The Listening House Read online

  “Aw, listen, buddy.”

  “We’ll vote on it. If Mrs. Garr comes home and kicks up a fuss, we’ll chalk it up to our interest in her welfare. All those in favor?”

  “Aye,” several voices replied. I don’t know how many, but at least no one said, “No.”

  Jerry said, “Okay,” crossly.

  He, Red, and Mr. Waller pushed against the door. It was a strong door; when Jerry had his shoulder against it, it gave a little, but the lock held.

  “Wait,” Mr. Kistler suggested. “There’s a hatchet around here somewhere. I’ve seen Lady Garr herself chopping kindling.”

  They hunted until they found the toolbox under a laundry tub. Jerry took a small ax out of it and soon splintered the lock out of the door; when it came free the door swung inward.

  Instantly the three cats shot out and scattered from under our feet. The dog came, too, standing at bay for a moment in the door, then slinking fast around the group of us.

  “God! It’s a zoo!” Jerry said. “Smells like one, too.” He pushed the door farther open, purposefully. The room ahead was completely dark; he slid his flashlight from his pocket and played the light ahead. He took two steps forward; his light seemed to draw us; we all moved forward, too.

  “See, there ain’t anybody in—” he began confidently. Then his voice stopped, as if it had been pushed back into his throat, and there was an odd, electric instant of silence.

  “Jesus Christ!” he whispered. “Get out of here! Get—”

  His arm went up in front of his eyes, as if he were warding something off; the beam of the flashlight accompanied the gesture with a wild parabola of light. He came backward, staggering; he turned on us blindly.

  “Red! You—where—you—”

  His face was pea-green in the light from the one bulb in the furnace room. Again we gave way as he lurched away from the kitchen door, leaving it ajar as it was; he reached the furnace, caught at that.

  “Jesus Christ! I—God!”

  He gagged, turned frantically, and was thoroughly sick in the ash barrel.

  The furnace room was suddenly full of movement then. Red wheeled, grabbed Jerry’s flashlight from his limp hand, whirled toward the kitchen. Mr. Kistler and Mr. Waller, too, leaped to look over his shoulder. They didn’t go in; they just peered around the edge of that quarter-open door, then backed away quickly.

  Their faces were pea-green, too, when they turned to us again.

  Mr. Kistler looked as if he wanted to be sick but wouldn’t be. The rest of us stared back at them. I don’t think we thought much; it was as if something in the air suspended both time and thought. Somewhere inside my head a ticker tape began running of its own volition, a tape that repeated incessantly: “What is it? What is it? What is it?”

  Then Mrs. Halloran began screaming steadily, one shrill shriek after the other. I went over to her, slapped her, pulled her away from the group to the foot of the stairs, where I pushed her down until she sat on a step. She began panting then, and the screams subsided into little blubbering noises: “Oh-hu. Oh-hu. Oh-hu.”

  Scared, I can remember thinking. I looked around to see what the others were doing. Red had gone over to Jerry and stood clapping him on the back. Miss Sands and Mrs. Waller walked over to stand near me at the foot of the steps. Mr. Grant and Mr. Buffingham were looking uncertainly from the door to Mr. Waller and Mr. Kistler.

  “My God almighty,” Mr. Waller was whispering over and over to himself, reverently.

  His wife whispered back, from beside me, “What is it, Joe? What is it?”

  “Her.” Mr. Waller’s voice answered tonelessly. “My God. Even her. Jesus.”

  “You mean she’s dead?” I whispered, too.

  For a moment there wasn’t any answer. Then Mr. Kistler said shortly:

  “Yeah. She’s dead. She’s dead, all right.”

  Mr. Waller came over to the stairs to sit beside Mrs. Halloran. Mrs. Waller held on to his shoulder.

  No longer sick, Jerry leaned against the furnace, glaring at Red.

  “If you ever let a peep out of you . . .”

  “Hell no.” Red avoided looking at him.

  “What a hell of a mess that was to walk in on. Well, I guess I know what a cop gets in for now, all right.” Jerry grinned around at us wryly. He stood a moment longer, hesitating as if he didn’t know what to do; then he squared his shoulders for action.

