All Things Bright and Strange

by James Markert

  He stood next to Ellsworth’s chair, facing the street, as tears dripped down his cheeks.

  Ellsworth gripped his elbow, and Alfred jumped.

  “Sorry.” He helped Alfred into the chair. “Here, have a seat.”

  Alfred gripped the chair arms and lowered his voice so those in the kitchen couldn’t hear. “I’m sorry, Ellsworth. I told Anna Belle you had secrets about Calvin. It just came out. I think that’s what’s happening. People have thoughts, and usually our minds sort out the bad ones, the ones we shouldn’t act on. But now we’re all listening, doing what comes to mind. It’s because of that place, isn’t it?”

  Ellsworth patted his shoulder in agreement. Alfred gnawed on his fingertip, spat a fleck of nail to the windowsill. “People won’t stop going. You know that, don’t you? Even now, knowing what I know, I’m itchin’ to go back. And by nightfall it’ll be a full-out craving and cold sweats.”

  “Close your eyes, Alfred. Take a nap. There’s a bottle of Old Sam on the ledge.”

  Alfred patted his coat pocket. “Got my own from your shed.” He removed it, downed two gulps. “She didn’t come back. Said she’d only be a few hours. To dance? What does that even mean? Why would she need to go dance with a man she hardly knows when I can still dance perfectly fine?”

  “I’ll think of something. Now rest up.” Ellsworth turned toward the kitchen.

  “Ellsworth.”

  “Yes, Alfred.”

  “I know we’ve been needling you about it, but you think maybe you could do a painting for me sometime?”

  “What kind of painting?”

  “One of them that you do.” He made a few rapid brushstrokes through the air. “Raphael told me about it. Said it’s a good way to get the bad stuff out. Like bloodletting—let out some of the humors. Thought maybe it would help keep me out of the woods.”

  “How ’bout I set you up with a canvas and a brush, let you paint something yourself.”

  “But . . .”

  “You’re still seeing it, Alfred. Makes no difference that you’re blind. Yours might end up looking better than mine anyhow.”

  Old Man Tanner sat with his elbows on Ellsworth’s kitchen table. He looked around at Ellsworth, Gabriel, and Raphael as steam floated up from his coffee mug.

  “I’ve studied earthquakes all over the country. Got a knack for sensing them. A sulfur smell in the air. Shifts in the wind. Energy. The hair on my arms stands up.” He sipped coffee with unsteady hands.

  “Need some whiskey in that?” asked Raphael.

  Tanner winked at the boy. “Wouldn’t hurt.” Ellsworth poured a finger’s worth into the mug. Tanner swirled it, took a healthy gulp. “The first foreshock hit on August 27, 1886, in Summerville. Had an acquaintance there who took a train to Tennessee to tell me. Me and my wife, Susannah, packed right quick.”

  “She was a scientist too?”

  “Not by training, but she’d worked with me for years. Like a ball team of two, we were. Any rate, we arrived in Summerville the next day, two hours before the second foreshock hit on August 28. Folks there thought that was it because there were no shocks the next day, but I sensed more.”

  “How so?” asked Ellsworth.

  “The wind. It was taking me east toward the coast, and Susannah agreed I should go. Short trip by train and we ended up in Charleston. The energy there tugged at my arm hair. Susannah took notes, like always. Every night we’d return to Summerville to stay with my acquaintance. He put us up in the old White Meeting House. At sunup we’d return to Charleston. I’d follow the air. Record shifts in the wind. The water in the harbor was unusually still. So many birds circled above the Battery.”

  “What kinds of birds?” asked Ellsworth.

  “All kinds. I just noticed there was more than what would be considered usual. Everyone walking the harbor had their eyes peeled to the sky.

  “It was closing in on nightfall on the thirty-first of August, four days after the first foreshock. Susannah and I were about to board the train to Summerville when I got this numb feeling up my left arm, and then the hair on my head stood up. Susannah said it was just windblown, but I didn’t think so. Didn’t feel any gust. I told her to go on back to Summerville and that I’d catch up later. I insisted she go. It would be safer there at the meeting house. If something was going to happen, I was convinced Charleston would be the center.

