| |
––––––––
It was a Wednesday in October, and the world was changing. The sunflowers, so polite in these autumn downpours, tipped their hats and nodded their heads and shook their hands in the flowing rain. All the while above their heads, whispers trickle down from the trees above, whispers of leave-taking, leaves making last-minute plans before going to their winter homes. And somewhere there in the grove behind the house, waiting for the leaves to fall and for the limbs to cry out in ice-cold agony, creaking and snapping, something watching, waiting for the sun's resignation as it began traveling quicker and quicker through the sky, wishing not to spend one-moment longer suspended on display.
The days grew shorter, leaving all manner of life to scramble, skitter, and hurry about their biological duties, in constant preparation for the coming season. The sun fell across the sky, dragging its belly across the earth. The ducks all flew south, the cold winds billowed in from the north, and in the grove behind the house, something waited.
Elriah stretched across the porch of the house, soaking in what heat he could from the drab, miserable sun. He watched without much interest, as the last pollinators of the year finished up their duties and prepared for another long winter. He stretched himself over the ledge of the porch, paws dangling down to the flowerbed, and greeted the bees with a heavy, but friendly slap.
Of course, Elriah came nowhere near hitting them, instead just causing a commotion amongst the lilies. Here, his friends had been busy working away all summer while Elriah had spent his lounging in the sun, stalking through the fields, and catching and killing any rodents that came near the porch. The bees, however, kept on working, almost supposing that the protective instincts of Elriah were not expressed towards the house, but to the bees themselves. For it is amongst the bees that Elriah spent most of his time due to their contagious, and persistent laughter.
"The bees are loud, and their laughter makes my bones tingle, so busy working away", Elriah often thought.
––––––––
May was walking home from school. The trees shed their leaves along the sidewalk, the wind blowing them into the road, and the passing cars dashing them into vortexes that blew across the lane. May stopped in front of the window of Chan’s diner and laughed at the girl she saw standing on the other side. Her hair, a tangled spider’s web matted with dead leaves, pine straw, and one loose, yellow ribbon being tugged by the wind. The girl in the diner laughed with her.
She was glad to be leaving the summer behind. No longer would she wrestle with her frizzy hair on the early summer mornings, trying to get all those rambunctious strands to stand in line and obey. It was September, and with the cool breeze in the air, the crunching and crashing of the dying trees, May eagerly awaited her 15th birthday on October 31st. To this, her thoughts were turned as she walked down St Anne, through the town square, down across the river to St Simone.
Once on the street, she kept a watchful eye out for any early decorations that had found their way to the stoops and porches of her neighbors. So far, few were in the spirit, but May knew in time that St Simone would be alive with all things foul and wicked, for not a year passed that terror found itself into the hearts and homes of those in Greendale.
As long as anyone could remember, the fall and winter here in Greendale brought out the worst of the mischievous, the boldest of the devils, and the most deceptive and troublemaking of the rascals, ghouls, and goblins. All her young life, May felt that Greendale existed between two worlds, a limbo between the dulled grays of reality and the land of shadows that stretched out far beyond the veil. Here, in this between place, life would seem nearly as normal as any other town to any passersby but those that had lived there knew that something not quite definable lingered and idled amongst the alleys of the town, in the dilapidated old factory district near the western tracks, in the fields stretching far beyond the city limits.
In fact, May was so compelled to believe that through her little town, down St Anne, through the town square, down across the river to St Simone and out throughout the county, was the left-handed path, a conviction she held and grew ever frightened of as the seasons changed. However, this was not something she could prove, but only a feeling that was enforced in her on those evening walks home from school after choir practice. Choir was always after school on Thursdays and depending on the rising and falling of the cascading tones, was typically over by 5:30, but often ran later as May and the other girls seemed to have lost their notes. Often, May found herself walking through the streets of Greendale in the setting sun, always trying to stay one step ahead from the shadows that reached out before her, attempting to swallow her whole.
––––––––
On such evenings May found that she was often preoccupied with her future. She always liked to plan. If all went according to her machinations, and she excelled in her yearly exams, she would be on her way to graduating a year early. In that year following graduation May was hoping to spend some time in New Orleans with her uncle Amos. Amos had lived in New Orleans since before May was born and for most of his life, worked as an English teacher for a small private school there in the city. However, May was not interested in any of this. May’s interest lay in her uncle’s lack of guidance and guardianship that failed to be expressed and imposed on him as a child, and later on his children as a father. May knew that when she visited her uncle, it would be nothing like her home in Greendale, where she must abide by a strict routine, set bedtimes, and the ever-imposing eye of parental guardianship. In New Orleans, she would be free to come and go as she pleased and indulge her curiosities in all manners and people without the fear of punishment from her eagerly manic parents.
After a year with Uncle Amos in New Orleans, May was thinking about New York if all things worked out correctly. While the industry itself did not exist in Greendale, she had always had a fascination and wonder for the world of fashion that she caught glimpses of here and there in magazines at the library and on her occasional trips to the drive-in. She would imagine herself in the finest wardrobe, clothes that fit tight to her hips, sleeves that did not need rolling back, shirts and tops that set perfectly at her waist. May knew she was a pretty girl but May dreamed of being beautiful.
