And when the end came, my dear Charlotte met it with courage. “He is gone,” were her words as she stood in the doorway to my study, the first time she’d been out of Charles’ sick room for more than a fortnight. “There will be a funeral instead of a wedding,” she said and then turned and walked out of the room.
And so we prepared for my friend’s funeral. Word was sent to Charles’ father in London, his only family. We decided to bury him in our Madison family plot on our land. Charlotte could see the area from the library window and she said knowing that Charles rested so close would bring her comfort.
During this time I was greatly relieved to see my sister so active and involved in these final preparations. A notice was placed in the Baltimore paper and messages sent to all of our friends who had known Charles. Charlotte decided that he should lie in the library while friends and business associates paid their respects. The library is a large room on the opposite side of the main house, situated thusly for quiet and privacy, but perfect for a small service. The large wide doors leading to the garden and then to the family plot would make it easy for the pall bearers to carry the coffin to the grave. The dining room on the other side of our large house would hold those mourners able to stay for a meal.
While Charlotte went to pick out the coffin and have it delivered, I prepared a catafalque and made arrangements with my groundskeeper to start digging the grave. Eventually I walked to the plot to see the progress. Charlotte had already returned and I heard her say, “Make sure it is deep. I want no resurrection men digging him up.” She then turned and saw me, gave me a quick nod and walked away to begin to prepare Charles’ body for burial.
As easily as she had made arrangements for their wedding, Charlotte prepared for Charles’ funeral. She used black edge note cards for the messages to friends and business associates. She made a wreath of laurel from our garden, wrapped it with a black grosgrain ribbon and hung it on our door. Charlotte made sure Madison House followed the traditions of a house in mourning. The servants stopped all our clocks at the hour of Charles’ death and hung black crepe over all the mirrors in the house.
The coffin was delivered and set up on the catafalque in the middle of the library. It was very large, of polished mahogany with brass fittings and screws around the lid. The stable boy and groundskeeper carried Charles down to the library and placed him in the coffin. Charlotte had dressed him in his wedding suit, the suit she had picked out for their nuptials. She rearranged his tie, the pillow under his head and his hands on top of the satin blanket. Then she stood back as if admiring her work. She sighed and turned to me, “I will change my dress. Cook is preparing a meal for our guests.”
She returned later in her mourning dress and bustled around the downstairs kitchen and then back up to the dining room and the library. Her actions and attitude comforted me. My sister had lost her love, but not her heart. All would be well. Yes, we would mourn but eventually we could return to our previous life.
Mr. Poe, I was so very, very wrong. You will soon understand why I blame you for what has befallen us.
The mourners came to pay their respects. The minister said a few words of comfort. The funeral meal was served and everyone finally left. It was just me and my sister—alone with Charles’ body in the large mahogany coffin. Burial would be in the morning and would be attended by just the minister, Charlotte and myself. I had managed a few words with my sister and encouraged her to take the offer of a visit with a cousin who lived nearby. It would get her out of the house where Charles had died. Charlotte had quietly said she would consider it and again I felt a glow of optimism.
Charlotte had moved a chair next to the catafalque and I found her sitting there, quietly, her hands folded in her lap. “Charlotte, it’s been a long, sad day. You should go to your room and rest.”
“Someone must sit with Charles until tomorrow morning. He’s so cold and all alone,” she answered. “He’s so cold and all alone,” she repeated, this time more quietly as if to herself.
Reluctantly I left her and the body of my best friend and retired to my room. The day must have been even more taxing than I realized because I overslept and was awakened by a maid telling me that the minister was here and ready for the burial. I asked the maid to summon Charlotte but the poor girl looked distraught. “Sir,” she finally said, “Miss Madison is not in her room.”
I ushered the maid out and rushed to get dressed, thinking my sister was already in the library, or maybe had been there the entire night. When I finally got there, I found the servants who would act as pall bearers, the minister, but no Charlotte. One of the maids finally appeared and gave me a note she had found in Charlotte’s room. “William, I cannot bear to watch him interred.” Thinking that she may have gone for a walk on our large estate, I ordered the burial to commence. It was brief and I walked away from the gravesite as the groundskeeper started to close the grave by slowly shoveling in the dark dirt of our land.
Mr. Poe, that one scene will haunt me for the rest of my life; the sound of the dirt hitting the coffin “will forever ring within my ears.” Your words, Mr. Poe. Your words.
But I move my narrative too quickly. I shall continue. By noon I was frantic with worry because Charlotte had not returned. I walked the grounds myself thinking that I would find her in a faint among the gardens. But she was not there. I had all the servants search the house. She was not in house. Finally I sent a stable boy to my cousin’s home to see if she had walked there. She was in the habit of walking long distances to clear her mind. It was late when he returned and my sister’s whereabouts were still unknown.
Mr. Poe, you can imagine the night I spent, a night in terror for my Charlotte’s safety, not just for her body but also for her mind. Could she have drowned herself in a pond like Ophelia? Could she have been kidnapped by gypsies? Could she have taken a room in a disreputable boarding house? I harbored all manner of horrible scenes of her, all except the truth. I could never have guessed the truth.
