The Kingdom of Bones (33 page)

FIFTY-THREE

O
n Friday, the first of January, 1904, the British theatrical knight Sir Henry Irving received a note at his Washington hotel. Acting manager Bram Stoker opened and read the mail as usual, and conveyed the message to his master. It came from the White House, inviting him to attend the president’s reception later that same morning.

For over a century, it had been a New Year’s custom for the president of the United States to receive all government officials based in the capital, along with all the ambassadors and any common citizen who cared to turn up and get in line to pay their respects to the nation’s chief magistrate. Irving’s invitation specified that he should go to the private entrance around the back of the White House. From there, he and Stoker were led straight up to the Blue Room, where Irving was given a place in line after the officers of the Marine Corps.

The reception marked the launch of the official social season, and with close to seven thousand hands to be shaken there was an unusual level of personal security for the president. Secret Service men and extra police were all over the building. No one was allowed to approach the receiving party with hands in pockets, or concealed in any way.

As soon as President Roosevelt saw Irving and Stoker, he stopped the line and they conversed for several minutes. To Stoker’s delight, the president remembered him by name from the time when he’d invited him to share the bench at a New York Police Department disciplinary hearing.

Some felt their patience tested as the line was forced to wait. Others wondered if the canny Roosevelt had seen the ideal opportunity to call a halt for a few moments and conserve the presidential stamina. Extra attention for this official or that ambassador might be construed as unequal treatment, but an eminent actor stood outside such considerations.

When the conversation had to end, Irving and Stoker were invited to join Roosevelt’s friends and family behind the velvet rope.

They stayed for about an hour. Much was made of Irving. Occasions like this one had been helping both men to rise above the feeling that this eighth American tour was but a ghost of the great ones; Irving was fussed over and feted as always, and the venture would turn a profit, but the expensive failure of
Dante
had taken any sense of triumph with it.

Stoker’s reverence for his employer had never diminished. But as they pressed ahead, working their way through thirty-three cities on a five-month schedule, with the sixty-six-year-old actor playing only roles that he’d created some thirty years before, Stoker would feel the occasional rueful twinge. He couldn’t help but wonder if this was all some kind of reckoning for the time when he’d once stood on a station platform and considered his lot superior to that of Edmund Whitlock’s man.

When he checked the next morning’s newspapers, Stoker found that the president’s reception had been displaced to the inside pages by reports of a devastating theater fire in Chicago. Close to six hundred people had died in the disaster at the Iroquois Theater, where staff had been untrained, the asbestos fire curtain had stuck fast in wooden tracks, and inward-opening exit doors had jammed or been frozen shut. Many had been trampled. Some of those who did not panic or run had perished in their seats. A trapeze artist had died, stranded high above the stage. Stoker, never one to be able to resist the spectacle of a blazing building, was torn between feelings of horror and fascination. He also wondered if there would be any impact on their tour schedule. Many theaters were being closed for a safety review.

Among that day’s letters was a bulky envelope that was addressed to him by name, and that had been delayed by at least three redirects.

He opened it, and found a dozen sheets of onionskin paper each filled on both sides with some of the closest handwriting he’d ever seen. No longer blessed with the eyesight he’d once had, he fetched a magnifying glass. The letter was unsigned, but he knew its author from the opening lines.

For an hour the guv’nor’s affairs were forgotten as Stoker read and reread the story in those pages.

When it was done, he took out his tour diary and began to work out how best to steal a few more days from the itinerary, which would be keeping him busy from here until March.

This was not easy to pull off. Stoker’s responsibilities covered just about every practical matter involved in getting the company from one place to another, as well as serving as the guv’nor’s round-the-clock factotum. But the same skills that kept the company moving now came into play to squeeze out time where there appeared to be none.

So it came to pass that one day later that month, Bram Stoker arrived alone in the small town of Iberville, Louisiana, and hired a horse-drawn taxi carriage to take him out as far as a crossroads within sight of a distant yellow church. The track that once led to the church had now been plowed over. He had the driver wait—he’d taken the carriage for the day—and set out across the cane field toward the building.

Even before he reached it, he could hear the flies. They hovered in a cloud over the body of a woman. She lay about thirty feet from the door of the church. Her face was in the dust, and could not be seen.

