The Heirloom Page 5

  Sara said, ‘Did you shave this morning?’

  ‘Sure I shaved this morning. You saw me do it.’

  She didn’t say anything else, but continued to stare at the chair as if she expected it to jump at her.

  ‘What did you say that for?’ I asked her.

  She glanced up. ‘What did I say what for?’

  ‘Why did you ask me if I’d shaved?’

  ‘I don’t know. You just look stubbly.’

  ‘Well, thanks.’

  ‘You don’t have to be sarcastic,’ she said. ‘Perhaps your razor needs a service. My father always used to use an old-fashioned straight-razor.’

  ‘Your father used to walk around with more plasters on his chin than any man I ever knew.’

  There was a lengthy, awkward silence, while we both stood beside old man Jessop’s chair like guests at a cocktail party who couldn’t think of anything to say to each other. The clock at the far end of the library began to chime the hour.

  Eventually, I said, ‘Let’s try it, shall we? You wait here, and I’ll take it back to the garage.’

  Sara brushed her hair back from her face. ‘Supposing it–’

  ‘Supposing it what? Supposing it comes strolling in here on its own?’

  ‘Ricky, it got here before.’

  ‘I know. That’s just what we’re trying this experiment for. To find out how.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I want to know,’ she said, in a voice so soft that I could scarcely hear her.

  Nonchalantly, I rested my hand on the chair’s cresting-rail, and pointed to the man-serpent’s face with the commercial ease of an auctioneer. ‘Don’t tell me this thing scares you. It’s a piece of furniture. It looks scary, I admit. But it’s nothing more than a rather singular item of eighteenth-century American Chippendale.’

  ‘Does it scare you?’ asked Sara.

  ‘Are you crazy?’

  ‘I was just asking. The last time you talked this way was when we thought someone had broken into the house.’

  ‘Well, you’re right,’ I said. ‘It scares me.’

  We were both silent again. Then Sara said, ‘Let’s wait till the morning.’

  ‘You think either of us are going to be able to sleep until we know what’s going on here?’

  ‘I don’t know. No, probably not.’

  I bent down, and took hold of the chair’s mahogany arms. ‘In that case, let’s give this experiment just one try, shall we? Keep all the lights on, take hold of the poker, and wait here. That’s all you have to do.’

  ‘Don’t you think you’d better put some clothes on?’

  ‘Who’s going to see? The Johnsons are on vacation, and apart from that it’s nine o’clock on a Sunday evening.’

  ‘It’s still light outside.’

  ‘That’s the moon. If you’re really worried that a stray Winnebago full of Girl Scouts is going to pull in to the driveway and that twenty innocent eyes are all going to stare at my penis, then I’ll wait until it goes behind a cloud.’

  ‘Ricky…’ smiled Sara.

  Still holding the arms of the chair, I turned around to her and gave her a hard, serious look to show her that I wasn’t really joking. The only reason I was teasing her was because I didn’t know of any other way to suppress my feeling that something very powerful and very frightening had come to lodge itself in our house tonight. No wonder people laugh so much at death, and funeral parlours. How else can you deal with the dark charade they really represent?

  I had a sensation at that moment of incredible foreboding, as black as the nodding plumes on an old-style horse-drawn hearse, as wild as a coastal typhoon.

  Then I tried to lift up the chair.

  I yelled: ‘AAaaah!’ and whipped my hands away. Because the instant I had attempted to heave the chair off the floor, those snake-like arms had wriggled, as dry and as muscular as real snakes. I stood away from the chair, my hands raised, and you could tell how frightened I was by the way my balls had tightened up like a pair of shrivelled walnuts.

  ‘It’s alive,’ I managed to choke out.

  ‘Ricky?’ asked Sara, reaching out for my hand.

  ‘I tried to pick it up and the damned thing’s alive!’

  ‘Ricky, it can’t be. It’s wood. You said so yourself. It’s only a piece of furniture.’

  I shivered, and rubbed my arms to try to stir up my circulation. All of a sudden I felt intensely cold, as if someone had left the window wide open, and a freezing draught were flowing in.

