House of Secrets

“Welcome to the library,” Diane said.

It was stunning. A vaulted ceiling spanned books stacked on mahogany shelves that reached all the way up the walls. Two brass ladders ran on casters to enable access to the shelves. Between them, a massive oak table lined with green-glassed bankers’ lamps split the room. A few gleaming dust motes circled the table like birds on updraughts.

Cordelia absolutely had to see what books were on the shelves. She always did. She poked her nose up to the nearest one and realised where she’d heard of Mr Kristoff.

Cordelia could read anywhere. She had been reading on the car ride to 128 Sea Cliff Avenue even though she was sandwiched between her siblings going up and down San Francisco hills with a dyslexic in charge of the GPS. “Losing yourself in a book is the best,” her mother always said, and Cordelia had a feeling her grandmother had said the same thing to Bellamy as a young girl.

Cordelia had started early, embarrassing her parents in a fancy restaurant at the age of four by reading a newspaper over an old lady’s shoulder, causing the woman to shout, “That baby is reading!” As she got older, she moved on to her parents’ collection of western literature: the Oxford Library of the World’s Great Books, with their thick leather spines. Now she was into more obscure authors, people whose books she had to find in first edition or old paperbacks with names like Brautigan and Paley and Kosinski. The more obscure the better. She felt that if she read a writer that no one had heard of, she kept him or her alive single-handedly, like intellectual CPR. At school she got in trouble for sneaking books inside her textbooks (though Ms Kavanaugh never minded). In the last year she’d discovered a man whom Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft had cited as an influence, quite prolific, who’d written adventure novels in the early twentieth century.

“‘Denver Kristoff’,” she read from a book’s spine. “Diane: the Kristoff who built this house was Denver Kristoff, the writer?”

“That’s right. You’ve heard of him?”

“Never read, definitely heard of. His books don’t even show up on eBay. Fantasy, science fiction… instrumental in the work of the people who later invented Conan the Barbarian and our modern idea of the zombie. Never got much critical acclaim—”

She had to stop speaking because of Brendan’s exaggerated gagging.

“Will you stop that?”

“Sorry, I’m allergic to book geeks.”

“Dad, we could be living in the home of a well-known obscure writer!”

“I’ll take that under advisement.”

Diane led the family out of the library (Dr Walker practically had to drag Cordelia) and presented a pristine kitchen, the most modern room they had seen so far. New appliances glittered under a sprawling skylight. It looked like a place germs would be afraid to enter. An impressive array of knives, in order from smallest to largest, hung magnetically over the stove. Eleanor asked, “Can we make cookies here?”

“Sure,” Dr Walker said.

“Can we make only cookies here?”

“Viking, Electrolux, Sub-Zero,” Diane checked off, leading the family past the stainless-steel, double-doored fridge. Brendan wondered if there might be something weird inside it, like a head, so he peeked… but he didn’t see anything more disturbing than clinical emptiness.

Diane took the Walkers upstairs. The contemporary decor of the kitchen was instantly lost in a spiral wooden staircase that Eleanor insisted on climbing up and down and up again. The spiral stairs were wider than any the Walkers had ever seen; they served as the main stairs between the first and second floors. Upstairs, a broad hallway ran the length of the house, ending at a bay window and another, smaller staircase that led back down to the great hall.

The walls featured old portraits, in colour, with a faded pastel tint. In one, a grim-faced man with a square beard stood next to a lady in a frilled dress gripping a buggy. In the next, the same lady looked over her shoulder on a wharf as men in newsboy caps eyed her. In a third, an elderly woman sat beneath a tree holding a baby in a dress and bonnet.

“The Kristoff family,” Diane explained, noting Brendan and Cordelia’s fascination. “That’s Denver Kristoff” – the man with the square beard – “his wife, Eliza May” – the woman on the wharf – “and his mother” – the woman under the tree with the baby. “I forget her name. Anyway. The pictures are just for show. When you move in – if you move in – you can put up pictures of your own family.”

Brendan tried to imagine Walker photos on the wall: him and Dad at a lacrosse game with Dr Walker holding the stick incorrectly; Cordelia yelling at Mum because she didn’t want her picture taken without make-up; Eleanor crossing her eyes and smiling too wide. If you took stupid pictures and added a hundred years, did they end up looking eerie and important?

