by Walter, Adam
Three days after Benjamin arrived, Nathan, the lawyer son, appeared at the house late in the evening. He immediately asked that he be shown a bed and declined, for the time being, to speak with Benjamin who had been sitting up in the room where their father slept.
For the next two days, the three brothers spent many uneasy hours in each other’s company. They ate meals prepared by their father’s modest staff of servants and poured whisky throughout the day, doubling the flow in the evenings. When together, they always seemed to settle in some different room of the massive, elegant house of their boyhoods. And when they made any mention of their parents, it was always some brief comment about their mother, now thirty years dead. Of their current lives, there was little discussion. Benjamin had never married, and Nathan’s wife had died, leaving him no children.
On the third evening, when all three had had much to drink and John was about to return home to his family for the night, Nathan told his brothers what he knew of their father’s will.
“Before coming out here I spoke briefly with Mr. Aaron, his solicitor,” Nathan said. “Father has, without question, used that man badly over the years. For this reason Mr. Aaron was not above making some discrete remarks concerning our position. In short, he has never seen a will. However, on two or three occasions the old man assured him that he’d had one drawn up elsewhere many years ago and that it ‘need never be altered’.”
Late the next morning Saul took feverish for two hours. During that time he, himself, spoke of the will to Benjamin. After rambling for a very long time, his eyes rolling about madly all the while, the old man suddenly went still. Then for a full minute, he shook as though chilled. He motioned his son to him and, with his right hand, clutched Benjamin’s shirt.
“Your inheritance—” he began and hesitated before starting again. “You should not search for a bequest outside this house, do you hear? You will not find one.” His eyes went suddenly sharp, and he raised his head from his pillow, saying, “My will is my hate.” His head fell back again. “Not one of you will come into his inheritance until his brothers lie buried with me.”
That evening the brothers drank together well into the night. Finally, Benjamin returned to his father’s bedroom. There he glanced quickly at the man’s thin, relaxed face, then collapsed on the sofa near the door and immediately fell asleep.
Benjamin woke early the next morning and found his father was dead. He stayed in the room with the body all of that day. Neither of his brothers came to the room, and Benjamin met the servants at the door to receive the trays with his breakfast and lunch. In the evening, he at last went down for supper. When the brothers had eaten, Benjamin led the other two to their father’s room.
All three stood around the bed, looking at the body there, when Nathan said, “Let him stay here until we find the will. The servants will not come into the room, and no one will be told that he has died.”
The three brothers agreed then, and the next day they told the servants that Saul had ordered his sons to take the house in hand and make what changes they thought best, as he knew that he had little time remaining.
Nathan followed this by telling all the household staff that they were restricted to certain areas of the house and that they were not to leave their quarters at night. The brothers then began sorting through the house, starting with Saul’s bedroom and study. John took it upon himself to remove the old papers and debris that the other two found in the rooms, bearing it all to the burning heap that lay at the far corner of the overgrown gardens behind the house.
The next night, still having not located the will, the three found themselves again standing around their father’s bed, looking down at his body. None of the brothers could remember a time when they’d met that face without apprehension. Nor would any of them claim it was a face now at peace. And as the brothers continued to regard the body, some unseen change made itself felt in the room. Some wrong was in the air, a growing sense that the ill this dead man had long carried in his heart was, itself, yet to die.
“He can’t remain here like this,” Benjamin said finally.
“Then we bury him,” Nathan said. “Now. We are the family, and it is our right to bury him at the time and in the place we choose.”
“Where then?” Benjamin said.
“In mother’s garden,” John said, and his brothers nodded.
All three had been boys yet when their mother died. At that time Saul, always a gruff, disagreeable man, turned unrelentingly severe and bitter. Two weeks after her death, he sold his wife’s jewellery and gave orders to have her wardrobe disposed of as well. A month later he turned his anger against the extensive gardens on which his wife had lavished her attentions for so many years. When his groundskeeper refused to carry out Saul’s new orders for the gardens, Saul dismissed the man immediately.
The next day, Saul hired three men from the village. Two were given axes and saws, and the third man Saul equipped with a plow and a team of horses. For two days the men cut vines and stalks, severed trunks, and razed beds. Last to topple were the rose beds and then the diverse collection of plants that made up the elaborate butterfly garden. It was during this time that a small part of what had been the butterfly garden became the burning heap for the house and its grounds. When the heap was first lit it was laden with only a portion of the debris, only enough to aid in clearing a few paths through the area. Nevertheless, the pile smouldered for days and was enough to drive away, at least for a short time, all the remaining wildlife, the few tenacious squirrels, birds and butterflies which would have stayed to explore the upended, newly-foreign territory.
Finally, the spectacle of wrack and ruin came to an end at the edge of the gardens, a border marked by several large willow trees. After that the gardens, mutilated, broken, were left fallow. And slowly, in the years following, many of the plants resurfaced in a wild, languorous snarl, a ghastly parody of what had been.
