And yet, true. She might not last the night.
He didn’t know how long he lay in his bed without sleeping. Long enough for the storm to quiet and his parents to finally retire to their bedroom. Long enough for the heavy clouds to part and let the moonlight creep through his window. Jamie wanted to fall asleep, but he could not.
More time passed. In the silent house, he could hear every creak and groan of old wood, every tic of cooling radiator pipes. And then a new sound: Great-Grandmother was talking. She sounded so bright and clear that he imagined she must have arisen from her coma. A spark of hope was ignited in him, and he slipped noiselessly from the bed to creep into her room at the end of the hall. The door was open and the room was stalked by tall shadows of old furniture, cast by the feeble glow of a night-light.
Silently, Jamie approached the bed. If anything, the old woman looked worse than before and she spoke as though in a trance.
But her words were soft and clear: “…and down we would go to Balquhidder with the other children to gather for the fires. A-beggin’ from the folk, and we would say ‘Give us a peat t’barn the witches, good missus!’ Pile it high, we would! With straw, furze and peat…what a beautiful Samhnagan it would be!”
Jamie felt a chill race down his back. He thought of calling his parents, but they would only make him go back to bed. Yet he sensed an urgency in the old woman’s voice, and he knew he’d never remember what she was trying to say—especially the funny words. Then he thought of his tape recorder, and moving quickly, silently, he retrieved it from his room. Turning it on, he captured the trance-like ramblings of the old woman.
“…and the fire would burn through the night on All Hallow’s Even, and we would dance about it, we would! The fire that kept away the Cutty Black Sow! Kept it away from any soul who died on that witches’ night! Till the heap had turned to bright red coals. And we would gather up the coals and ash in the form of a circle. Then into that circle we would put stones—one marked for each member of our families. The stones were our souls, don’t ya see! And as long as they stayed inside the circle of Samhnagan, ole Cutty Black could not harm us! And in the mornin’ everyone would run to the cool ashen circle—to make sure that not a stone was disturbed or missin’. For if it was, the soul that stood for that missin’ stone would be took by the Cutty Black Sow!”
Jamie listened as the old woman rambled. It was some memory, a bit of remembered childhood. He tried to speak to her, to ask her what she meant, but she continued on to the end, the last words only a whisper.
He waited for her to continue, but there was nothing more. Great-Gran’s breathing became ragged, catching in her hollow chest, then wheezing out as if released by a cruel fist. Suddenly her body became rigid, and then a tremor passed once through her bones. Jamie watched as her drawn little body rose under the bed-covers for an instant, then fell slack, her head lolling to the far side of the pillow.
He could not see her face, yet he knew she was gone. There was a coolness in the room that had been absent before. He felt utterly alone in a vast darkness despite the pale glow of the night-light.
Slowly, Jamie thumbed off the Sony recorder as his gaze drifted to an old Westclock on Great-Gran’s bureau. 4:35 in the morning. She’d been right: she did die on Halloween.
He padded silently back to his room, replaced his cassette recorder on a shelf by his bed, then woke up his parents. He told them he had heard Great-Gran making strange noises, and that he was afraid to go see her. His father moved quickly from the bed and down the hall. A few minutes later he returned to announce quietly that she was gone.
The time had come when they could cry. Jamie’s mother held him while they both sobbed, and she whispered that everything would be all right.
But he was thinking about the recording he’d made—and he was unsure if what his mother said was altogether true.
Halloween came early that year because nobody went back to sleep. They sat in the kitchen having a very early breakfast while the sunrise burned through the autumn trees in the backyard. Then, while Jamie dressed for school, his father made lots of phone calls, and his mother cried openly a few more times. Gloria was still asleep as Jamie sat in his room and replayed the tape he’d made. To hear Great-Gran’s voice, knowing she was gone, gave him a strange feeling. It struck him that he was listening to those “last words” everybody talks about.
