Lost (19 page)

“Who?”

“John Comestor.”

The woman gave a wry smile that seemed to be detachable, like a Cheshire Cat smile, and said, “Days ago, or weeks, or was he down the stairs this morning?” She looked at a sign on the mantelpiece. “I must remember not to forget my pills, you know.”

“What language do you think it was?” said Winnie.

“I'm not following you,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “The young are so imprecise in their speech. It's not their fault, but there you are.”

“You said you'd heard noises and didn't know the language.”

“Oh, I can't hear a thing except the cats,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “If you hadn't come to call they'd be yowling up a storm. Now as a rule I'm deafer than a stone wall. But all week they've been speaking very urgently indeed, as if they have something to tell me, only of course, who can speak the language of cats? Chutney is quite impossible, doesn't enunciate for one thing, and what vocabulary he has ever had is sorely dwindled to a few well-chosen syllables. The word for
ghost
is lost, for instance. But the cats are going on about something, although who can tell what it is?”

Oh, John, thought Winnie, why aren't you sitting next to me to hear this? “You've been here a while, haven't you?” said Winnie, trying another approach.

“Indeed I have,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “My husband and I moved in after the war. We once had two floors, don't you know, and we'd have liked to buy the whole house, but then I'm not talented at climbing stairs any longer, so maybe it's for the best. Anyway, poor Alan is dead, and that's fine, that's all right. We don't need the space
now, and a good thing too. At today's prices, too dear by half. I couldn't afford to purchase an envelope anymore, so it's good all my friends are dead and not expecting the annual letter.”

“You remember the upstairs. You lived there once,” deduced Winnie.

“Oh, I did. Rooms, you know, rooms and rooms.” She waved her hand vaguely, as if there might once have been half a city block's worth of spare bedrooms and salons annexed to the house. “They've all been invaded by others.”

“Do you know how old the house is?”

“Absolute ages. These front rooms are the showpieces you know, late Georgian. Not a very prepossessing Georgian, one might add, a bin-end variety. Hardly more than a cottage, really. But the rooms are low and cozy, and I have walnut coping about my boudoir. It's gone wormy they tell me but so will I before long, so I don't mind. The back bit goes into the new building; I have some steps to a useless box room that I can't get to. The floors don't agree with each other and the steps don't agree with my knees. Do you want to see?”

“No.” Winnie studied Mrs. Maddingly. Despite herself Winnie was looking at life as if for her book. She was double-living through a day with genuine concerns because the needs of her fictions were as strong as those of her life, or stronger. Domestically, while John Comestor was AWOL, there was a conundrum rapping its fingers on his walls, but narratively it was also knocking on her forehead, pretending to be a ghost or a specter of some sort, and she couldn't concentrate.

Winnie sensed herself looking at this house not as John Comestor's house, but as a place where brash capable Wendy Pritzke could come across the ghost of Jack the Ripper. Winnie was channeling Wendy Pritzke, dialing her up. She couldn't help it.

Jack the Ripper was late 1800s. So this house would have been standing when he disappeared without a trace, to leave the most famous unsolved murder mystery of his day, and ours.

What if Jack the Ripper had gotten boarded up behind a reconstructed wall? What if that was why he had never been found? What if he had followed some toothsome filly home to her Georgian house in the village of Hampstead, only to meet a filthy end there at the hands of some vengeful husband or father or brother, and had his body bricked into a chimney stack?

Only to be exhumed more than a century later?

It was a worrisome habit she had, of vacating the premises mentally and transposing herself into the same premises, organized otherwise, fictionally. Like Alice and the mirror over the mantel, where the world looks the same but different: not just backward, but uncannily precise, and precisely strange. Or as Lewis Carroll had otherwise put it:

 

He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk

Descending from the bus:

He looked again, and found it was

A hippopotamus.

 

“I must have my pills,” said Mrs. Maddingly, as if Winnie had been lobbying for their removal.

“It's not noon, and your signs say M
IDDAY
,” said Winnie.

