Late into the night, the silent snow falls and falls.

Under the down quilt pulled up to my nose, I seem to float, as if I have no body. But the icy air makes my forehead ache and the tips of my ears sting. The snow outside sucks the sound from the room.  For a long time I am nothing but ache and sting hovering in dimness, miserably waiting for sleep…or daylight.

I hear something, feel something—that makes no sense.

“What?” My voice, hoarse, is muffled by the covers. I pull them off my face, staring and straining to hear who roused me. “You?”  Almost a cry. Then softer, “…here?”

My heart thuds many times.

“Yess...” The word is the whisper of ice blowing through frozen boughs.

Is the voice just in my head? Or is it real? I know her, feel her so-familiar presence.  There can be no mistake. I molded myself to it over years, over decades. Absolutely no mistake. And yet...

I can see her now.  My mind fails to grasp the way she somehow pivoted from absence into solidity. I can see her, but with what light?

“You look different,” I blurt, still stupid with drowsiness.  In life she had been a sturdy, sunny tomboy, and, after babies and years, a cheerful matron. A steady love.  But now…now she is young, but not like before. Her familiar features have a subtly alien, elfin cast.  Like the fey folk.  Standing almost close enough to touch, she still feels remote.  And perilous. I shiver.

Color and shadow cloth her, shifting prisms.  Silence presses me. I push back.  “I had no idea this was a part of you.”

I try to master myself, but my foundations shift when she speaks again.

“I have…changed. But the openness to become different, to ascend...words aren’t precise...was always a part of me.”

I remember.  Her questing intelligence. Her bright fascination with everything and everyone.  Openness.  Without fear. Yes.

“And me?”  My voice shakes. I try not to show it, but I am shaken. To have her back. All wounds healed. Our future reborn from its old ashes. It’s all I can see.

She doesn’t meet my eyes. Hers are still silver-gray, but unfocused.  She is partly, or mostly, elsewhere.

“You have everything figured out.  The whole universe Mapped and Connected. But your world is too small.”

The so-familiar phrase rattles me.  My words rush out. “I can’t exercise faith. Religion makes no sense! Reality does.”

Now she meets my gaze. The veil of her otherness lifts like a cruel weapon being drawn.  I looked into her eyes and see pity as she cuts me.

“Yes. Religion is a fiction. But you never imagine something true beyond it.”

This difference between us was never resolved. When I witness other people’s struggles for enlightenment and meaning, I am coolly dismissive. I have been there.  I have searched those arid wastes for gleanings to nourish a tiny flame of faith.  In vain.  I rue the wasted hours, and years, and condemn my own folly along with everyone else’s.  But her response to the same benighted people, however horrifying their acts, was ever compassionate: “Their God is too small.”  I remembered the benign smile, the gentle shake of her head.  She made me feel unworthy of her, and that was infinitely beguiling. I promised her all the years to come.

But even with my back turned, that glimpse of mystery always pulled on me.  I didn’t know how to follow the tug, or even whether I wanted to. Our life together teased me with possibility.  What was it, that together-life?  A cathedral of color and shadow.  A vastness that rendered me inarticulate.  It was the core of me, but too huge to comprehend. I didn’t need to comprehend, as long as it never stopped.

After her death, everything flattened to echoes and emptiness. Possibility erased. Fade to black.

Can it be that it was not erased, but only forgotten, color chased into the shadows?  I wore myself out trying to understand. Then I numbed himself to that emptiness, and my need. My life would be blank, until it stopped, and there was nothing.

“I love you,” I say. The old ritual, whether I said it or she did, had always healed us both, but now it’s a plea.  Her response, at first, is a non-sequitur:

“With my loupe, a grain of sand was a great flashing diamond.”

Her loupe...  I still wear it on a leather cord around my neck; I reach for it, find it, clutch it like a talisman. How long since I have looked through it? 

What is she trying to tell me?

Silence sings in my ears.  I turn the question over and over, worried that she might leave if I take too long. A grain. Of sand. A diamond. No! A big diamond. And I work it out. Aah… What had seemed large, was in truth very tiny. Our life together, our love, the biggest thing I ever knew…can her reality now be very much greater than that?

What would that even mean? How is it possible?

