Chloe glanced to the top of the big house. The widow’s walk was like a perch for a caged bird. Lana still had not moved even as Chloe stood in front of her, smiling and giving introductions. Lana’s gaze rested on Jeff, who stood farther back, near the Jeep. The gulf that existed between Jeff and Chloe was shockingly evident at times.
“So why do they stay together?” Lana whispered.
“Excuse me?” Chloe had been telling the retired actress—lying to her—about how lovely she thought the big house was.
Lana reversed her gaze back to Chloe. “I’ve set some tea for us on the porch. I thought you might like some after your long trip.”
“That would be nice. Thank you.”
“Let’s not let it get cold, then.” Lana turned, movement at last, and slowly made her way up stone-and-wood steps to the porch. Chloe followed. Jeff came last, hands in pockets.
The wind was growing stronger now. There was no humidity in it. It slapped at their faces. The treeless heights on which the big house sat did nothing to keep the abuse from them. The woods only began near the cottage.
“It’s very quiet here,” Chloe said as they climbed.
“Disturbingly so sometimes. I refuse to hang chimes of any kind. The wind would shake them useless, I’m afraid, and keep me wide awake.”
As they climbed, Chloe noticed the house looked less foreboding with each step. Instead, it became desolate and pleading. Paint chipped from its sides like leaves from a tree. The wind shook the windows in their frames so that the house seemed to shake and sigh in despair. To one side of the house was what, at one time, must have been a stunning piece of garden and yard. It was now grown over, though. Thick vines and an army of weeds would not give back the statuary and walkway. There was a fatigued beauty to the scene. It expressed a rotted class. Above it, as was the case all around, the sky was a blighted white, and where it met the sea, there was an indifferent fusion.
The place settings at the table were meticulous and lovely. They were like ornaments from a different, wealthier dollhouse. The china gleamed as Lana Pruitt poured Chloe and Jeff each a cup of tea, then one for herself. There was a tray of sugar cookies in the center of the table. They would not be touched, however. And there were no napkins. The wind that circled the big house forbade them.
Chloe saw a rifle leaning against the house by the door.
“Don’t worry,” Lana said. “That’s not for you. It’s for all the damn nuisances that crawl up the hill.”
“Nuisances?”
“Pests.” Lana said no more about it. She took a sip of her tea.
After a few moments of dangerous silence, but for the wind and the water down below as it crashed on the rocks, Chloe couldn’t take it anymore. Silence was intent on driving her mad today. “It’s a lovely day… a lovely place.”
“Don’t invite me to the cottage,” Lana said. It was blunt, but not mean.
“What? I didn’t mean—”
“I won’t come. I haven’t been past the tree line on the hill in years. I’ve never set foot in the cottage and I don’t intend to.”
Chloe looked at Jeff. He seemed undisturbed by the actress, but he was studying her. As if she wasn’t real and he was looking for a trick to the illusion.
“Never? But there are pictures…”
Lana gave her a suddenly interested glare.
“Old pictures of you and…”
“Oh, those.” The actress waved her hand dismissively. “My husband spent a lot of time in the little place with my daughter.” She stopped and quickly took another sip of tea. “He fixed it up for her. You know, like a playhouse.”
“Quite a playhouse.” It was the first thing Jeff had said.
Lana made a gesture as if swatting away the conversation. “Other things,” she said. “There are other things you should know about the cottage.”
Shadows
, Chloe wanted to say.
Are there shadows?
But she said nothing. She wanted to believe that it was simply nerves for just a little bit longer so that all her plans would not be for naught.
Lana continued. “The barn out back is very old. Maybe too old. It might need to be demolished altogether. There’s a well in front of it. I think there is a stone that covers its mouth now, but just know it’s there. Be careful.” She looked at Jeff. It was a strange look of warning.
“I’ll never need the place,” Chloe said. “The barn, I mean. That’s Jeff’s domain if he wants to do something with it.”
Lana’s eyes flicked back to Chloe. “Be careful.”
The tea was finished soon after, but not nearly soon enough for Chloe. Jeff looked back at the actress as they descended the steps. Chloe chose to keep looking straight ahead. Neither of them spoke until they were in the Jeep.
“What a strange woman, don’t you think?” Chloe finally spoke. “What an odd woman.”
***
Lana stood in front of the tea table, one arm wrapped around a porch pole. She watched the new cottage owners drive back down the hill. She knew they were still watching her in their mirrors. That was good. As long as they watched, as long as they kept an eye out, they might be okay. There was nothing more Lana could do for them. That cottage was bad luck, and she felt a twinge of guilt for selling it to them. They seemed like nice enough people.
She walked back into the big house. She’d remember to bring the china in later. She could have hired help for that. There was more than enough money. But then that would mean company, wouldn’t it? That would mean attempted conversations and questions. And besides that annoyance, no one would ever agree to stay in the house once they heard the wind on a cold night.
The big house—Clemson it was called when they bought it, though she never referred to it by name—was furnished with strange antiques that at one time had looked beautiful to Lana. Tall chairs with thin backs and tables with claws. Now they looked beaten and even menacing. She refused to touch many of them. The wood was too dark. It seemed to get darker as the years went by and, in turn, darkened the house. Perhaps she could sell all of it and refurnish with simpler things. Things with straight lines and unimaginative curves that didn’t beckon to the past. Or perhaps she wouldn’t refurnish the place at all.
How many years had it been since her husband, Michael (surname of Kinsar, though Lana never took it), had left her? How many years since their little girl, Rebecca, had fallen off the cliff? It had all happened soon after they had moved to the big house. The story Michael had told her about that day Rebecca fell had given her chills for years to come. Mad, quaking chills. And then he left too, without a word or a note, that very same year.
