“Great.”
“How’s Martha?” she countered.
“Fine, doing fine.” I shuffled about, unsure of what to do with myself. “I’m sorry about before, I—”
“Andy, don’t be absurd,” she said through a sigh. “You don’t have to apologize for breaking down at a time like this.”
“Everything just sort of hit me at once, you know?”
She nodded. “I know the feeling.”
“How are you holding up?”
“I’ve spent the better part of the day crying myself. I was so sure I had everything under control then it all just crashed down on me like a ton of bricks. It happens like that sometimes. I see it in court quite a bit, particularly when people are sentenced.”
I could tell she was trying to focus on the subject matter in order to deflect emotion, and I went along with her, following her lead.
She moved away, a bit closer to the altar, and gazed at it reflectively. “Have you ever heard of Medjugorje?”
It seemed I had heard something about it on television years before. “Vaguely.”
“It’s a mountain village in Yugoslavia,” she said. “Back in the 80s, six children allegedly encountered the Virgin Mary on a mountaintop there, and ever since she’s visited them regularly in these religious visions that take them over. Supposedly, in these visions, Mary reveals several secrets to them about the future of mankind and the possible end of the world. The church hasn’t confirmed it as genuine yet, even though apparently these apparitions are still taking place today. The young people having the visitations have undergone numerous medical tests, and it’s been determined that there’s nothing wrong with them physically or psychologically, and that they’re not faking it, it’s not a hoax. The jury’s still out on whether what they’re experiencing is supernatural or not, but they’re definitely experiencing something. Anyway, it got so much press and news coverage that by the late 80s Medjugorje was known all over the world, and literally millions of people have gone there to see what it’s all about, believers and nonbelievers alike.
“On this documentary about it,” she continued, “they showed this horde of people who had traveled there from all over the world celebrating Mass one afternoon in the village, and all of sudden this one man left the group and wandered off on his own. He was an American, a middle-aged, everyday sort of guy. The camera followed him as he left the Mass and went off on his own to this small courtyard. He was obviously praying and trying to hold himself together, but then all of a sudden he just fell to his knees and burst into tears. His tears weren’t the tears of an adult, though, more like a child. He knelt there wailing uncontrollably, totally broken and overwhelmed by what had to be some grand epiphany. One that tore him apart in some ways, but one that also set him free, guilt and shame, retribution and an awakening all at the same time. I’d never heard anyone cry like that before.” She turned from the altar, faced me. “Until tonight. I’ve heard it twice tonight. Once from myself, and once from you.”
“There’s been so much pain,” I said. “So much violence.”
She nodded. “But there’s also been joy.”
“Both.”
“Both,” she agreed. “I don’t know if what happened in some little Yugoslavian village on the other side of the world is real or not. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. The point is, regardless of where we are or what happens or doesn’t happen, we all carry what we have to carry in this life, we do what we do and we hope to God it’s at least close to the right thing. I put people in prison every day of the week, Andy, and most days I know I’m doing good, making the world a better place, a safer place. Some part of me is putting Michael Ring away every time, part of me is putting Uncle away, putting them both to rest along with the little girl I used to be, each of us in our little boxes, like dolls no one wants to play with anymore. It’s the only way I know how to do it, and for a long time it was the only way I could deal with it and still get through the day, you know?”
I’d never been prouder of my sister than at that moment. Success had been her revenge, success professionally, success as a wife and mother, as a daughter and a sister, as the decent and loving human being she’d always been. In the end, despite the pain we’d all felt, what took place had been perpetrated against her. The rest of us had been traumatized witnesses to the damage afflicted upon her, fellow soldiers wounded by the fallout of shrapnel from the grenade thrown into her lap. What had happened hadn’t destroyed her then, hadn’t broken her, and it never would. She was bigger, stronger and smarter than any of us, and had been from the start.
A few weeks after Ed Kelleher leaves, Uncle arrives at our house. It is early afternoon, a bright and sunny day. He appears with a plastic bag full of tiny tan rings that suspiciously resemble breakfast cereal. But when Angela and I ask why he is carrying around a bag of cereal he claims he purchased them from a mysterious man he’d met on a recent trip to New York City. “In a little shop, out of the way, on a dark little side street,” he says gleefully. He tells us the rings are actually seeds, that when planted properly in fresh soil, yield a wide variety of doughnuts within hours.
Although I consider myself a savvy eight-year-old, he speaks about the power of these seeds with such conviction that it seems sinful to doubt him even for a moment.
“Do you believe?” he asks.
