Chapter Twenty

Movement in a family’s history sometimes stops. When it does, inertia descends like a weight of stones. Evil is content to wait. Eventually one small stone will shift. The weight begins to slide. The force rides the momentum.

Alexander Lily, Jr, was John Tracker’s great grandfather on his mother’s father’s side, and he was a deacon. His wife, Faith Smith, was a religious fanatic, transplanted from the midwest to the west; and then returned east after her mother’s disappearance. Faith had more than “a touch of the paint brush.” She passed for white by claiming to be Spanish.

They were penurious people, clever and hard-working. They raised one son and so tired him with cant that he became a questioner all his life. They never missed a church service and contributed almost regularly one-tenth of their income to build steeples. They thanked heaven for everything, although the record suggests that except for money they had next to nothing. They were buried in waterproof coffins encased in waterproof vaults deep in the cold New England soil. It seems safe to say that except for their son Samuel, they neither added nor subtracted one jot from the life of the earth. This static condition in Tracker’s history waited to be faced. John Tracker had to face it, to act.

He had to get moving. Had to. He checked his watch. A few minutes before eight. He took a dozen steps, felt himself losing control, and stood fighting to regain it. This time he lost… “What’s in the well?” “Nothin’ in that one, boy. Don’t go anywhere near that other’n.” “What’s in the well?” “Water.” “What’s in the well?” “Fall in there and you’ll see. Look in there and it’ll grab you.” Slow falling, slow, like the descent of the newly drowned into fathoms of water; turning, legs locked, then bent with knees held into his face, arms at first flailing and then rigid and then limp. Hands clasped in claws, fists, loosed, clutching, hooked, and then immobile and stiff as rusted hinges.

“When you are raised with crazy people, then you’re crazy.” His father’s voice once more seemed present. His father’s voice brought him slowly to awareness. He had not expected this. He stood there, weaving, as the gaping well closed over, shimmered and disappeared. He had no time for this, he had very little time at all. He didn’t know whether this was a manifestation of the house, or of his own mind. Two lights, like blue sparks seen through fog, like eyes, dwelled in the far corner of the hallways beside the coffin. The door was still open at his back. Wind whirled snow into the hall.

It seemed he had been running for the hall and the doorway, because when Amy had left he remembered taking several steps back into the house.

He turned to the doorway, saw the trap door yawning open. This was his mind doing this.

The deal was still on.

He looked at his watch. In a little under eleven hours, he would leave this house. If he did not succeed in his purpose, he would leave as a creature of this house.

His rewards would be unlimited money, power, sex and youth. He would be a thing incarnate; also success incarnate, strength flowing from this house and independent of this house. It would no longer make any difference whether the house stood or not. What made the house special, demented, would be loose in the world. It would wear the form of John Tracker.

But that was if he did not succeed. He’d purchased a dozen precious hours. One was already gone. The force of this house was ironic, sporting, willing to grant time on the promise of Tracker’s capitulation if he did not succeed in discovering the key, the power that would set him free. Of course, to the force inhabiting this house he must have seemed like a pathetic creature, easily ruled, easily captured. He must seem less than Vera, less than Theophilus. So the proposition was really not so sporting.

“Evil is weak because it is evil.”

His father had written that the way to survive was to keep doing, to keep walking. So that was the general scheme Tracker had in mind. It was impossible to walk the entire house in twelve—no, now less than eleven—hours. But it was still possible to walk much of it. To take action? He was less sure about that.

He stood unsteadily before the open doorway and open trap door. In the corner the blue lights faded, and with the fading it seemed there was a movement, like a wisp of mist. He didn’t have to be frightened now, he told himself. He knew what he was up against. He didn’t care how it showed itself, even as Vera.

He worried about how he was going to stay awake through the night, but in the kitchens it at least ought to be possible to rest and plan.

Except for the sanctuary, which was not safe after all, he wondered what else his father had built. Thoughts of Justice accompanied his trudging advance to the kitchens. Maybe he could get wired on coffee. In the kitchens he leaned against a door frame while waiting for the coffee to perk. He drowsed, standing. When the coffee perked he inhaled its aroma, took it from the heat, and leaned back against the door frame, his mind rapidly filling with dreams…drifting, going away into sleep—and it was the dreamed-of voice of Justice Tracker urgently calling that awakened him.

He shook his head, opened his eyes and reached for the coffee pot. It was warm. He checked his watch. Ten hours left. He’d stood there drowsing for at least a half hour.

