Midnight in New England: Strange and Mysterious Tales

by Scott Thomas

  There beneath the snow lay the flower god. Constance had gasped and bent to brush it off. She cradled it and wiped the cold off its smooth green face. The birds had chewed at its limbs, the fingers like the tips of vines.

  Inside the house, the dead god lay by the fireplace in her room, wrapped in a shawl. Taking advantage of every offered opportunity, Constance rushed to her room to see if the warmth of the fire had revived the thing. By nightfall, the flower god began to blacken and the room smelled like rotting weeds.

  Benjamin enjoyed walking in the hills above the town. It both soothed and inspired him. But there seemed to be so little time to himself since his mother’s illness had arrived, just fleeting moments in which to indulge his art. The hills offered some escape and a taste of life as it was meant to be. While picturesque views and natural beauty surrounded him, such things did not always find their way into his sketch book.

  The location afforded him an atmosphere conducive to creativity and the creative process was a thing of magic and mystery. An ill-defined impulse stirred a mist inside, a cloud of blurring possibilities in the skull, which, through pencil and hand, took shape. It was as if he were a medium for some otherworldly intelligence to work through.

  He drew women who had never walked or breathed and strange spectral places of ethereal beauty. He gave birth to new mythological beasts, gave wing to cherubs and dreams.

  That afternoon in May was an exception; he drew precisely what he saw. Two soft hills rose like green breasts. He sat on one and on the other, across from him and unaware, sat a beautiful young woman. She had a parasol and a white dress and loose dark hair and a face loved equally by shadow and sun.

  Benjamin conjured the woman in shades of grey, there on her hill, gazing out on the roofs of the town. She was vapour at the start. The lead hissed softly on the paper as he gave her shadows. He made the creases in her skirt and the warm wings of darkness beneath her breasts. She was perfect.

  The air grew cooler as the sun dipped down. Benjamin hunched lower over his drawing, detailing her hair and the profile of her mouth. When he looked up again, his subject had risen to her feet and was facing away from him. His heart twisted.

  “No,” Benjamin whispered. “It’s not done!”

  The woman floated over the rim of her hill and out of view.

  “They say there’s a monster up in those hills,” Benjamin’s mother said, when he told her of his encounter.

  Benjamin was robust, handsome as his father had been, with dark curls and serene eyes.

  “When I was a girl...” the woman’s words moved slowly in her mouth, her tongue choosing and sculpting each one with care, “a young couple went to meet there and never came back.”

  Benjamin sat by the bed, gazing at the incomplete drawing that his mother had refused to view. He chuckled politely. “Mother, that’s the very same story you told me as a boy, when I was madly in love with Mr. Mortensen’s wife. It frightened me so much that I never stepped foot on their farm again.”

  Mrs. Wagner closed her eyes. “There are monsters everywhere.”

  “You’d rather I didn’t return to that place I am so fond of?”

  “Did I say as much? You’re a young man now, Benjamin. You don’t listen to me anyhow. Still, there are other places where you might find peace enough to sketch.”

  Benjamin flipped his sketch book shut. “I suppose. Perhaps tomorrow, I’ll seek a new location.”

  Mrs. Wagner leaned her bony head back, seemed to shrink into her pillow. “You never were a good liar, Benjamin...”

  Midway through his waiting, Benjamin refreshed himself with the wine and cheese he had brought in a hamper. There was no sign of the lovely young woman. Her hill stood grassy and steep, with a dark pucker of clouds rising up behind it, as if the village below were burning. The thunder, distant at first, stepped closer in great hollow boots. The clouds spread out and rain tiptoed in the grass around him.

  Benjamin gathered up his art supplies and hamper and hurried down the hill to where the edging forest offered shelter. Shadowy leaves jerked beneath the heavy drops. He ducked beneath the trees as the shower filled the air and found himself face to face with the woman he had drawn the previous afternoon.

  “Hello,” Constance said. A raindrop stole through the cover, skimmed her cheek, and rolled over her lips.

  “Hello,” Benjamin breathed.

  The young woman held a sketch pad. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said, smiling shyly, holding out her drawing.

