The Vampires of Vigil's Sorrow

by Cassandra Duffy

  “Then you should keep it for yourself,” she said. “Hide it away so he can’t ruin it the way he does with pretty things.”

  Sarah took the offered doll, clutched it to her chest as precious, and finally smiled in return to Margaret. “You’re a dear friend,” she said.

  Margaret held her hand for a moment while Sarah cradled the little cornhusk doll. When the tremble finally faded from Sarah’s pudgy hand clenched tightly in Margaret’s slender digits, they took a moment to pray together. It was the same prayer they always uttered before parting ways. They asked that Margaret’s mother be commended to heaven and that Sarah’s husband be touched by the hand of God so he might be a kinder man.

  Margaret left things with Sarah as well-off as she could, waving to her through the cabin window before departing. As many times as they’d prayed together without anything ever changing, she doubted God was listening.

  3.

  Margaret always had to work twice as hard through the afternoon and evening to finish all her housework and chores when she went out to see Esther or stopped by to see Sarah and she’d done both that day. She never minded the intensity of the work after though and her father was always placated in her absence when she gave him half the money she’d earned selling the cornhusk dolls. She usually told him it was the full amount even though she set aside the other half to buy items Esther needed but would never ask for.

  The billow of her father’s forge was putting out great puffs of smoke and steam on the street side of their house when Margaret approached. The trail of smoke vanished up into the haze of the town’s wood smoke, which in turn faded against the overcast autumn sky. Margaret would no doubt have cleaning to do around the house, an angry mess left over from her father and brother having to fend for themselves at breakfast. She would need to make sure the house was clean and orderly before she could head into town to sell the dolls in case she returned after her father was done with his work.

  She set the basket of dolls on the table and removed her shawl to hang it on the peg nearest the door. The sound of her father’s hammer clanging against steel horseshoes and the iron anvil resounded through the cabin. She’d grown accustomed to the repetitive sound and the acrid scents that always permeated the wall shared with the smithy until she couldn’t imagine the house without them.

  She nearly leapt out of her skin with fright when her brother Ezekiel emerged from the back bedroom. His sandy blond hair was a mess while his overalls were entirely too clean to have been to work. He was only thirteen, and small for his age, but he worked hard at a few odd jobs on nearby pig farms. He was a sweet boy with a soft temperament and a way with animals making him a poor choice to apprentice as a blacksmith under their father.

  “What are you doing home in such a tidy state?” Margaret asked as she began stoking up the fire in the stove to boil water over.

  “Mr. Derby is slaughtering today,” Ezekiel explained. “He knows I don’t like hearing the pigs screaming, so he sent me home.”

  The sweetness of her little brother struck her. He was a tender boy growing into a fine young man. Whatever hardness their father had tried to instill in him simply hadn’t taken. They were the only two children of seven to survive, but Margaret thought they had done well as a family to produce such a boy.

  “Someday you might have the money to make a farm of your own,” Margaret said. “I’ve seen how you save your earnings. What will you do when it is your job to slaughter the animals?”

  “Oh, I don’t want a farm,” Ezekiel replied in his quiet way. “I want a livery where I can take care of horses all day and sleep in the hayloft above them.”

  “That sounds like a fine plan if I ever heard one.” Margaret busied herself tidying up the kitchen while she talked. The mess was not as bad as other days, which she suspected meant Ezekiel hadn’t eaten for fear of creating extra work for his sister. “Are you hungry? I could make you something before I go out again.”

  “Mrs. Derby fed me up fine before they sent me home,” Ezekiel replied.

  There was something odd in the way her brother was talking and standing. He was smiling shyly, which was becoming off-putting and he was standing as though he’d recently removed a cap to hide it behind his back. Margaret gave him a puzzled look and quirked an eyebrow.

  “You look about ready to burst with a secret,” Margaret said.

  “My saved money…we could take it and go…I know what has been going on in the mornings and I’m wanting to rescue you from it,” Ezekiel said quickly, his words tumbling out of him in a jumbled mess as though he knew what he wanted to say, but couldn’t get the words to come out in an orderly stream. “I love you…”

  “I love you too, Ezekiel, but I’m not sure what you’re…” and this was all Margaret managed before her sweet little brother grasped her by the arms and forcibly kissed her.

  She struggled at his embrace, surprised to find the wiry boy was a good deal stronger than her. His insistent and unpracticed advances were remarkably difficult to shrug off, and she might not have managed if her father hadn’t stormed into the house at that exact moment. She hadn’t noticed that the clanging of the hammer had stopped and neither had her brother apparently. Her father yanked away Ezekiel by a handful of his hair and hurled him violently into the table and chairs.

