The cops began spinning, clipping the pickup and sending it across the median into the path of southbound traffic. Roy heard smashes, saw cars rear-ending over there. But the worst thing was the CHP cruiser. It was rolling now, glass spraying, a wheel off and bouncing along the highway. The other police cars were doing things to avoid running into the debris. For the moment, the pursuit was over.

  That was when Roy noticed the police helicopter overhead. At the same moment, he saw the big yellow house. It was a restaurant; that was its color and its name. He pulled into the parking lot behind the frame building. There was no time for anything. “Mother, I have to go!” He snatched up his script.

  “Royal, what’s going on?”

  He saw her face, cold and hard with a threat of punishment in eyes made of glass. He could not stand looking at this face. “There’s no time. Stay here, you’ll be all right.”

  “The president is waiting to talk to me.”

  “I’ll explain there was an accident. He’ll understand.”

  Roy slammed the car door and darted into a stand of trees on the hillside. The chopper was holding position high above the parking lot. Cops would soon arrive in numbers. What would Clara Hunter Flagg tell them? Everything she knew. But people in authority always have to check things out. If he hurried, there would still be time.

  Roy was panting when he reached the iron gates. He could see a white porch and a red tile roof through dark foliage down a gravel lane. Two uniformed guards came forward to meet him. Three men in suits lingered by the gate, jackets unbuttoned.

  “I had a flat tire at the bottom of the hill.” The self-deprecating grin was always there when he needed it. “I have an appointment. Royal Flagg.”

  The guard turned a page on his clipboard. “Supposed to be a lady as well. Clara Flagg?”

  “My mother. She’s not well, she couldn’t come. I’ll have to make her apologies.”

  They patted him down, then let him go on up to the house. Another man in a suit headed him off on the porch and patted him down again. A maid led him through to a spacious room with logs burning in a fireplace. An elderly man with a bald head was tucked into a chair near the fire. A tall, slender woman in shiny red lounging pajamas rose from a chair on the other side of the fire. Roy looked past her, because Mike Linford was stretched out on a sofa with his shoes off and two pillows propping up the big pink face with its cap of salt-and-pepper hair. All three had drinks; the president was holding his glass on his belt buckle.

  “You must be Roy Flagg. I’m Fanny Temple. That’s my husband, Ellis, over there.” She peered over Roy’s shoulder into the doorway. “Where’s your mother?”

  “She was taken ill at the last minute. I’m sorry. I should have telephoned.”

  “Taken ill.”

  “I came ahead because I was afraid you’d tell me not to come. And I did so want to see the president.”

  “Is that a Louisiana accent I’m listening to?” Linford said. This was all the permission Roy needed. He was in.

  “Better than that, sir. Smokey Valley.”

  The president got to his feet. It surprised Roy how big he was. Even in his socks, he towered over everybody else. They shook hands. “Royal Flagg, your mother is one fine piano teacher. Why, she almost taught me to play ‘Beautiful Ohio.’ ”

  Everybody laughed and Roy relaxed even more. But when Fanny Temple offered him a drink, he refused. It seemed good tactics. He was not a member of this party. He would make his pitch, and he would leave his script in the president’s hands, and he would go.

  The others resumed their seats. Roy remained standing. “I don’t want to intrude on your quiet time, Mr. President, in such peaceful surroundings with these good people.”

  “Don’t you just love it?” the president said.

  “So I’ll say my piece and take my leave. I’ve written a screenplay. I took the liberty of bringing it with me.”

  “Listen to this, Ellis. Wake up, he’s making a pitch. Give the man a Kewpie doll.”

  “I want your permission to hand it to you, Mr. President. Because it’s all about the town we both grew up in and the people who live there. And it comes from the heart.”

  Linford was sitting now, big woolly feet angled on the carpet. He took the script from Roy, balanced it on a knee, and opened the cover.

  “All I ask is for you to read it. Then pass it on to whoever you think ought to see it.” Roy glanced at Fanny Temple. She granted him a solemn wink.

  There was a movement outside the room, voices rumbling in the vestibule. One of the suited men walked in, glancing at Roy as he said, “Mr. President?”

