Four Months Later
After the ship docked it was a two-hour ride by carriage into the heart of Manhattan. The heat and humidity were oppressive. To Anine Atherton the streets seemed to exude a sort of miasma—equal parts sweat, smoke, the stench of horse dung and human urine, and a strange intangible quality that seemed, if not malevolent, at least unfriendly. Sitting in the carriage watching the streets go by around her, she grasped tightly the gloves she’d allowed herself to take off due to the heat. Her small knobby knuckles were nearly white. She was excited to see the new house—thrilled, even, to have the chance to witness the object of her anticipation for the past few months—but her excitement was colored with nervousness.
For his part, Julian was completely in his element. He sprawled in the carriage seat, one hand hanging limply over the gilded head of his walking stick, his forest-green top hat cocked casually to one side. “New York never changes,” he said, watching Sixth Avenue go by in the carriage window. “That’s both its charm and its curse.”
It was a sweltering afternoon in August 1880. The Britannic was a day late docking in New York thanks to an unseasonable squall in the North Atlantic that tossed the steamer roughly and left Anine, already exhausted from endless traveling, seasick for the better part of three days. Only this morning had her stomach returned to something resembling normal. Her corset felt like a band of iron around her midsection. She wanted to reach the house quickly if only so she could change into a more comfortable dress. Our servants will be waiting for us, she thought, contemplating relief at the end of a long journey. We’ll have a home-cooked meal and I can sleep in a bed that I’ll be able to call my own. How I’ve looked forward to that.
“You’re sure everything is in order?” she asked her husband. “I mean, all the furniture and everything arrived as—”
Julian put a finger to her lips. “No, no, my dear,” he said. “English only from now on. We’re in New York now.”
She hadn’t even realized she’d spoken to him in Swedish. “I’m sorry.” She repeated her thought in English: “You’re sure everything got done? I mean, the deliveries, the furniture, the staff and everything?”
Julian’s mouth broke into a grin under the wispy red mustache that he’d begun growing in London and which Anine thought perfectly ridiculous. “Don’t worry, Anine. I’m sure Bradbury took care of everything. He’s even had an extra day to prepare because the ship docked late.”
She had never met Bradbury, the man Julian had hired to outfit their house during their honeymoon and prepare for their arrival, but she had to trust Julian knew what he was doing. “You went to the telegraph office at the terminal as soon as we docked—you were cabling him?”
“Yes. And I sent a telegram from Southampton just before we sailed. He’s had plenty of warning of our arrival.”
“All right.” Anine forced herself to smile. I’m just nervous about seeing the place for the first time. I’m sure everything is fine. She sat still and quiet, still gripping the gloves tightly. The carriage bounced uncomfortably over the dirty manure-strewn street. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine what Lake Vänern was like right now. In August the air would be scented of flowers and grass and the almost mossy smell of the lake itself. It was a very long way from here.
Anine had never seen the house. Today was her first day back in New York, and prior to this she’d spent a grand total of four days here, culminating with their marriage at Grace Church on the 30th of April. When they sailed on the first of May for their four-month European honeymoon Julian hadn’t yet found a place for them to live permanently. He bought the house sight-unseen, conducting the deal via telegraph from London. “Chenowerth says it’s the most charming house in Manhattan,” Julian had assured her. “Nothing less will do for the most beautiful bride in the world.” A block off Fifth Avenue, its address wasn’t at the apex of New York’s social geography, but it was at most a stone’s throw away from it. Julian described it to her: a four-story townhouse, a pink-white travertine façade and four Grecian columns supporting the overhanging bay windows on the second story. Roman Chenowerth, who worked at the law firm that Julian’s father had arranged for him to join, told him that the house itself was a work of art, having been designed by a prominent architect. Chenowerth sent detailed sketches of the house which reached the honeymooning couple by post in Marseille. Anine studied them while sitting on a sun-drenched terrace overlooking the Mediterranean. In that setting it was hard to imagine what the house was like in real life.
Still, she thought it would be quite a wonderful place, if it lived up to Chenowerth’s and Julian’s hyperbole. Its interior was horseshoe-shaped, arranged around a grand entryway with an ascending staircase and a huge chandelier. Above the ground floor with its twin parlors, dining room, breakfast room and library there were two more floors packed with bedrooms, a billiard room and (optimistically) a children’s nursery with an adjoining nurse’s room. All the rooms circled the entryway space and the servants’ quarters in the garret formed the truncated top floor. Looking at the plans Anine found herself both awed and bewildered that Americans would choose to build their houses like this. The huge entryway was a giant empty maw at the heart of the house—a terrible waste of space. It’s grand and innovative, but not very practical, she thought. What will I do with that much space?
Now the house was approaching in the carriage window. They had already turned the corner and Anine was staring right at it before she recognized it: a sort of pink-white monolith, tall and straight and imposing. It looked more like a fortress than a home. All of the shutters around the windows were closed. As the carriage pulled up, the horses’ hooves clattering on the rough bricks, the house showed no sign of life or habitation. The great wooden front door at the top of the stone stairs leading up from West 38th Street was painted black and the paint was beginning to peel. From the look of it the place might have been abandoned for decades. The harsh August sunlight splashed down on it with uncommon brutality, laying bare the fine cracks in the travertine and the dusty unwashed sills of the windows.
This is it? It looks rather gloomy.
The driver got out of the carriage, opened the door and helped Julian down. He reached for Anine’s hand and she descended, using her gloves to shield her eyes from the sudden stab of afternoon sunlight.
“I’m sure Bradbury will be out to greet us at any moment,” said Julian, glancing up at the front door. “He must have closed the shutters against the heat.” As the driver began unloading the trunks and suitcases piled on the back of the carriage Julian walked up the stone steps to the door. He looked back at his wife. “You coming?”
Anine was, at that moment, looking up at the façade of her new house. It’s monstrous, she thought. Stone and columns and shutters—built to keep the world out. She guessed that was the way of things in New York, people needed walls to block themselves off from the noisy streets filled with delivery carts, braying horses, pushy cops, shrieking newsboys and plaintive beggars. It was very different from Stockholm, where (she supposed) little had changed in hundreds of years. Looking at this monstrosity looming above her, filling her with foreboding—onda aningar, the Swedish phrase for it, rang in her head—she scarcely believed she was going to live here.
“Yes, I’m coming.” With her free hand she pulled up her skirt out of the foul-smelling muck trickling through the brick gutter and started up the steps toward the front door.
“If anyone asks, tell them I carried you over the threshold like a dutiful husband,” Julian laughed. A moment later, with the head of his walking stick, he rapped against the colossal black door.
Anine forced herself to smile as she looked up again at the façade, the sunlight falling on her face. For a moment she was genuinely cheerful. “Our first home together. It’s a happy moment.”
Julian was smiling too. But a long pause, during which nothing stirred inside the house, stretched into a puzzling eternity. His smile gradually faded. He rapped again with the walking stick. “Bradbury? Are you there? We’ve arrived!”
There’s no one home. This worried her. There should have been someone home. And not just Bradbury—where were the cook and the ladies’ maid and the valet he was supposed to hire, the workmen delivering the furniture, carpets and draperies that Anine had ordered from the catalogs? The house should have been buzzing with activity. But it was as still and silent as a tomb.
“What the hell?” said Julian, after a third knock at the door still elicited no response. He didn’t even have a key. Reticently he reached forward and touched the heavy brass doorknob. It turned. The door was unlocked. Julian pushed it, and on rusty un-oiled hinges that gave a mournful metallic moan the great black door swung open onto a musty-smelling darkness.
Nothing stirred. There were no servants, no workmen. No lamps were lit. Anine was astounded at how little light there was at this time of the day. The front door was flanked with tall windows of thick leaded glass, but black velvet drapes—drapes that Anine had not ordered from the catalogs—had been drawn around them, blocking out almost all the light. In the glow from the doorway she could see the balustrade of a great stairway leading upwards, but little else.
