The Broken Hours

by Jacqueline Baker

  And then I saw him, his silhouette against the draperies, rising slowly, a gaunt figure, tall but hunched, crippled almost; just for an instant, darkness against darkness—I might have imagined it—and it was gone.

  Forgive me, he said, weakly, I had been writing a long while before the power went out. I am tired. It has been a bad time, these recent weeks.

  Sir?

  Finances, my own poor health, my aunt. My work, of course. It builds and builds and yet I have no energy for it, no enthusiasm. I am tired, Candle. I must lie down.

  A slow dragging in the darkness, as if he, whatever he was, had not the power to walk but only crawl. Some rustling, and then all, again, was quiet. Only the wind outside.

  I have wasted myself, Candle, came the voice again, at pen and paper. I have been writing since I was a child. Do you know how many books I’ve published?

  I shook my head stupidly in the darkness.

  None. I wonder sometimes, had I made greater efforts, earlier on, to write something of importance, something meaningful.

  Meaningful?

  A story I wrote some time ago. I don’t suppose you know it. Never mind. It matters not. In it, a character of mine finds a key which allows him to return to a time of childhood, where he was happiest. Do you see?

  I think so. Though, of course, I did not.

  He disappears from his adult life even while his relatives report that at the age of ten he gained the ability to predict the future.

  Time collapses?

  In a way. I thought that was important. Then. But it has all been drivel. I have of late been making certain attempts …

  Yes?

  A family saga. The inheritance of blood is, after all, inescapable. But then I have always been relatively indifferent to people, and so depth of character, or feeling, has been a problem for me.

  To which I could quite rightly think of no reply.

  Indeed, Candle. Indeed. But this new story, of blood, can hardly escape character.

  Blood, sir?

  Inevitability. There is a certain school of thought which explains all our monsters, our witches and vampires and werewolves, as a certain kind of insanity. Not that they do not exist, but that they do.That a demon is because he believes himself to be. An internal phenomenon, rather than an external.

  Do you believe it so?

  I know not anymore what I believe. I only want to write …

  Yes?

  Something … important. He paused. And then again, it is awfully late. Forty-six is, after all, forty-six.

  That is not old, sir.

  For some things, Candle.

  He was silent a long moment, then said, It is too late anyway for those kinds of regrets—

  He broke off as if he had lost his breath.

  Are you very unwell? I asked.

  More rustling and a rusty creaking, as of sofa coils.

  I have been always unwell, he said, after a time. A habit, perhaps, from childhood.

  A habit, sir?

  That which is forced upon us early enough. They become our habits. For better or worse. I formed the habit of illness. And of reclusiveness. He paused. I was considered, by some, monstrous then, too.

  I chilled, thinking of the old man’s words to Flossie.

  Why monstrous? I asked.

  It was said I did not go out because I was too hideous, too terrible. I could not be looked upon.

  Said, I asked, by whom?

  My mother.

  The storm lashed and lashed at the windows. The house seemed to tilt in the relentless wind.

  A long silence, and then, I’m quite unwell. Very tired, Candle. You will forgive me if I ask you to come to the point.

  The point, sir? I … wanted to see …

  Yes.

  … if you were all right—

  Did you.

  Your illness—

  Very good of you. To have come. And how is she?

  She?

  Mother. Does she send word?

  She … she’s … she’s well.

  I cringed in the darkness. Was there nothing in me of truth anymore? I prayed he would not ask more. And he did not. The wind rattled the walls.

  Do you need anything? I finally asked.

  I feel, Candle, he said, that I need so much that, were I to be granted my wishes, I would not know where to begin, and I would leave as I had come, with nothing.

  If you should need … , I began, for lack of anything else.

  Ink.

  Ink?

  For writing. I will leave you another letter for Mother. She must be wondering. How is she?

  She’s … well.

  Forgive me, he said. I’ve already asked you that.

  I stood awkwardly in the darkness. I did not know how to leave. He was quiet again, a long while.

  Things were not always so, he said, finally. We … I … lost everything. Everything, he stressed. I lost everything. There was, he mused, a time when I was considered, too, quite a prodigy—

  He broke off then suddenly, with a stifled groan. I knew not what to do with myself and so only stood there, stupidly.

  Forgive me, he said finally. I am in a bad way tonight.

  He was quiet again then, a long time, and I realized, with no small degree of horror, that he was, in fact, weeping there in the darkness.

  I stood awhile uncomfortably in the doorway. Finally I said, I shouldn’t have troubled you.

  When he did not reply, I knew it was because he could not, and wanting to spare him any further humiliation, I felt my way backwards out of the study, closing the door with a soft click behind me, wishing, as is often the way with doors, that I’d never opened it in the first place.

  I had not expected so much. Had not expected to find him so broken. A monster, indeed.

  That night I did not sleep. I rose and moved around restlessly in my attic room. I felt weary—sad, too—and I went to the window to look out over the darkened city, turning the piece of gravestone in my fingers as had become my habit and comfort.

  I had seen into the heart of a stranger—a monster—and found it filled with such familiar longing and disappointment and despair that it might have been my own. How alike we all are. How broken. I could hardly bear to think about it.

