Pyramid House

I’d never met her before.

She wasn’t invited, but Ali was my friend and I didn’t want to be rude. Can Sarah come with me tonight, I haven’t seen her in so long and I’m only in town the one night.

Of course, I said. We were going to make triangle-shaped ravioli with our new pasta maker. James had prepped the dough and I’d made cocktails with whiskey and Cointreau and little bits of orange peel.

When Sarah arrived I met her at the door. She was a tall, clean-looking woman with long blonde hair and a large forehead. She held a bottle of wine in one hand and a black notebook in the other, and she gave me a limp hug. Thanks for letting me come, she said in an equally limp voice.

I let her in.

She was early. Ali hadn’t arrived yet but Sarah just shrugged and said, the trip was quick, she didn’t mind waiting. She was sitting on the arm of the couch and she was twisting her fingers together and practically eating me up with her hard, blue eyes. She was pretty but seemed, somehow, hostile. One of those blank-eyed women in the ads for pastel-colored sweaters or polo shirts.

We were still prepping dinner but, as people do when forced to entertain strangers, I said, what do you do for work?

Sarah said, sometimes I work as a nurse. There was no expression to her face and she didn’t move her eyes from mine. Her fingers tightened on the black notebook in her lap.

Well, I said as James rolled out the dough to put in the pasta-maker, want to help us make ravioli? I held up our ravioli cutters and smiled in my best hostess manner.

Sarah just stared at me.

Come on, I said, just try. Okay, I said, holding my arms out, why don’t I show you how I usually do it and then you can try.

I did not allow myself to be hurried but spoke quietly and slowly as I fed the dough into the pasta-maker. You fold the dough, I told her, and then feed it into the machine, crank the lever, don’t rip the dough…

As I moved my chair a little nearer to the table, Sarah began talking about our ravioli cutters, little treasures, she called them, and shaped like triangles, too, her favorite shape.

As it happens, though, James and I had had a hard time with those ravioli cutters in the past and we were both thinking of that, though neither of us said so.

You’re doing it wrong, Sarah suddenly said.

I looked up, keeping my face still and calm, and I said, it’s harder than it looks, do you want to try?

James caught my eye as the woman smirked.

For heaven’s sake, I broke in, laughing good-naturedly because hostesses don’t lose their tempers, would you like to try?

She nodded and came forward, but ripped the dough on the first go, so I took over and did the rest, while she stood back with her arms crossed over that notebook and one corner of her lip pulling up like it was tugged by a string.

I finished the ravioli. As James put the plump ravioli triangles into the pot to boil, I refilled our wine glasses and said, so what’s with the notebook?

Sarah looked at me and, with a slight laugh, said, I thought you’d never ask. She laid back on the couch.

You know D.S. Runeberg, she said, the famous historian?

I shrugged.

“Well,” she began, “in Runeberg’s History of Eden Township, you can read all about this place they call Pyramid House. It was built in 1860 for a guy who died in an abortive crossing of the Bermuda Triangle in a hot air balloon.” We had no idea who or what she was talking about and she figured as much. “Pyramid House was named for its three-sided design and for years it was kept exactly as it had been designed—you know, old Victorian furniture, darkly wooded rooms and white lace curtains, clawfoot tables covered in red fringed cloth, antique ceramic phrenology heads, stuffed tropical birds under glass bell jars. That sort of thing.”

She had our attention.

“Well,” she said, “the house was designed by a phrenologist and architect named Melton Wildey. He'd published a book called Superiority of Pyramid House, which talked all about the advantages of three-sided houses over traditionally-shaped houses and how, if done right,” (she grinned fiendishly) “you could open a portal to another dimension. People also used to say Mr. Wildey hid treasure inside the house—Spanish gold from an East India clipper ship, some said. So experts of all sort searched the house but no Spanish gold was ever found.

“Anyways, the original owner—the one who hired Wildey, the one who died in the hot air balloon—he went violently insane after his wife was impaled by part of a bannister that had come unscrewed from the spiral staircase—”

That sounds fake, I said. She ignored me.

“—and eventually the house was bought by Oscar Stinz, the world’s largest puzzle retailer at the time, and he decided to add more floors and verandas and hidden corner rooms and, some suspect, a great maze of secret passages below the house. Stinz lived in the house his whole life so no one ever found out for sure, but after he died, Runeberg bought the house, and he became dedicated to researching it—a goal he faithfully pursued for the better part of six decades.

