Blood Red Roses

by Russell James

  “For what it’s worth, boy, this ain’t right. Gyps is one thing, half-breeds another. But white ain’t right. Times is desperate though. Still, I ain’t doin’ the final delivery this time.”

  He kicked shut the door and plunged the cellar into total darkness. The chain clattered through the handles on the other side, and the lock clicked shut. I felt buried alive.

  What Ramses had said made no sense, nor did leaving me down here by myself. Whatever despicable deed he had planned, why not finish it now?

  But, as he said, I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.

  Chapter Seventeen

  No bodies surrounded me. My terror that the dead boys lay in wait for me down here proved unfounded.

  A dim light appeared to my right. The root cellar wasn’t just a sunken room. A corridor stretched off into the direction of the main house, with a low light at the far end. Before I could even think what that might mean, the sweet, echoing notes of piano music floated down the long passage. I remembered Lucinda’s playing the other night. If she was at the end of this passageway, perhaps I had hope of escape after all.

  I rose and staggered down the tunnel, hunched to protect my head, shoulders scraping the bare earthen walls. The rope bit into my wrists. The light grew brighter, the music louder. At the passage’s end, I climbed a set of steps through an open trap door. I stepped into the parlor of the main house.

  I squinted against the brighter light and looked about the room. To the left stood an armless leather lounge chair. To the right, Lucinda sat at a cream-colored piano trimmed in gold. Her hair was brushed back into a ponytail. She wore a red dress cut in the same style as the other day’s green one, although this dress was slit up the side to reveal her leg to just above her knee. She turned to me and smiled a crooked, lazy smile.

  She rose and approached. Tiny bottles clinked in her pocket. When she reached me, she wrapped her arms around my shoulders and clasped her hands behind my neck. My manly region caught fire like dried tinder.

  One hand still cradling the back of my head, she reached down and drew a small medicine bottle from her pocket. She pulled the cork with her teeth, spit it aside and laughed.

  “This will help you relax. It always helps me through.” She pinched the back of my neck and my mouth opened. She poured the contents of the bottle inside me. It tasted of alcohol and something else, something sharper and stronger. I swallowed. It burned all the way down my throat and hit my stomach like a cannon shot.

  A few drops remained in the bottle’s bottom.

  “This can’t be wasted,” she said. “It’s such good medicine.” She tapped them onto the tip of her outstretched, pink, full tongue. She ran the tip around her lips and sighed. “Oh, I need some of that back from you.”

  She grabbed my head with both hands and gave me a violent, passionate kiss. My mind swam, and then she thrust her tongue inside my mouth as if in search of any unswallowed drop of the drug she’d given me. When our lips parted, the combination of her passion and the opiate she’d given me brought forth a euphoria I’d never experienced before, and would never again. My knees grew weak.

  “Lucinda…” Her name fell from my lips like a prayer.

  The drug opened up my perception. This wasn’t what I’d feared at all. Whatever Ramses had done to the other boys, he hadn’t done it to me. My kidnapping hadn’t led to murder; it led to love. Lucinda must have bade him capture me for her, knowing her father would never approve of her being with an orphaned stable boy. What other way could we be together?

  She untied my hands and backed me up to the lounge chair. She pushed me down upon the supple leather, and I lolled back, arms out to my sides. A great tent rose between my legs. She pulled a second bottle from her pocket and drank down the contents. She threw the empty bottle at the fireplace and missed.

  “That should be enough,” she said.

  She pulled open my trousers, and released from its restraints, my manhood rose to stark attention. She shed her dress and it slipped down to her ankles. All she wore was a black corset that raised and displayed her full, supple breasts. The dark color accentuated the milky perfection of her skin. The sweeping curves of her legs arced up to end at the downy beauty below her waist. I’d never dreamed such splendor existed.

  She reached down and caressed me. My entire body shuddered in response. I couldn’t help but moan with pleasure, too addled to be embarrassed by my reaction.

  “I need to make you a man,” she said. Her words were slower and slurred. “Only a man will do. Are you ready?”

