Midnight Grinding (18 page)

But I was wrong about that. Very wrong.

A Union colonel kicked at the door with his dusty boot. “Open up this door, you traitorous rebels, or so help me I’ll burn this house to the ground with you in it!”

There was the sound of breaking glass, the steely rasp of drawn sabers, and the sound of wild laughter as soldiers
—
some drunk on confiscated spirits
—
began to ready themselves for the destruction of the massive structure of whitewashed wood and alabaster stone.

I looked to Lady Catherine. She looked frightened, but strangely enough, not because of the gathering of military men below. She held Emily and Martin in her arms, but the gesture did not have appearance of a mother’s loving protection. Instead, she seemed to be holding them in
restraint.

The crackle of splintering wood echoed from somewhere downstairs. I was sure that the soldiers had breached the security of the locked and bolted front door. But, upon listening further, I discovered that the noise was too muffled to be coming from the ground floor. No, it seemed to issue from some lower level. From the shadowy depths of the wine cellar.

Then came the most horrifying wail of pure rage that I had ever heard in my life. It was fury torn between the mortal soul of man and the raw bloodlust of the most primal of beasts. It barreled up out of the pit of the mansion’s black bowels, demanding to be vented, filling all who heard it with a fear so strong that it was as paralyzing as the venom of some exotic and deadly snake.

I turned and saw Emily and Martin then. Their faces were as pale as lard, their expressions contorted into a rictus of intense mental anguish. And their eyes…their eyes were the same shade of brilliant crimson as that which their father had exhibited that night so many years ago.

“I can’t hold them any longer!” gasped Catherine, her slender arms surrendering the two struggling children. Emily and Martin ran for the door, their faces like those of demons, their hands curled into pale, fleshed claws. I moved to stop them, but the woman’s voice cried out, “Let them go! Let them go or they will tear you apart!”

I stepped aside and they hit the door with such force that the lock was torn loose from its moorings. With enraged wails that more resembled the fitful snarling of beasts than that of innocent children, they disappeared down the staircase to join in the conflict below.

And what a conflict it was. There came another crack and splinter of wood, again from the inside. There was the sound of the main door being torn from its hinges and tossed aside. And there were screams. Lord in heaven help me, I can still hear those awful screams of fear and torment shrilling through the night air, climbing higher and higher, pushing the limits of the human vocal cords, then faltering into choking silence. Only a few gunshots rang out and there was the clatter of hooves on the flagstones as a few of the horses escaped into the summer darkness. After the screams of dying men faded, all that could be heard was the maddening sound of flesh being ripped apart. That and the wailing chorus of earthbound banshees performing atrocities in the outer courtyard.

After a time, the horrible noises ended. “Wait here,” Catherine Bellamere said, then, despite my protests, went downstairs alone. My family and I waited in the upstairs parlor, straining our ears. All that we could hear was the lady’s gentle, soothing voice and the sound of soft sobbing.

Minutes later, Catherine reappeared. Her gown was stained crimson with blood. Quietly, she avoided our questions and went to an iron safe in her husband’s study. She opened the safe and withdrew a small bag of gold coins and a folded document. “Come with me,” she said and the four of us went down to the ground floor of the Bellamere house.

The marble floor was splattered with streaks of fresh blood, leading from the darkness of the courtyard beyond. “Stay here for a moment,” Catherine requested. Her voice was rock steady, despite the carnage around her. As she slipped through the door of the downstairs sitting room, I caught a fleeting glimpse of huddled forms in the golden glow of a kerosene lamp. They were the forms of monsters, hideous fiends clad in blood-dyed rags. As the door swung shut, I watched as one of them looked my way, its eyes running the gamut from crimson to pink to eggshell white.

It was a demon I knew. A demon that possessed a familiar face, as well as a familiar voice. “Oh, what shame,” it moaned tearfully. “What sordid shame!”

A moment later, Lady Catherine exited the den. She handed me the gold sack and the folded paper. “Here is money and your freedom. Take a buggy and two strong horses from the stable and go. Never return to this house again, and for God’s sake, never utter a word of what took place here this night.”

Confused, we did as she said. We left the house and stood for a long and horrified instant in the courtyard beyond the alabaster columns of the Bellamere mansion. In the pale glow of moonlight we laid eyes on the massacre that the Bellameres’ secret shame had brought about. Soldiers and horses lay everywhere, torn and broken, like huge toys mangled by some vicious giant-child and cast aside. Fresh blood glistened in the nocturnal light, as well as the stark whiteness of denuded bone. When I quickly led my family past the awful scene of human devastation, I noticed that some of the bodies appeared to have been partially devoured.

