On a crisp-yet-sullen day in late August, Maxwell was taken by his parents to watch a witch being tried.
It was very straightforward, an open-and-shut case, and every bit of care had been taken to make the procedure as dull as possible for an audience. The accusations were droned rather than flung, the inquiring priest was unshaven and yawned frequently, and even the victims seemed more tired than tearful as they described how the evil eye had poisoned their livestock, soured their mouths, broken their windows, and set their children crying with fevers.
The punishment was delivered with similar apathetic thoroughness. After all and sundry had said their piece and a little bit extra, the accused was tied up with an old clothesline and dropped into a pond. The witch floated like a cork and was summarily stoned to death, making no protest and seeming only slightly more annoyed than the crowd.
“Let that be a lesson to you on wickedness,” said Maxwell’s father firmly. And Maxwell took it straight to heart: wickedness was one of two things in all the world, the other being good, straight-razor, stand-up wholesomeness. And after living thirteen years of one and seeing maybe a half-day of the other, he was fairly certain which was more interesting.
“I shall become a witch,” he announced, “and be a fearsome monster.” To himself, when he was quite certain he was alone, in the middle of the woods. He wasn’t crazy. At least, not in a directly self-destructive manner. No, about this he was serious. And he proved how serious when he made his first attempt at witchcraft that very night out behind his house, with a tiny little thimble of blood stolen from his thumb with the aid of mother’s silverware (she wouldn’t dare thrash a witch, would she?).
“I abjurr. I abjoor… I abjuu. I renounce you, Lord, our father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name on earth as it whoops, I renounce you.”
He looked around. Nothing much seemed to be happening.
“I embrace you, Satan, who is the Devil,” he continued. “Our uncle who are in hell unhallowed on earth as it is in heaven no wait hell. I, uh, embrace you.”
Nothing happened some more.
“A lot,” he added.
Nothing continued to happen. He checked under his bed, just in case, and found that nothing was in plenty there too.
“God damnit,” he said, at which point his father found him and had him thrashed for swearing before turning him over to his mother for a second go-round, as payment for the vandalized silverware.
That evening, as Maxwell went to bed, he hated his parents more than he’d ever hated anything before. He hated them more than chores, than work, than his cousins, than the terrible rusty old axe he had to cut firewood with. He hated them so much that he started to choke his pillow without noticing, and as his hands clutched at an imagined father’s neck (or maybe a mother’s skull), he felt a slight hum and smelt a whiff of brimstone.
His index finger touched paper, and he carefully extracted a small missive, printed on plain white paper, with text on it in plain black ink.
Stop it.
Maxwell made a face at it, then turned it over, lured by limitless optimism.
Be careful what you wish for.
Maxwell never made a second attempt at witchcraft, but he did run away the next year, after being thrashed something like every other day for sullenness, moodiness, surliness, malign spirits, and refusal to stop sulking. His father and mother blamed it on their undue moderation in his upbringing, and forbade his younger brother from smiling.
Maxwell left Pennsylvania, and took ship to the Old World as a cabin boy and general dog’s-body. “Perhaps there,” he speculated to an able-seaman, “if not witches, the other creatures of blackest night may be easier to find.”
“Gnarr,” opined the sailor, squinting haphazardly over the rail at the foamy waters. Then he vomited.
Maxwell was filled with the desire to reprove the man for his slovenly ways, but stifled it. This was a tumultuous night, filled with Saint Elmo’s fire and waves bigger than the ship. He wondered if it had anything to do with that large pretty seagull he’d killed earlier as it perched on the bow. He’d thought it would make a nice roast for dinner, but everyone had been rather upset about it. Then the sea split open and spat out a ship masted all in black, and his thoughts were put to a second priority at best.
Her name was illegible, and her hull worn grey from age. Her crew were ghastly spectres, and they lined up every man from oldest to youngest and worked their way down the line, questioning them all.
“Will you serve?” they asked. And every man felt fear close his throat to a pinhole, and could but nod yes. From the old, old navigator to the greying captain down to the freshest-faced of the able-seamen, not a man dared say anything more.
They reached Maxwell.
“Will you serve?” croaked the spectre.
“Yes please!” said Maxwell, unable to contain his eagerness.
The spectre stared.
“If it’s no trouble,” he added.
The spectre gave him an unfathomable look, then yelled something in dutch. The captain came to his side, a broad, decayed man who looked more solid and unyielding than the deck under his feet.
