Pitchindye Bridge

The funeral was on Monday. That is all I can remember, besides carrying with other pallbearers dressed in assigned black suits the red chestnut casket that held the body of the deceased with blue hydrangeas placed in her hands. I can sort of also remember my own thought of how there is irony in the flower choice because of its Victorian meaning of being cold and frigid; the dead was in fact both of those: cold and frigid.

It was last Thursday, the last time I sat before a rosy cheek and breathing Lady Aldridge. I had come back to read more from the passage of The Picture of Dorian Gray, a scandalous and immoral novel that the Missus deemed worthy of reading now at her age. When she first brought it to my attention that I had to fetch this story, she minded me to only narrate and not take in any of the horrific messages that could seep into my conscious. It was not even thirteen pages in that she startingly said in humor, “How wild that Wilde man is!”

It seemed lately that Lady Aldridge, a woman with perfectly pinned up silver hair, hazel eyes that seem too young with her aging face, tight, thin lips, and with more pronounced wrinkles that pinched between her eyebrows, had been into the themes of horror that were popularized in its genre. Of the three stories we had just finished reading, there was a pattern of monsters and death. She had me start in chronological order of when the novels were first published, the first being Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. The second novel, I would say is far more promiscuous and provocative than the current storytelling given by Oscar Wilde, Carmilla, a female vampire prying on the adolescent Laura with her longing for blood and homoerotic relations. The third was supposed to be The Picture of Dorian Gray, with it being published in 1891, six years prior to Dracula, yet it seems the Missus was eager to listen to Bram Stocker’s telling that was influenced by Carmilla’s Le Fanu. That was the only reason Albert Lewin’s was put last, and to this day, unfinished for the Lady Aldridge.

I can still recall what she last said to me, how strange it was when I first heard it, “To live fully, you need to understand Death.” At the time, when I was packing in the bookmark to pause where I was last reading, I heard her say ‘death’ as a noun, made with a lowercase ‘d,’ not as a personified entity. Now as the days since passed and her body freshly laid beneath shoveled dirt, it seemed she knew her days were becoming fewer and fewer. Quite strange how she went about to understanding him, the man draped in black, faceless, carrying a scythe. At least, that is who I hope to assume she calls “Death.”

The next day, unaware that she had been declared dead by the town’s doctor, I came across the main hallway, the bookmarked novel in my hand, and unbeknownst at the time, standing amongst the other five pallbearers for Monday’s funeral. The people stood in the middle, filed in two lines ranked in their position, separated by the duties of the house and duties of society. Eighteen people stood in that hall, the silence making the small clock on the mantle tick loudly as they honored her life for three still minutes, and almost with a bit of relief, her lack of presence.

Walking into that main entrance of the Aldridge Manor on that day felt like interrupting an intimate scene where one’s own place was not welcomed. I was not an honorary hired member of the house; I did not have a room to board in. I was the young Pip, Peter Henley, who lived at the end of the town’s border, a ward to the local bookstore Matrille and Sons’ Books.

It came by chance that I met the Missus, a terrible chance.

Not even a year after I turned twelve, I was placed in the guardianship of Mr. Matrille, a lone widow with two sons who never made it past the ages of twenty. He never cared to speak to me, he only ever grunted as he placed my food before me or when he motioned for me to unload books in the stock room. If I ever did hear him speak a word, it was never directed towards myself, it was always for a pleasant shopper or complaining delivery boy over his lack in tips. Mr. Matrille was a simple man, honorable and cheap, but a simple man that gave me a place to stay and let me do as I please.

One day when the rain from the day before had flooded the streets and the air was dank and cold, he let me leave the shop to go place an order for the newest horror novel that was supposed to sweep the country away under their covers. I can hardly remember what the title of the book was called but I do remember never putting in an order because I let myself get taken down the road where I heard whispers that Mrs. Matrille was last seen. On the corner of Pitchindye, there is this small, stoned bridge covered in moss and broken rock. It crosses over a nearly black pond that is rumored to never have a bottom, it just keeps on going and going until your bones float back up to the surface and your soul is lost in its own Hell. Not many people in this town are fond of the Pitchindye bridge, not when so many of their own folks go missing each year from there.

