Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (33 page)

And now I’m awake, disoriented and my chest aching, gasping for air as if a moment before I was drowning and have only just been pulled to the safety of dry land. The wallpaper is only dingy calico again, and the bookcase is only a bookcase. The clock radio and the lamp and the ashtray sit in their appointed places upon the bedside table.

The sheets are soaked through with sweat, and I’m shivering. I sit up, my back braced against the headboard, and my eyes go to the second-story window on the other side of the small room. The sun is still down, but it’s a little lighter out there than it is in the bedroom. And for a fraction of a moment, clearly silhouetted against that false dawn, I see the head and shoulders of a young woman. I also see the muzzle and alert ears of a wolf and that golden eyeshine watching me. Then it’s gone, she or it, whichever pronoun might best apply. It doesn’t seem to matter. Because now I do know exactly what I’m looking for, and I know that I’ve seen it before, years before I first caught sight of Abby Gladding standing in the rain without an umbrella.

6.

Friday morning I drive back to Newport, and it doesn’t take me long at all to find the grave. It’s just a little ways south of the chain-link fence dividing the North Burial Ground from the older Common Burying Ground and Island Cemetery. I turn off Warner Street onto the rutted, unpaved road winding between the indistinct rows of monuments. I find a place that’s wide enough to pull over and park. The trees have only just begun to bud, and their bare limbs are stark against a sky so blue-white it hurts my eyes to look directly into it. The grass is mostly still brown from long months of snow and frost, though there are small clumps of new green showing here and there.

The cemetery has been in use since 1640 or so. There are three Colonial-era governors buried here (one a delegate to the Continental Congress), along with the founder of Freemasonry in Rhode Island, a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, various Civil War generals, lighthouse keepers, and hundreds of African slaves stolen from Gambia and Sierra Leone, the Gold and Ivory coasts, and brought to Newport in the heyday of whaling and the Rhode Island rum trade. The grave of Abby Gladding is marked by a weathered slate headstone, badly scabbed over with lichen. But, despite the centuries, the shallow inscription is still easy enough to read:

Above the inscription, in place of the usual death’s head, is a crude carving of a violin. I sit down in the dry, dead grass in front of the marker, and I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting there when I hear crows cawing. I look over my shoulder, and there’s a tree back towards Farewell Street filled with the big black birds. They watch me, and I take that as my cue to leave. I know now that I have to go back to the library, that whatever remains of this mystery is waiting for me there. I might find it tucked away in an old journal, a newspaper clipping, or in crumbling church records. I only know I’ll find it, because now I have the missing pieces. But there is an odd reluctance to leave the grave of Abby Gladding. There’s no fear in me, no shock or stubborn disbelief at what I’ve discovered or at its impossible ramifications. And some part of me notes the oddness of this, that I am not afraid. I leave her alone in that narrow house, watched over by the wary crows, and go back to my car. Less than fifteen minutes later I’m in the Redwood Library, asking for anything they can find on a Solomon Gladding and his daughter, Abby.

“Are you okay?” the librarian asks, and I wonder what she sees in my face, in my eyes, to elicit such a question. “Are you feeling well?”

“I’m fine,” I assure her. “I was up a little too late last night, that’s all. A little too much to drink, most likely.”

She nods, and I smile.

“Well, then. I’ll see what we might have,” she says, and, cutting to the chase, it ends with a short article that appeared in the
Newport Mercury
early in November 1785, hardly more than two months after Abby Gladding’s death. It begins, “We hear a ∫trange account from la∫t Thursday evening, the Night of the 3rd of November, of a body di∫interred from its Grave and coffin. This most peculiar occurrence was undertaken at the behe∫t of the father of the decea∫ed young woman therein buried, a circum∫tance making the affair even ∫tranger ∫till.” What follows is a description of a ritual which will be familiar to anyone who has read of the 1892 Mercy Brown case from Exeter, or the much earlier exhumation of Nancy Young (summer of 1827), or other purported New England “vampires.”