Listening to her words for the second time, he realized the old woman was fearful of dying on Halloween. She was telling him something—something important. Her people had always protected anybody who dies on that day. Protected them from the Cutty Black Sow—whatever that was…
Jamie stuffed the Sony into his backpack, along with his schoolbooks, and returned to the kitchen. His mother poured him another glass of orange juice.
“Your father’s not going to work today,” she said. “He can drive you and Gloria to school.”
She paused as though suddenly remembering something important. “Oh God—she’s still asleep. I’ve got to wake her up, and tell her…”
His mother left the kitchen, leaving Jamie alone again with his thoughts. He could hear his father’s muffled voice as he spoke on the phone. Other than that, it was quiet. He thought about Great-Gran, wondering if she’d known he was listening to her last night, if she’d been talking about that stuff with the stones for a reason.
Jamie couldn’t get the story out of his mind as he and Gloria rode into town with their father. The bonfire and the stones and the Cutty Black Sow. At school he waited until study hall just after lunch, then transcribed the recording into his math notebook. When it was written out, he was able to study the words more carefully, and he became even more convinced that Great-Gran had been giving him a message.
Jamie asked Miss Hall, the school librarian, for books about Scotland and Scottish folklore. Usually quiet and dour, Miss Hall volunteered that she was Scottish on her mother’s side, and it was good to see young people interested in their heritage.
With her help, Jamie figured out a lot of what Great-Gran had been talking about. Samhnagan was a ritual bonfire, burned on Halloween night to protect the people from the forces of Evil, and to save the souls of any who died on the Witches’ Day. There was nothing about the “Cutty Black Sow,” but Miss Hall told him that she would be happy to look it up when she went home that evening. Jamie thanked her and gave her his phone number, making the librarian promise to call if she discovered anything.
On his way home on the bus, Jamie planned his evening. He knew what he had to do for his great-grandmother. Gloria kept interrupting his thoughts and, finally, he knew he’d have to talk to her.
“Do you think we’ll still be able to trick-or-treat tonight?” she asked solemnly.
“Gee, I don’t know, Gloria. I wasn’t really thinking about it. I guess I figured we’d go, but I might have to do something else.”
“Oh yeah? Like what?”
He considered telling her what he intended. Sometimes Gloria could be trusted with secrets, but oftentimes not.
“You wouldn’t understand,” he said after a pause. “Something Great-Gran wanted me to do. For her.”
Gloria’s eyes flashed. He had her hooked now. “But she’s dead now…”
“She asked me last night—right before she died. It was like a…a last request.”
“Really?” Gloria’s voice flirted with true awe.
“Yeah, but this is secret, you understand?”
“Sure I do! I can keep a secret.”
“Now listen, if I tell you about this, you have to swear you won’t tell anybody—not even Mom or Dad, okay?”
“Gee, what’re you going to do, anyway?”
“You swear?”
She nodded with great seriousness. “I swear.”
“All right,” said Jamie. “Last night…”
⟡
When the bus dropped them off at the house, Jamie’s mother informed them that The Undertaker had picked up Great-Gran. Jamie w
ent into the backyard and sat on a swing. To his right was a barbecue pit and outdoor fireplace. If he was going to build a fort, that was the place. The yard was enclosed by tall oak and poplar trees, and a cool wind sifted through the brown and orange and yellow leaves, shaking them loose and bringing them down all around him. It was pretty, but he found it also very sad.
The back door slammed and Gloria ran down to the swing-set. “I just talked to Mommy, and she said we can still go trick-or-treating!”
“Okay.”
“They’re going to be at the funeral home, but she said I can go out as long as you stay with me. Then we gotta go to Mrs. Stamrick’s house when we’re done. They’ll pick us up there when they get home, okay?”
“Yeah,” he said absently. “That’ll be fine. But we’ll have to make that bonfire first.”
“What?”
“C’mon, Gloria. Get real. I just told you about that.”
“That didn’t make much sense to me.” She grimaced.
“Well, it did to me. And I gotta make that fire for Great-Gran. She wanted me to.”
