The Red House Read online

  The Red House

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 1943 by George Agnew Chamberlain

  Published by Wildside Press LLC.

  wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

  I

  THE PINEYS used to hog the whole of the lozenge between the Shore Road and the White Horse Pike. But no longer is that region a mystery; too many thoroughfares have let in the light. Not so with the Barrens farther south, an irregular sweep of country that has defied unveiling for a hundred years. Highways have been bored across it, but step off them on either side and it is as though you had passed through a wall and closed a door behind you. Seen from the air, this area seems compact, an even blot of forest pierced by the oases of a dozen farms, each distant from the rest and solitary. But to a man on foot or on horse it has a diversity beyond belief. Bayous as sombrous as any in the Florida Everglades widen into creeks that narrow into runs. Marshes rise into sparsely wooded tablelands that plunge down unexpectedly into swales darkened by primeval trees.

  No view anywhere, only discoveries. And roads. Roads that cross each other or intertwine or break at right angles for no reason. Roads that sometimes make a complete circle, like a lost dog. Roads linked to obsolete and forgotten treasure; this to a marl pit, that to a reds tone quarry and another to a bog of buried cedar. Wood roads to rare sand, to vanished cranberry patches and even to faint earthworks thrown up as far back as the Revolution. Roads that tunnel through laurel twenty feet high. Obliterated roads, studded with young pines, that end nowhere. Still other roads, wide open, that tumble downward and cease in surprise at the edge of an impassable void.

  Of the dozen oases, the most central and by far the deepest hidden was Yocum Farm. A plank house of eight-by-eight timbers mortised at the corners was the oldest of its buildings, and from this squat beginning had sprouted near by a huge barn, all the usual outhouses and eventually the main building. It was an irregular frame structure that faced open fields, but its rear hung over a deep tarn. The cleared acres were completely encircled by woods, billowing away or standing like a wall. Wherever there were hollows, the trees were mighty; elsewhere they had either the meager shanks of second-growth forest or the stiff flatness of scrub oak and jack pine. A lane with power wires tacked from tree to tree plunged westward for half a mile to the County Road, the nearest contact with the outer world.

  The farm revolved around Pete Yocum, a hogshead of a man sixty-eight years old with barrels for legs. Everything about him was round, even his elbows and knees, yet nothing was soft. The white hair of his broad beard, mustache and head formed an electric nimbus that came alive to the least draft. Frequently, when about to speak, he would give a preliminary puff, and silky hair would shower out like a bursting milkweed pod. At sight of him, people were inclined to laugh, but only until they collided with eyes that created the illusion of a spider lurking in the center of a web. In a genial mood, the eyes might twinkle amiably, but anger could make them bore like gimlets or broaden into a defiant and terrifying glare. They had one more phase, occurring only at intervals, that would flatten them into fish scales. At such moments Pete turned purple and his vast bulk would heave with internal convulsions and threaten to burst.

  Only Ellen, his twin sister, and Lottie knew the source of these attacks. Ellen was flat as a board, with faded hair drawn tight back over a well-formed head, yet for all her gaunt appearance she exuded kindliness. Lottie was her counterpart in build, but in nothing else. At first glance she seemed an ordinary colored woman until you noticed with a shock that her hair was straight and her eyes pale blue. Her son, Lot, was marked the same way. They were members of that mysterious people, the Moors of Delaware, and proud of the legend that they were descended from an Egyptian prince. Pete and Ellen had been nursed at the same breast with Lottie, making her a foster sister, twined into the web of Yocum Farm by a bond far tighter than wages.

  Into this strange and hidden tangle of existence, fate tumbled a child named Meg Yarrow. Her mother had died in childbirth, and when her father followed five years later, Yocum Farm absorbed the orphan as a matter of course. From the start, her attitude toward Ellen and Lottie had been that of one more woman in a man’s world. As for Pete, according to what mood he happened to be in, she soon learned to call him “Uncle” or “sir” or just plain “Pete”; in reality, he was her granduncle. He had been huge even as far back as 1932, the date of her arrival, an inexhaustible well of wonder. Occasionally he would scat her out, vexed by her unblinking gaze, and she would have to content herself with watching Big Alee, the capable farm hand, trying to pound sense into Lot’s half-addled brain.

