The man’s face burned, glowed as though illuminated by a shaft of sunlight falling from a high cathedral window. But the man was no gentleman, unanimated, serene. His face showed violent emotion. Marc fought to turn away from the shining brilliance, but he could neither move nor run. The old strangling dread began to tighten his throat –
The man stared at him, accusing. His black eyes shone nearly bright as the sun’s ray reflected on a mirror. Behind him was darkness, nothing but darkness. It intensified the frightening radiance of his face and emphasised the whiteness of his teeth. Like most men of his years – he was less than forty; Marc knew every dreadful detail – by some inherited curse, his teeth had gaps and brown rot.
Marc struggled to hide from the face and could not even avert his head. The dread quickened. He heard his own strident breathing. It grew louder because he knew he would speak to him –
And he did, the words frightening as always, frightening because he could never be certain whether he spoke from a grudge or rage.
“Don’t try to run. I told you – don’t. You will listen.”
Run. God, as if he could! He was held in that vast darkness where the man’s face burned so fiercely; and his eyes –
Like coals on the hearth of a winter midnight, his eyes were fire, hypnotic. But they held no warmth. Marc was all cold sweat, terror, crippled immobility –
Stabbing out, disembodied white things, white claws, his hands reached at Marc. Closed on his upper arms. He took him, shaken him with the ferocity of his rage.
Trying to deny him, negate him, Marc was able at last to turn his head from side to side. The effort required all his strength. But he would not release him. His face floated closer, wrenching into the ugliness that brought the old, silent scream climbing into his throat.
Marc tried to speak but his voice remained somehow clogged. Nothing but a feeble hiss of air came out between his gritted teeth.
He shook him harder, then harder still, as a wind from the limitless dark tossed his dark long hair. The wind added its keen to the rising shrillness of his voice; its blowing and buffeting seemed to simmer the burning image of his face like a candle-flame in a gale –
At last, Marc brought forth sound: a howling, animal cry of fear and pain –
The wind-roar broke off like an interrupted thunderclap. He tore himself away from the clutching hands, fled through the darkness. Away from the white claws. The face. The eyes –
But the darkness to which he fled was without substance. His legs churned on emptiness, as he fell, and fell, and fell . . .
This time the sound from his throat was a scream for mercy. Suddenly, sputtering, he woke up from the dream. A terrible dream that drove him back through time. Decades. Back to October 29, 1929, in Wall Street.
The MacDonalds and their equivalents were fraught. Countrywide, retrenchment and halving of staff were words in the air. Marc was aware of them, so conscious that he wouldn’t risk losing his own job. When he was offered the Coburns’ case, he wasn’t hesitant about seeing to it as almost immediately as he could and told his supervisor he could handle it, alone. After all, he had a wife – an expectant woman, with the demands of a baby soon to be born.
Thursday, October 24, Wall Street started crumbling. Tuesday, October 29, life came to a screeching halt, business going bust, more buildings going empty than one could care to count. None the less, blog busters, one or two, still remained; like some robust millionaire, Marc’s supervisor’s boss. He shouldered the blame and purchased these empty structures, and on that day for only a few shillings. And there came Marc’s position, to go inspect them: remove any valuables – once a butcher’s pit full of fresh hanging stacks of meat, or a dealer in furs who got kicked out and forced to abandon his entire stock behind – and to make it a point that none of the human beasts recently declared homeless found it a useful hive.
An easy job! Only on paper. Walking door to door, he’d see forgotten personal properties or had to scatter an old woman with a crew of dirty children, whose scurry faces, more horrible than a grimace of a losing Cincinnati Red, were pleading for compassion. But it was a job and that was all it meant to keep it.
When Marc awoke from his dream, sweating, sweating and – after a moment’s realisation that it was over – enraged. The dream came to him from time to time. He should be used to it. But he wasn’t. Always, the dream brought uncountable terror. In those first muzzy moments, his anger turned to shame. He rubbed his eyes to rid himself of sleepiness. The roughness of his knuckles against his eyelids was a reassurance.
His body was slick with sweat. Yet at the same time, he was cold in the garret room above the inn. He knuckled his eyes harder. A little more of his drowsiness sloughed away. And more of the fear. He tried to laugh but made only a rough croaking sound.
