The Broken Hours: A Novel of H. P. Lovecraft (2 page)

I paused on the street a moment, wondering at the kind of house into which I’d been employed. Certainly the man Baxter had been odd about it. Inclined to see darkness everywhere, in spite of his denying it. Sensitives, of all things. I’d been under the impression that had gone out with the Victorians. I recalled the boy’s pale, unnerving gaze. And that business about the wife and the landing. The gossip—whatever it was—about the upstairs tenants, surely that referred to my employer.

Still, no matter the house, no matter the situation, the truth was I’d run out of alternatives. There could have been nothing so bad I would have walked away from it then.

So I plucked my valise from where it lay in the puddle, giving it a useless shake. A vicious gust whipped the elms unbeautifully and sent cold rivulets down the back of my neck as I ducked quickly into the narrow, overgrown lane. The sunken path had pooled with rainwater and I skirted the edges where a creeper vine tendrilled out over the cobblestones, emitting a distinctly medicinal childhood aroma of peppermint as I trod upon it. I did not pause when I emerged into the small courtyard but made straight for the front door, unadorned but for two electric lantern lights which, though I was expected, were unlit. Another blast of rain hit me from behind. I hesitated only briefly.

Then I rang the bell.

Did I have a sense even then of—not foreboding—but an uneasiness about my new engagement, my new employer? His name meant nothing to me. I’d gathered from the temporary agency where I’d applied only that he was a gentleman writer of some small reputation who, due to personal circumstances, had fallen behind in correspondence and manuscript preparation and therefore required assistance in such matters, along with basic domestic chores. As the clerk at the agency had, earlier that afternoon, read out to me doubtfully between bites of a heel of bread:
“congenial lodgement and small remuneration in return for light secretarial and housekeeping services—”

I’ll take it
, I’d said.

The clerk reached over and stabbed the desk lamp on with his thumb, blinking at me in the dim green light. Crumbs clung to his lower lip. His office reeked of old meat.

Housekeeping
, he said again, pronouncing it oddly:
hisskeeping
.

He might have said fish-gutter, garbage collector, gravedigger. It mattered not.

I’ll take it,
I repeated.

He bit again, then brushed his mouth with the back of his hand before taking up a pen and writing painfully, cross-checking each number. Beyond the spattered windows, the storm swelled blackly in from Narragansett Bay. Great, roiling clouds swirled above the courthouse and Westminster Arcade and the distant, dark hunch of Federal Hill. Thunder, I thought, but a second later a metal trolley stacked with files passed the open door, pushed by a young page who looked in at us uncuriously.

The clerk cleared his throat and handed me the number on a slip of sticky paper, not waiting for my thanks but spinning away on his chair to a file cabinet at the back of the room.

I made the call immediately from a telephone in the lobby, worrying at a hole in the musty carpet with the heel of my shoe as I waited for an answer.

At first, I’d thought it was a woman. The voice high, reedy, weak.

Candle, you say?

Tired, but with a strained, sad quality which I put down to the effects of a poor connection. I felt the line vibrate and tremble between us like a live thing.

Crandle
, I corrected mildly, neither wanting to give offense nor cause upset to someone who, if the connection were not to blame, sounded so tremulous.

I wonder, Mr. Candle
, he repeated, though from poor hearing or willful perversity, I could not have said,
I wonder if you would enlighten me as to the provenance of such an upstanding cognomen
.

He said it without humour, but I was not ignorant to his little joke.

Crandle
, I stressed,
is an Irish name, if that’s what you mean, sir.

The line crackled and clicked and hung suddenly silent between us so long I had the disconcerting impression I’d been talking to myself.

Is that the Pawtuxet Crandles
, he finally said, the line humming to life again.

Fall River.

A Catholic, then.

I’m afraid so.

I said it lightly. Perhaps I gave a small, apologetic laugh. Among men of my standing, it has ever been thus.

Spoken like a true Catholic, Candle, fear being a great motivator of papists the world over. Forgive me, I mean to give no offense. Their graveyards are unparalleled. They die, it is said, beautiful deaths. But listen, don’t mind Old Grandpa. You must take what I say
cum grano salis.
It is important only that we become acquainted with one another, our particular idiosyncrasies, you see. I intend no insult.

None taken, sir
.

Though I felt not a little affronted and suspected his idea of getting to know me meant conjuring me—the way men of his class have always done to men of mine—in an already predetermined and hardly flattering image: a paddy; a fish eater; a Fall River yob. I knew his type too, of course, the old Rhode Island guard, the intellectuals, the blue bloods.

I take it, then, Father Candle, that you are not of the venerable Crandle line of northern New England who made their fortune in textiles?

My father made his fortune as a mill worker, sir.

He made a noise, possibly of distaste, though perhaps I only imagined this as well, sensitive as I am to the matter of what some among his class would consider my “low birth.”

You have been educated.

Yes, sir.

Your father sent you to university.

Yes—

Not to Brown.

I studied in Boston.

Indeed?

Not without certain sacrifices on behalf of my father, and that of my mother—

She is not a mill worker, I presume, your mother.

No, sir, she is—

Indeed.