  “What do you say, Red? Gosh, we gotta put in a call! I’ll do it—you stay here by them.”

  He walked heavily toward the group of us at the foot of the stairs. Mr. Waller stood up to let him by; Mrs. Halloran was still weakly sobbing.

  Mr. Kistler handed Jerry his flashlight, and he started up the stairs, flashing it ahead of himself as he went, although it was half light in the room ahead, from the light in the hall. Halfway up he stumbled, fell back a couple of steps and stood there, lurching.

  “Get out!” he yelled. “Get out! Beat it!”

  We looked up. One of the cats was crouching at the top of the stairs, looking down, its eyes catching and reflecting the light from the flashlight. When Jerry yelled, it backed away, and he went up again, cursing steadily under his breath.

  We could hear his voice at the telephone above, but not what he said. We just stayed where we were, not saying anything, as if all our normal actions were stopped, as if on the outsides of ourselves a thick layer had been frozen by the horror in the air, and only a little warm life trickled through inside.

  “What is it? What is it? What is it?” My mind continued ticking from down in my stomach somewhere, where it had retreated for safety.

  Jerry had again regained his pose of imperturbable policeman when he returned to us.

  “They’ll be here in a minute. You folks go on upstairs now,” he ordered. “Red—”

  “Yeah.”

  “Think anybody ought to . . . ?”

  “Naw. What’s the use now?”

  Both policemen came upstairs with us. Right at our heels.

  We were all herded into my living room; we stood apart there, as if we might contaminate each other in that frozen silence. Mr. Kistler stood in the west bay, staring out the window. I walked over to him.

  “What is it? What’s so awful?” I whispered to him. “Was she—murdered?”

  “I don’t know,” he whispered back.

  “Then what is it? What is it?”

  “She must have been dead a long time,” he whispered, not looking at me. “You know. Cats.”

  8

  I SCREAMED THEN.

  Even telling about it, having to remember it, makes me feel sick. Most of the time, now, I can keep it pushed so far back in my mind that I’m safe against stumbling into it accidentally. But it was new then. For the first time in my life, I knew how deep horror could go.

  It’s a lot different—the horror you feel from just hearing about something loathsome or reading something horrifying, like Dracula. But this was horror that was right in my own life. It was right in the house with me. I wanted to cry and shriek and push away with my hands the pictures that jumped into my head. Hodge Kistler’s face was whirling in front of me like a pinwheel, and it seemed half an hour before the world got props under itself again and steadied down.

  Hodge Kistler was shaking me, and I just let myself be shaken, limp. There was a chair under me; I don’t know when that got there. For a while all I could do was wipe my forehead and the palms of my hands with my handkerchief; I never knew emotion could squeeze so much moisture out of me.

  It was a while before I got around to being interested in the other people. By that time Mr. Kistler was pounding me on the back. I don’t know why it is that men think pounding on the back is such a cure-all.

  I looked, then, to see if the others knew what I knew.

  No. Except for Mr. Waller and the two p
olicemen, they stood as wondering and separate as before, staring now at me; people of a different world, staring across the ocean of my knowledge. Only Mrs. Halloran was living in herself instead of in that outside fear and awe; her face was twisted into a whimper, a whimper that grew steadily stronger.

  “What is it?” Mrs. Waller whispered again dully, this time asking me.

  Mrs. Halloran burst into a scream.

  “Nobody tells me anything! It’s my aunt Hattie! She’s been murdered! That’s what she’s been! Nobody tells me anything!”

  Mr. Grant appealed soberly to Mr. Kistler.

  “Surely if Mrs. Dacres can be told, then the rest of us . . .”

  Mr. Kistler turned to where Jerry and Red stood at the door as if on guard. Jerry’s head nodded, almost imperceptibly; he was giving permission, but he didn’t want to be responsible for having given it. He was watching me; I had the impression he’d been cataloging every emotion I’d had when Hodge Kistler had told me.

  “You tell ’em, Jerry.”

  “Not me.”

  “Well,” Hodge Kistler said, “I don’t know why it should be me, but here goes.”

