Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (32 page)

I’m sitting in the green leather chair, and there’s a manila folder of photocopies and computer printouts in my lap. I’ve been picking through them, pretending this is work. It isn’t. There’s nothing in the folder I haven’t read five or ten times over, nothing that hasn’t been cited by other academics chasing stories of New England vampires. On top of the stack is “The ‘Vampires’ of Rhode Island,” from
Yankee
magazine, October 1970. Beneath that, “They Burned Her Heart…Was Mercy Brown a Vampire?” from the
Narragansett Times,
October 25th 1979, and from the
Providence Sunday Journal,
also October 1979, “Did They Hear the Vampire Whisper?” So many of these popular pieces have October dates, a testament to journalism’s attitude towards the subject, which it clearly views as nothing more than a convenient skeleton to pull from the closet every Halloween, something to dust off and trot out for laughs.

Salem has its witches. Sleepy Hollow its headless Hessian mercenary. And Rhode Island has its consumptive, consuming phantoms – Mercy Brown, Sarah Tillinghast, Nellie Vaughn, Ruth Ellen Rose, and all the rest. Beneath the
Providence Sunday Journal
piece is a black-and-white photograph I took a couple of years ago, Nellie Vaughn’s vandalized headstone with its infamous inscription: “I am waiting and watching for you.” I stare at the photograph for a moment or two and set it aside. Beneath it there’s a copy of another October article, “When the Wind Howls and the Trees Moan,” also from the
Providence Sunday Journal.
I close the manila folder and try not to stare at the window across the room.

It is only a window, and it only looks out on trees and houses and sunlight.

I open the folder again and read from a much older article, “The Animistic Vampire in New England” from
American Anthropologist
, published in 1896, only four years after the Mercy Brown incident. I read it silently, to myself, but catch my lips moving:

In New England the vampire superstition is unknown by its proper name. It is believed that consumption is not a physical but spiritual disease, obsession, or visitation; that as long as the body of a dead consumptive relative has blood in its heart it is proof that an occult influence steals from it for death and is at work draining the blood of the living into the heart of the dead and causing his rapid decline.

I close the folder again and return it to its place in my book bag. And then I stand and cross the wide reading room to the window and the alcove where I saw, or only thought I saw, Abby looking in at me. There’s a marble bust of Cicero on the window ledge, and I’ve been staring out at the leafless trees and the brown grass, the sidewalk and the street, for several minutes before I notice the smudges on the pane of glass, only inches from my face. Sometime recently, when the window was wet, a finger traced a circle there, and then traced a circle within that first circle. When the glass dried, these smudges were left behind. And I remember Monday afternoon at the coffeehouse, Abby tracing an identical symbol (if “symbol” is the appropriate word here) in the condensation on the window while we talked and watched the rain.

I press my palm to the glass, which is much colder than I’d expected.

In my dream, I stood at another window, at the end of a long hallway, and looked down at the North Burial Ground. With some difficulty, I opened the window, hoping the air outside would be fresher than the stale air in the hallway. It was, and I thought it smelled faintly of clover and strawberries. And there was music. I saw, then, Abby standing beneath a tree, playing a violin. The music was very beautiful, though very sad, and completely unfamiliar. She drew the bow slowly across the strings, and I realized that somehow the music was shaping the night. There were clouds sailing past above the cemetery, and the chords she drew from the violin changed the shapes of those clouds and also seemed to dictate the speed at which they moved. The moon was bloated and shone an unhealthy shade of ivory, and the whole sky writhed like a Van Gogh painting. I wondered why she didn’t tell me that she plays the violin.

Behind me, something clattered to the floor, and I looked over my shoulder. But there was only the long hallway, leading off into perfect darkness, leading back the way I’d apparently come. When I turned again to the open window and the cemetery, the music had ceased, and Abby was gone. There was only the tree and row after row of tilted headstones, charcoal-colored slate, white marble, a few cut from slabs of reddish sandstone mined from Massachusetts or Connecticut. I was reminded of a platoon of drunken soldiers, lined up for a battle they knew they were going to lose.

I have never liked writing my dreams down.

