My Work is Not Yet Completed
Nick Manzolillo
“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”- Mark Twain
By the time Samuel Clemens stopped being entirely dead, the world had moved on. He wasn’t surprised to find himself back in New York, within the West Village apartment he had inhabited for several years at the dawn of the twentieth century. He was born on the eve of Halley’s comet soaring across the night sky and as he predicted throughout his whole life, he died the day after it returned, on his seventy-fourth birthday.
He died a rich man, whose every artistic whim had been met. He died with more friends than names he could ever remember, from celebrities to politicians to all the obscure and brilliant men in between. In his last years, he was told that he would be remembered. That America would remember him.
Samuel Clemens died alone, leaving behind a vast body of work and not a single living relative. He was not surprised that he awoke, a thin specter still clad in the white suit he requested to be buried in. He was not surprised, for there was one puzzle in his life that he never had the chance, nor found the courage, to solve, and it was that of his former apartment building in the West Village, a century old brownstone known only to the locals as The House of Death.
As a specter with his feet not quite planted on the floor and his hands incapable of touching the walls and stroking the cool glass of the window panes, Samuel was aware of the bitter irony of the place he haunted. How fitting, to find oneself a spirit in The House of Death. If he only could have drawn his fingers across a typewriter, he would have loved to write about it. He could walk through walls with ease, like panels of water, but he couldn’t access the roof nor take a step out the front door. The worst irony of leaving something unsolved was that he was now a prisoner to his own curiosity.
Samuel’s mother claimed that he was walking by the age of one, yet Samuel’s first step after his re-emergence, if it could have even been called a step, lasted several decades. Unstuck in time, his mind swimming in and out of memories of who he was and what he had become, the world around him evolved. He was dimly aware, while peering through the building’s many windows in the grips of lunacy, that the city was growing disproportionately, sprouting clumps of steel and brick like hair on a puberty-ridden body. Before he became conscious of his actions, Samuel watched through dulled senses as marvels sprung out through the world around him.
Advances in technology that influenced the lights, buildings and the streets themselves, all rebuilt countless times into vaguely familiar shades of what they once were. The irony, yes, Samuel knew it well. His entire catalogue of published work was based off satire.
Eventually, all rocking ships either sink or still and Samuel found himself in control of his mind and ethereal body. The decades stopped fluttering by him like the thumbed pages of a novel, and he became aware of the individual apartments and tenants around him. Mere moments after the revelation that he was back, that he had completed his transformation into a conscious spirit, he encountered the overwhelming presence of dread that he first encountered in this building as a living man.
The shadows that twitch of their own accord in the corner of a partially lit room, the wandering things just outside one’s field of vision, and the chills in the air that draw visible the breath from the tenants living their partially aware lives around him. As a mortal, Samuel had little doubts that there was an evil in The House of Death, that there was a reason it was given such a name long before his last breath.
While inhabiting his West Village apartment, Samuel lived each and every day to the fullest. At night, with his dear wife Livy by his side, his alcohol-glazed rest was disturbed by a presence disguised as nightmares. The incidents were random and almost always after he’d been drinking; as if something were peering into his mind, running its bone-thin fingertips over his arms and lapping up some of the essence that made him real, that made him an artist. His work suffered and it was only after his wife became ill and they moved out that he became truly aware something had been wrong. Something had been sharing his and Lilly’s bed, the very air they breathed. Years later, he wondered if it had fostered the sickness that killed her.
Despite being anchored in time, Samuel found himself suffering from some inexplicable phenomena that plagued both the dead and the mentally handicapped. One moment he would be wandering the apartment of a journalist and his wife on the third floor, and the next he’d be on the first, nodding his head back and forth by a street side window. Travelling up and down the four-story building’s staircase would inexplicably take hours, during which he could only stare at the steps his shoes weren’t connecting with, as if hypnotized by their rectangular symmetry. While giving a lecture in South Africa, he learned that certain tribes believed stitching an intricate pattern onto a quilt could fixate spirits and demons and offer protection. This fit in with what he knew of other superstitious architects in the world, from the creators of actual labyrinths to hotel corridors. There was also Sarah Winchester, a madwoman who used her fortune to build a mystery house full of stairs that lead nowhere, backwards rooms and hidden passageways, all in an attempt to confuse the legions of ghosts that allegedly haunted her. Samuel had assumed she was mad, but perhaps she was more intelligent than anybody.
Being dead, Samuel found that he was ridden with apathy. There was a certain restlessness - he could care less about life and death, as well as his purpose for returning to his former apartment building. His wife and daughters along with his parents and siblings, who had all died years before him, were just names and faces once dear to another man. Samuel lingered by the windows, half curious if anyone could see him from the streets below. Occasionally a child being dragged along by his mother would stop and point, only to be hurried along as its parents passed a wary eye over Samuel.
His curiosity would flare over the memory that spirits would oft be seen in windows and doorways, watching the living much like how he would sit in his garden before his death, watching cardinals and humming birds. Samuel’s curiosity would fade before it could do him any good, before it could give him that familiar spark of inspiration, of desire and purpose. It wasn’t until a child was dead that he began to feel alive again.
