IN THE VERY STONES
"It is inconceivable to me," wrote my psychic-investigator friend, Lucius Leffing, "that any person of reasonable perception and sensitivity could pass a long period of his life in a specific habitation without leaving something of himself, impregnated as it were, in the very stones, wood and mortar of the place."
How vividly I recalled this statement later on! But let me start at the beginning.
I had been away from New Haven for many years and I returned in a rather weary mood of reminiscence and regret. My health was not good. The rheumatic fever of my childhood had finally damaged my heart. In addition, I was having eye trouble. The optic nerves were unaccountably inflamed; strong light was painful to me. In dim or subdued light, however, I could see remarkably well, so well in fact that I began to feel that my vision was becoming abnormal.
After engaging a room in one of the few remaining residential areas of the city which had not been engulfed in the spreading contagion of human and social degeneration, I began to take long, rambling walks about the town. I usually waited for a day when the sun was hidden; when the sky was overcast and the light was grey rather than gold, my eyes stopped throbbing and I could stroll in relative peace.
The city had changed remarkably. At times I scarcely knew where I was. Acres of familiar buildings had been swept away. Remembered streets had vanished. Great new structures, efficient but ugly, rose on every side. New highways looped and slashed in every direction. In bewilderment I frequently retreated to the still unseized central Common, or Green as it is called. (I understood, however, that even this last leafy refuge was under siege; various interests were agitating to cover the grass with cement in order to create a gigantic pay-toll parking lot.)
One afternoon in late October when a threat of rain hung in the air, I started out on a walk. The lack of sun rested my eyes; the chill air somehow soothed me. For an hour or so I strolled aimlessly. On a sudden whim I decided to visit a city area which I had so far neglected. I had lived in this section as a very young child—over forty years ago. Although I was scarcely more than three when the family moved, I retained vivid memories of the neighborhood and of the specific house itself.
The house was a two-story, red-brick structure, solidly built, located at 1248 State Street. When I lived there, a big elm tree stood in front of the house. In the rear, a large empty lot which stretched to the adjacent street, Cedar Hill Avenue, made an ideal playground. Subsequently the elm tree was cut down, the lot was nearly filled by a cheap tenement-type building and the entire neighborhood declined.
As I approached the old area, I was appalled at the appearance of things. Some houses had been torn down; others stood vacant, displaying smashed windows, broken doors and collapsed verandas. On one block every house was empty and partially wrecked. I was amazed and disconcerted. I had not seen such desolation since war days.
Under those grey October skies, with a thin mist already starting to fall, it was the bleakest scene imaginable. I experienced an intense oppression of spirits, and as I continued to walk along those strangely deserted streets, my mood of dejection only deepened.
I finally met a pedestrian, muffled already in a winter overcoat. He squinted at me suspiciously when I asked him why so many of the houses stood smashed and empty. "Route 91," he muttered, hurrying away.
Although I had learned there was indeed a rational explanation for the devastation, I felt no better. I was firmly convinced that a slight alteration on the highway blueprints could have carried the new road across empty marsh flats, only a few miles away. The cost of fill would have been a fraction of that expended on extensive condemnation proceedings.
I fully expected that the brick house of my early childhood lay already in ruins. I felt a thin exultation at finding it still standing. I say "thin" because of course I knew it was doomed. Already its windows were broken, its door sagged in and part of its front hedge had been ground away by truck or bulldozer.
As I stood regarding it, remembering clearly episodes of over forty years past, I reflected on the rootlessness which marks the average city denizen. By choice, or more likely necessity, he moves from one house to another. He has no anchor, nothing of continuity. When he visits his old neighborhood, he may find that his former house has vanished. The site of it may be occupied by a city-supported "project" for permanent welfare cases, or by a cinder-block garage, or by a barren parking lot. The house, the trees, the back yard, the very curbstones and sidewalks may be gone.
The returner will experience a haunting sense of loss, a sense of bewilderment, of chaos. He may finally begin to feel that he is even losing his own identity, that, in fact, he has no identity. He will feel lost in time, without either a future or a past. There will be nothing he can go back to and nothing of permanence that he can foresee in an uncertain future.
Isolated, fugacious, essentially a drifter, he will experience a loneliness of spirit which nothing can assuage. Thousands of his kind inhabit the modern city, gnawed by a sense of their own rootlessness, hungering in vain for a home, a habitation which partakes of the flavor of time, a continuing and cherished spot of earth which links their own past with some kind of hopeful future.
With these depressing thoughts in mind, I stood before the lost red brick house of my childhood. I had an impulse to enter, but I supposed it was unsafe and very probably forbidden.
Dusk fell; the mist grew heavier; and still I lingered in that area. Moving away from the doomed house I had known, I wandered along those desolate streets, peering through cracked windows, through sagging doors which never again would open to a friendly hand.
In some windows, frayed, blackened curtains, left hanging in the confusion of forced removal, fluttered in the cold October wind. Odd bits of broken furniture, dishes and ornaments lay scattered about. Entire lifetimes had been passed in some of these houses; now they stood as empty shells, awaiting absolute and final destruction.
The entire area seemed deserted, silent, drained of all life. Even the usual city noises were strangely muffled and distant.
