The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories

by James D. Jenkins

  Time had passed, if not swiftly, steadily. Morning itself was advancing. Mr Evening, during the entire visit, having opened his mouth chiefly to partake of food whose taste alone invited him, since he had already dined, took up his napkin, wiped his handsome red lips on it, though it was, he saw, an indignity to soil such a piece of linen, and rose. Both Mrs Owens and her sister had long since dozed or pretended to doze by the carefully tended log fire. He said good night therefore to stone ears, and went out the door.

  It was the fifth Thursday of his visits to Mrs Owens that the change which he had feared and suspected from the start, and which he was somehow incapable of averting, came about.

  Mrs Owens and her sister had ignored him more and more on the occasion of his ‘calls’, and an onlooker, not in on the agreement, might have thought his presence was either distasteful to the ladies, or that he was too insignificant – an impecunious relative, perhaps – to merit the bestowal of a glance or word.

  The spell of the pretense of indifference, of not recognizing one another, ended haphazardly one hour when Pearl, without any preface of warning, said in a loud voice that strong light was being allowed to reach and ruin the ingrain carpet on the third floor.

  Before Mrs Owens could take in the information or issue a command as to what might be done, if she intended indeed to do anything about protecting the carpet from light, she heard a certain flurry from the direction of the visitor, and turning saw what the mention of this special carpet had done to the face of Mr Evening. He bore an expression of greed, passionate covet­ousness, one might even say a deranged, demented wish for immediate ownership. Indeed his countenance was so arresting in its eloquence that Mrs Owens found herself, going against her own protocol, saying, ‘Are you quite all right, sir?’ But before she had the words out of her mouth he had come over to her chair without waiting her permission.

  ‘Did you say ingrain carpet?’ he asked with great abruptness.

  When Mrs Owens, too astonished at his tone and movement, did not reply, she heard Mr Evening’s peremptory: ‘Show it to me at once!’

  ‘If you have not taken leave of your senses, Mr Evening,’ Mrs Owens began, bringing forth from the folds of her red cashmere dress an enormous gold chain, which she pressed, ‘would you be so kind, I might even say, so decent, as to remember our agreement, if you cannot remember who I am, and in whose house you are visiting.’

  Then, quickly, in a voice of annihilating anger, loud enough to be heard on a passing steamship: ‘You’ve not waited long enough, spoilsport!’

  Standing before her, jaws apart, an expression close to that of an idiot who has been slapped into brief attention, he could only stutter something inaudible.

  Alarmed by her own outburst, Mrs Owens hastened to add, ‘It’s not ready to be shown, my dear, special friend.’

  Mrs Owens took his hands now in hers, and kissed them gently.

  Kneeling before her, not letting go her chill handclasp, looking up into her furrowed rouged cheeks, ‘Allow me one glimpse,’ he beseeched.

  She extricated her hands from his and touched his forehead.

  ‘Quite out of the question.’ She seemed almost to flirt now, and her voice had gone up an octave. ‘But the day will come’ – she motioned for him to seat himself again – ‘before one perhaps is expecting it. You have only hope ahead of you, dear Mr Evening.’

  Obeying her, he seated himself again, and his look of crestfallen abject submissiveness, coupled with fear, comforted and strengthened Mrs Owens so that she was able to smile tentatively.

  ‘No one who does not live here, you see, can see the carpet.’ She was almost apologetic for her tirade, certainly she was consoling.

  He bent his head.

  Then they heard the wind from the northeast, and felt the huge shutter on the front of the house struggle as if for life. The snow followed soon after, hard as hail.

  Tenting him to the quick, Mrs Owens studied Mr Evening’s incipient immobility, and after waiting to see whether it would pass, and as she suspected, noted that it did not, she rang for the night servant, gave the latter cursory instructions, and then sat studying her guest until the ser­vant returned with a tiny decanter and a sliver of handsome glass, setting these by Mr Evening, who lightly caressed both vessels.

  ‘Alas, Mr Evening, they’re only new,’ Mrs Owens said.

