by Ivan Blake
Chris climbed onstage and limped to the iron maiden. He hoped against hope something had blocked the spikes, but knew in his heart they’d struck home. Rose’s arm dangled lifeless from the side of the iron maiden, her hand no longer clutching Geraldine’s. Gillian ran to Chris’s side and embraced him. They stared in silence at the blood pooling about their feet.
Geraldine, who’d been holding her breath, gasped and cried out, “Rose! Oh God, Rose!” She fell forward onto her knees. Her father behind her sobbed hysterically.
Gillian helped Geraldine to her feet and hugged her tightly. Chris knelt by the door of the iron maiden. “Oh, Rose,” he said in barely a whisper. After a moment, he took hold of the door handle and ever so slowly began to pull it open.
From behind the door there came a long sigh and a faint voice. “Christopher? Are you there?”
Chris froze. “Yes, Rose. I’m here.”
“Please, open the door.”
Again he pulled on the door, and again Rose sighed. Chris sobbed. “Oh, Rose, I...I can’t do this.”
“You can. You must. Please.”
Then there came a second muffled voice from inside the iron maiden. “Chris, you mustn’t. Don’t open the door.”
“Jackie? Are you all right?”
“She saved me, oh God, she saved me. But now she’s...she’s nailed to the door.”
“Listen to me, Chris.” Rose’s voice was growing weaker. “You must open the door. Do it now, please, or it’ll be too late.”
Chris grasped the door firmly and drew it open in one steady movement.
At first, the spikes pulled Rose’s body forward, but then, as they were drawn clear of her flesh—from her chest and abdomen and arms and even her eye—she fell forward into Chris’s arms. For a moment, he held her to his chest, then carefully lowered her to the floor, where he cradled her head in his lap. Blood flowed from every wound. Geraldine knelt beside Rose. Rose smiled, and took Geraldine’s hand.
“Geraldine Paget,” Rose said, “I’m so proud of you. You are a lioness. Never let anyone tell you otherwise.”
“Oh, Rose!” Geraldine kissed Rose’s hand and wept.
Rose then looked up into Chris’s face. “Did we win?”
“Yes, Rose. We won, with the help of your friends.”
“My brother was so right about you. A Mortsafeman indeed.”
“Rose...I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry? Why?” she whispered. “You know what this means. The lord has answered my prayer. ‘May He not hate me so much that He would let me live one more day without feeling the desire of love!’ Chris Chandler, I’m saved at last, and I have you to thank.”
She touched the amulet on Chris’s chest. “I’m so glad I made this for you. Use it well,” she said with a beautiful smile, “you and your lovely friend,” and then closed her eyes. Her head inclined to the right, and the color drained from her face. Geraldine wept softly. Gillian put her arms around the girl’s shoulders and gently stroked her hair.
The theater had fallen strangely quiet. Chris looked out over the seats and saw the specters, all ten of them, hovering, watching the stage, and smiling. Then they were gone and the cries and screams of the suffering and dying returned. Martin Koyman stumbled to Jackie’s side. “I almost lost you,” he said as he tore away her restraints.
Smoke was beginning to fill the theater. Several seat cushions were smoldering, many already in flames. Cinders floated across the auditorium, igniting piles of rubbish and pieces of scenery. The surviving performers were stumbling toward the exit where the police constable, in spite of his shattered jaw and the ugly stream of blood running from his mouth, was attempting to corral them into the alley. Geraldine was trying to unfasten her father’s restraints, but his crazed thrashing about was making her task very difficult.
Then it hit Chris. “We don’t have the bones,” he said. “We have to save the bones.”
“Do you know where they are?” Gillian asked.
“In the mechanical room.”
“I’ll get them,” Geraldine shouted. “You help my dad,” she said to Martin.
“Right,” Martin replied. “You go.”
Jackie, now free from the iron maiden, dropped to her knees beside Rose and wept. “She saved me.”
“Coming, Chris?” Geraldine shouted as she ran from the stage.
