Harrow: Three Novels (Nightmare House, Mischief, The Infinite)

by Douglas Clegg

  “This is so…old-fashioned.” I grinned as I hefted it and remembered the one my father once had in his workroom in Boston. “An EverReady Clover Leaf Lantern, Good lord. Is anything modern in this village?”

  I glanced over to her again, her face now brilliantly lit with the quavering whiteness of the lantern’s light while the moon spent its efforts elsewhere.

  “Don’t tromp around at night scaring people,” she said.

  Before I could say much else, she lit into me with words and perhaps even some foul language that sounded funny coming from her maddeningly sweet lips. Somewhere in her tirade, I began to realize that she was the “Maggie” that Wentworth had warned me about - and now, here she was — spitting venom about sneaking up on her in the night; again, I distinctly smelled fresh onion and shallots, and in fact, was positive I saw some twisted scallions in her hair. Had she been lying in the dirt, staring up at the moon? Digging for something? Needing sustenance from the garden? I wondered what she could possibly have been doing at that time of the morning, with her old-fashioned lantern and the cats ‘round her ankles — digging for shallots and turnips on my grandfather’s property? Part of me thought it a lark to imagine a servant girl digging away at all hours for food, part of me felt sad. Was she so poor and destitute that she was reduced to this? Part of me was self-righteously enraged for my dear grandfather that the very people he had hired to work for him would steal — but this was ridiculous. Who cared if the young woman took from the garden - and in October, no less!

  It was funny and sad, but this woman before me was furious because somehow she could read my mind or my face or the way I grinned and she became more enraged, for she seemed to know all of the things of which I had begun mentally accusing her.

  9

  “Your grandfather let me take vegetables and fruit from the garden, and it’s October so why would I be sneaking over here,” she said, stumbling over her words, obviously guessing at my suspicions, “and I’m not out here at three a.m. for the wild onions,” she added. “And furthermore,” she wagged a finger practically in my face, “I’m not some trollop digging for weeds. I have plenty, thank you, and I only take what’s going to waste here, so wipe that look of judge, jury, and executioner off that snotty face of yours.”

  The woman had a mouth on her. I was stunned. All I could think to say was: “Why are you here this time of night - or morning - Maggie?”

  “Mrs. Barrow to you.”

  “All right, Mrs. Barrow,” I conceded.

  She calmed a bit. Something about the way she explained herself led me to believe that she was used to being accused of all kinds of minor crimes.

  “It was the cats. I thought one of them was hurt,” she said, “And then…”

  “Then?”

  “I don’t live that far from the property. Sound travels long distances this time of the morning. And I couldn’t sleep,” she said, but I felt she was holding something back.

  “Was it just the cats?”

  “They’re going at it, the devils,” she said forthrightly. “They sound like babies crying when they’re in season. It’s a racket like you’ve never heard.”

  “If they’re wild, I’ll see to it that they’re gotten rid of,” I said, not

  really meaning it, but I was unsure of any other solution. “They might carry disease.”

  “You, the new master of Harrow, ready to rid the place of the cats that have been here longer than you’ll ever stay. Diseased! These are healthy cats living on healthful country mice,” she spat. “Murder innocent cats, will you?”

  I had to catch my breath. I didn’t want servants; I didn’t even want

  Wentworth; but I supposed they, too, were part of what I’d inherited. I was

  no longer a working man; I had just become everything I had always loathed in my father: a gentleman of leisure.

  “All right,” I said. “Mrs. Barrow—Maggie—I’m very sleepy, and I’ve had bad dreams and need to go back to bed and have some more. You’re welcome to the shallots in this garden. I will ignore the cats as best I can. Is that fair?”

  She eyed me suspiciously. I had thought her quite beautiful at first, but between her temper and her intolerance of anything I had to say, she was beginning to seem less-than-lovely. “Give me back my lantern,” was all she said. When I did, she smiled, briefly. “You scared me half to death, coming out here like you did, weaving in and out of the path, with that wild look,” she said. “I thought you were some kind of ghost.”

