by H C Turk
Chapter 43
Port Commotion
Not even the Sabbath gave Naylor respite from his occult duties. Each day from his first of providing me with the utilities of writing, he visited me as though a publisher of pamphlets come to make certain his creative charge’s literary products were palatable. This imprisoned scribe, however, established the protocols of writing, for her experience was the only expertise in the desired subject of her life. So Naylor arrived each day to collect my product and read with all concentration, never long remaining with the proven witch, and never without guards.
Once the magistrate had confirmed me officially occult, his disposition changed subtly in the immediacy while portending poorly for my future, for Naylor achieved a curiosity of my living aligned toward fear. Reasonable was this view from one to have observed me the killer of men. But Naylor was no man to wait for expected damage. To preserve himself, Sir Jacob would attack when some dangerous force found him its subject. And did he not wonder of the witch, after ending her testimony, directing her evil efforts toward that nearest man, her captor?
Sir Jacob’s disposition I knew from his smell. That excited interest of finding papers stained with knowledge was ever tempered by distrust, fear for his ultimate well-being with the witch. This fear was best smelled when Naylor was least protective of himself, upon gaining satisfaction from my writings. Then his bright interest would become tainted by sex, the fear of illicit sex with a desirable woman, the fear of death from her sex as though holy in its immediate punition directed from God via his decrepit counterpart, Lord Satan. Uppermost was not the plain sex smell roiling from males, but a subtle odor unusual due to its apparent source; for did not the magistrate have a prick in his brain?
Believing that Naylor once done with me would have me well done, I should have procrastinated my tome’s end. This I could not do. With its stench of criminals, with its leader Naylor and his vengeance-in-advance, Montclaire was a misery chamber, more sepulcher than cave. In comparison, my testimony was my life, which I experienced as God intended: with vigor and genuine morality. My guide was not some secular code idealized by sinners, but a desire to comprehend God through worship, a passion inherent to any true human.
At times, I could not move the quill quickly enough to remove all my words, to settle them upon paper. Like ink’s opacity, these words obscured my present, for when busied with the past I could scarcely notice upcoming terror. With each of Naylor’s visits, I could better sense his odor, smell a lust unique since he would not quench it with my body and his sex, but eliminate his desire by eliminating me. Ignorant he was not to sense the prisoner’s entrapping him, for never could he reject the witch. I could not be avoided, for my home was the manse of the magistrate’s career. We two could only be separated by killing the passion to bind us, but I had no lust for Naylor. Though he knew enough of my special sex to be coupling with me without dying, the married magistrate was too moral to accept intercourse out of wedlock. But what love had he to find me resistible only with death?
• • •
I knew myself special. According to smell, no other prisoner of Montclaire was female except Rathel, but she was no concern of mine once settled, though she had not settled so well as I. Had the magistrate personally asked her preferred eating since he knew Montclaire’s meals to be unfit a lady? Did the Rathel thereafter receive instead of felon slop fresh vegetables from the English countryside? Had Amanda been provided a desk of yew and all the ink her distressed spirit desired? Did the very magistrate visit her each day with a personal interest and a smell increasingly reminiscent of conclusion?
What a torment that window was to pass implications of true living while allowing no experience. Between me and that life outside was not metal, but the devil; for the separating entity was tortuous, the space beyond not God’s, but Satan’s. Common sounds of wagons passing, lovely horses snorting and clomping, were alternately enlivening and distressing from describing a life to be loved while offering only separation. Sinners’ voices I well treasured in that era, though most often they were heard due to abnormal volume, the cause thereof either traffic confrontations or excess gallivanting, though even mutual curses at failed horsemanship seemed more energetic than disputatious to me, the sober and drunk carousing more humorous than foolish; for who was I in my constrained existence to denigrate parenthetical results of genuine living?
