The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991)

by David G. Hartwell (Ed. )

  aloud, it being good practice for the approaching days on the

  long, long trail:

  ‘ 7 hear in the chamber above me

  The patter o f little feet,

  The sound o f a door that is opened,

  And voices soft and sweet. . . . ”

  Here he ceased. Had he heard something in the passage—

  or “ descending the broad hall stair” ? Because of the wind

  outside, he could not be certain. It cost him a gritting of his

  teeth to rise and open the parlor door. Of course no one could

  be seen in the hall or on the stair. “ Crazy Frank,” men had

  called him at Joliet and other prisons: he had clenched his

  fists, but had kept a check upon himself. Didn’t Saint Paul

  say that the violent take Heaven by storm? Perhaps he had

  barked up the wrong tree; perhaps he would be spewed out

  of His mouth for being too peacefid.

  Shutting the door, he went back to the fireside. Those lines

  of Longfellow had been no evocation. He put “ The Long,

  Long Trail” on the old phonograph again, strolling about the

  room until the record ran out. There was an old print of a

  Great Lakes schooner on one wall that he liked. Beside it,

  he noticed, there seemed to be some pellets embedded in a

  There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding

  117

  closet door-jamb, but painted over, as if someone had fired

  a shotgun in the parlor in the old days. “ The violent take it

  by storm . . . ’’ He admired the grand piano; perhaps Allegra

  had learned to play it. There was one or two big notches or

  gashes along one edge of the piano, varnished over, hard

  though that wood was. Then Frank sank into the big chair

  again and stared at the burning logs.

  Just how long he had dozed, he did not know. He woke

  abruptly. Had he heard a whisper, the faintest whisper? He

  tensed to spring up. But before he could move, he saw reflections in the tall mirror.

  Something had moved in the comer by the bookcase. No

  doubt about it; that small something had stirred again. Also

  something crept behind one o f the satin sofas, and something

  else lurked near the piano. All these were at his back: he saw

  the reflections in the glass, as in a glass darkly, more alarming

  than physical forms. In this high shadowy room, the light of

  the kerosene lamp and of the seven candles did not suffice.

  From near the bookcase, the first of them emerged into

  candlelight; then came the second, and the third. They were

  giggling, but he could not hear them—only see their faces,

  and those not clearly. He was unable to stir, and the goose-

  flesh prickled all over him, and his hair rose at the back of

  his big head.

  They were three little girls, barefoot, in their long muslin

  nightgowns, ready for bed. One may have been as much as

  twelve years old, and the smallest was little more than a baby.

  The middle one was Allegra, tiny even for her tender years,

  and a little imp: he knew, he knew! They were playing

  Creepmouse.

  The three of them stole forward, Allegra in the lead, her

  qres alight. He could see them plain now, and the dread was

  ebbing out of him. He might have risen and turned to greet

  them across the great gulf of time, but any action—why, what

  might it do to these little ones? Frank sat frozen in his chair,

  looking at the nimble reflections in the mirror, and nearer

  118

  Russell Kirk

  they came, perfectly silent. Allegra vanished from the glass,

  which meant that she must be standing just behind him.

  He must please them. Could he speak? He tried, and the

  lines came out hoarsely:

  "Down, down, down in Creepmouse Town

  All the lamps are low.

  And the little rodent f e e t . . . ”

  He was not permitted to finish. Wow! There came a light

  tug at the curly white hair on the back of his head. Oh, to

  talk with Allegra, the imp! Reckless, he heaved his bulk out

  of the chair, and swung round—too late.

  The parlor door was closing. But from the hall came another whisper, ever so faint, ever so unmistakable: “ Good night, Frank! ’ ’ There followed subdued giggles, scampering,

  and then the silence once more.

  He strode to the parlor door. The hall was empty again,

  and the broad stair. Should he follow them up? No, all three

  would be abed now. Should he knock at Mama’s Room, muttering, “ Mrs. Anthony, are the children all right?” No, he hadn’t the nerve for that, and it would be presumptuous. He

  had been given one moment of perception, and no more.

  Somehow he knew that they would not go so fer as the

  garret floor. Ah, he needed fresh air! He snuffed out lamp

  and candles, except for one candlestick—Allegra’s—that he

  took with him. Out into the hall he went. He unfastened the

  front door with that oaken patch about the middle of it, and

  stepped upon the porch, leaving the burning candle just within

  the hall. The wind had risen again, bringing still more snow.

  It was black as sin outside, and the temperature must.be

  thirty below.

  To him the wind bore one erratic peal of the desolate

  church-bell of Anthonyville, and then another. How strong

  the blast must be through that belfry! Frank retreated inside

  from that unfathomable darkness and that sepulchral bell

  which seemed to toll for him. He locked the thick door be­

  There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding

  119

  hind him and screwed up his courage for the expedition to

  his room at the top of the old house.

  But why shudder? He loved them now, Allegra most of all.

