The Broken Hours Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE BROKEN HOURS

  “A powerful read, creepy to the point of terrifying and, at times, utterly heartbreaking, graced with both a compelling narrative and a deep, thoughtful substrata.”

  —The Vancouver Sun

  “Baker’s prose is absolutely magical.”

  —Rue Morgue

  “A sinister page-turner about loneliness and the restless past.”

  —Quill & Quire

  “A sleek, stylish ghost story.”

  —Edmonton Journal

  “It is a perfectly ghastly tale and Baker achieves the double task of mirroring Lovecraft’s own story.”

  —Toronto Star

  “The most terrifying books often don’t involve monsters or bloody gore; instead, their creep factor lies in the questions, the doubts, the shadows—like those in Jacqueline Baker’s skin crawler The Broken Hours.”

  —Elle (Must Read)

  “With every page of Jacqueline Baker’s eerie tale, set in 1936 in Lovecraft’s creaky old house, you’ll be drawn further into the mysterious world Crandle has entered.”

  —Chatelaine

  “Baker writes with the conviction of a fan, adeptly evoking the shadowy melancholy of Lovecraft’s world while always keeping the narrative’s momentum moving.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “This brilliant novel of one man’s descent into a world of smoke and shadows kept me reading late into the night. In exquisitely precise prose, with a pitch-perfect feel for the starkness of H.P. Lovecraft’s Rhode Island, The Broken Hours taps into our fears, challenges our beliefs and brings us back to the delicious terrors of childhood. This is a ghost story in the vein of Henry James and Susan Hill, a meditation on love interrupted, and the perils of solitude. Deliciously creepy, heartbreaking and beautiful.”

  —Esi Edugyan, author of the Giller Prize–winning novel Half-Blood Blues

  “I can’t remember the last time a book really, truly creeped me out. This one … yeah, this one did. Jacqueline Baker gets under your skin with this depression-era tale of child spectres, haunted houses, mad scribes and lunatic asylums—and caps it all with a mind-melting twist that will reorder your sense of everything that preceded it.”

  —Craig Davidson, Giller Prize–shortlisted author of Cataract City

  “The Broken Hours is a spooky novel of the terrible nature of humankind and the things we aren’t meant to know. Baker manipulates fiction and metafiction with sure-handed grace.”

  —Laird Barron, author of X’s for Eyes

  Copyright © 2016 by Jacqueline Baker

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Talos Press, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  Talos Press books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover art by Jeffrey Alan Love

  Cover design by Claudia Noble

  Print ISBN: 978-1-940456-55-3

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-940456-56-0

  Printed in the United States of America

  For John

  The sleep of reason brings forth monsters.

  —Goya

  One

  1

  Providence, Rhode Island

  {1936}

  Desperation, some say, is but a particular form of madness.

  Indeed I felt so, toting my valise up College Street like a vagabond in the blowing rain, the address blurred on a scrap of wet paper in my hand, the lights just beginning to come on in the windows of the great houses against the evening gloom. The spring has been late this year, and leonine, on the heels of a bitter winter, and the rain blasted sideways, soaking my trousers and threatening to wrench my battered umbrella like some shining black jellyfish into the watery aether. The air stank of the sea, as it always does here in such weather. So chilled was I, so tired from the long walk I had undertaken to save the few pennies of trolley fare, and so generally unwell my state of mind, I confess I would have given it all up but for the fact—why dissemble?—I had nowhere else to go.

  So I pressed on along the steep, cobbled street, past lampposts yet unlit and wrought iron gates and the white marble edifice of the university library, where, briefly, I considered seeking shelter. The light so dim beneath the dripping elms, I could not make out his smeared address and cursed my own carelessness in allowing the paper to become damp.

  Engrossed as I was, I scarcely noticed the man and the bicycle there until I stumbled into them, dropping my valise and almost toppling the bicycle, and the man, over.

  I do beg your pardon, I said, setting the bicycle to rights again.

  The man shot me a mild look of annoyance from beneath his crumpled fedora. He appeared to be of the street himself, as I suppose a good many of us must look, these lean times making vagrants of us all. He was accompanied by a boy in a gray woollen hat, and galoshes, and a coat far too heavy for even such inclement weather, and with a great crimson scarf wound exceedingly tight so that it seemed all that kept his head from tumbling from his little shoulders. He looked up at me, eyes pale and disinterested in their sockets like watery eggs in their cups.

  Quite the weather for an outing, I observed.

  We were caught in it, the man said, in a voice that smacked of the northern hills. My own fault. I could see it coming. But boys, you know. Can’t keep them shut up all day.

  He seemed understandably anxious to be off.

  Do you live here, then? I asked. In College Hill?

  He wiped the rain from his nose before nodding toward a large yellow house on the back side of the street. Boarding house across the way.

  I see.

  Just for a time, he added quickly, as if I’d suggested otherwise.

