The Burr Conspiracies

by Paul Taylor

  As I did so, the magnifying glass, still clutched in my hand, caught a ray of light from the basement window and directed it on her cheek, which immediately singed. She loosed her hands from my forearms and held her cheek in agony, screeching like a mating cat as she fled clumsily out the basement door and onto the street.

  When I regained my strength, I walked out the basement door in the unlikely hope I might gather evidence of the woman’s whereabouts. To my surprise, there before me lay the dark-maned woman, prostrate in a market stall, shivering and immobilized, having apparently stumbled into a cart of ripened garlic.

  Her face had melted into her cleavage.

  “What do you make of this, Dr. Franklin?” asked Jefferson at our next cabinet meeting.

  “I surmise the yellow fever has transmuted into a yet more disturbing affliction,” I said. “An affliction that seizes the mind with arresting insanity and the skin with an ultra-sensitivity to light.”

  Burr, who had remained remarkably unfazed during my description of these events, suddenly straightened with alarm.

  “We must be discreet with these developments to avoid panic!” he said. “We must not risk a mass exodus from the territories without a firmer understanding of any evolved pandemic.”

  Jefferson said the postal service had been forced to cease deliveries from the western territories to the east coast, but that he had received a reassuring letter from Madison, who continued to help coordinate the Habsburg emigration treaty from Eastern Europe.

  “I would like Dolley to hear of this as well,” said Jefferson.

  He rang a bell gently, and Dolley’s entrance complemented the chimes.

  Jefferson read Madison’s letter aloud.

  Dear Mr. President,

  The emigration treaty is being implemented with the enthusiastic cooperation of Governor Gyorgy and the House of Habsburg. Reports from those immigrating to our western territories confirm that farms are thriving and the yellow fever has receded to the Appalachian Mountains, which we suspect is the point of blockage for external communications to Washington City. Once the fever is extinguished in the mountains, you will no doubt obtain similar assurances from parts west.

  Things here in Eastern Europe, however, are dire. Food is exceedingly scarce. While my hosts persist on the verge of starvation, they have supplied me with some of their remaining store of cured meats and dried grains. Yet fruits are exceedingly rare. So much so that I have come down with the scurvy due to a lack of citrus, and it will be some time before I can make the trip home. Rest assured, however, that I am hopeful of an eventual recovery thanks to the largess of the Governor who has recently supplied me with a box of lemons. Indeed, I have eaten of them so ravenously I fear you may have noticed I drizzled their juices, should you be reading this letter by close candlelight. For that, my apologies.

  Yours in service,

  James Madison

  Jefferson folded the letter.

  “Encouraging news!” exclaimed Burr. “Now the President can return to other, more pressing matters.”

  I looked to Dolley, expecting to derive my own pleasure from her reaction to her husband’s reassuring report. But her face, normally smooth as porcelain, now bore the cracks of concern.

  “My thanks to you for sharing my husband’s news, Mr. President,” she said, her delicate voice wavering like a wounded dove, “but I must confess I am unnerved by his letter’s closing lines.”

  Burr glared at Dolley as though she had overturned a neatly laid table at a State dinner.

  “I have impressed upon my husband meticulous etiquette,” she said. “And it is unlike him to draw so much attention to the slovenly spillage of lemon juice.”

  I know not how the others may have reacted to the fair Dolley’s observation, but I was compelled to make her concerns mine. I racked my brain to find a way to substantiate her seemingly trifling worry.

  “Something is amiss,” I said.

  I then gathered half a dozen candles and bunched them together on a nearby desk. After lighting the wicks, I held Madison’s letter as close to the embers as feasible, letting their warm glow dry the parchment. The mild acidity of the lemon juice had penetrated the paper, weakening parts of it such that the stained portions began turning brown before the rest.

  Sure enough, the candlelight drew out the lemon juice, with which Madison had spelled a secret plea, which I read aloud.

