He went up the front steps. Even the doorknob had been removed, he saw, but probably one could simply push the door open. Or if it was locked, the window to the right . . . No, that was too high from the ground to climb into easily, though it gaped wide, glassless. Tim looked at the door, and decided to put the fingers of his right hand into the gap where the doorknob had been, his left hand against the door, and push. He lifted his hands to do this, then hesitated, dropped his hands, and smiled at himself. As his uncle had said, why bother? What would he be proving? Nothing at all, and indeed he might break a leg with a first step onto a rotten floor.
Tim eased his shoulders, ran down the steps and turned and shouted up at the house: “Halloo-oo! . . . Anyone there? . . . Ha-ha!”
He trotted down the path toward his car, looked back, and gave the house a wave, as if he were waving good-bye to someone he saw at a window there, but there was nobody.
It was suddenly dark.
Tim had intended to say to his uncle Roger that he had visited the black house, walked around it, gone into it—and so what? But he felt ashamed, that evening, of not having entered the house after all, and therefore he said nothing about his visit there at dusk. Tim found himself thinking about, remembering a fair-haired little girl he had been in love with when he was nine, and she about the same age, in school. In love, at that age? What an absurdity! Yet the sensations, Tim realized, were much the same at nine as at twenty and so on, when one was in love. The sensation posed an unanswerable question: why is one certain person of such fantastic importance to me? Tim remembered his fantasies of asking the little girl to meet him at the empty house, as Tim remembered his contemporaries calling it. Had she ever? Of course she hadn’t. What would her parents have thought, if their little eight- or nine-year-old daughter had said, after supper, that she had a date with a boy at the black house, or the empty house, maybe a mile from where she lived? Tim found himself smiling again. He could see that it would be so easy to pretend she had come, that they had kissed and embraced madly, and done nothing else, at that age. Yes, so easy to invent, and to come to believe that what he had invented and told to other people was true. That, of course, was exactly what the old boys at the White Horse were doing every Sunday after church, and maybe a little bit on Friday and Saturday nights too.
By the following Sunday, Tim’s ideas had taken a different and more realistic form. He felt calmer and more detached, as if he were seeing the situation—even the black house itself—from a certain distance. So he was quite cool and collected as he walked into the White Horse Tavern at twenty past noon on Sunday. He wore his walking boots, twill trousers, an anorak jacket of bright blue.
The boys were here, Ed Sanders, Frank Keynes, a couple of others whose names Tim knew also, even one high school acquaintance, Steve, whose last name Tim couldn’t at once recollect, though it began with a C. With a friendly nod at Ed, who had one leg over a stool, facing him, Tim walked up to the bar near the group, not as if he intended to join them, but not putting a distance between him and them either. Tim ordered a beer, as usual.
Before a minute had passed, Frank Keynes, who was standing at the bar with a Christmasy-looking old-fashioned in his hand, turned to Tim and said, “Hiking again?—How are you, Tim?”
“Quite well, thank you, sir!” said Tim. In the mirror beyond the row of bottles, he saw his own face, rosy-cheeked from his hike, and he felt pleased with himself, happy to be twenty-three years old, and also—in the left back corner of the room he could see reflected a pretty girl with short brown hair who sat at a table. Tim had noticed her when he came in just now, but in the mirror he could stare at her with pleasure, without her being aware of his staring. She was with two fellows, unfortunately. Tim lifted his beer and drank, and brought his thoughts back to what he intended to say to the men near him. The right moment came when he was on his second beer, and there was a lull in the conversation in which Tim had joined.
“By the way, I went to the black house Friday evening,” Tim said.
Short silence.
Then Frank Keynes said, “Y’did? . . . Inside it?”
Tim quickly noticed that four men, even the younger Steve, were all attention, and he wished very much that he could say that he had been inside the house. “No, not inside. I mean, I went up and looked around, walked around the grounds there. I didn’t see any signs of tramps—or people. Just one old beer can, I remember.”
“What time of night was it?” asked a tallish man named Grant Dunn, who seldom spoke.
