Sean E. Britten

I’ve always been inspired by music (I know, super original!) and music has always been a part of my writing. Way back in the days of burnt CDs, my mates and I used to put together CD mixtapes and I came up with the idea of a series of short stories based around pieces of music. Mixtape is all short stories sharing their titles with different songs and inspired, to various degrees, by their lyrics, artists, and vibe.

Currently Playing: Billy Idol – White Wedding

Eunice Mayweather was a young woman murdered before her time, along with all the attendees at her wedding, but the legend of The Black Bride is only a story. To prove it, Leah agrees to perform a ritual at the abandoned church where the deaths occurred. Except sometimes ‘until death do they part’ isn’t always the end. 

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The Black Bride, they called her. Or just The Bride. A story, Leah reminded herself as she ran through the dark woods. Only a story. Limbs of fog snaked around the trunks of trees. A fat moon wafted above the canopy. Dressed entirely in white, her hoodie, tracksuit pants and sneakers were faintly luminous in the darkness of the woods. Almost like she was a wraith or a ghost herself.

The Bride was a ghost story, an urban legend. Something that little girls used to scare themselves at sleepovers. Except Leah and her family had only moved to Tennsville a few months ago so she’d never been a little girl here and never part of those sleepovers. In fact, her family had moved around so much for her father’s job that she’d never been a part of many sleepovers full stop. Now, at seventeen-years-old, there were parties and dances but not a lot of sleepovers so when she’d been invited to one anyway she’d been determined to make it count. It was there that she’d heard the story of The Black Bride.

Eunice Mayweather was a terror of a young woman during the frontier days of Tennsville. Before the borders of town had moved on and the foundations of the settlement became lost in these same woods that Leah was making her way through. She’d been described as a hellcat, which was apparently some kind of cowboy way of calling her a crazy bitch. Back in those days, Leah had suggested that women probably got that kind of reputation for flashing their ankles and maybe wanting to learn how to read but according to the other girls at the sleepover her reputation was actually earned. When she was just a girl, she’d killed another girl’s pet cat for correcting her on something in school. When she got a little older, she’d beaten up a rival for a boy’s affection in the middle of the street and pulled out a chunk of her hair. She’d stolen booze and conned money and generally terrorised the local community to the best of her ability.

Then, when Eunice was a teenager, she’d fallen pregnant to a guy around her age, Jed, who had a reputation as a petty criminal. Eunice’s father, however, was still a prominent member of the frontier community. He’d conspired to marry her off to one of his business partners who wanted a young bride even if she came already despoiled.

On the day of the wedding, Eunice went to the altar almost literally with a shotgun at her back. Many other prominent members of town were on the list of invitations. Eunice’s father had done his best to see that Jed was kept from attending but he failed. Instead of trying to whisk Eunice away, however, Jed lashed out in a fit of jealous rage. Barricading the church’s doors, he made sure no one could get out, including Eunice herself, and then hurled flaming lanterns through the stained glass windows. No one escaped as the interior burned, roasting the wedding guests alive. Jed had then put a shotgun in his mouth and blown his brains out right on the steps of the church. Eunice, her would-be husband, her father, and dozens of guests were killed.

The church loomed out of the blackness of the forest. Leah had seen it before while hiking with her family, during the day, but she hadn’t known its history. She’d even stuck her head through its open doorway. It was a different beast in the moonlight. A shell of a building, roughhewn stone and pillars of ancient wood. A jag of a steeple above the yawning mouth of an empty doorway. All the windows were long gone and most of its roof had collapsed. During the day, it looked like not much more than a burned out pile of stones that should have fallen down a long time ago. In the middle of the night though, close to midnight, it felt obvious that something terrible had happened here. Evil soaked into the ground, into the trees that crowded close to the walls of the church. The woods fell silent in its presence.

They didn’t just tell the story at sleepovers. There was a kind of ritual to it as well, like Candyman or Bloody Mary. Girls would lock themselves in a darkened bathroom or closet and six times they had to repeat, ‘Marry me, Eunice.’ Supposedly, if they were brave enough to make it to six repetitions then Eunice herself, The Black Bride, would appear out of the darkness and steal their soul with a kiss.

“Of course, it doesn’t really work like that,” Evahlee, one of the girls at the sleepover, had said.

Leah laughed. “No way, I kind of figured the ghost wasn’t actually real.”

