Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (6 page)

So Magdalena was sent away, hurt and mortified.

So Magdalena fled the little church, and the churchyard, and lower Edmundston, tears streaking her cheeks.

Hearing, behind her, a pounding, reverberating silence like the waves of an invisible sea; a silence that beat against her eardrums like a great heartbeat, threatening to drown her. And beneath this silence the voice of the singer, not so strong as before, but as exquisite as ever.
Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh. Shadows of the evening…
And at the house on Charter Street, in the gathering dusk, she had to ring the bell (which was erratic, defective) for some minutes before grumbling Hannah came to unlock it, to let her, weeping, inside.

5.

"What—what is this thing! This encumbrance that is always with me!"

Suddenly in the midst of Magdalena reading the Ninety-sixth Psalm to her, Aunt Erica began slapping and pushing at her limp left arm with the clawlike fingers of her right hand. A fury seemed to seize her, like a flame passing over her frail, doll-like body; she began to cry in high-pitched angry sobs. Helge who had been knitting close by threw down her needles and hurried to her, as Magdalena, sitting on a stool by her aunt's divan, stared at the stricken woman in astonishment. Helge said, chiding, "Now, Mrs. Kistenmacher! Now you know what that is," and Aunt Erica cried, "I don't! I don't know!" and Helge said, "Yes, you do, Mrs. Kistenmacher. Say it: 'my arm,'" and Aunt Erica shrieked, “No." Using the strength of her right arm and legs, the elderly woman was trying desperately to push herself up the back of the divan, like a wounded, blindly flailing creature; her eyes bulged in their sockets. Magdalena watched in horror. What could she do? How could she help? Helge had seized Aunt Erica's right hand to calm it, and her; she placed the hand firmly on the left hand which hung useless at the invalid's side, in a way that suggested she'd done in the past. She said, "You see? This is your hand, too, Mrs. Kistenmacher. This is your arm, too. It is all you," and Aunt Erica whispered, "No! It is not," though ceasing her futile struggle, and Helge said, "You mustn't turn against yourself, Mrs. Kistenmacher. Dr. Meinke has told you."

For a moment it seemed that the elderly invalid had returned to her senses. She was panting, and staring at her left arm in its crocheted pink woolen sleeve; experimentally she released the left hand from her right hand, and leaned as far away on the divan as possible without losing her balance. Then her moist little rosebud mouth opened like a bird's beak and her good, right eye narrowed to a squint and as Magdalena and Helge looked on, helpless, she began to scream, and scream.

6.

Magdalena thought
He has sent me away, I must never approach him again
.

Magdalena thought
I failed him: he detests me.

Magdalena thought, sifting her shiny black rosary beads through her fingers,
God, give me strength not to approach him again. God, give me pride.

And so for days Magdalena obsessively barricaded the windows of her room against the gusty sunshine and tumult of spring. She made certain that the windows were shut tight, and locked; and the blinds drawn flush to the sills. During the day she avoided windows elsewhere in the house whenever possible and didn't dare go outside, even to walk about the grounds. At night she slept poorly, pillows pressed against her ears; though she could hear little beyond the anxious pulsing of her own blood, she imagined the singer's voice with unnerving clarity as if he were standing, not miles away in a deserted church, but just outside her bedroom door.
Now the day is over… Night is drawing…

Fiercely Magdalena whispered to herself, "No!"

§

The wind off the river was damp, chill, smelling of something brackish and metallic. Invisible grit was driven into Magdalena's face, stinging her eyes. How ugly the river looked, the color of molten lead, reflecting a heavy leaden sky. And the riverfront structures and boats, how shabby, derelict. Magdalena was hurrying across Merrimack Bridge, breathless and shivering. Despite the bridge traffic and the harsh lapping sounds of the river she could hear distinctly the young man singing, calling to her. It seemed he was singing with a renewed passion, or desperation. And had he not pleaded with her,
Will you help me, Magdalena?

This time, Magdalena was determined not to fail him.

