The Haunting of the New, Ray Bradbury

I hadn’t been in Dublin for years. I’d been round the world—everywhere but Ireland—but now within the hour of my arrival the Royal Hibernian Hotel phone rang and on the phone: Nora herself, God Bless!

“Charles? Charlie? Chuck? Are you rich at last? And do rich writers buy fabulous estates?”
“Nora!” I laughed. “Don’t you ever say hello?”

“Life’s too short for hellos, and now there’s no time for decent good-byes.Couldyou buy Grynwood?”

“Nora, Nora, your family house, two hundred rich years old? What would happen to wild Irish social life, the parties, drinks, gossip? You can’t throw it all away!”

“Can and shall. Oh, I’ve trunks of money waiting out in the rain this moment. But, Charlie, Charles, I’malonein the house. The servants have fled to help the Aga. Now on this final night, Chuck, I need a writer-man to see the Ghost. Does your skin prickle? Come. I’ve mysteries and a home to give away. Charlie, oh, Chuck, oh, Charles.”

Click. Silence.

Ten minutes later I roared round the snake-road through the green hills toward the blue lake and the lush grass meadows of the hidden and fabulous house called Grynwood.

I laughed again. Dear Nora! For all her gab, a party was probably on the tracks this moment, lurched toward wondrous destruction. Bertie might fly from London, Nick from Paris, Alicia would surely motor up from Galway. Some film director, cabled within the hour, would parachute or helicopter down, a rather seedy manna in dark glasses. Marion would show with his Pekingese dog troupe, which always got drunker, and sicker, than he.

I gunned my hilarity as I gunned the motor.

You’ll be beautifully mellow by eight o’clock, I thought, stunned to sleep by concussions of bodies before midnight, drowse till noon, then even more nicely potted by Sunday high tea. And somewhere in between, the rare game of musical beds with Irish and French contesses, ladies, and plain field-beast art majors crated in from the Sorbonne, some with chewable mustaches, some not, and Monday ten million years off. Tuesday, I would motor oh so carefully back to Dublin, nursing my body like a great impacted wisdom tooth, gone much too wise with women, pain-flashing with memory.

Trembling, I remembered the first time I had drummed out to Nora’s, when I was twenty-one.

A mad old Duchess with flour-talcummed cheeks, and the teeth of a barracuda had wrestled me and a sports car down this road fifteen years ago, braying into the fast weather:
“You shall love Nora’s menagerie zoo and horticultural garden! Her friends are beasts and keepers, tigers and pussies, rhododendrons and flytraps. Her streams run cold fish, hot trout. Hers is a great greenhouse where brutes grow outsize, force-fed by unnatural airs, enter Nora’s on Friday with clean linen, sog out with the wet-wash-soiled bedclothes Monday, feeling as if you had meantime inspired, painted, and lived through all Bosch’s Temptations, Hells, Judgments, and Dooms! Live at Nora’s and you reside in a great warm giant’s cheek, deliriously gummed and morseled hourly. You will pass, like victuals, through her mansion. When it has crushed forth your last sweet-sour sauce and dismarrowed your youth-candied bones, you will be discarded in a cold iron-country train station lonely with rain.”

“I’m coated with enzymes?” I cried above the engine roar. “No house can break down my elements, or take nourishment from my Original Sin.”

“Fool!” laughed the Duchess. “We shall see most of your skeleton by sunrise Sunday!”

I came out of memory as I came out of the woods at a fine popping glide and slowed because the very friction of beauty stayed the heart, the mind, the blood, and therefore the foot upon the throttle.

There under a blue-lake sky by a blue-sky lake lay Nora’s own dear place, the grand house called Grynwood. It nestled in the roundest hills by the tallest trees in the deepest forest in all Eire. It had towers built a thousand years ago by unremembered peoples and unsung architects for reasons never to be guessed.

Its gardens had first flowered five hundred years back and there were outbuildings scattered from a creative explosion two hundred years gone amongst old tomb yards and crypts.

Here was a convent hall become a horse barn of the landed gentry, there were new wings built on ninety years ago. Out around the lake was a hunting-lodge ruin where wild horses might plunge through minted shadow to sink away in greenwater grasses by yet further cold ponds and single graves of daughters whose sins were so rank they were driven forth even in death to the wilderness, sunk traceless in the gloom.

As if in bright welcome, the sun flashed vast tintinnabulations from scores of house windows. Blinded, I clenched the car to a halt. Eyes shut, I licked my lips.
I remembered my first night at Grynwood.

