Tell-Tales of Usher: Lady of Slaughter, Mistress of Dread, Chapter I

of English.

  "We'll both come get you, Hattie," I said and so we did, in the process leaving a trail of yet more debris. As we helped him to a seat, Madeline noticed the cup filling with blood and ran to get a larger bowl to contain the splashes.

  "What are you doing?" he asked of Madeline as he put his hands on his knees and leaned in squinting to get a closer look – his eyesight was less than perfect and we had discussed how we might get him to see an optician without causing general hysteria.

  "Oh, we've had the strangest thing happen. While we were sitting here chatting, Edmund noticed drops of blood falling to the rug. I checked my hands and wrists and found no wounds; Edmund checked himself foot to head and found nothing. We then noticed the drops were just falling from the air."

  "Oh, my dear," Hatotep said gravely. "She has come. Sekhmet has come to this world of yours. Many years ago, before my time, even, before her great massacre within the walls of the city of Nanoor, drops of blood began to fall. Soon, the walls of the houses began spouting blood until finally it inundated the rooms and people were forced to run into the streets but the blood kept coming and as they gathered together, as people will when they are frightened and facing a common enemy, the slaughter began. Sekhmet ripped the flesh of the inhabitants with such ferocity, that those who still had legs to carry them were hemmed in by mounds of corpses that clogged the narrow streets. All, every last one, was killed. Oh, Madeline, Edmund, if I have brought this upon you, I am truly cursed. Forgive me.

  We both instinctively reached out to comfort the old fellow, now so distraught at this turn of events.

  "There is no blame to be apportioned here, Hatotep," Madeline assured him. "If the goddess has come to us through you, then you have been terribly used by her. I know of what I speak. My family has been cursed for hundreds of years with just this sort of abuse. And though we bear a terrible burden of guilt, none of us is responsible for the horrors that occur, though they might not have occurred without our existence."

  "Your words are so kind; I wish I could take comfort from them but I fear for you all too much. Oh, I curse the words that brought me back to life and all the scribes who wrote them and the priests that prepared my body for this life after death, which has proven to be not a paradise but merely a fresh opportunity for misery."

  "But Hatotep, you must understand and I say this with all respect, that Sekhmet was merely a faulty interpretation of a higher truth. She was a figment of early mankind's need to understand the world it had no revelations of and could not otherwise fathom. We have a different understanding now. We have the Christian god and we have science."

  "Am I to assume that when you say "early mankind" you refer to me? You think me primitive, do you?"

  "Well you needn't take that tone with me; I meant no offense."

  "Please, both of you, stop. Eddie, I know Hatotep speaks the absolute truth, not simply his personal religious truth, when he declares that Sekhmet is here among us."

  "But Madeline, that's ridiculous, the gods of those times were myths. Would you have me believe that these ancient gods actually existed and do so still? What of our biblical god? Is the Christian god merely one among equals?

  "I don't understand how you have come to worship the god of the Canaanites," Hatotep said dismissively, "such a powerless people. The Egypt of my time was a great nation – why would you not worship our gods, gods that favor the great? Perhaps this is the reason Sekhmet has returned. You have not respected her power."

  "Our religion favors the good and the meek, Hatotep. You yourself have suffered greatly and our God, through his son Jesus Christ, has offered redemption and an end to suffering for those who accept him. Love is the power of our lord, it is what characterizes our religion, not the exercise of power."

  "Love!? Your god's love will not save you from Sekhmet. She loves too – human blood!"

  And more misery there was to be that day.

  "Now the blood seems to be coming from my finger-tips," Madeline said as she touched a knob of the parlour doors. Then she looked down at her feet to the blood spreading out from under them. "Oh, Edmund, help me," she cried. Madeline was usually so self-possessed that she rarely displayed such overt vulnerability. Her need drew from me all the tenderness I had stuffed in my heart because it had seldom been called for so pleadingly, so immediately. I clasped her hands in mine and blood trickled down my wrists and forearms. I embraced her and quieted her agitation.