  Margaret screamed and moved to aid her brother, but her father struck her hard across the face with an open hand, dropping her to the floor with the entire left side of her face stinging and her left ear ringing. From her vantage point sprawled partially on her side, she could see Ezekiel was hurt, but not badly. He was faking to some degree, crawling away from his father to use the table as an obstacle until he could regain himself.

  “Vile whore,” Margaret’s father yelled down at her, accompanying the insult with a healthy spray of spittle. “How dare you…” But he didn’t seem to know how to finish the thought without implicating himself in the same sin he was railing against Ezekiel for. Margaret had ceased attempting to fight him off when he came to her bed, not out of desire for him, but because fighting only led to a beating before, during, or after the disgusting act. She saw now that her father had begun mistaking her passivity for enjoyment.

  He turned on Ezekiel next when he couldn’t think of what else he might shout at Margaret. “You are an abomination!” he shouted at his son. “Get out of my sight before I kill you for defiling my house with your wickedness.” To get his point across, their father scooped up the length of iron piping used for stoking fires and swung it at Ezekiel. The boy managed to duck away from the strike, which didn’t seem to truly be meant to harm him.

  Ezekiel regained his feet and placed the kitchen table between himself and his father long enough to escape out the front door before the iron rod could be swung again. Margaret called after him and moved to follow, but she was yanked back down to the floor by her hair when her father caught up to her before the door. He slammed the door with his free hand, threw the iron rod down on the floor with a clatter, and came at her with equal parts rage and desire. Now she fought him, not just for herself but for Ezekiel too. She lashed out with fingernails, kicks, and bites as he pushed her to the floor and tore at her clothes. He roared unspeakable, horrible things at her when she managed to draw blood from his leathery cheek. Now he closed his fist to strike her in earnest. The punch sent stars across her vision and rattled the fight from her. Despite that she was too dazed to fight any further, he struck her again, loosening her front teeth and sending a shock of blood through her mouth. She cried at the pain as he went about his business, but struggled no more for fear he would hit her again.

  4.

  That evening, with the sun low and red in the western sky, a wagon rolled through town, heavy with dead bodies. Margaret’s father abandoned his work when he saw the herald and the constable leading a pack of men to follow the slowly drawn old wagon, hauled by a mongrel mule. Two boys, no more than six or seven were in the bed of the wagon, blue and icy as though they�
�d been fished from the depths. With them, a much larger boy, purple and black in the face and around the neck, was Ezekiel.

  “The Sheffington brothers washed up near the mill,” the miller leading the wagon told the constable. “When me and my sons retraced the creek to see if anyone else had drowned, we found the Mayhew boy dangling from a rope.”

  Her father put on a show of grief that she hadn’t expected him capable of. He wailed at the sky, prayed out loud for God to return his boy to him, and accepted all forms of comfort the gathered men could offer by way of kind words and hands on the shoulder. Margaret hated her father with every growing second and had no intention of praying and waiting for justice when praying had done so little to help her to that point.

  5.

  Her father didn’t notice that she didn’t eat that night. He didn’t notice her smile as he did. Most damning of all, he didn’t notice the flavor of hemlock mixed in the end of the week stew in which all the meals to that point combined to create a thick gruel. He expired on the floor in wracking pain, spilling the rest of the poisoned bowl of stew across himself in the process.

  Margaret turned down the lamps, blew out the candles, and left him where he lay. She knew she would be blamed, and she couldn’t think of a reason why she would even deny it. She would confess when asked, take her punishment which would no doubt be death, and would at last be reunited with her mother and brother. She wondered why she had waited so long to take such steps against her father.

  She slept soundly in her own bed that night, certain it would be her last night there, yet equally certain no one would crawl in to disturb her.

  6.

  She awoke late the following morning to the sound of men in the house. She dressed for the day without concern before emerging from her bedroom. She wasn’t surprised that people had come by and discovered her father as she imagined she’d slept well past dawn and into the morning hours where customers might start wondering why the blacksmith wasn’t at his post. Father Virgil, who claimed to be a descendant of Hanford Vigil for whom the town was named a century ago, was among the men along with the constable and as many other brawny souls as they could fit into the tiny front room of the cabin.

  “Witchcraft no doubt,” Father Virgil said. “The old crone must have drowned the Sheffington brothers for her dark art, hung the Mayhew boy when he happened upon her in the act, and then come back to wipe the rest of the family from the earth with a witch’s poison.” The other men nodded and grunted their agreement at his assessment. He turned slowly at Margaret’s entrance, seemingly surprised she wasn’t dead in her bed. When the surprise faded, Father Virgil embraced her with an unwarranted fervor. “My child, thank goodness you are alive. We’re here to help. Be not afraid. We are here to help.”

