Divine 05 - Nevermore Read online

  Nevermore

  by

  Melanie Jackson

  Version 1.1 – January, 2011

  Published by Brian Jackson at Smashwords

  Copyright © 2011 by Melanie Jackson

  Discover other titles by Brian Jackson at www.melaniejackson.com

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Author Note

  This the final book in the Divine series. It is also the last of the Wildside. The two series have married, given birth to this book and now I am wishing them a fond farewell. If you haven’t read at least one story of each series, do yourself a favor and go back to the beginning and read Divine Fire and Traveler. Trust me, it will make this story so much easier to understand.

  Foreword

  Growing up, a lot of the family dinner conversation had revolved around what has weirdo Anna done now? So I have always known that I am peculiar, but it was only in January of this last year that I realized how strange I am.

  They say it is a gift to see ourselves as others do, but I would be just as happy without any more frank or impolite appraisals from people who are supposedly friends or loving relatives. And the place I am now will probably guarantee my ego’s safety. For a while.

  There will probably be some temptation to judge me as you read this, but just remember that I did this for you—for all of you—so that you could live in safety and not have your nice, normal world ruined by the monsters. And what a way to end this last issue of Golden Words.

  Chapter 1

  “But evil things, in robes of sorrow,

  Assailed the monarch’s high estate.”

  —The Haunted Palace by Edgar Allen Poe

  The cabin would have been perfect if not for the body at the kitchen table.

  Of course, I use the word ‘body’ advisedly since it was little more than charred bones and a puddle of black grease under the frightening iron chair. It smelled terrible, a barbecue gone grotesquely awry.

  Night was falling and though staggering with exhaustion, I was still very worried by whatever I had felt herding me through the darkening forest most of the day. But obviously this place wasn’t going to be any kind of friendly sanctuary either. It was probably even the monster’s lair.

  So, lock the door and hope to shut the evil out? Or leave it unlocked in case the very bad thing was still inside with me. It feels sometimes that my life is full of hard decisions.

  Moving silently—a skill I was good at since I lived in a forest and liked to watch the wildlife—I crept around the single room looking for a phone or a gun or even a knife. And for boogiemen hiding under the rusted cot or behind the coat tree or on the lone shelf filled with a few canned goods near the cold potbelly stove. No phone or weapons— bad. No boogieman— good. That left only the loft so close overhead that I could touch it with my hand. I climbed the stair at the end of the room which was more ladder than true steps until my eyes crested the thick planks of the ceiling-floor. Nothing. Just a pair of drag marks in the thick dust and some kind of half-door built into the North wall.

  Time to start breathing again even if the air was sickening. I ghosted back down the ladder and returned to the still smoking body. The sun was setting now and the light wasn’t good, and I needed to make a decision before full dark. Should I stay or should I go? If my cell had been working the choice would have been easier and made hours ago, but the strange electrical storm circling the woods was interfering with the signal. I had no flashlight and no weapon of my own. My thin coat was very wet and not doing much to keep me warm. Hypothermia was a real danger.

  The body was still in the chair, still burnt beyond my ability to say absolutely that it was human, but I did notice on second inspection that there were iron shackles around what I was guessing were arms and legs though something about the proportions and joints seemed wrong for a human. So, probably not a case of spontaneous combustion.

  I circled slowly, reluctant to touch it. The damned thing looked like an electric chair with an antenna or lightning rod on the back. But there were no cables leading from it and there was no sign of electricity in the cabin. Looking at the floor in the red, dying light I could see where it had been dragged from the base of the ladder. Had the chair been upstairs? Why? And how had the body burned when there was no electricity and no fire?

  But as well to ask why have any such thing at all? The only question that mattered immediately was what to do with it. It was all metal, heavy and full of sharp edges. It looked like something you would buy at a prison surplus store—assuming such a beast existed. It probably did, though I couldn’t imagine what kind of person bought things there. Probably no one I wanted to know.

  But then who owned a cabin without plumbing or electricity this in this modern day and age? What was it used for? Hunting or fishing one assumed since I didn’t want to think it was some serial killers getaway, but shouldn’t there be some kind of basic amenities? Like a bathroom? Or maybe the owner was really into roughing it. After all, he owned a cot without a mattress and iron chair. That had a burned body in it.

  Serial killer. The words appeared again unbidden and unwanted in my mind. After all, even if that wasn’t a human in the chair, there was still something very sick going on. There hadn’t been anything on the news, but this was something the police should probably know about.

  I tried taking a picture with my phone to share later, but the batteries had died completely. Maybe sucked out by the storm? I had charged it that morning before leaving the hotel to take up my vigil at the grave. My pockets were full of soggy leaves and silt. Had I dropped the phone or damaged it by falling in water? Certainly I was wet enough and muddy enough for that to be the case. But when had this happened? I had almost no memory of… well, whatever I had been doing since the graveyard. Had I had a seizure? The drugs I took every morning were supposed to control them, but once in a while something would go wrong in my brain anyway.

