Applying still more pomade to his lank black hair, he took to invading our house, supposedly to talk business with Papa, but in reality to ogle my cousin Rose – then fifteen and almost of marriageable age. Though I was but a great clumsy overgrown boy with long skinny shanks and feet like keelboats, I well understood that the Overseer designed to marry into our family as the first step toward gaining control of Mon Repos. In a rage, I summoned up my smattering of French and called him cochon to his face, for his English was so poor I feared he might misunderstand if I called him swine. I ordered him never again to set foot in the house, at which he laughed in his strange soundless way. He would have loved to give me a taste of his whip, but the caste system protected me, for only the schoolmaster was allowed to beat the heir of Mon Repos.
To get rid of me, Monsieur Felix told Papa I deserved to finish my education in the North, saying how ’twould honour our family if I won a degree from a famous school. With money weighing down his pockets, Papa agreed, and in the summer of 1860 I was compelled to say goodbye to everyone and everything I knew, and set out for the land of the Puritans, as I imagined it. I wished to take Royal to Yale College as my valet, but Monsieur Felix warned Papa that he would run away, once in the free states. So he was doomed to stay behind, whilst I boarded a Cincinnati-bound steamer at Red River Landing for the first leg of my journey.
I was seventeen years of age, as fresh and proud as a new ear of corn, and as green. Wearing varnished boots and carrying my shiny first top hat, I stood upon the hurricane deck, gazing down at ragged and dusty Royal, who had come with the family to say farewell. We who had been playmates now were clearly master and slave. Yet we shared a secret plan, devised during many a night-time meeting at the graveyard. If, as I anticipated, Monsieur Felix laid hands upon Rose, Royal was to kill him, and give himself up to the sheriff without resistance. I would return post-haste and testify that he had merely obeyed my orders, as a slave should, to protect my cousin’s honour. As his reward, when I inherited him I would set him free. Upon this understanding, I left my rifle in a place only Royal knew – wrapped in oily rags, and tied atop a rafter in the cabin of the slave quarters where he slept.
I raised my hand to him as one conspirator to another, and he nodded in reply, his face smooth and immobile as a mask of bronze. Rose wept, Papa honked into his handkerchief, and Monsieur Felix vouchsafed a thin arid smile, like an arroyo dividing his blade of a nose from his large blue chin. Then the whistle blew, the bell chimed, the gangplank lifted, and the muddy bank – like my youth – began drifting away from me.
Siesta time had come. Lerner returned the manuscript to the safe, closed the heavy door and spun the dial. He picked up a little silver bell, rang it briskly, and within ten minutes Morse appeared like a household genie. He removed the lunchtime clutter, spread and adjusted the old man’s lap robe, put a pillow behind his head, and vanished again, quietly closing the door.
Since the back injury that had left him unable to walk, Lerner had needed such coddling to shield him against severe pains that otherwise spread up and down his spine. Yet he understood that his immobility was killing him. He could almost feel the systems of his body rusting in place, shutting down slowly. How tiresome it is, he thought, to die by inches, and with an effort of will concentrated his mind upon his story. He’d come to the end of what he’d already written; tomorrow he must carry the tale forward, weaving fragments of memory into a narrative.
He dozed until five-thirty, waking when Morse turned on the electric chandelier and set down his dinner tray with a folded evening newspaper beside the plate. Lerner ate while perusing the unexciting developments of the day – the end of the Philippine Insurrection, the galumphing of that damned cowboy in the White House. Then the long ritual of putting him to bed began. Morse worked with the deft expertness of a hospital nurse, and by seven-thirty the old man was resting in bed, propped up on a hillock of cushions and covered with spotless linen. He sniffed the penetrating, somehow frigid smell of grain spirits left by the alcohol rub Morse had given him, then folded his hands and smiled, awaiting the high point of his day.
“Come, come, Morse,” he whispered.
The indefatigable one returned with a gleaming salver on which rested a sticky pellet of opium wrapped in rice paper, a crystal flask of amber bourbon, a shot glass, and a silver coffee spoon. Deftly he prepared the laudanum, dissolving the opium in the whiskey with ritualized movements, like a priest mixing water and wine.
