The Heads That Rolled

by Lucille Moncrief

  What mist, what terrible mist swirled in the Parisian dark! Pierre, his anger dampening his fear and appealing to his baser nature, shook within his soft, obese frame. His bones rattled, and his muscles quaked. There, beneath the misty foot of the grape arbour, was his wife, enthralled by some creature.

  A heat that rivalled the thickening swirl of the mist crawled up Pierre’s quivering jowls, and the flame of his candle quickened, jumping and skipping to a fast rhythm that echoed the frantic beating of his overburdened heart.

  Leaning against the worn post of the grape arbour, Lorrette was enraptured in the arms of some otherworldly fiend, its hair and skin in hues as time worn as the silver birch.

  Pierre’s breath froze within his shuddering frame, and he began to close the door, but something below his solar plexus compelled him to keep watch like an invisible cord hooked him to the horrifying scene unfolding beneath the grape arbour. His mouth opened and closed silently around his agitated breath as he stood, transfixed. An inkling to bash the fiend’s head in with the heavy copper head of his cane tugged at Pierre, and if the thing which cradled his wife had been a man, he would have. But Pierre, despite his quick temper, was only a timid man. Some would call him intelligent, but most would deem him a coward.

  Pierre would have felt a terrible coward of a man if what happened next were not so, but what happened next solidified in his pickled mind that his wife, indeed, enjoyed the fiend’s libidinous effect.

  A sound, gentler than the mewling of a newborn lamb, drifted through the dark. Pierre kept watching through widened eyes above the candle flame as the fanged creature tore at his wife’s nightgown, and kissed her heaving breast. Her back arched as the fiend traced a gentle hand down the swell of her bosom to her stomach, and splayed his spindly fingers across the rapid rise and fall of her midsection. His shoulders were broad as he cradled her there in the nebulous mist.

  Pierre’s mouth slammed shut as his wife pressed her body against the creature’s palm.

  The creature whispered something within her gentle ear, and she turned her head to face the house, her eyes closed. It, that thing, pressed its nose to the flesh of her neck, closed its eyes as it inhaled the scent of her skin, and its eyes snapped open, spinning in rays of steel. It lifted her hair from her ear, placing the thick, dark hank against the front of her neck as she smiled with her eyes still closed.

  Pierre’s stomach flipped, threatening his dinner to heave. He swallowed hard, remembering what was below his wife’s ear—a mark, a darkened fold of flesh. His heart beat in double time as he watched the creature’s fangs elongate, growing, and it looked straight through the crack of the door at Pierre. A shot of burning heat, lightning, ripped through Pierre’s very soul, and he dropped the candle. As it clattered to the floor and extinguished, Pierre knew that beast’s gaze all too well—the same tilt of the chin, the familiar angle of the brow, and the intensity of the stare was the same face that looked at Pierre from within his son’s countenance. The fiend smirked at him as it bit into his wife’s flesh and suckled from her witch’s teat.

  Pierre’s dinner promptly made its hurried appearance there in the darkened hallway, and his wife’s crazed mirth echoed throughout the streets of Paris as she erupted into a harrowing fit of laughter.

  Holding his stomach, wiping the sick from his chin on his shirtsleeve, Pierre slammed the door shut and fled from the hall and into the kitchen, past the larder. He wrenched open the door to the servants' stairwell, and upon looking up at the top, another flame flickered within the darkness. His son Sebastien held aloft a candle from which the eerie light emanated.

  That gaze . . . Pierre’s world quickly spun into nothingness, and he fell at the foot of the stairs into an unconscious heap.

  Pierre swallowed hard in the daylight of his draper’s shoppe as he tried to push away the memory of that horrifying night—the night he learned his wife, and neither his son, were his own. Nor were they of God: disgusting, filthy fiends and creatures of some dark corners of the shrieking night. Pierre dared not think too long of what they were, and he rued the day France stopped hunting and cutting down witches.

  But, to his estimable credit, Pierre Francois Quartermayns was a calculating and patient man. He’d strategically kept distance between himself and the two people he was tasked to provide for—the witch, and the fiend’s seed—for decades now. Although, even if they had been of a godly, human origin, Pierre Francois would have hardly been classified as a warm and loving father besides.

