The Architecture of Fear (35 page)

Phail shouted and started for him. Ormsby straight-armed Phail in the chest. "Don't touch him," Ormsby said. He didn't share the advice with the priest, who crouched and rolled Clement over.

Clement groaned. His gloves were burned nearly through, and when Totten pulled them off the skin below was scorched, but Clement said, "I'm all right—I got a shock," (yeah, us too) and got up. "What did she do?" That was a couple of kinds of good question, because she was gone.

Boudreau had been watching, taping. (He hadn't turned to look at Clement steaming and screaming. No comment.) "She took off into the woods. That way."

Ormsby got out a walkie-talkie, and the helicopter spun up its rotors, presumably to chase Our Heroine across the frozen woods. "Okay," Ormsby said to us, "we're going inside."

"Could I remind you," Clement said, as Phail wrapped his hands in gauze, "that in the previous sightings the house disappears within half an hour? What happens if we're inside when it goes?"

"Then we go where it's going," Ormsby said, and that was it, because we all knew when we took this job that we were going inside the house when it showed up, if it showed up, if it had an inside to go into. Clement was just expressing a little manly high spirit, common among the nearly electrocuted. So I took my number-one camera and thirty-pound equipment vest, Boudreau switched to battery power, Clement and Phail took up their portable gear. Father Totten clutched his prayerbook and Ormsby put on his hardest expression.

As we approached, the house seemed to get taller still, like a mountain that looks like nothing from a distance but is scraping cloud by the time you reach its foothills. The grayness didn't change as we grew near. When you walk through the fog, things are supposed to get clearer, it says so right here on the label; this didn't, inspiring thoughts of classical tortoises that can cover half the distance till doomsday but never all of it, so much for your damned slow and steady (do Zeno and Aesop sit around in the first circle of Hell swapping turtle stories, A to Z?).

We all got into what I would suppose one might call ready positions, and Phail pushed open the door. It swung wide and silently. There was a hall beyond: exactly the sort of hall you would expect to find behind that sort of door, with a red carpet and an umbrella stand. We went in.

There was a grand stairway at the end of the hall, going up into genuinely total darkness. And there was a large arch, opening onto a bay-windowed parlor.

The parlor was full of wheelchairs, all of them occupied, and there was a woman in a starched white dress. They were all looking out the windows.

"Hey," Ormsby said.

No one paid attention to him. Bad move with Ormsby.

"What the hell is that?" Ormsby said. Once, before I died, I would have liked to hear Ormsby answer a question even half as stupid as the ones he asked. No such luck.

"The book," I told him.

"What book?"

"The book we just walked into the cover of."

There is a version of the story in which the house has been converted into a hospital for wounded Allied pilots at the height of the Battle of Britain: if you look into the mist you may see the lights of the R.A.F. aerodrome nearby. She has been sent from London for safety's sake, but as the aerodrome is in danger from German raids—perhaps the house as well, as who can measure the depravity of the Hun—there is no safety. And she is surrounded daily with the smells of disinfectant, of human fluids, of death, and with the pilots themselves, blind, burnt, broken. There are jobs for the injured in this desperate hour, but none for them, and so they know that they are useless, shall perhaps always be useless: these are
men who flew
and now are wrecked, a Victorian hall of Icarii.

Outside, half seen through the taped windows and the trees, there was a crash and a fireball rolling up. A bell began to toll, and of course we asked who for. "The chopper," Ormsby said, and drew the gun that how could he have doubted he would be carrying, it looked so natural on him, and went to the window, thinking that a helicopter had crashed on the other side of the window, but wrong craft, wrong tale, wrong earth. The smoke comes from a burning Spitfire, shot down in the Bloody April of 1940.

Ormsby turned from the window and saw her, standing pot ten steps away from him in her severe whites and her nurse's cap, looking out at the wreck and hoping that it is not him, not
him
in the twist of metal and flaming petrol, before she turns back to the men in her charge.

