Jonathan Barrett Gentleman Vampire

by P. N. Elrod

  Good God, no. It can’t be.

  My body thrashed, out of control as my lungs vainly tried to work. The terrible pressure on my chest spread, crushing me into the earth like a giant’s boot heel. I had to fight it or be smashed into a pulp like a worm.

  Beldon, damn him, was trying to hold me still. He didn’t understand.

  Air. Please, God. Just a little air. . .

  I breathed blood instead. Choked. Sputtered it out again. Beldon was covered with it. Like that dream of Nora . . .

  The memory whipped from my mind. I struggled to clear my clogged throat.

  Elizabeth. Father . . .

  Just a little air. Just a little that I might see them once more. God, I was on fire from within. What burned me?

  Fight it.

  My efforts produced only a bubbling, gagging noise. I was already panicked; to hear and know that dreadful, disgusting sound was coming from me. . . .

  Fight it!

  The blazing pain abruptly ebbed. The weight on me eased.

  Fight . . .

  Eyelids heavy now Couldn’t blink. Couldn’t focus on anything. The light and leaves above blurred and merged and danced together, receding.

  . . .it . . .

  A shuddering convulsion shook my body from head to toe. I was aware of the movement, but not really feeling it. Beldon cried my name in a hopeless wail.

  But I was unable to answer as a soft stillness settled upon me. I lingered at the threshold between waking and sleep. He shook me, trying to rouse me. It should have worked, but all that was me was in retreat. It was like rolling over against cold morning air and pulling the blanket down more snugly to seize another few minutes of blissful, warm rest.

  Beldon stopped the shaking. I pushed the sleep off briefly, wondering what troubled him. He was yet within view, but his head was bowed as for prayer.

  The pain was gone now. No air yet, but I didn’t seem to need it. That awful weight was also absent. Good. Good.

  Nothing left to do now but give in to the sleep. Which I did, slipping away into the silence and sweet darkness.

  * * *

  I awoke with none of the usual attendant grogginess of a a deep slumber. The room was blacker than ink. Must have been well past moon set. That, or Jericho had closed the shutters of my window and drawn the curtains. I should have been baking from the day’s lingering summer heat, but was neither warm nor cold. The only feeling intruding on my general awareness was that my bed was uncomfortably hard.

  Damnation. I must have passed out drunk on the floor. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  But . . . I hadn’t gotten drunk since leaving Cambridge. I was home. Surely Jericho would have taken care of me.

  The back of my head rolled from side to side on the wooden planks, each irregularity of the bone against an unyielding surface made apparent by my movement. Damn the man. Even if my drunkenness offended him, he could have at least spared a pillow for me.

  My shoulders pressed down heavily as well. And my backside. And my heels. I’d grow numb and stiff if I stayed like this.

  He’d thought to give me a blanket, but had drawn it completely over my head. I had trouble pulling it from my face . . . . I could not pull it away from my face. When I tried to move my arms, my elbows thumped into—

  What? The sides of a box? Where in God’s name was I?

  My eyes had been open through this. Or so I thought. It was difficult to tell, everything being black. They were definitely open now. In the cramped space I inched one hand up and felt to be sure. Cheek. Lashes. Lids. Outer corner. Blink.

  Nothing. I saw nothing.

  It was the damned blanket. I tugged and came to realize it was wrapped around me and somehow tied over the top of my head like a—

  No. That was ridiculous.

  Almighty God, but it was quiet. I could only hear my own stirrings in what I now accepted as a small, enclosed space—the rustle of cloth, the scrape of shoe heels on wood, even the soft creak of my joints—but absolutely nothing else.

  But there had to be some sound. It was always there, even when one did not listen, there were hundreds of things to be heard. Wind. Bird song. The whisper of leaf and grass blade. One’s own pulse, for God’s sake, thumping against the eardrum.

  Silence. Perfect. Unremitting.

  Even my heart?

  No. It was there—had to be; I was just too alarmed now to hear it.

