by Thomas Tryon
“Why?”
“In Russia there was no place for us to hear music, except Madame sometimes playing her piano, but she always played French songs, never nothing like Tchaikovsky. And in Russia when I was a girl there was no music for the poor people except what we made for ourselves. Ach, how I love the music!”
“Then the Russians should be happier there today.”
“Why is that?”
“Because now they have music for the poor people.”
“For the poor people, yas. But I’m not sure they’re any happier.” And from the sadness in her voice he could tell how much she missed the old Russia.
“You miss the sunflowers,” he said, reaching to touch her hand across the space between them. “But we have sunflowers too, not too many, but some,” he said, as though apologizing for the paucity of flowers. “And butterflies. You love butterflies.”
“Here all the sunflowers have dust on their faces,” she said, then fell silent and thought for a time. “Well,” she said at last, “I shall have to select some flowers for the church service, no? Some larkspur, I think, and coreopsis; perhaps some baby’s breath, if it looks to be good.”
Larkspur. Coreopsis. He remembered misty mornings with the sun a white disk behind the mist when they would waken her early and lead her into the still-wet meadow where she would pick buttercups and daisies and wild roses; select others from the flower beds: pansies with faces like oriental lions, violas, petunias; making them into floral processions with petal faces, snapdragon horses drawing carriages of Queen Anne’s lace.
“Or perhaps some iris,” she thought aloud, “an arrangement either side of the pulpit.”
“No—one big bowl, and put it on the table under her.”
Her. Ada’s smile widened. “Her” was the figure in one of the stained glass windows, the Angel of the Annunciation, arriving with the glad tidings, a beautiful piece of work showing her sweeping to earth on giant luminous wings, one hand clasping a lily. It was Niles who had made up a name for her, “The Angel of the Brighter Day,” a kind and loving pretend creature whom he fancied as a guardian spirit.
Ada sat up. “What’s that you say? Queen Anne’s lace?”
He had said nothing; but, “Sure. There’s a ton of it in the meadow. I’ll pick you some tomorrow.” She had read his mind, even as Holland had. The bond between them was undeniable. It was as if an invisible cord ran from his head to hers, and they could telephone to each other, the one sensing the other’s thoughts. He always knew before she spoke what she was going to ask him to do: a book from the library, her needlework, a Dixie cup of ice cream, feed oatmeal to her cat . . . except of course now there was no need for oatmeal; the cat was dead.
“And what else did you see at the fair?” Ada asked.
He thought a moment, then described for her the baby in the bottle.
“Ach, such things should not be exhibited for children. It shall make nightmares for you.”
“No it won’t,” he assured her.
“But it made Holland mad, and he hit the bottle with his hand and ran away.”
“But he was mad anyway.”
“Yas? What does he have to be mad at?”
“Old Lady Rowe.”
She shot him a glance.
“I mean Mrs. Rowe.” He was hunched forward, eyes on the blinking swarm of fireflies. “Dot-dit dit-dit dit-dot-dit-dit dit dit-dit-dit.”
“What’s that?”
“Morse code. From the fireflies. Better than our crystal set.” His look was hopeful. “Can I do it now?”
“What?”
“The game.”
Ach, the game. Tonight she felt weary. Usually, where the family was concerned, nothing was an intrusion on her time, her energies. Fix this, please? Do that, would you? Be this. Play that. Play a game, let’s? The game, their game, the three of them. Here Torrie was an outsider. Alas, she had never been quick to see it; called it “casting the spell,” made jokes about gypsies, and Russian superstitions. But the twins were another story. They seemed able to divine the thing, to seize the whole concept of it without difficulty. Yes, Holland’s mind occasionally wandered, his concentration obscured by some flibberty-gibbet prank or nonsense that amused him more; but Niles, now—Niles was different. With him it seemed both innate and suitable. Ah, but he was quick! Looking and looking and looking. Then feeling. Then knowing. And the knowing came as though a light had quite suddenly come on.
Yes, interesting enough, this game, the effects harmless; salutary even. And such fun.
But Niles, she told herself, needed watching; there was a danger lurking. Sometimes it seemed he would actually be hypnotized. And who in the family could ever forget that harrowing experience with the rooster? Chanticleer, they called the bird; wretched creature . . . that damn rooster.