  “What is it, Mel?”

  “There’s been some trouble on the freeway south of here. A unit belonging to the highway patrol went over. There’s an officer killed.”

  Fanny said, “God help us.”

  Mel went on, “The unit that crashed, and others, were in pursuit of a vehicle driven by this man here. The car was reported stolen.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “We spoke to his mother, sir. She’s waiting down the hill in the car. She told us they were coming here.”

  After a silence, Linford said, “This is very serious, Roy.”

  “I know it is, sir.”

  “You’re going to have to go with Mel and answer for whatever you’ve done.”

  “I’m ready to do that,” Royal Flagg said. “But can I ask you to read my script all the same?”

  The president riffled the pages, ending back at page one. “I have a problem with the title. An Air That Kills. That’s Housman, isn’t it? ‘A Shropshire Lad’?” Linford tipped his head as he began to recite:

  “Into my heart an air that kills

  From yon far country blows.

  What are those blue, remembered hills,

  What spires, what farms are those?”

  “You know that poem, sir!”

  “The line you chose for your title has a negative connotation. Could be talking about pollution, hydrocarbons. You’d be better off calling your play Blue Remembered Hills.” He handed back the script.

  “That’s a good idea. I’ll change the title.”

  “And maybe you can work on the rest of it while you’re at it. One more draft can’t hurt.”

  Mel was staring at Roy. His eyes were hard, his face a mask. “Let’s go,” he said.

  Leaving the room with Mel behind him, shoving him, Roy managed to turn and say, “Thank you, sir. You only glanced at my script and you’ve improved it a lot.”

  “That’s why they elected me president,” Linford said as agents in the vestibule seized Roy and roughly cuffed his hands behind his back, making his wrists bleed while they hurried him out of the house.

  The Haunted Dolls’ House

  by M. R. James

  The following ghost story by M. R. James was written specially for the library of a dolls’ house built in honor of Britain’s Queen Mary. Visitors to the Wembley Exhibition of 1924 would have seen the structure, which was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, filled with pictures and furniture by leading artists and craftsmen of the day, but the house was not then, nor as far as we know, at any future time, peopled with the six-inch dolls for which it was designed. Ultimately, the house found its way to Windsor Castle where it remained at least up to the time of the 1992 fire, when it contained the castle’s only working piece of fire equipment, a tiny fire engine designed by Lutyens. Unlike Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, the miniature building of M. R. James’s imagination is all too full of inhabitants. A Cambridge don, James was celebrated for his ghost stories, which he often read to friends on Christmas Eve at King’s College...

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  “I suppose you get stuff of that kind through your hands pretty often?” said Mr. Dillet, as he pointed with his stick to an object which shall be described when the time comes: and when he said it, he lied in his throat, and knew that he lied. Not once in twenty years — perhaps not once in a lifetime — could Mr. Chittenden, skilled as he was in ferreting out the forgotten treasures of half a dozen counties, expect to handle such a specimen. It was collectors’ palaver, and Mr. Chittenden recognized it as such.

  “Stuff of that kind, Mr. Dillet! It’s a museum piece, that is.”

  “Well, I suppose there are museums that’ll take anything.”

  “I’ve seen one, not as good as that, years back,” said Mr. Chittenden thoughtfully, “but that’s not likely to come into the market: and I’m told they ’ave some fine ones of the period over the water. No, I’m only telling you the truth, Mr. Dillet, when I say that if you was to place an unlimited order with me for the very best that could be got — and you know I ’ave facilities for getting to know of such things, and a reputation to maintain — well, all I can say is, I should lead you straight up to that one and say, ‘I can’t do any better for you than that, sir.’ ”

  “Hear, hear!” said Mr. Dillet, applauding ironically with the end of his stick on the floor of the shop. “How much are you sticking the innocent American buyer for it, eh?”

  “Oh, I shan’t be over hard on the buyer, American or otherwise. You see, it stands this way, Mr. Dillet — if I knew just a bit more about the pedigree—”

  “Or just a bit less,” Mr. Dillet put in.

