Fitcher's Brides

by Gregory Frost

  “What about Lavinia?” Amy asked.

  She replied, “She’s gone.”

  Vern said, “All right, sister.”

  The three girls crept down the steps into the yard, but they hadn’t gone more than a few steps when a cluster of people barreled out of a dormitory door and saw them. “My Lord, it’s the angels!” They pointed and clung to one another. “The angels are come for us!” The group sprang apart, scrambling in every direction with their announcement. Kate said, “Go, hurry, get Papa. I’ll stay here and divert them.” Vern and Amy bolted for the village, running through the night like fabled monsters out of a bestiary.

  Shortly, more people came crowding around the sides of the house, rushing to see the angels. Kate reasoned that if they thought she was an angel, she would be an angel. Rather than trying to flee, she stepped boldly to the alarm bell and swung the clapper back and forth. Now no one would pay attention to Vern and Amy.

  More people crowded around her. They pressed in, some quivering with terror, some crying, so many that she could not bear their collective misery. They wanted salvation so much that they had lost their wits.

  “Listen to me, good people,” she said. “The world has not ended. It was never going to end the way you’ve been told. You were lied to, deceived.”

  “Who?” they cried. “Who deceived us?”

  “You deceived yourselves. You let one man promise he could save you, one villain—”

  She was grabbed from behind and spun around. Fitcher loomed over her in his black coat, his face blackly furious.

  Kate twisted out of his grip and shouted, “Look for yourselves, look at First Corinthians, fifteen-two. You are saved—”

  Fitcher hauled her around again. “Where is He? Why has He sent you instead? Behold you, and tell Him”—he turned her about again and swept his arm across the gathering—“here they all are, his most ardent worshippers, but they’re all mine now, they’ve given me their souls, every one, even the most virginal—” He stopped suddenly and craned his head. “Where is my wife? I want Him to see her especially. She’s the purest, the most perfect, but I have her, too. She promised me her soul tonight and I’ll have it. Where is she?”

  She replied, “I know where she is. I’ll show you, devil.”

  He grinned. Then he followed her up onto the porch and inside. The crowd moved to the porch but hesitated to go farther. They tried to fathom what the angel had been saying, tried to recall her verse.

  Crossing the foyer, Kate watched Fitcher as he followed her. Clearly he did not recognize her. She dismissed it as more proof of his madness, until they passed the large girandole mirror on the side wall and she caught a glimpse of herself and her husband. Her reflection glowed. Her feathers looked more like a gown, and nothing like how she saw herself. To him and to the Fitcherites, she had been transformed.

  Kate led him up the main stairs. People on the staircase fled before them and scurried onto the second floor as they continued to climb. Fitcher jabbered insanely behind her, “He makes me walk among them, these bovine golems of His. How easily I could collect them, every one, and He’d have nothing. He must let me in now, or I’ll smash His little world.”

  At the top floor she stopped and pointed down the hall. “There she is. She’s waiting for you.”

  Fitcher saw his wife in the bloody chamber. The door was thrown open and candles set on the floor burned all around her. She faced him, fearless it seemed, standing her ground. Her hands gestured, waved him forward, invited him in. His eyes narrowed. “So, Katherine, you, too. Daughter of Eve. You lie like all the others, you’re all the same, every one of you!” He strode hard, faster and faster down the hall. Kate ran after him. The doors of the rooms had closed. The silent men were gone.

  Fitcher burst into the bloody room and swiped at the enticing figure. His fingers caught the dress. It tore away from the frame of the candelabrum. The skull spun into the air and struck him. One of the glass thorns gashed his forehead. Underfoot, glass crunched, and he looked down at it, then up to where stained glass leading hung empty and contorted. His mouth opened—it seemed to Kate in fear. For the first time, he was afraid.

  Decayed fingers crawled wormlike out of the cauldron and grabbed on to him.

  “What is this?” he cried. He realized he’d been tricked and struggled to fight off the clawing hands, but more hands reached out from beneath the cauldron and took hold of his ankles. He faced Kate.

  In the doorway she replied, “Behold, thou art wiser than Daniel, and there is no secret we can hide from thee!”

  The hands drew shards of broken glass, shattered pieces of Eve and Adam, and drove them through his feet and his hands. The cauldron trembled and frothed. One disembodied skeletal hand pushed a long thin blade of crimson glass through the back of his neck and out between his teeth. Mouth pushed wide, Fitcher howled inhumanly and stretched out his impaled hands to the sky. His fingers writhed like snakes, curling, uncurling, grasping for power.

  Kate slammed the door on him. The keys were still in the lock where she’d left them. She turned the latch, then broke the glass key in half. With a loud crack it snapped off in the lock.

  She raced for the stairs. As she ran down them she yelled at everyone ahead of her to get out of the house. Before the charging, feathered avatar, the Fitcherites fled shrieking. She could see the glow of herself reflecting on every polished surface.

  They stumbled, crawled, and ran out the front doors ahead of her. She stopped upon the portico and surveyed the melee below. The crowd became aware of her. They turned, pointed, and fell silent, both inside and beyond the fence. Torches were raised. Perhaps three dozen smaller lights glowed among the crowd—candles, lit so that they might not meet their maker in darkness.

