Grim Expectations Page 4

  If I am responsible for that, to even the smallest degree, I scourge myself more for it than any of the precedent death and destruction. To the extent that it resulted in my lingering disrepute, such that busybodies as the possibly late Reverend Weebsome could amuse themselves by ferreting out my past – then perhaps I deserve that lash and burden.

  * * *

  “Very well, George; you see your father’s name. You have seen it many times before. Why such trepidation now?”

  Reader, I have indicated above some of the bitter reflections that were spurred by the sight of that name, my parent and inventive deviser of the box which was seemingly the last gift from my heart’s companion – if gift it was, rather than some elabourate curse. For I had seen the name attached to more fearsome devices than this, great clanking machines of intimidating power.

  A mystery, though, was dispelled by the recognition of my father as the box’s creator. I had learned, in the course of my lifelong trials, that various of my father’s machines had their chief functions based upon the subtle principle of sympathetic vibrations. Many have had occasion to see this phenomenon illustrated by the string of a violin trembling of its own accord, in response to another at a slight distance, playing a note of the exact same pitch. Where my father’s genius had excelled, among other areas, was in applying this principle to vibrations more ethereal than those of mere sound traveling through the air that surrounds us. Certain of his creations were so finely tuned as to be able to detect and operate upon the vibrations of human thought, moving from out our skulls and through some medium otherwise unknown to us, but real nevertheless. Indeed, I bear witness to such; I had acquaintance, tête-à-tête as it were, with the device known as the Paganinicon, as human in appearance as myself, and possessed of every ability of speech and motion just as though it were my fleshly brother, rather than a construction of gears and even more intricate machinery. And in some ways, it was more than mere brother to me – for within the metal skull concealed beneath its artfully waxen head had been wires thinner and more sensitive than the hairs upon a housefly’s back, all tuned to the vibrations emitted by the soft grey jelly inside my own head. Take it as a sign of my father’s regard for me, his only son, that he would use my infant cranium as an adjunct to one of his mechanical devisings – but such was his nature, to place no limit upon the productions of his fecund genius.

  I surmised that the enigmatic box left to me by my beloved Miss McThane operated on the same principle, though on a less dramatic scale. Some connection had apparently existed between it and her, communicated through that same insubstantial medium. Thus the box’s ticking – though sharper and more mechanically regulated in nature, I was sure that it had been responsive in some way to the beating of the heart in her breast. Somewhere in the box’s hidden machinery were the fine wires that had at some time been tuned to a frequency constantly flowing out from her. While she lived, the box listened to her and knew, in its slight way, that she was alive – this no doubt allowed her to operate its lock and turn back its lid at her convenience, though no one else would have been able to, including her husband. Thus, while her breath and heartbeat continued, her privacy was ensured and secrets maintained – but then upon her demise, the box’s concealed mainspring slowly wound down and finally stilled, allowing inspection of the box’s contents by other hands and eyes. She would have had to have known that this would be the case; her working knowledge of my father’s devices exceeded my own.

  Thus I felt there was no violation in my tipping back the lid once more, while keeping my eyes averted from the brass plate with my father’s name incised upon it.

  That the box held papers, I had already ascertained; there were in fact fewer than I had initially supposed, upon my earlier and cursory glimpse inside. A remarkably thin sheaf indeed, given the number of years that Miss McThane might have spent storing up documents important to her – their lack of uniformity indicated her correspondent had apparently employed whatever had come to hand, when he – or perhaps she – had taken an opportunity to communicate with her. There were no envelopes or other appurtenances included with the lot, from which clues to the missives’ origin might have been obtained. A small deal table, much scarred and ring-marked from tankards set down by the inn’s thirstier guests, sat close to my chair. I drew it over and sorted out the papers upon its surface.

  Until this point, I had delayed a close examination of the letters themselves, dreading any confirmation therein of the dire suspicions that had already been raised. But I could put off the task no longer…

  Little effort was required on my part to place them in at least rough chronological order; she had done as much, however frequently she had perused them. Some of them, which seemed to have been more carefully prepared by their author, were dated at the top margin; the others, showing some evidence of haste at the time of their writing, were interleaved between.

  My heart sank upon examining the first of the pages to bear a date, for it did indicate a time subsequent to our retiring together to this remote locale, after her life and mine had been so thoroughly and notoriously endangered in London. It is one thing to accept, as all men must, the secretiveness common to all women – but quite another to confront the secrets of one woman in particular. Had she continued not just thinking of, but corresponding with, another man while I had been beguiled into thinking that I alone had claim upon her affections?