Where are you going, child?
Aunt Erica had asked, playfully tapping Magdalena's arm.
Your thoughts are flying away from here, and where?
Magdalena had murmured, embarrassed, that she was going for a walk; just in the neighborhood; it was such a beautiful May afternoon (for so the weather had been beautiful, in the hilly district above Edmundston); she promised she wouldn't go far. And Aunt Erica had laughed, her good eye cold twinkling, saying
I don't go far, there's two of us.

And so Magdalena made her way along the rough riverfront streets, and into the older, deserted neighborhood, and to the old church at the top of a hill. She saw to her surprise that the churchyard was more overgrown and desolate than she recalled, as if a storm had swept violently through it. Dead tree limbs lay scattered amid the graves, smashed urns, numerous gravestones overturned, severely cracked. Beyond the stone wall where there should have been land, Magdalena saw, as before, an opaque wall of undulating mist, more oppressive than before as it seemed to be quivering with its own malevolent life. And beyond the mist was—the open sea? The great Atlantic Ocean that had so broken her parents, and others who'd made the crossing, that they never wished to see or speak of it again? Magdalena could see no water but believed she could hear, beyond the tenor's strained, hopeful voice, its forceful arrhythmic sound. Always, beyond the human voice, the sound of the great ocean.

And the shrill, cruel shrieks of the gulls overhead, always circling, lunging for their prey.

Another surprise awaited Magdalena at the rear of the church, for she saw that it was hardly a church at all any longer, but rather a ruin; mound of rubble; most of the roof had collapsed inward, and was covered in patches of moss. Yet there remained a narrow entranceway like the opening to a cave, hardly more than the size of a man of ordinary height, into the cobwebbed, shadowy interior. Still the singing continued. A pause, and coughing; quick panting; and again the singing.
Now the day is over… Night is drawing…
Magdalena trembled with excitement and dread—for what if the young man should banish her, again? At once? As soon as he saw her?
Shadows of the evening…
These notes were, to Magdalena's eager ear, as flawless as ever, of surpassing beauty.

She drew nearer to the entrance, and could make out the singer's figure, in approximately the same place as before, pacing about before a ruined altar, in and out of crevices of shadow black as pitch. His fists were clenched, his shoulders hunched with tension. Yet—there was something wrong with him. He was not so young now, nor so handsome. When he whirled at the sound of her footstep, scowling in Magdalena's direction while not seeming to see her, Magdalena realized to her horror that he'd grown skeletal; his face was wizened and sickly pale, as aged as her Aunt Erica's; his neck was emaciated, the ropy tendons and artery prominent. His eyes were narrowed to slits like those of a frightened, ferocious animal.
He doesn't know me!
Magdalena thought.
He doesn't see me.

Yet, and this was a truth Magdalena would recall for the remainder of her life, and would entrust to no one except, one day, many decades later, her granddaughter who loved her, she would have cast aside all her pride and fear, and gone to the singer, to present herself to him in any way he would accept her, if there hadn't suddenly stepped out of the shadows another figure—a queer stunted old-young woman, with a wizened monkeyish face, deft and solicitous, clearly compelled by adoration; this person came quickly to the singer as he leaned weakly against a broken pew, and wiped his oily-damp forehead with a cloth; and lifted a pitcher to his mouth, steadying his shaky hands so that he could drink. Ah, how thirsty he was! His emaciated chest rising and sinking with the effort of swallowing! And blind, empty, blank as an idiot's fixed stare, his beautiful eyes turned in Magdalena's direction.

The haglike woman was stroking the singer's thin hands, whispering words of praise and encouragement; he seemed to be listening, and his bloodless lips twitched in a sort of smile; at last he threw his head back proudly, his gray hair thin and straggly on his death's-head of a skull, and began another time to sing.
Now the day is over…
At first his voice quavered, for it was no longer a young man's voice; the ghastly tendons and artery in his throat grew taut; then by degrees his voice grew stronger, richer, as if drawing strength from the man's physical being, sucking life from his very soul. Magdalena recalled his mysterious words uttered not in pride nor certainly in protest but in simple resignation:
I must sing, I have no choice.

