by John Langan
What came up was a link to a site called The Occult Dickens, which was in fact the manuscript of a book this guy—Christopher Graves, self-described independent scholar—had been unable to find a publisher for. So he'd posted all three hundred and fifty pages of the thing online. Briefly put, the book was a survey of Dickens's interest in the occult and how it informed his fiction. Not, in and of itself, an unpromising topic—to be honest, it struck me as a lot more interesting than the latest effort at relating Bleak House to the tax laws of the day. What had cost Graves a publisher, I was sure, was his insistence at the outset on the validity of nineteenth-century spiritualism, which transformed a well-researched study into a lengthy tract, and took Dickens's novels from stories about things seen to arguments about things unseen.
Anyway, there was a search box for the manuscript, so I entered "spirit map." The page that appeared was titled, "Dickens, Collins, and the 'Spirit Map.'" I scrolled down. The story came from a couple of Wilkie Collins's letters. Apparently, Collins had visited Dickens while Dickens and his family were staying in Paris. (I'm not sure why the Dickenses were in France in the first place; Graves didn't say.) During their time together, Collins and Dickens went for walks around the city, and, on one of them, while they were basically window-shopping, they came upon a bookstore. Collins was excited because he found all these books about French crimes—a kind of true crime collection that he snatched up and I gather used in some of his fiction.
Dickens picked up an oversized volume that Collins said looked on the verge of collapsing into dust at any moment. The expression on Dickens's face when he touched its covers was one of distaste—Collins noticed and asked him what was wrong; Dickens replied that whatever the book had been bound with had a particularly greasy feel to it. He was ready to replace it unread, then changed his mind and flipped it open. Apparently, it was a treatise on witchcraft. Intrigued, Dickens paged through it, stopping every now and again to read a passage to Collins, who was equally fascinated. He encouraged Dickens to buy it, but Dickens dismissed the idea—although, Collins thought, he was tempted.
During this time, Collins and Dickens started planning to collaborate on a play, The Frozen Deep, about a polar expedition. Before settling on that plot, they kicked around a few others, including at least one of which drew its inspiration from that unnamed book. It would concern a father whose vanity and selfishness had caused a rift between him and his son, after which his estranged son had been killed in the Crimea. Desperate with grief, the father turns to a mysterious woman—possibly a gypsy—who promises to put him in contact with his son. This woman would employ a spirit map, Dickens said, which the book he'd leafed through had described as a way to lead the dead back to this world from the next. The man would have a daughter—or a niece—who would urge him not to follow this course. There might be a suitor for the daughter/niece who would do something heroic. Collins was intrigued—he saw the possibility for some nice ghostly effects—but, in the end, the two of them couldn't arrive at a satisfactory ending for the story. The one they liked the best involved having the father descend into madness and the daughter burn the spirit map, but Collins was inclined to make the mysterious gypsy a con artist who'd prayed on the father's grief, while Dickens thought the gypsy should have some kind of connection to the family—possibly another daughter the father had never acknowledged, or the son's wife. After what Collins said was a pleasant evening bandying about possibilities, the two men passed on the story in favor of one about an Arctic expedition.
Having completed the anecdote, the book went on to discuss the importance of the spirit map to understanding Dickens's later fiction. I didn't bother with this part. What concerned me was the truth of the Collins story. I stood and walked to the bookshelves. Roger had three or four copies of Peter Ackroyd's biography of Dickens, one here, one in his office, and at least one more at school, before I added the one I'd bought for his class. There was plenty about it he didn't care for, especially what he described as its "blatantly unnecessary concessions to postmodern self-indulgence," but for sheer volume of information on Dickens, he admitted, the Ackroyd was hard to beat. I slid the biography down and opened to the index. Five minutes, and I'd confirmed the outlines of the story. There was no doubt Roger knew it. The relevant paragraph in this particular copy had a penciled check beside it, and I was sure that, were I to open the copy in his office, I'd find the margins heavily annotated.
After receiving word of Ted's death, how long would it have taken Roger to remember Collins and Dickens's idea for their collaboration? Once the first, unbearable surge of grief had ebbed, how long before Roger recalled Dickens's plot about the father whose son is taken from him in war? The similarity to his situation was more than remarkable. It was downright uncanny, one of those times you feel yourself brushing up against powers and intentions far greater than your own. It isn't so much that life imitates art as it is that life and art converge on some third thing—I don't know what to call it.
However superficial it might be, Roger would have been stung by his resemblance to the father in the play. He'd always identified himself with Dickens's heroic young men, whether Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, or even Pip. It wasn't something he'd ever told me, but once I'd learned the circumstances of his early life—the nightmarish upbringing, the rise to better circumstances—I mean, you don't need much interpretive ability to realize that what Roger found in those heroes was himself, his story retold for him. He'd never had to identify with one of Dickens's failed fathers—now, as his life took on the shape of another of Dickens's plots, he was at best a Micawber, at worst a Krook or a Scrooge. Talk about pouring salt into your wounds. It must have seemed that even the writer he loved best had, in an obscure way, judged him and found him wanting.
