A Ghost Story for Hallowe'en: Milverton's Eyes
A couple relocates to a new town and a new apartment. They love the history of their old neighborhood, though their downstairs neighbor tends to give them the chills with his long, speechless stares. After people begin disappearing from the building, they become suspicious that he may be involved, but it is the naked, crawling thing in their stairwell that really tips them off.
M I L V E R T O N ' S E Y E S
I.
Time-Haunted Madison
THOSE of you who know me personally – who know me well – know that my wife and I lived together for a year and a half before our marriage in a town that neither of us had been to before, or had any connection to whatsoever. It is true that I later learned that an aunt of my father’s had lived there – not three blocks from our apartment – for years, and that my grandparents had visited them there often, but I wasn’t aware of this until I had been installed in the area for several months. To us it was a strange place: a quaint port town on the Indiana side of the Ohio River, snuggly slumbering between Louisville to the west and Cincinnati to the east, with dozens of miles of green hills and shaggy woodlands between them. The River spilled its way westward towards the Mississippi – and hence to the Gulf and the Atlantic – all beneath our watch. And we had a lovely vantage point to view it. But before I get to the apartment at 512 East Main Street, or to our neighbor below and what we suspected of him, I had better begin at an early point in these memories.
My wife and I drove down to the town – a four hour trek from the area we were then living in – on a rainy afternoon in either March or April. The drive was a disappointingly unremarkable one, crossing through featureless soy bean fields and towns whose gas stations and boarded-up Main Streets were the only memorable features. Three or four times we drove into hilly terrain where the highway wove dangerously around flinty hillocks and under moss-drenched overpasses, but for the most part we filled our time straining the radio’s tenuous grip on NPR stations which would perennially fall out of reach to be lost in a sea of gospel, country, and hissing static. The rain grew heavier as we drove further south, until we were surrounded on all sides by a flashing white halo that blocked our sight, leaving only the walls of water that passed by us like a series of large white veils being pulled back and forth and up and down.
Out of that floating water we could dimly see two grey towers that pulled into focus as we neared them, and then we were between them; between two massive walls of stone and earth as the road cut between them and dove downwards. The highway spun in loose tendrils, weaving around piles of stone and walls of brown rock, curving delicately as if trying not to be noticed by the great formations that peered at this new and unwanted innovation. The car seemed small and I felt as though it was now of little protection should a rock overhead suddenly give way as the road signs warned they did. We sped out of the cliffs’ shadows, past broad, weedy hillsides that swelled up like the backs of great whales encrusted with barnacles and slimy with algae. And then there were houses: unlit trailers from the eighties, small single-storied shacks from the fifties, and unpainted farmsteads from before the First World War. A Catholic graveyard loomed to the right, fenced in by stone walls and overshadowed by the jaw of a thorn-infested peak. It was in plain view with its grass clipped diligently and an whole acre untenanted by the dead, but even now I remember how old the stones were, how forgotten they seemed, almost as if someone had begun the project and suddenly thought better of it, leaving a relic of ambition and futility ironically uncompleted.
We drove over a bridge which spanned one of the black, silent tongue of Crooked Creek, which slithered its way out of the Ohio River’s embrace and disappeared in the shadows of the woodlands and flintrock. We entered the town just as the clouds seemed to float off across the river into Kentucky, and for a moment we saw the sun glint boastfully between two shifting piles of vapor. It cast a brassy glow over a Main Street which surely looked little different now than it had at the beginning of the previous century. To the west the businesses had taken up camp in two or three story Victorian-era flat-tops, whose bricks were bleached by decades of sun, snow, and rain. At the center was the city hall, a Federal Era building, boasting a discolored Civil War monument clawing defiantly at the shifting fog, with a cannonball from the Siege of Vicksburg nestled proudly at its base. To the east were a long series of houses, duplexes, churches, and apartment complexes. Here and there were some modern innovations, but most of them were the product of the Victorian and Antebellum Eras. Fresh reports from Custer’s defeat in Montana had been read on these porches. The looming ramifications of Lincoln’s assassination had been discussed in these shuttered rooms. Slaves had dragged themselves from the water and pressed their wet bodies against these dry bricks as they evaded bounty hunters.
My wife successfully interviewed for the job that she had been offered, and in a month we drove back into town and selected our first shared home. The sky was white with heat, and steam saturated the air and buildings and pavement. The sun loomed triumphantly over the courthouse as we pulled into the city’s chief intersection and turned east. The apartment we had selected was only three blocks away: the penthouse of 512 East Main Street. There are times when I wake up in the middle night and I momentarily forget all the history that has marched on since then; times when I am back at Apartment Six, when I look up and see the old, warped windows letting in the orange glimmer of the old streetlamps, and expect to feel the old, bowing floorboards on my bare feet. But I don’t set foot out of my bed, not until I remember that we live four hours away and that I will never have to dream in that building again. But the impression is a strong one, and my wife complains that I wake her up every now and then with a stifled gasp. I rarely remember these episodes, but when I do, the emotional impact is galvanizing.
Apartment Six occupied the entire fourth floor of a four floor Victorian building. It was constructed in a year when France was at war with Prussia and President Grant was serving his first term. The floors below us were carved up into smaller apartments that were tenanted by affluent, middle-aged couples including an Egyptian surgeon, a banker, and several retirees with multiple properties who lived in the building seasonally. We didn’t have trouble bidding for the residence, and I remember thinking that although the condominium was popular with wealthy professionals, we must have had an advantage because the climb – some forty-six steps in total – had frightened away prospective tenants. This is what I believed, for the apartment that we took was the crown jewel of the complex: a studio apartment of over 1,900 square feet surrounded on all sides by double casement windows that brought in air during the summer and light during the winter. The bedroom – which featured a vast, built in wardrobe and an en-suite – was easily made private by closing two ten-foot tall French doors. Hardwood floors spanned the entire apartment, a comfortable laundry room doubled as guest quarters and a library, and one of the casements opened out onto a section of roof which afforded one of the most remarkable landscapes of hills, spires, and river. During the summer months I used to climb through that window with a folding chair and some small means of entertainment – a book, a cigar, a chilled porter – and enjoy what felt like the apex of my life.
The third floor was split into two apartments which shared a landing with us. Walking up the first seventeen steps brought you to the six by six platform, and turning around to the right brought you to a locked, glass-panelled door which opened into our stairwell, which – upon turning once more to the right – brought you to another flight which led to our living room. If, however, you stopped before turning right, there were two other doors which opened into two other apartments. To the left was Apartment Four. This was where Susan lived. We saw little of her, but much of her cleaning lady, a middle-aged woman named Ellen. When Ellen would mount the stairs our cat would discontinue whatever he was currently occupied with, scuttle down the steps, and watch her through the glass door. Although Susan seemed to be homebound, Ellen was chipper and friendly, and we knew more about her than the woman who actually owned the apartment. This was, as I said, the door to the left. Apartment Five was the door straight ahead which was visible from the foot of the stairs. This is where the person we called Milverton lived.
I say called because we never learned what he called himself. He never said and we never cared. Milverton’s apartment stretched out below our bedroom and bathroom, and his living space appeared to be directly below our bed. We named Milverton after the Sherlock Holmes character of the same name: a greedy, socially awkward parasite who resembled our Milverton in personality and appearance alike. Our neighbor was a short, squat man advancing past middle age. His head was round and soft-looking, with flabby cheeks and bulging grey eyes set wide apart from a pug nose. These eyes were the dominant feature of his face: two colorless irises set in two yellowed eyeballs like black marbles pressed into animal fat. He was horrendously farsighted, I am sure, for his round glasses seemed to double their natural size, which was awful to see for they leered constantly. I never seem to remember looking at him without seeing that his eyes had first been levelled at me. They pried and wondered in a way that I found indescribably off putting for a man of his age.
Milverton’s apartment, by the nature of its location, always loomed over me when I came home from work and began the ascent up our antique stairway, and even before I knew him I felt that something about it was off – not quite right. It didn’t matter if you had measured the door jambs or taken a picture of it to compare with our corresponding door, his always seemed – not quite larger, but incorrect, out of alignment with the general mood and symmetry of the rest of the apartments. It was externally identical to Apartment Four. It featured a white wooden door some seven feet tall with ornate Victorian trim; the brass door handle and plate that had been blackened by use, with just the faintest smears of yellow in the untouched corners and crevasses. Overhead was a rectangular transom that would have admitted a view inside his rooms had it not been patched over on the inside by purple construction paper (which I suspected of having originally been black before it was faded by time). Outside the door was a shaggy welcome mat scored by two grey streaks that almost certainly matched his toddling gait; in floral, grandmotherly script it announced “Welcome In!” to passersby. It seemed that very few people accepted the offer, for the floor boards were thin, and while I could hear him watching television, blowing his nose, coughing, and cooking, I never seemed to hear another human voice – not even him talking into a telephone.
II.
The Vaccum of His Gaze
I first saw Milverton while we were moving in. Her parents had travelled with us and we had formed a human chain in order to swiftly move boxes from the truck into our third story apartment. A box left from the trailer, met me at the foot of the first flight, where I would carry it up to the second, where my wife would collect and deposit it. In spite of the great load of boxes I found that the chore was curiously lonely. A box would be thrust into my hands every three minutes without a word or glance, and I would walk it up the stairs and return to my post in the same manner. We had possibly gone through six boxes of cookware and knick-knacks before I noticed that the door at the top of the stairs had opened. Behind it was a red wall which successfully obscured any view of the interior. There was nothing hanging from it – pictures, key-catchers, coat hooks – and indeed this was the only feature that I could see: a wall painted dark crimson, like an overripe strawberry. In front of the wall but behind the door was the little man with his round, bald head and his unblinking eyes. My first impression was one of embarrassment: clearly we were upsetting our neighbors before we had even met them. But then I looked closer at him. The expression I had taken for annoyance was actually entirely neutral – blank, like the face of a lethargic toad watching something that had the potential to upset his stupor but had so far proven nothing other than a vapid curiosity. And if Milverton had any emotion whatsoever, that emotion was curiosity. But not like an imaginative child or an excitable puppy or even a prowling cat. It was like the curiosity of a man who watches two people converse in a foreign language that he has never heard and never wishes to learn. The distinct impression was that he saw me as a quaint curiosity; not a young, noisy threat to his comfortable retirement; not a potential friend; not a nice young man with a pretty girlfriend who would bring some life into the elderly population; but a strange and inconceivable oddity. I made eye contact with him in the first moment that I realized he was standing in the doorway, but broke off without a word, because there was no question or salutation in his expression.
This is a strange thing to describe because usually it is an unspoken code of human beings that our glances speak for us: they say “Can I help?” and “Oh, hi there! I’m kind of shy but it’s nice to see new neighbors” or “Great… another young brat to make a lot of ruckus. I’d thank you to keep the noise down, and no parties after eight; I have my stories at seven and then it’s off to bed.” But his face made no such declaration: those glassy black balls just sat in his fat head without blinking or breaking their aim at me.
Suddenly there was a box. I took it and turned. Now in most stories like this that I have heard of or read about this is the point where he would have vanished and shut the door. But I looked up and realized that I had the excessively distasteful task of climbing the stairs towards the unblinking toad on the landing. I smiled thinly once or twice at him to make sure that the awkward energy between us was as one-sided as I could manage, but for the most part I kept my eyes down and trudged up the steps, watching the worn and warped brown steps and the off-white, scuff-mottled rises that separated them. I was half way there. Look up. Still standing. Watching. Look down. Step. Step. Step. I will sigh exasperatedly as if the load is heavy to fill the silence. Step. Step. Step. Three quarters. Look up. With five steps to go I had hoped that he would either walk in front of the door or walk behind it – either announce himself or retire inside. But as I climbed onto the penultimate step, I felt my pulse palpably thud in my ear drum when I saw him step aside and open his door wider, never breaking his googling stare. Had I been more dazed by the action, I might have accepted his mute invitation and walked straight off of the landing and into the waiting apartment. But no, surely not. It was the lunacy of the gesture – that by simply holding open a door and stepping back you could coax a complete stranger to change their intended course and make themselves at home. It was an outrageous offer, but it stunned me, and a small part of my mind wanted to obey the expressionless command to leave my wife and her parents and to enter his territory, but I denied the existence of such a daft impulse and turned the corner sharply. Entering our apartment and turning once again to mount the stairs on our landing, I occaisioned to see him once again: black eyes made wet and bubbly behind his glasses, still fixed on me.
By the time I had deposited the box and descended onto the shared landing, the story seemed over: the door was shut and nothing except for the “Welcome In!” mat was left to remind me of the encounter. And indeed we saw nothing of Milverton for the remainder of the month. My wife had still yet to meet him, and as much as I dreaded walking up the steps when I came home from teaching night classes, I rarely thought of him outside of those lonely ascents. We didn’t see a thing of him until one Saturday morning during that same blistering summer on the Ohio River. The steam clung to everything, and the heat bled through walls and leaked through the roof so that our air conditioning had given out the previous afternoon leaving us to suffer through the night. I couldn’t sleep because of the humidity, so at four in the morning I decided to take a cold shower. The water stung in my face and hair, but it felt delicious on my skin, and I drank from it until I felt full of cool water. Turning the tap off I toweled the water from my feet and legs, but let the moisture dew on my torso in hopes of relieving the miserable temperature. Walking out of the bathroom, through the bedroom, en route to the living room, I caught a glimpse of bright yellow. It startled me because the room was deep blue, and only a few windows glinted with the dusky orange of street lamps. This light was foreign to me and unaccounted for. I walked towards it and realized that it came from the bedroom floor, where it perfectly outlined half of one of the floorboards: two long silvery bands of parallel light, and a short stroke connecting them at the top. It horrified me to think that our floors were as thin as that, and without stopping to plot out the condo layout, I paused to wonder whose light that might be. Curious, I stooped to the floor and peered into the crack. Now, I might have expected to find a perfect peephole through which I could spy on Milverton and witness his direful deeds, but the truth of the matter was that his ceiling must have had a tile loose and that light must be pouring through this and illuminating the cavity between our floor and his ceiling, for all I saw was the back of a tile. I had still not done the mental work of figuring out which apartment would be below the bedroom – we had heard the nose blowing, the TV blaring, the coughs coughing and the cooking clinking, but none of this named the originator – and so I gave it no other thought. I made a sandwich, read some stories, and went to bed exhausted.
As I said, it was in the morning that we saw Milverton again. We left early to spend the day with a friend who had air conditioning while ours was being repaired. Having left our many windows open to air out the steam and musk, we tramped down the stairs and hurriedly unlocked the door. Through the glass panels I saw a figure bent over the “Welcome In!” mat, adjusting it with serious attention. To my wife it was just a round, bald man in his fifties, but I suddenly felt an impulse to turn her around and return up our stairs where we would suffer in peace. But the bolt was thrown and the knob turned and now the door opened, and in a single, twisting motion, Milverton had turned around and was eyeing me from behind his magnifying glasses. This time a smile played on his lips like a breeze that brushes across a pond in regular pulses.
“You’re the young folks upstairs, huh?”
His voice was unremarkable: neither creaky, nor oaky, high nor deep, garbled nor clear. It was a voice. A man’s voice, but entirely without feature or personality or accent.
“Yeah,” I said, pushing my wife along she had stopped to talk. “That’s us. I think I saw you when we were moving in.”
I wanted to simply leave things at that and spill down the stairs, but I knew that polite society required that I give him the chance to respond before clipping him off. But he surprised me.
“Don’t shower at night, guys,” he said without inflection. He stepped into my path and righted himself. Now we were facing one another squarely. “I heard you. Can you not do that? I think you can. There’s no need for it, and it bothers me, guys.”
“I’m sorry if I woke you up; I didn’t realize you could hear—"
“I didn’t say you woke me up. I asked you not to shower at night. That’s all. You should be in bed, anyway. Sleep at night. That’s what you do.”
Here he nodded slowly without breaking his gaze. There was something in it now, something alive, where before there had only been wooden death. It was like an ember had been lit in a dark room, and now for all the darkness this one red light had tainted everything around it with its murky personality. It was dark, but something was there, and it felt like hate. I don’t really remember what I said other than to say it was a loud, frantic combination of laughs, apologies, promises, and farewells as I attempted to placate him into letting us go.
I don’t know why I had any impression that he wouldn’t, but that feeling was strong, and I was strangely relieved when I managed to slip under his nose and pull my wife out with me – down the stairs and out the door. He was not there when we returned to the apartment and the repaired air conditioner.
III.
"Sometimes I Think He'll Get Me"
The months built on top of each other like bricks reaching towards a planned conclusion, and while we rarely saw or heard of Milverton, I was still tense whenever we would leave our apartment or return to it – always anticipating the sight of his open door. In the meantime we settled into our new town, found restaurants that we favored, learned where the bookstore lived, and became familiar with the riverside. One day we were leaving the frozen yogurt shop when I noticed that the shop next door sold historical artifacts and replicas, mostly from the Civil War – oil lamps, muskets, hand-cranked sewing machines, old dress forms. I went inside and emerged with a replica saber. It wasn’t sharpened, but it only cost fifty dollars. Such was the character of our new residence: yogurt stores and antique shops, electric cars and horse-drawn buggies, replicas and artifacts. The town seemed formed out of two parts, one buzzing and humming with modernity – hot dog carts, indie rock concerts, and camera-toting tourists – and another – lower, beneath it all, under everything – that exuded unconquerable antiquity. Sometimes when I would walk home from the little market in our neighborhood, especially when the afternoon had waned and the sky was deep pink and the shadows deep purple, I had a sense that if I turned a corner sharply enough I would find myself in a previous century. The neighborhoods by the river were densely populated with old Antebellum storefronts and Federal Era brick houses, separated at intervals by modern bungalows and four-squares, as if two rival gangs were innocuously moving around each other in silent but understanding preparation for an inevitable battle. The modern houses were cheery and optimistic, but they seemed small and pointless next to their ponderous brick neighbors. After dark it would not have surprised me to find the alleys and courtyards sheltering tall shadows wearing slouch hats and flat caps, smoking long, thin cigars, and thumping on the cobble stones in hobnailed boots. I often had this mental image when I was hurrying home at twilight, although in my mind’s eye the faces were always washed away by unnaturally permanent shadows, like the blackening of progressive decomposition.
We had been in town for a year when one day I came down the stairs to find the cat pawing frantically at our glass door to the landing. I heard his paws smacking against the panes like erasers being drummed on desktops, and saw the white flash of his tail as he clamored back and forth, swatting and calling out in eager howls. I was nervous to descend the stairs, but decided that if Milverton was causing his antics I would simply grab the cat and stay inside. For whatever reason I didn’t like the idea of our cat looking at Milverton anymore than I liked the idea of Milverton looking at me. But when I came downstairs I saw that Ellen was tapping on the glass, and my nerves relaxed into amusement. She jumped a little when she saw me, but I smiled and opened the door. Would she like to pet him? Only if it was okay with me, but of course it was. As I mentioned, the cleaning lady for Apartment Four had nurtured a strange little friendship with our typically antisocial pet, and I knew that she had never actually been able to rub his head or chin in spite of their daily ritual. She said that she was just leaving from her work at the apartment, so I invited her in and offered her some coffee while she sat with the cat on our entryway bench. I went upstairs to get a couple of mugs and returned to the landing to find her glaring through the door. She didn’t break her gaze when I came down the stairs, or when I reached the bottom. Looking over my shoulder I saw Milverton shuffle lethargically through his door. The red t-shirt he wore was dark with sweat and clung tightly to his corpulent frame. He closed the door, but not before exchanging a venomous glance with my guest: I know that it was the light flashing on his glasses, but the piggish eyes that they magnified seemed to blaze with unnatural power. But the door was now closed and he was now gone.
“He’s a weird one,” she said.
I was tremendously relieved to hear the subject being broached. As much as Milverton featured in our lives, there was no one to share in my disgust. The president of the condo was a respectful Coptic surgeon who was too introverted and too well-bred to indulge my commentary on our neighbor, and the other tenants never seemed to be interested in condo gossip. My wife was unsettled by the uncanny way that he seemed to materialize when we were shopping at the Kroger – he would suddenly be staring at us from the middle of an aisle that had seconds early been empty – or walking down the side streets, but she saw him as little more than a bizarre phenomenon, more of an oddity than a threat. But in Ellen’s voice and face I read hate, and I jumped at the opportunity to compare notes.
“He is isn’t he? Listen, do you know his name? We just call him Milverton here, and no one else here calls him anything besides ‘the guy in five.’”
She shook her head, her eyes still locked on the closed door with its age-blackened handle.
“I don’t know. Maybe you’ve noticed that he doesn’t get mail?”
“I don’t remember seeing anything in his box – not even junk mail, yes.”
“It’s weird, that’s the only word for it.”
“How long has he been here, do you know?”
“I started work here twelve years ago and he was here then.”
“Twelve years? Really? And no mail, no name? I mean, surely we could ask,” and here I said the name of the condo president.
“Oh him? He doesn’t know,” she said bitterly. “He owns the apartment, and he did before anyone here lived in this building. What I’ve heard is that he bought it with cash back when that wasn’t as rare, and that he’s paid for everything he needs with cash.”
“But there’s his license plate. Maybe that would clear it up.”
“It could, but knowing his name won’t be enough to understand what he is. Sure he pays taxes and has a driver’s license and a social security card – I assume he does anyway. But it’s not who he is; it’s what he is that I don’t like. There’s something old about him. Old and poisonous, like those toads that kill dogs who try to eat them because they’re dripping with the stuff – every day, every night, its oozing from their backs and out of their eyes: poison that could knock a grown man to his knees and into his grave.”
I followed her gaze which still hovered nervously around his door jambs. Our cat was playfully cycling from the floor where he wove devotedly around her legs onto the bench where he rubbed his face into her hand which was frozen in space, outstretched and limp.
“Do you know anything about him personally?” I asked, hoping to fill the vapid silence that had settled on us after the last word she had spoken.
“No, no I don’t. Only that he hasn’t changed once in twelve years. His clothes are sometimes newer. He used to wear jeans and a polo before he started wearing t-shirts and khaki shorts. But his face – that damned frog face of his hasn’t changed. He is no bigger or smaller, no greyer or darker. The same as if he was a photograph in a frame. But he moves around, though, and it isn’t right for photographs to move.” She was talking to herself now, and her narrowed eyes told me that she was thinking very hard. The last phrase floated off her lips in a slow, half-whispered conclusion.
“Sometimes I think he’ll get me.”
I had been lost myself in a meta reverie as I pondered Ellen’s reverie, and was jolted back to myself by the strangeness of her words.
“Get you?”
“He wants company, you know? You feel it, too, yes? Not company, maybe so much as collection. Not that I know what he keeps in that apartment, but there’s – there’s almost a sense that he will leave the door open, and – and you know the feeling? It’s as if it’s an afterthought, but still a desire, like a little boy who casually leaves a mousetrap in an attic and checks on it from time to time: he doesn’t put them everywhere, and he doesn’t hunt mice with a pellet gun, but he changes the cheese every week, and even though he spends his time playing in the fields and climbing trees, each night he checks the trap, and nothing would make his night more than to come up there one evening to find that some rodent has finally taken the bait – some stiff-backed, open-mouthed thing with its spine shattered and its body hard with death. And to think what he would do with it… What would a boy like that do with a mouse? No parent wants to have such a boy – a morbid little bastard who plays in the woods by himself and comes home with odd smells on his clothes and mud on his hands, who reads books about genocides and crematoriums and executions alone in his bed with the door closed, who makes dogs bark when they catch the smell of him, whose neighborhood begins to lose its cats – more and more, year after year – until one day someone wonders what’s happened to them all,” and here she pulled her friend up onto her lap and clasped her hands protectively around him. “He is that sort of boy. He’s old and fat and grey, but he’s that sort of boy. And he’s too lazy to hunt, but he knows that if he changes the cheese and checks everyday… one day he’ll get his mouse. And I don’t wonder that he hasn’t already caught a few.”
Ellen finished her coffee, thanked me, and left our cat with a warm rub behind his ears. She was out of the door and into the corridor. Before I had turned the light out and made my way up the stairs I heard the bolt draw back from the door across from ours, and the hinges sighed like the springs of a mousetrap being cocked.
IV.
Taken
There wasn’t much traffic on Main Street that night – only the soft hum of travelers crossing the slumber gap between Cincinnati and Louisville, interrupted at odd intervals by the far-off moan of an ambulance and the occasional watch cry of a barge horn as it churned through the black waters of the Ohio with its sagging load of pig iron, coal, or limestone, passing under our windows like a primordial whale calling for company in the lonely night. My wife slept soundly as she always does, and as she especially did on nights that were so still and silent. But I had trouble falling asleep. Perhaps my conversation with Ellen had unsettled me, but I kept imagining the man who in all likelihood was sitting in a chair directly below me, separated from us by two feet of floorboards, space, and ceiling tile. I remembered the dislodged tile and the light it had – and continued to – leak through our floor when he had a light on, and I felt even less protected at the thought. He seemed like a roommate or a pet. But the more I pondered the thin veneer that separated us, the more it felt like the roles were reversed: maybe we were his roommates – his pets. I shuddered when I remembered Ellen’s description of the little boy who lures cats and dogs into the woods for pleasure killing. I saw in my mind a small child, a fat child with a round head and fat eyes magnified by round, thick lenses. His hands were pudgy but nimble. And they were strong. Strong enough to crush life from a living animal’s throat. Whether I was dreaming or imagining I can’t say, because the vision both seemed to emanate from my mind and to be projected onto it, but I saw him even clearer now: he was wearing knickerbockers tucked into dark calf-length socks which disappeared into plain, brown ankle boots, and he wore a short-sleeved white button-up and a grey flannel cap. I realized now that this boy in my mind is from a very specific time – not a generic child, but one dressed in the regalia of a period before my lifetime, or my father’s, or my grandfather’s. He is walking down a mossy hillock and looking behind him very often.
Now he is at its foot, on the bank of a black, muddy creek, and I am recognizing Crooked Creek, and the bridge that we drove over that first day is not there, but something is in its place, although it is wooden and already grey with weather and age. And now the boy is under it, and he is still smiling and looking, and I now realize that I am very hungry and feel dirty and sore and that my feet are cold while my legs are warm, and the boy is showing me something. He is pointing and smiling and his teeth are showing through the smile. And I move towards him, and we are under the bridge, and I am so very hungry. And the boy is showing me a rabbit, or perhaps it is a dog, but its skin is gone, and only the bright pink muscle is showing. It is uncooked, but I am hungry – so very, very hungry. And I say “Thankee! Thankee right kind! I know it ain’t fittin’ fer you ter be dealin’ with the likes-a me, but Gawd effin’ that ain’t right kind of yeh. Gawd bless yeh, young’un. Gawd bless yeh right good.” And my hands are on the rabbit, or maybe it is a dog, and the muscle is warm and wet, and I am unsettled even though I have seen war and been to Shiloh and watched the carnage at Stone’s River, and hadn’t I seen Captain Symond’s body torn into four quarters by grapeshot at Chickamauga? But I am feeling uneasy about this young’un when I see the butcherly job that he has done – and so well, too. And now is shadow falling over my eyes and blood is drumming in my ears because the coldness in my feet is now everywhere, and I know what I am feeling because I was bayonetted through the shoulder by one of my our own pickets when I came up behind him during a guard change at Fort Donelson. And it’s happening many times, more times than is natural, even for this sort of thing, and I’m on the ground, and my hair is being tugged on. I’m feeling the heat of two stubby legs against my cheeks, and I’m calling out but then I stop because I’ve lost my voice and my throat is on fire and my head is very cold and then I am seeing flashes of light and whiteness and electric pops like a galvanic battery.
At this point I swam out of my blankets, and my hands flew wildly towards my throat – guarding it which the knuckles that I hoped would stave off a carving knife, but of course there was nothing to stave off, and I wiped the sweat off of my chest and cheeks and brow. I got out of bed for a glass of water – and also to force myself to shake off the nightmare. Get up, I thought to myself, get out of bed and walk around; there’s nothing to get you and nothing to be afraid of. But how cowardly did I slink from the bedroom with my shoulders hunched and my eyes flitting madly around each shape and shadow that they could decipher from the darkness. I returned to bed still shattered by my dream – or vision or imaginings – and greedily wrapped myself in the sheets. But I hadn’t failed to notice the yellow outline of the loose floorboard, and the idea of Milverton being awake with me – and I say with me because I continued to feel the increasingly distinct sense that he was as much a member of our household as the cat or my wife – was hopelessly disturbing for reasons which I could not describe or attempt to voice. I ignored the intrusive light, but I could not ignore the sounds, for I could shut my eyes, but I could not shut my ears. There were the normal noises: the recline of an easy chair, a gruesomely loud series of phlegm-smothered coughs, incidental mutterings, the creak of floorboards, and the clatter of plate ware. But just as I was becoming comfortable with the prospect of becoming vulnerable to sleep something else caught my attention: a slow, squeaking, rubbing sound, like a hand which has been pressed hard against a wet tile wall and is now being dragged across its surface, or like wet rubber being dragged over a hard floor. The sounds coincided with a flabby padding of naked feet against tile, and the picture that formed in my mind was of a man staggering out of a shower and pulling something with him. I refused to feed my imagination any further, having felt betrayed by it earlier, and I put in ear plugs and listened to podcasts until I fell asleep.
We lived in that town for nearly two years, from the May of 2012 to the summer of 2014. We each found our first professional jobs there, and our careers flourished, but once we became engaged in October of 2013 we decided that it would be a convenient time to relocate closer to friends and family. Of course I also relished the chance to move away from Milverton, but I didn’t think about him as much after our engagement. We had decided to move our little household to Fort Wayne, four hours northward, and the prospect of putting so much distance between us took out the chill of Milverton’s awkward gazes and uncanny appearances considerably. Milverton notwithstanding, I knew that the move would signifying a loss as much as it was a welcome eventuality: I had grown to love the little town with its quaint charm and unescapable history. I even became attached to the clusters of shadowy men that I imagined smoking cigars in their slouch hats and hobnails, for while Fort Wayne might be haunted by the ghosts of Maumee warriors, French traders, and Johnny Appleseed himself, I doubted if any of their shades had the same gallant character of these faceless loiterers. The cobblestones started to become very dear to me, and once we had signed the lease on our new apartment on Rivermet Avenue, just east of downtown Fort Wayne, I found myself spending most of my free time walking down the oldest parts of town, stalling my progress homeward, and wandering aimlessly across the narrow streets and under the looming Antebellum domiciles. My imagination was pregnant with impressions and suppositions to the point where I felt I knew a dozen residents of each tall-windowed house from a dozen different decades. I could see their figures and knew their names even though their faces always evaded my musing. Here on the riverbank was a two story Italianate where Jack Tawney and his wife lived after he retired from captaining flatboats up the Ohio to Pennsylvania. Mr. Sheppard, the coal mogul, and his Canadian mistress stayed there fifteen years later during his divorce. It didn’t end well, for she committed suicide and he moved to St. Louis, but Judge Pierson moved his family there after that, and they were comparatively happy although his son was never heard from again after he left to join the AEF in the Great War. After they sold it, Henry Bramwell used the cellar to store bathtub gin and sold it out of his kitchen before he caught polio at the Crystal Beach Pool. It was damaged in the 1937 flood, but Bramwell’s children repaired it and sold it to Susan Gentry who lived there peacefully while her husband was flying B-17s over Berlin and Hamburg… And so it goes, and so it went.
My wife was at work and I was packing our apartment when the condo president knocked at our landing door to tell me that Ellen was missing. Two policemen had come with him and they were curious if I recalled the last time I had seen her, and if she had given off any odd impressions. I didn’t remember if I had seen her after our conversation a few weeks earlier, but when I gave them my abbreviated account and guessed the date (for I couldn’t remember exactly, but I thought it had been probably Thursday the 12th), it was apparent that I could not have seen her since then, or if I did it had been after she failed to come to work the first time. After taking down a few notes, the cops left, chatting cheerfully as they made their way outside. I watched them laugh and gesture nonchalantly as they climbed into a squad car and pulled away. The case certainly didn’t seem to worry them. It surprised me that the police had waited so long to interview the residents, but the little surgeon politely informed us that they didn’t think her disappearance had anything to do with the condo or anyone in the condo. It was suspected, they had told him, that she had left town to avoid paying a rent on her apartment, which her landlady found unlocked after Ellen’s employer had called in search of her whereabouts. Even though her valuables were still in place, the police continued to pursue the theory that she was dodging creditors. Ellen was never seen again. The case is still open today.
“If you can think of anything, let me know, or call the police.”
“Do you really think they’re taking this seriously?” I asked.
“I should hope so! Why do you question that?”
“Have they interviewed everyone?”
The question lodged in my throat and came out in a forceful, angry tone which gave vent to the irrational and unfounded suspicions that were whirring in my brain like vague, unformed sheets of vapor that barely suggested the well-defined cloud that they were destined to shape.
“You and your neighbor. I know you were acquaintances so I suggested that they meet with you.”
“What about the guy in five?”
“Mister…” he paused and twisted his face. I saw on it that this might actually be the first time he had realized that the man’s name was a mystery to him.
“The gentleman in number five did not have a relationship with Ellen so far as I know.”
“I would encourage you to ask the police to question him,” I said sharply.
He eyed me curiously, nodding his head as if testing the weight of a melon.
“Perhaps, perhaps. If you say so, then perhaps. You must know more than I. The gentleman has never caused any trouble that I know of, and he pays his fees in cash every year on the first of January. He never has been a problem. But yes, yes…” it was as if the self-composed little Copt was suddenly seeing something that his unobtrusive nature had been obscuring until now. He was a kind man but a private man, the sort who shuns gossip and spurns hearsay along with intuition and imagination. But even within his precise, trusting mind I could see dim and nightmarish shapes forming. His forehead twisted as if he were calling into question problems which he had heretofore written off or refused to consider. “Yes… I see perhaps what you might mean. Maybe. I might ask that they call on the gentleman. Yes. Well, excellent day to you. Goodbye.”
The president disappeared down the hall after our discussion, and I turned around to close the door after him. I fumbled with the lock – for whatever reason the bolt hadn’t lined up with its receiver and I had to push hard against the door before it ran home – and when I looked up Milverton was glowering at me from behind his door – his grapefruit head wedged between its white surface and the crimson wall behind it, with a few pudgy fingers peeping out above the doorknob as he slowly drew it back. His eyes seemed to swim in fluid, being even more large and watery behind the glasses than usual – two great, black, liquid pools that threatened to fill the entire surface of each lens. I felt my soul well with hate and I broke the gaze that had so often petrified me, slamming the door indignantly and returning to the monotonous chore of packing.
V.
Into the Den
That night my wife was going to be very late, so I went to bed early after a light supper. The summer days were long and the evenings were light, but a storm had spilled across the Ohio River Valley, and the sky which the day before had been the color of raw honey the night before was a dusky, putrid green. Shaggy purple clouds mottled the horizon, spreading over the town at a steady pace until it was as dark as any winter evening, and the mood was set for an early bedtime since I had no wish to watch the storm or try to fall asleep once it had already opened up with the loud violence that the clouds forecasted. As I settled against my pillows I could already hear the rippling murmur of approaching thunder, and the last thing I remember before I fell asleep was a searing flash of electric white.
There seemed to be whispers all around me. Not the sort that show up in heavy-handed horror movies where a fellow is on his bed tossing from one side to the other as familiar voices clearly speak the words that haunt his heart. No, instead it was as if people were actually moving from one room to another, speaking in this corner and around that wall, their tones appearing first as choppy echoes in the cavernous stairwell, then as muffled squabble in the laundry room behind the curtains, now behind my head as glassy accents bouncing off the bathroom tiles. I heard them shifting physically across space like two (when there were two, although there weren’t always) men casually moving from one area of the apartment to another with all the casualness and nonchalance of longtime residents. And now and again as my eyes moved behind closed lids I was seeing the apartment lit by daylight, or by dull electric lamps, but with different furnishings and sometimes different walls. Here the bathroom was a ratty kitchen, there the laundry room was a closet that stored a huge metal tub and a miniscule sink basin with ugly black knobs. And the voices flowed in and out of the rooms. Worried. Always they were worried. Two men speaking in angry, hushed tones, a man and a woman nervously holding a meeting in the corner of the bedroom, a fat old man (so he sounded) anxiously turning a rotary dial before contacting his son with worrisome intelligence. And in the gaps between I sometimes saw shapes: men in seersucker fiddling with boater hats, teenagers handling chunky landlines in tattered acid-wash jeans, a women wearing cloches picking at pendulous strings of beads, old gentlemen in three-piece suits with watch-chains and square bowties, pretty girls in flowing skirts that swung below their knees, young bucks in suspenders that flanked neckties which were ludicrously short, balding fellows in checked leisure suits dabbing sweat from their domes, sooty young women in shirtwaists wiping their hands on stained aprons. And always they worried and wondered:
We should move – It’s bothering my sleep now – I’m calling the landlord – It ain’t a right thing, Mac – Yesterday I saw him on the stairs and he just smiled at me, but golly what a smile! – I can’t explain it, Sal, but something about him just don’t settle with me – Get the kids and go town to the auto; we’re leaving tonight – I dunno. I mean he’s a dweeb, but there’s like something else. No. No, he’s just such a creeper, but like, it’s not like he’s ever even talked to me, ya know? – Mr. Levenstein, you know, the Jew in number three, well he says that he’s been in the house since the War with Spain and in all that time he says this fella hasn’t ever changed. Not a jot – Good God, Mary! Good God!
When I woke up my wife was not beside me. I frantically grabbed for my phone in a blackness that I had not expected – apparently the storm had knocked out power to the north side of town, because the window panes that usually glowed orange were indecipherable from the wall. The phone gushed white light into the room, and I saw a text that announced her plan to stay with a colleague due to the ferocity of the weather. I felt relieved at once and turned back to my bed. But before I had even rested by shoulder down I was up again, and this time I would not go back to sleep. I had heard something. Something on the stairs. But for whatever reason it was so much more visceral than anything that had been flitting through my mind that I immediately flailed to a sitting positing and stretched my hands out for some kind of defense. It had definitely been a sound, a real sound. A fat, flabby footfall – a naked foot on the naked wood. And there was another. And then – this one was different, less heavy, sharper, like a hand. It was repeated, and then the feet, like a heavy, grown person was crawling up the stairs on all fours – foot, hand, foot, foot, hand, foot, hand, foot, foot, hand… I looked desperately for a reference point, but all I could managed to see were the two windows just opposite me, the glass of which occasionally flickered with blue light as the lightning crackled in the low-hanging clouds that clawed at our town’s hills and steeples. At irregular intervals the two tombstone-shaped apertures would gleam with cold electricity and admit a watery blue flash like the gleam of a television menu. Of course, my senses were thrown into chaos by the sudden importance of hearing and impotence of seeing. Used to favoring the other to inform my world, I clung desperately to my underdeveloped sense of sound and waited to hear what would happen next. And it came – a revolting flop, followed by the squirmy squeak of bloated flesh being dragged slowly and determinedly across bare floors. Pat! Pat! Two swollen paws would reach out ahead of their primary mass, and then a torturous screech as a belly was dragged forward. The sounds were in the living room, inching methodically towards the massive French doors that served as a fourth wall when closed.
For the first time I realized that whatever it was, it knew where to go, and that to remain in bed, silent and inert was a poor strategy. Desperately, and in pathetic vanity, I rushed out of the sheets and flung open the switches of every light or lamp I could reach in the room. Lightlessness prevailed, of course, and the straining breath of the crawling thing was now outside the door. I rushed into the darkness, clawing about ineffectively for a means of protection. I then remembered the dull saber I had bought at the Civil War antique shop. The blade, as I mentioned, was as sharp as the backside of a butter knife, but it was three feet long and weighed five pounds. At the best, I knew that its pointed tip could stab through flesh, but my chief defense was in the physics of a weapon of its dimensions: swung with a full motion of the arm, the force of the blade would unquestionably shatter bone and crush muscle, and a direct blow to the head – sharp or dull – could crack open any man’s skull. I say this in retrospect, knowing that if I were burgled tonight I would feel comfortable defending myself with the saber even though the blade is slightly bent, but that is a contest of flesh against flesh, and whatever was dragging itself towards my bedroom may have been composed of flesh, but it was animated by something which no blade or bullet or bludgeon could fend off.
I hoisted the sword from its hooks on the wall, and removed it from its sheath with a grating screech, letting the scabbard clatter noisily to the floor as I backed into the corner where my wife kept her shoes and waited. If the blade was wrenched out of my hands, or if it broke from the blows I weakly comforted myself with the possibility that I could grab a brace of heels and push them into my attacker’s soft eyes. I was thinking this when the door shook. A sweaty cluster of fingers had gripped it from the outside with a snapping, forceful grasp, which now pried it open. I swung around to peer at the blackness that I knew contained my attacker, and in my nervousness, I struck the blade on the edge of a bookcase, twisting the weapon out of my hands and sending it spinning through the darkness in the direction of the open door. It made a noise like a thrown skillet, and I could hear it rotating in slow orbits on the wood before it stilled. There was an asthmatic wheeze, and both doors now creaked open. In that moment a family of lightning sizzled opposite my two windows, and I saw the silhouette of my companion struck against the turquoise panes: rising up on its stubby arms, with head thrown back, mouth agape, and throat puffed out, its round head dangled along its spine, and although I could only barely infer anything beyond the outline, I confirmed a suspicion that needed no confirmation as Milverton slid across my floor like a sea lion dragging its ponderous girth behind it. Suddenly it was down, flat to the ground, and a hand shot out in the direction of my lost saber. With nausea in my spirit I heard flabby skin smack down on steel, and noted the rumbling clatter as the blade was pulled steadily across the boards towards a sound – a kind of giddy breathing – that I prefer to leave undescribed.
The printer clicked on loudly and three series of high-pitched electric beeps – the dryer, dishwasher, and oven – sang out as eye-peeling light blazed in every corner of the room: the overhead light, two standing lamps, a desk lamp, the bathroom vanity lights and overhead light, and the brave yellow bulb in the closet all threw their educating rays out in a network of interlacing light. And there on the floor, pressed into it like flattened wad of dough, his swollen hand greedily clutching the first six inches of the saber blade, was Milverton. He was entirely naked. Even his eyes were uncovered, and for the first time I saw his eyes: black, beastly holes that flashed angrily in the light with an animalistic intelligence that I still cannot say whether it was less than human or more than human, only that the ghastly message which they conveyed was anything thing but. His teeth – which I had never seen – were clashed together and bared, and reminded me of encounters I have had with animals which I would rather forget. In the second that the electricity returned I saw his puffy, grey-skinned body splattered on my floor, and it stunned me, but in the following second my wits returned, and I launched across the yard or two that separated us, clutched the leather grip with a quick motion, and swiped the replica from his fist. His eyes seemed to further darken – perhaps because the thin halo of white that encircled his black irises had blushed dark red with rage – and he squirmed towards me with a rapid twitching shuffle, like an aggressive crocodile, and his teeth gnashed with an iron clap. I was so disgusted with the image that at first I forgot myself, but then I twisted my finger tightly around the leather grip, hoisted the blade over my head, and brought it down with as much weight as I could impart to it on the side of his face. The bone yielded, and the sound is difficult to relive even under the circumstances. The steel rang and the blade quivered. Before he could cry out, I threw it back into the air and using both hands like an axe, I transmitted all the force my body could generate into a blow across his back, and I heard his ribs give way and saw the blood hemorrhaging under his fat.
Far worse in some ways than his entrance was his exit: he cried out in a childish, pig-like wail, and scuttled backwards through the door like a newt fleeing from a shock. I heard the rapid patter of his feet and hands as he trickled down the stairs and crashed onto the landing and into the hall. My last memory was of his face – eyes wide in injured shock, mouth agape with wounded indignity, like a toddler who after clubbing his sibling with a heavy plastic toy is awestruck when their will is defied and the bruised child slaps them in the mouth.
