Black Evening
« ^ »
So we all went out there. I can see you're apprehensive, as we all were, and so I'll tell you at the outset that you're right. The house was in the poorest section. It had been among the best homes in the twenties, I'd been told, but now its shutters had long ago fallen; its porch was listing; its paint was chipped and peeling, gray at dusk, although I could guess that it had once been brilliant white. Three stories: gables, chimneys, dormer windows, balconies. Nobody could afford to build so large a home these days, and no doubt it had required someone rich to build it then. A mansion in its dotage. Sad, I imagined the pride of those who had first owned it and their disappointment should they see what had happened to it. But they would all be dead now, so it didn't matter. All that mattered was the stench.
I say we all went out. I mean my deputy, the doctor, and myself. We stood beside the police car, staring at the dark, silent, decrepit mansion. We saw the neighbors on the porches of the other ill-kept, once-great houses, silhouetted by the dying sunset. Then we held our breath and started toward the picket gate, which fell off in my hand. We moved up toward the front steps. The sidewalk was weed-cracked, the yard overgrown. We felt the cool air, almost misty, as the sun dipped below the horizon; and in the dark, our flashlights glaring, we climbed the cracked, creaking steps that led to the porch. We had to work around some broken boards on the porch. We stared down at a pile of newspapers. Then we squinted through the stained glass window, dusty and opaque, the darkness in there absolute. At last, I twisted the grip that rang the bell. The tone was flat, without enthusiasm. No echo or reverberation followed.
No light came on. No weak footsteps shuffled near to let us in. I twisted at the bell again. We waited.
"Now what?" The deputy looked nervous.
"Give them time. They're old," I answered. "Or maybe they're not at home."
"Just one," the doctor told me.
"What?"
"There's only one. Her name is Agnes. She's eighty at least."
"Maybe she's sleeping."
"You don't think so. Otherwise we wouldn't be here."
I twisted the bell again. I hadn't lived in town for long. After too many years in the city, I'd brought my family to what I'd hoped was a better place, and as the new police chief, I was hardly eager to antagonize the townsfolk by disturbing an old woman.
All the same, the stench was horrible. It made my stomach rise, my nostrils widen with disgust. The neighbors' phone calls had been so persistent that I couldn't ignore them.
"All right, let's go in."
I tried the knob. The door was locked. I pushed, and the door came open with a sound as if the jamb had been cardboard. No sharp crack, instead a rip, a tear, so soft, so effortless. The wood was rotten at my feet.
"Is anybody here?" I called.
No answer.
So we looked at one another, and we stepped inside. The hall was dusty, the odor more intense.
We flashed our lights. The living room, or what I guess had once been called the parlor, was beyond an oval entrance to our right. The room was filled with stacks of newspapers, from the floor to above my head. There was a makeshift corridor that we could walk through, but the newspapers towered on each side.
"This could be it," I told the doctor. "Papers, wet and musty. If they moulded…"
"You don't think so."
We went through another oval doorway.
"Anybody home?"
I saw the grand piano, cobwebs glistening in my flashlight's glare. More newspapers towered around it.
"Hoarding. Some old folks…" The deputy's voice quavered. Abruptly he coughed, gagging from the stench.
"I guess we do it room by room," I told them.
So we went up to the attic, starting downward, trying for some order, some sane balance. Newspapers, 1929 and 1936, each room devoted to a decade, 1942 and 1958. We found a bedroom on the second floor, and it at least was normal, if by that is meant no clutter and no useless objects. But the bedroom was from the twenties, or so I guessed. I have no eye for furniture. The canopy above the bed, the stained glass fixtures, and the heavy hopsack covers on the chairs, these clearly were from another time.
The bed had not been slept in. We had tried the lights. They didn't work.
"She didn't pay her bill, I guess." The deputy coughed again.
The dust, the cobwebs, that pervasive cloying stench. We went with flashlights to the first floor, and the cellar is the place that you suspect you ought to check first but you always wait until last.
We stood inside the pantry on the first floor in the back, the stench even worse there. I strained to muster control as I pulled the door. The smell was like a veil that struck us, wafting up. We went down slowly, board by creaking board.
You know I'm a trained observer. I've been taught to stop emotion, just to take in what I see. But that's difficult, especially when you're staring by the aid of flashlights, and you see only one object at a time, the horror mounting until you don't think you can bear it.
First, the woman's headless body on the floor, the stench like old potatoes that have turned to liquid in their jackets. Something has seeped from her. The urge to vomit is uncontrollable.
Then, for no reason you can understand, you scan up with your flashlight, and you see her head jammed in the noose, the white hair dangling, flesh now viscous on her cheeks, her open eyes dissolving toward you.
But that isn't it yet, not the final detail, for once more without a reason you can understand, as if you know that it will be there, you aim your flashlight toward a corner, toward a tiny table meant for dolls and set for tea, where tied to a toy chair, slumped, is another body, small and lonely, a young girl. You know this from the long hair and the bow and dress; you wouldn't know it from the face which has been food for insects. And that isn't it yet, not the final detail, for the clothes she wears are not from our time, but rather from the old days, straw hat, button shoes and yellowed crinoline, a moth-eaten satin party dress, as if she wore a costume or had been compelled to act a part she didn't like, the bow around her neck so tight her blackened tongue is bulging out.
