Текст книги "Cages and Those Who Hold the Keys"
Автор книги: Gary A. Braunbeck
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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 31 страниц)
9
When I was eleven years old, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. She went fast, lasting just over one year, but it was an agonizing year. My dad, who never was worth much of anything, put her to bed and left her there, leaving it up to me to make sure she got her medicine on time, to change her sheets, and to clean her up when she didn’t make it to the bathroom on time.
Toward the end, I became so angry with him, with his cowardice and drunkenness, that I actually made the mistake of hitting him one night.
He beat the shit out of me, then threw me out the back door into the yard. It had snowed a lot that week, and there was about a foot of snow and ice on the ground.
I remember landing on my side, half my face buried in the snow.
I remember that I couldn’t move because it hurt so much.
And I remember thinking how cold my ear was getting.
I regained consciousness about five hours later. A neighbor had come home and seen me laying in the yard. They took me to the hospital where I stayed for almost two weeks. I had pneumonia and frostbite. They had to remove my ear, which was okay because I was deaf on that side, anyway.
Somewhere in there dad took off and just left Mom alone. The whole time I was in the hospital, I was so scared because she had no one there to take care of her (one of our neighbors was keeping an eye on her, but I didn’t know that).
By the time I was released, Mom was all but dead. She lasted just two days after I got home.
There was no money to cover the hospital bills, so the house was sold, and I was put into the care of the county.
I remember that as I sat there in the courthouse, waiting for someone from Childrens’ Services to come and collect me, that I had never felt so alone and afraid in my life. I hated myself for not being there for Mom, and I hated Dad for being such a worthless coward, and I hated looking like a freak with one ear, and I hated everything.
But mostly, I hated feeling that afraid.
And I promised myself that I would never, ever, ever feel that afraid again, no matter what.
A promise that I had kept to myself until the moment the Reverend, Grant, Sheriff Jackson, and I hit the bottom of those stairs and turned in the hallway.
And I came face to face with the Mudman.
10
The east wall had almost completely collapsed, spewing out wood beams, bricks, and mud. So much mud. And it was moving. “Holy Mother of God,” whispered Grant.
A demon with three bulging red eyes and a four-fanged grin rose up from the muck before us. It was draped in corpse skin and riding a huge black bear. It carried an axe in one hand and a skullcap of blood in the other…and from every side of its form, faces peered out, faces made of black mud, their dark lips working to form words.
I saw them all; Hendrix, Morrison, Garcia, Ms. Holiday, Cobain, all of them.
And I felt the buzz in the center of my head as their words began to come clear.
I Am, I Am, I AM the darkness…I AM, I AM, I AM darkness’s empty belly, the pit at the end of your days…
It rose up to its fullest height, cracking the ceiling with its back, and lumbered forward, blood spilling from the skullcap, snot and foam dripping from the bear’s snout and mouth, smashing holes into the wall with every swing of its axe.
Its eyes glowed brighter with every step.
The Reverend was the first to fire. The bullet slammed into the muck with a loud splat! that did no damage at all. No sooner was the hole made than it oozed closed, healing.
And with every step, the thing grew larger, the singer’s words louder.
I AM, I AM, I AM Kichar Admi, I AM, I AM, I AM the source of all the songs you sing…
Grant McCullers pumped four rounds into it but it would not stop coming.
I AM, I AM, I AM the song the darkness sings, in the pit of my starving belly… We continued backing up, all of us firing into its center, none of the bullets having any effect. The mud dripped and oozed, clumping into the face of a beggar woman, the body of a dead child. The singers continued:
I AM, I AM, I AM what you made me, what you wanted me to be, I AM, I AM, I AM only my song and nothing more… The lights flickered again, and the building shuddered. I ran out of bullets, as did everyone else. And then I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned and saw Byron Knight beside me. His face was a mask of peace and acceptance. I had to watch his lips, because I could no longer hear anything; the roar of the gunfire was still screaming through my head. “I’ve had this appointment for a long time,” he said. “Just…let me go.” Cradling his guitar, he pushed past us and walked forward. The Mudman stopped moving. The singers fell silent. And the bear rose up on its hind legs.