  ‘Never mind what I said,’ I told Sara. ‘I tried to pick it up just then and those arms felt exactly like live snakes. They moved, Sara. It was like holding on to a couple of goddamned boa constrictors.’

  Sara walked across to the phone. ‘Who are you calling?’ I asked her.

  ‘Who do you think? The police.’

  ‘The police? What do you think the police are going to say?’

  She had lifted the receiver, and was about to punch out the number. Then, slowly, she laid the receiver down again. ‘I’m not sure. I’m not even sure what we’re going to say to them.’

  I said, ‘The first thing I’m going to do is get dressed. Look – my towelling wrap’s over there. Put that on. I’m not having any damned chair staring at you while you’re naked. Not a chair with a face like that.’

  The man-serpent grinned at me sightlessly.

  ‘All right,’ said Sara, tying up the white wrap, and circling around the chair. ‘Now what are we going to do?’

  ‘We’re going to wait until ten o’clock, which should give Mr Grant plenty of time to get home to Santa Barbara, if he’s not home already, and then we’re going to give him a call. We’re going to tell him to get his ass down here as quickly as possible, no arguments, and to pick up all of this junk he’s left here. Including, and especially, this chair.’

  ‘Do you think he will?’

  ‘If he doesn’t, I’ll get in touch with the California Antique Dealers’ Association and have him struck off their register for shoddy practice. And I’ll sue him for misrepresentation. And I’ll bust him in the mouth.’

  We retreated into the living-room, locking the library door behind us, although it was quite obvious that the chair didn’t consider locks to be much of an obstacle. It was one of those ritual gestures that any human being would make, I guess. Why do we say prayers, or light candles for our loved ones? They’re all part of our endearing frailty in the face of sinister and cataclysmic forces that we can neither control nor understand. And don’t think I’m usually this philosophical. It was just that during that first terrifying night, I began to realise what it’s really like to be helpless. What else could I do but lock the door?

  We walked into the living-room. It was cold in there, too, and I went over to the fire to poke a little more life into it. To my surprise, it had almost completely burned out. There was nothing left of the logs I had stacked on it only a half-hour before but mounds of soft grey ash, glowing with cinders.

  ‘Sara,’ I said. ‘Will you take a look at this fire?’

  She came closer. She raised her hands to feel its dying warmth. ‘It was blazing,’ she said. ‘When we were making love just now – it was really burning up.’

  I raked through the hearth. A soft cold wind blew from nowhere at all, and some of the powdery ash sifted across the rug.

  ‘Something’s wrong here, honey,’ I said. ‘Something’s very badly wrong. I think we’d better go up and check that Jonathan’s okay. I don’t want anything happening to him.’

  We left the fire and went upstairs. At the top of the stairs, there was a long landing carpeted in light gold, and our five bedrooms came off it on either side. Jonathan’s room was way down at the far end, past a row of framed engravings of American birds of prey, Mississippi kites and sharp-shinned hawks and California condors. There was a fan-shaped window at the end, too, and the extraordinary thing about it was that it was already bright with the misty blue light of dawn.

  ‘A
m I going nuts or is it morning?’ I asked Sara. I’d taken my watch off downstairs, when we’d been making love. All she could do was shake her head in confusion.

  ‘It can’t be morning,’ she said.

  We hurried down the corridor to Jonathan’s room. Sara flung open the door, and there he was. Safe, and still asleep. Tucked up in his early-American patchwork quilt in his bright little room with its brass-bound bureau, and red-and-white wallpaper, and some of the gaudy paintings that he’d brought home from playschool. Sara leaned over and kissed his cheek. I saw a tear glistening in her eye, a tear that fell on her son’s pillow. I stood by the door and said, ‘At least it hasn’t affected him – whatever it is.’

  ‘There’s really something here, isn’t there?’ Sara asked me, as she quietly closed Jonathan’s door behind her. ‘I mean – that chair’s brought some kind of evil spirit in with it.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, and I didn’t. ‘I’m still willing to admit that we could be suffering from overloaded imaginations. Don’t ask me how, or why. But can you actually believe that it’s something to do with the supernatural?’

