The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991)
Page 11
her handkerchief, all wet with tears, to the children at the
window; she made the baby kiss its hand; and in a moment
mother and baby had vanished from their sight.
Then the children felt their hearts ache with sorrow, and
they cried bitterly, and yet they could not believe that she had
gone. And the broken clock struck eleven, and suddenly there
was a sound, a quick, clanging, jangling sound, with a strange
discordant note at intervals. They rushed to the open window, and there they saw the village girl dancing along and playing as she did so.
“ We have done all you told u s,” the children called.
“ Come and see; and now show us the little man and
woman.”
The girl did not cease her playing or her dancing, but she
called out in a voice that was half speaking half singing.
“ You did it all badly. You threw the water on the wrong side
of the fire, the tin things were not quite in the middle of the
room, the clock was not broken enough, you did not stand
the baby on its head.”
She was already passing the cottage. She did not stop singing, and all she said sounded like part of a terrible song. “ I am going to my own land,” the girl sang, “ to the land where
I was bom. ’ ’
“ But our mother is gone,” the children cried; “ our dear
mother will she ever come back?”
“ No,” sang the girl, “ she’ll never come back. She took a
boat upon the river; she is sailing to the sea; she will meet
your father once again, and they will go sailing on.”
Then the girl, her voice getting fainter and fainter in
the distance, called out once more to them. “ Your new
mother is coming. She is already on her way; but she only
walks slowly, for her tail is rather long, and her spectacles
are left behind; but she is coming, she is coming—com ing-
coming.”
The last word died away; it was the last one they ever heard
the village girl utter. On she went, dancing on.
84
Lucy Clifford
Then the children turned, and looked at each other and at
the little cottage home, that only a week before had been so
bright and happy, so cosy and spotless. The fire was out, the
clock all broken and spoilt. And there was the baby’s high
chair, with no baby to sit in it; there was the cupboard on
the wall, and never a sweet loaf on its shelf; and there were
the broken mugs, and the bits of bread tossed about, and the
greasy boards which the mother had knelt down to scrub until
they were as white as snow. In the midst of all stood the
children, looking at the wreck they had made, their eyes
blinded with tears, and their poor little hands clasped in misery.
“ I don’t know what we shall do if the new mother comes,”
cried Blue-Eyes. ‘ ‘I shall never, never like any other mother. ”
The Turkey stopped crying for a minute, to think what
should be done. “ We will bolt the door and shut the window;
and we won’t take any notice when she knocks.”
All through the afternoon they sat watching and listening
for fear of the new mother, but they saw and heard nothing
of her, and gradually they became less and less afraid lest
she could come. They fetched a pail of water and washed the
floor; they found some rag, and rubbed the tins; they picked
up the broken mugs and made the room as neat as they could.
There was no sweet loaf to put on the table, but perhaps the
mother would bring something from the village, they thought.
At last all was ready, and Blue-Eyes and the Turkey washed
their faces and their hands, and then sat and waited, for of
course they did not believe what the village girl had said
about their mother sailing away.
Suddenly, while they were sitting by the lire, they heard a
sound as of something heavy being dragged along the ground
outside, and then there was a loud and terrible knocking at
the door. The children felt their hearts stand still. They knew
it could not be their own mother, for she would have turned
the handle and tried to come in without any knocking at all.
Again there came a loud and terrible knocking.
The New Mother
85
“ She’ll break the door down if she knocks so hard,” cried
Blue-Eyes.
“ Go and put your back to it,” whispered the Turkey, “ and
I ’ll peep out of the window and try to see if it is really the
new mother. ’ ’
So in fear and trembling Blue-Eyes put her back against
the door, and the Turkey went to the window. She could just
see a black satin poke bonnet with a frill round the edge, and
a long bony arm carrying a black leather bag. From beneath
the bonnet there flashed a strange bright light, and Turkey’s
heart sank and her cheeks turned pale, for she knew it was
the flashing of two glass eyes. She crept up to Blue-Eyes. “ It
is—it is—it is!” she whispered, her voice shaking with fear,
“ it is the new mother!”
Together they stood with the two little backs against the
door. There was a long pause. They thought perhaps the new
mother had made up her mind that there was no one at home
to let her in, and would go away, but presently the two children heard through the thin wooden door the new mother move a little, and then say to herself—“ I must break the door
open with my tail.”
For one terrible moment all was still, but in it the children
could almost hear her lift up her tail, and then, with a fearful
blow, the little painted door was cracked and splintered. With
a shriek the children darted from the spot and fled through
the cottage, and out at the back door into the forest beyond.
