Sporeville

By Paul Marlowe

...There were more people in the streets, all of them moving toward the lighthouse. Each walked alone, neither speaking to the others nor making any signs of recognition. They simply drifted. Slowly, steadily, inexorably...

Elliott Graven was prepared to be bored by his new town, and prepared to be annoyed by it. After all, it was

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sybertooth Inc.
• Release date: Mar 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781927592267

Paul Marlowe

Paul Marlowe's collection Ether Frolics was short-listed for the 16th annual Danuta Gleed Literary Award, an annual $10,000 prize recognizing the best début collection of short fiction by a Canadian author.

Book preview

Prologue

OCTOBER 1885

SHIPS HAD ALWAYS BEEN a trial for Jessica. Some feared being wrecked; she simply loathed the motion, and the seasickness. Though the steamer Nereid was a decent-enough vessel, it tossed and swayed as much as any sailing ship. An afternoon spent sound asleep in her cabin had relieved a little of her nausea, but she still felt like a dose of ’flu. At least it had been a good excuse to avoid the unwanted attentions of the bothersome Mr Strange for a few hours.

Out in the corridor, the gaslights glared too brightly as she plodded along towards the companionway leading up to the deck. A bit of fresh sea air before dinner might be just the thing. She leant on the wall-rail for support, her palm coming away coated in fine, dark dust. Soot, from the funnels? Perhaps someone had left a hatch open and a draught had brought it in. The air here smelt close, stifling. Musty. She put a hand to her stomach. Perhaps tea, instead of dinner.

Her eyes were scratchy from sleep, or the dust, and she stopped on her way up the stairs to rub them. Cold, salty air caught in her throat as she pushed the companionway door open against the gale and stepped out onto the deck, blinking away the wind-tears. She paused there to let her eyes adjust to the near twilight.

Several people were gathered at the stern railings, about thirty feet distant, seeming to admire the view of endless slatey-grey ocean rippling away to the horizon. About to call out a greeting to them — she recognized one man as the steward, Mr Gibson — something stopped her. Something out of place.

Go! shouted one of them in a muffled voice to the third man, the one nearest the rail. It was not just the wind fooling with her eyes. The speaker really was wearing a mask, and clutching a suitcase with a pipe attached.

The third man twisted desperately about, his chest rising and falling in short, shuddering gasps of panic. He locked eyes with Jessica for an instant. She recognized him now. Lieutenant Arkwright. The man who had lost his temper with Mr Strange, just before they stopped in at Boston harbour. The masked man pointed a length of tubing at Arkwright and it blew a stream of what looked like smoke into his face, making Arkwright cough violently.

Go, the masked man ordered again.

Slowly, mechanically, Arkwright climbed over the railing, looking less terrified, more like a sleepwalker, eyes half-lidded. Only now did Jessica begin to grasp what was happening. Arkwright shook in the wind as he hung out from the stern, clinging to the barrier, staring down into the churning waters where the ship’s screws spun.

Stop! cried Jessica.

The three men turned to her, but the one in the mask said something and pointed into the ship’s wake. Arkwright looked past him at Jessica for a long second before he let go of the railing and dropped into the sea.

Jessica took a step forward and started to shout but found she couldn’t. Instead she turned and lurched across the rolling, windswept deck for the ship’s bridge. Someone there would help. The ship’s officers, they would stop this … whatever was happening. This madness. In her horror, she fumbled with the handle of the bridge door, as in a nightmare, unable to get it open. Locked? Through the round window she could see the captain and other officers standing by their stations, and pounded on the door to get their attention.

Help! Please help! A man … a man has fallen overboard! Though they looked at her, the officers made no move to open the door. Each stared with the empty eyes that Arkwright had had just before he … As one, they returned to their work as if she had merely been the wind howling at the door. She beat harder and screamed, but no-one took any further notice. Jessica felt a cold, paralysing despair as she realized they were all like Arkwright, indifferent to everything. Even to their own deaths.

