“So what were the hauntings about, then?”
All this scrutiny of a hoary old family legend, and the night darkening above London. Above London’s cystic blur of electric lights, its frizz of cosmopolitan energy leaching ever deeper into the stratosphere, but the night darkened nonetheless, a gathering heaviness, year by year. “Why are you so intent to know?”
“Is my interest unseemly? Sorry. This is a busman’s holiday for me. I derive some of my notions by examining the distance between the supernatural event and the telling of it. In the Middle Ages, we see few firsthand accounts about the experience of being haunted. Far more often, a prelate transcribes a story of haunting as told to him. This lends a kind of journalistic objectivity to the narrative, broadens its credibility—after all, if it weren’t true, the good cleric wouldn’t have taken his holy time to record it for posterity. I find it charming, really, that you have no scrap of evidence of this story from Ozias Rudge’s own hand. It quite follows the norm. And supports my humble thesis.”
“Glad to oblige. I guess. Anyway, Ozias Rudge was apparently vague about it. One of the other relatives, later a convert to the Clapham Sect, remembered it like this: Ozias Rudge—as verbatim as I can manage—Ozias Rudge was visited by a wraith whose language he could not understand, and for fear of his sanity he closed his ears against all entreaty and determined to live a blameless life for others, in the hope of certain pardon for his sins when it was his turn to cross. You see, there’s nothing said about who the wraith was or what it wanted. If anything.”
“The dead ask a lot of favors.”
“The exceptional dead. As you point out.”
“As I point out. But most of the dead are mute. And most of the living know how to grieve without inventing phantasms or going psychotic.”
“I have no evidence that O. R. went psychotic. I only know this: after the supposed visitations by a ghost, he never went abroad again. He found someone else to marry, someone younger and more fertile than the old widow, and at the age of fifty he began to beget Edward and Harriet and Marianne and Jane.”
“I’d love to see Edward’s letter sometime. Though of course in the written word the reality of the situation has no choice but to calcify and become less thrilling.”
“How well I know that.”
“Have you opened the letter from your cousin John? To see what excuse he gave for standing you up?”
She had been led there without seeing it coming. She flinched. “That’s none of your business at all.”
“Oh, please, how you rush to take offense!” He threw up his hands good-naturedly. “I only point it out so that . . .”
“So that what?”
“Oh, well,” he said, “never mind, then. We’re having a nice night.”
She decided to let it go. He was right. It was a nice night.
Champagne was replaced by wine, and wine by snifters of cognac, and by the time they yielded their table, there were no other diners hulking about the cold doorway. As Winnie and Irv steered their way lopsidedly up Hampstead High Street, Winnie wondered where, in ten minutes, she wanted to find herself. Irv was a solid mailbox of a man, a throwback. He wore a tie, for Christ’s sake, and some sort of aftershave you could buy by the quart at CVS. He looked as if he’d be at home in a fifties homburg chatting with Edward R. Murrow. And John—though John not in the running of course—but John so opposite, so lightly penned in and at the same time so fierce, so defined. It was an exercise she didn’t want to be engaging in. She gave up when, bumping into Irv and giggling, they met up with a crowd of people emerging from the doors of the Tube station and sallying across the street. One of them was Rasia McIntyre, who had been doing some partying of her own.
“Where are the kids?” said Winnie, forsaking hellos.
“Oh, you,” said Rasia, “out on the town, I see?” She smiled with a colluding earnestness at Irv.
“Where are the kids?” said Winnie.
“Don’t panic; why the panic?” Irv put his hand on Winnie’s shoulder, neither an embrace nor a squeeze, but a gesture of caution. She shrugged him off.
Rasia was too giddy herself to take offense “They’re at my mother’s in Balham. I was at a girls’ night out—a friend getting married. We knew there’d be wine, so I dropped the kiddos in front of the telly.”
Winnie sagged a bit. She could sense in Irv’s bearing a certain misgiving rising through him. And well he might have misgivings. She was grateful, oddly, for bumping into Rasia. It put things back where they belonged. Winnie about to entertain notions of romance? It wasn’t to be.
