Dark Terrors 3 (49 page)

Rough and hungry boy, barely nineteen, that first time Silas Desvernine saw the Storm King, laid bright young eyes to raw granite and green rash rising up and up above the river and then lost again in the Hudson morning mist. The craggy skull of the world, he thought, scalped by some Red Indian god and left to bleed, grain by mica grain, and he leaned out past the uncertain rails of the ferryboat’s stern, frothy wakes-lash on the dark water and no reflection there. He squinted and there was the railroad’s iron scar winding around its base, cross-tie stitches and already the fog was swallowing the mountain, the
A.F. Beach’s
restless sidewheel carrying him away, upriver, deeper into the Highlands, towards Newburgh and work in Albany and he opens his leathery old eyelids and it’s deadest winter 1941, not that wet May morning in 1889. Old, old man, parchment and twigs, instead of that boy and he’s been nodding off again, drifted away and her voice has brought him back. Her voice across the decades, and he wipes away a stringy bit of drool at the corner of his mouth.

‘Were you dreaming again?’ she asks, soft, velvet tongue from her corner and he blinks, stares up into the emptycold light spilling down through the high windows, stingy, narrow slits in the stone of the long mansard roof. And ‘No,’ he mumbles, No, knows damn well there’s no point to the lie, no hiding himself from her, but at least he’s made the effort.

‘Yes. You were,’ she says, Jesus that voice that’s never a moment older than the first time and the words squeeze his tired heart. ‘You were dreaming about Storm King, the first time you saw the mountain, the first morning...’

‘Please,’ no strength in him, begging and she stops, all he knows of mercy. He wishes the sun were warm on his face, warm where it falls in weaktea pools across the clutter of his gallery. Most of his collection here, the better part, gathered around him like the years and the creases in his stubbled face. Dying man’s pride, dead-man-to-be obsession,
possessions,
these things he spent a life gathering, stolen or secreted but made his own so they could be no one else’s. The things sentenced to float out his little for ever in murky formalin tombs, specimen jars and stoppered bottles, a thousand milky eyes staring nowhere. Glass eyes in taxidermied skulls, bodies stuffed with sawdust; wings and legs spread wide and pinned inside museum cases. Old bones yellowed and wired together in shabby mockeries of life, older bones gone to silica and varnished, shellacked, fossilized. Plaster and imagination where something might have been lost. Here, the teeth of leviathans, there, the claws of a behemoth; a piece of something fleshy that once fell from the sky over Missouri and kept inside a bell jar. Toads from stones found a mile underground. Sarcophagi and defiled Egyptian nobility ravelling inside, crumbling like him, and a chunk of amber as big as an orange and the carbonized hummingbird trapped inside fifty million years.

A narwhal’s ivory tooth bought for half a fortune and he once believed with the unflinching faith of martyrs that it was a unicorn’s horn. Precious bit of scaly hide from the Great Sea Serpent, harpooned off Malta in 1807, they said and never mind that he knew it was never anything but the peeling belly of a crocodile.

‘There’s not much more,’ she says, ‘A day, perhaps,’ and even her urgency, her fear, is patient, wetnurse gentle, but Silas Desvernine closes his eyes again, prays he can slip back, fifty-two trips wrong way round the sun and when he opens them he’ll be standing on the deck of the ferry, the damp and chill no match for his young wonder, his anticipation and a strong body and the river rolling slow and deep underneath his feet.

‘No,’ she says, ‘I’m still here, Silas.’

‘I know that,’ he says and the December wind makes a hard sound around the edges of this rich man’s house.

* * * *

After the War, his father had run, run from defeat and reprisal and grief, from a wasted Confederacy. World broken and there would be no resurrection, no reconstruction. Captain Eustace Desvernine, who’d marched home in ‘65 to the shallow graves of wife and child, graves scooped from the red Georgia clay with free black hands. And so he faded into the arms of the enemy, trailing behind him the shreds of a life gone to ash and smoke, gone to lead and worms, hiding himself in the gaslight squalor and cobbled industrial sprawl of Manhattan; the first skyscrapers rose around him, and the Union licked its wounds and forgot its dead.

