by Scott Thomas
I had last spoken to Webster the afternoon before he came up missing. Following our final class of the afternoon, we had ducked into a small diner to escape a chill downpour, and to warm our innards with coffee. My companion was in a state of intense enthusiasm, having made a particular appointment with a comely young waitress he had met at a local eatery.
Webster had recently been threatened with eviction from the house where he was boarding after violating a “no visitors” condition. He had lamented for days and spent a great deal of time discussing alternative locations where an amorous young male might find privacy with an attractive young waitress.
My friend was in high spirits that rainy afternoon, having come to what he considered a satisfactory conclusion, so far as his dilemma was concerned. I was sceptical about his choice, and told him as much, but Webster was as stubborn as he was amorous, and he would not be persuaded by one endowed with as little argumentative endurance as I possessed.
So, when we parted, each heading off into the rain-heavy dusk, he was his usual light-hearted self, grinning with boyish charm. I, for the life of me, could not imagine why a young woman would care to join Webster, or anyone else for that matter, in an old deserted factory, but then he had insisted that the young lady was enthusiastic about the idea of stealing into one of the local decrepit mills, providing it offered them a level of privacy.
Neither Webster’s landlord, nor his friends, myself included, were terribly concerned when he did not report to his room that night, or to class the following morning. He was, after all, known to indulge his restless nature. It was the young woman’s family who contacted the police.
Searches were made in some of the abandoned mills (though I saw no one enter the one facing my room) on the assumption that the couple had become trapped, or fallen through weakened floorboards in one of the brick behemoths. The authorities were hopeful and attempted to persuade the families of the missing couple that it was only a matter of time before they were discovered.
Three days passed before a boy delivering newspapers made a tragic and gruesome discovery. He found the body of the girl lying on the grey bank of the rancid river that crawled along through the unwholesome shadows of the mill district. She was face down in the mud where she had either crawled, or been murdered. Her left arm had been severed at the elbow.
The police worked tirelessly in their attempt to locate Webster, on the suspicion that he was responsible for the terrible violence perpetrated against the girl. It was theorized that he had killed her and then departed from the city, which would explain why none had seen him since he and the girl went about their nocturnal adventure.
If Webster was not responsible for the crime, then his disappearance might indicate that he, too, had fallen prey to murderous force. Wasn’t it possible that the killer or killers had intended to discard the bodies in the dark waters of the river, and had been interrupted before completing the task, thus leaving the girl on the bank?
A search was made, but the murky current offered no answers. Webster’s body was not found, nor was a murder weapon, for that matter. Several large leg bones were discovered, but they were certainly not human, and they seemed very old indeed.
No arrest was made in the case of the murdered waitress, and Morris Webster, so far as investigators were concerned, remained a suspect. But no one knew where he was, or if he was even alive.
Several months passed and even the coming of snow could not brighten the dreary streets of the mill district. Each day I passed the homeless and destitute, huddled on door stoops, or hobbling in the grey slush of the gutters. The miserable beasts wandered hungrily in the crippling cold.
While I had resumed my studies, I was further fascinated with the building upon which my window gazed, and went so far as to question my landlord about its history.
The old man, while never striking me as loquacious, gave the impression that he was reluctant to speak on the subject—until I provided him with a bottle of whiskey and saw to it that he consumed a good portion.
It was only then that he told me about the retired professor who had purchased the vacant mill in the months preceding the explosion. The man’s name was Reynolds and he had just returned to the states from an excursion in the Middle East. He was a solitary fellow, rarely seen except for those nights when his spindly silhouette passed back and forth before the upper-floor windows of the mill where he worked and slept.
No one knew what went on behind the brick walls of the old mill, but it was assumed that the man was involved in some form of laboratory research. Reynolds did not make himself available to questions; he shunned human contact.
I asked the landlord about the explosion and he steeled himself with another drink. He gazed into the amber bottle and muttered something about screams. I urged him to elaborate and he told me that he had been awakened by screaming, coming from the mill, moments before an explosion shook the place and sent fire raging through the second floor. Reynolds died in the blast. Some of his limbs were never found. The building had stood empty since.
Some months later it became known that authorities from the Middle East had been attempting to locate the mysterious professor in order to question him about the disappearance of some pages from an ancient book in a museum where he had been conducting research.
The passages from the manuscript known as The Scorched Book contained archaic rites alleged to give one the power to “crack space,” l thought it ironic that the stolen pages of The Scorched Book were lost in a storm of flame.
For a number of weeks I spent my free time wading through musty corridors of books, haunting this or that library, searching for information on the mill, Professor Reynolds, and The Scorched Book. Considering the amount of time invested, the information I collected hardly quenched my curiosity.
The mill had no prior history of infamy; in fact, nothing out of the ordinary had occurred there until Reynolds purchased it. I located some papers that the professor had written on ancient systems of magic, but they were teasingly brief, ambiguous things concerning mystical symbols and strange herbal potations. As for The Scorched Book, I came across a solitary reference to it in a creaking old tome of esoteric matters. The Scorched Book, it was noted, was written in a code, most of which remained untranslated. Anyone opening its pages was encouraged to leave a drop of their blood on the final page as something of a toll price to ensure safe departure from the thing. Whoever refused, or neglected to offer the placating libation, risked grave misfortune. So said the reference book.
