Disquiet Heart

by Randall Silvis

  “I am certain of it. On this wall alone there are four sconces, all identical. Similar ones exist throughout the house. I would not be surprised to find these eyepieces in other rooms as well.”

  “Let’s see what’s in there,” I told him, and back up the stairs I went, with Poe not far behind me.

  He came into the bedroom, saw me waiting by the secret doorway. “Momentarily,” he said. He then scrutinized the room just as I had done. But where I had seen nothing, he saw a great deal.

  “There,” he said, and pointed to the wall on his right. Another sconce, this one only five feet off the floor. He leaned against the wall and put his eye to the lens.

  “What can you see?”

  “It looks into the bath and the toilet.”

  “You mean, when I was in there …”

  He turned from the wall. “You. Me. All of his guests, I daresay.”

  “The bastard!”

  He crossed to a small bed table on which set a candle in its silver holder. He opened the bed-table drawer, found the lucifers, pocketed several of them, then struck another and lit the candle. “Let us proceed,” he said, and with that he stepped through the secret doorway.

  The corridor walls were bare planking, as was the floor, and the dark grain of the wood seemed to soak up much of the candle’s illumination. Twice in the first eight paces Poe had to pause to cup his hand around the flame when a draft threatened to extinguish it.

  We were nearly upon another door before we detected it, for no knob protruded to break the plane of the wall, only a short leather cord used for pulling the door shut. But more corridor lay in front of us. “Wait here by this door,” Poe told me. “I’ll check farther along.”

  “I should go back for another light.”

  He handed me the candlestick, removed the candle and broke it in half. He lit the bottom half on the top, stuck one piece in the holder and kept the other for himself. “Wait here for me,” he said.

  “We need to be quick.”

  “The room lies farther down.”

  “We don’t know where Buck is or what he’s up to.”

  “Wait here.”

  With that he strode forward, holding the candle as far ahead of him as he could reach. I watched for only a few seconds before returning my attention to the closed door at hand. I put a palm to it and pushed lightly. It gave way without much effort and spilled a rush of cooler air out at me. Before me lay a narrow staircase leading steeply down.

  “Another door!” Poe called out from ten feet down the corridor.

  “See what you can find! I’ll go this way!”

  I was two steps down when some muttered protest from Poe reached my ears, some mumbled epithet I took to be his admonition that I wait for him. But I was in no mood for waiting. We had wasted far too much time already, and there was little way to tell in these narrow, blackened confines, with no timepiece in our pockets, how many minutes had already passed.

  With each downward step the coolness deepened. I counted the stairs as I descended—sixteen, seventeen, eighteen—going well past any number that would have brought me to the mansion’s ground floor, and continuing on until, after step thirty-three, I was confronted with another blank face, another empty doorway.

  Gingerly I pushed it open. But nothing lay beyond it but the cellar, no different from any to be expected in a house so large, its nooks filled with gardening tools and other implements, old chairs, a bin stacked with firewood, cubicles in which barrels of salted meat and hams wrapped in burlap were stored, baskets filled with apples, cabbages, onions, turnips, parsnips and squash, shelves lined with dusty jars of Mrs. Dalrymple’s pickled fruits and confitures.

  The entire area was much brighter than the stairway and corridor had been; light entered through four narrow windows mounted at ground level. I had a quick peek out each of these windows, just to orient myself, and in one of them spotted Buck coming out of the carriage house, an ax in hand. I shivered to think of what use he would make of it—or already had.

  The cellar walls were of limestone, all but the one closest to where I now stood. It was paneled in wide vertical planks. A question occurred to me then: Why have a secret staircase leading to the cellar?

  It made no sense, unless the cellar itself was but a way station. Which implied the presence of another secret doorway. And where would such a doorway be, in limestone or wood?

  I found it not four feet to my left. The door opened onto another corridor, but this one a tunnel of earthen walls and trampled earth floor. The scent of mildew and soil mold was thick in the tunnel, and the space resonated with a dull kind of hum, more felt than heard. I told myself that it was nothing more than the movement of cool air through the tunnel, for the candle would surely have flickered out had I not kept a hand cupped in front of the flame. Yet I could not shake the notion that the low-pitched hum was the moan of the earth itself.

