The celebration seemed to invigorate the town which bustled with new energy on the morn. The collective anxiety over the advance of Santa Anna’s forces were swept away in a tide of sublime reflection and brotherhood. The festival of jubilation had passed and given way to a dreamy sabbath morn. The streets were thronged with businessmen and farmers selling produce and trading livestock. There was talk of a new barge of goods coming into port in the next few days. The town was also seeing an influx of customers from the surrounding territory come to ply their own wares for the harvest or replenish stock for winter. Drovers and ranch hands moved hogs, mules, and cattle along the river. Often, they stopped a while for rest, refreshment, and repairs, giving a surge of business to the Washington Inn and local taverns. There was even a surge of new residents—mostly German and Swiss immigrants looking to plant a settlement, set up shop or conduct surveying expeditions. Here and there, Texian volunteer companies passed through bringing news of the front that seemed closing in ever nearer.
For Gabriel Blackwood, this was a prime business opportunity. Various couriers and long-distance trade partners from Galveston and Houston were making their stop there. This of course gave him a rare chance at direct correspondence with shipping agents, warehouse men and importers carrying local and exotic goods. Most especially, it was a chance to connect with certain trade partners from New Orleans. Naturally, this meant a day on the town for him and his family.
What might appear to most a menial chore was in fact a fine family outing for the Blackwoods. While Gabriel chatted with the boatmen and assorted business associates, his wife and daughter chatted with tradesmen and travelers about news upriver from Brazoria or Velasco.
Ada enjoyed watching steamboats listing by, puffing great plumes of black smoke into the air like slumbering leviathans. She enjoyed watching the unloading of cargo by dozens of dockhands and sailors milling around in a well-oiled machine. The effect was equal parts hypnotic and enthralling. She liked to imagine the most fantastic contents in those titanic crates—rich silk, spices, and gems of oriental splendor. Every bruise, every callous and scar on a sailor’s hand or body told a story. She imagined the brawls in seedy taverns and misty piers, and crowded barns and steamboat decks with brutal boxing matches. When business experienced a break, Gabriel attended the horse races with his wife while permitting Ada to take her fill of the town. For Ada, such time was ripe for her usual round through the taverns and inns, soliciting news and tales from the newcomers.
The tavern known as The Royal Oak was a favorite haunt of denizens and passersby alike. A cobbled together two-story shack of rough, oaken planks and iron nails. Its frame was twisted, warped, and bloated with the dank air of early autumn. The walls were painted deep green, and the ceiling was a deep blue, like the hue of a winter dusk. The packed foyer and dining area was beclouded with the smoke of pipes, and floors were stained dark with whiskey.
“The big thicket, you say, Miss?” chortled a wizened man with a knotted face. “Ah, you mean eastward through the woods. There was a group of fifty or so settlers foraged yon when ol’ Moses Austin brought his people to the promised land. Some Austrians or such folks from Germany or Hungary thereabouts as found their way to the Gulf ports at Velasco.”
“Were they our neighbors? Were they part of our community? Did we once extend through the thicket?” She spoke hurriedly as she leaned towards him from the other side of the table.
“Oh, miss, they’d been gone and moved off some fifteen years agone once our little town was founded,” replied the man with a wave of his hand. “We don’t even know that they planted roots. Might’ve got a whiff of that summer wind off the gulf and decided to head for drier pastures northward.”
Most of Ada’s investigations yielded similar results. Few could say aught but that others had been there before, but largely cleared out by the time an actual township was founded. Until recently, Washington had been a backwater town before the provisional government had been moved there in order to draft the Declaration of Independence. Then it had served a brief tenure as the capital of the Republic. Now it was a central hub of trade and general foot traffic through the territory. Strange that though some (mostly the elder folk) recalled the former settlement, they knew no more than what the old gentlemen in the inn had told her. Furthermore, no one could help her draw a connection between Black Jack and his supposed presence in the thicket.
She sat hunched over the stained table scrawling on her little book, oblivious to the curious looks from patrons and staff alike. Noise and commotion never seemed to bother Ada. If anything, the unruly nature of the setting only served to enhance its ambiance and further inspire her writings. Her focus often drifted to a local inebriate who was known to her; Israel Norman his name was. She rather enjoyed observing Israel, feeling he added color to the place.
Israel’s inebriate moods vacillated wildly between effusive mirth and melancholic reflection. In the brief twilight of morning sobriety, his manner affected a sense of living death. His gaze was vacant, and he drifted, almost floated, his way through the streets like driftwood bobbing along a serene sea. People said he kept his spirit in a whiskey jug, and his body returned every morning to collect it.
