The Fall of the Year

by Howard Frank Mosher

  At exactly 7:30, with no fanfare at all, Mr. Mentality walked onto the stage and approached the footlights. While the Princess wheeled out the portable blackboard, he surveyed the audience nearsightedly. Tonight the mind reader looked more wan and jaded than ever. His yellow eyes were bloodshot. His frock coat was tattered and threadbare. His shiny, bottle-green top hat sat on his head at a cockeyed slant. A mossy gray fuzz had sprouted on his jaw, and his hair stuck out from under his hat in all directions. The Princess, in a little girl’s pink party dress, seemed to have gained another ten pounds overnight. Mr. Mentality’s carpetbag, which she placed on the card table, had a new rent in one end, through which a flat, reptilian head flicked out and then back in again.

  There was something vaguely malignant in the air of the old hall tonight. There was no bantering from the gallery, only a muttering audible between blasts of the wind. The town seemed outraged that the old showman had the sheer gall to return the night after he’d been cheated. It was as if, having mistreated him, the Common was now determined to despise him as well. A low growl spread through the packed rows of seats. There was no doubt in my mind that the audience of semidisguised villagers could easily become a mob. Sheriff White stood near the dimly lighted exit door just left of the stage. But what could he do by himself?

  “Mr. Mentality will now unlock the intimate secrets of Kingdom Common,” the Princess announced. “I’ll circulate through the audience and take your written questions. Please ask anything you wish.”

  The glass fishbowl that had contained Louvia’s rose quartz gazing stone the night before appeared in the Princess’s hand. She descended from the stage, and as she started up the center aisle the magic bowl floated down the first row of seats and up the second. Members of the audience scribbled questions on the backs of old check stubs, sales slips, whatever they could find. It did not appear that the bowl was being passed from hand to hand; it levitated right past Louvia and me of its own accord. The Princess continued to keep pace as the bowl worked its way back through the hall. When she reached the commission-sales gang, Harlan Kittredge reached out to grab her breast. Writhing in his hand instead was a short black viper, which he flung away with a shout, whereupon the serpent turned into a green and crimson butterfly, fluttered up to Mr. Mentality, and landed on his hat, its six-inch swallowtails iridescent in the footlights.

  As the Princess followed the progress of the bowl up to the balcony, Mr. Mentality released more butterflies from his carpetbag. Suddenly Hook LaMott stood up and heaved a dead cat onto the stage. But when Mr. Mentality nudged it with his toe, it sprang up, arched its back, gave a great yowl, and leaped into his arms, where it transformed itself into something inert. He gave it a puzzled look, then smiled. “I believe this belongs to you, Mr. Barrows,” he said, and sailed the dark, furry object out over the audience. As all eyes followed, it landed on Zack Barrows’s gleaming bald dome—the old prosecutor’s hairpiece. But even as the hall filled with laughter, the Princess withdrew from the bowl, in rapid succession, Bumper Stevens’s truss, Julia Hefner’s voluminous girdle, and Sunday School Superintendent Lily Broom’s pointed falsies—all of which the prestidigitator nonchalantly restored to their rightful owners.

  From the balcony a tomato came flying, striking Mr. Mentality just above the breast pocket of his frock coat, where it instantly turned into a scarlet Floribunda rose. A lone brown egg hit the card table beside the glass bowl. Instead of splattering, it opened slowly and a yellow chick emerged, flew to the blackboard, picked up a stick of red chalk in its tiny claw, then vanished while the chalk, as if held by an invisible hand, wrote on the slate in fiery letters large enough to be read from the rear of the hall:

  Another sleight-of-hand trick? The Princess was standing near the blackboard; no doubt she was manipulating the chalk, the way she had somehow caused the glass fishbowl to float through the audience.

  The storm roared louder. Inside the drafty hall, the stage curtains swayed to and fro. The summery sky above the painted village at the rear of the stage turned a steely gray; the painted elms on the common seemed to stir in the wind.

  The Princess selected a slip of paper from the goldfish bowl and read it out. “Topic: Child geniuses and savants. Question: Who persecuted Foster Boy Dufresne?”

