by Louis Bayard
“You don’t know me, then, Mr. Landor.”
And he was right: I didn’t. I didn’t know what he was capable of until it was already done.
We stood at last in front of the colonnade. Poe’s breathing was coming steady now, and his face had regained something of its usual pallor. Never had that pallor looked so healthy.
“Well,” I said. “I’m glad I happened along when I did.”
“Oh, I think I should have had an answer for Ballinger in the end. But I’m grateful you were standing by in reserve.”
“Do you think Ballinger knew where you were going?”
“I don’t see how he could have. The hotel wasn’t even in view.”
“So you don’t believe our little arrangement has been disclosed.”
“Nor shall it be, Mr. Landor. Not to anyone, not even . . .” He paused to let the tide of feeling crest inside him. “Not even to her.” Rousing himself then, he declared in a bright voice, “You have failed to ask me why I was coming to visit you in the first place.”
“I assume you have some fresh news to deliver.”
“Indeed I do.”
All hands now, he began to ransack his pockets. It took him a minute to find the thing: a single sheet, which he unfolded as reverently as he might’ve unpacked a chalice.
I should have guessed. The glint in his eye alone should have told me, but no, I took the paper in all innocence and so was completely unprepared to read:
In the shades of that dream-shadowed weir, I trembled ’neath Night’s loathsome stole. “Leonore, tell me how cam’st thou here To this bleak unaccountable shoal To this dank undesirable shoal.” “Dare I speak?” cried she, cracking with fear.
“Dare I whisper Hell’s terrible toll? “Each new dawn brings the memory drear Of the devils who ravished my soul Of the demons who ravaged my soul.”
The words revolved in the lantern light, and I found I could call up no words to answer them. Over and over, I dredged my brain for something, and each time I came up empty, and in the end, all I could find to say was:
“It’s nice,” I said. “Really, Mr. Poe. Very nice.”
I heard his laugh then in my ear—full and sweet and ringing.
“Thank you, Mr. Landor. I shall tell Mother you said so.”
Narrative of Gus Landor
21
November 22nd to 25th
Later that night, I heard a knock on my hotel-room door. Not the shy tap that was Poe’s trademark, but a more urgent summons that had me leaping from my bed, fully expecting to find—who could say?—Judgment itself.
It was Patsy. Wrapped in double bands of wool, her breath steaming in the cold hallway.
“Let me in,” she said.
I waited for her to dissolve. Instead, she stepped into the room—all three dimensions, solid as my hand.
“I was just dropping off some liquor for the boys,” she said.
“Anything left for me?”
That was as casual as I could be in the face of such temptation. Indeed, I think it fair to say I sprang on her . . . and she, angel that she is, suffered me to. Lay there with the most amused look on her face as I undressed her. Of all the stages, this is the one I like best: the peeling away of layers— stockings, shoes, petticoats—each one more suspenseful than the last. For will she be there at the end of it all? The eternal question. Your hands tremble as you undo the final row of buttons. . . .
And there she lies, shiny and white and prosperous.
“Mmm,” she says, dictating to the last. “Yes, indeed. Right there.”
It was a longer business than usual—Mr. Cozzens’ bed had never made so many squeaks from so many corners—and when we were done, we lay there for a while, her head on my arm. And then, in her usual way, she fell asleep, and after listening for some time to the cataract of her breathing, I gently lifted her head from my chest and slipped out of bed.
Leroy Fry’s diary was waiting for me by the window. Lighting the taper, I spread the pages on my lap and placed the notebook on the table and once more set to work, unwinding the long skeins of letters. I’d been working for more than an hour and a half when I felt her hands on my shoulders.
“What’s in the book, Gus?”
“Oh.” I set down my pen, gave my face a good rub. “Words.”
She pressed her knuckles into the knotted ridges above my collarbones. “Good words?”
“Not really. Although I’m learning quite a lot about, oh, firing theory and Congreve rockets and Lord, wouldn’t it be grand to be back home in Kentucky where the cold don’t—don’t scratch at your bones so. Amazing how boring a diary can be.”
“Not mine,” said Patsy.
“You—” My eyes flared open. “You keep one?”
After a long pause, she shook her head. “But if I did,” she said.
Well, why shouldn’t she? I thought. Wasn’t I already walled round with texts? Poe with his poems and prose, and Professor Pawpaw with his notebook, and Sergeant Locke with his notebook . . . even Captain Hitchcock was rumored to keep a journal. I thought of the scrap in Leroy Fry’s balled-up fist and the engraving of that devils’ sabbath and the newspapers on Thayer’s breakfast table and the newspapers next to Blind Jasper’s elbow—all these texts, do you see? Not gathering into meaning, as you might expect, but erasing one another, until one word was no truer than the next, and down we would all go, down this rabbit hole of words, clanging and shrilling like Pawpaw’s birds. . . .
