Shadows Out of Time

The Private Estate JAMES CHAMBERS

Tonight, nearly fifty years after my big brother leapt to his death while fleeing a giant cockroach with the face of an old woman, my long-lost childhood sweetheart, Maggie Delano, knocked on my front door. I hadn’t seen Maggie since she vanished from New York City in the summer of 1973 while helping me investigate Dennis’s death. Now on this warm, placid night, there she stood, exactly as I recalled her, as if birthed into existence from my memory, aged not a day although the gravity in her eyes hinted at decades of experiences unimaginable to me.

“Hey there, Richie-Rich,” she said.

The sound of my old nickname, spoken by her voice, eroded my doubts about her identity. When she guided me through the childish secret handshake we’d invented in middle school, she erased them completely.

What else could I do but invite her in and listen, speechless, to her story? Her presence incited in me a paralyzing riot of emotion and anxiety that only deepened as I grasped her words. They ignited as many new questions as they answered, and by the end of our all-too-short visit, my mind boiled over with jigsaw fragments of the past, present, and future. Only the invitation Maggie extended to me stuck firmly in my mind, a shocking offer she allowed me a single night and day to consider before she promised to return tonight for my answer.

Though I yearn for the moment I’ll see her again, a day provided hardly enough time to organize my thoughts — but I have struggled, sleepless, the entire time to make sense of what she revealed to me. I don’t know what’s real anymore or what I believe. I’ve dug deep into the past to my nineteen-year-old self’s stunted effort to explain Dennis’s death, the last period in my life when I sought the truth.

In those days, only Maggie stood by me when my family refused any support. Strict and conservative, the entire Hendricks clan had disowned Dennis for his drug abuse and involvement in a counterculture movement called Wicca, advocated in New York City back then by a modern witch named Raymond Buckland. Dennis, being Dennis, climbed those Neopagan ranks until he met Redcap, a man who ran a Greenwich Village coven inspired by the work of Keziah Mason, a 17th-century witch now acknowledged in rarified circles as an early, misunderstood mathematical genius. Redcap almost certainly caused my brother’s death, though neither I nor the police could prove it. My parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, however, all so ashamed of Dennis, didn’t care to know either way and remained content to see him buried and move on with their lives. Only Maggie and I cared to do otherwise.

We had grown up thick as thieves next door to each other in the Long Island Bay town of Knicksport, fifty miles outside the city. At age five, we promised to marry in that way little kids innocently do, but as adults, we remained platonic, the bond of brother and sister, which made losing Maggie in 1973 all the more difficult. The one warm, ever-present constant in my life, a caring woman who dreamed of becoming a doctor — gone. And when we had come so close to grasping the hidden facts of Dennis’s death.

Based on statements to police from neighbors who witnessed his panicked dash from his second-floor apartment to the rooftop from which he plummeted, we knew Dennis had raved about the cockroach creature as he ran, that he had talked about it stalking him for days. The cops chalked it off to hallucinations instigated by drug use, an easy enough explanation. Except that the story resonated for me. Five years younger than my twentytwo-year-old brother and my head filled with the strange things he’d told me, I wondered what if there were more to his fatal mania than psychedelic derangement. I couldn’t shake myself loose from that question.

In the aftermath of Maggie’s visit tonight, I’ve retrieved an old shoebox from the back of my closet. In it lie all my notes and photos from that time, materials I never mustered the courage to revisit or discard. And with them my 1968 Carry-Corder 150, which, astonishingly, still works with fresh batteries despite storage for all the intervening years.

The cassettes still play. The voices still speak.

Maggie’s. That dirtbag pusher, Squirrel’s. Mine, younger and deeper.

My brother’s.

The city street noise hums like a background theme. The morning of August 8, 1973, outside a brownstone apartment on East 4th Street, a moment kept alive magnetically.

The last day I sought the truth.

August 8, 1973, recording. The rush of passing cars. Chattering passersby. A call for a taxi.

Maggie: You recording?

Me: Yeah, pretty cool, right? Easier than taking notes.

Maggie: Unless you run out of batteries or tape.

Me: Got extras right here.

The slap of my hand patting my satchel.

Maggie: You sure this is the right place?