  Instantly a terrific booming voice that seemed to emanate from the turbulent sky on the backdrop filled the hall. “THE ENTIRE VILLAGE OF KINGDOM COMMON, SAVE ONLY A FEW.”

  The Princess plucked out another slip. “Who tried to help him?”

  “NO ONE!” thundered the voice, which, to my horror, did not resemble that of Mr. Moriarity Mentality or of any other living being.

  The footlights flickered. Outside the windows a bolt of lightning, more red than yellow, raced across the sky. At the same instant a flash of lurid red light flared above the painted village on the tableau.

  Mr. Moriarity looked at the Princess, who selected another slip from the bowl and read: “Topic: Biblical scholarship. Question: What did the adult Bible study class tell Foster Boy?”

  “ANSWER,” boomed the terrifying voice. “NEVER TO DARKEN THEIR DOORWAY AGAIN.”

  “Topic,” said the Princess. “An examination of the personal conduct of the members of the Bible group. Question: Where was Julia Hefner last Thursday evening when Mrs. Zachariah Barrows was calling overnight on her daughter in Burlington?”

  “ANSWER: FROLICKING WITH OLD ZACK IN THE BARROWS’S FEATHERBED, NAKED AS TWO JAYBIRDS.”

  A gasp of laughter went up from the audience. Zack struggled to his feet. “See here. Objection. That material is ir—”

  “Hush, you old fool,” Julia hissed, yanking him back down into his seat.

  On stage the Petrograd Princess had already selected another slip of paper. “Question: Who embezzled five hundred and twenty-three dollars from the Church Fair fund fifteen years ago?”

  “DEACON ROY QUINN,” came the reply, echoing through the hall like a voice of judgment.

  “Question: How does Mrs. Twyla Quinn amuse herself every third Saturday night of the month when the Deacon attends his Masonic Lodge meeting?”

  “ANSWER: SHE TAKES THE 6:45 LOCAL TO MEMPHREMAGOG AND DRESSES UP IN MEN’S CLOTHING WITH MRS. EVELYN SIMON.”

  “Question: Who traveled to Montreal last leap-year day to have an abortion?”

  “SUNDAY SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT LILY BROOM,” came the reply.

  “Who was the proud father?”

  “THE REVEREND MR. MILES JOHNSTONE,” rumbled the great voice of doom.

  I was sure that the audience would begin to stampede from the hall or perhaps rise up in a body and charge the mind reader and the Princess. Astonishingly, everyone remained seated. Perhaps the questions and answers were coming so fast that we were stunned into immobility. Or perhaps we were willing to run the risk of hearing our own most shameful secrets unveiled in order to learn those of our neighbors. Or perhaps we simply couldn’t bear the thought of not knowing what was said about us if we left. Whatever the reasons, we sat as though bewitched and listened greedily to Mr. Mentality’s revelations, which, as the tempest outside the windows gathered force, became stranger still—more penetrating and savage and enunciated in that merciless resounding voice that now seemed to emanate from the wild stormy sky on the undulating backdrop.

  “What does the Reverend Johnstone long for most?”

  “HIS WIFE’S DEMISE.”

  “And Choirmistress Hefner?”

  “TO COUPLE WITH AUCTIONEER STEVENS’S PRIZE BULL, SAMSON.”

  At this, the painted sky in the tableau turned into a roiling sea of flames. Simultaneously, both the Princess and Moriarity Mentality seemed to undergo a metamorphosis of their own. Before everyone’s eyes the Princess became slimmer and younger. Her stained dress transformed into a shimmering evening gown. Her hair fell over her slender bare shoulders in a golden cascade. On her feet was a pair of high-heeled silver shoes. As for the mind reader, his shabby frock coat had been replaced by a brand-new cloak
with a crimson satin lining. His suit fit like a glove, his frilled shirt front gleamed like fresh mountain snow. The nap of his tall green top hat shone in the spotlight. The slicked-back hair on the sides of his head glistened like black ice. And, like the imposing Svengali on his posters, he now sported a commanding dark goatee that enhanced his Mephistophelean presence.

  “QUESTION,” thundered the voice from the burning sky. “WHERE DID ZACK BARROWS RECEIVE HIS LAW DEGREE?”

  “NOWHERE,” boomed the same voice of brass. “IT’S AS FALSIFIED AS HIS HAIR.”