It is late Thursday morning, almost noon, and I pull my hand back from the cold, smudged windowpane. I have to be in Providence for an evening lecture, and I gather my things and leave the Redwood Library and Athenaeum. On the drive back to the city, I do my best to stop thinking about the nightmare, my best not to dwell on what I saw sitting beneath the tree, after the music stopped and Abby Gladding disappeared. My best isn’t good enough.

4.

The lecture goes well, quite a bit better than I’d expected it would, better, probably, than it had a right to, all things considered. “Mercy Brown as Inspiration for Bram Stoker’s
Dracula,
” presented to the Rhode Island Historical Society, and, somehow, I even manage not to make a fool of myself answering questions afterwards. It helps that I’ve answered these same questions so many times in the past. For example:

“I’m assuming you’ve also drawn connections between the Mercy Brown incident and Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla?’”

“There are similarities, certainly, but so far as I know, no one has been able to demonstrate conclusively that Le Fanu knew of the New England phenomena. And, more importantly, the publication of ‘Carmilla’ predates the exhumation of Mercy Brown’s body by twenty years.”

“Still, he might have known of the earlier cases.”

“Certainly. He may well have. However, I have no evidence that he did.”

But, the entire time, my mind is elsewhere, back across the water in Newport, in that coffeehouse on Thames, and the Redwood Library, and standing in a dream hallway, looking down on my subconscious rendering of the Common Burying Ground. A woman playing a violin beneath a tree. A woman with whom I have only actually spoken once, but about whom I cannot stop thinking.

It is believed that consumption is not a physical but spiritual disease, obsession, or visitation…

After the lecture, and the questions, after introductions are made and notable, influential hands are shaken, when I can finally slip away without seeming either rude or unprofessional, I spend an hour or so walking alone on College Hill. It’s a cold, clear night, and I follow Benevolent Street west to Benefit and turn north. There’s comfort in the uneven, buckled bricks of the sidewalk, in the bare limbs of the trees, in all the softly glowing windows. I pause at the granite steps leading up to the front door of what historians call the Stephen Harris House, built in 1764. One hundred and sixty years later, H. P. Lovecraft called this the “Babbitt House” and used it as the setting for an odd tale of lycanthropy and vampirism. I know this huge yellow house well. And I know, too, the four hand-painted signs nailed up on the gatepost, all of them in French. From the sidewalk, by the electric glow of a nearby street lamp, I can only make out the top half of the third sign in the series; the rest are lost in the gloom –
Oubliez le Chien.
Forget the Dog.

I start walking again, heading home to my tiny, cluttered apartment, only a couple of blocks east on Prospect. The side streets are notoriously steep, and I’ve been in better shape. I haven’t gone twenty-five yards before I’m winded and have a nasty stitch in my side. I lean against a stone wall, cursing the cigarettes and the exercise I can’t be bothered with, trying to catch my breath. The freezing air makes my sinuses and teeth ache. It burns my throat like whiskey.

And this is when I glimpse a sudden blur from out the corner of my right eye, hardly
more
than a blur. An impression or the shadow of something large and black, moving quickly across the street. It’s no more than ten feet away from me, but downhill, back towards Benefit. By the time I turn to get a better look, it’s gone, and I’m already beginning to doubt I saw anything, except, possibly, a stray dog.

I linger here a moment, squinting into the darkness and the yellow-orange sodium-vapor pool of streetlight that the blur seemed to cross before it disappeared. I want to laugh at myself, because I can actually feel the prick of goose bumps along my forearms, and the short, fine hairs at the nape of my neck standing on end. I’ve blundered into a horror-movie cliché, and I can’t help but be reminded of Val Lewton’s
Cat People,
the scene where Jane Rudolph walks quickly past Central Park, stalked by a vengeful Simone Simon, only to be rescued at the last possible moment by the fortuitous arrival of a city bus. But I know there’s no helpful bus coming to intervene on my behalf, and, more importantly, I understand full fucking well that this night holds in store nothing more menacing than what my over-stimulated imagination has put there. I turn away from the street light and continue up the hill towards home. And I do not have to
pretend
that I don’t hear footsteps following me, or the clack of claws on concrete, because I
don’t.
The quick shadow, the peripheral blur, it was only a moment’s misapprehension, no more than a trick of my exhausted, preoccupied mind, filled with the evening’s morbid banter.

