As quickly as we could we crawled out of the cave and made our way in single file up the narrow dirt path of the tunnel. At the mouth of the tunnel we were all of us surprised when the door swung open after first Poe, then I, then Mrs. Clemm threw our weight against it. The door, which had no lock, had been propped shut with a small chest, but it was no match for Mrs. Clemm’s broad shoulders.
We emerged into the larger hallway of the basement as if into freedom itself. I for one felt like dancing. And then came the second thud, clearer and even louder than the first. We realized in an instant that we were yet far from freedom. Hobbs’s man had ascended the stairs into the kitchen. Our prison had been widened, but we were no less trapped.
I raced through the basement and up the stairs ahead of the others. The door to the kitchen would not yield. I could tell from its solidity that, whether locked or barricaded, this one would not give way no matter how hard Mrs. Clemm pushed. And even if it did, would we open it to see Careys filling the doorway, this time with sword or even pistol in hand?
Poe, at the bottom of the stairs, called me away from the door. “He might be arming himself for an attack,” Poe said. “We must find a better way out.”
I hurried down to them. To Mrs. Clemm I said, “Maybe I can crawl out through that little window we saw.”
“It’s too small for even you. Look for the coal chute instead.”
We found the coal bin after a few minutes of searching. It was filled to four feet high with shiny lumps of anthracite. Another few feet above this pile was a small square door, hinged at the top to swing inside, latched at the bottom. I undid the latch, but still the door would not open.
“It must be latched on the outside as well,” Poe said.
Mrs. Clemm seized the largest lump of coal she could hold in both hands, and with a great heaving swing she crashed it squarely against the coal chute’s door. Again and again she swung, until finally the hinge gave way. Now she slipped her fingers into the opening and pulled at the top of the door. She yanked at it until her hands were bloody. Then Poe put out a hand and moved her aside and, battered as he was, finished the job.
I climbed up and into the opening and managed to squirm outside without leaving too much skin behind. I wanted nothing at that moment but to lie there on the grass and breathe in the scent of the night, the sweet green wondrous fragrance of liberation. But Mrs. Clemm and Poe remained inside.
I ran to the side porch and crept onto it and peered in through the pantry door. The kitchen was well lit now, an oil lamp in the center of the table. Standing bent and vigilant to the side of the cellar door, his ear cocked for the sound of footsteps on the stairs, was Hobbs’s man, a meat cleaver at the ready in his huge right hand.
I had no idea what to do. I knew that Mrs. Clemm and I had left the pantry door unlocked, but I was not so foolish as to believe that I could simply stroll inside and confront Hobbs’s man face-to-face. He was not swift of movement, but apparently strong enough to have shanghaied Poe. Armed as he now was with a kitchen broadax, what could he do to a boy barely half his size?
My only choice was to outwit the man. Draw him outside somehow, set him in pursuit of me around the block, then circle back and turn the prisoners free before he could catch up. At the time, it seemed a wonderful plan. Even foolproof. I was ten years old.
I hurried back to the coal chute and stuck my head inside and asked Mrs. Clemm to pass me up a couple of good-sized lumps of coal. As she did so, she asked, “What are you up to?” but I did not answer; I merely grinned and arched my eyebrows.
Back to the side porch then, the coal cradled in my arms. I eased both lumps to the floor, then picked them up one at a time to heave through the pane of glass in the top half of the pantry door. The first lump shattered the pane completely; the second sailed through to bounce off crockery inside and set it ringing.
In answer to the noise I was making, a dog not far away launched into a chorus of barking. Another dog joined in. By now I was off the porch and waiting in the yard for Hobbs’s man to come flying out after me, but he did not appear.
I waited another quarter minute, then approached the pantry door. By degrees I moved close enough to peer inside. The kitchen was empty. Had I frightened him away? Apparently so. I swung the door open and let it bang back against the wall. Still no sign of Careys. I entered with more confidence than caution. Into the kitchen, a quick glance to see that the way was clear, then straight for the cellar door.
