The Furniture Went Mad

Vera Pell had rehearsed it and it did not survive contact.

What she had decided, in the kitchen on Sunday night with Wes Corliss's hat marks still on the table, was that she would go up in the morning with the tray and the coffee, because the tray was the last piece of ordinary life in the house and she was not going to be the one to break it. She would set the tray on the step. She would say, in an ordinary voice, that the rent was due on Tuesday. And then she would say the other thing, which she had rehearsed eleven times, which was: "There's money missing from the rectory and it's the same money you've been paying me, and I want you out of my house by Tuesday noon, and I don't want to know anything else."

She got as far as the tray. She got as far as the step.

The door opened before she knocked. He had been standing behind it; she saw the shape of the shadow under the door shift a half-second before the handle turned, and it came on her all at once, the thing she should have known from the beginning and had refused to know, which was that a man who has no face has been listening to everything that happens in a house.

"You don't have to say it," he said.

"Don't have to say what."

"Whatever you've got arranged on that tray. The coffee's cold."

Vera put the tray down on the step, and then, because she had promised herself, she straightened up and said the first five words of the eleven times' rehearsal, which were: "There's money missing from the rectory."

The door opened the rest of the way.

She never afterwards could get the room into an order, and she tried, she tried for the newspaper man from Millvale and for the county attorney and for the woman in the green coat. What she could say was that she looked past him, because that was where people look when a thing with no face is standing in front of them — past him, for something else to rest on — and the room behind him was not the room she had searched on the second week, and the difference was the part of the story she could never get straight, no matter who was asking.

There was a chair on the bed. There was a chair on the bed — sitting on the bed, right way up, facing the window, as though somebody had carried it up there and left it. The crates were gone from the wall, all of them, and the bottles that had been in the crates were on the floor in a wide semicircle, and the stove was out, and the window was propped open six inches with a bottle wedged under the sash in a room where the temperature outside was nineteen degrees. The dresser had been pulled out from the wall and stood at an angle, and on its top, in a row, the three marbled notebooks were open, all three, side by side, and the brown envelope was gone and the mattress had been slashed.

And there were dishes on the floor. That was the thing that finished Vera. There was a plate and a bowl and a cup on the floor by the bed, all three with the food still in them, a heap of food, three days of food, every tray she had sent up since Thursday, all of it on the floor in one place and gone hard, and on the slashed mattress there was nothing.

The man in the room had been sitting in a chair on the bed facing the open window, in the dark, in February, waiting.

"Get your things," Vera said, and heard her own voice go up at the end, and hated it.

"I'll be gone Tuesday."

"Tuesday's not good enough."

"Tuesday is when I'm going."

"I've called the deputy."

"Yes," he said, "you have," and Vera Pell understood that he had heard her on the phone from the kitchen, through a floor, two nights ago, and that he had waited anyway, and that this was either the strangest patience she had ever met in a human being or the plainest proof that whatever was in her upstairs room was not a human being at all.

Roy Nunn came at eleven, and Vera watched him come up the walk with Boyd Trask and with Wes Corliss, because Roy Nunn had been a deputy for nineteen years and knew that the two most useful men in the valley in any situation involving a locked door and a story were the man who owned the crowbar and the man who had been talking about it for four days.

What Roy did not do was what everybody afterward agreed he should have done, which was wait for the county to send somebody, or wait for the evening, or wait for a second deputy, or ask the state police in Millvale for a warrant, and Roy Nunn answered that charge the rest of his life, and his answer never changed: "I have a burglary and eleven thousand dollars and one suspect and one address. You tell me which of those you'd have waited on."

He knocked. Nothing. He knocked again and said his name and his office. He called through the door that there was a stolen property complaint and that he wanted to talk to the man, and that the man could talk to him on the porch or talk to him at the substation.

Then, from inside the room, from behind the door, in a voice that was flat and calm and perfectly audible and came through the door rather than above it, the man said: "You can't see me."

Roy Nunn said, "I'll see you fine."

"You didn't hear me. You can't see me. That's not a threat. I'm telling you a fact about the world and you need to take it in before you open this door, because if you open it you'll do something you can't undo and then you'll have to live with having done it."

"Mr. Brandt," Roy said, because he had the register from the Wayfarer in his hand and the name on it in a careful upright hand that was not the hand of a man who was in the habit of giving his name, "I've got a warrant application, and a crowbar, and I've been up since five. Open the door."

