Fitcher's Brides

by Gregory Frost

  Then, in the hour before sunset, the bridge across Jekyll’s Gorge collapsed.

  The bridge had not been built to support the weight of the two hundred people who were on it at the time. The braces gave out.

  With an explosive crack the center split and both halves tipped the screaming, wailing crowd into the widening gap in the middle. Finally the whole structure gave way. The push from the back continued, and another three score were forced over the side before the mob realized what had happened and could stop their momentum. The bridge hit the bottom of the gorge with an explosion as loud as a volley of cannons. A few souls instinctively sprang after their tumbling loved ones, committing themselves to the same sure fate. The rest began racing like frantic ants along the edge of the gorge in search of a path to the bottom—some to give aid, but most in a desperate hope of finding another way to the opposite side. They couldn’t have come this far just to be damned by a collapsing bridge. It wasn’t fair!

  People clinging to the debris of the bridge were hauled up. From below came cries for help. It was impossible to tell if these were from people who’d been camped below or from survivors of the fall—the smoke from the fires at the bottom obscured the view. Galls went up for rope. Some people wanted to climb down for a rescue, others to make a new bridge across while there was still time. But no one had any rope—most everyone had divested themselves of practical items on this, the last day of the world—and so a handful of reluctant converts began to fight their way through the teeming crush of crowd back toward Jekyll’s Glen, where they might buy enough hemp to get across the divide.

  The thunder of the bridge landing in the basin of the gorge made the ground shake at Harbinger House and, because of the nature of sound in the gorge, seemed to come from all sides at once. Random panic followed, fueled by the belief that the explosion was a first sign of the end. People who’d only just settled themselves in the woods came flying out, wild-eyed, terrified. Others wailed and fell to their knees, hands clasped to the sky as they begged for their salvation.

  It was another half an hour before the first of the injured was carried to the front gate and the story of the disaster made its way through the community. The call went out for aid. Someone hitched horses to a wagon and drove around to the gate only to find the road so congested that they couldn’t go any farther. At Harbinger there was plenty of rope, and coils of it were rushed out to the gates, tossed into the wagons. As the gates parted, many who hung on the outside tried again to push through, and a battle raged until some had been hammered unconscious or dead and the rest pushed back to let the rope bearers and wagons out.

  At the lip of the gorge, the arrival of the rope was cheered at first. The men tied their ropes to the remaining struts, then threw them over the side. Those who were alive and unharmed at the bottom secured the ropes to those in need of aid. The laborious process of hauling up the injured began. It became complicated, as those with broken ribs had to be hauled up by being tied by the ankles and pulled up upside down. No one could think how else to get them safely to the top. Meanwhile, on the far side, the cheers had turned into angry demands that the ropes be thrown across the gorge so they could get to Harbinger. Their demands were absurd—no one could have thrown a rope that far—but they were frantic to reach their safe haven.

  The bodies were carried along a thin lane through the midst of the crowd. Some who were light and not so injured were passed overhead like participants in a grotesque festive game.

  Word reached Fitcher as he was sitting down to his meal. He got up and apologized to his flock that he would not be able to share a final supper with them. He raised his eyes to the ceiling and said, “Lord, I should have closed the gates before but for my concern for the many who might not join me. It’s I who’ll answer for their having fallen into the pit.” Then he went out. Some of those at the tables—Mr. Charter and Lavinia among them—got up and followed him. Kate, closest to the door, led them.

  People had already been laid out on the floor of the crowded foyer, attended to by others she didn’t recognize—most of whom had been all too happy to carry the wounded into Harbinger in order to gain swift entrance for themselves. Fitcher and the rest of his entourage filed out the front door.

  Attending to the group, Kate said, “Bring them upstairs.” She took a man who was hobbling on one foot, put his arm over her shoulder, and helped him to the stairs. They led the way up. On the second floor she helped him sit against the wall, then pulled out her keys.

