Vapors: The Essential G. Wayne Miller Fiction Vol. 2

by G. Wayne Miller

  Carrying the green bag he’d picked up in the Palmer House lobby, he opened the rusted iron gate and walked uncertainly into the cemetery. That shaky feeling had returned. His lips were dry. He felt suddenly alone, inexplicably embarrassed, like the man in the dream who finds himself in public without any clothes. Let’s get it over with and get out of here, he thought. He went directly to the Andersen plot, past the Birds, the Bergmans, the Mondales, the Thompsons. The featured Andersen stone was a towering obelisk, at least twice his height, cut from what appeared to be gray marble, polished and mirror-smooth. The shadow from a leafless tree fell across it in an abstract pattern. Somebody had paid a small fortune for this display, he could tell that. He remembered her father, Ambrose Andersen, a tall, stern man he’d met once. Andersen had made a small fortune in construction, and like many newly wealthy people, he enjoyed spending. He’d probably footed the bill.

  Laid out in front of the obelisk were perhaps 25 flat stones, each roughly the size of a hardcover dictionary. All that had been inscribed on any of them were names and the two most important years in anyone’s existence. “Mother, 1845-1912.” “Father, 1840-1905.” “Henry, 1884-1944,” and so forth. On the extreme left-hand perimeter of the Andersen territory, almost into the Birds’, was the stone he was looking for.

  “Baby Bryce,” it read, “1996-1996.”

  He opened the green bag and laid what was in it, a single white rose, atop the stone. His fingers were clumsy, his breath more labored than it should have been. He didn’t have any of the thoughts he had expected would be haunting him right now; maybe they would come on the return trip to Chicago, or the plane home tomorrow to Boston. Nothing about what might have been, how he might have been playing Little League baseball, what he might have looked like, what his favorite subject in school might have been. None of that. Only a nagging sensation of having done wrong, and never being able to make contrition, even if he wanted to.

  He didn’t hear the pickup. Didn’t see her approach from the field.

  When he looked up, she was there, barely 20 feet away.

  He looked at her, startled initially. Time had gotten to her. It had to him, too, he couldn’t kid himself. She looked unkempt, haggard, as if she never got enough sleep any more. Her clothes looked freshly laundered but worn, as if she’d had them too long. For an instant, their eyes locked. It was impossible to say what was exchanged between them in that moment. Recognition, but more. Loneliness. A glimmer of what might have been, perhaps. A rush of memories, none well defined. Then it was gone. Her eyes went as cold as the gathering evening. There was nothing to say.

  She came closer. He didn’t move. He hadn’t expected it to play out like this.

  They embraced. For his part, it was instinctive. Reflexive. There was no more thought to it than drawing a breath. She was warm, her breath intoxicating. Through her coat, he could feel the swell of her breasts. Suddenly, the memories had taken on sharp definition. Now he remembered them making love the first time, the way he’d eased inside her, the softly building passion that had finally exploded one Saturday evening when his roommate was away.

  He didn’t see her knife.

  She plunged it into the back of his neck.

  The first blood fell in perfect splatters on Baby Bryce’s stone, like drops of wax from a flaming red candle. It was only a surface wound, calculated and deliberate. Alone, it might have stopped bleeding. He wasn’t even sure at first that he’d been stabbed. He thought maybe she’d dug her fingernails into him. The tenderness he’d started to feel escaped him like steam. He was tempted to slap her. He’d never wanted to hit a woman before. He did now. Self-defense. But he didn’t. He turned, headed for the car. A trickle of warmth ran down the inside of his shirt. The crazy fucker.

  She roared toward him, her cutting arm a scythe of blurred motion. This time he saw the blade. It was a pocket knife, the kind young punks smuggle into school. The blade couldn’t have been four inches long. In that instant of confused terror, he remembered something his mother had told him as a kid. It wasn’t about knives. It was about drowning. You can drown anywhere there’s water, she’d said. Even in your own bathtub, even in an inch of water.