In September, Abby Gladding’s body was discovered in Newport Harbor by a local fisherman, and it was determined that she had drowned. The body was in an advanced state of decay, leading me to wonder if the date on the headstone is meant to be the date the body was found, not the date of her death. There were persistent rumors that the daughter of Solomon Gladding, a local merchant, had taken her own life. She is said to have been a “child of ∫ingular and morbid temperament,” who had recently refused a marriage proposal by the eldest son of another Newport merchant, Ebenezer Burrill. There was also back-fence talk that Abby had practiced witchcraft in the woods bordering the town and that she would play her violin (a gift from her mother) to summon “voraciou∫ wolve∫ and other ∫uch dæmon∫ to do her bidding.”

Very shortly after her death, her youngest sister, Susan, suddenly fell ill. This was in October, and the girl was dead before the end of the month. Her symptoms, like those of Mercy Brown’s stricken family members, can readily be identified as late-stage tuberculosis. What is peculiar here is that Abby doesn’t appear to have suffered any such wasting disease herself, and the speed with which Susan became ill and died is also atypical of consumption. Even as Susan fought for her life, Abby’s mother, Mary, fell ill, and it was in hope of saving his wife that Solomon Gladding agreed to the exhumation of his daughter’s body. The article in the
Newport Mercury
speculates that he’d learned of this ritual and folk remedy from a Jamaican slave woman.

At sunrise, with the aid of several other men, some apparently family members, the grave was opened, and all present were horrified to see “the body fre∫h as the day it wa∫ con∫igned to God,” her cheeks “flu∫hed with colour and lu∫terous.” The liver and heart were duly cut out, and both were discovered to contain clotted blood, which Solomon had been told would prove that Abby was rising from her grave each night to steal the blood of her mother and sister. The heart was burned in a fire kindled in the cemetery, the ashes mixed with water, and the mother drank the mixture. The body of Abby was turned facedown in her casket, and an iron stake was driven through her chest, to insure that the restless spirit would be unable to find its way out of the grave. Nonetheless, according to parish records from Trinity Church, Mary Gladding died before Christmas. Her father fell ill a few months later and died in August of 1786.

And I find one more thing that I will put down here. Scribbled in sepia ink in the left-hand margin of the newspaper page containing the account of the exhumation of Abby Gladding is the phrase
Jé-rouge,
or “red eyes,” which I’ve learned is a Haitian term denoting werewolfery and cannibalism. Below that word, in the same spidery hand, is written “As white as snow, as red as red, as green as briers, as black as coal.” There is no date or signature accompanying these notations.

Now it is almost Friday night, and I sit alone on a wooden bench at Bowen’s Wharf, not too far from the kiosk advertising daily boat tours to view fat, doe-eyed seals sunning themselves on the rocky beaches ringing Narragansett Bay. I sit here and watch the sun going down, shivering because I left home this morning without my coat. I do not expect to see Abby Gladding, tonight or ever again. But I’ve come here, anyway, and I may come again tomorrow evening.

I will not include the 1785 disinterment in my thesis, no matter how many feathers it might earn for my cap. I mean never to speak of it again. What I have written here, I suspect I’ll destroy it later on. It has only been written for me and for me alone. If Abby was trying to speak
through
me to find a larger audience, she’ll have to find another mouthpiece. I watch a lobster boat heading out for the night. I light a cigarette and eye the herring gulls wheeling above the marina.

AS RED AS RED

This story earned me my first nomination for the Shirley Jackson Award. I’ve called it a footnote to my novel
The Red Tree,
and it is that, a repository for a haunting which didn’t quite fit into that book. It’s a story that I walked through, from Bowen’s Wharf to the Roderick Terry Reading Room, from Benefit Street to Newport’s North Burial Ground, because I believe that Hemingway was absolutely correct in saying we must write what we know. It’s just that fantasists have to go an extra mile and include that which we know only from our restless mind’s eye, which may only be visited in fits of subjective, secret tourism. I thank my late grandfather, Gordon Monroe Ramey, for this title.

