Houses Without Doors by Peter Straub
“…good it’s going to do,” she muttered to the screen.
“What?”
“I wonder how much good that map is going to do you.” She did not bother to look at him.
“Why would you wonder about that?” he asked, unable to keep a sudden quickening from his voice.
“Because it shows you how to get to that place from Heathrow.” Then she did turn her head to face him.
“Heathrow is the name of the London airport.”
“But you’re not going to London. You’re going to someplace called Gatwick.”
The name Gatwick did sound familiar. Standish went upstairs to the bedroom, pulled his airline ticket out of his dresser drawer, and read what was printed on its face.
“You’re right,” he said when he came back downstairs. Jean grunted. Standish wondered if she had prowled through his dresser drawers. The television seemed very loud. He turned to the bookshelf and pulled out an atlas and found the index for England. Gatwick was unlisted.
Standish sat down in the chair beside Jean’s and unfolded Robert Wall’s little map, with its complications of roadways and interchanges. None of the towns in black boldface was Gatwick. He could see Gatwick nowhere between London and Lincolnshire. Gatwick was literally off the map. Well, he would find the place once he got there. Gas stations all had maps. England had to have gas stations, didn’t it?
Though Standish checked his mail every day, Robert Wall never wrote that Esswood had found it necessary to withdraw his appointment; and now here he was, thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean. Standish had two more drinks on the long flight, and nearly ordered a fourth until he remembered Jeremy Starger.
You couldn’t turn a ridiculous red-bearded little drunk loose in the Esswood library, could you? You couldn’t let that happen.
Standish took Crack, Whack, and Wheel from his carry-on bag. Feeling pleasantly honorable and muzzy from gin, he opened Isobel’s book. His underlinings, notes, and annotations jumped reassuringly out at him, testimony to the merits of Isobel’s poetry and the depth of his own thought. Here were the physical traces of an alert scholarly mind at work on a worthy object. Cf. Pslam 69, read one of his notes, world does not answer the cry for pity, ironic intent, ref, husband? In ink of another color, he had added eloquent offer of charity, attribute of the poetic self. And in pencil above this was added anti-narrative strategy. Isobel Standish’s work was full of antinarrative strategy. At some point Standish had scrawled Odysseus, Dante in the crowded margins. The title of the poem he had annotated so industriously was “Rebuke.”
Neither found he any, the vagrant said
Under the moldering eaves of the house
Full of heaviness and no one to comfort,
No one wavering up to say
“Put on your indiscretions, little fool,
but first take your glasses off. Why, Miss Standish…”
This glowing moon. The crowd
Has already gathered on the terraces.
The history of one who came too late
To the rooms of broken babies and their toys
Is all they talk about around here
And rebuke, did you think you’d be left out?
Blurry with a hangover, he ate the terrible airline meal, drank one glass of red wine that tasted of solvent, and nursed another through the movie. He was not accustomed to drinking so much. Jean did not approve of wine with meals, and Standish did not usually appreciate the sluggishness and confusion with which more than a single drink afflicted him. Yet this was not at all the life to which he was accustomed—the safety of home was thousands of miles behind him, and he was suspended in midair with a copy of Crack, Whack, and Wheel, on his way somewhere utterly unknown. Every aspect of this circumstance felt ripe with anxiety. Three weeks seemed a very long time to be immured in a remote country house looking at manuscripts of poems he still was not sure he understood.
Standish fell asleep during the movie, and woke up in dim morning greasy with sweat, as if covered with a fine film of oil. The stewardess had put a blanket over him, and he thrashed and kicked, imagining that some loathsome thing, some fragment of a nightmare, lay atop him—fully awake, he wiped his greasy face with his hands and looked around. Only a few goggling idiots had observed his moment of panic. Standish pulled the blanket off the floor and only then noticed that he had an erection. Like some huge beast diving into concealment, his dream shifted massively just beneath the surface of his memory.
The airplane began to descend shortly after he had eaten. Standish pushed up his window cover, and cold gray light streamed into the cabin. They seemed to descend through layer after layer of this silvery undersea light. At last the plane came through a final layer of clouds filled with a pure, unliving whiteness, and an utterly foreign landscape opened beneath them. Tiny fields as distinct as cobblestones surrounded an equally tiny airport. In the distance, two great motorways met and mingled on the outskirts of a little city surrounded by rows of terraced houses. A long way past the toy city lay a forest, a great flash of vibrant green that seemed the only true color in the landscape. England, Standish thought. A thrill of strangeness passed through him.
The plane landed at some distance from the terminal, and the passengers had to carry their hand baggage across the tarmac. Standish’s arms ached from the weight of the various small bags he had filled at the last minute with books and cassettes. His Walkman bumped his chest as it swung on its strap. He felt a queer, fatalistic exhilaration. The silvery light, a light never seen in America, lay over the tarmac. Two dwarfish men in filthy boiler-suits stood in the shadows beneath the airplane watching the passengers trudge toward the terminal. Standish knew that if he could overhear the words the men passed as they squinted through their cigarette smoke, he would not understand a one.