Too often I dreamed. No new subjects came to my sleeping, a variety of old events tormenting me sequentially. Mother, Eric, ocean, ever. But my greatest distress was to awaken and find my nightmares real, find myself always ill with a remorse as changeable as Mother’s breathing, as Eric’s manhood. Though I deserved to drown in these sins, I was not saint enough to accept my torment. In God’s additive punition, I suffered from my suffering, and well prayed Him my apologies, not for myself but for those I had loved incorrectly.
An abject importance I learned was that the more I wrote, the less I dreamed.
What a smothering this writing became, and all selfishness I purveyed to endanger my truest race to avoid not my execution but my waking thoughts. And though I wrote factually, it all seemed story, an operatic composition to occupy my emotions, to conceal me from the real.
• • •
In this manner, my days receded. Each hour disappeared into a future that would culminate my past. Recurring remorse I retained from my mentor, the magistrate’s best suffering to come. Poor Naylor and his smelled guilt from having to snuff me. Sick Jacob reeking from pride at saving England from this bitch. Lovely God to enjoy all the thick living below Him. Thank you Satan for eating my tedium.
I could not write enough to dream nothing. Having reached that segment of my tome’s chronology equaling my current life—writing then of my writing then—I received a dream appropriate in being an end, for therein I was released from prison—but was this foreboding of escape or execution?
A terrible smell came as I stood in my cell, for it was the odor of a person I had killed. Not a particular person, but a group; for in varying ways, I had killed not every person known to me, but every person loved. Elsie I smelled, or Eric, or Marybelle—perhaps all three or some combination of their souls, their soot. The smell’s increasing intensity indicated an approach. In my cell cave casket, I waited for the smoke and blood person to near. Soon came eyes at my door hole, a nose brow on my bars belonging to the husband.
I have come for my wife, the lashes said.
None exists, sir, I replied. Here is but a witch.
Then I shall take the witch and teach her the past, for in that realm she was my wife, and in the future shall be again.
Then, Sir Nostril, I go with you; for who is a prisoner to argue with the master of time?
Therefore, I opened the door to find Elsie in Lord Andrew’s pantry attacking Randolph. Demanding that the dog accompany her, Elsie found him hiding, having smelled the missus; and knowing full well she had killed all the others she loved, he preferred to be the last alive, not the final murder. Ah, but he’d be coming with his family or remain with the yams, and Elsie would be choosing for the blooming coward. Thus, the miss became forceful, first nudging the dog with one hand, then attempting to lift him, and Randolph growled. Then loudly she spoke with inadequate results. Therefore, the servant lifted the only member of the family her lesser, and the hair rose along his spine, and those were teeth displayed. But knowing the best for her dog lass, Elsie proceeded either to pinch his penis away or lift the heavy brute completely in her arms. And with the first full grasp of either his torso or phallus, the dog with surprising speed turned to bite Miss Elsie’s arm, bite her fruitlessly; for although she yelped herself and began weeping, she continued either to pinch his prick off or lift him from the ground, and he ceased. Either Randolph quit his breathing in that he was bleeding instead, or the frightened dog came to understand that no choice had he in hiding from mere witches whose evil owned the world, at least every family he had known. Pull the maleness from
his torso she did or his torso from the floor, Elsie with a heavy, stiff, and fearful item that she carried with tears and the one bleeding bite that hurt her to the bone; and here were two saved, neither submitting to fearful instincts, Elsie not abandoning her friend, Randolph not being so cowardly as to shun his family when an entire new world awaited. If only he had sense enough not to slap Elsie’s hand away when she came at him with salvation, sense enough not to refuse her after he had imbibed her act. Therefore, when Elsie conveyed the dog in her arms to Montclaire and me, I opened the door to find Naylor.
“You sleep in the day, missus,” the magistrate stated in my waking reality. “Is your health therefore impaired?”
Not a word came as I arose, only a negating nod as I stepped from the bed, a fine new mattress from Naylor. Long enough had I slept there for the bed to smell of me: not man sweat and piss, but my sweat and piss, my blood and smoke.
“Your weariness is understandable, for you have expended great effort in writing. But your latest, which I have read during your strong sleeping, contains nothing new. This also is understandable, since heretofore you have described your entire life. I find, missus, that nothing remains, for you have come to the end.”
