Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (31 page)

THE MELUSINE (1898)

It will be obvious to anyone who’s read my story “Postcards from the King of Tides” that there’s significant reworking going on here, although I wasn’t aware I’d done it until years later. I suppose this story could be said to be a rationalist response to “Postcards from the King of Tides,” but, if so, it was my rational subconscious responding, which is odd as I tend to suspect my subconscious mind of being embarrassingly superstitious. Of my five Cherry Creek stories, this is my second favorite, after “The Steam Dancer (1896)”.

As Red as Red

1.

“So, you believe in vampires?” she asks, then takes another sip of her coffee and looks out at the rain pelting Thames Street beyond the café window. It’s been pissing rain for almost an hour, a cold, stinging shower on an overcast afternoon near the end of March, a bitter Newport afternoon that would have been equally at home in January or February. But at least it’s not pissing snow.

I put my own cup down – tea, not coffee – and stare across the booth at her for a moment or two before answering. “No,” I tell Abby Gladding. “But, quite clearly, those people in Exeter who saw to it that Mercy Brown’s body was exhumed, the ones who cut out her heart and burned it, clearly
they
believed in vampires. And that’s what I’m studying, the psychology behind that hysteria, behind the superstitions.”

“It was so long ago,” she replies and smiles. There’s no foreshadowing in that smile, not even in hindsight. It surely isn’t a predatory smile. There’s nothing malevolent, or hungry, or feral in the expression. She just watches the rain and smiles, as though something I’ve said amuses her.

“Not really,” I say, glancing down at my steaming cup. “Not so long ago as people might
like
to think. The Mercy Brown incident, that was in 1892, and the most recent case of purported vampirism in the Northeast I’ve been able to pin down dates from sometime in 1898, a mere hundred and eleven years ago.”

Her smile lingers, and she traces a circle in the condensation on the plate-glass window, then traces another circle inside it.

“We’re not so far removed from the villagers with their torches and pitchforks, from old Cotton Mather and his bunch. That’s what you’re saying.”

“Well, not exactly, but…” and when I trail off, she turns her head towards me, and her blue-grey eyes seem as cold as the low-slung sky above Newport. You could almost freeze to death in eyes like those, I think, and I take another sip of my lukewarm Earl Grey with lemon. Her eyes seem somehow brighter than they should in the dim light of the coffeehouse, so there’s your foreshadowing, I suppose, if you’re the sort who needs it.

“You’re pretty far from Exeter, Ms. Howard,” she says and takes another sip of her coffee. And me, I’m sitting here wishing we were talking about almost anything but Rhode Island vampires and the madness of crowds, tuberculosis and the Master’s thesis I’ll be defending at the end of May. It has been months since I’ve had anything even resembling a date, and I don’t want to squander the next half hour or so talking shop.

“I think I’ve turned up something interesting,” I tell her, because I can’t think of any subtle way to steer the conversation in another direction. “A case no one’s documented before, right here in Newport.”

She smiles that smile again.

“I got a tip from a folklorist up at Brown,” I say. “Seems like maybe there was an incident here in 1785 or thereabouts. If it checks out, I might be onto the oldest case of suspected vampirism resulting in an exhumation anywhere in New England. So, now I’m trying to verify the rumors. But there’s precious little to go on. Chasing vampires, it’s not like studying the Salem witch trials, where you have all those court records, the indictments and depositions and what have you. Instead, it’s necessary to spend a lot of time sifting and sorting fact from fiction, and, usually, there’s not much of either to work with.”

She nods, then glances back towards the big window and the rain. “Be a feather in your cap, though. If it’s not just a rumor, I mean.”

“Yes,” I reply. “Yes, it certainly would.”

And here, there’s an unsettling wave of not-quite déjà vu, something closer to dissociation, perhaps, and for a few dizzying seconds I feel as if I’m watching this conversation, a voyeur listening in, or as if I’m only remembering it, but in no way actually, presently, taking part in it. And, too, the coffeehouse and our talk and the rain outside seem no more concrete – no more
here and now
– than does the morning before. One day that might as well be the next, and it’s raining, either way.

