The Lord Came at Twilight

by Daniel Mills

  “He returned to town, where cries of terror greeted his arrival. Peter shouted an oath and fell to his knees, confessing his crime so all could hear.

  “The two men were brought before the Boyar, who was so amazed by the miracle of Silas’s return that he was moved to show mercy. He spared Peter from the axe and rewarded Silas’s steadfastness with two gold coins. Peter turned to the Lord and entered a monastery, while Silas, resurrected, resumed his trade as a carpenter

  “Years passed, but having died once, Silas did not age. The Boyar died and was replaced by his successor. In time his successor succumbed to the plague and the land passed into civil war. When Peter died at the age of one-hundred-and-eleven, Silas knew his time had come.

  “One evening, around twilight, he left the town and went once more to the crossroads. There he lay himself down between the two forks, just as he had awoken so many years before. He placed the Boyar’s gold coins upon his eyelids and waited there for nightfall. He waited in the stillness of the evening, his heart pounding, pounding—”

  Here the Professor paused, as though lost in thought. He dragged on his pipe, blowing curls of smoke back against the lamplight. He sighed.

  “In the morning, he was gone. Some say he walks the earth to this day, that God will not grant him rest. Others believe the earth swallowed him whole, while still others—”

  “It was the gray woman,” Virgil said. “She came back for him. She must have done.”

  The Professor shrugged and sucked the stem of his pipe, exhaling through his nose. “Perhaps she did,” he said. “But no one knows—and no one can know.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because of the crossroads. It is a between place, Virgil. A place of nothingness. And in that nothingness, all things are possible.”

  *

  The story ended there—much to Virgil’s frustration—but the mystery of it tantalized him somehow, so that he found himself returning to it again and again throughout the course of his childhood. Upon learning of his adoption, he became obsessed with the story, much as the Professor had always intended.

  The late Professor T. Albert Lodge was a noted scholar of linguistics with an avowed interest in folklore and so-called “fairy stories,” particularly those that had been compiled by the Russian scholar Alexandr Vidofsky in the mid-Nineteenth Century. Vidofsky himself was long dead, executed as an anarchist by the Tsarist government. Since then, his work had fallen into disinterest, if not outright disrepute.

  This was hardly surprising. While Vidofsky was a gifted writer and artist, his scholarship could hardly be described as conventional. For seven years, he traveled on foot throughout the Ukraine and Byelorussia, recording in shorthand some four thousand variations on a set of eighty-one peasant stories.

  But Vidofsky was not content merely to be a collector of Slavic folklore. After returning to St. Petersburg, he engaged upon the creation of his masterwork: a three volume sequence entitled Ex Tenebris Tenebrae. In this work, he refined and synthesized his four thousand variations to produce a sequence of eighty-one short tales of limitless implication and lingering strangeness. These eighty-one were further divided into three volumes of twenty-seven tales each—a nod to Vidofsky’s interest in numerology.

  Vol. III appeared when Vidofsky was fifty-one. He lived out the remaining twenty years of his life in seclusion. After his execution, a search was made of his belongings, but the original source materials—those four thousand stories he had collected as a young man—were missing. Later it emerged that Vidofsky had burned his papers himself, so that the “purified” texts (as he referred to them) would remain his final legacy.

  Following his retirement from the University, Professor Lodge devoted the whole of his scholarly efforts to the study of Vidofsky’s writings. Through careful analysis of the Russian folklorist’s grammar and verbiage, the Professor believed he could reconstruct the original peasant stories in all of their many variations.

  When Virgil’s parents died, the Professor read of the tragedy in the papers and used his standing in society to secure the adoption of the “the miracle child.” To Virgil he bestowed his surname and his vocation. He attended to Virgil’s schooling personally, teaching the boy to read at age three. For thirty years they lived together in the house, working together, seeing almost no one. Then he died, leaving Virgil to continue with his work at the age of thirty-one.