Ever since that baffling Chanticleer occurrence, she had watched closely, cautiously, alert for signs of similar remarkable happenings. But she had witnessed none; only the growing perception of an unusual mind which, in another, less aware, one like Holland’s, might be nothing more than the extreme vividness of imagination. But in Niles, nurtured, what might it produce? A genius? A seer? A prophet? Grown a man, what could he not do in the world? It was for this she said her prayers each night.
Was it wrong? Should it be encouraged? No—leave it. Leave it behind; it is a child’s game merely and children must grow up. Mustn’t they? Must they? No—wait, not yet. How she adored indulging Niles, delighting in his whims and fancies, those cat-and-mouse insistences, his alluring make-believe; loved his guileless face, eyes wonder-widened as his mind worked. And in time surely he would outgrow it—the way children outgrow Santa Claus. They must have their dreams, that is what being children is all about, isn’t it? Childhood was but a few brief summers; winter a whole, cold, lifetime long. No—not yet, not yet.
“Can we?” he coaxed.
How’s that? Oh—the game. But the hour was getting late. “It’s bedtime, child,” she told him. Aw, he said, Holland was still up. Pajalsta, pajalsta, just once? And his “please” was so earnest, his smile so disarming, she had not the heart to deny him. With a deep breath, she nodded her head at the cluster of fireflies. “Very well, look there. Tell me what those are like. What do they feel like?” Turning the gold band on her finger, she waited while he concentrated.
Fireflies. Lightning bugs. What are they like? Tiny pulses, bright seeds sown in the blackness. They look so. But what do they feel like? Cold green stars, light years away, their glow produced by layers of specialized cells. Miniature neon dots. No—neon is cold. Hot, rather. Flies of fire, hot sparks burning in the night wind. Yes, that was it, now he was getting closer to it. Fire! In the crotches of elm twigs cobwebs catching moon flames, laddered patterns as if dusted with golden pollen, burning in the gauzy night. There! And there! Luminous pinpoints igniting, now leaping to set the night ablaze, with shadows dancing while ashes swirl upward like black snow, sucked into the green fire, spiraling death into the night sky . . . death . . . and horror . . .
He was trembling; goosebumps raised on end the yellow fuzz along his arms. He rubbed himself, laughing. “Cripes, that’s some crow that walked across my grave.” He rose from the step. “Well, it’s almost time for First Nighter. Want to listen? No? Okay. Shall I put your sewing in your room for you?”
She nodded without speaking and he carefully removed her work from her lap to put it in the basket. After he had kissed her, and the screen door clacked at his back as he carried the basket and Torrie’s doll-lamp inside, she remained a little longer in her chair, rocking gently, and feeling the warm night grow cold around her, while terror stole across her mind, so quietly, so stealthily, so imperceptibly that, absently fingering her swollen knuckles, she was taken quite unawares.
Niles went up to Torrie and Rider’s room and presented his sister with the doll-lamp, then returned to the upper hall where he had left Ada’s sewing basket sitting by the newel post. He went along the gallery and
opened her door. The room had a clean, spare look. Other than a chest of drawers, a straight-backed chair beside a lamp, an iron bedstead painted white like the one she’d slept on in Russia, on the floor a rug she’d hooked herself, in blue and white, the room was quite bare. On one wall hung a single small icon in a gold frame. You could tell a lot about Ada by looking at her room, Niles decided, setting her work basket by the chair. On the bureau was a large picture book, old engravings from the Bible and other world literature, a book whose pages he and Holland knew by heart now. The Illustrated Doré. He lifted the cover and looked at the spidery handwriting inside. Ada Katerina Vedrenya. Baltimore, Maryland 1894. A faint aroma arose from the pages: she used it for pressing flowers. He dropped the cover and, softly closing the door behind him, went down the hall and hurried into the back wing to his own room. He didn’t want to miss the beginning of First Nighter.
The earphones to the crystal set were lying on Holland’s bed. He put them on, lay down on the cover, tuned in the set, and listened. The play tonight wasn’t very good and he amused himself by watching the face which seemed to form itself out of the center of the waterstain on the ceiling overhead: two eyes, a nose, a mouth. A familiar face. But whose? Whose?