  I’d have happily let her push me from a cliff if she’d asked. I slid up on the bed to make room for her.

  She climbed up and straddled me. She stroked me several times and then tucked me inside of her. She lowered herself upon me. Her wet, tight womanhood made every inch of me tingle. She rocked back and forth, and I roiled with rounds of ecstasy. With each stroke, her swollen breasts passed before my face; the lace of her corset tickled my nose. By the third twitch of her waist I lost control of myself. I closed my eyes and grabbed her. My back arched and I exploded inside her. The world in my head went white, and joy as I’d never experienced rippled through every muscle in my body. No experience that ever followed would match this one’s intensity.

  “Lucinda,” I whispered. I smiled such that I feared my face would split. “My love.”

  I opened my eyes. She did not share my delight. She had instead the look of one who’d just finished a task, and an unpleasant one, like downing a dose of castor oil.

  “Lucinda?”

  She raised herself off me. My spent, flaccid manhood flopped down between my legs. All the bliss driven by love—and its artificial, opiate cousin I’d ingested—drained away. Lucinda stood and took two quick steps from the bed, as if repelled. She pulled a cloth from beneath her corset and wiped between her legs with the sharp downward strokes reserved for scraping mud from fine boots.

  The door to the room burst open. Washington and another big house slave rushed in to the side of the bed. Washington’s ice-blue eyes looked cold as winter.

  The scant remainder of my postcoital daze burned away, replaced with panic. I realized there were darker designs to my abduction than I’d imagined, and love had nothing to do with them.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I raised my pants just in time for the two men to grab my arms and yank me off the chair. I struggled against their iron grips, but my encounter with Lucinda had left me physically drained.

  Master Powell entered. His gaze bounced around from one corner of the room to another, and his steps had a jitter to them. Lucinda looked up at him, unconcerned about her partial state of dress. Tears rolled down her cheeks.

  “Father, the laudanum’s not enough. I can’t do this anymore. Don’t make me do this anymore.”

  “It’s finished now,” he said in his tweedy little voice. “The last payment. It’s all for the family, you know. Your brother will thank you.”

  I was completely confused now. From the moment Ramses seized me, every time I thought I understood my situation, the whole thing turned upside down.

  “Master Powell?” I said.

  Washington pulled a strip of cloth from his pocket. He bound my mouth shut.

  “You got nothing to say, nothing you need to know,” Washington said. “No more than the others did. Told you from the first day you wasn’t nothing special.”

  Lucinda wrapped her dress around below her waist and slumped into the seat at the piano. She dropped her head on the keys, and they sounded a deep, dissonant chord. Her back heaved as she sobbed.

  The two servants dragged me away and out the back door. So large were they both that my feet scarcely grazed the ground the whole time. The full moon had risen, and the area had a washed-out, ethereal luminosity about it. Off in the distance, to the house’s front, a brief crackle of musketry rose from nervous Confederate pickets, miles away.

  Master Powell followed a few steps behind us. All of us stopped
at the sight of Ramses astride Victor by the cookhouse. Two saddlebags and a bedroll rested on Victor’s haunches behind the saddle.

  “Where might you be going?” Master Powell demanded, though his squeaky voice lacked all pretense of authority.

  “The hell out of here,” Ramses said. “Ain’t doin’ any of this no more. Should a known not to work a plantation what had a witch. Should a had her sold the minute I hired on, before she fouled my situation like it is. Killin’ lazy gyps is part of the institution, but this…” He pointed out to the rose garden. “This here’s murder, and more of the Devil than I want.”

  Ramses’s statements seemed to ground Master Powell a bit more in reality.

  “You’re under contract, Mr. Ramses. I kept you off the front lines with the Home Guard. Pass through that gate, and they make you Yankee cannon fodder.”

  “A chance I’ll take.” He swung Victor’s head around, and the horse clopped off to the main entrance.

  “No matter,” Master Powell squeaked after him. “Junius will be back soon enough to run things.”

