The Lord Came at Twilight

by Daniel Mills

  My father’s last words came as a strangled whisper.

  “I’m tired,” he said. “Let me sleep.”

  WHISPERERS

  He steps onto the platform at Brattleboro. The air is crisp, the blackness dappled by the lamps along Main Street. Late November. Vapors whirl at his lips only to be scattered by a blast of cold air, the wind that shrieks from the nearby Connecticut, blowing the rain into flurries.

  The aging porter brings round his bag. He deposits it on the platform at Carter’s feet and stands to one side, shuffling his feet, expecting a tip. Carter gives him what he can. The old man doesn’t hide his disappointment but merely stares down at the few coins in his palm, his mouth twitching along one side, the opposite corner hanging down.

  Carter cannot face him. His eyes find his feet, and after a time, the porter withdraws. The old man drifts away toward the station, his long scarf blowing out behind him, snapping at the air like a ragged pennant. Carter thinks again of his wife, recalling the scarf she wore that night in Magnolia, when they were first courting, when they walked together along the esplanade.

  He remembers. The wind came roaring from the sea, skimming the spray from the waves, flinging the damp into their faces as they followed the curve of the shoreline. The moon surfaced from a crumbling bank of clouds even as a strange cry rang out from somewhere far off: a queer, keening moan like the bellow of a beast in lust.

  At first, Carter thought he had imagined it, but when she grabbed at his arm, rigid with fright, he realized that she had heard it too. She folded her hand into his, weaving their fingers together. His heart raced, but the sound did not come again. Another wind: her long scarf blew out toward him, the end crossing his chest, circling round his neck.

  The porter disappears into the station. The doors slam shut, leaving Carter alone on the platform. He glances uphill toward the brick buildings and store-fronts of Main Street, scarcely visible through the blowing snow, and recalls, dimly, the ecstasies they once inspired in him—was it only a year ago? Tonight, they appear stained and dirty, a jumble of cracked facades broken by wind and endless winter.

  He collects his bags from the platform. He makes his way outside.

  A Ford truck roars to life, its headlights blinding. George. The other man has come to collect Carter from the station as promised. The truck’s engine coughs and sputters, finding a rhythm as its breath unspools against the night.

  Carter walks toward the glow of the headlights, passing through a cascade of flurries that whirl and hover in the air around him. They toss and glitter, shimmering like the sea in summertime, spinning away with a breath from the river.

  *

  “George.”

  “It’s good of you to come. It’s Henry. He’s not well.”

  “What, exactly, is the matter?”

  “The doctor can’t say. Three times now he’s been to see him, but left each time shaking his head. It’s outside his area of expertise. Says Henry needs to see a specialist.”

  “It must be serious, then. I’m sorry, George.”

  “It’s in his head, the sickness. Apparently, he’s healthy as a horse, though he’s wasting away for lack of food. Sarah brings him breakfast each morning, but he won’t touch it.”

  “He is trying to starve himself?”

  “We don’t know. He won’t talk to us. Not Sarah. Not even me. Only you, Randolph. I know you didn’t spend more than half-an-hour with him this summer, but whatever you said—well, it made some impression on him.”

  “I see. You would like me to speak to him?”

  “If you could. I feel just awful about it, calling you up here on a night like this. It’s a long journey, I know, but I didn’t know what else to do. Henry scribbled your name on a scrap of paper. Asked me to send for you, though I could tell by his bearing that he doubted you’d come. I told him—well, I told him that he didn’t know you.”

  “Your telegram mentioned there was some urgency?”

  “A new doctor’s coming to the farm tomorrow. An alienist from the Retreat. It’s got Sarah terribly worried. She’s afraid they’ll want to take him from her. If you could just talk to him. If you could just… Well, it’d mean the world to me. Sarah too.”