“What did you say?” he asked, every syllable a restrained request for a chance to hurt something.
“Yes please can I serve thank you very much,” said Maxwell.
The captain punched him firmly in the eyesocket, and Maxwell woke up in the rotting timbers of a half-sunken hulk next to a pier. Upon disembarking, he quickly learned that he was about a century late, but he’d never considered tardiness to be as sinful as it was cracked up to be.
Maxwell travelled fast and meandered hard, skipping from village to village, hunting folklore. He slept in fairy circles and woke up with nothing but crude statements in dead languages painted on his forehead, he crafted upside-down crosses and prayed at them, only to find his socks smelling of brimstone and his shoes of sulphur. He even once ate a whole raw onion. It tasted better than he’d suspected.
His next big break came as his carriage hit a pothole in an old, terrifying road in the midst of an overcrowded Germanic forest. The coachdriver ran away into the woods and the driving rain, screamed once, and didn’t come back.
Maxwell couldn’t be happier. Well, he could’ve if his luggage hadn’t been dumped into a puddle with ambitions of pondhood when the coach overturned, but he felt that might be asking too much of life.
A beast howled. It lasted for forty-five seconds and one long lungful of blood-scented air and felt like three hours. Small things cringed deeper in their burrows, and the bats flew a little higher. Maxwell nearly urinated in his trousers from excitement, and began to dig through his soaked belongings. Spare (soaked) trousers, sextant, compass, maps of (soaked) middle Europe…
The howl sounded again, closer. And faster.
…spectacles, spare codpiece, wallet, watch…
A third time. From the volume, whatever was calling seemed to be located just inside Maxwell’s left eardrum.
Aha! The raw steak! A bit past its prime by now, but any sirloin in a storm. Maxwell rubbed it all over his torso and took a big bite just as the werewolf bounded into the fading puddle of light left by the coach’s single, dying lantern. It was as tall as he was at the shoulder and blacker than the sky and all its clouds.
Maxwell growled haplessly at it and made stiff, jerky, uncertain movements, and was immediately bowled over and had a mouthful of his jacket torn away.
“No, no, no, no! The skin, break the skin!” he cried in excitement.
The werewolf chewed its mouthful three times, swallowed, and considered him.
“Right here,” he said, pushing away the ruins of his collar. “Right on the shoulder. Upper half, if you don’t mind – just so I don’t bleed out before it sets in.”
The werewolf stared away into the trees, either deep in thought or having heard a squirrel. Then it cocked its leg, urinated on Maxwell’s already-stained trousers, and trotted off, ears pricked, leaving him to brood over another wasted opportunity and laundry bill.
By the evening’s end, things were looking up. Maxwell had somewhere dry for the night, a meal under his belt, and he was paying back the host already, so he felt no shame of obligation. True the dryness was due to the furnace two feet from the crude pallet, the meal had mostly been tripe, and the repayment in labour involved rustily and ineptly sawing through the corpses of some fifteen executed men, plus a few horses, two-thirds of a cow, and something unidentifiable that was mostly liver. As well as very nearly his own hand, on some six occasions so far.
“Pull the switch!” called the doctor, finish the last of a forty-some series of injections into their combined labour of love. “Pull it! While the storm lasts and the spark holds! Make it so!”
Maxwell pulled a switch on the enormous slab of metal and clockwork that took up half the basement.
“No no no not THAT switch! THE switch!”
Maxwell pulled the switch marked “THE switch,” and was rewarded with immediate and thorough electrocution, flashing white light, and a rich, meaty scent that brought to mind that perfectly good (if a little ripe) steak he’d ruined earlier in the night. Then the monster exploded and his hair caught fire. The doctor screamed something blasphemous that was cut out by a sudden bolt of lightning, and Maxwell woke up with no sense of smell on the roof of a little inn in Munich, without the faintest idea of how he’d got there and a searing case of tetanus. One was cured with ignorant bliss, the other with inadvertent consumption of mouldy bread.
Years passed, and Maxwell grew no less determined. He slept in the beds of self-mutilating artists and had terrible nightmares walk right past him. He plumbed his family tree’s darkest depths in castles once owned by depraved ancestors, and found in the cellars a few dead rats in the walls and some empty stills set up by squatters. He swam in dark, cursed coves from which no man had ever returned alive in skimpy bathing costumes, and was attacked by an irked bull shark, for which he received many stitches. He drank wine with men who did not, and woke up the next morning with nothing more than a hangover and a terse request to leave it’s been three days you know what they say about guests and fish.