There were always a handful of pebbles that I could grab before finding myself leaning over the middle of the bridge and tossing them into the pond, trying to count the ripples but never getting past three or four before they disappeared into the darkness.

That day with its fog still lingering and evident around noontime, the ripples could not be counted pass two or three. No matter if I threw in a sizeable one or one as tiny as the knuckle on my pinky, the ripples expanded out in one or two, maybe a third ring before the blackness stilled its waters.

When dropping the pebbles into the water, it made strange noises too. Whereas one would hear a plop! Here at the pond under the Pitchindye bridge, the balls of earth hitting the surface of water sounded like this:

Pip.

Pip.

Pip.

Pip. Pip. Pip.

Never any louder, never any quieter. And I never questioned its queerness, it was just another one of its characteristics that made this area a place of secret comfort for me.

It came by no shock to me that on that day, I did not hear the heels of Lady Aldridge sauntering behind me as I dropped one after another of the pebbles in my hands into the pitch-black pond layered with an afternoon, gray fog over the top.

Pip.

Pip.

Pip. Pip.

Her thick and silky voice startled my young heart, dropping the remaining six rocks in my hand, only this once did I hear a gulp made by the pond.

I can recall the way she stared at me as if I were a foolish boy caught sneaking cookies from the kitchen. Or maybe she saw me as someone who thought they came across a horrible phantom that was rumored to cut your head off if you didn’t correctly place it’s name. Nevertheless, I could feel the coloring in my face curdle white and my heart quench horribly inwards as she came behind me as if from nowhere.

“What are you doing here,” she asked me.

I could not find the words to defend myself, my mouth opened and closed like a gasping fish in air, and I can remember the feeling of my hands clenching the stones on the bridge as if they were to keep me on my feet.

“Have you no manners to tell a Lady why you trespass on her property?”

“This-this is your bridge?”

“Never more than these eyes that lay within my skull or the hair that lays over your head.”

I could already hear the words stumbling out of my mouth before I began to say, “I-I was not told. I-I mean the to- the town never said anything.” I probably never once sounded more like a bumbling fool except in that moment I met the Lady of Aldridge who lived in the tall, dark brown manor at the top of the hill that overlooked the Atlantic Sea, and then again asked her, “This-this bridge is yours?”

The brown meshed with green in her eyes annoyingly rolled at me. “Only a child with blindness could not read my lips and a child with deafness could not hear my words. Are you either of those, boy?”

“No, ma’am.”

“‘My lady.’” She corrected me then.

“No, my lady.”

“What are you doing on my bridge, —” She paused at the end of her sentence to give me space to say my name.

“Peter. Peter Henley.”

“—Peter Henley?”

I told her why. There was no point in being dishonest. In fact, a part of me now knows that if I were to lie to her then, I hardly think I would be here right now recalling the day Lady Aldridge saved me for herself.

Strange things were said about this bridge, even more so after I learned it was hers. There was an ominous avoidance for anyone that was near Pitchindye. No one dared to glance over in that street’s direction, they wouldn’t even fix the lantern by the street sign, it just stood there dusty and lightless.

When I first arrived in this town, there were many things that I was ignorant of. How no one spoke of the owners of Aldridge Manor. No one spoke of or to the workers that resided there. There was a time that a valet came to the bookshop on behalf of Lady Aldridge and Mr. Matrille acted as if the shop was empty. That young man looked at me, hopeless and just equally afraid, and I meant to assist him when I noticed Mr. Matrille wouldn’t, but a grunt that sounded like a gurgled “Peter” held me back. And since my thirteenth year, I have become a shunned ghost as well.

What I think was the worst part about this town, was how no one talked of their family members that went missing on Pitchindye bridge. Maybe there were a few whispers after the initial event, but to even speak of the missing’s name in front of their family was frowned upon with the utmost horrifying reaction. I did not even ask Mr. Matrille what happened to his wife and sons, I asked the baker’s wife when I saw her shoot a quick look over in that direction of Pitchindye when I told her where I came from. She lost the breath in her lungs, had bulging eyes, and screeched awfully loud before she collapsed to the floor. I probably should have considered that the eldest daughter in her family was the first to go under their roof, yet it did not cross my mind until I saw the baker come out of his kitchen with this large paddle board, murder spewing from his eyes. That night, Mr. Matrille and I didn’t get to have any buttered rolls and cheese, and never again was I sent by him to pick up his bakery orders.