She was also struck by the horrible smell. It was more than just dust and mold, the faintly musty aroma of an empty house in the depths of a humid summer. There was a much fouler and ranker odor too. It smelled like rot.
“Something’s wrong,” said Anine, fear suddenly clutching icily at her throat.
“Bradbury?” Julian shouted into the darkness of the entryway. Softer, he cursed. “This is outrageous. Nothing has been done. Nothing! I’ve been cabling him with instructions for weeks!”
She was angry too but the feeling of fear was much stronger, drowning out her indignation. “What is that smell?” she gasped. “It smells like something dead.”
“Maybe a cat or bird got into the house and died.” Julian stepped toward an arched doorway, barely visible in the darkness, to his left. Anine guessed it communicated with a parlor. “Nothing!” he gasped again, standing in the doorway. “Not a single thing we ordered has been done. The furniture from the previous owners is even still here!”
Thunk. Anine leapt at the sound, terrified; she whirled and saw the carriage driver was piling the trunks inside the door. Thunk. Thunk.
We need more light, she thought. The darkness was unnerving. She walked around the driver and pulled back one of the velvet drapes. It admitted slightly more light, but through the thick leaded glass it was diffused, like sunlight on an overcast day. It didn’t help much.
“This is unconscionable!” Julian roared. “Bradbury embezzled the salary I paid him and ran off without doing a thing! I’ll sue him! I’ll have him in prison!”
Anine blanched at the sudden rage in her husband’s voice. She walked toward the sound of it and stood next to him in the parlor doorway. Like the entryway it was forebodingly dark. Its windows faced 38th Street, but they too were covered in thick draperies and the shutters on the outside were closed. The dark shapes of the furniture loomed like frozen beasts in the darkness. She felt along the wall, which was covered in velvet wallpaper, for the main light switch. She found it, but it had no effect.
“The darkness scares me,” she said. “Please, Julian, light the gas.”
He walked into the parlor, his shoes clacking on the parquet floor. “What about all the furniture we bought? Where is it? My God, if Bradbury sold it—the scoundrel!” Anine saw his darkened shape reach up toward one of the looming frozen animals, a huge spidery bat clinging to the ceiling. Julian snapped a match with his thumb. A moment later the parlor came into view in the soft orange light of the gas lamp. The bat was the light fixture, its burners struggling to come to life, swinging gently from Julian’s touch.
The parlor was almost ghostly in appearance. There was less furniture than there should have been, but a piano and one chair, covered in dusty white sheets, remained. The bookshelves were still full of books. A cobweb streamed from the light fixture. Most alarmingly, Anine found herself being watched. The eyes drew Julian’s attention too. Over the fireplace hung a large portrait of a middle-aged woman in a brilliant sapphire-blue dress about twenty years out of date. She was smiling broadly—quite unusual for a serious portrait—and her face seemed filled with happiness, yet there was something unnerving about her cold blue eyes. They seemed to drill uncomfortably into Anine’s soul.
“You ain’t got no maid?”
Anine jumped again. The driver was standing next to her in the doorway of the parlor. She sighed, exhaling the panicked breath she had drawn. “No,” she told him. “No maid.”
“It’s an outrage!” Julian blasted. “Chenowerth recommended Bradbury highly! He was supposed to be a very able fellow. This is just…unbelievable!”
“Done with the bags, sir,” said the driver.
His face a mask of contempt, Julian walked to the doorway, took some coins from his pocket and thrust them into the driver’s hand. “Now get out,” he barked.
“Please, Julian, let’s go too,” Anine begged as she heard the great front door swing shut behind the driver. “Something’s very, very wrong here. That smell—”
Julian pushed past her into the entryway. “First we have to find out how much Bradbury stole,” he hissed. “Then I’m calling upon the police.” He tried to light one of the smaller wall sconces, but his match flared out. The darkness—and the stench of rot—remained unbroken. “God damn it! The gas doesn’t even work down here!”
