BOXES OF DEAD CHILDREN, by Darrell Schweitzer

When the last of the workmen were done installing his “effects” into his new abode and the last of their trucks disappeared down the rough, gravel road, he really wished he could just blow up the little bridge that connected him with the rest of the world and become the most spectacular recluse since Howard Hughes. He pressed down, hard, on the imaginary plunger. Boom! The place was called Eagle’s Head for some obscure reason, a little knob of land off the Maine coast at the end of a peninsula, amid tiny, rocky islands. High tides had washed away just enough that where he stood was an island now, too, but for that bridge, and if he could blow it up, well, all the better, because a gazillionaire minus his gazillions still has some resources left and he was sure he could continue to pay the private security firm he employed to float baskets of groceries over to him once a week and otherwise restrict access and leave him alone.

His was a name anyone would know, once a celebrity, the Boy Inventor (aged twenty-something), creator of _______, essential element in the daily lives of millions (who have to pay for it), the new Thomas Edison, who used to be in all the papers as an inspiration or perspiration of the American Dream, but was now, at sixty-something, if you believed hostile sources, the pirate entrepreneur who’d cheated his buddies out of _______, and was pursued by the slings and arrows of congressional investigations, not to mention a mysterious Woman in Red, several distraught ex-wives and former offspring—a.k.a. money-grubbing leeches—plus any number of lawyers, lawyers, lawyers, until he had made his way in abject retreat by swerve of shore and bend of bay to Eagle’s Head, Maine, and a curiously long-vacant but “fully furnished” property which a Martha’s Vineyard realtor who owed him a debt of discreet gratitude had managed to procure for him.

Boom.

He turned to regard his new acquisition, and the odd thought came to him that if aliens had beamed up bits and pieces of famous edifices from all over the world and glued them together at random, that would only begin to explain the architecture of this place, which had everything from Gothic towers to Romanesque windows to twirly Italianate pillars to a classic, wooden, late Victorian wooden porch on which one could enjoy the sea breeze.

It occurred to him a little later, as he sat on that porch in the evening, that he had so much privacy here that if he wanted to lounge about in a lion-skin loincloth while reading old Tarzan novels, he bloody well could, because amid his vast personal library he actually owned an expensive set of Edgar Rice Burroughs first editions he’d once picked up on a whim, and he did not doubt that the wardrobes inside contained a lion-skin or two; and besides, he was, despite his considerable falling-down in the world, still rich enough to be “eccentric” rather than merely mad, like that crazy DuPont before he’d finally shot somebody.

But a mosquito bit him, and then another, and another, something no amount of isolation or money could do anything about at this time of year, so he went inside. It was not loincloth weather.

Inside, the hallway, which the realtor had described to him as an “atrium,” was filled with stuff. He was very much into stuff, things, objects of art or curiosity, which became a kind of expression of his mind, like graffiti written on the fabric of reality, to an extent more than one of his ex-wives had described as pathological: stuff, his own and that of his rather mysterious “fully furnished” predecessor who had built this little hideaway back in the days of Newport mansions, when anything smaller than the palace of Versailles was accounted a “cottage.” He himself, the product of a simpler age, had grown up watching The Addams Family on TV and had always wanted to live in a house like that, and now, as nearly as possible, he did, complete with a stuffed bear, a samurai statue, and a two-headed concrete tortoise in the living room.

But there was something else here, too, something he couldn’t quite define, some sense of an Other, no doubt caused by the presence of a good deal of antique stuff which was not his—i.e. which had not accumulated through the remembrances and associations of his life. The theory of stuff held that whoever lived in a bare, pristine apartment with no stuff in it was probably not worth getting to know. His predecessor must have been interesting, at least.

So what he was doing here was intruding into the lingering mind of someone else, hoping to fuse his own with it. The bronze and lacquer dragon clock in the atrium, or the life-sized, age-darkened, papier mache’ bobble-head figure of a Chinese attendant had not been his, but they intrigued.

Concerning the former owner, who had left the place boarded up while his estate was left in suspended animation for decades, the realtor had said very little.

Boom. If only he could blow up every connection to the outside world and merely disappear into this place, into the woodwork and accumulations of the house itself. He had to admit to himself, when he had such thoughts, that he was tired, not young anymore, and there were so many things in the world he no longer cared about, most of which had lawyers attached.

