Fortress of Ephemera: A Gothic Thriller (2 page)

November 28
^th
(Continued)

2078 Fifth Avenue, Harlem

If only my voice would return. For I would surely serve you a blast of it now, Doctor Dunn. If you must read this manuscript over my shoulder, as it were, i.e., once per day as I go along, then please refrain from your efforts to direct the course of my authorship. I shan't tell this story at all but in my own way.

As it happens, I do not wish—as you would have me do—to describe any feelings of melancholia at this point in the narrative. I will merely summarize for you that, prior to my introduction to Noah Langley, I had entertained thoughts of suicide. Wined, dined, and danced with them, in fact. I should think it hardly surprising given what the so-called Great War and the recent flu pandemic wrought for me personally.

Now where was I?

Ah, yes, the eviction party . . .

We drove to the Langley mansion in a taxicab. At the start Noah volunteered that he hadn't ridden in a motor car since motoring goggles were
de rigueur
. He spent an entire city block leaning his head out beyond the passenger window, as dogs do, to catch the wind on his face. (Whether his tongue was in his mouth, or dangling giddily out of one side, I couldn't say.)

During the ride, I asked him a few questions about his long ago dealings with my father. All I knew to this point was that when Noah's father, the colonel, had died an old man in 1903, Noah had essentially inherited my father's legal expertise; but, as the result of a cancer,
mon père
had followed the colonel into the spiritual world just eighteen months later.

“He struck me as a gracious man,” Noah said of my father, “polite and gracious, as all true gentlemen are, and my own father, on his deathbed, had instructed me to heed your father's advice, but one day Mister Trenowyth stopped telephoning—we had one still, in those days—and writing his letters and paying personal visits too. After a short while another attorney from your firm paid a visit, Gaines or Fenno, I forget which one.

“He informed me of your father's poor health and volunteered to handle my affairs until your father recovered—I suppose he never did—but I told this other lawyer, after some thought, that it would be more prudent—and more in keeping with my father's deathbed instructions—if I kept using Mister Trenowyth's old advice, rather than paying for new from someone else. The man put up quite an argument, but he'd had training at that, hadn't he, and I held my ground.”

Noah had a knack for leaving me bereft of my native language, if only for moments at a time. When I'd found words again I said: “What about all the legal work my father did for you?”

“Yes, well, I simply let that go. Apparently, I hadn't needed it done after all. Whatever allows itself to be ignored doesn't exist in the first place. That's my philosophy. You'd be surprised as to how much of this world doesn't really exist, young man. I wasn't even sure about this tax problem until this morning.”

At this point I thought it prudent to change the subject. I changed it to the extremely relevant topic of his current assets. He proved guarded there, to be sure, but by the time we'd hit upon the outskirts of Harlem I had badgered him into sharing with me a group of assets to sell that were together sufficient to pay his back taxes and—I was confident—all accrued penalties. They consisted of twenty-five thousand shares in the Bell Telephone Company and about ninety-three acres of undeveloped land along the north shore of Long Island at West Egg.

Noah soon flummoxed me (again) by expressing near familial attachment to these assets. He described in detail the history of when and why the shares had been purchased by his father. The real estate, which he hadn't eyed in half a century, proved to be the scene of old camping and boating stories from boyhood, too many of which he shared with me, or not enough, because then Noah began to whimper and moan, softly at first, then in earnest. It was all quite unmanly. He finally ceased and proposed—in a wheezy, halting, gasping voice—an alternative sale of assets to meet the tax, one that he quickly reneged upon. He repeated this process twice more, and was in the midst of proposing yet another alternative when we arrived at his address.

I'd last set eyes upon the Langley abode as a whisker-less youth. The year, if I had to guess, had been 1899, at any rate before Harlem's sidewalks had grown Negroid, when blue-blooded Knickerbockers still bowed and curtsied their way along 125th Street. It was a Sunday, of that I'm certain, for my father and I were in our best frock coats and beneath our top hats and in the habit of promenading through the neighborhood surrounding our church after services, whilst Mother would take a horse and carriage home to Morningside Heights and oversee the Sunday dinner preparations. I am unsure as to whether we confronted the Langley residence by accident or design.

