Lost (23 page)

“What the fuck?” said Mac.

“Dr. Seuss,” she answered.

“We'll be needing some doctor or other,” said Mac. “Dr. Freud. Or maybe Dr. Kevorkian.”

Winnie's voice was softer than she'd have liked. “It's just annoying. How can we be spooked by redecorating? The kitchen that rejected new fixtures? What does it want?”

“Holy shite,” said Mac.

The nails, one by one, began to retract into the walls, like a cat sheathing its claws.

It was like trick photography, like watching a video in rewind. Cool and constant. Time in reverse, time broken. Winnie felt her grasp of things shudder, her thoughts wheel out, seeking for a scrabble hold elsewhere, in a world more obedient than the aberrations on display at this hobbled moment. Somewhere else, children on playgrounds were quietly ganging up on the unpopular isolate. Junior varsity teams were suiting up for a scrimmage.
Middle-management types were plotting office putsches over the watercooler. Some bored child was tossing a book of Winnie's on the floor. Some mother frantic for a cup of Tension Tamer tea was hacking through the cellophane wrapping with a meat cleaver. Everywhere else, furnaces were firing up, trucks were backing up, computers were booting up, things were going forward, except here, where the nails were retreating.

In a moment there was no sign of Winnie's efforts, and the flat had gone silent again.

“A whole
week
of this?” she said.

“No,” said Jenkins, “we haven't been able to get as close as you just did. Nerves.”

She put her weight on her heels, her back against the kitchen cabinets. “You'd better tell me everything,” she said. “You'd better just start at the top. Where are you guys from? Have you done work for John before? What's the first thing you noticed that was strange?”

They didn't speak. “Why would you not trust me?” she said. “You just better,” she added.

“I'm from Raheny, in Dublin,” said Mac after a minute. “And here four years and some, staying with mates in Kilburn, off Mill Lane. Been at this sort of thing since weekend jobs with my da. Five, six years now. Never seen the likes of this.”

“Have you got a real name, Mac?”

“Mac's good enough for you if it's good enough for me,” he said. He had the look of a ferret with mumps, his narrow elegant nose blooming out of a face raw with the last of adolescent acne. “I've been with himself the past two years.” He nodded sullenly to his partner.

“Colum Jenkins,” said the older man, his hand on his left shoulder, rubbing it. “Building's been my trade the past dozen years,
working now for myself, previously on a maintenance staff in a clinic in Birmingham. And I think my domestic arrangements are none of your concern. I did some work for a friend of Mr. Comestor's and was recommended; Mr. C rang me a month ago or so. I came out to look at the job, deliver an estimate, collect my deposit. The usual. Mr. C was a pleasant enough chap, a bit distracted, you might say—”

“Distracted? How?”

“Oh, Monday morning we arrived, lots of to-ing and fro-ing on the phone. Some buyers interested in the flat below came pounding on his door to ask him some questions about the neighborhood. That sort of thing, don't you know. He didn't look like a man who stayed in one place with a newspaper for very long, did he, Mac? So when we arrived back on Tuesday and he wasn't here, we weren't so very surprised. We thought he'd be back in a moment, or maybe I'd just misunderstood. That was the day the nasty weather began. I left a note asking his permission to do the bathroom first. I didn't care to risk breaking through to a chimney stack whose shaft could well have shifted over time, allowing in the rain, leaving us dealing with the elements. But Mr. C left no written reply on Wednesday morning to answer my proposal. He just disappeared. So we spread out the dust sheets, put our wet things to dry, and got to work, or thought we would.”

“So it's been rainy weather all week?”

“Had to set out the oilcloth in the hall the first morning he was gone, Tuesday, it was, to drop our wellies on. We've not had to pick it up yet. Very English weather.”

They were all skirting the imponderable: that some thing or other had pulled the nails back into the wood so efficiently that the nailheads were once again flush. It was too strange, like biting into an apple and tasting a mouthful of cauliflower.

“Why didn't you just say, ‘Oh, the hell with this,' and take off?” she asked.

Mac looked as if he'd made that very remark to Jenkins repeatedly over the past four days. “It's bad doings, and worse to come,” said Mac.

