Black Angus – Chapter 3
This is a working draft and not a final product.
Content Warnings:
Decaying Flesh, Mutliation, Human Trafficking [implied]
In which Angus practices the dark arts.
“Who told you you could pick my verbenas?” Edwina rose from her spot on the loveseat in Esther’s office next to the fresh corpse and stepped towards Angus with pronounced purpose, tight curls bouncing in time, framing her cross pout. Angus stood straight with his back to the rear door, a sprig of tiny purple flowers splayed out in small, clustered domes in his soil-covered hands. He’d just returned from burying the mutt’s body in their tiny but bountiful backyard, as per Esther’s instruction. Normally, the women would take their refuse through the back gate to the graveyard nearby, find a fresh spot, and supply its occupant with an extra passenger to the afterlife, but since the dog’s body was not too large and unburdened by legal complications, Esther had granted certain hospitable allowances.
“I— I needed some to do magic,” Angus stammered. Edwina’s face snapped into a new expression entirely, her chestnut eyes large and glossy.
“Magic? Oh, what are we going to do? Show me.”
She circled around the loveseat, petticoat rippling about her heels as she followed Angus through the wide open threshold into Esther’s kitchen. Esther released a deep sigh as she approached to the sitting corpse to checked its pockets.
“Are we summoning a spirit to grant us wishes? Enchanting a jeweled dagger? Is it a love potion?”
Edwina hovered her delicate nose over Angus’s shoulder while he crouched with his arm deep in his burlap sack. He removed a sealed, earthen jar.
Turning her head over her shoulder to call out past the open threshold, Edwina continued, “Oh, Esther! There are three of us! Don’t you think we could form a coven? I know Angus isn’t a girl, but he’s like one enough. I think it’d be alright.”
Angus flit a puzzled glance up at Edwina, who was a good two inches taller than himself. She sometimes reminded him of his mother, who had also been Boreastican, but had come to Ériusíde as child with her merchant father. Removing the lid from the jar, he revealed a bundle wrapped from a finely crafted cloth. Edwina was already reaching for her nose as he began to unfurl it.
“Angus, what the shite is that thing? —Ah, yuck!”
Inside the embroidered mortcloth, pruned, gray-skinned, and covered with salt and other herbs, was Leslie’s severed left hand. The appendage smelled sour and botanical, like a jar of pickles forgotten by a sunny window and rediscovered days too late; the kind of smell one could taste with ones tongue. It looked now like it had come off an animal likely more than a man. Esther curled her hand over her chin to obscure a wicked smile as she watched Edwina’s face contort.
Edwina fled from the kitchen back into the office, “Light a candle, please. I’m going to be sick.” Esther pulled a matchbox from her desk to oblige.
Angus peeked into their cobweb-filled cabinets until he found a mortar and pestle. He ground the verbenas into a dark magenta paste, which he sprinkled over the palm of the dehydrated hand. He placed the hand into a cocotte, hanging it next over an already started fire —one of the few areas of the kitchen that was still in regular use.
Taking a keyring from her skirt pocket, Esther unlatched a tin box from atop her bookshelf and filed the corpse’s valuable possessions. Remaining in hand were various miscellany which might, in one way or another, identify the man on the loveseat. She strode next to Angus and casually tossed them into the flames.
She contemplatively tilted her head his way. “You should stay here for a while, a few days at least, a couple of weeks, if that’s what you’d like. I’m no witch, but I realize it will take at least a week more to cure that hand of yours before it’s ready. And I’ll have to deliver your new registry of birth to Dr. Jameson. So long as you’re able to feed yourself, you are welcome to stay at my home while you sort out your next steps.”
Angus kept his sight fixed on the hearth but gave a pensive nod, “Thank you, Esther. That means a great deal to me.”