“I need to go and buy more of your medicine, Mr Nick,” he murmured, presenting the drink.
“Why not buy it from a drugstore?” Lerner demanded. “Those neighbourhoods by the docks are dangerous.”
“Mr Nick, I can do that, but it’ll cost twice as much. The import tax alone is six dollars a pound, and I can buy decent opium from a Chinaman for five.”
Grumbling, the old man extracted a few bills from a drawer in his marble-topped night table and handed them over. Then in three long sips he drank the draught that ended pain and summoned sleep.
His throat burned, he felt a sharp pain in his gut, then a banked fire that burned low, warming and soothing him. A delicious languor began to spread through his old body. He felt his weight lessen, then almost evaporate. He felt dry and light, like a balsa-wood doll floating high on still water.
“Ah,” he whispered. “So good, so good.”
Morse lingered, watching him, rearranging his bedclothes to make him even more comfortable and secure. When he felt sure that Lerner was asleep, he leaned close to his ear and whispered, “Father? I need to know the word that opens the safe. Tell me the word, Father. Father? What word opens the safe?”
Lerner grunted but slept on.
“Shit,” grumbled Morse. “Old bastard, he don’t relax even when he’s snoring. I bet he keeps a bag of gold in that iron box of his.”
From the cache of bills in the night table he took a tenner, added it to the five, thrust both into his pocket, and soon afterward left the house. He slipped away into the lengthening blue shadows, his mind perhaps on pleasure, or merely on escaping for a few hours the dull round of servitude to a dying man that defined his daytime life.
Lerner woke early, tasting ashes. Dun shadows filled the bedroom, but a thin white scar of daylight already ran between the red-plush window drapes, casting the shadows of iron security bars. He seized the silver bell and rang it loudly.
“Morse—” he began as the door opened. But instead of Morse, the yellow face of the housemaid – Cleo, was that her name? – intruded, anxious beneath a spotted kerchief.
“Oh, Mr Nick,” she burst out, “don’t nobody know where Mr Morse is at. I been up to his room to look, and his baid ain’t been slep’ in.”
Lerner stared at her. If she’d told him the sun had failed to rise in the east, he could hardly have been more astonished.
With Cleo’s help he wrestled himself painfully into the wheelchair, but there his abilities ended. A one-armed man with a spinal injury was close to helpless. A manservant had to be borrowed from next door to prepare him for the day. Lerner found the process distasteful; he hated to have a stranger see him unclothed or touch him; the fact that the man obviously disliked the work made it no easier to bear. In shaving him, the fellow nicked his face repeatedly, until Lerner sent him away with a miserly tip and a muttered curse. A barber had to be brought from a nearby shop, and he charged a whole dollar for the visit!
By then Cleo had brought him breakfast, and it was all wrong for a variety of reasons. Yet he failed to complain about the chilly toast, hard egg, and unsugared coffee. As he entered the den a good hour late and dragged out his manuscript, he was worrying over something much more serious: the possibility that Morse might never return.
As he’d warned last night, rough characters swarmed on the docks; the knife, the revolver, and the slung-shot were common weapons of choice; the Mississippi with its murky water, vast size, and hidden undertows was perfect for disposing of superfluous bodies –
as Lerner knew well from certain experiences of his own.
“And without Morse, how would I live?” Lerner demanded aloud, and there was nobody to answer him.
From a desk drawer he took out a new gold-banded reservoir pen, uncapped it with fingers and teeth, filled it from his inkwell by pressing down an ivory piston, and tried to fix his mind on his story. From time to time as he wrote, he raised his head and listened. Despite the thick walls of the house, some street sounds intruded – the horn of a motor-car brayed; a seller of vegetables chanted “Ah got ni-ess al-li-gay-tuh pay-uhs” – and the house itself was never totally quiet, doors opening and closing for no good reason, a woman’s starched dress (Cleo’s?) rustling past in the hall.
