The Lord Came at Twilight

by Daniel Mills

  Crisis. AM much distraught. Come at once. FGT.

  Fearing the worst, I rang for the valet and called downstairs for a carriage to be readied. My mouth had gone dry and mealy. While I dressed, my imagination—overly vigorous even at the best of times—presented me with scene after scene of fantastical horror. Here was the minister sprawled on the floor, stone-dead, his mouth stretched thin in agony. There he was, trapped inside the mirror, eyes wide and staring, while Ann Margaret screamed and pounded her fists on the unyielding glass.

  I arrived at Willow Wood not long after noon. To my relief, there were no circling constables, no parasitic journalists—only the reliable Sanders, who nodded in greeting and showed me into the parlor. Inside, I found my friend seated before the French windows with a tumbler of sherry cupped in both hands, his face downcast, as though it bore within its likeness all the sorrows of the world.

  “What is it?” I asked. “What has happened?”

  “It is,” he began, “the Reverend Danforth.”

  My stomach lurched.

  “He has broken off the engagement.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  With that, my ghoulish fantasies faded to nothing, and I thought of the way a midnight apparition is revealed by dawn to be a limp and tattered curtain.

  My relief must have shown, for Franklin became angry with me. “Have you no feelings at all? No kindness? No pity? My dear cousin is upstairs weeping, utterly inconsolable, and all you have to say is ‘Ah?’”

  “You must forgive me. I was in shock. It is a beastly thing.”

  “The brute!” He drained the rest of his glass. “And to think I gave him my blessing to marry Ann Margaret, that I sheltered him under my own roof… It sickens me, Julius. Sickens me.”

  He poured himself another sherry. By now, the decanter was half-empty.

  “And the mirror?” I asked.

  His eyes widened. “The mirror? Confound the damned thing. I intend to have it melted down at the earliest opportunity.”

  “But Danforth—did he…?”

  “He did. He came down this morning in something of a state. When I asked him what was the matter, he fed me some tripe about the Flood and made some excuse to be on his way. It was only later that I learned from my cousin what had actually transpired.”

  “Which is?”

  “This morning, after spending the night with the mirror, he came into her room on the third floor and informed her that their engagement was at an end.”

  “He gave no reason?”

  “None. He simply turned and left the room. It was shortly after this that I spoke to him, but he said nothing of it.”

  He sipped from his sherry, sloshing the liquid around in his mouth before swallowing it down. He sighed. The anger drained out of his face, leaving behind a genuine sadness.

  “Ah well,” he mused. “I suppose it really is for the best. Better to be rid of him now when he has no claim to Ann Margaret’s money.”

  I echoed this conclusion and poured myself a drink, opening the French windows to admit the balmy air. Sanders brought in lunch and we spent the next hour or more engaged in conversation on matters as trivial as they were irrelevant.

  All of this had the effect of brightening Franklin’s mood considerably so that I dared to bring the discussion back to the subject of the Tempest Glass.

  “Danforth mentioned something about a flood?”

  “Not a flood. The Flood. Noah’s Ark and all that.”

  “Oh?”

  “Apparently, he lay himself down to sleep shortly after retiring. He fell asleep almost immediately and slept soundly—for a time, that is. Then, in the dark of the night, he was awoken by a noise like rushing waves. Recalling the maid’s story, he lighted the lamp and approached the mirror where it sat in its usual place on the chair in the corner.

  “There he saw the same thing as the maid and the butler. Gray waves rippled across the glass, their peaks white and tufted as in the midst of a storm. But he continued to watch, longer than the maid had dared, and soon the waves darkened, becoming more brown than gray—and frothing. Spray boiled off in great clouds as the waves crashed together, and he distinctly felt the cold kiss of moisture on his cheek.”

  I chuckled. “I didn’t realize the Reverend was given to such fanciful description.”

