The Well

by Jack Cady

  “Grow an extra hand…”

  And that was it. John remembered that the whole scene had come about because Justice was demonstrating that Theophilus always built to the right. Justice had innocently begun talking about psychology, and it ended in the implication that anyone could solve anything in the house if he thought to the right.

  Tracker turned the flashlight on, calling out to Amy that he would be there soon. No answer. He called out again. No answer.

  He quickly followed the leaf pattern and got out of the maze, rapidly moved through a half dozen rooms until he returned to the room where Vera was supposed to be sitting. The firelight flickered and danced on a shadowed, empty chair.

  Vera had tricked Amy, and he had allowed it to happen. He could not really blame Amy. Leaving her with Vera was like leaving a rabbit in the tender care of a bobcat. Now Vera was loose in these endless corridors and rooms. It might even be Vera trying to lead Amy deeper into the maze.

  He was back at the starting point. He entered. Each time there was a choice he moved right, his moves carrying him deeper and deeper into the maze. It was almost as if he could feel the depth of it crushing down on him. He could see, using the light, how options for turning always led slightly to the right. It came from the subconscious of the builder. He figured that Theophilus, once alerted, never made such a mistake again. Well, he was glad Theophilus had not been alerted when this thing was first built.

  Tracker walks…he tensed at the thought, moved rapidly, was nearly running as he made his decisions. He wondered how much space the maze covered and figured it must take up a quarter or more of the first floor.

  He flicked off the light. Waited. Listened. Vera must be in here somewhere, otherwise he would also be seeing blue light, hearing sighs. He wondered how anyone that feeble could move so quickly, then told himself that she knew this house like he knew a ledger sheet. She would not need to be quick.

  He found Amy curled with her knees tucked to her chin, shoulders wedged against one wall and feet pressing against the other. She was moaning as he approached, seemed to draw herself together even more tightly.

  He rushed to her, knelt. “It’s me, it’s all right, you are safe.” He touched her. She tensed, tried to straighten, tried to scream. He looked at her face in the reflected light from the flashlight that he’d placed on the floor. He could tell that she thought she was screaming.

  “It’s all a trick,” he said. “You are safe.” He repeated it over and over, and as he did she gradually seemed to comprehend. Finally the message seemed to overtake her, and as suddenly as a scream, she relaxed. She recognized him. She huddled into his arms and lay there, breathing short breaths.

  “I’ll get you out of here, I’m so sorry…”

  She stiffened, seemed to rebel, then relaxed.

  “Can you walk?”

  He helped her to her feet. She leaned on him. He directed the flashlight to the floor and followed the leaf symbols, and in less than two minutes they were free of the maze and headed for the kitchens. As they walked he grabbed a blanket from a bedroom and draped it over her shoulders.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  She shook her head dumbly. Her mouth tried to make sound, was soundless. She was clearly in some form of shock, and he tried to remember how to treat for shock. He talked gently to her. The house was silent, but Vera was out there somewhere. Walking.

  Chapter Nine

  Not all violence in Tracker history came through deceit. If Theophilus was a master of tricks, and if Vera, walking (animated by Theophilus, by the evil genius of him, of her forbears), was a master of spiritual violence, others were not as subtle. As time shifted in the house of the Trackers, every crime seemed to predict a future crime.

  Matthew Snider was John Tracker’s great great grandfather on his mother’s mother’s father’s side. When he was alive he had no fun except when some neighbor became crippled or died. His envy was overwhelming. His fields amounted to three hundred and twenty acres. His family amounted to five healthy children and a wife. His stables were full, his barns brimmed with life, yet Matthew Snider was known to curse himself as a victim of God’s wrath when a neighbor’s cow calved twins. When the church was built he took his tools and went home because someone else was working on the staging for the altar.

  His wife Gertrude had been known as a gentle and quiet girl. Life with Matthew changed her. She surrounded herself with children and food. She became fat and dictatorial.

  Matthew Snider was murdered shortly after the Civil War by his wife, the former Gertrude Drucker. She put rat poison in his supper. This caused him to “swell up and bust,” according to the coroner’s report. A jury of two men traveled eighteen miles in a one-horse rig over bunipy, trail-like roads; not to condemn Gertrude but because they wanted to be sure that Matthew Snider was really dead.

  Of the murder nothing was said. Conditions were diferent in those days. Gertrude was a young woman with five children and good land. There was no place to send the children if she was charged with murder. Matthew Snider was no loss. The coroner’s jury ruled that he committed suicide. Gertrude Snider lived until age forty-six, when she died of a stroke.

  Amy slumped on a kitchen bench. She was not, after all, one of those strong German women of the kind that had issued generations into this house.

  She made small sounds but could not talk. Before they got to the kitchens she twice delayed them by stopping and trying to look backward, and each time she did he made the mistake of releasing her, and each time she nearly fell. When they got to the kitchens he helped her onto an upholstered bench that ran along one wall. A regular table could be raised in front of the bench from its storage place in the floor. A desk-like table could be lowered from the wall for work on papers and ledgers.

  “Amy, can you talk? Tell me what happened.”

