by Daniel Mills
He is in the hospital. The days pass, and he is discharged, sent home to recover. Home: his parents’ house, where he is treated like a sickly child. His mother hovers by the bedside, reading passages aloud from the Bible or Reader’s Digest. His father kneels by the bed with his hand folded round Samuel’s, offering up prayers for his recovery.
Some of his Sunday School students come to visit, three boys in tee shirts and swimsuits. They linger in the doorway, their limbs white and hairless. One boy is heavier than the others, the fat forming dimples where it overhangs his knees. They sing songs from church, their faces like masks showing nothing, and afterward, the fat boy says they are going swimming.
“Off to the beach, then?” Samuel’s father asks.
“No,” the boy says. “We’ll probably just go up to the dam.”
The final song is sung—let the lower lights be burning, send a gleam across the wave—and his father ushers them from the room. Samuel listens for their voices as they retreat downstairs, the door closing behind them.
The boys are gone.
He heaves himself onto his side, turns his face to the wall.
A Shadow Passing
March 15th, 1937. These things he remembers.
The light is green, then gold. The elms are waving, and he is a child again, feverish and chilled. He smells smoke, leaf-mold in the gutters. His mother’s eau de cologne.
She lingers in the doorway, dressed in widow’s black with kid gloves buttoned to her sleeves and her hair in a bun with no strand out of place.
I’m going out, she says.
She speaks these words to no one. The others are upstairs (his grandfather, his aunt), and she does not see him where he crouches behind the settee, listening as the doors fall shut: the inner, the outer.
He leaps to his feet, running, and watches from the window as she rounds the far corner. Her shadow dwindles down the pavement, vanishing with the light through the elm trees.
He waits.
Later, his aunt finds him curled up in the window-seat, shivering as his fever climbs. Minutes or hours have passed, and his mother has not returned.
Poor child, she says. You needn’t worry about her.
And he does not reply because he knows better. Because his mother has come to him at night when the fires have gone out and told him of the shapes that dwell between the buildings, the winged shadows she calls them.
His aunt helps him up. She places her hand across his forehead, sighs, and leads him to the kitchen that is her sanctum. It is warmer here, the flames kindled high and licking round the copper kettle. She sits him down at the table and sees to his supper in silence, as is her way, unspeaking unless spoken to and he has nothing to say.
The kitchen is quiet but for the rasp of her breathing. His aunt makes herself coffee and rolls out the dough for her teacakes, which she keeps in a tin with the President’s face on it and the words Remember the Maine inscribed below. This tin is forbidden him, as are so many things, and his aunt keeps it on a shelf where he cannot reach.
Six o’clock. His aunt claps her hands to rid them of flour and lights the kerosene lamp. The wick she turns down to a glowering—orange like the windows that look west to the street. She will not use the gas. She is thrifty, as is her sister, who lives near Boston with her husband and saves her hair in jars to use as stuffing for her cushions.
His grandfather does not join them. There will be no stories tonight, no tales of djinns and princesses such as his grandfather is fond of telling. They eat alone in the paneled dining room with the vast expanse of table between them and the lamp placed near its center, the flame burning low as the hour stretches, and the windows are black past the lamplight when he hears the doors slam shut: the outer door, the inner.
His mother enters. Her hands are bare, the gloves discarded so her knuckles show, the long fingers. Her eyes are blank, hair windblown and wild.
His aunt, rising, takes his mother by the arm before she can speak and walks with her down the hallway to the stair. It is some time before his aunt returns, and the boy is alone with the darkness gathering into shapes like wings all round him, beating out of the shadows.
Afterward, when supper is finished, he sneaks a candle from the tallboy and brings it to his bedroom upstairs. His aunt would disapprove, as would his mother, but he strikes a match and lights the candle and quickly falls asleep.
He is shaken awake. His mother looms over him, white and ghostly in the half-dark.
