Another Short Story Attempt

Here's another one with same characters as framing device, in the same vein:

Weeks after the story of Alvarez, Stu presented Gammell with a photocopy of an old letter. “Our window installer found this in an old Queen Anne in the neighborhood. He gave the original to the historical society, but I thought you might like to read it or even frame it or something…” Gammell peered over his glasses at the copy. “Oh this is good…” he murmured. “What do you have there? Tales of Mystery and Imagination 1925? Oh well I think this is worth at least that edition in trade…” Stu held up the book. “Til later then.” He turned as he was leaving and Gammell was still reading. “Oh yes. Thank you indeed,” he said without looking up, then waved vaguely. Stu smiled and shut the door behind him.

“August the 7th, 1902

Dear Cousin-
I fear I may have been very absent-minded indeed. Did I leave a son or a daughter in the ruin of my past life? Is there an unearthly creditor pursuing me now, another in the long list of disappointed lenders?
It seems that I am not safe even in my dreams. It happened last night, which I make ten years since I have made my home here. Only now has my old life caught up. At any rate, this seems to me the only possible interpretation. Perhaps you may supply another more apt… I left the window open to admit the spring air, as is my custom. It is very salutary, do not listen to the general store experts who insist otherwise… I had left a short candle burning on the stand, there to illuminate my edition of A. Bierce. The mail had not brought good news that day and I was anxious to quiet the voices of obligation in my head…
The voices had faded to a low murmur when I finally was obliged to pinch out the flame and lay my book aside. I smelled the familiar perfume of the lilac outside my window, but underneath it there was a sharp suggestion, a hint of mold. My fading consciousness paid it no mind, but I fear this was a signal to my dreaming self…After a brief period of inner darkness my dreaming eye opened on a scene of great anxiety: myself, searching frantically for a bundle of incriminating papers. The room was my own, familiar yet alien, as if I had returned after a long absence. As I pushed a row of books aside I heard a tread behind me. It was me, dressed as I was, looking as I was, wearing an expression of startled surprise.
This double turned and hurried down the stairs, an act horrible to me because I did not know that he may not have been fleeing me, but leading me… And twice horrible because I knew that I must follow. I knew it in my arms, legs, guts, before any intellectual consideration.
I chased him down the stairs and across the first floor, the rooms familiar as those of my childhood home, but deserted and bare. I followed him through the cellar door, down the uneven basement stairs. For the first time I could see his back before me. It was truly horrible to see him run as another would see me from behind. I do not know what death is like, and I do not want to know until the time comes… but the sight of myself fleeing before me in that gray-lit basement seemed very like death. At the back wall he turned to face me, sweating and panting like an animal. I took him by the shoulders and looked him square in the face. He returned my look, mirroring my mask of confused fright. Then he was gone… Replaced in my hands by a scrap of damp black cloth, a rag. I cast it down, disgusted and afraid of some species of contamination.
Then, off my right shoulder, I heard a young voice, quiet but clear, singing a name, as a child might do searching for a younger sibling or a pet… “Bobby Helms, Bobby Helms,” it sang. “Good luck, Bobby Helms.” The voice emanated from a pile of dirt made smooth over the years. The mound was lit from behind by a grimy window.
I stared at it… Was it a grave? Perhaps. I could barely discern the outline of some broken masonry. The voice faded. Was I Bobby Helms? The obvious answer eluded me, as had every other object in this terrible place… I only knew that I must excavate the mound; but even the thought of picking up a shovel shocked me to my fundament. Mercifully, then, I awoke to my own room and dancing lace curtains.

August the 12th

The events of the past few days have fairly turned me upside-down. I can do no better, then, than simply pick up the thread on the day after my strange dream…
The fine, rich smell of brewing coffee brought me to my senses and seemed to chase away the heart of my nightmare. Mrs. E., as usual, was up before me and busy. She was never obliged to ask me to rise at a decent hour, even I, an old sinner. Somehow she extracted from me what I would never think to ask of myself, and this without any special demonstration on her part, save a species of reserve combined with a directness of action. She is not an unattractive woman, and if that seems faint praise, it is because she does not deign to demand acknowledgement of those qualities that make her handsome, for all that she is. In fact she emanates a contempt for exhibition of any kind, even the most pedestrian or innocent, and as you might have guessed, this only adds to her peculiar magnetism and makes her the object of the sort of attention she scorns. I can only guess that she may have taken a more conventional view of these things long ago and some tragedy was the sequel of just that species of attention. This would explain her removal to this lonely spot, and her reserve toward me, friendly as it was.
In fact, one episode may furnish a clue … It was in the first year after my application. I stood in the front room while Mrs. E. wrote a draft for some supplies. I remarked a collection of photographs hanging on the opposite wall, above a cotillion. On the cotillion was arranged some fine lace, a vase of flowers and a photo scorched on one corner. The photograph depicted a powerfully-built man with a grave face standing by a little girl, in front of a farmhouse. At the center of the arrangement on the wall was a portrait of a grammar school class. As I examined the faces in the fore of the group I thought I could see the face of the little girl in the farmhouse portrait. At the extreme right stood Mrs. E., a gentle smile on her face. I asked her about the school portrait and she answered without looking up from her writing. “Another life, Mr. Helms,” she said. I mentioned my discovery of the little girl in both photographs and there was a long silence. “It is a reminder, Mr. Helms, of the evils of drink. He worked the next lot during the day and carried on at night. The little girl was his. Just before you applied the little girl, Alice, failed to appear in my class and after the usual inquiries a futile search was conducted. After a few days…” She paused here and continued only with great difficulty. “After a few days, days in which her father’s nightly scenes grew more intense and frightening, the farmhouse burned and Mr. Nichols, the drunkard, fled. Neither were seen again. The photo you see was found in the ruin. Ever after, whenever I addressed my class…” Her voice broke and I turned. I saw her pen laying by the draft book. Her hands were clasped before her face. “I am sorry, Mrs. E. I was wrong to pry…”
“No, Mr. Helms, you could not know. I resigned my position at the school. The house is an inheritance and I own it outright. My support comes from a wealthy relative, a small price to him for the continual proof that my choice of career was foolish.” She handed me the draft. “You will pardon my boldness,” I said, “But there is nothing foolish about educating a child. It seems to me a sacred trust, deserving of respect.” She smiled faintly. “It is kind of you to say so, Mr. Helms.” Then she excused herself and the interview was at an end.
Until the day after my nightmare, I respected this reserve and treated her as any tradesman would a steady and reliable customer; for she did provide me with clean, even handsome room and board, in return for my prompt attention to all the minor annoyances pertaining to an aging house on an isolated lot.
But a very odd turn of events upset this fragile equilbrium, as you shall see. I had guessed in opening this letter that my dream signified the intrusion of some past folly on my waking life… But later events have suggested an even more startling construction…
On the day after my strange dream Mrs. E. seemed even more distant than usual. On many occasions I saw her pause before the bay facing the road and stare out, as if she were waiting for someone. Her hands and face, however, spoke something quite opposite from pleasant anticipation. In the glass I saw her eyes deepen to a shade of terrible clarity.
It occurred to me then how fine she was, how resolute in a situation hard enough for a man… I mean the isolation. And it occurred to me how darkly comic that we lived the life of a married couple with barely a word between us, let alone a term of affection… At the sight of her standing before the window I felt a surge of pity, awe, regard and affection, all in one powerful admixture. Still, I quietly ate my breakfast. Just as I finally resolved to speak she spoke to me, as if she were fending off my verbal approach. I watched her face in the glass. “Mr. Helms, I wish you would address an unhealthy odor on the property. Have you remarked it? It seems to originate from that part…” She gestured to an old oak that stood at some distance, on the boundary of the lot. “I would be pleased, Mrs. E.”, I replied. “I have remarked it, even last night, as I fell asleep.” Here eyes moved my direction in the glass. “Is that so?” she said with a trace of wonder. Then her normal reserve returned. “It cannot be healthy.”
“No indeed,” I said. “I will attend to it directly.” I rose to collect my tools and she stopped me with her eyes. “Please, Mr. Helms– finish your breakfast. It is not so urgent you must give that up.” I nodded briefly. “Of course. Thank you, I will.”
She did not stir from that spot , not even when I had crossed the lot with a grasshook to expose the carcass I was certain was the source of the tainted air. I turned when I was fairly under the old oak. She still stood behind the window, tall and straight, her hands clasped before her, like a statue in a churchyard.
It was not until I began my work that I began to feel the presentiment of an evil that Mrs. E. had borne, I think, much longer. How I had escaped it I do not know… Perhaps my selfish nature and the many distractions resulting from it protected me. It manisfested as an evil smell, but in my mind it grew to an echo of an atrocity so profound that it scarred the air... I laid into a tangled island of grass and hawthorne with a will. The branches of the old oak rattled above me; the smell grew stronger at times, then would waft away.
Then, just as I stepped to face a last clump of dry yellow grass, I nearly met disaster: my foot punched through a rotten board and released a cool but foul parcel of air. As you may have guessed, I had found an old well, and the source of the miasma. I could only surmise that it served the neighboring farmhouse in its time, now the burned black skeleton that mrs. E. alluded to in that long-ago interview. The lot that bounded it was an unsightly desert; once, when I offered to approach the owners with a view of clearing it, and before she had told me about the fire, Mrs. E.’s face assumed an expression of sorrow and dread as she told me shortly that she had never seen the owners and did not know if they were even still living. Then she excused herself to perform some urgent but minor household task.
Now, as I studied the black decaying timbers rising from the grass, I felt an outrage and an overwhelming desire to rush to the site and begin pulling down the unholy thing. I turned to the house and saw Mrs. E. straighten and clasp her hands more firmly together, as if she were straining to see events partly hidden by the tall grass. I waved to reassure her and started towards the porch.
She met me at the door and I told her what I had found and my near miss. She insisted on examining my leg and dressing the minor scratches. “There is such a thing as blood poisoning, Mr. Helms. You must be careful,” she said in a worried way that touched me. She returned to her station by the window, as if to hide her face. “Mr. Helms,” she said, “I know it seems excessive, but I must insist the well be excavated completely, the offending material removed and the pit carefully filled so as to prevent any future collapse.” I will own that my shoulders sagged at the thought. “But Mrs. E.,” I rejoined, “That will require the removal of a tremendous amount of clay… Would it not be simpler–“ I detected then a slight quaver in her voice, as of some kind of suppressed violence of feeling. “Please, Mr. Helms, I beg–“ her voice quieted then. “Please do not argue. I am adamant.” I was instantly sorry for my objection. “Of course, Mrs. E. I will do as you say. Rely on me.” Her face relaxed but kept its expression of sadness. “Thank you, Mr. Helms. I do appreciate the pains you are taking.”
When I had laid my tools by the well I turned towards the house. Again, she stood behind the window, watching. She lifted one hand slowly. I could not decide whether she intended the gesture as a greeting or a warning. In both interpretations I perceived an abiding concern for me, perhaps even an affection beyond that merely professional species that grows from familiarity and opens a gate to a much smaller and more private demesne…
At first, the work was almost pleasant: a cool breeze had risen and I removed a mountain of tan soil. The bricks I pitched over this mound to form a tumbled heap on the other side. Presently, however, I exposed a layer of bluish grey clay. My pick shivered cruelly on the surface and my hands burned with opened blisters. The oppression came not from hard work, though, to which I am well accustomed, but from the odor, which had grown steadily in its power and insistence. The odor seemed to fill not only the vessel of my body, but of my mind, the vapors forming the ragged messenger of a long-dreaded answer.
It was not until the evening of the next day that I had descended to the last few courses of the well; in the intervening hours I had been obliged to construct a sort of derrick fitted with a block and tackle and bucket, so that I could hoist the bricks up to the surface, tie off the rope and climb a rude stair cut into the side of the pit to pitch the bricks onto their heap. Finally, though, my labor was near an end; the smell was almost overpowering and I had tied a kerchief around my face in a vain attempt to strain out the worst of it. I resembled a filthy highwayman. As I bent to pick up a brick I heard Mrs. E.’s voice above me. I craned my neck and she was leaning over the side, the sun behind her head. A half-humorous comparison came to me then, in which she was Beatrice and I the poet beginning his arduous climb… I smiled through the grime and she must have stared at me, though to me her face was but a black silhouette. Then a much more solemn comparison came to me… Her voice matched in its exact timbre at that moment the voice of my dream; and here was I at the conclusion of that terrible task assigned to me in that basement before the grimy window!
At that moment I saw a scrap of fabric laying at the bottom of the well. The soft muck that consumed it had an evil, bluish-green sheen. I called to Mrs. E. to drop a stick into the well, and this I used to lift the scrap from its prison.