Me: The papers reported this address back in ’71. The superintendent found a child’s corpse hidden in the basement walls. The police suspected Redcap and his coven of killing him.

Maggie: Whoa, Richie-Rich, you didn’t tell me we’re checking out a murder scene.

Me: It’s not related. Redcap’s people had a solid alibi.

Squirrel: Yeah, alibis don’t mean shit, man.

Me: The body was found behind a wall that hadn’t been touched for fifteen years.

Squirrel: Right, man, but it was the body of a kid only a week dead.

Maggie: What? Are you joking? You’re joking.

Squirrel: I ain’t joking. You guys paid me for information. I’m giving you information.

Maggie: It’s not like there’s a dead body in there now, right?

Me: No, of course not.

Squirrel: Not that you know of.

Maggie: Guess there’s only one way to find out, huh, boys?

Maggie hustled up the stoop and then unlocked the door with the key the superintendent had rented us for fifty dollars cash. The sight of her waiting in the open doorway filled me with hope and confidence that answers awaited us on the other side of the threshold. I walked into the foyer and Squirrel followed me. I had paid him to help us because he’d sold drugs to Redcap’s Coven of the Right Stars, which seemingly dissolved sometime in the winter of 1973, and though he hadn’t taken part in their rituals, he knew more about them than anyone else I’d found.

We entered Redcap’s old apartment. Never occupied for long since he left it, the place carried a bad reputation. The super complained he couldn’t clean it up right no matter what he did, and its tenants all “wigged out and broke their lease or ran off in the middle of the night.”

The rooms themselves created an oppressive, claustrophobic feeling. The air tasted acrid and thick with stale cigarette smoke, incense, candles, marijuana — and a stronger, elemental odor that lingered despite the super’s attempts to erase evidence of the place’s past.

Me: Look at those marks on the wall.

Maggie: Where? I don’t see them.

Me: Tilt your head so the light hits them.

Maggie: Oh, wow! That’s freaky.

Me: They’re occult symbols. I know them from witchcraft books Dennis left in our room.

Squirrel: Super needs to slap a few more coats of paint on here if he wants to rent this place.

Me: Must be at least four coats already. See how thick it is by the window frames?

Maggie: Maybe someone redrew the symbols?

Me: Nah. The paint just hasn’t covered them up. Probably didn’t use primer.

Squirrel: Yeah, right, primer. ’Cause that would work.

Maggie: Hey, what’s under this old rug? See those scratches in the floorboards?

Me: Here, help me roll it up.

Scuffing and huffing sounds. Irregular footsteps. The thud of a carpet roll against a wall.

Me: Holy shit. It’s scratched into the wood.

Maggie: What the hell is it?

Squirrel: Hey, don’t mess with that. Seriously, man, take some pictures and let’s get out of here.

Me: I’ve read about this in Dennis’s books. It’s a ritual circle.

Maggie: That’s no circle. That’s — I don’t know, Salvador Dali’s geometry homework maybe.

Me: There are different kinds for different rituals. Not all of them are actual circles.

Maggie: What’s it for?

Me: It protects the witches.

Maggie: From what?

Squirrel: Trust me, sister, you don’t want to know.

Me: Why, Squirrel? You ever see Redcap’s coven do a ritual?

Squirrel: Yeah, man, I saw them do all kinds of crazy shit, orgies, rituals, you name it, but I don’t want to talk about it. You paid me to show you around the place, not give a lecture.

Me: I’ll pay more for the extra information.

Squirrel: You couldn’t pay me enough. I want to forget that stuff.

Me: Aw, c’mon, you brought us this far. Don’t leave us hanging.

Squirrel: I said no. You done up here? I’ll take you downstairs.

My photos of Redcap’s apartment had faded and yellowed over the years in the shoe box. I snapped them on a Kodak Instamatic discarded a long time ago though a package of flash cubes for it remained in the box. The images show the room well enough. Later, when I returned the building keys to the super, I asked about his efforts to paint the walls or buff the floor smooth. He bitched that nothing worked, but the landlord still rode his ass to clean the place and rent it. He wanted to replace the plaster with fresh drywall, rip up the floorboards and put down new ones, but, as he put it, the “cheap-ass landlord won’t unpucker his purse, you know?”

