The Sins of the Living by Barbara A. Barnett

Thomas tossed his head back, drained the last of his ale, then slammed the mug down hard enough to knock his tri-cornered hat off its perch on the table’s edge.  The throbbing in his temples worsened; even the jolting motion of his last carriage ride home from Richmond hadn’t made his head ache so badly.  But ten mugs of ale wasn’t enough to erase that final image of Sarah, lips blue and eyes wide with the vacuity of death.

A death for which he was responsible.

“No good will come of marrying this girl,” his father had once told him, frowning with his usual disapproval.  Thomas’s memory of that look dug more sharply into his gut now than it ever had before.  He had become a lawyer as his father had wanted.  He had earned the esteem of his colleagues and taken a wife whom the church elders praised for her piety.  What more could he have done to please the man?

Thomas stared into his mug and studied his distorted reflection in the stray droplets of ale that clung to the sides.  Once more, the unbidden memory came:  his father and Sarah together, betraying him in his own home, his own bed.

“Guess I’ll never be like you now, Father,” Thomas muttered.  “Damned hypocrite that you are.”

But even killing the man could not banish his voice from Thomas’s head, chiding him with lectures on sin and redemption, with strange stories about creatures who fed off the sins of those who refused to acknowledge their wrongdoing.

“If sin is bad,” Thomas had once asked as a child, “then isn’t it good that these creatures take it away?”

“Not when all you are left with is emptiness,” his father had said.

Thomas’s lack of comprehension must have shown on his face, for his father looked to the sky with eyes that seemed to plead, Why does my son never understand?

“How we overcome our sins,” his father continued, “our desire to sin, is what defines us.  Without the capacity for sin, you would be but a shell—like your mother before she took her life.”

Hypocritical nonsense, Thomas thought now.  He waved his hand to catch a serving woman’s attention as she passed, but she ignored him and continued on toward a group of men at a nearby table, all in powdered wigs and knee-length coats that were not so wrinkled as the one Thomas had discarded on the bench beside him.  He groaned in annoyance and ran his hands through his hair, pulling some of it free from the ribbon that held it back.

“Haven’t you had enough, Thomas?” a woman asked.

Thomas squinted up at her, uncertain if it was the tavern’s smoky air or the amount he had drunk that made it so hard to focus on her.  She wore a gown of deep crimson velvet, square-necked with an embroidered silk inset and ruffled sleeves, and her auburn hair was piled on her head in loose curls, some of which escaped their binding and fell down her neck.  Except for the knowing smile on her lips, every facial feature was indistinct, as if Thomas were seeing her through a cloud of smoke—and yet she seemed familiar.

“Do I know you?” he asked, aware of how slurred his speech was, of how rumpled his breeches and stockings were, of how his unbuttoned waistcoat was hanging open.  For a moment, he swore he could smell the imperceptible droplets of blood on his cravat.

“I know you,” the woman said, joining Thomas on the bench and pressing close.  “And I know what you’ve done.”

Thomas jumped to his feet, banging his knees so hard against the table that he almost toppled it.  He would have fallen over the bench, but the woman took him by the arm and eased him back to his seat.  She brushed her fingers across his temples, and though Thomas never closed his eyes, a vision came to him:  this strange woman gliding through a crowd gathered at the gallows, her smirk the only distinct feature as she watched him hang.

Thomas shook away the vision, sick with the panic and rage he had spent the night trying to drown in drink.  I had every right to kill her, he told himself, trembling at the memory of his hands around Sarah’s neck.  To kill them both.

“Is that what your faith teaches you?” the woman asked, her tone casual, as if she were responding to words instead of thoughts he had not voiced.  “Thou shalt not kill, except to punish as you deem fit?”

“Who the hell are you?” Thomas asked in a choked whisper.

“I was once a dear friend of your mother’s—until I found her lying with my husband.”

“Molly Warren,” Thomas said.  “You’re Molly Warren.  I remember you.”

“You were so young.”  Molly stroked his cheeks, and though her touch was delicate, Thomas imagined her fingernails were claws tearing his flesh.  “And now we have so much in common, Thomas.  I can help you take back this thing you have done.”

“How?”

Molly laughed—a low sound as smoky as the tavern.  “Do you want to take it back?”

Thomas’s chest tightened with the desperate desire to see Sarah again—to know her skin would be warm with life, even if he wasn’t the one to hold her.  “Yes.”

“I warn you:  if you are not truly repentant of your sin, my master will know.”  Molly leaned closer, filling Thomas’s nose with her strange scent—fire masked in perfume.  “Do you still want to take it back?”

Thomas licked his lips; the closer Molly drew to him, the drier they became.  “I do.”

