Silver

by Graham Masterton

  He climbed the stairs one by one, until he reached the rickety landing at the top. He hesitated again, but then he knocked loudly on the side of the door-frame; so loudly that he would be bound to wake her up, if she were there, and he would be committed to seeing her.

  He waited for three whole minutes. He rubbed his hands to warm himself up, and shifted from one foot to the other, and sniffed because the cold had started his nose running. He was about to pick up his bag and go back down the stairs when a lamplight appeared through the curtained window in the door, and he heard feet dragging on the floor inside. The lamplight came very close to the door, and then an extraordinary voice called, ‘Who’s there? Is there anybody out there?’ It sounded like a woman; but she seemed to have something over her head that distorted and muffled what she was saying.

  Henry sniffed again, and cleared his throat, and then said, ‘I’m looking for somebody who used to live here. A girl called Annabel.’

  There was a long silence; and then at last Henry heard the bolts being nudged back, and a key turning. The door opened inwards, and so all he could see was a hand holding up an engraved-glass oil-lamp. He recognized the lamp with a peculiar shock as the same lamp that had stood on Annabel’s bedside all those years ago. An offensive smell eddied out of the house, not just burning kerosene from the lamp, but stale food, and liniment, and some sweetish odour like urine-soaked clothing, only stronger. Henry stayed where he was, watching the hand holding the lamp.

  ‘Do you know where Annabel is now?’ he asked.

  The strange voice hooted, ‘Come in.’

  ‘You don’t know who I am.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter who you are. Come in.’

  ‘Look, if Annabel isn’t here, I don’t really think—’

  ‘Come in,’ the voice insisted. And then, when Henry still hesitated, it said, ‘She’s here. Annabel’s here. Never left; not ever.’

  Henry took out his handkerchief, and blew his nose; but kept the handkerchief raised to his face to stifle some of the smell. He stepped cautiously in through the doorway, and into the small lobby which he remembered from before. Then he turned and looked at the woman who had so persistently invited him in.

  She was a small, dwarfish figure, with grizzled grey hair. The lower part of her face was entirely smothered in a filthy white scarf, crusted with yellow. She was wearing a large Indian blanket wrapped around her, tied at the waist with a pair of old stockings. She looked less than half-human, and she stank appallingly, but to Henry’s surprise the eyes which glittered above the face-bandage were alert and intelligent-looking.

  ‘Come in,’ said the woman, and led him into the parlour.

  It was like a nightmare: a hideous denial of everything he had remembered. The occasional tables had gone, the chaise-longue had gone, the patent organ had been taken away to leave nothing but a mark on the wallpaper. Instead of lace and velvet at the windows, there were dirty lengths of calico, nailed into the frames. There was no carpet, no pictures, no tiger-skin. It was just a bare, cold, inhospitable cell; and it reeked of filth and medicine and slow suppurations that Henry couldn’t even guess at.

  ‘I think I’m going to have to go,’ said Henry. Bile rose up in his throat and nastily flooded his mouth, and he had to swallow it again. ‘I can’t imagine Annabel living here. I’m sorry. It was all my fault. I shouldn’t have woken you up.’

  The eyes watched him above the face-bandage.

  ‘Annabel is here,’ the voice repeated.

  Henry at last realized what she was telling him. He stood in the centre of the room and the cold crawled down his skin from head to toe as if he were connected to a slow, powerful, galvanic current. He couldn’t bring himself to move: either to step towards her or to turn and run away. Because the horror of it was that not only had she been destroyed, her flesh and her beauty and everything she had once been; but one of Henry’s most crucial beliefs had been destroyed with her. The secret belief that whatever happened, he could always go back to that hot, erotic morning; that if ever he left Augusta he could always find the same sly, provocative girl with the blue eyes and the soft, massive breasts, and the willing vagina that would open up for him whenever he wanted it. Destroyed: the memory and the fantasy and all the unspoken desire, like a bright sky-coloured window breaking into hundreds of pealing pieces.

  He said, ‘Annabel.’

  Her eyes told him yes. Her voice said, with an odd thumping accompaniment, ‘Which one are you? Did you ever have a name?’

  ‘I visited you one morning. I didn’t have any money.’

