STEVE RASNIC TEM lives with his wife, the writer Melanie Tem, in a supposedly haunted Victorian house in Denver, Colorado.
A prolific author of short stories and poems for the small press field and numerous anthology markets, recent or upcoming appearances include Fantasy Tales 4, Pulphouse 7, Psycho Paths 2, New Crimes 3, Stalkers 3, and books without numbers on them such as The Fantastic Robin Hood, Tales of the Wandering Jew, Dark At Heart and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. A collection of stories, Ombres sur la route, was published in France by Denoel, and collaborations with Melanie appear in The Ultimate Frankenstein and The Ultimate Dracula.
Roadkill Press has published his chapbook Fairytales, and another is due from Haunted Library entitled Absences: Charlie Goode’s Ghosts.
We are pleased to welcome him back to Best New Horror with another fine example of his mastery of the short form . . .
IN THE ORPHANAGE THEY’D HAD AN AQUARIUM. A wooden model of the ancient, sprawling orphanage itself, open at the top, had served as a frame for the ordinary glass aquarium inside.
The orphanage was always receiving unusual gifts like that— giant gingerbread men, dolls with some president’s face, doll houses modeled after some famous building. There’d be an article in the paper each time with a picture of the donor and his gift, surrounded by dozens of children with practiced smiles.
Other benefactors hosted special events. The SeaHarp used to throw parties for the children of the orphanage every year, parties that sometimes lasted for days, with the children sleeping in the hotel. Michael knew he had attended several of them, but he had been so young at the time—not more than four or five—he really couldn’t remember them.
The aquarium had had a little brass plaque: “Gift of Martin O’Brien.” Michael had heard that the fellow had been some sort of fisherman, and himself an orphan. Many of the gifts were supposedly from former residents of the orphanage. But Michael never actually believed that there was such a thing as a former resident; the place marked you forever. Sometimes he would wonder what he would give to the orphanage when he got old and successful.
Sometimes the fish would swim up to the tiny model windows and look out. One of the older boys said that fish could barely see past their mouths, but they sure looked like they were peering out at you. As if you were a prospective parent and today was visitor’s day. That’s the way the children always looked on visitor’s day, Michael thought: staring wide-eyed out the windows and moving their gills in and out nervously. Trying to look like whoever these prospective parents expected you to look like. Trying to look like you’d fit right into their family. Sometimes when the light was right in the aquarium room you could see your own reflection in these windows, superimposed over the fish. Looking in, and looking out. Waiting.
In the orphanage Michael used to dream that he had no face. He was waiting for someone to choose a face for him. Until then, he had the open-mouthed, wide- and wet-eyed face of a fish.
Now, in Greystone Bay, Michael got into a green cab that said “Two Crazy Brothers Cab Co.” on the door. He wondered if that meant there were two identical cabs, a brother driving each one, or perhaps only one cab with which they alternated shifts—Greystone Bay was, after all, a relatively small place. Or perhaps there were dozens of such cabs, and the brothers didn’t drive anymore, being president and vice-president of the company, or perhaps co-vice-presidents, their mother or father taking the largely honorary presidential post. It was difficult to know exactly who his driver was, and what he expected from him.
“Not many go to the SeaHarp this time o’ year,” the driver said.
Michael glanced at the rear-view mirror and fixed on the driver’s eyes. Seeing just the slice of face holding the eyes bothered him. He’d never been able to tell much from eyes— people’s eyes had always seemed somewhat interchangeable. Seeing just that cut-out of someone’s eyes led him to imagine that they were his own eyes, transplanted somehow into someone else’s shadowy face. A social worker at the orphanage had once given him a toy that rearranged slices of faces like that, a chin, a mouth, a nose, eyes, hair, all from different characters mixed and matched. After a while the particular arrangement hadn’t seemed to matter. It was the very act of changing which had been important.
“You must like a quiet holiday,” the cab driver said.
Michael looked at the mirror eyes which might have been his own. He wondered what the driver’s mouth was like, whether it conveyed a message different from that of the eyes. “Why do you say that?”
“Like I said. Before. Nobody much comes to the SeaHarp this time of year. Thanksgiving through Christmas, right up ’til the party on New Year’s Eve. Then the whole town turns out. But up ’til then, that’s their dead season. People are home with their families, not in some hotel.”
