The illusion—if illusion it was —faded away. Lights dimmed, went out, disappeared. The “new” furniture turned back into empty spaces; the walls resumed their brown discoloration, the woodwork lost its sheen. Nelson and Nora dissolved into empty air. It was as though a moment had come—and gone.
Looking at the walls, Elizabeth saw that the electrical fixtures were missing. Looking at the clock on the mantel, she saw that it had no hands.
She lit a candle and went through the downstairs rooms. None of the clocks had hands and some of them—the new ones which she had overlooked in her weeding-out operation—had disappeared. So had the cupboards that Byron had had built when he remodeled the kitchen. So had the inlaid linoleum on the kitchen floor. She went upstairs. So had the writing desk that contained every poem she had ever written.
At least her bed was still there, and her sheets and blankets and pillows. The bed, being pre-Dickensonian, would have been exempt in any case, but the sheets and blankets and pillows were relatively new. Maybe what had happened to the house had affected only those articles that were an integral part of the house. Frightened, broken-hearted, she undressed and slipped beneath the covers. She blew out the candle and closed her eyes. Lying there, she tried to reassure herself. She had been living alone too long—that was it. She had let her obsession with the past get the best of her common sense. In the morning, her common sense would be back at the helm, and everything would be back to normal again.
But morning did not come.
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SHE could not believe it at first when she awoke to total darkness. She had slept for at least eight hours, and daybreak should have been on hand. She lit her candle, got out of bed, and went over to the window. Blackness lay beyond the panes, blackness unrelieved by the faintest gleam or sparkle or particle of light.
Standing there, she became aware of the intense cold. Had the furnace gone out? Slipping into her blue dressing gown, she hurried downstairs. The living room was like an ice box, the kitchen was like a deepfreeze. Holding her candle before her, she descended the basement stairs. The electric furnace had vanished. So had the electric hot-water tank. So had the water pipes and the wiring.
Well anyway, her teakettle was full.
She was trembling now, partly from fright, but mostly from the cold. Returning to the kitchen, she built a fire in the wood stove and when it was going good she went into the living room and built another one in the fireplace. As warmth rose around her, some of her confidence returned. Remembering that there was snow on the ground, she found a pan in the kitchen and stepped out onto the back porch. Instantly, the candlelight shrank into a tiny sphere of wan light and she found that she couldn’t see beyond a radius of two feet. The cold was unbearable, the blackness terrifying. She had a sudden, horrible conviction that the house no longer rested on solid earth and that if she were to step down from the porch, she would step into nothingness. Shuddering, she went back into the kitchen and closed the door.
The cordwood, she thought numbly. If I can’t get to the garage, how am I going to keep my fires going?
There could be only one answer, and presently it came to her : By burning the furniture.
Thus far, she had not reacted to the situation the way a normal person would have reacted. Living alone for so long, she had failed to consider the possibility that the catastrophe that had overtaken her might have overtaken others as well, that it might, in fact, have overtaken the entire world. When the thought finally occurred to her, she hurried back into the living room, hungry for the first time in years for the sound of a human voice. However, her hunger was not appeased. There wasn’t even an outline in the dust on the Sheraton sofa table to show where the phone had been.
She stood very still and clenched her hands into fists. “I won’t scream,” she said. “I won’t.”
Maybe somewhere in the house there was a transistor radio which she might have overlooked and which might still have enough power in its batteries to enable her to pick up a nearby station. It was a bright and shining hope while it lasted, but it didn’t last long. She knew without even having to think that if there had been such a radio, it no longer existed any more than the phone did, any more than anything else that was endemic to the house and in the least incongruous with the Nelson-and Nora period. Besides, even if one did exist and even if its batteries still had power in them, what good would it be to her? Radio waves couldn’t penetrate where light waves couldn’t.
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PENETRATE? Penetrate what? She frowned, trying to think. Did she understand unconsciously what had happened and was her unconscious mind reluctant to release the facts because they were too unpleasant?
She closed her eyes. Maybe she could visualize the situation symbolically.
At first, she “saw” nothing. Then, gradually, a river took form. It was a wide river, flowing evenly between indeterminate banks, and in the middle of it there was a large rock. The part of the rock that rose above the surface was damp, indicating that the river had recently washed over it, and then leveled off. Elizabeth waited for more details to manifest themselves, but the image remained the way it was. At length she opened her eyes, no wiser than she had been before.
The fire was dying down, and she added more wood. She remembered that she hadn’t had breakfast yet, and went into the kitchen and made a small pot of coffee. Raising one of the grids of the ancient wood stove, she toasted a slice of bread over the flames. She had enough food on hand to keep her going for a week —two, if she rationed it—and there were a couple of dozen quarts of fruit juice with which she could eke out her water supply. Of course she couldn’t make coffee with fruit juice, but it wouldn’t hurt her to go without coffee. “Why am I thinking like this?” she asked herself suddenly. “I act as though it really matters whether I live or die.”
