The Haunted Boardinghouse

ENAN BAMBRICK HAD LEFT THE university at the close of his third year. It had been due only to the largess of a gentleman of his neighborhood, a certain Dr. Foxxe, that it had been possible for him to attend at all; but the doctor had married again, and his bride had not approved of his charity—or indeed of any other expenditure not devoted to her adornment.

The news reached Enan at midwinter. He had saved a little money; and his college, which professed to cherish classicists, had permitted him to run up an inconsiderable debt, to be repaid if his patron’s interest should reawaken, or if Enan should find another, or if ever he was himself in a position to repay it.

But when spring came and the roads were once more passable, he was informed that his business with Calpurnius Siculus and Pomponius Mela was now ended, for the time being at least. His fellows urged him strongly to steal what books he could from the library in order that he might trade for food while pursuing his studies in those that remained. He rejected this well-intended advice, departing the halls of learning with no luggage beyond a clean shirt, a collection of coins begged upon his behalf by his dearest friend, and a tattered, leather-bound Moralia—this last wholly his own, the gift of one of his professors, who, having found a better one, no longer wanted it.

Upon reaching his native town, some nine days after setting out and after privations too easily imagined, he discovered that his father, a tailor, had small need of his assistance. Through his father’s influence, however, he was at length able to secure a position as a draper’s clerk; and a draper’s clerk he remained for something in excess of a year. Alis volat propriis.

He flies with his own wings—but not too high, for he slept, with two brother clerks, in the loft above the shop. And if he continued to dine at his parents’ table once or twice a week, if he read Moralia on long summer evenings, if he made for himself a little manual of Latin in a foolscap notebook, the others had peculiarities no less striking; and it was by no means apparent that his eventual end was to be in any way different from theirs.

Spring returned, and it struck Enan with almost unbearable poignancy that a year had passed; many of the faces he had known would soon be gone. There would be much talk of examinations now, and much casting of summer plans. The wealthiest students would issue invitations—though not, of course, to such as he had been. The ancient apple on the common (said to date from the second millennium) would be wreathed in bridal white.

Even at the draper’s, summer was not altogether without its pleasures. The shop closed early on Wednesday and Thursday, and was closed altogether on Monday. Enan discoursed upon Vergil to certain attentive cows and buttercups, and wrestled and fished with two younger brothers. He had very nearly become reconciled to a lifetime of praising, measuring, and selling cotton, linen, and wool when the letter came. It was from the kind friend who had begged coins for him; and because it was the most important, and very nearly the only, letter he had ever received, it will be given here in full.

Enan’s hands were shaking before he had finished his first reading of this letter, which he read through a second time, and a third, before refolding it and laying it aside.

To be master of a library! There would be scores of books—there might well be hundreds. There would be funds, perhaps, now and then for the acquisition of more. He could continue his studies, prepare for an eventual return to the university. It might even be possible to complete his degree in the vicinity of Granville, concerning which he knew nothing, except that it lay some fifty miles to the east.

Or perhaps in time some wealthy family might desire a tutor to accompany its heir. Enan had known several such individuals, half teacher and half servant. A tutor might attend a class or two himself, might take on an additional pupil here and there in order to make that possible. And who could be more suitable? … young Arthur’s present tutor … known and respected … himself.

It says something for Enan’s character that he wrote his friend to thank him before writing the headmaster of New Lake School. Then and only then, with much chewing of the draper’s already well-chewed pen, with much scratching of head and much wringing of hands and walking up and down, did he dare address Mr. Seely, modestly and even humbly, expressing ab imo pectore his entire willingness to accept the position on whatever terms Mr. Seely might think suitable. With what care this letter was folded and stamped, with what feelings it was committed to the town’s post office, need not be described.

The tobacconist around the corner had in his youth been a stoker of coaches, and Enan seized the earliest opportunity to question him regarding Granville.

“You’re not figuring on staying very long?” the tobacconist inquired, knocking out his pipe.

“I might.” Enan was scrupulous. “A friend of mine’s got family there.”

The tobacconist shrugged. “Lock your door, lad. And shut your window, too. You know the coach don’t run?”

Enan shook his head.

“Not no more—used to be a big place.” The tobacconist did not know whether there was a university in Granville or near it, had never heard of New Lake School.

June was nearly spent already. July passed without word. The pupils at New Lake School, Enan told himself, very probably did not attend classes during the summer months; it might well be that Mr. Seely himself had gone afield.

Toward the end of August, in a fever of anxiety, he wrote again.

When the harvest was nearly in, when cartloads of pumpkins were to be seen in every street and the breath of men and horses smoked at two in the afternoon, when the bell of the grammar school that had been his own sounded before sunrise, and little troupes of its pupils went from door to door at dusk, habited as witches, tunnel men, and ghouls, the letter arrived.

It was torn and stained, and had been marked by a town far to the south. When Enan opened it, he discovered that it had been composed in August—by one of those coincidences that seem nearly preternatural, upon the same date that he had penned his second missive. As a precedent has now been established, this tattered letter, too, will be given in full. Usus magister est.

Enan wrote immediately, informing Mr. Seely that his letter had miscarried; but he slept very little that night, and in the morning, with every apology he could lay tongue to, but with the tenacity of one clinging to his last hope, he resigned his post with the draper. In less than an hour, he had packed his scant belongings and bade his parents farewell.

