The House That Jack Built Read online

  Graham Masterton

  The House That Jack Built

  ***

  After Craig Bellman is horrirically attacked, he and his wife Effie leave New York for the peace or the country, hoping to rebuild their damaged relationship. However, when Craig insists on buying a derelict mansion on a mountainside - despite Effie's serious reservations - their problems are only just beginning…

  The house echoes with a terrible agonised sobbing, and Effie, trying to overcome her fears, recruits a spiritualist to deal with its threatening vibrations. But when a gruesome death occurs she starts to fear that the spirit of the past, and of the previous owner, notorious gambler Jack Belias, is back to haunt them for good…

  ***

  From Publishers Weekly

  Lacing an atmospheric tale of haunting and possession with heavy doses of gore and sex, Masterton (Burial) screams out a story better told in a whisper. High-powered Manhattan lawyer Craig Bellman and his eager-to-please wife, Effie, are touring the Hudson River Valley when they chance upon Valhalla, a decrepit mansion that broods on the bluffs north of Cold Spring. A monument to the towering ego of textile mogul Jack Belias, who vanished mysteriously in 1937, the edifice has understandable psychological appeal for Craig, who is recuperating from his near emasculation during a recent mugging. At first, Effie is happy that Craig's obsessive interest in rebuilding Valhalla has restored his confidence and potence. But when he becomes sexually insatiable and a suspect in the deaths of several colleagues and acquaintances, she probes the house's history for an explanation and discovers that Belias - an occultist who excelled in ruining his gambling companions and who "used his virility to dominate people too" - is engineering his return from a dimension beyond time through her vulnerable husband. The spooky events climax spectacularly during a thunderstorm atop the Hudson Highlands, but not before the author has numbed the reader with countless scenes of sexual humiliation and offended sensibilities with the suggestion that physical abuse is titillating to its victims. Masterton's evocation of Hudson Valley history and his re-creation of the era of the pre-Depression robber barons is outstanding. Hopefully he will exploit this rich material, rather than his characters, in the sequel telegraphed in the novel's closing paragraphs.

  ***

  From Library Journal

  Masterton has once again contributed to the overcrowded hall closet of horror literature. In his latest book, Craig Bellman, a berserk type A, has an encounter with some street toughs and a hammer. Male readers will wince. He and his long-suffering wife, Effie, a Wendy Torrance clone, discover a deserted mansion while resting and recuperating. Craig feels an immediate affinity and wants to move right in. Naturally, the place is haunted by an evil revenant, Jack Belias, former high-stakes gambler and roue. Amid various gruesome scenes, usually involving sharp instruments and somebody's intestines, the book strides to the inevitable conclusion: the bad get punished and the good don't get off scot-free either. Masterton has two basic formulas: the evil demon has risen, and he is not happy; and the malevolent building has taken over the body and soul of the good but flawed protagonist, and nuclear Ragnarok is going to happen soon. This present work falls into the latter category. Enthusiasts of Masterton's many works will greet this latest gore fest with delight, and other readers of horror fiction will enjoy discovering him. Recommended for general fiction collections.

  ***

  'One of the few true masters of the horror genre.'

  - James Herbert

  'One of the most original and frightening storytellers of our time.'

  - Peter James

  'Graham Masterton's novels are charming, dangerous and frightening… but all based on immense erudition.'

  - L'express Paris

  ***

  P. (scaning & OCR) & P. (formating & proofing) edition.

  ***

  For my father, Ian, with love

  But every beginning is only a continuation

  And the book of fate is always open in the middle.

  Polish poem

  Mayan priests had a ceremonial calendar which governed thirteen festivals of twenty days each. The ceremonial calendar rolled through the year like a wheel, and consequently the festivals occurred at different days each year but always in the same sequence. The priests could calculate into the future or the past exacdy what the populace would be doing, hearing or seeing on any given date. They were dealing from a stacked deck.

  William Burroughs

  If time were a pool we could kneel at its edge and gaze at our reflections and then beyond them to what lay deeper still. Instead of looking back at time we could look down into it - just as we could peel back the layers of the palimpsest - and now and again different features of the past - different sights and sounds and voices and dreams - would rise to the surface: rise and subside, and the deep pool would hold them all, so that nothing was lost and nothing ever went away.