She has reached glory. Somehow continuing, and not in sorrow.  Joy wars with grief, twists my face and squeezes my heart. She lives! But for myself, death, a final nothingness, is the only end I can foresee. Without her. Nothing could be more bitter. Now that I know.  She lives.

Tears blur my sight. I struggle to speak. “Can I get there? Where you are?”  Why has she come to me if there is no hope?

She is disappearing, rotating away on some higher-dimensional axis.  My eyes try to follow, but cannot. Her whisper of ice kisses me.

“You would have to change...”
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Early in the morning, the silent snow falls and falls.

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Michael Scholtes has been an astronomer, a software engineer, and has had over 1600 limericks published with OEDILF.com  (the Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form.)  After a long time in Texas, he now lives in southern Oregon between the Cascades and the Siskiyou Mountains with his wife and two bengal cats. He is stardust, and makes a lot of sawdust.
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Moonbeams and firelight hazily danced off the ghostly skin. The corpses had gathered on the mansion’s sprawling front lawn, and their decaying, translucent bodies shimmered beneath the lunar brilliance.


The massive Gothic mansion dwarfed the legions of decomposing forms; they appeared as hundreds of ants scurrying beneath their shadowy stone anthill. Their bellies ached, for they were eternally famished. They had devoured countless pounds of flesh over the decades, but their hunger was unceasing, their stomachs rumbling, desperate to be satisfied. But now a feast had congregated opposite them at the entrance to the lawn—a feast wielding pitchforks and torches, but a feast nonetheless, and their rotting mouths salivated. Surely, this time their hunger would be satiated.


To Calvin Seaworthy, or what was left of him, the glint of steel and the flamed-illuminated scowls of the villagers were familiar sights. He had seen the same thing sixty years before—the memory still haunted him, the townspeople with their torches and bloodlust, the gypsy settlement razed to the ground, friends burned alive and survivors hanged. The last thing Calvin had seen before being set aflame himself was his child ripped away from the boy’s mother’s arms. 


“No! Daniel! Look away! Look away!” Calvin had cried out. Daniel did not listen. The boy watched his father, the Gypsy King, burn.


Calvin’s only respite from the painful remembrances was the dream—and even then, such consolation was fleeting. Each night, he dreamed of the door. The door promised something. Comfort? Freedom? In that brief moment, Calvin was at peace. An escape from his anguish lay beyond the other side. But each night was the same—as his fingers grasped the knob, panic swept through him as he realized the door was locked. He would become more and more frantic as he pushed, pulled, and begged the door to open. Calvin’s heart had deteriorated years before, so the frenzy could not cause it to thump faster, yet still he would wildly convulse at the nightmare throughout his slumber. Ultimately, he would awaken with a start, sweating in a fit of frothing madness.


This same fury flickered in his dead eyes as he turned toward the putrid phantoms behind him. Of them there were a hundredfold, and they barked and clawed, eyes fixed on the approaching crowd of the living. They did not move forward, however; they waited for their leader’s command. As he had been their king in life, he was their king in death. 


“Fear nothing, friends,” the Gypsy King snarled. His vocal cords had rotted, and his voice was a half-hiss and half-growl. “Every man dies but once, and we have had our turn.”


The decaying ghosts howled with delight and hunger. Calvin signaled his forces onward, and they hurried to meet the villagers in the center of the lawn.


“Destroy this blasphemous place!” 


“Kill the dark, fallen angels!” 


“Burn it all to the ground!” 


Cries rang out from the townspeople as they waged their holy war. However, as the night passed beneath the mansion’s gnarled gargoyles, all knew victory belonged to Calvin Seaworthy and his legion of phantom gypsies. Piercing screams echoed throughout the chaos as arms were ripped from bodies. Prayers were started and abruptly cut off as faces were devoured by ravenous teeth. Roars of laughter split the battle as the undead washed themselves in blood.


Calvin found it fitting that there were no survivors.


The feasting lasted until the early hours of the morning. The victors ate and ate and ate, their hope for satiety replaced by dismay with every bite. Their stomachs remained unfilled and despair crept into their blackened, soulless bodies, each desperate that the next mouthful would provide satisfaction. Calvin reassured them the next meal would fill their stomachs—it was a lie, resolute and benevolent, and with the empty promises of their commander, the ants returned to their towering anthill.


