Burial
Authors: Graham Masterton
GRAHAM MASTERTON
New York
Naomi was right in the middle of peppering her cod chowder when she heard a sharp scraping sound from the dining room. Slowly she lowered her ladle, listening hard. A sharp scrape like somebody dragging their chair out without lifting it. But of course there was nobody there. Michael and Erwin were still at the synagogue; she wasn't expecting them back for nearly an hour.
She waited and waited; the chowder simmered, the lid covering the potatoes softly rattled. But the sound wasn't repeated. All she could hear was muffled rock music from the Benson's apartment above her, and the echoing of car-horns from the street below. The front door was protected by three deadlocks, a chain and two bolts, so it was hardly likely that anybody could have broken in without her hearing him.
She leaned forward a little so that she could peer through the dining room door. It was only half open, so all she could see was the darkly varnished sideboard with its crowds of framed photographs and its cream lace runners, and the corner of the dining table, and the back of one chair. The light from the candles swivelled and dipped, distorting the shadows; and for a split-second she thought she saw a dark and hostile shape. But common sense told her that there was nobody there; and that it was nothing but light and dark, and the draught from an open window.
She took the strawberry shortcake out of the freezer and set it on the counter to defrost. Then she opened the oven to make sure that the chicken pieces were browning nicely.
For a moment her glasses were blinded by the steam.
She closed the oven door, and it was then that she thought she heard it again. The very slightest of scrapes.
She opened and closed the oven door once more, just to make sure that it wasn't the hinges that had scraped. Then, wiping her hands on her apron, she cautiously approached the dining room door. From here she could see herself reflected in the mirror over the sideboard, a plump, pale woman with a flat Eastern European face and deep-set eyes, her rinsed hair tied with a bright red headscarf. A woman who had been startlingly pretty once, twenty-nine years ago, when she and Michael had first furnished this apartment, and who still retained a girlishness that all of their men friends found appealing. But her knuckles were reddened from housework, and from years of office-cleaning, and although she was still pillowy-breasted, too many potatoes and too much cream had made her
zaftig
, and she didn't like to go without her corset. She could diet, she supposed; but food was her only real pleasure, apart from television and singing (she loved choirs and opera), and maybe life was too short to give up such an important pleasure.
She reached out and pushed the door a few inches wider. She paused, listened.
âWho's there?' she demanded. At the same time, thinking how stupid she was. A burglar was going to say, âDon't worry, it's only me, the burglar?'
She waited a few moments more. The shadows flickered, the clock ticked softly on the bookcase. She suddenly felt that she had been standing here for years, at this half-open door â that her fate was waiting for her, just out of sight. What kind of fate, she couldn't tell. She wasn't sure that she wanted to find out.
âI know there's nobody there!' she announced, and flinging the door wide open she stepped into the dining room.
She was right. There was nobody there. Only the table set for dinner for three, with its red tablecloth and its white lace overcloth. The best crystal glasses shining, the napkin rings polished; flowers arranged in the centrepiece, which was a porcelain figure of an old Hungarian flower-seller leading a donkey and cart.
The
challas
loaves were ready, covered with a cloth, the
kiddush
cup was filled with wine. She had already lit the
Shabbes
candles and said a prayer for her family, for their health, and their peace and their honour.
She walked around the table, touching everything with her fingertips â glasses, cutlery, side-plates, as if to make sure that they were all sanctified and pure. The
Shabbes
evening was one of the few times when a woman became a priestess in her own home, endowed with the ability to bless those she loved.
She looked into the living room, too. Nobody there. The big brown upholstered chairs were empty, the television cabinet closed; the whole room smelled of furniture polish and room spray. A little shabby, maybe, a little tired, but a houseproud woman's home.
Maybe it was rats again. They had been infested with rats three or four times in the years they had lived on 17th Street. Each time the building managers had cleared the rats out and sworn that there was no way for them to get back in, but she had been raised in the Bronx and she knew about rats. They could gnaw their way through solid concrete, given enough time.
She returned to the kitchen. She dusted the chowder with a little nutmeg and decided it was ready although for some reason she wasn't very hungry any more. The chicken was doing fine: all she had to do now was to cream the potatoes.
Then â there it was again. That scraping noise. Then louder â chair legs dragging, table legs dragging. The
tinkling of glasses and cutlery. She opened the drawer and took out her largest breadknife, and stood rigid and terrified â listening.