  Tanner stared into his cup as if searching for answers, then shook his head. “I told her I’d be safe, and smart. That I’d see her in a few hours. I kissed her and watched the train pull away. And then I followed the energy in the air. An hour later, after a short ride on a mule cart and walking the rest on foot, I’d followed it here to Bellhaven.” He pointed out the kitchen window. “Town I’d never heard of. But I knew right away that I needed to go into the woods, just by the cyclic way the moss spun on the trees.

  “The sun was setting, so I knocked on a door and asked to borrow a lantern. Man asked what for. So I could go into the woods, I said. At night? He looked at me like I’d gone off the tracks. I told him it was important, that I was a scientist. And you know what he told me? Said a priest would do me better than a lantern, but to give him a minute and he’d fetch me one.”

  “A priest?” asked Raphael.

  “I didn’t know,” said Tanner. “I waited on the stoop, and he returned with a lantern and a gun. I said, what do I need a gun for? Just in case, he says, shoving it in my hand. Just in case what? He didn’t answer. He said if I come back out to just leave the lantern and gun on the back porch. And then he closed the door.”

  “Remember his name?” asked Ellsworth.

  “I don’t.” Tanner’s hands had stopped shaking. He gripped the mug and gulped more coffee, his arthritic knuckles bone white. “He moved out of Bellhaven in the days after. I took the lantern and gun into the woods and followed my nose. That sulfur smell was strong.”

  Tanner stared at the whorls in the tabletop. Flicked a bread crumb into his hand, only to drop it right back to the table. “I held that gun out as I walked because I felt I needed to. Heard voices in the wind, noise swirls that didn’t sound human. The energy pulled me deeper. Ten minutes in, I noticed the animals going out. Hundreds of them. Deer, squirrels, ’possums, woodchucks, ’coons—all heading in the opposite direction because they felt it too. Saw a deer ramming its head into a tree repeatedly. Another deer walking backwards.”

  Ellsworth shifted in his chair, caught Gabriel’s eye. “Backwards?”

  “Like backing away from something you don’t understand. Like you gotta get away but at the same time you still gotta see.

  “I dodged the fleeing animals, walked deeper, but I felt sick to my stomach. Two times the gun drifted to my right temple like I was some puppet on a string. Like I had no control. Once my finger flirted with pulling the trigger. I was being pulled to something like quicksilver spinning onto a funnel—lured to exactly where this thing was starting. I moved aside branches, stepped over deadfall, resisted the urge to use the gun on myself, and eventually I made it to the clearing we all now know about. By then, every hair on my arm was standing on end, as were all the hairs on my head—straight up and rigid—and my skin tingled. Hundreds of birds circled through the moonlight.”

  “Was the chapel there?” asked Ellsworth.

  “It was there even then,” said Tanner, wide-eyed. “The door was opening and closing fast, whapping against the stone wall like hammer blows. Then water in the creek behind the chapel suddenly rose, and fish were jumping in it. One of them landed on the ground and flopped around in the grass. I went to kick it back in, and that’s when I saw a light flicker inside the chapel. A glow against the stained glass, and then it darkened.

  “The earth started shaking seconds later—at nine fifty-one, to be exact. Lasted thirty-five, forty seconds. Knocked me off my feet. It sounded like a heavy bowling ball rolling along a wooden alley. Trees uprooted and split. Tiny fissures opened, and I swear the creek widened. More fish jumped,
and the birds were singing so loudly it was like one continuous screech. The chapel door kept opening and closing, and light flickered even though there were no candles in there, no electric current. Swamp water belched high in the air, and sand blows popped up like small volcanoes all over the woods. It was the most violent shaking of the earth in my entire career, and here I was in the middle of the woods—in the dark. The lantern had gone out, and I couldn’t find the gun. It’s a wonder I wasn’t killed by a falling limb.”

  “But you weren’t hurt or anything,” said Ellsworth.

  “Nope. Just scared out of my wits. And then it all stopped, and everything got silent. Even the birds closed their beaks. The chapel door was open, and I heard a woman crying.” Tanner pulled a kerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes. “I knew right away it was Susannah. I went into the chapel, dropped to the floor, and felt the mosaic tiles. Moon glow entered through the hole in the roof, showed me the picture on the floor.

