by Orrin Grey
His gaze searched Jonah the way Amaryllis’ had, sorting his bones.
“Are you sure you want this?” the dead man asked. “I could make you forget, instead.” His breath smelled like poppies, too.
The grey-dead fingers plucked a flower from an equally grey chest and held it out. The corpse’s eyes were black coffee, edged in dried blood. They were the colour of midnight and crimson dawn. He was the most beautiful man Jonah had ever seen, and the most terrifying.
Jonah opened his mouth, closed it on silence, then shook his head. “I need to know.”
He couldn’t look directly at the dead man as he gave his answer, but he glanced at him from beneath half-lowered lids.
The dead man’s smile was crooked. “Too bad.”
He tossed the poppy over the bridge and the canal caught it. It floated for a moment, incongruous against the slick green-black before sinking. The sky flickered again; the bridge trembled. The stone split and pale mushrooms fruited in place of red petals. Eyes white, skin blue, the dead man pointed to the water.
“There.”
Dread swelled in Jonah’s throat, stopping his breath. It stiffened the muscles of his neck so he couldn’t turn his head. He knew what he would see and he didn’t want it anymore. But it was too late to change his mind.
After an eternity, he turned.
Merrin rose, dripping, from the water. It ran black on her skin, like ink, fat drops tracing the flesh between the mirrors. Between floating and walking, swimming and drowning, she moved to the edge of the canal and clambered up the slick stone.
Jonah’s pulse hammered, fear rooting him to the spot. Merrin crossed the bridge and stopped inches from him, her eyes the dull, shattered colour of broken glass. When she blinked blood ran from her lids. All over her skin, her mirrors were broken. Jonah couldn’t see anything in them at all.
“I’m sorry.” He reached for her.
She flinched away. “You shouldn’t have looked so deep.”
Jonah clenched his jaw, his fingers. “You shouldn’t have run. I could have helped you. We could have figured something out, together.”
Merrin blinked. More blood ran from her eyes. She shivered.
“No.” Her voice blew — a cold wind coming from far away.
Jonah reached for her again, and again, she pulled away.
“I wasn’t scared of death.” Merrin’s tone and gaze were steady. She met Jonah’s eyes. “Every time you looked in my mirrors, all those possible futures narrowed the world. They piled up against me until I couldn’t breathe. You saw what you wanted to see and you never once asked me what I wanted.”
“That’s not true! I never ….”
Jonah shook his head. He knew what he’d seen in her skin — all the houses they might live in, the children they would have had, different iterations, but always together, always happy. He reached for her shoulder. He caught her this time, digging his fingers in when she tried to twist away.
He gripped harder, desperate to hold her. His hands slipped, moved, squeezed. His thumbs pressed against her windpipe, crushing.
Her mirrored eyes widened, truth and lies tumbling through them; Jonah couldn’t tell them apart.
His love had terrified her. She’d run away seeking her death. Her death was a tragic accident. She wasn’t dead at all. She had a secret lover, a life of crime. He’d never really known her. She was a stranger and her mirrors had only shown him what he wanted to see.
“Stop.” It wasn’t Merrin’s voice but the dead man’s.
He put a hand on Jonah’s wrist. Grey poppies, moth-wing-thin, covered his skin. His eyes were white, tinged with red.
Jonah let go, startled. His palms were lacerated a dozen times, slick with blood.
He whirled back to Merrin, but the space where she’d stood was empty, the only evidence of her the black water pooled on the stone. Everything had gone wrong. He’d meant to say he was sorry. He’d meant to fix everything. And now it was too late. Again.
“You should have taken forgetting.” The dead man fingered the edge of one of poppies growing out of his skin, a delicate mushroom flower.
“Is it too late?”
“Probably. For you.” The dead man’s smile flickered like the world, the sky shivering back from white to black. The air smelled like poppies; his smile tasted like oblivion. “But then again, dreams are strange and fickle things.”