It was on such a night as this, as May walked hurriedly down the left-handed path, away from the shadows that followed, her mind lost in the dense fog of the future, that she felt the hair on her neck stand up, the goose-pimples rise like the dead from her arms, and a lightning bolt of fear jolt through her heart. She had found herself near the end of St Anne, standing in front of Mike Shirley’s convenience store. Mikes was closed because it was Wednesday. Mike was never open on Wednesdays. Yet, as her heart shook like a lightning rod and her hair whispered along her neck, through the glass of Mike’s store she saw over the counter two orbs, reflecting the glowing neon “closed” light that hung suspended in the front door.
In that moment, May could see the orbs were suspended in a mask of death: gaunt, sunken cheeks, a bloodless face, and thin lips, all outlined by whisps of hair that seemed to be falling and shedding as she looked on in surprise. In a single instant, the luminous orbs blinked, and the mask began moving towards the front of the store and with the illumination from the setting sun cast through the window, May could see its sickly pale body wrapped in old children’s clothes that were tight against the masks’ body, and in horror May began to scream. Her own voice was so startling in the quiet autumn evening that May jumped, her folder of sheet music leaping from her hand, dashing itself upon the sidewalk, and dispersing like the leaves. Instinctually she dropped down to grab as many of the papers as she could before darting back up, her eyes locked on the shop window, and in a moment of fear and panic, she screamed again, for the shop was empty and all she saw before her was the girl with tangled, unkempt hair.
––––––––
It was a year ago that May had seen the mask and glowing orbs in Mike’s shop. She had ran, her heart beating in her throat, to Mr. Shirley’s home where she banged on his door relentlessly. When he had finally came to the door, she was nearly in tears.
“What’s the matter with you May? Take a deep breath girl and talk to me!”, Mr. Shirley had grasped her by her shoulders attempting to calm her down.
“Your shop!”, she cried “There’s something in your shop!”
“Oh Christ. Is the Jacobs boy breaking in again? Last time I assumed it was just the mischief of children but if he’s gone off and done it again after I let it slide then by god his father is going to get a word”, and in no moment of hesitation, Mr. Shirley grabbed his coat from the hanger behind the door and stepped outside, closing the door behind him, and headed off down the street toward the Jacobs’s families house, away from his shop.
“No Mr. Shirley! It wasn’t Tommy that I saw. You’re going the wrong way, you’ve got to go back to your shop!”, May began to beg and plead but Mike Shirley was set in his beliefs: once a child is a troublemaker, a troublemaker he will always be and the only child in this town that would break into his shop was the only child that ever had, Tommy Jacobs.
Despite her pleading, Mr. Shirley wouldn’t listen. He went and gave Ted Jacobs a piece of his mind that night and told him he better keep his son Tommy away from Mike’s Shop. Yet, Mr. Shirley couldn’t understand why May was still so worked up about the whole incident. So, Mike did what any well-meaning man would, he went and knocked on May’s door and had a word with her parents in which he accused their daughter of trying to spread panic with bizarre and quite unentertaining tales of boogeymen and monsters breaking into his store.
For this, May found herself on the receiving end of ridicule and punishment from her parents, who seemed heartbroken to hear that their daughter, an honor roll student and active member of the choir, was spreading rumors in an attempt to frighten local townspeople, as well as lying, for reasons unknown to them, to try and protect the Jacobs boy.
“We thought you had outgrown such childish fancies”, her father had sighed dejectedly, “You are far too old to be spreading such nonsense about ghouls and monsters, have you never considered how frightening that could be to your little brother, or how damaging such lies can be when you’re trying to protect a good for nothing troublemaker like Tommy Jacobs?”.
May’s father ashed his cigarette and with his thumb and middle finger, massaged his temples.
“Dear, maybe we should have her go stay with Ms. Ursula once she’s back in town this year. Rarely has a child spent time with her and come back making the same mistakes they had made before visiting her. I think Ursula could really do her some good”, May’s mother said as she was glancing up from her magazine, “think about Sheryl Pennington! That girl used to be a firecracker just ready to go off and then she spent that winter with Ms. Ursula! Now look at her, she’s off to Harvard and I can guarantee she will be graduating top of her class. You know the Pennington’s are so proud of her, how could they not be with a girl like that!”.
No matter what May said, her parents would not budge. She had been found guilty under their dominion and even as she begged and pleaded, they would not listen.
“May, you are being ridiculous. A witch? What has gotten into you!” her father smothered the ember and began to rise, “I think you’re being too easily influenced by those drive-in films. Do you hear yourself? The instance that Ms. Ursula is back in town you will apologize for such slander! Ms. Ursula, a witch, my god I have heard some unruly talk from children but what has gotten into you!”.
And with that, he stalked out of the room. It was settled. Ms. Ursula would arrive in town the following week if she kept to her annual schedule, and May would be sent to stay with her through most of the winter months. May couldn’t stand the thought and began to wonder how she could get out of town in less than a week. What would her parents think then? She would not apologize because she firmly believed she had said nothing wrong. After all, it was well known amongst the children, Ms. Ursula was a witch.
––––––––
The first cool breeze found its way through the grove, up to St Simone and out across the river to the town of Greendale. The sun began to slide towards the horizon and with each passing day it spent less and less time over the quiet town. All the while the town began preparing for festivities. The pumpkin patch was preparing for its busiest time of year and the local theater opened its costume shop to the town to rent all kinds of costumes for Halloween day. In only three weeks to the day, Greendale would be overrun by ghouls, goblins, zombies, pirates, werewolves, princesses, Amazonians, and all manner of things wicked and fae.
