Do they still sing songs for the dead? Requiem. Holy Mass. Chapels full of mourners, both made of stone. I wonder what it must be like to enter that state. Non-being. Death. Everyone dies. Or so I believed. Once.

No one will ever mourn for me. Not for Quentin Collins. For one of my alter egos, perhaps. Eventually, they must all suffer some form of mortal "death." In 1915, James Resch was lost at sea, for example. In 1928, Michael Hunt "died" in an automobile crash. 1944, and Geoffrey Robins was listed missing in action nine miles out of Berlin. 1957: Charles Green "perished" in a warehouse fire. And Thomas Camden...

Thomas, the most recent of my incarnations, found a most interesting means of departing this earth, and very nearly exposed the secret of my curse in the process. Joanna was to blame for that.

Today is September 11th, 1964. Thomas Camden is dead (as far as the world is concerned) and there are no mourners. No requiem.

I should, of course, have known better than to think Joanna was special. How many countless, faceless women had I known, each of whom desired above all to be special? Those passing years had made me careless. Passing years and passing dreams; a cavalcade of faces, lovers, wives... But Joanna was so unlike the rest. I thought.

Her knowledge of matters occult first drew me to her. Her uncanny ability to discern my thoughts and desires, even as I had them, compelled me to stay. And many months after, it was her subtle depth of understanding that one evening prompted me to tell her all there was to know shout myself. I'll never know what possessed me to entrust her with a secret so dark. Was I so eager to unburden the load that I alone had carried for so long?

Fool.

I hadn't expected her to believe me. But she did more than believe. She was fascinated. And she wanted to see it. She wanted to see the hideous, gawking object of my immortal curse, a thing I had long ago locked in the vault of Meyerton's only hank; the one item of my past I loathed most and yet from which I could never escape... The portrait.

I refused her, saying that I myself had not looked at it in the three years since I had come to Pennsylvania in the guise of Thomas Camden. No other mortal soul had looked at it in more than sixty years.

Who said "All my sins remembered?" Mine are all written there in that shriveled face of Death. They were indelibly etched in enchanted oil by the hand of a master warlock.

Why hadn't I seen, long before I gave her my confession, where Joanna's preoccupation with the supernatural would inevitably lead? She took the safety deposit key one evening as I slept, and her going never woke me. I would not have suspected a danger there, for banks, even in small towns, are never open after hours. But I'd forgotten that in a small town, every resident knows the other. The Meyerton Bank's night watchman, an unconscionable sort named Mark LeSalle, was an acquaintance of Joanna's.

Joanna, Joanna. You knew I'd leave you one day, didn't you? We'd argued shout that, even before you knew my reasons. No marriage. No commitments. If you'd done this thing out of anger, in an enraged attempt to do away with me, I'd have understood. But you didn't. If your pretense of gentle understanding had been genuine and your intent had been to free me from this curse of immortality, then I could have forgiven you. But that was not your reason either. You wanted nothing more than to satisfy a gnawing curiosity... to dabble in the Art you thought you knew so well.

And so you saw the portrait. It was surely no accident that you chose to do so on a night when the moon was high and full. Poor, naive Joanna. Did you really think a few brief years spent poring over witchcraft books could enable you to undo the work of one who had practiced the Art for centuries?

You tried to lift Petofi's spell. And somehow, incredibly, you succeeded. For one terrible night. The proverbial sealing of fate occurred when you chose to come and see the proof of your success.

I don't know why the creature waited for you there. It must have known somehow, as I had known, that you were coming. And why did LeSalle come with you? To protect you from the monstrous thing that neither of you was quite willing to believe was lurking there? The foolhardy are deservedly short-lived.

Did you ever, I wonder, have time to regret what you had done? When the beast sank its fangs into your flesh, was your unbounded curiosity satisfied then?

I had no time, then, to consider your final impressions. For me, there was a full disc of moon sinking deeper in the west, the stinging light of dawn, the rancid, residual taste of blood, and the clammy chill of awakening on a sodden river bank... All sensations I'd forgotten... and that I had prayed I would never know again.

* * *

"This court finds the defendant, Thomas Camden, guilty of murder in the first degree." "...for the brutal murders of Joanna Henriksen and Mark LeSalle, the court of the township of Meyerton, Pennsylvania does hereby sentence the defendant Thomas Camden to the supreme penalty. Death by electrocution."

I resisted the initial urge to laugh at them. I was preoccupied with far more frightening contingencies. They had judged me sane, hence confinement to a mental ward (where the fact that I did not age might soon have become obvious) had been forestalled. But imprisonment... the chance of that, if the court attorney's appeal were granted, chilled me. In a prison, the same revelation would eventually have to be made. And if the appeal were not granted...

I was trapped with seemingly no way to avoid the exposure of my curse. What would the prison medical authotities do with a death row "victim" who simply would not die? My "execution" was bound to create publicity nothing short of spectacle. It was this, and not the threat of the ordeal itself, which I dreaded most.