  The picture showed the hill, as seen from the bordering wood below, with Benjamin sitting on top gazing off to the west.

  “Why no,” Benjamin’s face pinkened. “I’m flattered that you found me a worthy subject. And it’s such fine work, but who is that woman standing behind me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I was under the impression that I was alone.”

  “You were, really, I only saw her in my mind.”

  Benjamin smiled.

  The woman in the picture was familiar.

  “I, too, come here to sketch. May I show you one?”

  Constance took a small step closer. It was dark beneath the trees and the rain hummed and slapped on the leaves.

  Benjamin flipped through his pictures until he came to the most recent. Constance saw his face change.

  “Mother!” he hissed.

  “A picture of your mother,” Constance said, leaning closer, “how nice that you sketch your mother.”

  Benjamin tore the page out and crumpled it before Constance could see. Apologetically, he explained, “I’m afraid I’m not pleased with it, after all.”

  She must have done it when he slept, he thought, dragged herself from her sick bed and drew herself into his picture of the girl on the hill, drew herself hovering menacingly with her bony hands outstretched to the back of the girl’s neck.

  Benjamin did not invite Constance to the house until after his mother’s funeral. The women never did meet, and Benjamin had kept their afternoon meetings a secret. But love found their hearts there on the warm green hills and wildflowers sang their scent into the air.

  “When I was a girl,” Constance said, standing in his bedchamber, unbuttoning her dress, “I conjured my own little gods.”

  Benjamin saw her breasts for the first time, soft in the afternoon sun.

  “One winter, I called on the flower god, but it was too cold and he died in the snow.”

  The dress slid down away from her plush dimpled belly, down over her fine, wide hips, then her thighs.

  “I kept him for days, but he began to rot.”

  Constance stood naked.

  “I buried him in the yard and the grass turned brown, but the following year there was this great cluster of spring flowers. It terrified me so, but it was beautiful, too, how its sleep became the soil. I think of my own skin going back to the earth one day, and it exhilarates me.”

  Constance moved her hands over the rounded warmth of her flesh. She lifted her heavy breasts up, kneading and shaping, as if working dough. She tugged at the ends until they were strawberries, hard with aching blood.

  Benjamin was trembling and crying when he returned with the bucket of mud.

  “Mother was lying in the stream! I saw her in the dark water, staring up at me!”

  Constance held him and reassured him. “It was nothing, my love, only your grief making a shadow in the water, and nothing more.”

  She took his hand and dipped it in the warm mud, then pressed it to her chest. The hand slid down, drawing a dark glistening blur. His finger made a small moist sound as it slipped in then out of her navel.

  She looked like the dead flower god lying on the bed with a batter of damp earth encasing her. She had caked it thickly on her face so that her features were only smooth impressions. Benjamin drew her like that and, at her insistence, entitled it: “Sleep of the Flower God.”

  Then he climbed on the bed and onto her and she was slippery brown and gasping beneath
him.

  The bath water seemed gold from the candles, and Constance lay back in the heat and steam, her eyes shut, her body clean. It was late and the crickets outside shared rumours of the coming frost. She listened to them and to her own breathing. She felt her heart as it counted softly within. She felt the crowding of cold legs in the water with her and her eyes opened.

  Mrs. Wagner was slumped at the opposite end of the tub, bony and naked, her rictus mouth all horrible teeth and her eyes glaring in dead malignancy.

  Constance did not scream. She closed her eyes and called to the warm dark. With her own voice inside her head, she whispered the name of the god of stones. She saw him shuffle up out of the dark, grey and strong, and she told him to go to a grave, told him to fill the coffin with stones to weigh the occupant down.

  When Constance opened her eyes, Mrs. Wagner was gone, never to be seen again.

  The Puppet and the Train

  Massachusetts, 1909

  Though there were several known cases of human infestation, actinomycosis, more commonly known as lumpy jaw, preferred cattle by a notable margin. The insidious little fungus stole into the body of an animal, more often than not the head, where it inspired swelling and created an abscess within the inflamed area. Gabriel Burkett had seen untreated animals afflicted with tumours the size of coconuts.

