The Heirloom Read online

  ‘Can you smell anybody’s barbecue? The Johnsons are away in Philadelphia.’

  I sniffed. ‘I’m not sure. But maybe the spark was just carried on the wind. It happens.’

  ‘But the way it simply caught fire…’

  I led her back towards the house. She was right – the night had grown unseasonably chilly, and she was naked. By the time I got her inside and slid the doors shut, she was trembling all over. Her nipples were stiff and tight, and she was covered in goosebumps.

  ‘Straight upstairs, have a hot shower, and then I’ll fix you another drink,’ I told her. ‘You can borrow my thick towelling wrap.’

  She kissed me, her lips cold and shaking. ‘At least I know you’d never let me drown,’ she told me, and then she went padding off to take her shower.

  I went to the windows and stared out at the patio chair for a while. It must have been a stray spark that had set light to Sara’s kimono. There wasn’t any other explanation. On a summer evening, a red-hot speck of charcoal could be wafted on the wind for miles, and still set fire to anything it settled on. Sheriff Young had told me that, and he’d had to deal with more brushfires than I’d sold wheelback chairs.

  I fixed two more drinks, and carried them through the living-room. It was long, the living-room, with a pitched ceiling, and a big old-fashioned fireplace with brass firedogs and brass-handled irons. The walls were plain and whitewashed, so that they didn’t detract from the two magnificent early-American paintings we had hanging at either end of the room. One was a John Singleton Copley, a second version of his famous 1778 picture of a naked mariner being rescued by his friends from the gaping jaws of a shark. The other was a dark portrait by Gilbert Stuart of a serious colonial gentleman in a periwig and a black hat. I switched on the spotlights that illuminated both pictures, and then went to the fire and stacked on a few split logs.

  ‘Ricky!’ called Sara, from upstairs. I had a match out of the box, just ready to strike, but I left the hearth and walked to the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Everything okay?’ I asked her.

  ‘Sure. I feel better for a warm shower. Did you leave your towelling wrap downstairs?’

  ‘I don’t think so, unless I took it off in the library this morning.’

  ‘Could you go look for me?’

  I crossed the tiled hallway and opened the library door. Somebody had drawn the drapes in there, and it was unusually dark. I reached for the light switch, but when I found it, and flicked it down, nothing happened. I hesitated at the door, and frowned. The lights had been working all right last night, and there were six of them – bracket-lamps all the way around the walls – so it couldn’t be anything as simple as a blown bulb. Maybe the fuse had gone on the downstairs lighting circuit – but if that had happened, the living-room lights wouldn’t be working either. I pushed open the door a little way and peered inside.

  It was absurd, but I was suddenly convinced that someone was inside the library, watching me. I strained my eyes, and I could just make out the corner of my desk, and the light from the hallway reflected on the side of my Olivetti typewriter. I listened, but all I could hear was the busy rustling of the bougainvillaea in the evening wind outside.

  ‘Ricky?’ called Sara.

  ‘The lights have gone,’ I called back. ‘I won’t be a minute.’

  I took a step forward, and it was then that I was sure that I saw a hostile pair of eyes. Slanted, like an animal’s eyes – a wolf, or a fox – but strangely fluorescent. I stayed where I was, holding my breath so that I could pick up the slightest sound, but my heart was banging hard enough to convince the people across the road that I was putting up shelves.

  The eyes, slowly, blinked.

  ‘Sara,’ I said, in a warning voice. I don’t think she heard me. ‘Sara, there’s something in the library.’

  Now I could just detect a faint grumbling growling noise. It sounded like the rattle of breath in a fierce animal’s throat. Maybe a coyote had accidentally wandered into the house through the patio doors, or even a mountain lion. Maybe something had escaped from the wild-life park, and it had managed to make its way here. A tiger, or a puma, or something.

  ‘Who’s there?’ I snapped, trying to sound brisk and authoritative.

  There was no reply. The low growling went on.

