Stingy Jack’s Last Trick — A Halloween Tale - 6. Chapter 6. What the Storm Carried

I had marked, in the days since I learned his name, that a change had come over my own watching that I had not thought a dead man still capable of undergoing. It is one labor to love a stranger through glass, to ache after a face that owns, so far as the watcher knows, no name at all, and quite another to love a face that answers, in the watcher's own private thought, to Julian, for a name is a door, however small, and once a door has been opened even a crack, a man finds he cannot shut it again upon himself, however much the good sense left to him counsels that he ought.

It was upon such an evening, some nights after the telephone had given him to me whole, that I felt the storm gathering before ever I saw it, a heaviness in the dark that had nothing to do with the season's ordinary turning, and came to the window already uneasy, though I could not then have named the whole of what unsettled me.

The wind found the house before the rain did, working at the old wood of it with a patience that put me, God help me, in mind of my own long labor at that glass, and the light within the room flickered once, twice, held, and I watched him move through it in the manner of a man for whom an ordinary evening has, without warning, begun to cost more than an ordinary evening ought. He was restless in a way I had not seen him restless before, rising and sitting and rising again, one hand pressed, now and again, flat against his own chest as though he might, by the pressing, hold some part of himself more firmly in its place.

I had watched him decline before, by slow and steady degrees, across the whole of my acquaintance with that window. I had not watched him decline so swift, nor so visibly, as I watched him decline that night, and I confess that whatever restraint I had schooled myself toward since the evening of the telephone deserted me entire in the watching of it, so that I stood nearer the glass than I had yet permitted myself to stand, as though nearness alone, however useless, might avail him something.

The lights failed altogether some while after, the whole room dropping to a dark broken only by what small grey the storm itself allowed through the pane, and in that dark I saw him go to a drawer, not the desk's drawer but some other, nearer his bed, and take from it a small vial, and measure from it, with the particular unhurried care of a hand long practiced in a labor it takes no pleasure in performing, some dose I could not name nor rightly see, and take it, and sit a long while after with his eyes closed, waiting, I understood, for whatever mercy the dose intended to grant him.

I had seen that gesture before. Not his. My own father's.

I had not thought of it in the whole of my long wandering, so far had it sunk beneath the ordinary business of grief and cold and watching, but it rose in me now entire, unbidden, as such memories will: my father, of an evening some years before my own death, measuring laudanum from a brown bottle kept always at the back of the kitchen shelf, against some ache he never named to me nor, so far as I ever learned, to any living soul, a man raised, as I had been raised, to bear a hurt in silence rather than trouble a household with the speaking of it. I had not asked him, that evening or any evening after, what pained him. I had understood, without being told, that the asking would not have been welcomed, and had gone on with my own labor, and let him go on with his, and thought no more of it until this very hour, a hundred and some years distant, watching a boy I loved measure out his own small mercy in a dark I had no right to be standing in.

I did not know, that night, precisely what ailed Julian, no more than I had ever known precisely what ailed my father. I knew only that I recognized, in the practiced weariness of the gesture, a whole inheritance of silence I had thought belonged only to the dead men of my own blood, and found, watching it repeat itself in a boy a century and a half removed from anything my father had ever known to call a life, that grief, whatever else it changes about the world it visits, changes remarkably little about the shape a man's solitude takes in the bearing of it.

The storm had reached, by then, its full and furious height, and it was into that height, some minutes after he had taken the dose and let his head fall back against the pillow, waiting out whatever hour the medicine demanded of him before it granted its relief, that I marked the cold about me had ceased, entirely, to behave as it had always behaved before. It did not gather and disperse, as it was its habit to do. It held, thick and unmoving, against the glass, as though the glass itself had grown thinner in the storm's working, or as though whatever wall stood between his ordinary dark and my own had, for that one violent hour, forgotten a portion of its old vigilance.

I did not think then to wonder at it. I have since. I did not think, that hour, of anything at all beyond the boy before me and the plain and terrible ordinariness of his suffering.
It was some while later, the worst of the storm's violence spent though its rain went on unabated, that he spoke.

I do not know whether he believed himself alone in truth, or whether some part of him, dulled by the dose and worn past the whole day's guarding of himself, no longer troubled to keep the old distinction between speech offered to an empty room and speech offered to whatever unseen thing might occupy it. I know only that the words reached me clean and entire, as no lesser word of his had ever yet reached me clean, saving only the giving of his own name, and that I have wished, every hour since, that they had reached me broken instead, so that I might have told myself, as a mercy to my own heart, that I had misheard them.