I twisted the knob, but the door would not open. The door was locked and the key had been removed. I turned away so as to scour the kitchen for the key, and it was then I saw him, his great gangly form emerging to fill the open doorway on the far side of the kitchen, cleaver dangling at his side.
His mouth was stretched tight in a hard and grotesque smile. “You’re about to lose that hand of yours,” he said. He raised the cleaver to his shoulder and came toward me. With one long stride he cut the distance between us in half.
Nothing but the table kept him from reaching for me. And so I seized the only thing there available, the oil lamp, and holding it by the wire handle, I swung it out wide and let go and sent it flying at his face. He twisted aside, and the lamp smashed into the wall and the glass and oil exploded out in all directions. He stood there blinking for a moment, the right side of his face in flames, his right hand a torch.
An instant later he made a sound like a dying animal, an animal panicked by the scent of its own death, and staggering forward, he lurched into the table, driving it into me. I, so as not to be pinned against a wall, lifted it by the corner and shoved it with all my might, slamming it against him. Careys dropped the cleaver but continued lurching forward, half-blinded by pain, beating both hands against his face. I slipped to the inside of him, toward the other rooms, while he staggered headlong into the pantry. He was still aflame when he disappeared from view and went banging out the back door.
I retrieved the cleaver and hacked away at the basement door. By the time I had it open and called to Poe and Mrs. Clemm, by the time they decided to trust my voice and had ascended the stairs, the entire corner of the kitchen was in flames. A fog of gray smoke two feet thick blanketed the ceiling.
“This way quick,” I said and stepped into the pantry, and, on the verge of warning the others to keep an eye out for Careys, there met him creeping in, advancing in a stiff crouch. Never before had he so resembled Death himself. His face seemed half melted, blackened, and hairless. In his seared right hand he clutched a dagger. In his left, a short cudgel of stove wood. I smelled the reek of his burned flesh and saw his twisted grin, and all I could think was that he had used that same dagger on my mother.
“You stinking rat bastard!” I screamed, and lunged toward him with the cleaver.
Poe jerked me back so violently that the cleaver flew from my hand and clattered to the floor. He then dragged me back into the kitchen and shoved me past the flaming wall, and in a moment, all three of us were racing for the front door.
But that door was locked as well, as we should have known it would be. And far too solid to ever yield to a battering from Mrs. Clemm’s shoulder.
“You’ll want this key,” Careys said from behind us, croaking out of the corner of his mouth as he came lurching through the flames. The heavy key dangled from his left hand. Cocked in his right was the cleaver.
“The window upstairs!” I told them and set off up the steps, leading the way. We thundered up the staircase with Careys lurching up behind us.
Down the hall we raced. “This way!” I cried, and led them into the darkened bedroom, Mrs. Clemm’s breath as heavy now as the footsteps like hammer blows that were mounting the steps.
I slammed shut the bedroom door and took Mrs. Clemm by the arm and pulled her to the open window. “Climb out. And watch yourself on the broken glass.”
As her legs were disappearing into the darkness, I turned
to Poe. “You’ll have to help her down and off the roof.”
“Go,” Poe told me.
I pushed him toward the window. “I ain’t tall enough to help her. I’ll be right behind you.”
“Go!” he shouted, and with that he shoved me ahead of him. Even as I ducked into the opening, he kept his hand on the small of my back, urging me forward. Mrs. Clemm was by then inching her way down the sloping roof, scooting toward its edge, scraping forward on her heels and backside.
With my head out the window I did not hear Careys’s heavy stride pounding down the hallway, but I heard the thunderous crack at the door as his foot kicked it open, and I felt Poe’s hand fly off my back as he turned.
Had I at that instant dived headfirst out onto the pantry roof, there might have been time for Poe to follow. But I did not. Something compelled me to stop halfway out the window, to twist my body around and look back into the room.
Poe had turned to stand with his back to me, a shadow, a shield. Twelve feet beyond him, but closing that distance quickly, came Careys. Behind him, the doorway was filled with a rose-colored light, smoke gray, flickering and alive. He looked huge, as did the kitchen cleaver still in his fist.
