The Pale Blue Eye: A Novel (45 page)

"If there's one thing I've learned, Doctor, it's that cadets never go anywhere without their cloaks. Nothing worse, is there, than turning out for reveille on a winter morning without some padding?"

I set the cloak back on the rack. Gave it a couple of brushes. And said, as casually as I could, "So if Mr. Poe didn't leave, where did he go?"

Something flashed in his eye. The tiniest spark.

"What is it, Doctor?"

"They were..." He turned round now, trying to get his bearings. "They were taking out a trunk."

"A trunk?"

"Old clothes, they said. They were throwing out old clothes."

"Who was?"

"Artemus. And Lea was helping. And they had their hands full, so I opened the door for them. And they..." He opened the door. Took a step onto the landing and peered into the darkness, as if he expected to find them still there. "I don't..."

He turned back to me, and as his eyes met mine, his face went white, and his hands flew to his ears. It was the very same position I'd seen him assume in Kosciusko's Garden that day with his wife. The position of a man who wants to shut everything out.

I grabbed his hands. I pulled them down to his sides and locked them in place.

"Where have they taken him?" I asked. He fought me. Fought as though he were the stronger one.

"It can't be far," I said, trying to keep my voice steady. "You can't carry a trunk too far. It must be somewhere within walking distance."

"I don't--"

"Where?"

I meant to scream it, right into his naked ear, but something snagged my voice at the last moment, strangled it down to a whisper. And yet it might as well have been a scream, for his face blew back under the force of it. He closed his eyes, and the words dribbled from his lips.

"The icehouse."

Narrative of Gus Landor

37

December 13th

A saber wind was driving down from the west as Dr. Marquis and I went hurtling down the Plain. The trees were whistling, and a screech owl was flying, near-somersaulting, over our heads, and a cedar bird was chattering like a mad monk... and Dr. Marquis was chattering, too, even as he ran.

"I don't--don't think we need... bring in anyone else, do you? Family business and all that. I'm sure I can--talk to them, Mr. Landor... once that's done, no one's harmed..."

Well, I suffered him to go on. I knew his biggest fear was that I would call in Hitchcock and a full party of reinforcements, and since I had my own reasons for settling the matter in private, I held my peace. That is, until two young cadets came striding toward us in long bounds.

"Who comes there?" they cried in near unison.

One of Hitchcock's newly ordered double postings. Seething with belts and cartridge boxes and brass and steel.

I felt the doctor's hand on my arm like a prayer.

"It's Mr. Landor," I said, trying to sound as calm as I could between pants. "And Dr. Marquis. Out for some late-night exercise."

"Advance and give the countersign," they said.

I was well enough known at the guard posts by now that on a normal evening, this request would have been a mere formality. Such were the changed times that the older sentinel, far from relaxing, thrust out his chin and repeated the order in a crackling man-boy voice.

"Advance and give the countersign!"

I took a step forward. "Ticonderoga," I said. He held his stance for some time, and it was only when he heard his companion clear his throat that he pulled his chin back.

"Carry on," he said gruffly .

"Excellent work, gentlemen!" Dr. Marquis called back as we dashed away. "I feel safer, I'm sure, seeing you on the job."

The only other person we saw abroad that night was Cesar, the mess steward, who appeared, improbably enough, on the brow of the hill and waved at us like a boy on an outing. We were too busy running to return his greeting. Two minutes more, and we were standing before the icehouse, staring up at that homely little barn with its stone walls and thatched roof, and I had a sudden memory of Poe atop those very heights, peering down at me as I wedged little rocks in the turf. No way for us to know, then, what we were looking for--Leroy Fry's heart--lay just below us.

"Where are they?" I asked now.

No more than a whisper, but Dr. Marquis shrank back a step.

"You know, I'm not entirely sure," he whispered back.

"Not sure?"

"I've never been there. They found it many years ago while they were playing. It's some kind of crypt or--or catacomb or something."

"But where is it?" I asked in a louder voice.

He shrugged. "Inside, I think."

"Doctor, that icehouse is no more than fifteen feet on each side. Are you suggesting it contains a crypt?"