  ‘No money? Did I throw you out?’

  ‘No. You gave me coffee, and lace cookies.’

  ‘Did we go to bed?’

  He nodded. ‘I remembered it all these years. I never forgot you.’

  ‘Hmfff,’ she breathed. She shuffled slowly across the room, and sat down on a broken bentwood chair. It was the only chair in the house, as far as he could see. The bedroom was in darkness, but he thought he could make out a heap of blankets in there, and an old flour-barrel.

  ‘Everybody else forgot me,’ she said.

  Henry stood and watched her in silence. Far away, towards the depot, a train screamed. Union Pacific railroad, heading west.

  ‘I was so beautiful, wasn’t I?’ Annabel said, not noticeably to Henry, but to someone behind the face-bandage. ‘The men used to say that I looked like an angel. And a bosom, they said, like a mermaid. A mermaid who never saw the sea. Did I tell you that I’ve never seen the sea?’

  ‘No, you didn’t tell me,’ said Henry. He was so depressed and yet so sickened that he didn’t know whether he wanted to weep or choke. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to stay here for very much longer.

  ‘I was beautiful, wasn’t I?’ Annabel asked him, directly this time.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘The doctor gave me salts of mercury,’ she told him. ‘I don’t take them now. I want to die, that’s all. There isn’t any point in living unless you’re beautiful. My mouth is all full of sores; I can hardly walk. There are so many swellings between my legs I can’t bear the pain of cleaning myself. All I want to do is die; but somehow I don’t.’

  She peered at him. ‘What did you say your name was?’ ‘Henry.’

  ‘Ah, Henry,’ she snuffled. She thought for a while, and then she said, ‘If I asked you, Henry, would you kill me?’

  He swallowed. Even his saliva seemed to taste of her sickly decaying smell. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘If I begged you?’

  He shook his head. ‘You should take the salts of mercury. Some people are cured.’

  ‘Hmmfff,’ she said.

  Without saying anything else, Henry took a gold ten-dollar eagle out of his wallet, and held it up so that Annabel could see it. Then he bent down and laid it carefully on the floor. He had heard how contagious syphilis could be; and he preferred to offend her, rather than catch it himself. She made no attempt to approach him, or to come forward and pick the coin up. He waited for one moment longer, and then turned around and walked quickly through the lobby, picked up his bag, opened the door, and was cantering down the outside stairs before he could allow himself to think what a coward he might be. He crossed the street, and began to stride back towards the depot, taking in deep breaths of cold night air, and shivering as he went.

  On the corner, he turned around, and looked back. It was an eerie sight, that old-fashioned square-built Iowa house, under a sky that was luminous with hidden moonlight, with the muffled white figure of Annabel standing on the top of the stairs, watching him run away from her. He carried on walking, so fast that he was almost dog-trotting.

  He walked as far as the Pottawattamie Hotel; or at least as far as the lot where the Pottawattamie Hotel had once stood. Now it had been replaced by a large brick-built hardware store, with shuttered windows, and enamelled advertisements for Henry H. Taylor’s famous graining combs, and Seroco Floor Oil. Not far away, a clock struck one, and here he was s
tanding on a strange street in Council Bluffs, cold and shocked, and exiled from his own past by eighteen years that had gone by in reality, but not in his mind. But Mrs Newall had vanished, and so had Dat Apple, and the hidey-hole where they had laughed and eaten bacon.

  Hefting up his bag again, he went back to the depot. The cab-drivers had gone now, and he was glad of that. He was humiliated enough by what he had tried to do without being stared at by insolent locals. He went into the waiting-room where the cast-iron stove had died out, but still retained some of its warmth, and he huddled himself up on a varnished wooden form and tried to doze.

  It was a long, uncomfortable night. At four o’clock in the morning, a long goods train clattered and clashed into the sidings, and for the next ninety minutes, brakemen whistled and shouted as they broke the train up and connected new waggons. There was no hope of sleeping, so Henry went outside into the cold to watch them disconnecting the link-and-pin couplings, and marshalling the rolling-stock around with the grinding of brakes and the colliding of buffers. He struck up a conversation with one of the brakemen, a laconic Pennsylvanian with a mouthful of chewing-tobacco, and after the train had been made up, he was invited into the huge roundhouse to share a cup of hot stewed coffee and a smoke.

