Grimm Memorials

by R. Patrick Gates

  "Wow!" the two friends of Jimmy and Jeff exclaimed at the same time. Jimmy smiled with delight, but Jeff remained silent.

  "Wait till you see inside," Jennifer coaxed. She, too, marvelled at what Grandma had done with the gingerbread house, but she didn't question how. Grandma had told her she was going to do something special with the house for the company Jen was bringing, and that was good enough for Jen. She waved the boys on and led them to the small front door. She pushed it open and a warm, sour smell, like boiled cabbage, emanated from within.

  "Look, it's just as I told you," Jennifer said happily as she led them inside. The boys oohed and ahhed as they walked through the door and into a tiny, wood-paneled kitchen. A hand-hewn square wooden table sat in the middle of the room to the left of a wide open hearth with a fire going under a large black kettle. Around the table were three stools of varying size from small to tall, each one at a spot where a bowl was sitting on the table with wooden spoons by their sides. Wisps of steam rose from the contents of each bowl.

  Jennifer went around the table and sat on the first stool which had the largest bowl in front of it. "Someone's been eating my porridge," Jen intoned in a deep voice. The boys, except for Jeff, giggled. She moved on to the next bowl as they watched with rapt attention. Now she spoke in a falsetto, saying again: "Someone's been eating my porridge." At the third bowl, she spoke in a high, squeaky baby voice: "Someone's been eating my porridge, and they ate it all up!" The boys laughed loudly at Jennifer's antics, which brought a small smile even to Jeff's serious face.

  Leading them from the kitchen, Jennifer brought the boys into the next room at the back of the small house. Its floor was covered with a red and green braided rug upon which sat two rocking chairs, one large, the other a little smaller. A third one lay in a broken heap. Jen followed the story to a tee, sitting in each chair and proclaiming, "Someone's been sitting in my chair," like a ritual chant, until at the third chair she cried like a baby over the broken pile.

  The boys cracked up with laughter until Jeff pointed at a ladder that went up through the ceiling at the back of the room. "I bet Goldilocks is up there," he said. The other boys looked at him wonderingly.

  Jen smiled and nodded. "Let's see," she said, and went to the ladder. She began climbing up.

  The upstairs room was small, the underside of the thatched roof squeezed between the wooden support beams and pressed low over their heads. Continuing on in the Goldilocks mode, there were three beds in the room: one large, one medium, and one small. The first two beds were empty, the bed covers rumpled. Jennifer paused by each one and recited the proper words. There was obviously someone in the third bed. The blankets were pulled up and tucked around a blonde-haired head, hiding the face.

  "Goldilocks," Jeff whispered excitedly, his eyes gleaming.

  "Someone's been sleeping in my bed, too," Jennifer squeaked in her baby bear voice, "and here she is!" She grabbed the covers and pulled them back, throwing them to the floor.

  The boys stared at the figure in the bed with anticipated delight, which soon turned to horror. Though it had long, golden hair, the thing in the bed was not Goldilocks. The thing in the bed was barely recognizable as having once been human. The body was devoid of skin except on its face, where it was a bluish gray color and very loose, wrinkled like the skin of a dried apple. Even so, little Jimmy thought he recognized it as that of a girl in one of the other first-grade classes at school. Exposed muscle and cartilage showed on her arms and legs where the skin had been flayed away. The stomach was a hollow cavity, empty of entrails and revealing the top edges of the hip bones and the base of the spine. Her chest had been flayed open, the ribs exposed and the heart and lungs removed. A mass of tiny flies and insects flitted over the rotting corpse and a stench like chicken bones left in a garbage can for a month rose from it, causing the boys to gag and back away from the bed. Only Jennifer continued to smile.

  A low growl came from behind them. Jeff turned and gasped at what he saw. The three bears were hunched in the corner. A tall, ferocious grizzly bear was the daddy, a black bear, nearly as tall, was the mother, and a little brown bear with a mouth full of long, nasty teeth was the baby.

  Papa Bear roared loudly, shaking the rafters of the thatched roof and revealing double rows of daggerlike teeth. Mama Bear licked her chops hungrily. Baby Bear yawned, showing his razor-sharp teeth, also. Together, the three started slowly toward the boys.