Esther reached over to give a quick squeeze of his hand, though she quickly recovered the display of emotion by narrowing her eyes with an irate grin, “Clever job you did, pawning treasures off to me that I can’t even touch when you had a main de gloire in the making with you the whole time. Failed to mention that while ye were skinnin’ a frog in yer pocket, didjya?”
Angus dropped his lashes, shrugging coolly as he addressed her, “I figured you’d have read about it in your morning paper.”
“What do you even have planned for it? I just know I’d put it to better use,” Esther retorted with a wave of her hand.
“No plans, cousin. It’s just good to have around in an emergency.”
Esther thoughtfully wet her lower lip, detecting a subtext that few other than she could understand. Angus was shielding himself. He was afraid. An easy silence passed as she decided whether or not she should say anything at all. She knew, as his elder, she had a responsibility to pass down wisdom, but also, for all of her many talents she’d not yet mastered the art of vulnerability. She choose not to speak, but then Edwina said something.
“What are you two whispering about over there, hoggin’ all the good craic? Leave that foul hand behind and come sit over here with me instead,” she demanded from her spot on the loveseat next to the fresh corpse. From this interjection, Esther realized a sudden opportunity, promptly changing her mind. What she wished to say to Angus might be valuable to Edwina as well.
Taking his hand as they walked through the open threshold, Esther spoke up, “You know, Angus, it’s . . . more than just difficult for Gifted Folk to survive all on their own. The truth is, it’s terribly lonely too.”
She sat in her black leather desk chair, swinging it around to face the others with scholarly authority, while Angus took his place, once again, in the armchair square between her desk and the loveseat. He sat slant, languishing his limbs carelessly to the side and resting his chin on his fist with an expression of cautious interest. An orb-weaver crawled down his sock to the tip of his shoe then dropped a string to access the ground below.
“You’re awfully young. Hesitant, I’ve noticed, to commit to companions of your own, which I laud you for. Few your age demonstrate such restraint. I think of you as unusually prudent. That said, I do think there is a line where sensibility crosses over into . . . spinelessness,” she gave a quick and pained shrug, “You make excuses, self-sabotage . . . to protect yourself from getting hurt.”
Angus straightened, his voice pitched, “I’m sorry. —Are you saying that I need friends?”
Edwina nodded, her brow stitched with a pitying look, “Yeah . . . You really do.”
Esther’s hands clenched and unclenched in her lap, biting her lower lip, “Really, you must believe me; I wasn’t going to mention it at all. You don’t know what it’s like to have children. You don’t know how it feels to lose them. —They never leave your heart.”
Angus stilled. Edwina, oblivious, gazed at Esther with soft affection.
“I don’t know what happened between the two of you,” Esther continued, “but it’s been seven years now, and you still have yet to settle somewhere new. Seven years that you’ve been drifting about.”
Angus sat for a moment in the chair, quivering, unblinking. Then he rose sharply.
“You thought right before. You shouldn’t have mentioned it,” he stammered.
Edwina looked from Angus, then quizzically back to Esther, “I don’t— What’s going on?”
“Hasn’t it crossed your mind that naming yourself Sansgen might make it seem like you wish to be found?”
“A pity then, should anyone try, because I wish for no such thing,” announced Angus, too upset to care how histrionic he may have sounded.
He paced back to the hearth, his fuming discomfort making it impossible for him to stay still. The embers warbled an unpredictable rhythm through gaps of charred wood, blooming hungry, orange rings. He thought about how locks of red hair used to fall in curtains around his face; how he’d imagine them as flames, burning him alive, devouring him completely. Fire, just like the glimmer of the night sky, made him feel nauseous if he stared at it too long.
Edwina released a sharp huff, fed up from the two having continued to leave her out of the conversation, “If it’s so important that Angus have friends, then he should be mine. Surely, not all magic is revolting. I request that, when you leave, you’ll write me letters often, and you’ll teach me magic. I’ve always wanted someone to write letters to.”
