Don walked around the fence, then slogged through the damp mass of leaves that covered the front lawn of the carriage-house. Autumn had struck with a vengeance. He was a little surprised they didn't have the door open for him before he mounted the porch. What, were they slacking off on their spying?
He rang the doorbell. Nothing. Knocked. No answer.
He waited, knocked, rang, knocked again. Nothing.
Around the back it was the same. The curtains were drawn. No sign of life within. These were elderly women. Was something wrong? He tried the doorknob, just to peer in. It was locked.
Back to the front porch. That door was also locked. He knocked again, louder, rattling the windows. "Miss Judea!" he called. "Miss Evelyn!"
Then he realized. It was barely dawn. Old people didn't sleep all that much, he knew, but maybe they still slept past first light. And he couldn't keep shouting, he'd wake the neighbors. He shouldn't be here. And yet he had to ask them what they knew. What they understood about the house. What hope there was for Sylvie cutting loose from the place.
One last ring of the doorbell, and he turned away to head back to the Bellamy house. Naturally, that was when he heard the door being unbolted behind him.
It opened only a crack. No one peered out at him.
"Go away," said an aged, weary voice. He couldn't be sure which of the Weird sisters it was. It didn't sound like either of them.
"I need to talk with you," he said. "You told me if I had any questions—"
No answer.
"About getting somebody free of that house. I have to talk to you."
"Talk," she said scornfully. Now he knew the voice. Miz Evelyn. Probably. Maybe.
"Are you all right?" asked Don.
"What do you care?" she asked.
"Of course I care," he said. "Can I get you something?"
"Are you really that stupid?"
No. It was definitely Miz Judea.
Her voice came again, a whisper now, fierce but broken. "Don't you know you're killing us?"
The door closed. The deadbolt turned.
Don turned away and surveyed the front yard. Covered with leaves. These ladies spent every waking moment either fixing food for Gladys or working in the yard. And yet the yard had been so neglected that not a leaf had been raked.
Why? The answer was obvious. Now that he believed in the power of the house, he also had to believe what these women had told him about it. Every bit of work he did on the house had sapped their strength. They had begged him to tear it down, for their sake. He had done the opposite, restoring it closer and closer to its true shape. What would happen when he finished? Would they come feebly staggering around the fence to knock at his door and beg him to let them come inside their prison? Or would they remain stubbornly in the carriagehouse until they were too weak to teed themselves?
Who would the killer be then?
And yet if he weakened the house now, what would that do to Sylvie? Now that she knew the truth about herself, now that he also knew, their ignorant faith could no longer help them maintain an illusion. They depended on the strength of the house to keep her there, to make her real, until...
Until what?
He couldn't think. He was too tired. He hadn't slept at all last night, had done two days' worth of work, and there was nothing left.
He turned back to the door and shouted through it. "Can I bring you something!"
But there was no answer.
He walked back around the fence and into the Bellamy house. To his surprise, his cot had been moved back into the ballroom. It looked small, almost pathetic compared to the vast space around it. He remembered dancing with Sylvie, how the room had sparkled with the memories of the people who had danced here. Did the house hold all these memories? Had the breaking down of the false walls released them? Why was this house so powerful, when others had no such power? What magic had been done? And how, how could it be undone without hurting Sylvie?
Or maybe it was being here that was hurting her. Maybe if she had gone on she'd be happier. Instead of being trapped here. Maybe he should tear down the house, burn it right now, let her go, and free the Weird sisters.
Even the thought of wrecking the house made him sick with grief. He couldn't bear the thought of losing her.
Is this what it comes down to? My need for her? Is that more important than what the ladies next door need? What Sylvie herself might need?
He would gladly do whatever it took to set everything to rights. But what was the way things should be? Simple: Sylvie not dead, the Weird sisters free. But Sylvie was dead, except for the power of the house. And the Weird sisters were trapped because of the house. He could not save one without harming the other.
And somewhere Lissy was free as a bird, unharmed by any of this. He knew that, even though he had no evidence, even though for all he knew she was tormented by guilt and living in a hell of her own making. He knew that she was unharmed because that's the way the world worked. A decent person like Cindy lived in hell for a crime she only almost committed. While Lissy, a selfish, lying, conniving murderer, was probably doing just fine.
Wasn't there something he could do? Wasn't there some choice that didn't lead to somebody's destruction?
There was no one to ask. All he could do was lie down on the bed Sylvie had prepared for him and sleep at last.
He dreamed that he was a house. He dreamed that he felt the bones of it when he moved his hands, his arms. That he knelt to form the foundation, strong and steady, that the wind blew across his body, and inside him a heart was beating strongly, and it was his daughter there. She was in the most beautiful alcove in his body, playing, laughing. He heard her laughing. And then... silence. She was gone, and no heart beat there.
He grew cold. Snow piled on him, the wind tore at him. He bowed under the blast of the storm, empty. He did not understand why he was still kneeling there, why he hadn't simply ceased to exist. Why he was not dead, with his heart no longer beating.
And then it beat again. His heart was alive again, only he looked and there was still nothing there, nothing at all, and yet he was coming alive. Where was his heart? Why was he alive when he had no heart?
His eyes flew open and there she was, sitting in the alcove. Sylvie.
Why hadn't he been able to find her in his dream?
Because she wasn't there.
She did not know he was awake. She sat there, holding her knees, her head leaning back, her hair free, as she looked straight above her at the apex of the alcove. Was something carved there? What did she see?
For that matter, what did he see? What was it, exactly, that he wanted from her? With Cindy there had been no doubt about what was driving their passion. But what kind of passion bound him to Sylvie? Certainly he had taken her under his wing—reluctantly at first, but completely. So there was that fatherly, protective element. But she wasn't his daughter. When he thought about it, she might be a year or two older than he was. Except that she hadn't aged these years in this house, so she was still younger. Oh, but what did their ages matter? A man has his children under his protection, and his wife also, and his parents—it's part of what defines a man, to provide and protect. It's what you do when you grow up.
It was partly Sylvie's beauty, he knew that. It wasn't a traditional beauty, not the beauty of models or the fresh-faced beauty of the cinematic girl next door. She had a moody face, and her hair, while it couldn't possibly hold a coif, he was sure of that, had a kind of freedom to it, a contrariness that echoed her elusiveness. What was the beauty of her, really? Was it the line of her slender neck? Was it, in fact, how lean she was? A beauty that would be lost if she filled out to a more womanly shape? He didn't think so.
At last she sensed his eyes on her, and turned to look at him. She smiled. "What are you looking at?" she said.
"Beauty," he said.
"I laugh." But she didn't laugh.
"I'm trying to figure it out myself," he said.
"Thanks."
"I start with the beauty, Sylvie, and figure from there."
"Truth is beauty."
"Is that it?"
"I was just quoting Keats," she said.
"Are you the truth?" he asked. "That's pretty heavy. The truth is dead but still beautiful, haunting us but always out of reach."
She rose lightly to her feet and came to kneel beside his cot. She kissed his cheek. He touched her face and kissed her lips, warm and sweet and slow. "Not out of reach," she said.
"Oh, Sylvie," he said. "Don't you know how tempted I am just to live here forever with you? Keep the place up, leave only to earn enough money to come home to you?"
"Then do it," she said. "Oh, do it, please."
He rolled onto his back, looked at the ceiling. "For how long?" he said. "Until I'm sixty and you're still whatever age you are now?"
"I won't mind."
"I will," he said.
"Then you'll die and we'll be together."
"This is a good plan?" asked Don.
"The Ghost and Mrs. Muir" she said. "Did you ever see it?"
"There are some old ladies next door who are being destroyed by this house."
"Only because they fight it."
He turned to her. "They should come and live with us, too? Is that what you're saying?"
"I don't know why this house is so strong, Don. I didn't make it that way. They were trapped before I was born."
"I want to do the right thing, Sylvie."
"The right thing for whom?" she asked.
"The right thing."
"The greatest good for the greatest number? Did you ever take ethics?"
"Sylvie," he said. "I'm blocked. I'm stopped cold. There's nothing I can do that doesn't ruin somebody's life."
She kissed him. "I know."
"And if I don't do anything, that also ruins lives."
"Beginning with your own."
"Maybe," he said.
"Because you need children," she said.
He shuddered.
"Don't you?" she asked.
"I don't know if I could ever do that again. Now that I know what it does to you when you lose one."
"Is it any worse than losing a parent?"
"Yes."
"Worse than losing yourself?"
"I've never lost myself, Sylvie. Neither have you."
"I must have," she said. "Because it feels so good now that I've found myself again."
"You think because we danced, because we kissed, because we love each other—we do love each other, don't we?"
She kissed him again.
"You think," he said, "that this means our problems are over. But they're not."
She sat crosslegged on the floor. "Something's still wrong."
"Right. But what is it? What's the thing that if we fix it, everything will be all right?"
"It's not the house," said Sylvie. "The house isn't aware, really. It's strong, but it doesn't know anything. It... holds people. That's all it does. It makes them yearn for this place. It's a home."
"And that's not bad."
"That's not bad if you want to be here. My point is that the house isn't what's wrong. It just is."
"The ladies next door don't feel that way."
"You know what the problem is? She's still out there."
Don's mind was on Miz Evelyn and Miz Judea and the mysterious Gladys upstairs. "Who?"
"Lissy. My roommate. My murderer."
"Don't I know it."
"I know I can't live here forever, Don. If you can call me alive."
He squeezed her hand.
She smiled at him. "I know that if you're really going to be happy you have to love a living woman."
"I do," he said. "You."
"I know that maybe if I could let go of this place, if I could drift away. I mean, think about it. Who is it the house holds onto? Not the Bellamys. When they died, they drifted away."
"True," said Don. "And why didn't their children get caught up the way the ladies next door did? They grew up here and yet they could leave, they could even sell the place."
"That is odd, when you think about it. Why would two prostitutes be tied here, and not the others? Why me, and not the others who died here?"
"Maybe because you lost something here. Maybe you all lost something."
"My life," she said. "What about them?"
"I don't know. Their innocence? Their trust?"
"Their self-respect?"
"I don't know them that well," said Don. "But they lost something and so they can't leave the house until they get it back."
"Maybe it's not something in particular at all. Maybe it's just—loss."
"Other people have to have lost things here, too."
"Well, then, maybe it's need."
"What do you need?"
"A life," she said, laughing.
"But that's not a joke, is it?" he said.
"No," she said. "Even before she killed me, I needed a life, Don. My parents were gone. There was nobody to show my accomplishments to. You know? Nobody to watch me sing or dance or whatever and clap their hands when I got through it without a single mistake."
He nodded. "I know what you mean."
"So I believed all that stuff about pleasing myself." She laughed. "Can't be done. You can't please yourself by doing what you want. Because it doesn't mean anything if it's just you. There has to be somebody else it matters to. I think... I think that in my heart I needed that to be Lissy. I needed her to care about what I did."
"And instead she cared so little that she was willing to wreck it all just to get a good grade on a paper."
Sylvie nodded. "So it's my own need holding me here."
"Maybe," said Don.
They sat in silence for a while.
"Or maybe," said Don.
"What?"
"Maybe it's justice that you need."
"What's justice? I hit Lissy with a stone. I could have killed her. As far as I can tell, my being dead and trapped here may very well be justice. Maybe this is hell, Don."
"Hell is knowing she's out there, thinking she got away with it."
"Not just thinking," said Sylvie. "She did get away with it."
"I want to find her," said Don.
"No."
"I just want to... I don't know. Send her a note. Just let her know that somebody knows what she did."
"And then?"
"I just don't think she should be happy," said Don.
"Will it bring my body back to life?"
Don thought of the corpse lying on the mattress down in the tunnel. He thought of Nellie's little body—and his ex-wife's, too. She at least had died for her sins. Lissy hadn't.
"She has to face what she did," said Don.
Sylvie laughed. "You're not going to do that by sending her a note."
"How, then?"
"Bring her back here," said Sylvie. "Bring her back to me."
Don looked at her. What was she talking about? What did she mean to do?
"Maybe now that the Bellamy house is becoming itself again, it's time for it to be haunted."
He thought back to the movies he'd seen with haunted houses. Poltergeist. The Uninvited. The Changeling. He thought of Lissy coming into this house and coming face to face with the woman she murdered. And the house...
"Oh, man," he said. "What would happen?"
"I don't know," said Sylvie. "But one thing's certain. She couldn't hurt me again."
"So she comes," said Don. "We find her somehow and she comes and you face her and she, what, I don't know, runs screaming from the house and never has a good night's sleep again. Or she goes to the police and confesses. Or she laughs at you and burns the house down. Or she dies of a heart attack. Whatever. Then what?"
"Then nothing," said Sylvie. "We know, that's all. We find out what happens and then we both know."
Don thought about this. "Is there really some balance in the universe? Some scale of justice that will bring her here and find some way to set things to rights?"
"She's what's missing, Don. You're the one who kept saying it—she's out there. And she shouldn't be. She committed murder in this house, Don. If anyone should be trapped here, it's her."
"You think the house wants her?"
"The house just wants. But if she comes, I think it might want her."
"And it will let you go."
"Maybe."
"Let you go, but how? By making you disappear? Like you did this morning out there in the yard?"
"Would that be so terrible, Don?"
"I don't want to lose you."
"Don, be honest, please. You don't have me. You never can. And I can never have you. So maybe the best thing, the right thing—remember, you were asking about that?—maybe the right thing is for me to be set free of this place. And maybe if Lissy comes here, that can happen. I can..."
"Go to heaven," he murmured.
"Whatever."
Don swung his legs off the cot and got up. "I've got to use the john." Then he laughed. "And I actually worried about whether you'd been peeing in some sink or something."
"Gross," she said.
He walked through the huge ballroom instead of along the narrow hall. When he got to the bathroom he closed the door out of habit. It felt so good to release his bladder. The easing of that pressure.
He thought of the ladies next door. What pressure they felt, what its easing would mean to them. Was Sylvie right? Did it all depend on bringing Lissy back?
When he came back into the ballroom, he could feel a draft. A cool breeze was blowing outside, and the front door was open. She couldn't have gone outside!
No. She was sitting on the bottom step of the stairway, looking at the outdoors.
He sat down beside her. "You know, I'm not some macho guy who avenges murdered girls."
"I know," said Sylvie. "That's what's eating you alive. That you aren't the kind of guy who takes the law into his own hands. You left the law in other hands and it screwed you over pretty bad."
"I was talking about you, not..."
"Not your little girl. But that's still part of what this is about. It's your hunger, Don. You need to save some captured girl before this whole thing plays out."
"So you've got me figured out, huh?"
"You haunt this house just like I do, Don."
"I'm not dead."
"You live in dead places."
"I bring them back to life."
"But then you move on to another dead place."
Don sighed. "Whatever. I wouldn't even know where to start looking for her. She could live anywhere. Under any name."
"Not if nobody's looking for her," said Sylvie. "Not if she thinks no one ever found my body. And even if they did, there'd be no way to tie it to her."
"So I just check every American phone book looking for Lissy—what's her last name?"
"Felicity Yont. But she has changed her name, I'll bet. To McCoy."
"Why McCoy?"
"Because that's her boyfriend. Lanny McCoy."
"So I look up Yont and McCoy."
"Lissy was from Asheboro, but her people were all dead—it's one of the things we had in common, that we were both alone. Lanny, though, he was local. He even lived with his parents. She used to laugh about that. How she never thought she'd be with a guy who lived with his parents. She said all that was left was for her to put on Spock ears and go to a Star Trek convention."
"You think they might still be living in town?"
"No," she said. "Lissy couldn't wait to get out of North Carolina. She was so jealous of my getting a job in another state. We joked about how she was dying to leave and couldn't, and I didn't care about leaving North Carolina, and I was the one who had the cool job waiting for me in Providence."
"So I start calling directory assistance? That's the way to go through my bankroll, a quarter at a time."
"No, silly," she said. "Haven't you ever done any research?"
"Not lately."
"Not ever," she said, teasing him. But they both knew it was true. "The library has a lot of phone books from other areas. But you won't start there. If Lanny's people still live in Greensboro, all you have to do is find them and they'll probably tell you where Lanny is living now. With his wife Lissy, I'll bet."
"That would be too easy."
"But maybe that's how easy it'll be."
Plenty of McCoys in the Greensboro phone book. Calling from a pay phone at the grocery store, twenty-five cents at a time, was tedious work.
The same conversation, over and over. "I'm looking for the family of Lanny McCoy.... He would have been in school at UNCG back in '85.... No, I never met him, but my wife did.... Sorry for bothering you.... Thanks for talking to me.... Sorry for.... Family of Lanny McCoy who went to UNCG back in '85...."
