The Broken Hours: A Novel of H. P. Lovecraft (11 page)

We wove our way in and out of shops, and every one held something of interest to Flossie. She astonished me with her vigour and enthusiasm. Packages accumulated in her hands as if by magic, and she displayed them all to me as if they were marvels, those charming unnecessaries: violet pastilles in a pretty little pewter tin; a hair comb inlaid with tortoiseshell; a pink glass jar of rose hand cream. In a jeweller’s, she ran ropes of pearls through her fingers and hovered for what seemed an hour over a velvet tray of cocktail rings and held up at least a dozen pairs of earrings, turning her head to and fro in the rosy light of a looking glass, finally settling on filigreed silver drops with lemony stones that matched the colour of her hair. I thought of the plain silver cross Jane used to wear always around her neck, the way it had sometimes throbbed with the steady rhythm of her pulse as she slept. I wondered if she wore it still.

Flossie turned from the cash register with a smile.

Shall we?
she said.

I held open the door of the jeweller’s, noting that she was wearing her new earrings, glinting with sunlight as she stepped outside. These were no paste reproductions. I speculated at their cost. Certainly, she seemed to have no qualms about spending. Her family was obviously well-to-do. Footing the bills, as it were. Or someone was.

It occurred to me then that Providence was an odd place for an actress. I asked her about it.

You mean why am I not in Los Angeles or New York or somewhere?

One would think even Bridgeport. But Providence?

She laughed, then fell silent awhile; musing, it seemed. We walked slower, negotiating passersby and the puddles on the cobblestones, and bumping pleasantly against one another. Flossie glanced discreetly at her reflection now and again in the windowglass and I recalled Jane remarking once upon this being the pastime of certain kinds of narcissistic women,
as if
, she said,
they could not be parted from their own precious image for even a moment. As if they might lose themselves
. Jane thought herself above mirrors, and it occurred to me to wonder only then, in hindsight, what she feared she might lose there.

I found this habit of Flossie’s charming.

Finally she said,
It wasn’t my career which brought me here, I’m afraid.

I see.

We strolled on beneath the bare elms and shop awnings in silence. I hadn’t intended to pursue it, but my curiosity got the better of me.

Might I ask?
I ventured.

Where he is now?
she said quickly, as if she’d been waiting for me to ask.
Oh, still here. In Providence, I mean. With someone else. In our bed.

So you were married, then.

She gave me a funny look.

I see
, I said.

You needn’t be so shocked
, she teased.

I’m hardly a prude in such matters. Though I confess it hadn’t occurred to me.

So, anyway
, she said,
that’s why I needed the sublet in such an awful hurry. And Helen, I’d heard she was living here, and when I telephoned she’d sounded only too eager for a roommate, and so I handed him my walking papers. I swear my teacup hadn’t even cooled and he had her all moved in. Well. So what. He wasn’t worth it.

But
, I observed,
you’re still here.

She shrugged her silvery fur.
For now. I don’t plan to stay. Just until I get my sea legs again. Do you know what I mean?

I think so.

She eyed me from beneath the velvet brim of her hat.

What about you, Arthor P. Crandle? Got a gal?
She grinned up at me, teasingly, and her smile faded. She brushed my sleeve.
I’m sorry, that was too forward of me. I forget not everyone wants to hang out their laundry. Nor look at anyone else’s.

She dropped her hand.

It’s the Midwest in me, you know,
she added after a time.
I don’t mean to be rude. We’re very direct. It’s considered good manners there to just come out and say a thing. Otherwise you’ll be thought sneaky, suspicious. I forget you New Englanders are …

Sneaky and suspicious?

Reserved.

That, too.

There is something to be said for discretion, I’m sure.

There is something to be said for all things, given one’s perspective.

Yes,
she said, and considered.
Except deceit.

I glanced down at her.

Even that
, I offered cautiously,
can be excused, or at least accounted for. In certain circumstances. Can it not?

Not by my code.

The code of the Midwest?

The code of Flossie Kush.

It was my opportunity to come clean about it all. I knew very well it was then or never.

Sounds like a picture,
I said instead.

Doesn’t it. There you go. I am at least the star of my own life. As are we all, I suppose.

No, indeed.

No?

I think we are only the minor characters. Others take the best roles. The leads.

That’s a sad thought.

You’re right. It is. Let’s talk no more of it. It’s too cold for introspection and melancholy.

But I seemed to have genuinely saddened her, and I regretted my silly banter. I had never been good at what people call “small talk” and I feared I had spoiled the morning.

But I had not to worry long, for Flossie stopped abruptly in front of a shop window beneath a green and white striped awning.

Oh, look. Do let’s go inside. My treat.

I peered through the glass. White tiled floors and little round marble tables and wrought iron chairs with backs like twisted hearts.

It’s an ice cream parlor.

Oh, please, I’m almost frozen to death.

And so you’d like ice cream?

It’ll make us feel warm. Like when you jump into a lake on a cool day. It’s so much more pleasant than on a hot. The shock is not so great.

I don’t swim.

You’ve never swum in a lake?

I’ve never swum anywhere.

Then you must at least have ice cream,
she said firmly.
To make up for the loss.

