by william Todd
“I see,” the old man went on, “that I will have to cconvince you of it. No mind, I’ve already made ready with proof.”
“Father, is this really necessary? I—”
“It is!” he cut in. “You don’t understand. I’m doing this f-for you. So you can do something about it. It’s too late for me. Maybe not for you.”
Wendell rutted his brow and pushed back his stilldamp, frenetic locks with a long sigh. “I don’t understand Father.”
The elder Wiggins, with much effort, extracted his hands from under the covers and pointed a trembling finger at two candles in the farthest corner of the room on the other side of a large wardrobe. “Those candles over there, the ones on the right, not the left, beyond that—yes, p-pick them up and take one step back from the corner.”
Wendell did as asked and picked up the candles, one in each hand, and took one step back. “Now what?”
Mr. Wiggins took a labored breath and said in a broken voice, “N-now blow them out.” Not sure where these strange requests were going but settling easily back into the role of child-who-ever-wanted-toplease-his-father, Wendell blew out each of the candles.
“Now wha—” Suddenly, within the shadows in the corner left by the snuffed candles, there arose movement that startled the young Wiggins. He glanced briefly back at his father, who had pulled the covers back over himself, cowering like a frightened mouse, which unnerved Wendell; he’d never seen his father recoil at anything.
When he looked back, the movement, initially only of different shades crisscrossing one another, had begun to take a definite form. It swirled about like oily snakes in an orgiastic, slithering ball.
The mass then became bigger, darker. Darker than the shadows in which it occupied.
Suddenly, two yellow eyes blinked open on the slithering mass.
He froze in terror, and his heart threatened to burst through his ribcage.
“Quickly, relight the c-candles!” Mr. Wiggins exclaimed between struggled breaths. Wendell only stood, feet cemented to the floor, eyes as wide as two full moons, as the sour eyes within the mass fixed their unblinking glower upon him. His stomach, empty of food for two days, threatened to push its caustic fluid into his throat.
A black appendage slowly unraveled itself from the rest of the mass and reached out at Wendell with mottled, talon-like claws.
“Wendell!” his father exclaimed, then broke into a coughing fit. The interjection broke the young man free from the initial shock. Although he was loath to turn his back on the freakish display in front of him, he did so, ran to the opposite corner, and quickly relit the candles from the lit ones there.
The candles shook violently as Wendell turned back around. He almost dropped them but quickly recovered himself before the fear of burning the hospital down became a reality.
As the light from the candles touched the slick, onyx mass, it mysteriously disappeared as quickly as it manifested. He blinked twice in bewilderment, as he searched the corner for the thing that was only a moment ago manifest in the shadows there. “Wha…what in the hell was that?” he whispered, as if fear of saying it too loud would somehow summon it back. He slowly put down the candles and retreated back to his bedridden father, hands still quivering.
With much trouble catching his breath, the elder Wiggins replied, “That is nothing, my son, compared to what h-happens when there is no light to keep it at bay. That, that thing has been plaguing me since you were but a…but a boy. When I close my eyes in sleep or when t-the light goes…the light goes away.”
Suddenly, as the elder Wiggins spoke, his color unexpectedly flushed from his face, and his breathing became noticeably more labored. He seemed on the verge of saying something else when his chest heaved twice, and he clutched himself, as a painful cry caught in his throat.
Wendell threw off the covers and pulled the man to him.
“Father?” Wendell pleaded. “Father!” The elder Wiggins convulsed, two quick spasms, as he tried to focus on his son. His eyes passed from agony to fear to anger to almost, Wendell thought, shame.
It seemed his father’s very life was leaving him with every labored breath. Finally, with herculean effort, he managed to whisper, “I’m sorry, son. I…I tried. Never mmea—”
The man wheezed, convulsed, and his chest depressed one last time.
A doctor and Mr. Wiggin’s nurse rushed into the room, having heard Wendell’s fearful cry.
