Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 1. Whole No. 767, July 2005

Voices by Brenda Joziatis

The following tale is a departure from what EQMM usually deems a crime story. But it can boast a most unusual culprit. Its author, Brenda Joziatis, is a writer of literary short stories who has twice before contributed to EQMM (see “Chairs” 8/03 and “A Glass of Water” 11/04). Ms. Joziatis lives in New Hampshire and has a degree in creative writing from the University of New Hampshire.

The house was hungry.

For over a century, its existence had depended on the voices within it. Quarreling voices. Loving voices. Whining voices. The house was no gourmet; voices of any pitch and timbre fed it, the merest mutter made it fat and happy.

It was a standard New Englander. A design typical of those built for the more successful Irish roustabouts who came to work in the woolen mills. An offset front entrance, opening to a flight of stairs; a living room to the right, a den and dining room beyond, then a kitchen the width of the house, followed by sheds and a small barn. Over the years, a side porch by the kitchen had been added, morning glories planted, the den modernized to a bathroom.

The house sighed wistfully, remembering those rowdy times. Huge families, birthing and dying, fighting and frolicking, a veritable feast of noise day after day. But things had changed over the decades. Daughters and sons married and moved away. Only one, Hester, stayed to look after the old folks, a maiden daughter with fiery red hair and a temper to match. Hester married late and inherited the house, but had had only two daughters. Still, it was an acceptable diet of noise, enough to sustain the house through the decades, particularly during World War I when one of the daughters died of influenza and the lamentations went on for weeks. Almost as satisfying was the night Hester called her boozing husband a sot and told him to get lost. He left, whistling “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” a flagrant insult, since Kathleen was the name of his mistress. Hester had woken the neighborhood flinging deprecations after him like frying pans. Not long after, he’d stumbled and fallen on the railroad tracks at an inopportune moment, freeing Hester to remarry in the Church.

Hester’s second husband was a man who had a son from his first wife. The two men sang together in a barbershop quartet and often practiced at home. Their voices were sweet as petits fours and the house grew plump and smug. I never had it so good, it thought.

The musical stepson died in the Second World War and the house momentarily put on even more weight, taking in the murmurs of the mourners, the wails at the wake. The second husband died, too, and again the voices had fed the house with mournful cries. But the noises had withered as the red-headed woman grew gray and silent. Hester celebrated the holidays at her remaining daughter’s house, hosted neither great-grandchildren nor coffee klatsches, spoke only on the phone and then in random phrases: “I see.” “Oh, really?” “That so?”

The house, too, grew gray and wizened. Like a cannibal, it had taken to gnawing its own creaks and shifts. Finally, it thought, I can’t keep this up; I shall perish. One night, as the old woman was descending the stairs to the bathroom, the house shrugged at a crucial moment. Hester tumbled to her death, unfortunately for the house emitting only one piercing scream and a few broken moans before expiring. Still, it was a start. Now we can get some life in here again, the house exulted.

It took awhile. First someone had to find Hester. A week went by before they did. Then, because she left no will, the lawyers had to get involved. Next, the rooms had to be cleared out of their ponderous walnut furnitures, their residue of Pyrex pie plates and plisse dresses. The house relished the hearty voices of the antique dealers, the coos of the vintage-clothing collectors, the verbal to-and-fro of the strangers at the yard sale who came to pick over Hester’s soaps and soup pans. Dogs barked, children laughed, teenagers twittered in delight at the celluloid vanity set and the chenille spread. “Can you do any better?” was prevalent. The house drank it all in and felt its strength returning.

The daughter hired workmen to paper and paint. They drank, they swore, they ogled the girls sauntering by on their way home from school. The house partook of this audial buffet and smiled.

Harriet, the woman who bought the house, was young, a good sign. She’s sure to marry and start the whole cycle up again, thought the house. There were changes, however. She converted the sheds into what she called a family room (a very good sign), made the dining room into her office, the living room into her bedroom. Carpenters came and went, electricians tickled the house with new wiring for a computer. The house snuffled with delight at each new coming and going, each additional register of male voices.

Then Harriet moved in and silence fell. Oh no, thought the house, not again. For Harriet’s only friends were books, and she seldom used the phone, except when she plugged the computer modem into it.

Harriet was absent during the day — she taught English as a second language at an alternative school — and at night, except for an occasional “Damn” or “Drat” when she spilled spaghetti sauce or dropped a slice of bread butter-side down, the loudest sound was the turning of the pages of a contemporary novel. She had a television set, but put it on for just the six o’clock news. She listened to CDs, but only classical music. She may have had dates, but if so, she met them elsewhere.