"No one would even know," said he, low, half into the pillow, in a voice gone soft and slurred with whatever the dose had granted him, "if I didn't make it through tonight." A small, terrible laugh followed it, no true mirth in it at all. "Wouldn't that be something."

I did not think. I have turned that word over since, think, and found it does not serve, for there was no thought in what I did next, only a want so immediate and so entire that it moved through me before any better counsel could rise to check it. I reached for him.

I do not know what I gave him, precisely, nor by what faculty a dead man gives anything at all to the living. I know only that I reached, as a man reaches in the dark for a hand he cannot see but knows to be near, and that something of what I carried, warmth, though it was no true warmth, only the memory and the wanting of it, passed the glass that night as it had never fully passed it before, thin, and clumsy, and entirely inadequate to the whole of what I wished to give, but real enough, I think, real enough to be felt.

He stirred. Not woke, not fully, the dose held him too close for waking, but stirred, his brow easing some fraction from the tightness it had carried the whole evening, and one hand, which had lain closed upon the coverlet, opened, slow, as a hand opens that has decided, somewhere beneath the reach of waking thought, that it need not hold itself so hard against the world a moment longer.

And behind me, though I did not mark it myself until after, so wholly was my attention spent upon him, the lantern I have carried the whole of my long exile, I am told now, though I did not feel it happen, flared. Not greatly. Not in any fashion a careless eye would have troubled itself to remark. But enough, it seems, that its small banked orange caught and held an instant in the black glass before me, where no lamp of his own was lit to explain it, a second, low, steady light, keeping close company with my own long shape at the window.

His eyes came half open at that.

I do not know what he saw. I have asked myself the question a thousand times since and have never once arrived at an answer I could set down here with any confidence of its truth. I know only that his gaze found the glass, unfocused, drugged, uncertain of its own seeing, and held there a long moment, and that some furrow gathered between his brows that was not, I think, entirely the furrow of pain.

"That's not," he said, so faint I very nearly lost it beneath the storm's own dying voice, "that's not the streetlight." He blinked, slow, and I watched him reach, even in that half-conquered state, for the explanation his own reason would sooner have believed.

"M'not supposed to mix this with," he said, and did not finish it, and closed his eyes again, and I could not tell, watching him, whether he had settled the matter to his own satisfaction or only postponed the settling of it to some hour he had strength enough to give it.

He did not wake fully again that night. I stood at that glass long after his breathing had gone even and slow, the lantern's small flare fading back to its ordinary bank behind me, and felt, for the first time since I had begun this long and unwilling accounting of the world's turning, not merely grief at what I witnessed, nor wonder at what I could not have, but something nearer fear, that I had done a thing that night I could not undo, whatever mercy I had told myself I intended by the doing of it.

I have stood at a great many windows, in the whole of my long exile, and heard a great many griefs pass through them, muffled, partial, easily enough set aside once the glass had done its ordinary work of softening them. I had never yet heard a grief reach me so entire, nor felt, upon the hearing of it, a fear so immediate nor so entirely unlike the slow, patient ache I had carried toward that window every evening since first I found it.
For I understood, standing there, that I was hearing my own death spoken back to me by another mouth.

I had died exactly so, unwitnessed, unmissed until the missing was already accomplished past any mending, my own father learning of my going only when he found me past waking, and no soul in that whole cold county troubling themselves to ask, in the weeks before it, what precisely ailed a strong young man that he should fail so steadily before their eyes. I had told myself, in a hundred and fifty years of turning the matter over, that this had been the particular cruelty of my own circumstance, the isolation of that hill country, the silence my own upbringing had trained into me before ever the Devil found me at his crossroads. I had not understood, until that storm-wracked hour at Julian's glass, how little the intervening century had changed the shape of it, that a boy might lie now, in a world grown loud with every manner of voice and light and swift device, and believe himself every bit as unwitnessed as I had believed myself upon my own deathbed, and perhaps, God forgive the whole modern world its failures, not be wholly wrong in the believing.

I could not touch him. I could not speak to him in any voice he might have owned as more than wind or fancy. I stood at that glass with the whole of what remained to me of a soul straining toward a nearness I had no right to close, and understood, in that hour, with a clarity that frightened me more than the crossroads itself had ever done, that whatever restraint I had schooled myself toward since first I found that window had ceased, from that night forward, to be restraint I could any longer afford myself. I had watched him as a starving man watches bread through another man's glass, content, or telling myself I was content, with the mere sight of the thing I could not have. I understood now that I could not go on being merely content. Whatever I was, whatever license a dead man's love was granted or denied him, I would not stand at another window and watch another soul go out unwitnessed while I had eyes enough left to witness it.