  Clutching his chest, the ancient prosecutor sank back in his seat. Outside, the wind screamed like the voices of the damned. The hall shook with its force. Fire shot across the wildly swaying backdrop. On the blackboard beside the Princess the invisible hand was writing again:

  The illusionist seemed to have grown a foot taller. He looked nothing at all like the confused little man who’d gotten off the train the day before. In an amazingly loud voice he roared, “Who clapped his elderly father in the state lunatic asylum and made over ten thousand dollars from the sale of the old man’s house into his own name?”

  “SHERIFF MASON WHITE,” replied the even louder answer from the burning sky.

  From the ceiling of the hall came a chorus of guttural laughter. Etched in flames, the words

  manifested themselves on the blackboard.

  “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die,” translated Sal the Berry Picker from the back of the hall, to the astonishment of no one more than herself.

  There was more bestial laughter, over which Sal’s shrill, cracked voice shouted, “Who drove Dr. Sam Rong out of town?”

  Several of the town fathers sprang to their feet. “We churchmen. God-fearing gentlemen all!”

  One by one, the long-buried secrets of the village were uttered by the demonic voice, sometimes issuing from Mr. Mentality, sometimes from the fiery sky: secrets heretofore disclosed only in deathbed confessions, whispered into the darkness by couples clinging to each other late at night, or inscribed in coded diaries meant for the author’s eyes alone.

  Louvia jumped to her feet. “Just what I’ve been telling them all for years.”

  But the mind reader pointed at her, and a rivulet of yellow sparks sprang from his fingertip to her breast, driving her back down into her seat like a stunning electrical shock. “BE WARNED, FORTUNETELLER,” intoned the encompassing voice. “THE SECRET THAT YOU AND YOUR DAUGHTER HAVE CHERISHED SO LONG WILL BE DIVULGED BEFORE THIS YEAR IS OUT. ITS REVELATION, WHETHER RUINOUS OR OTHERWISE, RESTS IN YOUR HANDS ALONE.”

  Some of the villagers whose transgressions had not yet been disclosed began to clamor, “Me, me. Tell mine!”

  At the height of the hysteria, the footlights came on again. The card table and blackboard disappeared. So did the Princess herself, leaving only a filmy pink haze. In the place of the towering satanic figure that had dominated the stage stood the aging Moriarity Mentality in his worn suit and scuffed shoes, with that rather aggrieved and slighted bemused expression on his sunken face. Outside the windows, the tempest seemed to have let up.

  “Hark,” he said, cocking his head.

  Over the diminished wind came the faraway moaning of the 10:06 Montreal Flyer, five miles to the south in Kingdom Landing. The mind reader shrugged and grinned his feckless small grin. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the backdrop. “Then again,” he said, letting his voice trail off into silence like the train whistle.

  Now on the tableau, instead of high summer it was late fall. The hills and mountains rising above the village were bare and gray. Instead of midafternoon on a sunny day, it was an overcast evening; the sky was as gray as the hills. The village was different, too. The elms on the common were not only leafless but dead. The green was sere and brown, as though no rain had fallen in many weeks, the baseball diamond grown up to weeds. The village houses were dingy and peeling. The rail yard was empty, no smoke rose from the tall mill stack. Not a sign of life appeared anywhere.

  The countryside beyond the village was abandoned as well. Farmhouses and barns had collapsed into the overgrown fields around them. Once-cleared pastures had been overrun with wild redtop grass, barberry, juniper, and thorn apples. The painting was a study in desuetude. What it depicted was nothing less than the eradication of a way of life.

  And of all the mind reader’s revelations and prophecies and shifting sleights of legerdemain, this somber scene of utter emptiness hit me hardest.

  The train whistle hooted again at the crossing three miles south of town. Mr. Mentality respectfully tipped his hat. Then he vanished.

  I hurried across the dark, wet green toward the railroad station. In the rainy darkness the wind whipped the invisible tops of the elms back and forth like something alive. Even so, I was relieved to find the trees still standing, the ball diamond still intact—that was how unsettling and real the ghost town on the backdrop had been to me. Here and there I encountered a few other townspeople, hastening home wordlessly in shared human frailty.

