Of aristocrats and riffraff the world was comprised. It was a very clear world which vulgar persons hoped to muddy with arguments in favor of increased taxation, increased “suffrage,” increased budgets for public education, public works. The father, Horace Phineas Love, had liked to joke that he’d “jumped ship”—leaving behind his riffraff origins—and had landed on his feet, very happily, on Charity Hill.
Much of this the child would piece together, in time. A taciturn child, but very alert, vigilant to the seemingly random remarks of his elders. As, with uncanny patience, of a kind rarely found in a child so young, he might spend hours piecing together jigsaw puzzles whose pictures were replicas of brooding-dark nineteenth-century landscapes by Corot, Rembrandt, Constable, Courbet.
Why, look! The boy has almost finished the puzzle already.
No! That doesn’t seem possible …
Other predilections of the child, of which the mother and the Scots nanny might not have approved, the shrewd child kept to himself.
Late that night when his mother and the Scots nanny returned home with their grim news it was to discover the child hunched over a near-completed jigsaw puzzle in the drawing room, a replica of Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa. He had known at once that something was terribly wrong since neither woman praised him or seemed to notice the highly challenging puzzle at all.
Indeed, the child’s mother turned away from him, her face very white and her mouth twisting as if she were determined not to burst into sobs. “Take him to bed, Adelaide; he will make himself sick, staying up so late.”
But when the frowning Scots nanny tried to lift the child in her strong arms, as she’d done since he’d been a baby, the child squirmed from her lithe as a snake. “Why, Horace! What is wrong with you?”
Wrong with him? What was wrong with them?—these words caught in the child’s mouth, he could not speak.
“Adelaide, take him away please. I can’t bear him right now. Tell him what has happened, and when the funeral will be. I—I’m exhausted, and am going to bed.”
“But, ma’am—”
“Take him away! Please.”
As he was borne off struggling the child managed to catch a glimpse of the mother’s face, so contorted with grief, or with rage, that he could have barely recognized it; her reddened eyes, glancing at his, suggested no compassion for him, no sympathy or pity, only just the rawness of animal misery.
And so it was, the night of the day of the miraculous death.
Such relief! To know that the father would not ever return from the hospital but had died.
A sobbing sort of happiness like something writhing in his chest, seeking release.
But of course such happiness had to be kept secret. No one would understand and all would chide him, as a coldhearted child. Freak.
A succession of grave-faced adults offered the child condolences. Some of the females actually dared to stoop, to grasp the stiff-limbed child in their arms before he could wriggle away.
“Horace! Behave now, please”—so his mother instructed, with trembling lips.
Horace! That was the father’s name, too.
The father was Horace Phineas Love, Sr. And he, the son—Horace Phineas Love, Jr.
The Scots nanny had dressed Horace, Jr. in dark woolen clothing that fitted him loosely and made his sensitive skin itch. Against his tender throat, the stiff-starched collar of his shirt chafed.
The child had been led to believe that he would not ever see his father again, and yet!—there in a chapel smelling of sickish-sweet lilies was the father, formally dressed in a dark pinstripe suit and waistcoat, unnaturally lying on his back, flat on his back as the child had never seen him, in a shining mahogany coffin the size of a small boat. How could this be! The once proud father, smaller than the child remembered him even as the birthmark on his right cheek appeared larger, seemingly asleep in a brightly lit public place? How mortified Father would be, and how furious! A sensation of paralysis suffused the child’s small body even as his eyes stared fixedly at this astonishing sight.
“Horace, come here”—the Scots nanny urged him closer to the coffin.
Father’s skin had coarsened during his illness, and was poorly disguised with (peach-colored) makeup; deep creases around his mouth and at the corners of his eyes made him appear much older than he was. (How old was Father at the time of his death? In his early forties?) The birthmark had become an inflamed-looking boil that no amount of makeup and powder could disguise.
