But I had to go on through this wreckage of a poisoned wood. I followed doggedly the carriage-ride, which normally at this time of year would have been rather overgrown. Surely I had seen it so myself — with sprinklings of woodland flowers everywhere the sun could penetrate, thick moss and large lacy ferns where it did not. There was no hint of that now. Not even the toadstools and other fungi that colonize any woodland, good or bad, had ventured in. Nor was anything else to be come on. No beasts or birds ran or fluttered or fluted through the trees, or played about the tracks. Silence ruled the woods. Absence ruled them. And here was I, forging on perforce, like the last man alive upon a dying earth. And my feelings of horror and dejection increased with every step I took.
By the time I got out into Salter’s Lane, I may say I was prepared for anything. Had I not been, the quantity of felled trees that marked the exit point would have alerted me, and the expanses of the deadly dust, which resembled here nothing so much as the encroachment of a desert.
Even prepared, yet I halted where I stood. I looked down the Lane, and knew it for an avenue accursed. It was — and I do not exaggerate — like some landscape of the damned.
Nothing stood in it. Its length was paved by horizontal trees and in between them the dust had formed mounds which had partly solidified, in a friable, hopeless manner, perhaps from the direct action of the weather. Where hedges had been, there were sometimes left some bare black twigs and poles. I did not want to enter the Lane. I did not want to travel over it.
But I had no choice — unless I turned back, retrod my path and then went on to Joiner’s Crossing, a detour which would now add almost an hour to my urgent journey.
So I went on. I walked into the Lane and advanced, having, every yard or so, to get over the fallen trees, most of which gave way under my feet, meaning I must scramble and jump to save myself from a fall. The mounds of dust were much the same; I sank in them as in the dunes of some hellish beach, or else the humps of powdery ‘soil’ they had formed crumbled, and I slithered unsafely.
This was very exhausting, and additionally foul from the dust that was constantly billowing up as if purposely to stifle me.
Above, the sky was no longer blue. It had a tarnished sheen to it, like unpolished metal. True clouds were hung out on it, grimy-looking and peculiar in shape, like torn banners, each a mile across.
Of course, I knew that I must come to the house. I knew that I must pass it. I had vowed I would not give it one glance. The perils and obstacles of the Lane would assist me, surely, in that, since I needed all my attention for the road.
However, I reached the house of Josebaar Hawkins, and did not keep to my vow.
The holly tree was gone. There was no trace of it — it had become one with the dust. The wall too had come down. It lay scattered all over the Lane, the bricks and bits of stonework disintegrating, like everything else. Behind the wall stretched a vast piece of ground that was like a bare, swept floor. It had nothing at all growing upon it, and even the dust had blown or otherwise vanished away. It was a nothingness, in colour greyish. And upon this table of death there rose — the house. Beside it was the little ornamental building that I had spied on my last excursion there. This I now saw, with an unnerving pang, had been a small mausoleum, no doubt the supposed resting place of Hawkins’s wife. Now it comprised merely a part of a roof upon a couple of columns. Within, too, was nothing. Of the toppled oak that had leant there, no sign remained, naturally.
Of everything that had been there, of nature or contrivance, the house alone stood — but not intact. Its roof had come away in broad segments: one could see the gaping joists and beams, which were in turn collapsing. Both chimneys were down, crashed inwards. On the lower floors not one window had kept its antique glass or its boxed decorations. The creepers had slipped from the exterior walls and after them the bricks had tried and were still trying to come out. Yet the shell of the building, what there was of it, still jutted upright. And in that spot, this made it a thing of unbelievable terror. Ruined and distorted and every moment increasingly giving way, nevertheless it had so far stayed, where nothing else remained.
I perceived all this before I had raised my gaze beyond the lower floors. When I did raise it, I selected its targets with much care. But in the end, I knew I would have to do it, would have to look full-on at the upper window under the roof.
I had been in Rome, I had been in Siena and Venice. Among the hills and waters, among the bronzes, surely I had somehow understood that she still stood here, on and on, stood here looking out, eating with her eyes first the bricks and mortar, then the pins that sealed her up, patient as only a hopeless thing can be, taking a century over it; next eating out the glass, and next what lay beyond the glass — the trees, the air, the Lane, the countryside.
They must have known, the people of Steepleford town, in 1788, when they passed by on the Lane, hearing her weeping and shrieking in agony and fear, all those endless days and nights. They must have known what he had done to her. What then did they do, but cross themselves, perhaps, or use some older, less acceptable mark. But they knew, they knew.
She had loved too well, that was her sole crime. She had seen too much in mankind that was beautiful and good, and for sure too much in him, in Josebaar Hawkins, and for this they had condemned her and killed her. How she must then have hated them. How she must have looked, fixing despairingly her mad eyes upon the impenetrable dark. And if she had not survived her death, something that came of her, and of her hatred, and of those eyes — and which learned too, new skills whereby to use those eyes — that did survive, and lived still, and saw and looked — and fed. And it was there, there in that window, drawing up the whole world in its slow and bottomless net.
‘Oh, God, Amber Maria, poor lost pitiable hideous residue—’
My gaze was fixed on her window, her death’s window. My gaze was stuck there and now could not pull away. I felt my heart turn to water inside me and the occluded atmosphere blackened over.
I did not quite lose my senses. Instead I found myself leaning on my hands, kneeling in the desert of dust among the slaughter of the trees.
To myself I said, But what did I see this time?
For I had not seen a single thing. The window — her window — was empty of everything. Of creeper and of bricks, pins and glass. Of light and shadow, and of any shape. As with the rest, nothing was there. And yet. the nothing that was in that window was not empty. No. She was there in it, there in the core of it, as things hide in darkness. Or her eyes were there, those pits of seeing, her looking was there, her looking looked out. It had looked even into me, and through me, and away, to have all else.