George Martin - Rogues

patrick carterhook

The carving was in a severe Victorian cursive, the two juicy o’s dissected by a feathery curlicue. It made me want to protect my belly.

Susan opened the door with red eyes.

“Welcome to Carterhook Manor,” she said, fake grandeur. She caught me staring—Susan never looked good when I saw her, but she hadn’t even pretended to brush her hair, and a foul, acrid odor came off her. (Not “despair” or “depression,” just bad breath and body odor.) She shrugged limply. “I’ve finally stopped sleeping.”

The inside of the house was nothing like the outside. The interior had been gutted and now looked like every other rich person’s house. It made me feel immediately more cheerful. I could cleanse this place: the tasteful recessed lights, the granite counters and stainless-steel appliances, the new, freakishly smooth wood paneling: wall upon wall of Botoxed oak.

“Let’s start with the blood trickle,” I suggested.

We climbed to the second floor. There were two more above it. The stairwell was open, and I peered up through the banisters to see a face peering down at me from the top floor. Black hair and eyes, set against the porcelain skin of an antique doll. Miles. He stared at me for a solemn moment, then disappeared again. That kid matched the original house perfectly.

Susan pulled down a tasteful print on the landing, so I could see the full wall.

“Here, it was right here.” She pointed from the ceiling to the floor.

I pretended to examine it closely, but there was nothing really to see. She’d scrubbed it down completely; I could still smell the bleach.

“I can help you,” I said. “There is a tremendous feeling of pain, right here. Throughout the whole house, but definitely here. I can help you.”

“The house creaks all night long,” she said. “I mean, it almost moans. It shouldn’t. Everything inside is new. Miles’s door slams at strange times. And he … he’s getting worse. It’s like something has settled on him. A darkness he carries on his back. Like an insect shell. He scuttles. Like a beetle. I’d move, that’s how scared I am, I’d move, but we don’t have the money. Anymore. We spent so much on this house, and then almost that much renovating, and … my husband won’t let me anyway. He says Miles is just going through growing pains. And that I’m a nervous, silly woman.”

“I can help you,” I said.

“Let me give you the whole tour,” she replied.

We walked down the long, narrow hall. The house was naturally dark. You moved away from a window and the gloom descended. Susan flipped on lights as we walked.

“Miles turns them off,” she said. “Then I turn them back on. When I ask him to keep them on, he pretends he has no idea what I’m talking about. Here’s our den,” she said. She opened a door to reveal a cavernous room with a fireplace and wall-to-wall bookshelves.

“It’s a library, ” I gasped. They had to own a thousand books, easy. Thick, impressive, smart-people books. How do you keep a thousand books in one room and then call the room a den?

I stepped inside. I shivered dramatically. “Do you feel this? Do you feel the … heaviness here?”

“I hate this room.” She nodded.

“I’ll need to pay extra attention to this room,” I said. I’d park myself in it for an hour at a time and just read, read whatever I wanted.

We went back into the hall, which was now dark again. Susan sighed and began flipping on lights. I could hear a patter of feet upstairs, running manically up and down the hallway. We passed a closed door to my right. Susan knocked at it— Jack, it’s me. A shuffle of a chair being pushed back, a snick of a lock, and then the door was opened by another child, younger than Miles by several years. He looked like his mother. He smiled at Susan like he hadn’t seen her in a year.

“Hi, Momma,” he said. He wrapped his arms around her. “I missed you.”

“This is Jack, he’s nine,” she said. She ruffled his hair.

“Momma has to go do a little work with her friend here,” Susan said, kneeling to his eye level. “Finish your reading and then I’ll make a snack.”

“Do I lock the door?” Jack asked.

“Yes, always lock your door, sweetheart.”

We started walking again as we heard the snick of the lock behind us.

“Why the lock?”

“Miles doesn’t like his brother.”

She must have felt my frown: No teenager likes his kid brother.

“You should see what Miles did to the babysitter he didn’t like. It’s one of the reasons we don’t have money. Medical bills.” She turned to me sharply. “I shouldn’t have said that. It wasn’t … major. Possibly an accident. I don’t know anymore, actually. Maybe I am just goddam crazy.”

Her laugh was raw. She swiped at an eye.

We walked to the end of the hallway, where another door was locked.

“I’d show you Miles’s room, but I don’t have a key,” she said simply. “Also, I’m too scared.”

She forced another laugh. It wasn’t convincing; it didn’t have enough energy to even pose as a laugh. We went up to the next floor, which was a series of rooms, wallpapered and painted, with fine-boned Victorian furniture arranged haphazardly. One room held only a litterbox. “For our cat, Wilkie,” Susan said. “Luckiest cat in the world: his own room for his own crap.”

“You’ll find a use for the space.”

“He’s actually a sweet cat,” she said. “Almost twenty years old.”

I smiled like that was interesting and good.

“We obviously have more room than we need,” Susan said. “I think we thought, there might be another … maybe adopt, but I wouldn’t bring another child into this house. So instead we live in a very expensive storage facility. My husband does like his antiques.” I could picture him, this uptight, snooty husband. A man who bought antiques but didn’t find them himself. Probably had some classy decorator woman in horn-rims doing the actual work. She probably bought those books for him too. I heard you could do that—buy books by the yard, turn them into furniture. People are dumb. I’ll never get over how dumb people are.

We climbed some more. The top floor was just a large attic space with a few old steamer trunks all along the walls.

“Aren’t the trunks stupid?” she whispered. “He says it gives the place a little authenticity. He didn’t like the renovation.”

So the house had been a compromise: The husband wanted vintage, Susan wanted new, so they thought this outside/inside split might settle things. But the Burkes ended up more resentful than satisfied. Millions of dollars later, and neither of them were happy. Money is wasted on the rich.

We went down the back stairs, cramped and dizzying, like an animal’s burrow, and ended up in the gaping, gleaming modern kitchen.

Miles sat at the kitchen island, waiting. Susan started when she saw him.

He was small for his age. Pale face and pointy chin, and black eyes that reflected twitchily, like a spider’s. Assessing. Extremely bright but hates school, I thought. Never gets enough attention—even if he got all of Susan’s attention it still wouldn’t be enough. Mean-spirited. Self-centered.

“Hi, Momma,” he said. His face was transformed, a bright, goofy smile cracking through it. “I missed you.” Sweet-natured; loving; Jack. He was doing a perfect version of his little brother. Miles went to hug Susan, and as he walked, he assumed Jack’s slump-shouldered, childish posture. He wrapped his arms around her, nuzzled into her. Susan watched me over his head, her cheeks flush, her lips tight as if she smelled something nasty. Miles gazed up at her. “Why won’t you hug me?”