by Thomas Cater
“I think so,” I said. “He’s older and wiser now, hopefully. If he hasn’t found someone else, which he hasn’t, or he wouldn’t be here, it’ll work.”
She stopped sealing envelopes and took my hand.
“You came along at the right time, Charles. You were a godsend.”
“Please,” I said, “it’s not necessary. We did not meet in Sunday school. We just happened to need each other in different ways at the same time.”
“I’m glad my leaving won’t disappoint you. I thought you might think I was reneging on some kind of unspoken promise.”
I smiled and squeezed her hand, regretting that I had not studied her body in greater detail when I had the chance. It would have been a memory to cherish.
“I’m a sophisticated man of the world,” I said. “I don’t really believe too strongly in the inviolability of matrimony or any other kind of institution, including mental institutions.”
She kissed my cheek tenderly and walked to her desk, back to her envelope stuffing and licking. I stared at her for a few moments in silence, trying to remember what it was like, that field of skin with its nooks and crannies, forests of soft, thin hair, streams of slick fluids.
“When are you leaving?” I asked.
“In two weeks,” she said. “He has to be at work by then.”
I didn’t have the nerve to propose a final farewell fling, though it was on my mind. I knew she would refuse. A true love had rediscovered her. At least this parting was far less painful and expensive than the previous one. There were no vehicles or real estate to haggle over, just a few cracks in the ego.
“Good luck, Miss Pennington.”
“Thank you, Mr. Case. I hope you find whatever it is you’re looking for.”
It sounded like such a strange but appropriate thing to say, or so I thought. Did I give people the impression that I was looking for something? If so, I didn't know what, or I'd probably forgotten all about it. True, I was looking for something for Elinore. It was not as if I were on a quest to get rich. I was looking for someone else’s happiness, or so I thought. I was looking for the happiness of someone who had died many years ago.
“Oh, Charles, before you go, there’s one more thing,” she said. “Remember the letter I sent to Harvard? We asked About Grier’s qualifications and education?” I nodded, feeling my interest in abstractions waning rapidly. “Well, we got an answer, it came yesterday.” She gave me the envelope. “You’re not going to believe this,” she said. I opened the letter and began to read. “They never heard of him,” she said.
“No!” I said sadly, feeling a pang of remorse deep down inside, but I kept reading. In the second paragraph, they claimed they had no record of ever registering a graduate medical student by the name of Ezekiel Grier. “Bullshit, I don’t believe it.”
“It’s true,” she piped, as confident as I was skeptical. “Here’s a card from MEETH the New York Eye, Ear and Throat Association, which is now defunct and only a museum. They have no history of him, either.”
“It can’t be!” I shouted. “They didn’t check back far enough.”
She kept shaking her head defiantly. “It doesn’t surprise me. He was probably just some old quack who talked Ryder into giving him the job for a big campaign contribution.”
“No,” I was firm. “Samuel wouldn’t do that to his own daughter. Not to his own flesh and blood!” I was responding a little too aggressively. Connie winced.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Right as rain,” I replied, “right as rain.”
I said good-bye for the last time and walked sullenly back to the van. If Grier wasn’t a surgeon or a psychiatrist, I could not imagine the kind of inhuman thing he was.
Chapter Forty-Five
I drove to the Good Shepherd Cemetery, right up to the rusting chain link fence and parked. It was an hour or two before dusk. I opened the door to let the breezes sweep in and ventilate the van.
I felt the setting sun on my face; felt it warm my skin and bones. It had been a bright and balmy day, a day to hold communion with the living, not the dead.
I made a cup of tea, opened Samuel’s shoebox full of letters and set them on a gravestone. I listened to the birds chattering, as if they were impatient for dusk.
It was a strange family I had become involved with, Samuel and Elinore. I knew nothing about them and yet I thought I knew them well. I had become some kind of intermediary between them, but not in death, in this other life.
