The Broken Hours: A Novel of H. P. Lovecraft (5 page)

Imagine my astonishment, upon clicking on the overhead bulb in the cramped bathroom, to discover a clawfooted tub filled nearly to the brim with trash.

Not the usual household trash of the muckier sort, but rather candy bar wrappers and the emptied boxes of other confectionary, chocolates and gumdrops and sugary lozenges. I rifled straight through to the bottom of the tub, so confounded was I by this perverse collection. Nothing but candy wrappers.

After more rummaging about, I found beneath the sink some paper bags and filled several and twisted them shut and put them aside and rinsed the tub. The rest of the room, too, was in a state of what Jane would call disgrace: dust balls skated along the baseboards; the sink rimed with the powdery residue of old tooth polish; bits of toilet tissue littered the floor like ticker tape. Off-putting, to say the least. Nests of gray hair clung to the edge of the wastebasket like spiders. Fingernail scissors rusted on the lip of the sink. Everywhere a stench of unwashed underclothes. With some effort, I cracked the sticky window to the morning air, the sill there peppered, too, with a winter’s worth of flies. I recalled the doubtful gaze of the clerk at the agency:
hisskeeping
.

I washed my hands and face in the icy trickle from the tap—the drain gave off a sour odour of old spittle—and only then did I notice no mirror hung over the sink. I peered about, dripping, my eyes stinging with water. I dried my face on a crumpled towel, then dug around back in the cabinet for one of those ladies’ hand mirrors, which are used, I am told, chiefly in the viewing of the back of one’s head; but none was to be found. I ran my fingers cursorily through my hair. A quick palm across my jaw told me I was in need of a shave. It was liberating, in a way, to know I was in a position where no such thing would be necessary. What could my appearance possibly matter to a man who would not meet me?

The kitchenette proved no better than the bathroom, the counters covered in a greasy film, likewise the floor, the soles of my shoes sticking unpleasantly. A table in the corner was lost in stacks of books and papers and unopened mail; against one wall a pile of cardboard boxes and empty tin cans, their tops flipped open like razored eyelids; a pair of dirty galoshes leaned by a door leading to a rickety exterior set of stairs; the wall above the range so spattered with cooking oil it shone.

Oddly, though, there was not a dirty dish, or cup, or spoon to be seen. I found the pots and crockery all clean and put away neatly in the cupboards, which nevertheless stank of damp and too-few openings. On the door of an ironing closet hung a calendar, issued by the Insurance Company of Providence, depicting the gateway arch in Federal Hill with its famous
pignoli
cluster dangling obscenely. The month showing was February and I flipped the pages forward to April, feeling uneasily as I did so that I was violating some kind of inexplicable order. I shut the closet only to open it a second later and flip them back to February again. When I turned on the faucet the pipes banged and lurched, and a thin, spitting foam of gray water spattered into the sink. I located the kettle in a drawer beneath the range and filled it and put it on to boil. But upon closer examination of the cupboards, I could detect not a single leaf of tea, nor any food at all besides a few unopened tins of Zocates and chili con carne and Protase and an ancient can of cocoa ranged unassumingly next to a line of spoiled-looking jellies—or so I imagined they were—with unlikely labels, handwritten: dandelion, stinging nettle, hawthorne. I pushed the dusty preserves and the tinned bread and meat to the back and opened the cocoa, struck by an earthy, wet-wool smell, not altogether unpleasant but certainly not chocolate. I spooned it out in clumps. The kettle shrieked and I poured out the steaming water. In the small icebox I found a crusted tin of condensed milk of questionable date and poured a bit of that in as well and stirred, my spoon clanging against the sides of the cup like a cathedral bell in the silence. Finally, I sipped the concoction and, finding the odour worse than the taste, which could perhaps best be described as faintly mushroomy, I took the cup and went to the front hall, pausing there a moment in the gloom. The light shone from beneath the study door, as it had the previous evening, but I could detect no sound of anyone stirring within. I returned with my cup to the kitchenette and wiped off a seat at the table.

From the window I could see across a good-sized, overgrown garden to the yellow boarding house, temporary home of Baxter and James, as if they were partners in law. A low, glossy hedge in need of trimming and, between the two properties, a charming shed, the roof of which appeared to be—astonishingly—covered in cats. Creatures of various colorations and markings, sitting with their tails curled round them or prodding the eaves or patrolling the roof with serious, studied airs, like dancers just taking the stage. I counted some dozen of them. As I watched, a broad-shouldered silver tabby scaled the barren trellis up the side of the shed, then coiled himself just below the lip of the eaves, watching the others, tail twitching. When he pounced, the rest scattered. I knew that sort well. I’d never cared for the beasts. There was something about them so alien, so cold. Looking into their eyes, I saw no connection and knew very well they would gladly slit me open and eat me steaming from the inside out, then sit mildly wiping their gory muzzles.

Turning from the window, I sipped my cocoa and, taking up pen and paper, began my letter to Jane.

