The Best New Horror 2 (69 page)

He stopped once he discovered he was standing by the window. A heavy fog had come in from the bay, had crept like steaming gray mud over the trees, and was now filling the yard to surround and isolate the SeaHarp. It seemed only fitting for such obsessive, lonely work. On the evening before his solitary Thanksgiving meal. It had been only recently that Michael realized he had no practical use for the antiques he valued so much. These were heirlooms, family icons and embodiments. Made for a family to use, for fathers and mothers to pass
down to children and grandchildren. And he was someone who had no place to go for Thanksgiving. A wet fish trapped inside the aquarium. He was haunted by mothers and fathers, grandparents, generations of ancestors who—as far as he could tell—had never existed.

He had no fixed place. He was, forever, the rootless boy who cannot get along.

He got down on his hands and knees and rooted like a pig through the dust of ages. He pretended to be a professional. He examined the pieces of patina, wear, and tool marks. His fingers delicately traced the grain for the track of the jack plane. He crawled around and under the pieces, seeking out construction details. He made constant measurements, gauging proportion and dimension. “A sofa in the Louis XV style with a scroll-arched rail and a center crest of carved fruits and flowers with foliage,” he chanted into the recorder held to his lips, like a singer making love to his microphone.

But in fact he was a dirty little boy, four or five, hiding in a forest of legs and upholstery. Now and then he would try out a chair or sofa, sitting the way he was supposed to sit, sitting like a grownup in uncomfortable furniture that broke the back and warped the legs and changed the body until it fit the furniture, and nothing was more important than fitting in however painful the process. “A Philadelphia walnut armchair, mid-eighteenth century, with a pierced back and early cresting.” Yellow-pale, distorted children with featureless heads were strapping themselves into the chairs around him, trying to sit pretty with agreeable smiles so that visiting adults would choose them. “Three Victorian side chairs after the French style of Louis XV, both flower and fruit motifs, black walnut.” Wet children with eyes bigger than their mouths pressed tighter and tighter against the glass. “Belter chair with a scroll-outlined concave back and central upholstered panel crowned by a crest of carved foliage, flowers and fruit.”

He examined the wall nearer the floor. Letters were scratched into the baseboard, by something sharp. Perhaps a pocket knife. Perhaps a fingernail grown too long. V.I. He imagined a child on his knees, scratching away at the baseboard with his torn and bleeding fingernail. V.I.C.T.O.R, the baseboard cried.

The next morning he woke up from a series of strange dreams he could not remember, in the rough chair with the straps, the cracked leather chinstrap caressing his cheek like a lover’s dry hand.

The morning’s disorientation continued throughout the day.

Thanksgiving dinner in the Dining Room was a solitary affair; he quickly discovered that the last of the hotel’s guests had left that morning and, other than two or three staff members and the Montgomerys hidden away in their quarters at the top of the
hotel, he had been left to himself. An elderly waiter poured the wine.

“Compliments of Mr Montgomery, Suh,” the old man creaked out.

“Well, please tell Mr Montgomery how much I appreciate it.”

“Mr Montgomery feels badly that you should dine alone. And on
Thanksgiving
.”

“Well, I
do
appreciate his concern.” Michael tried not to look at the old man.

“Mr Montgomery says a family is a very important thing to a man. ‘Families make us human,’ he says.”

“How interesting.” Michael bolted his wine and held up his glass for more. The elderly waiter obliged. “He is close to his family, is he? And was he close to his father as well, when he was alive?”

“Mr Simon Montgomery had a strong
interest
in child-rearing. He was always looking for ways to improve his children, and read extensively on the subject. You can find some of his reading material still in the library, in fact.”

“Is that why he brought the children from the orphanage here over the years?” Again, Michael bolted his wine, and again the old waiter replenished his glass.

“I suppose. Did you enjoy yourselves?”

Michael stared up at the waiter. The old man’s tired red eyes were watching him carefully. Michael wanted to reach up and break through the glass wall that had suddenly surrounded him, and throttle this ancient Peeping Tom. But he couldn’t move. “I don’t remember,” he finally said.

