Marie said sternly, “Let it be, Danielle. It is not Alexandre.”
But Danielle knew they couldn’t believe. It didn’t matter that they didn’t. She did. She helped the man to his feet, and touched his split lip with her cold finger.
And then a screech from a window above, “William Kemmler, is that you? Get your sorry ass up these steps before I come after you with this hatchet, and I’ll do it, you know I will!”
“Fishwife!” screamed Danielle. “You do not know who you are talking to!”
A lantern came to the window, and then many lanterns at many windows, and there were faces peering out and down. Someone shouted, “Fishwife? Tillie ain’t Kemmler’s wife, just pretendin’ to be so they’s can fuck and still go to church on occasion!” There was a burst of raucous laughter, and then someone spit, a long, hefty hawk the color of rust that landed with a phatt in a puddle near Danielle’s shoe.
Danielle would let it go for now. For tonight. She would come again where there was not so much attention. For to try to reclaim him now would be careless. And carelessness could bring destruction. She had found him. She would return tomorrow, quietly, as her kind was greatly talented, and speak to him.
And bring him to his senses.
And back to her bed, back to her heart. And unlike the other misfortunates who had fallen under her bite, she would raise him from the dead for herself.
The following evening was clear and cold, with a sliver moon riding above the lights of Buffalo like a jealous and forgotten toy. Marie and Clarice warned Danielle to let it go, it was insane to believe her love was reincarnated into a fruit vendor, and when she refused to hear them, they refused to go with her. “We wash our hands of this,” said Marie. “We cannot endanger ourselves for your folly, as much as we love you.”
Danielle said, “Then do not.”
She went to the tenement house and watched from the shadows of a dwarfed maple tree as the occupants wandered in and out. Within minutes, two ragged women came out to the stoop in hats and shawls, their teeth broken and brown, and one said, “You get me some of them cigars if you can, Tillie. If you swipe ’em, we can sell ’em and make us a bit of coin, don’t you think?”
Tillie, a skinny thing who could have been twenty or forty, said, “I’ll swipe ’em and you can pay like the rest of ’em.”
“Bitch!”
Tillie strode from the stoop and the other woman spun angrily and went in the other direction.
Danielle counted to twenty. And then she went to the door of the tenement and waited. A man opened the front door, and flinched when he saw her standing there. She kept her lids lowered so the red of her eyes would not be so obvious. “Hey, honey,” he said. “What’s a fine-looking wench like you doin’ standing here?”
“Waiting for you to invite me inside,” said Danielle simply. The man did. She broke his neck in the hall, and stuffed him under the steps. No one was outside the flats to see, and she guessed they might not have cared much, anyway.
Tillie had shouted from a third-floor window, on the left. Danielle trod softly and quickly up the flights of stairs to the flat that surely belonged to William—to Alexandre. The door was locked, but with a simple jerk to the handle it swung open freely. She stepped inside the cluttered apartment.
There were three rooms, set like boxcars one behind the other. Danielle stood in the kitchen. A door to the left led to a parlor. A door to the right led to a bedroom. There was a pot on the cast iron stove half-filled with slop. There was a bedpan on the floor by the table, filled with urine.
“Alexandre,” whispered Danielle. “What has brought you to another difficult life? You suffered in Paris, and you suffer here. What, precious love, has so cursed you?”
She moved silently into the parlor. Several framed portraits sat, covered in dust, on a tiny table. The cushion of blue-upholstered settee had popped its seams, and down oozed from the splits. There was a small shelf on the wall behind the settee. On it was an ink well, a pen, several volumes, and a black leather book bound with string.
“Yes!” hissed Danielle. “It is my love, no doubt!” She took the book from the shelf and dropped onto the lumpy settee. He had not wanted her to look in this Bible, but she could not let it be. She flipped through the thin, yellowed pages and came to a place which had been thumbed to near illegibility.