Cripes, what a lousy program. When it was over, he yawned, removed the earphones, and went to open a window to the south. Along the drive, the fir trees, green-black against the sky, appeared a pantheon of bearded gods—Wotan, Fafnir, Thor—their arms stretching, stirring and stretching toward him in the wind. Gold, gold was what they craved—Nibelung gold; Peregrine gold.
From time to time the sky was vividly dyed by fireworks whooshing away down at the green. The pump cast a sentinel shadow onto the drive near the well, bits of gravel glittering, washed white as the waxing hunchback moon climbed the sky. A whistle hooted; a line of smoke appeared beyond the dark treetops as a train wound along the spur of track below the highway. Too-oo-oot, as it passed the Rose Rock bottling works at Church Street—a lonely sound, yet, Niles thought, not as lonely as the rattle, the clatter, the clang of the Shadow Hills trolley. That was the loneliest sound in the world . . .
And as the hoot of the train died away to the north, here came the clang of the streetcar from the south, the Babylon Express, rattling up the track from Talcotts Ferry. You can set your watch by that trolley, Father used to say: it’s always five minutes late. Larger and larger it loomed, lights bright, though bereft of passengers, the solitary Mr. Conductor lost in thought—wife? home? dinner?—feet spread wide apart for balance as the car swung along the rails.
Ding-ding-ding.
There it goes, five minutes late for sure—Niles checks his watch—the Shadow Hills Express, on the way out to Babylon. End of the line. He listens to the bell—ding-ding-ding—as the trolley clatters by the house.
He longed to get on that old Shadow Hills Express and, sitting on one of the straw-covered seats, ride all the way out to Babylon, to the end of the line. Shadow Hills? Oh, it’s just a name, Winnie had said when he asked her about it. Just a . . . a place, that’s all. No, the hills weren’t really shadows. Yes, her folks lived out that way, and Jennie, her sister; her father worked servicing the trolleys at the car barn. But was it true, what Holland said? Babylon was a fabulous place, to hear him tell it. A metropolis—El Dorado, practically, with a huge palace, grand flights of stairs, gates of brass, towers, pennants flying from the peaked turrets. Winnie laughed and shook her head. Bunk. There wa’n’t nothin’ like that in Babylon. There was just that bleak old red place, brick, she said, with iron gates and steps leading up, terrible dump—more fort than palace.
Ding-ding-ding—away in the distance now . . .
But Niles wanted to see for himself. Sometimes, when that lonely feeling would come over him, when he would be longing for something—what, he didn’t quite know what—suddenly it would come to him that he was feeling homesick for Shadow Hills, a place he had never been to. Funny; how could you feel homesick for a place you had never seen? Babylon—end of the line. And Holland never did any more than shrug and sing his clever little rhyme: How many miles to Babylon?—Threescore miles and ten. Can I get there by candlelight?—Yes, and back again.
He had moved to the west window, where he could look out past the barn, the peregrine weathervane motionless in the moonlight, tall to the east, its amber eye seemingly fixed on the river. Thrusting against the water’s band of silvery light was the dead sycamore where, summers, you could swing from its trunk and leap into the stream, winters use it as shelter, with old tires burning near its base for warmth while you skated. With a blur Niles remembered it was there that Billy Talcott had drowned, under the ice. That had been over George Washington’s Birthday. Niles, bedded with the croup, had gotten up to go to the bathroom. Passing the window, he had looked down at the river. Poor Billy, with his limp, could only hobble around on the ice, but when it gave way under him, he was close enough to the bank so that Holland, poking up the fire, could have rescued him. But, instead, he ran—ran and left Billy thrashing, freezing in the icy water.
Niles turned to see Holland walk in, and go to throw himself down on his bed.
“Did you go to see the fireworks?” Niles asked.
“No.” He was staring up at the brown waterstain on the ceiling directly overhead.
“There’s a beauty!” Niles exclaimed as a rocket exploded in the distance. No answer. Holland was sulking again. Niles combed his mind for an agreeable subject to ease the tension.
“What’s so funny?” Holland wanted to know.
