Softspoken Read online

  A

  CHILLING AND

  MYSTERIOUS VOICE

  becomes audible to Sanie shortly after she and her husband Jackson move into the decaying antebellum mansion that is the Bullard ancestral home in rural South Carolina. At first, she wonders if the voice might be a prank played by Jackson’s peyote-popping brother Will or his equally off-kilter sister Louise.

  But soon Sanie discovers that the ghostly voice is merely a single piece in the decadent, baroque puzzle that comprises the Bullard family history, rank with sensuality, violence, repression, and madness.

  Other Night Shade titles by Lucius Shepard:

  Trujillo

  Viator

  Softspoken © 2007 by Lucius Shepard

  This edition of Softspoken © 2007 by

  Night Shade Books

  Cover illustration © 2007 by J. K. Potter

  Interior layout and design by Jeremy Lassen

  Jacket layout and design by Claudia Noble

  First Edition

  ISBN

  978-1-59780-073-0 (Trade Hardcover)

  978-1-59780-072-3 (Limited Edition)

  Night Shade Books

  http://www.nightshadebooks.com

  For Daisy Mae.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilog

  ONE

  Sanie has been hearing him for days, she thinks, once she tunes into his voice. He’s been there all along, lost among the creaks and gasps and groans of the old house, indistinguishable from the whisper of a breeze blowing through a window crack, though he’s not speaking in a whisper, just softly, like a man gentling a tearful child or waking a lover.

  She’s alone in the kitchen, sitting at a table covered in waxy material with a green floral pattern, drinking a Diet Pepsi, when she first notices the voice. Like the rest of the house, the country kitchen, its white paint gone the yellow of an old document, is too spacious for what it contains. The twelve-foot ceiling dwarfs the appliances, making them seem like items from a kid’s playhouse. A vintage stove and refrigerator that must date from the Forties. The 1940s, probably. Cabinets with glass fronts behind which rest jelly glasses and dishes that once were fine china, but now, their edges chipped, surfaces discolored, wouldn’t fetch more than a nickel each in a yard sale. Taped to the refrigerator door is a Cumberland Farm Supplies 1977 calendar open to August, which happens to be the very month Sanie’s living in thirty years later. The August illustration is a painting of a red-faced farmer on a red tractor in a freshly tilled field. He’s wiping sweat from his brow with a bandana (also red) and his wife, a Playmate in gingham drag, looking artificially cheerful, a condition with which Sanie’s all too familiar, is handing him up what appears to be a glass of lemonade. Sanie, who’s feeling abandoned—Jackson, her husband, is studying for the bar and there’s no one else around—is staring at this picture because it is significantly less dismal than the view out the window: under a driving rain, a corn field with last summer’s stalks still standing, a demolished barn that’s little more than a massive pile of kindling, and a fringe of woods. She’s speculating on the farm wife’s marriage, the quality of life in Cumberland Farm Supplies’ Augustland, comparing her estimation of it to her own, and that’s when the voice calls to her, softly, barely audible above the rain drumming on the roof, but distinct:

  …Sanie…Sanie.

  Startled, she turns to find the speaker, suspecting it’s her husband. The idea she next entertains, that her mind is playing tricks, working up ambient noise into repetitions of her name, as sometimes happens when she’s listening to car tires droning on a highway…this explanation doesn’t hold up, because when the voice speaks again, it’s too articulate, the words too clearly stated:

  …I wish you could see me, Sanie.

  “Hey!” she says, coming to her feet. “Who’s there? Where are you?”

  …I wish you…

  The words blend together, Iwishhooo, and fade into a breath.

