“IT WILL JUST HAVE to hold until morning. I can get into town then and buy a new lock … maybe two or three locks, the way things look here. India! Can you beat it? That’s the puzzle!”
Mr. Small was speaking to himself. He wasn’t aware that Mrs. Small and Thomas listened to him, so intent was he on his work at the kitchen door. He had been working on the door for the past ten minutes. He had looked out once, right after Mr. Pluto had disappeared into darkness, and then had spent a few minutes trying to slam the door shut. But without the spring lock, the door wouldn’t stay closed. He had taken two dinner knives and slid them in the groove of the doorframe. One knife he placed by the lock and the other just below the doorknob. He then slid the latch in place.
“No. No,” Mr. Small muttered to himself. “Something else. Something different. Was it about the head? No, that was all right … perhaps the neck. The shoulders? If I could have just realized the difference when I shook his hand! If I could put my finger on it … that’s what it was. The gloves! He’s trying to conceal his hands. He might have burned himself badly. I’ve told him the kind of work he does is too hard for a man his age. And being the superstitious man he is, he will be afraid to see a doctor. He will suffer with pain as best he knows how, because a doctor has supernatural power the same as a ghost!”
Thomas and Mrs. Small listened. They understood that something had to be haunting Mr. Pluto. Whatever it was, part of it had taken hold of Mr. Small. Although he was finished with the door, he still stood before it, talking to it as if it were alive.
“Good Lord!” he was saying, “the man is history! He doesn’t have to leave this land, that other side of the hill. And yet he is running just as hard as the slaves had to run, as if he were one! He stays here, colliding with the past on the one hand and the present on the other. But does he mean to run to the one and away from the other? Or run to both and pull them together? Here he stays … now why! Why does he stay?”
Finally Mr. Small sat down glumly at the kitchen table, with one hand cupped over his mouth. Thomas, after taking in the large, lopsided kitchen, sat down beside him.
Mrs. Small busied herself by cleaning off the table and sweeping up all the broken dishes. She didn’t utter a word to Thomas or his father. When she had finished, she deposited all the trash in an empty carton as quietly as she could.
“I think I could do with more coffee,” Mr. Small said finally. His voice no longer held that feverish, crazy sound, Thomas noticed.
If he goes around talking to some more doors, Thomas thought, I’m just going to have Mama take him to a hospital.
“It’s still good and hot,” Mrs. Small said. “Thomas, will you have your coffee black, too?”
Thomas was so surprised he couldn’t think of anything to say. His mother never allowed him black coffee. What small amount of coffee she would permit him to have came only at Christmas or Thanksgiving, and then it was mostly cream and sugar with a dash of cinnamon.
“Oh, I know,” Mrs. Small said to him, “but you know you’d dearly love to have it strong and black, the way your papa does. And since you’re sitting here … well, it’s your birthday.”
She poured two full cups of black coffee, placing one cup in front of Thomas and one in front of Mr. Small. She then poured a half cup for herself and sat down between them.
The smell of coffee filled the room. It flooded Thomas’ mind with kitchen and coffee memories of long ago.
Mr. Small raised his cup. “Happy birthday, Thomas,” he said quietly.
“Yes,” Mrs. Small said, “happy birthday!”
So it was that Thomas had his first full cup of bittersweet, black, black coffee. He felt so good sitting there in the new kitchen, in the new house, with his mother and father. He felt as though he were at the center of whatever would happen next. Talk would happen next. He could tell that by his mother’s excited face and his father’s solemn one. They would talk things out the way they always had. Late at night, he’d often heard them in the kitchen talking things out, with that pure, hot smell of coffee filtering up to his room.
“Mama,” Thomas said after awhile. He had taken a few sips of coffee. “… do you think now you are here and have seen everything that you’ll ever want to go back home?”
Mrs. Small sat very still. Thomas thought she looked tired. He knew he was tired—all of them were. But he had to know right now how she felt about staying in the new house. And he knew none of them wanted to think about Mr. Pluto just yet.
“No, Thomas,” said Mrs. Small, “I don’t think so. Your father and I have moved around quite a bit, it’s true. We travelled this whole country in a camper we made ourselves.”
“Looking … looking,” Mr. Small said quietly.
“We finally settled in North Carolina,” said Mrs. Small, “and we stayed there a good long while. But it was never right for us. No. No, never go back.”
“And you won’t be afraid of Mr. Pluto?” Thomas couldn’t help asking.
“Thomas!” Mr. Small spoke sharply. “Nobody talking about ghosts and chanting verse is going to scare us out of this house. Nobody is going to take it away from us.”
“Do you think he will try?” Thomas said.
His father was silent. He rubbed his jaw thoughtfully, but said nothing.
“Well,” said Mrs. Small, as though to answer Thomas and clear their thinking at the same time. She looked searchingly at Mr. Small.
