The Twilight Pariah Read online

  “Yeah,” said Maggie, wiping her forehead with the back of her arm.

  “I’ll go pit,” he said.

  “Henry, you toss the spoil dirt like Russell was doing, and I’ll go through it and see if there’s any signs of life.”

  “Will do.”

  “Russell, use the spade first and make sure the edges are done. We want to keep it level as we descend,” said Maggie.

  “Got it,” he answered. “Hey, where’s the beer tonight?”

  There was no response.

  A minute later, we were back at work. Both Russell and I had been shanghaied into Maggie’s projects before, and the three of us had gotten really good at accomplishing a task together. Once the digging started there was no more bullshit. If she was like a digging machine, Russ, now that he was in the pit, was like a backhoe, a veritable god of shoveling. For a long time my thoughts were occupied in dreaming up a story set in the old Prewitt mansion, which loomed above us. Then came the sound of the shovel head hitting glass.

  “Hold up,” cried Maggie, and Russell halted mid-dig. She and I walked to the edge of the hole where our friend, usually six-foot-five, was standing with his head at our shoulder level. Maggie jumped in next to him and called for me to bring her one of the lanterns. I did as I was told, and as Russell climbed out of the pit, she knelt and brushed the dirt away from the spot where the shovel head had landed.

  “You see something?” I asked her.

  “Yeah.” She cleaned off the dirt stuck to it with her hand and held up a brown beer bottle, part of the label still intact. “It’s a Schlitz. Probably late sixties, early seventies. I’m guessing we’re gonna find a layer of them here. Kids probably came out here to drink and threw the empties down the poop chute. This was after the pit had been abandoned as a toilet. Russ, you switch with me, and I’ll toss the spoil. Henry, you’re up. Don’t worry so much about these bottles, this is a foot or so from where the good stuff should start.”

  “The good stuff?” I asked.

  “We’ll leave the lantern right on the edge so you can see better. You’ll notice when we’re into the time when the thing was in use. You’ll hit night soil.”

  “What’s that?” asked Russell.

  “That’s actual antique shit turned to dirt.”

  “Does it smell like shit?” I asked.

  “Get to work,” she said, and lit a cigarette.

  We must have pulled three dozen beer bottles circa the Summer of Love out of that hole. Schlitz, Piels, Miller, all the crappy beers my father drank when he was young. It was late and had grown colder. My muscles were seizing and my lids drooping. Russell had given up and was sitting on a milk crate drinking a beer. He’d arranged all the dug-up bottles around him like a private army. Maggie was still going through the pile of dirt with her gloved hands. I was surprised we’d shoveled that much in one night.

  “How many thousands will these beer bottles get us?” asked Russell.

  “None,” she said.

  My next weary thrust with the shovel made an odd noise. The metal head had deflected off glass again, but the sound was somehow different than the clink of the beer bottles. In an instant, Maggie was heading my way, waving her hands and calling for me to stop. I was more than happy to.

  “Get out,” she said.

  Climbing out was a struggle. “We’re gonna need a ladder soon,” I told her.

  She nodded, grabbed up a lantern, and jumped in. Kneeling and hunched over in the glare, she worked at something just beneath the surface.

  Russell got up and walked toward us. “What?” he asked.

  Maggie stood and turned around. She held the lantern out to illuminate the object in her other hand. It was a pint bottle of the most beautifully clear aquamarine glass, with a cork in the top.

  “The thing was wrapped in a black cloth, and the material disintegrated at my touch. There are still some shreds, though. We should get samples.”

  “That bottle has a raised inscription,” I said.

  Maggie turned it and read slowly. “Dr. Anchill’s Kind Nepenthe.”

  She struggled with the last word, and I said it aloud for her. “It’s the drug of forgetfulness from mythology. It cures sorrow by wiping clean the memory of that which causes it. The phrase is from Poe’s ‘The Raven.’”

  “Impressive, Henry,” she said.

  “Henry’s like Wikipedia but with less personality,” said Russ.

  “Better than all that, though,” said Maggie. “There’s some Kind Nepenthe still left in the bottom.”