And, taking me by my overcoat sleeve, she pulled me inside, saying,
We’ll agree to talk only of ice cream. Nothing of our personal lives. And nothing serious. It’s too cold for talk of serious things.

I agreed that it was.

Do you know
, she said, unwinding the silver fur from around her neck as the door tinkled shut behind us,
they say in India everyone drinks only tea? Because of the heat.
She smiled up at me.
Doesn’t that make good sense?

I agreed that it did.

The shop was nearly empty. I placed our orders at the counter while Flossie selected a table at the very rear of the room and sat with her back to the wall, settling her handbag neatly upon her knees.

Perhaps they have a table in the ladies’ room
, I suggested, joining her.

She smiled up at me.

I always like to sit in the very back. Of restaurants, or streetcars, or theaters, or wherever. Do you want to know why?

Why?

Because I can never stand the feeling of someone’s gaze on the back of my neck. It makes my skin crawl and I break out in gooseflesh, as if someone’s just walked on my grave. I like to know always what’s behind me. They say you can tell a lot about a person by where they sit in a room. Where do you sit, Arthor?

Wherever there is space.

I’m sure that’s true. I bet that says something about you, too.

No doubt it does.

Do you want to pretend something?

I looked at her doubtfully.

You know, pretend we’re visiting somewhere.

We are visiting somewhere.

I mean somewhere exotic. Like India. Or Paris. Or, I don’t know, Singapore.

Not likely.

I spoke more loudly than I’d intended. A woman in a ghastly hat three tables from us turned and gave us a goggle-eyed look over her shoulder, then stood and primly changed her seat. Flossie took no notice.

Why not?
she said.
It would be fun.

I gave a half-hearted shrug. I had never cared for such games. There seemed always a hidden motive in them.

Flossie smiled and leaned toward me across the table.

Arthor. Don’t you ever have any fun?

Not in a long while
, I said truthfully.

She gave me a serious, searching look.

I think that’s sad
, she said, unhappily.
Oh, here’s our ice creams
.

Rounding the corner of the library, Flossie was chattering out some amusing little story, some nonsense about a two-headed calf named Calvin back in Indiana. I began to laugh and, happening to look up, stopped cold.

There, in the window of Sixty-Six, stood a man.

But not on the second floor where my employer’s study would be. He stood in the window of my own attic room.

What is it?
Flossie said, turning back to me.

Nothing
, I said quickly.
Thank you, Flossie, for the lovely morning
.

Arthor?

But I was already running ahead, down the lane, throwing open the door to the house and clattering up past the cold landing. I opened the apartment door and stepped inside and stood very still in the listening gloom of the front hall.

Nothing stirred.

The rooms felt heavy, muffled. Before me the hall stretched dimly down toward my employer’s closed study door. I listened and then I heard, very clearly, the sound of footsteps passing slowly over my head. My eyes tracked across the ceiling.

I crossed to the foot of the attic stairs and peered up. I could see nothing, no movement, just the twist of the stairwell walls in shadow. After a moment I went silently up, my left hand curled into a fist. I paused at my door, then reached out in a smooth gesture and flung it open.

It was empty.

I stood in the doorway a moment, blinking, then walked slowly in, pacing the perimeter, peering behind boxes, scraping back the bed from the wall. Of course there was no one. At last, with nothing else for it, I stood at the window and stared out over the rooftops, my heart hammering in my ears. I could not think what had just happened. Or how. I pressed my palms against the glass, tried to pry the windows up or out; they were, of course, sealed shut.

On impulse, I pushed all the cardboard boxes into a corner and moved my bed back against the far wall, then shifted my desk so that it faced, not the window and the dormered building, but the room and the doorway.

When I had finished, I stood panting, wondering what Flossie would have thought to see me behaving like a madman. I had abandoned her in the street. I looked out, as if she might still be there, waiting, where I had left her. Of course, she was not. What she must think. A madman, indeed.

But I had seen him there in the window. Had heard those footsteps.

And yet more.

When I crossed the room and shut the door, the hair stood on end all up the back of my neck. Though it was light outside, the shadows hung heavily in the corners. I felt a thickness in my throat, as if I could not swallow: that presence I had felt always on the landing and the second floor, it had followed me inside.

It was in my room.

3

I rose late the next morning, exhausted, consumed by a deep uneasiness, a creeping damp, in that attic which, I realized with some shock, I had begun to think of already as a kind of home. The presence was still there, though fainter than it had been the previous evening. The sense of someone watching me, always. I had slept poorly, the door to my room locked, though against what—whom—I knew not. I’d had terrible dreams and when I woke periodically, gasping, the light from the dormered building across the city flickered, filling the room with its cold, staccato light before I sank again into exhausted, uneasy sleep, with the vague sense of someone, something, moving in and out of the dark corners of the room.

And another thing: I had begun to notice that upon waking, I did not feel like myself, as if I’d spent my few sleeping hours dreaming the dreams of someone else; perhaps that, too, a result of the manuscript, that eerie story, or a symptom of the work at least, typing someone else’s correspondence, someone else’s thoughts. I wondered if there wasn’t some syndrome or other which affected personal assistants or secretaries or even butlers or ladies’ maids; a sense of being you but not you, or, if you will, more than you. Crandle Syndrome. What an ominous, melodious ring that had.