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I
Travellers who stray from Interstate 95 in northeastern North Carolina sometimes find themselves lost in a brooding country of vacant farmhouses and sagging barns and the overgrown frames of forgotten country stores. Roads take unexpected turns, confounding the sense of direction; they change names for no apparent reason, loop back upon themselves, narrow into graveled dust and fade into rutted pastures. The wind from the stump-studded swamps smells sometimes less than wholesome; the eyes peering from peeling porches and shabby trailers seem sometimes less than friendly; and night closes in with surprising swiftness in the deep woods where tall pines whisper dark secrets in the still Southern air.
It was into this uneasy bucolic landscape that Benjamin Blalock arrived to claim his inheritance. He was a lanky, dark-haired man of 37, with a narrow nose and a receding hairline and small round glasses that gave him the appearance of a slender owl. At the moment he was feeling somewhat uncomfortable in a navy blue suit that had grown a bit tighter during the two years since he'd last worn it, huddled between the pinstriped African attorney and the tired gray-flannel attorney in the back seat of a silver Lincoln Town Car swishing sleekly through the somber January drizzle toward his late grandfather's estate. In the front seat were the short rumpled attorney and the tidy black-suited attorney, who was driving.
Despite his lengthy and impressive moniker, Benjamin Burroughs Blalock III had never been truly wealthy, at least not in any permanent sense. His distant ancestor, Edmund Ebenezer Burroughs, had come south from New England in the late 17th century with his wife and three children under somewhat cloudy circumstances, ostensibly to escape an "inhospitable climate." They settled in an area of the Carolina colony that was for some reason generally avoided by those few settlers already living in the vicinity and even by the native tribes, and which was therefore readily available for homesteading. Although the Burroughs family themselves were also generally avoided, primarily for the chosen location of their domicile but also for the dark rumors that were whispered about regarding certain elements of their behavior, they eventually mingled with a less socially regarded branch of the locally distinguished Blalocks, and by the early 1820s held sway over a large and profitable plantation of nearly a thousand acres worked by several hundred slaves. The family's prosperity sharply declined in the wake of the Civil War, however, and its once-extensive wealth had for the most part long since been divvied up among numerous generations of descendents, now scattered around the country and indeed the world. Only his late grandfather, the original Benjamin B. Blalock, had managed to preserve a notable fraction of his line's former affluence, and in fact had even been successful in increasing his fortune somewhat over the years, partly through shrewd investments and partly due to a miserly and reclusive disposition.
The younger Blalock, on the other hand, possessed little of his namesake's business sense or acquisitive nature, and was described by his teachers and employers as being intelligent, hard-working, and likeable, but prone to daydreaming and lacking in ambition and aim. He had grown up in the respectable middle-class neighborhood of Stoneleigh in Baltimore, Maryland, the only son of an only son, more fond of reading than of sports, bearing a name that always seemed to him a bit ponderous to call his own. His mother used to call him "Benjie," which he also disliked because it went too far the other way, seeming too light and childish to him even as a child. He preferred to be called "Ben."
On his fifth birthday, October 9, 1968, his mother received word during his actual birthday party that his father had been killed in a helicopter crash over the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. The other children had been sent home in hurried confusion, and his mother sat him down at the kitchen table and told him with a breaking voice what had happened. He cried, and after he finished crying he told his mother that it must be the Devil's birthday present, and she wept uncontrollably. The last time Blalock had seen his grandfather was at the funeral, a stooped curmudgeon in a dark old-fashioned suit who seemed to want very little to do with anyone, including his only grandson and his bereaved daughter-in-law.
As he grew into manhood he watched with helpless sadness as his mother grew quieter and smaller and grayer, and when he received news of her death -- again on his birthday, his 20th -- he was somehow not entirely surprised, though his shock and grief were overwhelming despite his supposed emotional preparation and the heartfelt consolations of his friends. He was then a sophomore at Duke University, and it was only the second time that he had been able to celebrate his birthday with any sense of real pleasure since that fateful one so many years before. The first time had been the previous year, when he was giddy with the excitement and independence of finally moving away from home and attending college. Now that he was in truth fully independent, completely on his own, he suddenly felt profoundly at a loss.
He flew to Baltimore for the funeral and did not return for midterm exams. When his mother's affairs had been settled, he found himself in possession of his childhood home in Stoneleigh and almost enough money to finish school. But he could not sleep anymore in the house where he had grown up, because in the absence of anyone but himself it felt chillingly desolate and lifeless; so he rented, temporarily, a cheap rowhouse apartment closer to downtown, where he slept and ate and read and drank and dreamed and wondered exactly what he was going to do with his life.
His friends from Duke called him long distance to tell him how much he was missed, and hoped he would decide to return after all. His friends from Baltimore urged him to stay in the area, sell his old home if he had to but purchase another close by, perhaps complete his studies at the University of Maryland in College Park. His more practical acquaintances counseled him earnestly on investments and dividends and business ventures, stock portfolios and ground-level opportunities. He contemplated the advice of all concerned, weighed his options, and made up his mind. He decided to quit school, sell the house, buy a van, and travel across the country.
He deposited most of his assets in a savings account, which he could access from anywhere in the country via his ATM card, and put the rest toward the purchase of a suitable vehicle. He originally intended to buy a Volkswagen Microbus, just because of its association with the archetypal bohemian voyager, but finally settled on a black Chevrolet pickup with a closed camper shell, into which he placed a mattress, travel supplies, and his closest personal belongings. For the first three weeks he enjoyed himself recklessly, soaking in the nightlife and diversions of Atlanta, Miami, New Orleans. His once prodigious funds ran low surprisingly quickly, so he began taking odd jobs here and there to supplement his income, working as a service station attendant in Mobile, a waiter in Memphis, a cab driver in St. Louis, a sales clerk in Denver, a carpenter's assistant in Tucson. After three years of driving and drifting and discovering that by the 1980s most parts of America looked essentially identical to most other parts of America, he arrived in California, which he had always imagined as being magical and exotic but which proved instead to be crowded and expensive.
He had reached what was rapidly becoming known as Silicon Valley in the bright morning of the Information Age, but despite the press accounts of overnight fortunes and instant millionaires, his lack of a college degree and his spotty job history left him at a distinct disadvantage in the arena of employment. His bank account nearly depleted, he worked at various unfulfilling positions in service and retail before at last being hired as a technical writer for a small but stable software company. There he had remained for the last ten or twelve years, earning a modest but comfortable living and acquiring a taste for California wine. His philosophical curiosity and search for some sort of meaning in his existence had led him to many uncommon places and people and situations; but he had not set foot again in North Carolina since he left Duke, until now, and in any case he had never been to this isolated and deeply rural part of the state.
The Lincoln turned off the main road and onto a narrow unpaved drive that angled off into a naked forest of elm and sycamore and pinoak and gum trees, broken here and there by the winter greenery of pine and cedar. The large overhanging limbs on either side of the tiny bumpy road receded into the gray rain, and Blalock felt an unplaceable sensation of passing into a realm somehow apart from ordinary time, where strange old things still lingered undisturbed.
After jolting along for about half a mile through heavily wooded countryside, they came to a large spiked wrought-iron gate wound with a heavy chain and secured by both a sturdy steel padlock and the kind of lettered combination lock frequently used in real estate. The tidy black-suited lawyer stopped the car and the tired gray-flannel attorney got out, turned the dial on the combination lock, opened it, took out the key inside, unlocked the padlock, removed the chain, opened the gate, and returned to the car. They drove on, wipers sweeping, raindrops beading on the windshield.
Beyond the gate the one-lane drive was paved with macadam, and the Lincoln rode more smoothly again. As they rounded a curve to the right and proceeded up a steep incline and around another curve to the left, the woods thinned and cleared to reveal an enormous lawn now overgrown with weeds and sawgrass, set here and there with the skeletal forms of denuded winter trees and the remains of crumbling stone walls, the cedar-lined drive winding up a now more gentle slope to the tall house at the top of the hill.
The house itself was a monstrous two-and-a-half story Gothic edifice of late Victorian origin, dominated by enormous twin turrets, one on each side of the house, capped with steeply pitched conical roofs crowned by ornate pointed lightning rods. Between the turrets a corniced attic dormer with a round oculus window protruded from the roofline, the symmetry of which was broken only by a brick chimney nestled behind and to the right of the left turret. The turrets were windowless above the roofline, and Blalock noticed that the round dormer window appeared to be boarded up.
On the second story, below the main roofline, three tall windows were set in the convex face of each turret; between them, below the dormer, a French door capped by an arched window opened onto a small curved balcony hardly big enough to hold one person standing. The balcony stood directly behind, and was partially obscured by, the long triangular Greek Revival entablature which crowned the entry to a deep covered porch supported by whitewashed Ionic columns, which flared out from the first story and curved around beyond the front of the house on both sides. Beneath the porch roof the turrets continued downward, their curved surfaces lending their outlines to the large bay windows that bulged from the rooms on either side of the formidable main entrance.
The drive formed a loop at the front of the house, and as the Lincoln slowed to a halt Blalock observed that the imposing Gothic structure, though weathered by the elements of more than a century, was remarkably well preserved, its elaborately scrollworked trim and old-fashioned leaded windows bespeaking the details of late nineteenth-century workmanship.
"Not your typical farmhouse, eh?" grinned the pinstriped African attorney as they disembarked from the Lincoln and raised umbrellas against the drizzling rain. He was originally from South Africa, and had a charmingly distinctive accent and a hearty laugh. His name was Mr. Benson.
"No, not at all," replied Blalock distractedly, gazing up at the towering turrets that reminded him more than anything else of missiles ready for launching. He could see now that the high round dormer window was indeed tightly boarded over with plywood, apparently from the inside.
"The original farmhouse was much more traditional," Benson continued, "but it burned in the 1860s and wasn't rebuilt for fifteen or twenty years. When your great-grandfather finally did rebuild it, he built this."
As the five of them walked down the slate path from the drive toward the steps leading up to the front porch, Blalock noted that the triangular Greek-style cornice over the two front columns was emblazoned with a bas-relief frieze of some kind, though it was so weathered that the worn details were difficult to discern, especially in the rain. Once under the cover of the porch, Blalock and the four attorneys lowered their umbrellas and shook them off. They were facing tall four-paneled double doors bordered by long sidelight windows and capped by a fanlight under a keystoned arch. The upper two panels of the doors were of beveled glass, through which Blalock could see a narrow vestibule and another set of double doors, these made of solid wood, so that he could see no further into the house, the glass transom above the inner doors being too high to afford any view of the interior.
The tired gray-flannel attorney opened another lettered combination lock and extracted two keys. With one key he unlocked the outer doors, which swung outward, and they entered the vestibule, which was adorned by a thinly worn rug of faded Oriental design, a brass umbrella stand on the left, and to the right an ornate Victorian coat-tree barely narrow enough to fit in the confined space. They wiped their feet on the rug, placed their damp umbrellas in the stand, and hung their coats on the tree. The gray-flannel attorney unlocked the inner wooden doors with the second key.
The doors opened into a vaulted foyer with a high chandelier and a large central staircase that rose majestically to a wide landing graced by an enormous gilt-framed portrait of a stern-looking man in nineteenth-century clothing. From here, the staircase split and curved elegantly to the second floor, sweeping around from both sides of the landing. White paneled doors with faceted glass knobs stood to the left and right of the foyer, and swinging doors on either side of the wall behind the central staircase led further back into the house. Overall the effect was impressive, though to Blalock's eyes somewhat bare except for the portrait, and the whole place seemed permeated with a sharp musty smell of the sort that often pervades older houses, and the houses of older people.
The pinstriped attorney opened the door to the left into a room which, in sharp contrast to the sparsely decorated foyer, was richly furnished and tastefully appointed, albeit in a distinctly antiquarian fashion. Directly in front of him, a Victorian settee large enough for three people sat before a west-facing window, facing a heavy wooden coffee table flanked by two leather armchairs. On either side of the settee were round clawfooted endtables, one of which held a beaded art nouveau lamp and the other a quaint candlestick telephone, both resting on embroidered cotton doilies. The hardwood floor was almost completely covered by a thick woolen Oriental carpet of intricate burgundy and sable weave. To his left, the concave south wall formed by the curvature of the turret was dominated by an expansive three-paned bay window of leaded glass, through which dim afternoon sunlight trickled feebly into the room. On the left of the door by which he was entering there stood a sizeable fireplace, its exquisitely molded mantle supporting an old humpbacked eight-day clock and two glass-chimneyed kerosene lamps. It was apparent that the house had remained virtually unchanged for a great many years.