Winter had settled in about the lonely streets of the mill district, tucking snow into the windy alleys, leaving half-melted clumps on the crooked roofs of tilted houses. The puddles in the pot holes dotting the narrow stretch of Danvers Street had glazed darkly and even the sluggish waters of that foetid black river had filmed with sickly grey ice.
I discovered the skeletal remains of a dog half-sunk in a heap of snow along the outer side wall of the mill that loomed across from my temporary home. It was a nightmarish thing to behold, the bare teeth and eye sockets blurred with ice and the front legs poking out as if it had made an effort of digging itself free.
I stared at the ghastly thing for several minutes and then a whispering impulse came to my mind and I indulged it, digging at the snow with my hands until the whole of the remains were revealed. It was as I had suspected—the dog was missing a hind leg.
Digging further in the snow, I at last uncovered a cellar window where the boards had been loosened, probably by disenfranchised street urchins seeking shelter in the old mill, as it seems the unfortunate hound had done.
I peered into the low rectangular darkness of the window and a dreadful chill flew through my bones. The window exhaled a foul odour, like the ghost of something burnt, and I made away quickly, gulping at the cold air, hugging my coat about my flesh. I did not stop running until I was locked safely in the familiar warmth of my room.
Following my discovery of an ingress into the mill, and in l
ight of the unnerving sense of dread that fired through me at the time, I made a concerted effort to avoid looking out at the sullen mass of bricks across from my room on Danvers Street. I kept my shades drawn against the thing and turned my head from it when on the street, all the while striving against the swelling urge to go to the place and access the secrets that waited in the dark beyond its walls.
There was little doubt in my mind that there was something more than silence and webs in the abandoned building. Still, I possessed no tangible evidence on which to base such speculation; it was intuition more than reason that formulated my opinion.
I held fast against the compulsion to explore the mill, though I could not entirely eliminate its presence from my mind. I found myself doodling the dark brick-lipped cellar window on my papers in class and on the newspapers sprawled across the desk in my quarters, where I had aimed to anchor my thoughts in occurrences beyond the grim streets and hollow factories that surrounded my little room.
The sky was a sickly thing above the city as I traded the warmth and comfort of the university for the grey of twilight. I walked briskly, bundled against the wind that raged with teeth of sleet. The haggard Colonial houses seemed to huddle together against the climate, squeezing the streets that took me to the grime and dimness of the mill district.
I chose an uncommon route in order to lessen the length of time in which the icy precipitation could sink its chill into my limbs. I stumbled through treacherous alleys, over heaps of darkness that might have been debris, or miserable humans with no means with which to rent a roof, sheltering under soggy blankets.
It was in just such a place, where the freezing rain had transformed the dark walls into glistening reptilian things, that a ragged figure lurched up from the cluttered floor and turned to me with a face of horror. Though hunger had sunken the features in shadow, and the hair had gone wild, and whiskers crowded the gaping mouth, I recognized the face of Morris Webster. The charm and wit that had once gleamed in the man’s eyes were gone. There was only desperation, or a feral madness that I found both pitiful and frightening. I spoke his name, but he recoiled, turned and ran, muttering incoherently, flailing his left arm, the right sleeve flapping as if there was nothing inside of it.
I tried to pursue, but I slipped repeatedly on the slick pavement and Morris’s twisted silhouette vanished into the shadows and sleet of the labyrinthine alleys.
Squinting against the weather, I reeled through a maze of narrow passages that bent the wind into odd sounds. The cold air ached in my lungs and, when at last I paused to catch my breath, I realized that I was lost. I cursed and thrust myself onward, turning down this and that alley, my feet squishing in unidentified substances that reeked of stagnancy and rot. I felt as if I was trapped in the petrified innards of some immense monstrosity.
My feet flew from under me, betrayed again by the icy pavement, and I found myself flat on my chest, my face close to something familiar. It was the dark cellar window of the Danvers Street mill, with the rotting boards that once had served to seal it dangling ineffectually.
The vile breath of the mill burned in my nostrils and my previous concerns wisped away. It mattered not that I had been lost, that Morris Webster had escaped into the night; nothing mattered, beyond squeezing my body past the boards into the brick opening that led into the bowels of the mill.
It would be a misrepresentation of the truth were I to maintain that, finding myself within the very object of my fascination, I did not experience a strange sort of thrill. It was a blend of fear and curiosity such as I had never known. I stood in the dizzying darkness of that vast, dank under-chamber while my limbs prickled with gooseflesh.
The floor beneath the window was littered with coins and shoes, lending the impression that they had been lost by individuals either hastily or carelessly leaving the premises. I found a box of matches there and struck one to take in my surroundings.