  It can’t be her husband—the voice has a thick southern accent, and Jackson’s accent, though once as thick, has long since been scrubbed away though exercise of will, by Harvard, and four years in New York City. She thinks it might be Will, her brother-in-law, trying to spook her. There may be a secret passage and he’s standing behind a hidden door, laughing at her. The Bullard house was built in the late eighteenth century—they were into secret doors and passages back then—and Will’s weird enough to be playing such a game. He keeps a journal in which everything is written backwards. Peyote is his drug of choice. Thirty-six years old, he lives on a trickle of an inheritance, spends his time wandering in the woods, watching old horror movies, and reading magazines that feature histrionic articles about demonic possession, conspiracies between the Vatican and the Kennedy Administration, and how to survive the coming apocalypse. She’s almost convinced that it is Will, but then recalls he had a doctor’s appointment. It’s too deep to be a woman’s voice, so it can’t be her sister-in-law, Louise, who is every bit as off-center as Will. Six years older and thus farther along the road to absolute weirdness. Sanie decides that the voice must have been her imagination.

  Or maybe it’s a ghost.

  If ever a house deserved a ghost, it’s this derelict antebellum mansion. A three-story home that might be featured in the real estate section of The Astral Times. Boards weathered to the brown of cured tobacco. The place is Cobweb Central, the last paint job done sometime during the Kennedy Administration. Shingles litter the weedy front lawn. Torn rusted screens on the porch. Steps missing and certain of the floorboards, when you put your weight on them, groan sharply as if you’re stepping on a cat. Filled with three hundred years of eccentric accumulation. Permanently fogged mirrors. Every room a freak scene. Eminently Hauntable, the ad would read, with hot and cold running ectoplasm.

  She toys with the idea of going into the study and telling Jackson she’s seen…No, not seen. Heard a ghost. What’s the point, though? She knows how he’d react. Without lifting his head from his book, he’d say, Yeah? and keep reading. If she were to persist, he would remind her sternly that ghosts do not exist, and if she continued to plead the case, he would say, Are you serious? Didn’t ghosts go out with hippies? and give her a pitying look. She wonders how he came to be kin to Will and Louise. He’s so straight, so completely un-weird, it’s like he’s a changeling. Or else, being the youngest, noting the unhappy consequences of Will-and-Louise’s behavior, he has channeled his own weirdness into the formation of a clever disguise. Sometimes she finds herself wishing he was more like his siblings. A few weeks back, talking to her mom, she floated the idea of leaving Jackson. You’re crazy, her mom said. Jackson’s a doll. To which Sanie replied, Uh-huh, a boring doll. Malibu Ken after the lobotomy. There followed the lecture entitled: Just Because You’re Bored Doesn’t Mean He’s Boring. Implying that if Sanie had something to occupy her, she wouldn’t be bored. Sanie was forced to admit that this may be true. Though she’s been struggling to write, she hasn’t made much progress and is close to giving up on that obsession. But she’s twenty-eight years old and she does not want that challenge to take the form of resurrecting a marriage that’s on the verge of becoming a lifestyle choice.

  It might be time, her mom said, to think about children.

  A couple of
Sanie’s friends have already gone down that road, substituting a child for a vital life, and though the children make them happy, Sanie understands the trap they’ve built for themselves, the one that’ll snap shut after the children leave home and they’re forced to take a hard look at their husbands.

  If the voice proves to be a ghost, she tells herself, at least that won’t be boring.

  TWO

  Like many people from North Carolina, Sanie considers most South Carolinians to be either snooty and pretentious (Charleston types) or low-class and ignorant (the rest). The irony attaching to this point of view is not lost on her, yet she adheres to it, and the next morning, in keeping with her attitude, she wriggles into a pair of cut-offs and a raggedy T-shirt, Daisy Duke redneck-slut drag, prior to walking to Snade’s Corners, a general store and gas station that lies at the end of the dirt road leading to the house. She means to engage the citizenry in visual terms to which they can relate and thus bridge the cultural divide. She seeks to infiltrate, to access secret hick lore that may come in handy for the grad-level creative writing workshop she intends to take once she and Jackson return to Chapel Hill. But either her disguise is ineffective or some behavioral tic gives her away, because when she reaches the store—a one-story structure of brown-painted boards, with a peaked roof that extends out over the gas pumps—and steps to the counter to pay for her Diet Pepsi, the cashier, a thirtyish, prematurely balding lout with a potbelly the size of a watermelon and a face remarkable only for an unfortunate Fu Manchu mustache and soul patch, says, “You Jackson Bullard’s wife, ain’tcha?”

