by Brian Hodge
He approached the top of the hill and peered through iron entry gates. In the distance he saw scattered headstones poised in the earth like rotten teeth. Beyond them were larger shapes, monuments, and above-ground tombs that housed the slumbering tenants.
Something caught the corner of Timmy’s eye. It lay several yards off in the shadows to his left. As he strained to see better, a group of geometric shapes began to materialize, white and luminous in the moonlight. They were rows of folding chairs gathered around freshly turned earth. Timmy felt a tremor of inevitability rise from the gravel beneath his sneakers. It climbed his legs and settled in his spine, cold and spidery. It was Grammy’s grave.
He approached the gates, wedged a foot between two support bars, and shimmied to the top. With a grunt he lowered himself down the other side and landed firmly between two stone lions. The stoic creatures said nothing, but gazed at him through empty stone eyes.
Timmy took a breath and followed a path toward the assemblage of empty chairs.
As he drew closer he began to see remnants of the afternoon’s ceremonies. Forgotten hymnal sheets littered the grass beneath the folding chairs. Wilted floral arrangements bordered a vinyl walkway leading to the grave. The odor of perfume and carnations still hung heavy in the darkness. Timmy found himself absently wondering why somebody hadn’t cleared it all away. Didn’t the cemetery take care of those kinds of things? Weren’t there caretakers who cleaned up after all the mourners? It was as o
if Grammy’s burial was put on hold midway through the service and left in this silent tableau.
He walked past the chairs and stepped up to the grave. There were more flowers, hundreds of them, tossed haphazardly about the ground. The odor was as slick as cinnamon. Timmy felt oddly exhilarated as he stood in the shadow of an enormous granite tombstone and dutifully read its epitaph.
ABERNATHY, CIELA JANE
B. 1925 - D. 1986
Whosoever Believeth in Him
Shall Have Everlasting Life
Now the silence was everywhere, as thick and palpable as fog. Timmy wanted to scream, to break the silence somehow. Instead he knelt by the grave, shut his eyes, and prayed as hard as he could.
“I’m sorry God,” he whispered. “I didn’t say goodbye to Grammy.” He felt the knees of his jeans becoming damp, the smell of flowers engulfing him.
He decided to speak to Grammy.
“I’m sorry, Grammy.”
A new feeling came over him. It was a surge of warmth, a wave of giddiness brought on by the evocation of Grammy’s name. His plan was working.
“Goodbye… “ He considered saying something else, then said it. “I love you.”
Then finally: “Rest in peace.”
Timmy’s voice broke then.
Something cold and electric swept up behind him and touched his neck.
He sprang forward instinctively and tripped on the loose dirt, lurching past the headstone and tumbling down a small hill that bordered the gravesite. The world became dark and formless, as if the touch had sent him reeling into space… into endless corridors of shadows. And when he finally landed in a shallow ravine, his brain sang pain and terror. The impact wrenched his ankle nearly 90 degrees inward, and when he tried to move, the pain knifed through his veins and brought tears to his eyes.
For several moments Timmy lay there in the darkness, gazing up at the gravesite. From this angle, it looked like an empty city with enormous old tenements staring down at him, a million broken windows written in stone. Within them, a million dead voices pining for his soul.
A million dead eyes, beckoning.
He realized he would have to twist his foot back into position in order to move. It would have to be done quickly, without emotion.
He reached down and corrected the sprain.
His scream pierced the silence of the empty cemetery. Pain bolted up through his tendons. Starbursts of agony ruptured his mind and sent him floating into semi-consciousness. He turned his face to the cool ground and tried to get his bearings. His brain swam with confusion.
Something awful was happening.
Amid the odors of moist earth and decay, the jolts of pain were transforming into shivers of ecstasy. The tang of perfume was sharp in his nostrils. Memories bombarded his brain, images of matronly women in church, their dark pantyhose stretched taut across enormous thighs, the shooshing sound as they crossed their legs, tiny gold crucifixes drowning in moist cleavage, and the smell. The rich alkaline odor of his own semen swirling around his mind, intoxicating him.
He felt himself becoming erect.
Then the music started.
It began as a faint vibration beneath him, building as it came up through the ground. Reverberations at first, nearly unrecognizable. Traces of sounds. But soon the noise was coalescing into a familiar drone. The patter of timbales, the whisper of shakers and the thump of conga drums: The Latin music from the patio party.
His face snapped away from the gravesite. He couldn’t bring himself to look, couldn’t imagine what was happening. On the opposite side of the ravine, where moonlight caught the edge of a hill, he saw a shadow. It moved with the beat of the music, undulated like syrup.
He turned back toward the grave.
Grammy was there.
She stood in harsh relief against the black sky, as alabaster and substantial as a bathtub Madonna. She stood in her burial dress, pristine and pale, dancing to the rhythms of a mambo. Her eyes were riveted to Timmy. She bumped and ground and shimmied suggestively. And when she smiled, Timmy saw mortician’s wax flaking off her face.
He tried to run away.