  Dear Mr. President:

  I had no doubt Dr. Franklin would discover this secreted message, the one benefit of the scurvy from which I suffer. The Habsburg immigration treaty is a plot involving Gyorgy, whose men hold me captive and keep me alive to send you false reports. The mutations caused by the Habsburg’s perpetual inbreeding – a practice I have learned began with the notorious Vlad the Impaler of Transylvania some three centuries ago -- far exceeds their misshapen jaws. It extends to their having developed a craving for human blood, which, when satisfied, makes them immune to disease and most other harms. They pass on to others this vile craving and its associated immunities when they engage in their cannibalistic feasts.

  The Habsburgs did indeed lose their most fertile lands to Napoleon’s armies, but the fertility in question is not that of arable land, but of human population! Having lost large swaths of human sustenance, the Habsburgs have conspired to populate the western territories of the United States, infect its people with their disease, and ultimately build a vampire army that will harvest the blood of the uninfected on the eastern seaboard.

  But there appear to be weaknesses in the Habsburgs’ constitutions. They have forbidden their food preparers from using garlic. I have also noticed Gyorgy and his relations assiduously avoid sunlight. And so great is their allergy to wood that I once saw a Habsburg Duke curl over in pain at the slightest paper cut, which apparently placed trace amounts of pulp in his bloodstream.

  By the time you read this, the western territories may already have been lost. You must act quickly, Mr. President!

  Yours in service,

  James Madison

  Dolley put her supple wrists to her forehead. Her knees buckled and I jumped to catch her as she fainted.

  “My autopsy now takes on added urgency!” I said. “I had apparently become privy to a Habsburg attack on a woman who subsequently became infected. It was not yellow fever after all, but a horrifying new virulence from Eastern Europe, maliciously spread!”

  Burr waved his arms.

  “Dr. Franklin forgets scurvy leads to neuropathy and severe disorientation,” said Burr. “Madison’s delirious imaginings cannot be trusted!”

  Jefferson leaned back, uneasily, and said he would direct Lewis and Clark to assess the extent of the Romanian-bred scourge in the western territories.

  The meeting adjourned and I took Dolley into a nearby antechamber. I gave her smelling salts, to no effect, and then some cumin snuff. She finally sneezed her way to consciousness.

  “James!” she cried, holding my arms. Her squeeze pumped life into my chest.

  “It’s Franklin,” I said, delicately wiping the pearls of sweat from her neck. “Your husband is in Eastern Europe, imprisoned by the Habsburgs.”

  “What will become of him?” she asked, delirious, as if she were overcome with ethylene fumes at the Delphic oracle.

  I felt compelled to still Dolley’s young heart, lest her anxiety tie my old ventricles into knots. “We will defeat the scourge that enslaves him, my dear. I promise you.”

  She looked at me, and her quivering eyes shook me to my spine. I held her tight, and for a moment too long. I was an old, balding man with stout features and rounded shoulders. What could I have been thinking?

  “I must tend to Mr. Jefferson’s dinner party preparations,” said Dolley, lifting from my arms and leaving only the slightest perfume breeze.

  I was left to return to my quarters alone, where I received a report from the young intelligence officer I had sent to monitor Mohawk aggression in the Ohio Territory. It read as follows.
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  Dear Secretary Franklin:

  The Mohawks have dramatically grown in strength by decimating neighboring tribes. Their newfound ferocity in battle is unexplained, which magnifies the terror of the settlers who border their territory. I find myself in a frontier town not unlike the others through which I have passed. In each, the settlers throw themselves into fortifying their defenses by day, as most are paralyzed with fear by night. News of the latest Mohawk attacks spread like yellow fever, and immobilize just the same.

  The attacks come in waves, usually around two past midnight, as they did last night. They began with loud and sudden cries that sent the settlers into panic. The terrifying commotion was accompanied at first by the sound of smashing rum bottles. The Mohawks then waited in the darkness, watching the settler’s movements to better gauge the weaknesses of their defense. With only the moon as their guide, the Mohawks dispersed about the perimeter.

