Night Relics

by James P. Blaylock

  Then something fluttered against the downhill lattice, not ten feet distant—a pale shape like a drift of suspended muslin buoyed by the wind. Peter pointed the flashlight at it, and for an instant, just before the beam illuminated it, Beth saw that it was the figure of the boy, standing with something in his arms—the gray cat. Then the light shone on it, revealing a broad drape of dusty cobweb hanging from an overhead beam. The wind pushed it sideways, into an amorphous shape. There was no cat, nothing at all human about the cobweb.

  Peter stared at it for another moment before turning toward her. He took a step away from the gate. “Why don’t you go back inside?” he said, gesturing with the light toward the candlelit parlor windows. She could see the old bookcases inside, along the far wall, the decanter and glasses on top, the framed pictures, the two empty chairs. From outside it looked almost elegant, pristine, unaffected by the years and neglect. She shook her head. “Not without you.”

  The gate started to creak shut, and Peter reached out and pushed it solidly open, then rolled a rock in front of it, blocking it there. He suddenly bent down and kissed her, and then, taking her hand, he ducked into the interior of the cellar.

  She could just barely stand beneath the low beams, and she raked the air in front of her to push away cobwebs. The cellar stretched away before them, the height of the ceiling diminishing nearly to nothing at the uphill end. The fireplace chimney sat next to the gate, its wide base flaring down into the ground almost like tree roots. The chimney was massive, as if the builder had gotten carried away with the abundance of river rock lining the creek and hadn’t known when to stop building. The stones were mixed up with patches of clinker bricks, the joints slopping over with old mortar.

  She followed Peter as he moved toward the center of the room, picking his way through the debris that lay in the loose dirt—scraps of lumber and iron pipe, broken clinker brick, and old garden tools. He cast the beam of the flashlight into the far corners and along the wall, stooping beneath sagging floor joists that were black with age and strung with the silky white orbs of spider eggs.

  Dead autumn leaves lay heaped in a low hillock against the wooden lattice that fenced the cellar, and Beth could hear the snick, snick, snick of something moving through them. They stirred in a mass, like a sleeping person shifting beneath bed covers. When the flashlight shone on them, Peter recoiled, as if he’d seen something there. She heard him whisper.

  “What?” she asked.

  Silence.

  “You said something.”

  “Nothing.” He turned the light away, sweeping it across the base of the chimney before shining it on the leaves again.

  “I don’t think he’s under here,” Beth whispered. “What are you looking for?” There was a vague glow to the darkness, a phosphorescent haziness, as if smoky moonlight were filtering through the lattice, filling the room. It came to her that smoke was drifting downward from the fireplace in the room above. It swirled in the eddying winds. The hillock of leaves shuddered again.

  “She’s here,” Peter whispered. The crying had diminished now, the wind momentarily hushed.

  Beth held her breath, looking at the leaves. She could almost make out a human shape in it now—the curve of a shoulder and hip, a woman lying on her side, covered in a cloak woven of autumn leaves.

  “Amanda?” Peter whispered.

  Beth put her hand to her mouth. Peter’s voice was husky, deeper. He stepped toward the leaves, falling to his knees in the soft dirt and rock, reaching out a trembling hand to caress the assemblage of leaves with the beam of light.

  “Peter?” Beth said to him, her voice rising. She pushed his shoulder.

  He was oblivious to her. A gust of wind rattled the lattice, as if in answer, the leaves sighing out a sibiliant whisper. Peter dropped the flashlight into the dirt. He shook his head slightly, as if denying something. His words sounded like a quiet prayer. The room was aglow now, the dirt and debris of the floor shining silver. Tendrils of smoke gathered on the floor, circulating in the drifting air. Peter bent forward and ran a hand carefully across the top of the leaves, which bunched together, pressing up along the lattice in a dark mass like a half-animated thing trying to rise. A scattering of them pushed through the lattice and whirled away into the moonlit night.

