Authors: Don Sloan
The talk turned in many different directions that night and later each wondered at the ease of the conversation―the seemingly effortless way in which two people brought together in a small seaboard town on a wintry night could talk―about themselves, about their friends, their work, their beliefs in everything from politics to religion and everything in between, finding so much in common that it later stunned them both.
At the time, however, the conversation just seemed wonderful, and a happy coincidence that each should be so instantly interested in the other.
Dinner came, accompanied by more wine, and the unceasing flow of dinner talk went on. In fact, long after dessert had come and gone, Nathan and Sarah still sat completely and totally involved with each other. George was cleaning up after the other diners, the last of whom was departing, when Nathan finally broke his attention away from Sarah long enough to notice they were the only ones still in the restaurant and that the time was well past 9 p.m. He could hear the wind whistling outside and he had no doubt they were in for a long walk if they could not find a cab. He motioned to George, and asked for the check. Sarah protested and reached for her pocketbook, but Nathan insisted and said truthfully that he had not enjoyed dinner so much in a very long time. Sarah, now flush with wine again (and, she thought, after promising herself only last night to cut back) did not protest long. The matter was therefore quickly settled and a cab was called.
George reappeared with the check, which Nathan promptly paid, including a generous tip, and they headed for the door. “Your cab should be here any minute,” the waiter said. And even as he spoke, the door blew open and a stout, short man of indeterminate racial heritage stood there, asking who had ordered a cab.
“That would be us,” said Nathan and, taking Sarah by the arm, they trudged out into the storm.
They tried later to understand why Nathan had not gone inside Sarah’s house when she invited him. The snow was howling and it seemed ludicrous for him to go off to his own big silent house. Surely this structure was more than enough for the two of them, particularly on a night like this. But the moment was an awkward one, and ended only with a warm embrace and a smile from Nathan, who turned abruptly and fought the wind and driving volleys of snow back to the waiting cab.
Sarah raised a hand tentatively in a parting wave before going inside, but she could barely see Nathan get into the cab, and so she entered the empty hallway and closed the door behind her. The brass lock tumblers fell into place with greased precision when she turned the knob and she imagined uncomfortably for some reason that she was now locked in just as well as others were locked out.
Nathan paid the cab driver and began pushing his way through mounting snow drifts toward his front door. The storm was gathering momentum, throwing wave after wave of heavy snow at the eastern shoreline and points well inland. The Adirondack chairs were already coated in three inches of wet snow and Nathan knew it was only the beginning. He unlocked his front door and stepped inside.
Instantly, he noticed a difference, and it was not a pleasant one.
It was as though a large animal had died in the basement three or four days earlier, parked against the heating ducts that led from the basement to the upper floors. The odor was so foul and so intense that Nathan gagged involuntarily and put his hand to his mouth and nose. Surely the decay could not have set in so abruptly while he was away from the house at dinner, he thought, and he reached for the hallway light switch. As the lights flared, he moved toward the back of the house and the entrance to the basement stairs. He wasn’t sure why, but he reached into a tall cupboard and extracted a baseball bat, a relic from his visits to the shore with cousins, along with a big, solid Nightwatch flashlight with halogen beam.
He opened the door to the basement tentatively, still expecting to find a rational explanation for the smell. In truth, he thought he would find a couple of Cape May high school kids in his basement with a fresh cow patty or some half-rotten relic from the countryside―something they no doubt intended as a joke. Nathan crept down the stairs in the darkness, hoping to hear adolescent giggling in one of the corners.
Instead, he heard a noise he could not quite place. Nathan flipped on the basement light switch, but no light came on. That’s strange, he thought. He stopped, one foot still on the wooden step of the staircase. Something heavy was being dragged across the cement floor in the darkness.
Nathan switched on the big flashlight, holding it shoulder-high, police style. “Who’s there?” he said. The dragging noise stopped, but when Nathan flooded the area with light there was nothing there. “Come on,” he said gruffly, “this is no time for jokes. Where the hell are you?” The dragging noise resumed, right where the beam of his light was focused, not ten feet away. Bile crept into Nathan’s throat on furry little feet and he choked.
This is impossible, he thought.
Down here, the sounds of the storm were muted, the wind faint and far away. The stench, however, was nearly unbearable and Nathan put the back of his hand to his mouth.
He swept the cellar again with the big light and saw nothing out of place. But the dragging noise continued, receding now into one of the far corners, as though a bag of rotten potatoes or some other object too heavy to pick up was being pulled with deliberate care to its destination.
“Why can’t I see something?” he asked.
And then he did.
Fainting was not something that had happened often in Nathan’s life. He recalled once he did, when he was having stitches taken out of his hand after a childhood accident. Then, later, when he had sliced open a finger and seen the fresh fillet of skin carved down to the white bone, spurting blood like a water pump, he went out cold.
And so it was that on this third time in his life, he came back to consciousness, wondering for an instant where he was and what had happened. He was lying halfway down the cellar stairs, leaning against the cold cinder block wall. The baseball bat he had carried earlier was at the bottom of the staircase along with the heavy black flashlight, now illuminating nothing except the usual basement oddments, stacked here and there.
The muzzy taste was still fresh in Nathan’s mouth and he licked his lips and blinked his eyes. The darkness in the basement was complete, except for the halo of light thrown by the flashlight at the bottom of the steps. But Nathan noted one other thing immediately: the horrible, stifling dead animal stench was gone. Not just diminished, but utterly gone, as though it had never been.
A slightly damp smell was in the air, as you might expect in any basement, but that was all.
“What in the name of God just happened?” Nathan said in a hoarse whisper. And it came flooding back to him: the instant in which he had seen the eyes.
They were wide-set, and seemed to glow with a luminescence all their own, turning, turning toward him, slowly as though in a dream, and regarding him coldly. They were not at animal height, but at man height, about seven feet from the floor. But is that really what he saw or just what he thought he saw? Nathan shook his head and stood up carefully on the creaking wooden step. This was all some kind of temporary mental aberration, he thought, as he walked to the bottom of the stairs and picked up the flashlight and bat. Straightening up, he felt again the bile that teetered on the back of his tongue. But as he swept the cellar again with the light, he saw nothing and heard nothing except the muffled sounds of the storm outside. He went up the stairs slowly, forcing himself not to look back. And, upon reaching the top, where the kitchen light shone out brightly, he closed the door and put the bat and flashlight back into the tall pantry.
“This is all one big illusion, and I’m not buying it,” he said. Yet, doubt gnawed and slavered like a hungry rat around the edges of his reason.
Sarah was sleeping soundly in her house as Nathan was closing the door to his basement.
She had gone upstairs after leaving him, slipping out of her jeans, and climbing quickly into the big four-poster bed wearing only her sweater and panties, trying to escape the chill that swept in from outside. She rarely went to sleep quickly but tonight seemed to be a night for exceptions and she dropped almost immediately into a deep sleep.
She was in a library―not the kind they had in town, with rows and rows of Dewey Decimal coded books and periodicals―but an old-fashioned parlor with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and volumes bound beautifully in leather and gilt.
The smell of roses filled the air and, as she turned in a circle in the middle of the room, she saw bouquets of roses everywhere―on settees, on butler’s tables, on etageres, and on a fine oak table, set squarely in the middle of an octagonal bay window area.
On the table was the largest bouquet by far, some three dozen fragrant long-stemmed roses in the most beautiful leaded crystal vase she had ever seen. Light from an elaborate chandelier overhead shimmered through the bevels in the elegantly cut glass and threw it in a hundred different hues around the room.
Sarah looked down and found she was dressed in an elegant black sequined evening gown, made of the finest velvet, and that she clutched a small beaded bag.
Where am I? she thought, and heard music from a Victrola playing somewhere. It sounded like an ancient phonograph record she had once heard at an antique store in South Jersey.
toot-toot-tootsie, good-bye, toot-toot-tootsie, don’t cry
The crooner crooned and Sarah continued to turn in place, in the middle of this storybook library, with a ladder close by, a ladder on wheels on a track, and she saw that the track went completely around three-fourths of the room, allowing easy access to the top-most books in the collection.
She turned another quarter-turn and saw the tidy fire set carefully in the hearth, with a leaded stained-glass firescreen placed in front of it. An iridescent blue peacock was fashioned into the middle of the panes of cobalt and hunter-green glass, giving a three-dimensional perspective to the lavish outdoor scene depicted on the screen: a hunt from the middle of the 18th century, in search, perhaps, of this very bird magnificently strutting and warming itself in front of the economical fire.
It really came as no surprise to Sarah when she realized that this was the parlor in her own house, and that she apparently was a guest―or perhaps the hostess―at a party that was about to begin.
She crossed the room to the wide oak mantel and gazed upon a row of sepia portraits. She was drawn to one photograph in particular: a classically posed image of her great grandmother, seated regally amid a forest of ferns and exotic hanging plants. This image had always been a favorite of Sarah’s and occupied a favored place on her bedroom dresser back in Philadelphia.
She knew she was dreaming. But she also knew that this room and all its belongings were real―that she had been transported as if by magic to an early evening in the mid-1920s, and the night was full of promise. Elsewhere in the house, the unknown singer crooned on, and Sarah wondered who had begun playing the record. As if in answer to her question, a liveried butler, complete with white gloves and waistcoat, appeared in the hall doorway. His countenance was practiced and professional, his balding head bobbing atop a withering frame.
“Your guests will be arriving shortly, Miss Claymore. Shall I open the wine?” he said.
Sarah wasn’t sure how to answer. But she had read enough Harlequin romances to know that one always socialized prior to actually beginning a dinner party, so she said, “Yes, that will be fine. Thank you.” And she would have added the man’s name, but she didn’t know it. She wished now she had paid more attention when her cousin Mandy had endlessly and boringly recounted the genealogy of her family at their last gathering. But she doubted that servants’ names were included in the family tree anyway.
She made a mental note to contact Mandy when she woke up.
The butler nodded and bowed almost imperceptibly and disappeared into the hallway. This really is a great dream, Sarah thought. Everything seems so real. She wondered who was coming to dinner, and what she would say to keep the conversation flowing. As the hostess, she knew she had certain duties to perform. But she supposed that when the time came, the right words would appear. At the moment, she just felt a giddy enjoyment and girlish enthusiasm for the trappings of a society position and privileges she had never known.
Wait, she thought, I should practice my gliding. Wasn’t that what Lauren Bacall always did in her movies, when she was all done up in a to-die-for evening gown? She glided from room to room and scene to scene. Never a jerky or unpracticed move for her. Only the effortless glide that inevitably landed her in the arms of Humphrey Bogart or Gregory Peck or some other fabulous leading man of her time.
Sarah took a few tentative steps, practicing as though she had a book on her head, and actually was doing quite well when she was aware that the butler had reappeared at the doorway and was observing her movements. If it amused him, he didn’t say so. To cover her embarrassment, she decided to be curt. “Yes?” she said.
“Mr. and Mrs. Presbury are here, ma’am. Shall I show them into the parlor?”
“No, I’ll meet them in the entryway,” Sarah said, and thought to herself: this is a snap. The servants always ask a question with the obvious right answer embedded in it. And now she knew the names (last names, anyway) of her first two guests. A momentary flush came over her. What if they expect me to know their first names? Then she laughed.
“What the hell am I worried about? This is my dream. I’ll call them Fred and Ethel if I want to and they’ll just have to like it.” She glided across the polished hardwood floor to greet her first guests of the evening.
well, my dear, the stage was set and the Presburys were
founded on the gold standard and drew their investments from the poor and the hard-working, which was an awful shame and yet, darling,
she was dressed from the floor up in black velvet and had no idea
the dinner was overdone, but the guests made no remark and chatted and made bets on who the next President might be and whether
anyone noticed that Arnold Presbury had been away from dinner for a very long time, except his wife, a frilly, nervous thing with eyes the color of walnuts, who
found him splashing about in his own blood and shouting quietly through the jagged cut in his throat
no!
yes, and to make matters worse, he had a butcher knife in his hand and stabbed her before she knew what was happening so that
the police found her lying beside her husband with the knife plunged into her temple and so they ruled it a murder-suicide.
well, isn’t that just like them to see only that
the dinner party ended abruptly, but the others were saying that they had seen it coming anyway, and the dear young hostess was wringing her hands and saying something about a dream, a dream, that had gone from bad to worse
It was the shrieking, strangling sound that brought Mrs. Presbury to the bathroom under the stairs. When she knocked on the door, Arnold had considerately opened it and then plunged the knife into the sallow temple skin of his wife, who screamed and screamed and screamed, finally dropping down alongside her husband in a bloody heap, half in the bathroom door and half in the polished hallway.