Fish Bride (1970)

We lie here together, naked on her sheets which are always damp, no matter the weather, and she’s still sleeping. I’ve lain next to her, watching the long cold sunrise, the walls of this dingy room in this dingy house turning so slowly from charcoal to a hundred successively lighter shades of grey. The weak November morning has a hard time at the window, because the glass was knocked out years ago and she chose as a substitute a sheet of tattered and not-quite-clear plastic she found washed up on the shore, now held in place with mismatched nails and a few thumbtacks. But it deters the worst of the wind and rain and snow, and she says there’s nothing out there she wants to see, anyway. I’ve offered to replace the broken glass, a couple of times I’ve said that, but it’s just another of the hundred or so things that I’ve promised I would do for her and haven’t yet gotten around to doing; she doesn’t seem to mind. That’s not why she keeps letting me come here. Whatever she wants from me, it isn’t handouts and pity and someone to fix her broken windows and leaky ceiling. Which is fortunate, as I’ve never fixed anything in my whole life. I can’t even change a flat tire. I’ve only ever been the sort of man who does harm and leaves it for someone else to put right again or simply sweep beneath a rug where no one will have to notice the damage I’ve done. So, why should she be any different? And yet, to my knowledge, I’ve done her no harm so far.

I come down the hill from the village on those interminable nights and afternoons when I can’t write and don’t feel like getting drunk alone. I leave that other world, that safe and smothering kingdom of clean sheets and typescript, electric lights and indoor plumbing and radio and window frames with windowpanes, and I follow the sandy path through gale-stunted trees and stolen, burned-out automobiles, smoldering trash-barrel fires and suspicious, under-lit glances.

They all know I don’t belong here with them, all the other men and women who share her squalid existence at the edge of the sea, the ones who have come down and never gone back up the hill again. When I call them her apostles, she gets sullen and angry.

“No,” she says, “it’s not like that. They’re nothing of the sort.”

But I understand well enough that’s exactly what they are, even if she doesn’t want to admit it, either to herself or to me. And so they hold me in contempt, because she’s taken me into her bed – me, an interloper who comes and goes, who has some choice in the matter, who has that option because the world beyond these dunes and shanty walls still imagines it has some use for me. One of these nights, I think, her apostles will do murder against me. One of them alone or all of them together. It may be stones or sticks or an old filleting knife. It may even be a gun. I wouldn’t put it past them. They are resourceful, and there’s a lot on the line. They’ll bury me in the dog roses, or sink me in some deep place among the tide-worn rocks, or carve me up like a fat sow and have themselves a feast. She’ll likely join them, if they are bold enough and offer her a few scraps of my charred, anonymous flesh to complete the sacrifice. And later, much, much later, she’ll remember and miss me, in her sloppy, indifferent way, and wonder whatever became of the man who brought her beer and whiskey, candles and chocolate bars, the man who said he’d fix the window, but never did. She might recall my name, but I wouldn’t hold it against her if she doesn’t.

“This used to be someplace,” she’s told me time and time again. “Oh, sure, you’d never know it now. But when my mother was a girl, this used to be a town. When I was little, it was still a town. There were dress shops, and a diner, and a jail. There was a public park with a bandshell and a hundred-year-old oak tree. In the summer, there was music in the park, and picnics. There were even churches,
two
of them, one Catholic and one Presbyterian. But then the storm came and took it all away.”

And it’s true, most of what she says. There was a town here once. A decade’s neglect hasn’t quite erased all signs of it. She’s shown me some of what there’s left to see – the stump of a brick chimney, a few broken pilings where the waterfront once stood – and I’ve asked questions around the village. But people up there don’t like to speak openly about this place or even allow their thoughts to linger on it very long. Every now and then, usually after a burglary or before an election, there’s talk of cleaning it up, pulling down these listing, clapboard shacks and chasing away the vagrants and squatters and winos. So far, the talk has come to nothing.

A sudden gust of wind blows in from off the beach, and the sheet of plastic stretched across the window flaps and rustles, and she opens her eyes.

“You’re still here,” she says, not sounding surprised, merely telling me what I already know. “I was dreaming that you’d gone away and would never come back to me again. I dreamed there was a boat called the
Silver Star
, and it took you away.”

“I get seasick,” I tell her. “I don’t like boats. I haven’t been on a boat since I was fifteen.”

