The House That Jack Built (14 page)

    Morton listened keenly. The wind was very light, but the day was hot, so that Valhalla creaked and complained with the normal expansion of metal and wood. He couldn't get over the feeling that he wasn't supposed to be here at all, that he was intruding. When he spoke into his cassette-recorder, he spoke in a very quiet voice indeed, in case he was overheard (though by whom? or by what?).

    'Third storey, south corridor, headed east. Serious roof collapses for the first hundred feet; and water penetration, too, going right through the building, floor after floor.'

    He climbed with difficulty over the heaps of broken tiles and splintered rafters and squirrels' nest. 'Again… serious rodent infestation in the loft spaces… in fact the whole of this house is a goddamned menagerie. We're talking five-and-a-half thousand for extermination minimum.'

    He pushed against the door of the first bedroom that he came to. It was stiff, but two or three good shoves managed to get it open. It was carpeted in pale, faded blue, and there was a dark rust-coloured stain in the centre of the floor. Morton paced across the room to the window. He looked at the view of Valhalla's chimneys, and the trees beyond. Then he turned back to look at the floor stain. It looked to Morton like a devil, or a goat, or the shadow that his grandmother used to cast on the wall when she was telling him stories all those years ago, when he was a boy. She used to fold her headscarf into peaks, so that she looked as if she had horns. Grimm's fairy tales, she used to tell him, crowded to the rafters with child-eating ogres and hunchbacked hobgoblins.

    Something lurched. Just an old joist. Somewhere, a door closed. Even the softest of draughts never closed a door that quietly.

    Morton looked around, his breath wheezing asthmatically. Empty houses had never alarmed him before, but this one did. He was sure that he could hear people breathing, just behind his back. He was sure that he was not alone, and that somebody was standing very close to him, watching every move that he made.

    This room in particular felt stifling and claustrophobic, and he was beginning to realise that it stank, too, of kerosene and cheap women's perfume and cockroach powder and something worse, he didn't know what it was. He hadn't noticed it before, but maybe the wind had dropped. Yet how could it smell so strongly if nobody had occupied Valhalla for so many years? Somebody must have been squatting here recently, or the stench would have faded long ago. Maybe somebody was squatting here now.

    He turned back to the bedroom door. He had opened it flat against the wall, so that anybody could have hidden behind it. He hesitated, then slammed it shut, shouting out loud as he did so. But of course there was nobody there. Only a brownish cruciform mark on the wallpaper where an effigy of Christ had hung.

    'Goddamn it,' said Morton. He reopened the door and looked out into the corridor. All he could see was heaps of tiles, and a flapping black wing of abandoned tarpaper. Through the collapsed roof, the sun was burning off the morning mist, and everything was blurry and gilded. The landscape was so dazzling that, for a moment, he was temporarily blinded.

    'Okay, I know there's somebody here!' he shouted, very emphatically. 'There's somebody here! I know you're here! There's no use hiding!'

    He waited, sweating; and then he thought he heard somebody say something abusive, right in his ear, quietly. It sounded like '… cretin', with an unintelligible swearword. He turned, furious, but there was nobody there. It was only when he turned back the other way that he saw a man in a dark suit walking away from him, at the very far end of the corridor, a man who appeared to be brushing his sleeves and buttoning his gloves.

    'You!' he called out. 'You, sir! What the hell do you think you're doing here? This is private property!'

    The man stopped at the very end of the corridor, and peered back at Morton with obvious bewilderment. Then, still buttoning his right-hand glove, he turned the corner and disappeared.

    Morton hadn't taken any exercise in years. But he was determined to catch this trespasser. He shouted, 'Hoi!' and 'Hoi!' and 'You just wait up there, pal!' and he started to run along the corridor in lumbering pursuit.

    For a few seconds, he was running like an athlete, his head held high, his lungs expanded, his fists punching. He ran through all the golden triangles of sunlight that fell across the corridor.

    'You're trespassing!' he bellowed. And then his left foot went right through the floorboards, in a thick, woody explosion of dry-rot dust and stick-thin lathes and rendering.