I did not know, that night, what such a resolve might cost either of us. I knew only that I had made it, silently, uselessly, against a glass that gave no more answer to my own vow than the ridges of my boyhood had ever given to my shout, and that I meant, this time, to keep it.

The storm passed before morning, as storms will, and left behind it an ordinary grey October dawn, indistinguishable, to any eye but mine, from any dawn that had come before it. I did not leave the glass that night, nor, in any true sense, have I left it since.

I did not know, in the days that followed, how a resolve so entire might be kept by a man possessed of no hands, no voice worth the name, nothing but cold and a small stolen warmth and a stubborn coal that would not gutter. I knew only that I could not go back to mere watching, having once resolved against it, and so I began, clumsily, and I own it now clumsily, to try.

It was some four nights after the storm that I first attempted it in true earnest, rather than by the accident of feeling too strongly to contain myself, as I had done with the warmth I gave him in his sleep. He sat that evening at his desk, the lamp lit, a stillness upon him that I had learned, by then, to read as neither peace nor its opposite but some worn country between the two, and I set myself, with what care a spirit possesses for such labor, to trace upon the glass, in the fog my own cold had gathered there, a single word.

I meant to write his name. I had, by then, said it to myself so many hundred times that I believed the writing of it would come easy. It did not. My hand, if hand it can be called, found the letters slower than I had reckoned, and clumsier, so that what stood upon the glass when I had done was rough, and small, and showed, when he turned at last and marked it, not Julian entire but only so much of it as I had managed before my own strange strength gave out: JUL.

He went very still.

"Okay," he said, after a moment, in a voice that had none of its usual dryness left in it, "okay, that's, I definitely didn't do that." He rose from the desk, slow, the way a man rises who does not trust the floor to hold the same shape it held a moment before, and came to the glass, and stood before it a long while, close enough that I could have counted, had I still owned eyes fit for such counting, every fine hair that stood along his arm.

"Is someone." He stopped. Started again, quieter. "Is there actually someone there."

I had no voice to answer him with, not that night, not yet, whatever the veil had begun to permit me elsewhere it had not yet permitted me speech, and so I did the only thing left within my gift, and pressed, as gently as so blunt an instrument as cold could manage gentleness, against the glass where his own hand had come to rest, so that he felt, I believe, though I cannot swear he named it rightly even to himself, some faint answering pressure meeting his palm through a pane that ought to have carried nothing at all.

He did not pull away.

"Okay," he said again, and this time something almost like a laugh moved under the word, thin, disbelieving, but a laugh nonetheless, the first I had ever drawn from him that was not aimed first at his own expense. "Okay, this is either the best or the worst thing that has ever happened to me and I genuinely cannot tell which yet, so. Hi. I guess. Hi, whoever, whatever you are. I've been feeling you for weeks and telling myself it was the meds, which, incidentally, extremely rude of you, do you know how many times I've questioned my own sanity over a draft."

I could have wept, had I tears left to weep with, at the plain foolish courage of it, that he should stand at a black window in the middle of the night and greet, with dry unkillable humor, a thing he had every reason in the world to fear.

I wrote what I could. Slow, and small, and never so much as I wished to give him, but real: not a dream. And beneath it, when the first fog had thinned and I had gathered enough of whatever strange strength the veil allowed me to try again, not gone either.

He read it, and pressed his palm flatter against the glass, and I felt, in the pressing, something I had not felt since a ridge above my father's north field a hundred and fifty years gone, that a living hand might reach for a dead one and mean, by the reaching, no fear at all.

"Okay," he said a third time, and this time his voice broke a little around the word, though he covered it, as he covered so much, with the shadow of a laugh. "I have about four hundred questions and I am going to need you to somehow answer at least one of them before I convince myself I imagined this whole conversation by morning."

I could not answer his four hundred questions that night, nor the next, nor for some nights after. I could give him only fragments, a word traced slow in the cold I left behind me, a pressure met and held a moment longer than the last, and once, when he asked outright whether I had a name, the single word Jack, which he read aloud back to the glass with a wonder that undid, in the reading of it, every careful distance I had spent a hundred and fifty years constructing between myself and the living world I watched.

"Jack," he said. "Of course you're a Jack. You have extremely Jack energy. Cold, mysterious, writes in fog instead of just, I don't know, knocking twice for yes." He was silent a moment, and when he spoke again the humor had gone thin and honest beneath it. "I don't care that this makes no sense. I've felt more like an actual person talking to you for five minutes than I have in about a year. So. Whatever you are. I'm glad you're here."

