On Night's Shore

by Randall Silvis

  31

  Across Nassau Street I flew full chisel. Up empty Broadway and to the guttering gaslights below City Hall. A half-dozen glances over my left shoulder, over my right, and the realization began to sink in finally that I was safely away. I stood in the middle of Broadway, hands on my knees, gasping, vigilant for any small movement in the layers of night. Sweat that was cold on my scalp ran into the scratches on my neck and seared the scratches deeper.

  But I was free. Slipped through the Grim One’s fingers. I felt like laughing out loud, like sending a victory whoop high into the sky.

  The first thing I heard was the flutter descending on me, the loud flap like a luffing sail. Instantly then his footsteps registered on my ears, boom boom boom as he came in from the west, swooping black and huge down a narrow side street with the tails of his frock coat fanned out behind him, flapping like wings. I shot away from him with more speed than I knew I had, but also blindly, my field of vision reduced by terror to a peephole, my only other functioning sense, auditory, attuned to nothing but the wild gallop of my hysterical heart.

  I had never before thought of the Old Brewery as a sanctuary, but in that moment, it presented itself to me as one, only two minutes away, a labyrinth of darkness in which to hide. It was the only thought I could hold in my head. These were after all the streets I knew best. I made for Five Points on a zigzag course, through garbage-strewn alleys and scraggly lots and deep-rutted lanes. Except for holding in my mind the image of the Old Brewery, I did not pause to think and scarcely to breathe until the rambling hulk itself loomed before me.

  Never had decay and squalor looked so inviting. Yet I would allow no diminishment of fear, not the slightest whisper of relief, until I bolted through its front door and slammed the door shut behind me and dropped into place the rusted latch that no resident ever employed.

  For three, four, a half-dozen minutes, I leaned against that door, my ear to the crack. It took me half that time to attune my senses to the external. And then…nothing. Only silence without. Had silence ever sung so beautifully? A few minutes more and I even began to entertain the notion that I had escaped outright, that I had outwitted Death.

  Suddenly, then, on the floor above me, so startling through the rotten wood as to sound only inches from my head, a loud thud, as of a chair falling over. In my heightened state I imagined that the sound, every sound, pertained to me, that Death had managed somehow to climb in through a window but had knocked over an object (a body?) in the process.

  And if Death was inside, I wanted to be out. With an excruciating slowness I lifted the latch. Breathlessly, I eased open the door. The street before me, seen through the two-inch opening, lay empty. I eased the door open a bit wider, all the while keeping one ear attuned to the floor above, stingy with every movement lest the sound of it might drown out the creep or scuffle of Death’s approach.

  Ever wider I lay open the door, ever broader my view. None of the building’s noises distinguished itself as particularly invidious; no lank shadow stood before me. I blinked the stinging sweat from my eyes and leaned forward, half out the doorway, needing only a last look to my left before I could break into a run.

  I stretched out my foot, took one step across the threshold. A claw swiped at my face; bones cracked across my cheek. But I was still mostly inside the building and only had to jerk in my head and again throw shut the door, not stopping this time to fumble with the latch but diving for the nearest egress, the open doorway into the basement, half tumbling, half sliding down to the bottom of the steps, to the soft moldy corner of pitch blackness where I crammed myself into the dirt.

  The front door opened with a drawn-out squeak; he was in no hurry. My only hope was that I was in a basement so dark, so redolent already with the scent of death, with the myriad diseased and slashed bodies already buried there in shallow graves beneath the earthen floor, that I would be all but invisible even to night-keen eyes. At worst he would descend and in his attempt to zero in on me give me room to flash past him, up the stairs and out onto the streets again. I would run all night if need be. I would run to the Mississippi and beyond.

  But no. His footsteps thudded up the narrow stairway—up. After the first flight of stairs, I could hear him no more. At first I told myself that he had given up on me and would take somebody else this night. But even as I unwound this thought, I knew it was not true. He was hunting for me and me alone. And would go to the most logical place to find me—my old room.

