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

by Douglas Clegg

  Ethan went over, took the cigar, and reached into his breast pocket for his lighter – which he’d also left downstairs with his beloved cigarettes.

  “I always have a tinder box on hand for just such occasions,” Pocket grinned, his crooked row of nearly all imperfect teeth seeming nearly canine in the lamp light. “But first, sit yourself here. And take in the aroma before we light this ambrosia. A cigar is something to be savored, but these…Why, did you know that men would smoke these while drinking brandy or a favorite port? But what a waste, sir, what a waste. For these are like brandy unto themselves. The horrible demon drink would ruin these.”

  Ethan sat, staring at the cigar in his hand. He glanced over to the doorway that led up to the turret. Then, back to Pocket. “Is Pocket your full name?”

  “Grayson Pocket,” the constable said, rolling the cigar between his fingers. “Born in Poughkeepsie of a Dutch mother and a Welsh father, and the name Pocket was not his own, but one he bought. His Welsh name was nigh unpronounceable and he wanted to be part of this world and not of the one he’d left. Names have their own magic, don’t they, sir? They have their own spell. Grayson was too dour a name for me. Son of Gray, eh? Not likely. I became known as Pocket, or Pock, as a boy, and then grew further into the name when I began my servitude to the law,” Pocket said. For a moment, he reminded Ethan of the Walrus from Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter. Pocket seemed the Walrus, and the cigar seemed his tusk as he thrust it between his lips. The constable struck a match, and lit it, rolling the cigar slowly with his left hand while he held the burning match with his right.

  “Hand rolled, sir,” Pocket said. He demonstrated the proper technique so that Ethan could light his own cigar without destroying its flavor. “Sip it like port. Do not gulp. This is an experience to be enjoyed.”

  “I’m quite fond of cigarettes,” Ethan said, coughing for a moment because he had, indeed, gulped.

  “Foul nasty things,” Pocket said with no small amount of disgust as he held his beloved cigar between his lips. “Cigarettes should be outlawed. They are for the uncivilized.”

  And then, as if this were part of the same conversation, he said, “You do know who this woman is, don’t you?”

  2

  Pocket Tells A Story Between Puffs of a Cigar

  I was twenty four when I first came to Watch Point to work in the local office. It wasn’t as it is now – I don’t mean Watch Point, although that is certainly true, sir. What I mean to say is: the practice of policing areas like this one was not then what it is today. In those days, the villagers who got into any trouble at all tended not to do much beyond brawl and cause much more than noise or the mayhem that the very young tend to be drawn toward. I would find the Colloquian brothers setting fire to the old barn behind the Westerly’s place. Or I would be called in to settle disputes between husbands and their wives, either of which might have gone astray or thrown something at the other. Now and then, a pistol was waved in the village, but no one ever was hurt here.

  Certainly, I am not a fool. I knew that the larger towns nearby had their share of genuine criminal activity, and I knew some of it would by necessity spill over to our hamlet. I worked for a constable then who was near his retirement age, and I discovered fairly quickly that he had more than once taken what we would then call “little gifts of gratitude” from shopkeepers and private individuals who wanted some transgression overlooked. Please don’t look at me so disapprovingly. When you are an officer of the law, you must of necessity also be a father-confessor and one who understands other people as if they were books meant to be opened and thumbed through for further understanding of – well, to extend this thought – their plots, as it were. So, I watched this senior officer take bits of cash and the occasional Christmas goose among other sundries. As I see you are now, I was truly appalled and disturbed by this behavior. But he sat me down and he told me this. And I will never forget what he said.

  That man said, “Pocky,” as I was then known, “you are still a boy. You do not understand what men must endure. These are good people. In this village, few had been bad. There are cities and places where truly bad men exist. They do terrible things. They are inhuman, in some respects. But here, in Watch Point, I have seen no terrible things. I have seen nothing that was not entirely human. So I shave.”

  And I said, “You shave?”

  “Yes, I shave every day to remove what I think of them. I judge them anew each and every day. I do not hold grudges. I do not hold them responsible for fates that are beyond their control.”

  “But the law,” I said, feeling every bit as indignant as if I were the son of the Almighty.

  “I see no one in Watch Point what wrote the law,” says he. “I see no one here who goes to the legislature and tells the truth about what human beings must endure in this life in order to survive and prosper.” Then, he pointed at me as if he were my judge. “You see the law as immutable. You see it as an eternal truth. But I tell you, Pocky,” he said, just like that. “I tell you, there is no law that protects good people. The law protects those bad people in the cities and in the other towns. There is no law for those here. But I am their law. I am their law and their conscience and as they go to their priests and their God to unburden themselves, so they come to me. But should I step upon them, should I press out the law as it is written from their hands and hearts, I would have lost my authority.”

  He says something just like that.