No one could explain from where the mansion had arrived. Its appearance the morning after the gypsy massacre on the same spot of the slaughter was as mysterious to its ghoulish inhabitants as it was to the villagers. Perhaps they had been banished to the miseries of Hell and the mansion was their damnation—not fiery and red, but ominous and cut from stone.


The mansion housed countless bedrooms, but they were never used. After all, the comforts of a warm blanket and a place for peaceful retreat were reserved for the living. Rather, the bloodthirsty phantoms found themselves draped over rafters, lounging between staircase banisters, and cackling in twinkling chandeliers. Those whose noses had decomposed considered themselves the most fortunate, for they were unaffected by the stench of the fleshly remains of intruders and foolhardy adventurers. It was of no consequence whether an unlucky trespasser was able to escape the haunted dwelling before he was devoured. The phenomenon was shark-like, the threshold of the mansion like the ocean and mortal flesh like blood. It did not matter if an intruder fled hundreds of miles after crossing into the blasphemous stone structure. He would still be tracked down by the hunger-maddened ghosts, returned to the mysterious mansion, and greedily consumed. As long as the towering residence stood piercing the sky, it would serve as a macabre feeding hall for the denizens of the damned.


Exhaustion from the feasting frenzy spread throughout the rafters and banisters, and the nauseating snores of the undead began to accumulate. Calvin, the Gypsy King, noted no other resident ever thrashed around violently in their sleep. They never woke in a tortuous rage, blinded with terror.  Perhaps he was the only one whose slumber was menaced by nightmares. 


That night, as his starving companions slept, Calvin, fatigued from the evening’s bloody melee, desperately struggled to stay awake, dreading the torment of the dream of the locked door. He lost the fight, and his dull, decaying eyelids began to droop.


His eyes flew open when he heard it. It was faint, as if the source wished to remain undetected. Could it be another phantom rearranging his slumber, vainly attempting to get comfortable in an afterlife where comfort was impossible? Or perhaps another ghost was sleepily and mindlessly gnawing on the femur bone of an unlucky villager? No, this was the unmistakable sound of something alive—animated, fearful, anxious, alive. Through the doorway of the dining room where Calvin lay and the hall, a soft glow was illuminating. The Gypsy King slunk silently toward the glow, salivating, his remaining teeth bared. 


He had been wrong. There had been one survivor, though he would not be one for long. The stranger had crossed the threshold of the haunted mansion and in doing so, had sealed his fate. It would be mere moments before the undead arose to feast, and there would be no escape.


As Calvin peered into the hall, he saw the intruder. He was tall, pale, with long brown hair and eyes so fearfully angry he could have been mistaken for another ghost. Clutching a torch, he stood over a stirring gypsy. His pupils raged, terrified and ablaze, and he towered above the sleeping phantom, glaring down, preparing to set the deteriorating monstrosity aflame. As Calvin’s mind returned to his own death—to the agony of being burned alive—he emerged from the shadows with a single guttural syllable.


“No.”


Startled, the young man spun to face the leader of the gypsies. He was afraid. This was obvious from the quivering shake and salted drops of sweat trickling down his skin. And yet, he was resolute. His eyes remained lit up like an inferno as he swung the torch at Calvin. He would fight. Calvin leapt backwards, the flames missing him by inches. Heat pulsated from the torch.


The two stared at each other with indistinguishably wild gazes. Before the mortal man had the chance to attack again, Calvin flung himself at him, tackling him to the ground. The pale stranger was pinned beneath the spectre. He struggled, kicking and clawing, trying to force the undead creature off. Calvin Seaworthy let out the animalistic roar of a desperate beast, drool dripping from his mouth onto his prey. 


The gypsies, who had begun to rouse from their sleep, were now fully awakened by their leader’s victorious cry. They began to howl and clamor for flesh. They shook with anticipation for the signal to dine. For one, the Gypsy King’s promise that the next meal would bring a satisfied stomach and the sight of the man trapped and within reach was too much to resist. He suddenly rushed Calvin and his capture. Resolved that they would not miss out on the banquet, the other gypsies joined the mad stampede.


The gypsy leader was distracted by the chaos for only a moment, but it was all the trespasser needed. He swung the torch once again, and the flames made contact. An insufferable stench permeated the air as the phantom’s hand was incinerated. The wounded king howled out in pain, and with the strength of the undead, flung the young man through the wooden front door of the mansion. 