  Surely no little girl ever fell into a cozier nest or woke to more sudden terror. It had happened long ago and at night, the hour between supper and bed. Pete sat in his great square chair that somehow always seemed a throne. It had flat arms and a straight back with glides on its feet, so that he could shove it around at will. Without warning, his hands had locked tight over the head of his stout trench stick, armed with a pointed iron ferrule. His eyes flattened into fish scales and his bulk heaved and swelled to the verge of bursting. The cane clattered to the floor. His short arms reached upward and his fists closed tighter and tighter until they glistened like frozen snowballs.

  “I’ll tell the hull world!” he muttered in a strangled tone. “I will so!”

  “Pete, be you crazy?” cried Ellen. “Pete!”

  Then Pete’s voice, strange and preceded by no warning puff, had resounded with a clang, “Drive right around! Drive right around and in!”

  Ellen had ordered Meg up to her room with a rush, and never again had she been allowed to watch even a beginning of one of Pete’s spells. The minute he showed the first sign, she would be hustled upstairs, but nobody realized how clearly she could hear Lottie falling on her bony knees to pray and Ellen’s protesting cries, rising so high they smothered whatever Pete was trying to say. Suddenly he would snap out of it and let them lead him off to bed. Meg could hear that too. The creak of his chair. The pegging of his iron-shod stick, pitting the bare floor so it looked like smallpox. Finally, the groan of the big four-poster as it received his weight. Then silence, a silence more terrible than sound.

  Even now, when she was sixteen, after such a scene she would creep to kneel at the window over the tarn and lean far out. She wasn’t praying, like Lottie; she was running away. From what? That was the trouble; you couldn’t say. Yet you felt something was loose in the house behind you. Something you couldn’t hear, see or name, that had been inside Pete, tormenting him, and now was out and free to roam. Though it never quite caught her, sometimes she almost wished it would, because then she could give it a name. Ellen knew its name, and so did Lottie; only they wouldn’t tell. Just ask them about Pete’s queer turns and why you felt this way, and their tongues and faces would freeze into stone.

  Night can do a strange thing to you; it can shrivel you into a baby in your mind. But when morning breaks, you find you’re quite grown-up and astonished to think you could have been so silly. Like this morning in May of 1943. Pete hadn’t put on one of his shows for months, not even when he had lost Big Alec to the draft, and she ran downstairs to find him in the midst of a battle with Ellen.

  Ordinarily, people noticed when Meg came into a room, even though there was nothing remarkable about her looks. Shoulder-long brown hair, seldom hidden by a hat, topped a neat body of average height that appeared to be featherweight, but could turn into lead when she anchored her feet. As to her face, one expression gave it one shape and another another. The same might be said of her eyes. From small and speckled, they could widen into pools of reddish-brown as lucent as the waters of the tarn. All her dresses were made by Ellen, and, strangely enough
, they were becoming and sometimes even spicy, as if Ellen, while sewing, might have been listening to some echo from her own faraway youth. But looks were the least part of Meg. As if quicksilver ran in her veins instead of blood, she passed from light to shadow, not slowly, but swiftly as stepping across a line. Yet today Pete didn’t notice her; he kept right on talking to Ellen.

  “I’ve lived here all my days,” he declared, “and no war ain’t going to push me out.”

  “This war’s different,” said Ellen. “It’s pushed plenty others out, folks with money behind them, outside folk with richer land than ourn. The paper tells how they’re selling their stock and moving to town because of the loss of their boys or their hired help. Good farmers, too; men that’s able to get around.”

  “You mocking my flesh?” asked Pete.

  “No,” said Ellen, “there’s no call to mock it. It ain’t your fault you can scarce move from wherever you’re at.”

  “A man has two ways of getting around,” said Pete; “one’s his feet, t’other’s his brain. My brain can walk faster’n any of them farmers you been reading about can run.”

  “Huh!” sniffed Ellen. “Then why don’t you send your brain out to do the milking along of the rest of the chores, so Lot can get on with the plowing and planting?”

  “There you go,” said Pete, “reading my inner mind. That’s just what I’m aiming to do.” He swiveled his eyes until they took hold of Meg. “Meg, who’s the huskiest lad in school?”

  Meg thought fast. Johannath Storm was sturdy and by far the nicest boy, but he wasn’t the huskiest; besides, she didn’t know yet what old Pete was up to. “Reds Truman’s son,” she answered. “Teller, they call him, but he’s dumb. Rising eighteen and he’s only a sophomore at high.”

  “Dumbness won’t hurt none,” decided Pete. “If you’ll fetch him out to see me no later than this afternoon, I’ll give ye two bits in real money.”

  “I’ll bring him,” said Meg.

  After breakfast she started for school. From the house, the lane swept wide of the fields to a drawgate, seldom closed. Then it turned sharp to the left, but should you face about, you could make out the masked entrance to an abandoned belt road that hugged the fences of Yocum Farm. Along all its length it was shrouded behind a tangled curtain of honeysuckle and greenbrier, and off it broke a fair maze of mysterious paths that dipped and spread through Oxhead Woods. But the lane she followed also held its share of mystery. Tightly enclosed by crowding laurel, holly and second-growth forest, it became a tunnel where silence was imprisoned. Here no screams could be heard; not on account of distance, but because sound couldn’t get out. At the lane’s end you didn’t just reach the County Road, you burst into it, drew a long breath and perched on the milk-can platform to wait for the school bus.

  How was she going to corner Teller? Though they had seen each other often enough, they were scarcely acquainted. He reminded her of the Yocum dog, Rumble, who lived on a chain under the apple tree at home, his eyes red with perpetual rage, his skin the color of sand, and under it you could see every move of his big bones and knotted muscles. Teller was like that, and the only chance she would have at him would be the lunch hour, when he would rather play softball than eat.

  That gave her an idea, and when he came rushing out, she stepped in front of him and let him knock her down.

  “My!” she exclaimed, scrambling to her feet. “My, but you’re clumsy!”

  “Me clumsy!” cried Teller wrathfully. “You buck into me blinder’n a scairt rabbit and it’s me that’s clumsy!”

  “I know,” said Meg with a sudden smile. “It was my fault. I did it on purpose because I wanted to ask you a favor.”

  He swept his eyes up and down her, and ended by trading a leer for her smile. She made note that his sandy hair stood up in a brush between his big ears, for all the world like Rumble with his hackles raised.

  “I guess you rate a favor,” decided Teller. “Name it.”

  “Nothing much,” she said. “It’s for Pete Yocum out to the farm. He asked me to fetch you there this afternoon.”

  “Can’t today,” said Teller. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  Meg gave him a wide-eyed look tinged with sadness. “Sorry,” she said. “Tomorrow won’t do.”

  “Oh, all right,” said Teller.

  The County Road route had to be content with an improvised affair where the passengers sat facing each other, and during the ride Meg grew more and more uneasy over the way Teller would work his eyes from her feet to her knees and slowly up to her face. She left the bus sedately, but as soon as she was hidden from sight in the lane, she ran. She could outrun most boys, but not Teller. He caught up with her easily, seized her wrist and flipped her into the crook of his arm.

  “Pay as you enter, sweetheart.”

  The tussle that followed taught Teller that an impact can be so sudden it has no beginning. Next came the realization that his notion of feminine frailty was a dud. Had he tangled with a girl or a full-grown coon? Whatever it was, its flesh was too solid to pinch and it had heels that were kin to a road scraper, to say nothing of several other cutting edges that threatened to leave his skin in shreds. He gave up all idea of a conquest by force and asked no more than to free himself. The only way he could do it was to hurl Meg off bodily. He did. She landed on her feet, pulled down her rucked dress and picked up her books.

  “I guess that’ll show you,” she panted, “you big lug!”

  “Aw, shucks,” said Teller, looking her over admiringly, “all I wanted was a kiss.”

  “Better keep your kisses till somebody asks for them,” said Meg, “even if you have to wait all your life.”

  She hurried along the lane, and didn’t need to look over her shoulder to know that he was following, because once in a while she could hear a catlike footfall. Teller was bred to the woods; you could tell by the way he walked. He caught up with her only gradually, careful not to offend her again. Neither of them said a word until they came to the belt road.

