The Pale Blue Eye

by Louis Bayard

  “Where are they?” I asked now.

  No more than a whisper, but Dr. Marquis shrank back a step.

  “You know, I’m not entirely sure,” he whispered back.

  “Not sure?”

  “I’ve never been there. They found it many years ago while they were playing. It’s some kind of crypt or—or catacomb or something.”

  “But where is it?” I asked in a louder voice.

  He shrugged. “Inside, I think.”

  “Doctor, that icehouse is no more than fifteen feet on each side. Are you suggesting it contains a crypt?”

  A feeble smile. “I’m sorry, that’s—that’s all I know.”

  We had at least brought lanterns, and in my pocket was a box of phosphorous matches. All the same, after opening the sheepskin-covered door, we paused there on the threshold—at the first breath of that cold-fuming darkness—and might have held off longer had there not lain before us the example of Artemus and Lea, who had come here as mere children and found a way to go inside. Couldn’t we do the same?

  We almost came to grief, though, at the very start. Neither of us was ready for the four-foot drop, and as we recovered our footing and raised our lanterns once more, we were startled to see nothing more than . . . ourselves.

  We were standing before a shining tower of ice—hacked last winter from the nearby pond and laid in, block by block, for the long year ahead. And now it stood before us, a warped mirror in which our images eeled and bubbled and our lanterns dimmed into old suns.

  It was only ice, of course. The ice that would prevent Mr. Cozzens’ butter from running, and grace Sylvanus Thayer’s dessert table the next time the Board of Visitors came calling . . . and, yes, keep the occasional body a little fresher until it could be committed to the earth. Frozen water, nothing more. And yet what a fearful place this was! I couldn’t have told you what made it so. Maybe it was the odor of damp sawdust everywhere. Or the faint squeaking of the straw that had been stuffed into every cavity. Or the jabbering of mice inside the double wall, or the sweat that breathed off the ice and stuck to you like new skin.

  Or did it come down to this? There’s something wrong about entering a place set aside for winter.

  “They can’t be far,” murmured the doctor, shining his light on a long shelf of axes and hoisting tongs.

  His breathing was heavier now—an effect, maybe, of this air, which was warmer and closer than I’d expected. My own lantern had already picked out the hard metal lines of an ice plow, flashing its shark-teeth, and I felt in that moment as if we were dangling from some giant palate, bobbing on currents of breath.

  The vents in the ceiling were breathing, too: soft drafts of night-air, tickled with starlight. I took a step back, the better to admire the view . . . and felt the back of my foot give way. My other foot shifted to compensate, then gave way altogether. I was dropping now, or more properly angling away, on a long slow tangent. I grabbed for a purchase, but the nearest thing was—ice—and my hand came off like paint, and I knew then what was happening: I was literally going down the drain, and in the explosion of my lantern against the wall, I caught the look on Dr. Marquis’ face: fear and, yes, concern, I do remember that, and also impotence. For even as he thrust out his hand, he knew, probably, there was nothing he could do. I was falling. . . .

  * * *

  The funny thing is, I never lost my footing until I reached the bottom, and even then, it was only the impact of the ground that threw me onto all fours. I raised my head. On either side were stone walls; beneath me, a stone floor. I had dropped into some kind of corridor—bare and musty, a remnant, maybe, of the years when Fort Clinton was being built—some twenty feet below the icehouse interior.

  I took a step forward. One step only, and there came an answering sound: thin and crackling.

  I drew a match from my pocket and struck it against the box.

  I was standing on bones. The whole floor was strewn with them.

  Tiny, most of them, not much bigger than Pawpaw’s frog bones. The skeletons of squirrels and field mice, a possum or two, a goodly number of birds. Hard to say, really, for the bones had been strewn across the floor with no care or order. Indeed, they seemed to function only as an alarm, for you couldn’t set a foot anywhere without crunching them.

  And so I dropped once more onto all fours, and I began to crawl down that corridor, holding the match with one hand and, with the other, softly sweeping the bones from my path. More than once, a leg or a tiny skull worked its way into the crevices of my fingers. Each time, I shook it free and kept on my course, sweeping and crawling, sweeping and crawling.

  When the first match died out, I struck another—raised it toward the ceiling—and saw a colony of bats hanging there like dainty black purses, throbbing with breath. Through the walls I could hear, for the first time, a weave of sounds—impossible to define—murmurs changing to squeals, a hiss broken by a wail. Not loud, by any means; not even real, perhaps; but they had, all the same, an authority, as if they’d been building up like the rock itself, piling themselves in layers.

  I began to work faster. And as I swept my way down the corridor, I noticed that the flame of my match was growing less distinct. Something—something was competing with it.

  I blew out the match and squinted into the boiling darkness. Ten feet ahead, a patch of light cut through a chasm in the wall.

  The strangest light I’ve ever seen, Reader! Cold as cream and stranded like a net. And as I drew nearer, the net began to run into streaks, and the streaks blurred into sheets, and suddenly, I was peering into a room. A room of fire.