No time for regret. He reheated the coffee, then sat at the table determined to drink the whole pot. He wished Justice had made an index to those journals. They might lead him to more information, maybe to the answer, but there was no time to do that much reading. It was John Tracker who must pull this off.

Tracker stood, checked his flashlight, and began to walk.

Before the main staircase, which ran over the hidden staircase, there was a concealed entry that also led to the second floor. If you pushed the door the wrong way you got shot. Tracker nudged the door the wrong way. It did not move. He stood to one side and pushed harder. It did not move. He pushed as hard as he could and the door remained solid. This was a mechanical trap; it did not depend on current. So he was not going to have to avoid traps. Apparently he was needed alive.

Since the generators went off, nothing but the cellar seemed affected, and you didn’t need those generators to run the few small lights in the cellar.

He wished there were blueprints for the fourth floor. If he failed he would try to fling himself from one of the towers into the river. At least he would die outside this house. It was not much of an option, though. For one thing, it was not likely that it could be done. He would no doubt be stopped. Besides, he didn’t want to die. What was worse than death? He was afraid he knew.

He climbed to the third floor and decided it came down to: what did he want? He could have money, power, youth, sex. Before coming to this house he had money, limited power, limited sex, and the knowledge that he would get old. Not so bad, but were they enough?

Amy.

He shrugged, tried to make himself ignore his feelings for her. He’d taken losses before.

The third floor was where the terraces were built, and he walked now in the direction of the large one. As he did so he concentrated on the movement of his hands, looked at his watch, looked at his legs moving…he couldn’t afford to be drawn into the world of shifting currents beneath his feet. He looked again at his hands. Maybe hands were like the two sides of your mind.

The terrace was a broad expanse of flagstones, in the middle of which sat a fountain, decorated with concrete turtles. If you twisted one of them a chute opened that led to the cell where the skeleton lay. He didn’t want to see more death and wondered if the skeleton was the same as before, lying there as though dreaming.

A cold wind across the terrace chilled him, and he walked to the edge, leaned over. A three floor drop. He would bounce off of at least one railing. It might be worth the attempt, but something was sure to break, and you could not get over that grade with a broken limb.

He turned and looked up into the dark sky. The house rose above him. Even from the third floor there was another floor to view; ornamented, threatening. Above that floor rose the towers and turret. Wind whipped and swept the terrace. He looked into the dark at the winter landscape. It seemed that nothing was alive out there. The thought struck him as even more oppressive than the house at his back. With the towers behind him, he felt as though he stood on the bridge of a great ship. Out there in the darkness was the snow-covered landscape and the hump-backed mound of freeway that vanished like a thread into darkness.

The wind whistled, moaned.

The dead spruce towered from the ground. Nothing alive out there. The world seemed dead.

Not true, he instructed himself. It was snow-covered. Dormant. The promise of growth and life lay beneath the snow. It was a renewing promise that needed the protective mantle of snow.

Sex and money and power and youth…Could you also have love?

He tried to clear his head. There was one decent thing in this place, and Justice had built it. He remembered now. There was a greenhouse up here. He walked toward it, eager, confident that he could cross the entire third floor and not be captured in its illusion.

He walked faster. He felt almost spiritlike, moving through the airy-feeling third floor. The greenhouse was on a small terrace, not hard to reach.

It was a good place to build a greenhouse, catching as it would the afternoon and evening sun. He walked faster still, went onto the terrace and broke into a run. The greenhouse was not large, no more than twenty-by-forty, but it was a good one. He could remember shades that could be pulled against the hottest afternoons; you had to do that for trees in order to prevent scald.

The greenhouse was almost intact, without much broken glass. Tracker opened the door, found light switches, stepped inside.

Crumbling woody plants, leafless stands of skeletal tiny branches, soil dry except under the occasional panes of broken glass where it lay frozen, light puffs of snow scattered about. Planting flats were stacked to the right of the door. Overhead irrigation was rigged from fine spray nozzles. Tracker turned a faucet, found it frozen, and checked the spray heads. They were green with corrosion now, caked about the freckling of holes that directed the mist, but it was a good rig at one time, professional. At the far end of the greenhouse was a large door, which was a rig for trees as well as plant flats.

Tools were stacked to the left of the door—reaching tools, small tools, pruners, old cord and burlap for root balls. He looked at the center section. There was probably three-and-a-half feet of soil. You could go with pretty big trees. The dead ones still standing looked like small maple.

