The Safety of Death

The Safety of Death

Three old bones lay shackled in the city center, to keep the dead from returning to haunt. Three more shackles lay open beside them, for the next to be accused. Anyone could be a hunter and anyone could be a witch. The three bones that lay there belonged to neither.
#
The doctor’s hand plunged past the doughy surface.
His face remained expressionless as he pressed deeper.
The woman was just wondering what he was feeling, whether the calm look on his face meant she had hope after all, when his hand stopped dead.
“What is it?” she demanded.
The doctor’s hand had only touched it, felt it push back against his searching fingers once, and he knew what it was. He covered up the woman’s belly and looked up at her, eyes darting subtly back and forth as he thought of how to tell her.
“Well how long do I have?” she asked impatiently. Bernice Creeyard never had time for anyone but straight shooters, and now she really didn’t.
“Can we sit?” asked the doctor.
Bernice was lying on the bed, which stood just a foot off the ground in the low-ceiling cottage room, and the doctor was kneeling beside. Sitting wouldn’t be a huge change from their current positions and she hardly saw how it would better facilitate conversation. Bernice swung her legs over the side of her bed regardless, faced the doctor where he knelt, looked at him square in the eyes, and then pushed him over with a vicious thrust of her leg.
“There,” she said.
“Mother!” came a chorus of voices. Bernice’s three daughters and two son-in-laws stood in the doorway.
She shot them a wild look. Normally they’d just roll their eyes at her, but that day they were struck by her look. Her eyes were creamy and full of bulging red vessels. Her skin was white and clung to her bones like a bed sheet. Bernice’s ghost was at the very surface.
#
“I know this is not the news you were expecting to receive,” the doctor said, still kneeling at the bedside with his robe bunched around him.
Bernice’s mind had wandered after she’d heard her diagnosis, but when the doctor’s last comment registered, she shot him a look of contempt. He recoiled slightly, bracing himself in case she tried to push him over again. She studied the details in his cloud-blue eyes and, as she did, the lines of her grimace deepened. She looked away abruptly. As she stared at the opposite wall, her face slowly smoothed back out, but this was reassuring to no one.
“Have you inspected the bodies of any witches lately doctor?” Bernice broke the silence. Her head turned towards him before her eyes, as though she was reluctant to rejoin conversation with him.
“Witches?” he asked.
“Yes, witches!” she snapped. “Do not play dumb with a woman on her deathbed. I do not have the time for that. I know you receive the murdered men and women to examine their bodies for demons’ marks and confirm their blood was mottled black. Tell me, have you refuted any of the cases? Have you come back and said that any accuser was wrong? Flora Walters’ accuser? Charlie Bloor’s? Montgomery Reese’s?” A tear fled Bernice’s eye. She picked it up between her thumb and forefinger and crushed it.
The doctor merely looked at her, hoping the silence would do the explaining for him.
“You shit!” she said, her turquoise eyes suddenly bright as lightning. She twitched towards the doorway. “Carina, lock the front door. Boys! Search the doctor. I want his documents.”
“Mother! You cannot just—”
She turned her wild eyes on her dissenting daughter.
“I have seven hours left, Margaret. OR WHAT!”
“Seven hours?” Margaret asked meekly as her mother stormed past. She had been present for the doctor’s whole visit and she didn’t remember him ever saying that her mother had less than half a day to live. Was it that bad?
#
Bernice took a seat at the trestle table at the center of their cottage and waited for the documents to be slid in front of her. Like a drooping flower exposed to sun, her spine slowly straightened amid the ensuing mischief. Color was even returning to her face, though it came in red blotches.
“Pour me a drink, Margaret. Stop watching the boys,” she said.
Bernice heard the sound of a bottle toppling over amid the thuds and rustling in the next room.
“Oh do not be so clum—”
CLISH! Bernice swung around to find a wine bottle had rolled off the shelf and exploded, spattering everything in remote proximity to it indigo.
“Oh damn you mother! Damn you!” Bernice shrieked.
“Mother stop suggesting there are ghosts,” Margaret hissed.
“My mother never let me have a sip in my life, Margaret, do you think that was a coincidence just now? Do not be a fool and find me a drink. I will have a drink today.”
#
Wrists and ankles wrapped with coils of rope and bruises, the doctor watched as the notebook was picked out of his bag of medical supplies and walked over to the matriarch. Her six-foot-four son-in-law placed it in front of her as though he was placing it in a raging fire. She turned to look at him, amused.