“Wasn’t night. Just before six, I think.”
Ed Sanders, flushed of face, lips slightly parted as if about to say something, exchanged a glance with Frank who was standing to Tim’s right. Ed said nothing, but Frank cleared his throat and spoke.
“You didn’t go in,” Frank said.
“No, I just walked around the house.” Tim looked Frank in the eyes and smiled, though he frowned at the same time. What was all the fuss about? Did one of these fellows own the house? What if one of them did? “I did go up to the door, but—I didn’t open it, no. No doorknob even. Is the place locked?” Tim noticed that Sam Eadie had joined the circle, drink in hand.
“The place is not locked,” Frank said steadily. He had gray-blue eyes which were now as cold as metal. He looked as if he were accusing Tim of trespassing, of having tried to break in.
Tim glanced to his left toward the tables where the women sat, and his eyes met briefly the eyes of one of the wives, whose wife, Tim wasn’t sure.
Ed suddenly laughed. “Don’t go there again, boy . . . What’re you trying to prove, eh?” Ed looked at Frank and Grant as if for approval or support. “What would you be proving?” he repeated.
“I’m not trying to prove anything,” Tim replied amiably. Ed’s a little pissed again, Tim thought, and felt tolerant, and quite sure of himself by comparison. A beer and a half had not gone to Tim’s head. Tim took his time, let the curiously hostile glances at him die away, and finally he said, “My Uncle Roger told me about an adolescent boy being killed there.” Tim had lowered his voice, as his uncle had done. He felt the coolness of perspiration on his forehead.
“True enough,” said Frank Keynes. “You interested in that?”
“No. Not really,” Tim replied. “I’m not a detective.”
“Then—best to stay away, Tim,” said Sam Eadie with a small smile, looking at Tim sharply for an instant. He turned to Frank as if for confirmation of what he had just said, winked at Frank, then said to everyone, “I’ll be pushing off. My wife’s getting impatient over there.”
Frank and Ed smiled more broadly, almost chuckled, as they watched Sam’s round figure in dark blue Sunday-best suit walk away toward a table of four women.
“Henpecked,” one of the men said softly, and a couple of others laughed.
“You never went into the black house—when you were a kid, Tim?” Ed Sanders asked, now on a fresh scotch and ice.
“Yes, sure!” Tim said. “We all did. When we were around ten or eleven. Halloween, I remember, we’d take lighted pumpkins up and march around it. Sometimes we—”
Guffaws interrupted Tim’s sentence. Men rocked back on their heels, those who were standing up.
Tim wondered what was so funny? The clap of laughter had made his ears ring.
“But not afterwards?” asked Frank Keynes. “Not when you were sixteen or so?”
Tim hadn’t, that he could remember. “Around that time I was in—boarding school for one year. Out of town.” That was true. He’d had to go to a crammer to pull his grades up enough to enter Cornell. Tim felt, and saw, the men looking at him as if he had disappointed them, missed something, failed another exam. Tim, vaguely uneasy, asked, “Is there some mystery about that boy who was killed there? . . . Maybe there’s a local secret I don’t know.” Tim glanced at the barman, but he was quite busy over to
Tim’s left. “I don’t mean to be prying into anything, if it is a secret.”
Ed Sanders shook his head with an air of boredom, and finished his drink. “No.”
“Naw,” said Frank. “No secrets. Just the truth.”
Now a man laughed, as if at Frank’s remark. Tim looked behind him, to his left, because the man who had laughed was standing there. This man was a stranger to Tim, tall with neat black hair, wearing a cashmere sweater with a blue-and-yellow silk scarf, one of the group obviously. Tim glanced again quickly at the very pretty girl in the front corner, who was smiling, but not at him. Tim took no comfort from his glimpse of her. He suddenly thought of Linda, his last girl friend, who had stopped seeing him because she had met a fellow she liked better. Tim hadn’t been much in love with Linda, just a little bit, but her telling him she wouldn’t be coming to Canfield had hurt his ego. Tim wanted very much to meet a new girl, someone more exciting than the three or four girls he knew from college days, two of whom lived in New York.