A feeble smile. "I'm sorry, that's--that's all I know."

We had at least brought lanterns, and in my pocket was a box of phosphorous matches. All the same, after opening the sheepskin-covered door, we paused there on the threshold--at the first breath of that cold-fuming darkness--and might have held off longer had there not lain before us the example of Artemus and Lea, who had come here as mere children and found a way to go inside. Couldn't we do the same?

We almost came to grief, though, at the very start. Neither of us was ready for the four-foot drop, and as we recovered our footing and raised our lanterns once more, we were startled to see nothing more than... ourselves.

We were standing before a shining tower of ice--hacked last winter from the nearby pond and laid in, block by block, for the long year ahead. And now it stood before us, a warped mirror in which our images eeled and bubbled and our lanterns dimmed into old suns. It was only ice, of course. The ice that would prevent Mr. Cozzens' butter from running, and grace Sylvanus Thayer's dessert table the next time the Board of Visitors came calling... and, yes, keep the occasional body a little fresher until it could be committed to the earth. Frozen water, nothing more. And yet what a fearful place this was! I couldn't have told you what made it so. Maybe it was the odor of damp sawdust everywhere. Or the faint squeaking of the straw that had been stuffed into every cavity. Or the jabbering of mice inside the double wall, or the sweat that breathed off the ice and stuck to you like new skin.

Or did it come down to this? There's something wrong about entering a place set aside for winter.

"They can't be far," murmured the doctor, shining his light on a long shelf of axes and hoisting tongs.

His breathing was heavier now--an effect, maybe, of this air, which was warmer and closer than I'd expected. My own lantern had already picked out the hard metal lines of an ice plow, flashing its shark-teeth, and I felt in that moment as if we were dangling from some giant palate, bobbing on currents of breath.

The vents in the ceiling were breathing, too: soft drafts of night-air, tickled with starlight. I took a step back, the better to admire the view... and felt the back of my foot give way. My other foot shifted to compensate, then gave way altogether. I was dropping now, or more properly angling away, on a long slow tangent. I grabbed for a purchase, but the nearest thing was--ice--and my hand came off like paint, and I knew then what was happening: I was literally going down the drain, and in the explosion of my lantern against the wall, I caught the look on Dr. Marquis' face: fear and, yes, concern, I do remember that, and also impotence. For even as he thrust out his hand, he knew, probably, there was nothing he could do. I was falling. ...

** *

The funny thing is, I never lost my footing until I reached the bottom, and even then, it was only the impact of the ground that threw me onto all fours. I raised my head. On either side were stone walls; beneath me, a stone floor. I had dropped into some kind of corridor--bare and musty, a remnant, maybe, of the years when Fort Clinton was being built--some twenty feet below the icehouse interior.

I took a step forward. One step only, and there came an answering sound: thin and crackling.

I drew a match from my pocket and struck it against the box.

I was standing on bones. The whole floor was strewn with them.

Tiny, most of them, not much bigger than Pawpaw's frog bones. The skeletons of squirrels and field mice, a possum or two, a goodly number of birds. Hard to say, really, for the bones had been strewn across the floor with no care or order. Indeed, they seemed to function only as an alarm, for you couldn't set a foot anywhere without crunching them.

And so I dropped once more onto all fours, and I began to crawl down that corridor, holding the match with one hand and, with the other, softly sweeping the bones from my path. More than once, a leg or a tiny skull worked its way into the crevices of my fingers. Each time, I shook it free and kept on my course, sweeping and crawling, sweeping and crawling. When the first match died out, I struck another--raised it toward the ceiling--and saw a colony of bats hanging there like dainty black purses, throbbing with breath. Through the walls I could hear, for the first time, a weave of sounds--impossible to define--murmurs changing to squeals, a hiss broken by a wail. Not loud, by any means; not even real, perhaps; but they had, all the same, an authority, as if they'd been building up like the rock itself, piling themselves in layers.

I began to work faster. And as I swept my way down the corridor, I noticed that the flame of my match was growing less distinct. Something--something was competing with it.

I blew out the match and squinted into the boiling darkness. Ten feet ahead, a patch of light cut through a chasm in the wall.