The rising fear was like a cold claw gripping the back of Anine’s neck. “Julian, please. Take me out of here, please!”
He ignored her. “Hopefully some lights work up here.” He started up the stairs. They were carpeted, so his feet made no sound.
Suddenly alone in the darkness of the entryway—though she could still hear Julian—Anine felt as though she was about to be pounced upon by some kind of beast. She sensed danger somewhere above her. She was being watched.
“Julian!” she cried.
“What is it?”
“Someone’s here!” She could not help calling out in Swedish. Någon är här! “We’re not alone!”
“There’s no one here,” he called back in English. “Trust me, Bradbury is long-gone.”
Julian walked up to the second level. There was a gas fixture on the wall near the stairs. With another snap of a match he lit it.
As the second floor lamp blazed, another frozen animal shape loomed out of the darkness. Something large was hanging from a great height, dangling down above the stairs into the entryway. Anine’s terror at feeling a presence about her turned suddenly to revulsion and horror. The thing hanging above her had human feet with great knobby toes, like the grotesque feet of trolls in old legends Anine remembered from her childhood.
“Dear God!” Julian gasped.
The feet belonged to the body of a man hanging from a rope looped to the top of the balustrade on the third floor. His neck had been wrenched to one side, his jaw hanging slack. His form was barely more than a skeleton over which a thin layer of rotted, leathery skin was stretched. He was clad in thick woolen pants but no shirt, one suspender still looped over his shoulder. Evidently the man shit himself at the moment of death; there were black stains on his pants. He had obviously been dead a long time, perhaps months. The rope on which he hung was eerily still.
“Bradbury,” Julian breathed.
Anine did not hear him. She was screaming, scrambling backwards toward the door, panic surging through every nerve in her body. She tripped on her skirt and collapsed to the floor, fearing at first that the hideous dead thing hanging in the entryway was attacking her; she remembered little more.
She did not think she had been unconscious, but in the next moment of which she was aware Anine found herself sitting up in a large comfortable bed, gas lights glowing softly around her, and a woman with a kind pleasant face and gray hair was spooning her soup from a bowl with a gilt-painted rim. She did not recognize the woman, but she did look familiar; she had Julian’s beautiful sea-green eyes.
“There, I told you the soup would rekindle your light,” said the woman. “I used to make this for Julian and Sarah when they were sick as children.”
Recognition flooded back to her. Lucretia. Julian’s aunt. She’d been at the wedding. She raised Julian and his sister after their mother died. This must have been her house. Anine had never been there, but Julian mentioned that she lived up on Lexington Avenue.
“Where’s my husband?” Anine asked, after a few more spoonfuls of soup.
“He’s still at the police station.”
Anine grasped Lucretia’s wrist as the spoon, full of chicken soup, thrust toward her again. “I’m all right. I can eat by myself.”
“You’ve had quite a shock,” said Lucretia. But after a look from Anine she surrendered the bowl and the spoon to her.
While she ate it Lucretia stood, smoothing out the skirt of her summer evening dress, and then busied herself setting right the glazed porcelain knickknacks on the mantel over the fireplace where a flame gently crackled. “You and Julian are welcome to stay for as long as you need to,” she said brightly. Then, her voice lower and more somber, she remarked: “Awful thing. Awful. I tell you that I’d need a good long spell of taking the waters at Saratoga to recover from a shock like that. I’ve recommended just that to Julian. I hope he listens to me for once.”
Anine did not feel especially weak or sick, but she knew that if she tried to rise from the bed of Lucretia’s guest room the woman—and her maid, who came to check on her frequently—would simply not be able to believe that she wasn’t completely weak and prostrate from shock. To avoid that argument she elected to stay in bed. Julian remained out until late in the evening. Anine sat up in bed, trying to pass the time reading a Walter Scott romance, but she couldn’t concentrate on the words. Bradbury’s rotting visage seemed to leer at her out of the pages.
