A Natural History of Hell: Stories Read online

  All that had somehow passed, though, and she no longer felt a slave to gravity. Gone was the perpetual headache like the beating of a drum, gone the labored rasping for breath. That frantic confusion of thought that had plagued her seemed only a fading nightmare, as if now, at the start of autumn, there’d been a spring cleaning in her mind. Before standing, she took stock to make sure she wasn’t deluding herself, but no, she felt calm and rested. She stood and stretched, noticing a dim reflection of her loose white nightgown in the window glass, a floating specter that made her smile.

  Moonlight sifted in through the two windows and showed her the way to her writing table. There, she lit the taper in the pewter candlestick and took it up to lead her through the darkened house. She wanted to let them know that she’d recovered from her spell. Turning right, down the hallway, she stopped first at Lavinia’s room. A tapping at the door brought no response. She rapped louder, but still couldn’t raise Vinnie from sleep. Quietly, she opened the door and crossed the dark expanse. Bringing the candlestick down in order to light her sister’s form, she was surprised to find the bed still made, empty. She left that room and hurried farther down the hall to her parents’. Her mother had been in the poorest health, and Emily was reluctant to wake her, but concern for Vinnie overcame her caution and she knocked heavily three times. Silence followed.

  The raised lantern revealed her parents’ bed to also be empty, still made from the day. She hurried back up the hall to the top of the stairs and called out for her father. The glow of the candle only reached halfway down the steps. Beyond was a quiet darkness from which no answer came. She felt the nettle sting of fear in her blood and called again, this time for Carlo, her dog. At any other time the Newfoundland would have been right by her side. Slowly, she backed away and returned to her room. She set down the candlestick on her writing table and stepped toward the bed. After a quick look over each shoulder, and a moment of just listening, she pulled the nightgown off and tossed it on her pillow. She was paler than the garment she discarded, glowing within the glow of the candlelight. From the closet, she removed her white cotton day dress from its hanger and slipped it on with nothing beneath. She found her walking boots in the shadow at the end of the bed and guided her bare feet into them while standing. Not bothering to tie the laces, she picked up the candlestick and left the room.

  The untied boots made a racket on the steps—better, she thought, than having to utter a warning to whatever revelation lurked in the dark. She discovered that the clock on the mantel in the downstairs parlor had stopped at 2:15. Stillness reigned in every room, from her father’s library to the kitchen. She fled to the conservatory, to her gardens, for comfort. As soon as she crossed the threshold from the house into the growing room, the aroma of the soil soothed her. An Aeolian harp in the one open window made music, and she turned to the plants, desperate for a moment’s distraction.

  It seemed to her like it had been weeks since the last time she’d inspected the exotics. September had definitely come and was drawing the summer out of blossoms. The peonies, gardenias, jasmine drooped dejectedly, their closed petals half wilted. The summer gentian were long shriveled, and she knew she must pick them before they fell in order to make the purple tea she’d dreamed of. Resting the candle in a patch of thyme, she leaned over pots of oregano to reach the plants and pinch the desiccated flowers from their stems. Only when she had a handful did she recall that her family had vanished in the night. She shook her head, muttering recriminations at herself, put the petals in the pocket of her dress, and blew out the candle. Her eyes had adjusted to the moonlit night.

  Before leaving through the door at the end of the conservatory, she grabbed from a peg the tippet of tulle she often wrapped around her shoulders when walking or working in the outdoor gardens. It was a flimsy wrap, and did little to warm her against the wind that shook the trees in the orchard. She thought of it more as a familiar arm around her shoulders. She kept to the path and called out in a whisper for her father and then Vinnie.

  Upon reaching the heart of the gardens, she rested upon the log bench her brother, Austin, had built when just a boy. She resolved to go next door to The Evergreens, Austin’s house, and get help. She had a choice to either reach it by traversing a lonely thicket or going round to the street. For the first time ever, she chose the street.

  She hadn’t been in front of the Homestead in over a year, and the thought of being seen drained her will. She found it ever preferable to be in her room, sitting at her writing table, watching, through the wavy window glass, the traffic of Main Street. For long stretches in the afternoon, before she’d put pen to paper again, she’d watch her neighbors come and go. Her imagination gave her their names and their secrets, but she felt in her bones that only at a distance could she know them.

  It was different when the children came into the yard and stood beneath her window. They could smell that she’d been baking. When the cookies cooled, she’d slip them in a crude envelope she made from butcher wrap and then attach a parachute of green tissue paper her mother had been saving and forbade anyone to use. There’d be three or four children on the lawn, looking up at the white form behind the glass, a mere smudge of a phantom. Opening the window, she’d say nothing, but launch the cookies, the green paper cupping the air. The parcel would float gracefully down into their grasping hands. They’d hear her breathy laughter, the window would slam shut, and they’d scurry in fear.

  She opened the wrought-iron gate of the fence that ran between the property and the sidewalk, cringing with the squeal of its hinges. Looking around, she waited for someone or something to come at her out of the dark. She left the gate open so as not to make it cry again and headed right, toward The Evergreens. The wind pushed against her, and dry leaves scraped the street. She shifted the tippet on her shoulders but it could do no better. It was only early September, yet she smelled a hint of snow and felt winter in her brain. A line from a poem she’d written surfaced, and she spoke it under her breath: “Great streets of silence led away . . . .”

