Thoreau on Wolf Hill

Book 2: Henry David Thoreau Mystery

by B.B. Oak

Genres: Historical Mysteries

Synopsis

Far from the tranquility of Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau confronts the chilling reality of an epidemic. . .as well as cold-blooded murder. The winter of 1847 has brought a consumption epidemic which is devastating the village of Plumford, Massachusetts. In an atmosphere of increasing hysteria and superstition, country doctor Adam Walker and philosopher Henry David Thoreau seem the only voices of reason. The winter also brings two visitors to Plumford. Solomon Wiley hails from Rhode Island and offers his services as a vampyre hunter, insisting that the scourge is supernatural in origin. At the same time, Adam's cousin Julia has returned home from France, mysteriously without her new husband. When a former student of Thoreau's is found mutilated and drained of blood in the woods, Wiley insists that a legendary Indian vampyre has arisen. Dismissing the blustering fearmonger, Thoreau and Adam follow clues to the backstage world of a Boston theater, the smoky decadence of an opium den, and an Indian burial ground. Both men will need to keep their wits about them--or risk ending up in coffins of their own. . . Praise for Thoreau at Devil's Perch "A promising debut. . .Thoreau is just as you'd expect him: erudite, eccentric, waxing philosophical about his love of nature, and a natural detective." -- Publishers Weekly "Ambitious. . .the research and fresh take on Thoreau make for an admirable start." -- Library Journal

Release date: October 28, 2014

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 321

Sample

Wednesday, December 1, 1847

I had already done a day’s doctoring, downed a dram of whiskey, and gotten chilled to the bone before setting down to breakfast this morning. And just when I was about to dig into a stack of flat-jacks fresh off Gran’s griddle, there was a knock on the back door.

“Pray you do not have to go out on another patient call!” Harriet said, giving me such a look of concern I thought she might burst into tears. Although Gran’s ward is nigh reaching womanhood, she still has the volatile emotions of a child.

“Adam ain’t goin’ nowhere afore he gits some hot food and coffee down his gullet,” Gran said.

She declared this with such conviction you would think she still had a say in my comings and goings. I suppose it is only natural for her to fall into old habits now that I have taken up residence in my boyhood home for a spell.

Of course I would have disregarded her command and left my breakfast uneaten if the need for me were urgent. Such is the life of a country doctor, a life I never intended to have when I left Tuttle Farm for Harvard. Obligations have overruled ambitions, however.

It turned out the caller was Henry Thoreau. “Well, ain’t you the early bird,” Gran said as she ushered him in.

But it is never too early for Henry. He feels it unwise to keep the head long on a level with the feet, as he puts it, and appears to thrive on little sleep and much exercise. He looked full of vigor as usual this morning, the hawky, ever-present look of vigilance upon his clean-shaven visage. His erect carriage and the quick grace of his movements always call to my mind an Indian brave, as does his strong, large nose. At thirty, he is my senior by five years, but he still has the boundless energy of a boy. Or a colt. His ruddy, unruly mane was dank with morning mist, and he was clutching his broad-brimmed felt hat to his chest.

“On sich a cold, damp morn as this, you would have been better off wearin’ that hat than carryin’ it,” Gran told him.

“If I’d kept it on my head,” he replied, “in what would I have collected these?” He proffered his hat to her.

Gran’s eyes lit up when she looked into the deep crown. “Chestnuts!” she cried.

“I came upon them not too far from here,” he said, “and reckoned you might appreciate them, Mrs. Tuttle.”

“You reckoned right,” she said. “Roasted, stewed, or preserved, there ain’t nothin’ I like more’n chestnuts.” She transferred the glossy nuggets into a basket. “How did you manage to find such a bounteous treasure of ’em so late in the season?”

“I simply looked where I thought a squirrel might,” he said with a shrug and went to stand by the fire. He seemed to take for granted his ability to find treasures invisible to others. Often when we hike together, he unearths an ancient arrowhead, yet no matter how hard I look for them, I have never come upon a single one.

