Lovecraft Country

by Matt Ruff

  “Nothing,” Braithwhite said. “That wouldn’t be the worst outcome, for me. Don’t misunderstand, I want the notebooks, but it’s more important to me that no one else gets them.”

  “Like Lancaster?”

  “Especially him. Look, Mr. Turner, when I asked you before what you wanted, I already knew the answer. You want me gone: out of Chicago, out of your family’s lives.”

  “You got that right.”

  “The thing is, if I left town now, you’d be at the mercy of Captain Lancaster and the rest of the Order. They don’t care about you. But Atticus, because of his relationship to Titus Braithwhite, has a certain value to them. Not as a person, you understand, but as a sort of living fetish object. Now that they know he exists, they won’t forget about him. Ever.”

  “Yeah, and I got you to thank for that.”

  “You have my father to thank for it. But that’s spilled milk. My point is, if things go the way I hope they will, very soon I’ll be in charge of the Order. Not just one lodge but all of them, all across the country. Captain Lancaster will be out of the picture and I’ll make sure your family is left alone. You have my word on that.”

  “Uh-huh,” Montrose said, not believing it for a second. “And you having these notebooks will hasten the day?”

  “It couldn’t hurt.”

  “Whereas if I don’t give them to you, I might be slitting my own son’s throat.”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way,” Braithwhite said, “but you wouldn’t be helping Atticus.”

  “And of course if I burned the notebooks and you won through anyway, then you’d be a king who didn’t owe me any favors.”

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  Montrose smiled. “You see?” he said. “I knew there’d be a threat in there somewhere.”

  Aken, Illinois was a small city on the Ohio River midway between Cairo and Metropolis. The sun was just above the rooftops as they drove through the central business and municipal district, which felt like a ghost town at that hour. They paused for a red light in front of the Aken city hall, and Atticus was reminded uncomfortably of a three a.m. traffic stop in Bideford, Massachusetts. But Montrose, still heated from the encounter with the boys, glared furiously at the empty sidewalks, daring someone—anyone—to come out and look at him cross-eyed.

  The light changed. They turned right and drove west along Elm Street, looking for number 213.

  It would have been hard to miss. The house itself was unremarkable, but the owner of the property next door had erected a marquee sign on his garage roof with a flashing neon arrow that pointed at 213 Elm. The letters on the marquee read NIG ER LOVER. Father and son both looked up dumbfounded, Montrose saying to himself: Just when you think you’ve seen it all . . .

  The front door of 213 Elm flew open and a short, burly white man came out brandishing a fireplace poker. He charged down the front walk but stopped abruptly a few feet from the Cadillac, lowering his weapon in sudden embarrassment.

  Atticus rolled down his window. “Henry Narrow?” he said.

  “David Landsdowne,” the man replied. “Esquire.”

  “You’re a lawyer?” Atticus glanced up at the marquee. “Affiliated with the NAACP, by any chance?”

  Landsdowne nodded. “Two years ago, I was lead counsel on a lawsuit to integrate our county school system. Clark, my neighbor, wanted to make sure everyone knew which house to throw stones at . . . I’m sorry about this,” he said, holding up the fireplace poker, “but when a car I don’t recognize stops in front of the property it usually means trouble.”

  “No need to apologize,” said Montrose, leaning across from the driver’s side.

  “Would you gentlemen like to come inside for some coffee?”

  “Yes, sir,” Montrose said. “We’d be honored.”

  They took their coffee in David Landsdowne’s living room. As he passed around the cream and sugar, Landsdowne explained that his wife, Judith, had already left for church in Mt. Vernon, an hour and a half drive to the north. “After the lawsuit, our local pastor asked us to stop coming on Sundays. He was afraid someone would take a shot at me and send him to heaven by mistake. Judy found a new congregation and started attending again last year, but I guess I’ve lost the habit.”

  “You ever think about moving?” Atticus asked.

  “Every time I replace a window. But I’m stubborn. If Judy were here, she’d tell you how stubborn I can be.” Landsdowne settled in a chair by the fireplace; the poker was back in its stand. “So, Henry Narrow . . . Would he be an old friend of yours?”

