by Daniel Mills
All of the rooms were empty. In one doorway I lingered long enough to take in the straw-covered cot, a pair of cheap candlesticks crusted with wax. A bedroom of some sort, I thought. Slave quarters, maybe. The curtains were drawn, but a wan light seeped through, casting a checkered glow on the floor, and I saw that the boards were clean and largely free of dust.
By now Nichols and Barry were far ahead of me. They had reached the end of the hall, where a heavy door blocked our way, sealing us inside that narrow corridor. Nichols struck out with his rifle-butt. This caused the door to shudder, though it didn’t yield, not even after a second blow and a third. Barry simply grinned and tried the handle. It was unlocked.
He stepped through, and I followed, emerging behind him into the largest room I had ever seen. The ceilings were high, the space beneath unfurnished save for scattered piles of silk cushions, which were grouped about an assortment of braziers and candelabra.
It seemed we were inside an entry hall of some sort, though the high doors were nailed shut. To our left, a wide staircase swept down from the upper floor, while a marble pedestal sat at the center of the room, opposite the stair, upon which perched the statue of a naked man.
He was four feet tall, nearly life-sized, his eyes round and piercing but also distant, as though he were straining to see across an unbridgeable chasm. Only when I looked closer did I notice the horns nestled within the loops of his hair and the hooves he had in place of feet.
Nichols was drawn to it immediately. He approached the statue with short, shuffling steps and came to a halt directly beneath it. He sighed and smiled queerly, his face darkening with a memory of other days. “Exquisite,” he said.
I looked at Barry, but the Irishman looked at least as surprised as I felt, and then I recalled that Nichols had once been an artist. Maybe he had been a sculptor.
For a while, we were quiet, and I walked toward the doors, drawing up short when I noticed the picture at my feet, lying half-concealed beneath a silk pillow. It was a daguerreotype image of a man in a ladder-back chair: tall and gaunt, his hands long and thin. The glass casing had cracked, allowing in the damp, so that the man’s face had been blotted out, though the doctor’s bag on his knee bespoke his profession. A statue could be seen in the background, a naked man with hooves, and I realized the photograph had been taken in that very room.
I thought about picking it up but decided against it. The picture made me distinctly uneasy, though I couldn’t say why. Just a feeling, I suppose. So I went to the window and peeled back the drapery to look outside. Shadows moved on the statue of the covered woman, and beyond her, the flooded fields rippled and frothed.
Barry broke the silence.
“This Goddamned heat,” he said, mopping his brow. “I’m thirsty.”
“You’re always thirsty,” Nichols said, who appeared to have shaken off whatever spell had come over him. “Comes with being Irish, I expect.”
“Maybe so,” Barry replied, gamely. “But the kitchen can’t be far from here.”
I rejoined the others where they lingered round the statue, and Nichols led us down a second corridor, one running parallel to the first. We passed closets stuffed with stained linens, bedding ragged with age or overuse. The kitchen lay at the end of this hallway, a cramped space floored in stone with small windows opening onto the rear of the house.
We laid our rifles by the door. Inside, the great hearth was unlit, mounded with old ashes, and a flight of stairs led down to the cellars. To the right I spotted a small door inset within the wall. It caught my eye straightaway, being no more than a yard on a side and situated some three feet off the ground.
“A dumbwaiter,” Barry said. “You find them in houses like this.”
Nichols threw wide the pantry doors and began to rummage, looking for whiskey, I guessed, or wine. Finding nothing, he cursed and dashed a shelf of canning jars onto the floor.
“I’m going down the cellar,” he said, and swept from the pantry, trailed by Barry, who paused just long enough to pluck a pickled onion from the floor and sink in his teeth.
I didn’t go with them. I suppose I was still nervous, still unsettled. Or maybe I was just tired. I don’t know. In any case I set myself down upon the counter and fanned myself with my cap, listening to the wind through the columns outside, bringing in the storm.