Israel’s soul found smooth sailing that day, for he was full of hearty, slurring goodwill for his fellow man. He had earned his money formerly as a Texas Ranger, but these days he worked on one of the local plantations harvesting sugarcane. His skull was partially bald and marked with the long scar of a scalping wound. Locals commonly diagnosed this gruesome feature as the itch that only the whisky could scratch. He was a rangy man with a hooked nose who as often belched his terse responses or expressed each garbled thought like something more resembling a bowl movement than coherent English. He often punctuated a string of rambling, incoherent thoughts with a lift of his mug and a raw throated, “Hang the lot of ya!” before drenching his parched palette. He would punctuate his toast by dropping his chin, leaning over the knotted floorboards and stomping his foot three times. Little could be made of this peculiar ritual apart from a sort of nervous tick.
Ada never spoke to Israel but found it more rewarding to simply observe. Oh, she caught whispers and murmurings and guffaws at his expense. Yet she was an impartial observer. To her, Israel was atmosphere—the surly gravedigger on a moonlit night, the bellowing guard swaggering over the gloomy jailhouse. She traced a morbid history from the scars on his skull and sometimes pictured a tragic hero; a fallen figure of the frontier vowing vengeance on the natives who took his scalp and bore away his fair maiden. Or perhaps more sinister. Perhaps a wicked desperado, a real Bluebeard bearing away captive maidens for the dashing hero to rescue.
“Dear me, Ada! You’re so morbid!” sighed her friend, Cora. Cora Banway was a neighbor of the Blackwoods, and her father was a close associate of Ada’s in the shipping office. He owned some stock in San Antonio that ranked him among the elite of Washington’s estates. The girls were huddled around a candle on the floor of the green bedroom, where they had resolved to share scary stories.
“My mother said the same thing yesterday,” huffed Ada, looking slightly vexed. “This town’s chief export is tales of morbidity—warfare, Indian raids, scalping, banditry, ghosts, goblins. Am I so much more morbid? Grandmother told me fairy stories that would make your hair curl!”
“My hair curls just fine, thank you,” sighed Cora lying on her stomach and propping her chin in her hands. “I blame your infatuation with Mr. Poe more than your German fairy stories.”
“Oh, don’t be so dull, Cora,” teased Ada. “What about the Thicket? Who knows what secrets hide there? What of Black Jack? What of the settlers who vanished those years agone?”
“Vanished might be a strong word, Ada. I’m sure they simply moved on. It was a settlement that didn’t stick.”
“What of the lost colonies like Roanoke or Popham?” countered Ada. “They vanished too, and no such explanations presented themselves. We know they were here before, they were gone when we arrived, and no one knows where they went.”
“You yourself told me of Mr. Morgan’s answer. They probably just moved on and scattered to the larger colonies and cities. You know how many homesteads are scattered across the territory. Perhaps they got tired of each other’s company and decided to spread out.” Cora rolled onto her back and stretched. “Anyway, why not talk of more interesting stories? This one’s too scattered and incomplete. Why not talk about Jean Lafitte? I always liked that story. Pirates, treasure, daring escapes.”
Ada acquiesced without complaint. After all, she loved the tales of swashbuckling adventure and romance as much as anyone. Many of the youths loved to recount tales of Lafitte’s exploits, alternately casting him as a fearsome brute or dashing rogue. Alternately a leviathan looming from the fog of the gulf, or a Robin Hood of the high seas. Ada decided a more sinister aspect was called for that night with the thrash of the rain against the roof and the snarling thunder above. She painted a picture of thrashing waves on a black sea and churning foam. She snatched the groan of the cypress timbers of the large frame house and wove it into the timbers of a ship’s hull. It was a chase lit only by the flash of errant lightning.
That night, the rain soothed Ada as it often did, a rhythm of pattering drops punctuated by the low purr of thunder. In her sleep, she dreamed she lay within the hull of that long barque hewing its path through the tossing waves like a scalpel.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Then abruptly she woke. She knew not why. It was one of those abrupt awakenings that leaves the afterimage of a nightmare you cannot recall. She was conscious only that her heart thundered in her breast, and she placed a hand there to calm it. She blinked and cast her eyes around the darkness, immersing herself in the familiar surroundings. Yet so dark was it that she could make out no shape in the room, not even her own hands. She silently prayed for another intermittent flash of lightning to give her a glimpse of the room, just a glimpse to remind her she was not alone. The lightning only flickered slightly, like wavering candlelight, and the thunder continued to roll overhead.
She lay back on her pillow and stared up at the ceiling, waiting for sleep to claim her again. She felt Cora beside her but could hear no breath of hers over the thunder and rain. A sudden and weird feeling crawled up her spine like a plodding tarantula, a feeling of alien company, as if it were not truly Cora that lay beside her.
