Wrathbone and Other Stories

by Parent, Jason

  I had no explanations for them. The President needed immediate assistance. I called for a doctor to step forward. A young man introduced himself as an army surgeon, and I let him pass. Racing around the theater, I found two more doctors and a soldier to stand guard before rushing back to my fallen countryman’s side.

  Everything was happening so quickly, I could not catch my breath. I followed the army surgeon and a small squadron as they carried the President down the stairs and across the street to the Pederson house. The President was unconscious but still breathing, albeit strenuously.

  They placed him on a bed in a small room, where my presence was only a hindrance to those better qualified to administer aid. I was useless. I said a prayer for the President and stepped out of the room, not allowing hope to fill me with unreasonable expectations. I had seen many a man die from far less dire injuries.

  Out in the foyer, alone in my thoughts, I revisited the attack. Though it had happened quickly, I began to wonder why I hadn’t seen the intruder. Had I been less intent on the play—no, on Clara—I might have been able to stop the assassin.

  The candlelight flickered, then all light vanished. Though the sound was faint, I thought I heard children laughing. I swayed on my feet. The room spun, slowly at first, but soon, the particulars of the room melted into each other. I tried to blink it away and steady my mind, thinking it another delusion.

  When I opened my eyes, the room had ceased spinning. But what remained caused my heart to stop. The walls, the furniture … everything was situated as they had been only minutes before, but they had fallen into rot. Termite holes marred the wood. Paint flaked off the walls. Metal hinges creaked with rust.

  But most alarming were the black tendrils oozing out of the floor, rising from the dirt beneath. They spread across the floorboards, inching toward me.

  Again, I closed my eyes, not believing what they showed me to be anything other than a trick of the eyes or mind derived from stress. When I opened my eyes, the tendrils were upon me, coiling around my feet. I gasped, tried to run, to cry out for help, but my body betrayed me. There I stood, suffocating inside the coffin of my mind, trapped inside a body no longer my own, as something sinister violated me.

  A hand emerged from a black hole, which, though small at first, was quickly stretching across the floor. The hand belonged to no human or animal. Five fingers, it had, but the appendage had too many knuckles. The nails, monstrous and soiled, were tools for tearing flesh and carving bone. The hand reached for me, and I screamed inside, but I could no more move than sprout wings and fly.

  The fingers ran down my shirt, poking at my chest as if exploring for tender spots. I was at their mercy. Dead gray flesh fell from gnarled joints. The hand would infect me with its decay and drag me into the floor, down into the fiery pits below.

  Fingernails slid along my arm, tasting the skin before delving into it. A poisoned, smothering death nearly at hand, I fell into the darkness as my mind shattered. The room began to spin again, faster and faster, until all was nothing and I was no more.

  A hand seized my arm. I screamed.

  Clara.

  The room was reborn. The darkness retreated. With one touch, Clara had forced it to relent.

  My terror slowly subsided as Clara tied a handkerchief around my wound. I looked at her and smiled weakly. She was the sun that parted the clouds. She was the calm that leveled the waves.

  My sun. My calm. My love.

  “Henry, you’re as pale as a ghost.”

  “It is only a trifle,” I lied, trying to forget the hallucination. Surely, the visions could be attributed to stress and blood loss or perhaps a tainted blade. Clara was real. I needed rest with my love beside me. But the nation’s needs came before the man’s.

  “I’ll be fine. We must see to the President.”

  “There’s little we can do for him now. Please, Henry, the Provost Marshal is here. Let him take a look at your arm.”

  Soon he will belong to the ages, Henry .

  “What? Who’s there?”

  A voice, low and guttural like the start of a dog’s growl, pierced my head. Gloom blanketed the air like heavy fog. Clara? I looked everywhere, but found myself alone again. The room was cloaked in silence—except for that voice disturbing the peace. You failed him, Henry .

  Laughter rose from the floor, and I saw that the hole had reopened. I staggered forward, pulled toward it by some unseen force. My head splitting, I was blinded by pain. My knees wobbled beneath my weight, and my mind went blank. I fell headlong into the abyss.

