They didn’t really plan it, but over the weekend, Jessy and Karma ended up walking with Twyla down to the cemetery. Fallen yellow leaves were stuck flattened to the street and sidewalk, like patterns stenciled on the earth. Jessy looked at the houses whose back yards went right up to the cemetery's chain link fence, so close to the graves. How quiet would it be, in a neighborhood where so many people were dead? That could be her bedroom, she realized. The girl in her story. In the back of the house, facing the dead people. It would be a great place to have your bedroom, because how creepy was that?
Jessy looked across the field of tombstones. The graves seemed so lonely, as if not just their lives, but even their deaths had been forgotten. The grass, slightly yellowing, was almost completely covered by the strewn leaves, which stuck to their shoes, dirty yellow and brown, as they kicked through the moist surface.
“It had better not snow on Halloween,” Jessy said.
“I’m not wearing my winter coat,” Karma said. “No matter what.”
Many costumes had been ruined over the years by snowstorms. It was hard to plan something that would look right with a big winter coat and snow boots on top of it. And anything involving paper or cardboard, like homemade masks, and even paper trick-or-treat bags, could turn into a soggy mess after walking around in sleet.
“Some of us are supposed to come here on Halloween,” Jessy confided to her sister. “It’s kind of a dare.”
Twyla rummaged in her denim purse and pulled out a blue cigarette lighter, full of watery liquid, and a gold tube with what looked like tobacco at the end.
“You shouldn’t smoke,” Jessy said.
“Don’t start.”
“You’re going to die of lung cancer before you get out of high school.”
Twyla laughed at her.
“Do you believe everything you hear?”
Because of the wind, Twyla had a hard time getting the tube lighted.
“Who are you guys going to the cemetery with?” she asked.
“Troy and Scott. And maybe Corey.”
“Do Mom and Dad know about this?”
“Just that we're going trick or treating,” Jessy said. She suddenly felt like she was sneaking out of the house to a keg party. “They always give me the thing about being too young for boys.”
Twyla sucked on the end of the tube. “They may have a point.”
“They’re just my friends,” Jessy said. “It’s stupid. Anyway, they say that you can see lights in the cemetery at night, so we’re going to see if it’s true.”
They walked to the far end of the cemetery, where the last rows ended in a stretch of solid lawn, with fields beyond them. Jessy kicked again at the built-up leaves on the ground. Then Karma reached up and touched a piece of old rope that was tied around a thick tree branch, like a friendship bracelet, and tugged at it slightly.
“You really shouldn’t come here on Halloween,” Twyla said.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s haunted.”
“It is not.” Jessy was almost offended that Twyla was trying to pull something like that on her.
“Don’t you know what that rope is?”
Karma worked at it, but it didn’t come loose. It was knotted, with only the faintest nub hanging off it. Probably it had gotten wet, and the threads had bound together like a fist.
“It’s just an old piece of rope,” Karma said.
Twyla tapped the end of the gold tube hard on the ground and stuffed it back in her purse.
“That’s the rope of Johnny the Hangman. Haven’t you heard of Johnny the Hangman?”
“You’re making it up,” Jessy said. They’d watched movies together about the Boston Strangler and Jack the Ripper, and of course there was that episode of Star Trek. “Johnny the Hangman” wasn’t even original.
“Seriously.” Twyla sat down on the edge of cement block anchoring the VFW memorial, a cast-iron cannon that kids stuffed with candy wrappers and empty beer cans. “Johnny was a young guy who was hired to be the caretaker here at the cemetery. He raked the leaves, stuff like that. He was really sensitive, and people picked on him, but he wanted to be, you know, a guy.” Her voice sounded sarcastic about the word “guy.”
“So he’d try to get with these popular girls, and he’d ask them out, but they wouldn’t go out with him.”
“So he – hanged them?”
Twyla gave her the behave-yourself look.
“Meanwhile, there was a killer terrorizing the town. These young pretty girls were turning up dead, all over town. Their bodies were found hanging by the neck from trees, just like how they used to hang people in the old days, in the Westerns. Everybody was scared.
“One day, Johnny met a girl while he was raking leaves here in the cemetery, and she was really nice. They talked, and she started to come back to see him. She got to really like him, and he liked her. But he never asked her out or did anything to make the first move.”
One tree creaked really slowly, empty sounding. Twyla pointed to a little padlocked shed next to the standing water faucet.
“You know that shed over there? There used to be an old house there, really old and small, like a shack, where the caretaker got to live for free as part of his salary. So that’s where Johnny lived. One day the girl decided that she was going to make the first move, if he wasn’t.”
She paused, for dramatic effect.
“So on Halloween night, when she knew she could stay out late, she came to the cemetery to surprise him. In the dark, from a distance, she could see something going on by that tree, moving around. As she got closer, the movement seemed to stop. Then she saw Johnny in the shadows, stepping slowly away from the body of a girl that was hanging from that tree, right where that rope is.”
They stared at the frayed end of the rope.
“It was too late, the girl was already dead. So the other girl snuck away, and she went to the police and told them she knew who the killer was. They came to take him away, and the story leaked out while they were questioning him. He was grabbed by the mob and hanged by the neck, from the same tree where he hung his last victim.”
The wind blew around the leaves some more, gusted them around their feet.
“The sad part is, he was a total split personality. He didn’t even know what he’d done.”
“What happened to the house where he lived?” Karma asked.
“The city ended up tearing it down,” Twyla said. “It all happened years ago.”
“You’re totally making this up,” Jessy said. “If it had happened, we'd have heard this story before.”
“Stick a needle in my eye,” Twyla said. “It’s bad luck to come here on Halloween.”
****
The Jack-o-Lantern Box Page 20