In the afternoon, after posting my letter to Jane in the red-enamelled box outside the front door, I dug with reluctance from the pile of papers on my desk the manuscript I’d been instructed to proofread and type. It amounted to only a few pages scrawled across with the same cramped, crippled script, which, on a second viewing, I seemed to have little difficulty making out. I was no great reader, but something in the opening lines caught me and instead of typing I sat at my desk reading.
It was a sort of a horror story—or it began like one, anyway—about a young chambermaid, Aralyn Eakinns, the only child of a reclusive and aged New England fisherman, Oakley Eakinns. Aralyn had come to Providence shortly after her mother disappeared under mysterious circumstances, Oakley claiming the mother had run off to Philadelphy or somewhere as she always promised she would. Aralyn found work in a local hotel—elegantly carpeted and crystalled—down on Benefit Street near the waterfront. She was not a favourite among her co-workers and employers. A certain standoffishness, a certain haughtiness, hardly appropriate in a girl of such humble origins, was found distasteful, offensive. They found her cold, in every sense; her fellow chambermaids, brushing against her as they stripped the bedclothes, felt an inexplicable repulsion. They went out of their way to avoid her.
And more: Old Oakley would turn up there at the hotel each night, smelling of cinders, and sit in the lobby beneath the chandeliers, waiting in his work clothes on the finely upholstered rose settees, his muddy boots planted firmly on the silk carpets, scratching absently at the knees of his dungarees, watching everyone with a cold, bulbous stare while they pretended not to see him, and waiting for Aralyn to finish work so he could take her home.
Aralyn, seeing him there, would stop suddenly while passing through the lobby and stare coldly back. The other employees exchanged glances, watching from their corners, until finally Oakley bared his broken teeth at her and said, High time you come home. Then, nodding once, he rose and disappeared out the glass doors into the Providence darkness. The hotel manager was infuriated by them but would never have dreamed of inviting either of them, father or daughter, to leave.
It surprised no one when Aralyn, black-haired and bewitching, married into money. A frequent guest of the hotel, Mr. Harris Wolfe, a California businessman not much younger than Oakley himself, whisked her away to a life of sunlight and blue pools and caviar—this latter a delicacy for which Aralyn had a particular taste—far from her dreary, questionable New England roots and a life of toil and decadence, a word my employer seemed overly fond of using, along with “eldritch” and “unknowable.” The other employees of the hotel were not sorry to see Aralyn go, not least because they would no longer be forced to suffer Oakley’s objectionable presence.
And yet, though Aralyn was gone, Oakley continued his nightly visitations, stepping through the glass doors, trailing ribbons of fog, to sit staring an hour or two under the rose light of the chandeliers, before rising, announcing to the room, High time she come home, and disappearing back into the night.
Or so began the tale.
Though I had never been one for such nonsense, this story quite captured my interest, or fancy, call it what you will. I knew the hotel to which my employer referred on Benefit Street, which cut across College Hill west of the university, a street of red brick colonials and the aforementioned hotel, among others, frequented by moneyed tourists and businessmen. He certainly spun an engaging yarn, and I confess I was uncertain from how he told the story what to take as truth and what fiction. Since there was such a hotel, perhaps there was such a family also.
I set to focused work typing the pages, losing myself in the slow rhythm of the keys and, again, in Oakley and Aralyn. When at last I looked up and out the window over the misty garden, I felt, from having sunk myself so deeply into the story, remote, disconnected, as if I were not of the world. Beyond the box hedge, the man Baxter and his son had come out. The boy in his crimson scarf played with one of the shed cats on the grass while his father, in an overcoat, sat frowning on the steps, smoking, circling items in what I assumed was the help-wanted section of the paper. I rose and stood at the window. My heart went out to them.
The muffled creak of a screen door, and father and son were joined by a woman with a gray woollen wrap thrown about her shoulders. She looked pleasant, apple-cheeked, hardly a madwoman. I watched as she walked up behind Baxter and draped her arms about his shoulders, her chin resting comfortably on the top of his head. My hand went on impulse to my heart, as if it could still what swelled brutally there.