I balanced the cup of tea on the stone and thumbed through his dated letters. I was looking for anything in the 20s or 30s. Much of the stuff was from …Washington. From a woman whose name was Alice Cadman! Her address was … I couldn’t believe it. Her former address was mine! 1609 16th St. NW. next to the Swedenborgian Church! Talk about strange and unsettling circumstances. The more I thought about it the more uneasy I became. Cadman, I suddenly realized, was the name of the woman who had married my belated benefactor Rufus C. Dangerfield.
I removed the letter carefully from the envelope and unfolded the three-page missive.
“My Dearest Samuel,” the letter began. ‘Dearest Samuel?’ I couldn’t believe they knew each other and they were on familiar terms. “He is coming!” the letter extolled. It reminded me of the words in Elinore’s diary. Could ‘he’ have been the one coming? Her letter announced the arrival of a clever man, a former theosophist and a man who professed interpreting the ‘Voynich Manuscript’. There were those words again. She talked about how many years he spent in the Jesuit school of Mandigone in Fracati, Italy, studying the pages of the text, until it sold to a book dealer by the name of Wilfred Voynich.
She also discussed Elinore’s problem and Dr. Grier was ‘sure he could help.’ He said there were sections in the text that covered such operations and it was, in fact, possible to transplant organs from one creature to another. If Samuel wished, he could provide Elinore with the vision of a sacred Ethiopian temple baboon, which ‘possessed vision capable of gazing into the depths of the human soul and discovering what lies therein’.
She went on to tell him in detail about the Voynich script, a paper that baffled men for the past 600 years.
“In all that time no one had been able to translate its strange cipher,” she said. “No one, that is, until now. Some have claimed to understand it, but no one has revealed nearly so great an understanding of its mysteries as Dr. Grier.”
She continued to extol the man’s learning and virtues, as if he were a messiah. Before closing, she said, “and so, my dearest, I urge you find some excuse to visit my home again in Washington. We can discuss your beloved’s fate.”
Chapter Forty-Six
I returned the letter to its envelope. I could not imagine Samuel’s strange belief system. What compelled him to commit such unforgivable sins: I could not believe he took his daughter's eyes! He also denied her the satisfaction of knowing a man and the pleasure of loving her child. How could he have condemned her to such torment?
It could also be true that his love for her had driven him to attempt restorative surgery, years ahead of its time and inspired by an obscure medical treatise. He also tried to provide her with the eyesight of an old world monkey, rumored to see far beyond human capabilities and into the very heart and darkness of men’s souls. His impossible plan for her well-being had apparently driven her mad and the results bore terrible witness to what he had accomplished.
The wall was undoubtedly another one of his machinations, something evil that would sustain his empire forever and keep his world beyond everyone’s reach. I was of the opinion that the only evil in the world was the evil men did to each other. Samuel however was succeeding where others had failed. If my suspicions were correct, I suspected I knew how to end Samuel’s reign of terror from beyond the grave.
I was going to blow his wall to smithereens, not with conventional explosives, but with …well, I would take care of that later if my calculations were correct. When I breac
hed the wall, there would be a tremendous exodus of spirits, free to return to wherever spirits were destined to return.
My tea was cold. I poured the dregs out on the ground and listened to the earth drink it in. There was no point in putting off the ghoulish chore any longer. I gathered up the digging tools and set out for infant Harmon’s grave.
It took lass than twenty minutes to reach the desacrilized sight. Traffic on the dirt road was light. Only one car had passed since I had arrived. I went to work digging just below the head stone. An infant’s coffin was bound to be less than half the size of an adult’s. I did not intend to dig three feet beyond it.
The ground was soft. Once I stepped in the hole, I was no longer visible from the road. I dug into hard clay sooner than I had anticipated, but kept on digging. The air became cool. I saw the sun dip slowly behind the rolling hills. There was still a splash of soft light and color in the sky. I heard the birds chattering noisily, settling down before dusk in nearby trees.
My shoulders were nearly even with the ground when the shovel struck the coffin. The depth and length of the coffin would extend another foot, or so I’ve been told. They went by the book in the 1920s.
