Blackwater - The House Part 4

But Frances didn't laugh and clung to her father more tightly still.

"Elinor," said Oscar, seeing that his daughter 55.really was frightened, "cain't we let her sleep with us?"

"No," said Elinor. "Then she'd want to sleep with us forever."

"I wouldn't!" protested Frances. "Just tonight!" "Then tomorrow night, then the night after that." "Your mama," said Oscar, "wants you in the front room, so I guess I'm just gone have to carry you up there."

Oscar did so, and laid her in the bed beneath the covers. He waggled the curtains to show her that no one was hiding behind them, ostentatiously knelt down on the floor and peered under the bed, opened the door of the pa.s.sage that led to Frances's own room where Queenie was already asleep, and rattled the k.n.o.b of the closet to show that it remained locked. He kissed Frances good-night and left the room. Snaking his hand back through the door, he pushed the b.u.t.ton that turned out the overhead light.

After her father had shut the door, Frances could no longer a.s.sure herself that the front room was connected with the rest of the house. She was cut off from her parents' protection; they would never hear her if she called. The front room was real enough but those doors no longer communicated with the house in which Elinor and Oscar Caskey lived. Those windows no longer looked out on the same familiar scene. Frances trembled now to think what unimaginable s.p.a.ce might lie behind those doors, what unexpected somber landscape might be imperfectly discerned through those windows. She lay rigidly in the bed, staring into the unsettling blackness, listening in a terrified stupor for something to begin shifting about inside the closet. Gradually her eyes became accustomed to the dark, and she faintly made out the room's objects as inky shadows against more blackness. The cast-iron chandelier above the foot of her bed was her point of reference. She stared-at it with concentration. It seemed to sway but there was 56.no air moving in the room. Frances balled herself up and burrowed beneath the covers. Her stifled breath was hot and Wet under the starched sheets.

Occasionally she heard creaks. Once she was startled by what sounded to her like a marble dropping to the floor and rolling a short distance.

Eventually she fell asleep. She must have, for Zad-die awakened her in the morning, pulling back the curtains on a dim overcast day. Frances felt the relief a man feels when he has narrowly escaped a terrible death, as when a pursuing animal is momentarily distracted and turns aside, forgetting his quarry.

"Y'all having breakfast out on the porch this morning, Frances," said Zaddie, kneeling at the side of the bed, and slipping on the child's socks for her.

"Zaddie, I'm hungry! Can I have three pieces of toast today?"

"You sure can! I tell you what, if you'll finish up your dressing, I'll go downstairs right this minute and put that bread in the oven."

"I can dress myself," said Frances. "You don't have to help me."

"I like to! You're my little girl!"

Frances hugged Zaddie. "Zaddie," she whispered, "I'm so glad you didn't go away to that college for colored people."

"Well, if I'd done that, who'd take care of my little girl? Sure not n.o.body in town loves you like I love you!" Zaddie laughed, and left Frances alone once again.

Frances made a little show of her morning bravery, witnessed only by herself. With no apparent hesitation she pulled open the door of the chifforobe and placed her folded nightclothes in the darkest corner of the bottom shelf. She went alone into the connecting pa.s.sage, actually shutting herself in, and took her time in selecting a fresh towel. Returning to the room, she dropped a pin so that she could lean down and peer, as if inadvertently, under the bed.

57.Perhaps, after all, the danger in the room had been no more than her imagination. Perhaps, after all, there was nothing to fear. Zaddie called her from the hallway. "Frances, toast's ready!"

Frances grinned to herself and looked around the room. As she was about to leave, glowing in her confidence, she decided to try to rid herself of her last piece of fear. She'd rattle the k.n.o.b of the locked closet door.

"Coming!" she called to Zaddie, and thinking only of the food she was about to eat, she ran across the room and turned the k.n.o.b of the closet door, waiting for that comforting rattle that would show her that whatever was inside-and there wasn't anything anyway-still couldn't get out at her.

But the k.n.o.b did not rattle. Instead it turned smoothly in her grasp, and the door swung open to reveal the vista of crowded fur and feathers, showing Frances that the danger all night long had been inestimably greater than she had imagined.

Somehow, during the night, the closet door had been unlocked.

Frances ran to her mother, and told Elinor-with all the firmness that she could muster-that she was never going to sleep in the front room again.

"Hush!" said Elinor. "Are you still going on about that room?"

Frances nodded dolefully.

"Did anything happen last night?"

"No," replied Frances in a hot whisper, kneeling on the swing and burying her face against her mother's neck. "But this morning when I got up the closet door was unlocked."

Elinor made no response to this.

Defensively, Frances cried: "You locked it yesterday afternoon, Mama! I saw you! Daddy jiggled the k.n.o.b last night and it was still locked! And when I got up this morning, it was un locked. Please let me sleep with you and Daddy tonight."

