And then I think that she must surely be singing, though her song has no words. There is no need for mere lyrics, not when texture and timbre, harmony and melody, are sufficient to unmake the mundane artifacts that comprise my bedroom, wiping aside the here and now that belie what I am meant to see, in this fleeting moment. And even as the wall and the bookshelf and the table beside my bed dissolve and fall away, I understand that her music is drawing me deeper into sleep again, though I must have been very nearly awake when she told me to open my eyes. I have no time to worry over apparent contradictions, and I can’t move my head to look away from what she means for me to see.
There’s nothing to be afraid of, I think, and No more here than in any bad dream. But I find the thought carries no conviction whatsoever. It’s even less substantial than the dissolving wallpaper and bookcase.
And now I’m looking at the weed-choked shore of a misty pond or swamp, a bog or tidal marsh. The light is so dim it might be dusk, or it might be dawn, or merely an overcast day. There are huge trees bending low near the water, which seems almost perfectly smooth and the green of polished malachite. I hear frogs, hidden among the moss and reeds, the ferns and skunk cabbages, and now the calls of birds form a counterpoint to Abby’s voice. Except, seeing her standing ankle deep in that stagnant green pool, I also see that she isn’t singing. The music is coming from the violin braced against her shoulder, from the bow and strings and the movement of her left hand along the fingerboard of the instrument. She has her back to me, but I don’t need to see her face to know it’s her. Her black hair hangs down almost to her hips. And only now do I realize that she’s naked.
Abruptly, she stops playing, and her arms fall to her sides, the violin in her left hand, the bow in her right. The tip of the bow breaks the surface of the pool, and ripples in concentric rings race away from it.
“I wear this rough garment to deceive,” she says, and, at that, all the birds and frogs fall silent. “Aren’t you the clever girl? Aren’t you canny? I would not think appearances would so easily lead you astray. Not for long as this.”
No words escape my rigid, sleeping jaws, but she hears me, all the same, my answer that needs no voice, and she turns to face me. Her eyes are golden, not blue. And in the low light, they briefly flash a bright, iridescent yellow. She smiles, showing me teeth as sharp as razors, and then she quotes from the Gospel of Matthew.
“Inwardly, they were ravening wolves,” she says to me, though her tone is not unkind. “You’ve seen all that you need to see, and probably more, I’d wager.” And with this, she turns away again, turning to face the fog shrouding the wide green pool. As I watch, helpless to divert my gaze or even shut my eyes, she lets the violin and bow slip from her hands; they fall into the water with quiet splashes. The bow sinks, though the violin floats. And then she goes down on all fours. She laps at the pool, and her hair has begun to writhe like a nest of serpents.
And now I’m awake, disoriented and my chest aching, gasping for air as if a moment before I was drowning and have only just been pulled to the safety of dry land. The wallpaper is only dingy calico again, and the bookcase is only a bookcase. The clock radio and the lamp and the ashtray sit in their appointed places upon the bedside table.
The sheets are soaked through with sweat, and I’m shivering. I sit up, my back braced against the headboard, and my eyes go to the second-story window on the other side of the small room. The sun is still down, but it’s a little lighter out there than it is in the bedroom. And for a fraction of a moment, clearly silhouetted against that false dawn, I see the head and shoulders of a young woman. I also see the muzzle and alert ears of a wolf, and that golden eyeshine watching me. Then it’s gone, she or it, whichever pronoun might best apply. It doesn’t seem to matter. Because now I do know exactly what I’m looking for, and I know that I’ve seen it before, years before I first caught sight of Abby Gladding standing in the rain without an umbrella.
6.
Friday morning I drive back to Newport, and it doesn’t take me long at all to find the grave. It’s just a little ways south of the chain-link fence dividing the North Burial Ground from the older Common Burying Ground and Island Cemetery. I turn off Warner Street onto the rutted, unpaved road winding between the indistinct rows of monuments. I find a place that’s wide enough to pull over and park. The trees have only just begun to bud, and their bare limbs are stark against a sky so blue-white it hurts my eyes to look directly into it. The grass is mostly still brown from long months of snow and frost, though there are small clumps of new green showing here and there.