“There are three bedrooms on this floor,” Diane said. “The master—”

“Only three? You guys promised me I’d have my own room,” Brendan said.

“The fourth is upstairs. In the attic.” Diane pulled a string on the ceiling. A trapdoor swung down, followed by steps that folded out to lightly kiss the floor.

“Cool!” Brendan said. He climbed the ladder hand over fist.

Cordelia entered one of the bedrooms off the hall. It wasn’t the master (which had a king-size bed and two bedside tables) but it was a nice-sized room with fleur-de-lis wallpaper. She said, “I’ll take this one.”

“Then which one is mine?” Eleanor asked.

“Guys, this is all hypothetical…” Dr Walker tried, but Cordelia pointed Eleanor to the third bedroom, which was more of a maid’s bedroom – or a closet.

“I’m stuck with the smallest?”

“You are the smallest.”

“Mum! It’s not fair! How come I get the little room?”

“Cordelia’s a big girl. She needs space,” Mrs Walker said.

“Hear that, Cordelia? Mum says you need to go on a diet!” Brendan called from the attic.

“Bren, shut up! She means I’m older!”

Alone, upstairs, Brendan smiled… but then the attic began to hold his attention. It had a rollaway bed set up by the window, a bureau with various ornaments on top, and a bat skeleton on a shelf jutting out of the wall.

The bat skeleton was mounted on a smooth black rock with its wings outstretched. Its head tilted up like it was catching bugs. It was one of the creepiest things Brendan had ever seen… but he wasn’t scared. He pulled out his phone to take a picture.

“Brendan, apologise to your sister!” Mrs Walker yelled, and Eleanor joined in: “Yeah, Bren, get down here!”

Of course when he wasn’t scared of something, there was no one around to be impressed. Brendan descended the ladder. Cordelia glared at him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You don’t need to go on a diet. But – look what they have upstairs! I took a picture—”

Cordelia grabbed his phone and deleted the photo.

“Hey!”

“Now we’re even.”

“You didn’t even look at it!”

Diane tried to hide her exasperation with a smile. “Shall we continue?”

The family followed her down the hall, passing a knob sticking out of a square cut into the wall. “What’s that?” Eleanor asked.

“Dumbwaiter,” Diane said curtly.

They reached the end of the hall. “That’s it,” Diane said, glancing out of the bay window at the Walkers’ used Toyota, then back to Dr Walker. “You haven’t asked the critical question.”

“The price,” Dr Walker said dolefully. Truth was, when he’d heard “rustic” and “charming”, he’d thought the same thing as Cordelia: that the house was a fixer-upper he could afford. But two storeys plus an attic, fully furnished, with a library and bridge views, in Sea Cliff? This was a five-million-dollar residence.

Diane said, “The owners are asking three hundred thousand.”

Brendan saw a look of disbelief ripple across his father’s face. Then Dr Walker pulled himself together and put on his business voice. It was good to hear. Brendan used to hear it often, when his dad did interviews or advised other surgeons, but for the last month, since ‘the incident’, Dr Walker hadn’t had occasion to make those sorts of calls. Now he spoke with purpose.

“Ms Dobson, we’ll take it. Please draw up the papers and we’ll close as soon as possible.”

“Wonderful!” Diane opened a silver case to give Dr Walker a business card. Mrs Walker hugged her husband.

Eleanor asked, “What’s that mean? We got the house? We’re going to live here?”

Brendan stepped forward. “Why is it so cheap?”

“Bren!” Mrs Walker snapped.

“It’s the same price as an apartment. Less, even. It doesn’t add up. What are you trying to pull?”

“Your family’s inquisitiveness is welcome,” said Diane. “Brendan, the owners are trying to liquidate their investment. Like many families they’ve fallen on hard times, and they’re willing to drop the price to get out – especially if it means helping others in a tough spot. You may have noticed that there’s no For Sale sign on the lawn. The owners aren’t looking to sell to any family – they’re looking for the right family. A family in need.”