I’m standing alone on Bowen’s Warf, staring out past the masts crowded into the marina at sleek white sailboats skimming over the glittering water, and there’s the silhouette of Goat Island, half hidden in the fog. I’m about to turn and walk back up the hill to Washington Square and the library, about to leave the gaudy Disney World concessions catering to the tastes of tourists and return to the comforting maze of ancient gabled houses lining winding, narrow streets. And that’s when I see her for the first time. She’s standing alone near the “seal safari” kiosk, staring at a faded sign, at black-and-white photographs of harbor seals with eyes like the puppies and little girls from those hideous Margaret Keane paintings. She’s wearing an old pea coat and shiny green galoshes that look new, but there’s nothing on her head, and she doesn’t have an umbrella. Her long black hair hangs wet and limp, and when she looks at me, it frames her pale face.

Then it passes, the blip or glitch in my psyche, and I’ve snapped back, into myself, into
this
present. I’m sitting across the booth from her once more, and the air smells almost oppressively of freshly roasted and freshly ground coffee beans.

“I’m sure it has a lot of secrets, this town,” she says, fixing me again with those blue-grey eyes and smiling that irreproachable smile of hers.

“Can’t swing a dead cat,” I say, and she laughs.

“Well, did it ever work?” Abby asks. “I mean, digging up the dead, desecrating their mortal remains to appease the living. Did it tend to do the trick?”

“No,” I reply. “Of course not. But that’s beside the point. People do strange things when they’re scared.”

And there’s more, mostly more questions from her about Colonial-era vampirism, Newport’s urban legends, and my research as a folklorist. I’m grateful that she’s kind or polite enough not to ask the usual “you mean people get paid to do this sort of thing” questions. Instead, she tells me a werewolf story dating back to the 1800’s, a local priest supposedly locked away in the Portsmouth Poor Asylum after he committed a particularly gruesome murder, how he was spared the gallows because people believed he was a werewolf and so not in control of his actions. She even tells me about seeing his nameless grave in a cemetery up in Middletown, his tombstone bearing the head of a wolf. And I’m polite enough not to tell her that I’ve heard this one before.

Finally, I notice that it’s stopped raining.

“I really ought to get back to work,” I say, and she nods and suggests that we should have dinner sometime soon. I agree, but we don’t set a date. She has my number, after all, so we can figure that out later. She also mentions a movie playing at Jane Pickens that she hasn’t seen and thinks I might enjoy. I leave her sitting there in the booth, in her pea coat and green galoshes, and she orders another cup of coffee as I’m exiting the café. On the way back to the library, I see a tree filled with noisy, cawing crows, and for some reason it reminds me of Abby Gladding.

2.

That was Monday, and there’s nothing the least bit remarkable about Tuesday. I make the commute from Providence to Newport, crossing the West Passage of Narragansett Bay to Conanicut Island, and then the East Passage to Aquidneck Island and Newport. Most of the day is spent at the Redwood Library and Athenaeum on Bellevue, shut away with my newspaper clippings and microfiche, with frail yellowed books that were printed before the Revolutionary War. I wear the white cotton gloves they give me for handling archival materials and make several pages of handwritten notes, pertaining primarily to the treatment of cases of consumption in Newport during the first two decades of the Eighteenth Century.

The library is open late on Tuesdays, and I don’t leave until sometime after seven p.m. But nothing I find gets me any nearer to confirming that a corpse believed to have belonged to a vampire was exhumed from the Common Burying Ground in 1785. On the long drive home, I try not to think about the fact that she hasn’t called, or my growing suspicion that she likely never will. I have a can of ravioli and a beer for dinner. I half watch something forgettable on television. I take a hot shower and brush my teeth. If there are any dreams – good, bad, or otherwise – they’re nothing I recall upon waking. The day is sunny, and not quite as cold, and I do my best to summon a few shoddy scraps of optimism, enough to get me out the door and into the car.

But by the time I reach the library in Newport, I’ve got a headache, what feels like the beginnings of a migraine, railroad spikes in both my eyes, and I’m wishing I’d stayed in bed. I find a comfortable seat in the Roderick Terry Reading Room, one of the armchairs upholstered with dark green leather, and leave my sunglasses on while I flip through books pulled randomly from the shelf on my right. Novels by William Kennedy and Elia Kazan, familiar, friendly books, but trying to focus on the words only makes my head hurt worse. I return
The Arrangement
to its slot on the shelf, and pick up something called
Thousand Cranes
by a Japanese author, Yasunari Kawbata. I’ve never heard of him, but the blurb on the back of the dust jacket assures me he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, and that he was the first Japanese author to receive it.

