by Jack Cady
His Mercedes was out of its element. Snow melted on the windshield and wind gusted against the car. It responded with shudders like his own. He stopped the engine and continued to look beyond the freeway. He could not name his fear, but he could name its source.
Immense and towering beyond the mound was the house, rising like twisted battlements on the bluff above the river. Coarse, cankered, its spires and points faded in and out of Tracker’s vision as low clouds ran through the snow-blown sky — a sky that seemed a funnel of gloom. A well of despair? The house reached high, weatherbeaten. It looked like the last castle of defense in a chess game against civilization-striding forces. Yet Tracker knew that the house was, in its fashion, as contemporary as himself.
Beneath the cold sky the house seemed luminous. Its brown and yellow mosaics, the Stars of David in purple, blue and green, the silver crosses, the umber and gold birds, black octagons, russet circles, white moon crescents and multicolored triangles. Rusted iron railings on tiered balconies held carved satyr’s masks, sea beasts. There were griffins and Biblical renderings ofJonah and Goliath and the Fall. Because of the light and distance, Tracker could not make out the figure on the enormous stained glass window that wove the face of the house into an imitation of a medieval cathedral.
Rusted, cracked, faded, the designs swirled and beckoned, as sure as the Book of Revelations, as obscure. Some balconies were tumbled. Carvings that decorated them stood singly on posts like chopped heads displayed as some stern lesson. Ancient fecundity figures with oversized bellies dwelt beside satanic forms. From eaves sprouted faces of forgotten gods that seemed struck dumb by surrounding gargoyles. The wind pressed against closed shutters. The house bore the injury of time and weather, yet at no place did it seem weak. Only the shrill tumbling of its symbols was affected.
Nothing so huge could be just a house. It was more a trap, a disaster visited on Trackers for over a century. Man after man, and woman after woman, they added their share: predestined, it seemed, to pour into the monster the best of each individual genius.
And they were, in their fashion, geniuses:
Johan the builder. In Johan’s middle age the theme of the house emerged. Johan began to worry about his soul. He built the first trap in his already enormous house. It was a trap to capture the Devil. Johan’s wife was named Sarah. Her genius was sainthood, if tales about her were to be believed. Sarah was a saint of patience and forbearance.
Their son Theophilus was the designer and primitive artist. Theophilus was also a builder. His wife’s name was Vera, and her genius was to inflict mental and emotional pain. If John Tracker, their grandson, could not remember his great grandparents Johan and Sarah, he could remember his grandparents Theophilus and Vera too well.
Justice, John’s father, was considered by many to be out of his mind, but in his rational moments he was a theologian and historian. Justice’s wife was also named Sarah. John Tracker did not know what his father Justice had built into this house, but it had to be something huge; when Justice was all right he was truly brilliant. John’s mother, the second Sarah, ran away from this house, and John figured that no matter how frenzied his mother’s later life was, she gave this house its proper name. Sarah never called it the house of the Trackers, she spoke of it as “that hideous place.”
As for himself, John Tracker had no wife. He also, he was sure, had no genius. Right now his job was to destroy, and you did not need genius to do that. You also did not need a wife. This was a job best done alone.
The house had to be destroyed because of the new freeway. Actually that was only one reason. There were other considerations. If it was only a matter of destruction then the state could do the job. He smiled and tried a low laugh, and this time the laugh came. He would think of the other considerations later.
The house dominated his view, and he plotted its destruction while wondering at its size. There would be more than two hundred and fifty rooms, not counting the towers, not counting the darkened plain of the cellar nor the subcellar, which he considered a true nether-region.
He paused. There was one decent thing in that house his father, Justice, once built a greenhouse on a third floor terrace, which was the sole retreat for John as a child.
He smoothed his hair, rubbed at his eyes, was surprised by the rough wool shirtsleeves. He raised his hands. They were strong, not trembling. Dark hair on the backs of his hands contrasted with the brightly colored wool shirt.
It was past time to get moving, but he remained seated to watch the scud of clouds between the towers. High gables gave onto areas of flat roofs, wide porches; first floor, second, third, and now there was a porch on fourth. That was new in the past twenty years. Roof to subcellar the house stood railed, bannistered, balconied of oak, pine, teak, mahogany, walnut, elm, poplar, cherry, gum, rosewood and maple. It was foundationed in rock with rock underfootings cut from the bones of the land.
Tracker thought of his grandfather Theophilus and of his eyes that sometimes flared with new ideas, that at other times were cold, flat like the eyes of a reptile. No doubt Theophilus was dead by now, his eyes blank, slatelike. The corded arms of Theophilus, the white, Methuselah hair…dead, kicked out of Hell, if John Tracker was any judge.
Wind buffeted the car and whirled snow along the top of the grade. The snow danced formless. Tracker shuddered. It seemed like there were memories that were going to come no matter how he tried to hold them back. He had visited his father here more than once. Those years between ages ten and twenty had been bad ones. Maybe they’d also been bad for his father.
