Fitcher's Brides

by Gregory Frost

  Kate rounded the wide staircase, away from Fitcher. It was then she came upon the caretaker of the glass skull. He had his knees up, his feet hooked over the edge of his chair. He held out his coat flap to try to hide the skull on the chair beside him. Kate caught a gleam of light off one of the thorns in its crown and came closer. The squatter looked around at her approach, inadvertently lowering his coat. When he saw that he’d revealed the skull, he slid his feet to the floor and sat upright, turning his body away from her as if unaware of the skull’s presence. He gave a cringing slantendicular glance her way. Their eyes met and his face went taut with fear. He got up guiltily, handed the skull to her, then fled through the crowd into the refectory.

  Fitcher and the family were gone, so she went to return the skull to the Hall of Worship. People sat along the dark entryway. She stumbled over someone. Hands brushed her, possibly groping. The one or two hands that clutched, she struck away with the skull. Shortly she emerged into the rear of the hall and found herself at the edge of an orgy. The whippings taking place there on the pretext of self-loathing had excited other desires in the penitents. Lying naked on the altar had given way to coupling naked in the pews. Kate backed away and retreated before someone noticed and tried to force her to join their mad assemblage. She held the skull before her in the dark corridor again, but no one tried to grab her this time.

  She took it with her upstairs, intending to place it for safekeeping in her room.

  She found that the open rooms where the injured had earlier been cared for had subsequently been looted. Trunks and crates lay pried or smashed open, their contents spilled out across floors, dragged into the hallway—clothing, pillows and sheets, necklaces, pots and pans, even a miner’s pickax, lay incongruously beside the bloodstained mattresses, shredded sheets, and makeshift stretchers of canvas and tree branches.

  Downstairs, the clock chimed eleven times, and a cacophony of voices bawled back with beseeching prayers, fortifying quotations: “I have faith in Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Savior!”

  “He that believeth shall be saved!”

  “By Grace are we saved, through Faith and not of ourselves is the Gift of God!”

  Kate heard the mortal dread in their words. She returned to the landing to scan the crowd below. Fitcher had gone. She must act now. Whatever happened after midnight—however many angels appeared and hallelujahs were sung—she would see the monster exposed. Whether or not she would be reunited with them in the next life, Kate’s sisters had been murdered in this one. Her only defense in Fitcher’s new world lay in the evidence of his evil.

  Her bull’s-eye lantern had been left on the floor there. She set the skull down beside it, then ran to her room and grabbed the lucifers from the mantel. She lit the lantern with one and put the rest in her pocket.

  She picked up the skull—if she left it here, it would just be stolen again—and climbed to the top floor.

  The floor was as dark and seemingly lifeless as before, but now the doors to all the rooms along the hall stood open. Walking past them, she was startled to see figures lurking just inside. When she stopped, they shuffled back from the doorways and haunted the shadows. This time, when she shone the light of her lamp into the doorways, the men did not vanish, as if their presence had grown stronger. Their faces were gray as ash. All were solemn, their eyes sunken, heads down as if afraid to meet her gaze. She saw that they all bore wounds, some disfiguring. She knew that she was looking at shades, men who now existed only in the dark, condemned to these rooms like souls condemned to purgatory. In the third one along, before he backed out of view, Kate saw a face with a wide mustache with waxed ends. It was the man in the daguerreotype, James Pulaski.

  Then, in the fourth doorway, Michael Notaro stood. She could not mistake him, nor the black wounds in his belly and his throat. Slowly, he raised his head and looked into her eyes. He made a gentle smile then—a look she’d never seen on his face in life. Was this the face Amy had seen? He backed away into the shadows. Kate stepped toward him and shone her lantern through the doorway. Its light fell upon an empty foyer. She nodded as though understanding that his shade could not speak to her, and went on.

  At the rear of the hall, one door to the side remained closed. She hadn’t noticed it before. It was smaller than the others. She found the key for it after only one try. The door opened onto a small stairwell—servant’s stairs. Going down they no doubt exited at the back of the house, near the kitchen. Going up, she could guess where they would take her. That might make things easier for her, but later. Afterward.