  This time, she connected only once, a long, violent gash that sliced through his coat sleeve into his forearm. The fabric was quickly moist from the inside out. The pain was immense. She meant to kill him. It was like being kicked in the stomach, realizing that, but he knew it was true. He was suddenly breathless, fevered. With his good arm, he grabbed his wounded one, holding it fiercely, as if that would stop the bleeding. She came at him again. For a second, he saw her eyes. There was nothing there but emptiness. He ducked to one side, and she charged past him, almost falling.

  He hesitated. For a second, he thought of fighting back. He was bigger than she, stronger. And she was out of her mind, a crazed psychotic with a knife. He looked wildly around, but there was nothing he could use as a weapon, no branch or loose rock. The best bet was to get the hell away. The bleeding wasn’t bad, but he’d have to see a doctor. Then he would go to the police and have the crazy fucker arrested. That’s what he was going to do, goddamn it. Have her put behind bars for good.

  He took a step, a step that brought his foot into contact with Baby Bryce’s stone.

  He felt something lock around his ankle. Tiny, vice-like.

  He looked down. There was nothing there, of course, only grass and that flat polished marble stone, blending into the shadows of approaching evening. He could taste bile as his panic rose.

  He tried to move.

  He was locked in place.

  “What the—”

  She was back, blade whistling. Her aim was more precise than before. He saw the knife, heard it, tried to roll out of its trajectory, but his foot was stuck. He did the best he could, twisting and squirming to one side. It was not enough.

  She made contact, again and again. His shoulder. His side. His thigh. His right hand. He felt each cut. None was deeper than tendon level. It was more like being pricked with a needle or stung by hornets than being stabbed. After each cut, the warm moisture. Death by a thousand cuts.

  His ankle.

  He grabbed at it, like a mink caught in a leg hold trap. There was nothing there, of course. With his other hand, he tried frantically to fend her off. She was nimble. She seemed able to anticipate him, dodging when he lashed out, closing back in when he tried unsuccessfully to get to his feet.

  Maybe he could crawl. In his panic, that new thought was delightful. It was like being born again. He was on his belly and maybe he could crawl. Maybe he’d broken his ankle, that was all, and he could slither away from her.

  But he couldn’t crawl, not more than a few inches. His foot was frozen.

  She was in no hurry. There was still plenty of daylight remaining, 15 minutes or more until blackness settled over them. She was nicking him. Little flicks of cuts, counting toward a thousand. It was uncanny how she kept missing all the major arteries and organs, the ones that would have ended it quickly. She seemed to know anatomy, seemed to have studied it until she was sure what to hit, what to avoid. He was bleeding everywhere but gushing nowhere. His central nervous system only gradually was shifting into shock.

  The pain was building. Soon it was too big for screaming. He began to moan. A mortally wounded animal sound, back through the millennia to when ancestors walked on all fours. Hunter and prey. Victor and vanquished.

  His vision blurred.

  As consciousness drained away to nothingness, he thought he saw her.

  Smiling, her face inches from his.

  He thought he heard a new sound.

  The sound of a newborn crying.

  The sound of birth.

  Vapors

  The vapors emerged late that night, the first night of August. They traveled fog-like, yet invisible, hugging the ground, curling onward, relentless, odorless, out of the woods and along the streets to the quiet North Smithfield villages, where they seeped into every ho
use without exception, drifting upstairs to the bedrooms, where the good folk slept. The good folk breathed in, deeply, rhythmically, unknowingly, as the vapors penetrated their dreams, which were quickly poisoned.

  The essence of the poison was people dead and dying. The sounds were of musket fire, of arrows slicing the air, of determination and courage and anger and then horror; of fleeing into twilight darkness, and, finally, of soundless unconsciousness, save for the buzz of insects drawn to blood. The sights were of a swamp in summer, of an armed militia on attack, of men with deeper skin tones indiscriminately butchered.

  And piercing it all, the scream of a little girl, her parents obliterated: the girl now crying, now shivering, now fading, now gone, dissipated into vapor.

  Mercifully for the good folk, only the faint echoes of something unformed and barely imagined remained when they awoke the next morning. They were the lucky ones. Just two people remembered with clarity.