The house at the end of St Simone had lay empty all year despite its constant upkeep. The grass was never overgrown, the paint on the wraparound porch was always fresh, the garden was always full in bloom with all manner of lilies, roses, sunflowers, daffodils, and all types of seasonal wildflowers. To those who knew no better, the house in the corner lot must be inhabited year-round by a true, well-to-do homemaker. After all, how else could the black cat, always seen lounging around the porch, be so well-fed and cared for? There was no mail overflowing the mailbox, no shutters in need of repair, and no leaves that needed raking. In fact, the corner lot was the most pristine and maintained piece of property in all of Greendale, east of the river that is.
This home belonged to Ms. Ursula Brenning, a long-time inhabitant of Greendale, who, in the summer months, would stay with her sister in Ohio. Ursula in her old age could not bear the heat of the oppressive summers in the South. She had been on these annual pilgrimages for years now and no one in town could remember a time when she ever spent a summer here in the town of Greendale. Before her long absences from Greendale, Ursula had been a schoolteacher at the St Anne high school, teaching biology, anatomy, and elementary chemistry courses. While she had been retired for over a decade now, most of the townsfolk could remember those daunting mornings, walking into Ms. Brenning’s classroom and bracing themselves for cutting open frogs, turtles, and on the final occasion for every year, cats.
Her classroom was a well-oiled machine, where she spared no rod and spoiled no child. Ursula believed in her strict approach to education and child-rearing, that she was preparing the children for the cruel world that faced them upon graduation. Ursula did not believe that this world was our Eden, but a jungle to be tamed and dominated. Ursula believed in hard work, preparation, and action. She believed that it was every child’s duty to live up to their full potential.
Since her retirement, Ursula had not entirely withdrawn herself from the communal position of teacher and mentor. Parents throughout the town would seek her advice in those autumn and winter months, begging her for any secret left forgotten that could help them straighten their children out and set them on the path to success. A path that Ursula knew well, and under her strictest guidance, she would take in local children for an experience quite contrarian to those of summer camp. All the parents knew that if they couldn’t control their children and guide them to the right path of success, Ursula, much like with themselves when they were her students, cutting open the chest cavities of cats, could guide their own children to a life of hard work, duty, and diligence.
In the coming winter following May’s scare at Mike’s Shop, May was spared a trip to Ms. Ursula’s. While her parents intended to make an example of trouble-rousers, they could not manage to do so at the expense of a long-planned family vacation to New Orleans to spend the late weeks of November and early weeks of December with Uncle Amos. May turned 15 just weeks before the trip but due to her wicked charades about monsters in Mikes Shop, she was grounded and spent her 15th birthday at home, no costumes, no ghouls, no candy. By the time she was in New Orleans, she had nearly forgotten about her experience that September, walking home in the setting sun, the mask suspended in ghoulish fright. In fact, May was just glad to be in New Orleans, having avoided spending the winter with Ms. Ursula, and with her parents distracted with Uncle Amos’s recounts of the year, she was able to come and go as she pleased, for the most part, as she explored the city.
Yet, Ms. Ursula Brenning did not have to go without her calling that winter. Following the events that transpired, with Mike Shirley knocking on Ted Jacobs’s door, the Jacobs decided that despite their own resistance to Ms. Brenning as children, she was exactly who they needed to help set their son Tommy on a productive and healthy path to success. Elriah had spent the ending of the summer lounging around the porch but as the cold came in he found himself more and more in the crawl spaces beneath the house or curled up deep within the gardens flowerbed. The cold wind and the long shadows of winter had come creeping up from the grove behind the house and on one chilly evening, the lights on the porch blinked on, the front door creaked open, and bags were dropped with a heavy thud in the parlor. Elijah shot out of the flowerbed at the sound of the door, running up the stairs to the porch and darting towards the opening into the house. Right as he approached the door, his paws crossing over the welcome mat, the door was slammed shut, and in a mocking resonance, so too did all the shutters slam shut across the windows to the house.
Elriah sat, pawing briefly at the door, then sighed. He walked back down the stairs, crossed around to the side of the house, and made his way through the broken lattice leading underneath the house. The morning came with the rising of the dull winter sun, and through the latticework, Elriah saw Ted and Tommy Jacobs walking up the road, down the driveway, and up to the front door of the house. Elriah heard a knock, knock, knocking on the front door, a shuffling inside the house, and then the loud creaking of the hinges.
“Sad”, thought Elriah, “The creaking has come so early this year, and I’m afraid the cries will keep me up all night.”
––––––––
“Hey there Tommy, you been having a good time with Ms. Brenning?”.
Tommy stared passively into Mr. Shirley’s eyes and a smile began to creep into the corners of his mouth. Mike Shirley felt angry, then, somewhat guilty. He was sure the boy’s winter break was nowhere near as exciting as the boy could have expected if he hadn’t spent those few weeks in the house at the end of St. Simone. But Mike also knew that he couldn’t let a second break-in slide.