“Are you still scared of me, Brian?” Bernice made her eyes wide, opened her mouth like a savage, and licked the rim of her lips in jerky movements of her tongue. Then she gnashed her teeth and screamed, filling the cottage from floor to rafters with ear-tearing noise in an instant. Her face fell flat immediately after and she looked him up and down, from head to toe. “Good! I would be scared of me. If I was you, if I was the doctor, if I was any bastard on this mountain. I have had it with you all,” she said, her attention drifting back to the book in front of her, her hand still outstretched waiting for a wine goblet to be docked in it. When her fingers tightened around the metallic stem, she set it quickly down on the table, and then took a couple quick breaths to replenish the oxygen it took to scare Brian. “Alright. Let me see what can be done about all these bastards, and in a timely fashion,” she said. “Mariah!” she called to her other daughter. “Come sit with me. Help me decipher the doctor’s materials. Let us be sure of the bastards before we see what can be done about them.”
#
“How sure are you?” Bernice asked, turning to look at her daughter beside her on the bench of the trestle table.
“I—I cannot be sure, but mother it has no note of any un-humanness of the persecuted witches. The anatomical diagrams remain unmarked by signs of disease or the occult. The doctor even states perfect health in his summaries. That would not be the case of the possessed, demon-allied, or magic-conjuring.”
“Good!” she said brightly. “That is all I needed to hear.”
“Margaret, will you get me my finest? My colorful finest. And a couple streaks of make-up too. Make me fearful. Make Brian here piss his pants.
“Did you just smirk, Gregoire?” she suddenly asked the other son-in-law. “Do you like it when I tease Brian?”
His eyes went wide and he became very serious. He couldn’t answer, though you could see that he thought he should.
“I do too, but I do hope I am doing more than tease him. I hope I am hurting him, like he hurt my daughter.”
“It was one time, mother! And he is sorry for it!” Margaret interjected.
“God help you, Margaret! When I am gone, there will be nothing but my threatening memory in your prick husband’s head protecting you.” Bernice looked at Brian. “Come on Gregoire,” she said, motioning to him. “Let us laugh for Margaret’s sake. AHAHAHAAHAHA!” She pushed the air out like it was poison gas, her eyes challenging him as she did.
#
The door of the cottage swung outward into the grey afternoon and the sound of the doctor pounding on the bedroom door sounded like distant thunder.
“Mother you cannot go out like this!” Margaret said, arms partially outstretched, wanting to restrain her but not daring to.
Bernice’s cheekbones and jaw were lined with fuchsia make-up and her eyes were spring-loaded. She wore a periwinkle cape, knee-high boots, and upwards of ten jangling necklaces about her. Straddling the threshold of the doorway, she looked at her daughter coolly, and then threw back her head.
“AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!” she blurted with the full capacity of her lungs, this time to the sky. Then her face fell flat, as though slapped off by her mortality.
“Mother!” Margaret whimpered. “You cannot go out because you look like,” she adjusted her vocal cords, “a witch!” she whispered. “I am worried about you!”
“I LOOK LIKE A WITCH BECAUSE I AM A WITCH!” she announced to the empty tree-shadowed road.
“What are you saying mother?” Mariah asked horrorstruck.
Turning her back to the street and lowering her voice, Bernice divulged her plan. “I am going to present myself as the nastiest witch this city has ever seen. I am going to be so nasty, tired old women will risk their rickety hips to join the mob coming after me. And as I am doing my nasty parade through town, I will advertise all my witchy ties. Did you know, Mariah, that I am bestest of witch friends with Macey Winchley, Clarence Skully, Larson Monroe, Marcel Worsley, and Coriander Fitz? The very same people who killed your mother’s friends with their gossip. It turns out, I am just the bestest of witch friends with them! Aha! The six of us are going to die today. Kind of sweet is it not? All of us friends dying together? The only thing they do not know is that I will be dying of natural causes and they will be dying of the most unnatural ones,” Bernice winked.
“Mum!” Carina, the youngest daughter cried.
Seeing the honest terror in her little one’s eyes, Bernice sobered for a moment.
“Carina, I am sorry dear. Listen, I want you to remember your mother…” she sifted through the past. “I want you to remember your mother as she was when you were eight. Erase all of this from your memories after I have gone and think of me only as I was when you were eight.”