  I hadn’t noticed, but when she shook the bottle, I saw about a half inch of dark liquid sloshing around. “I’ll have to go online tomorrow and start looking into this stuff.” She stood aside and held the lantern down at knee height. “We’ve hit night soil,” she said.

  The darker-looking dirt was evident even in the deceptive lantern light. It looked less dry, richer in texture. Just thinking about it, I spit twice. Maggie called quitting time. She’d constructed a top for the hole out of two-by-fours and a sheet of plywood so, as she put it, “Some poor bastard doesn’t stumble in.” We got the cap on, gathered the shovels and other equipment, and went to where the cars were parked. Russell and I wanted one more up-close look at the bottle.

  I asked Maggie how old she thought it was.

  “Probably early twentieth century,” she said.

  Russ turned it upside down and we watched the elixir flow.

  The lanterns were extinguished and we were getting into the cars (I was riding back with Maggie in her Galaxie) when there came a loud crash from inside the house. It sounded as if it emanated from the upstairs, on the side that overlooked our work.

  “What?” said Russell, and got back out of the SUV. “Did you hear that?”

  Both of us, poised to get in the car, nodded.

  “You want to go see what that was?” he asked.

  “Fuck no,” I said.

  “It’s probably some creature,” said Maggie. “I saw a few raccoons around here when I first found the place. They’re probably living in the mansion now.”

  “I’m picturing one with a cigar and a three-piece suit,” said Russ.

  Maggie dropped me off a little before midnight. I asked her if she wanted to come in and have a beer. She said she would and followed me in the back door. The kitchen light was on and I knew my father was still up. I saw the television light wavering in the otherwise darkened living room. I got beers for us and we went in to visit with the old man. He was in his chair, and we sat on the couch.

  “What’s up,” I said to him.

  He waved to Maggie. “Ventriloquist giant crabs is what’s up.”

  “Sweet,” said Maggie.

  We watched a few minutes. During a scene in which one of the giant crabs used its psychic ability, my father, without ever looking away from the tube, said, “What are you two up to tonight?”

  “She’s got me and Russell digging a hole.”

  “Sounds healthy,” he said, and lit a cigarette. The TV light cut through the smoke to reveal its swirls and motes.

  “We’re digging out the privy of the Prewitt mansion,” she said.

  That got the old man’s attention. He looked at us and eventually laughed. “You know that place was abandoned when I was a kid,” he said. “We’d go out there at night, light a fire outside in the back, and drink beer. One night we went inside and were breaking bottles, and I’m not exactly sure what it was, but something chased us out of the place. I remember the adrenaline rush and the running. It was right on our asses, growling. We ran past the fire and my buddy Nose picked up a burning tree branch and swung it at what was behind us. There was this earsplitting shriek and the thing vanished, leaving a sick smell of burnt hair. You ever smell burning hair?”

  “What did the thing look like?” asked Maggie.

  “I don’t remember if I even saw it or not, but I was scared shitless.”

  “Sounds like one of your movies,” I said.

&n
bsp; He widened his eyes and smiled. “Could have been. Find anything in the pit yet?”

  “An old medicine bottle. Some crazy remedy. Probably a mix of cheap alcohol and shoe polish.”

  “Any name on it?” he asked.

  I was about to launch into my exegesis on nepenthe, but Maggie pinched my thigh. “I can’t remember,” she said, and that shut the conversation down.

  Soon after, she said she had to go, and I walked her to her car. Out on the porch I asked why she’d pinched me.

  “I knew you couldn’t help driveling about the meaning of the name.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “I couldn’t stand to hear a story about a drug that erases sorrow in your father’s presence.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “He was always nice to me.”

  3

  WHEN I GOT OUT of work the next afternoon, it was raining, really coming down. I’d borrowed my father’s car that day, so at least I didn’t have to walk home. Good thing too, as my back and arms and legs ached fiercely from the shoveling. There was no way I was digging in the rain, so I figured it was going to be a night off. But Maggie called me before I made it the four blocks home. Meeting at eight at Russell’s apartment. After I hung up with her I realized I could just bag the whole thing and beg off the project. Finding the old medicine bottle was intriguing, but nothing I couldn’t have easily lived without. What was to stop me? Still, come eight p.m., I was knocking on Russell’s door.