  Washington and the other slave went back to business. Through the glowing, silent garden we marched, past the rows of vegetables. We came upon the rose beds.

  Two torches burned and flickered in the center. The fresh-turned plot where I’d dumped the manure now hosted a dozen new bushes. A new, second plot lay beside it. The earth rose to a long dome in the pile’s center. Beside that, a third plot was excavated, this one not yet disguised as a place for planting. Rectangular and deep, with its missing earth piled around it, it could be mistaken for nothing but the grave it was.

  Atop the opening rested an old wooden door mounted on four legs, the legs at the bottom a half-foot shorter than the ones at the top, so that the door angled down. A series of herringbone gouges on its face pointed down and in, to a central cut that terminated at the lower center of the door. A bucket hung beneath it. Leather straps were bolted to the door in such positions to hold a prone man’s arms, legs and chest.

  I apprehended that this device of torture was my destination. I struggled anew, some strength regained as anxiety wore the drug’s effects further away. But Washington wrapped an arm about my windpipe and squeezed. I went lightheaded, the strength drained from my limbs and I passed out.

  Chapter Nineteen

  When next aware, I lay strapped to the contraption and moments closer to what I knew would be my death.

  Beulah Powell stood at the foot of my future grave, the two house slaves at either side. The veil of her mourning dress was pulled back, and her face had an almost cheerful look of expectation. Beside me stood Master Powell. He held an awl in his hand. The maniacal grin on his face sent a fresh bolt of fear through my body.

  “Ah, awake. My Beulah wished to rush, but I thought you deserved to know the result of your sacrifice. The others did not, but you get the respect due your race.”

  I tugged at the thick straps at my wrists and feet. They didn’t budge. Master Powell carried on, eyes looking glazed and crazy in the torchlight.

  “As soon as we buried Junius beneath the bewitched roses, he came to my Beulah from the other side. He explained how the blood of men fed to the roses would keep him alive on our spectral plane.”

  Mrs. Powell bounced upon her toes as she relived the thrill of that moment.

  “And of course, the polluted blood of the tribe of Ham wouldn’t do. Slave blood to feed the master’s son? Perish the thought. So I had Ramses bring me the slaves I’d fathered, so at least half the blood we poured upon the ground would be as pure as that which had run through my son’s veins.”

  The more Master Powell spoke, the deeper my despair became. It is frightening to listen to a madman, but twice as terrifying when the madman can make rational to himself actions beyond all reason. That kind of lunatic is beyond convincing to change their path. Grief had driven the entire family to believe in the fantasy Eleeza’s story had sparked in Beulah Powell. They had gone so far as to perform human sacrifice in response to her hallucinations.

  “And we’ve fed our son well,” Master Powell said. He swept a hand across the multiple plots of roses in the garden. “But now the Union Army advances toward Meridian. They’ve burned every plantation north of Jackson. We must bring back Junius for good before the roses are put to the torch, and we lose him forever. He’s told us your pure, white blood will do just that.”

  I screamed into my gag and shook my head in a violent no as I pulled at my bindings. Master Powell did not react, too lost in his own vision of a beautiful Beechwood family reunion.

  “Of course, as it had to be the blood of men, Lucinda had her role to play with each, to usher them into manhood before their sacrifice.” He shot his wife a sideways glance. “Given her mother’s list of infidelities with the slaves, I was certain the girl would enjoy it, no matter her pretense otherwise.”

  Through my gag, I cursed him for what he had done to his daughter to fulfill his insane quest. He rolled the awl against his fingers.

  “No need to fear. This is razor-sharp. I’ll just cut you here and here—” he tapped the cold metal blade to a few spots on my body, “—and your heart will do all the work, pumping blood out through your veins, onto the table and into the bucket. With so many to practice on before you, I’ve become quite good. You’ll drain away and fall asleep.”