Jenkins sighed. “Mac is spooked if a mouse runs across his path, thinking it is the devil's agent. But though I don't fathom it and I don't like it, I'm ashamed to be scared of it. And I don't want to leave it till Mr. C comes home. I've a reputation, and a good one, the which I worked hard enough to get. And we don't know where Mr. C is.”

“There must be a missing persons bureau at the police station,” said Winnie. “Why not call?”

“
You
ring, give
your
name, and tell some authority that you're scared of your assignment?” said Jenkins. “Go ahead, try it.”

“You're not telling it all,” said Mac. “He isn't,” he said to Winnie.

“What's he leaving out?”

“You mind your tongue,” began Jenkins, but Mac said stoutly, nearly in a shout, “This is a fecking waste of time. And there's naught to it anyway, so just belt up.” He turned to Winnie and continued. “Wednesday we just stood around some, joking about it, trying to show we weren't pissing ourselves with fright. Then yesterday even in the rain we thought we'd get up on the roof and look down, try to find a hole from above and block it. If it was a suction thing, a dark wind howling down the bones of this house, well, we'd clog its arteries and give it a stroke. Give the whole house a huge shake. A thrombosis.”

“Please,” said Jenkins, “my own heart is listening. Don't give it notions.”

“So we did,” said Mac. “There's no roof access from this flat right now; that's what your friend Mr. C wants to improve by this
rehab. We had to get the ladder out the study window, up in what you call the new house part. We had to steady one end on the window ledge and drop the other onto the pitched roof of the house next door to that, across the yard below. Not to cross to that house but just to have someplace to stand and get our balance so we could turn and begin to scrabble up the slope of the roof over the study, and then cross to where it joins the valley gutter of the older house—Rudge House as you have it—at the chimney stack.”

“Not my favorite thing, heights,” said Jenkins, and closed his eyes. “But what else was to be done?”

“So we get out there in the filthy fecking weather, and the wind wobbles the ladder like a vengeance. But we get up onto the roof all right and walk around a bit.

“We're up there, poking about the rear chimney stack, the one that leads down here. It's nothing out of the ordinary. They capped it with an ironstone chimney pot shaped like a castle in a big chess game. The leads seemed snug enough. A little cracking in the mortar around the chimney pot. We think maybe this is it. We chip the chimney pot off its mount and set it to, on the parapet. It's a great monstrous thing, and heavy. And then the rapping begins up top, too, coming from inside the house, coming out. But it sounds different when you're outside.”

Winnie wanted to ask that they move into the front room, looking out over the staid, empty forecourt of Rudge House, farther away from the kitchen and the pantry wall still making Morse code at them. But she merely said, “Oh?”

“It sounded like a voice, is what he wants to say,” said Jenkins. His eyes were brimming. “Some sound pushed through a throat, that's all, but what throat, or whose, or when, we could not tell.”

“He had his little fit, he did,” said Mac, pointing at Jenkins. “He lost his brekkie and clawed at his clothes. I wanted to go get the
priest and nuke that buggery wailer into kingdom come. But he wouldn't let me.”

“He's a moron,” said Jenkins, not unkindly, “he's that most superstitious sort of fellow; only bothers to believe in God and the blessed saints because he likes to believe in the devil and his army of familiars. In actual fact, of any given Sunday he'd just as soon run down a man of the cloth and rob the widow of her mite. He has no scruples, don't you know, no faith, only dim fears, which he populates out of
The X-Files
and
The Twilight Zone
.”

Mac said, “It's a case of house possession, isn't it? And Mister Colum Jenkins bawled like an infant at the sound of it.”

“What did it say?” Winnie only asked because the longer they talked, the more time passed since the nails retracted into the wall, and the easier it became to breathe.

“The consonants were vowels, the vowels were mud, the language was far away, possibly beastly,” said Jenkins.

“Like if you gave a dog electroshock and convinced him he could speak English,” said Mac, “only he couldn't, of course.”

“Why did you weep?” said Winnie.

“Everyone's got a grief,” said Jenkins, “mine is mine and none of your concern, but mine came up the chimney to remind me of itself.”

