“She told him that the door had been shut ever since she and Jackson had been married. He’d told her he felt a man was entitled to some privacy, and that right there was his private place, and if she wanted a private place of her own she could have it, but to stay out of his. She’d taken one of the upstairs bedrooms and made it her sewing room.
“Nowadays they just make a basement and put everything on top, but these old houses have cellars with walls and rooms, just like upstairs. The reason is that they didn’t have the steel beams we use to hold everything up, so they had to build masonry walls underneath; if you built a couple of those, why you had four rooms. The foundations of all these old houses are stone.”
I nodded again.
“This one room had a big, heavy door. The sheriff tried to knock it down, but he couldn’t. Finally he had to telephone around and get a bunch of men to help him. They found three girls in there.”
“Dead?” I asked Howie.
“That’s right. I don’t know what kind of shape they were in, but not very good, I guess. One had been gone over a year. That’s what I heard.”
As soon as I said it, I felt like a half-wit; but I was thinking of all the others, of John Gacy and Jack the Ripper and the dead black children of Atlanta, and I said, “Three? That was all he killed?”
“Four,” Howie told me, “counting the Italian girl in the truck. Most people thought it was enough. Only there was some others missing too, you know, in various places around the state, so the sheriff and some deputies tore everything up looking for more bodies. Dug in the yard and out in the fields and so on.”
“But they didn’t find any more?”
“No they didn’t. Not then,” Howie said. “Meantime, Jackson was in jail like I told you. He had kind of reddish hair, so the paper called him Redbeard. Because of Bluebeard, you know, and him not wanting his wife to look inside that cellar room. They called the house Redbeard’s Castle.
“They did things a whole lot quicker in those times, and it wasn’t much more than a month before he was tried. Naturally, his wife had to get up in the stand.”
I said, “A wife can’t be forced to testify against her husband.”
“She wasn’t testifying against him, she was testifying for him. What a good man he was, and all that. Who else would do it? Of course when she’d had her say, the district attorney got to go to work on her. You know how they do.
“He asked her about that room, and she told him just about what I told you. Jackson, he said he wanted a place for himself and told her not to go in there. She said she hadn’t even known the door was locked till the sheriff tried to open it. Then the district attorney said didn’t you know he was asking for your help, that your husband was asking for your help, that the whole room there was a cry for help, and he wanted you to go in there and find those bodies so he wouldn’t have to kill again?” Howie fell silent for a mile or two. I tossed the butt of my cigar out the window and sat wondering if I would hear any more about those old and only too commonplace murders.
When Howie began talking again, it was as though he had never stopped. “That was the first time anybody from around here had heard that kind of talk, I think. Up till then, I guess everybody thought if a man wanted to get caught he’d just go to the police and say he did it. I always felt sorry for her, because of that. She was—I don’t know—like an owl in daylight. You know what I mean?”
I didn’t, and I told him so.
“The way she’d been raised, a man meant what he said. Then too, the man was the boss. Today when they get married there isn’t hardly a woman that promises to obey, but back then they all did it. If they’d asked the minister to leave that out, most likely he’d have told them he wouldn’t perform the ceremony. Now the rules were all changed, only nobody’d told her that.
“I believe she took it pretty hard, and of course it didn’t do any good, her getting in the stand or the district attorney talking like that to her either. The jury came back in about as quick as they’d gone out, and they said he was guilty, and the judge said sentencing would be the next day. He was going to hang him, and everybody knew it. They hanged them back then.”
“Sure,” I said.
“That next morning his wife came to see him in the jail. I guess he knew she would, because he asked the old man that swept out to lend him a razor and so forth. Said he wanted to look good. He shaved and then he waited till he heard her step.”
Howie paused to let me comment or ask a question. I thought I knew what was coming, and there didn’t seem to be much point in saying anything.
“When he heard her coming, he cut his throat with the razor blade. The old man was with her, and he told the paper about it afterwards. He said they came up in front of the cell, and Jackson was standing there with blood all running down his shirt. He really was Redbeard for true then. After a little bit, his knees gave out and he fell down in a heap.
“His wife tried to sell the farm, but nobody wanted that house. She moved back with her folks, quit calling herself Sarah Jackson. She was a good looking woman, and the land brought her some money. After a year or so she got married again and had a baby. Everybody forgot, I suppose you could say, except maybe for the families of the girls that had died. And the house, it’s still standing back there. You just saw it yourself.” Howie pronounced the final words as though the story were over and he wanted to talk of something else, but I said, “You said there were more bodies found later.”
“Just one. Some kids were playing in that old house. It’s funny, isn’t it, that kids would find it when the sheriff and all those deputies didn’t.”
“Where was it?”
“Upstairs. In her sewing room. You remember I told you how she could have a room to herself too? Of course, the sheriff had looked in there, but it hadn’t been there when he looked. It was her, and she’d hung herself from a hook in the wall. Who do you think killed her?”
I glanced at him to see if he were serious. “I thought you said she killed herself?”