  They were petrified with fear. Jimmy, in front of the others, wet his pants. His brother, Jeff, soiled his, the odor mingling with the stench of the flayed corpse in the bed. The other two boys burst into tears. Suddenly, as if they had all been seeing triple and now their eyesight was returning to normal, the boys saw the three bears waver and begin to slide together. First Baby Bear was absorbed into Mama Bear, then Mama Bear was sucked into Papa Bear. Finally, like a holograph that shifts images with the changing light, Papa Bear turned into an old woman. She cackled loudly and threw a heavy nylon net over the screaming boys.

  "I brought you some company for tea, just like you asked," Jennifer said to her grandmother, smiling sweetly and completely unaware of the horrors the boys had just seen. In her eyes, the boys were sitting down to tea and cookies in a corner of the room. "When can I bring Jackie, Gram?" Jen asked pleadingly.

  Eleanor patted Jennifer's head. "All in good time, child. All in good time."

  CHAPTER 20

  Old woman, old woman, shall we go a-shearing?

  Eleanor closed the cage door on the four sniveling boys Jennifer had brought her. She was very pleased. Despite the constant pain in her arms and chest, things were going well. There were less than two weeks to go to Halloween and she needed only five more boys. Since she was fairly sure she could take Jennifer's brother Jackie any time she needed him, the count was down to four.

  She went to the embalming table and brought a tray of peanut butter sandwiches, milk, and an assortment of junk foods back to the cage and placed it inside. A quick compelling thought from her was enough to make the four new boys forget their predicament for the moment and become hungry enough to devour everything on the tray. The twins and Timmy Walsh, who hadn't eaten for a day, needed no prodding.

  She looked at Davy Torrez lying in the rear corner of the cage and bit her lip. He looked worse every day. His color was bad, a sign that shock was taking its toll on his health. As far as she knew, he had neither eaten nor drunk since his capture. Nor had he used the toilet, soiling his pajamas instead until he stank so bad the other boys stayed away from him. If he kept this up, he'd be dead by Halloween and she'd have to look for another. She couldn't have that. Though it had been awhile since she'd heard any thoughts from him, Eleanor probed his mind and felt only the barest glimmer of a response. She sighed. There was nothing more she could do. Little Margaret was waiting for her. It was time for the Third Ritual of Preparation.

  Deep in the protective subconscious hole Davy Torrez had dug for himself, faint echoes of the witch's probing reached him. With it came memories: his mother reading to him; his father playing catch with him. He smiled at these, his thin pale lips barely moving, but then more recent memories came unbidden.

  He relived all the nightmare turns his life had taken recently the Mother Goose rhymes running riot in the parking lot outside his home; the boy in the cage with no arms or legs (What else? I don't know but he'll never go pee pee again); the witch's wrinkled old face grinning at him, her mouth stretching open to reveal wasted teeth waiting to sink into his trembling flesh (good for stew!)

  Davy sat bolt upright. His eyes flew open, and he became vaguely aware of his surroundings. He was still in the cage, still a captive. Across the cage seven other boys were wolfing down sandwiches and packaged pastries and drinking tall glasses of milk. The hazy memory of the witch pouring a white powder into the milk pitcher came to him and he suddenly understood what it meant: That powder would put them to sleep.

  Don't drink the milk! Davy wanted to yell at them, but he cou
ldn't get his voice to work or his lips to move. He was too weak. Don't drink the milk or it 'll put you to sleep, he thought again, much fainter this time. It was no use. He was drifting again, hovering on the edge of consciousness.

  Eleanor led a naked Margaret into the crematorium and told her to sit in the high-backed wooden chair she had placed in the middle of the pentagram after moving the heavy recliner out of the way. She made a quick mental check of the boys and found them all in deep, drugged sleep. That done, she wheeled the metal instrument cart over and placed it to the side and behind the chair.

  Eleanor looked over the tools and picked up a large, rectangular-shaped, barber's electric shears. She plugged the shears into a wall socket next to the cage and turned it on. It hummed to life, buzzing like a swarm of attacking bees.

