Black House

“There was no creel,” Judy had called back. She might have said keel, but Enid was quite sure it was creel. “I dreamed that, too.” Then, Enid reluctantly told Fred, Judy Marshall had begun crying. It had been very upsetting, listening to that sound come to her through the letter slot. It had even made the dog whine.

Enid had called through one more time, asking if she could come in and make sure Judy wasn’t hurt.

“Go away!” Judy had called back. In the midst of her crying, she’d laughed again—an angry, distracted laugh. “You’re a dream, too. This whole world is a dream.” Then there had been the sound of shattering glass, as if she had struck a coffee mug or water tumbler and knocked it to the floor. Or thrown it at the wall.

“I didn’t call the police, because she sounded all right,” Enid told Fred (Fred standing with the phone jammed up against one ear and his hand plastered over the other to cut out all the yammering mechanical sounds, which he ordinarily enjoys and which at that moment seemed to go into his head like chrome spikes). “Physically all right, anyway. But Fred . . . I think you ought to go home and check on her.”

All of Judy’s recent oddities went through his mind in a whirl. So did Pat Skarda’s words. Mental dysfunction. . . . We hear people say “So-and-so snapped,” but there are usually signs . . .

And he has seen the signs, hasn’t he?

Seen them and done nothing.

Fred parks his car, a sensible Ford Explorer, in the driveway and hurries up the steps, already calling his wife’s name. There is no answer. Even when he has stepped through the front door (he pushes it open so hard the brass letter slot gives a nonsensical little clack), there is no answer. The air-conditioned interior of the house feels too cold on his skin and he realizes he’s sweating.

“Judy? Jude?”

Still no answer. He hurries down the hall to the kitchen, where he is most apt to find her if he comes home for something in the middle of the day.

The kitchen is sun-washed and empty. The table and the counter are clean; the appliances gleam; two coffee cups have been placed in the dish drainer, winking sun from their freshly washed surfaces. More sun winks from a heap of broken glass in the corner. Fred sees a flower decal on one piece and realizes it was the vase on the windowsill.

“Judy?” he calls again. He can feel the blood hammering in his throat and at his temples.

She doesn’t answer him, but he hears her upstairs, beginning to sing.

“Rock-a-bye baby . . . on the treetop . . . when the wind blows . . .”

Fred recognizes it, and instead of feeling relieved at the sound of her voice, his flesh goes even colder. She used to sing it to Tyler when their son was little. Ty’s lullabye. Fred hasn’t heard that particular ditty come out of her mouth in years.

He goes back down the hall to the stairs, now seeing what he missed on his first trip. The Andrew Wyeth print, Christina’s World, has been taken down and set against the baseboard heater. The wallpaper below the picture hook has been scraped away in several places, revealing the plasterboard beneath. Fred, colder than ever, knows that Judy did this. It isn’t intuition, exactly; not deduction, either. Call it the telepathy of the long married.

Floating down from above, beautiful and on-key yet at the same time perfectly empty: “. . . the cradle will rock. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall . . .”

Fred is up the stairs two at a time, calling her name.

The upper hall is a scary mess. This is where they have hung the gallery of their past: Fred and Judy outside Madison Shoes, a blues club they sometimes went to when there was nothing interesting going on at the Chocolate Watchband; Fred and Judy dancing the first dance at their wedding reception while their folks happily looked on; Judy in a hospital bed, exhausted but smiling, holding the wrapped bundle that was Ty; the photo of the Marshall family farm that she always sniffed at; more.

Most of these framed photographs have been taken down. Some, like the one of the farm, have been thrown down. Glass litters the hall in sparkling sprays. And she has been at the wallpaper behind half a dozen. In the spot where the picture of Judy and Ty in the hospital had hung, the paper has been torn almost completely away, and he can see where she scraped at the wallboard beneath. Some of the scratches are dappled with drying spots of blood.

“Judy! Judy!”

Tyler’s door stands open. Fred sprints the length of the upstairs hall with glass crunching under his loafers.

“. . . and down will come Tyler, cradle and all.”

“Judy! Ju—”