The Accursed (29 page)

Even of the bridal bed, it is very difficult to speak.

The master bedchamber at the top of a flight of badly worn and mossy stone steps, overlaid with grime, and the hard-dried excrement and remains of vermin—overlooking, from its single (barred) window, a marshy graveyard, the aged markers tilted and filthy from neglect, spiky grasses growing all around, and pools of brackish water interspersed among the graves. Here, creatures of a kind I have never glimpsed before freely disported themselves, like overgrown, rowdy children; such strange species, I shrank in terror from even gazing upon them for many days: great ungainly birds that were yet reptilian, with sharp talons; giant lizards with darting tongues, and topaz eyes; soft fleshy bulbous creatures like mollusks without shells, of the size of pigs, that drew sustenance from sucking from numerous mouth-tentacles at once. And how horrible!—the soil of the graveyard was torn and churned from the feeding of these creatures.

Who is buried in the graveyard, Axson?
—so I dared to ask my husband; who remarked casually, indifferently
—Why, your predecessors, dear Annabel. For I am a widower, many times over.

THE BOG PALACE
, in which Annabel reigned as (mock) Queen—for a brief spell.

The Bog Palace, with its dank mossy chambers—some, rooms as large as private chapels; others so cramped and airless, and dark, they might have served as dungeons, or places of torture. Many corridors leading in many directions into the very depths of the Palace, and outward, through breaks in the crumbling stone wall, into the depths of the swamp; slope-ceilinged hallways that lurched to one side, then to the other; windowless, or with narrow (barred) windows that overlooked fetid courtyards heaped with broken masonry, and profuse with sickly-smelling swamp lilies. Many flights of steps there were, that led nowhere; or to heavy locked doors that gave every impression of having been locked for centuries.

The Bog Palace! But one day Axson took pity on me, or so I supposed, leading me into his library; which was far larger than my grandfather Winslow Slade’s famed library—
Anything you wish, you can read, my dear wife. With my blessing.

Yet a shock to me, and a torment, that on shelves reaching to the fifteen-foot ceiling there were leather-bound books that, when opened, revealed smudged print, as if there had been a flood in the Palace; worse yet, many books had utterly blank pages, which I examined with mounting dismay, and a sense of great desolation.

Why is this, Axson, I asked my bridegroom, what has happened to your books?—
and again Axson replied casually, with an indifferent shrug
—All pages, all books, are equally useless: what’s the fuss?

THE BOG PALACE
, staffed by “servants”—and these creatures that seemed but part-human!—repulsive, yet piteous. They were misshapen, female and male alike; of greatly varying ages, but mostly older; their skins were ghastly-pale, like the underbellies of frogs or snakes; their grieving eyes were dark-shadowed and hollow; their manner craven and abashed yet sly, even furtive. How hard they worked!—yet how fruitlessly.
That is one of your predecessors, dear Annabel, if you are curious
—so Axson indicated a stoop-backed old crone wrapped in what appeared to be a winding-shroud though she was animatedly scrubbing steps, on her hands and knees; if this piteous creature heard Axson’s off-handed remark, she did not give any sign; nor did I continue to stare at her, in a state of light-headedness. (How terrible it seemed, that the poor woman seemed to be laboring in vain, spilling dirty water onto dirty steps, scrubbing vigorously at them, yet with not the slightest change in the grime on the steps; and on the wetted steps, Axson indifferently strode, with not a glance downward.)

At a distance, I was allowed to view Axson Mayte’s sister Camille—a woman of a particularly hard-faced beauty, with very pale skin, pale-blond hair loosened down her back, and a pitiless gaze.

You must never approach Camille. You must never speak with Camille, unless she speaks with you first.

Axson spoke of his sister admiringly. On his face, that had become a splotched frog’s face, with bulging eyes, and a slack spittle-damp mouth, was a look of commingled wonderment, apprehension, and sibling-dislike.

CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT
he named them. The ugly creatures sporting outside our bedchamber window, in the desolate graveyard. Though they were nearly as active during the day-hours: shrieking, squawking, squabbling among themselves, poking about in the moldering graves with manic greed, and in black infested pools of water.
Children of the Night
Axson Mayte murmured
which you would do well not to scorn, my proud Annabel, for you and they will become well acquainted soon, before many months have passed; and I, and my companions, weary of your creamy skin and insipid ways.