Another marriage, strong Galway girl who gave him another son, Silas Josiah; the last dregs of his fortune into a ferry, the
Alexander Hamilton,
sturdy name that meant nothing to him but he’d seen it painted on the side of a tall building. So, the Captain (as Silas would always remember him, the Captain in shoddy cap and shoddier coat on wide shoulders) carried men and freight from Weehawken to the foot of West 42nd Street. Later, another boat, whitewashed sidewheeler, double-ender he’d named the
A.F. Beach
and the year that Robert E. Lee died, the Captain began running the long route between New York and Albany.

And one night, when Silas was still eighteen years old, almost a man himself and strong, he stood beside his father in the wheelhouse of the
A.F. Beach.
The Captain’s face older by the unsteady lamp as they slipped past the lights of West Point on their way downriver. The Captain taking out his old revolving pistol, Confederate-issue Colt, dullshine tarnish and his callused thumb cocking the hammer back while Silas watched, watched the big muzzle pressed against the Captain’s
left temple. Woman’s name across his father’s lips then, unfamiliar ‘Carrie’ burned for ever into Silas’ brain like the flash, the echo of the gunshot trapped between the high cliffs, slipping away into the river night and pressed for ever behind his eyes.

* * * *

‘Are you sure that’s the way it happened?’ she asked him once, when he told her. Years and years ago, not so long after he brought her to his castle on Pollepel Island and she still wore the wings, then, and her eyes still shone new dollar silver from between the narrow bars of her cage.

‘I was young,’ he said, ‘Very young,’ and she sighed, short and matter-of-fact sigh that said something but he wasn’t certain what.

Whole minutes later, ‘Who was she?’ and him already turned away, unpacking a crate just arrived from Kathmandu; ‘What?’ he asked, but already remembering, the meaning of her question and the answer, absently picking a stray bit of excelsior from in his beard and watching those eyes watching him.

‘Carrie,’ she said. ‘Who was Carrie?’

‘Oh,’ and ‘I never found out,’ he lied, ‘I never tried,’ no reason, but already he felt the need to guard those odd details of his confessions, scraps of truth, trifling charms. Hoarding an empty purse, when all the coins have gone to beggars’ hands.

‘Ah,’ she said and Silas looked too quickly back to the things in the crate, pilfered treasures come halfway around the world to him, and it was a long time before he felt her eyes leave him.

* * * *

Pollepel Island: uneven jut of rock above water where the Hudson gets wide past the Northern Gate, Wey-Gat, the long stony throat of Martyr’s Reach, greenscab at the foot of Newburgh Bay; white oak and briar tangle, birch skin over bones of gneiss and granite. Bones of the world laid down a billion years ago and raised again in the splitting of continents,
divorce of lands; birth of the Highlands in the time of terrible lizards, then scraped and sculpted raw, made this scape of bald rock and gorge during the chill and fever of ice ages. And Pollepel Island like a footnote to so much time, little scar in this big wound of a place.

Silas Desvernine already a rich man when he first came here. Already a man who had traded the Captain’s ragtag ferries for a clattering empire of steel and sweat, Desvernine Consolidated Shipyard, turning out ironclad steamers, modern ships to carry modern men across the ocean, to carry men to modern war. And Pollepel chosen for his retreat from industry, the sprawling, ordered chaos of the yard, the noise and careless humanity of Manhattan. First glimpse, an engraving, frontispiece by Mr N.P. Willis for
American Scenery:
tall sails and rowboat serenity, Storm King rising in the misty distance. The island recalled from his trips up and down the river and the Captain had shown him where George Washington’s soldiers sank their
chevaux-de-frises,
sixty-foot logs carved to spikes and tipped with iron, set into stone caissons and dropped into the river off Pollepel to pierce the hulls of British warships.