All night long they stayed in the darkness and the cold, and
all the next day and the next, and all through the cold, dreary
days and the long dark nights that followed.
They are there still, my children. All through the long
weeks and months they have been there, with only green
rushes for their pillows and only the brown dead leaves to
cover them, feeding on the wild strawberries in the summer,
or on the nuts when they hang green; on the blackberries
when they are no longer sour in the autumn, and in the winter
on the little red berries that ripen in the snow. They wander
about among the tall dark firs or beneath the great trees be
86
Lucy Clifford
yond. Sometimes they stay to rest beside the little pool near
the copse, and they long and long, with a longing that is
greater than words can say, to see their own dear mother
again, just once again, to tell her that they’ll be good for
evermore—just once again.
And still the new mother stays in the little cottage, but the
windows are closed and the doors are shut, and no one knows
what the inside looks like. Now and then, when the darkness
has fallen and the night is still, hand in hand Blue-Eyes and
the Turkey creep up near the home in which they once were
so happy, and with beating hearts they watch and
listen;
sometimes a blinding flash comes through the window, and
they know it is the light from the new mother’s glass eyes,
or they hear a strange muffled noise, and they know it is the
sound of her wooden tail as she drags it along the floor.
Russell Kirk
Therms a Long,
Long Trail A-Winding
Russell Kirk is one of the most articulate Conservatives
in the U.S. and also one of the contemporary masters of
the Gothic, the supernatural and the uncanny in fiction.
He is the great living exponent of the Christian moral
allegory in the horror mode. His approach is set forth in
an essay appendix to his first collection, The Surly Sullen Bell (1962), “A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale.” Kirk and T. S. Eliot were close friends and they
shared an intellectual and emotional commitment to the
Christian supernatural that informs all of Kirk’s fiction.
"There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding” is one of Kirk's
later works and the winner of the World Fantasy Award
for best short fiction of the year in 1977. It epitomizes
the overtly allegorical mode in contemporary horror (stories written,as allegory as opposed to stories, such as much of the works of Stephen King, that may be interpreted using the moral coordinates of the allegorical method). Kirk's body of work in this mode makes him
the C. S. Lewis of the supernatural genre in our day.
Then he said unto the disciples, It is impossible but that
offenses will come; but woe unto him, through whom
they come!
87
88
Russell Kirk
It were better fo r him that a millstone were hanged
about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he
should offend one o f these little ones.
Luke 17:1-2
Along the vast empty six-lane highway, the blizzard swept
as if it meant to swallow all the sensual world. Frank
Sarsfield, massive though he was, scudded like a heavy kite
before that overwhelming wind. On his thick white hair the
snow clotted and tried to form a Phrygian cap; the big flakes
so swirled about his Viking face that he scarcely could make
out the barren country on either side of the road.
Somehow he must get indoors. Racing for sanctuary, the
last automobile had swept unheeding past his thumb two hours
ago, doubtless bound for the county town some twenty miles
eastward. Westward among the hills, the highway must be
blocked by snowdrifts now. This was an unkind twelfth of
January. “ Blow, blow, thou winter wind!” TWilight being
almost upon him, soon he must find lodging or else freeze
stiff by the roadside.
He had walked more than thirty miles that day. Having in
his pocket the sum of twenty-nine dollars and thirty cents,
he could have put up at either of the two motels he had passed,
had they not been closed for the winter. Well, as always, he
was decently dressed—a good wash-and-wear suit and a neat
black overcoat. As always, he was shaven and clean and civil-
spoken. Surely some fanner or villager would take him in, if
he knocked with a ten-dollar bill in his fist. People sometimes
mistook him for a stranded well-to-do motorist, and sometimes he took the trouble to undeceive them.
But where to apply? This was depopulated country, its forests gone to the sawmills long before, its mines worked out.
The freeway ran through the abomination of desolation. He
did not prefer to walk the freeways, but on such a day as this
there were no cars on the lesser roads.
He had run away from a hardscrabble New Hampshire farm
There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding
89
when he was fourteen, and ever since then, except for brief
working intervals, he had been either on the roads or in the
jails. Now his sixtieth birthday was imminent. There were
few men bigger than Frank Sarsfield, and none more solitary.
Where was a friendly house?
For a few moments, the rage of the snow slackened; he
stared about. Away to the left, almost a mile distant, he made
out a grim high clump of buildings on rising ground, a wall
enclosing them; the roof of the central building was gone.
