Magic Terror (31 page)

Had I but known of the thousand eyes upon me . . .

Why does Ethel Carroway report to her window on the fourth floor of the Oliphant Hotel at the full of the moon? Guilt? Grief? Remorse?

In life, this was a thoughtless girl, vibrant but shallow, the epitome of a Visible, who felt no more of guilt than does a cast-iron pump. For months, Ethel had gone about her duties in loose overblouses to conceal her condition, of which even her slatternly friends were ignorant. The infant signified no more than a threat to her employment. She never gave it a name or fantasized about it or thought of it with aught but distaste. Captain Starbuck had departed the day following conception, in any case a hasty, rather
scuffling
matter, no doubt to sow his seed in foreign ports. Delivery took place behind the locked door of Ethel’s basement room and lasted approximately twelve hours, during which she had twice to shout from her bed that she was violently ill and could not work. During the process, she consumed much of a bottle of bourbon whiskey given her by another priapic guest of the Oliphant. When at last the child bullied its way out between her legs, Ethel bit the umbilicus in two and observed that she had delivered a boy. Its swollen purple genitals were a vivid reminder of Captain Starbuck. Then she passed out. An hour later, consciousness returned on a tide of pain. Despite all, Ethel felt a curious new pride in herself—in what she had done. Her baby lay on her chest, uttering little kittenish mewls. It resembled a monkey, or a bald old man. She found herself regretting that she had to dispose of this creature who had brought her so much pain. They had shared an experience that now seemed almost hallucinatory in its intensity. She wished the baby were the kitten it sounded like, that she might keep it. She and the baby were companions of a sort. And she realized that it was hers—she had made this little being.

Yet her unanticipated affection for the infant did not alter the facts. Ethel needed her job, and that was that. The baby had to die. She moved her legs to the side of the bed, and a fresh wave of pain made her gasp. Her legs, her middle, the bed, all were soaked in blood. The baby mewed again, and more to comfort herself than it, she slid the squeaking child upward toward her right breast and bumped the nipple against his lips until he opened his mouth and tried to suck. Like Ethel, the baby was covered with blood, as well as with something that resembled grease. At that moment she wanted more than anything else to wash herself off—she wanted to wash the baby, too. At least he could die clean. She transferred him to her other breast, which gave no more milk than the first. When she stroked his body, some of the blood and grease came off on her hand, and she wiped his back with a clean part of the sheet.

Some time later, Ethel swung her feet off the bed, ignored the bolts of pain, and stood up with the baby clamped to her bosom. Grimacing, she limped to the sink and filled it with tepid water. Then she lowered the baby into the sink. As soon as his skin met the water, his eyes flew open and appeared to search her face. For the first time, she noticed that their color was a violent purple-blue, like no other eyes she had ever seen. The infant was frowning magisterially. His legs contracted under him like a frog’s. His violent eyes glowered up at her, as if he knew what she was ultimately going to do, did not at all like what she was going to do, but accepted it. As she swabbed him with the washcloth, he kept frowning up at her, scanning her face with his astonishing eyes.

Ethel considered drowning him, but if she did so, she would have to carry his body out of the hotel, and she didn’t even have a suitcase. Besides, she did not enjoy the idea of holding him under the water while he looked up at her with that funny old-king frown. She let the water drain from the sink, wrapped the baby in a towel, and gave herself a rudimentary sponge bath. When she picked the baby off the floor, his eyes flew open again, then closed as his mouth gaped in an enormous yawn. She limped back to bed, tore the sheets off one-handed, cast a blanket over the mattress, and fell asleep with the baby limp on her chest.

It was still dark when Ethel awakened, but the quality of the darkness told her that it would soon be morning. The baby stirred. Its arms, which had worked free of the towel, jerked upward, paused in the air, and drifted down again. This was the hour when the hotel was still, but for the furnaceman. The hallways were empty; a single sleepy clerk manned the desk. In another hour, the bootboys would be setting out the night’s polished shoes, and a few early-bird guests would be calling down their room-service orders. In two hours, a uniformed Ethel Carroway was supposed to report for duty. She intended to do this. When it became noticed that she was in pain, she would be allowed another day’s sick leave, but report she must. She had approximately forty-five minutes in which to determine what to do with the baby and then to do it.

