The Stolen Hearts

  after M.R. James

   It was in September of 1899 that a stagecoach pulled up at the drive of Ashbury Hall, out on the prairie of central Iowa. The only passenger was a little boy, who jumped down as soon as the vehicle stopped, and stood for a moment on the gravel, taking everything in. The house was a tall, dark brooding edifice of an older fashion, with many windows and a classical stone porch tacked on some years later; its several, strangely arranged windows reflected the sunset in hues from orange to blood red. Wings ran off each side, linked by glazed corridors with thin colonnades; the wings kept the stables and the service rooms, and each one had a small cupola crowned with a gilded vane.

   The evening sun made the windowpanes glow like a furnace. Beyond the front lawn the park unrolled flat and oak-studded, with a fringe of firs set against the skyline. A church steeple, half hidden by trees at the park’s edge, had a golden weathercock catching the light; the bell from its tower struck six, the sound rolling in faintly on the prairie wind. Everything about the place—from its ordered, melancholy length of lawn, to the way the road disappeared behind a copse of trees—left the boy feeling the sort of comfortable melancholy that a September evening brings.

   He had come from another county, brought by the coach from a town over toward the river, because six months earlier he had become an orphan. His cousin, an elderly man named Abner Ashbury, had unexpectedly offered to take him in, and the boy, Stephen Elliott, had been sent for; those who knew Mr. Ashbury thought him a withdrawn, austere scholar—hardly the sort of man to take a child into his quiet life. People had odd stories about him: the language professors at the university said Abner had studied the strange cults, the Orphic writings and the rites of old. He had a library full of rare volumes of the ancient world, and in the marble hall stood a costly painting of Mithras slaying the bull, brought home from the Levant. Neighbors said he preferred books to company; so it surprised them when they heard of his orphaned cousin being taken in.

   And yet when the great front door opened, the tall, thin Mr. Abner came briskly out of his study, rubbing his hands, and greeted the boy with obvious pleasure.

   “How are you, my lad? How've you been? I hope your travel here was comfortable, and you're not too tired after your journey to eat your supper, I hope?” he asked, looking at Stephen with a tilt of his head.

   “I’m all right, Sir,” said Stephen. "Not hungry, really." 

   “That’s alright, that’s just fine. Now, how old might you be?”

   “I’ll be twelve next birthday, sir,” Stephen replied.

   “When’s that? Ninth of September?—nearly a year hence. Good. I like to have these things set down in my book.” Mr. Abner chuckled. “Parkes—take him to Mrs. Pincher and let him have his tea.”

   Mrs. Pincher, the housekeeper, was the first person at Ashbury to make Stephen feel at home. In fifteen minutes they were friends; she had been in the neighborhood for half a century, and had kept house at the Hall for twenty years. No corner of the house or its grounds was unknown to her, and she loved to tell stories. She supplied answers to the boy’s immediate questions—such as who built the little temple at the end of the laurel walk; who the old man in the portrait on the stair was; why the servants’ wing smelled faintly of cedar—and she hinted at other things in a voice that fell to a whisper when she reached them.

   On a cold November evening, some weeks later, Stephen sat by Mrs. Pincher’s kitchen fire and asked, bluntly: “Do you think Mr. Ashbury a good man? Will he go to heaven?”

   “Good? Bless you, yes,” said Mrs. Pincher warmly. “He’s as kind as they make ’em. You remember when I told you how he took in that little gypsy girl, some years ago? And the other one—an Italian boy who played an organ he called a hurdy-gurdy? Kind old Mr. Ashbury took both of them orphans in, he did. Shame about the two of them, though—gone, vanished, neither one of ’em with a trace left. Out here in these parts, its no small wonder, what with wild beasts out and about after dark. Master was upset, he was. He had the ponds dragged. But sometimes, Lord knows, you don’t get any answers for such things. Folks come and go, that’s about all I can say.” She shook her head while the memories engulfed her. 

   Stephen begged for more information; Mrs. Pincher obliged, with that mixture of fact and speculation servants accumulate. The girl had been found wandering and brought home; until a few weeks later, when she left one night and was never seen again. The Italian boy—Giovanni, he’d called himself—had turned up one winter with his music, and was taken in on account of being homeless, and then he vanished in the same way. Just wandered off one evening, never to return. The hurdy-gurdy sat on a shelf and had never been played again.