The first time I'd stopped in at Roger's office at school, he'd declared, "The great writers are forever out ahead of us." He was pontificating, showing off. I didn't care. He said, "We are always catching up to them—always trying to catch up to them, because as soon as we are sure we have—the moment we have arrived at a reading that we are gospel-positive explains a novel once and for all—we realize that there is something else, something left over, something we could not bring under our critical control. In fact, there are several such somethings, each of them suitable to form the core of an entirely new interpretation of the text. Just when we are about to say that we have Dickens, he wriggles free from our grasp. I have written one reasonably long book about him; he has been a significant part of three of my other books; and thirty-five of my articles have addressed his work from various perspectives. You would think that so much writing would have exhausted Dickens for me. It has not. I continue to find new things to say about the work of a man I first read years before you were born. I have more to say about him, and he has more to say about me.
"Yes," Roger nodded, "about me. Dickens's novels—no less than any great literature—define us. They lend shape to the lives we inhabit and color our understanding of them. I am no critical solipsist, but I do believe that, in reading Dickens, we read ourselves."
I'd always admired that sentiment—admired and envied it, since I couldn't say I'd ever felt that way about any writer—even with the ones I admire the most, with Hawthorne and Dickinson, I've been aware of the distance between us, the gap in our sensibilities. However narrow that gap may draw, I've never been able to close it. To tell the truth, I'm not sure I'd want to. My life is mine, you know? But I couldn't help thinking it must be nice to so identify with a writer that his work is a kind of home to you. Until, that is, the walls start to shriek and the windows run with blood, and you find yourself in a completely different story than you'd anticipated.
Roger wouldn't have bothered researching the spirit map, not right away, at least. He had nothing but contempt for that kind of stuff—witchcraft, Ouija boards, séances, all deeply annoyed him. He dismissed them as exploiting the gullible. He would have done his best to put the idea from his thoughts. But as he
walked the night hours away, his head brimming with memories of Ted and of his own father—as he stood at the edge of Belvedere House's lawn and watched those same memories spill across the house's windows—did he glimpse one more image on the living room window, what couldn't properly be called a memory but which had taken place nonetheless? What had he seen? Two men sitting beside a fire, talking? Both were bearded: the one's enormous, flourishing down his chest, over his tie; the other's an extended goatee that appeared to have sprung out of control. The one's hair was short, well-combed; the other's curling up and around his head. The one's eyes were mild, unremarkable; the other's large, liquid, expressive. Roger knew Dickens—and Collins—well enough to have heard their conversation. He would have winced at the description of the father's character as shrill, vain, and selfish. He would have wondered at the construction of what was essentially his situation. He would have listened attentively to Dickens's short-hand description of the sprit map and then—
The sun's final rays were flaring on the library's windows. The sky over Frenchman's Mountain was pink and red; the mountain itself a long silhouette fringed with fire. Squinting at the glare, I looked down on Founders Street. A couple—both of them in their fifties, I guessed—was walking hand in hand. As I watched, the woman pointed to Belvedere House and said something to which the man nodded. Tourists, probably up from the City for the day to visit the quaint town of Huguenot. Maybe one or both of them had attended SUNY. They were just about old enough to have lived in the house when it had been broken up into apartments. I fought the impulse to run downstairs and ask them if this was the case, if they knew anything about the house worth telling. Stupid. I had information. I had more information than I knew what to do with. Alcoholic painter-shamans; magic formulae for bringing houses to some kind of weird life; malevolent entities offering sinister deals; ghosts trapped who knew where by paternal curses; strange visions and sensations; and, to cap it all off, a spirit map. I wasn't living one horror story; I was the screaming heroine in a B-movie marathon. The sun dropped below the horizon. The couple continued on their way, toward the Reformed Church. What is it Freud says, about every action being overdetermined? Bingo.
Inspired—was that the right word?—by Dickens, Roger had constructed his own spirit map, built a pathway for Ted to travel. No—that was too cut-and-dried a way of putting what had happened, wasn't it? No doubt he'd told himself the same story he'd told me. He needed a better map. There might have been some truth to it, too. All the while he'd been drafting that map, though—What? Had he investigated the book with the greasy covers? It was possible; although hard to believe he could have obtained a copy without me knowing. Well, an original copy. Someone could have mailed him copies of the relevant pages in a regular envelope, or e-mailed them. He might have hit a dead-end in his research, but just knowing that such a thing had been proposed—I could imagine him speculating about it, asking himself how a spirit map would function, how it would lead the dead back from wherever they'd gone—or been sent. His logic wasn't hard to reconstruct: he'd disclosed most of it when he'd shown me the changes he'd made to his office—was that months ago? The place where Ted had died—the doorway through which he'd been forced out of this life—was the ideal place from which to try to bring him back into it. Going to Afghanistan, however, was out of the question, so you would need a substitute. The map was his re-creation of that space symbolically, supplemented by the tabletop model with its dirt and fragment. It was all the wildest wishing—except that Roger had made it here, in the heart of a space that was different—quickened. Before his last collapse, Rudolph de Castries had claimed he hadn't understood his own ideas. Was this what he hadn't realized, that a space changed by desire might respond to further desire?