  She’d taken no more than fifty steps, head down, anticipating the comfort she’d find in the presence of Austin and the arms of his wife, Susan, when from the street behind her rose the sound of horses’ hooves, the clickety-whir of carriage wheels. The noise slowed and then stopped her; zero at the bone. She dared not turn to look, and hoped the late-night travelers would pass her without notice. From the corner of her left eye she saw the contrivance pull just ahead of her and stop. It was an elegant black brougham with a driver’s seat, a cab, and two white horses dappled with dark spots like a leopard’s markings.

  Emily turned and lifted her head but couldn’t make out the driver beyond his silhouette. He was dressed in a heavy coat, collar up, a wide-brimmed hat, and gloves. He turned and lit the two lanterns that were attached to the front of the cab and then resumed his slumped posture. The door swung open and a male voice called out of the dark compartment, “Miss Emily Dickinson?” She blushed as she always did when confronted by a stranger. A man stepped out of the brougham. She took two steps back.

  In that instant, she hoped and then thought for certain it was Sam Bowles, editor of The Springfield Republican and her clandestine correspondent. His stream of letters had dried up since his wife had discovered that he and Emily referred to her as “the hedgehog.” Emily missed him so dearly since his departure for the sanitorium to treat his nervous condition. It would be like him to surprise her with his return in this way. But just as quickly she saw the features weren’t Bowles’, and her joy curdled.

  It was a gentleman, finely dressed in a black tailcoat and trousers, a spotless white shirt. There was a lovely white rose in his lapel. He wore leather gloves and carried a walking stick. The last she dared to take in was his face, which was adorned by a thin mustache but otherwise smoothly shaven. His eyes were dark yet glimmered with the light of the lanterns. His smile was, considering
her anxiety, enormously appealing. He took a gold watch from his vest pocket and held it on its chain up close to his eyes. “We’re running late,” he muttered, as if to himself, but loud enough for her to hear. This fact didn’t seem to distress him in the least. In fact, he smiled more broadly.

  Her manners obliterated, she called out louder than she’d intended, “Who are you?”

  The gentleman stepped up out of the street and onto the sidewalk. “I’m nobody, who are you?” he said and laughed. “You know me,” he added.

  He wore some subtle cologne that reminded her exactly of the scent of the garden at the height of summer. The chill left her immediately and her breathing eased. “What do you want?” she asked, now more relaxed but still with a fading memory that she’d meant to be defensive.

  “I’m here to bring you where you need to go,” he said. “I know you’re busy so I’ve taken it upon myself to come for you.”

  “I’m only going up the street to my brother’s house.”

  “Oh, no, Miss Dickinson, you’ll be going much farther than that.”

  “Please. I’m in a hurry. An emergency.”

  He took the glove off his left hand and held it in his right. She was incredulous at the effrontery when he reached down and lightly clasped her fingers. At his touch a blast of cold, like a January wind, ran through her body, lodging in her mind and causing a sudden confusion. He had no right to touch her. She meant to protest, to pull her hand away, but every time forgot what she’d intended and then remembered and forgot again.

  “If I might call you Emily?” he said in a soothing voice.

  “How civil,” she thought while still searching within herself for the panic she expected. The cold that had invaded her slowly diffused into a sense of utter calm more comforting than an afternoon with Susan and the new baby. He gave a half-bow and led her toward the brougham as if her fears about him had never existed. She stepped off the curb convinced that a journey was precisely what was needed.

  Emily woke to the movement of the carriage. The shades were up and the sunlight shone through the window to her left. She pushed against the hard bench to straighten her posture and yawned.

  “You’ll want to see this,” said the gentleman, sitting opposite her.

  He smiled cordially and her spine stiffened; a scream rendered numb fell to the bottom of her throat. He pointed out the sunlit window and his gaze insisted she look. The view was dizzying as the rig sped madly through town. She thought they were caught up in a twister, but then she was able to identify a section of street, and the whizzing scenery slowed to a crawl, as if it and not the carriage were moving. The sidewalks were empty in the late afternoon light, and the aroma of the oyster bar downstairs in the Gunn Hotel pervaded the cab. The very next thing she noticed was the spire of the First Congregational Church, and that was all wrong, for it should have been in the opposite direction.

  They went a few more yards down the road and, impossibly, were passing the grounds of Amherst Academy. Whereas the church and hotel were steeped in the summer heat, the three-story school was surrounded by trees whose leaves had gone golden. There were children sitting on the steps of the building and some playing Ring A Rosie in the field out front. Emily remembered that the school had closed just that year, as a new public school had been built. She wondered what had brought the old place back to life. As the carriage rolled by, the children turned in the ring and she glimpsed the laughing face of her second cousin, Sophia.

  She gasped and closed her eyes, averting her gaze from the window. “It can’t be,” she said.

