The House That Jack Built (21 page)

    'You're sure he wasn't a squatter, or a trespasser? Or something worse? A realtor, maybe?'

    'I don't think so. He was much too elegant. I called out, but he looked right through me, as if I wasn't even there.'

    'Well…' said Pepper, hanging up an arrangement of dried thorns and weeds and mandrake roots, 'I've been to Valhalla, too, as Norman probably told you. I never heard anything and I never saw anything, but that place has absolutely the worst psychic atmosphere I ever encountered. Especially the ballroom, and some of the upstairs corridors. I sensed such dread there. I sensed such malevolence.'

    'But what is it?' Effie wanted to know. 'Is it haunted, is that it?'

    Pepper pursed her lips. 'By haunted you mean ghosts.'

    'I guess so.'

    'You don't really believe in ghosts, surely?'

    'I don't know. I didn't till last night.'

    'But now you're not so sure? Well, let me put your mind at rest. There are absolutely and irrefutably no such things. There are psychic vibrations, yes. There are very strong psychic vibrations; good and evil; and at some locations those psychic vibrations can make themselves felt so strongly that people can hear and see and even smell them. It can happen in houses, in hotels, or right out on the street. We call them a psychic nexus. There's a woman who lives over on Fair Street whose daughter died when she was just eight years old, and that little girl loved lilac. Every year, on her birthday, you can smell lilac flowers in the room where the little girl died. I've smelled them myself. That's not a ghost, though - that's a psychic vibration, and what you've been hearing and seeing, they're psychic vibrations, too.'

    'Are they dangerous?'

    Pepper made a see-sawing gesture with her hand, as if to say 'kind of'. 'They're not dangerous in themselves, no. But any psychic nexus is dangerous; just like any physical nexus is dangerous. Like, most of the time you can walk around on the Earth's surface and you're perfectly safe, right? But if you stand too close to a place where the surface is broken, like a volcano or a geyser or something like that, then you're taking a risk. It's the same with the psychic world, do you follow me? Most of the time, it's safe, but it has its ruptures, it has its fissures and its weaknesses where the psychic equivalent of molten lava or steam-heated water are liable to burst through.'

    'And that's what's happened at Valhalla?' asked Effie, although she didn't fully understand what Pepper was talking about. 'A kind of… bursting through?'

    'In a manner of speaking, yes. That's what I think, anyway.' She picked a small green bottle off the shelf. 'Do you see this stuff? Oil of Foxgloves. You get it by boiling down foxglove flowers. It's poison… witches used to use it in the seventeenth century to kill off babies born deformed. But it also contains digitalis, which doctors are still prescribing today to help cardiac patients.'

    'I'm not sure that I-'

    Pepper looked at her patiently. 'What I'm trying to tell you is that psychics and healers like me aren't fakes. We're not snake-oil sellers. What I'm trying to tell you is that I know what I'm talking about, okay? You heard a woman crying up at Valhalla and you want to know what you can possibly do about it. And my answer to you is: you can't do anything about it. She lives there, just the same as you're planning to live there, and I'm afraid that you and your less-than-polite lawyer of a husband are going to have to grow used to the idea.'

    'If she's not a ghost, I don't see how she can live there.'

    Pepper dusted and replaced another bottle. 'You see this? Flying ointment - eleoselenium, aconitum, frondes populeas, and soot. It's supposed to contain the fat of young children, too, but that doesn't meet federal requirements these days. Women used to rub it on themselves, hoping they would fly. Of course they never physically flew, but it used to penetrate any cuts or lice-bites they might have had, and get into their bloodstream, and at least two of the ingredients are strong hallucinogens. They may not have actually left the ground, but they sure thought that they were flying.'

    Effie said, 'Mrs. Moriarty… I don't want to be a nuisance, but I have to know what's happening at Valhalla, if I'm going to live there.'

    'It's Ms., not Mrs., and anyhow please call me Pepper.'

    'I'm sorry. But I'm genuinely frightened.'