Poe put a hand out behind himself, probably feeling for the window ledge. Instead he felt me still blocking the only escape. He knew in that moment that he no longer had time to crawl out the window, knew that I, apparently paralyzed, was in danger myself. And so he charged. He lunged forward, head tucked into his neck, shoulders hunched, and rammed Careys in the midsection, wrapped his arms about the man’s waist, and strove to drive him backward against the wall.
Careys was thin and stiff but as hard as forged steel. Even as he stumbled back, he raised his right hand and, in an awkward sideways chop, slammed the flat side of the cleaver against Poe’s skull. Poe dropped to the floor in a heap.
Careys looked up at me now and grinned. It was all I needed to break the paralysis. I leaped forward and pulled my legs out behind me and scrambled on my hands and toes down over the slates.
But I did not jump to the ground, did not join Mrs. Clemm already on the grass, standing there looking up at me with her arms outstretched. At the edge of the porch roof I looked back over a shoulder; somehow I knew he would not follow. He stood framed in the window for just a moment, smiling and nodding his head at me, acknowledging, I thought, my cowardice. Then he ducked back inside.
All of the air went out of the night. Something inside me collapsed. I felt deflated, an empty skin. Because now Poe was doomed. I had abandoned him. I and I alone had brought him to this impasse, I with my encouragement, my greed, my loose talk in Hobbs’s kitchen. From the moment I had met Poe, I had been angling him toward this fate, just as surely as I had directed Careys’s knife into my mother.
Mrs. Clemm was calling to me from below, but how could I go to her now? How could I ever look into her eyes again, or bless myself with Virginia’s smile? Even their forgiveness would be too painful to bear.
You might as well be dead yourself, that was the refrain that echoed inside my head. And I knew it was true, the truest thought I had ever had.
So I crawled back up toward the window. Sneaking like a mouse, I crept up to it and peeked in through the haze of smoke and saw Careys dragging Poe by the ankles, out to the hallway and into the carnation-colored light.
The window seemed smaller as I eased one leg inside, straddling the sill, then ducked and brought in the upper half of my body. The room itself seemed smaller, the ceiling two feet closer to my head now, a ceiling of gray smoke, oppressive and acrid. My eyes stung, my chest burned, but more than that my soul ached with emptiness, with the hollow red throb of futility.
Into the bedroom I crept, and toward the door. The thin fog of smoke rendered the sheeted furnishings all the more eerie, but I was resigned to their foreboding now. I heard Careys’s first heavy footfalls on the stairway, the thump of Poe’s body being dragged behind.
Out into the hallway then, out into the fluttering light. It was there I saw the source of the illumination and the reason Careys’s footfalls had abruptly ceased. He stood one-quarter of the way down the stairs, facing downward but still holding one of Poe’s ankles in each hand, holding them like yokes atop his hips while Poe, on his back, lay unconscious. Five steps below Careys, the fire had burned through the stairway; the flames were reaching up, fluttering pennants of blue and orange and golden flame. I thought how strangely beautiful they looked, how strangely sad. Everything at that moment struck me as beautiful and sad, the entire world, and certainly the way I was now walking toward the top of the stairs, heedlessly, without caution, as doomed as everyone and everything else in this sad and beautiful universe.
Just as I reached the top of the stairs, Careys heard me and looked back, but I did not pause to let him grin. I threw myself forward, I sailed off the top landing, swooped down on him, flung myself at his head. He could not raise his hands fast enough to catch me. I crashed into him, and together we were catapulted into the flames, into and suddenly through their heat to land in a tumble at the bottom.
He was more dazed than I, having fallen on his back with me atop him. In a second I was on my feet again. My one objective was to draw Careys away from Poe.
I vaulted out of his reach, then looked up the staircase to where Poe still lay. The flames were not far from his feet, but he was beginning to stir now; his head went to one side and a hand came up to rub his cheek. I knew that if he saw me down there, he would come after me, and I did not want his intervention. I did not want to be saved, but to be the savior.
And so I hurried away, out of Poe’s sight. I stepped behind the doorjamb of the nearest room.