“Well, I don’t have a family, I’m afraid.”
The driver was silent a moment. Then, “Didn’t think you did.”
Michael held himself stiff, eyes motionless. They always seem to know. How do they always know? Then he forced himself to relax, wondering what it was the cab driver might like to see. What kind of passenger he might like and admire. Just like a good orphan. He could feel the themes of independence and “good business” entering his relaxed facial muscles, his posture.
“Too busy building a career, I guess.” He let slip a self-amused chuckle. “A fellow my age, his career takes up most of his time.”
“Your age?”
“Twenty-five.” He’d lied by twelve years, but he could see in the mirror eyes that the driver believed him, apparently not seeing all the age signs that made that unlikely. People believed a good orphan. “I’m an architect.”
A sudden, new respect in those mirror eyes. “Really? They planning to expand up there at the SeaHarp? Maybe they know some things about money coming into the Bay us regular working folk don’t?”
“I really couldn’t say . . .”
“Or maybe they’re going to remodel. You gonna give that old lady a facelift?”
“Really. I couldn’t.”
“Hey, I get ya. I understand.” One of the mirror eyes half-winked.
The driver offered to carry his bags up the steps to the hotel, but Michael told him that wasn’t necessary. “Travel light in my business.” The driver nodded as if he knew exactly what Michael was talking about. Michael gave him a generous tip anyway; he had to. Walking up the steps he wondered if he had enough expense money left.
In the dark, the SeaHarp was magnificent. Its classical lines flowed sweetly into the shadows left and right; its silhouette climbed smoothly out of the porchlight with very few of the architectural afterthoughts that spoiled the proportions of so many of its type. Outside lighting had been kept to a minimum, forcing the night-time visitor to focus on the windows—so many windows—exaggerating the width of that first floor.
But then most old buildings looked impressive in the dark. He hoped it lived up to its promise in the less forgiving daylight. That’s when you could tell just how much of the SeaHarp’s budget had been alloted to maintenance and repair over the years. By mid-morning he’d be able to spot any dryrot or sagging wood. He could already tell the SeaHarp had been fitted with Dutch gutters in spots—the downspouts went right up into the enclosed eaves—a real problem with water damage if they hadn’t been refurbished recently.
Something bothered him about the windows. It was silly, and these little naggings he was prey to now and then made him angry; he didn’t like to think of himself as irrational. Rationality had always meant safety. All the kids he’d grown up with in the orphanage and all their dreams—it had given them nothing but a crib of pain as far as he could see.
And yet he took the few steps up onto the porch and stopped, compelled to examine these windows before entering.
The glass was extraordinarily clean. A good omen. In fact the glass was so clean you’d hardly know it was there. It was an invisible barrier separating what was in—the contents, the atmosphere of the hotel—from what was out. Michael imagined the heavy pressure of that atmosphere—the accumulated breath and spirit of all those visitors over all those years—pushing mightily against that glass which had to be so strong, so finely crafted. Like an aquarium.
He stepped closer to the glass. Inside, the furniture and the carpets were of sea colors, blue and blue-green, the wall-paper a faded blue. The guests moved slowly from setting to setting. As if asleep. Or as if underwater. Their faces, blue and green, pumping the heavy, ancient hotel air. Michael wondered if they could see him outside the glass, peering into their underwater world, seeing his own face in the faces of all these fish.
He walked gingerly to the main door and opened it, took a deep breath. The moist air quickly escaped, pushing over the porch and wetting his face and hair. Stepping inside, he pulled the door tightly, sealing himself in.
He forced himself to remember who he was and the nature of the task he had been hired for.
He was pleased to see that much of the furniture in the lobby and other public areas dated back to the original construction of the hotel; whether it was original to the SeaHarp itself, of course, remained to be seen. And there was so much of it. On impulse he crouched as low as possible for a child’s eye view, and peered along the floor at a sea of Victorian furniture legs: rosewood and black walnut with the characteristic cabriole carving and rudimentary feet supporting a Gallic ornateness of leaved, flowered, and fruited moldings and upholsteries. Here and there among the Victorian legs there were the occasional modern, straight-legged anachronisms, or, stranger still, legs of curly maple and cherry, spirally reeded or acanthus-leaf carved American Empire pieces, or, going back even further, Sheraton mahogany with satinwood. Michael wondered if the original builder—Bolgran he believed was the name—had brought some older, family pieces into the hotel when he moved in.