“No, she’s real! But she doesn’t just show up anywhere. You have to actually go to the church where she was unalived, where she was going to be married. The one that Jed burned. And you’ve got to do it at midnight! You’ve got to stand at the actual altar and you repeat the words six times, and then she’ll appear! It’s not her dad, it’s Satan himself that gives her away now. All the other dead people are there, and there’s a priest who marries you and only then does she kiss you and eat your soul!”

Leah hadn’t known Evahlee that well before they were both invited to the sleepover. She had laughed again, thinking she was joking, but Evahlee got upset. She insisted The Black Bride and her version of the ritual were real. She claimed to know someone, a friend of her older brother or maybe a friend of his friend, who had gone to the church in the middle of the night and then was never seen again. Determined not to look stupid or like a pushover, Leah didn’t back down though. The other girls refused to take sides. They’d all grown up in Tennsville and all of them, at one time or another, had chickened out before saying ‘Marry me, Eunice,’ six times while playing the game.

Finally, Leah agreed. If she didn’t believe in The Black Bride then she would do the ritual herself at midnight on the full moon. It was stupid, really stupid, monumentally stupid, but Leah had always struggled to make friends when her family moved so much. Worse, she struggled to stand out and always worried she’d be forgotten as soon as her family moved on. If she did this, recorded of course, she wasn’t worried about proving how smart she was or how brave but at least, she hoped, it would prove memorable.

Leah felt her heart hammering as she approached the church and it wasn’t from the exertion of her gentle run through the woods. She made sure she was alone but felt like she was being watched. The feeling only got more intense as she reached the church steps.

Moss grew between the broad, stone steps before the entryway. The steps where Jed shot himself after setting fire to the church. Leah imagined the blood and brain matter running into those same cracks. Taking her phone out of her hoodie, she switched on its flashlight. She scanned the entrance and saw its massive doors tossed to either side. Aged and shattered, as if they’d been pried apart by some kind of giant, they’d been wedged open for years with mounds of dirt and leaf litter collected at their bases. The inside of the wood had been blackened by flames. Looking closer, she could see ugly grooves carved into the wood and she imagined the desperate clawing of the wedding guests as they burned alive. The doorway itself yawned like a sinkhole.

Pointing her phone ahead of her, Leah stepped inside. She tried to pretend there was a logical reason behind her fear, like she was worried about some homeless weirdo sleeping in the church or something, but she didn’t feel convinced. Her heart throbbed and her breathing ran short. The fear wasn’t necessarily rational but, come on, she thought, this was a scary place! An abandoned church, the site of a mass murder, in the middle of the night. Whether she believed in ghost stories or not, it was a spooky place to be.

Heavy pews still lined both sides of the church. Big and solid enough that they hadn’t burned entirely or rotted away over the years, although they were warped and covered in scales of charcoal. Leaf litter lay thick on the ground. In her luminous white outfit, Leah moved down the centre of the aisle. Above her head, craters in the collapsed ceiling showed the full moon and a scatter of stars through a latticework of naked branches. There was no one around, no homeless weirdos, no bodies of course. No other midnight parishioners taking shelter in this cold and deconsecrated place. She cast her phone around just to be sure, light bouncing off the pews and creeping into the corners of the room.

At the end of the aisle was a raised pulpit. Like everything else, it was blackened and despairing. The front wall of the church looked the most undamaged but there was nothing back there to be seen.

Leah turned on the camera on her phone. Recording, she flipped the camera back and forth to take in the interior of the church and then her face with the pulpit behind her. The clock in the corner of the screen read ‘11:53 PM’.

“Alright, so I’m here obviously,” Leah said. “And it’s basically midnight, right? So, I guess I just do this?”

Her face looked pale and bloodless in the reflected light of the flashlight. She turned it off and let the screen adjust. It was almost black but she could make out the contours of the church in the moonlight once her eyes adjusted. She took a deep breath to steady her voice.

“Marry me, Eunice,” Leah said.

Leah jumped as she heard a snapping noise. After a moment of confusion, she decided it must have been a branch breaking free of a nearby tree and falling to the ground.

“Marry me, Eunice.”

A breeze crawled through the church. Leaves crackled underfoot. There was nothing weird about there being a breeze given the open doorway and the windows and the holes in the roof. Instead of creating a chill though, the breeze felt strangely warm. Like someone had opened the door of a hot oven or something.

“Marry me, Eunice.”

