Grim Expectations

by KW Jeter

  I had little if any time to reflect upon the undertaker’s plight. As a swimmer rising upon the highest point of a tidal swell might soon anticipate being tumbled down its face, I looked over my shoulder and saw the church’s rear wall quickly approaching. The structure was of whitewashed stone, substantial enough to have withstood centuries of neglect. I could imagine the impressive force of the crowd breaking apart the seams of the wall and tossing my impromptu craft out to the relative safety of the night air and the surrounding mossy loam – but that hope was rendered vain by the certainty of the stones remaining intact and my helpless form, surrounded by the pew’s splinters, being crushed like an insect slapped against the plastered wall of one’s bedchamber.

  Squeezing shut my eyes, as I had before when expecting my doom, I braced myself for an annihilating blow–

  To all the din confined by the little rural church, was suddenly added another sound. The shattering of glass has a particular timbre, able to cut above the shouts of men and screams of women – that was what I heard, to a startling degree of loudness. Bracing myself against the back of the tottering pew, I could see another destructive event, illumined by the combined flames of the mechanical cherubim still swarming and diving about. The church’s sole ornamentation was a stained-glass window, the funds for which had been donated by a charitable society in London, dedicated to bringing enlightenment to the heathen, Cornish peasants qualifying as such by their standards. Multicoloured leaden glass depicted the region’s patron Saint Piran, surrounded by the bear, fox and badger that had been his first disciples, the local human inhabitants having been rather less enthusiastic about adopting Christianity. Or at least the window had depicted such; as I watched, it burst into pieces, the bright shards scattering above the heads of those trapped within the church.

  So maddened by terror were the villagers, that it had not occurred to any that smashing the window might have afforded another means of egress; my first surmise upon seeing its demolishment was that some unknown party outside had come to this fortunate conclusion, and acted upon it. Thus it came as a considerable surprise, to witness a small number of able-bodied men fighting their way into the church, climbing over the stone lintel of what had been the stained-glass window and laying about themselves with fist and upraised shovels. The latter instruments of violence confirmed my recognition of the grave-diggers who had earlier come to the door of the church. That these men had some singular purpose in mind was indicated by the accuracy and frequency of the punches they threw into the faces of the crowd, as they drove themselves wedge-like to the area in front of the altar.

  The close press of bodies had prevented the coffin from having been toppled over from the trestles upon which it rested. With a shoulder-first push, the grave-diggers managed to surround the simple wooden casket, then hoist it above their heads. Exiting with their prize was more easily accomplished; the crowd, still driven to witless panic by the fiery cherubim diving upon them from above, surged en masse to the apparent safety afforded by the star-lit open air visible where the window had been moments before. The grave-diggers, bearing the coffin aloft, needed merely to join with that flow, like swimmers being carried out into the ocean by a retreating tide, and then they were outside with the others.

  All this I observed in what seemed like less than a minute – then I was able to observe very little more. Where the pew in which I rode had been caught against the church’s farther wall, now it dropped precipitously, being no longer held in place by the formidable strength and number of the maddened crowd. The pew crashed to splinters, among which I lay dazed…

  * * *

  Silence is a soothing balm, particularly when it follows such a riot of screaming and cursing, punctuated by various exploding infants.

  I could have remained for a while longer in the battered church, listening to no more than the beating of my heart. A storm had seemed to pass over me, leaving a desolate peace in its wake. Enough cold moonlight angled through the empty window aperture, glinting on the shards of stained glass scattered across the church’s floor, that I could make a general assessment of the situation, even as I reluctantly gained full consciousness once more.

  “Reverend Weebsome?” I struggled to my feet, brushing away various bits of debris as I gazed about the dim interior. “Are you still here? Alive?”

  No answer came – likely, his corpse was hidden in the wreckage, trampled to a gory state, or charred by the now-extinguished fire that had consumed a good deal of these sacrosanct premises.