What was most distressing, Father’s eyes were not peacefully shut as in an ordinary sleep but tensely shut, with a grimace, as if he was steeling himself for some fresh insult, worse than death. His hair that had once been dark and thick had thinned so that small bumps and protuberances in his skull were perceptible and even his mustache, that had once been so dapper, had become sparse as if with mange. Forced to come closer to this hellish sight the child could not escape seeing a scattering of small inflamed sores on the father’s forehead and the lurid-pink tip of his tongue protruding between thickish lips; and these lips also covered in small blister-like sores.
“Horace, come kiss your father goodbye. You know he loved you …”
The sickly-sweet fragrance of the lilies was making the child queasy. Under ordinary circumstances his stomach was easily upset.
His heart clattered and clanged and came to an abrupt halt like a clock stopping—but then, after a terrifying moment, began again, rapidly and painfully. Paralyzed to the tips of his toes the child could move neither forward nor back. The Scots nanny expressed impatience with her young charge, whom other mourners were observing with concern, trying at last to lift him forcibly toward the coffin, hands beneath his arms, that he might kiss his father a final time …
The eyelids flickered. About the sore-stippled lips, a faint greenish froth.
“No! No!”—the child began screaming and kicking, breathless, and fell to the floor in a faint.
Quickly then he was lifted, and carried to an open window, where fresh air partly revived him. (But where was Mother? In her distress and distraction had Mother no time for him?) Poor boy! He loved his father very much. The father and son were very close. He has the father’s features, you can see—the eyes …
Observers believed that the child should be taken home, and spared the emotional strain of the funeral service to follow, but the mother insisted that the Scots nanny bring him, as they’d planned—“Horace would not have wanted it any other way. They were so very close.”
And, “The Cornishes do not shrink from their duty. The boy is far more Cornish than Love.“
In a trance of horror the child was made to attend the funeral in the family pew in St. John’s Episcopal Church of Providence, from which the father would now be permanently absent; and afterward the lengthy church service, barely able to walk, tugged forward by the nanny, he was a terrified witness to another, briefer ceremony in the cemetery behind the church, that ended with the most remarkable of all sights: the shining mahogany coffin, now mercifully shut, was lowered into a fresh-dug rectangular hole in the grass, and earth was shoveled onto it even as the priest continued to recite his mysterious words, drowned out in the child’s head by a roaring of blood in his ears.
And then, it was ended. Clearly now, Father was gone.
So strangely, a kind of party followed—food, drink, lighted candles, hordes of guests in the downstairs rooms of the Cornish house. The child was given food to eat—“You must keep up your strength, Horace!”—though he had no appetite, and wanted only to crawl away upstairs and hide in his room. Again, he was subjected to embraces, unwanted kisses, condolences. And the assurance that, as some visitors were claiming with a forced air of conviction, his father had gone to Heaven.
(Did anyone believe that? What exactly was Heaven? The child knew of Hell for he’d seen the most terrifying engravings of Hell in certain books in his grandfather’s study, and these were utterly convincing; but illustrations of Heaven, wh
ich were rarer, did not seem convincing at all.)
Another time, the child grew faint. At last he was led away by the nanny, and allowed to go to bed early. Through the night buffeted by thoughts like gusts of wind rattling the leaded windows of the austere old house long after the many guests had gone home—And now you are free. Never will that terrible man hurt you again.
Little freak.
Soon then, the night-gaunts began to appear.
Never by day. Rarely outside the house. Though the child was uncomfortable at school yet no night-gaunt had ever appeared to him at the Providence Academy for Boys where he was to excel in English composition, science, mathematics. (Already in sixth grade, while his eleven-year-old classmates were struggling with simple arithmetic, Horace Love, Jr. would be allowed to take high school algebra and geometry in which he also excelled, to the resentment of his adolescent classmates at the high school.)
A night-gaunt was a creature of seeming substance, that might appear suddenly, within an eye-blink—as if (indeed!) the thing was a sort of optical imprint in the child’s brain, resembling an animated dust mote, or a living molecule, that quivered, and shimmered, and if it did not fade at once (which sometimes, if the child held his breath and willed it to fade, it did) seemed to enlarge, into three dimensions, as a protoplasmic life-form might enlarge, horribly, yet exuding an uncanny fascination to an alert and imaginative prepubescent boy who spent a good deal of time entirely alone.