I removed the dirt from the coffin. Bodies, I decided, do not care to vacate their comfortable graves. It took nearly another hour to remove enough soil to lift the child’s box from the earth. I could not help imagining what people would think if they saw me robbing a grave. It was as if the ghost of old Nicodemus Thanatos was on the prowl again. I dragged the tiny coffin back to the van and swept it off with a broom.
After spending nearly a century in the ground, it was in good shape, even though the seals had rotted. Samuel had chosen a good piece of high and dry ground in which to bury his unnamed grandchild.
I needed headlights to drive back to town. By the time I reached the Elkton Road, darkness had settled over the surrounding hills. I still had Virgil’s flashlight in the glove box; it was long-handled and required five batteries. It projected a beam of light that could nearly reach the stars. I drove straight to the Ryder house. For the first time, since I had arrived in Vandalia, I knew what to expect.
I was not wearing my murdered man’s suit. After tonight, I would not need it. I was confident. If Elinore did not approve of my plan, she could wait several more decades for another liberator to come. Time meant nothing to the dead.
I stopped in front of the iron gate. The headlights from the van knifed through the trees and brush to the house. Dark looming shadows leaped over the wooded landscape. The house lay nearly concealed and secure beyond the tangle of overgrown brush and trees. I was in too much of a hurry to drag the coffin out of the van and carry it to the Ryder mausoleum. It was more than 30 yards from the gate to the house, and another 20 from the house to the cemetery. Most of the distance was uphill. Besides, it didn’t’ fit in with my plan.
The road was not clear enough to provide the necessary traction needed to push through the weeds and brush. Unless I had to breech the gate and take the overgrown drive to the abandoned railroad bed behind the house. The moment I had been waiting ffor was at hand. It was time to test my plan. I turned the amplifier on, removed the speakers from the van and positioned them near the gate. I climbed back into the van, turned on the tape deck and the amplifier. I switched on the music. The sound of the Scottish bagpipes filled the night with a terrifying wail. The woods seemed to come alive, to jump back and away from the gate and the loud blaring sounds. The gates literally swung in on its hinges and I saw rock dust flaking from the pillars.
I climbed back into the van and started pressing a steady rhythmic blast on the twin diesel horns. A squalling super-charged lullaby howled in time to the sound of the bawling bagpipes; they were deafening, ‘Amazing Grace.’ The gates began to sway. The lights dimmed on the van registering a power drain on the battery. I accelerated. The van’s diesel horns began to blare and the music was ear-splitting. I lifted my voice and sang as loud as I could with the shrill notes of the horn and the wailing bagpipes: “Amaaaazing Grace, how sweet the sound!”
As the sounds of the pipes grew monstrous, I cranked up the amplifier as high as it would go. I kept my hand on the horn and my foot on the accelerator. The sound of the engine, the horn and the bagpipes were booming. I could see strange things happening around the trembling gates. The stone mortar was beginning to flake and crumble. I saw pieces of the pillar shatter and fall to the ground. The wrought iron gate began to shudder and one end sunk into the ground. I continued to press on the horn, blasting away as if it were a kind of weapon. The mortar for the bricks in the wall crumbled, while the hinges, imbedded in the concrete pillars supporting the gate, popped out scattering rock dust everywhere, and then the gates slipped from the columns and fell flat on the ground.
I released the horn, turned off the music, waited and watched for a second in disbelief, and then stopped accelerating. The night was deadly still, but something else was about to happen. There can only be a partial explanation for what occurred next. I got out of the van to see and hear more clearly. The night, for the moment, was incredibly still. The sounds of my footsteps were so clear and distinct they could have been mistaken for those of a frightened animal creeping through the brush. The air was so motionless I could have heard a squirrel fart in the highest treetop, if one had been so inclined. The air had also grown warmer, too warm for the time of year and the time of night. It was also muggier than it had ever been before on any of my previous trips. Sweat was beginning to stand out on my forehead and neck.
