He seemed about to add more, then shut his mouth with an abrupt snap. When he spoke again, it was obvious he had bypassed whatever had been on his lips. “Would you care to sit down? I’m sure you have questions.”
“I do.” Somehow it came out more curtly than he had intended.
Reynard sighed and nodded slowly. He led the way deeper into the living room and gestured at a chair. Wharton sank deeply into it, and it seemed to gobble him up rather than give beneath him. Reynard sat next to the fireplace and dug for cigarettes. He offered them wordlessly to Wharton, and he shook his head.
He waited until Reynard lit his cigarette, then asked, “Just how did she die? Your letter didn’t say much.
Reynard blew out the match and threw it into the fireplace. It landed on one of the ebony iron fire-dogs, a carven gargoyle that stared at Wharton with toad’s eyes.
“She fell,” he said. “She was dusting in one of the other rooms, up along the eaves. We were planning to paint, and she said it would have to be well-dusted before we could begin. She had the ladder. It slipped.
Her neck was broken.” There was a clicking sound in his throat as he swallowed.
“She died – instantly?”
30
“Yes.” He lowered his head and placed a hand against his brow. “I was heartbroken.
The gargoyle leered at him, squat torso and flattened, sooty head. Its mouth was twisted upward in a weird, gleeful grin, and its eyes seemed turned inward at some private joke. Wharton looked away from it with an effort.
“I want to see where it happened.”
Reynard stubbed out his cigarette half-smoked. “You can’t.”
“I’m afraid I must,” Wharton said coldly. “After all, she was my…”
“It’s not that,” Reynard said. “The room has been partitioned off. That should have been done a long time ago.”
“If it’s just a matter of prising a few boards off a door…”
“You don’t understand. The room has been plastered off completely There’s nothing but a wall there.”
Wharton felt his gaze being pulled inexorably back to the fire-dog.
Damn the thing, what did it have to grin about?
“I can’t help it. I want to see the room.”
Reynard stood suddenly, towering over him. “Impossible.”
Wharton also stood. “I’m beginning to wonder if you don’t have something to hide in there,” he said quietly.
“Just what are you implying?”
Wharton shook his head a little dazedly. What was he implying? That perhaps Anthony Reynard had murdered his Sister in this Revolutionary War-vintage crypt? That there might be Something more sinister here than shadowy corners and hideous iron fire-dogs?
“I don’t know what I’m implying, ” he said slowly, “except that Janine was shoveled under in a hell of a hurry, and that you’re acting damn strange now.”
For moment the anger blazed brighter, and then it died away, leaving only hopelessness and dumb sorrow. “Leave me alone,” he mumbled.
“Please leave me alone, Mr. Wharton.”
“I can’t. I’ve got to know…”
The aged housekeeper appeared, her face thrusting from the shadowy cavern of the hall. “Supper’s ready, Mr. Reynard.”
“Thank you, Louise, but I’m not hungry. Perhaps Mr. Wharton…?”
Wharton shook his head.
“Very well, then. Perhaps we’ll have a bite later.”
“As you say, sir.” She turned to go. “Louise?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Come here a moment.”
Louise shuffled slowly back into the room, her loose tongue slopping wetly over her lips for a moment and then disappearing. “Sir?”
31
“Mr. Wharton seems to have some questions about his sister’s death.
Would you tell him all you know about it?”
“Yes, sir.” Her eyes glittered with alacrity. “She was dustin’, she was.
Dustin’ the East Room. Hot on paintin’ it, she was. Mr. Reynard here, I guess he wasn’t much interested, because…”
“Just get to the point, Louise,” Reynard said impatiently.
“No,” Wharton said. “Why wasn’t he much interested?”
Louise looked doubtfully from one to the other.
“Go ahead,” Reynard said tiredly. “He’ll find out in the village if he doesn’t up here.”
“Yes, sir.” Again he saw the glitter, caught the greedy purse of the loose flesh of her mouth as she prepared to impart the precious story.
“Mr. Reynard didn’t like no one goin’ in the East Room. Said it was dangerous.”
“Dangerous?”