Tracker turned from the memories. Snow whirled on the grade. Time to get moving. He was, after all, John Tracker; a millionaire businessman who did not put up with foolishness from anything human. This was not, after all, the thirteenth century. A cold draft touched his ankle. Tracker restarted the engine to run the heater. The weather was already dragging on the afternoon light. With this kind of winter, he was sure there would be more snow. The heater warmed him, and he reluctantly stopped the engine, opened the door and stepped into deep snow, nearly sliding into a shallow ditch along the access road. From the trunk he took a flashlight and a crowbar.
The snow whirled, danced, feathered.
He was sure the place was abandoned. His father was reported missing and presumed dead for more than the required seven years. His grandfather Theophilus was either dead, or in his nineties. His grandmother Vera, the same. Nothing was alive in that house except spiders and rats.
He wished he knew more about his family. If he knew more he would not feel so damned alone, so alien. Those were strange things for a man to feel when that man controlled the kind of business John Tracker owned. Still, he needed facts and his memory mostly fed him emotion. If he had more facts there might emerge some overall scheme in his family’s history. That scheme might not be logical, but at least you could look at it logically.
The mound of freeway rose high. The house seemed to stand as a prop for the mound. Thirty-by-thirty rafters. Double-slate roofs. Limestone and granite mazes far beneath the earth. The monster was built and ballasted against winds so incredible they could never blow except in the mind of a demon imagination. He paused and wondered if he was overstating. Demon? Were his grandparents that bad? And he remembered their furious needs, their bizarre compulsions. Yes, his grandparents’ lives wove a tapestry of lust and spite and destruction.
The snow whirled in his face and he slid twice before gaining the top of the grade. On the crest he felt saturated with snow. It was down his shirt and coat, his boots were full. He thought of going back to the car and knew he was trying to kid himself.
He looked down the white, snow-dancing grade, then caught movement in the corner of his eye and looked back at the house. A sliding gray shadow? He saw nothing. Blown snow? If it was a running, sliding gray shadow then it meant…he shook his head, there was something h
e should allow himself to remember.
A door on the right side of the house opened and an angel carrying a large cross emerged and moved, draped and gowned, through the snow to disappear through another door at the left side of the house. The transit was slow. The angel wore gilded wings, was taller by far than a tall man. It made a faint but distinct clicking as it mechanically followed rails. It plowed snow with its carved-wooden robes. The red and silver cross was faded, but before disappearing the angel turned and presented the cross forward, directly at the grade. Some trick of light, some illumination of the dull afternoon magnified the words written on the cross. Apage Satanis.
Either it was a trick of the light, or a trick once constructed by John’s grandfather Theophilus. John now remembered that there were three basic styles of mechanics that had been built into the house by Theophilus: there were Tricks, there were Traps, there were Warnings.
This mechanical angel, of course, was a Warning, though John did not know whether Theophilus had built the thing to warn the Devil or just to warn everyone, including himself.
The thought of generations pressed in John’s mind. He recoiled from the angel, then relaxed. It was exactly the kind of trash-ridden symbol that he needed to get him started. Wooden angels. Magic crosses. He tightened his hold on the crowbar and prepared to slide down the grade, skidding through drifts toward the house of the Trackers, where the voices of generation after generation of the dead were not yet stilled.
Chapter Two
The generations of voices swirled in the air and snow about John Tracker’s face. If he dared to listen he might have heard them.
One voice was Johan Tracker’s, founder of the house of the Trackers. During the First World War the name was changed from the German Traker to Tracker. Johan was at once the major victim, and villain, of Tracker history. He came to America in the late nineteenth century with cash. He was clever and hardworking and devout. His parents were peasant stock who prospered, but their religious beliefs were medieval.
Johan, living in a rapidly growing modern world, seemed to know nothing about that world. He clung to the god of his father, an authoritarian Protestant being that had changed little since the Reformation. He lived during a time in the history of his adopted nation when theology was essentially dead, and had been since the Civil War. Johan’s world was a world of evangelicalism and dogma, and he feared the counterpart of his ferocious deity. Johan feared the Devil.
He bought timbered land and he began to build. The house that grew beyond a house that grew beyond a house was originally shaved slabs. By the time Johan had erected a rambling two stories, he was stopped from building in the direction he desired because of a well, so he decided to build his house over the well and dig a second well. Labor was cheap. Men were practical. If Traker wanted to pay, his neighbors were more interested in wages than reasons. By this time Indiana was no longer frontier territory, but enough legend and memory of siege remained so that no one thought it was impractical to have a well in the subcellar of a house.
Johan’s next action reflected one variety of his diabolic fear. He built his first trap to trap the Devil. Then, having built one trap, he felt compelled to build more. The already large house of the Trackers embarked toward immensity.
It may be that Johan eventually found Peace, but not in this world. He died of a crushed chest as a machine he was trying to rig broke loose from hoisting tackle.
