Burnt Offerings (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (9 page)

She opened the door wider and stepped into the room which was large and dim, with two pencil lines of bright sunlight cutting through the not quite closed drapes. To her right, and with a suddenness that startled her, was an enormous table draped with velvet, burgundy like the drapes, and filled with framed photographs. The table covered half the room, stretching back to the rear windows which would overlook the lawn and the bay. It was a great field of photographs, faces as far as she could make out, each of them framed differently in silver – square, round, sunburst, some larger, some mere cameos. “The memories of a lifetime,” Miss Allardyce had told her. The light catching the frames was hypnotic.

The sound as well, which she had just become aware of: a very low and steady hum, barely audible, emphasizing the silence, like her own breathing. Still not moving, with her hand on the knob, she let her eyes range over the sitting room to trace the sound.

The door to the bedroom was in the left wall. Near it was a wingchair, gold brocade, facing the pictures on the table; a small tea table, set with a tray, stood in front of the chair. There was nothing else in the room except for the rug, a ruby-colored Sarouk, patterned in rose and gold.

The sound seemed to be coming from the bedroom. She moved toward the door, very quietly. It was the room, she told herself, that was intimidating: the stillness and the half-light and the hum. Initially, that’s all; she’d get used to them, and if she felt a little nervous now and entertained a brief second thought about the responsibility of an old woman and a house she hadn’t even begun to explore, it would all pass soon enough, and become familiar and comfortable.

The hum that drew her to the door at the end of the sitting room had become deeper and stronger, but almost imperceptibly so. It was the door itself that caught her attention now. It was white, and framed within the narrow, smooth border was an intricate pattern of lines and curves carved into the wood, so delicate in the room’s dim light that she hadn’t noticed the design until she came within a few feet. Swirls and garlands were cut into triangular panels that met in a small, raised pistil. She moved closer and the design became more intricate and abstract and impenetrable: a globe, a web, a sunburst, a maze, a slab carved with ancient pictographs.

Marian stopped just in front of the door and, impulsively, raised one hand, letting the tips of her fingers pass lightly over the raised surface. Immediately, she could feel the vibration passing through her. She lifted her other hand and slowly started to bring her face closer, turning so that her ear almost touched the door. The sound moved against her hair, deep and unrecognizable, an abstraction like the carved braille fluttering under her fingertips. Her fingers moved slower and then stopped, and the palms of her hands were flat against the door, and her ear pressed against it. Restful, so suddenly restful, not listening, not touching, barely aware of pushing herself closer into the door which was warm and fragrant, smelling of green. And the hum had deepened and broken into the sound of her own heartbeat.

She tried to fight the wave of drowsiness that had come over her, to open her eyes, and thought, One minute more, just one minute more. And then tried again and saw the small ridges of white pillowing her hand, and heard the sound and felt the wood against her cheek. And,
My God, what am I doing?
she said to herself – several times before she summoned the strength to pull herself away from the door.

How long had she been standing like that? She turned, startled, and waited for the room to work itself back into her consciousness: the wingchair, the tray, the photos, all of them shadowy; and with relief, with great relief, the open door leading to the corridor and the staircase and Ben and David and Aunt Elizabeth.

However dark the room was, and airless, and intimidating, however hypnotic that insistent hum, she couldn’t have been asleep on her feet, not that suddenly and completely. What in hell had happened to her?

She turned to the carved door again and stared at it. A trick? Some weird kind of optical illusion?

Whatever. She tried to dismiss it. Three hours sleep last night, if even that; packing, the tension of closing the apartment, remembering everything. The past week had been one long headache, literally. Nerves, anticipation; excitement, too much – Ben had said it several times. So she blacked out for a second. There’d be two months, two beautiful months to insulate the nerve ends.

She had come up to check the old lady, she reminded herself. She raised her hand to knock, hesitated, moved to the smooth frame of the door and knocked. The sound was dull, inaudible, she would think, over the air conditioner or whatever it was humming in the room. She knocked again, harder but no louder. Her knuckles hurt. The door had to be solid, unusually heavy.

She waited, and then closer to the door, called, “Mrs. Allardyce?”