  In the gloomier mood thus provoked, I continued my inspection of the thin hoard. In doing so, I garnered no more indications of their source. None of the letters was headed with a familiar salutation; evidently, Miss McThane’s correspondent had felt no need for any, the two of them being in a condition of familiarity with each other. The concluding lines of certain pages were, to a slight degree, more revelatory; one or two of the scrawled notes, and the majority of the longer missives, were signed with a single initial S.–

  How my heart staggered within my chest, as though from a blow by a mailed fist, at the sight of that serpentine capital! In truth, it might have been an actual snake of fatal breed, and it could have come no closer to causing my death. Espying my father’s name engraved on the box’s lid had been bad enough, as an indicator of what might be its dire contents – to have that premonition so swiftly confirmed set a chill in my bones.

  As I sat alone in that dark room, a consuming spectre of great fires was summoned within my memory – but it did nothing to elide the past’s icy grip upon my spirits. As though intervening Time itself had evaporated, I seemed to find myself on the bank of a great river, my gaze lifted to a human figure silhouetted by those flames, falling to what I had assumed then would be his certain destruction…

  To what degree I could, I thrust that appalling recollection from my thoughts. Perhaps another had written the letters before; certainly there were more scoundrels in Britain whose names began with that initial, than he who I so remembered.

  As the matter turned out, I was somewhat relieved of the concerns that had tormented me before that first discovery. The letters were devoid of those terms of endearment, and detailed reminiscences of sweet assignations, that would have indicated a continuing romantic relationship between their author and Miss McThane. If lovers they had ever been, that ardour had cooled to mere friendship by the time this correspondence had commenced. What reprieve was thus provided from my own jealousies, it was obviated by what else I detected in the letters – I could almost hear aloud their nervous, breezy tone, somewhat slangy in the words chosen, though their subject matter was scarcely light-hearted; that manner was more than familiar to me, recalled as the herald of what been the most dreadful moments of my life.

  I soon discovered that there was but one subject contained within the letters, and that obsessively so: they described the author’s search for another, unnamed person. This quest was both seemingly arduous, and with fruitless results. The place names mentioned, I was able by my own geographical knowledge to locate in the North of England and in the far
ther reaches of Scotland. I had some small familiarity with those provinces, having been abducted at a time early in my career to the remote Hebridean isle of Groughay – little more than a muddy flyspeck in those frigid waters. The person who had written these letters to Miss McThane – this enigmatic S.; an enigma due most to the reluctance to name him to myself – was apparently at ease in disreputable circumstances; some of the events experienced and individuals encountered in his search, particularly of what he recounted as happening in the darker alleys of Glasgow and Edinburgh and even grimmer towns to their north, were specified to a hair-raising degree.

  Dark meditations engulfed my brain, like a nocturnal tide sluicing through and engulfing the stern rocks only a short distance from where I sat. Reading through the grim details of the search for the unnamed person, I came at last to the final missive in the collection.

  A single sheet of paper, torn in half and in what seemed to be evident haste. There were but two words upon it, and scrawled hand similarly evinced some considerable agitation on the part of their author:

  FOUND HIM –

  That was all. No more than that; perplexed, I turned to the box on the small table beside my chair, pried open its lid once more and prodded my fingertips through its slight depths, as though there might have been some other scrap of paper that I had overlooked. But there was nothing of the kind.

  Shuffling the papers into a more compact assemblage, I leaned back and regarded them with unavoidable suspicion. Genuine, they appeared to be; that Miss McThane’s correspondent was real, and had been engaged in this scouring of the northern countryside for an equally unnamed person, I had little doubt. For her to have fabricated the documents attesting to the man’s endeavour – that seemed to be elabourate lengths to have gone to, in order to perpetrate a hoax upon me. Though of course, I reminded myself, there was always the possibility that Miss McThane, here in Cornwall and so far distant from her correspondent, had been misled by him as to the actual events. How much confidence had she reposed in him, as to what he related in these letters? If his identity were in fact that which I bleakly suspected, then it was an out-and-out rascal with whom she had dealt, no matter the degree of conspiracy that had once been maintained between them. Perhaps she had been the victim of deviousness on his part – he might have been sitting at his ease in some public house, penning at his leisure an entirely concocted epic. Which he might have been motivated to draw out at as much length as possible, if she had been sending him money to continue his search. But if that were the case, why would he have imperilled the continued fleecing of the poor woman, by indicating that he had at last located his quarry? My various surmises about the matter failed to coalesce into anything that made sense.

  My wearied thoughts stumbled from one blind, fruitless alley into another. Whether Miss McThane had been the victim of he whose correspondence she had preserved so carefully in the box ticking in time with her own heart, or whether I was meant to be cozened by a scheme that she had painstakingly assembled before her death – perhaps in league with this S. person, perhaps on her own – I had no way of knowing.

  And – a possibility I was forced to acknowledge – perhaps I might never know. At least on this side of the grave; she who would have been most able to elucidate the matter, now lay buried some distance from the church that had been despoiled by those fiery cherubim. Genuine angels, made even more fearsome by the flaming swords they carried, might as well have been stationed about Miss McThane’s grave, to keep me from interrogating her…

  Thus the day after her interment passed, with myself no wiser than when it had dawned. Bleak speculation had produced meagre results. Stiff from long sitting, I creakily stood upright; surrounded by the night’s advancing shades, I leaned over the small table and deposited the papers back into the repository from which I had taken them, and closed the lid. If some hidden mechanism were set to spring into action and irrevocably seal the box once again, preventing me from further examination of those sordid pages, I would have considered it small loss.