   That night Stephen dreamed vividly. At the far end of the upstairs passage, above his room, was an old disused bathroom—locked, though the top half of its door had a pane of glazed glass embossed with intricate patterns of laurel leaves and satyrs. The muslin curtain that once hung over it had long since gone, and through the frosted glass the lead-lined tub could just be glimpsed, bolted to the wall with its head toward the window.

   In his dream, the moon stood cold in that window, its dim radiance revealing something laying in the tub. It was a body like those Stephen had seen once in photographs of mummies in the vaults of an old cathedral—a skeletal form, covered in a sheet the color of old tarnished metal, wrapped as in a shroud; the lips drawn into the faintest, dreadful smile; the hands clasped together over the breast. As he stared, a low, almost wordless moan escaped the mouth, and the hands moved. The sight frightened him so much that he woke, finding himself standing in the moonlit passage; he'd been sleepwalking. With a courage that surprised him, he crept over to the bathroom door and once again peered through the glass. The tub was empty. He tiptoed back to bed, and told Mrs. Pincher in the morning. She, uneasy, put up another curtain, covering the etched display of leering satyrs and the view to the tub.  After Stephen told Mr. Abner about  it, the old man swiftly took notes in his little book.  

   As spring neared—Mr. Abner was always reminding the boy of the old calendars and how the equinoxes had their dangers—a few things happened that made Stephen uneasy. First was during one early morning, when Mrs. Pincher arrived to Stephen's bedroom door, bringing him his breakfast on a silver tray. She gasped out loud as she noticed claw marks to the left of the door knob, scratched through the paint and gouged into the wood, four parallel slashes about six inches in length.  After showing them to Stephen, he was just as mystified as her. 

   Then, on a dark and windy evening when Mrs. Pincher was darning his nightshirt, she broke off with a small cry. A series of long parallel slashes had been cut through the left side of the garment—long, close together, each about six inches in length, some hardly through the linen. Stephen swore he had not torn them; as far as he knew, the night was uneventful and the shirt had been whole when he last put it away.

   “Why, Master Stephen,” Mrs. Pincher said, staring, “they look like the marks on your bedroom door. Too high for a cat, and too straight for rats—curious things, like somebody’s long nails. You best keep your door locked when you go to bed, my dear, and say your prayers like a good child.”

   He did keep his door locked, and he did say his prayers, every night. But the next incident later that week alarmed both of them even more.

   Parkes, the butler, came in one evening more agitated than was his custom. “There’s muttering in the cellar,” he said. “Either I’m grown old and daft, or there’s something in that wine-bin that don’t belong. I’ve heard things down there—voices. If you put your ear to the far bin, you might hear ’em and know what I mean.”

   “Oh come now,” scoffed Mrs. Pincher. But Parkes only shrugged, uneasy. Stephen listened, and heard nothing; he could not make sense of the old man’s tale, and yet it sat in his mind, bothering him nonetheless. 

   On March 24, 1900, the overcast sky filled with a restless wind that rushed over the park and made the bare branches in the wood creak like mariners’ rigging. Stephen stood at the outer fence and felt, as the wind howled by, a procession of unending figures borne along on that current—ghostly, helpless shapes that could not stop themselves or rejoin the living. Whether a vision or his imagination, it left him visibly shaken. After lunch Mr. Abner asked him quietly:

   “Stephen, my boy, can you come to my study at eleven to-night? I have some business—a matter I've been meaning to let you know about, connecting your past with your future. You must say nothing of it to the others. Go to bed at the usual hour.”

   Stephen’s heart leapt. To be allowed to sit up past bedtime, and in Mr. Abner’s study, was an honor he'd never dreamed of having bestowed upon him.  While in his room awaiting the appointed time to arrive, he heard the wind had died away, and saw the moon hung bright and still, visible outside his bay window.  From across the low marsh and the fringe of higher reeds some strange cries came—half like owls, half like some other, more human lament. The sounds moved nearer and nearer until they seemed to be in the shrubbery close by. Then they stopped.

