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Authors: Scott Jäeger

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BOOK: Dreamlands
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“Served? 
Like on a boat you mean?
”  She looked at me suspiciously, as if she
may have to call for assistance.  “Your uncle’s never been to sea.  He’s always
lived right here in Arkham.  I know he loved to fill your head with stories,
but you, a grown man– You don’t think they were anything but stories, do you?”

I
wished to argue with her, from spite as much as anything else, but remained
mute.  She had introduced a doubt not easily refuted.

“Honestly,”
she said on her way out the door, “I wonder which one of you was the more addled. 
No wonder you got on so well.”

* * *

The
funeral was a lonely, rain swept affair.  Having been too distracted by grief (and
also my other problem) to be of assistance, I had left everything to Mrs.
Caddock, who spared all expense.  Other than the minister, the event was
attended by the housekeeper, the groundskeeper, and myself.  Georgine hadn’t been
seen since the evening of Uncles’ death.  I presumed she been run off by Mrs.
Caddock and had a vague impulse to do something about it, but to actually take
action seemed an insurmountable riddle.  Afterwards, I retreated to my uncle’s
study to sit brooding alone, a pastime that would in the days that followed become
my second most consuming habit.

A
shriek, fortuitously dulled by both opium and disinterest, sounded from somewhere
else in the house.  When Mrs. Caddock’s wide, colourless frame materialized
stage left, rivulets of tears were streaming down its homely face.  I couldn’t
have been more surprised if the painting of my great aunt had begun weeping.

“I
found out what the master’s ward has been up to, Mr. Sloan.  She’s run off with
our good silver service:  the table settings, the teapot, the whole thing.  Can
you believe it?”  Her hands anticipating her words, she said, “If I see her
again, I'll wring her pretty little neck!”

Judging
it to be the most aggravating possible response, I smiled dazedly up at her,
and otherwise did not move at all.  The old washerwoman herself was most likely
responsible for the silver taking its leave, but absent Georgine I could see no
point in accusing her.

Scorning
the rules governing time and its passage, the hours of that day stretched improbably. 
I lurched to and fro among my scattered memories, grasping for a purpose, but always
ending by staring into my empty hands.  The slack-springed hall clock was, twenty
minutes late, chiming the last hour of evening when my mind wandered around to
the incident of my burned arm.  I remembered the pain so intense I wished to
hold it to me but could not, and biting my cheek against the tears, so as not
to appear weak in front of my uncle.

I
remembered also that the fire which had slain my parents was at our house in
Boston.  My uncle and I had been over a hundred miles away, in Arkham.

* * *

I
don’t know how many days later, I came across a well-dressed man
circumnavigating
the drawing room.  At each open door he paused as if restrained from passing through
by some invisible barrier, squinting into the room beyond as if making an
inventory.  From the close relationship he maintained with his tailor, I
guessed him to be a lawyer.

“You’re
a lawyer,” I said.

“My
name is Duncan Simmons, Esquire,” he replied, “and you must be Isaac Sloan.  I
don’t believe we’ve met, but I was your uncle’s solicitor.  I have been
appointed to represent his estate.”

“Please
have a seat.”  We acquainted ourselves with two leather club chairs, I thinking
that sitting in this room might make a pleasant alternative to the study.

“Mr.
Sloan, as you’re no doubt aware your uncle, Eamon Sloan,” he specified, unnecessarily
I thought, “was in dire straits financially.  Really quite dire.  The Sloan estate
is carrying many outstanding debts, the details of which I’ve no doubt you will
find troubling.  First, I must ask:  since your uncle requested your presence
at his side not long before the night of his passing, did he mention any
valuables?  Jewelry perhaps, deeds to property, or cash?”

“If
only he had,” I said.  I had intended it in jest, or partly in jest at any
rate, but Mr. Simmons kept his lips fixed in a straight and humourless slash. 
He was that breed of man.

“That
is unfortunate, Mr. Sloan, and places me –both of us– in an embarrassing
position.”

I
nodded vaguely.

“The
estate is far in arrears, Mr. Sloan.  Debt,” he said at the end, to preclude
any misunderstanding.

“Debt,”
I said, nodding some more.  “Well.”  I had hoped that playing the fool would
discourage him from speaking his troubling details.  Mr. Simmons Esquire was,
sadly, not so easily discouraged.