  Beth took an involuntary step backward, suppressing the wild urge to run toward the propped-open gate. She searched the ground around her, looking frantically at the collection of junk that lay scattered in the dirt. There must be something, anything…. She snatched up a straight stick, the handle of some long-ruined garden tool.

  The leaves tilted toward Peter, shuffling together, drawn upright. A voice whispered—“Esther,” it said, a man’s voice, not Peter’s, a voice full of sadness and longing. She turned and looked behind her, lifting the stick, but there was nothing there, nothing but the heaped stone and brick of the chimney, occluded by the smoke that curled languorously before it, rising like a candle flame.

  Beth stepped past Peter, striking out with the stick, flailing at the moving leaves, slashing at them as Peter recoiled in evident horror. He snatched frantically at the stick, stumbling to his feet. She evaded his grasp, lunged forward in a crouch and whipped the stick left and right, leaves scattering, flattening against the lattice. The air was full of them, a sudden whirlwind of leaves, the wind moaning, the walls vibrating.

  “Stop!” Peter shouted, grabbing at her wrist, his face twisted into such an expression of fear and anger that she hardly knew him. His features flickered in her vision, and she was filled with the strange sensation that Peter was falling away from her, as if into a vast chasm, and that some other thing was rushing forward to occupy the space where he had been. The standing smoke in front of the old chimney pulsed and swirled. Beyond it a shadow grew, filling the smoke with darkness and solidity.

  Peter’s hand clasped her arm as he reached again for the stick. She jammed her elbow backward, feeling it hit his chest. Jerking away from him and taking the stick in both hands, she waded forward into the leaves, swinging the stick like a baseball bat. It tore through them, the dry leaves spinning behind it, the stick whirring around so fast and hard that she turned with it, unable to stop it from cracking Peter on the forehead as he lunged in to grab at her again.

  There was a sharp snap as the stick broke, and a simultaneous rush of wind and sound. She dropped the stick and grabbed Peter’s shoulders with both hands as he stumbled forward, a line of blood appearing on his brow over his left eye.

  “I’m sorry!” she shouted, trying to dab at the blood with the sleeve of her shirt and at the same time to drag him toward the open gate. He shrugged away from her, staggering against a post that supported the floor. He touched his forehead with his hand, looking blankly at his bloodstained fingertips. There was a sound like static on a television tuned to a dead station, and disembodied voices drifted on the circulating air.

  A window appeared in the twilight in front of her eyes, a pale, hovering rectangle that seemed to open onto infinite space. Through it Beth could see a black shadow like something crouched toadlike in the far distance. The sound of the staticky wind rushed in her ears. She could hear a tumult of faint noises above it, within it—the boy’s weeping, a woman’s voice calling from somewhere far away, the sound of laughter and of glass clinking against glass, the cheerful fluting of “The Merry Old Land of Oz.”

  The shadow within the rectangle drew nearer, approaching her in little staccato leaps like a jerky black-and-white film. It was the figure of a man, rushing forward now. She stepped backward, throwing up her hands, and felt a rush of cold wind that droned through the cellar like flies in a paper cup. She threw her hands up in front of her face, recoiling from it, turning toward Peter, then shouting out loud in fear and surprise.

  Peter was gone.

  A man stood in the center of the cellar—the man they’d seen outside. He seemed to look straight through her, as if she weren’t there at all, his features growing slowly more anim
ate, like a man just regaining consciousness.

  She ran, through the propped-open gate, around the side of the house and out toward the windswept road, where she looked back over her shoulder at the house. Shadows moved within the candlelit parlor, and the wind carried to her ears the myriad sounds of the room coming back to life at long last.

  10

  ACKROYD FOUND IT IMPOSSIBLE TO READ, ESPECIALLY TO read Chesterton, who demanded more concentration than he possessed tonight. There was too much wind, too much noise and movement. The moonlit road outside was a constant distraction. He shut the book and laid it on the table. Since dark he’d seen no one out and about in the canyon, not even a car. And probably he wouldn’t, not on a weekday night and with the Santa Anas blowing. People were locked inside their houses, waiting out the darkness and the weather.