  That was many years ago. I do forget some things at times. But I never forget what he told me, or the way he said it. Or how I took it. I understood why he tolerated the little bribes and the transgressions. Because these are good people, sir. Bad people do not live in Watch Point. You may argue the finer points of this with me. You may call me simple. You may tell me that I can’t see beyond my own nose. You may even tell me all the things I told myself then. I told myself that no one man could judge who was good or who was bad, and this, I thought, was the reason for the law. Justice should be blind, sir, I thought. Justice should be meted out to all men, no matter if I deemed them good or bad. But one thing I know from my years here: good people do things sometimes that seem bad. But within their hearts and souls, it is as good as can be understood by anyone. The only problem I see is this: the law does not deal in human souls and human hearts. The law deals in the shallows of life. Did he do this? Did he not do this? Does that woman have the stolen money in her hands, or does she not? It is like a photographer taking pictures. If photographs were the only truth in life, then we would, most of us, be considered a hideous lot, and we would, most of us, never fall in love, nor understand how to love beyond the picture.

  I will give you an example with which you are quite familiar, I believe, sir. Just the other evening, I saw you at the local pub, did I not? You were there with the others in town, pretending that it was a place of food and coffee, with not a whiff of ale about.

  Yet, each night during the week, I go there to dine, as I have for the past twenty years. And each night, since strong drink has been declared unlawful, the stage has been set for what I think of as the ritual of the sacred sassyfrass. I know what our villagers drink there. I can smell it on their breath. I can see it in the cup. But I’ve seen other villages and cities where the local constable raises his club and breaks glasses rather than allow himself to tolerate a speakeasy.

  Yet, in those places, speakeasies flourish. They are unstoppable.

  Here, in Watch Point, the local tavern is the only place where villagers have their illicit fun. And because the ritual continues there nightly, and I am almost always witness to it, it never gets out of hand. Neither do the bootleggers from up the river come here often. I suspect that our Jimmy Winthrop in the village makes the ale himself in the great barrels he keeps in his cellar. Were I to stop this sassyfrass ceremony, I would first have to spit in the eye of nearly every man and woman in Watch Point in order to do it. Next, I would need to try and keep good people from doing something g
ood people have done for thousands of years: forget themselves with the aid of something I may not approve of, but I can’t dismiss out of hand. No, not just because somewhere a law was passed. Somewhere someone with special interests decided that a rule should be made that covered all people in all places.

  You perhaps know Adela Wentworth. Of course you do. She has been a common thief in our village since she was in her teens, apparently. She picks up things, and when caught, often says she found them. Is she wrong to do this. Well, of course she is. If she were even aware of her own proclivity towards this, she would perhaps be a bad person. But Adela, dear sad soul, is not bad at all. She is lonely. Even even her neighbors neglect her. The kind of love that exists spiritually between man and woman never came her way, no matter how much she prayed for it. My predecessor in this job told me that she began pocketing rock candy in the local confectionary when she was a young girl, and this pattern continued until she was once seen taking a woman’s shoes from her front porch where they’d been left to dry after a storm had gone past.

  Yet, Adela is not bad. She is not a criminal. She is a human being with a soul and a heart. The world crushed something within her. She takes things, now and again, because it makes her feel as if she’s part of the village. Part of the world she lives within. I understand her. And I generally feel for her, and let it go. I suppose believing this depends, sir, upon whether you believe the world is a benevolent place or a hostile one.

  I believe it is a hostile and brutal place. Our modern world allows us to forget this. We have radio now, and newspapers that tell us what the world is about, and somehow makes it all sound as if it is taken care of. A benevolent place.

  But I see the jungle, still, sir. I see the jungle and the wasteland, both. And these people, in this small patch of land at the edge of the Hudson River, are within the domain I have sworn to care for, as I would care for a garden, or children who have been shipwrecked on some distant shore.

  I confide this to you, sir. I do not mean to spread gossip of Adela Wentworth. I do not mean to imply that I take bribes, either, as the former constable did.

  I am telling you this to prepare you for something more.

  And so, the reason I set you here, and share cigars with you, sir, is because once upon a time, I sat here with your grandfather and shared just such a cigar.

  3

  Ethan felt as if he’d held his breath through the entire tale that Pocket had spun. He had barely touched the cigar that remained perched between the fingers of his upturned hand. “My grandfather murdered this woman upstairs,” he said, as if this were the sum total to which Pocket had been alluding.

  “I told you downstairs, your grandfather never murdered anyone. But once, many years ago, when you were still a boy, and I was still a young man, as you are now, Justin Gravesend turned to me and offered me a puzzle to solve.”

  And then, Pocket continued his story.

  4

  Pocket Continues His Tale of the Past

  Your grandfather was never what one could call “jolly.” In fact, the name suited him: Justin Gravesend. He was interested in being just.

  He was grave. Have you noticed that about names? They often contain the seeds of an interior life. Your name, Ethan. Ethan Gravesend. Ethan puts me in mind of ether. I am called Pocket, and of course I keep things in my pocket most of the time. I have always been somewhat secretive, knowing what I understand about life in this village. You are really the first to hear of any of this.

  I trust that you will not allow what I tell you to go further?