* * *

The
next day I dismissed Mrs. Caddock, and although I declined to provide a written
reference, invited her to send prospective employers to stop by to hear my
opinion in person.  That one bright point past, I roamed the empty house like a
spectre, on occasion venturing into town to the pawnshop, where I exchanged
candlesticks and linens for cash while waiting on future visits from Mr.
Simmons.

Weeks
passed and my mood grew blacker as the news was delivered one bitter dram at a
time:  there was a significant lien against the house, a delinquent account of
over a thousand dollars at St. Mary’s, and an unpaid invoice for a leased automobile,
current whereabouts unknown.  If I lingered in Arkham much longer, not only
would I be forcibly removed from the premises, I might end up in court dodging the
family’s debts.

One
morning, couched in the fantastic soporific of Uncle’s favourite chair, I was
leafing through his atlas and discovered the page for Spain, marked with an
envelope.  Unable to locate Circo anywhere in the country, I tossed the book
aside, annoyed.  Perhaps his weird islands and scraps with pirates and moon
worshipers were, as Mrs. Caddock stated, so much fantasy.

Then,
I read the empty envelope.  The postmark was two years old, the return address 77
Wharf Street, Kingsport, Massachusetts, and the sender one G. Longbottom.

Kingsport

The
town of Kingsport is dominated by its towering central hill, upon the slopes of
which Colonial era houses perch cheek-and-jowl.  The bald head of this
prominence is crowned by the Congregational Church, which venerable entity
glowers disapprovingly down on the port and her inhabitants, where the Puritan values
of her founders have by this century been all but abandoned.

Simply
to look upon this protuberance was to feel weak in the knees, and it was a
palpable relief I did not need to climb it.  Hoisting again my all but empty
valise, I followed the stationmaster’s directions towards the harbour, where I had
wired ahead for accommodations.  It turned out to be less work to find the
place than it was to clear a circle in the greasy dust to sit down in my room,
but I consoled myself that the price of my lodgings was in keeping with their
quality.  After settling in, a process comprised of putting my bag down on the
bed, I resolved to regard the lack of comfort as an advantage, as it reinforced
my commitment to track down Mr. Longbottom posthaste.  When I enquired about the
Wharf Street address, the proprietor shuffled his feet and muttered that only
fishermen should have business by the docks, and thus I elected to find it
myself.

I
would be pressed to imagine a less welcoming sight than the grey fishing
vessels of Kingsport harbour, rocking hollowly in their births.  An
unseasonably cold wind darted into my cuffs and collar whenever the opportunity
presented, and the gloaming’s uncertain light made it seem wherever I glanced that
small creatures had in the previous instant flitted into cover.

Presently,
I arrived at 77 Wharf Street, a miserable clapboard structure that looked to
have lost a few fights to its brick brothers.  It didn’t appear to be a private
residence, but neither did any shingle announce it as a business.  Finding no
clues at the window, so begrimed it revealed nothing but a warm yellow light, I
knocked.  The door was opened immediately by a middle-aged man in a cook’s apron,
who regarded me with a sour squint.  The noise behind him suggested a
restaurant or similar gathering place.  He continued to watch me suspiciously
while I waited for some kind of greeting.  His patience won out.

“Are
you going to let me in?” I asked.

Before
he could make up his mind, I was shifted aside by another man who moved past
unchallenged.  At an almost imperceptible nod from this newcomer, the proprietor
waved me in impatiently, as if my dawdling on the stoop was putting him out.  With
a groan and a squeak, the door was secured again at my back.

Bo’sun
Longbottom’s address was a speakeasy, one of those secret establishments which
the federal prohibition against alcohol had made as rare as mice in a grain
silo.  I ordered a pint of bitter ale and sat at a table.  The predictable maritime
theme was in effect, featuring raddled nets, an anchor, and an assortment of scratched
brass fixtures.  The customers were each one dressed like fishermen, but none
so perfectly as he who had nodded over my shoulder at the door.  That gentleman
had the salt-stained look of a lifelong seaman, his cap made shapeless by wind
and wave, his homespun sweater fashioned more of holes than wool.  I half
expected barnacles were making their home beneath his white muttonchops.  I was
staring at him in fascination as I asked the passing barman, “I wonder if you were
acquainted with my uncle.  He was in the merchant marine, used to travel in
these parts.”

“No,
not at all,” he said gruffly, and started to move off, as if urgent business
called.

“Can
I tell you his name before you deny him?” I said sharply.  “It was Eamon Sloan.”