“That story’s as plain as day, sure . . .”
The jukebox had started up, not loudly, but the song happened to be a loud one, with horns and drums. Tim couldn’t hear every word the men were saying. A wife came up, Ed’s, and he disappeared.
“Good story!” Frank yelled into Tim’s ear. “That story you mentioned. Dramatic, y’know? The girl was going to have a baby. Maybe she loved the boy. Must have—to’ve gone up to the black house again to meet him.”
And her father had cut the boy’s throat. Tim was not going to bring that up, not going to query the truth of it, because his uncle Roger had said it was supposed that the father had killed the boy. Two more wives came up to claim their husbands.
A few minutes later, Tim was walking to his uncle’s house with a feeling of having been slighted, even laughed at by the men in the White Horse Tavern. He hadn’t gone into the house, true enough, but he certainly hadn’t been afraid of the black house. There’d be nothing there, that he could see, to be afraid of. What was all the drama about, which seemed to extend from Ed Sanders to the rather stuffy-looking guy in the cashmere and scarf today? Was the black house some kind of private club that the men didn’t visit any longer? Why not go in and tell them he’d gone in, and join the club thereby?
Tim realized that he was angry, resentful, that he’d best cool down and not say a word about the White Horse conversation today to his uncle. Uncle Roger, Tim knew, had a touch of the same mystic reverence for the black house as Ed and Frank and the others.
So Tim kept his thoughts to himself all Sunday. But he did not change his mind about going into the black house, walking up the two flights of stairs, and he intended to do it one night that week. By Friday afternoon, Tim felt inspired, irresistibly inspired, to visit the black house that evening, though he had been thinking of Saturday night.
His uncle Roger on Friday evening was engrossed in a television play which had not interested Tim from the start. Roger took hardly any notice, when around ten o’clock Tim said he was going out for an hour. Tim drove his car to the north of Canfield, toward the black house, and he parked it in the same place as before, on the unpaved road, and got out.
Tim had brought a flashlight. Now it was really dark, utterly black all around him, until after a few seconds he could make out clumps of trees nearby, not belonging to the black house property, which were darker than the starless sky. Tim flicked on his flashlight, and began to climb the pebbly path.
He shone the light to right and left: nothing but empty and untended ground. And then he walked up the steps. Now with more assurance, he pushed against the door, and it opened with his second thrust. Timothy turned his flashlight beam around the front room, which seemed to be a large living room without any small front hall. Empty. The gray, neglected floorboards were each some five inches wide. Tim set his left foot beyond the threshold, and the floor supported him. In fact, he saw, at least at this point, no sign of missing boards or of decay in the wood. There was a hall to the right, or a wall which partly concealed a staircase. Tim walked softly toward this, stopped before he reached the wide doorway to the stairs, and shouted:
“Hello?” He waited. “Anyone here?” He smiled, as if to put on a friendly face to an unseen person.
No answer. Not even a rustle of someone stirring upstairs or anywhere else. He advanced.
The stairs creaked, the banister and steps were covered with very fine whitish dust. But they held his weight. On the second floor there was a worn-out rug in the hall, one corner folded under. And as far as Tim could yet see, this was the only sign of furnishings. Not even a broken chair stood in any of the four rooms on the second floor. The rooms were rather square. A swallow, two of them, took flight from a room’s upper corner at his presence, and made their way with audible flutter out a window which had no glass. Tim laughed nervously, and turned around, shining his flashlight now toward the stairs to the next floor.
This banister was shaky. Tim didn’t trust it, not that he needed it, and stepped carefully upward more on the wall side of the steps than the middle, as this stairway seemed more sagging. Up here, there were four more rooms, and one tiny one with no door, which Tim saw had once been a toilet, though the toilet bowl had been removed. He stood on one room’s threshold and shone his light into its four corners. He saw faded rose-colored wallpaper with an indefinable pattern in it, three windows with half their glass gone, and absolutely nothing on the floor except the ubiquitous pale dust. Somehow he had expected an old blanket or carpet, even a burlap bag or two. Nothing! Just space. A fine place to invite a girl!