  Though jumping with nerves, I made myself hold still and think. I was pretty sure that it had been that morning when I charged my phone. I was missing pieces of time, but I would be a lot hungrier if it had been more than one day in the woods. I would be colder too. Probably truly suffering from hypothermia and not teetering on the brink. That’s what I thought at least. So it was still the 19th. I couldn’t check the phone to confirm this though and didn’t feel completely confident in this supposition.

  The next question was back around to the first question; did I stay or did I go? The sun was calling it a day and so were my nerves, which hadn’t been tested in the last three years beyond dealing with a stubborn word processor or a long line at the DMV. They were not at their proper fighting weight for this kind of thing. Yes, I had a nice selection of nightmares in the dream closet left over from childhood and my husband’s death, but this was several degrees worse than alligators under the bed or grieving a personal loss.

  My knees made the decision to stay for me. They refused to hold me up any more. Pulling out the single wooden chair at the small warped table, I dropped down across from the corpse. The light was fading from the sky but I could see the thing clearly. Hear it too. Even above the slow patter of dirty water dripping from my hair and coat onto the plank floor. It sounded like logs settling in a fire.

  Okay, it was time to take a break from blind panic and p
ointless ricocheting between unknown horrors, and apply my brain to this conundrum. I had been running and not thinking from the moment I woke up in a pile of smoldering leaves. It was time to rest the muscles and engage the mind even if I was in some kind of shock. I needed a plan.

  First things first. Did I know who I was?

  Yes. I was Anna Peyton of Irish Camp, California.

  Did I know where I was?

  Not specifically, but I assumed somewhere in Maryland near Baltimore.

  And I was there because….?

  Well, I could explain Maryland but not the woods. Not this cabin.

  I had found my way east because of a literary magazine I publish and because of some frequent flyer miles donated to me by my sister who was worried about my depressed state of mind. I had been spouseless for three Christmases, which isn’t much in regular years but an eternity in widow years when you hate the holidays and have to pretend to be jolly anyway so you don’t wreck everyone else’s good time. This year the annual apocalyptic event culminated in Christmas Eve at my sister’s house complete with her husband’s enormous, loving but very loud family— and my Great Aunt Juliet, the horror of my childhood whose very name could burn a hole in the lining of my stomach. Juliet and I went together like pancakes and battery acid. What had Clarice been thinking?

  Not amazingly, I was relieved that January had rolled around and I was back at work, even with the crappy weather. Lonely life and all, it beat holidays. But my desperation for a change of scene after the world’s most depressing New Year’s Eve party of this and any other lifetimes was so great that for the first time in years I listened to my sister and got on an airplane. It took a valium and two scotches, but I did it. Because I had a purpose. After years of theorizing about events, I was going after the true story of Edgar Allen Poe and the unknown mourner.

  For those who are not ardent fans of the late, great Edgar Allen Poe, let me fill you in on a mysterious tradition inaugurated in 1949, a century after the poet’s untimely death. Every January 19th, on the poet’s birthday, a mystery mourner comes to his grave and leaves three red roses and a bottle of cognac. Other mourners gather to wait for the visitor but he or she has never been seen. Not at either grave. Poe has two. And there are rumors that he actually rests in neither.

  And how could this be when Poe was one of America’s most loved and documented poets? No one knew exactly. The provable facts of his demise are few. In September 1849 an already ailing Poe left Richmond and headed for New York to help a female friend with arranging her manuscripts with an eye to eventual publication. I personally suspected that he had been lonely after his wife’s death and willing to ghostwrite a book if it gave him some company. For reasons unknown, but widely speculated on, he stopped in Baltimore on the way and on the third day of an especially dreary October he was discovered in the street outside a polling station in a state of delirium. Some think it was excessive alcohol, others laudanum poisoning or epilepsy — or possibly a trifecta of all three. I believed, from personal experience, that it might be something else. Poe was taken to what passed for a hospital in those days and confined to a cell-like room with barred windows and allowed no visitors. He was under the care of a visiting physician referred to by the nurses as ‘the dark man’. Poe died four days later during a violent storm that caused lightning strikes upon the hospital and in the very cell where he was confined. His last words were supposedly: “Lord, help my poor soul.”

  Officially, he was buried the next day in the Baltimore Presbyterian Cemetery in an unmarked grave though there was no sign of infectious disease and no need for this unseemly haste.

  Unofficially, it is said that his body disappeared from the morgue where it was waiting to be claimed and the tale of a burial was to hush up a potential scandal. The ‘dark man’ disappeared as well.

  A monument was erected in 1875 when the poet’s wife’s and mother-in-law’s remains were disinterred and added to his second gravesite, and there was a ceremony with poems read by Longfellow and Whitman. But this belated observance was marred by a story in the local paper, put about by a drunken gravedigger who insisted that there was no actual grave to add the wife’s and mother-in-law’s bones to.