That afternoon, she found an ancient hatchet in the basement, brought it upstairs, and began breaking up enough furniture to see her through the night. As always, she saved the old at the expense of the new, and when she decided to supplement her fuel supply with books, the ones she brought in from the library were, like the furniture, directly related to the Nelson-and-Nora period. She hesitated over Emily Dickinson’s Further Poems, but ultimately decided that it, too, must go, and piled it with the other doomed volumes.
She looked at the wing-back chair and the footstool. She would never burn them. Nor would she ever burn the bed in her room. The three pieces, along with the handless clock on the mantel and the wood stove in the kitchen, were the oldest items in the house. They were the house, in a way . . .
The books and the broken-up furniture stacked neatly beside the fireplace, Elizabeth fixed herself a frugal dinner. Afterward, she settled down before the fire with Sonnets by E.B.B. She spent the “night” in the wing-back chair, augmenting the heat from the fire, to which she periodically added books and wood, with a yellow lap robe. The cold neither intensified nor lessened. There was no wind, or if there was, she could not hear it; no sound at all save for the crackling of the flames. When she thought it was morning, she went out into the kitchen and fixed breakfast. During the next three “waking periods”, as she came to call them, she broke up the rest of the Nelson-and-Nora furniture and burned it along with the Nelson-and-Nora books. It was with a feeling of vast regret that she cast the last volume into the flames. She felt as though she was destroying an entire age, a whole way of life; and the destruction was made all the more poignant by the fact that the last volume was Emily Dickinson’s The Single Hound.
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SHE watched the cover curl, saw the pages blacken. Words, words, she thought. Your life, like mine, Emily, was words, words, words—words written in our lonely rooms, in secret and in silence and in pain, while without our windows birds sang, and lovers walked beneath the trees. Oh Matt, Matt, words are not enough to fill a person’s life; as sustenance, they feed the soul, but starve the heart; and the patterns that we form with them are patte
rns, and nothing more. Pointless patterns falling like the leaves of life upon the dusty lap of death.
The pages crinkled, turned to ashes; the cover crumbled away. The flames died down, and the room darkened... then grew abruptly bright with gaslight as the House of Dickenson shuddered. A Victorian side table with a marble top materialized along an empty wall. On it stood a Gothic wax light. In a poignant corner, a familiar harpsichord appeared. Gaily-patterned hooked rugs came into being on the barren floor. A fantastic chandelier appeared hanging from the suddenly immaculate ceiling, and walls and woodwork took on a brighter hue. A Victorian rosewood sofa sprang into existence where only dust and desuetude had been, and on it sat a young woman in a gay-nineties dress, crocheting in the radiance of a Pickle-jar lamp. Tantalizing aromas emanated from the kitchen, and somewhere in the house a music box was playing Brahms’ Lullaby.
The moment was as transient as the first moment had been. In a sense, it was a picture glimpsed while riffling through the pages of a book. Now, the pages had come together, and the room was as it had been before, shadow-filled, pale with the radiance of fainting flames, inhabited only by an old woman sitting in a wing-back chair—an old woman whose resurrected spectacles did little for her fading vision, but who nevertheless had peered back through the pages of time and seen her own great-grandmother.
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HALF dreaming, half awake, Elizabeth became aware of the awesome cold that had crept into the room. It was time to break up the rest of the furniture; time to burn the rest of the books.
She broke up all of the remaining pieces, all except the wing-back chair, the footstool, and her bed, and piled the remaining books by the fireplace, exempting only Sonnets by E.B.B. She wound the clock on the mantel in order that she might hear its rhythmic voice. “Tick-tock, tick-tock,” it said, and chimed the hour of nothing.
The third and final shudder came two “waking-periods” later while the fire was burning bright and nothing remained to be consumed but the remnants of a Chippendale highboy. This time, there was no sudden brightness, only a gradual paling of the shadows as twilight tiptoed into the room. Going to the front door, Elizabeth opened it and looked out.
Night was falling swiftly. However, there was still enough light to see by. Upon the ground, snow lay; but it wasn’t the same snow that had lain there before. Nor was the ground quite the same. The trees, too, had changed, and the shrubbery had disappeared. As for the street, it was a street no more, but a country road. Across it rose a stand of basswoods; some distance down it the buildings of a small village showed. Elizabeth heard the sound of sleighbells. She knew who she was then, who she had been all along. Before I was born, I died, she thought. Before I knew the light of day, I breathed the breath of night. My sun had already set before I even saw it. And it was I and I alone who instigated this travesty of time.
She stepped back into the House of Death and closed the door behind her. She listened in the silence, and presently she heard their wings. She was glad that they had come.
