by Tanith Lee
I said again I was very sorry, as I was, and gave him something for his trouble, at which he looked as if it were the Thirty Pieces of Silver themselves.
I was glad to get out of the station after this.
My intention had not been to walk. It was too sultry, and here for sure there was a dull storminess to the air that already made my head ache. The station further up the line lay five miles beyond the town, but in an outpost where a cab might be accosted. Here, however, I had been promised my aunt’s carriage, which now, going out on to the path, I did not find. This I could have understood more readily if the train had been early, or on time.
I half turned back to ask the station-master if a carriage might be procured from the local inn, but then thought better of it. The walk to the town would not take so long, providing I struck off at once for Salter’s Lane, and followed that to Steepleford.
There I idled then, on the gravel, under the impoverished shade of some spindly, desiccated sycamores, as if a decision must still be made. I was reluctant to go on. But go on I must, and would.
Until this moment I had, I think, almost entirely suppressed or driven away my utter unease at the prospect of the Lane where witches once had leaped in their revels, and where lay the house of a murderer, and his wife who, as I had seen and still credited, haunted its window. Now my fears rushed in like the sea tearing through one small crack in a dam, and carrying all before it.
I broke out into a sweat which even the leaden heat had not occasioned, for it was cold, and my heart thudded in my breast.
Come, I thought, in heaven’s name, you are not a baby. What is there to be afraid of? If the wretched nook effects you so, do what the others do, and look away from it.
What finally galvanized me was a dawning grasp of what the absence of the carriage might mean. In the past, when it was promised, it had been reliable. If my aunt had forgotten to order it forth, or her coachman not brought it, then something must have occurred to interrupt the mission. And all at once I was vastly unsettled as to what.
Then I did set off, striding the path between the fields, towards the woodland which lay, like a smoky cloud, upon the nearest horizon.
As I went, I must have noticed the state of those fields. They were bleached and barren-looking, the grain in parts fallen, and where upright, then not usual in its colour, and in areas seeming burnt. At the time I suspected a fire had taken place, or infestation of some sort. My mind was not truly on the fields, or did not want to be.
But then I reached the edges of the woods. And with the best will in the world, I could no longer delude myself very much.
Only after the most serious of gales would so many great trees have fallen. Looking in, at what had been the greenest of green shades, I now beheld bald, wide avenues, all railwayed with these broken pillars, which had tumbled in every direction, taking in every case more than one or two fellows with them. Besides these fallen giants, the standing wood was sickly. There could be no mistaking it. A yellowish tinge was on each leaf, or worse, a blackened scorching, as if some acid had been thrown over and among them all. The canopy besides showed great holes.
I advanced like some soldier into enemy territory, where any lethal hazard or trap may be encountered. No sooner was I in, however, than again I paused. Upon the raddled ground, bare of anything but for the most hardy weeds and brackens (and these burnt and brown), I had begun to see strange heaps and drifts of a dark dust. I knew at once what these were, but going over to one of the fallen trees, I tapped it, not very hard, with a strong-looking stick I had found on the outer path, and picked up thoughtlessly, as one sometimes does on a walk. No sooner did the stick make contact than the bole of the prone trunk, for about five feet either side the light blow, gave way in a shower of what appeared to be the finest black sugar. The sturdy-looking stick also snapped in half, brittle as charcoal. And the sugar-like substance sprayed out also from this. I dropped the stick then. As it hit the ground, it shattered into some twenty further fragments. The dust — the dust was all that persisted of trees which, last summer, had seemed to touch the sky.
But I must go on through this wreckage of a poisoned wood. I followed the carriage-ride doggedly, which normally at this time of year would have been rather overgrown. Surely I had seen it so myself — with sprinklings of woodland flowers everywhere the sun could penetrate, thick moss and large lacy ferns where it did not. There was no hint of that now. Not even the toadstools and other funguses, that colonize any woodland, good or bad, had ventured in. Nor was anything else to be come on. No beasts or birds ran or fluttered or fluted through the trees, or played about the tracks. Silence ruled the woods. Absence ruled them. And here was I, forging on perforce, like the last man quick upon a dying earth. And my feelings of horror and dejection increased with every step I took.
