The Broken Hours: A Novel of H. P. Lovecraft (7 page)

I pulled the letter for his mother from my suit jacket. I stared at the envelope a long while. Finally, I took a letter opener from the drawer and sat tapping it on the desk. But I could not; it would be unforgivable. At long length, I dropped the envelope on the desk and rose with the letter opener. The boxes stood there along the wall. I confess I hesitated. I had never been one to pry into the business of others. If anything, I had been too much inclined the other way.
You lack interest
, Jane had often said, quite unjustly, I thought then,
in anyone other than yourself
.

Taking the first box, I slit it open. Papers, old pamphlets and circulars, anonymous memorabilia; insignificant, uninteresting. The same true of all the boxes. Nothing; though what I thought I might find I could not have said. The last two boxes in the corner were unsealed and I pried open their lids to discover magazines with grotesque cover illustrations: enormous, fanged serpents and tortured specters, winged demons and vampires hovering over cowering, shrieking ladies in scanty dress.

Putting them aside, I surveyed the mess I’d made of the room. I stacked the boxes all up against the wall again and put the magazines on my desk. Then I recalled the other boxes in the adjacent room. After pausing on the landing to listen—for, though it was unlikely, I did not relish the idea of being caught prying into someone else’s belongings—I stepped across and entered the lightless room. I opened the first box. Then the second, the third. I did not stop until they all stood open on the floor around me. Every box was the same: women’s clothing, the aunt’s, I assumed, dated as they were to my eye, but of good quality, silks and velvets stiffened with age and disuse. A faint, stale odour of lavender and liniment filled the air. I felt queer standing there among those garments. Guilty, but something else as well.
What is it you’re looking for, Crandle?
I asked myself. Having no answer, I hastily stuffed all the clothing back into the boxes. Then, feeling disgusted at myself, I closed the door behind me, intending to make a quick trip out to the shops for packing tape to reseal the boxes before my trespass was discovered.

But, to my astonishment, it was almost four o’clock—where had the hours gone?—and the shops would soon be closed. I returned to the kitchenette with its bright row of primroses and opened a can of chili con carne and heated it on the stove. After eating a few bites while staring out the window at the cats on the shed roof (they seemed to have multiplied), the food did not taste good and I did not feel particularly hungry. I left the remainder in a covered saucepan on low heat on the stovetop for my employer to help himself, as I supposed was expected, though he had not said as much, and went directly upstairs for a few more hours at my desk.

And yet, as soon as I settled, I could not shake that image of him bending over me in the darkness. I rose and, feeling the fool, locked the door to my room.

The story of Aralyn and Oakley Eakinns unfolded as I read and typed and read some more. Several years passed at the hotel. None there had seen or heard from Aralyn. Oakley continued his nightly visits without fail. Then Oakley disappeared, too. At first, no one noticed his absence, so accustomed were they to his presence; the great irony of the familiar and the reviled. And, because of this late notice, there was some dissension as to just when his visits had stopped. Some claimed it had been more than a month, some a week, two at the most. One girl who worked in the laundry swore she’d seen him there just the previous night, owl-eyed and reeking of cinders, as always. But she was a known teller of tales, and scarcely to be believed. Then they heard he had been seen that previous Sunday, out on the bay. Boys who frequented the docks to smoke and throw stones at the pilings for a nickel a strike claimed to have seen him row out in his little, rotting boat around nightfall, just as the late November frets were beginning to drift in over the water. He seemed to be toting something in his boat, something wrapped in a white sheet, the corner of which hung over the prow, trailing in the black water. It looked, they claimed with typical adolescent imagination, like a body. One of the boys had called out as much to old Oakley, jocularly, some nonsense jibe. The old man had turned upon them then, teeth bared, a gaze so ominous as to silence them all and send them home, one by one, early to their lighted houses. Oakley’s boat was found by a small fishing tug at dawn the next morning, drifting empty in the murderous, icy tides.

Aralyn appeared at the hotel not a month later, imperiously, decked in jewels and furs as black as her hair. Her husband did not accompany her; she made hasty excuses, ordering dishes of caviar, which she ate with great relish, downing goblets of water as if her thirst could not be quenched. Her colour, many remarked, was not good. She had aged, markedly, paled and shrivelled under that west coast sun. Her lips had taken on a greenish tinge. Her breath stank of the sea. Her former co-workers were hardly welcoming, distant, uneasy at her sudden, glittering appearance, casting glances through the glass doors to the Providence night, half expecting Oakley to step through at any moment, wreathed in sour sea-mist, announcing in a watery voice,
High time you come home.