  She steeled herself for what she must do next, then unlocked the door to the bloody chamber and went inside. She locked the door behind her. Now she was sealed in with all of his wives.

  The room was cold as winter. Kate set the skull down beside the cauldron, and carried the lantern to the rear wall. She had to look closely at the horrible torsos to identify her sisters’ bodies. They hung side by side on hooks, the least decayed of the six.

  She set the lantern behind her on the candelabrum. Then with a silent prayer to God to give her strength, she took hold of Amy’s torso and pushed it up off the hook.

  It was like lifting a great dead fish. The skin was cold and rubbery, horrid to the touch, but she refused to give in to her repulsion. She laid it on the floor. She had to shove aside some leg irons and move the candelabrum up against the barrel to place Vernelia’s torso beside it. The arms and legs were hard to judge. She pictured Amy’s feet, against the wall of the bedroom, as she cracked her toe joints. It seemed as if that had been years ago.

  Through trial and error, she matched the arms and legs to the bodies, placing them like the parts of enormous bloodless dolls. One arm from each body had been stuck in the cauldron for display, and it had to be for his own amusement, for who else was meant to see it?

  Now came the worst of all. She picked up the lantern again and held it out above the cauldron as she leaned over and made herself look into the dead faces of Fitcher’s brides. So many heads. She recognized Vern and Amy—and, she thought, the head of Mrs. Pulaski. Of course it was there. It had to be.

  Into the red depths, she plunged her hand to grab hold of Amy’s hair and lift the head out. The water swirled. The heads shifted and rocked.

  Cringing, keeping it at arm’s length, she placed Amy’s head at the top of its body, then went back for Vern’s.

  In taking hold of Vern, she caught strands from another, more decayed head as well, and it came up with Vern’s, like a submerged monster aroused by Kate’s intrusion into its domain. She dropped Vern’s, and both heads fell with a splash. Kate had to leap aside as a bloody plume sprayed out of the cauldron. She knocked over the wrought-iron candelabrum; the candles tumbled and rolled across the floor.

  Kate hesitated. “Again,” she ordered herself. “Only once more. Dear Lord, only once.” She leaned over the cauldron again and grabbed hold of Vern’s head. Quickly, she raised it. Watery blood splashed over her silk dress, but she didn’t care, didn’t stop. Blood was on her hands and forearms, her feet, her knees and petticoats where she’d knelt. It couldn’t be covered up now. She wanted the blood there. She wanted her father to see it, the blood of his girls.

  She left them lying there, unlocked the door, and went out, locking it once more to disguise her handiwork. She realized that she’d locked the skull in with them, then decided that was as it should be. What was the skull if not a demonic distortion of Christ, stripped of meaning, of truth? One more cruel jape of Fitcher’s. It belonged to that hellish room, too.

  How much time did she have now? Probably only a quarter hour, not much more than that. Yet she knew with unshakable certainty that no one here was Heaven-bound. No man as monstrous as Elias Fitcher would ever enter Heaven. He might inveigle all of humanity with his arcane gifts, but what deity would let him in? Did he think that Satan had gained control of the celestial city? And with that thought came a flash of insight too outrageous to put into words, but which—if it
was true—meant that eternal damnation lived inside and not beyond the iron rails that bordered Harbinger.

  She returned to the door to the servant stairs. There couldn’t be much time left. She had to find her father now, and if he was in the fields, away from the house, he might be anywhere. And there was the possibility as well that Fitcher had lied about that, too. She would use the pyramid. She only hoped Amy’s claims of its magical properties were true.

  Holding the lantern ahead of her, Kate climbed the circling stairs. Even before she saw the pyramid, she could hear the howl like a great storm above her.