“If I don't have them now I might forget. I should take them while I remember.” She teetered toward a sideboard and with a crash she let the drop front of an antique desk fall open. Within were three small crystal glasses on a shelf lined with old newspaper, a grimy decanter of amber liquid, and an empty bottle of prescription drugs.

“What are you doing?” said Winnie as Mrs. Maddingly poured herself a healthy portion of whatever it was.

“I am afraid of dropping the damn things and having them roll under the hearth rug, so I dissolve them in sherry and drink my obligations down. So sorry I can't offer you any.”

“It's not even ten o'clock in the morning,” said Winnie, not so much scandalized as disbelieving. “I wouldn't touch sherry at this hour if you paid me.”

“It's terrible to be old and sick,” said the woman agreeably, smacking her lips. “In praise of modern medicine, though, which keeps us alive enough to criticize ourselves and others.” She lifted her glass in a toast, and downed the contents. “Now then, where's Chutney? It's time for his little tot too.”

Winnie left the cats, the flat, the dotty old dame, and the clutches of the Wendy Pritzke story, or at least as much of it as she could.

Maybe Chutney was trapped behind some baseboard, and scratching, and Mrs. Maddingly just hadn't noticed.

Oh, but it could be anything, anything but what it seemed to be: a figure trying to communicate through the wall at them, trying to say something, something. What was it? Beware your childhood reading, Winnie said to herself: There is no Narnia in the wardrobe, there is no monkey's paw with a third and damning wish to grant. You live in a world with starving Eritrean refugees and escaping smallpox viruses and third-world trade imbalances and the escalating of urban violence into an art form. You don't need the magic world to be really real; that would be a distraction.

And the world—she stood in the hall outside John's doorway, afraid for a moment to go in—the world was already upside down or inside out; it was already Alice's mad Wonderland. That was the secret of Alice, Winnie remembered, she'd spoken about it once at a conference of fantasy writers. Even if Tenniel had drawn her with
an encephalitic head, little Alice in the stories had been the correct junior citizen, sober and sane. It was the world around Alice, the Wonderland, that had gone mad. From the authority of the podium Winnie had theorized about it jocularly. Back in Winnie's great-great-grandfather's day, England had been soldered together with trust in the eternal verities of God's divine plan as worked out in Crown, Empire, the class system, and the family. And then mild unlikely insurrectionist Lewis Carroll had written the first Alice in the late 1860s, 1871 for
Looking-Glass
. Absurdity, sedition, planted at almost the very epicenter of the Victorian epoch.

A reading child back in those early days, corseted, even straitjacketed by Victorian certainties, could delight in a story stuffed with nonsense. Time was malleable during a mad tea party in which there could be jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam today. Creatures could shift shapes, a sheep into an old lady, a baby into a pig. Fury could win out over reason. In the nineteenth century, reading Alice was refreshing because it was an escape from strict convictions about reality.

But now? Now? Children in the twentieth and this early twenty-first century hated the Alice books, couldn't read them, and why should they? Their world had strayed into madness long ago. Look at the planet. Rain is acid, poisonous. Sun causes cancer. Sex = death. Children murder each other. Parents lie, leaders lie, the churches have less moral credibility than Benetton ads.

And faces of missing children staring out from milk cartons—imagine all those poor Lost Boys, and Lost Girls, not in Neverland but lost here, lost now. No wonder Wonderland isn't funny to read anymore: We live there full-time. We need a break from it.

“You,” said Winnie to the boot scraper hedgehog, “might as well make a statement. I'm standing here lecturing myself because
I don't want to go in there and find I've wandered into a madhouse. Life is mad enough already. For one thing, John is gone. Where is he?”

The hedgehog neither answered nor waddled away in search of greater privacy.

“Well, that's proof of nothing,” said Winnie. “I like to keep my own counsel too.” She threw back her shoulders to appear proprietary, and entered John's flat with what she hoped was convincing briskness. “
That's
a stink you've raised, then,” she called out. “Ooh, Lordy. Something die in here?” She picked up the morning post and riffled through it to make sure there was no letter from John for her, then fanned the air away from her nose and went into the kitchen.

Mac and Jenkins had managed to remove most of the plaster. “Aha, progress,” she said. “Is this halitosis common to old houses?”