  “Ha, ha! You will have your joke, sir. No, but as I was saying, if I knew just a little more than what I do about the piece — though anyone can see for themselves it’s a genuine thing, every last comer of it, and there’s not been one of my men allowed to so much as touch it since it came into the shop — there’d be another figure in the price I’m asking.”

  “And what’s that: five and twenty?”

  “Multiply that by three and you’ve got it, sir. Seventy-five’s my price.”

  “And fifty’s mine,” said Mr. Dillet.

  The point of agreement was, of course, somewhere between the two, it does not matter exactly where — I think sixty guineas. But half an hour later the object was being packed, and within an hour Mr. Dillet had called for it in his car and driven away. Mr. Chittenden, holding the cheque in his hand, saw him off from the door with smiles, and returned, still smiling, into the parlour where his wife was making the tea. He stopped at the door.

  “It’s gone,” he said.

  “Thank God for that!” said Mrs. Chittenden, putting down the teapot. “Mr. Dillet, was it?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “Well, I’d sooner it was him than another.”

  “Oh, I don’t know; he ain’t a bad feller, my dear.”

  “Maybe not, but in my opinion he’d be none the worse for a bit of a shake-up.”

  “Well, if that’s your opinion, it’s my opinion he’s put himself into the way of getting one. Anyhow, we shan’t have no more of it, and that’s something to be thankful for.”

  And so Mr. and Mrs. Chittenden sat down to tea.

  And what of Mr. Dillet and of his new acquisition? What it was, the title of this story will have told you. What it was like, I shall have to indicate as well as I can.

  There was only just room enough for it in the car, and Mr. Dillet had to sit with the driver: he had also to go slow, for though the rooms of the dolls’ house had all been stuffed carefully with soft cotton wool, jolting was to be avoided, in view of the immense number of small objects which thronged them; and the ten-mile drive was an anxious time for him, in spite of all the precautions he insisted upon. At last his front door was reached, and Collins, the butler, came out.

  “Look here, Collins, you must help me with this thing — it’s a delicate job. We must get it out upright, see? It’s full of little things that mustn’t be displaced more than we can help. Let’s see, where shall we have it? (After a pause for consideration.) Really, I think I shall have to put it in my own room, to begin with at any rate. On the big table — that’s it.”

  It was conveyed — with much talking — to Mr. Dillet’s spacious room on the first floor, looking out on the drive. The sheeting was unwound from it, and the front thrown open, and for the next hour or two Mr. Dillet was fully occupied in extracting the padding and setting in order the contents of the rooms.

  When this thoroughly congenial task was finished, I must say that it would have been difficult to find a more perfect and attractive specimen of a dolls’ house in Strawberry Hill Gothic than that which now stood on Mr. Dillet’s large kneehole table, lighted up by the evening sun which came slanting through three tall sash-windows.

  It was quite six feet long, including the chapel or oratory which flanked the front on the left as you faced it, and the stable on the right. The main block on the house was, as I have said, in the Gothic manner: that is to say, the windows had pointed arches and were surmounted by what are called ogival hoods, with crockets and finials such as we see on the canopies of tombs built into church walls. At the angles were absurd turrets covered with arched panels. The chapel had pinnacles and buttresses, and a bell in the turret and coloured glass in the windows. When the front of the house was open you saw four large rooms, bedroom, dining room, drawing room, and kitchen, each with its appropriate furniture in a very complete state.

  The stable on the right was in two storeys, with its proper complement of horses, coaches, and grooms, and with its clock and Gothic cupola for the clock bell.

  Pages, of course, might be written on the outfit of the mansion — how many frying pans, how many gilt chairs, what pictures, carpets, chandeliers, fourposters, table linen, glass, crockery, and plate it possessed; but all this must be left to the imagination. I will only say that the base of plinth on which the house stood (for it was fitted with one of some depth which allowed of a flight of steps to the front door and a terrace, partly balustraded) contained a shallow drawer or drawers in which were neatly stored sets of embroidered curtains, changes of raiment for the inmates, and, in short, all the materials for an infinite series of variations and refittings of the most absorbing and delightful kind.

