by Jack Cady
The restaurant helped. Though in Indianapolis, on Sunday night, the choices tended to be rather limited. A sulky waiter took orders for an Italian dinner that would predictably be breaded veal covered with tomato sauce. The room was large and brightly lit — too big for intimacy, too deserted for whispers.
Amy sat there across from him. Bright smile. Probably acting, but if so it was a very good act. She was dressed in a dark outfit that softened the color of her hair and promoted her brown eyes. It seemed incredible that they were lovers. It was almost like being in high school and finding yourself in love with a teacher. Amy seemed unattainable, even now. In addition to her beauty, that sense of being unattainable was surely one of the most compelling things about her. With the well-styled outfit she wore a nearly transparent blouse, high-necked and buttoned. Her long, near-perfect legs were crossed so that one calf and ankle formed a graceful line that seemed full of promise.
And was, he thought. It certainly was.
“How was the movie?”
“How did you know?”
“You always go to movies,” he said. “I’m not yet the world’s leading expert on Amy Griffith, but you always go to movies.”
“A potboiler,” she told him. “First-rate camera work, over-edited, but with some wonderful scenes.” The salad arrived. She plucked a lettuce leaf with her fingers and nibbled at it. “You can cover a lot of bad script with a good set and cameras.”
“I’ve never really learned about those things.”
“You’ve never really had time,” she said. “I never really have, either. Now it looks like I won’t.” Implied sadness made her seem even more sexual.
He felt the remaining fatigue from the day lifting. It was like the time had stepped sideways. It was like the day existed, but it did not exist in the continuum in which he now existed. It was like a scene edited from one of those movies Amy had described.
“What do you mean, you won’t have time?”
“You have to be young,” she said. “To make it in any kind of theater you have to be really young.”
“You are. Besides, not all acting parts are for kids.”
“Not young enough.” She clearly did not want to talk about it, although she was the one who had brought up the subject. “How was your day?”
“Unbelievable.”
“Tell me.”
He found himself really wanting to tell her all of it. He felt nearly obsessive. At the same time he knew how crazy the whole thing would sound. You could not, after all, tell the history of a life or a family over dinner. Especially not his life, his family. Even if you knew the whole history you could not impart the sense of time, over a hundred years of it, that existed in that house.
“I want to see.”
He pretended to be thinking about it. The problem was that, even now, he just did not know how much of what he had experienced was real. He did not know if the disrupting time shifts were real. He did not know if, overwhelmed by the long repressed sense and memory of his family and his early life, he had somehow hallucinated that specter of Theophilus to bring him back, to confront him but in a way so as not to have to believe in him. Tricks. That would have been his trick if he did that. And Vera…what about her? Could he say for certain that Vera was alive, or had he somehow hallucinated her too? One thing was real. The traps. The traps had been there since his earliest memory.
“I want to see,” Amy said again.
“It’s dangerous. It’s stupid and crazy, but it’s also truly dangerous, Amy. The house has thousands of traps. Any one of them could kill you.”
“If an old woman can live there?” She was prepared to argue for her right to see the house.
“You don’t know that old woman. That old woman could scare the horns off the Devil.” He told himself that he had never known Vera well enough to understand her. He knew that he would always fear her, even if she were dead.
“I want to go, I insist on it.”
He wondered if her life was so boring, if he was so boring, that she so badly needed variety. He tried to stall. “I’m going back day after tomorrow, it’ll take a day for a driver to bring a truck here from Cincinnati. We’ll talk about it later.”
Her look said that she was going. He’d fumbled, if he was going to say no he should already have said it.
“If you do go,” he said, “you’ll have to do exactly as I say. The place is dangerous beyond belief.”
She seemed not to hear. She seemed distant, as though structuring a fantasy about having an adventure. To her it was like a play. He decided not to press the point further about the traps until they got to the house. Once she saw the place she would understand.
He decided that he was glad she had talked him into taking her. He did not really want to go back to that house alone.
Chapter Seven
As a child, John Tracher’s grandmother, Vera Rothstein, learned what her mother Maggie knew. Mostly that was superstition, but much of that superstition came disguised as witchcraft. Maggie also knew primitive methods of contraception and abortion. She knew how it was to be raped by police. She had realistic methods for dealing with ham-handed laborers, who, working a twelve-hour day, brooded in taverns. Maggie knew poultices for bruises, and how to treat rotten meat so that it could be safely eaten. She knew how to steal. Vera learned all of these things, either from Maggie or from the streets, or both.
Vera learned these lessons from her mother Maggie as Maggie had learned from her mother Judith. The difference was that Judith had been a skilled witch. Judith knew that witchcraft and satanism dealt with sex and mutilation. Judith was also sufficiently well-versed to know that witchcraft flowered in medieval times because of the need for revolution. The sky was low in those old centuries. Life crowded close. The silence was profound. The only sounds in the gathering darkness were the lowing of cattle and the clank of the church bell. Travel was nearly unknown. The feudal system, manor and cathedral, struggled toward belief in a world where nearly all were serfs. Plagues swept whole nations. Rotting bodies stripped of their rags lay swollen in the streets. The peasant had no words or the opportunity to use them. Malcontents fought using the only weapon at hand, a figure that was against the manor and the cathedral, against the law and the church. The Devil, summoned, let loose, rose and began to walk.