October 29, 10:00 am, Marc’s supervisor’s boss relayed the Coburns case as a matter of urgency. The place was spacious, abandoned with a bushy exterior. The boss needed the city saved, structures demolished, and new apartments erected before the end of 1929, before the economy could steal a chance to stabilise. Low-cost housing was the day’s demand, and he, so egoistic like an old baboon in possession of a scorpion, wanted to embrace what he could within the Depression. It was the tenth month already, and the promise to complete an apartment before the year’s end was slim. But Marc would do his part and leave the rest for others.
11:00 am, Marc approached the Coburns place. The streets – decorated by the unemployed, who looked worse than urchins – were very scurry. Heavily-bearded men with placards begging, thin women in wobbly skirts pooling scraggy children in bread queues. Townhouses, tall apartment blocks and once famous stores, dwindled into shabbiness. Wall Street was sinking too fast. Its cracked windows looked like the angry claws of a furious leopard, and its dilapidated walls with falling paint and weedy yards were unlovely.
Parking outside Coburns Enterprises, he picked his notebook and shut the car door. An old balding fellow approached from a deserted neighbouring building. He looked lousy in sleeping gowns and had an empty pipe in his mouth. His monotonous voice blubbered as Marc approached the building, “Careful kid, that place is haunted.”
“Pardon?”
“Haunted. A lot of odd sounds. Voices but not voices, guess you know what I mean.’
“Mm. I see.”
“It’s Coburns, I guess. That’s what we all think,” he said, gesturing to the immediate neighbourhood. “Unhappy in life, moaning in death.”
“I see,” Marc said again, beginning to make his way up the path.
The old man followed, the pipe clenched between his teeth, and continued to tell him of the man who had been his neighbour for some twenty or so years. “Came from Berlin in 1882. His father, a successful businessman there, rented out horrid-looking people. So, if you’re only so-so, you hire the ugly and bum. Something like that. So Coburns, the son now, he says, it’s such a hit in Berlin, I will bring it to the good ol’days of America. But I can’t tell, maybe it’s the US attitude or possibly we’re so damn good looking,” he snorted, “it failed. Kind of continued for a couple of years, and then started to fail. Coburns sold his house, dismissed his wife, relocated here and occupied himself with some work, working to try and make the business a success, even after his last client left fifteen years after the business began. Been doing that till his death maybe three, four months ago.”
Standing in front of the offices, they looked at the front door standing ajar, its handle missing. All the windows on the ground floor were broken and the glasses crunched beneath their feet.
“I’m afraid I can’t invite you in,” Marc said.
“Well, you go on then. Don’t let me keep you,” the old man said, taking back to the narrow path. “I don’t intend to go in any way. Anything precious has been smuggled out already.”
The door soaked with damp and was swollen in place, and Marc squeezed through the porch the looters had left him. In the hallway, several pigeons fluttered at his appearance, before settling on the light fittings. The carpet looked less like one, covered in their droppings and feathers, while the wallpaper was peeling, and the portraits were crooked or littered the floor.
Besides that, the building seemed good enough. He followed a flight of steps up to six small offices upstairs. Turning the knob of one of them, he was hit on the face by a pile of clothing. He jumped back, dusting his hair and clothes. He smelled musty or worse. It appeared a clothing storeroom. They carelessly hung there, suits and dresses of every colour and fashion, like something horrible hid behind them. He imagined snakes or worse. Against a wall, long mirrors caught his reflection, so blemished that his body came reeling back at him, distorted all at once. For a moment he couldn’t help thinking it was an intruder. On a row of shabby shelves, fluffy wigs sat on nasty-looking wooden heads, their curls disentangled and shadowy with dust. An open window moved, making a swig sound. He was startled. He looked around to make sure he was safe, but the wind continued its turbulent hymn that he felt uncomfortable. He walked into another room. A metallic container, once a safe, ripped off from the wall, lay open and lonely on the floor. Doubtless, it was chock full with jewellery at one point in time, but now it was empty and useless, buttered on every visible side, its mouth opened wider than the scream of a roaring lion.
