Archibald Samuel - Arvida

All that doesn’t make for a haunted house. No point losing your head over it. It’s horrible enough, but the truth is that going back into the brothers’ room that night after having made the barricade, I just felt very sad. I thought about their life in that room. A nothing life, so small in scale that it could make you want to execute a grand, insignificant suicide. I don’t know. Along the grapevine it must certainly have seemed a fearful tale, but for me the lives of Vallaire and Thibeau Villeneuve amounted first and foremost to a very sad story. Over the following weeks I took apart the brothers’ room under the eaves, and I sent all the wood to the dump. I don’t know who Vallaire and Thibeau wanted to hex, carving the devil’s sign into the floor, but now the curse is someone else’s business.

I was smart enough not to tell the whole story to my ex-wife. When we moved in, all she knew about was the old room and the marks on the floor. That was enough to impress the little one, but at least it wasn’t the Stephen King novel cover to cover.

I let two days go by, and then I went to talk to Julie one night, before she went to bed. I was gentle and I tried to reassure her. She asked me if I wanted to see her big notebook. I said “Yes, my lovely.” In a Canada notebook, for at least six months, she’d been keeping track of all the strange things going on in the house:

> The dates and hours when her little dog Mélodie yapped for no good reason ; she who’d howled all the goddam day ever since we’d got her, long before moving in here. Who howled at the clock, at noises in the street, at squirrels, at her shadow.

> The dates and hours when there was mysterious knocking in the house, from inside the walls ; knocking that was no mystery, since some of the plumbing dated from before the war — the First War, I mean to say.

> Sketches indicating the before and after locations of objects that had shifted position in the house. The list included things like the car keys on the table and winter boots in the hall, and I had to stop myself from telling Julie that I knew the cleaning woman was a ghost.

> Entries dated, but with no time, such as I felt a presence in the TV room , or as if to enrage me even more, Mama says she was pushed by a force and almost fell downstairs . That was dated the Saturday before, when the poltergeist had been able to capitalize on the fact that Danièle was drunk as a skunk after Alain Laganière and his wife had come to have dinner and play cards.

And so on and so forth. For pages and pages.

Most of the entries gave the dates and hours when doors had slammed in the middle of the night. I remember being afraid for her and feeling sorry for her. Poor Julie. Poor us. I remember taking her in my arms like when she was little, and rocking her for a long time. Perhaps I should have come clean then and there, but I decided to let things go.

There were so many slammed doors in those days that it couldn’t hurt to blame two or three of them on ghosts.

After that things were better, things were worse, but they were never good any more. My wife and her friend Louise hired some clown with a moustache to purify the house : he walked all over mumbling in some bizarre language, and burning cheap incense. My daughter kept on adding to her notebook, but she didn’t have any more night sweats, and I suspected her of having begun to draw attention to herself at school with all that stuff. My wife, as she did with anything and everything, used the negative energy on the loose in our household as a pretext to spend money. She had to regain control of the house, she said, and to do so for the family. In practice that meant unloading vast sums onto her decorator friend, buying mountains of knick-knacks and trinkets every day, ordering lamps and furniture from the ends of the earth, then spending almost fifteen thousand bucks to have a made-to-measure feng shui bed built for our room, wide as two king beds, so wide in fact that there was no way we could come into contact except by making a special effort.

The little one thought the house had destroyed our marriage. Danièle must have thought so too because she never disputed anyone who had a stupid idea. But the truth was that it was all over long before we got here. I’ll never tell her, but we were done as soon as Julie was born. Everything that wasn’t working between us got even worse after that. Danièle was crazy and I was drinking. She liked to take a nip herself, mind you, and I wasn’t totally sane either. I suppose we’d be able to admit as much separately today, but certainly not face to face.

After the little one was born, sleeping with my wife became a long-term project. One that never cost me less than a couple of hundred bucks. Danièle began to fear for everything, for herself and for the little one, all the time. Nothing I did made any sense to her. We also had a different way of dealing with the fact that the business was doing well and I was making money. She came from a small village where she’d always held her own because of her beauty, and now she loved playing the parvenu, looking down her nose at her brothers and sisters, all of whom hated me because I’d turned her into a snob. But I came from the lower town, where you can get hammered for lots of reasons, but never harder than for a swelled head. I like paying for a round and buying big cars, but never in a hundred years would I go on about it, talking with my mouth all puckered up as did my wife, who came off as a real turkey, articulating like a countess with her three-hundred-word vocabulary.

I suppose it was partly my fault, because I spoiled her. I always liked letting her spend money so people could see what I had without my needing to make a big deal of it myself. When Julie was born, I had the same reflex as lots of workers’ sons: I wanted to close the floodgates so my daughter wouldn’t be the most coddled baby in the world. So she wouldn’t turn into a rich kid I couldn’t even talk to. I don’t know. All I know is that there was no way I could raise my daughter old-style with her mother taking herself for Empress Sisi right alongside. But there, at least, things worked out. She’s tough today, my daughter. She earns her own money and she’s not scared of anyone, but I’m not liar enough to say it’s thanks to me.

By the time we moved into the house, things had already gone sour. We made love about ten times a year. I tried to reconcile myself to that because we’d almost divorced in 1987 after my affair with a secretary. So I drank a lot, and yes, I was in a foul humour most of the time. Since Danièle was afraid of everything, and refused to go for counselling and said it was me who was crazy and irresponsible, the only place to spend our money was at the shopping centre. We didn’t travel any more because every country in the world was too dangerous for the little one — except for the States and Walt Disney World, which a normal guy soon gets tired of visiting. It was a real problem going to a restaurant because my wife ate nothing and was always scared that the people in the kitchen had left the chicken on the counter more than five minutes, or touched the meat with their bare hands. I tried to start a wine collection but she said it was stupid to pay fifty bucks for bottles that really aren’t any better than those you can get for ten, and anyway it was just another reason to get drunk.

Danièle babied our daughter and you couldn’t talk to her about it without her jumping all over you. She overprotected her and spoiled her and at the same time overexposed her by telling her all sorts of nonsense about men in general and me in particular. At one point she was reading another one of her ladies’ books: The Manipulators Are Among Us . She made a point of leaving it all over the house with a big bookmark sticking out of it. One afternoon I picked it up and opened it to the page she’d marked. It was the list of “what makes a manipulator”: