Blood Red Roses

by Russell James

  A thick chain and a padlock secured the doors. I was relieved to make that my excuse for ending my investigation and returning to the stable. I did not even sniff the air around the door, nor listen for the cries of anyone trapped within.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The afternoon brought the stables a visitor, one only the thoughts of recent horrific events had kept from my mind.

  As I shoveled the last of the first stall’s equine graveyard away, Miss Lucinda floated into the stables. She stepped upon tiptoes, as if she danced to some music none but she could perceive. Mud splattered the bottom hem of her pale yellow dress. Her blonde curls were askew and one long strand hung down across her right eye. She looked upon common objects with wonder, traced the outline of a hinge with her fingertip.

  She was a beauty; none could deny that. But this unkempt look of freedom made her doubly attractive, seductive in a way that I was only on the edge of understanding at that age. My pulse throbbed in my ears. The shovel slipped in my sweating palms.

  She looked across the stalls and noticed me for the first time, though I had been standing in plain sight. She smiled and waltzed over to my side. She smelled of the roses in the garden. She reached out and gave my neck the faintest caress with her fingertip. My knees grew weak.

  “Stable boy, dear stable boy.” I didn’t care that she knew not my name. “Hard at work among the dung and straw. Do you enjoy your work here?”

  I could scarcely speak in her presence, and her touch had nearly made me pass out. I mouthed some silent syllable and she continued.

  “We all have work we must do, though we may detest it, don’t we?” Her hand swept across the floor as if gesturing to a carpet of gold. She looked up at me with glassy eyes. “You must take things out, I must take things in, but it’s all the same, isn’t it? We all work for the common good, for what is best for the family. Isn’t that so?”

  I could scarcely manage a nod.

  She twirled around the stable floor, teetered at the end of her spin and caromed off the far wall. I rushed to help her, but she righted herself and held me at bay with an upturned palm.

  “Now I have my helper,” she said. She patted a pocket in her skirt, and two tiny bottles clinked together. “But you, poor boy, have to manage all on your own.”

  She stepped forward and held my head in her soft, white hands. A second curl had joined the first across her right eye. She appraised my checks and hair. Below my belt, I grew hot and hard, a shocking new sensation.

  “But soon you’ll be beyond all this. The last was not enough, though I did my dirty part as I should. It’s about the purity, about milk untainted by dirt, about magnolia blossoms in their first perfect bloom. You understand, don’t you, stable boy?”

  I did not, but her touch rendered the world immaterial. She reached down and ran her hand between my legs. I quivered and caught my breath.

  “Ah, you’ll be ready,” she said.

  She drifted away from me, like a ship sailing off to sea. She passed from the shadowed stable into the daylight, flapped her arms like some great butterfly, and tiptoed in the direction of the rose garden.

  I leaned against the shovel to relieve the throbbing, swollen pain between my legs. I watched her disappear from view, drinking in every second like she was water in the desert.

  She made no sense. No matter what she stirred in me, she made no sense. Nor did her father, nor her mother. Perhaps the loss of Junius had driven them all to lunacy; perhaps the fundamental evil of the servitude they forced on others had done it. Whatever the cause, they would be no help in stopping Ramses’s wicked ways. I shuddered to think that the task might fall upon my shoulders alone.

  Chapter Fourteen

  That night I slept uneasy, so surrounded by the awful news of the evil, afraid of what Ramses might do to me if he became aware I knew his guilt in the disappearances.

  In a dream that night, I stood in the cotton fields. Mist shrouded the edges, so it appeared that the skeletal plants stretched on forever. Malevolence seemed to seep up out of the ground, to threaten to climb up, wrap around me and pull me down in an embrace of permanent damnation. My skin crawled with the need to get out of that place.

  There was no clear direction back to the stables, but anywhere had to be better than here. I ran up one row.

  Beulah Powell appeared out of the mist, still clothed for mourning, her lace veil draped across her face. I jerked to a stop.