All of this took quite a lot of time, by which Maxwell should’ve been an old man. Instead, he was merely an aged man. He blamed it on his delayed trip to Europe, feeling that the whole continent had been a waste, and struck out for distant shores and more exotic mysteries. But alas, his further travels bore no greater fruit. In Africa he participated in the hunt for a mysterious lost city and succeeded in finding only a lost village, which had fallen off the map about a decade ago and had been getting on pretty well since. In South America he found El Dorado and was kicked out for drunk and impious conduct. Among the jungles of Asia he shot (or at least was on hand while it was shot) a demon-possessed man-eating tiger that turned out to be merely rabid, although he did have the excitement of a dose of rabies to contend with after that. Near to the southern pole he found a hidden, ancient cave full of what he initially thought was a monstrous and inhuman civilization older than mankind’s most creaking nightmares, but turned out to be merely hallucinogenic spores, and his attempt at finding the Min-Min light in Australia ceased when it led him into a billabong occupied by an irate bunyip, for which he received many more stitches.
“I’m getting closer,” Maxwell told the nurse in Melbourne, as he managed to feed himself without aid. “I can feel it!”
“Yes sir,” she agreed, and caught his spoon as it missed his mouth and dove for his navel.
It came that he returned to America. The witches were long gone, yes, but there were strange things out west, things that he couldn’t wait to check. He deliberately defiled a few ancient burial grounds (he was seized by virulent diarrhoea for three years and one month), and attempted three times to become shot dishonourably in a high-noon showdown only to be repeatedly pistol-whipped. It seemed the unlife of the restless spirit was as denied to him as that of the eternally cursed.
The first world war was a nasty nuisance (he’d been planning on checking under the Vatican for sealed vaults of heresies before the knives came out), but the second was a golden opportunity for Maxwell. Rumours took him to enlistment. Hair dye got him past the recruitment officers. Incredibly awkward slang terms carried him past the critical and alert eyes of his sergeant and fellow grunts, aided by profound apathy on their part. And a carefree and amoral spirit took him away from duty and deep into the heart (or at least the lungs) of German territory, where he found a creaking bunker, lined with medical waste and fraught with horrors.
He kicked in the door with his boot. He’d been wanting to do that for almost a century, ever since he’d missed the opportunity back out west. “Stop right there!” he yelled or something very much like it, to the mouldering, decayed corpse of what had probably been a Nazi scientist.
A few forlorn hours followed. Maxwell poked around the bunker (a cut-rate, shoddy thing, barely hidden underground at all), and discovered both cause of death – crushed underneath his own giant, dial-ridden belljar set – and experimental purporse: creating a master race of biomechanical goldfish while inhaling as much nitrous oxide as could possibly be smuggled into the budget. He hadn’t gotten far, which was probably for the best – the degree proudly framed on the western wall looked to be for gothic architecture.
Maxwell left in dejection, barely remembering to set fire to the bunker on his way, and deserted somewhere farther away, where the disappointment wouldn’t follow him as much.
He searched the Himalayas, and found the abominable frostbite, much to the dismay of three of his favourite toes.
He wandered the swamps of Borneo, and found the real wild man of the forests. Who noogied-and-ran.
And at last his wandering took him to Japan, where, in the midst of lunch after a disappointing morning following traces of radiation to no avail, he felt the ground shake and his drink spill on his crotch. Stepping outside, he came face to face with a receding tail bigger than buildings and devastation that matched anything he’d seen anywhere.
“Take me!” he cried after it. It didn’t listen, and vanished around a corner. Sweating bullets and crying, he wrested a miraculously undamaged motorcycle from the grip of a dying man and sped after the creature, dodging rubble and serious, ashen-faced men with Geiger counters that clicked and whirred like cockroaches.
“Take me!” he called, spinning around a block corner. A toe loomed overhead, somewhere above it, a body measured in kilotonnes.
“TAKE ME NOW!” called Maxwell, passion filling his soul. “I EMBRACE YOU, IN THE NAME OF THE ATOM!”
The creature stepped over him and continued on his way. A crushed pedestrian moaned, and Maxwell was filled with envy and spite.
