The Black House (25 page)

“And so what?” Walter replied. “But why should it bust?”

“Not strong enough, I bet. Even if it gets up, wind's gonna tear it. You think you know all about kites!” Ricky smiled with a superior air. His voice was changing, and lately he was trying to treat Walter as if he were a much smaller kid, or so Walter felt.

“My problem, anyway,” said Walter, and got back on his bike. “See you, Ricky!”

“Hey, Wally, where're you going?” Ricky wanted to join him.

“Haven't decided yet. Maybe nowhere!” Walter was on his way, coasting precariously down toward the shopping center.

He knew he would soon have to start walking, and walk all the rest of the way with his big kite, because it caught so much wind, he could not control his bike. There were only two heights within reasonable distance, Greenhills, where Walter didn't want to go, and the hill beyond Cooper's, which Walter headed for. He walked his bike along the very edge of the road, holding his kite on the right side of his bike, so he could see passing cars and keep clear of them. One car driver laughed at him and made some remark that Walter didn't catch. At last he arrived at the base of the hill he wanted. The footpath faded into grass, and Walter lowered his head and trudged the rest of the way, still holding his kite close to his bike, and leaning his weight against the push of the wind.

At the top of the hill, Walter laid his bike on the grass, and sat down with the kite flat on the grass beside him. He held his right wrist in his left hand, and gazed between his knees at the splendid view below: lots of little white houses, green lawns, winding gray streets, and way over to the left the blueness that was the Pacific, disappearing in a haze at the horizon. An airliner was coming in from the north, still rather high because it was going to land south of here in Los Angeles, but it was heading into the wind already. The wind was from the south, as it had been earlier that morning. Walter got to his feet.

“Hoo-o!—Hoo-o!” the wind said in his ears. It sounded warm and friendly, nicer than a human voice.

He shook out his string, and took a position from which he could run a few yards to launch the kite, but he did not need to. The kite rose at once toward the north. The tail flipped around wildly at first, the nose of the kite pointed right at him as the kite flew flat in the wind, then the tail pulled it upright, and the cord ran through his hand.

He held the cord with both hands, and let it slip for nearly a minute. The kite was a flyer! He had hardly to coax it at all!

“
Yee-hoo-oo!
” Walter yelled into the wind. No one was near him to hear, to stare, to heckle—or even to admire his kite. Walter leaned his whole weight back against the kite's pull. Now the pinkish diamond-shaped kite looked happy, waggling a little in the blue emptiness, and climbing ever higher. Walter let out more cord, until he felt the first wooden stick jump into his hands, and he held on to it.

This was fun! He could tug slowly and hard, then feel the kite pull against him even harder, lifting him forward, off the ground for several feet until his weight and his efforts with the stick got him back to earth. He was just about a match for the kite. That was an exciting thought.

A dog barked in the distance, down where the town was. The kite looked smaller now, like an ordinary kite, because it was so high. Walter pulled at the cord with all his strength, leaning back until his body nearly touched the ground. Then the kite pulled him up slowly and gently and lifted him off his feet. Walter moved his feet, thinking to find ground under them, then the kite gave another playful and powerful tug, like a beckoning, and Walter was flying.

He glanced behind him, and saw the roll of cord dancing around on the ground, unwinding itself, and the second roll near it, as yet motionless. Then the nylon twisted, the stick turned, and Walter saw the trees on the hill diminishing under him, and a valley below that he had been unaware of before, with a thin railroad track snaking through it. Walter held his breath for a few seconds, not knowing whether to be afraid or not. His arms, bent at the elbows, supported him quite comfortably on the stick tied in the nylon. Below him he saw another stick he had tied in the cord, and he tried for this with his feet, missing a couple of times, then he had it.

Now he was twisting again, and he could see to the southwest the town where he lived, the round white dot of Cooper's hamburger-and-ice-cream place on a green rise.
The town where he lived!
That was funny to think about while he floated high up in the air like a bird, like a kite himself.

“Hey, looka tha . . . !” The rest of the faraway voice was unintelligible to Walter.

Walter looked down and saw two figures, both men or both in trousers anyway, pointing up at him.

“Wha' you . . .
doing
?” one of them yelled.