At half-past-ten the wheels of the carriage finally clattered up to the house and Julian entered. Anine heard him speaking to his aunt downstairs, and that was followed by the creaking of the stairs under his shoes. He entered the guest room reticently, perhaps half-expecting Anine to be asleep. She smiled, grateful at last of the company, and set the book aside on the bed.
“I spoke to my father,” said Julian, his first words upon entering. “I’ve arranged for us to stay at his cottage in Newport for the next few weeks. We’ll leave from here on the morning train.”
Great. More traveling. She was sick to death of trains. But she didn’t protest; the alternative was either to stay here or go back to the house so soon after the horror. Neither option appealed to her. “Fine.” She motioned to the chair next to the bed. “Come sit with me a while.”
Julian dropped his lanky frame into the armchair. It was improper to smoke a cigar in a lady’s bedchamber, and he didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. Ultimately he set them on his thighs. He said nothing.
It’s up to me to mention it? Anine was exasperated. “You spoke to the police?” she said.
“They went over the house pretty thoroughly. Bradbury’s personal effects were neatly packed in the servants’ quarters in the garret. No sign of any disturbance. It’s quite clear that he took his own life. On the table in the office we found a newspaper and some correspondence with a furniture company, both dated June third. Inspector Lewis believes it happened on that date, or shortly thereafter. I hired him on May thirtieth.”
June third! Anine shuddered. “So he was hanging there for two and a half months?”
Julian nodded. “It explains why nothing was done—I mean, hiring servants and seeing to the furnishings and all. I went to the Stein Company where we ordered some of the furniture. There was still a man there at the office. He confirmed they received the order we telegraphed from Europe and received payment from Chenowerth, but he told them to wait for Bradbury to contact them with delivery instructions, and he never did. The furniture’s still in their warehouse. It’s likely the same story with the others, but I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to make the rounds of their offices.”
She shook her head. “Why? Why would he do this? And after only four days in the house?”
“I’ve no idea. Lewis said he’s going to look into Bradbury’s background and interview some of his family just to be sure. He may have been mad. There were bottles in the kitchen; perhaps he was drunk. We may never know.”
There was silence between them. The fire crackled. Anine said, “I’d like to send a note of condolence to his family.”
“We didn’t know him.” Julian shrugged.
“I still want to send a letter. It’s the decent thing to do.”
A particular fear had been gathering inside of her for much of the evening. Now that Julian had returned it was palpable; she dreaded asking him the question but guessed now she had little choice.
“Darling, I must ask you something.”
“Yes?”
“I’m not going to have to go back there, am I?”
“Back where?” He seemed to catch on, but his expression was still one of puzzlement. “You mean to the house?”
“Our first day—our first five minutes in that house—and we come home to that. I keep replaying it in my mind. It’s so horrible. I couldn’t imagine setting foot in the place again, much less living where such a thing happened.”
Julian smiled. He reached forward and touched her hand. “That’s what you’re worried about, Anine? Having to live there after what happened today?”
His tender touch melted her. She smiled too. Thank God he understands.
“You needn’t be concerned,” he said, still smiling. “You’ll feel much better after three weeks in Newport. While we’re gone I’ll hire a new caretaker and he’ll get all our furnishings settled. I’ll make sure they scrub and repaint the place from stem to stern. By the time we get back you won’t even recognize it as the same house. Don’t give it another thought.”
He rose from the chair. She was still smiling but his words were beginning to sink in. What did he say? Oh, God, he doesn’t mean that, does he? “Julian—”
“We shouldn’t have come back in August anyway,” he said, as if this had been the cause of the whole thing. “The summer air in New York is so thick and disagreeable. Yes, Newport will make us both anew. I’m certain of it.”
With that Julian Atherton stepped out of the guest room, without even looking back at his wife; thus he did not see the expression of shock on her face.
The dreams began that very night.