The town has a great secret, and at first, my thoughts never considered the Aldridge Manor, but after many years being the Missus’s personal reader, that bridge and the manor atop the hill have something to do with the terrible curse that besieges the people down below. It is no wonder when Lady Aldridge died, after witnessing the three minutes of silence to honor her life, that the people in the hall felt relief at what they thought was the end of a curse.

How more wrong they could have been.

When Lady Aldridge heard my reason for being on the bridge, I can still recall the change in her demeanor, the way her eyes soften, and she made a move to stand beside me, staring over the bridge into the dark waters as if she were telling it, “Not this one, this time, not this one.” She then took notice of my empty hands, went to go grab some more pebbles, and refilled them.

“Go on,” I can still hear her telling me. Hesitantly, I dropped one, small enough to be a nugget, and watched as it fell straight towards the still waters, another sound of a pip!

She took one out of my palm, curiously dropped and listened as hers too made a pip!

“Well, Mr. Henley, I rather think that made a strange sound. Is it always like that?”

“Yes, My Lady.”

“Something that sounds like a ‘pip’?”

“I would say so, indeed.”

“Curious.” She openly stated. Lady Aldridge then proceeded to wipe her hands down her dress, as if the one tiny rock created a massive amount of dust, before motioning for me to do just the same. Behind me, the water went pip, pip pip pip, pip! “You should come along with me, Pip. I have a use of you that I believe Mr. Matrille would not hesitate to accept.”

I did not correct her then. I was wise enough at the age to know where my place stood in the presence of Lady Aldridge. To her, and to anyone she introduced me to, I was Pip. There was no Peter Henley who read at Aldridge Manor, only his ghost slept in the tiny bedroom above the shop of Matrille and Sons’ Books.

•

They thought it would be all over.

Since Friday, the day Lady Aldridge passed, the air seemed to be relieved of its tension. The sky seemed to be a bit more bluer, yet that could simply be due to the lack of clouds rather than the departure of a high society woman with a connection to a darker force. The days leading up to Monday were spent in careful contemplation to how Lady Aldridge’s funeral would be held. Many of the people down in the town were willing to be involved in the business aspects with them being promised a hefty, “celebratory” check.

To myself, I could only keep wondering why the Missus’s funeral would be hosted on a Monday. It seemed, to me, that it would be far more respectable to have it on a Sunday or a Wednesday, the holiest days of the week if we are to argue such a notion. Be that as it may, the Earl of Aldridge Manor, husband to her, was keen on it being done the beginning of the week. He was even quite eager to write those multiple checks for the town’s shop owners. The reactions were all very strange, as if Lady Aldridge’s passing woke everyone up from a spell that entrapped them into a horrible waking nightmare.

One of the footmen, Wilbert Ingalls, was the first to break the illusion. Late into the afternoon on Sunday when most of the funeral arrangements have been completed and were waiting patiently to be used for the next day, Wilbert noticed a figure standing in the garden of roses, quite dearly treasured by Lady Aldridge. He did not recognize who was it, be it that their back was turned to him as Wilbert was beginning to dust out the curtains before closing them for the evening. Something of a great chill trickled down the back of his spine and he knew that the man in the rose garden was the terror that kept the people in this town hostage.

Wilbert brought this knowledge to the manor’s butler, Joseph Alexander, a great burly man with white eyebrows, dark brown eyes, and the dark skin of a farmer. Mr. Alexander is a man of great importance. Even the people down in the town would never ignore his presence, he is too respected of a man to be dismissed as one of the living ghosts of Aldridge Manor.

But there was most definitely a ghost that haunted the estate atop the hill. It was just that nobody, mind Lady Aldridge, had an understanding of why.

When both Mr. Alexander and Wilbert stood back in front of the window looking down into the rose garden, there was no denying that the figure was not a part of Wilbert’s active imagination. There was someone stalking around the reds and whites of the roses, dressed in a tan oxford suit with a white dress shirt and a red tie. His hair was silver, and his nose was placed high up on his face and very long, yet there seemed to be an emptiness where his eyes should have been. It would not surprise me if his eyes were missing and all that was left behind was the loose flesh.

