Mysteries of Winterthurn

by Joyce Carol Oates

  (Alas, Xavier was beginning to despair of ever learning the truth about his adversary!—or even the name, the actual name, of Poindexter’s mistress. For while some persons spoke vehemently of the man’s “rapacity” amongst women,—McPhearson Jones being particularly strong on this point—others, doubtless fearing his wrath, declined to speak at all. Jones claimed that he had for years been employed in driving Poindexter to the gaming houses and bordellos of Rivière-du-Loup; another informer slyly suggested that Poindexter’s true appetite was for young boys, of the poorer classes; yet other persons, who refused payment from Xavier, and struck him, consequently, as possessed of a higher degree of integrity, insisted they knew nothing of Ellery Poindexter’s private life,—save that it had been cloaked in secrecy, and had best remain so. As to Xavier’s shrewd question, whether this “secrecy” might have sprung from Poindexter’s animosity toward his wife,—no one wished to venture an answer.)

  Frustrated thus in his investigation, no matter with what diligence he labored, Xavier decided, of a sudden, to revisit Rivière-du-Loup: for it seemed the answer to his questions must reside there: and, no matter how long he waited, Ellery Poindexter would not lead him thither. “For he has grown fearful, and cautious,” Xavier thought, “and as devious, perhaps, as I.”

  All this while, it scarcely needs be recorded, the days grew ever darker, and bleaker, and windier: and snow began to fall near-daily, in great soft smothering clumps, or in stinging pellets, cruelly driven out of the northeast. This shifting of the Earth’s poles,—this inexorable slide to the winter solstice—roused in the hapless detective, despite his rational judgment, a frequent sensation of panicked despair: for in him, still, was the child-soul, paralyzed by the specter of greedy and all-embracing Night.

  AS FOR THE DISREPUTABLE VILLAGE of Rivière-du-Loup,—doubtless the reader is familiar in outline with its history, or, at the very least, its position vis-à-vis Winterthurn City: so I shall but briefly limn it here, before following Xavier Kilgarvan to the Hotel Paradise, and to his remarkable adventure there.

  According to all reliable histories, this village of some fifteen hundred persons had had, from the days of its earliest settlement in the 1700s, a rough and scandalous reputation: being an Indian trading post for many years; and then one of the liveliest centers for lumbering; and, more recently, with the gradual decline of the lumbering business, a kind of “free zone” for men for all social ranks,—a lawless, and, indeed, unlicensed place where vices of every imaginable sort (whether drinking, or gambling, or consorting with females of the lewdest type, or betting on dog-and cock-fighting) were freely indulged. True, the county law enforcement officers essayed, now and then, to reform Rivière-du-Loup, or, perhaps, to regulate its excesses (for a goodly percentage of the county’s crimes, including murder, were perpetrated there): but to no avail, as, it was whispered, the sheriff himself partook of the village’s profits; and if raids ensued, very few arrests were actually made, and it was a rare conviction that resulted. Even as a schoolboy, Xavier had heard wild and alarming tales of the village; and his brother Wolf had made little secret of it, that he, from the precocious age of seventeen onward, made regular jaunts there, to such sporting houses as The Golden Vanity, The Peacock, The Black Elk Inn, and, not least, the despoiled “gem” of Rivière-du-Loup, the Hôtel Paradis—or Hotel Paradise—which, in more prosperous lumbering days, had been a hotel of some legitimate prestige. (It had been Wolf’s half-serious jest to “kidnap” his youngest brother, on the occasion of his eighteenth birthday, and take him to the Paradise to celebrate!—but so little did the chaste Xavier fall in with this foolery, Wolf did not pursue the subject.)

  “Ah, if only I might be, still, that innocent prig, the boy Xavier!”—thus the detective laughingly murmured.

  Needless to say, at this juncture of his life, Xavier Kilgarvan had few moral qualms about visiting the sporting houses of Rivière-du-Loup; and so practiced was he in suppressing his distaste for such excursions, he betook himself to the village with little delay, in a two-seater gig belonging to Murre. En route, he sternly warned himself against overindulging in drink; nor must he succumb to any feminine blandishments, and be drawn into a dangerous situation. For it might be the case, after all, that Poindexter had friends in this depraved place, or even business associates: and it would ill behoove Xavier to be discovered. Many were the tales he had heard, as a youth, of feckless gentlemen lured to their ruin at the gambling tables, or beaten and robbed, and left for dead in the hills: there being an especial danger for solitary men whose names and faces were unknown, and who did not live in the Winterthurn area.

