The Mystery Surrounding Hamplock House

by John Tan

  ‘Could it not have been your death was the result of negligence or accident?’

  ‘Negligence! Pah! Accident! Pah!’ she leered and spat evilly, and eyed me with what looked like the epitome of contempt. ‘You are a young fool! But you must open the door for me, Miss!’ Then, silence, and the gleam in her eyes was extinguished and the old woman collapsed. I said, ‘Mrs. Cavendish! Are you there?’

  No reply answered me; but garbled syllables or a grunt. I thought: was there a flash of recognition, still smolderingly alive: but very distant—was that Mrs. Cavendish?

  Suddenly, I brightened, unaccountably, and the words from Windmills of Your Mind popped into my head—just like that, and I chanted in a purposefully obtrusive way, ‘ a wheel within a wheel… the windmills of your mind’—which was semi-automatically followed up by another oldie, Both Sides Now: ‘I don’t know life at all.’

  Mrs. Cavendish got the better of her struggles, uncoiled her arms, and looked at me as if she had just awakened from deep sleep and said, ‘Where am I? Where am I, girl?’ Then, she hesitated, and in her hesitation she became alarmed, and turning pale, she promptly fainted. I fetched water in a finger-glass and poured it on her face, and she revived, but she had no recollection of the disturbing account I am sharing with the reader, which she played a principal part. Except, one single moment, coming down the single flight of stairs, when she cried: ‘Oh, it’s horrible! Too horrible!’ and then promptly lost it. I took her on my shoulder and walked her gingerly to sick bay, where, there, she slept the night out among the company of other sick patients.

  7

  As this episode is still left hanging, I would augment it by saying, it came out later there had been reports in the New York Times and the Daily Mail, London, with reference to the wreck of the Czarina Olga on December 5, 1865, whereby—the Times has it that, “Mrs. Lara Hamplock and five year old Davy Hamplock, of 25th Street, New York, New York, lost their lives unexpectedly at sea in a ferry sinking that occurred at ten PM on that same day, eighteen nautical miles off the Finnish coast, near a rocky point called Hargoudd: the same Swedish ferry, having left Stockholm earlier in the evening, but it never made landfall as expected around midnight. The captain, crew and the passengers, numbering nearly two hundred souls, were feared to have drowned in the icy Baltic Sea. Rough weather conditions and choppy waters with eight-foot-high waves were blamed for the disaster which sprang up without warning upon the Czarina Olga which heretofore had been making good speed for her destined port of Helsinki.” There were many excellent notices of many solemn official condolences and the Finnish High Consul, His Excellency the Honorable Ethelbert Jacob Vass was especially mentioned to have extended his personal sorrow, having carried the sad news to Mr. Augustine Tecumseh Hamplock’s family.

  This chapter has been written for the reader’s benefit, with the aim of equipping him with hindsight; however, this piece of valuable, factual information only came to light a few months after I left Hamplock House when the mystery surrounding it had been solved, and I had myself investigated the archives for information regarding Millionaire Hamplock’s past, and what might have happened in regard to Lara Axel Wade who was his first wife.