What was uncanny about the whole of this incident that Mr. Alexander and Wilbert witnessed was not that a stranger had found his way into the garden and plucked the petals off like they were drops of the blood spilling from an open wound, in fact it was the way his clothes were wet, and a puddle followed everywhere he went.

If the men were not inside, there would be no doubt that they would have heard the eerie calling that entrances whoever hears it to walk to Pitchindye Bridge, stand on top one of the stone railing, and lose themselves below the black waters. At most, four capillary waves would expand outwards where the water near the surface begins to fill in the space it left behind, already appearing to be still.

That Sunday evening, no one was found missing…yet.

It would not take long after Monday. It was as if the thing that reigned terror and stole people’s family thought it could at least give us a few days to collect ourselves for the proper burial and respect of Lady Aldridge. She was the only source behind the few days of truce, but it will still come.

It always did.

No one knew that it was Death waiting for the right ear to heed his call. No one knew that upon opening Lady Aldridge’s casket at the viewing, where there was supposed to be no flowers in her hand, rested the blue hydrangeas. And no on expected for the Earl of Aldridge to become deathly pale upon seeing those flowers that he had seen on numerous occasions near his wife’s old pillow, coincidentally on a day where someone was lost to Pitchindye Bridge.

The whole of the church could hear him say, “Oh, dear. What have you done, Ephraima?”

Of the six of us pallbearers, each specifically assigned by the Missus, there was the Earl at the top left, Joseph Alexander, the butler, opposite to the Earl, both the footmen, Wilbert Ingalls and Phillip Dane behind them, and at the back left corner was the valet, Charles Decker. I was opposite him on the right, behind Phillip Dane. I felt like it was only Mr. Alexander, Wilbert, and myself that were clued into what the Earl meant when he spoke aloud after seeing those flowers in the Missus’s hands. None of us would truly know the meaning behind the connection Lady Aldridge had with the deaths, or with what we now can safely assume to be with the mystery, wet man in her garden. There is a darker element involved, there is a darker history that precedes, even what I can guess, her marriage to the Earl.

Although, there is one thing that I believe to be true, that wet man, he had access to Lady Aldridge’s red chestnut casket. I can already see the way his hands opened the top, probably stared at her for a while, and presented her with a different meaning behind the hydrangeas. Instead of being meant as an unwelcomed sight of death, now they mean something of regret; of a history that can only be lived through the condemned stuck to the trap and bridge of Pitchindye.

It was not long after Lady Aldridge was placed under freshly dug dirt with a pile of pink carnations laying atop, that the people of the town knew that the peace they assumed would be theirs, was only that of a dream. They were not going to live outside this nightmare hosted by Pitchindye Bridge. To them, forever will they be sitting ducks, ironically aware that they might hear a sound that takes them to drown under black waters to feed an appetite of an entity who cannot break this unforgiving pattern.

To Lady Aldridge, she was seeking to understand Death. There were answers in the books of monsters that she thought could restore the spiritual balance and wellbeing of the town, and more so, what I can only believe to be her bond to the bridge. She knew there was a monster there, and she could not deny her part in creating it.

As I come before her grave, days after her burial, I notice beyond her headstone that there stand dead trunks with their base poking out of the soil. Their roots stick out of the ground, clenching up like a hand in rigor mortis. Long strips of grass wave gently over the spaces between each root by the wind, and the forest whispers in the distance with their brushing leaves. I can see above her headstone that reads, “Here rests Ephraima Aldridge, 1849-1912”, a dying sun falling into a violet, blue sky.

So much like her flowers.

Something else mixes in with the whispers I hear the trees make. Before I am lost to the sound’s snare which will lure me to a place I know exactly where I am headed, a thought of absolute truth comes to mind: this thing, it will still come for it’s next victim. It will never stop calling for them.

I hear it again, this time louder. Beyond the trees, a few hundred feet deep in the street to Pitchindye Bridge will come before me, and I will make only four ripples in the waters too.

It is my funeral next.