  The Golem of Arbenville had his own place, a spacious two-room apartment over a corner convenience store owned by the local dairy he worked for. His boss, Ron Kerbb, the owner of the dairy, was an ex–football player. Pro or college, I had no idea, but he was pretty well known for it. He helped Russell out with a scholarship, a summer job, and a place to live just for the football fuck of it. He knew Russ wasn’t going to continue with the game after college and didn’t care. I was envious of the place for a number of reasons, but mainly because it was devoid of a gray, crusty life-form in the corner issuing clouds of toxic smoke and feasting on tales of wonder.

  I knocked and Russell let me in. We wound up sitting in his living room by the front window that looked out over Arbenville Road. He didn’t have beer that night. Instead he’d bought a bottle of cheap bourbon, and we drank it slowly on ice. It tasted like poison and I winced with every sip. Meanwhile the parakeets flew around us and occasionally set down on that crew cut like it was a landing pad. A Dean Martin record played in the background.

  “How do you know which one is Charles and which one’s Susan?” I asked.

  “Susan’s more laid-back,” he said.

  It took almost a half hour of prompting for him to get a parakeet—I think it was Susan—to squawk the line “Say hello to my little friend” from Scarface, but it did say it. I heard it distinctly. As it did, the door swung open and Maggie stepped in, soaking wet, no umbrella, carrying a briefcase.

  “Where’s your car?” said Russell.

  “I wanted to walk in the rain. When it gets warm I go out and walk in the rain for hours. It’s like you’re living underwater.”

  Russell poured Maggie a shitty bourbon. She took a big gulp and launched into it. “Okay, so I went online and checked local and state property records and some other real estate investigation sites, went to the Arbenville library to see what they had on local history. I was going to talk to the town clerk, but I was afraid someone might wonder about my inquiry into the place, go out there, and discover our pit.”

  “What’d you find?”

  She cleared her throat. “The place was built in the 1890s and occupied until 1923 by Prewitt and his wife. In December of 1923, Abner Prewitt, ex–district attorney for Tamblin County, died from a bullet to the head, fired from his own gun, by his own hand. The bank owns the property now. No one wants it. It’s too far out from town and in too bad a shape. You’d basically have to clear the land and build again.”

  “You sound like a kid doing an oral report,” said Russell.

  “I’m being professional,” she said, lifting the briefcase off the floor. She laid it on the coffee table and opened its latches.

  “You were breaking our balls the other night about the jobs we had,” I said. “Where are you working this summer?”

  “I’m doing this,” she said.

  “Bankrolled by Mom and Dad?” I asked.

  “While they’re in Europe, no less,” she said, and laughed.

  “Some life,” said Russell.

  “Well, forget that. In any event, the wife stayed on in the place for a couple years after the district attorney died, and then vanished. Her name was Marlby—kind of a weird name.”

  “Is that it?” asked Russ. “What about Dr. Anchill’s Kind Nepenthe?”

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “I found, in my search, a reference to it online in one of those ancient freebies on Google Books that’s a pain in the ass to read in pdf, and a photo of an identical bottle on eBay, selling for seventy-five dollars. The Google page said it was a home remedy for melancholia. That was it. But about Anchill, he was actually a resident of Billard’s Square, which isn’t that far from here.”

  “I’ve been through there,” I said.

  “Me too,” said Russell.

  “In addition to being a renowned psychologist, Anchill was some kind of chemist. He’d worked in the early pharmaceutical industry, making medicines from botanicals. I got a sense from the Web that, in that field, he was well-known in his time. But I wasn’t able to find a scrap that linked him to the Kind Nepenthe. It was probably a small side business he had.” She reached into the briefcase and removed a sheaf of papers. One by one she laid them out on the table for Russ and me. Some were printouts of 1920s photos from the Internet.

  “Anchill looks like Santa,” said Russell.

  “Prewitt’s got prehistoric eyebrows.”

