When he looked back, the three young men no longer followed. They remained at the fence line of the property. Even stranger, they no longer watched him. Instead they watched the Suydam home. They cowered before it. Tommy finally saw that these boys were younger than him. Maybe fifteen or sixteen. Children. Studying the Suydam home with fear.
Relief played from Tommy’s eyes to his heels. Tommy crouched, looking for a stone. He found one the size of a baseball and weighed it in his palm. He set down the guitar. He wanted to hit the biggest of the three young men. They still hadn’t returned their gazes to him. It was as if the house had mesmerized them. No better moment than this to take aim. He made a wish that the rock take out one of their eyes.
Then the door of the mansion opened. Barely a squeak behind Tommy but enough to make all three boys literally hop. They bolted like kittens, wriggly and mewling. Behind Tommy there was a groan as someone stepped out the front door and onto the boards of the mansion’s wraparound porch.
“If you blind one of them, the police will be called.”
This wasn’t said sternly, almost with amusement. Tommy Tester turned to find Robert Suydam coming down the steps, one hand out. Tommy gave him the rock and Robert Suydam weighed it in his hand as Tommy had done. Rather than throwing it back into the dirt he slipped the stone into the pocket of his coat. Now he looked at Tommy expectantly. The moment lingered. Suydam waited. Tommy took a full minute to remember the word he’d been instructed to use.
“Ashmodai,” Tommy finally said quietly.
Robert Suydam nodded and turned and walked back up the porch steps. When he entered the mansion, he left the front door open for Tommy to follow.
5
THE CLOAK OF TREES around the mansion did a great deal to hide its age, its infirmity, but inside there was no cover. The floorboards were old and poorly maintained; they looked splintered and parched. When Tommy entered the home, the entryway was lit by a single electric lamp, and he found the same in all three rooms on the first floor. This caused the edges of each room to lie in shadows, and it became difficult for Tommy to really understand the dimensions of each space. As if the mansion’s interior was larger than its exterior. The smell of age, meaning undifferentiated time, had settled throughout the home, a musty odor, as if the winds of the present never blew through here.
Robert Suydam led Tommy down the long first-floor hallway, and Tommy clutched the handle of his guitar case as if it were a guideline leading back to the front door, down the steps, out the yard, out of Flatbush, back onto the train, to Harlem, and by his father’s side. While they walked, the old man almost trotting, Tommy felt his guitar case jiggling as it had when the white boys had been kicking at it as they followed him. This spurred a suspicion that someone else—something else—was following him now. Twice the case almost flew out of his grip, but Tommy couldn’t make himself look back into the darkness of the long hall. Instead he only followed faster.
Suydam opened a set of double doors and entered a room so brightly lit Tommy squinted as he followed. As soon as he was inside, Suydam pushed one of the doors shut, then the other. Just before he shut the second, Suydam peeked into the hall. Tommy felt, distinctly, there’d been another presence trailing behind him. Then Suydam actually spoke—a single mumbled word, a command?—before the old man shut door and locked it.
Only then could Tommy turn to take in this room with its high ceilings. It had to be the size of the entire apartment Tommy and Otis shared. It might be larger. It had three towering walls of inset shelving, every one full of books. In addition to the books on the shelves, there were others spread across the floor, towers of tomes stacked as high as Tommy’s shoulder.
“I’ve read them all,” Suydam said. “And yet there’s still so much I must learn.”
Tommy stood the guitar case by his side like an upright rifle. “I’d say you earned yourself a break.”
Suydam shook his head faintly. “If only there were time for rest.”
Suydam walked to the far end of the room, toward the high windows running along one wall. A single great chair stood by the sill. Suydam sat in it. His feet dangled, not touching the floor. A strange sight because he wasn’t a short man. The chair didn’t appear oversized, either. The old man’s shoes swayed, three inches from the floorboards, and Tommy watched them, confused by the incongruity. Then, as if Suydam had noticed Tommy’s interest, the feet lowered to the ground. But Suydam hadn’t moved the rest of his body. Instead it was as if the old man had, by some power, made his legs grow at will. It was so odd, visually, Tommy actually became nauseated. Tommy looked away and back again and, sure enough, Suydam’s feet were flat on the floor. He waved a hand to catch Tommy’s attention.
