Later I knew that I was, in fact, treating Fay in exactly the way that Vanden Starr had treated Gloria Tremayne, recapitulating the steps of their tragedy with consequences that were equally disastrous.
Fay recognized the changed mood of the house immediately. ‘What’s happened to our lodger?’ she gibed at dinner the next evening. ‘Our beautiful ghost seems to be spurning you. Is the spirit unwilling although the flesh is weak?’
‘God knows,’ I growled testily. ‘I think you’ve really messed the place up.’ I glanced around the dining room for any echo of Gloria Tremayne, but she had gone. Fay went out to the kitchen and I sat over my half-eaten hors d’oeuvres, staring at it blankly, when I felt a curious ripple in the wall behind me, a silver dart of movement that vanished as soon as I looked up. I tried to focus it without success, the first echo of Gloria since our row, but later that evening, when I went into Fay’s bedroom after I heard her crying, I noticed it again.
Fay had gone into the bathroom. As I was about to find her I felt the same echo of feminine anguish. It had been prompted by Fay’s tears, but like Vanden Starr’s mood set off by my own anger, it persisted long after the original cue. I followed it into the corridor as it faded out of the room but it diffused outwards into the ceiling and hung there motionlessly.
Starting to walk down to the lounge, I realized that the house was watching me like a wounded animal.
Two days later came the attack on Fay.
I had just returned home from the office, childishly annoyed with Fay for parking her car on my side of the garage. In the cloakroom I tried to check my anger; the senso-cells had picked up the cue and began to suck the irritation out of me, pouring it back into the air until the walls of the cloakroom darkened and seethed.
I shouted some gratuitous insult at Fay, who was in the lounge. A second later she screamed: ‘Howard! Quickly!’
Running towards the lounge, I flung myself at the door, expecting it to retract. Instead, it remained rigid, frame locked in the archway. The entire house seemed grey and strained, the pool outside like a tank of cold lead.
Fay shouted again. I seized the metal handle of the manual control and wrenched the door back.
Fay was almost out of sight, on one of the slab sofas in the centre of the room, buried beneath the sagging canopy of the ceiling which had collapsed on to her. The heavy plastex had flowed together directly above her head, forming a blob a yard in diameter.
Raising the flaccid plastex with my hands, I managed to lift it off Fay, who was spread-eagled into the cushions with only her feet protruding. She wriggled out and flung her arms around me, sobbing noiselessly.
‘Howard, this house is insane, I think it’s trying to kill me!’
‘For heaven’s sake, Fay, don’t be silly. It was simply a freak accumulation of senso-cells. Your breathing probably set it off.’ I patted her shoulder, remembering the child I had married a few years earlier. Smiling to myself, I watched the ceiling retract slowly, the walls grow lighter in tone.
‘Howard, can’t we leave here?’ Fay babbled. ‘Let’s go and live in a static house. I know it’s dull, but what does it matter—?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s not just dull, it’s dead. Don’t worry, angel, you’ll learn to like it here.’
Fay twisted away from me. ‘Howard, I can’t stay in this house any more. You’ve been so preoccupied recently, you’re completely changed.’ She started to cry again, and pointed at the ceiling. ‘If I hadn’t been lying down, do you realize it would have killed me?’
I dusted the end of the sofa. ‘Yes, I can see your heel marks.’ Irritation welled up like bile before I could stop it. ‘I thought I told you not to stretch out here. This isn’t a beach, Fay. You know it annoys me.’
Around us the walls began to mottle and cloud again.
Why did Fay anger me so easily? Was it, as I assumed at the time, unconscious resentment that egged me on, or was I merely a vehicle for the antagonism which had accumulated during Vanden Starr’s marriage to Gloria Tremayne and was now venting itself on the hapless couple who followed them to 99 Stellavista? Perhaps I’m over-charitable to myself in assuming the latter, but Fay and I had been tolerably happy during our five years of marriage, and I am sure my nostalgic infatuation for Gloria Tremayne couldn’t have so swept me off my feet.
Either way, however, Fay didn’t wait for a second attempt. Two days later I came home to find a fresh tape on the kitchen memophone. I switched it on to hear her tell me that she could no longer put up with me, my nagging or 99 Stellavista and was going back east to stay with her sister.
Callously, my first reaction, after the initial twinge of indignation, was sheer relief. I still believed that Fay was responsible for Gloria Tremayne’s eclipse and the emergence of Vanden Starr, and that with her gone I would recapture the early days of idyll and romance.
I was only partly right. Gloria Tremayne did return, but not in the role expected. I, who had helped to defend her at her trial, should have known better.
A few days after Fay left I became aware that the house had taken on a separate existence, its coded memories discharging themselves independently of my own behaviour. Often when I returned in the evening, eager to relax over half a decanter of scotch, I would find the ghosts of Miles Vanden Starr and Gloria Tremayne in full flight. Starr’s black and menacing personality crowded after the tenuous but increasingly resilient quintessence of his wife. This rapier-like resistance could be observed literally — the walls of the lounge would stiffen and darken in a vortex of anger that converged upon a small zone of lightness hiding in one of the alcoves, as if to obliterate its presence, but at the last moment Gloria’s persona would flit nimbly away, leaving the room to seethe and writhe.
Fay had set off this spirit of resistance, and I visualized Gloria Tremayne going through a similar period of living hell. As her personality re-emerged in its new role I watched it carefully, volume at maximum despite the damage the house might do to itself. Once Stamers stopped by and offered to get the circuits checked for me. He had seen the house from the road, flexing and changing colour like an anguished squid. Thanking him, I made up some excuse and declined. Later he told me that I had kicked him out unceremoniously — apparently he hardly recognized me; I was striding around the dark quaking house like a madman in an Elizabethan horror tragedy, oblivious of everything.
Although submerged by the personality of Miles Vanden Starr, I gradually realized that Gloria Tremayne had been deliberately driven out of her mind by him. What had prompted his implacable hostility I can only hazard — perhaps he resented her success, perhaps she had been unfaithful to him. When she finally retaliated and shot him it was, I’m sure, an act of self-defence.
Two months after she went east Fay filed a divorce suit against me. Frantically I telephoned her, explaining that I would be grateful if she postponed the action as the publicity would probably kill my new law office. However, Fay was adamant. What annoyed me most was that she sounded better than she had done for years, really happy again. When I pleaded with her she said she needed the divorce in order to marry again, and then, as a last straw, refused to tell me who the man was.
By the time I slammed the phone down my temper was taking off like a lunar probe. I left the office early and began a tour of the bars in Red Beach, working my way slowly back to Vermilion Sands. I hit 99 Stellavista like a oneman task force, mowing down most of the magnolias in the drive, ramming the car into the garage on the third pass after wrecking both auto-doors.
My keys jammed in the door lock and I finally had to kick my way through one of the glass panels. Raging upstairs on to the darkened terrace I flung my hat and coat into the pool and slammed into the lounge. By 2 a.m., as I mixed myself a nightcap at the bar and put the last act of Gotterdammerung on the stereogram, the whole place was really warming up.