She says: I saw them again. They came out of the canal, rising in a smoke where the sun makes patterns from the floating leaves. I ran. I fled over the bridge, up the hill. I was making for the church—I thought I’d be safe there—but the alleys swarmed with them, hundreds of them, with bodies made of corners so you see them only where they block the light. I lost my hatpin, my gloves, but still I did not stop, not until I reached the church on the hill. I fell down, gasping, but they would come no nearer. They unfolded their bodies, forming rings around me. The church was at my back, its black spire, and I thought—
Her lips are wet, her breathing strained and rapid.
She says: It’s raining.
The elms are dripping, a gentle music. An arabber drags his cart down the street, whistling down the damp.
Then his mother notices the pilfered candle, and her face changes, her voice. Her mouth curls in on itself so that he scarcely recognizes her, this creature with a voice like the frost and the spittle flying from her lips.
You wicked thief, she says. You stole this from downstairs, didn’t you?
She slaps him once across the face. She calls him ugly and selfish and cursed with his father’s temperament. She snuffs the light and carries it with her when she goes.
His aunt is waiting in the hall. The two sisters argue in whispers, as not to wake his grandfather, who is sleeping in the room next door.
The rain continues.
The boy lies awake with the blankets pulled to his face, the nerves vibrating in his gut. An omnibus, passing, drags the puddles behind it, and he recalls the first time she saw them.
Like winged shadows, she said. But with hooks for teeth and long arms to reach.
Beyond that, she would not describe them, or perhaps could not, for she said she spied them only from the edges of her vision, in the angles where two roof-lines met, or where a tall man’s shadow divided on a slab of uneven paving.
In his dreams tonight, they surface out of the Moshassuck, with wings spread and mouths open, gums and lips flapping. They breach the water and hover in plumes above the river, coiled in darkness and merging with it before scattering themselves over the city with the rain that strikes the window, calling him from sleep.
It is Sunday morning, the curtains slightly parted. He fumbles at the bedside, fingers closing round the pocket-watch that belonged to his late father, whom he never knew.
Nine o’clock. Church bells sound throughout the city.
He dresses himself and descends the stairs, passing the parlor, where he is surprised to hear his aunt’s voice. She is not at church, then, but is talking with her father, his grandfather, and with his other aunt, visiting from Boston, the door closed and fastened.
There is no one in the kitchen. The boy lingers over the hearth where the coals smolder in the grate. He looks west toward the street, the rows of gray buildings washed clean by rain, sending back the bells in echoes.
His mother has gone out—early this time. He imagines her footsteps, heels striking pavement then soundless where they drop like rain amongst the muddied leaves.
And silent in the same way he tiptoes down the hall to the parlor, where his aunts are arguing now, their voices indistinguishable from one another.
It cannot continue. Not like this.
So young. And such a fragile thing—
Not as fragile as his mother.
But surely that is the point.
His grandfather’s voice: queer and creaking, scarcely audible.
T
oo much, he says. Sent away.
With these words, the fear settles over the boy. Terror fixes the bones inside him, binding the muscles so he cannot move, though footsteps cross the parlor and the door swings open to reveal his married aunt, who keeps her hair in tins beneath the bed.
She scowls. Listening at keyholes now? she says.
He turns and runs and throws himself into the window-seat. He pulls the blanket over him and presses his face to the window. The old glass vibrates with every bell from outside, blurring the light with the drips from the eaves and the elms beyond like yellow flags waving—and still his mother does not return.
An hour passes. He watches the married aunt depart with her umbrella, making for her hotel. She proceeds quickly, cheeks flushed and head down and so she does not see him.
His aunt enters the hall and lingers over the window-seat, wreathed in the smells of coffee and pipe-smoke. He lowers the blanket. She extends her hand to him with the palm open, a tea-cake nestled in the thatch of wrinkle and bone.
Take it, she says, and he does, and chokes it down quickly for fear that she might take it away or that his mother might see him with the sugar smeared about his lips.