He smelled of future ashes. I wondered if this prison typically burned their witches at dusk, or was it at the will of the magistrate, the master of time? And when he dragged me away like Elsie dragging Randolph, would I bite him? Would I find opportunity to pinch away some part of him before he removed my life?
Then came a new odor, another dream turned true, for through the air I sensed a fragrance to chill me from lost history. On Man’s Isle, I had not noticed the odor that changed Sarah Vidgeon, but in this waking dream I smelled it, and was transported to that era of innocence wherein the people I knew in all the world were only witches. Now, however, the only persons known to me were sinners. Better they than Satan, however, so before the latter was delivered by this final sinner in my cell, I would write of that odor. I would convey my ending dream.
I stepped to my desk, beginning to write with no word from the magistrate. Perhaps I heard him sigh, but mainly I perceived that fragrant dream. Carefully I sat so as not to disturb the atmosphere of lost living, yet hurriedly I moved before the dream vanished, before I failed to secure that fragrance.
The magistrate remained, but he did not read my rapid writing, for Naylor would never near me when I was active, lest I cut him with my quill cunt. The magistrate remained, and I queried him not of those activities I kept him from, not when they likely included me.
My lasting people were in this final dream, all of them dead in some manner; and how odd for vacated persons to be describing my life. Sensing Marybelle, I wrote of her. I sensed her with Eric, an unusual pairing since these loved ones had never met in life. Marybelle and Eric were clambering up a great wagon they had convinced its driver to park against Montclaire’s outer walls. Remarkably, Marybelle and Eric were not seen climbing the wall, in that the guards’ backs were toward them. Up they climbed and down to the prison grounds, not seen by guards, whose backs were turned for the moment. Exterior guards then ordered the wagon away. Since it contained a mariner’s box meant for comely cargo, its destination the Thames’ wharves, the driver hied there to wait for his employers, who then were occupied manifesting a dream.
To the prison entry they ran, but here was a massive door only to be unlocked from within as requested by an outer guard. Therefore, Eric shouted that the door be opened, and so it was, he and Marybelle entering with no guards noticing, since their backs were turned, and they smelled intruders poorly. The witch’s location within was known from Elsie’s stay and Marybelle’s smelling, and there they ran. And though the pair moved through corridors populated with guards, moved through locked doors whose keys were smelled and found, no man sensed them, for all males in Montclaire had been connived by manless magic to turn away from my dreaming.
Nearest that dream, the magistrate became so courageous as to approach my drying pages, reaching the paper while viewing me closely so that I would not attack him with my imagining. Attack him I did with my words, for at his back came Marybelle and Eric, though not quite in his hearing did that screaming transpire.
“Witch! Witch! A witch is in the prison and the other escapes!”
The screamer’s back was not turned to the invisible infiltrators, for no man was she, Lady Amanda so dark as to be nocturnal and infer my dream. Therein seeing Marybelle and Eric pass her door unnoticed, she announced their presence with a cry.
The decider in this dream, Marybelle said the husband should not face the magistrate beside his wife, but silence the Rathel instead. The witch would busy herself with the witch. Retreating through passageways, my dream achieved a key known without examination guarded by a man emulating Marybelle by facing folk with his back. Dreamy Eric ran to Rathel’s cell as Marybelle opened mine, seeing me write her name a final time before I faced her. Naylor could not see my move, not with his back to my family’s passion. The sinner could not see me depart with my sister, past jailors blinded by a dream.
Though the Rathel’s cave was on our path, Marybelle had us continue without halting, allowing Eric to conclude his task while my sister completed hers. The one to live here must leave first, before becoming seeable. Therefore, we rushed through Montclaire and to its outer wall, whereupon Marybelle hollered for the guards outside to open. They did, seeing not enough. Less charmed than Marybelle and Eric for being no magical producer in this dream, I was the one to be set in a box in a wagon and sent to a certain wharf, a specific ship. My sea cave, however, was missing. Dreaming that it was on the docks, my crooked sister sent me straight to the wharves in a coach and bid me wait for her as she returned for my husband, her invert lover.
