I put my hands round Poe's shoulders and drew him to his feet. "Are you ready?" I asked.
Dazed with pain, scarcely remembering where he was, he peered at the oily sheen on his arm. "Landor," he mumbled. "Might I have a bandage?"
I stared down at my shirt sleeve, dangling by the merest of threads. It was the bandage I had meant for Lea, but it would do quite as well for him. I wrapped it round his wound as tightly as I dared. Then, draping his other arm round my shoulder, I began to walk him toward the door. The only thing that could have stopped us now was this voice, soft and beseeching.
"Do you think..."
It was Mrs. Marquis. Pointing in abject humility toward the stone altar, where Artemus was now sitting.
Not by himself, no. He had dragged Lea's body there with him, and he was cradling her head in his lap, and he stared back at us with a challenge all the wilder for being unspoken. His mother could only turn her face toward mine with a mute entreaty.
"We'll come back for Lea later," I said. "I must get Mr. Poe to--"
A doctor. The words caught in my throat like the beginning of a joke, and the joke seemed to be taken up at once by Mrs. Marquis. I had never seen that smile of hers quite so brilliant. Which meant only that it was fueled by every human feeling--by such a blast of feeling I wouldn't have been surprised to see her teeth melt.
"Come, Artemus," she said as she followed me and Poe into the corridor.
He watched her with hollow eyes.
"Come, darling," she repeated. "You know, we can't--we can't do any more for her now, can we? We tried, didn't we?"
Even she must have realized how weakly her words sounded, but no matter how she coaxed and wheedled, he made her no reply.
"Now, listen to me, darling, I don't want you to worry. We're going to speak to Colonel Thayer, do you hear? We're going to explain everything. He understands all about--all about misunderstandings, darling... why, he's one of our oldest and dearest friends, he's known you since you were... he would never ... do you hear me? You'll still be graduated, darling, you will!"
"I'll come directly," he answered. There was in his voice a curious lightness--a light is the better word-- and that was, I suppose, the first signal. The second being this: instead of preparing to rise, he settled himself more thoroughly where he was. Drew Lea's head closer toward his chest. And only then did I see what he'd been hiding from us. The lancet that had so lately been carving open his sister's throat now lay embedded in his side.
Who knows when he did it? I never heard so much as a grunt from him. No speeches, no flourishes, no slash across the neck... no fuss of any kind. He wanted simply to be gone, I think. As slowly and quietly as he could effect it.
Our eyes met then, and the knowledge of what was happening passed between us in a current of fellow feeling.
"I'll be there directly," he said in a fainter voice.
Maybe a man, in his final minutes, attends more closely to the world around him. I only suggest it because Artemus, for all his distress, was the first of us to lift his eyes to the ceiling. And even before my eyes had followed suit, I was smelling it. Unmistakable: the odor of burning wood.
This was, in a way, the biggest surprise of all, that such a room, carved out of rock, should have something so prosaic as a wooden ceiling. Who knew what it had been in the old days? A holding cell? A root cellar? A tap room? It's safe to say it had never held such a grand and glorious fire as the one the Marquises had fashioned. For its builders would have known that fire can be no friend to wood.
And now that wooden ceiling, tortured by the brazier's flames, was charring and snapping-- and giving way. And as the beams cracked open, the strangest weather began to fall from the sky. Not snow but ice. The entire contents of the West Point icehouse came dropping down.
Not the tinkling cubes that went into Colonel Thayer's lemonade, no, these were slabs, fiftypound blocks, with the weight and sound of marble, falling slowly at first, but falling with purpose, gouging the stone floor with each collision.
"Artemus..." The slightest edge had crept back into Mrs. Marquis' voice as she stood watching from the safety of the corridor. "Artemus, you must come now!"
I don't know if she even understood what was happening. She took a step back into the room and was making as if to drag him out by his heels, when a huge chunk of ice landed just a few feet from her. The shattered crystals flew into her face, temporarily blinding her, and then another block landed, even closer, forcing her to take a step back. And as I grabbed her arm and pulled her back out of the room, all she could do at first was utter his name, in a tone that smacked almost of resignation.