Finally, unable to sleep, I wandered to her rooms. Oddly, I found her mourning dress hanging in her armoire but missing was her wedding dress. It was then that a trickle of fear began to prick at me. I shook it off and went through her things, hoping to find a clue to her whereabouts. And that’s when I came upon the copy of Godey’s Lady’s Magazine with your story, “The Oblong Box”. It was not hard to find, for Charlotte had marked the place with a letter from Charles.
First I read the letter. In this one, his handwriting was strong and clear. But in this one he mentioned the funeral of his friend and the death of the wife. And then I read your story, Mr. Poe.
I read it with no mind to the storyteller, the narrative, the plot—to none of that. I read it to find a clue to my sister’s mind. I found nothing until I came to this line:
“…the box, I say! Captain Hardy, you cannot, you will not refuse me.”
Suddenly the mystery of the box became all too clear. I quickly read to the ending. The man, Wyatt, had sacrificed himself to save, no … to be with, what was in that box.
Suddenly I was enveloped by a cold sweat. I knew where my sister was and it made my stomach churn. Scenes flashed through my mind: finding only the coffin in the library, the chair beside it empty, screwing down the lid, helping to carry it to the open pit, the sound of the dirt hitting the mahogany lid.
Charlotte could not leave Charles. “He’s so cold and all alone,” she had said. Wearing her wedding dress, she had crawled in the coffin with him. She had closed the lid, knowing that as a good friend I would leave the lid closed and fasten the screws.
I had buried my sister alive … alive with her dead bridegroom.
And it was your story, Mr. Poe that had put the idea in her fevered mind.
Oh, yes, we opened the grave, the groundskeeper and I, him thinking that I had gone quite mad. Then we found the truth in the opened coffin. Charlotte was there, in her wedding dress, lying next to Charles, her arms wrapped around his corpse. And she was as dead as he
.
Her words, “He’s so cold and all alone” along with the sound of dirt hitting the coffin “will forever ring within my ears.”
Sincerely,
William Madison
About Mitzi
Mitzi Flyte’s been writing since she was twelve ... for many, many years. She's been published in nonfiction, poetry, and short story in various genres. A retired RN, Mitzi lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, Morgan Reinbold, also a writer, a dog and various cats. www.mitziflyte.com
AN INCONVENIENT DEBT
(Faustian Fantasy Tales)
By Natalie G. Owens
I don’t hear her voice.
When she speaks, the sound pours inside me, down to my tummy, wet and warm. But the sound I hear is different. Not a voice, something else.
Zoom. Whoosh.
I swing with her body, from side to side. She moves like this as she stands, waiting for something. The wetness around me is hot, bad, not nice. It’s because she’s crying. She jerks forward and I get a bit warmer. I feel her touch from inside. Her hand is so close, I have tingles. If only I could reach it from here. She rubs, rubs.
Feels good, so good.
Now she jerks again and screams.
Screech.
I fall with her.
Can’t move, don’t want to move right now, just go to sleep, but she won’t let me. Someone’s pressing gently on her, on me. Another voice shouts. I suck my thumb faster and touch my face.
My head goes around and around as everything around me is sticky and ugly.
I don’t like this. Before was better, even when she sounded sad, when she screamed and the man screamed back at her. He screamed at her a lot, all the time. It was a deep, scary voice—not like hers at all. It yelled over her, louder, so much I couldn’t hear her any more.
Now I don’t hear her either. I hear the other voice, this new voice, say, “Call an ambulance! This woman’s pregnant!”
There’s more shouting but I hear only a little anymore as my ears close up.
The liquid thickens around me, but she doesn’t talk, rub or move with me.
She doesn’t make me better.
I feel tired, sleepy. Please make me better.
∼ ∼ ∼
Eighteen years later …
“You need to get some food in you. What are they giving you?”
He shook his head, embarrassed, and clutched the phone set harder. “I’m fine, Mama. Why you stress out so much?”
His mother’s gaze deepened in concern. He wished he could put his hand on her wrinkled one and squeeze it in reassurance. Through the glass of the prison’s visiting booth, what he saw was a once beautiful, washed out woman—her eyes dulled with suffering, her face creased and tired, her shoulders slumped in resignation. In the three months he’d been here, she’d aged more than she had over his eighteen years.
“Am I supposed to not worry ’bout you?”
The flush didn’t leave his cheeks. “Didn’t say that Ma, just chill, okay? Please.”
“I’ll try,” she said, unconvinced.
Fridays were the worst for him. He paced around his cell all day, trying to focus on something, anything, but how much he missed her. Work gave him respite from the anxiety and gnawing desire for Saturday to come around.
Saturday was the day he saw a beloved face—his mother’s. It was that face that kept him from jumping off the deep end.
Yesterday he had an early night after his pre–visit ritual of laying his shirt and pants carefully over the chair and smoothing out the material with his hands. He always ran his fingers over the creases, imagining that touch alone would make them disappear.