“Look kid, I’m sure you’ve got all sorts of awful feelings for me but you’ll thank me for talking to your parents when you’re a little older. That kind of life just doesn’t play out well. Trust me. I’ve got this brother, older than me by a few years, went and wasted it all just for a lousy T.V. and stereo speakers. Now he’s got his whole life planned out for him by the state of Alabama. Honestly, if someone had gotten to our parents when we was kids, maybe it wouldn’t have worked out like that. I swear it Tommy, think what you will now, but you’ll thank me later”.
By now, Mike was uncomfortable. Talking always made Mike uncomfortable. He always came to it so easily but no matter what he said, by the end of it, he just felt like he never got the car in gear. And Mike could only assume his talking was making Tommy uncomfortable too given his silence. Tommy continued to stare into Mike’s eyes, a half-smile on his lips as if he was dreaming of life all planned out.
“It’s ok Mr. Shirley. Ms. Ursula helped set me straight. I’m sorry for what I did and I won’t do it again, I swear on it.”
And with that, Tommy picked his soda off the counter and stepped out of Mike’s Store. Tommy meandered down the road heading back towards the town square, where he would cut back east towards his home. All the while, Tommy hummed quietly to himself, a song that he didn’t quite know the words to, but somehow couldn’t forget the jingle. As he hummed it, Tommy poured over his memories trying to find where in his life the song came from, and just exactly what those words behind the jingle were. And anyone in Greendale who passed Tommy in the street that afternoon would also find within themselves some ancestral-like memory of a once-forgotten song.
Here they come one by one,
to the shadows in setting sun,
and there they stay to spend their days,
feeding off the great oak vine.
But never missed, the children went,
and burrowed down in summer bliss,
and while away no hint would find
a gleam within their parents’ eye.
So back at home, deep in their beds,
sharing food with their friends,
or studying late at night,
no one could see that they weren’t right.
That year, May found herself balancing on a precipice that divided the mundane from the supernatural. The long months that followed the Shirley Shop event left May in occasional profound confusion. Most days were spent as usual, working through schoolwork, choir practice, pouring over fashion magazines, and as of recently, working on her own collection of designs inspired by what she was seeing in magazines, movies, and her own imagination. In just a couple of years, May would be going off to college, and she hoped by then she might have a portfolio of her own designs that might help her get into school somewhere in New York or California.
The spring and summer seemed to fly by as they always did, May and her friends spending every afternoon and weekend riding bikes, playing in the river, getting sick from ice cream, and staying up all night to talk about fashion, boys, and their futures. Yet, as with every year in Greendale, as the seasons began to change, and the cool winds found their way down from the cold North, goosebumps would find homes on the arms and legs of young boys and girls. Again, May found herself thinking of the incident at Mr. Shirley’s shop just a year ago.
She couldn’t be convinced that the person she saw in Mike’s Shop was Tommy Jacobs, she knew Tommy was a bit of a troublemaker but if it was really him in the shop that October day, something was wrong with him. If it was Tommy, he was sick with something. Yet, her feelings of uneasiness were not lessened that Spring when seeing Tommy again at school. Tommy had completely changed and left May and all of her classmates scratching their heads.
Until that Spring, Tommy was a delinquent. The list of Tommy's escapades could be enclosed in a scroll that when opened would unfurl, reaching far to the ground and dragging behind the reader like a tail. Tommy Jacobs was a terror to his classmates and May or anyone else could list a handful of offenses that would set anyone in alarm including but not limited to: Tommy pissing in the football and basketball trophies stored in the trophy case in the gym, taking the locks off the bathroom stalls, defacing anti-drug campaigns around the school, checking the school parking lot for any unlocked car doors, and of course, the one (perhaps two) occasion where Tommy broke into Mr. Shirley’s Shop to steal some low-end electronics. This was the Tommy that everyone in Greendale expected.
However, following his Winter break with Ms. Ursula Brenning, Tommy had become an entirely different person. Tommy was now on the honor roll, he had joined the wrestling team and had quickly become a favorite among his classmates and coaches, and he even started staying late after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays to help tutor other students in geometry and algebra. A year ago, if you asked Tommy what he wanted to do after high school, he would just laugh. Now, Tommy says he’s going to go to MIT and become some type of engineer. His teachers were impressed with his growth, his new friends on the wrestling team thought he was a great sport, and suddenly for the first time in Tommy's tenure at school, some of the girls in his grade were actually interested in talking to him, despite his history of delinquency and rabblerousing.
After school when walking home on a Friday afternoon, May saw Tommy walking through town and decided to stop and talk to him. As she approached, Tommy had a huge beaming smile on his face.
“Well hey there May, how’s it going?”
“Hey Tommy, can we talk for a second?”
Tommy nodded, all the while his shark smile never fading. Without anything yet to be said, May already felt uneasy. Usually, Tommy would have told her in not so simple of a way, to get lost. But May wouldn’t let this bizarre change in character deter her from what she needed to say.
“Look, I’m just going to come out and say it. I’m sorry for everything that happened with Mike’s Shop.”, she wrung her hands, “I swear I didn’t say anything about you to Mr. Shirley, he just made some wild accusations and the next thing I know, you’re getting forced to spend your summer at Ms. Brenning’s all because I...”
May didn’t know how to say it, she didn’t know exactly how to talk about what she experienced that afternoon without sounding like she had lost her marbles. As she sat there struggling for the right words, Tommy interrupted her.
