Halper, the village real-estate man, said with a squint, “You’re the same people looked at that place back in April, aren’t you? Sure you are. The ones got caught in that freak snow storm and spent the night there. Mr. and Mrs. Wilkes, is it?”
“Wilkins,” Norman corrected, frowning at a photograph on the wall of the old man’s dingy office: a yellowed, fly-spotted picture of the house itself, in all its decay and drabness.
“And you want to look at it again?”
“Yes!” Linda exclaimed.
Both men looked at her sharply because of her vehemence. Norman, her husband, was alarmed anew by the eagerness that suddenly flamed in her lovely brown eyes and as suddenly was replaced by a look of guilt. Yes—unmistakably a look of guilt.
“I mean,” she stammered, “we still want a big old house that we can do over, Mr. Halper. We’ve never stopped looking. And we keep thinking the Creighton place just might do.”
You keep thinking it might do, Norman silently corrected. He himself had intensely disliked the place when Halper showed it to them four months ago. The sharp edge of his abhorrence was not even blunted, and time would never dull his remembrance of that shocking expression on Linda’s face. When he stepped through that hundred-seventy-year-old doorway again, he would hate and fear the house as much as before, he was certain.
Would he again see that look on his wife’s face? God forbid!
‘Well,” Halper said, “there’s no need for me to go along with you this time, I guess. I’ll just ask you to return the key when you’re through, same as you did before.”
Norman accepted the tagged key from him and walked unhappily out to the car.
It was four miles from the village to the house. One mile of narrow blacktop, three of a dirt road that seemed forlorn and forgotten even in this neglected part of New England. At three in the afternoon of an awesomely hot August day the car made the only sound in a deep green silence. The sun’s heat had robbed even birds and insects of their voices.
Norman was silent too—with apprehension. Beside him his adored wife of less than two years leaned forward to peer through the windshield for the first glimpse of their destination, seeming to have forgotten he existed. Only the house now mattered.
And there it was.
Nothing had changed. It was big and ugly, with a sagging front piazza and too few windows. It was old. It was gray because almost all its white paint had weathered away. According to old Halper the Creightons had lived here for generations, having come here from Salem where one of their women in the days of witchcraft madness had been hanged for practicing demonolatry. A likely story.
As he stopped the car by the piazza steps, Norman glanced at the girl beside him. His beloved. His childhood sweetheart. Why in God’s name was she eager to come here again? She had not been so in the beginning. For days after that harrowing ordeal she had been depressed, unwilling even to talk about it.
But then, weeks later, the change. Ah, yes, the change! So subtle at first, or at least as subtle as her unsophisticated nature could contrive. “Norm . . . do you remember that old house we were snowbound in? Do you suppose we might have liked it if things had been different? . . .”
Then not so subtle. “Norm, can we look at the Creighton place again? Please? Norm?”
As he fumbled the key into the lock, he reached for her hand. “Are you all right, hon?”
“Of course!” The same tone of voice she had used in Halper’s shabby office. Impatient. Critical. Don’t ask silly questions!
With a premonition of disaster he pushed the old door open.
It was the same.
Furnished, Halper had called it, trying to be facetious. There were dusty ruins of furniture and carpets and—yes—someone or something was using them; that the house had not been empty for eight years, as Halper claimed. Now the feeling returned as Norman trailed his wife through the downstairs rooms and up the staircase to the bed chambers above. But the feeling was strong! He wanted desperately to seize her hand again and shout, “No, no, darling! Come out of here!”
Upstairs, when she halted in the big front bedroom, turning slowly to look about her, he said helplessly, “Hon, please—what is it? What do you want?”
No answer. He had ceased to exist. She even bumped into him as she went past to sit on the old four-poster with its mildewed mattress. And, seated there, she stared emptily into space as she had done before.
He went to her and took her hands. “Linda, for God’s sake! What is it with this place?”
She looked up and smiled at him. “I’m all right. Don’t worry, darling.”
There had been an old blanket on the bed when they entered this room before. He had thought of wrapping her in it because she was shivering, the house was frigid, and with the car trapped in deepening snow they would have to spend the night here. But the blanket reeked with age and she had cringed from the touch of it.
Then—“Wait,” he had said with a flash of inspiration. “Maybe if I could jam this under a tire! . . . Come on. It’s at least worth a try.”
“I’m cold, Norm. Let me stay here.”
“You’ll be all right? Not scared?”
“Better scared than frozen.”
“Well . . . I won’t be long.”
How long was he gone? Ten minutes? Twenty? Twice the car had seemed about to pull free from the snow’s mushy grip. Twice the wheel had spun the sodden blanket out from under and sent it flying through space like a huge yellow bird, and he’d been forced to go groping after it with the frigid wind lashing his half-frozen face. Say twenty minutes; certainly no longer. Then, giving it up as a bad job, he had trudged despondently back to the house and climbed the stairs again to that front bedroom.
And there she sat on the bed, as she was sitting now. White as the snow itself. Wide-eyed. Staring at or into something that only she could see.
“Linda! What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Nothing . . .”
He grasped her shoulders. “Look at me! Stop staring like that! What’s happened?”
“I thought I heard something. Saw something.”
“Saw what?”
“I don’t know. I don’t . . . remember.”
Lifting her from the bed, he put his arms about her and glowered defiantly at the empty doorway. Strange. A paper-thin layer of mist or smoke moved along the floor there, drifting out into the hall. And there were floating shapes of the same darkish stuff trapped in the room’s corners, as though left behind when the chamber emptied itself of a larger mass. Or was he imagining these things? One moment they seemed to be there; a moment later they were gone.
And was he also imagining the odor? It had not been present in the musty air of this room before; it certainly seemed to be now, unless his senses were playing tricks on him. A peculiarly robust smell, unquestionably male. But now it was fading.
Never mind. There was someone in this house, by God! He had felt an alien presence when Halper was here; even more so after the agent’s departure. Someone, something, following them about, watching them.
The back of Linda’s dress was unzipped, he realized then. His hands, pressing her to him, suddenly found themselves inside the garment, on her body. And her body was cold. Colder than the snow he had struggled with outside. Cold and clammy.