And this valley already a valley of castles, self-conscious stately, Millionaire’s Row decades before Silas’ architects began, before his masons laid the first stones, since the coming of the men of new money, the men who nailed shining locomotive track across the nation or milled steel or dug ore and with their fortunes built fashionable hiding places in the wilderness; cultivated, delusory romance of gentleman farmers in brick and marble, iron spires and garden pools. But Silas Desvernine was never a man of society or fashion, and his reasons for coming to Pollepel Island were his own.

Modest monstrosity, second-hand Gothic borrowed from his memory of something glimpsed on a business trip to Scotland, augmented with the architect’s taste for English Tudor, and the pale woman he married, Angeline, his wife, never liked the great and empty halls, the cold and damp that never deserted the rooms. The always-sound of the river and
the wind, restless in the too-close trees, the boats passing in the night.

If he’d permitted it, Angeline Desvernine would have named the awful house, given a name to tame it, to bind it, make it her home, maybe, instead of whatever else it was. But
No,
Silas said, stern and husbandly refusal, and so no poet ostentation, no Tioranda or Oulagisket or Glenclyffe on his island, just Silas’ castle, Silas’ Castle.

* * * *

His dream, and the long night on the Storm King is never precisely the same twice and never precisely the way things happened. And never anything but the truth. The dream and the truth worn thin, as vellum-soft, streampebble-smooth, these moments pressed between the weight of now and then and everything before, and still as terrible.

Younger but not young, reaching back and she takes his hand, or Angeline takes his hand, neither of them, but an encouraging squeeze for this precarious slow climb up and up, above the river, while Prof Henry Osborn talks, lectures like the man never has to catch his breath, ‘Watch your step there. A lot of loose stone about,’ and Silas feels sixty instead of forty-five.

Somewhere near the summit, he lingers, gasping, tearing water eyes and looks down and back, towards his island; a storm coming, on its way up the valley and so twilight settling in early, the day driven like dirty sheep before the thunder-heads, bruisebelly shepherds and the muddy stink of the river on the wind.

‘A shame about this weather, though, really,’ Osborn sighs. ‘On a clear day, you can see the Catskills and the Shawangunks.’

Of course, Osborn wasn’t with him that day, this day, and he knows that dimly, dim dream recollection of another history; another climb mixed in with this, the day that Osborn showed him a place where there were broken Iroquois pottery and arrowheads. Osborn, man whose father made a fortune on the Illinois Central and he’s never known anything but
privilege. The rain begins, then, wet and frying noise, and Henry Osborn squints at the sky, watches it fall as the drops melt his skin away, sugar from skeleton of wrought iron and seam welds; ‘On a clear day,’ he whispers from dissolving lips, before his jaw falls, clank and coppertooth scatter, and Silas goes on up the mountain alone.

* * * *

No one ever asked him the
why
of the collecting, except her. Enough whats and wheres and hows, from the very few who came to the island. The short years when Angeline was alive and she held her big, noisy parties, her balls for the rich from other castles down the valley, for gaudy bits of society and celebrity up from New York City or Philadelphia or Boston. Minor royalty once or twice. The curious who came for a peek inside the silent fortress on Pollepel. Long nights when she pretended this house wasn’t different, and he let her play the game, to dull the edge of an isolation already eating her alive.

Later, new visitors, after The Great War that left him more than wealthy, no counting anymore, and Angeline in her lonely grave on the western edge of the island, their son gone to Manhattan, the yard run by so many others that Silas rarely left the island. Let whatever of the world he had need of come to him, and never more than one or two at a time, men and women who came to walk his still halls and wonder at this or that oddity. All of them filled with questions, each their own cyclopedia of esoteric interrogations, lean and shadowy catechists, a hundred investigators of the past and future, the hidden corners of this life and the next. Occultists, spiritualists, those whose askings and experiments left them on the bastard edges of science or religion. They came and he traded them glimpses of half-truths for the small and inconsequential things they’d learned elsewhere. All of them single-minded and they knew, or mostly thought they knew, the why, so no point to ever asking.