  Gradually, I backed out. There was a telephone on the wall in the kitchen, only fifteen feet away, and I reckoned I could retreat discreetly and quickly enough to reach it before whatever it was in the library decided to come after me. I had a vivid memory of some black-and-white photographs that I’d seen years ago in Look, of a zoo-keeper being hideously mauled by a lion. Blood, bones, and anguish. And what had that doggedly jovial guide at the wild-animal park said this afternoon? ‘Don’t worry, folks, lions aren’t dangerous unless they decide to eat you.’

  I was halfway down the corridor, backing away on tippytoes, when I saw the lights in the library begin to brighten again. They didn’t flick on abruptly, like they do when you’ve mended a fuse, and you switch the power back on. They shuddered and faltered, gaining strength in intermittent surges, as if they were recording the heartbeat of someone who had nearly died, and was now struggling to recover. There was a curious blueish effect to them, too, that reminded me of wild electricity from a lightning-rod.

  I hesitated. The sensible adult thing to do was to run straight to the telephone and call the sheriff’s office. Help, help! There’s a wild animal in my library! But now that the lights had flickered back on, my fright began to ebb, and my curiosity began to take over instead. If there really was a puma in my library, it was probably just as alarmed as I was, and the chances that it would pounce on me were pretty remote. In any case, what were the odds on it really being a puma? About one in a million. It was far more likely to be a stray dog, or a wandering cat. And what would Sara say if three police cars came howling into the drive for the sake of a bewildered local mongrel?

  Cautiously, I crept back to the open doorway. The lights around the library were bright now, and shining normally. And there certainly wasn’t a lion there. Not even a puma. There wasn’t even a yowling cat which had lost its way, or been tempted into the house by the smell of Sara’s carnitas.

  ‘This is crazy,’ I said to myself, quite loudly. I took two or three steps into the room, and looked around. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed. My latest ‘Antiques Newsletter’ for the San Diego Evening Tribune was still in the typewriter, with that awful opening sentence, ‘Tired of Tiffany? Brassed off with brass? Here’s an idea for brightening up your home that wxjl…’ and that was as far as I’d got.

  I went to the window, opened the drapes, and tested all the handles. They were locked, two of them with security keys. But I was right in the middle of drawing the drapes closed again, my arms outstretched, when I saw in the darkness of the window a reflection of myself and the room behind me.

  I felt a cold shudder down my backbone. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t even want to turn around, but I knew that I had to. Besides, the reflection of my own frightened face in the window-pane was more than I could take.

  In the corner behind the door, placed right up against the wall so that I hadn’t noticed it when I first walked into the room, was the chair. Tall, forbidding, and secretive. A nightmare created out of burnished mahogany and old leather.

  I walked towards it, curious but shocked, the way you walk up to a road accident. I stopped when I was only a couple of feet away. For some reason, I didn’t feel like touching it. It had an aura about it, a tight self-possession, which warned me to keep my distance. I stared at the writhing snakes, and the bulging fruit, and the screaming figures who endlessly tumbled from the cresting rail down to the seat, and I thought of Mr Grant and his tiny dark glasses, and what he had said about ‘Sub-Hell’.

  I stared, too, at the man-serpent’s face on the crest of the chair – a face with slanted animal eyes and a mouth that seemed to find its own deep depravity a cause for amusement. The eyes
looked exactly like the eyes that I had seen glowing at me in the darkness, before the lights came on, and yet they couldn’t have been. I wouldn’t have been able to see anything more than the left-hand arm of the chair from the library doorway, even supposing the lights had been working. To have faced me from the darkest recesses of the library, the way those eyes had faced me, the chair would have had to move by itself more than thirteen or fourteen feet, and that was obviously out of the question. It couldn’t have been Sara playing a practical joke on me, either. I could scarcely budge the chair myself, and I was the one to whom Sara always passed the pickle jars, for opening. Sara couldn’t even have dragged the chair across the library, let alone lifted it.

  I peered at the face more closely. It was a study in cold ferocity. The eyes seemed to take in everything and give nothing back. It was the face of a devil.

  I thought: stop it, for Christ’s sake. This is nothing but an antique chair. Wood, leather, springs, and horsehair. That’s all.

