Day #11: The Bell Tolls by Amber Averay
Everything is so dark and quiet. Once, not too long ago, the street was full of noise, of life. Now the only sounds to be heard are the creaking wheels of the carts that come around to collect the corpses, and the sombre clanging of the church’s bells to mark yet more deaths.
The windows are boarded shut, the doors marked with warnings that we’re a house of pestilence. Mama was the first to go. She gathered up the washing in the morning, prepared the meal for midday, was dead by nightfall. Papa rolled her in blankets and dragged her already stiff body outside, where the corpse collectors took her up and hauled her onto their already laden cart.
The world now took on the blacks and greys of impending death. Shadows stalked the land, ranging over villages and cities and sweeping the Black Death along in its wake. It stole all the light and colour, leaving behind fear, misery, reeking death pits.
Papa tried to keep us safe, after Mama’s death. We were sequestered on the far side of the room, as far as possible from where their contaminated bed lurked in darkness like an altar sworn to Satan, and we stayed inside – well, we had to. Once touched by plague, we were pariahs. Shut up inside, looking askance at each other, waiting for the sweats and boils and death while listening to the world outside grow quieter, bleaker. The sounds of horses’ hooves clopping along were replaced by the grinding of wonky wheels as the corpse collectors pulled their carts laden with grim cargo through the streets. Voices that once filled the air faded until bells ringing and the plaintive howling of stray dogs assured us there was yet life beyond our door.
Then my baby sister Charlotte died, followed within a day by my brother William. Then Horace, Matthias, Eleanora, Rebecca, and Edward all went to the pits. Papa and I were all that remained – and he was showing signs of sickness.
A few folk – brave or foolhardy, or yet perhaps desperate – pushed into people’s homes and dragged their bedding, furniture, clothing away to be burned, the hoping the pestilence would die a swifter death than its victims. But all it did was fill quiet streets with swirls of smoke and ash, the collectors moving through sooty coils like malevolent Reapers parting Otherworldly veils in search of souls to claim.
Now I watch Papa, knowing I should feel fearful, angry, worried – but I’m empty. I can’t go for help, there is nobody. The plague doctors are dead, dumped in those great mass graves hastily dug just outside the village. Everybody else has either fled, or died – save the collectors with their groaning wagons and the howling dogs.
Papa’s death is swift, and yet agonisingly slow. Is it my imagination, or does he shrivel before my very eyes? The sockets in his skull become hollow pits, dark and forbidding, and the skin over his withered form stretches tight over bone until I can see with stark clarity every ridge and depression, every plane and irregularity. His breathing is raspy, desperate, panicked, as if he can’t draw enough into his lungs. Sweat rains over his flesh, and – God forgive me – he barely looks like my Papa anymore. He barely looks human.
Then he begins spasming, his body twitching and contracting. In the pallid light his tortured grunts escalate to blood-chilling screams, his back arching so dangerously that only his head and heels touch the ground. The convulsions ravage him, and there is naught I can do but watch, and wait, and wonder if I should be feeling anything.
Wondering why I’m not.
His spine crackles, splinters; his screams intensify. Though he is right beside me the sounds seem to be coming from a great distance, echoing eerily down a lengthy tunnel and no matter what I do I can’t block them out.
I close my eyes, but I still see the wreckage that is not my papa imprinted on the insides of my eyelids. There is no escape.
And my turn is coming. But nobody will be here to watch over me in my death throes.
When Papa dies, the quiet is a relief. His passing was by far the worst of them all, the most tortured. As I hold his slack hand the telltale heat crawls through my own body and I feel sweat leaking down my neck. Is it because of the sickness, or the stifling air in here?
I don’t know how long I sit, then lie beside his body. The smell in this foetid hut thickens, but I can’t find it in myself to care.
I’m dying.
The shakes have begun, the violent trembles that presage those wicked convulsions that so tormented my papa.
There is nobody left. None but me. Even the creaking wheels of the carts have been silenced. All I hear as the world dims and agony flows over me are those damned bells.
Bong…
Bong…
Bong…
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