  The degree of clarity was extreme.

  The first was Ted Steere, an unmarried man of approaching middle age, a photographer who lived with his golden retriever along the woods near the nexus of Smithfield and Burrillville (those kindred old mill towns), a professional photographer with his studio in Providence, a good man, a creative man, a sane man. The little girl was inescapable when he awoke, made his coffee, ate his breakfast, and looked across his back lawn into trees that deepened into a hidden swamp, on low boil now in the dog days of summer. He had only heard the girl in his poisoned dream, that piercing wail, the worse silence that followed - but now, in daylight, when he closed his eyes he could imagine her. She was perhaps eight years old, tall and thin, pretty, with dark hair and a gentle smile that atrocity had turned to terror... and, eventually, the mask of death.

  Ted went through the motions, could muster nothing more, during the hours of his day. He had no appetite when he returned home for dinner, and so he ate nothing. A glass of wine, and then a second, and then another and a fourth did not chase the girl from his thoughts. The good folks slept well that night, but not Ted. There were no vapors this time -but there was that voice, the little girl’s voice. Ted’s dog heard it, too, and the animal’s ears pricked up and she began to growl in fear. The dog retreated under his bed, and then he heard it: the girl calling his name.

  But not Ted.

  She called him Theodore. Only his mother, long since passed, had ever called him that. Seven nights straight, this was repeated.

  The second to remember was Charlie Thomas, a Native American and lifelong Slatersville resident whose ancestors comprised the Seaconke Wampanoags. His tribal name was Rainbow Man, a high compliment from his tribe that he cherished.

  He was a licensed pharmacist with a good job and a reputation for kindness, but his true calling was herbalism, and his soul belonged to his people. He had labored mightily to keep the traditions of the Wampanoags alive, their reverence for nature and each other, and for all others - yet he was not consumed by the past. He was a family man, a community man, a man of thirty-eight years who was respectful of inner spirit. And when the vapors came, he, unlike Ted, the only other, was not so disturbed when he awoke that next morning. He recognized omens, even if he did not always understand their meaning.

  That August 1st, he knew, was the 332nd anniversary of a patchily chronicled battle during King Philip’s War, so deadly to his ancient people. Chased into Nipsachuck Swamp by white men and their Mohegan allies that day in 1675, the Wampanoags, numbering some 300 (women and children among them), thought they had found sanctuary. What they had really found was slaughter. Some escaped deeper into the woods, bearing stories that would endure for centuries. Some were captured. And many, like the little girl — she who was called Dear One - left this earth that night.

  So he knew, this learned man Charlie, what - or, rather, who - had visited his dreams that night, though he could not grasp, not yet, why. Imbued as he was with his people, as reverentially as he remembered the anniversary of the Battle of Nipsachuck every summer, Charlie had never experienced anything like this.

  The two intersected over a drugstore counter. Ted knew Charlie, of course; North Smithfield is a small town, just as Blackstone Valley is a small valley, the state itself not much bigger. He had been to Charlie’s pharmacy often.

  It was first thing on a Saturday a week after the vapors, and Ted, plagued by insomnia, continued to hear and see nighttime things that now, sleep-deprived, he was beginning to believe must be entirely in his mind. He thought he must be going crazy - although his doctor, with some consoling words about stress and summer heat, had dismissed that, and then prescribed a sleep aid and advised him to return in a month.

  “I’ve never taken one before,” Ted told Charlie.

  “I don’t recommend it,” Charlie said. “The potential for dependency is great.”

  “You never like prescribing something that’s not natural, do you.”

  “Not never,” Charlie said with a smile, “but not often, either.”

  This was not a conversation of which Charlie’s boss would have approved, but Charlie was his own man, the pharmacy at this early hour deserted.

  “So what would you suggest?”

  “Lavender-mint tea.”

  “It will help me sleep?”

  “It should.”

  “Does it help with nightmares?”

  Charlie studied his customer. Their eyes locked, and he knew, with startling clarity, that she had come to him, too.

