Moving her clothes was hard; through the smell of dust and neglect, there was still a trace of my wife’s unique perfume that sprang from every garment I touched. That light hint of vanilla and roses that made a tight embrace so enticing filled my olfactory senses with memories, bringing me close to tears many times. I fought through them as best I could, happy to be done with the clothes and moved on to other items.
I looked at three clocks that I had made for her, sitting on the night table on her side of our bed, and decided not to start there. Some may think it is foolish to have three clocks in one room, especially since they were all beside one another, but Miriam loved them so much. I built each so that she was able to see the gears working, visible through glass housings. Each one ticked away seconds of the day in unison, a sound that always relaxed her as she sat up in bed, reading one of her books by lamplight. They were her favorite clocks, each set to a different time. One was for our city, Toronto, the second was for London, where she longed to visit, and the last was for the west coast where she had once visited with her father.
Leaving them, I went to her sewing room where she had spent so many hours. I approached the improved sewing machine. It was louder than I would have liked—a hydraulic system setup that ran on boiling water piped to a gearbox on the side that connected to pedals on the floor. The pedals made it easier for her to do all the work she so enjoyed, cutting down her dress making time by half. How envious her friends were!
I removed the tubing and went to lift the machine up, but as I did, the index finger on my right hand touched a sharp point on a cog, the metal cutting through the skin. I felt the sting and pulled my hand back, lifting the cut digit to my mouth and sucked on the blood, wanting to curse the machine more than my own clumsiness.
I looked down and saw there was blood streaked across the face of the machine and on the gears that had cut me. Staring at it with contempt, ready to shout at it, I heard a soft whisper. It was like wind slipping through a slightly open window, almost inaudible, but in the nearly dead silent house I was able to hear it and knew what it was.
“Miriam?” I called out, my voice quaking and seeming louder than it should be.
Listening, I heard the sound again; the sound was so quiet it could have been silk brushing the floorboards. I looked around the room, expecting to see an apparition, some nearly invisible version of my wife floating above the dark wood floors, her gauzy nightgown moving like cobwebs in a breeze. A cold child ran over my flesh, yet there was no ghost to be seen, no horrible blue-faced spectre of the woman I had loved and lost. The room was empty and silent. I was alone.
Calling out her name, I longed for her to answer me and that I would hear that sweet, melodic voice saying my name again. An hour I stood, blood falling unnoticed from my finger to the floor until the wound clotted; there was nothing to be heard. My resolve weakened. I let myself fall to the floor, weeping at her picture in my mind’s eye and wondered if I were truly losing a grasp on my sanity…or if it had been the ghost voice of my dead wife. It could have been a ghost, though I have never been a superstitious man. I went to church, believed in God, angels, and the Devil, but ghosts were the fodder of the stories my wife held dear. I did wonder if there was something wrong with me, some mental disorder brought on by the stress of trying to pack my wife’s belongings away. I am no expert on the way the human mind works, but I have heard of people enduring such great mental strain, suffering illness, loss, and seeing unspeakable things, causing infidelity of the eyes and ears. I feared that the same was happening to me.
Hours passed before I finally stood up, my joints aching, and I felt a sudden need for a drink. I left the room and poured a very full glass of scotch, drinking it fast as I pondered what had occurred. I went through all the possibilities, from the idea of an actual ghost to that of my own madness and thought any of the choices were possible. I am not an uneducated man, yet I found it hard to deduce a possibility that was not full of fantasy. I should have easily been able to eliminate the idea of a ghost haunting my house, especially that of my dead wife, yet I had heard her voice. It is as familiar to me as my own voice, of feet walking across a hardwood floor, or the sound of birds. It was her voice, and if it really were madness that had brought it to me, I was willing to welcome it just to hear her again.
Pouring another drink, I looked down and saw the forgotten cut on my finger, glad that it had stopped bleeding. It throbbed, but luckily wasn’t as deep as the amount of blood might have suggested. I downed my second drink and walked over to the sewing machine intent on surveying the mess I had made on it and the floor. A small pool lay on the ground where I had stood absently bleeding after hearing Miriam’s voice. The sewing machine itself was streaked with two lines of deep crimson. Most of the blood had landed on the gears, but some had also hit the face of it. I thought of how upset my wife would have been to see the mess I had made of her workspace, and then laughed to myself at the stupidity of the thought. After all, I would have never tried to move it if she were really here.
I wet my thumb with my tongue and wiped a bit of the blood away that was on the base, and then tried to wipe some of the blood that was on the gears. As my wet thumb moistened the blood on the mechanisms, smearing it more than wiping it away, the sound came again.
Soft.
Sweet.
It sounded as if someone was calling from the next room, but it was clearly coming from the room I stood in, almost as though it were coming from the machine.
I leaned my head toward it, hoping to catch a wisp of sound, but it faded as quickly as it had come. Frustration built up inside me, and I moved as though to smash my glass on the floor. With my arm raised, my eyes fell on my cut finger. An idea, ridiculous as it was, poked at my brain. Setting my glass on the floor, I put the cut finger to my mouth and bit into the freshly clotted wound so that blood began to flow once again. My mouth filled with the salty, copper tasting liquid. I held my bleeding finger over the machine, letting it drip first on the base, then on the top and finally on the gear work. It was then as the blood touched the mechanical teeth that the voice came back to me, stronger than the first times.
