Xeno Sapiens (49 page)

Never one to throw in much with the idea of
kismet or past lives, I could no longer deceive myself about vague
memories that had floated up from time to time over the years like
spirits emerging from some blackened ruin in my brain. Ghosts that
formed body and blood and wrote a dark story of early,
seventeenth-century Wallachia, a place I've never seen. I recalled
the place not from dreams, but from the first time I looked
directly into her eyes. I knew instantly that she was that unformed
spirit in my mind, now given substance by cordial flesh.

I had met her in a tavern, a black-haired
vixen with a smile that could light up the dark side of the world.
Time had not touched her fairness with its withering hand. It had
been only a few years prior that Wallachia had been completely
under Ottoman rule, and a tavern, if one could be found, would have
been a good place to get arrested. But the oppression of the
Ottoman empire was slowly eroding, and it was a time to
celebrate.

I am not sinless now and was less so then,
and I found her as seductive and bewitching then as I do now, and
she, me. Leave aside that I had a wife and children at home. Being
with her was like dancing on knives, or walking through fire, or
diving headlong from a precipice. She was as wild and unbroken as
the nail marks she clawed into my back, and I looked with more than
eagerness to the times I could steal away and feel the heat of her
body against mine, or bury my face in her hair, or run my fingers
down the pink bloom of her cheek, or hear her laugh. And she made
me laugh, too. She was hot-blooded and hot-tempered, unbridled and
full of life in a time when life was cheaper than dirt. She was the
drug that made my life worth living in a part of dismal,
seventeenth century Europe which had yet to be lit by the newly
budding Renaissance. It was a place where familiars still prowled
and witches were hanged. It was the black time; the Burning
Times.

Then, as now, she was a closed book. What I
knew of her life when she wasn't with me was a secret. And so it
was that her secrets didn't sit well with others of the town. Such
beauty, they whispered cattily among themselves, was not natural.
That she was unmarried and childless was the pinnacle of scandal.
It was rumored, far and wide, that she had dishonorable liaisons.
She was a free-spirited threat to the town's loathsome,
swamp-donkey women, heartless harridans, and court eunuch, Pope's
whores, clown-suited as the town council, whose piety stretched a
mile wide and an inch deep. And they intended to punish her for
it.

I was nearly caught many times, but managed
to steal away when discovery was at hand. Our trysts were always at
night and nobody got a really good look at me. But tongues started
wagging. Where was she when the Great Cat that had begun to plague
the town was seen? Livestock had been slaughtered, children
frightened. The attempt was a ham-fisted one to paint her as a
familiar. Wallachia was home only to some rather small, wild cats,
nothing so large as a cougar or a panther. No-one I knew had seen
such a cat, and I dismissed it as political theater, but the seed
for her destruction had been planted. Wallachia had thrown off the
shackles of the Sultans only to hang the anvil of the Holy Roman
Emperor around its neck, with its inquisitions and imprisonment of
heretics, and its burning and hanging of witches.

I couldn't discount the stories entirely.
Indeed, I was not with her every moment and knew nothing of her
life outside of our time together. In one of my only noble
gestures, I tried to persuade her to leave, at least for a while,
until things had settled, but she refused. I told her that powerful
forces were aligning against her. They meant to have her head, and
I couldn't help her. My job was such that I couldn't be associated
with her and risk not only myself, but my family. Like Icarus, I
was only a man, with wings of wax, and I was flying too close to
the sun, about to plunge into the killing sea with her.

She didn't want to listen as I tried to
explain the ugly realities of life to her. I don't think she really
believed it could be that bad, and was content to think that
everything would, somehow, turn out alright.

I wasn't there when she was arrested at the
tavern and hauled away, charged with adultery and witchcraft. She
was tried and convicted that night in a candle-lit sham of a
drumhead court, convened specifically for that reason. The judge
made his pronouncement and she was sentenced to hang the very next
afternoon, when the crowd would be the largest. Yet when I heard, I
didn't protest. I had too much to lose.

The assemblage was restless the next
afternoon as she was rudely shoved up onto the rickety gallows, its
unsound wood gray and sad, the hooded hangman standing by. I saw
confusion and hurt in her eyes more than fear, the sadness that was
the lovelorn's unhappiest harvest. The whispers flew amongst the
crowd.
Who was it? Why didn't she tell? What kind of a coward
would let a good woman, if indeed she were good, to suffer the
gallows and not reveal himself?
She looked into the crowd, her
scared eyes searching for me, perhaps expecting me to step forward
and put an end to this. But she never saw me. No eye, neither hers
nor the crowd's, fell upon me. I was invisible and beyond
suspicion. I was respected and respectable with a good, necessary
job. A decent, family man with children and a loving wife.

There were catcalls and tears, advocates of
her good nature and detractors out for innocent blood. I suppose I
was the last one to see the hopelessly lost look of betrayal in her
eyes before the hood was placed over her head and the noose
secured. It was
this
, this look in her eyes, that I had
recognized those many centuries later. The crowd quieted as the
moment approached and I heard her softly sobbing beneath the hood:
small as a child, her fragile wrists bound with thick coils of
rope, alone, and finally afraid. The lever groaned back with a
clank, the trap door banged and clattered.

Then the drop.

As I said, I didn't sleep last night and I
didn't expect to hear her laugh today when I came to the store,
working the twelve-thirty to nine shift. And I didn't. Perhaps it
was one of her days off, but I didn't think so. Some things weigh
like a black spot on your heart and I knew it was going to be my
last day. I even thought about going around and saying goodbye to
everyone at work, but I didn't. The only one I wanted to see was
already gone. The place seemed downright cheerless without her
laughter, and I knew now it was best for her when she laughed
alone. When the door closed behind me, it was already dark and I
didn't even look in my rear view mirror.

