Haunted Legends (10 page)

And there’s more, mostly more questions from her about Colonial-era vampirism, Newport’s urban legends, and my research as a folklorist. I’m grateful that she’s kind or polite enough not to ask the usual “you mean people get paid for this sort of thing” questions. She tells me a werewolf story dating back to the 1800s, a local priest supposedly locked away in the Portsmouth Poor Asylum after he committed a particularly gruesome murder, how he was spared the gallows because people believed he was a werewolf and so not in control of his actions. She even tells me about seeing his nameless grave in a cemetery up in Middletown, his tombstone bearing the
head of a wolf. And I’m polite enough not to tell her that I’ve heard this one before.

Finally, I notice that it’s stopped raining. “I really ought to get back to work,” I say, and she nods and suggests that we should have dinner sometime soon. I agree, but we don’t set a date. She has my cell number, after all, so we can figure that out later. She also mentions a movie playing at Jane Pickens that she hasn’t seen and thinks I might enjoy. I leave her sitting there in the booth, in her peacoat and green galoshes, and she orders another cup of coffee as I’m exiting the café. On the way back to the library, I see a tree filled with noisy, cawing crows, and for some reason it reminds me of Abby Gladding.

That was Monday, and there’s nothing the least bit remarkable about Tuesday. I make the commute from Providence to Newport, crossing the East Passage of Narragansett Bay to Conanicut Island, and then the West Passage to Aquidneck Island and Newport. Most of the day is spent at the Redwood Library and Athenaeum on Bellevue, shut away with my newspaper clippings and microfiche, with frail yellowed books that were printed before the Revolutionary War. I wear the white cotton gloves they give me for handling archival materials, and make several pages of handwritten notes, pertaining primarily to the treatment of cases of consumption in Newport during the first two decades of the eighteenth century.

The library is open late on Tuesdays, and I don’t leave until sometime after seven p.m. But nothing I find gets me any nearer to confirming that a corpse believed to have belonged to a vampire was exhumed from the Common Burying Ground in 1785. On the long drive home, I try not to think about the fact that she hasn’t called, or my growing suspicion that she likely never will. I have a can of ravioli and a beer for dinner. I half watch something forgettable on television. I take a hot shower and brush my teeth. If there are any dreams—good, bad, or otherwise—they’re nothing I recall upon waking. The day is sunny, and not quite as cold, and I do my best to summon a few shoddy scraps of optimism, enough to get me out the door and into the car.

But by the time I reach the library in Newport, I’ve got a headache, what feels like the beginnings of a migraine, railroad spikes in both my eyes, and I’m wishing I’d stayed in bed. I find a comfortable seat in the Roderick Terry Reading Room, one of the armchairs upholstered with dark green leather, and leave my sunglasses on while I flip through books pulled randomly from the shelf on my right. Novels by William Kennedy and Elia Kazan, familiar, friendly books, but trying to focus on the words only makes my head hurt worse. I return
The Arrangement
to its slot on the shelf, and pick up something called
Thousand Cranes
by a Japanese author, Yasunari Kawabata.

I don’t open the book, but I don’t reshelve it, either. It rests there in my lap, and I sit beneath the octagonal skylight with my eyes closed for a while. Five minutes maybe, maybe more, and the only sounds are muffled footsteps, the turning of pages, an old man clearing his throat, a passing police siren, one of the librarians at the front desk whispering a little louder than usual. Or maybe the migraine magnifies her voice and only makes it seem that way. In fact, all these small, unremarkable sounds seem magnified, if only by the quiet of the library.

When I open my eyes, I have to blink a few times to bring the room back into focus. So I don’t immediately notice the woman standing outside the window, looking in at me. Or only looking
in,
and I just happen to be in her line of sight. Maybe she’s looking at nothing in particular, or at the bronze statue of Pheidippides perched on its wooden pedestal. Perhaps she’s looking for someone else, someone who isn’t me. The window is on the opposite side of the library from where I’m sitting, forty feet or so away. But even at that distance, I’m almost certain that the pale face and lank black hair belong to Abby Gladding. I raise a hand, half waving to her, but if she sees me, she doesn’t acknowledge having seen me. She just stands there, perfectly still, staring in.