  “Junius is here,” she said. “In the earth, in the air, all around us. My son isn’t dead; he’ll live forever.”

  Her voice was high and sounded far away. It made the hairs on my arms stand erect. I turned to run the other way and leave this grief-crazed woman to herself.

  Master Powell blocked my way. His gray hair stood even more wildly askew. Each of his eyes looked in an opposite direction, though he faced me head-on.

  “Boy, fetch the carriage. We must take Junius to the ball. We can’t be late.”

  I jumped the cotton plants beside me and broke out in a run through the rows of plants. The rough bushes tore at my thin pants and scratched my legs.

  A young slave woman appeared out of nowhere to block my way, quite lovely to look at, but her head lay at such an angle that it rested upon her shoulder. A red ring of raised skin encircled her neck. She stared at me through vacant, clouded eyes.

  “William?” she said. It was the same voice I’d heard in the cabin from which Ramses had taken his last victim. “Where are you, William? I’ve come for you.”

  From behind me sounded Victor’s unmistakable whinny: part laughter, part threat, all terrifying. I spun in time to see a dark shape in the mist, a thick-set rider in a slouch hat upon a great shadow horse. Hooves thundered and a whip cracked.

  “William?” the mother called again, louder. “Where’s my boy?”

  Ramses and Victor’s dark hulk circled us at a gallop, just barely obscured by the mist, cutting off any avenue of escape.

  “William,” she called again. “Come to me, boy.”

  Somehow, in my subconscious, I thought that if she remained quiet, the mist would hide us from Ramses, as it partially hid him from us. Her calling out was just a beacon for him to follow.

  “You must be quiet,” I whispered. “He’ll find us both!”

  The look on her face didn’t change, still impassive and far off in another world. “William!” she shrieked.

  Ramses’s gravelly laughter filled the air. Victor whinnied. The horse turned and charged the two of us. As it broke through the mist, I had my first full view of the apparition.

  Victor’s bulging eyes burned red as hot coals. Ramses sat high in the saddle, his face a chilling, twisted snarl. In the darkness, his eyes matched the fire in his horse’s. So bright did they burn that the sides of his metal nose glowed crimson. The brim of his hat cast the rest of his face in shadow.

  Ramses drew his whip and reared back to strike me. I ducked and covered my head with my arms.

  The whip never struck. The pounding of the horse’s hooves stopped. Everything vanished.

  “Tell Eleeza. Now!” my father’s voice boomed in the darkness.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I sat straight up in the loft, wide awake. I could practically hear the thunder of my heart in my chest. My hands shook with fear.

  The memory of my father’s command still echoed in my head. Unlike a dream, the memory did not fade with my return to consciousness, and the imperative he gave me seemed no less commanding than it had been in the nightmare. This was a message from the spirit of my father.

  Eleeza sent an unnatural fear through me. Her shack was far off, through woods filled with wild animals and dangerous men. I could justly say that none of this really was my concern. All those reasons to stay tucked in the stable made sense.

  Until I remembered the slave whipped nearly to death at Ramses’s hand, the woman whom I would have left to die in my selfishness. And there was the boy I’d let be kidnapped without even a pr
otest. Under the weight of all my failures, only one course of action made any sense at all.

  I climbed down from the loft. I’d had quite a dance getting Victor unsaddled tonight, and had the bruised leg to prove it. As I passed his stall, he whinnied loudly enough to wake the Powells in the main house. He rammed himself against the stall door with a crash. All the stalls shook. Dust snowed down from the loft above. But the latch and hinges held.

  I hurried out into the night. I was certain that with such a strong declaration in my dream, my father’s spirit would again guide me to Eleeza’s hidden camp. But the dark night remained still. His luminous ghost did not appear, to my great disappointment.

  As best I could, I retraced the path he’d shown me the night before, crossing the cotton fields that had so recently haunted my dream, tramping through the moss-draped woods that began on the plantation’s edge. Just as I became certain I was lost, I arrived at the last place my father’s spirit stood, beneath the old lightning-shattered oak.