  He stood up and walked to the bookcase, sliding back one of the doors and removing a big mahogany box. Inside the box lay a set of painted tin soldiers, the paint half chipped off. He had lost a couple of the soldiers over the years, but that and the chipped paint and the years themselves were simply the price you had to pay for your memories. Esther had never tired of helping him build fortifications out of stacks of books on the parlor carpet—caves and canyons, tall towers with hidden rooms smelling of dusty old paper, regiments of soldiers marching down the long Sunday afternoons to do battle on fields of dark green Chinese wool.

  He took out a few of the soldiers now and set them on the dining room table, glancing up at the photo of him and his sister and suddenly feeling a little sheepish, as if she could see him there, still playing with tin soldiers at his age. Moonlight shone on the road outside now, but the road was still empty, and maybe just as well so. There was no percentage in chasing phantoms through the night, trying to recapture something irretrievably lost years and years ago.

  He recalled the day she’d gotten back from a summer visit to Michigan. He and Aunt Lydia had met her at Union Station in Los Angeles, and when she’d climbed down off the train with her newly bobbed hair, she was carrying the box. He’d known straightaway that it was for him. He could see it in her eyes, although she’d pretended it was a fruitcake, so full of brandy, she said, that he wouldn’t even be allowed to taste it. She had peeked inside, laughing, rolling her eyes as if clobbered by the reek of brandy. Finally he’d snatched it out of her hands, pulling back the lid to reveal the ranks of soldiers within, line after line of them in neat little doweled racks.

  He could remember everything about that day—the palm trees against a blue sky, the vast station with its leather seats and chandeliers and painted ceilings, the long platforms, the sound of the train whistle, the reek of smoke, the milling of the crowds. They’d eaten in an elegant restaurant, and his aunt, he remembered, had ordered Belgian hare, and he had done the same, proud to be ordering something so exotic that he had no idea what it was. When it turned out to be rabbit, he couldn’t eat it, and so he had sat through the meal in disgrace, his food untouched.

  Laying all of the soldiers except one neatly back into the box, he shut the lid, then set the box back onto its shelf. The leftover soldier he put into his pocket where he kept other small mementos, not luck charms, really, just—what?—maybe small fragments of memory. He had a token from the Chicago World’s Fair, an abalone button that he’d found among his mother’s things, a big blue rhinestone that he’d unearthed digging in the vegetable garden. Sometime last week he lost a polished opal that he’d carried in his pocket for years, and now this soldier would volunteer, to take its place.

  Yesterday at the veterinarian’s office he had decided to give the box of soldiers to Bobby, to Beth’s son. The boy had taken it hard—Sheba’s being hurt—even though he didn’t really know the cat very well. It was tough now just to think about it, the boy sitting beside her in the backseat all the way down to Dr. Stone’s office. He’d talked to Sheba continually, trying to convince her to hold on, even told her a quiet story about when he’d hurt himself falling off a fence, but it turned out to be nothing, which was almost always what happened. Well, something had convinced the old cat to hold on; why not believe it was a six-year-old’s compassion? Probably Bobby wouldn’t have eaten the Belgian hare, either, once he knew it was really a rabbit.

  It was time to turn out the lamp; there was nothing to be gained by summoning up memories like old ghosts. Inevitably they’d vanish into the darkness. He walked across to the oil lamp next to the reading chair and twisted the wick down, then cupped his hand over the chimney and blew the flame out. At that moment, when the room plunged into darkness, he saw a woman on the road, and he had to grab onto the back of the chair to steady himself.

  He saw then that she had long blond hair. It wasn’t Esther. She swept her hair back with her hand, running up the stairs onto the porch, pounding on the door even as he stepped across to open it.

  11

  HE WENT OUT INTO THE NIGHT WITHOUT HIS COAT, FOLLOWING Beth onto the porch and into a blast of wind, dragging the door shut behind him as she took his elbow and hurried him forward. She shouted into his ear, the wind snatching her words away. He caught only bits and pieces of what she was saying—Peter’s disappearance, the ghosts, something about the cellar….