Walter was silent, as if he couldn't reply. He didn't reply, because he didn't want to. He looked up, and pulled comfortably now at the pink kite, sending it a bit higher, he thought, straight up. Walter attempted to steer it more to the right, the east, but that didn't work with this length of cord. The kite seemed to have its own ideas where to go. Walter saw one of the men on the ground running now, looking like an insect, maybe an ant, moving up the gray thread of street. Walter felt in a more beautiful atmosphere. The nylon cord hummed musically now and then in the wind. Elsie would have loved a flight like this. Walter wasn't dumb enough to think Elsie's “spirit” might be with him now, but her name
was
on the kite, he felt somehow near to her, and for a few seconds wondered if she could be aware that he was flying now, borne by a kite? Even the white clouds looked close, tumbling over themselves like somersaulting sheep.

And the ocean! Now as the cord twisted, Walter had a slow, sweeping view of its blueness. A long white ship was sailing southward—maybe to Acapulco! “Shall we go to Acapulco, Elsie?” Walter said out loud, and then laughed. He tugged southward, westward, but the kite wanted to go northeast. Walter saw rows of fruit trees, maybe orange trees, and a low rectangular building whose silvery roof reflected the sunlight. Cars moved like ladybirds in two directions on a road down there. Walter saw a cluster of people beside what looked like a roadside diner. Were they staring up at him? A couple of them seemed to be pointing at him.

“. . .
kid
, not a man!” one of them said.

“Hey!—Can you get that thing
down
?”

Walter noticed that one man in the group had binoculars, and after staring up, passed the binoculars to another person. He floated over them and beyond, motionless with his hands on the stick and his sneakered feet on the stick below.

“Sure it's a
kid!
Not a dummy! Look!”

Over more fruit-tree fields, the kite soared in an updraft, northward. A bird like a small eagle zoomed close on Walter's right, as if curious about him, then with a tilt of its wings went up and away again.

He heard the hum of a motor, thought it might be from the plane he saw coming from the northeast, then realized the plane was much too far away to be audible. The sound was behind him, and Walter looked. There was a helicopter behind him, nearly a mile away, Walter estimated. Walter was higher. He looked up at his kite with pride. He could not be sure at this distance, but he thought that every inch of his paper must be holding to the wood, that the length of tail was just right. His work! Now was the time to compose a poem for his sister!

The wind sings in your magic paper!
I made a bird that the birds love . . .

“
Hey
, there!” The voice cut through the helicopter's rattle.

Walter was startled to see the helicopter above and just behind him. “Keep clear!” Walter yelled, frowning for emphasis, because he couldn't spare a hand to wave them back. He didn't want the copter blades snarling his cord, cutting it maybe. There were two men in the copter.

“How're you getting down? Can you get 'er
down
?”

“Sure!”

“You're sure?—How?” This man had goggles. They had opened the glass roof of their compartment and were hovering. The copter had something like
SKY PATROL
on its side. Maybe they were police.

“I'm okay! Just keep
clear
!” Walter suddenly felt afraid of them, as if they were enemies.

Now the boy saw more people on the ground, looking up. He was over another little community, where twenty or more people gawked up. Walter did not want to come down, didn't want to go back to his family, didn't particularly want to go back to his own room! The men in the copter were shouting something about pulling him in.

“Leave me alone, I'm
okay
!” Walter screamed in desperation, because he saw now that they were lengthening something like a long fishing rod, pulling out sections of it. Walter supposed it had a hook like a boathook at one end, and that they were going to make a try for the nylon cord. The cord trailed away, out of sight under Walter's feet.

“. . .
above!
” came one man's voice on the wind, and a second later the copter rose up, climbed to the height of his kite and maybe higher.

Walter was furious now. Were they going to attack his
kite
? Walter pulled defensively at his kite cord—which was so long, the pink kite scarcely bobbed. “Don't
touch
that, don't
touch
it!” Walter yelled with all his force, and he cursed the noisy chopping motor that had probably drowned out his words. “
Idiots!
” he screamed at them, blinded by his own tears now. He blinked and kept looking up. Yes, they were grappling with that long stick for the cord not far below the kite, or so it looked to him.

If the kite rose suddenly now, it would hit the blades and get chopped to bits. Couldn't the idiots know that? The long stick reached to the right of the copter, and slanted downward. Walter assumed it had a hook at the end—impossible to see, because the sun was directly in Walter's eyes now. Besides the copter's chopping noise, the people on the ground were yelling, laughing, shouting advice. Still, Walter screamed again:

“Keep away,
please
! Keep
awaa-aay
!”

