Resurrection House (16 page)

The next morning came the report of Dan’s death, his body found in his quarters, which showed the signs of a struggle so terrific that even the walls and ceiling had been torn from their frame. Unlike the other victims, though, Dan’s body remained intact, though mostly drained of blood, and the first real evidence of the killer appeared; a set of women’s clothing, Chinese in design, lay sprawled on the floor beside Dan, buried under mounds of salt from four broken sacks which seemed to have fallen on it as if pressed by a great weight.

There was no sign of Dan’s gold.

Officially, that’s where the tale of Black Danny O’Barry ends. The murders ceased and the green mist was never again reported in the city. The constable made a show of scratching his head by way of investigation, and the episode quickly removed itself to the realm of legend.

A few nights after Dan’s passing an elderly Chinese man entered Chesmire’s, approached me at the bar and ordered a whiskey, from which he did not drink the entire time he stayed. He was a withered man with a dull gleam to his eyes. A great sadness hung over him, and he glanced around the room in random succession, often staring at the door, his attitude one of searching as if he hoped something he’d lost would reveal itself to him. It was rare enough for Chinese to patronize Chesmire’s and even rarer for one so old and unusual to put in an appearance, and I found my curiosity roused. It was still early evening, and business was quiet, so as I cleaned glasses behind the bar I attempted conversation. The old man spoke enough English to respond, and in not too long a time, had rendered a story that left me pale and trembling.

He said his name was Chan, and his journey here from China had taken several months. He had arrived in fact only a few weeks ago, coming in search of his daughter. In China he was head of a noble family, and due to some actions the old man had taken, they had fallen target to a band of outlaws who sought vengeance by kidnapping the old man’s only daughter. Before anything could be done the outlaws spirited her away on a ship bound for San Francisco, where they were sure they could profit from selling the girl into prostitution and be certain her family never again saw her. But they underestimated the old man’s tenacity. He pursued them and sought out his child in the alien surroundings of the city, but when he finally found her, he was too late. She had perished in her captivity. The old man craved vengeance, but being Chinese and alone in America, he could not openly hunt his enemies.

His daughter’s name was Ling.

He took her body from where it rested in Sun Chou’s parlor house, and kept it from burial in the rooms he had rented in the Chinese district for the Chinese believe that the dead too long unburied become restless and angry. In this way Ling’s father stirred up what he called Ling’s
p’ai
, a powerful spirit force within her, and she was transformed, for the irritated spirit woke her from death, and motivated by anger, gave movement to her lifeless body, resurrecting the girl as
chiang shih
.

The words, which I had first heard from Dan’s lips, turned my blood cold.

What waited for Dan in his rooms when he came home that last night was something not entirely living and not entirely human, something savage and unholy with nothing more than its thirst for Dan’s blood to guide it. Imagine what must have gone through Dan’s mind as he lit his oil lamp and watched the shadows peel back to reveal Ling watching him with hungry eyes. Might he not have felt a pang of relief that he had not killed her after all? He probably wondered about her appearance, and how her beautiful skin had become pale and papery, and how her lush black hair had turned stark white. Maybe he wondered why her embrace felt so cold.

Ling quickly made her intentions clear by pulling Dan violently to the floor. Her strength, by then, would have been much greater than that of any living girl her size, which Dan likely found troubling. It must have unnerved him, as well, that Ling uttered not a sound during their scuffle, not even a gasp for breath. She fixated her attention on his neck, her wet lips spreading as she craned her dark mouth toward his flesh. For his part Dan took great annoyance in the idea that she had been able to sneak into his rooms ahead of him and, had he not been so drunk, he imagined Ling would’ve been bleeding and ruined by gunfire before she’d come within four feet of him. That spark of irritation gave Dan the necessary edge to brace himself on the frame of his bed, flip around and put himself on top of Ling, whose fingers now closed coldly around his throat. He lashed out with three rapid blows to her face and broke loose to draw his Colt.

He fired four times as Ling rose from the floor, each bullet ripping through her body like paper, but she barely noticed them. Dan fired twice more, emptying his gun, but still the bullets did nothing.

Ling, still silent, her black eyes laughing, changed. A thick, jade light burned around her like a cold flame, its glow expanding to fill the room. Her skin tightened and her hands grew in size, her fingers extending into bony needles whose nails protruded like the talons of a bird of prey. But the one element of Ling’s new aspect (and truthfully, at this point, Dan could not have any longer rightly considered the thing before him to be Ling) that delivered the purest note of fear to Dan’s heart was her mouth, which widened and drew open to reveal sharp, serrated teeth of mottled bone. It must have seemed then that the Devil had indeed come to collect his own.