  Up the broad stairs to the second floor he went, hearing only

  his own clumsy footfalls, and past the clay-sealed doors of

  the General and Father and Mama and Alice and Allegra and

  Edith. No one whispered, no one scampered.

  In Frank’s Room, he rolled himself in his blankets and

  quilt (had Allegra helped stitch the patchwork?), and almost

  at once the consciousness went out of him, and he must have

  slept dreamless for the first night since he was a farm boy.

  So profound had been his sleep, deep almost as death, that

  the siren may have been wailing for some minutes before at

  last it roused him. Frank knew that horrid sound: it had called

  for him thrice before, as he fled from prisons. Who wanted

  him now? He heaved his ponderous body out of the warm

  bed. The candle that he had brought up from the Sunday

  parlor and left burning all night was flickering in its socket,

  but by that flame he could see the hour on his watch: seven

  o’clock, too soon for dawn.

  Through the narrow skylight, as he flung on his clothes,

  the sky glowed an unnatural red, though it was long before

  sunup. The prison siren ceased to wail, as if choked off.

  Frank lumbered to the little frieze-window, and saw to the

  north, perhaps two miles distant, a monstrous mass of flame

  shooting high into the air. The prison was afire.

  Then came shots outside: first the bark of a heavy revolver,

  followed irregu
larly by blasts of shotguns or rifles. Frank was

  lacing his boots with a swiftness uncongenial to him. He got

  into his overcoat as there came a crashing and battering down

  below. That sound, too, he recognized, wood-chopper that

  he had been: axes shattering the front door.

  Amid this pandemonium, Frank was too bewildered to

  grasp altogether where he was or even how this catastrophe

  might be fitted into the pattern of time. All that mattered was

  flight; the scheme of his escape remained clear in his mind.

  120

  Russell Kirk

  Pull up the chair below the skylight, heave yourself out to

  the upper roof, descend those iron rungs to the woodshed

  roof, make for the other side of the freeway, then—why, then

  you must trust to circumstance, Frank. It’s that long, long

  trail a-winding for you.

  Now he heard a woman screaming within the house, and

  slipped and fumbled in his alarm. He had got upon the chair,

  opened the skylight, and was trying to obtain a good grip on

  the icy outer edge of the skylight-frame, when someone

  knocked and kicked at the door of Frank’s Room.

  Yet those were puny knocks and kicks. He was about to

  heave himself upward when, in a relative quiet—the screaming had ceased for a moment—he heard a little shrill voice outside his door, urgently pleading: “ Frank, Frank, let me

  in!”

  He was arrested in flight as though great weights had been

  clamped to his ankles. That little voice he knew, as if it were

  part of him: Allegra’s voice.

  For a brief moment he still meant to scramble out the skylight. But the sweet little voice was begging. He stumbled off the chair, upset it, and was at the door in one stride.

  “ Is that you, Allegra?”

  “ Open it, Frank, please open it!”

  He turned the key and pulled the bolt. On the threshold

  the little girl stood, indistinct by the dying candlelight, terribly pale, all tears, frantic.

  Frank snatched her up. Ah, this was the dear real Allegra

  Anthony, all warm and soft and sobbing, flesh and blood! He

  kissed her cheek gently.

  She clung to him in terror, and then squirmed loose, tugging at his heavy hand: “ Oh, Frank, come on! Come downstairs! They’re hurting Mama!”

  “ Who is, little girl?” He held her tiny hand, his body

  quivering with dread and indecision. “ Who’s down there,

  Allegra?”

  “ The bad men! Come on, Frank!” Braver than he, the

  There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding

  121

  little thing plunged back down the garret stair into the blackness below.

  “ Allegra! Come back here—come back now!” He bellowed it, but she was gone.

  Up two flights of stairs, there poured to him a tumult of

  shrieks, curses, laughter, breaking noises. Several men were

  below, their, speech slurred and raucous. He did not need

  Allegra to tell him what kind of men they were, for he heard

  prison slang and prison foulness, and he shook all over. There

  still was the skylight.

  He would have turned back to that hole in the roof, had

  not Allegra squealed in pain somewhere on the second floor.

  Dazed, trembling, unarmed, Frank went three steps down the

  garret staircase. “ Allegra! Little girl! What is it, Allegra?”

  Someone was charging up the stair toward him. It was a

  burly man in the prison uniform, a lighted lantern in one

  hand and a glittering axe in the other. Frank had no time to

  turn. The man screeched obscenely at him, and swung that

  axe.

  In those close quarters, wielded by a drunken man, it was

  a chancy weapon. The edge shattered the plaster wall; the

  flat of the blade thumped upon Frank’s shoulder. Frank,

  lurching forward, took the man by the throat with a mighty

  grip. They all tumbled pellmell down the steep stairs—the

  two men, the axe, the lantern.

  Frank’s ursine bulk landed atop the stranger’s body, and

  Frank heard his adversary’s bones crunch. The lantern had

  broken and gone out. The convict’s head hung loose on his

  shoulders, Frank found as he groped for the axe. Then he

  trampled over the fallen man and flung himself along the

  corridor, gripping the axe-helve. “ Allegra! Allegra girl!”