What a dismal place it was! There were web-laced pipes in rusty disarray spanning the low ceiling, and a huddled mass of tanks and tubes that had once been a boiler. Brick-colored smears ran across the dusty floor from the bottom of a staircase to the window through which I had come.
My match burnt out and I found myself in creaking darkness, feet carrying me toward the stairs that would take me up to ground level. The old boards ached loudly beneath my weight as I ascended, trembling so that the match sticks rattled in their box.
I made my way through a series of abandoned offices, each like a tomb and infested with that heady stench, as if the air itself was scorched. Dull light made a ghostly effort to penetrate the tall window panes, but it only served to dilute the darkness and I found myself thankful there were no furnishings to stumble over.
In that gloomy series of compartments I became aware of a certain vibration beneath my feet, as if the sprawling structure were trembling upon the rising tide of an earthquake, or situated near to a stretch of railroad tracks, which was not the case. Next there came a sound from the floor above me that set my heart reeling in my chest and sent my blood swirling feverishly through my skull. The heavy, grinding roar lasted only seconds, yet it was so loud and close that it seemed as if several train cars had rolled through the second story of the mill.
Had I not been so morbidly enthralled, I’d have heeded the rational voice in my head, which urged me to leave, but I was not powered by logic at the time and made my way up the steep, black-smeared stairs that slanted toward the second floor.
My match flared in the blackness of that great brick enclosure; it was a feeble light at best, and it only hinted at the ash-stained walls and twisted upright shapes that stood at uneven intervals in the room. At last I was within the space where I had glimpsed that mysterious circular object through the long window, several months previous. My match burnt down; I lit another and proceeded.
The air pressed upon me with its smoky stench as sleet clicked and rasped at the windows, and the tall geometrically irregular shapes came into sharper focus.
They were boxes, I discovered; tall, crazily constructed boxes comprised of greenish planks of some unknown wood. I could find no screws or nails holding the things together, yet they resisted my attempts to loosen them to see what they contained.
I lit another match and peered between several of the boards into one of the crates, and discovered a haphazard heap of pale bones. They were packed into the crude box, which towered several feet above me and stretched wider than my arms. There were human bones and cat bones and dog bones and bones from creatures that I had no awareness of, all knotted in a frenzied nest.
While gazing down at a set of finger bones, curling out from a gap in the boards, it struck me that each of these remains came from a hand, or foot, or arm, or leg, or paw, as the case may be.
Without hesitation I turned and ran, pounding on the old wooden floor, fear raging through me as I aimed for the steep stairs that led down to the floor below.
Once more I felt the building quake and heard that dreadful noise, and there before me in the dark of that unholy mill appeared a great smoky mass, twitching with snake-like protrusions, staring with one gigantic eye in which many pupils darted like fish in a tank.
The roar of a train drowned out my screams.
My fascination with the mill has been sated at last. I am no longer compelled to gaze at it, nor do I feel the urge to go inside of it. I have communed with it, as others before me have, and I am changed by the convergence. I have not paid my rent in weeks, nor have I attended a single class; I have sat half-starved, nourished only by scraps of sleep, in my room on Danvers Street, training myself to write with my left hand.
As these scrawled words prove, I have progressed with some degree of success, and now my story is complete. But, I fear there are only hours remaining before what is left of my sanity falters and I find myself haunting the alleyways and shadows of the dank and soulless mill district, like the others who have lost their limbs and their minds to that collector in the mill.
Massachusetts, 1859
Marcy Waters!
How I remember her now, standing by the bank of the river, with the summer light warm on the current of east-bound water and in the swift current of blood beneath her white skin. She lifted her skirt to show me where the briars had bit at her ankles and she laughed, tossing her long red hair, squinting her summer-green eyes.
We were both just ten, both stumbling between the inner world of dreams and the outer world, with its many colours and its slow days and the confusing ache of impatience. If there were, indeed, a world beyond our small New England town, it was only in pictures and other people’s words. We knew the shapes of the seasons well enough, though... the cold-quilted hours of snow, the rusted glory of apple-fat autumn, spring like a garden of coloured ghosts, and summers that seemed unending, the hot days stitched together by lightning.
Somewhere on a hill, east of a great swamp full of swallowing shadows, we sat and told stories of Indian spirits that moved like deer.
Marcy swore she saw one once when rain flew down from Canada and geese in great numbers fidgeted on old John Whitney’s fields. Crouched as a spider and swift as a fox, it flitted in and out of wet shadows.
Another time, she had me believe, they were in the trees about her house, with the owls. I told her she was a liar and she cried and when next we spoke, she showed me a box made of strange grey wood. There were patterns in the grain of wood, like owls or skulls or soft watery things that only walk this earth in dreams.
She found it in May, when John Whitney died in that queer accident. It was behind the woodpile where he’d been chopping. She hid it all summer, while blackberries peered out from their thorny vines and climbed crazily over cool stone walls. It was only when September brought soft rain and squirrels that she dug it out from the hollow log where it had sheltered. Only then did she hear the birds inside, and feel their eager flutters, unborn against the wood.