  Then, she turned, and seemed to flit along the path, back into the darkness, no doubt returning along some narrow road known only to her, across a break in the stone wall that surrounded Harrow, back to her little apartment in the village, back to her husband may-he-be-spared-the-smell-of-shallots.

  I shrugged it all off, and felt a small ache along the back of my head, and knew I must try to get some rest. I would be no good for the morning or even the afternoon if I stayed up all night long.

  As I walked back to the house, I thought I heard the sound of a child wailing, but knew it must be the cats, the cats whose Irish Faerie Queen I had just met, the Faerie Queen Maggie, Our Lady of Shallots.

  I wanted to look up the side of Harrow, half-expecting to see my grandfather there (as I had when I was a little boy) standing at the window of the turret room, watching me as if I were the most important thing in the world to him.

  I say “I wanted to,” because part of me was half-fearful that he might be there, that he had somehow not left Harrow, that he had called me back to him even in Death, and that I would look up at the window and see him there, glowing in some ghostly white smoke, and I would feel a chill and never sleep in Harrow again. It was juvenile of me, I know - but the fear had crept into me as I returned to the house, and I dared not look up at that window.

  It became very real to me at that ungodly hour of the morning—in those few moments that I must not look up at the window, because what if I saw him there - what if he were still there - what if I could never live in Harrow without sensing his presence, for good or ill, at every turn, every remembered instant?

  Finally, I looked up to the turret, overcoming my silly fear, knowing that he would not be standing at the window, watching me.

  What I saw felt more shocking. More violent. More jarring, in some indescribable way.

  I saw that the window of that room no longer existed.

  Brick and mortar had filled the place where the window should have been. I imagined that I had remembered it wrong, that my grandfather had never stood there looking down at me, that the window itself had never existed, but that what had seemed a tower window had been sealed since its beginning.

  Chapter Two

  1

  I, the one you know as Ethan, am writing this account of that time at Harrow as a warning to you. It is the year 2000, and it is a wonder I can write - or think - or breathe - at all, as my nurse says.

  I am in my room. I am ancient - I feel ancient, anyway. The body is a vehicle for consciousness, one supposes. My brain still has its daily fevers. My hands curl in pain at times, but I will keep writing for whoever comes after. I still smoke unfiltered cigarettes, rolled for me daily. I defy Mr. Death to come take me although I know Mr. Death will arrive soon enough.

  Still, another smoke, a sip of thick coffee, spattered with cinnamon and nutmeg, and I will write more in my journal of that early time at Harrow.

  I am now looking back on what I considered the prime of my life, although I was probably just around the curve of it at 29 - for I would soon grow serious with the shadows that emerged from Harrow. I have lived through wars and peace and technological furies the likes of which I could not imagine in my youth; I am over one hundred years old. Can you imagine what I saw then? The wonders in the sky - for we had begun what was then a miracle, called Air-Mail, by which an airplane could transport packages and letters from one end of the country to another in a few days, whereas it would take weeks for letters to travel
before this marvelous change. And the radio - I was completely mesmerized by it, and would even close the newspaper with my beloved Krazy Kat and the funny pages to listen to the news of the world or the broadcast of a boxing match. And the movies! I was in Harrow one night only and already wished that I could rush out to one of the great movie palaces in Manhattan to catch the latest Charlie Chaplin.