What is happening? she muttered. She was still in her stateroom, surely, asleep. Dreaming. That must be it. And no-one had leapt from the ship. Or was it real, the crew and everyone sleepwalking into disaster? Was the Nereid to be another Mary Celeste? She looked again into the bridge, wondering if the captain would even turn aside if there were rocks ahead.

The man in the mask was approaching, close behind. Dream or not, Jessica dashed to the other companionway leading below decks, falling painfully down half the stairs in her mad rush. No dream-fall hurt so much as that. She scrambled to her feet, continuing to race for her cabin. Again, she fumbled with the handle, clumsy with fear. The masked figure appeared at the top of the stairs, saying something in its low, mumbling voice. Her cabin door opened and once inside she slammed it shut, locked it, and panted, pressing her back against the door.

Footsteps, calm and even, came closer until they stopped behind her.

Ah’m sorry to have to do this, mah dear, the muffled voice said, but it’ll all be over in a few minutes.

Jessica’s eyes ran wildly over the little cabin for an escape, but there was none. Her gaze dropped hopelessly to the floor. Smoky powder was blowing past her shoes, coming in through a crack beneath the door.

Chapter One

PLOTTING A TERRIBLE TRAJECTORY

AUGUST 1886

MORE OUT OF HABIT than from any need to be furtive, Paisley DeLoup slunk down the broad, poorly-lit marble staircase with the silent stealth of a hungry cat. In the downstairs hall, a gaslamp flame was jumping inside its glass globe, painting the hall in twitching pulses of light that brought the walls alive with motion. The gas mantles cast a green, unnatural glow instead of a warm yellow light. When she reached the one outside her father’s study, she tapped it a few times with a finger, failing to fix it. The lamp continued to bubble, pop, and flare like a dragon with indigestion, so she gave up and went on into the study.

It was a large room, dark and lined with bookshelves except where oil paintings hung in gaps in the library, but it seemed almost to burst in the effort to contain the improbably large desk at its centre. Like a ship in a bottle, the desk was never meant to be moveable. Paisley remembered the day, a few years before — she’d been twelve then — when the carpenter had arrived to construct it, in situ. He’d been somewhat sceptical of the plans Paisley’s father had presented. It’ll never leave this room, you understand, not without a saw, the craftsman had warned, before commencing work. The house, and the land around it, had once been a fort, and as she advanced on the desk now Paisley had the feeling that this monumental block of furniture was a kind of fort within a fort, just for her father. His keep.

She peered across the battlements of stacked books to where Mr DeLoup was engrossed with charts and tables of numbers, beside a tall brass oil lamp that gave his face a healthier tone than the sickly gaslights. Instruments were strewn atop the layer of papers, and over them all her father hunched, fiddling with a complicated slide covered in tiny gradations and mathematical symbols. He continued to alternate between scribbling calculations and drawing cannon trajectories without noticing Paisley at all, until she grew tired of waiting.

They’re doing it again, she said, startling Mr DeLoup so much that he snapped the lead in his pencil and dropped the slide rule.

Paisley, said Mr DeLoup, what did you say? Have you finished with those pies? Shouldn’t you all be in bed by now?

The people, down in the town. They’re doing it again.

Mr DeLoup seemed to chew indecisively on several words as he tried to think of how to respond to this ominous news. Before he replied he dug under some papers to find a knife, which he used to sharpen his pencil. I’m sure it’s none of our affair whatever they do down in Spohrville at night, he said vaguely, a quarter of his pencil now rendered into shavings. After all, if it doesn’t disturb us, they have a right to carry on any way they see fit in their own town.

Paisley frowned. Her father was always like this. Fighting old battles in his head and wishing only to be left alone by the world, no matter how bizarre that world became.

Do you know, he said, pointing the stub of pencil at the figures and parabolas on his notes, I don’t think Bonaparte’s army in Italy had the firepower to bombard Venice from the mainland. It was all a bluff.

Paisley took a deep breath. Don’t you think it’s peculiar, Papa, that every night, while we’re perched up here on this ridge, everyone in Spohrville wanders about the streets in the dark. Or rather, she thought, didn’t wander. They all walked with silent, solitary purpose towards the lighthouse in the bay. All except the occasional lost soul … One was heading up this way, up the ridge road.

