by side, holding hands were Roger and Marie Stanwyk, and when Bobby and
Sasha pulled aside the veils, I was proved correct.
For some reason, I surveyed the ceiling, half expecting to see five-inch
long, fat cocoons spun in the corners. None hung over us, of course. I
was getting my waking nightmares confused.
Struggling to resist a potentially crippling claustrophobia, I left the
room ahead of Bobby and Sasha, joining Roosevelt in the hallway, where I
was pleased though surprised to find there were Sun no walking dead
people with black silk hoods covering their cold white faces.
The next bedroom was no less gonzo Victorian than the rest of the house,
but the two bodies in the carved mahogany half-tester bed with white
muslin and lace hangings were in a more modern pose than Roger and Marie,
lying on their sides, face-to-face, embracing during their last moments
on this earth. We studied their alabaster profiles, but none of us
recognized them, and Bobby and I replaced the silks.
There was a television set in this room, too. The Stanwyks, for all
their love of distant and more genteel times, were typical TV-crazed
Americans, for which they were certainly dumber than they otherwise
would have been, as it is well known and probably proven that for every
television set in a house, each member of the family suffers a loss of
five IQ points. The embracing couple on the bed had chosen to expire to
a thousandth rerun of an ancient Star Trek episode. At the moment,
Captain Kirk was solemnly expounding upon his belief that compassion and
tolerance were as important to the evolution and survival of an
intelligent species as were eyesight and opposable thumbs, so I had to
resist the urge to switch the damn TV to the Nature Channel, where the
fox was eating the guts of a quail.
I didn’t want to judge these poor people, because I couldn’t know the
angst and physical suffering that had brought them to this end point,
but if I were becoming and so distraught as to believe that suicide was
the only answer, I would want to expire not while watching the products
of Empire Disney, not to an earnest documentary about the beauty of
nature’s bloodlust, not to the adventures of the starship Enterprise,
but to the eternal music of Beethoven, Johann Sebastian Bach, perhaps
Brahms, Mozart, or the rock of Chris Isaak would do, and do handsomely.
As you may perceive from my baroque ranting, by the time I returned to
the upstairs hall, with the body count currently at nine, my
claustrophobia was getting rapidly worse, my imagination was in full-on
hyperdrive, my longing for a handgun had intensified until it was almost
a sexual need, and my testicles had retracted into my groin.
I knew that we weren’t all going to get out of this house alive.
Christopher Snow knows things.
I knew.
I knew.
The next room was dark, and a quick check revealed that it was used to
store excess Victorian furniture and art objects. In two or three
seconds of light, I saw paintings, chairs and more chairs, a
column-front cellarette, terra-cotta figures, urns, a Chippendale-style
satinwood desk, a break front as if the Stanwyks’ ultimate intention had
been to wedge every room of the house so full that no human being could
fit inside, until the density and weight of the furnishings distorted
the very fabric of space-time, causing the house to implode out of our
century and into the more comforting age of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and
Lord Chesterfield.
Mungojerrie, to all appearances unaffected by this surfeit of death and
decor, was standing in the hallway, in the inconstant light that pulsed
through the open door of the final room, peering intently past that last
threshold. Then suddenly he became way too intent, His back was arched
and his hackles were raised, as if he were a witch’s familiar that had
just seen the devil himself rising from a bubbling cauldron.
Though gunless, I was not going to let Sasha go through another doorway
first, because I believed that whoever entered this next room in the
point position would be blown away or chopped like a celery stalk in a