The Broken Hours: A Novel of H. P. Lovecraft (27 page)

And, then, when I was honest with myself, I knew there was a part of me that was glad also. Or, perhaps not glad but relieved. Jane was to come. Jane must come. And it made things much simpler if Flossie was not there.

I saw no one when I returned to Sixty-Six. Even the child, the presence, seemed to have gone. Only the silver tabby appeared at the kitchen window at dinnertime, or just past, when the streets were already bathed in dusklight. He sat on the shed roof waiting, like a ghost, until I raised the glass and put out a bowl of something good that I had, again, failed to eat. I had no appetite still and my trousers hung from my hip bones. I’d had to use a kitchen knife to work another hole into the leather of my belt.

As for the tabby, he was, in spite of his ghostly coloring, muscular and real. I had come to regard him with a kind of wonder and horror. There was about him nothing of the ephemeral; he was what he was, no less and no more. When he pushed against my palm, I pushed back, feeling the agility in him, the strength. The heat of all that blood.

That night I knocked, softly, at the study door. I could not put it off any longer. I felt none of the dread, or fear, I had used to feel, only a kind of embarrassed pity. There was nothing, it seemed, that life from some people would not wrench away.

When no answer came, I tried the latch. It was unlocked. I inched the door open and called, quietly,
It’s me, sir. Crandle.

A rustling as of blankets and a sigh and then,
What is it?

May I come in?

I waited outside the cracked door. More rustling and what sounded like a shifting of furniture across the floor, a dragging, and then he said,
Come
.

The heavy draperies were drawn against the dusklight. A lamp shone dimly on the table by the door, and I realized this was the constant light I must have seen from beneath the door. Beside it was a dusty jar containing a dead snake, mottled, dessicated, blind. Someone had taken pains to pose the creature in a manner the effect of which was hardly lifelike. I looked away in disgust.

The matches I’d dropped days ago still lay scattered across the carpet. I stooped to brush them quickly into my palm before looking about the room.

By dim lamplight, the space was much larger than I would have thought, and crammed with furnishings and papers and books, a maze of bookshelves, really; an antique rifle hung on one wall and clustered photographs and illustrations and shelves of curios; an elegant classical bust of a woman veiled in cobwebs; armchairs and occasional tables and two large desks, at opposite ends of the room, as if it were arranged for two people instead of one. The larger of these was situated under the window facing the street. The room was, in fact, so crammed with things that at first I could not make him out; it was like those children’s puzzles in which one must find the hidden figure.

Finally I saw him, hunched in the big Morris chair in the shadows at the far side of the room, just outside of the pool of lamplight. He appeared so heavily covered in blankets that I could see only shoulders—rather broader than I’d imagined—his face indistinguishable in the dim light.

Tell me, Candle—
he smacked his lips drily, as of someone waking from sleep—
when is spring to come
.

I was puzzled at first, wondering if he was speaking metaphorically. I struggled to shape an adequate reply, but then he said,
I don’t recall a springtime ever so miserable as this one.

It strikes me as a bit milder today, sir
, I said.

Not in here
.

I stood uncertainly in the doorway, wondering would he invite me in.

I have beheld all the universe has to hold of horror
, he said, sounding as if he was quoting someone,
and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever after be poison to me.

I’m afraid I don’t know who that is, sir.

No
, he said, heavily.

I felt of the gravestone in my pocket.

I believe I have something of yours. It only occurred to me today you might be wanting it.

Yes?

It’s …
I pulled the stone from my pocket.
May I come in?

I am not well, Candle.

I apologize, sir. I just … perhaps this is of some importance to you?

Well?

I took this as an invitation and stepped tentatively toward him across the room. I almost thought he might warn me back, but he did not, and the closer I came, the more I could make out his face dimly there in the shadows. It seemed, much to my astonishment, from what I could see, quite normal.

I’m sure I stood staring, gaping perhaps. It was a face quite long and narrow, lantern-jawed. Withered by illness, the face of a sick man, clearly, gaunt and strained, drained of all color, but hardly monstrous.

Will you speak
, he said then,
or is this to be some parlor game?

I beg your pardon
, I said.
I wanted only to give you this.

I handed him the chunk of gravestone and he took it with hands long and fine-fingered. As he leaned forward, his face spasmed and twisted, as if with great pain. He raised a hand self-consciously, to hide himself.

Forgive me
, he said, from behind his hand.
It is a condition I’ve had since childhood. Saint Vitus’ Dance. Enchanting name for an ugly syndrome. Worse when I am ill or tired, I’m afraid. I know it is unpleasant to look upon
.

I made motions of denial, but I had to admit it had been grotesque and frightening. He leaned back in his chair again, turning the stone over in his hands.

Where did you find it?

Upstairs
, I said,
in my room. If I’d known …

Known?

If I thought it had any significance to you, I would have returned it sooner. I’ve been carrying it around. I’m not quite sure why.
An embarrassing admission. I half-expected to be upbraided by him.

Do you know what it is?
he asked instead.

I didn’t, at first. But then, after a while, I thought it must be a piece broken from a gravestone.

Yes
, he said.
And no
.

He was quiet a long while, and when he finally looked up at me, it was as if he was surprised to find me still there.

Please
, he said,
sit. A proper meeting has been a long time coming. I hope you will forgive such rudeness.

I sat on the edge of a rocker a few feet away. It groaned beneath me and I stiffened to stop the noise.