As we made our way through the garden for the stable, the titter of childish laughter erupted from beneath the spreading magnolia tree. “Jeremiah,” called young Martin from the shadows. “Come play with me.”

My son took a step toward the tree, but I pulled him back. Moonlight shone upon the dirt circle where the Bellamere child crouched. His marble game was different that night from the countless times I had witnessed before. For, instead of the colorful balls of glass, onyx, and agate, Martin shot the circle with huge black orbs that seemed slick and slimy in appearance. It took me a moment before I realized that what he played with were the gouged eyes of a cavalry soldier’s horse.

We hitched two of the stable’s finest steeds to a wagon and left that horrible place, escaping the Federal soldiers by way of a desolate backroad. Although I have never spoken of that horrible night before this writing, I have thought about it many times. I have revisited the Bellamere mansion many times in my dreams, have heard the bestial screams of bloodlust and smelled the coppery scent of violent death in my nostrils. And I always wake with a scream trapped firmly behind my lips. Sometimes that scream escapes, like steam escaping from a boiler, saving my mind from the mounting pressure of certain insanity.

I am an old man now. I have lived past the conquering of the West, past the turn of the century, and now into the time of the Great War. I have watched the world progress before my aged eyes, have seen people live and die, including my own family. And I have watched for word regarding a particular surname. That search has ended with a story from a recent newspaper, a report about a soldier by the name of Bellamere who was court-marshaled for crimes unspeakable, even by the conventions of war. I cannot help but wonder if that poor soldier is a distant offspring of the family I once knew and if he is damned with the same seed of shame that his ancestors were.

I lay here now, bedridden and ill, my frail hands unfolding a document yellowed and crumbling with age. It is the declaration of freedom given to me some sixty years ago…my own private Emancipation Proclamation.

As I stare at the hastily scrawled signature at the bottom of the page, my heart grows heavy with uneasiness. For the name of Sebastian Bellamere is signed not in simple ink, but in the blood of a dozen slaughtered souls.

THE CEREBRAL

PASSION

Because of my religious beliefs, I don’t hold to the theory of evolution. But I do believe that it can take place in horror fiction. Not a gradual evolution over hundreds of thousands of years, but an abrupt and horrifying transformation of the normal into the abnormal. One day everything is fine and dandy, and then, out of the blue, everything changes…for the worse.

Even during such an abominable transformation of circumstance, love sometimes endures. And whatever you have become, man or monster, desperately clings to that fragile lifeline of human emotion.

The headaches only worsened as the week drew on. In a span of four days, Henry Beck had graduated from regular aspirin to extra-strength Tylenol to a painkiller Estelle had left over from her gall bladder surgery last spring. However, nothing seemed to help.

“Go see Doc Rhodes,” his wife urged, not naggingly, but out of genuine concern. “It could be something serious.”

Henry just shrugged off her suggestion. He had always been a stubborn man who preferred sticking to his common sense rather than relying on the advice of others. Besides, he needed no doctor to tell him what caused the awful migraines that plagued him from sunrise till mid-afternoon each day. He had a good idea precisely what brought them about.

Henry had been harvesting his tobacco crop the week before last with the help of Fred and Jimbo Hayes, a couple of neighboring boys from down the road a piece. The work had been hard and hot, the temperature in the mid-nineties that late August day. The boys had a truckload of cut leaves and were toting them to the graywood barn to be split, hung on poles, and smoke cured, when Henry found himself alone in the dusty field with a powerful thirst.

He had gone to the old stone well at the edge of the pasture, the well that his great-grandfather had dug over a hundred and twenty years before. It had been covered in disuse for many years, but Estelle’s Frigidaire with the Mason jar of ice water on the center shelf seemed so very far away at the moment, that he turned the wooden lid aside and lowered the ancient bucket into its depths. The water looked a little brackish, but it was cool, so he took a long swallow. It went down like bad medicine, strangely slick like mucus, the foul taste of algae, sulfur, and something else Henry couldn’t quite place causing him to sputter and gag. With a curse, he had returned the cover to the well and then forgotten the whole sorry episode.