It was revealed to be a child’s dress, badly faded where the muck had not stained it and bearing the faint imprint of a pattern of blue flowers. The smell, in the meantime, had fairly filled the lower portion of the muddy apartment. I staggered up my dirt stair, made unsteady by my cramped joints and the powerful odor. As my head appeared above the opening Mrs. E. approached, but I warned her away. “You will spoil your clothes,” I rejoined, pretending a light mood which I did not feel. She covered her nose and mouth as I dropped the fabric on the ground and we both regarded it.
A change came over Mrs. E.’s face that was not good to see. Some kind of awful fascination had siezed her and she began to approach the scrap as if to pick it up. Then, either the odor or some other influence arrested her and she turned suddenly, sobbing in disgust, sorrow or some combination of both. Her legs seemed to fail her and I had to hurry to her side and sieze her arms. Her muscles were tight like a bow. Then her arms relaxed in my grip and she began to weep abjectly, turning and sobbing into my filthy shirt. You might rejoin that the scrap was no proof of disaster or foul play, but now I realize we had both entertained the possibility of an innocent outcome, she long ago, and had known as a dowser knows an underground stream what the answer would be.
The sound of her weeping was terrible in the stillness. Her sobs deformed her body, as if they emanated from the ground I had lately excavated and traveled through her frame. I thought of her face that day I had asked her about the child’s photo, and in that moment traveled the years of a divided self who must forget a man who could have been a comfort but whose capacity for wretchedness outstripped all else, and a self who grieved for a child who might have been hers under some happier circumstance, and whose disappearance haunted her existence, forcing her to see man and child together, in a shadowbox of waking dream…
Then the image and sound of my own dream came to me again; this time it assumed the nature of a reproach for a life at once selfish for its lack of forethought and self-destructive in its insistence on perfect solitude. It was as if her grief had overflowed to fill my mind, and I wept with her and held her to me without reservation.
I held her away from me and looked into her eyes. When her questioning gaze met mine I was forced to look down; suddenly my powers of persuasion and dissembling, which has you know, cousin, are considerable, had fled me and I was like a child admitting some minor sin; but in this instance I was a grown man trying to admit, and I do not deny it, a wasted life.
Strangely, instead of admitting my true feelings for her, I found myself telling her of my dream, as if I were merely watching myself speak the words and had no influence over their selection. As I described the empty house and the basement her eyes widened. Then I told her of the voice and, for the first time since I had known her, she smiled broadly through her tears. She lay her palm against my cheek and said with a strange combination of wonder and sudden comprehension: “It was I, Mr. Helms. I was the voice. I dreamed your dream, from outside the house. I could but watch as you descended the stairs… I could but call to you. It was I.” I carefully wiped her tears with my grimy hands– a comic interlude, as her face was now almost as dirty as mine– and I promised her to fill the well and bury the scrap with a marker which I would tend as if the grave contained my own child.
I now know that in excavating the dress I had merely made a foregone conclusion plain for us both to see; for it was just this sad ceremony that could bring us together and bind us; for me, it was a terrible reminder of the expense of my selfish solitude; for her, a sign that marked a crossroads passed for ever and that must be seen small and in the distance to signify its true dimension, to speak the immensity and width of the plain still to come. We had been brought together, then, by more than casual chance, as two who had only this one last opportunity.
I explained this to her the best I could; I can’t even remember the final arrangement of my words; perhaps it could have been more comely; but at any rate the end of it all was a simple question. The air had sweetened by then and her sudden laugh chased away the last of the deadly miasma that hung over. “Yes, Robert. I am your Emma already, and have been, that is the comedy…” We held each other as if we were but vapor and would dissolve if released…


When I had tamped the last shovelful of earth on the well and set a marker near the old oak, I picked up an acorn and planted it in the soft fill. We could not wait for the acorn to sprout, however, before we met there again, this time with a justice. If the fates allow we will have plenty of time to watch it mature together.


P.S. I am sorry for telling you of my recent marriage in such a manner, but if you reflect on my position in the family and the age of my entry in that body’s register of the damned you will see that the affair was necessarily an intimate one. I know this explanation is unnecessary, for you know my mind better, I think, than I, but I felt you must know I hold your opinion highest and, had it been possible, you would have been there with me.
You may ask why the solution to the mystery of the well was so delayed in its revelation… Perhaps the power that furnished the clue wanted to give Emma and I every opportunity to realize our common destiny without resorting to parlor room tricks, or you may begin “The wheels of justice…”

P.P.S. If you receive any more “urgent posts” from E.J. Rigby and Sons please do not shield me any longer. Simply refer him to my current address. You may tell him also to go to the devil, but I will leave that up to you.

Yrs., Robert (Bobby) Helms”