“No,
sir,” he said, and with the pretense of considering my question, “I’ve been
introduced to no such person.”

“What
about a sailor named Longbottom?” I said.  “He served alongside my uncle.  I
have a letter posted by him from this address.”

“I
know plenty of fat bottoms, but no Longbottoms.  This building was a lot of
things before the Volstead Act, maybe even the flop of some poor beggar name of
Longbottom.  Now I’ll thank you to leave me to my work.”

The
background murmuring had dropped off abruptly during our exchange, and I looked
from man to man, hoping to catch a reaction from some corner of the room, but they
carefully avoided my gaze.  Everyone but the whiskered old salt in the corner,
who lifted his chin the fraction of an inch.

I joined
him at his small, splintery table.  Two more ales soon followed me.  There was
no introduction, but I would thereafter think of him as
the Captain
.  I
sat and sipped my drink while he proceeded to clean, fill, and tamp an ornately
carved meerschaum pipe.  Having lit the beast, he tilted back on his chair and drew
one mighty draught.  More seconds passed as he expelled it, and finally spoke.

“You’re
no Kingsport man,” he observed flatly.  “I wonder what brings a young college
fellow to this fisherman’s tavern.  Have you come to see the church?  It’s one
of the oldest in New England, but if that’s what you’re looking for I think the
crooked streets have got you mixed up.”

I
let him smile for a moment at his joke.

“My
uncle brings me here,” I said.  “Eamon Sloan was his name, and he passed away a
month back.  He spoke to me on many occasions of a long career in the merchant
marine, but after his death the housekeeper, a woman in our family’s employ for
decades, denied him any seagoing history.  Not wanting to give her opinion too much
credit, I’ve come here to track down one of his sailor friends.”

“Sloan,
eh?” was the Captain’s response.  He puffed on his meerschaum, the air between
us thickening with cloying smoke.  I stifled a yawn, thinking I could have used
a night’s sleep before undertaking my search.  “This uncle of yours called
Kingsport his home?”

After
first assembling the thought, it took me a minute or more to herd the relevant words,
like so many errant sheep, into order.

“No
he didn’t, but I found this in his effects.”  I fumblingly produced the
tattered envelope.  The hands of a belly dancer writhed in the effluvium of the
Captain’s pipe.  “It’s from a G. Longbottom, and lists 77 Wharf Street as his
home.” 

“The
life of a sailor is harsh and perilous,” he said, the words falling as if
whispered into my ear.  “A few men live it because they are suited for nothing
else, the sea-born romantics.  But most do it because the other choices are
harder yet:  prison, the gallows, or some messier death.  That is why Elias,” gesturing
at the bartender, “is so close lipped about our friend Longbottom.”

The
Captain’s face seemed to be lit up, while the room and everything else remained
dim, and though he spoke plainly enough, my understanding followed reluctantly.

“However,”
he continued, “the bo’sun is not in hiding.  If he wishes to speak to you, he
will make himself known.”

I
breathed deeply of the sweet smoke one last time and said my goodbyes.  I felt
as though I were cocooned in cotton batting, weaving and bumping through the narrowly
spaced tables like a sailing ship traversing dangerous shoals.  In this fashion
I eventually found the exit.

Once
through, however, I stepped not on the grubby lanes of Kingsport, but through a
cloud of moths, their softer-than-silk wings brushing my forehead, lips and, beneath
the fabric of my clothes, skin.  When the soundless wingbeats ceased, I opened
my eyes to a sun on the cusp of setting.

I stood
on a limestone pier in a foreign harbour.  In the fading light garishly painted
wooden ships rolled on magenta waves.  Fishmongers, labourers and fat merchants
marched past, and candlemakers, cloth sellers and scruffy indigents parleyed in
unfamiliar tongues.

The
scene was outlandish, but for reasons beyond my comprehension I felt full of a
peace which in waking life I had never attained.

* * *

I
woke back in the decrepit Kingsport apartment, the scene resonant in my mind. 
Beside my impressions of a walled city in a warm, maybe Mediterranean, climate,
and the gentle motion of the sea, I remembered this:  a dark-eyed girl stopping
in the middle of her work to dance in the cobbled street.  To someone raised in
a wealthy New England family, this was no less stunning than an unscheduled
eclipse.

The
landlord later revealed, with the special contempt of a man near the bottom of
the social ladder, yet crucially two rungs above me, that Elias has assisted me
to my room late the previous evening.