  The lights of the house shone through the trees, and he could see moonlit smoke tumbling out of the chimney. His fingers closed around the tin soldier in his pocket as dust swirled up from the road, gyrating toward them in a dozen skittering wind devils. He heard on the wind what sounded like the scratchy notes of antique music. He recognized the melody. In his memory he could hear his sister humming it.

  Her face came into his mind. He recalled the touch of her hand on the afternoon of their parents’ funeral, when he was five years old, the timeless week that followed, Esther reading to him for hours on end—On the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, The King of the Golden River—the two of them in the back garden through the still and sunny afternoons, their chairs shaded by tall rows of pole beans, the air heavy with the scent of orange blossom.

  “Hurry,” he whispered, but already she was stepping into the darkened living room. She pulled the door silently shut behind them. At the opposite end of the room a flickering light shone past the edge of the nearly closed parlor door. There was a sleepy, languorous atmosphere in the house, something molasses heavy, scented with the smoky menthol smell of burning eucalyptus from the fireplace in the parlor. He couldn’t hear the music anymore, and the sound of the wind diminished to a distant rush beyond the sheltering walls of the house. Their footsteps creaked on the floorboards, and he could hear his own breathing and the sound of blood rushing in his ears. He peered past the edge of the parlor door, into the candlelit room….

  Esther sat in her customary chair before the fire. Her hair long, grown out. The doctor, Dr. Landry, hadn’t liked it bobbed—too frivolous. And she’d taken to dressing in dark colors, usually black, as if she were in mourning for something she’d lost. She was dressed that way now, exactly as he’d seen her when she stood on the road two nights ago, her hair swept by the wind, the dress a dusty black in the light of the moon. Now she was composed, sitting in front of the hearth, a book open in her hands.

  Her husband sat in the other chair, a decanter and glass on the table. The boy, Jamie, lounged on the rug behind them, his back to the window, playing an endless game of Puzzle Peg. His hand moved across the board, picking up the blue-painted wooden pegs and dropping them to the carpet, new pegs appearing on the board in an endless succession, the discarded pegs blinking away one by one. There was the sound of book pages turning, of the logs crackling in the hearth, of the click, click, click of the wooden pegs. The fire rose and fell in the fireplace as if it were breathing.

  He remembered the room from sixty years past, knew now what he had known then, when he was fourteen years old and had visited his sister that last lonely time—that this room was an extension of the man who had built it, a manifestation of his will. The enchantment in its carefu
l design was meant to function as an impenetrable hedge of briar. There was nothing that betrayed the room’s connection to the outside world, not a stray slip of paper, not a piece of newsprint, not a hint in the carefully arranged ornaments and books or in the solemn, timeless prints on the wall—nothing suggested that the room was subject to time or change.

  He felt something tugging on his sleeve. The sensation registered slowly, calling him back along the years. Beth stood behind him in the dark living room. She gestured at the front door, urging him to follow her. She whispered something, but he only half heard it. He shook his head. He couldn’t leave now, not yet. He peered into the still room again, listening to her footfalls across the wooden floor, hearing a door close in another room. Then, when he was alone in the empty darkness, he whispered his sister’s name, half expecting that the room and all that was in it would vanish on the instant, like an image in a suddenly broken mirror.

  12

  UTTERLY ALONE, BETH WENT OUT THROUGH THE BACK door, remembering that the flashlight was under the house where Peter had dropped it. Maybe it wasn’t broken or burned out. He’d put away the tools that used to be scattered around the parlor floor, but she remembered a length of pipe lying in the dirt of the cellar. That would do.

  The moon had risen in the starry sky, illuminating the chipped white paint that peeled from the woven lath of the cellar gate. She held on to the rough, weathered frame, looking once again into the dim room beyond, at the sloping dirt of the littered floor, the dark hidden corners. She stepped inside, moving across to the chimney, and ran her hand across the patchwork masonry, the random masses of clinker brick and stone, and the crumbling lines of mortar slopped from the untooled joints. She snapped a long slab of it loose and dropped it into the dirt.