  “No, sir,” Montrose said. “We’ve never met the man. We’re here to see about buying some books from him.”

  “In that case, I hope you didn’t come a long way. The reason I asked if you were friends is that Henry Narrow is dead—has been, for some time. He and his family were murdered in 1945, right after the war ended.”

  “Murdered?” said Atticus. “In this house?”

  “No, the Narrows never lived here. The address you’re looking for, 213 Elm Street, is on the other side of town, near the cemetery. This is 213 West Elm. It’s common for visitors to get the two streets confused. It’s how I met Henry Narrow: He saw a Realtor’s listing for the old widow Metzger’s house, came to Aken to take a look at it, and ended up on my doorstep.

  “He had a woman and a boy with him. He acknowledged the boy, Henry junior, as his son, but he introduced the woman, Pearl, as the boy’s nanny. She was a Negro. Light-skinned. The boy was lighter still—light enough to pass, at least when he was standing by his father. But he resembled both his parents in different ways, and seeing the three of them together, it was obvious they were a family, in fact if not in law.

  “It wasn’t my business,” Landsdowne said, “but they seemed like nice people, and there was the welfare of the woman and the child to consider. So while Judy was getting a cookie for Henry junior, I took Narrow aside. I told him that while there was no anti-miscegenation statute in this state, a family of mixed race, if recognized as such, would probably not find Aken very welcoming. I also told him I thought he had the right to live where he wanted, so if he was determined to make a home here, I’d help him find a place. The house next door, where Clark lives now, was about to go on the market, and I thought my neighbor at the time could be convinced to sell to the Narrows. Maybe with a bit of arm-twisting.

  “But the widow Metzger’s house, that was another matter. That part of town, I said, would be not just inhospitable but dangerous. The mayor and the chief of police lived in that neighborhood, and they were old-school Democrats—the kind who liked to wear sheets after dark.”

  “How’d Narrow react?” Montrose asked.

  “He thanked me for the warning,” said Landsdowne. “The way men do, when they don’t intend to heed it. He told me that he and his family preferred to keep to themselves, so it was OK if the neighbors didn’t want to be friends. ‘Mr. Narrow, perhaps I wasn’t clear,’ I said. ‘If these men don’t like you, they won’t just shun you.’ But he insisted he’d dealt with such people before, had grown up around them in fact. Then he said something odd. He asked me if any of the men I was talking about had a reputation for studying philosophy. I said no, that was part of the problem—they weren’t students of anything, least of all that. ‘That’s all right, then,’ he said. ‘We’ll stay out of their way and they’ll stay out of ours.’

  “I could see there was no point in arguing with him. And I assumed it didn’t matter: I thought whoever was representing the widow Metzger’s heirs would take one look at the Narrows, see what I had seen, and refuse to sell to them. But I was wrong about that. You wouldn’t have guessed it from the car he drove, but Narrow had a lot of money. I heard later that he bought the house with cash, and the Realtor, Frank Barrington, made an unusually large commission on the deal. As for the widow’s heirs, the nearest of them lives in Bloomington, so they didn’t care what the neighbors thought.

  “It must have been July when they mo
ved into the house. The fire happened in August. It was the same week the Japanese surrendered, so the story was buried inside the newspaper. The paper claimed Narrow forgot to screen his downstairs fireplace before going up to bed, and a coal ignited the rug. The three of them were trapped upstairs and supposedly died of smoke inhalation. What the story didn’t explain is why Narrow would have been using his fireplace on a warm summer night.

  “About a week later I spoke to a friend of mine, Lewis Peters, who was a clerk in the coroner’s office. I asked him if he knew anything that hadn’t made the paper. He didn’t want to talk about it, but I pressed him, and finally he told me that he’d gone into the morgue the morning after the fire to pick up some paperwork and he’d seen Henry Narrow’s body. He said Narrow’s skin had been blackened by smoke but he also had what looked like a bullet hole in his temple.

  “I told Lewis if that was true, he needed to report it. ‘There’s no one to report it to,’ he said. ‘And there’s no evidence even if I did. The bodies have been disposed of.’”

  “You figure it was the mayor and the police chief?” Montrose said.