  He stood now at the side of my chair, hands in coat pockets, legs braced wide; only the two of us in the west bay; the others were halfway across the room or farther, as if we were speakers and they an audience. I could feel rising from them a wave of self-defense that still held eagerness, and fear. Mrs. Halloran, arrested in midwhisper, Mrs. Waller and Miss Sands, with faces frozen still, Mr. Grant, blinking, Mr. Buffingham, eyes alive in a dead face.

  Mr. Kistler’s voice came slow and low.

  “Prepare yourselves to be shocked. You especially, Mrs. Halloran. It’s worse than that she’s dead. It’s uglier than murder. It’s that the—the animals didn’t wait to be fed.”

  Even with the preparation they’d had, even with some of them, surely, guessing even if they didn’t want to acknowledge the guess, it hit them like a strong blow. Mr. Buffingham’s head jerked back; his face turned as red as fire. Mr. Grant’s face whitened; he sagged as he reached behind him toward the buffet for support. Miss Sands sucked in a long, wheezing breath before she seemed to stop breathing altogether; she stood as stiffly and blankly as if she were stone. Mrs. Waller turned yellow; her husband had had his arm at her back from the moment Mr. Kistler’s voice began; she crumpled, and Red kicked a chair toward her as he leaped to help Mr. Waller hold her; they got the chair under her as she came down. She didn’t faint, though; she moaned, turned her face to bury it in her husband’s coat.

  Mrs. Halloran was slow. She stupidly watched the others take it; when Mrs. Waller moaned the idea must finally have seeped into her mind, too, because she screamed once, a high-pitched, senseless cry, before her feet slipped out from under her. She went down so fast her head hit the floor, hard, before Jerry or Mr. Kistler could reach her.

  Jerry, I noticed, had been watching as much as I had, his eyes flickering quickly from one face to another.

  The two men lifted Mrs. Halloran to my studio couch, stretched her out flat. When Jerry began slapping her face I staggered out to the kitchen for a glass of water; the men gladly left her to me when I came back with it, Miss Sands stepping quietly forward to help me.

  Mrs. Halloran was less of a nuisance out than in; we should have left her alone. Conscious, she began the oh-hu business again, varied with little cries and gulping sobs. She was a stringy, scrawny woman—nothing describes her as well as those old-fashioned words—and frightfully unlovely lying there flat on my couch, with her pointed shoes sticking up in the air and her face blue under the cheap makeup.

  It wasn’t long after Mrs. Halloran revived that more police began turning up. We heard the first siren, a thin faraway whine crescendoing to a scream, abruptly stopped. Then another . . . another. Men in uniform stood around in groups to glare at us. Men not in uniform did the same. They stalked through my two rooms, which suddenly looked denuded of everything but people, and there were too many of them. Heavy feet pounded the stairs going down; heavy feet stamped in the furnace room below.

  But we heard no loud walking in that room under my kitchen. There, when it stepped, no foot was proud.

  Now so allied, the seven lodgers of that house and Mrs. Halloran, niece of that house, stood or sat, waiting. Mr. Kistler and Mr. Waller disappeared, reappeared again. Mrs. Waller kept to her dinette chair, her eyes glassy, her lips moving without expressing sound. Mr. Buffingham smoked steadily, leaning against the buffet and tapping ashes off on my floor. At one time I picked up a smoking stand, walked across the room to plank it squarely in front of him, but he didn’t seem to notice it, beyond jumping when I appeared before him. He was more haggard than ever; a damp forelock hung over his forehead; his lips puckered and unpuckered as if he were going to whistle, but changed his mind. Miss Sands and Mr. Grant cowered in corners.

  At one time a commotion began in the house, upstairs, downstairs. The dog barked loudly, and we looked at each other, sick.

  Suddenly a cat, with two policemen after her, darted from the hall into the room; it was the gray she-cat, now very heavy with her kittens, running fast and low, almost brushing along the floor.

  The women screamed; Miss Sands leaped on the gateleg table and stood yelling with her skirts tight around her knees; Mrs. Halloran sat up, crouching back against the wall, a hand protectively over her throat. I turned my back, but I knew when the men caught the snarling beast and took her away.