Jonah blinked. He stood on the bridge alone, the thick haze of the canal rising around him. The iron trees shed haunted light. There were no flowers, no mushrooms blooming between the cracks in the stones. The stars hadn’t shifted an inch. The night went on, just as it had been before, as though he’d never dreamed.
Jonah ran a hand over his scarred flesh, the latest cuts just beginning to heal. They itched and he rolled back his sleeve. It might have been a shadow, a trick of the light, but he thought he saw a faint tracery of mold between the red and white lines.
The scent of crushed flowers mingled with the chill scent of a room beneath a small, furniture crowded house. He thought of eyes frosted white and eyes the colour of black earth, soaked in blood.
Maybe it wasn’t too late.
Dreams were strange and fickle things, after all.
DUST FROM A DARK FLOWER
By Daniel Mills
Daniel Mills is the author of Revenants: A Dream of New England (Chomu Press, 2011), selected by Booklist as one of the Top 10 Historical Novels of 2011. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in a variety of venues, including Delicate Toxins (Side Real Press, 2011), Supernatural Tales 20 (Supernatural Tales Press, 2011), Dadaoism (Chomu Press, 2012), A Season in Carcosa (Miskatonic River Press, 2012), The Grimscribe’s Puppets (Miskatonic River Press, 2012) and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 23 (Robinson, 2012). He lives in Vermont.
Being a true account of the recent happenings
at the burying ground in Falmouth Village
as related by the murderer Hosea Edwards
on the night before his death
I
I AM HOSEA EDWARDS, physician to the Village of Falmouth in the New Hampshire Grants and Deacon to the congregation thereof. Sentenced to hang for the murders of the Verger Samuel Crabb and the Reverend Judah Stone, and the subsequent destruction, by fire, of the Falmouth meetinghouse, I leave behind these pages, that they might be found by my jailers after my death.
Tomorrow evening, I will be ashes, my body burned on my instructions; and though I die a criminal, my conscience is clear. At my trial, I offered no plea or protest of innocence, for I hoped yet to spare you the knowledge of these events. But the time is short: The White child is dead and buried these two days and the long night nearly spent.
There can be no more hesitation. A full accounting must be made.
II
Last winter, the Reverend Ambrose Cooper, who first ordained me to the Deaconate, and with whom I had traveled from the town of Marshfield in Massachusetts to Falmouth on the west bank of the Connecticut River in the year 1767, returned to the Lord at the age of one-and-sixty. The ground being well-frozen, his body was transferred to the vault following the funeral to be buried in the spring.
The season soon passed; the grave was prepared; and, on the second of April, we lowered him into the ground. Our church’s request for a minister had not yet been fulfilled and, so, the Reverend Crane from neighbouring Putney presided over the burial and erection of the slate headstone, upon which Samuel Crabb, the Church Verger, had laboured all winter.
‘Twas a thing of singular elegance and beauty: fully four feet high and so heavy it required the village’s five stoutest men to lower it into the sod. The stone was further distinguished by some of Crabb’s finest work, including an inset likeness of the minister in his vestments, followed by some words of tribute that I had myself prepared. At the base of the stone was an epitaph that the minister had chosen when he sensed his time was upon him:
And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and a high
mountain, and he shewed me the great city, Holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God (Rev. 21:10).
They were sanguine words, perfectly befitting a man of his character, but on that dim April morning, with a soft rain falling and the wet earth yielding before us like the opening of a throat, I found I could not share in their hope; and afterward, when I returned home to my cottage, I fell to my knees before the fire and wept.
While the Reverend Cooper was in all respects irreplaceable, the Church soon dispatched a new minister to Falmouth. The Reverend Judah Stone, formerly of Norfolk in the British Isles, arrived in town on the 22nd of April and immediately assumed residence in the parsonage, which was sited outside the village proper at the base of Meetinghouse Hill.