There was, as the tobacconist had warned him, no coach to Granville. There was, however, a coach to Bradford, which was, Enan was assured, not much over ten miles from it. Noon found him aboard, having secured a half-price ticket by his promise to help fire and carry water, and to push if necessary. Vast and clumsy, streaming brownish-black smoke, it departed at a pace no horse could have maintained for more than half a mile; and Enan knew for the first time (and the last) the exhilaration of rapid tireless motion. The night’s hard frost had left every twig of every bush and every blade of grass in every meadow traced with white. White, too, were the plumes of spent steam leaking from the coach’s cylinders; white still, they froze upon the rattling windowpanes until the interior was left in milky twilight, and Enan was forced to lay his book aside.

The man in the seat across the aisle asked whether he was going to Bradford. He shook his head. “No, to Granville.”

“Hello … . To Granville? Is that your home?”

Enan shook his head again.

“Know the place?”

“No,” Enan said truthfully. “I’ve never been there. Where are you from?”

“Bradford.” The man paused, sucking his teeth. “You have a care, hear me?”

“I’ll surely try to,” Enan said. “It’s a dangerous place, I take it?”

The man turned to look at the sheeted ice on his own window for a moment, and Enan feared he had offended him.

“Granville’s an odd sort of place, that’s all,” his fellow passenger told him at last. “Know anything about its history?”

Enan shook his head.

“It’s old, that’s all. They say it goes back to the first settlers hereabouts. Older than that, maybe.”

Enan ventured to ask how that was possible.

“Oh, there was people here before. We just don’t like to talk about them is all. And then Granville wasn’t left empty in the war like most places. There was more boats on the river then, and Granville had something to do with them—I don’t know what. Anyhow, walls got put up all around, and they’re still there. There’s fever and worse in the swamps, too. Things left over from the wars, just like the walls, they say.”

“Perhaps you could put me on the road to Granville when we get to Bradford,” Enan suggested. “That is, if you would be so good.”

His fellow passenger cocked an eyebrow. “How you going to get across the river?”

That was what Enan himself wondered as he studied it from a pier of the ruined bridge. The ice near the shore seemed solid enough; but a winding snake of dark water showed near the center of the wide channel, vagrant and threatening. The most sensible thing to do, he realized, would be to stay the night in Bradford and hope for a cold one that would make for stronger ice in the morning; but he commanded only scant funds, and he was far too diffident to beg a lodging from the traveler he had talked with on the coach, even if he were able to locate his house.

Yet the short autumn day was nearly spent. Something would have to be done soon, if he was not to undergo a freezing night in the open air.

After a few moments of indecision, he decided to work his way upstream along the bank. It might well be (he told himself) that at some point sound ice stretched across the entire river; or if there was no such crossing place, he might come upon some riverside cottage whose occupants would take him in.

It was in this way that he was granted his first sight of Granville, after three weary miles. The sun was setting behind him, and its level rays illuminated the squat, gray battlements as well as the venerable spires and skeletal towers overlooking them. Granville had been, as he now saw, built upon a low hill. The flooding of a century ago had turned the fertile bottomlands around it to marsh, among whose myriad shallows and tussocks the bewildered river lost its way. Isolated though this sunset town was, and decayed as Enan felt it must certainly be, it seemed to him to breathe promises as well as threats, to sparkle as well as to glower. Possibly some untimely recollection of the enchanted isles mentioned by Philostratus colored his thinking.

He blinked, and then Granville seemed enchanted indeed, for he realized that a complete path might be traced across the ice from the point from which he viewed it to the high ground that had preserved the moated town—not a direct path, but a path all the same, one that would skirt every dark reach of open water by a margin that appeared safe; the distance would be, he imagined, hardly greater than a mile.

He had a mile yet to go when the treacherous ice splintered beneath his feet and icy water closed over his head.

Enan dreamed of cold, of riding forever in a jolting cart, and of monstrous shadows that accompanied and pursued him; but always chiefly of cold, and once that he lay in his grave. His father stood at the graveside, threading a needle in the murky twilight; his mother wept, her tears cutting his cheeks and lips like sleet.

He was thrown into Hell, and there burned for all eternity, the sport of demons; and though he cried aloud to God and to his mother, they could not hear him, or perhaps would not. A fiend wrapped him in a sheet of flame; he cast it aside, and for whole ages roamed Hell’s contorted corridors, moaning in his agony and igniting all that he touched. There he met an angel; and though he could not voice his strangled pleas, he fell prostrate at her feet. And she, for one moment only, laid her cool hand upon his burning head.

Chill winter sunlight streamed from a small, high window of many panes. For a long time it seemed to Enan that it dyed the quilt, as sunshine through the windows of a church may dye the faces of the congregation; when he looked again, a little wooden tray had grown there, and sprouted a bowl and a tall and narrow cup, each one a cylinder of the lumbering coach. Something hot pressed his lips, and after a while he decided that it must be a rose aflame, because its fragrance filled his nostrils.

“Eat. This is very good. That’s right, open your mouth.”

A heavy-armed, wide-faced woman dipped her spoon into the soup again. She had blue eyes and white hair. “I died,” Enan told her.

She smiled, studying him. “You will, if you don’t eat.”

In some remote fashion Enan felt he should question her, though he did not know which questions to ask.