  Master Powell rent great holes my shirt and pants. With one hand he held me in place, and with the other plunged the awl into my flesh. It felt like a white-hot poker impaled me. I screamed into my gag. Then he wiggled the awl to widen the wound and get the blood to flow. Over and over he pierced my flesh. When he stopped, I could feel the warm blood flowing from my wounds. Then arrived the most sickening sound of all: the drip of the first drop of my blood into the metal bucket.

  As the source of my life drained away, I soon felt weak. Master Powell ministered to the wounds, clearing clots as they occurred to keep the blood flowing. Despite the thick heat of the night, a chill consumed me from the inside out. The edges of my vision grew dark.

  Death was now a certainty. In consolation, I would soon see my father and be reunited with the only person on this Earth who’d ever truly loved me.

  Beulah had been alight and dancing with expectation since my first incision, a bizarre sight in her mourning attire. She could stand waiting no more, and grabbed the bucket from the table’s end.

  “Beulah!” Master Powell said.

  But she whirled and poured my fresh blood at the base of the roses behind her. Like a praying supplicant, she dropped to her knees as she tossed the bucket away. My fresher blood dripped down from the door’s edge to water my own future grave.

  “Junius?” she cried out. “Where are you, Junius?”

  In my dazed mind, her voice seemed an echo of William’s mother’s cries in my dream.

  A tiny, shrill chorus of squeaks filled the air. A handful of field mice scattered from the plot of roses and raced off in all directions. The bushes rustled, like a breeze passed through them, though the night air hung perfectly still.

  Beulah leaped to her feet. “Junius! I’m here!”

  This time the roses shook, from the tips of the branches deep down to the roots. The two house servants stepped back, eyes wide in fear. Master Powell stepped up beside his wife, jaw hanging open.

  Between the bushes, a hand shot straight up through the soil, pallid and thin. The cuff of a Confederate officer’s jacket just cleared the dirt.

  It was not until this stunning moment that I truly believed the veracity of Eleeza’s claims of supernatural power. There was no denying that I was observing the resurrection of a dead body. My half-conscious state no doubt kept my mind from reeling off into oblivion at the epiphany. From Eleeza’s reaction when she had heard Junius was buried amidst the roses, I gathered that whatever unholy entity had pierced the membrane between the two worlds was not fully Junius.

  Without the master’s attentions, my clotted blood closed my wounds. But my blood
loss was such that I was too weak to do anything but watch, and too confused to disbelieve what was about to unfold.

  “Murderous bastards!” screamed the voice of Eleeza.

  From the opposite side of the garden, she rose to hover a dozen feet off the ground. Her eyes burned with fury. The two house slaves went down on their knees. The Powells looked up with the barest of comprehension.

  “You dared kill my family?” Eleeza said. She stared straight at Master Powell. “After you stained my daughter’s offspring with your putrid blood?”

  A second hand burst from the ground beside the first. Palms down on the earth, they pulled Junius free from the soil to the waist. Dirt matted his dark hair and worms crawled through it. His wan skin clung tight to his skull. His eyes were but black holes.

  This grotesque resurrection turned my stomach and sent through me a new wave of fear. Whatever the Powells had returned to this earth, it was not their son. It was not even human.

  But while this creature from hell repelled me, the Powells stood enthralled, Beulah Powell especially. She looked into the deformed face of her son’s cadaver as if upon a work of Florentine art. The dour expression of loss I’d always seen her wear was positively transfigured into a glowing, trance-like look of delight. It was as if she were reliving the first moments after her son’s birth, not the reanimation of his rotting flesh.

  “You want to raise the dead?” Eleeza said. “Then here you go!”

  Eleeza spread wide her arms, fingers outstretched. A stream of blue fire flew from each fingertip, and each hit a different block of planted roses. The roses burst into flame as one and vanished in an instant incineration. She closed her hands and snuffed out the streams.

  The earth of all ten sections twisted and surged. The corpses of the sacrificed boys surfaced. They were in all levels of decomposition, from William’s lifelike appearance to the oldest victim, now more bone than boy. Each clawed its way upward, limbs writhing, jaws clacking open and closed, stretching from their enforced slumber.