  “I do,” Landsdowne said. “Not that I could ever prove it. But if it was them, I suppose there was a measure of justice in the end.

  “The house was damaged but not destroyed, and since the Narrows had no next of kin that anyone could find, the mayor contrived to have the city take possession of the property and put it up for auction. The auction was so poorly advertised that there was only one bidder: the police chief’s son-in-law, who got the house at a bargain price.

  “The son-in-law, the police chief, and the mayor went to a restaurant over in Cairo to celebrate. They drank a great deal, and drove back to Aken at one in the morning. The son-in-law was at the wheel. He came down Elm Street going much too fast and plowed into a tree right in front of the Narrow house. The car burst into flame and all three men died.

  “After the funerals, a rumor started going around that it wasn’t alcohol that had caused the crash. The story was that the son-in-law had swerved to avoid a little boy and a Negro woman who had darted out into the street. Since there were no witnesses to the accident I don’t know how anyone could know that, but that was the story . . . and soon enough, other people started claiming they’d seen the woman and the boy as well.”

  “You believe it?” Atticus said.

  Landsdowne shook his head. “I think there were some guilty consciences at work, there. The rumors did have a salutary effect—a number of Elm Street’s other residents decided they no longer liked the neighborhood so much, and a few of the worst individuals left Aken entirely. Not enough of them, in my opinion. But our current mayor is a Republican, so maybe there’s hope for the future.”

  “What about the Narrow house?” Montrose asked. “Is it still standing?”

  “It’s a ruin, now,” Landsdowne told him. “It was never repaired after the fire. Ghosts or no, I imagine anything of value has long since been taken out of it.”

  “Might be worth a drive-by, anyway. As long as we’re here.”

  “All right. Let me get a map and show you how to go. I’d offer to take you over myself, but at this point, you’ll probably be more welcome in that neighborhood without me.”

  “Hill Street,” Montrose said, annoyed, staring at the sign for the cross street in front of them.

  “Should that last turn have been a right, maybe?” Atticus suggested.

  “I know how to read a map.”

  “I didn’t say you didn’t, Pop. But I thought I heard Mr. Landsdowne say to turn right off Locust.”

  “That’s what you heard, is it?” Montrose looked over at the house on the corner lot beside them. “We’re in the right vicinity at least.” Poking up out of the snow in the yard was a blackfaced lawn jockey.

  Atticus looked at it too. “Maybe we should just go home.”

  “Nah. We’ve come this far, we’ll find it.” Montrose swung a right onto Hill Street, thinking he might circle around the block. But after a short incline the street dead-ended at the entrance to the Aken cemetery.

  Montrose shifted into reverse and the car sputtered and stalled out cold. Cursing under his breath, he reached for the ignition.

  “Hold on a second, Pop,” Atticus said. Inside the cemetery, a Korean man was pushing a wheelbarrow along a line of graves, gathering up old flower wreaths and using a whisk broom to brush snow from the tops of the headstones. “Let me go ask this guy if he knows which way Elm Street is.”

  “Nah, stay in the car.” Montrose turned the ignition key. The Cadillac’s engine wheezed but wouldn’t catch. Atticus opened his door and got out. “Atticus!”

  “I’ll be right back, Pop.” He trotted off through the cemetery gates, his father calling after him.

  Montrose tried the ignition again. The engine continued to wheeze. He sat back, cursing aloud this time, and stabbed at the button on the dashboard lighter.

  He was fishing in his shirt pocket for a cigarette when the Cadillac bounced as though someone had jumped on the back fender. When Montrose looked behind him there was no one there. But he could hear somebody giggling.

  He got out of the car. “Who’s there?” he called. A snowball landed on the roof of the Cadillac and then he saw the boy, standing about fifteen feet away on the far side of the car. He was seven or eight years old and he was light-skinned, with big brown eyes and dark curly hair.

  “Hey!” Montrose said sharply. He started around the car, concern tempering his anger as he realized how the boy was dressed, in a denim jumper and nothing else. No winter coat. No shoes or socks. Not even a shirt underneath the jumper. “Hey,” Montrose said, in a different tone. “What are you doing out here? Where’s your mother?”

