Nevermore

by William Hjortsberg

  Not precisely empty. Aside from the usual run-down furniture and threadbare carpet, an H & M wardrobe trunk and several suitcases stood in line along the wall by the door, waiting for the express men to come and collect them. Maude stepped inside first. An unfamiliar sweetish smell hung in the air. Bloom sniffed, wrinkling his nose, trying to place it.

  “So, she went on tour and din’t take no luggage,” Maude sneered.

  “Perhaps she changed her plans.” Something definitely wrong here, aside from the unearthly noises. Bloom struggled to put his finger on just what it might be.

  Maude glanced around, a disgusted expression souring her features. “Nice to see the management doing all this redecorating,” she said. “They wouldn’t tumble for as much as a can of paint when we asked for something to be done about our dump.”

  That was it. Fresh wallpaper. Bloom ran his fingers along a moist seam. He smelled the drying paste. Someone had recently papered the room. Bloom couldn’t imagine Mrs. Speers doing such a thing. She was never coming back to this fleabag.

  A low moan filled the room, like a child weeping. Bloom and Mrs. Marchington stood stock-still, transfixed by the desolate wail. Gradually, the sound amplified, building into a demonic shriek more terrifying than anything either of them had ever heard before.

  It came from within the wall. Bloom pressed his ear against the spot. There was an empty resonance when he drummed his fist on the new wallpaper. The wall was hollow. Bloom stepped back in disbelief. “A closet,” he said, thumping along the outline of an invisible doorway. “There should be a closet …”

  “What…?” Maude had never been a quick study.

  “Wait here!” The day manager bounded out of the room.

  She shrugged. “Who’s going anywhere?” She didn’t like being left alone with that awful sound and stepped half out into the hallway, watching Bloom run to a fire safety station down by the elevator. A red-painted axe hung above a red sand bucket and the accordioned pleating of a folded canvas hose. Bloom seized the axe and rushed back to 6-D. He pushed past Maude, his eyes wild and white.

  Maude watched from the doorway. Bloom paused, breathing in short gasps like a cornered animal. He surveyed the wall, taking some mental measurement, and with a wild cry, swung the axe over the top of his head. The excess force proved a miscalculation on Bloom’s part. The opening to the former closet had been sealed with nothing more substantial than sheets of cardboard, plastered and papered over, and the axe ripped through it as if it Were stage scenery.

  Flung off balance, Bloom dropped to one knee. The axe hung from a long, ragged tear in the wall, its weight slowly pulling the upper portion of damp plaster and cardboard away from the opening, peeling it back like the lid on a tin of deviled ham. And, sure enough, packed inside was the dead meat.

  Held upright by coathooks in the closet wall behind her, Violette Speers’s corpse stood at stiff attention, the top of her head split apart deep into her brow. A clotted mingling of brains and blood caked her hair, forming a stiff crimson wig. Her left eye hung completely out of the socket, dangling down her cheek like a stranded tadpole. Maude Marchington screamed.

  Her scream echoed within the closet. Perched on the dead woman’s shoulder, a scrawny, one-eyed black cat squinted out into the unaccustomed light. The hideous creature opened its red maw and howled.

  6

  THE WRITING ON THE WALL

  SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE stooped to lift a volume of Heroditus from a footlocker piled with books. He slipped it into the careful line already arranged along the back of a rather too-small desk in his corner suite at the Plaza Hotel. He always traveled with a reference library, endeavoring to maintain a regular writing schedule even when engaged on a speaking tour. Nowhere near enough room on the desktop for everything he brought. If he spoke to the management they would make every effort to accommodate him, but he decided against any fuss. It didn’t matter where he wrote; railway carriages and waiting rooms had always served as well as his study. He piled the extra books against the wall, thinking of all the great literature composed on lap desks over the centuries.

  The little writing table stood in the semicircular corner alcove and warm morning sunshine angled in on the eastern side. Sir Arthur glanced out a north-facing window at the new spring green showing in the trees of Central Park. Aside from the hotel’s fine service, he most enjoyed the Plaza’s splendid location. Such spots were at a premium in New York, a thoroughly inhospitable city, in Sir Arthur’s opinion.