  He did not remember more until someone put a lap robe over his knees, and he knew the night had advanced into the glimmerings of dawn, and that he therefore must have slept upright in the chair all those hours, fortified by nips from the brandy, which, unlike the glass that contained it, was ancient.

  When morning had well advanced, he found he could not rise. A new attendant, with coal-black sideburns and ashen cheeks, assisted him to the bathroom, helped him bathe and then held him securely under the armpits while he urinated a stream largely blood. He stared into the bowl but regarded the crimson pool there without particular interest or alarm.

  Then he was back in the chair again, the snow still pelted the shutters, and the east wind raved like lunatics helpless without sedation.

  Although he was certain Mrs Owens passed from time to time in the adjoining room – who could fail to recognize her tread, as dominating and certain as her resonant voice – she did not enter that day either to look at him or inquire. Occasionally he heard, to his acute distress, dishes being moved and, so it seemed, placed in straw.

  Once or twice he thought he heard her clap her hands, an anachronism so imperial he found himself giggling convulsively. He also heard a parrot screech, and then almost immediately caught the sound of its cage being taken up and the cries of the bird retreating further and further into total silence.

  Some time later he was served food so highly seasoned, so copiously sprinkled with herbs and spices that added to his disinclination to partake of food, he could not identify a morsel of what he tasted.

  Then Giles reappeared, with a sterling-silver basin, a gleaming tray of verbena soap, and improbably enough, looking up at him, his own straight razor, for if it was one thing in the world of manhood he had mastered, it was to shave beautifully with a razor, an accomplishment he had learned from his captain in military school.

  ‘How did they get my own things fetched here, Giles?’ he inquired, with no real interest in having his question answered.

  ‘We’ve had to bring everything, under the circumstances,’ Giles replied in a hollow vestryman’s voice.

  Mr Evening lay back then, while he felt the servant’s hands tuck a blanket about his slippers and thighs.

  ‘Mrs Owens thinks it’s because your blood is thinner than we Northerners that the snow affects you in this way.’ Giles offered a tentative explanation of the young man’s plight.

  Suddenly from directly overhead, Mr Evening heard carpenters, loud as if in the room with him, sawing and hammering. He stirred uncomfortably in his stocking feet.

  In the hall directly in line with his chair, though separated by a kind of heavy partition, Mrs Owens and two gentlemen of vaguely familiar voices were doing a loud inventory of ‘effects’.

  Preparations for an auction must be in progress, Mr Evening decided. He now heard with incipient unease and at the same time a kind of feeble ecstasy the names of every rare heirloom in the trade, but these great objects’ names were loudly hawked, checked, callously enumerated, and the whole proceedings were carried off with a kind of rage and contempt in the voice of the auctioneer so that one had the impression the most priceless and rarest treasures worthy finally of finding a home only in the Louvre were being noted here prior to their being carted out in boxes and tossed into the bonfire. At one point in the inventory he let out a great cry of ‘Stop it!’

  The partition in the wall opened, and Mrs Owens stood staring at him from about ten feet away; then after a look of what was meant perhaps to be total unrecognition or bilious displeasure, she closed the sliding panel fast, and the inventory was again in progress, louder, if anything, th
an before, the tone of the hawker’s voice more rasping and vicious.

  Following a long nap, he remembered two strangers, dressed in overalls, enter with a gleaming gold tape; they stooped down, grunting and querulous, and made meticulous if furtive movements of measuring him from head to toe, his sitting posture requiring them, evidently, to check their results more than once.

  Was it now Friday night, or had the weekend already passed, and were we arrived at Monday?

  The snow had continued unabated, so far as his memory served, though the wind was weaker, or more fitful, and the shutters nearly silent. He supposed all kinds of people had called on him at his lodgings. Then Giles appeared again, after Mr Evening had passed more indistinct hours in his chair, and the servant helped him into the toilet, where he passed thick clots of blood, and on his return to his chair, Mr Evening found himself face to face with his own large steamer trunk and a pair of valises.

