The Accursed (30 page)
One of the ravaged female servants, who had once been a young bride of Axson Mayte, told me
You have come to the very edge of the world, in coming here. Poor child, how will you find your way back!—the distance is so far.
WHAT SORROW! WHAT
ignominy!
And yet, what gratitude, simply to be alive.
For I could not bring myself to hate the baby in my womb—that so drained my energy, and roused me to the most terrifying hunger, that I might almost have eaten as the graveyard scavengers ate, in the fierce desperation to live.
Axson Mayte’s sister Camille would appear, to the neutral observer, the more “noble” of the two; for so Camille Mayte comported herself, in a queenly fashion; yet she was of plebeian origin which she betrayed in small gestures, as in an unseemly scowl that contorted her sculpted-looking face; or a flashing stare of hauteur, yet of pity, directed toward such wretches as me. (It was Camille who at last, repelled by seeing me in my grossly altered state, banished me out of the central part of the Palace and commanded that I be put to work in the cellar, which other workers called the “tunnel,” or the “pit,” or “the hole of Hell.”)
In this way it was revealed to me, piecemeal, the true nature of the Bog Palace, and of the Bog Kingdom: presided over by murderous former servants of an era long past, whose particular history seemed to be lost now; for no one remembered when the uprising had occurred, and the public executions of the royal family and their retainers; and the forced servitude of many in the kingdom of aristocratic and genteel blood. The majority of the younger servants were certain that the insurrection had not taken place during their lifetimes; yet there were some, a very few, who claimed that they’d seen massacres with their own eyes, and had narrowly escaped being killed. These events had taken place thirty, or only twenty, or only ten years before. The elderly servants disclaimed such tales, and were more convincing to my ear.
That they concurred in the general detestation and fear of the present regime was evident; and how pathetic it seemed to me, that a crowd of former menials should be raised in such a way, and now waited upon by their former masters and mistresses. And these menials of old were of coarse untutored stock hailing from the more desolate regions of Europe, as from the west of Ireland where the “black Irish” are said to abide with their peasant superstitions, their Gaelic, and their wild melancholy so provok’d by alcohol!
Yet we are all grateful, we escaped with our lives
—the more stoic of the servants would say—
if indeed this is life, in such a hell of servitude.
EVER MORE DESPERATELY
I prayed for deliverance from this place, that my child would be born elsewhere; for though it kicked and cramped inside me, like a little fiend, I could not but love him; though it be Axson Mayte’s son, as I feared it must be, I could not but love him—for such is a woman’s nature.
Yet I lacked courage to try to escape, for I knew that Axson Mayte would punish me severely if he caught me; and my ever-swelling body was very awkward, since my limbs were somewhat thin, and lacking in muscle. In my weakness, I am ashamed to reveal, as in a fever-dream, I caught myself in the most absurd fantasies: that Axson was but testing me, as in the old medieval tale of Patient Griselde, we had had to read in English class at the Academy, in a translation from the Middle English. For could it be, Axson was hoping to determine if I loved him purely, or was so shallow as to foreswear my vow to him . . . At such times the hissing
Dear Annabel! Fair Annabel!
seemed to rise to me, from a lost world; the which, in my feverish imaginings, I so craved to regain, I would have sold my soul, or bartered it wildly—another time! Yet this too was mere foolishness, and had no weight in the actual, exterior world.
In that world, I was most piteous indeed; beginning to appear grossly pregnant, with every accompanying symptom of morning sickness, and a bloated belly, and swollen ankles; sinus infections and bronchitis swept through me, as did a ravaging stomach flu; merely to wait table to that crew of drunken ruffian louts was a torment, and exhausting; for quite “by accident” one or another of the men would jab an elbow against my belly, or ram into me with a bottle, or a chair; this provoked much laughter. Merely to witness the men devouring their food with bestial greed, not hesitating to devour raw beefsteak that leaked blood down their chins . . . (This “cannibal sandwich” was a favorite of the Palace, raw steak in a thick cut placed between two pieces of coarse bread.) As my condition grew more pronounced such displays of savage manners increased my bouts of nausea, and vomiting, so that I was disgusting to others, as to myself.
