The Listening House Read online

  But I didn’t know that then, either.

  * * *

  —

  THE LOCK ON THE double door didn’t look difficult enough to me, and the key looked too much like the old-fashioned skeleton key that would unlock any door. But by experimenting, I found I could hook the dinette chairs under the knobs; the doors couldn’t open then without heavy pressure and a lot of clatter. The two doors in the kitchen seemed as tight as Mrs. Garr said they were. I wanted to be barricaded until I had the lay of the land.

  With that settled, I went to sleep.

  I slept hard.

  It must have been nearly midnight when I woke, with cramped muscles, to stretch lightly and turn over.

  Seeping in came the thought of strangeness. Strange bed. Strange house. I must have been lying there for fifteen minutes, listening.

  Not hearing for anything specific, just listening. A creak here. A drip there.

  My room wasn’t dark at all; there’s a streetlight at the corner of Sixteenth and Trent, so the place was filled with that visionless yellow light streetlamps make in a room at a distance. I lay staring up through the yellow haze at the just-visible stains on the ceiling.

  Creak . . . crack . . . stir. Not a single active sound. Just tiny noises such as a house makes at night. Not even that much. Less noise than a house makes at night. As little noise as a house might make if it were holding itself tensely awake in the dark, listening.

  “Cut it out,” I said to myself. “You’ll be going utsnay, too.”

  Creak . . . crack . . . settle . . . stir. A whole house lying awake in stealth, waiting, listening. Listening, waiting.

  For what? For stealthy feet creeping, for stealthy hands groping . . .

  I sat up with a jerk and pushed the light button by the head of the studio couch I slept on. Of all the silly nonsense! I’d never gone in for ideas such as this before.

  I’d left a pile of magazines on the floor; I padded over for one on my bare feet, padded back to bed, pulled my bathrobe around my April-chilled shoulders.

  I hadn’t any more than begun on a story than there were three little ghost raps on my door. That had me sitting up, breathless.

  “Who is it?” I asked hoarsely.

  “It’s me, Mrs. Garr,” the whisper came back. “You sick or anything?”

  My breath came back with such a rush it knocked me limp. This really was the limit.

  “No, I’m not,” I said loudly and clearly. “I woke up, couldn’t sleep, felt like reading. Isn’t that all right?”

  “It’s near two o’clock,” she muttered, receding. I heard her slithering back into the room under the stairs where she slept; I’d seen a cot there.

  I was so jumpy, I read down into the middle of the story without knowing who the characters were or what they were doing. I started over and was maybe three paragraphs along when I heard the house front door open and heavy steps in the hall.

  “It’s me, Mrs. Garr,” a man’s voice said thickly. He wasn’t steering well, because he bumped against the wall before stumbling upstairs.

  Just a good old-fashioned drunk, but even that was reassuring. I got up, reinspected my doors, and said to myself, “No one can get in here. And if the house is listening, let it listen. There’s no harm in a house listening if it wants to. You’re going to think this damn silly in the morning.”

  I calmed down finally and went to sleep.

  But I was sure the house or something was listening to every breath I took.

  * * *

  —

  I WOKE UP EXPECTING to laugh, but all I got out was a feeble grin.

  After I was up and about, my imaginings of the night before did seem a bit ridiculous, but while I was still in bed, with the house quiet and the sunlight streaming in, I could still feel the house listening. Walter de la Mare, who wrote that poem called “The Listeners,” should have slept in that house once. He’d have had something to write about.

  I heard, finally, sounds of people stirring above me. Perhaps it was a house so well, so heavily built that it deadened sound, but even now, thinking back, I can’t remember ever having heard a loud, sharp sound in that house; I can’t remember anyone or anything that succeeded in filling that house with sound. It was a subduing house; it muffled steps and voices, it muffled even the roaring voices of policemen.

  But on that morning, I still did not know any policemen.

  I got out of bed as quickly as everyone else in the house seemed to be getting out of bed, unhooked my chairs, flung open my doors. There wasn’t a soul in the hall.

