Black Body

by H C Turk

  Came a woman so blatant as to enter through heaven, which was the door, a Jesus hole to save him. This audience carefully approached the felon’s back. Immediately Eric thought her Elsie; but, no, this person he had never seen and could not study now, not with his needing to match the killer’s every lunge, needing to hear his every grunt, the soundless woman with a shadowlike appearance grasping the timber Eric had failed to gain, striking the criminal against his shoulder.

  The felon gasped but retained his knife. Turning to face the woman, he made to strike her as she stepped away to swing the timber again, but these two were not alone in their lunging. Immediately upon seeing the killer’s back, Eric thrust a fist against his ear. This blow so stunned the man that he failed to elude the timber, which struck him near the neck, nearly cutting Eric’s face with a protruding nail, Eric instead striking the man to the nose, a slap to splatter the felon with blood and preclude his avoiding a timber blow that felled him.

  At once the man began to rise, but slowly, Eric immediately on with his exit, grasping the unknown woman’s wrist and pulling her along. Not light nor agile was she, though neither was she plodding, Eric viewing the damaged felon, then glimpsing the woman, a face never seen—a creature never seen. This was Eric’s startled thought as he clambered around debris toward the door, watching the felon, his spur, then the woman, his horror. A horror because when this woman looked about, she did so literally, her head swiveling past Eric but not stopping, rotating too far, too impossibly far, until her face was parallel with her back. And when looking about again, her head came comfortably to rest toward Eric at her side, her face pointing at him bizarrely, chin rubbing her neck—like an owl, not like any human. Then they were through that Jesus door and into the heaven of continued life.

  Quickly they stepped from the building, Eric certain to remain ahead so he would not see the woman look devilishly behind. He looked ahead to guide them, then briefly to her face seen as most ugly in day’s light, but at least pointing toward him, not Satan.

  “I have sought this man with the witch,” she spoke to Eric as they slowed, her voice revealing the stress of combat and flight. “Tell me your house so there we speak again, for Alba is mine to save with you or despite you.”

  After a pause for slow understanding, Eric stated his grandfather’s address. Then, after a glimpse behind by the woman that sickened Eric, the literal stranger concluded.

  “Common sinners can’t aid in your desire. We go to our own places now, but prepare for your future. If you will save the witch, prepare to lose some in exchange, for this is the way of nature.”

  Then she ran past, turning only her head to look over her back and warn Eric finally.

  “To gain your wife, expect to lose as much as me.” And to her place she ran, one Eric prayed God he would never need achieve.

  Chapter 41

  Exit From Hell

  With difficulty, Master Eric explained to his only servant how to prepare herself for a future guest.

  “And I’m to be upset, now, because this woman is unhandsome?” Elsie replied. “You’re noticing, sir, that I’m no beauty meself, though I’m frightening no people with my appearance.”

  “But a beauty you are, miss, compared to this woman who in her great courage saved my person as surely as you did that terrible morn. Therefore, you are equal in your depthless beauty.”

  Either modest regarding her own courage or horrified by the required deed, Elsie spoke of Eric’s further confrontations with danger.

  “Oh, and Master Eric, I’m worrying to near stop my heart whenever you’re gone to Penstone, and I’m fearing you’ve not told me half the times you’ve been attacked and I’d be fearful to hear them regardless. So what’s the terror in a woman coming here of no beauty? If she’s aiding in our planning, then I’m finding her handsome enough.”

  “In truth, Miss Elsie, this person’s lack of facial beauty is not her most distressing aspect. Instead, ’tis her neck most strangely bent, and…twisted.”

  “And it’s twisted, you’re saying, sir?”

  “I do say, and say further that from kindliness you must absorb your distress upon seeing this woman to avoid a mutual embarrassment she especially does not deserve, in that I believe her likely the most important resource in our freeing Mrs. Denton.”