The actress wandered—for that was all she did these days: wander and wonder—into her small library, which was no more than a sitting room filled with large books. There was a dusty pink sofa for her to recline on that had been brought up from town in the days she went there. The sofa had originally been part of Rebecca’s bedroom furnishings, but Lana brought it into the library after Rebecca had died. She did it herself, pulling it down the stairs against its will. It did not match the other humorless furnishings of the library, but that didn’t really matter. No one else ever saw the room.
Lana sat at one of the tables she had declawed and thumbed through a large leather-bound book, a very special book and the only thing in her house she regarded with any importance. Her fingers tingled at the touch of its ancient pages, its obscure script. When she first started the library, she was looking for answers. Now she only searched this one book looking for peace.
***
On that first night, it was the fiddling that woke her. Or, at least, the remaining echoes of a dream fiddle. At first, Chloe could have sworn it was more distant than a dream. The tune was something fast and amateurish. Something in the trees and speeding, racing through the night air around the cottage and then fading back. Back. Back to where?
Jeff was asleep beside her. His chest rose and fell with each heavy breath. He had once slept through an earthquake on a Peruvian adventure tour they had led together, the trip right before all the troubles began. They did not touch at night while they slept anymore. There was an invisible line down the center of the bed. Chloe felt it every night. It felt like his body heat. It roasted her.
She lay still for a few minutes, wide awake. These were their sheets on this strange bed, but it still did not feel like home. Home seemed a foreign concept now.
Finally, she rose and walked to the kitchen. On nights like this, Chloe was inclined to browse the Internet. Maybe even chat with some friends. But the cottage had yet to provide Internet services and so her laptop lay closed on the kitchen counter.
She flipped on the light in the helplessly outdated kitchen, searched through a box for her favorite mug and some green tea, and warmed some water up in a saucepan on the antiquated stove. The floor made a ruckus below her as she went from one corner of the room to another. The wood floor, stained by decades of dropped food, gave a louder moan than any other floor in the old cottage. It was a moan that stretched clear across the room. It reached and pleaded. Chloe felt it almost as if it were a pulse beneath her feet. Very old things and very new things, she thought, sounded similar in their whines and wants.
Once the tea was done, she stirred it slowly as she leaned against the counter. Tomorrow she’d start anew. Tomorrow would be the day today was supposed to be. She would begin to repair things, both in the cottage and in her and Jeff’s relationship. She took a deep breath and then a small sip. Then she quickly looked toward the kitchen doorway.
Just another trick of the eye
, she assured herself.
No one is there. You just
want
someone to be there.
The Couple in the Cottage
Jeff walked to the barn with the first real sense of purpose he’d felt since arriving on Bad Luck Hill. It had been a couple of days, and most of their things were unpacked. That did not feel like purpose to him. Unpacking was mindless. Pick something up. Put it over there. That was it. They had very little of their own furniture, having never really invested in any because neither of them were home very much due to the adventure tourism business. Thankfully, that was not an issue here. The cottage was nicely furnished, if with a style neither Jeff nor Chloe would have ever chosen. Rather, it was something akin to Antique Funereal.
The first evening had been awkward, mirroring the year in that way. But Jeff pushed through it. The house groaned so much while they lay in bed it woke him up a few times. He wondered if Chloe got any sleep at all that first night. Every time he woke up, he could hear her stricken breathing. He kept to his side of the bed, though, as had been the case for the past year. His feelings of contempt for her were somehow stronger that night. The more the autumn winds howled outside, the darker his mind became. Let her shiver alone. Let her think the creaks of the floorboards were monsters, or something worse, sent to drag her to whatever hell she feared the most. In the darker corners of his mind, he knew it was what she deserved anyway. He was relieved when she finally got up and went to the kitchen. It was only then that he was finally able to sleep soundly.
And the dreams he had! They were so vivid. And there was the same strange little boy in every one of them.
The closer Jeff came to the barn, the better he felt. Chloe’s pleading shadow was less oppressive. He wondered if she was watching him from the kitchen window at the back of the cottage. Lord, the watching! They were not going to survive as a couple. In the beginning, he thought they might. That if he really tried… but the truth was, he didn’t want to try. It was an easy thing to admit, really. It only took two drinks at a bar in Midtown to admit that to himself. And now, after a year and the dread, he knew things would soon fall away between them. Strange, he thought, that they had met because of an adventure sports outfit, running tours to dangerous places for adrenaline junkies. The perception of everyone who knew them was that they could survive anything. Jeff now realized “anything” had a limit.
He opened the barn door and it yawned. If it were of a later hour and a dimmer light, that yawn would have sounded more of a warning than a lazy welcome. The small interior of the place was flooded with the light from the opened door. It poured over the stacks and slabs of timber that were piled high. Jeff stood momentarily still and looked over everything. In truth, the little red barn was nothing more than a storage bin. The wood and other remnants of someone else’s life had been left to the bugs and the rain and snow when it seeped inside through the planks. The ground was a moist rug of mud and moss. The light peeking through the walls echoed prison bars.
The barn had a strange odor on the inside. Something faint. Something very old and kept way past its prime. It would have been unpleasant if it were any stronger. Jeff swatted at a couple of large black flies that danced around his face. He walked to the nearest pile of wood, taking an armful of the rotted stuff and pitching it outside near the well that lay beneath the large stone. This would be
his
project. It would be his alone. This barn and the well would be his rescue from the cottage when Chloe became too much. Chloe wouldn’t want to spend her time in here. The dankness would make her retch. He had a couple of months before work started again. That was maddening. He couldn’t believe now that he had agreed to take some time off to work on something that was already dead. But he could get by with a project. If he could finesse it, this well could save him.