After dinner Michael spent several hours in the library trying to sober up so that he could continue his cataloguing. He was particularly interested in the older books, of course, and in the course of his examinations discovered the German title
Kallipädie
, 1858, by a Dr Daniel Schreber. Michael’s German was rather rusty, but the book’s illustrations were clear enough. A figure-eight shoulder band that tied the child’s shoulders back so they wouldn’t slump forward. A “Geradhalter”—a metal cross attached to the edge of a table—that prevented the child from leaning forward during meals or study. Chairs and beds with straps and halters to prevent “squirming” or “tossing and turning,” guaranteed to keep the young body “straight.”

Off in the distance, in some other room, Michael could hear the pounding of tiny knees on the carpet, the thunder of the old men trying to catch them.

Michael made his way down to the cellars via a door in the wall on the north side of the back porch. That door led him to a descending staircase, and the cellars. The main part of these cellars consisted of the
kitchen, laundry, furnace and supply rooms, and various rooms used by the gardeners and janitors. But hidden on one end, seldom-used, were the storage cellars.

In the cellars had been stored a treasure of miscellaneous household appurtenances: some of the most ornate andirons Michael had ever seen, with dogs and lions and elephants worked into their designs; shuttlecocks and beakers; finely painted bellows and ancient bottles and all manner of brass ware (ladles, skimmers, colanders, kettles, candlesticks and the like); twenty-two elaborately stenciled tin canisters and a chafing dish in the shape of a deer (necessary to keep the colonials’ freshly slain venison suitably warm); dozens of rolls of carpet which had been ill-preserved and fell into rotted clumps when he tried to examine them; a half-dozen crocks, several filled with such odd hardware as teardrop handles, bat’s-wing and willow mounts, rosette knobs and wrought-iron hinges, and the largest with an assortment of wall and furniture stencils; another half-dozen pieces of Delft ware from Holland (also called “counterfeit china”); a dripping pan and a dredging box; a variety of flesh hooks and graters and latten ware and patty pans, all artifacts from earlier versions of the SeaHarp’s grand kitchen; a jack for removing some long-dead gentleman’s boots; a finely-made milk keeler and several old jack mangles for smoothing the hotel’s linen; a rotting bag full of crumbling pillow cases (sorting through these Michael liked to imagine all the young maids’ hands which had smoothed them and fluffed their pillows—they would have been calling them “pillow bears” back then); skewers and skillets; trays and trenchers; and a great wealth of wooden ware, no doubt used by some past manager in an attempt to hold down costs.

He could spend a full week cataloguing it all, which wasn’t really what he wanted to do during his time at the hotel. After seeing just these more common, day-to-day, bits and pieces, he was more anxious than ever to go through the other rooms. But he could tell from his finds in the cellars that there was quite a bit of antique wealth here. If the sales were handled properly they could bring the Montgomerys a fair amount of money. And the beauty of it, of course, was that these relics were now of little use in the actual running of the hotel.

That evening Michael began his inventories of the guest rooms themselves. Most could be handled very quickly as there was little of value or interest. The only thing that slowed him was a continuation of the vague sense of disorientation he’d felt since awakening that morning. Things—most recognizably the faceless cupid statues he’d encountered his first night—hovered at the periphery of his vision, and then disappeared, much like the after-effects of some drug-induced alertness. He began to wonder if there had been something wrong with his Thanksgiving dinner—perhaps it had been the wine the old
waiter had delivered so freely—and he became very careful of the things he ate, examining each glass of beverage or piece of bread or meat minutely—for consistency, pattern, tool-marks, style—before consumption.

“A tea-table with cabriole legs and slipper feet tapering finely to the toe. Like some stylish grandmother dancing. Perhaps my own, undiscovered, grandmother dancing. Second quarter of the eighteenth century, probably from Philadelphia.”

The orphans squealed with delight, their tiny knees raw and bleeding from carpet burns.

“This kettledrum base desk is obviously pregnant. A portrait of my mother bearing me? Its sides swell out greatly at the bottom. A block front.”

