“Susan, have you considered that the house is affecting your son’s behavior?”
Susan leaned in, her eyes wide. “Yes! Yes, I do. Is that crazy? That’s why … why I came back. Because … there was blood on my wall.”
“Blood?”
She leaned in and I could smell the mint masking sour breath. “Last week. I didn’t want to say anything … I thought you’d think I was crazy. But it was there. One long trickle from the floor to the ceiling. Am I … am I crazy?”
I met her at the house the next week. Driving up her street in my trusty hatchback, I thought, rust. Not blood. Something from the walls, the roof. Who knew what old houses were built of? Who knew what could leak out after a hundred years? The question was how to play it. I really wasn’t interested in getting into exorcism, demonology church shit. I don’t think that’s what Susan wanted either. But she did invite me to her house, and women like that don’t invite over women like me unless they want something. Comfort. I would breeze over the “blood trickle,” find an explanation for it, and yet still insist the house could use a cleansing.
Repeated cleansings. We had yet to discuss money. Twelve visits for $2,000 seemed like a good price point. Spread them out, one a month, over a year, and give the stepson time to sort himself out, get adjusted to the new school, the new kids. Then he’s cured and I’m the hero, and pretty soon Susan is referring all her rich, nervous friends to me. I could go into business for myself, and when people asked me, “What do you do?” I’d say, I’m an entrepreneur in that haughty way entrepreneurs had. Maybe Susan and I would become friends. Maybe she’d invite me to a book club. I’d sit by a fire and nibble on Brie and say, I’m a small business owner, an entrepreneur, if you will. I parked, got out of the car, and took a big breath of optimistic spring air.
But then I spotted Susan’s house. I actually stopped and stared. Then I shivered.
It was different from the rest.
It lurked. It was the only remaining Victorian house in a long row of boxy new construction, and maybe that’s why it seemed alive, calculating. The mansion’s front was all elaborate, carved stonework, dizzying in its detaiclass="underline" flowers and filigrees, dainty rods and swooping ribbons. Two life-sized angels framed the doorway, their arms reaching upward, their faces fascinated by something I couldn’t see.
I watched the house. It watched me back through long, baleful windows so tall a child could stand in the sill. And one was. I could see the length of his thin body: gray trousers, black sweater, a maroon tie perfectly knotted at the neck. A thicket of dark hair covering his eyes. Then, a sudden blur, and he’d hopped down and disappeared behind the heavy brocade drapes.
The steps to the mansion were steep and long. My heart was thumping by the time I reached the top, passed the awestruck angels, reached the door, and rang the bell. As I waited I read the inscription carved in the stone near my feet.
carterhook manor
established 1893
patrick carterhook
The carving was in a severe Victorian cursive, the two juicy o’s dissected by a feathery curlicue. It made me want to protect my belly.
Susan opened the door with red eyes.
“Welcome to Carterhook Manor,” she said, fake grandeur. She caught me staring—Susan never looked good when I saw her, but she hadn’t even pretended to brush her hair, and a foul, acrid odor came off her. (Not “despair” or “depression,” just bad breath and body odor.) She shrugged limply. “I’ve finally stopped sleeping.”
The inside of the house was nothing like the outside. The interior had been gutted and now looked like every other rich person’s house. It made me feel immediately more cheerful. I could cleanse this place: the tasteful recessed lights, the granite counters and stainless-steel appliances, the new, freakishly smooth wood paneling, wall upon wall of Botoxed oak.
“Let’s start with the blood trickle,” I suggested.
We climbed to the second floor. There were two more above it. The stairwell was open, and I peered up through the banisters to see a face peering down at me from the top floor. Black hair and eyes, set against the porcelain skin of an antique doll. Miles. He stared at me for a solemn moment, then disappeared again. That kid matched the original house perfectly.
Susan pulled down a tasteful print on the landing, so I could see the full wall.
“Here, it was right here.” She pointed from the ceiling to the floor.
I pretended to examine it closely, but there was nothing really to see. She’d scrubbed it down completely; I could still smell the bleach.
“I can help you,” I said. “There is a tremendous feeling of pain, right here. Throughout the whole house, but definitely here. I can help you.”
“The house creaks all night long,” she said. “I mean, it almost moans. It shouldn’t. Everything inside is new. Miles’s door slams at strange times. And he … he’s getting worse. It’s like something has settled on him. A darkness he carries on his back. Like an insect shell. He scuttles. Like a beetle. I’d move, that’s how scared I am, I’d move, but we don’t have the money. Anymore. We spent so much on this house, and then almost that much renovating, and … my husband won’t let me anyway. He says Miles is just going through growing pains. And that I’m a nervous, silly woman.”
“I can help you,” I said.
“Let me give you the whole tour,” she replied.
We walked down the long, narrow hall. The house was naturally dark. You moved away from a window and the gloom descended. Susan flipped on lights as we walked.
“Miles turns them off,” she said. “Then I turn them back on. When I ask him to keep them on, he pretends he has no idea what I’m talking about. Here’s our den,” she said. She opened a door to reveal a cavernous room with a fireplace and wall-to-wall bookshelves.
“It’s a library,” I gasped. They had to own a thousand books, easy. Thick, impressive, smart-people books. How do you keep a thousand books in one room and then call the room a den?
I stepped inside. I shivered dramatically. “Do you feel this? Do you feel the … heaviness here?”
“I hate this room.” She nodded.
“I’ll need to pay extra attention to this room,” I said. I’d park myself in it for an hour at a time and just read, read whatever I wanted.
We went back into the hall, which was now dark again. Susan sighed and began flipping on lights. I could hear a patter of feet upstairs, running manically up and down the hallway. We passed a closed door to my right. Susan knocked at it—Jack, it’s me. A shuffle of a chair being pushed back, a snick of a lock, and then the door was opened by another child, younger than Miles by several years. He looked like his mother. He smiled at Susan like he hadn’t seen her in a year.
“Hi, Momma,” he said. He wrapped his arms around her. “I missed you.”
“This is Jack, he’s seven,” she said. She ruffled his hair.
“Momma has to go do a little work with her friend here,” Susan said, kneeling to his eye level. “Finish your reading and then I’ll make a snack.”
“Do I lock the door?” Jack asked.
“Yes, always lock your door, sweetheart.”
We started walking again as we heard the snick of the lock behind us.
“Why the lock?”
“Miles doesn’t like his brother.”
She must have felt my frown: No teenager likes his kid brother.
“You should see what Miles did to the babysitter he didn’t like. It’s one of the reasons we don’t have money. Medical bills.” She turned to me sharply. “I shouldn’t have said that. It wasn’t … major. Possibly an accident. I don’t know anymore, actually. Maybe I am just goddam crazy.”