The two creatures of the night grappled, Dan failing before Ling’s growing strength. She lifted him three inches off the floor, forcing him up against the wall toward which Dan struggled and wriggled to direct them. Their bodies pressed against one another in a mockery of their first meeting. Dan slipped loose his knife and stabbed Ling’s torso, but the blade failed to harm her. It left him no choice. He twisted one arm loose and lifted it up behind him where he could pry at the wall and ceiling with his knife. Ling closed on Dan’s neck and the pricking of her teeth against his throat spurred him into a fury. He thrashed and flailed, the knife gouging and chipping the wood behind him, but unable to find home—the crack Dan sought between two boards. Ling’s teeth settled into him and Dan’s blood begin to drain away. Still he could not find his target with the blade. His head grew heavy and sluggish. And then the knife slid easily into place, Dan twisted his arm and pulled, and the trap he’d laid was sprung.

The wall cracked away behind a great weight, a portion of the ceiling followed, and a moment later, both Ling and Dan were buried on the floor beneath a layer of debris which consisted mostly of splintered wood, salt pouring from four large punctured sacks and an incredible amount of gold that had been placed so as to weight the whole mess down when it fell. Dan could hardly breathe for the crushing pressure of the gold on his back. As salt poured over Ling’s body, it corroded her dead flesh and sent up small wisps of smoke, for salt holds great power over the
chiang shih
. Ling writhed, but the pain and the weight of Dan’s fortune held her down. Still, even Dan’s forethought was not enough to shake Ling’s single-minded determination. She never let loose her grip on Dan’s throat.

Black Danny O’Barry had time for one dry laugh before his world went dark.

The salt, while effective, was not fast enough to save his hide. Ultimately it left nothing of Ling but her clothes, but in a contest of moments, Dan gave up before she did. Her father, who’d been watching and following her closely the whole time, broke down in tears at the sight of his daughter’s body turned to ash and sent on its way to final peace, sated and avenged. He meant to remove her clothes from the room, but before he could do so, Dan’s neighbors grew curious in the silence following the melee. They had listened intently from their own quarters, as they often did when Dan took on an intruder, but not one of them dared to investigate. They sure didn’t mind taking off with Dan’s gold after the fact, though.

For obvious reasons the truth of this story remains unsubstantiated. Not even Chan might be consulted for when I closed the bar that night the old Chinese man still occupied his seat, his drink still stood untouched, and as I went to rouse him, he simply fell sideways, dead, most likely of grief.

I turned thirty-four today. The music now rising around me to fill this concert hall thundered its first chord in my soul the winter my great-grandfather burned himself to death.

Twenty years ago today he said good-bye to me. It wasn’t the last time I saw him, but it was the last time he called me “boss” and spoke to me like we were equals. It had always been our private joke: At dinner his nurse, Ophelia, would remind him to take his pills, Mom would tell me to drink my milk, and then Grandad would wink at me across the table as if to say “Well, Boss, what can we do, a couple of helpless fools…”

When he smiled, his face grew deep with lines and chasms that held uncharted shadows.

He was ninety-six when he died.

That last day, he shared a story with me, and made me swear never to let my mother know he’d told me anything about it. Is there anything more exciting to the imagination of a boy of fourteen than dangerous secrets?

We sat outdoors on the porch of my family’s home in Cold Spring Harbor. Below the sloping lawn and beyond the hard-paved road gaped the harbor, a wide mouth opening to the Long Island Sound. Late afternoon sun carved a bronze strip along the water’s rippling skin and clean white sailboats bobbed like withering flowers. Despite the October air, chilly as a cold drink, Grandad reclined comfortably in an Adirondack chair, his pale cardigan buttoned tight as he smoked with satisfaction. My mother forbade smoking inside and so great-grandad had spent much of his visit with us outdoors, his crinkled lips wrapped carelessly around the gnarled, strange-smelling cigars he favored. Beside him on a small wicker table rested a wooden box, its finish worn to nothing.

“Henry,” he said, calling me by my middle name, the name of his brother who had died in the First World War. “I’m going back to Baltimore soon.”

“I know,” I said.

“I’m old, Henry. We won’t see each other, again. I won’t see the next spring.”

“Don’t joke, Grandad. You’re going to live forever.”

He sucked down on his cigar. A fog of blue smoke wafted from his mouth and spread above his head. “Who wants to live forever?”

“Live fast, die young, right?”

That made him chuckle.

I’ve tried since to recreate the sound of him, the throaty gurgling that rolled so easily from his mouth. Tympani and violins come closest, though for a while I was content with the mimicry achieved by cello and French horn. I flirted briefly with flutes and other woodwinds, but Grandad’s throat was not a delicate mechanism. Even in his softest voice, Grandad was power and urgency, polished will eroded not at all by time. A pipe organ might measure his strength, but he was never so grandiose.

