The Lord Came at Twilight

by Daniel Mills

  “But what was this thing that had taken her place? So alike in every detail and yet so different. The skin it wore was but a kind of mask, pale and waxy like the flesh of my drowned wife. At times this mask slipped loose, giving me a glimpse of what lay beneath, something dead and squirming. Something foreign. Something alien.

  “These lapses were few and seldom, never lasting more than a moment. Eventually, they stopped altogether, as though this creature, whatever its nature, had finally mastered the trick of being human. So I took to watching her. All day long sometimes. I scrutinized her every action and expression until her daily habits came to seem more and more strange to me: the way she did up her hair in the mirror, taking hours over it in the morning before church, or the way she embroidered pillowcases for George’s children, sewing little hearts into the margins.

  “It was all so artificial, so inhuman. It was only then that I realized—like your Mr. Thurston—the full horror of my predicament. I took to my room and then to my bed. I insisted on it, the darkness. That way I wouldn’t have to see her face.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow you,” Carter says. “Of what were you so afraid?”

  “Don’t you see? I’d already gotten a glimpse of what lay beneath that mask. I saw the horror it concealed: the tar-black darkness of the sky at night, the empty places that lie beyond the stars. But what if it were to slip free altogether? What then?”

  “I don’t know,” Carter replies. His voice is hoarse.

  “I hear them whispering in the kitchen at night. George and that—creature. My other friends too. But they know nothing. They understand nothing. Not like you, Mr. Carter.

  “Because the mask never slips. Not once. After a while, you stop expecting people to believe you, which is just as well, because you never can tell, can you, who might be one of them: who among us is flesh and who has already been replaced, switched with a double made from wax. A brain that you can never know. A body you can never touch.”

  Ackley lowers his face into his hands. Moonlight shows in a faint band across his fingers, emphasizing their pallor.

  A strong wind rocks the house, the window rattling in its frame. As it subsides, Carter’s ears catch the creak of a floorboard from the kitchen. George is pacing, treading the same loose board again and again as he waits for him to emerge.

  Carter shifts his gaze from the window, allowing it to settle on the man who sits across from him, invisible but for the line of his white hands. He sighs. It is some time before he can bring himself to speak, breaking the silence with a ragged whisper.

  “There is—something I can tell you,” he says. “Something that happened to me once, long ago, beside the sea in Magnolia.”

  *

  An hour later, Carter steps from the bedroom. He clicks the door shut as an electric light blazes to life behind him. Its illumination creeps from beneath the closed door, driving winged shadows into the kitchen.

  George’s eyes widen. “My God,” he says, taken aback. “What did you say to him? That light hasn’t been on in more than a week.”

  Carter shakes his head. “It was—nothing,” he says. “He needed company, someone to whom he felt he could speak frankly. That was all. He was right in thinking I might understand, though it was not for the reasons he imagined.”

  A moment passes, but Carter does not elaborate. George’s expression wavers. His features register confusion, then excitement. “I have to tell Sarah,” he says, and disappears from the room.

  In the dusky kitchen, Carter’s shadow looms impossibly large on the window behind him. The glass is cracked along its length, starred with autumn snow. He looks up, notes the light fixture overhead. He finds the cord. The light winks on, chasing his shadow from the window.

  Sarah appears. In this light, Carter can see her clearly for the first time. She, too, has changed since the summer. Her features are haggard and gaunt while her eyes are darker than he remembers: flat, lifeless. He cannot bear to look at her.

  Brushing off her gratitude, he makes his goodbyes and heads for the door, followed by George, who doffs his cap to Sarah and walks with Carter to the truck.

  *

  Brattleboro Union Station.

  The building is dark but for the light that seeps from a back office. Branch-shadows flitter across the windows, swaying with the winds that gust and bring in the snowfall.

  “You’re sure you won’t stay the night?” George asks. “I hate leaving you off in the cold like this—especially when there’s a warm bed waiting for you down the road.”