I was not ill-mannered in those days—if you can possibly believe it, Doctor—and my father seemed to enjoy introducing me to his clients whenever the opportunity presented. So I was a bit surprised, and a little taken aback, when told to remain on the curbstone whilst Father alone called on the colonel. A mere twenty years later I would understand. He was protecting me.

Infamy had not yet stained the Langleys, nor their home. The capacious brownstone had been built by Piers, the family patriarch, in the late 1840s, when buildings of such material had just begun to transform Manhattan's cityscape into the sorry gingerbread wonderland it is today.

The mansion offered little opulence in its Greek Revival architecture beyond sheer size, having been erected prior to the Gilded Age, when the rich still had pretensions to modesty. It stood four stories tall and four bays wide on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 128th Street. Its nearest neighbors—including a white marble building of the gay Parisian boulevard style, boasting a bright red mansard roof—helped to make the Langley edifice seem as somber as an elderly bishop.

Yet, upon closer inspection, which I had nothing to do but supply during the wait for my father's return, the mansion reminded me of a rich old man in the early throes of dementia. The sagging front stoop was a loose bottom lip, its dirty marble railing—which ran parallel to the street—I took to be a set of yellowed teeth, and the front yard, somewhat littered and overdue for a mowing, an unkempt beard. (Ah, youthful imagination!)

Now, roughly two decades later, as I stood on the same curbstone again, it was evident that full-blown dementia had arrived. What a ghastly, unspeakable horror!

But speak of it I shall try . . .

The entire neighborhood was in decline, I noticed, with coloreds residing within two blocks, with groups of old women and young riffraff squatting on the front stoops outside former mansions turned dilapidated apartment buildings. A stranger to the area might well have assumed the Langley mansion condemned and deserted.

Over the decades, layers of brownstone had chipped away without repair so that the exterior appeared pockmarked with disease, and in one jaggedly oval spot on the fourth floor, just below a gargoyle grinning in the roofline cornice, the brownstone veneer was entirely gone, exposing red brick beneath the
façade
like an untended wound or a sign of the plague.

The building's perimeter was marked by knee-high, rusty iron fencing, whilst rusty iron grilles caged the narrow basement windows. These windows, like the rest above, were marble-framed, and they peeped up a foot and a half or so above the sidewalk. The first floor windows were caged also; yet the grilles had not protected the glass, which in each case had been shattered completely or else hung in their frames in thin shards, fang-like. Much of the missing glass lay ground and glinting at the base of the house amongst some paper trash and empty bottles and a number of suspect stones. Left any longer there, it seemed, and the glass might revert to sand.

The basement and first-floor windows had all been boarded up from the inside. The second and third floor windows were shuttered or, when a shutter was broken or missing, boarded up. The top floor was too high—given the home's sixteen-foot ceilings—for even the strongest pitching arms to reach with power or accuracy, so the windows were neither shuttered, nor boarded up. The glass was intact, barring a crack or two, and appeared lead-tinted, appeared to swallow sunlight. I never probed Noah on the cause of this urban mirage, but allow me to speculate—based on all that I came to know of this household—that it was the undisturbed accumulation of floating coal-soot upon the window panes for a good quarter century.

We found the eviction party had grown in number, due to unexpected difficulties in breaching the home. The mahogany front door, once twelve-feet tall, was now a stack of splintered pieces leaning against the wall on the entry porch landing, a victim of the marshal's axe; yet, the entrance remained blocked by a high wall of rubble and debris trapped within some sturdy wire netting—scrap metal and broken bricks, slabs of concrete and stacks of corroded car batteries, a pair of steel oil drums filled with who-knows-what, lawnmower parts, cast-iron frying pans, shovel heads, dented pots and pans blackened with crud, an ice box, a meat grinder, a boat anchor, a tire iron—the list was endless. The tonnage impenetrable. I would soon learn that Noah, recipient of a bachelors degree in engineering from Columbia University, class of 1878, had moved his blockade into place via a gas-powered winch.