“Set yourself down, and I’ll hot up the coffee fer ye,” Gran told him.

“Thank you kindly but no coffee for me,” he said.

“You sure? ’Twon’t be no trouble at all.”

“Henry does not take coffee, nor tea, nor any other stimulant,” I told Gran. “Not even fermented cider.”

“Not even cider!” That did amaze her. “Why, most menfolk drink it like water.”

“I believe water is the only drink for a wise man,” Henry said.

Gran sniffed. “Suit yerself.”

Henry gave me an amused look, then a more careful study from head to toe. “Well, my friend, I see you have been up and about very early yourself. And even though you had a bit of trouble with your horse or gig on your way to the Yates farm, you still got there in plenty of time to deliver Mrs. Yates of a fine baby boy.”

We all three stared at him. I had related those very facts to Gran and Harriet when I staggered in not ten minutes before.

“Mr. Thoreau is clairvoyant!” Harriet said.

Henry laughed. “Not clairvoyant. Observant.” He pointed to my feet. “There in the cleft of Adam’s boot heel is a leaf from the climbing fern.”

“So what about it?” Gran said.

“That rare species of fern can be found in Old Sow Swamp, which lies between here and the Yates farm,” Henry said. “Hence I surmised that’s where Adam picked it up on his boot when he got out of his gig. But what would compel him to alight in a swamp? Obviously something was in need of fixing before he could go on.”

“And so it was,” I confirmed. “I stopped there to straighten the bit that had gone askew in Napoleon’s mouth.”

“But how’d you git from knowin’ where some fern grows to knowin’ why Adam went out afore daybreak?” Gran asked Henry.

“Ratiocination,” Henry replied.

Gran and Harriet looked at him blankly. I own that I did too.

“You need to explain your reasoning process to us, Henry,” I said. “If you don’t mind.”

Of course I knew he wouldn’t mind a jot. If there’s one thing Henry enjoys, it’s showing off his powers of observation and deduction. He sat down at the table and elucidated.

“I noted the climbing fern in Old Sow Swamp a few days ago. And then, as I cut through a pasture behind the Yates farmstead, I saw the lady of the house hanging out her wash. She had a hard time of it for she was very far advanced with child. Thus I deduced that Adam went out that way early this morning to assist with the birth.”

“But how did you know Mrs. Yates was delivered of a boy?” Harriet said.

“Why, Adam’s breath,” Henry replied. He folded his arms across his chest and said no more, no doubt waiting to be urged to.

He did not have to wait long. “Out with it, Henry!” Gran said. “You got me hooked now like a catfish danglin’ on a chunk of dough. What in tarnation has my grandson’s breathing to do with the sex of Mrs. Yates’s newborn?”

“I can smell whiskey on Adam’s breath,” Henry said, his large and bright eyes dancing with quiet merriment. “Mr. Yates is famous for being closefisted and a man who seldom imbibes. So it would be a rare occasion indeed when before dawn he would bring out his best liquor. He already has three daughters, so another would not so inspire him. Only a boy would do the trick. And I wager this was the first time Adam ever quaffed a spirituous libation so early in the day. That would also indicate to me that the birth was a long and perilous one. Still, if I know him he toasted the birth of the boy to please the proud father more than to indulge himself.”

I could only nod. He had deduced all from what seemed no evidence at all.

“Well, I’ll be jiggered,” Gran said. “You are as smart as a steel trap, Henry. And as a reward for yer fancy bit of cogitat’n I am going to serve you up a heapin’ pile of flat-jacks.”

Henry, not one to turn down an offer of food, pulled his chair closer to the table, but as Gran was mixing fresh batter there came more pounding at the door. Before anyone had time to answer it, Ezekiel Wiley’s youngest child, Orin, charged in. He was panting so hard he must have run full speed all three miles from his farm.

“Ma wants you to come right away, Dr. Walker,” he gasped out.

“Has Joanna taken a turn for the worse?” I had been expecting this since I’d visited his sister’s bedside yesterday.

“No, it’s Hetty!”

“Hetty?” I did not understand. His other sister had died in September.