  But when I turned to the left, Eleeza’s camp wasn’t there. No shack, no fire, not even the clearing I’d stood in. My first fear was that my earlier discovery had driven her to move to a new, unknown location.

  Then I remembered the circle of salt and her enchantment of invisibility. Without my father’s spirit here to part that curtain, perhaps her camp was still here, but hidden.

  I took slow, deliberate steps in what I surmised to be the shack’s direction. With my ninth step forward, the encampment shimmered into view. A fire blazed before Eleeza’s shanty. Eleeza stood sprinkling something into an iron pot suspended above the flames. She looked upon me with surprise.

  “What are you doing back here?”

  I couldn’t just blurt out the horrible news of her familial deaths, and opted for a partial truth. “I had a dream in which my father told me to return.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know.” I paused and grasped at a straw for conversation that might enhance her mood to soften the later blow. “You should know the roses you enchanted have given Mrs. Powell great solace. She walks among them every day. She buried Junius among them.”

  “No; that can’t be.” The old woman looked terrified. “There was no body returned.”

  “It came home later, after you escaped.”

  Eleeza stepped away from the fire and paced in a tight circle. She rubbed her hands against her temples, eyes clamped shut.

  “This is a bad thing. I had to cast a strong spell on the roses because the body was lost, the soul tied to the flesh somewhere far away. If the roses touch the elements of the departed…do you know what that would awaken?”

  This revelation that I had hoped would ease her mind before the bad news’ arrival had the opposite effect. She was off on some superstitious tangent. I needed to get to the point.

  The old woman wrung her gnarled hands together and paced faster.

  “Eleeza, there is something else of greater consequence I am afraid I must share.”

  I paused, but had to do my duty.

  “I have bad news about your daughter and her son, William.”

  Eleeza stopped, then stepped to within a foot of me. Her face fell into shadow; her voice turned hard as ironwood. “What happened to them?”

  “I fear that William has become Ramses’s latest victim. As I left you last night, I witnessed it myself. Then, such was her grief, his mother took her own life.”

  The old woman’s frail body began to shake with rage. Her fists balled up, and the muscles in her arms tensed like knotted rope.

  “They’ll pay for this,” she said. “After I cast the spell of the roses for them, they threatened to sell me, and now they kill my family.”

  “It’s not the Powells,” I said. “Just Ramses. Whatever Mr. Powell did to you—”

  “Work with the Devil and you earn the Devil’s due,” she said. “No slaveholding family deserves a lick of compassion. I learned that lesson once already.”

  She went into her shack and reappeared in a flash. She handed me a tiny burlap sack, tied closed with a black string. It smelled of swampy decomposition. She pressed it into my palm.

  “This isn’t your doing, boy,” she said. “This hex bag will keep you from reaping what they have sown.”

  Something oily oozed from the little bag onto my palm. I resisted the urge to drop the ridiculous, disgusting offering, but instead shoved it in my pocket. I wiped my palm on my shirt.

  “My mother taught me her magic, and to use only for good,” Eleeza said. “Never for evil, never for revenge. What have been my rewards? Slavery, loneliness, my daughter raped and impregnated, and now even that sliver of family taken from me.”

  Hatred blazed in her eyes. She threw a log hard upon the fire. An explosion of burning cinders flew up in the air.

  I thought of Lucinda’s alluring beauty, her innocence in all this.

  “I swear to you,” I said. “The daughter certainly isn’t involved.”

  Eleeza pulled some herbs from her pocket and threw them into the fire. It fulminated in blue flame and sent up a white cloud like a mushroom.

  “Silence!” Her face was now a mask of twisted rage. “I’ve offered you protection from what I’m about to unleash. Save yourself before I revoke it.”

  I weighed her words and the fury she displayed, and judged that I’d not convince her she was wrong. I backed out of the salt circle, and the scene transformed back to a dark, quiet place in the woods. Even the smoky scent of the fire disappeared.

