“You’re acting like it, though. You’re acting like you’re scared to death.”
“Well, I’m not going to sit here and argue with you,” Julia says and tells herself that just this once it doesn’t matter if she sounds more like Anna’s mother than her lover. “It’s my car, and we never should have driven all the way out here alone. I would have turned around half an hour ago, if there’d been enough room on that road.” And then she puts the Bel Air into reverse and backs off the dirt road, raising an alarmed and fluttering cloud of grasshoppers, frantic insect wings beating all about them as she shifts into drive and cuts the wheel sharply in the direction of the trees.
“I thought you’d understand,” Anna says. “I thought you were different,” and she’s out of the car before Julia can try to stop her, slams her door shut and walks quickly away, following the path that leads between the high and whispering grass towards the house.
Julia sits in the Chevy and watches her go, watches helplessly as Anna seems to grow smaller with every step, the grass and the brilliant day swallowing her alive, wrapping her up tightly in golden stalks and sunbeam teeth. And Julia imagines driving away alone, simply taking her foot off the brake pedal and retracing that twisting, tree-shadowed path to the safety of paved roads. How easy that would be, how perfectly satisfying, and then she watches Anna for a few minutes more before she turns the car to face the house and tries to pretend that she never had any choice in the matter at all.
* * *
The house stands like a grim and untimely joke, like something better off in a Charles Addams cartoon than perched on the high, sheer cliff, the pampas grass and a bumpy ride ends. This ramshackle grotesquerie of boards gone the silver-gray of old oyster shells, the splinterskin walls with their broken windows and crooked shutters, steep gables and turrets missing half their slate shingles, and there are places where the roof beams and struts show straight through the house’s weathered hide. One black lightning rod still standing guard against the weather, a rusting garland of wrought iron filigree along the eaves, and the uppermost part of the chimney has collapsed in a red-green scatter of bricks gnawed back to soft clay by moss and the corrosive sea air. Thick weeds where there might once have been a lawn and flower beds, and the way the entire structure has begun to list perceptibly leaves Julia with the disconcerting impression that the house is cringing, or that it has actually begun to pull itself free of the earth and is preparing to crawl, inch by crumbling inch, away from the ocean.
“Anna, wait,” but the girl’s already halfway up the steps to the wide front porch, and Julia’s still sitting behind the wheel of the Chevy. She closes her eyes for a moment, better to sit listening to the wind and the waves crashing against the cliffs and the smaller, hollow sound of Anna’s feet on the porch, than to let the house think that she can’t look away. Some dim instinct to tell her that’s how this works, the mere sight of it enough to leave you dumbstruck and vulnerable.
My god, she thinks. It’s only an ugly old house. An ugly old house that no one wants anymore, and then she laughs out loud, like it can hear.
As if it’s listening.
After she caught up with Anna and made her get back into the car, and after Julia agreed to drive her the rest of the way out to the house, Anna Foley started talking about Dr. Montague’s article in Argosy again, talking as though there’d never been an argument. The tension between them forgotten or discarded in a flood of words, words that came faster and faster as they neared the house, almost piling atop each other towards the end of her monologue.
“There were stories that Dandridge murdered his daughter as a sacrifice, sometime after his wife died in 1914. But no one ever actually found her body. No, she just vanished one day, and no one ever saw her again. The daughter, I mean. The daughter vanished, not the wife. His wife is buried behind the house, though I’m not sure…”
Only an ugly, old house sitting forgotten beside the sea.
“…to Poseidon, or maybe even Dagon, who was a sort of Mesopotamian corn king, half man and half fish. Dandridge traveled all over the Middle East and India before he came back and settled in California. He had a fascination with Indo-Iranian antiquities and mythologies.”
Then open your eyes and get this over with, and she does open her eyes, then, staring back at the house, and Julia relaxes her grip on the steering wheel. Anna’s standing on the porch now, standing on tip-toes and peering in through a small shattered window near the door.
“Anna, wait on me. I’m coming,” and Anna turns and smiles, waving to her, then goes back to staring into the house through the broken window.
Julia leaves the keys dangling in the ignition and picks her way towards the house, past lupine and wild white roses and a patch of poppies the color of tangerines, three or four orange-and-black monarch butterflies flitting from blossom to blossom, and there’s a line of flagstones almost lost in the weeds. The stones lead straight to the house, though the weedy patch seems much wider than it did from the car.
I should be there by now, she thinks, looking over her shoulder at the convertible and then ahead, at Anna standing on the porch, standing at the door of the Dandridge house, wrestling with the knob. No. I’m so anxious, it only seems that way, but five, seven, ten more steps, and the porch seems almost as far away as it did when she got out of the car.
“Wait on me,” she shouts at Anna, who doesn’t seem to have heard. Julia stops and wipes the sweat from her forehead before it runs down into her eyes. She glances up at the sun, directly overhead and hot against her face and bare arms, and she realizes that the wind has died. The blustery day has grown suddenly so still, and she can’t hear the breakers anymore, either. Only the faint and oddly muted symphony of the gulls and grasshoppers.
She turns to face the sea, and there’s a brittle noise from the sky that makes her think of eggshells cracking against the edge of a china mixing bowl, and on the porch Anna’s opening the door. And the shimmering darkness, somehow wet and sticky, that flows out and over and through Anna Foley makes a different sound, and Julia shuts her eyes so she won’t have to watch whatever comes next.
* * *
The angle of the light falling velvet soft across the dusty floor, the angle and the honey color of the sun, so Julia knows that it’s late afternoon, and somehow she’s lost everything in between. That last moment in the yard before entering this place without even unconsciousness to bridge the gap, then and now, and she understands it’s as simple as that. Her head aches and her stomach rolls when she tries to sit up to get a better look at the room, and Julia decides that maybe it’s best to lie still a little while longer. Just lie here and stare out that window at the blue sky framed in glass-jagged mouths. There might have been someone there a moment ago, a scarecrow face looking in at her through the broken window, watching, waiting, and there might have been nothing but the partitioned swatches of the fading day.
She can hear the breakers again, now only slightly muffled by the walls and the wind around the corners of the house; these sounds through air filled with the oily stench of rotting fish and the neglected smell of any very old and empty house. A barren, fishstinking room and a wall with one tall arched window just a few feet away from her, sunbleached and peeling wallpaper strips, and she knows that it must be a western wall, the sunlight through the broken window panes proof enough of that.