“Mother this is crazy!” Mariah said, clearly regretting helping her read the medical documents.
“Oh stop it, this is going to be fun for me!” Bernice stepped down the stoop and onto the cobble streets. “I love you all! Except for you, Brian. My witch ghost will breathe down your neck until the day you die,” she said cheerfully, turning on her heel. “Take care of each other! Remember me as I was when Carina was eight. Oh, and go now and report me! If you are not the first to do so then they will expect that you are all witches too.”
“She has lost her mind!” Mariah wailed turning into the house.
“I will go tell the officers,” Margaret said. When she grabbed her coat and stepped out of the house, her mother was just a bouncing purple smudge in the distance.
#
Silence lined the streets like sky-high walls. Fear filled them like a suffocating fog. Windows and doors were shut tight and behind them people practiced being impeccably normal. For months now Bernice had suffered through over-polite small talk, drab clothing that seemed to pull the light out of a sunny day, and the smell of reeking bullshit as everyone pretended it was how they had always been. No one wanted to express a single thought that might differ from someone else’s because being different in any way could mean that they were a witch. Bernice hadn’t told anyone about her dreams in three months. They’d warped since she’d gotten sick and admittedly started to bother her. She resented herself for this, for falling victim to the perversion of the witch hunt. She’d vowed she never would from the day that it all started.
#
Three houses down the spiraling lane, someone slipped out their door. They pulled a ring of keys from their pocket and then went methodically down a row of deadbolts to secure their home.
Bernice hurried over, her boots making an awful scraping sound as she went, and leaned against the fence post of the man’s modest yard. Before she started her witch mission, there was one thing she wanted to do.
“Excuse me sir, I have something to tell you,” she began. “I had a dream last night that was admittedly a little disturbing. I have been sick, you see, and my dreams have been horrible ever since. Last night bugs were growing in my body, like one of those old soggy logs you find on the forest floor. They had taken my skin, my heart, my brain as their home and made their own tunnels and chambers throughout them. My body was taken from me before I was even done with it. I was evicted!” she said with a little laugh.
The man stiffened and his head jerked sideways fifteen degrees so that he could just barely see her in the corner of his eye.
Bernice didn’t know what to do once she’d told him. She hadn’t thought that far ahead, she’d just wanted to get it out. The man remained completely still. Silence stretched out after Bernice’s last word, still and unbroken as a morning lake. Though she didn’t know what she expected from the encounter, as her heart wilted in her chest, she realized that she had just wanted a bit of recognition for all the shit she’d been going through.
A pressure built in Bernice’s lower back. Normally she would have clenched and sent it back where it came from, but she was exhausted. She was tired of everyone thinking about how they were presenting themselves, she was tired of the awkward encounter with this man, and she knew how good it felt to relieve her head of the pressure of that dream. Bernice pushed and let the long grumbling fart fill the silence in the conversation.
The man looked like he was about to call for someone, maybe to report her strange behaviour, when she interrupted him.
“By the way, I am a big old raging witch and my very bestest of witch friends include Macey Winchley and Clarence Skully. They said they want to eat your kids. Do you have kids? Your future kids, sorry. They saw your future and they want to eat your future kids! She turned on her heel. “GOOD DAY TO YOU SIR!”
#
Bernice knew exactly where to start her mission. She headed straight for the private school, which was housed in one of the oldest pillared buildings on the mountain. Enrolled there were the arrogant children of all the most prominent and well-connected families. She started demonstrating her poor behavior on the way there, dancing and singing and itching and belching whenever she got the urge. The streets hadn’t heard that much noise since the last execution.
Bernice barged through the front doors of the school and into the sky-lit foyer. She followed a path of lit sconces into the maze of book stacks that had to be the library. The children gathered somewhere deep in the room were loud, too loud to be in the company of an adult. She closed the library doors behind her.
#
“Who are you?” one of the boys, no older than seven, asked her when she sat in the teacher’s chair in the carpeted alcove.
“I am your librarian for today. Do you want to have a lesson?” It was a rhetorical question. She was going to give them a lesson. The percussion of the librarian’s fists on the door drum-rolled her in. “What do you know about the witches on the mountain?”