Grateful to be jerked back into reality, Angus turned his head to her. He lifted the lid of the cocotte and tested the heat of its contents with his hand before deciding it was safe to grab. The hand had withered significantly in size, much of its moisture now gone. Clumps of salt and pulped flower flaked off as he held it up for her to see. He replaced the lid of the hanging iron pot.
“Hand of Glory. Must be the left hand of a guilty criminal who perished to hanging or gibbeting. Wrongly convicted won’t do. There are a number of different herbs or minerals you may season it with, but salt is the most important. Squeeze out as much moisture as you can, soaking it in a pall cloth, then let it marinate in an earth jar.”
Angus reached into his pocket, drawing a knife. He wedged the tip of the blade into the nail bed of each of the hand’s fingers. “Next you take a lock of the criminal’s hair. Spin the strands into wicks. Insert them like so,” he demonstrated as he spoke, dividing the bits of hair he’d torn from Leslie’s scalp into the gaps he’d cut behind the nails, “turning it into a crude candle.”
Esther pulled a letter knife out of a crystal glass filled with various other writing instruments which she kept on top of her desk. She reached for the first of the letters she’d received that evening, neatly cutting it open. As her hands worked, she glanced silently up at Angus, pride creeping in through the corners of her mouth. Edwina remained yet to be impressed, though her brow arched with curiosity.
“What does it do then?” she asked impatiently.
“All who look upon it when lit, except for the one who lights it, fall into a deep sleep. —A simple jape in itself, but incredibly useful if applied to the right situation,” Angus answered her, his voice full of enthusiasm. He’d never crafted a hand of glory before, but he’d wanted to ever since he’d first read about them. It’d be a thrill to see if he was successful.
“Can you show us?”
Angus balked, “Ah, no —you’d fall asleep. Besides, it will only work once, and I won’t waste my effort on a parlor trick.” He rewrapped the hand and slid it back into its jar, then placed the jar back in the burlap sack at his feet.
Edwina gave a long stretch, placing one arm over the shoulders of the dead body bedside her and adjusting to rest her head on its chest. “How did you learn all of this kind of stuff?”
Angus sucked down on his tongue, pondering how much he wanted to say. “My Sire -Esther’s younger brother- taught me.”
Edwina’s eyes drew wide as she pulled herself forward on her palms. “You have a brother, Esther?”
Esther studied a letter in her hands, her loosely-tied bun slowly floating from right to left. Just as enough time had passed for one to assume she hadn’t been listening, she spoke up.
“Yes dear, I have a few. We went our own ways after An Ceann-Feadhna, ahm, The Chieftain of our Clan, retired to long rest. Friedolf inherited the estate, given the conditions that he tended to the crypt and kept it blooded. The estate itself has held no local authority for centuries, of course.”
Edwina scoffed, raising her hand, “There it is —you’ve gone and made it boring.”
Angus hid his own intrigue. In the forty-odd years he’d lived with Friedolf, he’d never known that their patriarch had been resting somewhere deep within the heritage, nor about Friedolf’s duties. It didn’t surprise Angus that he hadn’t known. Far more terrible secrets had been kept from him before, and he was sure that there were more still. However, it had felt odd to hear Esther state it so plainly.
Holding her final letter in hand, Esther pursed her lips critically. Her eyes darted across the short note, then placed it face down.
“That’s enough playing with your food, Edwina. I’ll help you take it out. —Angus, I have a bit of correspondence I ought to take care of first, but I’ll do my best to finish your papers by morning. If you’d like to get settled, there’s an extra room down the hall next to the washroom.” She rose from her desk chair and walked to the corpse to lift it under its arms while Edwina obediently took the legs. Knowing better than to offer any other kind of help, Angus held the back door open for them, inviting the scent of chill, garden air. Though a few hours remained until morning, he was eager to find the room Esther had mentioned. It had been two weeks since Angus had slept in a bed.
For the first time since I’ve been executed, he thought cheekily to himself, I’ll finally be able to rest in peace.