Fair Annabel!—beauteous Annabel!—go away and hide yourself, you are VILE.
So mocking words echoed in my reeling brain.
Exiled to the dank cellar, which was a vast cavernous space like a cave, amid garbage, raw sewage, rats and other vermin, I found myself a comrade of similar laborers; one of our tasks was to bail excessive sewage out of the cesspool, and carry it to a woodland ravine a quarter mile from the house; our task was the continuous filling of buckets, and the continuous emptying-out of buckets, hour after hour, day following day, amid the most nauseating of odors and sights; with provision for no more than a few minutes’ respite for a frantic feeding, of poorly baked dough, and leftovers from the kitchen; and brief periods of scanty sleep, amid the very stench of the cellar in which we toiled. Sixteen hours of stoop labor daily—and then eighteen—twenty!—as autumn rains fell thunderously, and increased the water-level of the cesspool, and the Palace was threatened with flooding; entire days were spent in such labor, under threat of death from Axson Mayte, who could not abide “mutiny.” Our miserable cellar-crew of which I was surely the weakest member were obliged to crawl where we could not walk upright, and where the jagged stone ceiling was low we had to squirm like snakes, on our bellies . . . At which times the thought came to me stern and judicious
This is your Hole of Hell, to which you have brought yourself.
Yet it might be that this final mortification worked for good; for it came to me soon after that if it was so, I had brought myself to the Hole of Hell, and so could take myself away, if I had courage; all the while sprawled facedown, on my swollen belly, in a filthy composition of mud, slime, sewage, and offal, not excluding the bones of fellow menials of an age long ago. And a new thought came to me
If I am freed from the Hole of Hell I will consecrate my life to freeing my fellow-sufferers
and it was astonishing to me, this thought did not seem to be from God but from the depths of my own soul, and in my own voice.
ESCAPE FROM THE
Bog Kingdom was only possible if my fellow-slaves did not report me, as evidently they did not; though pleading with me, it was “too dangerous” to chance, crawling through a sort of cave, or tunnel, to reach the outside of the Palace, by night; then making my way through the Bog Forest, by the most pallid moonlight. It was the purest chance, Axson Mayte had not the slightest awareness of me at this time, as I was banished from the better part of the Palace; it may even have been, Axson Mayte had brought a new bride to the Bog Palace by this time, without my knowing. And so I set off, less in desperation than in resolution, on a cold night of intermittent rain and sleet; in which month this was, I had no idea; nor even which year; for in the Bog Kingdom, Time did not exist as we know it elsewhere. And so—somehow—I made my way back—beginning to recognize my surroundings after dawn of the next day—seeing with amazed eyes the hills outside Princeton, now a latticework of the brightest snow.
Hearing these terrible words from one so debased, you cannot help but feel repugnance, for the depth of sin, degradation, bestiality and even worse to which your Annabel has fallen. Yet it is my prayer that you will see it in your hearts to forgive me, and perhaps one day again to love me; and to allow me, and my baby soon to be born, a refuge at the Manse.
I
t might be of interest to the reader of scientific and naturalistic inclinations to learn that at least one of the strange species of scavenger which Annabel describes in the graveyard of the Bog Palace—the one that is part-bird and part-reptile—is evidently no mere phantom of her delirium but an actual creature to be found in certain isolated regions of the eastern United States.
Though few living persons have claimed to have actually seen these terrifying birds—(for “birds” they are classified, with the capacity for limited periods of flight)—it is evidently the case, according to a biologist at the university whom I have consulted, that they must be descendants of
Archaeopteryx,
an extinct “flying reptile” of the Jurassic period. Such creatures are to be found today primarily in the Florida Everglades (where they are companions of the Everglade kite), in the Ogeechee region of Georgia, in the Dismal Swamp of North Carolina, and, closer to home, in both the remote Pine Barrens of southeastern New Jersey (encompassing more than seventeen hundred square miles) and the smaller Great Bog, or Crosswicks Bog, several miles south and west of Princeton.
