Plumtree had actually read the sign. “That iron cap in the ground is to the coal chute,” she told him. “And those windows up on the second floor there to the left are where the old lady’s bedroom was. The Daisy Bedroom’—huh!”
“We’re supposed to,” panted Pete, “find the Winchester woman’s ghost—and, I guess, a—container?—of the pagadebiti wine.” He turned to the ghost. “You can do those things?”
The tall, bearded ghost was looking at Cochran when it echoed Pete’s last sentence: “You can do those things,” it said hollowly.
“I guess that’ll do,” sighed Pete. “Up onto the porch there, everybody, and I’ll unlock us a door.”
THEY FOUND a modern-looking glass door with an empty carpeted hall visible inside. A decal on the glass read PLEASE NO ADMITTANCE EMPLOYEES ONLY, but Pete was able to pop back the bolt with a contemptuous fiddle-and-twist of his kinked comb-teeth.
“We should hear a tour-party, if one’s nearby,” whispered Cochran as he stepped inside. Angelica was leading the king’s ghost by the hand, and Plumtree had sidled in ahead of them and was now carefully standing on the other side of Cochran from the ghost. “We’ll hear the guide talking, and the footsteps. Move the other way if we do, right?”
They hurried down the corridor toward the interior of the great house, and soon the corridor turned left and they were in a broad, empty Victorian entry hall lit by electric lights that mimicked gas lamps. Polished carved mahogany framed the windows and doors and the corners of the ceiling, and panelled the walls from the wainscot down; and the floors were a sort of interlocking-plaid pattern of inlaid maple and walnut. The panes in the two front doors were hundreds of carved quartz crystals arranged in fanciful flower and fleur-de-lis patterns, set in webs of silver and lead and bronze.
“How many rooms did the old lady build here?” asked Angelica in a whisper.
“I don’t know,” said Cochran. “Two hundred.”
“Can we—call her ghost, somehow? We can’t search every damn room!”
“The goose of Winchester can’t hear to hiss,” said the king’s ghost. “A bolt-hole, a hidey-hole, is where she is—hidden, escaped from Dionysus like a possum hidden in its own pouch.” He touched the glossy, deeply imprinted white wallpaper.
“Swell,” said Cody. “Let’s move on.”
They hurried down the hall, and found themselves in a vast, dark ballroom. Even in the shadowy dimness Cochran could see that the floor, and the framed and panelled and shelved walls, and the very ceiling way up above the silver chandelier, were of glossy inlaid wood. Far out across the floor on one side was a pipe organ like a cathedral altar, and in the long adjoining wall a fireplace was inset between the two tall, narrow windows that let in the ballroom’s only light.
Cochran could faintly hear the muffled creak and knock of footsteps on the floor above, and he looked around helplessly at the huge, high-ceilinged room. He was aware of nearly inaudible creaks and rustles from the far, dark corners of the room, and realized that he’d been hearing these soft flexings ever since they had entered the house; and he had steadily felt attention being paid to him and his companions, but it felt childish and frightful, nothing like a tour-guide or a security guard. Could the ghost of Mrs. Winchester be looking at them now from some remote shelf or alcove, flitting along after them from room to room? He flexed his right hand—but got no sense of help from the god.
“Let’s just goddamn keep going,” he whispered.
“Sid—!” gasped Pmmtree. “Look at the stained-glass windows!”
Cochran locussed his eyes on the panes of leaded glass that glowed with the gray daylight outside, and he noticed that they each portrayed a long banner curling around ivy-vine patterns. And there was stylized lettering, capitals, on each banner—WIDE UNCLASP THE TABLES OF THEIR THOUGHTS, read the one in the left-hand window, and on the banner in the right was spelled out THESE SAME THOUGHTS PEOPLE THIS LITTLE WORLD.
“The left one’s the Troilus and Cressida quote,” said Angelica softly, “though ‘table’ isn’t supposed to be plural. And the right one is from Richard II, when the king is alone in prison, and conjuring up company for himself out of his own head.” She shook her head. “Why the hell would Winchester have put them up here? The Troilus and Cressida one is from a speech where Ulysses is saying what a promiscuous ghost-slut Cressida is!”
Plumtree’s cold left hand clasped Cochran’s, and was shaking.
“It’d get a raised eyebrow from any Shakespeare-savvy guest,” agreed Pete.
“Is that a clue, is she in here?” snapped Cochran, looking from the windows to the ghost in the white suit.
“Probably not in a room with a fireplace,” said Pete. “Fireplaces would be the… portals for ghosts to get broken up in and sent to the god, like the ashtrays you see with palindromes lettered around the rims.”
“She was talking to me,” said Plumtree flatly. “Those windows were put there as a message for…for the person who looks like is turning out to be me, all these years later. This little head. Shit, she must have been, voluntarily or involuntarily, a multiple-personality herself.”
“So what’s the message?” asked Angelica.
“She—she didn’t want to go smoking away up one of the chimneys,” said Plumtree.
“Sail on,” said Scott Crane’s ghost, with a chopping wave toward the rest of the house.
They found a broader hall and tiptoed along it, instinctively crowding against one panelled wall after another, and darting quickly across the wide, gleaming patches of hardwood floor between. The electric lights were far apart, but the open rectangular spaces were all grayly lit by the dozens of interior windows and arches and skylights. In fact the layout of the rooms was so open and expansive that the sprawling scope of the house was evident at every turn, from every obtuse perspective; at no point could one fail to get the visceral impression that the house was infinite in every dimension, like a house in an Escher print—that one could walk forever down these broad, carpeted halls, up and down these dark-railed stairs from floor to ever-unfamiliar floor, without once re-crossing one’s path. And Cochran remembered Mammy Pleasant saying that the place had been built to attract, and trap, and dispatch to the afterworld, wandering ghosts reluctant to go on to the god.
“It looks open,” whispered Angelica at one point, “but she’s made the geometry in here as complicated as the mazes in the Mandelbrot set; there are patches of empty air in here that might as well be steel bulkheads. You’d never know because you could never quite manage to get to ’em.”
Cochran found a stairway, but it ran uselessly right up against the ceiling, with not even a trap-door to justify it; then he led his party up another set of stairs that switch-backed seven times but only took them up one floor, for each step was only two inches tall; and he led them through galleries with railed-off squares to keep one from stepping into windows that were set in the floor, and through a broad hall or series of open-walled rooms in which four ornate fireplaces stood nearly side by side; and they shuffled past mercifully locked windowed doors that opened onto sheer drops into kitchens and corridors below.
“More a house for birds,” said Cody at one point, “or monkeys, than for people.” “Aerial manlike entities,” agreed Angelica with a glance at the dead king. “Smoking away up the chimneys,” said the bearded figure, drawing a frown from Plumtree.