  The next thing I knew, the Provost Marshal was helping me to my feet. My arm draped over his shoulder, he walked me outside and helped me into a carriage. Clara hopped in next to me, and I rested my head on her lap. Her fingers ran lines through my hair, her touch again claiming sovereignty over the darkness, trading nightmare for serenity.

  As I flittered in and out of consciousness, my mind fought to remember what had emerged from the depths of that pit. I muttered something about creatures, demons maybe … Yes, demons! Had they come for my soul?

  Figments, no doubt, of a momentarily unstable mind. They were of no concern. Clara was with me. So long as she stayed there, no demon in hell or on earth could tear me from her side. I let my thoughts settle upon the motion of her hand, the soothing simplicity of her stroke. I closed my eyes and dreamed of her.

  II.

  I had never considered myself a religious or philosophical man, at least not at the time of President Lincoln’s assassination. Trivial words on paper, anecdotal nonsense—that was all the Good Book was to me. It had no influence over a learned man.

  Or so I had thought. A near-death experience and the events that came after cast away all my doubt, for I know now that the devil is real. He was there that day, wearing the face of Mr. John Wilkes Booth. He was there the day I failed my president.

  And he had hooked his depraved fingers deep into my soul.

  Perhaps I had been in shock. Perhaps the surge of energy I had felt coursing through me deteriorated my appreciation for life’s fragility—although I had not known it at the time, I was so near death that had I remained still, I might have been mistaken for a corpse. My blood loss had been severe. The seven-inch blade had sliced a gash below my shoulder that ran the length of my arm nearly to my elbow. It was so deep that it scratched bone and delved so near an artery that my blood poured like rainwater down a gutter.

  I’ve heard tell that excitement and blood loss such as I experienced might cause one to remember events differently than they occurred, to imagine the fantastical where only the natural had been. My own doctors had claimed as much, and for a long time, I believed them. But what I saw that day was real! The Father of Lies came for my soul as my body wavered on existence’s delicate balance.

  I do believe it was Clara who saved me, who liberated me from damnation, offering a reprieve from an eternity in hell. Surely, I will soon call the fiery pits home. Even now, I see oblivion’s tendrils rising from the floor, scaling the garden walls. My surroundings begin to circle, slowly now, like a weathervane caught in a slight breeze. I only pray for enough time to finish my confessions, to let the truth be known regardless of whether or not those who read this choose to believe it. The wise would heed my warning, for the darkness awaits us all.

  Yet, the simple truth is this: I have damned myself. The devil is merely trying to collect what is owed him, what I am not yet ready to give up. I can blame him only for the action, not the reaction. He killed a great man, while I, the lesser, failed to stop him.

  I asked it then, and I ask it again: why had I not seen the demon as he entered the President’s Box? I alone was in a position to thwart the monster. I alone had opportunity to save an infallible man, to alter fate and defeat evil. A trained soldier, bested by a thespian? If ever the hour of need had been greater … how could I have been so absent when destiny called?

  That question has been the bane of my existence for more than forty-five yea
rs. God, has it really been that long? To think that I would persist when so many others, so many betters, have fallen to time’s unrelenting progression.

  My sweet Clara …

  My failures, my guilt, my sin—in them, the devil took root. He never let me forget that day. Though at first, I managed to carry on with my life, the memory of that horror plagued my sleep and crept into my thoughts whenever the fortress of my lucidity revealed its faults. The memory, chiseling like a prospector after precious ore, tore that fortress into ruins.

  Perhaps, too, I was punishing myself. I should not have dragged Clara down with me.

  In the years that followed the assassination, Clara and I had peace and were wed. Happy years were spent in what should have been recovery.

  But the devil was merely biding his time, cultivating his strength. In the sullen hours, I brooded, while he laughed into my ears and barraged me with fork-tongued curses. I was not his puppet or plaything. I ignored his taunting and mockery, but his hold on me was only beginning.

  * * *

  “It is this house, Henry,” Clara said. “We should never have moved here. It isn’t good for you.”

