The House That Jack Built (13 page)

    'All right,' she said, at length. 'We'll have a survey.'

    Craig didn't answer, but kissed her on the lips. Then he dragged off the sheet which she had wound around herself, and straddled her, and when she reached down she discovered that his erection was just as hard as it had been before.

    He pushed himself right into her. He was so hard when he arched himself back, he almost lifted her hips off the bed. 'Bitch,' he whispered, and this time she felt degraded more than stimulated.

    'Craig,' she said, touching his lips with her fingertips. 'Craig, darling, don't call me that.'

    'Bitch,' he repeated, and she could actually feel him smiling.

    

    

    Morton Walker parked his beige Buick station wagon next to the statue of the headless woman holding up the sackful of dead puppies. He eased himself out of the driver's seat, and stood beside the open door for a while, methodically' mopping his forehead and the back of his neck with his handkerchief.

    It was a hot, oppressive morning, and the landscape around Valhalla looked as if it were covered with a thin coat of amber varnish. Valhalla itself seemed unnaturally large and out-of-scale, as if the heat had magnified it.

    Morton had visited Valhalla just once before, for a Dutch hotel group called Kuypers, but he had recommended that they look elsewhere if they wanted to open a health resort and golf complex. In his opinion, it would have cost over $51 million to bring Valhalla up to luxury hotel standards, with very little guarantee that Kuypers would ever recoup their investment. The terrain wasn't suitable for the Gary Player championship golf course that Kuypers had envisaged, the weather up here was notoriously unpredictable, and the simple fact was that Valhalla was far too isolated, especially for weekenders. Jack Belias had built it on this awkward and inhospitable hilltop for the specific purpose of shutting himself away from the world around him.

    Still, a private buyer was a different matter. A private buyer wouldn't have to concern himself with all the health and safety regulartions that a resort complex would have been obliged to meet, such as fire doors and emergency exits and entrances widened for wheelchairs; and a private buyer could take as long to restore the house as he felt like. Years, if necessary - and it probably would take years. Why the hell anybody should want to buy a decaying mausoleum like Valhalla, Morton couldn't understand. As far as he was concerned, it was fit for nothing but demolition. He was a Federalist man himself: he hated Gothic.

    He reached across to the passenger seat and picked up his cassette-recorder, his flashlight and his notepad. His assistant Brewster Ridge was supposed to have been here to meet him; but it didn't surprise him that he wasn't. Brewster had probably been too carried away by the Snoop Doggy Dogg CD whomping on his car stereo to have noticed the Red Oaks-Valhalla turnoff. Morton and Brewster didn't get along particularly well, although Brewster had genuine respect for Morton's experience in detecting the kind of flaws in construction that slipshod builders would do their best to disguise, like hiding subsidence cracks with folded-up slices of bread and flexible filler, and nailing clean sheets of expanded polystyrene over walls that were running with damp. Morton for his part was grudgingly impressed by Brewster's college qualifications in the work of residential architects. He definitely knew his Irving Gill from his Barry Byrne.

    Morton slammed his station wagon door and trudged towards the house. He was big and balding, with a face that had the pale lumpy texture of a root vegetable. He blinked a lot and wore rimless spectacles with clip-on sunglasses, which he lifted up whenever he went indoors, so that he looked like a croupier. His shirt was already stained with sweat and his beige cotton trousers were impossibly creased. They were held up with withered, once-jazzy suspenders, in scarlet and green. They were the last Christmas present that his wife Audrey had given him, before she took seventy-six paracetamol tablets and died of liver failure. He had never known why. She hadn't even given him the consolation of a suicide note.

    He took out the keys to Valhalla and sneezed twice. Hay fever. Or maybe he was allergic to huge, half-collapsed buildings. As he turned the key in the door, he thought he heard Brewster's car coming, but when he turned around there was nobody there: only the mossy, overgrown terraces, wavering in the mid-morning heat. Only the shrunken oaks; and the overgrown tennis courts; and crickets chirruping from the cracks in the bricks.

