November Night Tales

by Henry Chapman Mercer

  “Think of your life,” said I, “hanging on such threads.”

  “No! No! Not that. What was one life in thousands? It was the whole city that was doomed,—cursed. The Powers of Darkness were at work.”

  As the evening shadows gathered about us, we talked on of those Powers, and that Curse, which was the Malice of a Master Mind, until, out of our words, as if to frighten us, rose too vividly the sinister image of the man himself. The Rat Pedlar whose Pack was Death, the prowling fiend who had opened the doors of his vengeance upon the World, when events defeated his purpose. I thought of my unconscious agency in his destruction without a shudder.

  Rather as a blessing than as a calamity came the fire that had swept away all trace of his terrible fate and of the deadly vermin that had devoured him. His dangerous secret, only shared by his accomplice, who was never heard of again, perished with him.

  THE BLACKBIRDS

  i

  It was a fine June afternoon, unusually cool that summer for Eastport. Charles Carrington, the dramatist, was in his housetop study, talking to his friend Arthur Norton, who had just come in to join him on one of his eccentric suburban rambles. He was standing by an open window, looking out across the city roofs and river at the magnificent uprolled clouds that deepened the distant blue and cast their majestic shadows over the far-off suburb of Fairfield.

  “What is there about Midsummer Eve,” said he, “that you don’t get on any other day of the year? You feel it in the air, particularly toward evening,—a sort of flutter, as if something might happen.”

  He walked over to the writing-table, where several paper-weighted stacks of manuscript were rattling in the draft. Wedged between them lay a pile of engravings, one of which Norton had pulled out and was looking at intently.

  “What a curious print,” said he. “What is it?”

  “Don’t you recognize it? It’s the cemetery where they never bury the dead,—the Tower of Silence, as they call it, at Bombay.”

  Norton held up the picture and turned it about in the light.

  “I see,” said he; “the vultures are waiting for one of those ghastly funerals.”

  “Exactly,” replied his host. “I had a notion of having it framed as a curiosity, but fear it is a little too suggestive.”

  “I should say it was,” returned Norton with a mock shudder as he laid down the picture.

  Carrington pulled out his watch. He had been expecting their friend Pryor, who, having chosen to remain in town that season after the fashionable world left for the seashore, often dropped in of an afternoon.

  “Pryor won’t join us today,” remarked his guest decisively, and then paused. “Tomorrow is his birthday.”

  “What! Midsummer Day? He never told me that.”

  “No wonder, considering his point of view. He has a reason. A very peculiar reason.” Norton paused again. “Don’t tell him I told you. He has been warned.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “By one of his Spiritualist advisers, to escape some calamity, God knows what, that threatens him on his birthday. He is superstitious enough to believe it, and has left town.”

  The dramatist looked at his friend a moment with an astonished, half-amused expression.

  “What nonsense!” said he. “I thought that sort of thing was out of date. There’s a story that it reminds me of. But come on,—it’s getting late.”

  A bulky-looking satchel, packed with cold supper, lay on a chair. Carrington, after closing the windows, walked over to a large cupboard, opened it, and producing a dingy-looking bottle marked Château Larose, held it up gayly to the light, then thrust it into the satchel. When he had slung the package over his shoulder, the two men, leaving the aerial observatory of the writer of plays, descended by a series of dusty office-fronted passages and reverberating staircases into the commonplace world below.

  As they hurried down Merchant Street to the Ferry, a lurid glare had suddenly caught the eastern house-fronts. Against the deep shadows in the cross streets, it gave the city a threatening, unfamiliar look, as if the lights were out of order, as Norton expressed it.

  “Shifting for the climax,” said Carrington. “Tomorrow the sun turns. These shadows are the warnings of winter.”

  “Or a storm,” muttered Norton. “We ought to have brought umbrellas.”

  “No,” declared his friend, “look! the west is clear. We shall have a fine evening.”

  ii

  Within an hour they had reached Fairfield, where, after lagging behind the crowd at the wharf, they gained the street, to find the pavement blocked by their fellow-passengers. A funeral procession had halted the impatient throng. The dramatist got out on the cobblestones and looked up and down the gloomy cortege extending indefinitely along the river front. Then, quickly pushing across between a pair of black horses’ heads and the rear of a curtained carriage, he stopped to wait until his friend, who had hesitated and drawn back, took the next chance and followed him.

  “Not a very lucky thing to do,” remarked the latter, as the two men stepped upon the pavement on the shady side of Brooke Street. “Pryor would have kept us waiting here an hour.”

  “Or gone home,” said Carrington, laughing, and then, after they had walked on a while in silence. “But this runaway of his is absurd. Did he tell you where he was going?”

  “No.”

  “He ought to lock himself up in a cellar, or hide in a cave like the calender in the Arabian Nights—if that’s the story I’m thinking of——”

  “Don’t get it wrong,” interrupted Norton. “It was the boy who hid in a cave to escape his birthday. The calender found the little fellow there and killed him, you remember.”

