by Scott Thomas
I marched out of the house and before my daughters’ horrified eyes, demolished the thing with my hands, then stood there foolishly in the cold, trembling, without explanation. My youngest child wept and ran to the house.
“What’s the meaning of this?” I said, at last. “Why not a conventional snowman?”
The eldest, Julia, explained that the idea had come to her in a dream.
A man of medicine and science has little room for superstition and I dismissed the episode as coincidence. What else could it have been? The following day I brought the girls presents from the doll shop in Worcester.
One night in January, with a light snow falling, I lay in bed by my Susanna. The fire had burned low, its failing light flickering, drowning in a waxing darkness. I listened to my wife’s breathing and the breathing wind beyond and a third sound, softer than the others. It came from somewhere within the house and I wondered if the servants were up to some mischief. Someone was whispering outside my bedchamber door.
I rose stealthily and lit a candle. The voice persisted, but seemed to grow faint, as if moving away. A strange thought came to me, that if sounds were capable of producing temperature, then that was the coldest sound I had ever heard.
There was no one in the dark hall outside my room. A wisp of noise came from farther down. Snowy light from a window there showed a door ajar. My heart shuddered and I became aware of some deep and primitive fear. I grasped at logical explanations, even as I moved toward the room where my daughters slumbered. But they were not asleep, for it must have been their voices that I heard seeping out like a wintry mist. Yes, that had to be it, they were awake and talking.
I reached the door and pushed it open. The two smaller girls were lying on their bed quivering, their eyes open, mouths gasping. Julia was sprawled on her own mattress and a shadowy facsimile of Esta Henstick was standing hunched over her. The apparition had one of its arms stuffed elbow-deep down my daughter’s throat.
I shrieked and the horror turned to me, its eyes aflame with great malignancy above a slack black mouth. My two younger girls rasped, then lay still. Julia convulsed, her eyes opened in terror or pain and still I was frozen to the floor, lost in some ghastly dream.
Esta’s arm snaked free and she fell flat backward to the floor without a sound. She skated head first across the floor, staring up, wriggling like a fish in a calm stream, crossing the room toward me. I stepped aside and she slithered past, out into the hall.
I rushed to Julia’s side and took her hand as her failing nerves gave her one last shake and the life hissed out of her. I heard a scream and raced toward my own chamber.
Esta slid out of the room as before, brushing my legs like a cat as she passed. Susanna was in death throes, gulping at air that could not find her lungs. I cursed and swooned and wept. I took my pistol from under the bed and ran through the house, calling after that demon. From one dark room to the next, I searched and shouted.
At last I collapsed in my study, sobbing, dropping my weapon. Snow was glowing through the window and the pale light came in, vaguely illuminating the figure lying still on the floor, rug-like beside me. I looked down into its hateful eyes and its broken mouth and I lurched up, my back against a wall. Esta lifted up in a queer marionette-like fashion and moved toward me, her arms outstretched and waving like eels. I watched as her hands sank wrist-deep into my chest and I stood there, immobilized, looking into that dead white face. I could feel her icy fingers playing over this and that organ, squeezing them as one testing fruit at market. She pinched and prodded, tracing her sharp fingers around on my lungs, along soft intestines and cupping my maddened heart.
She was gone when I awoke some minutes later. I prayed that it had been a dream, but my family lay dead upstairs. I had been a healthy specimen until that time, but following the dread episode, I was sorely damaged and prone to every ailment. I could, and can to this day, feel the cold that her fingers planted in my body. Twenty years later and I still feel the cold.
The three gentlemen sit in silence. Edmund is exhausted by his telling and stares fixedly at the window where the sunlight is no more than a pink whisper. Bellows is more than quenched and has receded, trembling, into his wing chair. Welcher dabs his eyes with a handkerchief.
The storyteller’s friends seem at a loss for words until...
Bellows’ voice is soft now and he says, “I think I would like another brandy...”
Welcher nods enthusiastically. “Yes, yes, another drink. What do you say, dear Edmund, may I get you one as well?”
Edmund is staring out the window.
“She’s here.”
“What’s that?” Welcher asks.
“She’s here.”
Edmund sees a dark bird flying out of the night, but it is not a bird at all. It is a large hurtling stone that bursts through the window, striking him square in the mouth, like a cannonball.
A Milion Dying Leaves
1840
The history books make no reference to the actual fate of Pitcherville, which is not to fault the volumes, for the truth of the matter was never disclosed beyond a certain locality. While I am old now, and my memory betrays me in the short term—often I forget where I’ve leaned my walking stick or lain my pipe—the events of that autumn are retained with unsettling clarity.
Pitcherville was a modest place, an unexpected little village tucked in dark Massachusetts woods by a lake that was never brighter than slate, no matter how sunny the day. If it were not for the white church steeple poking up from the tree cover, one might have missed the place entirely.
Imbued with Yankee determination, the hundred or so locals lived off the land, the lot of them farmers or herders, with the exception of the blacksmith, an undertaker, the reverend, and myself. I was the village physician.