That it would make the hurt go, like when his mother told him the story of how she’d struggled to keep him alive after a hit and run battered her pregnant body. Already bruised from an altercation with her abusive husband, she never saw the vehicle coming. She confessed once it had been an unconscious death wish at the time, one she fast regretted. He was her reason for living, she’d admitted. She wanted to let go but didn’t because of her unborn child. Because of her Luke. After his father she’d sworn off men and gave him her freedom.
So he wanted to look clean and neat out of respect. One of life’s cruelest slaps was the necessity to make amends. It was like putting oneself in a lightless, filthy corner from which there was no escape. The concrete prison was small potatoes compared to the dank, frightening prison in his mind.
The other inmates exercised regularly. They told him that it got the adrenaline flowing and made them feel fit enough to conquer the world. For fleeting moments, it pushed away the doldrums. He couldn’t manage it, although he agreed it would have done him some good. He just sat down, alone, and studied because he was already resigned to a life in chains. The average person never gave up hope until the final judgment on appeal but he refused to fool himself.
They told him it would get better as the years passed … but Ma was getting older. After these few months of incarceration, she went from strong and loving to lost and uncertain. He saw it, even when she tried to hide it. More than that, he saw dread in her eyes that spilled into his heart.
Despite her one hour plus drive to get here, she was always on time, at nine a.m. sharp, as soon as visiting hours started. Today wasn’t any different. Her eyes now were misty with tears, as they often were when he saw her.
“Ma, I have some good news,” he said, remembering what he’d been planning to tell her.
Confusion knitted her brow as she tilted her head to one side. “Are they going to let you go?”
He was looking at a fifteen year sentence, for which he probably wouldn’t be considered for parole before the thirteenth. If he was lucky and behaved like a good boy, things might look up earlier. If he dared hope … but if his case went to appeal, that could take years.
“You know that’s not possible, Ma. My case is still on. … But I wanted to say I signed up to study Braille. Planning on getting a certificate as a transcriber.” He imbued his words with a sense of accomplishment.
Can you be proud of me, Ma?
He wouldn’t tell her that if he was convicted, chances were he’d be moved to a high–security penitentiary many miles away, possibly on the other side of the country. A place where he’d be able to hug her only once at the beginning and end of each visit, where he couldn’t hold her hand, show affection. They would sit at a table and chairs without the glass separating them, but without the comfort of contact. However, at such a great distance, he would probably only see her once or twice a year, if her strength allowed her.
Morton’s Fork—two lousy choices, a false dilemma. He’d read about it in his first and only semester of college. Worse than that, someone else would make the choice for him. The thought knotted him up inside.
“But you’re not blind.”
What? Oh yes, the Braille thing.
He clawed his way back up the slide of despair and laughed.
“It’s a job. Usually, the long–term inmates participate in this program, but I told the admins I wanted to do it, to stay busy. They said okay. I’m handed books that I have to translate for the blind, and then I get to see how many people I make happy. There’s a lot to study and then I gotta go through college too.”
“Can you do it from here?”
“I haven’t asked about the process yet. I’m … waiting.”
Faith is a motherfucker.
She put a hand on her lap and looked down at her skirt that seemed to fit too wide at the waist. She hadn’t been eating either. He swallowed his worry and smiled at her, put his palm against the glass. She raised her hand to mirror his on the cool surface. Love flowed from her to him, from her eyes to his.
“Will that get you out earlier, then, what you’re doing for the blind? I wish it would,” she said. The last words came out in a murmur.
“At least it helps me get used to things.” That was true. It gave him a reason to wake up in the morning.
No
t to speak of the fact that it helped him redeem himself in some superficial way, since he couldn’t turn back the clock. She knew that.
Her face softened. “You’re a good boy, Luke. You always were.”
He swallowed a lump in his throat and got drunk on her voice. Only she existed, not his fellow jail mates sitting in a row beside him, or their visitors who spoke in subdued tones. He would give her this much, something good from the bad.
He hung on her every word and forced a grin as she excitedly told him about the apple pie she’d cooked for him the day before. It was force of habit she said, even after all this time. She wanted to bring it to him but couldn’t—prison rules. He could fairly smell the aroma of cinnamon and the crumbled almond cookies that she liked to work into the pastry. There was something about the comforting fragrance of pies baking in the old oven in her light–filled kitchen. It said “welcome” much louder than the subdued tones printed on the mat outside the front door.
More welcome than he felt in his own skin these days.
Thirty minutes sped by. His mother rose gingerly from the chair as the warden announced that the time was up. He imagined her bones creaking, her hair getting a little grayer. She wasn’t that old though, was she? Perhaps the saying is true that we are only as old as we feel.
Rather than leave, though, she stood there and stared at him, anguish written all over her.
“Mama, please …”
“I’m okay, baby. Just … I wanted to take a good look at you. You’re a fine man, son, and you’ll be safe. I’ll make sure that you are, if it’s the last thing I do. Don’t forget that I love you. I always will, no matter what happens.”
A sense of premonition trapped the words in his throat. “Love you too,” he managed hoarsely.
Tales From The Mist: An Anthology of Horror and Paranormal Stories Page 18