  It took her a few moments to unlock the first door, but once she had identified the right key, the other rooms were easy to open. Those following behind her had to set down their fellow travelers and drag trunks and crates aside to gain access to the beds and sofas in the rooms. More people were coming up the stairs, bringing more wounded. Some they placed on top of the crates. The bedding was stripped and brought into the hall, and mattresses laid on the floor. Community members arrived—three men, who announced that they were surgeons and immediately fell to performing as such. They barked orders down to the first floor, calling for bandages and splints. Someone began ripping up the bedsheets.

  Kate came back along the far side of the hall, unlocking the last of the doors. She returned to the main group of the wounded just as one child, lying on his back upon a crate, was pronounced dead.

  She asked one of the surgeons if she should open more rooms on the next floor.

  “No,” he told her. “We’ll make them comfortable with what’s here. Don’t want to spread ’em out too far anyway. Better we can attend to them all in close proximity. We won’t be sawing at anyone. Bandage ’em up is all we’re going to do.” He patted her shoulder, smiling. “They only have to hold up till midnight, after all.” He thanked her for opening the rooms and added, “Best let us work now. Some of these broken bones do have to be set.”

  Kate withdrew then. She stood awhile at the rail, overlooking the foyer. It seemed that the first wave of wounded had all arrived. No one else was bursting in. She noticed then the blood on her skirt from the wounded man she’d helped. In some way she couldn’t explain, the sight of it cemented her will to act.

  She ran to her room. She was going to change the skirt, and removed the egg from its pocket, placing it on the bed. She stopped. There wasn’t time to change. She didn’t know how long he would be gone or how much she would have to search for the evidence she wanted. She pushed the egg beneath her pillow, then hurried out.

  The top floor of the house was deserted. This would have seemed stranger were it not for the atmosphere there: It was almost impenetrably dark and uninviting. The drapery at the top of the stairs barred even the low light of the sun from entering. Amy had asked rhetorically where Fitcher lived, and Kate could only speculate that he must have a room here at the top, unless he truly lived in that pyramid of his, that construct of magic numbers and powers. It was glass, and she suspected that the glass key opened it. She wanted that answer, but she also wanted to know what lay behind all of these doors. Why, as she had wondered before, was there an entire floor of the house empty when the people below could not find enough room to sit?

  At the first door, she fumbled in the dark with the keys until she thought she would never find the right one. When finally the door unlatched, she thought it must be a trick, because she’d hardly turned the key. Charily, she pushed open the door.

  The room lay all in shadow. Unlike her room and those of the floor below, there was an alcove inside here, a narrow hall leading to the main part of the room. She could make out shapes of the furnishings, of a table sporting a tin candelabrum, of a bed and a dresser. It smelled as ancient as a tomb, though. As she moved into the main part of the room, she heard something scuttle into the corner. She could just make out the shape of a man squatting, with his arms crossed over his head as if to hide from her. “I’m sorry,” she said, and was going to withdraw, but changed her mind. What if the man was someone she knew? Immediately she thought of Pulaski.

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bsp; She crossed to a window that was heavily draped and shuttered. She pushed back the drapes and opened the shutters. Low red light poured in, and she turned around to discover who it was crouching there.

  In the light she saw clearly. Every shape, every piece of furniture, every suggested detail of the room, had vanished. There were no furnishings—no chairs or tables, no bed. It was a cadaverous room. The walls were chalky and cracked. The floorboards looked to have rotted in places. A spider bounced on its web in the corner beside her.

  The crouching man in the corner had also vanished.

  A ruddy glow came from the narrow alcove leading to the door, as if a fire burned out in the hall. It was, she thought, as if the room had been transported to another place. She sensed instinctively that these were the rooms of her dreams, the places where the spirit had brought her. The hall outside was the dark hallway down which she’d been propelled.

  Kate closed the shutters and pulled the drapes together again. When she turned, all the shapes that had been there before were back. She retraced her steps, dragged her fingers through the dust on top of the table, touched the cold metal of the candelabrum, her senses recording the details of things that were not there, or only formed in the umbra of dreams. She closed the door, locked it. What were these rooms then? Repositories for ghosts? How did he make this happen?