The nearest town was Charterton, somewhat larger and a half hour’s ride south. That autumn there had been an outbreak of consumption there and much of my time was spent in the service of my friend Dr. Benjamin Lamb, who himself had lost a young daughter to the cruel wasting malady.
Those afflicted were placed in quarantine, set away from the town proper in a series of dismal mice-infested shacks. It was my duty to tend them as best as possible. I soon acquired an unforeseen task however, fending off peculiar remedies provided by one of the volunteers who came regularly to aid in the feeding of the patients.
Mrs. Noyes seemed to think that the best thing for the stricken were doses of butter that came from cows that had grazed in the churchyard. Worse yet was the administration of mice (boiled in oil and salt). While there was indeed a considerable supply of ingredients there in the shacks, and while her intentions were good, the old woman was a menace, until she, too, fell ill.
One afternoon I sat by Mrs. Noyes’s bed in a shadowy corner and read to her. Acorns could be heard tapping on the roof as they dropped from the venerable oaks that sheltered the place. The poor woman flinched at each impact.
Having degenerated beyond the point where sunlight and fresh air would have any prolonging effect, the feeble woman could do little more than nod and wheeze. Her colour was unwholesome and her eyes seemed to be collapsing into her face.
Mrs. Noyes was always a bit on the unusual side, so I took her rare mutterings to be the works of a singular imagination coupled with fever.
“A terrible year,” she rasped, “storms in July, drought in August, epidemics come fall...”
I paused in my reading, glanced at her, then started again, but she was not finished.
“And that wretched burnt man stealing from my woodpile.”
This time I placed the book in my lap and studied her. An acorn clattered down the sloped roof above. Lately there had been reports of wood gone missing from stacks and sheds in my own town, Pitcherville.
“A burnt man, you say?” I inquired.
The woman lifted her head from the pillow and hissed, “Well, he looked burnt, all dark and gnarled like he was.”
Curious, I thought, n
o one else seemed to have gotten a look at the culprit, but then of course I had to consider the source of this information and apply a measure of scepticism.
At any rate, Mrs. Noyes had nothing more to say on the matter and I read further, until she lay snoring with her eyes half closed.
We buried Mrs. Noyes three days later. It was a brisk October morning, as bright as it was chill, and the leaves were a twirling rain of yellow on Burial Hill. We joked sadly about her remedies.
In the afternoon I rode from Charterton to my home in Pitcherville, where I found my woodpile disturbed. Some of the maple logs had been toppled and others were missing.
“I saw nothing,” my Martha insisted, her hair disarranged by the steam of cooking. “But the dogs were barking at something.”
The mystery would have to wait as my appetite took precedence— the warm smell of a meal was all the more appealing for the cold outside.
In the evening I sat by the fire with a pipe and a book. The wind was in the trees—it hissed in the leaves like the sound of the sea. Several times I rose to peer out at the stacked wood, but I saw nothing out of the ordinary.
The thief was not to return to my property that night, but it seems he was busy elsewhere in the village. On my way to Charterton, come morning, I encountered a neighbour who told me that some of his supply had been purloined.
“My missus heard thumping ’round midnight and saw some fella out the window.”
“Anyone we know?” I asked.
“She couldn’t really say—he looked to be all in black, or something, just hunched over the woodpile. He was gone by the time I got out there with my gun. Funny thing is my wife said he didn’t look to be carrying anything when he headed into the woods, but still there were logs missing.”
“Perhaps he noticed her and dropped them before making off,” I offered.
“Well, I didn’t see any about.”
“Perhaps he ate them,” I joked.
I was in the midst of delivering a child when news of the terrible events reached me. Lucy Rumford, who served as midwife for Pitcherville, Charterton, Hibbins, and towns beyond, had been felled by the consumption and was off with the others in the isolated shacks, so I was left to mind the mothers.
Ann Southey, a sturdy farm wife with hair the colour of a crow, was bringing her third son into the world when the door to the house was shaken by a series of desperate knocks. It was my friend Dr. Lamb together with a team of local Charterton men (some of them armed). Mrs. Southey’s oldest boy led the doctor to the upstairs room where the birth was taking place.
“I’m sorry, Joseph,” Benjamin Lamb said, removing his hat, “there’s something horrible happened in Pitcherville.”
I looked up, startled. “Martha?”
“Everyone, it seems. They’re gone.”
“Gone?” I asked. “Where? How?”
“I don’t know, Joseph. Everett Brown’s boy just returned from there in an awful state. He’d gone to bring a pie to his aunt and said her house was full of leaves and that she was not to be found. Same with every other house he saw—no people, just leaves.”
Dr. Lamb offered to relieve me in tending the birth so that I might go with the others, seeing that my wife was among those missing and his family was safe in Charterton. I thanked him and joined the anxious group of men outside.
The first farmhouse we came to was the Fitch place, a modest white thing on a small hill. The house, the outbuildings, and the fields were ringed on three sides by woods that only hours previous had been decked with their brilliant October colours. While there had been no storm, nor even much wind that day, the trees were all bare— bleak, twisted, and grey. Curiously, the downed leaves that one might have expected to see carpeting the earth beneath the trees were nowhere in sight.