As the days wore on and the pain intensified, he began to wonder if the well had been poisoned. If that were the case, then he would have been stricken with nausea and stomach cramps. Neither had appeared, only the headaches. That and the tenderness along the sides of his neck from the collarbone to just behind the ears. And there was that weird way the headaches abruptly ended around two or three o’clock in the afternoon. Afterward, Henry always felt refreshed and strangely energized, as if he were half of his seventy years. Instead of dragging in, bone-weary and sullen, from a hard day’s work, he found himself coming in from the fields, whistling and grinning, feeling like a million bucks.

Estelle Beck also noticed the change. For years she had witnessed a gradual breakdown in their relationship, a barrier of disinterest forming between them that she had both dreaded and sadly resigned herself to. But recently Henry had come in from his work an entirely different man. He would bring her wildflowers from the pasture and give her a big smile and a peck on the cheek, a rare show of affection for a man as grim as her Henry. Why, the last evening he had even picked her up, his calloused hands hooked beneath her arms, and waltzed her cheerfully across the kitchen floor.

Toward the end of the week, Estelle began to gradually lose her sense of impending doom and that nagging sense that they were no more than two strangers with only a yellowed marriage license to link them.

***

The knots appeared Friday morning.

Small and doughy, they rose atop the hard ridges of his collarbones and just behind the lobes of his ears. The tenderness had turned into soreness, but again the pain only lasted as long as the headaches.

Henry began to feel a great calm overtake him that Friday evening, a peace of mind that he had not experienced since his youth. It was as if the horrible migraines had a cleansing effect, as if they drained his brain of mental impurities. He could think clearer than before. His senses seemed sharpened to a point he had never known. The evening sunset that appeared upon the Tennessee hillscape seemed to possess colors he had never noticed before. The honeysuckle and magnolia blooms seemed more sweet to the smell, while his wife’s cooking was definitely more delicious to his heightened taste buds. It was as if his mind had been rejuvenated; as if the blinders had suddenly been lifted after years of drab, narrow-minded living.

And his newfound well-being wasn’t confined merely to his head. His physical strength and endurance seemed to increase, and not only in relation to the work he did in the fields. That night Estelle had come to bed and found him ready for her. She had been both surprised and secretly delighted. Due to a back injury, Henry had been hopelessly impotent for nearly seven years. But now he had no such problem. Aroused, he had moved to her side of the bed, gently caressing her, peppering her face and neck with small kisses that made her heart leap with joy. With a passion unequaled since they were newlyweds, Henry and Estelle made love. Slow and natural, devoid of the awkwardness that had always strained their lovemaking before, it seemed to last for hours, then end with a flashpoint of ecstasy that Estelle had never experienced in fifty years of marriage.

They fell asleep in each other’s arms, Henry snoozing with the dreamless ease of an infant. His wife lay awake a while longer, an odd mixture of elation and deep-seated dread swimming in her thoughts until slumber finally came.

***

The next morning she was alarmed to find that the bumps on Henry’s neck had grown in size. They also had an ugly bruised color to them. Estelle once again voiced her concern.

“Probably nothing more than swollen glands,” grumbled her spouse as he chugged the last of Estelle’s painkillers with his morning coffee. She wasn’t convinced of that at all, but did not press the matter, afraid that the wall between them might thicken where it finally seemed to be crumbling.

Despite Henry’s blinding headache, they drove to the nearby town of Coleman as they always did on Saturday morning. They did their shopping, ate lunch at the corner café, then visited Estelle’s sister for an hour or so. As they drove down the main street for home, the courthouse clock struck the hour of three. Henry’s brow, which had been creased with pain, suddenly smoothed and he turned to his wife with a big smile. “What do you say we go to the fair?” he proposed with the enthusiasm of a ten-year-old.

Estelle stared at him as though he had spoken in a foreign tongue. She could hardly believe that it was her husband talking. Henry Beck, although never bitter or cynical, had always been a solemn, no-nonsense man. Oh, he had been fun when they were first courting, always ready with a joke, always making her laugh. But three straight years of drought and failed crops after their wedding had dampened the man’s spirit and hardened his outlook on life. And now here he was eagerly wanting to take in the Bedloe County Fair. She was beginning to seriously wonder if severe headaches were a warning sign of Alzheimer’s disease.

