Fortress of Ephemera: A Gothic Thriller (3 page)

A huge junk pile indeed! They had entered what they believed to be a children's day nursery, based on the wallpaper pattern—what they could see of it, which wasn't much, due to the clutter—and the presence of several broken baby carriages and three or four score of stuffed animals, pungent with mildew. In short, they'd faced a vast disarray of moldering mementos stacked in towers to the ceiling, or shaped in hills whose peaks stood far above their heads.

I can recall from my own later visit boxed collections of corks and bottle caps, one of pencils and of compact mirrors; a fleet of scale model schooners; baseballs, tennis balls, golf balls, rubber balls; mothballs both loose and in boxes; at least a thousand decks of playing cards, hundreds of dice and marbles in metal canisters; twin piles of scrapbooks pasted with seemingly ordinary dollar bills; Christmas ornaments enough to decorate the entire Vatican. There were about a dozen crystal radio sets, along with radio parts, and as many bicycles and bicycle parts, including a disassembled English Velocipede with iron-banded wheels known as the
bone-shaker
and likely not seen on the streets of New York since the 1870s.

What else? There was so much else. I recall stacks of yellowed newspapers bundled in twine—which were in every room of the house, I think—and Communist pamphlets and circulars and handbills as well as playbills advertising long-forgotten shows starring long-deceased actors. There were crates of mason jars, half of them empty, half filled with pennies or nickels; a Japanned tea chest; a few hobby horses that, if animal, would've been overdue at the glue factory; a collection of summer hats (fraying straw boaters, mostly); a rotting wooden rain barrel filled with reams of musty linen, wool, and silk; enough yarn and knitting needles to busy every granny in North America; shopping bags stuffed with McKinley era children's clothing; soap boxes filled with anything but soap. Spider-born gossamer linked the items together, and a fine white dust lay on top of it all, three or four inches thick in spots, as if it had snowed indoors.

Dust would fly, spiders swing from their tethers, and rats chitter and scurry each time the firemen lifted any clutter out of their way, attempting to clear a path. I say
attempting
because whenever they moved enough clutter a tower of junk would topple, or a hill collapse, and fill the space up again.

“We'd of had an easier time of it walking through quicksand,” one of firemen had been quoted as saying. They'd spent an hour inside the home and penetrated the morass four feet.

It was another newspaper story, a few days later, that would serve a key, catalyst's role in the dire events to follow. But I wouldn't recognize that until it was much too late.

I shall quit my story for the night now, perfuse with sweat after reliving mere minutes inside that festering ruin, that hideous empire of oddments, material netherworld, cursed afterlife for things. What a beastly task.

Is it I mad or you and Sigmund Freud? Sometimes I think we've all gone mad in this bloody, new century of ours.

Of the Next Ten Days

I managed to halt the eviction process by negotiating a preliminary agreement with the head Internal Revenue agent as we stood atop the front porch entry. All the while, the fireman's cutting torch melted metal and roasted my pant legs. The agent fetched me a tablet of paper and a pen, and I forced Noah to sign into escrow his Bell Telephone company stock and the deed to the land at West Egg in Long Island. And I do mean
forced!
Oh, the histrionics! It took a solid hour of cajoling and coercing on my part before Noah would relent and sign the document—in his own name, that is. The first time that he'd taken up the pen he'd attempted an evasion by signing his name,
Niles Lachney
.

In the days to follow, with the Langley twins again safely ensconced inside their derelict castle, I took a brief vacation from my law practice. I dodged all the newspaper reporters stalking me by spending 72 hours straight, I think it was, roosting on a high bunk inside an opium joint on Division Street in Chinatown.

I'd developed a taste for the blissful vapor—and soon a decided craving—last year in Antwerp, Belgium while recuperating from my war injuries. By July of this year, I'd taken to sipping laudanum throughout the work day from a flask I kept in the drawer of my office desk.

I confess it did my law practice little good, to the extent that my law partners had threatened to sever me from the firm. I do believe they would've done so by this time, if my father, Alfred, hadn't been a founding partner, if I hadn't returned from Europe a one-armed war hero with a Distinguished Service Cross to prove it, and if I hadn't so recently lost Annabel.

Opium appeals to me for the usual reasons, but especially because of the vivid hallucinations. When I conjure Annabel through pipe smoke I am all but truly by her side again, in her arms again. This non-reality is so convincing that I rarely mind when an hallucination of her swerves into nightmarish territory. I am only too happy to watch her sprout tentacles, to stab me, even cuckold me. For it is the return of day-to-day humdrum without her that I fear most.

With my extended drug stupor behind me, I returned to the law offices of Gaines, Trenowyth and Fenno. The telephone calls from reporters dwindled day by day, as did news stories on the Langleys.

A representative of the New York City Public Health Department delivered a court order granting it access to the Langley residence for suspected violations of city ordinances. I conferred with Noah before filing a request for a temporary restraining order, blocking access to the home. Yet I warned my client that it was only a matter of time before the city condemned his building as a health and fire hazard.

Noah would not believe me, insisting that all he need do was “dust and straighten up a bit” to avert this latest impending disaster. I could not shake his confidence on that point in the slightest. As I made my departure from the mansion one day, I halted outside his new front door (an eyesore hammered together using bits of mahogany furniture and paint-spattered sawhorse limbs) and turned back to Noah to try one more time to reach him.

“You really must undertake an immediate search for a new residence.”

“So you keep saying, but as I keep saying—”

“And I caution you further to remove your valuables from this home as soon as possible, lest everything be razed to the ground by the Health department.”

Before he shut the door in my face, he gave me a long, quizzical stare and said: “It's
all
valuable.” The following morning I returned to the mansion to try once again to persuade, cajole, goad him into taking a rational course of action, but alas, I was refused entry.