  Her face was drawn tight, eyes too bright. She was very pale. Her lips tried to move. Sounds came from her throat but her lips only tightened. Whatever the trick was, it had thrown her into too deep a shock to be answering questions.

  “Some of the tricks are so real,” he said quietly to her, “you can’t believe they are tricks. It’s what makes them so awful.”

  Her breathing was light now. He knew something about her strong will, and now he was glad for it. He rubbed her arms, feeling their softness, surprised a little because the texture of her flesh did not seem quite as firm as before.

  Shock would be followed by fatigue.

  He worked with her, mostly rubbing her arms and legs as much for the soothing effect as to help restore circulation. He rubbed her forehead, her temples. It occurred to him, as it had earlier, why Amy had at first accepted the house so easily. She had been seeing it as a set for a play. She had simply walked through it, thinking it no more than staged make-believe. He nearly smiled, and at the same time felt guilty for bringing her here. Well, he was willing to bet that her acceptance of this place would not come as easily from now on. He told himself that as soon as she could walk by herself, he was taking her out of here.

  She seemed to go through several stages of recognition. At first she was helplessly dependent. Then her eyes showed that she was afraid of him. That passed rapidly, her body relaxed, her eyes were submissive. And when the submission passed her eyes became trusting. He estimated that he worked with her for the better part of an hour.

  “Touched me.” Her voice was small and childlike. He could hardly hear her.

  “What?”

  “Touched me.”

  “Who?”

  She shuddered, half raised up, lay back. Tears stood in her eyes but she controlled them.

  “Did you really see? Who did you see?”

  “Didn’t see. Felt.”

  “Touched you where?” He was afraid of the answer, because he knew Theophilus.

&nbs
p; The tears came, and she wept like a small child caught doing something she knew was wrong.

  “It was Vera,” he said. “It was bound to be Vera, if you knew her you would understand — ”

  “It was strong.”

  “Then it was a trick,” he told her. “That old bastard, my grandfather, could rig anything. You were touched by some kind of device he rigged up.”

  It was true. He didn’t know how to convince Amy, but he knew it was true. There were no theatrics Theophilus couldn’t rig. If you wanted a mist that drifted and talked, Theophilus could rig it. He could rig slow poison accumulating over years through a water system. He could rig the memory of a skeleton in a cell. Could he rig the apparition of death — something that looked like death, but which waked and walked? Impossible. Not even Theophilus could have rigged and manipulated some replica of Vera. Just impossible…but, if he had, it meant that Theophilus had not only lived after her…he was still alive.

  The house of the Trackers. Now it was taking him back to the irrational beliefs of the Middle Ages. Then he seemed to hear his father’s explaining voice… “remember, remember this…”

  Impossible.

  “Sleep,” he told Amy. “At least try to rest. I’ll be here every minute. Then if you want I’ll go back with you and show you what happened. You won’t need to be afraid.” He was talking to himself too.

  She actually did sleep. He watched her narrow form beneath the blanket and told himself not to be impatient. Amy clutched the blanket to her face, her hair lay rich and thick as it spilled from beneath the blanket. A gray hair here and there showed almost incandescent in the thick hair. He was glad she didn’t dye her hair. Honesty worked for her, ordinarily you didn’t notice a single gray hair.

  He wanted to get the job done, told himself he could not be impatient but must get Vera out and set the place up for demolition. If he didn’t get the contract written for demolition, the whole affair would take time next spring; and hell or house or the hereafter, he intended to be in Council Bluffs in the spring.

  Amy moaned now in her sleep, clutched the blanket tighter, shuddered, then relaxed and seemed to go deeper into sleep.

  So terribly innocent, Amy. Either that, or she trusted him more than he trusted himself. He began slowly to pace up and down the main kitchen, telling himself again he should not have left her for a minute. Well, he would not leave her now. Instead, he sat looking at all of the house that he could see.

  These kitchens, which were the only safe places in the house, stretched in a long line. The main one was tiled with a color that just missed being purple. It was ugly but efficient — the countertops and cabinets old-fashioned, painted white and red and brown. Sinks were deep like small tubs. An enormous commercial range dominated one corner of the main kitchen, all nickel and brass and blackened steel. Flanking the main kitchen were two smaller ones, and behind them were pantries.

  He’d had intimations of it before, but now he knew that he had two sides to his mind, knew that the business, decision-making side seemed frail in this house, that the other side harbored an ancient fear, and cruelty, and that it kept trying to get free in this house, was trying to get free from him right now. Well, even at his worst he would not leave Amy. Suppose she woke up and found herself alone in this place.

  On the side of the kitchen opposite the pantries the house gave onto an ornamented dining hall with leaded glass windows that looked onto a first floor terrace, a cold and sunless terrace, the sky a small patch in the tunnel made by the house. Not even shade-loving, resilient plants like azalea or rhododendron had ever done well there. Even in the hottest summer that terrace was cool, sometimes cold.