  I arrived at the station just as the brilliant light of the Flyer came into sight. Moriarity Mentality and the Princess stood alone on the platform. The mind reader looked more tawdry than ever. One handle had fallen off his carpetbag, his shoes and trouser cuffs were sopping wet and splashed with mud, his overcoat was missing two buttons. His goatee was gone, and in the searching headlamp of the braking Flyer, he looked a hundred years old. The Petrograd Princess seemed to have regained twenty years and thirty pounds.

  “Sorry to rush off without saying so long, Bob. Thought I’d best skedaddle while the skedaddling was good.”

  “Frank,” the Princess said. “It’s Frank.”

  The reader looked at her blankly, then mumbled something about making a tight connection in Montreal for a kiddie matinee the next day in North Bay.

  “Try not to get old, Bob,” he said as he ascended the steps of the Flyer’s single passenger coach ahead of the Princess. “Old age is a hard pull.”

  From the deep shadows at the corner of the station a familiar voice hissed, “A philosopher, no less.”

  I spun around. “Louvia!”

  But the fortuneteller was already slinking off through the night, and when I looked up at the coach, the Flyer was gathering momentum for its journey north through the mountains to Canada. Mr. Mentality and the Princess sat opposite each other at a window. At the last possible minute the mind reader looked back and raised his top hat an inch or two. Then he and the Princess passed out of sight forever.

  “No doubt it was all an illusion,” Father George said to me a few days later.

  “I suppose it was,” I said. “But you weren’t there for the second show. You didn’t see that painting change in front of our eyes.”

  Father George shrugged. “Sleight of hand, mirrors. He and his helper spent half the day over at the hall getting their props ready. He’s a pro, Frank. The best of the best and the last of the best. As for his revelations, I’m more certain than ever that he uses a stalking horse.”

  Reflecting on the matter later, I too was quite sure that the mind reader had employed a confederate, very probably someone who lived in the village. Incredible as it seemed, the likeliest candidate in my estimation was Mr. Mentality’s great adversary, Louvia DeBanville. Who else but my friend the fortuneteller could have supplied him with such unsettling details about the village, true or not? Nor, I suspected, was it any coincidence that along with the few people in town who had had sense enough to stay away from the reader’s second performance, Louvia herself had been spared the worst mortifications of Mr. Mentality’s revelations. Surely, after her attack on him the night before, he would have gone for her throat before anyone else’s had they not been in league; and even at that, he had warned her about her great secret, whatever that might be.

  Still, I had no idea how even Louvia could have known some of the horrors the mind reader had disclosed. And what was her motivation? Revenge? Retribution because the vi
llage had laughed up its sleeve at her for thirty years? This seemed unlikely. Louvia had long ago cultivated a moral ascendancy over her detractors in the Common because of her very lack of hypocrisy.

  Other mysteries bewildered me. What was Mr. Moriarity Mentality’s connection to Foster Boy Dufresne? Could he conceivably have been the boy’s father? I wondered but had no idea. And wasn’t the mind reader’s terrorization of the village on the night of the hurricane cruelly out of proportion to our crime against him? What lesson could be extracted from such an act of pure vengeance? “Do unto others as you would have done to you.” No one anywhere can deny the wisdom of those words. They were the entire basis of Father George’s own faith, the way he had always explained the concept of faith to his parishioners and to me. But wasn’t everything we had witnessed on that fateful night in the town hall in complete contradiction of the golden rule, not to mention all that we knew of the forgetful, deeply hypochondriacal, mildly irascible yet essentially kindly old magician?

  And what of the transformed painting on the stage backdrop? While few of the mind reader’s catastrophic prophecies came to pass, at least in exactly the way he’d forecast them, the tableau of the village never did regain its bold and vivid summer colors. Rather, it has continued to fade into a somber reminder of its original splendor, while the town itself has come to resemble that faded image of its former self. One by one, the elms on the common have succumbed to disease. The railroad and the mill have shut down. The parti-colored houses in Little Quebec have fallen into disrepair. The farms in the surrounding hills have continued to go under until today there are only a handful left. If you visit the village, look at the tableau. Yes, it’s still there. Then step back outside the hall and look at the Common. Doesn’t it seem as though life here has come to imitate art?