When he woke again, the window was dark, his throat aflame. His groping hands found a ewer beside his bed; he drank from it, and was as before. Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux, nox est perpetua una dormienda.

A long sleep indeed, but not in fact a perpetual one. He sat up and saw a shadow fly the room.

Standing, he nearly fell. He clutched the bedpost, leaned against the chill, plaster wall, and at length managed a step, then another. The window was too high to let him look out. The gray light beyond might have been dawn or dusk, or merely that of a dark winter’s day. The room held the narrow bed in which he had lain, a washstand with a mirror half spoiled by damp, a chest of drawers, and a plain, wooden, cane-bottomed chair. The ceiling was much lower on the side of the room that held the bed—low enough that he might knock his head against it, though he was not tall.

He went to the door through which the shadow had run, half afraid he would find it locked. It opened with a squeak. The shadow had neither opened it nor closed it, he felt certain; the shadow had not been real, then. Too-loose clothing hung limply from nails beside the door. Bracing his back against it, he put on his trousers, then added his shirt while seated on the chair.

Beyond the door lay a contracted hall. A cramped stairway ended almost at his feet; his was the first door of three. The second opened onto an even smaller room, much like his. The bed was made (though not very neatly), and a clean shirt reclined at ease upon it. There were tattered books—A Modern Geography of America and English Composition—on a folding table. Enan left, shutting the door carefully behind him.

The third door, two steps higher than the others, opened on a wide, shingled roof not in the best repair. Here a fresh wind greeted him; upon it, sailing like some swift sloop of war, rode a peregrine falcon. It passed him at eye level, perhaps twenty feet away, and he succumbed to the urge to wave. If it saw him it gave no sign.

After testing the latch to make certain the door could not lock him out by swinging shut, he stepped out onto the shingles. A thaw had come, surely; the wind held that watery renewal which signals that winter is on holiday. The confused sounds of play drifted up to him from some trampled spot he felt must be very far below—this though a half-naked tower at no great distance rose much higher.

Turning to look back at the place from which he had come, he found it an octagonal turret. One narrow window showed the ill-made bed with its occupant shirt.

He advanced, climbing the slope toward the ridgeline. An irregular clump of wilting feathers recalled the corsair falcon. Melting snow slumped in the shadow of a dormer. A second turret sprang into view, and a third. Chimneys he had assumed belonged to other buildings were, it now appeared, parts of this one; for although a whole jumble of roofs—shingled, leaded, and tiled—lay between them and himself, there was no gap to indicate that the monstrous house had ended.

From the ridge he saw it whole, four-faced, a beast without a back. The decayed wall, an earthenwork battlemented with wood and stone, lay only a street away; beyond it stretched the marsh he remembered, sheathed in ice. The breeze whipping his hair was pleasant and cool, sparkling with dancing snowflakes. He filled his lungs. How good he felt! How free now from sickness and pain!

The shadow of the falcon raced toward him across the roof; for a moment it seemed that a second shadow raced with it, that (perhaps) of a girl or slender woman. Then both were gone, and there was only the falcon, wheeling above the boys who romped in the street below, then darting away.

Though he told himself that there was nothing left for him to do, he was reluctant to return to the narrow bed in which he had lain. Was it possible to reach the ground from this roof? Or to re-enter this strange house by another door? He wandered aimlessly until he stood before a garret window and peered into a bare room in which a pale maiden in black sat weeping before a second window. When he tapped on the glass, she lifted the sash for him.

“What were you doing out there?”

“Looking,” he told her, and hoped she would not ask at what.

“That’s good.” She hesitated. “You’re Enan Bambrick. Do you remember me?”

Embarrassed, he shook his head.

“I came to see you several times while you were so ill.”

“That was certainly very kind of you.” He groped. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter.” She wiped her eyes on her sleeve.

“Why were you crying?”

“For a boy who fell from this window.”

“I’ve been looking at that,” he said. “It—it doesn’t go outside, not like the one I came through. There’s another room over there.”

She nodded. “Another boy sleeps in that room now.”

“Then this boy couldn’t have fallen—” He did not want to contradict her, and realized he already had. “Or at least,” he finished weakly, “that’s how it seems to me.”

She rose. “You don’t know this house. Come. I think you should go back.” She opened the door and took his hand.

The corridor seemed warmer, though it was not until he felt its warmth that he knew he had been cold. With a key she took from her sleeve, she opened the protesting door of a storeroom that was practically empty. Daylight stole faintly through the slanted roof overhead.

“Is this your house?” he asked her.

“Not yet.”

A ladder led to the floor below. She went down it first, without hesitation, and as far as he could see, without effort. He felt tired by the time he reached the bottom.

The corridor was wider here, the ceiling higher, the walls prickly with nails and pegs. “This was a fine house once,” Enan said.

“Don’t let him hear you.” The pale maiden favored him with a sad smile. “He thinks it a fine house still.”

“Who does?” he asked, but she did not reply. An open door revealed a wide room holding half a dozen cots. Beyond another, a gray-haired man sat writing at a desk; he did not look up as they passed. A second corridor was less spacious, the stair at its termination nearly as steep as the ladder. “This isn’t the best part,” the maiden told him.

He nodded.

“Go up. I’ll follow you.”

