Blood Red Roses Read online

  Praise for Russell James

  James creates powerful intimacy and terror…a seriously creepy page-turner that will keep readers up all night.

  —Publisher’s Weekly on Q Island

  “James has a talent for combining action-packed vignettes into a powerful, fast-paced whole.”

  —Library Journal on Black Magic

  “…made me wish for a sequel. I’d recommend Blood Red Roses to anyone looking for something dark yet intelligent. It kept me on my toes from beginning to end!”

  —Long and Short Reviews on Blood Red Roses

  (Five Stars, A Night Owl Top Pick) “I loved the story so much that I’m eagerly waiting to read more from him. He carefully and very intricately weaved his storyline to have elements of mystery and suspense throughout. I now have a new favorite book I’ll read over and over again.”

  —Night Owl Reviews on Dark Inspiration

  “The book had me at the edge of my seat. The writing is so vivid I even jumped a few times. If you're a fan of the genre, love ghosts and are drawn to the supernatural, then do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of this book!”

  —Long and Short Reviews on Dark Inspiration

  This was a wonderful tale that had me drawn in from the beginning, fascinated by the vividness of the storytelling. While there’s plenty of the somewhat gruesome and occult we horror fans love so much, it’s the depth and emotions of the characters that truly make this a fabulous read.

  —The Entertainer Magazine on Dark Vengeance

  Look for these other titles by

  Russell James

  Novels

  Sacrifice

  Dark Vengeance

  Black Magic

  Dreamwalker

  Q Island

  Novellas

  Blood Red Roses

  The Antikythera Answer

  Collections

  Tales from Beyond

  Deeper Into Darkness

  Outer Rim

  Forever Out of Time

  Blood Red Roses

  Russell James

  Blood Red Roses

  Print Version

  Copyright 2014 by Russell James.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  ISBN-13: 978-1543095012

  ISBN-10: 1543095011

  MLG Publishing

  Dedication

  For Mr. E.A. Poe,

  So much of what ails me I lay upon your doorstep.

  Acknowledgements

  A special thanks to Paul Siluch for his thoughtful commentary on the first draft.

  Chapter One

  When I was but the tender age of fourteen, my father died.

  Such a tragedy would be the year’s formative event in most people’s lives. It was just one of many in mine.

  At that time, my familial life had been turned quite convoluted. My mother had run off years ago, so when Jefferson Davis ordered my father conscripted after the Battle of Manassas, I, his only son, was left in the care of Uncle Trent and Aunt Clara in the small Mississippi town of De Kalb.

  Uncle Trent was a barrel-chested man, skin bronzed to leather and hair the color of straw from long days in the fields. Aunt Clara was the opposite, a wisp of a woman with long, dark hair that accentuated her perpetually pallid skin. My father thought they could use another hand about their farm. Uncle Trent thought my father’s pay would help him make ends meet. A deal was struck, with an agreement in terms though none in motive. The home of my father’s sister already brimmed full with three children, two younger and one older than I, but Uncle Trent promised to fashion lodging for me in an old shed. Assured of my welfare, my father marched off to keep us safe from Yankees.

  Two years later, in the summer of 1863, a premonition struck my Aunt Clara. In it, my father appeared to her from across a misty bridge, waved and then retreated into the shroud of fog. He spoke not a word, just offering a gesture of farewell. She awoke in a cold sweat, terrified to her marrow, filled with the certainty that he was dead. When she shared her dream with us, Uncle Trent admonished her that my father was a thousand miles away, marching with General Lee, and not to speak of such foolishness within my earshot.

  When I first heard Aunt Clara’s dream, I was quick to dismiss it. I told myself that Aunt Clara was always aflutter about one imagined item or another. But mostly, I did not want it to be true.

  Though my aunt and uncle were never cruel to me, they were family in name only, placeholders for the return of my father and the reopening of our livery down in Pelahatchie. After my father’s departure, I had followed the news of the war and plotted positions on a map I nailed over my straw mattress in the shed. I imagined my father in a tent outside certain towns or walking guard beside a specific river. I was always calculating how far that place was from home, and how soon he could be back when the war ended. I lived for his return. If Aunt Clara’s dream came true, what future would I have?

  Word came across the telegraph that next morning that a great battle had begun in a place called Gettysburg. Aunt Clara nearly fainted when she heard, and took to fanning herself constantly throughout the rest of the day, as if the tiny breeze she made would keep bad tidings at bay.

  News never came of the battle’s conclusion. They had told us after both battles at Manassas, after Fredericksburg, after Seven Pines. The newspapers always overflowed with tales of the invincible Army of Northern Virginia when the Bluecoats turned tail. Hollow trepidation already possessed us, as nearby Vicksburg, our fortress on the Mississippi, had at that time just fallen to Union forces. The paper’s deafening silence on Pennsylvania could only mean that General Lee had finally, incomprehensibly failed.