A tremendous thud from the lawn reverberated throughout the hall. 


Then silence. 


There were no snores, no snarls of hunger, no twinkling of the chandeliers. In every room of the hellish house where the miserable souls of Calvin Seaworthy and his men had been imprisoned for six decades, there was an absolute silence.


Calvin, rageful but in a measured tone, turned toward his men. “Stay. I will bring him here.” His eyes bore into those of the man whose overeagerness had caused the uproar. Fearful of his wrathful leader, the gypsy looked down at the mansion floor and took a step backwards. With a wild call, Calvin leapt through the broken remains of the doorway into the night.


Fleshly debris littered the lawn. Bones picked clean from the evening’s fight shone beneath the full Moon. The spectacle of death lay bare in the shadow of the mansion, but there was no sign of the living. Calvin paused for a moment. The stranger had entered the mansion; there was now blood in the water, regardless of how far the man fled. This sharkish sense drew Calvin’s gaze upward. There, scaling the side of the mansion, was the intruder, torch still in hand. 


The Gypsy King gave pursuit. Calvin cursed that the strength of the undead, which should have allowed him to reach the mortal man in seconds, was compromised by the burned stub where his hand had been minutes prior. The man was injured from his fight with the much stronger Calvin, however, and as he pulled himself up to the gargoyle’s ledge, the phantom overtook him.


With a backhanded swing, Calvin sent the stranger sprawling toward the end of the ledge. The young man tried to arise and face the gypsy leader, but Calvin thrust his boot into the man’s face. Blood ran down over his eyes. He struggled to get up, but to no avail, and he feebly watched as Calvin picked up the still blazing torch that had fallen beside him. The intruder was at the mercy of the rageful victor.


The two once again locked eyes. Calvin’s stare was wrathful, wicked, pained, the man’s stare beaten, but resolved—and also pained. It was the same wounded expression that Calvin’s eyes carried. When Calvin had first laid eyes on the stranger, their gazes of rage had been the same. Now, it was something deeper—a mutual agony haunting the two combatants.


Perhaps it was the peculiar look in his enemy’s eyes, or perhaps it was the respect that Calvin had begrudgingly gained for the man who had dared to infiltrate the mansion walls and challenge him. In any event, the Gypsy King did something in death he had never done before. He asked the damnable mortal, offspring of those who had destroyed his life, a question.


“Who are you?”


The man coughed blood, but turned to face the ghost towering over him.


“You unholy monster. How long have you terrorized our town? How long have you killed our men and devoured our women and children? I don’t ask for a fate different from my friends, dismembered on that lawn, or my father, killed by the grief this dark place had caused him. I only ask that you know that we will keep coming, and we will keep fighting. Our sons and their sons will not rest until we no longer cower beneath the tyranny of your bloodthirsty legion, invading our homes and destroying our families. Who am I? I am Daniel Seaworthy, and I swear to you this day, kill me now, but my children shall live free.”


The screams of a boy’s mother. An inferno blazing out of control. Pain abandoning the body as nerve endings were scorched. Daniel! Look away! Look away!


Calvin stood motionless. A whisper of incredulity accompanied the grating, rasping voice from his decayed vocal cords as he spoke again.


“...Daniel Seaworthy?”


The monster’s vengeful stare had transformed into something else as he took a nearly imperceptible step back. It was now Daniel’s turn to disbelieve. He nodded and cautiously answered, bloodied and weakened from his impassioned speech.


“Daniel Seaworthy II.”


Daniel Seaworthy II. The weight of the years and the decades crushed Calvin. Of course, Calvin’s son, the flesh of his flesh, would be killed. Of course, those devils would burn him alive or hang him, as they had all the others, and the Gypsy King could only hope that the boy’s afterlife would be one of peace.


But no. He had lived. He had grown up. He had breathed the air and walked the streets. He had learned and hurt and loved and died. He had lived. And he had had a son. And that son, Calvin’s grandson, still flesh of his flesh, lay before him now, beaten, bloodied, and wounded, but alive. 


Daniel.


Daniel.


Forgive me, Daniel.