I took from his tone of weary courteousness that he was on the brink of dismissing me and I put in quickly,
I am an excellent worker, always punctual.

Hardly difficult, sleeping where you work.

I pride myself in efficiency.

Nothing worthwhile achieved in haste.

And I think I can claim to be more than usually dependable, and honest—

No man less so than he who claims—

Perhaps among certain classes, sir.

I confess I was a bit sharp.

So,
he said, after a short pause,
the flame doth scorch a bit, after all.

I attempted a stuttered retraction but he said, sadly,
I have often, myself, wished to be of a little more fire and a little less wax.

I knew not how to reply, so said only,
I assure you I am equal to any task which—

Might I ask what you studied? At BU?

I hesitated.
Astronomy, sir.

You don’t say?
His voice showed new interest.

I laughed, again, apologetically.
I realize it isn’t—

One must follow one’s heart, is that right, Candle?

Yes, sir, I believe so.

And your father, did he also believe in following one’s heart?

Again, I hesitated.
He might have wished for something more—

Practical?

Yes.

A solicitor, say? A numerary?

Numerary?

An accountant.

Yes, perhaps.

I cannot say I disagree with him, your father. But when one is young—

I make no claim to that, sir.

Do you not? Well, no matter. Neither do I. But tell me, how did you enjoy it, this study of the stars?

I judged it best to speak frankly.

I found I hadn’t the heart for it, after all.

Too much of the abstract?

Too much,
I said,
of the infinite.

The line rattled.

No,
he agreed.
No, you are not young.

An empty pause, as if we’d again lost the connection, a crackling static during which I could not make out what he said, and then he was back.

—you cook?

Cook, sir?

You know, heat up things in cans. Chili, or spaghetti, or what have you. Baked beans. There are an increasing variety of good things that come in cans, I have found.

The mention of food caused an involuntary clenching at my abdomen. I had eaten so little in recent days that I had reached a point beyond hunger. Or perhaps I had only convinced myself it was so. We make a virtue of necessity when we must.

I’ve done my own cooking, sir.

It wasn’t a complete fabrication. I had done some.

Just the basics,
I clarified,
but I know how to economize. And housekeeping as well.

Self-made man, and all that?

I have, I believe, striven for self-sufficiency.

And can you type?

I can type, sir.

This much, at least, was true.

Two, or how many?

I was stumped.
Words per minute?
I ventured.

Fingers.

Why, all of them, sir.

He made a humphing sound which might have been admiration or might have been disbelief.

I cannot say I’ve taken to it, myself
.
I like to think it is because I have the hands of a pianist, not—
he said, giving the word a distinctive snap
—a stenographer.

You are a musician, then?

My mother is rather gifted. I am, sadly, not.
Snapping that word again, elastically.
But I do feel there is no harm in indulging in a bit of wishful thinking now and again, providing one does not make of it a habit. By such means of self-flattery do we often comfort ourselves for what we lack, isn’t it so, Candle?

Indeed, sir.

You are not one to imbibe in hallucinogenic and incapacitating liquid refreshments, certain, as they used to say,
aqua vitae
?

I beg your pardon?

You are not a drinker, are you, Father Candle? It does run high among certain of your pontifical denomination. All that Blood of Christ business. Sets up a damned poor precedent, if you see my point.

I told him I did. He did not seem convinced.

It is,
he went on,
the greatest unrelieved evil to any delicately cultivated civilization. I am nauseated by even the distant stink of any alcoholic liquor. And not one to use tobacco, either, I hope. I find it worse than the nausea. I can think of no greater horror than a smoking car.

He coughed.

I am neither a smoker nor a drinker,
I assured him.

And neither are you then what is commonly called a family man? Which is not to say I have anything against it. But I assume you are not connubially leashed, lest you would not be applying for such a position,
in domus,
as it were.

Sir?

I assume, apart from your good mother, there is no Mrs. Candle, no Lady Candle, no Candle of Perpetual Sorrows. That would complicate things, of course.

There is no Mrs. Crandle.

I felt a sudden twinge, a black spot spreading on my soul like mould on pale fruit. I saw Jane’s face, white-lipped, that December afternoon in Boston, where we had walked along the Charles River, Molly running ahead making figure eights with her little footprints in the snow—in and out among the trees with stilted grace—like the trails of deer. Jane had stopped with a hand on my arm to watch the flakes hit the brown water and disappear. She’d said,
It’s a kind of extinction, isn’t it. Each one. So permanent.

How grief collapses time. A year ago, two? Last month? It might have been yesterday, a lifetime. When Jane had turned her face up to kiss me, or rather to be kissed, I had hesitated, the snow seeming all at once cold and soiled and hopeless, fallen angels in the failing light. All was dirty, then, all was rot, the child’s black footprints like burned things, the twisted limbs of trees grotesque against a bled sky, the foul, drunken swirling of the river. The stench of it, the unbearable decay.
All
, I thought,
all
.

By lesser means had I often been tipped into despair. It was a failing in me, to be sure.

Jane mistook me, then. It was not uncommon between us, these misreadings. I should have kissed her. But when I looked at her, I saw only blackness, a pit into which I was forever falling; my own inevitable failings.