Rasia put both her hands out. “Hello, I’m Rasia McIntyre,” she said. “I remember you from crashing through the locked door. You rang me for Winnie’s number.” Winnie thought: Go ahead, Rasia, take him if you want him; I was a fool, for an evening, to imagine I was deserving of a surprise. And Rasia was all charm, letting her brown shawl slip off her head to show her beautiful crimped black hair. Her eyes were made sensual by kohl or a Revlon approximation. A blue and gold sari enveloping her ample bosom slipped back along her cioccolata arms to reveal a stenciled pattern of dots, an organized rash. Irv Hausserman was a study in American composure, that little-known quality so often eclipsed by the spectacle of bumpkiny American forwardness. He even said “How do you do?” as if he were at a gentlemen’s club.
“Your hands,” said Winnie, because she felt awkward. She was thrashing about in the deep water, forgetting again how adults proceeded in situations like this. “What happened to your hands?”
“Oh, a wedding custom. Nothing much. The night before, the ladies of the wedding party and the family get together with the bride and ornament her palms with henna.” Rasia threw back her head, an apparition of louche sexiness. “It’s called a mehndi ceremony. Traditional singing. Lots of good good food. The mehndi is henna; you can’t see it in this sodium glare, but it’s really dark red. Nowadays we ditch the kids and have a drink and do our own hands too, not just our palms—we get carried away sometimes. Then we tell horror stories about wedding nights.”
“Like?” said Irv, betraying his professional interest in stories.
Rasia began to laugh. “The drunken bridegroom with a herniated umbilical cord that the wife mistakes for a cock and mounts. The bridegroom with a donkey’s penis. Everyone laughs and the bride gets scared, or pretends to. These days chances are she isn’t unfamiliar with her boyfriend’s cock, but we’re all too polite to presume, and we play the part nicely.” She rotated her hands, as if displaying rings and baubles, and turned her palms up to the light. Winnie caught her right wrist and drew it nearer.
“You—you’ve borrowed that—the slashed cross,” she said.
Rasia snatched her hand back. “You leave me alone,” she said. “I’m trying to be ordinary with you, but it’s just a no-go, isn’t it?” She tucked her hands back into her shawl and looked at Irving Hausserman, as if to see if he shared Winnie’s obsessions.
“I saw it. Did you put it there on purpose? I saw those dots. Just like the pattern I showed you on the cloth.”
“Leave me alone. I’ll thank you for that.” Rasia cloaked her clouded face with her shawl and moved back, turned to slip into a newsagent’s for a newspaper or a carton of milk for the morning.
“I am not making it up,” said Winnie. “Did you see it? Did you see, Irv?”
“It was too fast for me to see, and I don’t know what I’m looking for.”
She scowled at him. Was he avoiding corroborating what was plainly there, for the sake of gentility, or was he dim?
“Leave me here, I’ll go on alone,” she said.
“I’ll see you home.”
“It’s not necessary and, more to the point, I want to be alone.”
“I’ll see you home,” he said again, and did.
She did not ask him in, of course; nor would he have come, most likely. There was a light on in the top floor of Rudge House. But John wasn’t there, just another note, this one aff
ixed with a magnet to the door of the small fridge that crouched on a countertop. “Bonne nuit,” it said, “I’ll call tomorrow.”
When he came by the next day, with two paper cups of coffee and a Sunday Times, Winnie had already finished with her shower and was packing her bags.
“You needn’t do that,” he said. “You still have research to do, I suppose?”
“There is nothing to write about,” she said. “It was a good effort, but I’ve taken it as far as it could go. I kept trying to find Jack the Ripper in the tale, but my protagonist would keep leaning toward Romania. There’s no point. Maybe another year.”
At the word Romania John sighed and tossed his coffee, undrunk, down the sink. “Are you just never going to let it go?” he said. “Are you just going to give up and rotate there endlessly, in the maelstrom? In the toilet? With everyone throwing you lifelines to drag you back, and you won’t reach out and grab on? It’s just tedious is what it is. If there were no other reason, Winnie, for me to have vacated the premises, being royally bored by your persistent self-loathing would have sufficed.”