  After I’d had toast and coffee I kept close to those double doors while I worked about the living room. I was going to look over the inhabitants of that house. If they were suspicious, I’d move. I didn’t want to get into anything.

  I saw all the boarders through the morning.

  My first catch was a thin woman with dyed black hair and a thin, rouged face; a woman with the pitifully well-pressed afternoon dress, the tired, artificial sprightliness of a saleswoman straining at her job.

  It was easy to place her as Miss Sands. I knew that type well enough, at Tellier’s.

  She hurried past me without nodding, although I said, “Good morning,” at her pleasantly and clearly.

  Sounds in the room under the stairs announced that Mrs. Garr was rising. Barks and cat cries below announced that she was joining pets in the cellar. Mrs. Garr’s voice soon rose from there, too. She was berating someone soundly as a lazy good-for-nothing. She could get up early in the morning, but not Mrs. Tewman, oh no, not Mrs. Tewman; Mrs. Tewman had to lie abed while the gentlemen didn’t get their rooms done. Mrs. Tewman, oh no, not Mrs. Tewman; Mrs. Tewman had stayed dirty; here it was Friday with all the halls to be done, and all the stairs to be done, and what was Mrs. Tewman doing? She was looking at pitchers in the paper. The shrill old voice went on and on.

  Well, toward nine a mousey old gentleman in a gray suit slipped quietly down from upstairs.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  He stopped, as if startled.

  “Good morning, good morning,” he replied in a dry, brisk voice before hurrying on as if I were chasing him out.

  I couldn’t imagine a policeman being that small; that would have to be the other retired gentleman: Mr. Grant. Heaven knew, he looked innocuous enough.

  At midmorning a sullen, black-haired woman—French Canadian, I guessed—slumped up the cellar stairs and on to the second floor, a pail, scouring powder, brushes, and very dirty cleaning rags in tow; that, I guessed, was Mrs. Tewman, finally released to her work from the scolding below.

  She stared straight at me but, like Miss Sands, did not reply to my greeting. On the stairs she passed another woman who was coming down; a dark woman with a faint, silky black mustache, a woman so fat she lunged a little from side to side as she moved, so fat her sides and thighs were pendulous, as well as her breasts.

  The fat woman was dressed decently in black.

  She answered, “Good morning,” shortly.

  Mrs. Waller, without doubt. She hung around in the hall until she was joined by a man in his early forties, ponderous, slow-moving, red-faced. That must be the ex-policeman, then. I wondered a little at his age. Were policemen retired so young?

  It wasn’t until nearly noon that the other two men came along. They came downstairs one behind the other, but they weren’t, I thought, together. I wondered which one had come in drunk the night before, or if that had been Mr. Waller. The man ahead came down quickly and lightly; he wore a slouch hat pulled down over his eyes and a light topcoat; he was heavily, stockily built. He looked me over with funny round brown eyes over a nose that was just slightly pug.

  “Hello and welcome!” he said before I’d said anything; the first one who’d done so.

  The man behind just grunted; all I could see of him as he hurr
ied past was that he was older, tall, and dark, with a strongly featured face almost as sullen as Mrs. Tewman’s.

  It wasn’t until a week later that I knew which one was Mr. Buff’nim and which one Mr. Kistler.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER A DAY SPENT scrubbing, I treated myself to a dinner in one of the small restaurants below the capitol. It was dusk when I’d fumbled with the unfamiliar lock and landed in the dim hall; the minute I was inside a dark body pelted at me.

  “Get down!” I said, making it good and loud.

  What had come at me was a dog. If rooming-house keepers are going to have dogs, they should introduce them to their paying guests before the paying guests are jumped on.

  The surly dog got down, but he growled, backing away from me and showing his teeth as I pushed down the hall. There was a flurry in the dark room under the stairs, a light snapped on there, and Mrs. Garr rushed out, panting.

  “Rover, Rover, nice Rover, don’t growl at the nice lady. That’s my dog, Mis’ Dacres. Rover, his name is. I was down cellar. I usually keep ’em locked in, but I guess the door got left open.”