The dark symbols ghosted under coats of off-white paint looked like a messy blend of runes, constellation maps, pictographs, and mathematical signs. The floor markings sketched a riot of intertwined geometric patterns, accented by curving arcs that cut tangents with the straight lines. Symbols like those on the walls filled the spaces in-between. Blank spots in the pattern hinted at where Redcap and his acolytes had stood during their rites.

Where Dennis had once stood with them.

What appealed to him about that life, I never grasped.

He tried to explain it to me the night before he left home for good.

“There’s a vast universe out there,” he’d said, his lips pursing as he puffed on a joint. “Worlds that make ours look like a dust speck. Places most people would lose their shit over after one peek. It’s the truth, though, you know? It’s real. Puts the sorry crap we worry about on this big blue marble in perspective. And let me tell you, nothing matters. Get me? Nothing. We don’t matter. The world doesn’t matter. Nixon, the draft, Vietnam, OPEC, the Rolling Stones, Johnny Carson on the boob tube, the damn Berlin Wall, and all the starving kids in Africa. None of it matters. None of this belongs to us. You remember the wasps’ nest in the shed last summer? We’re the wasps. There are things out there like Dad with his bug spray. Nobody cared about the wasps until one stung Mom, right? Then, whoosh!” Dennis mimed spraying an invisible canister, exhaling a stream of pot smoke, filling our room with a skunky stink. “Wasp extinction. The real lords of the shed reasserted their claim. You get it? The Earth is a shed, little brother. Redcap’s magic lets us see what lies beyond it to other worlds and things sleeping in voids, oblivious to our existence— for now. It’s utterly cosmic and totally terrifying. But it’s one-hundred percent the realest shit I’ve ever known. If everyone in the world saw it, we’d give up all the petty crap and enjoy life while we can, one big party groove. We don’t realize how good we’ve got it — and it won’t last long.”

His words as best I remember them. I didn’t take him as seriously as I should’ve.

It sounded like lyrics from the psychedelic music he loved. I pictured the other worlds as scenes from the album covers in his record collection. Colorful, wild, bright. Unreal. Imagined. Desirable.

How wrong I was.

When we finished in the apartment, Squirrel took us to the cellar.

Most of the tenants had removed their stored belongings after the murder investigation, and the super discouraged newcomers from using the dank, musty space. A furnace occupied a large chunk of it, but the owner had never rebuilt the wall that had hidden the dead child, leaving plumbing and electrical conduit exposed. Scraps of old mortar on the floor showed where it had once stood, the outline of a desecrated grave.

Squirrel: Cops picked this place over with the finest of fine-toothed combs, my man.

Me: It looks like just…a cellar. Maggie: Hoping for a body?

Me: No. I don’t know, hoping for something, I guess.

Maggie: Hey, what direction are we facing? East 4th Street is that way, right?

Me: Yeah, should be.

Maggie: Does the basement extend under the street? There’s an awful lot of space over there.

Me: Where?

Maggie: Come by me. You can’t see it from there. Stand here. Look into the corner, by the pipes, past where the wall used to be.

Me: Whoa, another room. Weird. Maggie: I know, right?

Squirrel: Hey, leave it. You don’t want to go back there. That’s where they found the dead kid.

Me: Do you know what this space is, Squirrel? Is it out under the street?

Squirrel: There’s tunnels under the street. Sewer, subway, gas, water, electric lines. You see any of that?

Me: No.

Squirrel: Then you ain’t under the street, man. But don’t go over there.

Footsteps, scraping dusty concrete.

Maggie: I can’t see the room anymore. It’s not visible from anywhere else in the basement except where you’re standing, Richie.

Squirrel: Hey, let it alone, already, would’ya?

Me: No, man, this is what we’re looking for. Maybe there’s stuff in there from Redcap.

Squirrel: Thought this was all gone. I wouldn’t have set foot down here if I knew it was still…

Me: Still what?

Squirrel: Forget it. Come on, you saw what you came to see.

Let’s blow.

Me: Cool it, Squirrel. We want to check this out.

Squirrel: Yeah? Do it without me, man. I got no skin in this. I’ve done what I came to do.