"My Christ," the deputy moans behind me, and the bile that spews up in my mouth is bitter, scalding.
***
"All right, help me understand this."
We are in my office downtown, its lights glaring painfully. Although the night outside is cold, filled with sudden autumn gusts, I have opened all the windows, turned the fan on, anything to clear the stench.
"She killed the child, then hanged herself, that much is obvious," I say. "But why? I'm new here. I don't understand this. What would make her do it?"
I hear the rattle of the fan.
The doctor clears his throat. "Agnes lived there since the house was new. She and her husband built it."
"But I thought that…"
"They had money then," the doctor goes on without pause. His voice is weak. "He was a banker. They were prosperous."
"The husband?"
"Andrew was his name. In 1928. The world was theirs. They had a child, a daughter who was three. She died that fall. Diphtheria. I know this from my father who was the doctor in charge of the case. He couldn't save the daughter, and he watched the parents ruined by their loss. The husband left one day. The wife became a recluse. It's so easy now in retrospect to understand. You see, from time to time there have been children missing, usually in autumn, just as now. That girl we found, for instance. All the people who've been looking for her. You'll soon have to notify her parents. I don't envy you. My guess is that as Agnes aged, as she became more lonely and reclusive, she went crazy. She tried to find a substitute for what she'd lost. She kidnapped children, but of course she couldn't let them live to tell what she'd done. She killed them but believed that they were still alive, her own child."
"The way children play make believe with dolls?" I ask.
"If that analogy helps you. This is sickness so bizarre it threatens s
anity to think about it. Where did she put the corpses of those other children? Maybe when they started rotting, she couldn't sustain her make-believe. Maybe this final time she understood what she'd become and hanged herself."
"It works," the deputy says, nauseated, his face still ashen. "It makes sense."
"That's the trouble," the doctor says. "A lunatic's always logical, but the logic's horribly twisted."
There were many things to do. I'd put off phoning for an ambulance. I'd wanted to understand before the scene became disturbed, a clue destroyed, but I knew I had to act now, make those calls, tell the parents. I reached for the phone, but it rang in anticipation.
"Yes?" I asked, and then I listened, and I realized how wrong we'd been.
I set down the phone and peered at them.
"It wasn't her. It wasn't Agnes."
"What?" The doctor and the deputy stared.
"It was Andrew," I told them as I rushed toward the door.
"He left in 1928," the doctor repeated.
"No, he never left."
They ran out with me toward the cruiser.
"He's still in there."
"But we searched the place," the deputy insisted.
"He was in there. We were just too dumb to see him."
We scrambled into the cruiser. I sped from the station's lot.
"But I don't understand," the doctor said.
I didn't have the will or time to argue. I skidded around corners, raced up side streets. At that once great, now dilapidated section of the town, I ran out, hurrying past the ruined gate, up the weed-choked sidewalk, past the porch holes, through the stained glass door.
"I know you're in here, Andrew! Come out now! Don't make me look for you!"
The house was silent, grotesque as I flashed my light and charged in toward the parlor.
"Dammit, Andrew! If you've harmed her, I swear I'll punish you, the way you punished all those children!"
In a frenzy, I yanked at the stacks of newspapers.
"Chief, you'd better get control," the deputy said.
But I kept pulling, yanking, and the one side of the room was no good. I swung toward the other.
"Help me!" I yelled to the deputy, the doctor.
And we found him, Andrew, in the music room, or rather in a room within a room, a room whose walls were stacks of newspapers. He was in there, almost eighty, brittle and yet strangely spry. He glared up at me, smelling old, like ancient newspapers, squirming to hide his secret, but I grabbed his shirt and yanked him to one side, and there she was, another young girl, dressed in clothing from the twenties, gagged and bound and staring, wide-eyed, fearful, for it had been Andrew who grabbed the children. He had never left. He'd only lost his mind. Agnes, to protect and preserve him, hid him. But each time he killed a child, her loyalty had weakened, until at last, faced with awful choices, she had hanged herself, unable to reveal him.
I'd guessed that he was there because that phone call had informed me of another missing child, a child who from fright was now white-haired, always would be, and if Agnes hadn't done it, who else but Andrew? Yes, that girl, an adult now, is white-haired, I can prove it, for that small child was my daughter, and she sometimes seems to know me when I visit her on weekends.
A final story about a house, "The Hidden Laughter" was published the same year as "Black Evening": 1981. Ever since I attended modern-poetry courses in college, I've been haunted by T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets and in particular the first section, "Burnt Norton," its eerie otherworldly tone, the sense it creates of falling through and out of time. When my family and I first arrived in Iowa City, we lived in a small, pleasant ranch house, which we eventually outgrew. But even after we moved to a larger house in a different section of town, we often drove back to the old neighborhood and paused to savor the memories associated with our six years in that house. It represented our post-college youth. We associated it with the excitement and difficulty of getting started in the world. I got to wondering if, under the right circumstances, a house could be loved enough that a person might develop a mystical bond with it, to the exclusion of everything else. The house, which I continue to remember fondly, is described in this story.