So on the night of their father’s burial, the three brothers took lanterns and made their way into the tangled morass that had once been the repository of their mother’s greatest pleasure. There, in the centre of the gardens, by starlight they dug their father a deep grave. When they returned to the house for the body, John proposed burying the old man himself while the others continued their search of the house. Though they were surprised, Nathan and Benjamin assented. Both knew that their large but quiet brother had suffered something unusual following their mother’s death, something perplexing yet wholly different in character from their father’s anger, something that remained with him even now.
Alone then, John carried Saul’s body, still in its night clothes, to the long, narrow, two-wheeled wagon that he had used to haul refuse to the burning heap. And taking the two posts in his hands, he pulled the wagon into the dark garden. To illuminate the path he had a lantern hanging from the post, near his right hand.
When John returned an hour later, his brothers remarked on the blaze they saw coming from the distant burning heap, and John told them that the light had been necessary for the burial.
For two more days the brothers searched the house. John, though, stayed at his own home for most of this time to oversee the operations of his farm, returning to the company of his brothers only in the evenings. There he silently continued in his servile role, hauling the wagon back and forth as his brothers slowly picked their way through room after room, making piles of everything that held no obvious value. Much of the refuse was old bedding, damaged furniture, mouldering books, the old man’s decayed hunting trophies, his clothes, and seemingly endless stacks of yellowed papers.
On the first of these two days after the burial, Benjamin, and later Nathan, began to notice an odd sound in the house. Regardless of which room they occupied, from beyond the door would issue a soft, susurrus noise, like a whisper of wings or the rustle of cloth. Several times the brothers opened a door only to have the sound stop abruptly. The occurrences of this sound increased on the second day. By evening it h
ad become almost continuous, and when the brothers took their late supper they left the dining room door open to allow them a short reprieve.
After supper, in the dark, John made one of his many trips from the house with a lantern and his loaded wagon. When an hour had passed and he did not return, the other two left the house to look for him, Benjamin carrying another lantern. Thus for the second time Benjamin and Nathan walked through that queer thing: the resurrection of their mother’s garden, the strange sequel to the immaculate beauty amid which they had played and revelled as boys.
With slow strides, they waded through the thick growth of the place. And they were little surprised when they came to the grave they had dug and now found it open and empty, seemingly untouched from the time they’d finished digging it. They continued toward the place where the burning heap lay in the old butterfly garden. Here they met with an eeriness more unsettling than anything so far in this morbid visit to their father’s house.
Seeing all these dimly familiar plants, and in their current, haphazard arrangement, was very like encountering the dead. They saw that two cherry trees had sprouted and matured, massive and wild, from the old garden’s remains. And here were all manner of herbs from rosemary to mint, and vegetables also — cabbage and fennel with its pale yellow blossoms.
There were flowers they knew well, the buttery-yellow Black-eyed Susans, beside flowers they recognized but could not name, one a pale pink flower with a dark center like a ripe raspberry. On one side their arms were scraped by wild nettles or the waxy leaves of a holly tree’s dark and hulking form, and on the other stood swaying wands covered in blue petals or tall, slender stalks crowned with a flowering swag, a drooping cluster of purple. At their feet were violets and clumps of plants with small, star-like flowers in yellow and pink.
And all of this was seen in quick glimpses from the light of Benjamin’s lantern.
Upon finally reaching the burning heap, both brothers were taken aback. Though John had set fire to it just two days before, now the heap was piled high again with the accumulated refuse uncovered in their search of the house. The heap was stacked to a height two feet above the head of either man and had the circumference of a small outbuilding. They stopped before it, and after only a moment Benjamin cried out in alarm and then pointed, showing his brother the blackened sceptre of human bone, a leg with its crumbling foot at the end, protruding from the base of the heap.
Neither brother spoke, and in truth there was no need. Both instantly realized this was what had become of their father’s body. And each, secretly, deep within, judged it fitting that the body should be desecrated in such a way here, in the very place that bore witness to the earlier desecration of their mother’s legacy. For indeed, the gardens held no sense of her any longer.
Here, one influence pervaded. Here, everything spoke of Saul Timmenson’s cruel hand. Still, Nathan groaned in disgust at the sight before them. After a moment he grabbed a shaft of wood from the heap. He opened his brother’s lamp, lit the piece of wood and made a torch of it. When the torch was well lit, the men moved away from each other to circle the heap. Both called out for John but received no answer.
Soon Nathan came upon the wagon pushed up against a bush covered in minute yellow flowers. John’s lantern, dark now, lay on its side nearby. Then Nathan saw John’s motionless body a dozen yards beyond, in the grass.
“Benjamin, it’s him,” he called. “John is here!”
The two hurried to their brother, and Nathan lowered his torch close to the man’s face. John was clearly dead, and his face was smeared in something dark and speckled with many deep colors — blue, green, and a muddied orange. Benjamin bent forward and took a pinch of the stuff from John’s open mouth, which was rimed with it. He rubbed it between his fingers. It was a powder so fine it felt oily, and there were thin scraps of something mixed in, something like the nearly transparent fragments of dried and crumbled birch leaves.