The cemetery has been in use since 1640 or so. There are three Colonial-era governors buried here (one a delegate to the Continental Congress), along with the founder of Freemasonry in Rhode Island, a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, various Civil-War generals, lighthouse keepers, and hundreds of African slaves stolen from Gambia and Sierra Leone, the Gold and Ivory coasts and brought to Newport in the hey-day of whaling and the Rhode Island rum trade. The grave of Abby Gladding is marked by a weathered slate headstone, badly scabbed over with lichen. But, despite the centuries, the shallow inscription is still easy enough to read:
HERE LYETH INTERED YE BODY
OF ABBY MARY GLADDING
DAUGHTER OF SOLOMON GLADDING ESQ
& MARY HIS WYFE WHO
DEPARTED THIS LIFE YE 2D DAY OF
SEPT 1785 AGED 22 YEARS
SHE WAS DROWN’D & DEPARTED & SLEEPS
ZECH 4:1 NEITHER SHALL THEY WEAR
A HAIRY GARMENT TO DECEIVE
Above the inscription, in place of the usual death’s head, is a crude carving of a violin. I sit down in the dry, dead grass in front of the marker, and I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting there when I hear crows cawing. I look over my shoulder, and there’s tree back towards Farewell Street filled with the big black birds. The watch me, and I take that as my cue to leave. I know now that I have to go back to the library, that whatever remains of this mystery is waiting for me there. I might find it tucked away in an old journal a newspaper clipping, or in crumbling church records. I only know I’ll find it, because now I have the missing pieces. But there is an odd reluctance to leave the grave of Abby Gladding. There’s no fear in me, no shock or stubborn disbelief at what I’ve discovered or at its impossible ramifications. And some part of me notes the oddness of this, that I am not afraid. I leave her alone in that narrow house, watched over by the wary crows, and go back to my car. Less than fifteen minutes later I’m in the Redwood Library, asking for anything they can find on a Solomon Gladding, and his daughter, Abby.
“Are you sick?” the librarian asks, and I wonder what she sees in my face, in my eyes, to elicit such a question. “Are you feeling well?”
“I’m fine,” I assure her. “I was up a little too late last night, that’s all. A little too much to drink, most likely.”
She nods, and I smile.
“Well, then. I’ll see what we might have,” she says, and, cutting to the chase, it ends with a short article that appeared in the Newport Mercury early in November 1785, hardly more than two months after Abby Gladding’s death. It begins, “We hear a ftrange account from laft Thursday evening, the Night of the 3rd of November, of a body difinterred from its Grave and coffin. This most peculiar occurrence was undertaken at the beheft of the father of the deceafed young woman therein buried, a circumftance making the affair even ftranger ftill.” What follows is a description of a ritual which will be familiar to anyone who has read of the 1892 Mercy Brown case from Exeter, or the much earlier exhumation of Nancy Young (summer of 1827), or other purported New England “vampires.”
In September, Abby Gladding’s body was discovered in Newport Harbor by a local fisherman, and it was determined that she had drowned. The body was in an advanced state of decay, leading me to wonder if the date of the headstone is meant to be the date the body was found, not the date of her death. There were persistent rumors that the daughter of Samuel Gladding
, a local merchant, had taken her own life. She is said to have been a “child of singular and morbid temperament,” who had recently refused a marriage proposal by the eldest son of another Newport merchant, Ebenezer Burrill. There was also back-fence talk that Abby had practiced witchcraft in the woods bordering the town, and that she would play her violin (a gift from her mother) to summon “voracious wolves and other such dæmons to do her bidding.”
Very shortly after her death, her youngest sister, Susan, suddenly fell ill. This was in October, and the girl was dead before the end of the month. Her symptoms, like those of Mercy Brown’s stricken family members, can readily be identified as late-stage tuberculosis. What is peculiar here is that Abby doesn’t appear to have suffered any such wasting disease herself, and the speed with which Susan became ill and died is also atypical of consumption. Even as Susan fought for her life, Abby’s mother, Mary, fell ill, and it was in hope of saving his wife that Solomon Gladding agreed to the exhumation of his daughter’s body. The article in the Newport Mercury speculates that he’d learned of this ritual and folk remedy from a Jamaican slave woman.
