“We can choose to stop exploring the minute we want,” said Winnie, “the minute it’s too much for us. Poor Wendy can’t—” She didn’t go on. She just began to extract the nails from the vertical planking. This time the nails did not sink back into the wall.
Wendy and John in a room, high up over a dark city.
“What if it is the ghost of Jack the Ripper in that chimney stack?”
“What if it is?”
“What if someone lets it out without knowing it?”
“The curse of the mummy? The revenge threat on the tombstone of William Shakespeare?”
“What if it needs to take some time to gather its--memory--its intentionality--to remember what it had been before it died? The way a child takes so long, coming up from a nap, to wake up? Come back to itself? What if the wall opens and nothing much emerges, but an invisible something, hovering in midair: taking its time to grow and amass invisible bulk to it, remember its appetites? Like a bundle of cancer cells, taking time to metastasize into a parasitic colony?”
“You mean,” said John, “what if it has remembered its calling, and it has fastened on you as a possible victim?”
“I don’t mean that, exactly,” she said. “Everything isn’t about me.”
They looked down on the city at night. It might have been a huddle of medieval houses and pubs and sheds, given how the silted shadows obliterated any telltale indication of the modern age. They might have been in Hamelin, with the circuit of rats making a hangman’s rope around the perimeters of the town.
“That’s the nails, then,” said Allegra. “Not hard to grip, for all that; I guess your worker friends managed that much for us.” The extracted nails, some of them tooled four-sided, lay in a pile like ancient and capable thorns.
“To the boards, then,” said Winnie. She took a hammer and used it to drive the screwdriver between the uprights. The paint was old and hard, and enough layers thick that the boards resisted separation, but as soon as Winnie had managed a small purchase Allegra joined with a chisel. The top of the first board came away from its backing with a sound like dry suction. A stir of dusty plaster breathed into the hollow made by the board pulling away from the wall.
“Not a sound. Nobody home,” said Allegra.
“Not yet,” said Winnie.
“Well, let’s demolish the home before it gets back, and then maybe it’ll go someplace else.”
“There’s not always someplace else to go,” said Winnie.
“There’s always someplace else to go,” said Wendy.
Then the first board was off, set down delicately on the floor. The wall behind it, bricks laid slapdashedly, cemented with a coarse mortar.
“Surely this can’t be a chimney stack?” said Allegra.
“Why can’t it be?”
“Look at the joining compound. Hardly smoothed over, and full of gaps. A chimney fire should have burned this house down long ago. Furthermore, no evidence of smoke on the back of this board.”
“So you be the detective for a change. Or the novelist. What do you think it means?”
“I don’t know, but there’s no chimney here.”
“Of course there is, be reasonable,” said Winnie. “There are fireplaces on each of the floors below, and there’s a chimney stack up top. Jenkins and Mac told me. How was the house heated and its smoke vented for two hundred years without a functioning respiratory system?”
“Well, I don’t know. Let’s keep going. Maybe we’ll find something else.”
The second board was easier than the first, and the third easier still. Some boards had to be broken in half, and the upper and lower parts extracted with force, dislodging ceiling plaster, which was making ghosts of Allegra and Winnie, and dusting their eyes.
“None of these boards look like one another,” said Winnie, looking more closely. “Different heights, widths, and thicknesses too—you didn’t notice that from the pantry side; the wall seemed smooth.”
“Meaning there were gaps, and air passages.”
“Chimney flutes. The origin of the noise.”
“Which is even more gone than it seemed before.”
“All we need is the lights back on, and someone to jump through the door and say, ‘Surprise, it’s your birthday,’ and balloons and cake and confetti.”
“Right. But what about the bricking of this chimney stack?”
The exposed wall was a crazy quilt of handiwork. The bricks were of uneven shapes, some laid in vertical patches suggestive of a lazy herringbone. “The one thing that could be supposed,” said Allegra, running a hand over the surface ruminatively, “is that this wall was put up hastily.”