  Sentiment seemed to encase my feet in lead, an unseen weight stopping me from mounting the stairs that led above. The memories of those few years, now at an end, in which I had not been alone in this heartless world – they flooded my thoughts. It was yet too painful for me to seek rest either in the bed we had shared, or even one in another chamber, so close to that narrower bed by which I had sat, nursing her through her final days. The inn’s public area held among its furnishings a short, sag-bottomed couch, suitable for the use of those who drank here with a companion, usually of the opposite sex. Wrapping a woollen throw about my shoulders, and drawing my shod feet up, I curled myself on the threadbare item, considering myself no more discomforted than I would have been upon a palace’s feather mattress.

  A storm was rolling in from the Atlantic. Eyes closed in the dark, I listened for a moment to the wind-driven creaking of the surrounding timbers, and the clattering of the shingles and shutters above – and thus at last fell asleep.

  THREE

  Mr Dower Receives Some Unwelcome Visitors

  Travellers who arrive by night are an innkeeper’s curse.

  Or thus it has always seemed to me. Perhaps if I had been born to this trade, both hospitable and mercenary, I might have resigned myself more easily to such nocturnal guests – but I was not so. To pry a living from the inn which had also served as home for Miss McThane and myself, I had been forced to open the door at any hour, day or night, to those who had either been adventurous or unfortunate enough to have found themselves on this stretch of jagged coast.

  Perhaps I should have posted a notice on the door-front: A private grief forestalls our furnishing bed and supper to the public; pray forgive the inconvenience. How else might they have had any inkling that I had but recently buried my wife, and desired no visitors?

  The sounds that had woken me continued; I raised my head from the stone-like arm of the couch and listened. On this occasion – with my thoughts jumbled up with dreaming fragments of infant angels leering inanely as they burst into flame, and cryptic letters tumbled from out a thundering box the size of Saint Paul’s Cathedral – some moments of blinking confusion were required before I could make even partial determination of what had woken me from exhausted slumber. Not jingling bridlery in the courtyard before, or footsteps damply approaching the inn’s doorstep, but something altogether wetter and more amorphous, as though it were some element of the enveloping rain itself, and the waves surging in the distance.

  I had no candle or lantern close at hand, thus my hearing was the only sense I could employ. For the span of a few seconds, I detected nothing beyond those noises of wind and pelting storm that had become so usual in my experience, that they were as easily disregarded as dead silence itself.

  On the verge of reapplying my head to the couch’s arm, I closed my eyes and tugged the wrap closer about myself – and at that moment, heard more undeniably that sound which had woken me. No auditory spectre this, and distinct from the rain and other relentless weather to which I had become accustomed, but at the same time possessing a certain aqueous timbre. Words so often fail me; the closest I am able to describe that which I heard outside is as being similar to what one would hear if standing upon the shore, the heaving motion of the constant waves lifting up a mass of seaweed and slapping it upon the rocks nearby, then dragging it back into the ocean depths as the waters retreated.

  Again, the wetly flapping sound came from the dark beyond the walls, ominously nearer this time. It ceased, as though whatever were its cause had reached the point that was its intent.

  Then – my hair prickles upon the back of my neck even as I relate this history – another sound, of different nature; a soft, hooting call, disturbing in its mournfulness, as might have been emitted by the post-horn of those riders who had once carried the mail, had the one who forced this brazen cry been at the edge of death, and about to topple from his horse’s back.

  My initial impulse was
to draw the woollen throw over my head and curl into a ball upon the couch. I have encountered dreadful things – more than my share, frankly, if there were any justice in this world – and facing them with whatever courage I have been able to summon has not, for the most part, worked out any better than attempting to ignore them. Cowardice is a greatly underrated virtue.

  The dying call sounded once more, perhaps a little louder and more insistent. Refuge there was none; despite my reluctance, I would have to confront this storm-borne entity.

  “Where are you?” Having unlatched and drawn open the door, I received the full brunt of the rain onto my face and chest. Shielding my eyes as well as I could, I peered out into the darkness. “If you seek George Dower, you have found him. But if you desire some other unfortunate, then go your way.”

  The winds from off the sea are often so violent, that they are able to tear vast rents in the clouds overhead, even as the rain continues to lash the hills and valleys. They did so now, allowing a shaft of moonlight to penetrate, silvering the ground about me. In that radiance, I spotted something clinging to the corner of the inn, its rounded bulk having mounted partway toward one of the upper windows. By the fragmentary lunar spectrum, my unwanted visitor appeared glassy and jelly-like, and blurrily transparent, so that through it I could see the sticks and branches of the untrimmed hedges beyond…