The axe swung down swiftly and surely, deeply burying itself in Knight’s chest. The demon threw back its head and howled with laughter, then pulled Knight from the floor, his legs dangling as blood from his wound pumped down in heavy rivulets, splattering across the floor.
The demon opened its mouth, its jaws dislodging, dropping down, growing wider, until its face was nothing more than slick, dark maw, big enough to swallow a man whole.
Which is what it did.
Then spat out Knight’s guitar, that hit the floor and shattered into half a dozen pieces, the snapping strings a final death groan that echoed against the walls.
The demon turned around and walked toward the collapsed wall, then crouched down and began to move into the mounds of dirt, sludge, and muck, becoming less and less solid until it became what it had been; just mud.
I closed my eyes and began to cry. The Reverend came over and put his arms around me.
It didn’t help much.
11
We don’t talk about that night. Oh, every once in a while, when the four of get together to play cards, Grant McCullers will call us “The Wild Bunch” and everyone will get this look on their faces, but that’s as close as we come to discussing it.
One night Ted Jackson told us a story about something he’d seen after a recent labor riot that made me cringe, and Grant told us what had really happened at the Hangman.
We listened, and we all believed, but we don’t talk about it.
Like the Reverend says, this is Cedar Hill. Weird shit happens here.
Grant gave Beth and her kids five hundred dollars and put them on the bus to Indiana himself. Lump even got a seat, but he had to ride in a carrier, which didn’t please him too much from all reports. Beth and the kids promised to write and call Grant as much as they could, but if they’ve ever been in touch with him, he hasn’t said.
The basement was finally repaired after the Reverend got really pushy with a couple of local contractors. So far, it’s holding up fine.
Linus is touring with another carnival, once again as Thalidomide Man. He sends us postcards all the time.
I’d almost managed to learn how to live with what I saw, until one afternoon a couple of weeks ago when I was waiting at a crosswalk for the light to change. A bird chirped. A car backfired. A child laughed somewhere. The wind whistled.
And those four notes, in succession, in the right tempo, began that tune, and I remembered Knight’s words: The notes, they’re out there. They’re everywhere. A bird, the sound of the wind, a car backfiring…the notes are all over the place. And every so often, enough of them come together in the same place, at the same, and in the right tempo, that the doorway opens and he comes shambling in. And there’s not a goddamn thing you can do to stop it.
I can’t listen to music anymore. Oh, I hear it, but I’ve trained myself to think of it as background noise, nothing to pay attention to.
It has to be this way, because I have been made aware of the sequence of notes that, if heard, recognized, and acknowledged, will bring something terrible into the world.
Of all the things I have lost in this life, it is music that I miss the most.
Ethel, God love her, has noticed that I don’t seem as “chipper” as I used to be. I smile, shrug, and tell her not to worry, that I’m fine, still seeing the doctor, still taking my medications. “You need to stay cheerful, Sam,” she says. “It’s a sad world, and you got to fight it or else it’ll eat you alive.” She has no idea. She tells me that I ought to be like the Seven Dwarves when I work, that I should whistle a happy tune. A happy tune. But I can’t remember any.
Tessellations
“The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.”
– Thomas Wolfe, “God’s Lonely Man.”
1
Make certain that all the tools you’ll need for cutting materials for your patchwork quilt are properly sharpened so as to ensure each edge-cut is as clean as possible.
