Houses Without Doors by Peter Straub
——
Standish looked up and saw moonless night through the chinks in the shutters. A faint murmurous sound that had faded in and out of his awareness revealed itself to be the splashing of the fountain. He guessed that it was something like four o’clock.
——
For a time the young woman was conscious of nothing but her joy in being reunited with territory so sacred to her. She took her chair in the library in a daze of happiness. She wandered down the terraces and crossed the fields, letting them soak into her. She often found herself weeping, as if her life had been rescued from a barely perceived danger. The pitch of perception she had reached three years ago now returned effortlessly, and everything about her carried the charge of its own energy. The earth burned. The bindings in the library gleamed, the fat white sheep blazed in the fields. Poetry came in a vivid, almost frightening rush that left her exhausted and trembling. Every day there were two, three, four new poems—and dozens of pages of her journal. She was like an adept of a religion that worshipped creation itself, for what infused the Land with energy and made her writing leap sizzling onto the page was an original sacred force without a god, without Jesus, without priests or ceremonies—a transfiguring force that was its own god, savior, priest, ceremony. She had been chosen more decisively than before. She would never leave by choice, and if someone dragged her away—if she were expelled like waste into the inert world of Brunton Road, Duxbury, Massachusetts—she would inhale gray death and die.
For among the other guests was the “vagrant,” the “scholar-gipsy” who had helped awaken her. The famous cornflower eyes seemed dimmed and faded, his clothing even shabbier, he was not perhaps even notably clean—to Standish he seemed a distressingly seedy character. Yet they worked side by side in the library, they dined together, they walked together in the summery fields. They spent many hours in the Seneschals’ suite with E., who had fallen ill, and her son. The girl’s illness had progressed, and she was kept secluded in another room. My daughter cannot be seen, E. said, waving away their request with a limp hand. She is on a journey she must make alone—though she has needed you, my dear. We have all needed you. The boy, as beautiful as ever, like his sister with the same hawklike beauty of their mother, had become abstracted and wan. He slept most of the day, but when awake he seized the young woman’s hand and begged her for stories. We have all needed you. The young woman caught on both their drawn grave “hawk” features a look of hunger that was more a cast of features than a passing mood, as if it underlay all their charm and accomplishment.
——
Stung out of his trance, Standish looked up. A faint light had begun to seep through the shutters. Outside the house, hundreds, maybe thousands of birds seemed to be spinning in circles, raising an amazing joyous clamor as they flew round and round.
Need and hunger, thought the appalled Standish. Hawk features.
——
Did he know of the secret staircase and the secret corridor, the young woman asked her scholar-gipsy. She saw in the raised eyebrow that he thought she was teasing him—adding a literary mystery to their tale. I’m not joking, she said, there really is a secret staircase. Oh, is there now, asked the scholar-gipsy. And what have you been reading, you Duxbury romancer, The Castle of Otranto? The Monk? No, nor Vamey the Vampire, she answered, but how do you imagine I travel about the house without being seen? Do I transport myself by magick? Show me, my girl, I am in your thrall, uttered the scholar-gipsy, and the young woman led him up the grand staircase and through the disused chamber that in the days, now gone, when E.’s husband had deigned to spend the Parliamentary recess in Lincolnshire had been his study, which was a misnomer for any activity ever carried on in that little room—and when were the servants ever going to do anything about that wonky light (as E. called it)?