Footsteps pounding up the stairs, receding.

Me: Squirrel! Hey! Come back here, dude!

Maggie: Aw, let him go.

Me: He took off without the rest of his money.

Maggie: Then lunch is on Squirrel. Hey, look, there’s a light back there.

Me: It’s a reflection, off something metal.

Only visible from one spot in the cellar, the space widened as we entered it, creating the illusion of the cellar expanding around us. A trap door sat in the floor in the back corner. Its steel handle glinted in the dim light. An iron chain looped through floor-mounted rings at each corner of the door held it shut, secured with a heavy padlock.

Maggie and I deliberated the wisdom of opening it. Squirrel ditching unsettled us, but we figured he didn’t want to be around if we dug up any dirt that brought the police. And we’d come here precisely to dig up dirt, not look away when secrets presented themselves.

I scrounged a pry bar from an old toolbox by the furnace. Levering it under the chain and applying my weight, I snapped a rusty link. The chain rattled loose. Maggie reached for the handle then stopped and offered me the honor. “All yours, Richie-Rich,” she said.

The iron burned cold in my hand as I opened the door.

Unexpectedly fresh, warm air, redolent of burning wood and animal dung, drifted across my face. Hazy, flickering light came from the opening.

The faint illumination cast the shadows of rough grooves in the cement and revealed occult markings carved there. Geometric patterns and inscriptions like those from the apartment floor but denser and more complex, the difference between multiplication tables and calculus. The light seemed to ooze through them and lend them a wispy aura. A low murmur followed the illumination, a rhythmic sound like a subway rolling by on the other side of the wall. I snapped photos. My camera’s flash exposed more markings on the walls and ceiling. Weird symbols and diagrams covered the space around us. In my pictures, the opening to the main cellar appeared dead black and much narrower than it seemed by eye, like the narrow neck of a balloon opening into a space forced wide by air and liable to pop out of existence the moment its skin broke.

Beneath the trap door, ladder rungs descended into twilight.

Mustering my resolve with thoughts of Dennis, I climbed down.

Maggie came after me.

We set foot on a cobble-stoned surface in a scene so outlandish, the impossibility of it froze me in place. The ladder emerged from a hatch in the underside of the second-floor balcony of a Georgian Revival house, the kind tucked away here and there in the Village. A second alley intersected the one in which we stood and wound into a city lit by gaslight streetlamps. Above us, stars dappled the sky — the open sky — where clouds drifted across a bright half-moon encircled in blue haze.

Maggie: Are we…outside? What…?

Me: How the hell did we get…? Where are we?

Scuffling as Maggie climbs the ladder, pokes her head up through the balcony hatch.

Maggie: Oh God, Richie. The basement is, like, what, inside the balcony? How’s this possible?

Me: I…I don’t know.

Maggie: It’s like an Escher drawing. I hate those things. They give me a headache.

The recording catches a nearby scream, plaintive and frightened.

Me: What was that?

Maggie: We should split.

Me: Maybe, but…

Maggie: But what?

Me: What if Redcap’s here?

Maggie: Where is here? How do we climb down an underground ladder and come out on an open street?

Me: We’re…hey, look where the moonlight reflects on the water. That’s the East River, isn’t it? It’s okay.

Maggie: It’s ten in the morning, and the moon is up. There are streetlamps out of a Henry James story. Fifty buildings should block our view to the river from here. Nothing’s okay! Nothing!

All of Maggie’s points hit home, but I had no explanations.

The connecting alley revealed more of the city’s rudimentary geography. A rough sketch of the Big Apple we knew, delineated in cobblestone, low buildings, and flickering gaslight. The antique seed of modern New York, yet to grow and bloom.

Even the air tasted different, free of fuel exhaust and street food aromas but richer with smoke scents and animal musk I couldn’t name.

A second horrible scream curtailed our amazement.

Maggie gripped my arm. In a courtyard at the far end of the adjoining alley stood a man in Georgian high socks and breeches, a frock coat, and a tricorne hat. He paced and checked a pocket watch repeatedly, each time changing direction. The quality of his clothing and the shine in his silver shoe-buckles suggested great wealth and status. His posture telegraphed impatience. I inched closer to hear what he muttered to himself, but then he sensed my presence and looked at Maggie and me with a terrified expression before stamping off out of the courtyard.