“Ma wants you to stop them from diggin’ her up!”

“Good Lord, why dig her up?”

“Uncle Solomon claims she ain’t really dead. He says she rises from the grave every night to suck the breath out of Joanna.”

“He must be deranged!” I said.

“Else he comes straight from the devil,” Gran said.

“No, no, he comes from Rhode Island,” Orin said, “where such things are done. Uncle Solomon has dug up many a body there, being a practitioner.”

“A practitioner of what?” Henry said. “The Black Arts?”

“He is a slayer of vampyres. And he aims to slay the night-stalking horror that Sister Hetty has become.”

Harriet gasped. “Hetty a vampyre? That cannot be! She was my dearest friend, and there was no soul better. She suffered like a saint, never complaining as the Consumption devoured her.” Harriet turned to me, tears brimming in her gentle eyes. “Did you not say she was a good, brave patient, Adam?”

I could only nod. That I could do nothing to save the lovely young woman weighs heavily upon my heart, especially since her sister Joanna is now dying from the selfsame disease.

“What exactly does this so-called vampyre slayer intend to do after he exhumes his niece’s body?” Henry asked Orin.

“Cut out her heart and burn it whilst Joanna breathes in the smoke.” The boy’s face twisted in a grimace. “Then poor Joanna must eat the ashes.”

“Not if I can help it,” I said, grabbing my jacket off the peg. “Subjecting that young girl to such horror might well put an end to her. She is weak enough as it is.”

Henry put on his battered hat. “I will go with you, Adam. Irrational heads are always hard of hearing, and two voices might better penetrate their ignorance.”

“Orin, you stay here,” Gran ordered the boy. “Else you might see things not fit fer young eyes.” That seemed to make him all the more eager to go with us, but Gran grabbed his arm and held him back.

Out we went to the barn, and in a trice Napoleon was back between the buggy shafts. Off we raced, and the good horse did not slacken his pace until we reached the Wiley homestead. Mrs. Wiley stood in the door yard, wringing her hands.

“They have just gone up to fetch Joanna,” she said with a sob.

Henry and I went inside and up the stairs to Joanna’s bedroom. The rusty odor of the girl’s retched-up blood filled the room, emanating from a basin on the floor. Her father was lifting her from the bed.

“Pray wait, Mr. Wiley,” I said, as calmly as I could muster. We had no legal right to be on his property, much less tell him what to do with his child. Or the bodies in the family graveyard, for that matter.

Cradling his emaciated daughter in his arms, he looked at me, his eyes filled with misery. “Wait for what? For her to die?” His voice was hollow and hoarse. “Despite all your doctoring skills, that is all you could do for her sister, is it not, Dr. Walker? You could only wait by her bedside and hold her hand till she breathed her last ragged breath.”

The truth of his words seared me. What good am I as a doctor when I know not how to save my patients? Until a cure for Consumption is discovered, all I can offer them is the consolation of my presence. And as a most virulent form of the disease swoops through the area, claiming victims in a matter of days rather than years, ’tis no wonder remedies, no matter how irrational, are tried.

“I understand your need to do something to save your daughter, Mr. Wiley,” I said. “But if you proceed with this madness, you will only hasten Joanna’s death.”

“If you try to prevent us, you will hasten your own damn death,” the man standing beside the distraught father said in a deep menacing voice. He was of imposing height and broad-shouldered, with a full, black beard and pale eyes of penetrating intensity. “So get out of the way. What must be done here will be done.”

Henry stepped right up to him and, reaching up, laid a hand upon the man’s shoulder. “Hark this, sir. Your threats cannot prevent us from interfering. We will not stand by and let you haul this sick girl out in the cold for no rational purpose.”

The man glared down in disbelief that one of Henry’s slight stature would dare stand straight as a pine tree against him. “Who the hell are you?”

“The voice of reason,” Henry said.

“Is that so? Well, I will silence your voice quick enough if you do not step aside!” the man bellowed.

“Easy there, Solomon. You will affright Joanna,” Mr. Wiley cautioned his brother.