In her way, John’s grandmother Vera Rothstein Tracker represented much of the American experience. She was born from a long line of theology (in her case dark) and emerged into an age of dogma. The development is easily traced. Vera’s grandmother Judith was a practiced theorist. She understood her skills, and the source of her power. She was capable of relating herself to that power, and understanding the relationship. Vera’s mother, Maggie, daughter of Judith, ran away before she was fully educated. No doubt she had a few skills, but the theory and the dark theology that justified those skills she never acquired. And Vera ran away even before she was able to learn the little that Maggie knew. All Vera had gained was a nearly blind faith in the powers of what she called darkness. Other presumably rival dogmatists arrived on the scene in a similar fashion. The only difference was that they praised the powers of light.
Until she met Theophilus, Vera’s life was confused and bitter; as degraded as those of starving horses that were whipped through Chicago’s streets. At age thirteen she fled into a society that placed iron deer on its lawns, iron regulations on sex, prosperity in banks, and immigrants in sweatshops. Vera knew more about sweatshops than she knew about banks.
To combat both she turned to sex. Early experience taught her that prostitution was the work of the ignorant, the failed, the lazy and the starving. Sex was only a method. Experience further taught that control through sex could be managed as long as something was withheld. Vera fell in love once, with a man who became bored by love and sexual excess, so Vera decided that to c
ontrol with sex she would withhold some aspect of love.
At twenty-four she met Theophilus, who was twenty-one and who, for a young man of his time and station, was refreshingly cynical. After World War I, and before the Depression, it paid to be an optimist. Yet Theophilus, hard-working and with money, sneered at nearly everything and everyone he saw. Which touched Vera’s experience. She called it good sense. It was also rather romantic.
Theophilus was a builder, and she recognized that she was also a builder. When she arrived at the house of the Trackers it seemed that the darkness of her past was actually an illumination. In this house ranks and ranks of violent ideas were ranged against the dreams of a steadily cheapening world. Vera decided that in a world of lies, she had found a refuge of truth. She spent the next fifty-six years in company with Theophilus in the house of the Trackers, which was her spiritual creation, as it was his artistic creation.
Vera bore one child, Justice, John’s father, when she was twenty-five. She died at seventy-four as she was seated before the dying embers of a fire place. Her son Justice was forty-nine when she died. Her grandson John was twenty-three. He returned to his grandmother when he was forty.
Arctic winds blew the midwinter snow for two days causing drifts to mount against the windward side of the house. The house was wrapped in a New England kind of cold. The cold penetrated the thick walls and lay in deserted corridors. It was life-stilling cold. The room where John had seen Vera sitting was like an ice chamber. At night the temperature fell further, plummeting on the river wind like a hammer dropped from a ship into hundreds of fathoms.
John and Amy came across the fields, and this time John felt prepared. They rounded the far side of the woodlot, approaching in a dark green four-by-four which had tracker and associates painted on the door, the truck a new piece of equipment belonging to the landscape company. Purchased especially for the coming job in Council Bluffs, it was rigged with a heavy winch and dump bed. The four-wheel drive and off-the-road tires discarded snow in loud whirls as the truck jarred back and forth. John held the wheel too tightly, the truck skidded even at five miles per hour.
He wondered and worried about Amy. If you loved somebody, or thought you did, then it seemed wrong to expose her to this. He fought the wheel and tried to understand what he saw in Amy’s behavior. She was different, though he couldn’t say exactly how. Her literal-mindedness was the same, he’d always known about that. Her innocence about business seemed too innocent to be real. He had known about that too. It was as though she had some childish faith in the rightness of the universe and the naturalness of what they did…not what they did in bed, sometimes she was still uneasy about that. The faith was in the naturalness of the current order. She assumed that he was good, and that what he did was worthwhile. The most noticeable new thing about her was her discontent. In the past it had been hidden. He was sure she wanted to come on this visit for the sheer adventure of it. If she’d wanted to come because of him, or because of the house, then surely she would have asked more questions.
Now she sat quiet beside him, gazing across the snow, and as they rounded the woodlot she got her first sight of the house. She gasped.
“I told you.” Tracker heard the grimness in his voice. He over-corrected. The truck skidded, pulled back, wobbled at an unsteady five miles per hour.
“No wonder you left.” She reached to touch his shoulder, and her expression said that a man as smart as John Tracker could never come from this bizarre-looking place of rising towers.
“We can still go back. Maybe we should — ”
“Of course we can’t go back,” she said. “Not after all the trouble and expense — ”
“It hasn’t been much.”