  But, more than that. Something had changed. I felt different somehow, I felt … alone.

  Quite literally. That black oppressiveness had lifted, was gone. I was alone in my attic room. I breathed deeply. Outside, the storm was dying. The rain had ceased, though the wind was still up. Everywhere in the blue darkness, it seemed, things moved. A moon was there, showing sickly between the clouds as they split, its light filtering through the lashing branches as the darkness scattered and regrouped.

  And I saw her.

  A girl, down in the garden, passing quickly between the trees in a long white nightdress. I stepped nearer the window. But she was gone, disappeared it seemed, through the garden entrance to Flossie’s suite. And yet it had not been Flossie, certainly. I was sure of that. I wondered if perhaps Helen had returned. She must have.

  And so another mystery was solved. The sad pieces, it seemed, were falling into place. And yet there was no satisfaction in any of it. I felt the beginnings of another headache and wondered how I was to sleep that night.

  I thought of my employer, weeping in the darkness below me, and of that malevolence I had felt shifting in the rooms there, in the front hall. It—whatever it was, that darkness—did not come from my employer, as I had thought. He was not its source. He was its victim.

  I lay down upon my bed, pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes until the darkness blazed red.

  Three

  1

  The morning broke bright and wet. A fine, clean light shone in through the windows. The horror magazines I’d been reading the afternoon before lay scattered at the foot of the bed and I gathered them up, their grotesque covers absurd by daylight. The previous day seemed a blur, a nightmare, all of it. The trip to the w
harf with Flossie, the storm, the unhappy interview with my employer, the girl in the garden, Helen. The latter, at least, had been a welcome discovery. Though why she’d been out in the garden in such weather and at such an hour was certainly mysterious.

  My head ached. I pulled the aspirin bottle from my valise. It was empty, though I was sure it had been nearly full when I’d taken some the previous day. I would have to go out to the shops for more. I tossed the bottle into the wastebasket and dressed hastily. Sticking a hand into my trouser pocket, I found an envelope. In all the night’s upset, I had forgotten about the note I’d plucked from the hall table in darkness. It was a moment before I realized it was, in fact, not a letter from my employer, as I had thought, but my own letter, the one I had left for him. In the darkness, an easy mistake.

  I went at once out to the chemists, still in a kind of fog, my eyes throbbing and my thoughts troubled, playing over and over the conversation I’d had with my employer. I did not wish to pry into his affairs. And yet it seemed to me something very wrong was at work in that house, something very wrong at work in him, around him. What had he said of his mother? That she had considered him too monstrous to look upon? No, I could not shed the feeling of pity I felt growing for the sickly man. To be despised so. I did not ask myself if there was something of myself I saw, too, in his misery. I felt ashamed, the things I’d wondered about him.

  I did not feel up to the long walk to the chemists, after all, and the Weybosset was still closed, so I stepped instead through the swinging glass door of Woolworth’s and was hit by an unpleasant mixture of smells: plastic and floor cleaner, coffee and sausages from the lunch counter at the back.

  I made my way up the mopped aisles, my shoes squeaking against the washed linoleum still slick with suds, collecting what I needed: Lifebuoy soap, ink, a large bottle of aspirin. A girl scarcely out of her teens, hair held back prettily from her face by a rhinestone pin, stood noisily filling a jar with jellybeans at the candy counter. She smiled at me as I passed.

  Apart from the girl, the store appeared to be empty. I was spared the tedium of waiting in line. It diminished one, such waiting. I scarcely had the energy for it.

  I set my purchases on the counter. A woman with a gold lapel pin in the shape of an angel—or possibly a moth—waited there. The image of the pin was familiarly iconic somehow, as if it were the symbol for some well-known organization I should have recognized, like the Boston Red Sox or the Salvation Army, and this woman before me looked as if she might well stand ringing her little bell, part forced cheer, part grim determination.

  Good morning, she said.

  She shifted a box of Wrigley’s out of the way and picked up the bottle of ink I’d just set down, dangling it between her fingers, like a mouse.

  Well, I say, hardly nobody ever buys this old cheap stuff here. Dust on the bottle, even; look there. Now that’s not a judgment, mind—we all need to save our pennies where we can—there’s only a fool would spend extra on something meaningless as ink—that should be a saying, shouldn’t it, meaningless as ink, like …

  She flapped her fingers in the air, physically grasping for another figure of speech, then waved and shrugged.

  Anyway, I don’t judge you, not one bit. It’s the spendthrifts, and I see a bunch of them. You wouldn’t think it, the way things are, so many struggling, but there are the Haves and the Have Nots, same as it’s always been. I see it all; I’m here every day just about, unless the arthuritis gets me down. That’s why I do these nails, see.

  She clacked the bottle of ink back down on the counter, displaying long, pink fingernails.

  Oh, I know some would say it’s, you know, furvolous, but I always think: Treat a thing right and it’ll come back to you. Treat a thing bad, well, that comes back, too. Comes back even stronger. It all comes around. But I don’t have to tell you that. You types know all about that, about how what goes around comes around, how everything does, all the time.

  Types?