She smiled. Brendan hated being the object of her pity. It would have been one thing if she only pitied him – that he could deal with – but she pitied all of them. And that was because of his father. It was so embarrassing. Dr Walker was trying to do it all backwards: reverse-engineer his reputation by getting an impressive house to land an impressive job at an impressive hospital with an administration that was impressed by his renown and willing to overlook ‘the incident’. But he couldn’t even impress this estate agent. Brendan felt like he’d be better off on his own, or maybe at boarding school like some of his friends. But there was no way his parents could afford boarding school.

Diane led the Walkers downstairs, through the great hall, to the front entrance. “I think you’ll find Kristoff House a wonderful home.”

“We shouldn’t take it,” Brendan whispered to Cordelia. “You know Dad’s not thinking right these days. There’s something fishy here.”

“You’re just scared.”

“What? Me? No.”

“Sure you are. You don’t want to live with that creepy angel on the lawn.”

“Excuse me? There was a bat skeleton in the attic and I wasn’t scared of that.”

“So? Doesn’t prove anything. Nell, wasn’t Bren scared of that statue?”

Eleanor nodded.

“I rest my case.”

There was no way Brendan was going to let Cordelia have the last word. As his family walked out of the front door and headed down the pebbled path, he split off and ran to the stone angel, pulling out his phone to take another picture. He’d put his arm around the thing and grin and show the world he wasn’t frightened of a hunk of rock with moss accents.

Except the stone angel wasn’t there.

Brendan suppressed the urge to call out. Maybe he was just confused. Maybe the statue was on the other side of the house. But no: he remembered the broken hand was the right hand, and that it was a few inches from the exterior wall. Who moved the statue?

Brendan knelt to investigate the pine needles that carpeted the ground. There should have been a clear imprint where the base of the statue had been, where the needles were flat and damp, maybe with pill bugs scurrying around, but it looked like the statue had simply never been there—

Suddenly a face appeared. Inches from Brendan’s own, hissing, its voice like a swarm of wasps leaving hell.

“You don’t belong here.”

She was a bone-white old woman, as tall as the stone angel, bald, with cracked lips pulled back over brown teeth. She stared at Brendan with glistening steel-blue eyes. She wore dirty layers of rags and no shoes; her toenails were amber, encrusted with soil. She was the crone that Brendan had feared, but a hundred times worse, and when she spoke, her breath was fouler than six-month-old compost.

“Leave this place!”

She wrapped her hand around Brendan’s wrist. It felt like a rope. He tried to pull away, but she held him fast… and then she looked into his eyes. “Who are you?” she asked more quietly.

“B-Brendan Walker,” he said.

“Walker?” she repeated.

Brendan had never been so scared. Not scared stiff – beyond that, scared into action, like someone had shot a spike of adrenalin into his back. He twisted and wrested his hand free. He ran, spit flying out of the side of his mouth. “Mum! Dad!”

Surely they’d seen her: she was a six-foot baldy with the body-mass index of a skeleton; she’d be tough to miss. He reached his family back at the Toyota after running across the lawn, which suddenly seemed to be the size of a football field.

“Bren, what’s wrong?”

“Are you OK?!”

“I – you guys – you didn’t—?” Brendan looked back. Suddenly the whole scene looked much smaller and safer to him. It couldn’t have been more than twenty metres from the pavement to the house. The whole time he’d been running, his heart pounding in his chest, still seeing the old crone’s face in front of him… that had been only seconds.

And the woman was gone.

The sun had moved. The side of Kristoff House was bathed in shadow. The stone angel might have been there or it might not. Shadows hid all sorts of things.

“Brendan…? Did something happen?” That was Cordelia. She was looking at him seriously; she knew he was freaked. Brendan started to explain – but what would be the point? He couldn’t prove anything. He didn’t want to sound like a little kid.

“Nothing,” he said. “I just… I thought I lost this.”

He turned on his PSP. He had never been happier to see the title screen of Uncharted. Back in a world that he understood and controlled, he slipped into the car.

A funny thing happened to Brendan on the drive back from 128 Sea Cliff Avenue. Every second that he put between himself and the old crone, he became more and more convinced that she hadn’t been so scary after all. Dressed in rags, barefoot, with bad teeth… obviously she was a homeless lady. The more Brendan thought about it, the more it made sense: She lived in the yard. That was why the price was so low. She’d been spying on the Walkers, and she’d hidden when they’d spotted her – that was the darting shadow that Eleanor had seen. She loved the angel statue – she was obviously mentally disturbed; maybe she talked to it – and so she moved it (never mind how) when she saw Brendan and his sisters investigating. Then, when she had the chance, she sneaked up on him to scare him, to drive his family away. And she asked his name because… because she was crazy! What other reason did there need to be?

