Authors: James P. Blaylock
He took out a few of the soldiers now and set them on the dining room table, glancing up at the photo of him and his sister
and suddenly feeling a little sheepish, as if she could see him there, still playing with tin soldiers at his age. Moonlight
shone on the road outside now, but the road was still empty, and maybe just as well so. There was no percentage in chasing
phantoms through the night, trying to recapture something irretrievably lost years and years ago.
He recalled the day she’d gotten back from a summer visit to Michigan. He and Aunt Lydia had met her at Union Station in Los
Angeles, and when she’d climbed down off the train with her newly bobbed hair, she was carrying the box. He’d known straightaway
that it was for him. He could see it in her eyes, although she’d pretended it was a fruitcake, so full of brandy, she said,
that he wouldn’t even be allowed to taste it. She had peeked inside, laughing, rolling her eyes as if clobbered by the reek
of brandy. Finally he’d snatched it out of her hands, pulling back the lid to reveal the ranks of soldiers within, line after
line of them in neat little doweled racks.
He could remember everything about that day—the palm trees against a blue sky, the vast station with its leather seats and
chandeliers and painted ceilings, the long platforms, the sound of the train whistle, the reek of smoke, the milling of the
crowds. They’d eaten in an elegant restaurant, and his aunt, he remembered, had ordered Belgian hare, and he had done the
same, proud to be ordering something so exotic that he had no idea what it was. When it turned out to be rabbit, he couldn’t
eat it, and so he had sat through the meal in disgrace, his food untouched.
Laying all of the soldiers except one neatly back into the box, he shut the lid, then set the box back onto its shelf. The
leftover soldier he put into his pocket where he kept other small mementos, not luck charms, really, just—what?—maybe small
fragments of memory. He had a token
from the Chicago World’s Fair, an abalone button that he’d found among his mother’s things, a big blue rhinestone that he’d
unearthed digging in the vegetable garden. Sometime last week he lost a polished opal that he’d carried in his pocket for
years, and now this soldier would volunteer, to take its place.
Yesterday at the veterinarian’s office he had decided to give the box of soldiers to Bobby, to Beth’s son. The boy had taken
it hard—Sheba’s being hurt—even though he didn’t really know the cat very well. It was tough now just to think about it, the
boy sitting beside her in the backseat all the way down to Dr. Stone’s office. He’d talked to Sheba continually, trying to
convince her to hold on, even told her a quiet story about when he’d hurt himself falling off a fence, but it turned out to
be nothing, which was almost always what happened. Well,
something
had convinced the old cat to hold on; why not believe it was a six-year-old’s compassion? Probably Bobby wouldn’t have eaten
the Belgian hare, either, once he knew it was really a rabbit.
It was time to turn out the lamp; there was nothing to be gained by summoning up memories like old ghosts. Inevitably they’d
vanish into the darkness. He walked across to the oil lamp next to the reading chair and twisted the wick down, then cupped
his hand over the chimney and blew the flame out. At that moment, when the room plunged into darkness, he saw a woman on the
road, and he had to grab onto the back of the chair to steady himself.
He saw then that she had long blond hair. It wasn’t Esther. She swept her hair back with her hand, running up the stairs onto
the porch, pounding on the door even as he stepped across to open it.
H
E WENT OUT INTO THE NIGHT WITHOUT HIS COAT, FOLLOWING
Beth onto the porch and into a blast of wind, dragging the door shut behind him as she took his elbow and hurried him
forward. She shouted into his ear, the wind snatching her words away. He caught only bits and pieces of what she was saying—Peter’s
disappearance, the ghosts, something about the cellar….
The lights of the house shone through the trees, and he could see moonlit smoke tumbling out of the chimney. His fingers closed
around the tin soldier in his pocket as dust swirled up from the road, gyrating toward them in a dozen skittering wind devils.
He heard on the wind what sounded like the scratchy notes of antique music. He recognized the melody. In his memory he could
hear his sister humming it.
Her face came into his mind. He recalled the touch of her hand on the afternoon of their parents’ funeral, when he was five
years old, the timeless week that followed, Esther reading to him for hours on end—
On the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, The King of the Golden River
—the two of them in the back garden through the still and sunny afternoons, their chairs shaded by tall rows of pole beans,
the air heavy with the scent of orange blossom.
