The Legacy - Part III

A curse be upon them...

photo: Nasher Virtue

Previously in Part II

….And it was then and there, when the stonemason, Jack Slatnapper’s tools cut the niche in the wall for the red post-box that the Reverend’s curse manifested. It had been seeping skyward through the hallowed soil towards the light. It caressed the worm the weevil and the slug, stirring Nature’s creeping instruments of decay to more fervid burrowing and mastication. With the first stone pulled out, the Curse was unleashed from the crumbling earth behind it….

Part III

Journeyman Jack, as he was wont to be known, was the first to suffer of the Curse and consequently his demise was not the first to be attributed to it. The first axe blow fells not the tree; Queen Mary’s head took one, two three! as the childrens’ rhyme attests. On his return from Gloucester and the final year and a day of his apprenticeship, Jack Slatnapper’s first commission was to install the town’s new post box. The tools of his trade gleamed virgin in his belt and had cut no stone since they were earned and presented by the Guild Master, the resident stonemason of that city’s great Cathedral.

Nether Clevehaven is not a large town and the Worthies of it – the Mayor, Parish Councilors, Bailiff, Beadle and Sheriff - never shied from ennobling any civic works with their liveried presence. Jack, therefore, had an audience of all the Town’s dignitaries and their good lady wives, and many other townsfolk besides. With pride and ringing mallet blows he drove in, cleanly, his chisel’s steel to cut the first stone from its mortar.

Stooping to stare into the hole he had made, a foul exhalation from within assailed his senses. The rancourousness with which it invaded his nostrils blinded him with tears and left him breathless. Instinctively, but in vain, seeking to cover his offended orifices, he let slip the ashlar block and it fell and crushed three toes of his right foot. It was in this state of sensorial incapacity that he performed a full circle, clockwise on one leg, letting forth the most unseemly profanities at every hop. The shock of the Mayoral retinue as their ears were thus assailed - for stonemasons take pride in sharpening both their tools and their invective - was soon replaced by horror. From the black hole spewed forth a torrent of the earth’s most verminous and loathsome creatures. Be-slimed and with many more legs and tails than seemed natural, the foetid flow spread outwards and gentleman and lady alike fled before it. Only poor Jack did not escape. Unbalanced and seeking, on one leg to flee, his hopping crushed to slippery ichor many of the scuttling myriapods and backward he fell, thrashing onto the seething carpet.

Awful enough one might think, such an inglorious happening, but this was not the full measure of awfulness that befell poor Jack. When the last of the creeping horrors had been shaken from his vestments and scuttled off to some other darkness, Jack still had his commission to perform. Without his audience now, and somewhat grateful for a cleansing rainfall, he finished the installation of the post box. Scraping down the inside of the stony cavity so the iron box would snuggly fit, he happened to cut his left hand upon some sharpness protruding from the earth. He thought nothing of it then. It was but a week later that the barber surgeon was called for; the pharmacist’s mercuric tincture had not stopped the rot in the depths of Jack’s wound.

“The choice be plain,” said Marion Kilmister, pumping the bellows of his brazier “I takes thine hand now, or the rot takes thee to Jesus.” Jack thought on it, for what use could a one-handed stonemason be?

“But two and twenty years I be, and too full of life to die. Perhaps the smithy can fashion me some device by which I might yet hold firm my chisel.” Jack gave nod to the surgeon’s saw and took down a pint of rum. He bit the leather and tears streaked his face as he thought of the long hours of practice he had put into that hand; now all for naught. It thudded into the hay as he slid into merciful unconsciousness, and so was spared the smoke and steam of the white-hot sealing blade upon his ruddy stump.

When did talk first turn to the presence of a curse upon the Church? The next few graves dug, only Mungo and his son bore witness to the multitudes of shining black beetles and slugs bursting from the earth as their spades dug in. It is as if the earth itself has turned unnatural thought Mungo. The creatures would scuttle away, in time, and graves could be dug, but it was a most unpleasant ordeal. Such was it that Mungo’s son, Seth, broke with generations of tradition and sought apprenticeship at the tannery, preferring to collect the excrescence of dogs and to tramp in the piss-stinking leather vats than the emanations of the grave. But though uneasy, and aggrieved, Mungo did not at that point fall to thinking there was a curse.

But malady followed calamity followed inexplicable coincidence, and folk are prone to superstition after all. Percival Ricketts, the bandy-legged organist, trapped a foot in the pedals and fell whilst taking his seat. The lid of the keyboard slammed shut and broke three fingers, and the wrist of his other hand snapped as he hit the floor. The resulting commotion and lack of an organist put back the hastily agreed wedding of Ms. Philippa Flux and Mr. Gregory Minchin.