A flawless plan came to her. If she carried the baby to the service stairs, she would avoid the furnaceman’s realm, and once on the service stairs, she could go anywhere without being seen. The hallways would remain empty. She could reach one of the upper floors, open a window, and—let the baby fall. Her part in his death would be over in an instant, and the death itself would be a matter of a second, less than a second, a moment too brief for pain. Afterward, no one would be able to connect Ethel Carroway with the little corpse on the Erie Street pavement. It would seem as though a guest had dropped the baby, or as though an outsider had entered the hotel to rid herself of an unwanted child. It would be a mystery: a baby from nowhere, fallen from the Oliphant Hotel. Police Are Baffled.

She pulled on a nightdress and wrapped herself in an old hotel bathrobe. Then she swaddled her child in the towel and silently left her room. On the other side of the basement, the furnaceman snored on his pallet. Gritting her teeth, Ethel limped to the stairs.

The second floor was too low, and the third seemed uncertain. To be safe, she would have to get to the fourth floor. Her legs trembled, and spears of pain shot through the center of her body. She was weeping and groaning when she reached the third floor, but for the sake of the baby forced herself to keep mounting the stairs. At the fourth floor, she opened the door to the empty, gas-lit hallway and leaned panting against the frame. Sweat stung her eyes. Ethel staggered into the corridor and moved past numbered doors until she reached the elevator alcove. Opposite the closed bronze doors, two large casement windows looked out onto Erie Street. She hugged the baby to her chest, struggled with a catch, and pushed the window open.

Cold air streamed in, and the baby tugged his brows together and scowled. Impulsively, Ethel kissed the top of his lolling head, then settled her waist against the ridge at the bottom of the casement. She gripped the baby beneath his armpits, and the towel dropped onto her feet. The baby drew up his legs and kicked, as if rejecting the cold. A bright, mottled pink covered his face like a rash. His mouth was a tiny red beak. One of his eyes squeezed shut. The other slid sideways in a gaze of unfocused reproach.

Gripping his sides, Ethel extended her arms and moved his kicking body through the casement. She could feel the ribs beneath his skin. The bottom of the frame dug into her belly. Ethel took a sharp inhalation and prepared to let go by loosening her grip. Instantly, unexpectedly, he slipped through her hands and dropped into the darkness. For a moment briefer than a second, she leaned forward, open-mouthed.

What happened to her in the moment she watched her baby fall away toward the Erie Street sidewalk is the reason Ethel Carroway returns to the window on the fourth floor of the Oliphant Hotel.

A doorman found the dead infant half an hour later. By the start of the morning shift, the entire staff knew that someone had thrown a baby from an upper window. Policemen went from room to room and in a maid’s basement chamber came upon an exhausted young woman stuffing bloody sheets into a pillowcase. Despite her denials of having recently given birth, she was arrested and given a medical examination. At her trial, she was condemned to death, and in April 1893, Ethel Carroway departed from her earthly state at the end of a hangman’s rope. During the next two decades, several fourth-floor guests at the Oliphant remarked a peculiar atmosphere in the area of the elevators: some found it unpleasantly chilly even in the dog days, others said it was overheated in winter, and Nelly Tetrazelli, the “Golden Thrush,” an Italian mezzo-soprano touring the northern states with a program of songs related to faerie legend, complained that a “nasty, nasty porridge” in the elevator alcove had constricted her voice. In 1916, the Oliphant went out of business. For three years, the hotel steadily deteriorated, until new owners took it over; they ran it until 1930, when they went broke and sold the building for use as a boarding school for young women. The first sightings of a ghostly figure on the fourth floor were made by students of the Erie Academy for Girls; by 1948, when the academy closed its doors, local lore had supplied the name of the spectral figure, and a year later, when the Oliphant opened yet again, Ethel Carroway began putting in regular appearances, not unlike Nelly Tetrazelli, the “Golden Thrush.” Over the decades, Ethel acquired a modest notoriety. The Oliphant devotes a long paragraph of its brochure to the legend, an undoubtedly idealized portrait of the revenant hangs above the lobby fireplace, and a bronze plaque memorializes the site of the crime. Guests with amateur or professional interests in the paranormal have often spent weeks in residence, hoping for a glimpse, a blurry photograph, a sonic, tape-recorded rustle. (None have ever been granted their wish.)

