Spirits of the Charles

by Paul C. K. Spears

  “Fine. Just… Can you give him a message for me?”

  “Sure. What’s the news?”

  She tried to put to words how she felt: abandoned, freakish, confused. Lost in a world where her skills no longer had a place, where her lover preached Mithras’ love, but never asked if Rose loved him. Instead she said, “Tell him to lay off the Draughts. And that I miss him. And that I’m doing fine.” She swallowed. “Mostly.”

  CHAPTER 2

  CARLA GLARED at her lawyer, from across the table. “They’re saying I’m a what?”

  “A revolutionary, ma’am. Communists have been outside for days, demanding your freedom.”

  Her attorney, Dan Jeffords, was nearly as small as she was. With his shamrock cuff-links and spectacles, he looked more like a kind of well-meaning leprechaun than an actual lawyer—not surprising, considering how few of them were willing to take her case. He straightened his papers, fidgeting.

  “Jesus.” Carla felt like shit warmed over, and this wasn’t helping. Her ribs still hurt from yesterday; some big woman had knocked her down in the yard, and stolen the few cigarettes she’d had left. None of her lieutenants, not Betsy Metcalf or Sheila or that pussy bitch Little Lula, had lifted a finger to help her. “I don’t need this shit. I’m in deep, real deep, and now they’re making me look like a commie? Can’t you… I don’t know, call the cops on these idiots?”

  “The mob has been dispersed many times. They just keep coming back.” He swallowed. “Their support will not make things easy, in court.”

  “No shit, Sherlock.” She leaned back, trying to keep her cool. It was hard. After the hell she’d been through, she felt like flying across the table and slapping Dan’s glasses off. She’d been comfortable in Framingham, even powerful, but now they’d shipped her all the way to fucking Connecticut, at the State Farm and Reformatory—because her case was getting hotter than ever. She made Saco and Vanzetti look like Abbott and Costello.

  And unlike her stint in Framingham, the State Farm was a pit. She slept on a greasy cot here, bargaining for each day she spent without fresh bruises or broken bones. She was beginning to feel like the ‘It-Girl’ of bad luck itself. Month after month, her case languished in the court circuit, kicked down the road as judges tried to wait for her supporters to lose interest. But they kept showing up. And to top it all off, her lawyer was a goddamn idiota.

  “I’ve considered playing up your role as a woman of the people…” Jeffords was going through his notes. “It’s possible the jury might have… um, socialistic bents. It might be our only shot at reducing your sentence to fifteen years…”

  “Fifteen years?” She’d be almost sixty. An old maid, childless, barren and unfit to run her businesses—behind the scenes, or otherwise. “That’s not fucking acceptable. There must be some kind of deal.”

  “I’ve tried every plea bargain on the books! Trust me—we’re not getting any sympathy here.” The lawyer sighed, clearly as worn down as she was… except he returned to a hot meal and a bed every night, not a freezing cell and a piss-bucket. “But if we focus our defense on your love of the common man, and the difficulties of your childhood, we might be able to—”

  “Fuck my childhood, and fuck the common man.” She didn’t realize how much she meant it, until it was out of her mouth. “They’re all rubes and scumbags. Especially that prick, Mick Vance. He come out of his coma yet?”

  “Yes… But he’s not talking to the police.” Carla’s heart plummeted. Vance was the only one who could confirm her abduction by Buda and the Soldiers of Mithras—without proof that she hadn’t been at the Atlantic of her own accord, she was screwed. She’d tried tracking down the other fly in her ointment, Rose Sweetwater, but every time Jeffords went looking for her, he came back muttering about the nice parks in Jamaica Way or the “divine solitude of the cemetery” in Forest Hills. Someone was putting a move on him, and she bet it was Rose. That goddamn mind-voodoo.

  “If he doesn’t talk…”

  Jeffords shrugged, helpless. “Then we have no witnesses. No one to back up your story.”

  “Fuck.” This whispered curse didn’t help Carla feel better, so she screamed it, pounding her fists on the table. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

  One of the guards came over, a huge bastard called Polowitz. She’d given him a handy in the bathroom earlier, for an extra hour of lawyer consultation—all for nothing now. “Is there a problem?”