“Hurry,” he whispered, but already she was stepping into the darkened living room. She pulled the door silently shut behind
them. At the opposite end of the room a flickering
light shone past the edge of the nearly closed parlor door. There was a sleepy, languorous atmosphere in the house, something
molasses heavy, scented with the smoky menthol smell of burning eucalyptus from the fireplace in the parlor. He couldn’t hear
the music anymore, and the sound of the wind diminished to a distant rush beyond the sheltering walls of the house. Their
footsteps creaked on the floorboards, and he could hear his own breathing and the sound of blood rushing in his ears. He peered
past the edge of the parlor door, into the candlelit room….
Esther sat in her customary chair before the fire. Her hair long, grown out. The doctor, Dr. Landry, hadn’t liked it bobbed—too
frivolous. And she’d taken to dressing in dark colors, usually black, as if she were in mourning for something she’d lost.
She was dressed that way now, exactly as he’d seen her when she stood on the road two nights ago, her hair swept by the wind,
the dress a dusty black in the light of the moon. Now she was composed, sitting in front of the hearth, a book open in her
hands.
Her husband sat in the other chair, a decanter and glass on the table. The boy, Jamie, lounged on the rug behind them, his
back to the window, playing an endless game of Puzzle Peg. His hand moved across the board, picking up the blue-painted wooden
pegs and dropping them to the carpet, new pegs appearing on the board in an endless succession, the discarded pegs blinking
away one by one. There was the sound of book pages turning, of the logs crackling in the hearth, of the
click, click, click
of the wooden pegs. The fire rose and fell in the fireplace as if it were breathing.
He remembered the room from sixty years past, knew now what he had known then, when he was fourteen years old and had visited
his sister that last lonely time—that this room was an extension of the man who had built it, a manifestation of his will.
The enchantment in its careful design was meant to function as an impenetrable hedge of briar. There was nothing that betrayed
the room’s connection to
the outside world, not a stray slip of paper, not a piece of newsprint, not a hint in the carefully arranged ornaments and
books or in the solemn, timeless prints on the wall—nothing suggested that the room was subject to time or change.
He felt something tugging on his sleeve. The sensation registered slowly, calling him back along the years. Beth stood behind
him in the dark living room. She gestured at the front door, urging him to follow her. She whispered something, but he only
half heard it. He shook his head. He couldn’t leave now, not yet. He peered into the still room again, listening to her footfalls
across the wooden floor, hearing a door close in another room. Then, when he was alone in the empty darkness, he whispered
his sister’s name, half expecting that the room and all that was in it would vanish on the instant, like an image in a suddenly
broken mirror.
U
TTERLY ALONE
, B
ETH WENT OUT THROUGH THE BACK
door, remembering that the flashlight was under the house where Peter had dropped it. Maybe it wasn’t broken or burned out.
He’d put away the tools that used to be scattered around the parlor floor, but she remembered a length of pipe lying in the
dirt of the cellar. That would do.
The moon had risen in the starry sky, illuminating the chipped white paint that peeled from the woven lath of the cellar gate.
She held on to the rough, weathered frame, looking once again into the dim room beyond, at the sloping
dirt of the littered floor, the dark hidden corners. She stepped inside, moving across to the chimney, and ran her hand across
the patchwork masonry, the random masses of clinker brick and stone, and the crumbling lines of mortar slopped from the untooled
joints. She snapped a long slab of it loose and dropped it into the dirt.
On the ground lay the piece of pipe, a couple of feet long and half-hidden by junk. She grabbed the end, twisting it out from
under scrap wood and debris, then knocked it against the chimney stones to shake loose the clinging webs and leaves and dirt.
Gripping it solidly, she swung it at a heavy granite boulder, the cornerstone of the chimney. The pipe hit it with a dead
ring, rust flakes spraying across the backs of her hands. She hit it again, harder, knocking off a fragment of stone that
flew up and stung her cheek, and she dropped the pipe and wiped her cheek with her sleeve.