His aunt nods, satisfied, and continues to the kitchen.
The boy retreats to his bedroom. He wraps the blanket round him like a shawl as to ward off the chill, returning now with his fever as the afternoon passes. He loses himself in the books he has borrowed from his grandfather’s study, rereading the stories of heroes and dryads and gods from the sea. He is working on a tale of his own, a story of a ship. He opens his notebook—a gift from his grandfather—but finds he cannot focus on the page for thoughts of his mother and of the things that follow her.
Hours later, with night approaching, he hears the doors open and shut and listens for her step outside his bedroom. It does not come. He closes the notebook and steals across the hall to the carved railing that overlooks the staircase. His mother sits on the landing, marooned in a mess of skirt and crinoline and with her head held in her hands.
She lifts her gaze. Her eyes are dry and empty and she sees through him where he stands with his fingers round the railing and the terror bursting over him once more.
Too much, his grandfather said. Sent away.
His mother says: They waited so long. I walked for hours and miles and still they didn’t show themselves. It was dusk before they came for me. I watched them approach. I waited with hands held out, expectant. They gathered themselves into clouds, which whirled and spun beyond my grasp for all I begged them to touch me, to take me. They parted with a ripple of wings, and I saw the hill beyond them. The church was clearly visible, and I knew at once what was required of me.
His mother hears footsteps, is quiet. His aunt emerges from the kitchen with a ladle in hand and her lips pressed together, a thin line.
His aunt says: You were gone all day.
His mother shrugs.
You might at least have told us where you were going.
Nowhere, his mother says.
Our sister has come from Boston. She wanted to see you.
His mother laughs. Is that so? She’s staying at a hotel, isn’t she?
We talked to Father. You’ve left us no other choice.
Father, she says, dully.
About your—sickness.
I am perfectly well.
Please, you must think of the child—
He is my child, she says. Not yours.
Anyway, Father is in agreement. The doctor is coming tomorrow.
Doctor. The word drops like a thunderclap between them and his mother is on her feet, yelling and flailing out. The boy bolts down the hall to his room and slams the door on the noise from downstairs. The leaves of his story rise up in a storm from the desk and then float down softly, landing face-down on the floor.
He burrows deep into the bedclothes and closes his eyes as the shadows loom over him, slanted with the streetlamps through the curtains. He sees winged creatures with legs like thin cables and arms arrayed in writhing masses. A church spire long and sharp where it wounds the sky, the clouds pouring down blood. His mother surfacing out of the river. She grins, horribly, showing steel hooks for teeth. He does not go down for supper.
Midnight comes, and his mother enters the bedroom, souring the air with her perfume. He pretends to sleep. She places the candle on the nightstand and sits down beside the bed. She says nothing, makes no attempt to wake him, and he does not stir, though an hour passes or more until at last she rises and goes out, her perfume fading.
Hours later, he wakes with the same fever, familiar now. His legs ache, and his head is like crown glass. There will be no school today.
His mother is downstairs in the parlor. She is sleeping on the daybed while the glow makes patterns on her face: light through leaves and the leaf-shadows overlying it. Her brow is relaxed, hands falling open, her fingers half-curled like the smile on her lips.
He finds his aunt in the kitchen, leant up against the countertop with a teacup clasped in both hands and her gaze fixed on nowhere, the curtains drawn across the windows. She nods at him as he enters and wordlessly boils him an egg. As usual she takes no breakfast herself but merely watches him eat while sipping her coffee to the dregs, and her voice is hoarse and brittle when, finally, she speaks.
She says: Your Grandfather is asking after you.
She breathes out sharply, fumbles in her apron for her pipe.
She says: There is something you should know about. My sister reckons you’re too young, but Father and I—well, we think maybe you’re old enough.
She lights her pipe, waves him away.
Go on, she says. He’s in his study waiting.
