Familiar Spirit

The house was out of the way, on the west side of town, and much too large for one person, but Sarah wanted it.

It stood well back from the road on a huge corner lot, a weathered green frame house surrounded by trees. Even now, in mid-October, with the leaves beginning to fall, the house was nearly invisible from the street. Only the grey cement steps, a glimpse of the black tarpaper roof, and the bright red splotch of a crookedly leaning mailbox revealed the house to a passing observer.

The first sight of it made Sarah’s heart beat more quickly. She could live there, yes, she could. She responded to this solitary, unkempt house almost with recognition, a feeling more positive than any she’d had in a week of examining sterile apartments and dreary, refurbished duplexes. To have a whole house, all to herself . . . She followed the gleaming black Ferrari off the street and up a short concrete ramp, the merest fragment of a driveway, and parked behind the house.

Valerie, a thin, young redhead dressed in blue jeans, high leather boots and a dirty yellow sweater, climbed out of the Ferrari. Sarah switched off her engine, but didn’t get out of her car. Something about the other woman, something she couldn’t quite define, made her nervous. She wondered if she had made a mistake in coming here.

The house had been built on a slope, so that while the back door was only three wooden steps from the ground, an imposing flight of cement stairs rose more than ten feet to the sagging wooden porch and the front door. The lawn—if anything so wild and weedy could be called a lawn—rolled out before the house, down to the street below and vanished on either side into a little wilderness of bushes, trees and creeper vines. Behind the house there was only a small patch of bare ground, lightly sprinkled with gravel broken up by the occasional hardy plant, which provided space for cars to be parked. The back boundary was defined by a high wire fence.

Curious, nerves forgotten, Sarah got out of her car and nodded towards the fence. “What’s that?”

“Camp Mabry, National Guard,” the other woman said in a dull, uninflected voice. She gestured along the fence, westward. “All that down there is wilderness, government owned, no trespassing. You’ll hear them sometimes, on weekends, playing war games. Other than that, it’s very quiet here. Very quiet.”

Sarah nodded. The isolation pleased her. There were no near neighbors, the nearest house being on the other side of the four lanes of West 35th Street. Living here, she would never be bothered by the sound of neighbors quarrelling, never have to worry about keeping quiet herself, or suffer another’s fondness for high-volume disco. Here, she would have plenty of room, plenty of peace, plenty of the solitude she had always lacked.

I’ll be alone, she thought, and in that moment the idea of solitude became not a longed-for treat but a punishment. Why was she doing this, sentencing herself to loneliness? Did she have to look for the biggest, most isolated house she could find?

“Let’s go inside; you have to go inside.” Valerie had made another of her disturbing transfers from dullness into a feverish liveliness. Her voice had become shrill, and she was jigging slightly with impatience, or some other ill-repressed emotion. Sarah moved away, back towards her car, reluctant to follow this woman anywhere, fearful of some trap.

She looked back up at the house and felt it again, that basic attraction, the desire to live here. It was an old, worn house, old-fashioned and somehow rural in appearance. It reminded her of an old farmhouse near Bellville, where she had spent many happy weekends as a child. Well, why not? Why shouldn’t she be happy here?

She looked at Valerie’s tense, miserable face and wondered if it was pills, or an incipient nervous breakdown. Whatever it was, surely she didn’t have to be afraid of this poor thing, younger and frailer than she was herself. Sarah prided herself on her ability to cope.

“Yes,” she said. “Let’s go inside. I’d like to see it.”

Valerie moved away and bounded up the three wooden steps to the back door.

Sarah blinked, startled, and followed more slowly. Valerie’s movements had reminded her of some animal running free, and that type of grace was completely at odds with the neuroses she sensed in Valerie’s behavior.

The back door led onto an enclosed porch; there, a heavy wooden door with a window opened into the kitchen. Sarah realized that Valerie had opened both doors without using a key.

“Don’t you lock your house?”

Valerie shook her head. “Why bother? If anyone wants to get in, he’ll get in. Locks don’t work, they just fool you into thinking you’re safe. There’s a lock here, see, but it’s just a button—anyone could pick it. And there’s a skeleton key for the front door, if you want to use it.”