  I pushed against the blanket or whatever it was that covered me and encountered the lid of the box I was in. Oliver and some of his cronies were having a game with me. Waiting until I was drunk, they’d put me in here for a bad joke. A positively foul joke. Oliver wasn’t the sort to be cruel, though, so . . . .

  But I was not in Cambridge. My mind sought any answer but the truth. I already knew, or thought I did, but to face it—no, impossible. Quite impossible.

  Perhaps Oliver was drunk, insensible in another room, that had to be it.

  My shoulders strained and muscles popped as I pushed on the lid.

  The bastards had nailed it down. The thing wouldn’t budge. I’d be damned before I gave them the satisfaction of hearing me call for help. Oliver had had no part in this. It was too spiteful.

  Warburton, perhaps.

  Warburton, white around the eyes and drunk. But he hadn’t been drunk.

  Warburton, curled up on the floor, weeping.

  Nora, looking down at him.

  Nora, looking at me.

  Nora, talking to me. Telling me all the things that I must forget.

  I shook away that memory as though it were rain streaming in my face. Just as persistently, it continued to flood down.

  Rain. Yes, that was right.

  It had been raining. Cold. Icy. Tony Warburton striding away into the night. And when I saw him again he was drunk and repentant. But he hadn’t been drunk. He’d tricked me to going over to Nora’s and when she’d walked in, he’d . . .

  No. That was only a bad dream.

  To the devil with them. I could not bear the silence and darkness any longer. My voice roared out—

  And went no farther than the confines of the box. The flat sound thrown back on itself told me as much.

  Beldon had also called for help. He and I had been . . . I’d just seen the Finch boy raise his musket. But he couldn’t have—that simply could not have happened to me. I couldn’t believe, didn’t dare believe. To do so meant that I was . . . had been . . . they wouldn’t have done this to me.

  I was alive. The living aren’t trapped in the ground like this; God would surely spare the worst of sinners that horror. I could think, move, speak, even smell. The odor of musty cloth and new wood and damp earth were making me sick.

  Earth. In the ground.

  Trapped in the ground.

  I heaved against the lid, calling for help. I did this many times, keeping the unthinkable at bay a little longer.

  Useless. My arms dropped to my chest, drained, shaking with weakness.

  Now I knew without doubt, without any deceiving fancies, exactly where I was, and no yell, no scream, no plea, no sobbing prayer would free me from this.

  My grave.

  For maybe a count of five I lay frozen, then:

  No. No. Nonononononono.

  I bellowed, I shrieked, panic seizing me wholly as I clawed at the lid tearing my hands on the unyielding wood. I had to get out—

  And, for a fraction of a moment, I ceased to be at all, turned into a mindless screaming thing. Then my cries faded and died, along with the pain of life, and I seemed to be floating, falling, but slowly. I fancied the earth bearing indifferently down on me, trying to hold me into itself, yet I pushed and pressed my way past it, like, and yet unlike, a swimmer. Instead of cleaving soil, it was as though it flowed through me.

  My thrashing body sudden
ly hurtled free of its prison and, heavy as stone, rolled down a slight grading. Arms and kicking legs ripped at the shroud, almost free—

  I was . . . on the ground. Not in it. Open ground. Trees. Their leaves whispering to one another. What a sweet song for my starved ears. I could still smell earth, but it wasn’t as cloying, diluted by other scents carried on the wind. Clover, grass, and a skunk, by God. I never thought I’d welcome that pungency.

  Able to use my arms again, I finally tore away the cloth shroud binding me.

  Shroud. I sat up and forced myself to look.

  My shroud. Yellow with age, for it had been stored in the attic since my birth, as was the custom. We each of us had one, Father, Elizabeth, Mother, all the servants, all our friends. Death was always around us, from a summer fever to a bad fall from a horse. One prepared for death as soon as one was born. One had to accept it, for there was no other alternative.

  Nora, my mind whispered uneasily. I shook my head violently.