The door to the study is ajar, though the boy pauses at the threshold. His grandfather is slumped at the desk with his back to the door and his head bowed forward. The breath whistles from him, doubling the sound of the wind in the casement.
Come and sit down, his grandfather says.
The boy shuffles inside with head bowed and eyes averted, saying nothing as the old man’s gaze strikes across him: his ugliness, his shame. He sits on the rug beside his grandfather’s chair and crosses his legs.
His grandfather looks out toward the street, and his gaze lingers there a spell, as though watching for a long-awaited guest. He opens his mouth then hesitates, closing his eyes—and with eyes closed, he tells a story. This time he does not take down a book from the shelf behind him but speaks instead from memory or imagination with the words and phrases trailing one another, a halting procession.
Once in Baghdad, he says, there lived a princess, who was the Caliph’s daughter. Her hair was darkly luminous, as is the new moon, while her smile was coy and lovely as the crescent. She had many suitors, princes of Syria and Jordan, but the Caliph loved her more than life itself and could not bear to be parted from her. He turned them all away, princes and poets alike, and the princess withdrew into her loneliness.
Around this time a young man arrived in the city. This boy was the son of a magician and carried with him a sealed bottle, which his father had left him, though he had warned the boy against opening it. For within this bottle there dwelt a djinn, who was cunning and cruel, as are all such spirits. One night, at dusk, this young man chanced to spy the princess on her balcony and a kind of madness overcame him. He unstoppered the bottle.
The djinn issued in a vapor from the bottle’s narrow neck and unfolded himself to stand in a cloud high over the boy. The spirit was tall as the tallest man and black as an eclipsing sun and curved the night about himself in the same way. The djinn proposed to him a bargain. If the boy would but break the bottle, giving the djinn his freedom, the djinn would grant the child his heart’s innermost desire.
Now this young man could have had anything, but he was afflicted with love and thought of nothing save the princess. He wished for one night alone with her beauty, which was to him, the boy said, as pale and bright as the stars in winter. Saying this, he
smashed the bottle.
The djinn kept his bargain. He gathered the boy and the princess into his arms and whisked them away to a mountain far from the city, to a place where no living thing grew and the snows lay deep and white as the Milky Way overhead.
The djinn departed. He laughed as he rode the night winds, leaving the two lovers alone in that place of winter, just as the boy had desired, with the cold stars shining over them. There was nothing to eat, no wood with which to make a fire, and the young man, despairing, leapt to his death.
But the princess was the Caliph’s daughter: she was born with iron in her heart. The tears froze inside her eyes but she trusted in her father and waited through the night for the rescue she knew must come.
His grandfather halts. The old man’s voice trails off to a strangled pitch, his breathing slow and labored. His eyes stray to the window overlooking the street, where a coach has pulled up beside the house. A man alights from inside, wearing a black cloak and top-hat.
His grandfather says: And in the end he, too, betrayed her.
These last words circle the boy, unheard for the heat of his illness and the blood that pulses in his ears. The old man lowers his head to the desk once more. His story is over, will never be finished, and the leaves outside are shearing from the elm trees, burying roads and walkways. The doorbell sounds.
His aunt responds from the kitchen. Coming, she says.
The boy, standing, backs up toward the hallway, terrified by the thought of the cloaked visitor and the fate which has come for him.
His mother appears. She sweeps toward him down the corridor, dressed in black with her hair pinned up beneath a wide hat. Her face betrays excitement, relief.
This way, she says, and takes his hand in hers. She drags him down the corridor to the back door and outside onto the lawn.
She says: They are waiting for us. We mustn't be late.
And so they run. He flies with her down an adjoining alleyway, his hand folded in hers and her skirts billowing out behind. The folds engulf him, wrapping round his face and eyes so he follows blindly, their steps carrying them downhill and at such a pace that the speed of it threatens to lift him from the ground and send him sailing up behind her, a tethered balloon.