Blalock and the four attorneys settled around the heavy coffee table, Blalock on the settee, again between the pinstriped Benson and the tired gray-flannel attorney whose name Blalock couldn't seem to remember, who were overseeing the disposition of his late grandfather's estate. In one armchair was the tidy black-suited attorney, who was the lawyer for a local contracting and development company that had recently purchased a hundred-acre tract on the western edge of the estate and was hoping to negotiate the sale of the entire property. In the other armchair was the short rumpled attorney, representing a group of tenants who had been renting the attic dormer room since August and who were concerned about how the recent turn of events would affect their lease.
It was all supposed to have been a simple, cut and dried affair that would take no more than an afternoon. Blalock had flown into RDU airport and taken a cab to the law offices of Rutlidge, Carnegie, Benson, and Price, with the full intention of taking a perfunctory view of the property, signing it over to the McDermott Construction Company for a most appreciable sum, and returning to California with the proceeds. He had not been aware of the concerns of the tenants, or even that there were tenants at all, until this morning; and in any case he considered the matter more or less someone else's affair, since he had not planned to hold ownership of the property himself.
But now that he had actually seen the place, he had begun to have a change of heart. He thought of his cramped, one-bedroom apartment whose rent had recently surpassed $2000 a month, crammed with cheap pressboard furniture he'd bought in large flat boxes and screwed together himself at home. He thought about the apparently sizeable inheritance he had received upon the death of his mother, and how quickly it had dissipated. He thought about his small job and small prospects and small life that had seemed to shrink around him over the last rapid decade. This spacious, stately room with its fine antique furnishings made his accustomed quarters seem mean and shabby by comparison, and he was suddenly possessed by a strong urge to stay.
The black-suited attorney for the developers was holding out a leatherbound clipboard with several pages of finely-printed legalese. "Now, Mr. Blalock, if you'll just glance through these and give us your signature in the designated spaces, we can get this wrapped up right away."
Blalock took the clipboard, removed the large round pen from the loop on the side, and hesitated. "Could I see more of the house first?"
The black-suited attorney looked momentarily impatient and glanced at the gray-flannel attorney, who said tonelessly, "We've got time."
"Absolutely," said Benson, who rose smiling. "Right this way, Mr. Blalock." They stood and crossed into the foyer.
"This was known as the great hall, where visitors were received," explained Benson with an expansive sweep of his arm. "The room we just left was called the sitting room, where casual guests were entertained. Over here," he continued, crossing to the east side of the hall, "is the parlor, which was reserved for more personal acquaintances."
He opened the door to reveal a room of decidedly different character from the staid one which they had last occupied. The musty smell seemed stronger here. On the concave south wall the bay window, twin to the one in the sitting room, was shrouded by a heavy black velvet curtain with a gold cloth pullcord, shading the parlor in near-darkness. The room, as far as Blalock could see it in the heavy shadows, was furnished in the early art deco style, bearing strong Egyptian influences, which had been popular in the mid-to-late 1920s. In the center of the room was a large round table made of some sort of black wood with a filigreed rim; it was surrounded by seven high-backed Gothic chairs, and in the center of the table was some nondescript object covered with a black cloth. On the east side of the room, behind and to the right of the table, was a large fireplace whose chimney must be hidden from the front. To the left of the fireplace was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase filled with hoary volumes whose leatherbound spines and yellowed pages attested to their significant age. On the north wall to the left stood a large old globe in a wooden stand, as well as a glass-topped display case. The carpet was deep black with inlaid gold tracery whose patterns somehow made Blalock's eyes hurt. Jet lag, he thought, though in California it was three hours earlier and he was not at all tired. He felt oddly glad when Benson led them out of the dim room through a door to the left of the bay window, near the corner of the east wall.
To his immediate right as he exited the parlor, Blalock saw a glass-paned door with a screen door behind it leading south out to the end of the front porch where it curled around the east face of the house. To his left was a comfortably sized dining room with tall east-facing windows where the frame of the house jutted out behind the porch, with another smaller window to the north. In the middle of the room was a long covered table surrounded by curved-backed wooden chairs with round cushioned seats, with a mirrored mahogany sideboard along the west wall. Closer to the door, the room extended to the west, forming something of an L-shape; on the south side of the L was another deep fireplace that evidently shared a chimney with the fireplace in the parlor. A swinging door on the left led them into a narrow butler's pantry. Had the party stopped to investigate the closed cupboard to the right of the door on the far side of the pantry, they might have noticed, next to a gnawed and spilled bag of flour, tiny pawprints that bore an uncanny resemblance to minuscule human hands; but they did not notice, and continued on west into the kitchen.
The kitchen was floored with old linoleum of a green floral pattern, with a daisy-curtained window above the white enamel sink on the right, and a Formica counter that extended to the west wall. To the right of the sink was a wooden door with a single glass pane that opened into the back yard -- servant's entrance, explained Benson. The east wall held a humming old Kelvinator refrigerator, partially obscured by the open door from the pantry. On the west wall ahead of them was a white electric range with a round wall clock above it, and another glass-knobbed door. To Blalock's left was a white swinging door, and beyond that on the same wall, a radiator.
"The kitchen was remodeled in the early 1950s," said Benson. "It's the only room here that's been completely redone since the '20s or '30s." He waved his hand in front of him. "Originally the house was only heated through fireplaces, but as you can see, some radiators were added later. There's a boiler in the basement. The heat's actually on now, at a low setting, which is why it isn't as cold in the house as it might be."
"Chilly enough," said Blalock. He placed a hand on the whirring Kelvinator. "Looks like the power's on, too."
"No time to turn it off," said the tired gray-flannel attorney. The funeral had indeed been only the day before, and Blalock had been regrettably unable to attend, needing another day to arrange for his departure; but he was reassured by Mr. Benson that the funeral had been a rather quickly executed and impersonal affair, his grandfather having had no remaining close friends at the advanced age of 97, and his burial having been carried out by agencies of the state.
"That door leads back to the great hall," said Benson, pointing to the swinging door on their left. "Let's go this way." He led them through the door in the north wall by the stove, and they entered a room that reminded Blalock a bit of the sitting room, except furnished somewhat more casually. There were several plush armchairs upholstered in conservative fabric, and a burgundy Edwardian love seat, the latter being situated between two tall windows on the north wall draped with curtains of the same burgandy material, as well as a small round table flanked by two wooden chairs where light meals might be taken. There was also a leather-topped writing desk and a china cabinet with curved glass panels. On the south wall beyond the swinging door, which Blalock presumed led back into the great hall on the other side of the stairway, there stood a fine marble fireplace with a polished veined mantle. A circular Oriental rug in the center of the room left much of the wooden floor visible. On the far side of the room were two doors, one glass-paneled and leading to a screened-in porch that occupied the northwest corner of the house, the other a closed narrow white door on the same wall, closer to the fireplace.
"This was known as the 'morning room,' or sometimes the 'ladies' parlor,'" said Benson. "It was the closest thing to what we'd call a 'multi-purpose room' today. You could read, entertain friends, have a snack, whatever. That writing desk over there is close to 200 years old."
"Where does that little white door go?" asked Blalock.
Benson smiled broadly. "To one of the greatest technological wonders of the Industrial Age," he replied dramatically, opening the door to reveal an ornate porcelain sink, a flush toilet with a ceiling tank and pullchain, and in the back an antique clawfooted bathtub equipped with some kind of elaborate brass showering device. "Looks dated now, but at the time it was considered a marvel. Notice how it's tucked away in the back of the house, though. Victorian propriety and all that."
Blalock noticed a mild fetid odor which he attributed to old plumbing and possibly poor drainage. It was a bathroom, after all, and the oldest one he had ever seen. There was another narrow door on the other side of the toilet, leading south. "What about that door?" asked Blalock. "Where does it go?"
Benson looked momentarily uncomfortable. "Well, it was originally intended as a study, and for many years it was. But for the last twenty years or more your grandfather slept down here, rather than climbing up and down the stairs from the master bedroom." He gave Blalock a significant look. "He died in that room."
Blalock was briefly taken aback, but quickly regained his composure. "Then by all means, let's take a look."
"Of course," said Benson with little enthusiasm. "By all means."
He turned the knob and pushed the opened the door, which yielded with a sticky squeak. As they stepped into the room they were immediately hit by an overpowering charnel stench, a pervasive odor of decay, which caused Blalock to involuntarily cover his nose with his hand. The tidy black-suited attorney drew out a pocket hankerchief and held it over his face, and the tired gray-suited attorney asked to be excused, retreating into the bathroom and closing the door behind him. They heard him retch. The short rumpled attorney looked like he really wanted to leave but didn't want to say anything about it.
Benson explained in a halting voice that although the late Mr. Blalock had apparently passed away a few days before Christmas, the body had remained undiscovered until three days ago. A local storekeeper had noticed that the elderly Blalock had missed his customary trip into town for supplies for two weekends running and had referred the matter to the local sheriff's office, deputies of which had subsequently found the corpse in a state of significant deterioration. The sash on the western window was raised slightly, presumably to help air out the room, but apparently this measure had not been particularly effective so far.
The room where Blalock's grandfather had slept for most of his declining years was uncarpeted and sparsely furnished, containing only a metal cot, a spool-legged nightstand, and a sturdy empire bureau. On the east side of the north wall was a plain brick fireplace with a rough oaken mantle. On the south wall opposite the fireplace was a heavy wooden door with a brass-rimmed peephole, and to the left of that a solid white paneled door through which the party hastily exited, finding themselves once again in the sitting room. The smell of death followed them faintly, and Blalock shuddered.
Benson quickly shut the door to the room behind them and walked over to the door to the great hall. "Bob," he called, "we're in the sitting room." The gray-flannel attorney rejoined them presently, his face rather pale and looking more tired than ever as they settled back down around the sitting room table in the light of the beaded lamp. The humpbacked clock on the mantle read half past two.
The black-suited attorney folded his pocket hankerchief neatly and replaced it in his jacket. "Seen enough?" he asked with businesslike cheerfulness. Almost to himself he added, "I think I would have, after that last room."
Blalock did not answer immediately; he was lost in thought.
"Mr. Blalock?" the black-suited attorney asked again.
"Hm? Oh yes. Yes, I've seen enough."
"Don't want to see the upstairs?" asked Benson. The black-suited lawyer gave him an irritated look, which Benson seemed perversely to enjoy.
"No," said Blalock. "No, that's okay." The black-suited lawyer started to say something, but Blalock continued quickly, "I do have a couple of questions, though. Would all the furnishings here be included in the sale of the property to the developers?"
"Well yes, they certainly would," said the black-suited lawyer smartly. "But you would receive the proceeds from the sale of the property, which as we agreed is quite generous according to market value, even including the furnishings. And of course you would retain the intangible assets."
"Intangible assets?" Blalock remembered the term being mentioned at the law offices that morning, which was beginning to seem very long ago; but he had been inundated by legal terminology, by addenda and codicils and parties of the various parts, and he had not been able to absorb even half of it at the time.
"Yes," Benson joined in. He took out a pair of half-glasses, perched them on the end of his thick nose, and begin sifting through some of the papers laid out on the coffee table. "Yes, mm-hmm. Apparently your grandfather opened a savings account as a young man and continued to contribute to it for most of his life. He also made certain investments in the stock and bond markets, which with compounded interest and reinvested dividends comes to approximately..." -- he pulled a pocket calculator from his inside jacket pocket and tapped the keypad purposefully -- "...approximately 3.2 million dollars."
Blalock felt his jaw drop. He knew that his grandfather had at one point been quite wealthy, but he had assumed that since the old man had begun selling off land and renting out rooms that his money had at last begun to run short. He knew the feeling. But obviously this was not the case: his grandfather had not been strapped, he had merely been stingy.
"Three point two million dollars?" he ventured at last.
"Or close to it," the gray-flannel attorney said flatly. He glanced at Benson. "Market's down again."
"So even if I decide not to sell the property," Blalock said almost to himself, "I still get over three million dollars."
Benson and the gray-flannel attorney nodded. The black-suited lawyer looked impatient. "Mr. Blalock," he began with a trace of annoyance, "I thought you said this morning that you were definitely planning to sell the property."
"That was before I saw it," Blalock replied, summoning all the firmness he could muster in the face of this neatly pressed and stern-sounding lawyer. "I've changed my mind."
"Excuse me?" asked the black-suited lawyer.
"I said I've changed my mind," said Blalock with a definitiveness that surprised even himself. "I don't want to sell."
"That's his prerogative, Mr. Pierce," said the gray-flannel attorney.