  Never comfortable in any town, Conan Doyle preferred the capitals of Europe, where the inconveniences were offset by rich historic tradition. Compared to the amenities of London (charming irregular streets, unexpected squares and parks by the dozen, and the decidedly human scale of its white-and-black Edwardian buildings), the rigid grid of Manhattan closed in like an urban purgatory. Looming skyscrapers crowded out the sun, and thoroughfares snarled with motor traffic and a never-ending pedestrian manswarm.

  Grand Army Plaza remained a pleasant exception. Here, the constricted canyon of Fifth Avenue opened onto a three-sided square in a splendid preamble to the liberating expansiveness of the park itself. Sir Arthur turned to the east-facing windows and took it all in. He always made a point of learning the local geography, seeking to inform his fiction with an exact sense of place. Last year, on a previous trip to America, Scully, the doorman, had pointed out the surrounding landmarks.

  The circular fountain, surmounted by a graceful bronze statue of “Abundance,” delighted him. Pulitzer, the newspaper chap, paid for the whole thing, a gift to the city. Sir Arthur preferred it to the “Eros” fountain, stranded like a damsel in distress amid the congestion of Piccadilly Circus.

  The crown jewel of the square was the extravagant building to the south. Cornelius Vanderbilt’s turreted mansion rivaled the royal palaces of Europe. A spiked, ornamented iron fence surrounded the carriage entrance facing onto the plaza. It took thirty servants to run the place, Scully told him, with a certain note of vicarious pride.

  Sir Arthur marveled at the vulgar ostentation of America’s merchant princes. All along Fifth Avenue, facing the park north of the plaza, a mile-long row of chateaux and palazzi, each deserving a country estate, crowded together cheek by jowl like an overdressed chorus line rudely competing for the limelight. How ironic that a nation priding itself on creating a classless society tolerated this obscene nouveau-riche overindulgence.

  A brisk knock interrupted his musing. Sir Arthur consulted his pocket watch. Right on time. He opened the door to admit a waiter wheeling a serving table with a proper hot English breakfast housed under covered platters. He praised the young man for the hotel’s excellent service and ushered him out with a tip. Breakfast in bed was a luxury he and his wife enjoyed when traveling. At home, such utterly sybaritic behavior remained a rare holiday treat, but in foreign hotels it seemed just the ticket.

  Sir Arthur rearranged the crystal bud vase, fanning fringed ferns around a single red rose. Satisfied with the arrangement, he pushed the breakfast table into the darkened bedroom.

  The knight pulled back the heavy drapes, flooding the pale yellow room with sunlight. Smiling, he bent to awaken his lady with a kiss. She roused, her smile drowsy, her heavy golden hair unpinned and tumbling across her breasts. “Lovely morning,” he said. “No less lovely than you.”

  Jean drew him down beside her on the bed. “You’re lovely,” she purred, her voice thick with sleep.

  “Am I, indeed?” He kissed her slender neck and the strap of her nightgown slipped from her shoulder. A soft, chaste kiss, yet her flesh blushed pink at his touch.

  “Indeed, indeed, indeed …” Her nimble fingers unfastened the buttons on his waistcoat.

  “I say,” he protested, “there’s breakfast waiting.”

  “You’re all the breakfast I need.”

  Her probing kiss silenced any further discourse. By the time they got around to the porridge, coddled eggs, broiled tomatoes, kippered herring, bacon
, and buttered toast, everything was soggy and cold.

  The knightly couple had separate schedules that day. Sir Arthur arrived back from interminable meetings in a thoroughly disagreeable mood. He had barely enough time to bathe, shave, and dress before their dinner engagement. Winding uptown through Central Park in a cab restored his robust good humor. The invitation to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Harry Houdini had been a long-anticipated pleasure.

  Before the start of Houdini’s much-publicized war on psychics, the two men corresponded frequently on the subject of spiritualism, and when the magician toured England in 1920, Sir Arthur provided introductions to a number of well-known mediums. Thanks to these letters, Houdini obtained over a hundred psychic sittings in Britain, insisting he was an impartial observer. Midway through his tour, when the April daffodils bloomed in saffron profusion about the countryside, the great Self-Liberator journeyed down to Windlesham, the Conan Doyles’ home in Crowborough, for a well-remembered luncheon.