“That’s what they would have said, back when she married Jackson. But who killed her now? Jackson—Redbeard—when he killed those other girls and cut his throat like that? Or was it when he loved her? Or that district attorney? Or the sheriff? Or the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters of the girls Jackson got? Or her other husband, maybe some things he said to her? Or maybe it was just having her baby that killed her—baby blues they call it. I’ve heard that too.”
“Postnatal depression,” I said. I shook my head. “I don’t suppose it makes much difference now.”
“It does to me,” Howie said. “She was my mother.” He pushed the lighter into the dashboard and lit a cigarette. “I thought I ought to tell you before somebody else does.”
For a moment I supposed that we had left the highway and circled back along some secondary road. To our right was another ruined gate, another outdated house collapsing slowly among young trees.
The Turn of Time
David B. Silva
One reason editors say “No,” even when they might derive joy from discovering a promising new writer, is that tiny botches by a professional, which they’d ignore or correct, look glaring in a beginner’s yarn—and explaining proposed changes is time-consuming. Unless the PNW (promising new writer) has done a mistake-proof, original, uncontroversial minor masterwork, editors fear it will go unread in a magazine or anthology displaying the safer efforts of familiar pros. “The Turn of Time” should not go unread.
David B. Silva, born July 11, 1950, influenced by Bradbury and King, the writer of 15 tales published the small-press route, is one of three PNWs who became a part of Masques. They don’t know each other but they achieved the near-impossible in similar ways: Their premises were either highly original or left the indefinable haunting impression all good stories share; each PNW was the soul of cooperation; and each story filled a need that seemed otherwise to go unfulfilled—need for a certain style or kind of horrific or super
natural yarn.
Silva, editor of the inexpensive, usually-readable The Horror Show for two years, worked in gerontology—a vocational background that, we think, had much to do with the evolution of our next story, the moody, slowly-building, eventually terrifying “The Turn of Time.”
“Must you, Father?”
“I’ll only be a minute.” Harley James Mann smiled distantly, almost feebly, as he edged himself from the confines of his son’s small Datsun. He pulled a cane from behind the seat. “Only a minute,” he repeated.
The February day had arrived cold and dry, sharp as a shard of ice against the old man’s soft flesh. With one hand, Harley kept the collar of his coat tight against his neck. He stepped carefully through the thin carpet of snow, using the cane first as a probe in quest of solid ground, then as his only means of stable balance. His steps were small.
A white picket fence, older than Harley Mann, guarded the house. The gate was partly open, caught against the packed and frozen earth, hinges rusted stiff and inoperative.
Harley paused, his back to where Daniel waited in the Datsun. He raised his face to the bitter wind, to the old Victorian house, and a tear filled one eye. He knew his son could not see his face but he wiped it away. How long? he wondered. It did not seem so far in the past. But it had been a lifetime, hadn’t it? Yes, he admitted to himself. A lifetime.
Harley shuffled past the snow-laced grotesqueries of the topiary garden which lined the walkway. He stopped to stand before one, then moved onto the porch steps where he gripped the rail, let his cane dangle freely from two fingers stiff with arthritis. White paint flaked from the rail at his touch and he felt the rawness of the wood. It shouldn’t be like this. In places, the porch boards sagged, more beneath the weight of time than the old gentleman’s frail weight. One of the front windows, boarded over, seemed a dark-patched eye upon the aged Victorian. Although the lean of the walls was still slight, the house was clearly beginning to collapse in upon itself. The door remained padlocked, appeared rusted; thinking, It should not be like this, Harley stooped to an unbroken, unpatched window at the front.
A curtain of grime was brushed back by the sleeve of his heavy coat. He cupped one hand above his eyes to peer beyond the glass, saw long tails of light filtering into the house from a line of windows on the south side.
The room was empty. The mantel over the stone fireplace, where once a family portrait painted by his father had hung, was featureless. To the left side of the large room, a stairway led into darkness, seemingly skyward. Beyond it, Harley could not see the dining room.
A sigh fogged the windowglass. The wind was picking up, but Harley scarcely noticed it. “There, it was there,” he said softly, to no one listening. “Where I grew up—right there.” He straightened, blinking. Here.
The cold wind whistled under the porch boards as if seeking something.
Awkwardly, old fingers chipped at windowsill paint; splintering had left cracks, grave-deep in the wood. As a boy, he’d used a gift of his father—a pocket knife—to carve his name into this sill. Now he wondered if his mark remained and picked at the whiteness with his nails. With each falling chip, his heart sank deeper. Perhaps, he thought, even old windowsills are not safe from the inroads of time. And he knew it was true even when the last falling flake revealed HARLEY scratched, with schoolboy precision, into the wood. He knew the time was near when the old house could no longer care for itself.
Almost time for bed, Harley.
But it’s only eight o’clock, Mother.
There’s school tomorrow, young man, remember?
“What?” Harley, startled, turned back to the street where his son tapdanced impatient fingers upon the Datsun steering wheel. The sidewalk was deserted; a sleeve of newspaper was caught by a gust of wind and flapped off into the stillness.
Harley, put your toys away now!