After a time, rain broke from the clouds and clattered against the windows, and a few whoops of laughter drifted up from the cellar. Nichols had found the spirits, evidently, and I lowered myself to the ground, thinking I might go and join them.
Then I heard something, and froze. I listened hard ‘til I heard it again.
The sound of someone breathing. Coming from inside the dumbwaiter.
The blood surged inside me. Shaking now, breathing fast, I stalked noiselessly to the doors and retrieved my rifle. It wasn’t loaded, but I slid the bayonet down over the barrel and thrust it out before me as I approached the dumbwaiter. The breathing grew louder, or so I thought, and then choked off altogether, as though he or she were holding the breath inside them.
A bottle shattered downstairs. Nichols roared with laughter, and I knew they couldn’t hear me even if I were to cry out. I was alone in that moment, as I would always be alone. There was nothing else for it: I slid the bayonet under the latch and lifted it free.
The door creaked open. Inside was a negress, a slave. She looked young, younger than I was, and I was just nineteen. She might have been a pretty thing once, but her masters had been awfully cruel to her. Her front teeth were missing, and there were white lines etched about her lips, scars where her mouth had been forcibly widened, the tongue sliced away.
She made no sound, but it was plain enough that she was frightened, and I lowered the bayonet. This caused her to breathe easier—at least for a time, anyway—at least until we heard footfalls on the cellar stairs and Nichols entered the room.
*
My father paused. He hesitated, as though unsure of how much he wished to impart, and the silence stretched between us. In that shared emptiness, a sparrow alighted upon the windowsill. It twitched its head from left to right and then back again, turning one eye on me and then the other, and it was several minutes more before my father resumed his story.
*
We saw to her, the girl we found. Afterward, she scuttled away into the dusk. The wind was still blowing and the downpour showed no signs of ceasing. Four o’clock. We were running out of daylight, but those southern storms never lasted long.
“We’ll wait it out,” Nichols said.
He refilled his flask from the bottle he had found and handed it round. Barry helped himself to a swallow then offered it to me. I drank greedily, tipping back the flask ‘til my throat ached and the floor seemed to tilt beneath me, sliding away into the cellar’s mouth.
“Now, now,” said Barry, easing the bottle from my grip. He loosened my fingers one at a time, saying nothing all the while, and Nichols, too, was quiet as he listened to the storm and watched the raindrops slither down the windows.
Barry asked me if I wanted to go upstairs. I nodded. Nichols offered no reply, so we left him where he sat, gazing off into the distance with his pants around one ankle, looking in that moment like the statue he had so admired.
We climbed the staircase to the upper floor, walking without purpose or direction, passing bedrooms and a gentleman’s study, and Barry beside me all the while, speaking softly, trying to give comfort. “You did nothing wrong,” he said. “You did nothing.”
But I wasn’t listening, and when we came to the doctor’s library, I left Barry standing in the doorway and made my way over to the window. The upper half of the frame was domed by a fan of colored glass. Through this I saw the back of the woman-warrior’s head, her hair red and streaming against the storm. Her neck was thickly muscled, the tendons showing like knotted ropes, and her sword was visible where it soared to the cornice, splitting the rain as it winged toward the glass.
I stood
there for a while—I don’t know how long—but the next thing I remember, Barry was calling to me across the library. The ground at his feet was scattered with scraps of loose paper, and he held a drill in his hands.
He motioned me closer, and I crossed the room to where he stood, my steps muted beneath me so that I seemed to be half-floating, moving slow and silent as a somnambulist.
“Look at this,” he said, grasping the hand-crank and turning. The bit revolved slowly, the toothed end flecked with black stains. “It’s a barber-surgeon’s drill. For taking out teeth.”
He opened his mouth. “Like these,” he said, grinning, showing off rows of rotten stumps—and I thought of the negro girl, the gaps in her otherwise perfect teeth.
I didn’t say anything.
