When he stopped, he was breathing heavy. He should go back. They would accept him, no matter what he had done. They would. Augie caught sight of a reflection in a shop window, then; a hairy creature stared back.
This was what they saw. A haggard beard engulfing his face. A thatch of straggly hair circling a sunburned bald pate. The shabby remnants of a soldier’s uniform and ill-fitting skunk-leather moccasins. An image as obscene and unearthly as Mr. Bagby’s wraiths. Augie was no longer a part of this world. He would forever be outside.
He walked slowly through town, unashamed of crying. How can one have shame if he has no pride? The world had been denied him, and he had no direction, no task to keep him going. At the stable, he wiped his eyes before he went in, but Mr. Bagby was gone.
The horses were agitated. Then Augie smelled it—death. The stench was familiar and strong. He thought he might find Mr. Bagby’s corpse in one of the stalls, but his sense of smell directed outside to the road. It grew stronger as he got out of town.
Half a mile out he saw smoke. Then the sky erupted, firecracker bursts and thundering artillery. Mr. Bagby had been drawn by the scent, just as Augie was.
The Battle Flag waved above a field of smoke. The dead were left where they fell and the fighting moved on. Augie identified a portly shape hunkered over a body in the field. A bugler sounded a charge, drowning out his call to Mr. Bagby, and then a regiment of Confederates separated them.
Augie ran between the formations. He was back in the army, heart racing, palms sweaty, running through hell. Smoke stung his eyes and Minie balls sang past him. Mr. Bagby half-turned, seeing Augie, and a grin split his face. Then he was jerked backward, followed by the crack of a gunshot.
Augie slid to the dirt, skinning his knees. Mr. Bagby was lolled on his back. The wound sucked air through his chest, whistling. Augie stuttered meaningless words and pressed his hands in the bloody mess. It was very red.
Mr. Bagby’s pale lips quivered. "You know this is vital," he said.
"Hush, Bagby." Augie called out: "Medic! Over here!"
"What we do," Mr. Bagby insisted, struggling to talk. "You’ve seen it. It must be done."
"Yes, yes," Augie agreed. His friend’s life oozed through his fingers.
A veil covered the sky, a dark cloud directly over the two of them. The battle raged on elsewhere, outside of them, oblivious to this moment.
"Take my hand." Augie didn’t want to stop compression, but Mr. Bagby was adamant. "Take it!"
Slick with his blood, Augie’s hand clasped Mr. Bagby’s limp right hand. He squeezed firmly to communicate support, acceptance, a covenant between them. Then, with a burst of hidden strength, Mr. Bagby’s left hand lashed out and his dagger chopped at his own wrist. His hand came away in Augie’s grasp. Hot blood squirted from the stump, splattering Augie’s face. Mr. Bagby grunted and arched his back.
The white darkness descended. The wraiths were upon them, their chittering expectant. Then that horrible face opened its toothy maw for Mr. Bagby.
But he raised his ragged stump defiantly. "Ha! You bastards! You’re not gettin’ me!"
Augie stared at the severed hand in his own palm.
Mr. Bagby’s laugh degraded into a hacking cough and he slumped down and was still.
The wraith hovered over him; its sucker mouth pouted, but it did not latch on. It snapped its head in Augie’s direction and the chittering crescendoed. The puckered lips slurped for him, but the wraith whisked away, and the sunlight returned.
Augie sat alone in the field with his friend.
*****
The battle at Gettysburg lasted three days before Lee retreated to Maryland and the Union army pursued. There were some 50,000 casualties all together, 8,000 dead. It took Augie a week to collect all the parts. The wraiths were thwarted, not defeated. The work was unfinished.
He had Mr. Bagby buried as a soldier along with the Union dead. No one commented that he wore a Rebel coat and belt.
Mr. Bagby had no belongings except the dagger, which Augie thought might come in handy, and his black derby. Augie wore that in tribute.
He was loading the handcart when a voice called out to him. "Bagby!"
Augie turned and recognized Dr. Hawthorne. The field surgeon had more white in his beard and didn’t seem to recognize that he had mistaken Augie for his friend.
