When in good spirits, fresh from a triumph, Poe wanted nothing more than to stride about with a disciple or devotee in tow, his weak chin thrust high. At moments like these, he had sufficient confidence to bridge the gap to arrogance. Yes, he could be imperious. He knew himself to be a brilliant man and knew also that few others grasped the extent of his genius, and at certain infrequent moments, he could not keep himself from striding through the world like a Moses parting the Red Sea, commanding his followers to trust him. The waters of ignorance could not dampen his shoes at such times. Nor, unfortunately, could the mist of reason, which might have dampened his mania enough to save him.
But the arrogance would not appear for a while yet. For now he wished to be alone with darker, roiled thoughts. He sent me back to the Newsboys’ Lodging-House.
“I have many things to puzzle out concerning Messrs. Hobbs and Andrews,” he said. “If the solution to the puzzle occurs to me, you should look for it on the Mirror’s front page in a day or so. I regret the effect such news will have on the young Miss Hobbs, but perhaps in the end I shall be doing her a greater service than she can now appreciate.”
I mustered the nerve to caution him against tilting his lance at a windmill so impregnable as Hobbs.
“There is no man so powerful as the written word,” he told me. “If you forget all else, remember that at least.”
He promised to call for me two or, at the most, three days hence. By then he would be ensconced, he said, in his permanent position at the Mirror—a sinecure he now considered inevitable—and would be ideally situated then to arrange for my employment as a printer’s devil. Better yet, he would demand that I be hired as a copyboy. And when, in a few months’ time, he was in a position to begin his own journal—destined, of course, to be the city’s, no, the nation’s literary and cultural clarion—he would move me with him, taking his fidus Achates into the rarefied air of Olympus.
“As I rise,” he told me, “my friends rise with me.”
(Did he ever realize, I often wonder, that this was the moment when we both, he with his eyes on Olympus and me with no idea what the name implied, began our Hadean slide?)
And so I returned to the Newsboys’ house to await my promotion from gutterslink to gallinipper to, in time, a big bug myself. Perhaps I even bragged a bit to the other boys that I would soon be leaving them behind for a splendid house on Fifth Avenue, where I would eat eggs and rashers off fine china instead of scraping mush from a cracked bowl. And that is why I attended Jacob Van Rensselaer’s lecture the following evening with a clot of dried blood in my nose, compliments of Moonie Weaver.
I had made no friends at the House who, whether in opposition to Moonie or other forces, would have sprung to my aid. Nor did I cultivate any friendships. I had Poe; no other chums need apply.
That evening as Van Rensselaer droned on in his monotonic rumble, I sat apart from the other boys and picked flecks of blood from a nostril. I sat there despising all of them, projecting my self-loathing onto boys whose names I had not bothered to learn. Instead of hating myself for behaving like a field mouse in the face of Moonie’s fist, I oozed contempt for every other boy in the room, their crude and vulgar ways, their inevitable destinies of violence and crime.
Van Rensselaer seemed as ridiculous as the rest of them, as complete a fool. Throughout his harangue about the need to be vigilant over turpitude of mind and body, the other boys attempted to torture him with rude sounds. Instead of silencing the perpetrator with a whack to the head, or better yet a thrashing with his belt, Van Rensselaer reacted with a passivity that smacked, I thought, of cowardice.
Sin lies crouched at our doorsteps, he told us, waiting to pounce upon us as it had pounced upon Cain…and a boy off to his left shrilly barked. Van Rensselaer flinched, looked about for the culprit, but all faces were deadpan.
Van Rensselaer then admonished us to avoid highly spiced foods, for they would engender an inflammation of the bowels, which in turn would cause an irritation of certain nether parts, a heat too often interpreted by older boys as an animalistic urge in need of venting. At this, one of the boys vented a fart.
Not only did the ragged percussion startle Van Rensselaer even more than the bark had, but the rank effluvium threatened to lay him out flat. I have never since seen a man so paled by a fart as he was. His face went snow white and his eyes watered and his lips, what I could see of them behind his hand, began to quiver.