  "Stay still, I will get some rags to mop up the blood and I shall carry you down to the kitchen, where we can sit without fear of ruining the rugs and upholstery. Let me help you; you are not alone." With that I kissed her forehead and ran to the hallway to fetch some rags from the closet.

  I got her situated at the kitchen table. We soon discovered that the blood appeared and disappeared, which at least provided Madeline some respite from the mess. The stains, which caused her so much distress, would eventually vanish.

  Madeline had decided to examine the blood under microscope and had me fetch her equipment from upstairs and bring it to the kitchen. Once we learned that the blood was fugitive, the experiments became more urgent and she had me back upstairs again to fetch her photographic equipment, a science she was much taken with.

  "Blood speaks softly, too soft for most to hear but it does speak. It may have something important to tell us. And thanks to developments in microscopy, I am able to read it as well. It helps me understand more fully what the blood is saying."

  "Madeline, you can't be saying that you talk with blood."

  "Well, of course I don't discourse on the topics of the day with it, Edmund, don't be thick." I had irritated her, which I seemed to do too frequently and it always pained me. I am intolerably stupid sometimes.

  "There is spiritual matter that flows with the blood; It lives as long as the blood lives. That is how blood speaks, through the spirit of the blood. I have been attempting to see if this presence leaves any physical trace. We know spirits effect matter, but is there any trace of them beyond the effects of their intervention? In other words, do they themselves possess physicality; can a spirit leave behind traces of its own entity? Is there a spiritual matter that also possesses physicality? I say there is, though it be like the vapor of a fog. Is blood itself that matter or is there something else in the blood?" This focus on the science greatly aided her self-control and then with less surety she said,

  "Thanks, Eddie, for your kindness. I panicked. Emotion is the enemy of science and of art; I should not have allowed it to pollute my inquiry.

  "You're a woman, Madeline; it's natural for you to feel fear and need comfort. Your tenderness is no pollution. If anything you seem all the more real to me at these times, rare as they are, so much more open. I confess, I would love for you to express your fears passionately and frequently so that I could sweep you up into my arms and carry you away on a daily basis – I should never grow tired of it."

  "You're the one who's being carried away," she said with impatient gentleness, "and women are no different than men in that regard, Edmund. It is no more natural for women to need comfort than it is for men. Men, however look for their comforts furtively, not openly."

  "Well, yes, I suppose that's true."

  "The truth is, Eddie, that often my life does not seem natural or real to me. I feel myself to be a most unnatural woman, merely an empty vessel for others' utilization."

  "You are an extraordinary woman and more connected to nature than anyone I know. You are uncommonly gifted, not unnatural; you are a victim of abuse. I will never let all the wicked things in the world defeat you, I promise."

  "We are all beset by wickedness; protecting me from it is not a promise you can make, Eddie, even the most powerful cannot always stay the hand of evil."

  "The Hand of Evil," I said, wriggling my fingers as I drew them into claws, trying to lift us up to the ether of good humor away from the shadows that always threatened our relationship; "a melodrama in three acts. Act I: The Divinat
ion of Digits. The stage is set; a large hand in the ruins of a Gothic abbey, drumming the floor impatiently with it's fingers."

  "Act II," she cried, The Clamor of the Cudicles. The hand begins waving wildly in an attempt to catch the attention of the audience, which is frightfully distracted." Madeline giggled.

  "Act, the Third: Knuckles Anon. The stage is pelted with assorted vegetables which the hand furiously attempts to flick off the stage back out into the audience; yet it is overcome and falls palm upward in a gesture of surrender. The curtain descends."

  I bowed my head and flung back my arms in the supplication of a thespian and then a most frightening thing happened. Madeline began speaking in a hoarse voice not her own as she spat out these words from Leviticus 17:11:

  "For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul."

  Madeline's mouth seemed to be completely detached in expression from her eyes and the rest of her face, which was all contorted in anguish. She could not stop her mouth, moving in equipoise, from speaking nor had she formulated any of its messages in her own brain, rather they came from elsewhere. She continued:

  "There will be more blood to follow, floods of it. The streets will sponge the