Uncollected Stories 2003

God knows I warned her about that floor!'

Wharton was dimly aware of Louise staring greedily at them, storing up gossip like a squirrel stores up nuts. 'Get her out of here,' he said thickly.

'Yes,' Reynard said. 'Go see to supper.'

'Yes, sir.' Louise moved reluctantly toward the hall, and the shadows swallowed her.

'Now,' Wharton said quietly. 'It seems to me that you have some explaining to do, Reynard. This whole thing sounds funny to me. Wasn't there even an inquest?'

'No,' Reynard said. He slumped back into his chair suddenly, and he looked blindly into the darkness of the vaulted overhead ceiling. 'They know around here about the – East Room.'

'And just what is there to know?' Wharton asked tightly

'The East Room is bad luck,' Reynard said. 'Some people might even say it's cursed.”

'Now listen,' Wharton said, his ill temper and unlaid grief building up like steam in a teakettle, 'I'm not going to be put off, Reynard. Every word that comes out of your mouth makes me more determined to see 32

that room. Now are you going to agree to it or do I have to go down to that village and ... ?'

'Please.' Something in the quiet hopelessness of the word made Wharton look up. Reynard looked directly into his eyes for the first time and they were haunted, haggard eyes. 'Please, Mr. Wharton. Take my word that your sister died naturally and go away. I don't want to see you die!' His voice rose to a wail. 'I didn't want to see anybody die!'

Wharton felt a quiet chill steal over him. His gaze skipped from the grinning fireplace gargoyle to the dusty, empty-eyed bust of Cicero in the corner to the strange wainscoting carvings. And a voice came from within him: Go away from here. A thousand living yet insentient eyes seemed to stare at him from the darkness, and again the voice spoke...

'Go away from here.'

Only this time it was Reynard.

'Go away from here,' he repeated. 'Your sister is beyond caring and beyond revenge. I give you my word...”

'Damn your word!' Wharton said harshly. 'I'm going down to the sheriff, Reynard. And if the sheriff won't help me, I'll go to the county commissioner. And if the county commissioner won't help me...”

'Very well.' The words were like the faraway tolling of a churchyard bell.

'Come.'

Reynard led the way into the hall, down past the kitchen, the empty dining room with the chandelier catching and reflecting the last light of day, past the pantry, toward the blind plaster of the corridor's end.

This is it, he thought, and suddenly there was a strange crawling in the pit of his stomach.

'I...' he began involuntarily.

'What?' Reynard asked, hope glittering in his eyes.

'Nothing.'

They stopped at the end of the hall, stopped in the twilight gloom.

There seemed to be no electric light. On the floor Wharton could see the still-damp plasterer’s trowel Reynard had used to wall up the doorway, and a straggling remnant of Poe’s “Black Cat” clanged through his mind: “I had walled the monster up within the tomb…”

Reynard handed the trowel to him blindly. 'Do whatever you have to do, Wharton. I won't be party to it. I wash my hands of it.”

Wharton watched him move off down the hall with misgivings, his hand opening and closing on the handle of the trowel. The faces of the Little-boy weathervane, the fire-dog gargoyle, the wizened housemaid all seemed to mix and mingle before him, all grinning at something he could not understand. Go away from here...

33

With a sudden bitter curse he attacked the wall, hacking into the soft, new plaster until the trowel scraped across the door of the East Room.

He dug away plaster until he could reach the doorknob. He twisted, then yanked on it until the veins stood out in his temples .

The plaster cracked, schismed, and finally split. The door swung ponderously open, shedding plaster like a dead skin.

Wharton stared into the shimmering quicksilver pool.

It seemed to glow with a light of its own in the darkness, ethereal and fairy-like. Wharton stepped in, half- expecting to sink into warm, pliant fluid.

But the floor was solid.

His own reflection hung suspended below him, attached only by the feet, seeming to stand on its head in thin air. It made him dizzy just to look at it.

Slowly his gaze shifted around the room. The ladder was still there, stretching up into the glimmering depths of the mirror. The room was high, he saw. High enough for a fall to he winced – to kill.

It was ringed with empty bookcases, all seeming to lean over him on the very threshold of imbalance. They added to the room's strange, distorting effect.

He went over to the ladder and stared down at the feet. They were rubbershod, as Reynard had said, and