“Oh no biggie! Shit happens ya know, and honestly, I enjoyed my winter break with Ms. Brenning. She really helped me get some perspective on it all and I’m glad to be turning things around. So don’t mention it May. But look, I gotta get going. I promised Jason I would help him after school with some college applications. I’ll see you later May.”
And with that, Tommy turned without giving May a chance to say anything else, and quickly began walking away toward St. Simone. May was somewhat in shock, she didn’t get to say half of what she wanted to say or ask any of the questions she had intended to ask. Yet still, May could feel something was very different about Tommy while he was talking and the final nail in the coffin was Tommy walking away towards St. Simone, the opposite direction of Jason’s home.
She watched him go for a moment, then, after he turned the corner heading east, with great hesitancy, she began to follow him. She kept her distance so as not to alert him to her presence, feeling like she was in an old spy movie, and as she followed and watched, she noticed Tommy even walked differently than before. The once brooding, slouched young man, filled to the brim with discontentment and anger towards his world, now walked with his head high, shoulders back, and energy in every step. As he made his way across town, Tommy led May to the exact place she was afraid of, down St. Simone, right towards Ms. Brenning's house.
However, May knew, as was usual to this time of year, that Ms. Brenning would not be back in town for another 2 or 3 months, and as she thought of this, she watched Tommy cut across Ms. Brenning's yard and around to the back of the house. The house stood as pristine as ever, flowerbed neatly kept, paint in perfect shape, and there on the porch, the little black cat switching its tail back and forth like the rhythm of a metronome.
May crept quietly around the house, following the path that Tommy had taken. The cat on the porch meowed at her as she walked by and as she passed, the cat rose to follow her, meowing all the while. And once May had reached the back of the lot, she could see Tommy in the distance, walking towards the grove of Oak trees that stood in congregation far off in the field behind the house. May waited for a moment, crouching near the corner of the porch so if Tommy looked back he wouldn’t see her, and at that moment, there came a loud banging from inside Ms. Ursula Brenning’s house.
May ran. She ran so far, for so long, with such speed, that her heart had beat her brains to mush. She had collapsed on a bench not far from Mike’s Shop and sat there, violently trying to catch her breath. Her lungs ached, her feet hurt from pounding the pavement, and she felt like she was on the verge of a manic breakdown. Around this time, Mike Shirley was walking by and saw her there.
“What you got today May? Seen some more ghouls hiding in my shop?” Mike laughed and kept on strolling by, completely unaware of the fear that had settled like a cat in the lap of May’s heart. May was barely holding herself together as her mind raced over and over what had happened at Ms. Brenning’s house. At the same time she watched Tommy enter into the grove, a loud THUD, THUD THUD, came banging from the back door of Ms. Brenning’s home. The sound had caused May to jump up from where she crouched by the porch in such a way that she scraped her knee across the cornerstone support of the house and tripped over the brick barrier of the flowerbed. She lay in crumpled flowers as once again, the banging echoed off the door. She sat motionless in fright, wondering if someone was inside Ms. Brenning’s home, why were they banging on the door? If they wanted to come out, why didn’t they just come out? May was speechless and though she wanted to call out to whoever was on the other side, the words would not come. After what felt like hours, she stood and made her way toward the door and tried to open it, but the handle was firmly locked. The thudding continued, but with each repetition the intervals were longer and the intensity weaker. While the door wouldn’t budge, May peaked through the windows that stood like guardians on either side of the door trying to see who, or what, was throwing itself again and again against the backdoor. The regret seeped into May’s heart immediately, for when she pressed herself against the class, something on the other side pressed against it as well. Her heart jumped to her throat as the cold hand of fear rested itself on her shoulders, sending chills down her spine to resound off her heart like lightning.
May couldn’t believe her eyes. There in the window, passed the reflection of the girl with messy hair, were two floating red orbs again suspended in a mask of terror that was far too familiar to her. The skin was pale with hints of sickly green colors and covered with deep pockmarks and sores. The lips were shriveled and pulled tight around the teeth while hair hung down in strands that seemed to be constantly falling and separating. Cheeks were sunk deep, shoulders slouched low with arms dangling passed the knees, all wrapped in clothes that were stained and stretched and torn and filth covered. On the other side of the window was the figure she saw in Mike’s Shop, yet at the same time, it was something completely different. Even in her terror she could tell that behind the glass, with glowing red orbs for eyes, was Tommy Jacobs, clawing and banging and throwing himself against the doors and windows, and now with a ghostly howl, screaming, screaming incoherent words that sounded like a child begging to be set free from torment. May was like a phantom, frozen and speechless and floating, and fleeing as fast as she could down off the porch. She tripped and fell as something grabbed her leg as she turned around the side of the house. She picked herself up in a flash, kicking at whatever had caught her leg, and glancing back only momentarily to see a pale, bony hand, that stuck out from beneath the crawlspace, and there, two red eyes glaring at her. Howling filled the air, and May’s legs carried her like the wind away from the back lot of St Simone.
Many people know the feeling that is the torturous scar of traumatic fear and pain, the pain that lingers deep inside their psyches and finds a home amongst all their joy and hope and loss. Such a scar often alters our perceptions of time, turning days into months, months into minutes, and years into hours, leaving us to linger in a purgatory of experience, stuck between the future and the past. Two weeks had passed since May found herself running like a shooting star from the back lot of St. Simone and all the while time stood still. The days moved about her like dead leaves blowing across the pavement. Class, friends, choir practice, all these things came and went while May, like a ghost, idled through time, stuck deep inside her head.