But it wasn’t as simple as that of course. No isolation can be perfect, particularly if you want modern conveniences. The electricity worked. It worked well enough when he found the electric train layout and followed an antique steam engine as it rattled across table-tops and over the lintel of a door, then through a hole cut in the wall, along a ceiling on a high ledge, up a spiraling staircase, one, two, three storeys, until it came to an attic room which had been laid out with an immense tabletop display of a rolling prairie, a station in the middle of it where the train came to a stop, and, stretching in all directions, hundreds of tiny gravestones, most of them with names written on them, but some still blank.

Then the power went out, and he was drawn naturally to the fading light of a window. He could see, across Penobscot Bay, a lighthouse in the distance, two or three sailboats beneath a darkening sky, and, below him, on what must be the back lawn, a single grave, a real one, in the back yard, surrounded by a fence.

He spared himself such clichés as Well, that’s weird, and he didn’t feel particularly afraid. He wasn’t quite sure what he felt.

The oddest thing that came to him just then was the temptation, not to blow up his last bridge to the outside world, but to reconnect. So he pulled up a chair and sat down by the window, in the fading light, and got out his cell phone and turned it on. Yes, there was a signal here. He was online, before long fingering his way up and down the screen, reading news, wandering over the Facebook, and then he found a mention of himself in the form of a crudely Photoshopped image of his face on a devil’s body with a wriggling boy and girl spitted on his pitchfork and a caption: IS IT TRUE THAT THE RICH EAT BABIES?

Before he could even turn the phone off a voice behind him in the room distinctly said, “That is not a good idea,” and somehow the phone was snatched out of his hand.

He turned around in alarm and said, “Who’s there?” but of course there was no one there, just the shadow-filled room with the strange train layout and the tiny graveyard.

That the place should be haunted only seemed appropriate. If it were not, he should call the realtor and ask for a discount.

Call him with what? His phone was gone.

He must have dropped it. He could come up here in daylight, with a flashlight if necessary, and search for it.

Then he’d have a long talk with the ghost. Maybe the two of them could become friends, and commiserate without fear of wiretaps and lawsuits.

He realized this was not a normal reaction, but then, he was not here to be normal.

This was well beyond the level of lion-skin loincloths, something deeper than mere eccentricity.

He tried to open himself to the influence of the house, as he explored room after room, some filled with old furniture, shelves crammed with newspapers, another crammed with plaster, life-sized figures of clowns, yet another with every inch of wall space covered with very old, dusty, mounted heads of birds and animals, including what might have been a pterodactyl. Often it was hard to see, because the power was off. Sometimes he just groped. Once he thought he was running his hands over a mummy case. It smelled of wood and exotic spices. Splinters came off on his fingertips. But he could see nothing until he finally found yet another winding staircase which took him down to the kitchen.

Just then the lights came on.

It was quite a modern kitchen, refurnished and stocked as he had instructed. He opened the freezer, got out a frozen entrée and popped it in the microwave, which cheerfully chirped at him as he pressed the bottoms.

He resisted the temptation to actually turn the television on.

As he ate his meager dinner in silence, his hand drifted over to a large book that lay on the table, an album of some kind. He opened it, and saw that it was indeed a late 19th century photo album, each of the pictures in a stiff cardboard setting hinged with cloth, all black & whites of course, some of them badly faded, a couple of them tintypes and one on glass.

They were all pictures of children, the boys in stiff suits or even sailor suits, and short pants, their socks neatly drawn up to their knees, the girls in frilly dresses and bonnets. It took him a while as he turned the pages, from photo to photo, to figure out what was wrong with their faces, their blank expressions. A couple of them seemed to be wearing round, smoked glasses, or else they had pennies on their eyes.

They were dead, all of them. He knew that it had once been the custom to photograph the dearly departed one last time, and so such pictures did exist, and a whole album of them like this was a fascinating, if decidedly morbid—and no doubt very valuable—collector’s item; but, still, as he came to this conclusion, he snapped the book shut. He laid his fork down gently. He reached for the TV remote.

And then the power went out again.

“You have your little hobbies. I have mine.”

Now he actually was alarmed, but at something more mundane than a ghost.

“Who the hell’s there? Who’s there?”

He groped around in a drawer. He found a steak knife. Armed with this, he turned to face the darkness threateningly.

“I said, who the hell’s there?”

There was no answer. He heard only faint creating and snapping. Old houses “settled,” he knew. Maybe it was windy out. Maybe there were branches scraping against windows.

Knife in hand, he made his way around the kitchen, tapping things with the tip of the knife the way a blind man would with a cane.

There actually was a small flashlight in one of the drawers.

“I said, who—”

He flicked on the flashlight then jumped back as the beam revealed a face, right in front of him, but then he realized it wasn’t a face at all, but a framed oval-shaped photo on the wall, of a man in a stiff collar and a suit, but whose face was somehow indistinct, and becoming even more indistinct by the moment, fading away as he watched.

He turned off the light. He briefly considered that maybe flashlights were bad for old photographs.

And while he stood there in the dark, he considered his options, some of which were, he knew, very traditional in a situation like this. They included:

Running screaming into the night.

Or making his way to the master library upstairs by candlelight and spending the evening poring over ancient, blasphemous, eldritch, forbidden, and crumbling tomes in arcane languages (which he would somehow be able to read), until he had ventured into truly forbidden territory which sufficiently altered his mind that he was no longer even remotely sane and all the more willing to invite in tentacular spooks from outer space, while incidentally discovering in a climax of mind-blasting horror what precisely the former owner of this house (of sinister repute, both the owner and the house) had been up to.

Calling in a team of professional ghost busters with their instruments and their technobabble, which would ultimately lead them to yadda-yadda—see, previous paragraph.

Going out into the back yard and digging up that grave with his bare hands.

Or just lying out there and listening to the voices from out of the ground.

Or waiting for the power to come back on and then watching TV. Something he could relate to, like Big Bang Theory, because he, too, was an awkward genius that nobody understood. This option included calling out for pizza, even if it was quite a ways for a delivery. First he’d have to find his phone.

Or none of the above.

What actually did happen after that was a little hard to follow. For one thing, he lost track of time. It was dark. It stayed dark. He wondered if the sun would ever rise. He thought he remembered distinct instances of sleeping, on a couch, or in a huge, canopied bed, and of getting up several times to go to the bathroom—fortunately the plumbing worked, even if the electricity didn’t, and he laughed and repeated to himself the old joke in a comic-geezer’s voice about, I have an old man’s bladder. Imagine how upset he was to discover it missing. But it was still dark, and more than once he made his way down to the kitchen by candlelight and ate whatever he could find that didn’t require cooking. And always, he avoided looking at the photo on the wall, or any of the ones in the album.

Now what was interesting was that he had the distinct sense that it was his album, and he began to remember how he had taken those photographs, one by one, and under what circumstances, which was very odd indeed, because he hadn’t taken them. He, the inventor and entrepreneur and the subject of rude Photoshopped pictures on Facebook had done nothing of the sort, and those weren’t digital photographs anyway. He had no idea how to use the sort of antique equipment that must have been employed in the creation of those pictures, even if, during his ruminations, he had found a whole room full of cameras and metal basins and bottles of chemicals.

Once he actually heard someone knocking loudly at the front door. He saw the gleam of headlights in the driveway. But he didn’t answer it. That was for someone else, in another time.

He hadn’t come here to be normal, he kept telling himself.

Time to break out the old loincloth and go swinging through the vines.

But that was not what he did—this not being loincloth weather—as he made his way slowly upstairs, through rooms filled with his own stuff, glimpsing by candlelight his comic-book collection, his movie posters, the glass case containing the Aurora model kits of the Frankenstein Monster and Dracula he’d built as a kid—as he was the sort of person who went through life accumulating, never letting go of anything—then into another room filled with his trophies, for innovation, for excellence, for making lots and lots of money and keeping most of it from anybody else—and after that the room full of stuffed, mounted heads, which brought back to his consciousness like bright bubbles of memory rising from a dark pool the vivid recollections of how exactly he had killed each one of these creatures. And yes, the pterodactyl was a joke, a clever fabrication given to him by a friend one Christmas after he’d returned from an expedition to Mato Grosso in 1922 and they’d both sat up reading aloud passages from The Lost World and getting a jolly good laugh over it. He found a closet filled with old suits and put one on, because a gentleman, even at home, had to maintain a certain standard. His fingers seemed to know what to do with the stiff, detached collar, even if his mind didn’t.