  ‘What else could it be?’

  ‘Come on, Sara. The supernatural? Demons and devils and invisible forces that throw all your pots and pans around the place? It just doesn’t happen.’

  ‘What about The Amityville Horror?’

  ‘Didn’t you read that article in the papers? They proved that half of the things that were supposed to have taken place at Amityville were – well, they were exaggerated, to put it kindly.’

  Sara turned towards the window. It looked out on to our sloping side garden, and the picket fence that surrounded the lemon grove. The rising sun was shining through the dark green leaves of the lemon trees, and the sharp-coloured citrus fruits looked almost as if they were fashioned out of wax.

  ‘Ricky,’ she said, gently, ‘about a half-hour ago it was nine o’clock in the evening. We’d only just come home from the wild-animal park. Now, it’s morning. Are you trying to say that what we’re experiencing isn’t supernatural?’

  ‘We could have slept by the fire without realising it.’

  ‘Ricky, we didn’t sleep by the fire.’

  ‘But maybe we did.’

  ‘We didn’t, for God’s sake! Don’t you think I know if I’ve been to sleep or not? It’s morning, and I’m tired, and I haven’t closed my eyes even once!’

  ‘What the hell do you want me to say?’ I shouted at her. ‘I don’t know where the night’s gone any more than you do! I’m trying to rationalise it. Trying to explain it.’

  ‘What for? Can’t you question it? Can’t you challenge it? Can’t you suppose just for one moment that it might be something outside of any kind of explanation at all?’

  I couldn’t answer that, and I didn’t try. The truth was that I was only seeking answers to what had happened during this briefest of nights because I had Sara to take care of, and Jonathan, and if I once admitted that our house had been possessed by some species of supernatural force, I was admitting that I couldn’t protect them against it. Maybe I was acting like a stereotypical husband; but I didn’t know how else to behave when there was a chair downstairs that could apparently move itself through locked doors at will, and a night that I had thought was just about to begin had vapourised away in front of my eyes.

  I thought of the wall-clock in the library. When we had been examining the chair it had struck the hour. I could remember the strokes in my head. One – two – three – four – five. I should have realised then that the chair was turning our whole world upside-down.

  While Sara took a shower, I went to our bedroom and dressed. Our bedroom was decorated all in white – with a white shag rug, white figured bedspread, and white furniture. The only relief was a huge unfinished oil painting by Gustave Moreau, the French symbolist. It showed an androgynous figure in a crown and white robes, standing in a dark and exotic temple. The figure was obviously supposed to be reacting to something in surprise and possibly terror, but nobody would ever find out to what, because Moreau had died in 1898 and left over a third of the picture as blank canvas, with only a few rough sketches on it.

  I put on a dark blue shirt and a pair of cream linen jeans. I looked at myself in the mirror over Sara’s dressing-table, and I saw that she was right. I’d shaved this morning – or what by now must be yesterday morning – but there was at least twenty-four hours’ growth. In some weird way, the arrival of that chair had taken a whole slice of time out of our lives. It had tampered with our entire perception of day and night.

  I shaved quickly, and splashed on some English Leather. Sara came in from the bathroom, her hair wound into a towel-turban, her eyelashes spiky with wet. As she rubbed herself dry in front of the mirror, I stood behind her and touched her on the shoulder and said, ‘Listen. I didn’t mean to shout at you. You have to understand that I’m trying to look after you.’

  ‘I know,’ she nodded. ‘But you won’t be able to look after us unless you face up to reality.’

  ‘You call a half-hour night reality?’

  ‘It’s reality as far as we’re concerned. I don’t know how it happened, but we lost eight hours someplace, and there isn’t any question in my mind at all that Mr Grant’s chair was responsible for it.’

  I kissed her ear, the wet stray curl of her hair. ‘You’re a wife in a million,’ I said, ‘and a lover in a billion.’

  ‘You’ve had a billion lovers to compare me with?’

  ‘Don’t be so pragmatic.’