  I would like to claim now that I acted without a moment’s hesitation, that what happened next was in no way due to a failure of courage on my part. I would like to make this claim, but cannot. I cowered in the basement for ten full minutes, striving to discern in the dull symphony of groans and curses and all the usual muted thuds of the place some indication that my mother, too mean for death, had tossed the fiend out. But such salvation was not possible, no easy end to this dilemma, and I knew it. She was a drunkard whose most animated act was to swing the strop at me. Her only power had been my own passivity.

  I ascended the stairs with as much stealth as I could muster. I was chilled to the core, quivering like a rabbit. But I made it finally to within a yard of our door, close enough to hear the question in its final utterance, the croaking voice as deep as Hell itself, “Where’s the boy, damn you!”

  My mother spat at him—I knew the sound well. But the one that followed it, the liquid hiss, and then my mother’s startled, “Ah—you bastard you,” and then the hiss again, again, sloppy and thick, a sharp knife cleaving soft flesh, and I burst through the open door and saw him straddled atop her from behind, she on her hands and knees and wanting to fall prostrate but held half aloft by her hair clutched in his left hand, pulling her chin high, the dirk in his right, striking, plunging, and then his hand yanking the dagger from her side and driving it into her neck, dragging it sideways, a sound like nothing I have ever heard coming out of my mother then, a sound no human should ever have to hear.

  I must have screamed, must have cried out; I don’t recall. I only know that he looked up at me and grinned. I recognized his face then, his bony hand. I knew this man.

  He let go my mother’s hair and she fell facedown to the floor. I heard her teeth break when her chin struck the wood.

  I ran.

  32

  Fear has a way of crowding all reason from the brain, of filling those wrinkles and creases with a thick sludge impermeable to light. I had but one thought as I ran, the thought of every terrified rodent: to find a small tight space too narrow for any body but my own, too deep for a long bony arm to plumb. I ran with my vision still reduced to a tunnel view of the world and this time blurry with hot tears, so that I had to swing my head as I ran in order to see more than a constricted path before me.

  Across Canal I ran, through lots and dooryards, veering one direction and then the other, zigzagging north as if drawn there magnetically. It did not occur to me that I surely had outdistanced my pursuer after a block or so; I imagined him relentless and knew I could beat him only by being more of the same.

  Not far past the Bowery Theater, I understood suddenly where I was headed, where I must go—to the open pipework of the Croton Aqueduct, those narrow masonry tubes in their ditches. From the Thirteenth Street holding tank on down into the city, these sections of three-foot pipe were being laid willy-nilly, all sections to be connected one day but for now seemingly random, the handiwork of a mad architect. A section sixty yards long or so traversed Grand Street, and it was to this one I found myself racing.

  Down into the ditch I leapt without a moment’s thought of what lay beneath me. Shin-deep into rancid, stinking water. Sloshing forward like a heart about to burst, then onto hands and knees in the slimy mud, slithering into the pipe, slipping and sliding and clawing my way through the darkness. I banged my head so many times and scraped my elbows so frequently that the pain alone was what slowed me down, what finall
y brought me to a halt somewhere near the center of the section.

  Beyond me lay a gray pinpoint, the eastern aperture. By lying on my side I could look down the length of my body and see another pinpoint to the west. If he attempted to enter from either end, I would see him coming, could slither out the other way. But a pistol ball, that was a different matter. I could not sink low enough in the mud to hide from a pistol ball. I spent the next quarter hour looking frantically from one aperture to the other.

  The mud on my neck dried and stiffened, cracking each time I swung my head to the right or left. The air was foul and sticky; any breath deep enough to fill my lungs made me want to vomit. But as long as both apertures remained clear, this pipe would remain my home. I resolved that I would sooner expire there of hunger or pistol ball than by a knife drawn across my throat.