  Lucie Duff Gordon

  TUESDAY, MARCH 16, 8:07 P.M.

  'Can't you try Broadway?' Craig demanded. It was raining so hard that the taxi's windshield wipers couldn't keep up with it, and up ahead of them Eighth Avenue was a jostling carnival of glaring red brake lights.

  'Broadway's the same, my friend,' said the driver, placidly. He was swarthy-skinned and narrow-faced, with an odd woven hat that looked like an upside-down flower pot. His medallion revealed that his name was Zaghlul Fuad. 'The whole Theater District's gridlocked solid.' He gave a dry sniff, and added, 'It's raining.'

  'It's raining?' said Craig. 'I wouldn't have noticed.'

  He checked his watch even though he had last checked it less than a minute ago. He was supposed to have been at Petrossian by 7:30 at the latest, for Mr. Ipi Hakayawa's celebration dinner. Mr. Hakayawa was their wealthiest and most prestigious client, and he had invited Craig and his partner Steven to a lavish evening of champagne and caviar - not only to thank them for all of the white-hot legal work that they had put into Hakayawa vs Nash Electronics, the most expensive patent-infringement action in legal history, but to brief them on the next stage in his fight against US protectionism, Hakayawa vs Department of Commerce.

  Craig was sufficiently well versed in Japanese business protocol to know that Mr. Hakayawa would make no comment on his lateness; but that privately he would take it as a deep discourtesy. If you pay a man $1.3 million in fees, you expect that man to take account of such a commonplace occurrence as a rainstorm.

  The traffic crept forward another two car lengths before the brake lights flared up again. Rain drummed viciously on the taxi's roof, and streamed down the steamed-up windows. Craig wiped the window with his sleeve and peered out. Shit. They were only as far as 46th Street - still eleven blocks to go.

  'Take a right on 48th,' he snapped.

  'I told you, friend, Broadway's the same.'

  'Just do it, will you, please? If Broadway's the same, try Sixth.'

  'Sixth is the same, Madison's the same.'

  'Listen, I don't need some fucking Egyptian to tell me the way around my own city, all right?'

  There was a moment's pause. The taxi in front of them crept ahead a little way, but Zaghlul Fuad turned around in the driver's seat and stared at Craig with large, dark liquid eyes. He was unexpectedly handsome.

  The taxi behind them blared its horn. Craig flushed, and shrugged, and said, 'I'm sorry, okay? I'm late, that's all. I've had a bad day. I apologise, all right? I didn't mean to lose my temper.'

  Zaghlul Fuad continued to stare at him with no expression whatever on his face. Then, without looking around, he switched off the meter and said, 'You had a bad day, my friend? Do you know what happened to me today? My father died today.'

  'Listen, I've said I'm sorry.
And I'm sorry about your father, too. Now can we just-' Craig nodded towards the taxi in front, which had pulled ahead another three lengths. The taxi behind them was deafening them with a barrage of horn blasts.

  'My father was a fucking Egyprian, like me,' said Zaghlul Fuad. He pronounced his words with extreme delicacy. A lisp, almost like a woman. 'He tried his best, the same way I always try my best. Sometimes he was not perfect. Sometimes I, too, am not perfect. Sometimes I fail to take my passengers where they wish to go. I will not take you where you wish to go. Get out of my taxi.'

  'What are you talking about? Are you nuts?'

  'I said, get out of my taxi.'

  'It's raining, for Christ's sake!'

  'It's raining? I wouldn't have noticed.'

  Craig felt a huge surge of frustration, panic, and almost uncontainable rage. In the US Court of International Trade, he had faced down countless case-hardened lawyers with twice his experience. Smooth, tough, silver-haired men in silver suits with rumbling magisterial voices. But how could he face down a fey Egyptian taxi driver whose ancestry he had just gratuitously insulted, and who had nothing to lose except a few dollars' fare?

  'Okay,' he said. 'Let's be conciliatory here. Whatever the fare comes to, I'll double it.'

