clearly: that night, that night in the spring, the night of the riots in Washington, the night her babygirl lay in a bathtub burning with fever, the night he tore into her. The cheap wine wasn’t blurring the memory enough. The more she drank, the clearer that night became.

  “My baby! Four! Death! Room! Fire!” she brayed as she set the empty bottle down by her side, but in her mind she cried out: I remember! Hounfour! Hounfour! Oh, my baby, death in room, fire out window, stink, death, you…

  2.

  I remember!

  The room smelled of death; and of new life.

  The only light came from beyond the window, out where the fires of riots tore up the night. A wall of flame shot up in the projects in the back alley, the building that had housed Madeleine Perreau and her daughter, Nadine. Gunfire down the block; sirens shrieking; shouts of a city gone wild.

  The window was closed to that, and what little seeped through from beneath the pane was ignored by the people in this room. A sink dripped rusty water; roaches scuttled across the cracked yellow tiles; a sound like moist chewing coming from the man who bent over the bathtub. He was naked, his legs and buttocks thrusting forward over the tub as he leaned further into it. His shoulders were skin and bone, with sinewy muscles tying them together. He kept his head ducked down into the tub, his hands moving frantically. As he fed, Mattie could see his back muscles contract, his breaths coming short and swift with each swallow. The silk top hat he had worn earlier lay crushed beside the tub, its rim splattered with blood.

  Mattie watched as her half brother, Gil, performed his operation. In his possessed state he became Baron Samedi. The muddy stink of the grave surrounded him. He was tearing into her daughter’s flesh. In memory it happened slowly, excruciating seconds that stretched into hours. But that April of 1968, it had been over in a matter of minutes.

  Mr. Big Man sat on his haunches next to the toilet, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his tie askew, his gray pants ripped at the knees from when he’d fallen down, when he’d seen Gil begin to feed. He didn’t look over at Mattie, and he didn’t look at the spirit-in-flesh woman either. He stared transfixed at the blood-streaked bathtub. Mr. Big Man, face white with fear, screamed.

  But then even his face changed, became full of beatific wonder: something had come over him, too, something bigger than even the spirits of rada and petro.

  Something in the house that screamed in madness, like a starved wild animal escaped from its cage.

  Something that had nothing to do with the Voudun Mattie’d been taught by her mother, something darker, something that once loose would never be caged again.

  The nameless evil that passed through the house, that drew smaller evil to it—smaller evil like her half brother—and consumed it like a fire devouring the kindling that gave it life. A battery recharging.

  Mattie howled in pain as blood splashed up from the tub—Gil DuRaz turned, grinning, his wide toothy grin smeared with red, his tongue slipping out from his mouth, mopping up the string of blood that drooled beneath his chin. His eyes like twin obsidian marbles.

  From those eyes, hooks flew out to catch Mattie’s soul, to pull her forward, towards him. “Drink, my love, my sister, the milk of the mother.” He smeared his bloodstained hands across his face.

  “Baron Samedi,” Mattie gasped. Her brother had crossed the line, given himself over, alive, to the spirits of death, to the guardian of graveyards. She felt a tremendous pressure push in on all sides, squeezing her brains, thumping against her eardrums; the ax in her heart going choppity-chop! She reeled backwards, slamming into the wall. Her breath came in quick pants, and she fouled her underwear. The stench of her own body became overwhelming—it was as if she’d opened an old grave and inhaled the fumes of an exploded corpse, and the corpse had her own face. She became aware of her flesh and its decay until the room was spinning with the smell.

  She called on the old gods, the spirits, the loa, who would help her. At your altar, I pray, you bring your vengeance down on these -

  But her thoughts were cut off, hacked at until her mind ripped in jagged cliffs and valleys within her skull. Her blood broke the dam of their blood vessels and her nose began bleeding.

  Baby girl—screaming!—Mambomambomambo—guh-guhguh—

  The Old One, the Spirit-In-Flesh, the one called Housekeeper, half in shadows, stood above her. “You never had power, you wasp nest, you jar for jelly.”

  Mattie knew she had lost her magic, lost her power as a mambo priestess. Somehow it had been taken away from her, and now she was weak and spent. Mattie slid to the floor, pounding her fists against her stomach, trying to drive the evil spirits from her. She began gnashing her teeth, foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog, clawing her breasts.

  Gil was done feeding. He cupped his hands into the mess of flesh and blood and brought the baby out.

  It made sucking noises, and Gil held it in one hand. With the other, he poured dark blood into its grasping mouth.

  Gil laughed. “This is the one, this is the vessel that shall hold my spirit.”

  He handed the wriggling fetus to the Housekeeper. The thing mewled like a kitte
n.

  Mattie had no energy to move. Her mind was trickling out of her skull, her thoughts were jumbling as if she were falling down a long staircase with nothing to stop her descent.

  Gil extended his hand towards Mr. Big Man. A hand that dripped with Nadine’s steaming blood. “Drink.”

  And Mr. Big Man crawled like a supplicant on his knees before Gil. His face just beneath the offering hand. His mouth turned upwards. He lapped at the underside of Gil’s hand, greedily.

  When Gil pulled his hand away from the man’s lips, Mr. Big Man grabbed for Gil’s hands with both of his, tried to wrench them back to his face, sucking at the fingers to get the last traces of the girl’s blood. Gil slapped Mr. Big Man, and Mr. Big Man let go. He sat back, sliding like a naughty child to the corner, behind the toilet, licking his lips.

  “Life’s milk, sister, drink and be with me, here, forever,” Gil whispered. He leaned into the tub again. She heard his slurping. He turned towards her, his cheeks puffed out, his mouth full of blood.

  Gil crawled on all fours across the cold wet tiles. To Mattie.

  She felt as if she’d been boned like a chicken. Could not move. Had no will. No will. Mind draining down through the plumbing, into the earth. No mind, no will, no energy.