Too late. Poor Joanna, feverish, eyes as panicked as a fawn’s, clutching a red-stained cloth to her mouth, burst into tears and hid her face against her father’s chest.

“You must put her back to bed as any good father would,” I told Mr. Wiley.

“Don’t listen to him, Ezekiel,” his brother said.

But thank God he did. He returned Joanna to her bed, and I stroked her hand to calm her until her sunken eyes closed and her breathing steadied.

“Can it be done without her?” Mr. Wiley asked his brother in a low tone.

“If it has to be. But I cannot promise it will be as effective,” he replied.

“Best you forego it then,” Henry advised.

“This is not your business,” Solomon told him. “So be gone with you, and let us get on with it.”

“Are you ashamed to have witnesses?”

“Ashamed?” Solomon lifted his massive head most proudly. “I am not ashamed of my calling, nor have I anything to hide,” he declared. “If you and the doctor want to bear witness to the death of a vampyre, come with us.”

And so, leaving the child to sleep in peace, we four trudged out of the house. “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” Mrs. Wiley wailed as she chased after us.

Solomon stopped and faced her down. “Go see to your living daughter, woman. The other is lost to you.” She looked to her husband, but he only shook his head. With a shudder, she turned back to the house.

Onward we walked up the grassy knoll to the family burial plot. Solomon pulled a half-dozen cheroots tied with string from his dirty jacket pocket. He offered them to us, and after we refused he lit one and puffed at it hard. “It helps spare the nose from what’s coming,” he said.

I tried my best to reason with Ezekiel Wiley. “Let Hetty rest in peace. Do not listen to your brother’s false notions and violate her corpse.”

“If all that remains of my dear daughter now is a dried husk, we will return her to rest untouched,” he replied in a shaky voice.

“But if there are signs of life upon her body, it will be proof she is a revenant and must be destroyed,” Solomon said.

“Three months is not sufficient time for her body to have completely decomposed,” I said. “During my years of medical training I have seen many stages of decaying flesh and know of what I speak.”

“As I do!” Solomon firmly declared. “This is not the first nor the last time I will unearth a vampyre. And you shall soon see that Hetty has become one, doctor. Poor Joanna is being sucked dry of her life blood by her elder sister, who comes to her like the savage wolf to the helpless lamb.”

“Superstitious balderdash!” I shouted back at him.

Henry remained more calm. “How came you to believe your younger daughter was being preyed upon by her dead sister, Mr. Wiley?” he asked most courteously.

“When I awoke her in the night because she was moaning most piteously, she said there was such a weight upon her chest she could not catch a breath.”

“Hetty sitting upon her torso feeding!” Solomon interjected.

“The weight poor Joanna felt was the fluid trapped in her lungs, blocking her breathing,” I told Mr. Wiley. “Pay no heed to your brother’s reckless conjecture.”

“But ’twas Joanna herself who said to me that she saw Hetty looming over her in the night, eyes black as a demon’s and mouth dripping blood.”

“When did she tell you this, Mr. Wiley?” Henry inquired. “When first you awoke her?”

“No, not then, but the next morning.”

“After her Uncle Solomon had talked to her?”

“I don’t recall.” Mr. Wiley looked to his brother.

“What I recall,” Solomon told him, “is poor little Joanna pleading with me to save her from Hetty. And that is what I intend to do.”

Mr. Wiley shook his head and commenced to weep. “How can we desecrate Hetty’s body? She was such a good daughter.”

“That is why we must save her too!” his brother said. “If we kill this vile thing Hetty has become, her soul shall be set free to go to heaven.”

Mr. Wiley regained his resolve. “Then we must do it for her sake as well as Joanna’s.”