  Thus it was, Xavier arrived in Rivière-du-Loup shortly past dusk of a day in mid-December, skillfully, though not elaborately, costumed in a herringbone-tweed coat some years old, and a bowler hat of a subdued brown shade, and the red-dyed wig and goatee which he had worn on the day of his arrival back in September. (Since his gold-rimmed glasses had been broken, he had not troubled to replace them.) As one or another of his paid informers had named Ellery Poindexter a patron at all of the houses, Xavier felt obliged to visit each in turn, under the pretense of being an ordinary customer,—a businessman from Vanderpoel who had come to spend a few days in Winterthurn City, and had found his surroundings dull. He began, then, with the lowliest, and, in many ways, the least offensive of the houses, The Peacock: and worked his way up, so to speak, to the yet-resplendent Hotel Paradise,—a yellow clapboard structure of seven stories, with a grandiose portico, and ornately bracketed pillars in the style of the 1870s, and an air, surprisingly appealing on this grim December night, of tawdry prosperity. True, alarming tales had been told, over the years, of innocent young girls and women, many of immigrant stock, brought to the Paradise with the promise of honest employment, there to be drugged, and abused, and imprisoned, until such time as they would cooperate with their captors; and yet more alarming tales,—whispered, rather than spoken aloud—of hapless girls “bought” by well-to-do gentlemen, for a night’s savage sport, which, upon some occasions, they did not survive.

  So ablaze, however, was the Paradise, with lights, and music, and laughter, and so infectious its high masculine spirits, Xavier found himself thinking, as he entered, and was at once made welcome: “I suppose one cannot entirely blame a weak man like Poindexter, for seeking, in such a place, what low happiness might be his.”

  THOUGH INITIALLY DISCOUNTENANCED by the rowdy gaiety of the high-ceilinged public rooms, Xavier partook but sparingly of alcoholic drink, and made his way about with shrewd discretion, as a “visitor to Winterthurn City who was not entirely a stranger,”—and who wished to make inquiries after an acquaintance of his, Mr. Ellery Poindexter, about whom he had become concerned of late. Unfortunately, no one Xavier encountered seemed to know the elusive Poindexter in person, though a fair number of the young women professed to have heard of him; and, it was hinted, he may well have been a regular patron of the Paradise, under one or another alias. (For, needless to say, the majority of the Winterthurn gentlemen who visited Rivière-du-Loup frequently,—those of high social rank, at any rate—were known by aliases and “nicknames” on this side of the river.) Might the person Xavier sought not be “Old Bull”?—or “Red”?—or “Buck”?—or “The Fox”? Might he not be “Trouble”?—or “Gnasher”?—or “Zach”?—or “Ironlocks”?—or “Bibs”?—or “Kooch”? Alas, even when Xavier generously proferred gold coins, to elicit more substantial information, his inquiries came to very little: for, as one young woman gaily averred, most of the well-heeled gentlemen of Winterthurn City visited Rivière-du-Loup from time to time, and it would be nigh impossible to remember them all—!

  “Doubtless everyone in this place is in his pay,” Xavier sullenly thought, “and it is a futile effort to make honest inquiries.”

  Thus it was, with the passage of hours, Xavier found himself drinking more heavily than he had planned, and somewhat promiscuously mixing drinks,—now a sherry, now a gin-and-water, now brand
y, now Scotch—for he saw little purpose in returning to Jewett’s Lane in the dark, alone and embittered, and, truth to tell, utterly baffled as to how next to proceed.

  “Is’t not the case that, at the age of thirty-nine, I am emulating, still, the ‘Jashbers’ of my boyhood,” Xavier thought, in disgust, “while deluding myself, that I am an adult?—and have taken my rightful place amongst the adults of the world?” Seeing that, for the moment, he was unobserved, Xavier gave vent to his pique by roughly stripping the red goatee from his chin and shoving it into his pocket; for it had begun to irritate his sensitive skin, and served no purpose in any case. “Can it be, the majority of human beings live out their lives according to a child’s scheme?—soon forgotten by the conscious mind, and ‘buried over,’ but operant nonetheless?” Xavier bethought himself, while, in the midst of a hurlyburly of drunken high spirits, to which he paid very little heed, he continued to sip at his drink: and felt so icily composed, he could not be vulnerable to anything so common as drunkenness.