Angela’s face breaks into a smile. “Are you teasing us, Uncle?”
“If you don’t believe,” he says, “they won’t work.”
“Then I believe,” Angela says.
Uncle looks to me. “Andy?”
“Me too.”
With our mother watching from the back door, the three of us clear a small patch of dirt in the backyard and begin planting the seeds. Once finished, Uncle announces he has a busy day planned and has to go, but promises to return later to see the results of our efforts. “Remember,” he tells us, “you have to believe or the magic won’t work.”
As fate would have it, our mother suddenly remembers some chores she has to run. Angela and I object, but Uncle explains that it doesn’t matter where we are once the seeds have been planted, just so long as we continue to believe as hard as we can.
The trip to the post office and local drug store is the longest fifteen minutes of our young lives. Each time I look over at Angela, strapped into her car seat like a dwarf astronaut, her eyes are shut and the words, “I believe,” whisper from her lips again and again.
Apparently our collective faith is sufficient, because when we return home, jump from the car and bolt to the backyard, there in our garden are several varieties of fresh doughnuts protruding from the ground, impaled on objects that look an awful lot like tongue depressors, but that Uncle later verifies as “stems.”
I laugh as Angela dances about, a doughnut in each hand and chocolate frosting from one side of her face to the other while lecturing our mother on the power of “believing really hard.” My mother looks on, barely containing a smile, as Uncle dances about with Angela, having even more fun than the rest of us.
Of course it occurs to me that Uncle has simply purchased a dozen doughnuts and displayed them in our absence, but it doesn’t matter. It’s more fun to believe.
It’s more important to believe.
“I just spoke to him about two weeks ago on the phone,” Angela said, bringing me back. She shook her head slightly and smiled, though her eyes had grown wet. “He seemed so happy. You know how Uncle was when he was happy.”
“Like a little kid.”
She laughed in agreement, but the tears spilled free despite her laughter, or maybe because of it. “I loved Uncle, Andy, and I always will. But he’s dead now. He’s out from under all the rest of it, and so are we.”
I wanted to believe her, so I did. “You think Mom feels the same way?”
She smiled a quiet, sad little smile. “I hope so.”
After a moment Angela strolled back down the aisle, put her arm around my shoulder and turned me toward the doo
r. “Come on,” she whispered. “Let’s go home.”
16
I parked in front of the house. The kitchen light was on, and I could see my mother hunched over the table with a drink in her hand, mourning the death of her brother while occupying rooms we’d once shared, a porter to ghosts in a realm long deserted.
I often dream of my mother in that house, older now and still paying for our sins, still smothered by the cocoon we’d all insisted upon and then abandoned her in. The dream is always the same. My mother is walking slowly down a dark corridor. The ceiling is low and the space between the walls narrow, the only light provided by a candle she holds in a pewter, ornate holder I have never before seen. When the dream begins I see her from quite a distance, at the far end of the corridor, moving closer, barefoot in an off-white nightgown that nearly reaches the floor. With each new step the hem swishes back and forth with a curious whispering that sounds as if she’s shushing someone. She holds the candle high and out in front of her like a lost miner, coming closer still and eventually reaching a door at the end of the hallway.
The door opens with a creak. She steps into a modest room. There are windows there, through which traces of soft natural light emerge. I guess it to be early morning, perhaps that brief period of time just after dawn, when the world is suspended somewhere between total light and total darkness, a time when magic seems alive and well, when anything—even miracles—might be possible.
The room is bare but for a low, long table, at the end of which sit a porcelain basin and two stacks of neatly folded towels.
As my mother approaches the table, I see her more clearly. Her hair is drawn into a French twist that is gradually loosening and coming apart. The hair close to her scalp has turned a dull shade of silver, and the lines in her face are more defined, as if etched there by an artisan with a delicate sharp tool. Her eyes are tired, but thoughtful, knowing, in a way only a mother’s eyes can be.
She places the candle on the table and looks down into the basin. A fat squishy sponge floats in the water. She reaches for it, pulls it free and wrings it out, the water trickling loudly into the basin.
It is then that I notice the water is a faint crimson, almost pink.
My mother washes her hands in the light cherry water, runs the sponge over her wrists and forearms—Lady Macbeth come to life, the blood in her visions diluted but alive—then returns the sponge to the basin and dries herself off with one of the towels. The towel is so white it seems out of place, but she takes no notice of this, simply dries herself with a slow efficiency and drops the towel in a heap to the table.