She knocked again, waving her hand to fan the knuckles. “Are you all right, Mrs. Allardyce?” she called louder. “It’s Marian Rolfe.” She assumed the old lady had been told about them, but added anyway, “We’re the people who’ve taken the house for the summer.” There was only the hum in reply. (
Was
it an air conditioner? She’d have to check the west window of the bedroom.) “If there’s anything you need . . .” Marian said, letting her voice fall.

The old lady was probably asleep; she’d show herself when she was ready, although Miss Allardyce had said the people last time didn’t see her once. Marian herself would prefer it that way.

She gave the door one final long look, without touching it, and then moved away, stopping to pick up the tray which held a blue Spode plate and egg coddler (the egg half eaten), an untouched wedge of toast and a silver spoon; the napkin, linen with lace trim, was unfolded. Miss Allardyce had prepared her: the old woman ate little, some days nothing at all, surviving, her daughter insisted, on sheer will and, less mysteriously, whatever she might have cached away in her room. Marian’s grandmother had done the same, she recalled: the bottom drawer of her dresser had to be emptied regularly of candy wrappers, stale cookies and dried sausage skins. (“Emphatically
not
the same,” Miss Allardyce had said when Marian told her.) In any event, whether she ate or not, the silver tray was to be carried up three times a day: egg for breakfast, soup for lunch, a single piece of chicken and a green vegetable for dinner. At nine, twelve and six.

Marian balanced the tray, listening for a sound or some movement behind the bedroom door and looking at the vague faces watching her on the table. Was the room always this close? Surely a little more light, a bit of air; she could always close the windows again and draw the heavy drapes if Mrs. Allardyce preferred. She lay the tray down and went to the window, parting the velvet drapes which were heavy with dust. There were thick curtains against the windows, blurring the sun to a white haze. Silk damask, gold tinted, shone on the walls. She went to the second window, and when she spread the drapes, motes filled the light which fell over the silver frames on the table and bounced against the walls and the ceiling.

Marian was beside the table. She let her eyes travel over the photographs which, like the pictures in the alcove downstairs, were a mixture of sepia and color and black and white. Each of them was of a single figure, some full length, some of faces only; every age seemed to be represented, every style of dress, from turn of the century, or earlier, up to the present. She bent closer, awed by the display, by the incredible variety of faces and the delicacy of the frames, no two alike. There was a color shot of a beautiful young woman, unsmiling, and next to her an older woman in a thirties-style dress, staring blankly into the camera, and a man, Ben’s age, with a peculiar, almost stunned expression; an infant with her eyes closed, and older children, all of them strangely unsmiling. And as she looked over the table, she realized that none of the faces was smiling, not one of them. The expressions were uniformly, and chillingly, blank. And one of the faces, an old man’s, was looking out at her with what had to be outright terror. Like that boy’s. And the child near the edge of the table. And the woman wearing the old fashioned bonnet whose picture, a cameo, she reached down for. When she touched the frame, the picture fell forward with a small metallic cry which made Marian gasp and spin around to look at the carved door. It was closed and the only sound the insistent hum. Her fingers, she found, were trembling. She moved them slowly toward the cameo, waited, and then uprighted the picture quickly, pulling her hand away as though she had touched something painful or repellent.

Miss Allardyce’s soft phrase came back to her again: “the memories of a lifetime.” It did nothing to soften or clarify the expressions frozen on the table, or make them less unsettling.

Ben stood at the top of the stairs, a suitcase in either hand, and called, “Marian!” down the corridor. Where the hell was she? The inclinator whirred behind him, mounting the steps with Aunt Elizabeth and David; he was half-seated on her lap, their backs to Ben as they rose. Ben said, “Christ!” under his breath, dropped the suitcases, and started to walk down the corridor when he finally saw Marian in the distance. She was closing the double doors behind her and coming down the steps.

“Where’ve you been?” he yelled, and Marian replied with a loud “Sssshhh!” fifty feet away.

The inclinator stopped behind him and David cried, “Again! Again!”

“We’ve been up twice already,” Aunt Elizabeth said. “It’s making me giddy.”