“What, you had a bad night with Allegra?” said Winnie as coldly as she could.
“Don’t change the subject.”
She didn’t have to. A knock on the door served that purpose. John looked at her. “I’m not expecting anyone,” she said.
He strode over and flung open the door, revealing Colum Jenkins, the very same, though thinner and grayer, his face sagged with new lines. Behind him, a young woman in a fat coat made of blue synthetic fur, standing on lollipop-stick legs sheathed in red spandex.
“So it’s you,” said Jenkins. “I thought the lady might still be here alone, and I brought my daughter for propriety’s sake.”
This the daughter that Mac had blabbered about? The whore? Despite the clothes she looked sensible and somewhat urgent. About thirty, maybe. Good skin, unflinching eyes, and nice crisp gestures as she followed her father into the flat. She didn’t look like a hooker, but like someone acting in an Almodóvar film. If she were a dominatrix by night, she appeared a physical therapist by seemly daylight. “It’s not the propriety of it,” she said to Winnie and John. “He shouldn’t be doing any heavy lifting, and that yob Mac has disappeared back to North Dublin, as far as we can tell.”
“I can’t finish the job, sir,” said Jenkins to John. “No doubt your guest has told you about the accident. I had a concussion followed the next day by heart failure. Whether one brought on the other or if the heart failure was just waiting to happen, they can’t say, but at least I was in the surgery when it happened and they could attend to me at once. But I’ve had to slow myself down. And I’ll find you some alternate builders to come round if you require.”
“What has been going on here?” said John. “I’ve heard all sorts of stories.”
“Oh, I daresay it was coming on.” Jenkins was vague in his expression. How we move toward the margins of our own lives, inch by inch, Winnie thought; we concede our own centrality. “I certainly wasn’t feeling myself the days leading up to it. Look at how little we got done. I won’t trouble you with a bill for the hours spent, sir, just for the materials in the hall, which your next contractor can use.”
“What happened to you?” Winnie was pleased to hear the calm in her own voice. “Can you say?”
“I had a spell, that was all.” Jenkins didn’t look at her. “It could’ve been the end of me, I suppose, but it wasn’t. It turns out my Kat was always keeping closer tabs on me than I could manage to keep on her. She showed her old da up in that department, I should say.”
“Enough,” said Kat Jenkins fiercely, to Winnie. “We’re not here to be interviewed.”
“How I’ll manage the bills without this sort of work,” said Jen-kins, “a mystery.”
“Da,” said Kat, “this your wrench? This your hammer? Let’s collect these things and not bother these people.”
“But I suppose we’ll manage,” said Jenkins.
“We’ll manage,” said Kat. The face of Jenkins père showed a contradiction: some relief at being reunited with his daughter, and some worry about just how she intended to raise funds to help him pay the outgoings.
“There was all that noise in the chimney stack,” said Winnie. “Tell him. Tell John.”
“I’m not—I’m not,” said Jenkins, shaking his head, “I’m not certain of what was going on with me. Early warning signs of a systemic arrest, they say in the clinic. I should have paid more attention. Anyway, it was all quite dreamlike, wasn’t it? I shouldn’t wonder if there was a minute little gas leak or the like, making us fanciful.”
“There was no gas leak,” said Winnie.
“Stow it,” said Kat belligerently. “Leave it be.” She held up a crowbar as if ready to use it on Winnie. “This your crowbar, Da?”
“ ’Tis.”
Winnie had no choice but to let them pack. She watched Jenkins gingerly make his way out the door. John carried the toolbox down the stairs for him, and Kat turned at the top of the stairs to look at Winnie.
“I don’t know what that Mac said to you,” she said, “but it’s a load of bollocks. Whatever he said means sod-all, and anyway it’s none of your affair.”
“I never would,” said Winnie, use your life in a fiction, but that the thought could occur to her made her hesitate. Kat closed the door and was gone. With her, at last, dissolved the final remnant of the notion of a prostitute murdered and bricked up in the chimney stack of Rudge House, or of Jack the Ripper himself disappeared there. Kat Jenkins was too competent and real for fictional trappings to adhere to her. The Jack the Ripper exploration was proving a dead end.