He was a gentleman, despite some of the things that went on in that room filled with cameras and metal basins and sinks, and even though they didn’t involve, exclusively, photography.

There was a room of knives. The walls were covered with them, each in little sheaths. Thousands of them.

And then it seemed that he was riding in the passenger car of a train, the steam engine whistling and roaring, as he gazed out the window past a landscape that seemed to twist over tabletops and along the lintel of a door and through tunnels and up spiraling flights of stairs until he found himself disembarking at the final stop, which was an old-fashioned wooden train station in the middle of an impossibly flat landscape covered with perfectly regular gravestones as far as he could see.

At the same time he was in the room where the toy train’s track came to its terminus, where moonlight streamed in through a window, and he heard the sound of a foghorn from across the bay. Why would they blow a foghorn on a moonlit night? He wasn’t sure, but they did.

“Choo! Choo! End of the line!” someone said.

“Who the hell is there?”

“We have our little hobbies. Wanna see?”

He followed, by candlelight, as the Other led him to a higher loft, the true attic of this part of the house, a long, low room under the eaves, and for just a moment what he saw looked, impossibly and absurdly, like something he’d seen in the dark once in that scenic metropolis of Shell Pile, New Jersey, a soft-shell crab farm out in the middle of a field, consisting of row upon row of rectangular tanks stacked on top of one another in a metal framework. But these were not tanks. They were boxes, white cardboard boxes, like gift boxes, the kind you’d get a doll or new suit in, carefully stacked row upon row on metal shelves.

“Look.”

None of the boxes had lids. Inside each, surrounding by crumpled wrapping paper the way a new doll might be wrapped, lay the corpse of a child. He knew each of them. He remembered them. He knew their names. He had gently placed pictures of every one of them into his album.

Now some of them were starting to shrivel up or blacken, which made him sad, because he remembered how beautiful they had been.

But no, he argued, he hadn’t done any of this. That was someone else. It was as if his memories and that of some Other were getting all mixed up now, but he was sure, no, that he had never been in this room before the Other had tricked him into it; and that was not his own picture on the wall in the kitchen with a face that faded away; and the children in the boxes did not call out to him and demand to know why? Why? Why did you hurt me? He hadn’t hurt anyone. They were having such fun. Like the joke with the pterodactyl was such fun. No one asked him Well, what about that guy you buried in the Pine Barrens near Shell Pile? And he did not have to explain, as one might to a child, that to get where he had gotten, much less to hold onto what he had obtained, whether it be a perfect Aurora model kit of Dracula or a million dollars in hoarded rare gold coins that nobody else knew about, much less his legendary gazillions in the stock of ___, well, sometimes you have to do things that just have to be done, however unpleasant; so no one asked him about the fire in the sweatshop in Bangladesh either, and no one even said, Who do you think you are kidding? Do you really think you can just hide away from the world and from the past forty years of your life with your head in the fucking sand? That doesn’t work very well for ostriches either.

That’s not a good idea.

Good? Bad? He knew that he was not a bad man, and who was to judge anyway? Some things were beyond judgment.

He ran out of the loft, back down into the lower part of the attic, where the toy train was, where he could see a distant lighthouse out a window across the bay, and somehow, miraculously, his phone was right there, by the chair, where he’d dropped it, still on and glowing.

The last good idea he had involved scooping up that phone off the floor and pressing in a number he knew. His youngest daughter. He hadn’t spoken to her in a very long time. He sensed, he hoped, that she didn’t hate him quite as much as everybody else. If only he could just speak to her—

“That’s not a good idea,” the Other said.

“Yes, it’s a very good idea!” he said, “a very good idea.”

The phone was ringing.

“A very good idea!”

“Daddy? Is that you? What’s a good idea?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and then he couldn’t think of anything more to say.

Someone took the phone out of his hand and threw it across the dark room.

But of course there was no one in the room with him. He was standing there, alone, wearing an old-fashioned suit, and in the upper loft were boxes and boxes of dead children, whose names he knew.

* * * *

Later, there was a loud knocking at the door and he looked out another window and he saw the policemen down there in the driveway, and he laughed at the ridiculous jalopies they’d come in and the absurd uniforms they wore, like something out of an old, silent movie, but he knew they’d never find him, because he was here now and he was part of the house and he could just fade into the darkness until they’d gone away.

“Boom,” he said.