At sunrise, with the aid of several other men, some apparently family members, the grave was opened, and all present were horrified to see “the body fresh as the day it was configned to God,” her cheeks “flufhed with colour and lufterous.” The liver and heart were duly cut out, and both were discovered to contain clotted blood, which Solomon had been told would prove that Abby was rising from her grave each night to steal the blood of her mother and sister. The heart was burned in a fire kindled in the cemetery, the ashes mixed with water, and the mother drank the mixture. The body of Abby was turned facedown in her casket, and an iron stake was driven through her chest, to insure that the restless spirit would be unable to find its way out of the grave. Nonetheless, according to parish records from Trinity Church, Mary Gladding died before Christmas. Her father fell ill a few months later, and died in August of 1786.
And I find one more thing that I will put down here. Scribbled in sepia ink, in the left-hand margin of the newspaper page containing the account of the exhumation of Abby Gladding is the phrase Jé-rouge, or “red eyes,” which I’ve learned is a Haitian term denoting werewolfery and cannibalism. Below that word, in the same spidery hand, is written “As white as snow, as red as red, as green as briers, as black as coal.” There is no date or signature accompanying these notations.
And now it is almost Friday night, and I sit alone on a wooden bench at Bowen’s Wharf, not too far from the kiosk advertising daily boat tours to view fat, doe-eyed seals sunning themselves on the rocky beaches ringing Narragansett Bay. I sit here and watch the sun going down, shivering because I left home this morning without my coat. I do not expect to see Abby Gladding, tonight or ever again. But I’ve come here, anyway, and I may come again tomorrow evening.
I will not include the 1785 disinterment in my thesis, no matter how many feathers it might earn for my cap. I mean never to speak of it again. What I have written here, I suspect I’ll destroy it later on. It has only been written for me, and for me alone. If Abby was trying to speak through me, to find a larger audience, she’ll have to find another mouthpiece. I watch a lobster boat heading out for the night. I light a cigarette, and eye the herring gulls wheeling above the marina.
Come up with a convincing character and no one will ask: Is it true or is it make-believe? For the period of reading, it will necessarily be true. How eagerly we collaborate in our own hoodwinking. All an author has to do is say: Listen. This is what happened . . .
TRAGIC LIFE STORIES
STEVE DUFFY
Eidetic, a. (Psychol.) Applied to an image that creates an optical impression with hallucinatory clearness, or to the faculty of seeing such images, or to a person having this faculty. Also n., one who sees eidetic images.
“The inability to discriminate between hallucinations and normal mental imagery and the mental confusion thereby entailed is responsible for a psychological abortion called the eidetic image.”
—C. Fox, Educational Psychology
It was an attritional season, the spring of slow destruction. In the space of four months beginning in January, Dan had managed to lose both his life partner and his book deal. He’d seen the first one coming: things between him and Angie had been getting bad for quite some time, and when she finally said, Look, there’s this man at work, he’d accepted it pretty much without protesting. She’d fallen out of love with him, was all. What else could he do? He was fine with it, really, so long as he didn’t stop to think about the two of them together, Angie and Malcolm. So long as he didn’t ever do that, it was fine. Because if he did, it was like a hook in his guts, like being caught on barbed wire while the rats gnawed your heart out. Whenever he thought about that, or about the times they’d had, or about the bitter hopelessness of the Ange-subtracted future, then it was pretty bad, and so he tried not to, inasmuch as that was possible.