If anyone in town were to be asked about May that week, the answers would be similar. Clearly, May must be sick with something, feeling so awful that a shadow had settled over her heart and left her wrestling with the aches of maturity, the pain of growing. Whatever was bothering May would pass because May was an excellent student, a wonderful daughter, and a kind friend. She was on the right path and had been for years, and in no time, as the whole town knew, May would fly the coop and begin her life as some fashion designer in some faraway metropolitan area, eating food that no one here in Greendale had ever heard of.
In truth, May’s mind had become a bog where she wandered in search of dry ground but could not find her way in the growing fog. She had seen Tommy at school on occasion since she followed him towards the grove, but since then it seemed like he tried to avoid her. At school and around town, he had no red eyes, no putrefied skin, and no rotting clothes. And while she found herself unable to sleep, seeing glowing eyes in the darkness of her room, she was unable to speak of what happened that day. She was unable to reach out to anyone but even more so, unable to forget what she saw at the Brenning house. Fall was settling itself like a blanket over Greendale, the leaves falling from their branches and blanketing the town from the fields, across the river, to the town center. In just a week’s time, Ms. Ursula Brenning would be expected to arrive home and prepare for her brief annual tenure at the Brenning residence. All the while, unbeknownst to her friends and family, May had been preparing to do the most out-of-character act she had ever done in her life.
May didn’t sleep much anymore because whatever it was that banged behind the walls of the Brenning home now banged behind the walls of her mind, keeping her awake throughout the night, and while May feared to tell anyone for fear of finding herself in the Brenning home with Ms. Ursula that winter, she was not entirely opposed to acting on her own, which is exactly what she planned to do. Since that day near the end of the summer, May had followed Tommy on a couple of occasions, and every time she watched him walk back through the field, to the grove of trees on the back lot of St. Simone. While she didn’t know exactly what it all meant, she knew there was something about that grove of trees that was connected to the Brenning home and whatever it was that she saw through the windows of the shop and the house, whether it was Tommy or something else altogether. So, May, in an attempt to take control of her fear, waited late one evening when her parents were asleep, and most of the town shut up for the night, the streetlights on, to make her way down St. Simone to the back lot with the grove of oak trees.
That evening, May had packed her backpack with a screwdriver, a hammer, and a flashlight. She crept carefully out her window to not awaken her parents, and slowly made her way to St. Simone, following it down to the last lot, avoiding the light of the streetlamps as best she could. She went in silence, like a spirit, across the property line, crossing to the back of the house, heading towards the grove of trees. The night was still with the chorus of cicadas and crickets chirping and shrilling away while the moons illuminated the field ahead of her. A steady wind was blowing in from the east, and before her, the trees in the grove waved and bent and shook their heads in evening songs, adding their own voices of rustling leaves to the nightly chorus. At the edge of the grove, May stopped, feeling as she had so often felt that year, her heart like a lightning rod, lit up with fear. The grove was dense and the darkness pushed in around her so much so that she could no longer separate the other from herself as the shadows swallowed her whole. As she took her first step into the grove, she finally lit her flashlight, now hidden entirely from the street and the neighboring homes and began to make her way through the dense undergrowth surrounding the Oak trees.
As she moved slowly through the grove, looking for anything out of the ordinary, she noticed the most peculiar thing. All the noise from the nightly chorus which had resounded in a symphony of the dark had quieted to an eerie stillness the further she found herself within the grove. The air sat heavy and still, the trees stood motionless like silent watchers, and the crickets and cicadas had gone silent. All May could hear were the crunching of dead leaves under her footfall, and the slow and steady rhythm of her own breath. She had not gone far into the grove before she realized the vegetation was clearing up, the trees growing further and further from each other, and finally, she passed through a point that gave way to a large, circular, opening within the trees and there in the middle of that opening, stood a massive Oak tree, so massive that it must be older than any tree she had ever seen
The Great Oak was so massive that in linking hands it would take nearly 5 or 6 of May’s classmates to wrap themselves around the trunk. The bark was dark near the base, but on many branches further up, it seemed the tree was dying, where the bark had fallen off and in the moonlight, many branches reflected like pale fingers reaching up to the sky. The grass beneath the Oak was slick with perspiration and as May reached her hand to the trunk itself, she realized the trunk was also slick to the touch. She pulled her hand back, her fingertips now coated in a sticky, wet substance, and brought them to her nose. It was a sweet smell, almost like syrup, yet here it was covering the lower half of this massive Oak. She wiped her hands on her jeans as she began to look around the base of the tree, shining her light this way and that. As she reached the opposite side of the tree, her mind couldn’t make sense of what her eyes were seeing.
A massive scar cut deep and wide into the base of the oak where the ground seemed to slant down and away into a bottomless pit that opened deep within the trunk. The flashlight beam bounced all around the scar and down into the gaping maw that seemed to go on and on in an endless retreat where her flashlight did no good. May felt like she was going to be sick. The smell that rose from the pit was sickeningly sweet and despite the fear rising deep in her belly, begging to burst from her throat, she swallowed it down and began to make her way into the abyss. If this was where Tommy kept coming to, May wanted to know why.