  Take stock. Where . . .?

  I was . . . in a graveyard. The one I passed each Sunday going in to hear the sermon.

  But I could not be.

  I pushed the impossibility away.

  It kept returning like a nagging fly.

  I pushed away the burgeoning fear. It held back for the moment.

  An unbidden image came to me of standing at the edge of the drop off to the kettle, of noting without alarm the puff of smoke across the way, of not knowing what it meant, of falling, of pain, of blood . . . .

  Without any thought behind the action, I began unbuttoning my waistcoat. My fingers moved on their own, and it was with mild surprise that I looked down to see my clothes parted and my chest bared. The wound that some hidden part of my mind expected to find was there, right over my heart, but closed up and healed. The surrounding skin was bruised and red, but not from inflammation. There was no pain. Not any more.

  Nora.

  I grew suddenly cold. Not from the soft air flowing past me, but from the stark memory of her slumping down, run through with my sword-stick. It had caught her in the heart. The blood covered her dress. Warburton had laughed and turned upon me. My dream, my nightmare, had been true. Nora had died and returned . . . and had made me forget.

  Made me forget everything.

  Our love. How we had loved. All of it plucked from my mind like ripping pages from a book.

  Not completely, it seemed. Those lost pages were fluttering back into place, each sweet memory offset by a last, bitter betrayal.

  Had she been cruel or kind? From the pieces returning, I knew that she had truly loved me and would have done anything to protect me from harm. But she had also herself to protect, and so I’d been made to forget not only all that made her different from others, but my deepest feelings for her, made to wall away half of my very soul. The enormity of her gentle perfidy numbed my battered mind. I drew my arms around my legs and rocked back and forth, overcome by the misery.

  My eyes stared without seeing at the bright night sky, at the humps and angled shapes of the gravestones surrounding me, at the church’s great gray shadow creeping over the ground. As a child, I would have taken on any dare but this one, to spend a single moment in this place after dark. Was I now become some lost spirit rejected by both heaven and hell? Was I condemned to be trapped here? Was this my punishment for falling in love?

  Such questions as these hammered at the barrier of desolation I’d built. Eventually their absurdity broke through, allowing a vestige of reason to slip in.

  Such sinister imaginings were suitable for a ghost story, or the drama of a stage play, but not for me. I wasn’t a spirit or the recipient of divine vengeance, though I had no doubt now that I had died. My heart was silent. My lungs only worked when I consciously used them. How strange it was not to breathe.

  Nora had been the same. I could almost laugh to remember how alarmed I’d been when I’d noticed. It had been on the night when we’d first exchanged blood. She must have blocked my mind from remarking on it before.

  I was . . . I was now like Nora. By giving my blood to her and taking hers into myself, she’d passed on—what? Her immunity to death?

  Why hadn’t she told me what to expect?

  Perhaps she hadn’t known herself, I logically answered. There was much she’d never told me. Far too much, apparently.

  Then I did laugh. I laughed until I wept. Couldn’t stop. Didn’t want to stop. Giving myself up to a malignant self-pity blacker than the confines of my vacant grave, I moaned and howled and cried, my voice striking off the side of the church to cast itself to the open air. I did not recognize it. I did not recognize myself, for I’d been turned into a most miserable wretch by the overwhelming despair of losing her.

  * * *

  The storm passed.

  Eventually.

  My temper was not such as to leave me in the depths for long. Sooner or later we must all emerge and deal with mundane practicalities.

  I wiped at my nose and swollen eyes with the lower edge of my shirt. They’d dressed me in my best Sunday clothes. I’d even been given a proper shave. Poor Jericho would have had to do it. I swayed where I sat, nearly plunging into the darkness again by thinking of how he must have felt.

  Later. I would worry about it later.

  Levering stiffly to my feet, I kicked away the shroud and brushed at the earth clinging to my breeches.

  What next?

  Go home, of course.