Approaching the house, there was a brief moment when it looked as if the front-facing windows were filled with flame, such were the bright colours of leaves filling the rooms, pressing against the glass.
“What in God’s name...” I muttered.
The men were frightened and moved cautiously up to the door. When opened, it spilled forth a great rasping heap of colourful foliage. It was as if someone had lifted the roof like the lid of a trunk and filled the house with a million dying leaves.
“Hello,” they called into the stuffed rooms.
No reply came. A number of us tried to wade into the place, but the leaves were thick from floor to ceiling, and the chambers were full of their dry foresty smell.
Rakes and pitchforks were taken from the barn (where all the livestock was found safe and intact) and we began carving a path through the rooms. Groping through the rustling sea, we encountered furniture buried in place, seemingly undisturbed, and even a cup of half-drunk coffee, hidden on the kitchen table.
A few of the searchers fumbled their way slowly up the staircase, a steady flow of crisp leaves tumbling down in their wake. We heard them shuffling about on the floors above us, and we waited hopefully. They had no good news to share upon returning.
The party of men decided to move on to the next house while I, accompanied by Joshua Brown (the young man who had discovered the leaf infestation while bringing pie to his aunt), took the westerly road toward my home.
The first thing I noticed was that the trees in the vicinity of my house were stripped of their leaves. The second thing I noted was that each of the nine small-paned windows at the front of the house were completely filled with the reds and oranges and golds that had grown upon the maples.
I leapt from my horse and flung open the door. Leaves gushed out and I called into the house. Like the Finch residence, the building was packed with the things. I squirmed my way into the scratchy wall of hissing, rasping leaves, clawing desperately until I was lost in my own home and near suffocated. I found only empty chairs and the hidden pictures on the walls. Crawling on the floors I searched for a body, but there was none to be found. Martha was gone.
Dr. Benjamin Lamb, having finished up with the Southey birth, had arrived with more men from Charterton, come to lend assistance at Pitcherville. I rejoined the mob outside the white church at the common as dusk came cool and dim from the east. There was an air of great agitation and general disbelief at what had been discovered.
Benjamin took me by the arm and led me toward the steps of the peaked white structure, which, like all the other buildings in the village, had been flooded with leaves.
“They found no one, Joseph—not a soul in any of the houses. But they did find something, a figure within the leaves; it was roped to a chair in the aisle of the church. There must have been a struggle for there were spent guns, and axes on the floor.”
It was at this time that we pushed our way through the bewildered crowd and faced the captive. Even now I am hard pressed to describe the thing that the villagers had managed to restrain, before disappearing. It was like a man in its shape, yet it seemed more tree than human, the exterior surface all gnarled grey bark, the limbs like boughs, the middle like a trunk. But for the horrible dark hole of a mouth, there were no features to be seen.
The prisoner never uttered a sound, but it jerked violently the whole time, as if in convulsion, the chair legs clacking against the granite step of the church. Fortunately the ropes held.
“Look there,” Joshua said, pointing, “seems they got a shot off at it.”
There was a wound on the torso and several axe marks besides. What showed beneath the bark was the same stuff that one would find under any tree bark—no blood, no muscle, no bone.
Lost to the madness of the whole dreadful episode, I found myself shouting at the thing, “Where is my Martha? What have you done with my wife?”
The creature’s round head turned to me, the black mouth staring. There was no answer; the monster simply continued its fits, jerking from side to side, shaking all over.
Someone in the crowd called out, “Kill it!”
“Burn it!” another cried.
The suggestion became a
chant. Men scrambled and straw was gathered—they piled it under and around the chair. I helped them, stuffing armfuls around the blunt hoof-like feet of the thing.
Someone had fashioned a torch and tossed it on the heap; flames swept up around the squirming captive. It rocked violently, painfully, and wood smoke gushed up above it. Still the creature remained silent, though suddenly we heard cries from within the church where there were in fact no people.
Although we had found no living persons in the village houses, no bodies nor even bones, screams came from the surrounding homes, as if the spirits of their occupants were trapped within. It was the same throughout Pitcherville, for at that very moment, when the tree-man went up in flames, all the leaves in all the houses ignited as well.
I did not remain to watch as the monster burned, its body glowing orange, blackening, crumbling to ash. I rode quickly to my house, passing more burning dwellings on the way. There were shrieks like birds in the air and acrid smoke like fog throughout the village. My own home was like the rest, a terrible stark blaze against the purple dusk, the windows filled with actual flame.
I knew my wife’s voice well enough to identify her cries. Her agonized screams tormented me until they were drowned out by the roar of the blaze. I tried several times to enter, but the leaves were all alight and swirling in a storm of hot wind within the hall.
Yet she had been gone before the inferno, hadn’t she? How could it be that I heard her voice when there was nothing in there but leaves?
Only dying leaves.
These many years later I have no better explanation for what took place that autumn of eighteen-forty than I had at the time. I still sit by the fireplace and imagine sounds that no husband should hear.
As for the village of Pitcherville, the books tell only of a tragic fire that burned every house to the ground. It’s just as well that the actual events are not committed to print, just as well that the memories are entombed in the minds of a few old men. In some instances, I suppose, the facts are better off forgotten.