  ‘Aside from fighting bears in nothin’ but your long johns, being a brakeman is the world’s most dangerous job,’ the fellow told him, as the sun began to shine through the roundhouse windows as softly as if it were shining into a dark, greasy cathedral. ‘Gettin’ yourself pinned between the cars, that’s the favourite. Friends of mine chopped in half, couldn’t count ’em. Then there was Smith, he was a real close pal, never even knew his first name, neither. Last month he was workin’ on a bridge, and a runaway locomotive comes wallopin’ down the track, and there ain’t no way he’s goin’ to outrun that locomotive down a 200-yard bridge, so he lays his neck on the rail just to make it quick.’

  Henry had breakfast at the station when the depot diner opened. He sat alone at the end of the counter eating corned-beef hash and drinking coffee while a bustling woman in a long white apron polished up her glasses, and her cups and her urns, and occasionally flicked her tea-towel at the ears of her young black assistant, telling him to ‘get some steam up, Thomas.’ Then Henry took up his bag again and ordered a cab to take him to Edward McLowery’s house.

  The house was gone, demolished and replaced by a savings bank. But Henry went to the saloon at the corner of the street, a dark smoky room which looked as if it might be the kind of place where Edward would have gone drinking; and he asked the portly proprietor if he knew where Edward was living these days. ‘McLowery,’ he said, everybody knew him; thin as a garden-rake; an old-time waggon-train guide.’

  ‘Sure,’ said the saloon proprietor. ‘He used to come in here more or less every afternoon. I knew him, Edward McLowery. Died four years ago; that cough of his got him during the winter. Think it was four years ago, could have been five.’

  Henry found Edward’s grave-marker in the unkempt grass of the Episcopalian Church on the eastern side of the city. It was the simplest of stones, not more than seven or eight dollars’ worth, and the lettering was poorly chiselled. It said nothing more than ‘Edward Harold McLowery, Gone To God.’ No date, no message of love or sympathy, just ‘Gone To God.’ Henry stood in the cemetery with his hat in his hand, the grass whipping at the legs of his trousers, and above him the sky was overcast and dark, and the clouds were running to the east in a hurried, mysterious army. Here it was then, the end of the dream, the final realization that the life he had lived had not remained crystallized for him, waiting for him to look happily through it all again like an album of living photographs.

  ‘Edward,’ he whispered. Then, ‘Annabel.’ Then he put on his hat and walked out of the cemetery to where the cab was waiting for him.

  ‘Depot?’ asked the driver, and Henry nodded.

  He took the 10:15 train back to Cheyenne. He spent most of the journey talking to a salesman who had come out West to see if he couldn’t interest the people of Denver in boudoir alarm clocks. ‘I’ve heard there’s a fair number of ladies in Denver who spend a good deal of their time in their boudoirs,’ he remarked, passing Henry a silver flask of bourbon, and saying, ‘Go on, take a pull.’

  The weather had turned very hot and clear by the time Henry got back to Denver. He went straight away to the Front Range Hotel, and shaved and changed, and then went down to the bar and ordered up a bottle of whiskey, from which he drank two brimful glasses, one straight after the other. He felt hungry, but he didn’t know what he wanted to eat. Slightly lightheaded, he boarded the tram for Brown’s Bluff, and sat in the back feeling as if he had no identity and no past. Even the letters he received from his father these days read like the letters of a stranger, describing a world which had become shrunken by distance and time and by unfamiliarity. It had never occurred to him before, but Fenchurch must look very old now; and Henry knew that he would never see him again before he died.

  William Byers was sitting in a patent collapsible day-bed in his back garden, drinking Regent punch through a straw and reading The Wasp. The tree shading his sun-bed rustled in the afternoon wind. The principal ingredients of Regent punch were rum, strong tea, rye whiskey, lemon juice, and champagne. The principal ingredients of The Wasp were satire. William looked up as Henry cross the lawn, and raised his straw hat, and said, ‘Well, you were quick! I thought you said you were going to Council Bluffs for a month!’

  Henry had to shade his eyes against the sun. ‘I changed my mind.’