A hand pruner, a nice tool. Tracker picked one from a rack and walked down the line. He scraped bark. Dead. He snipped top branches, went low, scraped low branches. It was all dead, no green in any of the trees, the wood brittle and turning gray. He went to the plant beds on one side. The soil was dry and cold except where moisture came through broken glass. He stirred a little of the soil with the tips of the pruners, and went for a hand rake.

One thing you learned early in this game was the tenacity of life. Even in the middle of the most arid and terrible desert, seeds lay dormant and waiting. He’d read that wheat seeds had been uncovered in a two-thousand-year-old tomb, and some of them germinated. He didn’t know if that story was true, but he did know that seeds seven hundred years old had sprouted. Life was always just beneath the soil.

Tracker checked his watch, sure that time was faulting against him in the same way that it had faulted against Theophilus and Vera. He should be about other business, he should be walking, trying to understand.

He felt for the flashlight in his back pocket. One more minute or maybe two could make no difference. Rake the soil. Root with fingers at the base of plants. His hands felt like dull stumps in the freezing soil. But there was always beginning yellow or green somewhere—beneath frozen tundra, underneath salt water, flowers blooming on the edge of glaciers. Plants were the most tenacious life in the world. They had only one job, and that was to seed.

The soil was crusted. Where it was dry the loam beneath the soil was loose. A thousand, a million webs of roots from small plants. Dead. But somewhere, surely, he would find green. He raked out ten feet of bed along one side. He checked his watch. Almost half an hour had passed. A couple more pulls with the rake and he must quit. The light was different, or else the darkness was. Was time faulting?

The best seed, he knew, held weeds. You could never get rid of weed seed, as evidenced by the skeletal remains among the tiny jungle here. Grass, dill, as many uncultivated plants as desirable ones. He’d seen enough varieties: tangles of green and red and purple attacked with hoes, flame throwers, chemicals.

He tasted the soil. There was no oil or chemical. Besides, no matter what the manufacturers said, the sprays never got full kill. A lot of times they did no better than ten percent.

The grass was dead, but there was a clump he was saving back. It was gray and dead on top. Grass could survive anywhere, though, in the cracks and crevices of twenty-story buildings, in the back of pickup trucks, even once in the trunk of his car when a coiled hose had drained on seed. He raked now all around the clump, dug with clumsy fingers, reached under the soil and felt crumbling roots, then pulled it free. It came with a puff of dust. No white, no green, no yellow. The roots fell to powder as he looked past lights and through broken glass to the sky that was like ancient night. Break loose frozen soil, pound it apart, crumble it. You could see germination that water started even if it later froze. He spit on it, rolled cold and muddy particles between cold fingers.

He frantically raked out the rest of the plant bed. He dropped the rake, turned, and thought of one last hope.

Afternoon sun would have been more on the western bed. As he raked his breath came in an almost animal-like pant. He returned to raked-over areas, crumbled soil, dug deeper, and his breath froze in bursts against the glass panes. The soil humped and hollowed and furrowed. It remained gray, dead. He finished with the bed, wheeled and walked along all the beds, and found no life. Pressure crescendoed, flowed all over him, punished him.

He was tired. Tired of being strong, of enduring. He wanted to give up. He sat on the edge of the plant bed, shoulders hunched and finally gave way to tears of grief and remorse. Death was failure, and failure was horror. There would be no job for him in Council Bluffs. Some other man would do that job, but it would not be the same. Who else would try the alder? Who would argue with that architect? Or argue for the right trees. He could see them already, the sweep of the dark leaves, the liquid motion and feel of alder; the straight insistence of alder that made order and sense. He was not going to get to do that job.

He checked his watch and was furious. He was not done yet. Let time whirl, let the sky color or contort. Let the wind suck dust from the terrace to cloud an ancient cathedral sky.

The dust around the roots had puffed. The roots themselves went up in tiny puffs. Dust. Death. Well, he was not dead, not yet, and he resolved that he would die before he would give up.

Time to get inside. He could not feel his fingers. He shuddered and crossed the terrace as quickly as he could. Inside it was not much warmer, but at least there was no wind.

He walked, and as he walked he searched for signs of his father.

But keep walking. If the evil of this house wanted John Tracker alive then it meant that evil could not exist without him.

In this house evil could be, but was not yet, John Tracker himself.