weeks, when the house was still responding to my star-struck idealism. While my devotion to the departed spirit of Gloria Tremayne was the dominant mood, the house played itself back accordingly, recapitulating only the more serene aspects of Gloria Tremayne’s character.
Soon, however, the mirror was to darken.
It was Fay who broke the spell. She quickly realized that the initial responses were being overlayed by others from a more mellow and, from her point of view, more dangerous quarter of the past. After doing her best to put up with them she made a few guarded attempts to freeze Gloria out, switching the volume controls up and down, selecting the maximum of bass lift – which stressed the masculine responses – and the minimum of alto lift.
One morning I caught her on her knees by the console, poking a screwdriver at the memory drum, apparently in an effort to erase the entire store.
Taking it from her, I locked the unit and hooked the key on to my chain.
‘Darling, the mortgage company could sue us for destroying the pedigree. Without it this house would be valueless. What are you trying to do?’
Fay dusted her hands on her skirt and stared me straight in the eye, chin jutting.
‘I’m trying to restore a little sanity here and if possible, find my own marriage again. I thought it might be in there somewhere.’
I put my arm around her and steered her back towards the kitchen. ‘Darling, you’re getting over-intuitive again. Just relax, don’t try to upset everything.’
‘Upset –? Howard, what are you talking about? Haven’t I a right to my own husband? I’m sick of sharing him with a homicidal neurotic who died five years ago. It’s positively ghoulish!’
I winced as she snapped this out, feeling the walls in the hallway darken and retreat defensively. The air became clouded and frenetic, like a dull storm-filled day.
‘Fay, you know your talent for exaggeration…’ I searched around for the kitchen, momentarily disoriented as the corridor walls shifted and backed. ‘You don’t know how lucky you –’
I didn’t get any further before she interrupted. Within five seconds we were in the middle of a blistering row. Fay threw all caution to the winds, deliberately, I think, in the hope of damaging the house permanently, while I stupidly let a lot of my unconscious resentment towards her come out. Finally she stormed away into her bedroom and I stamped into the shattered lounge and slumped down angrily on the sofa.
Above me the ceiling flexed and quivered, the colour of roof slates, here and there mottled by angry veins that bunched the walls in on each other. The air pressure mounted but I felt too tired to open a window and sat stewing in a pit of black anger.
It must have been then that I recognized the presence of Miles Vanden Starr. All echoes of Gloria Tremayne’s personality had vanished, and for the first time since moving in I had recovered my normal perspectives. The mood of anger and resentment in the lounge was remarkably persistent, far longer than expected from what had been little more than a tiff. The walls continued to pulse and knot for over half an hour, long after my own irritation had faded and I was sitting up and examining the room clear-headedly.
The anger, deep and frustrated, was obviously masculine. I assumed, correctly, that the original source had been Vanden Starr, who had designed the house for Gloria Tremayne and lived there for over a year before his death. To have so grooved the memory drum meant that this atmosphere of blind, neurotic hostility had been maintained for most of that time.
As the resentment slowly dispersed I could see that for the time being Fay had succeeded in her object. The serene persona of Gloria Tremayne had vanished. The feminine motif was still there, in a higher and shriller key, but the dominant presence was distinctly Vanden Starr’s. This new mood of the house reminded me of the courtroom photographs of him; glowering out of 1950-ish groups with Le Corbusier and Lloyd Wright, stalking about some housing project in Chicago or Tokyo like a petty dictator, heavy-jowled, thyroidal, with large lustreless eyes, and then the Vermilion Sands: 1970 shots of him, fitting into the movie colony like a shark into a goldfish bowl.
However, there was power behind those baleful drives. Cued in by our tantrum, the presence of Vanden Starr had descended upon 99 Stellavista like a thundercloud. At first I tried to recapture the earlier halcyon mood, but this had disappeared and my irritation at losing it only served to inflate the thundercloud. An unfortunate aspect of psychotropic houses is the factor of resonance – diametrically opposed personalities soon stabilize their relationship, the echo inevitably yielding to the new source. But where the personalities are of similar frequency and amplitude they mutually reinforce themselves, each adapting itself for comfort to the personality of the other. All too soon I began to assume the character of Vanden Starr, and my increased exasperation with Fay merely drew from the house a harder front of antagonism.
