The Broken Hours: A Novel of H. P. Lovecraft (22 page)

Mr. Hill drove me in his old Chevrolet and we made slow progress. I saw nothing: snow, the black river—did we cross it? I think we did; we must have—the ghost lights of a predawn December.

When, at last, we pulled up in front of the emergency room at Weymouth, all blazing with light, I stepped out and then asked, for some inexplicable reason,
Aren’t you coming in?

What things we do in times of crisis.

Mr. Hill just bit his lip and shook his head, his face green with the dashboard lights, there in the Chevrolet wafting plumes of exhaust over me. I shut the door, a groaning, clipped sound in the winter air. I can hear it still. But he did not leave. And I did not leave. I stood and stood. And finally he turned off the engine and got out and I followed him, this man I scarcely knew, who rapped the floor of his apartment above us sometimes, but timidly, a gentle reminder, when our shouting grew too loud. He led and I followed, stupidly, the snow banked up to our knees, and through the front doors, not bothering to stamp our galoshes, and inside to a desk, where Mr. Hill spoke quietly to a nurse who stood looking at me over his shoulder—oh, good Mr. Hill, where are you now?—before leading us away, down that polished hall, shedding snow as we went in great, heavy clumps and no one seeming to mind about that, no one seeming to care. And then Jane was there, hunched over in an armchair, as if someone had delivered a great blow to her stomach, as if she could not catch her breath, and I stood looking at Mr. Hill, as if he should do something, as if this were his story. And then he was gone. And we were alone, then, in that white room. Just Jane and me.

Who can say how the days thereafter unfolded. There were vague impressions, and memories, sometimes so sharp I could taste them, feel them. The smell of flowers. A soft blue sweater with pearly buttons. A certain waxed wood beneath my palm. Or had I imagined that, the last bit? I no longer knew.

There are things I would not remember. Things I told myself I did not. And when you shut a thing up, when you shut it—

No. There was everything; and then there was nothing. That is the way with loss. It does not come in gradations.

At some point it was day again, brutally. The light seared my eyes. All down our street the snow had browned from passing automobiles. There was nothing anymore of beauty in it. There was nothing. Only Jane climbing into the front seat there with her mother while her father slammed the black trunk shut, and no one looking at me, no one. As if I had never been there at all.

What is it about the darkness which draws us? At once inward and outward. I had always been too easily drawn, too easily, Jane would have said, had said, too easily enveloped. I, who feared once, as a child, not the witching autumn, but spring, that clear-lighted season of ghosts when Jesus rose from the tomb, bloodless and terrible, rolling away the stone in the sunlight with his own deathless hands. I imagined Jane’s shock at hearing such a confession.

Oh, yes, the darkness drew me. Had drawn me always.

There was something in me, I knew, something perhaps in us all which, no matter our rational selves, was haunted.

Five

1

Something had changed in me. Was changing. There was something sinister in Sixty-Six. Something sinister in the face of that child, something ugly, angry. It was not Molly. I knew that. But, then, who was it? And what did it want with me, attached as it seemed to be to my employer? It meant to tell me something; I was sure of it. But what?

That night of my fall down the stairs, the child did not return. I slept badly, dreaming terrible dreams of being propelled up and up to where darkness thinned and into the gray ether toward some terrible knowledge which lay just out of my grasp, and then I was falling, hurtling into something cold and black and soulless, something that chilled me to my very core, that roused in me a feeling of despair which made me want to weep as I had not done in a long while.

And then I was awake, and alone. Two letters lay on my bedside table, weighted down with the chunk of gravestone. They had surely not been there the night before. My door, of course, remained shut and locked. I picked up the letters. The first was another from my employer to his mother. A fresh wave of guilt washed over me. I still had not delivered the first. The hours and days seemed to slip away from me always, in fragments, as if they were not in my control, as if broken things that crumbled in my hands. I lifted the second envelope, addressed to me. I saw with no small degree of shock it was from Jane.

I rose hastily and opened it at once, hands shaking so terribly I tore the pages. I could scarcely believe what I read. I sat down on the edge of my bed, reviewing the letter several times over before dropping it onto the table in dismay.