  From the head of the main stair, he could see that the

  lamps and candles were burning in the hall and in the rooms

  of the ground floor. All three children were down there, wailing, and above their noise rose Mama’s shrieks again. A mob of men were stamping, breaking things, roaring with amusement and desire, shouting filth. A bottle shattered.

  122

  Russell Kirk

  His heart pounding as if it would burst out of his chest,

  Frank hurried rashly down that stair and went, all crimson

  with fury, into the Sunday parlor, the double-bitted axe

  swinging in his hand. They all were there: the little girls,

  Mama, and five wild men. “ Stop that!” Frank roared with

  all the power of his lungs. “ You let them go!”

  Everyone in the parlor stood transfixed at that summons

  like the Last Trump. Allegra had been tugging pathetically

  at the leg of a dark man who gripped her mother’s waist, and

  the other girls sputtered and sobbed, cornered, as a tall man

  poured a bottle of whiskey over them. Mrs. Anthony’s gown

  was ripped nearly its whole length, and a third man was

  bending her backward by her long hair, ds if he would snap

  her spine. Near the hall door stood a man like a long lean

  rat, the Rat of Creepmouse Town, a shotgun on his arm,

  gape-jawed at Frank’s intervention. Guns and axes lay scattered about the Tbrkey carpet. By the fireplace, a fifth man had been heating the poker in the flames.

  For that tableau-moment, they all stared astonished at the

  raving giant who had burst upon them; and the giant, puffing,

  stared back with his strange blue eyes. “ Oh, Frank!” Allegra

  sobbed: it was more command than entreaty—as if, Frank

  thought in a flash of insane mirth, he were like the boy in the

  fairy tale who could cry confidently, “ All heads off but mine!”

  He knew what these men were, the rats and bats of Creep-

  mouse Town: the worst men in any prison, lifers who had

  made their hell upon earth, killers all of them and worse than

  killers. The rotten damnation showed in all those flushed and

  drunken faces. Then the dark man let go of Mama and said

  in relief, with a coughing laugh, “ Hell, it’s only old Punkin-

  head Frank, clowning again! Have some fun for yourself,

  Frank boy!”

  “ Hey, Frank,” Ratface asked, his shotgun crooked under

  his arm, “ where’d the old man keep his money?”

  Frank towered there perplexed, the berserker-lust draining

  out of him, almost bashful—and frightened worse than ever

  before in all his years on the trail. What should he shout now?

  There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding

  123

  What should he do? Who was he to resist such perfect evil?

  They were five to one, and those five were fiends from down

  under, and that one a coward. Long ago he had been weighed

  in the balance and found wantin
g.

  Mama was the first to break the tableau. Her second captor

  had relaxed his clutch upon her hair, and she prodded the

  little girls before her, and she leaped for the door.

  The hair-puller was after her at once, but she bounded past

  Ratface’s shotgun, which had wavered toward Frank, and Alice and Edith were ahead of her. Allegra, her eyes wide and desperate, tripped over the rung of a broken chair. Everything happened in half a second. The hair-puller caught Allegra by her little ankle.

  Then Frank bellowed again, loudest in all his life, and he

  swung his axe high above his head and downward, a skillful

  dreadful stroke, catching the hair-puller’s arm just below the

  shoulder. At once the man began to scream and spout, while

  Allegra fled after her mother.

  Falling, the hair-puller collided with Ratface, spoiling his

  aim, but one barrel of the shotgun fired, and Frank felt pain

  in his side. His bloody axe on high, he hulked between the

  five men and the door.

  All the men’s faces were glaring at Frank, incredulously,

  as if demanding how he dared stir against them. Three convicts were scrabbling tipsily for weapons on the floor. As Frank strode among them, he saw the expression on those

  faces change from gloating to desperation. Just as his second

  blow descended, there passed through his mind a kind of

  fleshly collage of death he had seen once at a farmyard gate:

  the corpses of five weasels nailed to a gatepost by the farmer,

  their frozen open jaws agape like damned souls in Hell.

  “ All heads off but mine!” Frank heard himself braying.

  ‘‘All heads off but mine!” He hacked and hewed, his own

  screams of lunatic fury drowning their screams of terror.

  For less than three minutes, shots, thuds, shrieks, crashes,

  terrible wailing. They could not get past him to the doorway.

  ‘‘Come on!” Frank was raging as he stood in the middle

  124

  Russell Kirk

  of the parlor. ‘ ‘Come on, who’s next? All heads off but mine!

  Who’s next?”

  There came no answer but a ghastly rattle from one of the

  five heaps that littered the carpet. Blood-soaked from hair to

  boots, the berserker towered alone, swaying where he stood.

  His mind began to clear. He had been shot twice, Frank

  guessed, and the pain at his heart was frightful. Into his frantic consciousness burst all the glory of what he had done, and all the horror.