* * *
There is a certain night when stories of the darkness and that which calls it home are commonplace, accompanied by a host of spirits who wait patiently for their chance to set foot upon soil where unknowing humankind shrugs off its fear with laughter and candy and the celebrating of an ancient ritual. The mouth of this night is the choice hour for the formless, nameless, restless dead as they drift in low-moaning winds, searching for something– an errant wish, an echo of joy or terror, a blind spot in someone’s peripheral vision– anything they can use to give themselves shape and dimension, however briefly. Many of them take joy in frightening the living out of the husk of their hearts; others wait quietly by the sides of those alone, a companion whose only wish is to bring a sense of friendship and comfort; still others are content to drift along, taking great pleasure in simply watching the bustle of humankind. The light that is shadowless, colorless, softer than moonglow shimmering over a snow-laden field, this light against which even the deepest darkness would appear bright as a star in supernova, this light is the place they call home.
The Romans called this night the Feast of Pomona; the Druids named it All Souls’ Day; in Mexico it is known as el Dia de los Muertos.
Most call it Hallowe’en.
The children here have a favorite story they like to tell one another as they pass down dark streets in search of houses whose porch lights bid welcome; it is a story that has been around as long as even many of the adults can remember, all about Grave-Hag and the Monster who lives with her, guarding her house from curiosity-seekers and passers-by until Hallowe’en arrives; then, say the tellers, and only then, do the two of them slip out of the house and into the night, skulking through shadows toward some hideous task....
And so it begins, this tale best told under a full autumn moon when the wind brings with it a chill that dances through the bones and the sounds from beyond the campfire grow ominously semi-human.
A sad and damaged little town.
In its center, an October-lonely cemetery.
A lone figure holding two red roses stands near a pair of graves– one still quite fresh, the other settled, comfortable, long at home– listening to the echoing laughter of children dressed as beasties and hobgoblins. A trace of unease. The smoky scent of dried leaves burning in a distant, unseen yard. A pulsing of blood through the temples. And the unseen presence of regrets both new and old about to become flesh.
2
Sort your materials into separate stacks, double check to make certain all detailing accessories have also been gathered and properly assembled into groups that correlate with their respective patches.
* * *
Marian knew that coming here first might be a mistake but, wanting to put off facing her brother, she came anyway. If the morbid tone of the phone call from Aunt Boots was any indication of what waited for her at the house, she wanted to avoid going there for as long as possible. After the paralyzing wreckage of the last few days she needed a quiet place to be alone, to find her bearings, to begin recovering from the awful thing that had happened and steel herself for whatever else was coming.
A small group of ghosts moved in the distance, bags in one hand, flashlights in the other, each giddy with anticipation of the treasures waiting– the candied apples, the chocolate bars, the popcorn balls and licorice sticks. Marian found herself envying them. The one night of the year when everyone– young and old, adult and child– cast away their fear of the dark for the sake of enjoying some good old-fashioned scares, decorating their houses with multicolored corn strung across doorways, pumpkins, stacked sheaves of straw leaning against the porch railings, even monster-masked scarecrows waiting on the steps.
The ghosts chanted: “Tonight is the night when dead leaves fly/Like witches on switches across the sky…”
Her smile widened as she remembered the path that ran next to the north side of the gate at Cedar Hill Cemetery, providing the trick-or-treaters with a shortcut through the gravestones. On many Hallowe’ens past she’d taken the shortcut herself, climbing the tiny embankment and following the path through this place of the resting dead until it emerged near North Tenth. Every town has that one special street where all the ghouls, withes, goblins, and their like head toward on Beggar’s Night, that special street where the people gave out the best goodies in town, and in the case of Cedar Hill, that street was North Tenth. At least, that’s the way it had been when Marian was a child. She wondered if that were still the case.
On those Beggars’ Nights, so long ago, as she and Alan skulked their way past the tombstones and crypts and eternal flames, she would listen for the rhythmic thudding of the dead trying to beat their way out of their coffins– Let-us-OUT! Let us OUT!— all the while gripping her brother’s hand very tightly as he spooked her with stories of warlocks and demons and fog-shrouded moors where rotting hands suddenly shot up out of graves to snatch away innocent children and drag them down into the pits of darkness where some terrible, slobbering, hairy, starving, unspeakably grouchy Thing waited. God, what fun it had been!
