The Broken Hours: A Novel of H. P. Lovecraft (15 page)

And then I saw him, his silhouette against the draperies, rising slowly, a gaunt figure, tall but hunched, crippled almost; just for an instant, darkness against darkness—I might have imagined it—and it was gone.

Forgive me
, he said, weakly,
I had been writing a long while before the power went out. I am tired. It has been a bad time, these recent weeks.

Sir?

Finances, my own poor health, my aunt. My work, of course. It builds and builds and yet I have no energy for it, no enthusiasm. I am tired, Candle. I must lie down.

A slow dragging in the darkness, as if he, whatever he was, had not the power to walk but only crawl. Some rustling, and then all, again, was quiet. Only the wind outside.

I have wasted myself, Candle,
came the voice again,
at pen and paper. I have been writing since I was a child. Do you know how many books I’ve published?

I shook my head stupidly in the darkness.

None. I wonder sometimes, had I made greater efforts, earlier on, to write something of importance, something meaningful.

Meaningful?

A story I wrote some time ago. I don’t suppose you know it. Never mind. It matters not. In it, a character of mine finds a key which allows him to return to a time of childhood, where he was happiest. Do you see?

I think so.
Though, of course, I did not.

He disappears from his adult life even while his relatives report that at the age of ten he gained the ability to predict the future.

Time collapses?

In a way. I thought that was important. Then. But it has all been drivel. I have of late been making certain attempts …

Yes?

A family saga. The inheritance of blood is, after all, inescapable. But then I have always been relatively indifferent to people, and so depth of character, or feeling, has been a problem for me.

To which I could quite rightly think of no reply.

Indeed, Candle. Indeed. But this new story, of blood, can hardly escape character.

Blood, sir?

Inevitability. There is a certain school of thought which explains all our monsters, our witches and vampires and werewolves, as a certain kind of insanity. Not that they do not exist, but that they do.That a demon is because he believes himself to be. An internal phenomenon, rather than an external.

Do you believe it so?

I know not anymore what I believe. I only want to write …

Yes?

Something … important.
He paused.
And then again, it is awfully late. Forty-six is, after all, forty-six.

That is not old, sir.

For some things, Candle.

He was silent a long moment, then said,
It is too late anyway for those kinds of regrets—

He broke off as if he had lost his breath.

Are you very unwell?
I asked.

More rustling and a rusty creaking, as of sofa coils.

I have been always unwell
, he said, after a time.
A habit, perhaps, from childhood.

A habit, sir?

That which is forced upon us early enough. They become our habits. For better or worse. I formed the habit of illness. And of reclusiveness.
He paused.
I was considered, by some, monstrous then, too.

I chilled, thinking of the old man’s words to Flossie.

Why monstrous?
I asked.

It was said I did not go out because I was too hideous, too terrible. I could not be looked upon.

Said
, I asked,
by whom?

My mother.

The storm lashed and lashed at the windows. The house seemed to tilt in the relentless wind.

A long silence, and then,
I’m quite unwell. Very tired, Candle. You will forgive me if I ask you to come to the point.

The point, sir? I … wanted to see …

Yes.

… if you were all right—

Did you.

Your illness—

Very good of you. To have come. And how is she?

She?

Mother. Does she send word?

She … she’s … she’s well.

I cringed in the darkness. Was there nothing in me of truth anymore? I prayed he would not ask more. And he did not. The wind rattled the walls.

Do you need anything?
I finally asked.

I feel, Candle
, he said,
that I need so much that, were I to be granted my wishes, I would not know where to begin, and I would leave as I had come, with nothing.

If you should need … ,
I began, for lack of anything else.

Ink.

Ink?

For writing. I will leave you another letter for Mother. She must be wondering. How is she?

She’s … well.

Forgive me,
he said.
I’ve already asked you that.

I stood awkwardly in the darkness. I did not know how to leave. He was quiet again, a long while.

Things were not always so
, he said, finally.
We … I … lost everything. Everything
, he stressed.
I lost everything. There was
, he mused,
a time when I was considered, too, quite a prodigy—

He broke off then suddenly, with a stifled groan. I knew not what to do with myself and so only stood there, stupidly.

Forgive me
, he said finally.
I am in a bad way tonight
.

He was quiet again then, a long time, and I realized, with no small degree of horror, that he was, in fact, weeping there in the darkness.

I stood awhile uncomfortably in the doorway. Finally I said,
I shouldn’t have troubled you
.

When he did not reply, I knew it was because he could not, and wanting to spare him any further humiliation, I felt my way backwards out of the study, closing the door with a soft click behind me, wishing, as is often the way with doors, that I’d never opened it in the first place.

I had not expected so much. Had not expected to find him so broken. A monster, indeed.

That night I did not sleep. I rose and moved around restlessly in my attic room. I felt weary—sad, too—and I went to the window to look out over the darkened city, turning the piece of gravestone in my fingers as had become my habit and comfort.

