The Year's Best Horror Stories 6

by Gerald W. Page (Ed. )

  In that black cellar he found no light switch. Though he never smoked, he carried matches for such emergencies. Having lit one, he discovered a providential kerosene lamp on a table, with enough kerosene still in it. Sarsfield went lamp-lit through the cellars and up more stone stairs into a pantry. “Anybody home?” he called. It was an eerie echo.

  He would make sure before exploring, for he dreaded shotguns. How about a cheerful song? In that chill pantry, Sarsfield bellowed a tune formerly beloved at Rotary Clubs. Once, a waggish Rotarian, after half an hour’s talk with the hobo extraordinary, had taken him to Rotary for lunch and commanded him to tell tales of the road and to sing the members a song. Frank Sarsfield’s untutored voice was loud enough when he wanted it to be, and he sang the song he had sung to the Rotary:

  “There’s a long, long trail a-winding into the land of my dreams,

  Where the nightingales are singing and the white moon beams;

  There’s a long, long night of waiting until my dreams all come true,

  Till the day when I’ll be going down that long, long trail with you!”

  No response: no cry, no footstep, not a rustle. Even in so big a house, they couldn’t have failed to hear his song, sung in a voice fit to wake the dead. Father O’Malley had called Frank’s voice “stentorian”—a good word, though he was not just sure what it meant. He liked that last tune, though he’d no one to walk to; he’d repeat it:

  “Till the day when I’ll be going down that long, long trail with you!”

  It was all right. Sarsfield went into the dining room, where he found a splendid long walnut table, chairs with embroidered seats, a fine sideboard and china cabinet, and a high Venetian chandelier. The china was in that cabinet, and the silverware was in that sideboard. But in no room of Tamarack House was any living soul.

  Sprawled in a big chair before the fireplace in the Sunday parlor, Sarsfield took the chill out of his bones. The woodshed, connected with the main house by a passage from the kitchen, was half-filled with logs—not first-rate fuel, true, for they had been stacked there three or four years ago, to judge by the fungi upon them, but burnable after he had collected old newspapers and chopped kindling. He had crisscrossed elm and birch to make a noble fire.

  It was not very risky to let white wood-smoke eddy from the chimneys, for it would blend with the driving snow and the blast would dissipate it at once. Besides, Anthonyville’s population was zero. From the cupola atop the house, in another lull of the blizzard, he had looked over the icy countryside and had seen no inhabited farmhouse up the forgotten dirt road—which, anyway, was hopelessly blocked by drifts today. There was no approach for vehicles from the freeway, while river and marsh protected the rear. He speculated that Tamarack House might be inhabited summers, though not in any very recent summer. The “Protective Service” probably consisted of a farmer who made a fortnightly inspection in fair weather.

  It was good to hole up in a remote county where burglars seemed unknown as yet. Frank Sarsfield restricted his own depredations to church poor-boxes (Catholic, preferably, he being no Protestant), and then only under the defense of necessity, after a run of unsuccessful mendicancy. He feared and detested strong thieves, so numerous nowadays; to avoid them and worse than thieves he steered clear of the cities, roving to little places which still kept crime in the family, where it belonged.

  He had dined, and then washed the dishes dutifully. The kitchen wood-range still functioned, and so did the hard-water and soft-water hand pumps in the scullery. As for food, there was enough to feed a good-sized prison: the shelves of the deep cellar cold-room threatened to collapse under the weight of glass jars full of jams, jellies, preserved peaches, apricots, applesauce, pickled trout, and many more good things, all redolent of his New England youth. Most of the jars had neat paper labels, all giving the year of canning, some the name of the canner; on the front shelves, the most recent date he had found was 1968, on a little pot of strawberry jam, and below it was the name “Allegra” in a feminine hand.

  Everything in this house lay in apple-pie order—though Sarsfield wondered how long the plaster would keep from cracking, with Tamarack House unheated in winter. He felt positively virtuous for lighting fires, one here in the Sunday parlor, another in the little antique iron stove in the bedroom he had chosen for himself at the top of the house.