  The horrible harbinger feeling dropped upon me again, the one that had foretold my father’s death, the one that had predicted Beechwood would be hell. This time, it felt more foreboding and terrifying than both of those combined.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I left the woods and cut back across the plantation to the stable. I turned a plan over and around in my mind. I could not stop whatever Eleeza was about to do. I tried to convince myself that she was a crazy old woman in the woods, that she could no more make magic than I could turn manure into silver. The supposedly bewitched roses were just a convenient fantasy for Mrs. Powell, a crutch to support the weight of her grief.

  But there were ways she could take revenge that required no supernatural skills, like setting the plantation alight or returning to rouse other slaves to rebellion.

  A bit of me did fear that she could tap some unearthly power. I could not deny that Eleeza could hide her camp from my sight, that she appeared to have some command of the campfire’s flames. There was indeed some magic she could summon, and it was best that I think the worst of her abilities.

  Ramses should get what he deserved. An eye for an eye, as the Good Book said. But the Powells had no hand in his depraved behavior. The parents were mad, and a woman of Lucinda’s beauty couldn’t even imagine such horrible acts as Ramses had committed. It was up to me to warn them. They could offer Ramses up, take him to the woods and leave him there for Eleeza to exact revenge for her family and the other victims. At a minimum, the Powells could flee, leave the plantation for a few days, and let Eleeza hunt Ramses down.

  I could not barge into the main house at this hour of the night and wake the family. The house servants would throw me out. I resolved to wait until morning, to let Ramses collect Victor and head out to the fields, and then to warn the Powells, especially Lucinda, of the danger they faced.

  As I approached the stable, I was quite lost in these thoughts, including visions of Lucinda’s warm embrace for the hero who saved her from whatever grisly fate Ramses would endure. Perhaps her other favors would follow…

  I crossed the dark stable threshold.

  “There you are!” Ramses said.

  I stopped cold. Sweat popped from by brow. Even in the stable’s darkness, I could see the faint, reflective glow of Ramses’s metal nose.

  “Told you the rules ’bout being out at night, ’bout consorting with the gyps.” He stepped forward from the shadows. He held his whip at the ready. “S
hould of paid me mind. Makes this whole thing a mite easier.”

  Sheer terror either freezes one on the spot or sends the burst of energy to flee. This time it gave me the latter. I turned and ran to the dark main house, the only hope I had for salvation from this killer madman.

  Ramses’s whip flew out from the stable like the arm of a giant squid. It wrapped around my ankle, and the metal tip stung my calf. Ramses yanked it, and I dropped to the ground face-first. He reeled me in across the rough path like a hooked fish. I scrambled in vain to sieze something to arrest my retrieval. He dropped, knee first, upon my back. My lungs collapsed at his weight. He lashed my hands together behind me. From the stable came Victor’s haughty whinny.

  “Gyps can’t outrun the whip,” he said. “Ain’t no way you can.”

  He yanked me to my feet. His sweat smelled of whiskey.

  “Please, sir,” I begged as I gasped for breath. “Let me be. I won’t tell the Powells. I won’t tell a soul.”

  He shoved me forward. “Boy, you don’t even know what you don’t know.”

  And just as he’d pushed William the night before, so he thrust me ahead of him, one foot-dragging step behind me with each prod. We passed the silent cookhouse and approached the door to the root cellar. The chain and lock hung open.

  “Look, I’ll run off,” I volunteered. “Cross the Union lines and head north to Tennessee, or Kentucky, or even Canada. No one will ever know anything about what you’ve done.”

  Ramses pulled open the root cellar door. The damp, moldy smell of earth rose up from the inky depths. He stood me on the top step inside. Visions of a pile of Ramses’s victims flashed into my head. Their rictus-frozen mouths no doubt awaited me below.

  “Ain’t no one gonna know this way neither,” he said

  He shoved me forward. I stumbled down a short flight of steps and fell, back first, upon the bare earth. Ramses stood in silhouette above me, framed by the open doorway.