Excerpt from The Wheel

{Author's note: although this story won't find its way into Corpse Honey (I simply do not have the room for it), I was happy with how it turned out, that I just had to share it. I think my regular readers will find it delightfully twisted and macabre. My thanks to Rob Mosher for inspiration and collaboration on the piece.}

The ones who screamed the longest were the first ones to die. 

Cimarron, the stone mason’s daughter, had been the first to go. Her desperate pleas had changed to cries as the wheel turned. Those cries steadily dissolved into ragged screams as she was lowered down, into the trough. Sebastian could still hear her even after she was plunged under the murky black waters. Even now, days later, he could still hear her gurgling screams as she had thrashed and strained against her lashings. He’d watched her go under that first time. Watched as she had closed her eyes, her tears running down, over her forehead, falling down into the basin. Sebastian remembered that part vividly. He wondered if he would be able to taste her tears when his time came in the trough. Her eyes were clenched like her fists as the wheel dipped ever downward. He remembered the slow methodical clop of the header tank as it filled, spilling the water into the buckets lining the wheel. Driving it forward — inexorably forward and down. Down toward the trough. Toward death.

Clop… splash… groan.

For three days Sebastian had listened and cried and cursed with his peers as one by one they had succumbed to the wheel. He had borne witness to their struggles and had wept when their torment has ceased. Cecil, he had been the last one. Yes, strong-willed Cecil. The older boy had finally surrendered to the wheel as dawn broke over the barren hills on the third day. His death came as no surprise to Sebastian. The talkative butcher’s son had stopped speaking in the dim cold hours just before dawn. Perhaps sleep finally claimed him as he neared the trough. Even as he tipped toward the kill trough, Sebastian had implored him to breathe, to prepare for his submersion. But, Cecil had simply dipped beneath the waters without a struggle and without a sound. Sebastian knew he was dead even before he himself was drawn under. The dead never gasped or coughed. 

That’s how you knew.

The wooden panel of the sluice gate gently clopped back into place as the water spilled into the waiting paddle bucket. This was accompanied by a splash, as the water was simultaneously deposited into the basin below. The shift in weight propelled the wheel forward — ever forward. The timbers groaned and creaked as the wheel turned on its ancient iron axle. Clop… splash… groan.The process took about a minute to complete, perhaps a slightly less. Three buckets had to spill into the trough in order for it to propel the each of them through the trough. Lashed to the spokes, their feet bound toward the axle, all the children passed through the kill trough. They had been lashed along the outer edge of the wheel so that just their heads dipped into the trough. The surface of the water never made it past their shoulders — their tiny upside down bodies thrashing against their bonds as they struggled to free themselves before they drowned. 

Clop… splash… groan.

Before they all had died, the sounds of the wheel were interrupted by the gasps of those who survived their immersion: the gurgling coughs of those who were barely conscious as they finally emerged from beneath the water. And there were the cries and curses from those hanging suspended, facing downward, staring at the water’s surface. Their tangled hair hung down, cascading in sodden rivulets over their faces, merging into the dank turbulent waters, listening to those ahead of them fighting to remain conscious. Now they were all dreadfully still. All the children dipped into the trough without uttering a sound. All but Sebastian.

Of all of them, Sebastian was the last one left alive. But probably not for much longer. Sleep was as much of an enemy now as the fetid waters below. It threatened to pull him into oblivion as the wheel spun. Clop… splash… groan. Clop… splash… groan. The sound was soporific, a deadly lullaby. All that mattered now was the wheel — surviving the trough. That’s all his life had become: Surviving the wheel. Breathing. Waiting. Counting the buckets as they fell. Knowing that twice on the hour, he would be he would be plunged down, inexorably down, into the increasingly rancid waters. His field of vision would be cut off by the rusted edge of the trough. The dank runoff would flood into his sinuses. Even as he emerged, the taste of decomposition would linger in the back of his throat as he spit and coughed and gasped his way back to weary consciousness.

It was to him the taste of death.