The Hidden Laughter
« ^ »
There's a line somewhere in an Eliot poem, "Burnt Norton" I think, about unheard music and leaves being full of children, hidden in excitement, laughing. I have sensed that music, almost seen those children, not in leaves it turns out, in a house, though, where I used to live, except that all this was so long ago that now I think of "I" as "he" and how he turned to see her walking toward him.
She was looking very puzzled. "Something's funny at the house we sold," she told him. "All the neighbors say there are children inside laughing."
What was odd, of course, was that he'd locked it when they'd moved out, and besides, there were few children in that neighborhood, all of them accounted for. "I think I'd better look," she said. She had a key, you see, until the new owners came to take possession, just in case some trouble happened in the meantime, and she loved that house, the one that she'd been married in, so she was going back to take a final look. He didn't think she ought to, but he couldn't talk her out of it. Because he was working on some bookshelves, he just told her that he'd wait to hear about the laughter, which he knew would be imaginary. So she left, and that's the last he ever saw of her.
This happened in the morning. He postponed his lunch and waited for her. Finally he ate. He figured she was visiting some friends in the old neighborhood, and after all, the kind of marriage that they had, they both were free and easy, so he didn't worry. Then the evening came, and it was time for supper. Still she didn't come, and now he did begin to worry. After he made a meal and fed his children, he began to phone, but no one at the old neighborhood had seen her. Not since lunch at least.
She'd checked the house, he was told, and as he had expected, there was nothing. Then she'd visited some friends, again as he'd expected. After lunch she'd gone back to the house, just to see it one last time, and people in the neighborhood had gone on with their business. But yes, wait a minute, yes, her car was still parked in the driveway down there, and she must be with some other friends. When he made more calls, however, he learned that no one else had seen her, and he worried even more. He thought that maybe she'd had some trouble with the car and left it. But she would have phoned him then. That much was certain. He got a sitter for the children and drove over.
The house was much the same as he'd left it. Oh, the grass was somewhat long, the shrubs in need of a little trimming, but except for that and dust on the outside windows, it looked as if they still lived there. As he stood at the curb and surveyed the place, he felt a yearning: for his youth, for the days when he and she were just beginning. Don't mistake. The place was not impressive. Oh, acceptable but nothing more. A single-story ranch house with a lush maple tree on the right, a stunted plum tree on the left, and in the middle an overhang that formed a porch. What they used to call low-income housing when a house was something that ambitious, saving people could afford. A lot of things had changed since then, more money and more complications. That moment as he stood there, watching, brought back fond memories of early days and innocence.
He walked up toward the house, and of course the door was locked. That was exactly like her. She had felt so close to what the house had meant to her that she would never have left it unsecured. He had a key as well, though, and he turned it, going in. There was an echo off the bare walls and the floor. The cabinets that they'd built, the hardwood floors that they'd varnished, these brought back a sequence of quick images, the two of them starting their marriage.
He waited, and he listened. "Honey?" But he really didn't think there'd be an answer. He walked through the living room to the kitchen, looking for some sign that she had been there. But the kitchen was the way it should be, and he continued to the stairs down to the basement. Maybe she had fallen. When he took a breath and opened the door to
look down, though, the concrete floor below was silent, and he almost didn't go down, but he knew he should be thorough. So he checked the basement, even looked behind the furnace and the washer and the dryer they had sold with the house. He glanced inside the crawlspace. Then he went upstairs and checked the closets, the two bedrooms, the small bathroom, but he didn't see a sign of her, and now he didn't know what else to do. He almost went back to the front door before he thought of the attic, and for reasons he didn't understand, he felt a chill.
At first he just dismissed it. Then he thought that she would have had no reason to go up there, and he almost left the house. But he'd been determined to be thorough, and he knew that failing to check the attic would soon nag him, so he walked back to the hallway, moving toward the trapdoor. When he stretched, he barely touched the ring, but then he had it, and he pulled, and the fold-out steps came down to reach the floor. He waited just a moment longer. There was something like the coo-coo-coo of pigeons up there, one on top the other, faint and soft and gentle, and it sounded just enough like laughter that he guessed this maybe was what people had been hearing. Not exactly laughter, more like giggling. Coo-coo-coo. And then it stopped.
Of course. Some birds had somehow gotten into the attic, and they'd heard him, going silent. She had gone up there to look, and maybe she was hurt. He didn't think until later that the trapdoor would be open if she had. He knew only that he needed to look, and quickly, so he scrambled up, and there was nothing. Insulation, cobwebs, wiring. But no sign of her, no birds, no laughter, nothing. There was must all through the close stale air, and he checked in the corners, sweating, and he still found no sign of her. He thought too late that he had climbed around up there without first looking for a disturbance in the dust. Now, with the smudge marks where he had knelt among the rafters, he could never tell if someone had preceded him. He listened for the cooing, looking for some explanation. When the sweat became too much for him, he eased back, leaving.