No one appeared to be watching, so Michael went down to his knees, lowering his head to scan the floor even better. And then he remembered: four years old, and all the legs and furniture had been trees and caves to him, as he raced across the lobby on hands and knees, so fast that Mr Dobbins, the supervisor that day, had been unable to catch him. Every time Dobbins had gotten close Michael had hidden under a particularly well-stuffed item, sitting there trying not to giggle while Dobbins called and pleaded with increasing volume. Dobbins’ tightly-panted gabardine legs—old, stiff, a bit crooked—seemed like all those other legs of the forest while he was still, and once he moved it was as if the whole forest of legs moved, and when other adult legs joined the search, it felt like a forest in a hurricane, legs sliding across the floor, crashing to the floor, old voices cracking with alarm. At the time he’d thought about staying in that forest forever, maybe grabbing a few of his friends and living there, but then Dobbins had lifted the chair from over him, there was daylight and thunder overhead, and Michael was lifted skyward.
He stood up, dusted off his pants, and headed toward the desk. Still looking around. No one had noticed. Good. He made himself look professional.
Numerous secretaries and writing desks lined the far wall of the lobby, including two excellent drop-fronts of the French secrétaire à abattant type, built all in one piece, which must have been brought up from New Orleans at no small expense. He couldn’t wait to open them up and examine the insides.
He continued to the registration desk, his eyes alert for the odd detail, the surprise.
Victor Montgomery sat motionless on the other side of his desk. He seemed strangely out of place, and yet Michael could not imagine this man being anywhere else. Perhaps it was the clothes: all of them a size too large, including the collar. But the knot of the tie was firm and tight, and the suit wasn’t particularly wrinkled from enclosing a body too small for it. It was as if Montgomery had shrunk after putting the suit on. The desk appeared too large for him, as well. As did the black phone, the blotter, the desk lamp with the green glass shade. They seemed huge to Michael. And Victor Montgomery seemed an infant, forcing his small wrinkled head out of the huge collar, his baby face glowing red from the exertion, his small eyes having difficulty focusing.
“There is quite a lot to catalogue,” Montgomery said, his baby eyes straying. “The furniture in all the rooms, the public areas, the storage cellars. As well as all the art and accessory items, of course. You will not be inventorying the family’s private quarters or the attics, however, nor will you be permitted access to a few odd rooms. But those are locked, in any case. If there is any question, I expect you to ask.”
“I can assure you there will be no problem completing the inventory in the allotted time. Perhaps even sooner.” Michael permitted just a hint of laughter into his voice, thinking it might show enthusiasm.
Montgomery looked like a baby startled by a sudden noise. “I did not expect there would be.”
“No, of course not. I just thought that if you were leaving the family quarters, the attics, or any other areas off my assignment for fear of the time they would take, I should reassure you that they would be no problem as well. I have done a number of these hotel inventories and have become quite efficient, I assure you.”
“Any furniture in those off-limit areas I wanted inventoried has already been moved into rooms 312 and 313. You will evaluate each piece, make recommendations as to which should remain part of the SeaHarp collection—whether because of historical interest, rarity, or to illustrate a particular theme, I do not care—and which might be sold at auction. Any marginal items of dubious functionality should be disposed of as quickly and inexpensively as possible. Most importantly, I want a complete record and evaluation of all items in the hotel. I am quite sure we have been pilfered in the past and am determined to put a stop to it.”
Michael nodded, doodling in his pad as if he had recorded every word. The infant’s head was frighteningly red. “May I start tonight?”
“If you wish. In fact I would suggest that you do much of your work at night. That will avoid distracting the help from their work, not to mention attracting their curiosity.”
“And that would be a problem?”
“I do not want them to think I distrust them. Although, of course, I do. You will be eating Thanksgiving dinner here.”
Michael didn’t know if that was a question or an order. “I had planned on it, if possible.”
“What of your family?”
“I have none. And no other place to go this holiday.”
The infant looked vaguely distressed, as if it had filled its diapers. “I am sorry to hear that. A family is a great source of strength. It is important to belong.” Michael waited for him to say something specific about his own family, but he did not.
“I feel I am a member of the family of man,” Michael lied.