“Won’t you play now?” he asked. There was an edge to his tone, as if trying to get Tommy’s mind onto something other than the strangeness—shape-shifting—he swore he’d just seen.
Tommy looked around the library. The only other guests seemed to be the books.
“The party is tomorrow night,” Suydam said. “But I felt like meeting with you tonight first. You didn’t think I was paying you that much money to play for one evening, did you?”
“No, sir,” Tommy said. “Whatever you like.” He opened the guitar case and took out the instrument.
He had, in fact, expected to be paid to play for one evening because that’s exactly what the man promised three days earlier. But a wealthy man’s reality is remade at will.
Suydam reached into a coat pocket and revealed a fold of bills so thick it choked down all of Tommy Tester’s pride. Suydam set it on the windowsill, then grinned at Tommy. Tommy strummed and played as expected. The old man stared out the windows.
Mercifully, the man wanted to talk more than he wanted Tommy to play. Tommy had only four songs in his repertoire, after all, including the one his father recently taught him. After playing for nearly thirty minutes, Tommy’s fingers and shoulders, the small of his back, all ached terribly. He slowed his playing, strummed lightly, until he simply hummed in the cavernous old library. Finally Suydam—who hadn’t once looked away from the great windows—cleared his throat and spoke.
“And it is my belief that an awful lore is not yet dead,” he said.
Suydam wasn’t speaking to Tommy, just reciting something half remembered. But Tommy, slightly dazed from the strangeness of this engagement, still responded.
“I’m sorry, sir?” he asked, and instantly regretted it.
Robert Suydam turned away from the windows irritably and glared at Tommy as if he’d caught a burglar breaking into his home. Normally, when a white man gave Tommy this look, he had a series of useful defenses. Looking down at his feet abjectly often worked; a smile might sometimes do. Tommy tried the latter.
“Well, what could you be grinning at?” Suydam demanded.
A third option, considered in a panic, was to get his father’s razor out and cut this old man’s throat, take the money, and flee. But by now, well past eleven, Tommy couldn’t imagine making it to the train station. A Negro walking through this white neighborhood at damn near midnight? He might as well be Satan strolling through Eden. And if they found him with that wad of money, well, he’d be fortunate if the police were called. They might only beat him, then take him to jail. Much worse would happen if he got snatched by a mob. No razor then. He was, in essence, trapped here until morning.
“I asked you something,” Suydam said. “And when I speak I expect a response.”
No good deflections left, so Tommy Tester raised his head and returned Suydam’s gaze. Might as well try honesty.
“I’m confused,” he said.
“Of course you are,” Suydam said. “The veil of ignorance has been set over your face since birth. Shall I pull it free?”
Tommy pursed his lips, trying to decide his best response. So far honesty had worked. At least the old man wasn’t glaring at him.
“It’s your money,” Tommy said.
Robert Suydam clapped. “Do yo
u know why I hired you? Why I was drawn to you three days past? I could see you. And I don’t mean this charade.” Suydam extended one hand and gestured from Tommy’s purposefully scuffed boots to his well-worn suit to his guitar. “I saw that you understood illusion. And that you, in your way, were casting a powerful spell. I admired it. I felt a kinship with you, I suppose. Because I, too, understand illusion.”
Suydam rose from his chair, and faced the wall of tall windows. The old man tapped at one pane lightly. Because of all the lights inside the library, it was impossible to see outside into the night. The windows had turned into a sort of screen reflecting Tommy and Suydam and the expansive library. Suydam waved Tommy over, and as he walked closer Tommy thought he saw movement behind him. The reflected image of the library’s double doors buckled twice, as if someone were in the hallway, trying to push them open. Tommy turned quickly, but the doors weren’t moving now. Tommy couldn’t make himself turn back to Suydam yet.
