The Broken Hours: A Novel of H. P. Lovecraft (3 page)

Mama?

Molly stood all at once still in the snow, staring back at us, as if something unspeakable had just occurred to her. The flakes settled on her blue felt hat like the loosed feathers of a hunted swan.

She looks flushed
, Jane said.

Molly’s cheeks flamed in the cold, her black eyes bright, glittering. Jane bent to fuss with the scarf hanging askew around her little throat.

It’s the fresh air
, I said, and walked on, leaving Jane to follow with Molly. It was well past lunch and I was hungry and underdressed for the cold.

Will you wait
, Jane called.

—and bring whatever small, personal items you require
, came the voice over the telephone.
The room which will be yours at the very top of the house—splendid views—is comfortably and tastefully furnished in the colonial manner. You will be quite at liberty to make yourself at home.

It was a moment before I realized what he was saying.

Thank you, sir
, I said. My voice trembled embarrassingly.

Are you quite sure of your way?
he asked.

I believe so.

Nevertheless, he proceeded to give detailed, colourfully descriptive, one might even say atmospheric, directions to his home behind the Brown University campus. I was given to understand that a sister or mother or some other elderly female relative (not a wife, to be sure) who normally handled such matters was to be away for a time convalescing from
a somewhat prolonged and exceedingly virulent case of the grippe
, as he put it, and that I was to be employed for at least the duration of her absence. This would be some few weeks and perhaps, all going well, a good while afterward, he added, if I were agreeable to such arrangements.

I assured him I was most agreeable. In the meantime there was a more immediate concern.

I beg your pardon
, I began then, hesitantly.
We have not discussed …

I had hoped he would take up the hint, but I was met with only silence. It was awkward, to be sure. I would not have brought it up had my situation not been quite so desperate.

… the matter of salary
.

More muffled humphing or, possibly, coughing. Perspective, I have found, is everything.

I do feel, Candle, that between gentlemen talk of money is a coarse matter.

I only ask … my circumstances are what one might call straitened.
I laughed apologetically. I sensed it was not the first time I had done so.
I do realize this is out of the ordinary, inappropriate even, certainly not something I’m in the habit of—

You are guttering, Candle.

Might I receive a small portion of my salary in advance? It is rather urgent—

Yes, yes,
he said wearily.
I find this talk of such low matters—
a cough here, he seemed to be growing breathless—
degrading to us both. Please, let us speak no more of it.

He asked then if I needed a review of the directions to his home, and I assured him I could find the place easily and that I would begin making preparations for my move within the hour—another fabrication as there were no preparations to make, only myself and my shoddy valise there in the dank, panelled lobby and outside the lowering skies over the city and the coastal gusts rattling the windowglass, the promise of the storm to come.

That I need not face it, this storm—another night on the cold, wet streets among the other desperate and unwashed, urinating in the park like an animal, waiting in the damp at the back of the line for the soup kitchen only to arrive at the front to find the kettle had just been scraped—was only just beginning to settle. I assured him he could expect me before nightfall. In truth, I could not get there soon enough to suit me, but I did not say as much to him. It did not do, I had found in such situations, to appear too eager.

It is a splendid thing you are not a woman
, he said, out of the blue.
I wasn’t quite sure how I would manage it. A pleasant surprise, Candle. I expect our time together to be quite—
he wheezed—
illuminating
.

And then he was gone.

I stood in the rain on the doorstep of darkened Number Sixty-Six, waiting for an answer to my ring. When none came, I stepped back into a puddle and looked up at the building.

It rose, modest but elegant, two square stories plus an attic in the typical Rhode Island colonial style, with small-paned windows and a carved fan above the panelled front door. Still, while handsome, there was something unwelcoming about it, too, tucked away there in the trees behind the university, a kind of squat and sublimated misanthropy. It struck me often, the similarities between buildings and people; not that they resemble us, but that we resemble them. We, too, only hollow frames subject to the slow indignities of decay, the darkening that age brings. I wonder, sometimes, what lives in us. I wonder what comes calling, what we invite inside.

But such thinking always troubled Jane.

The streaked windows of Sixty-Six remained unlit. A sudden movement there and I lifted a hand in greeting before realizing, with some embarrassment, it was only the trees and the storm reflected darkly in the glass. The rain blasted against me. Feeling a flicker of irritation, I collapsed my umbrella, opened the door, and stepped inside.

My first impression was of gloom. The small foyer of dark wood panelling and floorboards made darker by the storm and the hour. It smelled of damp and wax and something richly, unpleasantly sweet, like overripe cherries. A chime clock ticked on the wall immediately to my left, the swing of its brass pendulum a glint of light in the gloaming, and beside it a panelled door stood closed and—strangely—padlocked into what I assumed was the main floor suite which the man Baxter had mentioned. I wondered what could be behind such barricading. Across the foyer, a second, smaller door, flanked by brass-potted palms, was set into the wall beneath the stairs. This door was not padlocked.

Apart from these, there was only an iron coat stand to my right and the stairs, banistered and covered in a richly filigreed ruby carpeting, which curved up and to the left into the darkened second story.