Going on maybe four hours of sleep, Don had a hard time staying awake between calls. A hard time listening to what people were saying. A teenage kid walked by talking loudly to his girlfriend. "The X-Files is a crock. The government couldn't have secret UFO stuff because the government can't keep a secret, period!" He almost missed hearing the soft voice on the other end of the phone say, "You knew him?"
So there was a pause in the conversation before he realized that maybe he was hitting paydirt. "Actually, not me," he said. "My wife knew him. Good friends with him and his girlfriend in those days, what was her name? Missy? Lissy?"
"Oh, yes, that dear girl, that poor girl."
"Poor girl?"
"So broken-hearted. Oh, you don't know, do you? Of course not. Lanny's gone. All these years."
"Gone?"
"You don't—you haven't seen him, have you?"
"No ma'am, I'm sorry."
"Can't help hoping. Silly, isn't it? To hope that a phone call out of the blue...."
This was it. And he wouldn't get anywhere on the phone. "Mrs. McCoy, I don't mean to intrude, but can I come over?"
"Oh, I wish you would."
As soon as she said the address, Don knew half the history of the family. It was a tiny crackerbox house on a street of crackerbox houses, in a neighborhood built by Cone Mills for their textile workers. A strategy for keeping the unions out. The paternalistic employer provides workers with homes and they're grateful; meanwhile, labor agitators get evicted, not just fired, so their families are out on the street. Very effective disincentive. But when times changed, the company sold the houses to the workers at a better than fair price, and now those factory families or their children or grandchildren kept immaculate yards around those tiny houses, their labor insisting that the size of the houses did not tell you about the class of the people inside. These were solid people, working people, salt of the earth. And for one of these families to send a child to college was still a big deal, even in the days of student loans and government financial aid. Lanny must have been the bearer of the McCoy family honor, their hope, their ambition.
Mr. and Mrs. McCoy were white people in their late fifties, her hair gray, his graying. They ushered him into a tiny living room filled with furniture covered with doilies and throws. The fireplace mantle was covered with knickknacks, including a couple of Hummels and a Lladro that must have been the markers of special occasions. The pride of place in the center of the mantle went to a framed eight-by-ten of a young man with longish hair and a great smile. No sooner had Don sat down than Mr. McCoy took down the picture and handed it to him.
"That's our Lanny," he said. "Senior picture from high school."
"Nice-looking boy."
"He was the first of our family ever to get to college," said Mrs. McCoy. "And he was with that nice girl, too—we were sure they'd get married."
"You just never know," said Mr. McCoy, shaking his head.
"Nice girl?"
"You mentioned her on the phone," said Mrs. McCoy. "Felicity Yont."
"Lissy," said Mr. McCoy.
"Then they didn't get married?" asked Don. "We all assumed that they would."
"It just broke her heart," said Mrs. McCoy. "She came over here crying and crying about how he ran off with her roommate."
Ran off with.... This was not the story Don had expected to hear.
"A snake in the grass, that's what that one was," said Mr. McCoy. "The librarian steals the man? What a joke."
"And you don't know where they're living now?"
"We've never heard from him since." Mrs. McCoy broke down in tears.
After a delicate pause to show respect for his wife's grief, Mr. McCoy said softly, "I don't expect they're together. A woman like that, she's got no loyalty. She probably left him cold somewhere."
What could Don say? What would be gained by telling them that in fact Lissy murdered that very roommate, who certainly did not run off with anyone because she was still haunting the house where they roomed together?
The only sound was Mrs. McCoy's soft crying. Her husband gave her a handkerchief.
"I'm sorry I made you think of your loss again," said Don.
"Oh, young man, we think of Lanny every day," said Mrs. McCoy.
Mr. McCoy nodded sadly. Don suspected he carried handkerchiefs solely to deal with his wife's tears.
Don hated deceiving these people, but it was kinder than the truth. "My wife always assumed Lissy and Lanny must have ended up together."
"Maybe our boy is alive, maybe not," said Mr. McCoy. "I don't know what we did to make him leave us without a word." He stood up to keep himself from crying openly. So... maybe the handkerchiefs weren't just for her. "I guess we've disappointed you," he said.
Don could take a hint. Besides, he'd learned what he came to learn. There'd be no address from these people. "I appreciate your time. I'm just sorry that... I'm sorry." He got up, shook hands with Mr. McCoy, and took the one step that was needed to get him to the door.
Mrs. McCoy rose to her feet.
"Don't be sorry, young man," she said. "Don't. It's good to remember a child you loved, even if you've lost him."
He thought of his own tears, his own rage, his years of hiding in old houses from himself and the whole world. The pain he had suffered... and yet she was right.
"I know," said Don. Almost he told them about Nellie. But he couldn't. In this home, there was only one lost child to be remembered. There were other places where Nellie's memory was the foundation of life. After ten years, they still shed tears for their boy. The edge of grief never lost its sharpness. And yet... there was a nobility about their suffering. Their child still lived in them as a light of goodness. If Lanny were still around, they would not have the grief; but they would not have the illusion, either. Just as Don would never hear a teenage Nellie shout at him what a terrible hateful man he was, how he was trying to ruin her life. She would never wreck his car, never fight with him over whether she would or would not wear that outfit on a date. The lost child remained a dream of a child. A sweet ghost haunting the memory. The tears that came were not bitter for these people. It was a sweet grief they felt. They had lost him, but once they had him, such a good child, they had him and he still gave shape and meaning to their lives.
He hadn't bargained on learning so much from these people.
Mrs. McCoy came to him in the doorway, took his hands, held them in hers. "I believe you do know," she said.
Out in his truck, driving back through the streets of Greensboro, Don got caught up in the traffic of teenagers from Page High School racing to get to the Weaver Center downtown for special classes that no one high school in the city could afford to teach. The kids called it the "Weaver 500," and drove like stock car madmen. Don wasn't exactly moseying down Elm, but they were whipping around him to pass at fifty or sixty on what was, after all, a residential street through this part of town. Miracle that more of them weren't killed.
He imagined talking to Nellie when she got her license. "I don't care how late you are," he'd have said. "You got twenty miles an hour over the limit for three blocks, do you know how much time you've saved? Exactly none. But in the meantime you've put your life, everybody else's lives at risk. Better to be late. Always be late. I'll never be mad at you for being late. Just be safe. Be safe."
It was blinding him, the tears that came when he thought this way, when he imagined the kind of father he might have been. The father he would never be. Even if he married someone and had children, none of them would be Nellie. That ache would never be eased. Besides, look who he fell in love with lately. A woman who couldn't trust herself with her own children. Then a dead woman. Nope, he wasn't exactly picking the child-rearing type. Nellie was it. Because he knew how much it cost to lose one. Couldn't put himself at risk like that again.
It was obvious, of course, that Lanny McCoy was dead. When Lissy told his parents that story about him running off with Sylvie—how ludicrous to imagine even if Sylvie hadn't been dead!—it could only mean one thing. Lissy knew that neither of them would ever be showing up to contradict her story. How did it play out? Did she tell Lanny what had happened, and then he got all these crazy ideas about going to the police and pleading self-defense? He could imagine him earnestly telling her, "She hit you with a rock, you had to defend yourself," but Lissy would know that the prosecutor would have an expert testify that you had to hold onto the victim's throat so, so, so long in order to strangle her. Strangling is never a crime of passion, the prosecutor would say. It's a cold-hearted crime. It's a crime of icy hate. So what could Lissy do? She lures Lanny somewhere, maybe even tells him she wants to show him the body, but they're down in that gully maybe, and suddenly there's a rock in her hand, a blow to his head.
Or maybe she never talked to him at all. She knew already that she couldn't afford to have anyone else who knew about that tunnel. The body couldn't be found until she was long gone. Lanny never got a choice. Because a woman like Lissy, she doesn't love anybody. Lanny was good for sex and drugs. But expendable. So she went up to the kitchen and got a knife and was waiting for him when he arrived. For all Don knew, his body was farther down the tunnel.
Then she went to his parents and told them a story that would hold them for a while. A few days. Long enough to get away. Only instead of a few days, it held them for years. Because Lanny had never told them about the tunnel. And since the house was closed, why would they dream of looking there in the cellar? No, Lissy's secret was safe in that old house. Until now.
He had to laugh at his own pretension. Until now? What a joke. Her secret was still safe. Sure, he could go to the police and tell them he found a body in the tunnel. But how could he possibly explain anything about it? Everything he knew, he learned from a ghost. The dead woman was not going to be acceptable as a witness. Nobody was going to take her deposition. So they'd have a body and no leads and that would be it. They probably wouldn't even figure out who it was. Sylvie was never reported missing, except to the McCoys, and to them she was missing because she ran off with their son. The story of the body found in the basement could play for a day in the local paper and on the TV news—they'd find a way to sneak footage of that corpse onto the screen—but no one would ever make the connection. Or if they did, nothing would come of it. The trail was too cold.
Lissy actually went to Lanny's parents and wept as she told them her lies. Cried as if her heart were breaking, when in fact she murdered the two people she was slandering. Don boiled with rage against her. This Lissy Yont—for sheer gall she topped even Don's ex-wife when she testified how the baby couldn't be Don's because he only had sex with his secretaries at the office.
He got to Friendly Avenue and headed west, but instead of turning south into the College Hill area where the Bellamy house was, he drove on to the grocery store where he'd been making his phone calls. The huge new Harris Teeter—the local pundits were now calling it the Taj Ma-Teeter—had a pretty good deli. He went in and bought vast quantities of basic food. The soup of the day in a tub the size of a paint can. Another container of potato salad, another of fruit salad. Don remembered how much food could disappear when it was carried upstairs to Gladys. He had to talk to the Weird sisters, and so he needed a serious peace offering. He stopped in the bakery and bought a cheesecake. None of the food would be as good as what they made themselves—but if they were as weary and sick as Miz Judea or whoever it was said this morning, they'd be glad of the break from cooking.
Don pulled up in front of the carriagehouse instead of parking around the corner beside the Bellamy house. He got the bags of food out of the cab and carried them up to the porch.
It took even longer to get someone to answer the door this time. Naptime? Or both of them upstairs with Gladys, and now so feeble that getting down the stairs took forever? He wasn't going to give up, though. He pounded on the door, he rang the doorbell over and over. Finally the door opened, and not a crack, either. Miz Evelyn stood there, haggard, stooped, her eyes bloodshot and angry enough to kill on the spot. "Who the hell do you think you are!" she demanded.
"I'm lunch," he said, holding out the bags. "It's only Harris Teeter deli stuff, but it's edible and you didn't have to cook it."
"After what you done—"
"I didn't believe you. I'm sorry now, but I just couldn't believe in it then."
Her face was the picture of scorn. "Fine to be a skeptic when other people pay the price for it."
"Eat the food," he said. "Get some rest. Please let me come back and talk to you."
"Why, when it takes you two damn months to believe what you're told?"
But she took the food. He offered to carry it to the kitchen for her, but her lip curled in disgust. He clearly wasn't welcome in this house anymore.
"Can I come back later?" he asked.
"You can hang yourself for all I care," she said. "In fact, there's rope in the shed out back. Feel free." She smacked the door with her butt and it closed in his face.
Couldn't blame them. But despite her tough words, she had taken the food. And she knew that he believed them now. Sooner or later they'd let him come in and ask his questions.
Only when he got to the front door of his own house and Sylvie opened it wide for him, only then did he realize that he hadn't bought any food for them.
Which was stupid. She didn't need food. He was famished, after all of yesterday's work and missing dinner besides. But he could grab something later. He sat down with Sylvie in the alcove and told her about his conversation with the McCoys. She reached the same conclusion he did. "Lissy killed him," she said.
"She's a nasty one all right," said Don. "If you had any doubts about the moral difference between the two of you—"
"Yes," said Sylvie. "She kills to cover her crime. I hide."
"You hid to cover her crime."
"Poor Lanny. He was an ass, but he might have grown out of it."
"I realized something," said Don. "A little fact about murder that you often overlook. It's always somebody's child who dies."
"Not me," said Sylvie. "I'm nobody's child."
He held her hand. You're mine now, he was saying. Not my child, but mine. To miss you when you go, to look out for you, to hope you'll be careful.
"I don't know what to do, now, Sylvie," he said. "I don't know how to find her. I just can't imagine Lissy is still living under her own name. She told her lies to the McCoys and then she took off. She could be anywhere. Any country."
"So," said Sylvie. "So we don't find her."
"But we have to," said Don. "I don't know how we can set things to rights without her."
She stroked the wood of the bench. "So work awhile this afternoon. Maybe some idea will come to you."
He shook his head. "I can't work on the house anymore," he said. "Not till I know what's needed."
She flinched. "Don, it's the house that's making me real. Keeping me alive."
"But it's killing the women next door."
She looked at him searchingly. "Don?"
"Don't ask me to do that, Sylvie," he said. "Think what you're asking. Those old ladies may be crotchety and strange but I can't just forget them and finish the house and it kills them or enslaves them completely or... You're solid now, Sylvie."
She nodded. "I know, I wasn't... I didn't mean for you to forget them, I just... I can feel the hunger of the house."
"So can they."
"It wants you to go on. Can't you feel it?"
He shook his head.
"Well that's good," she said. "You're still free, then."
"I've got to find a way to set things right. Not to decide between the dead woman that I love and a couple of strange old ladies I like a lot."
She giggled. "Did you ever think you'd say a phrase like 'the dead woman that I love'?"
He stroked her neck, the part of her shoulder left bare by the neckline of the dress. "Nor did I ever think that the most beautiful woman I ever met would disappear if she ever went outdoors."
"Strange times," said Sylvie.
"Strange but good," said Don.
"Good?"
"This is completely selfish of me, but if you hadn't been killed in this house and trapped here and... you think a college graduate librarian would ever look at a man like me?"
She shook her head. "But then, think of the hard road you had to travel to bring you here."
"Come to think of it," said Don, "if our meeting and falling in love with each other—that is what happened, isn't it?"
She nodded.
"Well if that was part of some cosmic plan, then I got to say that's one hell of a lousy planner. Somebody should fire that guy."
"Let's be honest," said Sylvie. "If we could undo the bad things—I wasn't murdered, and you didn't lose Nellie—and the price of doing that was that we never met each other and never loved each other..."
Don didn't need to answer. They both knew that they'd do it in a hot second.
"That doesn't mean this isn't real," said Sylvie. "Just because our lives might have gone another way. A better way. Doesn't mean that we don't love each other now. I mean, it did go this way, and we can't trade this for that or that for this, so..."
She couldn't figure out how to end what she was saying, so he kissed her and solved that one small problem. Anything that could be solved with a kiss, he could do that. Trouble was, it was a very small list of very minor problems.
"It's Gladys who'll know," he said. "If anybody does. She had the power to get those old ladies out of here. To keep them out this long. If there's any way to keep you alive but get you out of this house..."
"There isn't," said Sylvie. "She couldn't even get those ladies farther than the carriagehouse. What can she do for me?"
"Hey, it's just a lot of old wives' tales, right?" said Don. "But I'll tell you, everything they told me has turned out to be right. I'm not going to make the mistake of underestimating any of those old wives."
"Think they've finished the food you brought them?" asked Sylvie.
"You had to remind me of food."
"So go eat," she said. "And when you come back, see if they'll let you in and give you some answers. Even if the answer is that there's nothing you can do for me, at least we'll know."
He paused at the door. "Do you really think God has anything to do with this?" he asked.
She shrugged.
"I mean religion is all about life after death and right and wrong, right?"
"I guess we know there's a life after death," she said.
"But the will of God and all that," said Don. "I just don't see how the will of God could possibly have anything to do with this."
"I don't know, Don. I wasn't a believer."
"I was raised that way, but when Nellie died I decided that was all the proof I needed that God didn't exist or if he did then he didn't care about us at all." Even saying this much about Nellie brought tears to his eyes and he had to swallow hard. "But now here you are. Here you are. A spirit, alive when your body's dead. So where does God come into it? Is he out there somewhere, working to make it so that in the long run, the really really lo-o-o-ong run, everything comes out even?"
"I don't think so," she said. "I mean, maybe he's out there." She walked to him, touched his chest, right over his breastbone, right over his heart. "But maybe he's in there. Making it all come out right."
Don shook his head. "I don't think God is in there." He lifted her hand from his chest and kissed it. "But you are."
He went out to the car and his legs felt loose and rubbery under him. He was a little dizzy. Either he was very hungry or he was in love. A quarter pounder with cheese would settle the question.