By the time I got out into Salter’s Lane, I may say I was prepared for anything. Had I not been, the quantity of felled trees which marked the exit point would have alerted me, and the expanses of the deadly dust, which resembled here nothing so much as the encroachment of a desert.
Even prepared, yet I halted where I stood. I looked down the Lane, and knew it for an avenue accursed. It was — and I do not exaggerate — like some landscape of the damned.
Nothing stood in it, its length was paved by horizontal trees, and between, the dust had formed mounds which had partly solidified, in a friable, hopeless manner, perhaps from the direct action of weather. Where hedges had been, there were sometimes left some bare black twigs and poles. I did not want to enter the Lane; I did not want to travel over it.
I had no choice, unless I turned back and retrod my path, then going on to Joiner’s Crossing, which would now add almost an hour to my hurrying journey.
So, I went on. I walked into the Lane and advanced, having every yard or so to get over the fallen trees, most of which gave way under my feet, meaning I must scramble and jump to save myself also from a fall. The mounds of dust were much the same; I sank in them as in the dunes of some hellish beach, or else the humps of powdery ‘soil’ they had formed crumbled, and I unsafely slithered.
All this was very exhausting, and addedly foul from the dust which was constantly clouding up, as if purposely to stifle me.
Above, the sky was no longer blue. It had a tarnished sheen to it, like unpolished metal. True clouds were hung out on it, grimy-looking and peculiar in shape, like torn banners, each a mile across.
Of course, I knew I must come to the house. I knew I must pass it. I had vowed I would not give it one glance. The perils and obstacles of the Lane would assist me, surely, in that, since I needed all my attention for the road.
However, I reached the house of Josebaar Hawkins, and did not keep to my vow.
The holly tree was gone. There was no trace of it, it had become one with the dusts. The wall too had come down It lay scattered all over the Lane, the bricks and bits of stonework disintegrating, like everything else. Behind the wall stretched a vast piece of ground that was like a bare, swept floor. It had nothing at all growing upon it, and even the dust had blown or died away. It was a nothingness, in colour greyish. And upon this table of death there rose — the house. Beside it stood the little ornamental building I had spied on my last excursion here. This I now saw, with an unnerving pang, had been a small mausoleum, no doubt the supposed resting-place of Hawkins’s wife. Now it comprised a part of a roof upon a couple of columns, and within, too, was nothing. Of the toppled oak which had leant there, naturally there was no sign.
Of everything which had been there, of nature or contrivance, that house alone remained, but not intact. Its roof had come away in broad segments; one saw the gaping joists and beams, which were in turn disbanding. Both chimneys were down, crashed inwards. On the lower floors was not a window that held its antique glass, or its boxed decorations. The creepers had slipped from it; and after them the bricks had tried, and still tried to come out. Yet the building, what there was of it, jutted upright. And in that s
pot, this made it a thing of unbelievable terror. Ruined and dislodged and every moment giving more, nevertheless it had so far stayed, where nothing else had been enabled.
All this while I had not raised my eyes beyond the lower floors — or where I had raised them, I had selected their progress with much care. But in the end, I knew I would have to do it, would have to look full on at the upper window under the roof.
I had been in Rome, I had been in Siena and Venice. Among the hills and waters, among the bronzes, had I not somehow understood that she stood here, on and on, stood here looking out, eating with her eyes first the bricks and mortar, then the pins that sealed her up, patient as only a hopeless thing can be, taking a century over it; next eating out the glass, and next, what lay beyond the glass: the trees, the air, the Lane, the countryside.