There was an open door at the top of the steep stair. In the little room beyond, a white-haired woman bent over something shapeless. The small room was his own; his clothing hung there. “Lie down,” the maiden whispered. “Hurry!”

He did, and the woman shook his shoulder. “Yes?” he said. “What is it?”

“Thanks be!” She laid a plump, red hand over her heart. “I thought—never mind. We ought to have somebody to sit with you, truly we ought.”

Enan wanted to suggest the maiden, but she had gone. He sat up.

“How’re you feeling?”

“Weak.”

“No wonder, when you won’t eat.” She laid a tray on his lap. “That’s good stew. I made it myself, and the boys loved it. I’ve saved the bottom of the kettle for you—that’s where the best meat goes. Can you hold the spoon?”

He could. The stew was delicious.

“That’s it. You shouldn’t give an old lady such a fright.”

“Where is this?” Enan asked. “This house?”

“Corner of Gate and Prescott. That’s what I always tell people—what the headmaster tells when he writes them, too.”

Enan’s spoon rattled against the side of the bowl. “Is this the New Lake School?”

“Course it is. Eat your stew.”

To mollify her, he took another bite.

“They found his letter in your pocket—them that saved you did. So naturally they brought you here.”

Enan’s heart pounded as though his ribs were the bars of a prison. “Is the post filled?”

“You,” the white-haired woman told him, “aren’t going to be filling any post, young fellow, not for a while. First, you’re going to get better. Then you’re going home to your poor mother, that’s worried to death about you. We get a letter from her in every mail.”

“Mrs.—Are you Mrs. Seely?”

The white-haired woman laughed. “Wish I was that young and pretty again, dear. I’m Mrs. Boyle.”

“Mrs. Boyle, is the post filled? I really must know.”

“Yes, it is, and don’t you bother your head about that any more. You drink your tea.”

Hours passed before his next visitor arrived; and though Enan was awake, they flew swiftly in utter idleness. Temporis ars medicina fere est.

This second visitor was a boy of twelve or thirteen, who peeped around the door with wondering eyes. “Hello,” Enan said.

“Hello.”

“Come in, if you want. What’s your name?”

“Wade.”

“Do you go to school here, Wade? To the New Lake School?” He might, Enan thought, have punned upon the name of the school and that of the boy; but it did not seem worth the effort, and was probably inadvisable.

The boy nodded. “I’m finished—my last class. I came up to put my books away.”

“May I see them?”

They seemed very heavy; Enan nearly dropped them. “Do you like any of these?”

The boy hesitated and fidgeted, struggling almost openly with the cultural demand that he express nothing but contempt for learning. Eventually, he triumphed. “That one, sir.”

It was A Modern Geography of North America.

“Because it has colored maps?”

“Yes, sir. Where people used to live, the islands and all that stuff.”

Enan quoted, “‘My boyhood saw Greek islands floating over Harvard Square.’”

“Yes, sir. I guess so. And this one.”

English Composition. “They’ve got you reading Hemingway of course. And—let’s see—Kipling, Parker, Thurber, Crowley … no modern writers. My, my, W. H. Hudson. Do you like him?”

“Yes, sir. But there’s only this one little bit.”

Enan let the book fall to his quilt. “You have a library, don’t you, Wade? Here at the school? Perhaps you could find more.”

Bitterly the boy said, “He always says they haven’t got it.”

“I see.”

“I just came to leave off my books, sir. They said for me to help you if you called or get somebody, so I thought it would be all right for me to look in.”

“It was,” Enan told him. “It was very kind of you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I do call, Wade. I need your help now.” As decisively as he could, Enan pushed aside quilt and sheet. “I don’t think I’m going to be very steady, Wade. Would you bring my shirt? There it is.”

The little room whirled when he stood, but with the boy’s help he stood again, and this time it was steadier.

“These are steep steps, sir. You better let me go down first.”

“If I fall, I’ll knock you down them.”

“I won’t let you fall, sir.”

“Are there more stairs?” Enan asked when they reached the bottom. “Where is the library? What kind of house is this?” A streak of naked wood down the middle of the corridor betrayed a vanished carpet.

“Two more flights, sir. It’s across the street.”

“I’ll be all right,” Enan told him, “I’m feeling stronger.”

“It’s Headmaster Seely’s house, sir. The town boys go home after class, but the rest of us board with him.”

Enan nodded to show he understood. The second flight was wider than the first, and less steep; he clung to the banister while the boy braced his free arm.

“The teachers board here too, except for Master Burke—he’s married. And we rent rooms to travelers, too. It helps pay for the school.”

“But is the school worth paying for, Wade? Do you learn?”

Clearly the boy had not thought about that; he did so now, although he sighed with relief when they reached the foot of the stair safely. “It’s supposed to be the best on this side of the river, sir. My folks sent me here, and it takes all day to get here from Gilman.”

“That merely indicates it enjoys a good reputation,” Enan explained patiently. “Do you consider it deserves it? Do you study rhetoric? What is personification?”

“Yes, sir. It’s when you pretend something’s a real person. Like, ‘Nature will have her due.’”

“But isn’t there a Nature, really? A blond lady who plans for the animals and so on?”

“No, sir. They have to do that themselves.”

“Very good.” Enan smiled. “Euphemism?”

“It’s when Master Snyder says that Headmaster Seely’s sick, sir.”