  8

  Morning’s orisons of larks had summoned the sun, and out came the wan light of the breaking dawn upon Hamplock House; making its present the muted effervesce from the other side, the light side, against those dark encroachments of the night. Upon opening my eyes, I was moved by my fading dream, sketchy enough now—of two hairless heads as bare as bodkins, long and thin at the jaw, with piercing blue eyes from which sparks flew as when flint is struck, and cobwebby breasts without repose, hollowed out by mirthless, grim death. Then, I recollected with rueful start I had dreamt of my father, also. He was eating mussel and guzzling bottled beer, speechlessly,--admitting only grunts of delight as he savored his fare with big muttering jowl,--the dexterity of which maxillary muscles were evident as the flush of his neck and temples; showing the joy suffusing those red corpuses of his bumping inside his veins within. My mother had a smiling look while she looked upon him; also eating her food beside him, albeit with some little reluctance; gathering up watercress with her fork. I was in sudden turn thinking about home. Sometime in the early days of June, tum-tiddly-tum—how the jazz music played—it was one of those days that made a difference; as everything in my life had been up till then, delicately poised—my thoughts, now a-beginning to wander, I must needs it stayed on the groove; like the gramophone record’s needle. Struck me, too, it did--that my father would drink the ocean dry from his earthen mugs if he could. Today, however, in retrospect, was a day imbued with a happy promise as comfortable as bread crumbs. I had, myself, descended to breakfast quite early; and half-listened to Georg “creepy” Clearwater’s nasal hipness--his cool, racy Southern intonation from my usual seat. Georg was punching the air, and he threw his fist with a bitter swinging cuff and screwed up his very silvery eyebrows,--serving us fruit on a platter and looked he longed to sip some rum. The sun, that morning had made itself conspicuous by refusing to show itself fully, hence, a peach day, in the falling rain,--until the luminary rose at last belatedly. Georg had said, in his world everybody was bald in the rain, and the company he kept was constantly falling apart. ‘Chicken and chorox, box and phlox, there is no pleasing this combination of sauce, and believe me, I have tried, whatever which way, but the entrée is sich a failure, and the burnt fish-head won’t make you sprawl in the luxury of a tight stomach, I’d wager…’ he muttered, matter-of-factly. ‘Now, if I was Chief cook—and I’d like to mention the pig knuckle last week--’ His large larynx showed above his unbuttoned throat, as he stood there fawning like a salubrious shrimp that was breeding a chill in my negligent young bones,--whereby we returned the compliment by heaping jeers on him for being a great imposter. His unprepossessing face was fighting an uphill battle with us breakfasters and what made his face burned with shame, of course, was his oft-spoken liberty towards his bottles.

  We had a new inmate there, today, a strange stout middle-aged woman, who would suffer flies to buzz around and settle on her food and soups. She was known to have said that as one does not know which spot on earth these flies had come from, or how far they have journeyed, one therefore, should be a kind and gracious host to them: to the extent of sharing one’s food and drinks with them—one should, in fact, exercise the most scrupulous hospitality and not shoo them away. That would be most rude and inconsiderate thing in the world to do—to deny our guests decent treatment at our hands, while we have hands to do, thus and thus. This morning, she was munching cornbread in her corner and saying to nobody in particular, ‘There are many kinds of truth, dearie. For instance, there is the devil’s truth, which is a kind of black lie; and it is opposite to God’s truth. There are factual truth, and there are emotional truth. Emotional truth doesn’t have to be factually real or true, it just feels that way. And now, for example, God’s truth is how God sees a particular thing or situation, and because He is God, He has the casting vote. Hey, what did you want, Georg! This say,--fie upon it, when the fair bottom of hell up rises--’

  ‘Go, read a book, woman--’

  ‘Nay, Georg! Nowadays, modern people ask nothing of a book other than it should disparage, slur or enervate some of its readers, or to scatter the ashes of some late powers-that-be; all bombast and ill-made sarcastic--’

  ‘Go; paint your toenails with your lips, my hussy of the sour eye--’

  ‘I betcha you assisted your mother with the preparations, Mr. Top-notch cook! For the erstwhile, forever erstwhile, as often--before you peel the tomatoes, and cut a hundred notches in your face with a nail-clipper! I bet she drinks like you, too—bubbles going up her nose like in my dreams and her hair all waxy and green seaweeds, and ye go to sleep, resting your downy face on my fair lady’s lap.’

  At her ingenuity, Georg rubbed his moustache with his thumb as if bent on having a lark at her expense; for suddenly he slapped his eye and screame
d he had hit a big fly that had settled on his eyelid. His hand was yellowish-brown and his eyes were greys of darkest hue.

  As I was finishing breakfast, I was being called to the social worker’s room because they put my dad on hold while waiting for me to talk with him over the telephone. So, I missed his answer—for Georg looked like he was sprucing himself for a fine repartee.

  ‘Hello, dad. Where are you?’ I spoke low and calmly, nodding to the social worker to be allowed to talk in private.