  Fire on the walls: tapers blazing in rows of sconces. Fire on the floor: a circle of torches, and inscribed in the circle, a triangle of candles. Fire nearly to the ceiling: a charcoal brazier, so savagely stoked that the flames were the height of a parlor, and next to the brazier, a single pine tree, braced in the stone and also streaming with fire. So much fire, so much light that it was an act of will or despair to see the things that weren’t light. The letters, for instance, that someone had etched at the base of the triangle:

  And the three figures, moving with such quiet purpose among the torches and candles. A tiny monk in a gray homespun robe, and a priest in a cassock and surplice . . . and an officer of the United States Army, wearing, as best I could tell, Joshua Marquis’ old uniform.

  I had come in the nick of time. The curtain had just gone up on the Marquis family’s private theater.

  And yet, what sort of theater was this? Where were the savage rites I’d seen pictured in Pawpaw’s book? The winged demons dragging their babies? The hags on brooms and the bonneted skeletons and the dancing gargoyles? I had expected—had wanted, I think—to see Sin writ large. And instead I’d found . . . a costume ball.

  And now one of the revelers—the monk—was turning toward me. I drew back behind the wall—but not before the torchlight had revealed, inside the monk’s cowl, the bare cold rabbit-features of Mrs. Marquis.

  Nothing like the brittle, grinning woman I had known before. She had become the dullest of acolytes, waiting for her next command. It came before another minute had passed. Came, fittingly enough, from the Army officer, who bent his head toward her and spoke, in a gentle voice that carried straight to my ear:

  “Soon.”

  Artemus, of course. Dressed in his late uncle’s uniform. It didn’t fit him nearly as well as it did Poe, but he still carried himself with all the pride that had made him captain of Table Eight.

  And if that was Artemus, then the third figure—the slow-treading priest with the bowed head and rolled shoulders, even now moving toward a rough-hewn rock altar—this could only be Lea.

  Lea Marquis, yes. Minus the white collar I had torn away from her outside Benny Havens’ tavern.

  She was speaking now—or maybe she had been speaking all along— in a voice of unusual resonance. Now, I’m no good with foreign tongues, Reader, but I’m willing to bet that what came out of her mouth wasn’t La
tin or French or German or any language ever uttered by a human. I believe it was a tongue newly minted, on the spot, by Lea Marquis and Henri le Clerc.

  Oh, I could try to write it down for you, but it would come out looking something like skrallikonafaheerenow, and you’d think it the purest nonsense. Which it was, but with this difference: somehow it had the effect of turning all language into nonsense, so that even the words you’d been speaking for nearly half a century could seem as random as dirt clods.

  Well, at any rate, this language must have made some sense to Lea’s companions, for after some minutes, her voice rose to a higher cadence, and the three of them turned as one and stared at a shrouded object that lay just outside the magic circle. And this is how much they held me in their spell: until now, I hadn’t even noticed the thing, though it was there to be seen in the back-glow of a torch. And even in the act of studying it, I could see only what Dr. Marquis had seen: a bundle of clothes. From which a single bare hand protruded.

  Artemus knelt down. Peeled away the garments, one by one . . . to reveal the prostrate form of Cadet Poe.

  His coatee had been stripped away, but the rest of his uniform was still in place, and he lay there like a candidate for a five-gun salute: so pale in the face, so rigid in the fingers that I had about given him up for lost. Until I saw a tremor pass through his frame like a current. And in that moment, I was glad of the cold.

  And, oh, it was cold! Colder by far than the icehouse, colder than the polar caps. Cold enough, yes, to keep a heart in good condition for many weeks.

  Artemus was rolling up the sleeve of Poe’s shirt now . . . opening a doctor’s bag much like his father might have used . . . extracting first a tourniquet and then a small marble cruet . . . then a narrow-gauge glass tube . . . then a lancet.

  I didn’t cry out, but Lea comforted me as if she knew I was there. “Sssshhhhh,” she said, to no one in particular.

  Ah, yes. She was telling me it would all turn out. And though I didn’t believe it, I didn’t protest, either. Not even when Artemus’ lancet found the thin blue streak in Poe’s forearm. Not even when the blood began to dribble through the tube into the waiting cruet.

  It was done in five seconds—Artemus had learned well—but the lancet’s prick had stirred something in Poe’s body. A buzzing in his legs and shoulders. He murmured, “Lea.” The hazel eyes startled open and beheld the spectacle of himself, disappearing into a bowl.

  “Strange,” he muttered.

  He made as if to rise but whatever strength he had was already ebbing away. It seemed to me I could even hear it ebbing, like rain leaking through a joist: drip . . . drip . . . drip. . . . And whenever the blood flagged, Artemus gave the tourniquet a squeeze.

  He’ll die, I thought.

  Poe raised himself on his elbow. He said:

  “Lea.”

  And said it again. Said it with more purpose, for somehow he had found her. Through the blaze of torches and candles, through the screen of her own vestments.