If the idea was to make up with the Weird sisters, Don still had a ways to go. And the start would be that leaf-covered lawn.
Their garage contained no car. Instead, it had the cleanest array of gardening tools Don had ever seen. What did they do, wash them in dish soap after each use? Every tool had a shelf of its own or a clip to hold it to the wall. Nothing touched the ground. The only sign that they had not been maintaining the garage up to their normal standards was a couple of spiderwebs, but these were so new they didn't even have sacs of eggs or more than a couple of bug corpses. If these ladies had stayed in the Bellamy house, the place would never have decayed at all.
The rake was clipped to the wall. Don took it down and toted it over his shoulder out to the front yard. His body didn't like raking, not today, not after yesterday's labors, but he pushed on and after a while the aches and pains subsided and became the trance of labor. His hands were already callused. It felt good to him, to know that work had shaped his body. Back when he was a general contractor, building house after house, real physical labor had been only a hobby for him, fine carpentry in the garage. He had no calluses then. The last few years before his wife left, he had even been developing a little pooch at the beltline. That was gone, too. He didn't have the shaped, constructed muscles of a bodybuilder. He had the body that honest labor made, and he had learned to recognize it in other men, and respect it. And to like his own. He felt good in this flesh.
The job was done. The leaves were piled at the curb. He leaned for a moment on the rake, and the front door opened. Not just a crack, and not just to be slammed in his face. Miz Judea and Miz Evelyn both stood there, waiting for him. He waved. "Got to put the rake away." They closed the door as he walked around the house to the garage in the backyard.
Unsure how they went about making their tools so perfectly clean, Don contented himself with picking all the leaves off the rake before putting it back into its clip. He used that small handful of leaves to swipe at the spiderwebs and clear them away. Then he tossed the leaves over the high hedge into his own yard. Plenty of room for spiders there. They didn't need to go disturbing the perfection of the Weird sisters' garage.
The back door stood ajar, waiting for him.
He went inside. Miz Judea, looking weary and ancient, was slowly washing the plastic containers that had contained the food Don brought for them. "Was it good?" he asked her.
She just looked at him sadly and went back to washing.
Miz Evelyn came in from the parlor, carrying a plate of cookies. "I had this set out for you in the parlor, but then I remembered you didn't like going in there when you were dirty from work." It broke Don's heart to see her walking like an old woman, one step at a time, balancing the plate in one hand.
"Oh, ladies," he said. "I'm so sorry I've put you through all this."
Miz Evelyn shook her head. "All began before you were born."
At the sink, Miz Judea began to hum a melody that Don didn't recognize. At first he wondered why she was singing this song at this point in the conversation; then he realized that she wasn't paying attention to their conversation at all. She was humming because she felt like it.
"Thank you so much for raking our leaves," said Miz Evelyn.
"I had an ulterior motive."
"Oh, and for the lunch, too. But Gladys liked it. She misses store-bought food. Can you believe it?"
"Too much vinegar in everything," said Miz Judea. So she was listening.
"Maybe that's how they keep it from going bad in the display case," said Don.
"Maybe they don't know how to cook," said Miz Judea. "Gladys wouldn't know a good meal if it bit her on the butt."
"Now, Miz Judy, don't go talking down your dear cousin," said Miz Evelyn.
"Hungry bitch," said Miz Judea.
"It's the house that's hungry, Miz Judy, and you know it."
Miz Judea nodded. "I'm tired."
Miz Evelyn turned to Don to explain. "The house is so strong now."
"I wake up dreaming about it," said Miz Judea. "Five times a night. Dreamed there was a ball there. Saw you dancing, young man. With a heron."
"A what?" asked Don.
"A heron. Long-legged bird."
"It wasn't a heron," said Don.
"Whose dream we talking about, boy?" she demanded.
"I thought it wasn't a dream," said Don. "Because I was dancing there this morning. Until dawn."
"You too lonely, boy," said Miz Judea.
"You wasn't dancing alone, I take it," said Miz Evelyn.
"No, not alone," said Don.
"Who you got over there?" asked Miz Evelyn.
"She was there when I arrived. A girl. A woman."
Miz Judea looked skeptical. "Gladys never said nothing about no woman there."
"She's not a... her body was left in a tunnel under the back yard. About ten years ago."
"Good Lord," said Miz Evelyn. "You telling us she's a haint?"
Don nodded. "She gets stronger along with the house. I didn't understand any of what you told me. But the more I worked on the house, the more solid she became. Until I could feel her in my arms as we danced. But she's only real inside the house."
"You expect us to believe this bullshit?" asked Miz Judea.
"Hush, you silly old goose," said Miz Evelyn. To Don she said, "She's only trying to get even with you for not believing us earlier."
"I don't blame her," said Don.
"Well who the hell else you going to blame?" asked Miz Evelyn. "We may be old and feeble and going through a hard time, but we're still responsible for what we say, I hope! I ain't ready for them boys in white coats, I can tell you that."
"Ladies," said Don. "I need your help."
Miz Judea whirled on him, sudsy water flying from her fingers, she turned so fast. "And how that supposed to work, Mr. Lark? You tell us what you need, and then we go do the opposite, that it? That how folks help each other?"
"Come now, Miz Judy," said Miz Evelyn. "Can't you see he's sorry?"
"Look at my hands," said Miz Judea. They were trembling so violently it was a surprise she could wash dishes without dropping them. "You sorry enough to make up for that?"
"All I want," said Don, "is to find a way to set everything to right. I've stopped renovating the house."
"When?" said Miz Judea. "You tore out those false walls all yesterday afternoon and half the night. Gladys was up there crying her eyes out, saying, Don't he have to sleep? When that boy going to sleep! We all so desperate for sleep we almost gave up, we almost just walked on over there and knocked on the door and give ourselves back to that place."
"We weren't even close," said Miz Evelyn. "We just talked about it. Nobody was going to do it."
"Gladys can't do it," said Miz Judea. "That's the only reason we didn't. Her magic ain't doing much now that the house is so strong. It just goes on day after day, year after year. What you think that poor woman can do?"
"It's not him, Miz Judy," said Miz Evelyn. "It's the house. Don't you go getting that confused."
"There's got to be a way," said Don. "To set you free without destroying Sylvie."
"That the name of that haint you got?" asked Miz Evelyn.
"Didn't you ever think maybe you tear that house down, she get set free too?" asked Miz Judea.
"If that's the best solution, and she agrees to it, then that's what I'll do," said Don. "But neither of us wants to."
They looked at him in silence for a moment.
Then: "Don't that beat all," said Miz Evelyn.
And at the same moment, from Miz Judea: "He gone and fell in love with a ghost."
"I didn't know she was a ghost until after."
"After what?" asked Miz Evelyn, all curiosity.
"After I came to care for her," said Don.
"'Care for her,'" echoed Miz Evelyn. "Ain't that sweet, Miz Judy? You hear anybody talk like that anymore these days?"
"Shut up, you silly two-bit tart," said Miz Judea. "There's nothing old-fashioned about plain old love. I'm just glad to know he's suffering a little, too."
"Miz Judy, it pains the Lord to hear you talk like that." To Don she spoke apologetically. "She doesn't really wish suffering on you, Mr. Lark."
"But she's right," said Don. "The way things are going right now, everybody's in some kind of pain except one person."
"Who's that?" asked Miz Judea, as if she meant to find that person and slap him.
"The woman who killed Sylvie."
Suddenly Miz Judea grinned. "Oh, now we got the game going, don't we. That's why you come here. To find a way to get that killer."
Don had no idea what she was imagining. Voodoo dolls? A fatal potion? "I don't know why I came," said Don. "Except that the way y'all talk about Gladys, I thought she might know what I should do."
Miz Evelyn looked shocked. "Talk to Gladys? In person?"
"Well, I don't have a phone."
The two women retired to the back of the kitchen and conferred for a moment. Don ate a cookie while he waited. It was very good. When did they have time to bake, as wiped out as they were? And how many of these cookies did Gladys eat at a time?
"We got to ask her," said Miz Judea, when they broke their huddle.
"But it's so hard getting up and down the stairs now," said Miz Evelyn. "Would you mind helping us get up the stairs? You still have to wait outside Gladys's room. And you best call her Miss Gladys, even though we don't. We're older than her, but you sure ain't."
"Promise you don't go in till she say so," said Miz Judea.
Don agreed at once, and soon had Miz Judea on one arm and Miz Evelyn on the other, helping them up the stairs, which were wide, but not wide enough to make three abreast easy. They both hung from his arm, they were so weak. It hurt him to feel how light and frail they were. I did this, he thought.
No, age did this, and the house. I only pushed them the next step.
Miz Judea disappeared inside the bedroom to the left at the top of the stairs—the bedroom whose curtains Don had so often seen parted, back when they still had the strength to spy on him. As soon as the door was closed, Miz Evelyn leaned close to him. "You got to be nice to that girl," she said.
"Miz Judea?"
"No, you fool," said Miz Evelyn. "Gladys. Don't you look at her like no sideshow. Because she got that way for our sake. She got to eat to give her the strength to fight that house. Only fighting the house, that don't use no calories if you see my point."
"She's fat," said Don.
"Oh, she's way beyond fat, you poor boy. Fat? My land." Miz Evelyn shook her head. "You just remember that we owe her everything. Me especially. She didn't need to take me. She come for Miz Judy, her cousin, don't you see. Gladys, she was only a slip of a girl, fourteen years old at the time. Took the train from Wilmington all by herself, and those was hard times for a black girl traveling alone, you can bet on that. But she comes right in and rebukes that house like a preacher casting out Satan. Then she calls our names and says, 'Come forth,' like Jesus calling Lazarus. And Miz Judy and me, we just feel a load come off our shoulders like as if we're free for the first time since we was born. That little slip of a girl."
"How could she do what the two of you couldn't do?"
"Oh, she learnt the old ways. Some of them black people brought secrets with them from Africa. Passed them along mother to daughter, aunt to niece. Gladys knew them old ways, and found out a few new ones of her own. And I said, 'We're free!' and Miz Judy starts laughing so hard she's crying for joy, but Gladys, she just scorns us and says, 'That spell's the best one I know for what ails you, and it only lasts an hour or so. I got to keep casting it over and over, or this house going to suck you back here.' And I see she's just talking to Miz Judy, not to me, and I understood that. I didn't even ask her to take me along. But I got to saying good-bye to Miz Judy, and naturally I was crying but I didn't ask no favors. And Miz Judy, she's crying too, but she never thought Gladys would care a fig for a hillbilly white girl like me, so she didn't ask either. But Gladys, she ups and says, 'You planning to spend your whole life here?' and I says, 'I pray not, every night and every morning.' And she says, 'This day your prayers be answered.' Just like scripture she said it. 'All you got to do is stay together, close by me, and I can keep you out of this house.' And she kept her word. So you show respect to that girl, Don Lark. You hear?"
"I hear, ma'am, and I'll obey."
"About time you started doing that," she said, without a trace of a smile.
The door opened. Miz Judea shuffled out. "She says come on in."
The curtains were drawn in the room, and in the light of a single lamp beside the bed it took a moment for Don to realize that the mountain of pillows on top of the king-size bed that almost filled the room wasn't pillows at all. It was the vast body of a black woman, her face sagging with chins and dewlaps of fat, her arms sticking out almost sideways, held up by the rolls of fat.
Don tried not to look at the body. Look at the eyes, that's all, see nothing but her eyes.
They were good eyes. Kind eyes. Weary, but well-meaning. And they were gazing at Don.
"Took you long enough to believe us," said Gladys. Her voice was deep and husky. The voice of a woman just roused from a sleep that was not long enough.
"I believe you," said Don. "But I don't know what to do now."
"Tear the damn house down," said Gladys. "We told you that from the start."
"It's the only thing keeping Sylvie alive!"
"Excuse an ignorant girl from tobacco country, but it seem to me that girl already be dead."
"But she shouldn't be," said Don.
"A lot of things is that shouldn't be," said Gladys. "I should be married and have me about forty grandkids by now. Your baby daughter ought to be about four and a half years old. Sure that girl ought to be alive. God's world works that way."
"God expects us to make things right when we can," said Don.
"What do you know about what God expect?"
"I know as much as you know about God," said Don. "What I don't know about is houses."
Behind him, the Weird sisters were whispering, coaching him.
"Don't do no good to make her mad."
"Careful what you say to her, Mr. Lark."
A slow smile spread across Gladys's face. "I think the word uppity was invented so they'd have something to call you."
Don didn't bother answering that. What mattered was that he had her attention. "Miss Gladys," he said, "what is it about that house? Why is it so strong?"
"You ask me that?" said Gladys. "You, a builder of houses?"
"I've built plenty of good solid houses in my life, but none of them had that kind of power."
"Come on now, Mr. Lark. Don't tell lies like that. You know the minute you walk into a house which ones got power and which ones be dead. The powerful ones, they feel like home the minute you go inside. You feel like you already remember living there even though you never did. But the dead ones, they feel like nothing but walls and floor and roof, just slabs of stuff."
Now that she put it into words, he'd felt those things about every house he ever entered. Some made him welcome, and some repelled him. "So what makes the difference? Good design? Workmanship?"
"That's part of it," said Gladys. "That's the starting place. Shoddy don't ever come to life. But the house got to be one of a kind. You build a whole bunch of houses all the same, you got to take one house worth of life and spread it out over all fifty or a hundred of them."
So much for housing tracts. No wonder Don hated working from overused designs. They felt dead before work even started.
"One of a kind, shaped to fit the people who live there. And then the first people who live in a house, oh, that's more important than all the rest. You got love there, you got parents looking out for their kids, you got hardworking folks caring for the house, you got guests coming in and feeling welcome, people in and out all the time—why, that house gets a heart to it, that house gets a soul, it gets a name, their name. The carpenter make the bones of the house, but the people breathe the breath of life into it. You get a ugly little cottage, shoddy built, ten thousand others just like it, and if the first people that live there fill it up with good life, then there be some strength in that house, at least a little."
"So it really is the Bellamys' house. Even though they're long dead."
"It has their name, it beats with their hearts. I felt their love the minute I walked into the place. Made me sad how the strength of that love got twisted by the ugly things bad folks turn it to when my cousin Judea got to whoring there. Stole that house, turned the name into a lie. That wasn't no love there, that wasn't no joy. It wasn't the Bellamy house no more."
"So how did they get stuck?"
"It ain't the house sticking to them, it be them sticking to the house."
"So it depends on the person?" said Don. "But why them?"
"You don't think I be wondering about that myself? I'll tell you what I guess. And this just a guess, Mr. Lark. It be the folks who most need a home that gets stuck in a strong house. Pain and loss, that fetch you up in a place like that. Shame and guilt, that hold you, that make you stick. My cousin Judea, she got herself pregnant by her uncle Mack, and they took that baby away from her before it make a sound, she never see it, and then she run off what with her mama and daddy calling her a low-class whore, and then she fetch up here where they make it true. You got it all there, pain and loss, shame and guilt. That baby didn't get adopted, either. They drown that baby like a cat. She told me before that baby born, she say, Gladys, I better run off, they going to hurt my baby. Only she never did run off, did you, Cousin Judea."
"No," said Judea softly.
"So she stick to that house. Her need so strong, that house so strong, they be two magnets."
Don turned to Miz Evelyn. "What about you?"
"That's nobody's business," said Miz Evelyn darkly.
"Oh, now, Miz Evelyn, we asking this man to help us get shut of that house," said Gladys.
"He don't have to know all that," said Miz Evelyn.
"Let's just say that Miz Evelyn knowed where the shotgun be, and where her husband be, and who he with. Let's just say that. Had to hightail it out of the mountains before the sheriff found the bodies. They still warm when she fetch up here and hide out in that house. Pain and loss and shame and guilt."
"So why am I not caught?" asked Don.
"You got the pain, you got the loss," said Gladys. "But what you ashamed of? What you guilty for?"
"I didn't save my daughter when I could."
"My laws, boy, you know you couldn't save her. You know you did all that Jesus ever let you do. You may think you ashamed, but you not. Deep in your heart, you know you done all."
"You don't know what I feel," said Don.
"I know that if you be guilty, that house suck you in."
Don had to think about this. About what it meant for Sylvie. He walked to the window that faced the house and opened the curtains.
"Please don't," said Miz Judea.
"No, you let him," said Gladys. "Just you don't look."
What about Sylvie? He knew her pain and her loss. But shame? Guilt? She had thought she killed Lissy. So the house held her. But now she knew she didn't...
"The girl next door," said Don. "Sylvie Delaney. She thought she committed murder there, and so she had the shame and guilt. But now she knows she didn't. That she was the one who was murdered."
