The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by Christopher Conlon THE HAUNTING Some
tourists claim to hear the footsteps of Mary Surratt, hanged in 1865
for her role in the Lincoln assassination conspiracy, wandering the
upstairs rooms of her Clinton home to this day. --Maryland Ghosts & Legends
Mary wakes. The ceiling is unfamiliar, the bed unknown. Her throat burns. Her eyes ache. She inhales, but can't catch her breath: as if the oxygen itself had been pulled from the air, sucked from her very body. Where is she? The bedroom in which she lies niggles some splintered memory, but it's incoherent, lost. She hears voices, murmurings somewhere beneath her, footsteps. Her breath is shallow, ragged. She tries to stand, her bones and muscles alarmingly pained, as if she were a two-hundred year old woman, and she staggers as she approaches the window, looks out, sees what she can't be seeing--a world as hallucinatory as a vision of Mr. Poe's. She's dreaming, surely; she'll wake in her own bed, in her own life, far from this phantasm before her of bright metal carapaces scurrying like monstrous insects across a black-ribbon road, their colors as loud as those of the disorderly women she recalls from the City, nightmare-beast carriages which disgorge from their dark innards what appear to be human beings, though shockingly strange ones, naked in their sleeveless shirts and children's skirts, their hatless hair wild and askew in the breeze. This is not the world, not her world, not 1823 or 1840, not 1865, not even-- but that's the last year that comes to her, the last she can articulate in her mind, other future numbers stubbornly black, blank. She turns from the window, clenches shut her eyes, tries to will herself back to her life, her real life, and she begins then to weep, her face hot as with pneumonia or malaria, a gagging, dying sound rattling in her throat as she sways with terror, thinking Father, Our Father That Art In Heaven, heart hammering in her chest, lungs empty of air while the voices from below draw nearer--demons, perhaps, the Devil himself crawling toward her, preparing to engulf her sin-filled soul, Father, Our Father, as she hears odd, impossible words-- her name, spoken aloud, Mary Surratt, the accent that of a Yankee yet, somehow, not, and then other words, words she tries not to hear, words that make her pace the floor, wring her hands, groan: Lincoln and hanged, conspirator and ghost. Her throat burns. Her eyes ache. Her body shakes wildly, in grief, in agony, as she moves to a far corner of the room, huddles there, curls up tight, palms covering her eyes, Father, Our Father, praying that if she's quiet enough, unobtrusive enough, good enough, the nearing voices will fade off, die away, leave her alone here in silence, allow her simply to breathe, to rest. At last. In peace. © Copyright 2006-7 by Cook Communication |