“Our family has a history,” he told me. “It’s something you should know about, something your mother never understood. Your grandfather knew what it meant, and your uncle, God rest their souls, though it was more than they could bear to face.”

My grandfather entered an asylum in 1964 and lived the rest of his life there. My mother’s brother disappeared in 1972 after returning from his second tour of duty in Vietnam. He drove off for work one day and never came home. I knew none of this at the time, believing still my mother’s stories of their deaths from ordinary causes, lies molded to hide her shame.

I tested the weight of the old box in my hands. It had rested on Grandad’s lap as he told his story, so he could pluck forth the odds and ends it contained, the relics of our family, the evidence that we did indeed possess a history and that it was a terrible one. He finished as twilight crept into the sky and a few eager stars broke like out-of-season fireflies on the darkening horizon. He placed the box in my hands and squeezed my shoulder as if to charge me with the caretaking of the living, beating heart of our family. Then he ground out his cigar and went inside for supper.

I hid the box in my room in a corner of my closet where clothes and old toys piled so deep that my mother dared not disturb it. She never found it.

Grandad stayed with us for three more days. We barely spoke, and though his smile still beckoned to the explorer in my heart, I sensed that his business with me was done. He avoided me guiltily, as if he wished he could take back the box and all he’d said so things between us could go back to the way they were, back to the knowing wink and the warm smile. But at the same time he seemed relieved as if he’d been waiting a long time to unburden himself of the story. On the day he left he waved to me from the car as Dad drove him and Ophelia to the airport.

Three months later Ophelia came home from the grocery store in time to see Grandad standing in the yard of his house, naked in the bitter cold, gasoline glistening on his skin, the match poised above his head. His old bones and dry skin burned like autumn leaves.

I immersed myself in music that year. My parents encouraged me, believing it was therapeutic, and in a sense it was.

I was searching for my great-grandfather.

Each new instrument I explored uncovered some small element of him, his breathing, the sound of his footsteps, the sigh he released when my mother nagged him about smoking. It was for him I wrote and played, for him I composed pieces to transport myself back to that afternoon on the porch, to my last, most vivid memory of him.

I excelled in my musical pursuits, earned praise, won scholarships, not that I needed them since my father, who had made his fortune with a company that manufactured surgical tools, could afford to send me to the best schools. My instructors recognized my talent though most of them didn’t understand me, and a few, I saw, clearly feared me. They heard the darkness in my work and called it haunted. They criticized me for my stubborn refusal to explore new variations and lighter themes, but there was nothing I could do. The moment I prepared to play, the germ of madness infected me and I welcomed it like some nourishing spirit.

Not only did I seek my great-grandfather, I sought, as well, the depths of the tale he had given me.

I have told it again and again, whispering it to myself in the dark on nights when sleep was a distant thing, listening until I knew it as well as Grandad had known it, until my words became a mantra to accompany the images in my head as the story took on its own life. I have heard it woven in my music like Grandad’s voice on a windy autumn afternoon, and even now it speaks to me and calls out as the overture nears its close and flutes and violins race.

The ocean stretches on before them
, Grandad says,
all shocking blue and stinging salt air. No land in sight. A cloudless sky hangs above them like the mouth of infinity.

A sailing ship appears, an American ship on the dim, sad horizon. But these are not American waters. No, Henry, this is dangerous territory, the domain of pirates and corsairs, waters off the coast of the Barbary States when the Turks still ruled those lands. Death travels these currents.

But the American ship is armed and not alone, and its three mates rise behind it on the clean Mediterranean waters. They sail with a purpose, the wind billowing the rows of white skin draped from their masts, their tilt angry upon the waves.

Among them sails the frigate
Westerner
, though you will never find any official record of her or her fate. Heaven knows, Henry, I’ve tried.

Inak Rustikoff, a celebrated conductor from Georgia, taps his wand. The oboes arrive, and the kettle drums rumble. A triangle rings insistently.

Grandad’s box contained a medal, a collapsible brass spyglass, three Spanish coins and a leather-bound journal, water-stained and disheveled with age. I have read repeatedly those parts of the journal still legible, carried the book in my coat pocket like a bible and retraced my path over its passages at every opportunity. I have gazed through the glass, worn the medal on my shirt, tested the weight of three thin foreign coins in my pocket. I have stood before the mirror in candlelight and searched my own face for the depths that could be found in my great-grandfather’s cheeks and brow. My flesh is too young, too smooth and thick. I am nothing like him.

And, yet, I am everything he needed me to be.