"Kind of slow, ain't she?" said Gladys, looking amused.
"Innocent, that's what she is," said Don. "And now that she knows it, will the house lose its grip on her?"
"Maybe she not telling you, Mr. Lark," said Gladys, "but that house already letting go of her bit by bit. She fading. So you might as well tear that place down. She as good as gone."
Don sat down on the window sill, despondent. "I found her and then I lost her," he said.
"Why you sad about that?" said Gladys. "She going to be free now. She can go home to Jesus."
"Call me selfish, but I wanted her to go home with me."
"You show me where it says in God's plan about a man marrying him a dead girl. You show me that."
"You show me where it says that when a man and a woman fall in love, they shouldn't get married just because one of them's dead."
"I'll tell you where," said Gladys. "It says in the Good Book that in heaven they be neither marrying nor giving in marriage."
"Well what does that prove? Sylvie ain't in heaven." Don got up and walked up and put a knee on the foot of Gladys's bed, so he could look her straight in her squinched-up little eyes. "Miss Gladys, everything about this is wrong. That house is beautiful and filled with love—so why should it snag people because of the ugliness in their lives?"
"Nothing needs beauty so much as ugly do," said Gladys.
"But it's not beautiful to them. To Miz Judea and Miz Evelyn. If it was, they'd still be over there, and it would make them happy inside."
"It got twisted," said Gladys. "Man who make it a whorehouse he be six kinds of ugly in his heart. I tell you the strength come from the love of that first family who lived there. But after that, the house take on the soul of the owner."
"Well I'm the owner now!"
"Too late," said Gladys. "Too late for us. Maybe ten years from now, you so good that house be decent again. But you think we still alive by then? Besides, Mr. Lark, that's a pretty big gamble. Whether you good enough to unbad that house, or it bad enough to ungood you."
"I don't want to tear it down," said Don. "It's too beautiful."
"Beautiful to look at," said Gladys. "But if it do ugly things, then all that pretty be a lie."
"But it's not doing ugly things," said Don. "No, listen to me. The house was mean enough when it thought I was tearing it down. I still have a sore place on the back of my head to prove it. But then it stole my wrecking bar and when I went looking for it, it was behind the old coal furnace. Right where that tunnel entrance was. That was what sent me down the tunnel. That was why I found Sylvie's body there, and we learned the truth. Now you can't tell me the house is malicious when it did that!"
Gladys shook her head, which moved her whole body, quaking the bed. "You poor man, you try so hard," she said.
"Don't make fun of me," he said, "just tell me what's wrong with what I said."
"It Sylvie's house all these years, Mr. Lark," said Gladys. "House be malicious, all right. It do what Sylvie want. Not what she want in her mind, but what she want in the dark secret places. She want to be blamed for her crimes. So... the house led you there. Betrayed her."
"But she didn't commit a crime! And if the house knows so much, it knew that!"
"Tunnel ain't part of the house, Mr. Lark. Tunnel be older than the house. A good place. A freedom place. The tunnel showed you the truth. But the house, all it knew was what Sylvie knew. So the house, it trying to make you hate Sylvie. That's what she thought—if you went down that tunnel and saw what it had there, you hate her then. Treachery and malice, Mr. Lark. That's what that house got from all those years with that bad man and his bad sons owning it."
Don thought of how he'd had to pay extortion money to the last owner. "I guess none of the owners were very nice, not since the Bellamys."
"Now that dead girl," said Gladys, "she's nice enough. She been taking the edge off that malice. Made my job a little easier. That's why Miz Evelyn and Miz Judea, they can go out and work in the yard. Till you fix things up over there."
"Miss Gladys," said Don. "I appreciate all you've explained to me. But the big question is still hanging in the air. What can I do to set things right?"
"And my answer still hanging right next to it. Tear down that house."
Don could feel Sylvie slipping through his fingers. "No," he said. "Not till I've done... something."
"What?"
"I got to set things right."
"You can't."
"If Sylvie's going to fade from that house no matter what I do, then she's sure as hell not going alone!"
"If you thinking of killing yourself, do the kind thing and tear the house down first, all right?" said Gladys.
"I'm not killing anyone," said Don.
"You're killing me right now," said Gladys. "Me and these ladies. Look how they can't take their eyes off that house."
It was true. Miz Evelyn and Miz Judea had both wandered over to the window and now had their faces pressed against the glass like little children.
"Close that curtain, Mr. Lark," said Gladys.
Don excused his way past the Weird sisters and drew the curtain closed. Miz Evelyn was crying softly, and Miz Judea looked like she had lost her last best hope in life. Gladys was right. This couldn't go on.
"Thank you for your help," he said. And it was help. He knew more. Knowing was better than not knowing.
But not by much.
All the way back around the fence to the Bellamy house, Don was filled with dread. Sylvie was fading already, Gladys had said. Now that she didn't have that aching hole of guilt and shame in her heart, the house didn't have so much power over her. What if she was already gone? At this moment it was an unbearable thought. I just found her, he thought. I didn't ask to be in this swamp, and neither did she, but we found each other, and it's not right that I should already be losing her.
The door wasn't waiting open for him. She wasn't in the alcove in the ballroom. He called her name, striding through the main floor. Called again, again, more loudly, as he ran up the stairs, searched the second floor. Then up to the attic, and she wasn't there either, and now he felt it like another death. How could it happen so quickly?
The basement? She never went down there on purpose.
But then, that was before she learned the truth about who killed whom. Don skimmed down the stairs like a schoolboy, then ran the length of the ballroom to get to the basement stairs. "Sylvie!" he called. "Sylvie!"
She still didn't answer, but now it didn't matter, because there she was, pressed against the foundation wall, almost behind the coal furnace. Near the tunnel entrance.
"Sylvie, what are you doing?"
She smiled wanly. "I don't know," she said.
"What brought you down here?"
"I just... wanted to see myself again."
Was it ghoulish to want to see a corpse, if it was your own? "So did you?"
"No," she said. "Part of me wants to go there. Down the tunnel. But the house doesn't want me there. I don't know what's the right thing to do."
"All I know about the tunnel is that it's not part of the house," said Don. "Gladys says it's older than the house."
"You know what it feels like?" she said. "If I go down there again, I'll be free!"
"Depends on what you mean by freedom." He explained to her what Gladys had said about how the house might be losing its hold on Sylvie. "If you want to be free, then go," he said. "I can't ask you to stay."
"Yes you can," she said.
"Then stay," he said. "Please stay."
She launched herself from the wall, ran to him, threw her arms around him.
He held her, but as he stroked her hair, it kept passing right through his fingers. Slowly, but passing through. He couldn't help the tears of grief that began to flow. "You're going," he said.
She pulled away from him, her eyes frightened. He showed her what was happening with her hair. In reply she clung to him all the more tightly.
He lifted her—lighter now, or was it his fear of losing her that made her seem like nothing in his arms?—and carried her upstairs, back to the alcove. "I'll tell you something," he whispered to her. "If I lose you, Sylvie, then you can count on this. I'll find Lissy wherever she's hiding. I'll find her and..."
"And what?" she said. "Look, your hair goes through my fingers, too." She shuddered. "Which one of us is disappearing?"
"You don't know how many times I've wished that I could."
"Me too," she said. "And now that I don't want to, the wish comes true." She kissed him lightly. "But you didn't answer my question."
"What did you ask?"
"What you'll do when you find Lissy?"
Kill her, thought Don. But then he knew that it wasn't true. He wouldn't have the heart for it. "There's no statute of limitations on murder," he said. "I'll turn her in."
"Waste of time," said Sylvie. "Don't even bother looking for her, Don. They won't do anything to her because there won't be enough evidence, nothing to point to her except you, and you got all your information from the victim's ghost. And they'll say to you, Well, Mr. Lark, where's that ghost now? And you'll say, Sorry, Your Honor, but she faded away."
"So Lissy gets away with it."
"She already got away with it. There's nothing you can do about that."
"That's all I seem capable of, when it really matters: nothing."
Sylvie leaned back. "I think I won't sleep tonight," she said. "I don't want to go to sleep and wake up invisible. So I'll stay awake. I'll watch you all night. I'll hold your hand. And then when your hand sinks through mine and leaves my hand empty, I'll know I'm gone."
Again Don's tears flowed. It made him angry, to have to face grief again. He clenched his fists. "Damn, what happened to me? I used to be stronger than this."
"Fat lot of good it did you. I'm glad you're crying for me, Don. I've been dead for a decade, and you're the first one to shed any tears of grief for me."
"This is just the start, kid."
"You want to hear something pathetic?" she said. "I've had more kisses from you than from every other boy or man in my life combined."
He kissed her again.
"What's that for? You've already got the record."
"Running up the score," he said.
She kissed him back.
"Mm," she said.
He broke off the kiss. "What?"
"Just thinking," she said. "About Lissy. Maybe we're giving her credit for being too resourceful. You know, coming up with a false name. That's not easy to do. I mean, sure, you can get fake ID, but don't you have to know somebody? How do you go buy a fake driver's license?"
"She bought drugs," said Don. "So she knew some underground people."
"No, Lanny bought the drugs. Just pot, mostly. I don't think she knew anybody like that."
"She really did coast on other people, didn't she," said Don. "He buys the drugs, you do her homework."
"That's the thing," said Sylvie. "When she needed some A papers right away, she didn't write them, she didn't do anything on her own, she just copied mine. Whatever looked easiest. Going underground and changing identities, that's hard. I just don't see her doing it."
"So you're saying she'll be living under her own name?"
"Don't you think?"
"No," said Don. "She knew she had to conceal her crime. That's why she killed Lanny, it's the only possible reason. She didn't know that neither body was going to be discovered. So she couldn't keep her own name."
The idea dawned on both of them at once. "She used mine," said Sylvie, as Don said, "How much did you two look alike?" They laughed for a moment, more at the excitement of the discovery than the coincidence of their talking at once.
"You said you two could swap clothes," said Don.
"Same color hair, nearly," said Sylvie. "Same basic shape in the face. Not that we looked like sisters, but if you didn't know either of us..."
"I mean, could she use your ID?"
"She could maybe get a haircut, different glasses, and tell the person at the motor vehicle department that of course she doesn't look the same, it's been years."
"No," said Don. "She just reports your license missing. Says her name is Sylvie Delaney and her purse was stolen."
"She'd need a birth certificate or something, wouldn't she?"
"Where did you keep your birth certificate?"
"In my room." Sylvie nodded. "You're right, she'd never have to show a picture."
"And your fingerprints were never taken."
"Right," said Sylvie. "I wasn't arrested much."
"This feels right, Sylvie, This is it. She took your name, your identity—"
"My savings. She could do my signature. She did that as a joke, but she could do it as well as I could. She used to tell me that I should do a harder signature, any fourth grader could fake mine."
"That's her whole getaway," said Don.
"Getaway," echoed Sylvie. "Don, she took my job."
It took him a moment to realize what she meant. "Providence?"
"They interviewed me over the phone. We never met. She read all my papers. She's a champion shmoozer. She could fake being me well enough to get along until she really learned the job. All the time getting an income."
"That makes my skin crawl," said Don. "To think of her out there in the world, using your name. People asking for Sylvie Delaney and she's the one they mean."
Sylvie shuddered. "Well, after killing me, I guess that's only adding insult to injury."
"I'm going to call," he said.
"Call who?"
"Directory assistance," he said. "Providence, Rhode Island."
"And then what?"
"And then I'll invite her here," he said.
"What makes you think she'd come?"
"Come on, Sylvie, give me credit." He put on his Marlon-Brando-as-Don-Corleone voice. "I'll make her an invitation she can't refuse."
"I don't want you hurting her, Don," said Sylvie. "You'd only get in trouble yourself. It won't help me for you to be in jail."
"No, I won't hurt her," said Don. "All I want is for her to face what she did. To face you. While you're still here."
"Oh," she said. "Oh, Don, I'm not sure I want to—"
"Why not?" he answered. "What can she do to you? What are you afraid of? Let her face her own shame and guilt."
Those words resonated with what he had told her from his interview with Gladys. "You're hoping the house will hold her," said Sylvie.
"Maybe," said Don. "It probably won't, though. She's guilty and what she did was shameful and she knows it, she can't hide from that. But pain and loss? She's got everything. I'm betting she feels no pain."
"She lost her family," said Sylvie. "Remember?"
"Then the house will snag her. That's justice, Sylvie. To have her trapped here."
"But how will you finish your renovations then?" she said.
He looked away from her. "I don't know if I will."
"You can't afford to walk away from this place."
He shrugged. "I have some money in the bank. I can break the house up a little bit, weaken it so the Weird Sisters aren't so drawn to it."
"But then she won't be drawn to it anymore."
"Sylvie, why don't you want me to bring her here?"
"I don't know," she said. "Because... because this is our place. If I'm going to fade, the only memory I want to take with me is this one. You and me. In this place."
Don got up from the alcove, paced toward the far wall, then stopped. "OK," he said.
"OK what?"
"OK, I won't call her. I'll let her get away with it. We'll have these last days or hours, whatever we've got, we'll spend this time together, and then I'll just... I'll just forget it all." He turned around and kicked the wall. It was tough and strong. It hurt his foot through the shoe. He slapped the wall with the flat of his palm and leaned there, crying again, dammit.
After a while he felt her hand on his back. Lightly, too lightly.
"Don," she said. "I can face her."
"No," he said.
"I want to," she said. "What she did to me, that's done with. But what she's done to you—that really pisses me off."
He laughed in spite of himself, turned around, held her. "You mean it?"
"It's less than a twelve-hour drive to Providence if you go straight through," she said. "I had that all figured out. Feels like only yesterday."
"Let me guess. The bitch took your car."
Sylvie danced away from him. "We're such stupid children," she said. She pirouetted lazily. "We've built up this whole castle in the air, and she's probably married to some executive with Coca-Cola and living in Atlanta under his name."
"Still, it's worth a shot. It makes sense," said Don. "I'm going next door to see if they'll let me use their phone."
"Hurry back," she said.
"Stay out of the basement, please."
"Of course," she said. "I'm too busy dancing my life away to bother with basements." She was still turning around and around as he closed the door behind him.
Next door, Miz Evelyn let him into the house. "So have you decided what you're going to do?" she asked.
"Sylvie's fading. When she's gone, I won't leave the house strong like this."
"But all your money's tied up in it."
"I've lost a lot more money than this," said Don. "Lose enough of it, and you start thinking of it as nothing."
"Money's never nothing," said Miz Evelyn. "All those years we took in laundry and sewing, living on nothing, growing a garden, saving, saving. All so we could keep living here and never go out of the yard. Money is very much something."
"Not compared to saving people I care about."
"Well, all I can say is, if you weaken that house I'll be the first to kiss you."
"Too late," he said.
"There's already a line?" Miz Evelyn laughed. "Should have known, a strapping young man like you."
"Miz Evelyn, you ladies do have a phone, don't you?"
"Oh, you need to borrow one? It's right here in the parlor, right over here on the writing desk."
It was an ancient black dial phone. "You don't know how many years it's been since I've used one of these," he said.
"Oh, I don't know how we could ever get along without it. That's how we get our groceries delivered! And lightbulbs and things like that!"
"I didn't mean the phone, I meant that phone." She didn't understand. "They have phones with buttons now."
She looked baffled. Then comprehension dawned. "Oh, you mean pushbuttons. For a minute I thought, what in the world would you need to button up a telephone for!" She laughed. "Oh, my laws, I don't get out much." She looked wistful.
Don picked up the phone and dialed 411. He got the area code for Providence and then dialed directory assistance at that number. It was amazing how irritating it could be. The pressure on the sides of his finger. The endless waiting for the dial to return to position.
"For Providence," he said.
Miz Judea walked into the room.
"I need a listing for Sylvia Delaney. Or Sylvie. I'm not sure how the last name is spelled. Delaney."
He realized he had nothing to write with. He flung out a hand toward the Weird sisters, who were eavesdropping unabashedly. "Pen pen pen, please," he said.
Miz Evelyn fetched a pencil for him from a cubbyhole in the writing desk, and took an open envelope from the mail table.
The operator came back on. "Could that be S. Delaney, D-E-L-A-N-E-Y, on Academy Street?"
"Could well be, it's worth a shot."
"Hold for the number, please." After a moment, the computer voice started intoning the number. Don wrote it down and dialed it immediately.
"Am I missing something?" Miz Evelyn asked. "Ain't Sylvie Delaney the name of the haint?"
Don nodded, listening to the phone ringing.