“What happened?” the doctor asked, as he rushed to the patient’s side. Glancing momentarily over his shoulder at the candlelit corner where the unnamable apparition had taken form only moments ago, Wendell said, “I was sitting here by his side, and he became gray and had trouble breathing. Before I knew it, he clutched his chest, shuddered twice, and that was it. It was over that quick. I never even had a chance to say goodbye.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” the nurse said with more affection than her appearance would betray. She momentarily put a comforting hand on his shoulder, as all there stared at the body in silence; but as quickly as the sympathetic gestures appeared, they once more hid themselves behind those beady dark eyes, and her cold professionalism took over. The nurse said matter-of-factly to the doctor, “I’ll send for Father Casey, then I’ll return to start preparing the body.”
She then excused herself from the room. “A priest?” Wendell queried in vexation. “Again with the spiritual fascinations. When did my father become a religious man?”
“You will have to ask his associate outside for that information,” the doctor said, as he pulled the covers up over the dead man’s head. “The first thing he said when we admitted him was that when he died, we were to call on Father Casey. He had made all arrangements for burial with St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. In fact, he must have known his time was close; the priest was just here not but an hour and a quarter before you arrived to give Last Rites to the man.”
The doctor turned to depart the room. “I’ll leave you to say your goodbyes.”
Wendell stopped him before he disappeared beyond the door. “Doctor, what, exactly, was wrong with my father?” He cleared his throat, seemed almost embarrassed to admit, “Your father was cleared in every test we performed. As far as could be told, there was absolutely nothing wrong with the man other than he was perpetually sleep deprived for a reason we could not put a finger to. You see the manifestation of that,” he said, sweeping an arm around the room full of lights. He rubbed his jaw perplexed. “I’ll put down on his death certificate that he died of an unknown paroxysm. I’m sorry that we weren’t more help to him.”
The doctor then closed the door behind him as he left room. Wendell looked down on his lifeless father under the white sheet then over at the corner of the room where something had become alive in the shadows left by the extinguished candles. A snake of apprehension slithered up his back and sunk its teeth into the nape of his neck, making his hair stand on end.
“I doubt anyone in medicine could have helped cure what killed my father,” he whispered.
2
Wendell and Arnold sat in somber silence on the hillside outside Hamot Hospital, looking out over the bay and Presque Ilse beyond. White triangular sails gamboled across its surface. They skirted alongside a multitude of fishing boats and the steamer taking patrons to the Massassauga Point Hotel on the flats where the peninsula connected to the mainland.
Wendell picked at the browning grass
absentmindedly, as he took in the view. “I’ve forgotten how nice it is here along the lakeshore,” he said. “I tend to spend my time now in the south of Erie, maybe travel down to Waterford on occasion.”
“You loved it here,” Arnold reminisced. “Mr. Wiggins could never get you off the peninsula as a boy. What’s made you stay away for so long? There can’t have been much to do in the country.”
“Oh, I have my hobbies—” “—Yes, I’ve seen your hobbies—”
“—But I mostly was just trying to stay out of Father’s way. It’s no sec
ret that I was a disappointment to him. He only proved my point when he tossed me from the house.”
“The disappointment that got you tossed from the house was a genuine frustration on your father’s part. You had an opportunity to be a responsible man and you chose not to.”
“”Yes, well we don’t need to rehash that at the moment,” Wendell interjected. Going on Arnold said, “I think the general disappointment you are referring to was misplaced. I could tell something had been eating at him from very early on. A secret of some sort that he would not betray. It started shortly after you mother died.”
They were silent but only for a moment, for Wendell decided to use that last statement to open the door to the topic he really wanted to discuss. He was hoping to pry information from Arnold that his father had no time to divulge.
Feeling out the extent of Arnold’s knowledge Wendell asked, “What was the purpose for all the lit candles in father’s room? That request must have seemed peculiar.”