The man Baxter, perhaps alerted by my sudden movement, looked up sharply and I stepped back, out of the window. I cannot say for certain why I did so, nor whether he had seen me there, but he rose and took the woman’s arm. James, I heard him command, and his wife, amused, puzzled, said, What is it? their voices so faint and brittle through the windowglass, they might have been speaking out of a former age. The boy, James, rose heavily and followed his parents, glancing back once with that unnerving gaze, directly up to the attic window behind which I stood, before disappearing inside the boarding house. Only the cat remained, abandoned there in the long grasses, looking perplexed, too, at the sudden departure.
And I felt, for no reason I could explain, as if I had been caught at something despicable.
3
I saw him, my employer. I felt certain of it.
That night as I drifted into sleep, curled on my side, my hands pressed between my knees for warmth, he was there, bending close over me in streetlight, to see were I asleep or not. I sat up in alarm, the bed coils shrieking beneath me.
Of course, there was no one.
And yet I had seen him. He was tall, about my height and build roughly, perhaps a little on the thinner side, a little on the older, with broad shoulders and a long, aquiline face. The vision was so strong I could even describe what he wore: wire spectacles, a heavy cardigan buttoned up over a white shirt. About the collar, or whether or not he wore a tie, I could not say.
I turned on the table lamp and climbed out of bed. The floor was cold. I opened the door upon the dark stairwell and paused there, listening. Nothing. I stepped onto the landing and opened the adjacent door. Just the old cornbroom and the boxes and an odour of dust and liniment. I closed the door again and went back to my room.
Still, the sense of someone having been there—the sense of him having been there—was so strong I dressed hastily and went down to the kitchenette, as if I might find him there, perhaps making a cup of cocoa, saying, Ah, Candle, there you are. I hope I didn’t waken you, but I did so want to meet you. I’m feeling quite well, you see. Care for a cup?
But the second floor, too, was dark. Only the light shining dimly from beneath his study door. And that presence, a slight stirring of the air around me, as if someone, something, moved there in the darkness. I scarcely knew what to think of it, whether it was the place or my own unreliable perceptions.
About the nightmare—my employer in my room—I knew not what to think, either. I was beginning to wonder if it was not a result of reading that story, an eerie conjuring of Oakley Eakinns, though there was nothing of resemblance between the two. Still, there was something haunting in Oakley’s refrain, High time you come home, which ran through my head in endless, unwanted repetition.
I returned to bed, locking the door to my room behind me. But I could not sleep and I rose again and stood instead for some time staring across the city to the lightless dormer window, Oakley’s refrain still ringing in my head.
In the morning, a fat white envelope lay waiting on the pedestal table in the front hall. I carried it to the kitchen and sat down to read it over a cup of that detestable cocoa—the only thing I seemed able to stomach—made slightly more palatable by the addition of several teaspoons of sugar scraped from the bottom of a cracked porcelain bowl so palely blue it resembled bone. I made a mental note to go out to the shops to purchase more, along with a few other items that were wanting. Already, I felt foolish for my
overreaction to the dream of the previous night. A brisk walk in the fresh air would do me good.
The letter looked to be another long one. Tucked inside the envelope I also found a smaller envelope. This I took, with some relief, to be my advance, which I intended to post to Jane immediately. I put it aside for the moment and unfolded the letter.
It came to five pages, slightly shorter than his previous missive, though the handwriting, cramped and nearly illegible then, had deteriorated substantially. He noted this himself and begged my tolerance, explaining it away as the result of long hours at work the previous day. Were he to strive for greater legibility, he claimed, he would not complete the many letters and manuscripts he wished.
He was, oddly, both the most courteous (my eerie dream more foolish still) and the most thoroughly snobbish person I’d ever—I could not say met—become acquainted with. He was all exceeding politeness but referred often to his inability to go outside not only because of his illness and the dreadful cold but, worse still, the miserable burgeoning rabble which throng the streets and shops daily.