She stared at the roomful of eyeless men, limbless men, physical metaphors of the more fundamental incapacity. Though most can still speak, they cannot speak their need for her, to arouse them from slumber, to absorb their seed and return it as children, strong sons who will learn the ways of the split-S and the Immelmann turn, who will learn the arcana of the Norden bombsight, men who will learn, as their fathers did not, that they must avert their eyes from the falling pregnant bomb.

She must acquiesce, they must do this. It is the only way they can continue to fight the war.

Ormsby still didn't see, though the room is full of ravaged men. Of course not, how could we have been so foolish, he has a purpose here and they are not part of it. Visitations. Apparition. Troop movements. From those wonderful folks who brought you helicopter-borne assaults, a new sort of borning: the First Ectoplasmic Infantry. Having mastered the delivery of Hellfire, they have sent Ormsby to discover the remaining secrets of the damned, coming soon to a theatre of war near you. He saw the veterans, all keloid and the stumps of limbs, he saw them clearly enough. But he looked straight through them, for he knew their secrets already.

He took hold of her, pinning down the lass he grasps, and demanded of her what has happened to the helicopter.

She understands, though he does not. She knows what he has lost in the fall of his machine. She sponges his manly brow, she absorbs his curses, his demands for the missing part of himself. She knows where the rest of Ormsby is, buried in a concrete tomb without the codes to launch.

Ormsby began to panic as she tended to him. He waved his pistol. This should excite him, always has. At least it should produce some response from her that will excite him. But no. There is a war on, and loose lips sink ships.

Ormsby yelled something that Adam probably yelled at Eve and certainly yelled at Lilith, and ripped her white dress open.

There came (oof) the roar of Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, the flash of a propeller—an airscrew, the British call it—switch on, contact. Airscrew. Contact. Loose lips rip zips. Ormsby screamed (like a woman, he would say if it were another man making the noise) as the white blades ground his bone. Littering the past, he gasped.

Ormsby danced hither and yon, as if trying to gather his guts for the journey home, shock trooper bundling his chute. Hold still, Ormsby, how shall they find your pieces on the judgement day? Down he goes. Pigeon under glass at last. She stares at him. The wheelchairs circle round.

Suddenly there is nothing but Ormsby in the room, crumpled on the floor in a puddle of himself.

And we...

Well, picture it. Here we were, gang of scientists confronted by the new phenomenon, ready to analyze it to destruction. Everything dies if you turn enough light on it. Those of you who are familiar with the history of astronomy will recall how the immensely complex theory of epicyclic motion was created to explain those celestial movements that a sun-centered system put into much more elegant order. Once it became accepted that buildings and their contents might manifest out of the clear blue (Rayleigh scattering—oh excuse me) then a thousand small mysteries of life, from the slowness of urban mail delivery to the theft of cable television service, would at once fall into systematic place.

As if systems or sensibility had anything to do with it. The dark closes in. You push it back, using what cleverness you can hold onto in your crab-crawling terror to make light.

Mind makes tools, tools dispel madness, madness, oh,
oh.

Rock breaks scissors, scissors cut paper, paper smothers rock.

We ran.

Clement smashed through a glass door. We hadn't seen it, and yes we were so looking. I doubt it was there, doesn't matter, wasn't there anymore anyhow. Clement was on his knees in a garden, green and mossy and crystalline with broken glass.

Phail was there in an instant. Their hands touched, and instantly I knew why Ormsby had not permitted them contact in his sight. Clement seemed all right, the gauze wrapping his hands had prevented much further damage.

"Are we outside?" Clement asked, looking around at the fog, the peat, the vines and trees.

"This is Spanish moss," Boudreau said, not touching it. "Spanish moss doesn't grow up here. Besides," he added, ever the camera-eyed observer, "if we're outside, where's the sun?"

She came around a moss-shrouded tree, and we turned to see her, dressed in her white, with her pale smile.

Clement took a step toward her, a little unsteady on the soft soil, and said, "Who are you?"

"Please," she said, or I thought I heard her say, her lips didn't seem to move, those thin lips like a shallow wound. "Help me, I need you," the wound said.

Clement must have heard. He went to help her. Any way he could.