  Her heart was hammering in her breast. She would not open the other rooms beside this one. She did not need to meet the rest of his dead men.

  She felt for the glass key and walked into the depths of the gloom. There must be some lock it matched. She had nearly reached the end of the hall before she made out the recessed doorway there. This was a different sort of door from the rest. She took a step into the entryway. Her skin rose in gooseflesh from a sudden blast of arctic air.

  The keyhole emitted an incongruously molten glow. Its light struck her keys, and they glittered. The keyhole was large, easily identifiable as the match for the glass key, and she fit it into the lock. The air seemed to breathe around her, to sigh. The door latch clicked as it released, such a small sound for so black and immense a door.

  Kate pushed the slender handle and opened the door a crack to peer into the smoky red room. The first narrow glimpse revealed strange devices of torture on the far wall—pincers and tongs, a flaying knife, and a cage to fit over someone’s head with a locking band around the neck. A mist swirled around them, pushed by the air leaking into the chamber. A smell emerged, a salty, coppery stink at once familiar and foreign.

  When she pushed the door wider she saw the first torso, and then the second. Beneath them stood a black wrought-iron candelabrum bearing six thick candles. “My God,” she said. The words simply escaped her.

  The door swung back until she could see the whole monstrous abattoir, and she had to hold on to the jamb for fear she would collapse in the face of it.

  The torsos were all female, in various states of decomposition.

  The weird light filtered down through a stained-glass window in the middle of the ceiling, a portrayal of Adam and Eve and the Snake of Eden. A bronze cauldron stood beneath it, splashed by the reds and greens of the glass. Tendrils of hair like strands of moss hung off the side, bony fingertips protruded just above the rim. She knew without even crossing the room what the cauldron contained, knew it as if her soul flew ahead of her body on the icy steam of her breath and peered down into the bloody depths at the six blind faces. Beside it, assorted hands and feet jutted like the handles of freakish walking sticks out of a squat barrel. An ax leaned against the barrel as if it had just been set down. The floor all around was sticky-wet with blood and gore.

  Kate grabbed the handle and pulled the door closed. She locked it, then backed carefully out through the layer of cold air and down the hall. She held the keys rigid at her side. Her mind whirled like clockwork gearing, adding up the facts, insulating her from the grip of terror by seeking a solution: six torsos, Vern and Amy and four more besides. Wives, they must all be wives. How easy it was for him, with his power of persuasion, his position as emissary, messenger, angel of the Lord. Who wouldn’t wish their daughter allied with one so exalted? Who could have refused his compassionate advances? Escaped his treacherous traps?

  One day the ax just fell.

  This house where no one and everyone lived, where rooms could vanish in the light of day, where Christ was a glass ornament—what was this place if not hell?

  Kate knew she’d been gone dangerously long and hurried back to her room. The surgeons were still at work, though most of the injured had gone. She stood beside her bed while her brain spun.

  When had he begun to take his brides? Would there be others in other places, the landscape of proselytizing sprinkled with the blood of more women? How many had he sampled? She’d asked and he had eluded her question. “Enough” was all he said. More than Vern and Amy—at least five or six here, and he meant for her to join them. She might survive awhile, but his goal was clear. She doubted his promises of any next life, doubted his predictions, yet knew he had powers beyond those of other men. He was mad, yes, but he was much more as well. What she had to do was shake her father’s belief in the madman until it cracked, show him the truth before the hour—

  She sensed rather than heard the presence behind her. As she turned, she pocketed the keys in her skirt.

  Fitcher looked her over, a predator sniffing his prey. “My dear, where have you been?”