A second man appeared, hurrying after him.

A man in worn denim bell-bottoms and a tie-dyed Uriah Heep t-shirt.

A man with unruly dark hair and a close, shaggy beard.

A man I knew.

Dennis.

Maggie saw him too.

At that moment, I forgot our bizarre and inexplicable circumstances and chased after my brother. Maggie, my true friend always and in all things, ran right along behind me.

From the courtyard, we faced the mouths of several dark alleys.

Along one, I glimpsed the bright spray of Dennis’s shirt and cried his name. We spilled into another courtyard, the hub for more openings onto narrow pathways into blackness.

Dennis gaped at us when we caught up to him.

I couldn’t help myself. Overjoyed to find my big brother, I seized him in a rough hug.

Dennis: Richie? What the hell are you doing here?

Me: Dennis! Oh God, is it you? Is it really you? I’m so happy to see you!

Dennis: Okay, yeah, I’m happy to see you too, little bro, but…how’d you find me?

Me: We were looking for Redcap, snooping around his old apartment building.

Dennis: What the hell do you want with Redcap?

Me: It’s, he…uh, I don’t know how to explain.

Maggie: We thought he killed you.

Dennis: What?

Me: Dennis, we haven’t seen you for two years. The police told us you died. They brought us your body. We had a funeral and…

Dennis: Ha-ha. Bullshit.

Maggie: He’s not joking. We cried our goddamn eyes out over you.

Dennis: I don’t…What the hell are you saying?

Me: What is this place? We don’t know how we got here.

Dennis: You couldn’t have come here unless you were invited by that guy I was following, or Redcap opened the way.

Me: We came through a trap door in the basement of Redcap’s old building.

Dennis: That’s how I got here. He did a ritual. He sent me to find…

Me: Find what?

Dennis: I…I can’t say. How long have you been here?

Me: Not long.

Maggie: Longer than we think. Look.

Maggie pointed at the now three-quarters moon, night’s eye watching our every move. How had it changed phases so fast? Even Dennis regarded it with discomfort — or, perhaps, distrust. One more thing about which our senses lied.

A series of screams rose from every direction.

Dennis hurried us along crooked alleys and irregular courtyards, through buildings that reeked of rotten wood and mold. The city changed as we walked, the gloom deepening, gaslights giving way to conical tin candle lamps of Colonial vintage, architecture regressing in time from one building to the next, closing on us with sinister shadows and overhangs. Along the whole way, mad, tortured screams dogged us.

We stopped in a courtyard, where Dennis approached a wood and steel door.

The sight of him filled me with happiness that even our horrifying surroundings couldn’t dampen. My brother alive and my best friend at my side, I held my fear in check, bolstered by the presence of the two most important people in my life.

Dennis: Wait here. I’ll be back fast as I can. Then we’ll all beat feet out of here.

Me: No way I’m letting you out of my sight after finding you.

Dennis: Man, if you came down here the same way I did then Redcap let it happen. That means he wants something from you. Trust me, you give that creep an inch, he’ll take a mile. Wait here and then I’ll get us all out of here and away before he can do anything to you.

Me: I haven’t seen you in two years. I’m not letting go now I’ve got you back from the dead.

Dennis: Two years? When…when did you think I died?

Me: August, 1971.

Dennis: That’s now, that’s this month.

Me: Now is 1973, Den.

Dennis: No, you’re wrong, that’s not possible…Listen, we’ll figure this out later, but you can’t come with me. You aren’t protected.

Me: What does that mean?

Three overlapping screams, loud, close, slightly distorted on the tape.

Maggie: Yeah, ’cause I don’t feel very protected right here either.

Dennis: It means you don’t have this.

Me: A medallion?

Dennis: A talisman. This is the symbol of Redcap’s coven. It carries power here. Not much but enough to keep me safe while I do what I came for.

Me: What’s going on? Is this even real? Are you really here?

Dennis: Yeah, it’s all real, but, little brother, it’s not what I wanted. I sure as hell didn’t want you tailing me here. It never occurred to me you would — or that you even could. All I wanted was to open people’s eyes to how the universe really works. I figured it would bring us together. Right? What unites people more than knowing we’re all equally screwed? But that’s not Redcap’s trip. He’s a power-hungry asshole into pulling people’s strings.