—and then down the Inner Gallery past the view of the fountain, not neglecting to wave to the dear grave boy watching who knew what from his mother’s window, and into the young woman’s cherished Fountain Rooms. Her soul mate admired the stuffed fox and the terrarium while she slipped into the other room and through the door to the staircase and called out, Can you find me? He homed toward the sound of her laughter. And opened the door and came through to join her behind the walls, saying Cowslip bluet lily hyacinth rose. Now you know my secret, she said. And took him down the long staircase to the library. I hear strange creatures moving here at night. But I have an advantage, strange night-creatures or no. No—you have /^advantage, said the vagrant scholar-gipsy, you have a special place in this house, you have been taken in, you heard E., they need you. Because I need them more, she said, and he smiled and shook his head. Yet sometimes I feel quite terrified, a great change is coming upon us all and I don’t know if I have courage for it. Then, because he looked puzzled and downcast, she said, Behold, I have mysterious treasures, and took his hand in her private realm behind the walls and led him down and down the staircase until they were in darkness beneath the earth. You will see what I have seen, she said, and led him through a rat’s run of stone passages. You can find your way back? Oh there is no way back but to go forward. At length she gripped his hand and said: Here. It was a passage like any other, stone and dark and lined with doors. She threw open the nearest and said, Here is the chamber of the bones, where previous guests have gathered. Who is laughing? he said, following into a vault heaped with dry nibbled bones, not you nor I, but some laughter follows us. The treasure is laughing, said she, and took him out and down and through another door where three great doll’s houses stood side by side beneath a reproduction of the painting in which a gay King Charles spaniel scampers by the right offside wheel of a carriage coming up to Esswood House. The doll’s houses reproduced Esswood House in miniature, and in one front window of each little house a low light as of a candle burned.
Inch-Me and Pinch-Me and Beckon-Me-Hither are landlords here, she said. Within each house are rooms with little golden plates and little golden goblets and the room where little wine bottles fill rack upon rack and the dark little library where Inch-Me and Pinch-Me and Beckon-Me-Hither pretend to read like the great grand folks upstairs. And I must still show you the enormous furnace room where the live furnace they tend burns and burns, and the last room, the final room, the as you might say ultimate room—and they both heard a stir of sound behind them and turned, the young woman with an almost fearful ecstasy to see not whatever it was that she expected, but E.’s young son, the inheritor of the Land and all its treasures should the miniature live furnace continue to burn in his narrow live chest, Robert.
——
Of course, said William Standish to himself, and heard that the birds had ceased their racket. I knew it all along. I knew who he was. And I knew who she was, too.
——
Looking for poems? the boy asked. I often wondered where poems come from, and now I see two poets and I know. Have you seen enough of our cellars? I can show you other aspects, if you please? His smile played, and the young woman and her scholar-gipsy pleased that he show them wonders, new wonders. And the boy took them past the furnace room and the tiny chair empty of the tiny furnace-tender and up into the house again and through the screened passage and outside into the blazing warmth. The boy’s face, so like his mother’s, was full of an odd translucent light thrown up by the marble steps. He led them through the trellis to the top of the terraces.
E. and several other guests sat upon a Turkish carpet unrolled in the shade, and their hostess waved to the party of three. The other guests were G., a poet newly arrived in London from Yorkshire, N., a painter of portraits, and his mistress, O., so pale and weary of attitude that the young woman suspected her of indulging in opium, Y., D., and T., young novelists who had come down from Oxford to vanquish the literary world, lived together in a house in Chalk Farm, and reviewed books for TLS, and J., a literary banker and book collector from New York. These were not a particularly brilliant bunch, the young woman felt. Even E. had lost interest in Y., D., and T., w
All of these people waved to the threesome that crossed their vision, and E. called out to the young woman as she might to a servant a request that she speak to the cook about the quality of the lamb to be found in the local market—the young woman had come to be involved in some of the day-to-day matters of the house.
They clattered down the iron staircase to the long pond and the gnarled trees. The boy Robert led them to the trees, saying Oh, in all your wanderings did you ever wander here} I hear the laughter again, the vagrant said, who is laughing? He thought to balk, but the young woman took his hand and pulled him after the dancing boy into the trees. Inch-Me and Pinch-Me and Beckon-Me-Hither, said she. The gamekeeper’s boy, said the vagrant, looking out for foxes. And does old William have a boy now, called out Robert, I thought he lived without woman or get. Our young lady must be right, though I doubt I ever heard the names ere now.
