The Accursed

by Joyce Carol Oates

  At a distance, I was allowed to view Axson Mayte’s sister Camille—a woman of a particularly hard-faced beauty, with very pale skin, pale-blond hair loosened down her back, and a pitiless gaze.

  You must never approach Camille. You must never speak with Camille, unless she speaks with you first.

  Axson spoke of his sister admiringly. On his face, that had become a splotched frog’s face, with bulging eyes, and a slack spittle-damp mouth, was a look of commingled wonderment, apprehension, and sibling-dislike.

  CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT he named them. The ugly creatures sporting outside our bedchamber window, in the desolate graveyard. Though they were nearly as active during the day-hours: shrieking, squawking, squabbling among themselves, poking about in the moldering graves with manic greed, and in black infested pools of water. Children of the Night Axson Mayte murmured which you would do well not to scorn, my proud Annabel, for you and they will become well acquainted soon, before many months have passed; and I, and my companions, weary of your creamy skin and insipid ways.

  IT WAS NOT entirely true, that Axson’s former brides were dead; but some varying number of them, as many as twenty, it sometimes seemed, were fully alive, kept captive in rooms in the Bog Palace, or allowed to emerge, to work as manual laborers, like the piteous crone in the winding-shroud. My harem is not so showy as the harem of an Arab prince Axson Mayte remarked for our females are not so well disciplined, and soon pine away, and die; or are helped to die; if they are not loved. In a true harem, it is not realistic to expect to be loved. Dear Annabel, be wise!

  So broken in mortification, so weakened by cruel and crude usage, and repugnant food, I could not even pray to our merciful God (whom I had abandoned, in my vanity and stupidity) but lay senseless for days, for weeks, while Axson Mayte plied upon my limp and unresisting body such obscene acts, I am sickened and speechless to recall. That my body was limp and resisting sometimes pleased him, but at other times aroused him to fury. Soon, there will be no need to “play dead,” dear Wife!

  Soon, too, bored with the sameness of our marital bed, Axson Mate invited into it his lewd drinking companions.

  UPON THE HOUR a great bell tolled. An undersea bell it sounded like, and we the inhabitants of an ancient sea.

  And sometimes the tolling had a hollow ring, dull, ponderous, leaden, and muffled; as if the sound were coming from within, in the marrow of one’s bones.

  So Axson Mayte said, seeing my look of baffled horror Dear Annabel, it is but the music of Time you are hearing. Why take foolish alarm as if you were still a child at the Manse? You have left your paradise forever, you cannot return. Now, as each note sounds—each tolling of the bell—understand how quickly it passes; each note, imagining it is Eternity, while so very fleeting, one can scarcely grasp that it existed at all.

  Upon the hour, and the half hour, and the quarter hour—tolling, tolling, to make a mockery of Time.

  For in the Bog Kingdom, Time did not pass.

  Or, as Axson Mayte gloatingly said, it passes so fleetingly, one cannot measure it, or experience it.

  So, feverish Annabel lay in her filth-encrusted bridal gown, which had become a kind of nightgown, or housecoat; sometimes, she lay in a bed of mere rags on the stone floor of a nameless room; hearing, close by, the cries of luckless females and men, singled out, as Axson chanced to remark, as “medical” or “scientific” subjects; for certain of his drinking companions, it was revealed, were men of medicine, or science; though Annabel would know them but dimly, through a scrim of horror, repugnance, shrinking pain as Macalaster!—“Scottie”!—O’Diggan!—Pitcairn!—Pitt-Williams!—Skinner!—jocularly introduced to Annabel, as Axson ushered them into the bedchamber.

  Later, there was water thrown on her: lukewarm, fetid water but welcomed, desperately. And there was food, of a kind—tossed into the room where she lay, or, as Axson and his friends looked on, to their vast amusement, dumped onto the filthy floor of the kitchen so that Annabel and the others were made to eat from the floor, like animals; and, like animals, greedy and grateful for what they were given.

  Rancid food, garbage food, bones mostly picked clean of meat—these were tossed at the starving, no matter that flies and beetles had gotten into them. Where is your Slade pride now, my darling?—so Axson mocked, and laughed.

