A Winter Haunting

FOURTEEN

I COULDN’T have told Dale what was waiting for him upstairs. I didn’t know. The Old Man had sealed off the second floor when I was three years old—not long after my mother died—and I had no memory of ever being up there. It may seem weird to have spent eight years in a house with the second floor sealed off behind plastic, but it didn’t seem that strange at the time. The Old Man was a fanatic for saving money, and I knew that it cost too much to heat the whole house for just the two of us. Also, on the second floor was their bedroom—the Old Man’s and my mother’s—and I understood early on that he hadn’t wanted to sleep up there after she died. Not that she died in the room. She died in the hospital at Oak Hill. At any rate, sleeping space was no problem as I got older—as old as I got—since the Old Man slept in his study and I began sleeping in the basement even before I went off to kindergarten.

As for calling the farm The Jolly Corner, well, that was just a conceit of mine after I’d read the James story when I was about seven. Essentially, I just liked the sound of the name. It’s true that the farm was anything but jolly with the Old Man on his regular drunken binges—he got angry when he drank—and both of us living our mostly silent and separate lives there. If there were any “alternative selves” haunting the house then, they belonged to the Old Man. My father had been intelligent enough, but he lacked that human gene that allows people to finish things. He’d dropped out of Harvard before World War II for no reason that he ever explained to me, and even with the GI Bill, he’d never gotten around to returning to school. His brother, my uncle Art, had not only graduated from college but had taught on the university level for a while. In a real sense, my uncle Art was the Jolly Corner-ish alternate-self ghost that the Old Man had to confront—Uncle Art had avoided the booze, written books, taught, traveled, married frequently, and basically just enjoyed himself through his life. Perhaps the Old Man lacked this enjoyment gene as well.

This Jolly Corner-ish idea of who he had become and what he had lost along the way had been buzzing through Dale Stewart’s brain for months. In writing his novel about the kids of Elm Haven in the summer of 1960, Dale had been staring unblinkingly at an innocence and breadth of potential that might have remained better off forgotten.

Potential, Dale had decided, was precisely the sort of curse that the Peanuts character Linus had once said it was. It was a burden before it was realized, and a constant specter after it had been failed to be realized. And every day, every hour, every small decision made, eliminated the remaining set of potential until—in what post-fifty Dale considered his last home stretch of life—that potential was fast dwindling toward zero.

Clare had once described the topography of life in those terms—an inverted cone dwindling to zero potential. Now Dale agreed with that figure.

The reality of opening up the second floor of the house had sobered Dale a bit. He had Michelle wait while he went into his study and returned with the baseball bat.

“Is that going to protect us from the ghosts?” she asked.

Dale shrugged. He’d also brought a flashlight, and he held it on the barricade of yellowed plastic as Michelle pulled out her box opener. “Do you want to do the honors?” she asked.

Dale’s hands were full with the bat and flashlight, so he just nodded to her. “You go ahead.”

Michelle did not hesitate. She cut through the first sheet of plastic with a lateral incision that ran four or five feet from the upper right to the lower left. Then she made a diagonal cut in the opposite direction. The brittle plastic peeled back as she tugged the first layer open. A second and third layer remained.

“Still time to change our minds,” said Michelle. Her eyes were bright.

Dale shook his head, and Michelle cut through the remaining plastic, pulling it free from the frame as if she were eagerly opening a Christmas present.

Dale didn’t know what he had expected—a sigh of sour air, perhaps, or a rushing in or rushing out of sealed-in atmosphere. But the plastic folded back, and if the air on the other side was anything but colder than the downstairs air, he could not detect it. He could detect the cold, however. It flowed out through the torn plastic like a frigid river. Michelle clicked shut the box opener and hugged herself. The cold made her nipples press against her blouse.

“Dark in there,” she said softly, almost whispering. “Cold.”

Dale nodded, stepped into the upstairs hallway, and jerked the flashlight beam to and fro. It was not much like his dream. There were no rooms to the right of the bare hallway, and only two closed doors on the left. He could see the same narrow table against the wall that he’d glimpsed the first time he peered through the plastic. There was a Victorian-style lamp on it. Heavy drapes covered the windows. The hardwood floor—no rug here—seemed strangely absent of dust. Could this space really have been sealed off for almost five decades without accumulating dust?

Propping the baseball bat against the table for a moment, Dale turned the old-fashioned switch on the lamp. Nothing. Either the bulb was burned out or Mr. McBride had cut off power to the second floor. Well, duh, he thought. It was fifty years ago.

Michelle took his arm. “Why didn’t we do this in the daylight?” she whispered.

“Too stupid,” said Dale. His voice sounded loud in the hardwood hallway. “Plus we had some drinking to do.” He lifted the bat again and took a few steps into the hall, with Michelle following closely. “You’d better stay over there by the stairs,” he said, all gallantry.

“Uh-huh, yeah, sure,” answered the redhead. “Like in the movies— Let’s split up. No offense, Dale Stewart, but fuck you.”

Dale grinned at this. They paused by the door to the front bedroom. The room held only an old-fashioned bed—stripped of sheets and pillows, the mattress pad yellowed with age but otherwise looking oddly clean—and a single dresser with no mirror. There was a built-in closet, but the door was open and it was empty. Without entering the front bedroom, Dale moved on to the second room, trying to remember the details of his dream.

Whatever the scary details had been, the second bedroom did not live up to them. The room was empty except for a small child’s rocking chair set precisely in the center of the square space, but directly above the rocking chair hung a massive and ornate chandelier. A huge, sepia-colored water stain covered much of the ceiling, looking like a faded fresco or a Rorschach test for giants.