I confess I was dismayed to find the house divided into two, possibly three, apartments. Surely I had been given the impression over the telephone that my gentleman employer was the owner and sole occupant apart from the recuperating relative. Already our conversation of only a few hours ago had taken on a hazy, gilded quality, as of something that had happened years previous, or that I had once dreamed. But I was exhausted, preoccupied, and my memory had never been good, as Jane had frequently pointed out. He might have mentioned it, after all.

Either way, it appeared no one would be coming down to greet me. I deposited my umbrella upon the iron stand and, after wiping my soaked shoes pointlessly, mounted the groaning staircase.

When I reached the landing, the air changed.

I do not know how else to describe it. It darkened, became more dense. The carpet grew unpleasantly thick beneath my shoes, a swollen thing. I paused, disoriented, off-balance, and gripped the cold banister to steady myself, the wax sticky on my palm. My sodden clothing chafed against my skin, and I unbuttoned the collar of my overcoat. I shut my eyes, breathed. Pricks of light raced behind my eyes like mad, blue constellations. I could almost feel the bracing, elemental rush of wind and rain beyond the papered walls.

It was a long moment before I regained my equilibrium, and I put this off, quite logically, to the storm and the absence of windows on the landing, and to my fatigue and light-headedness at the lack of a decent meal in many days. That I had not collapsed before now seemed miraculous in itself. I hoped I was not coming down with something.

Still, though I was not a superstitious man, I was aware that I had always been rather … impressionable. Easily swayed, Jane once said. The man Baxter’s face came back to me, abashed as he mentioned his wife, the upstairs tenants. But I had detected something else there, too. A question in his gaze, and in the bleached gaze of the boy as well.

I gripped the banister more tightly, moved from the landing slowly upward, feeling that weightiness, as if it were pressing me back. A door stood closed in the shadows above me and I climbed toward it, sliding my hand along the nicked banister, my valise thumping against my knees. I hesitated on the upper landing only an instant, then raised my fist and rapped soundly, the noise ricocheting around in the darkness. My trousers clung wetly to my shins and I shivered and rapped again and, inexplicably, looked over my shoulder down the staircase. At last, hearing no sound from within and being, after all, expected, I opened the door.

I was hit, first, by a wall of bad air, as if neither door nor window had been opened in weeks. As if the rooms had sat long empty, the air unstirred by even the slightest movement. An earthy smell, not altogether unpleasant, flooded over me, mixed with that same musky sweet odour and even taste of old cherries. It filled my throat, recalling to me an orchard I must once have known as a child, the plump, rich fruit warm and soft from the sun. But as soon as I grasped for the memory, it was gone, as is the way with memories. Like ghosts, they can only be glimpsed from the corners of the eyes.

From where I stood in the doorway, the apartment seemed darker than had the main floor foyer. I recalled that from the outside I’d seen all the curtains pulled shut against the streetlamps and whatever scant gray light the sky yet held. That heaviness of air seemed denser there, weightier, as if the darkness were caused not merely by a lack of light but by the presence of something else.

I noticed, then, a panelled door down a couple of steps at the end of the front hall, set a little apart from the rest of the suite. Though the door was shut fast, a light shone dimly from beneath.

Hello?
I called out.
Sir? It’s Arthor Crandle.

Only the wind and the rain outside. I stepped into the apartment, dropping my sodden valise with an intentional clatter, then rapped my knuckles in brisk manufactured annoyance against the wall where I stood waiting.

Hallo!
I called again.

Still, nothing came. I could imagine only that my employer was asleep or had stepped out. I walked to the end of the hall and, descending the steps to the lighted room, rapped soundly there, just to be certain. My wet clothes hung heavily from my shoulders and hips as I waited. I cleared my throat, watching the dampness spread out under my shoes in the weak light.

Then, as I waited, an unpleasant thought: the unnatural, studied silence coming from the other side of the door was neither that of someone having just gone out nor of someone at focused work or even in deep sleep. Rather it was the stillness of someone’s strained listening just on the other side. Watching, perhaps, through the crack there.

I felt a shiver run through me that was not the cold.

How I wanted, in that moment, to leave. Even as I thought,
My god, what things we do for …
not love, certainly. I knew very well it was not love which had driven me there, nor hope, nor even obligation. Desperation, certainly; but more than that: it was grief. A much fiercer and lasting kind of loyalty in the end.

A floorboard creaked behind me, and I turned in relief, expecting to greet my new employer.

But there was no one, only the open door through which I’d just come, out of the wet blackness, and my own shining footprints across the floor.

It was then I noticed the pedestal table in the entranceway. It bore, beneath the small light of an exquisite emerald lamp, a note weighted down, from heaven knew what phantom gusts in that still and airless place, with a human skull of such craftsmanship as to look quite real. I stepped toward it and, repressing an inexplicable urge to poke my fingers into its empty eye sockets, I plucked the envelope from beneath it with hands made unsteady by the cold and the strain, and by many weeks of having slept little and eaten less.

Welcome, Candle,
it read.