I heard Careys rising to his knees and pulling himself up, the way he grunted now with every movement. The wheeze of his angry breath enraged me. And those scratches where his claws had once raked my neck, they began to throb anew. Their heat became a liquid flame that trickled down my spine. There was no room in my mind for logic, no space in my heart for anything but black fury.
But this room was without opportunity; it was a room too small to hide in, and windowless, too dark to see my own hand before my face. Realizing this, a wave of panic rushed through me, that I had made a fatal error—I would die without revenge.
I went to the threshold and peeked out. Poe was crawling on his hands and knees, nearly to the top of the steps. Below him, at the bottom of the staircase, Careys watched, seething but impotent to follow, too stiff to ever leap upward through the thickening wall of flames.
At the top of the stairs Poe seized the banister and pulled himself to his feet. He glanced back just once, though not at me standing in the darkened threshold, and, seeing Careys unable to pursue him, thinking no doubt that I was safe outside, he hobbled toward the bedroom, coughing softly into his hand, and soon disappeared into the smoke.
Careys came down off the landing and stood there for a moment as if confused. Then he dug into a coat pocket and pulled out the thick key and lurched toward the front door.
The moment I realized what he was up to, that he was still, though circuitously, in pursuit of Poe, I stepped into the hallway again. An idea had only half formed in my mind, but there was no time left to let it take shape fully. I stepped out behind him as the key scraped into place.
“Rat bastard,” I said.
He swung around at the sound of my voice. He saw me and grinned. His hand came away from the key then, leaving the key fitted to the lock. He started toward me, his hand free now to slip into another pocket, free to ease out his dagger.
I pivoted to my left and ran. But not far, another ten feet, and then with both hands stretched out before me, palms flat to strike the wooden frame of a pair of French doors. The doors flew open, and I raced into Johnston Hobbs’s library, his den, that vast luxurious room where he had first entertained and deluded Mr. Poe.
I had no doubts that
Careys had seen me enter this room. No doubts that by virtue of the streetlight bleeding in through the windows, he would find me there. I raced to the far side of the room, to the fireplace, the fieldstone hearth. Ten seconds later I saw Careys’s lank shadow passing in front of the French doors, and I hurried to position myself behind Hobbs’s wing chair, shielding myself behind its high, brocaded back.
Careys came to the threshold, paused, and studied the room. A moment later he saw me huddled close behind the chair, my thin chest and shoulders, my smoke-stained face. He gave me an exhausted smile, half a twisted grin. Then stepped inside, turned, and closed the doors behind him. He faced me once again and said, “He got away for now, I’ll give ya that. But don’t ya worry, boy. He’ll be following ya inta the grave soon enough.”
He showed me the dagger then and took his time coming toward me. “Let’s see if it cuts you open as easy as it did your mum, eh boy?”
I said nothing, had nothing to say. All of my energy, all of my animus, I directed into my fists.
Outside that room, the house was snapping and crackling, pouring forth smoke, creaking and dying. The reflection of flames danced across the beveled glass of the broad French doors. Every breath stank of smoke, every blink burned my eyes. Yet I stood motionless, a paralyzed mouse.
I was a mouse, yes, but with the heart of a rat. For when he came around the side of the chair, when he came crabbing sideways toward me, an arm’s length away, his dagger held cocked, I did not flee in the opposite direction, did not run for a mouse hole; I stepped toward him. I raised up my fists, showed him the dueling swords I clutched there—the swords yanked down off Hobbs’s coat of arms above the fireplace, his shield of nobility, divine lineage—and the moment Careys’s eyes widened at the sight of them, I lunged into him. I charged headlong with my wrists cocked at my waist and then thrusting outward.
Into the softness of his belly I plunged both swords, and not only that but my hatred as well, every moment of hatred in my ten hard years, rammed it all into his gut, twisting and pushing, the end of my impotence. The rattling shock of vibration rippled all the way up into my shoulders, the violence of the act lifted me up off my feet, carrying me into him as he fell. I tumbled against him, into his arms, and we crashed to the floor together.
On Night's Shore Page 35