  The boy laughed and dashed away barefoot through the snow. Montrose went after him. They ran along the outside of the cemetery wall, Montrose’s feet plunging deep into the snow drifted up against the stone, while the boy bounded lightly on ahead, stopping now and then to look back. They came to the corner of the cemetery property and the boy, still laughing, vanished into a thicket of snow-covered branches. Montrose plunged after him and found himself tumbling down a slope. He fetched up hard at the bottom, half-buried in snow.

  Half-buried: His left arm was planted up to the elbow in a snowmound, but his right hand rested on warm green grass. Summer grass.

  Montrose lifted his head and looked over the grass at the back of a big yellow house standing bright beneath a hot noon sun. A Negro woman in a checked apron waited on the back porch steps for the boy, who came running towards her.

  Montrose got to his feet, straddling winter and summer. He pivoted clockwise and stood firmly on the grass, the snow on his left shoe and pants leg melting away instantly in the heat. “Ma’am?” he called to the woman, who had taken the boy by the hand and was leading him inside. But she didn’t respond and neither did the boy.

  Montrose looked over his shoulder at winter, still just a hand’s breadth away. Then he started towards the house. Halfway across the yard he looked back again and the snow had disappeared; the slope up to the cemetery was all green shrubbery and flowers.

  He climbed the steps to the porch. The back door of the house was ajar. Montrose stood at the threshold, his attention drawn to a line of letters from Adam’s alphabet carved into the right post of the doorframe. Looking farther to the right, he saw an identical inscription cut into the sill of a window.

  “Ma’am?” Montrose knocked on the half-open door. No one answered, but the door swung wide, and he stepped inside, into a kitchen.

  The woman was at the sink, scrubbing out a pot, though Montrose sensed that the majority of her effort was devoted to ignoring his presence. Meanwhile the boy, seated at a table with a sandwich and a glass of milk, looked up smiling, as though he and Montrose shared a private joke.

  “Ma’am?” Montrose said again. And then, when she still didn’t answer: “Mrs. Narrow?”

  At last she met his eye. But the words s
he spoke weren’t addressed to him. “Henry,” she said. “There’s someone here.”

  A white man appeared in an open doorway behind the boy. He regarded Montrose with curiosity, as though visitors to the house were rare. “Can I help you?” he said.

  Recalling the family portrait from the Winthrop House, Montrose had no doubt that this was Hiram Winthrop’s son. But you ain’t thirty-five, he thought. Then again, you wouldn’t be—you were only in your twenties when you died.

  What name to address him by? Montrose chose to be direct: “Mr. Winthrop,” he said.

  The woman, who had returned her attention to the sink, looked up startled. The boy lost his smile, and the man’s expression grew severe. “State your business, sir,” he said, and Montrose felt the chill of winter at his back, icy tendrils curling down inside his collar and threatening to freeze him where he stood.

  “It’s about my son, Mr. Winthrop,” Montrose said, his voice steady despite the cold. “My name is Montrose Turner, and I was sent here by a man named Braithwhite, who wants something that belonged to your father. But I didn’t come for that; I came on behalf of my boy, Atticus. Braithwhite has designs on him, and I don’t know how to stop him. But I think you might. So I’ve come to ask for your help, and I’m prepared to make a deal. If I can. If you will.”

  The cold receded. Summer returned. But the woman and the boy continued to watch and wait, until Henry senior nodded.

  “All right, Mr. Turner. Come into the parlor. We’ll talk.”

  They sat at a table by a front window. While Winthrop poured tea, Montrose looked out at the lawn. At the edge of the grass by the street was a big-boled oak with a tire swing. Montrose guessed this must be the tree the police chief’s son-in-law had swerved into, though the tree showed no evidence of having been involved in a fiery crash.

  Maybe the crash hadn’t happened yet. The calendar above the mantel of the parlor fireplace said AUGUST 1945, and among the cars parked on the street, Montrose could not identify a single one of postwar make. Even as he considered the possibility, some more stubbornly rational part of his brain kept trying to protest. This was all wrong, it warned him; he did not belong here, sitting in a summer yesteryear with a dead man. He should get up and go back the way he had come, without delay. And definitely, definitely, he should not eat or drink anything given him in this house.