Auraria: A Novel (11 page)

“You the one Arma let in?” said the face. “I’m Beluhah.”

“She said that Mr. Walton was upstairs.”

“Yes, we all think so.”

“But aren’t I already as high as I can go? I counted two stories from the outside.”

“Well, you know how some houses are,” said Beluhah. “They look small from the outside, but they’re bigger inside. How were you counting? By the windows? That’s not a very good way to count. What if someone forgot to put in a window or put in an extra one? I had some neighbors once that made up a passel of fake windows because they wanted us to think they lived in a ten-story house, as though it would make them better than us.”

“The laws of nature wouldn’t permit a ten-story house in the space I observed.”

“I can be certain in telling you that this house doesn’t have ten stories. That would be too neat and clean for Mr. Walton. Too round! No, he’d want to have one hundred seventeen and a quarter, if he could.”

“Could Mr. Walton be up that high?” he said.

“How should I know?” said Beluhah. “I’ve never been above fifty-five.”

The architects of this dwelling hadn’t the sense to build one set of spiraling stairs that traveled both upward and downward. Instead, they adopted the simpler alternating method, which forced the ascender to cross the entire room every time he wished to gain a story.

Holtzclaw picked his way through the debris of the third floor, which featured an inordinate number of rocks. Limestone, shale, quartz, obsidian, and granite were represented by stones the size of a house cat. Crossed pine branches covered another display. As Holtzclaw walked past, a hissing noise emerged from beneath the branches, and Holtzclaw gave the display a wide berth.

A woman named Cannie welcomed Holtzclaw to the next story, which was uncharacteristically empty. The room also felt smaller than the previous ones. It was a trick of the eye, given the emptiness of the floor. Still, Holtzclaw thought that his frames of reference—the windows, the staircases—were nearer each other than they’d been on the first floor.

“Be careful where you step, sir!” said Cannie, and she pointed to the floor. “Oh, not there! Anywhere but there!” She knelt beside Holtzclaw’s shoe and rapped on its toe twice with the knuckle of her index finger. Holtzclaw lifted it and contorted himself into a one-legged pose that enabled him to stoop lower without further moving his feet. The apparently empty surface of the floor was covered with piles of dust. Each of the ten or twelve piles that Holtzclaw could distinguish was different. Here was a blue tint or pinkish hue, large granules or fine-sifted crumbs like flour.

“I think you have stepped right into the arsenic powder and blown it to the four corners of the world,” said Cannie. “I don’t know how I’ll ever sort it out from the sulfur.”

“Such a collection would be better placed in vials or bottles,” said Holtzclaw.

“It’s not a collection of bottles.”

“No, I would imagine that collection is somewhere upstairs.”

“Maybe. I’ve never seen it.”

On his tiptoes, Holtzclaw managed to cross the room without further scorn from Cannie. He climbed the stairs, which should not have led anywhere, and found himself in another full-sized story. Across the room was another staircase. It was impossible and astonishing, this proliferation of space under a single roof, yet somehow disappointing—it was only more stories in a house. A very modest wonder.

If Holtzclaw had come to Walton’s house first, he would not have reacted thusly. He would have searched his person for traces of insanity, pinched himself to trying awakening from a dream, looked for trick staircases or prestidigitators conspiring against him. Part of his mind—the part that had been whimpering even since riding into town yesterday—still wanted to search for these links back to a rational world. But the haunted piano, the ghost wife, and the springhouse blizzard had prepared him for a revelation.

Perhaps Auraria did have its spirits and its own particular nature. If he resisted it, wailed for reason where there was none—that would only be a waste. Disbelief would slow him down. Holtzclaw could shut his eyes, but this infinite house would still be here, and Mr. Walton would still be inside, and Holtzclaw would still need to find him.