    He thought it was impossible, to drop clear through a floor, and that was why he didn't shout out. But he burst out of the ceiling into the music-room below, lacerating his arms, and tearing his face and ripping his shirt into plastery rags, and then he dropped another twenty feet. He felt that he was flying, with nothing to grab on to, but then he hit the floor, with a thudding impact that broke his collar bone and knocked the wind out of him. Immediately, the music-room floor collapsed, too, in a powdery shower of timber-dust and plaster, and Morton dropped again, another twenty feet. He saw a window fall past him. He saw shelves and walls. Then he plunged concussed like a diver through the wet rot that had turned the library floor into sodden flakes of yielding wood, and into the cellar.

    The vertical, capped-off heating pipe was waiting for him. He dropped directly onto it, and it tore through his upper left thigh muscle and into his pelvis, penetrating his large intesunes, piercing his liver, and puncturing his right lung, missing his heart by less than a quarter of an inch.

    He roared in agony, and a fine spray of blood blasted out of his mouth. He was transfixed, helplessly kicking and waving his arms. His feet were three or four inches clear of the cellar floor, so that all he could do was to pedal, and the more he pedalled the deeper the heating pipe sank into his body.

    'Oh God help-' he tried to shout out. Then, 'Oh God help me!'

    The pain of being impaled by a cold metal pipe was more than he could bear. He could feel it running right up inside him, right through his bowels and into his stomach. He could feel it in his lung, which blathered and wheeled like a wet balloon. But when he struggled, the pipe inched up further, until it was touching the inside of his ribcage, the pain was even greater, and he forced himself to stay still.

    He felt agonised, half-concussed, but he couldn't believe that he was still alive. He didn't know whether he wanted to live or die. God knows what damage the pipe had done to his insides. Blood was trickling down it, and spreading across the tiled floor. If he couldn't get himself free, he would probably bleed to death in a matter of minutes, and then what he wanted would be academic.

    Where the hell was Brewster? If Brewster were here, he could help to lift him off. But then the pain was so cold and intense that he didn't know whether he wanted to be lifted off. He couldn't bear the thought of the pipe sliding out of him.

    
Oh Christ,
he thought,
what did I do to deserve this? Maybe this is my punishment for what happened to Audrey. Maybe she took her life because of me, because I ignored her, because I took her so much for granted, and this is what I have to suffer in return.

    He closed his eyes but all he could see was scarlet. He was trying to remain still, but his weight was gradually pushing him further and further down. He could feel the top of the pipe pressing against his upper ribs now, and that was a very special kind of pain that made him suck in his breath and start to whimper.

    It seemed as if hours went by. He faded in and out of consciousness, but the pain never went away. He dreamed that he was sitting at home, talking to Audrey, asking her what she was doing. Audrey had nearly completed a jigsaw which was spread out on a tea tray on her lap. Her face was very pale, the colour of uncooked pastry. The light which came through the sitting-room window was scarlet, and lit up her hair. The jigsaw was very strange. It showed people walking around a garden with their eyes closed. They looked as if they were asleep. Audrey said, 'Life is just like a book. Don't you understand?'

    'Which book?' he asked her (or thought he asked her).

    'Any book. Life is like any book. That's why I took all those pills.'

    'I still don't know what you mean.'

    'You will, Morton. You will.'

    He opened his eyes and he hoped he was dead, but he wasn't. He was still alive, still transfixed, still in appalling agony. He took a deep, gurgling breath, and then he screamed, and screamed again, and he could hear his scream echoing around the house. Where the hell was Brewster? Why was Brewster always late?

    He tried to calm himself down. He had only succeeded in hurting himself even more; and making himself feel more helpless and frustrated.

    He tried to think about anything else except pain. Like,
what were the odds against his falling through three floors, and finishing up pierced by this pipe? I mean, what were the odds? A million-to-one. A billion-to-one.
Yet here he was, so accurately impaled that he could only believe that God had done it on purpose.