  Certainly, we had terrors in the world then, we had the fears and paranoia of menaces and foreign evils, we had serial killers the likes of which would curl your hair, we had all the good and bad that is forgotten and years later sifted through for moments to be relished as quaint and sentimental. There never has been an innocent time in human history - I suppose Harrow, in many ways, stood for that idea alone. There was no innocence in the world, and to pretend so is to bring a veil across one’s face and never look beyond it. The 1920s was no golden age; it was no calm before the storm. We even had boredom and craziness. It was a different time, it was another world; it was beyond anything you can probably imagine, you who are alive and reading this now, and yet, I tell you, it resembled this world, now, near enough to the birth of yet another century. These were the years I felt most alive. They were imperfect years; they were years of absolute confusion for me, between the end of my marriage, the losses of both my parents, and the loss of my distant but beloved grandfather. But they were my years, and I won’t give them up without a struggle.

  These were the years I often return to in order to feel that breath on my face again, that tender kiss of all that life takes from us as we grow beyond what life is meant to allow us.

  Yes, I have been accused of clinging to life - but why shouldn’t I?

  Yes, I return in my mind to my discovery of Harrow, my ownership of it, my legacy.

  But in those days, I was young in that way in which the last year of one’s twenties is still young. I was nearly as young as the century itself.

  Do you know the Hudson River and its beauty? Have you been there?

  I imagine the beginnings of Watch Point and Harrow - not when it became known as Camden’s Hundred under a Dutch-English family - but in those eras going further into prehistory. The glacial movement created the wormholes that became the river thousands of years ago; the primeval forest grew, the strange creatures that inhabited that realm arrived, the valley flourished. And then, something happened. Nothing cataclysmic, but something happened, and the land where the house would be built acquired a sense of being unclean.

  There is even a story - though no doubt created by some local wit - that Henry Hudson paused somewhere on his exploration of the river that would later bear his name, and mentioned, “This is a very bad Land to fall with, and an unpleasant Land to see.” He was, according to local wags of Watch Point - none of whom are to be believed in this—referring to the property that would become Harrow. In the 1620s, the Dutch West India company sent families to settle the river. Watch Point was largely overlooked, owing, it was suggested, to the way it jutted into the water and of the menace of the natives of the specific area.

  When the land that became Watch Point was first known, it was settled by natives who called themselves Mahanowacks, a variant spelling on what we know as Mohican, but nonetheless, this group was distinct and more closely related to the nearby tribe known as the Wappings and somewhat related to the Schaghticokes. The Mahanowacks were distinct from the other tribes of natives in that they were not welcoming to the invader.

  War-like and unwilling to transact business with the Dutch, the Mahanowacks along the river by Watch Point ended up being massacred in an event that was all but erased from the history books. Some of the survivors, no doubt, went up the river to join with the tribes of Mohicans, some went east to share space with the Pequots and the Mohegans (again, a separate but similar group), others west across the river. Many were killed and one can only suppose this killing took place near Harrow.

  This is purely my own conjecture, from what I know now about the property, and from my grandfather’s collection of artifacts.

  But I won’t get ahead of myself.

  It was 1926 when I arrived, and it was October, and my body was still strong and invulnerable, and my hair was thick and dark and my skin was perhaps too pale except where it was ruddy around my face, and I didn’t know that the feeling of being young would ever end. My first full day at Harrow, I woke up late in the morning surrounded by such luxury as I had never seen before.

  I truly was Ethan, then.

  Think of me thusly: Ethan with his snobbish upbringing; his outmoded ideas of women and wealth and his silly fears of what will come and what might come to pass; Ethan with his thoughts that are not thoughts at all, but the accumulated grease and gunk of a mind filled with the emptiness around him. Ethan, with his then-strong body, from playing tennis and what little boxing instruction he’d had at school. Ethan: a man who I would not necessarily like were I to meet him today, but in those days, he represented the least of society’s ills: an inheritor, a man without accomplishment, a man who had spent his entire young life “getting out of the way of things.”

  Harrow, I believe, taught him much.

  Harrow changed him. I can see myself as him now; I can slip down into that world gone by, and watch him move through it, unaware of what waits for him.