Me: Then why are you doing…whatever the hell you’re doing?

Dennis: I want out. I want to get off the drugs, the bullshit, and the lies. He promised to let me leave the coven if I did this for him.

More screams, louder, further distorted.

Me: Did what?

Dennis: There’s a special house here. Redcap calls it the Private Estate. It’s a place where the space between dimensions intersects and time becomes…I don’t know, malleable, I guess. We call the guy who lives there the Inheritor. He knows more than anyone else about the occult history of the universe and its future. Redcap wants me to find out when the Old Ones will return.

Maggie: Who the hell are they?

Dennis: It’s hard to explain, Mags. Richie can fill you in later. You remember, little brother, the wasps and the wasp spray? The Old Ones are Mom and Dad. Redcap wants to know when Dad is going to spray poison on the shed. The Inheritor can see that. From the windows in his library he sees all time from the birth of the cosmos to its end.

Maggie: Seriously, Dennis? What are you on right now?

Dennis: Nothing! It’s not like that. This dude’s family made a pact for knowledge centuries ago, and Redcap covets the secrets they’ve pulled from time and space.

Maggie: So why doesn’t he come get them himself?

Dennis: Bastard’s chicken. I’ve never seen him so scared as he was when he performed the ritual to open the way here for me. Just because he got his hands on an old book of Keziah Mason’s notes doesn’t make him a magician.

Me: He sent you here with…magic?

Dennis: Not magic, not really. Wicca dances around it, keeps it spiritual, right? But it’s math. Equations, geometrical diagrams, and symbols for an understanding of physics beyond what we know. Humans can only comprehend it with help from the Old Ones. The Black Stone Man. The Goat with a Thousand Young. Yog-Sothoth. Redcap’s familiar draws their aspects to our world, and we hope they never become fully aware of us. Shit, this is not the time for a lecture.

Me: Insane! It’s all nonsense. You really believe this?

Dennis: Look around, little bro. You saying seeing isn’t believing?

I had no answer for that. Maggie and I had gone too far to deny what we experienced, no matter how terrifying or bizarre. And at that point, in the last courtyard, the moon shone on us at its brightest, now full. The sight threaded fresh fear into my brother. I don’t know what the full moon signified, but I sensed his urgency.

He handed me a folded sheaf of papers Redcap had given him and swore me to keep it, the only known description of the Inheritor and the Private Estate. From the personal effects of a New England poet bought by Redcap at auction in Arkham, Massachusetts. The poet, who came to New York in the 1920s, found the city nightmarish and oppressive, its antiquarian remnants its only saving grace.

I read the brittle pages again tonight, recalling how I first skimmed them by moonlight, an account of a night walk like our own, ending in my brother’s destination. The poet rendered what he saw from the Estate’s library windows a “pandaemoniac sight…the heavens verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows.” He called it “the shrieking fulfilment of all the horror which that corpse-city had ever stirred in my soul, and forgetting every injunction to silence I screamed and screamed and screamed…”

Were the screams that haunted us that night echoes of the poet’s screams? The screams of others who’d walked those same alleys? The screams of children murdered and discarded behind old walls? Of those who’d looked out the Estate’s windows at a world of madness and despair?

When I looked up from the pages, the last door hung open, and Dennis, already through it, climbed a gravel path toward a terrifying house of shadows, whose cupola crested trees that didn’t belong in the city I knew, a bright needle aimed at the mysterious stars and illuminated by moonlight.

Maggie: Dennis, no! Come back.

Me: Let him do what he needs to do. Then we all get out of here.

Maggie: No way! He’s coming back with us now.

Me: Maggie, wait!

Maggie chased Dennis. I dashed after her as fresh screams resonated within the walls of the courtyard and footsteps clattered from the surrounding alleys. The meager flames of oil and candle that lit our way back snuffed out one by one behind us. The full moon persisted — then faded as a tangible darkness surrounded us and cut me off from my brother and friend. Cold seeped into my bones as I ascended the trail. Only the crunch of gravel underfoot let me know I remained on the path. I hurried along until I stumbled against a hard object. When I righted myself, a tepid yellow brightness glimmered ahead. I had caught my foot on the first of several steps approaching a doorway. The light came from within it. My eyes adjusted to the gloom. I entered the house in search of Dennis and Maggie.