A man of thirty, Reverend Stone seemed possessed of an imperturbable mildness and good humour. Many was the morning I saw him pass before the windows of my cottage with his hat tugged down to his brow, waving to all he encountered and greeting them with his usual cheer. His fondness of children was well-known, as was the patience he exercised in all aspects of his ministry, from the pulpit to the sickbed.
That is not to say that he was without eccentricity: His abhorrence of human contact quickly became apparent to us (and to me, personally, when he refused to take my hand on the occasion of our first meeting) and he was regularly attended by the aroma of the rose-water in which he washed. Furthermore, he was said to suffer from some obscure ailment of the joints, which pained him constantly, though he never consented to be examined.
But these were minor matters and inconsequential to us, given the depth of his knowledge and the strength of his faith; indeed, there were times that he seemed to us more spirit than flesh. In short, we soon came to believe that the Reverend Stone had been delivered unto us in answer to our oft-repeated prayers — but that was before the strange events at Meetinghouse Hill.
III
The Verger Crabb was the first to take notice. He raised the matter with the Reverend Stone, who dismissed the Verger’s concerns with his customary solicitude and urged him to think no more of it. But Crabb could not push the matter from his mind and passed an uneasy night in his one-room cottage by the burying ground. The next morning he yoked his ox and readied his cart, and traveled to the village to seek my advice. When I learned of his discovery, I wasted no time in insisting that I accompany him to the churchyard that very day.
The sun was nearing the meridian when we arrived at the hill. We chained the ox at the base of the drumlin and completed the climb on foot. Crabb led me to one corner of the graveyard, northwest of the meetinghouse, to the grave of the Mead child, a girl stillborn three years before. The low slate had sunk halfway into the ground and now listed to one side at a sharp angle, as though to indicate the nearby grave of her unmarried mother, who had followed the infant in death, despite the Reverend Cooper’s tender ministrations.
“You must watch me,” quoth Crabb, “and closely.”
Kneeling beside the infant’s grave, he ran his index finger along the stone. ‘Twas a gentle gesture, of exceeding delicateness, and yet the slate itself seemed to crumble upon contact with his skin. The stone flaked away in a cloud of black dust, finer in consistency than gunpowder, but of much the same colour. The Verger shewed me his finger, the tip of which was beaded with granules of the strange material. I noticed then, for the first time, that the man himself appeared pallid and gaunt, as in the throes of illness.
“For how long has it been like this?” I inquired of him, thinking, perhaps, that the stone’s position on the outskirts of the churchyard had left it vulnerable to the influence of weather; but Crabb’s answer made this impossible:
“Since yesterday morning.”
I waved the Verger away and placed my satchel on the ground beside the headstone. Extracting a scalpel from my bag, I moved the sharp edge along the top of the slate and observed, once more, the curious manner in which it yielded to the faintest contact; first, in brittle shavings like a hardened cheese, and again, as a black powder. The latter form clung to the blade, but was wiped away with ease, leaving behind a stain. In this, I was reminded of nothing so much as the dust from a dark flower.
Next, I applied myself to an inspection of the marker’s face, which I found to be in a similarly delicate condition. My scalpel stripped away the stone with ease, exposing a layer of black, ash-like sediment below the surface. Of this I collected a sample and secreted it away in my bag for further study. My initial observations had already led me to suspect that the substance was organic in nature; I hoped subsequent tests might lend further credence to this theory.
Afterward, Crabb and I descended the hill together and rode back into the village, where he left me off with a solemn promise to inform me of any further developments. Then he turned round the cart and clomped back toward the meetinghouse.
IV
Though I am not a man of science, my years at Philadelphia College bestowed on me a robust appreciation for, and passable knowledge of, Descartes’ Method. Upon returning home, I set about preparing an appropriate framework by which to analyse the chemical properties of the black powder.
Having first divided my sample into three parts, I sifted the first third into a pewter bowl, which I left exposed to the air, while adding the second third into a glass dish containing water, retaining the final third for additional tests, as necessary.