  Carter shakes his head. “Thank you,” he says. “But I fear I must decline your kind offer. There is—business—waiting for me at home.”

  The other man nods. “I’m grateful to you, Randolph, coming all this way. And on such short notice. It’s—” He pauses, searching after the right words. “It’s damned good of you.”

  Carter offers his hand. They shake.

  “Goodbye, George,” he says. “I’ll write soon.”

  He dismounts from the cabin and crosses the street to the station. Three times he nearly slips, his feet sinking in the slush that fills the road: glazing store fronts, burying parked cars.

  He enters the waiting room. The fire is out, the room unlit. From the porter’s office comes the rasp of soft snoring. Carter takes one look at the long benches, slouched in deep shadow, before continuing through the far doors that lead out to the platform.

  Outside. Again the river lies before him, striped by the lights of Main Street. Again a faint cry sounds from somewhere far-off, echoing with the storm-winds off the Connecticut, howling into nothingness. Alone on the platform, he thinks of a letter left at home—face-up on the desk, the signature half-visible—and knows what he will write in response.

  Time passes. An hour or a minute, it makes no difference. Silence closes in: black and supple, fragrant with snowfall. Ad Oblivionem. The cry comes again. Closer now. Clearer. Soon it emerges fully-formed from the diminishing distance.

  The blast of a train whistle.

  He steps to the edge of the platform.

  THE NAKED GODDESS

  This is a true story, though none here may believe it. The events I will relate happened to me when I was a young man of twenty-four. I have carried the memory with me these five decades, never once confiding in another soul. When men told their tales round the fireside at Christmas, I bit my lip and said nothing, unwilling to face their sad mutterings, their brief but pitying glances. Long have I kept my silence, but now, at the end of my life, I find there is little left to me but this story. In the quiet of the night, when the house is cold, and the beating of my heart scatters all sleep, I close my eyes and see their faces, her face: her skin like porcelain, her hair as deep and black as were her sightless eyes. Fifty years ago, she was but a dream, and in the intervening years she has become even more so, such that I sometimes question whether or not she was ever real, or if she were merely a fragment of my youthful imagination, a vision brought on by exhaustion or the storm. I am an old man now and no longer believe that it matters. Nevertheless, I will tell my story. Each man may decide the truth of it for himself.

  *

  In my youth I studied classics at Brown and graduated to the life of a gentleman scholar, a lonely but not unrewarding existence for those who are well suited to it. My father was no classicist, nor could he claim any real education, but in purchasing our rambling country estate, he had also acquired a magnificent library. For years, I spent my every waking hour there, cloistered among the books and dust and crumbling manuscripts.

  Cicero, Augustine, Boethius: these men were as real to me as the musty library in which I labored. Indeed, there were times, late at night, when I fancied that the muses themselves had gathered about me, hidden within the web-like shadows that formed beyond the light of a single candle—and when I fell asleep over my books as I inevitably did, I dreamed of the Roman forum and of the clouds above Helicon.

  It was a languorous and carefree
existence. In truth I did not know a day's labor until the year I turned twenty-two and my father's untimely stroke brought the true state of our family’s finances to light. Unbeknownst to me and my sisters, he had engaged in speculation some years before only to see his investment dry up to nothing. He fell into debt and kept off his creditors by borrowing more—a cycle that repeated itself year after year until the morning he dropped dead at the breakfast table.

  We were ruined. I spent three days boxing up my beloved library to be sold at auction, retaining only one volume—a seventeenth century edition of The Consolation of Philosophy—for myself. It seemed an appropriate choice, as I too, like Boethius, had fallen from glory, but philosophy was to provide scant solace during the days that followed. The bank took the house, and to support my sisters, I found work as a clerk for a Boston railroad.

