by Allyson Bird
“I suppose you are hungry. Well, are you?” I jumped at the sound of her cracked voice. For a small woman she certainly could carry an effect some distance. I was at the farthest end of her grand table, keeping away from the rank smell of her at the other end of the room.
“Er—yes,” I replied, looking around forlornly.
She pulled the bell cord and an old servant appeared who was almost as old as her. I withheld a nervous smile, yet the meat and potato soup was surprisingly palatable. I doubted that it warmed the stiff old bones of my grandmother’s.
I had no tactics to speak of so I came right out with it. Like Daniel before me I braved the wrath of the lion—or rather this lioness.
“What happened to grandfather?”
Her silence was intense. Still, the ceiling did not come crashing down and I was not turned to stone. Grandmother said nothing to my question and there followed a stare which chilled me to my very core and made me once again think of Kay and the Snow Queen.
“And how is your poor father?”
I thought about the word poor. Poor covered all the facts. Poor, as in lacking in money, therefore poor in stature, poor in spirit, poor in everything. All the men of her family had been a disappointment to her and I was assured of my rightful place by their side as they prepared for judgement day.
“He manages.”
My father had told me of the harsh measures she had metered out to him in his childhood. It made me almost sick to my stomach to broach my subject again but I would not rest until I knew more of the matter.
“What happened to grandfather?”
“Nothing—happened to your grandfather.”
I felt a cold squeeze as if her hand on my heart and the curses from hell fall on my shoulders.
I sat back in my chair and thought very carefully about my next words. “How did he die?”
“You know how he died. A heart attack—weak heart. The Mortimer men always have weak hearts.”
We were interrupted by a flash of lightening across the window and my next words were drowned out by a clap of thunder that would have prided Zeus himself. At this point my grandmother raised her stick in defiance as so many fearful witches had done before her and would do for all eternity. I saw her reflection in opposing mirrors, more of her than I would ever want to see in my worst nightmares. My words echoed to enhance the effect.
“How did he die—how did he die?” I could hear the words spreading through the large house like a canker on a wasting rose.
Grandmother rang a bell that was within easy reach. “I’m tired now—I will retire. You can stay the night after all.”
From out of nowhere the elderly servant reappeared to escort Grandmother to her bedroom. I sat back in my armchair and dozed before the servant returned to show me to my room.
Later, in my canopied bed, I lay awake as the rain railed against the windows like some great sea creature lashing its tail, and I pondered why I was there. My efforts to find out more about my grandfather had proved fruitless and I was failing dismally to discover any truth surrounding the mystery of his demise. I put on the lamp and stared at the clock on my bedside table. It was well past midnight. I stared at the huge doorway beyond which loomed irregular and I thought of escape.
I heard a floor creak in the room above, imagining all sorts of terrible things there. I was startled by the sound of something crashing to the floor and wondered if grandmother had an intruder in the manse. I hurriedly put on my clothes and peered around in the half-light for a weapon with which I could creep up upon whatever scoundrel was at that moment rifling through the family heirlooms and daring to injure the dubious matriarch of my family. I was surprised that I cared.
My steps were silent as I ascended the stairs; like Theseus in the labyrinth of the Minotaur; I was Heracles after the Nemean lion; Odysseus against the Cyclops. I was all these and more rolled into one and there was no one more heroic than I.
On the landing I looked upward, my gaze following the twisting stair that ascended to—only God or the Devil knew where, and then I stared into the great shadowy hall below. My mind was filled with shapes of grotesque creatures and of things half formed but not fully defined.
My racing thoughts began to slow as I looked out through the window at the rain that vanished into the darkness of the parkland below.
I put my first foot on the next stair. They seemed to go on forever. The creaking I heard came from directly above my bed but these stairs seemed to climb much higher. The banisters were carved with entwined vines and branches. As the moonlight struck the staircase I thought I saw the face of Bacchus himself, with his half-mad eyes staring at me from beneath a banister. Then he was gone.
Once at the top and on the landing I stood opposite a door. My mind flashed back and I was four years old again. I had the most horrible of nightmares. I saw myself outside this very door in fact, and had heard the scream of a bird in pain. The door had been partially open, enough to see the flash of a blade in the moonlight, and then a silence, strange and final.
A spilt second later and I was back in this new, more terrifying, situation. It was a moonlit night once again. As I slowly entered the room I could hear the ruffle of feathers and could just make out the structure of what appeared to be a wooden altar. Determined to be as brave as ever I could be, I continued but stumbled over something on the floor, falling backwards as the deep, dark scarlet wings of a bird brushed my face. Recovering myself, I took a deep breath and stepped forwards towards the wooden altar. It was inscribed with a Latin text, adorned with a pentagram and had a stained glass window in its centre. As the moonlight reflected off the coloured glass more dark shapes lurked in the corners of the room and I was even more afraid of my grandmother’s house with all its dark secrets.
The house echoed then with the sound of thunder and a bright white beam of light lit the room frantically for a second. What I saw then was enough to terrify me for the remainder of my life: there before me, lying in a shroud and as withered as the great pharaohs of Egypt, was a body. Over it stood my grandmother like some high priestess of ancient Egypt with a knife in one hand, holding a sacrificial bird by its feet in the other.