The infant looked confused. “An orphan?”
“Yes, in fact the children of the orphanage came here over a number of years for a kind of holiday. Even I . . .”
“I was away at school most of those years,” Montgomery said.
“Yes, yes, of course.”
“There are no more orphanages, are there? In the United States, I mean?” Montgomery said.
“No, I don’t believe there are.”
“Foster homes and such, I believe. The poor orphans get real families now,” Montgomery said. Michael simply nodded. The infant Montgomery was suddenly struggling to his feet, lost in his clothes, his baby’s head lost in the voluminous collar. The interview was over. “I will make sure the staff prepares a suitable Thanksgiving repast for you tomorrow. After that you will have the hotel essentially to yourself. The staff will be home with their families. We Montgomerys will remain in our quarters for the following two days, at the end of which time I expect to be able to review your full report.”
“Certainly.” Montgomery was moving slowly around his huge desk. He seemed to be extending one sleeve. For a panicked second Michael thought he was extending his hand to him, but the infant’s arms were so short Michael would never be able to find the hand, lost in the huge folds of the coat sleeve.
“One more thing.” The infant yawned and its eyes rolled. Up past his bedtime, Michael mused. “Any remaining furniture should fit the hotel. It is very important that things fit, find their proper place. I hired you because you supposedly know about such things.”
“I do, sir.”
The infant lolled its head in the huge collar, then waddled off to bed.
Michael took a long, rambling, post-midnight tour of the SeaHarp’s floors to get a preliminary feel for the place. He didn’t at all mind working at night. Most nights he was unable to get to sleep until three or four in the morning anyway. There never seemed to be any particular reason for his insomnia—his mind simply was not yet ready for sleep. And he had no wife or children to be bothered by his sleeplessness.
The walls of the SeaHarp’s public areas were well-supplied with art. There was a number of pieces by British painters in the German Romantic style. Michael had a working familiarity with art but knew he’d have to call in someone else for a proper appraisal: Reynolds from Boston or perhaps J.P. Jacobs in Providence, although Jacobs was often a bit too optimistic in his appraisals for Michael’s taste. And Montgomery would want a conservative appraisal, the more conservative the better. So maybe it would have to be Reynolds. Reynolds would have a field day: there were several excellent examples of the outline style, after Retzsch. Also some nice small sculptures he was sure Reynolds could identify—if the sculptors were worth identifying—the pieces looked nice enough but Michael was out of his area here. The themes seemed to be typically classical: Venus and Cupid, Venus and Mercury. The Death of Leander. And several small pieces of children. Cupid, no doubt. But the faces were so worn. Expressionless, as if left too long underwater.
Along one stretch of wall there were so many of these small, near-featureless sculptures, raised on pedestals or recessed in alcoves, that Michael was compelled to stop and ponder. But there seemed to be no reason for it. He could not understand the emphasis of these damaged, ill-colored pieces. Literally ill-colored, he thought, for the stone was a yellowish-white, like diseased flesh, like flesh kept half-wet and half-dry for a long time. Even when he left this area he could feel the sculptures clamoring for his attention, floating into his peripheral vision like distorted embryos.
The door to room 312 creaked open. He pawed through a fur of dust for the lightswitch, and when he finally got the light on he discovered more dust hanging in strings from the ceiling, and from antique furniture stacked almost to the ceiling, obscuring the glass fixture which itself appeared to have been dipped into brown oil. Obviously, Montgomery had had the furniture moved here some time ago. He wondered why it had taken the man so long to finally decide on getting an appraiser. Or maybe it was a matter of finding the right appraiser. That thought made him get out of the chill of the hall and completely into the room, however dim and dusty. The sound of the door shutting was muted by the thick skin of dust over the jamb. Michael slipped the small tape recorder out of his coat pocket.
A good deal of the furniture in the room predated the hotel, late eighteenth century to early nineteenth. Bought as collectors’ pieces, no doubt, by some past manager. Most of them were chairs: Chippendale mahogany wing chairs and armchairs of the Martha Washington type, late Sheraton side chairs and a few Queen Anne wing and slippers. But they varied widely in quality. Most of the Sheratons were too heavy, with rather awkward carving on the center splat, but there was one boasting a beautifully carved spread eagle and fine leg lines, worth a good ten times more than the others. The Chippendales were all too boxy and vertical in the back. Most of the Martha Washingtons suffered from shapeless arms or legs that were too short, seats often too heavy in relation to the top part of the chair, but there were two genuine masterpieces among those: finely scooped arms, serpentine crests, beautifully proportioned all around.