"He hasn't signed the papers," added Benson, half-smiling.
A dark look flashed over Pierce's face, but he almost instantly shifted his demeanor. "Well of course, Mr. Blalock, the decision is entirely up to you. But..." He appeared almost hesitant, but his smile seemed subtly predatory. "Would you be willing to consider the matter for a day or two? Look around a little, think about how much more convenient life might be for you in a more um modern environment?" He tried to strike a casual pose. "Well but hey, maybe that's just me." Pierce's smile widened, which to Blalock only made the lawyer look even more predatory.
"Well," said Blalock after a moment, "all right." He actually had no intention of selling his grandfather's property to anyone who would allow themselves to be represented by this unpleasantly sharklike person, but for now he just wanted Pierce to go away.
"Very good, very good," smiled Pierce, with an attempt to pat Blalock's back in a friendly manner. "Why don't we meet back in Raleigh, say, Thursday morning? Ten o'clock sound alright?"
It was Monday afternoon, January 8, 2001. Blalock would have two full days to contemplate the matter, and upon the suggestion of the short rumpled lawyer, whose name was Sawyer, he could meet with the tenants -- members of a band from the Chapel Hill/Carrboro area -- on Wednesday evening when they arrived for their biweekly recording session.
"That was my other question," said Blalock. "If the body was here for over two weeks, why didn't the tenants notice the smell? If it's still that bad now...."
"Well, they were out of town for the holidays," said the rumpled Sawyer, as if this should have been obvious to anyone. He fingered his curly hair nervously. "They didn't get back into town until Thursday, and they didn't come here until Saturday, and by then the gate was locked. They couldn't even get in." He paused. "And they might want a per-diem refund for that."
"Whatever," said Blalock, who was rapidly growing tired of being around lawyers. "I'll meet you in Raleigh at ten o'clock Thursday." He suddenly felt more relaxed, more confident, and he loosened his tie a little without really thinking about it. "Where can I rent a car?"
The attorneys drove him to a car rental establishment on the outskirts of Louisburg, which was on their way back to Raleigh. He thanked them and removed his overnight bag from the trunk of the Lincoln, then went inside and rented a white 1999 Ford Taurus, his newfound wealth still not being entirely internalized. He stopped at a Krispy Kreme to pick up donuts for breakfast the next morning. By the time he'd driven back for close to an hour along winding country roads, turned up the long drive through the gate and parked the rented car in front of the turreted Gothic house, the rain had stopped, and the lowering sun traced the westward clouds with borders of red and purple and gold.
As he opened the tall wooden doors into the empty, echoing hall, Blalock felt oddly alone and insignificant, dwarfed by the immensity of the vast archaic structure around him. The air was chilly and damp. He turned the round wall thermostat up to a more comfortable level and entered the sitting room, where several piles of legal documents awaited him on the coffee table. He unbuttoned his collar and removed his jacket and tie, which he draped over one of the leather armchairs. He sat down on the settee, turned on the beaded lamp, and began to look through the papers.
The documents in the first stack were from the attorney for the developers, outlining the terms of the purchase agreement; these he set aside. The next item was a rather long and disjointed letter from the tenants, members of a musical band self-described as "art/industrial" and going by the unpronounceable name of "H*st*r's Mouth"; they were, they said, on the verge of completing a new CD recording called Cthulhu Rising, and were highly emphatic that they needed to continue renting the attic dormer room for recording purposes at least until the end of the first week in February. A copy of the lease agreement, which appeared to be open-ended, was stapled to the letter. A third stack comprised several pages of summary documents related to the estate, including an itemization of the property -- 670 acres, Blalock noted -- as well as a brief historical overview of the house and surrounding land. There was also a small manila envelope on the table marked "keys."
The gray-flannel attorney, Bob somebody, had already given Blalock a ring of three keys before they parted ways in Louisburg: one for the driveway gate, and one for each set of double doors at the main entrance. The envelope contained four more keys, each with a small adhesive label. The labels read "Back," "Porch," "Stairs," and "Basement." Blalock placed the keys on the ring with the others and returned them to his pocket.
He picked up the historical summary again and began to read through it more carefully. The house, as Benson had indicated, was built by his great-grandfather Walter T. Blalock on the foundations of the original farmhouse that had burned, or been burned, in 1863; construction of the present house had been initiated in the spring of 1881 and completed in the fall of 1882. Upon the death of Walter Blalock in 1924, ownership of the house and 320 surrounding acres had passed to his son Benjamin, the younger Blalock's grandfather and namesake, who had it wired for electricity the following year. There followed a series of real estate plats detailing the additional land purchases made by Blalock's grandfather which had more than doubled the original acreage, even discounting the hundred acre tract sold to developers two years ago: adjoining 260 acre parcel acquired 1937; 65 acres added to northeast side in 1953; 125 acres purchased on west side in 1961; 100 of these 125 acres resold to the McDermott Construction Company in 1998....
As the orange rays of sunset slanted through the tall west windows behind him, casting sharp shadows over the sitting room, Blalock felt suddenly exhausted from the full and unusual events of the day. Though it was still mid-afternoon at his home in California, he had become intensely sleepy, his head beginning to nod over the densely printed documents. The words seemed to swim before his eyes, and he set down the papers, rubbed his eyelids, removed his shoes, and stretched out on the settee without bothering to undress further. In the deepening shadows of twilight, he dropped into sleep.
That night, Blalock dreamed that he awoke in the house that he was sleeping in. He was still stretched on the settee, but even in the silent darkness he could sense that there was something subtly different about the sitting room. There were empty wineglasses on the table, low guttering flames crackling in the fireplace, and as he rose sleepily, or dreamed he rose, something about the furniture or the placement of the furniture struck him as changed, though he was unable to determine exactly what it was. But his eyes fell on the door next to the chair on the north wall, behind which lay his grandfather's room, now thick with the awful stench of death and decay, and although he did not will it he found himself inexorably walking toward it, feeling fear rising within him as he helplessly turned the glass knob and pushed opened the white paneled door.
Within, the stench had vanished; but far beyond that, the room was entirely changed. The cot and nightstand and bureau were gone, and in their place stood tall shelves of venerable books, a high wingback armchair, the writing desk from the morning room, the antique globe from the parlor. The floor was carpeted with yet another of the ubiquitous Oriental rugs. The brick fireplace held dying embers.
He fled from the inexplicably transformed room, heart racing, and hurried through the sitting room into the great hall, which also seemed vaguely but perceptibly altered. He started to approach the closed door to the parlor -- he could have sworn Benson had left it open -- but halted when he heard a low murmur within. There were human voices speaking in soft whispers, but there were also weird buzzing sounds, shrill tittering noises, faint musical pipings, and from time to time a wet muffled thump, as if a large flexible paddle were flapping against thick carpet. As Blalock listened speechlessly, he caught a movement from the corner of his eye.
He turned and saw a Thing lumbering down the central staircase.
He awoke with a stifled yelp, staring all around through the grainy darkness, but he could hear nothing, see no one. He exhaled with relief and rolled over, sinking back into sleep. He did not notice the dark rat-like creature that scuttled hurriedly across the floor and squeezed itself under the door into the room where Blalock's grandfather had died.
II
Blalock awoke the next morning to a room bathed softly in diffuse sunlight. He dimly remembered a nightmare of some kind, followed by dreams of curiously angled spaces and vistas of preternatural cities, but these soon melted from his conscious mind.
He sat up and stretched stiffly, retrieving his glasses from the endtable by the lamp. He felt somewhat rested but still groggy, and his neck hurt from sleeping in a narrow and unaccustomed position. The coffee table was littered with legal documents; his tie and jacket hung over a nearby armchair; the radiator on the north wall sputtered warmly; the fireplace was bare and clean. There was a wide flat green-and-white box of donuts on the other endtable, next to the candlestick phone, but what he really wanted at the moment was coffee. He removed his wrinkled blue suit and took a set of more casual clothes from his overnight bag -- blue jeans, a blue plaid flannel shirt over a plain blue t-shirt, a pair of black Rockport sneakers -- and after completing his customary ablutions in the aged bathroom, he donned his dark blue overcoat and left in the rented Taurus in search of caffeine and perhaps a hot breakfast. The weather was clear and cold.
The nearest town of any appreciable size at all was Warrenton, a half-hour's drive from the Blalock estate. It was nonetheless a very small town, and except for the late model automobiles lining the streets, it looked as though it might have been frozen in time a half-century before. After a bit of random searching, Blalock found an old-fashioned drug store with a lunch counter and soda fountain, nestled between a stripe-poled barber shop and a glass-fronted jewelry store. He took a seat on a stool at the counter, ordered a cup of coffee, and began perusing the menu. When the waitress returned, an older woman with a name tag that read "Mabel", he ordered two eggs scrambled with bacon and toast, which arrived shortly. He had just begun to eat when he felt someone tap his shoulder. A thin, rasping voice behind him said something that sounded like "playoff."
Blalock swiveled on his stool and started. He was facing perhaps the ugliest old man he had ever seen. The man was short and wiry and incredibly wrinkled, with stubbled cheeks and crooked teeth ranging in condition from yellow to brown to missing. He was wearing baggy overalls and a short-sleeved shirt despite the January chill, and his hands and arms and face and presumably the rest of his body were covered with raised lumps or warts of some kind, like the skin of a toad. His rheumy eyes leered at Blalock intently.
Shocked and annoyed, Blalock asked sharply, "Can I help you?"
"Hep me?" mumbled the old man. He shook his head and chuckled gurglingly, as if he had just amused himself with some personal joke. Blalock started to swivel away from him in disgust, but stopped when the man muttered his name. The slurred pronunciation made it sound like "playoff" again, but there was no question that the man had said "Blalock."
"What?" asked Blalock incredulously, fixing his gaze on the man's lumpy face.
"You Blalock?" the old man asked. Although it was not yet eleven in the morning, his breath reeked of alcohol.
Blalock was taken aback for a moment. After a brief pause he said, "Yes, I'm Ben Blalock. How did you know my name?"
The old man didn't answer, just nodded and cackled, then stopped and stared vacantly into space for a long moment. He did not seem to be entirely in his right mind. Blalock started to turn away again, but the man caught him by the shoulder. "Yupinnat ows?" he asked incomprehensibly.
"What?" Blalock replied with growing irritation.
"You - up - in - that - house?" the old man enunciated with some effort. He was starting to make Blalock uncomfortable with these personal questions, not to mention his grotesque appearance and his unexplained knowledge of Blalock's name, and the young man just shook his head noncommittally. He started to turn away again, but the old man grabbed his arm with surprising strength and swiveled him around so the two were facing each other. He leaned in close, his breath rank, his bumpy nose almost touching Blalock's, and half-whispered with a kind of furtive urgency, "Ya know they's haints up thar."
"What?" Blalock asked again. The word seemed to be accounting for most of Blalock's side of the conversation.
"Haints! They's haints up thar!" said the old man emphatically, as if explaining a simple idea to a slow child.
"Haints?" asked Blalock. He was not entirely familiar with the word. "What, you mean ghosts?"
The man's eyes narrowed, and he shook his head. "Naw, they ain't ghosts." He paused, his red-rimmed blue eyes strangely piercing. "They's haints."
Blalock initial revulsion was beginning to turn to cautious curiosity, but at that moment Mabel the waitress came up to them behind the counter and said, "Junior, why don't you sit down and let this young man finish his breakfast?"
Junior looked at the waitress, gave her twitchy kind of smile, and shuffled off whistling toward a booth near the back.
"Don't let old Junior bother you, shug," Mabel told Blalock with a smile. "He ain't nothin' but crazy." She refilled his coffee and went off to take someone else's order.
Blalock took a few more bites of his breakfast, but he wasn't really very hungry anymore. He finished his coffee, paid, and left, his mind occupied with bizarre conjectures and speculations for most of the trip back to the house.
By the time Blalock had turned up the rutted drive off the main road and stopped his car to unlock the spiked iron gate, he had largely calmed himself down. It wasn't really so odd, he told himself, that the strange bumpy old man at the lunch counter in Warrenton had known his name. Word traveled quickly in rural areas like this, and his grandfather had been fairly well known, even if not well liked. Besides, Junior had only mentioned Blalock's last name, and there were still a good number of Blalocks in the vicinity. And besides that, the old man had obviously been crazy. The waitress had even said so.
He unlocked the tall black gate, opened it, and drove through. He didn't bother to lock it behind him, deeming the added security unnecessary in this secluded country, and continued onto the paved portion of the drive up the curving road to the house. As he parked the car in front of the turreted edifice he decided to spend the day exploring the property further. It was quite cold, near freezing, but it was also clear, and he wanted to see how things looked in broad sunlight as opposed to hazy drizzle.
