I could barely breathe for her sitting on me, and choked on my tears. What, I wondered, was a golem, to live in a crypt, and send false letters?
“Careful, sister, or you’ll give her fits,” said Bill. “We can’t have another one die on us, after the failure with our brother.”
“I shan’t let her suffocate. If we keep her and allow her to pupate into the Guardian, then all we’ll have to worry about is that,” here she pointed to where Orlando whimpered on the ground, “We can’t have him destroying the illusion that we are a happy family…”
“Indeed,” said Bill. “We can use him for all sorts of things, actually. I believe he’s a virgin, which could prove…useful.”
“What is happening,” I wept. “Oh, do get up, do let me go, please!”
“It’s too late for you, stupid girl,” said Lizzie, and kicked me in the side with her boot-heel. “Though it may please you to know you alone have been the agent of your undoing. Rather amusing! If you hadn’t surprised the former Lord into death, then he would have completed his transmutation, and you should have gotten away from here safely.”
“Sister, do think—if she had not been discovered perusing the Private Library, inducing the anger that made our loathsome brother wish to destroy it, then we never would have thought to create a Guardian to protect our family legacy from future well-meaning fools! Ha! It is very funny, how a young girl’s curiosity can result in such tragedy.” He smiled thinly. “Rather Gothic, really. Isn’t the bitch some sort of petty writer? Too bad she’ll never put it all into a story.”
“Perhaps we should have her chronicle her transformation!” sniggered Lizzie. “It might be of great scientific interest one day.”
“So it is you who are the twins of whom my father spoke,” mumbled Orlando, his hand raised to where his cheek still bled. “I thought he had become completely insensible when he began to rant about how he had siblings—twins, yes, but not terrible he thought, though he said to be on the lookout for you, lest you show some sign of treachery! Alas—I have realized it too late!”
I know it sounds incredible, that in this modern time such things as curses are real, but as I languish in the crypt, surrounded by my mummified ancestors and these strange stone gargoyles that emit the weird light by which I can see to write this, gradually changing into the creature whose jade likeness I so unwittingly wore upon my breast, I have been forced to admit I should have heeded the warning given to me during my train-ride home to Ivybridge. Lizzie and Bill, two people whom I should never have suspected of evil, have been proven to be nothing but. Long did they plot their revenge on my former guardian for his decision to destroy the Private Library; long have they cursed fortune for having made he who I knew as the Lord Calipash the legitimate heir, and them the servitors of an estate they could claim no right to manage.
The worst part is, Bill was not being hyperbolic when he accused me of authoring my own undoing—indeed, it is the case, in so very many ways. When the former Lord Calipash found me so entranced by that strange, deviant copy of Fanny Hill, he resolved to burn the collection. Bill told me that, horrified by the idea of his family’s Private Library destroyed, he offered to do it for his master and half-brother—but instead he stoked the bonfire with other books, all the while secreting the foul tomes of the Private Library in the family crypt, where I will now dwell until the end of my life, which I think will not be for decades, if not centuries, if what I have been told is true.
It seems the very day I was sent away to school, Lizzie and Bill resolved to create for the Calipash family’s possessions a Guardian, immortal and terrible, who would protect the satanic heirlooms of this degenerate family if again they were threatened. Such will be my fate. The golem—he with whom I am miserably and all-too-closely acquainted—would not do for the office, being constructed by his mistress, as I understand it, out of dead Calipash males for pleasure-purposes, and thus is more lover than fighter.
But the twins, like me, had gazed upon the fell contents of that strange, leather-bound book wherein I first saw the image of the winged tortoise, only they knew how to decipher its malignant text. Discovering that the pendant would transform its owner into rabid protectors of mortal treasure, long did they search for the idol that has changed me, and when they at last found it, they gave it unto my guardian—but I surprised him into death before he could fully transmute! Thus I was many times over my own executioner, and I use that word for I sense I shall be Miss Chelone Burchell for not too much more of my life. I can tell by the thickening of my skin and the swelling of my belly; the seizing of my hands into clawed monkey’s paws, the growing of two strange protuberances upon my already insensate back.
The twins had wanted the old Lord Calipash for a guardian, to punish him for his attempt to destroy the Private Library; my heinous half-aunt and half-uncle, evil though they surely are, held no ill-will towards me, and to their credit have expressed some regret over the unfortunate circumstances that have led me to this very particular doom. Their next victim was to have been Orlando; indeed, Bill himself had sent my cousin out to the crypt that night, to suffer the transformation himself. Now they are holding him for purposes of their own, I know not what—and likely never shall. They have told me only that Bill, shaven, is very like the old Lord Calipash, and so plans on impersonating his old master until the end of his days, claiming to have had a miraculous recovery from the illness that, unexpectedly, claimed his own groundskeeper!
At least I shall not be lonely. There is the voiceless golem who tries in his way to comfort me, poor creature, and the massive Private Library to read, and demoniac treasures I have found, and spend many hours contemplating. Oh, but none of it is any comfort to me; how I wish I had never come home! Calipash Manor is a blasphemous, unthinkable place, and to visit here is to face not death, but the vast terror of selfish, unfathomable evil. So ends my tale—my hands stiffen, my eyes dull—and the world shall never know what became of me. Beware those who would seek to rob my family: Soon it shall come the hour of the tortoise!
•
I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee
Christopher Reynaga
Whatever you do, don’t call me Ishmael.
Don’t call me anything at all. Give me my pint of piss-poor ale and leave me be in this yellowed corner where men relieve themselves when they are too lazy to make three extra stumbling steps to the streets of Nantucket. I am done. Finished. Come to this hole to die—and if you insist on speaking to me, I’ll find a deeper hole than this dying excuse of a whaling town can offer.
No, I do not want another round, nor your sick curiosity. Why can’t New Englanders, most stoic of men, keep to their business when a dead man walks among them. Yes dead, though life still beats in this heart. It does not matter that I am the only survivor of what happened to the Pequod out there in the deep. I am marked by it—
I see now. It’s not me you want at all, it’s him. Captain Ahab. Old Thunder. The god and monster among men. Ahab the cracked, the insane. The captain who would cut the throat of his own wife and son and lap up the blood, if it would give him revenge on the white beast he hunted. I heard the rumors of his madness on these very docks before we shipped out. And now you want to know all.
How wrong you are of him. He does not deserve your eager eyes and poison tongues. He was nothing of the monster you imagine. For his sake alone, I will set his tale to right.
The captain was no saint, I’ll have you that. My first sight of him was his savage backhand to Pip, the cabin boy, for touching the scar on the captain’s face as he made his way up to the quarter deck to address us. Ahab was the iron hand on the ship’s tiller, as all good captains are. A good captain would have you in irons if he smelled mutiny in your blood. I saw in Ahab’s eyes that he’d heave you over the side.