Tell-Tales of Usher:
Lady of Slaughter, Mistress of Dread
By
Wakefield Stowell
Copyright 2012 Wakefield Stowell
License Notes
Chapter I
Concentrate your mind, reader and imagine the difficulty of finding oneself alone with a beast possessed of razor-sharp claws and jaws with the compressive force of a section of stone parapet (one sporting a lovely row of teeth) parted from the facade and cast from the top of a six-storied building below onto the cobbled street (also sporting a lovely row of teeth that scissor perfectly with those above). The beast has the cunning and proverbial rage of a woman scorned and the kinetic power of a lion. Now invest this beast with the majesty of a god and render it invisible to the naked eye and you will begin to feel the terror that gripped the city of Boston in the year 18_ when just such a thing tore into the hearts and souls of the citizenry.
Never was night dark enough, nor shadows long, to hide from her sight. None were safe, not the prisoner in his cell nor the preacher on sanctified ground. There existed no barriers to her movements, neither walls nor wealth protected – no amount of money could buy her calm, though calmed she was, for a short spell, after her slaughters. She was a playful thing, in the way of any cat but it was man's mortality put into play; it was human blood that greased the wheels of her pleasure. She toyed with her victims, sometimes for hours – whole families might perish in this way – their moans and horrifying screams only signaling to others, once the predator was generally known, the devolving of a human being into helpless prey and the impossibility of any assistance. They signaled above all the need to flee the vicinity.
More than a few commented on the oppressive atmosphere of the time when Sekhmet ravaged the outlying burgs and cityscapes of Boston and how it must have been thus during the days of the Black Death, when people died painfully and mysteriously in great numbers and one could never know when one might succumb or have to bear witness to the spectacle of loved ones' horrifying demise.
A low purring came to be Boston's most dreaded sound and it could induce a whimpering fear in the bravest of the city's inhabitants. Once you had that noise in your ears, the sound would trick you into the madness of hearing it continually everywhere, the tympanum in the ears echoing fear's vibration, so that a demoralizing malaise stalked one in advance of the goddess herself.
And goddess she is still, for she retires but never dies, retreats but never loses. In form she takes after the Egyptian way of styling her with the head of a lioness and the nubile body of a young woman. Reflecting his fears and affections, man has made gods in his own image and that of his predators and prey. Such is the way of gods and goddesses that human conceptions of them may come to fashion their appearance after the depictions on their temples and tombs. They are shape-shifters and able to change their size along a vast continuum.
With an animal sniff of the air Sekhmet could smell human blood still flowing within the pump of the circulatory system, still contained within the sacs of living tissue; how she loved tearing into those sacs. The smell excited her and the throngs of people gathered so closely in our modern American cities reeked so of blood that the perfume ignited her frenzy. Not even the great battles of Egypt could supply her with such easy kills.
Maria Poule was not born to be a victim. She had such strength of character that it saw her through the deaths of two children and a husband who left her with bills and an aching heart after his death at the age of 32. She began – out of her Christian obligation to continue living despite yearning to join her loved ones in the grave – to apply the certitude of a highly religious mind to the rituals of commerce and she prospered by it. The prosperity added greatly to her appeal, such that she now added three proposals of marriage to the documentation of her busy life.
Hers was the face of domestic furnishment, the hair that embellished her forehead was an array of flat curls just like the memorial snippets of the deceased one took for a locket or a picture frame; her garments upholstered and buttoned as tight as a chaise lounge; her nose the pull to the cabinet of curiosities that was her soul. This nose was first to register a presence by way of an animal stink, as she walked home through the west field on that cold November day. The wind had changed and tucked a westerly gust up into her nostrils. This got her back up but only for a moment – I've faced worse than a wild animal, she thought and she continued on as she batted away the flies that had begun to mass.
"Flies? What in God's name? Flies in November – who ever heard of such a thing? And this sudden heat and stink," she said in a mumble to herself. Now she noticed that the ground that had crunched with the frozen moisture locked inside had begun to soften and liquefy. She was confused, terribly confused.
Some few minutes later, her crinolines were caught by something on the ground, though she could see no protrusion beyond the frosted leaves of grass and stalks of decayed wildflowers themselves. She gave her dress a gentle tug which failed to free it, so she strengthened her resolve and tugged a little harder, the effort now pitching her forward abruptly as the dress was untangled. It was then that she felt a pin-prick on her back followed by a sharp jab into her cheek that brought a flow of blood to her mouth. She whirled all about her trying to discern what might have caused these offenses and saw nothing but the disturbances of the wind on the open, icy hillside and the tufts of small trees.
The flush was draining out of her face with the bleeding and the fear that sent what blood wasn't gushing out of her cheek back down to her heart and lungs. Then she received a swipe down the back of such excruciating pain that it brought her to her knees. Long shreds of her skin and the fabric of her dress dangled from her backside. Her hands were clenched into fists that sprung open with each surge of pain only to close again with determined will.
She was on her stinging back now, staring into the white void of sky above her with such contorted bewilderment at the deity that had smote her so cruelly. Perhaps her supplications had been to the wrong god, she thought after ten minutes or so of intense pain. She was rolled to and fro playfully on the grass in a rather comical, if gruesome, display of flopping limbs and exposed undergarments just before she perished and was torn apart for her meat.
Such we came to know from one of Madeline's visions.
"Madeline, you're bleeding," I said as she handed me a cup of tea and spilled several drops of blood onto the rug. She looked at me then down at the still dripping blood.
"Oh, I don't remember cutting myself." She examined her cup-passing right hand and then her left. "I don't have any blood on me. That is strange. I don't see any blood at all except where the drops fall."
I too examined my hands, my arms and looked down at my legs. "I'm not bleeding either."
"That is interesting," she said somewhat distractedly and then, as though she had just come to her senses; "Oh, the rug – it will be ruined! Damn!" she cursed as she emptied her tea back into the pot and placed the cup below to catch the drops of blood which seemed to materialize from thin air like condensation.
"Well, if Roddy were here with us now, I know exactly what he'd do – he'd make a monstrous joke of it and say something like, 'We must hang signs on the house and post a notice in the papers – blood to let!" Madeline smiled despite her concern.
"Yes, well you and Roddy might have a giggle over the mess but it took the weavers in Persia over a year to make this rug and another three months to get it to Boston." She was interrupted in her fret by the voice of Hatotep calling from his casket in the next room.
"Madeline."
Her eyes rolled and sotto voce she said, "They say guests stink like old fish after three days; well Hatotep stinks like three-thousand year-old fish. With all the scraps of dried flesh and bits of muscle and bone he endlessly litters the house with you'd think he would be much diminished but his ability to scatter more and more of the stuff with no promise of an end to it is astounding."
"Madeline," I chastised her, for as much as she had me in thrall to her every thought and movement, I was quite fond of Hatotep and so was she, truth be told, however great her exasperation.
"Yes, Hatotep. Are you coming in to have some tea?" she called back to him.
"Yes, I should like that very much but I do need some assistance, I'm afraid." By now Hatotep had a tolerable command