I did not tell him, that night, what I was. I could not have found it in myself to trade so plain a gladness for the truth of a dead man's bargain, not yet, not while the giving of it might still cost me the very thing I had spent so long only permitted to want.

It was some five nights on from that first fog-written word, the veil grown thinner yet with the season's own turning, that he saw me whole for the first time.

I had not meant it. I understood, after, that I had not fully governed the doing of it, that the same strange permeability which let my letters hold now upon the glass had, upon that particular night, let more of me through than I had ever offered before, so that I stood, for some several minutes, not merely felt but seen, in the black glass's own reflection, a shape any eye might have mistaken for his own but for the dress of it, coat and shirt cut in a fashion no living tailor had made in a hundred years, and a face, I am told, though I have never in all my long exile owned a glass of my own to confirm it, that had not aged one single day past nineteen.

He went very quiet.

"Oh," he said, after a while, and it was not fear in the saying of it, or not fear alone. "Oh, you're. Okay. Nobody warned me you'd be." He stopped, and I watched a color rise faint in his pale cheek that had nothing to do with any fever, and finish, half laughing at his own plain honesty even as he gave it, "Devastatingly good-looking, actually. That feels like information I should have been given up front. I've been talking to my window for a week like an unhinged person and it turns out I've been flirting with a nineteenth-century Nicholas Galitzine."

I did not know, in that first instant, how to receive it. My own thought, before ever I could master it into something gentler, ran first to suspicion, not of him, but of myself, of what he could possibly be seeing that warranted such plain delight. I had catalogued, across so many weeks of watching, every fault and frailty the glass had shown me of him, and had loved him no less for the cataloguing, had loved him, if anything, the more entire for it. It had not once occurred to me, in all that time, to wonder what a living eye might find wanting in what little remained of me: a face unaged, yes, but a face that belonged, by every reasonable accounting, to a dead boy, dressed in a dead century's cloth, offering nothing of substance, no hand that could properly be held, no future that could honestly be promised him. I could not, in that first moment, credit that the pleasure in his voice was truly meant for me, and not for some trick of lamplight and loneliness working upon a boy too worn and too solitary to know better than to want a ghost.

I have since come to think this doubt did him some disservice, that I mistook, in my own long habit of believing myself unworthy of the plain looking, a generosity in him for a want in himself. He was not, whatever else that autumn made of him, a fool, nor so starved for company that he would have spent real delight on a thing he did not, in some fashion I still do not fully understand, actually find delightful. But I did not know that yet, standing at that glass, and so I let the doubt pass through me and out again, unspoken, unresolved, and gave him back only silence, until the moment for questioning it had gone by and there was nothing left to do but stand within his pleasure and try, however clumsily, to believe I had some right to it.

I had been looked at, in the whole of my long death, with fear, and with pity, and, twice, before ever that death claimed me, with a love that cost me everything it touched. I had not been looked at, not once in all that long exile, with plain, unguarded, delighted pleasure, the particular pleasure of a living soul finding, against every reasonable expectation the world had furnished him, that the thing he has begun to want turns out, upon the seeing of it, to be worth the wanting.

I did not know, in that hour, what to do with so undeserved a gift. I know only that I stood at that glass a long while after, and that whatever composure I had built across a hundred and fifty years of watching and never being watched in return had begun, that night, to come apart in my hands like a wall too long neglected, stone falling from stone, and that I did not, God forgive me, try very hard to catch it.

The days that ran on from there I have found easier to hold whole in memory than any stretch of my long wandering before them, for they were not spent merely watching now, but speaking, however halt and broken the speaking, a word given, a word returned, until I knew the particular music of his laugh, half real and half armor, and he knew, I believe, so much of the truth of me as a fog-written word and a face held one bare minute in dark glass could rightly convey. I did not tell him yet what bargain had made me what I was. I did not tell him what the crossroads had cost, nor what a boy named Obadiah's fist had cost, nor what a kiss and a drift of ash had cost. I told myself there would be time enough for the whole of that telling before Halloween came, and did not let myself examine too closely what a lie of omission costs a man who has sworn, this time, to keep his word entire.

And still the coal in my own poor lantern did not gutter. It burned, those nights, brighter than I had ever known it burn, as though it too had begun, after so long a patience, to take some interest in the particular shape of what I had, at last, and however dangerously, allowed myself to hold.

Halloween came on, that year, the way I have since come to believe it always comes on to those who wait for it in true earnest, slower than any calendar's honest reckoning would allow, and faster, when it arrived at last, than either of us, whatever we had built together in that borrowed handful of October nights, felt ourselves prepared to meet it.