  In this, as in all things, Virgil has proved a dutiful son. Every night, he applies himself to the study of Vidofsky’s language, cross referencing the Professor’s notes and translations so as to identify potential points of variance within the purified texts. At dawn, he retires to bed and sleeps until noon, at which time he eats his daily meal, sustaining himself on deliveries of bread and milk. At half-past four, he enters the library to begin the day’s work.

  The dullness of this routine, exact in every particular, is relieved only by his first sight of Katherine at dawn and by his second glimpse of her at twilight when she returns from the factory with her hair down, her heeled shoes rapping on the pavement.

  *

  Saturday evening. Shortly after eight o’clock, the doorbell sounds. He listens, disbelieving, and is rewarded by a second chime.

  He descends the stairs to the front door and cracks it open, peering outside over the chain. A woman lingers on the stoop, wreathed in the perfume of pressed flowers.

  She turns to the crack in the door. Katherine: dark hair, eyes like gray moons. Terror seizes him, pinning him into place with the surety of nightmare.

  “Mr. Lodge?” she says. Her voice is delicate and pretty, though her speech is unrefined. “It’s all right. I’m Katherine Sutcliff? I live across the street with my mother—Rose Sutcliff? She knew your father years ago. When she was a girl. She isn’t well, you see, and she’d like me to read to her. Only it’s so late now, I doubted I’d find anything—”

  He removes the chain and opens the door. He hopes she cannot see his shaking. “Rose Sutcliff,” he says, pretending to recognize the name. “Of course. Please come in.”

  She smiles, flashing a mouth of perfect teeth, and steps into the hallway. The smell of her perfume is overwhelming. It fills the dome of his skull, the confines of the narrow corridor.

  “I worried you meant to keep me out there all night.”

  “No,” he says. “It’s just—I need to be careful. The Professor’s books…”

  He gestures vaguely, miserably.

  “Isn’t that the truth?” she says. “Mother and I were robbed last fall. They made off with her savings. Every penny of it.”

  “Oh dear. That’s terrible.”

  He is dizzied by their proximity to one another, by the whiteness of her teeth and the smell of her breath and skin: sweat, the sweetness of dried roses. Light-headed, he turns and proceeds to the staircase, glancing over his shoulder to ensure she follows.

  “I gather you were hoping to borrow a book?”

  “It’s my mother,” she says. “Her gout pains her terribly of late and she cannot get out of bed. I’ve been reading to her for weeks now but she’s grown tired of His Word and it’s all we have. Then I remembered her saying once how your father was always reading, standing at the window of his room, and I thought maybe we might be able to borrow something.”

  They reach the library with its towering shelves, its long tables heaped with books and manuscripts. The stench of dust, pervasive, serves to conceal the smell of her perfume, and he finds he breathes easier in its absence.

  “What does your mother like to read?”

  “Ghost stories. Books with murders in them. Detective stories.”

  “I believe the Professor may have owned a few novels. Let me see if I can find them.” Virgil scales the library steps to the highest shelf and retrieves an early edition of The Moonstone. “Here we are,” he says, descending, but she does not hear him.

  She appears entirely absorbed in a copy of Ex Tenebris Tenebrae, which she must have plucked from one of
the desks. It is Volume I of the Professor’s English translation, published twenty years earlier in a limited run of fifty copies.

  The book includes all of Vidofsky’s original artwork, including the etched frontispiece at which Katherine now stares with obvious fascination. Her brow is furrowed, her lower lip folded into her mouth. The frontispiece depicts a woman posed with a writhing serpent—an obvious reference to Vidofsky No. 1, “Of Man’s Fall and the Conqueror Eve.” However, the Professor also believed the image doubled as an allusion to the gray woman of Vidofsky No. 27.

  Vidofsky has placed his subject in a woodland clearing, pine trees visible behind her head. The woman, veiled, stands with legs akimbo, pinning the snake with one bare foot, long hair streaming behind her like river weeds. In addition to the veil, she wears a flowing skirt, but her chest is exposed, marked by a single breast.

