She knew she was screaming. She couldn't hear herself but saw the reaction of the other guests around the table as they stared at her. She saw the hand of the woman next to her on her left sleeve, patting it and stroking it lightly. The woman's face showed concern as she said something Ellie couldn't hear. Robert turned toward her. She could see the judgment in his expression. She was ruining his dinner with her outburst.
When the waiter came with a towel, smiling at her and beginning to wipe the blood off the table, she wondered why he wasn't concerned. The blood left smear marks on the table's surface and the Berber floor but he was simply wiping it off and telling her that he would bring her another cup very shortly. She shut her eyes. There was a ringing in her ears and she could hear her blood flowing through the veins inside her head.
"…beth. …beth. Elizabeth!"
She looked at her husband. She heard his voice. It wasn't drowned out by the sound of her own blood anymore.
"Elizabeth, what's the matter? The waiter is bringing you another cup. It must have slipped through your fingers," he said with a mildly embarrassed smile.
She looked at the table again. A few drops of clear liquid were still visible, but the blood was gone. Her hands were clean. The Berber was as it had been when she first sat down: a light brown pattern on a green surface. There was no blood anywhere.
A bell rang.
"Dinner," the woman next to her said while placing the napkin on her lap. Without thinking, Ellie unfolded her own napkin. The head of a buck, an artful imprint on a white background, stared at her from her lap. She turned the napkin over. It showed the same buck's head, now upside down. She folded her hands across its face. She thought about praying, but dismissed it. She had never been a religious person and felt that it was much too late for her to begin now. This night she had to survive on her own, she thought.
Two waiters came in, each pushing a rolling cart in front of them. A large pot rested on each, steam rising out. The waiters took each of the guest's soup dishes and poured the soup into it. When Ellie saw that the liquid had, just like before, taken on a dark red color, she looked pleadingly at the woman next to her.
"Borscht," the woman said.
"Excuse me?" Ellie asked.
"Borscht. It's made of beets, hence the red color. I certainly hope it is as delicious as it has been every year since we came here."
The soup smelled decent, and when everyone started eating, Ellie took, with shaky hands, a spoonful of it. The warm liquid spread inside her stomach, and she felt the heat rise up inside her chest. She relaxed. The soup was delicious, and she began to think that she had been overreacting lately, likely due to the stressful and uncomfortable journey.
This is not so bad after all, she thought. She managed a smile and even told her husband that she thought she'd ask the kitchen to provide her with a recipe so that she could make the soup for him once they were back home. Robert was delighted and told her he knew she'd enjoy the trip after all. And when the waiters took her soup dish, she felt hungrier than she had in a while. She could smell the roasted meats through the doors into the hallway and wondered what kind of tasty treats the hotel had in store for them. As this was a hunting lodge, she expected it to have a good variety of game, possibly duck and wild boar.
Her spirits had lifted, and she continued her dialogue with the woman next to her, who proved to be an excellent conversationalist.
"Have you heard," said Ellie, "that they are building an unsinkable ship?"
"Who?" the woman asked.
"You must have heard. The newspapers are full of it. Titanic is its name, and it is the biggest ship that has ever been built."
"I'm sorry, dear, I have not," the woman answered, a slightly confused look on her face.
"They are building it in Ireland of all places. In Belfast."
"I have been so busy with my husband's work that it must have slipped my mind."
Before Ellie could think any further on the oddness of the woman's lack of knowledge of current events, the waiters came in.
"Main course," the woman said while straightening the napkin on her lap.
"Wild fennel pollen-rubbed venison leg," the first waiter announced as he placed a large plate into the center of the table. "With pickled mushrooms."
Everyone clapped. The waiter bowed and disappeared. Next, two waiters entered, holding an identical plate and placing it on either end of the table. "Tender duck breast wrapped in house-cured bacon and glazed with fresh peach sauce."
There was more applause. It continued throughout the side dishes: garlic potato salad with chives, steamed carrots in white wine sauce, and wild rice with truffles.
Another waiter brought a plate with Cornish game hens, telling the group that the chef had prepared it especially for tonight with a thyme and salt rub, mashed potatoes, and roasted beets.
"And now, ladies and gentlemen, the high point of tonight's dinner," the head waiter announced festively. "Whole roasted wild boar, caught just yesterday and garnished with carved apples, oranges, and rosemary, served on a bed of fresh greens."
People clapped, and the previously subdued mood was suddenly ecstatic. The food was perfectly arranged and pleasing to the sophisticated eyes and tastes of the guests. Ellie ate several of the duck and bacon wrappings before taking a piece of the Cornish game hen. It was tender and juicy and the meat fell off the bone on her plate. The woman next to her was engaged in a conversation with the man to her left who, at first, Ellie thought was her husband. But it turned out that her husband was at their home in Duram while she was officially off to see her sickly mother in Lancaster for two weeks. She eventually surmised that the man next to her, a shipbuilder from Sunderland with weathered skin and golden hair that was perfectly combed back, was her lover.