“And he isn’t?” Here large bedchambers had been combined to make apartments; a ramp sought to smooth a change in levels. “These used to be separate houses, didn’t they, Wade?”

“Yes, sir. No, sir. You’re sick—he’s drunk. They grew together, like, because you couldn’t build new houses inside the walls. But most of the people left when they had the siege.”

“Classics? Who were the Eumenides? Euphemism’s named for them.”

The boy’s face fell. “I don’t know, sir.”

“They were spirits of revenge, Wade. You see, the Greeks feared them so much that they called them the ‘Gracious Ones,’ which is what Eumenides means. Ancient pictures show them with wings and claws, and snakes in their hair.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. Most people say the classics are a waste of time and effort, Wade; but once you know even a little, you find it illuminates a hundred other matters, making them both clearer and much more interesting. What’s the largest city on the Great Lake?”

“West Chicago, sir.”

“Excellent. The Pythagorean Theorem?”

“‘The sum of the areas of squares constructed on the sides of a right triangle will be found equal to the area of a square constructed on the hypotenuse.’ We had to make a diagram that proved it.”

“Proved it or illustrated it?”

“Illustrated it, sir.”

“Very good. But you don’t know who Pythagoras was, do you? Do you know anything about his other discoveries?”

“No, sir.”

They had come to the final stair, broad enough for a coach. “You don’t have to hold my arm here, Wade. Some of them are quite interesting; that concordant musical intervals correspond to numerical ratios, for example … .”

A maidservant in a long black dress with a white collar was lighting lamps on the floor below.

“You should have a coat, sir.”

“But I have none, and so must do without.”

The street was twilit, its ancient lamps darkened or half destroyed, one lying (as it had for many years) parallel to the cracked walk, where it had gathered a trifling soil; the grasses and weeds that had sprouted from this had perished in the first frost, and lay limply beside their corroded parent pole, so many slaughtered children.

When its heavy doors had shut behind them, the school felt colder than the wind-sad street, perhaps simply because they had hurried across it, shoulders hunched, hugging themselves against its freezing sob. Here, in the two-hundred-year-old school, the atmosphere hung motionless, ripe with dust and chalk; their feet upon the naked planks evoked a cacophonous music of squeakings, squeals, and moans, as though they had brought in their train a goblin orchestra.

“Is the library on the first floor, Wade?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s well, I think.”

The door was locked. Enan rapped on it, and when there was no response, pounded.

“Maybe he’s gone, sir. There aren’t any more classes.”

“He is inside, smoking a cigarette.” Enan thumped the door once more. It was opened by a man half a head taller than he, his senior by perhaps a decade; untidy heaps of disordered books formed a backdrop. The librarian said nothing, glaring at Enan and staring at the boy.

“Green Mansions,” Enan told him. At this critical juncture his mind refused the name of the author. “Do you have it? Wade needs it.”

The librarian withdrew, and attempted to slam the door, an attempt that would have succeeded had it not been for Enan’s foot. “Let us in! I’ll look for it myself.”

This provoked only a muttered curse.

Enan thrust an arm through the narrow opening. “That is my library, and you know it!” He threw his weight against the door.

“Don’t, sir!”

“Before I fell sick—” Enan gasped for breath, “—I was no weakling.” It was a lie, but one the moment demanded.

The door flew back, taking Enan with it. He had just time enough to see the librarian’s clenched fist before it crashed into his face. He staggered, collided with a stack of books, and sent them flying as he fell.

Strangely, the librarian’s blows did not hurt, though each rocked his face like a boat. If he had known that fighting was thus painless, Enan reflected, he would have been less timid as a child. Pax in bello.

They found him sitting up, two books beside him, trying to stanch the gush of blood from his nose with his shirt.

“Good God,” the gray-haired man said, and knelt beside him.

“I’m all right. A little weak.”

“Tilt your head back,” the boy urged him.

“You’re right. I had forgotten. Are you Headmaster Seely, sir?”

“I’m Snyder, chemistry and biology. This is awful, young man. Intolerable!”

Enan nodded. “I shouldn’t have. But I wanted to find …” The bloodsoaked shirt muffled his voice. “Here’s The Book of a Naturalist, Wade. It’s Hudson’s, too. And one that I chose for you myself, Hawthorne’s Wonder Book. Take them, will you? I don’t want to get them dirty.”

The boy opened the latter at random. The bright old plate showed Bellerophon astride winged Pegasus, diving from the sky at the Chimera. Seeing the boy’s eyes at that moment, Enan knew he had won, and that whatever might come afterward did not matter. Nos exaequat victoria caelo.

Headmaster Seely was burly, red-faced, and bald. He entered Enan’s room somewhat diffidently, bringing with him the faint, heady aroma of corn whiskey. “Well, Enan, what did the doctor have to say?”

Enan, who could recollect no doctor and was innocent of the identity of his caller, replied, “He said I was making progress, sir.” It seemed safe.

“And said the same to me. Indeed, indeed. Enan, I want to show you a letter I’ve written. Master Snyder speaks highly of you, by the way. I won’t mail it unless you approve.”

It was thus that Enan ascertained his visitor’s identity, for he recognized the hand long before reaching the signature.

“You must compose yourself, my boy. Do you have a chill?”

“Yes, sir,” Enan said humbly, returning the paper. “It will pass off. Mail that, please, sir. Today.”