  Throughout the night, one could occasionally glimpse the silhouettes of their distinctive hairstyles in the moonlight, circling the town.

  The unison screams of the terrified settlers announced the Mohawks had breached the protective rows of wooden pikes. There began a chorus of howls and shrieks, punctuated by the agonizing sound of flesh pulled from flesh.

  As I dashed into the hallway of my residence at the Ellsworth Inn, I heard a guttural scream from a room down the hall and made haste to find the source. Inside I saw the lifeless body of a woman, her scalp ripped from forehead to nape of neck. I moved closer to examine her wounds.

  I saw immediately that they did not evidence the straight cuts of an ax, but rather the jagged gnawing of an animal.

  So intent was I to examine the odd wounds of the woman that I almost failed to notice the movement of the bear rug on the floor. It rose up, and I thought someone must be under it.

  But no one was under it. It was the rising form of a huge wolf.

  I jumped through the window and over the horse tie rails that bordered the street. A coach was nearby. Its driver was slumped back on the carriage, his torn esophagus exposed to the cold night air. Crazed horses reared in circles. I gathered the reins and whipped the steeds to sense before guiding them through a tight gap in the pike fence left by yet another runaway coach left driverless by animal attack.

  The path ahead was faint in the moonlight, but I managed to keep the coach upright by focusing intently on the shadow cast by the carriage on the center of the road. To my horror, that shadow grew distorted, cut through by the dark reflection of the massive beast pursuing me from behind.

  I pulled the reins tight, more with fright than with strategy. The coach veered left off the road, onto the forest edge. I sensed a huge stinking mass barrel past me. It turned, and as it did I felt the slap of fetid, beastly spit on my face. The animal’s momentum carried it ahead of my carriage, but it quickly pivoted on its canine tarsal bones.

  Facing me, framed by the hysterical horses still lashed to the carriage, was the lumbering hulk of the beast, confidently approaching its kill. On its hind legs!

  I looked into the beast’s eyes. They were black as bile.

  And then they were filled with light.

  I looked behind me and had to hold my hand to my eyes. There, approaching from the rear, was a horseman on a dark gray steed. The light he bore appeared at first as a torch. But as the horseman approached I discerned the white hot center of the flame he carried was in fact a carved silver bowl, or perhaps, strange as it may sound, a silver jack o’ lantern.

  The wolf roared, and flew like a demon over my carriage, grazing the roof with its claws as it leapt toward the mysterious horseman.

  I looked back, and the horseman let fly his jack o’ lantern. It landed at the beast’s paws and exploded, sending shards of molten silver in every direction.

  The wolf careened in agony, arching its back in pain so violently it appeared to break its own spine. It then fell in a flaming heap in the center of the road, the scorching silver leaving its smoldering hide sizzling under puddles of liquid metal.

  I heard the clip clop of the horseman approaching the fallen monster. As he drew closer, the flames from the burning wolf illuminated the horseman’s steed, then his top coat. I searched to see the face of my savior.

  But there was none. The fire cast a glow on an empty collar.

  Aghast, I whipped my horses to attention and rode until I collapsed at Ellsworth Junction.

  Yours faithfully,

  Ichabod Crane

  Crane’s report was the first item on the agenda of Jefferson’s next cabinet meeting.

  “Utter nonsense!” shouted Burr. “As if the Mohawks have not already been deprived of their human dignity by colonial aggression, Crane would now describe them as animals! And his account of a headless horseman has the stench of drink about it!”

  “Crane is rumored to be superstitious,” said Hamilton, “perhaps to a fault. And I know nothing of headless horsemen. But I have seen werewolves in battle before.”

  As Burr fulminated against Hamilton’s offhand corroboration of mythic legend, my own mind became engulfed with vivid memories of the episode Hamilton recalled.

