"Beneath that—what?''
“Indians,” he said heavily. “Lots of ’em. Infants, old people, braves, women. Way back before the Spaniards came. This was all Indian country once, of course. The Hippaway nation owned all these parts before the explorers came. Still some Hippaways around, on reservations in the mountains. But not anywhere around here, you can bet!"
“What do you mean?"
"Back in school I took a course in anthropology. Indian stuff Hippaways had a name for Hubble’s Field in their own language ... something like E-choc-lab, I think it was."
"What does it mean?" I inquired curiously.
His face looked stony. " 'The Place of Worms.' "
Suddenly the sunlight dulled, the sky seemed to darken, and the air around us became dank and unwholesomely chill. But when I glanced up, the sky was still clear and the sun shone brightly ... but seemed weirdly unable to warm the air.
I changed the subject.
IV.
WE arrived at our uncle’s house by late afternoon, after driving through what was left of the old town. Rows of dingy housing inhabited by whiskered, surly men and slatternly women and squalling brats ... storefronts shut and moldering into decay ... dirt streets cut with ruts, with scrub grass growing in many of them. And beyond the rotting wharves of the harbor, where only a small boat or two gave evidence of fishermen, loomed the abandoned warehouses and the crumbling canneries. It was hard to believe that this disintegrating ghost town had been a vigorous community in Brian's boyhood, only a dozen or fifteen years ago. It looked contaminated—poisoned, in some uncanny way—and slumping almost visibly into ruin.
“I'm certainly not surprised you’ve stayed away all of these years.” I murmured. “The wonder is, Uncle Hiram kept on. with all his money: I'd of moved to San Francisco or somewhere—anywhere but Durnham Beach!"
Brian grunted assent. "Still, the house is grand." he mused, looking it over. And I had to admit that it was. A two-story, rambling stucco structure in the Spanish hacienda style, with red-tile roofs and chimneys, ringed about with desolate gardens gone to seed and fishponds long dry, scummed with filth and rotting leaves.
"Doesn't look like he kept the place up in recent years," I remarked.
"No, it doesn't," he said. Then he pointed to a stretch of empty field bordering the property, beyond a row of dilapidated and dying palms. "Maybe he couldn’t," he added thoughtfully.
“What does that mean?"
He nodded to the empty fields: raw red clay, cut into ditches and hollows and gullies, stretched beyond the row of palms.
"Neighborhood sort of went to pot," he said sourly. "That is Hubble's Field ...!"
After a couple of cries, we opened the big front door with the keys from Uncle Hiram's lawyer and entered a dim, cool front hall. Suits of rusty armor stood beneath tattered banners and faded tapestries; a grand spiral staircase wound through the dimness into the upper reaches of the house. Dust lay thick and scummy on heavy, curved, antique furniture, and gusts of rain from some broken windows upstairs had turned the old carpet green with mildew.
The place had a cold, unlived-in feeling, despite its attempt at feudal grandeur. It looked like the reception hall in some high-class funeral parlor with pretensions toward Baroque.
"Well, we’re here," Brian grunted. “Let's look around—explore.” There were tall stained glass windows in the grand dining hall, whose heavy oak table must have seated twenty guests, if guests had ever been welcome here, and I had a queasy feeling they had not. Bronze statuary stood about on old sideboards and stone mantles, and there was quite a clutter of endtables and bric-a-brac, some fine pieces of old Indian pottery, Victorian art glass, ashtrays and brass pots. The air was musty and unwholesome, although the house had not really been closed chat long: Hiram Stokely had only recently died, after all—did he have something about open windows and fresh air?
Or did the breeze that blew across Hubble's Field, where hundreds and hundreds of corpses had rotted into the earth over centuries, bear with it the taint of some miasma, some pestilence so unholy, that even in the hot summer months, Hiram Stokely had preferred to stifle behind shut windows, rather than breathe it in?
It was a question to which I really desired no answer.
We found the library on the second floor, a huge room, lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves. I didn’t really feel in the mood for evaluating my inheritance that gray and gruesome afternoon, bur ran my eye cursorily over the shelves. Tooled leather bindings held standard sets of Dickens, Thackeray. Scott, the Lake poets. Doubtless, a good second-hand book dealer in San Francisco could turn a tidy profit for me, if the damp and mildew hadn’t gotten to the books first.
"My God! What’s that?” ejaculated Brian in startled tones. He was staring at an oil painting which hung on the paneled wall beside the door. Dim with dust and neglect, its thickly scrolled gilt frame held a shocking scene I could not quite make out in the dim light.
Peering closer, I read the little brass plate attached to the bottom of the frame. “Richard Upton Pickman,” I murmured. "I’ve heard of him, Boston artist—"
Then I lifted my eyes to study the painting. With a distinct sense of shock I saw a dim, shadowy graveyard vault, stone walls slick with trickling moisture, pallid and bloated fungi sprouting underfoot; scores of obscenely naked, unwholesomely plump men and women, naked and filthy, with heavy clawed hands and a suggestion of dog-like muzzles about their sloping brows and distorted lower faces, were clustered about one who held a guidebook. What was so spine-chillingly ghastly about the grotesque painting was the uncanny, the virtually photographic realism of the artist's technique ... that, and the hellish expressions of hideous, gloating relish stamped on the fat features of the degenerate, the almost bestial, hound-muzzled faces ....
With a shudder of aversion, I dropped my gaze hastily from the oil, to scan the title of the picture.
" 'Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount Auburn,' " I read half-aloud.
Brian looked sick. "God, I’ll sell that abomination first off!” he swore feelingly. I didn't blame him: frankly, I’d have burned the grisly thing.
We decided to stay the night, since it would have taken us hours to drive back to Santiago. We’d driven past a dingy little diner near the docks on our trip through town, but, somehow, neither of us felt like retracing our path through those rutted streets lined with tottering, decaying tenements. In a mood of festive generosity, Brian’s landlady had packed us a large picnic lunch, which we had only nibbled at along the way, so we built a fire in a cavernous stone fireplace and wolfed down cold tea, ham and chicken sandwiches, and potato salad by the flickering orange light of the blaze. A thin, drizzly rain had started up; the skies were leaden and overcast; a mournful wind prowled and whimpered about the eaves. It was going to be a filthy night, and neither of us felt like crawling into bed after one look at damp, stale-smelling sheets and empty, drafty bedrooms. We fed the fire and curled up on a couple of sofas, wrapped in quilts found in an upstairs closet.
Brian was soon snoring comfortably, but I found myself unable to get relaxed enough to feel drowsy. Giving it up after a while. I stirred up the fire and lit an old hurricane lamp we'd found on the back porch, which still held plenty of oil. Then I went hunting through the shelves for something to read. Twain, Dumas, Balzac—all of the standard classics were too heavy for my gloomy mood, but surely, somewhere in among all of these thousands of embalmed masterpieces, Uncle Hiram must have tucked away a good thriller or a juicy detective story ....