Nora herself opening the front door. Standing stark naked, she announced:
“You’re too late. It’s all over!”
“Nonsense. Hold this, boy, and this.”

Whereupon the Duchess, in three nimble moves, peeled herself raw as a blanched oyster in the wintry doorway.
I stood aghast, gripping her clothes.

“Come in, boy, you’ll catch your death.” And the bare Duchess walked serenely away among the well-dressed people.
“Beaten at my own game,” cried Nora. “Now, to compete, I must put my clothes back on. And I wassohoping to shock you.”

“Never fear.” I said. “You have.”
“Come help me dress.”

In the alcove, we waded among her clothes, which lay in misshapen pools of musky scent upon a parqueted floor.
“Hold the panties while I slip into them. You’re Charles, aren’t you?”

“How do you do.” I flushed, then burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. “Forgive me,” I said at last, snapping her bra in back, “it’s just here it is early evening, and I’m putting youintoyour clothes. I—”

A door slammed somewhere. I glanced around for the Duchess.
“Gone,” I murmured. “The house has devoured her, already.”

True. I didn’t see the Duchess again until the rainy Tuesday morn she had predicted. By then she had forgotten my name,myface, and the soul behind my face.
“My God,” I said, “What’s that, andthat?”

Still dressing Nora, we had arrived at the library door. Inside, like a bright mirror-maze, the weekend guests turned.

“That,” Nora pointed, “is the Manhattan Civic Ballet flown over on ice by jet stream. To the left, the Hamburg Dancers, flown the opposite way. Divine casting. Enemy ballet mobs unable, because of language, to express their scorn and vitriol. They must pantomime their cat-fight. Stand aside, Charlie. What was Valkyrie must become Rhine Maiden. And those boysareRhine Maidens. Guard your flank!”

Nora was right.
The battle was joined.

The tiger lilies leapt at each other, jabbering in tongues. Then, frustrated, they fell away, flushed. With a bombardment of slammed doors, the enemies plunged off to scores of rooms. What was horror became horrible friendship and what was friendship became steamroom oven-bastings of unabashed and, thank God, hidden affection.

After that it was one grand crystal-chandelier avalanche of writer-artist-choreographer-poets down the swift-sloped weekend.

Somewhere I was caught and swept in the heaped pummel of flesh headed straight for a collision with the maiden-aunt reality of Monday noon.

Now, many lost parties, many lost years later, here I stood.
And there stood Grynwood manse, very still.
No music played. No cars arrived.

Hello, I thought. A new statue seated by the shore. Hello again. Not a statue …

But Nora herself seated alone, legs drawn under her dress, face pale, staring at Grynwood as if I had not arrived, was nowhere in sight.

“Nora … ?” But her gaze was so steadily fixed to the house wings, its mossy roofs and windows full of empty sky, I turned to stare at it myself.

Somethingwaswrong. Had the house sunk two feet into the earth? Or had the earth sunk all about, leaving it stranded forlorn in the high chill air?
Had earthquakes shaken the windows atilt so they mirrored intruders with distorted gleams and glares?

The front door of Grynwood stood wide open. From this door, the house breathed out upon me.

Subtle. Like waking by night to feel the push of warm air from your wife’s nostrils, but suddenly terrified, for the scent of her breath has changed, she smells of someone else! You want to seize her awake, cry her name. Whoisshe, how, what? But heart thudding, you lie sleepless by some stranger in bed.

I walked. I sensed my image caught in a thousand windows moving across the grass to stand over a silent Nora.
A thousand of me sat quietly down.

Nora, I thought. Oh dear God, here we are again.
That first visit to Grynwood …

And then here and there through the years we had met like people brushing in a crowd, like lovers across the aisle and strangers on a train, and with the whistle crying the quick next stop touched hands or allowed our bodies to be bruised together by the crowd cramming out as the doors flung wide, then, impelled, no more touch, no word, nothing for years.

Or, it was as if at high noon midsummer every year ior so we ran off up the vital strand away, never dreaming we might come back and collide in mutual need. And then somehow another summer ended, a sun went down, and there came Nora dragging her empty sandpail and here came I with scabs on my knees, and the beach empty and a strange season gone, and just us left to say hello Nora, hello Charles as the wind rose and the sea darkened as if a great herd of octopi suddenly swam by with their inks.

I often wondered if a day might come when we circled the long way round and stayed. Somewhere back