IT WAS NOT
entirely true, that Axson’s former brides were dead; but some varying number of them, as many as twenty, it sometimes seemed, were fully alive, kept captive in rooms in the Bog Palace, or allowed to emerge, to work as manual laborers, like the piteous crone in the winding-shroud.
My harem is not so showy as the harem of an Arab prince
Axson Mayte remarked
for our females are not so well disciplined, and soon pine away, and die; or are helped to die; if they are not
loved
. In a true harem, it is not realistic to expect to be
loved
. Dear Annabel, be wise!

So broken in mortification, so weakened by cruel and crude usage, and repugnant food, I could not even pray to our merciful God (whom I had abandoned, in my vanity and stupidity) but lay senseless for days, for weeks, while Axson Mayte plied upon my limp and unresisting body such obscene acts, I am sickened and speechless to recall. That my body was limp and resisting sometimes pleased him, but at other times aroused him to fury.
Soon, there will be no need to “play dead,” dear Wife!

Soon, too, bored with the sameness of our marital bed, Axson Mate invited into it his lewd drinking companions.

UPON THE HOUR
a great bell tolled. An undersea bell it sounded like, and we the inhabitants of an ancient sea.

And sometimes the tolling had a hollow ring, dull, ponderous, leaden, and muffled; as if the sound were coming from within, in the marrow of one’s bones.

So Axson Mayte said, seeing my look of baffled horror
Dear Annabel, it is but the music of Time you are hearing. Why take foolish alarm as if you were still a child at the Manse? You have left your paradise forever, you cannot return. Now, as each note sounds—each tolling of the bell—understand how quickly it passes; each note, imagining it is Eternity, while so very fleeting, one can scarcely grasp that it existed at all.

Upon the hour, and the half hour, and the quarter hour—tolling, tolling, to make a mockery of Time.

For in the Bog Kingdom, Time did not pass.

Or, as Axson Mayte gloatingly said, it passes so fleetingly, one cannot measure it, or experience it.

So, feverish Annabel lay in her filth-encrusted bridal gown, which had become a kind of nightgown, or housecoat; sometimes, she lay in a bed of mere rags on the stone floor of a nameless room; hearing, close by, the cries of luckless females and men, singled out, as Axson chanced to remark, as “medical” or “scientific” subjects; for certain of his drinking companions, it was revealed, were men of medicine, or science; though Annabel would know them but dimly, through a scrim of horror, repugnance, shrinking pain as
Macalaster!—“Scottie”!—O’Diggan!—Pitcairn!—Pitt-Williams!—Skinner!—
jocularly introduced to Annabel, as Axson ushered them into the bedchamber.

Later, there was water thrown on her: lukewarm, fetid water but welcomed, desperately. And there was food, of a kind—tossed into the room where she lay, or, as Axson and his friends looked on, to their vast amusement, dumped onto the filthy floor of the kitchen so that Annabel and the others were made to eat from the floor, like animals; and, like animals, greedy and grateful for what they were given.

Rancid food, garbage food, bones mostly picked clean of meat—these were tossed at the starving, no matter that flies and beetles had gotten into them.
Where is your Slade pride now, my darling?
—so Axson mocked, and laughed.

Why these disfiguring tears? Men despise tears—it is the very weakness of the female sex that most disgusts them. Did you not foreswear all you’d known, to cleave to me; did you not cast your lot with Axson Mayte, who flattered you; did you not repudiate your family, the infamous Slades, who made their fortune in the slave trade, decades ago, and have been most holy-and-righteous Christians, since? Did you not cast aside your baby-faced Lieutenant, that fatuous gentleman, yet to moisten his lips in blood? Did you not break your parents’ hearts, and devastate your brother Josiah? Does not your foolish virgin-heart yet swoon in amorous abandon, in my presence?

Thus coldly and jeeringly Axson Mayte laughed. Changed utterly from the Southern gentleman I had known, in my grandfather’s garden.

His close-set eyes of the color of mucus, in the flaccid-toad face.

