*And I was told not to post snippets. So… I’m posting from a novel as yet unsold and unfinished. Because I’m THAT cruel.*
All Places Hell
Sarah A. Hoyt
Dead men don’t wake up.
The thought blazed through the darkness in my mind like one of those comets that astrologers say foretell death, famine and plague.
I tried to turn on a bed that felt hard beneath me. But the sheets had tangled on my arms and legs and pinned my hands where they were – crossed at my chest. I hit something as I turned – as if the wall and ceiling had caved in on me.
The air tasted stale and fishy, as if my room had been permeated with the stench of fish guts.
And through my mind the thought blazed again.
Dead men don’t wake up.
At the back of it there were other… Not thoughts. You couldn’t call them thoughts. They were shards of self knowledge, bright and incomplete, like fragments of a shattered mirror.
My name was Kit Marlowe. I was twenty nine years old. And I was dead.
I bridled at the last, startled with the certainty of it.
I couldn’t be dead. But I was. I remembered the tavern. And Poley, Skeres and Frizer. I remembered the dagger. My own ten pence dagger, almost new. And I remembered it piercing my left eye. And my brain.
I remembered searing pain, rushing despair. And then nothing.
Until I woke up.
Which must mean I hadn’t died. It would take a miracle. I didn’t believe in miracles. And yet…
I opened my eyes. Nothing but darkness from either of them, though the left one hurt with pounding, blazing pain. Which argued for my being alive.
Dead men don’t hurt.
Arching my body, I strained against the fabric that wrapped me, and tried to call out to whoever had left me alone on this hard bed, in the dark. But I couldn’t speak. My jaw had been tied.
Like the jaw of dead men is tied, to prevent it flopping.
I was buried. I’d been set in a grave.
My jaw had been tied and my body wrapped in a shroud. The wall and ceiling I could feel much too near to me, were those of the coffin.
They’d buried me alive.
Something like maddened panic set in. This had always been one of my nightmares. I remembered when I was a child, in Canterbury, hearing stories about people buried alive and found – when something necessitated opening the coffin – with scratches of despair on their arms and body, as they struggled to free themselves from their premature grave. And died of fear or suffocation.
I twisted and writhed within the shroud. I didn’t want to die.
Men enough had died near me – I’d killed enough of them, myself, by stealth and in private brawl – that I could tell you no soul escaped the body as it died. There was no rush of light, no benevolent God to receive the suffering.
Just a final stilling of the engine of life and then nothing. Carrion.
And yet, what if something existed? It was impossible, but what if it did? I’d killed, I’d betrayed, I’d mocked and I’d defiled. Through my fault, my very great fault.
I beat my body hard against the boards, and could feel them give and shake under my violence.
I believed in neither heaven nor hell. But I feared hell.
I twisted my hands and felt the strips of cloth around them loosen. It had only been tied to keep my hands in place, not to keep me still. I twisted and twisted against pain in my wrists, until the rag felt damp with my own blood.
Until it tore.
Then I grabbed the fabric that covered my body, and pulled it apart. It tore with a sound like a thunderclap.
Freed from this, I pulled off the strap that bound my jaws and I screamed and screamed while I pounded with my fists on the wood above me.
I screamed and pounded till my hands hurt. Till there was nothing left of my voice but a scratchy wisp that caught in my throat and subdued into a sob.
No one came.
I lay in my coffin, hearing my heart beat at a deafening volume. My mouth and throat hurt from screaming. Tears ran down my face, soaking my beard and dripping from my chin to gather in the hollow of my throat where neck met chest.
My body was covered in sweat.
And I was naked.
I remembered being dressed in my good suit, the dark wine-red velvet one with the slashed-through sleeves that showed the flame colored silk they call harlot’s leg. They’d taken my suit. Someone had undressed me. Doubtless, someone had examined me. How could they have failed to realize I was alive?
I felt my lips curl in a sneer. Incompetent fools. And now, doubtless, my three companions had gone to flog my suit to some used clothes dealer who wasn’t too picky about stains and gore, and left me here. Alone.
I couldn’t get out of the coffin by pounding and screaming, if there was no one out there to hear me. Or if anyone who might be out there was a superstitious fool who chose to believe I was a ghost.
That way would come no help. And all I was doing, pounding on that coffin, was using up my air and my strength.
I took a deep breath of the staler air in the coffin, and put my hands up, feeling the lid. The wood was grainy, full of gaps and squishy beneath my fingers. Old boards taken from rotted boats.
A pauper’s grave. I’d been buried in a pauper’s grave. I, who had once consorted with nobility and whose poems had been the toast of London.