"I have a bag for you." The doctor glanced around to see that no one was watching, then handed over the sack. Augie knew what was inside. Dr. Hawthorne looked at him expectantly. His eyes were sunken and shadowed. "Well? Do you have it?"
It finally registered what the doctor wanted. Augie found the proper sack on the cart, then handed a vial of amber liquid to Dr. Hawthorne.
The doctor shoved it in his pocket. "Goddammit, Bagby. Be discrete." Dr. Hawthorne stormed back to the medical tent.
It should have come as a surprise to Augie that Dr. Hawthorne couldn’t tell him from Mr. Bagby, but it didn’t. They were both outsiders, and no one looked closely. Augie’s metamorphosis was complete.
He tilted his head up and sniffed the air, catching a scent to the south. A jay soared across a blue sky. Then Augie pulled the handcart across the hallowed field.
THE SEVENTH PLAGUE
Allie Marini Batts
At the beginning of the sub period, Allie--who's appeared in places like Conclave: A Journal of Character, Danse Macabre, and Irregular Magazine--sent me a beautifully written story that reminded me of Thomas Ligiotti but wasn't right for Torn Realities. I admonished her to send me something else and she sent me "The Seventh Plague". I knew I had my coda to this book. This little flash prose-poem fits so well into what the book was trying to accomplish that I couldn't see it ending any other way.
For Mehitobel Wilson
It is raining down fire in Tallahassee, and everywhere, Florida is burning.
Canopy roads transmutate into trellises of blue flame, licking up invasive threads of kudzu and belching back greasy plumes of ash into the gagging black of the sky. Husks of kamikaze insects land smoking and charred like hailstones of hell from above. The sap of sweet gum trees boils as thrushes of flame set their boughs alight. The ground and sky come together in the combustion of trees, sending shrapnel, splinters, and embers in all directions. Ancient oaks surrender their histories to the inferno: this is their suttee; their marriage to the earth is ending. Steam and smoke hiss out, peals of superheated cinders a demon snow. The detritus of scrub pines, dead leaves and the dirty ground gobbled down in a barbarous yawp of perverse meteorology that sends birds back down featherless and roasted, a final feast for the damned.
Under a bloodmoon, murderous strangles of ivy, cling to every stagnant structure, trying to reclaim architectures back into the dirt over which they were erected--those heart-shaped witches of leaves, judged and sentenced, lashed to the stake without a locket of gunpowder to bring them back home. The scent of scorched magnolias; cloying, sweet, like a rot on the air. Slender skeletons of dogwood branches, cremated and scattered over ground no longer sacred. These hills are the burial mound of the lost. Burning bushes in a place that no longer has a need for the Bible or a savior.
After the fire, there is nothing left to save, walls of fire will collapse and implode, sucking everything down with them in their wake, a black hole from the alien skies wrought down upon the crust of our frail planet. On the coals of what used to be the ground, fat lighter from felled giants glitters and crackles, screaming like the squall of iron in a kettle, everywhere the sulphurous stench of timber. This is not Sinai, these brambles are consumed fully, the only angels are fallen ones whose faces are too terrible to look upon. A storm deity sweeps up what God has abandoned here. Borne back into pooling waters of brimstone, Lake Jackson is fire baptized and born anew: Ghenna, enraptured by the burning of its second death, predestined and unquenched. This is the darkness that can be felt, stretching your hands towards the sky, reaching over wicked orchards, croplands razed and salted with flame. For three days it will
burn, overpowering palmettos and twisting their trunks into the sonic blast of a bomb dropping. This is how we become myth; this is how to destroy legend. As it was in Egypt, so it is in Florida. We have disappeared; we are shadows, singed on the walls. Concrete becomes molten stone, soon our shadows, too, will be swallowed up in the rains that come down as fire.
Listen:
Florida is burning.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Paul Anderson's short stories have appeared in the Post Mortem Press anthologies A Means to an End, Dead Souls, and Dark Doorways: The Best of Post Mortem Press. Other work of his has appeared in Belfire Press's The New Bedlam Project, Necrotic Tissue, Title Goes Here, among others. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and daughter.
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