In the ensuing delay, Gregory’s suspicions as to the fidelity of Ms Flux were roused by rumours on good authority, and he gave in to brandy and brooding, promising that he would have his satisfaction. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for the attempted murder by unlawful duel of honour. Philippa was disgraced and cast out by her father to birth her child in the poorhouse, and the lover, the young replacement vicar, was left half blind and deaf by a kiss on the cheek from Gregory’s musket ball. Ms. Flux’s sister, who had been in love with Gregory and had set the rumours running in the hope of stealing his affection, withered with guilt and a broken heart. The incident was a stain upon the church and nobody thereafter wished to walk their daughters down an aisle of such scandal and shame.

And this was but one emanation of the curse, for curse it became on the lips of the townsfolk. Gravestones toppled upon the heads of those bowing to place flowers. A family pew broke violently, its rusting nails impaling the posteriors of three generations of the Caldicotts, inoculating them with dreaded lockjaw. Funerals descended into shrieking madness as eruptions of foul pests from beneath the coffin swelled up to engulf it. “Twas as if the devil was claiming the departed for his own!” were the mutterings at the wake. Townsfolk chose to be buried elsewhere.

Selwyn Hiblett’s foot was tangled in the bellpull, and he was lofted to dangle in the church tower for hours one evening when he was practising the peels alone. He was found, scarlet faced and insensible, swinging from a noose of rope which blackened his foot to deadness like a docked sheep’s tail.

Crump, the rat-catcher sent to poison and trap the plagues of vermin in the churchyard could find none, but left his arsenic in the vestry by mistake; and by mistake some found its way into the communion wine. Caustic soda was fetched instead of bicarbonate for cleaning the marble of the font, and twin babes were scarred with livid crosses which appeared the following morn like a branding by the hand of Satan.

The second and third replacement clergymen sent by the Bishop would stay but a few months before some unspoken terror they had witnessed in the dark; some vile whisperings of doom or lustful incitements drove them to flee or to madness, or worse.

Mungo tended the graveyard, but always hesitated to approach the tomb of Speighthart where hung the impotent brass bell. A silent reminder of his guilty act, it would swing on its mounting, when a breeze took it, like a corpse on the gibbet. Whenever he approached, it seemed to Mungo a coldness came up from the ground and branches of the yew tree would reach for him from their shadows. As more and more bad luck and ill omen befell the town, Mungo’s fears grew into certainty that Speighthart was taking his revenge upon the town and that the fault was his.

His mutterings at his work and at the alehouse grew less coherent and even his closest friends began to shun his company because of it. His dreams were shot through with sweaty visions. Within them, he relived the moment when, staring up from the grave at the ranting priest, lightning had struck; but in his dream, an animated skeleton began to dance about and mock him. In other dreams, he knelt to cut the chain but was transported into the coffin with Speighthart’s mouldering corpse. It pawed at him in the stinking darkness. What sent him beyond the edge of his growing madness, however, was the drowning of his beloved son, Seth who slipped and brained himself, face down, in the urine of the tanning vats. No worse an end could befall any man, thought Mungo… except perhaps to die a lingering death below the ground…

That night, raging with intention, Mungo attacked the tomb of Speighthart, determined to know the truth; had Speighthart truly been dead, or did he yet live on, a subterranean malevolence, and one he himself had created? In the glow of his hurricane lamp, he applied his entrenching spade with berserk and furious speed Down I shall go and up ye shall come, foul fellow, alive or dead! His chanting made a rhythm for his work and soon he heard the sound of steel strike on the coffin top. With maniacal strength, he heaved up the lid and cast it aside and what next befell drove all remaining sanity from his mind.

Mungo was unaware of the propensity of cadaverous sinew to contract as a corpse desiccates. Speighthart’s body, black clad and booted, remained in appearance much as it was when first entombed, and his deathly face, though shrunken to its skull-bone, was well preserved by the thick application of white lead upon it. Freed from the constraint of the coffin lid, with a sickening creak, Speighthart began to rise from the grave. Shrieking and scrabbling to escape the hole, Mungo fled, but the corpse continued upwards after him. From the lip of the grave, Mungo began to shovel dirt back in, gibbering insensibly but Speighthart did not cease and once fully upright, his jaw dropped open in a ghoulish rictus grin.

To be continued…in Part IV

To start this tale at the beginning…click here