  “No, we’re… We’re fine.” Jeffords tugged his collar. “She’s just a bit… hysterical. Over the case.”

  It’ll be ‘hysterical’ when I take your dick off with a shiv.

  “Alright. You two be civil.” Polowitz nodded at Carla, and returned to his position near the door.

  “Fuck…” She was hyperventilating. She could handle jail for a few years; her natural skill with words and graft had a shot at getting her out—but decades? That weighed on her, crushed her. “You gotta get Vance to talk, Jeffords. He’s the key. He’s how I got in with those Mithras fuckers in the first place!”

  “I’ll see what I can do...”

  “No. You’ll get it done.” She looked him in the eye. “Because if you don’t, some big bitch is gonna reach through the bars the next time you’re walking out of here, and yank on that tie until your face looks like grated parmesan!”

  He went white. “Miss Ponzi, are you threatening me?”

  “’Threat’ implies I can’t make it happen. And I can.” She massaged her temples. I’m a financial genius. I should have already gotten out of here. Why am I not out of here? “If you don’t have any good news for me, Dan, we’re done.”

  Later, back in her cell, she sat staring at the ceiling. Her eyes bored into the cracked stone, damp and mildewed. She knew she should be working angles, building herself a circle of protection, but the power structures at State Farm were too entrenched. Her charms and promises had no power here—especially once she’d stopped being Carla Ponzi the financial whiz, and started being known as Carla Ponzi, the anarchist. How had this happened?

  Fucking Buda. He’d killed himself, just to put her here. But why? It made no sense. After months of puzzling, she thought the Anticipation must have driven him crazy. There was no other explanation.

  “Ponzi. Got a paper for ya.”

  She glanced at the bars. Jacob Garfield, another guard, was standing there with a New York Times. She usually paid him for the copy, but she’d run out of barter weeks ago and was running on credit. The big ape still showed up every day, though, whether or not she paid. He seemed to like her company—and he never asked her for “special favors,” thank God.

  “Thanks, Garfield.” She unfurled the paper. “Nothing in here’s gonna help me.”

  “Probably not. But I thought… you should know.”

  “Know what?” Then she saw it. Front page byline, in small type. But still jarringly real.

  HUSBAND OF ANARCHIST DIES IN PRISON.

  The blurb below it was maddeningly short. Ronaldo Ponzi, formerly Ronaldo Gnecco, expired this morning after an incident at Suffolk County...

  “No, no!” She tore open the paper. The article ran a little further, saying he’d been in an ‘altercation’ with guards, and was rushed to the prison infirmary, where he’d died. The warden didn’t exactly wax sympathetic about it in his quote.

  It is, perhaps, better that this man—who allowed his shrew of a wife to force her surname on him—expired before reuniting with his anarchist mate, whose nefarious and Godless plans might have gained further traction with his freedom...

  “Fuckers!” she screamed at the paper, and threw it at the wall. “Go to hell!” She sank to the floor and began to sob. She had wept plenty of crocodile tears in her time, but these—for once—were genuine.

  Jacob watched her for a while. “You two were… close?”

  “He was my husband, you jackass.” She wiped her eyes, frustrated to be displaying weakness, and pulled her legs onto the sagging cot. “An ‘altercation.’ Bullshit. R
onnie would never hurt anyone—he was too simple. They jumped him, is what happened. They heard those awful stories about me, and they jumped him, to get back at me! Fucking rubes!”

  “It’s a shame.” He scratched his thick beard, leaning on the bars. “All this could have been avoided, if you’d embraced Mithras when you were told.”

  “If I… What?”

  He nodded at the cell block behind him, speaking quietly. “The people in here are animals. But it’s not much better, outside.” He tapped on the iron door. “You get tired of working in prisons. You get to thinking, maybe it’s better if they burned. Every last one. Know what I mean?”

  “You’re one of them.” She spoke quietly, terrified. “One of the Soldiers.”