  ‘At the Rehab. Center and I thought to call you up and see how you’re doing,’ his voice sounding gentle to my ear.

  ‘How about you? Are you okay, dad?’

  I told him some of my adventures with Mrs. Cavendish and he told me to be careful. ‘A funny thing, dad,’ I added, ‘do you know how it started? A housefly landed on the glasses she was then wearing!’

  ‘A fly--what?’

  I then told him about our new inmate, the middle-aged lady who had quarreled with old Georg; about how accommodating to flies she was, and how she intimated to us since she didn’t know whence they had come from, it was the least she could do for them, to allow them to settle on her food.

  ‘I am sorry ‘bout your mom,’ my father said, cutting to the point. I heard him breathe into the mouthpiece and he hesitated.

  ‘I know. I guess I had a lot of anger bottled up inside against you, dad. And the bible says, “Don’t let the sun set on your anger.” I guess what I want to say, dad, is I don’t want to die angry at you or angry at anybody. I don’t want to die harboring anger in my heart, and I don’t want to die feeling angry and upset with myself regarding what happened to Clara Amelia, feeling bitter and angry at her for not giving us a chance to patch things up with each other. I really don’t want to go to my grave angry, when the sun may not rise for me again. I might end up in the pit, if I am not careful, and I want to avoid that.’

  ‘You said you had a lot of anger, not you have lots of anger? Have you really forgiven me--?’

  ‘Forgiveness! That’s another thing—I don’t think I want to go into that right now! Forgiveness is religious-sounding, and is another issue altogether.’

  ‘Right,’ my father said, and his voice sounded clear and rang with a soberness I hadn’t heard for a long time.

  ‘Right,’ I almost shouted, excitedly.

  ‘I said right. I guess your mom had a lot of anger against me, too. You know, how in our family, I let things fall apart. It was going from bad to worse; and towards the end, your mom and I were practically like strangers living under the same roof. I harbor a lot of anger, you know, at government policy-makers, my business partners who cheated nearly every dollar out of me. I guess all of us had a lot of anger that we should have dealt with long ago, so that we could come together again as a family, and without anger management on my part, daughter, I ask you, where can my anger go? Am I supposed—supposed to apologize for my anger, or to repent of it—surely, I am talking nonsense here—right?’

  ‘But, dad, one’s life can be stuck—stymied because of anger! Anger is emotional poison and it has made me physically and emotionally sick; and may give us skin diseases, tumors, heart attacks and cancer. Every one of us at the bottom of it all is ill because of anger. So long as our anger is not resolved, we will forever be mentally ill—and, perhaps, to the very end of our lives. Yes, anger is the culprit that did its number on us.’

  ‘I guess anger accounts a lot for my hitting the bottle. Started that way, too.’

  ‘Listen, dad, I think anger is forebrain, and it happens in the anterior hypothalamus and amygdala, and when I am angry my sympathetic nervous system is being activated. Do find out what I am talking about, please. We lock horns with the front parts of our heads. That’s where a bull’s horns are anyway, and the back part of our head is gentle and blows softly in the wind, like a bull’s tail. Why, we make friends with our lizard’s tails inside our head, dad; like two amiable persons shaking hands! When you drive, dad, try to drive by focusing on your posterior hypothalamus—that is the back part of your head, mid-brain! Then, you will be in control, relaxed, and you are sure not to spook the other drivers because you won’t make sudden movements and you are connected up to God, and to your moving milieu.’

  ‘You seem to know a lot, daughter, about your head—I mean.’

  ‘Well, I have been figuring a lot of things out lately. And you won’t drive aggressively ever again on the road, okay?’

  ‘No, daughter. You know, I often thought that out there everybody is out to sock it to you, and so you’d better sock it to them, first. I admit I often thought it was like a war-zone out there.’