Ethel Carroway does not reappear before her window to increase her fame. She does it for another reason altogether. She’s hungry.

I have told you of bad Boy and the thousand eyes fixed upon the Shining Boy, and alluded to a secret. In the same forthright manner with which I introduced myself, I shall now introduce the matter of the wondrous secret, by laying it out upon the methaporical table. All throughout my life I possessed a crystalline but painful awareness of my superiority to the common man. To put it squarely: I understood that I was better than the others. Just about
all
the others.

A fool may say this and be ridiculed. A madman may say it and be bedlamized. What befalls the ordinary-seeming mortal whose great gifts, not displayed by any outward show, he dares proclaim? He risks the disbelief and growing ire of his peers—in humbler words, spitballs, furtive kicks and knocks, whispered obscenities, and shoves into muddy ditches, that’s what. Yet—and this must be allowed
—that the mortal in question is superior has already aroused ire and even hatred amongst those who have so perceived him.
Why was I the focus of Boy Teuteburg’s psychopathic rage? And why did my fellow kidlings not defend me from our common enemy?
What inflamed our enemy, Boy, chilled them.
It would have been the same had I never generously taken pains to illuminate their little errors, had I never pressed home the point by adding,
and I know this because I’m a lot smarter than you are.
They already knew the deal. They had observed my struggle to suppress my smiles as I instructed our teachers in their numerous errors, and surely they had likewise noted the inner soul-light within the precocious classmate.

Now I know better than to speak of these matters (save in privileged conditions such as these). In my midtwenties I gave all of that up, recognizing that my life had become a catastrophe, and that the gifts which so elevated me above the run of mankind (as the protagonists of the great
Poe
know themselves raised up) had not as it were elevated my outward circumstances accordingly. The inward soul-light had dimmed and guttered, would no longer draw the attacks of the envious. Life had circled ’round and stolen what was most essentially mine.

Not all ghosts are dead, but only the dead can be counted on for twenty-twenty vision. You only get to see what’s in front of your nose when it’s too late to do you any good.

At that point, enter hunger.

My life had already lost its luster before I understood that the process of diminishment had begun. Grade school went by in the manner described. My high school career, which should have been a four-year span of ever-increasing glories culminating in a 4.0 average and a full scholarship to a Harvard or even a College of William and Mary, ground into a weary pattern of C’s and D’s hurled at me by fools incapable of distinguishing the creative spirit from the glib, mendacious copycat. In his freshman year, young Frank Wardwell submitted to the school literary magazine under the pen name Orion three meritorious poems, all of which were summarily rejected on the grounds that several of their nobler phrases had been copied down from poets of the Romantic movement. Did the poets own these phrases, then? And would then a young chap like Frank Wardwell be forbidden to so much as
utter
these phrases in the course of literary conversations such as he never had, due to the absence of like-minded souls? Yes, one gathers, to the editors of a high school literary magazine.

I turned to the creation of a private journal in which to inscribe my exalted thoughts and far-flung imaginings. But the poison had already begun its deadly work. Brutal surroundings and moral isolation had robbed my pen of freshness, and much of what I committed to the page was mere lamentation for my misunderstood and friendless state. In coming from the depths to reach expression, the gleaming heroes with cascading blond hair of my high-arching thoughts met the stultifying ignorance about me and promptly shriveled into gat-toothed dwarves. The tales with which I had vowed to storm this world’s castles and four-star hotels refused to take wing. I blush to remember how, when stalled in the midst of what was to be a furious vision of awe and terror, my talent turned not to Great Imagination for its forms but to popular serials broadcast at the time over the radio waves.
The Green Hornet
and
Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy
, my personal favorites among these, supplied many of my plots and even, I grant, some of my less pungent dialogue.