  ‘I can’t help it. I’m made that way. Most women are. And that’s why I can face up to what’s going on here while you can’t. All this stuff about protecting us.’

  I kissed her again, but Sara shook her head, and said, ‘Not now, darling. Let’s get rid of the chair first.’

  I stepped back. ‘They should have run over Kate Millett with a truck when they had the chance.’

  I went to the telephone, picked it up, and punched out the number of Grant Antiques in Santa Barbara.

  ‘You’re calling Grant?’ asked Sara, as she combed out her hair.

  ‘You bet.’

  The phone rang and rang and rang. After a while, I sat down impatiently on the edge of the bed. I had almost given up the call when someone picked up the phone at the other end, a grave-sounding man with an East Coast accent.

  ‘Hallo? Henry Grant, Antiques.’

  ‘Oh, hi. Is Henry Grant there, please?’

  There was a silence that I can only describe as ‘difficult’. Then the grave-sounding man said, ‘I regret not.’

  ‘Do you expect him back today? My name’s Delatolla. I’m an antiques dealer from Rancho Santa Fe, near San Diego.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Delatolla. But I’m afraid Mr Grant has met with an accident.’

  ‘An accident? What kind of an accident? Is it serious?’

  ‘As serious as it could be. He was returning from a buying trip yesterday evening when his van collided with a concrete pier on the Santa Ana Freeway.’

  ‘You’re trying to tell me he’s dead?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. The van – the van caught fire. He didn’t have any chance to escape whatsoever. He was burned to death.’

  I smoothed the tense muscles at the back of my neck. ‘I see. I’m really sorry.’

  ‘Was there anything I could help you with?’ asked the gravesounding man. ‘I’m Mr Grant’s attorney, Douglas Eckstein. I’ll be doing whatever I can today to clear up his outstanding business affairs.’

  I cleared my throat. ‘As a matter of fact, Mr Grant left me with something of a problem. He came around here yesterday afternoon with a whole pile of antiques, none of which were particularly valuable or interesting to me, but he unloaded them all on to my driveway to show them to me, and then he took off in his van before I could tell him I didn’t particularly want them.’

  ‘He left some antiques with you, without asking for payment?’

  ‘A whole heap. And the trouble
is, I don’t want any of them. Do you think you could arrange to have them collected? There must be twenty or thirty thousand dollars’ worth here. I don’t really want to be responsible for them.’

  ‘Will you hold on for just a moment?’ Mr Eckstein asked me. He must have clamped his hand over the phone, because all I could hear for the next few moments was two or three muffled, distorted voices. After a while, though, he came back on the line.

  ‘Mr. Delatolla,’ he asked me, ‘do these antiques include a certain carved chair, with a sort of face on it?’

  ‘You’ve got it.’

  ‘Well, Mr Grant left a letter of instructions with his office before he went off to San Diego County, and he stated specifically in this letter that if he were to leave this particular chair with anyone, no matter whom, no matter whether it was paid for or not, we could take it that the chair and any other objects that came with it had been accepted by the beneficiary as a gift, and that we were to take no action to recover it.’

  I ran my hand through my hair. I could hardly believe what I was hearing. ‘What are you talking about, Mr Eckstein?’ I asked him. ‘I never accepted the chair either as a gift or a sale. All I want to do is get rid of it.’

  I was bending the truth a little – but since Henry Grant was no longer around to prove that I had offered him $7500 for his antiques, and since the chair had turned out to have such unpleasant and unsettling effects on my household, I think I was justified.

  But Eckstein was adamant. ‘Mr Grant’s instructions are quite clear,’ he told me. ‘He has written in the plainest, language possible that we should not take the chair back from whomsoever has accepted it, under any circumstances, and those include financial inducements, no matter how substantial, and even threats of physical duress.’

  ‘You mean you wouldn’t even take it back at gunpoint?’

  ‘Mr Grant’s instructions are quite unequivocal.’

  ‘Listen,’ I snapped, ‘this is crazy. I don’t want the damned thing.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Delatolla. I am not empowered to take any action to help you.’