  My bootsoles crunched upon ceramic fragments, the remains of those small, ignited angels that had wrought such terror. Stumbling outside, I drew the chill and ocean-smelling air deep into my lungs, a subsequent coughing exhalation bringing the taste of smoke and those rotting, flammable gasses onto my tongue.

  From the starlit distance came a faint sound of human voices. Lacking any other guide, I directed my steps toward them. At the crest of a mossy rise, slick with saline dew, I glanced over my shoulder and saw the church below, its roof timbers redly smouldering; no doubt there would be nothing but ash and blackened stone remaining when the morning light broke over the scene.

  The murmuring voices grew louder, then suddenly ceased as I drew near.

  “Oy!” One of the men had evidently spotted me. I saw the forms of three or four of them, silhouetted by the lantern set upon the ground. “There be grieving wid’wer now!”

  The remark was inflected with both surprise and some small degree of sympathy.

  “Begging yer pardon, sar–” The individual addressed me further. “Would’ve gun back and rescued you and all, ‘cept for being fair certain you was daid already.”

  “Would that I were.” I joined them at the edge of a deep, freshly excavated hole. “I have few ambitions remaining, but that one.”

  “Suit yerself,” spoke one of the others. “Ye’ve come at good time, though. If there be some proper words to speak, it’d have to be yers to speak ‘em, no priest being ‘vailable at the moment.”

  The situation which he described was clarified by the simple expedient of one of the men raising the lantern, so that its flickering beam fell into the hole by which we stood. I saw there, at an appropriate depth, the coffin which had so recently stood before the church’s altar.

  “How decent of you…” I realized now that I was in the company of those grave-diggers, who I had last witnessed bursting through the stained-glass window and fighting their way through the panicking crowd. “You have saved from desecration all that remains of one who was dear to me.”

  “‘F we did, so be it.” The first who had spoken to me now began coiling the ropes by which the coffin had been let down into the earth. “But in truth, weren’t so nobly mot’vated. Plain and simple, don’t get paid until she be planted. And hole bin already dug, so seemed shame to waste it.”

  I said no more. I watched dully as the men picked up their shovels and began filling in that cold doorway through which we all must pass someday, the damp clods drumming hollowly upon the casket’s nailed lid.

  Then I was alone once more, the men nodding their respects to me, then shouldering their tools and departing, the lantern leading their steps along the winding way back to the village.

  For a moment longer, I stood in wordless contemplation at the grave’s mounded edge. I heard the sound of wings fluttering above me; looking up, I saw against the stars a small form, the last of the mechanical cherubim, having escaped the church’s wreckage and now making its way to the rolling, accepting sea.

  When all was silent again, I turned myself away from the broken ground, and trod in darkness toward that place where no one waited for me.

  TWO

  Memories & Mysteries

  My wife – for so I thought of her, who had come to share my labours by day and our bedchamber by night – kept secrets from me. This in itself was no secret, for what husband is deluded otherwise? The fairer sex is a tribe of mysteries, and we are happier for leaving them undis
turbed.

  “Miss McThane; what see you there?”

  So I addressed her, when we were in our private moments – which amused her, and invariably elicited a slight smile. I believe that all women, whatever their age and station, enjoy being reminded of those times when they were most innately beautiful, and sly and rascal-like because of their beauty’s invocation of men’s desires…

  Such a wandering discourse reflects the state of my mind upon returning from the graveside of the one I describe above. I found myself sitting upon a punitively straight-backed chair in the parlour of an otherwise uninhabited inn, which had been both shelter and livelihood to myself and my late wife – or companion, however you may prefer; our union was not of the sort blessed by the church. My boots were still muddy from the journey home, burial ground and ruined church in the darkness behind me.