  *

  Carter’s first and only meeting with Henry Ackley took place during the previous summer near the end of his second trip to Brattleboro. He had come up from Providence for a meeting with a group of local writers. Afterward, he rode back with George, who remembered, halfway to the station, that he had need to call on his friend and neighbor Henry Ackley.

  Their visit to the Ackley farmhouse lasted less than an hour, the other men drinking round the table while Carter sipped a glass of milk. At one point George suggested that Henry show Carter his watercolors. Carter assented, and the two men went together to the barn.

  One corner of the squat structure had been converted into a makeshift display space that housed Ackley’s paintings. Only a few could be displayed at any given time and the remaining images—of which there were several dozen—were stored in a work cabinet.

  Ackley painted landscapes, mostly: unmistakably crude but nevertheless affecting. Some were painted on loose pieces of canvas, while others had been added to the reverse sides of postcards mailed years before from places like Burlington or Montreal. The barn was dark and cramped and reeked of mold and hay.

  Carter’s companion was taciturn by nature. He spoke but rarely and with the restrained humility characteristic of such rural Novanglians—as though, even in pride, he were always half-ashamed. Carter found himself oddly at ease in his presence and spoke for some time about his own work. The other man expressed an interest—polite rather than eager—and Carter offered to mail him a copy of his latest tale, a somewhat fantastical tale of dark gods and degenerate cults that had appeared in print that winter.

  Returning to the farmhouse, they met up with George and made their goodbyes. Ackley walked the two of them to the door, waving from the threshold as they descended the hill. As George swung the truck round, Carter glanced back at the house in time to see Henry disappear inside, the door slamming shut behind him, while Sarah Ackley looked out from an upstairs window, one hand raised in farewell.

  Upon his return to Providence, Carter sealed two of his stories into an envelope and dispatched them to southern Vermont. Months went by—months of personal upheaval, of increasingly desperate letters from his wife in New York—until this morning, when George’s telegram arrived. Ackley ill, it read. Asking for you. Come quick. Urgent.

  The note found Carter seated at his writing desk, where her latest letter lay open before him, scarcely a page in length where his had run to twenty. He had read it once already and made it less than halfway through a second read before lowering it to the desk, unable to continue. It was shorter than her previous letters but otherwise no different: in twenty lines of cursive, it asked of him the one thing he knew he could not give her.

  As soon as he read George’s telegram, he knew that he would go. He packed his traveling bag and left the house, leaving her letter lying open on the desk. The ends of the paper curled upward, sloping toward the folds, causing her neat script to circle back upon itself: slouching and coiled, a bathing viper.

  *

  George guides the truck to a stop and kills the engine. The headlights fade from the hill. The Ackley farmhouse, fifteen yards distant, fades to a silhouette, its outline discernible only by the steep plunge of the roof-line. No lights are visible inside.

  The men dismount from the cabin and proceed uphill toward the house, moving in and out of the whirling darkness. The yard is snowy and moon-latticed, silver in the glow that comes through the oak trees: jagged and thorny, stripped by the raking winds.

  “The house is dark,” Carter remarks. “Surely they haven’t retired?”

  George shakes his head. “It’s Henry’s doing. He insists on it, the darkness. Says he can’t stand to look at her. Sarah, I mean. The poor woman. It’s got her half-craze
d with fright, the more so because he won’t talk to her, because he won’t give any reason why.”

  They keep walking. Their steps carry them up the terraced lawn, where the bedrock breaks through in bone-like ridges, showing like rooftops in a flood, the brown waters that roared down the Connecticut little more than a year ago.

  They step onto the porch and approach the front door. A wintry gust sweeps uphill from the road, slashing through the wool of Carter’s overcoat. George knocks. On the third rap, he is answered by the din of footsteps from the other side.

  Sarah Ackley opens the door. She holds a candle in one hand, using no holder so that the wax drips and hardens on her nails and fingers. Its dim illumination gutters on her face, separating itself into a series of web-like lines that crack and dissolve into wordless relief at the sight of Carter. She steps aside and ushers them into the mudroom.

