The Broken Hours: A Novel of H. P. Lovecraft Read Online Free Page A

light.
    Then, as I waited, an unpleasant thought: the unnatural, studied silence coming from the other side of the door was neither that of someone having just gone out nor of someone at focused work or even in deep sleep. Rather it was the stillness of someone’s strained listening just on the other side. Watching, perhaps, through the crack there.
    I felt a shiver run through me that was not the cold.
    How I wanted, in that moment, to leave. Even as I thought, My god, what things we do for … not love, certainly. I knew very well it was not love which had driven me there, nor hope, nor even obligation. Desperation, certainly; but more than that: it was grief. A much fiercer and lasting kind of loyalty in the end.
    A floorboard creaked behind me, and I turned in relief, expecting to greet my new employer.
    But there was no one, only the open door through which I’d just come, out of the wet blackness, and my own shining footprints across the floor.
    It was then I noticed the pedestal table in the entranceway. It bore, beneath the small light of an exquisite emerald lamp, a note weighted down, from heaven knew what phantom gusts in that still and airless place, with a human skull of such craftsmanship as to look quite real. I stepped toward it and, repressing an inexplicable urge to poke my fingers into its empty eye sockets, I plucked the envelope from beneath it with hands made unsteady by the cold and the strain, and by many weeks of having slept little and eaten less.
    Welcome, Candle, it read.

    What is it in us which blinds us? Standing there in the front hall, I felt a chill spread slowly over me, like a palm cupping cold marble, or a window left open to an autumn night. But for the wind and rain lashing outside, the house was eerily still, eerily silent. And yet I told myself it was only sleep I needed. A bed, warmth, rest.
    I followed a set of creaking stairs from the front hall up to the darkened second story, clutching his letter, my valise bumping noisily against the walls of the narrow stairwell. At a small landing I found two doors and opened one. I felt for the electric light but when I punched the button, nothing happened. From what I could make out, the room appeared to be empty except for a few boxes against the wall and an antiquated cornbroom abandoned in the corner. I closed the door and opened the other.
    When I found the button this time, the bulb in the ceiling buzzed and crackled with a thin orange wire, then flared with light. I raised a hand to my face, blinking, and carried my dripping valise inside.
    It too seemed little more than a large storeroom, lowceilinged and grimly furnished. Behind the clutter of more cardboard boxes I could see a cast-iron bed, narrow and sagging and so short it would surely only allow me to curl up like a fetal cat or drape my ankles painfully across the foot rail. A washstand with a blue-flowered enamel basin and pitcher stood beneath a darker oval on the far wall where a mirror or a picture must once have hung; but all this, too, and the chest of drawers, even the lamp on my bedside table, had been built in miniature. I thought of Alice, having stepped through the looking glass. I reached out and turned on the lamp, which glowed with a rosy light. Certainly the room must once have been used by, intended for, a child.
    Yet clearly it had not been used so in quite some time. My shoes scraped the bare floorboards as I pushed aside sealed boxes thick with grit; even the folded bed linens, when I lifted them from the cold radiator, smelled musty from long disuse. The saving grace: the monitor roof boasted windows which, though smudged and fly-specked, afforded a nearly panoramic view of the city. Below one of these sat my desk. I regarded its stacks of manuscripts and correspondence without enthusiasm, then leaned toward the glass. Past my ghosted reflection I could see the university observatory glowing bluely, as if a celestial creation fallen, and beyond that the