I get to my feet, and the copy of
Thousand Cranes
slides off my lap; the noise the book makes when it hits the floor is enough that a couple of people look up from their magazines and glare at me. I offer them an apologetic gesture—part shrug and part sheepish frown—and they shake their heads, almost in unison, and go back to reading. When I glance at the window again, the black-haired woman is no longer there. Suddenly, my headache is much worse (probably from standing so quickly, I think), and I feel a sudden,
dizzying rush of adrenaline. No, it’s more than that. I feel afraid. My heart races, and my mouth has gone very dry. Any plans I might have harbored of going outside to see if the woman looking in actually was Abby vanish immediately, and I sit down again. If it was her, I reason, then she’ll come inside.

So I wait, and, very slowly, my pulse returns to its normal rhythm, but the adrenaline leaves me feeling jittery, and the pain behind my eyes doesn’t get any better. I pick the novel by Yasunari Kawabata up off the floor and place it back upon the shelf. Leaning over makes my head pound even worse, and I’m starting to feel nauseous. I consider going to the restrooms, near the circulation desk, but part of me is still afraid, for whatever reason, and it seems to be the part of me that controls my legs. I stay in the seat and wait for the woman from the window to walk into the Roderick Terry Reading Room. I wait for her to be Abby, and I expect to hear her green galoshes squeaking against the lacquered hardwood. She’ll say that she thought about calling, but then figured that I’d be in the library, so of course my phone would be switched off. She’ll say something about the weather, and she’ll want to know if I’m still up for dinner and the movie. I’ll tell her about the migraine, and maybe she’ll offer me Excedrin or Tylenol. Our hushed conversation will annoy someone, and he or she will shush us. We’ll laugh about it later on.

But Abby doesn’t appear, and so I sit for a while, gazing across the wide room at the window, a tree
outside
the window, at the houses lined up neat and tidy along Redwood Street. On Wednesday, the library is open until eight, but I leave as soon as I feel well enough to drive back to Providence.

It’s Thursday, and I’m sitting in that same green armchair in the Roderick Terry Reading Room. It’s only 11:26 a.m., and already I understand that I’ve lost the day. I have no days to spare, but already, I know that the research that I should get done today isn’t going to happen. Last night was too filled with uneasy dreaming, and this morning I can’t concentrate. It’s hard to think about anything but the nightmares, and the face of Abby Gladding at the window; her blue eyes, her black hair. And yes, I have grown quite certain that it
was
her face I saw peering in, and that she was peering in
at
me.

She hasn’t called (and I didn’t get her number, assuming she has one). An hour ago, I walked along the Newport waterfront looking for her, to no avail. I stood awhile beside the “seal safari” kiosk, hoping, irrationally I suppose, that she might turn up. I smoked a cigarette, and stood there in the cold, watching the sunlight on the bay, listening to traffic and the wind and a giggling flock of gray seagulls. Just before I gave up and made my way back to the library, I noticed dog tracks in a muddy patch of ground near the kiosk. I thought that they seemed unusually large, and I couldn’t help but recall the café on Monday and Abby relating the story of the werewolf priest buried in Middletown. But lots of people in Newport have big dogs, and they walk them along the wharf.

I’m sitting in the green leather chair, and there’s a manila folder of photocopies and computer printouts in my lap. I’ve been picking through them, pretending this is work. It isn’t. There’s nothing in the folder I haven’t read five or ten times over, nothing that hasn’t been cited by other academics chasing stories of New England vampires. On top of the stack is “The ‘Vampires’ of Rhode Island,” from
Yankee
magazine, October 1970. Beneath that, “They Burned Her Heart . . . Was Mercy Brown a Vampire?” from the
Narragansett Times,
October 25, 1979, and from the
Providence Sunday Journal,
also October 1979, “Did They Hear the Vampire Whisper?” So many of these popular pieces have October dates, a testament to journalism’s attitude toward the subject, which it clearly views as nothing more than a convenient skeleton to pull from the closet every Halloween, something to dust off and trot out for laughs.