The helicopter was still higher than the kite. The man had caught the cord, it seemed, and was trying to pull it toward him. Walter could see his tugs. The kite waggled crazily, as if it were as angry as Walter. Then there was a roar from the people below, and at the same time Walter saw his kite fold in half. The crosspiece had broken—from the idiot's tugging!

“
Stop
it!” For a couple of seconds his kite, folded and flat, was almost invisible, then the kite opened and spread, but in the wrong way, like a bird with broken wings. The kite flapped, leapt and leapt again and failed, as the beige stick drew the cord toward the copter.

Then Walter realized that he had pitched a bit forward and that he was dropping fast. He gripped his stick harder, terrified. Now the trees were zooming up, and ground also, faster and faster.

A shout, a groan like a big sigh came from the people below who were now quite close to Walter and in front of him on his right. Walter crashed into branches that punctured his body and tore off his shirt. He screamed in panic, “
Elsie!
” Upside down, he struck a heavy branch that cracked his skull, then he slid the last few yards to the ground, limp.

The Black House

A
n abandoned, three-story house stood black on the horizon of Canfield, a middle-sized town in upstate New York, whose industry was chiefly papermaking and leather processing, since the town had a river flowing through it. Houses and lawns in Canfield were neat and well-tended, people took a pride in keeping up their rose gardens and trimming their hedges, though none of the houses was a mansion. Canfield was composed of respectable middle-class Americans, many of whose families had been there two hundred years. Nearly everyone knew nearly everyone else, the atmosphere was friendly, people were neighborly, exchanging plants and trees from gardens, Christmas and birthday invitations, recipes and favors. They had cleaned up the river, which had used to carry yellowish refuse from the factories, at some expense and after some fighting against the government regulations that had demanded the cleaning, but now they were proud: the river looked rather clear again and certainly didn't smell sour or sulfurous when the wind blew, even though as yet there were no fish in it.

But the black house? Women chose to forget it, as if it were an eyesore they could do nothing about, but the men made jokes and told stories about it. First of all, the land was in dispute, said to be owned by a family now based in Ithaca, New York. But just who owned the land and the house? No one in Canfield really knew, though a couple of names were bandied about, Westbury and MacAllister, who were cousins, but nobody recalled ever seeing them or meeting them. The house had stood so, empty and neglected, before most of the people in Canfield had been born.

“Why doesn't somebody put a match to it?” a man would say, laughing over a scotch or a beer with his friends in the White Horse Tavern, a favorite gathering place.

“What harm's it doing anyone?” another would reply.

Another round of drinks—perhaps it would be “after church” at half-past noon on a Sunday—and Frank Keynes would relate a story of when he was fourteen with a crush on a girl in school, and he'd made a date with her to meet at nine o'clock at night at the foot of the hill to the black house, and she had stood him up. “But what do you know? Along came
another
girl who was quite willing to go up to the black house.
Quite
willing!”

The men would laugh. Was it true or not?

Ed Sanders, manager of the Guardian Paper Mills, might say, “The last time we heard that story, the
first
girl went up with you. Where are you, Frank? Whiskey's rotted your brain?”

And everyone would smile, while fantasies of boyhood, boastful tall tales, drifted through their minds like smoke, mingling together, trailing off. The men preferred to stand at the slightly curving mahogany bar. Their wives or girlfriends sat at the little tables, out of hearing, content to sip their own drinks and chatter until usually Kate Sanders, Ed's wife, would make the first move, come up to the bar and suggest that she and Ed get home for lunch, which would be ready, thanks to their automatic cooker, though she didn't have to say all this, because Ed knew it.

The youngest of the listeners was Timothy Porter, twenty-three, unmarried, a new employee of the leather factory, where he doubled as accountant and salesman. He had graduated from Cornell, tried his luck for a year in New York, and decided to return to his home town of Canfield, at least for a while. He was about six feet in height, with reddish blond hair, friendly but reserved. He rented a room in his uncle's house in town, his parents having moved away in the last years. Once he had brought an Ithaca girl to Canfield for the weekend, and they had both had a drink in the White Horse, but the girl had not visited him since. Timothy was alone one Sunday when he said, smiling, to the men at the bar:

“I remember when I was about ten, going to school here, we used to pretend that an ogre lived in the black house. Or a madman that even the police couldn't get out, and if we went very close to the house, he'd rush out and choke us to death. You know how kids are. Nothing but fantasies. But I remember aged ten it seemed very
real
.” Tim smiled broadly and downed the rest of his beer.