  In the silence of his shoppe, Pierre bit the inside of his cheek and grimaced at the thought of what he’d sacrificed for those two ingrates—the inhuman liars—over the years. That boy, now a man, was nothing like the one he’d dared call father.

  Pierre inhaled sharply. No, he’d never give his business to Sebastien. Although, he’d led him to believe that he’d never set him free from below his watchful gaze or from beneath his iron thumb, which was really just Pierre’s far-reaching purse strings.

  While Pierre had withheld his approval for any trade or woman Sebastien wished to have for himself, Pierre had insisted, somewhat duplicitously, that Sebastien was required, obligated even, to take over the drapery business. Pierre would never give his blessing nor his financial backing to him otherwise.

  Pierre, a cold man, was a liar as well. And his pathological myopathy, his ironclad self-preservation, kept him from seeing the evil in himself which he so often sniffed out like a crazed bloodhound in others.

  Oh, it wasn’t because Pierre actually wanted to keep the business all in the "family." No, it was because he couldn’t stand to see that Sebastien happy. His grin was the same as that fiend that visited his whore of witch wife every full moon.

  Pierre’s rage got the better of him for one moment, and he spat upon the floor of his beloved shoppe. His spittle slid and dripped down into an open whorl within the black walnut floors. Grimacing harder than before, he sighed. His jowls, even more generous than the night of that fateful discovery, quivered as he rubbed his eyes. Exhaustion came over him, for almost thirty years of bitter planning was about to culminate in the ultimate denouement at that evening’s dinner.

  Pierre lifted his gaze from beneath his palm and glanced out the front windows of the shoppe as the marriage clock behind the clerk’s desk struck two. Only six more hours until he was rid of those two fools. His lips twitched, vacillating between a grin and a frown, as he fluffed the curls of his peruke sitting upon the faceless display head.

  He’d learned of the terrible, awesome fate which befell most vampire halflings within the twilight of their adolescence by a delightful accident. Pierre, while awaiting a meeting with a renowned lacemaker in Devonshire only a few short months before, had found a filthy tome upon the wormy bench seat of the dark, smoky inn in which he awaited the lacemaker’s arrival.

  Malleus Maleficarum, The Witch Hammer, was carved into its droopy, weary face. But something whispered within the book’s iron hinges as Pierre snapped them open—a sharp, serrated knife’s edge of ill-intent, a lash of whips, and the howl of the tortured who once thought they were untouchable.

  Glancing around, Pierre quickly set The Witch Hammer upon his lap and riffled through the pages in circumspect curiosity. A shout of merriment and the clink of glasses raised above the bar on the opposite side of Pierre’s dark table did not break him from his concentration, for the pictures and the words in ornate Latin scrawl sang from the pages and on into his eager eyes and ears.

  The halfling vampyre, the witch’s son, would devour his mother upon his awakening unless she could delay it by the powers of a mandrake root nestled beneath his slumbering head.

  Pierre had promptly slammed the book shut, and a feeling of glee, but terror, stirred within his breast. He left the inn, the lacemaker of Devon far from his mind.

  He’d found that mandrake root, indeed. But of course, he wasn’t so foolish as to remove it completely, nor destroy it.

  He entered that interloper, Sebas
tien’s—even now the name made him spit—room every night for the last three months and removed the mandrake root, taking it into his bedchamber. The twisted root resembled an infant if the devil could birth babies. Pierre would hold it hostage in a sack of hessian fabric until morning, then promptly replace it once Sebastien left the house to partake in Lord-knew-what mischief with that traitorous, little malcontent, Therese Hortense Bellinger.

  Oh, how Pierre hated her, and all her foolishness. Political upheaval was horrendous for business. Pierre cared not a whit for who or what was in charge of the nation. It could have been a goddamned dog for all Pierre was concerned. He wanted nothing more than the price of fine cloth to remain stable, and for his patronage to worry about the latest fashions, not which egotistical royal was currently invading Belgium or declaring how many slack-jawed angels could dance upon the head of a pin. He’d already alerted his contacts in the fledgling, paranoid government of Mademoiselle Bellinger’s dissent.