“The floor,” she said. “The floor’s glass. It’s a mirror. The whole floor’s a mirror. ”
Wharton turned to Reynard, feeling dark blood suffuse his face. “You mean to tell me you let her go up on a ladder in a room with a glass floor?”
“The ladder had rubber grips,” Reynard began. “That wasn’t why…”
“You damned fool,” Wharton whispered. “You damned, bloody fool.”
“I tell you that wasn’t the reason!” Reynard shouted suddenly. “I loved your sister! No one is sorrier than I that she is dead! But I warned her!
God knows I warned her about that floor!”
Wharton was dimly aware of Louise staring greedily at them, storing up gossip like a squirrel stores up nuts. “Get her out of here,” he said thickly.
“Yes,” Reynard said. “Go see to supper.”
“Yes, sir.” Louise moved reluctantly toward the hall, and the shadows swallowed her.
“Now,” Wharton said quietly. “It seems to me that you have some explaining to do, Reynard. This whole thing sounds funny to me. Wasn’t there even an inquest?”
“No,” Reynard said. He slumped back into his chair suddenly, and he looked blindly into the darkness of the vaulted overhead ceiling. “They know around here about the – East Room.”
“And just what is there to know?” Wharton asked tightly
“The East Room is bad luck,” Reynard said. “Some people might even say it’s cursed.”
“Now listen,” Wharton said, his ill temper and unlaid grief building up like steam in a teakettle, “I’m not going to be put off, Reynard. Every word that comes out of your mouth makes me more determined to see 32
that room. Now are you going to agree to it or do I have to go down to that village and … ?”
“Please.” Something in the quiet hopelessness of the word made Wharton look up. Reynard looked directly into his eyes for the first time and they were haunted, haggard eyes. “Please, Mr. Wharton. Take my word that your sister died naturally and go away. I don’t want to see you die!” His voice rose to a wail. “I didn’t want to see anybody die!”
Wharton felt a quiet chill steal over him. His gaze skipped from the grinning fireplace gargoyle to the dusty, empty-eyed bust of Cicero in the corner to the strange wainscoting carvings. And a voice came from within him: Go away from here. A thousand living yet insentient eyes seemed to stare at him from the darkness, and again the voice spoke…
“Go away from here.”
Only this time it was Reynard.
“Go away from here,” he repeated. “Your sister is beyond caring and beyond revenge. I give you my word…”
“Damn your word!” Wharton said harshly. “I’m going down to the sheriff, Reynard. And if the sheriff won’t help me, I’ll go to the county commissioner. And if the county commissioner won’t help me…”
“Very well.” The words were like the faraway tolling of a churchyard bell.
“Come.”
Reynard led the way into the hall, down past the kitchen, the empty dining room with the chandelier catching and reflecting the last light of day, past the pantry, toward the blind plaster of the corridor’s end.
This is it, he thought, and suddenly there was a strange crawling in the pit of his stomach.
“I…” he began involuntarily.
“What?” Reynard asked, hope glittering in his eyes.
“Nothing.”
They stopped at the end of the hall, stopped in the twilight gloom.
There seemed to be no electric light. On the floor Wharton could see the still-damp plasterer’s trowel Reynard had used to wall up the doorway, and a straggling remnant of Poe’s “Black Cat” clanged through his mind: “I had walled the monster up within the tomb…”
Reynard handed the trowel to him blindly. “Do whatever you have to do, Wharton. I won’t be party to it. I wash my hands of it.”
Wharton watched him move off down the hall with misgivings, his hand opening and closing on the handle of the trowel. The faces of the Little-boy weathervane, the fire-dog gargoyle, the wizened housemaid all seemed to mix and mingle before him, all grinning at something he could not understand. Go away from here…
33
With a sudden bitter curse he attacked the wall, hacking into the soft, new plaster until the trowel scraped across the door of the East Room.
He dug away plaster until he could reach the doorknob. He twisted, then yanked on it until the veins stood out in his temples .
The plaster cracked, schismed, and finally split. The door swung ponderously open, shedding plaster like a dead skin.
Wharton stared into the shimmering quicksilver pool.