Evil Jester Digest, Vol.2

by Peter Giglio (Editor)

  Max and the others freeze, caught in a gruesome game of Red Light, Green Light. Daniel stares in shock at his hero, crumpled in the street.

  The moment stretches, and the hot summer air shivers with shouts and a high wailing from one of the younger children.

  “Stay here,” Max orders his brother. He and several boys run toward Hobie, terrified, sure he’s dead from a fractured skull. Max hears a tidal hiss in his ears like the voice of seashells. He passes the battered Wasp, its front wheel deformed and its rear wheel ticking over.

  Max reaches the curb as Hobie tries to sit up, blinking and grimacing. The coonskin cap lies in the gutter. Both knees of Hobie’s blue jeans are torn, and a river of Technicolor blood from his lacerated scalp flows down his face, forking at his broken nose to drench his new shirt. Max stares at Hobie’s gore-streaked face and bright eyes, his ears ringing. The sight of blood has always made Max faint. Hobie struggles to rise, opens his mouth to say something, and is struck by the ’59 Chevy Impala hardtop driven by Mrs. Davenport, a pretty young English teacher from their school. The driver’s-side whitewall tire crushes Hobie’s chest and mashes his stomach. The pressure sends a geyser of blood from Hobie’s mouth and nose and eyes, drowning whatever he had been about to say.

  The kids behind Max shriek. The chorus is joined in a few moments by Mrs. Davenport’s firebell screams. Paralyzed, Max watches the life run out of Hobie Peters, a kind, goofy kid who certainly never conceived that his time to pass from this life would arrive so soon, and on such a perfect day.

  Max turns to vomit into the sun-drunk Bermuda and crabgrass, and finds Daniel standing at his side.

  ***

  Daniel withdraws after the accident. He refuses meals and catches a lot of whippings. He begins begging their mother to attend the little white-columned Presbyterian Church they only rarely visit, usually when their father is sleeping off a two-day bender. Daniel prays with the ferocity of the imprisoned Apostle Paul. Max can guess what questions his younger brother is posing to the Almighty, and from Daniel’s miserable expression he knows that no answers are received.

  On cue, Lawrence is fired from his job at a local bakery in early August, and Max and Daniel never return to the Logan grammar school. While packing the bedroom closet, their father discovers a curious pyramid of storybooks, tinfoil, an empty cardboard cigar box, and three tea-light candles stolen from the kitchen—Daniel’s homemade altar tucked behind the battered toy chest, baseball gear, and winter boots. It looks pagan despite being crowned by Daniel’s plastic Sunday school crucifix, and it resonates a low thrumming Old Testament dread and shame.

  Lawrence sets his jaw and utters a low snarl. He kicks the altar apart with his house shoe and nearly loses his balance. He spies several blackened wood matchsticks on the floor, and Daniel gets a good lashing with his wide leather belt.

  ***

  Daniel always wins when they play hide-and-seek with neighborhood kids. The new ones they meet in Lenexa, Kansas, and Malvern, Arkansas, and Henderson, Kentucky.

  Daniel’s uncanny talent for locating the pitch-dark, forgotten dead places that sunshine never touches borders on the supernatural. Some days they search forever, calling his name, eventually conceding defeat and begging him to come out. The other kids drift away to play pickle or red rover or scatter to their homes for dinner, leaving Max to find Daniel or face the wrath of their mother, who is drinking more than ever.

  Lawrence Beckman, now a smudgy brimstone memory in the lockbox of Max’s memory and a vivid minor-circle Beelzebub in his prime, heads out one evening to buy cigarettes and never returns. Like something out of a folk song, yet lacking the frayed, blue-collar grandeur of a Springsteen tune.

  A month after their father’s vanishing act, Max finds Daniel’s new altar while searching the bedroom closet for his second-hand catcher’s mitt. He doesn’t rat out his brother. Max never observes Daniel’s secret ceremonies, though he occasionally disposes of the charred matches. The closet altar never harbors remnants of burnt offerings or Lovecraftian horrors, so Max never confronts Daniel.