  Oh, she said, leaning forward in a hot waft of some flowery cologne, it’s always in the eyes, you know.

  What is?

  She waved her hands and laughed. Oh, now, I’m just fooling with you. I can see you got ink stains all over your fingers, so you’re either a writer or you work for one of them newspapers, and I sure hope you ain’t that or I’ll have to give you an earful. Are you?

  Am I?

  A newspaperman?

  No.

  Well, good. You don’t even want to get me started. Only thing worse than a newspaperman is a banker. The nonsense in those pages. This new technology, funny cameras, who knows what they can do. Anyway, you know what it means if something funny is in the papers.

  No, I said. What does it mean?

  Something else is going on they don’t want us to know about, that’s what. So somebody plants some silly story, ghosts or, you know, creatures.

  Creatures?

  Space monsters.

  I must have given her quite a look. She had the good sense, at least, to look embarrassed.

  Oh, well, she said, they don’t come right out and say that, of course. They don’t say space monster, but just that it’s inidentifiable. And we fall for it. They could pass off any kind of nonsense. Like that fly-girl.

  Fly-girl?

  That lady pilot, flying all the way around the world.

  Amelia Earhart?

  What nonsense. And then, too, just the other day, right there in the paper, that thing they found on the beach, down at Narragansett.

  I looked up at her sharply.

  Some big tentacle or other. But, you know, awfully big. So now everybody’s talking sea monsters. I mean, really. All that talk. It’s been around since, she waved a hand, just forever. But what am I saying; you didn’t come in here just to visit now, did you? Say, you feeling all right? She narrowed her eyes at me across the counter. Here, she said, picking up the aspirin, let me ring these through. She punched some numbers into her till, carefully, with the pads of her fingers, so as not to damage her nails.

  I’m all right, I said.

  Not sick, are you? Lot of stuff going around.

  No, not sick.

  She stared at me, as if waiting for, expecting, more.

  Tired, I said. Rundown, I guess, is what you’d call it.

  Well, she said, you know what they say about the man who was feeling rundown.

  She handed me the aspirin, and I cranked open the lid and fished out the cotton batting and took two tablets, wincing at the sour, chalky taste.

  Thank you, I said, screwing the cap back on the bottle and slipping it into my overcoat pocket.

  Don’t mention it, she said. Feel better?

  As if the aspirin were already doing its work. I nodded.

  Now this, she said, and punched in the ink. Can’t have you leaving without that. I thought you said you weren’t a writer.

  It’s not for me, actually. Just the aspirin; that’s mine. The ink … I waved a hand meaninglessly across the counter. I’m on errands, I said, then paused. For a friend.

  She must have sensed my awkwardness over the word, and I can’t say myself why I used it. It was easier than attempting to explain a situation that was inexplicable, and she seemed just the sort to inquire.

  But, she said, raising a pencilled eyebrow, you’ve been in here before?

  No, indeed.

  But I’m quite sure … that ink—

  For my friend. My employer, actually. He is the writer, not me.

  She neatly placed my purchases into a paper bag.

  Well, she said, taking my money, I just work here. I don’t mind other people’s business.

  Something in her tone had changed, and I felt I had put her off somehow, or offended her, though I could not see how.

  Thank you, I said, inviting a return to her former cheeriness. But she did not respond. I tapped my fingers on the counter. Normally I’m healthy as a horse, I said.

  All right, she said.

  I picked
up my bag, puzzled at her change in demeanour.

  By the way, I said, what do they say? About the man who was feeling rundown?

  Oh, she said, waving a hand again, not looking at me, just an old joke. I hardly remember. Something silly. Never mind.

  She busied herself rearranging things behind her counter, and I said, Well. Thanks.

  Mm-hmm, she said.

  At the door, I turned back, but she had already put up a sign on her counter that read, Next till please, and moved away to the back of the store, one hand in her hair, her black skirt swishing purposefully.

  I’d scarcely shut the door of Sixty-Six behind me when Flossie popped her yellow head out from the landing. She was standing on a tasselled footstool, holding something in her hands. She looked fresh and bright. Swing music—I might have guessed as much—drifted through her open apartment door, the rich, toasted smell of fresh coffee in the air. She looked at me, I thought, a little warily.

  It’s so dull and gloomy on this landing, she said. I thought it could use some brightening up. I hope you don’t mind.

  We had not spoken since our strange, unhappy parting in the midst of the storm the previous day. No doubt she still thought I was angry. I had certainly behaved so.

  She held out the thing in her hands for me to see. It was a small painting. The ocean impossibly green. Inky clouds rolling in or away. Before or after a storm. In the middle distance, a small red boat, eerily empty.

  Hardly what I’d call bright, I observed.

  The colours are pretty, she said, looking at it again.

  She hung it firmly on the wall, adjusting it one way, then the other.

  There, she said with finality, stepping from the footstool. A woman’s touch.

  She came down to meet me in the foyer. Her hair was pulled back from her face with a filmy scarf and she wore a peacock blue Chinese dressing gown belted tightly at the waist. She looked at me cautiously.

  You’re out early. I saw you go. I thought maybe you were on your way to work?