  It seemed a good idea. Then it soured. They thought me dead. I’d terrify them. What would they think? How could I possibly explain myself? How could I explain Nora?

  How—I looked at the undisturbed mound of my grave—in God’s name had I escaped that? The flat marks where the spades had tamped the dirt down were still there, blurred a little where I’d rolled off. There were footprints all around, men’s and women’s. I had no difficulty imagining the mourners standing by it, listening to the service being read and weeping through the words. They were the real ghosts of this place, the living, with their grief twining about the low stones like sea mist. The dead were at peace; it was the ones they left behind who suffered.

  Where did that leave me, who was neither alive nor dead?

  Later. I would think on it later.

  My bones felt leaden; I was worn out by sheer emotion yet questions continued to pop into my head. I ignored them and trudged out of the churchyard. One foot before the other for a time, then I could rest. A little sleep in my own bed and I’d sort it all out for the others in the morning.

  God, what would I tell them?

  Later. Later. Later.

  Forsaking thought, I walked and let my senses drift. The road dust kicked up by my steps, the night insects at song, wind rustling the trees, these were most welcome distractions. Normal. Undemanding.

  “’Oo’s there?!”

  The intrusion of a human voice jerked me back to myself.

  “Speak up! I’ve a pistol on ye.” Despite the man’s bold declaration, there was a decided quaver in his tone.

  “Is that you, Mr. Nutting?” I called back. Something like relief flooded me as I recognized Mervin Nutting, the sexton. He was sheltered beneath the thick shadow of a tree, but I had no trouble spotting him. The puzzlement was that he could not see me standing not fifteen yards away in the middle of the road.

  “’Oo are ye?” he demanded, squinting right at me, then moving blindly on. He held a pistol, and his hand shook. “Stand forth and declare yerself!”

  “I’m right—” Oh, dear. Perhaps this was not such a good idea after all: confronting the man who had most likely dug my grave and filled it in again. My mouth snapped shut.

  “Come on! Show yerself!”

  I backed away a step. Quietly. Took another. My shoe crunched against a stone. Nutting swung in my direction with his pistol. He looked terrifi
ed, but determined. His clothing—what he wore of it—suggested that he’d recently been roused from bed. His house was close to the church; he must have heard my ravings and come to investigate. No wonder he was so fearful.

  “Come on!”

  Not this time, I thought, moving more carefully. Better to leave him with a mystery and to speculate at The Oak about hauntings than to reveal the truth and frighten him to death.

  “Vat is it, Herr Nutting?” A second man came up behind him, shrugging on a Hessian uniform coat while trying to keep hold of his lantern. He must have been quartered at Nutting’s house.

  “Thieves or worse,” was the reply. “Hold it high, man, so we can see.” He joggled the Hessian’s arm.

  “Vorsicht! Das Feuer!” the soldier yelped, worried about dropping it.

  The lantern may have helped them, but I perceived no real difference for myself. It was like a candle against full daylight. My eyes were used to the dark by now, but surely my vision should not be as clear as this.

  Emboldened by having company, Nutting advanced them onto the road. I saw every detail of their faces, even the colors in their clothes; in turn, they were limited to the radius of their feeble lamplight. I kept backing away, but was unable to judge the right distance to avoid its most outside reach.

  “There!” the Hessian cried. He pointed straight at me.

  Whether Nutting understood German or not was debatable, but he got the idea and brought his pistol to bear. He shouted an order. Or started to. I didn’t wait for him to finish and pelted down the road faster than I’d ever run before. The pistol roared behind me and I nearly fell flinching from it, terrified of being hit.

  Thank God Nutting was better at disposing of ale than shooting straight, and his companion was thankfully unwilling to proceed without more arms. I gained distance. Far behind, but still visible to me, they shouted for me to return. A most foolish request.

  Well, that had woken me right up. I slowed to a walk, albeit a quick one. I was not breathing hard. Good God in heaven, I wasn’t breathing at all.

  I groaned at the reminder.