  I grew chilled. My body ached. I sobbed and whimpered. Eventually I slept, exhausted. Haunted by dreams, my sleep was broken and fitful. When I awoke from time to time, I was hardly better than asleep, no more sentient or less prone to the phantoms of fear. I dreamed I was awake and when awake assured myself that I was only dreaming.

  In this manner the night somehow passed. Daybreak came; the apertures grew brighter. Warmer. The air thickened into its own invisible mud. The light at the western opening flickered with the shadows of workmen. Voices echoed down the pipe to me, but none with a tone sufficiently reassuring to coax me into the uncertainty of the outer world. Nobody knew I was there. I was utterly and irretrievably alone.

  The heat, the stink, the fear—what a narcotic it was. I must have slept ten minutes out of every fifteen. Often I awoke writhing in the mud, spitting and gagging. I despised myself for the coward I was and always had been. All my fears, whether personified by Moonie Weaver, or by the man who had murdered my mother, or by the seething world at large, whatever form my fear assumed, I had proven myself too craven to stand and face it. I had latched onto Poe for the same reason, to be my protector, to assume the duties I was too spineless to assume myself.

  My only comfort was the boyish notion that I could simply lie there in my pipe and fade away into oblivion. But even this idea brought no lasting peace. I dreamed that I was comfortably dead when the pipes were finished, buried, and connected and the water was released to flow beneath the city. The sudden gush dislodged my body and sent me speeding down the tube, spinning and wobbling like a badly fletched arrow, caroming from one wall to the other. I awoke flailing and dizzy, deafened by my own echoing screams.

  When finally I came sufficiently awake to realize I had been dreaming, another voice penetrated the cotton of my thoughts. Someone was shouting down the pipe, someone at the western opening. A workman alerted by my shrill cries.

  His concern was all I needed to drive me out in the other direction. Like an inchworm I made my way toward the eastern light. The nearer the opening came, the fresher the air. With it, my desire for life returned. I all but dove out the open end of the pipe.

  Then scrambled to my feet in the pool of stagnant water. A furtive glance over my shoulder revealed a workman walking toward me down the pipe. Up out of the ditch, I scurried. Waterlogged and stiff with mud. I was covered head to foot in slippery ochre clay, stinking like an outhouse. And yet…

  How to explain the way the city looked to me then? Despite its usual bustle, its clop and clamor of routine, despite the almost musical buzz of the sudden brightness of a summer day, despite the slosh of my boots and the sticky whoosh of plastered limbs, despite all this, there seemed a calmness all around me, the same tranquillity I had imagined must be found in death, a serenity of silence inside my brain.

  I knew with a knowledge that had seeped into me with the mud that I was an orphan now, whether my father lived or not. Yes, I was saddened by my mother’s death, saddened in a remote and guilty way, but it was a peculiarly peaceful kind of sadness. I felt as if I had taken the worst life has to offer. The worst fear and shock and there I stood whole in the sunlight. I was made of mud and slime but so are we all.

  At my filthiest, hungriest, and most perilous moment, I felt good about myself. I had outrun Death. I knew Death’s name, I knew his employer. Off I trotted for a quick bath in the Hudson, then to share my triumph and revelations with the only man in the world whom I knew I could trust.

  33

  The scene at Poe’s cottage dispatched my serenity the way a hatchet dispatches a chicken’s head. Mrs. Clemm sat on a porch step, huddled up in a clot of fidgets and worry. When she saw me coming down the lane, she leapt to her feet and came thundering out to meet me. The look on her face made me think she was about to throttle me, or at least bowl me over and stomp on my bones.

  But no, she pulled up short, she seized me by an arm. “They took him!” she cried. “My lord in heaven they got him and are keeping him somewhere, Augie!”

  Her words ran past me in such a rush that I could make neither heads nor tails of them. I stood there blinking at her, still damp from my dunking in the river. All I knew was that she had been weeping for more than a little while; her eyes were red rimmed and her cheeks puffy. I had her repeat herself again and again, which only served to make her more agitated and confusing. In this manner we returned to the house.