He spoke a while longer but, unwilling to risk an inhalation that might well prove fatal, he finished up chastising us all as low beasts and sent his charges tittering out the door.
In time I would discover that the ailments of Van Rensselaer were well known throughout the House, just as they were known throughout the upper echelons of Gotham society. He suffered principally from an acuteness of the senses. Any strong scent, whether sweet or rancid, set his stomach to heaving. Sounds louder than a low conversation, with the one exception of softly played violins, made him want to plug his ears and grit his teeth. Spiced foods, if ever a morsel found its way past his tongue, would have him perched in the privy for the next forty-eight hours.
He wore only silks and fine linens and, unable to abide the weight of even a down coverlet atop his body as he slept, was forced to keep a fire going in his hearth on cooler summer nights. Lastly, any sight visually loud was offensive to him, even noxious: bright colors, sudden movement, unfiltered sunlight, the dizzying spectacle of a milling crowd.
It was said that he had once tried to escape the throb and jostle of Manhattan with an excursion to Sagaponack. There he embarked upon a solitary stroll through the birch woods on a splendidly overcast and monochromatic day. And for a while, an hour or so, he found the gray stillness conducive to bliss. But when the clouds parted suddenly and sunlight flooded down through the canopy of slender trees, where it was then broken into irregular golden shafts that seemed to dart and dance all around him, he was dropped to his knees by a fit of vertigo. Unable to scream for help because his own voice would have driven him completely insane, he had no choice but to cower there until sundown, when, after the strobing illumination had ceased its giddy dance, he was able to crawl back to civilization.
Despite these infirmities, Van Rensselaer exerted tremendous influence inside Gotham and beyond. Because of his pedigree—his family had worked alongside Minuit and Stuyvesant in wrestling a city from wilderness and swamp—and because of his inherited wealth, both liquid and in real estate, his eccentricities were not only tolerated but coddled.
Unable to abide a woman’s touch or scent, he was the evolutionary dead end of the Van Rensselaer aristocracy. But it was his goal, before he departed this veil of sensory irritation, to temper the city’s cancerous growth with his own moral exactitude. In short, he intended to leave the island a cleaner and quieter and duller place, the barks and farts of newsboys notwithstanding.
Of course none of this would matter to me for a while. I was merely marking time until Poe came for me again. Little did I realize that our roles were about to be reversed.
At the end of Van Rensselaer’s lecture that night, the other boys were quick to exit the room, eager to return to unsupervised devilments. In no hurry to be at the mercy of Moonie Weaver again, I lingered. In so doing I became the target of Van Rensselaer’s attention.
“Mister Dubbins,” he said, without bridging the ten feet of empty room between us, “how do you find your new lodgings these days?”
I studied a fleck of blood on my thumbnail. “It’s like paradise,” I said. “Just like the Garden of Eden.”
My sarcasm went unnoticed. He nodded and pursed his thin lips. “And your mentor, Mr. Poe. How is his work progressing?”
“Writing up a storm,” I said.
“In regards to…?”
“Some kind of poetry, I don’t know. Stories. Things like that.”
“And his newspaper work?”
“It is bearing fruit?”
“Huh?”
He dabbed a gloved fingertip at the corners of his mouth. “Tell him, if you will, that I send my regards. That I wish him well.”
He stared at me for a moment or two, possibly because I was staring at him as well. Something about his manner of feigned nonchalance, his curiosity of Poe, struck me as odd. On the other hand, he was a very odd bird all told.
In any event, that exchange, as I now recall it, was the moment when my evening’s uneasiness began, a kind of nervous agitation. I grew all-overish, as we said back then, as if there were ants wriggling through my veins.
No doubt some of the discomfort was in anticipation of returning to my bedroom, which was also the bedroom of two dozen other boys, including Moonie Weaver. So when Van Rensselaer departed and left me alone in the lecture hall, I did not rush to my bed but remained huddled in a corner of the empty room.