“That’s weird,” whispered Michelle. “Why would they put a big chandelier up here? And that child’s rocker. . .”

“If it starts rocking,” said Dale, “I’m going to. . .”

“Shut up!” whispered Michelle with an urgency that may not have been pure acting.

They went into the room. Dale flicked a light switch. Nothing. He played the flashlight over the walls, the heavily draped windows, behind the door. Nothing of interest. Even the wallpaper designs had faded to indecipherability.

“Just think,” Michelle said softly, “the last time the air up here was breathed, Dwight Eisenhower was president.”

“That’s just because whatever walks up here doesn’t breathe,” said Dale, using his best Rod Serling voice.

Michelle made a fist and hit him in the upper arm. It hurt.

“Let’s take a look at that front bedroom.” He paused out in the hall and played the flashlight beam over the north wall of the hallway. “Odd,” he said, “the landing comes around here as if there should be a room on that side. There’s certainly room for it—it’d be over the kitchen.” The flashlight beam flicked back and forth, but there was only the ancient, faded wallpaper, with no sign of a doorway having been sealed off.

“The lost room,” whispered Michelle.

“‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ “said Dale.

“Pardon?”

Dale shook his head and led the way to the front bedroom. The cold up here really was brutal. He began wondering about re-fixing the plastic to seal off this floor again.

He stepped into the room without any sense of drama, but the sensation hit him so hard that he stopped in his tracks, almost stepping back into the hall. “Jesus Christ,” he said without meaning to.

“What?” demanded Michelle, squeezing his arm tightly.

“Don’t you feel that?”

“Feel what?” She looked at him in the reflected light from the flashlight beam. “Don’t kid anymore, Dale.”

Dale was not kidding. Not being well versed in the supernatural, he did not know what to expect in a so-called haunted room—the usual, probably: a deathly cold spot, the kind of smell of rotting meat that had greeted him during his first moments in the house, perhaps a sense of something cold and dead brushing past him like a blind breeze.

This was none of that.

The instant Dale had entered the room, he had been all but overcome by a wave of absolute physical desire. No, not desire. That was too weak a word. Lust. His erection had been immediate and powerful, and the only thing that kept Michelle from noticing it now was the darkness and the fact that he had worn a long cardigan sweater for the semiformal Thanksgiving dinner.

But even more powerful than the erection was the frenzy of lust that surged through his system. He turned to Michelle, not knowing what to say, and he immediately noticed the nipples still visibly straining against her blouse, the exposed cleavage there, the curve of her hips, her red hair—her pubic hair would still be red, the skin on her soft abdomen almost certainly a soft white, the lips of her sex a pale pink—and he had the urge, no, almost the absolute need, to drop the stupid baseball bat, set the flashlight down, pull her onto the bed, press her down, tear her clothes off, and. . .

“Jesus Christ,” Dale said again and stepped back out into the hallway.

The waves of lust abated the instant he stepped across the threshold. The erection remained, but it no longer controlled him.

“What?” demanded Michelle. She had followed him out into the hall but was looking back into the room with real alarm. His flashlight beam wavered on the hallway wall, and the bedroom was black with darkness. “What?”

Dale shook his head. He had the wild urge to laugh senselessly. Whoever heard of a haunted room that gave you hard-ons? Not a haunting, but a boning.

“What is it?” asked Michelle, dropping her grip on his arm but stepping in front of him.

Dale took a step back, half afraid that his erection would brush against her, afraid that even the softest touch of her large breasts against him would set him off again. He held the flashlight to one side, allowing the darkness to conceal him.

“Did you feel anything?” he asked at last.

“No. Did you?”

“Yeah,” said Dale. That syllable was an understatement. He had come very close to raping this visitor, this near-stranger, this fifty-one-year-old woman. Dale shook his head again, feeling the last tidal surges of lust disappearing. He had not felt such an erotic moment since his late adolescence, and possibly not even then. This, he thought, must be the kind of wild loss of sexual control that the brain-dead fundamentalists are afraid of when they try to ban pornography—to ban anything erotic. Sex with no humanity at all. Pure sexual energy, absolute desire. A fucking frenzy. He looked back at the darkened doorway. The Scientific Method demanded that he step back through there and see what happened.

Not today, Charlie, thought Dale.

“What was it?” said Michelle, no humor in her voice now. She grabbed Dale by the upper arms and shook him slightly. “Did you see something? Smell something?”

Dale raised the flashlight between them, causing her to release his arms, and tried to smile. “Just an. . . emotion,” he said huskily. “Hard to describe.”

“Sadness?” said Michelle.

“Not quite.”

“What, then?”

He looked at her pale face in the reddish light. “You didn’t feel anything in there? Nothing at all?”

She squinted slightly. “Right now I’m feeling pissed off. If this is your idea of a joke, it’s not really funny.”

Dale nodded in agreement and tried to smile again. “Sorry. I think it’s just the effect of the wine and beer. I don’t drink that often and. . . well, I’m taking some medicines that may interact with it.” True, he thought, but both the Prozac and the sleeping pills make me impotent, not horny. “Maybe we’d better go back downstairs,” he said aloud. Part of his hindbrain was still commanding him to drag Michelle Staffney into that darkness and fuck her brains out.

“Yes,” said Michelle, looking intently at him, “maybe we’d better go back downstairs. It’s getting late. I’d better be going.”