Moriah

by Daniel Mills

  “And then?”

  “We tried to live in it. We thought we had no choice. That was our error. There is always a choice, Mr. Flood. Greta has made hers—and I have made mine.”

  He closes the door, darkening the room, then leans into the frame, beaten, with his face flushed and swollen and his gaze down-turned.

  “Herr Bauer?” I venture, joining him at the door.

  “I am pathetic,” he says. “Like a lost child, I am to be pitied.”

  He raises a hand, silencing my objections.

  He continues: “I know this, for I have pitied myself each day since they died, and today the worst of all. But I am not a fool. I have sense, yet, to recognize madness in myself and in others where I find it, to tell truth from deceit. But sense profits us little if God Himself is mad.”

  “So you remain here.”

  “So I remain.”

  Behind us the clock’s mechanism engages. The hammer rises and swings toward the bell, sounding once, twice.

  Friedrich flinches. He shakes his head once as though to clear it, then sidles past me toward the dining room. He turns in the doorway, gestures to the low table at my right.

  “There is something for you. A letter, I believe. Mrs. Ambler left it.”

  He slips away.

  I approach the table. Its surface is cluttered with postcards and correspondence, yesterday’s mail. Probably Mrs. Ambler had fetched it in this morning when she went for her constitutional. In amongst the post I find an envelope addressed to me. The handwriting is familiar, the postmark Manhattan, and I recognize the return address.

  The Sunday Echo.

  Behind me the pendulum swings back and forth, gathering the quiet to itself at every stroke. For days I have expected this. I have written nothing since arriving in Vermont, sent no word to the paper, and now my story is due. I turn the envelope over in my hands, slide my nail under the flap.

  Pleased to inform your prev. article re: the Lynches of Moriah, Vt. has generated no small interest on the part of reading public. However we have yet to receive your follow-up as promised & so must press you to send immediately for inclusion in Sunday’s edition.

  Shall expect receipt c/o post no later than Saturday or will stop payment on advance. If possible advise by telegraph of your conclusions re: questions of imposture and spiritism, the visitations of the dead, & c.

  Et cetera. Grief and doubt and our uncertainty: Mrs. Ambler’s, Friedrich’s, my own. Our madness or the lack of it, reason contending with faith, then despair, and always the silence like the Goad at our backs. I do not know what I will write. I do not even know what I know, not really, and my time in Moriah is nearly over.

  I refold the letter. Thrust it down into my waistcoat pocket with the burnt ends of ribbon and take down my hat from the peg. I walk outside, crossing the lawn and footbridge. I come to the Hollow Road then pause to look west toward Moriah, east toward Pittsfield.

  East, then. I follow the road where it bends and rises to the hills, leading away from Moriah. The weather is cool and fine. Trees sway to either side, aspen and birch and branching elm, spreading shade ’cross the road while the sun sets fire to them, twig and leaf, and everything turning to meet the autumn, leaves green and dark at the petiole but edged with yellow.

  There are farm fields beyond, some brown where the hay has been mowed and baled. Others teem with corn, high for summer’s end and sparkling where the light cuts through it, flashing, and I think of the sun on the rails near Rutland, the crowd that gathered there.

  They were as watchers at a death, witnesses to its awful logic. I recall the rebel dead at Spotsylvania, stacked up and down the Bloody Angle. We buried them without marker or name, covering their faces with earth much as the streets of Rhinebeck vanished into snowfall on the morning I returned there. A ruined house, its broken chimneys. Their bodies in the lamplight. Kitty’s covered face. Surfacing from the depths of sleep, from the heat of summer when Sally turned to greet me. The way she danced that first evening, wearing Evening Star’s costume and with Mrs. Ambler’s ribbon fastened about her braid, the same ribbon which lies broken and burnt in my pocket. And always she has come, Mrs. Ambler said.

  Hoofbeats from the road ahead. I halt to listen.