The strangest light I've ever seen, Reader! Cold as cream and stranded like a net. And as I drew nearer, the net began to run into streaks, and the streaks blurred into sheets, and suddenly, I was peering into a room. A room of fire.

Fire on the walls: tapers blazing in rows of sconces. Fire on the floor: a circle of torches, and inscribed in the circle, a triangle of candles. Fire nearly to the ceiling: a charcoal brazier, so savagely stoked that the flames were the height of a parlor, and next to the brazier, a single pine tree, braced in the stone and also streaming with fire. So much fire, so much light that it was an act of will or despair to see the things that weren't light. The letters, for instance, that someone had etched at the base of the triangle:

And the three figures, moving with such quiet purpose among the torches and candles. A tiny monk in a gray homespun robe, and a priest in a cassock and surplice... and an officer of the United States Army, wearing, as best I could tell, Joshua Marquis' old uniform.

I had come in the nick of time. The curtain had just gone up on the Marquis family's private theater.

And yet, what sort of theater was this? Where were the savage rites I'd seen pictured in Pawpaw's book? The winged demons dragging their babies? The hags on brooms and the bonneted skeletons and the dancing gargoyles? I had expected--had wanted, I think--to see Sin writ large. And instead I'd found... a costume ball.

And now one of the revelers--the monk--was turning toward me. I drew back behind the wall--but not before the torchlight had revealed, inside the monk's cowl, the bare cold rabbitfeatures of Mrs. Marquis.

Nothing like the brittle, grinning woman I had known before. She had become the dullest of acolytes, waiting for her next command. It came before another minute had passed. Came, fittingly enough, from the Army officer, who bent his head toward her and spoke, in a gentle voice that carried straight to my ear:

"Soon."

Artemus, of course. Dressed in his late uncle's uniform. It didn't fit him nearly as well as it did Poe, but he still carried himself with all the pride that had made him captain of Table Eight.
And if that was Artemus, then the third figure--the slow-treading priest with the bowed head and rolled shoulders, even now moving toward a rough-hewn rock altar--this could only be Lea.

Lea Marquis, yes. Minus the white collar I had torn away from her outside Benny Havens' tavern.

She was speaking now--or maybe she had been speaking all along-- in a voice of unusual resonance. Now, I'm no good with foreign tongues, Reader, but I'm willing to bet that what came out of her mouth wasn't Latin or French or German or any language ever uttered by a human. I believe it was a tongue newly minted, on the spot, by Lea Marquis and Henri le Clerc.

Oh, I could try to write it down for you, but it would come out looking something like skrallikonafaheerenow, and you'd think it the purest nonsense. Which it was, but with this difference: somehow it had the effect of turning all language into nonsense, so that even the words you'd been speaking for nearly half a century could seem as random as dirt clods.

Well, at any rate, this language must have made some sense to Lea's companions, for after some minutes, her voice rose to a higher cadence, and the three of them turned as one and stared at a shrouded object that lay just outside the magic circle. And this is how much they held me in their spell: until now, I hadn't even noticed the thing, though it was there to be seen in the back-glow of a torch. And even in the act of studying it, I could see only what Dr. Marquis had seen: a bundle of clothes. From which a single bare hand protruded.

Artemus knelt down. Peeled away the garments, one by one... to reveal the prostrate form of Cadet Poe.

His coatee had been stripped away, but the rest of his uniform was still in place, and he lay there like a candidate for a five-gun salute: so pale in the face, so rigid in the fingers that I had about given him up for lost. Until I saw a tremor pass through his frame like a current. And in that moment, I was glad of the cold.

And, oh, it was cold! Colder by far than the icehouse, colder than the polar caps. Cold enough, yes, to keep a heart in good condition for many weeks.

Artemus was rolling up the sleeve of Poe's shirt now... opening a doctor's bag much like his father might have used... extracting first a tourniquet and then a small marble cruet... then a narrow-gauge glass tube... then a lancet.

I didn't cry out, but Lea comforted me as if she knew I was there. "Sssshhhhh," she said, to no one in particular.