  “Nay,” the detective murmured aloud, sighing, “I am one of those persons doomed, as it were, to sobriety.”

  Nonetheless, it somehow came about,—whether at this time, or an hour or two later—that Xavier found himself in an upstairs room of the hotel, in the company of a full-bodied and heavily rouged woman of indeterminate age, with Indian-black hair, and a hawkish look about the eyes; whose simpering prattle quite belied the melancholy savagery of her countenance; and who roused him to both manly desire and annoyance, by her overfamiliarity with his person. He was, it seemed, earnestly caught up in the attempt to explain to this woman that he had erred in accompanying her here, for he had given the pledge of his heart to another woman, and was not free: indeed, as Xavier excitedly insisted, in a slurred voice, he had never been free.

  Even in his confusion, he was not so ungallant as to fail to press some bills into the woman’s hand, and to close her moist, chill, trembling fingers about them: assuring her that he meant no insult to her, or harm: and apologizing for the violence of his response. (For, it seemed, Xavier had perpetrated some small damage in the room,—albeit he could not recall having done so: an overturned plush chair, a smashed vanity mirror, pillows and bedclothes tossed harmlessly about, in a sudden, and evidently short-lived, outburst of fury. Or had another gentleman caused this upset, and Xavier was not to be blamed—?)

  Next, panting aloud, he found himself hurrying along the dim-lit corridor, that he might not be apprehended by any of the hotel’s burly overseers: gloating in the cleverness of his escape, and making his way, with a shrewd simulation of knowledgeability, through the honeycomb-maze of corridors and back stairs. His excitation was such, he cared not precisely where his feet led him, so long as no one laid hands on him, and hauled him away downstairs. “Well,—for better or worse, I shall be faithful to Perdita,” he thought, “though this wretched ‘mystery’ is never resolved, and we are never wed.”

  How long, in this state of mental confusion, Xavier wandered about in the overheated interior of the Paradise, is not known; nor could he have been able to recall, afterward, how many of the numerous floors he had traversed, and how often he had eluded discovery, by ducking around a corner, or hiding in an unoccupied room. (Yet, as it turned out, his wish to avoid detection was not steadfastly observed, for, upon one occasion, he found himself quietly inquiring, of a disheveled blond woman in a robe trimmed with black ostrich feathers, whether she knew firsthand of the shameless Poindexter; and of the Grace Church murders; and of the near-unbearable pressure being exerted upon him to proclaim the murderer’s identity—!) One thing struck him above all, in this jumble of gas-jets, and banisters, and thick-piled carpets, and bursts of shrill bodiless laughter, and fleet mirrored images of a harried man who was, yet was not, Xavier Kilgarvan: the knowledge that the Hotel Paradise contained many more rooms, and, it certainly seemed, more floors, than one might have estimated, from the street; and that it must be altogether too easy to become lost in its labyrinthine passageways.

  “A hellish sort of ‘Paradise,’ indeed,” the detective thought, “wherein pleasure has no limit.”

  Had his senses been more acute, Xavier might, perhaps, have felt some premonitions of alarm, at the gradual increase in temperature, as he made his groping way down an ill-lit back stairs: there being, in addition, a steamy quality to the air, so that it became difficult to breathe; and an odor,—heady, rich, sweetly intoxicating, and somewhat sickening—of heated mammalian flesh. As he passed by degrees from the more lavishly decorated part of the hotel to a part distinctly older and shabbier, there came to him disjointed memories of the cruder sort of tales he had heard, from many years past: tales of “expendable” and “worthless” females, deemed insufficiently pretty, or healthy, or spirited, who were auctioned off to the highest bidders amongst the clientele, and taken off to the remoter corners of the hotel, to be dealt with as their buyers chose. There were, it was said, cork-lined subterranean chambers, wherein instruments of torture were available,—whips, and branding irons, and makeshift gallows, and “operating tables”—and the tiled floors were equipped with drains, that streams of blood might be carried away, with a minimum of perturbation. Why, had the amazed young Xavier not heard, by way of his older schoolmates, that there were even pens of a sort, in which luckless females were set upon, and torn to pieces by maddened pit bulls?—and cavernous ravines outside Rivière-du-Loup, where decaying bodies, sprinkled with quicklime, were unceremoniously dumped—?