  Every twenty feet or so, a truss of wooden beams shored up the ceiling. Now and then I stepped into a shallow pool of clay-slimed water. As I walked I kept one eye on the ceiling and wondered how much earth waited above me, ready to tumble down. I wondered too about rats and snakes, whether they frequented this place. Had even a mole crossed my path I would surely have jumped out of my boots. But step after step I encountered nothing, only rock and clay and the sticky damp odor of my escalating claustrophobia.

  I must have walked at least two hundred yards when my candle blinked out. And I had no lucifer, had not thought to take a few of Poe’s. I stood there in the sudden darkness, breathless, tasting my own fear, one hand gripping the pry bar. What now? I had no idea how much farther this tunnel stretched, nor what might lie at the end of it. Furthermore I began to think it a mistake to have abandoned Poe and Buck at the mansion. Neither knew the whereabouts of the other. Poe was no doubt cursing my heedlessness, just as I had begun to do.

  Good sense dictated that I retrace my steps. And it is amazing how persistent good sense can be when mixed with a hearty helping of fear. I was afraid to go on, afraid to keep creeping forward into blackness.

  The return trip was made at a slower pace, one hand riding along the wall. I moved with the hesitancy of a blind man. Every time I knocked loose a stone or clod of dirt, the sudden soft clattering froze me in my tracks. Fortunately I had left the doorway to the cellar standing open, and after several long minutes was able to detect a feeble glow, toward which I flew like a crippled moth to a flame.

  Then, in the basement, I was faced with another choice: To return to the master bedroom via the secret passageway, or to take the more attractive path, up the cellar steps and into the mansion’s kitchen. I was halfway up the cellar steps when a mumbling of voices reached me—those of Mrs. Dalrymple and Mr. Tevis!

  I had to warn Poe. Perhaps he already knew, but I could not be sure of that. Back to the secret stairway, again into darkness. Creeping quickly upward, keenly aware of every creak of wood as I ascended.

  At the top of the stairs, another decision: Into the master bedroom, or to the secret chamber where last I had seen Poe headed? I chose the latter. I had progressed no more than three paces, however, before I sensed that I was not alone.

  “Poe?” I whispered, pry bar at the ready, my body poised in a half crouch.

  “Shhh,” he answered, and I relaxed my fists.

  He came closer. Put a hand on my shoulder and leaned toward me, as if to whisper in my ear. Then put a hand to the back of my head, and with the other hand pressed a cloth to my nose and mouth, an action that caused me to gasp and jerk away, but too late, for one breath had filled my lungs with an astringent scent and I felt the darkness shifting out from under me, felt it swirling up from the floor like an eddy sucking me in, the pry bar slipping from my hand to land with a thud, then nothing more.

  34

  VOICES IN the distance, coming closer. Eyelids heavy, struggling to lift. I tried to raise a hand to my face but my arm, no matter how I struggled, would not rise. My stomach felt odd, my throat t
ight. The space around me rocked back and forth and I swallowed hard to suppress the seasickness.

  The voices came much closer now. Brunrichter. Poe. One of them mentioned something about “our brotherhood.” Another, or perhaps the same one, spoke of “my bitter disappointment.”

  I forced my eyelids open by a slit. But light, too much light. I closed my eyes again and listened. There was a hissing in my ears.

  “ … not the man I had thought you to be,” said Brunrichter. “not by half.” Poe answered something but I could not follow it. I drifted away.

  Minutes later—maybe only seconds—my consciousness swung back toward the voices. They seemed clearer now, and angry.

  Poe said, “The boy suspected. But I was seduced by your flattery.”

  “Your greatest weakness!” Brunrichter cried, shrill, on the verge of hysteria. His voice was a screech in my ears, jarring me awake. I sat motionless.

  “You pretend to be a man of logic,” he continued. “And you can be—more’s the pity! But then that nonsense of yours. The Particle Divine! You call that logic, Edgar? It is feebleness of thought. You succumbed to your despair.”

  “And you,” said Poe, his voice calmer, softly drawling, “you have succumbed to madness.”