As the first group of ghosts disappeared into a thick patch of trees, another, smaller group of creatures emerged next to the gate and moved stealthily along; there were devils in this batch, werewolves and misshapen monstrosities followed by a princess or two who looked over their shoulders at a fast-approaching vampire brigade, who chanted around their plastic fangs: “Tonight is the night when pumpkins stare/Through sheaves and leaves everywhere...”
Not wanting to pull herself away from the sights and her memories, wishing there was some way she could avoid having to deal with any of this, Marian sighed, felt a small shudder snake down her spine, and, with a smooth deliberation she’d spent most of her adult and professional life perfecting, turned to the business at hand.
“Well, you two,” she whispered, “looks like you can meet the rest of the family now.” Then she chuckled, albeit a bit morbidly, under her breath. There was as much truth as there was displaced irony in that statement.
In the early days of Cedar Hill when the Welsh, Scotch, and Irish immigrants worked alongside the Delaware and Hopewell Indians to establish safe shipping lanes through places such as Black Hand Gorge, the Narrows, and Buckeye Lake, a devastating epidemic of cholera swept through the county. People died so fast and in such great numbers that corpses had to be collected in express wagons every eight hours. People were dying faster than healthy men could be found to bury them. But the “…plague” (as it was referred to in the journals of the time) passed, the town began to rebuild its citizenship (many widows and widowers moving beyond the barriers of their “own clans and communities” to marry and procreate), and later, in 1803, Cedar Hill Cemetery was established by the town’s remaining founders as a place to permanently inter those who had died during the epidemic. Even though bodies were scattered for nearly seventy-five miles in all directions, groups of volunteers were assembled whose duty it was to locate and identify as many of the dead as possible, bring them back to Cedar Hill, and ensure each was given a “…burial befitting one of a good Christian community.” Since most of the bodies had been buried with some sort of marker, locating them wasn’t too difficult, nor, surprisingly, was identifying them, despite the ravages of time and disease on the bodies; every “…Hill citizen of Anglo descent” had been buried with a small Bible whose inside cover bore the name of its possessor, as well as those of his or her immediate family. Once found and returned, the bodies were placed in the cemetery according to family or clan, and over the decades it remained that way, albeit by unspoken agreement; members of families directly descended from Cedar Hill’s founding fathers were buried in or as near as possible to the plats where their ancestors slept. But such were the ways of nearly two hundred years ago that a majority of people in Cedar Hill (both the cemetery and the town) were now related by ancestral blood; some within three or less generations, others quite distantly.
The graves of Marian’s parents were located in front of a small abandoned church on the cemetery grounds. The long-forgotten architect who’d designed the church had, like Marian’s dad, been an admirer of Antonio Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona. She thought of Gaudi now because he’d been something of a hero to her father, a man who laid bricks, cut lumber, and balanced beams for a living. Her parents had married on Hallowe’en nearly forty years ago (hence that day being the Big Celebration Day in the Quinlan household), then honeymooned in Barcelona where her father was awestruck by Gaudi’s masterpiece: She could still recall the wonder in his face whenever he spoke of the experience, shaking his head in amazement that the plans for the cathedral’s construction were so vast, complex, and precise it would take hundreds of years to complete.
“I wish I had that kind of talent,” he’d said. “To be able to create something like that, something that you don’t just build, but something your soul goes into, something that will go on being created hundreds of years after you’re gone, so you’ll never be forgotten.”
“You know,” said Mom, “in that pamphlet they were giving out, it said that Gaudi was partly inspired by a quilt his mother had made when he was a child. I always wanted to get back to that quilt I was working on.”
Dad laughed. “Well, then; you got your dream project and I got mine.”
