The Ghosts of Heaven (20 page)

At bedtime, she came and stood in front of me in her nightdress, and wished me a joyless “good night.” I thought about what I should say, what I could do to cheer her up, but I could think of nothing. For a moment, I even thought I might put my arms around her and hug her, but she turned on her heel once she'd said her piece, and went off to her room.

I watched her go, then called out.

“Verity.”

But I must have called too softly for she didn't turn and come back.

I wonder often what life was like in the orphanage, but I hope it had to be better than when she lived on the streets before that. The streets of Manhattan are no place for a small girl to be, but I often get the feeling that the two years in the orphanage are what did the damage to her. Why she is so scared. Why she finds it hard to trust me. And every time I lose my temper with her, I know I am sending her back to the orphanage in some way, just a little.

After Caroline died, and I decided not to look for a new wife, but for a daughter, I lost touch with the remnants of my own family. I know they felt I was behaving oddly, but I know I will never love a woman the way I loved Caroline, though I might love a child as well and as truly. That was my belief, and still is, though I wonder when I will really, finally, connect my heart to Verity's, and she hers to mine.

It was easy to choose her.

Like choosing candy at the store, or the prettiest stone on the beach; there she was on the day I made my visit to the orphanage. And if no one told me she was the spitting image of Caroline, like a miniature version of my own dead wife, well that was only because no one there knew both the woman, and the girl.

*   *   *

When Verity went to bed, I did the same, but saw Dexter's book waiting for me beside the table. It seemed to be telling me that it had all the time in the world, that it could wait for me to read it, whenever I was ready. I felt like throwing the thing out of the seventh-floor window, but I didn't. Instead, I picked it up, and flicked to the table of contents, where the names of the poems were listed.

There it was:
Poquatuck.

I read.

Poquatuck

Sea-found, wind-worn and wild;

the land will lose.

Here are places so old as to defy memory;

The point, the creek, the inlet.

The old tide mills, dilapidated,

were but a blink in the eye of time.

And there are older things here,

things which the oyster boats dredge from the deep.

There on the headland;

the asylum,

and the asylum boneyard,

where the land-borne dead are corrupted,

harmless bodies are sucked of life;

in the cemetery.

Graves grow from the soil;

the black fingernails of the monstrosity beneath.

It lies far down, under the ground, under the sea,

pushing an arm up,

up to the air

a hand with a thousand fingers; and every fingernail a grave.

Deep in the sea, at the other end of the arm

sits its heart-brain,

this being from beyond the stars, from the beginning of time:

its mashy form quivers inside the shell

which protects

and resonates its thought-waves across the world

in ancient reverberation.

Spiral-set shell mind,

It blows a soundless horn to us all, a warning:

I am coming.

 

Dreaming

Caroline calls to me from beneath the waves.

I am standing on the roof of the asylum, and I jump, and somehow fly down to the shore from where her voice is louder and more insistent.

I am not afraid. I know she is dead, but somehow, in my dream, that doesn't matter. All that matters is that she is talking to me, and that I can hear her voice again, the voice I have not heard since she sailed for England four years ago, and never came back.

This is the shoreline of the Long Island Sound, whose trapped waters have engulfed hundreds of boats over the centuries. Deep down lie their bodies; these drowned souls, and rather like the madhouse, it doesn't matter where they came from or who they were, now they are all alike, now they are equal as they wait out the years, welcoming new souls from time to time.

The wind beats my face; it is spring and the wind is cold, colder still at night. The waves pound the shore in front of me and I become hypnotized by their continual cycle, up and down the beach.

Then, without warning, Caroline is there. She rises from the waves as far as her waist, dressed in the same green dress she was wearing the day I saw her off at the Chelsea Piers, though now the dress is darkened from the water. Her hair, always straight, is sleek and black and salt water runs from her fingers.

“Come to me,” she says, and I do.

I walk out into the cold waves. I feel nothing. I keep walking, a long way, and I know I should be underwater by now, but I am only waist high, like she is.

And then we touch, I put my hands into hers and pull them around me and hold her tight. Her wet hair strokes my cheek and I can smell salt and age and other, darker things, which I choose to ignore.

Then we go down. Fast, we sink into the water and I begin to panic that I will drown, but she laughs and puts a hand on my mouth.

“You don't need to breathe, down here,” she says, “You can't,” and I think, no, of course not, how silly of me.

Down we go, and though we are far below the night waves I can see through the murk around me.

Things are swimming. People. They swarm like clouds of midges that come and go, eager to see who I am, keen to keep their distance, and Caroline pulls me deeper. I know that all around me are the souls of the drowned, and yet only then do I begin to realize that there is something else down here. Something worse.

Now I see that Caroline is winding into the water. As if descending a vast invisible spiral stair, we're winding down, and down, and now the darkness does begin to take hold, and the water presses in on me, threatening to crush me in its grip, and Caroline turns to me and says,

“Why do you want her? Why do you want her? Why? When you could have me…”

She holds my hand and is about to pull me to the bottom where something terrible is waiting, and has been waiting through unlit centuries, and I scream.

I scream a stream of mad bubbles, and seeing them rise, I tear my hand from Caroline's and begin to kick for the surface, kicking, pulling with my arms, wriggling up through the water until my arms and legs are screaming, too, burning with pain, and just as I fear I won't ever get back, I land, in my bed, gasping for air.

I roll onto my back and, though I know it was a dream, my face is wet.