Near the house, I could hear wind rushing through the treetops, hissing like a steaming pot and heading in my direction. They were coming, I suspected, to greet me. I climbed over the gate and stood in the center of the overgrown drive, another mistake. The sound of the wind through the treetops was unlike any I had ever heard. It swirled around my ears and tried to tear my hair out by the roots. It could only have been the Klikouchy; there could be no other name for it.
From that moment on, the screaming wind did not abate. I covered my ears with both hands. It made shredded rags of my clothing, pelted me with broken limbs and branches, blew dirt and gravel into my lungs and eyes, and into the pores of my skin. I could feel the skin on my face blistering, and the hair on my head was standing straight up. I fell to my knees and took refuge clinging to the bars of the fallen gate.
It was then that I began to feel the earth beneath me undulate. It was like a woman in labor about to disgorge its unholy child, rising and falling, and the morbid fetus within its womb punching and jabbing, exploding beneath the dark loamy skin with pustulating nodules of earth and rock. Gaping black holes and mind shuddering moans began to emanate from the darkness, while a horrible stench seeped out of the ground in bilious green clouds. It wasted the bark on the trees and the cool and damp green moss turned black.
It was a horrendous orgy of earth and air, fire and water, coming from within the earth and spending itself upon the land. It was as if a great rushing, a forced evacuation through the bowels of the earth and the fallen gates were taking place.
I got to my feet and stood in the middle of the path, in the lich-way of escape. As the wind screamed and tore at my hair, the spirit of those things imprisoned in the earth for so long poured through the flattened gate and raced to the sanctuary of whatever heaven or hell dared provide.
It seemed a long time before the wind began to die down. The screams faded and the breezes soughed kindly through the trees. The earth stopped buckling and steaming and some semblance of order restored. I could hear once again my own thoughts. I hurried back to the van, put it in gear and drove through and over the fallen gate. I glanced in the rear view mirror and saw my tousled hair, which had turned shockingly white.
“Something that doesn’t like a wall,” I said echoing a forgotten poem. My voice was shaking and choking with fear.
“It walks in shadows, or so it seems to me.”
The density of the foliage kept the headlights from pe
netrating beyond the trees and shrubs. The van crawled over the deep grass, ruts and fallen limbs, bouncing roughly, spinning in the moist dew and dropping into soft and hidden excavations. The wheels however kept turning and the van kept climbing over the ruts and dead foliage and passed the steps of the front door.
I kept the van in low gear, started around the house, across the once neatly tended lawn, and passed the gazebo to the path that led down the hill to the cemetery. Before the incline became impassable, I turned the van parallel to the side of the hill. The cemetery was less than 30 yards farther down the hill. I could easily carry the coffin that far. I pulled it out of the RV and lowered it into the tall grass.
I returned to the cab of the van for the flashlight and shovel. I carried them both back to the coffin, loaded it up on one shoulder and proceeded to the graveyard. I positioned the box close to Elinore’s grave and paused. Elinore’s casket, I suspected, would not be as shallow. It would be buried six-feet deep. Since there were no more experiments after her operation, there would have been no need for more unauthorized interments.
I propped the flashlight on a stone, focused the beam upon the grave and began to dig. Time passed swiftly and each shovel full of dirt seemed to grow lighter. Twice I caught myself grinning and drooling like a ghoul.
I tried to take control by talking to myself: “Easy, Charlie. Two graves in one night; if you’re not careful you may become a jabbering idiot before you finish.”
I thought I heard someone else laugh, or perhaps it was … me. Yes, I was laughing and talking to myself, but I still couldn’t be sure if I was sane or not.
Nearly an hour passed before the shovel finally struck wood. Fortunately, it would not be necessary to remove the coffin from the ground. I planned to stack the baby's coffin on top of Elinore, its mother. Then I began to wonder if that would actually solve the problem. Instead of putting one coffin on the other, I could remove the child’s skeleton, and place the remains inside with her. In death, she would be able to succor the child she had never known. Yes, it made more sense to do it that way.