There was someone in the room. Leah smelt a whiff of smoke. It drew her attention toward the back of the church where, in the rear corner, she saw a silhouette. No, it couldn’t be a person, it must have been a trick of the shadows. By the moonlight, she couldn’t make out many details but what she could see looked more like a piece of burnt furniture than a person. It had the shape of a person’s head and shoulders but it was black and crispy and covered in ashes. Her breath caught but she didn’t want to look like a chicken on the recording.

“Marry me, Eunice.”

Leah felt something ripple in the air. Another cracking sound, another hot breeze, stronger this time. The smell of smoke was unmistakable. She looked around the church and saw more shadows filling the pews. They’d appeared as if from nowhere when she wasn’t looking. She couldn’t make out their features but judging by their outlines they looked like corpses that had been propped up in their seats. Burned corpses, their faces blackened, dressed in smoldering suits and dresses.

“Marry me, Eunice.”

Leah knew she should stop speaking. The story was real, the ritual was dangerous. Somehow, the words spilled out of their own accord. The heat rose along with the stench of smoke. Burning wood and roasting flesh. More wedding guests appeared across the pews. She’d dropped the phone away from her face and as her eyes adjusted further she could see their skull faces wrapped in burnt flesh, eye sockets empty, clothing melted to their skin.

Suddenly, the doors of the church slammed closed. It was impossible, they’d been broken and totally disconnected from their hinges. But they slammed, making Leah jump, creaked open, and slammed again. She tried to stop herself from speaking. Grabbing at her mouth, she tried to hold her lips closed but it was like some force had taken hold of her and made her into a puppet.

“Marry… Me… Eunice…”

The doors slammed shut one final time and then peeled open with a tortured squeal. Standing at the threshold was The Black Bride herself, Eunice Mayweather. A skeletal figure wrapped in a black wedding dress. The dress looked, impossibly, like it had been burned and charred black but had remained in one piece. Bits of it flaked off as she moved. A black veil shadowed her face, making her features impossible to distinguish from across the church. Between two bony fists, the skin black and blistered, she clutched a bouquet of flowers. Naturally, they too were dead and wilted and burned.

The Bride stepped inside the church. There was no noise except for a crackling breeze and the sound of sinews creaking in the necks of the wedding guests as they turned to watch. Leah tried to run but her feet were glued to the floor. Not with fear, literally she twisted and turned and tore at her own legs but it was like the soles of her sneakers had melted to the ancient floorboards and for whatever reason she couldn’t free her feet from the shoes either.

Something moved beside The Bride as she approached the altar. A disturbance in the air, snapping and fading in and out of sight. Leah thought it was smoke at first before realising it consistently sketched out a kind of figure. The shade had limbs of a sort and walked arm in arm with Eunice. The most distinct feature that Leah could make out were a pair of huge, curved horns that rose above the shadow’s ‘head’.

Evahlee had told her that it was Satan himself who now gave The Black Bride away. As they got closer, Leah got the impression that she was only looking at the very tip of an enormous tower. Or the edge of an abyss. Like she could only just see the rim of a fingernail belonging to a vast and impossible presence prodding a single finger into this reality across a vast and impossible distance. Fear turned her stomach to water. She shook so badly that she wasn’t sure how she remained standing. Whether something, some outside force, was also holding her upright the way it was holding her feet to the floor.

“No, no! Please, I didn’t mean it! I didn’t mean it, and I’m sorry, and let me go, please!” Leah fought but couldn’t get her feet to move.

The Black Bride stopped in front of her, standing side by side at the blackened altar. Bits of char flaked off of her dress. The shadowy presence that had walked her down the aisle withdrew and, thankfully, was gone. The Bride said nothing. She was shorter than Leah and her frame looked like a bunch of knotted sticks beneath her black dress yet she loomed menacingly. Once she got close enough, Leah got glimpses of what was beneath her veil. Jutting teeth in a lipless scowl. Sockets where her eyes and nose should have been. Little more than a skull barely hidden behind a layer of black and shrunken flesh.

“I didn’t mean it!” Leah said.

The Bride said nothing but a throat-clearing noise made Leah let out a small scream. Another walking corpse appeared on the other side of the burnt altar. It looked like a priest, fleshier than most of the wedding guests but still badly burned and rotting. A spare tyre of grey flesh pressed against the collar of his cassock, covered in scorch marks. His eyeballs were boiled and milky white. An upside down crucifix hung against his chest.