I had forgotten about the cat. He was a mess of raised hair and peeled eyes, foaming with rage and terror in the laundry room, but when I went to collect him (more for my company than for his comfort), he seemed to freeze and loosen – something in the air had been communicated to him, and his eyes widened while his ears rotated forward like antennae. His outrage seemingly gone now, he suddenly darted past me, slinking low to the ground, curling around the corner, and rushing down the stairs, his bell jingling determinedly with each velvet stride. I had a dim understanding of what he might be doing, and in horror I grabbed for the saber which I had tossed onto a pile of taped-up moving boxes, and ran after him. I turned the corner just in time to see his plume-like tail disappear into Milverton’s apartment, for his door was wide open. Hoping to be able to catch him in the entryway without encountering the injured occupant, I leapt through the door and caught a glimpse of white flashing in circles at the base of a dark shape. But before I made a move for the momentarily distracted animal, I found myself staggered by what surrounded me. The windows which looked out over Main Street were open, but a bizarre, red flickering light seeped in through the casements, and unfamiliar sounds floated through the night air: steady, stony clatters, the regular turning of steel on brick, the sounds of livestock – of sheep and pigs and cattle – braying, and the distinct moan of a steam whistle passing behind the building as it moved sluggishly down the river. The odor that buzzed in my nostrils was humiliating – I use the word because there is no other way to describe a young man’s first encounter with raw, unembalmed death. Syrupy and sweet underneath, but cripplingly pungent in its rancid atmosphere, the smell of human decay billowed from each black corner like gases from a marsh. In the pale red light I could see that the apartment was entirely contemporary without a single anachronistic touch, unlike the sights and sounds in the street bellow, but the walls were dark with raggedy, stick-like shapes that seemed suspended from wires or hooks or nails. The cat was crooning loudly at some seated thing – black and squat – that festered in an easy chair, winding playfully in a figure eight around its two bloated feet, occasionally pausing to raise himself on his hind paws, head bent to receive a scratch that would never come from a rigid hand that was bursting with putrefaction. In the glinting light I made out the oversized shape of a woman whose white clothes were blackened with rotting blood, and whose pulpy face was unrecognizable, though her identity was clear.
A cry came from the street bellow – “You men, put your backs into that. We need to clear the streets before the pigs come into town for slaughter day. Two hours to daylight and we have seven thousand swine on their way to the dockyards,” and another – “Here me, ya’ll. The James A. Garfield is puhling intuh pawrt, so make shuh ever’ stevedoh is attis post in fifteen min’tes. She gonna be a busy day, boys.”
I was distracted by the commotion enough that I didn’t notice the dark shape slithering in my direction, but when a giddy wheeze caught my ear, I spun around and swung the flat of the blade into the bobbing head that was worrying at my ankle. Something burned in my calf, but the mass slithered away at the blow with a yelp. I turned on my iPhone flashlight, holding it over him with my left hand while I cocked my right arm with the sword. In the white light I saw his face like a pink globe – his right cheek and eye socket disfigured by a pulpy, black weal. Unblinking and expressionless, he slowly pulled himself to his feet and set his round jaw. Calmly – as if repressing at tremendous amount of venom with a tremendous amount of self-control – he slid into bathrobe and gingerly applied his glasses to his broken face. With a smart motion he spun around, and in the glare of the cell phone I saw that his face was twisted into an ambiguous smile that gleamed with malignance. His black eyes once more swam glassily in the goggle-like lenses which magnified his bloated, purple injury.
He stood there in the twilight, the wrenched grin barely disguising his desperate hatred, with his fat hands hanging at his side – heavy and engorged with blood. The red light from the strange world that he looked out over – a view hidden from my window just four feet above his – glared savagely into his rat-hole apartment and shone in the black surface of his eyes like railroad lights on wet asphalt. I realized that there was nothing I could do to defend myself from him if he wanted me. I wondered how he had lured Ellen into his den. Maybe this had been a trick, too, and I began to question my part in the decision to follow the cat over this threshold into another world. Perhaps I had no choice in the matter. Perhaps this was a snare that had been laid for me for decades or centuries, one which the invisible rails of my life had circled around in large, open spirals until now the moment came when the destination was unmistakable.
He stepped forward, eyes twinkling in the murk like black billiards being rolled through a candlelit room. That wet-lipped smile spread thickly across his face, and I saw the black encrustations of blood rimming each tooth. My panic struggled against the hideous, irrational curiosity that beat in my heart, demanding to stay put and even die if it meant knowing what this was – all of this: this nightmare-haunted town with its sleepless ghosts, this strange dimension that I was now standing in where decades and death had no jurisdiction, yet seemed so paradoxically pervasive, this grotesque caricature of a man who fed on fear and life and was agelessly aged. I wanted to run, but with each clap of my heart I felt a voice growing in horrified wonder – louder and louder – first in my mind, then formulating in my throat until it poured out in a wild scream that I hardly recognized as coming from my voice.
“Who are you!?”
The question seemed to both shock and satisfy him. At first the smile flew from his face as his jaw plunged open and the flabby skin sank in awe. I sensed that he was unused to being questioned directly. Most people must try to avoid interacting with him, clinging to small talk and curt responses. Then, as he recollected himself, the skin reshaped itself to form that malicious, arch grin, as if pulled back into place by invisible wires. The eyes no longer shone – they burned.
“You know exactly who I am. I’m more apart of you – more a part of that –” he gestured to the black, swollen corpse fermenting in the chair “than your own skin.” As he said so, he flourished his sausage fingers in a gesture that ran up and down the length of my body. He bit down on his lower lip, peeling away the upper as if to suggest a rising curtain. And somehow I felt the metaphor. I did know him. He wasn’t some creature I had read about – this isn’t fiction, after all: he didn’t whisper to me “Before I fell from Grace, the angels had a name for me, and it was… Luc-i-fer…”, neither did he say “I am called many things by many people” before listing the international names for death, sin, or trickster demons like Mephistopheles, Apep, Baphomet, Beelzebub, the Black Man, or Nyarlathotep, and he certainly didn’t say “I was a prince in my homeland, and I fought the Church’s wars until I was too strong and they tried to break me – but they couldn’t; nothing can break me. Not man, nor his laws, nor death, nor time, nor anything. They were right when they called me the Dragon, the Devil, Dracul. Ah! I see you know of me after all.” As I said, this is not fiction, and the answers are not as neat and relatable. The fact is that I did know him, but that is where I must stop, because what I knew of him was not a name, but a feeling.
Here was this thing – this fat, bloated vermin – who had weathered what seemed to be twice the number of decades that I could ever hope to survive, who had thrived on the lives of his neighbors, and had transcended time, space, and matter themselves, all by being sedentary and unambitious. For one and a half centuries at least he had stayed in the same town – the same apartment – shunning the sights and experiences of an entire world, and his reward was immortality. I knew then that I hated him in a way that was entirely unique to me. It wasn’t a feeling like disgust – which I felt towards his flabby body, fungal skin, and unblinking stare – and it wasn’t indignation – which I felt towards his invasion of my life and home – or outrage – which I felt towards his murder of our little cat’s harmless friend. What I felt was a soulful detestation that rose against what stood in front of me – a positive refutation of the crannies in my own spirit which shaded the Milvertons that had grown there in my weakness and apathy. He was as much a part of me as much as the bacteria that peopled my intestines and the death that daily grew in my atoms – enhanced with every inhalation, heartbeat, and synapse. I knew him – knew him deep in each capillary and cell, deep in the fibers that held me up, deep in the fluids that fed my life – a shadow in the farthest corners of my existence. Here was my muffled anger, my redirected hatred, my hushed lust. Here was that slimy, lumbering personality that longed to drench itself in comfort, hiding from all other human faces in the warm shadows of selfishness that I yearned for early in the morning, when I was hungry, when I was irritated, when I was tired; a face that I had become familiar with: a grainy visage seen from the corner of my eye.