With the passage of time the night-gaunts acquired more definition as if, rooted in the child’s brain, like actual roots, or rapacious parasites, they had now the power to grow.
Though their natural habitat was the darkness close about the child’s bed yet a night-gaunt might be discovered in a mildly shadowed corner of the child’s room, or reflected behind the child in a mirror; on the narrow, steep stairs leading to the third floor of the house: a shimmering figure transparent as a jellyfish, with limbs resembling the tendrils of a jellyfish, deep-embedded eyes, an odor of damp rot from which the child shrank in terror, heart beating so hard his legs buckled beneath him and he had to crawl to safety along the carpeted floor …
“Horace? What is it?”—anxiously the Scots nanny spoke, discovering the half-conscious boy lying on the floor in the upstairs corridor curled upon himself like an invertebrate that has been trod upon.
Managing to stammer to the nanny that he’d only just tripped and fallen.
In such haphazard ways, Horace, Jr. was spared annihilation. For the time being at least.
What he most feared was, kept home from school with a bad chest cold, or bronchitis, he was made to remain in bed, waited upon by a servant and dangerously vulnerable, when alone, to a night-gaunt drifting across the ceiling of his room, to descend in a fine greenish toxic froth into his nostrils, like the froth that had shone about his father’s lips in the coffin, if his eyelids drooped shut; or, yet more insidiously, a night-gaunt of the size of a rat might flatten itself like a playing card, to slip beneath his pillow, quietly biding its time matching its breathing with his until he let down his guard and fell asleep, at which time the night-gaunt would slip out from beneath the pillow and begin to gnaw at his exposed throat …
Greatly agitated, coughing and choking, Horace, Jr. would be wakened in a trance of horror, on the brink of suffocation.
Help! Help me!—someone …
Another manifestation of the night-gaunt was a buzzing rattling sound, initially like the sound of a wasp, that caused the boy to lean over the edge of his bed in tremulous wonderment, and to see, or to imagine he saw, something like a ball, a living ball, a ball of … was it loathsome, coiled serpents?—writhing together in an obscene struggle, beneath a table or a chair.
Help! Help me!—please …
The Scots nanny now spent much of her time in the mother’s company, where she was badly needed; for the mother had become a “bundle of nerves” in her deep mourning for the father and could not bear to be alone. And so, it was not often that the Scots nanny could hurry to the boy’s bedside as she might once have done.
If a servant overheard the boy’s cries and came to his aid, the boy did not dare name the night-gaunts to another person; for he understood that no one else had quite the eye to see them, as human beings cannot see certain light rays, gamma rays or X-rays, or hear high-pitched sounds that are audible to animals.
You must not reveal to anyone, how you are a freak.
That you are a freak is your curse but may one day be your blessing.
Eventually, if the boy shut his eyes tightly, and hid beneath the bedclothes, and distracted his agitated mind with inwardly multiplying numbers, or envisioning the periodic table, or counting the steps of the several staircases in the house which he could perfectly envision, the danger would fade; he might even fall asleep; and when he dared to look again, the night-gaunt would have vanished, as if it had never been.
2. “Infectious”
Soon then the boy was shocked to discover, in one of the antiquarian volumes in his grandfather’s library, which he perused without the permission of his mother or the awareness of the vigilant Scots nanny, an extraordinary likeness of a night-gaunt in an illustration by a nineteenth-century Belgian artist named Felicien Rops: an obscene naked creature, a (female?) skeleton upon which translucent skin had been tightly stretched; with a skull for a head sparsely covered in savage tufts of hair, and a terrifying grin that seemed somehow, as Horace, Jr. stared, in flirtatious acknowledgment of him.
Quickly he shut the volume. Yet, after a few minutes, unable to resist he opened it again, turning the thick parchment pages until, horribly, the skeletal night-gaunt grinned up at him again.
Little freak! You know you are one of us.