Tim gave a laugh. He felt both amused and disappointed.
“Hey!” he yelled, and imagined that he heard his voice echo.
He glanced behind him at the dark hall, the darker well of the stairway down, and for an instant he felt fear at the thought of two flights of stairs to descend to get out. He swallowed and stood taller. He took a breath of air that was surely fresh because the windows were open, but he could still smell the dust.
Graffiti! Surely there’d be graffiti, considering all that had presumably gone on here. Tim focused his light on the floorboards of the pink room, tested their strength as he had tested the strength of all the other floors he had stepped on, and then he walked toward the front wall of the room. He stopped close to the wall, and moved his light slowly over a wide surface of the sun-blanched wallpaper, looking for pencil marks, initials. He found nothing. He looked over the other three walls quickly, then went into the hall, and with the same caution entered a back room. This room’s wallpaper had been stripped, for the most part, curls of it lay on the floor, and the patches that remained were of a dirty yellow color. Tim picked up a dry coil of paper, and out of curiosity straightened it. There was nothing on it.
Not a cap or a glove someone might have forgotten on the floor. “Not a sock!” Tim said out loud.
Courage flowed back into him. Well, he had seen the place. The floorboards held. There were no ghosts, and not a tramp or a hitchhiker was making use of the house as a pad, even though the winter was coming on.
Tim looked at the other two rooms upstairs, found them equally unrewarding, and then made his way downstairs. He felt like running downstairs, but he went down rather slowly. An old step could still give way, he supposed, and he didn’t want a broken leg or ankle. On the ground floor, he turned and looked up at the dark tunnel of the stairwell.
“Ha-ha!” Tim laughed softly.
One look into the closed room back? This turned out to be the remains of a kitchen. A scarred white sink was still there, but no water taps projected from the wall. Four marks in the green and white linoleum showed where the legs of a stove had rested.
This was enough!
“Hal-loo-oo!” Tim shouted, and let his voice break, as he pulled open the front door. “Happy next Halloween!” he added.
Carefully
, as if he were observing himself trying to do the right thing, Timothy closed the front door, using his fingers in the hole where the doorknob had been, trying to leave the door as he had found it.
It was good to be on solid ground again, to hear grit and pebbles under the soles of his tennis shoes.
On the familiar streets that he took driving homeward, he began to relax. Here he was, safe! Safe from what? There hadn’t been one spookily creaking door in the black house, not a current of wind through a crack that could have suggested the moan of a ghost. He felt proud for having explored every room, and he realized that his pride was silly, juvenile. He had best forget his satisfaction and simply state to the men on Sunday that he had gone in and . . . looked the place over.
And what was the matter with telling them now? Tim saw by his watch that it wasn’t yet midnight. Mightn’t a couple of the fellows be at the White Horse? If no one was there, he’d drink a beer by himself. He turned right at the next corner.
The White Horse was indeed busy this Friday night. Tim had an impression of yellow lights everywhere, balls of yellow lights across the eaves, yellow light pouring through the door when it opened and a couple came out. Tim parked his car in the graveled forecourt, and entered the bar. The jukebox music which he had heard only faintly outside now sounded nearly as loud as that of a disco. Of course Friday night wasn’t Sunday noon after church! And there were the fellows, the men, in their Sunday noon place at the back half of the bar, but in rather different clothes. Frank Keynes wore blue jeans and a turtleneck sweater. Ed Sanders was even in overalls with shoulder straps, as if he had been painting or working on his car, as maybe he had.
“Evening, Ed!” Tim shouted over the music, nodding and smiling. “Frank!”
“Timmy!” Frank replied. “Out on the town?”
Ed laughed, as if the town didn’t offer much.
Tim shook his head, and when he caught the eye of the barman, he ordered a draft beer.
Then Tim saw Sam Eadie turn from the jukebox into which he had evidently dropped some coins, because he was stuffing a hand back into his baggy trousers. He had a drink in his hand. The tables were only half-filled, and these mostly with young fellows and their girls.