  “You think this madness?”

  “How could I gaze upon this room and think otherwise?”

  Brunrichter sniffed at this, clicked his tongue. I heard him moving about, pacing. Again I opened my eyes. Again the brightness of the room assailed me so that I would have squeezed my eyes shut tight had I not glimpsed in the glare something too horrific to turn from, there within an arm’s reach on the very table at which I sat, a long refectory table in a long narrow room bathed in the light from a half-dozen hissing gas lights. A single oil lamp burned at the far end of the table. Arranged down the center of the table, each in its own separate bell jar, each looking eerily alive in amber liquid, seven severed heads with eyes wide open, mouths formed into smiles, long hair softly floating, as the hair of seven mermaids might.

  They did not seem real to me. They could not be real. But the shock of seeing them sent a terrible heat racing through me so that I burned from top to bottom. The sickness bubbled up in me again and I moved just slightly, lifted a hand to lay upon my stomach. Though a heaviness remained I could move my limbs now, saw that I was unrestrained, and for just an instant I thought of leaping to my feet, but then I saw through one of the jars the dark shape behind it, and lifted my gaze higher. Tevis stood against the wall, watching me. His eyes were empty. His face was stone. In his right hand, laid flat against his chest, a pistol.

  “I offered you the opportunity to be whole,” Brunrichter was saying, his back to me, head thrown back, hand rubbing his neck. “The opportunity to make both of us whole. You as the brilliant theorizer, the creator of possibilities—”

  “Fictions!” said Poe. He was seated farther down the table, turned toward Brunrichter. “Tales I composed for money alone. That is all they meant to me.”

  “Because they were meant for me!” said Brunrichter. “One half of the mind creates; the other half applies!”

  “What have you applied, Alfred? These girls are not alive.”

  “There will always be failures. Failures are the path to success.”

  “You murdered them for no reason.”

  Brunrichter spun to face him. “Science!” Brunrichter screamed, the spittle flying from his mouth. “In the name of science! How can you not understand?”

  “Because I am not you. And I, yes, yes, I too have suffered my madnesses, but none like yours. Like this. This is depravity.”

  A few moments passed, and a smile came to Brunrichter’s face. He closed his eyes and continued to smile. Then he looked again at Poe. “With that, dear Edgar, you have selected your fate.”

  The sentence hung there in the air, a guillotine’s blade about to fall. But before it could, a thunderclap. I thought at first that Tevis had fired his pistol, but no, he was as surprised as the rest of us and had leapt away from the wall, his face now white with fear.

  Another explosion. The entire room rattled. One of the white globes on the gaslights fell to the floor and shattered. The liquid in the bell jars rippled, hair swayed like kelp.

  A third explosion, and with it the wall on the other side of the table cracked, a jagged rent in the wood. Tevis quickly moved to my side of the table, stood so that he could keep his pistol trained on me and his eye on the crack in the wall. But Brunrichter rushed to the wall even as the thunder continued and put his eye to a small round lens and peered out into the library. There he must have seen what I could only picture in my mind, Buck Kemmer wielding his ax, turning the wall to splinters.

  With the next blow the crack in the wall tripled in width, wide enough that I could now see through to the other side. Brunrichter scurried into a far corner and for the first time looked my way. “You’ve come awake,” he said. “Good. Just in time.” With a jerk of his hand he signaled to Tevis, who reached into the pocket of his church coat and withdrew a second pistol, which he tossed to the doctor. Both men took aim on Buck.

  Another blow of Buck’s ax. The wall stood cleaved, the opening nearly a foot wide now. “They’ve got pistols!” I screamed. “Go for the police!”

  Brunrichter’s face darkened, and as his hand swung toward me I dove from my chair, sidelong under the table. His shot shattered two of the bell jars, sent a shower of glass and formaldehyde over my head. Poe jerked backward in his chair, knocking it over, twisting as he fell to land on his hands and knees. Tevis slid along the wall to stand with his back to the only exit, putting Poe and me and Brunrichter between himself and Buck’s ax.