  So, Justin sat here with me, and we shared just such a cigar. It may have been my first cigar, as far as I can recall. It was the most exquisite one, no doubt, for I try to recapture that moment of the first smoke of a fine cigar now and again, and it only returns to me in memory.

  Justin said to me, “Officer Pocket, do you like this cigar?”

  “Very much,” says I. And I did.

  “Then I will always make sure you have it. I have people in places who can send these.”

  Well, thought I, this is a fine mess, Pocky. The man building this castle has already offered me a gift without me first knowing what crime he’s committed against the almighty law.

  But I was soon to find out.

  We began talking of the village, and Justin spoke with great affection of his wife, your grandmother. He loved her dearly, although no one will believe it. I saw it within him. It was there in his heart. But she did not return the affection, and so they lived most of their lives apart – after your father was born.

  Your grandfather then began speaking – with great pride – of his engineering and construction of Harrow. How he had taken the house that had existed and was in the process of transforming it. Certainly, there was a house here before Justin and Genevieve arrived to buy the property. It was simply called The Cliffs, although there were no cliffs to be seen. It was not a grand estate, but a simple house of several rooms, built originally as a farmhouse in the 1700s, and then added upon for its various owners. Finally, your grandfather bought the land, named it Harrow, and obliterated all traces of the old house. He built Harrow up from the foundations, and covered over the ponds that spotted the property. It was rocky soil and streams once, and then he began creating this…well, this monstrosity for lack of a better term. I certainly mean no disrespect, sir.

  And over the course of years, it grew. He had engineers in to oversee things, and architects. That abbey, brought over in chunks of stone, brought up on barges along the river, some of it hauled by rail. It was a miracle to watch it go up.

  And then, as your grandfather told me the history of his building to that point, he mentioned something of his sadness, too. For, while the creation of the house was something he felt compelled to do, he had very much lost his family in the process.

  “Begging your pardon, sir,” says I. “But why build a home just to lose a family?”

  And then, I saw it in his eyes.

  Some would call it madness. You know the village was calling this place “Gravesend’s Madhouse” by then. They thought he had lost his mind and was merely building all of it just to make his own tomb.

  But it was not madness to me. I told you, there are no bad people in our village. And your grandfather was not mad. Not in the sense that was meant.

  He was on fire, that’s what he was. He was a good man on fire. And he said to me, “What I am about to tell you, Officer, you must not repeat to another living soul.”

  I remembered my superior, the constable who I would one day replace, and his thoughts on human beings, and my own thoughts on the hostile world. But as Justin told his story to me, I knew that the world was worse than merely a jungle. Merely a place of idiot hostility.

  The world was a place of the greatest terror within the smallest moment.

  I will hazard a guess as to who that woman in the room upstairs is.

  The corpse that I have not yet examined, but which I no doubt shall identify just by the room where she has been laid to rest.

  She is not Rory Scopes. I said that for the benefit of Mrs. Barrow and her son. It is easy to think of an unknown missing woman as a possible murder victim without it leaving a residue to bring on nightmares or worse in impressionable minds. We all read the tabloids. There are murders everywhere, men and women who seem as if they’ve been made up because we have no connection to them.

  Mrs. Barrow and her son do not yet need to hear the truth.

  No one but you and I should of necessity know this truth now. It is the truth within the human heart, sir. Within the human soul. No one but you and I need to know what Harrow meant to your grandfather. Or what has gone on in this house since your grandfather began building it. Or why your grandmother could not bear to live in this place, and chose instead to raise her son in another place, away from Harrow. Or why your grandfather could not leave this house for long without going mad himself. Of course, the woman in the room upstairs – the dead woman who may h
ave lain there for at least five years, perhaps longer – might be anyone.

  But my guess, sir, is that the body in that room is a woman named Matilde Gravesend. I believe she was your father’s sister. Your aunt.

  No one had seen her since she was a little girl. He had kept it that way. She died, didn’t she? That’s what was said. She’d died of some ailment while too young. The influenza epidemic swept through, and then an outbreak of measles and other sicknesses for which many children died. That’s when she died, so it was said. There’s even a grave for her in the family vault. Have you visited it yet since you’ve returned? Even your father believed her dead, many years gone by. Perhaps even your grandmother wanted to believe it. That may be why she stayed away all those years.

  But your grandfather was a good man, sir. Your grandfather was a good man set upon by the ravening wolves of a hostile world. And I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that no one murdered that woman. I was there when she died. In that room. That very room. Well, I can’t say I was there, exactly. I watched her, though. I saw things. I know.

  This is where the puzzle of the house came into things, sir. Your grandfather conceived of this place as a puzzle within a puzzle. You remember I mentioned that? Or have I yet? Ah, but this cigar has been smooth.

  You’re looking a little pale, sir. Would you like to hear more, or is that enough for you now?

  5

  Pocket’s voice grew soft. “That’s too much of a shock for you, sir.”

  “No,” Ethan stumbled across the words he wished to say, but “No” was the only one that seemed to come out.

  “I had seen Matilde somewhat when she was young. Before she died. Before your grandfather made his confession to me. Before I put the puzzle together.”