  “She is an androgyne,” Virgil says. “A hermaphrodite.”

  Katherine raises her head. She regards him blankly.

  “Vidofsky was fascinated by something he described in his writings as ‘the lure of luminal,’ which is to say, the indefinable attraction exerted on us by things or places that cannot be categorized by a single word, but which seem to exist, as it were, in the spaces between words—or, indeed, between worlds—where the signifier and the signified thin and merge together. The gray woman, by being both man and woman, embodies this state of essential flux. Even the color ‘gray’ suggests...”

  He trails off. She is not listening.

  “Are there ghosts?” she asks.

  “Pardon?”

  She taps the frontispiece. “In the book. My mother loves ghost stories.” She lowers her voice and leans toward him, close enough for him to feel the warmth of her breath on his ear. “She’s something of a believer, I’m afraid. Father Greenaway despairs of her.”

  Virgil swallows. He steps away from her, stammering. “Well, yes, there are ghosts, of a kind, but I’m not certain that—perhaps she might not prefer...”

  “Can I borrow it? I’ll bring it back to you.”

  Surprised, he can merely nod.

  She thanks him profusely and wishes him good evening, preceding him down the stairs to the door. He watches her cross the street to her building. She turns and waves from the stoop and then she is gone. He closes the door and secures the chain.

  The house is silent. He settles his weight against the wall and gazes up at the ceiling, invisible in the dimness. He breathes deeply, inhaling with every breath the certainty of solitude, the memory of her perfume.

  *

  He passes the remainder of the evening in restless frustration, unable to concentrate. The hours stretch, counted off by the clock downstairs, which rings first for eleven then twelve. He attempts to read from Vidofsky No. 1 in the original Cyrillic, but his eyes rove the page without comprehension and the characters rearrange themselves, forming the outline of a face—her face—and he tastes once more the sweetness of her scent in his lungs.

  At one o’clock, he goes to the window.

  From here, the city lies open before him, gas-flames flickering on shadowed streets and alleys. In the distance, a few lights glimmer, house-fires that wink like dying stars, flares that burst and streak and leave no trace upon the heavens. Even the street lamps crackle and fade with the dark, rendering all notions of space meaningless. He drifts off.

  The dream begins, like his childhood nightmares, with the loss of the light. The moon is down. The stars are gone, blotted from the sky. Despite the darkness, he can discern the outline of a hooded figure standing on the stoop of the tenement building opposite.

  It is the woman he saw on the previous night, though he can no longer be certain of her sex. She is exceedingly tall, surpassing Virgil’s height by a foot or more. Her skirts are wide and shapeless, her veil spun from a queer black material, darker even than light’s absence.

  She waves at him, beckoning, and begins to run—wild and graceful, a shadow swung before a swaying lamp. Outside now, he chases after her. His slippers pound the pavement but fail to absorb the impact of each step. His ankles throb. His calves burn with the effort of pursuit.

  Inevitably, he slows. He falls behind, sliding backward into the mouth of a city that feels increasingly drab and colorless, suffused with the monotony of routine. Ahead of him, the veiled woman rolls like a black wave over cracked earth and pavement, racing westward into the teeth of nightmare while the rest of the city recedes to placid normalcy.

  She is making for the lake. The rotten wharves, the shuttered warehouses. The rails that bend and crisscross, encircling the city like spider’s silk.

  He stumbles. When he regains his feet, she is nowhere to be seen. From the west, a whistle sounds, a low susurrus like the notes of a flute in water—then suddenly closer, so loud and shrill it cuts him from the dream.

  It is Sunday morning, the twilight soured, not yet spent. He collects himself from the floor of the library and retires to bed, intending to steal another few hours of rest. But he sleeps until two when he is woken by children playing stick-ball in the garden behind the house.

  His head aches. He draws the curtains.

  *

  After supper, he walks down to the lake, retracing the woman’s steps from the dream. Basswoods are flowering. Musk spills from their open blossoms, so that he thinks again of Katherine Sutcliff, the scent which lingers even now in the downstairs corridor of the house, in the stillness of the library. The thought of her has preoccupied him since he woke, driving him out-of-doors for the first time since the Professor’s funeral.

