Never again.
In Chapter 12(Mark), both Mark and Susan explore the Marsten House, plotting to kill Barlow. However, in the published novel, the house is still a shambles when Susan peers in the window. In the original manuscript, there has been some renovation, detailed below:
She peered in through the break in the shutters. “Wow,” she murmured.
“What is it?” he asked anxiously. Even standing on tiptoe, he wasn’t quite tall enough to peer in.
She tried stumblingly to explain. Of course, neither of them knew that Parker [Larry] Crockett, feeling more and more like a man in the devil’s power, had been acting on Straker’s orders—orders that unvaryingly specified pick-up and delivery after dark. The invoices and bills of lading were always correct to the final letter, and payment was always to be made in cash—and Straker calculated with devilish accuracy, including sums for tipping porters and drivers. Drivers were hard to find, also. The harried Crockett found himself having to cast further and further afield for haulers and he found none that would do the job more than once. Royal Snow had laughed in his face and said, “I wouldn’t go back to that hell-house for a million bucks. Not if you drove the million up to my back door in a pickup. Get someone else.”
The triumph of owning the hot property downstate had even gone a bit sour in his mouth. Looking at the duly-executed papers in his safe-deposit box somehow didn’t compensate for the looks on the country-boys’ faces when they came into his office to collect Straker’s money. Parker knew that some of the deliveries were paintings—even when crated and covered with brown paper, the shape and feel of a painting was unmistakable. He suspected that the other crates, some of them picked up at the Portland docks, some at the Gates Falls railhead, contained furniture.
On Friday evening, the two men Parker had hired from Harlow had not returned—instead, Straker had shown up, driving the U-Haul.
“Where are those two guys?” Parker had asked. “I got their money…” He indicated the sealed white envelopes with a finger that shook slightly. Straker made that happen, damn him. For the first time in his long and not-so-straight business life, Parker Crockett felt manipulated, and he did not like it.
“They were curious,” Straker said, smiling his wolfish smile. “Like Bluebeard’s wife.”
“Where are they?” Parker asked again, aware that he was afraid Straker might tell him the truth.
“I’ve paid them,” Straker said. “You needn’t worry. You can keep that, if you like,” he added carelessly. There was two hundred dollars in each envelope.
Parker said deliberately: “If the State Police or Homer McCaslin shows up here, I want you to know I’m not going to cover up a goddamned thing. You’ve exceeded our agreement.”
Straker had thrown back his head and roared out his humorless, black laughter. “You are a precious man, Mr Crockett. Precious. You needn’t fear the authorities. Indeed, no.” The mockery of humor disappeared from his face like a dream. “If you must fear anything, fear your own curiosity. Do not be like those two dirt-grubbers tonight…or Bluebeard’s wife. There is a saying in our country: he who knows little is a sparrow; and the sparrows abide.”
And Parker Crockett asked no more questions. His daughter was sick in bed, and he asked no questions about that, either.
Looking through those dusty, broken slats was like looking through a science fiction time-lens into some stately Victorian mansion after the family had gone to Brighton for the summer. The walls were covered with a heavy, silken paper, wine-colored. Several wing chairs stood about, and a deep green velour sofa. In the alcove just off the main living room she could see a huge mahogany rolltop desk. Over it, in a heavily-scrolled frame, was a reproduction of Rembrandt’s Boy at his Studies—of course, it had to be a reproduction, didn’t it? Sliding doors, half-open, fronted the hallway that led past the stairwell and down toward the kitchen where Hubert Marsten’s wife had met her end. In the passage’s brown depths, she could see the crystal glimmer of a chandelier.
She stepped away fighting an urge to rub her eyes. It was so unlike the Marsten House of town rumor, or the stories passed from mouth to horrified mouth around the Girl Scout campfires that it was almost indecent. And all the changes had been made invisibly, it seemed.
“What is it?” Mark hissed again. “Is it him?”
“No,” she said. “The house, it…it’s been redone,” she finished lamely.
“Sure,” he said, in perfect understanding. “ Theylike to have all theirstuff. Why shouldn’t they? They’ve got tons of money and gold.”
She boosted herself up with a smooth flex of her muscles, and suddenly thought of Ben telling her about the hoods who had stuck up John Stennis: We’re going to shoot you anyway.
She dropped lightly to the carpet, which was smooth and soft and deep. Across the room, a grandfather clock with its wonderfully convoluted works in an oblong glass case, ticked away the minutes. The highly polished pendulum made a sunstreak on the opposing wall. There was an open humidor by one of the wing chairs, and beside it, an old-looking book with a calfskin binding. A black satin bookmark was placed into it perhaps three quarters of the way through. The overhead light fixture was a wonderfully convoluted thing composed of oblique prisms.
There were no mirrors in the room.
“Hey,” Mark hissed. His hands waved above the windowsill. “Help me get up.”
She leaned out, caught him under the armpits, and dragged him up until he could catch a grip on the sill. Then he jackknifed himself in neatly. His sneakered feet thumped to the carpet, and then the house was still again.
They found themselves listening to the silence, fascinated by it. There did not even seem to be the faint, high hum in the ears that comes in utter stillness, the sound of nerve-endings idling in neutral. There was only a great dead soundlessness. And that wasn’t right because—
She looked wildly across the room.
The clock had stopped. The pendulum hung straight down.
The cellar door was standing ajar.
“That’s where we have to go,” he said.
“Oh,” she said weakly. “Oh.”
The door was open just a crack, and the light did not penetrate at all. The tongue of darkness seemed to lick at the kitchen, hungrily, waiting for night to come so it could swallow it whole. That quarter inch of darkness was hideous, unspeakable in its possibilities. She stood beside Mark, helpless and moveless.
Then he moved forward and pulled the door open, and she felt her legs fall in behind him.
His fingers found a light switch and thumbed it back and forth several times.
“Busted,” he muttered. “ That’sno surprise.” He reached into his back pocket and brought out a greasy, crooked candle that had been slightly flattened by its trip in Mark’s back pocket. He turned to her and made himself offer: “Look, maybe you better stay up here and keep a watch out for Straker.”
“No,” she said. “I’m coming.”
It did not occur to either of them that the time had come to go back, to get Ben and perhaps even Jimmy Cody, to come back here with powerful eight-cell flashlights and shotguns. They were beyond reality; they had gone around the bend that so many discuss so lightly at parties where the electric lights are on and shadows are kept sensibly under tables and locked in closets.
He lit the candle and they went through the door.
The throat of the stairway was narrow stone, the steps themselves dusty and old. The candle flame danced and fluttered in the noisome exhalation from below.
Now she heard something: the faint whisk and patter of many small feet. She pressed her lips together to still the sound that wanted to come between them—it might have been a scream.