Headmaster Seely nodded. “I will.”

“And—and accept my thanks. My very sincere thanks.”

“Think nothing of it, my boy. Had my letter reached you in time … Well, no use in that. I’ll tell Mrs. Boyle to bring you another blanket.”

Enan woke to find it had been spread across his face. The air for which he gasped was hot and stale, his thin pillow damp with sweat. He pushed the blanket aside and sat up. The room was dark and refreshingly cool. Someone wept there, the sound a tiny whimpering; he heard a tear plash on the floor like one single drop of rain. “It’s you, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Yes, it is I.”

“And you’re Headmaster Seely’s wife, the bride to whom he referred in his letter.”

“Yes. I am his bride.”

“You thought me dead,” Enan said. “It was very good of you, wonderful of you, to mourn for me. But you don’t have to sit there in the dark. Isn’t there a candle, or a lamp?”

“I have my own.”

Later Enan decided that it must have been on the floor, with the flame turned down so far that it had been practically invisible. Now it was in her hand, a small oil lamp with a metal base. He gasped at her beauty.

“Do you wish to walk with me?”

“Very much,” Enan said. “That is, if you want me to. I mean, if you’re going out, you shouldn’t go alone. I’ve been told that this is a dangerous town.”

“It isn’t dangerous for me.”

“Perhaps I had better take this blanket. I don’t have a coat.”

She did not reply. He pulled the blanket from the bed, folded it, and laid it across his shoulder.

The walls of the house were transparent to the light of her lamp. It was not that they had in any sense vanished; they were there, and Enan knew he could not walk through them. Yet he saw the sleeping boys; the weary man (small and thin, with graying, thinning hair) who sat before his window staring at the slender crescent moon; Headmaster Seely with his bottle and glass, his candle and his old-fashioned revolver; the empty rooms; and the rooms that were not empty though no living man or woman or child slept or woke in them.

“This is the house of four faces,” Seely’s bride told Enan, “but we must go outside for me to show them to you.”

The first and eldest was neoclassical. “This is a house for gods,” she said, “though the gods will never dwell in such houses again. Men live in such a house like rats in a house of men; yet it is possible to live there, and even to be happy for a time.”

“I understand.” Enan unfolded the blanket and put it over his head like a shawl and about his shoulders like a cloak.

Slowly, hand-in-hand, she bearing her lamp in her free hand while he clutched the blanket close with his, they walked along Water Street.

“If it will not sadden you too much, could you point out the window from which that poor boy fell to his death? I’d …”

“Yes?” A half smile played about her lips.

“I’d like to know where we were when we first met. That’s all.”

“It is within the structure now,” she told him.

“Oh, yes. I’d forgotten.”

“But I will show it to you, if you will look closely. We have a moment still.” She raised her lamp, and he saw it—faint yet distinct, outlined in flaking green paint. Even now a boy was climbing across the sill.

“It was many years before he died, though he was horribly injured. That was why I wept, Enan.”

“I see.”

“You must turn quickly. There is a cutthroat behind you. He raises his knife as I speak.”

Enan whirled. The knife rang, falling to the old, cracked walk; the cutthroat fled.

“He is a coward, as you saw. He could not meet you face-to-face, though he tries so hard to win a smile from me.” Stooping, Seely’s bride picked up the knife and handed it to Enan. “This side is Tudor, as I was on the point of telling you. Do you see the window high up that shows a faint, blue light? That is the window of your room.”

“What is the light?” he asked her.

“My lamp. Prescott is the next street. It was named for a man long dead, an historian.”

“I remember.” Enan nodded. “I’ve read his History of the Conquest of Mexico.”

“So had those who renamed this street, at the height of the siege. This face is neo-Victorian, as is your world. If you look closely, you can see the bullet holes.”

Enan did not see them. “Some of the windows are broken.”

“This part of the house is abandoned, save for a few rooms. Can you guess what the fourth face is, Enan? On Gate Street?”

“I shouldn’t have to guess. I crossed Gate Street to reach the school.”

“Yes.”

“But I can’t remember—I never looked back. Modern?”

“Contemporary.”

Gate Street was narrower than the rest, and darker because of it; yet Enan, looking along it, could make out the wall, the gate itself (open now), and the moonlit marsh beyond.

“The Mexican soldiers rushed down this street when the town fell. Your people fired upon them from this house and from the school, and from other structures along this street; and though many fell, they killed many. Some had only kitchen knives taped to broomsticks. Poisoned winds drove them into the streets, and there they died.”

Enan coughed. His right arm stung, and he rubbed it with his left.

“When the Mexicans retreated south of the Ohio, the gates were rebuilt; but they stand open, as you see. Does it give you pleasure, knowing that your nation is so secure?”

He shook his head.

“The children beg that they be shut at night, saying that evil things enter the town by night, but it isn’t done.”

“Are the children right?” he asked.

“Sometimes.”

“He’s gone, that librarian,” Mrs. Boyle told Enan. “Did you know?”

“I’m going down to the library today.”

“No, you’re not,” she said positively. “You’re not well enough yet.”

But when she herself had left, he wrapped his blanket about his shoulders as he had when he had toured the four faces of the house; and he carried with him, with a sickly reverence, a dog-eared and water-stained Moralia—his contribution to the library that was to be his. Should Headmaster Seely resist the class he would propose, he could point out truthfully that their library already possessed one work in Latin at least. Nullum est librum tam malum ut non ex aliqua parte prodesset.