  One Saturday in Henderson the brothers are re-reading old comic books in their shared bedroom, and at some point as Max sits absorbed in a pulpy House of Mystery story, Daniel wanders out of the frame house in dire need of fresh paint. Barbara is working a shift behind the counter of a Woolworth’s. She returns to find Max rummaging in the long closet beneath the staircase, his face streaked with tears and grime. She steps into the kitchen to call the police and nearly trips on a pile of saucepans, plates, cookware, and her well-worn iron skillet; Max has emptied the contents of all of the cabinets. She swears at him and grabs the phone from its wall cradle. The line is dead. She’s skipped that bill again to pay for cheap bourbon and Camels.

  They don’t find Daniel until long after sunset, curled up in the spider-infested darkness beneath a neighbor’s porch. Dead leaves and cobwebs cling to his hair and hand-me-down clothes. When the flashlight’s beam finds him, his eyes are open, pupils like black coins.

  ***

  Could there exist places where time as we experience it stagnates? The universes are far older than anyone imagines, so it’s not unreasonable that thin fissures and eddies might inevitably form, like moth-eaten holes in reality. These portals are surely few and far between, and undetectable to the average human organism. Only a few unique souls might somehow sense them. Going further, could someone possess the ability to widen them or invoke them by sheer will? We have evidence of only two such individuals: Daniel Beckman, and a long forgotten spinster named Sarah Winchester.

  A century earlier, in the spring of 1862, Sarah Lockwood Pardee marries William Wirt Winchester, dashing son of Oliver Fisher Winchester, a New Haven millionaire and manufacturer of the repeating rifle and Henry Rifle, a favorite of Civil War Union troops. The newlyweds are happy, ensconced in the most rarified New England society. In 1865 a daughter is born, Annie, but the infant never gains cherubic weight and succumbs the following year to a chronic protein-deficiency disease, her tiny body emaciated and her face a skin-stretched skull.

  There are no more successful pregnancies. William encounters expelled infectious aerosol droplets of Mycobacterium bacillus and contracts pulmonary tuberculosis. Sarah keeps a constant vigil, but William follows their daughter into death.

  The tragic loss of her family has a shearing effect on Sarah’s mind. The bright, vivacious girl that excelled in Connecticut private schools, mastering the piano and four languages, withers. She lies in her darkened bedroom for weeks, and when she finally emerges after a broken heart fails to reunite her with William and Annie, she orders the windows in her twenty-room mansion be draped in heavy black cloth. Her physical countenance changes: her petite frame contracts and shrinks into itself and her lush brunette hair grays prematurely. Only her dark-circled brown eyes seem to grow.

  Sarah is the wealthiest widow on the East Coast—she ultimately inherits the incredible sum of $20 million and a 48.9 percent stake in the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Rejecting all suitors, she lives in solitude. In 1882 she embraces spiritualism and seeks help from Boston medium Adam Coons, who informs her that he has contacted William and determined that the family business is the root of her sorrows. The legion of vengeful spirits of slain Indians and soldiers left to roam the earth are to blame for the loss of her child and husband, and in time they will come to claim her soul for an eternity of hellish retribution. They’re stalking her, and no amount of prayer or pleas to God or His Son can protect her. Suicide is no viable escape (her strict Catholic upbringing vehemently rejects the very notion). She must leave her lifelong home and travel to the new frontier of California, guided by William’s spirit, to construct an unlikely fortress if she is to survive. God has turned His back.

  Sarah sells her Connecticut mansion, furs and jewels, and makes the locomotive journey west. She purchases an unfinished eight-room house in the Santa Clara Valley. With millions in blood money and earning a reputed one thousand doll
ars per day from her stake in Winchester in the days before peacetime income taxes, Sarah hires a small army of laborers to enlarge the framed house. As expansion continues, Sarah is careful to sleep in a different room each night to keep ahead of the malignant souls. For the next thirty-six years of her addled, obsessive life, Sarah expands her Mystery House around the clock. Work never halts, as if adding new wings and scores of oblong rooms can insulate her from the normal flow of time. The years hollow her soul. Her once strong faith in a heavenly afterlife is replaced by an elemental fear of crossing the final threshold that awaits each of us. Consumed by abandonment, Sarah is convinced that she can access an unseen realm and refuge of the lost, the vanished.