In time the building grew quiet; all noises faded to an infrequent whisper, an occasional creak. Yet my restlessness would not subside. My muscles seemed to know what my senses could not confirm, that this night sat teetering on the edge of some greater darkness. I could not at first identify that darkness as evil, but merely as prelude, and waited nervously as you might wait for a knock on the door, or the first lightning crack of a blackening sky.
I was not well trained in inactivity. I sat hugging my knees for as long as I could stand it. Perhaps an hour, though it seemed much more. There was no question of sleep; sleep was for the foolish, for those not attuned like Poe and me to the tremblings of the night.
But though attuned to these tremblings, I had not yet learned to interpret them, and identified the flutter in my stomach as hunger. In the morning I would be forced to sit down to another serving of bran bread, mush, and water. Mrs. Clemm, on the other hand, would have stuffed me with chunks of ham, fried potatoes, johnnycake, and tea. I think it was her I missed most of all that night, not merely her meals but her gentle and loving solidity. Even in poverty she was far more generous than all the benefactors of this parsimonious place.
I doubted I might find any ham in the kitchen downstairs, but with luck a biscuit or two. Maybe a jar of fruit preserves. So I gave in to my urge for a bit of petty thievery. I had tried my best to remain upright and honest, but I had no knack for it. Besides, to just think of Mrs. Clemm shone a small light in the darkness I felt gathering all around me, squeezing me in. This then became the equation: a bit of food would make me feel closer to Mrs. Clemm, this sense of closeness would light a candle in my gloom, and with luck this one small candle might hold the snarling beasts of night at bay.
30
Every sneaking step down the stairs sent a slow creak throughout the house. Once or twice I thought my creak answered by one in another part of the building, and I froze in place until I could bring my breathing under sufficient control that I could again hear the silence of the building. By the time I reached the first floor, my hands were slick with perspiration, the pulse pounding in my temples. There was a hollowness in my stomach that I mistook for deepening hunger. Again, my body already knew what my mind did not.
I felt my way through the darkened foyer, past MacGregor’s empty desk. A smudge of weak moonlight filtered in through the windows, but only enough to make me long for more.
I was just inside the kitchen, my hand reaching for the first cupboard door, when a floorboard squeaked above my head. One of the matrons? I wondered. On her way to check the beds? If she found mine empty, I was sure to be punished for this violation, and punishment here was of the type I could least abide, a kind of house arrest that imprisoned the culprit inside for an entire day, washing floors and scrubbing down walls. I stood there paralyzed, wondering if there was any chance at all I might sneak to bed before being discovered.
Then came the second squeak. But this one different, not a floorboard but the squeak of a hinge. And not above my head but at my back, twenty feet away in the pantry.
The hackles were as stiff as splinters on my neck. For now the footsteps above my head were continuing, one slow creak after another. By their sound I could trace the creeper’s movements across the upstairs hallway, moving toward the stairs. Made not, I knew clearly now, by one of our heavy-footed waddling matrons. Too stealthy and deliberate. Too circumspect.
I felt I had no choice but to retreat in the direction of the other squeak, which in contrast had seemed not ominous but accidental. On tiptoe I crept to the pantry threshold and there saw, in its sliver of moonlight, the source of the noise. The back door stood open by six inches. Even as I stood there staring at it, dumbfounded, another small breeze blew it open a half inch farther and squeaked the hinge once more.
The door could not have been MacGregor’s fault, this much I knew. His routine of locking up was so ingrained in him by now that he would sooner forget to take off his boots before climbing into bed. The conclusion was inescapable: whoever had picked that lock was now creeping down the upstairs hallway.
What I should have done was to throw open that pantry door and fling myself out into the night. I almost did so. But two steps from freedom I was seized by a sudden fear: What if someone else waited just outside?
When the heart begins to hammer as loudly as mine did then, when the mouth goes dry and the blood begins to splash and roar behind your eyes, it does no good to try to think. The only thing to do is to move.