I spent the remainder of the morning with shirt sleeves rolled tightly past the elbow, carting out trash and cardboard boxes and newspapers to the bins at the back of the yard. The level of grime I discovered once I began exceeded all my expectations, even given that my employer had been on his own for some four weeks, according to his letter, and that he was a writer, with a writer’s habits. I swept dust and debris from the floors and, getting down on hands and knees, vigorously scrubbed every inch of the kitchen and bathroom with a stiff brush and buckets of hot water and a yellowed cake of lye soap on a saucer—which I had at first alarmingly put aside as a bit of margarine for my lunch—and which left my hands puckered and raw, and my fingertips thoroughly bleached of ink stains. I scraped crusted food from the kitchen counters with a metal spatula, and hacked at the rusted film in the sink. A black, hardshelled, antennaed thing crept up horribly out of the drain, groping blindly, and I cranked on the hot water, watching it flail in the vortex until it was flushed away. I screwed the plug in tightly, then turned my efforts to the greasy range.

All morning I scraped and scrubbed and polished. I ran over the furniture with a damp cloth. I shook carpets out the windows with a sharp snap. By noon I had managed to improve most of the apartment, leaving untouched only my employer’s study and another set of rooms behind closed doors across the front hall. These I assumed belonged to the lady of the house, the aunt he had mentioned in his letter. I pushed all of the curtains open and punched on every electric light and pried the windows up to the sea air. And still the place felt stale and dark.

One small delight: I discovered, after clearing away some of the kitchen clutter, three pots of primroses on the windowsill—yellow, magenta and orangey-pink—and I was so pleased to find them there, still blooming in spite of their miserable surroundings, it was as if I’d discovered the first crocus of spring breaking through late-lingering ice. I crumbled off all the dead leaves and blossoms and watered them until liquid ran like steeped tea from their pots.

But, I will confess, all morning as I moved about the apartment, I found myself looking now and again over my shoulder at nothing. I could not quell a strange feeling: that something—someone—moved through the rooms with me, just ahead of me. That I was not alone in that apartment. As, of course, I reminded myself, I was not.

I rattled about a good deal while I cleaned, taking comfort in the loud, ordinary noises, the sloshing and scrubbing and clanging, and thinking surely, sooner or later, to rouse my employer from his chambers. But the study door remained closed, and though I paused often as I passed through the hall, I heard nought.

In the afternoon, after posting my letter to Jane in the red-enamelled box outside the front door, I dug with reluctance from the pile of papers on my desk the manuscript I’d been instructed to proofread and type. It amounted to only a few pages scrawled across with the same cramped, crippled script, which, on a second viewing, I seemed to have little difficulty making out. I was no great reader, but something in the opening lines caught me and instead of typing I sat at my desk reading.

It was a sort of a horror story—or it began like one, anyway—about a young chambermaid, Aralyn Eakinns, the only child of a reclusive and aged New England fisherman, Oakley Eakinns. Aralyn had come to Providence shortly after her mother disappeared under mysterious circumstances, Oakley claiming the mother had
run off to Philadelphy or somewhere as she always promised she would
. Aralyn found work in a local hotel—elegantly carpeted and crystalled—down on Benefit Street near the waterfront. She was not a favourite among her co-workers and employers. A certain standoffishness, a certain haughtiness, hardly appropriate in a girl of such humble origins, was found distasteful, offensive. They found her cold, in every sense; her fellow chambermaids, brushing against her as they stripped the bedclothes, felt an inexplicable repulsion. They went out of their way to avoid her.

And more: Old Oakley would turn up there at the hotel each night, smelling of cinders, and sit in the lobby beneath the chandeliers, waiting in his work clothes on the finely upholstered rose settees, his muddy boots planted firmly on the silk carpets, scratching absently at the knees of his dungarees, watching everyone with a cold, bulbous stare while they pretended not to see him, and waiting for Aralyn to finish work so he could take her home.

Aralyn, seeing him there, would stop suddenly while passing through the lobby and stare coldly back. The other employees exchanged glances, watching from their corners, until finally Oakley bared his broken teeth at her and said,
High time you come home
. Then, nodding once, he rose and disappeared out the glass doors into the Providence darkness. The hotel manager was infuriated by them but would never have dreamed of inviting either of them, father or daughter, to leave.

It surprised no one when Aralyn, black-haired and bewitching, married into money. A frequent guest of the hotel, Mr. Harris Wolfe, a California businessman not much younger than Oakley himself, whisked her away to a life of sunlight and blue pools and caviar—this latter a delicacy for which Aralyn had a particular taste—far from her dreary, questionable New England roots and a life of toil and decadence, a word my employer seemed overly fond of using, along with “eldritch” and “unknowable.” The other employees of the hotel were not sorry to see Aralyn go, not least because they would no longer be forced to suffer Oakley’s objectionable presence.

And yet, though Aralyn was gone, Oakley continued his nightly visitations, stepping through the glass doors, trailing ribbons of fog, to sit staring an hour or two under the rose light of the chandeliers, before rising, announcing to the room,
High time she come home
, and disappearing back into the night.