  Sanie acknowledges this is the case, though she hates the name Bullard. Sanie Bullard sounds to her like the name of a character in a story by a writer whom she would not admire, a faux-Southern regionalist with a faintly malodorous literary cachet.

  “Your first time down, huh?” says the lout, first introducing himself as Garland Snade (“Gar’s what they call me.”), which sounds like a character from the same story. She tells him her name and he grunts a laugh, calls out to a teenage boy who’s restocking one of the aisles: “Says her name’s Zany Bullard!”

  The teenager’s doltish laugh calls to mind the word “guffaw.”

  “Sorry ’bout that,” Gar says, mightily pleased with his own wit. “But I just couldn’t resist. Thing is, the Bullards been a joke ’round Culliver County for years now. Not that that’s any of your doing…or Jackson’s, neither. Ol’ Jackson, he tore out of town minute he could get a wheel under his butt. I hear tell he’s done all right.”

  Much as she’s inclined to, Sanie raises no objection to being lumped in with “you Bullards,” and attests that Jackson is well on his way to world domination. Having made a small fortune as a day trader, he’s embarking on a political career.

  “Just like his daddy,” Gar says. “Though if you was to ask me, it’s Louise and Will who most take after ol’ Rayfield.”

  Since Jackson never reminisces about his family, speaking of them solely in regard to practical matters, all Sanie knows about Rayfield Bullard is that he was a lawyer and is dead.

  “Rayfield was a curious fellow,” says Gar, responding to her inquiry. “Powerful man down at the State House for more than twenty years. Got to where people said you couldn’t be governor unless Rayfield Bullard approved of you. Then his daddy died and left him the property, and Rayfield give up politics, his practice…just flat up and chucked the whole mess and come home to live. I reckon his wife dying not long before unsettled him some, and he just didn’t want to deal with that mess in Colombia anymore. My daddy said a month or two after he arrived, he walked into the store and put in an order for enough baked beans to start a swamp fire. Beans and bread. That’s all he ever bought. People hardly saw him after that. Man stayed to home and did whatever it was he did. Had most everything delivered. When he ventured out, you never knew what he’d do. It’s like the man went strange the second he took over that house. I remember one time when I was a kid, he busts into the store wearing nothing but four hats, one on top of the other. Bought a Sunday paper, a couple quarts of beer, and said ‘How ye doin’?’ to everyone, then stepped off right smartly down the road.”

  A new customer distracts Gar. Sanie goes out onto the porch with her soda, sits in a rusting lawn chair beside the door, and looks off along State Road 226, an asphalt straightaway laid between stands of scrub pine and palmettos, the foliage showing a leached green under the whitish sun. The smell is of hot dust and gasoline. Sweat trickles from her underarm and turns cool on the slope of her breast. A car zips by so swiftly, she can only make out a pasty blur at the wheel.

  Is Jackson’s fate, she wonders, to be the same as Rayfield’s? A lifetime of sturdy labor and acquisition curtailed by a sudden swerve, a U-turn, as if he has stretched the elastic connection between himself and his home to a point at which he can no longer withstand its pull? An existence fueled by baked beans and accompanied by the wearing of multiple hats offers even less appeal to Sanie than the current strictures of the marriage. Could the ghost, the voice she hears, have something to do with the Bullard family character? She’s heard it on three separate occasions now, she’s become attuned to that mild baritone, and it troubles her that she’s not more alarmed by the possibility of such a presence. Fear should be playing icy xylophone tunes along her vertebrae. She should be pleading with Jackson to flee from supernatural peril before it’s too late. But whether due to ignorance or indifference, or because the presence communicates a certain familiarity, a non-threatening vibe, she’s unafraid. The house has changed in her eyes from a monstrosity into a frail, musty puzzle that she wants to solve. There is, she imagines, a delicacy of purpose in the voice. Nothing sinister, merely a clever, cajoling sensibility. She expects that if a solution to the puzzle exists, it will be something redolent of lace and lilac water and a streak of crimson, an arrangement of color and texture that suggests some minor two-hundred-year-old violence that failed to meet the mark of tragedy. Still, she needs another perspective. Tonight, she decides, she’ll tell Jackson, she’ll ignore his predictable responses and make him reveal what, if anything, he knows.