Fifteen minutes later, they were there on the crowded midway, surrounded by the music of the calliope and the sugary scent of cotton candy. Like children, they gorged themselves on sweets and rode all the good rides
—
the rollercoaster, the dodge’em cars, the Tunnel of Love
—
both totally unaware of the strange looks they were receiving from their friends and neighbors. While on the Ferris wheel, the gears had jammed, leaving them suspended at the very top. They had kissed long and soulfully in the privacy of mid-air, loosening their embrace only when the grind of machinery once again pulled them earthward.

During the drive home, in the darkness of the truck cab, their hands had met, their fingers entwining. Their eyes had locked in the faint light of the dash, conveying that mutual signal which was far too intimate for spoken words. This time they hadn’t waited for the seclusion of home. Pulling off the road into a grove of crabapple trees, Henry and Estelle expressed their love in the bed of the pickup, as shameless as two feverish teenagers, beneath a velvety blanket of autumn stars.

***

Later that night, Henry Beck awoke to find himself standing in the open pasture. Standing beside the old, stone well.

Confusion gripped him momentarily, making him feel faint. He had fallen asleep under the patchwork quilt of their big brass bed with Estelle slumbering silently beside him. Now he was standing in knee-high thicket, his right hand resting upon the roughly-hewn lid of the well. He was bewildered to find himself drenched with sweat, as if fresh from some horrid nightmare, the cool September breeze plastering his damp nightshirt to his lean body. The fleshy knots throbbed along his neck as big as goose eggs.

He stared up at the sky. From the set of the moon, Henry figured it to be past three in the morning. Why was he out there? Did he sleepwalk or had something drawn him there to the well? The thought was not entirely implausible to him. For some reason, the ancient well had come to mind several times in the past few days. Not disturbing thoughts of the fetid waters within, but strangely comforting thoughts. Images of cool, black liquid and smooth stone walls, of something down there in the darkened pit, something of great presence and longevity. A longevity that, after countless ages, was slowly ebbing, moving toward nonexistence.

Tomorrow
…

The word echoed in his mind as if he himself had spoken it aloud. What was it about tomorrow? Tomorrow he would board up the well securely or fill it completely with a ton of earth and rock? No, the very thought of doing such a thing seemed to sicken him. It was like considering the desecration of something holy, although he could not for the life him figure out why. It was only an old well full of stagnant water. Nothing more.

Or was it? His mind thought differently. He slid back the wooden lid and peered down the curving walls. Moonlight flickered on the pool at the bottom and, for a moment, he thought he saw movement. He sighed and felt a great peace engulf him, barreling up at him from out of that dank pit like a tangible force. He experienced an emotion he could only describe as
belonging
; a bizarre kinship that he had never actually felt with members of his own family.

Then something seemed to whisper up from the black waters, the unintelligible meanderings of a weakened and dying race. But, strangely enough, the gist of understanding tickled at his subconscious…promising things dark and unfathomable.

Henry pulled the lid back into place and started back across the dusty furrows that had once blossomed with leafy green Burley. His bluetick hound, Old Sam, met him at the edge of the field. He crouched and scratched the dog absently behind the ears. “Am I going crazy, boy?” he asked hoarsely. “Or am I just a damned old fool?”

The dog had no answers for him. He sniffed at his master’s bare ankles as they walked through Estelle’s flower garden for the house. Henry looked back only once. The well was a squat lump of stone and mortar on the edge of the dark thicket, sitting where it always had. The old man felt a great loneliness wash over him. Tears began to well in his ancient eyes and suddenly he found himself sobbing without control.

Tomorrow
…

***

Sunday went as it usually did. After church, Henry and Estelle had come home, ate dinner, and then went about their own weekend activities. Estelle did her needlepoint, while Henry piddled around in his workshop in the barn. He was in the process of finishing a hand-made highchair for his newest grandchild, who would be making its appearance in late November. The Becks had two children, both grown with families of their own. It was their daughter Elizabeth who was expecting, for the third time in five years.

Normalcy reigned over the rural tobacco farm until three o’clock. Then existence, as he had known it, abruptly changed for Henry Beck.

He glanced down at his pocket watch, pleased to see the hands nearing the third hour. Relief would come now, as it did every day at that time. The awful headache would peter out and he would feel reborn again, the aches and pains of his advancing years traded in for a refreshed sense of physical and mental renewal.

He eagerly anticipated the strike of three, but this time it brought about an entirely different effect. The pain in his head did not diminish. Rather it increased tenfold, spearing through the very core of his skull, coursing through the lean column of his neck like liquid fire.