  I had heard the argument a hundred times. We had purchased a home in Lafayette Square, directly across the street from the White House, no less. Number 8 Jackson Place was a fine home, built for an admiral and worthy of one of his esteem. I hadn’t chosen the home to improve our political and social lives as I had claimed. That much was certain. After resigning from the army, I cared nothing for the public world. Everything I wanted—my beautiful wife and my tranquility—was always found at home, wherever that home might have been.

  Maybe I wanted to honor his memory. Maybe it was to make sure my guilt never let me forget.

  As I gazed out the front window at the solemn and graying structure, I wondered if forgetting was even possible. A tall, skeletal-thin man with a stovepipe hat and black coat stared back at me as he stood upon rigid White House steps. Blood ran down his forehead and masked his face, except for his wide shark-like grin.

  Clara could not see him, I knew. She was beginning to think something was wrong with me, and I was beginning to wish she were right. But I saw him, and he saw me. At first, I believed him the creation of a tortured mind, but upon seeing his unnatural smile, I knew he was something sinister, something frightfully real and altogether evil. Three presidents had taken up residence at that monolithic site since Lincoln’s assassination, yet his likeness was the one I’d seen the most. Over and over again.

  And he was dead.

  The demon haunting me was not.

  Clara wrapped her arms around me, startling me from my thoughts. I looked away, and when I looked back, my demon was gone. I wasn’t sure how she did it, but my Clara always scared the scoundrel away. I supposed no demon was a match for an angel, even one who refused to understand.

  “It is not the house,” I said. “This house is perfect, and it is exactly where we should be to advance our station.”

  “Our station? My dear Henry, you’ve written so many letters. How many others have been written on your behalf, by great men, prominent men? I am afraid we have pulled all the strings available to you. Yet President Hayes makes no appointment.”

  Clara sighed. She nuzzled her cheek against my back and held me close.

  My hands found hers, locked around my waist. I knew what she wanted to say. I had heard it for years. Still, I knew I would have to hear it again.

  “They know about you, Henry, how you’ve changed, retreated into yourself. They worry about you. I worry about you. Where do you go when you lock yourself in that mind of yours? What do you see?”

  “I see faces.”

  “Whose faces?”

  “The faces of the dead and one who would see more join their ranks.”

  Clara sniffled behind me, and I wished I were stronger. She squeezed me tighter. I lowered my chin against my chest and was content to stand there in silence, safe in her arms.

  When I looked up, President Lincoln took off his hat and bowed. The gesture would have been benevolent if he hadn’t been thirteen years dead. Thick sludge covered the front doors of the White House, flowing like a waterfall. When it hit the porch, it flowed like a blanket billowing in the wind, creeping up behind the dead president. When it was nary a foot behind him, it rose into the air and took shape. A shadowy figure appeared. A pistol fired.

  I fell backward. Clara’s arms caught my weight. No, they were not Clara’s. “How?”

  That didn’t matter. What I knew was horrifying enough. That shadow had been outside, but now its arms were wrapped around me, coiling tighter. I squirmed, batted at the hose-like arms, but it was no use. I could not escape.

  I turned in the demon’s grasp. Rage consumed me when I saw its face. Half-Booth, half-demon, the corrupted being bellowed, “You failed him. You killed him.”

  “I’ll kill you!” My hands found the monster’s throat and squeezed. I heard a scream. It seemed to come from everywhere. I glanced about for its source. When I looked down, I saw that the demon had vanished.

  Instead, it was Clara whom I was strangling.

  * * *

  The devil had been inside her! It had violated my Clara. It could taunt me, mock me, brutalize me, pine away for my soul … I didn’t care. I deserved it. But the demon had gone too far. I swore I would never let it possess my precious jewel, my beautiful Clara, again. I would kill it first, any way I could. Clara was mine, no one else’s. Our family would not claim her. All her would-be suitors prancing around as if I didn’t even exist could not have her! Hell should take the lot of them and leave my Clara with me. Hell couldn’t have her, either. No one could have her but me!