So singing now, as always:
Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh. Shadows of the evening… steal across the sky.

So for the second and final time Magdalena knew herself banished from this place, and fled too stricken with grief even to weep. A rising sea-wind snatched at her like crude, jeering fingers.

7.

"Please let me in! It's Magdalena!"

Desperately she rang the doorbell but there seemed to be no sound inside—was the doorbell broken? The afternoon had rapidly darkened to night and the house on Charter Street was darkened upstairs and down; Magdalena had been frantic trying to locate it in this neighborhood that, by night, she didn't recognize. She was exhausted from miles of walking, most of it uphill, on slippery wet cobblestones, beset by the wind. She pounded on the heavy oak door with her bare fists, frantic, sobbing like a terrified child. "Please! Let me in! It's Magdalena!" When at last the outdoor light was switched on she could see a woman's stern face at a vestibule window; it was Hannah staring at her without recognition. Magdalena's thick long hair had come undone from its neat coils on both sides of her head and was snarled and windblown; she was to discover afterward to her amazement that most of its fair, wheat-brown color had drained from it, as color drains from the world at the hour of a solar eclipse; her young face was lined and haggard, her clothes were disheveled, with a look of being torn. "Hannah, Hannah, please! Have mercy!" Magdalena begged.

At last, as if reluctantly, Hannah seemed to recognize Magdalena's voice, if not her face; she relented, and swung open the heavy oak door. "Miss Schön! I wouldn't have known you," she said, staring at the girl with wonder and sympathy.

"Yes, I found the place," said Arpad. "It's a queer sort of place, pretty much as the legends describe it." He spat quickly into the fire, as if speaking was distasteful to him, and, half-averting his face from the scrutiny of Tefere, he stared with morose and somber eyes into the jungle-matted Venezuelan darkness.

Tefere, still weak and dizzy from the fever that had incapacitated him, was curiously puzzled. Arpad, he thought, had undergone an inexplicable change during the three days of his absence; a change that was too elusive to be fully defined.

Others, however, were all too obvious. Arpad, even during extreme hardship or illness, had been irrepressibly cheerful. Now he seemed sullen, uncommunicative, and preoccupied. His face had grown hollow—even pointed—and his eyes had narrowed to secretive slits. Tefere was troubled by these changes; he tried to dismiss his impressions, putting them down to the influence of the ebbing fever.

"But can't you tell me what the place was like?" he persisted.

"There isn't much to tell" said Arpad, in a queer grumbling tone. "Just a few crumbling walls and falling pillars."

"But didn't you find the burial-pit of the Incan legend, where the gold was supposed to be?"

"I found it—but there was no treasure." Arpad's voice had taken on surliness and Tefere decided to refrain from further questioning.

"I guess," he commented lightly, "that we had better stick to orchid hunting. Treasure doesn't seem to be in our line. By the way, did you see any unusual flowers or plants during the trip?"

"Hell, no," Arpad snapped. His face had gone suddenly ashen in the firelight, and his eyes had assumed a set glare. "Shut up, can't you? I don't want to talk. I've had a headache all day; some damned Venezuelan fever coming on, I suppose. We'd better head for the Orinoco tomorrow. I've had all I want of this trip."'

Morgan Arpad and Marshal Tefere, professional orchid hunters, with two Amerindian guides, had been following an obscure tributary of the upper Orinoco. The country was rich in rare flowers, and beyond its floral wealth, they had been drawn by vague but persistent rumors among the local tribes concerning the existence of a ruined city somewhere on this tributary; a city that contained a burial pit in which vast treasures of gold, silver, and jewels had been interred together with the dead of some nameless people. The two men had thought it worthwhile to investigate these rumors. Tefere had fallen sick while they were still a full day's journey from the site of the ruins, and Arpad had gone on in a canoe with one of the guides, leaving the other to attend to Tefere. He had returned at nightfall of the third day following his departure.