“Charles…”
I gasped and felt tears flooding to the surface, stinging and burning my eyes with their impending threats. I knew that I was not mad and that I had heard her wondrous voice whispering to me, and I felt my legs weaken with memories of my beautiful wife.
I was brought back to the first day I had met her, the day love found me. I had been invited to a dinner held by the school that I usually lectured at for my expertise in engineering. I decided to go alone, bachelor that I was.
Arriving on time as usual, I met with members of the faculty, politicians, benefactors of the school, and other elite members of local society. There were many beautiful women that surrounded me, dressed in spectacular bustled-gowns and hats piled high with every variety of ornament. Yet, for all their efforts, none of these women caught my eye quite the way that Miriam did.
I stood with the dean of the school, his wife, and two lawyers who donated money to the school every year when I saw her walk into the room, glowing with radiance that I had never observed before in another. Her face was delicate and pale, not a sickly pale as many of the near-starved society women had, but the pallor typical of Scottish women. She carried a platter, but not as hostess, as a servant. She was thus generally unnoticed by the guests, but I have never subscribed to these caste system politics. I was a romantic, raised to look for love wherever it may turn up as my father had. He was a judge with great power and influence, and yet my mother came from a lower-class family of dishwashers and laundresses. My father could have married any woman from numerous powerful families, but followed his heart and told me to do the same.
A week after seeing Miriam for the first time, I began to court her. We went to plays, strolled along the boardwalk, for picnics in High Park, and before long we were very much in love. Though the stories of our upbringings could scarcely
have been more different, we were matched—a perfect, complementary pair. The more she shared with me, the more I fell in love with her and before the end of the year I had asked her father for permission to marry her, and we were wed.
Our love lasted five wonderful years, where every day was better than the one prior. There were no fights to be had under our roof and no vicious words or regrets. It was a fairytale life that books try to capture, and most people think an impossibility. I made her trinkets—watches, clocks, and useful things, as well. As a scholar, I kept no servants. Besides, a ladies maid would have made Miriam uncomfortable. She was a practical woman and cherished these gifts as another would jewelry and flowers. Between her practicality and warm nature, I thought she would have made an excellent mother. We did want to have children, to explore that part of life that most married people long for, but fate had decided to deal us only one bit of misfortune in our otherwise happy lives.
At least, that was what we thought.
Then, she fell ill. It was cholera, the doctor said. Many people believed that the immigrants that were flooding into the city caused the deadly disease, but the fact was the city was full of disease because of the filth amassing along the roads and walkways. As soon as spring came and the snow-filled streets began to melt, waves of the cholera spread from the dead animals, waste, and bodily refuse that defrosted and filled the air with the sickening stench. I did my best to comfort Miriam, to tell her that she would get better, staying by her side day and night. I brought her new little gifts I had made to keep her spirits high, but saw her deteriorate with each passing day. Her pale skin went from a soft white to a waxy yellow, her eyes sinking further into her skull and my heart ached so much until one day she was just gone, passing as I slept in a chair next to her.
I have never recovered from her death. The devastation of her leaving me was worse than any loss I had experienced in my life. It was as though someone was sitting on my chest, making it hard to breathe…to move, to be the man I had been when she had been by my side.
That is why I did what I had when I heard her voice whispering from the cold mechanisms, bringing her back to me, giving me hope that she could come back.
I answered her calling, asking if it were really her, and her voice spoke again. But it had already become barely audible, even in the silence of the room. I spread more blood across the metal and as my essence wet the gears, they shivered slightly, and her voice became clear again.
“My Charles…I miss you, my love.”
For the next hour, I bled onto the machine; feeding my own needs to speak to my dead wife. To hear her voice telling me how she longed to be in my arms, to feel my hands running through her hair and to lay across my lap, reading from a favorite book. I told her much the same; how I wished I could smell her skin that bore the very essence of roses. To feel her small delicate hand in my own and to walk along the streets, arms entwined, the eyes of jealous men falling on Miriam. Yet, spilling so much of my own blood to hear her was taking its toll. My head began to feel light and I found myself falling back on the ground in a near faint. As my head touched the ground, I heard her say one final thing.
“Please don’t leave me alone in the dark. It’s so cold.”
I wish I had never heard that. In fact, I have spent so many days of late regretting that I ever cut my hand and heard her voice. You may well wonder at my regret; for grievous years, I wanted nothing more than this. I thought I did, at least. Grief is a strange thing; making a man do things he might never do if not for that overpowering sensation. In a way, it was as though I was someone confined, for months with no food other than the flies he could catch, and then tempted by a plate full of slightly rotting meats, which he knows are sprinkled with poison. Even though I knew that it could kill me, that urge that throbs and groans inside gave way to a sick compulsion.