#
“I KNEW CLARENCE SKULLY WAS A WITCH!” a boy’s voice carried through the open window Bernice had crawled out of and onto the street. A passerby froze at hearing the accusation. Bernice turned to them, her necklaces jangling and fuchsia make-up accentuating the harsh lines of her emaciated face. She looked more like a witch than any of the accused to date, so she didn’t bother introducing herself as one.
“What the boy says is true, Clarence Skully is a dear, dear friend of mine,” she said. The woman she spoke to looked terrified, like every word Bernice was saying was actually a veiled curse slithering into her life. Bernice only found this irritating and decided to push the woman even further toward hysterics. “The two of us are doing witching tonight, you know. What is your name sweetie? What are your hopes and dreams? May I have a strand of your hair?” Bernice asked, sending the stranger running. “I AM SURE MY FRIEND CLARENCE SKULLY WILL CATCH UP WITH YOU SOON FOR THAT HAIR! HE IS A NASTY WITCH!” she hollered after her before whirling her cape and taking off in the opposite direction.
#
Bernice’s breath was labored, but she was riding a high now and she skipped down the street. Skipping had become so unorthodox in the mountain community that she felt like she was flying. Periodically, she popped into stores just about to close for the night and made a string of purchases. Her first major purchase was paint. Her second was a pair of turquoise earrings, because why the hell not.
#
“Larson Monroe—Witch,” she wrote on the door of the bank in bright pink paint. Larson had killed her friend, Flora Walters, with a whispered lie that ended in a tumble down the side of the mountain a couple months ago. From Bernice’s perspective, Larson was a witch, and she would soon find that her whispered curse backfired.
Someone pushed the bank door open just as she was finishing the “h”, and it trailed sloppily off. Bernice pointed with her paintbrush at the message and waited for him to read it.
“I would know—I am a witch too! Larson and I rub shoulders, you see. We laugh at misfortune together and sip horse blood through our teeth on Sunday nights!” Bernice was making things up on the spot and couldn’t help but wonder whether she was sounding more ridiculous than terrifying. She didn’t care. “Better tell your family about us!” she said. “Get home and warn them!” The middle-aged man, in his gray doublet and silver adornments, was already side-running away from her.
#
The last store Bernice visited was in the main square. It was a liquor store, and she bought as much liquor as her arms could hold. Then she went to the middle of the square, uncorked a bottle, and turned it upside down. She walked a circle with it pouring behind her. Bernice uncorked the next bottle and walked a sloppier circle overtop of the first, having started skipping again.
“HEY!” she yelled to someone hurrying furtively home on the outskirts. “WILL YOU GO GET MARCEL WORSLEY? I AM ABOUT TO CALL ON THE DEMONS AND I NEED HIS HELP!” The person looked horrified. “DEMONS. MARCEL WORSLEY. PLEASE AND THANK YOU!”
Bernice walked to the middle of the circle she’d just made, reached deep in the pocket of her cape, and pulled out a box of matches. She lit one with a satisfying hiss and inspected the flame for its quality. Then, taking a deep breath, she shouted, “HEEEY DEEEEMOOOOONS!” Bernice threw the match. It stopped midair right where the circle of alcohol lay below and instantly turned into a wall of fire. Bernice was surrounded by flame. It felt good to her. Her body had been losing heat for weeks. “DEEMONS OH DEEMONS, COME HEEEEERE!” she called, arms out and dancing at her sides. “MY FRIENDS COME HELP ME CALL THE DEMONS!” For a moment, Bernice wondered whether she was going too far, but very soon after resumed her outlandish dancing at the center of the fire. She chuckled at herself.
Bernice called through the wall of flames to the crowd that started to gather there and requested quite politely that they call her friends, her fellow witches, to help summon the demons. She explained that she couldn’t do it on her own and it was really important that the demons come so that they could do a bit of killing they’d been meaning to do.
“LARSON!” she picked her witch friend out of the growing crowd. “AHAHAHAHA! LARSON LAUGH WITH ME, BRING THE DEMONS!”
“Larson is a witch!” Someone yelled, “I heard she was just today!” An argument broke out.
The fire kept spraying from the ground. Bernice was surprised that it had survived as long as it did on the cheap liquor she’d bought. In fact, its heat only seemed to grow. Sweat started to fall out of her like a squeezed sponge. A thought crossed her mind as her clothes took up the weight of the liquid streaming through her pores, a thought she would have rejected with embarrassment any other night. Bernice started undressing. She took off her finest periwinkle cape, which fell to the ground like a limp bat, and then she wriggled free of her frock. Bernice left her necklaces and boots on, because she liked them, and she didn’t want to die completely naked in public.