    'Listen,' said Pepper, in a businesslike way. 'Everybody thinks that haunted houses are full of the souls of dead people, wandering around looking for revenge or lost opportunities or where the hell they left their glasses because they can't see to read The Heavenly Herald. But when you're dead, you're dead. You don't come back in any shape or form. I hate to tell people that, but I've been dabbling since Woodstock. I've tripped and I've tranced and I've ouija'd, I've done it all, and I'm very sensitive. But the dead are dead, believe me.'

    'So this sobbing woman… she's real?'

    Pepper briefly closed her eyes in assent. 'Yes. She's real.' Effie's mouth felt dry. She thought of Craig, waiting until she was asleep, and then sneaking off to meet - who? and how? And why did the woman sob like that?

    'If she's real,' she said, 'how come I can hear her but I can't see her?'

    'I thought you said you did see her.'

    'I'm not sure. It was only for a second.'

    Pepper put the last bottle back on the shelf, and then she laid her hand on Effie's shoulder. 'Come into the back. I'll brew us some tea. A friend of mine went to see his guru in Poona and sent me some wonderful Nilgiri. I also have some great cream cakes. They make them at the Riverview Bakery and I can't resist them. You'll put on five pounds just by looking at them.'

    Effie hesitated.

    'You do have time, don't you?' asked Pepper.

    'Well, sure, but this whole situation has left me really confused. I don't know why Craig's so set on buying Valhalla, and I don't know what you mean about this woman living there. I feel like I'm totally missing out on something somewhere.'

    Pepper led the way into a small back room with a hob and a kettle and more shelves crammed with herbs - betony, houndstongue, mugwort and spikenard - all the ingredients of the magic pantry, in blue ceramic jars with gilt lettering. One of the jars was marked 'Moriarty.'

    'I didn't know there was a herb called moriarty,' said Effie.

    'There isn't. That's blood root. It's the root of deception, so you always have to store it with a false name.'

    While the kettle boiled, Pepper led Effie into the garden at the rear of the store. They had to step over a monstrous grey cat sleeping in the open doorway. The garden was overgrown with wild flowers and it didn't look as if the grass had been cut all year. A cast-iron table and chairs stood beneath a gnarled old apple tree. Pepper spread a faded flower-patterned cloth over the table, and invited Effie to sit down.

    'What about the store?' asked Effie.

    'I hardly ever have stuff stolen,' said Pepper. 'The kind of people who come to the Hungry Moon leave their money on the counter if they can't find me. If somebody did steal something - well, it would probably be the worse for them. Every item in the store has been touched by centaury plants, and if a thief smells centaury he goes into mad delusions of terror.'

    'I'll make sure I don't take anything without paying for it, then,' said Effie. 'I think I'm having mad delusions of terror already.'

    'It's the vibrations,' Pepper told her, emphatically. 'Whatever happened in that house when Jack Belias was living there, it's soil happening.'

    Effie frowned. 'I read somewhere that if some really powerful emotional event occurs in a house, the walls can sort of absorb it, like a photograph.'

    Pepper shook her head. 'That's hooey. Walls are walls. You can't store an emotional event in a brick any more than you can store your voice in a jam jar.'

    'But these psychic vibrations… what can you do to get rid of them?'

    'What do you do when your tap leaks?'

    'Call for the plumber, I guess.'

    'So what do you do when your psychic vibrations are acting up? And don't say call for a vibrator.'

    For the first time since she had entered Valhalla yesterday evening, Effie laughed. She liked Pepper. She was one of the first matter-of-fact people that she had met since Craig had taken up international law, and she hadn't realised how much she missed the company of women who laughed, women who spoke their own minds, women who didn't give a shit for anything.

    The kettle whistled. Pepper stood up and said, 'Don't go away. When you need help with psychic vibrations, you need a psychic, and that's me.'

    

    

    Pepper closed up the Hungry Moon at six o'clock and they went across to the Old Post Inn for cocktails. The evening was warm and the sky was glazed in pale violet. Main

    Street was still busy with tourists and lights and slowly-creeping automobiles.

    They sat at a small corner table and Pepper ordered two Fish House punches: dark rum, cognac and peach brandy, with lime juice and plenty of sugar.