  They had hoped to get together again last year when Sir Arthur first lectured in America, but Houdini’s busy vaudeville schedule made this impossible until the very last moment. Two nights before sailing back to England, the Conan Doyles were guests of the magician at the Earl Carroll Theater for a performance of Raymond Hitchcock’s “Pinwheel Revue.” The occasion was a celebration of Mr. and Mrs. Houdini’s twenty-eighth wedding anniversary.

  Sir Arthur remembered a splendid evening. “Hitchy,” the irrepressible master of ceremonies, introduced him to the audience and urged Houdini onto the stage where, after an uncharacteristic display of modesty, the magician agreed to perform his famous “Needle Mystery.” Houdini stopped the show. Sir Arthur never forgot the startling appearance of all those glittering threaded needles. There had been no time to prepare any sort of trick. Clearly, he had witnessed a supreme psychic manifestation.

  The cab pulled to a stop in front of a four-story brownstone house at 278 West 113th Street. Every window glowed with electric light. In contrast with its more somber neighbors, the building declared itself boldly on the dark street, a bit of the Great White Way transplanted uptown. “Quite festive,” observed Lady Jean.

  Houdini himself opened the door mere seconds after Sir Arthur pressed the buzzer. His welcome warm and effusive, the magician ushered them into a wood-paneled foyer where a slender Oriental servant took their coats. A tiny, dark-haired woman with bright intelligent eyes and a broad, full-lipped smile stood shyly to one side. Two small energetic dogs scampered about her feet.

  “Mrs. Houdini,” Conan Doyle called in his bluff, hearty manner. “Delightful to see you once again. You’re looking quite splendid.” Stooping, he tousled a furry canine neck.

  “Welcome, welcome,” Bess said, taking Jean by the hand.

  “And this is the brother of the great Houdini,” the magician trumpeted like a carnival barker, pointing to a square-jawed man in the doorway behind his wife. Not a hint of irony in his voice. Houdini gestured expansively at his newly arrived guests. “Dash. I want you to meet the man who gave the world Sherlock Holmes: Sir Arthur and Lady Conan Doyle.”

  The knight caught his lady’s eye as the “great” man’s brother stepped up to shake hands. He detected a definite twinkle, but she kept her face blank as a card player holding trumps.

  “Theo Weiss,” the brother said, by way of introduction. “My friends call me Dash.”

  “Dash it is then, what?”

  Houdini suggested his wife and brother might want to get Lady Conan Doyle some refreshment and keep her company until the other guests arrived. His gracious manner belied his impatience. “I know Sir Arthur is anxious to have a look at the library.”

  In fact, the magician was the one who was anxious. His extensive collection of books and memorabilia dealing with magic, witchcraft, conjuring, spiritualism, and the theater was his pride and joy. He believed it to be the finest library of its kind on earth and was always eager to show it off to an appreciative audience.

  “If it’s no trouble,” said Sir Arthur, “I should be pleased to do some browsing.”

  Houdini bowed the knight toward a set of double doors, his “Alphonse and Gaston” manner unintentionally comic. The library occupied a huge room on the ground floor. Shelves of books rising to the ceiling lined all four walls. They surrounded hundreds of other stacked volumes. The two men wove between a waist-high colonnade as if negotiating a maze. Houdini showed Sir Arthur his proudest treasures: David Garrick’s diary, a Bible autographed by Martin Luther, Edgar A. Poe’s portable writing desk.

  This simple wooden box held Conan Doyle’s imagination. The writer placed his fingertips on the weathered mahogany surface. As a doctor, he had often felt for a patient’s pulse with just such a gesture. What lingering trace of genius might still be detected by those with a gift for divination? Although he believed passionately in a spiritual afterlife, he sadly lacked the sensitive’s nature and could not make contact unaided.

  Conan Doyle showed great interest in the number of books dealing with spiritism, but expressed disappointment on discovering that by and large they were written by antagonistic critics. “You certainly have all the nay-sayers,” he chided with a gentle smile. “Have you no room for statements of belief?”

  Houdini frowned, unwilling to acknowledge any deficiency in his library. “Not everything has been properly cataloged. There are many crates of books still stored in the basement. Upstairs, in my study, I keep a collection of holograph letters. Perhaps you’ll find them more intriguing. I’ve many by Lincoln; also, Edmund Kean, Jenny Lind, Disraeli … many others.”

