I press my palm to the glass, which is much colder than I’d expected.
In my dream, I stood at another window, at the end of a long hallway, and looked down at the North Burial Ground. With some difficulty, I opened the window, hoping the air outside would be fresher than the stale air in the hallway. It was, and I thought it smelled faintly of clover and strawberries. And there was music. I saw, then, Abby standing beneath a tree, playing a violin. The music was very beautiful, though very sad, and completely unfamiliar. She drew the bow slowly across the strings, and I realized that somehow the music was shaping the night. There were clouds sailing past above the cemetery, and the chords she drew from the violin changed the shapes of those clouds, and also seemed to dictate the speed at which they moved. The moon was bloated, and shone an unhealthy shade of ivory, and the whole sky writhed like a Van Gogh painting. I wondered why she didn’t tell me that she plays the violin.
Behind me, something clattered to the floor, and I looked over my shoulder. But there was only the long hallway, leading off into perfect darkness, leading back the way I’d apparently come. When I turned again to the open window and the cemetery, the music had ceased, and Abby was gone. There was only the tree and row after row of tilted headstones, charcoal-colored slate, white marble, a few cut from slabs of reddish sandstone mined from Massachusetts or Connecticut. I was reminded of a platoon of drunken soldiers, lined up for a battle they knew they were going to lose.
I have never liked writing my dreams down.
It is late Thursday morning, almost noon, and I pull my hand back from the cold, smudged windowpane. I have to be in Providence for an evening lecture, and I gather my things and leave the Redwood Library and Athenaeum. On the drive back to the city, I do my best to stop thinking about the nightmare, my best not to dwell on what I saw sitting beneath the tree, after the music stopped and Abby Gladding disappeared. My best isn’t good enough.
4.
The lecture goes well, quite a bit better than I’d expected it would, better, probably, than it had a right to, all things considered. “Mercy Brown as Inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” presented to the Rhode Island Historical Society, and, somehow, I even manage not to make a fool of myself answering questions afterwards. It helps that I’ve answered these same questions so many times in the past. For example:
“I’m assuming you’ve also drawn connections between the Mercy Brown incident and Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla?’”
“There are similarities, certainly, but so far as I know, no one has been able to demonstrate conclusively that Le Fanu knew of the New England phenomena. And, more importantly, the publication of ‘Carmilla’ predates the exhumation of Mercy Brown’s body by twenty years.”
“Still, he might have known of the earlier cases.”
“Certainly. He may well have. However, I have no evidence that he did.”
But, the entire time, my mind is elsewhere, back across the water in Newport, in that coffeehouse on Thames, and the Redwood Library, and standing in a dream hallway, looking down on my subconscious rendering of the Common Burying Ground. A woman playing a violin beneath a tree. A woman with whom I have only actually spoken once, but about whom I cannot stop thinking.
It is believed that consumption is not a physical but spiritual disease, obsession, or visitation…
After the lecture, and the questions, after introductions are made and notable, influential hands are shaken, when I can finally slip away without seeming either rude or unprofessional, I spend an hour or so walking alone on College Hill. It’s a cold, clear night, and I follow Benevolent Street west to Benefit and turn north. There’s comfort in the uneven, buckled bricks of the sidewalk, in the bare limbs of the trees, in all the softly glowing windows. I pause at the granite steps leading up to the front door of what historians call the Stephen Harris House, built in 1764. One hundred and sixty years later, H. P. Lovecraft called this the “Babbitt House” and used it as the setting for an odd tale of lycanthropy and vampirism. I know this huge yellow house well. And I know, too, the four hand-painted signs nailed up on the gatepost, all of them in French. From the sidewalk, by the electric glow of a nearby street lamp, I can only make out the top half of the third sign in the series; the rest are lost in the gloom – Oubliez le Chien. Forget the Dog.
I start walking again, heading home to my tiny, cluttered apartment, only a couple of blocks east on Prospect. The side streets are notoriously steep, and I’ve been in better shape. I haven’t gone twenty-five yards before I’m winded and have a nasty stitch in my side. I lean against a stone wall, cursing the cigarettes and the exercise I can’t be bothered with, trying to catch my breath. The freezing air makes my sinuses and teeth ache. It burns my throat like whiskey.
And this is when I glimpse a sudden blur from out the corner of my right eye, hardly more than a blur. An impression or the shadow of something large and black, moving quickly across the street. It’s no more than ten feet away from me, but downhill, back towards Benefit. By the time I turn to get a better look, it’s gone, and I’m already beginning to doubt I saw anything, except, possibly, a stray dog.
I linger here a moment, squinting into the darkness and the yellow-orange sodium-vapor pool of streetlight that the blur seemed to cross before it disappeared. I want to laugh at myself, because I can actually feel the prick of goose bumps along my forearms, and the short, fine hairs at the nape of my neck standing on end. I’ve blundered into a horror-movie cliché, and I can’t help but be reminded of Val Lewton’s Cat People, the scene where Jane Rudolph walks quickly past Central Park, stalked by a vengeful Simone Simon, only to be rescued at the last possible moment by the fortuitous arrival of a city bus. But I know there’s no helpful bus coming to intervene on my behalf, and, more importantly, I understand full fucking well that this night holds in store nothing more menacing than what my over-stimulated imagination has put there. I turn away from the street light and continue up the hill towards home. And I do not have to pretend that I don’t hear footsteps following me, or the clack of claws on concrete, because I don’t. The quick shadow, the peripheral blur, it was only a moment’s misapprehension, no more than a trick of my exhausted, preoccupied mind, filled with the evening’s morbid banter.
Oubliez le Chien.
Fifteen minutes later, I’m locking the front door of my apartment behind me. I make a hot cup of chamomile tea, which I drink standing at the kitchen counter. I’m in bed shortly after ten o’clock. By then, I’ve managed to completely dismiss whatever I only thought I saw crossing Jenckes Street.
5.
“Open your eyes, Ms. Howard,” Abby Gladding says, and I do. Her voice does not in any way command me to open my eyes, and it is perfectly clear that I have a choice in the matter. But there’s a certain je-ne-sais-quoi in the delivery, the inflection and intonation, in the measured conveyance of these seven syllables, that makes it impossible for me to keep my eyes closed. It’s not yet dawn, but sunrise cannot be very far away, and I am lying in my bed. I cannot say whether I am awake or dreaming, or if possibly I am stranded in some liminal state that is neither one nor the other. I am immediately conscious of an unseen weight bearing down painfully upon my chest, and I am having difficulty breathing.
“I promised that I’d call on you,” she says, and, with great effort, I turn my head towards the sound of her voice, my cheek pressing deeply into my pillow. I am aware now that I am all but paralyzed, perhaps by the same force pushing down on my chest, and I strain for any glimpse of her. But there’s only the bedside table, the clock radio and reading lamp and ashtray, an overcrowded bookcase with sagging shelves, and the floral calico wallpaper that came with the apartment. If I could move my arms, I would switch on the lamp. If I could move, I’d sit up, and maybe I would be able to breathe again.
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. 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.
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. “You’ve seen all that you need to see, and probably more, I’d wager.” 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 heyday 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 a tree back towards Farewell Street filled with the big black birds. They 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 okay?” 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 ∫trange account from la∫t Thursday evening, the Night of the 3rd of November, of a body di∫interred from its Grave and coffin. This most peculiar occurrence was undertaken at the behe∫t of the father of the decea∫ed young woman therein buried, a circum∫tance making the affair even ∫tranger ∫till.” 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 persistant rumors that the daughter of Solomon 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. Ther
e 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 con∫igned 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.
The Ape's Wife and Other Stories Page 16
