The Broken Hours: A Novel of H. P. Lovecraft (4 page)

What is it in us which blinds us? Standing there in the front hall, I felt a chill spread slowly over me, like a palm cupping cold marble, or a window left open to an autumn night. But for the wind and rain lashing outside, the house was eerily still, eerily silent. And yet I told myself it was only sleep I needed. A bed, warmth, rest.

I followed a set of creaking stairs from the front hall up to the darkened second story, clutching his letter, my valise bumping noisily against the walls of the narrow stairwell. At a small landing I found two doors and opened one. I felt for the electric light but when I punched the button, nothing happened. From what I could make out, the room appeared to be empty except for a few boxes against the wall and an antiquated cornbroom abandoned in the corner. I closed the door and opened the other.

When I found the button this time, the bulb in the ceiling buzzed and crackled with a thin orange wire, then flared with light. I raised a hand to my face, blinking, and carried my dripping valise inside.

It too seemed little more than a large storeroom, lowceilinged and grimly furnished. Behind the clutter of more cardboard boxes I could see a cast-iron bed, narrow and sagging and so short it would surely only allow me to curl up like a fetal cat or drape my ankles painfully across the foot rail. A washstand with a blue-flowered enamel basin and pitcher stood beneath a darker oval on the far wall where a mirror or a picture must once have hung; but all this, too, and the chest of drawers, even the lamp on my bedside table, had been built in miniature. I thought of Alice, having stepped through the looking glass. I reached out and turned on the lamp, which glowed with a rosy light. Certainly the room must once have been used by, intended for, a child.

Yet clearly it had not been used so in quite some time. My shoes scraped the bare floorboards as I pushed aside sealed boxes thick with grit; even the folded bed linens, when I lifted them from the cold radiator, smelled musty from long disuse. The saving grace: the monitor roof boasted windows which, though smudged and fly-specked, afforded a nearly panoramic view of the city. Below one of these sat my desk. I regarded its stacks of manuscripts and correspondence without enthusiasm, then leaned toward the glass. Past my ghosted reflection I could see the university observatory glowing bluely, as if a celestial creation fallen, and beyond that the hilled Providence skyline, domed and steepled, and in the distance, on the edge of the silvered river, a building more striking still: dark and sprawling, its gloomy peaks and dormers lit but dimly through the rain.

As I stood watching at the window, a light in one of the dormer windows went out, and I was caught by melancholia, as I have always been at the sight of a light going out across a vast distance, like the sudden, cold extinguishing of a star.

The light came on again, only to be put out a second later. This flickering continued nearly a full minute, as if someone there were sending a signal out across the darkening city, through the storm; as if someone were seeking a reply; and I almost felt, in that moment, in that cold room with the wind and rain raging outside, that the someone being signalled was me. But then the light went out and stayed out. I waited some time but it did not come on again.

Before me, on the chipped windowsill, the desiccated bodies of flies lay thickly. I touched one with my thumbnail, lightly, and it crumbled to dust. I turned from the window and, putting out my own lamp, pulled off my wet shoes and socks and trousers and climbed into bed in my shirt sleeves, too tired even to bother washing up. From the bed, I could still see out the low window to the dormered building that had so caught my interest. I waited a few moments to see if the light would come on, but there was nothing. It occurred to me then, that, though my attic room was practically ringed with windows, all of the furniture—the bed, a small, dingy armchair, the desk and ladderback chair—were oriented toward this window, this view. It gave me a queer feeling and I made a mental note to rearrange things to my own taste in the morning.

I said a quick prayer, as had long been my habit, against the suffering of loved ones and for my own failings and for the unhappy intersections between the two. There had been a time in my youth when prayer had brought me actual comfort and so I’d continued the ritual—out of a kind of familiar obligation, as was sometimes the way with habits—long after I had lost faith in it, when it left me only as exposed and unmoved as the solitary, ordinary, lonely bedtime ritual of removing one’s own clothing.

Thus have you also been cast off, Crandle
, I told myself, and closed my eyes.

But I could not get comfortable. Apart from the smallness of the bed, the room was cold and I lay shivering and sleepless beneath the musty, too-short blankets, finding myself staring out across the city through the window, listening to the rain batter down upon the shingles above my head, and the house creak and shift in the high wind. When I held a palm to the wall, I could feel a draft seep as through something porous, as if the wall were not plaster but skin. The starched sheets chafed, the pillow lumped unpleasantly.

It was then, as I tossed about seeking comfort, that my hand came upon a small, hard object beneath my pillow, and I pulled it out and turned on the lamp. In my palm lay what appeared to be a triangular chunk of concrete, which I took at first for a broken bit of sidewalk or building masonry.

And yet, as I turned it beneath the lamplight, I found it to be curved smoothly on one edge, polished but for its broken side, and all in all it gave the sense of something vexingly familiar—some exceedingly common thing—though just what somehow eluded me. I put out the light again and lay back against the pillow, rubbing my thumb against its smooth side as if it were a talisman. Possibly it had been so once, placed there as a charm against darkness for whatever child had inhabited that room. A charm against loneliness. It seemed terribly sad to me that the charm was still there, the child long gone.

At last I began to sink into sleep, down and down, with that sense of dark plummeting, as I imagined dying might feel.