  To my left is a strip of weeds and beyond it a low cottage, ramshackle, with its windows buckled, bending outward, a slate roof poised to fall. Two steel locks secure the front door and a damp smell wafts toward the road, an odour like leaf mould.

  The hoofbeats are closer now. A horse rounds the bend, a pony. It is a handsome beast, dearly bought, but ridden by a farm boy of eleven or twelve. The boy is slight of stature with cropped sandy hair and prominent front teeth—perhaps one of the lads I sighted from the road when first I walked from the village.

  The boy pulls up short. He looks down at me, grinning, plainly relishing his increased height. He says: “He ain’t in, you know. Saw him not ten minutes back. Going to the fields.”

  “I don’t know who you mean.”

  “Mr. Turner. That’s his place, ain’t it?”

  He takes the reins in one hand and points to the decrepit cottage, which I had taken to be deserted, as were so many New England farms in the years after the war.

  “John Turner?” I manage, surprised.

  “That’s him. Father doesn’t much like him. Says he’s a queer sort, always skulking ’bout the Lynch place that’s west of here. Where they call up the devils.”

  “The Yellow House.”

  “That’s what it’s called, right enough. We’ve got nothing to do with such things ourselves. It’s wrong what they’re doing, but least it won’t last much longer. Or so Father says.”

  “And why is that?”

  He laughs through his teeth, cheeks going red but for the freckles. “They’re poor as dirt,” he says. “Everyone hereabouts knows it. Can’t even afford to keep the house. Father bought the fields off them and soon enough they’ll up and sell it all to us, the house and the lot. Father reckons he can get it for a song. Says they’ve got no business owning such a place if they’re just going to keep on living in the past.”

  “What will happen to them?”

  “Maybe Mr. Turner’ll take them in,” he says, then laughs again. He jerks the pony into motion, kicking it to a steady trot so I am alone on the road with John Turner’s cottage before me. John Turner is out, the boy said, and his cottage is empty with none to see me as I pick my way across the ditch, wade through the weeds and high grass.

  The door is bolted fast, and in the absence of an obvious path, I realize he must come and go by another means. A back door, perhaps. I approach the nearest window and peer inside, hands cupped, shading my gaze against the glare. The glass is warped, scratched. Bronze with the light outside and burnished by my reflection.

  John Turner’s kitchen lies beyond. The floor is unswept, filthy, and the table is stacked with grimy dishes, opened tins, apple cores and old bones. There is lichen growing in the woodgrain, mould on the blade of a knife: a fine white fur. The hearth is choked with grey ashes while a doorway opposite the window opens onto a sitting room.

  I circle round the side of the cottage but the back door is likewise locked and the other windows are boarded up, shutters nailed fast to the frame and creeper thrusting through: morning glory and bittersweet and a hummingbird hovering nearby, poised to feed upon them. Its wings move without sound. I do not disturb it.

  I reach the northern wall of the cottage, where a single unboarded window looks into a smaller room, a bedroom. The bed is unmade, heaped with rags as to resemble a rodent’s burrow with mud and dirt tracked in splashes across the floorboards.

  The door here is open and gives onto the same sitting room as the kitchen. Two guitars are visible, leant up against the wall with a fiddle between them—lovely instruments all and polished to a high shine at odds with the dust and squalor surrounding.

  A flash of colour from the bedroom. The wardrobe is closed, the key turned in the lock
, but a flap of fabric shows where it has become trapped between the doors, blue silk with delicate lacework about the hem: a lady’s evening gown as fine as any you might see in Newport.

  For Sally. My betrothed, he called her, though Sally denied it, and whatever the truth of the matter, it is plain John means to marry her. She will come here when the wedding is done. She will scrub the floors free of grime and parade herself in evening dress even as the roof buckles and the house caves in around them.

  Spread-eagled like Isaac, Sally said. Gutted on the stone.

  Married to the man who had loved her sister and for whom she serves as a cheap surrogate, recalling the ways I have used her, just as she has used me.