  After that there was just the previous disorder. The doorbell rang, was silent awhile, rang again. Mr. Kistler grinned wryly at the roomful of us.

  “Reporters,” he said.

  “Oh, my goodness,” I said. “Will the papers . . . will they tell . . . ?”

  “Don’t worry, Mrs. Dacres,” he said grimly. “It won’t make more than a three-inch obituary on page seven. How’d you like to come across the details of this delectable little yarn in the Comet, say at the breakfast table?”

  We looked sicker.

  “The chance of a lifetime,” he mourned. “In on the inside. Think what I could have made out of it as a freelance! And this is the sort of story it is! Phooey!”

  He turned his back on us abruptly to stare out the window.

  On the face of the white electric clock on my buffet, the hands slid leadenly past three o’clock, four o’clock.

  Night, I told myself. In other houses, people slept. Night, with a little moon shining down, still and white, on a dim, normal world just outside the windows of Mrs. Garr’s house.

  Shortly after four o’clock a tall man with thinning blond hair and a disillusioned face stepped back into the room. He was dressed in civilian clothes but carried an air of official authority.

  “I’m Lieutenant Strom. I’ll see you one at a time, please. In the room at the front of the house.” He glanced once around the room. “Who was it made the call to the office? Mr. Waller? Okay, you first, Waller.”

  Mr. Waller went out with him.

  Seven of us left now, with Red sitting by the door, on guard. Mr. Kistler once walked toward me, but Red stopped him.

  “No talkin’ in private.”

  Mrs. Halloran sobbed herself to sleep. The rest of us looked at her with envy; I was dead tired.

  Mr. Waller stayed in that front room until after five o’clock.

  Then Red took Mrs. Waller in. She stayed only ten or fifteen minutes; I heard her come out, join Mr. Waller in the hall, and the two of them go upstairs.

  Mr. Buffingham was the next called. It was well after six before he went upstairs. Mrs. Halloran was called then. We woke her up, wiped her face with a damp cloth, sent her in trembling so she could scarcely walk, supported as she was by Red.

  The rest of us began prowling then, too nervous to be quiet longer. My mind was too numb from the shocks of the night to work well. I wondered dully what the policemen were f
inding out.

  What had happened in that room below the stairs? When had Mrs. Garr died? Could Mr. Grant be right—had he seen Mrs. Garr coming home at eight thirty that Friday night? Now that we had Mrs. Halloran’s story, it seemed quite possible that he might have seen her. And what then? What had happened in that listening house?

  Had Mrs. Garr walked into her house, walked down the stairs to her dark kitchen, fallen there or had a heart attack, lain on that cement floor calling weakly for help, and slowly died?

  Or was there deeper terror in it? Friday was the night an assailant had leaped upon me. Had she come home, been seized in the dark and killed—choked—by the very hands that closed on my throat? But why? Was there some strange mystery in the house that killed . . .

  I didn’t think I could stand not knowing. I said loudly to Red at his doorway post:

  “Did she die naturally? Was she murdered? Can’t you tell us that much?”

  He shrugged.

  “No talkin’.”

  What did that mean? Did the police know, and not want us to know? Or didn’t they know themselves? Were they trying to break someone down? What was going on in the room at the front of the house? When one of us went in, would there be a break—a cry—a confession?

  I listened tensely, my ears quick, but I could distinguish no words, only the rumble of voices in their differing rhythms.

  It was daylight by that time; had long since been. Our faces looked unslept and indecent in clean morning light. A stubble came out on Mr. Kistler’s cheeks and chin; one minute, it seemed, it wasn’t there, the next it was.

  Jerry brought Mrs. Halloran back.

  “You’re next, Kistler.”

  Mr. Kistler went.

  Mrs. Halloran was sobbing wildly. Jerry eased her into the armchair and turned to me.

  “Okay if she stays here? She can’t go home, not in the state she’s in. Besides, she might get wanted again.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “Let her stay.”

  In a few minutes Mrs. Halloran was asleep; her head lolled back like a limp rag doll’s.