“No, Chris,” Gillian said, “you stay with Rose.” She started after Geraldine. Just as she was about to disappear through the rear curtains, she stopped and gave Chris a smile which seemed to say, ‘I’ve got this. You’ve been through enough.’ Then she disappeared.
Mallory’s black eyes, still filled with rage, swept down toward Chris. He touched the amulet on his chest and stared right back at her, then he lifted Rose into his arms and started for the lobby. Mallory whirled around him, seemingly crazed she couldn’t rip the woman from his embrace. Chris was half way up the center aisle when Mallory noticed Sweat moving about on the lighting gantry overhead. During the maelstrom, the huge slug had flattened himself to the metal walkway, whimpering as the nightmare unfolded below. Now that the vengeful shades were gone, he’d started down a rope ladder and landed right next to Gilbert among the smoldering seats.
Gilbert stirred. “Help me, somebody please.”
“Everything’s gone.” Sweat was blubbering like an infant. “Blood is gone.”
“Is that you, Sweat? Listen to me! We can still win! Make the film.” Blood bubbled from Gilbert’s mouth. Sweat leaned as close to Gilbert as he dared. The stench from Gilbert’s mangled lower half was nauseating. “My plays, they’ll be more famous than ever! Soon, everybody will perform...” His eyes rolled back in his head.
Sweat turned to flee, and found himself looking into Mallory’s eyes.
A crowd had gathered in front of the theater. Smoke was billowing from the front doors. A police officer helped Chris through the crowd and cleared a circle on the pavement so he could lay Rose down. People whispered Rose’s name and wept.
“Dead,” the officer muttered.
“Chris,” Geraldine screamed from the alley. “It’s Gillian! You’ve got to come.”
“Gillian?” Chris raced to the alley. A police officer was holding back onlookers as the young officer with the broken jaw kept his gun on the surviving performers. They were seated on the ground whimpering and nursing their many injuries. A medic from the fire department who’d apparently just arrived, was standing in the midst of the chaos, sizing up the injuries, and muttering, “Holy Christ, Holy Christ.”
Chris rushed past the cop, pointing to Geraldine and shouting, “It’s my friend.”
The cop shouted after Chris, “Don’t go in there. There’s gas!”
Geraldine waited at the side exit. The smoke was heavier now. “It’s Gillian, she’s hurt,” she sobbed.
“Where is she?”
They ran inside and across the stage. “What happened,” Chris shouted as they made their way through thick, acrid smoke. The smell was appalling.
“Lassa Tetana, the tall skinny bitch, she’s what happened. Gillian and I were carrying the last package of bones to the alley when Lassa appeared from the basement. She was carrying a large picture of some woman and muttering about her mother. She looked crazy and when she saw us, she screamed that she needed the van keys. We said we didn’t have the keys, but Lassa screamed, “Liar!” and swung the picture at Gillian. The frame caught her across the forehead.”
They found Gillian slumped against the back wall of the theater, eyes closed and head in her hands. Nearby, Lassa Tetana lay sprawled on the floor out cold.
“What happened to her,” Chris asked.
“I decked the bitch,” Geraldine said.
“Gillian. It’s me,” Chris said softly as he knelt down. He put an arm over her shoulder and gently shifted the hair away from her face. Her face ran with blood from a terrible gash above the hairline.
“Of course it is, you sexy beast,” she said with a smile, and slumped in
to his arms.
At that moment, the methane in the cellar ignited.
Chapter 17
Late March, 1987
Eight died in the Lewis disaster. Standing in the middle of the smoldering ruins of the Bijoux Burgoyne, the Vermont State Fire Marshall told WCAX TV News it was a miracle anyone made it out alive given their many horrible injuries, the inexcusable condition of the building, and the incredible buildup of flammable gas in the cellar.
Gilbert Burgoyne, the twins Blood and Sweat, Caspar Fredrik, Manfred Arimanes, Emelia Tombstone, and Rose DuCalice were all determined to have died in the theater; Harold Ferguson’s remains were also found at the theater, but the coroner concluded he’d died elsewhere.
