Клайв Баркер – Galilee (страница 9)
All this said, the house was not by any means unspoiled. The years, and the humidity, have taken a terrible toll; scarcely a single room has escaped some measure of decay, and a few—particularly those which lay closest to the swamp—are in such a poor state of disrepair that I was obliged to have Dwight carry me into them, the floors were too rotted for my wheelchair. Even these chambers, I should say, had an undeniable grandeur to them. The creeping rot on the walls resembles the charts of some as yet unnamed world; the small forests of fungi that grow in the sodden boards have a fascination all of their own. Dwight was unpersuaded. “These are bad places,” he said, determined that their deterioration was due to some spiritual malaise that hung about them. “Bad things happened here.”
This didn’t make a lot of sense to me, and I told him so. If one room had rot in the walls and another didn’t, it was because of some vagary in the water table; it wasn’t evidence of bad karma.
“In this house,” Dwight said, “everything’s connected.”
That was all I could get him to say on the subject, but it was plain enough, I suppose. Just as I had come to appreciate the way the house played back and forth between spirit and sight, so Dwight seemed to be telling me the physical and moral states of the house were connected.
He was right, of course, though I couldn’t see it at the time. The house wasn’t simply a reflection of Jefferson’s genius and Cesaria’s vision: it was a repository for all that it had ever contained. The past was still present here, in ways my limited senses had yet to grasp.
I encountered Marietta once or twice during these days of reacquaintance with the house (I even glimpsed Zabrina on a few occasions, though she shared no interest in conversing with me; only hurried away). But of Luman, of the man Cesaria had promised could help educate me, I saw not a hair. Had my stepmother decided not to allow me access to her secrets after all? Or perhaps simply forgotten to tell Luman that he was to be my guide? I decided after a couple of days that I’d seek him out for myself, and tell him how badly I wanted to get on with my work, but that I couldn’t do so; not until I knew the stories Cesaria had told me I could not even guess at.
Luman, as I’ve said, does not live in the main house, though Lord knows it has enough rooms, empty rooms, to accommodate several families. He chooses instead to live in what was once the Smoke House; a modest building, which he claims suits him better. I had not until this visit ever come within fifty yards of the building, much less entered it; he has always been fiercely protective of his isolation.
My mounting irritation made me bold, however. So I had Dwight take me to the place, wheeling me down what had once been a pleasant path, but which was now thickly overgrown. The air became steadily danker; in places it swarmed with mosquitoes. I lit up a cigar to keep them at bay, which I doubt worked, but a good cigar always gets me a little high, so I cared rather less that they were making a meal of me.
As we approached the door I saw that it was open a little way, and that somebody was moving around inside. Luman knew I was here; which probably meant he also knew
“Luman? It’s Maddox! Is it all right if Dwight brings me in? I’d like to have a little talk!”
“We got nothing to talk about,” came the reply out of the murky interior.
“I beg to differ.”
Now Luman’s face appeared at the partially opened door. He looked thoroughly rattled, like a man who’d just stepped away from not one but several excesses. His wide, tawny face was shiny with sweat, his pupils pinpricks, his cornea yellowed. His beard looked as though it hadn’t been trimmed, or indeed even washed, in several weeks.
“Jesus, man,” he growled, “can’t you just let it be?”
“Did you speak to Cesaria?” I asked him.
He ran his hand through his mane and tugged it back from his head so violently it looked like an act of masochism. Those pinprick eyes of his suddenly grew to the size of quarters. This was a parlor trick I’d never seen him perform before; I was so startled I all but cried out. I stifled the yelp, however. I didn’t want him thinking he had the upper hand here. There was too much of the mad dog about him. If he sensed fear in me, I was certain he’d at very least drive me from his door. And at worst? Who knew what a creature like this could do if he set his perverse mind to it? Just about anything, probably.
“Yes,” he said finally, “she spoke to me. But I don’t think you need to be seeing the stuff she wants you to see. It ain’t your business.”