  He had poked into every handsome room of Tamarack House, with the intense pleasure of a small boy who had found his way into an enchanted castle. Every room was satisfying, well furnished (he was warming by the fire two sheets from the linen closet, for his bed), and wondrously old fashioned. There was no electric light, no central heating, no bathroom; there was an indoor privy at the back of the woodshed, but no running water unless one counted the hand pumps. There was an old-fangled wall telephone: Frank tried, greatly daring, for the operator, but it was dead. He had found a crystal-set radio that didn’t work. This was an old lady’s house, surely, and the old lady hadn’t visited it for some years, but perhaps her relatives kept it in order as a “holiday home” or in hope of selling it—at ruined Anthonyville, a forlorn hope. He had discovered two canisters of tea, a jar full of coffee beans, and ten gallons of kerosene. How thoughtful!

  Perhaps the old lady was dead, buried under that other boulder among the maples in front of the house. Perhaps she had been the General’s daughter—but no, not if the General had been born in 1836. Why those graves in the lawn? Sarsfield had heard of farm families near medical schools who, in the old days, had buried their dead by the house for fear of body snatchers; but that couldn’t apply at Anthonyville. Well, there were family graveyards, but this must be one of the smallest.

  The old General who built this house had died on January 14. Day after tomorrow, January 14 would come round again, and it would be Frank Sarsfield’s sixtieth birthday. “I drink your health in water, General,” Sarsfield said aloud, raising his cut-glass goblet taken from the china cabinet. There was no strong drink in the house, but that didn’t distress Sarsfield, for he never touched it. His mother had warned him against it—and sure enough, the one time he had drunk a good deal of wine, when he was new to the road, he had got sick. “Thanks, General, for your hospitality.”

  Nobody responded to his toast.

  His mother had been a saint, the neighbors had said, and his father a drunken devil. He had seen neither of them after he ran away. He had missed his mother’s funeral because he hadn’t known of her death until months after; he had missed his father’s, long later, because he chose to miss it, though that omission cost him sleepless nights now. Sarsfield slept poorly at best. Almost always there were nightmares.

  Yet perhaps he would sleep well enough tonight in that little garret room near the cupola. He had found that several of the bedrooms in Tamarack House had little metal plates over their doorways. There were “The General’s Room” and “Father’s Room” and “Mama’s Room” and “Alice’s Room” and “Allegra’s Room” and “Edith’s Room.” By a happy coincidence, the little room at the top of the back stair, on the garret floor of the house, was labeled “Frank’s Room.” but he’d not chosen it for that only. At the top of the house, one was safer from the sheriffs or burglars. And through the skylight—there was only a frieze window—a man could get to the roof of the main block. From that roof one could descend to the woodshed roof by a fire escape of iron rungs fixed in the stone outer wall; and from the woodshed it was an easy drop to the ground. After that, the chief difficulty would be to run down Main Street and then get across the freeway without being detected, while people searched the house for you. Talk of Goldilocks and the Three Bears! Much experience had taught Sarsfield such forethought.

  Had that other Frank, so commemorated over the bedroom door, been a son or a servant? Presumably a son—though Sarsfield had found no pictures of boys in the old velvet-covered album in the Sunday parlor, nor any of manservants. There were many pictures of the General, a little rooster-like man with a beard; and of Fath
er, portly and pleasant-faced; and of Mama, elegant; and of three small girls who must be Alice and Allegra and Edith. He had liked especially the photographs of Allegra, since he had tasted her strawberry jam. All the girls were pretty, but Allegra—who must have been about seven in most of the pictures—was really charming, with long ringlets and kind eyes and a delicate mouth that curved upward at its corners.

  Sarsfield adored little girls and distrusted big girls. His mother had cautioned him against bad women, so he had kept away from such. Because he liked peace, he had never married—not that he could have married anyway, because that would have tied him to one place, and he was too clumsy to earn money at practically anything except dishwashing for summer hotels. Not marrying had meant that he could have no little daughters like Allegra.

