Poppa M’s Bedlam Tales
Bedlam’s Love
By Brandon Layng
© 2010 All rights reserved.
There are those who say Doc Bedlam was never a child. They’d be wrong. He was a strange child, small and sickly with a penchant for catching whatever disease wandered the countryside at the time. His unfortunate immune system may well have been what sparked his prediliction for outlandish tonics.
When he fell ill, his grandmother cared for him (his parents were taken by Typhoid). Old stock from the darkest moors of Scotland, she was rumored to be one of the witches from MacBeth. From her, he learned his craft. Hearing snatches between delirium and exhausted sleep. She taught him the art of making the fairy jars. Jars that could catch and hold a soul.
One day Bedlam was a boy, the next, a man. Still thin, yet taller, and with a face full of shadows, skin scarred by fever blisters. Weakened by disease and strengthened by the most awful cures. How could anyone love him?
No one did; except his grandmother. Her love twisted him.
On the day he cast his eyes on the most beautiful creature in the world, he coveted her terribly, mistaking it for love.
In Bedlam’s earliest days before he left and returned to convert the dusty fields into what some say was the first settlement of New Bedlam — I’m an old pharmacist, you believe what Poppa’s saying, or not, so long as you let me tell the story — the land was lush and green everywhere and a river ran through where John Street is now, down to the spot Bedlam’s grandmother’s shack sat, in a little piece of the moors she’d brought with her from Scotland. It was at a pool beneath a small waterfall over near the current location of the school baseball diamond, that Bedlam saw the nymph Sophia. She basked naked on a rock.
Seeing her set Bedlam’s shrivelled heart to beating. Absorbed with the curves of her pearl-white flesh, he didn’t see the man swimming up to her. The man’s body was sculpted and shorn of clothing like the nymph’s, pulling himself up beside her, he blocked the woman from Bedlam’s view.
Bedlam stared at her with hunger but Morpheus gazed on her with dreamy eyes. The battle for her soul had begun with a pair of longing stares.
From that point on Bedlam snuck back to the pool to see Sophia swim while he built up the courage to talk to her. When he finally approached her, she jumped into the water and disappeared, leaving barely a ripple. That’s what happened each time he was close enough to speak to her. But she never swam away from Morpheus. Jealousy burned inside of Bedlam and he schemed to have Sophia to himself. He used a fairy jar and since he could not give it to Sophia himself, he left it for Morpheus to find.
This jar he made the most beautiful of all his fairy jars until that point. The others sat on shelves in his grandmother’s shack, the souls of bears, foxes, rabbits and squirrels swirling behind the brown glass. This jar he fashioned green as emerald, sparkling in the sunlight like fresh Spring grass. He placed a drop of sweet perfume in the bottom.
Bedlam had noticed that on the days when Morpheus came to swim with Sophia, he arrived first, sitting on their rock waiting for her to find him there. On the rock was where Bedlam left his trap.
Bedlam watched from a patch of bullrushes as Morpheus appeared from vapors and dust. The god lowered himself onto the rock and crossed his legs, searching the water for his nymph. Morpheus knocked over the jar with his toe, noticing the glass for the first time. It was a precious thing and he decided to give it as a gift to the woman he loved. While he inspected it, Sophia slipped unseen from the water. Her hands over his eyes, she surprised him. They rolled together on the rock, kissing and holding one another in warm embrace. Sophia felt the hardness of the jar beneath her and nodded to it, a question on her face.
“A gift,” Morpheus said, proffering the jar. “I found it here, on the rock. I think it has perfume in the bottom.”
Sophia took it from his hand with a smile. She brought the lip of it to her delicate nose and sniffed. Her face flushed with pleasure, then suddenly her eyes burst open in alarm, her mouth opening in a silent scream. In a moment she fell slack against the rock, the jar slipping out of her slender fingers and rolling down into the water where it floated in the current.
From his spot in the bullrushes, Bedlam plucked the jar from the pool and screwed a cap on tight, locking in the misty contents that coalesced into Sophia’s beautiful face as he watched. He swiftly escaped, while Morpheus fretted over the body of the nymph.
Back to the shack he ran, gathering the bundles he had packed before leaving for the pool that morning.
By the time Morpheus tracked Bedlam down, the man was gone. His grandmother sat in a rocking chair in her bedroom, a shrivelled corpse dead a half-dozen years.
“You’ll never find her,” the corpse whispered with the tone of a promise.
“Where has he gone?” Morpheus raged, grabbing hold of her bony shoulders but she’d vacated the body for good.
In his heartbroken fury, Morpheus laid waste to the lush green fields and forests, bringing them to dust and brown grass with a hellish storm of nightmares, forever poisoning the land.
And when his energy was spent. He sat on the rock beside the dried pool and waited for Bedlam to return.
Then, one day he looked up from his brooding and saw the day had come. A town was built, with a mansion looming over it on the spot where the shack once stood. New Bedlam.
Brandon Layng is an editor, artist and writer but first and foremost a father and husband. He’s never sure if he gets any of those things right. He keeps trying though. His fiction has or will appear in Northern Haunts, Courting Morpheus, Dead Bells, Morpheus Tales and Cemetery Moon among others. Follow his progress and his blog series, A Writer’s Journey.