“I was just thinking.”
“Yeah?” He looked over.
“I was just thinking about the five-legged pig in the freak show. Remember Mr. La Fever?” He laughed again, the reason being Mr. La Fever, Arnie’s father, was not only three-legged, but was a scandal as well—but not because of the extra limb. Mr. La Fever, who worked in the Ringling Brothers sideshow, had some years ago caused a flurry of attention around town by getting a girl pregnant. Their rendezvous, he later confessed, was on the baggage platform of the freight depot across from Fenstermacher’s Rose Rock bottling works. The girl, a live-in maid brought up from the Girl’s Reformatory at Middlehaven, was brokenhearted when she was returned to confinement, and her tri-legged lover, already married, fled to the circus’s winter quarters at Sarasota. The baby was put out for adoption and Pequot Landing hadn’t stopped talking yet. Arnie got mad when you joked about his old man.
“Put that away somewhere,” Holland growled. Niles was sitting and, without thinking, rattling the Prince Albert tin. He considered the contents. Peregrine for Perry. The Thing. The Thing was gruesome; of course it was. He tried not to think about it, tried to put it out of his mind. It was all Holland’s doing. Holland had decreed it all. Yet Niles was the one who must keep the Secret . . .
Yep, he was getting a Look. “I told you not to carry it around.”
Chastened, Niles deliberated over a suitable hiding place.
“Where should I put it? In the compartment?”
Holland shook his head. The whole family knew about the secret compartments Father had built into the matching chests. Even Winnie knew. He took the tin from Niles and went to the wall next to the closet door where, hanging on hooks, was the Chautauqua desk, Ada’s present to the twins. There was a blackboard with cubbyholes, and wire coils that held chalk, and a wide scroll of colored chromographs which turned up and down, illustrating Bible stories. Other scrolls in the closet informed not only about nature and paleontology, but biology, astronomy, mythology, and other subjects. Removing one of the spindles, he secreted the tobacco tin behind the picture roll and reset the spindle in position.
Niles shook his head. “That’s no good. Mother found the Civil War dollar behind there, remember?”
Holland turned the scroll until Jesus Delivering the Sermon on the Mount came into view. “She doesn’t come in here any more,” he said coolly. Then, something exciting his attention at the window, he gasped and rushed to pu
t out the lamp between the two beds and hurried back to his place. “Niles!” he exclaimed, “look!”
“What?”
“C’mere. Look!”
Opposite, in the wing parallel to their own, was one lighted window, the shade drawn. A man’s shadow was crossing behind it—light, shadow, pause, light, shadow, pause. Another shadow appeared, smaller, big-bellied; an embrace followed.
“It’s Torrie and Rider,” Niles heard Holland breathe. A silence, then: “Come on—let’s go watch!”
“Holland!” Niles was shocked.
“Don’t worry, little brother, they won’t know.” Holland’s tone was suave and inviting. “Come on.”
Niles felt himself propelled out the door, guided along the front hall in the path of a flashlight beam, past the grandfather clock, into the north wing, then up a pair of steps behind a door, over the landing, down more steps and into the storeroom. Maniac shadows leaped about the walls; the trunks squatted like fat coffins, the dress dummy loomed, big-busted, narrow-waisted, pins in it glinting. Niles felt his hand brush a web spun across the wicker cradle; a spider, a black jewel, dropped to the floor and sidled behind the rocking horse. He turned, starting nervously at his own reflection in the mirrored door of the wardrobe. Beyond, through a crack in the far wall, a light showed. Creeping silently over the floor in the path of the flashlight, Niles listened to low voices on the other side of the partition. Through the crack, partly hidden by a chest of drawers, was Torrie and Rider’s bed, a four-poster, canopied with tasseled netting. On it Torrie lay, unclothed, a carelessly pulled-down sheet draped over her feet. On the bedside table, Niles’s doll-lamp shed warm light over the delicate contours of her face, her breasts, her swollen belly. Rider turned off the overhead light and stretched out naked beside her, cradling her in his arms. In the lamp-glow he nuzzled her ripe breasts with his mouth, one dark hand gently caressing her stomach, his fingers moving slowly over the mound of her belly.