Some exploration proved necessary before he discovered the broad and kindly stair which he had descended with Wade, for he found that he did not recall the way as well as he had supposed; but he reached the head of it at last, and was about to descend when he glimpsed a young woman in a green silk dress in the act of surrendering her furs to the maid.

The young woman glimpsed him as well, and gave a little shriek.

Enan stumbled backward, covering his face with the blanket.

That evening the boy brought a razor borrowed from Master Snyder, a scrap of soap, and a basin of warm water begged from the cook. He laid a towel across the pillow. “I’ve done this before,” he told Enan. “You don’t have to worry.”

“I wasn’t,” Enan said. “Who was it you shaved?”

“My grandfather, after he got so sick. His secretary used to, but then he thought he’d stolen something and sent him away. I don’t think he did. He was old, like my grandfather, and you could see how he felt about it.”

Enan nodded, getting soapsuds on his nose. “Omnia fert aetas, animum quoque.” Seeing the boy’s incomprehension, he murmured, “All is borne away by age, even the mind.”

“Yes, sir. He passed away in the fall, the day the pond froze, but I used to shave him twice a week until then. I was the only one he would let come near him with a razor.”

It passed gently down Enan’s left cheek, and the boy held it before his eyes to display the collection of curling hairs. “What was it like when you were dead, sir?”

Enan sighed. “Was I dead, Wade?”

“That’s what everybody says, sir. What was it like?”

“Chill, while I was still in my body. I remember thinking that I lay in my grave while my mother wept over me. Burning hot, when I was no longer there. Hell was a labyrinth like the Minotaur’s. I had no clew to guide me, but I stumbled down the winding corridors until I met Ariadne. She returned me to this life, I suppose.”

The boy wiped the razor and began Enan’s left cheek. “You were damned, sir?”

“I imagine so. They didn’t tell me why, but then I suppose they don’t have to. Was I dead for long, Wade?”

“Nobody knows. Mrs. Boyle came with another blanket, and you were dead. They sent for the doctor—that’s what you have to do here—and he gave you injections. That’s what I heard.” The razor slipped. “Oh, I’m sorry, sir!”

“Did you cut me? I don’t feel it.” Enan touched his cheek and stared at his crimson fingers.

“Wait just a minute, sir. A piece of tissue will stop the bleeding.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Enan told him; he was thinking of his walk, the cutthroat, and many other things.

“I don’t want to get blood on the towel, sir.”

When he was through, the boy took the old, spotted mirror from the washstand and held it so that Enan could see himself. “You won’t frighten Mrs. Seely again, sir.”

Enan rolled his head from side to side. “That wasn’t Mrs. Seely, Wade.”

“Yes, it was, sir.”

The school library, when Enan reached it at last, he found to have attained that final stage of disorder in which apparent patterns are purely illusory. Now and again some volume might be discovered keeping company with one upon a similar subject; in the same way, a storm may wash ashore, at times, two objects of like color or size, but follow them with half the wreck of a schooner, or a tangled mat of kelp. The catalogue was useless, inaccurate and out of date, prepared some years before (as Enan surmised), when the impossibility of repairing the computer was finally accepted, solely to impress Headmaster Seely. He threw it out and began anew, starting with the Moralia and sifting the worn volumes with patient delight. It was nearly a week before his fever returned.

Though she was often away, Mrs. Seely—the boy’s Mrs. Seely—visited him at times, seating herself demurely in his rickety chair and watching him from the corners of her sly green eyes as she talked of clothes or gain. “As I’ve told George,” she said, “he ought to move this whole school east of the mountains. The profit from the very first term would cover the relocation. You wouldn’t mind packing all these up?” A heavy, sweet perfume and the smooth and almost greasy pallor of her decolletage made her seem a slightly stale confection. “Are any valuable?”

The only gem Enan had unearthed was Augustine’s Confessions, brass-fitted and bound in decaying calf, with Latin and English on facing pages—the spoil of some pillaged seminary. He hid it after Modesty’s first visit.

The difficulties he had anticipated in connection with his class vanished like smoke, as anticipated difficulties so often do. Headmaster Seely was only too happy to add another subject to the list he sent the parents of prospective students, and the boys took fire from Enan’s own enthusiasm. When the maiden in black joined the class, as she often did, he was sorely tempted to ask why she had called herself the headmaster’s bride—though any such question was surely better asked in private, and indeed it might be impolite to ask it at all. No doubt she had feared his importunities.

“When the ancient world was destroyed,” Enan said, “those who sought to regain its knowledge studied Latin and Greek in order that they might read such books as had survived. Notitia linguarum est prima porta sapientiae—the knowledge of tongues is the chief door to wisdom. Like them, we seek to learn from the books of a previous age, but they are in our own tongue, for the most part. Why study Latin, then?” He pointed to a fat boy whose grades in other classes indicated he might be far brighter than he appeared.

“If we’re ever to rise again,” the fat boy said slowly, “it would be good to understand how they did; if we’re going to fall further—and that’s what I believe myself, Master Bambrick—it will probably be because of all the things we don’t understand.”

She was among the class, though he had not seen her enter. Softly she said, “Tonight.” He turned to the board so that the boys could not watch his face, writing Doctrina sed vim promovet insitam; and when he turned back she was gone.