“She thinks it is.”
“Huh.”
“Look, can we at least have this conversation out of the way of the mosquitoes?”
“You don’t like bein’ bit?” he said, with a nasty little grin. “Oh I like to get naked an’ have ‘em at me. Gets me goin’.”
Perhaps he hoped he’d repulse me with this, and I’d leave, but I was not about to be so easily removed. I simply stared at him.
“Do you have any more of them cigars?”
I had indeed come prepared. Not only did I have cigars, I had gin, and, by way of more intellectual seduction, a small pamphlet on madhouses from my collection. Many years before Luman had spent some months incarcerated in Utica, an institution in upstate New York. A century later (so Marietta told me) he was still obsessed with the business of how a sane man might be thought mad, and a madman put in charge of Congress. I dug first for the cigar, as he’d requested it.
“Here,” I said.
“Is it Cuban?”
“Of course.”
“Toss it to me.”
“Dwight can bring it.”
“No. Toss it.”
I gently lobbed the cigar in his direction. It fell a foot shy of the threshold. He bent down and picked it up, rolling it between his fingers and sniffing it.
“This is nice,” he said appreciatively. “You keep a humidor?”
“Yes. In this humidity—”
“Got to, got to,” he said, his tone distinctly warming. “Well then,” he said, “you’d better get your sorry ass in here.”
“It’s all right if Dwight carries me in?”
“As long as he leaves,” Luman said. Then to Dwight: “No offense. But this is between my half-brother and me.”
“I understand,” said Dwight, and picking me up out of my wheelchair carried me to the door, which Luman now hauled open. A wave of stinking heat hit me; like the stench of a pigpen in high summer.
“I like it rank,” Luman said by way of explanation. “It reminds me of the old country.”
I didn’t reply to him; I was too—I don’t know quite what the word is—astonished, perhaps appalled by the state of the interior.
“Sit him down on the ol’ crib there,” Luman said, pointing to a peculiar bed-cum-coffin set close to the hearth. Worse than the crib itself—which looked more like an instrument of torture than a place of repose—was the fact that the hearth was far from cold: a large, smoky fire was burning there. It was little wonder Luman was sweating so profusely.
“Will this be all right?” Dwight said to me, plainly concerned for my well-being.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I could do with losing the weight.”
“That you could,” Luman said. “You need to get fightin’ fit. We all do.”
He had lit a match, and with the care of a true connoisseur, was slowly coaxing his cigar to life. “My,” he said, “this
“Speaking of which…” I said. “Dwight. The gin.”
Dwight set the bottle of gin on the table, which was as thickly strewn with detritus as every other inch of Luman’s hellhole.
“Well that’s mighty kind of you,” Luman said.
“And this—”
“My, my, the presents jus’ keep comin’, don’t they?” I gave him the book. “What’s this now?” He looked at the cover. “Oh, this is
“This came from an asylum?” I said, looking down at the bed on which Dwight had set me.
“It sure did. I was chained up in that for two hundred and fifty-five nights.”
“Inside it?”
“Inside it.”
He came over to where I sat and tugged the filthy blanket out from under me, so I could better see the cruel narrow box in which he had been put. The restraints were still in place.
“Why do you keep it?” I asked him.
“As a reminder,” he said, meeting my gaze head-on for the first time since I’d entered. “I can’t ever let myself forget, ‘cause the moment I forget then I’ve as good as forgiven them that did it to me, and I ain’t never going to do that.”
“But—”
“I know what you’re going to say: they’re all dead. And so they are. But that don’t mean I can’t still get my day with ‘em, when the Lord calls us all to judgment. I’m going to be sniffin’ after ‘em like the mad dog they said I was. I’m going to have their souls, and there ain’t no saint in Heaven’s goin’ to stop me.” His volume and vehemence had steadily escalated through this speech; when it was done I said nothing for a moment or two, so as to let him calm down. Then I said:
“Seems to me you’ve got reason to keep the crib.”