  “Well,” Franklin admitted, “I may have embroidered the language somewhat, but you see what I’m driving at. The water splashed out of the mirror, wetting his face and shirt. But still he could not look away. Eventually, the waves passed, leaving the waters brown and dirty and rapidly receding. What he saw next terrified him. As the floodwaters sloughed away, shapes surfaced out of the murk.”

  “Shapes?”

  “Farmhouses. Carriages. Horses bloated with rot. Bodies floating facedown, the corpses of mothers and children. A telegraph pole with wires trailing out behind it. He—”

  I had to interrupt. “I thought you said he had seen the Flood? The man’s shortcomings are considerable, I grant you, but surely he can’t believe they had the telegraph in the days of Noah.”

  Franklin shrugged. “They were his words, not mine. ‘The Flood.’ He was very clear about that. Now if I may continue?”

  “By all means.”

  “Nonsense or not, I could see the whole thing had left him quite distressed. I hadn’t taken him for the Millerite type, but I rather fancy he imagined that he had witnessed—in that mirror—the end of the world. ‘The broken covenant,’ he said. He kept repeating that phrase. ‘The broken covenant.’ As though it were all his fault. Just punishment for sins he had committed. I have to admit that I found it all rather strange.”

  “Not so strange, perhaps. He is, I believe, a practitioner of Total Depravity.”

  Franklin laughed. I was glad of it: it was the first time that day I had heard that familiar laugh. “Indeed. Well, as I said, he was obviously upset, so I asked him to mention nothing of the matter to Ann Margaret. But when he heard her name, a change came over him.”

  “A change?”

  “I can’t be any more precise than that. If anything, I would say he became even more serious—though that scarcely seems possible. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘There is little chance of that.’”

  Franklin stared into his empty glass with an air of mournful contemplation. “I suppose that should have been my first warning.”

  “You mustn’t blame yourself. How were you to know?”

  I patted his hand reassuringly.

  “Thank you, Julius. I am glad you are here.”

  “And Ann Margaret?” I asked.

  “She returns to New York tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow? That is sudden.”

  “Yes. She is most adamant about it.”

  “Ah,” I said, with a touch of regret.

  Franklin appeared lost in thought. With the sherry glass in one hand, he watched the shadows shrink from the lawn. He brought the glass to his lips and ran his tongue round the rim.

  “The broken covenant,” he muttered. “God. What a madman.”

  *

  Naturally, there are postscripts.

  The next morning, her engagement broken, Ann Margaret returned to New York. I assumed that was an end to the matter, but in the months that followed, I heard gossip of the most shocking kind. Franklin would say nothing about it, neither to confirm or deny, and I knew better than to press him. Whatever the truth of these rumors might have been, I never heard talk of a child, so perhaps there was nothing to them after all.

  As for Franklin, my friend took ill in the fall of ‘09. He died abroad, stricken with fever while staying in a rented Tuscan villa. He is buried over there. His grand-nephew informs me that his tomb is carved from a warm red marble unique to that region of Italy. It is, he avers, a truly remarkable stone, one that seems to catch the light itself, retaining its glow in a way a mirror never could.

  On this point, I should also add that Franklin ceased to show off the Tempest Glass immediately after the incident
. Later that summer, he sent it to be melted down—much to the collective relief of his household staff. “A thing of ill omen,” indeed.

  Which brings me to Danforth himself. As I understand it, he never recovered from his night at Willow Wood. His sermons became listless and uninspired, delivered by rote in a halting monotone that terrified his parishioners far more than any promise of hellfire. In time, he took to tramping the hills as his full time vocation, absenting himself from his church duties for days or weeks at a time, so that the congregation had no recourse but to remove him from his post.

  Danforth took this development in stride, or seemed to. For years afterward, he continued to live on in Westminster, working odd jobs to support himself. He never married. One summer, I arrived in town only to learn that he had sold his cottage and taken the early train north—heading for Canada, the locals reckoned, though he never made it that far.

  Two decades passed, during which I heard nothing of the man, and I confess I had nearly forgotten him altogether when I received the news from Waterbury.