What?

It’s true.

Mr DeLoup began whittling another pencil, having reduced the first to ruin. How can you see anything in this rain and fog, and — and — mist? he asked, glancing towards the streaming window.

From her bedroom, there was generally a good view of the town below, as her father well knew. Even on a such a night, the mist cleared from time to time, and when the Moon shone through the clouds it was easy to see they were up to something down there.

"I’m sure you’re aware, Papa, that you and I can see peculiarly well at night."

Yes, Mr DeLoup agreed, lowering his voice. Yes. He stopped fiddling at last and set down the knife and pencil. You’ve put your finger on the crux of the matter, my dear. He leant towards her, as if to avoid being overheard. You and I, Paisley, for our own sakes as much as that of your mother and little Alice, should avoid being conspicuous, or drawing attention to ourselves. Whatever those poor people are, as you say, ‘up to’, let us mind our own business so long as they don’t involve us in their … nocturnal perambulations. Please, he added, a little imploringly, don’t upset things. We have a good, quiet life here. Let that be enough.

Paisley grimaced, but nodded. She picked a spyglass up from the desktop and expanded it. May I borrow this? she asked. I only want to watch, she added, when her father’s brow wrinkled.

All right, he said, but nothing more, mind you.

She nodded again and turned to go back upstairs.

And, ah, lock all the doors and windows, would you, Paisley? her father said as she was leaving, attempting to sound casual.

Once she’d thrown the bolts and latches, Paisley made her way quickly up to her bedroom where she shut the door to keep out any distracting light from the hall gas jets. The sill was slick with drizzle that had blown in through the windows, still swung open from when she’d been watching earlier. Paisley wiped away the water with a fistful of curtain before planting her elbows on the sill to steady the spyglass. She aimed it downhill towards the village and the empty house of the now-dead doctor. With a little focusing, the blurry image cleared into a confusing jumble of rooftops, tree branches, and motion. Ignoring the distraction of the lighthouse in the distance, she panned the instrument back and forth to find anyone abroad in the night. In a few seconds a figure bobbed into view. With a shock, she saw it was a woman walking upside down. A moment later Paisley realized it was the telescope that was inverting everything, and felt a little foolish. Before long, though, she got the measure of the device and was able to make some sense of the magnified images. There were more people in the streets, all of them heading for the lighthouse. All walked alone, neither speaking to the others nor making any signs of recognition. They simply walked. Slowly, steadily, inexorably.

Paisley ignored the frisson that ran up her back and began counting people. It wasn’t easy, with the Moon coming and going behind clouds. Wisps of fog closer to earth obscured the town sometimes, and it was hard to tell one person from another at this distance, but one thing was clear enough: it was a rare person who was staying home that night.

Whatever her father had convinced himself of, Paisley didn’t believe that they could remain aloof from Spohrville forever. Unless they simply left, sooner or later events down there would draw them in as well, and Paisley didn’t like what she saw, not one jot. As surely as one of her father’s imaginary cannon shots sailed back to earth, in an arc shaped by the relentless laws of gravity, so would Spohrville bend the DeLoups’ fate around to follow the town’s. She cleaned the mist off the spyglass lens and aimed it for the lighthouse now, since that, or something near it, was where everyone was going. Its bright beam, moving through the haze, reminded Paisley of a verse from the poem she’d been reading earlier.

No rays from the holy heaven come down

On the long night-time of that town;

But light from out the lurid sea

Streams up the turrets silently…

But just as she had the tower in her sights and was waiting for a clear view, from somewhere downstairs a shrill scream rose.

Chapter Two

MEETINGS BY MOONLIGHT

FROM SOMEWHERE beyond the dripping carriage window, a long, low moan came out of the night.

Did you hear that? Elliott asked his father.

Dr Graven was dozing in the twilight. He merely rubbed his face and asked muzzily what Elliott had heard. Elliott shrugged and went back to staring out the window. His eyes — one of them green and the other blue, like his mother’s — occasionally disconcerted people, but tonight they were only bothering Elliott. They felt itchy. From something in the air, Elliott supposed.