My need for Miriam back in my life, to find some way to hold onto her in any way possible, made me do what I have done. The evidence of my mistakes sits below me in the cellar of this house I once shared with her. Down there is an abyss of regret, a cesspool of thoughts and actions no man should have. But it was for love that I acted. I want to write out my sins, confess my crimes, in the hope that somehow I will be forgiven and that whoever reads this may in some way understand my transgressions. You will have to forgive me for not wanting to go into certain details. If I do, I feel the villainy of my actions will shadow the fact that deep down I am a good person. A man blinded by love is a fool.
I slept dreamlessly. When I woke in the dark and silent house, my head swam and ached, but I had no doubt that what I had experienced was real. Though my rationale forbade it, I knew last night’s events were no dream.
Although I am an educated man, schooled at the University level, my specialty is engineering, not science, philosophy, or alchemy. I deal with tangibles—real things that I can touch, put together, or take apart. The idea of ghosts, demons, spirits, or a world beyond ours that can saturate this one was something I had never considered—the beliefs of people from the old country and religious zealots. And though I am a religious man, the only ghost I believed in was the Holy Ghost, not the idea of an apparition floating in the air like smoke. Yet, I could not deny what I had heard, so I began to dissect what had happened and tried as best I could to make sense of an impossible scenario.
Sitting on the floor replaying the scene again and again in my head, I believed that the ghost had somehow found a home in the gear workings of her sewing machine and that spilling my blood on it acted as a conductor, a passage for her to be able to speak to me. As a romantic, I told myself that she had come back to me, her spirit finding a home in those items that I had made for her, given to her as a symbol of my love. It was wonderful to think that she had cared so much for the gifts that they would be what called her back to this world, back to me. I thought this to be true and spent the day gathering all the items that I had improved for her, bringing them to the bedroom we had once shared. The room quickly became cramped with watches, clocks, baking tools, the sewing and washing machines, and many other little contraptions I had made or enhanced. Once the laborious work was done, I gathered a knife from the kitchen and went back to the room. I didn’t think of pain or fear, I just ran the blade across my right index finger and put my blood to the inner-workings on a clock. As soon as it made contact, I heard Miriam.
The conversation we had was long and personal. They were things I cannot share outside the confidence of husband and wife. I wish that last statement were completely true, but the truth can be clouded by emotion.
Hours passed and I became weak from the loss of blood again, feeling faint. From the beyond where Miriam was, her voice warned me against continuing to cut myself. I told her that I needed to hear her voice. I told her that I needed to have her close to me, that I missed her like no other man before me had ever missed anyone. Her voiced became thin, warning me that the continual injury would eventually kill me and that I needed to find another way. Her voice went away, and I tried to lift the knife to slice another finger open to bring her back to me, but my strength drained from me and darkness swept in.
I wish I could tell you that I let her go, knowing that if the bloodletting continued, it would be suicide, a sin, and I would never again see my lovely Miriam. Yet, I needed to hear her, longed so to feel the soothing presence of her in the room with me.
The following day, I made a plan and executed it before I could second-guess my actions.
I am hesitant now as I approach the things that shame me the most to write. Though there is an awareness that mistakes are made by the greatest of men, there is no pride in the actions that I took to ensure that I would be able to hear her again.
Disguising my status as a gentleman, I donned garments of a more common type, appearing as someone that might typically loiter near the ramparts of the city. I was headed to the dock in search of a prostitute. Though I had never before ventured to the waterfront known to house brothels and criminal
types, does not mean that I did not know of it. These things are passed on in the confidence of men of all situations. I intended to resolve this vague knowledge into actuality.
The stench of the lake permeated the area, full of seaweed and smelt fish, human waste that was pooling in the gutters, and of things dead and rotting that seemed to be around every corner. My boots were coated in layers of mud, but I was too busy watching for gaunt, shadowy men that leered at me from doorways and alleys, no doubt wishing to do me harm in hopes of relieving me of the coin purse I was carrying. My search quickly proved fruitful, however, and I made good on my intent.
Near a building that was barely standing, gutted from a fire that appeared to have ravaged it, was a large woman calling out to men passing by with promises of carnal pleasure. With caution, I approached her and made her a monetary offer to come to my house. She smiled at me and explained how she could not stray far from the brothel and her employer. I hadn’t expected that, being my first journey into the bowels of the city, but I knew that I had to make do. We walked towards a dark alley, and I tried to formulate a plan on the way.
My plan was simple enough. I would allow her to lead the way to somewhere dark and private, wait for her attention to be diverted, and then strike her with my cane, delivering blows until she was unconscious. Once that was done, I would drain her of enough blood to fill the silver flask that I carried in my coat pocket. It was not my original plan, but it would have to do.
As it turned out, beating someone unconscious is not as easy a task as one might think. I had never before been in a violent altercation and to avoid embarrassment to my ego, I will only say that though she was a lady, she was strong and determined. Having failed dreadfully, I ran from the ramparts, full of fear and a feeling of defeat. I needed to find a way to get a blood supply that was not my own, or would have to risk death. Possibly both.
Dark Light Book Three (Dark Light Anthology) Page 24