  And this has what to do with me? As I mentioned before, I am the editor-publisher of a small press that puts out a monthly magazine of poetry. I inherited it from my late husband. Every month I feature a famous dead poet along with several live ones. Harrison had been a nurturer of poet talent, but I like dead poets best. They have no egos and people, beyond the authors’ immediate families— who aren’t numerous enough to sustain the magazine— like to read about them. Naturally the January issue was dedicated to Edgar Allen Poe. And this year, to avoid being repetitious, I wanted a picture, or at least a glimpse of the mysterious person who left roses and cognac on the poet’s grave. Or the wife’s grave. Everyone has always assumed that the flowers were for Poe, but why not for Poe’s tragic wife dead at fifteen from consumption? Or even the mother-in-law who had been well-liked? My late husband and I had discussed this often. It was our favorite historic mystery.

  Of course it was hubris to think I would solve the mystery when so many others have failed, but I was going to try anyway. I knew the best bet was to wait at dawn near the grave by the sidewalk where the offerings appeared, but lured by some fit of gothic reverie, I wandered to the back of the cemetery where the original grave had been dug. It was disappointing to look at, and I had no sense of the poet’s presence lingering there. Usually I get something in a graveyard. I’m a little bit fey that way. All the women in my family are—or were. All of us except me, my sister and our queer Great Aunt Juliet are gone. But there was nothing there at the lonely grave, no restless spirit or perseveration. Whatever had called me back there, it was not the poet’s ghost.

  Feeling observed, I looked around and discovered a raven watching me from atop a tombstone half screened by bare branches. I started when the thing cawed in its deep masculine voice and then laughed at myself for assuming the incident was uncanny. The cemetery was getting to me. A raven indeed! The creature had disappeared by the time I looked again, but it was probably just some exceptionally large crow out looking for its lunch. It was time to be getting back to the real grave and watching for the mystery mourner.

  It started to rain just then, the storm not predicted in the previous night’s weather report, and there was a lightning strike near the abandoned tombstone that slashed a tree in two, nearly dropping half of it on me. In the afterglow, I could see that there was a figure under the fiery tree in long cloak with a hood. If he’d been carrying a scythe I might have screamed. As it was I hopped backwards when he pointed at me.

  And that was the last thing I remembered seeing before waking up in the woods—cold, wet, and not nearly enough alone. I hadn’t seen who or what had brought me into sheltering trees, but I had felt my stalker nearby and it had terrified me into blind flight. I still didn’t understand why I had been singled out since there were others in the graveyard. I hadn’t been attacked for monetary gain because my purse had been beside me, the strap wrapped tight around my wrist. I could see my wallet in it. Nor had I suffered the fate worse than death, at least not that I could tell, so what the hell was the meaning of the attack? Just sick sport?

  “Damn.” I retched at the bad air which was getting worse as the corpse continued to smolder and I forced myself to my feet.

  Enough speculating. I was going to stay the night at the cabin. There was a small pile of kindling by the stove, a rusty cast-iron pot that I could heat some of the canned stuff in, and there were shutters on the windows and a bar for the door. I would be safe.

  But the body had to go.

  Driven to extremis by the smell, I reached for the chair back, trying to find something that didn’t have crispy critter on it. Throwing my whole body into the effort I managed only to tip the thing a few inches to the left and hurriedly pulled it back upright before it overbalanced.

  “Da
mn it.” I was going to have to find a way to grab the thing closer to the floor where everything was covered in a sticky black crust. Looking at it made me dizzy with horror.

  I checked my pockets again—leaves, but no gloves. Taking off my raincoat and wrapping it around my hands, I approached the creature. There was no logical reason for my paranoia, but I was wary of the burnt offering and I have learned to listen to the voice of intuition. Squatting, I grasped a chair leg and tugged hard. The reward for a near hernia and for almost dislocation both arms was a skid of a whole six inches. Unless The Incredible Hulk happened along, it looked like I wasn’t going to be able to move the damn thing outside after all.

  Not unless I unstrapped the body and dragged it out first.

  I started to cry. It wasn’t useful, but neither was anything else I could think to do.

  And as I blubbered with self-pity and began freeing the left arm from the restraints, the thing in the chair opened its eyes. They were black from rim to rim, like a reptile or a shark. What happened next I put down to hallucination, for so it appeared at the time, because the thing’s neck stretched like snake pushing out of an old skin and whipped about in a way that no human neck could do. The head that emerged from the bursting layer of char was blond and beautiful except for the teeth. There were too many teeth. And then the head snapped down on its long neck and bit my right shoulder. The bite was fast and somewhat deterred by the wool sweater-vest I was wearing but I felt the fangs break flesh and then a rush of spreading fire. It reared back, readying its bloody mouth for another strike.

  I gasped with pain as I fell to the floor. I wanted to scream but there was no air and horror had frozen my lungs. I wanted to move, but was shocked and immobile. This thing wanted to part me from my life in the most gruesome way I could imagine and I couldn’t even scream a protest. Frankly, it looked like it was curtains for Anna Peyton, intrepid editor of Golden Words.