Miz Evelyn went on talking, ostensibly to Miz Judea. "Why's he calling a dead girl in Providence when she's haunting the house next door?"
"Hush and listen, Miz Evvie," said Miz Judea.
Someone picked up the phone. A woman's voice. "Hello?"
"Hello, is this Sylvie Delaney?" He did his best to keep his voice sounding breezy, cheerful.
"Yes," she said. "Who's this?" Bored. Must have a lot of unidentified men calling her.
"Forgive me, but I just want to make sure I've found the right person. Did you get your graduate degree at UNC-Greensboro?"
"Who is this?"
Don waited a moment. "When I'm sure you're the right person," he said.
"Yes, I did my graduate work there. Now who are you?"
"We've never met, Miss Delaney," said Don. "But I feel as though I know you. You see, I've been renovating the old Bellamy house."
"I don't know of any such place," she said.
"You roomed here back in the mid-eighties."
"You must be thinking of somebody else. Good-bye."
"Hang up if you want, Miss Delaney, but I've seen what's in the tunnel under the house."
She said nothing.
"You don't seem to be hanging up," said Don.
"Maybe we do need to have a conversation," she said.
Don covered the receiver and whispered to the old ladies, "Now she wants to talk." Into the phone he said, "Yes, I think we ought to meet."
"Are you here in town?" she asked.
"No, here in Greensboro."
"Well, you don't expect me to drop everything and go all the way down there, do you? I have a job, I have responsibilities—"
"That's not my problem, is it?" said Don. "I'm betting you can get here by tomorrow at noon. After that, I call the police to check the body. When they figure out that it matches Sylvia Delaney's dental records, they're bound to start wondering who's this woman who's been using Sylvie Delaney's name for all these years."
"You're crazy if you think I'm going to pay blackmail over something that you've clearly concocted out of your own imagination."
"I'm not taping this, so you can skip the innocent act," said Don. "Noon tomorrow, at the Bellamy house. Come to the front door, and come alone."
"This is the stupidest prank I've ever heard of."
"I'm looking forward to meeting you—Lissy."
"Who are you?" she demanded.
He set the receiver down on the cradle. Then he sat back in to one of the plush parlor chairs. "That may just be the stupidest thing I ever did."
"What did you do?" said Miz Evelyn.
"Is your brain gone, you silly hillbilly?" said Miz Judea. "He just invited the woman who killed the girl next door to come down here and kill him, too."
"Oh!" cried Miz Evelyn. "That was foolish of you, Mr. Lark!"
"I know," he said. "But it seemed like a good idea at the time."
"You mean you don't even have a plan?" said Miz Judea.
"All I know is that Lissy Yont is going to face Sylvie one last time before Sylvie fades away."
Miz Judea shook her head. "You best talk to Gladys again," she said. "You bit off more than you can chew this time."
Nothing had changed in Gladys's room, except that Gladys looked even wearier and more impatient. "I wish you'd tell that girl to stop all that dancing," she said. "It wears me out."
"Her dancing?"
"Around and around. Like spinning thread. Like knitting. It ties me up in knots."
"Well, don't worry," said Don. "She'll be gone soon."
Immediately Gladys was full of sympathy. "Oh, you poor thing. It never lets up for you, does it?"
Was she mocking him? "Miz Judea thinks I should talk to you."
"Only because you're as stupid as they come," said Gladys. "Of course, I say that with your best interests at heart. Most people are stupid. I don't hold it against them. I just wonder what we're supposed to do for you when you're dead?"
"Why, you can see the future now?"
"Miz Judea told me what you did. That woman's going crazy right now, figuring out how she's going to kill you and get away with it."
"Well, if it's any comfort, she's also probably planning how to burn down the house or blow it up to destroy all the evidence against her. So you'll win no matter what."
"Burning's the last thing we want. It'll take years for the shadow of that house to fade, if it burns. We need it torn down. In case you haven't been listening."
"Give me a break here," said Don. "You didn't come up with anything. And I'm going to get Sylvie some justice before she goes."
"Which Sylvie?"
"Which?" He was confused. "Sylvie. The Sylvie."
"The Sylvie who's dead and living next door? Or the Sylvie who's probably buying a gun right now and heading on down here to kill you?"
"That's Lissy Yont."
"It was Lissy," said Gladys. "Don't you know nothing about the power of names, Mr. Lark? When I saved these girls, I called them by their soul names—name of their spirit and their body. When that girl started going by Sylvie's name, she didn't know what she was getting in for. When people know you by a name, call you that name and you answer, it ties the name right to you. Now, her spirit is still Lissy Yont, but her body has been called Sylvie Delaney by everybody for the past ten years. She's been divided. Her soul is split, so her body's name is Sylvie Delaney by now."
"So the soul's name is the spirit and the body?" said Don.
"Divide the names and you divide the soul. Leaves room for other spirits to try and seize the body, possess it. That woman doesn't know how weak her hold on her own body is. That body don't feel like it be part of no soul, it feel like it just be possessed by this spirit named Lissy. It want to get with its right spirit." Gladys cackled with pleasure. "People who don't know what they're doing, they do the dumbest things! Like you, calling a killer down to visit you."
"And you think it's funny?" asked Don, irritated now.
"I won't laugh when you dead," said Gladys. Sounding a little irritated herself.
"Not this time," said Don.
"Why? You don't look bulletproof to me."
"Because long before she can get to me, she's going to meet Sylvie face to face, the real Sylvie, right there in that house, where Sylvie is strong. Where the house does her bidding."
"Sylvie strong there compared to dead people who got no house. A dead woman's never as strong as a live one."
"They're not going to wrestle. Lissy's just going to face what she did to Sylvie."
"Meaning you think that ghost is going to scare her to death."
"She thinks she got away with it. I just want her to see that there's a life after death and someday she's going to answer for what she did."
"Don't it ever occur to you that only good people are afraid of paying for their sins?"
"No ma'am," said Don. "I've known some bad people and some good people in my life, and it's the bad ones who live in fear, all the time. Cause they know their own hearts, Miss Gladys, and they think everybody else is just waiting to pull the same moves on them that they've got planned to pull on somebody else."
"People be more simple than you think, Don Lark."
"You've spent the last sixty years sitting on a bed getting fat while you do spells to keep a big old house from swallowing up your people, and you're telling me that people are simple?"
"Nobody simpler than me," said Gladys.
"Well, so, maybe you're right. Maybe Lissy'll get here and see Sylvie and laugh in her face and then come shoot my brains out. If she does, then I won't care anymore, will I?"
"Now look who's talking brave."
"I got to do something for Sylvie before she goes, if she's going."
"She's going, and you already done something. You gave that girl love. What you think anybody want more than that? You think she give a rat's behind about seeing Lissy? That for you, Mr. Lark. She do that for you."
"OK, maybe," said Don. "Maybe that's for me. Maybe just once I want to look evil in the face and name what it is."
"Only it be using the wrong name. That body be Sylvie Delaney walk through that door. And don't you go expecting her to show up at noon. You think she crazy? You call her what, ten minutes ago? She on the road now. Not the airplane! She ain't putting her name on no plane ticket. She driving, but not slow, no. She flying down the pike. How long from Rhode Island? Ten hours I bet. Pay cash for gas. She get to town at midnight. Then she get scared. Midnight too busy. She wait for you to sleep. She park way up the block. She come by the house on foot. From back there. Maybe she come to the gully, maybe she come up that tunnel. Maybe she try to take that body out. Destroy the evidence, like they say in them cop shows. Obstructing justice."
"I didn't think of that."
"You didn't think of nothing. You acting from your heart now, not your head."
"Yeah."
"No, no, that be good, you keep doing that. Good people can't out-think evil, cause evil think of things good folks can't think of. Can't enter your head what evil do."
"You'd be surprised."
"But the good heart, now, it think of good things that evil can't imagine, cause it got no heart. How about that? That be philosophy. That be deep."
Either it was too deep for Don, or not deep enough, he couldn't be sure either way. But he was glad he talked to Gladys again. That back entrance to the tunnel, that had to go before tonight. That had to be sealed off.
"You know I wish I wasn't so fat," said Gladys.
"I hear that from a lot of folks," said Don.
"I wish I could fit through that door. Wish I could go down them stairs. Wish I could be there next door."
"Why? Can't you tell what's going on from right here?"
"Oh, sure I can. But see, I never heard of something like this before. I don't think it ever happened. Somebody been living under a dead persons name for years and years, come face to face with that dead person's spirit. Who know what going to happen."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, that Sylvie spirit, it going to meet a Sylvie body. And back again. They going to know they belong together. If the Sylvie spirit still had its own body, then so what? That happen before, lots. But the Sylvie spirit got no body. What then? And that Sylvie body, it hungry for a Sylvie spirit for a long time. Want to be a soul again, not just possessed."
"You're not saying that Lissy's body might capture Sylvie's spirit," said Don.
"I not be saying nothing, I just wondering. I just thinking it be a real good thing if you tell that dead girl not to touch that Lissy when she get here."
"She might get trapped in the same body with the woman who killed her?" The idea made him sick at heart. What had he got her into?
"Just tell her keep away. She a ghost, Mr. Lark. That Lissy girl, she can't touch her if she don't want to be touched."
"Thanks for the warning," said Don.
"These ladies give you lots of warnings, you didn't listen to a one of them."
"So maybe I'm learning to listen better," said Don.
"Maybe but not likely," said Gladys. "But if you ain't dead when this is all over, you come see me, tell me what all happened. I can't see it except with the eyes of magic, and I want to know what it look like."
Don held out his hand, then walked around the bed to where she could reach it. They shook on it, though her hand was so puffy with fat that he could barely get a grip on it. "We got us a deal," said Gladys.
"Better than that," said Don. "We got us a friendship."
"Well, that's good news. Cause I know you a man look after his friends."
"No one does that better than you."
"Now you go and don't get killed if you can help it." She waggled her sausage fingers at him.
He tipped his imaginary hat to her. Then to Miz Evelyn and Miz Judea. "I'll let myself out," he said.
They bade him good-bye as well, and he headed back over to the Bellamy house.
It didn't take long to explain to Sylvie what he had done.
"Why did you call her?" Sylvie said. She looked miserable.
"There's nothing she can do to you now," said Don. "You don't have anything to be afraid of."
"Yes I do," she said. "She can kill you."
"Hey, you're living proof. Death isn't the worst thing in the world."
"Yes it is," she said. "You lose everything."
"You keep your memories," said Don. "In the end, that's all we have."
She held up her hands. "And our hands. And our feet. Our eyes. Our ears. The feel of things, the taste and smell of them." She smiled wanly. "I can't smell anything."
"We have what we have. If I'm still alive when you go, I'll remember you forever. That's how long I'll long for you."
"So I managed to hang on here long enough to ruin somebody else's life."
"Sylvie, you gave my life back to me." He reached for her, to kiss her.
She turned her head. "I don't want to kiss you, Don."
"Are you mad at me?"
"I don't want to kiss you and not feel it."
He looked away to hide his face from her. By habit, really, his old habit of hiding his emotions. There was nothing she hadn't seen of his emotions by now. No weakness she didn't already know.
"You need to get some sleep," said Sylvie.
"You think I can sleep?"
"You hardly got any rest last night. This morning. You're still mortal, Don. Don't you think you need to be alert when she gets here?"
"Something I got to do first."
"What?"
"Seal the gully end of that tunnel."
"What does it matter which way she gets into the house?"
"I don't want her messing around with your body." His wrecking bar wouldn't be enough. He got a big old crowbar, almost as heavy as his sledgehammer. Got the sledgehammer, too, and his skillsaw and his two longest extension cords. Sylvie came down into the basement to watch him plug in the saw and string the cords together. But he wouldn't let her come down into the tunnel with him. "The tunnel's outside the house," he said. "I don't want you to disappear on me again."
"So the little woman sits home and waits while her man goes off to war."
"Down into the mine is more like it."
"How green was my valley."
He didn't get it.
"An old movie about Welsh coal miners," she said. "Roddy McDowall was in it, back when he was cute."
"Someday you have to take me to see it," he said. They smiled at each other, even chuckled a little over the bitter impossibility of it. Then he plunged down into the dark tunnel.
The cord was long enough, with plenty to spare. There was no second corpse near the entrance. Whatever she did with Lanny's body, she didn't leave it here. The wooden ceiling came to an end right where the tunnel narrowed down to a twisting passage that showed no daylight. There must be some kind of closure outside, something that kept neighborhood children from discovering and rediscovering this tunnel all the time. Lissy would know how to find it, though, even in the dark, and open it. When she got in here she'd find things changed a little.
Don wore his goggles this time—the debris would be coming from above. He took the safety guard off the skillsaw. Now it was just a naked blade, spinning, deadly. Starting at the board nearest the entrance, he sliced through the rotting old wood pretty easily. Of course, there was no way the blade could get even halfway through the boards, so nothing fell but chunks of sawdust. Exposed to the wet ground for so long, however, there was no chance this ancient wood was dry and termite-free. The miracle was that it had lasted this long. Maybe the tunnel was a structure of its own. Gladys talked about it being a place of freedom. If it was older than the Bellamy house, that could only mean it was used for escaping slaves. Guests coming in and out, leaving happy. A place built by love. It had all the ingredients for strength, didn't it? Maybe that's why it lasted when any other such structure should have rotted away a long time ago.
It's history I'm cutting down here, thought Don. It's a place with a life of its own. I'm a builder, not a destroyer. And yet right now it's destruction that we need.
He didn't want to cut too far. When the tunnel collapsed, he didn't want it to make a sink across the lawn. He only needed to break down enough of it to stop Lissy from coming in. It wouldn't take more than a few yards of blockage to stop her completely. In the dark, she wasn't going to want to dig. She no doubt would be armed—but not with a pick and shovel.
He picked up his sledgehammer and began the arduous work of breaking up the wood overhead. He held the sledgehammer out in front of him, then launched it upward, his arms extended. His muscles weren't shaped to deliver much strength in that direction. Fortunately, the wood was as rotten as he had hoped, and most of the time the sledgehammer sank into wood and when it came away, half the railroad tie crumbled down with it. Dirt began to fall like rain. Now it was time for the crowbar. Don rammed it into the packed earth over the rotten fragments of railroad tie and pried it, tore it loose. More and more of it fell. He backed up and hammered out more wood, pried down more earth. Finally some kind of critical mass was achieved and with a whoosh and a great cloud of moist earth, the roof at the tunnel mouth collapsed completely.
The force of it made him lose his balance. He fell. He tried to scramble out of the way. More of the ceiling was collapsing. His legs were covered with dirt. For a moment he couldn't move them. Then he pulled hard with his arms and his legs came free. Another section of roof sagged, right where he had cut it. Wish I hadn't cut so far, he thought. He scrambled up the tunnel, reaching for his tools, trying to gather them up. The sledgehammer he got; the crowbar was buried and he didn't have time to get it out. He had left his worklantern on the shelf of stone just a little ways down the tunnel. He could still get it by clambering over the fallen earth just a little ways. But he decided against it. Good thing. Another two yards of roof gave way right then, and the light was gone.
He could hardly breathe in the thick wet dust. He still had the sledgehammer. And the skillsaw had to be around here, lying on the floor.
He felt the cord under his foot, followed it back. It disappeared into a pile of earth. Had he really left the saw so far down the tunnel? Forget it, leave it. It wasn't that expensive to buy another.
No, don't be stupid, he told himself. The part of the ceiling you cut has all collapsed. The saw must be just a few feet under the shallowest part of this earthfall.
He probed with the handle of the sledgehammer. Right. The saw was right there. He reached in, felt through the dirt till he got it by the handle and pulled it out.
Only now he was turned around. He swung with the sledgehammer until it rang against stone. Here's the wall. The left wall, as he headed up the tunnel. He didn't want to stay on the right side, where his feet would stumble across the mattress, across Sylvie's ruined body. He could hear snapping and creaking overhead. Was more of the tunnel going to collapse? Even where he hadn't cut the wood? This was going a little better than planned.
He finally saw the light at the top of the tunnel, just as he heard the rotten wood snapping and tearing like velcro as tons of earth collapsed into the tunnel, zipping toward him. He ran, faster, scrambling. He thought of dropping the tools, but couldn't get his fingers to let go of them, he was holding so tightly. A huge cloud of choking dust blew past him. He couldn't breathe. He staggered, fell. The crackling sound was coming toward him. He couldn't see at all now. He got partway up, crawled, stumbled, until he ran into something hard, right in his path. What could he possibly have run into?