“Well, you got on this one,” she insists, and the dim light filling up the room catches in the facets of her sleepy grey eyes. “You said that you were going to seek your fortune on the Ivory Coast. You had your typewriter, and a suitcase, and you were wearing a brand new suit of worsted wool. I was standing on the dock, watching as the
Silver Star
got smaller and smaller.”

“I’m not even sure I know where the Ivory Coast is supposed to be,” I say.

“Africa,” she replies.

“Well, I know that much, sure. But I don’t know where in Africa. And it’s an awfully big place.”

“In the dream, you knew,” she assures me, and I don’t press the point further. It’s her dream, not mine, even if it’s not a dream she’s actually ever had, even if it’s only something she’s making up as she goes along. “In the dream,” she continues, undaunted, “you had a travel brochure that the ticket agent had given you. It was printed all in color. There was a sort of tree called a bombax tree, with bright red flowers. There were elephants and a parrot. There were pretty women with skin the color of roasted coffee beans.”

“That’s quite a brochure,” I say, and for a moment I watch the plastic tacked over the window as it rustles in the wind off the bay. “I wish I could have a look at it right now.”

“I thought what a warm place it must be, the Ivory Coast,” and I glance down at her, at those drowsy eyes watching me. She lifts her right hand from the damp sheets, and patches of iridescent skin shimmer ever so faintly in the morning light. The sun shows through the thin, translucent webbing stretched between her long fingers. Her sharp nails brush gently across my unshaven cheek, and she smiles. Even I don’t like to look at those teeth for very long, and I let my eyes wander back to the flapping plastic. The wind is picking up, and I think maybe this might be the day when I finally have to find a hammer, a few ten-penny nails, and enough discarded pine slats to board up the hole in the wall.

“Not much longer before the snow comes,” she says, as if she doesn’t need to hear me speak to know my thoughts.

“Probably not for a couple of weeks yet,” I counter, and she blinks and turns her head towards the window.

In the village, I have a tiny room in a boardinghouse on Darling Street, and I keep a spiral-bound notebook hidden between my mattress and box springs. I’ve written a lot of things in that book that I shouldn’t like any other human being to ever read – secret desires, things I’ve heard, and read; things she’s told me, and things I’ve come to suspect all on my own. Sometimes, I think it would be wise to keep the notebook better hidden. But it’s true that the old woman who owns the place, and who does all the housekeeping herself, is afraid of me, and she never goes into my room. She leaves the clean linen and towels in a stack outside my door. Months ago, I stopped taking my meals with the other lodgers, because the strained silence and fleeting, leery glimpses that attended those breakfasts and dinners only served to give me indigestion. I expect the widow O’Dwyer would ask me to find a room elsewhere, if she weren’t so intimidated by me. Or, rather, if she weren’t so intimidated by the company I keep.

Outside the shanty, the wind howls like the son of Poseidon, and, for the moment, there’s no more talk of the Ivory Coast or dreams or sailing gaily away into the sunset aboard the
Silver Star.

Much of what I’ve secretly scribbled there in my notebook concerns that terrible storm that she claims rose up from the sea to steal away the little park and the bandshell, the diner and the jail and the dress shops, the two churches, one Presbyterian and the other Catholic. From what she’s said, it must have happened sometime in September of ’57 or ’58, but I’ve spent long afternoons in the small public library, carefully poring over old newspapers and magazines. I can find no evidence of such a tempest making landfall in the autumn of either of those years. What I can verify is that the village once extended down the hill, past the marshes and dunes to the bay, and there was a lively, prosperous waterfront. There was trade with Gloucester and Boston, Nantucket and Newport, and the bay was renowned for its lobsters, fat black sea bass, and teeming shoals of haddock. Then, abruptly, the waterfront was all but abandoned sometime before 1960. In print, I’ve found hardly more than scant and unsubstantiated speculations to account for it, that exodus, that strange desertion. Talk of overfishing, for instance, and passing comparisons with Cannery Row in faraway California and the collapse of the Monterey Bay sardine canning industry back in the 1950’s. I write down everything I find, no matter how unconvincing, but I permit myself to believe only a very little of it.