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WHAT is a generation-house if it is not the sum of the generations that have lived in it, and what is that sum if it is not the sum of the possessions those generations have left behind? Let us take the quantity “8” and assume that it has been arrived at by the following process:
2+2=4; 4+2=6; 6+2=8
In the case of the House of Dickenson, there had been the time of Theodore, the time of Nelson, the time of Byron, and before those times there had been the time of the old woman in the wing-back chair. Let the time of the old woman equal 2, the time of Theodore equal 4, the time of Nelson equal 6, and the time of Byron equal 8. Now, the sum of a tree is the number of its rings, and by those rings, its years can be computed. It follows logically that if those rings could be removed one by one, the tree would grow progressively younger. In the case of a tree, this is manifestly impossible; but a generation-house is not a tree. The “rings” of a generation-house are the marks left by the people who have lived in it—the chairs and the sofas and the clocks and the books which those people left behind. Such “rings” as these can be removed, not entirely perhaps, but to an extent where the “ring” loses its identity and ceases to be; and if the house is ideally constituted, the forces of time themselves can be fooled. Now, let us reverse the process used to obtain 8:
8-2=6; 6-2=4; 4-2=2
Consider: What binds a composite object such as a generation-house to present? Is it not the presence in that house of objects belonging to the present? Is it not the presence of people in that house who live in the present? When a house is abandoned and allowed to fall into desuetude, it eventually acquires the reputation of being haunted, does it not? And because of this do we not consider it as being detrimental to our neighborhood and start taking the necessary steps to get rid of it? Thus do we cooperate with the forces of time, for the forces of time do not like abandoned houses either. Such houses are too easy to forget, and they are haunted in order that our attention will be drawn to them. Moreover, they are haunted, not by apparitions out of the past, but by apparitions out of the future; by the supernatural minions of time.
There are cases, however, when a house loses its tie-in with the present without being abandoned, and this is the kind of house that the forces of time invariably forget. Once forgotten, the house slips back into a more appropriate moment, conforms completely to that moment, and remains in abeyance till that moment passes; then the time-paradox factor goes into action and the house is automatically relegated to a timeless limbo where, in ordinary cases, it remains forever, all memory of it wiped from the minds of men. But the House of Dickenson did not constitute an ordinary case: owing to the individual character of its “rings” and to the precision with which they were removed, it slipped back into the past, not once, but three times, and on the third occasion it outraged the laws of cause and effect by precluding its own beginning. At this point, the forces of time awoke to the fact that a cycle had been set in motion underneath their very proboscides, and they dispatched their minions to eliminate it. The trick was to make 2=8, thereby forcing the law of probabilities to cause Theodore to build the house, and to cause the original contents of the house to be acquired at a later date. The key factor was an old woman sleeping in a wing-back chair.
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OPENING her eyes, old Elizabeth Dickenson glimpsed lavender flutterings in the firelit room. “Come,” she said impatiently. “Do what you have to do, and have done with it. Why do you keep an old woman waiting?” Silence, then the dismal flap-flap of leathery wings. Elizabeth dozed again. Beside her, the flames crackled briskly as they consumed the last of the Chippendale highboy. Something cold and silken touched her cheek, but she neither stirred, nor opened her eyes. “Dress me in my burial gown if you must,” she murmured. “Hang the grave damps round my head. But get on with your loathesome business.”
The flapping crescendoed. There was a soporific quality about it. “I’m sorry, Matt,” she whispered. “Unknowingly I held your life in my hands. Unknowingly I let you die.” She sank down deeper into the chair. It was warm and restful there. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the obbly-gobblies my soul to keep. And if I die before / wake, I pray the obbly-gobblies my soul to take—
There was a knocking at the door.
The clatter of brass striking upon brass.
Young Elizabeth Dickenson opened her eyes.
A silvery web encased both her and the wing-back chair she sat in. She brushed the web away, and it was like wiping film from her eyes. The clock on the mantel said 4:19.
Matt, she thought. Matt, come to apologize. Part of her sprang to her feet, ran into the hall, and tried desperately to turn the knob that controlled the lock. But she was not strong enough. Help me, help me! she called to the rest of herself. In a moment he’ll be gone, and it’ll be too late!
Elizabeth did not move.
Suddenly a vista of long and empty years opened in her mind; long and empty years le
ading down, down, back, back, into darkness, into cold. She saw an old woman sitting by a fire. She saw two winged and hideous shapes.
Still, she did not move.
The image of the old woman faded from her mind, and the image of a man lying crushed beneath a ponderous machine took its place. “Matt, no!”
She was on her feet then, and running into the hall. She tore wildly at the knob, threw open the door. He was standing there in the late-afternoon sunlight, eyes hungry for the sight of her. In a moment, she was in his arms—
The face of all the world is changed, I think,
Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul...
THE END
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OCR, corrections and epub formatting by RS (2013/03). Part of an effort to preserve Robert F. Young's works.
The House That Time Forgot Page 4
