Fortress of Ephemera: A Gothic Thriller (5 page)

Another printed rumor had alleged that the Langleys were vampires, based on Noah's habit of emerging from his abode after midnight dragging an empty plywood box behind him by a rope. The box was sizable enough, the rumor mongers agreed, to contain a human body curled into a fetal position. He would return with it just before dawn struggling with a heavy load that would always be hidden by a blanket or a sheet of canvas he'd brought along. A reporter for the Daily News had gone to the extraordinary length of confronting Noah on his return home one recent, early morning, demanding a peek inside the box. When Noah refused, the reporter had simply yanked back the canvas. Inside was not a bound and muzzled human being, nor a fresh corpse, suitable for sharing with Noah's sister, but instead fresh garbage, piled atop an odd assortment of junk the hoarder had scavenged from the streets and alleyways.

“Don't do it, Miss,” Willie said. “You mustn't stay put here. This neighborhood ain't no place for a lady all by herself.”

Her countenance was resolute, squarely taking me in. Wood smoke from one of the chimneys of the Langley mansion—mixed with a faint, unidentifiable mélange of odors—wafted by us. Horns honked in the street. A young negress shuffled by along the sidewalk behind Miss Buxton, eyes stealing up and down the blue fox overcoat.

“Well-played, Miss Buxton,” I said at last. “For the truth is, I more than half-believe your threat. Follow me, if you're not to be warned off.” Instead of mounting the steps leading to the entry porch landing, I proceeded rightwards, down the sidewalk.

“Hey, where we going?” Howard asked, trailing behind the social worker.

“To the side of the house,” I shot back over my shoulder. “Noah never answers the front door, but I know how to draw his attention. We've worked out a system.” Still, I wondered whether Noah would even acknowledge our presence, given he'd refused to allow me inside the last time I'd called upon the household.

I turned left at the corner and, twenty yards later, halted and stepped over the knee-high iron fence tracing the perimeter of the Langley property. The hand I offered Miss Buxton to help her over the barrier she refused. She hiked up her overcoat and transgressed on her own, more nimbly than Howard, who caught his pant leg on a rusty spear point and spilled to the ground.

At the base of the mansion we waded into a patch of waist-high weeds brittle from the cold and the dry winter weather, crackling to the touch. Thousands of glass shards crunched beneath our feet. The sounds sent a pair of hitherto hidden alley cats bolting from the weeds near Willie's legs. The startled workman cursed in a manner altogether improper to mixed company. I cautioned him on his language. He apologized to Miss Buxton. I bent down and picked up a stone the size of a chicken egg from the large assortment hurled against the house however long ago and tapped it against a rain pipe, three times in quick succession. The metallic sound carried far and precipitated a sudden, alley cat chorus of yowls.

“So is it true what the newspapers say, Mister Trenowyth?” Howard asked. “That the Langleys aren't actually poor, despite appearances? That in fact they're eccentric millionaires?”

“I'm not at liberty to discuss the matter.” I delivered three more quick taps to the pipe.

“No? Well, I guess that answers my question all the same. If they were destitute there'd be no harm in saying so. Here's another question: What's this about one of the earlier generation of Langleys being an explorer of some kind? Raided ancient tombs in faraway places and brought back gold and silver treasure and marble statues and Egyptian mummies and whatnot?”

“You mean Noah's father,” I said. There had been a lengthy newspaper article in the Post—headlined
Fall of a Great American Family,
as I recall—that had limned the Langley pedigree in depth, tracing it all the way back to a 17
^th
century Puritan who'd been a founding member of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. “Colonel Langley was an amateur archaeologist, responsible for a few major finds in Egypt and Turkey.”

“That's right, 'the colonel,' ” he said while I tapped the pipe again. “The newspaper said he'd brought back 'unfathomable wealth' from his digs overseas. Exact word: 'unfathomable.' ”

“So he was a scavenger too?” Willie said. “ 'Like father, like son?' ”

“Right,” Howard said, laughing. “Only the father had taste, eh?” He added, when he'd finished laughing, “I kind of like that word, 'unfathomable.' Stimulates the imagination.”

Willie asked me, “So what did the colonel do with it all?”

“I believe he gave it away to museums. The Metropolitan here in New York and the Smithsonian in Washington.” This I vaguely remembered from conversations with my father.

A loud screech issued, high above our heads. I'd heard the same sound twice before, the lifting of a sticky window sash. We shot our gazes up to the top floor, where a flickering dot of candlelight levitated about a foot beyond the wall of the mansion. Noah Langley's reedy voice called down through the darkness.

“Trenowyth? Is that you?”

“Yes, of course.” The cats quieted as if to listen.

“It sounds like you, but I can't be sure until you say some more.”

“Come now, Noah. Who else but me would know the system of communication we've worked out?”

“Quite right, quite right. I confess I'm a bit jumpy these days. A week or so ago a burglar broke into my home.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positively. I was reading Elizabeth to sleep when we heard one of the boarded up windows on the second floor being splintered to pieces. We heard voices outside too. One of the burglars—but perhaps they were only neighborhood vandals, I don't really know—got inside and tripped a booby trap of mine before retreating.”

Booby trap
? “I am sorry to hear about the intrusion.”

“At least he left empty handed. Not to mention a little worse for wear.” He cackled once with pleasure or self-satisfaction.

“Did you report the incident?”

“Yes, to Patrolman Cox, who walks this neighborhood. Though I couldn't give him much to go on, because I hadn't seen the intruder myself, just heard him squeal.”

“I am not alone, Noah. With me are two representatives from New York Edison, the gas and electric company.” Miss Buxton, I decided, could make her own introduction. “They are here on official business.”

“They have no business on this property, official or otherwise, as we no longer make use of their services.”