“Mr. Pluto is the strangest man, isn’t he? I mean, you never ever told me he was such a huge man and such an odd-acting man.”
“Well, he didn’t seem …” began Mr. Small, “I mean to say, he wasn’t at all …”
For the second time this night, Thomas watched his father become rigid, his face controlled by an instant spasm. Mr. Small rose swiftly from the table.
“We won’t talk anymore about Pluto tonight,” he said.
“But, Papa,” Thomas protested, “we just got going on him.”
“Tomorrow is Sunday, Thomas,” Mr. Small said sternly.
Mrs. Small sucked in her breath. “Sunday,” she said. “My goodness, how in the world did I forget! I don’t have our clothes unpacked!” She looked worried. “I can’t remember where I put my hatboxes!”
“Oh, for heaven’s sakes,” said Mr. Small. “There will be plenty of time for your hat-box search in the morning if we all get to bed now. Thomas, you go ahead. Your room is at the end of the hall, on the right side as you go down the hall. Get your pajamas out of the suitcase, and your towel, too. Don’t forget your toothbrush.”
“It’s going to be Sunday all right,” Thomas said. “We’ll probably meet just everybody!”
“I don’t doubt that,” said Mr. Small.
“I did want to see the house tonight though,” Thomas said. He looked around at the lopsided kitchen. “I can tell straight off this room is smaller than it should be.”
“That’s because you’ve had time to see the house from the outside,” Mr. Small said.
“Let me see if I can figure it out,” said Thomas.
“I want you to go to bed. Here,” his father said, “I’ll show you myself to save time.”
On either side of the kitchen door there were sliding panels, which vanished into the wall at Mr. Small’s touch. Within were arched cubicles, large enough for a man stooping to hide.
“Why, I wouldn’t have imagined!” said Mrs. Small.
“That’s great!” Thomas said. “Boy, I wouldn’t have thought they were there either.”
“A very temporary measure,” Mr. Small said. “Slaves might be hidden in these walls for a short time, until the trapdoor could be raised so they could escape through the tunnel.”
“Old Dies Drear thought of everything,” said Thomas, clearly impressed.
“Now go upstairs,” Mr. Small said. “The twins have the room across from yours, so be quiet. We’ll be up shortly.”
“Papa, you won’t be able to get locks tomorrow,” Thomas said, “because it’s going to be Sunday.”
“Maybe I can find out where a locksmith lives,” Mr. Small answered. “I did forget for a minute that it would be Sunday. You go on up. Good night.”
Thomas went up to his room, treading softly down the carpeted hallway. The hall was not well lighted, and the ceiling was very high. There were closed, varnished doors on either side. Tall and dark, they didn’t seem at all friendly.
Why do I have to be so far away from the stairs? Thomas wondered. I’ll never be able to hear a sound back here!
He stopped long enough to find out if he could hear his mother and father talking. The silence made him feel he was smothering.
“That proves it,” he said. “You wouldn’t be able to hear anything coming or going. You’d just be a sitting duck!”
He thought of looking in all the rooms before going into his own bedroom. And he did march up to one door about halfway down the hall. For some reason, he couldn’t bring himself to turn the knob.
“Better wait until tomorrow,” he told himself and backed away from the door.
At his own door, at the end of the hall, he held on tightly to the doorknob but didn’t turn it. It was a brass knob. It felt cold. He looked across the hall, seeing the twins’ room. Their door was open, and a yellow nightlight shone through the darkness.
Gathering his courage, Thomas opened the door to his room and was at once blinded by bright light. There was a clear, glass globe suspended by a chain from the ceiling. The room was larger than he could have hoped, with a narrow fireplace to his left at the far end. There were two long windows across from him; his bed was placed between them, facing the door. There were smaller garret windows on each side of the fireplace. Directly in front of the fireplace was a large, old-fashioned captain’s chair. It was a ghostly chair, with its back to the room; it faced the bare, charred insides of the cold hearth. Thomas had the awful notion that someone he couldn’t see was sitting in it.
“Hello,” he said. “Who do you think you are?”
He hoped to startle anyone who might be there into some sudden movement. He still held onto the doorknob, half in and half out of the room. He could yell and run fast down the hall if he had to.
There was no movement from the chair. There was no sound of any kind in the room except his own breathing. He came cautiously inside, leaving the door slightly ajar. Going up to the chair at an angle, he saw that it was empty. At the same moment, he noticed that he was cold and clammy.
“Whose old chair is it anyway?” he said out loud.
The chair wasn’t one that had come from their home in North Carolina. Its cumbersome, hard seat and back were upholstered with faded leather. The flat, wood armrests were not even carved, and the base of it, made from the same hardwood, sat squarely on the floor.
“I’ve got to move it,” Thomas told himself. “I’ll never get to sleep if I don’t turn it around.”
