Dead Souls

by Campbell, Ramsey; Warren, Kaaron; Finch, Paul; McMahon, Gary; Hood, Robert; Stone, Michael; Mark S. Deniz

  “No! You shall not have Jonathan Browne’s soul! I am lost only in finding my way from this forest. I have not lost my way to heaven!”

  His voice returned to him in ghostly mimicry that resonated among the tall pines.

  ...lost my way...my way...my way...

  ...to heaven...heaven...heaven...

  ****

  Startled, Jonathan spun on his heels like a trapped animal.

  “Only my echo...only my own pitiful voice, lost and alone. Dear God, I have lost my way, and am I about to lose my mind as well?”

  His answer came to him from the sycamores.

  “Jonathan...! Jonathan Browne...!”

  ...Browne...Browne...Browne...

  He had gone mad in this forest. He felt certain of that now. His only hope was that death would come before someone discovered him blithering to himself like an imbecile, screaming back to the voices inside his head that called to him from the wind, voices that knew his name and would call to him again and again until the last fragment of his sanity disappeared.

  “Jonathan Browne! Where are you…?

  The reverberations surrounded him and were moving closer! There was nowhere to run!

  “Jonathan!! We heard you shout your name!”

  “We were so very worried! Where are you?”

  This last voice belonged to a woman! There was something familiar about it. He knew these people!

  “Amelia? Is that you?”

  “Jonathan, yes! We searched this entire night for you! Keep shouting! We’ll find you!”

  “Oh, thank God! Thank God! You seem so near! I am here! I am here!”

  The thick sedges behind him parted, and with torch in hand, Jonathan’s woman stood before him covered with grime and thorns. She rushed into the arms of her fiancé before he could utter a syllable.

  “You’re safe! Oh, Jonathan, I was so very worried! When I heard you had gone off so close to dark with Mercy Hathaway — and when you had not returned — I was fearful some harm had befallen you.”

  Others with torches entered the path. Jonathan recognized Reverend Habersham and the new church minister, Edmund Porter and much of his congregation, along with several hunting companions. Also there was Peter Farnsworth who practiced law in England, even old Mrs. Hutchinson who sold vegetables in the market square with her humpbacked husband. More entered behind them. It seemed Amelia had brought with her a search party consisting of half the town.

  “I feel so ashamed, Amelia — so ashamed for what pain I must have caused you. But how in this dense forest were you able to find me?”

  The question seemed to confuse his woman, and she looked towards Reverend Habersham for an answer. The old minister whispered something to Porter. The younger clergyman nodded and stepped forward.

  “You say you spent the night here in the forest with Mistress Mercy Hathaway, the young seamstress who lives alone in the cottage by the edge of this forest?” Edmund Porter asked.

  Suddenly Jonathan felt as if he were on trial.

  “If others say that I did so, I see no reason to deny it,” he answered. He was not able to look at Amelia.

  Porter turned to the lawyer, Farnsworth, to speak. The whole matter had an air of officiousness made even worse by the young Englishman’s cold and direct question.

  “Jonathan Browne, will you come with us? There is something I believe you should see before morning. It is only a short distance.”

  Amelia took hold of Browne’s hand and held it close to her. He looked into her eyes with complete bewilderment, turning to those who suddenly acted his accusers.

  “Come with you? To where?”

  “You must go with the ministers and the others, Jonathan,” Amelia urged. “I shall remain by your side, I promise you.”

  Browne walked with her and the others, noting the gathering of townspeople following close behind. Moments later the sound of a rushing waterfall stopped him in his tracks. In his escape earlier, the darkness must have confused him and he had come full circle. He was back where he had started!

  Mercy Hathaway slept undisturbed exactly where Jonathan had left her, not far from the cascading waters of the falls. The seamstress had covered herself completely with her long frock against the night chill, but her bare legs extended beyond the garment. Seeing them, Jonathan’s face went crimson with shame. Amelia did not look at the woman, but she held the hand of her fiancé more tightly than before. Despite the bitter chill his brow glistened with sweat. He spoke to the church elder like a man at confession.