But he did not. There was only Aralyn, alone in the center of the dining room, draped in furs that could scarcely be called glossy, as if they’d been cut from animals left dead sometime in the black of the woods, a silver dish of caviar before her, white hands placed palms down on the table, waiting for her former co-workers to fawn over her, as she seemed to expect they would. But, instead, they ignored her, were repelled by her. She grinned, finally, her teeth blackened with roe, and, in a rage, turned over the dish of caviar, the silver, the crystal goblets, and spat a dark curse upon the hotel and all who worked or slept within its finely papered walls, before blasting out the glass doors into the night, gone, some said, to find Oakley.

The telegram arrived the following morning. From a Mr. Wolfe of Windsor Hills, Los Angeles, California, inquiring as to whether anyone at the hotel had heard from his wife, Mrs. Aralyn Wolfe, missing this past month.

Though the story was indeed gripping, I could not say I liked it. It was not good. And yet I was compelled by it nevertheless. There was something about it so haunting, a certain desolation that rang quite true.

But dark, dark. I rose and took up a handful of the magazines and flipped through them. I could not help but wonder at the kind of imagination—the kind of man—who would not only read but write such, well, I scarcely knew what to call it. Horror, I supposed. But not quite that, either. There was something about the world he depicted, the coldness of it, the meaninglessness, which disturbed me. There was nothing of humanity in it. Nothing of goodness. Nothing of hope. There was something dreadful and empty at its heart and, therefore, I imagined, at the heart of its author.

To be the creator of all that hopelessness—well, how could one live with oneself? Darkness, I knew too well, begat only darkness. One way or another.

Most peculiar: working on the story of Aralyn and Oakley, I began to lose track of the passage of time. I settled in to my work, then lifted my face to find an hour, two hours, had passed. Later, what felt to be hours would be minutes, moments.

I put aside the manuscript and turned to the typing of his correspondence, formal, self-deprecating letters filled with my employer’s obvious insecurities and with sophomoric references to, and whimsical drawings of, the cats I’d seen lounging on the shed roof, a society he’d dubbed the Kappa Alpha Tau (KAT). Such playfulness hardly seemed possible in such a man. It made me feel, again, that my uneasiness had more to do with my own precarious state of mind than with this man I had not met. He was a mystery, certainly. A recluse. He was ill. But he was, it seemed after all, not really frightening.

His correspondence solved one mystery, at least: among the various pseudonyms used by my employer—Grandpa Theobald, Lewis Theobald Jr., Augustus T. Swift, Lawrence Appleton, John J. Jones, Humphrey Littlewit, Archibald Mainwaring, Henry Paget-Lowe, Ward Phillips, Richard Raleigh, Amos Dorance Rowley, Edward Softly, Albert Frederic Willie, Zoilus and the puzzling Ech-Pi—was his actual name. Not Ech-Pi, but H. P. Only that. Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

So ordinary. And sad, also. As the solving of every mystery must necessarily be.

Finally, putting aside my work, I gathered up the few finished pages for my employer, and stood and stretched and made my way downstairs.

Halfway down, I was hit by a foul, charred smell and I recalled the chili I had left to warm on the stove. I found it untouched, burned thickly to the bottom of the pot. I began to scrape the mess out into the trash and then, changing my mind, pulled a chipped bowl from the cupboard and, depositing the remains there instead, carried the bowl to the window, thinking with some amusement of that saying I’d once heard: that if you fed a dog, it would think you were a god; if you fed a cat, it would think it was a god. The cats were there on the shed, godlike, despite the darkness, and I tapped the spoon against the bowl. They glanced up at me, not with charming playfulness as in my employer’s drawings, but with obvious loathing. I shivered and set the bowl on the roof, closing the window.

It was after midnight, I noted to my surprise by the clock in the kitchen. According to his schedule, he should be awake and working. I took the typed pages back out to the hall. My note inquiring about the advance still lay untouched there on the pedestal table. The light glowed from beneath his door, as always.

On a whim, I went out the apartment door and down to the darkened courtyard. I stood in my shirt sleeves, shivering, and looked up at the second floor. Though there were windows there where windows should be—at the corner at which I placed his study—all were black. Surely, even with heavy draperies pulled shut, my employer’s light should show through at that hour. I slowly circled the entire house: there was the kitchenette, the rear door leading out of it and down a set of rickety stairs to the garden, the frosted bathroom window, another set of windows which must belong to the aunt’s rooms, and then back around again to the front and the lightless windows of my employer’s study.