On this higher story, the aforementioned Dan was still asleep. This seemed as impossible as the house itself, for the species of clutter unique to this story was by far the loudest. Musical instruments filled the room to the rafters. Dan was sleeping on top of a closed piano. When he turned, he jostled the neck of a banjo, which fell on top of a violin with a painful crash of wood and tuneless ringing. Two rotating musical disks, like one would find in a dingy nickelodeon, competed for supremacy with tinny melodies. Several standing clocks counted off unsynchronized minutes. When one would strike the quarter hour, as happened five times during Holtzclaw’s two-minute sojourn across the room, the other musical instruments in the room joined in sympathetic vibration.

As Holtzclaw’s head pushed into the higher story, two children looked up from their stations. They sat in an avalanche of paper—maps, deeds, land lottery tickets, stakes, claims, and surveys.

“Would either of you be, by chance, Mr. Walton?” said Holtzclaw.

“I’m Flossie, and he’s Ephraim,” said one.

“And you wouldn’t know, then, the whereabouts of Mr. Walton, owner of this property?”

“We trade a lot of properties,” said Flossie. “That’s how we pass the time. See all these papers? They’re land lottery tickets and maps and deeds. So Ephraim’s got his stack, and I’ve got my stack. And I say, ‘Hoy, Ephraim, I will trade to you the Moss farm if you’ll give me the Pigeon Roost mine.’ And he will say, ‘Hoy, Flossie, if you think I’ll give you that on face, you are batty. You’ll need to add in those bottomlands by the Amazon Branch, and two springs besides, the Lifsey and Taylor Springs.’ And I’ll say, ‘I’ll give you the Amazon Branch and the Lifsey Springs. Taylor I want. How about the Wright place?’ And he’ll say, ‘That’s nothing but twenty acres of cut-over woodland.’ And I’ll say, ‘Then we’ll have a whole new deal. For the Pigeon Roost mine, I’ll give you the deed for the Terrible Cascade, all the way from the Sky Pilot’s down to the Beaver Ruin.’ And he’ll say, ‘You can’t give me that ’cause I already own it. I got it from you two weeks ago!’ And I’ll say, ‘Show me!’ And we both go digging in our papers. Turns out that I did own the Terrible Cascade, just like I said, because he sold it to me for the Pigeon Roost mine two days ago!”

“You mean to tell me you own all that?” said Holtzclaw. “Or Mr. Walton owns all that?”

“Well, he has maps and papers and tickets,” said Flossie. “But he doesn’t live on it.”

“If you have the right papers, then you own the land. It doesn’t matter who lives on it.”

This made Flossie turn pensive. Still, Ephraim did not avail himself of the chance to get in a word.

“Can I see your game pieces?” said Holtzclaw. If they were real, he could buy the whole valley right here in this room.

Flossie handed over a few sheets of paper. They looked very old, and Holtzclaw didn’t recognize the signatures. Important survey notes were missing. Perhaps they were original deeds that had since been surpassed by more accurate records. It would not make sense for Auraria’s deeds to be here. They were too precious. Their owners would keep them, or they would be filed in the county seat.

He gave them back to Flossie, who clutched them close to her heart. Still, there was a great deal of paper, and some of it could be useful. Maybe somewhere here was a valid deed or two or even old maps that would offer leverage in property disputes. Perhaps Walton could just sell him the room, as a whole, and he could peruse the contents at his leisure, after getting back from Dahlonega.

On the next story, Holtzclaw was met with a collection of chairs, which he found far less interesting than the land deeds from below. All the chairs were scratched and dusty. Most had seats woven from corn husks. One of the chairs, a rocker beside the window, was filled with a large woman who called herself Gertie.

“Mr. Walton?” said Gertie. “He’s downstairs. In the cellar.”

Holtzclaw teetered on the edge of an apoplectic fit. “You must be mistaken. The others told me upstairs!”

“No, I am quite certain.”

“I shouldn’t go just a little higher and ask Hiram or Immajean or Jessie?”

“Well, we haven’t seen Hiram in ages, going on thirty years. I think he’s been lost. And he wasn’t the most respectable fellow to being with. Too much carousing, heading nowhere and spending a fortune to do it. The rest would just tell you the same as me. Mr. Walton is downstairs. He said he was going to the cellar, and that was hours ago, and we haven’t seen him come back up since.”