  The shears removed the hair from Margaret's head as easily as a wet rag clears dust from a tabletop. Starting at the base of her neck, Eleanor pushed the shears up and over the top of Margaret's head, letting the long brown curls fall on the floor and roll down the girl's naked chest to her lap.

  From the instrument cart she next took a thick roll of heavy, gray, duct tape and began winding it around Margaret at the waist, chest, and neck, securing her body to the chair. She next applied the tape across Margaret's forehead, strapping her bald head tightly to the back of the chair so that it was immovable. Throughout, Margaret never made a sound nor moved a muscle. She remained staring straight ahead.

  When Margaret was securely strapped to the chair, Eleanor removed a large, glowing hot, stoneware bowl from the crematorium oven and placed it in the middle of the pentangle. It was inscribed with strange symbols and runic letters. Carefully, she picked up all of Margaret's shorn locks and dropped them into the bowl one at a time while she knelt over it, mumbling as if in prayer. Flames shot up with each lock and little black globs of burnt hair floated out of the dish toward the ceiling.

  Eleanor stepped back, held her hands up, palms outward, and finished chanting. She crossed herself with the sign of the five-pointed star and began removing her clothing. When she was naked, she went to a shelf on the other side of the crematorium furnace and removed the neatly folded skin of Betty Boone and a Ball jar filled with a dark, gluey substance.

  She placed the skin on the embalming table then unlatched the top of the jar. She removed the glass and rubber stopper and dipped her finger in. The stuff was purplish black as she held it up in the candlelight. She brought her fingers to her lips, tasted it, and smiled.

  The liquid, which was rubbery and stale, was hard to work with, but Eleanor didn't seem to mind. She scooped the stuff out with her fingers and painted it on Margaret's naked head and body carefully, being sure to make each symbol precisely. When she was done and there were thirteen symbols in blood painted on her head, eyelids, lips, and unformed breasts, Eleanor again tasted the contents of the jar, leaving a bloody smear down her chin. Licking the stuff from her lips, she painted corresponding symbols on her own face and body.

  When she was done, she replaced the jar on the shelf and unfolded the skin, which had grown leathery. As though putting on a mink stole, she draped the skin of Betty Boone over her head and shoulders and proceeded to dance around the pentagram six times, her body gyrating wildly as she sang a song that had no discernible melody or understandable words. On her last turn around the table, Eleanor snatched a mortician's electrical bone saw from the instrument cart. She finished her dance where she'd started it, directly behind Margaret's chair. She plugged the saw into the same socket she'd used for the shears and with a flick of the switch brought it to life. It whined, a hard mean sound that set Eleanor to cackling merrily.

  From the twilight edges of dreamless unconsciousness Davy Torrez became aware of a sound like a dentist's drill magnified a hundred times. The sound pulled him reluctantly to consciousness again and forced his eyes open.

  Candlelight was the first thing he saw. It dazzled his eyes with rainbow auras for a moment and spilled over the sleeping bodies of the other boys in the cage. He looked past them, focusing as well as he could through the fog of trauma that ruled him, to the figures outside the cage. By the flickering light Davy saw the naked witch, some kind of sheet draped over her head and shoulders, standing behind an equally naked child strapped to a chair in the middle of the star within a circle. The child's head had no hair on it. As Davy's eyes dropped, he thought for a moment that the witch had cut off this child's peepee, too, but then he realized it was a girl.

  In the witch's hand was the thing that was making the awful noise that had woken him. It had a short round handle with a trigger on it, and a long, sharp, saw-toothed, doubleedged blade extending out for more than a foot from the handle. The two rows of teeth moved opposite each other, sliding back and forth much like his father's hedge clippers only at a much greater speed.

  As Davy watched in horror, the witch placed the whining saw against the girl's forehead and drew it back toward her. The saw screeched with an awful sound more shrill than a piece of broken chalk drawn hard across a blackboard. Bone dust and blood flew from the blade's jigsawing action. Blood ran over the tape on the girl's head and down her face like tears. The little girl's eyes widened. Her mouth dropped open and she drooled a thick line of spit. Held tightly by the gray tape, the rest of her body was becoming flecked with drops of blood, tiny skull splinters, and fragments of raw skin and flesh. Through it all the girl never uttered a sound.

