999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [35]
For in the Contracoeur Public Library he’d discovered, in a section tided “Contracoeur Valley History,” several aged, leather-bound books whose covers hadn’t been opened in decades, and out of curiosity he’d read of the renowned Moses Adams Matheson, the “textile manufacturer—wilderness conservationist” who’d constructed Cross Hill, one of the “distinguished architectural landmarks of the region;” he’d been intrigued to learn that his great-grandfather had crossed the Atlantic Ocean steerage class from Liverpool, England, unaccompanied by any adult, at the age of twelve, in 1873; that he’d been an apprentice to a shipbuilder in Marblehead, Massachusetts, but soon left for upstate New York, where, in Winterthurn City, he built the first of several Matheson textile mills on the Winterhurn River; within a decade, he’d become a wealthy man; by the turn of the century a multimillionaire, in the era in which such aggressive capitalists as J. Pierpont Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Edward Harriman and Andrew Carnegie made their enormous fortunes through monopolies and trusts; and through the systematic exploitation of unorganized, largely immigrant labor. Moses Adams Matheson was never so rich as these men, nor so notorious; yet, Graeme gathered from his rapid skimming of these texts, his great-grandfather had cruelly exploited his workers; women, young girls, even children had been employed in his mills for as little as $2.50 a week; many of his workers were younger than twelve, and girls as young as six and seven worked thirteen hours a day. Aloud Graeme whispered, “Thirteen hours!” He had never worked at any prolonged task until the folly of the breakfast room, under Mother’s guidance; at that, he hadn’t worked longer than two hours at a time, and his effort had hardly been uniformly concentrated. He could not imagine working for—thirteen hours! As a young child in clamorous, stifling-hot or freezing conditions.
Graeme read with horror of the “South Winterthurn conflagration of February 8, 1911"—one of the Matheson textile mills had burnt to the ground, killing more than thirty persons including young children; investigation revealed that the mill hadn’t been properly equipped with adequate fire exits, and in fact, unaccountably, most of the doors had been locked. He found himself staring at a sepia photograph of a smoldering skeleton of a building; firemen and others stood about, and on the snowy ground were corpses in rows, shrouded in canvas, so many! and some so small! A number of the fire victims had been so badly burnt, their faces so charred, absolute identification was impossible. Bodies without faces.
Blindly, Graeme shoved the book back onto the shelf. He’d had enough of family history. How right he’d been to feel a sick sort of shame to be a Matheson and to live at the ruin of Cross Hill; erected, as he was only now discovering, upon the bones of such innocent victims.
He decided not to tell Rosalind or Stephen. Not just yet. The revelation was too ugly, too humiliating. Graeme treasured his own adolescent cynicism but would not have wished his more energetic, more attractive sister and brother to share it. Someone has to protect the innocent from knowing too much.
He wondered if Mother knew about Moses Adams Matheson. Probably not. Surely not.
And Father? Surely yes.
To be fated, to be accursed—isn’t that also to be special?
Since that June night, early in our summer of exile, when he’d seen the creature he called the thing-without-a-face, Graeme had rarely slept more than an hour or two at a time at night; often he didn’t undress and lie down in his bed at all, for it had become to him a place of torment and misery. And so sleep overcame him during the day, in paralytic attacks; helpless to stay awake, he sank into a deep, catatonic sleep, like an infant; spells from which, blinking and gasping for breath, he’d wake with a violent