Grammy didn’t let him. She was pulling him up the hill with her eyes. Her filthy eyes. Her suggestive, naughty, seductive eyes. Dead eyes. And when her arms unfolded, Timmy saw puckered embalming scars tracking along her flesh. She twirled around, and her dress rode up over rigor-mortis-bruised legs. Still she smiled and beckoned him.
“I need you,” she whispered, her voice like metal shavings.
Timmy climbed the rest of the hill like a robot, moving one foot after another, his gaze welded to Grammy’s plush torso, her pale, pale cleavage. One final step, and Timmy collapsed into her cold embrace, and she seemed huge, and she seemed mountainous, and she seemed like magic milk. Flowing into him. Seeping into his pores. Reacting with his own blood and fluids.
Soon he felt her spirit entering him like a magic finger probing up his bowels and rending him apart.
The change came instantly. All the moist passion he held inside him came rushing out. The pain of discovery, the thrill of consummation, the things he didn’t understand… overwhelming him as he inhaled her odors. The fading perfume, whiskey fumes, the crushed cachet of her bosom.
They began to dance.
Together.
Sally found the entrance gate and peered through it. Her heart drummed in her chest. Her throat burned. When she saw the gravesite, she immediately fell to her knees.
A figure stood next to Grammy’s tombstone.
“Timmy?” Sally’s voice was reduced to a whimper.
She struggled up the fence and lowered herself inside. During the course of her journey, she had bitten her lip so hard it had started bleeding. Now blood was caked in swaths around her mouth.
She ran through the darkness.
“TIMMY?!”
The figure near the grave did not acknowledge Sally’s presence. It continued to sway and dance to the silent music. And as Sally approached, the figure’s features came into clearer focus, emerging from the shadows like a clay statue rising out of black water.
The silver moonlight illuminated his face. The features were delicate, small, boyish, yet filmed by a diaphanous layer of age. A white patina, etched in lines around his mouth, wrinkled crow’s feet around his eyes, and slack, flaccid skin hanging beneath his neck. An overlay of an ancient, wounded soul absorbed into his face.
It wasn’t Sally’s little boy anymore.
Sally froze in the ed
ge of the gravesite and watched her son do the same drunken dance that her mother had once performed at the Gebhardt’s patio party. But the look on the boy’s face was one that Sally was all too familiar with.
The look of restlessness and pain that Sally had always shared with her mother.
DUE DATE
I remember it was hot that night. The air conditioner was on the fritz, and we were sticking to the mattress.
“Make love to me,” she said, murmuring in my ear the four greatest words in the English language.
“Yeah, um… you sure?” I said. I wasn’t wearing any protection.
“Fill me up, Eddie, fill me up,” she kept saying.
It was making me crazy.
I entered her with blind abandon, and eventually gushed inside her.
Afterward, we lay in the darkness of our little rural Victorian, not saying very much, feeling as though we had done something.
Six weeks later we were in the bathroom when my wife told me she was pregnant.
I showed her my penis.
“Yeah, that’s right,” she said. “Blame it all on him.”
My wife and her jokes.
Everything was different for a while, at work, at home.
Then we sort of got used to the idea. I stopped trying to quit smoking. Sarah started drinking wine with dinner again. We were going to have a baby. Great. No big deal.
We were both working, and Sarah was healthy.
Bring it on.
I think it was around the fourth or fifth month that the trouble started.
“What if it’s a Damien?” I said one morning, eating my breakfast.
“A what?” Sarah was gobbling her scrambled eggs. She had gained like thirty pounds. You ask me, it was in all the right places.
“You know,” I said. “Like the movie.”
“What movie?”
I gave her a look. “You’re kidding me. You don’t remember The Omen?”
“Oh, I get it,” she said. She chewed a little bit more, then frowned. “Don’t even joke about stuff like that, Eddie.”
I asked her what she meant.
“You don’t fool around with negative imagery,” she explained, “not with an unborn child.”
She went on to tell me about the impact parents can have on fetal growth by directing positive thoughts at the baby. Even the father can have an effect.
“Oh please,” I said.
She raised one hand. “I’m telling you, the human brain has these cells, they’re called neuropeptides, and they’re like transmitters to the rest of the body.”
“But what difference does it make what the father thinks,” I said.
She said it makes a difference.
I decided to change the subject, but I couldn’t get that notion out of my mind.
Even at work that day, I kept wondering if I should be careful about how I envisioned our baby. I had trouble concentrating. It’s not easy designing get-well cards when you’re obsessing over something like this.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about that unborn child cooking in my wife’s womb next to me. I tried to think about something else but my mind kept going back to that fetus.
Over the next few weeks it got worse. The more I tried to think positive thoughts about the child, the more I kept seeing grotesque mutations.
I have an overactive imagination. There’s nothing I can do about that. I kept seeing creatures straight out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting in Sarah’s belly.
It really got bad at the end of month number six when we drove into town to see the OB/GYN for a checkup.
“You folks want to come into my office for a moment?” the doctor said after Sarah had gotten weighed and probed and measured and stuck.