That evening he carried the day’s discovery up to his room. The pages of Ruskin’s Queen of the Air had darkened to sepia and cracked, many were torn and some were gone altogether; yet what he read so enchanted him that he resolved to make a fair copy at the earliest opportunity. Headmaster Seely had been generous in the provision of paper; those sheets, Enan thought, might make a little book. Folded once and sewn with silk thread, they might bear Ruskin’s words down another four centuries, just as Ruskin himself had borne Homer’s.

“ … and she gave him strength in his shoulders, and in his limbs, and she gave him the courage”—of what animal, do you suppose? Had it been Neptune or Mars, they would have given him the courage of a bull or a lion; but Athena gives him the courage of the most fearless in attack of all creatures, small or great, and very small it is, but wholly incapable of terror,—she gives him the courage of a fly.

He woke cold, in a dark room. The candle had guttered to the socket, and she had not come—or if she had, had left again, having found him asleep in his chair. He rose, and discovered with some surprise that he was so weak he could hardly stand. The candles rattled in their drawer before he could extract a fresh one, and the hand that grasped the match trembled so much that he was forced to brace it with his left to light the wick.

Someone had thrust something white beneath his door. His first thought was that the maiden had left a note for him, but it was only a stamped letter, postmarked at the southerly town of Gilman the week before. When he unfolded the sheet it held, he discovered to his infinite astonishment several bills of no mean denomination.

Enan smoothed the bills, marveled at the numbers in their corners for a minute or more, and after some thought pinned them inside his shirt, which he decided was fit for a third wearing in the morning.

This accomplished, he draped the shirt carefully over the back of his chair, positioned the chair close to the head of his bed, heaped the rest of his clothes on the chair seat, read Mrs. James’ letter a second time, and a third, and retired. Lying in the dark with his hands behind his head, he told himself that he had almost certainly misunderstood. She had not said tonight, but tomorrow, or perhaps Tuesday—although it might be that she was delayed. No matter how beautiful she was, or how good, she was still, like every other woman and every man, at the mercy of Fate. What was it Apollo had confided to King Croesus? “Even the gods … Not even the gods … .”

She woke him with kisses. “May I lie here beside you? How warm you are!” Her hand was a benediction. “Paul Snyder swears you can’t infect me.”

Enan had kissed a woman, had held her hand and embraced her—had done those things three times precisely beneath the ancient apple that stood at the center of the common. He responded as a boy, half afraid, half asleep, and wholly unbelieving. When she left him at last, she left him frightened and unbelieving still. As if in a trance he heard the scratching of the match, and shut his eyes against the flare of light and the steadier radiance of the candle.

“Do you mind? I can’t very well get dressed in the dark. Besides, I thought you might want to see me.”

Rolling his head on the pillow, he looked. Looked, and saw Modesty Seely wiping herself with one of his handkerchiefs. She posed for him briefly, standing on tiptoes to appear taller, her arms above her head to lift her breasts. “Aren’t I beautiful?”

He managed to nod.

“I want to tell George.” She smiled. “Let him know where I’ve been. I want to see his face.”

A shadow dashed from the room.

“Can you fasten this for me, Enan? There’s a little catch at the back.”

When she had gone, he sat for a time on the bed, his bare feet flat upon the freezing floor. At length he stood, washed as well as he could in water from the ewer, and began to dress. The money was still pinned to his shirt; he noted it without interest, as he noted the burnt matchstick on the floor. The first shot came as he was tying his shoes.

For a moment he remained just as he was, the shoelaces in his hands, listening to the echoes and the sounds of running feet. He completed the bow and pulled it tight. Somewhere, on a floor below him, someone was pounding on a door. The second shot came as he stood.

He picked up the candle and looked about the little room. Was there anything here he wanted? He remembered the coat he had worn as far as Bradford and lost when the ice gave way beneath him. It would be nice, he thought, if that coat were returned to him now. But it was not there.

An odd sound had replaced the shouts and the running feet; he thought of some great animal, a fighting bull or a buffalo, rushing through a thicket of thin and very brittle twigs. There was a smell of smoke. He stuffed three letters from his mother in one pocket, The Queen of the Air in another.

He opened the door upon a darkling landscape. Sullen fires smoldered far off, and a dead man in bronze armor lay almost at his feet. Dark bowmen on lean and eager horses wheeled like the falcon; one loosed an arrow, missing his head by a scant inch.

“The dead have need of you, Enan.”

It was the maiden. “You came!” he said.

“This is their darkest hour. Today ten legions fell at Cannae. Varro escaped to Venusia with seventy horsemen, and those seventy constitute the Army of Rome tonight.”

He nodded, resigned yet frightened still. “Marcus Junius Pera will raise a new army. No one can say how.”

The maiden smiled, and it was the smile of one who knows a secret. “Some scholars have called that an army of freed slaves and boys.”

They had begun to walk over the battlefield. Enan said, “Boys and freed slaves could never defeat Hannibal. Pera will require every man. Take me to him.” A gust of smoke made him sneeze. He stepped across a shabbily clothed corpse, and only when it was behind him realized that it had been his own.

Placidaque ibi demum morte quievit. “At last he found rest in peaceful death.” For we are ever most at peace where we are most sorely needed.