  Across the terrace the house rose sheer like a cliff, unwindowed and faceless. Somewhere beyond that blank façade rose up one of the towers. Stairways wound through darkness into parts of the house where he had never been. He stood now, looking at the kitchens, and he believed he could remember enough to get around the first two floors. Perhaps he could manage the cellar. The subcellar, the third and fourth floors, and the towers were mysteries, except for a couple of terraces on the third.

  Beyond that blank façade was new construction, which could be anything. The only thing he could be sure of was that it would be some sort of a trap.

  He turned to look at Amy, and thought he saw movement as something seemed to disappear through a doorway of the kitchen. He raced to the doorway. Nothing. From where he stood he could see through a line of doorways, a sort of hall of doors. He told himself that he was edgy and imagining things. If Vera was out there she could hardly disappear so quickly. Surely he was imagining things.

  When it came, the time shift was so slight he was not sure it was a shift. For a moment the kitchen seemed warmer. His nose wrinkled. He smelled something light and flavored, like flowers or perfume. The light did not alter. There was no sound. Then, four rooms away, a hooded figure passed one of the doorways. It drifted easily and slow. He could catch her if he moved quick. He ran into the next room. Stopped. He was in the house of the Trackers. He was nearly decoyed. Wasn’t he?

  Decoy or real, he could not leave Amy. He told himself he was relearning fast, and felt he was doing pretty well for having been away so long.

  A memory nudged at him and he let it come. He’d visited his father here one summer, when he was fifteen. He’d had a summer job on the other side of the river. He recalled the clear, early mornings as he walked the long road down to the river where the workboat waited. Once across, the crew planted seedling trees in a burned area on the Kentucky side. It was easy to remember if you tried. What was not easy was training yourself to forget, and he had done that for years.

  When he was fifteen his mother was busy going through one of her interminable divorces. She always took them seriously. She was busy and slightly hysterical. He remembered her only vaguely in those days. He could remember significant incidents about his father, Justice, but he had lived with his mother from the time he was ten until he went to college. The day-to-day experience seemed to cloud what he remembered of her.

  Justice was hopeful in that summer when John was fifteen. It was almost like he still believed that, once more divorced, John’s mother would return to the house. They would be a family again. And at fifteen, John, his son, had been wise enough, had seen enough, to know that his father was being foolish. If asked, John would have added that Justice was also nuts to want such a thing. Anyone married to Sarah Tracker-plus-other-names would have to love living in a carnival, especially on the carousel. She was always trying something new, and while she usually married the men, she never married the projects.

  Vera was nearly civil to him that summer, and John could still remember his suspicions. When Vera was civil it meant she was planning something. She’d said she wanted him to stay. He remembered now. Right here in these kitchens, with Theophilus sitting over there at that table, and with his father sitting beside Theophilus, and with Vera standing there by the stove. Justice and Theophilus had a ledger open in front of them.

  “You aint goin’,” Vera said. “There’s a high school in town, and a college across the river.”

  “I never needed no damn high school,” Theophilus said. “Go ahead and get your brains stewed.”

  “Finish high school, go to college, any college you want.” His father was abstracted, was fooling around with totals in the ledger, was responding to Vera and Theophilus in a way that told all of them that he was only partly listening. When Justice was absorbed in something he made small, snuffling, worry sounds; but as far as the ledger was concerned there was no cause for worry. It was said of Theophilus that he had tied up half of the soybean crop in Indiana in 1942. Then he did it again in ’43. He had not only rigged it once, he had rigged it twice.

  “Your place is here,” Vera said. “They’s enough here to keep anybody named Tracker busy.”

/>   “I’ll learn to drive a bulldozer,” he had answered her. “Then I’m going to get the world’s biggest damn bulldozer and I’m going to start at one corner of the place — ”

  “You got a smart mouth.”

  “Come by honest.”

  “Sure you do,” Vera told him. “What you don’t ask, is what else you come by.”

  “Tinkering,” he’d said. “Well, I’m not about to waste my life building a junk pile.”

  “A smartass with a smart mouth.” Theophilus pulled a knife from his pocket and began cutting intricate designs on a table leg.

  “Study history,” his father said.

  Vera looked like she was trying to be honest, which could not have been easy. “It aint tinkering. None of us would fool with all this here if it was only tinkering.”

  “We’re in a race with power,” Justice said. “Stay out of it.”

  Vera turned to Justice, and she seemed tense, on edge. “You think you’re a smart one, but it’s just the same old Tracker dumb.”

  “A’course, there’s all them sorority girls,” Theophilus said, changing the subject. “You could study sorority girls. I always regret I never had nothing to do with anything but common women.”

  “You’ll come back,” Vera said. “You can kick and fight agin it, but you’ll come back.”

  “’Cause all of them people out there are stark staring shithead nuts,” Theophilus told him. “Go ahead and learn it. We all got to.”

  “Study history,” his father muttered from the depths of the ledger.

  Well, he had come back; because here he was, standing in the old kitchen and watching the sleeping form of a woman named Amy. A woman he’d helped scare out of her wits. If anyone had asked him if he’d come back willingly, he could not have answered. He did not want to be here, but he knew now that it was not a matter of his want. This house held part of him captive, as surely as if he were locked behind bars.