But he had no trouble understanding or being understood as he passed through the airport. The customs official treated him courteously, and the Immigration Officer seemed genuinely interested in Standish’s response to the question about the purpose of his visit. And when Standish asked him for directions to a village in Lincolnshire, he said, “Don’t worry, sir. This is a small country, compared to yours. You can’t get too lost.” Every word, in fact every syllable of this charming little speech was not only clear but musical: the Immigration Officer’s voice rose and fell as did no American’s, and so did that of the girl behind the rental desk, who had never heard of Esswood or Beaswick but pressed several maps on him before she walked him to the terminal’s glass doors and pointed to the decade-old turquoise Ford Escort, humble and patient as a mule, he had rented. “The boot should hold all your bags,” she said, “but there’s lashings of room in the backseat, if not. You’ll want to begin on the motorway directly ahead and go straight through the interchange, that’ll see you on your way.”
Standish wondered if all over England people played tunes at you with their voices.
TWO
Driving on the left, so counter to his instincts, elated him. Like all driving it was largely a matter of fitting in with the stream. Standish found that it took only a small adjustment to switch on the radio with the left hand instead of the right, to pass slower cars on the wrong side—but he was not sure how long this control would last in an emergency. If the car ahead of him blew a tire or began’ to skid…Standish saw himself creating a monumental crack-up, a line of wrecked smoking cars extending back a mile. His heart was beating fast-, and he smiled at himself in the rearview mirror. He was tired and jet-lagged, but he felt foolishly, shamelessly alive.
Only the roundabouts gave him trouble. The stream of traffic swept him into a great whirling circle from which drivers were to choose alternate exits marked by a great spokelike diagram. At first Standish could not tell which of the spokes was his, and drove sweating around the great circle twice. When at last he had seen that he wanted the third of the exits, he found himself trapped in the roundabout’s inner lane, unable to break through the circling traffic. He
Twenty-five kilometers further north, the whole thing happened all over again. His map slipped on the seat, and he panicked— he was supposed to stay on this northbound motorway, but at some point he did have to turn off onto a trunk road, and from that onto a series of roads that were only thin black lines on the map. He drove around and around and doubt overwhelmed him. His turn indicator ticked like a bomb. Sweat loosened his grip on the wheel. At last he managed to penetrate the honking wall of cars and escape the roundabout. He pulled off to the side of the road and scrabbled amongst the maps strewn on the floor. When he had the proper map in his hands, he could not locate the roundabout he had just fled. It did not exist on the map, only in life. His earlier feelings of relaxation and purposefulness mocked him now. They were illusions; he was lost. At length the desire to weep left him and he calmed down. He found a roundabout on the map, an innocuous gray circle, which almost had to be the one he had just escaped. He was not supposed to get off the motorway for another sixty kilometers, where a sign should indicate the way to Huckstall, the village where he picked up the next road. He would not have to brave any more roundabouts. Standish pulled out into the traffic.
After a time, the landscape became astonishingly empty. Dun-colored bushes lay scattered across flat colorless land. Far away in the distance was a gathering of red brick cottages. Standish wondered if this might be Huckstall.
He looked at the tiny village through the passenger window and saw a pale face pressed against a second-floor window, a white blur surrounded by black just as if—really for all the world, Standish thought, just as if a child had been imprisoned in that ugly two-story building, walled up within the red brick to stare eternally toward the cars rushing past on the motorway. Smaller white blotches that might have been hands pressed against the glass, and a hole opened up in the bottom of the child’s face, as if the child were screaming at Standish, screaming for help!
He quickly looked away and saw that a low black hill had appeared before him on the right side of the motorway. Bare of vegetation, the hill seemed to fasten onto the empty landscape rather than grow from it. Other hills like it canceled half the horizon. They looked dead, like garbage piles—then he thought they looked like black blood-soaked sheets, bloody towels and pads thrown onto the abortionist’s floor.
The air carried a sour metallic tang, as if it were filled with tiny metal shavings. Standish came up beside the first low hill and saw that it was a mound of some material like charcoal briquettes—stony chips of coal. Now and then rock slides of the chips ran down the flanks of the hill. Between the black hills of coal dusty men rode toy-like bulldozers. Completely ringed by the black hills was a world of men rushing around in blackened, murky air beneath strings of lights. Obscure machines rose and fell. Yellow flares burned beside the black mounds. Slag heaps, Standish thought, not knowing if he was right. What were slag heaps, anyhow?
Even the sky seemed dirty. Rhythmic clanks and thuds as from underground machines filled the air. It was like driving through a hellish factory without walls or roof. Standish had not seen a road sign or marker for what must have been miles. There was nothing around him now but the shifting black hills and the dusty men moving between the flares. Suddenly the road seemed too narrow to be the motorway.