    'I drink this on purpose,' she said, lifting her glass, her eyes shining silver in the light from the tablelamp. 'The Fish House in Schuylkill was the first men's dub in America, and this was their special tipple. Another bastion falls.'

    'This is going to knock me out,' said Effie, sniffing her drink as if it were hemlock.

    'That's the general idea,' Pepper replied, and clinked glasses with her. 'Here's to psychic harmony: and you; and that poor sobbing woman, whoever she is.'

    They drank for a while without talking. During the afternoon, they had grown to like each other more and more, in spite of the radical differences in their backgrounds and their politics and their points of view. Effie found that Pepper was convincing, direct and immensely liberating. She believed that everybody had a spirit life. She believed in souls. She believed, too, that the natural world was teeming with energy that anybody could harness, and use to their own benefit, if only they weren't so cynical. But she didn't subscribe to the conventional ideas of spiritualism or faith-healing. 'If I was a ghost, and some old biddy asked me, "Is anybody there?'' I'd tell her to stick her crystal ball where she didn't need Ray-Bans.'

    But she still hadn't explained who or what the sobbing woman could be: at least, not in any way that Effie could understand it.

    'I'll tell you the truth, Effie,' she said, leaning back in her chair, and crossing one booted foot over her knee. 'And the truth is that I don't honestly know. There are no ghosts, okay? But I don't really understand this crying, and I don't understand this man you said you saw.'

    Effie had half-finished her punch and she was already feeling more than a little unreal.

    Pepper said, 'Why don't I come up to Valhalla and give it another look? I'll bring some hazel twigs and some salt and we'll see what's what. Hazel twigs for sensing the psychic vibrations: it's just like water-divining. Salt for keeping off evil.'

    Effie looked down at her drink. She liked Pepper, but she really doubted that she could give her any serious help, especially with divining-rods and magic remedies. All the same, what else could she do? Call the police, and have them search Valhalla for squatters? Search it herself? Or simply pretend that she couldn't hear anything at all - that the woman's sobbing was imaginary, the first delusions of an early menopause?

    Pepper said, 'How about the day after tomorrow? That's if you can square it with Big Chief Craig.'

    'Craig's going back to the city tomorrow morning. He has some business to settle up. He said he'll be gone for only two or three days at the most.'

    'Then maybe we can exorcise your sobbing woman and your dark-haired man before he gets back.'

    'Well… I don't know. Craig's very possessive when it comes to Valhalla. He says it's not just a house, it's like him. It's like a map of his whole personality.'

    'He really feels that way?' Pepper frowned.

    'It's changed him, completely. After his accident he was very withdrawn, he had no confidence at all. He was mugged, if you want to know the truth, and very badly hurt, and it kind of disintegrated his ego. There were times when he could hardly feed himself. But as soon as he saw Valhalla, he changed. He started talking about giving up his law partnership. He started talking about rebuilding the roof, and gutting the kitchens, and laying out the grounds. It was just as if somebody gave him a shot of something.'

    'So how do you feel about it?' asked Pepper.

    'Buying Valhalla? Not totally committed. I guess I could learn to get used to it. But I'm not totally committed, the way that Craig is. I'm not obsessed.'

    'Tell the truth,' said Pepper. She didn't blink once. She didn't raise her voice. Effie knew that she had found her out.

    'All right,' Effie quivered. 'At first I didn't like Valhalla. Now I hate it. It frightens me, because it's going to eat up all our savings and all of our investments, and nobody will ever want to buy it from us because people don't buy thirteen-bedroom mansions on the Hudson any more, do they? Except for Craig.'

    Pepper gave her a slow, soft handclap. 'So don't buy it,' she said.

    'It's what he wants. He's so determined.'

    'It's your life, too.'

    'Yes, exactly. It's my life, too, and I want Craig in my life. I want him the way he used to be, before he became a hot-shot lawyer, and started treating me like a geisha. I want him the way he used to be, before he was mugged. Valhalla's given him some of that back. I hate Valhalla, I really, really hate it, and it scares me to death. But I'm not going to lose my husband to some sobbing woman, and I'm not going to lose him to a house.'