In fact, Candle
, he said, lifting the piece of stone,
I have not seen this in quite some time. A childhood memento. I had wondered where it had gotten to, and then time passes, and we forget, as we do with all things that once meant a great deal. It is necessary, I suppose, such forgetting. A blessing, really.
He lowered the stone to his lap, where it lay cupped in his palm.

You know, Candle, I was handsomely indulged as a boy, by my mother in particular. We had an idyllic estate, the most beautiful in Providence, I dare say, in what was practically the country, back then. My grandfather, with whom I was close, fell on hard times. When he lost his fortune, everything else hit an inevitable downslide. When he died, it seemed all was lost.

The rocker creaked beneath me and I stopped it.

So it is from his grave.

He closed a weak fist over the stone.

It is not. You see, I spent a good deal of time as a boy with my grandfather. My mother needed often to be alone. She suffered terrible migraines, was so sick from them she had bouts of vomiting so violent it left her gaunt-eyed and shaking. And, of course, she was always what she called “nervous.” My father was not much in my life. A salesman, away a good deal, with a demanding position. And so he fell ill from the pressures, was paralyzed, died not long after. My grandfather was the only other male in a house filled with women, and so it was only natural we should have a certain affinity. He was a great reader himself and loved especially a good ghost story. Perhaps this is where my own interest began. No doubt it is. He used to love telling me scary stories when I was a boy, and in truth I did not often feel afraid. Only once, when I’d expressed some discomfort at bedtime over some nonsense tale or other which he’d spun, he took me and led me, long after everyone else had gone to bed, through the darkened house, room by room, pointing out ordinary objects, touching them with me, exploring the familiar places that seemed so transformed by lack of light but were in fact still ordinary, still the same. After that night, I don’t recall ever feeling afraid again. It was as if he’d taken the mystery out of the darkness and replaced it with himself, the comfort of his presence, and of his voice.

At any rate, he had a story for everything, every phenomenon, every landmark, every person we’d meet all up and down Angell Street. Even the servants who lived up on the third floor, he had stories for them, dark stories that made them more than human to me, mythical, as if every ordinary face hid secrets and magic. Every place on the estate, the carriage house, the orchard, the woods, he had stories for them all. I spent a good deal of my boyhood exploring all of those places, and creating my own imaginary populations and cities among the grass and the dirt.

It was while occupied thus one afternoon that I came across a spot behind the carriage house, back near the woods in the tall grasses near the empty neighboring lot, where someone had placed a small concrete marker. I thought at first it was only a rock, all overgrown and covered in moss, but then noted its unusually square shape and I pulled away the long grass and brambles and rubbed at the moss only to discover, engraved there—can you imagine?

I shook my head dumbly.

The name of my own mother, Sarah Susan Phillips.

I watched my employer uneasily, but said nothing.

Of course, I had no idea what it might be, or why the name of my mother, alive and well, might be written there, but I played for some time around the place, using the stone as a fortress wall for a village of Arabs I’d imagined there, until one afternoon my grandfather happened upon me in that place and asked what I was doing. I told him. He seemed odd about it and advised that I find another place for my games, and being myself a rather precocious child, I sensed his demeanor had something to do with the stone, and so I asked him about it. I believe I may even have said something about it looking like a grave and remarking how strange it was that I should find it here with my mother up and around and quite well indeed. I believe I pressed the matter, no doubt I did, irrepressible as I was. I threw a bit of a tantrum, as I was wont to do in those days, and finally the old man said he would tell me but that it must be a secret just between the two of us and that I must never let on to my mother or anyone else what he was about to tell me. Of course, we had many good secrets, he and I, so this was hardly unusual, and so I agreed, knowing quite well this was the way he prefaced all of his best stories.

He told me then that it was a special place, that my mother had buried something there, a silver pier glass of some remarkable value, years ago, in darker times. Naturally I asked why she would do such a thing. He leaned in, then—I can picture his face still, with its big white walrus moustache—he leaned in and said, “Howard, if you can explain to me the confounding ways of women, I will be much obliged.” And we had a good laugh, then. In fact, he often made such jokes, about the women; it was a sort of them-and-us situation. It was a fine joke. And I moved my little Arab village and thought no more about it.

But then we lost it all, and everything changed. He changed. He was no longer the man I had known. Sometimes, I caught him looking at me blankly, as if he could not remember who I was. One afternoon I was passing by his study window and I caught sight of him. I stopped there, peeking out, despicably, from behind the shrubbery. He was standing on the old moth-eaten scarlet carpet my grandmother had always hated, and which I’d always loved, woven as it was into a sort of tapestry of the gods. He was standing there, adrift in the center of this great room, staring into the palms of his upturned hands. He stared and stared. Then, as if he sensed my presence, he looked out the window, at me, and I did not move. I thought I would catch hell from him. Privacy was sacrosanct among all us Phillipses. But he only stared at me the same way he had, a moment previous, been staring at his own hands. With nothing of recognition there. Not that he did not know me, but that he did not even know what I was. You understand?

I think so.

I was still a child, really, not even quite a young man. I wanted to weep. Instead, I grew angry. I went to him. I barged into his study, where he still stood on the scarlet carpet and I railed at him. A tantrum, as I hadn’t thrown in quite some time. And something in my vitriol reminded me of that treasure my mother had buried out behind the carriage house. The priceless pier glass. I stopped short, myself silenced by the revelation. I marvelled, felt I had saved the day. I came forward, eagerly, reminding my grandfather of it—how could he have forgotten? How could we all have? Surely it was worth quite a lot. He had told me as much himself. Oh, I was very pleased with myself.