The coal furnace. He was out of the tunnel. But he still couldn't see. The fine moist dust that had blown upward through the tunnel was hanging thick in the air in the basement. He blinked; dirt was in his eyes. They teared up, he couldn't see. Still pulling the skillsaw with him, he picked his way around the furnace, out into the open. Except the skillsaw suddenly snagged. Of course. The cord had been buried. Don grabbed the cord and pulled hard. It came free. But it was only the short cord of the saw itself that he had. The long extension cord was trapped down the tunnel.
"Don!" She was calling his name. She sounded so far away.
"I can't see," he said. "I've got dirt in my eyes."
"I'll lead you." He felt her gentle touch, tugging at his arm. She kept letting go. No. Not letting go. Her hand was sliding free. She was getting less substantial all the time. Less real.
He couldn't think of it that way. She wasn't getting less real, she was getting more free. She would let go of this house that had trapped her for so long. That was a good thing for her. It's not as if he was losing her, because he never really had her. Just the dream of her, the idea of her. It felt so real to hold her in his arms, but in the end she was always a ghost. And here, now, with his eyes closed, surrounded by darkness, he could believe that. This was reality, this choking blindness. What Sylvie was, what she meant to him, was a moment of clarity in the dark. She would be his memory of light. He could live with that.
Barely.
At last they were up the basement stairs. She led him into the bathroom. "I can't turn on the faucets anymore," she said.
"Can't you get the house to do it for you?" he said.
"Oh," she said. Then laughed. "I was getting used to being real."
He was still fumbling with the faucet when he felt it move on its own, and the water gushed out. He filled his hands again and again, splashing it on his face. Finally he could blink his eyes open without pain. His hands were filthy. He soaped them up to his elbows, then washed his face with soap. After he rinsed, as he toweled himself dry, he looked in the bathroom mirror. His hair was caked with mud. His clothing was completely covered.
"I thought you were dead down there," she said. "What was exploding?"
"No explosion," he said. "That tunnel was ready to collapse. I got it started and it didn't know when to stop."
"Well," she said. "I guess I finally got a decent burial."
He shuddered. He thought of her body lying on that mattress, now covered with broken, rotted timbers and tons of earth. Buried was buried, with or without a box. With or without a marker.
"What I need," he said, "is a shower." But when he left the bathroom, he didn't go out to the ballroom to head up the stairs to the shower. Instead he went down the basement stairs. The dirt had settled on everything. A thin skiff of it covering the whole basement, even clinging to the beams overhead. The light was dim because of moist earth spotting the bulb. He walked over to the coal furnace. Dirt spilled out from both sides like the fan at the mouth of a canyon. Behind the furnace, it was piled up as tall as he was. And daylight was visible above. The tunnel had broken down along its entire length, and what he feared had happened—there had to be a sag in the back yard right behind the house, marking where the tunnel was. If Lissy wanted to, she could sneak into the house through this gap in the foundation. But he didn't think she would. The gap wasn't all that high. She wouldn't know to look for it. If she couldn't get into the far end of the tunnel, she'd assume she had to come through the door.
The plugged-in end of the extension cord still emerged from the tunnel. He unplugged it and started to pull. At first it came easily. The earth that had fallen wasn't tightly packed, and he could straighten out the bends in the cord. It got harder as the cord straightened out and the weight of all the earth of the tunnel began to oppose him. Stubbornly he pulled and pulled. He had some vague idea that he didn't want to leave a cord like a trail, tempting someone to excavate and find Sylvie's body and disturb it. He leaned against the resistance of the cord, putting his whole weight behind it. And then suddenly it came free and he fell down on his butt, like a baby just learning to walk. It hurt his tailbone; the pain really stabbed as he got up. I'm getting old, he thought. All I need now is a broken tailbone.
The rest of the cord came out easily. He found what had given way. The second extension cord had come free. All he had pulled out was the first one. Well, that was fine. No part of the buried cord was sticking out. Nothing was left dangling.
He coiled the cord and walked up the stairs as he finished. She wasn't waiting for him at the top of the stairs. But he heard water running in the house. He gathered up the sledgehammer and the skillsaw. They were caked with dirt. He brushed them off at the back door. I could use the Weird sisters to clean my tools right now, he thought.
In the back yard, the sag of the collapsed tunnel was only visible right up against the house, where the entrance had been. The rest of the tunnel was deep enough that the sag didn't make a sharp line across the lawn.
He looked around. Could anybody see him from the nearby houses? Screw 'em if they could. He stripped off his shirt and pants and chucked them in the garbage can. There wasn't a coin laundry in America that could cope with this dirt without breaking down. His shoes, though, he could clean. He got them off and beat them against the wall of the house until they merely looked dirty instead of encrusted. His socks went into the garbage with his pants and shirt.
Even his underwear was muddy brown from dust that had got through his jeans. That stuff was in his lungs. He'd be coughing up mud for a week, he was sure. He glanced around one more time for onlookers, saw none, and stripped off his briefs and dropped them in the garbage can. Then he picked up the skillsaw, cord, and sledgehammer, and dodged inside the house. Maybe I take this neatness thing too far, he thought. I'd rather be naked for a whole minute out in front of God and everybody than leave my filthy clothes anywhere but in a closed garbage can, or set down my tools anywhere but in their proper place. He imagined the police showing up at his door with a warrant for his arrest for indecent exposure. Maybe they'd arrive just as Lissy got there with her gun.
Lissy. If he had harbored any ambition of getting her arrested, it had sure faded now. His best evidence was now lying under tons of dirt in a tunnel. He could see the police excavating with pick and shovel, tearing apart Sylvie's body in the act of discovering it. No, whatever happened with Lissy would be private. Just between the three of them.
Don put the saw and cord and sledgehammer where they belonged, then rummaged for some clean clothes. He could hear the water running. He knew it was Sylvie starting the shower for him. Man, was he ready. He felt his skin crackle as the clay dust dried all over him.
Holding his clothes, he turned around to head for the stairs, and there was Sylvie, watching him. Instinctively he brought his clothes down to cover his crotch. "Um, sorry," he said.
"I've seen you naked before," she said.
He raised his eyebrows.
"I watched you all the time," she said. "You were the only interesting thing going on in the house, Don. You can hardly blame me."
He wondered how she watched him. With her own eyes, or somehow using the house to see for her? He didn't understand how this thing worked with a house and the spirit that haunted it. It responded to her, did things that she wanted without her even knowing she wanted them. It watched whatever she wanted to see.
"Well fine," he said. "You've seen me naked, I've seen you dead. We got no secrets."
She laughed.
He jogged up the stairs. His tailbone still hurt and his muscles were sore from all his exertion of the past few days. Hard work was a good thing but he hadn't been giving his body enough rest. He set his clothes on the lid of the nonfunctional toilet and stepped into the shower. It took three soapings before the water finally rinsed away clear. He must have been carrying ten pounds of dirt, from the thick mud that formed in the bottom of the tub. He washed it all down the drain and soaped and rinsed himself a fourth time before he opened the shower curtain to find Sylvie leaning nonchalantly against the door, watching him. He grinned and shook his head, reached for his towel, and dried himself. "They got laws against peeping, you know," he said.
"I don't peep," she said. "I stare."
"That's all right then. As long as you don't point and laugh."
He pulled on his clothes. He tried not to look at her too much, because if he did, he'd see how he could kind of make out the door behind her, right through her. She was fading way too fast.
Sylvie, of course, didn't try to avoid the question. "What if I'm not here when she arrives?"
"That would be a bummer," said Don. "Let's hope she drives fast."
"Believe in me, Don," she said. "Keep me here."
"I have something better than belief," he said. "I know you. I love you."
"Well what do you think belief is?"
In the doorway he bent to kiss her. He could feel her, yes, but only faintly. Like the memory of a kiss. Like a gentle breeze. He started to cry again. "Damn," he said. "Damn, I'm not the crying kind of guy."
She touched his cheek. "I can still feel your tears," she said.
"I feel like this is just one sadness too many, Sylvie. I don't know. I don't know."
"You'll be fine."
"I don't know."
"You've got to sleep now," she said.
"Sleep? You think I'm going to waste any of the time we have together?"
"She's coming, Don. And you're so tired right now you can hardly stand up. Look at you, stooped over like an old man. What good will you be to me or yourself if you're falling down from exhaustion?"
"What if you're gone when I wake up?"
"I won't be gone, Don. Even if I've faded, I'll still be here. In the house. I'll still be here."
"She has to see you, Sylvie. She has to face you."
"I'll hold on. I'm stronger than you think. I've got the strength of the house to hold me here, don't I? And your strength to keep me real. But for now you've got to sleep."
She was right and he knew it. He nodded, unhappy about it, and started for the stairs.
"No, not down there," she said. "You can't sleep down there. What if she sneaks up in the dark before either of us knows she's there, and shoots you through the window?"
"Didn't think of that."
"This isn't TV," she said. "Bad guys don't really stand there and confess everything so there's time for the good guys to get there and rescue you. They just shoot and down you go and they're out of there."
"I don't know, even bad guys like to have somebody hear their story."
"We'll find out tonight, won't we. Here, sleep on my bed. In this beautiful room you made for me."
"I didn't know it was for you till it was done."
"I didn't know you loved me until you gave it to me."
Her bedding had gone unwashed for ten years, but it felt clean enough as he lay down atop the bedspread. Whatever was hers was clean enough for him. Or maybe it really was clean. Like her faded dress. Maybe the house had the power to do that, too. All that was missing was flower petals to mark her passage through the house.
With all his aches and pains, with the evening light still coming in through the windows, he thought it would take him forever to get to sleep, or that perhaps he might not sleep at all. But within a few minutes he felt himself fading. For a moment he thought: Is this how it feels to her? To fade like this? But he knew it was the opposite. His body was heavy and real; it was his consciousness that was fading. Her consciousness would stay, locked up in this house until he tore it down and set her free. And that's what he'd do. He'd have ten, twenty thousand left, maybe a little more, after paying the demolition crew. That was enough for a down payment. He'd work his way up to cash purchases again. He'd done it before. His life wasn't over. It only felt that way.
She was still there, sitting on the floor, her back against the wall. "Sylvie," he whispered.
"Aren't you asleep yet?"
"Almost," he said. "Promise me you'll wake me when she comes. Don't try to face her alone."
"I promise," she said. "I've been alone long enough. The house kept trying to draw me in, make me part of the walls, the timbers. I never did. I knew I had to stay separate. Myself. I was waiting."
"For Lissy to come back?"
"No. For you."
She crawled the yard or so to the bed and leaned on it with her face just inches from his. "When Lissy was around, men always ignored me and fell for her."
"I'm smarter than those guys," he said.
And then he slept.
Sylvie watched him for a while, but then she began to wander through the house. As she was fading, she felt the pull of the house on her growing stronger. She could already feel her footsteps as strongly from underneath as from above; she felt through the floor as much as through her own feet.
For ten years she hadn't let herself want anything. Not sunlight, not food, not love, not life. Nothing. She hadn't known she was dead, but at the same time she knew she felt that way. Only when she stopped being dead, only these few weeks with Don Lark in the house did she understand how dead she had been. Lost in her guilt, her shame, her pain, her losses. Now that she had learned again to love and hope, now that she was no longer ashamed or guilty, of course it was that very joy that was killing her again. Whoever set up this universe, she thought, it really sucks. If you ever get around to making another one, change the rules a little. Lighten up on your creatures. Give us a break now and then.
She walked the house, feeling like a ghost now for the first time. She could sense the house responding to her. Windows rattling as she passed. Boards creaking because she wanted them to. Doors opening, closing. She walked among Don's tools as if they were a field of butterflies; they rose up and flew out of her way as she walked among them, then settled back down, right where they had been, when she was gone. The flue opened and wind blew up the chimney because she wanted to exhale. She could feel her own heartbeat throbbing in the walls. This house was strong now. Don had made it strong. So now when she faded into the house there would be real power in it. She would own this house.
Please tear it down, Don. Please don't leave me trapped here, with timbers for a skeleton and lath-and-plaster skin. Windows are not eyes. This alcove is beautiful, but it's not my heart, not my heart.
The sky grew dark outside. The nearly leafless trees whistled in the gathering wind. Cold front coming through—she felt the temperature dropping through the contraction of the clapboard of the house. It would rain, it would blow; the last leaves would be stripped from the trees. Rain would probably pour down into the house through the sag in the lawn, the new opening in the basement. Mud would spread across the basement floor. The beginning of death. She could feel it like a wound. Not serious yet, but it would be infected. Left untended, it would kill the house. She wouldn't let Don fix it. She wouldn't.
And yet she felt the house's need for it to be repaired, felt it like a deep hunger, like thirst, like a full bladder, those strong desires. When she was fully swallowed up by the house, would she have the strength to tell him not to repair it? Or would the house's hungers become her own, the way most people were never able to distinguish between their bodies' hungers and their own. As if their body were their self. They tore their lives apart, all for the sake of giving their body what it wanted, thinking all the time that it was what they wanted. Then they looked at the wreckage of their lives and wondered what had seemed so important about getting laid right then by that person; they lay in the hospital tubed up and dying, wondering what it was about each new cigarette that had made it seem so much more important than life itself. It takes death to wake you up, she thought. And then it's too late. And when I'm caught up in the house, will I remember what I learned? Not likely. I'll be mortal again, and die when the house dies, never remembering that its desires were never my own. My love for Don will be a distant memory. And he'll forget me, too.
No. Not so. Never. You don't forget this, any more than Don could forget his daughter. He'll remember me. And I'll feel it. I'll know that I was known, that I am known. That someone holds me in his heart.
If she could have wept, she would have. Instead she let the rain cry for her, streaking down the side of the house, faster and faster. She let the wind sob for her, throbbing against the house, gust after gust.
And all the time she watched. Watched Don sleeping. Watched the street outside.
Midnight. A Saturn drove slowly by. She noticed it. When it passed, she almost let it go.
But it parked just up the block. Just the other side of the gully. A woman got out. A dim shape in the rain. Years had passed, but Sylvie knew the walk. It was Lissy. She had come.
She walked across the bridge over the gully. Looked both ways. No witnesses? If she only knew. She climbed the low fence. Went down the muddy slope. Sylvie lost track of her, but it didn't matter. She wouldn't get into the house that way.
Sure enough, ten minutes later, the rain falling much harder now, a cold rain, the woman came up out of the gully, bedraggled and muddy, her feet sliding. Still holding that purse, clutching that purse. That's where the gun was, Sylvie knew that.
Sylvie glided up the stairs to where Don slept. How many hours had he slept already? He was so tired. She hated to wake him, but she had promised.
"Don," she said. "Don, she's here."
But he didn't hear her. Didn't stir.
Was he that sleepy? She reached out to shake him, but her hand disappeared into his body. For a moment she felt his heart beating, then snatched her hand away. She couldn't shake him. "Don," she said, frightened. But this time when she spoke, she realized that her own voice was very faint now, almost lost against the sound of the wind outside the house, the rain against the windows and walls. "Don!" she shouted, screamed. But he only rolled over, probably putting her voice into his dream.
All right then. What could she do? She had tried to keep her promise. But it was better this way, she had known that ever since he told her Lissy was coming. This was between her and her old roommate. Don was the catalyst, but not the cause and not the solution. She'd deal with it. She had voice and substance enough left for that. Didn't she?
She flitted to the mirror in the bathroom. She could see the wall behind her, yes, but she was still there, still visible.
Down the stairs just as Lissy reached the front door. Lissy rattled the doorknob. Sylvie went around the corner to the alcove. Then she caused the house to unlock the door. To open it. It creaked open because she wanted it to creak. Let's do the whole haunted house bit, she thought. Let's give Lissy the whole ride.
Lissy came in with her hand inside her purse. Holding the gun, of course. Not a light was on in the house, but the streetlight was no longer obstructed by the leaves of the trees, and the rain did little to block the light. So Lissy could see, but not well, and the shadows were deep and black.
Sylvie watched as Lissy crept through the south apartment first, checking each room. No one there, of course, just Don's tools all assembled in the parlor, where he had put them while he opened up the ballroom. Five minutes, and then she was back at the entryway, looking up the stairs.
I don't want you to go up there, thought Sylvie.
So she made the worklight in the ballroom switch on, all by itself.
At once Lissy came into the room, her gun out of the purse now, naked, exposed. There was murder in her face. But she didn't see Sylvie in the shadowy alcove. Her gaze was taken by the hugeness of the ballroom. She walked out into the middle, looking around her in awe. She had never guessed that there was a space like this hidden in their cramped apartment.
Sylvie spoke aloud. She felt like she was shouting, but she had to make sure Lissy could hear her over the noise of the storm outside. "Not quite like you remember, is it?"