As he traversed the slate walkway to the porch, Blalock stopped to look up and examine the weathered bas-relief frieze that adorned the Greek cornice over the entrance. At the center of the widely sloping triangle was a classic sunburst pattern, while the edges were adorned with figures that looked like cherubs, angels, and saints. But the elements of 120 years had obviously taken their toll: the cherubs now wore hollow-eyed expressions of sadness or fear; the angels seemed to have bat-wings; and the faces of the robed saints had melted into lascivious leers. One of the saints even appeared to have a tail, but this was doubtless the result of blistering plaster. Perhaps it could be restored.
He started to climb the stairs to the porch, then stopped and decided to walk around the house instead, since he had thus far seen only the front from the outside. On the west side a short flight of wooden stairs ran up to the porch where it ended at a heavy wooden door with a peephole. Farther along, past the outward jut of the frame, a window perhaps seven or eight feet above ground level stood slightly open; as Blalock passed it, he caught a faint whiff of that rotten dead smell that infested his grandfather's old room. It seemed strange that the odor would persist so long after the body had been removed, and Blalock knew that at some point he would need to summon his fortitude and go back into that dreaded room, if only to open the window all the way in the hope of finally airing it out more fully. For now, though, he continued past the screened-in porch at the northwest corner, set with two antique rockers and a round green metal table with a scalloped glass top, and around to the back of the house.
From the rear northern exposure, the roof climbed in tiers, each rising story smaller than the one below it. Two brick chimneys projected from the second-story roof, hidden from the front behind the turrets. There were four tall windows on the second floor, but what caught his eye was the back of the half-story garret above. There was a high dormer on this side, too, but instead of a window it held a white door with a small round window that opened onto thin air. There was no ladder or any sign of a way down other than a precipitous plunge to the second-floor roof below, and Blalock was puzzled why anyone would place a door in such a lofty and inaccessible location. Maybe someone had planned to add a balcony at some point and never gotten around to it.
Before continuing around to the east side of the house, Blalock turned to survey the view from the back. There were a few scattered outbuildings, and beyond the bare pinoaks towering over the deep yard of brown grass peppered with weeds and winter onions, rolling fields and pastures broken by groves and belts of deep woods extended to the blue horizon. Something in the rise of a distant meadow caught his eye, a far glint of shiny black, and as he squinted to determine what it might be he felt inexplicably drawn to it. Almost involuntarily he crossed the back yard and soon found himself walking through a field of scrub brush and broomstraw that sloped down to a wooded creek. He walked along the creek for a few hundred yards until he found a place to cross, where large gray boulders formed something of a natural bridge, flowing water trickling in rivulets between them. He scrambled up the bank on the other side, grasping a small tree to steady himself, and continued through the climbing woods to a meadow that rose beyond. He had lost sight of the shiny black thing that had initially attracted his attention, and realized that it must be farther away than he had first thought.
The meadow rose to a high crest, and as he approached the summit, the freezing wind whipping past his tingling face, he again caught sight of the black object. It rested near the top of the next hill, and appeared to be a large boulder of decidedly different composition from the native gray stone. As he trotted down the grassy slope and up the next rise toward the boulder, he could see that it was quite smooth, like obsidian, with shiny angled surfaces. The area surrounding it was queerly devoid of plant life.
The boulder's polished surfaces gleamed coldly in the chill sun of early afternoon, and as Blalock studied its asymmetrically angled faces he felt his eyes begin to strain in a way that reminded him somehow of the twisting gold patterns in the black parlor carpet. The rock felt oddly warm to his touch. Had he known its true origin and significance, its age and import, Blalock might have succumbed to madness then and there; but he did not, and simply sat down on it.
From this vantage point, the rolling rural landscape spread before him assumed a hypnotically timeless cast, the fields and ponds and woodlands echoing the lost beauty of a vanished age, mantled in the supernal sunlight of an afternoon that might have been from a century ago or more. Blalock could see the distant turreted house, looking like a tiny model of itself, and he half-imagined that he could see diminutive figures moving across the grounds and in the fields around it, like shadows out of a bygone era; but this must have been a trick of the light. The sun was warm on his face despite the cold breeze, and he might have slipped into fanciful daydreams had he not noticed the odd circle of stones in the nearby woods.
The woods began at the end of a gentle slope on the other side of the hill from the boulder; they had not been visible from closer to the house. A path ran back into the woods to a clearing which in the summer would certainly have been obscured by foliage, but which now lay revealed among the naked winter trees. The clearing was surrounded by a tall circle of gray standing stones, and within this circle was a smaller ring of large stones or small boulders enclosing an area that looked like it had been recently burned. The area between the inner and outer circles appeared very well worn.
Blalock stood up and started to walk down toward the path to the clearing, then halted. How long had he been out here? His hands and face were numb with cold; and the sun, though still high, was well past its zenith. He didn't see how he could have been gone for much more than an hour, if that, so it shouldn't have been much after one o'clock, but the eastward slanting shadows of the trees spoke of mid-afternoon. Deciding to investigate the stone circle at some later time, he made his way back over the hilly meadow, across the wooded creek and up the sloping field to the house. He wasn't wearing a watch, but he was sure it couldn't have taken him more than twenty minutes to walk back. He crossed the back yard to the house, where a couple of concrete steps led up to the back door in the kitchen. He unlocked the door and entered, glancing at the clock above the stove. It was after three. He'd been gone more than an hour and a half longer than he had thought.
As Blalock closed the back door behind him, wondering where the time had gone, he noticed a narrow white door to his left; he hadn't seen it yesterday because it was on the other side of the refrigerator, which had blocked his view. He assumed it was only a small closet, but when he pulled the door's simple metal handle it opened onto a narrow, damp- smelling staircase climbing steeply upward in a tightly angled spiral. Of course. Benson had said that the back door was the servants' entrance; this must be the servants' staircase, for in the class-conscious times when the house was built, mere help would not have been permitted to use the elegant central stairs reserved for the master's family and guests.
Blalock hesitated a moment, but the stairs looked structurally sound, and as he had not yet explored the upper stories of the house, he began to climb. The space was so tight as to be nearly claustrophobic, but after several cramped turns a small landing opened up on the side. There were a couple of shelves with a few old cleaning supplies, and a narrow door like the one he had entered in the kitchen. Beside the door was an old push-button light switch; Blalock pressed the upper button, and a naked bulb came on far overhead, bathing the stairway in harsh yellow light. Above, the stairs continued their steep ascent.
Blalock opened the narrow door and stepped out into the second-floor hallway behind the curving wooden balustrade of the central staircase. Stairs curled up to his left on either side of the balustrade, and doors stood on each side of the hallway. Behind the staircase, on the south wall, there was a somewhat broader white door with an overhead transom; this must lead to the master bedroom. To his right there was another door on each side of the wide hallway, and near the end of the hallway on the wall across from him was a slightly smaller door, perhaps to a hall bathroom. Almost directly in front of him, just back from the center of the hallway, a sweeping spiral stair rose gracefully to the attic story. The contrast between the narrow dark stairwell he had just climbed and the posh elegance of the main staircases was nothing short of remarkable. Separate and unequal, he thought. Servants had emerged from and disappeared into closets, little more regarded than the brooms and dustmops they worked with.
Blalock continued his explorations. The master bedroom was exquisitely furnished with a tall four-poster bed, a Victorian armoire, a full-length oval mirror in a polished mahogany frame, a walnut dresser, an overstuffed armchair, and a small wooden bedside bench that looked almost colonial. A French door with an ornate brass handle, flanked by narrow floor-to-ceiling windows and topped by a semicircular leaded pane, opened to the south onto the small balcony behind the Greek portico. To the right was an elaborately arched fireplace with a carved white mantle. The two side bedrooms in the front, each set with tall windows in the concave south and side walls where the turrets emerged from the frame of the house, were nearly as well furnished; the two back bedrooms somewhat less so, though all were comfortably appointed with rare and probably irreplaceable antiques. The smaller door at the back was indeed an upstairs bathroom, its facilities as antiquated as its downstairs counterpart.
Blalock climbed the graceful spiral stair near the center of the hall to the attic story. There the stairs opened to the south on a low-ceilinged hallway, a wooden railing behind them. To his immediate left was a narrow door to the servants' staircase; he opened it and felt to the side for a light switch, which he pushed off. He would not be descending that way.
Ahead, the curves of the turrets bulged out into the low hall, each with a slightly convex wooden door; they were probably intended as storage areas. The turret doors were secured very simply, with just an oblong piece of wood nailed loosely to the door frame so it could be swiveled back and forth across the jamb. Blalock opened the one to his right, revealing cold damp darkness. Eyes adjusting, he could barely discern the high inverted cone of the steep turret roof. Far overhead, bats fluttered and chittered. The floor was caked with a thick layer of guano. Blalock closed the door.
The dormer room lay directly ahead, and as he approached it he saw that it had been fitted with a newer knob than the other doors in the house. The faceted glass knob had been removed and replaced with a contemporary brass-plated one fitted with a central keyhole. He tried the knob, rattled it, and found it locked. He would have to ask Benson about that on Thursday. Benson, and that short guy representing the tenants -- what was his name, Sawyer? Blalock didn't like the idea of renting a room that he couldn't get into himself if necessary.
At the rear of the garret hall, behind the wooden railing, was the door Blalock had seen from the back that opened onto empty space; and as he studied its round window he saw that it was not plain glass, but a thick convex pane like a magnifying lens. He peered through it, then started back in surprise. The image was highly distorted around the edges, but through the central focus point he could see the angled obsidian boulder in the far meadow with telescopic clarity.
This was all becoming, Blalock thought, too weird. A high door into nowhere with a window/lens focused on the same black boulder in the windy meadow where he must, he decided, have drifted into daydreams for a couple of hours; the strange circle of stones in the nearby clearing; the bumpy old man in the drug store whom he thought he had explained to himself but now wasn't so sure about; the dreams of the night before that were beginning to bubble back up into memory; the stench in his grandfather's room that wouldn't go away….
This last thought reminded him that he really needed to air out that room downstairs. Feeling a little spooked, he quickly descended the spiral stair down to the second floor and on around the balustrade, down the curving staircase to the landing overlooking the great hall, where he paused briefly. The landing offered a commanding view of the huge chandeliered foyer below; one could even look down through the transom over the inner doors and the beveled glass panels of the outer doors to get a general idea of who might be outside.
He felt eyes at his back.
He turned slowly to face the enormous gilt-framed portrait of his great-grandfather Walter Tiberius Blalock, and was unaccountably relieved to see that he bore no resemblance whatsoever to his stocky, dour-faced ancestor. The canvas was solid; there were no eye-holes, and Blalock felt almost silly for looking for them. He continued down the central stairs and through the now-familiar sitting room to the north door by the radiator -- hadn't there been a chair there before, or was that from some half-remembered dream? -- and, holding his breath against the odor, entered the stench-filled room and pushed up on the window sash.
It didn't give, and he had to exhale, breathing in again through the space at the bottom of the barely open window. The smell was still awful. He shoved up on the sash again, and the window suddenly sprang all the way open. He might have a hard time closing it again, but at this point Blalock didn't care.
As he turned to leave the noisome room, he noticed something white against the bare hardwood floor under the cot. He bent down to investigate, and pulled out a plate piled high with rancid meat and liquifying vegetables, partially nibbled by vermin. Stifling nausea, he picked up the plate and, not knowing what else to do with it, carried it into the adjacent bathroom and flushed its putrid contents down the toilet. He rinsed the plate in the bathroom sink and left it there.
Having solved and disposed of that particular mystery, Blalock decided to shed some light on the parlor, which he had barely been able to see in yesterday's curtained shadows. As he pushed open the door to the dim, musty room, he shuddered involuntarily; not so much at its physical appearance, with its dark heavy furniture and quasi-Egyptian decor, but at a subtle quality of the atmosphere, as if the room itself held lingering recollections of things best forgotten. But this oppressive tension lasted only a moment, and Blalock strode purposefully toward the velvet-shrouded bay window and pulled the gold cord, the curtains sliding open in a soft cascade of fine dust. With sunlight streaming in, the parlor felt much less unwelcoming, though the furnishings seemed almost to shrink away from the unaccustomed illumination.