  Yet – how had it managed to get into my library from the garage, where I had left it this afternoon? I had locked it in with a six-lever padlock, and when I had arrived back at the house from the wild-animal park, I had seen for myself that the padlock was securely in place. Maybe Sara might have found a way to heave the chair around the library in the dark – although my logical mind rejected the whole idea of it as totally insane. But there was no way she could have carried it into the house from the garage. Absolutely no way at all.

  I looked at the chair for a long time, and then I said, ‘I know what you’re up to. You’re trying to confuse me. That’s what you’re trying to do.’

  The chair didn’t answer, of course, but then it never would. I paced backwards and forwards thoughtfully in front of it, like an evangelist preacher on a Saturday evening, sober with the prospect of sin.

  ‘I’m going crazy,’ I told myself, and the chair as well. ‘I put you into the garage this afternoon and I locked the door. You can’t be here. There just isn’t any way.’

  The man-serpent grinned at me in mahogany amusement.

  ‘Sara!’ I shouted. ‘Sara!’

  She appeared in the library doorway wearing the top of my old blue-striped pyjamas.

  ‘Didn’t you find that wrap yet?’ she asked me.

  ‘Look at this,’ I told her, waving towards the chair. The sight of it made me feel unaccountably frustrated and angry. She looked at it, and then shook her head.

  ‘I don’t see what you’re so mad about.’

  ‘I’m mad because it’s here, in the library.’

  ‘I think it suits the library.’

  ‘Sure it suits the library. The only point is, who put it here?’

  She crinkled up her nose. ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘What can you possibly fail to understand? Who put it here, that’s all I’m asking!’

  ‘You mean – you didn’t?’

  ‘No, Sara, I didn’t.’

  ‘But there hasn’t been anybody else in the house. I mean – Marianna comes tomorrow to clean up – but she couldn’t have moved this chair anyway.’

  ‘Neither could you,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Then who…?’ she asked, and her words faded in the air like a smoke-ring, an evanescent question to an answer that seemed timeless and old and peculiarly frightening.

  ‘I don’t know who,’ I said, in a husky voice. ‘All I know is that Mr Grant’s wonderful chair is going to go straight back in the garage; and that in the morning I’m going to telephone him in Santa Barbara and tell him to come collect everything he’s left here. I don’t know how I could have been dumb enough to let him get away with selling me all this junk. It’s junk, and that’s all.’

  Emboldened by Sara’s presence, I bent over the chair, gripped hold of the serpentine arms, and heaved. To my surprise, I was able to lift it quite easily. It was heavy, yes – but no heavier than any other mahogany armchair. She opened the door wider for me while I staggered out of the library with it, along the corridor, and into the kitchen. She unlocked the back entrance, and I took it out into the night, across the driveway, and back to the garage. I set it down on the asphalt while I examined the padlock. Nobody had tampered with the lock, or the hasp. Whoever had brought the chair out of the garage must have had a key. I unlocked the padlock, lifted the garage door, and shuffled the chair inside. It was dark in the garage, and it smelled of varnish and gasoline and antique furniture. I slammed the door shut, relocked the padlock, and walked back to the house.

  Sara was in the living-room, warming her hands by the fire. I sat down heavily on the tapestry-covered sofa, and said, ‘That’s the last time I buy anything creepy. I mean that. That chair’s too damned creepy for me.’

  ‘You bought that creepy old Tarot pack in Indiana.’

  ‘Well, sure. But that wasn’t as creepy as this. Can you believe it? The chair found its way into the library, even though nobody touched the lock on the garage door, and nobody we know is strong enough to lift it.’

  ‘Maybe Miguel came around while we were out. Have you thought of that? He always fancies himself as an interior designer.’

  ‘If Miguel came around, why didn’t he leave a note? And why didn’t he take the stuff that was lying around the driveway? Besides, he doesn’t have a key to the garage.’

  ‘Ricky, don’t ask me,’ Sara protested. ‘I don’t know anything more about it than you do.’

  I reached for my drink, and took a cold fresh mouthful. ‘Maybe we’re just tired, and tense,’ I told Sara. ‘What a goddamned Sunday.’

