What the Night Knows

From the journal of Alton Turner Blackwood:

I am Alton Turner Blackwood, and I remember.…

The south tower was chiseled stairs and stone walls spiraling up four stories to one round room, fourteen feet in diameter. Four pairs of leaded windows, beveled glass, crank handles to open. A truss-and-beam ceiling. From one of the beams, she hanged herself.

The family’s fortune started from railroads. Maybe it was honest money then. Terrence James Turner Blackwood—Teejay to his closest associates, who were not the same thing as friends—inherited the whole estate. He was only twenty-one, as ambitious as a dung beetle. He grew it bigger by publishing magazines, producing silent films, developing land, buying politicians.

Teejay worshipped one thing. He didn’t worship money, for the same reason a desert dweller doesn’t worship sand. He worshipped beauty.

Teejay built the castle in 1924 when he was twenty-four. He called it a castle, but it wasn’t one. Just a big house with castle parts plugged on to it. Some public rooms were accidentally lovely. Outside, from every angle, it was an ugly pile.

He worshipped beauty, but he didn’t know how to create it.

In one sense, the house was the opposite of Teejay. He was so handsome you could call him pretty. His worship of beauty was in part self-worship. But inside, he was as ugly as the outside of his house. His soul was not bejeweled, but encrusted. Not even Teejay could have named some of the needs that formed that crust.

The immense house was called Crown Hill, after the knoll on which it stood. The 280-acre property lay along the northern coast, which has always been a dangerous length of shore. Every coast is dangerous, of course: Land falls away to the chaos of vast waters.

Jillian Hathaway was the most famous and beloved actress of silent films. She made two talkies, as well. One became a classic: Circle of Evil. She supposedly married Terrence Blackwood in Acapulco in 1926. They were never wed. She moved in to the castle that wasn’t. In 1929, at the age of twenty-eight, she retired from films.

Jillian gave birth to Marjorie, her only child, also in 1929. The once-glamorous star hung herself fourteen years thereafter. She was still very beautiful. Even in death, she was very beautiful. Perhaps especially in death.

The Blackwood family continued to produce new generations. Decades later, Anita Blackwood gave birth to Teejay’s great-grandson. Terrence, connoisseur of beauty, wanted the deformed infant placed at once in an institution. The father, of course, agreed. But Anita would not allow her son to be discarded like trash.

In time, perhaps she regretted her decision. Over the years, though she taught the boy to read well at a young age, she otherwise distanced herself from him. Eventually she abandoned him at Crown Hill, to the mercy of the merciless old man.

She just went away. No good-bye. They said she had grown scared of the boy, her own boy, repelled by his form and face.

When he was nine years old and abandoned by his mother, the ill-made boy was moved from the guest house he had shared with her into the round room at the top of the south tower.

The boy wasn’t me yet. In time, he would become me.

The boy hated old Teejay. For many reasons. One reason was the beatings.

Another reason was the tower room.

An electric heater made the room warm in winter. Because of the ocean influence, the summer nights were seldom sweltering. A toilet and shower stall were added at some expense. A mattress on the floor made a good bed. There were as many pillows as the boy wanted. A fine armchair and a desk were built right there in the room because they couldn’t be hauled up the spiral stairs. Breakfast and lunch were sent up by dumbwaiter. Using an in-house phone, he could request any treat he wished. At night, he could borrow whatever books he wanted from the immense library off the main hall.

The boy was comfortable enough but lonely. The tower room lay high above everything and far from everyone.

In the evening, after others retired, if there were no guests, he was permitted into the house. A late dinner was brought to the boy in the library. He ate off disposable plates with disposable utensils. What might have touched his mouth must never touch another’s, although he had no contagious disease.

The staff was forbidden to interact with him or he with them. If a servant violated this rule, he would be fired. The old man paid them exceedingly well not merely to maintain silence toward the boy but also to remain silent about him to the outside world, about him and everything that occurred at Crown Hill. None would risk losing his job.

If the boy initiated conversation, they reported him. Then came the beatings in the privacy of the old man’s suite.

He hated Teejay. He hated Regina, too, and Melissa. Regina was Anita’s sister, the boy’s aunt, the old man’s granddaughter. Melissa was Regina’s daughter. They were beautiful, as the boy was not, and they could go anywhere they wished, anytime they wanted. Regina and Melissa spoke to the staff and the staff spoke to them. But because Teejay forbid it, neither of them spoke to the boy. Once he overheard Regina and a maid mocking him. How she laughed.

One evening when the boy was twelve, in the library maze, in a far corner, on a high shelf, he found an album of black-and-white photos of Jillian Hathaway. Many were glamour shots of the movie star in elegant gowns and costumes.

The last photo in the album might have been taken by police. The boy suspected old Teejay, then her young husband, took it. In the picture, Jillian hung like a wingless angel from a tower-room beam.

She stripped out of her clothes before climbing on the stepstool and slipping the noose around her neck. The boy had never before seen a naked woman.

The boy wasn’t embarrassed to be half bewitched by the nudity of a woman from whom he was directly descended. He lacked the moral training that would allow such embarrassment. He had the capacity to be ashamed of only one thing: his appearance. By cruel experience, he had learned that deformity was the only sin. Therefore his sin was that he existed.

She was some kind of grandmother to him, but nonetheless voluptuous. Her pale breasts. Her full hips. Her slender legs.

He removed the photograph from the album, returned the album to the high shelf, and took the picture to his round room in the tower.

Often the boy dreamed of her. Sometimes she just hung there in the dream, dead but talking to him, though he never remembered what she said after he woke.

In other dreams, Jillian descended from the beam like a spider on a silken thread. She removed the noose from her neck. She held it for a moment above her head, as if it were a halo. Then she tried to slip the loop of rope over the boy’s head.

Sometimes it became a nightmare as she struggled to strangle him. On other occasions, he accepted the noose and let her lead him to the stepstool. Although she never hung him, he woke rested from such dreams.

One night the dreams changed forever.

For the first time, he was naked in a dream. Naked, Jillian Hathaway descended but this time didn’t stop at his bedside. With the noose around her neck, she slipped beneath the covers, and the rough rope trailed thrillingly across his body. He felt her breasts against him, more real than anything he ever before felt in a dream. The boy woke trembling, wet, and spent.

For a while, he thought it was a thing that could happen only in a dream with a dead woman. Eventually he learned that the photo of a dead woman worked as well as a dream of her.

The boy wasn’t me yet. But he was becoming me.