As he struggled to move the heavy chair, he thought of fifty ways to get even with old Pluto for putting the chair with its back to the room.
He did it just to scare me. He’s just a mean old man! Thomas thought.
But he couldn’t move the chair no matter how hard he tried. He couldn’t slide it on the gray, musty carpet and he could not tilt it and swivel it the way his mother did when she had to move furniture.
Mr. Pluto had arranged the room with the same plan in mind as he must have had when he’d arranged the front parlor. Thomas began to form a plan of his own as he went about getting ready for bed. He wasn’t going to sleep in the room, that was for certain.
Not until I change everything. Not until I get that chair into some corner.
Thomas’ old bookcase stood next to his bed, blocking the view from the lower half of the windows. On the other side of his bed, a crate of his books had been placed with great care. On top of that, his father had flung the smaller carton full of his carvings. There was a note attached to it as a reminder for him to put the contents away.
He took a few of his best carvings and grouped them at one end of the fireplace. That made things a little better, he thought. The view from the bed to the mantel of the fireplace was less balanced. Then Thomas opened his suitcase at the foot of the bed and got into his pajamas. He threw his clothes over the back of the chair. That made the room look almost messy. He smiled, relaxing a little. After that he lay down on his bed and stared up into the light
The ceiling of the room was painted the dullest gray Thomas had ever seen. The color of it was worse than the carpet, which was dimmer still. The walls were papered in a pale blue flower pattern with loops of brownish leaves. Automatically, Thomas let his mind redo the walls and ceiling in bright earth colors.
Windowframes and baseboards were trimmed a dark mahogany. The floor where the carpet ended was the same mahogany.
I’ll let the floor stay dark, Thomas thought. But all the trim he allowed his mind to paint pure white.
There were two more mahogany doors in the wall across from him. Thomas leaped up from the bed and snatched one of them open.
“Only an old, empty closet,” he said. “I knew it.”
It was not a large closet; it had a few hangers spaced about two inches apart along one wood pole. Thomas hung his Sunday suit in the closet and left the closet door open.
Treading barefoot, he went to the next door and flung it open. There was a tiny room with a sink and a three-paneled mirror above it. Thomas was pleased, and he remembered to brush his teeth. He even washed his face, eyeing himself in the three mirrors. After that he gave one last look around the room, especially at the chair, and turned out the light.
Lying with his arms over his eyes, Thomas tried not to think about anything. He didn’t want to scare himself about what he planned to do. Soon he heard a door open and close down the hall; then the voices of his mother and father. He’d wait about an hour and then he would take the sheets from the bed and carry them downstairs to the front parlor. He was going to sleep all night on the couch, where he could see anything coming up on the front porch and where he might hear something coming through the kitchen.
Thomas was tired, but he did stay awake. When he thought an hour had passed, he did as he had planned. He made a ball of his bedding and stealthily headed down the hall. Thank goodness there was a runner on the hall and stairs. His mother had helpfully left the dim hall light on.
Once downstairs, Thomas felt a lot better. He looked at himself in the ornate mirror just beyond the oak door, right next to the parlor. He couldn’t see himself well, but he was sure he must look brave. He went right into the parlor.
Without any light save what night glow came through the windows, he made his bed on the sofa. He felt almost calm as he settled down. Quickly he lapsed into semisleep, before going off altogether. Once he thought he heard water running somewhere, but that was an ordinary sound and he didn’t bother to wake himself. Vaguely, he heard the slightest movement, not far away. But he was too tired, too deeply gone. He had not even bothered to close the parlor door.
Thomas was sound asleep when suddenly the upstairs hall light went off. Awhile after that, there was again the sound of running water. Then the hall mirror near the oak door swung silently open. And through it all Thomas slept.
Soundlessly the mirror closed. Whatever stood there in front of it gave back no reflection in the totally dark house. The thing was not the same as night. It was darkness detached from the black of the entranceway. It was solid, but it could move, and it did not hesitate. It went directly to the stairs and up them, a mass of shadow-black that knew its way. At the top of the stairs, it paused as though listening. All remained silent. The thing, as it stopped before each closed door, was once more a part of the black house.
It pressed itself against each doorjamb, on the right side, but did not try to enter any room. Near the twins’ room, where the yellow light still glowed, it became more visible. Now it was massive, bold. Not vapor, not blackness, it was not ghostly at all. It was a thing become manlike.
It moved across to the twins’ room, skirting the light, where it placed something dimly metallic in the doorframe. It crossed back to Thomas’ room, doing the same. It did not move; it listened a long while. Then it crossed over to Mr. and Mrs. Small’s room, where it again placed something in the doorframe. After that it went down the hall and down the stairs.
Whatever it was did not bother looking at Thomas asleep in the parlor. Perhaps it didn’t know he was there. It vanished behind the mirror, the way it had come. All was still once more. The night passed, as dawn came creeping into the house through the parlor windows.