On the following morning, the first sample appeared no different. However, the second sample, which had steeped in water, had undergone a singular transformation. By some obscure agency, the powder had congealed overnight and extruded itself into a series of black hairs, fibrous and delicate, all of which were fastened by unknown means to the bottom of the dish, as though seeking for purchase there.
The stench was indescribable; I can only say that it reminded me of the fluid from a lanced boil. Dark specks leapt into my vision and I turned swiftly away, lest I succumb to a spell of fainting.
That evening, I lighted a tallow candle and subjected the substance to one final test. With the aid of my steel forceps, often employed by me during so-called “breach” birthings, I gathered a small quantity of the remaining powder and held it to the flame. To my surprise, the sample ignited with startling swiftness and burned down to the forceps in the span of a heartbeat, releasing a plume of acrid smoke that caught like bile in my throat.
Afterward, when I went to wipe the instrument clean, I was surprised to find it devoid of char or ash. Whatever its nature, the substance in question had evidently burned through completely, leaving no trace of itself behind.
V
The following day, a Wednesday, I received a second visit from Crabb. He sought me out at the White farm four miles from the village, whereunto I had been called to perform an amputation on the eldest White child, Ethan, whose right leg had begun to exhibit signs of gangrene.
The procedure was performed with assistance from the boy’s mother, who provided rum and a leather strap while the younger boys, Martin and John, watched from the doorway. The dressings in place, I made my farewells and exited the house.
Crabb waited for me outside with the ox and cart. As before, the Verger appeared sickly, his eyes hooded as if he had not slept in days. “The matter has become serious,” intoned he with his typical solemnity. “I came for you at once.”
We arrived at Meetinghouse Hill early in the afternoon and scaled the steep hillside. Our steps brought us to within ten paces of the parsonage windows, behind which the Reverend Stone was just visible to us, his sharp edges softened by the distortive effects of Crown Glass.
I inquired of the Verger whether Stone knew of these new developments, but Crabb shook his head. “It seemed of little use,” he said. “His pain has been worse, of late, and he does not wish for me to disturb him.”
The northwest corner of the burying ground had, it seemed, been subject to some queer manner of flooding or subsidence. The infant Mead’s stone was now completely black and featureless, with shards of brok
en slate littering the ground before it.
Each of the stones around it, including that of the child’s mother, was likewise speckled with the same black dust, which loosed in whirling clouds whenever the wind swept down from the meetinghouse and shook the arbor vitae. A faint odour hung over that dreary scene, not dissimilar to the pus-smell produced by my earlier experiments.
A cursory inspection of the child’s stone confirmed that it was no longer slate at all; instead, it seemed wholly composed of a porous organic material. I turned my attention to the base of the stone and cleared away the wet earth with one hand, only to learn that the growth reached deep into the ground, as though rooted somewhere below our feet.
The conclusion to which I came was, admittedly, fanciful, but also undeniable, for surely this black thing had come out of the ground and then, penetrating upward, proceeded to replace the slate from inside. Eventually, the outermost layer of stone cracked open like an acorn, leaving a faceless duplicate in its place.
Our course of action seemed clear. If this were some manner of sickness particular to the earth — a “gangrene of the soil,” as I described it to Crabb — then we had no choice but to seek out the source of the infection and cut it away.
“But first, we must put the matter to the Reverend,” said I, “and let him be the judge. Though I am not desirous of disturbing this consecrated ground, it may yet prove necessary.”
VI
Sometime later, we rapped upon the door of the parsonage and were received into the parlour by the Reverend Stone, who invited us to sit by the hearth. The minister was attired in his usual austere robes, with a high collar that reached to the throat. The scent of rose-water was, as ever, evident. He offered us ale, which we refused, and settled himself in a chair opposite us, wincing as he did so for the pain of his ailment. “‘Tis a distinct pleasure,” said he, with a forced smile, “but I sense you have not come merely to visit.”