At once Lissy whirled and fired the gun without even looking to see who it was, or whether she was armed. Still a murderer, aren't you, Lissy.
The bullet passed through Sylvie and lodged in the wood behind her. She felt it with her sense of the house, and there was a vague sense of heat in her own shadow-body as the bullet passed through, but that was all. Sylvie laughed at the futility of Lissy's weapon and rose to her feet, stepping out into the light.
"Ouch," Sylvie said.
Oh, it was sweet to see Lissy's eyes grow wide. To see her back away, holding the gun in front of her like a cross to ward away a vampire in an old horror movie. Fear, that's what Sylvie saw in Lissy's eyes. Fear and—could it be?—shame. Guilt? Could she still feel guilt? What was the recipe that would trap her here?
"Sylvie," said Lissy.
"Oh, but I thought that was your name now," said Sylvie. "I thought that's the name you were going by, there in Providence."
"The man who called me," said Lissy. "Where is he?"
"Your appointment was always with me," said Sylvie. She walked closer to Lissy. She remembered that she wasn't supposed to touch Lissy, but she wasn't even close yet. And Lissy's confusion was delicious. Lissy had never been confused. Always so sure of herself. Finally here was something she didn't know how to handle.
"Get away from me," Lissy said, panicking.
Now the gun wasn't a talisman. It became a gun again. She fired. Again, again. Sylvie felt the bullets pass right through the center of her chest.
"Good aim," said Sylvie. "But too late. You already killed me as dead as I'll ever get." But that wasn't quite true. Soon Sylvie would be even deader. Well, she wouldn't give Lissy the satisfaction of knowing that.
"I didn't mean to kill you," said Lissy.
"Sure, I know," said Sylvie in her most understanding voice. "You accidentally fell on my throat and accidentally squeezed it till I stopped kicking and clutching at you and then you accidentally kept squeezing until I was dead. These things happen."
"You hit me first!" cried Lissy. "With a rock!"
"But I didn't kill you, did I."
"So I was better at it than you were," said Lissy. "I was always better at everything."
There it was, the old Lissy. Angry Lissy, tearing at Sylvie, making her question her own ability. But Sylvie knew better now, knew how Lissy was a parasite who sucked her life from the people around her.
"How long did my job in Providence last?" said Sylvie. "I bet it didn't take them long to learn that you just couldn't cut it. You just didn't seem to be the same person who wrote that dissertation."
"Who needs a job like that?" said Lissy. "That was just to get me started anyway. I couldn't live on a pissant salary like that anyway. That was only enough money for the mousy kind of life you lived."
Lissy was moving toward the back of the ballroom, looking through the door to see if anyone was there. Fearing a trap, because she would have laid a trap.
Well, there was no trap. But she also wasn't going to get out that way. Just as Lissy broke and ran for the kitchen door, Sylvie reached through the house and slammed it right in Lissy's face. Lissy screeched and fell against the door, then whirled around and fired the gun again. This time it was wild. It entered the ceiling where the chandelier used to hang.
Sylvie felt his footfalls on the floor above her before she could hear the sound. Don was awake. The gunshots had done what her faint voice couldn't do. And now he was going to run down the stairs, straight into Lissy's gun.
"There he is!" cried Lissy.
"This is between you and me," said Sylvie.
Lissy ignored her and ran the length of the ballroom, toward the entryway, toward the passage to the stairway. This was not going to happen. Sylvie flew to the passageway between ballroom and entry and spun around several times in her fury, trying to make enough of a show to frighten Lissy, to make her back off.
"You've done your last murder, Lissy!" she cried.
"I'm Sylvie now! Me!" Lissy answered. She sounded contemptuous, but Sylvie could see she was also afraid. "Get out of my way."
"I'm not moving," said Sylvie. "I'm in your face forever."
Sylvie could see how Lissy steeled herself, put on a mask of bravado to hide her fear. "You don't have to move. You're nothing. I can walk right through you."
Sylvie backed up as Lissy took a step toward her, holding up a hand to ward Lissy off. Lissy lashed out with her left hand, the one not holding the gun, to slap Sylvie's hand away.
She should have seen it coming, should have dodged out of the way. She knew she wasn't supposed to let Lissy touch her. But the moment the hand touched her, it didn't feel like someone else's hand. It felt like her own hand. Her own self. The room spun insanely, and then everything was changed. She was looking out of eyes again, real eyes. Eyes that blinked, that went wide with panic.
But there was something suffocating her. Something interfering with her heartbeat. Something inside her body with her that had no right to be there, that was trying to control her, screaming at her even though it made no sound because Sylvie had control of the lungs, the throat, the tongue, the lips, the teeth.
This is my body. Sylvie felt it, knew it deep down. And the body knew it, too. Sylvie Delaney, that was this body's name, that was who this woman was. The other was a stranger, with another name, belonging in another place. The whole soul named Sylvie Delaney rejected the interloper. And without saying it, without even meaning to do it at any conscious level, Sylvie screamed silently back at the intruder: Get out! And gave a little push.
A little push at some level that she could not understand or feel with the flesh, a little push and suddenly she was alone in this body, this delicious living breathing flesh, this skin, this muscle, these organs, this beating heart. These hands holding a gun, this face with sweat dripping down, this hair tangled around her face, her neck. These clothes binding, pulling, sliding across her skin as she moved. This life, this reborn life.
Don heard the first gunshot, but it was part of his dream. The next three were also in his dream, but they woke him. His eyes opened and he listened but didn't hear anything. And then he did. Voices downstairs. Running feet. A slamming door. Another gunshot. He was off the bed and running along the floor. He heard the voices more clearly now. Someone was running across the ballroom floor. And he thought: She has a gun. What am I going to do, run down the stairs and die?
He ran as lightly as he could down the stairs, knowing that he was heard, but what could he do about that? He could hear their conversation. "I'm not moving," Sylvie was saying. He ducked around the corner into the south parlor, where his tools were. He could have used the big crowbar now as a weapon. "I'm in your face forever," Sylvie said.
The smaller wrecking bar he used for tearing out drywall and lath and plaster would have to do. Truth was, neither tool would be worth much against a gun, but it was his only chance. If she came close without seeing him, he could maybe get in a blow before the gun came into play. The right blow, and the gun would never fire again.
He came back around the corner, tiptoed as rapidly as he could across the entryway, peered around the corner into the ballroom. Sylvie was standing with her back to him, blocking Lissy's path. Lissy gun in hand, gathered herself up, covering her fear with a mask of contempt. Don had time to notice how much alike they looked, and yet how different. How jaded and world-weary Lissy looked, compared to the fresh beauty, the untainted grace of Sylvie's spirit.
"You don't have to move," Lissy said. "You're nothing. I can walk right through you."
She took a step toward Sylvie, who backed away, raising a hand to ward her off. Lissy lashed out with her left hand.
"No!" Don cried.
The hands touched. And to his horror, Sylvie lurched toward Lissy, then suddenly spun around in the air like a kite out of control in a storm, and then was sucked into Lissy's body.
"No!" Don screamed. She was trapped in the body of that murderous bitch and it was his fault, he had brought her here. Don lunged toward Lissy as the woman's face contorted, twisted with—pain? Confusion? She looked toward him but didn't seem to see him. The gun hung by the trigger guard from her hand. She was slackjawed, stupid, empty-faced. Don reached out to take away the gun.
Suddenly Lissy's body stiffened and she moaned, a long moan, rising in pitch, rising to a screech. And when it seemed she couldn't possibly scream any higher or louder, something leapt out of her body, flew up. For a moment it hung in the air, spread-eagled. It was Lissy again, a copy of her, a shadow of her, wearing only a t-shirt. She looked younger. Not like the body that had been called Sylvie for all these years. It was the spirit of the Lissy who murdered Sylvie that night more than ten years ago, now suspended in the air in the midst of the ballroom.
Meanwhile, Lissy's body came to life. The eyes opened. Looked at him. The gun clattered to the floor. The hands reached up to touch the face. The tongue flickered out to lick the lips. And the face changed. Came to life in a different way. No longer weary-looking, no longer cynical and angry. Those lines were still there, but the expression belied them. It was a face filled with wonder. With joy. "Don," she said. "It's me."
If Lissy's spirit had been flung out of the body, if it now hung in the air drifting toward the exact center of the ballroom, then who else could be in Lissy's body?
"Don, don't you know me?"
Of course he knew her. "Sylvie," he said.
The face smiled. And in that moment it was no longer Lissy's face. Oh, it was, by the superficial markers of a face, the bone structure, the lips, the eyebrows, the cheeks, the brow, the chin. The nose longer and narrower than Sylvie's had been, the eyelashes heavy with makeup where Sylvie had not had any such artifice. But the expression of the face, the way the mouth moved, the way the eyes sparkled when she looked at him—it was Sylvie's face that looked at him. Sylvie, in the flesh, in living, breathing flesh. In a body that knew it belonged to her. Sylvie alive. Sylvie whole.
He stepped toward her, reached for her. "Of course I know you," he said. He took her hand. He gathered her into an embrace. Not light now, not inhumanly light; she had the weight and mass of a real woman, the softness of flesh yielding against him as he held her. The breath warm on his chest. "Sylvie," he said.
"Did you know?" she said. "Did you know it would end this way?"
At that moment the spirit hanging in the air began to scream in terror. They parted, turned, looked up to see what was happening.
"I guess it hasn't ended yet," said Don.
The spirit was twisting in the air, turning over and over. But there was nothing simple about the movement. Parts of her were turning faster than other parts. She was being stretched, pulled, drawn out like elastic. Like a victim on the rack. Finally one hand flung itself out and smacked against the ceiling of the room, the arm drawn long and thin like an elastic, and so transparent it was a mere shimmering in the air. A foot leapt to the far wall, another hand to the floor, the other foot to the front wall of the house. The head spun, then leapt to the bearing wall.
What was left in the middle of the air lost all shape. It grew like a balloon, thinning as it grew, till it was nothing but the shining of a bubble, iridescent as it filled the room. Don felt it pass over him, through him, a cold feeling that chilled him to the bone. And then the shimmering reached the walls of the ballroom, the ceiling, the floor. The room glowed for a second or two, no longer. And then everything was back to-normal.
"She's gone," he said.
"No she's not," said Sylvie. "The house took her."
"Then she's gone," he repeated.
"No," said Sylvie. "I can't feel the house anymore. This is my only body now. Lissy's got the house."
They could hear it start, far up in the attic. Doors slamming. Windows rising and falling, rattling. The second floor now, the slamming, the rattling. The water turned on. The toilet flushed.
And now the room they were in. A window was flung up by invisible hands. Wind and rain sprayed into the room. The kitchen door opened, slammed, opened, slammed. Under their feet the floor buckled, a wave of it rippling across until it passed under their feet, knocking them down. Sylvie clutched at him; they held on to each other, helping each other as they struggled to their knees, tried to stand.
The vast expanse of the bearing wall beyond the alcove began to shudder, forming a new shape. The shape of a face. Lissy's face, huge, like a bas-relief made of lath and plaster. The mouth moved. They could hear the voice like the sound of a bass drum talking. "That's my body!" moaned the face on the wall.
They were so enthralled in watching the wall that it was only out of the corner of his eye that Don caught the movement at the entryway. It was his favorite hammer, flying through the air straight toward Sylvie. Don leapt up only just in time; the hammer struck his back, between the shoulder blades. The force of the blow was vicious, knocking him down to the floor, entangling Sylvie and bringing her down, too. Just as well, for the wrecking bar flew just over them as they fell.
"Are you all right?" Sylvie cried out to him.
"Get out of the house, Sylvie!" he shouted.
"I can't leave you to face her alone—"
"It's you she wants! Get out!"
He got up, looking around desperately for any more flying objects as he helped her to her feet. Stooped over, he half-dragged her toward the entry. The pain between his shoulders was excruciating. Bruised ribs? Or broken ones? Or a bloody wound? No time to worry about that now.
In the passage to the entryway, Don could see into the south parlor, where his tools were sliding and sliding in concentric circles on the floor. In the middle was the workbench. As he stood in the passage, the circles stopped moving, except where they cleared a path leading straight to where Don and Sylvie stood. The workbench began to slide, then hurtle toward them.
"Get out!" Don screamed as he ran toward the workbench.
It hit him at hip level, flipping him over it. But he caught it as he fell, held on to the leg of it, so it had to drag him, so it slowed down as it continued relentlessly toward Sylvie.
Sylvie was fumbling with the doorknob. "It won't open, it won't open!" she cried.
Don got enough of a purchase on the floor to get some leverage. He lifted upward on the leg of the workbench and it tipped and fell on its side. As if the house knew at once that it was no longer half so useful as a weapon, the bench stopped moving and lay there, inert.
Don started toward Sylvie to help her with the door, when he saw the wood of the door below the handle start to deform, to extrude. "Get away from the door!" he shouted, but almost before he was through saying it, and long before Sylvie could possibly have reacted, the extrusion became a human hand made of splintering wood, and it seized Sylvie's wrist and held her.
Sylvie screamed and tried to pull her hand away. To get leverage, she leaned her back against the wall beside the door. Another hand pushed out of the plaster and wrapped itself around her other arm, gripped it. Hands took her ankles, hands made of plaster, hands made of floorboard. And then a pair of hands at her throat.
"Don!" she cried, her eyes filling with panic.
It was going to happen again. Lissy was going to kill her again.
He stood up and screamed at the house. "How stupid are you? If you kill her then you won't have that body, either!"
At once the window in the door deformed and became Lissy's face in rippling glass. The mouth opened and the voice was high and sharp like the tinkling of crystal. "If I can't have it, nobody can."
Another face formed in the floor, the mouth gaping wide, the throat dark and deep. The voice thrummed deeply. "That body is Lissy, Lissy, not Sylvie. Call it Lissy."
"Don't say her name!" Don cried out. "Don't say it, Sylvie! Don't let her have that body back."
She looked at him with frightened eyes.
He didn't bother trying to pry away the hands that held her. He knew that his bare strength wouldn't have the power to get her free. It would take weapons, and instead of attacking these new-made hands at the door he would break this creature's back.
He searched the disarray of his tools for the skillsaw and the extension cord. Found. He plugged the extension cord into the wall, the skill-saw into the extension cord, and then pulled the trigger. It whined into life, the bare blade spitting off dirt from yesterday in the tunnel. The great timbers of the bearing wall still stood partly exposed, and he bit the skillsaw into the first one, making a cut all the way around it like a lumberman girdling a tree.
The glass Lissy-face in the doorway screamed. The wooden one in the floorboards buckled and deformed. What had once been the brow of that face now became a ripple in the floor, then a pair of hands that reached up and fumbled with the junction of the power cord and extension cord. Don was just starting on the second timber when the cords came apart and the skillsaw died.
One timber was cut. That was something. If he could find his sledgehammer he could break it apart. That would start the weakening of the house, wouldn't it?
There was no time, no time to be searching for tools. Sylvie was dying there, pinned like a bug against the wall. He had to paralyze this house, break its back. Kill it and kill Lissy along with it.
He caught the movement in time to fling up his hand. The point of a mortaring trowel pierced his palm. The pain shot through him and he stumbled, nearly fell from the shock of it. But he was too angry now, too frightened to let pain stop him. He took the trowel by the handle and pulled it out. This moved the pain to a new level, and he almost fainted with it as the blood flowed. He had to stop this house before he lost too much blood or he'd end up watching Sylvie strangle to death as the last life fled his own body. Where was the sledgehammer?
It flew through the air straight for his head. He caught it, spinning with the force of it as he did. "Thanks!" he shouted triumphantly. She had put his best weapon in his hands herself.
"I've got to let her have the body back, Don!" cried Sylvie. The hands had loosened around her throat enough to let her speak. "She's going to kill you!"
In answer, he swung the sledgehammer and struck the timber above the cut. It shuddered, but it did not break.
Sylvie screamed. He turned just enough to see the nails rising up like a swarm of bees from their brown sacks, eight-penny nails, ten-penny, twelve-penny. Every one of them an arrow aimed at him. He turned his back on them and swung the hammer again. The hammer struck just as the nails began stinging, stabbing at his back. His neck, his scalp, his arms, all up and down his legs. A hundred bee stings. He groaned, partly from the pain of it, but more because again the timber didn't break free. As he twisted his body to swing yet a third time, he could feel the nails popping out of his muscles, or snagging them, tearing him inside. It wasn't going to stop him. He wasn't going to stand by and let her die just because he was in pain. He swung with all his strength, perhaps with more than his strength. And this time the timber tore apart at the cut. Above the split, the post was dislodged almost completely free of the bottom part; only an edge of the upper part still rested there. A fourth swing as the face in the glass cried out, "No, you're hurting me, you're hurting me!"
