The Time Traveler's Almanac

It left unspeakable things scattered there on the grass and plunged, howling, into the barn, where it found only a mare and her foal, upon whom it fell in undiminished frenzy. When there was no more movement in the stall, it paused for a fraction of a moment. In the loft pigeons were fluttering; it heard the sound and went swarming up the ladder, in no way slowed by the saber. The pigeons were out of reach, swooping just under the roof, far above. At the end of the loft was another ladder, leading up to the great opening under the ridge pole through which the hay was hauled into the mow. It scuttled up with the agility of a great feral monkey. A startled pigeon flapped in confusion and then flew hastily through the opening, and the thing that had been Sam Dappling leaped for it, wildly cutting with its sword. The pigeon rose gracefully and curved back to alight on the roof. The thing sailed outward and dropped, still slicing and hacking at the air through which it fell. It struck the hard-packed earth and bounced slightly and was still. In the house the screaming had just begun.

For Henry Dappling it never stopped. He lived for the seven years that remained of his life with a never-ending scream in his ears. It was not the screaming from the house that he heard; it was the demented noise that came from Mrs. McVay, who was standing on the lawn with her face to the sky as he rode the gray out of the woods that evening. He had emerged from the sun-shot cool gloom and silence of the forest into the full evening sunlight and pulled up as usual. He heard it then, a mindless howl of terror and loss and unutterable grief, ripping through the bright clear air with ugly insistence, smirching the evening. He put the gray into a dead run, down the meadow and the drive and over the lawn to where she stood screaming and screaming. He saw what she held in her hands.

That was the real end of Henry Dappling’s life. His remaining seven years were something worse than death. He would have made a quick end of it almost immediately, except that he did not see how he could die without knowing why. Even a vindictive maniac God must have had a reason for so gross an affront to decency, so loathsome and abominable a cruelty as permitting him to see the bulging small blue eyes and yellow curls of what was frozen in Mrs. McVay’s clawed hands. The question became almost the sole tenant of his mind, a consuming obsession that was never absent for a second of his years as a mad hermit in his mansion. He did not find his answer, of course, and he died at last with the screaming still in his ears, alone in the great house where mildew and dry rot were crumbling the interior and weeds and branches besieged the walls. Long before his death the house had come to look desolate and abandoned, and it was known as a haunted house while its master still lived within its walls.

He had attended the funeral; indeed, he had taken charge from the very first, from the moment he had pried Mrs. McVay’s hands away from their awful burden. He had shouted at her in so loud and peremptory a voice that her hysteria was punctured, and she took hold of herself and obeyed his instructions to gather together the men whom he named and to have the sheriff sent for. He himself told the men what to do, evincing no emotion at the sight of the shambles in the house or the pitiful thing that had been his son lying broken on the ramp of the barn. He went about for the three days, with an expressionless face, speaking, when speech was needful, in a precise cold voice, glassy-hard and without apparent grief or rage. He was watched warily: at any moment full realization might strike him, and he could be expected to do something strange – to become violent and murderous or perhaps lose his mind entirely and gibber and drool.

In fact he did none of those things. After the funeral he took the superintendent of the mill aside. “Pay off everybody,” he said. “Yourself, too. Lock it up.”

“What?” said the superintendent. “Pay—? Lock—? What?”

“Do it,” Dappling said. The superintendent did. The town stopped. The big houses lost their people first, as the men who had run the mill betook themselves to Pittsburgh and Gary. Then some of the row houses emptied; venturesome or ambitious men severed their roots and went to Wheeling or Youngstown, while others, in whom the old highland blood ran strong, satisfied a perennial urge and returned to the cabins. A majority stayed. They stayed and watched the town decay around them, a passive indolent community bereft of leadership and energy, doomed now to a long sleep and then extinction.