  Even when kneeling, Gabe seemed tall. He was down in the shadow of a barn, long gentle fingers moving over the jaw of a hulking milk cow. The animal shifted nervously, moved its large eye, and snorted. The veterinarian leaned his face close to its head and whispered soothingly.

  Joseph McDonald, the cow’s owner, stood watching with his hands in his pockets. He had seen Gabe at work before, observed his solemn precision, and he trusted the veterinarian implicitly.

  Still kneeling, Gabe nodded to himself, thought a moment more and looked up. “It’s lumpy jaw, all right,” he said. “If we had caught

  it sooner, I’d have cut it out, but it might be into bone at this point and there are some good-sized blood vessels to consider.”

  Gabe felt around some more, then stood. He patted the beast’s great neck.

  “Simple enough, “ Gabe concluded, “we’ll give her iodide of potash in her drinking water for a week or so. That should do nicely.” McDonald grinned. He was expecting something more invasive, something more complicated. Gabe looked him in the eye, like a preacher would, and while a younger man at forty-six, he spoke in a fatherly fashion, “Now Joseph, if you should happen to notice this sort of thing again, don’t wait so long to fetch me, all right?”

  McDonald nodded. “I won’t, Gabe, I won’t.”

  The men stepped away from the barn into the warm June sun. They turned to the road, alerted by the sound of a motorcar’s horn. A Model T raced around the bend and came to a dusty stop. Gabe frowned. He hated “Tin Lizzies” and relied on his beloved horse for transportation. Mankind, he felt, was not wise enough to responsibly wield the power of its technology. Bombs, guns, and soaring horseless vehicles demonstrated his point menacingly, succinctly.

  Young Dan Muir, son of a lawyer and a neighbour of the two men, sprang from the automobile, goggled and wind-haired. He seemed breathless, as if he had run the length of dirt road to the McDonald farm, rather than driven it in his expensive metal contraption.

  “Doctor Burkett,” the man called, “you must come—there’s been a terrible accident down where they’re setting up the circus in Gaughan’s field.”

  Gabe threw McDonald a woeful look before climbing reluctantly into the sputtering machine.

  They raced over the top of a hill and drove down to where a stretch of railroad tracks gleamed out from behind a dense wall of small trees and tall bushes. Gabe cursed quietly to himself. He thought the accident scene looked like a cross between a children’s book illustration and a nightmare. A train had ploughed into the side of an elephant.

  Poor jousting partners, a locomotive and an elephant. The giant grey mammal, like some misplaced corporeal relic of prehistory, was on its side; the steaming black metal monster had simply tilted off its rails. There was a great dark wound on the side where the tusked beast had taken the blow. The man who had been leading the elephant across the tracks when the train came roaring out of the bushes had fared the worst. No need to check for a pulse there. Strangely, there was more blood from him than from the larger animal.

  A small crowd had gathered; the motorcar stopped. Burkett could only stare until Dan Muir turned to him and said, “Can you help it? See there, the front legs are kicking; it’s still alive!”

  “I’ve never treated an elephant,” Gabe muttered.

  “But you’re a veterinarian; you can help it, can’t you?”

  Gabe did not reply. He took up his bag, climbed out of the car, and pushed his way through the crowd.

  It was an Indian elephant, that much he knew. He could tell from the tusks, smaller and straighter than those of the larger African breed. There was an unpleasant burnt smell close to the creature. He leaned over the massive wrinkled head and gazed into the black eye, big as a fist. The eye did not seem to contain anything like a spark of life, yet a thick, dry trunk coiled around Gabe’s leg and quivered. Startled, Gabe took a step back, nearly tripping over the appendage, which went limp following its tremor. Perhaps it was an involuntary nervous reaction; he had seen animals move in curious ways at the point of death and shortly thereafter.

  The elephant was cold to the touch, cooler than the air, as if it had been dead for some time, though the accident had happened just a quarter of an hour previous. Gabe put a hand in front of the mouth and felt no breath. He worked his way back. Its side was not moving; there was no evidence of breathing whatsoever. The front limbs had stopped the spastic motion he had observed from the car, looking down as they came over the top of the hill, looking out over the colourful spired circus tents with their stripes and flags and the clutter of wagons like an encampment of gypsies.