“Your people,” Robert Suydam began. “Your people are forced to live in mazes of hybrid squalor. It’s all sound and filth and spiritual putrescence.”
If anything could pull Tommy Tester’s attention from the door it would be this. He turned to Robert Suydam expecting to find the man sneering, but the man had one hand on his belly, patting it gently. He looked up and to the right, like a man trying to remember a speech.
“Policemen despair of order or reform and seek rather to erect barriers protecting the outside world from the contagion,” he continued.
Tommy held the neck of the guitar tightly. “You talking about Harlem?”
The spell broke. “What?” Suydam said. “Oh damn you! Why did you interrupt?”
“I’m trying to understand what in the hell place you’re talking about. It doesn’t sound like anywhere I’ve ever lived.”
No applause for honesty this time.
“Mind your tone,” Suydam said. He covered the money with one hand. “You haven’t been paid yet.”
This motherfucker, Tommy Tester thought and took one step closer to the old man.
Even Robert Suydam, for all his authority, sensed a change in the room. For a moment he looked like a man who realized a meteorite was about to crash into his planet. He raised an open hand, a gesture of peace.
“Tomorrow night you’ll be playing at my party,” Suydam said. “And the guests will be men like you. Negroes from Harlem, Syrians and Spaniards from Red Hook, Chinese and Italians from Five Points, all of them will be here by my invitation. All of them will hear what I am now telling you.”
Tommy’s temper became cooled by his curiosity. A white man’s home crowded with Negroes and Syrians and all the rest. Suydam might be the strangest job he’d stumbled into yet.
“So why do I get the preview?” Tommy asked.
“I needed to practice my words,” Suydam said. “To see how they affect a man of the proper type. Also, I admit you were convenient,” Suydam said. “I needed those police to give me some room. The time they spent with you was enough for me to slip away. Thank you for that.”
“You knew you were being followed?”
“My family has doubts about my sanity—this is what they say. More likely they have doubts about my will, and to whom, exactly, I’ll leave this home and all its contents. Which of them will inherit the land on which it all sits. But they don’t see it that way. Nobody ever thinks of himself as a villain, does he? Even monsters hold high opinions of themselves.
“My family is convinced I’m in danger. They’ve made the police believe the same. They hired that private detective, too, the brutish one. His name is Mr. Howard. Mr. Howard and Detective Malone are collecting proof of my mental inferiority. For my own good, of course!”
Tommy laughed. “Talking to a Negro on the street won’t help you look sane.”
Suydam took his hand off the money and turned toward the window fully. He leaned with both hands against the ledge. “I know that I am high born. I mean that my family’s old wealth, and their bearing in history, should afford me all the comfort I need. But comfort can be a cage, you know. Certainly it can stunt the mind. Time spent with my family, with my old friends of means, began to feel like bathing in porridge, drowning in a child’s meal.
“So I sought out others, entirely unlike myself, and when they spoke of secret wisdom, I listened. What men like myself would dismiss as superstition or, worse, pure evil, I learned to cherish. The more I read, the more I listened, the more sure I became that a great and secret show had been playing throughout my life, throughout all our lives, but the mass of us were too ignorant, or too frightened, to raise our eyes and watch. Because to watch would be to understand the play isn’t being staged for us. To learn we simply do not matter to the players at all.”
Now he touched the window, tapping it, and the reflection seemed—for an instant—to ripple, as if they were staring into a pool of water rather than panes of glass.
“There is a King who sleeps at the bottom of the ocean.”
As Suydam said this—against all possibility—the windowpanes took on the color, and apparent depth, of the sea. It was as if Tommy Tester and Robert Suydam, standing in this room, in this mansion, in this city, were also peering down at distant waters elsewhere on the globe. The guitar fell out of Tommy’s hand as the image appeared. The thump it made, the sour note that played once, these hardly registered. A rush of cold seemed to enter not only the room, but also Tommy’s bones.