There is a version of the story in which the house has stood for centuries with the same mistress, in which all pleasure and all need are reduced to a single bittersweet act.

She was determined, but the determination was not the courage of the living but the implacable advance of the walking dead. Beauty must age and die, you see, that's the way things work; if beauty survives, then it must be by some terrible and unnatural means. She has been roused from her bed in her bedclothes by the scratch of Hell beneath the thin earth: she has been driven from her grave barefoot in her shroud by the hunger for salt blood.

But she will settle for whatever Clement has.

He shriveled as she touched him; he did not pull away, though it was a long, long moment until her fingers were actually around his throat; seeing that, computing that, scientifically analyzing that, led to only one conclusion about why he did not pull away. Why Ormsby took hold of his apparition with such definite intent. It didn't speak well for the rest of us; fear we had, desire we had, strength, well, Totten and I held Phail by the arms as Clement was pulled into the soil, and Boudreau's finger was on the camera trigger; Clement was a film of skin on blackening bones by the time he was breast-deep, but he didn't seem to be fighting. He didn't seem to be having a bad time at all, not nearly as bad as Phail was having. You know the song of the Lorelei, as she draws men to die on the stones: a kiss on the hand may be quite continental, but diamonds...

Suddenly Clement's eyes looked up—they were loose marbles in a skull, now—and his tongue rattled in what might have been a scream had there been any air to drive it, fluid to wet the system. And he was gone.

"There is a light this way," Father Totten said, pretty obvious from the way it lit up the fog, but there wasn't anywhere else to go, was there?

"I'm all right now," Phail lied, and we let him go and walked toward the glow, feeling for glass walls that might suddenly pop up. Instead we came to double doors, and a room beyond.

The lights were very bright in here, and copper cookware hung on racks, and stainless steel countertops ran every which way.

There is a version of the story in which she is a scullery maid, trapped in the kitchen kept insanely ordered by a head cook who is certainly a sadist, probably a lesbian, no question incompetent at food preparation—you never see the maiden preparing tournedos Rossini or medaillions de veau or even brutalizing a defenseless carpaccio, do you? It's always "Stir the stew" and "Scour out the roasting pans." She can cook, of course, though Cook bushels her light, until by happy accident her midnight snack reaches the late-night plate of the master of the house, who will, presented with this clear example of genetic superiority, elevate her to master of the house's mistress (lawfully, of course) where she will never again have to slice onions or scour a pot, and Cook will be horsewhipped and sent away, and God alone knows what the household will eat after that.

Phail looked around nervously at the boiling cauldrons, the crackling griddles. Suddenly he raised his hand, stared at it: I expected the flesh to be medium well with diagonal grill marks, but there was only a film of white lard on his fingers. Or something like lard. It certainly upset Phail. He scrubbed at it with his other hand, but that only coated the both of them. Towel, towel, who's got a towel? Next he wiped it on his jacket, then on his trousers. His face began to itch, he twitched it, he nearly touched it—but oh no, realization set in. It won't go away, not by washing. It was in his secret places now. Are you washed in the mint sauce of the lamb? (How about that, Father Totten? Have you spent time among the lepers outcast unclean, or is it all their own fault? Tell me, Father Totten, when exactly did God decide to wash his hands of Sodom?)

It isn't death we fear, you know, we can out brief candle all the livelong day; it is the bad procedures of death, the mashing of meat and bone, the struggling of the heart against the ribs of its cage, the physical scream of the steel in the skin, the disease that hides and waits and digs itself in.

Phail stood in the kitchen, but his sustenance and his life's hope had just died outside, leaving nothing but his fears. O little lamb, did he who made the spirochete make thee? As if to answer, things like purple corkscrews came drilling their way out of Phail, and his blood mingled with the white grease frosting him. Suppurations stitched his skin. His left eye popped, a little beak snapping down the bits from within. There was no longer a Phail, only a Phail-shaped disease, an infection casting a man's shadow. Totten gabbled a prayer. Boudreau threw up, and I watched the spew for signs of life, but it was only honest man's vomit, coffee and danish and an Egg McMuffin. It fried up crisp on the spotless floor.