  Why these disfiguring tears? Men despise tears—it is the very weakness of the female sex that most disgusts them. Did you not foreswear all you’d known, to cleave to me; did you not cast your lot with Axson Mayte, who flattered you; did you not repudiate your family, the infamous Slades, who made their fortune in the slave trade, decades ago, and have been most holy-and-righteous Christians, since? Did you not cast aside your baby-faced Lieutenant, that fatuous gentleman, yet to moisten his lips in blood? Did you not break your parents’ hearts, and devastate your brother Josiah? Does not your foolish virgin-heart yet swoon in amorous abandon, in my presence?

  Thus coldly and jeeringly Axson Mayte laughed. Changed utterly from the Southern gentleman I had known, in my grandfather’s garden.

  His close-set eyes of the color of mucus, in the flaccid-toad face.

  His forehead low, and furrowed, and sickly-white; his thin lips glistening lewdly, in the way that Annabel saw, or imagined she’d seen, in the faces of certain gentlemen of Princeton, who could not have known that Annabel, or anyone, was observing them at such a time.

  In the secrecy of her filthy bed begging God to forgive her. Begging God to show her the way out of the Bog Palace, and the Bog Kingdom, that was not the way of death.

  So badly she missed her dear family—her mother, and her father; her grandfather; her beloved brother Josiah, whom she had wantonly injured, and now could not recall why.

  For she was not yet desperate enough to comprehend how a Christian of purer heart and greater resolve than she might have preferred death, to the continued horrors of the Bog Kingdom; how a woman of purer heart than her own should have eagerly embraced the grave, and given herself to the loathsome scavengers of the cemetery, than willingly surrender to the bestial lusts of Axson Mayte and his companions.

  FORGIVE ME, for this abject wish to live! To be returned to my beloved family, whose hearts I have wounded, and whose reputation I have defiled.

  During this time and afterward, when I was yet more abused as a servant-girl and a cast-off wife, I found some small relief in moments of quiet; by summoning the Manse, and my family, and girlhood friends like Wilhelmina; and many another kindly face of childhood, as if the years could run backward. Often I lay too exhausted and demoralized to move, even to be kicked into action by Axson Mayte, or one of his drinking companions; and so I was allowed to lie in filth for as many as two or three days, as the brutes ignored me in their excited interest in one of their experimental subjects—electric shocks, blood-transfusions and “organ transplants” with creatures of another species, and if the poor wretched died, dissections with surgical instruments. (For so I came to know, though I had not ever looked upon such horrors directly.) During such times my soul seemed to pass from my body to drift about the airless cell; my fingers resumed an old, playful life, at the pianoforte in the drawing room at Crosswicks where I’d played sonatas by Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, and Chopin; or sang with my beloved family from sheet music at the piano, as I played, songs of Stephen Foster, Gilbert and Sullivan, and these words of Thomas Moore set to such exquisite music, that Josiah particularly loved—

  Oft, in the stilly night,

  Ere Slumber’s chain has bound me,

  Fond Memory brings the light

  Of other days around me;

  The smiles, the tears,

  Of childhood’s years,

  The words of love then spoken;

  The eyes that shone,

  Now dimmed and gone,

  The cheerful hearts, now broken!

  Thus, in the stilly night,

  Ere Slumber’s chain hath bound me,

  Of other days around me.

  In such
desperate ways, by slow degrees, I gathered in myself the strength to endure. And held out before my tear-swollen eyes the hope that I would someday escape the Bog Kingdom and return to the Manse and to my beloved family I had so cruelly wounded.

  THE FEMALE IS the most contemptible of creatures: deficient of wit, repulsive in her mammalian nature, lecherous, and “frigid”; scheming, and stupid; entirely devoid of the moral and rational motive that guides men. For a short while, some of these creatures possess beauty—but it no more endures than spring blossoms, and soon festers, and stinks, like these.

  So Axson Mayte and his drinking companions spoke, not vehemently so much as affably, and bemusedly; some of them men of “science,” and some of them it seemed men of “the cloth,” and some “businessmen”—or so Annabel gathered. And there was Axson Mayte’s declaration, to which the men drank toasts: Yet, we must allow uses for the female!—seeing that the world must be continuously repopulated, and we would not wish to spill our precious seed into the Bog.

