He was rather proud of how calmly he was taking the clear evidence of his own mental breakdown.
Somewhere inside that house was Madeleine. She would help him sort this out. She had married him in sickness and in health, hadn't she? Didn't they say that in the old church wedding vow? She would get him to a shrink and they'd get this under control and life would go on.
He climbed the steps, adding only the second set of footprints to break the snow, opened the front door of the house and stepped inside.
It was not the same house.
Oh, the rooms were arranged the same. Even the furniture was in the right place. But dustcovers were on all the major pieces of furniture, and the floor was half an inch thick in dirt and dust, except where his own peregrinations of last night and this morning had carved paths in it. Every step he took stirred up dust clouds and in only a few moments he was sneezing and coughing. If he had come through here before, why hadn't he sneezed and coughed before? Or had he? He had vague memories of wondering last night if he was coming down with a cold. Or was he merely inventing that memory to try to make these things make sense?
He opened the library doors. The windows had had several panes broken out, and snow had drifted across the cloth-covered table. Hundreds of books had been scattered across the floor. The room was freezing cold. His footsteps alone marked a passage across the floor, to what was obviously the only chair that had been moved and sat upon in many years. The others were tied to the table and floor and each other by cobwebs and spider webs. Even the chair he had used was bewebbed and dusty, and now he looked down at his own clothing for the first time and realized that strands of web and patches of dust were drawn across his jacket, his trousers. He brushed at them, and they came away; how could he not have noticed them before?
I am not going through a psychotic episode right now. The certainty grew even as he framed the words in his mind. This morning I was seeing things that were not real. People at breakfast. This room clean, this furniture lustrous. The footmen bringing perfect food here—not a single footprint led from the butler's pantry to the table. What did I eat, then?
The answering churning in his stomach told him that he had eaten nothing. The dryness in his mouth told him that he had drunk nothing. Not since yesterday in the limo, the Icelandic bottled water he had poured for himself and Mad. Had she drunk it? Was there anyone there to do the drinking? Had there ever been anyone there?
Yes, there had to have been. The limo driver did go to her door to open it—he saw her, too! His parents had seen her. His friends, the people at parties and meetings all over America—they all saw her, talked to her. They couldn't all be insane, or if they were, then insanity had lost all meaning.
Madeleine! He felt a sudden terrified yearning for her. Madeleine, how could I even for a moment have stopped believing in you!
He ran from the library, out into the entry hall, then up the two flights of stairs to the room they had shared. He flung open the door. There were his two bags, the suitcase and the carry-on. His side of the bed had been disturbed and slept in. But there were no sheets, just a single white dustcover thrown over the mattress, and webs fringed the bed on every side. Only his drawers in the bureau had been disturbed. Only his clothing hung in the musty wardrobe.
He ran into the bathroom. There was no water in the toilet, just his own urine at the bottom of the bowl. The floor of the bathroom was grimy. The tub was vile—at some point the sewer must have backed up and left grime all over the bottom of it. Had she known? Had she known what the bathroom was really like, and had enough compassion for him to steer him away from trying to bathe in it? The taps in the sink gave no water. His toothbrush still had toothpaste embedded in it—he hadn't rinsed it, but he had brushed his teeth. And now that he thought about it, he could taste the toothpaste in his mouth, could feel the graininess of it between his cheek and gums.
His heart beating madly, his mind racing yet thinking of nothing, he quickly gathered all his clothing out of the wardrobe and the drawers, his kit out of the bathroom, and crammed them all into his luggage. I slept alone in here last night, he thought. And yet we made love, Madeleine and I. We made love and then finished our sandwiches. But there was not a crumb to be found, and only a disturbance of the dust and grime on the small night table where his fingers must have brushed across the surface as he thought he was setting down the plate with his sandwich on it.
Luggage in hand, he left the room and clattered down the stairs. He did not even bother to look for a telephone. If this house had one, it would be as disconnected as the electricity and the waterlines.
The electricity. Today he could see because of light from the windows. But last night there was no light. And yet he hadn't bumped into anything. Someone had led him. Madeleine had led him. She might leave no footprints, but someone who knew this house had been with him or he never could have made his way inside in the darkness, up the stairs, into the bedroom in the pitch black that must have prevailed. The thick bedroom curtains had been closed.
I was not making it all up. Hallucinations can make you see things that aren't there, but they can't possibly let you see things that are there in pitch darkness. Schizophrenia doesn't give you a flashlight.
He set down his bags beside the door. He had been brought here by someone for some reason. The illusion had continued right up to the time when he didn't open the treasure box. Then Madeleine had fled and everyone disappeared except Uncle Paul and Grandmother. The ones whose headstones he had identified in the graveyard had disappeared.
What was real? The cleanliness of the place had been illusion, the food and servants were false, the people were—what, ghosts?—but the table had been real, the chairs, the doors, the bed, even the toilet and sink and tub in the bathroom. Maybe, in the parlor, on a small table, there really was an engraved wooden box that someone, for some reason, needed his help to open up.
He turned and headed for the door leading to the parlor. But as he approached it, two bright white letters appeared on the door.
NO
"I'm not making this up," he whispered to himself. The letters disappeared. He took another step toward the door.
More letters appeared, taster this time, smaller, each word taking the place of the one before.
DON'T
COME
IN
GET
OUT
GET
OUT
DEATH
DEATH
LIVES
HERE
He backed away from the door, looked around at the gloomy walls. In the cold dark fireplace something flickered. A light. He did not move closer; rather he recoiled from it, fearing what it would be. Yet he couldn't take his eyes away.
A rat emerged and perched atop the pile of ancient lumber stacked there. It looked him piercingly in the eye. As Grandmother had done. It opened its mouth.
"Find me," it said.
This was not madness, Quentin knew that now. It was not his mind creating a false reality. On the contrary, his mind was correctly apprehending that the rules that he had always believed reality to be governed by did not apply in this house. Something had made a rat speak, had made words appear on a door to a room he must not enter. Something had led him through this house in the dark. Something had made him believe that the woman he loved was at his side as he walked alone along the bluffs. Someone had introduced him to a group of dead people at breakfast and convinced him that he was eating the best food he had ever tasted in his life, while leaving his stomach empty.
All this he understood rationally. But his body was not rational. His heart was pounding, his limbs were cold, his fingers trembled. He dared not turn his back on the rat, on the parlor door, and yet dared not stay in this place another moment. So he did turn, and walked briskly to the front door where his luggage waited for him. He opened the door, picked up his bags, and stepped out onto the snowy porch.