Later I knew that I was, in fact, treating Fay in exactly the way that Vanden Starr had treated Gloria Tremayne, recapitulating the steps of their tragedy with consequences that were equally disastrous.
Fay recognized the changed mood of the house immediately. ‘What’s happened to our lodger?’ she gibed at dinner the next evening. ‘Our beautiful ghost seems to be spurning you. Is the spirit unwilling although the flesh is weak?’
‘God knows,’ I growled testily. ‘I think you’ve really messed the place up.’ I glanced around the dining room for any echo of Gloria Tremayne, but she had gone. Fay went out to the kitchen and I sat over my half-eaten hors d’oeuvres, staring at it blankly, when I felt a curious ripple in the wall behind me, a silver dart of movement that vanished as soon as I looked up. I tried to focus it without success, the first echo of Gloria since our row, but later that evening, when I went into Fay’s bedroom after I heard her crying, I noticed it again.
Fay had gone into the bathroom. As I was about to find her I felt the same echo of feminine anguish. It had been prompted by Fay’s tears, but like Vanden Starr’s mood set off by my own anger, it persisted long after the original cue. I followed it into the corridor as it faded out of the room but it diffused outwards into the ceiling and hung there motionlessly.
Starting to walk down to the lounge, I realized that the house was watching me like a wounded animal.
Two days later came the attack on Fay.
I had just returned home from the office, childishly annoyed with Fay for parking her car on my side of the garage. In the cloakroom I tried to check my anger; the senso-cells had picked up the cue and began to suck the irritation out of me, pouring it back into the air until the walls of the cloakroom darkened and seethed.
I shouted some gratuitous insult at Fay, who was in the lounge. A second later she screamed: ‘Howard! Quickly!’
Running towards the lounge, I flung myself at the door, expecting it to retract. Instead, it remained rigid, frame locked in the archway. The entire house seemed grey and strained, the pool outside like a tank of cold lead.
Fay shouted again. I seized the metal handle of the manual control and wrenched the door back.
Fay was almost out of sight, on one of the slab sofas in the centre of the room, buried beneath the sagging canopy of the ceiling which had collapsed on to her. The heavy plastex had flowed together directly above her head, forming a blob a yard in diameter.
Raising the flaccid plastex with my hands, I managed to lift it off Fay, who was spread-eagled into the cushions with only her feet protruding. She wriggled out and flung her arms around me, sobbing noiselessly.
‘Howard, this house is insane, I think it’s trying to kill me!’
‘For heaven’s sake, Fay, don’t be silly. It was simply a freak accumulation of senso-cells. Your breathing probably set it off.’ I patted her shoulder, remembering the child I had married a few years earlier. Smiling to myself, I watched the ceiling retract slowly, the walls grow lighter in tone.
‘Howard, can’t we leave here?’ Fay babbled. ‘Let’s go and live in a static house. I know it’s dull, but what does it matter–?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s not just dull, it’s dead. Don’t worry, angel, you’ll learn to like it here.’
Fay twisted away from me. ‘Howard, I can’t stay in this house any more. You’ve been so preoccupied recently, you’re completely changed.’ She started to cry again, and pointed at the ceiling. ‘If I hadn’t been lying down, do you realize it would have killed me?’
I dusted the end of the sofa. ‘Yes, I can see your heel marks.’ Irritation welled up like bile before I could stop it. ‘I thought I told you not to stretch out here. This isn’t a beach, Fay. You know it annoys me.’
Around us the walls began to mottle and cloud again.
Why did Fay anger me so easily? Was it, as I assumed at the time, unconscious resentment that egged me on, or was I merely a vehicle for the antagonism which had accumulated during Vanden Starr’s marriage to Gloria