Some of the chairs had been virtually ruined by amateurish restoration efforts: the arms crudely embellished, mismatched replacement of a crest rail or stretcher, the legs shortened to give the chair an awkward stance. And something odd about one of the altered pieces. Michael clicked on his recorder:
“A metal rod has been added to the top of the chair, with leather straps attached.” He brushed off the leather and leaned in for a closer look. “It appears to be some sort of chin strap. Another, wider leather strap has been attached to the seat. Like a seat belt, I’d say, but poorly designed. It would be much too tight, even for a child.”
He gradually worked his way around the room, not trying to catalog everything, but simply trying to get a feel for the range of the pieces, highlighting anything that looked interesting. “An English Tall Clock, with a black japanned case embellished with colored portraits of both George III and George Washington. An excellent matching highboy and lowboy with cabriole legs. An early eighteenth-century high chest of drawers. Ruined because one of the cup turned legs has been lost and replaced at some point with a leg trumpet turned. A very nice India side chair with Flemish scrolls and feet . . .”
He stopped once he discovered he was standing by the window. A heavy fog had come in from the bay, had crept like steaming gray mud over the trees, and was now filling the yard to surround and isolate the SeaHarp. It seemed only fitting for such obsessive, lonely work. On the evening before his solitary Thanksgiving meal. It had been only recently that Michael realized he had no practical use for the antiques he valued so much. These were heirlooms, family icons and embodiments. Made for a family to use, for fathers and mothers to pass down to children and grandchildren. And he was someone who had no place to go for Thanksgiving. A wet fish trapped inside the aquarium. He was haunted by mothers and fathers, grandparents, generations of ancestors who—as far as he could tell—had never existed.
He had no fixed place. He was, forever, the rootless boy who cannot get along.
He got down on his hands and knees and rooted like a pig through the dust of ages. He pretended to be a professional. He examined the pieces of patina, wear, and tool marks. His fingers delicately traced the grain for the track of the jack plane. He crawled around and under the pieces, seeking out construction details. He made constant measurements, gauging proportion and dimension. “A sofa in the Louis XV style with a scroll-arched rail and a center crest of carved fruits and flowers with foliage,” he chanted into the recorder held to his lips, like a singer making love to his microphone.
But in fact he was a dirty little boy, four or five, hiding in a forest of legs and upholstery. Now and then he would try out a chair or sofa, sitting the way he was supposed to sit, sitting like a grownup in uncomfortable furniture that broke the back and warped the legs and changed the body until it fit the furniture, and nothing was more important than fitting in however painful the process. “A Philadelphia walnut armchair, mid-eighteenth century, with a pierced back and early cresting.” Yellow-pale, distorted children with featureless heads were strapping themselves into the chairs around him, trying to sit pretty with agreeable smiles so that visiting adults would choose them. “Three Victorian side chairs after the French style of Louis XV, both flower and fruit motifs, black walnut.” Wet children with eyes bigger than their mouths pressed tighter and tighter against the glass. “Belter chair with a scroll-outlined concave back and central upholstered panel crowned by a crest of carved foliage, flowers and fruit.”
He examined the wall nearer the floor. Letters were scratched into the baseboard, by something sharp. Perhaps a pocket knife. Perhaps a fingernail grown too long. V.I. He imagined a child on his knees, scratching away at the baseboard with his torn and bleeding fingernail. V.I.C.T.O.R, the baseboard cried.
The next morning he woke up from a series of strange dreams he could not remember, in the rough chair with the straps, the cracked leather chinstrap caressing his cheek like a lover’s dry hand.
The morning’s disorientation continued throughout the day.
Thanksgiving dinner in the Dining Room was a solitary affair; he quickly discovered that the last of the hotel’s guests had left that morning and, other than two or three staff members and the Montgomerys hidden away in their quarters at the top of the hotel, he had been left to himself. An elderly waiter poured the wine.
“Compliments of Mr Montgomery, Suh,” the old man creaked out.
“Well, please tell Mr Montgomery how much I appreciate it.”