On the drive home, I pondered over why she
never outed me, but I can't dwell on it for long, because the only
answer that makes any sense is too bittersweet and shameful for me
to deal with:

Maybe -just maybe- she loved me.

I didn't sleep as I lay down, because I was
thinking. They say each trip back is a chance to improve yourself
and I hoped that, in this life, at least, I was a better man. That
this time I would do better by her than I did the last.

The screams are very close tonight, coming
from just beneath my back porch, close enough that if I got up to
look, I would see her on the ground, looking up. But I stayed in
bed, listening as she scaled the tree by my back porch and landed
on the roof with an easy creaking of wood. The soft thud of padded
paws thumped lightly on the sill as she slipped through the open
window, the curtains silent silk gliding along her back. I heard
the catty fall of her pads as they crossed the room next to mine,
tolling like the tell-tale heart that beats accusingly beneath the
bed of every villain. I felt the sinewy weight as she crawled up
onto my bed like a serpent, the sultry heat of her body as she
nestled down beside me, a thing I had looked forward to in happier
circumstances lifetimes ago.

I feel the warm fog of her respiration on my
neck, the wet, black-velvet nose on my cheek. The soft growling and
intake of breath -almost like a purr, or a low chuckle- are
directly in my ear. I turn my wide eyes to see her final
embodiment: Fur black, like her hair, green in eye and red of
tongue, white in tooth and claw. So this is what happens when the
world goes pear-shaped, the trap drops, and your life is whittled
down to a few, final ticks of breathless anticipation. I wonder if
I will see her ears laid back, or hear the snarl as she lunges for
the killing strike.

Because all things come around in their own
good time; all debts get paid in this life or another, and I
wouldn't beg for redemption, even if I wanted to.

You see, I was her executioner.

And I miss her laugh.

**********

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stories -featuring aliens, weird sisters, lost loves, bankers,
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By

Victor Allen

Copyright © 2006 all rights reserved

From
The Lost
Village of Craven County...

He had expected something just like it, but
that didn't keep him from being afraid when he awoke and heard the
footsteps outside of his trailer. Whatever it was, it could bode
nothing but ill. No human being would be here in this place at
three in the morning when the blood struggles through cold, pinched
veins.

He could hear whoever it was tramping with
bold defiance around the trailer. Around and around, stopping here
and there as if inspecting something. Twice, the rustling of leaves
stopped directly beneath his window, the dark, shadowy thing only
the breadth of sheet metal away from him.

He had thought he would know what to do when
the time came. Too much of a strange nature had happened to him
over the past years for him to balk at a strange noise that might
be only a roving 'possum. Except he knew that wasn't what it
was.

His eyes were playing tricks on him. Eerie,
phantom shadows leaped and swirled in the dark corners of the
trailer. The wind leaned against the walls, squeaking and
stretching the thin metal skin. The kerosene heater was burning low
and its guttering flame gargled and sputtered.

The rustling noises receded from his trailer
and he let out his pent-up breath in a trembling sigh. He hadn't
realized he had been holding it, his eyes wide and glazed, his
white-knuckled fingers gripping the hard mattress.

He stayed that way until the rustling
footsteps had been silent for five minutes. The heater's glow had
diminished to a sullen red ring and the trailer's temperature was
falling. It was either get up and put more fuel in the heater or
spend the rest of the night not only scared, but cold.

His first thought when he sat up was not of
his fright, but of how the cold would bite into him when the
insulating blanket's seal was breached. He pulled the ragged,
care-woven quilt around him as he placed his foot on the frigid
trailer floor. Metatarsals, stiffened by the cold, recoiled in
protest as they were forced to yield to their weighty new
burden.

He navigated the camper's narrow corridor,
wobbling sleepily between the beds that ruled both sides of the aft
section. His heels made jarring thumps on the linoleum covered
floor beams. His feet and ankle joints popped like lady finger
firecrackers.

The heater was a useless lump of metal, cold
to the touch, the last of its fire extinguished. There was a fifty
five gallon drum of kerosene outside, but Mark's fear of fire ever
since the night his barely know classmate had been consumed had not
allowed him to bring an extra supply inside. An uneasy calm that
was only the result of sleep induced half-awareness settled on
him.

He was at the door, his hand on the light
switch, when he saw the man standing outside. His finger froze on
the switch. The figure was obviously a man, but something was
hauntingly, in its most literal sense, familiar about him. Mark
could ferret out no details in the moonless night, only the
outlines of long sleeves and long pants snapping in the stiff wind.
It was the slight rightward tilting of the head, or the barely
hipshot stance that nudged some part of his mind towards
recognition.

Fresh fear burned in his heart like a powder
keg set afire by a stray spark. The figure stood alone, almost
complacent in its study of the trailer. It showed no sign of
retreating, rooted as firmly as any tree to its spot in this darkly
enchanted glade.

A two foot hickory club with a leather thong
attached to it leaned against the wall by the door. It was an inch
and three quarters thick along its entire length and sturdy as
concrete. Kim's father had made it in high school, intending for it
to be a table leg. As he had turned it on the lathe, a worm-eaten
flaw had emerged, rendering it useless for its intended purpose. He
had given it to Kim when she and Mark had moved to the city. She
had carried it as she walked to work at the Burger King in the days
before they could afford a car. Mark could only guess at how many
attacks Kim had thwarted with it, simply by clunking it heavily on
the sidewalk as she walked.

He closed his cold hand around it, hefted
it, and found its weight good. He gripped the metal door handle. He
levered it up and pushed. The door was stuck in its frame and he
had to shove it before it would jar loose from its moorings. It
swung outward with a grudging squeal, banging into the thin,
aluminum and wire screen door. The night was split by the raucous
twangs of the screen's metallic voice.