termites…'
'You said you never heard it again. I sure never heard it.'
'I did hear it. I heard it every day.' Walking quickly, Lila led them down a side hall from the kitchen, into one of the wings. They passed a modern bathroom and a couple of closed doors Cree assumed to be storage rooms or closets, and then came to a large, dark room lined with bookshelves.
In the gloom, Cree could make out the glisten of dark, oiled furniture and the straight white teeth of a piano keyboard. She picked up a faint sense of presence here, but not the sense of nightmare Lila apparently felt. This felt keening… a piercing sweetness. Whatever it was, it wras subtle, impossible to probe with the distractions of Jack and Lila present.
'Let's get some damn lights on in here,' Jack said. He fumbled for the switch and bulbs came on in a smaller version of the chandeliers in the front rooms.
'Jackie, that table… that table was making the noise.' Lila was unwilling to go farther than the doorway.
'What the hell -?'
'It… it came alive. The claws.'
Jack looked as if someone had hit him in the gut. He looked quickly to Cree, something like panic in his eyes. For a long moment, he didn't have a reply. Then he crossed the room to the table and bent to look at the wooden talons. The dark mahogany legs, Cree could see, were elaborately carved with scales or feathers, each one ending up in a gryphon's head just below the top.
Jack shoved at the table and turned back to his wife. 'We'll get rid of the thing. We'll sell it. Hell, we'll toss it out on the trash today!'
Lila just shook her head. She was biting her lips, fighting to stay functional. 'I can't. That was one of Daddy's favorites, Momma would never forgive me. Anyway, it wouldn't help. That… isn't all. There's more. A whole lot more.'
8
Later, Cree would remember Lila's quavering narrative as one of the most remarkable and terrifying tales she'd ever heard. This was true partly because of what she said, but mostly the way she said it: that tortured mix of self-doubt and utter conviction. And all told against the backdrop of the old house, the dim rooms full of unrelenting whispers. Maybe most poignant of all was the emotion between man and wife, the ebb and flow of terror, concern, distrust, love, doubt, resolve, desolation, loyalty, guilt. Cree did her best to disappear, speaking only to murmur something sympathetic when Lila seemed about to fall apart.
They continued to walk slowly through the house. Lila took small, broken steps, as if she were a woman thirty years older, or as if she'd injured herself. Indecisively, Jack did his best to help her. Sometimes she stood for long moments staring into some extraspatial distance as she struggled to put words to what she had seen.
The day after the first incident of the claw feet was one of the most horrible she could remember. She was afraid to tell anyone what had happened, because she knew what they'd think. So what she did instead was dream up excuses to be away from the house. When Jack left to go to his office the next morning, she left, too, taking the other car to go shopping for a couple of lamps she'd decided they needed. She called some friends and tried to get lunch dates, but no one could make it on such short notice. She ate lunch at a restaurant and drove around town, even swung by the empty lakeshore house as if seeing its familiar, safe facade could offer some comfort.
What was going on? she asked herself. She'd lived at Beauforte House for the first fifteen years of her life and couldn't recall feeling this way. Sure, a few childhood scares – bad dreams, Daddy or Uncle Brad or the nanny telling a scary story that kept her awake for a while, that kind of thing. And yes, she could remember the family talking about there being ghosts at the place, but everyone who lived in an old house, which was most of her friends, did; it was casual and taken for granted you were mostly kidding. Everybody had a housemaid or cook or gardener who supposedly practiced voodoo, too, and nobody took that seriously except as a potential personnel problem.
And then Momma had lived there for all those years, hadn't she? Lila had visited regularly over the course of two decades and had never felt any greater stress than missing Daddy, or being ticked off at Momma for one thing or another, or the general nostalgia for childhood. And Momma had never acted as if there was anything terrible there. Momma had a few secrets, maybe, but it couldn't have been anything too troubling or she wouldn't have stuck it out. Not if it felt like this.
Which, it seemed to Lila, suggested two possibilities. One, this was about something that had happened after Momma had moved out -Temp Chase's murder. Or, two, maybe she was just going plain crazy.
She couldn't decide which was scarier.
But eventually there was nothing left to do but go home. She felt a little better – walking around downtown had refreshed her. She convinced herself that she'd just been feeling uncomfortable, knowing about the Chase murder, and it was making her edgy. Anyone would feel the same. With time, it would no doubt pass.
Back at the house, that idea lasted about one second. The flutter, the jitter, was there as soon as she walked inside. From the kitchen, she could hear the table claws clenching.
She unpacked the things she'd bought, determined to ignore it. Then she went to do something in the upstairs bedroom. She turned into the big room at the top of the stairs, and when she glanced down the hallway she saw something at the edge of one of the doorways, maybe thirty feet away. The shoe tip! And something else, too, along the edge of the door at chest height. She stopped, feeling nauseous, and made herself look at it. Fabric – some kind of coarse brown weave, sort of raggedy. And it was moving, a slight, regular rise and fall. Breathing! She realized she was staring at part of the lapel and shoulder of a jacket. Worn by someone standing in one of the doorways. Someone who thought he was out of view.
It took a moment to shake off the shock. She wanted to run and call the police but was afraid to turn away from the intruder. Instead, she shouted out, 'I see you! I see you there! You come out of there right now!'
Whoever it was didn't move. Just continued to hold there, breathing.
'I have a gun!' she lied. 'You come out or I'll shoot you, so help me God!'
Standing in the big room at the top of the stairs now, Lila pulled out of the narrative to look wide-eyed from Cree's face to Jack's and back.
'And I would have!'
'Why didn't you? Couldn't you have gotten Jack's shotgun?' Cree asked. She sighted down the hallway, lined by many doorways.
Lila shook her head. 'Oh, I did. But not at that point. It's so hard to explain what goes through your head at a time like that! See, I… I saw somebody standing there. But then part of me was looking for a, I don't know, a normal explanation? I'm sorry, Jackie, for a minute I thought maybe it was you, home early and pulling some stupid prank. Or Ron. Or somebody else who maybe had some reason for being there, I don't know, a, a handyman Jack had asked to come in. Or then I thought, No, Lila, it's your nerves again, just like the first time. The security system was working when I came home – how could anyone have gotten in? I just didn't want to do anything stupid! I didn't want to call attention. You see?'
So she began to walk toward the doorway. When she was fifteen feet away, the lapel disappeared, slipping backward into the room. What she thought she was going to do, where she got the courage, Lila didn't know, but she kept on going until she stood in that doorway and looked inside. It was the room that had been her bedroom when she was a child, now set up as a guest bedroom.
There was nobody in there. The windows were closed and locked, and there was no other way out. She could see the empty floor under the bed. The only place someone could hide was the huge armoire that served as the room's closet. The doors were shut, but there was a key in the lock and she quickly turned it and yanked it out. Good, solid, old-time craftsmanship, heavy doors with strong lock and hinges. If someone was in there, he was stuck now.
She debated calling the police but then got afraid of making a fuss, of what people would think if they came with flashing lights and sirens and found nothing. Jackie would for sure hear about it, he'd tell Ron and Momma. So instead she went quickly across the hall, got the shotgun, and came back.
Jack had taught her how to load it, she'd even shot clay pigeons with him once in a while, she knew how to