  The house survives several minor fires and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Construction halts in September 1922 only when Sarah’s heart stops. Scores of carpenters gather their tools and depart, leaving half-driven nails. Cora Hatch and other prominent mediums claim that Sarah staged her own death, and that her coffin contains the body of a penniless old crone dead from consumption. They whisper that she finally succeeded in harnessing the house’s bizarre geometries to flee from the physical plane to some unseen cul-de-sac of reality where no discorporate assassins can follow. Dead or decamped, Sarah’s monument to survivalism is a seven-story, six-acre ramshackle mansion containing one hundred and sixty rooms and special séance chambers, ten thousand thirteen-paned windows, forty-seven stairways and fireplaces, two dozen bathrooms, and six fully equipped kitchens.

  And over nine hundred doors.

  No last will and testament is found and there are no surviving family members. Sarah’s grave is never exhumed. The estate reverts to the State of California.

  ***

  We’re leaping ahead to the summer of 1965. Daniel is nine and Max is eleven. Lawrence has been AWOL two years, and Barbara has moved through half a dozen jobs as the remaining Beckmans zigzag toward California, eventually stopping in dusty Fremont.

  If anyone haunts their childhood, it is the specter of Barbara, not their alcoholic ne’r-do-well father. In adulthood Max realizes that his father simply pulled stakes and left. No inexplicable mystery there. But their mother—

  By July she is waitressing at a greasy-spoon café near the highway. One weekend she trades shifts so she can spend a Saturday with her boys. She feeds them breakfast (government oatmeal with a dab of milk), dresses them in button-down shirts and their least faded blue jeans, and combs down their dark hair with water. Daniel and Max have hardly slept the night before in their twin bed. They are excited. Mom is taking them to tour a famous haunted house in San Jose.

  Tours can last over two hours. Barbara argues with the guide, who tells her the trek up and down the many staircases and halls is too rigorous for children. Barbara is stubborn, and the young man with the blond crew cut and navy blazer relents. They join the tour group, Barbara firmly grasping her boys’ hands. Three hours later, Daniel and Max step back into the sunlight of the courtyard entrance by the wrought-iron trellises, escorted by two worried guides and a tan young woman in a modish paisley dress.

  On the way to the San Jose police station, Daniel cries uncontrollably in the back seat of the Ford Falcon squad car before lapsing into a regressive, catatonic silence. At the station they lay him on the second-banana detective’s office sofa, wrapped in an Army blanket. He falls asleep instantly, a small fist circled under his chin.

  The two detectives grow exasperated as Max repeats his story.

  “Let’s start over. You were walking together with the group when you noticed your brother was missing.” The lead detective smells of nicotine and strong aftershave.

  Max nods. His heart feels like it will never slow to a normal rhythm.

  “And what happened then?”

  Mother tells him to hold the hand of the woman in the paisley dress until she returns with Daniel. She will be right back, she assures the woman. My boy Daniel, she says, is always wandering off.

  Daniel has slipped away, intoxicated with the maze of ornate rooms, closets opening on brick walls, staircases leading nowhere, dumbwaiters, blind chimneys that stop short of the ceiling, trap doors, double-back hallways, secret passages, and doors that reveal open air and a steep drop to the lawn below. Max believes he meant no harm. Maybe he just wanted to scare his older brother, whose job it is to watch out for him. Max thinks—knows in the pit of his stomach—that Daniel paid close attention to the tour guide’s description of the house’s heart, the Blue Room, used by Sarah Winchester to conduct séances between midnight and two a.m., the time of arriving and departing spirits left to wander the earth. The room she used to pull her final vanishing act.

  Max repeats what happened next.

  The guide and tourists wait impatiently, but Barbara never returns. The guide backtracks and finds Daniel wandering alone, happy as a clam. He asks for his brother and mommy.

  The police are summoned, and spend the afternoon and evening making a room-by-room search with the help of the staff. The next morning they canvas again with sheriff’s department dogs. By late afternoon on the second day they halt the search. Barbara Beckman is not inside the house. She had walked back no more than thirty yards to find her younger son and vanished into thin air.