The first thing Blalock did was to remove the black cloth covering the unidentified object at the center of the round black table. It was a crystal ball, of all things, which struck Blalock as something of a cliché, but it was a far cry from the cheap glass imitations available through certain catalogs. It was large, about nine inches across, set on a tarnished silver stand ornamented with elaborate and vaguely disturbing designs, like something from the artwork of H. R. Geiger. The ball contained no small bubbles such as glass would have, and as Blalock peered into its mesmerizing depths, he could almost see a spark begin to flicker deep within, not a spark of light but of tangible, palpable darkness, and this glimpse so disturbed him that he turned quickly away, draping the ball once more under its thick black cloth.
He turned his attention to the high bookshelves that stretched from floor to ceiling next to the fireplace. The books were obviously quite old and in various stages of deterioration; a number of them did not even appear to be written in English, bearing on their crumbling spines titles in Latin, German, and other less familiar languages. Here and there on the dusty shelves he noticed tiny pawprints. Rats, undoubtedly. He would have to contact an exterminator.
Passing the antique globe in its large wooden stand, Blalock began examining the glass-topped display case, and it was here that he received his first real shock. The case contained a number of odd curios: ancient coins of Greek or Roman origin; a Civil War bullet and musket ball; a strangely angled black stone that reminded him a great deal of the boulder in the far meadow. There was also a bizarre little figurine made of some soapy green stone carved in the form of a creature that looked almost humanoid despite its tentacled head, scaly body, and rudimentary wings; and next to that....
Blalock recoiled in horror, his heart beginning to palpitate as memories of his recent nightmare rushed back with haunting clarity. The statuette beside the squid-headed figurine was four or five inches high, made of a light gold-colored metal with streaks of greenish iridescence. It depicted a ridged, barrel-shaped object with thin horizontal arms radiating like spokes from a ring around the middle. At each end were flat five-pointed projections with a knobbed central hub, giving the metallic statuette a maximum diameter of two or three inches. It reflected in every hideous detail the unspeakable Thing he'd seen lumbering down the staircase in his dreams the night before, the Thing whose sight had frightened him awake, the Thing that looked like a giant leathery okra with a starfish stuck on each end....
There had to be an explanation, thought Blalock, trying to calm his racing mind. He must have caught an oblique, subconscious glimpse of the statuette when he'd passed through the parlor yesterday with the attorneys. He was in an unfamiliar place in an unexpected situation, and his imagination must be running away with him. He staggered back and leaned against the bookcase to steady himself.
He heard a soft click. The bookcase pivoted out from the wall as if hinged on a central pin, revealing a ladder climbing upward into darkness.
Blalock stared for a moment in astonishment. The whole house seemed wormholed with stairs and passages, some more hidden than others. Unable to contain his curiosity, Blalock climbed the ladder, found a trap door at the top, and pushed it open. He emerged into a black crawlspace hung with thick cobwebs. He could barely see an inch ahead, and wished he had a pocket flashlight with him. Something brushed his face, and when he slapped at it his fingers grasped a pullchain. He tugged the chain, and three bare bulbs lit up in a widely spaced row to the south.
The crawlspace was so low that Blalock had to traverse it on his hands and knees. Ahead, it cornered sharply to the right, and as he approached the corner he saw another dangling pullchain. He pulled it, and three more lights clicked on, receding to the west between rows of stout support beams. Beyond the last bulb and a little to the left, he could see the brickwork of another chimney, and beside it another ladder.
Gossamer cobwebs tickling his face, Blalock crawled to the second ladder, climbed it, and pushed on the trap door above. It gave slightly and stopped, as if obstructed by a yielding surface. He reached up through the gap and felt fabric. He shoved harder, and the trap door rose a little more. It appeared to be covered by a rug. He pushed again and squeezed through, lifting the carpet above into a sort of tunnel and emerging into the attic dormer room.
It stank, not of death, but of old sweat and stale smoke and something else that made Blalock think inexplicably of grasshoppers or fish bait. Like a locker room for insects, he thought, and chuckled at the absurdity of the image. The room was walled from floor to ceiling with acoustical tiles and contained numerous pieces of recording equipment. Cables snaked over the floor.
Feeling somehow like an intruder, Blalock extricated himself from the beneath the carpet, flattening it back over the trap door, and stood to examine the room more closely. The overhead light, merely a naked bulb, had been left on; otherwise it would have been utterly dark. The acoustical tiles angled in and out oddly from the walls and ceiling, forming surfaces whose geometry seemed to defy perspective, like some of the more fantastical woodcuts of M. C. Escher. Most of the recording equipment was of the usual sort -- microphone stands, stacks of black amplifiers, an electronic keyboard, a mixing panel, various instrument cases -- but some resembled nothing he'd ever seen before, like the shiny foot-long cylinder with three input jacks arranged in an isosceles triangle on the front. Three low wooden stools and a radiator comprised the only furnishings.
A key scraped on the outside of the door to the dormer room. The knob rattled, and the door opened to reveal a twentyish woman with frizzy two-toned hair and a pierced nose. She gaped at Blalock in surprise. "What are you doing here?" she demanded.
"I live here," Blalock replied, trying not to sound too surprised himself.
The woman paused, staring at him, and finally said, "Yes, I can see that." She glanced around the room, as if checking to see if anything had been disturbed. "Why are you in our room?"
Blalock felt put out by her presumptuous demeanor. "This is my house," he said, remembering that it was indeed his house, or would be when the final papers were signed on Thursday. "Are you a tenant?"
The woman sighed as though exasperated. "Well, obviously," she said. "We've been renting this room since August."
"Yes, I understand that," said Blalock, matching the woman's confrontational tone. "How did you get in? I wasn't expecting you until tomorrow."
"Didn't Steve call you?"
"Steve? Steve who?"
The woman rolled her eyes. "Steve Sawyer, our attorney? Didn't you get his message?" She sounded as though Blalock were at fault.
"No, I never heard from Mr. Sawyer." The woman simply stared at him without speaking, like he'd just said something totally ridiculous. "And you still haven't explained how you got in."
The woman spread her arms. "Well, the gate was open. The back door was unlocked." She spoke as if she were talking to an idiot. Blalock started to say something but she continued, "Our lease is for two nights a week. We couldn't get in on Saturday, so we're making it up tonight."
"I see," said Blalock, feeling as though he had no choice in the matter. There was a clatter in the low attic hallway, and Blalock looked around the woman through the open door to see several more people emerging from the servants' stairwell, some carrying instrument cases.
"Well, we're getting ready to practice," said the woman with finality, turning her back to Blalock.
"My name's Ben Blalock," Blalock said, ignoring the conversational cue. "What's yours?"
The woman gave him an irritated look. "If you'd read the lease agreement, you'd know who we are." She turned away again and began doing something with the recording equipment. Blalock glared at her, trying to look authoritative. He was, after all, the landlord.
Other members of the band began filing in, ignoring Blalock. There was a highly pierced and tattooed guy wearing lots of chains and a swastika-shaped scar on the side of his shaved head; a skinny red-haired kid with some kind of pop-eyed condition that made him look like Marty Feldman with a hangover; a short voluptuous woman with very short, very red hair wearing a great deal of makeup and a revealing black leather fetish costume that left both little and much to the imagination; and finally some gangly, waxen-faced fellow wearing heavy workman's gloves, a loose-fitting camouflage jumpsuit, and extraordinarily large shoes.
The frizzy-haired woman he'd been speaking with put an arm around Blalock's shoulder and began directing him bodily toward the door. "This is Snake, Flounder, Cleo, and Buzzy," she rattled off quickly, pushing Blalock out of the room. "I go by Hester. Well, nice to meet ya, bye!" She shoved Blalock into the hallway. Someone slammed the door, and he heard the latch click.
Blalock stood blinking in the hall for a moment or two, trying to figure out how he had been expelled from a room in his own house by his own tenants, then raised his fist to bang on the door. But before he could do so, he was hit by a wall of high-decibel pulsing and squawking that might loosely be described as music. Ears ringing painfully, he tried banging the door anyway, but there was no way anyone could hear his pounding over the cacophonous din. Fuming, Blalock turned to go down the spiral stair.
At the other end of the hall, there was a face at the window of the high door.
Blalock blinked and looked again. The face was still there, distorted by the glass into a widely grinning skeletal visage like a living skull. Then it was gone, vanishing in a dark flicker like the flapping of a great black wing.
Blalock's brief cry of terror was rendered inaudible by the deafening clamor from the dormer room. He fled down both staircases and into the now comfortable familiarity of the sitting room, where he stopped, panting for breath. Was he losing his mind? He couldn't have seen what he thought he had seen. It must have been some kind of illusion, perhaps brought on by stress. These tenants were very stressful people to deal with. He decided to terminate their lease as soon as possible.
As Blalock brought both his shock at the apparition in the window and his anger at the tenants under control, he saw the box of donuts on the endtable and realized that he was quite hungry. He hadn't eaten anything since before eleven in the morning, and it was now past five-thirty, shadows of dusk gathering in the bay window. He started to open the box and take one of the glazed confections, then saw that the box had been gnawed open and a number of the donuts already feasted upon by something, he imagined a rat. He threw the box away in the metal trash can outside the back door, feeling irritated and increasingly voracious. He would have to go back into Warrenton, he supposed, grab a bite to eat, pick up a few groceries for the next day or two. He did not particularly want to leave the house empty with those band people upstairs, but he didn't know how else he could get anything to eat. Besides, some food in his stomach might put him back into a more rational frame of mind.
As he started to leave through the great hall, he noticed that the door to the parlor was still ajar, and within, the bookcase was still pivoted to reveal the ladder. He didn't want to leave it like that while he was gone -- if one of the tenants discovered it there would no doubt be mischief -- so he walked in and pushed gently on the side of the bookcase sticking out into the room. It turned back smoothly and locked with a barely audible click. Blalock then realized that he wasn't sure how to open it again, trying for over forty-five minutes to locate the latch mechanism without success.
Finally he gave up, but as he started to leave he felt an unaccountable cloying impulse to look at the crystal ball again. He did not know why, because he was by now extremely hungry and frustrated and eager to get into town for a hopefully relaxing meal, away from the noise blasting down from upstairs. The throbbing reverberated throughout the house, jerky arrhythmic pulsing overlaid with twisting synthesized squeals, undulating drumbeats, harsh mechanical gratings, buzzing insectoid hums. Blalock thought it was utter garbage; the flute player in particular could use a lot of improvement. The lyrics, or what he could make of them, were equally facile, consisting primarily of nonsense syllables like "azathoth" and "nyarlathotep." Worst of all, the ear-splitting racket had disturbed the bats in the upper turrets, and their agitated sqeaking and flapping audibly contributed to the raucous pandemonium upstairs, which was now taking on a cyclic roaring quality.
Still, despite the echoing dissonance and his angry hunger, Blalock found himself almost involuntarily sitting down in one of the high Gothic chairs around the black table and removing the cloth covering from the enigmatic ball. He stared into it deeply, finding the negative spark far within, a rising, spreading darkness that seemed to shift and grow into impossible shapes that somehow mirrored the insane music pounding down from the dormer room far above. The shapes divided and coalesced, forming dim outlines of unearthly landscapes, swirling polyhedrons, foul alien entities that, as he watched, seemed almost to be turning their dark minds toward him....
He felt eyes at his back.
III
Of the events that happened next, even Blalock himself could not be entirely certain. He sensed himself drifting through an inky void spread with floating prisms, spinning pyramids, endlessly unfolding labyrinths, howling vortices of infinite blackness. By moving in certain directions -- or non-directions, as they corresponded to no bearings with which he was familiar -- he found that he could exit the void into more normal physical spaces, though not necessarily his own. He floated through stony underground caverns and over high crenellated walls; he stood atop a broken minaret overlooking a dead city of domes and turrets in the midst of a frozen plain; clung to the high riggings of a tall-masted sailing ship plying uncharted waters; gazed through a Cyclopean colonnade onto a wide tiled plaza under the searing glare of three simultaneous suns. He saw swimming patterns of gold tracery weaving through a background of solid black, felt something soft pressing against his cheek, and realized that he was lying on the carpeted floor of the parlor.
The music had stopped; the house was silent and dark. Or not entirely silent: through the closed door to the dining room he could hear the clink of silverware and the clatter of plates. Grabbing the edge of the black table and raising himself to his feet, Blalock saw that the curtain over the bay window was closed again.
Blalock listened more closely; in the darkened parlor, ambient noises seemed both muffled and sharply distinct. There were voices in the dining room.
Not all of the voices sounded human.
There was something that sounded like a huge talking bee, and a high shrill voice that squeaked and tittered horribly. He heard musical pipings that varied along a wide tonal range, pipings made by no human throat or by any human instrument. Something told him not to approach the dining room door, so he cautiously slipped out of the parlor to the west and into the great hall.