Parked curbside was a city fire truck. Its crew had run an aerial ladder up to a second story window whose shutters had been pried open, presumably, and the sash lifted. Milling about the entry porch landing, or on one of the mattress-size lawns to either side of the front door, were the U.S. Marshals and the Internal Revenue lawyers. They took peeks up at the open window or else at a fireman kneeling on the porch and using a cutting torch on the blockade. Two beat cops were intent on holding back a growing crowd of spectators.

“Quite a sight,” I said to my client.

“Look at them. Just look at them. Official agents of the United States government, storming the walls of a private citizen's home. It's outrageous! It's . . . it's un-American!”

“I wonder why these officials haven't thought to hack their way inside through the door where you'd made your exit? The old servants's entrance?”

“Because it too is blockaded. As is the bulkhead door leading into the cellar. In truth I got out using a secret passageway to the street. I wasn't comfortable in sharing its existence with you until now. I apologize for the deception.” (It wouldn't be his last lie, though.)

“A secret passageway? And ready blockades? Weighing tons each, no doubt?”

“All quite necessary, I'm afraid. For some reason, I've become an object of persecution in this neighborhood, as you can tell by the state of my windows—I've simply given up replacing the glass by now—and from time to time there have been attempts to break into my home.”

“I'm sorry to hear that. But surely the police—”

“Bah, the police! They take reports and then do nothing. This neighborhood is not a priority for them anymore.”

As we approached the half-dozen stairs leading up to the entry porch, a gang of underfed, mangy cats encircled Noah, brushing their bodies against his trouser legs, meowing. One of the police ordered us to halt, gripping my client above the elbow. I was identifying Noah and myself to this blue-hued authority when the crowd gasped in unison.

Its stimulus: the sudden appearance of a lone figure sticking its head out of the open window on the second floor. I gasped too when I saw it. A ghost! A ghost in broad daylight!

November 28
^th
(Continued)

What the Firemen Witnessed

The ghost turned out to be a man, in actuality, one of the firemen who'd entered the mansion through the window, his head and clothing so thickly caked in dust and so shrouded in spider webs as to blot out all flesh tones and bury the bright colors of his uniform in white. About a million arachnid filaments danced at the edges of his silhouette, shouting
Boo!
Foul fumes and a cloud of dust fled his body and dissipated to Earth. He coughed, gasped for breath, crisscrossed his arms in front of his face—palms outward in
ixnay
fashion—then called down to his brethren.

“It's no use! We're coming out!”

A second fireman, as ghostly as the first, popped his head out the window and shouted: “It's Hell in here, boys! A glimpse of Hell—I tell you—just before the Devil lit the flames!”

What the firemen had faced inside the Langley mansion would become known to all of Manhattan in the coming days. For among the crowd was a stringer for the New York Evening Post. Stories on the Langley mansion would appear there, and in that new rag, the Daily News, for five or six consecutive days. Even the gray lady herself, the New York Times, deigned to run a story in one edition. Perhaps you happened to read an account there,
Herr
doctor? For I've often noted a copy of the Times folded on your desk; albeit, always turned to the financial pages.

The next day a bold-print headline ran above a column in the lower half of the Post's front page:
Eviction Thwarted by Huge Junk Pile
. The headline and the story below it were inaccurate in that I myself—using my legal expertise and negotiating skills—had been the thwarter. (Perhaps you're right to stick with the stock numbers, Doctor, with so much of what's printed in a newspaper being inexact, or tediously shallow.) At least the story got right the judgment against the Langleys and the sad condition of the mansion's exterior and the reason for the firemen's entry through a second floor window and, finally, what they'd encountered inside.