They must have known, the people of Steepleford town, in 1788, when they passed by on the Lane, hearing her weeping and shrieking in agony and fear, all those endless days and nights. They must have known what he had done to her. What then did they do, but cross themselves, or perhaps use some older, less acceptable mark. But they knew, they knew.
She had loved too well, that was her sole crime. She had seen too much in mankind that was beautiful and good, and for sure too much in him, in Josebaar Hawkins, and for this they had condemned her and killed her. How she must then have hated them. How she must have looked, fixing despairingly her mad eyes upon the impenetrable dark. And if she had not survived her death, something that came of her, and of her hatred, and of those eyes — and which learned too, new skills whereby to use those eyes — that did survive, and lived still, and saw and looked — and fed. And it was there, there in that window, drawing up the whole world in its slow and bottomless net.
“Oh, God, Amber Maria, poor lost pitiable hideous residue —”
My eyes were on her window, her death’s window. My eyes were stuck there and now could not pull away. I felt my heart turn to water inside me and the occluded atmosphere blackened over.
I did not quite lose my senses. Instead I found I leaned on my hands, kneeling in the desert of dust among the slaughter of the trees.
To myself I said, But what did I see this time?
For I had not seen a single thing. The window — her window — was empty of everything. Of creeper and of bricks, pins and glass. Of light and shadow, and of any shape. As with the rest, nothing was there. And yet … the nothing which was in that window was not empty. No. She was there in it, there in the core of it, as things hide in darkness. Or, her eyes were there, those pits of seeing, her looking was there, her looking looked out. It had looked even into me, and through me, and away, to have all else.
Presently I got up, and as before I ran.
* * * *
The town — I wondered after why the station-master had not warned me. I wondered too why the newspapers and journals in London had not carried some mention of it, why no sensational word seemed to have escaped from it. Perhaps there had been some news which was disbelieved — or believed too well and suppressed. Besides, events had raced to their final act as swiftly as a wave.
I have read of times of siege and plague in Mediaeval Germany, Italy, France, and in certain of those occult little towns, crouched at the foot of deep valleys, hung like baskets from the sides of cliffs, where dim and winding alleys make such images still but too conjurable. But Steepleford was a slow, flat, gentle settlement, prosperous and mild, where the horse, casting its shoe, caused a stir, and they had longed for a foreign theatrical gentleman to liven them up.
Getting near the outskirts, I saw a cloud hung over the fields and town. It was a wreath of smoke. The dead gardens along the approach I had scarcely noticed, nor the untended houses, which seemed to have been afflicted too by a kind of partial hurricane, ripping the tiles from roofs and setting askew anything that had been in the slightest vulnerable. There was a dearth of people brisk at their trade or gossip. instead, there hung there a presence of incredible raw heat and turgid staleness. I have never smelled such air, even in the sinks of greater Europe.
I came into Market Gate Street before I properly knew it, and there, as in some canvas by Hieronymus Bosch, I saw what I took at once for plague fires burning in arches and at the corners of houses, reeking of sulphur and other purgatives.
The fumes by now were thick nearly as a London fog; and in them, as I moved on, persons came and went unknown, their heads down and swathed in scarves, none looking at another. They were creatures from the self-same painting, at large between torments.
Then came the River Styx, for the street was awash with a black, stinking body of fluid. I had splashed into it before I could prevent myself, but in any case, there was no other way across.
Up towards my aunt’s part of the town, a pony and trap leapt rattling by, the unhappy animal tossing its head, and red-eyed as the horses of Pluto from the smoke. A man hailed me and pulled the horse in. Amazed to be recognized in the Inferno, I stopped. There was my aunt’s doctor, peering down.
“Thank God you’ve arrived, young man. We sent off a wire this very morning.”
My heart clutched at me. “It must have missed me by an inch. Is she so bad, then?”