Nine, no, ten days after the Langley eviction had been averted, a stranger came to my office, a comely young social worker. She'd come insisting I introduce her to “that unfortunate family in the papers.”

I sighed. “You mean, of course, the Langleys?”

“Precisely. It's clear they're in need of charity.”

“They're richer than Croesus,” I said, which was how my father had often described the Langley's wealth.

“You misunderstand me, Sir. It's not that kind of charity I intend to offer.”

“Whatever kind it is”—I shook my head at her—“they're beyond help.” But that only seemed to stiffen her resolve.

December 8
^th
, 1919

Law Offices of Gaines, Trenowyth, and Fenno

She'd introduced herself as “Cora Buxton” and informed me that she was a “Family Visitor” with the city's Department of Public Charities, operating out of the United Charities Building at Fourth Avenue and 22
^nd
Street. Of course it's often said that it's a woman's true business to be beautiful, and on that measure she was skilled at her work, though her methods ran to the unorthodox.

She wore a corset-less, one-piece dress with one of those mid-calf hemlines originally designed to conserve material for the war effort, but yet to be eradicated a year past Armistice Day. Her light brown hair she wore mannishly short, cut straight around the head at about jaw-length with a fringe of bangs at the front. The aesthetic effect of her odd
coiffure
was arresting, I'll admit, whilst the political effect was a grotesque, Suffragist-like statement of independence. It wasn't hard for me to imagine why, despite her fairness and refinement, she had reached an advanced age for a woman who wore no wedding ring. Twenty-six or seven, I'd venture to say.

“It isn't merely the poor we serve,” she said shortly after we'd taken seats on opposite sides of my office desk, “but also the defective, the distressed, and the deviant.”

“In that case, not only the Langleys qualify for your services, but so do I. ”

She smiled even as she seemed to be guessing at which D-word applied to me, or how many. She had a mouth made to smile.

“May I ask, Sir, if it isn't too forward, how did you lose—” She poked her delicate chin toward the spot where my left arm wasn't to be found, the empty sleeve of my suit jacket folded and pinned at the shoulder socket.

“The appendage? That
is
rather forward of you.”

Her red lips oval-ed and her right hand fluttered like a dove to a landing over her heart. “My apologies, if I've offended you.”

I'd lost the arm the year before, fighting Jerry along the border between France and Belgium in the Battle of the Canal du Nord. I'd caught some shrapnel from a shell explosion, and whilst my unit was pinned down on the battlefield, infection and gangrene had set in. It'd taken nearly two days to reach a surgeon, who'd quite insisted the arm had to go to save the rest of me.

“I see by your appearance, Miss, that you consider yourself a progressive woman, to say the least. But in my opinion
progressive
is a misnomer for anyone allowing herself to be teased, flattered, and wheedled away from her natural place in society, and you and I will get along much better if you would, hence forth, confine your interest in me to lady-like topics.” Having stunned Miss Buxton into silence, I found the heart to add: “I recently served in the Great War, if that will help check your female curiosity.”

“Why, thank you, Sir. Thank you doubly, for in the same breath you've managed to check my female compassion too.” I reared back in my seat as if I'd been slapped across the face.

“I only wished to spare you the indelicate details of dismemberment, as I would any member of your sex, but you should not have asked for them in the first place. Sometimes I think the worst of war is the way it disrupts the social order on the home front.” I raised a judgmental eyebrow peering down to where her naked calves crossed.

Her cheeks flushed red, and she opened her mouth to say something harsh, but checked herself, and said instead: “As for the Langleys—”

“Yes, whatever it is you wish to do for them, I'm afraid—”

“My aim is simple—to help the family to help themselves.”

“Nothing is simple with that family.”

“Nevertheless, I feel confident I could help them to improve their physical and mental hygiene and to elevate their conditions of life. I would not give up on them until, ultimately, they returned to society.”

“Ultimately, then, you would be disappointed.”

“I do not believe that. But neither am I afraid of such an outcome. I've called on the Langleys to offer my services numerous times over the past few days, yet no one ever answers my knock at the door. I strongly suspect an introduction will be required, and I am here asking you, Mister Trenowyth, to provide it.”

A haughty dare flashed in her eyes. Dare I what? Deny such selfless passion? Or such a pretty face? Deny the Langleys an offer of well-intentioned charity simply because its source was a brazen, hermaphrodite-like beauty with exposed ankles?

“My clients wish no visitors. I myself was denied
entrée
the last time I called. So you see, I couldn't help you, even if my aim were to do so.” By now I was on my feet to signal the interview had reached its end. “Good day, Miss Buxton.”

She smiled up at me as if she held a secret. “Please sit down, Mister Trenowyth.”

I was overdue for a nip from the flask of laudanum hiding in my desk drawer, but I sat back down. Like a man who burns his tongue and cannot taste, I had not tasted of women since the death of my dear Annabel in the early spring. Yet I tasted Miss Buxton just then.

Her eyes locked onto mine for too-bold a time and they began to explore me in the way other eyes once had routinely, but no longer did. For I was one-armed now, due to the war, and weak of heart, due to a bout with the Spanish flu, which I'd contracted from Annabel on her death bed. The virus that had murdered my wife had damaged my heart muscle, both figuratively and literally, with the result that I'd dropped twenty pounds, and ill health shone in every line of my face. (I suppose too that opium isn't nourishing for the complexion.)

Will it surprise you to learn, Doctor Dunn, that I was too vain to wonder what Miss Buxton saw in me? Or to doubt the authenticity of her attraction? Somehow, I think not, men being men, me being me. I would succumb to her strange charms and eventually to her repeated requests for an introduction to the Langley family. I would, in fact, take her with me on the night of December 12th into the black belly of the mansion, where she was destined to join me in the ranks of the dismembered.