I roamed restlessly, numbed by the desolation which surrounded me, yet perversely unwilling to leave. The mist thickened and full darkness fell and I remained.
In spite of the darkness I could see remarkably well. I linked this abnormal ability with my eyes' unusual sensitivity to strong light; I felt that both conditions stemmed from the inflamed state of the optic nerves, an affliction I have already mentioned.
I passed an alley, glittering strangely with bits of scattered window glass, and stood surveying an adjacent house which leaned crazily with a collapsed roof. It was a small white frame house, inexpensively built, and yet I saw that someone had once tended it carefully. The paint was bright; the little mailbox looked as if it had been scrubbed; and the trampled remains of a once-neat garden surrounded the place.
As, musing, I stared at this wrecked house through the growing mist, I saw a face at one of the two front ground-floor windows. It was the face of an old man, white, mournful, filled with an ineffable desolation.
I gazed at it in astonishment. My first thought was that an elderly vagrant had crept into the wreckage of the white house in order to pass the night. The dampness, probably, made his old bones ache.
The face continued to look out at me; I walked away with some uneasiness. I shivered, blaming it on the cold mist.
I had gone less than a half block when I saw the woman. Enormously fat, she sat in a wicker chair on the half-demolished veranda of a two-story house. She wore very thick-lensed glasses which seemed to reflect light from some hidden source. There was no moon, certainly, and I saw no artificial lights nearby.
I was startled, but I supposed that a few people must still be clinging illegally to old homes in the area, pending final arrangements for the occupancy of a new residence.
Some impulse urged me to hurry past, to move straight ahead without looking aside. Stubbornly, however, and against my own best judgement, I refused.
Instead, I paused, cleared my throat and spoke. "Good evening," I said.
The fat woman did not reply; she did not seem to have heard me. Possibly, I reasoned, in addition to having weak eyes, she was also hard of hearing.
I moved a few steps up the front walk and nodded. "Good evening," I repeated, loudly.
Then I blinked in astonishment. The wicker chair was empty! I stopped dead and stared at it. Momentarily I had glanced down at the walk to make sure that I would not stumble over debris; in those scant seconds the fat woman must have vacated her chair and slipped inside.
I marveled. For one of her bulk, she moved with amazing agility. Turning, I went back to the sidewalk and started on. I supposed that the woman was self-conscious about her continued occupancy in the condemned house and had gone inside to avoid any necessity of discussing it with a stranger.
As I walked away, I glanced back. Once again I saw light glitter on those thick-lensed glasses; the fat woman was back in her wicker chair.
Something more than the swirling mist made me shudder. Frowning, I hurried on. It was late, I told myself, and I had better leave these ruined, mist-shrouded streets and go home to a good cup of hot tea.
I walked rapidly, but I could not resist looking at the vacant houses I passed.
Suddenly I stopped. My heart began pounding. An icy gush of fear made my scalp tingle. Wide-eyed, mouth agape, I gazed through that tenuous wall of mist and felt that reason and sanity were leaving me.
Nearly half of those smashed and deserted houses all at once were occupied. I saw pale sad faces peering from a dozen different windows. Dim, mist-circled figures sat on some of the porches. An old man, twisted with some arthritic malady, worked feebly in a tiny front garden. A middle-aged woman, white as death, but with a kind of hopeless fury stamped on her face, stood glaring near a broken gate.
Worse than these were other sights. I saw a rocker moving to-and-fro on a porch, although there was no one in it. I saw a claw-like hand, tapering to a vague sleeve which in turn raveled away to nothingness, clutching the brick side of a building. In the rear garden of a half-destroyed house I glimpsed what appeared to be the disembodied head of a woman in a big straw hat drifting slowly above the matted tangle of a neglected flower plot.
I felt the clutch of near madness. I no longer had any faint desire to linger and look. Flight, immediate and imperative, became my only object.
I rushed wildly through those forsaken, yet-not-forsaken streets with fear like a hound at my heels. I ran till my heart thumped and dizziness overcame me. At last, away from that accursed area of peering white faces, of clinging mist and strange pregnant silence, I collapsed in a doorway.
Hours afterward I reached home and fell into bed. For days I was ill. My heart had been strained anew and in addition I manifested pleuritic symptoms. As I lay in bed, I brooded over my weird experience on that street of silent houses. I told myself that my eyes, inflamed and super-sensitive, had played tricks on me, that the drifting fog plus my own imagination had been at fault.
But weeks later when I related my adventure to my psychic-investigator friend, Lucius Leffing, he shook his head at my explanations.
"I am firmly convinced," he told me, "that neither your inflamed eyes nor your imagination conjured up the phantoms which you describe.
"As I wrote you recently, it is inconceivable to me that any person of reasonable perception and sensitivity could pass a long period of his life in a specific habitation without leaving something of himself, impregnated as it were, in the very stones, wood and mortar of the place.
"What you saw were the psychic residues of the poor vanished souls who, in the aggregate, had spent hundreds of years in those condemned houses. Their psychic remnants were still clinging to the only earthly anchors that remained, and already, as you relate, some of them had dwindled and faded to mere detached fragments."
He shook his head. "Poor souls!"