We looked at each other, then followed the prim, grey-haired woman into her office.
“I notice you’ve had a little spotting,” the doctor said after closing her door and taking a seat behind her desk.
Sarah confirmed that she had seen a few drops of blood on her panties, but hadn’t thought it was anything to worry about.
“And it probably isn’t,” the doctor said with a tepid smile, then pulled out a notepad and drew a crude illustration of an upside-down baby. “This is the baby, and this is the amniotic sac, and this is the placenta. From the looks of the ultrasound, the placenta appears to have moved on us.”
“Moved?” Sarah said.
“It’s nothing to lose sleep over. There is a slight risk of the placenta covering the opening of the cervix, which could cause fairly serious bleeding. And depending on how close we are to your due date, it would probably necessitate a c-section.”
A moment of silence.
I was stricken with dread. What if I had been making the placenta move merely by ruminating on it?
Sarah put her hand to her mouth, and I think I said something like, “Oh my God.”
“Now there’s no reason to panic,” the doctor said. “This is not uncommon in women your age. Forty percent of my patients go with cesareans anyway.”
The doctor went on to explain that the baby was not in any danger, but it was probably a good idea for Sarah to come in once a week now and try to stay off her feet for the duration of the pregnancy.
We asked a lot of questions and didn’t write anything down and forgot all the details by the time we got home. I didn’t tell Sarah about my uncontrolled fantasies. I was hoping I could put them out of my mind.
I couldn’t put them out of my mind.
The next few weeks were awful. Sarah’s condition was getting worse. She had terrible back pain and cramps and vaginal bleeding. Unable to climb the stairs, she slept in the living room.
I waited on her around the clock, bringing her hot packs, Saltines and soup during the day, cold washcloths for her forehead at night. And every time I came in the room to fluff her pillow or freshen her tea, the image of a tiny horned creature burrowing in her womb flickered across my mind’s eye.
In my imagination, the fetus was a demonic parasite trying to claw its way out of my wife.
I couldn’t help it.
The thing is, I’m not a particularly morbid person. In fact, I’m not exceptional in any way. I just do my illustrations for the greeting card company during the day, and play around with my oil paintings at night.
Which was exactly what I kept doing after Sarah lost the baby.
Maybe that was where I went wrong. My graphic art background.
I just can’t help imagining stuff that most people would find unimaginable.
After the miscarriage, things were quiet around the house for several weeks. It was as though the sorrow were pressing down on us. Muffling everything just like the blanket of dirty snow on our roof. We had really wanted that baby. Maybe a little too much.
I tried to cheer Sarah. I told her that we could try again. I insisted that we try again. But Sarah was broken. Most of the time she just sat on the porch with a quilt over her lap, staring at the barren farms, the snow-covered fields blotched with spots of black earth.
The doctor saw Sarah on a regular basis during these weeks, tracking Sarah’s recovery, helping with her diet and medication. Sarah had developed gestational diabetes during the pregnancy, and had problems with her blood pressure, but she eventually made a full recovery.
Physically at least.
She wasn’t talking much. Which was tough. The house was so quiet. I couldn’t get over how quiet it was. I guess I never noticed it before.
We live in the country and it’s always pretty quiet, but this silence was like an unwanted guest. It had a smell to it. A color. And you got the feeling this silence was never going to leave.
I guess it was the grief. Or the guilt. I’m not sure. But it was maddening. And to make matters worse, I was still thinking about that fetus. Not in a grieving kind of way.
In the other way.
That’s when the noises started.
You know when you wake up in the middle of the
night and you’re kind of caught in that half-sleep state? You can’t really see or hear properly.
That’s what happened to me one night about a month after the miscarriage.
“Sarah?” I was sitting up in bed, blinking at the darkness of the bedroom.
“Hmm?”
“You awake?”
“Mm?”
“Did you hear that?”
“Mm.”
I was positive there was an animal in the house. It happens sometime out here. A possum or a raccoon finds its way into the storm cellar. That’s what this sounded like. But it was oddly muffled as though it were behind the walls.
I sat up on the edge of the bed, my skin crawling with goosebumps.
Then the noise was gone.
That’s how it went for several nights. I would wake up and hear stuff.
One time I even went downstairs to investigate a muffled thumping noise coming from somewhere inside the house. I even put my ear against the wall in the kitchen to hear better. I finally gave up, figuring it was one of the farmers.
A post-hole digger can send vibrations through the entire valley some times.
I want to make something clear. I still don’t believe in ghosts. Even at this late stage.
But something was going on. Even Sarah noticed it.
For instance, the furnace was acting up for no good reason. I would turn the thermostat way down — remember, this was early April in Illinois — but the house would remain like an oven. We could barely breathe.
There were odors, too, strong odors that seemed to collect in certain areas. In the crawlspace, in the attic. I’m at a loss to describe them. One of them was musky and sharp like dried sweat, another coppery like blood. Another one reminded Sarah of the brine they used to pack herring in.
But we could never find a source. It was as though something was festering behind the walls.