  This was during the summer of last year, my first season in Vermont following the floods of ’27. In the days after the storm, one of the local boys—the grandson of my gardener, from whom I heard the tale—traveled north to assist in the ongoing recovery.

  In Waterbury, the lad was posted to a team that was dispatched to search the surrounding landscape for a local hermit, an older man known to the folk of nearby Ricker Basin as “The Reverend.” Perhaps you can guess the rest.

  They never found him, but they did find his house—what remained of it, anyway. The former minister had chosen to spend his final years in a one-room cabin in the basin of a rocky cleft. When the waters came roaring down the Winooski, they bore down on his retreat with all of the force of an avalanche, blasting the cabin to pieces.

  The gardener described the scene in great detail: a wasteland of displaced boulders, fallen trees, and uprooted stumps. Oddly enough, the only object standing proved to be a telephone pole, which had been deposited there by the flood, its severed wires twitching like vines in the frigid autumn gale. Overhead, the sky was gray and patchy, threatening more rain.

  The searchers picked through the wreckage of the cabin. They uncovered little of interest save for a waterlogged bible, some old clerical garments, and a pocket watch inscribed on the back with the words To A from AM. The watch may have once had value but the mechanism was long broken, the face rusted shut. They left it behind in the wreckage and departed that melancholy scene under a persistent drizzle.

  The gardener’s story ended there, but my imagination—overactive, I fear, even in my old age—has supplied these final details.

  The rain continued, filling open graves and exposed cellar holes, the empty eyes of Abel Danforth. He lay with his face to the sky in some forgotten hollow, never to be discovered. Mid-November. Winter was near at hand. The wind gusted and howled, stripping the last leaves from the trees, even as the sun emerged to streak the sky with color. A rainbow.

  What was it Franklin said?

  God: What a madman.

  HOUSE OF THE CARYATIDS

  My father told me this story on his deathbed. He was young, not yet thirty, but the War had marked him when he was little more than a boy himself, and besides, he was ill.

  More than once, I found him seated on the floor of the bedroom, wearing his tattered uniform with his legs crossed beneath him. His eyes were open, but he looked at nothing, his face turned away, as though to a past I could not see.

  Nerves, the doctor said, but I wonder if the poison ran deeper than that somehow, pulsing in his failing organs, beating in his blood and brain. I was just a child, but even then he seemed a vacant shell, bird’s egg-thin, cracked by the horrors he had witnessed.

  And yet for all that, he was a cruel man, often violent, and I have not forgotten his anger: the roar of his voice in the house at night and the bruises my mother carried with her. This rage sustained him for most of my childhood, burning him up body and mind until at last his illness worsened and he no longer had the breath to shout.

  For days he lay incoherent, sweat-soaked and babbling from the grip of nightmare. Clarity dawned only in his final hours, whereupon he summoned me to the bedside and sent my mother from the room. He thrust out his hand. He grabbed me about the collar.

  “Look at me, boy,” he said. His blackened teeth were visible. The hot breath streamed across my face, rank with the odors of medicine and decay. “Look at me,” he repeated, speaking with such urgency and terror that I recalled the words of the angel from Revelation.

  Come and see. And I saw.

  *

  You cannot imagine what it was like [he said], that hell they called Shiloh. The rebels yelling as they swarmed from the trees, screeching like banshees as the grapeshot burst among us. And so much blood. Bodies stacked like cordwood up and down the lines, and still the guns were sounding. I was sixteen. I threw myself down among the bodies and hid there all that day, quivering with the stench of death in my nostrils, so sickly and strong I could scarcely breathe, and always the blossoms raining down from the peach trees, settling over me like snow.

  As I’ve said, you cannot imagine it. The fear. The shame of it.

  But maybe you can understand what came later. Why we marched through Georgia with Sherman. Why we did the things we did. Or maybe not. It hardly matters now, but by God, we made that country howl. We set their fields alight and left them smoldering behind us, laughing and singing with our heads full of hate and bootlegged liquor.