  It was 1776. At the time, Hamilton was an aid-de-camp to General George Washington. I was chief intelligence officer. The Continental army under Washington’s command had begun the evening with a reading of Thomas Paine’s latest pamphlet, which begins with the stirring words “These are the times that try men's souls …” By the next morning, those words were to resonate like cannon fire.

  By midnight our boats had come ashore in New Jersey carrying some two thousand men through a bone-shattering cold of rain and sleet, leaving us almost wishing we would find the hot flames of hell on the other side of the ridge. The sound of our unloading was smothered by howling sheets of snow. We marched, as much to keep our blood flowing as to reach our goal. Then, suddenly, General Washington thrust up his hand and signaled for us to stop.

  There, up ahead, I could see a raging fire surrounded by hard-drinking soldiers wearing gray topcoats and yellow shirts. They were Hessians, German soldiers hired out by their own leaders as auxiliaries to Great Britain to fight the American revolutionaries.

  The Hessians sang songs and raised huge mugs of ale. Though my German was weak, their words were sung so boldly I could not help but comprehend.

  “To Fenrir, son of Loki!” they toasted. “May we celebrate soon with our Visigoth ancestors the crushing of American resistance!”

  General Washington surveyed the scene before us and scribbled some notes onto a small piece of parchment. He rolled it into a small ball, placed it in a tiny bullet-shaped container, and screwed on a metal top.

  “Keep this intelligence safe,” he said, handing the container to a scout.

  We knew what we had to do next. General Washington held his hand aloft, showing three fingers, then two, then one.

  We charged.

  “Der Feind!” cried Lieutenant Andreas von Wiederholdt, the Hessian commander.

  The Continental army surged forward, jarring the Hessians from their drunken celebration. They rose and turned, their chests puffing as they growled an old Viking war cry.

  Our first musket volley created a smoky fog. We waited to hear screams of pain. None came. Instead, the fog was pierced by lunging wolves!

  They were huge, far larger than their Hessian form, as their uniforms hung in tatters across their shoulders.

  “Lycanthropes!” yelled General Washington. “Retreat!”

  But it was too late. We had heard tell of shape shifting Hessians, but the rumors came from those taking part in their intoxicating celebrations and so were easily dismissed. But now the horror was undeniable as the wolves slashed legs and chewed throats at whirlwind speed. General Washington did not wait for more Continentals to fall.

  “Drop your weapons!” he ordered the troops.

  They did, readily, having realized they were useless in the midst of a supernatural nightmare.

  “Achtung!” s
houted Wiederholdt, who remained in human form. The wolves slowly reared on their hind legs, blood-tinged saliva dripping from their extended jaws.

  Wiederholdt surveyed the writhing casualties and the fear-frozen Continentals.

  “Wolves before dogs, General Washington!” said Wiederholdt. “Stand your men down.”

  General Washington motioned for his men to submit. We did. Save my loyal intelligence scout, who ran like a rabbit for a hole.

  “Bring him to me!” ordered Wiederholdt.

  A wolf in a shredded officer’s uniform took chase. The wolf ran on all fours, and its muscular shoulders caught the scout within seconds. After the briefest struggle, the wolf dragged the scout back by the arm and deposited him whimpering at Wiederholdt’s feet.

  “He swallowed something, mein lieutenant,” growled the wolf.

  Wiederholdt sniffed.

  “Retrieve it,” he said.

  The wolf dove into the scout’s stomach, parting his ribs with a single gnash of its jaws and then burrowing through to his spine. The wolf chewed ravenously, and then delicately. Removing its head from the chest cavity, its lips glistened with intestinal grease.

  “Spit it out!” ordered Wiederholdt.

  The wolf paused. Its eyes widened and its throat appeared to constrict.

  “Spit it out!”

  The wolf looked puzzled, then panicked. But only for an instant, as the wolf’s head exploded in a burst of hair and bone.

  Wiederholdt wiped his face.

  “Where is Dr. Franklin!” he screamed.

  The Continentals shuffled, and a few parted. I stepped forward into the moonlight.