Stoker pulled out a handkerchief and covered his nose and mouth as he passed her. Where the flesh of her bare forearms showed, some animal had been tearing at it.

The church door was unsecured. It was cooler inside, but there was a rankness in the air. Near the foot of the loft stairs was the raggedy-puppet body of a long-dead man. He hadn’t been dragged as far as the woman. He’d been left propped against a pillar, sitting upright with his legs thrown out before him. His chin was down on his chest, but Stoker could see that the flesh was drawn back from his teeth and his eyes were sunken right back into his shaven head. A morbid humanity remained. He looked as if he might yet rise and speak.

“Up here, Bram,” Stoker heard from the direction of the organ loft.

Stoker ascended, trying not to breathe too deeply. In the room at the back of the organ loft, he found Tom Sayers. He was sitting on a hard chair behind a plain table. On the table before him lay a double-action Bulldog police revolver. On the floor beside the table lay an actual dog.

“Well, Tom,” Stoker said, eyeing the revolver. “What’s this?”

“Can’t say for sure, Bram. Having it around seems to calm me down.”

“Any plans to use it on anyone?”

“The thought sometimes crosses my mind.”

Stoker studied him. Sayers wasn’t meeting his eyes, which made it easier. The former prizefighter’s skin was gray and sheened with sweat. He didn’t look as if he’d seen sunlight in ages. Stoker would have been prepared to believe that he sat in this room, on that chair, for days on end, just waiting for someone to arrive and speak to him. Like an interview room in hell, manned for all eternity.

Stoker said, “What happened to the people downstairs?”

“They were bothering a lady. I had to defend her.”

Stoker drew out the second chair and sat down.

He said, “I made the inquiries you asked of me. The authorities here are still looking for Mary D’Alroy. Last week, Louise Porter sailed for England under her own name.” Stoker took a breath. “Tom…”

“I don’t sleep,” Sayers said abruptly. “I can’t eat. This Wanderer business, Bram. There is a substance to it that you cannot imagine.”

“Can you not simply…”

“Deny the reality of it? No. I thought perhaps I could. But you cannot enter into something because you believe in it, and then choose to stop believing. With the belief comes the obligation to do ill. The urge will turn outward or inward. But turn it must. It is a creature of my own making. But of which I am not the master.”

Stoker still had his eye on the revolver. Sayers wasn’t touching it, but he had it within reach. The barrel was pointing toward Stoker. He could see the tips of the rounds in the chambers, so he was in no doubt that it was loaded.

He said, “Do you need money?”

“No.”

“Doctors.”

Sayers shook his head.

“Then what would you have me do?” Stoker said. “You must have some purpose in bringing me out here. Please do not ask me to find you a successor. You cannot hand this on. There must be some other way.”

Now Sayers looked him in the eye. “A way to avoid seeing the evil continue?” he said. “There is only one. Which is to take it out of this world for good.”

Stoker was beginning to understand. “You mean go,” he said, “and take it with you.” Without disengaging from Sayers’ gaze, Stoker reached over and quickly slid the revolver out of his reach. “No, Tom,” he said.

“If the Wanderer is a thing of the mind, then it dies with the last one to believe in it.”

“And if that sends your soul to hell?”

“I am there already. Help me, Bram. This one last favor.”

So that was why Sayers had not reacted when he had taken the weapon. He had meant all along for Stoker to have it.

Stoker said, “Tom, I am in awe of your courage. And the enormity of what you propose. But abet a man in putting his soul beyond the reach of God for all of time? No. Do not ask.”

Sayers rose from his chair. “It’s a gamble for me, Bram, but it’s a calculated one.” He began to move around the table. The dog raised its head and took an interest, but without further movement.

Sayers said, “She does not love me, that I know. But she has to know what I’ve done for her, and in time, when her heart thaws, she may come to look differently on my memory. Wherever I am, if that day ever comes, I will know of it.”

Now the two men were standing face-to-face. The police revolver was in Stoker’s hand. Sayers placed both of his hands over it. There was a click as he thumbed off the safety catch.

“I swear to you, Bram,” he said. “This is the only way. If it does not end here today, tomorrow I’ll continue it in town.”

He held the barrel up against his chest.