By degrees Horace, Jr. became morbidly drawn to certain tall volumes on obscure shelves in the austere wood-paneled room that was called the “library”—“your dear grandfather’s library”—(though the grandfather, his mother’s father Obadiah Cornish, the founder of the Bank of Providence, had long been deceased by the time of his birth)—in which he was not welcome, as a child; for it was claimed that Obadiah Cornish had accumulated a collection of rare, priceless books and manuscripts dating back to medieval times, including antique copies of horrific but luridly beautiful drawings by such great masters of the transcendental macabre as Hieronymus Bosch, Goya, Durer, and the anonymous illustrator of the Necronomicon, and it was not “safe” for a child to peruse such materials, as it was not safe for the materials to be perused by a mere child.
As if he were but a mere child! An ordinary boy, crude and ignorant, willfully stupid, who might tear pages out of books or soil them, out of sheer idiocy.
Strange how, though the adults could see clearly that Horace, Jr. was hardly the son of Horace, Sr., who’d so often behaved roughly, carelessly, destructively with precious things (cut-glass goblets, Wedgwood china, antique chairs that shuddered and sometimes collapsed beneath his weight), that Horace, Sr. had often expressed his contempt for the very delicacy, hesitation, feminization of the son, yet the pretense in the household was that Horace, Jr., being a child, could not be trusted in the grandfather’s library.
(In fact, as his mysterious illness worsened, and attacks of ill will and temper came almost daily, the father had threatened to “clear out”—“auction”—the grandfather’s library; and only his total collapse had spared the precious books.)
Yet, in his shy, stubborn way, Horace, Jr. had learned to insinuate himself into the library so very stealthily, as a cat is stealthy, with eyes that can see in the dark, when no adult was likely to be observing; in the high-ceilinged room turning on only a single desk lamp with a green glass globe like an inverted bowl, so that no sliver of light would be visible through the crack beneath the shut door if anyone walked by.
How happy the boy felt, what excitement mounting almost to fever, and a dread that such happiness might be taken from him at any time, in Obadiah Cornish’s library!—though the library was not im
pervious to night-gaunts, any more than the boy’s bedroom or other desolate parts of the house.
In time, Horace, Jr. would make his way through an illustrated eighteenth-century English translation of Dante’s Inferno, with fine-ink illustrations of the tortures and sorrows of Hell; Ovid’s Metamorphoses, magnificently bound in a sort of chestnut-colored hide, that caused the boy to wonder uneasily if it were human skin, for it was so very soft, and warm to the touch, and seemed to invite stroking. Also, volumes of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, lavishly illustrated: a muscular, armor-clad warrior (Achilles?) piercing another (Hector?) with a lance; a giant with a single glaring eye in the center of his forehead, devouring a screaming man. How was it possible, such horrors existed! Yet each was so finely drawn, it was the beauty in suffering that most riveted the boy.
Secrets of the adult universe, forbidden for children to know: how beauty and suffering are intertwined.
Long would Horace, Jr. remember the rainy afternoon in his grandfather’s library when he discovered, in the Necronomicon, a crouching figure in an engraving depicting the interior of a sepulchre, that struck him so powerfully that the breath was knocked from him; for here was a gargoyle-like creature resembling a night-gaunt, with a face uncannily like the face of Horace Love, Sr. Horrified, yet fascinated, the boy held a magnifying glass he’d discovered in his grandfather’s desk to the page, to see, on the gargoyle’s right cheek, an unmistakable birthmark, a miniature hand with extended fingers, unless perhaps they were tendrils.
A small cry leapt from his lips, of alarm and wonder. His fingers sought his own face, where the skin was (yet) smooth and unblemished.
Hurriedly he shut up the Necronomicon, and shoved it back on the shelf.
Oh, he had to flee the library!—for that day, at least.
Climbing the stairs to the second floor. But not to his room as an observer might have supposed.
Instead his feet followed the long carpet where a beam of sunshine shone through a leaded window, a flurry of dust motes in the air like the chaos of thoughts that sweeps through a stunned brain.
Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense Page 23