As in his previous dream, the high vaulted foyer was subtly changed. The walls of the great hall were hung with richly woven tapestries which, upon closer examination, depicted both human beings and blasphemous monstrosities engaged in unspeakable acts of carnal perversion. A black velvet carpet runner ran up the central staircase to the landing, which was also carpeted in black. And over the landing hung a portrait not of Walter T. Blalock, but of that scaly squid-headed thing depicted by the green stone figurine in the parlor display case.
This had to be a dream, Blalock told himself. There was nothing to be afraid of; nothing could really hurt him. But the sense of tangible reality was too persistent to be ignored, so he remained very quiet as he approached the kitchen door, hoping to sneak around through the butler's pantry and eavesdrop more closely on the appalling inhuman voices in the dining room.
He opened the swinging door to the kitchen and recoiled in absolute horror.
The room was virtually unrecognizable. Below the north window was a deep metal sink with streaks and patches of rust. On the walls hung a variety of large knives and sharp cleavers. There was a pot-bellied wood stove, and in the center of the room was a wide heavy wooden table covered with dark brown stains. This was clearly a butcher shop, and the unmistakable human aspect of the limbs and torsos piled about the room left no doubt as to what had been butchered here. But far, far beyond this unthinkable tableau was the atrocity of the butcher itself: an eight-foot ridged barrel-like Thing, like a giant leathery okra with a starfish head, chopping and slicing with long serrated blades waving from its radial tendrils....
Blalock screamed.
The scream seemed to catapult him back into the void of whirling shapes and howling vortices; and then he was outdoors, bare trees branching above him in the ghostly illumination of a full moon. He was sitting cross-legged with his back against a cold hard surface, and before him was a ring of small boulders, a large bonfire blazing within the ring. He was aware of figures all around him, dancing and writhing with unholy abandon around the flickering bonfire.
Someone forced a bowl to his lips, and he swallowed a mouthful of some vile liquid that burned his throat and heated his stomach. Instantly the scene shifted to a negative image of itself. Light was darkness and darkness, light: the twisted shadows of the moonlit trees reversed themselves; the Stygian bonfire radiated shimmering curtains of palpable gloom; the moon was an empty hole in a dull white dome flecked with pinpoints of black. The mad dancing and shouting increased in fervor and intensity; malevolent drumbeats echoed from the deep woods beyond. Something warm was pressed into his hand, a slab of greasy meat; and he found himself eating it ravenously despite his uneasy uncertainties regarding its origin.
He felt something rubbing around his ankles and looked down to see a small furry creature like a very large rat circling between his legs. The rat scurried up his leg to his sleeve and onto his shoulder; and as Blalock turned his head fearfully toward it he found himself looking into a warped mockery of a human face whose features, even in the eldrich reversed lighting, were chillingly familiar. The rat-thing began speaking to him in a high, tittering voice; the writhing ululations of the silhouetted dancers rose to a fever pitch. Blalock felt his head spinning, and then he was falling, dropping, plummeting an unfathomable distance into a screeching vortex of lightless oblivion.
He awoke on the high meadow near the angled black boulder. It was very cold. The eastern horizon glowed in shades of orange and pink; a full moon was setting in the west.
Blalock rose to his feet, shivering and disoriented. He was wearing the same clothes he'd put on yesterday morning, but he had no overcoat, and his teeth rattled in the freezing chill. He trudged back toward the house in a daze.
As he passed through the silent woods over the creek, Blalock was struck by how quiet things were here as compared to his usual urban quarters. Except, of course, for those damnable tenants, he reminded himself. He was certain that they had had something to do with all this; it smacked of a juvenile prank.
By the time he reached the outskirts of the back yard, he had come to the conclusion that someone was trying to frighten him out of the house. Pierce, perhaps? The black-suited lawyer had obviously not been pleased by Blalock's change of plans regarding the sale of his grandfather's estate, and had seemed almost smugly confident that Blalock would reconsider after spending two or three nights there. And the tenants were a distinctly unpleasant bunch as well. Was their attorney, Sawyer, somehow in league with Pierce? He began to think that he was being made the victim of an elaborate hoax, a complex charlantry designed to send him fleeing back to California, never to return; and he had to admit that whoever was behind it, they were doing a damn good job so far.
The rising sun broke through the trees in the east, bathing the house and its outlying buildings in sharp golden light. There were a couple of rough-timbered sheds, a wellhouse with a hanging bucket and a large black bell, an old chicken coop, and a dilapidated free-standing garage. As he passed the old garage, Blalock glimpsed something dark and metallic through the crack between the broad wooden doors. His pulse began to race. He crept slowly toward the tumbledown structure, steeled himself, and threw open the doors. Inside was a polished black Model A Ford that must have been at least seventy years old. Blalock smiled, relieved. This must have been what his grandfather drove on his weekly trips out for supplies.
Blalock's stomach growled. He should probably, he considered, go out for some supplies himself. He hadn't eaten since the previous morning, and in spite of the most peculiar and disturbing events of the night before, he was positively famished. As he passed the house he stopped to shut the back door, which had been left hanging open. He considered locking it as well, but decided not to; if the tenants, or some of them, were still inside, he didn't want to lock them in when he wasn't there to escort them out.
As he walked around the front of the house to get into the rented Taurus, he saw that it was deeply scraped along the driver's side, the white exterior embedded with streaks of black paint. The circle of grass at the top of the drive was rutted with black muddy tire tracks.
Blalock swore. The tenants were now immediately and permanently evicted if he had any say in the matter, and as landlord he was certain that he did. He pulled the driver's side handle and discovered that the door was mashed shut. Irrationally, he kicked a tire. A piece of trim fell off.
There was a cold gust from the northeast, and Blalock shivered. He walked back to the house to retrieve his overcoat from the vestibule, then went out to the grass circle at the head of the driveway to examine the ruts. The car was rented; the lawn was his.
The damage wasn't quite as severe as he had first thought. It had rained the day before yesterday, but the ground was cold, so the ruts weren't very deep. They'd torn up the grass pretty badly, though, corrugated tire tracks tracing a curving route that first ran west and then cornered sharply to the south, out to where the main drive joined the circle at the bottom of the loop. The deepest ruts were where the vehicle had cornered near the center of the circle, where Blalock noticed a round gray stone protruding from the stubby winter grass. Upon closer examination, the stone turned out not to be a stone at all, but a hemispherical concrete marker about ten inches across, with a flaring rim at the bottom which bore a brief inscription, its incuse characters blackening with mold. The inscription read "1925."
He wasn't sure exactly what the marker was supposed to signify, but whatever the tenants were driving had nearly hit it. They were definitely out as of now. Blalock climbed into the Taurus from the passenger side and awkwardly slid over the seat to the driver's position. He swore again. His stomach growled.
He drove the car past the spiked iron gate, which he closed and locked behind him. Turning back to the car, he noticed patches of litter lying farther down the hill -- empty twelve-pack boxes, cans, bottles, fast-food bags. Probably some cigarette butts and expended condoms as well. He decided that he had better keep the gate locked all the time; teenagers obviously parked on the secluded road for nefarious purposes, and he didn't want them wandering up the hill onto the main property.
As he traveled through the sad January countryside toward Warrenton, he spotted a small country store on the right, previously unnoticed, surrounded by pickup trucks and SUVs. He parked the scarred Taurus incongruously between two much larger vehicles and slid out on the passenger side.
The store had modern gas pumps out front reflecting the current inflated fuel prices, but inside it retained the flavor of a local country market. There were shelves of light groceries, stands of snacks, a couple of slide-top freezers, and a row of coolers in the back. Behind the checkout counter was a short-order kitchen, and men wearing caps and hunting gear sat along a counter by the window.
Blalock ordered a cup of coffee and three ham biscuits, which he consumed greedily. As he sipped his coffee, he tried to rationalize to himself the apparently inexplicable occurrences of the previous night. That he had somehow dropped off to sleep in the parlor, despite the intense noise from the upper story, he had no doubt. Then he had lapsed into vivid dreams, or hallucinations -- could he have been drugged somehow? -- and awakened, or thought he awakened in the parlor again. But he must have been dreaming, because the awful butchering Thing in the kitchen -- oh, dear God, the kitchen! -- that Thing could not possibly have been real. Then there was a vaguely recalled dream of negative light and the circle of stones and a human-faced rat-thing; nothing that made much sense to him now. And then he had truly awakened on the cold dawn meadow by that singular black boulder. Who had carried him there? How and when could he have been drugged?
The tenants, he thought, were so completely out that they might as well rent a condo on the moon. And what about Pierce? Why did the development company, or whoever, want the property so badly? It was out in the middle of nowhere.
Blalock finished his fourth coffee refill and bought a loaf of bread, some sandwich meat, a squeeze-bottle of mustard, a jar of peanut butter, a few cans of soup, a quart of milk, some paper plates and plastic utensils, and a jar of instant coffee. He searched in vain for a bottle of decent wine, finding only the cheap, fortified varieties; he eventually settled on a six-pack of some kind of alcoholic lemonade called Hootch, which he imagined would be at least somewhat more palatable than the watery brand-name beers that filled most of the rest of that section of the cooler. It all cost somewhat more than it should have, but Blalock didn't care. He was rich now.
On the drive back to the estate, Blalock continued to try to piece things together. He was in a strange place and having strange dreams, he told himself, undoubtedly inspired at least in part by those bizarre artifacts in the parlor display case. Perhaps he would have the room redone. Someone had obviously placed the plate of rancid food under his grandfather's cot after the body had been removed, in order to create a highly unpleasant and persistent odor designed to drive off any prospective claimant. That having failed, the band members had been instructed -- by whom? -- to arrive unannounced a day early, and to conduct themselves in a belligerent manner so as to give the new landlord the impression that his tenants were more trouble than they were worth. The apparition in the window must have been a cleverly executed projection of some kind. He had gone to sleep in the parlor, and someone had drugged him while he slept and carried him in his stupor out to the far meadow. He was probably lucky he hadn't been left stripped naked.
He angled off the main road onto the rutted unmarked drive and up to the spiked iron gate, which he unlocked and passed through. This time, he locked it again behind him. He continued up the paved portion of the driveway to the tall turreted house, standing proud in the bright morning, its spacious interior furnished with unique objects and rare antiques.
They were trying to run him out. Well, they weren't going to do it.
After entering the house and locking both sets of doors behind him, Blalock started to the kitchen to put the groceries away. By the time he reached the swinging door by the central stairs, his heart was pounding in his ears. Determined not to be frightened by memories of an ephemeral nightmare, he pushed open the door boldly, and found the kitchen quiet and normal in all respects, except that the door to the servants' stairwell had been left open. He closed it with his foot and set the bags of groceries on the counter by the sink.
He put up most of the groceries in a cupboard in the butler's pantry, then returned to the kitchen and opened the Kelvinator to put away the milk, mustard, and sandwich meat, along with the six-pack of Hooch. The aging refrigerator was nearly empty except for a half gallon of curdled milk and a few sealed Tupperware containers holding thick slices of some pale and unidentifiable meat; all these he quickly removed to the outdoor trash can. For a moment he wasn't sure if he really wanted to use the Kelvinator himself, but it didn't smell, and he placed the perishables inside.
Feeling a bit grungy and dry-mouthed, Blalock proceeded to take a long hot shower in the downstairs bathroom. The brass shower attachment on the clawfooted tub looked a little complicated at first, but he soon mastered it. Much later, after the small room had grown thick with steam, he emerged and dried himself off, changing into the last set of clean clothes from his overnight bag: a pair of black Levis and a black-and-white striped flannel shirt over a black t-shirt, along with his usual Rockports. He felt much better.
While in the bathroom, Blalock had noticed that a faint fetid smell still lingered, and he was unsure whether it was connected to the dead smell in his grandfather's room or an unrelated symptom of the aged plumbing. He re-entered the bathroom from the morning room and opened the door by the toilet to the south.
The stench was as powerful as ever, and the room had additionally grown quite cold due to the open window. There must be something else, perhaps something dead in the basement.
Where was the basement? Benson had mentioned it -- the boiler was there, he'd said -- but Blalock couldn't remember seeing any way to get down there. Hadn't there been a key? He drew out his key ring and, sure enough, there was silver-colored key with a small adhesive label marked "Basement." There was also, he noticed, another key marked "Stairs." This now struck him as somewhat confusing, since the door to the servants' stairwell had no lock, and the main stairs were all open.
