The Red House. George Agnew Chamberlain
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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1943 by George Agnew Chamberlain
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com
I
THE PINEYS used to hog the whole of the lozenge between the Shore Road and the White Horse Pike. But no longer is that region a mystery; too many thoroughfares have let in the light. Not so with the Barrens farther south, an irregular sweep of country that has defied unveiling for a hundred years. Highways have been bored across it, but step off them on either side and it is as though you had passed through a wall and closed a door behind you. Seen from the air, this area seems compact, an even blot of forest pierced by the oases of a dozen farms, each distant from the rest and solitary. But to a man on foot or on horse it has a diversity beyond belief. Bayous as sombrous as any in the Florida Everglades widen into creeks that narrow into runs. Marshes rise into sparsely wooded tablelands that plunge down unexpectedly into swales darkened by primeval trees.
No view anywhere, only discoveries. And roads. Roads that cross each other or intertwine or break at right angles for no reason. Roads that sometimes make a complete circle, like a lost dog. Roads linked to obsolete and forgotten treasure; this to a marl pit, that to a reds tone quarry and another to a bog of buried cedar. Wood roads to rare sand, to vanished cranberry patches and even to faint earthworks thrown up as far back as the Revolution. Roads that tunnel through laurel twenty feet high. Obliterated roads, studded with young pines, that end nowhere. Still other roads, wide open, that tumble downward and cease in surprise at the edge of an impassable void.
Of the dozen oases, the most central and by far the deepest hidden was Yocum Farm. A plank house of eight-by-eight timbers mortised at the corners was the oldest of its buildings, and from this squat beginning had sprouted near by a huge barn, all the usual outhouses and eventually the main building. It was an irregular frame structure that faced open fields, but its rear hung over a deep tarn. The cleared acres were completely encircled by woods, billowing away or standing like a wall. Wherever there were hollows, the trees were mighty; elsewhere they had either the meager shanks of second-growth forest or the stiff flatness of scrub oak and jack pine. A lane with power wires tacked from tree to tree plunged westward for half a mile to the County Road, the nearest contact with the outer world.
The farm revolved around Pete Yocum, a hogshead of a man sixty-eight years old with barrels for legs. Everything about him was round, even his elbows and knees, yet nothing was soft. The white hair of his broad beard, mustache and head formed an electric nimbus that came alive to the least draft. Frequently, when about to speak, he would give a preliminary puff, and silky hair would shower out like a bursting milkweed pod. At sight of him, people were inclined to laugh, but only until they collided with eyes that created the illusion of a spider lurking in the center of a web. In a genial mood, the eyes might twinkle amiably, but anger could make them bore like gimlets or broaden into a defiant and terrifying glare. They had one more phase, occurring only at intervals, that would flatten them into fish scales. At such moments Pete turned purple and his vast bulk would heave with internal convulsions and threaten to burst.
Only Ellen, his twin sister, and Lottie knew the source of these attacks. Ellen was flat as a board, with faded hair drawn tight back over a well-formed head, yet for all her gaunt appearance she exuded kindliness. Lottie was her counterpart in build, but in nothing else. At first glance she seemed an ordinary colored woman until you noticed with a shock that her hair was straight and her eyes pale blue. Her son, Lot, was marked the same way. They were members of that mysterious people, the Moors of Delaware, and proud of the legend that they were descended from an Egyptian prince. Pete and Ellen had been nursed at the same breast with Lottie, making her a foster sister, twined into the web of Yocum Farm by a bond far tighter than wages.
Into this strange and hidden tangle of existence, fate tumbled a child named Meg Yarrow. Her mother had died in childbirth, and when her father followed five years later, Yocum Farm absorbed the orphan as a matter of course. From the start, her attitude toward Ellen and Lottie had been that of one more woman in a man’s world. As for Pete, according to what mood he happened to be in, she soon learned to call him “Uncle” or “sir” or just plain “Pete”; in reality, he was her granduncle. He had been huge even as far back as 1932, the date of her arrival, an inexhaustible well of wonder. Occasionally he would scat her out, vexed by her unblinking gaze, and she would have to content herself with watching Big Alee, the capable farm hand, trying to pound sense into Lot’s half-addled brain.
Surely no little girl ever fell into a cozier nest or woke to more sudden terror. It had happened long ago and at night, the hour between supper and bed. Pete sat in his great square chair that somehow always seemed a throne. It had flat arms and a straight back with glides on its feet, so that he could shove it around at will. Without warning, his hands had locked tight over the head of his stout trench stick, armed with a pointed iron ferrule. His eyes flattened into fish scales and his bulk heaved and swelled to the verge of bursting. The cane clattered to the floor. His short arms reached upward and his fists closed tighter and tighter until they glistened like frozen snowballs.
“I’ll tell the hull world!” he muttered in a strangled tone. “I will so!”
“Pete, be you crazy?” cried Ellen. “Pete!”
Then Pete’s voice, strange and preceded by no warning puff, had resounded with a clang, “Drive right around! Drive right around and in!”
Ellen had ordered Meg up to her room with a rush, and never again had she been allowed to watch even a beginning of one of Pete’s spells. The minute he showed the first sign, she would be hustled upstairs, but nobody realized how clearly she could hear Lottie falling on her bony knees to pray and Ellen’s protesting cries, rising so high they smothered whatever Pete was trying to say. Suddenly he would snap out of it and let them lead him off to bed. Meg could hear that too. The creak of his chair. The pegging of his iron-shod stick, pitting the bare floor so it looked like smallpox. Finally, the groan of the big four-poster as it received his weight. Then silence, a silence more terrible than sound.
Even now, when she was sixteen, after such a scene she would creep to kneel at the window over the tarn and lean far out. She wasn’t praying, like Lottie; she was running away. From what? That was the trouble; you couldn’t say. Yet you felt something was loose in the house behind you. Something you couldn’t hear, see or name, that had been inside Pete, tormenting him, and now was out and free to roam. Though it never quite caught her, sometimes she almost wished it would, because then she could give it a name. Ellen knew its name, and so did Lottie; only they wouldn’t tell. Just ask them about Pete’s queer turns and why you felt this way, and their tongues and faces would freeze into stone.
Night can do a strange thing to you; it can shrivel you into a baby in your mind. But when morning breaks, you find you’re quite grown-up and astonished to think you could have been so silly. Like this morning in May of 1943. Pete hadn’t put on one of his shows for months, not even when he had lost Big Alec to the draft, and she ran downstairs to find him in the midst of a battle with Ellen.
Ordinarily, people noticed when Meg came into a room, even though there was nothing remarkable about her looks. Shoulder-long brown hair, seldom hidden by a hat, topped a neat body of average height that appeared to be featherweight, but could turn into lead when she anchored her feet. As to her face, one expression gave it one shape and another another. The same might be said of her eyes. From small and speckled, they could widen into pools of reddish-brown as lucent as the waters of the tarn. All her dresses were made by Ellen, and, strangely enough, they were becoming and sometimes even spicy, as if Ellen, while sewing, might have been listening to some echo from her own faraway youth. But looks were the least part of Meg. As if quicksilver ran in her veins instead of blood, she passed from light to shadow, not slowly, but swiftly as stepping across a line. Yet today Pete didn’t notice her; he kept right on talking to Ellen.
“I’ve lived here all my days,” he declared, “and no war ain’t