  As they beheld Kate, there was movement at the side of the house. The throng parted and Vern and Amy appeared, like creatures woven of light themselves, leading Mr. Charter and the group who’d been with him in the barn.

  “Open those gates,” Kate cried. “Let everyone out.” She went down the steps and snatched a torch from one of the men nearby. She carried it back to the front door and threw the torch inside, against the stairwell. It broke apart, scattering flames into the green drapery. Flames caught the dried flowers between the stairs and climbed angrily up the huge wooden cross.

  The crowd was bewildered—ordering them to be let out suggested that they’d been locked in and not the other way around. They looked at the sky, at the stars scattered above them, and at all the people pressed against the outside of the fence: people who had not perished. Midnight had come, and no one had perished.

  A man with one of the large tallow candles approached the front of the house. He sidled past Kate, then threw his candle into one of the tall windows. The glass shattered and the curtains burst into flame. Someone yelled, and as if it were a signal, a horde rushed the building. Candles, lamps, and torches sailed into the air, through the windows, into the parlors. Within minutes, the fire spread to the upper floors. Flames danced at the windows and caught the siding.

  The shades upstairs—would they be released? she wondered. Would the fire grant them escape? Cleansing? Would the dead wives know peace now? She prayed it would be so.

  Kate crossed to her father and sisters. Mr. Charter looked at her with no less amazement than did those around him, but he seemed to recognize her. He wrapped his arms around her and hugged her close. “At times it approaches to sublimity, oh, my dear,” he whispered in her ear before he released her.

  The glowing angels went forward, and the multitude, in its awe of them, parted to let them walk through the gates. Mr. Charter and those who’d prayed with him followed close behind, and the others, with a trembling Reverend Flavy in the lead, fell in step after him.

  A woman, as Kate passed her, reached through the bars and asked, “Will we be saved then?”

  Kate looked into her desperate eyes and answered, “There’s no one here can tell you that.”

  Epilo
gue

  SHE IS SEATED BESIDE HER FATHER. It’s the first time she has seen him since moving away. He lived, she thinks, not as long a life as she might have wished for him, but now he’s where he wanted to be for most of it—with her mother.

  Looking at his face, so composed in the coffin, she knows he’s found peace. The last part of his life he spent as a Quaker. She attended some of the meetings with him and knows that he found great resolve there, as well as the guidance he’d sought mistakenly from Elias Fitcher to help him navigate a life without the person he held dearest.

  The Pulaski house (does anyone call it that now?) is as she remembers it. Her sisters haven’t done much beyond the general upkeep to take care of it, despite still having bags of money in the root cellar from all those travelers who once came down this dead-end road in the hope of finding salvation. Gaslight has arrived in Jekyll’s Glen, but it won’t be coming here anytime soon. They still use lamps and candles, but at least they don’t have to make their own.

  Her daughter is in the other room right now talking to the two of them, everybody giving her time alone with the body. With her thoughts.

  So much changed after that night. So much of what happened remains untold. She finds she prefers it that way.

  Newspaper accounts across New England and as far south as Virginia reported the events of that night as “the False Rapture.” So many people were tarred and feathered, beaten or hanged for having lied about the end of the world. It’s so strange, she thinks, that so many people were furious because their world hadn’t ended.

  The destruction of Harbinger House and the presumed death of its charismatic leader proved to be nothing but footnotes to the main event. All that remained of the house afterward were foundation and chimney stones, thrusting like deformed fingers out of the rise on which it had sat.

  The aspect of the story that has remained alive afterward is the account of the three glowing angels who led the way out of the fire. At least, that’s how people remember it—people who weren’t there.

  She still comes across references to “the night of the angels” in articles as far away as Boston. Nowadays they’re usually in spiritualist pamphlets, which she throws away whenever she receives one.

  As if knowing her thoughts, her daughter suddenly races into the darkened room and asks, “Mama, have you ever seen angels?”

  She knows exactly where this has come from, who has put this question in her child’s head. A moment later, her husband comes quietly in and lifts their daughter up into his arms, saying softly, “This isn’t the time, darling. Your mother’s having some time alone right now with your grandfather’s memory. You come outside with me and we’ll play in the snow.” He trades an apologetic smile with her. She mouths the words “Thank you” to him.

  Those two witches, she thinks. They won’t dare come out here now from the kitchen. They’ll hide back there like the two mad harpies they are.

  There’s so much the newspapers never reported. So much no one else knew. For instance, no report ever mentioned those members of the community who escaped the conflagration by fleeing into the fields, and who claimed to have seen the glass pyramid explode like a volcano on top of the house, hurling a fireball into the night sky, which ascended until it was lost from sight, and never came down. She didn’t see it herself, but she believes it.

  For the first few days after the failed Advent, the family was too busy to discuss what had happened. There was no time to mourn Lavinia at all. When day broke on October 15, a rope bridge was strung across the gorge, and many of those who’d escaped from the Harbinger side stayed on to help with the dead and dying below.

