The Broken Hours: A Novel of H. P. Lovecraft

PRAISE FOR
THE BROKEN HOURS

“A powerful read, creepy to the point of terrifying and, at times, utterly heartbreaking, graced with both a compelling narrative and a deep, thoughtful substrata.”

—
The Vancouver Sun

“Baker’s prose is absolutely magical.”

—
Rue Morgue

“A sinister page-turner about loneliness and the restless past.”

—
Quill & Quire

“A sleek, stylish ghost story.”

—
Edmonton Journal

“It is a perfectly ghastly tale and Baker achieves the double task of mirroring Lovecraft’s own story.”

—
Toronto Star

“The most terrifying books often don’t involve monsters or bloody gore; instead, their creep factor lies in the questions, the doubts, the shadows—like those in Jacqueline Baker’s skin crawler
The Broken Hours
.”

—
Elle
(Must Read)

“With every page of Jacqueline Baker’s eerie tale, set in 1936 in Lovecraft’s creaky old house, you’ll be drawn further into the mysterious world Crandle has entered.”

—
Chatelaine

“Baker writes with the conviction of a fan, adeptly evoking the shadowy melancholy of Lovecraft’s world while always keeping the narrative’s momentum moving.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“This brilliant novel of one man’s descent into a world of smoke and shadows kept me reading late into the night. In exquisitely precise prose, with a pitch-perfect feel for the starkness of H.P. Lovecraft’s Rhode Island,
The Broken Hours
taps into our fears, challenges our beliefs and brings us back to the delicious terrors of childhood. This is a ghost story in the vein of Henry James and Susan Hill, a meditation on love interrupted, and the perils of solitude. Deliciously creepy, heartbreaking and beautiful.”

—Esi Edugyan, author of the Giller Prize–winning novel
Half-Blood Blues

“I can’t remember the last time a book really, truly creeped me out. This one … yeah, this one did. Jacqueline Baker gets under your skin with this depression-era tale of child spectres, haunted houses, mad scribes and lunatic asylums—and caps it all with a mind-melting twist that will reorder your sense of everything that preceded it.”

—Craig Davidson, Giller Prize–shortlisted author of
Cataract City

“
The Broken Hours
is a spooky novel of the terrible nature of humankind and the things we aren’t meant to know. Baker manipulates fiction and metafiction with sure-handed grace.”

—Laird Barron, author of
X’s for Eyes

Copyright © 2016 by Jacqueline Baker

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.

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.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover art by Jeffrey Alan Love

Cover design by Claudia Noble

Print ISBN: 978-1-940456-55-3

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-940456-56-0

Printed in the United States of America

For John

The sleep of reason brings forth monsters.

—Goya

One

1

Providence, Rhode Island

{1936}

Desperation, some say, is but a particular form of madness.

Indeed I felt so, toting my valise up College Street like a vagabond in the blowing rain, the address blurred on a scrap of wet paper in my hand, the lights just beginning to come on in the windows of the great houses against the evening gloom. The spring has been late this year, and leonine, on the heels of a bitter winter, and the rain blasted sideways, soaking my trousers and threatening to wrench my battered umbrella like some shining black jellyfish into the watery aether. The air stank of the sea, as it always does here in such weather. So chilled was I, so tired from the long walk I had undertaken to save the few pennies of trolley fare, and so generally unwell my state of mind, I confess I would have given it all up but for the fact—why dissemble?—I had nowhere else to go.

So I pressed on along the steep, cobbled street, past lampposts yet unlit and wrought iron gates and the white marble edifice of the university library, where, briefly, I considered seeking shelter. The light so dim beneath the dripping elms, I could not make out his smeared address and cursed my own carelessness in allowing the paper to become damp.

Engrossed as I was, I scarcely noticed the man and the bicycle there until I stumbled into them, dropping my valise and almost toppling the bicycle, and the man, over.

I do beg your pardon
, I said, setting the bicycle to rights again.