From the terraces it looked as though only a small number of trees separated the pond from the fields, but in fact a considerable growth of trees lay beyond the pond, the illusion created by a valley or fold in the land into which the boy led them now. Sunlight fell in patches and spangles on the soft ground. My brothers and sisters are here, you know, he said, and the ground became level again and the trees separated before him like ladies drawing back from an unpleasantness. A round clearing lay open to the sun but out of sight of the house, visible only to the kites and blackbirds overhead.
Three low mounds occupied the center of the clearing, which was overgrown with long, silky grass. The young woman’s first thought raised gooseflesh on her arms: the long extremely comfortable-looking grass appeared well fertilized, well fed that is: and she tightened her grip on her friend’s arm. They have no headstones, he said, and answered the boy, They need none, we know their names. His young face filled with sly shadows. A magickal place, the young woman thought, thinking majick by no means as comfortable as the long-haired grass. A bird, some bird, cackled in the midst of the trees. You see our heart, I suppose you might make poems of it, the boy said, and his face became so complex the young woman cried aloud—from pain or fear she did not know.
The boy was gone when she looked up from the protection of the scholar-gipsy’s arms, and a dizzying male scent seemed to raise her from the ground. She was weeping in the pouring sunlight, and the gipsy kissed her and she moaned and the gipsy lifted her and lay her on the grass and made her clothing and his clothing disappear as he kissed her neck and shoulders; and she screamed with joy as he thrust his torch within her and they made love not for the first time and not for second or third, nor even the tenth or the twentieth.
Standish put down the pages. His outside, his shell, seemed to have detached itself from his interior and be capable of movement while the interior Standish, the real Standish, sat numb and frozen. He was visited by the acute memory of standing sweating in his hat and raincoat on the Popham street and looking up at the window behind which his loathsome treacherous friend was screwing his equally loathsome and treacherous wife. He should have expected exactly this, he realized: Isobel’s return to England was too passionate not to be at least partly romantic, of course she had been having an affair all along. Martin Standish and Duxbury, Massachusetts, had stifled her talent, and the “gipsy” who had set it free had filled her by fathering her child.
“They flee from me,” Standish said to himself-—
—and saw again, as from beneath the brim of a hat on a hot airless night as traffic hummed and roared like bees at his back, a lighted window in an apartment building. The bee-noise shook the world. A week before Jean had told him that she was pregnant, and expected him to believe that the child was his.
Standish shuddered, and for a moment feared that he was going to vomit upon the manuscript. B. of P. Birth of the Past or Birth of the Poet? Betrayal of the Professor. Bastard of the Pretender.
Childish giggling laughter came to him from the next room. He pushed the manuscript aside and watched his body get out of bed and cross to the door and open it. His body must have wanted to do this, because the inner Standish could not command the body to stop. All was well, however, all was well. The scampering little people from the basement had not overturned any tables or broken any lamps. He began to relax. Then both inner and outer Standish froze again. On the rug before the door the Inner Gallery lay a long white envelope.
He had heard them. Inch-Me and Pinch-Me and Beckon-Me-Hither had come and left a message. Welcome to reality, it would say, you don’t need your hat and raincoat now, no more standing about on street corners with a dry mouth and a pounding heart. No, sir! He stepped up and looked fearfully down at the envelope. It bore an English stamp, his name, the Esswood address. His name and the address had been written in a sloping, pushed-together handwriting he gradually recognized as his wife’s. Standish bent down and picked up the envelope. It had been postmarked in London.
He experienced a wave of instantaneous and pure revulsion. Jean and the magpie in her belly had tracked him down: they could not give him even a week’s seclusion. They would crowd through the door and waddle in, dripping cookie crumbs and shreds of doughnuts.
Braced for everything, braced multidimensionally, Standish sat down, ripped open the envelope, and removed his wife’s letter.