  AT THIS TIME it had become evident that I was with child. Which further provoked Axson Mayte to be repelled by me, and to consider if perhaps an “experiment” might be performed upon me, and the unborn child, by one or another of his companions.

  Yet, Axson seemed to forget this; or to take pity on me; for as I was deemed of little use to the men as an amorous object, lacking in feminine beauty and desirability, my position in the Palace reverted to that of servant-girl; which allowed me to learn from other servants that Axson Mayte and his sister Camille and certain of the churlish houseguests had themselves been mere servants in the household, or farm-laborers; and had some time ago risen against the rightful King and Queen and all of the royal family, and the nobles of the kingdom, slaying most, in heartless fashion, and forcing the others into lifelong servitude.

  One of the ravaged female servants, who had once been a young bride of Axson Mayte, told me You have come to the very edge of the world, in coming here. Poor child, how will you find your way back!—the distance is so far.

  WHAT SORROW! WHAT ignominy!

  And yet, what gratitude, simply to be alive.

  For I could not bring myself to hate the baby in my womb—that so drained my energy, and roused me to the most terrifying hunger, that I might almost have eaten as the graveyard scavengers ate, in the fierce desperation to live.

  Axson Mayte’s sister Camille would appear, to the neutral observer, the more “noble” of the two; for so Camille Mayte comported herself, in a queenly fashion; yet she was of plebeian origin which she betrayed in small gestures, as in an unseemly scowl that contorted her sculpted-looking face; or a flashing stare of hauteur, yet of pity, directed toward such wretches as me. (It was Camille who at last, repelled by seeing me in my grossly altered state, banished me out of the central part of the Palace and commanded that I be put to work in the cellar, which other workers called the “tunnel,” or the “pit,” or “the hole of Hell.”)

  In this way it was revealed to me, piecemeal, the true nature of the Bog Palace, and of the Bog Kingdom: presided over by murderous former servants of an era long past, whose particular history seemed to be lost now; for no one remembered when the uprising had occurred, and the public executions of the royal family and their retainers; and the forced servitude of many in the kingdom of aristocratic and genteel blood. The majority of the younger servants were certain that the insurrection had not taken place during their lifetimes; yet there were some, a very few, who claimed that they’d seen massacres with their own eyes, and had narrowly escaped being killed. These events had taken place thirty, or only twenty, or only ten years before. The elderly servants disclaimed such tales, and were more convincing to my ear.

  That they concurred in the general detestation and fear of the present regime was evident; and how pathetic it seemed to me, that a crowd of former menials should be raised in such a way, and now waited upon by their former masters and mistresses. And these menials of old were of coarse untutored stock hailing from the more desolate regions of Europe, as from the west of Ireland where the “black Irish” are said to abide with their peasant superstitions, their Gaelic, and their wild melancholy so provok’d by alcohol!

  Yet we are all grateful, we escaped with our lives—the more stoic of the servants would say—if indeed this is life, in such a hell of servitude.

  EVER MORE DESPERATELY I prayed for deliverance from this place, that my child would be born elsewhere; for though it kicked and cramped inside me, like a little fiend, I could not but love him; though it be Axson Mayte’s son, as I feared it must be, I could not but love him—for such is a woman’s nature.

  Yet I lacked courage to try to escape, for I knew that Axson Mayte would punish me severely if he caught me; and my ever-swelling body was very awkward, since my limbs were somewhat thin, and lacking in muscle. In my weakness, I am ashamed to reveal, as in a fever-dream, I caught myself in the most absurd fantasies: that Axson was but testing me, as in the old medieval tale of Patient Griselde, we had had to read in English class at the Academy, in a translation from the Middle English. For could it be, Axson was hoping to determine if I loved him purely, or was so shallow as to foreswear my vow to him . . . At such times the hissing Dear Annabel! Fair Annabel! seemed to rise to me, from a lost world; the which, in my feverish imaginings, I so craved to regain, I would have sold my soul, or bartered it wildly—another time! Yet this too was mere foolishness, and had no weight in the actual, exterior world.