  In recent decades, the city’s harbor has shrunken in size and significance. A few warehouses show signs of recent activity, but many have closed their doors for good, and the lake-shore is deserted at this hour. Birds sing in the abandoned railway station. The tracks, used only for freight, swarm with weeds and wildflowers.

  At dusk, he turns and heads for home. Behind him, in the space over the lake, constellations have arrayed themselves in interwoven patterns, changing with the changing seasons. Springtime. The air hums, charged with possibility: the retreat of the frost, the birds’ mating songs, the life which swells and bursts from the basswoods.

  *

  She is waiting for him when he arrives home. Rising from the stoop, she greets him cheerfully, the borrowed book held to her breast. He can smell the spring on her, the tang of perfume in her hair. “I hope you haven’t waited long,” he says.

  “Not long,” she replies, smiling brightly. “Besides, it’s a beautiful evening.”

  “It is.”

  “I wanted to return this to you,” she says, proffering the Vidofsky. “I meant to bring it by this morning, before church, but Mother wanted to show it to Father Greenaway.”

  “Father Greenaway?”

  “He’s our priest—and very proper, too. He doesn’t go in for spirits and so on, but Mother thought it might convince him, the book. That’s why we had to bring it with us.”

  “Convince him of what, precisely?”

  “Well, it was that last story, the one with the two friends and the gray woman, the crossroads where they left the body.”

  “‘And in that place there was a nothingness,’” he murmurs.

  “Right,” she says. “That’s the one. Mother said it was like one of Our Lord’s parables, but instead of showing us how we should be kind to our neighbors, say, or give up all our possessions, it shows how Christ returned from the grave—and why. The man in the story, Silas? He was neither dead nor alive but it didn’t matter either way. Because of the crossroads.

  “Now Father Greenaway seemed willing to accept her argument that far, but then she said the same was true of Our Lord. His very life, she said, was a place halfway—not halfway between man and woman like in that picture but between Man and God. For him, there could be no lasting death—and so there could be no resurrection either.”

  Katherine pauses dramatically, expecting some manner of reaction from him. Shock?
Revulsion? Virgil says, “Your mother sounds like a remarkable woman.”

  She laughs. “Oh, she is that, and no mistake! But Father Greenaway said the book was the vilest blasphemy and told her she must have nothing more to do with it. Not that she listened. She wanted me to read to her again tonight, but I said I couldn’t—not after what Father Greenaway told us. Then she said she’d read it herself, but I couldn’t possibly let her do that. The good of her soul, you understand. Besides, it gave her bad dreams. So I hid it away in the pantry until she went to sleep. Then I brought it here.”

  He takes the book from her. The leather cover is gritty, dusted with bread flour. “I’m sorry it has caused you such trouble.”

  “It isn’t your fault. I know you meant us no harm. Will you be at home tomorrow night? I’d like to bring you some supper. To thank you, I mean.”

  He nods. His tongue, flaccid, fills his mouth, choking off his breath.

  “Well, then,” she says, grinning. Her crimson lips curl back, baring bone-white teeth. Her gray eyes shimmer with starlight. “Until tomorrow.”

  *

  He carries the book upstairs to the library and lays it down on the desk. With a damp cloth, he wipes the flour from the cover and lights a second candle for closer inspection. He is surprised by the care with which the book has been handled. The binding appears undamaged, the pages intact. He sighs, relieved, and fans the leaves with his thumb.

  The book falls open to Vidofsky No. 11: “Of Other Worlds and the Passageways Thereof.” The accompanying etching depicts a cobble road, a horizon crowded with unfamiliar constellations. A minotaur. A spider. A serpent with forked tongue.

  A massive hole has been torn into the sky. This “passageway” yawns at the center, its edges ragged and spreading. Two figures stand before it, discernible only in silhouette, black strokes on the faded page.