The Broken Hours: A Novel of H. P. Lovecraft (21 page)

After I’d seen her into her apartment, I checked the lock on the front door again, for no particular reason. Then I mounted the stairs. I was just past the landing when the hair on the back of my neck all stood on end. I turned.

There, below me, just a glimpse as it slipped across the darkened foyer, gone, with the quick movements of a child. I gripped the stair rail, my heart racing. This was no vision, no dream. I was wide awake.

I descended the stairs, still gripping the rail. The streetlight fell against the polished boards. The door between the potted palms stood slightly ajar. I hesitated, then pulled it open to find myself at the top of a narrow, dark stairwell. I felt around on the wall for a light switch, but there was nothing.

Sliding one of the heavy palms over, I propped the door open and stepped inside. I descended slowly, my hands against walls swollen with damp, the concrete steps cold and crumbling beneath my bare feet. The air smelled of root cellars and earth and wet stone. I almost expected to hear water dripping. I inched my feet forward along the rough stairs, feeling for the edges, careful of my footing. Streetlight fell in faintly from the foyer above me but did not reach very far down the passageway. Surely there could not have been anything—anyone—down there. And yet.

My foot dislodged a chunk of masonry and it tumbled down the stairs with an echoing clatter. When it stopped, I could hear my own breathing. I pressed my palms against the walls to steady myself.

And then I became aware of something else:
it
was there with me, too, in the stairwell. That old malevolence, that darkness. What I had felt on the landing that first day, and outside my employer’s door. The thing, whatever it was, that was feeding on him. There, more powerful than I had ever felt it. As if I had come to the terrible, cold heart of something. And yet there was a dreadful sense, too, of nothingness. The sense that I could keep descending forever into an infinite darkness.

A scuttling across the floor at the bottom. I stopped. A quick, cold movement passed me up the stairs. My skin crawled. I turned to look behind me, but before I could do so I felt, very clearly, the press of two small hands—a child’s hands—firm between my shoulders. I froze.

And then they gave a savage push, and I was falling, tumbling forward, down and down, into black emptiness.

I came to in a heap at the bottom, though whether I’d actually lost consciousness, I could not say. All was blackness. I was blinded. I blinked and blinked but no sight came. The door to the foyer above me was shut fast. I felt stunned, battered, my palms and knees tender and stinging. I touched a hand to my temple and it came away wet. I wiped my hand on my trousers and slid my back up against the wall. I sat a moment. All was silent. My head throbbed.

I was alone.

And yet I could recall precisely the feel of those small hands on my back, touching me, there, between the shoulder blades. I could feel the place on my back still where I’d been shoved, as though the prints of those palms had been burned there.

I scrabbled my feet on the rough concrete floor, trying to rise, feeling the wall for something to hold onto, dizzy still.

But it was not the damp wall I felt upon reaching up. It was a wooden door, cracked and splintering. My hand found the latch and, pulling myself upright, I leaned there a moment in blackness, breathing. Then, thinking to find a light within, I opened it.

A smell of rust and mothballs and rot. I felt around inside for a switch, my skin crawling. When I found it, the room fizzled with a weak, tea-coloured light, the bulb over my head glowing by a single corroded filament.

A storage room. Or, not even a storage room, a crawl space. Not big enough to stand up in. I leaned inside and poked around. Nothing, it seemed, of any importance. Boxes of curios, china figurines, books, old furniture, silvery Christmas bulbs packed in tissue like eggs in a nest. A cord was strung from beam to beam of the low, cobwebbed ceiling, and hung with metal clothes hangers. A dress dummy leaned against the far wall, white as a corpse, its shoulders disappearing eerily into the shadows.

The electric light fizzled. I bent to pry the lid off a sealed box, the cardboard dusty and damp. Children’s toys, a red engine upturned over strips of jumbled railway, as if there had been some disaster. I opened another. It appeared to be filled with crusted rags. I plucked one off the top, exposing a nest of baby rats, groping blindly. An awfulness in their vulnerability. I straightened abruptly, dropping the rag, disgusted, and in doing so, jostled the hangers with a terrible metallic clatter and the light fizzled again and went out.

I reached up to touch the bulb, scorching my fingers as the light flickered on weakly, then went out again. I felt around for the rag and, using it to protect my fingertips, reached for the bulb again. Touched it. The light flickered on.

She was there: crouched among the boxes.

I recoiled, plunging the room again into a terrible darkness. I grabbed the bulb, heedless of burns, and the light came on and stayed on as I screwed it in tightly.

Of course, there was no one. Could not have been room for anyone besides myself. It was my mind which had seen the child, not my eyes. I could picture, still, its face there, peering out, horrible, from among the boxes. Not Molly’s face at all. It could not have been. I swallowed a terrible tightness in my throat as I stood there in the doorway, aching.

