Demon Stories

Josephine: From the Journal of Andrew Windsor, 18--, England

Josephine

From The Journal of Andrew Windsor 

18--, England

The Journal of Andrew Windsor

January 24, 1822

I must tell you I miss my friend. My confidant. My greatest companion. How this slow heart longs for the quiet touch of a time long gone. I remember when I first met her, my lovely Josephine. My lovely red rose.

I remember like it was yesterday, that slow Autumn day. I was a lad of twelve, and I was in my father's study. It was close to the the kitchen where the servants enter. Sometimes people of a poor sort of manner would come and knock on the kitchen door from the outside, and try to sell their wares to our servants and head Butler, Klein. Usually most would be turned away, but there would be few who were allowed to linger. Few who sold such which could be bought and be useful. 

It was such a time where I happened to hear a faint knock on the kitchen door of the next room over. I stopped looking at my father's intriguing bookshelf and wandered to the kitchen. Many of the servants were out at this hour, being quite an early morning. They were shopping or doing some such, so I knew there would be no one to inquire of this small knock.

What a lucky happenstance it turned out to be.

The knock did not come again, so I hurried to the door. Turning the heavy latch, I wondered if perhaps the seller had gone and my opportunity to mingle with someone of a different sort of life had gone as well. You see, I never was allowed to interact with anyone who my parents did not deem worthy of us. My father was Lord Windsor and my mother Lady Windsor, so anyone below was forbidden. So as a child, how curious I was.

Hurrying the latch, finally I swung open the door and there, small and quiet and unmoving, stood a creature I wholly did not expect to see. 

For there stood a small child, perhaps of six but looking as a toddler does for the malnourished and terribly skinny state. The child was bald headed, shaved as often I had heard the orphanges did in books. The child peered up at me from low stature with the most sad looking pool of blue eyes like a painter had dropped two large, searching droplets of the purest blue on his face. He wore a brown hat which overtook his small head, a brown ratty old thing which looked as if it had been dipped in grease. But even with the hat I could tell there was no hair there underneath, so flat it laid. Like the hat, his clothes were dirty and greasy, tent-like on his emaciated tiny frame. It was from the grease I could tell he must wear these clothes every day, never washing. For this I could tell also from the enormous stink coming from him. But as my eyes traveled down, I noticed something wholy different from his appearance in his small, bird-like hand.

Outstretched to me was a full headed rose, a brilliant ruby red and with a strangely opulent shine of which I had never seen on a rose but for only once. At his feet was a beaten up basket full of these roses, cut carefully to form the lovely shapes I had seen in various houses of my parents' friends. But again at these roses, my heart sank and an eerie feeling came over me slowly. 

As he stared at me without a word, just holding out that rose, I realized how these roses had come from the garden of one Lady Alistair, from the estate nearby us. A widow, whose pride and joy were her luscious ruby red, award-winning roses. My heart began to beat wildly and my eyebrows creased with worry.