At the same moment, both Nathan and Benjamin noticed a whispery, now-familiar noise in the air. They turned around, and gradually they made out the dark form of a cloud above and about the burning heap. The susurrus continued. A small spot of blue, then another of red, shot out of the dark toward the brothers. Soon there were a dozen and then several dozen of these little wraiths, all throwing themselves at the faces of the two men.
The things had the colouring of butterflies, but each was a blur of movement, darting and diving like a swift or a daemonic swallow. Nathan and Benjamin shook their heads and swatted at the creatures, each man protecting his face with his free hand and bringing up the torch or lantern to brandish before him.
Then something else appeared in front of the burning heap, though they saw it for only a moment: a fearsome thing like a walking pile of charred sticks. It seemed a man-sized marionette composed of scorched bone but not a scrap of flesh. Only its face was hidden, obscured by the dark cloud of innumerable tiny wings.
Amid the whisper of these wings, suddenly a dry, hollow voice was heard.
“My will is my hate,” it rasped.
The cloud advanced, and as the two men brushed the wings from their faces, they felt an oily smear on their skin. Each also now tasted the soft wings in his mouth. They coughed and spat and backed away. At last Nathan hurled his torch into the cloud. In less time than it takes to draw a breath, the entire cloud caught fire, and the blaze lit the area all about the heap and the two brothers.
There, now brightly exposed, lay the wagon and John’s body. The awful creature of a moment ago, however, was nowhere in sight. The brothers took only a moment to realize that the cloud of wings was not expiring, was sustaining its light and motion and showing no sign of burning out.
Benjamin dropped his lantern, and both men turned and fled toward the distant willow trees beyond the garden’s edge. A moment later they shouldered their way through the hanging limbs of the first willow. As they made to hurry past its trunk, the cloud of winged flames dropped onto the tree.
Instantly the two men found themselves caught in a burning cage. Above and on every side lay an unbroken sheet of flame. And from this there was no escape.
The next morning smoke still rose from the garden. During the night, the flames had spread to the other willow trees and reduced all to charred trunks surrounded by a wide patch of blackened earth. The aftermath of that night and its fire would endure as legend for more than a generation in the surrounding hills, and for many miles up and down the river. Endless speculation would be made concerning that scene in which John’s body was found in the grass and not so very far from the place where, in the ashes of one willow tree, three piles of bones lay, all burned beyond recognition.
As for what came after, little remains to be told. Of the brothers, one alone left a family to mourn him. No will of any kind was ever found in the old house, and finally the estate was sold. The new owners were goodly folk, devout and in every way respectable. Mindful of the estate’s history, they brought a priest to bless the house and its grounds before they took possession of it all.
The Judas Man
by D. Siddall
“You should leave, Abby. Sell the cottage and leave.”
I glanced across the room to where she was sitting by the window. She didn’t move. Never once did her blank eyes stray from the darkness outside and I wondered if she were listening, or even if she knew I was there. I picked up my wine glass.
“How long is it,” I asked, “since you lost David?”
She came alive. “Lost!” She swung around to face me, a triangle of lines appearing on her forehead. “You make him sound like a dog.”
Then she sighed and turned back to the window. “Six months, three weeks and five days.”
I lowered my head; I had no words of comfort, and her bitterness cut deep.
I was there the night they met. We were celebrating in a club when a commotion caught our attention. David was at its hub. He intrigued Abby, I could see that immediately and when he saw her interest
, he pursued her with the tenacity he reserved for every ‘Next - Big - Thing.’
Those first months were a nightmare. I remember David’s wild, impulsive nature, his intrigues and petty jealousies and the way he tried to dominate every situation. But mostly, I remember his eyes. Charles Manson eyes I called them, for with just one look he seemed able to lay bare your very soul. But Abby saw only good. It was no surprise when they announced their engagement. And like everyone else, I wished them a long and happy life.
I placed my glass back on the table. Abby still hadn’t moved.
“It doesn’t have to be like this.”
“Doesn’t it?”
Carelessly she pushed a strand of black hair behind her ear and I was able to see the profile of her face: the sharp angular line of her chin and her prominent cheek bones. She had lost weight.
“No it doesn’t.” I rose from the sofa and took her hand. “Abby, you’re only thirty-five. David wouldn’t want you like this.”
I choked on the words; it wasn’t true. David would have loved seeing Abby distraught – proof to the world that she couldn’t live without him.
Abby pulled her hand from my grasp. “If only it were that simple.”
She turned back to the window. Unable to offer anything more than kind words, I followed her gaze.
Night comes early in November. A wind was rising and in the wood opposite the cottage, the trees thrashed back and forth. A gust rocked the house and in the kitchen something fell. Startled, Abby threw her arms about me. For a few seconds I held her in my arms, felt the gentle curve of her breasts and her trembling, racing heart.