  “I guess it must have.” I didn’t like Rover much better seen than unseen. He was a big, hulking brute of a dog; he was about the size of a police dog, but built to be heavier if he hadn’t been so thin. He was covered with short black hair that was a coarse imitation of sealskin.

  I immediately recalled a nightmare I’d had at the age of eleven after reading a tale about werewolves. He had that narrow, grinning muzzle.

  He stood at bay, staring at me still, when two big black-and-white tomcats, followed by the gray female cat, came slinking out of the room, too, to flatten against the wall and look me over with tilted eyes.

  “My gracious, you have a family!” I couldn’t say I liked it.

  “They’re the best friends I got,” Mrs. Garr snapped. She stooped, picked up one of the tomcats, held him awkwardly dangling against her bosom. Her voice pitched higher, as if she wanted someone at a distance to hear. “You don’t catch them coming around asking for money, money, money all the time, asking for help all the time, always this, always that, bad times, can’t get work—”

  The door of the front parlor jerked open.

  “Did I hear you speaking, Auntie?” asked a saccharine voice.

  The owner of the voice teetered into the hall.

  “Mis’ Dacres, I make you acquainted with Mis’ Hall’ran. She’s my niece.” Mrs. Garr’s voice was heavy with contempt.

  Looking at Mrs. Halloran, I thought immediately of Dickens’ Mrs. Micawber as she would be if played by ZaSu Pitts. Mrs. Halloran wore a yellow-green felt hat, pushed far back on a frazzled finger wave; her dress was blue-green rayon crepe with a white lace collar, limp and long unwashed. Her rayon stockings were twisted, her black patent heels tipped to the side, but overall she was dreamily elegant.

  “So pleased to meet ya.” She smiled impressively.

  “I was tellin’ Mis’ Dacres,” Mrs. Garr repeated for emphasis, “how a man’s best friend is his dog. And his cats. They don’t come asking for money, money. All the time money, money, money.”

  Mrs. Halloran’s fingers twitched at a crystal bead necklace.

  “Oh, but not like your own kith and kin, wouldn’t you say, Mis’ Dacres? Not like your own flesh and blood.” She bore heavily on the kith, the kin, the flesh, and the blood.

  “Some kiths and kins is worse than gangsters. Oh, I could tell you about kiths and kins,” Mrs. Garr pursued bitterly. “Especially when they marry themselves to no-good drunken bums, that’s who they get married to, and get a pack of bawling chillern, that’s what they get.”

  I excused myself and escaped. Unnoticed, I think.

  As I made up my studio couch for the night I could not help learning, through the double doors, that Mr. Halloran was a bum, and where was the ten thousand dollars he got on his completely disabled insurance from the gov’ment? Where was the bonus money he got from the gov’ment? So, she had to come to her poor old auntie, working her fingers to the bone, while they lived high, they lived handsome, they went to movies, they went to taverns, they bought a Packard, that’s what they bought, and went out and wrecked it drunk, and where was it now?

  At this point the argument must have adjourned behind a closed door, thank goodness.

  I inspected my barricades, put out my light, and went to bed.

  I thought that after a whole day spent in the house, after seeing how commonplace it was, I’d spend a quiet night.

  But the same thing happened as the night before. At midnight, or shortly after, I woke again feeling tense, not of my own ears hearing sounds, but of other ears listening, of the house listening. Again I lay awake, staring upward through the misty dark, not afraid so much as waiting, waiting for something that did not happen that night, nor the next, nor the next. For I did the same thing every night: woke at least enough to recognize the awareness, to know it was there again, before increasing familiarity allowed me to sleep in spite of it.

  It wasn’t long before I knew the routine of the house, by day. Mrs. Garr rotated from the davenport in her parlor at the front of the house, where she was seldom, to the black chair in the hall, where she was slightly more often, to the basement, where she spent most of her time. After I had been down there with my boxes of wrappings, I knew she had a table and rocking chair down there by the furnace.