  “So he did,” Carrington admitted. “But the idea of the thing! A man running away from his birthday on Midsummer Eve. It’s a plot for a play.”

  Keeping in the shade of the rustling poplar trees as they hurried onward, the dramatist had begun to describe one of his discoveries, an extraordinary place, called Deadlock Meadow, which he had planned to show his friend, when they reached a corner where a narrow street turned eastward. There, by one of those chances that happen so often as to have become proverbial, they almost ran into the very man they had been talking about.

  The fashionable artist, dressed in white flannel, with glittering patent-leather boots, and one of his gorgeous cravats, stood with a sketching satchel slung over his shoulder, leaning against a curbstone tree. He was looking despondently down the side street, and turned suddenly as his astonished friends confronted him.

  “Why, Pryor,” cried Norton; “we have just been talking about you. You told me you were going out of town.”

  “I wish I had,” said the handsome painter, with some hesitation. “Unfortunately, I changed my mind. I came over here to do a little sketching. But there’s nothing to sketch.”

  He looked about contemptuously at the gingerbread porches, rows of white marble steps, and dreary intervals of a spike-topped board fence that shut off the background.

  “What inspiration a celebrated poet like Whitwell finds in this sort of environment I fail to see,” he added gloomily.

  “You are on the wrong side of things,” exclaimed the dramatist, with a flourish of his cane. “We must get behind the scenes. Did you ever see Deadlock Meadow at high tide?”

  Pryor had never heard of the place, and Carrington pictured it in glowing terms as a watery freak of Nature,—a lake unmarked on the map, which had no existence except at certain tides.

  “But you’re just in time to join us,” he urged.

  For various insufficient reasons, Pryor seemed unwilling to accompany the wonder-hunters, but his final counter-proposal for supper at a neighboring hotel, where he said he had engaged a room for the night, was overruled, and the three men, after a polite controversary
based on the contents of the supper satchel, at last started eastward along the newly-built street.

  iii

  As they passed the boundary between the city’s encroachment and undevastated Nature, the blocks of fresh brickwork gave way to half-dug cellars, vacant lots, and dismal-looking sheds roofed with corrugated iron. Then came exposed culverts, pools of stagnant water, with here and there vistas of open country. At last the street ended in a board-fence of unusual height, starting at the walls of a foundry. Carrington pointed through one of the open gateways at grimy expanses of high-windowed brickwork and smoke stacks, which had ceased to smoke, he said, when the place closed down, years before, on account of a lawsuit.

  He crossed the street into a bleak rubbish-littered yard and stopped before the formidable partition, nearly twenty feet high.

  “The trouble began here,” he explained. “They call it a spite fence.” He pointed along the boards. “The man on the other side kept just inside his line, you see, beginning at the foundry and bringing it around the corner there, so as to block off his neighbor.”

  “And block us off,” said Pryor dejectedly, as he walked back to the rear of the dirty, sun-scorched enclosure, to peer along the obstruction and point to a barbed-wire fence just beyond. “We might as well go back.”

  Carrington looked triumphantly at the baffled artist. Pushing through some blighted gooseberry-bushes, he leaned down and pulled back a loose board.

  “There,” said he, “is the stage entrance to the theatre.”

  His friends looked at him in astonishment, hesitated a moment, and then got through the opening, after which the dramatic explorer, holding back with difficulty the elastic board, squeezed after them.

  iv

  They had come suddenly out of the hot sunlight into a refreshing coolness. Just beyond the outrageous fence, under high trees, stood a dilapidated farmhouse, several sheds, and an old stone barn.

  “There is always some nonsense of this sort to shut off what you want to see,” declared Carrington.

  Pryor looked around him suspiciously, walked slowly forward across the mossy grass, and halted. He called attention to a board, painted with the words Keep Off, nailed against the house corner.

  “Never mind that,” said Carrington, stepping past him, “No one cares. The place has been deserted for years.”

  He pointed to two planks forming an outdoor table, wedged in the shade between tree trunks. Then, going across to one of the open sheds, he unslung his lunch satchel, pushed it into what looked like the top of an old iron stove, half-buried in rubbish and rejoined his friends.

  “My idea is to come back here for supper,” said he. “Deadlock Meadow is over beyond the orchard yonder,—miles of woods,—shut off along the water. But it all depends on the tide.”

  The two men followed him past the rear of the vacant house and along the walled barnyard overgrown with jimson weed. Back of this a path led on under some apple and cherry trees, and they kept to it until it brought them to the wood. Just then Pryor, who was walking ahead, started back as two turkey-buzzards rose from the grass with a loud flapping of wings and, without flying far, lit again on the open slope above them. He picked up a stone and was about to throw it at the birds.

  “Don’t do that,” interposed Norton. “They are protected by law,—and ought to be. They eat up anything that’s dead.”

  “They look as if they would like to eat me up,” muttered Pryor, with evident disgust at the black scavengers staring at them from the bank. “Why don’t they fly away?”

  Carrington supposed that there was something in the neighborhood that attracted them, explaining that they were never seen on the Eastport side of the river, though common enough where they found them at that time of year. They were believed to come up from the south about midsummer.

