Songs of Leaving by Peter Crowther & Peter Crowther

Author:Peter Crowther & Peter Crowther
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: PS Publishing
Published: 2022-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

A Worse Place Than Hell

“If there is a worse place than Hell, then I am in it.”

—attributed to Abraham Lincoln following

the Fredericksburg collapse, 1862

PROLOGUE

1:30 am, 15 April 1865, Washington DC: The tuft of hair is removed almost lovingly by Corporal John Lansing, its thick strands—matted by blood and tissue—carefully removed from the wound by means of a folding-knife that the soldier had bought from a one-eyed trail scout in Abilene the previous year. John Lansing, a Church-going Baptist, is not a thief and the ‘taking’ is one borne out of respect, admiration and profound loss.

At this time the patient is still alive, lying diagonally across a walnut bed in a room measuring 15 by 9 feet, but he is unconscious, lower extremities cold to the touch, pulse feeble. As Corporal Lansing steps back from the table, he places the swatch of hair in the fold of a theater handbill and, his hands now clasped across his stomach, he stealthily re-folds the handbill before dropping it into his tunic pocket.

One of the two medical men present—name of Leale—proceeds to cover the body with mustard plasters. Lansing looks away, his eyes traveling the topmost circumference of the room, and he immediately feels a tell-tale tear roll down his left cheek. After almost 30 minutes, the other doctor—Barnes—straightens up and drops the shiny instruments onto the small folding table by his side. He cannot locate the bullet, a small lead ball less than one half-inch in diameter, which is embedded amidst shards of pulverized bone fragments in the anterior lobe of the left hemisphere of the brain.

When Doctor Barnes speaks to the people in the room, his voice is tired and without hope: further explorations will be of no use, he tells them.

Soon, he will be free, the doctor says. We must simply wait.

The Present: A bizarre mixture of smells floated across the dark, early morning street, the gentle wind blowing the disparate elements into one single aroma: a cloying, olfactory amalgam of smoke, sweat and rotting flesh.

The sixteenth President of the United States of America had been alternating running with brisk walking for several hours now, feeding off a heady adrenaline cocktail of wonder and fear. He stepped out of the shadows onto the pock-marked sidewalk and once again breathed deeply the myriad aromas of New York City.

It was almost five hours since his escape and with each passing minute the smells floating on the wind had strengthened, grown bolder. He had made good speed, at first moving without clear knowledge of where he was going save to put distance between himself and the doctors but then weaving his way across the city and then heading down towards Greenwich Village.

For the past few hours he had been lying on a bench in Washington Square, reputed—according to his map—to be a park but which in truth amounted to the barest scattering of trees, several concrete pillars (the function of which he could not fathom) and what appeared to be a huge fountain though it contained no water.

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