  “She visited, didn’t she,” Charlie said. “One night last week, and every night since. A little girl. Unshaped - vaporous - I can think of no better word - but a little girl nonetheless. You know that, don’t you. It’s not your imagination.”

  “She called me Theodore. No one but my mother ever did, and she died when I was a boy.”

  “The girl came to me, too, on that night, though not since,” Charlie continued. “Her name is Dear One, a name bestowed with the love of her parents, who had feared they would never have a child. She was beautiful, and wise - yes, wise, even as a girl of eight. The elders prophesized that someday she would achieve magnificence.”

  “She died before it could happen.”

  “More properly, was first badly wounded, and then, crawling to escape the madness of war, disappeared into the terrible swamp, where, as darkness descended and she turned feverish and the life drained from her, her screams tapered into silence.”

  “Nipsachuck Swamp.”

  “Not far from your house.”

  Charlie related the greater story of the 1675 battle, with which Ted was passingly familiar. A local newspaper had recently published a story about a strange grouping of stones in woods adjacent to the swamp - stones that some, like Charlie, who had guided the reporter there, believed were related to the battle. Tombs, perhaps, or a rock memorial - whatever the original intent, undoubtedly sacred. But there had been nothing in the newspaper story about Dear One, whose fleeting life was known only to those, like Charlie, who were imbued with tribal culture.

  “What does she want?” Ted said.

  “I don’t know. Nor do I know why she should appear all these years later - to my certain knowledge, this is a first. Nor still why it should be on the 332nd anniversary, and not, say the 300th, or the 333rd - or December or March of another year, no anniversary at all. But this is an academic issue, no more relevant than the question or why a bear can sleep an entire winter but a person cannot sleep a full day. The questions for us are ones you have already framed: what does she want, and why it involves us, and only us.”

  They talked some more, Ted seeking to apply logic and rationale where none belonged. Charlie speculated that Dear One had left something vital unaccomplished, or sought justice - or, ghost-like, inexplicably belated, liberation from her fate; surely, passing on in her circumstances could not have brought her to a better place. Charlie assumed, modestly, that his role in her salvation - if salvation is what was before them - derived from his connection to his culture. Ted wo
ndered if a colonial ancestor had been the one to send Dear One to her spongy grave.

  Indeed, the Steeres, this extended family of farmers and industrialists, had lived in the valley since earliest settlement - but none had participated in King Philip’s War. Ted knew this with virtual assurance, for he had recently completed his genealogy. The Steeres had been hard-working and patriotic, and virtually without exception, peace-loving, and sane. But Ted had not gone that far back on his maternal grandmother’s side. Had he, he would have learned a remarkable tale.

  They met, these two, the next evening as the sun started down behind the hills west of Nipsachuck Swamp. Insects droned, birds chattered, and the summer earth simmered as they headed into woods, Charlie guiding them along a trail that wilderness had all but swallowed, a trail that only he and a few others, obeying unspoken secrecy, knew existed. Instinct seemed his compass - or perhaps, Ted thought, madly, it was the ancients reaching through time to show the way. Ted remained weary and sleepless, the lavender-mint tea having failed abysmally. How easily they could get lost in this darkening tangle, which time had forgotten here, barely fifteen miles from the city.

  They crossed a small stream and the tall trees thinned, giving way to dense shrub and briar and the low vegetation of thriving wetlands. Ten minutes passed without a word, and then fifteen more. An owl proclaimed something somewhere in the distance and crickets chimed in, and then it was suddenly silent, dead silent, more silent than Ted had ever experienced - but not Charlie, no, not him.

  “We’re here,” he said.

  It seemed nothing noteworthy, just a clearing at the edge of the swamp: a leaf-carpeted, branch-cluttered, spongy area, with moss-covered rocks in the middle.

  “Look carefully,” Charlie said.

  In the advancing twilight, Ted saw that the rocks were arranged in patterns whose meaning he could not decipher. Separate piles. Cairns. Nature could not have been responsible, Ted thought; neither wind nor rain nor snow had the ability.