  “I never heard that,” said Pryor, dropping the stone. “But come on. I can’t bear the looks of them.”

  v

  The path had led the trespassers into a rocky tract of rubbish-littered, tramp-defaced woodland, which, according to Carrington, extended eastward for several miles. Blocking the city’s extension, it owed its prolonged existence, he said, to certain legal disputes, the details of one of which he had begun to recount to his friends, when they reached the edge of a bluff, where the green shadows yielded to glimmerings of light ahead. There, on mounting to the top of a flat rock, the trees opened upon an enchanting view of distant meadows, cliffs, and a village, seen across an expanse of water. The eastern sky had changed to rose color. The water’s shimmer was broken by the breeze into deep-blue paths of ripples. Clouds, more gorgeous than ever, robed in white, gold, and lavender, floated overhead.

  “Now,” said Carrington delightedly, “what do you think of my lake that’s not on the map?”

  Pryor’s face lit up at last, as he began to unstrap his sketching satchel. “How in the world did you ever find this place?” he asked. “Where have I seen it?”

  “Nowhere. You must have dreamt it. It has no existence, except at these high tides.”

  “It’s Holland, all but the windmills and a ship or two.”

  “The ships are in the sky,” said the dramatist. “Did you ever see such clouds?”

  Just then a series of distant explosions, lasting several seconds, followed each other like thunderclaps in quick succession from across the water. But Carrington explained them as blasts ending the day’s work at some neighboring quarries visible in the distance. Pointing to the far-off yellow cliffs, he told them that the excavations faintly seen followed the hills for miles. Several recently-exposed caves lent interest to the place and to a large settlement of imported quarrymen, nondescripts of varied nationality, who were known to live there in very primitive style. The distinguished ethnologist, Professor Blackmore, had established himself in Greenmarsh for the summer, expressly to study their languages and habits.

  “Cheap ethnology,” declared Norton. “Why doesn’t he go abroad and do the thing properly?”

  “No need of that. These people come to him, with their birthmarks. You can’t obliterate language overnight, you know. I call it a very clever idea.” Carrington glanced at his watch. “If it’s not too late,” he added, “we might have a look. Some of them, they say, have taken possession of the caves, some live in sod-huts without chimneys and make fire with the bow-drill or something of that sort.” He proposed going up around the point and crossing the railroad bridge on the trestles.

  “No railroad bridge for me,” grumbled Pryor, who had begun his sketch. “It makes me dizzy to think of it.”

  Norton had walked out to the edge of the rock and was looking with delight up and down the watery expanse. “Why don’t we have supper here?” he asked.

  As a compliment to his taste, the suggestion pleased Carrington; but when Norton offered to go back to the farmhouse and get the satchel, a discussion followed, in which the leader of the party asserted his authority, left his friends, and undertook the errand himself.

  vi

  Half an hour passed before Carrington returned with the provisions, to find Norton on the rock alone.

  “Where’s Pryor?” he asked.

  His friend explained that he had left the artist, a short time before, to take a walk, during which the latter had disappeared, probably to hunt another point of view.

  “The buzzards annoyed him,” he added. “I never saw so many. There must be something here that attracts them.”

  “Easily explained,” said Carrington. “It’s the chickens and animals caught in the tide.”

  The men sat down, and the dramatist, in his picturesque style, entertained his companion with an account of the topography of the elusive flood, which owed its freakish existence to certain half-finished dykes and the phases of the moon. He compared it to a mirage that might fade away at any moment.
Like other reprieved solitudes, sometimes seen within the zone of city development, the whole scene awaited its doom, in the onrush of so-called improvement, which would suddenly drain the meadows, and overwhelm the woods with streets and houses. An epidemic of smallpox at some neighboring quarries had frightened off trespassers.

  “It’s an odd place,” he continued, as if entertained by the thought. “Anything might happen here. I expect to come back some day and find nothing that I remember,—absolutely nothing.”

  “Except turkey-buzzards,” said Norton, looking skyward at a black train of soaring shadows.

  By the time the talk had ended in an amusing sketch of a proposed musical burlesque, with a cast of characters who had lost their way or identity in the approaching catastrophe, Norton had grown restless.

  “Pryor ought to remember that it’s suppertime,” he declared, walking out to the edge of the rock, where several calls at the top of his voice were mocked by echoes.

  “Suppose we hunt him up,” suggested his friend.

  And the men climbed down the rock, to follow the water’s edge for a while in the direction of the headland they had noticed. But after wetting their feet in grass-hidden encroachments of the tide, they remounted the slope and pushed onward, by several rock-built ovens and devastated patches of charred underbrush, which Carrington accounted for as “tramp kitchens.” At length a disused path, winding upward along the ridge, brought them to a halt, where an opening in the bushes suddenly revealed the brink of a deep excavation. Far below them glittered a pool of water, enclosed by cliffs.

  “Look out!” warned Carrington, as his companion stepped near the precipice and looked over. “The bank has just given way there.”