The Lord Came at Twilight

by Daniel Mills

  He poured my drink. I took it from him and crossed the room and settled myself on an empty bench to watch the woman finish the ballad. She had reached the final verses, when the babes confront their mother and describe the fate that God has prepared her.

  Seven years a warning bell.

  Seven years in the deeps of hell.

  I drained my cup and did not notice when the barmaid returned to top it off, as I was much too absorbed in the scene laid before me. Those faceless watchers in the fire’s shadow. The light on the woman’s face as she sang in a childish voice: at once innocent and alluringly despoiled, garbed in crimson so that I knew I had to have her.

  The song was over. She turned away, heedless of the hoots and jeers that followed after her and disappeared beyond the firelight. I leapt to my feet in pursuit and pushed my way across the tavern until I cornered her in a narrow staircase.

  What do you want? she demanded, spinning around. Her accent was rough, her speech that of the western hills. Why are you following me?

  My tongue went limp against my teeth. I fumbled at my pocket and produced a crumpled wad of dollar bills. For the room, I mumbled. For the night.

  She looked down at the money and down at me. She inclined her head, tilted slightly to one side, and shook it slowly, her features downcast, the glimmerings of pity showing through.

  Goodnight, she said, politely but firmly, and began to climb.

  I lunged forward. No, I said, grabbing for her hand. Please, they said—

  She slapped me. Her nails sliced through my cheek, drawing blood where they raked across my nose and mouth. Too late I attempted to throw up my hand in defense and almost lost my balance. The singer disappeared up the stairs, leaving me to collapse with my face in my hands, the tears stinging in my eyes.

  But I wasn’t alone. I uncovered my face and found her lurking nearby. The barmaid. She had seen it all, I was sure. She must have followed me from the barroom. I expected ridicule, a snort of laughter, but instead I glimpsed a hunger in her—a delirious thirst, as of some need unfulfilled—and she touched my shoulder and kissed my cheek and showed me upstairs to her room.

  Here memory fails me. The rest of that night exists in fragments, glittering like the pieces of a broken mirror beyond which the world yawns blackly, blackening.

  The dank heat inside her bedroom. The sensation of her tongue against mine. The taste of yellowed teeth, rotted gums. The salt of sweat upon her skin.

  When it was over, we lay tangled together amidst the filthy bedding. She curled up against my armpit and fastened her arms around me.

  Downstairs, the tavern was quiet. The hour was late—the others departed or retired—and in that hush, the girl said things to me, foolish things. I saw it, she said. Your money. Marry me now and we’ll go away together. We’ll leave this place behind us.

  I could stand it no longer. I lurched to my feet and pulled on my shirt and trousers, ignoring her cries, conscious of nothing save my own sinfulness, the guilt that turned and kicked inside my chest. My hands shook. I buttoned my shirt and slipped away down the hall.

  There was the landing. The sconces had been extinguished, but the moon shone brightly through the shutters, and I hurried down the narrow stair, desperate to be away from that place and out among the night. The window vanished. A shadow passed across it, swift and silent as a bird’s wing, and I saw the gleam of bared teeth, the sparkle of bloodied metal—

  IV. The Innkeeper’s Daughter

  I was seven, I remember, when first I heard the screams come down the hallway. Roused from sleep, I tiptoed to the door and cracked it open in time to watch a woman sprint past, weeping, leaving dark handprints down the length of the corridor.

  My father pursued her, loping despite his girth, a cleaver in one hand. The woman reached the stairs, and hesitated, though my father did not. He barreled into her, sending her crashing down the wooden steps before descending after her with the cleaver raised.

  Her screams ceased. I stood in the doorway, trembling.

  Later, I tried to run. While my father was in the cellar, I donned my cloak and lowered myself from the bedroom window. The roof-line sloped beneath me, slanting to a low eave from which I dangled and dropped. Terrified, I fled north along the old road, passing flooded farm-fields, empty houses.