So yes, I thought. By all means, Patsy. Keep a diary.
“Care to come back to bed?” she whispered in my ear.
“Mmm.”
I gave it some thought, I will say that for myself. Gave it serious consideration. And fool that I was, chose to stay where I was.
“I’ll be there soon,” I promised.
Except that I fell asleep in my chair. And when I woke up, it was morning, and she was gone, and in my notebook, the following words had been scrawled: Bundle Up, Gus. It’s Cold Outside.
It was cold—all through Tuesday and Tuesday evening.
On Wednesday morning, Cadet First Classman Randolph Ballinger failed to return from his guard posting.
A search was immediately mounted, but the men left off after twenty minutes because an ice storm had begun to sweep through the Highlands. The chill and damp were extreme, the views had shrunk to nothing, and after a time, the horses and mules could make no headway, so it was agreed that the search would be remounted as soon as the weather permitted.
But the weather didn’t permit. The ice kept falling through the morning and the afternoon. It tickled the roofs and pattered on the leaded casement windows and made a crazing chatter on the eaves and walls. Down, down it came, never stopping, never changing. I spent the whole morning listening to it scratch like a hungry cur in the gutters, until I realized that if I didn’t throw on my coat and stagger outside, I would go mad.
Early afternoon, and the whole land lay prisoner. Ice had formed in thick brittle crusts over Captain Wood’s obelisk and the brass eighteen-pounders in the artillery park and the water pump behind South Barracks and the downspouts on the stone buildings of Professors’ Row. Ice had lacquered together the gravel on the walkways and ambered over the rock lichens on their rocks and clamped the wide expanses of snow into beds hard as quartz. Ice had dragged down the boughs of the cedar trees into wigwams that shuddered at each kiss of wind. Pure democracy, this ice, falling on blue and gray alike, silencing everything it touched. Except for me. My boots, as they picked their way through, made a sound like clanging armor, and the sound seemed to sing from one end of the Point to the other.
Back I staggered to my room and, for the rest of the afternoon, dozed in and out in the endless twilight. Sometime around five, I woke with a start and ran to the window. The ice had stopped, and there was a peal of quiet now, and through the bolls of mist, I could just make out a single dugout toiling downriver with a bare-armed oarsman. I hurried on my trousers and a shirt and coa
t and closed the door quietly after me.
The cadets had come out of their holes and were already lining up for parade. The crackling ice magnified each step a thousand times over, and in that din, I passed with no interference to Gee’s Point. I’m not sure what took me there. I suppose it was the same idea that had come over me my first day there, the notion that I—or, if not me, someone—could just keep going. Take that river to somewhere he’d never been.
Behind me came footsteps, crunching down the path. A soft, deferential voice.
“Mr. Landor?”
It was Lieutenant Meadows. Who was, by coincidence, the officer who’d been escorting me the last time I stood here. He was positioned ten feet behind me now, just as he’d been then, and he was braced, as though he were getting ready to leap a moat.
“Good evening,” I said. “I hope you’re well.”
His voice was stiff as a quill. “Captain Hitchcock has asked me to come for you. It pertains to the missing cadet.”
“Ballinger’s been found?”
Meadows said nothing at first. He’d been instructed, clearly, to say no more than was needed, but I took his silence to mean something else. Half under my breath, I spoke the word he couldn’t.
“Dead,” I said.
His only assent was silence.
“Hanged?” I asked.
And this time, Meadows did consent to nod.
“The heart,” I said. “The heart was—”
He cut me off then, as brusquely as if he were carving a joint. “The heart is gone, yes.”
It might well have been the cold that made him shiver and set his feet dancing. Or else he’d seen the body.
The moon, just rising over Breakneck Hill, was sending down a soft gauzy light that caught the planes of his face and gilded his eyes.
“There’s something else,” I said. “Something you haven’t yet told me.”
Under normal circumstances, he’d have fallen back on the usual refrain: Not at liberty to say, sir. But something in him wanted to say it. He stopped and started and stopped again and then, after great effort, confessed:
“An additional infamy was perpetrated against Mr. Ballinger’s person.”
Absurd wording—formal, empty—and yet it seemed to be his only hedge against the thing itself. Until it couldn’t be hedged anymore.
“Mr. Ballinger,” he said at last, “was castrated.”
A silence fell over us then, broken only by the distant sound of ice crunching beneath cadet boots.
“Maybe you’d better show me,” I said.
“Captain Hitchcock would prefer if you met him there tomorrow. The day being so far along, he considers there’s not enough light to—to—”
“To examine the scene, I see. Where is Mr. Ballinger’s body being held for the time being?”
“In the hospital.”
“Under full guard?”
“Yes.”
“And what time does the captain wish to meet me tomorrow?”
“Nine a.m.”