    He wondered if he tilted himself sideways, the pipe would bend sideways, too. If it fell over horizontally, then he could crawl off it. But when he leaned to the left, only half an inch, the pipe touched his heart and he went into such an agonising spasm that he bit right through his lower lip and clenched his fists until his fingernails punctured the palms of his hands.

    It took him over a minute to recover. When he did so, he was still trembling and sweating, and now he was convinced that he was going to die. He whispered 'Our Father…', or tried to, but somehow he got it all mixed up with the 23rd Psalm. 'Give us this day our daily bread… for thy rod and staff, they comfort me…'

    He heard a scurrying noise. Then another.

    'Forgive us our trespasses… as we forgive them who trespass against us… and spreads a table in the sight of mine enemy…'

    It was hard for him to see. He was deeply shocked and half delirious, and apart from the pale reflected sunlight that penetrated the alcove from the hole in the ceiling through which he had fallen, the cellar was utterly dark.

    But he heard another scratching, scurrying noise, and then a rustling sound, as if somebody were dragging sacks across the floor; and he didn't need to glimpse much more than a wriggling rug of brownish-grey fur to know what was happening. The rats in the cellar had gathered around him. He could smell them. He could see their beady jet black eyes glittering in the shadows. They were lapping up the blood that had trickled down the pipe, and one or two of them were already venturing up to the pipe itself and following the blood to its source.

    Morton bellowed in panic and disgust. The rats flinched, as if he had hit them with a stick, and some of them scurried away. But they soon came back again, sniffing and chittering and crawling all over each other in their eagerness to lick up his blood.

    One of them managed to scramble up the heating pipe and bite into Morton's left foot. He was hurting so much already that he scarcely felt it; but even when he swung his foot backward and forward, the rat clung on, pirouetting heavily with every swing.

    Another rat jumped up and bit at his ankle, and then another dug its teeth into his heel. He kept on swinging his feet, and every swing was torture, but the rats refused to let go, and soon he was doing nothing more than heaving great festoons of rats from one side of the pipe to the other, like a man wading through thick grey seaweed.

    It hurt so much that he couldn't understand why he didn't die. Maybe he was dead, and this was Purgatory, where he would have to swing impaled on a pole, eaten alive by rats, until somebody prayed for his soul, and he was saved. He tried to think of somebody who might pray for his soul, but the only person he could imagine doing it was Audrey, and she was dead already.

    'Life is like a book,' she told him.

    'Yes, Audrey, but which book?'

    'Any book. Don't you understand?'

    Any book? What did she mean? Maybe she was trying to say that when you were born, it was like opening a book, and you lived your life from page to page, and when you died the book was snapped shut. But he still didn't get it.

    A huge rat jumped up and dug its teeth into his chest. Another scrambled onto his shoulder. An even heavier rat clawed its way up his back, its claws digging into his skin, and perched itself on top of his head, like a terrible parody of a trapper's hat.

    Morton twisted his head around and around but the rat dug its claws into his scalp and he couldn't dislodge it. Then another rat bit into his upper lip, and another bit into his cheek, and then he was wearing a living, swaying mask of greasy sewage-smeared fur.

    He tried to shout out, but a narrow-nosed rat bit into his tongue, and then thrust its head into his mouth. He tasted sick and sewage and blood.

    A book, she said, and at last he understood.

    

    

    Brewster Ridge slewed his TransAm to a halt outside Valhalla, grabbed his briefcase, and ran up the steps to the front door. Morton was going to kill him. He knew that Morton was going to kill him. He had promised himself that he would never give Morton the chance to criticise him for anything any more: not for lateness, nor over-optimistic surveys, nor wrongly identifying termites or parasites or wood-boring beetles. Morton had already complained about him to Leonard Braun, their senior executive surveyor, and Leonard had given him the same sort of look that he had given Ray Philips, Brewster's fellow junior, a week before Ray Philips had found himself out of residential surveying and into utensil control (in other words, clearing tables at St. Andrew's Cafe).