Then, her head jerked up from the pillow. She heard it. Faintly. Briefly. But she knew she heard it. Yet she could not describe it. She strained her ears in the darkness and, for once, tried desperately to suppress her overactive imagination. She stared into nothing, and slowly, faintly, the nothing answered. A kind of slow, guttural rattle seemed to whisper in the distance. Then it was silent, and she only heard the patter of the rain for a space.
Ada looked over towards Cora and lifted a hand to wake her, but stopped, her hand arrested midair. She knew not why, but she drew back her hand and clutched it to her breast. She had no word for this hesitation, and indeed she hardly thought at all as she slipped a foot to the floor and drew herself up. By the time her hand hovered before the cold iron of the door handle, she decided she simply had not wanted to wake Cora. She recoiled slightly from the icy touch of the brass handle, then gripped it and squeezed the thumb press that lifted the latch. The door glided outward on silent hinges, which somehow made Ada’s skin crawl more than if they had screamed with rust. She felt a draft through the open door like the hot breath of a slumbering giant. Then she was in the hallway. Soon, a silent flash of lightning below told her she was on the landing, some ten feet from the topmost stair. She felt around in the blackness until her fingers gripped the banister. Another flash through the windows below revealed the height of the landing. She involuntarily cringed against the banister, wrapping an arm bracingly around it. When she collected herself, she listened again. She watched the brief flashes of light illuminate the foyer, which stretched and leaned with its angled shadows. The world felt tilted as she felt her way along the banister, and she felt herself leaning against it as she moved. She halted abruptly before the stairs, straining her ears again. She tried to convince herself of the emptiness, that all truly slept but the sundering sky, and she would walk back to rejoin her comrade in dreamless sleep.
Her shoulders clenched, and a small squeak of a gasp escaped her lips as the croak echoed again, this time louder, reverberating through the halls. A faint stench wafted to her nostrils which caused her to gag slightly. Her fingers dug into her cheeks as she clenched a hand over her mouth. The croak had sounded muffled, as if far below. Intermittent gusts of wind rattled the windows, startling her. Slowly, she felt her way across the banister and descended the stairwell.
The alien feeling swept over her again as she moved around the corner into the sitting room. As if Ada herself had been a dream, as if the town itself had been a dream, and now she woke in nothing. She could think of no more awful feeling than that terrible loneliness; that the world itself was empty but for her.
She stood in the entrance to the sitting room, staring at vague shapes in the darkness, holding her breath against the stench which was more potent now. A trembling shudder buckled her knees and seared up her spine as the silence broke. She heard the croak again, louder, nearer, and beneath her feet. She turned sharply and staggered back against the couch with another squeak of fear. Covering her mouth again, she stared at the floorboards where she had just stood. In rigid silence, she focused on the dark floor as if it were the edge of a vast spiderweb. In the pregnant silence, she waited with bated breath. Then, she knelt stiffly on the floor and braced her hands against it. The stench was now almost overpowering—a pungent odor like rotting fruit that seemed to seep between the floorboards. She was no longer human, but a bundle of nerves, a puppet driven by impulses she could only observe, powerless, from the back of her mind. Tremblingly, she pressed her ear to the floor, which felt like ice, and listened. Silence followed, but she felt no relief. She did not know what she expected or wanted to hear. She felt as though she were held there, forced to listen by some unseen hand. Her eyes all the while stared back across the floor to the foyer. She heard faintly the drip, drip, drip as of water into a well and a vague lapping noise. Her joints relaxed, and she lay flat on the floor with a deep sigh. From the depths beneath the floor, a sigh gave back. She froze. The wind. The wind through the boards. The sigh caught, and her breath with it. A gurgling sounded faintly before breaking into a long and hideous croak that rolled up from the floor. Her spine recoiled back as the blood drained from her body, but the sound echoed louder following her from the boards. She flew back, skittering on flailing elbows and heels. A scream ripped from her strangled throat, raw and broken, that trembled into the blackness of the groaning rafters.
Ada was a mass of flailing limbs, scrambling and clawing across the floor, and the world around her was a blur. She felt the inescapable darkness drag at her, and tripping snagging her nightgown on a splinter. Blood thundered in her ears, and her blurred vision melted shadows around her. She finally found her feet and ran through the darkness, not knowing where she was bound, but away. A trampling sound sounded from the darkness, distant before closing in abruptly like the tread of a massive spider. She spun around in blind panic, staggering back around a corner. She pivoted on her heel, twisted an ankle, and flailed out with a hand that found emptiness. Her breath caught as she fell forward through nothingness. Then, hands grasped from the darkness. She felt a coiling around her waist like a python and writhed. The coiling tightened around her with a sharp tug, like the snap of a snare, and her world vanished.