Alone in my library, the magistrate read another witch’s dreams. Eventually he sensed a discrepancy, for Naylor was reading of Amanda’s screaming though nowhere on the paper was it writ. Only upon understanding that he stood beside a prisoner no longer present did Naylor reach my final word, then he escaped as well.
Wiry was the Rathel when attacked, and stunningly loud, but Eric silenced her despite his approval of ladies. This one, after all, had been known to lie. Scarcely a bruise did he render the woman, Eric simply leaping upon her, collapsing Amanda with his weight. Out went her breath, her screaming ended. Then Eric tied her with bedding until she resembled upholstery, the woman not moving as Eric turned to the door to see Naylor run past.
The magistrate attempted to awaken his jailors from my sleepless dream, but since the topic was magic, the sinner subordinates failed to notice. Though listening to the magistrate, they knew not where to run, since nowhere in Montclaire were misplaced persons. Not being with Marybelle, Eric was misplaced, becoming cautious of Naylor, who now could turn, who now could see him.
Aware that loose persons would leave, Sir Jacob hied to the prison exit. Ignorant guards heard his orders and followed, but only Naylor of the pack was not blind to Eric. Therefore, the husband ran among guards with their confused activity of looking for whom where, ran past loud boots, but not so near the magistrate as to be seen. Run they all did, an increasing lot soon at the prison exit, Eric wondering how he would pass the seeing leader. But Naylor was not seeing once at that gate, for he was drowning in my dream, smothering in apparel; for a witch had fallen from the sky onto his face, Marybelle having imaginatively dropped from the stone wall. Dreamy Eric then guided several guards into stumbling over their magistrate until the lot was a heap, Marybelle calling for the gate to be opened, her voice heard only by the gatekeeper, and obeyed. The magic pair in their implied innocence then walked calmly, briskly away, to a carriage and to awakening.
• • •
At its ocean outlet, the Thames spread broadly and smelled of brine. Busy was the water, its traffic boats large and small for transporting hay and for fishing. The largest, for conveying people to distant lands, was mine, and I despised it. Gently, precariously, it moved side
to side. With all its huge timbers for sails situated so high above the hull proper, clearly the boat was unstable. A mobile bridge it was, meant to travel far from land before collapsing to toss its passengers into the water.
Aboard this huge armoire, this closet cave for drowning, stood people appearing like frogs on a log about to leap away from their unsteady perch. The only familiar persons in this dream were dead, my nightmare coming true most falsely in having begun with dead Marybelle returned in a silly shape accompanied by the ridiculous smell of Eric’s assistance as though he were yet a whole person with some interest in the wife. Especially foolish was this dream’s intent, since clearly my former loves meant to drown me. But there would be no drowning in most solid Montclaire. Therefore, I requested that the sinning coachman return to being fatefully real by returning me to my home.
How typical of a dream to be more convincing than established life, that tilting bridge behind me more of a threat than Naylor’s smell. But, after all, I was witch or sinner according to the disadvantage of the identity. In this regard, who was I to so determine a genuine sinner as to judge Naylor prepared to roast me? In fact, was he not merely contemplating a change in my living? Perhaps a new cell, one smaller and with a worse view. One my length made of wood with no windows and a sky of soil. Not so disastrous would this be, since Marybelle had survived her lodging in such a cave. And what if a few of my body parts were removed by Naylor first? After all, Marybelle had survived into my dream with no head. Eric had continued to seek my window though lacking a unique limb. Then I imagined these semi-living seeming-witches dragging my box from the dirt, performing magic to reinstate my pieces. Indeed, had they not previously attempted that painful worship in order to enter the cave of Montclaire? What items of their lives had they lost for me that now I vomited at their faces? How saintly was I to refuse their pieces and their tilting ship? How demonic was I to reject that final drowning I had ever dreamed and thereby reject their love?