   Stephen had just caught sight of two figures on the gravel terrace outside the garden—the shapes of a boy and a girl standing side by side looking up at the bay windows. The girl, with her hand clasped over her heart, had a smile that reminded him of his bath-dream. The boy was thin and ragged, with black hair plastered across his pale face; when he raised his arms they looked milky white under the moon. His nails were terribly long and the moonlight seemed to go through them. Then Stephen saw, with a shock that was more vision than sound, a dark, gaping rent on the left side of the boy’s chest. A hollow, despairing cry—the same that had drifted from the reeds—burst in Stephen’s head. In an instant the pair had glided across the gravel and vanished among the laurels.

   He was shaken by the sight, but determined to keep his appointment at eleven. The study door should have been bolted on the outside as was Mr. Abner’s habit; Stephen knocked, and when only silence answered him he pushed, and the door gave. When he entered through the doorway into Mr. Abner's study, the brazier was drawn before the hearth, and there was a little silver-gilt cup on the table filled with dark red wine. A small round silver box burning incense sat upon an ornate, antique end table. 

   He found Mr. Abner in his chair, but not as one would expect. Papers lay across the table, and a long, thin knife was there, clean and bright. Mr. Abner’s head was thrown back; his face carried an expression part fury, part terror—the awful look of a man surprised at the last moment of life. In the left side of his coat was a deep, jagged laceration through which the flesh was opened, revealing a torn open cavity where his heart should have been. There was no blood on his hands and the knife bore no stain. The window was open; the coroner later said a wild animal must have done it, but people who later examined and read the sheets on the table understood otherwise.  

   Among Mr. Abner’s papers Stephen found passages that chilled him, so that in time he began to understand their meaning. They were written in the clipped, neat style of the scholar—but the content was barbaric. Abner wrote, in effect, that the ancients held that by certain cruel rites a man might enhance his spiritual and physical dominion: that consuming or absorbing the hearts of others—especially those of developing children—was reputed to open strange powers, and that Simon Magus and other adepts from olden times were said to have attained flight, invisibility, hypnotic powers and mastery over natural elements by such means. Abner recorded how he had tested the recipe for years.

   He confessed, in cold clinical sentences, to the removal of two young lives: a girl of gypsy blood taken in March of 1888, and an Italian boy—Giovanni—taken in March of 1895. He described, in grotesque technical detail, the method he had employed: while the subject still breathed, to remove the heart, reduce it to ash, and mix the ashes with a pint of red wine—port being preferred—then to incorporate that draught in an arcane ritual. He had hidden the remains in the disused bathroom and in a wine-bin. He had expected, he wrote, that only the least of the spirits—the so-called ghosts—would trouble him afterward, and that a man of real philosophic temperament would not heed their feeble efforts at revenge. He ended by speaking of the emancipation and potential immortality he anticipated—the sense of power that would put him beyond law and death.

   Outside, the night was still and the moon radiated cold. Mr. Abner’s face, Stephen saw, had the color of someone who had lived for some time with a great, terrible excitement—an anticipation capsized at the last. The wound in his side was terrible, as if some animal or something savagely wielding an instrument had torn at the living tissue. Stephen noticed where the body’s hands lay, folded over the throat in a way that gave the face an expression of impossible, grim composure.

   The coroner’s jury—called at the Hall the next morning—found an official answer: the old man had been killed, perhaps by some wild beast, perhaps by misadventure; the window had been left open; the angle and nature of the wound suggested claws. But the papers in the study showed another course of events: the human cruelty, deliberate and studious, which had been the work of a necromantic scholar who had turned to arcane, hideous rites.

   Stephen never had proof of who or what had actually torn the body. He knew only that Mr. Abner had been killed, and that the two children once sheltered in the house had vanished again, as they had vanished before. He had seen their faces under the moon; he was sure of it.  He had seen the rent in the boy’s chest. And he knew, from the cold, pathological lines in the notes, that the appetites of a certain kind of learned man can be as terrible and single minded as those of a wild beast.

   That was the account Stephen later recalled most clearly: how he had found the papers, the silver cup, and the brazier-smell of incense in the study; how he had seen the open window and the gaping wound; and how the coroner’s version left all the horrible detail undocumented. The Hall shut its doors for a time. The hurdy-gurdy remained on its shelf, collecting dust. The turrets of the house continued looking down, blank as ever, reflecting the sunsets across the flat prairie; and in the quietest of evenings, when the wind swept in from the marsh, some said you could hear a faint, desolate cry drift by—as if half-bird, half-human—like some lost thing searching for its heart.