Childgrave

by Ken Greenhall

  It was totally dark now; a darkness that was the equivalent of the silence; more intense than anything I was used to. Rudd had finished eating and was taking noisy gulps from a thermos jug. The smell of coffee filled the car, and immediately I felt more confident. Coffee was something from my world. Rudd didn’t exist on night air; he drank coffee, not blood. I switched on the interior lights. “That wouldn’t be very convenient for me, chief,” I said. “I have to be back in the city tomorrow. So I think I’ll just have a word with Mrs. Coleridge before her meeting.”

  Rudd looked at me blankly for a moment and then smiled. “I’ll show you where the house is,” he said cheerfully. “Why don’t you follow me down?” He got out of the car and walked away. A couple of minutes later, headlights appeared behind some low trees, and the chief’s black car pulled out onto the road. I followed it down into the darkness.

  Sara’s mother lived in the center of the town in a frame house which, from the little I could see of it, was in need of repairs. Chief Rudd came with me to the door and rapped several times on a tarnished brass knocker. No lights were visible in the house. The chief rapped again and then spoke for the first time since we had driven into town. “Like to see brass shine, myself,” he said, running his fingers over the knocker, which seemed to represent the head of a cherub or a young child. Rudd made it sound as though Mrs. Coleridge’s failure to polish brass were some kind of felony. I said nothing, but I had a little moment of pleasure as I remembered that there had been a knocker similar to it on the door of Sara’s apartment in the city. The chief rapped once more. “She might be out visiting,” he said.

  It seemed obvious that there was no one in the house. And it also seemed obvious that the chief was not surprised. I wondered whether this was even Mrs. Coleridge’s house. “I couldn’t telephone her tomorrow, could I?”

  “No telephones in Childgrave, Mr. Brewster. Is your astrological sign Leo, by any chance?”

  I didn’t answer the question. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing he had guessed right. “I think what I’ll do,” I said, “is wait in my car for a while. If Mrs. Coleridge doesn’t get back, I’ll write her a note and leave it for her.”

  The chief hesitated, obviously trying to think of a way to keep me in his sight or get me out of town. “You could always leave a message with me,” he said. “My office is up at the head of the street in the Meeting Hall.”

  “Thanks. I may do that. You’ve been a big help, Chief Rudd. I hope I’ll see you again.”

  “I think you might, Mr. Brewster. Yes, I think so.”

  I went to my car, almost breaking into a sprint, eager to shut myself away from grace and the law. They make you tell lies. I sat shivering and wondering whether I had only imagined Delbert Rudd. Perhaps a defect in my car was producing fumes. I could be having carbon monoxide hallucinations. I wanted a slender, solicitous woman to appear and offer me shelter and the kind of pie crust you can’t buy in Manhattan. I wanted Sara to dance before me like a courting falcon.

  Instead, the black patrol car reappeared and pulled up across the street from me. A woman got out of the back door and walked toward my car. I lowered the window and heard her say, “Mr. Brewster? I am Mrs. Coleridge.”

  “Yes.” I wouldn’t have been sure about the relationship. The woman was wearing a long, hooded black coat. Shadows hid her face. But she stood unnaturally straight and pronounced my name oddly; both things that Sara did.

  “You are looking for my daughter, Sara?” she asked, her voice faint in the cold night. “She is, I regret to say, not here.”

  “Not in Childgrave?”

  “Precisely. I had a note from her. She said she was to be traveling in Europe. She would let me know later exactly where she planned to stay. She was vague.” Mrs. Coleridge looked back at Chief Rudd. I wondered whether there was fear in that glance, but when she turned back to me she was smiling slightly, as if in perfect collusion with the chief. “Forgive me if I cannot talk to you any longer,” she said. “I am late for an appointment.”

  I reached into my pocket and found one of my business cards. I held it out to her. “When you find out where Sara is, perhaps you can let me know,” I said.