Salem has its witches. Sleepy Hollow its headless Hessian mercenary. And Rhode Island has its consumptive, consuming phantoms—Mercy Brown, Sarah Tillinghast, Nellie Vaughn, Ruth Ellen Rose, and all the rest. Beneath the
Providence Sunday Journal
piece is a black-and-white photograph I took a couple of years ago, Nellie Vaughn’s vandalized headstone, with its infamous inscription: “I am waiting and watching for you.” I stare at the photograph for a moment or two, and set it aside. Beneath it there’s a copy of another October article, “When the Wind Howls and the Trees Moan,” also from the
Providence Sunday Journal.
I close the manila folder and try not to stare at the window across the room.

It is only a window, and it only looks out on trees and houses and sunlight.

I open the folder again, and read from a much older article, “The Animistic Vampire in New England” from
American Anthropologist,
published in 1896, only four years after the Mercy Brown incident. I read it silently, to myself, but catch my lips moving:

In New England the vampire superstition is unknown by its proper name. It is believed that consumption is not a physical but spiritual disease, obsession, or visitation; that as long as the body of a dead consumptive relative has blood in its heart it is proof that an occult influence steals from it for death and is at work draining the blood of the living into the heart of the dead and causing his rapid decline.

I close the folder again and return it to its place in my book bag. And then I stand and cross the wide reading room to the window and the alcove where I saw, or only thought I saw, Abby looking in at me. There’s a marble bust of Cicero on the window ledge, and I’ve been staring out at the leafless trees and the brown grass, the sidewalk and the street, for several minutes before I notice the smudges on the pane of glass, only inches from my face. Sometime recently, when the window was wet, a finger traced a circle there, and then traced a circle within that first circle. When the glass dried, these smudges were left behind. And I remember Monday afternoon at the coffeehouse, Abby tracing an identical symbol (if “symbol” is the appropriate word here) in the condensation on the window while we talked and watched the rain.

I press my palm to the glass, which is much colder than I’d expected.

In my dream, I stood at another window, at the end of a long hallway, and looked down at the North Burial Ground. With some difficulty, I opened the window, hoping the air outside would be fresher than the stale air in the hallway. It was, and I thought it smelled faintly of clover and strawberries. And there was music. I saw Abby then, standing beneath a tree, playing a violin. The music was very beautiful, though very sad, and completely unfamiliar. She drew the bow slowly across the strings, and I realized that somehow the music was shaping the night. There were clouds sailing past above the cemetery, and the chords she drew from the violin changed the shapes of those clouds, and also seemed to dictate the speed at which they moved. The moon was bloated, and shone an unhealthy shade of ivory, and the
whole sky writhed like a Van Gogh painting. I wondered why she didn’t tell me that she plays the violin.

Behind me, something clattered to the floor, and I looked over my shoulder. But there was only the long hallway, leading off into perfect darkness, leading back the way I’d apparently come. When I turned again to the open window and the cemetery, the music had ceased, and Abby was gone. What had taken her place, it might almost have passed for a large dog. It sat near the tree, amid row after row of tilted headstones, charcoal-colored slate, white marble, a few cut from slabs of reddish sandstone mined from Massachusetts or Connecticut. I was reminded of a platoon of drunken soldiers, lined up for a battle they knew they were going to lose.

I have never liked writing down my dreams.

It is late Thursday morning, almost noon, and I pull my hand back from the cold, smudged windowpane. I have to be in Providence for an evening lecture, and I gather my things and leave the Redwood Library and Athenaeum. On the drive back to the city, I do my best to stop thinking about the nightmare, my best not to dwell on what I saw sitting beneath the tree, after the music stopped and Abby Gladding disappeared. My best isn’t good enough.

The lecture goes well, quite a bit better than I’d expected it would, better, probably, than it had a right to, all things considered. “Mercy Brown as Inspiration for Bram Stoker’s
Dracula,
” presented to the Rhode Island Historical Society, and, somehow, I even manage not to make a fool of myself answering questions afterward. It helps that I’ve answered these same questions so many times in the past. For example:

“I’m assuming you’ve also drawn connections between the Mercy Brown incident and Sheridan Le Fanu’s
Carmilla
?”

“There are similarities, certainly, but so far as I know, no one has been able to demonstrate conclusively that Le Fanu knew of the New England phenomena. And, of course, the publication of
Carmilla
predates the exhumation of Mercy Brown’s body by twenty years.”