  From the view she’d had of it on the ground, the pyramid had looked clear, but the light of her lamp reflected off its surfaces as if off mirrors. Yet it wasn’t a simple reflection. As she watched, the brightest part of the light moved and took on shapes, which crystallized into images of the people below. Each of the panes showed her some portion of the thousands surrounding the house. There were people mutilating themselves, tearing out their hair, gouging out their own eyes, then reaching with blood-drenched fingers for the sky in agonized supplication for God to come and take them now. She realized she could hear as well as see them—what had seemed the howl of the wind was the wailing of so many souls in torment. At the chained front gates, hundreds pushed against the iron to get in. Some attempted to scale the bars. At the top, many had lost their hold and been impaled on the points, but more crazed converts climbed and crawled over them to get to the other side. They dangled from the bodies, jumped to the lawn. Some succeeded and ran off. Others hurt themselves in the jump and couldn’t move. The guards beat anyone within reach the moment they landed.

  Then Fitcher arrived. He approached the bars and those outside reached between them. Children stuck their heads through. Fitcher strode along the fence as though he walked down an aisle in a church, seemingly unaware of the carnage and cruelty around him. He touched their hands, promising them salvation if they entrusted their souls to him—or, no, she realized, he was quoting from Proverbs: “Confesseth and forsaketh and you shall find my mercy!” Yes, his mercy. His mercy dripped from her hands.

  Remembering what Amy had said about the properties of this place, she called out her father’s name. The image blackened, was replaced by that of her father on his knees, his elbows propped on a bale of hay. A dozen others knelt with him, all deep in prayer. It was the village barn. Somehow Mr. Charter had found a pocket of sanity and sanctity in the midst of the horrors below. She heard his whispered prayer as if she were beside him: “Oh, Lord, forgive me for in my weakness I gave myself to him. I am damned forever but spare my girls, please, they entered here as innocents, lambs for his slaughtering, O Merciful God, spare them, let them join their mother, who I know is with you. Elizabeth, my darling, I shall never see you again.”

  Kate glanced away from the view, her eyes brimming with tears. So he knew, he already knew. The spell upon him must have lifted. Her poor father had been deluded in his grief by the persuasion of Fitcher. And by Lavinia. Turning back to the glass, she said her stepmother’s name.

  Abruptly there was darkness. Trees in tidy rows stood on either side of her. It was the orchard. In the distance were the lights of the village, but no sign of Lavinia. Then she burst into view between the trees, turned, and ran straight at Kate. She was dressed again in her riding clothes, her hair unfurled, fanning blackly behind her. Her face taut with terror, she sobbed between ragged breaths. She looked over her shoulder, as if watching for pursuit, as a gray veil appeared between Kate’s view and Lavinia. It fluttered and settled in her path, flexed into an anthropomorphic form like smoke trapped in a human-shaped bottle. Kate cried out, “Lavinia, no, go back!”

  As if hearing her, Lavinia faced forward and saw it. She shrieked and tried to run the other way, but the grayness swept right up and embraced her. Lavinia wailed, “Please, Elias, no, let me stay! I’ll find you more, I’ll find you new ones!” Her feet rose off the ground. She was held in the air, and slowly, inexorably, she began to wither. Her scream of agony thinned, became a shrill whistle, her skin wrinkled and collapsed as if everything inside were desiccating. Her bones cracked like kindling taking a flame. Under the crackling sound, the thing whispered to her soothingly, “There, now, give unto me your life, there can be no resurrection for you, my servant, slave. You were judged so long ago.” Kate shivered at the awful slyness of a voice she’d only heard in dreams till now. This was the thing he’d sent to their room, the shade in the wall that had enticed each sister in her turn. It was no spirit, no angel as she imagined angels, no matter what they called it here.

  When finally the thing set her down, Lavinia was nothing but a dry skin in a boiled shirt. The skin crumpled into the grass, vanishing as if the earth had absorbed her. The murdering shade slid away between the trees.

  Lavinia had been Fitcher’s lieutenant, his lover, his jealous procurer. She had delivered his wives—at least, thought Kate, the last three of them. Kate made a silent prayer that God would forgive Lavinia what she had done: She couldn’t hate another victim of Fitcher, not even her stepmother. In a few minutes, he would claim Kate’s soul as well. That was the plan, of course, and always had been. Lavinia’s task had been to find him his perfect flower. No doubt she worshipped him as Kate’s sisters and the multitude did—worshipped him and desired him. Now he didn’t need her any longer. He had everything he wanted.