  The choices we made. The ghost I saw in her and the deliverance she craved, rescue from the chains into which she was born: sister, wife, mother. Tomorrow I will leave Moriah, as I left Rhinebeck, and Sally will become a memory, a story like my marriage with the same hollow at its centre, the emptiness left where understanding ends.

  But faith is such that a man can take a lie and call it truth and make this an atonement—and thinking now of The Echo, I know what I will write.

  There is always a choice, said Friedrich. And I have made mine.

  A quarter-hour’s walk and I reach the Yellow House, passing the boy a second time near the foot of the drive and tipping my cap as he clomps past. I climb the drive, head spinning, and mount the steps to the porch. The parlour is empty, as is the dining room, and Ambrose sits in the kitchen—alone and unmoving, it seems, since morning.

  He starts at the sight of me then curls in on himself, arms folding into his knees, crab-like. The vacancy is gone from his features, the look of absence. In its place there is a barbed and crackling terror which rocks him where he sits, sending tremors through him.

  “Ambrose,” I say.

  He shakes his head, squeezes his eyes shut.

  “It’s all right,” I say.

  “He mustn’t see,” he says.

  “Who mustn’t? Thaddeus?”

  But he continues to shake his head, more violent now, whipping his body to one side then another, a long tongue of drool swinging free of his lower lip. It spatters the floor between us.

  “Coming for me.”

  Someone behind me: odour of camphor, the tang of wood smoke. Thaddeus. He does not confront me as expected but simply nods and passes into the corridor.

  Ambrose weeps into his hands, inconsolable. I take the chair opposite him and extend one hand across the tabletop, closing my fingers round his wrist, gently, meaning to give comfort.

  He spasms at my touch. He leaps to his feet, the chair toppling behind him.

  “I hear him coming,” he says. “Hear him call.”

  Then lurches forward like a drunk, stumbling through the side door and slamming it behind him. The frame strikes the latch and swings open once more, the din echoed from somewhere inside by a crack like a bullwhip or a window falling shut.

  I go upstairs. In my room, I turn the key in the lock and draw the curtains. I retrieve my portmanteau from beneath the bed and remove my correspondence case from inside. Place three sheets of paper on the writing desk along with my ink and blotter.

  Four in the afternoon. I sit down, begin to write.

  Fragments:

  . . . and was privileged to observe the dancing of Evening Star, a Red Indian girl, who leapt and capered about the platform with Unearthly grace and ease . . .

  Ambrose is in this respect his brother’s equal, gifted with the powers of medium-ship and possessed of such a Voice as would be the envy of the Holy Seraphim . . .

  Measurements were made of the Circle Room, and all of the witnesses interviewed at length. Every precaution was taken, all possible analyses made . . .

  That night a woman of seventy emerged from the Cabinet shepherding before her two lovely children, boys with the flush of youth about them. By chance or providence their father was present among the sitters and recognized his boys at once. The children approached the edge of the platform where they made themselves known to him. Never before in his thirty-six years has this writer borne witness to so moving a spectacle . . .

  There is a tapping at the door. I know who it is, who it must be. The pen freezes in my hand, the e tailing off to a broken line.

  She tries the handle. The latch rattles, ineffectually, and the rapping comes again, louder now. “Are you there?” she asks, whispering through the keyhole. “Let me in.”

  The pen slips from my grasp, splashing ink over the page. I daub at the stains with the blotter but my hands are shaking and they seize up when her voice comes again through the keyhole.

  “Please, Silas.”

  She has never addressed me by my Christian name. The sound fills me with shame, self-loathing: a hatred so hot it annihilates all other sensation and I pitch forward in the chair, my forehead striking the desk.

  “I can hear you,” she says. “Please let me in.”

  The world is mad, said Friedrich, delivering this judgment in a voice like Death’s which bore within it the full weight of his soul’s emptiness. The same suffering is there in Sally’s voice now as it was in Mrs. Ambler’s when she told me of her miscarriage, or two days ago, when Greta recalled her lost children, or throughout these last ten years of dreaming in which Kitty appeared to me in sleep, looking much as she had in life, wearing that green dress and standing in the doorway, the baby not yet showing. For years she returned to me across that sea of silence only to watch me leave her behind, again and again, and always too proud to weep, as I do now, with my face crushed up against the desk.