  “Look there!” someone in the crowd called out suddenly, and Gabe turned, looking up as a thin, naked man with brownish skin pulled himself up out of the enormous, surprisingly bloodless wound in the elephant’s side. The man had wild black hair and wild black eyes and threw the crowd a glance both feral and contemptuous before springing from the dead elephant and racing off into the thick greenery nearby.

  “Dear God,” Gabe hissed.

  “Catch him,” the shout went up, and after a baffled pause, some young men did charge off in pursuit.

  Gabe climbed up the body and peered into the wound, through the pale bars of the elephant’s ribs into a hollow space where one would have expected to find an assortment of organs. It was like a room, the roof darkened as if a fire had been lit inside, and there was a dry tree bark-coloured floor. Gabe reached a trembling hand down into the thing and scooped up two pale objects which appeared to be candles, slipping them into his pocket.

  Below, a man with a pointed beard of silver, sporting the long coat and the tall hat of a circus master, was bemoaning the loss of Trevor the Talking Elephant. He seemed less concerned with the trainer, whose segments now lay beneath a pair of damp blankets.

  Dizzy, Gabe sat on one of the mighty grey legs, as if on a bench, and stared at the earth. He heard the rushing hiss of steam from the big black engine and watched as an ant dragged off a small piece of the elephant trainer.

  We find Gabriel Burkett at his humble home that overlooks an orchard in the southern hills of a small central-Massachusetts town. Tired from interviewing members of the circus, the driver of the train, and having discussed the bizarre situation with the local police, he only let his wife Audrey hear the more mundane aspects of the case. He did not wish to disturb her with the whole story for even he, a man accustomed to seeing sad and distressing sights, was himself unnerved by that afternoon’s events.

  The days in June were long and they sat outside after eating and watched the sky over the town as it went to orange and pink and deep blue. Roofs and steeples poked
up through the distant billowing green of trees. Gabe thought about the thin brown figure that had dashed into the brush. The men who had gone looking for him had not been successful.

  Though a serious-looking man, Gabe did not appear stern. He had dark, somewhat wavy hair and dark, deep-set eyes. There was something melancholic about his face, the features both intense and gentle. A child had once told him that he looked more like an undertaker than a veterinarian. He gazed over at his wife, who sat on the farmer’s porch with him, her lap a tangle of knitting, and he made a mental note to himself that he should (uncharacteristically) lock the door that night.

  Lying in bed, he thought about the train, like a great metal puppet caterpillar, racing along with men inside, and wondered if—though it seemed impossible—the elephant had served a similar purpose, transporting its lone passenger, or, more accurately, its pilot. It had to have been dead before the train hit it; no animal can live with the majority of its vital organs missing. And where had those gone? The train had ripped the wound in the thing’s side and, having inspected the carcass, Gabe had found no scars to indicate an earlier extraction of the poor behemoth’s innards.

  Unable to sleep, he quietly rose and bent over the bed to touch Audrey’s cheek. Sometimes she spoke out in the darkness, especially when their large amber and white cat moved restlessly, repositioning himself to find the most comfortable spot, thus disturbing her. She would mutter from a place between sleep and the world. She did this now. “Crouching on a roof...black mist from the lips,” she said, then settled back into soft rhythmic breathing. Her husband brushed a strand of cidery hair from her face.

  Gabe walked downstairs and found the two candles in the pocket where he had left them. He had not told anyone else about them, none of the other stupefied townsfolk, not even the police. In a way he was afraid to have others see them, for it would make it harder to deny that such a mystery could exist in the world if there were more than one witness.

  One of the resident circus freaks, a woman from Mexico who was covered in long dark hair, had told Gabe that she had heard strange noises one night and had wandered out of her tent to see a strange brown woman inserting a small cloth doll, like a witch’s poppet, into the birthing place of Trevor the Talking elephant. The elephant was known as Bessie then and performed in a ring and was also made to move heavy objects. That was before they discovered that the elephant could talk, and it was only later that the name was changed to Trevor. Somehow the circus proprietor seemed taken with that bit of alliteration and felt that the public would respond better to a talking male elephant more so than they would a female. Besides, the creature spoke in a masculine voice.