“Which is precisely why they have come to collect their gas and electric meters.”

“What? Repeat that last bit, please, I don't think I quite heard you.”

Noah was a touch deaf when he wished to be, a stalling tactic more often than a symptom of old age. I repeated myself at a louder volume.

“Out of the question,” he responded this time. “Those meters belong to us, as does everything else in this household. I imagine they were purchased by my father at some point, perhaps as long ago as the eighteen eighties.”

“Actually, it's New York Edison who owns the meters. Every last one in the city.”

“I say differently. If you would allow me time to search for the sales receipt—”

“Paying customers rent the meters, in effect, and ex-customers are obligated to return them upon request. You haven't any use for the meters at any rate. None whatsoever. And—”

“I might think of some use one day.”

“And I've been presented with a court order.”

“Come to think of it, I often hang my hat on one or the other of those meters when I'm at my workshop in the basement.”

“A court order, you understand.”

“What was that? You'll have to repeat yourself, I didn't quite catch—”

“A court order. Signed by a judge. Granting New York Edison access to your home to retrieve their rightful property. You must let these men inside or you will be held in contempt.”

A long pause. Then: “I think not.”

I sighed. “Come, Noah. Do you wish another horrid spectacle of the kind we'd witnessed together two weeks ago? With the police and fire departments battering down your front door and scaling the walls of your home? With great crowds of onlookers? And more newspaper articles being written—”

“Lies! Inaccuracies! Rubbish!” Noah would recover old newspapers from city trash bins to read to his blind sister and to bundle later for—well, only Heaven and he ever really knew what for. The stories to which he alluded were a week old or more by now, yet it seemed likely that he'd only just read them, given the sharp arrows of umbrage hurtling down upon our heads. “Has any one man ever been so persecuted? At any rate, what business has anyone in how we live our lives? We only wish to keep to ourselves . . .” He went on to deny this zany rumor and that (some true, however), and finally took a breather after saying: “Trenowyth, I authorize you to sue those scandal sheets for me. For malice, and slander, and so on. Whatever else applies.”

“Why, that's a capital idea,” I said, humoring him. “Capital. Why don't you and I discuss this indoors, whilst these men tend to their business, shall we?”

“Now? Tonight? Oh, that won't do, I'm afraid. The house is in no shape for unexpected visitors. Perhaps later in the week, after I've had a chance to dust and straighten up a bit. Explain to your associates down there that my sister is an invalid and takes up a great deal of my time, so much, in fact, that I sometimes neglect the domestic chores.”

Dust and straighten up a bit?
Had he really said that? Along with
I sometimes neglect the domestic chores?
Why, the man would have to clean up round the clock and through to 1950 before he could whip his house into decent shape for visitors.

“Open up now, Noah, or in the morning there will be fire ladders beneath your windows again and fire axes—”

The beam of a flashlight caught me flush from behind, hurling my weeds-infested silhouette against the wall. Before I could turn around, I heard a single, cricket-like chirp a few feet behind me that proved to be the hammer of a .38 revolver ratcheting back.

A man's voice—one I didn't recognize—barked at us. “Don't move and keep your yap shut. All of ya's.”

Entering the Mansion

The armed man was, to my relief, the patrolman named Cox whom Noah had recently mentioned. Out walking his beat, he'd overheard our half-shouted conversation and
got the drop on us
, as they say in the dime novels, in case our party were the same group of vandals or robbers who'd attempted that break-in the week before. Once we'd established our true identities to his satisfaction, the patrolman holstered his weapon and leant his authority to our cause. It was the final push Noah needed, I think, to acquiesce to what he termed a “sudden invasion.”

Sleet began to pelt us as we made for the entry porch landing. There, we huddled and shivered waiting to be let inside. Patrolman Cox resolved to stay with our party until the visit concluded—a well-advised decision, I thought at the time, given Noah's unpredictable nature as well as the known and potential hazards of such a dark, begrimed, artifact-choked household.

Twenty minutes passed, long enough to debate whether we'd ever be met, before we heard Noah straining and grunting from the opposite side of his crude but sturdy new front door. I explained to the others that he was clearing heavy barricades out of the way. Next came the release and unbolting of a ridiculous number of locks—six or seven, as I recall—before the door at last creaked open.

But only an inch. The patrolman's flashlight caught a veiny eyeball peeping out at us through the crack, as if Noah were searching our persons for the slightest pretext to yet turn us away. When the eyeball roved upon Miss Buxton, its owner's voice struck like a barking poodle's. “Who is
she
? And what
is
she doing here?”

Patrolman Cox violently pushed in the door. “That's your very own angel of mercy, Noah, don't be so foolish as to shut her out.”

In single file we burrowed into the dark entry hall, guided by the patrolman's flashlight beam. The air was repugnant, to describe it kindly, as stuffed with foul odors as a bale is stuffed with hay. We jammed our noses into handkerchiefs, or the crooks of our arms, and issued not a few stifled coughs. Noah fell into the rear position, turning up his kerosene lamp. Its sulfurous light divulged our location in a canyon of clutter.

Walls of sundry items lined our narrow, snaking path and often towered overhead, walls of stacked newspaper bundles and empty burlap sacks, of beer barrels and wooden crates, of foot stools and kitsch pottery, of unopened mail and—oh, suffice it to say, scores of other collections, all layered with dust, latticed with spider webs.

In shadow the stacks of clutter often resembled cubist sculpture, or in some way or another were charged with aesthetic properties, but when exposed by passing light, profaned the order of the universe.

Noah addressed the party: “As you can see the house is something of a mess, and you have my deepest apologies. If only you had waited until next week, and given me a chance to dust and clean up and put some things away …” His voice trailed off. No one challenged this amazing ludicrosity, and I wondered what exactly he saw when he looked about his own home.