  She stepped toward me, her boots squeaking in the packed snow. Her eyes were on the card, not on me. “Yes,” she said. “I regret I am unable to be of more help.” She reentered the patrol car and drove off with Rudd. I suppose when you tell lies you can expect people to respond with lies. There was no choice but to leave town.

  The main street—Golightly Street—ran only about four blocks. I drove slowly along the street past the old two-story buildings: solemn, awkwardly designed residences. I didn’t see the church that I thought every small town had on its main street and that I would have expected in a community of saints. At the end of the road was the Meeting Hall, its lighted windows supplying the only feeling of life I had sensed in any of the buildings. Then there was only the night before me. My headlights picked out a heavy iron gate directly ahead, and beyond the gate I could make out what seemed to be the tallest structure in Childgrave: a mausoleum surmounted by an enormous stone angel. In its setting, the building had a more impressive scale—and certainly more dignity—than Manhattan’s World Trade Center towers. I drove up to the gates, and my headlights revealed an inscription carved across the facade of the mausoleum: THE FOUNDER’S CHILD. I got out of the car and tried to open the gate, but it was firmly locked. There couldn’t be much doubt that this was the child’s grave that the town was named for. But that didn’t tell me much. I wanted to know what remarkable thing the child must have done to have been commemorated in such a way.

  I stood staring at the angel and listening to the occasional sounds coming from behind me in the town: a barking dog, the muffled clink of dishes. And then I became aware of a noise ahead of me: a faint, sibilant sound. It could have been someone dragging his or her feet through the snow. I looked intently ahead. Surrounding the mausoleum were neat rows of small, white-marble tombstones, barely distinguishable against the snow. Then, where the glow of my headlights blended into the night, I saw a quickly moving figure. It was a man dressed in black. He wore a short cape, knee breeches, and a high-crowned, wide-brimmed hat. It was the costume that one of the ghostly figures wore in my Spectral Portraits.

  As I got back into the car, wondering whether I had really seen the figure, light appeared behind me, and a car pulled up, braking hard and scattering snow. It was a patrol car—not baby-blue—and in it sat my new friend Delbert Rudd. We lowered windows.

  “Looking for the way out of town, were you?” the chief asked. He didn’t wait for an answer. “Only one road out: the same one that comes in. If you turn either left or right, you’ll circle back to the main street.”

  I circled back and drove out of town toward the highway.

  Before I reached the highway, I pulled the car into a narrow side lane and parked. I didn’t have any plans at that point, but I needed time to think about what had happened. It had stopped snowing, and it seemed to be warming up. A couple of inches of wet snow lay on the ground and on the branches of the pines that grew heavily in the area. With the car lights out, I thought maybe I had gone blind. Melting snow thudded onto the roof and hood of the car occasionally. I sat there, not so much thinking of what I had experienced in Childgrave as letting images flash through my mind.

  It was a measure of how much I wanted to be with Sara again that I decided not to go right back to Manhattan. I was confused and frightened, but I wasn’t going to give up. I knew there was no point in driving back to Childgrave, because Chief Rudd would undoubtedly be watching for my car to return. That meant I would have to walk back to the village. Sure. Down an unfamiliar, snow-covered hillside in the dark. Canvas shoes. No flashlight. A man with a handgun watching for me. Only an idiot would try it.

  The idiot got out of the car
and started to walk.

  Obviously, if I wanted to keep from getting lost or breaking a few important bones, I had to stay close to the road. I was aware of the pines that loomed above me. Their snow-covered branches were slightly lighter than the sky, which made navigation possible, if not pleasant or simple. I stumbled along with my arms stretched out in front of my face. When I got free of the lane and onto the road to Childgrave, things got slightly easier. The snow on the road reflected enough light from the moonless sky to give me a sense of location. My biggest problem was that I kept stepping into holes or tripping over stones and branches. After twisting both ankles, I worked up a little audacity and moved out into the road, following the tracks that my tires had made earlier.