It was in the Book of Trials. She read:
When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing to save the man Jesus and that Jesus was indeed to die to please the crowd, he offered the execution of noble captives, to have the man’s wrists slashed with sword and thus causing him to bleed quickly unto death. But from the crowd called up the man Andrew, son of Phinneas the shepherd, who said, Jesus must suffer for his words! Crucify Him! The crowd joined in the mocking call, He must suffer for his words!
“What has this to do with you, Alexandre?” Danielle wondered aloud. “I don’t understand. Jesus, give me understanding so I can help my dearest lover!”
There was thumping at the door, and a woman came into the kitchen. It was Tillie. She saw Danielle through the doorway, and her lips drew back in a snarl. “Bitch!” she shrieked. “Come back to fix my shoe and what do I find here? One of William’s whores, no doubt, brazen and bold as a sow, sitting on my very own sofa, she is! Waiting for him to come home, eh? Waiting to suck his little worthless worm for a few pennies, yes?”
Danielle stood slowly. There would be no contest with this woman, but she didn’t care to kill her if she didn’t have to. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve made a mistake. I thought this was the home of my cousin Randolph Sykes. I beg your pardon, miss.”
But the woman was not to be appeased, and she reached for a hatchet that was leaning against the stove.
Danielle held out her hand. “Miss, just let me go. It would be for the best.”
“What’s the best is that William quit his whorin’. What’s best is you die quickly and keep your trap shut about it.” Tillie ran her wrist across her nose, sniffed, and stepped into the parlor, hatchet raised.
Calmly: “Put it down.”
Tillie’s mouth opened wide; she growled and stepped closer. “Down middle o’ your head, that’d look good! Part your hair right down the middle!” And the hatchet swung out in an arc, and down toward Danielle’s forehead. Danielle stepped deftly to the side and the settee received the full force of the blow. Feathers flew. “Damn it!” screamed the woman. She tugged the hatchet free and spun on Danielle again. Danielle backed into the kitchen. She would come back again, later. She’d been invited into the building so entering would be no trouble.
Suddenly there was panting on the steps, in the hall, outside the door, and she whipped about to see Alexandre standing there, clutching the doorframe and panting. He looked past Danielle to the woman with the hatchet.
“You cow!” he cried. “I could hear you wailin’ from the street below! What you doin’ now, gonna kill some woman who looks like she just got lost?”
“Alexandre,” whispered Danielle in amazement.
But the man brushed past her and flew at Tillie, snatching for the hatchet as he clutched her hair with his other hand. “Pig! You can’t be trusted with nothin’ or nobody! Oughta stick you in the asylum, I oughta! Give me the damned hatchet or you’ll find yourself up for murder!”
Tillie jumped away, stumbled against a straight-backed chair and fell to the floor. Alexandre—William—leapt again and grabbed for the weapon. She swung it at him and missed his face by a hair’s breath.
Danielle stepped into the parlor. She could be cut, it wouldn’t matter. But she would not let Alexandre be killed. Not again. She reached for the wavering hatchet just as the man snatched it from the woman on the floor.
“Get back!” he cried to Danielle.
Tillie was up on her feet in a second, and latched on to Alexandre’s arm with her teeth. He screamed, and began to strike her shoulder with the blade. Again. Again.
Again.
“I’m
sick of you, I’m sick of you, I’m sick of you!” he wailed.
Danielle watched in horror as the woman stumbled past her into the kitchen and fell through the door and down the stairs to the landing. Alexandre, enraged, followed, and planted a solid blow to her head. The woman on the landing stopped moving.
Every flat door seemed to open at the same moment. Screams and curses followed, with fingers pointing at Alexandre and Danielle. “Murderer!” a man cried. “Killer!” screamed a child.
Danielle, dumbfounded, retreated to the apartment and escaped through the window into the mist of the night.
William Kemmler confessed to the murder of his common-law wife, Matilda Ziegler, and was sentenced to death by the state of New York. He was transferred to the prison in Auburn, where in August of 1890 he awaited his execution.