  And Buck, instead of heeding my advice, doubled his efforts. Having seen that the secret room was elevated, its floor perhaps four feet above the library’s floor, he had shoved the divan closer to the wall and stood atop it, legs spread wide for balance as he once again attacked the wall. Brunrichter gripped his empty pistol by the barrel now, held it like a bludgeon, and pressed himself into the far corner. His eyes darted from Poe to Tevis to Buck. I came out from under the table on the other side, Buck’s side, and inched my way toward Tevis. Now he did not know who to aim at, me or Buck. His pistol jerked from side to side.

  Three more blows of the ax, five seconds at the most, and Buck was finished with the wall. With his left hand he seized the edge of broken board, raised a foot to the secret room’s floor, and heaved himself up, coming in sideways. He was only halfway through the opening, the ax still dangling on the library side, when he saw the table and the five remaining jars. It was too much for him. He stopped. He squeezed shut his eyes.

  Tevis fired.

  Buck fell back into the library, crashing down on the divan. Brunrichter began to laugh, a silly, girlish giggle. But his happiness was short-lived. For with a roar Buck came diving back into the room with us, in as far as his waist and then dragging himself up, bellowing bull-like as he wrestled his bulk inside, up onto his knees and jerking the ax in behind him, the right half of his shirt already dark with blood. I went to him and gripped an arm, meaning to help him to his feet, but he shook me off, did not recognize me in his rage, but moved in on Brunrichter, made his way down the length of the table as broken glass crunched underfoot.

  Tevis, his pistol useless, fled through the secret door. Brunrichter moved to do the same but Poe stood up and blocked his retreat. To Poe he said, his eyes on Buck, “You’ve got to stop this!” He put out his hands as if to seize Poe by the lapels, to embrace him, but Poe stepped back, one hand raised.

  Poe said to Buck, “He’s not the one who killed your Susan.”

  Buck stopped. He blinked. Waved a hand at the table. “He’s the one done this, ain’t he?”

  “But not Susan.”

  Buck hesitated for a moment, then shook his head just once and came around the table. Brunrichter dropped to his knees, clutched at Poe’s trousers, whimpered for salvation. I heard little that he said, and ca
red of it even less, but stood there enjoying the roar of rage inside my head. The smell of blood already filled the room but it was not enough for me, I was eager for more.

  And Poe, I think, did what he could to stay Buck’s ax. I see him protesting, his hands shielding the doctor’s head. I remember it as a dream, all bathed in red.

  In the end Buck seized Brunrichter by the throat and jerked him to his feet, thrust him hard against the wall and held him there, Buck’s huge hand clamped around the doctor’s neck while the ax rose in his right hand, level with the doctor’s head. Then, with a snap of Buck’s wrist, the ax came forward, and the blade cleaved the wall, not two inches from Brunrichter’s ear.

  The doctor was unconscious on his feet, I think, but no matter. Buck released the ax handle, left it stuck in the wall, and drove his fist into Brunrichter’s face. I heard bones shatter, and a moan escaped my lips, and I was only a little embarrassed by the satisfaction I felt.

  Now Buck turned to Poe. He nodded toward the open doorway. “It was him then?”

  We knew by his tone what he intended to do. “The police will be notified,” said Poe. “They will have him by nightfall. As for you—,” and he put a hand on Buck’s arm, a gesture not of remonstrance but something else, of compassion, affection, of love.

  Buck looked down at Poe’s hand. Smiled. Patted it twice with the same hand that had laid Brunrichter out. Then Buck turned away. He seized the unconscious doctor by his shirt front, hauled him up and tossed him over a shoulder. With a blood-soaked hand he wrenched the ax from the wall, then pushed past Poe as if he were not there and strode out into the corridor.

  Poe turned to me. “We’ve got to stop him.”

  “We can try,” I said. I grabbed the oil lamp off the table and followed Poe out the door.

  WE TRACKED Buck without difficulty along the corridor and into the cellar and its tunnel, marked as they were now by the trail of blood, which shone oily black in the lamplight. There seemed a great deal of blood, and I voiced my concern that Buck might collapse deep inside the tunnel, leaving Poe and me to somehow haul him out and to the hospital.