The journey to Spohrville had been a long and wearisome one. Three days previously Elliott, his father, and those of their belongings that weren’t travelling separately, had departed for Truro, Nova Scotia — as close as they could get by train — riding the Intercolonial Railway all the way from Kingston, just across the border from up-state New York, on the shore of Lake Ontario. Compared to the luxury of the train carriages, the last leg of the trip by road had been a cramped torture. They’d been jostling along rough tracks for hours in a ceaseless drizzle, and were feeling as if they’d spent the day repeatedly tumbling over Niagara in a barrel. The driver was at best a dullard, and with the dimming rays of evening he’d become that much more confused about where they were and where they were going. It could only be a few more miles to Spohrville, but with no road signs, nor fellow travellers to ask directions of, they were reduced to probing down muddy lanes towards the sea until the right way was found by luck.

As to why they were undertaking the move … His father would only give curt words that said nothing, except that he didn’t wish to discuss it with Elliott. ‘Professional opportunities’. ‘Change of scene’. Elliott had turned fifteen the previous month, in July, and leaving Kingston had meant abandoning not only his home but also his best friend, Thomas, probably forever. His father had enjoyed a good medical practice there, so they weren’t moving for the sake of money. On the contrary, coming to this remote fishing town would likely mean a substantial drop in their income. His father had told him that living by the sea would be good for his lungs, but so far his hay fever had shown no improvement the closer they drew to the Atlantic.

Elliott couldn’t see much through the windows aside from the grey jungle of alder bushes that crowded in on them from both sides of the road, the branches occasionally clawing the coach. They’d already watched legions of trees march tediously past, starting with the forests along the railway, and the flora had grown painfully dull after the first couple of hours. Now that he considered, though, he could see a bit of variety appearing in the landscape. In places, the foliage gave way to brown rock, quite different from the hard grey limestone of home. It poked through the red soil here in crumbling lumps, or fell away from cliffsides that seemed hardly stronger than sand stuck together with paste.

Even the earth here was sinking into ruin, overgrown and decayed.

The going slowed as they climbed the next ridge, the road growing steeper now, as if the land were wrinkled up like a blanket. Beside Elliot, his father rummaged in the pockets of his overcoat, finding a box of matches. He shook it to hear if there were any left.

Won’t be much longer, Elliott, he said, sounding weary of the trip himself.

He struck a match, filling the tight space with a burnt reek. Opening a small lamp affixed to the wall of the decrepit old coach, he lit the wick. A yellow glow spread around it. Elliott could see himself reflected slightly in the carriage window now. His brown hair looked black in the glass, but the square features and straight nose that he shared with his father looked back at him. The face looked more bored than anything else. It coughed, partly from the smoke but mostly because his father was putting him through such a senseless ordeal.

Sorry, Elliott, his father told him, remembering his son’s weak lungs.

Dr Graven tapped on the roof with his walking stick and opened a little window there to let in some fresh air and mosquitoes, and to exchange a few words with the driver.

How are we doing, Mr Hicks?

The driver’s wrinkled face appeared at the square hole, glistening with rainwater.

Gettin’ there, sir.

Any idea when we can expect to make town?

Right soon now.

Hicks’ confidence wasn’t comforting. To make matters worse, while he was speaking with Dr Graven, Hicks allowed the team to slow in their climb up the incline to such an extent that the carriage got mired in the rutted muck. They juddered to a stop, the motion sending a puff of oily soot out of the lamp as it flared brighter. From his waistcoat pocket, Elliott’s father pulled a watch and popped the cover open. The watch was strangely quiet. The old familiar tune of My Grandfather’s Clock no longer tinkled forth from the works, not since the previous year, when Dr Graven had switched the music-box mechanism off for the last time. Perhaps remembering the event that silenced it, the doctor drummed his fingers on the golden case for a moment before his features took on a wistful, faraway look.

Outside, Hicks was bellowing some words of encouragement to the horses, his imprecise but emphatic use of various terms of barnyard anatomy causing Dr Graven’s eyebrows to levitate. These goadings proved