The wind gusted, swirling through the lattice behind her, raising a cloud of leaves and dust that nearly choked her. She buried
her face in the crook of her arm, waiting it out. Abruptly she swung the pipe again, slamming it into a patch of bricks now,
the echoing
thump
filling the cellar. Cracks radiated outward from where the pipe crushed into the brick, and mortar and brick chips cascaded
to the ground. At the next blow a grapefruit-sized stone broke free and fell out whole. She stepped out of the way, leaned
back and chunked the pipe into a patch of cracked bricks, which showered to the floor in a dusty avalanche.
The air swirled with brick grit and windblown leaves and rang with the sound of falling debris and of iron clanging over and
over against stone until finally she tossed the pipe aside, unable to swing it any more, and began to pull fragments of brick
out with her hands. Abruptly a patch of bricks fell inward, exposing a rectangular hole, nothing but black air behind it.
She stopped, suddenly fearful, almost surprised to discover so suddenly that she’d been right: the deep base of the chimney
was hollow. Carefully now she dislodged more bricks and stones, wiggling them out of
their slots and depressions. Lines of mortar tugged away, and loose bricks simply fell out, tumbling to the floor.
The flashlight … She turned and saw it through the hovering dust, lying where Peter had dropped it. She picked it up and pushed
the switch, the light feeble and dim until she shined it into the utter darkness of the cavity within the hollow chimney.
At first she could see nothing, just a cloud of dust slowly settling. Then she could see that something stood against the
outside wall of the chimney, maybe two feet away from her—a couple of narrow shelves suspended from chains and hooks affixed
to the mortar. There were objects sitting on the shelves, ill-defined shadows growing slowly visible in the setting dust….
On the top shelf a black beaded purse sat tilted against the stones. There was the likeness of an owl on it in white beads,
and the name “Esther” beneath the owl’s feet. The beadwork was ragged and patchy as if the purse had been carried for years,
perhaps by a child. Next to the purse stood a photograph in a frame of hammered copper—the likeness of a man and a woman.
She shined the flashlight on it. Even through the dust the man’s eyes looked dark and obsessed. The woman held Something in
her hand, which was curled back across her chest, and she gazed at some distant point, as if her mind were miles away. Next
to the photograph lay a silver-handled hairbrush and matching hand mirror, the mirror’s dust-hazed glass reflecting the darkness
above. Lying atop the mirror was a gold ring—a wedding band—and a bracelet that was a spiral of tarnished silver set with
dark stones that might have been jet. Beside the mirror sat a crystal bulldog with garnets for eyes. Behind it, also tilted
against the stones, was a book with a pale leather binding, on the cover of which was painted a single blue lupine. A crystal
perfume bottle sat open and alone near the edge of the table, its faceted stopper lying beside it.
When she saw the dark residue of the evaporated scent in the bottom of the bottle, it seemed to her that she could
smell jasmine on the cool cellar air. She knew exactly why the bottle had been left unstoppered. Then into her mind came the
image of the woman in the photograph, walking along the windblown ridges above the canyon, her dress and hair blowing out
behind her. She clutched a handful of enormous papery white poppies that stood out against blue sky like clouds.
O
NLY VAGUELY CONSCIOUS OF THE SOUND OF THE WIND
and of a muffled pounding somewhere far away, he stood in the doorway watching her for an indeterminate time. She hadn’t
looked up when he whispered her name, hadn’t glanced away from the fire. The logs in the fireplace settled, a wash of sparks
rising up the chimney, and the wind keened through the dark night.
And even if she knew him after the long years, what would he say to her that she didn’t already know?
He could see now that she looked like photographs of their mother—the raven hair, the dark eyes full of a sadness like the
passing of seasons as she stared over the top of her book, mesmerized by the flames. He hadn’t been old enough to see it when
she’d died—neither the resemblance to his mother nor the autumn shadow in her eyes. He realized now that all his memories
of her were circumscribed by a few brief years of his boyhood like the handful of trinkets in his pocket. The scattered moments
were reflected in the pages of illustrated books read in a sunlit back garden, in rainwater pattering against parlor windows
behind
tin soldiers ranked along the wooden sill, in dusty country roads where they would find the first wildflowers of spring. She
would let him pick only a few, only the prettiest, because a star would fall out of the sky, she said, and somewhere a person
would die, for each flower in the bouquet.