And yet, despite his distraction, the new chapter began taking form. His thoughts might be elsewhere, but his hand travelled over the paper in a sort of automatic writing, like a spirit’s message upon a sealed slate.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
Wherein I Encounter War, and a Spirit
Need I say that eighteen-sixty was a poor year for a southern lad to get an education? That winter a storm of rebellion swept the cotton states, and in the spring of ’61 the country went to war.
For a time I dawdled, hoping that peace might break out. But after the affray at Fort Sumter, with the whole country responding to the call of the trumpet and the drum, I saw that I must go home. I took a train to Cincinnati, where the steam-packets were still running, war or no war; and after a week spent churning down the Ohio to the Mississippi, and down the Mississippi to the Red, stepped ashore at the same spot I had left a year earlier.
Already the Landing seemed to belong to another and darker age. The village was strangely silent; I learned that my schoolfellows had vanished into the Army, and two were already dead of camp diseases in Virginia. Mon Repos had never deserved its name less. Though I arrived at noon, I found Papa already drunk, and noted with disgust how he wobbled when he walked, like a goose hit with a rock. Royal and the Overseer both had disappeared, and when I asked Papa what had happened to them, he only mumbled and shook his head.
’Twas Rose – all atremble – who told me the story. Monsieur Felix had proposed marriage to her, and, when she declined, threatened to compromise her honour so that she would have to marry him, willing or not. This she took to be a threat of rape, and many a tear-stained letter had she written, praying me to return and save her. But because of the war, I received none of them. Then the war itself intervened. The men of the slave patrols joined the army and went east, and as soon as they were gone, Royal took down my rifle from its hiding place, shot Monsieur Felix neatly through the eye and ran away, leaving the corpse lying spread out like a hog ready for flaying on the gallery of the nice house Papa had built for him.
At first I felt only pleasure in hearing this tale, and laughed gaily at the thought of being (as I imagined) rid of the Overseer forever. But after I spent a day tramping over our acres, I began to suspect that in reality his death had ruined us all. The crops of corn and cotton stood heavy but weed-choked and in need of hoeing; the hands idled about the quarters, and when I ordered them to work they went but slowly, with deep mutterings that boded no good.
Brooding over these developments, I turned my steps homeward, passing close by the Overseer’s house on the way. I found it a scene of ruin, grown up with vines like a castle in a fairy tale, with cicadas droning in the trees and hot sunlight vibrating upon a weedy mound of earth where he lay buried. A pine board carven only with his name and the date of his death served as his headstone.
I was gazing upon this melancholy scene when something moved upon the vine-shrouded gallery of the house. I shaded my eyes against the fierce light, and espied through drifting red spots Monsieur Felix standing in the spot where he had died. His pale face seemed to float amid a dark wreath of cat’s-claw, his left eye nothing but an oozing pit, his right gleaming like a splinter of glass. His blue jaw moved and his penetrating whisper etched itself upon my eardrums, saying, Tu, mon p’tit, serais mon vengeur.
I stepped back – stumbled over the grave marker – staggered, blinked away drops of stinging sweat, and an instant later found myself entering our house, with no sense of time elapsed nor memory of anything I might have seen along the way. Rose was fetching something for Papa, and she stopped and gazed at me, astonished. She brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes and said, “Nick, are you well?”
I answered without knowing what I said.
That night I drank with Papa, paying no attention as his slurring voice complained endlessly of his troubles, but instead thinking of the words of the Phantasm. I could make no sense of them: for what could be greater nonsense than that I (of all people) should become the avenger of my hated enemy, Monsieur Felix?
I went to bed more than half drunk, and slept like the waterlogged trees that river pilots call dead-men. When I wakened at first light, the house seemed uncommonly silent. For half an hour I lay at ease, waiting for the usual noises to begin, the murmur of voices, the rattle of pots in the kitchen, the creak of the pump handle. A summer wind passed across the world with a great sigh, and a light rain began to fall. Still I heard nothing from downstairs, as if the house had died overnight. Then my door opened and Rose slipped in, looking especially thin and pale in her cotton nightdress.