Oubliez le Chien.

Fifteen minutes later, I’m locking the front door of my apartment behind me. I make a hot cup of chamomile tea, which I drink standing at the kitchen counter. I’m in bed shortly after ten o’clock. By then, I’ve managed to completely dismiss whatever I only thought I saw crossing Jenckes Street.

5.

“Open your eyes, Ms. Howard,” Abby Gladding says, and I do. Her voice does not in any way command me to open my eyes, and it is perfectly clear that I have a choice in the matter. But there’s a certain
je ne sais quoi
in the delivery, the inflection and intonation, in the measured conveyance of these seven syllables, that makes it impossible for me to keep my eyes closed. It’s not yet dawn, but sunrise cannot be very far away, and I am lying in my bed. I cannot say whether I am awake or dreaming or if possibly I am stranded in some liminal state that is neither one nor the other. I am immediately conscious of an unseen weight bearing down painfully upon my chest, and I am having difficulty breathing.

“I promised that I’d call on you,” she says, and, with great effort, I turn my head towards the sound of her voice, my cheek pressing deeply into my pillow. I am aware now that I am all but paralyzed, perhaps by the same force pushing down on my chest, and I strain for any glimpse of her. But there’s only the bedside table, the clock radio and reading lamp and ashtray, an overcrowded bookcase with sagging shelves, and the floral calico wallpaper that came with the apartment. If I could move my arms, I would switch on the lamp. If I could move, I’d sit up, and maybe I would be able to breathe again.

And then I think that she must surely be singing, though her song has no words. There is no need for mere lyrics, not when texture and timbre, harmony and melody, are sufficient to unmake the mundane artifacts that comprise my bedroom, wiping aside the here and now that belie what I am meant to see in this fleeting moment. And even as the wall and the bookshelf and the table beside my bed dissolve and fall away, I understand that her music is drawing me deeper into sleep again, though I must have been very nearly awake when she told me to open my eyes. I have no time to worry over apparent contradictions, and I can’t move my head to look away from what she means for me to see.

There’s nothing to be afraid of,
I think.
No more here than in any bad dream.
But I find the thought carries no conviction whatsoever. It’s even less substantial than the dissolving wallpaper and bookcase.

Now I’m looking at the weed-choked shore of a misty pond or swamp, a bog or tidal marsh. The light is so dim it might be dusk, or it might be dawn, or merely an overcast day. There are huge trees bending low near the water, water which seems almost perfectly smooth and the green of polished malachite. I hear frogs, hidden among the moss and reeds, the ferns and skunk cabbages, and now the calls of birds form a counterpoint to Abby’s voice. Except, seeing her standing ankle deep in that stagnant green pool, I also see that she isn’t singing. The music is coming from the violin braced against her shoulder, from the bow and strings and the movement of her left hand along the fingerboard of the instrument. She has her back to me, but I don’t need to see her face to know it’s her. Her black hair hangs down almost to her hips. And only now do I realize that she’s naked.

Abruptly, she stops playing, and her arms fall to her sides, the violin in her left hand, the bow in her right. The tip of the bow breaks the surface of the pool, and ripples in concentric rings race away from it.

“I wear this rough garment to deceive,” she says, and, at that, all the birds and frogs fall silent. “Aren’t you the clever girl? Aren’t you canny? I would not think appearances would so easily lead you astray. Not for long as this.”

No words escape my rigid, sleeping jaws, but she hears me all the same, my answer that needs no voice, and she turns to face me. Her eyes are golden, not blue. And in the low light, they briefly flash a bright, iridescent yellow. She smiles, showing me teeth as sharp as razors, and then she quotes from the
Gospel of Matthew
.

“Inwardly, they were ravening wolves,” she says to me. “You’ve seen all that you need to see, and probably more, I’d wager.” With this, she turns away again, turning to face the fog shrouding the wide green pool. As I watch, helpless to divert my gaze or even shut my eyes, she lets the violin and bow slip from her hands; they fall into the water with quiet splashes. The bow sinks, though the violin floats. And then she goes down on all fours. She laps at the pool, and her hair has begun to writhe like a nest of serpents.