At first her dream was very pleasant. She was walking along the shore of Lake Vänern on a warm summer afternoon, wearing a white dress with flowers in her hair. She carried a parasol. Julian was with her. He looked as he did when she met him nearly three years ago. He was twenty then, a tall, thin-framed boy who had just barely gotten past an extended phase of adolescent gawkiness. His hair was red, his eyes sea-green, his fingers long and spindly. His cheeks and the back of his hands were covered in light freckles. She didn’t know it then but he also had freckles across the back of his shoulders and on his calves. Julian the Awkward Boy had charmed her in a way that Julian the New York Gentleman could never quite do. The way he looked at her and smiled at her as they walked rekindled the forbidden passion she’d felt for him when they first met.
“Such a beautiful day,” she said, admiring the glinting blue waters shimmering gold in the sunlight. “I like to think God paints days like these, the way a painter creates a picture.” She was speaking Swedish; all of her dreams were in Swedish.
“Perhaps He does. God loves beauty.” He winked at her. “After all, He created you.”
As he spoke these words she noticed that the quality of the light was changing. Looking up through the leaves of the birch trees she could see gray clouds suddenly boiling into the crystal blue sky, much faster than was possible in real life. The disk of the sun became diffused and the forest and lake were plunged into a blank overcast grayness that obliterated shadows instantly. “God is painting, all right,” she sighed, closing her parasol. A cold wind blew brownish leaves in swirling eddies through the forest. It was as if autumn had come in seconds.
Then there were noises around her, strange rustling sounds in the leaves and underbrush. It came from several places in front of her and behind, to each side, even above. “I’m frightened,” she said, clutching Julian’s hand. “Take me back to the cottage.”
“What is there to be frightened of?” Julian looked about but seemed not to notice the change in their surroundings. “Who can be scared of anything on a day like today?”
She did not see the place from where the dark shape came. It was a blur, a smudge of black and yellow and red that flew suddenly out of the woods and instantly was upon him. The blade of a knife glinted in the dull overcast light. Julian cried out, but the blade flashed against his throat. Arterial blood sprayed in a broad arc across Anine’s arm and her face. She screamed as Julian crumpled to his knees, gasping and clawing at his cleaved throat. The fear that seized her was like an iron glove closing suddenly around her, crushing the life and breath from her.
The blade flashed again, the roaring assailant plunging it downward into the top of Julian’s back. Now the thing that had attacked him stood still enough for her to see. It was a man dressed in ragged clothes, torn and stained with dirt. The remains of a blue necktie hung in mud-smeared rags. A yellow silk waistcoat was marred with broad stains of dried blood. A jagged splinter of wood six inches long protruded from the monster’s mangled neck.
The thing was a relic of the grave, but its pale blue eyes still looked very human. As it withdrew the knife—Julian’s body, still gushing fresh blood, slumped to the floor of the forest—the ghoul that had once been Ola Bergenhjelm stared directly at Anine, rotting lips pulling back from its blackened teeth. Oily sludge leaked from its mouth.
“No! No!” Anine fell backwards, tripping over the bustle of her dress. She tried to scramble away from the living corpse that was now approaching her. It was making noise, straining for words, but the piece of the carriage axle in its throat rendered them hoarse unintelligible groans. With his dead fingers now nearly skeletal Ola gripped the handle of the knife, still dripping Julian’s blood.
“Forgive me,” she gasped. “Please, Ola, forgive me! I’m sorry!”
The thing lunged at her. She felt its cold oily hand grasping her neck, and a moment later the blade of the knife plunged into the lace of her bodice. The stench of death and the feel of Ola’s hand on her nearly made her retch. She struggled, but the monster held her in some kind of paralysis that made her helpless against it. All she could do was watch as the knife tore away her clothes, touching but not breaking her skin. Ola had come from the grave to claim his bride.
She tried to scream. She wanted to scream. But no air left her lungs; instead it sucked itself in, like screaming in reverse. When the horrible scene passed she found herself sitting up in bed, gasping and huffing in the darkness, clawing at the bosom of her nightgown as if warding away the blade of the knife and Ola Bergenhjelm’s jealous wrath.