  ‘You still didn’t find me your wrap,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve got the fire,’ I retorted. ‘That should keep you warm. And, besides, whenever I see a nice log fire blazing, it puts me in mind of love-making on the hearth-rug.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It does, does it?’

  I kissed her. A small, affectionate kiss at first; as cute and romantic as an old-time Valentine card. But then I kissed her longer, and deeper, and my tongue probed her mouth. She closed her eyes, and I felt her breath on my cheek. She touched my neck with her fingertips, and then her hand strayed downwards and unbuttoned my shirt.

  Slowly, an open-mouthed actress in a freeze-frame movie, she settled down on the shaggy rug in front of the fire. Her eyes sparkled with the orange flames that danced around the logs. Her lips were parted to kiss me. I opened her pyjama coat and held her breasts in my hands, squeezing and fondling them until her nipples rose between my fingers. Then I touched her between her thighs where the firelight made, her moisture glisten like maple syrup in the fall sunshine.

  She held my penis in her fist, its head reddened in the fire’s glow, and guided it urgently between her thighs. Then her flesh swallowed it, and I thrust into her as deeply and passionately as I could. Hair tangled with hair, blonde and brown. And I remembered.

  I remembered!

  ‘Sara,’ I said. I could hear how haunted my voice sounded.

  She opened her eyes. Stared at me.

  ‘Sara, listen. Did you light this fire?’

  A long, uncomprehending pause. How far must the world have rotated on its axis in the time it took for Sara to grasp what I had asked her.

  ‘Me?’ she said. ‘I came downstairs and it was already alight. You told me you were going to—’

  I knelt up straight. ‘Sara, I didn’t light it. I had the match in my hand but I didn’t light it.’

  ‘Darling, of course you lit it.’

  I shook my head. I knew, damn it. Sara had called down for the bathrobe, and I’d been right on the brink of striking the match, but I hadn’t. I stood up, naked, and I walked across the living-room towards the library.

  ‘Ricky – where are you going?’

  ‘Don’t ask. I’m probably wrong.’

  ‘Wrong about what?’

  I didn’t answer her. I went straight to the library door, threw it wide, and switched on the lights.

  Just as I’d feared, there it w
as. Right in the centre of the room this time. Dark, tall-backed, upholstered in black. The chair that only ten minutes ago I had locked up in my garage.

  ‘Sara,’ I said, and she must have heard the shock in my voice, because she came running over straight away.

  She stared at the chair, and then at me.

  ‘You said you were going to put it in the garage,’ she said. ‘Ricky – you said you were going to put it in the garage.’

  ‘I did,’ I said quietly. ‘But it doesn’t seem to want to stay there.’

  She held her hand over her mouth.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ she breathed. ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe it.’

  *

  ‘I’m going to try it one more time,’ I told her. ‘I’m going to take the chair out into the garage, and I want you to stand here and keep watch. It’s my experience with mysterious happenings that they don’t stand up to close scrutiny with the lights on.’

  ‘What experience have you ever had with mysterious happenings?’ Sara asked me.

  I stared at her. ‘Well, none,’ I admitted.

  ‘Ricky,’ she whispered, ‘I’m frightened.’

  ‘There’s nothing to be frightened about. It’s only a chair.’

  ‘But it moved by itself. You locked it in the garage and it came back. Through two locked doors.’

  I walked around the chair, without touching it. The eyes on that mask-like man-serpent’s face didn’t follow me around the room, but I had the oddest feeling that they didn’t have to. The man-serpent looked as if he could sense everything that was happening without having to move. Then I thought to myself: What am I saying? It’s wood. It can’t move.

  ‘Maybe it’s an hallucination,’ I suggested. ‘Maybe there’s something in the timber. Some kind of aromatic quality, like a drug. Peyote, yage, something like that. Maybe I only imagined I took it out into the garage.’

  ‘Ricky, you know that’s not true,’ said Sara.

  I rubbed my face. My chin felt prickly and uncomfortable. ‘It’s a theory, that’s all,’ I said, without much conviction. ‘But you can’t tell me the chair actually walked along the corridor on its own wooden legs. I mean, for Christ’s sake.’