  It was there that Mr. Sexton Whistler took me under his wing. He was a kindly man who had known my father when they were children. He was saddened to hear of the ignominy that attended my father's passing and of the circumstances that had subsequently befallen my family. Out of sympathy, he arranged to have me transferred to his department, which oversaw the expansion of the railroad into central Vermont. I served him for two years as a clerk before he took me on as his private secretary.

  By that time, the railroad lines had reached as far as Rutland with the eventual goal of connecting with Burlington and from there on to Canada. However, before the railroad could expand, they first had to secure the necessary acreage—an unenviable task that had fallen to Mr. Whistler. He spent his days haggling with truculent farmers, who possessed neither wit nor breeding but believed themselves gentry merely because they owned their twenty acres of sod and stone. After many months of exhaustive effort, Mr. Whistler had finally negotiated the purchase of a corridor south of Vergennes. He needed only the signature upon the deed of sale.

  To this end he arranged for me to travel to Vermont in order to procure the necessary signature. “It will not be easy,” he warned me as he handed me the file. He peered at me over the desk, his pince-nez gleaming in the candlelight. “You are aware, of course, that the railroad has made only the most tenuous inroads into the state. Much of your traveling will be by horse and the roads there are difficult—often dangerous. Yours is a thankless task—I admit that—but there is no one I trust more.”

  Disarmed by such praise, I stammered my thanks and took the folder from him.

  He nodded his farewell. “Good luck,” he said. “And Godspeed you.”

  *

  Later that evening, I boarded a train in Boston and traveled through Worcester and Springfield en route to Vermont, crossing the state line just as dawn was breaking. The train stopped in Brattleboro to take on coal and water, and by the time the engine lurched forward again, morning had broken in earnest, and the cabin swam in the soft gold light of early August.

  Overgrazing during the last few decades had caused the state’s agricultural backbone to collapse, and the train bore me north past abandoned hill farms, countless in number, where walled-in fields went untended and filled with the beginnings of forest. I tried to read, but the sun shone brightly upon my face, and the shadows of birches flickered soothingly on the opposite wall of the cabin. A breeze entered through the open window, redolent with the scents of pine and cedar, and I drifted off with my book in my lap.

  When I woke, the train had halted.

  “End of the line,” the conductor called into the empty cabin. I wiped the sleep from my eyes and stepped outside onto the platform at Rutland.

  The town center consisted of little more than an assemblage of low brick structures: dirty, ramshackle, and ultimately indistinguishable from one another. The road from the station proved to be an unpaved track, winding and deeply rutted, and I sank in mud to my ankles as soon as I stepped down off the platform.

  I purchased bread and meat at a dry goods shop and procured a horse from the local stable. He was a truly miserable beast: fly-covered and emaciated, his spine showing like a coil through stands of fibrous muscle. “The best I’ve got,” the stable master assured me.

  He called his boy who brought the horse round and strapped a saddle across his back. The pony whinnied loudly, his mane tossing, and would not take the bit. The boy advanced, proffered the bridle, and then retreated once more when the pony gnashed his teeth. This went on for some minutes and the lad soon grew apologetic.

  “I’m sorry, mister,” he managed. “I’m sorry.”

  I waved off his apology and begged him not to trouble himself. Once the horse was bridled, I tipped the lad as generously as I could manage and took the reins from him, leading the ill-tempered beast north at a steady clomp.

  It was a fine day. The sun lingered near the meridian and the wind came soft and constant out of the west, fanning away the day’s heat. As I rode, I ate a meager luncheon, keeping the horse to a leisurely stroll, and in time, the road began to climb.

  Soon we were among the mountains, where the pastures of southern Vermont were replaced by rank upon rank of maple and pine. Here the trees grew in thick profusion, swallowing wind and sun alike.

  Ten miles from Rutland, I came to an ill-defined crossroads, where the road forked to north and west. The map I had purchased was of little use: no such intersection was noted and the surrounding landscape was entirely devoid of landmarks. Overhead, the sky was dark with the approach of stratus clouds from the east. Under that forbidding sky, one fork appeared as good as the other. I chose the north.