  The roof is leaking. A bucket has been set out to catch the falling drops. Snow-melt ripples within, shimmering where it catches the candlelight. Sarah beckons. They follow her through the kitchen to the closed door that leads (Carter assumes) into the larger bedroom. Here she stops. She offers George the candle, but he waves it away. She shrugs, the slightest of gestures, and disappears through an adjoining doorway, her long skirts trailing on the floorboards.

  A draft creeps into the kitchen. The stench of mold is unmistakable, tinged with the odor of wood rot. From the mudroom: the splash of a drop in a bucket.

  Carter looks at George. The other man nods and reaches for the handle, the bedroom door creaking open on its hinges. The room beyond is dark. Even the window is but a silvered line, the shade drawn to. They go inside.

  Carter’s eyes adjust slowly, fixing themselves first upon the outline of a bed in the corner and then upon the shelves that line the near wall, laden with books and candles. A high Windsor-style chair is positioned before the covered window. Henry Ackley sits within. Draped in a blanket, he is recognizable only by his silhouette, his features hidden save for the line of moonlight that spans his throat, its edges merging into shadow. He faces them, or appears to, but is completely motionless, incontrovertibly silent.

  George speaks first, acknowledging his friend with the stern greeting so common to New England farmers: “Henry.”

  No response.

  “I brought Randolph with me. I thought—”

  “Get out, George.” The change in Ackley’s voice is startling. Once strong and resonant, it is now little more than a harsh whisper: snake-like and sibilant, sharp with the suggestion of bile. “It’s Mr. Carter I need to speak to.”

  George’s mouth drops open.

  Carter silences him with a hand on his elbow. “If you would be so good as to leave us, George, I believe that Mr. Ackley has something he would like to discuss.”

  George swallows, his Adam’s Apple bulging. “I’ll be in the kitchen,” he mutters. “If you need me.” He wheels round and stalks into the other room, drawing the door shut behind him.

  The two men are alone in the darkened bedroom.

  “I’m glad you could come,” Ackley whispers. “It’s a long way from Providence.”

  “Yes,” Carter agrees. “It is.” He looks about the room, his gaze settling on a second comb-backed chair. “May I sit?”

  Ackley grunts and nods, his head falling forward, the silver line moving up to illuminate his lips: black and crusted, caked with spittle.

  Carter settles into the second chair. He places his hands together at the level of his chest, bridging his fingers to peer above the tips. He says nothing but merely waits, knowing, somehow, that the other man will speak.

  “You must think I’m mad,” he says. “They all do. Even George.”

  “Perhaps he does,” Carter says. “But I am not George.”

  “It was your stories, you see. The ones you sent me.”

  “Oh?”

  “You mailed them to me months ago, I know, but it was only recently, after the incident, that I had time to read them. When I did… well, they gave me a kind of hope. They made me think that maybe—just maybe—you might understand.”

  “Go on.”

  Ackley coughs and covers his mouth, his hands like white marble in that sliver of moonlight. He clears his throat.

  “It started three weeks ago,” he says. “When I found the body.”

  *

  I left early that morning, Ackley says, before Sarah was up. I kissed her on the forehead and slipped out of the house, taking the truck as far as East Dummerston before going ahead on foot. I brought my gun with me, thinking I might shoot a bird for dinner.

  I took my usual path through the woods along the hills south of the Hadley farm. The woods were quiet—I remember that clear enough. I saw no one, and the stillness seemed heavy somehow, if you catch my meaning, though there was one point where my ears caught the bark of some roaming animal—a coyote, I reckoned, baying to raise heaven, as though in the midst of some sickness.

  I walked as far as the stream that runs round the northern edge of the Hadley property. My plan was to ford the stream and cross to the woods on the other side. The stream’s slow-moving and shallow and no more than a couple of feet at its deepest—most of the time, anyway. Not that day. Rain had fallen hard during the previous weeks, and the water was brown and frothing.