Arnold rubbed his big scruffy chin. “Now that’s an oddity that’s right hard to explain. Mr. Wiggins had that peculiarity a long time ago—when you were a boy—for the better part of a year. Then, as quickly as it started it stopped, but his mood changed permanently and not for the good. That orneriness is what you remember. Even after he stopped lighting all the candles at night, he still feared the dark. That never seemed to go away. Then about, oh I’d say the last year, I think, he started doing it all over again.” He knitted his brow and scratched at the bald spot on his head contemplatively in silence, as if trying his best to recall and give as accurate an account as possible. After a moment he then added, “Well, I’m not sure exactly when it started up again, but it was sometime after you left—”
“—Kicked out,” Wendell corrected. “Did he ever give a reason for it?” he then pressed. A cloud of seagulls cawed in the distance, as they swooped and swirled above a newly docked fishing boat. The smell of fish, even at the distance of a several hundred feet was noticeable in the cool, fall air.
“Not to me,” Arnold finally said with a note of frustration. “He was very secretive about what afflicted him. He never talked about why he hated the dark so much. Why he insisted on sleeping in the light. And it got worse towards the end. Kept the whole house lit all the time, lamps and candles everywhere. Surprised the damned place didn’t burn to the ground. Then he got to the point where he wasn’t sleeping at all. He got weak and funny acting. That’s when I brought him here. In the end, I think that’s what killed him—lack of sleep.”
Wendell thought back to the shadowy adumbration that struggled in the corner of the hospital room. The thought of those sickly sour-yellow eyes staring at him and what would have happened if he hadn’t relit the candles…He understood completely why his father feared the dark.
Realizing that Arnold seemed to possess less knowledge of the strange events than did Wendell, he decided to act upon an idea that he’d been entertaining since his father’s last breath.
“I believe you’re going to have to stay here and prepare things with the priest that’s coming?” Wendell asked.
“The next few days are going to be busy ones for me and the household to get things ready for the funeral,” Arnold agreed, as he extracted his behemoth frame from the grassy hillside.
“Am I still banned from the house?” Arnold sighed. Wendell could tell he was conflicted. “Even now, you are still considered the prodigal son out in the world, penniless and—hopefully—penitent. I’m fairly certain that your circumstances will change for the better once the will is read, but it must remain so until then.”
“So yes, then?”
“Yes. You are still banned from the house.”
“Is there at least anything I can do to help?” Digging into his pocket, Arnold pulled out some money held in a bundle with a silver clip and, handing it to Wendell, said, “Mr. Wiggins had everything spelled out in great detail what each of our duties were to be upon his death.” He plunked the money into Wendell’s hand. “Yours is to buy some decent clothes, get a hotel room on the Diamond and wait. I’ll come fetch you for the viewing and funeral. The reading of the will comes a day or two after.”
Looking over the money Wendell said, “There’s well more here than what I would need for a change of clothes and a room.”
“Then give some of it to Verity. She has two of your children to raise.” With that, the big man lumbered back up to the hospital, and Wendell was left there on that little hill in silent humiliation.
. . . . . South from the lakefront, Wendell ambled deep in thought. If it weren’t for his father’s remarks, which had made him realize the elder Wiggins was seeing the same thing he was, he’d swear he was hallucinating the thing in the shadows. He was very practiced at hallucination; they were his constant companions while high on opium. Those hallucinations were mostly idyllic ones, however. Not ones that looked as though they crawled up from the very pit of hell. One reverie of that nature would have broken him from that habit before it ever started.
He had decided to reconnoiter the elder Wiggins’ bedroom. It had been his sanctuary from the world of lies, deceit, and backstabbing that had become a part of a business Wendell could not bring himself to be a part of (horseshoe manufacturing was more ruthless than one would imagine on the surface of it). If Father held any secrets they would most likely be found somewhere in that room.