Events surrounding the deaths of Rose DuCalice and Harold Ferguson were relatively easy for the pathologist to interpret; the evidence was clear the two had been murdered, and Burgoyne and associates were responsible. The other deaths, however, proved virtually impossible for the pathologist to untangle. Some bodies were missing organs. Body parts were found at great distances from their host. Some victims had died in incomprehensible positions. Others had suffered trauma almost impossible to attribute to a human agent. He had no idea, the pathologist admitted at the Coroner’s Inquest, how one human being might rip the testes from another or tear a person’s scalp completely off without some sort of weapon. In the end, the pathologist was forced to conclude that much of the bizarre damage had to have been post-mortem, and in all likelihood caused by the blast which levelled the building.
The police officer with the broken jaw provided identical accounts at both the Coroner’s Inquest and the trials of the accused. Chris Chandler, Martin Koyman, Geraldine Paget, and Jackie Cormier all corroborated his testimony. The officer testified he witnessed performers of the Grand Guignol Theater, in what had likely been a drug-induced frenzy, suddenly turn on one another in a horrifying and savage fashion. The most crazed and violent had died at each other’s hands. The less addled and less culpable had merely been collateral damage. Rose DuCalice had died when she’d interceded to prevent the execution of Jackie Cormier by Gilbert Burgoyne, and Harold Ferguson had been killed as part of Burgoyne’s scheme to sell human remains. The only outstanding issue in the coroner’s report was the hallucinogen responsible for such a bloody frenzy, since no known drug was detected in any of the deceased.
The ten survivors of the Lewis catastrophe all had to be hospitalized for their injuries and for varying lengths of time. The three youngest members of the theater company had suffered lacerations, bruises, broken bones, and severe emotional trauma. They babbled for weeks about spirits attacking them—proof positive, according to the pathologist, they’d consumed some heretofore unidentified drug. They were also convicted of committing indignities on human remains for their part in robbing the Monsegur cemetery and sentenced to six-month jail terms to be served in a state mental institution. Dolorosa Morgana was convicted of the same crime but received a lesser sentence because of the part she’d played in exposing the crimes of Gilbert Burgoyne. Lassa Tetana was convicted of the additional crime of assault for her savage attack on Gillian Willard.
Mayor Paget suffered a complete mental breakdown, and after several weeks in the tiny local hospital, during which his behaviour swung wildly between violent desperation and profound melancholia, had to be moved to a private long-term care facility near Burlington.
After a week of observation, Jackie Cormier was released into the care of her family and Martin Koyman. She took a month-long absence from her job at the Bangor paper, as did Koyman, which they spent together, not as lovers but as dearest friends and colleagues, at a seaside inn near Eastport, where Koyman continued his research on the spread of AIDS, and Jackie wrote an extended profile of Chris Chandler for the Bangor paper entitled, Defender of the Dead.
Jackie’s story described the courage of the team of Chris Chandler and Gillian Willard, who in spite of protracted torment by small-minded classmates, teachers and neighbors, had investigated and brought to justice the desecrators of so many dead in both Maine and Vermont. On Koyman’s advice, the story made no mention of Mallory Dahlman or any other paranormal event. In a note at the end of her story, however, Jackie indicated she one day hoped to write a book on the ancient and otherworldly dimensions of defending the departed. Her story was published in the Bangor paper the same day the State Inquiry into the events in Bemishstock released its final report.
The report exonerated Chandler and found the police had been derelict in their investigations of grave robbery and many other instances of vandalism and harassment going back several years. The inquiry recommended the State Police assume control of the Bemishstock Department until such time as the taint of personal vendetta and willful abuse could be scrubbed from the culture of the force.
The young Lewis police officer, who’d suffered a badly shattered jaw and a serious concussion, stayed off work for several months. His account of the Burgoyne Theater disaster had been clear, consistent and highly professional...and of course incomplete, and he knew it. Chris Chandler visited the officer in hospital several times during his convalescence, and they became friends. As the officer confided to Chris one afternoon, whatever the spirits may have been, their presence hadn’t altered or in any way lessened the ghastly crimes Gilbert Burgoyne and company had committed. The spirits, as far as he was concerned, were like the wind or the rain—mere forces of nature which in no way excused the conduct of the guilty.