  • • •

  What a life of doors had Eric for these swinging walls to present him alternately with anxiety and stressed love. Next to arrive at Grand’s stoop was the macabre, for Elsie one day approached Eric to state with a whisper and pale visage that a lady had come, no name given.

  Solemn Eric approached the foyer to find Lord Andrew chatting with the saving woman as though the two were friends seen each week in church. How decent was the weather, they decided, with the clouds only occasionally drizzling. What exceptional strength had Grand, determined Eric, to pleasantly converse with a woman completely repellent, from her hideous face to her soiled apparel, to her neck so canted that her head seemed about to fall. She did, however, face Grand at an angle so that her head turned obliquely across her body seemed natural, likely a comfortable positioning for one whose face was usually directed to the side. Andrew then stated to Eric that this fine and friendly woman was known to him, and her purpose was business. Summoning some courtesy, Eric agreed with a smile inferior to Grand’s, the latter bowing to Eric’s guest, stating he would leave them and the drawing room for their discussion, exiting their presence with no hand kissing. As the two colleagues in crime began to step away, Eric was elated that the woman’s first words for him had not been given Grand as well.

  “I know Alba in that she and I are as family. On Man’s Isle we lived, not persons of the same blood, but the same type of humans we be.”

  Not delicately settling as a lady, the woman placed her weight on a chair as did the wife; and were not the two of one nature? Thoughtful this woman was, Eric knew, to look over her shoulder instead of her back.

  “Saying you are the same type of person as Alba is to say you are equally the witch.”

  “No more pride could I have than to be friend to Alba’s mother,” the woman replied. “And God forgive my boasting to say that I am the same person as the daughter, the same witch as she.”

  “To what extent are you the same as she, madam? Do you have equivalently within you a physical surge that mutilates fools?”

  Though stern before, the woman achieved an unpleasant tone when next replying.

  “Alba can annoy with all her words, but I will take them from a sister. No more of sinners’ words will I suffer from a man. When I suffer next again, it shall be blood for blood.”

  The woman was becoming filled with emotions, a type of anger seen in her eyes, and in her voice perhaps some hatred—or was it love?

  “I would have no further suffering,” Eric told her, “for we all have suffered beyond normal living. So tell me, friend and family of Alba, how might we release this person to a freer world without more torment befalling us?”

  “Before have I told you that suffering has only begun. To free Alba, you must not only accept torment, but seek it.”

  “Here I travel with difficulty, since I’ve less of the estimable courage that you witches so pridelessly display.”

  “Boast before you lie, man. Those in Penstone know your courage, thinking you foolhardy enough to live there. When that knifer fell, a coward would have left alone. What were you, then, to pull me along and thereby slow yourself?”

  “What I was, I remain, a foolhardy man who thanks you to his heart for allowing me to live via the force of your own courageous actions. If all witches be the same people as you and Alba, then praise God for witches.”

  “Courageous words are those in a land of sinners, but we’ve told of your courage. Next to be measured is your love, and with it your desperation, for not love and courage together will free the sister. Your taste of death given by Satan through Alba must come again. No weaker force will break the bonds that hold her, f
or they take the hateful form of society. Sinners’ justice is not changed by mere permanent love.”

  “Emotion for Alba is no lack within me, but it has no tactile state. How, then, shall we manifest our emotion? Pure feeling is pure nothing compared to the passionless building that holds her in its heart.”

  “We free the witch from sinners not with their means, but those traits of their best prisoner: with that unpleasant state of magic.”

  “Magic is known to me only as superstition, as groundless rumor on the lips of the ignorant. Alba herself asserted to me that she knows no more of magic than I, and I believe her honest.”

  “Honest she is, but oft incomplete, for with her long wording, she can have one hear things not said. Enough you’ve heard her to know this.”

  “As well, madam, you might understand that my own affected speech is due directly to Alba’s lingual influence.”

  “I am no madam,” she returned, “but named Marybelle.”

  “A name I have heard,” Eric mused, then paused to study either that face or deeper for identity. “God of Heaven, you are the one to take her and live in the wilderness. But unless Alba is the absolute liar, you should be dead, for this was her most saddening belief.”