“Come on, real fast this time.” David pressed a button and they started to descend again.

“David, no,” Aunt Elizabeth protested, and laughed.

Marian reached Ben; she was carrying Mrs. Allardyce’s tray.

“Is she okay?” he asked.

“She’s asleep.” She looked over his shoulder at the heads sinking below the stairs. “That’s not a toy, David,” she called. “Up, and off.”

“What did I tell you?” Aunt Elizabeth said, still laughing. She pressed the Up button.

“Did you see her?” Ben asked.

“No.” She was balancing the tray and pulling the map out of the waist of her skirt. “She’s all the way at the end of the corridor,” Marian said. “They were right; you probably won’t even see her.”

“Crushing,” Ben said.

David and Aunt Elizabeth were climbing out of the inclinator. “The stairs back there are out of bounds,” Marian announced. “To everybody but me. Do you hear that, Dave? Absolutely out of bounds at all times.” She waited for each of them to nod, Ben included and Ben especially; she’d prefer he didn’t see the photographs or the carved door or anything to bring out the inevitable “Weird.” She was unfolding the map, the old man’s face still clear in her mind, and the woman wearing the bonnet. “We’re in there,” she said to Ben, nodding right. “David across, and then Aunt Elizabeth.”

“Nice and cozy,” Aunt Elizabeth said. She had been looking up the stairs which wound, narrower, up to the third floor.

Ben went for the suitcases. “How about bringing up your games?” he said to David who started to climb into the inclinator again until Marian ordered, “Walk!” He bounded down the stairs.

Aunt Elizabeth stopped in front of the tall clock which read eight o’clock. “None of the clocks are working,” she said. “Pity; they’re all so lovely and expensive.”

“They just need winding,” Marian said. They were moving toward Aunt Elizabeth’s room. “Just wait till I get started.”

“She’s just itching to get into her kneepads and her jockstrap,” Ben said, and Aunt Elizabeth said, “Benjie!” and laughed disapprovingly. “Guarantee you don’t see her before Labor Day.”

Marian, who was still carrying the tray, gave him a nudge with the side of her knee. “You play with your toys and I’ll play with mine,” she said.

Aunt Elizabeth looked down the corridor before following Ben into her room which faced, beyond a large and dying elm, the vast field sloping away from the front of the house. There was a huge fourposter and a silk-covered chaise in the room, a fanback Windsor, and several early Primitives on the walls which delighted Aunt Elizabeth as much as the ancient gas heater in a corner of the room. “I haven’t seen one of those in years,” she said, and then hugged Marian and Ben, saying, “Thanks for having me, my darlings. It’s going to be a perfectly lovely summer.”

Ben carried the last of the suitcases up to his and Marian’s room which, of the three, was the largest, the most beautifully furnished, with, Marian pointed out to him, an extraordinary Queen Anne highboy carved with a sunburst pattern, and a rare Newport desk. The room looked north, toward the bay.

He was changing into a tee shirt and chinos when she came into the bedroom.

“Put your pants on and come with me,” she said excitedly.

“An eighteenth century pottie, right?” he guessed, pulling on a pair of tennis sneakers. “Signed, of course.”

“You’ll see,” she said. She had already changed into jeans and one of his old button-down shirts; the sleeves were rolled up and the tail hanging loose.

She bounced down the stairs ahead of him and led him into the kitchen, moving with assurance through the passageway, past the table piled with their pots and shopping bags, to the large double refrigerator. “They’re weird, right?” she said, grabbing the handle; “dirty-crazy and not to be trusted.” She waited for him to come in front of the refrigerator, and then, with a flourish, pulled it open, exclaiming “
Voilà!
” and, as she pulled the second door open, “
Voilà
again!” The shelves were packed with food, all of it, she pointed out, fresh, specially laid in for them. There was a large cooked chicken and a strawberry pie, and several bottles of champagne chilling; and when she grabbed his hand and took him into the pantry, he saw shelves laden with canned goods and liquor and soft drinks, and the freezer as well was packed with steaks and roasts. She waved the damp note she had found in the refrigerator.