The business with the book deal, on the other hand, had come out of nowhere. He’d had an invitation to lunch in town, to talk over the options—that’s what they’d said, those were exactly the words they’d used, he remembered it perfectly—and before the dessert trolley had come round, he’d been dumped. “Taking a hard look at the fiction end of the operation.” “Revising our strategies.” “Great opportunities to explore new partnerships.” Bullshit. He’d been given the heave-ho. You get to recognize the signs, after a while. When enough people take it in turns to crap on you, you either get an umbrella or you put up a notice saying Town Dump. He barely heard the bleated goodbyes from the insultingly young suit they’d sent to do the dirty deed. Mechanically, he shook hands and stumbled off into the gray afternoon, on the verge of a major panic attack.
An hour of aimless rambling round the streets of Chester brought him back to himself, more or less, stabilized him without even beginning to cheer him up. He might have gone home then, back to his rented flat across the railway tracks—but to what? Instead, he made the great mistake of going into WHSmith’s, just for a look, just to prove something to himself, that’s all. It was a large branch with an extensive book section, and he made a beeline for FANTASY.
There they were, the bastards—all the usual suspects, smug and secure in their shiny bastard jackets. This one: he couldn’t write two grammatical sentences in a row, his sub-editor spent upwards of six months on each MS, Dan knew that for a fact. Not so much editing it, as translating it into English. This one next to him: been ripping off Tolkien for how long now? Surprised she hadn’t grown a beard and changed her name to Gandalf. And this one? This one was very, very lucky the girl’s parents had decided not to bring charges—and no one was taking a hard look at the fiction end of his operation, were they? Bastards. At least he’d never have to share a panel with them at some godawful convention in Leicester or Ashton-under-Lyne ever again. It was the small presses for him now—if he could even be bothered.
Really, though: could he? Go the small press route? Right now, he suspected not. Chronicling the lives and times of Nevernesse was onerous enough at the best of times, when you knew the results would enjoy a guaranteed appearance between elegantly foil-embossed covers on the shelves of bookshop and library, with a print run firmly into four figures. Was he really going to go back to desktop-publishing layouts and editions of two hundred and fifty? Could he?
It was that or get a proper job, though. That, or stop to take stock of the world without Ange—and there it was, jabbing right into the heart of him again. A gangling young pair of Goths with big hair and multi-buckled garments crowded him out of the way of the Fantasy shelves, where they immediately honed in on . . . who else but the biggest bastard of the lot? Mister fucking Peter Perfect, darling of the convention, Angie’s favorite author—she’s actually told him that much, in Dan’s own hearing, that time in Nottingham. He had to get away. Eyes swimming, overcome all at once with a sour uprush of exquisite self-pity, he wandered off to an adjacent section.
“Excuse me? Are you okay?” There was genuine solicitude in the voice of the well-dressed woman who touched his elbow. “Is everything all right?”
Trying very hard not to break down and weep aloud in the middle of WHSmith (there would be a time and a place, but not here, not now, please god), Dan bit down on his lip. What might be a good enough reason to be blubbing in a bookshop? He was about to invent a wholly spurious bereavement, and was casting about for the right degree of relationship to the beloved departed, when the woman said sympathetically, “Is it to do with the book? It’s nothing to be ashamed of, you know.”
Bloody hell, word traveled fast, didn’t it? “I’m sorry?”
“It is very moving. I cried myself.” She was holding on to his elbow, standing very close by his side. Her voice, pitched conspiratorially low, sounded in his ear like the sea inside a shell. He hadn’t been so close to a woman in months. Now she was whispering a secret: “I actually think it’s rather lovely, that you’re so connected with your feelings. Most men aren’t. Like my ex. Or poor Ando’s father.”
“Sorry?” Was she actually insane, though? There were lots of walking wounded on the streets these days. They got thrown out of their bed-and-breakfasts at ten, and couldn’t go back till teatime. This one was far more presentable than any of those, and not so patently damaged as the majority of them. . . . but she was holding his elbow quite tightly, and she did have a slightly despondent kind of look about her, some fundamental neediness chronically unassuaged. Maybe money couldn’t buy you happiness after all. Dan tried to concentrate on the conversation at hand. “Ando?”
“Ando, in the book.” She picked up a hardback from the display stand in front of them. Dan hadn’t noticed it was even there. “Ando McElwee? I Won’t Do It Any More, Daddy?”
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror Page 8