  “You thought they’d let you disappear?” His wet, dark eyes glittered in the half-light. “Buda was no fool, Ms. Ponzi. He built a network, before he died… and now it belongs to you.” He extended a hand. “All you have to do, is take our oath. Swear to kill these pigs, and Mithras will free you.”

  She shook her head. “I’m done with killing. The inmates here aren’t half as crazy as you pricks. You put me in here—now you expect me to trust you?” She rolled over. “Take your oath, and shove it up your ass.”

  “Suit yourself.” The hand withdrew. “I’ll let you think on it. Just ponder all the years they’ll keep you here, for crimes you didn’t commit. Capitalists are animals, Carla.” He withdrew, and the glittering eyes disappeared down the hall. “And when animals go rabid, someone has to pull the trigger.”

  CHAPTER 3

  NESTLED DEEP in the Framingham woods, off the mail route, away from sleepy main-streets and crumbling factories, there was a farm.

  It was a small piece of land, with no neighbors. The farm had once belonged to the Holmstead family, relatives of Frederick Law Olmsted, the man who’d designed Boston’s parks. The Holmsteads were less ambitious, preferring to farm and endure harsh winters instead of deal with Boston and all its temptations. It was a humble life, and it served them well—until they’d started distilling emotions, to make ends meet.

  The family patriarch, John Holmstead, somehow got the idea that drinking pure Faith could bring people closer to God. He began to brew it in his basement. It was a successful business… too successful.

  Eventually he quit farming, so that he could focus on squeezing more Faith out of his two daughters. He chained them to the distilling rig in the cellar, and forced them to read Bible verses and sing hymns until they were Drained. He watered down the product, mixed it with dandelion wine, drank it with every meal. This continued until his wife Lara Holmstead went mad over it, and called the police—who never came—before bashing in her husband’s skull with a shovel.

  For her crime, she got several years at Framingham, and the farm was given to the state of Massachusetts. There was talk of building textile mills, but the ground was damp, and no one wanted the farmhouse—not with its rotting-dandelion stench, and murderous tales. Then an anonymous buyer, using money from a local temperance union, offered to pay an absurdly high price.

  The state sold immediately; the place was an eyesore, and had become a home for squatters. And then the world turned its eye away from Holmstead Farm, leaving plenty of room for the Devil to play.

  The buyer, “Mithran Temperance Co.,” was a front for the Soldiers. They moved in the very next day. On a cold dawn in February, a chain of flat-bed trucks rolled up the drive, venting fumes. When they unloaded, Aleksandra was still in withdrawal from pure Rage: the fire of it, the fury, had made her an addict though she’d never touched a Draught. Fischer handled it, nursing her back to health with diminishing doses of Anger and brandy. Now she was ready to do her part for the Cause—preferably with a drink in first. Or two. Or three, or four.

  She left the dingy farmhouse one misty evening in May, and approached the barn, with several film reels tucked under her arm. She’d had to dig deep to find those: they came from bad, unscrupulous men, and it had taken many bribes and a lot of blackmail to get what she wanted. There was a new show playing on Holmstead Farm: an all-day, all-night spectacular, with an audience of one.

  Mitchell Palmer.

  She shouldered open the big doors, whistling an old folk-tune. Fisher was there, directing two half-wit farmboys they’d found in Winchester. The pair had been run out of town; the rest of their backwoods clan, it seemed, had turned on them when their Draught mutations grew too severe. Myths were no longer the life of the party, in Massachusetts, and the Fomeroy boys had gotten very unpopular.

  They’d taken the job she offered, without question. Her condition they must work in secret hadn’t bothered the brothers, and neither had Palmer’s screams… at least, not yet.

  Their victim hung on a pig-iron cross, welded by John Holmstead years ago and covered in rust. They’d found it abandoned in the fields, and it had seemed fitting to Aleksandra—the imagery of it appealed to her. Palmer wasn’t crucified, just wrapped in lengths of freezing chain, but he looked like he’d rather be dead. It made sense, given what they’d done to him.