  Pierre pursed his lips and frowned, glancing at the clock once more. Once he began to remove that mandrake root, Sebastien’s awakening was afoot. Tonight, the night of the blue moon, Sebastien would fully awaken to the hungry snarls of the beast within him, and Lorrette would become desiccated to a hollow husk, as empty and dry boned as her vanity and lip service to morality had been all these years. At least, if The Witch Hammer was to be believed. And believe it Pierre did, for what choice did he have? The fact that he’d found that mandrake root under Sebastien’s bed proved the book must have been true.

  Pierre gave a curt nod to the clock as if he wished to receive the blessing of someone or something for the deceit he was about to render upon the woman he’d legally promised to call his wife, and their son—his lineage.

  Oh, but he did not forget about Sebastien. His was a fate as bad as Lorrette’s, perhaps worse.

  Straightening the lapel of his redingote, Pierre tore his gaze from the yellowed face of the wedding clock. His footfalls were a clipped and determined staccato, beating back his hesitation with a drumbeat to drown out his niggling guilt, and potential regret. The door to the shoppe rattled as Pierre opened and closed it, and he disappeared into the busy streets of Montmartre.

  V

  The Quartermayns family took dinner in the upstairs hall at a half past eight. Tallow candles and oil lamps cast impressions of the flames against the tawny plaster walls, and the manservant, Victor, held fast to the edge of the octagonal chamber with his back ramrod straight. He peered down the tip of his aquiline nose with one bushy, grey eyebrow raised in a contemptuous arch at the elder Quartermayns. Victor cared not for the old man’s deceit and disgusting ability to bear offence for decades, but Victor knew from whose hand the gold Louis poured, and it was not from the purse strings of the woman, nor the ink-stained fingers of the younger Quartermayns.

  A fork clattered against a silver tray, and Victor straightened his eyebrow along with his back. He peered out the wavy, poured-glass transom above the window to his right as the sun disappeared entirely behind the backdrop of a city tearing at its very own neck.

  “Mademoiselle Trebuchet tells me it is a dreadful sound,” the woman, Lorrette, said before placing down her knife and taking a sip of the wine.

  The savoury smell of stuffed pheasant filled the air, and Victor’s stomach rumbled. The younger Quartermayns dropped his fork along with his chin and placed his fisted right hand against the cleft at the base of his rib cage.

  Lorrette put down her wine glass, her forehead wrinkling as she gazed at her son from across the table. “Sebastien, are you all right?”

  Victor’s jaw ticked as Sebastien raised his eyes to his mother’s face but was unable to meet her gaze. Pierre shoved a biscuit into his mouth and began to chew loudly as his lips threatened to spread into a grin.

  Victor noticed that the younger man’s face had paled.

  Sebastien gave a weak, quivering smile and waved his mother off. “I’m fine. But all this talk of guillotines at the dinner table doesn’t agree with my appetite.” He picked up his fork and began to pry apart a cooked carrot.

  “Oh.” His mother sighed. “My apologies.” Her lips twitched as she picked up her glass again.

  Pierre spoke around a mouthful of dry biscuit. “My dear, please. Sebastien’s always had a bit of a weak stomach.” Flakes of the biscuit flew from his puffy lips: thick, slimy, and about as unappealing as two slugs.

  Lorrette made a small "hm" sound, her eyes narrowing for a moment as she set down her glass and picked up her fork. A needling, prickling sensation played upon her ribs like a discordant xylophone as she turned her attention to her plate, her head downcast enough to ignore the presence of the others in the room. Her husband; her captor. Her son, the avenger, and . . . she frowned as she speared the end of a leek with her fork. She’d forgotten the servant’s name again. He was an object who breathed.

  While all heads were down in a telling repose, the scrape of cutlery upon the dish, Victor watched on with a narrow-eyed, worn fascination. He was sure his master referred to the "transformation" as a sort of euphemism for arsenic poisoning, and over the edge of his twitching aquiline nose, Victor regarded the younger Quartermayns. His breath appeared shallow and jagged, and his head was down near the edge of the table, with his forehead—which Victor could only surmise was clammy—in his palm. Victor wondered who’d slipped the poison into the younger man’s food. He was certain it wasn’t his master. Perhaps it had been the second cook, Clement, or maybe his name was Gaspard.

