The Night Crossing by Robert Masello

Author:Robert Masello [Masello, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-09-17T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY

Once inside the foyer, Stoker closed the door behind him with the back of his boot, as he shrugged off his overcoat and hat. He was inclined to hang them on the rack beside the mirror, but knew that Florence would chastise him in the morning if he did, and with Noel returning home for the school holiday, he wanted nothing but peace. So he went to the hall closet instead and hung them properly. Even when she was presumably asleep—he had seen her bedroom light on when he approached the house, but he knew by now that she would have extinguished it and gone to bed, lest he trouble her—her spirit reigned.

The house was as quiet as the grave, and his boot heels made the wooden floorboards creak as he went into the library and gently closed the double doors behind him. It was only then that he took a full breath, and after pouring himself a generous measure of Scotch, plopped into the wingback chair by the window. A notebook in which he had been jotting story ideas the night before lay where he had left it on the side table.

Exhausted as he was—it had been a long day, and a long night of revelry—he felt restless and at odds. It wasn’t only about Lucinda Watts, whose sanity was plainly still imperiled. Something else was gnawing at him, and though he would have been ashamed to express it aloud, it had to do with Irving’s knighthood. For years now, he had labored in the great man’s shadow, making sure that everything having to do with the theater continued to function as it was meant to do, easing Irving’s way through the vicissitudes of life, and shielding him from the thousand and one problems that cropped up daily. It wasn’t that he begrudged him his success—the man was a genius on the stage and had well-earned this honor—it was more that he, Bram, had sacrificed so much and still could not see what mark of his own, if any, he would leave on the world. His short stories, almost always of a macabre nature, were occasionally published in some of the smaller magazines, as were his essays and various letters to the editors, but of such stuff no literary reputation was ever forged. What he needed was some singular idea, something that had not been done, something that would create a sensation.

He drained the glass, then poured himself another. Surely, he thought, the recent events in his life should have provided him with more than adequate material . . . the mummy ceremony overwhelmed by a tide of rats, the attack in the underground tunnel as he and Lucinda carried the corpse of young Davey back above ground, the séance at Lady Wilde’s where he was warned that something was coming for him. He even had the makings of a cast of characters—from the multilingual Professor Vambéry to the soulless and rapacious Thornes, from the fraudulent medium to

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