“Hadn’t I better check just a few stories, just to see if he’s right above?” said Holtzclaw.

“What’s a few stories? Two, eight, thirty-six?” said Gertie.

“How many could there be?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been higher than forty-four. That one is pretty tiny. I couldn’t fit myself up the staircase past that. You know the rooms get smaller, right?”

Holtzclaw had noted that on Cannie’s story, and Gertie’s felt smaller yet; the windows were half a pace nearer each other.

“So you say that I should go back down?”

“I would insist on it.” Gertie rose from her chair and stepped in front of the ascending stairs.

There was nothing for it. He descended the staircases and crossed the rooms again, past Flossie haggling with the still-silent Ephraim, past sleeping Dan and his cacophony, past Cannie hunched over a pile of powder and holding her breath, past Beluhah rearranging her rocks, and past the skeleton of the long cow.

When he reached the ground floor, Arma was surprised to see him so soon.

“I climbed as high as Gertie,” said Holtzclaw. “But she told me that Mr. Walton had gone downstairs.”

“Gertie is a rotten liar!” said Arma.

“Still, hadn’t I better check the cellar?” protested Holtzclaw.

“You’d be the worse for it. It’s dark down there, and for every floor we’ve got up here, they’ve got two down there.” But Arma did not bar his way.

Holtzclaw descended the stairs into the first level of the cellar and, in the twilight, blundered into a small soot-covered man. His thready hair hung past his ears, and his collar was uneven.

“Hullo there, can I help you?” said the grubby man.

“I am hoping against hope that you can tell me, please, where I can find Mr. Walton and that you are not a Zebulon or a Bertram,” said Holtzclaw.

“Walton, that’s me. I’d just popped down to select a bottle for afternoon refreshment. Would you care to join in?” Walton held out a magnificent claret, of a vintage that belonged to a nobler century.

“Nothing would give me more pleasure,” said Holtzclaw, not believing his luck.

Walton sat down on one of the stairs and, using a field knife from his boot, hacked off the corked end of the bottle. The glass neck flew into a dark corner. Walton pulled a large mouthful of the rare and ancient claret directly from the bottle, then passed it to Holtzclaw. “Careful where you put your lip! Sharp edges.”

A desecration! Such a wine should be enjoyed with all the proper ceremony and respect: the glass, the temperature, time to breathe, the proper chamber, the proper attitude. To drink claret still cool from the cellar, sitting on a dirty stoop, in subterranean half-darkness, was a horror. Holtzclaw felt an emotion that others would call anger begin to rise toward his face.

Still, he took the bottle and drew his own mouthful of the claret. It was symphony of mature flavors. Yet how much more harmonious if given a stage, rather than a street corner!

Holtzclaw’s fugue was broken by Walton’s snapping fingers. He wanted another drink. Holtzclaw handed the bottle back.

“So you’ve spent an hour finding me,” said Walton. “What is it that I can do for you?”

Holtzclaw explained his mission—the acquisition of scrap metal from certain mines in the area.

“Why, I have a great deal of scrap metal myself,” said Walton. “Not for sale, of course, but you might appreciate it as much as I do, if you are dealer. It’s upstairs somewhere. Would you like me to show you?”

“No! No, thank you. I have a tight schedule today, and I’m afraid I’m already behind. I am inquiring if you are interested in selling your dwelling here. It would make a suitable and spacious temporary headquarters for my operation.”

“This place is cramped. Above one hundred floors, the space is only fit for thimbles and thread. I think it is a fundamental flaw of the vertical model. A problem of gravity.”

“I should think that fifty floors would suffice for my needs.”

“And what possessions do you have to offer me in return for my house?”

“Well, there is a certain standard formula for these transactions. We consider the dimensions of the property, apply certain transformations and regularizations, and the result is a dollar value that I can offer.”

“That is all one possession, merely differing in quantity,” said Walton. “Dollars! I have dollars already. I have a room with dollars from every year that they have been printed. What else do you have?”

“I have some of unusual gold coins,” said Holtzclaw.

“That is more interesting. People here love gold coins. They want to keep them in their own pockets and not trade them with me.”