Gathered Dust and Others (6 page)

I didn’t know how to respond to his talk, and so I remained silent as he moved from the window and to another wall shelf lined with books.  I watched as he removed a volume of Henry James’s ghost stories and raised the book to his delicate nostrils, and I imagined him shutting his eyes as he sucked in the old book’s fragrance, even though those eyes were concealed behind the dark lens of his absurd glasses.  Opening the book, Carter allowed some particles of dirt to fall into one hand.  His face darkened as he stared at the rubble in his palm, and then he brought that palm to his mouth and touched the debris with his tongue, as from some distant place outside a thing cried to twilight.

V.

My guest insisted that he wanted to walk home, and so I stood on the porch and watched him cross the road and enter into Old Dethshill Cemetery.  He turned to me, waved and smiled, and did a little jig among the stones.  He was a silly creature, but I was getting to like him.  I returned his wave and then returned into my home, happy to be alone.  I had not yet removed Harrod’s heavy cloak, and so I climbed the stairs to his room and began to undress, breathing easier as the tie was removed and the shirt’s top button released.  Standing in my underwear, I put the discarded clothes into the closet and then sat upon the dead man’s massive bed, which proved extremely comfortable.  Because I had closed all of the vents in the upstairs section of the house, the room was chilly; and when I reached down to open a bedside bureau I smiled to find a pair of yellow pajamas.  Pulling on bottoms, I was happy to find them a perfect fit for me, and the thick material was certainly comfortable.  I pulled the top part of the pajamas over my head and reclined on Harrod’s bed, contemplating his possible sex life.  Most of his visitors, from what I could ascertain, had been men.  Perhaps he had been queer – or perhaps, like me, he had no interest in sex, preferring to be alone with his books and dreams.  I rose and turned off the overhead light, then went to open the curtains of one window and thus allow moonlight to beam into the cozy room.  Returning to the bed, I rested my shoulders and head on a pile of pillows and closed my eyes. 

In dream, I returned to Miss Warren’s studio.  My thoughts on sexual matters must have tainted my dreams, for the small woman was nude as she danced before her painting of the sinister pale tree that once lived among the graveyard tombs.  As she danced, her painted image began to writhe behind her, unwinding its tendrils of vine so that they embraced her neck and coiled atop her head, reminding me of something I could not clearly recollect.  Someone linked my arm, and I saw that a robed figure stood beside me; and when its black eyes turned to wink at me, I saw Carter’s pale face beneath the hood.  How strangely he smiled at me as he led me to the naked woman and her painting, through which we walked.  Holding tightly to my hands, they led me in a ritual danse around the writhing tree, and then they came near to embrace me and kiss my eyes.  When they drifted away from me, their mouths moved but I could hear no uttered communication – the dream was entirely silent, except for the sound of deep breathing, which I assumed must be coming from my sleeping form, an infiltration of reality into the realm of phantasy.  Each took hold of one of my hands and led me through the tall grass, past black rotting tombstones, just beyond an ivied mausoleum.  I saw what looked to be an open grave, but as I was pulled into it I found that there were earthen steps leading to unseen depths.  For the first time, I was aware of fragrance – or rather, stench, as we stepped through a dark passageway underground.  I peered through the darkness to a blacker form before us, one that caused my bones to shudder with fear and from which the stench of death weaved through the air and froze my brain.

I awakened.