After dinner that night, Jamie’s parents left for the funeral home. He went out to the backyard, down toward the woods which bordered the property, and began gathering up sticks and branches from a big deadfall left from last winter’s storms. He also gathered up five stones about the size of baseballs. As he began arranging the wood in his father’s barbecue pit, he heard Gloria coming down the back steps. She was dressed in her trick-or-treat costume—a skeleton in a hooded robe.
“Getting it ready?” Gloria asked as she watched.
“What do you think, stupid?”
“I’m not stupid. I was just asking.”
With matches he lit the wood; it took several attempts to get the heavier branches burning, but soon the fire licked and cracked with a small, contained fury. It warmed their faces and cast a hot orange glow on the surrounding trees. Jamie piled on more wood from the deadfall, and the blaze became a small inferno, roaring as it sucked up the cool autumn air.
“It’s going good now,” said Gloria, entranced by the ever changing shapes and glowing coals.
Jamie finally pulled an El Marko from his jacket pocket and an old rag he’d taken from his father’s workroom in the basement. He wiped the stones as clean as possible, then marked each one with an initial.
“What’re you doing now?” asked Gloria.
“I have to fix the stones. One for each of us in the family. See that G? That’s for you. And these are for Mom and Dad, me and Great-Gran. Now, we have to throw them into the middle, like this.” Jamie tossed Great-Gran’s stone into the center of the coals. Then he tossed all the others in, one by one, with a small amount of ceremony. “There, it’s done.”
“Why’d you have to do that, Jamie?”
“Because. That’s the way they always did it. To protect us all…”
“Protect us?” Gloria giggled beneath her skull-mask. “From what?”
“I’m not sure…from the Cutty Black Sow, I guess.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know,” said Jamie. “I couldn’t find out.”
The only sound was the wind in the treetops and an occasional pop of a coal cooling down.
“Hey,” said his sister. “Are we gonna go trick-or-treating or what?”
“Oh yeah, I guess we can go now,” he said.
“Finally!” Gloria turned toward the house. “I’ll be right back out—gotta get my shopping bag!”
Then they went trick-or-treating and when they returned from a tour of the neighborhood streets, it was almost totally dark. Jamie guided her back to their house and Gloria reminded him that they were to go to Mrs. Stamrick’s place.
“In a minute. I want to go check on the fire.”
“Aw, Jamie, I’m tired…”
“Look, it’ll only take a minute. Come on, you got what you wanted, didn’t you?”
“Oh, all right.” she followed him as Jamie took a flashlight from the garage and moved close to the barbecue pit. Only a few orange embers belied the location of the small bonfire. He played the light over the ashes, searching for the five stones in the debris.
“What’re you doing?”
“Just checking to see that everything’s OK.” He counted the stones as the beam of light touched them: three…four…where was the last one? From the looks of the ashes and embers, the wood had collapsed, then spilled toward the edge of the firebrick. He directed the beam down to the patio and found the fifth stone, amidst a scattering of ash. It had fallen from the fire, and he remembered his Great-Gran’s words: “no stone should be missing or disturbed…”
Jamie bent low and saw in the flashlight beam that it was the stone with a just-legible “J” on its face.
His stone. His soul?
It would be best if he left it as it lay—undisturbed.
“Hey, look,” said Gloria. “One of ’em fell out!”
Before he could say anything, his sister, costumed as a miniature Grim Reaper, swooped down beside him and grabbed for the stone.
“No, Gloria! Don’t touch it!”
But her fingers had already encircled it, had begun to pick it up. In that instant, Jamie felt a jolt of energy spike through him. His heart accelerated from a burst of adrenaline, and suddenly Gloria screamed.
Pulling her hand back, she let go of the stone in the same motion. It was flung into the darkness and Jamie could hear it thump upon the lawn somewhere to his right.
“It burned my hand!” sobbed Gloria. “It was still hot!”
“I told you not to touch it! Oh, Jeez, Gloria, you really shouldn’t have touched it! I’ve got to find it!”