He struck the post and it came entirely free. At once a great creaking sound came from the ceiling. The post that had been holding up the second story and the roof was now a weight pulling them down. The house writhed with the injury.
Don looked over at Sylvie. She was struggling to get free. The hands still held her, but were they perhaps a little bit weaker? The hands at her throat seemed no longer to be trying to strangle her. No—it was worse. They had hold of her head now. Twisting. Lissy was trying to use the strength of the house to break Sylvie's neck.
"Don," Sylvie cried. "If I go back into the house she'll leave it, she'll go into the body. You have to be the first to get the gun!"
"Don't do it!" he screamed at her. "Don't let go of that body! Don't go into the house! I can do this!"
He meant it when he said it, but he had no idea how.
Gladys watched with her eyes closed, feeling more than seeing what was happening. Judea and Evelyn could look out the window all they wanted—there was little to see that way. It was Gladys who could sense what was happening. How the spirit of the murderer had taken possession of the house. Fortunately it was still distracted, trying to destroy Don and either get the girl's body back or, failing that, to kill it. But if it once succeeded in doing that, it would turn its attention again to them. To their old bodies, in thrall to the house. Gladys wouldn't have the strength to fight it off anymore, not if it were ruled by such malevolence.
So when the floor rose up and tore apart the power cord, Gladys moaned in despair.
But despair never lasted long. There were things she could do to help. "Quick," she cried out. "Get me that extension cord!"
Evelyn and Judea looked at her blankly.
"From the TV! The extension cord!" The TV had been her lifeline to the outside world. The girls never watched it—it just made them sad. But Gladys had it on a lot, a background to her life, to her struggles with the house. There was only one outlet in this old room, electrified before modern codes. To get the TV across from her, they had had to run an extension cord from the outlet beside her bed.
Judea got it free of the wall and handed that end to her. "Both ends," Gladys said. And in a moment Evelyn had the end from the television plug. Gladys took the male end in her left hand, the female in her right, and tried to put them together. It was like pushing together the north poles of two magnets. They dodged, refused.
Of course they did. Because the spell she was casting linked the extension cord to the skillsaw cord in the house. And the house could feel it, and was fighting her. It was a hard spell in any circumstance. But she had to do it.
"Help me," she said. "Hold my arms. Push. Help me get these together."
They did their best, but it wasn't until Don managed to break open the first timber that the house weakened enough or got distracted enough that they could do it. Gladys felt the plugs touch. She guided them, carefully, forced them with all her strength, all their combined strength, until the prongs slid into the receptacle.
In the parlor, Don held the skillsaw but couldn't get the cord to hold still long enough to grab the power end. It was like a snake, dodging, dodging. And then, suddenly, sparks leapt from the extension cord on the floor, arcing like a welder, blinding him for a moment. The extension cord and the skillsaw power cord still didn't touch, were yards apart, in fact, but the power sparked through the air to join them. A current flowed, dazzling white and blue in the air. Don's finger found the trigger of the saw and it whined into life. He wasted no time, no matter what the house flung at him. He made his cuts, post after post. Of course only the posts in this room were exposed, but that had to be enough. Cutting these down had to be enough.
The house's strength was growing feebler all the time. What it threw at him struck with less and less force. He glanced over to see that Sylvie still hung in the house's grip, but it was no longer trying to break her neck or strangle her. It only held her, held on to her.
"Please," moaned the face in the glass. "I didn't mean anything by it. I didn't mean to do anything bad." Don had no pity. He knew what Lissy was and what had to happen to her now. He hefted the sledgehammer and began striking the cut timbers. It took three blows with the first one, but after that the house was weak enough that a single blow broke each timber apart. The whole second floor sagged. The house's back had been broken.
The glass face rippled, thinned, then collapsed back into the original flat surface. Only a shadow of it remained. Only the whisper of a voice.
"Don't kill the house, Sylvie," said the face. "It loves you."
The ceiling above them, pulled downward by the weight of the timbers, bowed more and more; plaster in the ceiling cracked. Plaster dust and fragments began to fall, more of them, faster and thicker. As the house weakened, its power to heal itself, to hold itself together faded and its age began to tell on it. Don cared only for Sylvie, still held by plaster hands, wooden hands. They didn't let go but they didn't grip her tightly, either. They were dead. The house had lost the power to extrude them, but along with it had also lost the power to draw them in. Don used the sledgehammer, aiming carefully so as not to break Sylvie's bones. He struck once, again, again. The plaster hands shattered into dust. The wooden ones broke off in splinters at the wrists. Nothing held her. She was free.
Behind them, the stairway itself, no longer anchored to anything on one side, groaned, sagged, lurched downward. Sylvie looked at it, looked up at the cracking ceiling above her as Don fumbled with the deadbolt. The key was gone from the lock. He had one in his pocket, but he wasn't going to look for it. "Out of the way," he said to Sylvie. She moved behind him as he swung the sledgehammer one last time, knocking the deadbolt clear out of the door. The door itself rebounded from the blow, falling open. Don grabbed Sylvie by the wrist and half-dragged her out onto the porch. It buckled and sagged under the weight of them. He bounded down the steps, then held out his arms and she jumped to him, he caught her and staggered back, turning around and around, out on the lawn in the rain, in the wind, free of the house. He held her in his arms, dancing again, only this time no dream of old waltzes, now it was real and cold and wet and the woman in his arms was alive and crying and laughing for joy.
He stopped. He kissed her. Her lips were wet with rain, but her mouth was warm, and she held him, not lightly, but with tight, eager arms.
A voice came from across the yard. "Pardon me, but don't you two have sense enough to come in out of the rain?"
They looked over at Miz Evelyn standing behind the picket fence, holding an umbrella. Even by the light of the streetlamp she looked stronger than yesterday. Invigorated.
"We did it, Miz Evelyn," he said. "We put things back to rights."
"House is weaker now but it ain't dead."
"It will be soon," he said. "And we're alive."
"Just barely! Look at you, bleeding like a stuck pig."
It was true. Blood was still seeping from the wound in his hand. Now that he thought about it, now that the adrenaline was wearing off, he hurt all over.
"Oh," cried Sylvie softly. "There are nails still in your head. Turn around."
"Get over here," said Miz Evelyn. "I can help." As they walked around the picket fence and into the carriagehouse yard, Miz Judea came out onto the porch and waved them over. "Get on up here out of the rain," she said. "Come on, I've got what you need." Steam rose from a pitcher. She held a basket full of bandages and ointments. Some of them looked like the FDA had never certified them, but he figured Gladys knew things that the FDA never heard of, so there on the porch he stood while they pulled nails out of his legs and backside.
"Somebody nailed you good," said Miz Judea. Then she cackled with such mirth, you'd think she hadn't laughed for years.
As soon as he could, he sat on the porch swing and let them strip off his shirt and start anointing his wounds with foul-smelling salves that stung and then felt good. The old ladies introduced themselves to Sylvie and Sylvie smiled and introduced herself back again. Don just sat and watched, deeply weary but also satisfied.
"So you're the haint that's been living in that house all these years," said Miz Evelyn.
Sylvie reached up and touched her own cheek. "Not anymore, though," she said.
"I told Miz Judy here, I said if anyone can put things to rights, it's that boy Don Lark."
"Said no such thing," said Miz Judea. "You just said nobody could ever put things to rights."
"The memory is the first thing to go," said Miz Evelyn.
They watched as a man in sweats carrying an umbrella padded across the street to them. "What's going on in that old house there?" he demanded. "I thought I heard such a crash. And a woman screaming."
"That was us, I'm afraid," said Don. "I'm the one who's been renovating it. It wasn't as sturdy as it looked. A main load-bearing wall collapsed."
"That house ought to be condemned."
"You're telling me," said Don. "I'm not spending another night under that roof. I'll have a wrecking crew out here to tear it down first thing tomorrow."
"Wait till after eight in the morning, would you?" said the neighbor.
"Count on it," said Don.
"Can I give you some coffee?" said Miz Judea.
"No thanks, ma'am," said the neighbor. "I don't want to be awake."
"They barely escaped with their lives," said Miz Evelyn.
"Yeah, well, nobody was hurt, right?"
"All of us are fine," said Don. And, in fact, with Gladys's salves going onto his body and Sylvie there in the flesh before him, it was true.
The neighbor trotted back across the street.
"I think the rain is letting up a little," said Miz Evelyn.
"I love the rain," said Sylvie.
"You'll love the sun, too, come morning," said Miz Judea. "Now let's get this poor boy inside and in to a bed. I'm afraid he's going to have to buy himself some new clothes. Everything he's got is either in that house or full of holes and covered with blood."
"I guess I can go shopping for him in the morning," said Sylvie. Then she burst into tears. "Oh, Don," she said. "I can go shopping. I can go out."
In answer he held her hand, and with the old ladies fussing around them, they went inside.
A week later, the demolition was complete. Don never went into the house again. He was afraid that some shadow of Lissy would remain alive in there. He didn't want to hear her voice again. Didn't want to walk into her lair where she and the house might have one last trick up their sleeves. So his tools were a dead loss. The only things he might have missed were his pictures of Nellie, but those were in the photo album in the glove compartment of his truck. So he could lose the rest.
As the house came down, the old ladies brightened and strengthened and began taking walks around the neighborhood. Sylvie got a locksmith to make her a new key for the Saturn, and after Don cleared out every reminder of its previous owner, she began driving everywhere, taking Miz Evelyn and Miz Judea with her. The three of them were soon as thick as thieves. Leaving Don with Gladys in that upstairs room.
With new tools he carefully dismantled the doorway of her room and laid boards and carpet down the stairway to convert it into a long, slow slide. He opened the front door, cutting away part of the wall, and made ramps out onto the porch and down to the lawn. A parade of doctors came to examine her, to judge whether she could make the move. Arrangements were made with a sanitarium, and they rented a truck to move her.
On the day the demolition was complete, everything hauled away, and the foundation hole filled in, Gladys was hoisted from her bed and, with the help of four men from the sanitarium, she passed through the widened doorway of her room and slid very, very slowly down the carpeted slide. On the main floor they harnessed and winched her up onto three gurneys strapped together and rolled her out through the gap in the front wall of the house to the street, where the truck waited.
"We going to the fat farm!" she cried when she saw the truck. "Inside this body be fourteen skinny women dying to get out!"
"Just do whatever the doctors tell you," Miz Judea said.
"We'll visit every day," said Miz Evelyn.
"No you won't," said Gladys. "That get boring for you, and tell the truth I could use a little vacation from looking at you two every day. Of course I mean that nice as can be."
It took another twenty minutes of hard labor but finally Gladys was up inside the truck, sitting on a king-size mattress with an enormous pile of pillows all around her. Two attendants would be riding in back with her, monitoring her vital signs during the whole trip.
Sylvie and Don and Evelyn and Judea gathered around the wide-open back doors of the truck to say good-bye.
"I told you not to visit every day but that don't mean I want you to forget me." Gladys pointed at Don in particular. "I'm charming company and besides, you owe me."
"We'll be there," said Don. "We'll even hold the wedding there if you want, so you can come. Nothing fancy. I figure just the five of us and some preacher or something to make it legal."
"And thanks for tearing up the house to get me out," she said. "Once I didn't have to fight that damn house anymore I thought I go crazy if I stay in that room another minute."
"I understand that," said Sylvie.
"Come on, boys," she said to her attendants. "Get me to the fat farm. Good-bye, Miz Evvie, Cousin Judy! I'm gonna miss your cooking!"
They said their good-byes as the driver closed the back door of the truck. Then they watched as it drove away.
Don walked over to the FOR SALE sign on the lawn of the carriagehouse, then up at the gaping hole in the front wall of the house. "I guess I got me some work to do before this house can be sold."
"And it's right kind of you to do it for us," said Miz Evelyn.
"No need for this house to end up like the other one," said Miz Judea.
They all looked over at the freshly leveled ground where the old Bellamy house had stood. It was hard to believe that the plot of land was even large enough to hold such a house, or that it had once risen tall among the trees.
"It was a beautiful house," said Don.
"Built in love," said Sylvie.
"Too strong for its own damn good," said Miz Judea.
"But I did love the place," said Miz Evelyn.
"Too many ugly secrets," Miz Judea answered.
"I was content there," said Sylvie. "For ten years."
"Dead but happy," said Miz Judea.
"No," said Sylvie. "Now I'm happy."
She took Don's hand.
"How can you be happy?" said Miz Judea. "You two got no money to speak of. All lost when that house came down."
"I got a few thousand left," said Don.
"Now don't spoil it by telling us you got all you need," said Miz Evelyn. She reached into her big purse and pulled out a SOLD sticker. She peeled off the backing and placed it across the FOR SALE sign.
"You've already sold it?" Don asked.
"The boy's a little dim, isn't he?" Miz Judea said to Sylvie.
"I think they're giving us the house, Don."
"No," said Don. "You need the place."
"I've had enough of this house, Don Lark. I want a nice little apartment where somebody else takes care of the yard while I watch TV or go to the movies."
"We already agreed on that," said Evelyn. "I'm still working on getting her to take a cruise with me."
"No boats," said Miz Judea. "No planes."
"She's just an old woman," said Miz Evelyn. "No doubt about it."
"We got plenty of savings," said Miz Judea. "We don't need the house. And we got no sentimental attachment to it, either, so once you get all that damage repaired, you go ahead and sell it yourself and move on, you understand? I know you two won't want to live next door to where all that bad stuff happened. The house may be gone, but the memories ain't."
"But we're OK," said Don. "I'll fix this up but you keep the money—"
Miz Evelyn shook her head and reached up and put her hand across his mouth. "Some folks just can't figure out when to shut up and say thank you."
"I feel sorry for folks like that," said Miz Judea. "Don't you, Sylvie?"
She laughed and Don laughed and it was done.
"We'll let you know when we set up the closing," said Miz Evelyn.
A Daniel Keck Co. taxi pulled up to the curb. The old ladies immediately bustled around, telling the driver to put the bags in the trunk and when there wasn't room, into the front seat so they could sit in back. And a few minutes later, they were away.
Alone together now, Don and Sylvie walked up the ramp into the torn-open house they had just been given. Sylvie went around touching knick-knacks, pictures, furniture, the artifacts of a half-century of life. "They can't mean to leave all this behind," she said.
"I think they do mean to," said Don. "They're done with it. It doesn't matter anymore."
"I guess you'd know," said Sylvie.
"I've left everything behind before. Lost it all. Only one thing I'm hanging on to now." He took her hand.
"Don," she said. "Look at me."
He looked into her face.
"Now that I look like Lissy, am I prettier?"
He laughed as if it were a crazy question, but she held his hand tighter and insisted. "I have to know, Don."
"Sylvie, I can't tell you, because I only saw Lissy's face for a few seconds before she left and this became your face."
"It's still the face I looked at all those years when I saw her. I don't like looking in the mirror now. It makes me sick and sad. And then to know that when you look at me, you see her..."
"No," he said, "no, don't think that way. It's not her face, not for a moment. She never smiled like you do. She never looked out of those eyes with your soul. I saw her there in the ballroom, how tired and worn-out she looked, cynical, plain-looking. And then it was you inside that face, and Sylvie, I would have recognized you even if I hadn't seen the transition. All the gestures, all the facial expressions. The way you laugh, the way you smile, it's you I'm seeing, and the face will look more and more the way it should as time goes on. Don't you see, Sylvie? The men who looked at her and preferred her to you—they were her kind of men, that's all. I'm not. I'm your kind of man."
She searched his eyes, believing him, not believing him, believing him again.
"Aw, hell," said Don. "I guess I'll just have to spend the next fifty or sixty years reassuring you."
"OK," she said. "That just might work. We're both damaged property, I guess."
"Plenty of time for renovation." He kissed her, there in the gap at the front of the house, with the chilly autumn breeze passing through, where all the world could watch, if they noticed, if they cared.
The kiss ended. "Let's get started," Sylvie said. "I know you work alone, but I'd like to train as your assistant."
"I think the official term is 'helpmeet'."
"Whatever," she said. "I've got no experience but at least I'm cheap."
They spent the rest of the afternoon framing in the replacement wall and putting up the new door. By nightfall, the house was tight again.
Copyright © 1998 by Orson Scott Card
ISBN 0-06-109399-8
Cover illustration © 1998 by Phil Heffernan/Stepback Art, © 1999 by Douglas Paul Design