  In that world, I was most piteous indeed; beginning to appear grossly pregnant, with every accompanying symptom of morning sickness, and a bloated belly, and swollen ankles; sinus infections and bronchitis swept through me, as did a ravaging stomach flu; merely to wait table to that crew of drunken ruffian louts was a torment, and exhausting; for quite “by accident” one or another of the men would jab an elbow against my belly, or ram into me with a bottle, or a chair; this provoked much laughter. Merely to witness the men devouring their food with bestial greed, not hesitating to devour raw beefsteak that leaked blood down their chins . . . (This “cannibal sandwich” was a favorite of the Palace, raw steak in a thick cut placed between two pieces of coarse bread.) As my condition grew more pronounced such displays of savage manners increased my bouts of nausea, and vomiting, so that I was disgusting to others, as to myself. Fair Annabel!—beauteous Annabel!—go away and hide yourself, you are VILE. So mocking words echoed in my reeling brain.

  Exiled to the dank cellar, which was a vast cavernous space like a cave, amid garbage, raw sewage, rats and other vermin, I found myself a comrade of similar laborers; one of our tasks was to bail excessive sewage out of the cesspool, and carry it to a woodland ravine a quarter mile from the house; our task was the continuous filling of buckets, and the continuous emptying-out of buckets, hour after hour, day following day, amid the most nauseating of odors and sights; with provision for no more than a few minutes’ respite for a frantic feeding, of poorly baked dough, and leftovers from the kitchen; and brief periods of scanty sleep, amid the very stench of the cellar in which we toiled. Sixteen hours of stoop labor daily—and then eighteen—twenty!—as autumn rains fell thunderously, and increased the water-level of the cesspool, and the Palace was threatened with flooding; entire days were spent in such labor, under threat of death from Axson Mayte, who could not abide “mutiny.” Our miserable cellar-crew of which I was surely the weakest member were obliged to crawl where we could not walk upright, and where the jagged stone ceiling was low we had to squirm like snakes, on our bellies . . . At which times the thought came to me stern and judicious This is your Hole of Hell, to which you have brought yourself.

  Yet it might be that this final mortification worked for good; for it came to me soon after that if it was so, I had brought myself to the Hole of Hell, and so could take myself away, if I had courage; all the while sprawled facedown, on my swollen belly, in a filthy composition of mud, slime, sewage, and offal, not excluding the bones of fellow menials of an age long ago.
And a new thought came to me If I am freed from the Hole of Hell I will consecrate my life to freeing my fellow-sufferers and it was astonishing to me, this thought did not seem to be from God but from the depths of my own soul, and in my own voice.

  ESCAPE FROM THE Bog Kingdom was only possible if my fellow-slaves did not report me, as evidently they did not; though pleading with me, it was “too dangerous” to chance, crawling through a sort of cave, or tunnel, to reach the outside of the Palace, by night; then making my way through the Bog Forest, by the most pallid moonlight. It was the purest chance, Axson Mayte had not the slightest awareness of me at this time, as I was banished from the better part of the Palace; it may even have been, Axson Mayte had brought a new bride to the Bog Palace by this time, without my knowing. And so I set off, less in desperation than in resolution, on a cold night of intermittent rain and sleet; in which month this was, I had no idea; nor even which year; for in the Bog Kingdom, Time did not exist as we know it elsewhere. And so—somehow—I made my way back—beginning to recognize my surroundings after dawn of the next day—seeing with amazed eyes the hills outside Princeton, now a latticework of the brightest snow.

  Hearing these terrible words from one so debased, you cannot help but feel repugnance, for the depth of sin, degradation, bestiality and even worse to which your Annabel has fallen. Yet it is my prayer that you will see it in your hearts to forgive me, and perhaps one day again to love me; and to allow me, and my baby soon to be born, a refuge at the Manse.

  POSTSCRIPT: ARCHAEOPTERYX

  It might be of interest to the reader of scientific and naturalistic inclinations to learn that at least one of the strange species of scavenger which Annabel describes in the graveyard of the Bog Palace—the one that is part-bird and part-reptile—is evidently no mere phantom of her delirium but an actual creature to be found in certain isolated regions of the eastern United States.