I don’t open the book, but I don’t reshelve it, either. It rests there in my lap, and I sit beneath the octagonal skylight with my eyes closed for a while. Five minutes maybe, maybe more, and the only sounds are muffled footsteps, the turning of pages, an old man clearing his throat, a passing police siren, one of the librarians at the front desk whispering a little more loudly than usual. Or maybe the migraine magnifies her voice and only makes it seem that way. In fact, all these small, unremarkable sounds seem magnified, if only by the quiet of the library.

When I open my eyes, I have to blink a few times to bring the room back into focus. So I don’t immediately notice the woman standing outside the window, looking in at me. Or only looking
in
, and I just happen to be in her line of sight. Maybe she’s looking at nothing in particular, or at the bronze statue of Pheidippides perched on its wooden pedestal. Perhaps she’s looking for someone else, someone who isn’t me. The window is on the opposite side of the library from where I’m sitting, forty feet or so away. But even at that distance, I’m almost certain that the pale face and lank black hair belong to Abby Gladding. I raise a hand, half waving to her, but if she sees me, she doesn’t acknowledge having seen me. She just stands there, perfectly still, staring in.

I get to my feet, and the copy of
Thousand Cranes
slides off my lap; the noise the book makes when it hits the floor is enough that a couple of people look up from their magazines and glare at me. I offer them an apologetic gesture – part shrug and part sheepish frown – and they shake their heads, almost in unison, and go back to reading. When I glance at the window again, the black-haired woman is no longer there. Suddenly, my headache is much worse (probably from standing so quickly, I think), and I feel a sudden, dizzying rush of adrenalin. No, it’s more than that. I feel afraid. My heart races, and my mouth has gone very dry. Any plans I might have harbored of going outside to see if the woman looking in actually was Abby vanish immediately, and I sit down again. If it was her, I reason, then she’ll come inside.

So I wait, and, very slowly, my pulse returns to its normal rhythm, but the adrenaline leaves me feeling jittery, and the pain behind my eyes doesn’t get any better. I pick the novel by Yasunari Kawbata up off the floor and place it back upon the shelf. Leaning over makes my head pound even worse, and I’m starting to feel nauseous. I consider going to the restrooms, near the circulation desk, but part of me is still afraid, for whatever reason, and it seems to be the part of me that controls my legs. I stay in the seat and wait for the woman from the window to walk into the Roderick Terry Reading Room. I wait for her to be Abby, and I expect to hear her green galoshes squeaking against the lacquered hardwood. She’ll say that she thought about calling, but then figured that I’d be in the library, so of course my phone would be switched off. She’ll say something about the weather, and she’ll want to know if I’m still up for dinner and the movie. I’ll tell her about the migraine, and maybe she’ll offer me Excedrin or Tylenol. Our hushed conversation will annoy someone, and he or she will shush us. We’ll laugh about it later on.

But Abby doesn’t appear, and so I sit for a while, gazing across the wide room at the window, a tree
outside
the window, at the houses lined up neat and tidy along Redwood Street. On Wednesday, the library is open until eight, but I leave as soon as I feel well enough to drive back to Providence.

3.

It’s Thursday, and I’m sitting in that same green armchair in the Terry Roderick Reading Room. It’s only 11:26 a.m., and already I understand that I’ve lost the day. I have no days to spare, but already I know that the research that I should get done today isn’t going to happen. Last night was too filled with uneasy dreaming, and this morning I can’t concentrate. It’s hard to think about anything but the nightmares and the face of Abby Gladding at the window, her blue eyes, her black hair. And yes, I have grown quite certain that it
was
her face I saw peering in and that she was peering in
at
me.

She hasn’t called (and I didn’t get her number, assuming she has one). An hour ago, I walked along the Newport waterfront looking for her, but to no avail. I stood a while beside the “seal safari” kiosk, hoping, irrationally I suppose, that she might turn up. I smoked a cigarette and stood there in the cold, watching the sunlight on the bay, listening to traffic and the wind and a giggling flock of grey seagulls. Just before I gave up and made my way back to the library, I noticed dog tracks in a muddy patch of ground near the kiosk. I thought that they seemed unusually large, and I couldn’t help but recall the café on Monday and Abby relating the story of the werewolf priest buried in Middletown. But lots of people in Newport have big dogs, and they walk them along the wharf.