“It's the stink of the devil,” said Mac.

“The devil is going to have a hard time getting a date, then.”

Mac poked out his lips at her; was it a grin or a sneer? “I have a bad worry, there's things with dark wings hovering over this whole place. I don't give a toss what she found out, Jenkins. We should get ourselves out of here and take the sacrament of absolution.”

“You're as spooked as an old bog woman,” said Jenkins. “If you can be no help, at least keep your shite to yourself.” He was perspiring around the ears and forehead, and the collar of his sweatshirt was damp.

“What's the matter?” said Winnie. She didn't like the look of Jenkins, clammy as a cold boiled ham. “What are you yammering about?”

Jenkins picked up a hammer. He reached out his arm and held the hammer toward the newly exposed wall boards at the back of the
pantry. When he was still two feet away, the hollow banging sound began. It was rhythmic and steady. As Jenkins moved the hammer nearer, the banging picked up in speed and volume.

“Well, that's clever.” Winnie kept her voice flat, even steely. “A sound-and-light show without the light. Now do you mind telling me where John is? I'm beginning to be tired of this.”

“I make no representation, for how do I know?” said Jenkins.

“He's in there; he's dead,” said Mac. “We didn't do it, but what could be the reason for the thumping of the bohrain? It's a death drum, and his body is hammering to get out.”

“And so that's the smell of his corpse, I suppose,” she said. “Well, he always was a man of tidy personal habits. He'd be mortified to know he was so aromatic.” She wrenched open a window and let some remnant of Hurricane Gretl, making its English landfall, sweep cold rainy air in across them.

“Look, look,” she said, and hustled for some paper, partly to turn her back on the pantry boards, to show them she wasn't scared of noise or smells. “I had no luck with the downstairs neighbor, a sweet old thing named Mrs. Maddingly, who's half loony herself. Probably her cat has gotten caught in some crawl space and, by the smell of it, has spectacularly died.”

“So it's a dead cat, is it, striking its claws against the back of these bricks?” said Jenkins, but gently and mockingly, for Mac's benefit, to tease him and console him both. Mac spit.

“Not a dead cat. Dead cats have no sense of rhythm. Listen to me. I told you how this old Georgian house sits next to a place on Rowancroft Gardens. For one thing, the houses share these party walls—like any abutting houses. But for another, when the Victorian house behind us went up, the developers put some back rooms onto this existing house, to enlarge it. Look.” She sketched a map of John's flat, the older three front Georgian rooms in a lumpy square
and a newer extension behind, running only half the width of the original house. John's two workrooms took a chunk out of the footprint of the adjacent building. “You see, the equivalent flat in the Rowancroft Gardens building must be roughly a mirror shape to this one, only longer and with larger rooms. Its puzzle piece probably fills in over here, on the other side of our noisy chimney stack, assuming that these pantry boards do back onto a chimney stack.”

“That's something Mr. C never mentioned,” said Jenkins.

“So maybe I should go over to that building. I know someone who lives there I can ask.”

“You'll not go alone. Yourself'd never know where a sound might be coming from,” said Mac, as if eager not to be left in the flat anymore, even with Jenkins to protect him. “I'll join ye.”

“No, sir,” said Winnie. “I'll get further on my own.”

She went to the bathroom and changed her blouse and freshened her face. The someone she knew who lived there was, damn it, Allegra Lowe. Through such mere proximity had Allegra Lowe and John Comestor originally met. They fought briefly over a coven of pigeons living under the eaves of her building and fouling the windowsills of his. They'd solved the problem with wire meshing, and good fences had made them better neighbors, and more than that. Winnie had not been to Allegra's flat before, nor did she want to go now. But, face it, if John was holed up in connubial bliss there, well, better that she should know it.

She looked at herself in the mirror. “You ready to face the Queen of Hearts?” she asked herself. “Hello in there.” Her reflection did not reply. She saw the crow's-feet, the jet lag drawing down the corners of her eyelids. The pursed mouth of mirror-Winnie displayed a clumsy application of lipstick. She did a touch-up.