  I started to make decent progress, and if my feet hadn’t been so cold and wet, I would have felt like a clever boy scout earning a merit badge in night-hiking. Then the road curved sharply and began to rise. I was getting close to the crest of the hill, where nosy, devout Rudd would probably be lurking, making sure I wasn’t walking too fast. I moved back to the side of the road, where I promptly tripped and fell over a rock, scraping my hand as I went down. I lay there for a moment, pitying myself and listening for signs of Rudd. Just as I started to push myself to my feet, a brilliant light flashed on in the area to my right. I dropped back into the snow. In the glare, I could see now that there were two lights—headlights. Then there was the sound of an engine being started, and Chief Rudd’s car moved slowly out of a thicket. It was making straight for me. He’s going to squash my head, I thought. I would give him another five seconds, and then I was going to run for the pine forest.

  At the count of four, the lights moved away from me. The chief was turning onto the road, in the direction of Childgrave. I realized that I had been holding my breath and that I was gripping snow in each of my clenched fists. I relaxed for a moment and then stood up and watched the lights of the police car recede down the road to Childgrave. My eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness again, and I set out walking in the tracks that the chief’s car had conveniently left for me. I moved off the road again when I got close to the first house on the edge of the village. I navigated awkwardly but accurately by the lights of the houses and I got to what I hoped was Mrs. Coleridge’s house without encountering any more automobiles or any strolling citizens. When I got to the door of the house, I was fairly certain I had the right place, because the cherubic (unpolished) knocker was where I expected it to be. On the other hand, the houses on the street looked pretty much alike, and maybe that type of door knocker was a town motif. There were lights on in the house, both downstairs and upstairs. I thought I had better take a peek through a window before I announced myself.

  I scuttled around to the side of the house and slowly raised my head to the corner of a window. The room on the other side of the glass was a shadowy, deserted dining room, lit only indirectly by the lights from an adjoining room. I crouched again and crept around to the other side of the house; icy water dripped on me from the eaves. The next window I tried was more strongly lighted, although far from bright. It was also heavily curtained, but that made me feel a little safer and less likely to be seen by anyone inside. I was looking into a starkly decorated—or underdecorated—sitting room. And, appropriately, there was someone sitting in the room: Evelyn Coleridge. Seen through the diffusing material of the curtain, she looked younger and more attractive than she had when I saw her earlier. She also resembled Sara more closely than I had thought.

  Evelyn was sitting in profile to me. I couldn’t decide what she was doing. She seemed just to be staring at the bare wall. It occurred to me that she might be listening to music, but I would have heard any reasonably loud sound in the house. The excitement I had been feeling about my spy work began to turn to embarrassment. Also, now that I had stopped moving around, I began to realize how cold my body was. There was a fire burning in the large fireplace that dominated the room, and I found myself becoming more interested in that than in anything else.

  Whatever Evelyn Coleridge was thinking about, it occupied all her attention. If I hadn’t been so miserable—I had begun to shiver—I would have felt guilty about interrupting her. Before I went to knock at the door, I took another look at the room. It was as stark as Sara’s apartment had been in New York, but something more than my desperate condition made it seem inviting. And then I realized that the room was lighted not, as I had thought, by electric fixtures in the shape of candles but by actual candles. The yellowish light softened the effect of the bare walls and angular furniture. My shivering had become uncontrollable, and my neck was jerking strongly enough that I was afraid my head would bang against the window. As I started toward the front door Mrs. Coleridge stopped whatever she was doing and stood up. I heard the faint sound of a woman’s voice coming from somewhere in the house. I hesitated.

  Mrs. Coleridge walked out of the room and went to stand at the foot of the stairs and spoke a couple of times. Her voice was louder than the other one I had heard, but it wasn’t clear enough for me to hear anything she said. If I had been even reasonably comfortable, I would have waited before revealing my presence, but I was almost hysterical with the cold. I ran quickly to the front of the house. I paused long enough to be sure there was no one on the street, and then I went to the door and tapped as lightly as I could with the door knocker.