The odor grew stronger and stronger as she made her way through the narrow tunnel, its walls slick with the same sweet sap that was on the trunk of the tree. She knew not how far she had traveled down the passage for her fear had frozen her heart and her mind and it was all she could do to place one foot in front of the other. She went on and on, each step finding herself more and more intoxicated by the sickeningly sweet odor that surrounded her. At last, the passageway opened up, and May found herself stepping into a large open cavern that was deep beneath the oak and here the odor was the strongest.
While May’s eyes absorbed all that her flashlight illuminated, her brain could not process what it meant. She was in a large cavern and sitting in the middle of the cavern were chairs and a few small tables all arranged in the same direction. They faced the back wall of the cavern, where carved deep into the wall was an oblong cubby, nearly rectangular in shape, with some type of shroud hanging down from above, concealing what was within. The walls of the cavern were covered in thick roots, the roots of the oak digging deep into the earth and dripping from those roots, the sticky aromatic sap, which dripped to the floor of the cavern, causing each step May took to be like stepping into thick mud.
May approached the cubby in the back wall and without hesitation, snatched down the shroud. In an instant, she tumbled back, reeling away, her right foot sinking into the slick sap and falling backward onto the floor of the cavern. May scrambled to her feet, and backed towards the tunnel, her eyes glued to the cubby. It was deathly silent aside from the soft, wet, padding of May’s feet against the cavern floor as she eased her way backward. As she passed into the tunnel, she turned and ran as quickly as she could, slipping and falling all the way back to the surface. May felt she must be in a dream. She must have fallen into the dream a year ago outside of Mike Shirley’s shop and still not awoken. She scampered as quickly as she could out of the dark cavern, all the while the image plastered against her mind. Behind the shroud, in a damp, sticky cocoon, dripping with sap and covered in earth, lay Ms. Ursula Brenning, eyes opened and a slight smile on her lips.
As she emerged from the tunnel, the Oak lingered over her, bending its pale fingers down to rest gently in her hair and on her shoulders. She fled from the grove as quickly as she could and noticed it was not so quiet anymore, the wind had picked up and the gusts had sent the trees into a ritual dance, shedding what remained of their leaves in a crescendo rustling and creaking of branches. She ran in the dark because she had dropped her flashlight in the tunnel as she ran and fought against the sap and the earth that stuck to her on all sides. As she broke through the grove, she came across the field to Ms. Brenning's house. Her mind was numb with fear, yet still she found herself setting about the task she had intended to accomplish. With the wind at her back, she hit the back porch like a meteor, slinging her backpack to the ground, and tearing from it the hammer and screwdriver.
Her faculties were beyond thought now, and instead her body ran through the motions she imagined she would take this dark evening, long before she discovered what lie in the grove. With extreme force, driven by fear and mania, she drove the screwdriver into the crack between the door and the frame, right below the lock, and using the screwdriver as a chisel, hammered it from the bottom again and again and again as the frame began to crack and the lock began to give away. Who’s to say all those movies didn’t teach me anything, a voice thought in the back of May’s mind. Again and again she hammered, lost in the rhythm of the THUD THUD THUD that resonated against the door but this time, from her own hands, and finally with one last blow a great CRACK resounded from within and the door gave way in such a quick moment that May in a startled jump, dropped the hammer and screwdriver to the ground.
––––––––
The door eased open upon its hinges and deep within the Brenning house, all was dark, still, and silent. With her flashlight lost, May waited until her eyes adjusted to the darkness and began to ease her way into the home. With each step the floorboards creaked underneath her with a low moaning sound and a following sigh of relief as she moved each foot forward. The house was not very big, and she had found her way through it in little to no time and in all that she observed, there was nothing suspect within this home. Much like the outer appearance of the house, the inside was immaculate. The kitchen was spotless, the office was orderly with two massive bookshelves filled to bursting with books on anatomy, chemistry, biology, and many other texts that May could not even comprehend. As she began to thumb through some of these, she realized they were in a language completely unknown to her, the letters of an entirely unknown tongue that neither seemed to be Arabic, or Hebrew, or Persian, or Russian, or any other language she could imagine that excluded western script.
The bedroom was neat, the bed made, the vanity dresser nicely polished and the mirror perfectly clean. It was here, in the bedroom, as she looked at the girl with the messy hair, that she saw a doorknob seated into the wall opposite the closet. Turning, she saw the knob set firm within the wall but no definition that outlined a door. She went closer to it and saw there was a padlock set below it that to May’s surprise, was broken. Turning and pulling on the knob, a section of the wall opened outward revealing a staircase receding steeply downwards. The darkness was consuming and looking around, May took a candle from the vanity and from within her bookbag found an old book of matches and lit the candle. The little flame danced and shook and cast itself across the dark room and down the narrow passage. With the candle in one hand, and the hammer in the other, May began to move down the staircase, yet, as her foot first connected with the stairs, deep within the passage she heard a long, low, moan. Her heart beat like a drum deep within her brain.
Driven not by determination but by the fear of turning around, she moved further and further down the stairs as the moaning grew louder and louder. At the bottom of the stairs, she found herself in a short passage that had a doorway on the left which opened into another room. Before making the corner, she could hear shuffling in the connecting room. Here, May stood paralyzed by fear, sweat on her brow and forming under her arms, the light quivering across the walls as it did in her hands. Compelled by terror and the fear of looking back, she moved further, turning the corner, and beholding the room ahead.