  ‘Sit down,’ William invited. ‘Bring over that chair.’

  Henry said, ‘I can’t stay long. I want to finish up a couple of business arrangements downtown: then I’m leaving for Leadville in the morning.’

  ‘Back to the fair Augusta?’

  Henry didn’t answer that. William said: ‘I’m sorry about Stanley.’

  ‘You don’t have to be sorry,’ Henry replied.

  ‘Well, he’s always rather full of himself,’ William remarked. ‘I suppose anyone would be, after discovering Livingstone and then finding the source of the Nile. He’s an ambitious fellow, Stanley. What you might call a man of destiny. Or he believes he is, anyway.’

  Henry nodded, and walked around the garden a little. William watched him, without getting up from his day-bed. Birds chirped, leaves blew. In the distance, snow glittered on Pike’s Peak. Henry said, ‘What kind of a tree is this?’

  ‘A royal paulownia. Comes from Japan. What do you think of it?’

  Henry shrugged.

  ‘Are you here to say yes?’ William asked him.

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Well, then, that’s one load off of my mind. Why don’t you have a drink?’

  Henry said, ‘I think I’ve had enough, thanks. I’ll just get back to town and finish what I have to finish, and leave it at that. You can arrange the paperwork, can’t you? The name of the bank, that kind of thing?’

  ‘Of course I can,’ William told him, carefully. ‘Listen, you’re not upset about anything are you? We don’t want problems.’

  ‘You won’t get any.’

  ‘Well, okay then,’ said William. ‘Just so long as we don’t. We’re talking about very large sums of money here. Tens of thousands of dollars. And I know Stanley wouldn’t take very kindly to anything going wrong.’

  ‘What will he do, shoot me with his elephant gun?’ asked Henry, turning around so that the heel of his shoe crunched on the grass.

  William’s eyes sloped sideways in embarrassment. ‘I don’t think that what Stanley had to go through in Africa has very much to do with a plan to build a vacation resort at Mountclair .and set up a regular side-wheeler service on the South Platte River.’

  ‘I think it has everything to do with it,’ said Henry. ‘But, you’re going to pay me one thousand dollars a year, so you say; and on those terms I believe that I can forget my own opinion. And, provided you keep up your payments, I see no reason wh
y I shouldn’t continue to forget it, year by year.’

  ‘No,’ William agreed, with a mask-like smile, ‘I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t, either.’

  Henry rubbed a paulownia leaf between his fingers, feeling the soft hairiness of its green under-surface, and smelling the dead-geranium smell of crushed chlorophyll. ‘Can you give me the first thousand now?’ he asked. ‘How shall we put it, by way of advance?’

  ‘I don’t usually walk around with a thousand dollars in my pocket,’ said William, ‘even when I’m setting out to bribe the president of the First Silver Bank of Leadville, Colorado. But I’ll see what I can do.’

  Henry didn’t even smile. ‘I’m not leaving Denver until tomorrow morning,’ he said, firmly. ‘You know where I’m staying, the Front Range. You can leave the money at the desk if I’m not there.’

  ‘Henry,’ said William. The shadows of the shade tree flickered across his face.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘We’ve always been friends, haven’t we? You and I? We’re not doing anything criminal here; we’re not even doing anything unethical. We’re only helping ourselves, and helping Denver at the same time. It’s all for the good of the city, so you don’t have to be so censorious. Nobody’s twisting your arm, Henry; and if you don’t want to act as our banker, then all I can say is that we’ll have to find ourselves somebody else. But, there are tens of thousands of dollars involved, like I told you; and I would rather that you looked after them, than David Moffat, or Luther Kountze at the Colorado. It’s all a question of discretion.’

  Henry said, ‘I understand.’

  ‘Well, I hope you do,’ William replied. ‘Listen, why don’t you have that glass of punch?’

  Henry hesitated, and then he said, ‘All right. Just one.’ He brought over the white-painted cast-iron chair from under the oak tree, and sat on it with studied correctness, his hat on his lap, almost as if he were posing for his portrait. William reached around to the little side-table that was attached to his daybed, where the glass jug of Regent punch quietly clinked, and poured him a long one, and topped it with mint.