  On the first floor, the clock struck the first toll of midnight. A roar reached Kate from the yard far below. She’d been absorbed too long. She had to get to her father.

  She turned to run but in her haste lurched against a small rail she hadn’t seen. She hit it with such force that she nearly tumbled over it headfirst. Her lantern rang against it like a bell. The egg spun out of her pocket. She clutched the rail to keep from going over, and found herself hanging above the stained-glass panel over the slaughter room, over the cauldron. The egg fell straight through the glass, sending cracks in every direction, puncturing the image of Eve. For an instant the window sagged around the hole. Then like the bridge in the gorge, it collapsed. It crashed down as the clock struck its fourth chime. “Vern! Amy!” Kate cried. She raced down the stairs to the room.

  Most of the window had landed in the cauldron. The bodies she’d laid out at the side were untouched. The skull was rolling around in the sticky blood on the floor, and Kate picked it up. She stood up the overturned candelabrum and set the skull on top of it, between the prongs.

  It was then that she witnessed the unfolding miracle.

  The bodies she had assembled were knitting together. Where Fitcher had hacked them apart, skin and bones were rejoining, the awful seams were closing up.

  The clock tolled again.

  Kate looked up at the refulgent point of the pyramid above her and thought, Not a Day of Judgment, but one of Resurrection. Whose power, whose magic, was this? Surely not his, not Fitcher’s. His powers delivered only death.

  As she watched, dumbfounded, her healed sisters opened their eyes and sat up. Vern looked at herself in wonder. Amy began to cry. Kate knelt and hugged them both. The skull, perched above, seemed to gaze imperiously upon the reunion.

  From the floors below came the din of the congregation, sounding more animal than human.

  “It’s the end of the world,” Amy cried.

  “Not for us, not if I can help it,” said Kate. “But it will be if we walk out through the front of this house—he’d recognize us and have us torn to pieces. He’s out there now with his Angel of Death. And you two, you’re drenched in more blood than the angel.”

  She paused a moment then, thinking of what she’d seen in the magic glass above. The clock sounded one final time. The fifteenth had arrived. Kate rose and began to undress.

  “What are you doing?” Vern asked.

  “I’ll show you soon enough. Help me now. We have to get to Papa and take him with us.” She undressed quickly, and draped her fancy clothes over the candelabrum. The matches in her pockets spill
ed across the floor, but she ignored them. She didn’t need them now. She began to smear herself with the blood from the floor. They saw what she was doing and joined in. They smeared her and then themselves with it, until all three of them were covered from head to foot in blood.

  “Follow me now,” she said, and took them by the hand, leading them out of the chamber and down the back circling stairwell. She emerged on the second floor. It was empty, although the crowd sounded as if they stood on the stairs below. Vandalized belongings were still strewn across the hall. She wanted the mattresses where the surgeons had worked, in particular the expensive ones. Kate grabbed the pickax beside them and used it to rip a mattress down the middle. She stuck her hands into the cavity and flung the contents into the air. Feathers flew around them, settled, and stuck. “They’re all expecting signs,” she said as she shook out more feathers. “Demons or angels. They’ll let us through, they’re too terrified to reason it out.”

  Vern nodded, uncertainly but gamely reached into the mattress and threw more feathers at Kate. In a few minutes they were all covered in a layer of feathers, unrecognizable as Fitcher’s brides, almost as anything human.

  People were milling about on the second floor now. Kate led her sisters to the back stairs and quickly descended.

  At the bottom, one door opened to the kitchen and another to the back porch. They went outside. As Kate had hoped, most of the crowd had surged to the front of the house at the stroke of midnight to be close to Fitcher, their savior, and abandoned the makeshift encampment. Many of the tents had been trampled flat. There were bodies lying strewn through the debris. Kate said, “Listen to me, now, Papa is in the village barn. We have to go and bring him.”