  Charitably, the police detectives call it an abduction case, one without a motive or resolution. The consensus in Fremont is abandonment. Can you imagine it? It runs in their family, didn’t you know? And she liked to drink.

  Max doesn’t believe in phantasms or a spectral world, and there are many times in the difficult, rebellious years that follow when he tells himself she had seen her chance and left to be with their father. No matter how cruel, how else can her disappearance be rationally explained? Who would believe that by some synchronicity of bad fortune she stepped through the very portal Sarah Winchester’s grief-warped mind believed could be conjured? A doorway unconsciously summoned by her younger, odder son?

  The brothers are placed into foster care in San Jose. The Freemans are teetotalers and Methodist. They aren’t a warm couple but they keep a roof over Max and Daniel’s heads and three daily meals on the table. No more altars appear in the closet.

  Daniel runs away several times and breaks into the Winchester Mystery House. On his final attempt he doesn’t bother to break a window to gain entry; he steals a neighbor’s car and rams the brand new Buick into the side of the mammoth house. The Freemans have had enough. They make sure that Daniel, underage, is remanded to a juvenile detention center in San Mateo County. The judge sentences him to eighteen months, and Daniel serves thirteen, a number of significance to Sarah Winchester.

  At some point during his incarceration Daniel realizes that escape from the shower room hazing and nightly sexual assaults by the older youth doesn’t require a Blue Room with ornate wainscoting and spirit boards. Fellow inmate Ritchie Garza, age sixteen, convicted of arson and petty theft, testifies that after finishing dish-pit duties the night of his disappearance, Daniel challenges the other boys to a game of hide and seek inside the large industrial kitchen. Garza and several other boys are later accused of assisting Daniel in his escape, but none change their story. Garza serves an extra year.

  ***

  Max turns sixty-seven and the doctors find the brain tumor. In February, a month before the sun begins melting winter’s gray ice from the gutters and narrow seaside sidewalks. The size of a walnut, malignant, it has sprouted black tendrils into the surrounding tissue. His prognosis is uncertain.

  Now, standing in his moonlit bedroom at well past midnight, Max doubts that Daniel’s long-awaited reappearance is a coincidence.

  He steps carefully across the wooden floor and through faint moonbeams, sure that Daniel can hear his galloping heart, fearful that the dusty air will trigger another coughing fit.

  Max stops before the closet, which has opened wider since he eased himself from the bed.

  In the spectral light all Max sees are two brown eyes peeping shyly out from beneath a dark cap of hair tha
t rarely saw a barber. Max totters on the threshold of a truncated old age, yet Daniel is forever thirteen. All these years Max has heard his brother’s light breath and felt his eyes watching from the gloom, and all those times his drowning mind clung to the idea that Daniel had escaped his detention to lead a lone quest to locate their parents.

  Shadows stir behind his brother’s floating gaze, indistinct faces and silhouettes farther down a cold bluish corridor that the petulantly logical part of Max’s mind argues cannot exist. The closet is only four feet deep. Is batty old Sarah Winchester lurking wherever this temporary doorway leads, still a step ahead of the Last Rites? Is his chain-smoking mother enjoying an extended retirement in Limbo, free from bill collectors and lung cancer?

  Max thinks so, and it takes a supreme effort to not throw the door completely open and step inside. He is certain that if he extends his liver-spotted hand into the shadows it will be grasped by a smooth, slimmer hand that will tug him out of this melancholy but familiar existence into—where exactly?

  A tear slips down Max’s weathered face. Something in his chest sears like medical radiation, the old scar tissue of loss and anger, and the slightest moan escapes his lips. He trembles on the chilly bare floor.

  But Max is not his brother, and has always lacked Daniel’s steadfast faith. The coward inside him whispers that he will prefer a deep sleep and perfect rest after this long, troubled life. Besides, it’s too late for him. Too many chances to join his brother on nights like this one have been forfeited.

  “Good-bye, Daniel,” he whispers.

  Those deep eyes hold Max’s for a moment, then dip and disappear. The shadows melt back until only weak moonlight shines on the water-stained closet wall.