  “Sinner, I am dead,” Marybelle declared, her sound like a sentence of further execution. “Dead she yet believes me, but I walk because of her. Death I neared because of you, sinner, for your kind had all the hatred to remove my head, even as we must have the love to give Alba further life.”

  Eric’s reply was to move his head side to side as he stared at Marybelle, her neck, able to say no more than, “No such thing is possible…,” in a strangely firm whisper. Firm in her living, Marybelle replied more certainly.

  “The sinning men of Lucansbludge placed my head in the casket against me, but with no more care than needed for the dead, and so it grew, though decently it functions. And all from Alba, for though unaware of magic she remains, the force of God’s greater nature came to her through a love and panic to cure me.”

  “Marybelle, please tell me anything but that Alba via magic reattached your head,” Eric returned, those last words nearly choked out.

  Then the woman stood to approach Eric, turning her back toward him, but also her face.

  “Sinner, I come from the grave to free my sister, and no less a passion would have brought me from that repose. For days with bloody fingers I dug through the wood and soil above to gain clean air, and only because I knew that Alba one day would need equal to what she gave me. Now, male, I come for my sister and will use you if only in slaughter to free one who to her shit is your better.”

  Sitting strictly upright, Eric stared at that face too near, that back too improper, stared at the witch to declare:

  “Marybelle, you could have no more desire than mine for Alba’s release, for with the woman I lived in love, and with God’s grace shall do so again.”

  “Boast not on your lust, sinner, for your love is mere fucking, and ye shall have no more of that. Your prick is gone to never return, but Alba is retrievable. But not forever. Too much passion has this magistrate to retain the witch long. So much he wants her sex that only killing Alba will end it, unless you think he’ll cut his own prick off. Pray your Jesus she rambles well with the writing he’s having from her, for thereafter he has her burned like the animals you sinners eat, and God has given not even Satan the power to retrieve a person from ashes.”

  “I will have her out, I tell you,” Eric croaked, wishing to shout yet wishing to retain this conversation within the room. “But you speak of impossibilities and ask me to agree when I have no ability.”

  “Alba knew no ability to save me, yet save me she did with a strength of spirit a sinner would die to experience. So if you aid me, male, be prepared to approach some loss that seems death.”

  Marybelle then stepped even nearer, her ugliness and perversely canted neck not hiding the humanity of her emotion, perfectly normal except for an intensity that seemed enough to kill.

  “If you save the wife as I save the witch, prepare to lose as she did to save me. And that was no small body part taken in sleep by Satan. What she lost was the sanity and sanctity of loving her own life, for she exchanged it for a blade, exchanged it for my head, exchanged it with a sinners’ knife to kill her. But, no, instead she lived for me.”

  Eric made to speak again, but Marybelle stopped him insanely, her voice filled with spiritual fury.

  “With her own hand and own volition she did cut away herself to save me, sinner, so in your love to release her life, what gift have ye for Satan?!”

  Eric leapt to his feet, brushing past Marybelle as he stepped away, having to halt because of the pain that bent his body, the pain in his head that turned visual; for he saw the wife hacking her breast with a blade, Eric’s greatest pain that he could not imagine mine, not with all his fine intelligence. Great was his torment because it was not his own. And so genuine was his love that Eric rejected the tears coming enough to drown him; for in surviving that wetting, he proved himself the witch, finding again the anger that drove him, drove him to me.

  He turned in a rush, facing oblique Marybelle to wipe his face as though slapping himself, speaking with a power equal to the witch’s previous harshness.

  “By any God or Jesus, I’ll not weep my brain away. And if metaphysics be needed, beware of my magic, woman, for the power of sinners is death, and nothing else can be nearer Satan.”

  Marybelle then smiled, a normally hideous sight now adding to Eric’s strength. When she turned to leave without a word, her move was accompanied by a type of mad laughter heard before by Eric, but only from his wife.