“There
is
something funny about the house,” Ed Sanders said dreamily, perched on a bar stool. “It
looks
haunted—you know? The way that roof and the chimney tilts at the top, as if it's about to fall down on somebody.” Ed saw his wife approaching, and was sorry. He was having a good time, talking about the black house. It was like being in another world, like being a boy again, twelve years old perhaps, and not a thirty-nine-year-old man with a growing paunch, knowing all about life, and more than enough.

Sam Eadie, plump, blond and balding, bent close to Ed, having also seen Ed's wife, and whispered rapidly, “I still say, because it's true, I made love
for the first time
to a girl there—when I was fifteen.” He straightened and put on a smile. “Good morning, Kate! Second good morning today! I think you've come to collect?”

You're not the only one who did
, Ed Sanders thought, a bit resentfully and proudly, but he couldn't say it aloud, because his wife was present. Ed only frowned for a couple of seconds at his old friend Sam Eadie.

Timothy Porter went home to his uncle Roger Porter's house for his Sunday lunch. Uncle Roger had not been to church, but then neither had Timothy, who had been walking in the woods before joining the locals at the White Horse. At Uncle Roger's house, the Sunday meal, prepared yesterday by his uncle's part-time housekeeper Anna, was ready to serve: a pork and rice casserole which Roger had been warming in the oven. Roger, in shirtsleeves, gave the final touches, Timothy finished setting the table—wine glasses and his own napkin which Roger had forgotten—and then Roger put on a tweed jacket and they sat down.

“Nice morning?” asked Tim, serving himself after his uncle. He knew his uncle had been either pottering in the back garden or going over his law office briefs.

“Not bad. And yours?”

“Sure, fine. In the woods. Then I had a beer at the White Horse.”

“Lots of people? . . . Well, Ed Sanders, I'm sure.” Roger smiled. “Frank Keynes too.”

Why don't you join them sometimes, Tim wanted to ask, but his uncle at fifty-five was older than most of the White Horse group, and a little sad after the death of Tim's Aunt Meg about three years ago. Roger had not yet got used to her absence, and Tim knew Roger was glad of his company in the house, though Roger was not the type to put it into words. “I was wondering,” Tim began, “why—”

“Why what?”

“Why the conversation in the White Horse always turns to that house they call the black house. Here. You know, the old abandoned house on the hill.”

Roger looked at his nephew and smiled, his fork poised near his lips. “Because it's been there a long time, perhaps. It's our castle.” He chuckled, and ate.

“But they sound like a bunch of kids talking about it. I remember too, when I was little, all the kids used to pretend to be afraid of it. But these grown men talk as if it's . . . haunted or somehow dangerous even now. Granted they've all had a couple of drinks by the time they start talking about it. But this is the third or fourth time I've noticed.” Tim suddenly laughed. “And these old guys brag about taking
girls
there! When they were teenagers, I mean. It's really a panic to listen to them!”

Roger chewed reflectively, and looked into a corner of the room. His thinning brown and gray hair was neatly parted, his forehead wrinkled with thought, but his lips still smiled. “Well—they dream. They make stories up, I'm sure. After all, there was that murder there five or six years ago. Adolescent boy—body found on the ground floor of the house. Throat cut. He'd been there three or four days. Awful story.” Roger shook his head with distaste.

“And they never found out who did it?”

“They never found out. Not a boy from around here. He was from—oh, Connecticut, I think. Doesn't matter.” Roger went on in a more cheerful tone, “I used to play in that house when I was eight and nine. I remember distinctly, I and a lot of kids, running up and down the stairways there, telling each other the stairs would fall down with us, that there was an idiot behind the doors—things like that. The place was abandoned even in my day. Imagine.”

Tim tried to imagine forty-five years back. “Why didn't somebody take care of the house?”

“Because legally speaking no one's got the right to touch the property till the case is settled, and since the house isn't a fire hazard up there on the hill with no trees around it . . . Even the trees died, I think, from sheer neglect.”