“Damned and unloved, we are gathered here today to witness the union of these two young souls,” the zombie priest began.

“I can’t get married, I’m only seventeen!” Leah shouted.

The dead priest’s expression didn’t change. Leah could feel the argument fall flat amongst the zombie congregation. Teenagers got married all the time in the frontier era they were from. An unmarried seventeen-year-old was probably considered leftovers back then. She wasn’t even sure how old Eunice Mayweather had been when she died but probably no older than sixteen or seventeen.

“Unholy matrimony is a covenant hidden from the eyes of God. Not to be entered into lightly or willingly.”

The priest’s voice grated like a stone slab being drawn across the mouth of a tomb. He cleared his throat again, dislodging something wet, and an unidentifiable insect with too many legs scuttled out of his mouth then dropped off his chin.

Leah bent over and tried to unlace her sneakers but her fingers shook too badly. Her breathing came hard and fast. She hoped if she could get her feet free then maybe she could run for it. None of the wedding guests looked like they were in any shape to stop her. She was too freaked out to do the knots though. Suddenly, she was hit by a jolt of inspiration and shot upright again.

“I’m a girl! Right? You don’t want a woman marrying a woman, right?” Leah said. “Like, obviously I’ve got no problem with it. I don’t know if personally I’m-, I’m, like, I’m not sure if I’m ready to put a label on exactly what I’m into, but back in the frontier-ass, bullshit times you’re all from you wouldn’t want two women getting married, right?”

The priest’s boiled white eyes looked terribly tired. None of the congregation reacted. Leah looked to The Bride for support. Behind her veil, the dead girl’s rictus grin didn’t change. Maybe she didn’t mind.

“Oh, fuck this!” Leah said. “Fuck you!”

“Do you,” the priest said, facing Leah. “Take this woman to be your awfully wedded wife. In sickness, in woe, for richer or horror, for the little time you have left to live?”

Leah tried to resist but she felt that power slide inside her again. That same force that made her finish the ritual earlier and now kept her feet rooted to the floor. It pried her jaws open with invisible fingers and pushed her voice out of her mouth. She sounded choked and scared and broken.

“I do,” Leah said.

Vertebrae grated inside the priest’s neck as he turned toward The Bride. “And do you, Eunice, take this mortal soul to be your awfully wedded victim. In sickness, in woe, for richer or horror, for the rest of your damned eternal life?”

“No! No, please don’t do this! Please!” Leah managed to reclaim her voice.

The Bride’s lower jaw creaked open. Black dust, ashes, spilled out of her open mouth. A terrible moan started deep in her throat and reverberated in the air between them. It went on for over half a minute and contained no words but the priest took it as an affirmation.

“If anyone knows of a reason why these two should not be dead, speak now or forever rest in peace.”

“I object, I object!” Leah shouted. “Don’t do this! I didn’t mean to call you here, and you don’t want to marry me!”

Leah got another jolt of inspiration. Her previous arguments about being seventeen and being a woman had gone nowhere. She clung onto her latest thought with desperate hope.

“You don’t want me!” Leah repeated. “You want Jed, right? Jed! Is he here? Does he come back too, with all this shit?”

While her feet remained glued to the ground, Leah twisted and turned to search for Eunice’s zombie boyfriend. The one who had burned down the church and cursed Eunice and all these people in the first place. The congregation started to look around as well. Vertebrae popped and ashy flesh cracked as they craned their necks. Eyeless sockets searched the far corners of the building.

“Jed! Jed!” Leah shouted.

Another shambling figure appeared in the open doorway of the church. Like the priest, he looked fresher than most of the congregation but that might have been simply down to the fact he wasn’t burnt to a blackened skeleton. He dressed in a simple duster and ranchhand clothes. Blood drooled from the shattered hole where his mouth had been. His jaw hung open, stretching his torn cheeks. Spikes of fractured teeth lined his gums.

The new arrival scanned the church nervously then glanced around behind him as if thinking of running. When he did, Leah saw the crater blown in the back of his skull. Moonlight shone straight through the opening. Rotting brains matted his hair. Jed, according to the story, had put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger right on the church steps. It looked like that detail was true as well.

“There he is, Jed!” Leah said. “He objects! He objects!”

Jed pointed at himself in a kind of timeless ‘Who, me?’ gesture. The entire undead congregation watched from their pews. Skull grating against her neck, The Black Bride turned to look. Her face made no readable expression, if she could even be said to have a face, but the dead flowers drooped in her hands.

