by Curran, Tim
Because, honestly, he was hoping that was it, but in Witcham these days hope ran very dry even if everything else was soaking wet. He stood there a moment, remembering this neighborhood at high summer, the life, the activity. The sounds of kids playing and radios blaring from porches, the smell of charcoal smoke from barbecues and that summery green tang of freshly cut grass. He smiled briefly at the memory of that. Could almost feel the crisping heat of July, hear the sound of cards flapping in spokes, birds singing in the trees. But the smile faded to a ghost that drifted away when he saw the neighborhood now: wet and stinking and gradually flooding. All you could hear was water rushing in the streets, swirling and pooling, the inundated stormdrains still backing up and up as the world sprang a leak and Kneale Street sank. The sidewalks where Chrissy and her friends had drawn elaborate dream houses in chalk and roller-skated and skipped rope…they were covered in sluicing gray water and clumped, rotting leaves.
It was a cemetery now.
That’s what Mitch thought as he stood there. Kneale Street was a cemetery. Just a crumbling and graying monument to what was and what would probably never be again.
He shivered then, noticing that the shadows were spreading through yards, seeping from gutters and beneath sheds, roping around foundations. What sun remained was hidden behind that tightly woven gray tapestry of clouds, well behind the rooftops across the street.
The rain had diminished to a chill drizzle and Mitch looked over at Tommy and wondered what he was thinking as he stared down the street.
“I ever tell you, Mitch, how I put myself through trade school to get my welding and metalwork papers?”
Mitch shook his head. That’s when he was still in Milwaukee working a lathe for Empire Shipbuilding. “No, never did.”
Tommy lit a cigarette in his cupped hands. “I got me a job over in Bethany at Harvest Hill boneyard. You know the place?”
Mitch did. An old, hilly cemetery surrounded by high wrought iron gates. Place was huge. They’d buried his Uncle Lou out there years ago when Mitch was a kid. Place gave him the creeps with all those old stones, statuary, and crypts set into the hillsides. He always expected to see Vincent Price hanging around out there. Harvest Hill was older than the town that had sprung up around it, had graves dating back to before the turn of the 19th century.
Tommy pulled off his cigarette. “Yeah, well that’s how I paid for my two years of higher education. See, Harvest was and is, a goddamned big place. They had like three full time caretakers and lots of college kids helping out with the lawns in the summer and the leaves in the fall. You finished cutting the grass, then you started again. And in the fall? Forget it. You could never keep the leaves out. Anyway, so they got this big ugly mortuary out back of the place stuck in this little woods out there. You could never see it from the cemetery unless it was fall and the trees dropped their leaves…”
Tommy said it was a high, gray concrete building, two story, with tall black windows covered by bars. Looked either like a Victorian insane asylum or Doc Frankenstein’s workshop. Nice manicured lawns and a circular cobblestone drive. Real old world sort of joint, but spooky.
“They used to store bodies there during cholera and typhus outbreaks, piled ‘em up like cordwood,” Tommy said. “The cellar is used as a morgue for people that die during the winter. They store them there for Harvest and a lot of other cemeteries that don’t have their own meatlockers. Out back now, in the rear of the building, you got these two high, dirty smokestacks like something they borrowed from Bergen-Belsen or Treblinka or one of those happy places. Yeah, they’ve got a crematory in the back and they cremate a lot of stiffs in there. At least, they did back then, but probably still do.” Tommy took another drag. “Well, I picked up extra money by cleaning the mortuary up three times a week—Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights.”
Mitch grimaced. “Nice job.”
“Yeah, you bet. While the rest of you idiots were out chasing tail and getting drunk Friday night, there I was alone in that fucking spookhouse mopping the marble tiled floors and swabbing down the prep room, lucky bastard that I was. You know what a place like that is like at night?”
Mitch said he didn’t.
Tommy blew smoke out through his nostrils. “It’s just like you think a place like that is. So quiet it’ll curl the hairs at the back of your neck. You hear a timber creak or moth tap at the window, you almost shit your pants. Maybe some people get used to it, but I never did. Place always smelled old like a library, maybe with a sweet scent of wilting flowers and things beneath that smell you didn’t want to think about. And that crematory…don’t let anybody ever kid you, those places smell awful, like burning hair and singed meat and wet ashes. About make you want to puke.” Tommy laughed as if to dismiss it all, but you could see these memories did not sit easy with him. “But you know what’s really bad, Mitch? It’s the feel of the place. Not how it looks or smells, but how it feels. How it makes your guts curdle in your stomach and makes you imagine things that aren’t there. It’s cold in that mortuary in mid-summer and everything echoes. God. The place is dead and empty, yet you can’t get past the idea that you’re being watched all the time, that there’s somebody behind you or just out of sight that disappears whenever you look. I never got past that. Never.”