His forehead low, and furrowed, and sickly-white; his thin lips glistening lewdly, in the way that Annabel saw, or imagined she’d seen, in the faces of certain gentlemen of Princeton, who could not have known that Annabel, or anyone, was observing them at such a time.

In the secrecy of her filthy bed begging God to forgive her. Begging God to show her the way out of the Bog Palace, and the Bog Kingdom, that was not the way of death.

So badly she missed her dear family—her mother, and her father; her grandfather; her beloved brother Josiah, whom she had wantonly injured, and now could not recall why.

For she was not yet desperate enough to comprehend how a Christian of purer heart and greater resolve than she might have preferred death, to the continued horrors of the Bog Kingdom; how a woman of purer heart than her own should have eagerly embraced the grave, and given herself to the loathsome scavengers of the cemetery, than willingly surrender to the bestial lusts of Axson Mayte and his companions.

FORGIVE ME,
for this abject wish to live! To be returned to my beloved family, whose hearts I have wounded, and whose reputation I have defiled.

During this time and afterward, when I was yet more abused as a servant-girl and a cast-off wife, I found some small relief in moments of quiet; by summoning the Manse, and my family, and girlhood friends like Wilhelmina; and many another kindly face of childhood, as if the years could run backward. Often I lay too exhausted and demoralized to move, even to be kicked into action by Axson Mayte, or one of his drinking companions; and so I was allowed to lie in filth for as many as two or three days, as the brutes ignored me in their excited interest in one of their experimental subjects—electric shocks, blood-transfusions and “organ transplants” with creatures of another species, and if the poor wretched died, dissections with surgical instruments. (For so I came to know, though I had not ever looked upon such horrors directly.) During such times my soul seemed to pass from my body to drift about the airless cell; my fingers resumed an old, playful life, at the pianoforte in the drawing room at Crosswicks where I’d played sonatas by Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, and Chopin; or sang with my beloved family from sheet music at the piano, as I played, songs of Stephen Foster, Gilbert and Sullivan, and these words of Thomas Moore set to such exquisite music, that Josiah particularly loved—

Oft, in the stilly night,

Ere Slumber’s chain has bound me,

Fond Memory brings the light

Of other days around me;

The smiles, the tears,

Of childhood’s years,

The words of love then spoken;

The eyes that shone,

Now dimmed and gone,

The cheerful hearts, now broken!

Thus, in the stilly night,

Ere Slumber’s chain hath bound me,

Of other days around me.

In such desperate ways, by slow degrees, I gathered in myself the strength to endure. And held out before my tear-swollen eyes the hope that I would someday escape the Bog Kingdom and return to the Manse and to my beloved family I had so cruelly wounded.

THE FEMALE IS
the most contemptible of creatures: deficient of wit, repulsive in her mammalian nature, lecherous, and “frigid”; scheming, and stupid; entirely devoid of the moral and rational motive that guides men. For a short while, some of these creatures possess
beauty
—but it no more endures than spring blossoms, and soon festers, and stinks, like these.

So Axson Mayte and his drinking companions spoke, not vehemently so much as affably, and bemusedly; some of them men of “science,” and some of them it seemed men of “the cloth,” and some “businessmen”—or so Annabel gathered. And there was Axson Mayte’s declaration, to which the men drank toasts:
Yet, we must allow uses for the female!—seeing that the world must be continuously repopulated, and we would not wish to spill our precious seed into the Bog.

AT THIS TIME
it had become evident that I was with child. Which further provoked Axson Mayte to be repelled by me, and to consider if perhaps an “experiment” might be performed upon me, and the unborn child, by one or another of his companions.

Yet, Axson seemed to forget this; or to take pity on me; for as I was deemed of little use to the men as an amorous object, lacking in feminine beauty and desirability, my position in the Palace reverted to that of servant-girl; which allowed me to learn from other servants that Axson Mayte and his sister Camille and certain of the churlish houseguests had themselves been mere servants in the household, or farm-laborers; and had some time ago risen against the rightful King and Queen and all of the royal family, and the nobles of the kingdom, slaying most, in heartless fashion, and forcing the others into lifelong servitude.