He decided to keep driving until he saw a road sign. The thought of getting out of his car in this brutal and desolate place made his throat tighten.
Then the entire world changed in an eye-blink. The black hills, strings of lights, men on toy bulldozers, and tiny flares fell back behind him, and Standish found himself driving through dense, vibrant green. On either side of the car fat vine-encrusted trees and wide bushes pushed right to the edge of the road. For ten or fifteen minutes Standish drove through what appeared to be a great forest. The interior of the car grew as hot as a greenhouse. Standish pulled up to the side of the road and wiped his forehead. Leaves and vines flattened against the side window. He looked at his map again.
Northeast from the second roundabout extended the road to Huckstall. The map indicated woodlands in green, but none of the green covered the roadway. Sickeningly, Standish thought that all this right-left business had so confused him that he had traveled south from Gatwick instead of north—by now he would be hundreds of kilometers out of his way. He groaned and closed his eyes. Something soft thumped against his windshield. Standish moaned in dismay and surprise, and reflexively covered his face with his arms.
He lowered his arms and looked out. On the upper right-hand side of the windshield was a broad smeary stripe which he did not think had been there earlier. Standish did not at all want to think about what sort of creature had made the smear. An insect the size of a baby had turned to froth and spread itself like butter across the glass. Death again, messy and uncontainable. He wiped his face and started forward again.
The woodland ended as abruptly as it had begun, and without any transition Standish found himself back in the empty burnt-looking landscape. Twice he passed through other, smaller outdoor factories with their slag heaps and dusty men wandering through flares. He felt as if he had been driving in circles. There were no signs to Huckstall or anywhere else. Unmarked roads intersected his, leading deeper into the undulating russet landscape. Full of heaviness and no one to comfort, Standish remembered from “Rebuke.” He longed for markers pointing to Boston or Sleaford or Lincoln, names prominent on the map Robert Wall had sent him.
In minutes a low marker, a small stone post like a tooth set upright beside the road, came into view before him. Standish pulled up across from it. He got out of the car and walked around to see the worn words carved on the marker: 12km. Twelve kilometers? Twelve kilometers from what?
“Lost?”
Standish snapped his head up to see a tall thin man standing directly behind the little stone tooth. He might just now have jumped up out of the earth. His loose baggy brown trousers, spattered boots, and rumpled mackintosh were nearly the color of the landscape. He wore a dark cap pulled low on his forehead. The man slouched and grinned at Standish. He was missing most of his teeth.
“I don’t really know,” Standish said.
“Is that right?” said the grinning man. His tongue licked the spaces between his teeth.
“I mean, I’m trying to figure it out,” Standish said. “I thought this marker might help me.”
“And does it?” The man’s voice was a sly quiet burr, remarkably insinuating. ‘There’s precise matter to be read here. A man might do a great deal with information as accurate as that.”
Standish hated the man’s dry, insulting mockery. “Well, it doesn’t do me any good. I thought I was on the motorway, going toward Huckstall.”
“Huckstall.” The man pondered it. “Never heard of Americans making their way to Huckstall.”
“I’m not really going to Huckstall,” Standish said, infuriated at having to explain himself. “I just thought I might have lunch there. I was going to pick up the road to Lincolnshire.”
“Lincolnshire, is it? You’ll want to do a good bit of driving. And you thought you were on the motorway. Is this how motorways look in America, then?”
“Where is the motorway?” Standish cried.
“Kill a bird? Little baby?”
“What?”
“With your car?” He pointed his chin toward the smear on the windshield.
“You’re crazy,” Standish said, though he had feared exactly this.
The man blinked and stepped backward. His tongue slid into one of the spaces between his teeth. Now he seemed uncertain and defensive instead of insolent. He
“Where are you from?” he asked, hoping that the man would answer: Huckstall.
The man tilted his head back over his shoulder, indicating wide empty blankness. Then he took another backward step, as if he feared that Standish might try to capture him. The stranger came into focus for Standish: he was not at all the ironic, almost menacing figure he had seemed. The fellow was deficient, probably retarded. He lived in that empty wilderness and he slept in his clothes. Now that he was no longer afraid of the man, Standish could pity him.
“Killed something, that’ll do you,” the man said. His eyes gleamed like a dog’s, and he edged a bit further away. “That’ll be bad luck, that will.”
Standish thought the bad luck was in meeting an oaf straight out of Thomas Hardy. “Where is Huckstall, would you know?”
“I would. That I would. Yes.”
“And?”
“And?”
“And where is it?” Standish shouted.
“Up there, up there, right up that road, which is the very road you’re on.”
Standish sighed.
“They flee from me,” the man said.
Standish put his hands in his pockets and began to move around the front of the car without quite turning his back on the vagrant.
“That sometime did me seek,” the man said. “With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.”