With the next flash of lightening I could see that the bird had ceased its fight for life and its blood poured over the musty shroud. The servant woman by her side fumbled in the dark and lit a lantern. She held it low and my grandmother peered at the shroud. My eyes reluctantly left the shrouded body and searched for more horrors in the room—I saw the dozens of dead birds scattered on the floor.
“Not enough—never enough,” she cried bitterly.
It was then, with a look of madness in her eyes, she turned to me. I ran. Once outside the mad wings of crows beat, as if in slow motion, as they settled on the rooftops in silent mourning for their fallen brethren.
I did return to the manse for my grandmother’s funeral and saw her shrouded body laid out in its black coffin. I felt that even in death she mocked me and the male line of my family. I was the only person besides the servants to attend the funeral and I was surprised that she had not been buried in the backwoods with others of her ilk. I had only the servants’ word for it that it was my grandmother who lay in that coffin and not secreted in some evil corner of that house. But the old witch had not finished with me yet.
Many years later I was performing some magic tricks in a rather modest theatre in New York. In the middle of a rather famous little trick of mine I looked up with a smile on my face and stared into the audience, anticipating the look of wonder from them. To my horror I saw my grandmother’s burning eyes looking back at me. It had not been the first time that she had appeared to me. A few weeks earlier, during the interval of a play, she had appeared in the quiet cloister of my dressing room and crept close to me, breathing blasphemies in my ear. It was more in fear than rage that night when my voice trembled as I suffocated the desolate Desdemona. I wished I was strangling my grandmother’s ghost. My grandmother had whispered to me of
my tragic flaw and how all the men in the family would never achieve their potential because, ultimately, we are too weak.
In her will she bequeathed the manse to me and any children that I might have but I refused to go back. She taunted me in her ghostly form and I found I could not concentrate upon anything. All I could think about was the house. It became an obsession, an obsession that would consume me, and of that I was more afraid.
Eventually I did take up residence in the house. I had kept on the last, old faithful retainer. I did not, however, ever venture into that room that I had entered twice before. It was kept firmly locked and for a time my grandmother left me alone. That was until one Christmas Eve when her spirit stirred and came once more to visit.
I was sitting by the fire in the library. I felt her vile breath in my ear until I was driven to a sudden madness and hurled myself into a rage, tearing books from the shelves and scattering them across the tattered carpet. It did not stop there. More books found themselves onto the fire and soon I was looking for a bigger bonfire in which to burn her books of sorcery and witchcraft.
I dragged the decrepit manservant from his bed and threw him outside into the snow, cursing him a thousand fold for aiding my grandmother in her evil ceremonies, for I knew now that she had doomed me and bound me to the house.
“Cursed!” I screamed and heard it echo through the house to the graveyards beyond. And within that one word, in that final moment, all the horror was concentrated.
I bolted the door and ran back to the library. The books made a large fire but it wasn’t enough. I knew what I needed to do next. Pulling one burning book of necromancy (an evil testament to an evil life) from the fire I tossed it onto the middle of the rug.
I threw more books on top of it, and more still, until the flames leapt at the large armchair, and the curtains beyond. I could see through the flames to the window and fancied that I saw my grandmother’s face, larger than in life, once more mocking and laughing at me.
There was nothing I wanted more now than to destroy the manse. It was a shrine to the unholy, to the folly of an old woman who only ever loved my grandfather with an intensity that she wanted to preserve forever. In my madness I thought I saw her body go up in flames and I ran once more from that house.
As I looked back that final time, I saw the crows billowing out from under the eaves like some threatening cloud, followed by the tortured remnants of evil. I watched the house from the safety of the parkland; I watched it burn to the ground, knowing that within those dark corners burnt the remains of my grandfather and grandmother.
Dedicated to Orson Welles.
Silence is Golden
“It is easy to go down to hell; night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide; but to climb back again, retrace one’s steps to the upper air—there’s the rub, the task.” From The Aeneid by Virgil.
Vince Taylor was soon to bury his wife, but not before he had kept her in the house for seven days, awaiting her funeral.
Mary Taylor had been a very rich woman and some naïve folks said that they couldn’t understand why Vince had married plain Mary, while others said they would have married her for the money too. Whatever the truth of the matter was, it didn’t matter now. All that mattered was that she had stipulated in her will, that for seven days and seven nights she was to lie in an open casket in the front parlour. She was to be surrounded by four ivory pillar candles which must never go out, and four bouquets of white roses which must never die before her funeral—or Vince would be out on his elbow without a penny.
Vince considered himself to be a smart guy, ten years younger than Mary. He had gotten to know Mary when he delivered meat from Naylor’s shop to her house once a week. She had fallen for his long brown hair and lost-boy looks. That was over two years ago when he first came to Madison County. She had just turned thirty-eight when she disappeared on a Tuesday afternoon in December and was found dead on a Wednesday morning in the Crown Hill Cemetery Creek by the graveside of her friend Miriam Newbury. Why would someone stay so long at a graveside that they froze to death?