  “Quintessence of Horace Walpole, that’s what it is: he must have had something to do with the making of it.” Such was Mr. Dillet’s murmured reflection as he knelt before it in a reverent ecstasy. “Simply wonderful! This is my day and no mistake. Five hundred pound coming in this morning for that cabinet which I never cared about, and now this tumbling into my hands for a tenth, at the very most, of what it would fetch in town. Well, well! It almost makes one afraid something’ll happen to counter it. Let’s have a look at the population, anyhow.”

  Accordingly, he set them before him in a row. Again, here is an opportunity, which some would snatch at, of making an inventory of costume: I am incapable of it.

  There was a gentleman and lady, in blue satin and brocade respectively. There were two children, a boy and a girl. There was a cook, a nurse, a footman, and there were the stable servants, two postilions, a coachman, two grooms.

  “Anyone else? Yes, possibly.”

  The curtains of the fourposter in the bedroom were closely drawn round all four sides of it, and he put his finger in between them and felt in the bed. He drew the finger back hastily, for it almost seemed to him as if something had — not stirred, perhaps, but yielded — in an odd live way as he pressed it. Then he put back the curtains, which ran on rods in the proper manner, and extracted from the bed a white-haired old gentleman in a long linen nightdress and cap, and laid him down by the rest. The tale was complete.

  Dinnertime was now near, so Mr. Dillet spent but five minutes in putting the lady and children into the drawing room, the gentleman into the dining room, the servants into the kitchen and stables, and the old man back into his bed. He retired into his dressing room next door, and we see and hear no more of him until something like eleven o’clock at night.

  His whim was to sleep surrounded by some of the gems of his collection. The big room in which we have seen him contained his bed: bath, wardrobe, and all the appliances of dressing were in a commodious room adjoining: but his fourposter, which itself was a valued treasure, stood in the large room where he sometimes wrote, and often sat, and even received visitors. Tonight he repaired to it in a highly complacent frame of mind.

  There was no striking clock within earshot — none on the staircase, none in the stable, none in the distant church tower. Yet it is indubitable that Mr. Dillet was startled out of a very pleasant slumber by a bell tolling one.

  He was so much startled that he did not merely lie breathless with wide-open eyes, but actually sat up in his bed.

  He never asked himself, till the morning hours, how it was that, though there was no light at all in the room, the dolls’ house on the kneehole table stood out with complete clearness. But it was so. The effect was that of a bright harvest moon shining full on the front of a big white stone mansion — a quarter of a mile away it might be, and yet every detail was photographically sharp. There were trees about it, too — trees rising behind the chapel and the house. He seemed to be conscious of the scent of a cool, still September night. He thought he could hear an occasional stamp and clink from the stable, as of horses stirring. And with another shock he realised that, above the house, he was looking, not at the wall of his room with its pictures, but into the profound blue of a night sky.

  There were lights, more than one, in the windows, and he quickly saw that this was no four-roomed house with a movable front, but one of many rooms, and staircases — a real house, but seen as if through the wrong end of a telescope. “You mean to show me something,” he muttered to himself, and he gazed earnestly on the lighted windows. They would in real life have been shuttered or curtained, no doubt, he thought; but, as it was, there was nothing to intercept his view of what was being transacted inside the rooms.

  Two rooms were lighted — one on the ground floor to the right of the door, one upstairs, on the left — the first brightly enough, the other rather dimly. The lower room was the dining room: a table was laid, but the meal was over, and only wine and glasses were left on the table. The man of the blue satin and the woman of the brocade were alone in the room, and they were talking very earnestly, seated close together at the table, their elbows on it: every now and again stopping to listen, as it seemed. Once he rose, came to the window and opened it, and put his head out and his hand to his ear. There was a lighted taper in a silver candlestick on a sideboard. When the man left the window he seemed to leave the room also; and the lady, taper in hand, remained standing and listening. The expression on her face was that of one striving her utmost to keep down a fear that threatened to master her — and succeeding. It was a hateful face, too; broad, flat, and sly. Now the man came back and she took some small thing from him and hurried out of the room. He, too, disappeared, but only for a moment or two. The front door slowly opened and he stepped out and stood on the top of the perron, looking this way and that; then turned towards the upper window that was lighted, and shook his fist.

 

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