I had seen into the heart of a stranger—a monster—and found it filled with such familiar longing and disappointment and despair that it might have been my own. How alike we all are. How broken. I could hardly bear to think about it.

But, more than that. Something had changed. I felt different somehow, I felt … alone.

Quite literally. That black oppressiveness had lifted, was gone. I was alone in my attic room. I breathed deeply. Outside, the storm was dying. The rain had ceased, though the wind was still up. Everywhere in the blue darkness, it seemed, things moved. A moon was there, showing sickly between the clouds as they split, its light filtering through the lashing branches as the darkness scattered and regrouped.

And I saw her.

A girl, down in the garden, passing quickly between the trees in a long white nightdress. I stepped nearer the window. But she was gone, disappeared it seemed, through the garden entrance to Flossie’s suite. And yet it had not been Flossie, certainly. I was sure of that. I wondered if perhaps Helen had returned. She must have.

And so another mystery was solved. The sad pieces, it seemed, were falling into place. And yet there was no satisfaction in any of it. I felt the beginnings of another headache and wondered how I was to sleep that night.

I thought of my employer, weeping in the darkness below me, and of that malevolence I had felt shifting in the rooms there, in the front hall. It—whatever it was, that darkness—did not come from my employer, as I had thought. He was not its source. He was its victim.

I lay down upon my bed, pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes until the darkness blazed red.

Three

1

The morning broke bright and wet. A fine, clean light shone in through the windows. The horror magazines I’d been reading the afternoon before lay scattered at the foot of the bed and I gathered them up, their grotesque covers absurd by daylight. The previous day seemed a blur, a nightmare, all of it. The trip to the wharf with Flossie, the storm, the unhappy interview with my employer, the girl in the garden, Helen. The latter, at least, had been a welcome discovery. Though why she’d been out in the garden in such weather and at such an hour was certainly mysterious.

My head ached. I pulled the aspirin bottle from my valise. It was empty, though I was sure it had been nearly full when I’d taken some the previous day. I would have to go out to the shops for more. I tossed the bottle into the wastebasket and dressed hastily. Sticking a hand into my trouser pocket, I found an envelope. In all the night’s upset, I had forgotten about the note I’d plucked from the hall table in darkness. It was a moment before I realized it was, in fact, not a letter from my employer, as I had thought, but my own letter, the one I had left for him. In the darkness, an easy mistake.

I went at once out to the chemists, still in a kind of fog, my eyes throbbing and my thoughts troubled, playing over and over the conversation I’d had with my employer. I did not wish to pry into his affairs. And yet it seemed to me something very wrong was at work in that house, something very wrong at work in him, around him. What had he said of his mother? That she had considered him too monstrous to look upon? No, I could not shed the feeling of pity I felt growing for the sickly man. To be despised so. I did not ask myself if there was something of myself I saw, too, in his misery. I felt ashamed, the things I’d wondered about him.

I did not feel up to the long walk to the chemists, after all, and the Weybosset was still closed, so I stepped instead through the swinging glass door of Woolworth’s and was hit by an unpleasant mixture of smells: plastic and floor cleaner, coffee and sausages from the lunch counter at the back.

I made my way up the mopped aisles, my shoes squeaking against the washed linoleum still slick with suds, collecting what I needed: Lifebuoy soap, ink, a large bottle of aspirin. A girl scarcely out of her teens, hair held back prettily from her face by a rhinestone pin, stood noisily filling a jar with jellybeans at the candy counter. She smiled at me as I passed.

Apart from the girl, the store appeared to be empty. I was spared the tedium of waiting in line. It diminished one, such waiting. I scarcely had the energy for it.

I set my purchases on the counter. A woman with a gold lapel pin in the shape of an angel—or possibly a moth—waited there. The image of the pin was familiarly iconic somehow, as if it were the symbol for some well-known organization I should have recognized, like the Boston Red Sox or the Salvation Army, and this woman before me looked as if she might well stand ringing her little bell, part forced cheer, part grim determination.

Good morning
, she said.

She shifted a box of Wrigley’s out of the way and picked up the bottle of ink I’d just set down, dangling it between her fingers, like a mouse.

Well, I say, hardly nobody ever buys this old cheap stuff here. Dust on the bottle, even; look there. Now that’s not a judgment, mind—we all need to save our pennies where we can—there’s only a fool would spend extra on something meaningless as ink—that should be a saying, shouldn’t it, meaningless as ink, like …

She flapped her fingers in the air, physically grasping for another figure of speech, then waved and shrugged.

Anyway, I don’t judge you, not one bit. It’s the spendthrifts, and I see a bunch of them. You wouldn’t think it, the way things are, so many struggling, but there are the Haves and the Have Nots, same as it’s always been. I see it all; I’m here every day just about, unless the arthuritis gets me down. That’s why I do these nails, see.