This was not the errand that Stoker had expected. But what could he do?

“God bless you, Tom,” he said.

“One more thing,” Sayers said. “When it’s done, I want to go home.”

FIFTY-FOUR

O
n a spring morning in the year of nineteen hundred and eleven, the same morning—entirely by chance—that the transatlantic steamer bringing Sebastian Becker and his small extended family to England made its arrival at Southampton dock, a woman and a child passed through the bastard mix of castle wall and cathedral windows that was the gatehouse of Highgate’s Western Cemetery. They made their way through avenues of memorial stones and mausoleums toward the upper terrace.

Highgate Cemetery, on London’s Highgate Hill, was not always the place of romantic decay that it has now become. It was then a city of the decent dead, a privately run enterprise kept in order by the constant attention of a team of landscape gardeners. Graves that are now engulfed by creeping ivy stood out on open hillside. Today’s soot-stained, derelict vaults were originally scrubbed and solid, like provincial banks with their assets in bones. Statuary gleamed with the purity of new marble. Urns spilled over with flowers, where they would one day brim with dirt and moss. Its neatly kept and winding ways ran from the sunken catacombs of its Lebanon Circle, all the way up to the high terrace with its view across London as far as the East End.

The woman knew where she was going. The child did not, and stared about her. This place was both captivating and disturbing. It was as if she had dreamed of a garden of toys and playhouses, all drained of life and color.

The path climbed a grassy slope. Then the gravel way leveled out and they passed along a row of monuments, each an act of morbid imagination. Stone women wept, petrified torches burned with sculpted flames. Stone angels spread their wings and raised their arms, their majesty frozen as if stilled by a curse in mid-exaltation.

The child did not know why she was here. She carried a small posy of flowers that her mother had given to her before they left home, and which she suspected she would soon have to give up. No matter. She was tiring of them.

Her mother seemed to have found what she was looking for. The monument at which they stopped was far from the biggest or the grandest, but it was one of the most intriguing. A plinth had been raised to a height of about two feet. On the plinth stood a granite sepulchre with sloping sides and a pitched-roof lid. The mason had made a couple of gestures toward classical detailing but the overall effect was homely, like an upturned bathtub.

At the foot of the sepulchre lay a stone dog of indeterminate breed. Its head was on its paws and the sculptor had managed to infuse it with a sense of enormous dejection. The child looked at it and thought how sad its eyes were…although, of course, it had no actual eyes at all. Its body was smooth and muscled. She feared to touch it, lest it proved to be more than stone.

On the end of the tomb above the dog was an inset circle. It framed a relief carving of a man’s head in profile, like a king on a coin.

“Who’s buried here, Mother?” she said.

“A good man,” her mother said. “The best I’ll ever know.”

The child stared at the relief. Whoever he was, he lived in history now. All kinds of people lived in history. None of them was ever quite real.

Her mother told her to lay down the flowers. She put them on the plinth. Her mother moved them to the middle and turned the posy around the other way. Then she stepped back and stood there for a long time without saying anything.

The girl moved her weight from one foot to another, until her mother’s silent touch on her shoulder made her stop. She didn’t move again. What if every time she moved, she had to start the wait all over again from the beginning? They’d be here forever.

So she watched a bird. It came and went a few times. One of the times, it had a twig in its beak.

She wondered if it would be wrong to take some of the flowers from the graves that had many, and place them on the graves that had none.

Finally, her mother said, “Come on,” and took her hand.

They descended toward the gatehouse. She looked back once, before the monument was lost to sight. Her mother didn’t say anything, and she didn’t break the silence herself, in case she spoke out of turn. She sensed that this was not the time for it.

It had been an odd day out. She’d had to dress in her best. She never found out why. Over the next few years, her mother would sometimes ask her if she remembered that morning. But she was growing fast, and new things were happening all the time. She would always pretend that she did, although most of it had soon faded.

She would remember the mixture of anxiety and fascination she’d experienced walking through that gated necropolis. That feeling would never leave her. But for the rest of it…she grew to accept there were mysteries about her mother that she could never hope to understand. If she ever recalled a purpose to the visit, it would only be in the vaguest of terms.

She’d think of it as just another of those odd remembered things in a child’s world.

Usually as the day that she left some flowers for a dog.