Mitch swallowed. “And why are you telling me this, Tommy?”
“Because this neighborhood is starting to feel just like that goddamn mortuary,” he said. “Like maybe the dead outnumber the living. I’m feeling something and it ain’t exactly good.”
Mitch lit a cigarette himself because his nerves were jangling and he had that same gnawing feeling in his belly that he’d had early in the day, the sense that something very terrible was waiting to pounce on him and the whole town. Problem was, he figured he now knew what that something was. Standing there with Tommy, he had that feeling of being watched, too, of eyes crawling along the nape of his neck. But from where? The trees? The sky? The hedges? You just could not put a finger on it.
Maybe it was just the emptiness needling him.
That could have been it.
There was just no one around. As if maybe the rumors of what was really going on were making the rounds, were being telegraphed mouth to ear until everyone knew the nature of what had Witcham in its grip. And such was its dire nature that doors were locked and curtains drawn, children dragged inside and knocks went unanswered. Looking around the neighborhood, there was a hush and a vacancy that you might associate with a desert ghost town. It looked very…desolate. Like one of those spooky, empty towns you saw on a 1950’s civil defense newsreel that was about to be hit with an A-bomb. It was doomsday on Kneale Street and everyone had filtered down into their bomb shelters to wait it out.
Cars were abandoned at the curb, bikes forgotten in yards, garage doors left banging in the wind.
“I had a cousin that was an undertaker,” Tommy said. “George, on my mother’s side. He said sometimes the stiffs would move because of the gas and what not. But I’m thinking they didn’t move like these ones do.”
“C’mon,” Mitch finally said, “let’s get this done.”
9
The next house down the way was Wanda Sepperly’s.
She was something of a legend in the neighborhood, Mitch knew. A cauldron stirring witch to the kids and a reader of palms and diviner of futures to many adults. Mitch didn’t go in for any of that business himself, but he knew for a fact that quite a few on Kneale Street did and many more from other parts of the city. He did not put much stock in fortune-tellers. He did not doubt that Wanda Sepperly practiced some form of folk medicine and was believed clairvoyant, because he had heard the stories just like anyone else. She could cure acne and impotency, she could touch your head with a switch of cherrywood and make your hair grow back and, it was also rumored, she could stop bleeding, both internal and external, by laying her hands upon the afflicted member. Fertility, it seemed, was something of a specialty of hers. She could examine a spid
er’s dewy web and tell you when to plant and by studying the phases of the moon, she could tell a woman the best nights to lay with her husband to bring forth seed.
Depending on who you listened to, these gifts, if they indeed existed, were either faith-healing or witchcraft.
Mitch didn’t put much into any of it, but he knew that Lily had been over there a few times…even if she would not admit as much.
All Mitch knew for sure about Wanda Sepperly was that she had lived on Kneale Street for the past twenty years in that trim yellow two story house with the gingerbread at the eaves and the sharp pitched roof with the serpent weather vane on top. That there was a tall white picket fence around her property that guarded her apple trees and pumpkin patch. That her vegetable and flower gardens grew lush and green and inexplicably verdant even in the driest and coldest years. And that her petunias and hollyhocks, bleeding hearts and wild roses were exceptionally healthy and vibrant and her tomatoes and carrots, sweet peas and snap beans produced a yield that was far out of proportion to the size of their plots. And all of this, it seemed, with no tending by Wanda herself. She had the green thumb, they said, but you would never see her putting it to use unless it was done by the light of the moon.
This is what Mitch knew.
He did not know about fortune-telling or any of that business. Only that Wanda was very old and that she had operated a farm in northern Price County for fifty-odd years and had managed to outlive a string of husbands. That when the last one was buried, Wanda had come to live in Witcham and nobody honestly knew why.
Tommy followed Mitch through the gate and up the walk. He went up the steps onto the porch and noticed that there were bundles of dried flowers suspended from the overhang. They gave off a sharp, unpleasant odor like a spice cupboard closed up for too long.
He knocked and the door swung in. It hadn’t even been latched.
“Mrs. Sepperly?” Mitch called out. “It’s just me, Mitch Barron, from down the block. Just wanted a quick word with you…Mrs. Sepperly?”
“Well, come on in then, don’t just stand there pissing water into my fine old carpet,” a voice said that was unnaturally hearty for the age of its owner. “I knew someone would come calling, Mitch, and it might as well be you.”