Brendan kept telling himself this as he went through the hypnotic motions of gaming, and soon he was not only convinced that the old crone wasn’t dangerous or supernatural (supernatural, come on), but he was determined to go back and drive her from the property. After all, Brendan Walker wasn’t somebody you could just push around. He was practically JV lacrosse.

The Walkers had been renting since ‘the incident’.Their new apartment was much smaller than their old house, especially the kitchen, which was more of a corner than a room. That meant less cooking and more cheap takeout. The night after seeing Kristoff House, Dr Walker convened a family meeting over Chinese food in the living room.

“So what’s up?” Brendan asked.

“I just want to make sure you’re all comfortable with our decision to buy Kristoff House.”

“You mean your decision,” said Brendan. “We had no part in it.”

“Fine,” said Dr Walker. “But speak now if you have a problem.”

“If we moved in, wouldn’t it be Walker House?” asked Eleanor.

“I think we should call it one twenty-eight Sea Cliff Avenue, its proper address,” said Mrs Walker. “Otherwise it sounds like we’re moving into something that belongs to someone else.”

It does belong to someone else, thought Brendan. The old crone. But he didn’t want to sound scared. He said, “I like it fine. Better than this dump.”

“I like it too,” Eleanor said. She was using a sauce-dipped spring roll to gather up as much shredded carrot and celery as possible; it looked like the spring roll was wearing a wig. “The faster we move in there, the faster we can get Misty.”

“Nell, how many times do we have to go through this—”

“But Mum said I could get her. Mum made me picture her—”

“You’ll get your horse some day,” Mrs Walker said, “if you eat your spring roll and stop playing with it.”

Eleanor tackled the spring roll in four huge bites. She looked at her mother and spoke with a full mouth: “Do I get my horse now?”

Everybody laughed – even Brendan. You’d have a hard time getting them to admit it, but the Walkers liked dinners this way, quick and greasy, instead of with cloth napkins with rings.

“What about you, Cordelia?” Dr Walker asked.

“Let me show you something.” Cordelia ducked out of the room and returned with an old book. It had a black cover, no dust jacket, and gold lettering nearly worn off the spine.

“Savage Warriors by Denver Kristoff,” Cordelia announced. “First edition, 1910. I took it from the library. And look!” She pulled out her MacBook Air. “On Powell’s Books they’re selling this for five hundred dollars! So that library alone is worth, like, the closing cost of the house!”

“Cordelia,” Brendan said, “you stole from the Kristoff House library?”

“You don’t steal from libraries. You borrow. Not that you would know.”

“No, your brother’s right,” said Dr Walker. “It’s not our house yet, and you shouldn’t have taken that—”

“That’s right you shouldn’t!” Brendan stood up. “Somebody might be really mad at you for stealing! You ever think of that?”

“Seriously, Bren?” Cordelia smirked. “Since when do you have a moral compass?”

Brendan didn’t answer – partly because he didn’t know what a moral compass was, partly because he was terrified of the old crone. Maybe she was a homeless lady, but maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she lived at 128 Sea Cliff Avenue. Maybe she didn’t take kindly to curious girls stealing books from her library. Brendan almost spoke up then about seeing her, about how he could still feel her hand around his wrist, about how that wrist felt cold even now, about how she had said “Walker” like it meant something… but he didn’t want to be made fun of. He would handle the crone himself when they moved in. Like a man.

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just… it’s not right to steal.”

“That’s true,” Dr Walker said, “and Cordelia, you’ll be putting that book back next week.”

“What happens next week?”

“We’re moving in.”

Spartan Movers was a removal company in San Francisco, the name of which was a source of huge embarrassment for Cordelia. “Why don’t we just go with Low-rent Movers?” she asked her mum. But when she saw the truck, she realised it wasn’t spartan like self-denying; it was Spartan like a citizen of ancient Sparta, with a plumed helmet for a logo.