Sarsfield grinned, knowing what that complex must be: a
derelict prison. He had lodged in prisons altogether too many
nights.
His hand sheltering his eyes from the north wind, he looked
to his right. Down in a snug valley, beside a narrow river
and broad marshes, he could perceive a village or hamlet: a
white church-tower, three or four commercial buildings, some
little houses, beyond them a park of bare maple trees. The
old highway must have run through or near this forgotten
place, but the new freeway had sealed it off. There was no
sign of a freeway exit to the setdement; probably it could be
reached by car only along some detouring country lane. In
such a litde decayed town there would be folk willing to
accept him for the sake of his proffered ten dollars—or, better, simply for charity’s sake and talk with an amusing stranger who could recite every kind of poetry.
He scrambled heavily down the embankment. At this point,
praise be, no tremendous wire fence kept the haughty new
highway inviolable. His powerfol thighs took him through the
swelling drifts, though his heart pounded as the storm burst
upon him afresh.
The village was more distant than he had thought. He
passed panting through old fields half-grown up to poplar and
birch. A litde to the west he noticed what seemed to be old
mine-workings, with fragments of brick buildings. He clambered upon an old railroad bed, its rails and ties taken up; perhaps the new freeway had dealt the final blow to the rails.
Here the going was somewhat easier.
90
Russell Kirk
Mingled with the wind’s shriek, did he hear a church-bell
now? Could they be holding services at the village in this
weather? Presently he came to a bumt-out little railway depot, on its platform signboard still the name “ Anthonyville.”
Now he walked on a street of sorts, but no car-tracks or
footprints sullied the snow.
Anthonyville Free Methodist Church hulked before him.
Indeed the bell was swinging, and now and again faintly ringing in the steeple; but it was the wind’s mockery, a knell for the derelict town of Anthonyville. The church door was slamming in the high wind, flying open again, and slamming once more, like a perpetual-motion machine, the glass being gone
from the church windows. Sarsfield trudged past the skeletal
church.
The front of Emmons’s General Store was boarded up, and
so was the front of what may have been a drugstore. The
village hall was a wreck. The school may have stood upon
those scanty foundations which protruded from the snow. And
from no chimney of the decrepit cottages and cabins along
Main Street—the only street—did any smoke rise.
Sarsfield never had seen a deader village. In an upper window of what looked like a livery-stable converted into a garage, a faded cardboard sign could be read—
REMEMBER YOUR FUTURE
BACK THE TOWNSEND PLAN
&nbs
p; Was no one at all left here—not even some gaunt old couple managing on Social Security? He might force his way into one of the stores or cottages—though on principle and
prudence he generally steered clear of possible charges of
breaking and entering—but that would be cold comfort. In
poor Anthonyville there must remain some living soul.
His mittened hands clutching his red ears, Sarsfield had
plodded nearly to the end of Main Street. Anthonyville was
Endsville, he saw now: river and swamp and new highway
cut it off altogether from the rest of the frozen world, except
There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding
91
for the drift-obliterated country road that twisted southward,
Lord knew whither. He might count himself lucky to find a
stove, left behind in some shack, that he could feed with
boards ripped from walls.
Main Street ended at that grove or park of old maples. Just
a sugarbush, like those he had tapped in his boyhood under
his father’s rough command? No: had the trees not been leafless, he might not have discerned the big stone house among the trees, the only substantial building remaining to Anthony ville. But see it he did for one moment, before the blizzard veiled it from him. There were stone gateposts, too, and a
bronze tablet set into one of them. Sarsfield brushed the
snowflakes from the inscription: “ Tamarack House.’’
Stumbling among the maples toward this promise, he almost collided with a tall glacial boulder. A similar boulder rose a few feet to his right, the pair of them halfway between
gateposts and house. There was a bronze tablet on this boulder, too, and he paused to read it: SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF
JEROME ANTHONY
JULY 4 , 1836- JANUARY 14 ,19 15
B r ig a d ie r - G e n e r a l i n t h e C o r p s o f E n g in e e r s ,
A rm y o f t h e R e p u b l ic , F o u n d e r o f t h is To w n
A r c h it e c t o f A n t h o n y v il l e St a t e P r is o n
WHO DIED AS HE HAD LIVED, WITH HONOR
‘‘And there will I keep you forever,
Yes, forever and a day,
Till the walls shall crumble in ruin,
And moulder in dust away. ”
There’s an epitaph for a prison architect, Sarsfield thought.
It was too bitter an evening for inspecting the other boulder,
and he hurried toward the portico of Tamarack House. This