“It’s him you want, right? Your dad isn’t here anymore, he can’t make you do anything! You were carrying his baby! Marry him, not me, and you can all be together in-, whatever this all is. In death, I guess?”

The Bride seemed to think. She thought slowly and moved even slower, limbs creaking. After several long and terrifying moments of hesitation, the corpse in the black wedding gown stepped away from the altar. Leah whimpered with desperate hope. The train of The Bride’s dress dragged, leaving scraps of ash behind her.

“Yes, yes, please!” Leah said.

Jed came to meet Eunice in the middle of the aisle. He slurred something unintelligible and they embraced. After a moment, he tossed her black veil over her head. The Bride pressed her lipless mouth against the sucking hole in the middle of Jed’s face, smearing blood on her blackened teeth. The congregation stared in silence. Leah looked back at the priest. His blistered and rotting face looked indifferent, even bored, by the turn of events.

“It looks like I’ve been left at the altar,” Leah said. “What-, uh, what do we do now?”

Eunice stepped away from Jed for a moment. Dropping her flowers, she smoothed the front of her dress over her concave stomach. Something inside the cavity reached out. Two impossibly tiny limbs found slits in the dress. A tiny skull pressed against the material. Eunice and Jed’s unborn child meeting its father for the first time.

“Oh, shit,” Leah gagged.

Smoke began to fill the church. Seeping from nowhere and everywhere, it thickened fast. Leah felt her eyes sting and started to cough, her fear rising again. The church grew hot. Hot as Hell. Suddenly, however, Leah’s feet became unstuck from the floor. She stumbled then immediately looked for a way out. The church doors remained open but the only way to reach them was past The Bride and her groom. Banks of smoke obscured the way forward. Hands out in front of her, she made her way back down the aisle and circled the two living corpses as widely as she could.

“Uh, congratulations.”

Through more smoke, Leah made it to the doorway. She staggered into the night and found clean air almost immediately. Blinking, she cleared her eyes and sucked oxygen deep into her lungs. When she looked back, the interior of the church was nothing but a swirling, black mass. At its centre was an abyss. Like water running down a drain, the smoke rolled backward. From what Leah could see, the church was left scoured and empty again. The Bride was gone, her groom, the priest and congregation. All of them were gone and the building looked the same as it had before she stepped inside.

Leah glanced down at her phone. At some point it had stopped recording and she wasn’t sure how much of the night’s events she had caught. She wondered what she might tell people. Running it back in her head, one thought occurred to her.

“Did that count? Like, am I married now?” Leah said. “He didn’t finish the thing, right? I don’t have to get a ghost divorce?”

Hurriedly, Leah made her way home. She hoped she didn’t have to worry about another wedding for a long, long time. In fact, she might be happier being always a bridesmaid and never The Bride.

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Sean: Only the second time a musical artist has inspired more than one Mixtape story! The first, a few weeks ago, was INXS with both Devil Inside and Need You Tonight, and now this is the second Billy Idol track after Dancing With Myself! I’m sure they’re very flattered, I should probably check in with them.

It’s possible I’ve been watching too much ‘Tales from the Crypt’, all the puns in the priest’s dialogue sound like I lifted them straight off the fucking Cryptkeeper. I’d been binge watching the show and I’m halfway through the fifth season. Genuinely, the only reason I haven’t watched it in a few weeks is because my daughter, Zoe, has started to gain a bit too much awareness about what’s going on around her and on the TV screen. After she was born we had a system that my wife would take the first half of the night in the living room and then I would swap in at three AM. Eventually, we moved her into our room but still took responsibility for the different halves of the night so I’d be up before dawn every morning. So literally every morning for months there I was watching one or two of just the worst horror films imaginable while taking care of her. Just the depths of absolute shit you can find on Amazon with a Shudder account. It has completely destroyed the algorithm on my account. And then, when I had a bit less time to kill but a bit more mental acuity I started watching Tales from the Crypt instead, but now that she can actually watch TV too I’m trying not to warp her too much.

Was feeling pretty burnt out a couple of weeks ago, to the point where I was really starting to wonder if I could keep up the pace on short stories. But I’ve gained a little bit of breathing room since then so watch this space for more to come and for maybe a little announcement on a new project!

Next Track: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds ft. Kylie Minogue – Where the Wild Roses Grow