Aside from their modest wealth, there was nothing unusual about the building’s tenants; accountants, artists, architects, the usual mix of the New York middle and upper class. Samuel passively flickered through their lives, imperceptible and having no impact on the environment around him. Snapping his fingers in front of a man’s face registered nothing. Watching a young couple sleep didn’t cause them to shiver and nude occupants the building over showed no signs of shame when he spotted them fresh out of a bath. Children, on the other hand, were a different matter entirely.
They couldn’t see him, but they knew he was there. There were three children in the building, one a newborn often confined to her crib and the other two, toddlers, barely of speaking age. On the second floor, in the same unremarkable unit Samuel used to live in, a little girl living with her single mother pointed right at Samuel and said “man,” which the mother promptly ignored while she was on the telephone, a fascinating device whose wirings had somehow wormed there way through the walls of the building. Considering the building was built in the mid 1800’s, it was likely no stranger to such rude re-workings. Samuel paid the little girl no mind as he gravitated toward the window. He received only the briefest memory of his daughter Suzy, before the meningitis swept her away from a forever incomplete chapter of his life.
Despite being a dead thing, night was more uncomfortable for Samuel as a spirit than it had ever been when he was mortal. He was banished to the darkness after the tenants shut off their lights, and not even the distant glow of the streetlights could illuminate the rooms around him. The eye’s natural ability to dilate when the lights went out didn’t carry over into the afterlife for Samuel. The d
arkness around him was stronger than it had any right to be, which is why it took him a long while to become aware of the snakelike thing darting in and out of the shadows throughout the bedroom of the crib-bound infant. Samuel had been peering out the window with his arms clasped behind his back when something moved out of the corner of his eye and there was a sudden chill along his spine. Later, he would realize this was the first physical sensation he had felt during his re-emergence. He would also realize that chill was directly associated to the presence of the long shadow, as it made its way toward the child.
Through the faint aura of streetlights, Samuel watched as the shadow spiraled around the crib, disappearing entirely in clumps of pure blackness like an Amazonian beast stalking its prey through the underbrush. The roving shadow – had it dripped over Samuel during his stay here as a living thing? Had this been what had seeped into his dreams, perpetuated his wife’s illness? A memory of emotion became reality, a dull spark burned in his chest. He imagined he could feel his heart beating. The reason he had come back, the reason he wasn’t with his wife and his children was there. In that child’s bedroom, within a physical world he could no more influence than an old woman’s prayers.
“Be gone!” Samuel shouted, his mind conjuring up an image of a priest screaming at a scaly demon. It was worth a shot. Nothing within the bedroom and all that blackness changed, until a moment later when the door burst inward and the infant’s father stumbled in.
Drunk, Samuel could tell from the way he staggered. A light switched on and the man peered over the crib. Samuel made to stand beside him just as the father began screaming and sobbing, shaking the crib and the soundless, still thing within. The shadow was a thief of more than pleasant dreams. It was a coward, snuffing out all that was weaker than it. Samuel faded through the floor then, his mind nearly scrubbed blank by the horror of what he’d just witnessed.
After the child’s death, the entire building seemed alive with those roving shadows, hovering over shoulders and cradling ears. The building’s twenty-one tenants all went through their various stages of grief, tears staining the floorboards around them as they’d sob and speak to one another in hushed tones before tossing and turning the night away. A few weeks later the doomed, now-childless couple moved out of the building, the father drunk as ever. Samuel, helpless, began to cling to the rekindled memories of his wife and daughters, and how they were stolen from him.
He first fell in love with his wife, Livy, when her brother showed him a portrait of her while they were aboard the USS Quaker City Steamship. It had been mostly a chance encounter, the man had heard of Samuel’s celebrity status, read some of his novels, and sought him out. It’s funny that Samuel never made a point of getting down the name of the artist who painted that portrait of Livy, who created a longing in his heart through a few expert slashes of paint and oil.
He hardly believed his luck when Livy’s brother agreed to introduce them. A few years later, when she told him she was pregnant, oh his luck, where did it go wrong? His daughter Suzy died first, before the illness began to invade Livy and his other daughter, Jane. It took them both longer to die, Samuel having to lie to Livy about Jane’s condition. The doctors with their halfwit diagnoses, deeming it necessary that Samuel not spend Livy’s last few weeks with her; over concerns that he would “overexcite her”. Samuel would slip her notes with the finest, most cheerful writing he could drive himself to produce. He recalled Livy’s heart giving out. Jane’s final seizure occurring in the tub she then drowned in. The years alone, before he died. Watching Halley’s Comet come to mirror his birth, and complete his cycle. He remembers the warmth of the grass meeting his face as he collapsed, the sweet spring scent of an impending bloom. The moment of dying wasn’t so bad, given the pounds of grief that had come before it.