  Margaret was not asked, was not given leave to speak really. They surmised that she must have been too grief-stricken the night before to eat, and that was the only reason she hadn’t been poisoned alongside her father. The old Hessian crone, the witch of Vigil’s Woods was to blame, and they had the answer for such hideousness among their township of the righteous.

  Margaret allowed herself to be led from her home. She tried several times to correct the men, but they shushed and silenced her with every attempt, insisting her grief was making her say foolish things. She was given over to the constable’s wife for care, ushered slowly through the streets where the entire village apparently had gathered to stare upon her with mournful eyes.

  “Wickedness is rampant these days,” the constable’s wife muttered to her. “Why even now, Jacob has been found to have murdered his wife.”

  It took several moments for what she said to permeate the thick fog surrounding Margaret’s head that morning. Jacob had murdered his wife, his pregnant wife, as it turned out. Strangled her to death with his own hands, Margaret was told; he somehow had it in his head that she was having a daughter and that’d been the last straw. Margaret escaped the motherly grasp of the constable’s wife and fled through the streets toward Sarah’s house.

  The front door was broken, shattered really, having been pulled from its hinges and hurled onto the front porch, likely done by the men who came to take Jacob into custody. Margaret found her frightened way into her friend’s cabin. It was in the common state of disarray after one of Jacob’s rages, but did not contain Sarah or her woodsman husband. The only major difference, aside from the missing door, was a tattered cornhusk doll lying near a pool of what was likely Sarah’s quickly drying blood.

  Margaret wailed her grief, stumbled into the street in search of her friend, clutching the little cornhusk doll to her chest in hopes of returning it when Sarah could be found. The women of the village, normally hard edged and emotionally vacant, found their sympathy to come to Margaret and lead her away to where she might see Sarah one last time.

  7.

  Margaret was given a bible to pray with and a soft cot in the church’s rectory for recuperation. She lay there, catatonic, for most of the day, clutching the cornhusk doll to her chest. Sarah had been battered unrecognizable before Jacob had choked the life from her, and this was the only hope left for Margaret that somehow the bludgeoned mess of a woman they showed her wasn’t really Sarah, but some other unfortunate soul.

  She could feel herself slipping into madness as though she were slowly settling into a frigid lake. Every bit of her numbed to the world as it dipped in and she knew what she believed was becoming farther and farther from the truth. Even knowing this, even knowing the sensation was the unraveling of her mind, she didn’t care—she welcomed it really, and she began to wonder if she might not have been going mad for quite some time.

  As the sun began to fade, she heard men shouting and the hoof beats of horses on the cobblestone square. She crept from the bed and absconded out the back of the church, careful not to be seen and careful to carry with her Sarah’s cornhusk doll should she come across her friend. Sarah would probably find it most interesting that some beaten woman had been found in her house.

  Whatever commotion was taking place had come and gone through the square like a wildfire. Indeed, fire seemed to be the truth of the situation as the scent of burning wood and burning flesh still lingered in the air. A lynch mob, that’s what it must have been, Margaret surmised. She’d actually seen them before in Vigil’s Rest but not with fire, never with fire. The smoldering corpse of what she guessed used to be Jacob was still strapped to the slowly dwindling remains of a bonfire. Goodness they were organized, Margaret thought wistfully as she inspected the charred body. She certainly needed to find Sarah now to tell her that her husband was dead. Of course, she didn’t know for certain if the burned body was actually Jacob, although she couldn’t think of anyone else deserving of a lynching. A scrap of paper blew against her ankle. She lifted it to find it had a singed end, but what remained entailed the list of crimes against Jacob that warranted such a hasty and public trial ending in an execution. The murder of his wife and unborn child was at the top of the list, but immediately below it was the sin of succumbing to witchcraft and the devil’s desires. Margaret tossed aside the piece of paper. Jacob practicing witchcraft was preposterous—he couldn’t read well enough to follow a hymnal at church. What would the devil want with such a thundering imbecile?

  The sound of footsteps and voices broke Margaret from her musings. She stepped back into the shadow of the courthouse that clearly hadn’t been used for Jacob’s trial, and waited behind the brick steps for the coming group to pass. They were women, including the constable’s wife, carrying lanterns, looking for someone.

  “…feeble excuse,” one of the women said.

  “Burned like so much rubbish is better than he deserved,” another agreed.

  “Still, it could be the witch,” the constable’s wife said.

  “Father Virgil and the men will see to that all the same,” the first woman said, “but I still say Jacob was a liar until the fire took his lying tongue.”

  “Poor little lamb,” the se
cond woman said as they were passing out of hearing range. “It’s a suffering shame the witch would turn on someone who had been so kind to her…”

  Margaret’s mind cleared for a moment. They meant Esther. The men were going to kill Esther for being a witch. Margaret wondered if she wasn’t in good company while going mad since most of the town appeared to be joining her.