Among the survivors, the most life-threatening injuries turned out to be Gillian’s. Lassa Tetana’s blow to her head worsened the damage Gillian had previously suffered in the explosion of Doctor Meath’s barn. Gillian was airlifted to Montpelier where she was kept in an induced coma for a month, and then under observation for another month to make sure she’d suffered no significant loss of neurological function. She wasn’t flown to Bangor because of her very delicate state, so Gillian’s mother rented a room near the hospital and spent every day at her side. Chris drove from Lewis every second day to do the same.
Her doctors’ conclusions were both encouraging and shattering. Gillian’s mental capabilities and motor skills had not been affected in any way, but the blood vessel in her brain which had suffered the greatest trauma in Bemishstock had been further compromised to such a degree by Tetana’s blow that at any moment she might suffer a fatal aneurism. Surgery would be required to replace the damaged portion of the blood vessel, but the surgery would be extremely risky and very expensive and would have to wait until Gillian was strong enough to undergo the procedure. In the meantime, all anyone could do was wait and pray.
Chris became despondent, confused, and angry. Once again, his efforts to avenge the dead had taken many lives. Once again, his very private effort to do the right thing had made him appear in the press like some sort of swaggering adventurer. Once again, the media made him out to be a hero, when in this instance, everybody except him had been heroic: Rose for saving Jackie’s life, Geraldine for saving the life of her father, the police officer for making the case to the courts, and Gillian for actually rescuing the remains of Rose’s friends and family. What the hell had he done, he sobbed to himself as he sat at Gillian’s bedside? That was the worst of it! Once again, his reckless adventurism had nearly cost Gillian her life...and might yet. Never again would he place Gillian in jeopardy. Even if it meant losing her for good, he vowed he would never put his own reckless impulses ahead of Gillian’s well-being. Gillian was all that mattered.
April-May, 1987
Bernard Monsegur arrived in Lewis the morning after Rose’s death. Chris had been terrified to meet him, feeling such remorse over the catastrophic outcome. Bernard, as it turned out, was extraordinary. He was the same slender, elegant man, minus the top hat, of course, Chris had glimpsed in the photos from the nineteenth century. He embraced Chris, sobbed on his shoulder, and said how grateful he was that Chris had recovered the stolen remains and been with Rose as she passed away.
; “But if I hadn’t interfered, Rose might still be alive,” Chris wept as he spoke.
“If Rose had lived, she would have been heartbroken, her friends would still be suffering, and she would judge her interminable existence as without meaning. She died doing precisely what she dreamed she would—saving her friends. After eight hundred years, saving her friends from pain was all Rose lived for anymore. You brought joy back into Rose’s life. And how better to die than with joy in your heart?”
For the duration of the inquest and the funeral, Bernard Monsegur remained at Marymount. Chris and Bernard spent hours together repairing the cemetery. They replaced missing stones with new ones, had broken stones repaired, and ordered hand-crafted boxes for the recovered remains. They cut away roots and shrubs and re-excavated the ten ransacked graves in preparation for the upcoming re-interment. Bernard also had a friend in California examine the bones using something called DNA fingerprinting—a procedure developed a mere eighteen months earlier—to ensure they were properly grouped together. Most important of all, they prepared Rose’s grave, and her stone. Bernard had it inscribed with something Rose herself had written: Love should fill every moment of our lives, and when it doesn’t, then surely we have lived too long.
Hundreds attended Rose’s memorial service at the Catholic Church in town. In speech after speech, people lauded her selfless devotion to Lewis and its library, and her remarkable courage in saving the life of a stranger. Bernard hosted a magnificent luncheon in the Library reading room for the entire town. Even people who’d moved away from Lewis returned to express their gratitude for her devotion to the town.