The ships are bound for Tripoli under the command of Stephen Decatur, who himself sails under the orders of Edward Premble. The Barbary corsairs prey upon American vessels, openly defying the treaty that grants them safe passage, and nothing but force will settle the matter. Yusuf Qaramanali, Pasha of Tripoli, holds three hundred Americans in forced labor, the captured crew of the 36-gun frigate
Philadelphia
run aground east of the city. It’s criminal. It can’t be permitted.

Upon
Westerner
a mate gazes over the bow at the vast pale emptiness that contains them. This mate’s name is James Henry Webster, just like yours would’ve been, Henry, if your mother could’ve carried on the family name. Two days out from North Africa, Webster spies a ship before them, adrift, flying a corsair’s colors, ragged and faded by the sun.

James Henry Webster was my great-grandfather’s great grandfather, and the words in the journal came from his pen. The spyglass and coins belonged to him, as did the medal, though I have never learned what he did to earn it.

The entries began in 1803. Many of the dates and a good portion of the text have been obliterated by time, but I’ve pieced together the broken account rendered in its pages, welded it to the story as Grandad told it and blended it as closely as possible with what historical records I could find. These include a simple listing in the Naval Archives covering the same period as Webster’s journal, enough to confirm for me that he lived and sailed as my great-grandfather described, and record of
Westerner’s
construction in 1799 in the books of a Virginia shipbuilding company now part of a small collection held at Annapolis.

James Webster sailed on merchant ships, trading with the Spaniards in Florida and the Caribbean until something caused him to abandon this work and become a crewman in the burgeoning United States Navy. If he kept any logs of those earlier times, they have been lost forever. An entry in his lone surviving book reveals his intent to resign from Naval service immediately upon his return to America, and apparently he never again sailed or so much as dared set foot upon any oceangoing vessel. It seems he gained some notoriety as a poet after resigning from the sea, but is said to have burned every last page of his work on the eve of its publication. Little of his life after this is known. His son, William Webster, was born in 1829, four months after his father died under unknown circumstances. James passed no stories to William, but left behind for him the same box Grandad would give to me more than one hundred years later.

The ships approach their enemy with guns at the ready, and fire two shots across the bow, but the warning is not returned. Even at a distance her decks are obviously clear, and some damage is visible to the hull and upper regions of the craft, though insufficient to risk her integrity. The American ships draw closer, Westerner in the lead, her crew taut with anticipation.

Captain Franks hails the corsair as Westerner turns aside her, but no reply comes. Her decks are indeed abandoned, their rails and planking splintered in places as if crushed by a great weight. Parts of her rigging hang slack. The entire ship floats draped in an atmosphere of uncomfortable stillness. It recalls the great white shark that is but the shadow of death beneath the surface, announced only by its graceful dorsal fin before it erupts upward in a chaos of teeth and greedy maw.

Westerner
draws parallel to the corsair, which is called
Yaşli Yildiz
.

The crewmen hurl grapples across the gap, and moments later the hulls bump together and men leap across, weapons in hand. No resistance materializes. Not a soul can be found. Captain Franks himself boards the pirate vessel to confront the gre
at mystery, while several of the crew become uneasy with the bizarre encounter and wish to leave immediately. There are strange signs on deck. Fish and seaweed scattered about as if they had fallen from the sky. One fish in particular, truly startling in appearance, cannot be identified by any of the men present, though Webster’s description fits that of the deep-swimming coelacanth. Strangely no gulls circle the craft despite the ample carrion.

Captain Franks will not be persuaded to leave by the unsettling atmosphere. In a show of resolve, he signals the other American vessels to sail on, leaving his crew to decide the fate of the captured ship and join them later.

It is only after the Westerner’s companions have passed the point of communication that the immense black coffin is discovered in the hold. Franks’ men, in raiding the cargo in search of gold and the spoils of pirates, throw back a canvas tarpaulin to uncover a box of perfect blackness ten feet long and five feet wide and crafted from a hard, lustrous dark material like no other any of them have ever seen.

The lid takes six men to raise. Its utterly smooth surface makes any grip upon it tenuous. The men surround the oblong box, squeeze their fingertips into the narrow lip that runs its length and heave upward, each man straining not only to move the covering, but to keep his hold fast on the material that, though dry, feels like oil against their skin.

On deck James Henry Webster works as part of the detail attempting repairs to the rigging.

Now the music—long sustained notes rising, cello and viola the undertow with violins the pulse—gives way to a new rhythm, a dreamy explosion of instruments as piano enters, mischievous, horns rise in a moment of discovery and percussion rattles with life. Clarinets and flutes howl and whisper like desperate ghosts.