Late in the Civil War a surgeon attached to the Ninety-fifth New York Infantry, a man named Major Robert S. Sparks, invented a concoction for pain relief composed of a combination of chloroform, capsicum, Indian hemp, alcohol, tincture of cannabis and opium. Needless to say, it worked. Major Sparks, who played fanciful Schumann papillons on the piano between amputations and who became known as “Painless Bob,” died from an accidental overdose of his own medicine, but not before selling the recipe to an apothecary of German extraction who lived in New York.
The apothecary, whose name was Gustav Wolff, took out the capsicum, replaced it with peppermint and bottled the sweet-tasting mixture under the name “Chloromemdium.” According to the advertising for the product, it cured cholera, diarrhea, insomnia, toothache, cancer and any sort of headache. It was also available in a “Ladies” formula for the relief of the pain of “accouchement.”
The drug, approved by none other than Pope Leo XIII, with a medal to prove it, sold like hot-cakes, first in New York and then all over North America, Great Britain and even Europe. Gustav changed his name to George, dropped one F from Wolff and began building a castle on Eriskay Island on the St. Lawrence River border of New York State, an area that had become a favorite place for the scions of the patent medicine industry to build opulent summer residences, probably because of the proximity to the Canadian border, which was convenient for the surreptitious removal of untaxed income skimmed from already questionable profits.
In George Wolf’s case, the river border was less than two hundred yards away from his private island. He worked on the castle for years, the plans changing and expanding as he went along. There were battlements, towers, dungeons, a grotto and a great hall hung with dozens of hunting trophies that he’d bought wholesale from a bankrupt taxidermist in Rhode Island, supposedly re-creating the hunting lodges of his homeland, although the closest his cobbler father had ever come to a wild boar was the making of a pair of hunting boots for a Prussian cavalry officer in Hanover. Wolf, now a multimillionaire, called the castle and the island Wolfschanze, or “Wolf’s Lair” a name that remained until World War II and its unfortunate and embarrassing connection with Hitler’s headquarters near Rastenburg, Poland. At that point the name was prudently changed to Castle Island.
George Wolf completed his stone and oak-beamed fantasy in 1903, with his flagship medicine, Chloromemdium at the height of its popularity. Within a few years of the summer residence’s completion, George Wolf’s beloved wife, Louise, died, and with her died the snake-oil salesman’s interest in his castle. He never occupied the place, nor did he sell it. By 1910 more and more coroner’s reports were referring to bodies found in rooms full of empty bottles of George’s elixir, and in 1914 George Wolf went belly-up. By 1918, a broken, tired and heartbroken old man, George Wolf became a statistic in the great Spanish flu pandemic and faded quickly from memory, having left no children behind to carry on his name.
The castle languished, left to occasional vandals and the harsh winters of that part of the country. The Thousand Islands Bridge Authority purchased the island from the state of New York for a dollar, intending to lease it to the Coast Guard as a base for catching the rum runners prospering in the area, but the Coast Guard never took the place over, let alone maintained it, and the decay worsened.
In the 1930s title passed to the Catholic Church, which originally intended to use it as a summer retreat for the archbishop, but when that proved to be an unpopular decision they changed their plan first to a summer camp for Catholic orphans, then a home for unwed mothers and finally briefly passed the declining property over to a Catholic military academy.
The church had little use for a military school on an island in the middle of the St. Lawrence with all the attendant problems, so the property was sold in the late forties to an evangelical association, but after losing their tax-exempt status the group in turn sold Castle Island again. Between 1956 and 1972 it was owned in turn by an artists collective, a reclusive millionaire, a Korean love cult eventually indicted for tax fraud and a British newspaper baron who never even bothered to visit.
For thirty-five years after that the castle languished, empty again until it was purchased by a German venture capitalist with the coincidentally prescient name of Vlad Jorstadt, a man who collected private islands and bartered them as a hobby. The last time Castle Island was up for sale was through Sotheby’s Properties at twenty-two million dollars. There were no takers.
Carrie slept and did not dream. To her it seemed that no time at all had passed. She heard the sound of tires on gravel and opened her eyes. The man who called himself Enoch Bale turned to her and smiled.
“You slept well.”
“Where are we?” Carrie asked. She still felt sluggish and vague. All she really wanted was to go into that dreamless sleep again and wait until this bad dream ended. The man who sat beside her was a specter from some terrible fever, a demon lover of monstrous power who could hold her rigid with a glance and turn any kind of fortitude to water in her veins.
“Come and see,” he said. He opened the door of the limousine, then turned and offered her his hand. She took it and stepped out of the car. It was dark, so she knew it was still night. The rain had stopped, but dark, dangerous clouds scudded overhead and in the far distance she could see the flicker of lightning.
They were at the end of a gravel road. To the left was a large, dark building and a long dock leading out into inky water. A mist had risen on the water, pale but heavy enough to be called a fog. There wasn’t a breath of wind. There were no lights on in the building that must have been a yacht club once upon a time, but Carrie could faintly hear music. Big band music.
“Benny Goodman,” said Enoch Bale. “‘Stomping at the Savoy.’ He always plays it when he comes up here to perform for the gentry.”
“Plays?” Carrie was sure he’d used the present tense and that didn’t make any sense at all.
“I told you, time is elastic.” He smiled. “The blink of a dinosaur’s eye.”
“Why are we here?” she asked.
“We have an appointment.”
“Where?”
“There,” he said and pointed. For a moment she thought he’d changed into some kind of cloak that brushed against his ankles and shrouded his upraised arm. His hand pointed to the fog-covered water, and, blinking, Carrie found herself halfway down the dock. Her companion was standing in an old-fashioned inboard runabout, a mahogany Chris-Craft Cadet from the late twenties. The powerful engine rumbled and once again the Vampyr offered Carrie his hand. The fog was steadily becoming thicker. She turned and looked back over her shoulder. The old building had disappeared but now she could see lights shining through the thickening mist. The music had changed as well.
“That’s ‘Moonlight Serenade,’” whispered Carrie, staring back through the twisting fog.
“Glenn Miller,” the Vampyr replied. “They all play at Scobie House.” He paused. “In their time.”
Carrie felt dizzy for a moment, and it seemed that the only way to maintain her balance on the old wood dock was to keep her gaze firmly fixed on those luminous green eyes. Reality began to shred around her as though the very fabric of the world was falling away. Over the water, quite near now, she heard the sound of volleys of musket fire, the blast of cannon and the desperate screams of dying men. Or was it only thunder?
“Come,” the Vampyr urged, “we mustn’t be late.”
Carrie nodded absently, took the extended hand and stepped down into the boat. She sat down on the seat beside her companion. Behind her the music was very clear, rich and full of melody. Somewhere a woman laughed, the sound full of life. The Vampyr pushed the throttle of the Chris-Craft forward and they headed slowly out into the fog.