  “Anything by spiritualists?”

  “Of course … Ira Davenport. D. D. Home.”

  “Home, you say: By Jove, I’d be keen to have a look at those.”

  “Your wish is my command, Sir Arthur. Please follow me.” Houdini led the way out of the library, grinning like a schoolboy.

  On the second-floor landing, a peculiar piece of furniture caught Sir Arthur’s eye. A sturdy oaken chair, extremely worn, with sweat-stained leather straps hanging from the arms, legs, and back. He had seen a similar contrivance once before, nearly ten years ago, on the eve of the war, when he made a tour of Sing Sing Prison as the guest of Warden Clancy.

  “Ah-hah!” Houdini cried, noting the author’s curiosity. “Worthy of Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors. The very first electric chair ever used at Auburn Prison. I saw it originally as a youngster at a dime museum where I was showing. When it came up at auction a few years back, I couldn’t resist the temptation.”

  Sir Arthur visibly recoiled from the grotesque device, as if facing some malignant creature crouching to attack. “Odd to have such a thing in one’s home,” was his only comment. Conan Doyle remembered sitting cheerfully in the chair in the death house at Ossining back in 1914, smoking a pipe and fitting his head into the small steel cap. One thing to enjoy a bit of gallows humor; quite another to display such a hideous instrument as household decor.

  The magician remained oblivious to any implied criticism. “At first, I thought to use it in my act. You know, with a time deadline like when some of your naval petty officers challenged me to escape tied to the muzzle of a cannon with a twenty-minute fuse. Twelve years ago in Chatham. A good many paid to see me blown to kingdom come. Made sense to figure I’d draw a big crowd to watch me burn.”

  “A bit macabre for family entertainment, don’t you think?”

  “Exactly. That’s why I dropped the idea. Used a hot seat escape as one of the cliff-hangers in ‘The Master Mystery,’ but it was just a prop.” Houdini continued on up the stairs, leading the way to the third floor. “Over seventy men died in that contraption,” he said.

  The magician’s study was at the end of the hall. Sir Arthur paused along the way. Something odd about the bedroom on his right. Great gathered drapery folds suggested the Orient, as did hanging silks, carved furnishings, tasseled lamps. A candle flickered on a small shelf, illuminating the glass-framed Kodak portrait of a k
indly gray-coifed matron. The same pleasant face stared out of a larger photograph resting against the cushions on the brocade-covered bed. No one lived in this room. He was gazing into a shrine.

  “My beloved mother’s room.” Houdini stepped past him toward the bed. “Sometimes I come in here and lay my head down on the counterpane, just as I used to lay against her breast and listen to the beating of her heart.”

  The appalling frankness of this confession was offset by the magician’s passionate sincerity and Conan Doyle, who knew himself to be also a bit of a mama’s boy, felt touched by it. “Contact is possible, you know,” he said. “Such I sincerely believe.”

  “I cannot imagine a greater happiness. If willpower alone could bring her back, she would be with us now.”

  “There are guides.”

  “In a lifetime of searching, I never found one who wasn’t a phony.” Houdini’s manner abruptly changed. “It’s all hokum.” The mournful attitude dropped away and he marched out of the room grim with determination.

  Sir Arthur followed amiably. “You must keep an open heart,” he said. “I have spoken with the Ma’am, my own cherished mother, on several occasions since she passed over.”

  Houdini’s study resembled the lair of a mad alchemist. Bizarre magic show memorabilia in bright carnival colors stood among wooden filing cabinets stacked like gargantuan children’s blocks. Crates, trunks; folios crammed with posters; bound programs shelved along the walls. The chaos had an apparent order; the magician produced the Davenport and Home correspondence with a minimum of searching.

  Sir Arthur examined the thick folders. Far too many letters to read in one sitting. He asked if he might come back at a more convenient time and peruse them.

  “My collection is at your disposal.” Obviously pleased, Houdini made no effort to conceal a smug smile. “I also have hundreds of letters from Harry Kellar, who was with the Davenports on their first tour.”

  “Thank you, but no. Kellar was a stage magician. I mean no offense when I say I am interested only in the genuine article, not a trickster merely duplicating the effects of a séance.”