On a small shelf in the guest room, Angus found a neat collection of tomes, each transcribed in Esther’s familiar hand. He thumbed through them, thinking about how important it had been to his folks that he learned how to read and write Ériush, in addition to the common tongue. How different might his life have been if he hadn’t. He could have been somebody’s shriveled grandfather now, taking his last breath in a cottage that no longer exists in this world, after a long and unremarkable life. This person who he could have been grew further away from him with each passing year. He’d met vampires before who’d try to relate to him over the shared experience of gradually losing the ones they had loved in their previous life, but it hadn’t been that way for Angus. Relatively speaking, it had sort of happened all at once, all while he was still human.
There was a soft knock on the already cracked door.
“Can I bother you? I’m near my second death from boredom, and Esther is just so-,” Edwina strangled the air with each of her hands, “focused at the moment.”
Angus waved her in. With no hesitation, Edwina sat right on the bed. She was dressed in her nightclothes —gossamer layers of eggshell chiffon under an untied pink linen housecoat. Draped over her neck was a long strand of blue glass beads, which she fidgeted with in one hand.
“You knew her before I did. To your knowledge, has that dryshite ever had fun by her own free will?” asked Edwina.
Angus turned half-way, clasping the book in his hand, then returning it to the shelf. “I think that forging is Esther’s very own version of fun. If she never had to eat, sleep, or clean, she would do nothing else.”
“I think you’re right. I love her to pieces, but I often wish we had more in common.” Edwina twisted the beads around her fingers.
Angus gazed into a high corner in the ceiling, “I guess when one gets to be as old as Esther, survival becomes something of a numbers game. Her head must be projecting decades, if not centuries, into the future with every decision. She’s lost several girls like you before, and she’d probably be much happier if she had a companion more like herself. That would mean more time hunting, less time working, less time preparing for the unexpected —all those precautions that may preserve your future for centuries to come. Esther likely knows she’d be happier if she loved someone as introverted as herself, but she wouldn’t live as long either, so she chooses survival over happiness.”
“I didn’t say I was planning to leave her.”
“I’m glad you feel that way. I hope you feel that way for hundreds of years. I know if you do, she’ll take good care of you.”
The thread holding Edwina’s beads broke as she twirled them. Seized by a mighty compulsion, both vampires sprung to the ground and started gathering the beads from the ground in their hands, muttering numbers to themselves until they had each gathered their own pile.
“What have you got?” Angus asked, suppressing the stressful urge to check the count in her pile himself.
“Forty-nine.”
“Are you sure? I’ve got fifty-seven. What’s that? One hundred and six?”
“I think so. Yes. Yes, one hundred and six. I think that’s right,” Edwina said, searching her head to see if she felt any better.
They each repeated the number once more, the anxiety pounding in their heads fading at its mention. It was the correct number. Angus carefully spooned his pile into her lap. He was sure of their answer, but if it happened again he’d have to double-check.
“Sorry,” Edwina apologized, “Idle hands.”
Angus shrugged, “It’s good to get some practice in when stakes are low. You never know when you might have to count something. So— Tell me, Eddie. Who were you before?”
“Oh, me? Just an orphan. I lived at the dorms until I was 16, but I’d been entertaining men since I’d turned 14. I was sharing a room with four other women when I met Esther. I’d already begun fantasizing about the men I laid with meeting horrible fates before then. Esther’s proposal was a dream come true,” Edwina answered him with a lilt on her voice.
“How old were you then?”
“Thirty-one.”
“Twenty-four. I was an orphan, too,” Angus replied.
It felt good to displace the number of the beads with some new miscellany. He felt terribly sure Edwina had counted correctly, but a small part of him wanted to count all one hundred and six beads once more over himself, to be sure. Angus knew his cousin probably felt the same way.
Edwina smiled, “Makes the big decision easy, doesn’t it? We’re the lucky ones.”
Angus didn’t correct her. It was the second time that night someone had called him lucky.