  And she—she was ready for him. Knelt by his side, hair spilling over her shoulders, wearing a smile like a dream. A smile that should have been a blessing but which affected him like the most terrible of afflictions. He tried to drag himself away and, failing that, tried once more to raise himself, but his strength again failed him. And the blood . . . for Artemus had indeed cut true . . . kept up its steady trickle: drip . . . drip. . . .

  Lea ran her hand through his matted hair—a gesture of wifely affection—caressed his jaw with long gentle strokes.

  “It won’t be much longer.”

  “What?” he stammered. “I don’t—what?”

  “Ssshhhhhh.” She put a finger to his lips. “Just a few minutes more, and it will all be done, and I’ll be free, Edgar.”

  “Free?” he echoed, faintly.

  “ To be your wife, what else? What better?” Laughing, then, she gave her robes a tug. “I suppose I shall have to give up the priesthood first!”

  He stared at her as if she were changing shapes with each word. Then he held up his arm and pointed to the glass tubing and, in a child’s voice, said:

  “But this, Lea. What’s this?”

  I was so very close to answering him myself. Oh, yes, I wanted my voice to blaze through that ice-cold cloister. I wanted to shout it to the very bats. . . .

  Haven’t you figured it out yet, Poe? They need a virgin.

  Narrative of Gus Landor

  38

  Truth be told, it had only just hit me. I’d been recalling those odd remarks of Artemus’ in the darkened stairwell: “It’s my suspicion that you’ve not yet, oh, given yourself, shall we say? To a woman.” I’d been going over those words for days, waiting for the glimmer—and the glimmer came—and I knew then that Artemus had put the question not out of vulgar curiosity but in behalf of another party: Henri le Clerc. Who, like any good sorcerer, would demand, for the grander kind of ceremony, only the best kind of blood.

  “Listen to me,” Lea was saying, tucking her fingers under Poe’s chin and tilting his face toward hers. “This must happen, do you understand that?”

  He nodded. Whether it was his own doing or the action of her fingers, I don’t know, but he nodded. And then watched as she cupped her hands round the cruet of his blood.

  It was nearly full by now, and she held it like a bowl of hot soup, watchfully, as she carried it to the rock altar. Then, turning, she gazed round the chamber, meeting each pair of eyes in turn. She raised the cruet over her head . . . and calmly overturned it.

  The blood fell in a plunging drift. Pooled on the top of her head and charged over the side, sliding down her face in shining bands. It gave her an almost comical look, Reader, as if she had draped a fringed lampshade over her head, and yet the fringe clung to her like sin, and as she gazed through her veil of blood, the words that came out of her were, shockingly, English. And perfectly distinct.

  “Great Father. Release me from thy gift. Release me, O Most Merciful Father.”

  She reached behind the rock altar . . . fumbled in a small niche in the stone wall, and removed a small wooden box. A cigar box, I think it was, probably one of her father’s. She opened it and stared at the contents with a pure fixity, and then, good teacher that she was, held it out for her comrades to see.

  How slight it seemed, after all, in its little container! Not much larger than a fist, as Dr. Marquis had said. Scarcely worth all the trouble.

  But it had been the start of everything, that heart. And it would be the end, too.

  From Lea’s mouth now came pouring a bright stream of . . . of oaths, I’d call them. She was speaking again in her alien tongue, but the smack of consonants against her lips, the cruel savor of each sound, she gave her utterances the feeling of deepest obscenity. Then her voice died away, and the cloister fell silent as she raised the heart toward the ceiling.

  I knew then we were on the brink of something. I knew there was no longer anything to gain by waiting. If I was going to save Poe, I’d have to act, and act now.

  Oddly, it wasn’t the danger that made me pause, it was a queer feeling of pride. I didn’t want to be just another player in the Marquis theatricals. A player who didn’t even know his lines, and had only the vaguest idea of the plot. . . .

  This much I had come to see, though: there was a weak link in this family chain. And if I exploited it quickly enough and kept my head about me, then maybe I could brazen this thing out, and get Poe to safety . . . and live another day.

  Oh, but I never felt so old as in that moment, lingering in the corridor. If I could have found someone else to do it for me, I’d have pushed him through that doorway without a thought or care. But there was no one else, and Lea Marquis was angling her face upward as if she were stacking linen on a high shelf, and that single motion—and all it portended—was enough finally to drive me on.

  I took three long strides into the chamber. Stood there with the heat from the torches raking my face. Waited for them to see me.


  Not a long wait, as it turned out. Within five seconds, Mrs. Marquis’ cowled head had swung round. Her two children followed her lead in short order. Even Poe—drugged as he was, the life force draining from him in a slow red stream—even he managed to fasten his eyes to mine.

  “Landor,” he whispered.

  The heat of those torches was nothing compared to the heat of those eyes, all boring in on me, and behind the eyes, a single shared demand. I would have to account for myself. Nothing could continue until I did.