58.Elinor took her daughter to the front room, pulled on the handle of the closet door, and demonstrated that it was indeed still locked.

"Who locked it?" cried Frances, staring at the door in another agony of terror.

"No one!" cried Elinor. "It was never unlocked. You dreamed it, darling."

"I didn't!"

"You are worrying Oscar and me to death with this business, Frances. I don't want to hear it mentioned again. I want you to get it through your head that you are going to stay in this room until Queenie is well enough to go home, do you understand?"

"Yes, ma'am," replied Frances despairingly.

That night, Frances was summarily put between the covers, hastily kissed, and promptly abandoned to the darkness of the room and the infidel closet.

For the several weeks of Queenie's convalescence, Frances nightly went through her agony in the front room. One night her terror would perhaps be a bit less, and she would think, I'm getting used to it. Nothing's ever happened. The next night, however, her fear would be greater, and she would think, It's just waiting until I'm completely off my guard. Elinor did not repeat the experiment of trying the lock, but would merely say, "It's nonsense, Frances, complete nonsense. You know there's nothing in that closet anyway except my clothes and hats and shoes." During the day the door was always locked. It was only at night that the closet began to play its tricks. Then the door was sometimes locked, sometimes not. Every night, after Frances had lain in bed for a time without even thinking of trying to fall asleep, she would quietly rise and walk over and try the k.n.o.b. No matter which way she antic.i.p.ated, locked or unlocked, she was always wrong. As time pa.s.sed, she began to make a game of it, and would stand before the door and make a prediction as to whether the 59.k.n.o.b were locked or unlocked-whether it would turn cleanly, or jar in her hand. She always chose wrong.

She became accustomed even to this maddening pattern, and her bravery in attempting the door always seemed in her mind to defuse the real danger of the closet. After thus proving herself, she was allowed to sleep undisturbed for the remainder of the night.

One night, however, she awakened suddenly, borne up out of sleep with the presentiment that something was very wrong. The room was very dark, and the Viouse was quiet and still. She somehow knew that everyone in the house was asleep but her. Without thinking, she rose in the bed, kicked the pillows aside, and pulled open the drapes over the front window.

The room became less dark. Frances now could see the black outline of the closet door. She could see the bra.s.s k.n.o.b, gleaming a faint gold. She had locked the closet door herself. She was certain no one had come into the room to undo that brave piece of work.

If she tried the k.n.o.b now, however, would the door be locked?

She would pull on the k.n.o.b. If the door remained locked, then she'd be safe and could go back to sleep; if it were unlocked, then whatever was inside would jump out and kill her.

Frances prayed her usual ineffectual prayer and started to climb down from the bed.

A rectangle of light, white-blue and cold, suddenly gleamed around the closet door. It was bright enough to show the colors of the carpet fringe. The left-hand side of the rectangle of light began to grow wider; the other three sides remained the same narrow strips. After a moment of observing this merely as a phenomenon of geometrical progression, Frances realized that it was the result of the door of the closet slowly opening.

60.The hallway down the center of the second floor of the Caskey home was wide, with a long runner of dark blue carpet over the parquet floors. At one end was the door with stained gla.s.s leading to the narrow unscreened porch at the front of the house. At the other end was the landing and a great window, halfway between the first and second floors, looking out over the back yard and the levee. Frances fled down this corridor, desperate to cry out. The doors of all the other bedrooms were shut. She could scarcely believe that her parents were actually behind one of them, Queenie behind another, Lucille and Malcolm sleeping peacefully behind the third. She took, hold of the banister k.n.o.b at the top of the stairs and turned and looked back down the hallway. A whiteness, not like sunlight or lamplight or moonlight, now formed a rectangle-very like the first one around the closet door-around the front room door that she had pulled shut behind her. To be as bright as it was, the room must have been filled with the unnatural bluish-white illumination. Frances was certain that the closet door was opened full. Whatever had been inside the closet now completely possessed the front room. Perhaps it was looking under the bed for her, just as she had always checked under the bed for it. As Frances stared, transfixed, waiting for that door to open as the other one had only moments before, the refulgence began to seep out into the hallway like mist. By its light she could now make out the pattern of the wallpaper; she could see the lines in the parquet along the walls.

Frances dared not disturb her parents. She felt certain that the minute they stepped into the hallway the glow would somehow dissipate and she would be returned to the front room, chastised for her cries and her fear. She decided, therefore, to go downstairs to Zaddie, who slept in a small room off the kitchen. Zaddie would give her a blanket, and Frances would 61.roll up in it on the floor and be perfectly content. The light from the closet could do as it pleased.