FOURTEEN
Dear William,
I bet you didn’t expect to hear from me so soon. It’s the funniest thing, yesterday I ran into Saul Dickman, who said that he was spending the rest of the summer in England. He only wished he was going to be in a cushy spot like you, with an exciting project like yours. Anyhow, I asked him if he could take a letter with him and mail it when he got to London, and if you get this, that’s what he did. Three-day delivery, not bad, right?
I wanted to write for a lot of reasons—William, you seemed so tense before you left. When I took you to the airport, you were frothing at the mouth whenever anyone passed us, and when they called your flight you were so worked up you wouldn’t have said good-bye if I hadn’t reminded you. You had that awful look in your eye. This makes me so worried. But I don’t know how much I should say, because I don’t know how mad you’11 get. Anyhow, I sure hope you got some sleep on the plane because some of this was just plain old lack of sleep. And William, you were never really a relaxed kind of guy anyhow, were you? I mean, a lot of stuff is just kind of normal for you, and I guess I’m not perfect either, you know what I mean.
But you know why I’m worried, too. You should know, I don’t want to make you mad at me, and things have been pretty good between us for the past couple of years. But neither one of us will ever forget what happened at Popham, Of course everything was hushed up and you landed on your feet. I got over it. We managed to forgive each other, didn’t we? You even got another job. But it still happened. William, I don’t ever want any of ‘ that to ever happen again, I’m not going to lose this baby, you can bank on that, but it’s just as important that you take care of yourself.
If you start feeling that old way again, just come home. COME HOME. Don’t lose yourself. Don’t forget me. Everything is all right.
Zenith is nice, but couldn’t we live anywhere? As long as you stay William.
I need reassurance too. A lot of it, like you. I don’t know if I’m trying to give it to you or to me by writing to you like this— I know I’d find it really hard to say things like this to you in person. I hope you’ll write to me or even call me, maybe just to cheer me up. I’m so heavy I can hardly walk to the bathroom, and I pee every time I burp. I have heartburn that won’t go away. I’m afraid that something is going to go wrong— I know there’s no reason for this, but I’m afraid that it’ll be like that other time, our terrible time, and that I’ll have to talk to lawyers and policemen, and when I get so worried I wish you were here so I could see you were okay.
Please write, do good work, and come
Love,
Jean
P.S. I looked up your place in a reference book, Oxford Companion to English Literature? Something like that. What a place! Have you found out ANYTHING? Is there really a big dark secret? Or shouldn’t I ask?
FIFTEEN
Saul Dickman, Standish thought. That figured. Yesterday I ran into Saul Dickman. Yesterday I just happened to find myself talking to good old Saul, who’s been married twice and can be counted on to see the sex object in even an abject blob of hysteria like Jean Standish. Standish crumpled the letter and threw it into the wastebasket.
——
Showered and dressed, he emerged into the Inner Gallery twenty minutes later. A small razor nick beside his Adam’s apple printed a constellation of red-brown spots onto his collar as he walked past the windows. He twisted his neck to look at the Seneschals’ windows, and imagined seeing a boy with a shadowy angelic face the younger duplicate of Robert Wall’s staring back at him. He could not see the boy unless he looked with Isobel’s eyes—and then he could see, with dreamlike clarity, the dark-haired boy who would grow up to call himself Robert Wall, leaning against the glass across the way. The boy followed him in a manner that looked casual at first but was actually charged with an electric attention. It was what they had seen as they walked through the Inner Gallery. The seeming languor, the actual hunger. If s better never to leave Esswood—that was how they did things, by tossing these gauzy little spiderwebs over you and seeing if you figured out the pattern before they melted away. Oh, you were ten years old in 1914, were you, Mr. Robert Wall? And are you implying that your general appearance at the age of eighty-six, not to mention your sister’s at the relatively even more astonishing age of eighty-three or four, is part of the reason why it’s better never to leave Esswood?