In two rooms he found painted Pennsylvania Dutch rocking chairs. The pale yellow children rocked them so vigorously he thought they might take off, fueled by their infant dreams.

When it finally came time to retire, Michael of course had his choice of many beds. But many of the beds were of the modern type and therefore of little interest to him. Where there were antique beds they were usually Jenny Linds with simple spool-turned posts or the occasional Belter bed with its huge headboard carved with leaves and tendrils.

Michael finally settled for a bed with straps, so many straps it was like sleeping in a cage. But he felt secure, accepted. He began a dream about a forest full of children, tying one another to the trees. The crackling noises in the walls of his bedroom jarred his nerves, but eventually he was able to fall asleep. That night, as always, he had a boy’s dreams. No business or marital worries informed them.

It was only upon waking that Michael discovered this room had a stenciled wall. This was of course a surprise in a structure from the 1850s, with the number of manufactured wallpapers available, but he supposed it might have been done—no doubt using old stencils—for uniqueness, to preserve some individual effect. Michael was surprised to find that it had survived the many small repaintings and remodellings that had occurred over the years. Usually a later owner would find the slight imperfections normal to a stencilled wall irritating, and the patterns crude, as certainly they often were.

But Michael liked them; there was a lot to be said for the note of individuality they added to a room. He suspected the only reason this particular wall had been saved, however, was because the guests hadn’t the opportunity to see it. Looking around the walls—at their shabbiness, and the crude nature of the furniture—he felt
sure this room was not normally rented. So an owner would not be embarrassed.

The pattern was an unusual one. The border was standard enough: leaves and vines and pineapples, quite similar to the work of Moses Eaton, Jr. Some of the wall stencils Michael had found in the cellar matched these shapes. Within these borders, however, was a grove of trees. Most of them were large stencils of weeping willows, but still fairly standard, again derived from Eaton’s work. But here and there among the willows was another sort of tree: an oak, perhaps, but he wasn’t sure, tied or bound by a large rope, or maybe it was a snake wrapping around the trunk and through the branches. Bound was the proper description, because the branches seemed pulled down or otherwise diverted from their natural direction by the rope or snake, and the trunk
twisted
from the upright—a dramatic violation of the classical symmetry one usually found in wall designs.

The design of this particular tree was obviously too intricate to have been done with a single stencil. There had to have been several, overlapping. But the color was too faded and worn to make out much of the detail, as if some past cleaning woman had tried to remove the bound trees, though not the willows, with an abrasive.

He got down on his hands and knees. The baseboard was covered with scratches, the signatures of dozens of different children. He could hear a distant thundering in the hall outside, hundreds of orphan limbs, pounding out a protest that grew slowly in its articulateness.
Choose me. Me me me
. He began to doubt that Victor Montgomery had ever been away to school, that he had ever left this hotel, and his father’s watchful eye, at all. The voices in the hall seemed strangely distorted.
Distorted embryos
. As if under water. The scratches in the baseboard tore at his fingertips.

Michael crawled out the door and down several flights of stairs. The faceless children all crowded him, jostled him, and yet he still kept his knees moving. He maneuvered through a mass of legs, odd items of furniture stacked and jammed wall-to-wall, all eager to grab him with their straps and wooden arms and bend him to their shape. He cried when their sharp legs kicked him, and covered his face when hurricanes swept through the woods and shouted like old men.

He stopped at the front windows and floated up to the glass. A crowd of people watched him, pointed, tapped the glass. Sweat drenched him and fogged the glass wall. His eyes grew bigger than his mouth. And yet no matter how hard he peered at the ones outside, he could find no face that resembled his own.

G
AHAN
W
ILSON
is best known as one of America’s most popular cartoonists, his macabre work appearing regularly in
The New Yorker, Playboy, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, National Lampoon, Punch
and
Paris Match
, amongst others. He illustrated Edgar Allan Poe’s
The Raven and Other Poems
for the first issue of the new Classics Illustrated comics, and contributed all the artwork to
Weird Tales
No. 300, a special Robert Bloch issue.