Somewhere in the crimson-tinged darkness behind Milverton I sensed a plodding, swaying movement, as if a small crowd were silently biding their time. From the dusky glow of the lamplight creeping in from the dirt street bellow I could make out the silhouettes of tall, sturdy men with wide, pulpy shoulders and heavy jaws. At intervals the orange gleam of dragged cigarettes peered at me like snakes’ eyes blinking sleepily in the dark. The town ghosts were materializing in the gloom like carrions flocking after the clatter of troops marching to destruction. It was as if the world outside the window – the one which I had so often felt, and heard, and smelled in the periphery of my understanding – was quietly making preparations for an invasion. Milverton’s apartment seemed to be the hinge point between the dimension that he had fled and the one in which he and I lived in – a lobby whose doors were locked to the outside, but permitted a view of a universe no less real than the one I was born into and stood in now, and I sensed that his hand was at the deadbolt, ready to admit the denizens of whatever timeless place teemed beneath his windows.
Even as I warily scanned the shades behind him, a kind of sallow intensity swam over his features, and the shades appeared more and more distinct against the scarlet panes. Just as I felt myself being drawn into that glassy light, the cat howled. Pivoting on my heel, I saw the white animal gleaming pink in the murk, squatting authoritatively on the sagging head of his decomposing friend. The image of the loyal animal clinging unabashedly to that image of foul corruption struck me like a blow to the face, and I felt an impulse tremble in my arms as I dashed headlong into Milverton’s fleshy body. His teeth and eyes flashed with shocked desperation as he fell to the floor with a hideous flop. He sprawled under my weight, as I pressed myself into him without a thought, shoving my hands and face into his trembling skin. For some reason he was entirely immobilized by my touch, and his tongue churned between his teeth and lips, smacking violently and working his spit into a foam that glinted in the lamplight as it dripped down his cheeks. Before I knew what I was doing, I spread my entire body over his, pressing my face against his, feeling the hot vapor gushing in panicked spurts from his lips and nostrils. I had been holding him down for what felt like minutes before I noticed that the room was bathed in husky, purple light from the night sky. The electric lamps outside of our building outlined the panes in milky white, and the hiss of tires on wet pavement sounded in the street below like waves breaking softly on a beach. I looked down at Milverton. His jowls were quivering, and his eyes jiggled in his skull like blackberry jelly. With a shove, I stood up and surveyed his body – flattened on the floor and sparkling with oily sweat.
The cat was now at my side. With a long, unflinching gaze, it considered the jiggling mess, and then it silently turned for the door and disappeared up our stairs and into the blackness. I found the saber with its warped blade and quietly picked it up. In front of me were windows unobstructed by loitering phantoms, still occasionally illuminated by a weal of lightning. I turned around and left Milverton sweltering on his floor. Before I ascended up the stairs I made sure that both of the locks on our door were set. I slept until noon, when the sunlight refracted in the puddles and the rain-drenched foliage.
VI.
My Conclusion
I never called the police about Ellen’s body. I knew in some part of myself that I change had happened before the morning, and I went downstairs when I woke up. The door was closed, but through the transom I could see a beige wall gleaming with midday sunlight. Something pushed me to turn the handle, and I wasn’t surprised by what I found, or – more to the point – what I didn’t.
I didn’t tell my wife why I was so tired and nervous, or why I had decided to give the cat an impromptu bath, or why a smell like spoiled ham lingered in the bathroom where he had been cleaned and the bedroom where the lose plank had finally been pinned into place with six framing nails. We carried our boxes out as unceremoniously as we carried them in. After five hours we had packed our furniture, books, and boxes into a moving van. My parents’ car was packed with clothes, towels, and linens. Our car carried the leftover miscellany. The cat in his carrier was snuggly tucked into the backseat. We pulled our little convoy out of the parking lot, up the alley, spilling into Main Street, and flowing steadily with the westbound traffic until we turned north on Highway 421. The highway rolled over the low hills, climbing rapidly up the ravine that passed through the two craggy cliff faces. We lurched over Crooked Creek, jolting across the bridge – that site of a long forgotten bridge where some half-starved tramp had been lured and butchered by in a previous century. Our tires spun eagerly, humming on the pavement with each revolution, dragging us up the looping road, higher and higher towards the cliffs. At every bump of the tires, every shift of gears, I expected to see a toad-shaped man lurch in front of us, emerging from the woods on all fours, skitter across the highway like a crab – anything to prevent our escape from that memory-haunted city where the structures of three centuries stand solemnly side by side, as if in defiance of time and space and progress. I looked for him on the shoulders, behind the guardrails, and I even spooked when we passed a deer carcass, round with putrid gases. But it was only a deer, and we drove on and on, into Versailles and Greensburgh, onto 465 and thence to I-69. We drove further and further, and we stopped in Fort Wayne where our new apartment stood, overlooking a smaller river, Fort Wayne where we married, where we bought our first house, where we work and sleep and eat and dream – full 200 miles from 512 East Main Street.
But I don’t sleep well anymore, and no distance can comfort my nights. There are times when I lay awake well into four o’clock, listening for a flabby footfall on the stairs – gentle but solid – or peer into the muffled shadows for the globular head and bulbous form beneath it. Will it hop into my bedroom like a frog? Scuttle in backwards like a spider? Or slide on its belly across the floor beneath my hand like a centipede? I don’t know what to expect, but I know only too well that my escape may have been made, but it may just as likely have been a delay. When will I meet Milverton again? Will I glimpse his face in the reflection of my car window when I’m unlocking my car after a night class? Will I turn a corner on my way to my son’s college graduation and walk into his open embrace? Will I be struggling in my death throes only to recognize his black eyes glaring over the crest of my doctor’s surgical mask? Or will I have met him walking home from school twenty years ago? Will I have met him at my daycare when a strange, round man walks in a deftly plucks me from the room like a tramp picking an apple from a tree? Will he be waiting for me in my future or will he hunt me down in my past? Of course there is no way to answer these questions. I know that I was not supposed to escape. I was supposed to accompany Ellen in that dark room lit by the gaslights of another century, and perhaps I still will. Milverton disappeared without a sight or sound, and his apartment was impeccably tidy, the little Egyptian surgeon told us while we were moving. There was no odor to arouse suspicions, and certainly no stains or bodies or bones. He was gone. Probably to another time, possibly to another place. I hope that my embrace – the feeling of my flesh clinging to his, not in defense but in communion – forced him back into whatever snake hole he first emerged from. Maybe he was now a six year old boy, not yet lonely and bitter. Maybe he was a young man trying a different source of vitality. Maybe he is dead. But Ellen has never come back from the dead, and I have not forgotten about my encounter (as time-travel logic would expect), so I fear that he may be none of these things. Whatever he is, whoever he is – there is no name for it, and I won’t begin to speculate – I only hope that my fear-exhausted life concludes before I see those piggish eyes boring into mine.