Dying candle stubs lit the foyer and the bottom of a curving staircase. Seeing no other rooms or doors I climbed the stairs and called out Maggie’s name, then Dennis’s. My voice echoed flatly, but no other answer came. At the top of the stairs I faced three doors along a hallway filled with the odor of age and mustiness. The first two doors proved locked, but the third swung open onto a room where I found my brother and my friend with the strange man in the Georgian clothing. He studied his pocket watch, its chain dangling from his grip. The room — a paneled library stocked with books so ancient they looked ready to crumble to dust — sloped oddly to my right, creating an odd discordance with the sagging shelves. Dennis and Maggie stood side by side at three modest windows of rippled glass and lead muntins. Timid light from a sliver of moon glittered through. Before I saw any more, the Georgian man noticed me. Stuffing his watch into his pocket, he rushed me, and then pushed me back into the hallway. Without a word, he slammed the door in my face and locked it.

I pounded on the wood, called for Maggie and Dennis, but the door held firm, and no one answered my pleas. How long I stayed there, fighting a losing battle with the door, I don’t know. The harder I banged, the louder I cried out, the more the screams that filled that horrible night pierced me. They came from everywhere outside the strange house as if all the screams I’d ever heard reverberated together in that place.

I gave up on the door only when a hand dropped onto my shoulder from behind.

Jolting around, I confronted an arm reaching for me out of the empty shadows.

Another arm joined it. Both seized me by the shoulders then yanked me off-balance. As I toppled forward, darkness cupped me like an angry hand — and shoved.

A sensation of falling came. The world blanked out.

It returned in candle-lit gloom. The secret space in the basement of Redcap’s apartment building, its stones engraved with symbols and formulae, its walls tilted at strange angles. The open trap door through which Maggie and I had descended. Hands still clutched me tight. The arms belonged to a tall, wiry man, who pressed me to my knees and glared down at me. Long, wavy hair shadowed his face. Beaded necklaces click-clacked over a loose, paisley shirt, and from a chain around his neck dangled a talisman like the one Dennis had showed me, engraved with the symbol of Redcap’s coven. People surrounded us, posted at the perimeter of the ritual circle. They chanted. Their words made no sense to me, but in them I heard the familiar rolling rhythm I had earlier mistaken for a passing subway train.

Somewhere in their midst a young child wept.

Redcap: What’d you see though the windows of the Private Estate, Richie.

Me: Are you…Redcap?

The sharp smack of a hand slapping my face.

Redcap: Who else would I be? Tell me what you saw.

Me: What I saw…

Redcap: Your deadbeat brother screwed it up, Richie, so now you put it right and tell me.

Me: Where are Dennis and Maggie?

Redcap: Dennis is dead and probably Maggie too by now.

Squirrel snitched about your plan to pin it on me. Man, I was furious. Then I told him to go along with it because I saw this golden opportunity for you to finish what your brother started. I put the Coven back together just for you, kiddo, and we brought a new sacrifice to reopen the way.

Me: Did you…kill Dennis?

Redcap: Nah, man, the sudden stop when he hit the sidewalk did that.

Me: Let me go find them. Please!

Redcap: Tell me what you saw through the windows. That’s all your brother had to do, but when he came back, he told me to fuck off. You believe it? He wanted to protect the world by keeping the secret. What a hypocrite. And what about me, man? Who’s protecting me from the cosmic darkness thundering at us out of history? Only me, man. Only me. And to do that, I must know what you saw through the windows in the Private Estate.

Me: I saw…I saw a sliver of the moon.

A horrifying groan of anger and frustration from Redcap. Rattling, chittering sounds from the shadows. Louder, faster, frightened chanting from the circle.

Redcap: What else? Tell me.

Me: There isn’t anything else. The guy slammed the door in my face when I tried to look.