As she raved at the center of the magically fed flames, the other members of her fabricated coven appeared on the other side of the wavering red walls. If they didn’t come bound and escorted by townspeople, they were quickly tied up in the wake of the circulating gossip. They were hauled away from Bernice and her flames for fear of giving them power and brought to the corners of the city in which executions were done. Two to the cliffs, one to the tree that parted the cobble streets, and two to await lightning at the feet of the worshipped stone figures in the square. Each and every one of them wailed. It was hard for Bernice to hear their pain, until she remembered their shrill voices at the executions of her friends. Then it was quite easy for her.
With the murderers of Bernice’s friends and neighbors taken care, a profound sense of fulfillment came over her. Her work was done and she felt ready to die. The only question that remained was—how would she go?
Bernice felt her heart racing, she heard it in her ears, and then, all of a sudden, it seemed to stop completely. Her whole body lost power and she faltered like someone who missed a step. Black spots appeared in her vision. One in the corner and one at her feet. The one in the corner took the shape of a cloaked man in a dark alley. He watched the chaos coolly; in fact, she sensed that he was enjoying it, as she might be if she had been in the crowd. The black spot at her feet took the shape of a door.
When the doctor told Bernice that she was going to die, she had an interesting shift in perspective. She pictured a door waiting to open for her in precisely seven hours. Even though the doctor had never specified exactly how much time she had left, it had always been seven hours to her. It would accept only her, and shut right behind. No one could follow her through. She couldn’t even take anything with her.
Bernice’s heart started to beat again, then it stopped. She felt like she was falling through the door at her feet, and then her heart jolted back into action and the door slammed shut. Bernice’s vision was a blur of light and shadow, but when she glanced up at the flames, she found that they were shrinking. The crowd on the other side was getting bolder. One man in particular looked like he was going to chance it with his axe. He broke away from the back of the crowd and charged toward her with the blade cocked at his side.
Maybe it was the adrenaline, but Bernice’s eyes cleared as the man approached and she suddenly felt very much awake. Just a moment ago she’d felt like she was slipping down a steep slope into her grave, but now it didn’t feel like that at all. Bernice had given herself seven hours to run wild and avenge her friends, expecting to die immediately after and avoid the horrible death she’d earned along the way. As the axman stalked toward her, however, she couldn’t help but doubt it was going to end so cleanly for her. Bernice tried holding her breath to speed up the process of her dying. She punched herself clumsily in the tumor as though it was a beehive she could crack open in her gut. When that didn’t seem to be working, she felt her flappy neck for some important cord she could pull to end her life in an instant. Had she gotten it wrong? Was she supposed to die in eight hours instead of seven? Oh my god, I am going to die a village idiot! she thought as the man built up speed toward her.
The church bell swung, sound exploded in the square, and the axman startled halfway through the fire. The starving flames latched onto his pants and climbed. They grew in flares as the bell’s hypnotic clang echoed and then blared again. Bernice looked at him and forced out a laugh, tried to feed the flames licking down to his bones with her breath. She tried her best to look wild as she did, to cackle like a real witch would, and scare off anyone else who was thinking of coming at her.
When the last “Ha” was out of her lungs, Bernice listened for her heart to see if it was beating. She desperately hoped that it had stopped again during the ruckus. She didn’t have much time before the townspeople got hold of her and tore her tired body apart. All the oxygen she had spent laughing had certainly made her woozy, but that only made it hard to focus on her heartbeat. Bernice found herself reeling at the center of the fire-scarred square, only vaguely aware of her naked body and jangling necklaces, with a single question in her mind: is my heart still beating?
The world tilted on Bernice before she could make out the lup-dub in her ears. The black door that had appeared at her feet was now open and rising up from the ground. As the sinister ring of fire finally guttered out and the last toll of the silver bell clanged, its dark frame surrounded her. Suddenly feeling like she wanted to, Bernice closed her eyes experimentally. The door swung behind her as she did, and the last thing she was aware of was it easing shut with the most wonderful sense of finality. No one and nothing else could come through.
The murderous crowd closed in on her indecent, fuchsia streaked body, but Bernice Creeyard was already gone, sealed into the absolute safety of death.

The End.