  Sometimes he had puzzled the prison psychiatrists. In prison it was well to play stupid. He had refrained cunningly from reciting poetry to the psychiatrists. So after testing Sarsfield they wrote him down as “dull normal” and he was assigned to labor as a “gardener”—which meant going round the prison yards picking up trash by a stick with a nail in the end of it. That was easy work, and he detested hard work. Yet when there was truly heavy work to be done in prison, sometimes he would come forward to shovel tons of coal or carry hods of brick or lift big blocks into place. That, too, was his cunning: it impressed the other jailbirds with his enormous strength, so that the gangs left him alone.

  “Yes, you’re a loner, Frank Sarsfield,” he said to himself aloud. He looked at himself in that splendid Sunday-parlor mirror, which stretched from floor to ceiling. He saw a man overweight but lean enough of face, standing six feet six, built like a bear, a strong nose, some teeth missing, a strong chin, and rather wild light blue eyes. He was an uncommon sort of bum. Deliberately he looked at his image out of the corners of his eyes, as was his way, because he was nonviolent, and eye contact might mean trouble.

  “You look like a Viking, Frank,” old Father O’Malley had told him once, “but you ought to have been a monk.”

  “Oh, Father,” he had answered, “I’m too much of a fool for a monk.”

  “Well,” said Father O’Malley, “you’re no more fool than many a brother, and you’re celibate and continent, I take it. Yet it’s late for that now. Look out you don’t turn berserker, Frank. Go to confession sometime, to a priest that doesn’t know you, if you’ll not go to me. If you’d confess, you’d not be haunted.”

  But he seldom went to mass, and never to confession. All those church boxes pilfered, his mother and father abandoned, his sister neglected, all the ghastly humbling of himself before policemen, all the horror and shame of the prisons! There could be no grace for him now. “There’s a long, long trail a-winding into the land of my dreams . . .” What dreams! He had looked up “berserker” in Webster. But he wouldn’t ever do that sort of thing. A man had to keep a control upon himself; besides, he was a coward, and he loved peace.

  Nearly all the other prisoners had been brutes, guilty as sin, guilty as Miranda or Escobedo. Once, sentenced for rifling a church safe, he had been put into the same cell with a man who had murdered his wife by taking off her head. The head never had been found. Sarsfield had dreamed of that head in such short intervals of sleep as he had enjoyed while the wife-killer was his cellmate. Nearly all night, every night, he had lain awake surreptitiously watching the murderer in the opposite bunk and feeling his own neck now and again. He had been surprised and pleased when eventually the wife-killer had gone hysterical and obtained assignment to another cell. The murderer had told the guards that he just couldn’t stand being watched all night by that terrible giant who never talked.

  Only one of the prison psychiatrists had been pleasant or bright, and that had been the old doctor born in Vienna who went round from penitentiary to penitentiary checking on the psychiatric staffs. The old doctor had taken a liking to him, and had written a report to accompany Frank’s petition for parole. Three months later, in a parole office, the parole officer had gone out hurriedly for a quarter of an hour, and Sarsfield had taken the chance to read his own file that the parole man had left in a folder on his desk.

  “Francis Sarsfield has a memory that almost can be described as photographic”—so had run one line in the Vienna doctor’s report. When he read that, Sarsfield had known that the doctor was a clever doctor. “He suffers chiefly from an arrest of emotional development, and may be regarded as a rather bright small boy in some respects. His three temporarily successful escapes from prison suggest that his intelligence has been much underrated. On at least one of those occasions he could have eluded the arresting officer had he been willing to resort to violence. Sarsfield repeatedly describes himself as nonviolent and has no record of aggression while confined, nor in connection with any of the offenses for which he was arrested. On the contrary, he seems timid and withdrawn, and might become a victim of assaults in prison, were it not for his size, strength, and power of voice.”