He inquired as to whether I had made any progress on the typing of his manuscript and his correspondence, adding that he hoped I would not trouble him but simply post the letters as I finished them, for he trusted to my accuracy. He advised again that I leave the typed pages on the hall table, forbidding me to knock at his door under any circumstances. He wondered also if I would be interested in a rather tedious project which I have lately undertaken with some regrets. This project, it seemed, was some sort of book of grammar, a kind of ghostwriting which he told me made up a good deal of his income, though he spoke of it as a favour, or a hobby, rather than actual gainful employment.
He apologized, too, at length for the lack of heat in my quarters and complained himself of the unseasonably cold temperatures, assuring me that once spring arrived, as it surely would any day, I would notice a distinct change in the atmosphere of my attic room as the sun strikes there quite clear and bright, with a honeyed, bee-buzz warmth, for the greater part of the day, making it so pleasant I almost wish I’d arranged it for my own use. I read this line twice, marvelling that a grown man would use the phrase “honeyed, bee-buzz warmth.” But, then, he was a writer, after all.
He advised, in the meantime, that extra blankets could be found in the linen cupboard just outside his aunt’s room. He wrote:
My good Aunt Annie, as I believe I have mentioned, is likely to remain in hospital another two weeks, and since she has, for some time now, been my most doting caretaker, I feel her absence keenly, as you might imagine. In fact, she is almost as a second mother to me, only more, how shall I put it, at once more demonstrative and more combative. I mean this in only the most affectionate sense. That she is not one to take things sitting down, as the young folks say nowadays. That she is not easily bruised, as it were; an anomaly among us Phillipses, it would seem. You see she is the younger sister to my mother, the latter by far the more sensitive of the two, though there seems in us all to be bred a streak of what I can only call the unusual; the inevitable result, perhaps, of a pure and unvarying bloodline. You will, of course, meet her in good time, my aunt, and then you may see for yourself what I mean when I say she is a bit of a Viking—that Nordic blood!—although her illness may have temporarily doused some of the fire in her, as mine has in me.
As to my mother, perhaps a word here is in order. I beg you to understand that all the damage wrought on a sensitive and artistic temperament such as hers—among other qualities and accomplishments, she is a painter and pianist of no little skill and has an impressive writing and speaking knowledge of French—has left her also unwell. Her, shall we say, highly refined, aristocratic nerves have for the moment gotten quite the better of her and so she has been advised a period of complete rest while she recovers her equilibrium, as it were. My own unfortunate illness, this grippe I have been battling most of the winter, now the worst it’s been, along with the insufferably cold weather, has kept me this week from my accustomed visits, and she must be speculating at my absence. I wonder if you would consider paying her a call and explaining the situation? I have outlined the matter in my letter, but Mother has always been a worrier and will no doubt jump to grim conclusions if the situation is not explained in propria persona, or as close to it as I can manage! I have, you see, rather a history of—well, “nervous breakdown” smacks of the hysterical!—perhaps “nervous disorder” captures it best, and I was for a long time in my youth subject to my own confinement—but enough; suffice it to say she will worry. I grieve mightily at my own unavoidable absence and would consider your visit a great favour in addition to taking it into account as, shall we say, your services rendered.
You will find when you meet her, no doubt, that she is striking, even given her age—which in itself is not considered “old” by any stretch of the proverbial imagination—her complexion not outmatched in whiteness and purity, and her features being rather inclined to the aquiline, the noble, retaining their good qualities no matter the advancement of age.
At any rate, I do believe you will enjoy meeting someone of her position and calibre in society, and I dare say you might spend a pleasant hour or two in her company should you see it possible to spare the hours from your work here. She is not one for games of cards or other such imbecile amusements, nor is she much inclined to conversation, but we have on her best days spent many a pleasant hour at the little park along the river in companionable silence.
He reiterated that he would be much obliged if I would make the letter a priority.
There was, however, no mention of advance or salary.