We had reached the burying ground at the top of the knoll, and on the grass lay a wooden casket they had already hauled out of the grave. I heard a piercing cry and looked up to see a hawk gliding in a wide, sweeping circle overhead. I had to wonder at what the hawk saw. Four grim men and an unearthed casket were but a part of a wider view from such a height. Spread out below the bird lay the rolling hills of the township, and atop one of them stood the Green, where the steeple of the Meetinghouse pierced the sky and the white clapboard houses clustered peacefully about the rectangle of grass and trees. Beyond the Green the ribbon of the Assabet River curved away south, with mills and water meadows along its banks. Carriages and pedestrians moved along the roads stretching through the landscape, chimneys puffed out smoke, and perhaps the sharp-eyed hawk could make out a train sliding along the gleaming rails of the new Fitchburg line. From such a height our individual, impassioned efforts below must seem as significant to a bird as the scurrying of ants does to us. I could not help but muse that as this hawk must circle and scream, we each have our destinies to act out, no matter how meaningless to other eyes. Yet as Henry oft reminds me, it is what man thinks of himself that really determines his fate. So our destinies are of our own making.

“It is not too late to put back the casket and let Hetty rest in peace,” Henry now told the two brothers.

Solomon picked up a crow bar, gave Henry a vicious look as if to strike him with it, then turned his attention to the task at hand. As he pried loose the lid, the nails holding it down shrieked, and when he yanked it off and revealed the corpse within, Mr. Wiley shrieked too.

“Her eyes!” he cried in horror.

They were wide open, pools of viscous liquid without iris or definition. Her skin had a faint blush of color, and her body was so bloated that it pressed against the fabric of her girlish white dress. Although the smell of rot permeated the damp air, indicating decomposition, there were no signs of decay. I have seen the condition many times in bodies brought in for dissection classes, some, shame to say, robbed from graves such as this and sold to Harvard Medical School.

“Observe how she has turned herself sideways,” Solomon said. Indeed, Hetty’s body, distorted by the gas within, had shifted in the coffin. “She lives, Ezekiel!”

Mr. Wiley gazed at the body, his countenance contorted with horror. “She lives upon the blood of her own sister,” he sobbed and pointed at fluid that had been forced out by the internal pressure of decay through the gaping mouth. “Look how she is swelled up on Joanna’s blood.”

“No. What you see is caused by the gases within the corpse,” I began to explain. “It is a most common occurrence and does not mean—”

My words were cut off by the thrust of an ax swung by Solomon into the dead girl’s chest, landing with a most sickening, squelching thud and cleaving through clothes, flesh, and into the sternum. The corpse shook, the arms rising in rebound from the force of the blow, the legs near jolted straight up in a most alarming fashion before falling back down. A gush of blood and fluid assaulted us, but Solomon did not falter. He swung and struck down once more with a ferocious and precisely directed blow, cleaving through the sternum entirely. He wrenched wider the split in the raw white bone to expose the heart, took out a curved knife, and savagely hacked around the organ. Then, without the slightest hesitation, he reached into the chest cavity and pulled the heart out with a sucking wrench. It leaked a red gore that was comprised of decomposed blood trapped at death within the now limp heart chambers.

“You see!” Solomon said, holding it up. “The demon’s heart drips with Joanna’s blood from last night’s feeding.”

Ezekiel staggered back. “Kill it!” he cried. “End it!”

Solomon stepped to the coffin and sawed through the corpse’s throat and neck vertebrae, grunting with the effort. The head shook in a most gruesome fashion as if protesting this further indignity. A handful of fair hair broke free of the scalp as he yanked upward. He bent again, wound his hand in the tresses, and pulled the head free of the neck. So disturbed, the eyes poured out their fluid, and more gore dripped around the projecting black tongue and ran down the chin.

Solomon turned the head around and shoved it backwards into the coffin but now at the feet of the corpse. “There!” He regarded his handiwork with grim satisfaction. “All that is left to do is burn the heart.”

Henry and I nailed the lid back on the coffin and, with Mr. Wiley’s help, lowered it into the ground. As we shoveled the dirt back, Solomon lit a fire and burned the heart on a flat stone. It took a good blaze to accomplish the task in the mist. I will never forget the hissing and bubbling and the odor of roasting flesh until the organ was finally reduced to ashes.

“Joanna has not breathed in the smoke,” Solomon said, “but we can bring her the ashes to ingest.”