“A penny for your thoughts,” she says, then shuts her eyes again.

“You haven’t got a penny,” I reply, trying to ignore the raw, hungry sound of the wind and the constant noise at the window.

“I most certainly do,” she tells me and pretends to scowl and look offended. “I have a few dollars, tucked away. I’m not an indigent.”

“Fine, then. I was thinking of Africa,” I lie. “I was thinking of palm trees and parrots.”

“I don’t remember any palm trees in the travel brochure,” she says. “But I expect there must be quite a lot of them, regardless.”

“Undoubtedly,” I agree. I don’t say anything else, though, because I think I hear voices coming from somewhere outside her shack – urgent, muttering voices that reach me despite the wind and the flapping plastic. I can’t make out the words, no matter how hard I try. It ought to scare me more than it does. Like I said, one of these nights, they’ll do murder against me. One of them alone, or all of them together. Maybe they won’t even wait for the conspiring cover of nightfall. Maybe they’ll come for me in broad daylight. I begin to suspect my murder would not even be deemed a crime by the people who live in those brightly painted houses up the hill, back beyond the dunes. On the contrary, they might consider it a necessary sacrifice, something to placate the flotsam and jetsam huddling in the ruins along the shore, an oblation of blood and flesh to buy them time.

Seems more likely than not.

“They shouldn’t come so near,” she says, acknowledging that she too hears the whispering voices. “I’ll have a word with them later. They ought to know better.”

“They’ve more business being here than I do,” I reply, and she silently watches me for a moment or two. In the last month, her grey eyes have gone almost entirely black, and I can no longer distinguish the irises from the pupils.

“They ought to know better,” she says again, and this time her tone leaves me no room for argument.

There are tales that I’ve heard, and bits of dreams I sometimes think I’ve borrowed -– from her or one of her apostles – that I find somewhat more convincing than either newspaper accounts of depleted fish stocks or rumors of a cataclysmic hurricane. There are the spook stories I’ve overheard, passed between children. There are yarns traded by the half dozen or so grizzled old men who sit outside the filling station near the widow’s boardinghouse, who seem possessed of no greater ambition than checkers and hand-rolled cigarettes, cheap gin and gossip. I have begun to believe the truth is not something that was entrusted to the press, but, instead, an ignominy the town has struggled, purposefully, to forget, and which is now recalled dimly or not at all. There is remaining no consensus to be had, but there
are
common threads from which I have woven rough speculation.

Late one night, very near the end of summer or towards the beginning of fall, there was an unusually high tide. It quickly swallowed the granite jetty and the shingle, then broke across the seawall and flooded the streets of the harbor. There was a full moon that night, hanging low and ripe on the eastern horizon, and by its wicked reddish glow men and women saw the things that came slithering and creeping and lurching out of those angry waves. The invaders cast no shadow, or the moonlight shone straight through them, but was somehow oddly distorted. Or, perhaps, what came out of the sea that night glimmered faintly with an eerie phosphorescence of its own.

I know that I’m choosing lurid, loaded words here –
wicked, lurching, hungry, eerie
– hoping, I suppose, to discredit all the cock and bull I’ve heard, trying to neuter those schoolyard demons. But, in my defense, the children and the old men whom I’ve overheard were quite a bit less discreet. They have little use, and even less concern, for the sensibilities of people who aren’t going to believe them, anyway. In some respects, they’re almost as removed as she, as distant and disconnected as the shanty dwellers here in the rubble at the edge of the bay.

“I would be sorry,” she says, “if you were to sail away to Africa.”

“I’m not going anywhere. There isn’t anywhere I want to go. There isn’t anywhere I’d rather be.”

She smiles again, and this time I don’t allow myself to look away. She has teeth like those of a very small shark, and they glint wet and dark in healthy pink gums. I have often wondered how she manages not to cut her lips or tongue on those teeth, why there are not always trickles of drying blood at the corners of her thin lips. She’s bitten into me enough times now. I have ugly crescent scars across my shoulders and chest and upper arms to prove that we are lovers, stigmata to make her apostles hate me that much more.