  The younger Quartermayns’ unoccupied hand slapped against the top of the table, rattling the stilled cutlery at his plate’s edge. Something fell to the floor, and silence like a shadow grew as the woman and the master turned their attention to the sound and the drama unfolding in their very midst.

  Victor’s rumbling stomach filled with a fist and his narrowed gaze widened and flew to the closed door to his immediate right. It would take him past the kitchen and straight on to the root cellar, where he could exit through the cellar door into the grape arbour, and disappear into the night, missing the carnage and the coming of the guards.

  “Sebastien?” Lorette enquired, setting down her fork.

  Sebastien’s downcast head was still in his palm, while his hand upon the table tightened like the fist palming and twisting Victor’s innards. With knuckles so tight they’d turned to chalk, Sebastien’s breath came out in shuddering rasps.

  Pierre was silent, watching, but Victor could see from his position that his master’s meaty hand had reached for the silver hilt of the scabbard at his hip.

  Lorrette looked down at her dish, aghast. Her voice took on a hard edge. “We ought to fire that cook.” She pushed her plate away, and the tablecloth rode up in thick wrinkles, knocking over a wine glass. A soft gasp escaped her lips.

  The tablecloth sopped up the florid liquid, wicking it into the fibers, pulsating like the veins in a living thing. Still, Sebastien did not look up as the wine poured over the edge of the table between his feet. It fell in quick, fat drops and a puddle grew.

  Victor didn’t move. Lorrette looked to the servant, and her mouth fell open.

  Pierre stood in haste, his chair rattling to the ground as he lumbered behind his wife, making his way to the door that opened out into the main hall.

  Lorrette turned her head and called after him as her face splotched red with fear and confusion. The door slammed shut behind Pierre.

  While Lorrette was distracted, Victor made his fleet-footed move, opening the door which led down to the root cellar. He dashed inside the dark opening and slammed the door closed behind him, locking it before he began his quick descent into the dark bowels of the house.

  Back inside the dining hall, the massacre was unfolding. Sebastien looked up at his mother, and a scream caught in her throat. Her hand flew to her mouth.

  The thin, reedy tendons of Sebastien’s neck jutted out at horrifying angles, like the gills of a banked fish. Every vein, every artery was lit and
illuminated in shades of cadaverous blues and greens, yet it was his eyes which terrified her so; they’d turned to orbs of luminous ice, crystal blue, and spinning with incandescent light. A roar filled his twisted neck, and she screamed along with him as the locks clicked in the doors which led out into the main hall. She was alone with the creature that had lain hidden for years within the man she loved the most, the beast which would seek the earth’s vengeance for her dark magic, and betrayal of the natural order of things.

  Sebastien leapt upon the table, kicking away the dinner plate which was not poisoned nor spoilt. They fell to the floor with a crash. Lorette pressed her back hard against the chair, the edge of the seat digging into the soft flesh behind her knees. The beast, her son, stared at her with mouth agape. A low, raspy moan escaped his wine-stained lips. His eyes held no pupils, and their otherworldly gaze filled her with a cold to match their hue.

  No sounds filled the air but that raspy moan and the fear which pulsated wildly within her veins. She wanted to cry; she wanted to scream, but more than that, she longed to plead with the beast that had taken over her lovely and gentle young man.

  What had happened to the mandrake root? Did her husband’s wretched servant sweep it up into a dustpan and toss it into the ash heap—her life, her protector! She felt faint and filled with a horrible rage at everyone’s painful ignorance.

  Time slowed. A low, crackling sound started, and fangs grew within her son’s mouth, matching the black claws that now capped his chalk-white hands. The sight of them brought tears to her eyes, and she watched him transform before her.

  It was the night of the blue moon, and unless the devil himself crashed through the window and rescued her from her fate, Sebastien’s transformation would be completed with the sacrifice of her warm blood. A heavy resignation filled her every fiber.