A few blocks up was the Diamond. It was a large public park now bustling with chatting mothers with their prams and lounge-abouts. The park was often full, especially now with warm color raining down from every tree at the slightest breeze. They came to see this display and to get in as much sun and fresh air before the harsh Great Lakes winter settled over the area in the next month and a half.
Wendell followed the park’s perimeter, turned west, crossed Peach Street, and hastened down West 6th Street. West 6th Street, also known as “Millionaire’s Row”, was filled with the grandest architecture that Erie’s business barons could buy. They ranged from great gray granite, to brick, to glimmering alabaster wood, but all had one thing in common: they all tried to outdo their neighbor in grandiosity. Some had large Romanesque columns, others had great mullioned windows and intricately manicured lawns; all had carriage houses as large as barns.
The elder Wiggins was not quite in this league, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying. His home was a slightly-lessgrand, many-gabled brick house at the corner of West 6th and Holland Streets—the caboose of the train of mansions. It was nestled on a large wooded lot surrounded by old, shady elms and white oaks and sugar maples, all dropping their leaves in a hurricane of reds and browns and yellows. The house looked no different from his last memory of it, though there seemed to be some moss growing on the roof at one corner. It must have been a recent development, for the persnickety elder Wiggins would never have allowed such a blemish and had it rectified at once with much
consternation.
Wendell knew he couldn’t just walk nonchalantly into his old home. Sully—Jack Sullivan, Mr. Wiggins’ Butler, would never let him pass without Mr. Wiggins—and now Arnold’s—express consent. He decided it more prudent to take a more surreptitious route into his father’s house.
He turned north on Holland and walked until the carriage house was between himself and the dwelling. Then, using stealth, Wendell slalomed from tree to tree until he came to the one he wanted: an old white oak that stretched fifty feet into the fall sky with thick, octopus-like branches. With mature Rhododendrons along the sides of the house and the mammoth trunk to shield him, he would only be visible for the last few feet of his climb until he came to his father’s bedroom. As long as the window was not latched, he could gain entrance, although he still wasn’t sure what he would be looking for once he was inside.
Verifying that no one was about to see his climb, Wendell slowly and surreptitiously ascended the outstretched limbs.
Everything transpired as Wendell had hoped, and he now found himself in his fathe
r’s bedroom. It was now approaching noon. Sully and Mrs. Sully, the cook, and Miss Betty, the maid, would all be down in the basement quarters eating lunch. Wendell suspected he had half-hour before they returned to their tasks, and he’d more than likely be found out and tossed out on his ear.
He looked around the great room. As suspected, candelabras and oil lamps occupied almost every empty space. However cluttered it may have been, it was still spotless, and the candelabras and oil lamps were set out as if on some grand display; a testament that even without the elder Wiggins home, his ire was still feared.
Wendell’s attention was immediately drawn to the great chest of drawers along the far wall. Along the top were photographs, papers, ledgers, and books with an oval mirror placed strategically in the middle. Strewn in between were lamps and candles, some waxy nubs in dire need of being replaced.
This was as good a place to start as any. He quietly tip-toed to the chiffonier and began moving things about looking for something he, as yet, did not know. He poked around the papers, all business of one sort or another. Father had left his gold pocket watch behind when he had taken ill. This Wendell put in his front pocket without a second thought, as he picked up and perused the photographs—mostly of Mother before she died. One was of his parents together outside the newly expanded factory. They looked happy.
But there was one in particular that caught his eye: to the right of the mirror was a small picture of Wendell in a brass frame. It was of him at Presque Ilse as an adolescent fishing in the waters of the bay. He was surprised that Father even tolerated this picture, let alone felt compelled to display it openly. Wendell was certain that when he was evicted from the home all traces of him would have been exorcised, as well.
It was only when he was about to replace it next to the mirror that he realized his hand was beginning to visibly shake. He tried to play the tremor off as nervousness of possibly being caught, however, he knew the symptom well. He did his best to ignore it—for the time being, anyway. He knew from experience that he couldn’t disregard it for long.