“Mr Montgomery feels badly that you should dine alone. And on Thanksgiving.”
“Well, I do appreciate his concern.” Michael tried not to look at the old man.
“Mr Montgomery says a family is a very important thing to a man. ‘Families make us human,’ he says.”
“How interesting.” Michael bolted his wine and held up his glass for more. The elderly waiter obliged. “He is close to his family, is he? And was he close to his father as well, when he was alive?”
“Mr Simon Montgomery had a strong interest in child-rearing. He was always looking for ways to improve his children, and read extensively on the subject. You can find some of his reading material still in the library, in fact.”
“Is that why he brought the children from the orphanage here over the years?” Again, Michael bolted his wine, and again the old waiter replenished his glass.
“I suppose. Did you enjoy yourselves?”
Michael stared up at the waiter. The old man’s tired red eyes were watching him carefully. Michael wanted to reach up and break through the glass wall that had suddenly surrounded him, and throttle this ancient Peeping Tom. But he couldn’t move. “I don’t remember,” he finally said.
After dinner Michael spent several hours in the library trying to sober up so that he could continue his cataloguing. He was particularly interested in the older books, of course, and in the course of his examinations discovered the German title Kallipädie, 1858, by a Dr Daniel Schreber. Michael’s German was rather rusty, but the book’s illustrations were clear enough. A figure-eight shoulder band that tied the child’s shoulders back so they wouldn’t slump forward. A “Geradhalter”—a metal cross attached to the edge of a table—that prevented the child from leaning forward during meals or study. Chairs and beds with straps and halters to prevent “squirming” or “tossing and turning,” guaranteed to keep the young body “straight.”
Off in the distance, in some other room, Michael could hear the pounding of tiny knees on the carpet, the thunder of the old men trying to catch them.
Michael made his way down to the cellars via a door in the wall on the north side of the back porch. That door led him to a descending staircase, and the cellars. The main part of these cellars consisted of the kitchen, laundry, furnace and supply rooms, and various rooms used by the gardeners and janitors. But hidden on one end, seldom-used, were the storage cellars.
In the cellars had been stored a treasure of miscellaneous household appurtenances: some of the most ornate andirons Michael had ever seen, with dogs and lions and elephants worked into their designs; shuttlecocks and beakers; finely painted bellows and ancient bottles and all manner of brass ware (ladles, skimmers, colanders, kettles, candlesticks and the like); twenty-two elaborately stenciled tin canisters and a chafing dish in the shape of a deer (necessary to keep the colonials’ freshly slain venison suitably warm); dozens of rolls of carpet which had been ill-preserved and fell into rotted clumps when he tried to examine them; a half-dozen crocks, several filled with such odd hardware as teardrop handles, bat’s-wing and willow mounts, rosette knobs and wrought-iron hinges, and the largest with an assortment of wall and furniture stencils; another half-dozen pieces of Delft ware from Holland (also called “counterfeit china”); a dripping pan and a dredging box; a variety of flesh hooks and graters and latten ware and patty pans, all artifacts from earlier versions of the SeaHarp’s grand kitchen; a jack for removing some long-dead gentleman’s boots; a finely-made milk keeler and several old jack mangles for smoothing the hotel’s linen; a rotting bag full of crumbling pillow cases (sorting through these Michael liked to imagine all the young maids’ hands which had smoothed them and fluffed their pillows—they would have been calling them “pillow bears” back then); skewers and skillets; trays and trenchers; and a great wealth of wooden ware, no doubt used by some past manager in an attempt to hold down costs.
He could spend a full week cataloguing it all, which wasn’t really what he wanted to do during his time at the hotel. After seeing just these more common, day-to-day, bits and pieces, he was more anxious than ever to go through the other rooms. But he could tell from his finds in the cellars that there was quite a bit of antique wealth here. If the sales were handled properly they could bring the Montgomerys a fair amount of money. And the beauty of it, of course, was that these relics were now of little use in the actual running of the hotel.
That evening Michael began his inventories of the guest rooms themselves. Most could be handled very quickly as there was little of value or interest. The only thing that slowed him was a continuation of the vague sense of disorientation he’d felt since awakening that morning. Things—most recognizably the faceless cupid statues he’d encountered his first night—hovered at the periphery of his vision, and then disappeared, much like the after-effects of some drug-induced alertness. He began to wonder if there had been something wrong with his Thanksgiving dinner—perhaps it had been the wine the old waiter had delivered so freely—and he became very careful of the things he ate, examining each glass of beverage or piece of bread or meat minutely—for consistency, pattern, tool-marks, style—before consumption.