  “They say he was a real bastard in court, going after the death penalty whenever possible and sometimes when it wasn’t. A hardass,” said Maggie.

  “What does all this mean?” I asked, sweeping a hand over the copies of old photos and real estate listings.

  “So far, not much. We gotta keep digging, both in the pit and out.”

  Yeah, we kept digging, but now slowly with trowels and brushes and pans, and every square foot of dirt had to be sifted through a screen. Maggie had hand hoes and a small pickax thing she called a mattock. There was also a canvas roll filled with metal picks and scrapers and brushes. We nickel-and-dimed our way down through the years, through the dark night soil. The entire enterprise grew more tedious by the day, until about a week after we started.

  That night was hot, and mosquitos made their debut for the summer. Maggie’d packed some DEET spray, but all in all that shit’s pretty useless. It was Russell who made the discovery. He was at the bottom of the pit, a lantern beside him, scraping delicately away at the dirt. Maggie and I were sitting on the milk crates, taking a break, having a beer. The sweat was running off the both of us, and I’d taken my shirt off.

  “If it’s this hot now, imagine what August is gonna be,” I said.

  We heard a hoot from the pit. “My, my, my,” yelled Russell. A moment later, he came tromping up the wooden ladder.

  “You got something?” asked Maggie, and stood up.

  I followed her lead and we both met Russell at the lantern that sat next to the opening. He was leaning over and examining something in the bright light. “Look at this,” he said, peeling clumps of dirt off the thing. He turned his hand palm-up next to the light, and resting in the center of it was a small derringer pistol.

  “Nice score, Russ,” I said.

  Maggie took the gun from him and put it closer to her eyes. “Wow. This might be worth something.” She rubbed it with her thumb and found a name along the barrel. “It’s a Colt,” she said. “The handle’s mother-of-pearl, with some nice swirly engraving. I’m guessing it’s silver plated. It might be worth a hundred or two.”


  “So we’ve found a bottle of Kind Nepenthe and a gun,” I said. “That almost constitutes a plot.”

  When it was my second turn in the hole that night, I found a meerschaum pipe with a broken stem. The bowl had been fashioned into the head of a monkey wearing a crown. Later on, Maggie found the stem that had cracked off. She and Russell decided to bequeath me both parts of the pipe, so I might clean it up and repair it and smoke pot from it. I gladly accepted. As she handed it over, Maggie shook her head and said, “Henry, it’s such a loser habit.” Russell said, “Same as cigarettes.”

  That night, more stuff materialized from beneath the dark soil of the pit. A couple of plates, one broken, one just chipped. A cup and a saucer, perfectly intact. A folding straight razor rusted open. More bottles of various kinds, some in shards, some whole. A dark brown wig, half eaten to tatters. When Maggie found the last item, we heard her say, “Oh shit.” She thought it was a body but eventually it became clear what it was.

  Russell said he thought it was made of horse hair.

  Not even an hour after the wig came up, I was down there, monotonously brushing dirt. Maggie said we were into “the heart of the past.” I thought that was a beautiful phrase. If I’d kept a notebook, I’d have jotted it down. She also said, “Henry, at this stage of the game, I don’t trust you with a trowel. Just brush.”

  “Where will I put the dirt?”

  She went to her car and came back carrying a steel bucket with a rope tied around the handle. “You sweep it into the dust pan thing and then pour it into the bucket. Babcock will hoist it. I’ll sift it.”

  Back and forth I swept with something that looked an awful lot like a paint brush you’d do the trim on a house with. I daydreamed I was applying blush to a dying woman. The closer she drew to the end, the paler she got, and the more blush I had to apply. Back and forth. I was at it so long, but when I came to, I was still pretty much where I’d started.

  What I hadn’t noticed at first was that in the spot I’d been working over, there was something protruding from beneath the soft dirt. It looked at first glance like a white weed sending shoots up toward the surface. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. I leaned in closer and then it became clear to me. Those three shoots were the delicate finger bones of a tiny hand. The initial sight was a surprise, but after that I wondered if perhaps it could have been the remains of a raccoon.