  She and her sisters, all scrubbed clean and pink as newborns, worked through the whole day. They ripped sheets into strips for bandages, helped carry the wounded back to the house, made splints and tied tourniquets. If anyone recognized them as brides of Fitcher, they didn’t let on, but the vast majority had probably only seen Kate and then only at the turnpike. Over the next few days the sisters did encounter faces they recognized. The ones she didn’t know, like Sarah, who seemed to have lost her wits, the other two pointed out to her. There was Reverend Flavy, presiding ineffectually over the sorting of the dead in the gorge; and the man with the teamster mustache, who oversaw the clearing of a cart track from Mill Creek Road to the path leading into the gorge, and whose name they never learned; and also the slight, bearded stranger she’d seen once in Jekyll’s Glen, who wasn’t even part of the community but without hesitation pitched in and helped carry the bodies out of the gorge to the cleared track. The stevedores, too, all brought their wagons down the track and solemnly piled the many unidentified bodies on board, then took them back to town. Their procession through the woods looked peculiarly medieval to her. She has a mental picture of them rolling through the trees like a train of men carting off plague victims.

  It was in the woods between the path and her house that she encountered the young man. He’d been struck upon the head a great, bleeding gash, but had no memory of how, or where he was. His parents were somewhere in the area but he didn’t know where. She took him home and ministered to him along with the many others. At least he remembered his name, which was Orlando, and she felt as if she’d rescued a knight out of legend. For her, that was the best thing to come out of it all.

  It was a few days before the injured and exhausted former Fitcherites cleared out of their house. Some would only go as far as Jekyll’s Glen before settling down. Orlando and his folks numbered among those.

  She remembers the night she and her sisters rested together again for the first time since Fitcher had entered their lives. She asked them what it had felt like to be dead. The two exchanged an odd, nervous glance and then denied having any memory of death at all. She knew they were lying. She knows it still. She knows that they could tell her right this minute, but that they won’t. Something in their relationship was changed forever by those events. Although she rescued them, she isn’t allowed to know what she rescued them from.

  Those two became inseparable afterward.

  Once when she was just finished sweeping their father’s room, she caught the two of them seated together on what had originally been her bed. They were whispering and rapping on the wall. Nothing seemed to be answering. She watched awhile from the doorway, then very deliberately she broke the broom handle across her knee with a loud Crack! that made them both leap to their feet. They were furious and resentful, but they never tried talking to the wall again while she was around.

  They probably do now, she thinks. She doesn’t really want to know.

  They still have never married, and she knows they never will. She suspects that they are probably both mad, but not dangerously so.

  Outside there are black gum, basswood, elm, and maple trees where the road used to wind on to Harbinger. The cart track that was cut to Mill Creek Road became Falls Road, the only access to the gorge now. No one goes to the far side of it anyway, because of the stories of the haunted ghost town lost somewhere back in the woods there. It, like the angels, has become part of the local lore, like Mr. Irving’s headless horseman elsewhere in New England.

  In a few days, after they’ve buried her father, they will go out and cut down a tree for Christmas. Her husband will handle the ax, and they’ll be more than happy to let him, she’s sure. Her sisters will bring out the decorations for it—all the ornaments with the trio of angels painted on them, that match the quilts on the beds, the needlepoints on the walls. The two of them sell the quilts, which act alone keeps the tale of the angels alive, she supposes.

  No one ever gets the real story, however. Kate’s heard the tales her sisters tell, and they’re nothing like what happened at the gorge, nothing like the real way the three of them were transported across it. She may be the only living soul in her right mind who knows. The two of them either have no memory of that night’s final miracle or have suppressed it as they’ve done their other disquieting recollections.

 
Just as she, estranged by their collusion, will never share with them how she climbed across the rope bridge to Harbinger that first winter and sowed the grounds with salt.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  FITCHER’S BRIDES

  Copyright © 2002 by Gregory Frost

  Introduction copyright © 2002 by Terri Windling

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Edited by Terri Windling

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Frost, Gregory.

  Fitcher’s brides / Gregory Frost.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN: 978-1-4668-2157-6

  1. Finger Lakes Region (N.Y.)—Fiction. 2. Religious communities—Fiction. 3. Spouses of clergy—Fiction. 4. Remarried people—Fiction. 5. Stepmothers—Fiction. 6. Sisters—Fiction. 7. Clergy—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3556.R59815 F58 2002

  813'.6—dc21

  2002028583

  1 Perrault’s collection was originally published under the name of his son, and presented itself as a book of bedtime tales from “Old Mother Goose”—but a “faux naif” style was often adopted by the salon writers, who nonetheless intended their work for an audience of fellow salonnières and other artistocratic, educated adults. Embedded within the tales were sly, pointed critiques of life under Louis XIV.

  2 Italian Folktales, Italo Calvino (1956).

  3 The unexplained name Fitcher, according to Marina Warner, “derives from the Icelandic fitfugl, meaning ‘web-footed bird,’ so there may well be a buried memory here of those bird-women who rule narrative enchantments.” (Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, 1994).