Then I backed out of the room and punched off the light, groping my way back up the stairs, blind.

4

Constance careened us through the twisted streets of Boston’s South End, the gas lamps ghostly in the falling snow. The drifts were all across the road. Constance plowed through them, her father’s Lincoln halting and swerving and chugging on again.

She sang, at first, full tilt in a flat contralto,
Di-ner, is there no one fi-ner, in the state of Caroli-ner
, but forgot the rest of the words and finally just hunched silently, maniacally, over the steering wheel, propelling us through the dismal Victorian streets, reeking of sweat and gin punch and Tabu gone stale with the hour. Her coat was open over her lap and her dress hiked up to the top of indigo stockings, her thigh lean and finely muscled. I would not have called her beautiful. Handsome, perhaps. But more than this, there was a certain careless strength to her. A certain recklessness. A certain darkness.

The Lincoln slammed into a drift and stopped. The engine died. Constance cranked the starter brutally, again and again. Nothing. She put her forehead against the steering wheel and laughed. All around us the snow fell and fell in the dead city.

When she finally stopped laughing, the silence was profound, enormous. She turned her face toward me, her mascara all looped blackly under her eyes like a soldier.

She was, I admit, irresistible.

We are none of us free from the terrible humiliation of our humanness. Our bodies betray us. Our emotions likewise. Our minds, perhaps, most treacherous of all. Everything subject not to what our heart but to what our psychology conceives.

Lack of love, they say, is not what makes an unhappy marriage, but lack of friendship. In Jane, then, there was neither friendship nor love. But neither was there in Constance.

Inconstance, an unhappy accident of language.

Afterward I walked the Boston streets alone, the wet, heavy snow to my shins. It seemed to take hours. I imagined the scene which would greet me at home: Jane sitting on the sofa in the same old sour dressing gown, Molly asleep on her lap. I would enter, shaking snow in the alcove.
Finally out, eh
, I would say.
Must be a relief
.
Snowing like the dickens out there.
I would hang my overcoat carefully, fiddle a long while with my galoshes.
Arthor
, Jane would say, evenly.
I called my mother.
She had threatened as much in the past. I would step into the room, peer at her in the lamplight, as if I could not conceive what she was saying.

She would look as if she had been crying, but she might not have been; she’d looked that way for weeks.
Do you know,
she would say,
what time it is? I cannot believe you went out tonight, to a party.
I would tell her again it wasn’t a party. She would wipe her nose on a wadded hanky, tell me she was going back to Rochester, back to her parents. I would act honestly astonished, honestly confused. Oh, we’d had these scenes before.
I cannot believe,
she would say,
you went out this evening.
I would tell her I had no choice. She would say that was what I always said. I would be unable to deny it. In fact, it was how I often felt in those days. As if I had no choice. I would say,
I don’t understand why you’re so upset.

If you want your secrets kept, they say, cloak them in candour.

My god
, I would say, then, gaping.
You think I’ve been unfaithful. Is that it?
She would rise, struggling with Molly’s weight, tell me she was going to bed.
Nothing happened between me and the girl,
I would say, angrily.
Between me and anyone. Not even between me and you in quite some time
.

She would turn and cast me a long glance, then shut the bedroom door firmly behind her. She would be frosty in the morning, unresponsive. I would act as if I did not care. And maybe I did not. Maybe I was tired of caring. Maybe I, too, was tired of such scenes. Tired of feeling old. Just tired.

I steeled myself for it as I turned onto our street. We were the last on the block, the lower floor of a slumped brownstone in a row of slumped brownstones, cloaked now in patches of snow, as if diseased things. Light fell through the drapes onto the unshovelled front steps and I tripped on my way up, ready for the confrontation but hoping too, maybe, just a little, that this time it would unfold differently. I pictured them again, as I had earlier in the evening, but tenderly now, curled together in a pool of lamplight on our old sofa and I softened.

I slid my key into the lock, but it was already open. Strange, I thought, and pushed the door ajar, stepping quietly inside. I paused a moment in the alcove. The sofa stood empty and orange in the light of the lamp still burning there. It was not like Jane, frugal always, to leave a light burning unnecessarily. I stamped my snowy galoshes lightly, then crossed the wood floor to where our bedroom door stood gaping weirdly. Streetlight fell coldly in through the window. The bed was as I had left it. Unmade, empty. I punched on the light.

Jane?
I said.

I crossed the room, wrenched open the closet door, looking for her travelling case. I rummaged about in the heaps of soiled laundry.

A faint knocking at the front door and I turned and stepped back into the living room, my wet galoshes slipping against the wooden boards.

Mrs. Hill, who lived upstairs, teetered in the alcove in her husband’s greatcoat, wringing her tiny red hands. I stood staring at her dumbly, something, a certain numbness, already settling over me.

What is it?
I finally managed.

Oh, Mr. Crandle
, was all she said.