  Such horrors were, of course, highly doubtful: particularly as it was said they occurred so close to Winterthurn City. “Nay, they are naught but fancies,—the crudest sort of fancies,” Xavier told himself, wiping his damp brow with a handkerchief, and fighting a growing sensation of nausea.

  Now he searched assiduously for an exit: down a flight of stairs, and into another wing of the building: through a heavy oaken door, fortified with tin: and into a passageway so airless and low-ceilinged, it might have been a tunnel. Here, the commingled odors of food, and liquor, and perspiration, and soiled linen, and, it may have been, stale flesh, so throbbed with humid heat, Xavier found it ever more difficult to breathe, and worried that, of a sudden, he might faint, and lie undiscovered for many hours. He passed an open doorway, glimpsing, inside, amidst coils of steam, laundresses bent over their washboards, their soap-splashed arms bared to the shoulder, and their hair escaping in untidy strands from their white caps. How queer, that they took no note of him,—had not the strength, it seemed, to glance around in his direction.

  Farther along, he believed he heard women shrieking in terror: but when he passed by a large, dim-lit, and, it seemed, sumptuously appointed chamber, he saw that they were carousing in a most drunken fashion, not unlike their sisters in the public rooms abovestairs: but here they were only part-clad, in soiled chemises and other scant undergarments, though a number of gentlemen moved freely amongst them. Ah, how careless these women were of their delicate flesh, as if it possessed no value whatsoever—!

  In revulsion, Xavier turned away at once; and blundered through a door, to discover himself in a storage room of sorts, in which slop jars and ill-scoured chamber pots were piled. He gagged; retreated in haste; hurried up a short flight of steps; along yet another narrow passageway, which seemed,—he knew not why—to be leading in the desired direction. Hazy, fleet, broken, and dreamlike were the glimpses he had, into rooms past which his panicked feet led him: one in which, it seemed, his brother Bradford stood, wiping his bloodied hands on a towel; another in which shadowed figures coiled together, whimpering and moaning; yet another, in which a naked girl crouched before a black-garbed gentleman who held something poised above her,—a riding crop, by the look of it: the particular shock of the sight being, this chestnut-haired girl closely resembled Perdita as she had been twenty years before.

  Nonetheless, Xavier pressed onward: for he did not dare pause.

  At one spot, condensation had formed so thickly on the walls of the tunnel
, it had gathered into rivulets, and, in the lowest section of the passageway, had drained into an actual puddle, or pool, some three inches deep, through which Xavier was obliged to splash. Water it was, surely; water, and nothing more; though he seemed to recall, from the dim past, that the entrapped females of the Paradise so copiously wept, their tears collected into a pool . . . “Nay, it is naught but fancy, and I shall give no more thought to it,” Xavier sternly chided himself.

  Alas, the detective’s adventure was fast drawing to a close, and something very like a child’s terror was beginning. For his affrighted heart now beat so violently, he could scarcely draw breath; and the pain behind his eyes was such, a frenzied bird might have been encased in his skull, beating its frenzied wings. “Where is the way out?—I must find the way out,” Xavier exclaimed: by happenstance turning a corner, to come upon a candle-lit chamber, a private dining room, by the look of it: albeit malodorous, and low-ceilinged, with damp concrete walls, and a disagreeably wet concrete floor into which several drains had been set. A queer enough dining room, Xavier saw, as his eyes accustomed themselves to the gloom, in that a solitary gentleman in a bowler hat was being served, seated at a table rather too high for such purposes, over which an ill-laundered white sheet had been hastily arranged, as a tablecloth—!

  Yet more remarkable was the identity of the diner,—the redoubtable Dr. Wilts, upon whom Xavier had not set eyes for many years! Genial and white-haired, with a high, tight, round little belly, and faded blue eyes crinkled in an expression of sly merriment, it was Dr. Holyrod Wilts, who had lately been barred from practicing medicine in the State: and here he sat, his brown bowler hat pushed back upon his head, and a somewhat stained white towel tucked into his shirt front as a napkin. Evidently he had been feasting upon a latenight supper of oysters on the half-shell; a near-depleted bottle of champagne was set before him; his starched white collar had been unfastened, for comfort’s sake. Pink-skinned, he exuded an air of contentment and well-being, and showed very little surprise at Xavier’s entrance,—or at Xavier’s identity. (For, even in the tremulous candlelight, he had no difficulty recognizing Xavier Kilgarvan; albeit some remnants of the night’s disguise yet clung to the detective.)