  While he kept his eyes averted from the phenomenal appearance of his luggage, Giles combed and cut his long chestnut hair, trimmed the shagginess of his eyebrows, and massaged the back of his neck. Mr Evening did not ask him if there was any reason or occasion for tonsorial attention, but at last he did inquire, more for breaking the lugubrious silence than for getting any pertinent answer, ‘What was the carpentering upstairs for, Giles?’

  The servant hesitated, stammered, and in his confusion came near nipping Mr Evening’s ear with the barber’s shears, but at last answered the question in a loud whisper: ‘They’re remodeling the bed.’

  The room in which he had sat these past days, however many, four, six, a fortnight, perhaps, the room which had been Mrs Owens’s and her sister’s on those first Thursday nights of his visits, was now only his alone, and the two women had passed on to other quarters in a house whose chambers were, like its heirlooms, difficult, perhaps impossible, to number.

  Limited to a kind of speechless listlessness – he assumed he must be very ill, though he did not wonder why no doctor came – and passing several hours without attendance, suddenly, in pique at being neglected, he employed Mrs Owens’s own queer custom and clapped his hands peremptorily. A dark-skinned youth with severe bruises about his temples appeared and, without inquiry or greeting, adjusted Mr Evening’s feet on a stool, poured him a drink of something red with a bitter taste, and, while he waited for the sick man to drink, made a gesture of inquiry as to whether Mr Evening wished to relieve himself.

  More indistinct hours swam slowly into blurred unremembrance. At last the hammering, pounding, moving of furniture, together with the suffocating fumes of turpentine and paint, all ceased to molest him.

  Mrs Owens, improbably, appeared again, accompanied by Pearl.

  ‘I am glad to see you better, Mr Evening, needless to say,’ Mrs Owens began icily, and one could see at once that she appeared some years younger, perhaps strong sunlight – now pouring in – flattered her, or could it be, he wondered, she had had recourse to plastic surgery during his illness, at any rate, she was much younger, while her voice was harsher, harder, more actresslike than ever before.

  ‘Because of your splendid recovery, we are therefore ready to move you into your room,’ Mrs Owens went on, ‘where, I’m glad to report, you’ll find more than one ingrain carpet spread out for you to rest your eyes on . . . The bed,’ she added after a careful pause, ‘I do hope will meet with your approval’ (here he attempted to say something contradictory, but she indicated she would not allow it), ‘for its refashioning has cost all of us here some pains to make over.’ Here he felt she would have used the word heirloom, but prevented herself from doing so. She said only, in conclusion, ‘You’re over, do you realize, six foot six in your stocking feet!’

  She studied him closely. ‘We couldn’t let you lie with your legs hanging out of the bedclothes!’

  ‘Now, sir’ – Mrs Owens folded her arms – ‘can you move, do you suppose, to the next floor, provided someone, of course, assists you?’

  The next thing he remembered was being helped up the interminable winding staircase by a brace of servants, while Mrs Owens and Pearl brought up the rear, Mrs Owens talking away: ‘Those of us who are Northerners, Mr Evening, have of course the blood from birth to take these terribly snowy days, Boreas and his blasts, the sight of Orion climbing the winter night, but our friends of Southern birth must be more careful. That is why we take such good care of you. You should have come, in any case, from the beginning and not kept picking away at a mere Thursday call,’ she ended on a scolding note.

  The servants deposited Mr Evening on a large horsehair sofa which in turn faced the longest bed he had ever set eyes on, counting any, he was certain, he had ever stared at in museums. And now it must be confessed that Mr Evening, for all the length of him, had never from early youth slept in the kind of bed that his height and build required, for after coming into his fortune, he had continued to live in lodging houses which did not provide anything adequate for his physical measurements. Here at Mrs Owens’s, where his living was all unchosen by him, he now saw the bed perfectly suited for his frame.

  A tiny screen was thrown up around the horsehair sofa, and while Mrs Owens and Pearl waited as if for a performance to begin, Cole, a Norwegian, as it turned out, quietly got Mr Evening’s old business clothes off, and clad him in gleaming green and shell silk pajamas, and in a lightning single stride across the room carried the invalid to the bed, propped him up in a layer of cushions and pillows so that he looked as a matter of fact more seated now than when he had spent those days and nights in the big chair downstairs.