  It was too dangerous to cross there. I decided to follow the stream downhill for another mile. I knew it got wider at the mouth: shallower too, where it meets the West River.

  The trip took me half-an-hour or so—a pleasant enough walk, though I heard that strange barking again: closer this time but still far away. Again it put me in mind of a coyote—possibly rabid—and a part of me hoped it might cross my path so I could put a bullet in it. The meat would be worthless, but surely death would be the most merciful thing for it.

  Anyway. Like I said, it wasn’t more than half-an-hour before I reached the stream’s mouth. The water was running faster than usual, but not so deep that I’d get swept away. I lifted my gun over my head and set one foot down in the stream, the water changing the way it does, reforming round my ankle, closing about it like a fist. I pulled out my foot and set it down again, the stream remaking itself all round me as I waded out toward the center.

  That was when it happened. Halfway across, I happened to look upstream. Twenty yards away, the stream-bed cracked and thrust upward, making a kind of shelf. The stream rushed over this, forming white bubbles at the lip that tumbled over each other, fanning out to all sides as they slowed with the current.

  But there was something else too. At first I thought it was a man swimming. Then I thought maybe it was a woman. She wasn’t swimming, though.

  The corpse drifted over the shelf and plunged forward with arms extended, the current turning her over and over. She landed in the shallows and went under. A few seconds later, she surfaced again, flopping over on her back as the current weakened, floating her toward me like she was no heavier than a leaf.

  She was fifteen yards away. Then ten.

  When she got within five yards, I could see that she was wearing a linen dress. For a moment, she looked oddly at peace—her arms at her sides, her face turned up, hair streaming with the current—and my heart went out to her, whoever she was.

  I reached out with the butt of my gun and managed to catch hold of her shoulder so that she spun round fearful quick. I scarcely had time to transfer the rifle to my right hand and reach for her with my left. It was blind luck alone that allowed me to get hold of her wrist. The water frothed all around us, brown and filthy, but I held her fast within that churning current, her dark hair flowing down her chest, half-hiding her face.

  Her face—God, how can I describe it? Her eyes were missing, fish-eaten. Her flesh was pale, dreadfully pale, but the worst thing about it was the way it moved. There was water beneath her skin, forming waves that raced across her forehead and across her shattered face so that for a moment she seemed more wax than flesh.

  It was a terrible thing:
so motionless, yet so alive. Believe me, I was scared, more scared than ever before in my life, but even the fear I felt then was nothing to what came next. For that corpse—pearly and white, gorged with gases and rippling like a bed sheet—I recognized it, Mr. Carter. I don’t expect you to believe me, but that dead thing—

  It was my wife.

  *

  For a time, Carter is silent. He sits perfectly still, his eyes closed. A waxen face floats in the air before him, adrift in darkness, but its features are not those of Sarah Ackley. When he speaks at last, he finds he cannot raise his voice above a whisper.

  “The corpse that you described… surely it had been in the water some time?”

  “It had. You could tell that just by looking at it.”

  “But you yourself said that you had kissed your wife that morning.”

  “That’s right. At least I thought so at the time.”

  “And now?”

  “When I saw her face—her dead face—I panicked. The blood drained from my head, and I fell to my knees in the midst of that filth. The current wrestled her from my grip and carried her downstream while I looked on, helpless. A minute later, she was gone.”

  “What did you do?”

  Ackley shrugs. “I ran. Wouldn’t you have done the same? Soon as my senses returned, I waded back across the stream and scrabbled up the bank. Cold and shivering, soaked through, I bolted through the woods like a frightened hare, running until I reached my truck. I jumped in and stomped on the gas, screeching toward home.”

  “Your wife was there?”

  He nods. “I found her—it—in the yard. Raking the leaves out of the flowerbeds, the same as my dear wife used to do: the girl I’d once courted, the woman I married who I now knew to be dead. Drowned. Left to rot in that muddy stream.