Suydam said, “The return of the Sleeping King would mean the end of your people’s wretchedness. The end of all the wreck and squalor of a billion lives. When he rises, he wipes away the follies of mankind. And he is only one of many. They are the Great Old Ones. Their footfalls cause mountains to topple. One gaze strikes ten million bodies dead. But imagine the fortunes of those of us who were allowed to survive? The reward for those of us who helped the Sleeping King wake?”
Suydam tapped the window again and the ocean—truly Tommy was seeing a vast and distant sea in the windows—churned, heaved, and from its depths a shape, too massive to be real, stirred. Tommy’s throat tightened. He didn’t want to see this. He thought he might shatter the wall of windows with his own hands if that thing in the sea depths became visible, distinct.
But then the image shifted, the perspective rising, leaving the sea far below. They left the continents behind. Was it possible? They left the world. They rose into the night sky. It really seemed as if these two men in a house in Flatbush were now adrift in farthest space. Tommy Tester clutched at the windowsill for balance.
“From here you might understand,” Robert Suydam said quietly.
But Tommy didn’t understand, he only wanted desperately to be home. He let go of the windowsill, turned, and picked up his guitar, and he ran across the library. He ran toward the locked library doors. Robert Suydam shouted after him. Indecipherable words. Tommy barreled through the stacks of books on the floor, sent them flying. He wanted to be home with his father, damn the cost. If he’d stared out that window any longer, something terrible would have happened to his soul. For all his confidence about his hustle, he understood that Robert Suydam was playing with a more potent force. He reached the double doors of the library and he opened them.
And Malone, the police officer, stood in the hallway.
Malone with his service revolver pointed forward.
“What?” Tommy said. “What?”
Tommy clutched at the doorknob. In his other hand he held the guitar. He expected to die as soon as Malone pulled the trigger. Was this who’d been behind him when he first entered Suydam’s home? Had Malone been the one kicking at his guitar?
But then Tommy realized something strange about Malone, or about Malone’s surroundings. While Tommy stood in the library of Robert Suydam’s home, Malone stood in what looked to be the lobby of an apartment building and most certainly not the hallway of Robert Suydam’s estate. What the hell was going on? It was as if the two locations—mansion and tenement lobby—had be
en stitched together by a haphazard tailor, Tommy Tester and Detective Malone facing each other because of a bad splice in reality’s fabric. And actually both men looked mystified. In a moment Robert Suydam—breathless—reached the library doors and threw them shut. Then he slapped Tommy Tester in the face.
“What did you see?” Suydam shouted. “Tell me!”
“I don’t understand,” Tommy said quietly.
“Was it Him?” Suydam yelled. He reached into the pocket of his coat, pulled out the stone he’d taken from Tommy. He raised it, intending to break open Tommy Tester’s skull. “Did the King see you?”
“The cop,” Tommy said, almost breathless. “The skinny one.”
Suydam held the stone high for two moments more. “Malone?” Then he lowered the rock. “Only Malone,” he said quietly to himself.
“I don’t understand where I’ve ended up,” Tommy said.
Suydam breathed deeply, swallowing. “We can’t leave this room yet,” he explained. “Not till morning.”
If Tommy looked baffled, it’s because he was baffled.
“If we tried to open that door again, the results would be even stranger than what you’ve just seen. And potentially more dangerous.”
Tommy looked back at the doors. His forehead went cold. “Malone was standing in the hallway, but it wasn’t your hallway out there.”
“I believe you,” Suydam said. “But believe me it could’ve been worse. You might’ve opened that door and encountered . . .”
Suydam moved himself in between Tommy and the doors and stayed there the rest of the night.
6
CHARLES THOMAS TESTER left Robert Suydam’s home at seven the next morning. When the sun rose, when they could peek outside the windows and see the streets of Flatbush again, that’s when Suydam said it was safe to open the library doors. Before then, all through the night, Suydam explained, his home had been Outside. The term, the idea, seemed commonplace to the old man, but Tester had a terrible time understanding. The mansion had been Outside? But of course it was. Where else could a mansion be? This hadn’t been the old man’s meaning, though. Finally Suydam described it this way:
The Ballad of Black Tom Page 3