Deciding to do the inspection faster, he ran down stairs to four spacious downstairs offices. It was very quiet here. So quiet it terrified him. In one bottom office several drawers of a filing cabinet lay ajar, papers and photos filthy on the carpet. Unappealing faces on the photographs jumped up at Marc, like revolting little demons. They looked uglier than most countryside girls: rough, sunburnt, with coarse hair and narrow eyes like were imported from Arizona, the desert. Farm-working women uncomfortable in rusty clothes, and portrayed that discomfort even in their general demeanour. Picking one paper after another, sometimes kicking, he discovered, too, a section of a list dated 1910: Miss Eleanor Marks had hired Ida four nights running before switching to Sarah for six. Mr Malcolm Bulls had hired Der… A swig of wind swept the paper off his hand, and he jumped with a groan. His knees collected cold, and he imagined things worse than words can describe, only God knows what. He left the room for another and discovered what must have been Coburns’ bedroom. It was sparsely furnished with a slim cot, a flat pillow, a blanket, and on the floor beside the cot, was a pile of notebooks, the writing all in German, of which none made sense to him.
He walked up the steps to his entry point. He decided that all the rooms had nothing of interest or value. He wanted to leave the place, but according to the site visit plans, he had one last room to check – a basement with its door accessed only from the outside. He walked out through the front door again. Now outside, he felt comfortable. Walking around the building and down into a narrow alley where six steps led him down to a door, he met a heavy gauge crossbar, and there were two more like ones, each with a heavy lock of its own.
He went back to the car for his bolt-cutters and struggled to crack open the thick metal. Finally, it receded. He dragged the heavy door wide open. Thick reek hit his nostrils. He smelled something worse than the bad stink of a filthy room, and he thought something was off-beam. The pong defied analysis, and he had to filter the air through his jacket to breathe. It was a long narrow room, becoming darker and darker going in. His jacket pressed tightly against his nose, he walked several metres into the dark, his flashlight scanning across the area.
It took him moments of inspection before he understood what he was seeing. Weak and very thin anomalous lengths of indefinable creatures made very feeble crawls. He went reeling back, falling at least three times before reaching the door. He shut the door hastily, pulling the crossbars too, and all this while gagging at the heavy stink that had glued itself to his clothes, body, nose, mouth and insides. His stomach peeved, he emptied all its contents. And finally, he screamed.
More times than he cared to count, he refused to go in there again, though the municipality and the police carried him back there many times with their endless questioning.
“Describe what you saw?” “Come again, what did you see down there?” “Any idea what it was?”
But his answer could not change. “I’ve told you. I don’t know. Weird things more creepy than the most perverted creature in the universe.”
But they wouldn’t let him go. For several days and nights, he was interrogated, detained and fed little food. Much worse he couldn’t close his eyes. His sleep interrupted by crazy wild dreams that made him scream. Finally, twenty-one days down the line he was asked to sign a vow of silence. Never to mention it or he’d lose his life. But he couldn’t help asking the man, rather stout with a thick moustache, who made him sign. “What was it?”
“Kid,” the man replied, “this Coburns was – I don’t know how you’d describe it – breeding, I suppose, gruesome people. Creepy. That’s what we’ve learnt from his books and creatures we found in his basement.”
As the police officer spoke, Marc tried to understand what he had seen, what Coburns had entertained himself with all those years alone. He tried to imagine it – the breeding of horrid couples, their copulation controlled and limited until they laid down with their own young ones, until they became all sorts of relatives in the planet while living under one roof, and copulating each other like animals. And all the while their mental processes grew bleak, reasoning diminished, and inexplicable deformities appeared. The outcome most creepy than the most horrible cartoon: wide, thick lips hanging in front of toothless gums, new-borns devoid of ears or eyeballs, without feet or forearms or had seven or nine limbs. In the dark and diet inadequacy, their bones fused or brittled, their backs curved, goitres growing large to the size of a buffalo hump on their throats. Walking became an unattainable dream, crab-like crawling motion made them creepier that the human body shook in disgust. Coburn fed his pets until his death. And after that, the weaker ones become the source of food until the last one would file down across the basement floor.
“They are no longer human beings. Just take that,” the officer told him as he left the detention room.
Marc did not go by there again. Not till more than a year later when he had to inspect a nearby building. By then the Coburns place was gone and the tenement building had been erected. From its windows stared out the poor inhabitants, victims of the Depression, their faces grown unsightly with need.
No word of Coburns’ scheme was breathed to the public, and Marc kept his oath and has never related what he saw. Not until he needed freedom, on his deathbed, trying to break free from the haunting of the past and the internal furnaces of secrets inside him. The dream broke the silence. He told the story to me, his grandson. And I did not sign an oath of silence.
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