On Night's Shore

by Randall Silvis

  “Closed up tight,” said Mrs. Clemm. “There’s not a soul inside.”

  “Some animals prefer the darkness.”

  “Augie, the house is closed up. Their ship leaves for Europe at midnight tonight; isn’t that what the newspaper said? Which means the Mr. and Mrs. are in their staterooms already.”

  “A man like Hobbs wouldn’t just walk away without trying to even the score.”

  “No one is inside that house. We have come all this way for nothing.”

  I wasn’t convinced. More accurately, I was convinced—convinced of the reliability of my suspicions. The house still felt alive to me; it gave off an emanation of inhabitancy, as peculiar as that might sound. I felt somebody still inside, left behind. The hackles of my neck had not lain down since first we spotted the building’s hulking silhouette.

  “I’m going to check around back,” I said.

  I left her standing there on Fifth Avenue, doing her best to appear inconspicuous as she paced beneath the gaslights. I ran quickly through the large side yard, as light on my feet as only a child can be. And there in the rear stood the carriage house, the same stonework and gabling as the mansion, a one-sixth version of the house.

  It too was dark, but as I crept closer, I heard a horse nickering, and I followed that sound until I determined that the stables comprised the southern half of the carriage house. On a night like this there was bound to be a window open for ventilation, and I scoured the wall for evidence of one, discerned only a blank sameness, then crept to the eastern wall and found there the off-colored square, shutters folded open, the window eight feet off the ground.

  From out the open window came a horsey scent and the smell of hay and the snuffling nickering sound that horses make. I raced back to the front corner of the mansion and kept close to the wall and went Sssst! Sssst! until Mrs. Clemm nervously joined me there.

  “I need a boost” was all I told her and was off again to the carriage house. I flinched with every heavy footfall that came thumping behind me.

  When she stood beside me finally, I pointed up to the stable window and whispered, “I need to have a look inside. If there’s a chestnut bay in there, we’ll at least know if we’re on the right track or not.”

  I bent over then to unbuckle my brogans, because I did not want to leave filthy heel marks on Mrs. Clemm’s shoulders. But she, for once in her life, was not meticulous. She seized me under the arms and with one swift movement raised me over her head and set me whomp atop her shoulders.

  It was easy enough from that perch to haul myself inside. I dangled from the inside ledge as long as my arms would take it, getting my eyes accustomed to this even deeper darkness, then let go and dropped softly to a bare wooden floor.

  I landed less than three feet from the Victoria that had brought Felicia Hobbs to Poe’s door. Beside it sat a phaeton, a smaller carriage with a folding top. But no Dearborn.

  Then to the stalls. Two horses, this much I could see at once. It took a while longer to distinguish them. A roan mare. Another mare, black.

  I felt my way along the wall until I came to a side door and unlatched it and tiptoed back to Mrs. Clemm; she was standing yet beneath the open window, staring up at it. She gasped when I tapped her on the arm.

  “It’s not there,” I whispered. “Neither the wagon nor the horse.”

  “Then…” She turned to gaze at the house, that huge blank edifice, as if its only door had been forever closed to us now.

  “I never expected to find that wagon here anyway,” I said. “He hired somebody to do his dirty work. You know as well as me that he ain’t—”

  She put a finger to her lips and with her other hand turned me to face the mansion. Then she raised her arm and pointed a finger.

  “I don’t see nothing,” I said.

  “Close to the ground. There was a light passing by. It’s gone now, but I’m sure I saw it.”

  “Somebody in the cellar,” I said.

  We moved like a Siamese shadow to the rear of the house and found the window well and the small rectangular glass. I lay on my belly and put my face close to the glass and cupped my hands around my eyes. A minute later, I sat back on my knees.

  “Nothing,” I said. “It’s black as Hades in there.”

  “There was a light,” she said.

  I stood and walked a few feet back from the house and looked it over. The rear wall was a sheer face, but the left side sported a small covered porch from whose roof I could easily scramble over the many dormers and gables. I had no doubt that I could find a way inside.