  “I heard Susannah’s voice clear as day.” He bit his lower lip and then downed the rest of his coffee. “Told me she was okay. That she was in a good place.”

  “She died, didn’t she?” asked Ellsworth.

  Tanner nodded. “The White Meeting House where we were staying was leveled, reduced to ruins. Her body was crushed by bricks and ceiling beams, and she died instantly. Even though I’d told her she’d be safer there.”

  Gabriel said, “You couldn’t have known.”

  “Maybe not. But I still should’ve kept her by my side.” He sucked in a deep breath. “Don’t know how I heard her voice inside that chapel or how it happened so fast after the meeting house went down. But I spent the next several minutes in there talking to her. Taking in that burst of fresh air that was so right it couldn’t have been wrong.”

  Tanner motioned for Ellsworth to slide the flask over. He downed two gulps, blew out air, and looked from chair to chair. “That was the largest earthquake ever recorded in this part of the US. Eight minutes later we were hit by another aftershock, and six more followed over the next twenty-four hours. The main quake was felt as far away as Boston and Chicago, Cuba and Bermuda. Wires snapped. Train rails were torn apart. Nearly every building in Charleston was damaged. It was so severe that some speculated the Florida peninsula had broken away from the continent.”

  Ellsworth said, “How long do you think that chapel has been there, Tanner?”

  “I don’t know. But the reason it was built there and the reason I was pulled to the center of that earthquake are one and the same.”

  “What do you mean?” Gabriel put an arm around Raphael’s shoulders.

  “I don’t know exactly, but there’s pressure needing to come up. And it isn’t done.”

  “Eliza, my wife—she used to go there. At one time she said something about doorways.”

  “Sometimes they come through.”

  Tanner put his hands to his temples and blinked hard, forming crow’s feet upon crow’s feet around his eyes. He opened them sharply. “There’s a mystery to it all. To my knowledge—and other scientists agree with me—there are no fault lines here. Not for sixty miles in any direction. From what we know, earthquakes occur when the earth’s tectonic plates—think of it like puzzle pieces fit together—get pushed together at the places where they join, the fault lines. The plates will slip and then jump past each other, and that’s what causes the ground to move. That’s what happened in San Francisco in ’06.”

  “But how could it happen here?” Gabriel asked. “You said there are no fault lines.”

  Tanner shrugged. “It’s befuddled me for years. I don’t know how it could—unless somehow it happened inside the plate. Some believe that’s what happened with the big New Madrid quake a hundred plus years ago—some kind of an intraplate movement. But I don’t know.” He folded his hands on the table. “I just wonder if that chapel, whenever it was built, was placed in that exact spot for a reason that goes beyond science.”

  It was silent for a moment as they chewed on their thoughts.

  Ellsworth said, “You mentioned earlier that you don’t think it’s done shaking.”

  “No, I don’t. I still think there’s potential for another quake. And soon. I felt aftershocks for weeks. Two strong ones on October 22 and November 5 of that same year. On January 3, 1903, another quake shook houses along the South Carolina and Georgia border, near Savannah. In April of ’07, another quake affected Charleston, Augusta, and Savannah, rattling dishes and knocking items from shelves. Another quake hit Summerville in June of 1912, felt as far as Wilmington, North Carolina, and Macon, Georgia. Union County had a small quake in 1913. And another one in Summerville in September of 1914 knocked pictures from walls. Folks said it sounded like a train coming into their homes. Hundreds of minor quakes have occurred that are barely noticeable. Then, of course, there was the one the night the town hall was set on fire.”

  “And you feel the energy again?” asked Raphael.

  “I do. It was harder for me to pick it up on account of how far I’d fallen, but now that I’ve regained my wits, I feel it strong. It’s always been hissing, but I think that quake in ’86 busted something open.”

  Ellsworth said, “Why did you stay in Bellhaven? Was it the quakes or the chapel?”

  “Both. Scientifically I was curious to learn why an earthquake of that magnitude happened here.”

  “And the other?”