“Nick,” she whispered, “where are all the servants?”
I jumped out of bed, threw on some clothes and ran outside. The brief shower having passed, I walked through the slave quarters, finding the cabins all empty, with doors hanging open on leathern hinges, and in the little fireplaces ashes that were still warm. The paddocks were empty, the farm animals all gone, driven into the woods and marshes by the departing slaves. I understood then that the slaves felt no loyalty toward Papa, who had never protected them from Monsieur Felix, whilst the Overseer’s death had freed them from the fear that alone had made Mon Repos run.
I stood gazing at the overgrown fields, where little pines had already begun to spring up, whilst afar off, a church bell started to toll in dreary monotone – the notice of a funeral, whose I don’t know: perhaps the funeral of our world.
So much Lerner had written, and was staring at an unappetizing lunch that Cleo had brought, when the door to his den opened suddenly and Morse stumbled in.
His hands were tremulous, his face yellow, his shoes muddy, his clothes mussed and odorous. In a hoarse voice he began to complain about the darkness of the house. In fact, it was no darker than usual; but as Lerner perceived, the pupils of his eyes had shrunk to pinpoints that shut out the light.
If anybody knew opium’s aftermath, that man was Lerner. Speaking firmly, he ordered Morse to go to bed and, when he sobered up, to return and explain his conduct. He slouched away, looking like some wretched Lascar who sleeps off his drug debauch under the wharves, while the old man, muttering a curse, returned grimly to telling his tale.
* * *
Well do I remember those late-summer days in ’61 when, like a child, I imagined that the worst had already happened.
I knew that we must abandon Mon Repos, hoping to return in better days, should better days ever come. And yet for weeks Papa refused even to consider flight. Finally, in a rage I threatened to take Rose away with me, and leave him to manage alone. At last he yielded and we became refugees, an early rivulet of the great tide that would flow southward in years to come.
At Red River Landing we bought our way aboard a fishing yawl, for Papa had become very close with a dollar, and refused to buy us passage on a steamboat.
Mostly our fellow-passengers were ordinary country folk, but one caught my eye – a very tall, thin man dressed in black, who sat at the prow, stiff and unmoving like the dragon’s-head of a Viking ship. ’Twas evening, and he was hard to focus on against the blaze of the setting sun. I looked away, blinked and looked back: a hefty woman was seating herself in a flurry of skirts; perhaps he was behind her, perhaps not. Intending to make sure whether he was what I feared, I rose
to my feet. But the boat was now so crowded and the freeboard so small that the captain shouted at me to sit, or I should swamp her.
Night shut down, the sails were raised, and we began a ghostly voyage down a moon-haunted river, in company perhaps with a Phantom. Does this not sound like a poem by Coleridge, or a tale by Poe? Yet I remember chiefly the discomfort of the wretched craft. I dozed and waked a dozen times; a woman nursed a baby that cried often; some fellow who had managed to fall asleep snorted like a donkey-engine. Once a steamboat blazing with lights pounded by in midstream, and the waves so rocked our burdened craft that we shipped water, and had to bail with cupped hands.
Come morning, we landed at New Orleans, all of us stiff and soaked and blear-eyed. The levee swarmed with shouting labourers; barrels and bales and cannons and gun-carriages were heaped up everywhere, guarded by new-minted soldiers in fancy uniforms. I sought the man in black, but he seemed to have vanished in the confusion. We engaged a porter with a barrow, and traipsed behind him through the Old Quarter, which was saturated with the smell of roasting coffee and noisy as a parrot cage.
In time we reached a house on Rue des Bons Enfants, or Good-children Street, belonging to some of our cousins, and they bade us welcome, having plenty of room to spare. Their warmth was not entirely a matter of family feeling. We again had money, for the city banks were still open, and Papa insisted on paying all our expenses – as foolish in generosity as he had been in miserliness. From the same sense of pride, when I was commissioned a lieutenant in the Confederate Army, he bought me a fine grey uniform that did not survive my first and only battle.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20 Page 47