I could not force myself out the pantry door, and there was no safety in my bed. Only one path lay open to me—through the front door. I hurried out of the pantry and kitchen, turned the corner, and, still on tiptoe, all but sprinted for the foyer. Bang into MacGregor’s table, a quick screech of its legs, the shock of impact stabbing into my hip. I froze for just a moment, long enough to hear that the footsteps above my head had paused as well, but only for an instant, and then had increased in pace, one quick creak after another, now nearly to the stairs.
I grabbed the glass knob of the front door and twisted it with both hands and pulled with all my might. But here MacGregor had not been undone. And the key, I knew, the massive iron key on a leather thong, would be on his bed table now, or still in his trousers pocket.
In any case, the door would not budge. And suddenly all those earlier murmurs of the night congealed in solid form, all those vague premonitions materialized. The stairway creaked at my back, but my legs would not run. My hands kept twisting at the knob though my mind screamed to release it. Another stair step creaked. And a third.
I broke free of my paralysis and turned just in time to see a black boot descending into view, black boot and flapping black trouser cuff. When its mate came down to join it on the stair, I fled. Three steps back toward MacGregor’s desk and I then dove to my left, plunged breathless into the wide, deep parlor, the room we boys were forbidden to enter, its soft chairs and divan reserved for those more genteel than we, for Mr. Graham’s lectures to the General Society and the Sunday School Union.
A pitch-black room it was, on the wrong side for moonlight. But I had glanced inside it often enough to know its basic layout, and I made it to the far side of the room without knocking anything over. There I crouched behind the side of the divan and peered over the brocaded armrest and tried not to blink as I watched the wide rectangle of gray that was the parlor’s door.
He came down the stairs and paused. I could not yet see him but his wariness was tangible. His eyes searched the foyer. He sniffed for my scent. Then the footsteps began again, a slow scrape. Step by step they grew louder. And then his figure filled the parlor door.
It was little more than adumbration, a shadow slightly darker than the doorway, yet I recognized him immediately. He was Death. The one who prowled the Bowery. The one whose existence I had denied. And now he was here, peering into this room, probing its darkness.
I saw him as a stiff scarecrow of a man, a kind of Ich
abod Crane, but sinister rather than ineffectual, a corpse himself, emaciated by a hunger that could never be sated. When I heard myself whimpering with fear, I dropped down below the armrest and cowered, hugging myself.
There was no question that he was looking for me. Why else would I feel the chill of his heart in my own bones?
I should have screamed out, should have raised an alarm. But I was mute. Did I imagine he could not hear me there, quivering like a mouse? I don’t know what I imagined.
But I felt him coming nearer. I felt his presence fill the room. He smelled of tobacco smoke and musty earth, an odor of dry dead leaves. But if this perception was accurate, my auditory sense was not, was clouded by a fog of fear as I lowered myself onto all fours and began to crawl—away from him, I thought.
His hand was suddenly on the back of my neck, five fingernails seizing, a pinching grip. Hauled up onto my feet, I was pushed before him like a dangling puppet, thrust toward the door. He was grunting with every breath now, every exhalation a small moan of effort, and this was all that saved me, all that kept me from hanging there forever like a limp gaffed fish—the recognition that Death was subject to fatigue, not indefatigable, not inescapable, that he was, perhaps, more human than demon after all.
I swept my feet back, I dropped to my knees. The extra weight pulled him forward, off balance. As my knees hit the floor, I twisted in his grasp, felt his fingernails raking skin from my neck, streaks as hot as fire. But his grip broke, and I was rolling away even as he put out his left hand to break his fall, even as he lunged after me, and now the fear in me turned to joy, energy, and his claws snatching at my shirt came back empty, for I was on my feet and running now, flying through the kitchen, through the pantry, and out the unlocked door, free for the moment at least, delicious freedom, though my neck burned with fresh blood, and I knew not what or who might be out here awaiting my emergence into the night.
On Night's Shore Page 23