  I pitied the man his embarrassment. I had felt as much often enough myself in recent months.

  Well, I won’t keep you, I said. But, say, do you know where I might find Number Sixty-Six? Behind the John Hay Library, I was told.

  He shot me an odd look. Sixty-Six?

  That’s right.

  The rain dripped from his fedora.

  You’d be standing smack in front of it, he said. This place right here.

  I lifted my umbrella and there it was, set back from the street in a small overgrown courtyard at the end of a short lane. A two-story colonial with a monitor roof, bone-colored with black shutters framing windows darkened by heavy draperies drawn tight against the coming night and the storm. The man looked at me with a new interest.

  Sure it’s Sixty-Six you’re looking for?

  I consulted the paper again. Quite sure.

  Visiting, are you?

  In fact, I’ll be living here, temporarily. You see, I’ve been engaged—

  Daddy, the boy said then, isn’t that the house—

  Never mind, James, he said shortly.

  The rain pattered around us, filling an uncomfortable pause.

  Do you know something of it, then? I asked.

  Daddy—

  The man cast his son a pointed look before saying, There was a suite for rent ther
e, the main floor, when we come to the neighbourhood last week. But the wife—

  Mama wouldn’t—

  James, he said, firmly.

  The boy looked chastened.

  Well, she wouldn’t, he said, mostly to himself. He lifted the end of his wet scarf and put it between his lips.

  I looked from son to father.

  Wife didn’t much care for the place, the man offered.

  Oh? Why not?

  He glanced across to the boarding house.

  Fancies herself, he began, dropping his voice, a what you call it, “sensitive.”

  Sensitive?

  Sees things. Or senses them, or what have you. Her and the boy both.

  I smiled. I’m afraid I don’t go in for that sort of thing myself.

  Nor me, he said, hastily. He hesitated, then added, But … the other tenants, upstairs. She’d heard talk. Gossip, like. Just women stuff. Nonsense things. But in such close quarters. He shrugged.

  You’ve met them, then? The upstairs tenants?

  The man shifted his boots on the wet cobblestones. The old bicycle creaked.

  Can’t say as we got that far.

  What do you mean?

  Mama wouldn’t go past the landing, James put in. She said—

  We should be getting on. The man laid a heavy hand on the boy’s shoulder. Suppertime.

  I repressed another smile at their country manners. And their country superstitions, too. I’ve known their like.

  At any rate, I said pleasantly, I suppose we’ll be neighbours.

  I extended my hand, noticing with some surprise my fingertips were stained blue with ink from the wet slip of paper I carried. I checked an impulse to wipe them on my overcoat. The man must have noticed as well for he hesitated before extending his own.

  Crandle, I said.

  Baxter. This is my boy—

  James, I finished, extending my hand to the child.

  James reached out a sodden mitt in surprise at his name, as if I’d divined it rather than heard his father speak it.

  We had a whole house, the boy said, marvelling himself at the fact, all to our own selves. And a red barn too before we come here.

  Hard times, the man said.

  For us all, I agreed.

  Well. The man seemed to hesitate, but then he said only, Come along, James.

  And with that they were gone, the boy clutching his father’s trouser leg and looking up at darkened number Sixty-Six as they wheeled their rusted bicycle to the boarding house lit warmly there beyond, in the gathering dusk.

  I paused on the street a moment, wondering at the kind of house into which I’d been employed. Certainly the man Baxter had been odd about it. Inclined to see darkness everywhere, in spite of his denying it. Sensitives, of all things. I’d been under the impression that had gone out with the Victorians. I recalled the boy’s pale, unnerving gaze. And that business about the wife and the landing. The gossip—whatever it was—about the upstairs tenants, surely that referred to my employer.

  Still, no matter the house, no matter the situation, the truth was I’d run out of alternatives. There could have been nothing so bad I would have walked away from it then.

  So I plucked my valise from where it lay in the puddle, giving it a useless shake. A vicious gust whipped the elms unbeautifully and sent cold rivulets down the back of my neck as I ducked quickly into the narrow, overgrown lane. The sunken path had pooled with rainwater and I skirted the edges where a creeper vine tendrilled out over the cobblestones, emitting a distinctly medicinal childhood aroma of peppermint as I trod upon it. I did not pause when I emerged into the small courtyard but made straight for the front door, unadorned but for two electric lantern lights which, though I was expected, were unlit. Another blast of rain hit me from behind. I hesitated only briefly.

  Then I rang the bell.

  Did I have a sense even then of—not foreboding—but an uneasiness about my new engagement, my new employer? His name meant nothing to me. I’d gathered from the temporary agency where I’d applied only that he was a gentleman writer of some small reputation who, due to personal circumstances, had fallen behind in correspondence and manuscript preparation and therefore required assistance in such matters, along with basic domestic chores. As the clerk at the agency had, earlier that afternoon, read out to me doubtfully between bites of a heel of bread: “congenial lodgement and small remuneration in return for light secretarial and housekeeping services—”

  I’ll take it, I’d said.