“W-What is it?” Turning back to the house, from which the voices had seemed to emanate, he saw that the window was clean, clear, welcoming him. Now there was light from the interior of the aged house. And when Harley leaned closer, he saw flames burning blue-yellow in the fireplace. “How?” He scrubbed the sleeve of his coat over the pane again but the fire remained, summoningly. And above the fireplace, his childhood recollection vivid and true, the family portrait beamed back at him.
. . . A lifetime ago.
Eagerly, Harley hooked his cane to the projecting sill, again cupped hands over eyes, and watched the boy sit cross-legged upon the thick, oval scatter rug—watched him come to life. Twelve, perhaps. New-pup scrawny. Clad in knickerbockers and knee-high socks, all gray, black, and diamond print. Playing half-heartedly, it seemed, with a locomotive carved of wood. When he glanced up, attention apparently directed to Harley, it was to the old man as if they sent silent confirmations across the strange turn of time which separated and yet linked them—young from old, yesterday from today. He sensed the words: I know you’re there, looking back.
“Do you; did I?” Harley asked of himself, past and present. “At this instant, do you perceive your future as well as I perceive my past? Your tomorrow, my yesterday?”
A smile upon the boy’s face; as if to say, The answer is in the question. Then, spell broken, the twelve-year-old turned from the window where Harley stood waiting, anticipating perhaps, remembering what had next transpired—a lifetime ago. And the man entered the room from the shadows beside the stairway.
“My Father,” the old man whispered, breath clouding the window.
The man smiled for the boy with faraway sadness, dulled eyes a granite grey, hands first tucked neatly into pockets and then out, helping him settle into the chair Harley knew was his father’s alone. It was the chair that belonged to the man of the house, and, while he looked tired, depleted, he seemed comfortable in the warmth from the fireplace. It was as if the day had drained from him more than he’d been capable of giving, short of a surrender. Yet he was so much younger than Harley had remembered! Not fifty, sixty, with grey sprinkled at the temples; early thirties, round-faced, engaging, unsophisticated. Yet so grave of manner.
Father leaned forward, resting elbows on knees, looking down upon the young son. Appearing hesitant, at first, to speak, he swallowed hard and quietly began whispering—his words drawing the boy into a sitting position of alert attention. The locomotive tumbled to the floor. The boy, frozen, listened.
Harley himself sought a fragment of what the man said but silence greeted him, except for the distant moan of a train. Those words—so long ago uttered that they were soundless to memory, banished—the best he could—decades ago.
Then the man glanced away, shaking his head. Tears fell from the boy’s eyes.
And tears spilled from the eyes of the grown, the old Harley. “I loved you, Father,” he whispered.
From around his neck, the man who had been Harley’s father removed a gold chain. A pendant dangled—bright and firelit—from the chain, twirling and twisting on an unseen cushion of air. The boy’s eyes grew wide, wondrous; he took gentle hold of the pendant, his father making sure of his grasp.
Take it, Harley.
The mature Harley’s fingers touched the talisman round his own throat, tested its lines, all fine and cold and shaped from soft gold in the likeness of strawberry shrub. So quickly the years had gone, days to months, months to years. Winters, in biting, Alaskan cold fronts. Summers turned heavy, and drooling from unsought humidities. So quickly, now, they were drawing to an end.
Gently, the man encircled his son’s head with the chain, still holding the pendant in his palm as if he were reluctant to let it pass from his possession. The instant of his release brought a black sense of loss that stilled time and scented the air. It will protect you, boy. The quiet, cautioning words were familiar to the old man who listened. Always keep it in your possession.
“I will, Father,” Harley whispered, synchronous with the boy.
Then a tongue of blue flame rose high and hot from the fireplace, seemed to fan ou
t, to lap the air of past-become-present . . .
And an old man’s reverie was washed with blue yesterdays—
And a hand caught Harley Mann’s elbow, pulled him away from the window, blinking.
“Father, it’s time to go!”
“Wait, wait.” Harley tried to avoid begging. “Just another moment.”
“Father, please.”
“No!” Harley wrenched his elbow free. But when he turned back to the window, back to the viewing-glass that had spanned the years, it was different again: the fire was less than smouldering embers, the voices silent, the room itself dark, emptied. He found himself facing a grimy window, transparent only where he had used his own sleeve to effect a small peephole; and already, it was microscopically closing over . . .
“Damn it, Father!” The son’s hold on his arm once more. “You’ll be late.”
“No, I won’t. Because I’m not going back.” Whispering, Harley stared into the chilly bleakness of his long-ago living room. “It ends—here.”
“Please! Don’t behave as if you’re senile.” The youth, inhaling sharply, impatient and anxious to be gone from there.
It wasn’t the first time Harley’s son had said such a terrible, casual thing, as if verbally slapping the hand of a child groping for forbidden chocolate. “Do I seem . . . so old . . . to you?” he inquired. Their eyes met briefly before the son looked away, studying the empty, snow-silenced street. He sighed heavily without answering. “Do I, my son, truly seem to have become so pathetically ancient?”
“It’s only that they’ll be waiting dinner.” He said it flatly, leaving Harley’s question unanswered.
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