It did not occur to Frances that whatever was in the front room might mean danger to anyone but herself. Whatever was in the closet, whatever caused the door to lock and unlock, whatever produced this misty light and now wandered about the front room, was interested in Frances alone.

She ran down the. stairs and paused on the landing. Behind the great window the night was still black. The water oaks were only ma.s.sive amorphous shadows. She couldn't see the levee. She turned once more to look back. The front room door had been thrown wide open, and the light poured out into the corridor, bleaching the colors there. The panes of colored gla.s.s in the porch door reflected the light in sickly hues.

Frances closed her eyes and convulsively grasped the banister, momentarily frozen to the spot, when with the sound of a great explosion, the staircase window behind her shattered. Thousands of shards of gla.s.s and splinters of wood showered down upon her, and Frances no longer held back her screams.

CHAPTER 33.

The Croker Sack

Elinor and Oscar were wakened immediately by the noise of the explosion and the screams of both Frances and Queenie. As Elinor rose in her bed, there was the sound of a gunshot, and the window of their bedroom shattered and a picture on the opposite wall crashed to the floor. The house seemed to be under fire from the direction of the levee.

"For G.o.d's sake Elinor, get down!" cried Oscar.

Elinor paid no attention. She leaped from the bed and ran out of the room, calling "Frances! Frances!"

There were more shots. Elinor heard windows breaking on the first floor. There were dull thumps as the bullets struck the side of the house. A window seemed to break somewhere inside the house, and Elinor heard Zaddie's scream.

Queenie stood in the doorway of her room, holding herself up weakly by the doorjamb. She had her thumb on the switch to turn on the hall light.

63."No!" cried Elinor. "Don't! They'll be able to see inside the house!"

"It must be Carl!" cried Queenie wildly.

A shot, aimed through the broken staircase window, whizzed down the corridor and smashed three panes of stained gla.s.s in the door at the opposite end.

"Mama?" said Malcolm tentatively. He and Lucille stood in the open doorway of the children's room, staring at the broken gla.s.s at their feet.

"Go back inside your room," said Elinor quickly. "Sit down on the floor and don't move."

The children hesitated.

"Now!"

Lucille and Malcolm retreated inside and slammed the door after them.

"Queenie, go back in and sit down in that chair in the corner. Don't get up no matter what."

"It's Carl," cried Queenie in desperation, "trying to kill us all!"

The shots, which had briefly stopped, resumed. Elinor stood upright against the doorway of her room. With resounding thumps, two bullets embedded themselves in the ceiling of the hallway.

"Frances!" she called.

"Mama?" The terrified voice came weakly from below.

"Where are you?"

"I'm on the stairs! I'm cut! The gla.s.s cut me!"

"Frances, don't turn on any lights. And don't try to come back upstairs."

"Miss El'nor!"

"Zaddie?"

"Yes, ma'am!" Zaddie called up.

"Zaddie, don't turn on any lights. Can you see Frances?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Zaddie, come get me," whispered Frances.

"Walk up the stairs and get her," said Elinor, "then 64.carry her down to the front hallway. Don't go near any windows."

"You want me to call the police, Miss El'nor?"

"No," replied Elinor, "Oscar's calling them now."

Oscar reached out from behind and put his hand on Elinor's shoulder. "I cain't get Mr. Key on the line. Are we sure it's Carl?"

"Who else is going to be firing bullets into the house, Oscar?"

"n.o.body else, I guess. Is everybody standing away from the windows, Elinor?" He whispered, as if by his voice, at such a distance, Carl Strickland would find them out.

"Lucille and Malcolm are in the children's room. They're safe-at least for now-because that's at the front of the house. Queenie's sitting in the corner chair in Frances's room. Some of the shots went through the screens, and that inside window is broken, but if Queenie sits still, she'll be all right."

"Where's Frances?"

"Downstairs with Zaddie. I told them to sit in the hallway. Frances got cut when the staircase window broke."

"Is she cut bad?"

"I don't know."

"Let me go call Dr. Benquith."

Oscar went back into the sitting room, which had no window open to the back of the house and the madman firing there, and telephoned Leo Benquith. He returned to the door, saying, "He's coming right over, but I told him to be careful, he should-"

Elinor was no longer there.

He called for her frantically.

"Hush!" she cried from the landing.

She was on her knees, inching her way across the gla.s.s-littered floor. Once past the danger of the exposed staircase window, Elinor got to her feet and descended the stairs. Broken gla.s.s crackled beneath her feet. "I'm going to see to Frances, Oscar! You 65.stay up there. Make sure Queenie and the children stay where they are!"

"Elinor, you shouldn't have left me!"

"Mama!" cried Frances. Regardless of the splinters and shards of gla.s.s, Elinor seated herself on the bottom step. She held out her arms to her daughter, and the child leaped into them.

"Frances, did anything get in your eyes? Can you see me?"