  The clerk reached over and stabbed the desk lamp on with his thumb, blinking at me in the dim green light. Crumbs clung to his lower lip. His office reeked of old meat.

  Housekeeping, he said again, pronouncing it oddly: hisskeeping.

  He might have said fish-gutter, garbage collector, gravedigger. It mattered not.

  I’ll take it, I repeated.

  He bit again, then brushed his mouth with the back of his hand before taking up a pen and writing painfully, cross-checking each number. Beyond the spattered windows, the storm swelled blackly in from Narragansett Bay. Great, roiling clouds swirled above the courthouse and Westminster Arcade and the distant, dark hunch of Federal Hill. Thunder, I thought, but a second later a metal trolley stacked with files passed the open door, pushed by a young page who looked in at us uncuriously.

  The clerk cleared his throat and handed me the number on a slip of sticky paper, not waiting for my thanks but spinning away on his chair to a file cabinet at the back of the room.

  I made the call immediately from a telephone in the lobby, worrying at a hole in the musty carpet with the heel of my shoe as I waited for an answer.

  At first, I’d thought it was a woman. The voice high, reedy, weak.

  Candle, you say?

  Tired, but with a strained, sad quality which I put down to the effects of a poor connection. I felt the line vibrate and tremble between us like a live thing.

  Crandle, I corrected mildly, neither wanting to give offense nor cause upset to someone who, if the connection were not to blame, sounded so tremulous.

  I wonder, Mr. Candle, he repeated, though from poor hearing or willful perversity, I could not have said, I wonder if you would enlighten me as to the provenance of such an upstanding cognomen.

  He said it without humour, but I was not ignorant to his little joke.

  Crandle, I stressed, is an Irish name, if that’s what you mean, sir.

  The line crackled and clicked and hung suddenly silent between us so long I had the disconcerting impression I’d been talking to myself.

  Is that the Pawtuxet Crandles, he finally said, the line humming to life again.

  Fall River.

  A Catholic, then.

  I’m afraid so.

  I said it lightly. Perhaps I gave a small, apologetic laugh. Among men of my standing, it has ever been thus.

  Spoken like a true Catholic, Candle, fear being a great motivator of papists the world over. Forgive me, I mean to give no offense. Their graveyards are unparalleled. They die, it is said, beautiful deaths. But listen, don’t mind Old Grandpa. You must take what I say cum grano salis. It is important only that we become acquainted with one another, our particular idiosyncrasies, you see. I intend no insult.

  None taken, sir.

  Though I felt not a little affronted and suspected his idea of getting to know me meant conjuring me—the way men of his class have always done to men of mine—in an already predetermined and hardly flattering image: a paddy; a fish eater; a Fall River yob. I knew his type too, of course, the old Rhode Island guard, the intellectuals, the blue bloods.

  I take it, then, Father Candle, that you are not of the venerable Crandle line of northern New England who made their fortune in textiles?

  My father made his fortune as a mill worker, sir.

  He made a noise, possibly of distaste, though perhaps I only imagined this as well, sensitive as I am to the matter of what some among his class would consider my “low birth.”

/>   You have been educated.

  Yes, sir.

  Your father sent you to university.

  Yes—

  Not to Brown.

  I studied in Boston.

  Indeed?

  Not without certain sacrifices on behalf of my father, and that of my mother—

  She is not a mill worker, I presume, your mother.

  No, sir, she is—

  Indeed.

  I took from his tone of weary courteousness that he was on the brink of dismissing me and I put in quickly, I am an excellent worker, always punctual.

  Hardly difficult, sleeping where you work.

  I pride myself in efficiency.

  Nothing worthwhile achieved in haste.

  And I think I can claim to be more than usually dependable, and honest—

  No man less so than he who claims—

  Perhaps among certain classes, sir.

  I confess I was a bit sharp.

  So, he said, after a short pause, the flame doth scorch a bit, after all.

  I attempted a stuttered retraction but he said, sadly, I have often, myself, wished to be of a little more fire and a little less wax.

  I knew not how to reply, so said only, I assure you I am equal to any task which—

  Might I ask what you studied? At BU?

  I hesitated. Astronomy, sir.

  You don’t say? His voice showed new interest.

  I laughed, again, apologetically. I realize it isn’t—

  One must follow one’s heart, is that right, Candle?

  Yes, sir, I believe so.

  And your father, did he also believe in following one’s heart?

  Again, I hesitated. He might have wished for something more—

  Practical?

  Yes.

  A solicitor, say? A numerary?

  Numerary?

  An accountant.

  Yes, perhaps.

  I cannot say I disagree with him, your father. But when one is young—

  I make no claim to that, sir.

  Do you not? Well, no matter. Neither do I. But tell me, how did you enjoy it, this study of the stars?

  I judged it best to speak frankly.