  My thoughts circled again to the one I had left there. There had not been time enough for age to rob her of the beauty that was still vivid in memory; she would have been considered by most, and certainly myself, to have still been in her prime when the grey hand of infirmity had struck her down upon her deathbed. How much of a life can be encompassed in so short a span! Had we really two or so years together, before the indulgences of her previous existence caught up with her, like a daggered assassin who treads only a step behind? Measured by a calendar’s discarded pages, seemingly so; by the depth rather than length of our private comfort, that time had been greater indeed.

  The loss of which left me sensing myself as an old man, in spirit if not in bodily frame. Less than a decade had passed from Miss McThane’s first entrance into my affairs, to that of our conjoined escape here to Cornwall. Of that intervening time, she had been far from my presence – though admittedly still close in my thoughts, as one might recall a lightning-filled storm that rages for a night, then leaves a dull and prosaic peace in all the subsequent days. That our brief domestic idyll had followed even more calamitous events – such might only indicate that her fiery passions had been tamped by the first awareness of her own mortality…

  Now that I was alone – utterly – I wished that I felt my own approaching.

  I admit that in the not too distant past, I had embraced a suicidal frame of mine. But to pursue one’s own destruction requires at least a residual measure of vigour, and my heart was too battered for that final energy to be summoned. Perhaps in the morning I would feel better, and I could kill myself then.

  From these dark thoughts I was diverted, to the degree such was possible, by the singular object that sat upon my lap, its dimensions framed by my clammy hands–

  A ticking box.

  Others might have had some concern that the device was some sort of bomb; such is the world in which we have come to live, that anything of unknown purpose can be surmised to be of lethal intent.

  The item had been constructed of some smooth-grained exotic wood, perhaps mahogany, geometrically inlaid with thin intarsia strips of what I took to be macassar ebony. The box overall possessed a square form, a few inches deep, its length and width perhaps a little less than a foot or so. On that side touched by my fingertips were silvery hinges, somewhat tarnished, chased with an intricate engraved pattern. On the side facing my chest was a hasp and lock of the same metal. Any attempt to disengage the lock, thus enabling me to throw back the ornate lid and reveal the box’s contents, was frustrated not so much by my lack of that key which would fit it, but even more so by the apparent absence of any keyhole upon the lock’s small face. Its operation then, as with so many singular devices I have encountered, remained a mystery to me.

  Grey morning light seeped through the inn’s tatty curtains as I pondered the matter, my thoughts seemingly prodded along by the soft, persistent ticking of whatever mechanism, of whatever purpose, was concealed in that which I held.

  “It is nothing.” I spoke aloud, my words listened to by no one save myself. “Either be rid of the thing – the ocean is near at hand, and has received larger than this in its depths – or break it open by brute force, and satisfy yourself as to what it holds.”

  My reluctance to do either was occasioned by the thought of how the mysterious box had come into my possession. For it had been given to me by my late wife.

  Her last gift, and the last act she had done. I had discovered it resting upon her breast, as she lay motionless on her deathbed but a few nights ago. I had been absent from her side for only a moment, but when I had returned to the chamber, I saw that the closet door was open, though I knew it had been shut for days. As well, a number of its contents had been scattered across the floor nearby, as though someone had been rummaging in haste through the closet’s furthest reaches. Some extraordinary passion had driven her, in that weakened state, to crawl out of the bed and across the chamber, pull open the door and fetch out the object – never seen by me before – that I found clutched to her breast.

  She was gone now, buried; thus was left the box, to ponder. Had Miss McThane wanted me to have it? As remembrance or incumbrance – which? No doubt there was some trick to opening the box, that she had known – but she had left it closed, for me to find where her chilling hands clutched it against her bosom.

  The box stopped ticking. An ominous silence filled the parlour in which I sat.

  I felt the hair prickling upright along my arms and neck. My unease increased as I sat trapped by the object on my lap.

  Its lid opened.

  With a caution that is both innate and bitterly learned, I placed a fingertip beneath the lid and lifted upward, the hinges behind making no protest as I revealed the box’s contents.

