The Trials & Tribulations of One Victor Freestone

In which

his ending is bittersweet

Henshaw, Missouri

June 29th, 1853

Final Entry

To think that I should see the end coming so clearly. It hurts even to write for too long. But I came so close. Even if I missed my last chance, I made such progress! I can spare a few of these last hours making sure my near-success is recorded.

Based on the records kept by my friend and colleague…no, no need to bother with half-truths now. According to my distant lover, Theodore ‘Teddy’ Birch, she called herself Lilith, first wife of Adam, and that very well may have been the case. She claimed knowledge from distant lands and ages long past, and she was supposedly unkillable. I am hesitant about any of the leads Teddy gives me - not because of him, but because of his usual source. But everything he told me matched up with what scant records of Lilith’s existence exist. Lurking at the outskirts of mankind, judging it in word and deed.

She was here. Not just an artifact from the antediluvian era, but a survivor! She might’ve been the key that I’ve been missing for so long. And yet, it looks like I won’t be the one to find the path and unlock the gate.

Some weeks ago, she entered into the control of local man Lamentations Bean, erstwhile brother of the town’s reverend, Deuteronomy Bean, recently returned from the East. She killed his uncle, the incident drove him mad, and he’s been attempting to execute her ever since. She consented to imprisonment in a basement under duress; he would rather kill himself than let her go free. Was her plan to find a way to subdue him safely at close range? Or was she just trying to avoid more death than she desired? I will not know. By the time I arrived, shortly after a massive town-wide feast, she was nowhere to be seen. Lamentations claimed that she escaped and ran North, taking her accomplice - the recalcitrant ‘Reynard’, Teddy’s fair-weather companion in my absence and powerful, if untrustworthy, trickster. But Teddy said she was planning on going South after finishing with Bean - she had a deep bloodlust for those who sell or own slaves. Bean’s behavior is that of a guilty man, his eyes haunted, but guilty of what, and where could she be? She couldn’t be killed; she has full command over all beasts of the land; and she’s deeply capricious when it comes to her own matters. And from Teddy’s account, she would not leave a matter like Bean unresolved. It all pointed to an ignomious fate of some kind.

I racked my brain for hours, no doubt putting more strain on my body on top of that of travel. I had not yet accepted that she’d slipped out of my fingers; I thought I might still have a chance. What he must have done came to me in a flash. Lamentations is a madman, but a learned one, a theologian. The Christian forms and methods differ from the Jewish ones, but there are shared principles. Applied theology works on precedent. What has happened once may happen again, even if what happened is not currently or has never been true in the eyes of some who perceive it. There’s no way for a mortal man to destroy sinless flesh in the Talmud, but what does the Christians’ New Testament say? Feast on the Son of God, eat sinless flesh and drink sinless blood, and have everlasting life. With the right principles, he could invoke the principles of communion. Flesh into food, blood into wine. He couldn’t damage her in any permanent way, but with a cleaver and the complete abandonment of personal decency, he could strip her to the bone and leave her all but dead. Transubstantiated into food and drink. She was the feast.

I lack the words to describe my horror. Teddy said it was like finding maggots in the Torah. I have no love for Christianity, but even then, it’s such a base perversion of the original intent; you might as well slice your son’s head off on Abraham’s altar. Driven by my failure and disgust, I attempted to confront Lamentations in the middle of the street, but midway through my accusations, I collapsed. Teddy said that my heart nearly gave out from apoplexy. I’ve been bedridden since, stable but not improving.

If there is a recourse under heaven or earth, it eludes me in these final days. There is no corpse; the flesh has been consumed; the bones have been hidden. Three people are willing to corroborate the man’s claims that she ran away to the North: Roger Macy, a well-liked and wealthy man, and the other two Bean siblings, who are unwilling to cast doubt on their brother and get him sent off to the asylum he only narrowly escaped before. Teddy and I alone are willing to hold the truth of what happened - that craven Negro fool of his having conveniently disappeared - and two Jewish outsiders are not going to contradict the word of a town’s homegrown children. Teddy, bless his heart, tried to go to the Mayor, only to be told that Macy was too wealthy to risk investigating him, and further entreaties may get him ousted. I’m not sure what the law could do to Lamentations that he hasn’t done to himself. If he had been sent to the asylum and subjected to lobotomy, he might have more light and joy than he does now.

I don’t have much time left. I will spend the rest of it with Teddy, wounded as he is by Reynard’s disappearance. If I stayed away a little longer, I may have lived a bit longer, but to die without seeing his face again? I would choose this again a thousand times. I leave this information to whoever continues my research. If the key existed once, it may exist again. Succeed where I failed.

Leonard Otto-Birch

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