Through the door to the sitting room, he heard a phone ring.
He left through the south door, closing it behind him against the sickening reek of decay, and saw that the candlestick telephone on the endtable was ringing. He picked it up and fumbled with it awkwardly; he'd seen telephones like this in antique shops and old movies, but he had never actually used one.
"Hello?" Blalock answered, placing the receiver to his ear and grasping the stick with his other hand like a microphone.
"Mr. Blalock?" came a tinny voice at his ear.
"Yes, this is Ben Blalock."
"Mr. Blalock, this is Steve Sawyer, attorney for your tenants? They wanted to complain that..."
"They wanted to complain?" interrupted Blalock.
"Yes, they complained to me that you apparently entered their room yesterday without their permission."
"Without their permission," Blalock repeated slowly.
"Yes, that's right. I was told that..."
"I don't need their permission," said Blalock with annoyance. "I'm the landlord."
"Nonetheless, Mr. Blalock, I was informed by my clients that you somehow entered their room without a key."
"Yes, I was going to bring that up tomorrow morning. If I'm going to rent a room in my house, I'll need a key for myself."
"Well, Mr. Blalock, I understand your concern, but my clients value their privacy just as much as you value yours. When they come back this evening..."
"They're not coming back."
"Pardon me, Mr. Blalock?"
"I said the tenants are not coming back. They are without a doubt the most obnoxious, inconsiderate people I have ever had the displeasure to meet. They shoved me out in the hall. They slammed the door in my face. They blasted noise all night. They stirred up the bats. They left the doors hanging open, they mashed the Taurus, and they left tire tracks all the way across the goddam circle!"
"Mr. Blalock, there's really no reason to swear. I'm afraid I don't quite follow..."
"Follow this. The tenants have been evicted. Permanently. Completely. Immediately. Forever."
"Mr. Blalock, I'm afraid you don't have the authority to make that decision, at least until you sign the final papers tomorrow."
"So sue me!" Blalock shouted, and slammed down the receiver.
A moment later, he realized that this might not have been the best thing to say to a lawyer. Oh well, too late, he thought, and left the sitting room to look for the basement stairs.
IV
Blalock spent the next couple of hours searching each room on the first floor thoroughly but fruitlessly for a passage to the basement. He moved furniture and looked behind it, felt along walls for hidden apertures, even braved the stench of his grandfather's room to check again under the cot. He spent a great deal of time fiddling with the bookcase in the parlor, to no avail. He had just examined the cupboard under the kitchen sink -- some old pots and pans, but nothing else -- and was slouching dejectedly into the great hall when he noticed a thin, almost invisible vertical line on the sloping wall beneath the central staircase, running perpendicularly to the long wooden slats. He examined this wall more carefully and discovered a small door, cunningly concealed, with an inconspicuous keyhole exactly the same color as the wood.
Blalock took out his keyring and inserted the key labeled "Basement" into the lock. It didn't fit. He then tried the key marked "Stairs," which slipped into the lock and turned with a click, and he opened the small creaking door onto the slanting area beneath the central staircase.
It was dark, but there was a push-button switch here, which when pressed revealed a steep flight of wooden stairs to his left, following the slant of the staircase above and ending at a narrow white door. Blalock descended the squeaking stairs, pushed open the door's magnetic latch, and entered the basement. It was pitch black, but he could see by the light from the stairwell a long pullchain dangling just beyond the door. He yanked it, and it broke off in his hand; but several incandescent bulbs lit up overhead as well, revealing a basement that was completely ordinary in every apparent respect.
There was the boiler that Benson had mentioned, originally designed for coal but at some point converted to natural gas. Blalock checked the gauge; the needle was comfortably in the green. There was a deep wooden workbench with a mounted vise and a rack of tools on the wall behind it, its surface bare except for a very old radio, a heavy-duty flashlamp, and a pair of thick work gloves. Scattered around the basement were some old yard implements; a ladder; a stack of used paint cans; a crowbar; a decrepit, mildewed baby carriage; a dusty bicycle; a short pile of lumber on the dirt floor; a stack of peeling window frames leaning against the foundation wall. The foundation itself seemed to be constructed of two distinct types of brick: darker brick on the upper two-thirds of the wall, and a more powdery, lighter-red brick below. To his right the basement ended at a plain white door secured by a simple hook-and-eye latch; to his left, the room continued for several yards before it cornered and receded into shadows.
Something about one of the window frames in the rear of the stack by the wall caught Blalock's attention. It was round. He flipped through the stack of frames, some of them still holding a few thin panes of wavy glass, and found in the back a round oculus window three feet across, its circular pane still fully intact. The outside of the frame was threaded with a raised spiral ridge. The pane was in fact a convex lens, like the one in the pointless high door at the back of the attic story, though much larger. It was without question the window that belonged in the attic dormer room, in the boarded-up space he'd seen from outside.
Blalock was suddenly and unaccountably possessed by an irresistible compulsion to reinstall the window immediately. He carefully lugged the heavy, cumbersome object up the three flights of stairs to the attic, gently setting it down against the wall outside the dormer room. The door to the room was locked, as he had suspected, but now he had a plan.
One of the more erudite bits of knowledge that Blalock had acquired while walking the hallowed halls of one of the country's most prestigious universities was how to open a lock with a credit card. Ordinarily he would not even remotely consider exercising such knowledge, but these were not ordinary circumstances, nor ordinary tenants. He took a flexible laminated movie-rental card from his wallet, stuck it in the crack of the door above the lock, and jimmied it down back and forth until it pushed the sliding bolt from the socket. He pulled the door open easily.
Nearly all of the recording equipment had been removed, leaving only the three stools, a scuffed black amplifier, and a few stray cables. Good, thought Blalock. That would make it easier for him to strip the south wall.
He brought the crowbar up from the basement and proceeded to do just that. The acoustical tiles fell away easily; behind them, a large sheet of plywood was nailed tightly over the window casing. This proved somewhat more difficult to remove, but Blalock eventually pried it off. The room now lay open to the afternoon breeze through the vacant casing. It was a little warmer than the day before, though still a bit chilly; but the influx of fresh air greatly improved the stale atmosphere. Blalock noticed that the inside surface of the now-exposed casing was threaded with a recessed spiral groove. The round window with its convex pane twisted into the casing like a screw.
Stepping back, Blalock was unsure why he had heretofore been gripped with the obsessive desire to put the window back in. It was striking, certainly; but the view of the landscape beyond the broad lens was stretched and bent into a distorted, almost extraterrestrial vista. Blalock found the effect unnerving. Still, he thought, it would at least improve the aesthetics of the front exterior, and he could always have it replaced with a pane of plain glass. He stepped back up to the window and peered through its central focus point, half-expecting to view the spire of some distant tower or some other significant object, but he could see nothing but empty sky. Maybe it had something to do with the sun or moon at certain seasons -- but no, the window faced south. Blalock turned away from the window, swiveled the latch on the inside of the door, checked the knob to make sure it was unlocked, and closed the door behind him. Had he done all this a few seconds later, he might have seen the skeletal apparition that appeared in the lensed window, hovered a long moment, and flapped away on great leathery wings.
It was now almost mid-afternoon. Blalock heated a can of soup on the kitchen stove, made a salami sandwich, and poured himself a glass of milk. He ate leisurely at the small table in the morning room, making plans for his permanent occupancy. He needed to call his job and give notice, and cancel the lease on his California apartment. His belongings could be shipped here. With the noisy tenants gone, he could retire in the master bedroom tonight, and perhaps finally get a decent night's sleep. For now, though, he needed to find the source of that highly unpleasant and persistent odor.
Blalock disposed of the remains of his lunch and returned to the basement. Near the white door to the north he caught a sharp whiff of decay; whatever was causing the stench must lay behind that door, and Blalock was not entirely sure that he wanted to find out what it was. But it had to be gotten rid of somehow, and depending on the nature of its source he might possibly have to call the police. He flipped the latch and opened the door into tomblike blackness where the nauseous odor hung even more thickly, if that were possible, than it did in his grandfather's room above.
Feeling around the doorframe, Blalock found a switch, and more bulbs came on above. The large room, floored with wide planks, was nearly bare except for an old plow, a pitchfork, a pile of rusted cylindrical objects that looked vaguely industrial, and few empty burlap bags that had once held livestock feed. Ahead the room ended in a brick wall, the western side of the foundation, and continued its length north for some distance to a plaster wall with a bricked-up fireplace. In front of him and a little to the right, close to the outside wall, a large section of flooring had collapsed, rotted away by drainage from cracks in the foundation; and it was from this ragged hole that the noxious miasma appeared to emanate.
Blalock did not dare approach the hole across the creaking, splintery boards lest they give way and send him falling through into the lightless space below. Along the wall to his right was a white door like the one he had just entered; it opened on a flight of rickety stairs descending to a planked landing and continuing down to the right into deep shadows. There did not seem to be a switch here. He heard a soft scuttling noise below, like a rat in the darkness.
Blalock left for a moment and returned with the flashlamp from the workbench. He switched it on and descended the rickety stairs, which turned right, and then right again, ending at a brick wall with a high arched opening. Beyond the arch was what looked like a root cellar; and beyond that, straight ahead past the shelves of dusty mason jars and corked bottles, an identical arch opened through the light red bricks of the far wall to a downward-sloping ramp, from which the charnel stench wafted with renewed intensity.
Battling trepidation, Blalock followed the twisting ramp into a high brick tunnel, down, down, and farther down. The brickwork changed to stonework; the air around him grew colder; the rancid fetor became nearly overpowering. At last the ramp ended in a short flight of very steep stone stairs, at the bottom of which was a solid wooden door, unusually tall, reinforced with metal bands and fitted with a wide iron keyplate. To the left of the door was an empty candle sconce; to the right was a large metal key on a larger metal ring, hanging from the wall on a stout rusty nail.
Blalock turned the large metal key in the lock of the tall door. It scraped reluctantly, then gave with a loud thumping click. The vile odor of filth and rot was almost unbearable; but it was not the putrid stench that sent Blalock's thoughts racing along unwanted avenues of unspeakable conjecture. He was standing at the bottom of a vast cavern, its far walls barely visible in the ranging beam of the flashlamp. High above he could see the jagged hole where the basement floor had fallen through, the feeble light seeping down from it seemingly absorbed before it could penetrate very far into the subterrene blackness. A rusty, slime-encrusted pipe ran down through the floor, which was riddled with pits covered by corroding metal grates. Thick iron chains ending in large grim hooks ran down from distant overhead beams in a diabolical arrangement of pulleys and hoists. But beyond even this, and what nearly cost Blalock his sanity then and there, was the hellish chorus of jibbers and squeals that had erupted from the noisome pits when the opening door disturbed the sarcophagal silence of the echoing cavern; the squelching and shambling in the depths below; the bellows and shrieks that sounded at once utterly bestial and all too human....
Blalock turned and fled in panic back through the tall door, shutting it heavily behind him against the horrible jabbering and the overwhelming stench, racing up the twisting ramp through the arches in the root cellar, up the rickety stairs to the planked basement room and out the plain door to the room with the boiler and the workbench. He stopped to catch his breath, his heart pounding wildly. He set the flashlamp down on the workbench, which he then slumped against. There was no way this could be a hoax, he thought, at least not entirely. But if not a hoax, then what? The realities were too hideous to contemplate.
Blalock decided he needed a drink, badly. A couple of belts of Scotch would be ideal, or at least a cool relaxing glass of Chardonnay. These unfortunately being unavailable, he went back up to the kitchen and uncapped a bottle of Hooch from the Kelvinator. He took his first sip rather cautiously, expecting the worst; but the lemonade brew wasn't bad, fairly tasty in fact, and he carried it with him to the table in the morning room and sat down. The kitchen, thought Blalock, desperately needed a place where one could sit. Later on he would bring down one of those stools from the dormer room. He took a long sip of the lemony drink and began to calm down a little.
The telephone rang again. Frowning, Blalock set down the bottle and crossed out the swinging door through the great hall and into the sitting room, where the phone continued to ring. He picked it up and raised the receiver to his ear. "Blalock," he said.
"Hello, Mr. Blalock, this is Steve Sawyer again."
Blalock scowled. "How can I help you, Mr. Sawyer?"
"Well, Mr. Blalock, my clients will be arriving at your estate in a few hours, and they'll be expecting an apology for..."
"Arriving here? In a few hours?"
"Yes, that's right, and they would like for you to apologize for..."
"Apologize?" Blalock was livid.
"Yes, apologize for entering their room without consent."
"They want me to apologize?" Blalock repeated incredulously.