Behind Redcap, a figure materialized. An impossibly giant man seemingly carved from black obsidian and with the face of a devil. Its height defied the confines of the room. Redcap shuddered and released me. The chanting of the circle reached a feverish beat. The members of the Coven of the Right Stars took on definition in the dark, men and women who swayed in a trance. An ungainly shape scrabbled around their feet and sent a ripple of excitement among them. The next moment I saw what Dennis had died to avoid. The abominable cockroach thing with the face of a haggard and ancient woman. As large as a dog and hazy as if it were somehow not entirely present. In its segmented forelegs it clutched the body of a bloody child, two, maybe three years old. A new sacrifice. The woman’s face opened its mouth and showed me a blend of teeth and wriggling palps, running with fresh blood. It dawned on me then that I hadn’t noticed when the child’s crying had stopped, and that single moment of realization pushed my senses reeling beyond the point of rational thought. I crawled toward the trap door, but Redcap seized me again and dragged me to my feet. He gestured at me, motions mimicked by the man of black stone, and I couldn’t tell which imitated the other, if the stone man pulled Redcap’s strings or vice versa. Cold terror filled me. I wrenched myself free and dove into the trapdoor opening even as the cockroach thing scuttled toward me.

I fell through a shrieking void. Merciful silence followed. For a time, I sensed nothing.

Then a car horn honked. A dog barked. A child cried. Daylight stabbed my eyes.

I clambered to my feet and stumbled down a narrow alley, spilling out onto a cobblestone road on the west side of Manhattan. Perry Street. The Hudson River a block away. The opposite side of the city from Redcap’s old apartment.

Passersby flashed me frightened glances.

My watch showed me less than an hour had passed since Maggie and I entered the trap door. My senses reeled, but I kept my composure, began walking, telling myself I had dreamt it or fallen victim to a prank by Squirrel, hallucinating on some drug he’d slipped me.

I gave up trying to rationalize it.

In my pocket remained the papers of the poet my dead brother had given me.

My Carry-Corder had recorded everything.

Days later, I picked up my developed film and photos and found the images exactly as I remembered them.

I knew only one thing for certain after that. Dennis somehow found his way back from The Private Estate, returning in 1971, perhaps seized and yanked though time and space as I had been by Redcap, but Redcap didn’t let him leave the Coven. He sent what my research identified as a familiar, maybe one that contained an aspect of his witch-master, Keziah Mason, herself manifest in a subservient, insectoid body. I’d blown my one chance to save my brother’s life and lost my best friend in the bargain. Although I rushed crosstown back to the apartment building in search of Maggie, I found no sign of her. Our access to the strange basement space had vanished. A solid wall stood where we had stepped over the grave of a lost child and into an underground nightmare. The super mocked me for suggesting such a space had ever existed.

Maggie’s disappearance destroyed her family. They never fully believed my lies that I didn’t know what had happened to her. How could I ever explain? It ruined me as well. I drifted apart from my parents and extended family, and despite two attempts at marriage, I wound up alone in life.

Now a night and most of the ensuing day have passed since Maggie came to visit. I’ve sifted the past and written down my memories. It’s clear to me now that Redcap knew we were coming that summer and used Squirrel to set us up. He manipulated me in hope of obtaining the information my brother refused to give him, setting the ritual circle like a trap into which Maggie and I blundered. What did Dennis know that led to his death? Who was the stony figure with Redcap? I’ve asked myself if I truly want to know the answers because if I accept Maggie’s invitation, I will finally have them, all of them.

Maggie, she explained to me, never left the Private Estate. She befriended the Inheritor, dwelled in his library, and looked out through its marvelous windows upon all time. She knows what happened after the door slammed shut in my face, and to her our separation occurred only weeks ago. She knows what Redcap wanted to know: the time and nature of the Old Ones’ return. She has invited me to go with her to the Private Estate when the moon next changes, to walk along the same Perry Street alley from which I stumbled so many years ago, back into that scream-riddled city out of history.

The world, it seems, has not much longer to wait for the dark times Dennis feared.

One too many wasps have stung. The nest will soon be cleared.

Will the Estate protect us? Maggie wouldn’t say.

Tonight, the first night of the full moon, the moon has changed, and opened the way.

I must decide.

Very soon, Maggie will knock again on my door.