  “Reverend Habersham, I make no excuse for myself. But you must know the truth about this wanton seamstress, and I will swear to it. Mercy Hathaway brought me to this spot so that I could witness those with whom she consorts. She wanted me to join them, I am certain of it. They killed a goat this night, and drank its blood! I saw them! And I saw her face smeared with it!”

  The two priests exchanged glances with the townspeople. Amelia took Jonathan by the arm before he might say more.

  “They found Mercy Hathaway like this, Jonathan,” she told him. “The Reverend and the others, when they were looking for you. They did not want me to see her, but I insisted on coming.”

  “Found? Found her...?”

  Reverend Habersham put a hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Mercy Hathaway’s throat has been cut, Jonathan. Probably here where she slept. Do you know anything of this matter?”

  “Dead? Mercy Hathaway is dead?”

  Any additional words Browne might have added withered upon his tongue. The night’s events exploded into fragments, and no matter how many ways he pieced them together he arrived at the same conclusion.

  “Witchery and that accursed ritual of blood...”

  “What?

  Pulling himself from Amelia, Jonathan turned towards the others. The townspeople whispered to one another never taking their eyes from him.

  “Satan’s fiends are responsible! Can’t you see that? The demons and the witches did this! They placed the woman’s mutilated corpse alongside me while I slept. They knew I watched them! My dear God, was the blood on Mercy Hathaway’s face her own?”

  Amelia tugged at Jonathan’s arm, but already his rants had revealed too much.

  “Then you saw blood on this girl?” Farnsworth asked in the manner of a magistrate gathering evidence. The attorney indicated the frock that completely covered Mercy Hathaway’s face. “Did you see a knife?”

  “What—?”

  “A knife, Jonathan. Did you see who killed Mercy Hathaway?”

  “I told you I saw her face blood smeared, and I thought — that is, I believed — I have already told you who killed her!”

  Farnsworth looked toward the clergymen.

  “Demons and witches, you say?” Habersham asked.

  “Yes! Yes!”

  “And Mercy Hathaway? A witch?”

  “Yes! Perhaps...I don’t know!”

  The Reverend scratched the smaller of his two chins.

  “You say demons and witches killed the woman because the seamstress herself was a witch? I see no logic here, Jonathan. Do you?”

  Browne had entangled himself within a maze more mired with traps than the forest itself.

  “Do fiends from hell require reason for what they do?” Jonathan asked.

  The English attorney had a ready answer as if the two faced one another in a chamber of law.

  “Fiends may not require reason for their actions, Jonathan Browne. However, men do.”

  “Murderer!” old Mrs. Hutchinson cried out. “A fiend himself who speaks of fiends!”

  “I say we hang the man tonight!” her husband shouted.

  Amelia tried to step between the crowd and Jonathan.

  “This forest is no courthouse. And none here are my Jonathan’s jurors!” The elderly Reverend held her back, and Amelia shouted, “Jonathan, you must listen to me! Say nothing more, only listen! There is a way out for you! You must believe me, there is a way out!”

  The hum
pbacked Mr. Hutchinson would hear none of it. “There is no way out for a man whose guilt bleeds through every pore as does the blood from that butchered girl’s cut throat!”

  “Hang him! Hang him now!” another hollered, and several others took up the chant.

  “Hang the murderer!”

  “Let him see the corpse of his victim as he chokes!”

  “Death to him! Death to Jonathan Browne!”

  Some threw their torches to the ground to create a bonfire. Others formed a tightening circle around Jonathan. Amelia shouted back to the unruly throng with a rage Browne had never seen his woman display before.

  “You know not this man I love! Jonathan Browne fears God! He is not one who changes into a murderer in a single night simply because he has been enchanted by a young whore! My Jonathan is as steadfast as the constellations, as unshakable in his beliefs as the most holy of men!”