  Sarsfield had been pleased enough by that paragraph, but a little puzzled by what followed:

  “In general, Sarsfield is one of those recidivists who ought not to be confined, were any alternative method now available for restraining them from petty offenses against property. Not only does he lack belligerence against men, but apparently he is quite clean of any record against women and children. It seems that he does not indulge in autoeroticism, either—perhaps because of strict instruction by his R. C. mother during his formative years.

  “I add, however, that conceivably Sarsfield is not fundamentally so gentle as his record indicates. He can be energetic in self-defense when pushed to the wall. In his youth occasionally he was induced, for the promise of $5 or $10, to stand up as an amateur against some traveling professional boxer. He admits that he did not fight hard, and cried when he was badly beaten. Nevertheless, I am inclined to suspect a potentiality for violence, long repressed but not totally extinguished by years of ‘humbling himself,’ in his phrase. This possibility is not so certain as to warrant additional detention, even though three years of Sarsfield’s sentence remain unexpired.”

  Yes, he had memorized nearly the whole of that old doctor’s analysis, which had got his parole for him. There had been the concluding paragraphs:

  “Francis Sarsfield is oppressed by a haunting sense of personal guilt. He is religious to the point of superstition, an R.C., and appears to believe himself damned. Although worldly-wise in a number of respects, he retains an almost unique innocence in others. His frequent humor and candor account for his success, much of the time, at begging. He has read much during his wanderings and terms of confinement. He has a strong taste for good poetry of the popular sort, and has accumulated a mass of miscellaneous information, much of it irrelevant to the life he leads.

  “Although occasionally moody and even surly, most of the time he subjects himself to authority, and will work fairly well if closely supervised. He possesses no skills of any sort, unless some knack for woodchopping, acquired while he was enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps, can be considered a marketable skill. He appears to be incorrigibly footloose, and therefore confinement is more unpleasant to him than to most prisoners. It is truly remarkable that he continues to be rational enough, his isolation and heavy guilt-complex considered.

  “Sometimes evasive when he does not desire to answer questions, nevertheless he rarely utters a direct lie. His personal modesty may be described as excessive. His habits of cleanliness are commendable, if perhaps of origins like Lady Macbeth’s.

  “Despite his strength, he is a diabetic and suffers from a heart murmur, sometimes painful.

  “Only in circumstances so favorable as to be virtually unobtainable could Sarsfield succeed in abstaining from the behavior pattern that has led to his repeated prosecution and imprisonment. The excessive crowding of this penitentiary considered, however, I strongly recommend that he be released upon parole. Previous psychiatric reports concerning this inmate have been shallow and erro
neous, I regret to note. Perhaps Sarsfield’s chief psychological difficulty is that, from obscure causes, he lacks emotional communication with other adults, although able to maintain cordial and healthy relations with small children. He is very nearly a solipsist, which in large part may account for his inability to make firm decisions or pursue any regular occupation. In contradiction of previous analyses of Sarsfield, he should not be described as ‘dull normal’ intellectually. Francis Xavier Sarsfield distinctly is neither dull nor normal.”

  Sarsfield had looked up “solipsist,” but hadn’t found himself much the wiser. He didn’t think himself the only existent thing—not most of the time, anyway. He wasn’t sure that the old doctor had been real, but he knew that his mother had been real before she went straight to heaven. He knew that his nightmares probably weren’t real; but sometimes, while awake, he could see things that other men couldn’t. In a house like this he could glimpse little unaccountable movements out of the corners of his eyes, but it wouldn’t do to worry about those. He was afraid of those things which other people couldn’t see, yet not so frightened of them as most people were. Some of the other inmates had called him Crazy Frank, and it had been hard to keep down his temper. If you could perceive more existent things, though not flesh-and-blood things, than psychiatrists or convicts could—why, were you then a solipsist?

  There was no point in puzzling over it. Dad had taken him out of school to work on the farm when he hadn’t yet finished the fourth grade, so Words like “solipsist” didn’t mean much to him. Poets’ words, though, he mostly understood. He had picked up a rhyme that made children laugh when he told it to them: