The Promontory - Chapter 6

The Promontory 17,000 words

-6-

We lost the baby.

The fall had given the unborn fetus a fatal concussion, right through the amniotic sac. An extremely rare occurrence, according to the doctor. I wondered if that was supposed to comfort me in some way.

I returned to the house the next day. The untouched remains of the party were exactly where we had left them. The place stank of stale food and cigarette smoke. The Hi-Fi was scratching away at the inner groove of the last LP that had been played. I turned to face the Promontory. It seemed to return my stare with stoic indifference. I was nothing against its permanence.

Julie came home a few days later. She was mostly silent. She would lay in her bed, staring glassy-eyed out the window and absently rubbing at her belly. Nothing I did to try and console her seemed to help.

I finally called Ramie. In truth, I couldn’t understand why she hadn’t already come. I knew she blamed me for the entire incident, as a matter of course, but still she should have come as soon as she heard the news.

“Ramie, it’s Peter.”

“I know.”

“Julie’s not good, Ramie.”

“I know.”

“I need someone to stay with her. Can you come down?”

“To Long Island?”

“Ramie, your daughter needs you.”

“I told you that house was a mistake.”

“Ramie!”

She arrived the next day, full of self righteousness and disdain. And something else. Julie was indifferent to her arrival. Ramie sat with her a few minutes, and seeing her autistic state, quickly grew impatient and instead went about settling herself in. As was her customary practice, she began to rearrange things around the house according to her tastes, under the pretense of cleaning up, all the while nattering to herself about the state of this and the condition of that.

Usually, this was a sore point for me; a churlish habit she could not prevent herself from engaging in since the days of our first apartment in New York City. At first it would be small things –- folding magazines and placing them in the rack, commandeering the kitchen and re-ordering the locations of the items in the cupboards. Eventually, her restless, controlling mind would take her to the furniture. The worst had been one day shortly after our marriage, when she had stayed the weekend, and during the night had re-arranged the entire living room. How she had moved so many heavy objects without waking us, continued to puzzle me to this day.

I felt too weak to protest. Instead, I watched her go about her business and wondered if my life would ever be the same again. In truth, the living room still showed the remains of the ill-fated party and it could use a little picking up. But I knew, for Ramie, it would be more than lending a hand; it would be claiming territory.

Ramie had picked up a small vase, which Julie had acquired from across the street, when the front door of the house spontaneously opened, letting in a cold breath of the late autumn air. We both froze, as if caught in our silent contest by a stranger. The pettiness of our unspoken competition struck us both with full force. Ramie put down the vase and stood in the center of the room facing me.

“You need to get that fixed,” she declared flatly, then shot a glance at the door, and for an instant, beyond the door.

She knew.

She began turning away from me.

“I don’t think it can be, Ramie,” I responded suggestively.

She stopped turning. Without facing me, she asked lightly, “What do you mean?”

“Even if I lock it, lots of times it’s opened the next morning. Have you ever heard of anything like that in your life?”

Ramie resumed her busy-work. “Of course not.”

“I can’t think of an explanation. Can you?”

She sighed impatiently, halting her pretense, and came up the sunken living room’s steps to stand directly before me.

With her hands on her hips, she declared, “I’m not very happy with you or with what’s happened here, so I prefer it if you stop playing your ridiculous word games and just let me be.”

I couldn’t do that. “I’ve also learned that the house across the street was – and probably still is -- owned by Swaneys.”

Ramie’s face became seamed concrete. Her dislike for me was like a heat.

“And what of it?”

“Sylvain was at the party, Ramie. He said you’re a Swaney.”

She shouted her answer. “And you believe that balding sycophant?” then more calmly, “Honestly, Julie has such poor taste in friends.”

Uncowed, I gestured at the living room and foyer. “What about her taste in furniture, Ramie? This furniture is from the house.”

“I guessed as much,” she answered flatly, ignoring my sarcasm.

“It’s like an obsession with her,” I said, referring to Julie. “It’s like the house is luring her in.”

Ramie’s eyes widened slightly. She quickly regained herself. “You’re a fool. I’ve always thought it.”

I was tired of this. Tired of Ramie’s snide response to anything I had ever said. I felt my ire rising. My eyes narrowed and bore into my mother-in-law’s countenance. “You know something and you’re going to tell me what it is. I need to know that something.”

She matched my anger note for note. “There’s only one thing to know, Peter, and that is my daughter has had a miscarriage and is now lying in a catatonia upstairs. Because of you and your stupid notions.” Her tone became more insistent. “Face it, Peter. This was all a bad investment. A bad decision. Sell it just as soon as you can.”

“You mean run away from here.”

Before she could answer there was a scream from upstairs. Both of us snapped our heads in that direction and made for the stairs. I reached the upstairs first and bolted into Julie’s room. Ramie came up behind me and both of us stared into Julie’s room in disbelief.

Julie’s bed; a massive, four post, mahogany specimen from the Promontory, was scraping its way towards us; towards the doorway. Julie was frozen on the bed, mouth open in dumb surprise. The bed lunged across the floor towards us with sudden speed. I dashed further into the room to avoid being bowled over by the heavy berth.

Ramie was slower, and before she could clear the doorway, the bed – with Julie upon it -- leapt for her and knocked her down the length of the stairs. The bed, complete with Julie, crashed through the doorway with tremendous force, cracking the doorframe, and went barreling down the steps after Ramie. It tumbled down in a loud crash and splintering of wood until they all reached the bottom. The bed set down directly on Ramie’s body.

Then there was silence. No one moved. I gingerly made my way down the broken steps until I reached the headboard. I had to leap the banister, which broke as soon as I put my weight on it and caused me to fall in a heap in the passageway alongside the stairs.

I scrambled to my feet and came around to the bottom of the stairway. Julie was unconscious on the bed. Somehow she hadn’t been thrown. I crouched down to see to Ramie. One of the legs had crashed its way through her teeth into her mouth and up into her brain stem. For her, there was no hope.

I fell backwards to the ground and tried to get control of my rising panic. The bed had moved. It had deliberately and vehemently attacked Ramie, before I could get her to tell me what I desperately needed to know.

The front door swung open again, despite the lock, as if to mock me. I forced myself upright and stared at it. No one there. I felt an illogical anger towards it. Or was it fear? I realized I was shivering with it. I shook off the feeling as best as I could and tried to move the bed off of Ramie’s corpse. It was very heavy, but I should have been able to move it, and yet now it would not budge. I backed off. The bed suddenly scraped down the last few steps with a loud crack, leaving Ramie’s maimed body to lie, disjointed, at the foot of the stairway.

Julie made a moaning sound and moved slightly, touching her belly with her hand. I was suddenly reminded of the baby. A black grief welled up inside of me. How could everything have gone so wrong? Suppressing my body’s desire to sob huge empty lungfuls of pain, I went to her and tried to shake her awake.

“Julie, we’ve got to get out of here. Wake up. I need you.”

She blinked. “Don’t touch me.”

She was speaking again!

I intoned seriously, “Julie. Your mother is dead.”

Her eyes opened and tried to focus on my sweating face.

“Dead? H…How?”

“That bed.”

This seemed to wake her from her stupor. She stared down at the bed in disbelief, then with sudden alacrity, jumped off and stumbled over to me. Her eyes scanned the wrecked living room, the schrapneled staircase, the damaged bed, and finally the body of her mutilated, inert mother.

Her voice was like a dry leaf. “What’s happening to us?”

“It’s that house. Across the way. We have to leave here.”

Even as I said it, I was incredulous at my revealed conviction that the long abandoned hulk across the road was the agent of our misery. As much as I had wanted Ramie to say it, to explain it all to me, I had already known the answer. I had fought it for a very long time, not even acknowledging to myself that it lurked like a serpent beneath the voices in my head, a soundless conviction of things that exist outside language and reason.

Julie stared at me, swaying slightly in her nightgown and bare feet. I thought she had understood nothing and was about to faint, when she answered me.

“No, Peter,” she said with growing steadiness. “That’s not the answer. Whatever killed our baby is over there,” she pointed in the direction of the Promontory. “And we have to kill it.”

I took a step away from her.

She reached for me and, touching my arm, finished with a maniacal softness, “Or nothing can continue. Not you. Not me. Not us. Do you see?”

I did see. But I was afraid. I said nothing, because I couldn’t find the courage to respond one way or the other.

She declared, “We’re going over there right now.”

To be continued…