  I will tell you of him as if he existed outside of myself. As if he were there, within a dream, living in Harrow – watch him as he sleeps, now, watch him in that dreadful place…

  2

  The drapes around his bed were shut. At first, when he opened his eyes, Ethan had the sensation of being buried alive. He had dreams of being entombed like this when he was younger, and in times of stress, the dreams often returned.

  It was an unpleasant feeling, to say the least, but one he knew was pure fantasy on his part. The curtaining about the enormous bed was wall-like and seemingly impenetrable—thick, red velvet drapes. Above his head, a large mahogany monstrosity that arched from the four posts, in which were carved snakes entwined with vines and some kind of rabbit or other small creature.

  The mattress was stuffed with eiderdown and did not bend as had his cheap bed at his equally cheap apartment in New York; instead, it felt thick and fat and it seemed to conform to his body perfectly. He felt rich, for the first time in his adult life.

  Rich as a king, for a moment, anyway, although he knew that the books of the estate would need some serious going-over, but the fantasy was in his head. He imagined the women who would throw themselves at him, his ex-wife calling to express remorse, the shirts he would buy as had Jay Gatsby in the recent novel by Fitzgerald; in fact, he very much felt like Gatsby, lying beneath a ton of covers and sheets with the musty smell of unlaundered luxury surrounding him.

  Harrow was his domain; Ethan Gravesend was king here; he could do anything now, with his life. He could pursue the dreams he’d always had of…And then, grinning, he pressed the half-dreams from his mind. Ethan heard a bird singing, somewhere beyond the red drapes that enshrouded the bed.

  He pulled off the sheets, feeling sticky and overslept. He sat up, feeling that awful scratchiness of still occupying the shirt that he’d worn for nearly twenty four hours before going to bed; he remembered—vaguely—crawling up the stairs, dizzy and sleepy, and nearly able to fall asleep at the top step, but managing to find -as if by magic - a bedroom with candles lit, and a bed waiting. His throat, dry, and his stomach, growling, he tore open the smothering drapes.

  The light was blinding for a moment; the sunlight blasted him; when his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw from the open window of the bedroom that he must have slept right through the best of the day.

  It was noon.

  Mrs. Wentworth stood in the doorway - no, she blocked it with her form, bedecked in a long dark dress of somber demeanor. She was, he assumed, still in mourning, and these were widow’s weeds she had donned, but this mourning was one accompanied by food.

  She had probably been waiting for the new master of Harrow to ris
e since dawn. On a small table beside the door to the room: a plate of cold fried eggs, and a pot of no-doubt lukewarm coffee. She had one of the most suspicious looks he’d ever seen on a human being. Ethan was on his feet, feeling a curious draft now that he was free of the bed.

  He realized in seconds that she glared at him not (merely) out of impatience, anger, and general contempt:

  He was naked from the waist down.

  3

  He made it to the elegant bathroom at the end of the hall in seconds — in fact, he ran from the bedroom as fast as his embarrassment could carry him.

  Still, he laughed too loud while sponging off a hangover and its subsequent splitting headache. The claw-footed tub was large and shaped like a swan (his grandmother’s touch). The faucets were, if not gold, then some remarkable imitation of gold. He sat in the steamy tub for nearly half an hour, unsure as to whether or not he could ever face Wentworth again.

  The memory of the look on Wentworth’s face, a mixture of wincing and sneering and lower lip protrusion, her eyelids trying to close but something in her horror not allowing them to do so, her absolute shock that Justin Gravesend’s grandson should sleep without a generous nightshirt - who knows what she had gone through her small brain at that moment?

  She had turned away quickly to look out the window overlooking the front drive, and would not turn around again. As he bathed, for all he knew, she remained there, looking out that window.

  The thought of Wentworth’s shock kept him in good humor through the rest of the day.

  Bathed, shaved, and dressed in a baggy pair of woolen slacks held up by suspenders and a rumpled white shirt with the collar half-free from its buttons, Ethan managed to scare Wentworth less an hour later, when he went down to give her a more formal greeting.