The Spartan truck pulled up in front of Kristoff House, and a trio of burly men got out. The Walkers were already there, eager to get their stuff moved in. Brendan was more eager than anyone: he had visions of turning his attic bedroom into a teenage man cave where he could happily ignore the rest of his family. He started trailing one of the removal men as the man carried a bag of lacrosse equipment into the house.

“That goes in my room, the attic,” Brendan said.

“No problemo,” said the man, eyeing Kristoff House. It looked the same, except the lawn needed mowing. Brendan’s dad would probably make him do it.

“Nice place,” the man said. He was clearly one of those people who liked to talk. “Most folks are downsizing these days. But you guys are moving up.”

“Back up,” corrected Brendan as they walked down the path. When Dr Walker looked over, Brendan gave a big smile, pretending to help the mover with the bag. “We used to live in a place like this.”

“What happened?”

“There was an incident,” said Brendan, before realising he’d said too much.

“Oh yeah? What kinda incident?” asked the man. “Your old man was running schemes on the stock market and he got caught?”

“No.”

“He did time in the joint for tax fraud?”

“Oh, no—”

“Did he wear a scuba suit to check the mail? Was he riding his bicycle naked in circles? What?”

Brendan stopped short: “Yes. Yes, you totally nailed it. Riding his bike naked in circles.”

The removal man nodded and frowned as if he knew Brendan didn’t want to hear any more from him. They moved into the kitchen… and Brendan’s mind went back to the day that had changed everything.

Dr Walker had been a surgeon at John Muir Medical Center. His speciality had been gastric bypass surgery; he’d been heading for a senior position – but then one day he fell asleep in the break room during a shift and woke up standing over a patient, holding a bloody scalpel.

He had carved a symbol into the man’s stomach.

It was an eye, with an iris and pupil in the centre and half-circles above and below.

Brendan had come home from school and found his mother and sisters in tears. His father couldn’t remember disfiguring the man’s stomach; Dr Walker had been taking sleeping pills to help him rest, and they had made him sleepwalk.

The patient had sued, of course. Dr Walker had lost his job. The lawsuit was still pending, and the Walkers had spent so much money fighting it that they’d been forced to sell their old home and their two cars. It was so weird – so crazy and unlikely – that Brendan still had trouble believing it had really happened, even though he was living with the results.

“You know, I heard weird stuff about this place,” the removal man said as they walked along the upstairs hall, past the portraits of the Kristoff family.

“What?” Brendan asked.

“Maybe I’m no Harvard grad, but I’m a real good listener and an even better eavesdropper. And I heard this house was cursed. That’s why the last family left.”

“You believe in that stuff? Curses?”

“In San Francisco? With all kinds of hippies and freaks running around? Anybody could get cursed.”

Brendan had a question, but he wasn’t sure if he could ask it without sounding crazy. He pulled the string so the attic stairs came down and went into the attic with the removal man.

“Where you want the hockey stuff?” the mover asked.

“Lacrosse,” Brendan said. “Put it anywhere.” The man put it by the window. Then Brendan said, “If this place is cursed, how do I fix it?”

The man didn’t seem to think that question was weird. “Best way to fix a curse is to find the person who set it up,” he said, shrugging. Then he left Brendan to think about the old crone.

Out on the pavement, the removal man returned to the Spartan truck for his next item: a white trunk with bands of riveted bronze. It had rounded metal corners and the faded initials RW stencilled over a hefty lock.

“What’s in that trunk?” Cordelia asked. She was standing outside with her father.

“Just some old family records,” said Dr Walker. “You never noticed before? I’ve been lugging them around for years. Master bedroom!” he told the removal man. Two hours later the Walkers had settled in, hardly daring to believe that this was their new home. Since the purchase price had covered the furniture, everything inside was as beautiful as when they’d first visited: the pottery, the suit of armour, the grand piano… The Walkers’ belongings seemed out of place, unworthy of their new surroundings. Even the box of groceries that they brought from their old house didn’t seem to belong in the shiny kitchen. After making her family take a self-timed photo with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, Mrs Walker let her kids wander while she made tea in the stellar kitchen and her husband dozed beneath a sunbeam in the living-room Chester chair.