  For many miles the road continued to climb, winding through forgotten towns, villages left empty when “merino fever” subsided and there was no longer enough food. I rode for hours and met no one. A quiet desolation lay upon that deserted landscape, gathering over the abandoned farms and cemeteries that climbed the slopes of every forested hill. There was something of beauty there—in the push of a sapling through a fallen roof or the growth of moss on a weathered gravestone—but it was a grim beauty, founded in suffering and failure: both beautiful and terrible, and indeed, more terrible for being beautiful.

  Lost in reflections like these, I grew heavy-hearted and preoccupied—so much so that I scarcely noticed the storm as it winged in from the east, turning the sky to cinders. Only when the first crack of thunder rent the air did I become truly conscious of my danger. I put my heels to the horse and rode hard for shelter, kicking the pony’s flanks until he whinnied and strained against the reins. Still I kept on, urging the horse to a faster pace, even as the rain swept down and soaked me to the skin.

  I did not know what lay ahead of me. The map had been sparsely notated and I was well and truly lost. At best I hoped for a night in an abandoned farmhouse, a place with its roof intact that might keep off the rain. And so I was quite unprepared for the sudden appearance of a mountain village, which surfaced from the driving rain with the unexpected clarity of a storm-following rainbow. I tugged hard on the reins and managed to wrestle the pony to a stop.

  The village with which I was confronted displayed all of the characteristics of abandonment. Darkness had nearly fallen and yet no lights showed in any window. The houses themselves were strained to collapse, sagging inward beneath the weight of a hundred mountain winters. The walls may have once been whitewashed, but they had gone so long without a fresh coat that they now appeared uniformly gray: the color of old bones. The church steeple possessed only the smallest fraction of its former metals and those plates that remained bore a deep patina.

  The church was no more than twenty yards away, but I could see no name indicated above the double doors, and its windows were naked frames. A placard stood near the doorway, a standard notice board where announcements should have been inscribed. It was completely empty, eroded into obscurity, and a nearby pile of weeds and rubbish threatened to bury it altogether.

  As I have said, every sign pointed to abandonment. At the same time I could plainly discern the sounds of chickens at their feed as well as the distant play of human voices
. I grew uneasy. A part of me wanted to ride on and seek shelter elsewhere, but the downpour continued without ceasing and the hollow sang with the sounds of rain. After a long pause, I sighed and dismounted.

  Taking the pony by the lead, I walked to the door of the nearest house and pounded twice upon the splintered wood—loudly so as to be heard above the rain. Hearing no reply, I knocked again. This time I was rewarded by an answering shout from within.

  “I’m comin’,” a creaking voice called. “Have ye no patience?” The voice in question was that of an old man. I could hear his footsteps from inside the house. They approached at such an exceedingly slow pace that I took him to be a cripple.

  The door swung open.

  There were no lights inside the house—all shutters drawn against the storm—and the old man stood in the darkness of the doorway, his face downturned. He was dressed in rags, strips of clothing that clung to him like leaves to a dying tree. His hair was similarly unkempt, and a gnarled beard fell past his navel.

  “Well?” he demanded angrily. “What do ye want?” He did not lift his head when he spoke, and his nostrils flared, as though he were seeking me by scent. Only then did I guess what should have been obvious: he was blind.

  I proffered my apologies. “I beg your pardon, sir. I was riding north when the storm broke upon me. I—”

  “Foolish of ye,” he interrupted. “Bein’ about in weather like this.”

  I could not deny it. “The rain came quickly,” I said. “I could not have anticipated it.”

  “Couldn’t ye now?” he snorted. “I’ve felt it comin’ for days I have—and me bein’ a humble farmer and not a gentleman like yer self.”

  His remark took me by surprise—surely he could not see me in my coat and riding boots. Probably he had taken my cultivated speech as proof of breeding. Ignoring his obvious dislike of me, I put my dignity to one side and proceeded to ask for shelter.