My great-aunt,
Lindsay Whitman, holds the grim distinction of being the only woman in New
Brunswick to have been exhumed twice. The first occasion came in the spring of
1973, when floodwater seeped into the riverside cemetery where she had been
recently interred; I shudder to remember the lurid accounts in the papers of
her casket breaching the sodden earth. The second came at the behest of the
provincial police, whose ongoing investigation into the suspicious circumstances
of Lindsay’s death provoked a confession from Meredith Whitman, her sister and
sole inheritor. Meredith had compelled Lindsay to ingest a key some hours
before her passing, the recovery of which led to a post office box and a
codicil striking the surviving sister’s name from the will. The result of all
this macabre intrigue was the enforcement of the codicil’s other instruction:
that my great-aunt’s estate—what remained of it, anyhow—should come into my
immediate possession.
My
inheritance amounted to a rather empty townhouse in the river valley. In her
time as householder, Meredith had demonstrated her mercantile aptitude by
selling off most of her sister’s earthly treasures, such that the aging
structure wanted furnishing more desperately than renovation. Some few chests
in the attic had escaped her pecuniary interest; these I opened, discovering a
small trove of antique books and manuscripts. The most curious relic was a
leather-bound volume containing the handwritten script of a French play. To all
appearances, the text was anonymous. A title page gave the year of 1876, but
there was such great variance in the age of the ink throughout that it was
impossible to say how many months or years of effort the piece might actually
represent. Strange to say, I could not find a printed edition or performance
record.
Having
come by a reasonable command of French during a decade of scholarship in
Quebec, I began a hobbyist translation of the text. Titled Otherwhere,
the play was a children’s fantasy concerning the quest undertaken by two
sisters, Ysaline and Mariette, to locate a magic portal that had been revealed
to them in shared dreams. I met with considerable difficulty in interpreting
the metaphor of the portal, owing to a peculiar feature of the manuscript:
clusters of supplemental text congesting the margins wherever the portal was
mentioned. These annotations were in a different hand and a language that I
could not identify beyond the obvious absence of a Latinate root. The frequency
of these notes betokened an alteration of some importance, but I could scarcely
guess the particulars. I sent copies of the confounding passages to a colleague
of mine who I knew to be a respected linguist, but my inquiries went
unanswered. At length, I chose to serve the most obvious interpretation: that
the play was a bittersweet coming-of-age story with the portal as a visual
metaphor for the transition to adulthood. I submitted my translation to a
publisher specializing in eccentric texts, enjoyed the brief season of public
interest that followed, and believed my relationship with the text ended.
Years
later, I received from my publisher the surprising news that my translation had
been optioned for a stage performance by a theatre group based in Fredericton.
Although I had no formal involvement with the production, I attended the
premiere at the Playhouse with no small measure of pride. It was during a scene
in the first act, in which Ysaline first discovers the portal in a feverish
dream, that I noticed a divergence from my translation. Appearing before the
mouth of the portal was a character not present in the original scene or indeed
the entirety of the play as I knew it. The stranger paced about the portal in a
cloak of black crushed velvet, its face concealed by a white, featureless mask
that extended below the neck. The actress portraying Ysaline seemed
apprehensive of its presence; she delivered her monologue but did not approach
the portal as the original text required. For its part, the stranger spoke not
a word and made no effort to interact with Ysaline. When the lights dimmed to
end the scene, the figure followed her backstage, its strange mask turned to
the audience all the while.
My
interest in this new character developed with each reappearance in subsequent
scenes. Whenever the portal was brought onstage, so did the figure assume its
post, pacing but never interfering with the other actors. As the final act
progressed, I found myself perched on the edge of my seat—so eager was I to
witness any dramatic consequence for the director’s inclusion of this mysterious
role.
We
came at last to the climax of the play: the moment when Ysaline and Mariette
enter the portal and emerge as adults in the world beyond. The stranger was
present with them as before, its cloak billowing as it paced about the portal—only
this time, while the two sisters were delivering their final lines, it advanced
toward them. The actresses stopped mid-sentence and recoiled. The figure raised
before them a single hand—a hooked, fingerless sort of hand—and spoke. I have
here put down spoke, yet in that dreadful
moment, I could not discern any sound producible by the human tongue in all the
mad oration that came from behind the mask. The terrible speech continued,
seeming to shackle Ysaline and Mariette where they stood. With tectonic
clamour, there arose behind the portal the smoking entrance of a Hellmouth; all
at once, a full quarter of the stage and the portal itself were swallowed up in
its cavernous maw. A tide of sulphuric green mist spilled over the stony lip of
the Hellmouth and curled in wisping tendrils about the legs of the actresses.
Cries of horror from house and stage alike resounded as the pair were dragged
in fits and starts toward the opening. How desperately they fought to free
themselves! How calmly the masked figure ushered them in! I could spectate the
horror no longer—alas, nothing will shut out the memory of their anguished
screams as they echoed into silence!
So
ended the only theatrical production of Otherwhere. There is no appetite
anywhere to stage it again; some members of the original production refuse to even
speak its name. At my insistence, my publisher withdrew the translation from
sale. The actresses, Julia Harmon and Eloise Pelletier-Gagnon, have not been
seen since their disappearance on the night of the premiere. Their case remains
open, although police have been silent on its progress. Every few months, I
turn over my evening paper to find the families’ latest petition for
information. Perhaps the only person who might have advanced their search was
Lindsay Whitman, and she has been mercifully at rest. As for myself, I have long
believed those women lost forever—but to Hell, to Kur or to Sheol, it profits
no one to ponder.
Some
days ago, I had word from my linguist colleague. He apologized for the delay,
explaining that the language of the annotations represents a
previously-undiscovered fork of Sanskrit. He lamented the impossibility of a precise
translation; however, he had traced enough points of lineage between my samples
and texts of the classical language to approximate the intended meaning. The
translations he has sent me are too profane to reproduce here, but an excerpt
from the final scene should satisfy any objections to my destruction of the
manuscript. It reads:
Come, ye brides of Esthir,
sing psalms of flesh and bone;
offer Him the red within
to beautify His throne.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ryan Marshall is a writer of heirloom horror living in Fredericton, New Brunswick. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of New Brunswick. His writing has taken him to such distances as Tottori Prefecture, Japan, where he lived for several years before returning to Canada. He is presently developing a collection of horror fiction concerning the history of New Brunswick.