  After I had throttled the demon out of my wife, I was constantly on my guard. I kept a pistol at my hip except when I slept. During the night, I tucked it beneath my pillow, a companion for the Bowie knife I kept in a nightstand by my bed. But sleep came only when exhaustion commanded it. Each time my eyes closed, they would spring open to the sound of a gunshot and the smell of a fired pistol. In that hazy realm between alertness and dream, laughter echoed in my ears. The merriment always sounded like a muffled version of the Ford’s Theatre crowd at first, roaring at Harry Hawk’s punchline as their President died.

  One laugh, soft at first, grew to a rumble. It was heavy, and soon, it overpowered all the rest. It belonged to Booth—no, it belonged to the face behind Booth’s.

  And each time I woke, the laughter followed me. Its ungodly maker hid somewhere inside my bedroom. Again, it blamed me, much like the hushed voices of neighbors, former friends, the self-righteous, and the know-it-alls did. Evil hid in the hearts of men. In those who let it take root, evil will surely manifest. The only question was: when would it take hold?

  “You failed him,” the voice still whispers. “You killed him.”

  My physician, bless his confused soul, repeated what our friends had said, except he used medical jargon. The gist of it was that I was harboring too much guilt from the assassination, assigning blame to myself where it was not due. My mind was at war with itself, laying waste to a once-fertile landscape. The constant shooting and stabbing was leaving it porous. In the resulting holes, delusions bred.

  My doctor, my family, and even my dear Clara, who had regarded me with suspicion too long after I had banished that demon from her—not one of them knew the truth: a malevolent being had taken up residence inside my mind. A real evil, not a product of my guilt, was locked behind walls of flesh and bone. They would not, could not, see it until it decided to reveal its dreadful conspiracies.

  Night after night, its voice came unbidden, unwelcomed, never revealing its corporeal form. It kept me from sleeping and wore me down, always seeking to break me. Then, one night, the walls of my mind’s construct crumbled. In spite of my will, I fell asleep.

  * * *

  I awoke to the acrid scent of smoke.

  “Clara?” My wife was not beside me. The smell of gunpowder fille
d my nostrils, and my mind flashed images of the dead at Fredericksburg. So many dead. Sweat beaded on my forehead. It soaked my sheets. The house was stifling, or I was feverish. No, a fire burned nearby.

  I leapt to my feet. “Clara!” I did not think she would let me sleep through danger even as she spirited our infant son to safety. She had been more distant as of late, more … wary? I laughed uneasily, dismissing such ill-conceived thoughts of my Clara before they could poison my mind. More likely, she had fallen. Was she hurt? Due to her delicate condition—she was carrying our second child—I feared the worst. I glanced around the room, but saw no one and heard nothing.

  The closet door creaked open. Something thudded against it. The soft tap repeated like a shutter rapping against the side of a house. With each dull thump, my heart thumped twice. I imagined something hanging—someone hanging. My little boy’s slippered foot banged against the opposite side of the door as he dangled lifelessly from a coat hook. My mind’s morbidity could not be cast aside, nor could I bring myself to draw open the closet door and defeat irrationality with knowledge.

  The thudding kept pace, then became harder and louder. I stepped closer. With one final bang, a crash loud as thunder or a bullet blasting from a Derringer, the door swung open.

  At my bedside, I peered into the darkness of the closet. Where clothes normally hung, I saw only black space so thick, it seemed tangible, so vibrant, it seemed alive. It peered into me.

  Then it moved.

  Tendrils like those I had seen at the Pederson house unraveled along the floor and across the walls. But they could not be real! My friends, my doctor, and my Clara had assured me of this.

  I reached out and touched one. It was icy, bloodless, as though it had never felt the warmth of the sun or the love of one’s heart. My finger passed into it but never came out the other side.

  Something touched me back.

  I yelped and jumped onto my bed. A hand as white as milk and as smooth as a melon rind floated out of the pitch-black closet. On its ring finger, I saw the band I had given my Clara. My mind fell into sorrow. The wrist followed the hand, then an elbow accompanied by the frills of a long, white satin dress.