  I was careful. Nonetheless I must have strayed—or so I thought—for I came upon the tavern once more. Morning had dawned, gray and lightless, and my father shouted my name from an upper window. I attempted to flee again that afternoon and again upon the following night, but it was all to no use, as every path returned me to the Wayside.

  Then the traveler came. He was familiar to me, somehow, and in my childishness, I thought I could save him. I brought him a cup, hoping that he might take his ease and then depart, but by then, he was already ensnared. Drugged or not, my father meant to have him, and the punishment he administered to me that night was swift and severe.

  If only I weren’t alone, I thought, as I lay awake afterward. If only there were another beside me. For the Wayside thrived on the shame of the lonely, the sorrows of the damned. My loneliness was that of the traveler, just as his grief was my grief, and I kicked and thrashed in the trap that had been set for me.

  At seventeen, I saw my chance for release and seized it, though the lad wanted nothing to do with me. Afterward, my father came into the bedroom. His rage was bottomless, terrifying, his apron dark with blood. He had exchanged the cleaver for the strap and fell upon me with the same cruelty he had shown to the others—but never before to me—thrashing me with his belt until my ears rang, and the world faded, and I lapsed into nothingness.

  I heard them. An old man, his voice like worn glass. Two young girls, twins. A father stricken with grief. The slurred and mumbled speech of a madwoman. The last voice I heard belonged to the ballad singer, dead no more than hour. Her song hissed and gurgled through the slash in her throat. Alive, alive, oh!

  When I woke, my bed was ruined, the sheets stained and soiled. The voices had faded, but my burden was lighter, for I now understood the nature of my isolation. This was why I could not leave the Wayside, its voices: even in life, I was no different from them.

  That summer was dry. One morning, out cutting kindling, I ventured beyond the far stone wall and looked back at the tavern. The sun had climbed above the wild wood, illuminating the locust trees, the shuttered windows of the Wayside.

  Smoke rose from the brick chimney like the last breaths of the dying. Months of drought had left the countryside as barren as its ghosts: the voices that haunted me in the night, the life that had taken root inside my belly.

  A breeze parted the dry grass. The locusts blanched and crackled, shedding flakes of bark. Good for nothing but firewood, my father had said—and the same was true of the Wayside itself with its beds and linens and the spirits kept behind the counter. It would go up in minutes, I knew, given the right kind of spark.

  Summer dwindled and still no rain. I made a dress from my bed-sheets and used it to cover my stomach. He would find out soon, I knew, but I bided my time before acting, siphoning rum from the bottles in the barroom. And if my father realized the bottles were getting low, he said nothing of it, nor did he find the bottles stashed behind the headboard in my room.

  The sawmill closed. Money was scarce, the travelers few. By night my father paced the length of his bedroom, pathetic in his despair, bewailing his lost purpose, the God whom he hated and against whom he raged in these late watches, though the darkness heard him not.

  There was no one listening—no one but me. That night, I waited outside his door until I heard him fall to sleep. Then I padded downstairs to the kitchen and retrieved a knife from the block. I donned wool socks to muffle my tread and shuffled toward his bedside with exacting—excruciating—slowness. The floorboards groaned beneath me, warped in the years since he built this tavern, but he did not wake, not even when I paused and stood looming over him in the dark.

  My hands wer
e sweaty. I shifted my grip on the knife’s handle and placed the tip against his throat. He murmured in his sleep. So many, he said. With one thrust, I drove in the knife and plunged it through a second time as he came awake sputtering. He burbled, choked, and dropped away into emptiness. I lowered my ear to his breast but heard nothing.

  I retrieved the bottles from my bedroom and returned to douse the bed. Then I went for the lantern and cast its light upon a scene of horror. Dark stains on my hands and dress. The stench of alcohol and urine. His eyes glittered, dull within that dim light. The mangled throat yawned, slick and shining. He smiled.

  I threw the lantern. It shattered, spilling paraffin down the bedclothes. The corpse ignited with a whoosh of air, the smiling face blackening, melting away.