"That's right, Mr. Blalock. If they find your apology satisfactory, they may consider dropping the lawsuit."
"Lawsuit?" Blalock felt his teeth clench.
"Yes, Mr. Blalock, my clients are intending to file suit against you for illegal entry and invasion of privacy. They'll be over to speak to you about it in a few hours, and we can make it an item of discussion tomorrow morning."
"No," said Blalock, "they won't be over. The front gate is locked."
"Well, I would suggest that you unlock the front gate right away, Mr. Blalock, or you'll be sued for breach of contract and unlawful confiscation of private property as well." Sawyer paused. "You might want to contact your attorneys this evening, Mr. Blalock. Goodbye." The line went dead.
Blalock slammed the phone down, suppressing a roar of outrage. He stalked quickly back to the morning room, guzzled the bottle of lemon brew, went to the kitchen, opened another, and returned to the sitting room to call Benson. The attorney was just getting ready to leave his office -- it was almost five o'clock -- but when Blalock explained the situation, and the telephone calls from Sawyer, Benson was more than willing to take time to counsel him.
"Do you have the lease agreement handy?" asked Benson.
Blalock thumbed through the legal documents still strewn over the coffee table, and found the lease stapled to the letter. "Yes, I've got it right here."
"Good. Take a look at item 4b...."
It turned out that Sawyer and the tenants, in Benson's words, had no legs to stand on. The lease stipulated only that the room was to be rented for two nights a week; it did not specify which nights, and it said that the lease could be temporarily suspended in the event of unexpected emergencies. "I think your grandfather's death would fall into that category," said Benson. Furthermore, the agreement granted the landlord full access to the rented property, and, Blalock noted with satisfaction, it explicitly specified that the lease could be terminated by the landlord at any time for an extensive variety of reasons, including excessive noise. "You've got nothing to worry about," Benson assured him.
"So I can leave the gate locked?"
"Absolutely," said Benson. Blalock heard the smile in his voice. "I doubt they would try to break in, but if they do, you'll be the one with grounds for a lawsuit."
Blalock felt himself smiling as well. They exchanged closing pleasantries, and Benson wished Blalock a good night's rest. "Thank you," said Blalock, with complete sincerity.
Blalock finished his second Hootch and returned to the kitchen, where he considered having a third. He should probably eat something, he thought, but he had taken a late lunch, and in any case his experience in the cavern below the basement had taken away any appetite he might otherwise have had. Did anyone besides himself know about that infernal place? He should bring it up at the meeting tomorrow, have them all come out here and show it to them. What was it? Why was it down there -- down below where he was standing now, he thought with a shudder -- and who put it there? It appeared by all accounts to be immensely old.
There was also, he thought, the key marked "Basement" that he had not yet used. Blalock shuddered again. What he had seen in that cavern below the basement without the use of an issued key, he never wanted to see again. What might lie behind some door that might otherwise be inaccessibly locked? He couldn't bear to know, but could bear not to even less; this was his house now, and he needed to know what was in it, even if only so he could contact the proper authorities. Also, it occurred to him, he didn't want the proper authorities to think he was hiding something himself; if they launched an investigation, as they undoubtedly would, he didn't want them to find something awful down there that he didn't even know about. He did, after all, have the key, which might make him liable in some way.
He decided to have a third Hooch after all, drinking it while leaning against the kitchen counter, summoning his nerve. Ten minutes later, Blalock set down the empty bottle and proceeded with forced courage through the door under the staircase and back into the basement. Since he hadn't yet explored to the left of the stairs, where the room ran east and cornered back into shadows, he picked up the flashlamp from the workbench and started in that direction.
He thumbed the switch on the handle and discovered that the flashlamp was already on, and starting to grow dim. He swore. He'd forgotten to turn it off after his mad flight out of that accursed cavern, leaving it unnoticed on the well-lit workbench. The room did not appear to extend far around the corner, however, and in the dimming beam of the flashlamp he could see that it ended abruptly in a dark brick wall with a closed wooden door set in a crumbling archway.
He heard a scuttling noise along the wall, and turned the fading beam to discover a large rat creeping along the foundation. It turned toward the light for a moment, and something in the uncertain illumination of the yellowing beam made it look briefly as though it had almost human features. He remembered the dream where he was sitting in the circle of stones, and that rat-thing had run up his shoulder to talk to him with a human face. He looked again, and the rat was gone. He refused to worry about it. This was an old house. Old houses had rats. And the light had really been too dim to tell much of anything for sure, hadn't it?
Blalock cast the beam over the arched door ahead. His heart began to pound. He didn't like where brick arches in the basement had led him thus far. Judging from the orientation of the door, the room behind it must lie directly beneath the parlor. He reached the door and gave a preliminary sniff. He smelled the damp dust of the basement, but that was all.
Blalock took out the key marked "Basement" and placed it in the circular brass lock. He noticed he was trembling. He breathed deeply, turned the key, and pushed open the large wooden door.
He entered a wood-paneled room lined from floor to ceiling with books. In the beam of the flashlamp he could see a light switch by the door, and he pushed it on. In the center of the room was a spacious reading table with a single banker's lamp and a high wingbacked armchair. The walls consisted solely of overflowing bookshelves.
He switched off the flashlamp and set it on the reading table. He scanned the shelves in awe at a vast selection of ancient volumes, any one of which would have been a prized treasure in the rarities collection of any university. There were books on biology, chemistry, geometry, mathematics, astronomy, physics -- all hopelessly outdated but beautifully printed and bound -- as well as a great number of crumbling leatherbound tomes dedicated to astrology, alchemy, necromancy, and other discredited superstitions. Along the top, the bookcases themselves were intricately traced with what at first appeared to be a delicate floral pattern but turned out on inspection to more closely resemble a series of interlocking spider webs.
Blalock heard the arched wooden door fall shut behind him with a soft, audible click. Another bookshelf slid down from the ceiling to the floor, completely covering the doorway. Blalock rushed over and rattled it in panic. It didn't budge. He seemed to be trapped.
Blalock stood frozen in a cold sweat. His pulse rang in his ears. He breathed very deeply. He would find a way out.
It was, he thought, not at all the worst of the basement rooms to be trapped in. It was as well appointed as any of the rooms upstairs, and well lit by a cut-glass chandelier overhead. His eyes played once more over the tall shelves of fine and deteriorating books. Here was a copy of Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species, first edition; there, a Shakespearean folio from the mid-seventeenth century. He began walking along beside the shelves, jogging books at random, hoping to stumble upon some secret latch that would raise the bookcase in front of the door again and allow him to escape. But he kept finding himself distracted by the books themselves, and eventually settled into the wingback chair at the reading table to thumb through some of the more interesting ones.
The histories and anatomies and geographies were lovely with their embossed leather bindings and colorful, detailed plates; but it was the brittle, yellowed pages of the medieval and early renaissance texts on alchemy and sorcery that truly captured his fascination. He recognized some titles he'd seen on the parlor bookshelf, but here in even earlier, less well preserved editions: Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten, Coelum Philosophorum, Liber Logaeth, La Géométrie de L'Abîme. The things people believed, he thought, and the effort they expended in pursuing those phantasms, bordered on the unbelievable. There was a catalog of demons from the early 1500s, which read in part:
"Amon, or Aamon, is a great and mightie marques, and commeth abroad in the likenes of a woolfe, having a serpents taile, spetting out and breathing flames of fier; when he putteth on the shape of a man, he sheweth out dogs teeth, and a great head like to a mightie raven; he is the strongest prince of all other, and understandeth of all things past and to come, he procureth favor, and reconcileth both freends and foes, and ruleth fourtie legions of divels. Barbatos, a great countie or earle, and also a duke, he appeareth in Signo sagittarii sylvestris, with foure kinds, which bring companies and great troopes. He and the voice of all living creatures. He detecteth treasures hidden by magicians, knoweth all things past, and to come, and reconcileth freends and powers; and governeth thirtie legions of divels by his authoritie...."
And on and on it went, naming and describing demon after demon in such great detail it began to become unsettling. And here was a 16th-century alchemical treatise:
"The opinion and determination of all who philosophize rightly is the same: that all metals are generated by the vapour of sulphur, and of argent vive. Because when the fat of the earth being heated, finds the substance of water somewhat globulous, it as well by its natural virtue, as by the rays of the celestial bodies and the endeavor of heaven, as according to the purity or impurity of each, consolidated it in the veins of the earth into those most beautiful bodies, gold, silver, copper, tin, iron, and lead."
All manner of useless knowledge, Blalock thought, on all kinds of emphemeral subjects.
"To form ye Gate through which They from ye Outer Void might manifest thou must set up ye stones in ye elevenfold configuration. First thou shalt raise up ye four cardinal stones and these shall mark ye direction of ye four winds as they howleth through their seasons…."
"When from the stone the wise Artist has made to spring forth the fountainhead of living waters, has expressed the resin of the vine of the Wise, & produced their wine, let him mark that within this homogenous substance, appearing in the form of water, are three & divers substances, & the three natural principles of all bodies, salt, & sulphur, & Mercury, the which are the spirit, soul, & body...."
"Whosoever performeth this Rite with true understanding shall pass beyond ye Gates of Creation and enter ye Ultimate Abyss wherein dwelleth ye vapourous Lord S'ngac who eternally pondereth ye Mystery of Chaos. ... Enter ye Web by the Gate of the North...."
"The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are and the Old Ones shall be. From the dark stars They came ere man was born, unseen and loathsome They descended to primal earth. Beneath the oceans They brooded while ages past, till seas gave up the land, whereupon They swarmed forth in Their multitudes and darkness ruled the Earth. At the frozen Poles They raised mighty cities, and upon high places the temples of Those whome nature owns not and the Gods have cursed...."
Absorbed in the contemplation of ancient hermetica within the thick underground walls of the basement library, Blalock did not hear the smash and clamor of metal against metal as the large black van slammed into the driveway gate, backed up, accelerated, and slammed again.
Blalock sat back, rubbed his eyes, and wondered how long he had been reading through the strange old texts with their curious illustrations. He thought about going upstairs to lie down, then remembered what he had known all along and had been trying to shut from his mind: he was trapped here. At least until he could find a way out. He began searching the room with somewhat more urgency. Outside, the van finally smashed through the gate and barreled up the drive.
Blalock felt under the table, jiggled the shade on the banker's lamp. He began touching and examining all of the bookshelves very carefully. He could find nothing.
The van streaked up the drive and straight through the middle of the grass circle. One of the tires struck the round concrete marker, flipping the marker into a vertical position. Somewhere below, there was the noise of a trip mechanism.
In the basement library, the middle bookshelf on the south wall slid back and then sideways, opening onto a very wide, very black tunnel. The van screeched to a halt in front of the house.
Blalock stared at the tunnel. He turned on the flashlamp and shone the beam into it, but it hardly seemed to shed any light at all. Battery's about dead, thought Blalock. From what he could see, the tunnel appeared to be carved through solid, shiny black stone, like obsidian, but that couldn't be possible. The edges of the tunnel were oddly angled, too, and he was reminded strongly of the strange black boulder in the far meadow. Upstairs, the tenants had finished banging angrily and uselessly on the front door, and were now circling around the side of the house to try the back door.
Blalock took a tentative step into the tunnel, then another. He suddenly felt highly disoriented. He turned around and realized with a shock that he could no longer see the library behind him. The black angled tunnel extended infinitely on both sides, front and back. Blalock took another step, and felt as though he were walking on a wall; his sense of direction, including up and down, was completely gone. The tunnel twisted and angled before him through incomprehensible vectors.
The tenants stormed up the servants' stairwell to the third floor. Blalock veered and slipped along the crazy vertiginous tunnel. He could almost make out something ahead that looked like a vast black gate.
The tenants reached the third floor and rushed to the door of the dormer room. One of them stuck a key quickly into the lock, turned it, and pulled on the door, which did not open because it had not been locked to begin with and now was. Swearing profusely, he jiggled the key again, turned the knob, and pulled open the door.
Three things happened at the same time.
The rays of the star Sirius, high in the south, struck the oculus window in such a way that they focused into a tight beam of blue-white light, which passed straight through the head of the heavily tattooed tenant with the swastika scar on his shaved scalp, killing him instantly, and proceeded without hindrance through the focal point of the smaller lensed window in the high door on the other side of the attic, where it bent very slightly downward and streaked in a blue line over the fields and trees to strike a peculiarly angled surface of the shiny black boulder in the far meadow, which shuddered, shook, shifted, and began to rise slowly into the air.
The old cloth wiring in the basement overheated and caught fire, igni