***
Ada could not say she awoke. More she felt that for an instant, she had vanished with the rest of the world. She had felt a sense of unreality, a shock that paralyzed her sense of cognition. Then, the darkness drew back like a slow curtain, and her gaze focused on a pair of wide, blue eyes. She heard a faint voice, and then the sensation of the hands grasping her crawled back like spider legs on her skin. She writhed with a gasp and threw her head back, but the firm hands held her, and a deep voice called to her from the darkness.
“Ada! Ada! Calm! It’s alright, girl!”
“Oh, God! Oh God!”
The sharp contrast of pitches and the muted, distant sobbing brought her sharply to reality, and the world gradually took shape from the darkness. She found herself in the arms of Mr. Banway, who pocketed his smelling salts and sat her up, rubbing her back. “There, my girl. Breathe. Breathe. That’s it. You’re safe now.”
Ada glanced around and saw Cora huddled by the hallway, crying, and saw the house slave, Miss Alma, leaning over them with a candle. When she saw Ada awake, she gave a deep sigh of relief and crossed herself. “Oh, thank Jesus! Are you alright, Miss?”
“Perhaps we should get a doctor,” suggested Mr. Banway.
“I’m alright!” Ada spoke suddenly, bracing on a hand and catching her breath. “I’m alright! Please, sir! Oh, I’m so sorry! So sorry!”
“Hush, hush, Ada! Don’t strain yourself. It’s alright.” Banway braced her by the shoulder and lifted her chin so he could see her eyes. He beckoned Alma closer with the light and squinted into Ada’s eyes. Then he sighed with relief. “I was worried you had hit your head when I pulled you back. Thank God.”
“Pulled me back? But what…?” Ada’s words slurred sightly in her bleary confusion. Then, she glanced to one side and saw a closet beneath the stairs thrust wide, black and interminable in the candlelight. Led gently back to the small doorway, the light of Banway’s candle revealed a portion of floor with missing boards. The faint glimmer of light shone down the mouth of a pit partially covered with fresh boards. She felt her heart lodge in her throat.
“Oh, God! I must have left the door open,” gasped Banway. “We haven’t replaced that part of the floor yet.” He drew Ada back, shut and bolted the door.
“Mr. Banway…” she whispered hollowly, “what is that?”
“A cistern,” he replied with a nervous look. “The house was built on an unused cistern that was uncovered some time after it was built. It had been long concealed by earth before some flooding collapsed it. I thought a sinkhole had formed. We’re still working on covering it.”
Banway was ushering her back towards Alma when Ada turned abruptly and asked, “Then what was that noise I heard?”
Banway looked puzzled. “Noise, Ada? You mean the storm?”
“No,” Ada insisted. “It was like a groan or a croak. I heard it echo upstairs and came down to look.”
Banway’s brows furrowed, and his face was indecipherable. Then again, perhaps it was merely the flicker of the candle playing its weird gleam on his face. Then his face softened as if he suddenly understood. “Oh, I see.” He patted her shoulder with a smile. “The heat and moisture have been warping the wood for some time now. This often causes the timbers to groan, especially when it rains after a dry spell. Possibly the croaking was just the groan echoing through the cistern. I’m sorry it woke you, dear. I should’ve mentioned it.” He led her back to Alma. “Everything’s alright now, girls. The storm will pass soon enough. Alma, why don’t you take the girls back to their room?”
“Yessir,” nodded Alma, taking Ada by the shoulders and leading her to the stairs. “You want I should make you some warm milk, Miss Ada? It’ll make you feel much better.” She looked back over at Banway. “Mister Banway, should I bring anything to the missus? I hope she ain’t been upset by such a row.”
Banway glanced at her as if just remembering. “Hm? Oh! Not to worry, Alma. She’s been having headaches lately and decided to take some laudanum tonight. Best not to disturb her.”
“Oh, bless her heart,” bid Alma sympathetically and turned to lead the children back upstairs.
Ada stopped once more and turned at the banister. “Mister Banway!”
Banway jerked his chin up to face her with a blank look on his face. “Yes, Ada?”
“I am…truly sorry, sir. I did not mean to cause such a disturbance. I hope you can forgive me.” The girl’s voice was quiet, and her eyes were downcast as she spoke.
Banway blinked and then made a motion like shaking the cobwebs from his head before smiling back up at her. “Oh, my dear, think nothing of it. Why, I had such nocturnal anxieties when I was a boy. Perhaps a little less ghost stories for now, eh?” He gave her a wink. “All’s well, now. Get a good night’s rest. There’s a good girl.”
The girls were led back upstairs, and Ada heard the click of a lock echo dully below. The echo was quickly swallowed by the white noise of falling rain, and a squeeze of Cora’s hand banished all grim thoughts away.