Winnie saw she was right. The worker or workers hadn’t stopped to trim excess filler with a trowel or make sure the line was true. Maybe the boards had been slapped up hastily, too, before the mortar was dry.
Winnie stooped down and looked at the boards again. “If there was some sort of pattern appearing on the surface of the planks, maybe it was just moisture sponging out through nail holes punched in two hundred years ago. Just a freak natural phenomenon. Or who knows, maybe the workers were superstitious, and hammered in a design of nails to represent a cross.”
“Unlikely, though I suppose possible. But that is no reason for the nails to retract themselves showily into the wall when your men Jenkins and Mac were around to witness it.”
“I witnessed it too, Allegra, and my vision is twenty-twenty. Furthermore—” She didn’t continue her sentence, which had threatened to be “there’s still no explanation why the same pattern would show up on my computer screen just before the power went out.” But one thing at a time.
“I feel fairly confident that there’s no ghost of John Comestor back here,” said Allegra. “Not even any interestingly dirty laundry.”
“No,” Winnie agreed, “slapdash as it is, this wall has been up for a while.”
The rain. The wind around the house. Noise outside, interior stillness. Silence settling upon them, as if snow, doing the thing that snow does: erasing the margins, blunting the particularities, distorting the differences between near and far.
She had to look to see for sure; no, it wasn’t snow. Just the silence that snow often implies.
If Jack the Ripper were abroad again, pale as a sheet of cellophane, would a sudden squall of snow fill in his outline, make him look like the ghosts in Saturday morning cartoons? White on white, the ghost in the snow, more visible yet still invisible.
“Damn John for his little renovations!” said Allegra suddenly, in the silence, as the darkness did nothing but deepen, by degrees almost as distinct one from its neighbor as seconds marked by a loud clock.
She looked at the bricks, and then put a hand against them. The bricks had no way of speaking to her, not like the boards oozing their blisters. Now that the boards were removed, she imagined that they had bled, that the nail holes had been small valves pumping blood. The liquor seeping in obscene drips along the warped surfaces of some long-dead tree. But there had been no blood, only paint blisters.
“If it is Jack the Ripper,” she said, “maybe after all this time, he doesn’t want to come out. He doesn’t want to be exhumed. He doesn’t want to be called back to the only service he knew, that of ripping the throats of prostitutes, that of murdering fertile women.”
He tore out the voices of his victims when he slit their throats; that much was documented fact. The harsher truth was that he also tore the voices out of their wombs: the life stories that their unborn children would never tell. The story of the future that only children can tell back to their parents.
He wanted no future for those women. Why would he want a future for himself, now? Killed himself, maybe by suicide, his bones plastered into a fake chimney stack--
“The chimney inside the chimney,” said Winnie, getting it. “That’s a fake chimney stack.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s no need for the bricks to be laid true, or for the mor
tar to be smooth. This is only a second skin of brick around the genuine chimney stack. That’s why there’s no smoke on the inside of the boards, that’s why the house never burnt down due to bad flues. This wall was put up hastily, to box up whatever is in there.”
“You may be right.” Allegra sounded surprised. She didn’t get up to look closer. “But we still don’t know what’s inside.”
Wendy would not release him upon the world; that was, perhaps, his only refuge. Perhaps he’d killed himself to keep from killing more women. Why undo his death?
But why wasn’t he dead in there, then?
“I don’t get it about ghosts,” said Winnie. “We all die unsatisfied. We all leave unfinished business. Only the Virgin Mother, assumed into heaven, managed to book the flight she wanted. Everyone else goes on crisis standby. What makes some figures capable of becoming phantoms, and others not?”
“Maybe it has to do with how much we want to leave unfinished business,” said Allegra. “Some days, if I’m annoyed enough, I’d like nothing better than to be struck down by a number forty-six bus on Rosslyn Hill and leave my heirs and assigns a mare’s nest of unfinished business, just to punish them for being a trial to me while I was alive. Don’t you want to open that wall, after all this?”