In my research, I have found yet another detail that adds to the notion of my patient's mental illness. There was indeed a shipbuilder in Sunderland. He was a tall, handsome fellow, his face weathered by sun and sea, with blond hair and enough money to have mistresses in every harbor from here to Honolulu. But he had disappeared fifteen years prior and he could not have been at the dinner that very night unless he had lived under a completely different name.
The woman next to Ellie had just put one forkful of the wild boar into her mouth when Ellie noticed a piece of garlic on her chin. At first she didn't want to say anything, especially because the woman didn't seem to notice. But then she decided to let her know.
"Oh, thank you, dear," the woman said. "I didn't notice it at all." Rather than using her napkin, she took the piece off with her fingers. Ellie followed the woman's hand with her eyes as she placed the piece at the edge of her plate and continued eating.
This moment must have been one of the worst for her. Having overcome two previous setbacks and having found new confidence in herself throughout the meal, she now couldn't believe what she saw. I spoke with her about this very moment in an interview. This was the first time she felt that she was on the brink of losing her mind.
At the edge of the plate next to hers, twisting and turning, its mouth searching for food, lay a maggot. Ellie very quietly put down her fork and knife. The heat in her chest made breathing harder than usual. She looked down and onto her plate. There were two pieces of potato and a small part of the skin from the Cornish game hen left. She had to force herself to look up. There was a part of her that wanted to disappear, to go back a day when she never stepped into that carriage, letting her husband go alone and finishing her needlework and visiting the fountain in the center of town to feed the doves.
But she looked up.
Ellie's world began to crumble, and reality morphed into a shattered image of disparate pieces as she tried to hold onto something familiar, something that would anchor her in the storm, like a dinghy in a hurricane.
But the line of the anchor was too short, and so the storm took the dinghy as if it wasn't even there and the waves came and washed over it and buried it. And from there it sank eve
r deeper to the bottom of the ocean. There it was quiet and peaceful and nothing could come near her and tell her of flesh foul and infected and decaying in front of her eyes.
The wild boar, or what was left of it, sat across from her in the center of the table. The plate — no, everything on it — was moving. There were thousands of maggots eating their way through the rotting flesh. A layer of mold had overtaken the Cornish game hens. Blisters of oozing liquid drained from the meat onto the plate. Bite-sized pieces that people were moving into their mouths had blood dripping from them and maggots falling from their mouths and forks.
The threshold to her sanity approached Ellie with immense speed. No one noticed. Not even her husband. She saw herself speaking to the woman next to her, who laughed while chewing on a piece of dove. The sound of flies crept into her ear as she looked down to see the first one sitting in the center of her plate as if it had just hatched from one of the larva.
"Can't you see?" Ellie said. "It's all rotten. The food is all rotten!"
The woman continued to laugh for a moment, then she became serious. She looked at Ellie for a while until her face began to change. At first Ellie couldn't grasp what was happening. Her sanity was hanging by a thread, and the storm was about to take it.
The woman opened her mouth as if to yawn, but it opened further and further, far beyond the natural limitations of her jaw bones. And suddenly sharp teeth appeared and her mouth turned into a snout, snarling and growling. It was the most horrific image imaginable.
One moment later, her face morphed back to normal. The woman laughed and apologized to Ellie for not hearing what she had said. Then she turned back to her lover.
"Are you feeling well, miss?" the waiter asked. But it was as if she heard it through a thick layer of cotton and dust. She got up. Her chair fell to the ground. She walked toward the door, turning once more to look at her husband.
None of the people around the table had human heads on their shoulders. Except for Robert, Ellie saw foxes and bucks and a lion, several heads of a boar and that of a puma. That was the woman next to her. And when Ellie's feet carried her out of the room, she heard the screams of the animals. They were screams of utter terror and despair. It induced in her the certainty that she was alone in all the world with no one to comfort her and hold her hand and tell her that this was merely a nightmare and nothing else.
She went to her room and lay on her bed, slipping under the covers and pulling them over her head. There was no longer a cohesive thought in her. Terror fueled her every notion. Was that a sound outside her room? Did the door just open and close again? Was someone walking next to her bed?
She slowly lowered the thick down blanket until she could see her room. The bellboy stood next to her bed, and a scream escaped Ellie's mouth. It didn't stop until she was out of air. The bellboy — tongue hanging half out of his mouth, saliva dripping onto his starched shirt — looked at her as if wanting to ask a question. And when Ellie screamed again, he began to scream as well. His was bone-chilling and high-pitched, and while he screamed, he changed into a fox. It stood next to the bed looking up at Ellie and screaming in terror before he was torn to pieces by invisible fangs.
She opened the door to her room and stepped into the hallway. From there she went downstairs, passing the concierge, who had the head of a panther on his shoulders, and ran outside. She made it a hundred yards into the night when she heard the trumpets. They were the horns that signaled the beginning of the hunt. Ellie ran into the underbrush as fox and bear and buck and lion charged out of the entrance door and, like a pack of hounds on a fresh trail, picked up her scent and followed her into the woods.