  She didn’t read, didn’t knit, didn’t sew; I could sometimes hear her rocker creaking on the cement floor an entire afternoon. That’s how I came to picture her, as an evil-eyed old woman with lovely white hair, sitting there doing nothing, with the three big cats sitting on her lap or rubbing against her chair, and the black dog parked alongside.

  But the rest of the household was reasonably respectable. If that gentlemanly Mr. Grant, for instance, lived here by choice, then I should be able to stand it, considering that I’d have to pay almost twice for what I was getting, anywhere else.

  That, I remember, was my attitude the first week. The Friday I had been there a week I woke early; the April morning was lovely, and the air streaming in my windows smelled sunny and as fresh as Easter tulips. I wandered outdoors, after I’d dressed, to get more of that air. The house I left behind me was still quiet, but the morning outside crackled with spring growth. I walked across the paved court at the back of the house to stand at the railing and look down.

  It had rained in the night and, as happens once in almost every April, the twelve hours since yesterday seemed to have brought us suddenly into spring. The plots of earth between the houses below were green for sure now: that lovely, sunny, tender green of spring.

  Green even showed beneath the straggly brown stalks of last year’s weeds at the foot of the concrete drop. The inhabitants of Water Street threw refuse there: paper, tins, boxes, rusted iron.

  Someone had even thrown a heap of old clothes out there.

  A heap of clothes.

  I found myself leaning perilously far out over the guardrail.

  Not a heap of old clothes. For a moment I clung dizzily to the rail.

  A head with dark hair, arms outflung, feet . . .

  A man, a man twisted and motionless in a position that could only mean death, lay facedown in the weeds of Water Street, straight below where I stood.

  3

  A MAN, A DEAD man, sixty feet below me!

  As if the rail had pushed at me, I jumped for the house.

  “Mrs. Garr,” I cried, speeding through my rooms. “There’s someone lying at the foot of the drop! In the weeds! He looks dead. We’ve got to call a doctor, call the police! How do you get ’em? How do you get the police?”

  I fumbled dazedly with the phone book, trying to get the operator. Mrs. Garr stumbled out of her room in a short white nightgown, just as she had come from her bed.

  “You can’t call w
ithout a nickel!” she screamed at my incompetence.

  I sped back for a nickel; it seemed minutes before my fingers could pick one from the inside pocket of my handbag.

  The operator switched me quickly to the police.

  “There’s someone lying in the weeds, the weeds down below on Water Street,” I babbled. “He looks dead. It’s a man.”

  “Who is it?” the big voice at the other end of the wire asked calmly.

  “I don’t know. I just saw it lying there.”

  “Where is it? Where you calling from?”

  “Five ninety-three Trent Street. Oh, hurry, hurry!”

  “Right there!”

  The receiver clicked.

  “What should we do?” I continued into the unhearing phone. “What should we do now?”

  “We could go on down there.” There was a greedy light in Mrs. Garr’s eyes. She turned back into the room under the stairs for a bathrobe, then, still in her bare feet, padded through my rooms and across the back court to the guardrail, to peer avidly over.

  The scene below was just as it had been. Heap of clothes in last year’s weeds.

  “It’s a sure thing it’s a man lyin’ down there,” Mrs. Garr cried back to me. “There’s been illegal dealings down below in one of them houses; I’ll bet that’s what it is. Some fella stuck a knife in him and dumped him—Here they come!”

  It was no longer than that before the siren wailed, far off, then near. I ran around the house to intercept the two policemen at the front door.

  “Did you call up about a—”

  “Yes, I did,” I said breathlessly. “Come around the back. You can see—”

  I ran back; the two officers walked after, their longer legs keeping pace.

  “Right down there, Off’cer, right down there,” Mrs. Garr screamed, pointing.

  The two men looked once, then ran back to their car. The car slung off, leaving Mrs. Garr and me at the rail alone, but not for long. People began popping out of my back door. First the man I had guessed was Mr. Waller, elbowing into a bathrobe, his slippers flapping.