The house, confined to a daily half-hour of laconic anchormen, grew sullen. It would have shifted the stairs on her, too, if Harriet had slept on the second floor. But she didn’t. The house lured a stray cat to the kitchen door by wafting a scent of mice into the street. Harriet opened the door, took one look at the scrawny creature, and said, “No.” The house sucked the marrow from the obdurate “No” for weeks.

Fate intervened. The town had a property reevaluation, and Harriet’s taxes rose. She decided to convert the upstairs into an apartment. There was a brief flurry of activity again. A plumber turned a large upstairs closet into a second bathroom. In the room outside it, he added a unit with a shallow sink, two electric coils, and a small refrigerator. A carpenter built shelves, with an outlet for a microwave.

To the house’s disappointment (it had been counting on a month or two of drinking in prospective candidates and their questions), Harriet found a boarder without interviewing. Philip, a slim young man, moved in one Saturday with his meager possessions: a beanbag chair, a pole lamp, some TV trays in faux wood, a futon, and a few garbage bags of clothing. There was, of course, the ubiquitous computer.

If anything, Philip was even more silent than Harriet. He, too, eschewed the phone except as a vehicle for sending e-mail. In addition to the click of the computer keys, there was only an occasional “umph” as he trundled his bicycle into the front hall. From the soft wrrrp of the cellophane, the house surmised he ate only frozen dinners baked in the microwave.

The house remained hopeful. Two young people in the same house, surely they would sooner or later realize they were opposite genders and do what that fact entitled them to. The house, though wan, was looking forward to nights of loud and lewd sex.

But Harriet and Philip continued to disappoint it. All through the long winter, the house had to subsist on a scanty menu of some Christmas carolers in December and a visit from Federal Express with a package for which Harriet had to sign. By May, the house was wasting away.

Enough already, it thought. (If it had had feet, it would have stamped them.) It started to whisper in Philip’s ear during the long, dark nights. She wants you. You know she does. And in the mornings, when Harriet went out to get the local paper and Philip drank his instant coffee by the upstairs window: Look at the slut. You’d think she’d put on some clothes. Someday, she’s going to get what she deserves. Philip began to whimper in his dreams.

At first, the house was willing to settle for a rape. One gray afternoon, when Philip wheeled his bike into the hall, the door to Harriet’s bedroom (which had heretofore always closed tightly) creaked open and disclosed a nearly naked Harriet changing into a sweatsuit.

“Sorry,” Philip said, averting his eyes.

“These old houses.” Harriet shrugged. “They shift with the seasons.” She closed the door and propped a chair under it.

“I’ll have to get a hook and eye at Home Depot,” she told a friend in a rare phone conversation. “I should be able to install that myself, don’t you think?”

A bad decision. The house might have given her a reprieve of a week or so if only to enjoy the hubbub of a workman in the house again, asking for instructions, offering comments. Now it decided to go for broke.

That night, Philip’s sleep was haunted by an incessant whisper. YouknowshewantsitYouknowshewantsitYouknowshewantsit. Then a slice of sound like a wind whistling through a broken window. DoItDoItDoIt.

Philip sat up in bed and looked wildly around. He held his head. “No,” he moaned softly. YesYesYes, the house whispered back.

There was, of course, a slight problem. Philip didn’t have a sharp knife to his name. Sharp knives weren’t necessary for frozen dinners. The house nudged Philip to remember that the back stairs led to Harriet’s kitchen and that she had been chopping green peppers for supper.

The stairs should have creaked as Philip crept down them, but they didn’t. The house saw to that. It also shifted slightly so a pale shaft of moonlight lit up the knife on the drainboard.

After that, it was a piece of cake, so to speak. Or a piece of Harriet. The house would have preferred it if Philip had been raving, but Harriet’s pleas of terror were quite enough. Her screams were delicious.

Philip was at a loss to explain how a college honor student who had once been an Eagle Scout could have committed such a heinous crime. “There were these voices,” he kept muttering. The arresting officer was not impressed. Philip’s court-appointed lawyer planned an insanity defense.

Because of the publicity, the house — even though the blood had been scrubbed from the floor and the wallpaper changed yet again — took a long time to sell. The family that finally bought it was large and boisterous, too large for a trailer, too boisterous for a trailer park. There was a new baby that cried, teenagers who worked on old Chevys in the drive. There was a black and brown dog that barked whenever the neighbor drove in next-door, and three cats that came into heat regularly and enticed howling toms to the kitchen porch. The mother shouted and swatted. When the father drank, he shouted, too, and knocked the mother around. She howled, the children sniveled. The TV was on from morning till night, competing with rock music and a ten-year-old who practiced a tuba.

It was a veritable roast-beef dinner of voices. It had been a long time since the house had felt so full. It wasn’t your fault, the house reassured itself, burping up the memory of Harriet’s final plea for mercy. You were starving. Anyone could see that it was self-defense.

Copyright (c); 2005 by Brenda Joziatis.