"Artemus."
She was thinking, maybe, the ice would stop. Thinking, maybe, her son was safe where he was. The next wave of ice showed her how wrong she was. The first block clipped the side of his head--a brief blunt concussion--and threw him onto his side. The next caught him midsection, and the next crushed his feet. He was still alive enough by then to howl, but the sound lasted only as long as the next installment of ice, which made a bull's-eye of his head. Even from twelve feet away, we could hear the crack of his skull against stone. And then we heard nothing more from him.
His mother, though, chose that moment to find her voice again. And there I was, Reader, thinking she had already spent her grief, when in fact she had many rooms more inside her just waiting to be emptied. The only thing that could have made her pause, I think, was the sight of something so unexpected that no grief was equal to it. Through the falling ice, we saw a figure slowly rise.
Artemus, I remember thinking, hauling himself up for one last stand. But Artemus lay where he'd fallen. And the figure that drew itself up--like a barroom brawler peeling himself from the floor--this figure wore not a uniform but a priest's cassock.
Two feet planted themselves on the stony ground. Two legs tottered toward us. We saw pale arms and chestnut hair, we saw rouged cheeks and blue eyes, startled into light. We saw Lea Marquis rise and walk.
No mere apparition. Flesh and blood--blood. One hand was reaching for us, the other was clasped round the slit in her throat. And from her shredded, strangled body came a cry such as no human or animal has ever made.
It found its match, though, in Poe. Together they made a perfect anthem of horror--a rising, rasping wail that woke the bats from their beds and sent them bouncing off the walls and skidding through our legs and scrabbling through our hair.
"Lea!"
Weakened as he was, Poe did all he could to go back to her. He tried shoving me to one side, and when that failed, he tried to get round me, and when that failed, he tried to get over--yes, he tried to scale me! Anything, anything to get to her. Anything to die with her.
Mrs. Marquis, too: she would have done the same, she cared nothing for the danger. It was me who held them both back. Without ever asking myself why, I locked my arms round their waists and dragged them away. In their depleted states, they were no match for me, but by dint of struggling, they did succeed in slowing our progress. So that even as we passed down that corridor, away from that cursed chamber, we could see, framed in the doorway, the vision of the woman we had left behind.
"Lea!"
Did she even know what was happening? Did she know what was slamming her against the hard stone--piling on top of her with such grim purpose--grinding her down in the very minute of her rebirth? Nothing in that voiceless cry of hers gave any sign of understanding. She was being crushed, that was all. Crushed as surely as the bats that came squealing past her--dozens upon dozens of then, slammed between ice and stone, screaming all the way to Death's door.
And still the ice came dropping like thunderbolts, block after block... swallowing the torches and candles and tapers... splitting open Lea's head and hammering her cassock... striking her again and again, in a hard bleak fury that she met with nothing but a soft bare open body. So hard did it come, so fast, that before another minute had passed, the doorway was impassable, and the ice had begun to spill into the hall. And all the same, we lingered there, scarcely able to believe in such vengeance. For the ice was still falling. Falling in heavy choirs. Falling in shivers of mist. Falling on the Marquis lineage. Falling like death.
Narrative of Gus Landor
40
December 14th to 19th
Here, I suppose, was the final miracle. The ground above us never so much as shook. Not a single alarm was raised, not a single cadet was jarred from his sleep. Not a kink was thrown into the Academy's daily routine. At the first hint of dawn, as on any other morning, the Army drummer stepped into the assembly area between North and South Barracks and, at the cadet adjutant's cue, brought his sticks down on the drumhead, in a cadence that grew and blossomed until it was echoing across the Plain, pulsing into every ear--cadet, officer, soldier.
Until I saw that sound being made, I don't think I'd ever tied it to a human being. For me, hearing it from my room in Mr. Cozzens' hotel, it had always the air of an inner prompting, a stir of conscience, maybe. But conscience had kept me here for the remainder of the night, here in the North Barracks guardroom, briefing Captain Hitchcock and then writing down, as best I could, everything that had happened. Almost everything.