H
ow exhausted I am, and drained of emotion, following the account by Annabel Slade of her nightmare adventure in the Bog Kingdom! Though I have read it numerous times, each reading leaves me more upset, and with a fear that my objectivity as an historian might be jeopardized.
And a feeling of great sympathy for poor Josiah, who recorded this upsetting material verbatim, over a period of hours, often near-overcome by emotion as well, with such fury that his hand ached and his fingers could scarcely clutch at his pen.
If only it could be that this book of
The Accursed
might end with Annabel’s return home, her family’s forgiveness of her and great relief to have her back, and the birth of her child—
her
child, and not the Fiend’s.
Yet, unfortunately, it was not that way. So far as I have been able to determine, Annabel died in, or shortly after, childbirth; near the end of her labor she lapsed into a coma, and did not awaken; with the effort of the skilled midwife Cassandra, the baby was “born”—but did not live for more than a few seconds.
Called to the Manse, Dr. Boudinot could do nothing for the young mother, who had ceased breathing, and whose skin had begun to chill; the distraught physician signed a death certificate declaring that Annabel had died of “complications” following childbirth. (Which certificate I have located, in the Princeton Borough Records; but I was not able to locate any birth or death certificate for the unnamed and unbaptized Slade infant, the great-grandson of Winslow Slade.)
Both Annabel and her infant son were interred in the Slade family mausoleum in Princeton Cemetery, in a private ceremony attended only by family and barred to all others, by a special decree of the Princeton police which the Slades had arranged.
So it was said, and so it was widely believed.
THE TURQUOISE-MARBLED BOOK
contains nothing but Annabel’s words, as I have said; so, for a comprehension of the confused events that follow, the historian is obliged to consult a miscellany of sources of which no single one, unfortunately, can be thoroughly trusted.
Though all concur that Annabel Slade passed away in her childhood bed, after an arduous delivery, and was entombed shortly thereafter, yet there is considerable disagreement about the infant: was it a monster, or a normal infant?
The Beige Morocco Book, Josiah’s diary, contains no entries for this time, but several pages have been raggedly torn out.
Mrs. Johanna van Dyck’s Ivory Book devotes a dozen pages to the subject; but, having had no firsthand experience of the events at Crosswicks, and dependent solely upon gossip and rumor, her account is of limited value. It seems to have been Mrs. van Dyck’s assumption, which was common in Princeton, that the baby was a “premature birth” precipitated by the mother’s physical ordeal.
So the unhappy tale winds to its close
Mrs. van Dyck wrote.
God have mercy on these poor souls!
Adelaide Burr in the Crimson Calfskin Book seems to have been in possession of more bits of information, presumably by way of gossiping friends and tattling servants, or of Dr. Boudinot’s breach of confidence; for, though suffering from some undiagnosed fever, which Mrs. Burr feared might be
incipient Laotian sleeping sickness,
the invalid devotes some thirty close-written pages to what she calls THE TRAGEDY OF CROSSWICKS MANSE. So enthralled is Mrs. Burr by her salacious subject matter, there are passages in which she neglects to write in her usual crabbed hieroglyphic but lapses into English as she speculates on the “nature of the misshapenness” of the infant, which she had heard from “reliable sources” was
black-skinned;
whether this “cruelty of nature” should be interpreted as a “just & necessary Act of God” for the sin of forbidden “race-mixing”; or whether such a phenomenon was a sort of natural “mutant”—like conjoined twins, or dwarfs. Adelaide’s earliest entries deal with the “new & piteous fact that horrifies all of Princeton”—that poor Annabel Slade, returned to her family, has died in childbirth, having given birth to a
stillborn baby;
it is not until a day later, having been informed of a “fresh onslaught” of news, that the diarist adds that the baby’s skin is
black;
not until several days later that she writes that the baby had indeed been a “freakish prodigy of nature” born with two heads and foreshortened, flipper-like arms and certain of its vital organs, heart, liver, kidneys, carried on the outside of the body. “How merciful, there
is
God—to deny breath to such affliction.” (Adelaide then indulges herself in an unwholesome sort of speculation, questioning whether, if she and Horace had had a child, “it would have been in the shape of anything decently Human; or so mischievously deformed, as Horace sometimes appears to me in his disheveled state, I would have been locked away in a madhouse forever, like the legendary Mrs. Andrew West.” ) (For so cruel rumors circulated about Dean West’s wife, who had passed away twenty years before.)