“Let’s go to Mrs. Stamrick’s. Come on!”
“No, wait! I’ve got to find that stone…”
“What for? It’s just an old rock. You can get it in the morning.”
“No, it might be too late then.” It might be too late already, he thought.
Despite Gloria’s protests, she helped scan the lawn for the missing stone. She must have heard the urgency and fear in Jamie’s voice because she even got down on her hands and knees to grope about in the grass.
When they found the stone, it was still hot, but cool enough to pick up. Jamie carefully returned it to the spot where she had first disturbed it, and hoped that nothing would be wrong. After all, Gloria hadn’t meant to touch it. Perhaps it would be all right since it was not yet morning.
He and Gloria went to Mrs. Stamrick’s house two blocks away, and she welcomed them with affectionate hugs and kisses and mugs of hot chocolate. She spoke in saccharine tones and made a fuss over them.
Outside the clapboard house, the wind began gusting. Jamie listened to it whistle through the gutters and downspouts as he sat in Mrs. Stamrick’s parlor watching a situation comedy on TV.
Gloria was busy pouring her loot into a large mixing bowl on the floor; Mrs. Stamrick oohed and aahed appropriately as his sister scooped up especially fine prizes from the night’s haul.
Jamie sipped his cocoa and watched TV without actually paying attention. At one point he thought he heard something tapping on a windowpane, even though the others did not seem to notice. When he took his empty mug into the kitchen to place it in the sink, he heard another sound.
A thumping. Outside.
Something was padding across the wood floor of Mrs. Stamrick’s back porch. It was rapid and relentless, as though some heavy-footed dog, a large dog, was pacing back and forth beyond the kitchen door.
Slowly Jamie moved to the door, but could not bring himself to draw up the shade and peer out. The thumping footsteps continued and at one point he thought he heard another sound—a rough exhalation, a combination of a growl and a snort.
Moving quickly out of the kitchen, he told Mrs. Stamrick that it sounded like there was a big dog on her back porch. She walked past him into the kitchen, raised the shade and looked out. Seeing nothing, she opened the door, admitting a cool blast of face
-slapping wind—the only thing that was out there.
“It must have wandered off,” she said. “Nothing’s out there now.”
Jamie nodded and forced a silly grin, then let her lead him back into the parlor.
While Gloria was dozing off on the couch, Jamie tried to get absorbed in a cop-show drama. But he couldn’t concentrate on anything except the sounds of the wind outside the house. And the sounds of other things he couldn’t always identify.
When his father arrived to pick them up, Jamie could not recall ever being so glad to see him. He picked up his sister’s treat-bag as his father carried the sleeping Gloria out to the car where their mother waited. As Jamie walked down the driveway toward the safety of the big station wagon, he listened for the sounds, searched the shadows and the shrubbery that lurked beyond the splash of Mrs. Stamrick’s porch light.
He sensed there was something out there, could almost feel the burning gaze of unseen eyes, the hot stinging breath of an unknown thing so very close to him.
In the car, he exchanged small-talk with his parents. It was best if he tried to act as normal as possible. But his mother turned to look at him at one point, and he wondered if she sensed—as mothers often can—that something was not right with him.
As soon as the car stopped in the driveway, he jumped out and moved quickly to the back door, waiting for his father with the keys. A single yellow bug-light cast a sickening pall over everything, but it also sparked off feelings of safety and warmth.
Finally, they were all inside the house, which afforded him a feeling of warmth and safety. While his father carried Gloria off to bed, his mother checked the Code-A-Phone; its greenlight signaled calls waiting. Jamie hung up his coat in the closet. In the other room he could hear his mother as she played back the tape from the phone answering machine—mostly messages of condolence from friends and relatives. He was about to go down the hall to the stairs when he heard a loud thumping noise outside the kitchen window.
He fought down the urge to run blindly to his mother and wrap his arms around her. The sound of her voice breaking the silence almost made him cry out.
Fearful Symmetries Page 16