    He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. He looked around him, right and left, with a feeling of profound misgiving. Even in the hallway, he could sense the extent of Valhalla's collapse. It was like ground beef, when you knew that it had turned. It didn't smell too bad, but nothing would ever persuade you to eat it.

    'Well… the general structure of the entrance hall seems reasonably sound,' he told his cassette-recorder. 'All of the glazing will require repair or replacement, but the ultimate cost will depend on how closely you wish to reproduce the original windows. The glass is bubbled and slightly yellow-tinted. It was made by hand, and fitted by hand, too. I couldn't give an exact estimate on replacing the windows, not without finding out if anybody today is still capable of doing glazing work like this. Obviously we're talking six figures; and this is just the entrance hall.'

    He walked across to the left-hand staircase and bent over to examine its treads and its risers. 'Left-hand staircase is original… it's been repaired, here and there, and probably quite recently by the Fishkill Corporation. It's unusual in that it's been constructed without the use of nails, and with only a minimal number of pegs. In fact it's virtually self-supporting. Very interesting. Good thing it's in reasonable condition: a modern carpenter just couldn't do it. None that I know of, anyhow.'

    So Morton wandered from silent room to silent room, his voice occasionally echoing from the marble floors and the dulled oak panelling and the high, flaking ceilings.

    Slanted bars of sunshine lined the corridors, and Morton walked through them in swirls of golden dust. He had the strangest feeling that he was intruding - a feeling which he only had when the house that he was surveying was occupied. He stopped, and listened, but all he could hear was the miniaturised sound of distant traffic, and the cawing of a raven in the oak trees.

    He was satisfied that the ballroom would need little more than cleaning up; but once he had walked into the library he began to see the scale of Valhalla's decay.

    'Dry rot, wet rot, extensive termite infestation… some of the floor joists are on the point of collapse, and all of the panelling has to be replaced.'

    He left the library and paused for a moment at the foot of the secondary staircase, looking up to the landing. From here, through the balustrade, he could just see the hunched figure of plaster and moss that had unsettled Effie so much. He stared at it for longer than he meant to; almost as if he were expecting it to move. It stared directly back at him with its soulless, dripping eye.

    He shook his head, and said, 'Jesus H. Christ, Morton, what's the matter with you?' Then he carried on through to the kitchens.

    The kitchens were chilly and shadowy and cavernous, and fitted with all the latest equipment for 1929. Along one wall there was a cream-coloured enamel range which was large enough to cook for a decent-sized hotel, and along the opposite wall were glass-fronted cupboards capable of storing hundreds of plates. The floor was quarry-tiled, and seemed solid enough, but many of the tiles were cracked, and there was no doubt that the entire kitchen area would have to be gutted and brought up-to-date.

    The kitchen window looked out onto a surrealistically-overgrown vegetable garden, where knobbly sprouts had grown to the size of small trees, and asparagus waved tall and feathery in the summer breeze. There were huge rhubarb leaves and giant thistle-like artichokes and everything was tangled with creepers and tendrils as if the vegetables were deliberately strangling each other in their struggle to survive.

    At the far end of the kitchen, on the left, Morton saw a cream-painted door. He checked it on the faded blueprint plan that Walter Van Buren had given him. This led down to the cellars. He turned the key in the door and peered inside. A flight of wooden steps led directly into total darkness. He took out his flashlight and pointed it one way, and then the other, but the darkness was so intense that the pencil-thin beam scarcely seemed to illuminate anything at all, except the wooden handrail, and a dangling light-socket, and a bundle of greasy-looking rags that were hanging from a hook on the ceiling.

    He was just about to go down into the cellar when he was sure that he heard footsteps. It sounded like somebody running quickly downstairs: a man, wearing light-soled shoes. He hesitated, one hand clasping the door frame, one hand pointing his flashlight into the darkness. He listened, but Valhalla had fallen silent again.

    'Brewster?' he called. 'Brewster, is that you?'

    Silence. Dust fell ceaselessly down, in every room, as if Valhalla were quietly demolishing itself, a process that might take centuries.
Look on my works, O ye mighty, and despair
.