  He’d been out of shape and near geriatric when they’d taken him; his head-wound still festering, and a fever had nestled in his brain. They kept him starving, ribs sticking out under shrunken folds of skin. He struggled to stand on a tiny perch of steel Aleksandra had bolted to the crucifix, averting his eyes from the film playing below. They left him there night and day, occasionally taking him down to wash the shit off him.

  Beneath the cross was a small, but powerful distilling machine, its rune-stones glowing hot. Fischer and the boys gave it a wide berth: they didn’t want to taint the Humours, but there was also the matter of Draining. People harvested too long began to sink and collapse into themselves, losing all identity. Palmer was halfway there: his eyes were receding into his skull, sinking by a centimeter every day. Soon they would burrow deep into his brain, then beyond—to a place no one could understand. Fischer obsessively measured the movement of the eyes: he was fascinated by the whole process.

  She didn’t care. It was all a means to an end.

  The whole setup, except for the cross, had been Fischer’s idea. Aleksandra had little patience for his madness, but he had strokes of genius sometimes. It had been his plan, for instance, to stimulate Palmer’s Humours using movie reels—and not nice ones, either. Visions of horror played nonstop, to squeeze every drop from Palmer’s maddened brain.

  A sheet of canvas hung across the barn, taking up most of the space there. A film projector played stuttering loops of violence: strike-breaking scenes, reels from the Great War, footage of children being beaten. They’d had to empty what was left of the Soldiers’ treasury for all these films, but it was worth it.

  Every so often, the images switched over to lewd images of chorus-girls dancing, or a private stripper show. These had been easier to find. Between these reels and the violent ones, they’d achieved their goal. Palmer was constantly agonized, in terror, subjected to alternating images of brutality and lust. He wasn’t quite mad, but he was softened, pulverized by shame and fear. He was now a malleable lump of clay, writhing with negative emotions.

  “Why? Jesus, why?”

  That was about all he could manage, these days. They’d kept him chained in the cellar, at first, beneath the farmhouse. Fed on a diminishing diet of slops and crumbs, from their already Spartan meals. Finally, they’d started tossing live rats down. Aleksandra had listened to the sobs and the crunching of bones, the squeaks of dying rodents, from the cellar stairs. She’d almost felt pity… almost.

  But then she’d remembered drinking filthy rainwater, rampant with disease. Huddling in fear, while detainees grew sick around her with Spanish flu. The sensation of lice crawling on her skin. Rough hands clamping on her body in the night.

  After those memories, Palmer’s screams were like a gentle lullaby.

  She placed fresh reels of film beside the projector. They’d lost so many Soldiers, on their path: Big Joe, Father Buda. Even th
e Angel, killed by some idiot detective who’d managed to survive a stabbing and a bomb blast to continue sending the police after them. But it didn’t matter. They were close to their goal—very, very close. The new Host was taking shape, growing like a cancer, and when the time was right…

  Aleksandra took a nip from a flask of Rage in her pocket; she was tired, struggling to focus. They had to keep their guard up constantly—not even Fischer knew what would happen when they injected Palmer with Fear, Rage and Lust all at once. But she was certain the results would be glorious.

  Revolutionary.

  “Watch yourself,” said Fischer, as the elder Fomeroy struggled to switch reels with his malformed crab-hands. “If we don’t keep up the film transition, our friend might wake up from his trance.” He looked up at Palmer like a proud artist regarding a painting. “And we can’t have that.”

  Dick Fomeroy shook his head, but slid the new reel home. The pause in the projector was only a moment of white light, before fresh horrors arrived. Moving pictures were just as mysterious as Draughts to Aleksandra, and in some ways, more powerful. Not even Humours could change as many people as these images could, and not nearly as fast. Even Rose, a broken and unworthy Host, had only been able to bend one mind at a time. Moving pictures could control the feelings of thousands.

  “There you are, my Queen.” Fisher was beckoning her with a gloved hand. The other was clad in a fingerless tramp’s glove. She’d dressed him like a doll, for their infrequent journeys off the farm: he stood out like a sore thumb, refusing to wear matching clothes because it would “taint his connection to the Other Side.” It was one of countless annoying habits she’d had to live with since arriving. When they accomplished their goal, she looked forward to shooting him.