  The fire licked up the walls and crept along the floorboards. I turned and dashed down the hallway to the stairs. From behind me came a deafening crash, the roar of flames. I hurled myself into the night, sprinting with my dress held tight about me, the ends flapping like sails as the fire churned and belched and shook free the roof-slates, driving a column of smoke high into the air, where it would be visible for miles: a beacon, a warning bell.

  Rain sheeted down. I pushed myself forward despite my exhaustion, heedless of the damp in my hair, the mud that spattered my dress, forcing myself to go on though I could not feel the child inside me. The downpour was cold, verging on freezing, and I passed a long night amidst the darkness and the sleet and the snow that fell in the hours before daybreak.

  Dawn found the land well blanketed. Too weary to stand, I stumbled and crawled until I heard the snowfall cease and felt the warmth of the sun on my back.

  There was the Wayside. Its savaged hulk was dusted with snow and wreathed in rising steam. The timbers were blackened, burned out, but the southern wall stood with the light in its empty windows, a whitish glow. The doorframe survived though the door had fallen and the building exuded a living silence like the hush that follows a storm.

  I was alone. I could not hear them: their voices, mine.

  I could not hear anything at all.

  V. The Listener

  His flashlight passes over broken walls and foundations, bending back upon itself where it strikes the bare snags beyond. Locust trees: bald and peeling, shining like white lines. He lowers the light and sweeps its beam across the cellar hole in front of him.

  The ground has subsided from the northwest corner of the building. The stones have buckled and collapsed, spilling over into the cellar, but the brick chimney remains intact, a broken pillar. Dead leaves fill the whole of the structure, or what remains of it, and the darkness stirs within, immutable, alive with the whispers of night and stillness: present here in this late hour, in the glint of glass or bone amidst the rubble.

  He turns and strikes back toward the hiking trail, following the former toll route where it climbs toward the western mountains. After fifty yards he reaches his campsite. He unzips the tent and crawls inside, securing the flaps behind him.

  He pulls the sleeping bag to his chest and lies with the flashlight against his collarbone, the beam tilted up. He hears crickets, the call of an owl, and imagines his shadow on the tent-wall behind him. It swims in place, flickering with every breath, every wind.

  The wind in the locusts. The rattle of breath in the old chimney.

  He switches off the light.

  JOHN BLAKE

  In the village of Eastbourne in New York there lived a lad of seventeen, a farrier’s boy named John Blake.

  His late father Edward was a printer by trade, a Patriot known for broadsheets in which he wrote of mankind’s Natural Liberty and the tyranny of kings. He advocated protest, then warfare, and later he led the group that tarred and feathered a Royalist on Eastbourne Common. When fighting broke out, he shuttered his press to take up a musket and died at Long Island in August of ’76.

  In the autumn, Eastbourne’s Loyalists raised a militia company and marched through town to the beating of drums, inciting reprisals against the town’s Patriots. A mob assaulted Edward Blake’s print-shop. They broke up the press and set fire to the building that housed it. Edward’s widow Anne was said to have stood and watched from the cottage opposite, singing hymns over the roaring flames even as the child turned and kicked inside of her.

  The boy John was born in October. He was a thoughtful child, halting of speech and given to long silences. In these characteristics, at least, he resembled his mother, who was thin and sickly and famously devout, a fanatical Calvinist who had suffered from convulsions since girlhood. She married late on account of this infirmity and soon came to worship the man she had wed. With Edward’s death, she retreated into the low cottage wherein she raised the child on her own, safeguarding John against the world with all the jealousy of a god.

  By the age of sixteen, John was already an imposing lad, well over six feet in height. Naturally, the town’s farrier took notice. He approached Anne Blake and begged her leave to train the boy as his apprentice. To his surprise, she agreed. “John is a child no longer,” she said. “He must learn to make his way.” Perhaps she knew that she was dying.

