Dark Harbor House by Tom DeMarco

Author:Tom DeMarco
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Down East Books
Published: 2001-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

15

Intra-Structure

The original blueprints for Dark Harbor House indicated a ballroom forming its own small wing to the west. In that era, the room was called Saxony. It had been refitted in the 1890s as a chapel—complete with leaded glass windows, an altar, and a pulpit—and rechristened Bethel. The Colonel had pretensions of making it once again into a ballroom, but the work needed had proved to be too expensive. All he had really accomplished was to remount the original nameplate and get rid of the altar and pews.

Saxony had a soaring ceiling with no bedrooms above. Because it didn’t share its roof with any more useful room, the roof had been allowed to deteriorate until finally there were cascades of water coming in on any rainy day. Oddly enough, the room was used only on rainy days. It was here that Colonel Forsythe had installed his elaborate collection of model trains.

“Clark’s model trains,” the Colonel was explaining to Evan. “Though, now that I think about it, Clark hasn’t shown much interest for the past fifteen years. But I do remember, when he was just a little tyke, how much pleasure it gave him to be here. Marjorie would put him over there in his crib under an umbrella, and he would snooze happily while I made various improvements. I don’t think he was ever happier really, at least not while asleep. After he got to be a toddler, he toddled off and hasn’t been seen in here since.”

“But what a collection,” Evan enthused. “I mean, look at this. It’s a virtual microcosm . . . the towns and this tunnel and the little cemetery on the hill. What a creation.”

There were rubberized tablecloths rigged here and there about the room to keep the rain off the tracks and off the miniature villages.

The Colonel pointed with the stem of his pipe to one set of tablecloths formed into connecting troughs to lead the water over to the north wall. “As you see, we make good use of what nature provides us so copiously through the roof.”

“The water. Well, it’s ingenious. This little waterfall.”

“Yes. We made this mountain range, Monsignor Bill and I, expressly to contain the chasm for the waterfall and to give elevation to the river. That was a few summers back. Even then we were taking quite a lot of water through that big crack in the ceiling, and these other cracks, of course.”

“I like the way you’ve led the river across the whole platform”—Evan traced the gurgling flow from the waterfall—“from town to town, then through the farmland and this other little village and finally all the way to the . . . uh . . . end.” Two wooden sawhorses and a board formed a barricade where the water poured off the platform and down through the floor. The boards there had long ago rotted away.

Monsignor Leary spoke up from under the platform, where he was wiring track. “‘Even the longest river/winds somewhere safe to sea,’” he quoted, “as the poet Swinburne would have it.

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