Jane had booked train passage: she would arrive in three days’ time. What I had hoped for so long had come to pass now that I no longer desired or even welcomed it. The way of all things.

It could not be. But how was I to stop it? What could I tell her?

She could not come, and yet come she must.

I ventured forth early into the misty streets with single-minded determination, my collar buttoned against the cold and a woollen muffler wrapped snugly round my throat. I clenched the letters addressed to my employer’s mother tightly in my fist in the chance that some ill wind would snatch them away and send them drowning into the Seekonk. Certainly, there had been enough of such diversions over the past week to set me off my course.

And, then, I marvelled: a week. Only that. It felt like years.

Jane was to come. God only knew what I was to do when she did. I would lose Flossie. I would lose my position, to be sure. And so I must, at least, finish what I had been asked to do. I felt compelled to, now, having seen him so broken. I knew, only too well, that kind of loss.

Hope Street wound down toward the river, empty still at that hour but for a lone man in a trenchcoat waiting on the corner with a briefcase, checking his wristwatch. I cut sharply up Lloyd, past the winter-dead rose bushes of St. Sebastian church, its gray stone tower medieval in the fog, and on into wide, tree-lined Blackstone Boulevard with its storied mansions set well back from the street. Shining automobiles rattled by with regularity. In one of the curving drives, a child in a cowboy hat and fringed vest crouched slapping at the gravel with a toy shovel. A housekeeper raised an upper window with a sharp smack and leaned out. I thought she would call to the child, but she only watched a moment, then shook a white dust cloth briskly, as though in surrender, and slammed the window shut again. An elderly gentleman rode a bicycle up the sidewalk, bells jingling. I stepped into the street, out of his way.

Morning, Sheriff
, the man said to the boy, and the child pulled a toy pistol from his holster and fired after him.

I was nervous, unsure what I would find in my employer’s mother. A monster, he’d said.

But, no, that was not right: it was she who had called him a monster, not the other way around.

I followed Blackstone for what seemed a long time. The yards began to broaden out into farms and the mansions thinned and the trees grew more densely and I wondered if I’d come too far. It seemed I had left the city behind and entered the countryside. All was brown and gray and tattered gold. The air smelled of wet feathers, of ice just come off the mud at the river’s edge. A flock of crows or starlings or some raucous dark birds blasted out of the shrubbery like devils in a rattle of leafless branches. I had almost resolved to turn back when I noticed the landscape ahead seemed to become less wild again, more orderly. Rounding an obviously groomed bank of junipers, I came to an expanse of lawn. And paused.

I looked behind me. I checked for street signs. There were none. I walked closer, looked with a kind of wonder over the clipped brown lawns rolling out vastly and the curving drive and the circular flower beds still dormant with cold, the clipped hedges of box elder and rhododendron and, there in the near distance, the red-brick edifice I knew so well from my window. I stood marvelling. What a strange coincidence. There it stood, at the crest of the property. I was quite pleased with such fortuitousness. I could inquire inside about the address I sought and get a look around the place at the same time. Killing two birds with one stone. I walked nearer. The building was even more handsome than it had appeared from my attic window, luxurious even, and yet there was about the whole place a taint of something else, something marshy and decayed. There was about it the sort of restrained stillness one finds in only the unhappiest of houses. I walked to the foot of the lawn where a discreet sign rose up from the grass next to a gravel drive. I stared.

Butler Hospital for the Insane
.

And, beneath, an address. I felt a coldness settle over me. I lifted the envelopes. The address was the same. It was this very building I sought.

I looked over the grounds again. The whole place had darkened, it seemed. A flatness to it in the early light. The dark windowpanes reflected nothing. The ivied brick had a wet, heavy, salty look, as of some fortress on the edge of the sea.

I roused myself and followed the curving drive to the main building, my shoes crunching in the cold silence. The place might have been abandoned, the kind of place one reads of in ghost stories. I followed the drive as far as the sweeping front entrance, then hesitated at the foot of the wide white-painted stairs, looking up at the blackened windows for a sign of life.