Weird lights, barnyard animals could be seen in the house and a hulk of a rusted car in the debris of a lawn. She was a widow of 18 years with no one to call her home. To listen to the neighbours tell it, they were alarmed, best as they could recollect, when the old Ford lumbered toward town regular as ever each night at dusk.
"What ails those two," folk along the Palace would say. "You'd think new marrieds wouldn't care to be disturbed. Maybe Humboldt's right when he says there's some awful going's on there."
Rumors don't substantially change, I thought. Take, for instance, stories people tell of old Lake on the Mountain in these parts: the underground reservoir replete with ghostly lights, bottomless channels and of a lake not giving up its dead. It was alarming alright to sit across that expanse of water and see not a boat or hear a sound. Almost as eerie as standing here looking at Meg talk of Humboldt's forecasting eclipses back in '32. How he'd been right, dead right, each time with his divining rod.
Meg was still on the subject of Humboldt. Seems as for all his questions he had met a bitter end. To hear Meg tell it, one evening after the leaves were down--a cold evening at that--Humboldt, a recluse and bachelor recently separated from a sister with whom he had lived, was fetching wood. Being old and a careless housekeeper, the old man tripped and split his lantern. They found his charred remains near the door of the woodhouse next morning. Meg had seen the flames light the November sky. To hear her tell of it, that night had seen an uncommonly large number of cars on the back roads off the Palace. Meg was not drawing direct inferences, but I could see in the space between her eyes a sly connection.
She was silent on such things, drew the conversation back then forth to peculiarities surrounding the Ashley home. Meg was an Ashley. Since her husband's death, she had stayed in the family home not only days but those dreaded nights as well. I pressed for explanations.
"But if you wouldn't stay a night with Charlie when he was alive--the two of you--when you were married and had the companionship, why would you dare now? If you made the journey into town each night religiously for forty years only staying here during the daylight hours, how can you bring yourself to remain now?"
The question seemed logical enough, but seemed to irritate her. But was I trespassing too indelicately on the subject of the late model cars or probing into a veiled past too transparently?
"Yourn a relative of Conrad's,"--Jean's I heard her say. To my surprise, I told her my aunt had often taken me by this house on the way to Kincaid. As a child, the house in its unkempt stage had made a lasting impression on me. Brooding, enormously lonesome, the derelict house slouched against a weathered fence in a loathsome fashion. Overcast skies or darkness gave it the appearance of containing as many goblins or trolls as fancy might see fit to inhabit, I thought of a magnificent set of ruins, something Hawthorne might have used for his Seven Gables or a nigh perfect setting for a decadent family in the throes of their own poverty--some chilling Gothic charmer!
What was more, the chief inhabitant of such a home seemed straight off the grill of the gingerbread lady or the hag who forced her fattening children to hold out fingers to see if they were plump enough for the oven. Sufficiently chilling for a precocious mind--the place guaranteed sleeplessness for nights on end. Visions of the old woman, cat in hand, standing on the deck of her flag ship-like house, ghastly in its gloom, rifled through my consciousness. The abundance of animals and the witchy control she exerted over them, simply reinforced the spell over an impressionable child. Every detail was complete, right down to that proverbial one decayed tooth dangling from the centre of her facial cavity. One could only expect her to jabber in cackles instead of sentences for her memory to be entrenched deeper in every aspect.
More startled now than taken back, I summoned my organizational abilities to make sense of what she had imparted to me.