I upturned the outer envelope onto the table, and a thin fold of bills clipped together, hardly enough for the shops, slid out. A note accompanied this: To be used for postage, foodstuffs, writing supplies, et cetera.
On the reverse of this note, ink sketches of strange, insect-like creatures, emaciated and many-legged, with terrible, grasping mouths. Not a penny toward my advance.
I crumpled the note into a tight twist and flicked it from the table in irritation. It slid beneath the range. I sat staring into my cocoa a moment. Beyond my irritation, something about the letter made me distinctly uneasy. I could not put my finger on just what it was. In part, the mention of a nervous disorder, certainly. That image—premonition, vision, nightmare, call it what you will—of him bending over me in the darkness of my attic room came back to me. But there was yet something more, something troubling, about the mother.
I reread the letter, looking for clues to my unease. Finding nothing, but not finding comfort either, I rose from the table and, getting down on hands and knees, wedged my fingers beneath the range, feeling around until I retrieved the clotted, soiled paper. Smoothing it against my knee, I folded it and his letter into my pocket, along with the letter for his mother, and stuck the few bills into my wallet. Beyond the window, it had begun to rain hard again. The letter would not be delivered that day, at any rate.
So, too, did I feel not a little resentful that already he required more of me while not holding up his end of the bargain. On the back of the torn envelope, I scrawled a hasty note inquiring again about the advance. After swilling the last dregs of my detestable cocoa, I rinsed my cup and put it away.
I was compelled, upon returning to my room, to switch on the desk lamp as I worked, though whether because of the lowering skies or the black rain or my own uneasiness I could not have said.
I pulled the letter for his mother from my suit jacket. I stared at the envelope a long while. Finally, I took a letter opener from the drawer and sat tapping it on the desk. But I could not; it would be unforgivable. At long length, I dropped the envelope on the desk and rose with the letter opener. The boxes stood there along the wall. I confess I hesitated. I had never been one to pry into the business of others. If anything, I had been too much inclined the other way. You lack interest, Jane had often said, quite unjustly, I thought then, in anyone other than yourself.
Taking the first box, I slit it open. Papers, old pamphlets and circulars, anonymous memorabilia; insignificant, uninteresting. The same true of all the boxes. Nothing; though what I thought I might find I could not have said. The last two boxes in the corner were unsealed and I pried open their lids to discover magazines with grotesque cover illustrations: enormous, fanged serpents and tortured specters, winged demons and vampires hovering over cowering, shrieking ladies in scanty dress.
Putting them aside, I surveyed the mess I’d made of the room. I stacked the boxes all up against the wall again and put the magazines on my desk. Then I recalled the other boxes in the adjacent room. After pausing on the landing to listen—for, though it was unlikely, I did not relish the idea of being caught prying into someone else’s belongings—I stepped across and entered the lightless room. I opened the first box. Then the second, the third. I did not stop until they all stood open on the floor around me. Every box was the same: women’s clothing, the aunt’s, I assumed, dated as they were to my eye, but of good quality, silks and velvets stiffened with age and disuse. A faint, stale odour of lavender and liniment filled the air. I felt queer standing there among those garments. Guilty, but something else as well. What is it you’re looking for, Crandle? I asked myself. Having no answer, I hastily stuffed all the clothing back into the boxes. Then, feeling disgusted at myself, I closed the door behind me, intending to make a quick trip out to the shops for packing tape to reseal the boxes before my trespass was discovered.
But, to my astonishment, it was almost four o’clock—where had the hours gone?—and the shops would soon be closed. I returned to the kitchenette with its bright row of primroses and opened a can of chili con carne and heated it on the stove. After eating a few bites while staring out the window at the cats on the shed roof (they seemed to have multiplied), the food did not taste good and I did not feel particularly hungry. I left the remainder in a covered saucepan on low heat on the stovetop for my employer to help himself, as I supposed was expected, though he had not said as much, and went directly upstairs for a few more hours at my desk.
The Broken Hours Page 4