  But first I scuffed my foot over the ground and kicked at any protuberances I felt.

  Mrs. Clemm came and put a hand on my shoulder and whispered in my ear. “What in the world are you doing?”

  “I need a rock or something hard. I’m probably going to have to break a window so as to get inside.”

  “Augie, no. That is more than I am willing—”

  “You want to just sit here and wait until they find him in the Hudson?”

  She reached into one of the deep pockets of her dress and brought forth an object and held it out to me. “Will this do?”

  It was the pewter mug I had stolen from Hobbs’s kitchen, the very one from which I had been plied with tea and gooseberry jam.

  “What are you doing carrying this thing around?” I asked.

  “I just grabbed it on my way out the door. In case we needed to defend ourselves.”

  At first I thought it a curious choice for a weapon, until I slipped my hand inside the curved handle and felt again the mug’s solidity and heft. “Good for you,” I said.

  She hoisted me onto the porch roof, and I scampered up onto the slates and then pulled myself to the narrow ledge outside a second-floor dormer. It was not at the rear of the house as I would have preferred, but neither did it face the street directly, and as long as I kept close to the building, I would appear, even to someone as close as Mrs. Clemm, but a bump of darkness.

  The window was latched. I peered through one of its twelve square panes of glass and saw only a cavern of pitch. Then pulled the pewter mug from beneath my blouse and knocked the base of the mug hard against the bottom corner pane and flinched at the brief chime of broken glass and held my breath and did not move until a long quarter minute passed and there were no other sounds.

  My arm snaked through the jagged opening then, feeling for the latch. While all the while I had to chuckle to myself, considering the irony of the situation. How many hundreds of times had I fantasized about breaking into a house like this one, of filling a sack with enough swag to keep me in tea and biscuits all the rest of my days. And now here I was doing precisely that, but not to steal a single shilling. I almost seemed to be playing a joke on myself.

  Finally my thumb found the window latch. Fingers straining, I tried to wiggle it loose. A splinter of glass stabbed the underside of my forearm. Then the latch broke free, and with the heels of both hands I pushed hard on the casement and drove the window up.

  The scent of the room washed out to me, the dry caged heat of the place. Then inside I went, crawling like a snake. Slithering headfirst to the floor. And then I climbed to my feet and stood there smiling. I wanted to turn to the window and shout down to Mrs. Clemm that I had made it inside, to exult in it, thumb my nose at Hobbs, but of course any celebration would be premature, might even jinx what remained to be done.

  I wanted as well to move deliberately about this bedroom, wanted to whisk away the linen sheets that had been laid over all the furnishings, wanted to sprawl atop the gigantic four-poster bed, wriggle down deep into the feather mattress, run my hands up and down the damask draperies. I wanted to touch everything and leave my presence everywhere. I wanted to do less innocent things as well, wanted to wipe my shoes on the carpet and break things and steal and do the kinds of despicable acts so routine to the
place where I used to live. I wanted to own this place, and because I could not, I wanted to defile it.

  But I turned my mind again to Poe. Toward Poe and away from that small guttural voice of destruction. The open doorway. Out into the corridor. Creeping. Trying to glide from the ball of one foot to the other but flinching with every slow creak of a floorboard.

  By the time I reached the bottom of the staircase, I could see well enough to make out most every obstacle that might trip me up. Here too every piece of furniture had been draped with a linen sheet, and each stood out in a lighter shade of darkness, so that I seemed to be wending my way through a field of gray mounds, each of them larger and more sinister in the darkness than they would have been in daylight.

  Because of this, it took me several minutes to navigate through the foyer and into the kitchen without knocking anything over. The kitchen, though, was not enshrouded; no sheets had been laid here. I caught the scent of cold meat, congealed fat. The biting scent of snuff tobacco.

  From the kitchen I crept to the pantry. There I unlocked the door and eased it open and stuck my head out beneath the porch roof.