A soft rustling of leaves somewhere behind told Marian that yet another band of demons and wizards and ghoulies was making its way through, but she did not turn to look; her gaze was still fixed on the crumbling church before her. Dad had always been fascinated by the church’s obvious, though less extravagant, Gaudi influence, disregarding that the structure was merely the echo of another man’s genius; from the blue marble inlay to the ominous gargoyles to the reproduction of the Virgin Mary over the rotting and sealed oak doors, the building seemed to apologize for what it wasn’t rather than boast of its own virtues. Over the years sections of the front and side walls had collapsed, revealing parts of the interior. From where Marian stood she see exposed portions of both the belfry and the organ loft. Her dad once put in a bid to renovate this church, seeing it as his one and only chance to leave behind something to equal the glory of the Sagrada Familia– a wild and improbable dream, to be sure, but one that he’d nurtured for over half his life. It helped him to pass the long nights when his back pain kept him awake and the bills outweighed the bank balance– both conditions being part and parcel of an independent contractor’s chosen occupation. The city later decided that renovating the church wasn’t as important as building a new shopping mall and so dropped the project. Still, her father had kept the family gravesites near the structure; if he couldn’t rest near his greatest triumph, he would rest near the symbol of what might have been.
Marian stared at the decaying church and sighed. Even in death her parents had to settle for second best. Their tombstones were side by side, with a third spot reserved– at his own request– for Alan.
There was no space for Marian; they’d always known she’d be the one to break away completely, to build a new life far away from this sad and tired little town that liked to call itself a city.
She hoped that her dad knew how hard she’d tried (but not all that hard, said something in the back of her mind) to get here in time.
Tried and failed.
As the beggars’ retreating footsteps crunched through the dried leaves, Marian knelt down and placed one rose on each of her parents’ graves, whispering a prayer taught to her by her mother at a time when the Mass was still spoken in Latin, the language of worship Mom had always preferred:
“Intra tua vulnera aescode me,” she said, hoping she was remembering it correctly.
She heard the approaching footsteps but paid them no mind.
“Ne permittas me separari a te. Ab hoste maligno defende me. In hora mortis meae voca me; Et jub me venire ad te, Ut cum Sanctis tuis laudem—” She saw a shadow slowly rise up behind her to stretch over the graves. Spindly, almost twig-like arms and hands; a slender, tubular trunk; and a large, rounded head with its stem jutting upward. She smiled and felt a tear slip from her eye.
For a moment, kneeling there under the entwined shadows, she was six years old again, listening as Mom read to her from L. Frank Baum’s The Marvelous Land of Oz, describing how Tip came to build Jack Pumpkinhead who would be his partner as they went in search of the Tin Woodsman and the Scarecrow. Jack Pumpkinhead, with his round eyes, three-cornered nose, and mouth like a crescent moon, living under the watchful gaze of Mombi the Sorceress. Jack had been Marian’s imaginary friend through most of her childhood, always next to her during math tests at school, sitting by her bed at night after the Friday chiller movies to guard against the creatures she feared were waiting under the bed or crouching in the closet. Only she could see him then.
Just like now.
She was so pleased to have him with her again she almost couldn’t finish the prayer.
“In sa ... sa ...”
“In saecula saeculorum,” said Jack Pumpkinhead behind her. “Amen.” “Amen,” echoed Marian. Something brushed against her shoulder, then rested there. A soft whisper, full of October melancholy: “Let’s sing our special song.”
She reached up and, not turning to look, touched the twig-fingers of Jack’s hand. She knew his being here was just a bit of childhood whimsy she had never been able to discard (after all, a good actress was supposed to be able to recall feelings and experiences to enrich her performances), but, still, it amazed her how easily she was able to slip back into the Marian of childhood and find she still fit.
The shadow softly sang: “Ol’ Jack Pumpkinhead lived on a vine/Ol’ Jack Pumpkinhead thought it was fine...”
She thought there was something different about his voice, but not wanting to ruin this wonderful surprise by analyzing it to death, she answered in song, just as she always had: “First he was small and green, then big and yellow/Ol’ Jack Pumpkinhead is a very fine fellow.”