  “For the first time I believed in heaven. I talked to Susannah inside those walls the day after the big quake. And the day after that. I went nearly every day since. Couldn’t stop going. But what I didn’t realize—not at first—was that going there was changing me. It aged me like the dickens. And it made me selfish. Jealous. Like it was my own special place and no one else could ever have it. It was already mostly concealed beneath vines and branches, but I hid it even more with deadfall and brambles. I was determined that no one else would ever find it. Only recently had I begun to clear it out, so someone else could maybe find it after I died.”

  “Eliza found it,” said Ellsworth. “She spoke to me of the healing floor, about talking to our son who died stillborn. In the weeks before she died, she looked calmer, more at peace. But the aging was starting to show with her too.” He looked at Tanner, changed course. “When you stabbed me, you claimed the devil made you do it. Was it a voice you heard?”

  “No, just a thought that popped up in my head. You went into the woods, and I didn’t like it. So I needed to kill you.” Tanner leaned back in his chair, ran fingers through his white hair. “I saw the age marks in the mirror. Felt the goodness drip out of me like candle wax until all that remained was the bad stuff. I knew it all, and still I went. That was the power of hearing Susannah’s voice every day. I was willing to make a deal with the devil if I could be with her just a little more. And apparently I’m not alone.”

  “Just how old are you, Tanner?”

  He scoffed. “How old do I look?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Wouldn’t want it any other way.”

  “Eighty plus,” said Ellsworth. “On a bad day, maybe pushing ninety.”

  Tanner looked around the table, grimaced. “Well you’re about three decades off, you cake-eater. I’m fifty-five.” He looked at his hands. “Place has shriveled me up like a prune.” He winked at Ellsworth. “But at least I got both my legs.”

  Ellsworth chuckled at the bluntness.

  “Ask a man his age, you can’t always expect a nice answer.”

  Gabriel leaned with her elbows on the table. “Tanner, you spoke of believing in heaven earlier.”

  “Yes.”

  “But then you also spoke of the devil and his doings? Why?”

  Tanner stood from the table. “Because now I also believe in hell.”

  CHAPTER 19

  While Alfred slept in Ellsworth’s chair and Gabriel and Raphael went to check on the prisoners in the jailhouse, Ellsworth and Tanner headed up the hillside together to confront Eddington and bring home
Linda May and Anna Belle.

  It was slow going up the hillside, one man with a fake leg and the other stooped and depleted from having gone into the woods too many times.

  “Sorry about that leg comment,” said Tanner. “It was one of them thoughts that got through.”

  Ellsworth waved it away. “You simply stated a fact. You have two legs, and I don’t.”

  Tanner stared off toward the woods behind the yellow house. “I still have the urge. It’s strong.” They walked for another ten yards. “You actually have one and a half legs. It’s the foot you’re missing. And the knee.”

  “Close your head for a bit. Can you do that?”

  “I can.”

  “Next thing you know you’ll be walking backwards again.”

  Two men in pinstriped suits stood stone still on either side of the steps leading to the white sunporch. The man on the right had a flat nose and full lips. He pulled a pistol from his coat. The other guard did the same.

  Ellsworth had never seen either man before, so he held up his palms. “Just need to bump gums with your boss.”

  “G’v’m gun,” mumbled the flat-nosed guard.

  “What’d he say?” Ellsworth asked the other guard.

  “Said give him your gun.”

  Ellsworth removed the Smith & Wesson from his holster. Flat Nose handed it to his partner and patted Ellsworth down, then nodded his boxy head for them to proceed up the porch steps.

  “You heeled, old man?” asked the other guard.

  Tanner paused, then slowly opened his coat and came out with his hand pointed like a gun, index finger as the barrel and the thumb as the hammer. “Bang.” Flat Nose grunted, then decided to give the old man a quick pat down. Tanner said, “Careful, Frankenstein.”

  Flat Nose nudged him along toward the steps.

  “You trying to get us killed?” said Ellsworth.

  Tanner smirked. “Why does a maker of chess sets need armed guards?”

  Ellsworth didn’t know, but before he could knock on the front door it opened.

  “Gentlemen, welcome.” Lou Eddington stood tall in a white suit and shiny black shoes with spats. His neck was still bloated, and his cheeks were rosy. “Please come in.”