  Although food had been brought for all of them, seated in different sections of the immense room, that is for Pearl, Mrs Owens, and Mr Evening, only Pearl partook of any. Mr Evening, sunk in cushions, looked nowhere in particular, certainly not at his food. Mrs Owens, ignoring her own repast (some sort of roast game), produced from the folds of her organdy gown a jewel-studded lorgnette, and began reading aloud in droning monotone a list of rare antiques, finally naming with emphasis a certain ormolu clock, which caused Mr Evening to cry out, ‘If you please, read no more while I am dining!’, although he had not touched a morsel.

  Mrs Owens put down the paper, waved it against her like a fan, and having put away her lorgnette came over to the counterpane of the bed.

  She bent over him like a physician and he closed his eyes. The scent which came from her bosom was altogether like that of a garden by the sea.

  ‘Our whole life together, certainly,’ she began, like one talking in her sleep, ‘was to have been an enumeration of effects. I construed it so at any rate . . . I had thought,’ she went on, ‘that you would be attentive . . . I procured these special glasses’ – she touched the lorgnette briefly – ‘and if I may be allowed an explanation, I thought I would read to you since I no longer read to myself, and may I confess it, while I lifted my eyes occasionally from the paper, I hoped to rest them by letting them light on your fine features . . . If you are to deprive me of that pleasure, dear Mr Evening, say so, and new arrangements and new preparations can be made.’

  She pressed her hand now on the bed, as if to test its quality.

  ‘I do not think even so poor an observer and so indifferent a guest as yourself can be unaware of the stupendous animation, movement, preparation, the entire metamorphosis indeed which your coming here has entailed. Mark me, I am willing to do more for you, but if I am to be deprived of the simple and may I say sole pleasure left to me, reading a list of precious heirlooms and at the same time resting my eyes from time to time on you, then say so, then excuse me, pray, and allow me to depart from my own house.’

  Never one endowed with power over language, Mr Evening, at this, the most dramatic moment in his life, could only seize Mrs Owens’s pliant bejeweled hand in his rough, chapped one, hold her finger to his face, and cry, ‘No!’

  ‘No what?’ she said, withdrawing her hand, a tiny indication of pleasure, however, moving her lips.

  Raising himself up from th
e hillock of cushions, he got out, ‘What about the things I was doing out there,’ and he pointed haphazardly in the direction of where he thought his shop might possibly lie.

  Mrs Owens shook her head. ‘Whatever you did out there, Mr Evening’ – she looked down at him – ‘or, rather, amend that, sir, to this; you are now doing whatever and more than you could have ever done elsewhere . . . This is your home!’ she cried, and as if beside herself, ‘Your work is here, and only here!’

  ‘Am I as ill as everything points to?’ He turned to Pearl, who continued to dine.

  Pearl looked to her sister for instructions.

  ‘I don’t know how you could be so self-centered as to talk about a minor upset of the urinary tract as illness’ – Mrs Owens raised her voice – ‘especially when we have prepared a list like this’ – she tapped with her lorgnette on the inventory of antiques – ‘which you can’t be ass enough not to know will one day be yours!’

  Mrs Owens stood up and fixed him with her gaze.

  Mr Evening’s eyes fell then like dropping balls to the floor, where the unobtainable ingrain carpets, unobserved by him till then, rested beneath them like live breathing things. He wept shamelessly and Mrs Owens restrained what might have been a grin.

  He dried his eyes slowly on the napkin which she had proffered him.

  ‘If you would have at least the decency to pretend to drink your coffee, you would see your cup,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ she sighed, as she studied Mr Evening’s disoriented features as he now caught sight of the 1910 hand-painted cup within his very fingertip, unobserved by him earlier, as had been the ingrain carpets. ‘Yes,’ Mrs Owens continued, ‘while I have gained back my eyesight, as it were’ – she raised her lorgnette briefly – ‘others are to all practical purposes sand-blind . . . Pearl’ – she turned to her sister – ‘you may be excused from the room.’