It was the last text I would ever give Hitchcock, and he received it with all due ceremony. Folded it in half and tucked it inside a leather pouch, to be forwarded in due time to Colonel Thayer. Then he gave me a slow grave nod, which was the closest he would ever come to saying, Well done. And with that, there was nothing left for me to do but go back to my hotel.
Except I had a question. Just one question, but it needed answering.
"It was Dr. Marquis, I suppose?"
Hitchcock gave me a look of civil blankness. "I don't follow you."
"The one who told you where we were. I'm guessing it was Dr. Marquis?"
He shook his head softly. "I'm afraid not. The good doctor was still sitting by the icehouse when we got there. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth, very little information."
"Then who... ?"
The tiniest of smiles crept over his face then. "Cesar," he answered.
Well, if I hadn't been so distracted at the time, maybe I'd have figured it out myself. I'd have wondered why a mess-hall steward was gadding about on the Plain at such a late hour. But would it have occurred to me that this same Cesar--so kindly, so courteous--was the agent who'd been tasked with following Artemus Marquis? That after tracking his quarry to the icehouse, and then seeing me and the doctor follow close behind, he'd take himself straight to the commandant and sound the alarm?
"Cesar," I said, chuckling and scratching my head. "My, but you're a deep one, Captain."
"Thank you," he replied, in that dry ironical way of his. But all the same, there was something rising in him, something not so ironical--demanding to be heard.
"Mr. Landor," he said at last.
"Yes, Captain."
He must have thought it would be easier to say it if he turned away, but it was still a torment.
"I wish to note that if--if the exigencies of this business have rendered me... which is to say, if I ever, out of intemperance, impugned your--your integrity, or your competence, then I'm--I'm very..."
"Thank you, Captain. I'm sorry, too."
Which was as far as we could go without fatally embarrassing ourselves. We nodded. We shook hands for the last time. We parted.
And I left the guardroom just in time to see that drummer beating the reveille. The first rumbles of life were coming from inside the barracks. Young men were tumbling out on hand and knee, kicking their bedding and seizing their uniforms. Beginning again.
** *
Mrs. Marquis, since leaving the icehouse, had taken the signal step of not retiring to her bed. The pressure of grief had forced her upright. She refused every offer of escort and wandered in and out of the assembly yard on missions held close to her bosom. So it was that a pair of third classmen, coming back from sentinel duty, were accosted by a hard-grinning woman in a gray monk's robe, who asked if they might help "raise her children." It would take just a minute, she assured them.
There was, in fact, no thought of recovering the bodies anytime soon. That would be a labor of days. And until then, there was other work to be done. Work, that was Dr. Marquis' answer to grief. In his last official act before submitting his resignation, he even bound the wounds of Cadet Fourth Classman Poe. Upon which he took the young man's pulse and declared that he'd lost no more blood than a physician would have drawn in the course of a normal bleeding. "Might have been the best thing for him," announced Dr. Marquis.
The doctor himself looked in excellent health. His face had never glowed so redly. Only once did I see it lose color: when he passed his own wife in the assembly yard. They shrank from each other, yes, but found each other, too. Their eyes met; their heads angled together as if they were old neighbors passing in the street. And in that crossing, I thought I could glimpse the future that lay in store for them. Not a brilliant future, no. Dr. Marquis' conduct would bar him from military postings, and though he might (in light of past service) escape courtmartial, the taint of his past would trail him even into the civilian world. They would never realize Mrs. Marquis' dream of returning to New York--they'd be lucky to find a practice on the Illinois frontier--but they would survive, and they would seldom if ever talk of their dead children, in public or in private, and they would treat each other with grave courtesy and would wait, with all manner of calm, for the closing of Life's account. So, at any rate, I imagined.
Poe was put to bed in Ward B-3, the same ward that had housed both Leroy Fry and Randolph Ballinger. In his normal cast of mind, he might have thrilled to the chance of communing with dead spirits--might even have been moved to scrawl a poem on the transmigration of souls-- but on this occasion, he fell dead asleep and didn't wake, I was later told, until halfway through afternoon recital.