The River of Souls

The man was as big as a mountain. His shoulders were like boulders perched upon cliffs. His face was a sunbrowned patch of flesh above a wild growth of jetblack beard that hung halfway down a tobacco-stained shirt. In deference to the room he had removed his battered gray tricorn. His black hair was a bear-greased mop of a madman’s mane. From it issued a stink of dead ursines, and therefore had attracted the half-dozen big green flies that flitted and swooned about his glistening zenith.

A moment after he had come through the curtains from the garden beyond, where the lights glowed in candlepots and cicadas chirred sweetly in the pear trees, the music that charged the dancing ceased. Violin, cello, harpsichord and clacker of the clacksticks stopped their rotes and rhythms, and thus the dancers upon the shining plank floor in the candlelit chamber also stopped their series of roundabouts. All eyes turned toward the massive black-garbed man who had just stomped his hard dirty boots upon the selfsame planks, and those who knew what was likely to happen drew breath to whisper and point. They pointed toward a young man named Matthew Corbett, who stood nearly at the center of the room next to the most beautiful woman who had ever lived.

The mountain of a man gazed across the room in the flickering candlelight. From the ceiling hung streamers of red and white paper. Nearby was a long table upon which were placed the victuals of the evening: two roasted turkeys stuffed with oyster dressing, a roasted pig stuffed with mushrooms and bacon, grilled grouper and sea bass stuffed with crabmeat, and sundry potatoes stuffed with a variety of vegetables, sweetmeats and pickles. Platters held bottles of French wine and jugs of Carolina ale. Glasses sparkled, the music had been light and lively, the conversations keen and witty and the dancers high-stepping and precise in their turns. All in all, it had been an excellently festive party until this black-bearded, ebon-haired bull of the woods had just clomped in through the filmy curtains, and now in the absence of music and with the whispers dying down, there was only the noise of the flies, buzzing hungrily around the gleaming, smelly curls of matted hair.

“Oh, no,” said the most beautiful woman, who stood grasping Matthew’s arm on the right. And again, as if to ward the beast away: “Oh, no!”

The beast, however, just grunted with the sound of a horse team breaking wind. His iron-gray eyes had found the prize.

Matthew sensed the beautiful woman’s distress and touched her arm reassuringly. “There, it’s all right,” he said, resplendent in his wine-red suit and white shirt with a high collar and a frothy fronting of Spanish lace. “Um…who is he?”

She whispered in his direction, without taking her gorgeous and luminous violet eyes from the visage of impending violence, “He’s the man who’s going to kill you.”

“What say?” asked Matthew. He thought she’d said something he’d rather not have heard.

The monstrous mountain moved, and in so moving caused the throng of frozen dancers to by necessity thaw their legs and scurry out of the way. The boots pounded the planks like a drumbeat for the dead. The musicians, though they were safely upon a stage, drew back for the sake of further safety against a wall upon which hung a tapestry of the dual masks of comedy and tragedy, as the stage was normally used by the stalwart Charles Town Players. The bootpound drumbeats continued across the floor, step by ominous step, until the new arrival at the party stood looming over Matthew Corbett.

“Not again!” said Pandora Prisskitt, her red-lipped mouth twisting. The violet eyes in her heart-shaped face flashed with both anger and supplication. “Please! I’m begging you!”

The man shook his head as absolutely as a demon on doomsday. “No use beggin’,” he answered, in a voice as deep as the Pit and as rough as a rocky road. “What’s got to be done.”

Matthew did not like the sound of that. “What’s got to be done?” he asked Pandora, and to his chagrin he heard his voice tremble just the bit.

“You,” said the huge black-garbed man, who put a thick sausage of a grimy dirt-nailed finger upon Matthew’s chest, “have got to die.”

“It’s a necessity?”

“A certainty,” said the beast. “Now. Let’s get us to the fine points of the thing.” Reaching into a pocket of his long coat—which seemed to Matthew to be very much out of season on this sultry Friday night in late June—the man brought out a black leather glove which for all the world must’ve seen both the bottom of a pigsty and the floor of a horse-figged stable. He wasted no time in slapping Matthew across first the left cheek and then the right. Around the room there were gasps and shudders and a few licked chops of delight, for even the finest lads and ladies loved a spirited duel.

“I challenge you!” the man growled, in a tone that made the fresh glasses on the table clink together and the harpsichord’s strings hum.

“Magnus Muldoon!” said Pandora Prisskitt, her cheeks reddened. Her long hair was the color of the richest sable, clasped with a golden pin in the shape of a P. She wore a French gown the hue of the reddest rose in Colleton Park, enhanced by light pink ruffles at the throat and along the arms. “I won’t have it! Not another one!”

“Another one what?” Matthew asked, thoroughly poleaxed.

“Another dead man on my conscience,” she told him, without taking her gaze from the monster of the moment. “Listen to me, Magnus! This has got to stop!”