The medical examiner concluded that a good number of the injuries inflicted on her body could have been from her fingernails. There were mostly deep scratches that may or may not have resulted from her stumbling through the woods for days until a cow farmer picked her up thirty kilometers northwest of Churnsike. Some of the markings were deeper than the others. Except one, none were out of the ordinary. The one in question — and I say this with all caution — could have stemmed from a lion. But the examiner's report was inconclusive, and my research revealed that the area around Greystead had never seen a lion. No accounts had been made of such an animal escaping from a zoo in the nearby town.
I will have to conclude this report. My eyesight is failing in this low light and I need to be up at dawn, ready for my carriage. I will finish this when I return in three days’ time. I honestly don't see how I would change my point of view on my patient's fate in light of reason and a psychiatrist's eye for mental illness. Visiting the lodge will, as I have mentioned earlier, most likely be merely a formality and one to help bring closure to my patient's account. I owe her that much.
Oh. Yes. One more item I nearly forgot. As needlework was not allowed in the asylum for safety reasons, I had granted Ellie her wish to paint and provided her with a few brushes, canvases, and an easel. I am including with this report a photograph of the painting by Ellie Moore, done under strict supervision during her stay at the asylum. This was the only one she had attempted and she finished it two days before hanging herself in her room.
A Word from Stefan Bolz
I am truly sorry for writing such a hopeless and bleak story. The only silver lining, if there is one, lies in what I have discovered in my research. According to that, in 1956, the Churnsike Lodge in Greystead burned to the ground. Everything that wasn't stone was destroyed in the fire. Paintings, antlers, and stuffed heads of black bears all went up in flames. It is my hope that the tortured souls of the animals that had resided there were finally released into freedom.
The police found a few items in the ashes, mostly brass plates and, among other things, a pocket watch dating back to the early 1900s. It was bronze on a finely crafted silver chain. The picture inside was gone, melted into the top of the watch, but the engraving was still visible. It said: "To Robert, With My Undying Love, Ellie."
Oh, I must apologize for cutting this short. My carriage will be here shortly. I will be joining a hunting expedition to Vermont.
Farewell and until next time,
Stefan Bolz
P.S. The above painting inspired the story and all its aspects in a single instant. It is by the amazing artist, Helena Vólkova, who was kind enough to give me permission to use it. Check out her work at http://helenavolkova.tumblr.com/
If you'd like to read my other, much more hopeful stories, go to www.stefanbolz.thirdscribe.com
or find me on Amazon and Facebook.
Jeb & Aces: The Mechanical Plagues
by Alexia Purdy
One
“OH, GEEZ!” Jessie pulled off her welding glove, feeling the burning sting spread up her arm at a furious pace. Cringing, she clutched her hand tightly, biting down on her lip before inspecting the damage done from a wild spark. It had burned through the dense mesh of woven fibers and leather like butter, leaving a tiny pinprick burn burrowing into the top of her hand. It wasn’t much, but the pain had stopped her from continuing. Luckily, the metal shard had not dug its way into her flesh. That would’ve been permanent. Her skin was still intact, but the angry flesh beneath told her it was time to get a new set of gloves.
She pulled up her shirt beneath the heavy jacket she used for welding. There she tapped the small square ChemTend patch to alleviate pain. It clicked and began silently pumping endorphins into her body, numbing the pain instantly. Sighing in relief, she pulled down her shirt, covering any exposed skin. She was lucky she hadn’t hurt herself badly enough to need the physician med-bot to mend her skin. She hated that robot with a passion. Probably because it was an apathetic prick of a machine who didn’t think much of using its barbaric methods to harshly heal damage. She’d suffered through it before and didn’t care to go through it again.
The job was nearly done. There was no sense in stopping now, so she yanked it on again and made a mental note to patch it up later. She made quick work of melding the last seam. The
panel was almost welded shut; it had been in dire need of repair, especially since there was another violent sandstorm blowing in from the west. The constant bombardment of the elements against the blast door had left cracks, weakening the metal panels after years of such abuse. The gale-force storm was scheduled to slam into the outpost in about an hour. The doors were already vibrating from the press of air leaking in through the opened panel she had moved to access the broken one. Once it was shut and sealed, the blast doors would be hard to bring down. But with the triple-layered door’s seal broken open to access the cracked panel, the entire platform was shaking with teeth-shattering jolts as the storm outside worsened.
It was disconcerting, but she was used to working in such horrid conditions. Always alone, for the most part.
A groaning creak caught her notice, and it was followed by a snap of metal from the platform’s supports. She tumbled over the edge along with all of her tools. The ruckus as they clanked onto the cement floor beneath her could have woken the dead, but she had her hands full as she slid over the end of the platform and descended until her restraint harness snapped taut, leaving her dangling, swinging wildly as the straps dug into her body.
She cursed, feeling her body ache from the nylon encircling her limbs and torso, cutting off her blood flow. The damned straps had saved her from the fall, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t bruised and rubbed raw. Plus she realized getting out of this situation before the other supports snapped was going to be a challenge, especially since she couldn’t reach the edge of the platform and was not in the right position to pull herself up.
The Shapeshifter Chronicles Page 20
