The Kindest Man In Ashby

CW: Blood, violence, murder, and self-harm

If you ever happen to find yourself in the town of Ashby, you should make sure to pass by Mr. Albert Henderson’s Apothecary. Oh, that man has it all! Headaches? Sore throat? That pesky cough that just won’t quit? Whatever ails you, Mr. Henderson has just the thing. Ask anyone in town, and they’ll tell you! He’s the kindest man you’ll ever meet. He’ll greet you with a smile and send you home feeling better than ever. And doesn’t he look wonderful for his age? Must be the tonics! You really can't miss it. It's the small shop right on the corner of Main, with the purple curtains. Mr. Albert Henderson’s Apothecary. Open from dawn 'til dusk. Come on in! He’d just love to have you.

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Albert Henderson has lived in the town of Ashby for the past 22 years. Ask anyone about him, and the first thing they’ll say is that his apothecary is the best in town. The second is that he’s the kindest man you’ll ever meet. And the third is that he looks awfully good for a man his age.

See, Albert has barely aged a day since he came to town. He can credit that to his tonics, and the fact that he hasn’t ingested human blood in sixty years. If he had, he imagines he’d still look about 25, the age he was when he turned. But years of sustaining purely on pig’s blood have aged him. 

It has also made him hungry. Always hungry. A gnawing pit in his stomach that sours into violence, though he’d never let it show. Not when the old women trap him at the counter with gossip that goes on and on. Or when the man from the flower shop comes with his leg pain every week and won’t stop complaining. Or when the children , who’d be so easy to snatch up and eat whole, play around the apothecary without minding the hundreds of glass vials, and their aloof mothers are too distracted or disinterested to keep them in line.

He greets them all with a kind smile and a pleasant tone that hasn’t wavered since the day he opened up his doors. A dark little shop on the main road of Ashby, lit by dimmed bulbs and its windows hidden behind heavy curtains. Customers are always telling him to throw those curtains out and let some natural light in. But Albert keeps to the dark. 

It was a late afternoon, and Albert was in the back getting ready to close up, when the bell on the door rang. That miserable, dreadful sound that meant someone was coming inside. Most days it meant a visit from someone like Mrs. Vanderbilt, the pudgy woman who lives on the outskirts of town in a ridiculously extravagant manor and who comes in every Tuesday , and Albert knows it’s her before he even looks up from behind the counter. That rosewater perfume and the rapid heartbeat. 

“Good morning, Mr. Henderson!” she would say.

“Hello, Mrs. Vanderbilt! How’s the family?” Albert would kindly reply, and that’s all it takes. She’ll tell him about her daughter, who moved over to Weston and only comes by for Sunday lunch now, and about the sister who ought to visit more often, and about whatever the maid cooked that week. And while she talks, all Albert sees is her throat ripped open, blood spilling out and pooling on the floor. He sees himself crouched over her limp body, feeding until she’s nothing but an emptied carcass.

Then he hands over her tonics, and she leaves, and his smile never wavers. He watches her go on about her day, unsuspecting that every day she comes in here could be her last. But it won’t be, of course, because Albert is well in control over his urges. 

After she’s gone, he will reach for the leather notebook under his desk and write her name on the first line, and next to her name, Did not.

It’s what he does every time. Whether it’s Mrs. Vanderbilt, or Mr. Lawrence who props his bad leg on the stool and rolls up his trouser to show Albert the swollen veins, as though Albert doesn’t already hear the blood pushing through them. Or young Mrs Pelton, who holds her newborn against her shoulder while she waits for her order. Or the Hollis twins, who come in with scraped knees every other week and stand there bleeding onto his floorboards while their mother takes too long finding the change in her purse.

Albert smiles through all of it. He makes small talk. He hands out tonics and wraps them in brown paper while the hunger burns behind his ribs, waiting for him to slip just once. 

He never does. Because through it all there’s only one thing on his mind stronger than the hunger. All the names in his head, one after another, every person he has ever let walk away alive. Did not. By the time he reaches the end, they’re gone, and he can open the notebook and write another name.

Back in the storeroom, Albert realized he hadn’t heard a greeting after the bell. No chipper “Good afternoon, Mr. Henderson!” No footsteps toward the counter. Just the bell, and then nothing. 

The smell of the woman's blood reached him. And Albert froze.

This scent wasn’t Mrs Vanderbilt’s, or anyone in town’s for that matter. Plenty of strangers passed through Ashby. It was a good place to stop for the night on a long drive, and they all smelled the same. Of grit and sweat and the drowsiness of too many hours on the road. But not this man. He wasn’t a passerby. He smelled like he'd had a full night’s sleep. He also smelled like rotting death. But above all, He smelled familiar.