  I beheld sheets of paper, of various dimensions and condition; not printed or legal documents, but hand-scripted correspondence. Some of the pages, folded together, appeared to contain expositions of some length; others were but scraps with torn edges. I recognized my writing on none of them.

  What widower would not stay his hand, and consider it a wiser choice to light a fire upon the grate, and toss a box such as this thereon, leaving all that it held still unread? She kept secrets – fine, so be it; all women do. To discover this evidence convinced me of nothing which I did not already know. But why had she made it her final act in this world, to make sure that I would discover them in this way? I could not credit any desire of hers to drive a knife through my heart – she might have been mischievous by nature, but never cruel.

  I still held the opened and now silent box upon my lap; in regard to its workings, I expected little more. So when a further discovery was afforded me, it was by way of that which lay beyond the box.

  As I had sat, darkly musing, the parlour itself had lightened, the sun mounting high enough for its rays to break over the crest of the surrounding hills. One bright, near-horizontal beam pierced the tattered curtain of the window behind me, falling upon the inside of that lid I had tilted back with my finger.

  A brass plate was there, elegantly engraved, no doubt by the clever hand of he who had crafted the box and its mechanisms. A date was given, of the device’s manufacturing, and below that, the place where it had been done: Clerkenwell, a London district with which I am more than familiar, having once been the proprietor of a watchmaker’s shop therein.

  Then finally, the incised signature of the box’s fashioner–

  Which was – how could I ever have expected otherwise! – that of my father.

  I set both my hands upon the lid of the box and pressed it close, not caring whether its lock might engage once more, preventing my inquiry into those pages it held. For I knew, with sinking heart, that one more dire chapter in my own fate had been unsealed thereby.

  * * *

  We imagine our sins are such that all the world knows of them. That we are Napoleons and Caesars and Alexanders of black deed and destruction, much talked about – it seems rather a shame otherwise, to have ruined a life as certainly as I have my own, and not gotten at least a thrill of gossip from the endeavour.

  I did not start out by seeking for
as much disdain, little or small, as I have earned. I would rather have preferred to remain anonymous as the great run of men, or perhaps a little less – when one is in trade, as I had hoped to be when setting out upon my life’s course, a bit of notice is desired; one has no customers otherwise. I had inherited a few such from my father, as well as all the stock of mechanical devices in the shop that had first been his. I little realized then how much else was my inheritance from him, and how undesirable the bulk of it, for someone desiring a quiet, modest life.

  Be that as it may. My adulthood preceded his demise by only a few years; I assumed my legacy with perhaps a vague notion that among all the ticking, whirling contrivances that had been his creations – the least of which had been the watches and clocks, which admittedly kept excellent time, due to a patented improvement in the escape wheel’s configuration – there I might find some trace of him, a key to his personal nature that I might recognize in my own.

  I did not. What I discovered was that the elder Dower had been both a genius and a madman – neither of which I am, though the world has taken its best shot at maddening me.

  Thankfully, my own fumbling inadequacies with all things mechanical kept me from outright villainy, though they did little to prevent my enmeshment in all manner of frightful schemes. Thus I made the acquaintance of Miss McThane and her then-consort and fellow conspirators. There would have been no possibility of my foreseeing that one day she would become dear to me; when the destruction of this world had been averted by means of an improbable congress between the two of us, I had little expected – or desired – to ever see her again.

  But see her I did, and in the midst of even more wickedness occasioned by my father’s legacy, and my own connection to those devices. After the culmination of l’affaire Bendray, there might have been some hope of retiring into anonymity, free from surrounding humanity’s speculation and gossip. But subsequent events into which I was swept, propelled by both my own impecunious state and the machinations – how suitable a word! – of that loathsome woman Mrs Fletcher, who was less woman and more a terrifying engine of ambition – literally so – when I encountered her, put a stop to any such vain chance. Scarcely can one be involved in the destruction of a good deal of London, with the reduction of much of the Houses of Parliament to smoking rubble alongside the Thames, and expect to be spared public notice.