The man shot me a mild look of annoyance from beneath his crumpled fedora. He appeared to be of the street himself, as I suppose a good many of us must look, these lean times making vagrants of us all. He was accompanied by a boy in a gray woollen hat, and galoshes, and a coat far too heavy for even such inclement weather, and with a great crimson scarf wound exceedingly tight so that it seemed all that kept his head from tumbling from his little shoulders. He looked up at me, eyes pale and disinterested in their sockets like watery eggs in their cups.

Quite the weather for an outing
, I observed.

We were caught in it
, the man said, in a voice that smacked of the northern hills.
My own fault. I could see it coming. But boys, you know. Can’t keep them shut up all day.

He seemed understandably anxious to be off.

Do you live here, then?
I asked.
In College Hill?

He wiped the rain from his nose before nodding toward a large yellow house on the back side of the street.
Boarding house across the way
.

I see.

Just for a time
, he added quickly, as if I’d suggested otherwise.

I pitied the man his embarrassment. I had felt as much often enough myself in recent months.

Well, I won’t keep you
, I said.
But, say, do you know where I might find Number Sixty-Six? Behind the John Hay Library, I was told.

He shot me an odd look.
Sixty-Six?

That’s right.

The rain dripped from his fedora.

You’d be standing smack in front of it
, he said.
This place right here.

I lifted my umbrella and there it was, set back from the street in a small overgrown courtyard at the end of a short lane. A two-story colonial with a monitor roof, bone-colored with black shutters framing windows darkened by heavy draperies drawn tight against the coming night and the storm. The man looked at me with a new interest.

Sure it’s Sixty-Six you’re looking for?

I consulted the paper again.
Quite sure.

Visiting, are you?

In fact, I’ll be living here, temporarily. You see, I’ve been engaged—

Daddy
, the boy said then,
isn’t that the house—

Never mind, James,
he said shortly.

The rain pattered around us, filling an uncomfortable pause.

Do you know something of it, then?
I asked.

Daddy—

The man cast his son a pointed look before saying,
There was a suite for rent there, the main floor, when we come to the neighbourhood last week. But the wife—

Mama wouldn’t—

James,
he said, firmly.

The boy looked chastened.

Well, she wouldn’t,
he said, mostly to himself. He lifted the end of his wet scarf and put it between his lips.

I looked from son to father.

Wife didn’t much care for the place
, the man offered.

Oh? Why not?

He glanced across to the boarding house.

Fancies herself,
he began, dropping his voice,
a what you call it, “sensitive.”

Sensitive?

Sees things. Or senses them, or what have you
.
Her and the boy both.

I smiled.
I’m afraid I don’t go in for that sort of thing myself.

Nor me
, he said, hastily. He hesitated, then added,
But … the other tenants, upstairs. She’d heard talk. Gossip, like. Just women stuff. Nonsense things. But in such close quarters.
He shrugged.

You’ve met them, then? The upstairs tenants?

The man shifted his boots on the wet cobblestones. The old bicycle creaked.

Can’t say as we got that far.

What do you mean?

Mama wouldn’t go past the landing,
James put in.
She said—

We should be getting on.
The man laid a heavy hand on the boy’s shoulder.
Suppertime.

I repressed another smile at their country manners. And their country superstitions, too. I’ve known their like.

At any rate
, I said pleasantly,
I suppose we’ll be neighbours
.

I extended my hand, noticing with some surprise my fingertips were stained blue with ink from the wet slip of paper I carried. I checked an impulse to wipe them on my overcoat. The man must have noticed as well for he hesitated before extending his own.

Crandle
, I said.

Baxter
.
This is my boy—

James,
I finished, extending my hand to the child.

James reached out a sodden mitt in surprise at his name, as if I’d divined it rather than heard his father speak it.

We had a whole house
, the boy said, marvelling himself at the fact,
all to our own selves. And a red barn too before we come here
.

Hard times
, the man said.

For us all
, I agreed.

Well.
The man seemed to hesitate, but then he said only,
Come along, James.

And with that they were gone, the boy clutching his father’s trouser leg and looking up at darkened number Sixty-Six as they wheeled their rusted bicycle to the boarding house lit warmly there beyond, in the gathering dusk.