  “Sssst! Sssst! Sssst!”

  Mrs. Clemm was there almost instantly, pushing past me like a moose cow through swamp grass, searching for her calf. “Where?” she whispered. “Which way now?”

  I took her hand and led the way to the cellar door. It seemed to take us a lifetime to descend those narrow steps, down into the cool and musty basement. We had no matches or candle, no illumination of any kind, and so we felt our way along three-quarters blind, my left hand riding one wall, right hand riding the other, Mrs. Clemm’s breath warm and close on the top of my head.

  The hallway at the bottom of the stairs was long and not very wide; the floor was paved in brick. The doors to each of the rooms along the hallway were closed, the laundry room and pickling room, the curing room and servants’ kitchen, the many other rooms we could not identify.

  All told, we passed a dozen rooms before attaining the end wall and, for a moment, thought ourselves tricked, stymied, until I leaned against that wall and felt it give a little. I bent at the knees and ran my hand along the wall until I felt the knot of rope that served as a door latch. I motioned Mrs. Clemm back a few steps and eased open the door.

  A cool wet whoosh of deeper air, the scent of earth and mold. I put out a foot and felt for the first step and found not a step but an earthen floor that sloped away down a short narrow corridor. This tunnel was barely large enough for Mrs. Clemm, whose body was hot against my back, her hand gripping the waistband of my trousers.

  Waiting at the bottom of the tunnel, as if too weak to ascend any farther, was a soft yellow glow. I felt for the pewter mug beneath my shirt and pulled it forth and gripped it like a club handle. I heard blood drumming in my temples and the shallow rasp of Mrs. Clemm’s breath. I felt the collusion of every muscle and bone employed as I tried to set myself in motion.

  And then a faint clanging sound. I froze in my tracks. Mrs. Clemm thudded into me. I put up a hand and hoped that she could see it. I cocked my head and listened. Another faint clang. A scraping sound. A sputtering of lamplight.

  It was all we needed; it was everything. From that point on we both must have felt the same force seize and pull on us, a hand as strong as terror, as hot as rage, for without a word we were soon into that tunnel and moving along it and heading heedlessly down to its terminus.

  48

  The tunnel was no more than thirty feet long. We had progressed barely a sixth of the way before Mrs. Clemm took me by the arm and held me in place while she squeezed to the front. She walked with her head bent low so as not to scrape the dirt ceiling. So fully did she fill the tunnel that I could see nothing before me but her backside. An oil lamp hanging from a hook driven into the end wall threw a weak yellow light over her shoulders.

  Because of this I saw everything a few moments after she did, each of the small caves carved into the side walls, the first one on the right holding baskets of potatoes, yams, parsnips, and turnips, the first one on the left all manner of squash and pumpkins, onions and cabbages. The second on the right held only apples; the next, hams wrapped in waxed burlap and hanging from a rod above barrels filled, probably, with salted meats; the next cave lined with racks of bottled wine; the next, filled with demijohns and small casks. The rounded opening to each cave was no more than five feet high and four wide and another four deep. From each cave came a scent of bare earth, the cloying scent of dirt and rock.

  It was the last pair of caves, though, dug not at right angles to the end wall, as were the previous ones, but on a sixty-degree slant on opposite sides of the oil lamp, it was these two caves, when we came close enough to glimpse a portion of their apertures, that brought Mrs. Clemm to a sudden halt. I bumped into her backside, then quickly poked my head under her arm so as to see what had brought her up short. I could glimpse approximately half the opening of each of the remaining caves.

  The one on the left was partially sealed with brick, the first ten or twelve courses already in place, a pile of bricks remaining to be laid. More accurately, I suppose, sections of the top courses of a previously intact wall had been removed, for old mortar still clung to the bricks that lay in a pile.