  So John was taught to smith and shoe and tend the furnaces, though he was melancholic by nature and showed little temperament for the farrier’s trade. In the evenings, walking home, he would pause beside the stage road and watch the horses thunder past. Oftentimes he did not return to the cottage ‘til after nightfall when he heard his mother calling.

  In the spring of ’94, Anne Blake passed through her final illness and was interred beneath the churchyard. The funeral proved well-attended, with some coming from as far away as Boston. For the most part, these were relatives of his mother, to whom she had written in her last days, but there were others there as well, with names and faces John did not recognize.

  Among this latter group was the young Margaret Carrier, his cousin’s cousin, who lived with her father in a plantation across the river. She was pale and slender, as had been his mother, and likewise possessed the delicacy and grace of a frost-rimed blossom—and when they walked together, after the burial, she stopped and took his hand in hers and held it at her breast. In that moment, he heard the blood inside her, fluttering at his fingertips like the wings of a hummingbird. They did not speak, and John’s shyness was such that he could not look at her, and several minutes passed before he realized she was weeping.

  At home that evening, he opened his mother's jewelry box and took the ring from inside. With this ring, Edward Blake had won his mother’s hand. The band was silver and finely-wrought, with an inset ruby that shimmered and slowed the light, opening depths in the stone. Tonight, in that whirling redness, John saw Margaret standing with her back to him, one hand outstretched and the ring upon her finger. She was fat with child, his child, and he watched as she turned to face him.

  Sunday came, a day without work. He woke at dawn while the village slept and filled a sack with bread and cheese. He looped a cord through the ring and placed it round his neck, the band being too small for him to wear. He tucked the ruby inside his shirt and paused in the doorway, his head swimming with thoughts of his beloved: her dark eyes and sorrow, her heart's blood beating against his palm. He slipped from the house.

  It was a distance of nearly three miles to the river, beyond which lay the Carrier plantation. The morning was cold. Trees rattled and shook with the wind streaming through, sifting down drifts of shriveled buds and leaves. The ford was running high with snowmelt, but he followed the river northward to the narrows, where a great tree had fallen, and there made his way across with shuffling, sidelong steps.

  After another mile, he stopped to eat his breakfast. By then the morning frost had melted, though clouds remained to hide the sun. In the shelter of a hemlock grove, he seated himself on an uprooted trunk and wrapped his greatcoat round him. He listened for the songs of birds, the lowing of cattle, but heard only the wind, which was dry and constant and broke about his ears like the gnashing of teeth.

>   He did not hear the man approach. He would not have see him either but for his shadow, which stretched over the damp ground and covered John where he sat—and this despite the prevailing grayness, the absence of sun or other shadows.

  John leapt up, startled. He spun round to confront his visitor.

  The man was of normal height and build but plainly of great wealth. His breeches were silk and leafed with gold while over his shirt he wore a coat of rich blue wool. His face was hidden by his cloak, which was of a similarly fine fabric and dyed a pale and febrile shade of yellow. His boots gleamed.

  The man spoke. “I trust you have not waited here long?”

  His voice was refined in accent, possessed of a low timbre as smooth as the silks he wore.

  “Forgive me, sir,” said John, “but I fear you have mistaken me. I have not waited here for you—or for anyone. And I am certain we have not met before.”

  The other man was quiet. John imagined his eyes darting back and forth beneath the hood: assessing, probing.

  “Perhaps not,” the man conceded. “But I know you, John Blake.”

  He swept toward John with a single, fluid motion akin to the shimmer of light in water. John stepped back, stumbled, and dropped to his knees, even as the gloved hand came near him. The long fingers closed about the silver ring where it lay exposed upon John’s breast. Evidently, it had slipped free of his shirt while he crossed the river.

  For a time the man held the ring with exquisite delicacy, turning it back and forth as to catch the gray light through the hemlocks. Then he released it. The ring swung toward John upon its tether and thudded against his breastbone, striking once then twice, like the rapping of a visitor who stands upon the threshold and waits to be admitted.