And the portrait... I had been horrified, at first, that Joanna's meddling had been of a permanent nature; that the Meyerton jail keepers might have been treated to a demonstration of lycanthropic transformation at the moment the full moon rose. But Joanna's feeble spell, ironically imbued with the power to take her life and her companion's, had died with her. And now I had once again to find a way of providing for the portrait. Whether I would be incarcerated or made a public spectacle, the painting had to be protected. I had to find a way to get it out of Meyerton.... So the condemned prisoner had requested the right to visit his safety deposit box, and to ship a certain family heirloom to his nearest living relative. (I've always wondered why they say that. Would you ship anything to your nearest non-living relatives?) After much deliberation to determine that no illegal activity was there-in involved, the court had acquiesced. (What would I have done, I wonder, if they had demanded to see the portrait?) I shipped it to a warehouse in New York City, addressed "to be called for" by a gentleman whose identity I silently prayed I would one day be able to assume.

The defense assourney's appeal had been denied.

For three tedious months on death row of the state penitentiary, I had time to reflect my own ambivalence at that. Appeal denied or not, either way I would have been exposed. Now, it would simply happen sooner...

We walked down the hallway, just like the ending of a B-grade movie, with the prison physician on my one side and the droning chaplain on the other -- he reminded me, uncomfortably, of Reverand Trask. The warden and a quartet of guards paced fore and aft. The doctor was walking with an unsteady gait. He was trying to conceal his condition from the others, but I knew the symptoms all too well. When he came near to check my "vital signs" as I was strapped into the chair, I knew I had been right: his breath was heavy with the scent of gin, masked only partially by some perfumacious mouthwash. His fingers fumbled with the stethoscope, and he exhibited all the signs of a man too drunk to be absolutely sure of his senses. Did the others notice? Did they care? I dismissed the observation as unimportant for the moment. But shortly, it was going to mean everything.

I'd wondered, those many weeks on the cell block, what the "execution" would be like. Would I feel all the pain of death without actually crossing its threshold? Or would I, feeling nothing at all, be obliged to imitate a dead man in the faint hope that somehow my ruse would not later be discovered?

Odd. When I was certain they had moved that formidable switch, there seemed an inexplicable distortion of time. I felt the rigid tingling of nerve endings first. Then the horrifying sensation of burning; an intense, searing heat that penetrated every fiber, every muscle, every bone. The seconds until it passed were distended into an agonizing eternity, and then...

No need of any pretense. I could not feel my heartbeat, nor force the air into my lungs. Incapable of movement. Was I dying? Had Petofi's spell been broken after all? I felt rather than saw the doctor's proximity, and the cold metal of the stethoscope slipped clumsily inside my clothing. It did not come to rest in the proper place at all, and was hastily withdrawn again before the import of that fact had occurred to me. Muffled voices exchanged terse words somewhere above me, and two pairs of hands grasped me, pulling upward. I fought to move, to resist them, to force my lungs to draw breath, but no part of me would obey the silent pleading of my mind. I was placed upon something with coarse sheets (they reeked of alcohol) and one of these was pulled forward to cover my head. Someone said, "Call the boys in the morgue, George. Tell them Camden's on the way down." I wondered if he knew he'd made a joke. On the way down. Then the denial of air must have finally taken its toll, for I remembered nothing more.

Nothing until I awoke, every nerve in my body screaming, on the cold metal table of the prison morgue. There was no one else in the harshly lighted room, and mine was the only "corpse" in evidence. I realized, as the sense of touch returned, that I was covered to the neck with a coarse, green cotton sheet, and in the next moment, that my clothing had been removed. The crisp presence of the cloth against me evoked a grotesquely misplaced impression of the sensual. I dispelled it by mentally commanding my tingling fingers to remove the sheet, and was surprised when they obeyed. I rose from the table -- Lazarus returning from the dead -- and "borrowed" a lab tech's white clothing from the locker in the corner.

The delivery door of the morgue had a one-way latch, designed to open only from the inside when the metal bar was depressed. It led outdoors to the loading dock... and freedom. If my escape thereby seems far too easy (it did to me) I can only echo Edgar Allen Poe and say that the obvious was here the least anticipated. A corpse in a prison morgue simply is not expected to get up and walk away.

So "died" Thomas Camden. No mourners. No requiem.

I never read of the mysterious disappearance of the body. No doubt it was deliberately concealed from the press. I have no idea how the prison officials explained it internally. My morbidly curious side would give a great deal to know.

I've thought for a time that I might take my own name back again, and travel to ColIlinwood in the guise of a long-lost cousin. But something tells me the time is not quite right for that. (Will it ever be right again?) So I will choose another name, another place, and some other life. All three were preconceived for me on the day I shipped the portrait out of Meyerton.

* * *

Though he had only just come into being recently, Grant Douglas claimed a crated parcel bearing his name at a New York City warehouse on September 14th, 1964.
 
 
 

The End