Hoegbotton stared at the chairs for a long time. Had they been moved at all in the last hundred years? Had freak winds blowing through the gaps in the boarded-up windows caused them to move? How could anyone know? And yet, their current positioning teased his imagination. It did not look as if Samuel Hoegbotton’s family had gotten up in alarm—unfolded napkins lay on the seats of two of the chairs. The third—that of the person who would have been reading the newspaper—had not been used, nor had the silverware for that setting. The silverware of the other two was positioned peculiarly. On the right side, the fork lay at an angle near the plate, as if thrown there. Something dark and withered had been skewered by the fork’s tines. Did it match an irregularity in the dry flesh of the chicken upon the matching plate? The knife was missing entirely. On the left side of the table, the fork was still stuck into its piece of chicken, the knife sawing into the flesh beside it.
It appeared to Hoegbotton as if the family had been eating and simply … disappeared … in mid-meal. A prickly, cold sensation spread across Hoegbotton’s skin. The fork. The knife. The chairs. The broadsheet. The meals uneaten, half eaten. The bottle of port. The mystery gnawed at him even as it became ever more impenetrable. Nothing in the scenarios his sister and he had drawn up in their youth could account for it.
Hoegbotton took out his pocketknife and leaned over the table. He carefully pulled aside one leaf of the broadsheet to reveal the date: the very day of the Silence. The date transfixed him. He pulled out the chair where surely Samuel Hoegbotton must have sat, reading his papers, and slowly slid into it. Looked down the table to where his daughter and wife would have been sitting. Continued to read the paper with its articles on the turmoil at the docks, preparing for the windfall of squid meat due with the return of the fishing fleet; a brief message on blasphemy from the Truffidian Antechamber; the crossword puzzle. A sudden shift, a dislocation, a puzzled look from his wife, and he had stared up from his paper in that last moment to see … what? To see the gray caps or a vision much worse? Had Samuel Hoegbotton known surprise? Terror? Wonder? Or was he taken away so swiftly that he, his daughter, and his wife, had no time for any reaction at all.
Hoegbotton stared across the table again, focused on the bottle of port. The glass was half full. He leaned forward, examined the glass. The liquid inside had dried into sludge over time. A faint imprint of tiny lips could be seen on the edge of the glass. The cork was tightly wedged into the mouth of the bottle. A further mystery. Had the port been poured long after the Silence?
Beyond the bottle, the fork with the skewered meat came into focus. It did not, from this angle, look as if it came from the piece of chicken on the plate.
He pulled back, as much from a thought that had suddenly occurred to him as from the fork itself. A dim glint from the floor beside the chair caught his eye. Samuel Hoegbotton’s glasses. Twisted into a shape that resembled a circle attached to a line and two “U” shapes on either end. As he stared at the glasses, Hoegbotton felt the questions multiply, until he was not just sitting in Samuel Hoegbotton’s chair, but in the chairs of thousands of souls, looking out into darkness, trying to see what they had seen, to know what they came to know.
The baby was still screaming as Hoegbotton stumbled outside, gasping. He ran over bits of brick and rubble. He ran through the long weeds. He ran past the buildings with mortar made from bones. He scrambled over the fence that said he should not have been there. He did not stop running until he had reached the familiar cobblestones of Albumuth Boulevard’s farthest extreme. When he did stop, gasping for breath, the pressure in his temples remained, the stray thought lodged in his head like a disease. What had Samuel Hoegbotton seen? And was it necessary to disappear to have seen it?
* * *
That was how it had started—following a cold, one-hundred-year-old trail. At first, he convinced himself that he was just pursuing a good business opportunity: buying up the contents of boarded-up homes, fixing what was in disrepair, and reselling it from his store. He had begun with Samuel Hoegbotton’s apartment, hiring workmen to take the contents of the dining room and transplant it to the room next to his office. They had arranged it exactly as it had been when he first entered it. He would sit in the room for hours, scrutinizing each element—the bottle of port, the plates, the silverware, the napkins haphazard on the chairs—but no further insight came to him. After a few months, he dusted it all and repaired the table, the chairs, restoring everything but the broadsheet to the way it must have been the day of the Silence. In his darker moments, he felt as if he might be ushering in a new Silence with his actions, but still he came no closer to an answer.
Soon even the abandoned rooms of the Silence lost their hold on Hoegbotton. He would go in with the workmen and find old, dimly lit spaces from which whatever had briefly imbued them with a ghastly intensity had long since departed. He stopped acquiring such properties, although in a sense, it was too late. Ungdom, Slattery, and their ilk had already begun to slander him, spreading rumors about his intent and his sanity. They made life difficult for him, but by ignoring their barbs, he had survived it.
Hoegbotton did not give up. Whenever he could, he bought items that had some connection to the gray caps, hoping to find the answers necessary to quell his curiosity. He read books. He spoke to those who remembered, vaguely, the tales their elders had told them about the Silence. And then, finally, the breakthrough: a series of atrocities at one mansion after the other, bringing him closer than ever before.
* * *
Hoegbotton finished reading the ledger, took a last sip of the port he had poured for himself, and walked out of the room in time to hear the bell that announced the arrival of a customer. He put the books back in their place and was about to lock the door to Samuel Hoegbotton’s dining room when it occurred to him that the cage might be more secure inside the room. He picked it up—the handle seemed hot to the touch—walked back into the room, and placed the cage on the far end of the table. Then he locked the door, put the key in his desk, and went to attend to the needs of his customer.
4
That night, he made love to Rebecca. Her scar gleamed by the light from her eyes, which, at the height of her rapture, blazed so brightly that the bedroom seemed transported from night to day. As he came inside of her, he felt a part of her scar enter him. It registered as an ecstatic shudder that penetrated his muscles, his bones, his heart. She called out his name and ran her hands down his back, across his face, her eyes sparking with pleasure. At such moments, when the strangeness of her seeped through into him, he would suffer a sudden panic, as if he was losing himself, as if he no longer knew his own name. He would sit up, as now, all the muscles in his back rigid.
She knew him well enough not to ask what was wrong, but, sleep besotted, the light from her eyes dimming to a satisfied glow, said, simply, “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” he said. “Your eyes are full of fireflies.”
She laughed, but he meant it: entire cities, entire worlds, pulsed inside those eyes, hinting at an existence beyond the mundane.
Something in her gaze reminded him suddenly of the woman with the missing hands and he looked away, toward the window that, though closed, let in the persistent sound of rain. Beside the window, his grandmother’s possessions still lay in shadows on the mantel.