“A tea-table with cabriole legs and slipper feet tapering finely to the toe. Like some stylish grandmother dancing. Perhaps my own, undiscovered, grandmother dancing. Second quarter of the eighteenth century, probably from Philadelphia.”
The orphans squealed with delight, their tiny knees raw and bleeding from carpet burns.
“This kettledrum base desk is obviously pregnant. A portrait of my mother bearing me? Its sides swell out greatly at the bottom. A block front.”
In two rooms he found painted Pennsylvania Dutch rocking chairs. The pale yellow children rocked them so vigorously he thought they might take off, fueled by their infant dreams.
When it finally came time to retire, Michael of course had his choice of many beds. But many of the beds were of the modern type and therefore of little interest to him. Where there were antique beds they were usually Jenny Linds with simple spool-turned posts or the occasional Belter bed with its huge headboard carved with leaves and tendrils.
Michael finally settled for a bed with straps, so many straps it was like sleeping in a cage. But he felt secure, accepted. He began a dream about a forest full of children, tying one another to the trees. The crackling noises in the walls of his bedroom jarred his nerves, but eventually he was able to fall asleep. That night, as always, he had a boy’s dreams. No business or marital worries informed them.
It was only upon waking that Michael discovered this room had a stenciled wall. This was of course a surprise in a structure from the 1850s, with the number of manufactured wallpapers available, but he supposed it might have been done—no doubt using old stencils—for uniqueness, to preserve some individual effect. Michael was surprised to find that it had survived the many small repaintings and remodellings that had occurred over the years. Usually a later owner would find the slight imperfections normal to a stencilled wall irritating, and the patterns crude, as certainly they often were.
But Michael liked them; there was a lot to be said for the note of individuality they added to a room. He suspected the only reason this particular wall had been saved, however, was because the guests hadn’t the opportunity to see it. Looking around the walls—at their shabbiness, and the crude nature of the furniture—he felt sure this room was not normally rented. So an owner would not be embarrassed.
The pattern was an unusual one. The border was standard enough: leaves and vines and pineapples, quite similar to the work of Moses Eaton, Jr. Some of the wall stencils Michael had found in the cellar matched these shapes. Within these borders, however, was a grove of trees. Most of them were large stencils of weeping willows, but still fairly standard, again derived from Eaton’s work. But here and there among the willows was another sort of tree: an oak, perhaps, but he wasn’t sure, tied or bound by a large rope, or maybe it was a snake wrapping around the trunk and through the branches. Bound was the proper description, because the branches seemed pulled down or otherwise diverted from their natural direction by the rope or snake, and the trunk twisted from the upright—a dramatic violation of the classical symmetry one usually found in wall designs.
The design of this particular tree was obviously too intricate to have been done with a single stencil. There had to have been several, overlapping. But the color was too faded and worn to make out much of the detail, as if some past cleaning woman had tried to remove the bound trees, though not the willows, with an abrasive.
He got down on his hands and knees. The baseboard was covered with scratches, the signatures of dozens of different children. He could hear a distant thundering in the hall outside, hundreds of orphan limbs, pounding out a protest that grew slowly in its articulateness. Choose me. Me me me. He began to doubt that Victor Montgomery had ever been away to school, that he had ever left this hotel, and his father’s watchful eye, at all. The voices in the hall seemed strangely distorted. Distorted embryos. As if under water. The scratches in the baseboard tore at his fingertips.
Michael crawled out the door and down several flights of stairs. The faceless children all crowded him, jostled him, and yet he still kept his knees moving. He maneuvered through a mass of legs, odd items of furniture stacked and jammed wall-to-wall, all eager to grab him with their straps and wooden arms and bend him to their shape. He cried when their sharp legs kicked him, and covered his face when hurricanes swept through the woods and shouted like old men.
He stopped at the front windows and floated up to the glass. A crowd of people watched him, pointed, tapped the glass. Sweat drenched him and fogged the glass wall. His eyes grew bigger than his mouth. And yet no matter how hard he peered at the ones outside, he could find no face that resembled his own.