But it was desire that wouldn't stand still, desire at odds with itself. At the center of everything, all the plots swirling around him, was Roger, unable not to hurt his son as badly as he could, and then unable to stop trying to reverse what he couldn't admit he'd done in the first place. As it was, he'd laid a path to a door he refused to open. Talk about wanting to have your cake and eat it, too.
Of course, I could be wrong. For all I knew, the house was behind this. Observing Roger's activities, it had intuited their purpose and done what it could to give the impression they were succeeding—but in such a way as to cause him—and me—maximum anguish. If this were the case, it had done a pretty good job.
I turned back to the library. That was enough research for today. I shut down the computer, switched off the light, and closed the door behind me. Instead of heading for the first floor, I walked down the hall the other way, to the bottom of the third-floor stairs. I didn't climb them. For the moment, I'd had my fill of confrontations with Roger, big and small. What I wanted was a look out the window there, in the direction of the mountains I'd seen yesterday. I wasn't expecting them to be there again, and they weren't. The sky was still light, empty of even the slightest cloud. It was more a case of me wanting to see the place where they'd been, as if that space had been altered by their occupying it, as if there was a trace I'd be able to see, or sense—an afterimage, so to speak. I stood in front of the window searching the sky—trying to see through it, to wherever those huge forms had come from.
Nothing. For a moment, I was sure they were almost there, just out of range of my vision, and then that certainty passed. I don't know what I would have done if they had revealed themselves. I guess I was staring at the sky as much to see them not appear, if that makes any sense. Mind-blowing as another glimpse of them would have been, I think I would have been happy, too—this mad kind of happiness.
When I finally abandoned the window, the hallway was darker, the consequence of my prolonged sky-gazing. A few feet in front of me, walls, floor, ceiling vanished. Blinking, I stepped forward, stopped. That sense of the house changed—reconfigured—no longer so much a house as the meeting point for dozens of corridors leading off to who knew where—lit up my nerves like lightning. Like a tank crashing into a mud hut, that level where the weirdness lived—the not-place that had been drawing ever closer—broke through into this one—into what you might call real life.
The sensation—imagine leaning against a wall and having it jerked away from you—now double that, triple it, multiply it by twenty, forty—as if you've been leaning on not just one, but every wall in the house and they've all been yanked away at the same time. Vertigo does not begin to do the experience justice. This was falling away from myself in every possible direction. That what I could see around me appeared exactly the same didn't help. It made what was happening worse, the dislocation more extreme. For want of a better term, I had been wired into the house, as if it were a giant spiderweb whose every vibration carried itself to me. In less time than it takes to describe, that web had been stretched distances too far to know the end of.
I swayed, staggered, and put out my hand to the nearest wall to steady myself. It was like touching the side of a glacier. I jerked my hand away, overbalanced in the other direction, and sat down hard. My hand had been shocked numb—I pressed it to my chest. The hallway was still dark. My eyes should have adjusted by now, and I understood that my other sense of the house was overlapping my vision. I was seeing the mouths of passages black as emptiness, black and freezing. The numbness in my hand was fading, replaced by pain. I wanted out of there. It was all I could do not to bolt in any direction, including right in front of me. I glanced behind me, to where I'd just been gazing out the window, and saw nothing. So much for fleeing upstairs to Roger. I screamed his name anyway, loud as I could, loud enough to guarantee he'd drop whatever he was doing and come running. "ROGER!" I screamed it again. "ROGER!" My voice sounded strange, as if, instead of bouncing around the inside of the hallway, it had fled long distances. I should have heard Roger's feet hurrying down the stairs. I did not. The only sound in that space was the breath rushing in and out of my mouth.
Then I did hear something, a trio of sounds, one right after the oth
er, so close they might have been the same noise: bangbangbang. They seemed to come from miles away. A pause, and they repeated. The front door. Someone was knocking on the front door, pounding on it hard enough to rattle the glass. Absurdly, I almost called, "Just a minute." Just a minute what? I'm in the middle of a terrifying supernatural event?
Bangbangbang. With the third set of knocks, I realized that the scene around me hadn't changed, hadn't dissipated with the noise downstairs. Which meant that the sound wasn't separate from the terrifying supernatural event. It was part of it. I was on my feet, the hyper-vertigo, the pain licking my palm, put to one side as I focused on the front door. On the other level, the walls might have disappeared, but the doors held their places. It was strange, but I was less concerned with that strangeness than I was with the presence I could feel on the far side of that door, an absolute intensity, an inferno of heat—or cold; it didn't matter; either way, it would consume anything it came into contact with.
It was as if a figure—not just wreathed in flame, but made of flame, were standing on the porch. I had been in the presence of that same blast-furnace once before, in the diner on Martha's Vineyard. The other week, it had only been for a fraction of a second, and my mind had collapsed. Now, it was demanding admission, and even from this far away, my consciousness trembled. But it—Ted, say his name; it was Ted standing out there; Ted flaming with his father's curse and however much rage of his own; Ted crashing his tortured fist against the door. He was knocking—maybe that meant—