  It took only seconds for the saw to complete its path through the top of her skull, but to Davy Torrez it was an eternity. A scream of revulsion and horror built deep in his gut, travelled upward, bypassing his shock-silenced vocal cords, and exploded in his brain. Tears welled in his eyes and flowed freely down his face, matching the tears that welled in the eyes of the poor girl in the chair.

  The saw came free of the back of the girl's head with one last screech, dotting the witch's flattened, wrinkled breasts with blood and bone dust. The scream in Davy's head grew louder. The witch turned the saw off and put it aside. She began to chant strange unintelligible words and placed her hands on both sides of the girl's head. As though she were lifting the lid of a cookie jar, the witch removed the top of the girl's head. Davy could see a glimpse of the top of her quivering, wet brain just above the bloody rim of her forehead.

  The scream in Davy's head grew so loud it felt as though at any second it would blow the top off his head leaving his brain exposed to the air like the little girl's. Her eyes were still wide open, but had become bloodshot and glazed. Her face was streaked with blood that mingled with her tears, turning them red.

  Something bright and silvery flashed over the little girl's ruined head. Davy pulled his eyes away from that horrible stare and looked. The witch held something metallic in her hand. Davy couldn't see it well at first because of the candle light reflecting off it directly into his eyes. He moved his head and saw what it was.

  No! Please! Don't! a part of Davy's mind whispered beneath the scream that was reaching hurricane force between his ears. In her hand, the witch held a large silver spoon whose scooping end had been honed to dagger sharpness. The witch raised the spoon, holding it over the girl's head like a holy chalice, and intoned several incomprehensible words. She crossed herself with her left hand in a strange way, touching her forehead, breasts, and hips.

  Licking her lips greedily, the witch dug the spoon into the little girl's opened skull. She jabbed and tugged; there was a sickeningly soft, wet sucking sound like something being pulled out of thick mud and the witch scooped a large spoonful of brains from the opened skull.

  The girl's eyes widened farther than Davy would have thought was humanly possible, then rolled up into her head, showing only their whites. Her face twitched spasmodically, blood gushed from her nose, and her mouth opened and closed like a fish on land. The only part of her lower body that could move, her fingers, jerked convulsively. There was a farting sound followed by a soft spattering as her bowels and bladder let go, flowing onto th
e chair and down her naked legs to the floor. A foul smell of rotten eggs filled the room.

  The witch shoveled the gob of brains into her mouth, chewing slowly, relishing every bit of it, and swallowed. She smiled. Her lips and teeth were coated with a shiny bloody slime like gray Vaseline. She lapped the spoon and dug it in for another scoop which she pulled out and held toward Davy.

  Want some? she asked in his head, and erupted into horrible laughter.

  Reality snapped and Davy Torrez went into a tailspin falling deeper and deeper back into the protective black hole in his subconscious. As he fell, the scream of anguish in his head echoed around and around, accompanying him into the depths of unconsciousness where it went on and on and on.

  CHAPTER 21

  Oh, dear what can the matter be?

  Steve looked at the clock on his desk and sighed. It was 6 A.M. He'd been up since five trying to write but all he'd done was sit and stare at the blank paper in front of him and think of her. For the past month and a half, ever since he'd seen her that first day outside Roosevelt's Bar in Amherst, Steve Nailer had been haunted by the thought of, and desire for, the provocative young woman who seemed capable of crawling right inside his head and knowing all the dark, lustful secrets he kept hidden there.

  It certainly wasn't helping his work. Here it was, late October, and he hadn't finished more than two lines of the first of four sonnets he was writing for the Dickinson Poetry Competition. The deadline was little more than a week away and he couldn't finish one poem, much less four. He was trapped in the middle of the worst writer's block he had ever experienced. He felt like he was stuck in quicksand; the harder he struggled for the right words the deeper he sank into frustration.