  • • •

  Marybelle returned one evening. As instructed by Eric, Elsie would be the sole servant to answer the door, but finding Marybelle outside at night was a terror to the miss; for despite her faith in Eric that this woman would be their greatest resource, Elsie found Marybelle intrinsically a source of fear. From that night visit on, Elsie found a dread of evening as though a too-imaginative child.

  Eric and Marybelle spoke outside away from light.

  “Are you set, sinner, for evil? Have you readied the husband?”

  “We meet the devil now if it be best for Alba. We leave with but our scars and spirits, and I am prepared.”

  “I smell your anger, man, and it be dangerous. But this type is needed, for you must place yourself with danger. But never will we meet the devil, for he is holding Alba. To free the witch, we meet with God, as near to Him as to each other now, and no force of terror is greater in the world, for He made all the world, made Satan himself.”

  “Though I believe your speaking true, I can bring only ignorance. What I have to free Alba with is not knowledge. Bring guidance for us all, woman. Depend on my passion as I upon your expertise.”

  “Be expert in your living, man. Dying in pieces is easy when you have a killing love. So begin your part of this release beyond the end, and expect to live after Alba is out. If as a pair you be together again, find a place not knowing her, and that excludes most of England. What you do with her then is your planning, for it won’t be magic, but social. Find a place in this world for Alba, then together we’ll deliver her.”

  Marybelle then departed, Eric expecting her to return typically at night. And well the darkness hid her darkness, concealing her freakish cant, her pocked and pitted visage. The night that obscured her appearance supported the person, emphasizing the witch’s rich voice, which made her seem as magical as expected. But with the magic gone, Eric was left with society, needing to become mundane again after expecting the metaphysics of evil. Now he would need to be so social as to find a niche for a woman retrievable only with panic.

  • • •

  The day was brilliant in light and life as Eric journeyed to a friend, the supervisor of Grand’s shipping enterprise; for although Andrew yet owned the company, in activity he was retired. Only for scattered moments during his journey was Eric h
appily impressed by London, the sounds of people leading imperfect lives that were heavenly in not being based upon mutilation, in not seeking torture but avoiding such heinous rites. How magical of these common folk to emphasize felicity.

  Strange that a seafaring concern should have its offices in London’s center, removed not only from the ocean, but from the Thames. Perhaps this office for transportation was akin to Mr. Wroth’s, where I had dealt so poorly; but did this concern have wharves behind where lustful pilots might partake of their final and wettest sex?

  “Mr. Eastmon, I seek passage for my family to America, and must request that my father’s family does not learn of this business.”

  At his desk, Mr. Eastmon settled in a gloom, as though a ship harboring in a fog bank. Eastmon’s distress was from good thinking and gossip, for most of London had heard of Montclaire’s evilest inhabitant.

  “Some part of this arrangement I can fulfill, Eric, but certain aspects I must question. I knew your father before you could walk, and his, of course. These people I will not harm, not even to aid you.”

  “I ask you neither to lie nor falsify recordings, but only retain these truths until the ship leaves.”

  “If you seek nothing more, I might comply, for confidentiality does not equal dishonesty. Nevertheless, great consideration shall I apply before aiding the separation of Lord Andrew and Edward and yourself. Therefore, I must query your further motives. Above all, Eric, I will not jeopardize my place in God’s Heaven by supporting Satan’s evil.”

  “Supplying passage for myself, my servant, and her sister in no way approaches the illegal.”

  “And what of the immoral, Eric? What if one of these women upon approaching my dock is seen to be your wife, a prisoner for life in Montclaire? Why else, sir, would a man take his servant and her kin to America but no family member of his own?”

  “Because he has no other family, and because that servant prevented his dying from blood’s loss. As for my spouse, since she resides in Montclaire for life, expect her not to be traipsing upon your dock. Having never met this woman, you know her not; so if you find my servant or her sister suspect, I suggest you pray God for Him to rid you of suspicion, for this trait can be as evil as any.”