“I fear she is, now. It’s the same all over the town. The deuce knows what the illness is. We have three specialists down from London, and one from the Low Countries, and they have drawn a blank on it. My own sister, who has never taken sick in her life — well. But besides all this business of burst pipes and subsiding walls across the entire town — But I won’t trouble you with that, either.” The pony shook its head violently. The doctor raised his voice to curse. “Be damned to these confounded fires! What do the fools think they’re doing? Have they heard nothing of modern hygiene, our only reliable ally against disease — to fill up the air with such muck? Superstition, ignorance — Make haste to get on.” And with this baleful cry, either to me or the pony, I was unsure, the doctor whipped the beast on, and like King Death himself flung off into the smother.
But I ran again, and so reached my aunt’s house. And ten minutes later I was in her bedroom, by the side of her bed, but she, although living yet, did not see or hear me.
When I was a small boy, and my youthful mother died suddenly and without warning, this aunt of mine, then an elegant and pretty fashion-plate of an Alice, herself not much above thirty-five, sheathed in softest clothes and scented by vanilla, took me in her arms and let me sob out my soul. And now again I leaned by her, and I wept. But she never knew it, now. And oh, any pity I had felt for that other, for that thing once known as Amber Maria Hawkins, you can be sure I had given it up.
* * * *
So now I must come to the strangest part of my abnormal tale. To a conclusion, indeed, which any writer of fiction would be ashamed to set before his audience, having brought them thus far, and by such a fearful road. Therefore, prior to the last scenes of the drama, I will say this: One piece evidently missing from my narrative has since been supplied, and only the discovery of that unique absentee has brought me, at this time, and so many years after these occurrences took place, to write them down at all.
My aunt, where she lay on the bed, did not stir. Only the faintest movement demonstrated that she breathed at all. I looked ardently for this proof, and once or twice it seemed to me it faltered, and then I too held my breath. But always the slight rise and fall of her breast resumed. At least she was not in pain or distress. That was all, at this time, I might be thankful for.
Near midnight the doctor called again. He was worn out, as I could see, by his conscientious tours up and down the stricken town, through the acrid fumes of the fires, the stenchful spilled waters, and the furnace heat, which even nightfall had not abated. When he was done with his examination, a frighteningly swift one, I had them bring him some brandy, and he thanked me, then solemnly announced that he ‘did not think it would be long.’
“Is there nothing can be done?” I asked like a child.
He shook h
is head. He was doubtless exhausted too by this question, which must have been asked of him everywhere that night, by tearful wives and white-faced husbands, by daughters, by fathers, by one third of the folk of Steepleford, who in that hour had been made the people of Egypt, when the Angel of Death did not pass over them, but took from them, across all the boundaries of age and condition, their first-born.
After the doctor had gone, I sat down again, and drank some of the wine which had been brought me on an untouched dinner tray. Then I think I must have slipped into a doze.
I was wakened, as were some countless others, by the most fearsome noise I have ever heard.
Starting up I gave a cry, and as I did so, heard below and above me in the house, and everywhere about, many other throats exercised in similar startled exclamation. The sound I can only describe as being like an exact representation of that phrase: the Crack of Doom. It was as if a thunderbolt had been hurled from heaven and struck the town, cracking it open with one awful brazen clang.
Finding myself unharmed, and the house still entire about me, I turned in fear to the bed. But a glance at my aunt showed her still insensible. Going to the window then I stared out, but the street was thick in smoke and darkness, its few lamps half blind. Worse for being unseen, vague noises of fright and panic had risen all around, and I made out windows lighting up here and there like red eyes.
Then a man came running by. I opened the casement and called down to him. “What was that sound? Do you know?”
But he only raised to me a face paled by terror, and flew on.
I truly believed some apocalyptic conclusion was about to rush upon us all. The most primal urge came on me, and going to her, I meant to lift up my poor aunt in my arms, so we might at least perish together. But as I reached the bedside, I stopped dead once more. For I saw her eyes were open and looking at me lucidly. And where the lamp shone on her face, her colour had come back, not feverish but soft, even attractive.