She goes next to one of the windows. There are three in a row along one wall. Narrow but tall windows with single panes of glass and frilly lace curtains hanging in each. Beyond them there is still faint light, but nothing else, emptiness within the light. She stands at the center window and gazes through it, at nothing.
From a series of wide cracks in the ceiling, snow begins to fall inside the room like elegant plump feathers. My mother smiles and raises her hands as if to catch them, tilts back her head and sticks out her tongue like a child.
And then I’m there too. Suddenly, and without explanation I am in the corner of the room. Sitting there, watching her. I am her child, her baby, and she is my mother, and yet, in this odd territory between reality and dreams, we’re the same. Both blind mice reaching desperately through darkness for some sense of the divine and all the promises such a destination surely holds.
She moves through the snow to the corner, crouches before me. “Are you cold?”
“Yes,” I tell her.
She crawls next to me and sits on the floor, back against the wall. “It’s all right,” she says, opening her arms.
I lean closer; allow her arms to encircle me, to draw me near. She is warm and soft and I feel safe there, where I began. I hug her back; hopeful my embrace makes her feel the same.
“You’re all right,” she whispers.
“But are you?”
She looks again to the windows, but never answers.
The snow begins to stick, to cling to us like a membrane. Slowly, the cocoon slithers over us, seals us off and holds us still. Even as it cuts off our oxygen, even as we struggle to breathe, even as the light through the windows fade and it all goes black, I can hear my mother’s frantic, whispered prayers.
This time, rather than awakening in a twist of sweat-soaked sheets, I found myself sitting on the other side of the window, apart from my mother, but not for long.
Angela’s rental car was parked ahead of mine in the driveway. She was sitting behind the wheel, there in the dark, waiting for me.
Hiding in my own patch of darkness, for some reason memories of Michael Ring’s parents came to me. The only time I’d seen them was when they spoke out on a local television station not long after their son had vanished. I’d watched mesmerized and frightened all at once while his mother held up a photograph of her son, her eyes red and ringed with dark circles. She looked too old to be the boy’s mother—maybe his grandmother—and seemed beaten down by any number of things, but mostly she seemed alone. Terribly, utterly alone. His father was a large man of few words, gruff and looking more embarrassed or put out than concerned. He too looked too old to be Michael Ring’s father. None of it seemed to fit. Nothing seemed right.
And nothing was.
What did they do to you? I wondered. And what have you done to them?
What have you done to all of us?
My memories shifted to the day in Uncle’s apartment, the day he gave me the truth I’d gone looking for. It was the last time I’d ever spoken to him, but he’d always been with me, and he always would be. Good and bad and everything in between, he’d always be a part of me, and me him. We were all together—all of us—forever, washing in basins of bloody water and trying to stay warm while snowflakes fell from cracked ceilings, blind mice all, suddenly able to see.
Michael Ring’s disappearance remains an unsolved mystery to this day.
My eyes scanned the front yard. At first, all I saw was snow and ice glistening in the moonlight, but the darkness hanging over me no longer seemed quite real.
As the moonlight shifted I focused with such effort that just for a second I saw myself as a boy rolling around in the grass, giggling as Uncle tickled me.
“I can’t stop until you say it!” he shouted playfully, hugging me close.
“Uncle!” the little boy laughed. “Uncle!”
Even now, I still hear that laughter from time to time.
I suspect I always will.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Greg F. Gifune is a best-selling, internationally published author of several acclaimed novels, novellas and two short-story collections. Called, “One of the best writers of his generation” by both The Roswell Literary Review and author Brian Keene, and “Among the finest dark suspense writers of our time” by legendary best-selling author Ed Gorman, Greg’s work has been published all over the world, translated into several languages, consistently praised by readers and critics alike, and has garnered attention from Hollywood. His novel The Bleeding Season, originally published in 2003, has been hailed as a classic in the genre and is widely considered to be one of the best horror/thriller novels of the decade. Greg resides in Massachusetts with his wife Carol, a bevy of cats and two dogs, Dozer and Bella. He can be reached online via e-mail ([email protected]) or on Facebook and Twitter.
For more information on Greg and his work visit his official website at: www.gregfgifune.com.
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
DarkFuse is a leading independent publisher of modern fiction in the horror, suspense and thriller genres. As an independent company, it is focused on bringing to the masses the highest quality dark fiction, published as collectible limited hardcover, paperback and eBook editions.
To discover more titles published by DarkFuse, please visit its official site at www.darkfuse.com.
Table of Contents
SAY
ING UNCLE
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