Again, the sweet aroma was pungent here, the moaning loud, the shuffling consistent. The room before her was a large cellar with no windows, no furniture, no floorboards, only the cold dank earth. And the eyes, the glowing red eyes that lined the chamber reflecting the candlelight. There, along the earthen floor, chained to the walls, were a congregation of horrors with glowing red eyes, skin that seemed to slough off the bone, all wrapped in the old rotten clothes of children. And above all these delightful horrors, the constant moans and mumbling of incoherent voices that sounded at once as a death rattle and a plea. Here and there along the walls some of these horrors stood pacing the small distance allotted them by their chains and there in one corner bound by both hands and feet, the ghoulish apparition of Tommy Jacobs. The same figure she saw trying to escape this house just weeks before. And as May stared in frozen horror at the image of Tommy Jacobs, chained and dying in a damp cellar, a cold damp hand grabbed her wrist, causing her to jump in fright, dropping the candle to the floor. Within that brief moment, as the candle fell, she saw before her the twisted figure she had seen in Mike’s Shop, on its knees, reaching up to her, moaning. And there in those guttural tones, May thought she heard a voice, low and wheezing, begging her: please, please help us.
May screamed, and when she screamed all the glowing red orbs turned to her and in a symphony of pain, their moans rose and rose to a horrifying bellow that elevated her fear, breaking her loose of her paralysis as she turned and as quickly as she could, she darted for the stairs. The cries echoed on behind her and as she reached the top of the stairs, slamming the secret corridor shut, the sounds were instantly silenced and again she sat in the still, quiet house, her heart pounding her brain to oblivion. May pushed herself away from the wall and was running for the backdoor when she stopped short, caught between guilt and fear, she froze.
Turning back, mustering all the courage she could, she went back to the bedroom and opened the secret corridor. Like a gust escaping from a damp tomb, the moans from below swept past her and filled the house with the pleas of the dead and as May prepared herself to descend again into the cellar, she heard the snapping of a lock, the turning of a handle, and the hinges of a door drifting wide open. Again, fear gripped her in a vice that left her paralyzed as she heard the groaning floorboards and the steady click, clack of shoes moving through the home.
May was stuck between a terror she had witnessed and one only forming in the imagination and in those moments between time, frozen, May was too late to act. The footfall stopped just behind her as the cacophony of moans rose from the cellar, from the floorboards, from the house of Ms. Ursula Brenning, and May turned around in a stupefied state.
“Sweet girl, it’s far too early for all of this. I know you must be awfully confused.”, firm hands rested on May’s shoulders, “Here, let's go set the kettle on and cut a piece of cake”.
The sickening aroma of the sweet sap from the oak tree was washing over May’s mind, making all the noises, the darkness, the shadows, seem to fade to an afterthought and as she stared into Ms. Ursula’s eyes, the fear that had made a home in her heart for over a year began to give way and make room for another sensation altogether, one which May had not felt in a long time, a feeling of belonging. For over a year May had felt alienated from her parents and her peers as they listened in bored disbelief to her description of the apparition she saw in Mike Shirley’s shop. So often had she been mocked for what was considered her creative imagination, her knack for fib-telling, her inclination to soothsaying. And finally, here in this house where the moans echoed from the basement, she knew she would not be considered a storyteller.
Something behind her mind wanted to scream as her heart continued to hammer and beat its way against her ribs, trying to break free but deep in her mind, a fog began to settle and all May could think about was a nice warm cup of tea, and a sweet bite of chocolate cake. She felt an arm settle around her shoulders, and she leaned her head against it, feeling the sweet comfort we all so often dream of. She was led out of the bedroom; she heard the corridor close and found herself sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a small plate with a piece of cake sitting perfectly centered. The kitchen was dark all but for the pale moonlight shining in.
Please help me, May thought to herself, please help me, while another voice rose... was this her own? A quiet whisper that crept from her heart said I am home. The tea was warm and made her tired, and the cake was sweet and made her smile. And all the while across the table sat Ms. Ursula, swirling her spoon through her teacup, whistling a song that May didn’t quite know, but knew deep down she had heard it all her life, whistled or hummed by her parents, by her teachers, in the cafeteria and the local library, along St. Simone and down by the river, carried by the wind that comes from the north:
Here they come one by one,
to the shadows in setting sun,
and there they stay to spend their days,
feeding off the great oak vine.
But never missed, the children went,
and burrowed down in summer bliss,
and while away no hint would find
a gleam within their parents’ eye.
So back at home, deep in their beds,
sharing food with their friends,
or studying late at night,
no one could see that they weren’t right.
It was a Wednesday in October, and the world was changing.
The winter sun drug itself across the city, traveling as quickly as it could from horizon to horizon. Thereupon the porch, Elriah sat grooming himself, talking with the bees, and soaking up what little heat he could from the sun.
“What a racket last night”, Elriah thought to himself, “She will not be happy with the early arrival”.
He arched his back, stretching, and hopped down into the flowerbed amongst the bees.
"The bees are loud, and their laughter makes my bones tingle, so busy working away", Elriah thought. And at that moment, the front door opened and running down the steps, back up the street, went the little girl that came snooping around the night before.
“Sad, each year the creaking comes earlier and earlier, and soon the cries will keep me up forever”, Elriah stood, stretched again, and went trotting out across the field to the grove behind the house.