Then, at that moment, Calvin was a man once again, no longer a monster. For the first time in decades, he felt his heartbeat pumping warm, rich blood through every vein and artery in his body, the same blood that coursed through the mortal man before him. 


Daniel had crossed the threshold of the mansion. The ruthless phantoms would track him to Hell and back to feast on his flesh. 


To Calvin, all that was to be damned. He would not let the son of Daniel Seaworthy die.


Daniel, shocked but weakened and unable to resist the strength of the Gypsy King, watched as the monster took the still-burning torch between his teeth and the young man under his incinerated arm and descended the stone walls. Calvin placed him at the entrance of the lawn and moved the torch from his mouth to his intact hand. As the two looked at each other for the third and final time, the Gypsy King spoke a single word to his grandson.


“Leave.”


The man nodded. Somehow, he understood.


With these final words uttered, Calvin marched to the mansion’s broken doorway. He looked down at the torch in his hand and then back at the Gothic prison that had been the source of his incessant torment. He paused, listening to the grunts and growls of the ravenous beasts inside. The battle cry of the prior evening broke through his mind.


“Fear nothing, friends. Every man dies but once, and we have had our turn.” 


He charged the mansion.


The gypsies, ghostly mouths agape, watched as their leader first torched the hall curtains. Flames consumed them, blazing, as Calvin quickly swung the torch toward a wooden table. The chairs were next. Smoke pervaded the burning room, and those with lungs intact choked violently on the fumes. Calvin barreled through the crowd to the dining room as the ghouls realized that the Gypsy King had become a foe. Teeth gnashing, the gypsies rushed after him.


Calvin had only a few seconds’ head start on his former subordinates. In those few seconds, the furniture had already been set alight. Calvin spun like a madman, burning, torching, incinerating as he surged his way into the next room. Any member of the undead that stepped in his path was set on fire. Even Calvin could not see through the smoke-filled mansion as he continued his wild rampage. 


Room after room this continued. The gypsies would throw themselves at Calvin, trying to halt his destruction, but he would swing his torch, shoulder his great weight into his attackers, or charge into another chamber of the haunted house with the strength of the undead. Calvin eventually lost his pursuers to the enveloping chaos. Some were set ablaze. Others were lost to wild roamings of the crumbling mansion, bemoaning their crumbling afterlives. Both Calvin and the legion knew the mansion was deteriorating, collapsing. Its walls trembled and quaked. Fiery explosions echoed throughout. The chandeliers fell. Phantoms in flames pierced the smoky air with haunting screams. 


What would become of the residents of the house? They had arisen from the earth inexplicably with the monument of darkness. Could they exist beyond its destruction? This Calvin doubted, and he found peace in this doubt. He had reached the attic on his warpath, but he stopped. Torch held by his side, Calvin silently acknowledged the world of flames surrounding him. He stood alone. 


Daniel.


My grandson.


My son.


Life did not belong to Calvin Seaworthy. Life was a gift to the living. Perhaps Calvin had made amends for the atrocities of his afterlife by giving that gift to the pale, brown-haired man.


A snarl resounded throughout the attic. 


Calvin turned. There, at the entrance of the attic, stood the scorched, mangled, and wrathful form of the gypsy who had first treacherously charged Calvin in his battle with the intruder. Wild fury upon his face, he bared his teeth and let out a bloodthirsty howl. In the six decades Calvin had haunted the mansion, he had never heard such a painful and hateful call.


Calvin threw the torch to the ground. 


Ignoring his own injuries and burns, the raging phantom rushed him, salivating and continuing his savage cry. 


Calvin stood motionless.


The attacker launched himself at Calvin’s throat, fangs exposed and hands outstretched to force his former king into the all-encompassing flames.


Calvin remained unmoved.


The gypsy, deteriorating beneath his wounds and the crumbling mansion, made contact. His teeth ripped rotten flesh from Calvin’s throat and thrust him into the inferno, the same fire of sixty years before.


He burned.


Daniel.


Daniel.


***


Calvin Seaworthy once again stood before the door. He reached for the knob. It turned in his hand.

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Author bio
David Albano is a proud Louisiana native who now resides in Texas with his wife and child. David is an avid reader, and he also loves writing, LSU sports, and being involved in his church community. David has previously been published in Frontier Tales, Dark Moments and 50-Word Stories.
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