Albert stepped into the shop and saw the man standing by the vials. He caught the side of his face, and there it was. The face was now ruined by wrinkles and warts, the posture hunched, the hands frail. 

“Good afternoon, sir!” Albert said, the smile already in place. “Anything I can help you find?”

“Good day” The man’s voice was dry, and he still didn’t turn.

“Are you new in town?”

“No.” He said as he slowly turned to face him. “But I haven’t been back in a long while”

Something cold moved through Albert’s chest. Blood. Not the man’s. His own. Spilling between his fingers. A memory. One he had buried a long time ago.

A face.

Fair skin and blue eyes, framed by hair so dark it never caught the light. Sorscha.

She was ten years older than Albert, and she had been more of a mother to him than a sister. When he was turned, on a dreadful winter night when he’d been wandering streets he shouldn’t have, it was Sorscha who found him pale and shaking on their doorstep. She had always been clever, and her mind was open to the occult things of this world. So, she didn’t hesitate when she understood what he had become. She cared for him. She taught him to be gentle. She brought him pig’s blood from the butcher in a silver flask and made him promise he would never drink anything else. 

Years passed and Albert kept that promise. Sorscha worked as a caretaker at the Ashby orphanage. It was a wretched place, and Albert could not fathom why his sister spent so much time there. But when she became head mistress, the place changed. It grew warm, and the kids were happy. Albert allowed himself visits once a week, on Sundays. Back then, he had not tasted human blood and was not plagued by his agonizing visions of death. 

Albert had aged alongside his sister, but not nearly as fast. He knew it was the pig’s blood, and he was content. Some nights he even let himself hope that, if he kept to it long enough, he might one day grow old and die like her.

The orphanage had eighteen children at the time, and Albert liked most of them. Though there was one he had always particularly disliked. Albert never knew his real name, the other children called him the weasel, and so that’s what Albert called him too. A sneaky boy who slipped through rooms without making a sound and more than once Sorscha found him under the stairs, listening to conversations he had no business hearing. 

Albert would often look up and find the boy already watching him. 

“Why don’t you ever eat supper with us, Mr. Henderson?”

“Why do you never visit during the day?”

“What’s in your flask?”

Albert answered every question kindly, with the easy stories he’d told for years. He’d already eaten. The sun gave him headaches. It was medicine, nasty stuff, nothing a boy would want. 

Albert never quite knew if the boy figured out exactly what he was. But he must have had some idea that made him do what he did that evening, when the children were all in the drawing room and Sorscha was upstairs doing something or other, and Albert sat in his usual chair by the fire. He didn’t notice the weasel until the boy was already standing beside him.

“Mr. Henderson,” the boy whispered.

Before Albert could say a word, the boy slashed a kitchen knife across his own palm. He didn’t flinch. He only stared up at Albert with those cunning eyes, daring him, and pushed his bleeding hand toward Albert’s face.

Albert caught his wrist, and for a moment, nothing happened. The fire crackled. The boy stood still, his hand dripping onto the floorboards. Then the smell reached him.

It was nothing like the pig’s blood. It was hot and sweet, and it was everywhere. Albert’s grip tightened until the boy whimpered and twisted, trying to free himself from his grasp. 

Then his teeth were in the boy’s throat.

One child, then another, until the screams went quiet. Then Sorscha was beside him, on her knees, clawing at his arms to get him to stop. And then a splintered length of wood was buried in his gut with her hands still wrapped around it. It would’ve killed him, if she’d aimed a little higher. And Albert still wishes she had. But he pulled it free and let it fall. His own blood stained his hands. “Albert” was the only thing Sorscha could say. He went for her anyway.

When it was over, he knelt beside her for a long time. The house was silent except for the fire. 

Albert picked up the jagged stick of wood and held it to the fire until it caught. Then, he walked to the window, held the flame to the curtains and watched it climb. He moved to the next window, and the next, until the whole room was glowing orange and the smoke was rolling thick across the ceiling.

At the door, he looked back one last time. The spot where the boy's limp body had been was empty now. That little weasel. He closed the door behind him and walked into the night.

He never went back to see what was left. He never read the papers. Not knowing was the only mercy he allowed himself. 

The next night, in a rented room two towns away, Albert bought a leather notebook. He wrote a single name at the top of the first page: Sorscha. Beside it, one word: Did.

Beneath her, he wrote the children. Every one of them. Martha, Thomas, Agnes. Seventeen names. Did.

He didn’t know the boy’s name. He had never cared to learn it. So he wrote what he knew: The weasel. The space next to his name remained blank.