“I won’t do it,” said Wendy. “I won’t.”
John said, “You’ve come this far, and you won’t?”
“No.” She wouldn’t tell him her thesis about Jack the Ripper and his preference to stay in his own cask of amontillado. She didn’t care to sound as if she were in any way sympathetic to a mass murderer. She revived in herself an air of business snap. “It’s better to leave the possibilities as possibilities, rather than dry them up in the hot air of scrutiny. Besides, John”--looking at her watch--“haven’t we a plane to catch?”
“We’ve hours yet.”
“I’m done with London. Let’s go early and get a meal at Heathrow. It’ll be better than whatever pig’s hoofs they serve on Air Tarom.”
“Now you’ve got me pestered with curiosity. Let’s just dislodge a few bricks and see.”
“I won’t do it,” she said again, being in charge.
“I won’t,” said Winnie. Allegra’s expression was hidden in the gloom, but Winnie could almost hear the lifting of her eyebrows. “I wouldn’t open that wall of brick for all the tea in China.”
Allegra sighed and turned her head. The thunder fell in flat-footed paces on the Heath a half mile off. Lightning in London was not all that common, in Winnie’s experience, and the flashes glazed the room with sudden blue. Slowly the thunder, rolling a few feet this way and that, shifted its timbre, and delivered itself of a second, hollower sound, which proved to be feet on the stairs.
“Oh, God,” said Allegra.
“It’s the cavalry arriving,” whispered Winnie. “It’s John coming home at last.”
“It’s not John. It’s Mac come back.”
So it was, for he didn’t bother to work the key in the lock. By the sound of it, he was setting to the door with another hammer, withdrawing the nails he had slammed in earlier. He was drunk and singing some rebel’s song.
“Remove those nails and then go away.” Winnie got to her feet, thumping out to the door of the apartment, securing the chain. “Open the door for us and then back off. I’m warning you.”
Mac was musical with drink. His songs were hymns of revenge, evoking the bloody king of heaven and the bloody kings of Boyne and the bloody bull of Maeve and the bloody guns of Provos.
“We’ve opened the cage, Mac,” shouted Winnie over his racket. “We’ve got it open, we’ve let it out. You come in here and it’ll get you.”
“I’ve fecking Christ on my shoulder and a fecking pecker in my Y-fronts, don’t mess with me, you bloody cow.”
“Now here is someone I seriously intend to haunt,” said Allegra coldly, from behind Winnie, “if he should manage to get in here and lay a hand on us.”
“We’ll kill him first,” said Winnie. “We will.”
“With what? A first edition of Trevelyan? A bootlegged tape of Callas in rehearsal, Milan, summer 1953? Maybe we could break a Waterford whiskey tumbler into pieces and slice his face off with the shards.”
“You’re good, you should go on Whose Line Is It Anyway?” said Winnie. The wood of the door began to split.
“Though I’m generally not a churchgoer,” said Allegra, “Jesus H-for-Himself Christ.”
They were backing up into the shadows of the kitchen.
“There’s always the crowbar,” said Allegra.
Winnie grabbed it. A flush of something, almost glee. “Let the monsters at each other, and we’ll wait on the sidelines.” Hardly believing her own behavior, she notched one edge of the crowbar into a hole in the crumbling mortar and gave a good yank.
“Help me,” she said, and Allegra grabbed hold too.
Three bricks came out as easily as books sliding off a shelf.
Mac was a buffalo, shoulder ramming against the door.
“More,” said Winnie, and the purchase was easier this time. They had to leap back to keep their feet from being rained upon by falling bricks. A candle knocked over and went out.
“We could always brain Mac and tie him up and deface him with hot wax,” said Allegra.
“This is not the time for sex fantasies,” said Winnie. “Heave. Ho.”
A third of the wall was down by the time the chain on the door gave way, and Mac lurched into the hall. He was drawn toward the light of the kitchen, hulking in the doorway, groggy with ale, swollen with fear and bravado.