  This was in December of ’64. We were inseparable in those days, the three of us: myself, the Irishman Barry, and William Nichols, an artist turned to soldiering.

  Nichols was only a corporal but was born of wealthy parents and plainly accustomed to having things his way. What’s more, he was an educated man, a graduate of Yale, and I wondered at first what caused him to enlist. I knew better than to ask him, of course, but Barry once mentioned an incident involving a woman in New York, a shop-girl who had turned up dead, but it was more than his own life was worth, Barry averred, to speak of it further, and anyway, I’m not sure I believed him, not then.

  That morning was particularly hot, as I remember, sunlight blurring the dogwood with the magnolia and all of it shimmering with damp. The three of us had left the camp at dawn on a foraging party but later sneaked away from the others so as to prowl alone that empty country, searching out whiskey or ale or a woman’s company.

  At noon, we came to an old wagon road and this we followed uphill ‘til we reached a kind of promontory. From there we spied a large plantation below, a square house ringed with columns. It looked to have been abandoned during the previous summer, and in some hurry, for the crops lay un-harvested, the pastures brown and sickly.

  We descended the far side of the ridgeline, catching ourselves when the sodden earth crumbled and gave way underfoot. The sun beat down on us, hotter than before, and the world itself seemed to shrink from its glare until the rest of our regiment came to seem immeasurably far away, the road back masked by rising heat.

  We came to a crossroads marked by a splintered signpost. “The Pillars,” it read, “1 mile,” the sign angled in such a way as to point down a narrow road.

  The earth was muddy, the track well-faded, but we took it gladly, dreaming already of that big house and whatever we might find inside. And though the distance may have been a mile by the crow’s flight, the route proved torturous in the extreme, dipping and weaving all the time, circling round swamp and sinkhole alike, so that it was the best part of an hour before we emerged at the edge of the plantation itself.

  The fields were flooded, half-submerged. Tufts of old cotton mingled with overgrown weeds and grass. The winter rains had washed away most of the old wagon track, but its former course could be discerned where it cut through the fields and made a loop before the big house. The mansion faced south, its columns flaming like beacons with the sun shining on them.

 
Barry pointed. “You see them?” he asked me. “The women.”

  “Women?”

  “The pillars, boy. You see how they’re shaped?”

  I shaded my eyes and looked again and sure enough I saw them, the women. Every one of those pillars had been carved in the shape of a standing woman. A few had their hands at their sides while others seemed to be holding flowers, open books, sheaves of grain.

  “Caryatids,” Nichols said. “That’s what they’re called.”

  We continued across the fields at a good clip, preceded by our shadows where they stretched over the cotton. Soon we reached the entrance, where two columns flanked the high doors. These pillars were taller than the others, reaching the height of the roof, and they were a different color too. Whereas the other columns were white, or mostly so, these were made from a darker stone shot through with rusty veins.

  The first of these pillars wore a shapeless, robe-like garment that covered her from head to foot. She had no face but for those folds of sculpted cloth, and her hands were clasped before her, as though in prayer. The second pillar couldn’t have been more different. This woman was naked but for the armor on her forearms and shins. In one hand she carried a bow. With the other she lifted a sword high over her head, its tip forming part of the cornice overhead.

  She snarled at us, her mouth open.

  Barry tried the doors, but they were locked fast, barred from the inside. So we circled round to the far side of the mansion, skirting the boundary of a small burial plot marked with a dozen wooden crosses. A shiver went through me at the sight of it, but then the wind was kicking up as well, and I caught a whiff of something like flowering weeds or cotton gone to mold.

  We found a back door. This, too, was locked, but Nichols kicked it in with ease and we followed him inside. The hallway was dim, un-windowed, with closed doors stretching to either side of us. Nichols opened one. He ducked inside, shrugged, and moved onto the next, battering down one door then another, using the butt of his rifle, smashing bolts and hinges.