Grave Fortunes

“You’re kidding!” I snorted, and that was the start of it, my friend, the beginning of the end of it all.

​

The stranger pressed his glass to his lip, his rich red lip, and smiled a knife-slash smile. He gazed at me in a way that seemed to say; “I never ‘kid’”. For a moment I was lost in his eyes. Those orbs of night set in pearl gleaming skin. They weren’t eyes, not really, more like the negative image of an eye: the pupil was white as a new sheet of paper and the parts which should be white were blacker than a night in Hell.

 

“So,” I said, blinking back into consciousness with a sip of my drink, “what you’re saying is that you have been alive for two hundred years?”

The stranger’s smile altered slightly. “Ah, no. No, no, no, no, no. What I am saying is, garçon, I have existed for two hundred years. I am alas, no longer live.”

​

I spat my drink across the table. Embarrassed, I slid a tentative hand across my mouth. “Sorry,” I muttered. “You’re dead?” I sneered at that. “Look, monsieur, I may be young but I’m not stupid. Just because I‘ve been asking you questions doesn’t mean you have to give garbage answers.” I slurped the rest of my cocktail and stood up to leave. “Later, monsieur, when you’re ready to tell me something true call me.” I placed my card on the table, pressed it down against the wood.

 

His hand was around my wrist.

 

I hadn’t even seen the movement. Now his grip was tight around me, and I couldn’t move. I thought my hand would come right off. Without a word, the stranger drew the cocktail-stick from his drink, slipping the little chunk of pineapple into the still full glass. The smile was unmoveable as he lowered the sharp splinter of wood towards my hand. I cried out, but the stick didn’t touch me. Instead, he drove it hard into one of the cold veins in his winter hand. The vein bulged against the stick. It seemed to shrink as it pierced his skin and shivered into the icy flesh. I swallowed a scream and sank, numb, into my chair.

 

He released his vice-like grip and pulled out the cocktail-stick as though it were a syringe. “No pain,” he said flatly.

 

I shuddered. “No blood.”

​

“Dead Men do not bleed,” he told me.

 

“That’s rubbish.” I retorted sitting back.

 

“That,” he corrected me, “is science.”

 

I sat there for a while, thinking hard. The Dead Man hailed the waitress and ordered a hot drink for me. The waitress smiled that chocolate smile of hers and tossed her calico hair, locks brushing against her shoulders, contrasting against the deep red of her dress. Red like the Dead Man’s lips.

 

As I gazed at him through the veils of steam from my coffee, a thought struck me. “How did you survive death?” I asked him.

 

He grabbed my hand so that I tipped all of my drink into my mouth, burning my tongue to a numb weight between my jaws. “Come with me!” he commanded, “I will show you.”

 

Through the dark, haunted streets of that terrible French city he lead me, past the wraiths of women and the ghosts of houses, into a morbid, winding back-street. The buildings here seemed to drip with abhorrent histories, as painful and perverse as Edgar Allen Poe’s House of Usher; terrible, undead places that once had a life of their own. The building he took me to was a disused theatre, I suppose, a parody of a concert hall. Its doors were half boarded up, its windows blank; looming over the side-street like a vulture from the past.

 

The Dead Man eased the doors open, levering up the nailed boards. Inside smelt of dust and mothballs, the carpet was black with centuries of dirt, the seats in the stalls broken and torn. The curtains, which hung heavy and dark, leaning treacherously over the stage, were half torn from their hooks and were ripped and thin as cobwebs. Shifting shadows detached themselves from the dark and seemed to crowd around us, long fingers reaching for me, half-heard voices calling out.

 

“It was here that I died, my friend,” the Dead man told me, placing a heavy hand on my shoulder, “two hundred years ago. It was a full moon, quite like tonight in fact, the air tasted dull, I remember. It was five years since the theatre had closed. Do you know why it was closed?”

I did not, and I told him so.

 

“It was closed because its proprietor, one Monsieur Measiere, had a son who was insane. This son killed a boy his age onstage, right in front of the audience, and then committed suicide. His dark blood fell upon the dead boy, and from the evil of his spirit, the unfortunate victim was resurrected.”

 

We were half way down the aisle now, nearing the stage. The Dead Man sighed and continued. “The boy existed in pain and death for five long years, until he found a boy of his age and killed him on the same spot that he had fallen. If the victim was of the wrong age of fell upon the wrong board, that boy would join the shadows and haunt the theatre. At last he found the miserable wretch who would grant him freedom. I am that boy, that second sacrifice. Time has allowed me to age somewhat, but I am he. My mistakes have been numerous, more so than my predecessor. You see them here,” he indicated the screaming shadows, “but at last, I think I have found my replacement.”

 

We were on the stage now, carefully treading the rotting boards. I took a step back, away from him. “Are you mad?” I hissed, but he did not answer, because in his hand he held a knife. A showy sort of knife. Not a kitchen knife, but a sleek stiletto with a gilt handle and a bloodstained blade.

 

“A life for a life, a soul for a soul,” screamed the Dead Man, suddenly looking so much younger than before, “when you meet this need, your existence is whole!”

 

He ran at me, slashing and stabbing with the knife, slicing at me but always missing. I darted away, trying to dissuade him. “You have immortality!” I told him, “why throw all that away?”

 

“Have you felt what it is to be immortal?” he asked coldly, “to see the ages roll by, to watch those you love die, to feel the world change and be powerless to join it. And the boredom! Oh, the boredom of it all! You who are tired with one lifetime cannot comprehend the tediousness of eternity. You are finished!”

 

I had been a fool. I had stopped to listen, and he held me now as he moved to slice my jugular vein. I slithered backwards, but found myself caught in a hole between the floorboards. I heard myself scream, my choking scream, and keep screaming until he cut the nerve that let me do so. I felt my consciousness drift away from my body to some other, colder place. I was vaguely aware of my blood-drenched form collapsing and rolling away from him. He gasped and fell beyond me, where my cold eyes could not see him.

 

And then I was back in my body, feeling numb and cold. My cut throat seemed to ease itself whole as I watched the Dead Man’s body fall through the rotting boards of the stage into the abyss where he could crumble to slime in peace.

 

The shadow-ghosts were more defined to my dead eyes. They looked sad. They called to me in pitying, pitiful voices; “end it quickly,” the said, “or it will drive you to despair.”

 

So here I stand, my friend, looking for the end to this end. If I fail tonight, there will be tomorrow night. Who knows? Maybe I shall find one who wants immortality at any price, and I can take him. But for now…yes. Yes, I shall settle for you. Do not struggle, the pain will only last longer, the physical pain, that is. And I would know. Welcome to our eternity, my dear friend…