But the execution was to be a civil and humane one, the first one in which electricity would be used to snuff out the life of the convicted. A chair had been built of oak and electrical circuits, and tested on animals to make sure the death would be humane. Though there had been arguments between the two leading moguls of electric power, Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, as to which of the currents—Edison’s “Direct Current” and Westinghouse’s “Alternating Current”—it came to be through some underhanded manipulation that Edison assured that AC current would be used for the electric chair. Although Westinghouse refused to sell his equipment to the prison for the death machine, Edison arranged for some used equipment to be purchased without his competitor’s knowledge and made into the chair. This, Edison knew, would seal in the minds of Americans that AC was deadly, and so DC should be used in homes. Men at Auburn prison as well as reporters in their daily and weekly newspapers began joking that a man put to death in the electric chair would be said to have been “Westinghoused,” a term that horrified the developer of the alternating current.
None of this mattered to William Kemmler, however, nor to Danielle Boquet. With her charm and grace she had been able to gain welcome into the prison’s main building, but had yet to be invited to enter the cold portion of the death house where her Alexandre awaited his execution. She had the power to kill the guards but did not have the power to force them to offer her entrance.
And so she waited. And she fretted. And Marie and Clarice tried to console her. She went back time and again to the tenement flat in hopes she might find a way to help her love escape yet another death by the great and humane society, but there was nothing. She took the black Bible and kept it close in her skirt’s pocket, but reading it did nothing. Explained nothing.
Danielle clung to the exterior wall of the death chamber at night, and during the day slept in a closet of the prison’s gasworks. Marie and Clarice stayed with her, assuring her that it was not Alexandre and once he was dead she would come to her senses.
Witnesses arrived at the prison the evening of August 6, twenty-five men, fourteen of them doctors, anxious and excited to see this new death which would not cause undo suffering. The death chamber itself was in the cellar, and Danielle lay in the steamy, bug-infested grass at one of the windows, staring through the steel bars and glass at the horrific scene playing out below. The witnesses walked in, clutching top hats and gloves, and most of them settled themselves on seats that had been arranged to face the electric chair. Other men stood. And then the warden and several guards entered, with Alexandre between them. A priest, looking bored and disinterested, followed behind in his robe, holding his Scriptures to his chest.
Alexandre glanced about the damp, stark room. His eyes were red-rimmed with lack of sleep and the terror of the impending. The guards nodded at the chair. He walked to it, but could not seem to sit down. A guard said, “You’ll like this a lot better than the gallows, boy.”
“I must get in,” whispered Danielle to her Sisters behind her. Marie and Clarice, standing a few yards back, said, “You cannot.”
Alexandre turned and lowered himself into the chair. Then he sprang up again. “I remember!” he shouted.
“Shut up and sit down,” said the warden. “We’ll break your arms to do it if we have to.”
“No, no, hear me, I remember!” Alexandre’s face twisted with dreadful knowledge. “Oh, God, I remember!”
The warden shoved Alexandre into the chair. Guards began securing the leather straps at his legs and arms. But Alexandre continued. “I remember the blade on my throat, the quick slash of the merciful Africans who said I was the first to die a civil death! I remember the blade of the Guillotine, and the assurance that the execution would be painless. I remember now! Why again?”
“He’s crazed with fear,” said one nervous doctor. “Let’s have it done!”
“I know why! I am Sula! I am Alexandre! I am William!” said Alexandre. “But I was Andrew, by my own mouth condemning me again and again to that which I would not allow our Lord! A fair and gentle death. A courteous and mild demise!”
A strap was quickly buckled at his waist and a leather harness with electrodes was shoved down onto his head. “Enough babbling!” said the warden. “Shut your mouth, criminal!”
Danielle pressed her forehead to the tiny slit of window and screamed, “Alexandre, then do you remember me?”
All faces spun toward the window. Alexandre stared, his mouth open.
“Alexandre! Let me in!”
Behind Danielle, Marie and Clarice gasped, “No, Danielle, let it be!”