There was a pause. And then, from the other side of the door, distinctly, Vera Pell heard a man laugh — one note, short, not a happy note, a note of genuine and weary amusement, as though Roy Nunn had said something apt — and then the sound of a chair being moved off a bed.

The door opened.

Vera was on the landing behind the deputy because she had refused to go downstairs. Bellhaven was in the street because Bellhaven had been in the street since ten o'clock. Otis was at the bottom of the stairs with his boots on the wrong feet, and Lena Pruitt was out on the porch with her coat over her apron, and Augie Dieter's truck was up on the curb with Augie in it, and Bernie Kaminski had shut the Bitterroot and come up the block with three men, and Danny Wexler was in the alley behind the house, climbing the fire escape of the feed store, because Danny Wexler was nineteen.

The man stood in the middle of the room with his back to the window, and he was wrapped, all of him, head and neck and hands, and over the wrapping he was wearing two coats, and the wrapping on the head was the good tight wrapping and not the loose one, and he had put on the dark glasses with the hinged sides.

Roy Nunn said, "Take the glasses off."

"No."

"Take them off, sir, or I'll take them off."

"You will not."

And Roy Nunn, who was thirty-nine years old and a bigger man than the man in the bandages and who had spent four years of his life in the National Guard, walked across the room, and took hold of the man's head with his left hand and took the glasses off with his right, and it was such an ordinary movement, that was the thing, it was the movement of a man taking a hat off a boy at a ballgame, and Vera Pell, standing in the doorway, watched the glasses come away, and behind them there was the wrapping, and on the wrapping, where eyes should be, there was nothing at all. Not two hollows. Not two dark stains. The good tight gauze went from the hat to the cheek in an unbroken surface, and there was no place on it that anybody's eyes could be.

Roy Nunn was very still for about three seconds.

Then he said, "Boyd. Get the cuffs."

And then the furniture went mad.

Vera Pell spent the rest of her life being asked what happened next, and what she always said was that it was not a fight, because a fight has two people in it, and it was something else, and the closest she ever got was a sentence she said to the woman in the green coat at the very end: "Have you ever seen a deer get into a house."

The chair that had been on the bed went over. That was first. It went over sideways by itself, no hands, and hit the floor and slid, and then the whole semicircle of bottles on the floor started to go, not toppling, traveling — bottles going out from under each other in a spreading wave, rolling on the boards, and the smell came up off the floor in three colors in that one second, and Roy Nunn took a bottle across the shin and went down on one knee. The tray came off the step and up into the air and hit Wes Corliss in the chest. The mattresses on the bed turned over, the whole slashed mattress, it stood up on its edge like a propped door and blew across the room at the deputy, and Boyd Trask, who had been reaching into the doorway with the crowbar, got the crowbar taken out of his hand by a hand that was not visible, and had it thrown at him, and had to duck, and the crowbar went through the plaster of the hall wall four inches above Vera Pell's head.

And there was the fire. That was the last and Vera never could explain it, and nobody could, and the county attorney put it in the report as accelerant, which it was not. The stove had been out. The stove was out, she had seen it out with the bottle under the window sash, and the burning, when it came, came up off the floor in a low blue line where the bottles' contents had run out toward the window, and it ran across the boards like water going downhill and it went up the window curtain and out into the cold air of February with a sound like a sheet being torn.

And in the middle of it Roy Nunn got a hand on something at last — on the second coat, on the collar of the second coat — and held, and pulled, and the second coat came off in his hand, and under it there was a length of bandage and a glove, and then the wrapping at the neck gave, and the head wrapping unwound off the man's head in a long white line and turned in the air above the room like a thrown bandage should turn — the coat gone, then the glove, then the head wrapping, and then there was nothing at all where the head had been, and the dark glasses fell on the floor.

Roy Nunn let go. Anybody would have let go.

The man in the room was not in the room. He was at the window. The window went up and the bottle fell out and the curtain went with it, and Vera saw the cold come into the room in one gray sheet, and she saw two bare feet standing on the sill — bare, with the marks of the road on them, and the toes gripping — and she saw the feet step out into nineteen degrees and the snow and the six feet of air above the back walk, and there was nothing above the feet at all.

And then there was nothing on the sill either, and in the street somebody was shouting about the fire, and Otis was coming up the stairs two at a time, and Roy Nunn was sitting on the floor of Vera Pell's front bedroom with a white gauze bandage in his hand and his mouth open.