  “Ever foller that path and them it leads to?” he asked in the lingo he used outside of school, the only language fitting for a man.

  “Not far,” said Meg.

  “I wouldn’t if I was you,” said Teller. “You’d ought to stay clear of timber tracts, specially Oxhead Woods. If I ever catch you west of the Yocum fence—oh, my! I’ll pay you back, sister, and you’ll pay me!”

  Meg bit her lip, and when Rumble greeted them with a torrent of barks, thickening into growls that tore his throat, she eyed him speculatively. With a shrug of regret that his chain was so strong, she led the way into the kitchen and accosted Pete.

  “Here’s Teller Truman,” she announced, “but you can keep your two bits. I want a dollar or nothing.”

  “Eh, eh,” said Pete with a puff, “you’d think dollars growed thick as chinquapins. . . . Howdy, boy.”

  “Howdy,” answered Teller.

  He spoke absently because his eyes were skipping around like mad. It was hard to snatch them away from Pete and his puffing, the funniest sight on record, but there were other things to see. For years the Yocum place had carried a legend of opulence. Where else would you find a farm with an inside colored servant, working regular? Only she claimed she wasn’t colored and there were folks who said the law backed her up, yet there she stood—black. She had the nerve to give him as good as he sent, a startling blue-eyed gaze as flat as a wall.

  “By the looks of ye,” said Pete, “you’re a strong enough lad.”

  “I can lift a spoon as far as my mouth,” admitted Teller with a grin.

  “Be ye willing to work?” said Pete.

  “What kind?” asked Teller.

  “Nothing hefty,” said Pete. “Just take the milk away from eighteen head, cool it, feed and set the barn to rights. Come after school and leave afore supper.”

  “How much?” asked Teller.

  Pete’s eyes contracted to their gimlet aspect. “Fifty cents a day,” he said, “cash in hand.”


  The grin vanished from Teller’s face; his upper lip curled in a sneer and his eyes turned red. “You ton o’ beef,” he muttered angrily, “who do you think I am? Kiss you and your fifty cents!” He started out, shouting over his shoulder, “Who’s going to pay me my due of five bucks for walking five miles home? Me that wouldn’t travel half around your belly for fifty cents!”

  In an instant, rage transformed Pete’s grotesque bulk into the threat of a toppling rock. His cheeks took on the dreaded purple tinge, but his eyes, instead of flattening into fish scales, seemed to spurt venom.

  “Stop him!” he wheezed raucously. “Bring his greasy neck where I can squeeze it with only one hand! Stop him!”

  Lottie let fly with a wire pan brush that almost tore off Teller’s ear as he kicked open the door and left. Outside, he snatched up a quarter-brick and hurled it at Rumble. It caught the dog full in the chest, and though it bounced off harmlessly, it came near to killing him anyway from choking to death with fury.

  “Pete,” murmured Ellen, “how fast did you say your brain can walk?”

  Close to Pete’s chair stood the sturdy three-legged stool which he carried with him whenever he went out. He gave it a petulant side kick, knocking it over. His chin dropped, causing his beard to spread like a baby’s bib. A moment ago he had seemed a concentration of power, and even now he didn’t look ridiculous, only sad. Meg felt sorry for him.

  “Don’t worry, Pete,” she said softly. “Your brain was right, all right. Leave it to me and I’ll prove it.”

  II

  THAT NIGHT Meg lay awake, remembering Teller. He was mean and as tough as they come, but even so, it would have been a break to have him around, crashing like a bull into the hidden struggle at Yocum Farm and giving her something different to worry about. Then she thought of Johannath Storm, and when she woke she could hardly wait to get to school. Nath was barely seventeen and shorter than Teller’s six feet, but stockier. The way a lot of the girls acted, especially Tibby Rinton, you’d think he must be good-looking, yet he wasn’t—not really. He had freckles and rough hair, muskrat-brown, and when he smiled, his blue eyes would crinkle almost shut to the shape of a fingernail moon. Meg had never really talked to him the way Tibby Rinton did every chance she got, but she had smiled at him more than once and he had smiled back. She caught him alone in the hall and walked close behind him.