“Of course it has. You lost Sunday. We’ve lost two business days already. You paid a driver’s wages to transport the truck.”
“You have to do exactly as I tell you. It’s dangerous. I mean it.”
She kept silent and looked rather resentful. He supposed it was because he was talking like the Boss.
“I’m sorry, Amy, but it’s beyond any experience you could ever possibly have had.”
“I’ve not exactly been living in a convent, you know.” The resentment in her voice was clear. Now she thought he was being paternal.
“It’s beyond any experience anyone ever had.”
“I’ll do as you tell me.” But she sounded like a petulant child obliquely saying she would do anything she wanted.
There was, then, no answer except to show her the house. She would change her mind. He drove and was pleased with the way the truck handled. Damn few vehicles of any kind could manage this depth of snow. “I want to get in and then away before the storm.”
She looked at the sky, which was clear for the first time in weeks.
“That river is a funnel for weather,” he said, “but in these parts it’s kind of a wall. There’s a front piling west of the river. When it does break through, tomorrow or next day, it’s really going to howl.”
She seemed almost pleased. Her lips relaxed in a tiny smile and she licked them with a darting motion. Her eyes were dark and beautiful, but vague, as though she were daydreaming a scene of them roughing it. As for him, he’d worked outside enough in his life to know that the way to rough it was to find a good comfortable motel.
He turned toward her, reached to touch her shoulder, but as he did the truck slewed to one side and abruptly brought him back to his driving.
Mixed with his concern for Amy were memories of background music and of a skeleton lying in a cell. When they arrived, he parked a hundred feet from the house, which he figured was a safe margin.
“I want to see.” She opened the truck door.
“I want to get the truck pointed in the other direction. When we take Vera out it will save time.”
Amy climbed from the truck. “I’ll help you back up.”
He resented it but said nothing. The door was already closed. She stood outside and waited to signal him in his mirrors as he backed up. He supposed she had seen warehousemen do that and didn’t know she was being insulting. This wasn’t, after all, a loading dock. He wouldn’t tell her how to run a typewriter.
The ground was rutty beneath the snow — frozen mud creased where construction machinery had torn up the soil. He turned the truck, parked on a slight grade, looked up and saw Amy heading for the house and the fourth door.
Tracker jumped from the truck, ran hard, yelling after her, caught her at the edge of the porch and pulled her back. She stumbled and nearly fell in the snow, then stood quiet. He had never yelled at her before.
“All I was going to do was get out of the snow.” Her voice sounded prim.
He didn’t doubt she believed what she said, but from her pace and direction she was certainly going to open that fourth door.
He needed to get her past the illusions. He led her fifty feet back, where a windblown pile of dirt was nearly clear of snow.
“Stay here,” he said, “and watch.” He walked to the fourth door, stepped wide, reached out, twisted the knob and jumped back.
The door flew open, pulled by heavy springs. Nozzles swiveled instantly. A bloom of fire shot from the door at face level and burned with the red and blue light of gas above the snow on the porch. The flames went straight ahead so as not to burn the house, only someone in front of the door. When the fire died, the door automatically closed.
Tracker went to Amy. “I’ll take you inside, or I’ll take you home,” he said gently.
“All right.” All right what? Then she was moving toward the house. She was still only hearing, seeing what she wanted; one trap, it seemed, did not convince her of others. Tracker felt in his jacket pockets for flashlight, batteries and a box of heavy chalk. He steered her to the third door from the left, kicked the trapdoor, found it still on safety.
They went inside. The house seemed different. The beamed ceilings hung nearly invisible in gloom. Shadows pressed from the hall. John couldn’t be sure, but he suspected this was the first time anyone other than a Tracker had been in the place. He wanted to tell her that all of this had nothing to do with him; that the diabolic constructions were creatures of other imaginations. He put his arm around Amy, who was staring at the coffin.
“Don’t go near it.”
“Where can I go?” She was acting dependent on him but her body seemed tensed for what might be independent action.
“You can go almost anywhere if I go first.” He proceeded to walk ahead of her. Each time he came to a triggering device he drew heavy chalk circles. If she touched nothing within a circle, he explained, she would be safe. He also tried to explain each trap, but she didn’t want to know.
“Who was that man?” Her question startled him. He looked over one shoulder. He’d forgotten one kind of fear because of the immediate fear for her safety.
“What man?”
“In the picture.”
“Oh.” He breathed deep. “My father. Some people said he was crazy.” He leaned to trace another circle, one that enclosed a steel trap designed to break one’s ankles.
“Really crazy?”
He felt angry and couldn’t say why. “As a loon,” he told her. “As a March Hare. Right down to the ends of his fingernails.”
“Was he violent?”
“No. Maybe that’s why they thought he was crazy.” Strange, she’d evoked his anger with a simple question, a fair question. How was she supposed to know that the question meant more than she could imagine.