“But something wasn’t quite right about that house. Some say Runeberg became obsessed with the place. They say that, near the end, he rarely left that house and people in town said he stopped sleeping and eating. Closed up inside that house like a tomb, Runeberg grew old and forgetful and soon became lost in a perpetual dream, and the rooms and grounds of Pyramid House grew wild and full of dust and rodents and half-dead weeds like wisteria and hollyhock and rose of Sharon. But Runeberg didn’t notice any of that. He just kept on working in his telltale black notebook, into which he recorded the history of Pyramid House, the layout of its rooms and halls, its secrets…

“One day Runeberg was working in his study as usual, and he’d been sitting there for the better part of the day, just as he’d been sitting there for the better part of his life, but this time his granddaughter, Willow, was watching him from the open doorway.

“Runeberg was the only family Willow had in the world, unless you counted her mother, who’d left Pyramid House many years earlier to join a commune of artist-fishermen. But Willow didn’t count her mother as family because she’d been raised by her grandfather, she’d spent her whole life with him, and she’d watched, helplessly, as his dementia came on, slowly at first and then all at once.

“But, you see, Willow was the sort of person that believed man was inherently good and she stayed to take care of her grandfather because she knew that, even if he didn’t remember her name, he was a kind and good person and he needed her. That she was taking care of him in a suspected haunted house was not altogether strange to her.

“So Willow was watching her grandfather from a crack in the open doorway when the doorbell rang. Old Runeberg didn’t react to the sound of the bell and Willow supposed he hadn’t even heard it so she thought about ignoring it, maybe they would go away if she ignored it, but then the doorbell rang again.

“This is where it gets strange,” she said. “All that’s known for sure is that when Willow went to the front door, there was no one there. She called out and looked around a bit, waited. Finally she gave up and went back to the study, but the study was empty as well. Her grandfather was gone. He’d left his notebook on his desk and Willow knew something was wrong when she saw it there because he clung to that notebook like it was air in his lungs and he never would’ve left it lying around like that.

“Later on, after Willow called the police and after the police took the notebook as evidence, the rumors started. People said the notebook contained horrible secrets—a convoluted map of Pyramid House, a labyrinth of basement levels going deep into the ground, strange passages and doors that were searched for but never found—who knows whether they only existed in Runeberg’s addled mind, or whether they really did lead to other dimensions…

“Runeberg was eventually declared dead and Willow inherited Pyramid House and the police returned her grandfather’s notebook to her. But to everyone’s surprise, Willow, too, succumbed to her grandfather’s malady, that unhealthy obsession with Pyramid House and its secrets, all recorded in his small black notebook. And then, even more surprising, Willow inherited a great fortune from some long-lost relative—something like twenty-thousand dollars, which was a lot of money back then, and with all that money and living alone in that big house, Willow became something of a recluse.

“Then one day—poof!—she was gone, too, just like her grandfather. No leads, bodies never found. Rumor was that all they found of her was that notebook, left abandoned on a table in the parlor. Something to do with the house, people always said. Something to do with whatever was in that notebook…”

I pointed at her notebook and I said, half laughing, is that the notebook?

The woman smiled. She whispered, when I got it I won twenty-thousand dollars in a contest, isn’t that crazy?

All I could think of was a line from a half-forgotten poem: The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirmed case.

So, I said, it is the notebook?

As she opened her mouth to answer, the doorbell rang and James stood and said, that must be Ali, and he went away to the door, which was at the other end of the apartment.

Sarah and I just looked at each other.

Babe, James called after a moment, can you come here a sec?

I looked at Sarah and said, sorry, I’ll just be a moment, and then I went down the hall to see what was the matter.

At the door Ali was smiling and she hugged me and said, I’ve missed you! And then she turned and there was another young smiling woman behind her and Ali said, this is Sarah, thanks for letting me bring her.

I looked at James.

I’ve always been so curious about this place, Ali was saying, I’ve always wanted to see inside but was too scared, people used to say it was haunted, you know, I forget what they used to call it…

We’d just moved to town and we’d never heard this.

I made my way back to the living room, where I’d left the woman sitting on the couch.

Ali was chatting away as she followed. That front staircase is so grand, she said, people used to say it was haunted by some woman who’d died on it…

The living room was empty.

Pyramid House, Ali blurted, they used to call this building Pyramid House because of the way it’s shaped…

The kitchen was empty, too, and so was the back bedroom and the bathroom and the closets and under the bed and all the other furniture.

"What’s wrong," Ali said, looking very confused.

We didn’t tell her about the woman we’d thought was Sarah because the woman was gone and because none of it made any sense, and because all that was left of our strange guest was that black notebook, left abandoned on the kitchen table.