  Three days later, it was announced that the casualty list would be posted by the courthouse at noon. Aunt Clara couldn’t bring herself to travel into De Kalb to read it. She sent me instead. She could have forced some of my cousins to accompany me, but she kept them in the fields. It was as if, since I was the one who exposed the family to this loss, I should be the one to bear the brunt of it.

  The mayor had erected a wooden panel in the shadow of the clock tower for this solitary task: to herald the losses, losses that were often more than loved ones could bear. The posted list would carry the names of the Mississippians killed in action in those Pennsylvania cornfields, mowed down before a ridge that had held enormous value at that moment, and absolutely none just a day later.

  As I approached the courthouse, my front of excessive optimism was but a façade for the darkest of dread. A group clustered around the posting, stock-still and staring straight at the list. Doleful sobs and words of consolation drifted away from the crowd.

  In those days, I was short, even for my age, and had to work my way through the men and women who surrounded the lists, a human wall of wide skirts and dingy suits. I broke through the front row. Usually, a single sheet tacked to the boards held a half-dozen names. I caught my breath.

  The list stretched pages long. The ink seemed darker than usual, the letters in a bolder, more mournful font. My eyes scrolled down, and I prayed that the last names would leap from J to L and host no names that even started with the same K that started ours. At the first K, my pulse beat faster. I checked each one and froze when my last name jumped out before me. My heart stopped when my father’s first name followed my last.

  I stood there in shock. I stared at
the name, as if looking at it longer would make it fade away and return my world to the unbroken eggshell it had been moments ago. Tears welled in my eyes, and a vast, empty expanse formed in my stomach. I could not control myself. I reached up and tore this preacher of death from its pulpit. The page left its corners on the board, layered over the corners of an uncounted number of sheets before it.

  Blinded by tears, I turned from the board and vented my rage upon the cheap newsprint, shredding it so that no two letters of my father’s name would continue to touch. Despair so rent my body that I fell upon my knees and sobbed into the page’s detritus, until the damp scraps stuck to my hands.

  The people around me did not admonish me. But nor did they offer compassion. By now all had suffered losses, some today for the second or third time. They looked down on me in morose welcome, acknowledging my delayed entry into the fraternity of the mourning. The Angel of Death, who had passed my family over so often, had finally alighted upon my shoulders.

  Behind me, the town clerk, prepared for my reaction through past experience with others, posted a duplicate casualty list on the board.

  Chapter Two

  That evening we ate dinner in silence, Aunt Clara sadly vindicated that her premonition had proved true, Uncle Trent apparently consumed with concerns. My cousins expressed their subdued condolences, keenly uncomfortable with me now, as if death were as communicable as consumption and my contact could spread this epidemic amongst them all.

  Sequestered in my shed that evening, I apprehended that light still burned in the main house, when usually it had been extinguished long before this hour. I crept from my meager lodging and tucked myself under the kitchen window to overhear what kept my guardians up into the night.

  “Trent, you can’t,” Aunt Clara said.

  “I damn sure can, and you know I should.”

  “He’s just a boy.”

  “Who has just turned burden. He’s a mouth to feed without a penny to feed him. The Confederacy doesn’t pay dead soldiers. It barely pays the living.”

  “But he’s my blood.”

  “Situation’s about to get worse before it gets better. How long before Bluecoats march through town with Vicksburg gone? You heard the stories. They don’t leave nothing in their wake.”

  “But to send him to Beechwood—”

  “Glory, woman, it’s a plantation, not a prison. They’ll treat him right.”

  A plantation? To a small-town boy like myself, plantations were things of legend, places of fabulous wealth, worked by slaves from Africa. Was I to join them in their labor? The night was warm and humid, yet I shivered in my nightshirt. Here was I being spoken of as a mule, to be sent from one field to the next.

  “And they’ll pay,” my uncle added. “They been looking for a hired hand.”

  “They’ll pay him?” my aunt asked.

  “No, they’ll pay us. Like a finder’s fee. Real gold, not Confederate scrip.”

  My jaw dropped. I was not a mule being led from field to field. I was a mule being sold.

  “It’s your damn brother got us into this mess,” my uncle said. “Marrying that harlot, then getting himself killed, leaving us with her pup.”

  At this, Aunt Clara commenced with a fresh round of jagged sobs. My uncle plowed on undeterred.

  “Tomorrow morning he’ll be somewhere else, either at Beechwood or on the streets. Wherever it is, it won’t be here. Best we take the option that pays.”

  I had heard such type of discourse before, and Aunt Clara always finished on the losing end. Uncle Trent’s word was the law. On the morrow, I would be gone.

  I crawled back to the drafty shack I had called home. I wrapped myself in the frayed quilt that was the sum of my bedsheets. Fear found its way to every nook in my body, and I trembled until my teeth nearly chattered.

  At first I thought to run, to set out in the darkness before my uncle’s plan could unfold. But where would I run to? I had no family outside the five who were ready to abandon me now. And without a penny to my name, how would I survive?