“I found it in there,” he said, nodding toward the nearest bookcase. “It was on top of those ledgers.” One such volume had fallen on the ground. I noted the name upon the cover. Thaddeus H. Field, M.D., Esq. The doctor’s accounts were listed inside, with columns showing payments received and so forth, his patients given numbers rather than names.
Thunder rumbled in the distance. Barry rifled through the papers at our feet, reading from notes or letters, pages what appeared torn from an anatomy textbook. He showed me one leaf of paper that bore the imprint of a woman’s foot from toe to heel. The stain was brown and dark with age, the outlines blurring where some of the ink had leached through.
“Excellent news,” he read aloud. “Client 107 reported a dramatic increase in pleasure & duration of experience following this latest surgery to the pelvic regions, &c, a fact which I have this evening verified to my own satisfaction. Nonetheless I believe that further surgical intervention may yet prove desirable, given the girl’s youth as well as—”
Footsteps from downstairs. A crash like falling stone.
Barry cut himself off.
“Your rifle,” he hissed. “Where is it?”
“The kitchen. I didn’t…”
“Stay here,” he said. He pressed the drill into my hands. “It isn’t much,” he said, “but it’s sharp enough.”
“No,” I said. “Don’t go.”
He unsheathed the knife at his belt. The light was nearly gone, but the blade glittered, reflecting his face in all its anguish and resolve.
“I’ll come back for you,” he said, and disappeared down the corridor.
I was alone. Rain slapped the window, rattling the frame, and I fought to master my panic, worse now than at Shiloh, and the awful quiet pressing down on me.
Brown stains on the floor. A woman’s footprint traced in blood.
Sweat poured down my back, driving shivers out to the tips of my fingers, causing the blood to beat in my veins. It throbbed in my ears, rising steadily in pitch, whistling like irons in the forge or the cry of the warrior-woman as she raised her sword aloft.
Her scream, heard or imagined, slashed through my eardrums, boring into my brain, and I thought of the tongue-less girl, the scars about her mouth, those last words from the Doctor’s diary. Nonetheless I believe that further surgical intervention may yet prove desirable…
The drill twitched in my hands, a living thing. It slipped free, striking the floor with a heavy thump, and the wind roared again, whipping the rain through the statue’s hair and spattering the glass like the spray from a severed artery.
I fled.
The upper hallway ran the length of the house and came to an end before a tall, multi-paned window. The sun was visible through the glass, setting now, bursting from layers of storm-clouds to drive the reddish light before it. I hastened forward, halting when I reached what appeared to be the master bedroom.
I looked inside. The bed was unmade, the clothes caked in black stains.
Behind me, the hallway dimmed. The light had been blocked, and turning round, I saw her. A woman had appeared at the end of the corridor, robed and hooded like the statue outside. I could not say where she had come from, but she stood there perfectly still, a living statue, as motionless as marble, with her hands clasped before her and the window blazing at her back, setting her edges alight.
Then she stepped forward. It was the slightest of motions, noticeable only because the red light flickered about her, and she moved with a strange, irrational slowness, as though she were a long way off despite the mere yards that separated us.
I couldn’t breathe. My lungs heaved, contracting uselessly, and she advanced on me with all the certainty of hellfire, preceded by the stench of rotting cotton, the odors of musk and mold.
Her long garment swished along the floor, but it wasn’t a robe like I had thought but a single sheet of white muslin, a burial shroud wound about so many times it concealed the shape of her body completely.
Sounds: breaking glass, an upturned table.
The boom of a rifle downstairs.
The noise stirred me into motion. I wrested my gaze from the figure and started to run, sprinting headlong down the hallway, heedless of the din I made, conscious only of my need to escape from that faceless woman. But her footsteps clanged behind me, louder by far than my own, sounding in that moment like two steel bars rapped together, beating a forced march.
I lost my footing. I crashed into the wall and gashed my scalp. Warm fluid ran down into my eyes and I blinked rapidly to clear them. The woman was now two yards away, creeping toward me at the same unreal pace as before but getting closer, closer.