They talked of other things. Roger was a lawyer, the most highly esteemed in town. He had his own office, with a couple of secretaries and a younger partner who would finally take over. Roger and Meg had had no children. Tim asked his uncle about the progress of a difficult case he was working on, which he knew worried Roger, and Roger answered him. But Tim's mind kept returning to the black house, as if it held some kind of mystery unsolved.

“Do you think there were tramps sleeping there? When that boy you mentioned was murdered?”

For an instant, Roger didn't seem to know what Tim was talking about. “Oh! The black house! No. Not at that time. Well . . . there may be a tramp or two sleeping there sometimes. I don't know. No, Tim, if you want to know the truth—” Here his uncle lowered his voice as if someone might be able to hear him. “What I'm saying was not in the papers here or anywhere. The girl in the picture was pregnant by the boy who was killed. And she and the boy had made a date to meet again—in that house. As I recall, they often met there. The story is that her father was furious. And the boy—just a hoodlum—to tell the truth. The father left town afterward with his daughter.”

Tim was stunned. Such violence hardly two miles from where he sat now! “Do you mean the father wasn't even suspected?”

Roger gave a laugh and touched his lips with his napkin. “I think he was. I think the judge let him off. Everyone was on the father's side—somehow. There's something evil about that house.”

There was something evil about murder too. A pregnant daughter didn't warrant killing the boyfriend, in Tim's view, since it seemed not at all a case of rape. “I feel like going there again—taking a look. To that house, I mean. What is it but a lot of empty rooms?”

“Oh-h—why go?” Roger was serving the ice cream, but he paused to look at his nephew. “What'll you be accomplishing, going there?” He added as he sat down, “A floor might give way under you.”

Tim laughed. “I'll test 'em with a foot first. I'm not afraid of the place.”

Roger shook his head. “You'll be gaining nothing, Tim.”

Why was Roger looking at him so sternly? Tim started on his ice cream.

The next day, Tim left Canfield Leather at exactly 5
P.M
., quitting time, though he usually stayed a little later. He was eager to drive to the black house and have a look, before it became dark. The month was October. The house wasn't even black, he recalled, but a dark brown or red. It was only black at night, as any house would be without lights in it.

Tim drove his tomato-colored Chrysler up an unpaved road, whose bends he had quite forgotten. He stopped the car at a brambly spot where the lane ended, where there might have been gates to the estate in the very old days, before Tim's childhood. Now there was no sign of gates or fence. The old dark house seemed taller, seen close now, and somehow frowning down on him. Tim dropped his eyes from it, and watched the ground as he climbed the slope. It was still rather light, he could distinguish pebbles, blades of grass in the patchy and dried-out lawn on either side of the footpath that led to the front door. Had people even stolen the paving stones that surely must have been here once?

Some ten yards from the house, Tim stopped, and looked up. True enough, the house wasn't really black, but a dark brown. Stone front steps, with cement pillars at the foot. A paneled front door whose knocker had been removed or gouged out, leaving a hole in its place. There were two windows on either side of the door, of course with no glass in them. Was the door unlocked, able to be pushed open? Tim smiled a little, and walked to the right, intending to circle the house before he entered it.

He glanced at the sterile-looking ground for beer cans, sandwich papers, or any other sign of revelry, and found none. Tim lifted his eyes again to the windows of the second story, the third. Most of the windows were broken, open to the elements. Black inside. Was some face going to look out at him in a moment, some madman having heard his car motor, or his footsteps? Some white ghost?

Timothy laughed out loud. His laugh sounded deeper than his usual laugh, reassuring to him. Sure, it was an empty house, a classic, dark and all that. But why be afraid of it, unless you were a ten-year-old child? Tim walked more briskly around the other side of the house toward the front door. Off to the right of the front corner of the house, he did see a tossed away beer can, and he smiled at the sight.

He went up the front steps. Even the doorknob had been removed, he saw, but probably one could simply push the door open. Or if it was locked, the window to the right . . . No, that was too high from the ground to climb into easily, though it gaped wide, glassless. Tim looked at the door, and decided to put the fingers of his right hand into the gap where the doorknob had been, his left hand against the door, and push. He lifted his hands to do this, then hesitated, dropped his hands, and smiled at himself. As his uncle had said, why bother? What would he be proving? Nothing at all, and indeed he might break a leg with a first step onto a rotten floor.

Tim eased his shoulders, ran down the steps and turned and shouted up at the house: “Halloo-oo! . . . Anyone there? . . . Ha-ha!”