Did the shadow hound Samuel because of the deaths that would overshadow all of his achievements? Was it warning him, those nights that he and Livy comforted each other after Suzy’s passing? Or was it just sniffing him, admiring that whiff of impending misery? Samuel found himself howling, in a building where no one could hear him, with lungs that would never give out. He tilted his head to the ceiling, rising to the fourth floor and howled and howled as the days turned to night and Samuel could feel again, still dead but numb no more.
Settling down, he began his investigation anew. He had returned to this particular place for a reason. He couldn’t face Livy and his daughters without proving to them that he could confront the roving shadow. That he could beat it back, and free them. Wandering from room to room, eyeing the dark spots that lingered in every corner, Samuel thought of his friend, the blossoming young scientist and inventor, Nikola Tesla. The young man was surely older now, unless he died too, but what he had proven to Samuel still rung in his newly awakened mind. The electricity that the human body produces is awe-inspiring. Once, during a visit to Tesla’s lab, Samuel was given a demonstration on how the human body can act as a conductor when holding a wire in one hand and a phosphorescent light bulb in the other. Several photographs taken of Samuel holding the illuminated bulb in the air were the proudest conversational props he had to his name, next to signed letters from the president.
The human body is capable of strange wonders under the vague guise of science, and given Samuel’s present state and lack of mention of his current circumstances in the Bible, it was fair for him to assume that science ruled the world with a mightier grip than belief. And so it was with an analytical, scientist’s rationale that Samuel began rooting out the darkness that inhabited the West Village building.
He studied each of the building’s tenants like lab specimens under a microscope. He mentally checked off an ever-infinite list of quirks and expressions the tenants would make. The things they would say to one another and the faces they would make in private. The way one woman told her husband she loved him in one moment, and then clenched her fists and worked her jaw in frustration as she stepped into the next room. The building was inhabited by several cats and two dogs, all of whom detected Samuel’s presence to a lesser extent then the children, twitching their noses and staring at him as he passed, the dogs occasionally letting loose a low throated growl which they’d then shrug off like he were no more than a pesky house fly.
Weeks and months trickled on. Samuel made a special effort to monitor the building’s two toddlers, who both ignored him the older they got, only occasionally staring at him or frowning in his direction. Samuel found nothing amiss, no invaders seeping through the shadows. He at times wondered if he’d imagined the incident with the infant’s death. Perhaps the only otherworldly mischief lay in the dreams of the living. Then again, Samuel thought, “I am here.”
Despite his best efforts, time leapt forward. Tenants came and went, and Samuel continued his observations. During the moments when the tenants were asleep, he would lie in wait, diligent in spotting the shadow’s return.
One afternoon he studied a mother and daughter—one of the same little girls who had waved to him as an infant—while they listened to the radio. The mother, Sarah Cleland, adjusted the transmission while her daughter, Jennifer Cleland waited patiently, her hands folded over her dress, her feet swinging back and forth in the chair. The advancements in radio fascinated Samuel, and were the first true wondrous additions to his afterlife. He couldn’t physically manipulate a book or turn the pages but the radio, ah, he could listen to music and serial narratives to no end.
The little girl turned and looked at Samuel, springing to her feet and knocking her chair over in the same instant. “It’s, it’s…” she stuttered as her mother turned around and, to Samuel’s surprise, she saw him too.
“Who…” Sarah began, rising to stand between Samuel and her daughter.
“It’s Mark Twain, he used to live here!” The little girl shouted. Sarah’s face grew pale. She recognized him. Hearing his stage name brought a smile to his lips.
“What are you doing here?” Jennifer asked as Samuel rose a few feet from t
he ground. The radio played Jazz.
“My work here is not yet completed.” Samuel made as if to stroke the mustache he couldn’t feel. Both Sarah and Jane jumped back with fright.
“He’s gone!” Sarah shouted.
“He was a ghost!” Jennifer said and Samuel felt strange, since he continued to stand before them.
“He did Huckleberry Finn, Mom!” Sarah hushed her as she reached for Samuel, waving her hand through him.
“I know who he was. That man…” Sarah shook her head, peering around the room as if trying to catch him hiding in the corner.
“I told you there were ghosts, like that rotting smell in the hallway. He said his work wasn’t done, do you think he’s writing another book? Do we have any paper?” Jennifer ran across the room to the desk Sarah liked to open her mail at.
Smell in the hallway? What else has been going on in front of me? Jennifer slapped down pencils and paper and Samuel recalled a time his Suzy, no more than six years of age, asked him to tell her a story that was just for her and that nobody else was allowed to hear.
It involved a talking fish that liked to smoke pipe tobacco and play checkers, and Samuel would do anything to break his promise and tell it to Jennifer; to speak and cause a reaction other than fright. Then again, he should be lucky he was able to make his voice heard at all.
Sarah, a quick thinker, began to mess around with the radio antenna. It made Samuel think of his friend Tesla. If only he could somehow contact the man. There were ways to communicate with the living after all, ways to break down the barrier. It was then that Samuel wished he had warned Sarah and Jennifer. Or least asked them to spread the word about infant-devouring shadows.
Wicked Haunted: An Anthology of the New England Horror Writers Page 12