But something had happened, no matter what Jenkins had said. No matter how Rasia had turned on her. Something was blurting into her life, even if all corroborating testimony was failing. She was alone in her conviction of a haunting.
One by one the supporting staff was falling by the wayside. But they were following the lead set by her cousin. John Comestor had abdicated first, the very day she arrived.
Bucharest to Ploesti to Sinaia to Brasov. From there, Costal Doroftei would take them on, he said, through the Transylvanian Alps, on toward Sighisoara. But there was snow farther on, more in the northwest than here; they were in the grip of a storm front up there and the party of travelers would have to wait. Doroftei delivered the news in the lobby of the hotel, where, in morning light that had the filmy transparency of gin, Wendy sat dressed in her coat, surrounded by her luggage. “We can’t wait,” she said. “I don’t believe this. We haven’t come this far to wait.”
“There is no choice in mountain region. You move through mountains only when they say: Move.”
“I can’t wait,” she said, starting to panic. “I’ve come this far!”
“No, dear lady, I am thorouffly in mindfulness of your situation. You are needful of distraction and Doroftei will make you and Mr. Pritzke to do wonderful trip. Here in Brasov we are not far from Bran, and so we go to wonderful castle. Everyone at home you tell, you never see such wonderful thing.”
Wendy could not catch her breath to say that John was not her husband, he was not Mr. Pritzke. What had they done? Last night, what had they done?
“He won’t want to be making tour!” she said. Constructing sentences in erratic syntax was contagious. John, awakening in her bed, had fled down the hall to his own room. That he had left her room rather than she his made it feel that the dalliance had been at her invitation, but is that how it really had been?
Doroftei explained, “Then we leave him reading gentlemen’s papers, or smoking his pipe in lounge. Come, the car is all heat and ready.” She allowed herself to be dragged off by Doroftei, more for distraction than anything else.
The castle at Bran, it turned out, was none other than the home of Vlad the Impaler--the original Count Dracula. At the sloping approach to the castle huddled a sort of Ye Olde Transylvanian Village, unpeopled and dull. Little else but chickens squawking in the du
sting of snow, looking for frozen grubs or Lord knew what. The steep stairs leading up to the front door were huge stone slabs, lacking railings or balustrades. Very Hollywood, early talkies; very convincing. But once inside the castle, Wendy could catch no whiff of vampirism, could impugn no castle corridor or winding staircase with the drama of that old hackneyed tale. The place was beautifully plastered and entirely whitewashed, and if it were tricked out in tapestries of flowers and unicorns, it might serve handily as the setting of half a dozen European fairy tales.
There were no other visitors, due to the snow or to the rude good sense of the locals. Wendy didn’t even know why the place bothered to open its gates to the public. The only person in residence seemed to be the babka-faced auntie selling tickets, who sat in a tiny booth listening to an early Beastie Boys tape on a cassette recorder as she knitted an ugly olive drab sweater three feet high and five feet across, useful only to a troll.
It was good, though, to lose Doroftei, to be alone. She wandered about, seeing the white lightlessness in the sky, a low screen rolling down and cloaking the view beyond the valley.
Back at the car, she said suddenly, “Could we not just go on? Right now? Leave John at the hotel, and just try? It’s midday, certainly they’ll have cleared the road to Sighisoara by now?”
“We never could do that, I would not speak to myself again for weeks!” said Doroftei. “Leave the gentleman behind? For why you do that?”
“I am the one arranging this trip,” she said, in as steely a voice as she could.
“It is not you the one arranging the snow, I think,” said Doroftei.
“I insist. I may insist, and I do.”
Even as she spoke, however, the snow began again.
The road back to Brasov was treacherous now, and scary, but for so many reasons other than ice and snow.
“So,” said John, breathing a bit heavily due to the climb back up the stairs.
“There is news about Mrs. Maddingly?”
“Little news. She is in stable condition and resting comfortably but in and out of consciousness, mostly out. No diagnosis when I left. I don’t suppose you know if she has any relatives?”