  Inside I went to Poe’s bedroom and peeked into the dimness, and there in Poe’s chair sat Virginia wrapped in Poe’s shawl. She looked at me with the blankest, most bottomless stare I have ever witnessed on a living body. I would get no information from her; she was all but catatonic with dread.

  It took me the better part of thirty minutes to coax a coherent story out of Mrs. Clemm. She told the tale in disconnected bits and pieces that I, aided by a large measure of hand patting and gentle questioning, was finally able to puzzle together.

  Early that morning, a man had called on Poe. Mrs. Clemm described him as exceedingly tall and as thin as a stick. “He looked for all the world like the Grim One himself. I fear now he was the angel Azrael, the one who comes to separate a person’s body from his soul.”

  But on that day, I knew him to be the very same man who had sent me scurrying into the water pipe, Hobbs’s cadaverous servant. Mrs. Clemm of course had no knowledge that he worked for Hobbs, or any knowledge then or ever that he was my mother’s murderer. She only knew that an odd-looking man who called himself Careys had arrived by phaeton while Poe was still in his morning gown. The man had introduced himself as a messenger for one Horace Greeley, who was desirous of a meeting with Poe to discuss the poet’s participation in the inaugural issue of a new literary journal.

  “I did not like the man from the start,” Mrs. Clemm told me. “He had such a horrible smile, Augie. You would’ve flinched to’ve seen it. More like a knife cut than a smile, though I’m sure you can’t imagine what I mean.”

  I surely could.

  In any case, Poe was not so unnerved by the man and hurried to dress and ride off into town with him. For the next three hours Mrs. Clemm busied herself with broomery and other household chores and tried not to fantasize about any monies Poe’s latest opportunity might produce.

  Around noon a scowling leatherhead arrived by foot with the disastrous news. Poe had been found insentient outside the Sportsman’s Hall on Water Street, reeking of rum. (The things I might have told her about the notorious clip joint, but did not: that rat fights were held in the basement while soiled doves performed their own acrobatics in the third-floor bedrooms, with every other kind of liquored debauchery welcome on the two floors in between; that while a pianist and female singer entertained in the main barroom, a spider monkey in a red suit scampered from table to table, delighting the customers with his antics while surreptitiously relieving them of their slag and super, their money and pocket watches; that a favorite cabal of the establishment was to dope a sailor’s grog with laudanum, then carry the unconscious man outside, clean out his pockets, and summon a constable—though usually scarce in that part of town, one could a
lways be conveniently found just around the corner—who would slap the gob into a state of semi-wakefulness, drag him back to his ship, and there demand from his captain a good portion of the man’s advance wages in exchange for not locking him up until his ship left port.)

  “This constable who brought you the news,” I said. “Was he wearing the initials of the Bank of New York?”

  “No, the blue frock coat,” she said, meaning that he was an HP, a member of Hays’s Police. “He had a face like a long box.”

  “We seen that one in the Tombs when we went to check on Mr. Payne.”

  “That’s not the half of it,” she went on. “They’re going to hold Eddie on a charge of public drunkenness. They say he was talking wild about that girl they took from the river—that he even claimed to have put her there himself!”

  I recognized in a flash what Mrs. Clemm did not, the sinuated path of black intentions. Hobbs had sent his manservant to shanghai Poe and discredit him as a drunk, and now had enlisted at least one leatherhead in an effort to have Poe swing in the place of Lieutenant Andrews for the murder of the shopgirl.

  “He had evil on his mind, that constable did,” she continued. “Looked straight at Virginia and told me I’d best keep a close eye on her lest she turned up missing too. ‘That goes for yourself as well,’ he told me.”

  I knew Hobbs’s methods now, the impunity of the powerful. “You’ve got to get her away from here. The both of you have to get away.”

  “I wouldn’t know where to go,” she said.

  “You can’t stay another night where they know where you are.”

  “I don’t understand any of this, Augie. Who’s responsible for this?”

  I looked into the trees, studied the shadows. “Promise me you’ll get away from here.”