“Got it,” said Winnie, and reached her hands into the revealed recess.
“Bloody what,” said Mac, belching.
“I could run for help,” suggested Allegra, “but I wouldn’t leave you.”
“It’s an old horse blanket, nothing more,” said Winnie.
As she pulled it out, the lights came back on. Mac blinked and Allegra hit him over the head with a piece of glazed pottery from Tuscany. He didn’t fall to the ground, just said, “Ow, stop that,” and blinked again. “What old scrap of nappy is that?”
In the electric light, the thing was a sad bit of potato sacking, a shapeless turn of cloth, almost indistinguishably black-gray-brown, with some uneven seams sewn in with coarse stitches.
“That’s a hundred years old if it’s a day,” said Allegra, “but so what?”
“Whatever it is,” said Winnie, with relief, “it isn’t John.”
“Saints be praised,” said Mac. “Jenkins lives.”
“You went to see him?” said Winnie.
“No, I just guess he lives. He was afraid it was John too.”
“Whatever was here,” said Winnie, “is gone. This is just some old trashy cloth.” She dropped it on the floor. It was not running with lice, nor especially greasy or smoky. Just dusty, dry, and old; a worker’s smock, maybe, hung on a nook in there and bricked up. Maybe by accident. Maybe it wasn’t what had been intended for that cavity. Maybe the body put in there—for the space was deep enough for a human corpse—had been taken out earlier.
But the room was void of any spirit but those limited shades of Mac, Winnie, and Allegra. That meant, once again, that John Comestor was still missing, someplace else.
“We’ll owe you fine ladies something as day laborers, for helping the job progress,” said Mac.
He pointed at the rubbled wall. Then he fell over and passed out. “Shit, he’s punctured the canvas, John’ll kill me,” said Winnie, tugging the painting out from under Mac’s chin before he vomited on it. There was no rip in the canvas, though. Old Scrooge/Rudge staggered away from his nightmare without regard to the indignity of being collapsed upon.
The genie uncorked was no genie, just an attractive illusion. The cryptic hammering was a loose board in a fake flue, the slashed cross on the computer courtesy of an emotional persistence of vision. The retracting nails no doubt just some other accident, as yet undiagnosed. The world shrugged
itself smaller again, dying a little further.
How could you know anything for sure? The madmen and mystics of North London, hunting for significance, studied the pattern of browned oak leaves adhering to the wet pavements on Church Row. Unmask the world, rid it of theories and movements and dogmas, and what’s left is something near to instinct, imagination’s old curmudgeonly grandsire.
Probable-Possible, my black hen,
She lays eggs in the Relative When.
She doesn’t lay eggs in the Positive Now
Because she’s unable to Postulate How.
What stood between Winnie and the world was someone much like herself, though indistinct, and likely to remain so if Winnie couldn’t see her better. But Wendy Pritzke, like most apparitions, dissolved into vagueness when more closely examined. So if, in middle age, Winnie had thought she might be due some more certain notion of how the world was arranged, she was disappointed. When she learned to take her own pulse she found she was registering Wendy Pritzke’s instead.
Should Wendy jettison old-hat Jack the Ripper? Was the loss of a genuine ghost in Rudge House some sort of motion to dismiss the idea of an exhumed spirit of a fiend?
But the world couldn’t map anything but itself, and sometimes not even that.
No one answered the phone at John’s office. It was the weekend.
As quickly as they had united forces over a common perceived threat, Winnie and Allegra recoiled from each other, back to their natural state of antipathy and theatrical caution. Neither of them were inclined to press charges against Mac, since that might embroil Colum Jenkins in depositions, and who knew if he was either willing or up to such a thing: Winnie’s phone inquiries to the Royal Free Hospital about the status of Jenkins’s health had resulted in remarks neither clear nor useful. Though perhaps this was the institutional tone taken by anyone laboring under the auspices of the NHS. Winnie had no way of knowing.