Moonbeams had been replaced by misty morning light.  A bird warbled from a tree outside the window.  I rose and stretched, and then remembered a part of the house that I had yet to visit.  Exiting the room, I climbed the steps that led to the widow’s walk, and despite my uneasiness with heights, I stepped out on the platform and to its rail of white wood.  Why this section of the house existed I did not understand, for there was nothing to gaze at except the thickly wooded area of Old Dethshill Cemetery and the forested hills beyond it.  I had not realized until then the immense thickness of the growth of trees in the area, especially in the graveyard.  The burying ground looked utterly desolate, a lonely and forsaken realm indeed.  I looked down to the ground just below me, and that was a mistake for I was seized by a sudden fit of vertigo.  Dizzy and afraid, I backed to the door and re-entered my home.  I went to the landing and down the stairs, to the library, which was now the room I most occupied, into which I had moved a small cot and much of my wardrobe.  Dressing, I went to the kitchen and prepared a light breakfast, and as I sat at the table and devoured my omelet, I studied the door that led to the basement, another place I had yet to fully investigate.  I remembered the afternoon my uncle had taken me down there and showed me the entrance to the secret passage, and how I was too fearful to step with him into that sequestered place.  Dumping my dishes into the sink, I went to the library and got the antique lantern, then returned to the kitchen and walked down the skinny steps that took me to the basement.  The area was smaller than I remembered it being, and I easily found that portion of the wall that, after a switch was flipped, slid open so as to reveal the tunnel hewn out of the earth, which was much more spacious than I had expected it to be.  The floor was not just earth but some kind of finished material.  My lantern’s glow fell upon an object heaped at one place, and I reached to pick up the hooded robe, the material of which was smooth and slightly damp.  I pushed my arms through the sleeves and pulled the hood over my head, then continued my journey through the tunnel.  A slight and chilly breeze pushed at me, and I noticed some few vents built into the wall, and also fixtures that were apparently meant to hold torches, which made me feel that the tunnel was a thing of the deep past, long predating the structure that had been built above it.  Attracted by a slim recess that moved away from the main tunnel, I entered and followed it, sensing that it was slightly inclined and taking me to higher ground.  Finally the darkness grew less so, and I found myself confronted with steps of sod that rose toward an opening through which daylight filtered.  Climbing the smooth steps, I entered Old Dethshill Cemetery, at a place near a mausoleum where the growth of trees was less vigorous and allowed dawn to illuminate the area.  How strange, that to stand among those markers of death in daylight was far creepier than to do so at night.  The graveyard, in daylight, had a kind of presence that darkness clothed.  It felt dangerous and –
hungry
.  I fancied that it longed to devour my soul.  Tearing the robe off me and letting it fall to the ground, I turned out the lantern’s flame and found my way home.

Never had my haunted house felt more welcoming, a safe harbor.  I wanted, however, to capture the feeling of fear that I had just experienced, and so I rushed into the library and began to write, composing a kind of prose poem that I hoped I could turn into the opening chapter of the novel I intended to write about the cemetery and the Carters who were interred therein.  I don’t know how long I sat there, at my desk, scribbling.  Slight hunger reminded me of the time, and so I went to the kitchen and built myself a massive sandwich, which I washed down with some glasses of milk.  I saw from the wall clock, and from the shadows outside the window, that afternoon was darkening into early dusk.  Returning to the library, I sat on the sofa with one lamp spreading its soft light over the book I had decided to reread that evening,
The Attic Window and Others
.  Carter’s prose had a style all its own, very literary and rather rococo, a manner that proved mesmerizing and caught one’s imagination.  His ideas, for the most part, were not all that original, but his handling of them was evocative, and he had the ability to conjure a secret mythos of terror as no modern author I had read.  I must have eventually dozed because I was startled awake by the sound of something’s shrill cry in the graveyard next door.  I looked around me at the trappings that had been bequeathed me by my uncle, and that had come his way through the inheriting of Elmer Harrod’s “haunted house,” as the locals were determined to name it.  What an absurd, adolescent realm I had adopted as my own, and yet how easily I fitted into it.  I realized there was very little of myself within the house, of my personality; for I was not much of a collector of anything before I had inherited the place and my belongings were few.  I did not feel the need, now that I had some wealth, to buy things so as to add a bit of my presence into the place.  Rather, I would let the atmosphere of spookiness guide my life as an author, and grow old with the harmless horrors thus evoked.  I smiled to realize that I was, for the first time, happy and content.  Harrod’s haunted house was my safe harbor.  Actually, it was the graveyard that was truly haunted, by phantoms of the past and their intrigues.  One such phantom might have been the author of the book I had been reading, although there was no record of his ever having haunted Old Dethshill Cemetery.  Looking around the room, I espied the antique lantern that had inspired me to read books within the graveyard on certain nights, as had Harrod and my uncle before me.  It had been some little while since I had ventured into the burying ground with a book, and one very appropriate title was now in hand.  Thus inspired, I stood and grasped the lantern, then went to the front door and stepped into the gulf of night, where a star-studded abyss yawned above me.  Setting the book and lamp on a porch swing, I found my box of matches and lit the lantern’s wick, and then I retrieved my objects and stepped down the porch, along the walkway, across the road and into the waiting necropolis. 