  He took out his crocodile wallet and tugged out a $100 bill. 'Look- I'll give you a hundred. Just get me there, okay? I have an urgent, important meeting with a very important client. I'm late already, and that's a disaster. If I'm late and wet, that's going to be it. I mean, that's going to be-' and he drew his finger across his Adam's apple.

  Zaghlul Fuad remained expressionless. 'In Egypt we have a saying that a man who speaks sharp words will always cut his own throat.'

  'Oh, do you? Well, in New York we have a saying that a taxi driver is obliged to take his passenger to any destination in the city or else the Taxi & Limousine Commission will take away his medallion.'

  Lizard-like, Zaghlul Fuad closed and reopened his hooded eyes as if he wanted to remember Craig's face forever. 'Losing my medallion will be a small price to pay for ridding myself of someone who cannot respect his fellow beings. Get out of my taxi.'

  'What the hell kind of smartass game is this? Are you crazy? Did they just let you out of Bellevue?'

  'Please get out.'

  All around them, the salvo of horns was deafening. Craig could hear shouting, too. 'Move your ass you dumb mutha!'

  'Get oudda thuh goddamned way!' Craig thought: where the hell are the cops when you really need them? He took a deep, tight breath. He had already wasted more precious minutes by arguing. There was only one thing for it, and that was to get out and walk. He put away his wallet, and then with shaking hands he wrote down Zaghlul Fuad's medallion number. He was so angry and upset that he could barely hold his pen.

  He opened the taxi door, and a sharp fusillade of rain burst in. He jabbed his finger at Zaghlul Fuad and said, 'You're finished. You understand me? I'm going to make sure that you lose your medallion if it takes me the rest of my life. You Egyptian fuck.'

  'Salaam, effendi,' said Zaghlul Fuad, without the slightest trace of irony.

  Craig dodged across 48th Street between the honking, glaring herds of taxis and limousines. He clutched the lapels of his grey Alan Flusser suit close to his neck, but it didn't make much difference. The rain was crashing down in chilling torrents, the gutters were filled to overflowing, and the wreckage of broken umbrellas was strewn everywhere. He was drenched even before he reached the sidewalk, and he stepped right into a pothole and flooded his shoe with ice-cold water.

  He picked up a broken umbrella, shook it, and tried to straighten it out, but it was limp and bony and intractable, like a dead pterodactyl, and he swore and threw it away again. He had left his own raincoat and his own umbrella back at the offices of Fisher & Bellman on the 76th floor of World Trade Center. Worse than that, he had left his mobile phone there, too, expecting to collect everything after lunch. But lunch hadn't finished until five to seven, when Khryssa had woken him up with a kiss and said, 'Isn't it time you left?'

  The first thunderclap had shaken the windows of Khryssa's apartment, and the little blue teddy bear that he had given her had dropped off the mantelpiece.

  All he could do now was jog to Petrossian and hope that Steven had been keeping Ipi Hakayawa happy and that the maitre-d' could fix him up with a dry suit. He would just have to invent some cock-and-bull story about why he was so unpunctual. He couldn't really tell Ipi Hakayawa that he had spent the whole afternoon in bed with his nineteen-year-old mistress. Maybe he could say that his father had died.

  He jogged heavily towards Broadway, his thick brown hair sticking to his scalp like a bathing-cap. He was a big, healthy man, nothing at all like his father (who had actually died more than seven years ago, from lung cancer). He had the kind of square, well-fed face that put people in mind of prosperous farmers or wealthy dynasties of Democratic politicians. There was nothing in the way he looked that suggested an asthma-wracked childhood in a shabby walk-up apartment on Lispenard Street, and a pale, lonely boy in spectacles and a green home-knitted windbreaker, for which he was remorselessly teased.

  As he splashed along 48th Street, he may have been soaked, and out of breath, but he still looked affluent, and that was probably why the curly-haired girl came teetering out of the doorway of K-Plus Drugs and snatched at his arm. 'Help me!'

  'Hey,' he protested, and tried to pull away, but she screamed, 'Help me! You have to help me!'