“You're as superstitious as he is, only you use a different grammar,” said Winnie. “How long did it go on? How loud was it? When did it stop? What did you do then?”

Mac said, “We couldn't knock up the compound—so many parts sand to so many parts cement—to mortar it into place. Not till the rain let up. So we headed back in. Then the ladder jumped—it just jumped, like a skipping rope—and tipped into the alley. I was already in the window and Jenkins following; he fell on top of me to avoid losing his balance into the alley. He had a seizure then. His pills.”

“Bad heart,” said Jenkins. “Been so for a while, but frights make it worse.”

“You went a bit snoozers on me. Browned your boxers too, didn't you. Talk about stink.”

“And the ladder . . . ?” said Winnie quickly.

“Still in the alley. Never got to it yet.” Jenkins avoided Mac's eye.

“And the chimney pot is up there uncemented?”

“It's forty, fifty pounds of fired clay. Short of a gale-force wind, nothing's going to budge it. We'll right it soon enough.”

“Tell her about your dream,” said Mac. His head was back and tilted, his eyes hooded, his lips on one side drawn up into a mean pucker. “When you were out cold. Go on, then.”

“You shut your mouth,” said Jenkins. “It's none of her concern, nor yours. I'm sorry I spoke of it.”

“Go on, tell her, Jenky-jenks.”

Jenkins took a breath. Winnie saw him halting in his thoughts. “Now you,” she said to Mac, “you just hold on.” To be funny, addressing the pantry wall: “You, I don't want to hear it.” She took Jenkins by the elbow. “Come on, then. Have a seat. There's nothing here that we can't all walk away from. I'm going to make a cup of tea.”

“Oh, you don't know,” said Jenkins, “we can walk all we want, but the good it does?”

“You stupid git. Tell her the dream or I will.”

“I told you to shut up,” said Winnie. “Why don't you just go. Please? Grab a sandwich or something. We're going to have some tea.”

“Wouldn't scarper off, leaving my mate here, not with dead Mr. C in the walls, no, darlin', no.”

She stopped talking to him then, made two cups of tea, and sat down near to Jenkins. “This is all going to seem so ridiculous when
we get to the bottom of it,” she said. “Please. I don't care what you dreamed.”

“Tell her.”

“I don't hold by dreams,” said Jenkins, “it's not my way. But this was such a dream. I was so deep in it, not drowning but—bewildered—no word for it really. Everything hung in strands of gray, but it wasn't rain and it wasn't fog, it wasn't thread, it wasn't smoke, nor yet was it the scarring of stone with a chisel, nor the ripped seams of old plush curtains, but it was like all that.”

The house held its breath.

“Tell the part about your daughter. It's good, this,” said Mac. He looked ready to down a pint of Guinness and settle back to hear an old geezer retell the story of the Trojan horse. “Listen and you'll see.”

“I don't want to hear it,” said Winnie. “I'm not going to listen. The past has nothing to do with us, it's only what we make of the present that counts, the both of you.”

“She's a whore, works the Strand,” muttered Mac appreciatively. “You want to hear a dream that a dad can have about his daughter?”

“Piss off, I'll skewer you with my screwdriver, you,” said Jenkins, half rising, his face now gamboge.

“What's wanted is a fecking exorcism here before the devil in the pantry wall gets out to claim your soul. What he dreamed,” said Mac, “was a nightmare. Someone got his daughter, some fiend. His daughter. She's gone missing for several months. Or else she's gone swanning off somewhere, no forwarding address for old Da here. She doesn't come home to wash her smalls in the family sink anymore.”

She got between them before Jenkins attacked him, and there was just a little tussle then. She walloped Mac on the side of the head with a box of Weetabix, to score a point more than to hurt him. Mac
retired to the front hall, snorting with laughter. He made a noisy show of taking a leak in the bathroom without closing the door. She stood and settled her hand on Jenkins as his shoulders heaved and he worked to regain some dignity. “Let it go, the pair of you,” she said in a low voice, as if he were four years old, “you're each as bad as the other.” She dragged out a handkerchief from her jacket pocket and handed it to him. “I don't believe a word of it, anyway; you two are having too much fun beating each other up for me to pay attention.”