Molly kissed him, gripping his arms so tightly Thomas could not pull away from her searing touch.  Heat flashed through him—neither passion nor desire, but pain, burning into him just as his guilt had when he felt Sarah die at his hands.  He grew dizzy, closed his eyes.  Molly released him, and he fell backward, engulfed by cold darkness.

Thomas landed on his feet and lurched forward.  He shot out his right hand until it found a wall.  He steadied himself, but his head still swam from too much drink, and he felt a weight in his left hand that had not been there a moment before.

“What did you . . .”  Thomas blinked, but clearer vision only brought more confusion.  Molly was gone, and he was no longer in the tavern.  He was home, standing in the twilight-shadowed haze of the second floor hall.  The weight in his left hand was a flintlock pistol, the hammer half-cocked.

His heart pounded faster as a moan sounded from beyond the closed door of the master bedroom.  Sarah.  Her moan turned into a muffled cry, followed by the murmur of a man’s voice.  His father.  Thomas had lived this moment once already, and had relived it in his head again and again until his guilt did not burn as much as the ale he kept pouring down his throat.  Only this time, the effect of that drink was still with him.

Thomas stared at the pistol in his hand.  He remembered pouring a measure of gunpowder down the barrel, ramming a cloth-wrapped lead ball in after, loading more powder into the flash pan.  But everything that happened afterward—could he have imagined it all?  He thought he had gone straight for the pistol after learning of the rendezvous Sarah and his father had planned.  Now, though, he questioned which was more likely:  that he was too furious and inebriated to remember drinking at all, or that he had killed his wife and father and been sent back to that fateful moment by a woman he hadn’t seen in the years since his mother had died?

From the bedroom, Sarah cried out again.  Thomas would have thought she was in pain had he not known better.  Sarah and his father had no idea he was there, thought he was attending to business in town, and somehow that made the sound of their lovemaking all the more mocking. 

Thomas tightened his grip on the pistol.  Molly Warren, real or imagined, was wrong—he had no sin to repent, had performed no wrong in the eyes of God.  And whether or not he had imagined this moment, this time it would be different.  This time, he would let Sarah live to regret her sin.

With purposeful yet unsteady steps, Thomas stormed down the hall and threw open the bedroom door.  Sarah cried out, and his father leapt off her, eyes wide with surprise as his feet tangled in the bed sheets.

Thomas raised the pistol.  “Hello, Father.”

Though the words came out more slurred than he remembered, Thomas had no doubt he had spoken them before.  But the shock of seeing his father—the man who had always denigrated Sarah as a whore, a hypocrite for her pretension to piety—still hit him like a blow to the gut.  His veins iced over with the certainty that he had done this once already:  he had shot his father, then throttled his wife.

Sarah clutched the bed sheets, face streaked with tears, voice quavering with fear.  “Thomas, please, you don’t know what he is.  He attacked me and I—”

Thomas moved the hammer to full-cock.  “Don’t lie to me, woman!”

His father, standing by the bedside in rumpled clothing, raised his hands the way one would to calm a jittery horse.  “Listen to me, son.  Remember what I told you—”

Thomas squeezed the trigger.

Though the startling discharge was the same, everything else changed.  Thomas had held his ground before, but this time the pistol’s recoil sent him staggering backwards into the doorframe.  He closed his eyes and swallowed back the vomit that surged up his throat at the motion.  A cool breeze touched his face, and the silence struck him as wrong.  He heard no scream from Sarah, no plea for help from his father as he clutched at the wound in his chest.  Thomas opened his eyes to find them both gaping at him—Sarah with horror, his father as if he were shocked to still be alive.  Then Thomas saw the shattered glass of the window his stray shot had broken.

He dropped the pistol and ran.

Thomas grasped the railing to keep from stumbling down the stairs, and his footing failed to improve upon flatter ground.  He staggered out of the house, into the streets, tottering even though there was little other than gravel and piles of horse dung to impede him.  He shoved past people making their way home for the evening, past the boys who lit the street lanterns, not stopping until he found a secluded alleyway between the tavern and the apothecary’s shop.  Thomas dropped to his knees and retched.

To send me back as drunk as she found me . . .

Thomas staggered to his feet, thinking the stale, bitter taste in his mouth more pleasant than the kiss Molly had given him in the tavern.  His instinct was to wash away rage and regret and the taste of vomit with more ale, but apprehension held him there in the alley.  Would Sarah and his father try to find him?  Or would they wait for him to return, hoping he hadn’t said anything, hoping he would keep their affair silent and the family’s reputation unblemished?

And how could I live with that? Thomas thought.  For his wife to have smiled at him all this time, as if she craved his attention as much as the day they first met, and for his own father to have rendered him a cuckold—how could any of them live with that?

“Why?”  Thomas slammed his fist against the tavern’s outside wall.  “Why send me back for this?”

“You said you wanted to take it back.”