Danielle banged on the steel bars. “Alexander, please, let me in!”
“Are you an angel, sent by Christ to stop this cycle?” said Alexandre. The guards fumbled with the chinstrap, and drew the leather through the buckle. Before they could seal his jaws shut with the strap, he managed, “Angel, come in!”
Marie grabbed Danielle’s wrist from behind, and snarled at her, “Do not dare! They will see you for who you are. The priest has a crucifix. We will be done in, Sister!”
Danielle twisted violently, but Clarice took her other wrist and held it firmly. “We will not be destroyed by your carelessness!” Danielle bit her Sisters, and clawed. She kicked and spun, and the bones of her wrists shattered, but they would not let go.
Inside the cellar, she saw the priest raise his hand for the sign of the cross. He stepped back. A guard nodded to a man at the back of the room. “No!” Danielle screamed, and the witnesses ran their hands through their hair and shifted in their seats, uneasy with the spectacle this had become.
“Now,” said the guard.
“No!” cried Danielle. She kicked the bars and the pane of the window. The glass shattered and sprayed the cellar floor with shards.
There was the sound of a rushing trolley, a high-pitched and whining burr that caused the entire room to vibrate. Alexandre’s body convulsed and strained at the leather straps. Smoke rose from his hair, and then the hair caught fire, crackling and popping in a tongue of orange and blue.
“Jesus,” said one witness.
“I pray he’s dead already,” said another.
The body danced within the confines of the chair, a puppet on electric strings, until the warden nodded and the current was shut off.
Danielle could not move. She lay in the grass, her fingernails dug into her forehead, her eyes staring, staring, taking it in and rejecting it at the same time. Alexandre, dead again.
And then Alexandre moaned. The witnesses gasped and put their hands to their mouths. The warden pointed urgently toward the man at the wall switch, who threw it again, and again Alexandre danced.
It was all done in six minutes. At last Alexandre was dead. Guards gingerly unstrapped him, complaining that he was boiling to the touch, and with coats over their hands for protection, they rolled the body onto a gurney that had waited at the side of the room. They covered it with a sheet. But when a doctor attempted to examine the body, he could not remove the clothing for the heat. The warden escorted the ashen-faced men from the death chamber until the body cooled.
“Half hour,” the warden said. “Let it cool
and let the air clear a bit. And get a guard to arrest those women in the yard!”
“I hate you,” Danielle said to Marie and Clarice.
“No, you don’t,” said Marie.
“Oh, but I do,” said Danielle. The hands loosened on her wrists, and she was at last able to transform herself to mist to move through the window and into the cellar. Her friends followed.
They stood amid the stench and the death. Danielle was silent for a moment and then said, “I’m cursed as much as he is.”
“We are not cursed, Danielle,” said Clarice, “we are blessed.”
“What is a curse, then? That which you do not want, which you never asked for, yet which will not let you be!”
“It isn’t Alexandre,” Marie said again. “Come with us. Come with us.”
“You don’t know anything,” said Danielle. And she did not go with them.
She stepped to the gurney and lifted away the sheet. Her love lay there, his sweet face charred half-away, his hair blackened and crisp. His beautiful hands cooked into claws. She held one hand and kissed it and cried her tears onto it.
“I would remove your curse if I could,” she whispered. She bent to the scorched neck and bit there. The blood had the flavor of charcoal, and it made her vomit.
She heard the men’s voices coming toward the chamber. Footsteps pounding the cement of the hall floor. She would go. But she would find him again. She would be keen and sharp, she would have her wits always awake, and be ready. She would follow him and perhaps, save him. Save him for what, she wasn’t certain. Save him into what, she couldn’t know. But she would find him.
She touched her skirt’s pocket. The Bible was gone. It had gone ahead, to find her love once more.
“Until later,” she said. On still-lingering tendrils of smoke, she left the cellar. Outside, Marie and Clarice were not to be found. She knew she would never see them again. That was all right. She did not want to burden them. She would do this alone.
The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women Page 52