  And the person responsible for this endeavor, for dismantling and now reassembling the wall, was at this moment resting from his labors, taking a bit of snuff while sitting atop a stone inside the opposite cave. All but his huge feet and bony knees remained invisible behind the cave until he shifted forward and bent low to pick up the snuff pouch that had fallen off one knee. It was then his long face came into view, yellowed even more by the waxy light of the oil lamp, the gaunt cheeks and wolfish chin, the cadaverous tautness of his skin. He looked every bit as necrophagous in that position as he had while bending over my mother.

  Mrs. Clemm cocked her head around to look at me, eyebrows raised in silent question. She knew nothing of this man, but I knew everything, knew with a single glimpse of him that the cave he was resealing contained not hams or wines or turnips.

  I jammed my finger at the partially sealed cave, jabbed it repeatedly and violently, and mouthed the word Poe! The truth of the situation dawned on Mrs. Clemm in a flash, a flash that all but exploded in her eyes. She covered the remaining distance in a bull-like charge, heedlessly forward straight to the cave on the left, where she thrust head and shoulders over the courses of brick and cried out, shrieked, and then spun on the man who was awkwardly scooting clear of the other cave in an effort to stand.

  It was then I saw the dark stains all up and down his clothes, the splatter of dried blood on his hands, blackened further with dirt. A moment later Mrs. Clemm was on him, her hands flying at his face, her rage like a roar inside that tunnel.

  The man’s great height and long limbs did him no good here. Nor do I think he could have bested Mrs. Clemm inside a boxing ring, not even were she less provoked, for the man’s movements were as stiff as his features and it was all he could do finally to shove her away from him, propel her backward and over the built-up bricks and inside the cave with Poe.

  With the wall demolished, I could see him now; he lay on his side bound head to foot with rope, a rag tied over his mouth, a wide stain of black beneath his nose and covering his chin. Nor was he alone in the tomb; his intended decay would have increased by no more than a fourth the population of gray bones and rotted ropes already there. Including one poor soul who, judging from his bloated and gray appearance, had been entombed just weeks prior to Poe.

  Without a glance in my direction, Hobbs’s man moved in on Mrs. Clemm. He picked up a brick in his right hand and raised it nearly to the ceiling and moved toward her. He had but a moment to turn toward the scuffling sound of my approach before I swung the pewter mug with all my might and caught him squarely on his wolfish chin. The effort not only spun me off my feet but dropped Hobbs’s man to his knees, eyes vacant.
He dropped the brick and lurched onto his hands.

  I rolled over and crawled into the cave beside Mrs. Clemm, who was already pulling at Poe’s ropes, crying, “Eddie! Eddie, my Eddie!” as he lay there mumbling and rolling his head. She was too frantic to understand his message, so it was left to me to pull the rag out of his mouth so that he could speak.

  “You mustn’t pull, Muddy, please,” he said, his voice weak but so surprisingly gentle, almost dreamy. “You will have to untie them, dearest.”

  She asked me to bring her the lamp, and I rose to do so, only to be swung at by Hobbs’s man. He was unsteady and unfocused, and I had no trouble dodging his blow. I picked up the brick nearest me and heaved it at him, but it missed his head and bounced off a shoulder. He howled and fell away from me, but would have come at me again had Mrs. Clemm not pulled me back and risen to take my place.

  At the sight of her he turned and fled, hobbling, lurching up the tunnel.

  I handed the lamp down to Mrs. Clemm, and together we set to work on Poe’s ropes, she at his wrists and me at his ankles. At one point I paused, my gaze seized by the swollen corpse not two feet away. His stench was sharp and ripe; I could see maggots in his ear.

  “Fordyce,” Poe said. “The missing councilman.”

  Mrs. Clemm put a hand to my cheek and turned me away.

  Finally Poe was able to sit upright. He massaged his wrists, then rubbed the cobwebs and dirt off his face. Mrs. Clemm leaned close to brush the caked blood from beneath his nose and to scrutinize his face for other injuries.

  It was then we heard the awful thud of a door slammed shut, a black and final sound I felt like a blow in the pit of my stomach.