  Amelia Worthington turned to her fiancé. Her mouth curled into an unlikely grin. Suddenly others were laughing. The amusement became shared among the entire gathering, and some nearly fell into seizures.

  “So tell me, my most dearest love. Are you not such a man?”

  In a night signatured with incomprehensible occurrences, Jonathan witnessed yet another. Here stood his Amelia speaking to this diverse assemblage as if lecturing from the Reverend Habersham’s pulpit.

  “And does not such a man’s cherished Christian beliefs exceed the insignificance of a hundred Mercy Hathaways and those whose souls prove all but worthless to Him we serve?” Approaching the man who would be her husband, she took his hand. “I told you there is a way out, Jonathan. And so there is. Do you wish to be saved, my love? Shall you enter His kingdom this very night?”

  Amelia’s face took on the countenance of those Jonathan had seen only in his most horrific of dreams. Her skin bubbled, then split like a badly sewn garment. The girl’s porcelain teeth turned yellow and cracked while a wart the size of a pea sprouted on her chin. All the while Amelia Worthington’s grin remained. She took her lover’s hand and placed it on her breast whose flesh now had the insubstantial feel of a decaying old woman’s. Reverend Habersham stepped forward in dark robes. He chanted the words first. The others quickly joined in.

  “She changes everything she touches,

  And everything she touches changes...”

  Jonathan pulled himself from this creature who no longer resembled the Amelia he knew. He wanted to scream, to run as far as his legs might take him. But there were too many surrounding him, too many who would never allow him to leave this forest alive. He knew tomorrow each would tell the story of the well-regarded Jonathan Browne, who had taken a beguiling young seamstress into the woods, had his way with her, then became so deranged with shame he cut the poor girl’s throat. The townsfolk would explain how they had, together, meted out justice swiftly and avenged the man’s detestable act on the spot. With so many villagers already here, who in Boston would question any of this?

  “Join us, Jonathan,” the Amelia-thing muttered. “Join us tonight.”

  Old Reverend Habersham, his face suddenly gone to rot, kneeled over the corpse of Mercy Hathaway. In one motion he plucked away the frock that covered her remains. The seamstress’s throat still sopped thick crimson gobs, although much of the blood on her face had clotted and dried to dusty cakes. Habersham lifted the body while Amelia approached. The humpbacked Mr. Hutchinson produced a long butcher’s knife and handed it to the woman. She held the glittering blade close to her, addressing the dead girl to her face.

  “Poor Mercy Hathaway, thinking it was your own inclination to practice your seductions on my beloved, foolishly believing you had cast a spell of your own to bring him to this place. Rarely have I enjoyed the cutting of a throat so much as I did yours. But my work is merely half finished...”

  Jonathan could only watch as Amelia plunged the blade deeply into the murdered girl’s thin neck, hacking away at flesh and bone until she had severed the head entirely.

  “None here shall cry for Mercy, Jonathan! But you and I will drink to her sins!”

  She held the skull for the others to see as if displaying a trophy she had taken pride in winning, swilling the blood from its leaking neck with none of the delicate mannerisms of a woman. Thin crimson streaks veined Amelia’s warted chin and she wiped it with the back of her hand in grotesque parody of a bar wench. With the firelight in her eyes she turned to her bewildered lover.

  “Drink and join us, Jonathan.”

  The clergymen repeated her words. Every member of the assembly added voice to the chant, and already the pockmarked Mrs. Hutchinson had removed her clothes.

  “Drink and join us...Drink and join us...”

  Jonathan Browne could not explain it...

  His disgust had passed in a heartbeat. These unholy creatures no longer revolted him. Even the hag who had once called herself his fiancé, even she seemed strangely appealing. There was no explaining any of this.

  [...touches...changes...touches...]

  He felt a sensation even more strange...