  A bicycle bell, insistently rung, brakes her train of thought. In front of the porch, sitting astride a bike, one leg braced on the ground, is a skinny towheaded kid, nine or ten years old, in jeans and a Gamecocks T-shirt. He stares at her with glum intensity and asks, “You Miz Bullard?”

  Again, Sanie wants to deny it. “That’s right. Who’re you?”

  “Sandy Kyle.”

  She waits a couple of beats for him to state his purpose, then says, “Something I can do for you, Sandy?”

  “I want my cat,” he says defiantly.

  “You think I’ve got your cat?”

  “Your brother Will took him.”

  “Will’s my brother-in-law, not my brother. What makes you say he took your cat.”

  “’Cause I saw him. My cat was on y’all’s porch and Will opened up the door and let her in. That was three days ago. I ain’t seen her since.”

  “Why don’t you ask him about it?”

  Sandy toes up dirt, gazing down at the damage he’s doing. “You gonna see him, ain’tcha?”

  “Yeah, but you could ride on down there now.”

  Sandy seems uncomfortable with the idea. “I’m not in no hurry.”

  “You scared of Will? Is that what’s wrong?”

  “Heck, no! I talk to Will all the time.”

  “Well, then…go on down. I’m sure he’s at home.”

  Sandy develops a look of woeful confusion, and Sanie suspects that he’s experiencing one of those terrible, inexpressible conflicts between potential loss of face and personal mythology that children believe afflict only them.

  “Okay,” she says. “What I bet happened, Will let your cat in, then forgot about it. He’s liable to forget his head, he isn’t wearing his hat. And now she’s wandering around, getting fat on our mice. What’s she’s look like?”

  “She’s a marma
lade cat. You wanna yell out, her name’s Kissy.” A pause, then Sandy adopts a stern expression. “It was my mom named her.”

  Sanie tells him she’ll do her best to find Kissy and, since Sandy’s reluctant to disclose his phone number, says she’ll leave word at the store. Walking home, she puts the cat issue on a back burner and thinks about the voice, the house, Jackson. After hearing Gar’s story, she feels sorry for Jackson, and that makes her feel guilty about the thoughts she’s been having regarding the marriage. Growing up a Bullard must be what caused him to become such a tight-ass. Maybe that’s how his daddy was, rigid and orderly until the day his elastic band snapped him back to the ancestral stomping grounds.

  She rounds a curve and the house emerges from behind the screen of two water oaks, ramshackle and many-eyed with black windows, presenting the impression of a ditsy old matriarch, her torso rising from waist-high yellowing weeds of skirts so ragged, the corroded wrought-iron fence of her bustle shows through. The weathered brown of the boards is identical to the skin tone of a mummy that Sanie remembers from a traveling exhibition of Egyptian artifacts in Raleigh. It’s hard to imagine the place during its heyday, with white paint and lanterns lit and coaches drawn up along the road, begowned belles dancing the quadrille in the arms of gentlemen wearing frock coats and muttonchop whiskers. But that’s how it was. The Bullards were gentry and, despite disapproving of his family, Jackson remains inordinately proud of the fact that one of his great-grandaunts many times removed married General “Light Horse” Harry Lee, who was Robert E. Lee’s cousin or uncle or something.

  Weeds tickle Sanie’s thighs as she pushes in through the gate. A gust of wind flaps a torn porch screen. The steps creak shrill and feeble, like grandmothers complaining about their arthritis. The knockerless door has a deeper, more despairing voice, and the smells of two hundred years distilled into a musky cool breath rush to enclose her.