“No.” Ezekiel kicked the mound of ash into the grass. “This must be enough, brother. I can bear no more.”

Solomon relented. Henry and I went back to the house to assure Mrs. Wiley it was over and her daughter was safely back in the ground. We did not, of course, mention the defacement done to Hetty’s body, and I pray the two Wiley men spare her the details.

Henry and I rode home mostly in silence, each in his own thoughts. Mine were grim as I considered the ignorance and savagery we had just witnessed. Henry’s thoughts, however, had taken an uplifting turn.

“Let us hope Solomon Wiley will evolve into a more enlightened creature in some future life here on earth,” he said.

“Perhaps his soul will regress instead of advance, and he will return as a slug,” I replied.

“That too is possible, I suppose,” Henry said. “Indeed, I sometimes wonder if my own soul has regressed by returning to earth in the body of a civilized white man.”

I smiled. “You think your past life as a savage suited your soul better?”

“Yes. But let us not speak of it anymore.”

That had been our agreement two summers ago, when we had found the skull of an Indian that had proved to us the truth of Reincarnation. And we had only spoken of it once since then, when I had asked Henry’s permission to write about his regression in a scientific article regarding hypnosis. When I assured him that neither his name, nor the evidence we found, nor any reference whatsoever to rebirth would be revealed in the article, he had given me leave to do so.

For the rest of the way home we returned to our private musings. We both have a great appreciation for silence. No doubt that is one of the major reasons we became and remain friends.

This evening, however, alone in my room, I find silence oppressive. Ghastly memories of what I witnessed in the Wiley graveyard slither through my mind. I do not want them to be the last images I recall before I fall asleep, else they will haunt my dreams too. In order to prevent this I shall conjure up images from the happy past, when Julia and I were together. Such golden memories remain untarnished despite her betrayal of our love. They comfort me far more than her presence ever could. Indeed, I would find her actual presence unbearable now. Frailty, thy name is woman!

Friday, 3 December

Although I had no expectation of seeing Adam today, I now await his arrival with great impatience. A good half hour has passed since Henry went to the tavern to fetch him. To stop myself from pacing, I have settled myself at the kitchen table to record the day’s events. My hand is nearly illegible, I see, for I am trembling with anticipation. I must take control of my emotions before Adam comes through the door. Indeed, I must always control myself in his presence now that I am a married woman.

Shackled though I am by matrimonial bonds, at least I have liberated myself from my husband’s daily oppression. What a sense of freedom swept over me when I disembarked from the ship this morning! So relieved was I to set foot on American ground that I almost knelt down right there on the pier to offer up a prayer of thanks. Good thing I did not give in to that impulse, else I would have been trampled by my fellow passengers as they rushed down the gangway and into the arms of waiting friends and family. I pushed through the cheery throng and made my way toward a free hackney cab I had spotted. Unfortunately, a gentleman more swift of foot than I got to it first. Further attempts to engage a hack proved just as fruitless. A lone woman is as good as invisible in dear old Boston. So off I went by foot to the railway station. It would have been an easy enough walk if not for my heavy portmanteau and a strong, cold wind coming off the Charles River.

By the time I boarded the train to Concord I was chilled to the bone. Fortunately there was a blazing stove in the ladies’ car, and I took a seat as near as I could to it. My time in the south of France has made me too sensitive to stern New England weather, and I could not stop shivering.

The lady occupying the seat next to mine looked up from her book. “You are not dressed warmly enough,” she said.

She was quite correct on that score. But I had little inclination to relate to a stranger that I had fled the prison that was so unfortunately my home with little more than the clothes on my back and a valise stuffed with undergarments.

“Here, wrap this around your shoulders,” she said, shrugging off her woolen shawl.

“But then you will be cold,” I protested.

“I assure you I will not be. I am wearing three flannel petticoats,” she confided to me sotto voce. “Truly, you will be doing me a great service by alleviating me of this heavy shawl. I find the hot air radiating from that charcoal stove most oppressive.”

S. . .