  ‘Father, I am not trying to suppress my anger violently or forcibly—because that will not leave it smoldering inside, to burst out at moments I can’t consciously control. I am talking about taking time to tell myself to lighten up a bit, to tell myself to quit being so angry, and using every ounce of determination I’ve got to exhaust every effort until I have reprogrammed my inner reality—I mean, to use Doctor Cranston’s words—to remove the dark tone of my emotions that had gotten stuck inside, and thereby, coloring my perception of the outer world. As my inner reality is disburdened things will look brighter in my outer reality—and it needs the participation of my full will, my full conscious willing—by repeating endlessly a sort of mantra, if I have to, until it has its full effect in me. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Can you make it clearer by half?’

  ‘I mean, I am now trying my level best to preempt anger from rising up and also disqualifying myself from being angry about the past. It’s not a tall order at all, dad.’

  ‘Okay, daughter, okay. I hear you. I will do likewise; and I will stop telling fibs to myself—my prevarications—when I lash out at God; and I will allow the people here to help me put my life together again. I will not come out until I am a changed person, and I have disavowed the bottle completely.’

  ‘Good on you, dad.’

  ‘Bye, daughter.’

  ‘Good-bye, dad.’

  And he rang off.

  9

  ‘Hello, dad,’ my opening words of salutation.

  I was returning my father’s call a week later, when, during the time, ever since she had her episode that I had described earlier, Mrs. Cavendish had been staying at sick bay, when I had been having the whole of room no:44 all to myself. This was by using a public phone situated in the vestibule round about two o’clock, on a warm and pleasant afternoon. Mrs. Cavendish’s peppery temper hadn’t let up; and she had been puking a lot—as she had done, the first morning on waking up.

  ‘Hello, daughter,’ my father sounded equivocal, being what I did not expect.

  ‘I would like to quote a scrap of a hymn, dad. “In all the dangers you fear, you will find Me very near.’

  Silence issued from the other end of the line. I thought he had hung up.

  ‘Dad?’

  I heard him chuckling facetiously—

  ‘Tell me, what happened to that woman who wouldn’t hurt a fly. A Mrs. Cavendish--?’

  ‘No; it’s the other woman, dad. The stout one.’

  ‘Would she be as generous to the Mosquito Foundation?’

  ‘What? Are you making a lame joke, dad?’

  ‘Forget it, daughter.’

  ‘Is there something you want to tell me--?’

  ‘Yes, daughter,’ his voice sounded faint through the crackling of the static. ‘It is a dangerous road that one travels along in anger untrammelled—and when I append distress and fear to anger—what you perceive through your senses won’t be very pretty, I can tell you.’

  ‘I already know, dad,’ I said.

  ‘That’s good, and thanks for looking out for me; and thinking of me.’

  ‘The next stage will have come, dad, when you begin to trust the situation, but for this stage to come along, it might take some time. It’s like having my full capacity of life restored at long last…’

  ‘I get it: I must get
a grip on myself first. Sometimes, I don’t know what I want, and what other people wants, and what you, your sister or your mom wanted, and what I want and what she wanted and what you wanted got mixed up.’

  ‘I will tell you what health is, dad: the brain is a receptacle to make available the light to be received into the mind—and mine has been dented, somewhat. In a healthy person, in the anticipation and intuitive grasp of what is going on in the world, a healthy nervous system is a requirement. Dad, the state of mind that is steeped in anger is closely linked to the perception of threat. In other words, the experience of anger and the perception of a threat have the same neurological and bio-chemical roots: so Doctor Alvarez says. He tells me so.’

  ‘I seem—seem to be able to understand; but can you explain?’ said my father, pondering over my words, for a few seconds.

  ‘If—you are angry, a piece or fragment of the past is still stuck inside your mind; and organically, that way the brain organizes itself becomes gelled: these same chemicals that inundate your nervous system don’t really go away; since you are being transported when something approximating the original trauma takes place, and your feelings don’t go away. They come back with a vengeance.’

  ‘And—lives are being held in ransom by--’

  ‘Yes, by anger! You need to lighten your mood—your very moods of desolation, unburden yourself of the dark tone of your emotions—and yes, to do this consciously! To tell yourself you have all the world to gain for it, is to reprogram your outer reality which you share with other people, including your daughter (by the way), by reorganizing and healing your inner one. And, being thus motivated,--you must fly from the bottle as if it were hell’s pains!’