 

Saturday, April 9

The past week has hurried by, as fast as my first week at Orient Point. I am tired, perhaps to the point of exhaustion, for there is never an end to the work and the days are long. Now that I have been here a week I am expected to know everything, be everywhere, answer every query and report to Doctor Phillips each evening with a written summary of the day in my hand.

Verity's week has been no easier than mine, I suspect, and though she is talking to me happily enough again after the business last Saturday, she refuses to talk about school.

“If you need any help from me, Verity,” I told her last night, “you need only say.”

I hope she doesn't take me up on that offer, for there is no other choice for her than the schoolhouse in Greenport. Perhaps her tormentors will lose interest in her soon and pick on someone else. I don't tell her that. I don't want her to have false hopes.

I have not seen Dexter, to speak to, all week. Once or twice we passed each other in the halls, but he was always being detained by a warder or another doctor. Then, last night, as I made my report to Doctor Phillips, his name came up.

“The case of Charles Dexter,” Doctor Phillips said. “It remains an interesting one, does it not?”

I nodded, already on my guard. Phillips has used Dexter once already to humiliate me, and Dexter suffered as a consequence, too. I did not want to offer a repeat of either of those things.

“He does,” I said, prepared only to say the bare minimum by way of conversation.

“Come, now, Doctor James,” Phillips said. “You surely have more of an opinion than that?”

He fixed me with a needling look.

“His is an interesting case,” I admitted. “As are the cases of three thousand other patients here at Orient Point. Is there some matter you are referring to in particular?”

Doctor Phillips seemed to change his tune slightly then. He could see I was not going to be made the fool again, and his taunting manner disappeared.

“I know you think that some of our ways here are old-fashioned, but that is far from the case. As it happens, we are at the forefront of certain techniques, at least as far as the United States is concerned. I am very influenced by one or two European practitioners and, in fact, I have selected Dexter to be the first subject upon whom we will try a new cure, known as malarial treatment. The work in London, on those suffering from general paralysis, is very encouraging.”

“Malarial treatment?” I asked.

“You haven't heard of it? I thought you were abreast of all the latest techniques. Macbride and Templeton have published on the subject, as long as two years ago.”

“I must have been too busy to—”

“It doesn't matter. It is a very simple procedure and the outcomes of the experiments have been remarkable, at times.”

“What is involved in the procedure?”

“As I say, it is a very simple procedure. All that is required is access to a patient suffering from benign tertiary malaria. A blood sample is taken from that patient, and then injected into the general paralytic.”

“You infect the insane patient with malaria?”

“Indeed. The subsequent fevers are often high enough to destroy the syphilis bacillus in the patient, leading to recovery.”

“Often? And what of the malaria? Does that not prove fatal?”

Doctor Phillips fixed his eyes on me.

“Not in so many cases.”

I could do nothing but stare for a moment.

“And why do you select Dexter for this treatment?”

“I told you. Dexter is the candidate whom I consider most suitable. He is suffering from tertiary neurosyphilis, he shows increased symptoms and there seems little to be lost.”

“And when will you start?”

“We will start next week,” Doctor Phillips said. “I am making arrangements for the delivery of malarial blood from New York. All should be in hand very soon.”

Then he wished me a good night, and a pleasant weekend.

 

Sunday, April 10

I wanted to warn Dexter about what Doctor Phillips had in store for him. I spent all morning hunting for him. He had been allowed out to walk freely, the first time in two weeks.

I combed the grounds of Orient Point, as far as the shore, through the ornamental and vegetable gardens, through the workshops and outhouses of the asylum. I asked everyone I knew, and finally, it was the patient, Jonathan, who found him for me. Jonathan was nervously weeding a flower bed. I know he speaks to Dexter sometimes and thinks highly of him, and when I asked if he knew where he was, he sheepishly stabbed his trowel in the direction of the crematorium.

Spring has come to Long Island. The grounds are looking verdant and green, and today was warm, so I found it strange that Dexter had chosen to go inside.

The door of the crematorium was open, and I walked in to find it empty. It is a small place with enough room to seat no more than twenty mourners. There is the door to the furnace, and some apparatus for that business in front of it. But, of Dexter, I could see no sign. I noticed a metal door leading to a set of steps, which headed down to the basement, I guessed, and that was where I found him.

He turned away from a set of shelves as he heard me come into the dark basement room. It is without skylight or ventilations of any kind, and all four walls are covered with shelves from floor to ceiling. Every inch of the shelf space, the entire room, is taken up with identical metal canisters, copper canisters, each about five inches high and four in diameter. I noticed that there is a label on each, with some printed sections and handwritten additions.

“What are they?”

Dexter gave me the saddest of the many smiles he's given me in our time together.

“This is the library of dust,” he said.

Upstairs I had seen the cremation equipment, down here …

“Yes,” he said. “You're right. These are the ashes of the dead. Each in their own little tin, with a label. Their name, the date. Their age. That's all. And one by one, they're eating up the shelves.”

“Why don't the relatives take them?”

“You should know as well as me that asylums are full of people who no longer have anyone they can call a relative.”

He was right and I felt foolish for even asking the question. Yes, even somewhere as progressive as Orient Point had its share of people that society just wanted forgotten. And here they were, lining the shelves of the basement. Forgotten.

“Except by me,” Dexter said.

“Excuse me?”

“You were thinking about these people. All forgotten, yes? Except by me. And now you.”

That was not the first time that Dexter had somehow seen my thoughts. It continues to disturb me how he knows things he should not know. I did not want to give him a chance to disturb me the more.