  Something within him thirsted. He could not understand why, but there was no denying the craving. Watching Amelia taste Mercy Hathaway’s blood directly from the woman’s severed head as if she were imbibing from a bowl of fruit punch, not even this seemed loathsome. It did not seem even remotely unnatural.

  He stepped forward.

  “Well, then, where is the sin?” he asked of Amelia, and his woman could not restrain her toothless smile.

  Jonathan held out his hands to receive his drink.

  ****

  immortal beloved

  Lisa Kessler

  As I pen these words, I am sitting in my room, my flesh stone cold and without colour. Melina’s feverish pounding of the Moonlight Sonata is beginning to wear on me. I have given my word to my dear friend Marcus to keep her safe but I fear she knows that I am weakening. She begs me with each sounding of the grandfather clock to give her the Dark Gift. I have never met a mortal who yearns so deeply for immortality. If she only understood what it was she longed for, then she would know it for the curse it truly is.

  I am beginning to believe Melina derives pleasure from tormenting me with her warm, intoxicating mortality, teasing me with her scent. Each time the piano goes silent, she is touching me, offering herself to me as if I were the only man she had ever known. I have no desire to make another vampire, to damn another person to an eternal existence such as mine. But I am so greatly tempted by her, and I am infuriated with myself for my own weakness. Her future is for Marcus to decide, not me. I gave my word she would be safe while he was away.

  But I didn’t know her then. Didn’t know that she played the damned piano...the Moonlight Sonata of all pieces...She plays Beethoven’s masterpiece with a flawless, insane brilliance and a feverish intensity that makes my blood race through my ancient veins with a fiery passion that leaves me dizzy at times.

  She is in danger with me, I know this, and yet, I cannot keep her away from me. And now the melody is playing again, the third movement with all of its agitated fire. She plays the piece just as he did, making me feel sensations that I haven’t experienced for nearly two hundred years, not since the night I heard Beethoven begin his work on the Moonlight Sonata.

  He was thirty years old, the night his frenzied melodies first attracted my attention. I was walking the streets of Vienna late at night. All of the homes were dark and quiet, save for one. I could hear a mortal man’s crazed ranting, followed by the most intricate, complex, and passionate piano melodies, unlike anything I had heard since the death of young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

  Intrigued, I followed the sound and quickly located its source. In the upper room of a modest home, I saw flickering candlelight illuminating through the window, and in the shadows cast against the walls; I saw the form of what seemed to be a mad man.

  Silently willing my body into the air, I peered through the upper window. Inside I found two pianos, and a wild-eyed man sitt
ing on the floor between them. The legs of the pianos sawn off, leaving the huge instruments to rest on the floor as he banged fiercely at the keys only to follow the action with hurried scribbling of musical notations on crumpled parchment.

  I remember that night as if it were yesterday, hovering in the darkness for hours watching this mortal genius at work. I found his thoughts were as scattered as his hair when I attempted to read them. He was a paradox, his mind full of passion and anger, while his heart was full of love and divinely inspired music, or so he believed. I watched him each night for a week as he spent countless hours composing his Moonlight Sonata, until I could no longer stand to observe him from a distance. I needed to know him. I wanted to understand him.

  I was intrigued with the genius that was Ludwig Van Beethoven even though we had never met, but that was soon to change. I arranged to meet the man I had been secretly watching, explaining that I was a wealthy Lord who admired his musical genius. He welcomed me into his home, and I was shocked to find that my mortal companion was completely deaf. I soon learned that was the reason for the pianos resting on the floor. He explained to me that he could feel the music through the vibrations in the floor while sitting between them.

  I remember finding myself awe-struck at his accomplishments. How could a man write such difficult, intricate, and emotional music without being able to hear a single note?

  Being a vampire made it possible for me to send my voice past his deaf ears, directly into his mind, which frightened him at first, but eventually he came to welcome my silent voice. When he was with me, he was no longer a prisoner of silence. And how happy I was to set him free.