Thomas whirled to find Molly Warren sauntering toward him, her features as indistinct as before.  Her thick gown made no sound as it brushed across the gravel.

“I would have taken it back,” Thomas said, his voice a choked cry.  “I would have let her live this time.  But for what?”

“You would have let her live.”  Molly pressed closer.  “But what about your father?”

Thomas loosened his sweat-drenched collar, panted in the alley’s stifling air.  “To see them like that again, to know that kind of betrayal . . .”

Molly gave a throaty laugh.  “Betrayal?  It is your father who sought to save you, who begged our master to give you a second chance.”

“What are you talking about?”  Thomas tried to take a step back, but his legs grew so weak he was surprised he could stand at all.

Molly toyed with his cravat, and Thomas cringed at the heat of her proximity.  “We feed off the sins of the living,” she said, stroking his cheek.  “He off your harlot wife’s—a feast you ruined the first time—now I off yours.”

Thomas’s skin burned at her touch, but inside, he felt as if he had turned to ice.  Molly’s lips curved into a smile, and he realized he had not been able to tell how red they were before.  As if a cloud of smoke were clearing, her features grew more distinct, revealing eyes like flames:  yellow, cruel, and hot.

Thomas tried to scream, but his throat grew so tight he could only manage a pathetic yelp.  Molly pressed her lips against his, and after a flare of pain—the feeling that she was sucking away his very soul—he fell into blackness.

#

Thomas awoke on a hard mattress, shivering, suffused with a cold that seemed to rise from somewhere within him.  He sat up slowly and tried to rub the warmth back into his arms and legs.  Alone in a bare brick room, he studied the wooden door with a grated window that offered the only way out and grew certain he had seen this room before—from the other side.

The jail.  The vision that had flashed before him in the tavern returned:  Molly Warren walking through a crowd, watching him swing from the gallows with a mocking smile.  No one would sentence him to hang for trying to kill a man who had cuckolded him; Thomas had tried enough cases of that nature to be assured of the outcome.  But cold despair gripped him nonetheless, as if every emotion that had ever made him feel alive—from the giddy joy of his first days with Sarah to the heated rage with which he had killed her—had been burned away.

Voices and a rattling of keys sounded from outside.  The door swung open, and Thomas’s father stepped into the room, hat in one hand, his walking stick in the other, a powdered wig covering his balding head.  Thomas tried to muster the same fury with which he had fired his pistol at the man, but all he found within himself was hopelessness, the sense that his insides had been hollowed out.

“Public drunkenness, seen cavorting with a woman other than your wife outside the tavern . . .”  His father strolled through the room as he rattled off the offenses.  “Confess your sins before the church and they’ll let you go with a fine, no time in the stocks.”

“I’ll confess my sins when you confess yours.”

“And what sins have I to confess?”  His father scowled in a way that made his skin look as if it had been stretched back from his mouth and over his cheekbones.  “You have no idea how many men that harlot wife of yours has taken to her bed—just like your mother.  You have no idea what I was there to take from her, what I was trying to save you from.  But now . . .”  He shook his head, lips pursed in a look of disappointment.  “You proved yourself a hypocrite, like all of the others—trying to take a life when you profess to worship a god who forbids it.  And so I gave you to Molly to feed on.”

Thomas opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was a half-sobbed sigh.  He trembled, cold and helpless, then finally managed, “What the hell are you?”

“Your father, of course.  Also the servant of a master who bids me to feed on sin like yours.  Like your mother’s.  After your mother betrayed me, Molly took pity on me and showed me what I could become if I desired it.  I let her transform me.  I drank of the master’s blood, and then your mother was the first on whose sins I fed to serve him.”

His father joined him on the bed, and Thomas thought he saw a hint of yellow flame in his eyes.

“I could have been free of this blasphemous world, at my master’s side, but I begged him to let me come back.  I begged him to give you a second chance to prove yourself worthy enough to become one of us.  But you still would have killed me.  You still would have sinned out of your love for that whore.”

“Father,” Thomas said, his voice choked with pleading.

“You and Sarah are truly a pair—an adulteress and a murderer.  Though only a would-be murderer now, aren’t you?”  His father nodded, as if this made all right with the world, then stood to leave.  “Now that Molly has fed on you, you’ll find yourself wishing for the gallows in time.  You’ll understand why your mother took her life.  That cold you feel . . .”  He directed an all-too-familiar frown of disappointment at Thomas.  “Your sins have been taken, but so has all that made you whole.  For without the temptation of sin, you have nothing to overcome, no reason to live.”

“Father, please,” Thomas called.

His father strode from the room, seeming to suck the heat out with him.  The door clicked shut behind him, but no desire for revenge stirred within Thomas.  No anger, no guilt, nor anything at all except the realization of what he had become:  a shell void of every feeling but despair.

Alone, Thomas shivered.

END