Johan was not a bad man, according to his lights. His problem was that his lights were pale, medieval lamps.
Approaching the house which Johan Traker had begun enlarging a century before, his great grandson slid to the bottom of the grade, dropped the crowbar and picked it from the deep snow which got inside his gloves. He turned to the house. There were no tracks. Surely the house was abandoned. He looked up, and through a slit in closed shutters on the second floor came what seemed a vaporous, flashing blue light.
He stared and told himself that the light was more shocking than a specter.
Maybe someone was alive. Maybe electricity was being generated in the house. He felt dwarfed by the rising façades and symbols, the now-hidden towers and his knowledge that mazes and catacombs lay beneath his feet. He searched as high and wide as he could see. No other light appeared.
An eighty-foot blue spruce rose beside him, brown and dead in the snow-covered garden. It was root-cut by bulldozers. No green appeared anywhere, except for a fringe by the porch where snow blew from branches of low juniper. The soil would be full of sulphuric acid from shooting bedrock for the freeway. Tracker looked with professional knowledge and told himself that if anything could live in hell it would be juniper.
His favorite business, the one that started as a hobby and was now making enormous profits, was industrial landscaping. He figured that the urge to build was natural in his family. Inborn. He liked to carve the face of a mountain and turn that raw face into a park that framed a factory. He landscaped freeways. He would get the contract to landscape this one. The freeway, he knew, was a political hot potato that was not, strictly speaking, needed. In an office at the state capitol, some weeks before, several men including a U.S. senator, gathered and Tracker was told that there must be no publicity in connection with the freeway. He was also told that, as the last of the Trackers who could be found, he must get rid of that sideshow of a house before the road was open.
“Eminent domain,” they said. “The state could tear it down.” “It constitutes a hazard,” said a man with state highways. “The feds say so, and I say so. It’s the kind of curiosity…” The man’s belly was paunchy, his mouth tight and his face red. “You can just see a bunch of yahoos crossing that new bridge when it’s in. They’ll take one look, hit their brakes, and bam; we’ll have built the most deadly road in the nation.”
“I don’t own the place,” Tracker said.
“You probably do,” a lawyer with the state attorney’s office told him. The lawyer was young, thin and seemed worried. He was said to have hopeless political ambitions. “We’ve been able to make no contact with anyone in the house. Your father is dead.”
“Missing.”
“Legally, he could be declared dead.”
“I like design,” Tracker said. “In my business you always work with an architect. Most landscape architects don’t know pussywillow from night-shade.”
It was a fair price. Every one of the men knew it. Tracker would get to landscape the freeway. More important, no, most important, he would get to design the job. It was like he’d always interpreted other men’s paintings. Well, with this job he could paint his own.
Now he stood in the cold and snow, looking up at the house. What the men from the state did not say was that the house had them buffaloed. They made no contact with that house for more than one reason. Maybe nobody was alive in there, but the real reason was that the state could find no one who would set foot in the place. The Trackers had a reputation for wildness and perversity, but the house’s reputation was even stronger.
In a way he was being given an immense gift exactly when he needed a new shot of energy. When you turned forty it was a big shock. He had always heard that was true, and now he was finding out that it really was true.
He thought of Amy. Tracker knew himself well enough to figure that one. If he was not forty, he would probably not have gone beyond a good business arrangement of three years standing.
He shivered. It was stupid to be standing in deep snow when he could be inside. He tested his reluctance and surveyed the house. There was an immense scrap value. There were truckloads of antique furnishings. There were hundreds of thousands of board feet of hundred-year-old cherry and other furniture woods. Absolutely irreplaceable material. Wood like that was no longer available anyplace in the nation. He had no idea of the scrap value, but he was sure that even after high labor and trucking costs the scrap would net high in
the tens of thousands.
He figured he could run a temporary road just east of the cemetery. He stopped, then smiled. He would have to check specs on the road. There was no mention or order for exhumation, but the family cemetery was certainly under the grade or near it. If his grandfather was there then traffic would be thumping across the old man’s belly.
“You old bastard,” he muttered. He paused to still the first surge of elation that made him want to shout and cheer. He stood with the dead tree like a monument at his side and thought that the state was really in a bind. Newspapers could be emotional. People starved, beat, cheated and pushed each other around, then got emotional over graveyards. Tracker figured he had a greater advantage than he first thought.
“You old son of a bitch,” he said, turning in the direction of the grade and the covered cemetery. “You fought Hell. You listened night after night to wind against the windows. You allowed no music because it might hide the movement of evil. Wait until that road is open.”
He turned back to the house, flicked the flashlight on and directed the beam into the gloom of the long front porch that was railed like a ship, running narrow like a corridor. There were seven doors on this wing. Two were built to accommodate the angel. Tracker had been away a long time, but he had memory enough when it came to traps. He went to the third door from the east and tested the footing with the crowbar as he advanced. He stood at the side of the door, turned the knob, pushed the door open and quickly moved back.