As
it was too early to return to the speakeasy, I resumed my other quest, the
procurement of narcotics.  I engaged a man whose presence on a corner declared
him to be unemployed, and for the cost of a dollar purchased directions to the
local opium den.

In
the low-ceilinged basement of a haberdashery, a Chinese gentleman kept my pipe
filled and lit that morning and afternoon while I reclined on an American-made
Persian rug.  Smoking had never been my preferred indulgence, and though the
pipe deadened my need, it did nothing to chase away the images of the weird harbour
I had visited the night before.  Unsatisfied, I ascended the listing staircase
back to the street, where I saw the day had waned enough for a return to the
alehouse.

The
haze of opium in my mind and tobacco smoke in the air made an unsteady panorama
of Elias’s tavern, and in my skull a mallet thumped in time with the cries of
the Saturday night crowd.  Ordering an ale at the bar, I promptly spilled it on
my shoes, a seemingly unbearable injustice.  I pivoted on one heel to bellow at
the room:

“Has
anyone here been to Circo, on the Andalusian coast?”

After
a brief lull in the noise, some wag replied, “Yes, I’m out that way in my
fishing smack every Tuesday.”

“Didn’t
any of you sail in the merchant marine with Eamon Sloan,” I jabbered on, “or
fight in the Spanish-American war?  Any pirate killers in here?”

The
laughter this time was general and enthusiastic, with competing calls to throw
me out and to furnish me another drink.

“Wait,”
I cried, either to be heard or to calm the disordered thoughts buzzing about my
brain.  “What about a Captain Bromm?”

At
this, the various
hurhurhurs
fell away.  An isolated laugh started to
bubble up in an attempt to revive the good humour, but petered out hopelessly.

“Captain
Bromm has been dead for ten years,” a fisherman called out soberly, “but speak
ill of him here and you’ll meet him sooner than you’d like.”

A
discontented rustle circled the room as men shifted in their chairs, uncertain
if their pride had been challenged or not.  When one of their number stood from
a stool at the back, the name
Longbottom
was murmured in response.  The
man was not, as I had expected, the crusty old man with the fragrant pipe,
simply another fisherman, short, wide, and a little older than his peers.

“All
right now,” he said, brushing away the tension with one hand.  “Stand down. 
The young man didn’t come all the way from Arkham to brawl with a bunch of
broken-down drunks.”

He
pointed for me to meet him at the door.

“I’m
done for the night, son,” he said when we were close enough to speak.  “Do an
old man a favour and walk me back to my bunk, so’s I don’t stumble off the pier
on the way.”

Once
we were outside he said, “The redoubtable Master Sloan, in the flesh.  It has
been many a year.”

After
taking inventory of my form, he headed east along the docks and I followed.  What
I at first took for a sailor’s rolling gait was actually a pronounced limp.  I
had been searching for some evidence of a career at sea, though excepting a
tattoo of an anchor I had no idea what that would be.

“You
were friends with my uncle,” I said, grasping the fateful envelope in my hand
like a talisman.

“Your
Uncle Eamon and I were more like brothers.  If I had known he was so ill,
I would have made the trip to Arkham.  But you talk as if you don’t remember me. 
We met at the estate when you were still a boy.”

I
shook my head, doubting I would forget such a figure, however many years had
passed.

“Perhaps
it’s best if you don’t remember,” he said.  “The last time was right around when
your parents passed.”

Opening
and closing my left hand, I felt the tug where dead tissue resisted living
tendon.  “What do you know about the fire?”  

“That
it was a tragedy,” he replied curtly, shrugging himself deeper into his pea
coat, “an accident.”

“You’re
certain of that?”

“Must’ve
been,” he said, more to himself than to me.  “A servant forgot to douse a lamp
one evening, left it too close to the curtains in the front room.  The same woman
died in the fire, so it’s safe to say it began and ended with her.”

This
news hung in the air between us awhile, and I pushed on.

“Eamon
told me about your adventures in the merchant marine.  He spent his last night spinning
tales of pirates and storms and wrecks.  I expect it was heavily embellished,
but was any part of it true?”

“Yes,
he would have stories to tell.”  Longbottom laughed straight from the belly.  “What
a couple of rovers we were.  And to answer your question from Elias’s, yes, we
killed pirates.  Of course they laughed at you in there.  Those fishermen were
born into a world of comfort and order.  The biggest upset they’ve ever had was
trout with their chips instead of cod.”

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