  Sara’s mother opened the door immediately. She didn’t seem to like what she saw, and for a moment she moved involuntarily to push the door closed. I tried to speak, but all I could manage was a little chattering of my teeth. Mrs. Coleridge opened the door wider. “Mr. Brewster,” she said.

  I took it as a good sign that she remembered my name, but I still couldn’t talk.

  “You had better come in,” Mrs. Coleridge said.

  I didn’t hesitate. The hallway wasn’t much warmer than the porch I had been standing on, but I was grateful just to have the snow out from under my feet. Mrs. Coleridge leaned out of the doorway and glanced up and down the street before she closed the door. “Come with me,” she said and led me into the sitting room. I headed for the fireplace. Mrs. Coleridge watched me with what seemed to be a combination of fear and sympathy. The sympathy won out. She brought a chair to the edge of the fireplace. I sat down and put my feet practically into the flames. My feet had become the center of my universe. I was particularly interested in the fact that even though they were about to become torches, there was no sensation of warmth in them.

  “Maybe you should take your shoes off,” Mrs. Coleridge said.

  I managed to articulate a reasonable facsimile of “If you don’t mind.” I leaned to untie my laces, only to find that there wasn’t much more sensation in my fingers than there was in my toes. The laces were wet and caked with snow, and I couldn’t make much headway.

  “I had better help,” Mrs. Coleridge said. She knelt in front of me and, more clear-minded than I was, simply yanked the shoes off without bothering to untie them. She took my socks off and began to rub my feet with her hands. It could have been a scene out of the Bible. My gratitude certainly had a biblical quality. Evelyn Coleridge seemed like a saint.

  She was wearing a full-length black wool robe, and her hair, which was close to my face as I leaned forward, was almost totally white, although there were traces of the varied pale tints that I remembered from Sara’s hair. Mrs. Coleridge must have been about fifty, but her face didn’t have any lines that I could make out in the light of the fire. Her hands had the same graceful strength as Sara’s. I wondered if Evelyn also played the harp.

  A little sensation had begun to show up in my feet, and along with it came a new wave of embarrassment. “I think I’ll be all right now,” I said. “Why don’t I take over?”

  Evelyn leaned back and smiled at me. It seemed like a friendly smile. “Let me make you something hot to drink,” she said. But when she left the room, I thought I heard her footsteps going up
the stairway.

  If I had been warm and dry, I probably would have done some peeking around corners or into drawers. But my curiosity wasn’t as strong as my discomfort. I had stopped shaking, and sensation had returned to my body, but that just made me aware of a collection of aches and pains, and especially of my wet clothes. I hadn’t exactly dressed for the kind of activity I’d just been involved in.

  I heard Mrs. Coleridge on the stairway again, and in a moment she was back in the sitting room with me. She was holding a collection of somber but invitingly dry clothes.

  “These belonged to my husband,” she said. “Maybe you would like to put them on—if you have no objection to wearing someone else’s clothing.”

  “I don’t mind,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “I shall make the tea. Have you eaten?”

  “Not too recently.”

  “I can fix something. When you have changed, you might want to come into the kitchen, where it is warmer.”

  Evelyn left the room again, and I quickly got out of my sodden Manhattan garments, which I had mistakenly thought of as being practical simply because they weren’t especially fashionable. As I changed I noticed that, despite everything, old Jonathan’s sexual instinct hadn’t been completely deflated. For a moment, he knew he was naked and (presumably) alone in a house with a reasonably attractive woman. I wasn’t proud of myself at that moment, but I didn’t take responsibility for the impulse. It was merely my job to suppress it.

  It was easily suppressed, particularly when I got a look at the clothes Sara’s mother had brought me. Everything looked homemade: black trousers of a heavy, hand-finished fabric; a grayish denim shirt; a bulky, loosely knitted black sweater; gray cotton underwear; gray woolen socks; and black shoes. I wondered whether Mr. Coleridge had spent some time in prison. All the clothes were a little too small, but not small enough to cause me any discomfort.