“That’s easy for YOU to say,” he muttered viciously as he stared after the retreating backside of the monster. “YOU didn’t have to work for it, oh no no, it just happened to you. You had it easy. You didn’t have to try. You didn’t spend three hundred years and more running around trying to just once, just ONCE be the lucky one, oh no you didn’t. It just happened. ‘Just happened.’ Spoiled little shit.”
The pedestrian rolled his eyes and expired, leaving Maxwell alone, bitter, and with a mild case of radiation poisoning that made some of his hair fall out and cost him one of his particularly favourite teeth (the left maxillary canine, which had long been his preferred tearing instrument during meals).
“Hard work,” he grumbled as he wandered the streets of Cairo, purchased coffin after coffin and found them empty of curses and full of useless raggedy old limbs and archaeological knick-knacks. “‘Hard work is the way the Lord will admit you into heaven, boy.’ Well thank you, father, but I’ve been working hard at this for long enough without so much as a snippet of success. Where’s my excitement?” he complained as a mummified, shambling figure revealed itself to have been an inhumed minor scribe and waved off offers of vengeance upon the defilers of its rest in favour of investigating modern accounting.
“Where’s my trauma?” he grumbled as a bestial tribe of long-lost ape-men ceremonially exiled him with flung fecal matter.
“Where’s my insight into matters beyond the ken of cautious men?!” he yelled as the eightieth ancient crumbling scroll recovered from a sealed marble vault in the Mediterranean proved to be Socratic dialogues on recipes involving olive oil. He flung it aside in a temper and paced to the window. He already knew everything about cooking with olive oil.
Maxwell gazed out over the tranquil hideousness of a New England downtown with moody negativity. Home again, after three hundred years, and not a single step taken forwards. Not one vampire bloodletting, or werewolf bite, or even a conversion into some sort of ghoulish freak. No mutation, no satanic rites, no induction into hidden societies.
Of course, no UFO abductions. That was just silly.
“It’s all rot,” he said to the countryside in general. “All of it. And especially you,” he said to his father specifically, who had quietly begun hovering behind his back. “Yes, I know you’re there! You can’t fool me that easily.”
He turned around to face him. Father was much less frightening than he remembered. Faceless, yes, but shorter, and he’d seen almost more things without faces than with by this time. “Look at you! You haven’t moved one inch since we last talked. Where’s heaven now, eh? What about your hard work?”
The ghost raised its hands and made an ambiguous gesture, then took off its head.
“Yes, yes, very frightening, father,” said Maxwell. “God, how I was I scared of you as a boy? No, no – god DAMNIT. Look at you! You’re stuck, you’re wedged, you’re in a rut! And you jammed me into one too,” he spat. He threw an antique skull belonging to a depraved ancestral man-father at the ghost just to hear it shatter. The wraithish man drew back in alarm. “Maybe not the right rut, not the one you planned, but one all the same! Well, I’m fed up with it. I’m fed up with you and all this rot! I’m THROUGH, do you hear me?” He was advancing on his father now, sending the frail old spectre back on his heels, quailing in the corner of the room. “I’m GOD. DAMNED. THROUGH.”
There was a small piff, and two things happened, the second before the first. First, the ghost vanished.
Secondly, Maxwell didn’t believe in ghosts. He also didn’t believe in witches. Or werewolves, or vampires, or himself, or much of anything. It didn’t do you any good.
“What a crock,” he muttered to himself. Hair dropped from his head like a light spring rain, whitening itself as it hit the boards. “Rot, all of it. Unheard of. Rubbish.”
Plunk, plunk plunk, out fell the teeth.
“rot,” he mumbled
The landlord was surprised when he checked in the next day; after last night’s gale he was doing the rounds to see how many windows had fallen victim. Upstairs had already cost him a fortune, and he was thinking something more modern and durable. Can’t live in the past forever, and those old windowframes were deathtraps for glass. The man leaving so suddenly was a bit of a shocker, but he’d seemed the roaming sort, and at least he’d left his wallet – a great hulking slab of leather that could’ve doubled as a steak in an emergency. The landlord upended it, and cursed a bit as something very small and indisputably not a bill fell out.
He picked it up. It was a small note of plain white paper. Printed on it in plain black ink was this:
You too.
It made his teeth itch. Almost hum. Impulsively, he turned it over, and found some more text.
Look behind you.
He did, and came face-to-teeth with the head of a somewhat elderly puritan man.
It took a long time for both of them to stop screaming.
“Persistence,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.