Heat radiated from her body as from an ash-black coal, and the muslin twitched over her concealed mouth, moving outward then deflating, clinging to her parted lips, as though she were trying to speak, though I heard nothing.
Then she was upon me. She leaned across me where I lay, her lips moving without sound. Her warm breath issued from the shroud, damp with the perfume of decay. I gagged, nauseated, and the hallway spun around me, blurring with the onset of vertigo, and I forced myself to focus on that open mouth lest I black out altogether.
The mouth stopped moving. The message, whatever its nature, had been delivered. For a moment the woman remained perfectly still, as though once more a statue—and then, with painstaking slowness, she brought her hands to her face and peeled back the shroud.
The house vanished, the hall with it. Her hair bound me like ropes, holding me fast, scalding my flesh and penetrating me inside and out. I tumbled backward, falling within myself, descending to a hell like Shiloh or the burning fields east of Atlanta: depths from which I could not surface, though I raged and howled and made of myself a living death.
This sensation lasted ages, an eternity, and yet no more than a few minutes could have elapsed before Barry found me and shook me awake.
The woman was gone. The hallway was empty, awash in a cool blue light. The rain, too, had ceased, and the stillness was general. Barry knelt beside me, his hands about my shoulders.
“You’re alright,” he whispered. “You’re alright.”
I coughed, tasting blood and shit and moldering cotton.
“They’re downstairs,” he said, “the other women. That girl, she must have run to fetch them. I heard them, their voices, but there were too many, and I did not dare show myself.”
“And—Nichols?”
Barry shook his head. “That statue he’d taken to—I found it lying broken on the floor. That was queer enough, and I thought maybe he was responsible, but then I found him in the kitchen. He’d been stabbed, the blade driven clean through. They must have used your bayonet.”
“Or a sword.”
A shadow flickered across Barry’s face.
There was something he hadn’t told me, something he had seen downstairs. He couldn’t speak of it, of course, just as I would never relate to him what had happened in the hallway.
“We have to go,” he whispered. “They’re downstairs searching but it’s only a matter of time before they find us. Can you walk?”
I nodded. We heard voices, footsteps from below.
Barry helped me to my feet. We ran.
&
nbsp; *
Here my father’s voice faltered and cracked toward inaudibility. Spittle dribbled from his lips, collecting at the corner of his mouth, forming a yellow crust.
“We fled that place,” he said, “and ran away cross those flooded fields. We sheltered in the trunk of a hollow tree and waited there ‘til morning. When we made it back to camp, we were arrested and held under charges of desertion. Barry argued that we had simply gotten lost, which was true enough in a way, and eventually, they let us go.
“We never let on what had happened to Nichols. The army declared him missing, but they didn’t waste much time in looking. Barry and I kept the secret between us, all throughout that winter, though we never discussed it, not even with each other.
“Then Bentonville came and Barry fell to a rebel bullet. The shot struck him through the gut so that it took many hours for his life to drain away. Near the end, he called for a priest and offered up his confession. What passed between them, I’ll never know, but the priest looked shaken when he emerged from the tent.
“As for the Pillars—it’s still there, I’m sure of it, though I’ve never found it on any map. Maybe it’s better that way. By chance we had found it and by chance alone we escaped. We may have left that place behind us, at least for a time, but I’ll return there—and soon.”
He fixed his runny eyes on me. “But you must know that,” he said. “I can see it in your eyes. I can see her. You’ve done nothing wrong, I know. You’ve only listened. You may be innocent, but so was I, and still we must be punished. Do you hear her? Her footsteps? She’s coming for you, my boy, sure as she’s coming for me.”
He exhaled. “Won’t be long now.”
He turned his face to the window. The sparrow had not stirred from the sill. It gazed in at us through the glass like the dispassionate eye of the Ultimate Observer.
Several minutes elapsed. Sunlight drained from the horizon, and a shadow crept into the room. We sat together without speaking, each of us equally alone in that half-light. Then the sparrow took wing, bursting forth with a flurry of movement, and I was afraid.