My own laughter rang deranged in my ears. Before I could stop it, it turned into a sob that tore out of my throat, shocking me.
Oh, Tom must be happy. He’d finally got rid of me. And put me back in my own place – in the gutter. Below even my cobbler father’s plebeian sphere.
Tentatively, I scratched at the coffin lid with my nails. It came off, in tatters. I dug into it and pulled off the long strips of soft wood.
Some splinter pushed into my flesh, but I couldn’t allow myself to be distracted. I bit my lower lip and dug and dug and dug.
A shower of dirt on my face rewarded me and I had a moment of panic. How far down was I buried? And what if I was buried face down, to prevent my spirit from rising as they said the spirits of the evil dead did?
But cheap graves were never dug that deeply. No one to give the grave diggers their tip afterwards. And no one here knew me well enough to think I must be cursed. Besides dirt had fallen on me. And dirt fell downwards.
I stuck my arm through the opening on the lid, and my hand pushed up through cold, damp, loose dirt, to what felt like fresh air, freedom, and a steady drizzle.
My mother’s side of the family, minor gentry and ministers, had formed my features – my oval face, my pulpy, soft mouth, my too-large grey eyes that still managed to look all too innocent even at twenty-nine – but beneath the spare, limber frame that also resembled them, I was a Marlowe. From my father’s side of the family – burly laborers and leather workers, tanners and peasants all – I’d inherited the muscles of a work horse, the strength of a bull. Both limberness and strength had seen me unscathed through a hundred street brawls.
They served me well now. I braced my legs against the bottom of the coffin and used all my might to push my upper body up.
For a moment, it felt like drowning. My head pushed up through the boards and up through loose dirt.
I smelled death and carrion in what was, doubtlessly, a much-used grave.
A scream catching in my throat, my flesh crawling at the stench, I pushed.
It felt like forever, but it must have been no more than the space between breath and breath, thought and thought, and my head pushed out of the dirt, followed by my shoulders and my arms.
I clawed for the firmer dirt of the path and held onto it for dear life, as I pulled the rest of my body from the grave, in an obscene parody of birth. A voice was muttering, pleading, begging – for mercy, for air, for life, and there was a low whining sound, like a child crying alone in the dark.
I looked around frantically, but saw no one. And then I realized I was crying, moaning, and tears were falling down my face.
I fell on my knees on the path between graves. My lungs filled with the bracken, too-warm air of Deptford, in which mingled the smells of the port and the smells of the fishing industry.
The clangs and hollow wooden knocks of vessels at anchor, shaken by the tide, echoed in my ears.
I couldn’t remember where the cemetery was but it must not be too far from the port. And for a wonder, I’d been buried close to the church – a mean provincial church that looked as though it had been standing there since the Norman invasion.
It was squat, square and made of stone, without even the saving grace of a tower.
Its shadow fell on me, dark like a crow’s wing – and the cross at the top seemed to reproach me for escaping my grave.
A steady drizzle fell – enough water to turn the dirt on my naked body to mud, not enough to wash me clean. And my body hurt, cramped, as if I’d been sleeping too long in an uncomfortable position.
I looked down, dispassionately, at my white skin marred by cuts and scrapes and stained with grave dirt.
My left eye, as much as I could feel of it, was a pulpy mass. But they had at least removed the knife. Doubtless – I grinned bitterly in the dark – to sell.
Where could I go when I was presumed dead? I could go to Mistress Bull’s and reproach them with their mistake. But chances were they’d mistake me for a ghost or some other unholy creature.
And where else could I go? I didn’t know anyone else in Deptford – a meeting place I’d chosen for just that reason. And I could never get to London barefoot and naked.
I felt as if I were hurled with a great force. It was as if giant hands had taken hold of me and flung me aloft.
Only, nothing had. I could still feel my body where it had been, standing in the dark shadow of the church at Deptford. I could feel the pain in my eye, the sting of my abraded skin and the rain falling softly on my dirt-covered body.
But I could feel other things just as vividly.
#
I was standing on a London street. It felt as if I’d been walking along and just stopped, suddenly, as a new thought occurred to me.
The street was familiar – one of the narrow, crawling streets in the theater district, near the Rose. Fields that had been put to crop just a couple of years before were now covered in hastily-built houses, climbing crookedly to five stories, and looking like they might fall at any minute.
Taverns and bawdy houses flourished every other door, their noise raucous in the warm spring air. I filled my lungs with the smell of ale and roast mutton; of simmering broth and camphor-spiced bacon, and I smiled at my own folly.
The coffin and Deptford must all be a dream. I’d drunk too much and slept too little. I’d–