“Well, then,” I said. “The only thing I now require is a place. Where are we to meet?”
He paused, to do the name proper justice, I think.
“At Stony Lonesome.”
There is, it’s true, a good bit of stone and lonesomeness to all of West Point. But at least when you’re looking out from Mr. Cozzens’ hotel or standing on Redoubt Hill, you’re in view of the river, with all the freedom it promises. Venture out to Stony Lonesome, and you leave behind all signs of settlement, and your only companions are trees and ravines and maybe the low hiss of a stream . . . and the hills, of course, crowding out the light. It’s the hills that make you feel like an inmate. Many cadets, I’m told, after two hours of sentinel duty here, come to believe they will never leave Stony Lonesome.
If Randolph Ballinger was one of those, he was right.
The search for him had picked up again the moment the storm stopped. No one was counting on the ice to start melting almost as quickly as it had come. The spell blew off like chaff, and it was just a few minutes after four o’clock when two privates, filing back to the commandant’s quarters to make their report, were stopped by a noise like a thousand hinges. A nearby birch tree was shaking off its cloak of rime and springing open to reveal—huddled inside, like the pistil of a lily—the naked body of Randolph Ballinger.
A skin of ice had sealed him round and knitted his arms to his sides, but it failed to keep him from gyring, ever so slightly, in the onrushing wind.
By the time Lieutenant Meadows led me there, Ballinger had been taken down, and the branches that had formerly cocooned him had sprung back to their full height, and the only thing left to see was the rope, which hung now to its full length, stopping somewhere about my chest. Stiff and bristly and a fraction askew, as though some magnet were pulling it off track.
All round us, melting ice was falling—in pebbles and in large ragged sheets—and the sun was laying a dazzle on the earth, and the only things you could look at after a while, the only things that weren’t swatting the light right back to you, were the rhododendrons, still in full leaf.
I asked, “Why a birch tree?”
Hitchcock stared at me.
“I’m sorry, Captain, I was only wondering why, if you’re going to hang someone, you’d use such a bendy sort of tree. The branches aren’t nearly as thick as an oak’s, say, or a chestnut’s.”
“Closer to the ground, perhaps.”
“Yes, I suppose that would make things easier.”
“Easier,” agreed Hitchcock.
He had passed into some new realm of tiredness. The sort that swells your eyelids, pulls down your ears. The sort that roots you in the ground because all you can do is either stand perfectly straight or drop.
I like to think I was kind to him that morning. I gave him any number of chances to retire to his quarters, where he’d have plenty of space to gather his thoughts. And when he needed me to repeat a question, I did, no matter how many times it took. I remember, when I asked him what had distinguished the condition of Randolph Ballinger’s body from that of Leroy Fry’s, he looked straight at me, as though I’d confused him with someone else.
“You were there,” I prompted, “when both bodies were found. I was curious, you know, what made the—the look of this body different.”
“Oh,” he said at last. “Oh, no. This one . . .” He stared up into the branches. “Well,” he began, “the first thing I noticed was how much higher he was. Relative to Fry.”
“So his feet weren’t touching the ground?”
“No.” He took off his hat, put it back on. “There was no subterfuge this time. Ballinger had all his wounds on him when he was found. Which is to say he was killed, he was cut open—and then he was strung up.”
“No chance, I guess, that the wounds could have been inflicted—”
“Afterward? No.” He was warming up now. “No, not from that height, it would be nearly impossible. Impossible just to keep the body still.” He thumbed at his eyes. “A man can’t take such injuries and then go hang himself from a tree, that’s obvious. Therefore, the whole pretense of suicide is voided.”
He stared at the tree for a good long time, his mouth hanging just slightly open. Then, remembering himself, he added:
“We’re a good three hundred yards from Ballinger’s sentinel post. We don’t know if he came here willingly, or if he was even alive when he came. He may have walked, or he may have been dragged. The storm, as you see . . .” He shook his head. “It’s made a hash of everything. Mud and snow everywhere, dozens of soldiers traipsing through. Footprints all over the place, yes, and no way to tell one from the rest.”
He put an arm against the trunk of the birch and let his body tilt a foot or so.
“Captain,” I said, “I’m very sorry. I understand what a blow this must be.”
I don’t know why, but I gave him just the slightest pat on the shoulder. You know the gesture, Reader; it’s the sort of thing men
do to comfort one another—the only thing they do sometimes. Hitchcock didn’t take it that way. He jerked his shoulder away and wheeled on me with a fury-blanched face.
“No, Mr. Landor! I don’t think you do know. Under my watch, two cadets have been murdered and savagely desecrated, for reasons that beggar understanding. And we are no closer to finding the monster who did it than we were a month ago.”
“Well, now, Captain,” I said, still soothing. “I think we are closer. We’ve narrowed our field, we’re moving apace. Yes, I think it will only be a matter of time.”