Nearly forty years later, Albert came back to Ashby. The orphanage was long gone, and so were most of the people who might have known his face. No one would remember a man who had only ever visited on Sundays. So he opened a little shop on Main where he could mostly keep to himself and kept filling the pages.

Albert didn’t even realize the man had t left until he heard the bell ring. He didn’t stop to think. He went out the door, and he followed him into the night.

Albert had often wondered what became of the boy after he’d left him in that burning orphanage. From the looks of it, he hadn't made much of himself. He was alone, in an old house that had barely any furniture. So Albert assumed it was rented, not owned. 

The man didn’t seem surprised to find Albert standing in his doorway. He didn’t even turn around. He simply lit the lamp and lowered himself into the only chair.

“I thought my eyes were deceiving me the first time I saw you,” he said quietly. “I can’t believe you recognized me. You haven’t changed at all, Mr. Henderson.”

“I knew before I saw you.”

“Of course you did”. The man let out a dry laugh that broke into a cough. “Come in, then. Come in.”

Albert stepped across the threshold. So he had figured it out after all. The smell was stronger here. Sickness, and dust, and beneath it, that faint sweetness. His stomach ached. Something behind his teeth stirred.

No.

“There have been nights where I can’t sleep, and my mind drags me back to that night. I’d almost convinced myself I’d imagined it, that it was only a fire, an accident, the way everyone said.” He was studying his left palm, the one he’d cut open with the knife that night. “But the memories were so vivid, I could still smell the blood on the floors, and the burning flesh”

Albert said nothing as he stalked next to the man. He couldn’t. His mouth had filled with the taste of iron he could so vividly remember.

“I tried to find you, once I was older. I got so obsessed with figuring out who you were that they locked me in a mental ward for a few months. After that, I never spoke of you again. Not to anyone.” He folded his hands in his lap. “I assumed you’d died at some point. Until a few years ago, I passed by the town on my way to Knoxville. Stayed at the little inn down by Dawson Street, and I was suffering from a really bad headache that wouldn’t quit. The lady at the desk told me about your shop, said you had something for everything” His mouth twitched. “So I walked down, and there you were, through the window. It took me three years to work up the nerve to open that door”.

Ramona Vanderbilt. Did not.

Why come back after all this time? To make him remember? To make him pay?

Jon Rogers. Did not.

“I’m dying, as I’m sure you can tell,” the man said. “I didn’t come for an apology. I didn’t come for revenge. I just needed to know it was real.”

Lies. He had come to haunt him. To sit in that chair and bleed in front of him again.

And it was working.

His slow heartbeat filled the room. Every pulse pushing that sweet, familiar blood through withered veins.

Collin Abernathy. Did not. The Hollis twins. Did not.

Albert was standing over the chair. He didn’t remember crossing the room.

The man looked up at him, and did not look away. And even though the frame was old and gray, Albert could still see those same cunning eyes that had crept through the orphanage halls. The ones who always held a challenge in them.

Did not. Did not.

For the first time in sixty years, Albert ran out of names.

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It’s Thursday, and the town of Ashby is holding a memorial for a former resident. A Mr. Jonathan Belvert. Nobody really remembers him here, since he left when he was a child after a tragic accident in the orphanage he grew up in. Some people say he caused the fire, but that’s all just gossip. He barely survived it. 

The chapel is empty except for the priest and a man sitting in the back row. He begins the service for the only mourner. A young man of about 25. The priest cannot help but notice that when he mentions the name of the departed, the man pulls out a leather notebook and writes something down.

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Albert Henderson sits in the back of his apothecary, staring at the first page of his notebook. The scratched out The weasel and the fresh ink that reads Jonathan Belvert: Did.

He doesn’t pack much. His knees don’t hurt when he picks up boxes and he can move through the store a lot quicker now. In the mirror by the door, a young man looks back at him, the way he looked the winter Sorscha found him on their doorstep. No one in Ashby would believe it was him. No one in Ashby would ever see him again.

On Tuesday morning, Mrs. Vanderbilt arrives and finds the door locked. She knocks. She cups her hands against the glass and peers into the dark.

By Friday, the whole town is talking. Some say Mr. Henderson fell ill and went to stay with family, though no one can remember him ever mentioning any. Some say he got tired, at his age, and retired somewhere warm. Mrs. Vanderbilt tells anyone who will listen that he looked perfectly healthy the last time she saw him. Better than ever, really. 

So, if you ever happen to find yourself in the town of Ashby, you might pass by the little corner on the main road where Mr. Albert Henderson’s Apothecary used to be. Oh, that man had it all. Any ailment you might suffer, he had just the thing for it.

And he was so kind.