At Prospect, the Wilsons were naturally shocked and grieved over what Woodrow referred to as the “undeserved tragedy of the Slades”; for he had been very fond of Annabel, as of Josiah, and believed that the young woman’s “fall from grace” was to be attributed to the growing immorality of the secular world—indeed, in the very heart of Presbyterian orthodoxy. Dwelling in what observers slightingly called “Dr. Wilson’s petticoat haven,” with a wife and daughters and a frequently visiting mother-in-law, Woodrow was of two minds concerning Woman, and doubted that the “natural propensities” of the sex could include a moral and rational depth equivalent to Man’s. So, the mysterious behavior of Annabel Slade seemed to him but a vindication of certain doubts, and a warning to all, that years of Christian upbringing cannot always overcome the biological fact of
ab initio
femaleness.
Jessie Wilson, Annabel’s friend from school, was deeply shaken by news of her death; but did not want to talk about it, nor certainly about the rumor of a “misshapen black-skinned baby,” except to say that, since Annabel’s death, her nightmares seem to have lessened, for which she was grateful. “Instead of Annabel, I dream about—nothing! As if Annabel drew all with her of my emotions, and I am left behind.”
Jessie’s pink satin bridesmaid’s dress would hang in her closet at Prospect for years, unworn a second time; for the young woman sincerely believed that there was a curse on the dress, that would afflict her should she ever dare to wear it.
In her Brown-Dappled Book, Wilhelmina Burr set down an emotional account of what she was able to learn of her dear friend’s ordeal; initially, she records her dismay at being denied entry to the Manse, to visit Annabel; she records her concern, that Annabel might be very ill; then, a number of rumors: that Annabel had succumbed to madness, and tried to injure herself and her baby with an overdose of laudanum; that Annabel had not died in childbirth, but some days later, while nursing her misshapen baby; that the Fiend had come for his son, and taken away the infant, from all the Slades who dared not lift a finger to prevent him . . . Then, news came that Annabel had died: which Wilhelmina at first refused to believe.
Like other West End residents, Wilhelmina would be “baffled & incensed” by not being invited to Annabel’s funeral, and lapsed into melancholy, that she would never see her friend again; but began to dream, that in fact Annabel
had not died;
and that she and Annabel would be reunited one day soon,
this side of the grave.
Wilhelmina would hear of the burial in Princeton Cemetery that, as the mausoleum doors were slowly closed, Josiah broke into sobs and refused to be comforted by his mother, or anyone; and Todd woke from a transfixed state to rush at the mausoleum, clawing at the doors and wrestling with the attendants who were shutting them, crying angrily that his cousin Annabel
should not die, and would not die; because Todd would not allow it, and Todd would bring her back.
Among Princetonians, by this time, every sort of crazed rumor was circulating, the most bizarre being relayed to Amanda FitzRandolph by a neighbor on Edgehill Road, that the infant born to Annabel Slade was no human creature at all, but a
black snake;
with a blunt bullet head, topaz eyes, and a length of at least two feet, thick, muscular, with “diamond” scales covered in its mother’s blood. Amanda had felt faint with disgust, and disbelief; asking what had become of this hideous thing she was told that it had
escaped
.
For all who were in attendance at the delivery in Annabel’s room, it was reported, had been stunned by horror and incredulity, and too frightened to take hold of the snake, or beat at it with any weapon. “So that the horrible thing slithered from the bed, made its way downstairs, and out of Crosswicks Manse. And it was the sight of the snake that so terrified Annabel, she sank into a coma, and never awakened.”
Mrs. FitzRandolph cried: “Ridiculous! It is utterly absurd, such a rumor.”
So her neighbor went away chastened; but would relay to others that, as she’d told of the hellish birth, Mandy FitzRandolph had not looked nearly so surprised as one might have expected.