The coroner, Geoff Newbury, examined her body that same day.
“No evidence of anything unusual. The condition of the body is consistent with what you would expect in finding it out in the cold. She died of exposure.”
“Why would anyone visit a grave in that weather—crazy?”
The coroner peeled off his gloves. “Now that, Sheriff, is for you to find out.”
“And I’m sure I will. This town is too small for unanswered questions. There will be a reason, I tell you. There always is. Anyway, we finished here? Can her husband take her home?”
“Home?”
“Got a phone call from him this morning, said that if it was all right with you and me, then the undertaker would do what she had to do to bring Mary over to him, as per the instructions in the will.”
“Her will?”
“The one Mary wrote that stipulated she was to be taken home for seven days until her burial?”
“That’s—er—a little unusual wouldn’t you say?” asked Geoff.
“Geoff, I’ve been the sheriff here for thirty-two years. There is nothing under the sun and moon that is unusual to me. If you think that being taken home before burial these days is unusual, they used to do it all the time in the old days. You know that. Finding a body all bricked up in a cellar, now that is unusual, or dead and sitting up for seven years in a rocking chair—now that is unusual.”
“But this is 2008.”
“Wow, beejesus, we’re modern and the dearly departed aren’t allowed home before they’re shoved in the ground or burnt to buggery—”
“Easy, Jake, I was only saying—”
Geoff stared at the wedding ring on Mary’s hand, wondering if there was any point trying to get it off for her husband.
Perhaps the undertaker would do that.
At that moment Jake remembered that Geoff had lost his wife only a year earlier, and at the same time of year too.
“Sorry, Geoff. I’d plain forgotten about Miriam.”
“That’s okay, Jake.”
Feeling embarrassed, the sheriff zipped up his jacket, put on his hat and left.
Vince wrung his hands and wondered what condition his wife’s body was in. Dead and buried she should be, not unburied and coming home to him. He was not a man to be messed around with and he had waited two whole years for his freedom; Vince was eager to do what the hell he wanted with her money.
There was a knock at the door and he opened it. Two individuals of equal height, a man and a woman, stood before him. The woman looked slightly younger than the man but they could have been related, they looked so alike with pale, grey eyes and blonde hair.
“Mr. Taylor?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Frances St. Germaine and this is my brother, Gerald.”
The three shook hands and Vince couldn’t help but notice that Frances St. Germaine looked far too good looking and young to be a funeral director. He was a little disturbed by seeing her in a black suit, white shirt and black tie. She didn’t look right and yet, somehow, she did.
“Mrs. Taylor is ready for you now.”
That shook him. Vince felt his hands turn clammy and he rubbed them on his trousers in an attempt to remove his anxiety.
“Shall we bring her in?”
“Er—yes.” There was no way of avoiding it—if he wanted that money.
There were four funeral directors altogether who brought the casket containing his deceased wife into the parlour. It was the ugliest coffin he had ever seen, gold and white.
She never did have any taste, thought Vince. Once the coffin was settled on the trestle, Vince spoke out:
“Is that what Mary chose?” he pointed at the casket.
“Oh yes, it is exactly what Mrs. Taylor stipulated.” Frances brought a catalogue out of her briefcase, opened it and pointed to the page. His eyes followed her finger.
Devotion
&
nbsp; 20 gauge steel, hermetically sealed. White enamel finish with gold shading. Cream Madeira crepe interior, with church window/praying hands lid panel.
Swing bar handles and adjustable bed.
$4692 including traditional funeral.
He saw the dollar sign before the hideous picture of the casket.
“Jesus, how much?”
“Your wife was very particular. She wanted that casket and was very insistent upon it.”
“Do people usually plan their funeral down to the last detail before they die? Isn’t that what the relatives are for?” He flipped the pages of the catalogue, astounded at the funereal detail.
“A lot of people plan their own funerals as they don’t trust the choices their relatives might make when they are grieving.” Frances smiled at Vince and he couldn’t help noticing her peach perfume as she bent closer to him.
“I see, well, I suppose that sort of wraps that up then.” Vince gave her back the catalogue.
“Not quite, Mr. Taylor. We have the candles and the roses to bring in and then we will be back in seven days for the funeral.” Frances gestured to the nameless funeral directors and they all left the room.
Vince shuffled around uncomfortably and thought how much he hated the William Morris wallpaper on the parlour wall and the matching William Morris curtains. The Brother Rabbit pattern was inspired, according to his wife and May Morris, by the ‘Uncle Remus’ stories. Vince hated the green patterned, rabbit filled wallpaper and Mary had insisted that the curtains be made of the same pattern; it seemed to Vince that his wife had never heard of the word contrast. And, they had cost a fortune. She knew how to spend her inheritance and Vince was always worried that she was going to spend it all. But apart from a few favourite furnishings, and now a bloody awful casket and the roses (he didn’t know how he was going to keep them alive for seven days), she had been reasonably frugal. Still, she knew that he never kept anything alive; his dog Doody had pegged it, along with a cat, two gerbils, and a baby croc that had gotten into the plumbing somehow.