Yes. It was
this spectral place
that was truly eerie, not my happy home.  I could feel it all around me and hear it in the low moan of wind, and I could see it as my lantern light fell on the tall dead grass that looked like paper-thin tendrils reaching for me.  I beheld it in the mournful swaying of the thick growth of trees.  Below one section of those trees a spectre stood dead still among the weathered slabs, an eidolon in white that raised an arm and motioned me to join her.  I went to Julia and took her proffered hand.  In her other arm she cradled a box of fragrant wood on which elder symbols had been carved, emblems that I seemed to remember from snatches of dreaming.  The small woman stood near to where Obediah Carter’s weed-choked slab caught patches of pale moonlight on its hoary stone.  Raising my lantern, I tried to comprehend the thing that reclined upon that slab, the creature that moved a petite hand into the nearest earth and clutched a fistful of cemetery sod.  I watched that hand sail from the soil to a shadowed visage and let the debris sift through parting fingers into a waiting mouth.  The wind arose, as did the being on the slab; and with him raised a cloud of mist that aped a human shape, like some shadow conjoined to the breathing mortal who gazed at me.  Carter’s face had never looked so blanched, all color leaked from the texture of his skin.  I almost wanted to laugh, because his almost-ghoulish appearance reminded me of how Elmer Harrod sometimes looked in his ghoulish makeup when filmed in this same place.  The young man before me smiled, as if he understood what I was thinking, and as his lips curled a little bit of dirt slipped from one corner of his mouth.  He chortled, and the coils piled atop his dome shook, unwound, and fell to his feminine shoulders.  I watched them sway in the wind – although something in their movement seemed too vigorous for the force of wind that touched us.  Julia pressed her little body against mine and pressed her mouth to my ear.

“We are happy to have you here, to share the gift of nourishment.  Oh, Hayward, you’ll never be alone again.”  She opened the aromatic box and I saw the pile of white ash within it, on top of which was her Victorian mortuary straight razor that I had so admired in her studio.  Sensuously, she inhaled the contents of the box, and then she dipped one hand into its contents and pinched a bit of ash.  Moving from me, she glided to Carter and rubbed the ashes onto his soiled mouth, and his tongue played over her fingers as his tubes of colorless hair swayed and lengthened.  The lad shuddered spasmodically for some few moments as I held the lantern high enough to clearly study his countenance – and thus I witnessed his black spectacles as they tilted on his vibrating head and slipped partially down his nose; and I saw his eyes, one of which was newly blemished.  My blood became like ice. 

The artist bent low and placed the box onto the ground, clutched the razor within it and stood erect.  I watched as she lifted her arms, as the sleeves of her gown slid down so that her scars were revealed, some of which she kissed.  Then her mouth moved to one of the tube-like extensions of Carter’s impossible hair as the puny fingers of one hand pushed his spectacles back in place over his eyes.  Portions of his hair, the tresses of which had lengthened so that they reached his waist, wound like amorous things around the woman’s wounded arms.  I watched, nauseated, as she sliced into one arm with razor blade, and I fought sickness as a tube of hair lifted to the wound and pushed through it into Julia’s arm.  Dark fluid began to flow inside the tube-like extension. 

Carter raised a hand in which he held dirt, bent back his head and opened his mouth, from which there issued a familiar wailing sound.  He turned his hand over and let the soil fill his eager mouth, and I shivered as the tubes that extended from his scalp grew dark with the fragments that filtered through them.  Julia laughed and the tube that had entered her arm filled with flowing debris that washed into her upraised limb.  “More,” she begged, “more.  Nourish me.  My arm hungers.”  My knees, weakened, bent and I fell onto them.  This caught their attention, and the creatures turned to me.  “Hayward,” chanted the young man’s choked voice, and I could not resist its lure.  I crawled to where they stood and watched the winding tube-like tresses as the young man removed his spectacles, revealing fully his blemished eye.  “Hayward,” he laughed, licking his mouth with a soiled tongue.  I set my lantern and book onto the ground as the mist that rose from the slab that was Obediah Carter’s grave began to shape itself into a cruel and rapacious phantom, a ghost that sang my name.  I raised my arms toward it, one of which was found by the smooth blade of Julia’s antique razor.