I was startled awake. I knew not how long I’d slept, if truly at all, but a sudden thought brought my blood ripping hotly into my veins, startling me into the unfamiliar dark.

I switched on the bedside lamp and looked at the stone in my palm, the skin there welted red where I’d clenched it. I rubbed its smooth edge with my thumb.

A piece of gravestone.

I turned and turned it in my hands, and at last put out the light and lay listening for some time to the storm outside. The rain tapped at the windows; the wind creaked and whistled at one corner where a pane was loose from its caulking. Across the city, the light did not come on.

Finally, I closed my eyes. The stone radiated a deep and abiding cold which would not warm in my clenched palm. Though its presence might have been chilling to some, I found it only sad, as Jane claimed I found all things. And I suspected she was right, without having the power to change it, that melancholy I had known all my life, and which too must be a gift of God.

2

I awoke to a room filled with the pewtered light of a coastal morning, turning the walls a velvety lilac blue. The close, musty air felt rinsed after the storm. Beyond the windows, mourning doves shifted and sighed in the dripping branches. An automobile hushed past on the wet street. Somewhere, a child bounced a rubber ball against the sidewalk with a muffled, metrical regularity that set my teeth on edge.

I felt tired; a faint chill still lingered around my bones. My eyes ached at the backs of their sockets. But I had slept. And under a roof, and in a bed. I intended to write Jane first thing and tell her I was well situated and that I would soon be in a position to send money, likely that very day. I was not such a fool as to hope it might mean anything to her; hope, as they say, is the worst of all evils, prolonging only torment.

I lay awhile beneath the covers, turning the stone over in my palm. I was surprised, in a way, to find it still there. The house below me was silent, and though I listened for movement there was nothing. Beyond the windows, the city lay spread out in a misty, gray light, the observatory dark and somehow disenchanted—or was it unenchanted?—at any rate ordinary, and the sprawling, dormered building in the distance, which had so captured me the previous evening, quite ordinary too in a handsome, rather gothic, somehow forbidding way. I studied its four stories of red brick, choked in ivy, its chimneys puffing great gallows of mauve smoke into the cold, and only with great effort could I tear my eyes away.

The view was, as my employer had promised, splendid; the house situated on the very crest of College Hill. The lower town spread out before me on three sides, the narrow colonials and Georgians huddled together beneath peaked roofs, watercoloured, chimney pots smoking, the trees leafless and profound, still black with rain. The mercurial river coursing flat silver into the bay. The spires and pinnacles and belfries of the downtown proper, stately and ornate as the Orthodox crosses of Old Europe. Beyond, the rolling countryside cobwebbed in the early light. I wondered that my employer had not taken these rooms for his own use.

I recalled, then, his letter. I plucked it from the bedside table and opened it. It was a long letter, at that, and written right up to the very edges of the bright orange pages, with no margins even to break the eye. If handwriting is, indeed, indicative of character, then his cramped, nearly illegible scrawl filling every inch of the page said a good deal indeed.

He was an odd sort, to be sure, writing in a kind of baroque, formal tongue, and I had the distinct sense, when reading, of having received his letter out of the distant past. In addition, he was not one to use five words when fifty would do. No point in repeating all the remarkable detail the note contained; important only that he left a tarnished, silvery key (presumably to the front door), long-winded, formally polite instructions as to the general management of the house, a list of errands and a veritable treatise on the work I would—and did—find awaiting me on the desk.

It occurred to me then that he had not yet given me his name. Nor had he mentioned it on the telephone. I flipped to the last page of the letter. He mentioned an aunt, Annie, currently convalescing, said something about
we Phillipses
, but as to his own name, he’d only scrawled something that looked like
Ech-Pi
. I tried to make sense of it, but no matter how long I looked, the letters did not mutate into a recognizable name.

Ech-Pi. Imagine.

I wondered if I would meet him that morning, though his letter had given me no reason to believe I would, neither that morning nor any other, as he claimed he kept inconvenient hours, sleeping—when he was able—by day, and working all through the night. He wrote further that he had been unwell for some time and had not much left his rooms, and suggested that our communication should be epistolary until he was feeling well enough to meet. He claimed, in fact, that he preferred it so, as one never really became acquainted with another until they had maintained a correspondence. Still, I could not help but think we should cross paths, and likely sooner than later.

He had, however, left no money for my promised advance. I read again his insistence that he not be disturbed, under any circumstances. And I thought, rather peevishly, that if he wished not to be disturbed he might have delivered on his assurance.

I rose and dressed quickly in the cold room, in my one spare suit of clothes, a light summer suit ill-matched to the morning’s damp, my good jacket and trousers hanging like a doppelgänger in the window to dry.

I stopped.

Surely I’d not hung that suit the previous night. I recalled distinctly dropping my wet clothes to the floor and climbing, weary, into the cold bed. I could still recall the sound of my belt hitting the floorboards heavily. And yet there they hung, neatly, by the window. I could only imagine I must have been more exhausted than I’d supposed, to forget. Then again, such an habitual act could hardly be memorable.

I folded the letter into my trouser pocket with the key and made up my bed. After a second thought, I pocketed the piece of gravestone as well. Before venturing downstairs to find the bathroom, I paused a moment at the door to look back at the suit, hanging before the window, turning slowly in the blue light.