  “Why, I attended to some of the injured across the hall while you went out to the bridge.” She saw him looking at her skirt, at the blood on the hem. His gaze, rising to meet hers, was vulpine. Kate said, “I helped a man with a broken leg up to this floor, where the surgeons set his break. He was bleeding. I didn’t notice it at the time, and when I did, I returned here to change.” She undid the sash of the skirt, and reached behind her to unfasten the buttons; as she did, she sat on the bed, and let one hand stray beneath the pillow.

  “Ah, I see. Well, I shouldn’t trouble you after such a shock. But I wonder might I see my keys and my little marble egg?”

  “Of course,” she replied, as if it were the most natural request in the world. She drew the keys from her pocket and produced the egg in her other hand.

  Fitcher looked at them both. He took the egg and rolled it over in his palm before placing it again in hers. He held up the glass key as if to admire it. A look of wonder shaped his features. “I’m so glad, dearest Kate, to finally be wedded to you. You alone, untarnished by Eve’s rashness. The perfect flower. We have but a few hours remaining, so dress as you might for a ball, for some gala event, for it certainly shall be so. I probably won’t be with you now much before the end. There are so many yet whose good souls I must reap. This tragedy at the bridge makes me keenly aware that I do not wish to lose many more. We have thousands upon thousands here, you know. You will be all right?”

  “I will.”

  “I did not doubt it. You are worth them all, my dear.” He leaned forward and gave her a kiss before he left. She never flinched, even as she tasted his deceit.

  Thirty-one

  THE TIME ROLLED ON INTO THE last night of the world, and the community of Harbinger came unhinged. Contemplation of impending Rapture seemed more than most minds could bear, and a kind of diabolical hysteria swept through the gathered thousands. By torchlight, candlelight, and lamplight they took to dancing, pockets of the faithful leaping and whirling in ecstatic freedom, while their fellows played tunes that went faster and faster. Some people collapsed from the dancing, but it didn’t deter the rest from continuing. Exhaustion kept the brain from thinking, from having to acknowledge the terror of the heart.

  Others who didn’t join in the dancing spent their time clustered, kneeling, reading and praying, making their spirits pure for the Parousia of the Son of Man. Families gathered together to pray and await the end. Preachers in the community took their cues from Fitcher’s sermon of that morning, and berated the listeners for their innate sinfulness, particu
larly the women, who were tarred as “Jezebels” or “harlots,” and none of whom objected. The air throbbed with music, sermonizing, and wild rhapsodizing voices.

  A group wearing thin cotton nightshirts and carrying long birch switches took over the Hall of Worship, where they set to flogging one another upon the altar. One of the squatters they displaced from his pew stole the glass skull of Christ, which he carried into a corner of the foyer. He sat beside it, engaged with it in a secretive dialogue.

  Kate found her husband and asked where her father was. Fitcher replied that he’d sent Mr. Charter out to preach to those people camped in the pastures and fields. He was a lieutenant—he had duties. As did she. “Those such as ourselves are charged with obligations that transcend our own corporal desires. You shall have eternity with your family, after today.” She did not reply that she understood the truths encoded in his words, the tricks he was playing. She let it stand. What mattered was that her father was safe for now inside the gates.

  Late in the evening a small boy fell from the landing of the main staircase inside the house. Kate heard cries of alarm, and rushed into the foyer to find the parents kneeling over his body as they wailed and clutched one another. When she looked up, she saw Fitcher leaning over the rail of the landing. From there he descended almost casually, as though nothing that happened from now on could surprise or affect him. The crowd parted for him. He consoled the couple with the promise that their boy had gone ahead of them by hardly an hour—he pointed to the tall clock on the landing. It showed the time as five minutes before eleven. The parents and the body of their child were taken into the keeping room. Seeing Kate, Fitcher shook his head and muttered to her, “Oh, that boy” as if the child had done something mischievous rather than fatal. He took a step, then paused to consider her approvingly. She had, as he’d requested, dressed as for a ball, in a silk dress with a tiered skirt and an off-the-shoulder neckline. Fitcher purred, “One hour, dear Kate,” then walked after the parents.