    'Brewster, if that's you I'm in the kitchen… just going down to check out the cellar.'

    Still no reply. He must have been hearing things. He ventured cautiously down the cellar steps, making sure that he held on tight to the handrail. He had heard of too many surveyors falling ass-over-apex down the steps of unfamiliar basements, and he had trodden through too many termite-infested treads to trust the appearance of even the most solid-looking staircase.

    He reached the cellar floor. Like the kitchen, the cellar was quarry-tiled throughout, and stretched all the way from one end of Valhalla to the other. The floor was slippery with wet, and Morton could hear dripping from several directions, although the vaulted arches that held up the ceiling made it difficult for him to see where the water was coming from. He shone his flashlight towards the front of the house, and he could see that it was drier there, although apparent dryness didn't mean that the foundations weren't rotten. He took out his penknife and scraped at one of the walls, just to make sure that the limestone wasn't dissolving. There was no future in restoring Valhalla if it was in danger of complete collapse.

    Whistling between his teeth, he walked between the first two vaulted arches until he found the oil-fired boilers. They were dulled and rusted, but he could still see traces of red enamel, and the words Capitol Red Top embossed on them. Good boilers, in 1929. If they were restored, they could probably do the job of heating Valhalla, even today.

    He explored a little further. He heard rats scurrying and scratching in the furthest recesses of the cellars. They weren't used to intrusion. They must have proliferated in this lightless subterranean kingdom for so long now that they thought it was theirs. Well, Morton knew a man at Albany Exterminators who could show them different, but that was another expensive item to add to the estimate.

    Some of the pipework to the radiators had been half dismanded: maybe it had sprung a leak and somebody had tried to cap it off. A single vertical pipe, five feet high, stood in the centre of one of the alcoves and led to nothing at all. Morton shone his flashlight at the ceiling immediately above it and saw that it was black with wet rot and speckled with mould. God almighty, this house was going to take a fortune to put to rights, even if the Bellmans cut corners.

    He was still looking around when he heard footsteps crossing the ceiling above his head. They sounded the same as the footsteps he had heard before: lightly-shod, in slippers or pumps, but a man's footsteps, no doubt about it. They seemed to cross the room above diagonally, and he guessed that it was probably the library, where he had noticed before that the floor was seriously rotted.

    'Brewster!' he shouted out. 'I'm down here, Brewster, checking out the boilers!'

    He waited for Brewster to come down the steps, but Brewster didn't appear. Nobody appeared. He thought about exploring further, but when he shone his flashlight directly ahead, he saw a tawny-grey rush of rats at the very end of the cellars, and he decided against it. He could make a full inspection if and when the exterminators had done what they had to do. He took a last perfunctory look around the alcoves on either side, and then started to walk back.

    'The integrity of some of the load-bearing limestone piers looks suspect… we'll have to carry out some analysis. They could be reinforced with concrete pilings, but without detailed structural analysis it's going to be hard to tell how extensive that reinforcement would have to be. Again, we're talking six figures. Low six figures, but six figures all the same.'

    He climbed the steps back to the kitchen, closed the door and locked it. Outside, in the kitchen garden, the giant rhubarb leaves still glittered with the morning dew, and cobwebs glittered, too. He crossed the kitchen and opened the door to the hallway.

    As he did so, he glimpsed a shadow on the wall at the top of the staircase, and he heard the
chiff-chiff-chiff
of shoe soles on the stairs.

    'Brewster?' he called. 'Brewster, is that you?'

    He started to climb the stairs after him, pulling himself up with the banister rail. 'If you're not Brewster, then you'd better come on down here, mister, because this is private property and you're trespassing!'

    He reached the top of the stairs, and looked up to the next flight. Halfway up, the nun stood in the lily field with her eyes closed. Morton paused for a moment to catch his breath, then continued to climb up. But when he reached the third-storey landing, there was nobody in sight. Not down the left-hand corridor, not down the corridor right in front of him, not down the corridor that led off to his right, the corridor with the half-collapsed ceiling.