She rose to her feet and turned to embrace him, dearest Jack who’d come back one last time to protect her from the grief and guilt she couldn’t face.
His eyes glowed a sickly orange-red, casting diseased beams through the early evening mist. He was hunched and shuddering, a soul-sick animal.
“I thought you had forgotten about me,” he said, and it was then that Marian knew what was different about his voice; it was no longer the light, happy tenor that she’d given him, it was the sound of an empty house when the door was opened, an empty bed in the middle of the night, or an empty crib that never knew an occupant; dead leaves skittering dryly across a cold autumn sidewalk; the low, mournful whistling of the wind as it passed through the branches of bare trees; it was a sound so completely, totally, irrevocably alone that hearing it just in a whisper’s instant made her long for the warmth and safety of home and hearth: even if her company there was now superfluous, at least she wouldn’t be alone as that sound.
A thin trickle of blood dripped from the corner of Jack’s mouth.
She closed her eyes, wishing away this friend from her childhood, this dear friend who had been so horribly changed and misshapen—
–but why?
She felt the twigs that were his fingers grip her wrists. “I’ve really missed you, Marian. Please don’t be afraid. It’s so cold here, so lonely where everyone is sleeping and you have no friends.”
She opened her eyes, knowing– praying– that his return to her was just an hallucination brought on from lack of sleep the past three days. Maybe she’d just seen one too many houses where the children had constructed horrible Hallowe’en effigies from straw and old clothes, then set them on the front porch to scare the monsters away.
One of Jack’s twig-fingers broke through her flesh. She felt the warmth of her blood as it seeped out, staining her blouse’s white sleeve.
Jack was wearing one of Dad’s old shirts, the one Marian had bought him for Christmas last year.
“Jack Pumpkinhead is still a fine fellow,” he whispered to in that voice. “The quilt’s almost finished. And we put a light in the window for you.” The wind grew stronger. One of the bells in the church steeple swung back, then forth, ringing twice. “Please come home now,” said Jack. “You’re needed.” Her blood was soaking into the bark of his hand. Her legs began to buckle as Jack leaned forward to cover her lips with his crescent mouth in a welcome-home kiss.
Something moved in the distance; another group of tiny spirits broke through the bushes on their way to claim sugary treasures, singing: “A goblin lives in OUR house, in OUR house, in OUR house, a goblin lives in OUR house, all the year round...”
Marian broke away, slipped, and fell on top of her father’s grave, half expecting his desiccated hands—
–Let us OUT! Let us OUT!– – to break through the soil and grab her. The church bell rang once more, a brassy chime, Mom’s voice singing to her when she was young and sick with fever. The children’s laughter lingered as the bell fell silent. Autumn-dried leaves blew past her, a few clinging to the hem of her dress.
Jack Pumpkinhead began to fade; color went first, draining away until Jack and everything surrounding him looked like part of an old sepia-toned photograph, disappearing very slowly, an image retained on the inside of the eyelid for an instant, then gone.
Rising unsteadily to her feet, Marian saw the second set of footprints that followed her own and stopped at the edge of the graves.
No. It wasn’t him. It couldn’t have been. Someone must have been here before me and I just didn’t notice the prints, that’s all.
As convincing an argument as it was, it still didn’t stop her from half-sprinting out of the cemetery to her car. She needed to rest but couldn’t until she saw her brother. Maybe seeing Alan after all this time would help to purge her of whatever had made her resurrect Jack.
She started the car, saw the ghostly effigies resting on the porches of nearby homes, and noticed the small gash on the side of her wrist.
Some of her blood dripped onto the steering wheel.
“Goddammit,” she whispered, bandaging the wound with her handkerchief. “Welcome home.” Then, trying to force away the image of Jack’s glowing eyes and the mournful echo of his voice, drove away toward the place she once called home.