I should dial 911, she thought. There
must
be somebody here. No rat could make a noise like that. Rats may be able to chew through concrete but they can't move furniture.
She crossed the kitchen, holding the knife rigidly upright in front of her, trying to control the trembling in her hand.
She reached the telephone and lifted it off the wall. Keeping her eyes fixed on the dining room door she punched 911 with her left thumb, then lifted the receiver to her ear.
Nothing. The phone was dead.
She replaced the receiver and tried again. Still nothing. No dialling tone, no ringing tone. She tried one more time, and then hung up.
âIf there's anybody there,' she called out, âmy husband and five other men will be home in about a minute. So if I were you, I'd get the hell out.'
She listened. No reply. She hoped if there was somebody there, that whoever it was had believed her. If six men were coming home soon, how come the table was only laid for three?
âI'm warning you,' she called. She felt as if she had a thistle caught in her larynx. âYou have five seconds to get the hell out, then I'm calling the police and the neighbours and God help you.'
Instantly, the apartment was filled with a thunderous banging and colliding of furniture. Doors slammed, glass splintered, chairs toppled over. The huge mahogany sideboard which had once belonged to her grandmother was abruptly and noisily dragged out of view, shedding framed photographs and ornaments and most of her collection of glass paperweights.
She was too terrified even to scream. She stood breathless, gasping, listening to the last tinkling of broken glass; the muted thrumming of rock 'n'roll. What kind of intruder came into your house and pushed all your furniture around? And how had he moved that sideboard? That sideboard weighed a
ton
. Michael and Erwin had once had to ask Freddie Benson to help them shift it just three feet.
Perhaps it wasn't an intruder, after all. Perhaps it was subsidence. These old houses in the Village had been pretty hastily thrown up, on the whole, when Manhattan had been forcing its way uptown almost daily â street after street, square after square, fashionable one week and derelict the next. Their surveyor had warned them that the âentire fabric is suspect: structural wood is partly-rotted and the roof tiles have become porous with age.'
All the same, the house was built on solid rock, and there were no serious cracks in the walls. And she couldn't
feel any
subsidence. The floor would have had to slope at almost 45 degrees for that sideboard to slide.
She took two or three careful steps towards the dining room. She whispered a prayer that Michael and Erwin would come home early.
âI have a knife,' she said, âand I know how to use it.'
She wondered if she had made a serious mistake, telling the intruder that she was armed. It was highly likely that he had a knife of his own; or even a gun. Afriend of hers, Esther Fishman, had been shot in the left side of the face by an intruder, and even six years later she was still psychologically traumatised and badly scarred, and spoke like a ghastly parody of Donald Duck. She thought of Esther and almost decided to drop her knife and run for the front door. Better to lose everything than to end up like Esther.
But this was
Shabbes
evening; and this was
her
house; the house which she had prepared for her husband and her
brother-in-law. She was
Eshes Chayil
, the woman of valour, âclothed in strength and honour.'
She opened the dining room door. She couldn't believe what she saw. All of her furniture was crowded against the opposite wall. Chairs, table, sideboard, bookcase even the rug had rumpled up underneath them. Everything on the dinner table was heaped up against the wallpaper: the napkins, the glasses, the
challas
bread, the salt-cellar.
Even more disturbingly, the pictures on the walls were hanging sideways, as if gravity had changed direction and was trying to pull them towards the opposite wall. The oil-painting of Russia that her Auntie Katia had bequeathed her: the hand-tinted photograph of her great-great-uncles, on their arrival in Brooklyn, 1887. The drawing of Coney Island that Henry had given her when he was eleven. The only picture that was hanging properly was a small framed arrangement of dried flowers.
She approached the furniture with a terrible feeling of bewilderment and dread. No intruder could have done this. She had heard that the devil sometimes tried people's patience on the Sabbath, trying to shake their faith in God on the very night before their holiest day; and also to tempt them into working when work was forbidden. He would tear all the clothes in a woman's wardrobe so that she would be tempted to sew; or turn her bread into chalk so that she would be tempted to bake; or make a man's children sick so that he would have to carry them to the doctor.
There was a strange sour smell in the room, like nothing she had ever smelled before. She thought at first that it was the candles, that the tablecloth might have been burned, but the seven-branched
menorah
must have been instantly snuffed out when the table shifted, because it lay tilted against the bread-basket and none of its candles was lit.
She had lit each of those candles for her children, for her children's souls; and for Michael's soul, too; and Erwin's.