  Sally leaves. Night falls, blackening the room. Dinner is past and the darkness whirls about me, spinning faster for my exhaustion, though I am nearly finished. I take up the pen once more. I blot the last page and turn it over, append this final paragraph:

  This writer accounts himself to be foremost a Man of Reason and it was in the service of Scholarship that he first embarked upon this study. Having spent one week at the Yellow House he has completed an exhaustive survey of the house and grounds; he has interviewed all witnesses to the events described above; and he has spent hours engaged in conversation with the mediums Thaddeus and Ambrose Lynch. In all this he was unable to uncover any evidence whatsoever of imposture or deceit. In the absence of such evidence, then, he can only conclude these phenomena to be genuine.

  I wet my fingertips, scrub off the ink. Fold these few pages into Longfellow’s Purgatorio (the spine broken, pages disordered) and lay them together inside my portmanteau to be delivered in person upon my return to New York tomorrow.

  There is laundry on the bed, my torn and mud-stained clothing now pressed and mended and smelling faintly of lavender. I bundle them into the bottom of the portmanteau and add my shaving kit and correspondence case. I fasten the clasps then slide the case under the bed and walk to the door, withdrawing the key.

  I let myself out into the corridor, where all of the doors are shut, the rooms empty to either side of me. There is a gleam of lamplight at the end of the hall, the strains of music audible from the Circle Room, two men singing. I can make out Ambrose’s voice, brittle as lace, and John Turner’s twining round it.

  O to Grace how great a debtor

  Daily I’m compelled to be

  Let thy goodness like a fetter—

  Come Thou Font of Every Blessing. With all that has transpired the choice of song is enough to make me laugh, or weep, but drawing near I hear the others: Mrs. Ambler’s thin soprano, Sally’s alto throbbing just beneath. And thinking of Friedrich and Sally, the choices we’ve made, I enter the room and seat myself beside Friedrich, lifting my voice to join in the final verse.

  Come, my Lord, no longer tarry

  Take my ransomed soul away

  Send thine angels now to carry

  Me to realms of endless day.

  Ambrose takes his place in a chair nearest the stage, while John Turner unstraps his guitar and turns to extinguish the lamp
behind him. He takes in Sally’s presence, then mine, but is lost to sight when the light goes out, leaving only the memory of his gaze upon us. His contempt. A hunger like the sun’s afterimage, deep and red against the darkness of the room.

  Friedrich Bauer shifts beside me. His breathing quickens with a spurt of clapping which seems to spring from all directions at once and echoes from rafter and window, followed by a whistle like a huntsman’s call and the soft patter of movement near the stage.

  John Turner again. He produces a drunkard’s match and cups the flame with his palm as he approaches the stage. He lights the tallows, two in succession. The cones of their shadows swing out then converge on the entrance to the Spirit Cabinet, a lone point of night from which the old nurse steps, urging the children on before her.

  Johannes. Martin. Wearing their nightgowns as before but this time they approach the railing of their own accord with the nurse just behind them. They thrust their faces, pale as winter, to the railing, their lips red and wide. They cry out for their Mama.

  Friedrich rises from his seat with the gravity and resolve of a penitent called to communion. He does not hesitate but shuffles forward with head hung and arms extended and does not stop ’til his hands close round the railing.

  But the children shrink from his touch, withdrawing from the stage front, and with their father’s shadow over them, I can discern their features no longer.

  A voice: “Papa? Is that you?”

  “It is me.”

  The boys nod. One asks: “But where is Mama?”

  “Hush, child,” says the nurse.

  “No,” says Friedrich. “It is all right.”

  He kneels before the stage with his face against the railing. He addresses his children each by their name and whispers to them, words I cannot make out.