  “What’s that?” asked her traveling companion.

  “My cousin, Sophia. She died of typhus when we were children.”

  “You don’t understand yet, do you?”

  “You’re taking me to my family, I thought.”

  “In a sense,” he said.

  “But then what is all this, this journey through the town all crossways and confusing?”

  “You’re taking the tour, Emily. Everybody gets the tour.”

  “The tour of what?” she begged, her voice raised.

  “Why, your life, of course. A little summing up before nestling down into your alabaster chamber.”

  “How do you come to use my private words?”

  “I can see you’re beginning to see now,” he said.

  She turned quickly and caught a glimpse of Mount Holyoke Academy, miles away from Amherst, in the early evening, and right after it Amherst Town Hall, with its giant clock lit by morning light.

  She looked back at him and asked, “What happened?”

  “It comes to all, my dear. You were weak and had one of your seizures and . . . well . . . I have my job to do.”

  “But Vinnie and Mother and Father?”

  “Oh, they’re all as well as when you last saw them. It’ll be a while more before they get the tour.”

  “I want to say good-bye to them.” Tears formed in her eyes.

  He shrugged and opened his gloved hands as if to indicate there was nothing that could be done.

  “Where are we going?”

  The gentleman banged on the ceiling of the cab with his cane, and the horses instantly set into a gallop. “Toward eternity,” he said.

  She fell back into the corner of the bench, her face turned toward the window. It was night, no stars visible. Only the bumping of the carriage and the sound of the horses’ hooves gave any indication they were moving. They traveled on for what seemed hours and hours, and then she blinked and it was as if they’d arrived in a moment. In the carriage lantern’s glow, she could see they’d halted in front of the Amherst Town Tomb, a stone structure built into the earth with a grassy hill of a roof and its cornice in the ground, like a sinking house.

  “You are Death,” said Emily.

  Her fellow traveler sat in shadow. “Call me Quill.” He leaned forward so that she could see his face and nodded. “Go ahead. I know you have questions.”

  Emily knew there was no point in trying to escape or cry out. Although she was terrified, her curiosity was intact. “Which direction am I heading once I’m interred?”

  “That’s the thing,” said Quill, lighting a thin cigar. He swung open the carriage door to blow the smoke out. “I’ve got nothing to do with that. I don’t know what happens after. That will always remain a mystery to me. My specialty is the moment of, so to speak, an entire life squeezed down into a flyspeck on the windowpane of the universe. I wish I could tell you more.”

  “I’ve done bold things in my life, as quiet as it might have seemed.”

  “You don’t have to convince me, Emily,” he said. “I know everything you’ve done and thought. You’ve nothing to be ashamed of. Even the falling sickness you tried to hide. It was nothing more than some twisted little knot in your brain work. You and Julius Caesar, my dear. Two emperors, one of men and one of words.”

  “My secret afternoons?” she whispered.

  He shook his head. “I just deliver the spent to their rest.”

  “But why am I being put into the Town Tomb? It’s only for the bodies of those who die in winter when the ground is too hard to dig a grave.”

  The gentleman clasped the cigar between his teeth and then removed his left glove with his right hand. He snapped his fingers. “There, look now,” he said as he pulled the glove back on his hand.

  She peered out the carriage window at a snowy scene, the wind howling, drifts having instantaneously formed around the entrance to the tomb.

  Quill took a drag on his cigar and tossed it out the door of the cab. As he spoke his words traveled on curling smoke.

  The brain is just the weight of God,

  For, lift them, pound for pound,

  And they will differ, if they do,

  As syllable fro
m sound.

  “You see what I mean?” he asked. “It’s metaphorical.”

  “What is?” she said.

  “Everything. The world,” he told her. “Come now, let’s get to it.” He reached his gloved hand out.

  She appreciated his gentleness, his friendly manner, but still she pressed her back against the seat and didn’t reach to meet his touch. “I’m only thirty-one. A dozen unfinished poems right now await me in my dresser drawer.” Her breathing grew frantic.

  “Unlike you, Emily, I never tell it slantwise.”

  “Is there nothing?”

  He sat silently for a moment, and then reached out, grabbed the carriage door by the handle, and swung it shut. The sound of it latching brought a change to the scene outside the window. They were no longer in front of the tomb. It was early autumn again, twilight, and the carriage was moving along Russell Street, west, through Hadley, harvest fields to either side.

  “Are you much for deals, Miss Dickinson?” asked Quill.

  “Deals?” she asked.

  “Yes, it so happens I’m in need of a poet. If you’ll help me, I’ll erase this evening and not bother you again until, uh . . .” He paused and reached into his jacket pocket for a small notebook. Flipping the pages, he finally landed on one and stopped. Running his finger down a list of names, he said, “You’ll have another quarter century. It’s the best I can do.”

  “You’re saying I can go home?”

  “Yes, when we’re finished with my errand. It’s somewhat dangerous and there’s a chance you still might wind up in the tomb if things go awry, but this is the only way.”

  Emily remembered from her reading of fairy tales the dangers of deals with Death, but she was flattered that he knew her as a poet. “What do I have to do?”