  A line of thunderstorms barreled through within the hour. I sat awake in the corner of my little shack. Wind and rain blew through the gaps in the rough-hewn pine. Peals of thunder rolled in with such force that it shook dirt from the rafters. Lightning flared through the sky and turned the shed’s interior from black to blinding white for fractions of a second. Perhaps I imagined it, but in one of those brief illuminations, I swore I could see the spirit of my father by the shed door, in his uniform of new gray wool, a blank stare upon his countenance. I called to him, but the following flash revealed that I was still alone.

  By dawn the storms had spent their fury, and the sleepless night had sapped my strength. I faced the rising sun resigned to whatever future awaited me at the unknown plantation of Beechwood.

  Chapter Three

  In the end, Aunt Clara had but a cameo role in the show surrounding my abandonment. Uncle Trent roused me from the shed an hour before my morning chores were to begin. He did not seem surprised that I was up and wide awake. He issued a curt order to gather up all my belongings and carry them to the front porch. He offered no reason and I asked for none. Whether he knew I had overheard his previous evening’s conversation or thought that I had simply surmised my fate, I do not know. But he understood that, like the executioner and the prisoner upon their final meeting, we had no details that need be discussed.

  I had little in the way of possessions to show for my fourteen years of life. I stuffed two shirts and a pair of pants in a flour sack. Doing so left the shed nearly bare. I left the The great map of the now-divided United States remained on the wall. It no longer mattered how far Confederate forces were from my hometown. Nothing about the war mattered at all.

  The only other item I added to my bag I could never leave behind: my father’s own pocket watch, passed down through three fathers, the oldest of whom was said to have fought in the Revolution. The years had worn the engraving to just the faintest etching, but it was silver and the workmanship indicated it had been most expensive in its day. The crystal was cracked and its hands no longer swept its spotted ivory face. But it reminded my father of our lineage, one that had once been well-off enough for such finery. And now it reminded me of him.

  As I stood on the front porch awaiting the next turn of my fate, my cousins were reduced to a trio of faces pressed against the panes of the parlor window, looking like they were witnessing an unfolding tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. I thought this excessive, as I was stepping off the front porch, not off a cliff. Only later did I realize they knew more than I about Beechwood.

  Aunt Clara made her fleeting appearance through the front door. Tears rimmed her puffy eyes, and she could not look me in the face. She pressed a cloth bundle into my hands and scurried back inside like a mouse to its den. Up through the thin cloth rose the smell of warm cornbread. My hands, still chilled from the damp night winds, warmed from the toasty handful.

  No sooner had my aunt passed back inside than my uncle stepped onto the porch.

  “You’re heading to the Beechwood Plantation,” he said. “You’ll work for your keep there, rest assured. Do you know of the place?”

  I shook my head in an honest confession of my ignorance.

  “Well, it’s a good family there, the Powells. Lost their son at the Seven Days’ battle. Don’t act the fool and embarrass us.”

  As if anything I did could sully the reputation of a man paid to turn out his own orphaned kin.

  A buckboard pulled up in front of the house, driven by Nate French, the grizzled owner of the tack shop. I’d assumed someone from Beechwood would come to fetch me, but instead I was simply to be delivered, as any other commodity. My future grew darker by the moment.

  The old man sat slumped in the buckboard’s seat, his dropsy-swollen frame filling most of it. He pointed a thumb to the rear. I climbed in and sat upon my sack. We headed out, away from town, down the Meridian Road.

  Preferring the c
ompany of horses, Nate rarely spoke with even his customers. So you can imagine my shock when he addressed me midway through our journey.

  “Beechwood, eh?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You ain’t scared?”

  A chill ran down my spine. Until this moment, I’d been consumed by fear of the unknown, unaware that a specific fear was warranted as well. “Should I be?”

  Nate sighed and gave the reins a little snap. “Ramses the overseer there’s a legend. The tale is that a slave attacked him, bit part of his face clean off. Ramses took the time to whip the man to death before he’d let the family call him a doctor. He’s one mean cuss.”

  This morsel of news did nothing to calm my nerves. A disfigured, cruel man with a whip was the stuff of nightmares. I tried to convince myself Ramses was but a legend, like the ghost Bloody Mary or the hairy creature from the swamps. Needing no more kindling for the smoldering fear within me, I spoke no more to Nate, content to hear just the clop of the horse’s hooves along the red clay road.

  It was near midday when we finally crossed another’s path. Up ahead, a Confederate officer on horseback, hat festooned with a white plume, led a group of men marching in a column of two abreast. He called them to halt and then brought his horse forward to us at a canter.

  With each yard closer, the officer appeared to devolve. What at a distance appeared a proud, young, erect cavalryman came into focus and transformed into a wizened old man. His faded coat dated from the war with Mexico decades ago. Gray hair hung from beneath his battered hat. The scabbard at his side was brown with rust and empty.

  “Good day,” he said to Nate. He wore a captain’s rank on his faded epaulets. “Have you seen soldiers up near De Kalb?”

  “Nope,” Nate answered. “You’re the first men in gray we’ve seen all day.”