  He stopped, his shoes squelching. She clung onto his sleeve as if she were drowning, and she practically was. Her face was round and puffy and white, and blood and rainwater were running down her forehead and streaming from her nose. She wore a sodden black-leather blouson and a short black skirt, and she was hobbling on broken shoes. She couldn't have been older than fifteen or sixteen.

  'Help me!' she kept screaming, a thin breathy scream. 'They took my friend! They took my friend! Help me!'

  'Listen, I'll call a cop,' Craig told her. 'You stay there. Do you hear me? Stay there, and I'll call a cop.'

  'You have to help me, they're raping her! Please! You have to help me!'

  Craig took hold of her shoulders. 'Quiet, calm down. Who's raping your friend? Where?'

  The girl turned around and pointed to K-Plus Drugs. It was only now that Craig saw that the store was closed down and derelict, Bankruptcy Sale stickers criss-crossing the grimy, blacked-out window, along with the faded stickers for Pepto-Bismol and Maalox and Vaseline Intensive Care. The door was ajar, but inside it was impenetrably dark.

  Craig let go of the girl and peered without enthusiasm into the doorway. The rain clattered all around him, as loud as a standing ovation. Traffic honked, sirens wailed. The girl looked up at him with blood dripping and beady black eyes like raisins and shivered and muttered, 'Please help me, they're raping her.'

  Craig wiped the rain from his face with the back of his hand. 'How many?' he asked her.

  'Two, that's all. Please help me.'

  He looked back towards Eighth Avenue. Then he looked the other way, towards Broadway. The street was blocked with automobiles, with their windows tightly closed. He splashed across to the nearest taxi and rapped on the driver's window, but the driver emphatically shook his head. He stepped through a deep puddle to the car behind, a blue Buick with a balding shirt-sleeved businessman behind the wheel, and tapped on his window, too, but the businessman locked all his doors and wouldn't even turn to him.

  He knocked on the Buick's window a second time. 'There's a girl being raped in there! Can you hear me? A girl being raped in there! Call the cops, will you, that's all you have to do!'

  The businessman gave a barely-perceptible shake of his head, and edged his car along further.

  Craig stood up straight, dripping and desperate. The girl took hold of his arm again, and screamed, 'Please!' at him. 'Please!'

  'Listen,' he shouted, over the noise of the traffic and the rain, 'is either of them armed? Do they have
guns or a knife or anything like that?'

  The girl shook her head. Her face was a sliding mask of glutinous, rain-diluted blood. 'There's just two of them. Please.'

  Craig thought: what the hell, I'm already late, I'm already soaked. I can handle two of them, for Christ's sake. How fit are they going to be? I doubt if they jog six miles every morning, and work out three times a week at the Bar Association Athletics Club. And right now, I'm sufficiently pissed off to handle anybody.

  He went back to the half-open doorway. He could smell damp, and mould, and urine. He pushed the door wider, and stared into the blackness.

  'Who's there?' he called out. 'If you can hear me, you'd better get the hell out of there, and fast!'

  There was no reply. Only the sound of rain trickling down the walls. Craig's eyes were gradually growing accustomed to the darkness, and he could just distinguish a row of free-standing shelves.

  'What's your friend's name?' he asked the girl.

  'Susan,' the girl replied, blinking at him, almost as if she didn't expect him to believe her.

  'All right, then.' He reached into his pocket and produced a dime. 'You go call for the cops and an ambulance. I'll find your friend for you.'

  The girl started to limp towards Eighth Avenue, wiping her face with a handkerchief. Craig stood and watched her for a moment, but he didn't watch her long enough to see her turn her head and smile.

  He stepped into the darkened drugstore, his shoes crunching on ground glass and grit. 'Susan?' he called. 'Susan- if you can hear me, Susan, all you have to do is call out, or make a noise. Kick your heels on the floor, whatever.'

  He reached the row of shelves and stopped and listened. At first he couldn't hear anything, but then he picked up the faintest tapping. Trrapp, trrapp, trrapp, like somebody running their heels from side to side across a bare-boarded floor. His suit dripped onto the floor, a soft, uneven plip… plop… plip. He began to think there was nobody here; that the girl with the blood-covered face had been playing a malicious prank. You never knew in New York City, there were so many wackos roaming the streets.