They found her in the living room, though it might have been called a sitting room as in years gone by, because there was not a TV, radio, or electric appliance to be had. Incense was burning in a clay pot and Wanda Sepperly sat in a recliner covered in flowery fabric. There were some old books on a shelf, some curios beneath those, a menagerie of framed black and white photos on the wall. Not much else but an ugly lime-green sofa that had seen better days. Mitch didn’t know what he was expecting, maybe a crystal ball or a few skulls or a stuffed monkey, but the room was simply comfortable and cozy with a few tapestries on the wall and thick plum-colored velour curtains.
Nice.
Wanda was dressed in a plain brown dress with a white ruffled collar that looked almost like something the Puritan ladies wore in Thanksgiving prints. She wore no jewelry and her white hair was very sparse, pink scalp showing through. Her eyes were bright, a vivid blue. She looked nothing like the senile old lady that whiled away afternoons on the porch rocker or collected dandelions in a basket…or, it was rumored, wandered her yard by moonlight tapping a stick on the ground.
“You’ve come to warn me of the terrible fix this town is in…but haven’t I smelled it coming for weeks?” she said to them. “There are things you can know and things you can only guess and then there are those which your heart and spirit tell you which cannot be denied. Am I right? Right as rain! I saw it coming, young Mister Barron, indeed I did! Long before Hillside Cemetery gave up its dead, I saw it coming, a nasty surprise all trimmed out in black satin! It was a black ice winter with an early thaw followed by a hot locust summer asprout with devil grass! Such things always bring about a darkmoon autumn bleeding with rain and an angry sky veined with lightening. And what do we have out there? We have a town—more yours than mine—that’s going under like a brick in a bog! Surely, going under and a mind gets to wondering if it will ever, ever come up for air again! Now…are we on the same page here, Mitch Barron, neighbor of mine who can never can be troubled to stop by and while away the time with a crazy old lady?”
Mitch just nodded, couldn’t seem to find his voice.
He had never heard her talk so much. It was as if tragedy was the oil that freed her jaw. Here he thought old Mother Sepperly was just an old bag wrinkled and deflated by the years, but truth be told, that bag was filled with gas so hot it might burn you if you strayed too near. Yes, her face was old lady sallow and thin-skinned, her knuckles liver-spotted and she was more dry-wood than woman, but she was certainly alive. There was a vitality in those twinkling eyes you could not deny and a spirit haunting those bones that no oblong box could hope to contain. Those arthritic, knobby hands of hers had spanked naughty children to bed and pinched apple-pie crusts, they had harvested corn and slopped hogs, read tea leaves and whittled love charms. They were skeleton and skin worn smooth and thin as wax paper, but there was still a snap and a punch in them that ninety-six summers had not been able to steal away completely.
Standing there with his mouth open and Wanda Sepperly’s spicy tongue weaving a rich and heady spell over him, he could do nothing but compare her to some fine old wine stored in dust and cobweb and flaking time in a hidden cellar. A bottle that had now been uncorked and, damn, if it didn’t smell sweet and have enough kick left to put you on your ass.
“Well, Mitch Barron, are you going to speak or am I going to have to root around in yer head like my Finnish grandmother and expose all your dirty secrets as those of my bloodline always can?”
Mitch sighed, found his voice. “We just came to tell you that—”
“Yes, yes, yes, boy, I know, to lock my doors and bolt my shutters,” Wanda said as if it was all too apparent. “I saw it coming for weeks, did I tell you that? I felt it in my bones like the shivers and the rheumatism. Something’s coming, I said to myself many weeks gone. Oh be sure of that, old woman, there’s a big black pot being stirred and what crawls out will not be that you’d want to meet this side of the grave. I told myself these things, felt them, saw them, knew them. From that bad winter to that awful summer, oh, the signs were right and the planets aligned and the stars trembling in heaven. Oh yes, boy, oh yes, old Mother Sepperly was aware as I’m always aware. And when those storms started a-brewing, I knew as much. Back in farm country, yes, we would look for the signs and find them. It would have been no surprise to my kin if calves were stillborn and their placentas an electric blue. And if one placenta held a two-headed birth? Yes, yes, and yes! Such things always follow a pattern. The wind comes before the storm and the seed pops long before the harrow. Ain’t it the truth?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
Tommy was looking at Mitch as if he was wondering what in the Christ he had gotten him into and where the exit might be located. But Mitch could only shrug. They’d come here to do a neighborly duty, more or less, to warn old Mother Sepperly of what was and what could be, but she seemed to know all that.
“You,” she said to Tommy, narrowing her eyes, “I can guess your name and all that sideshow bullshit, but I’d rather you confessed. Simpler that way.”
“Tommy Kastle,” he said.
“As I thought. Now reach in your front shirt pocket and share your tobacco with me. Go ahead, go ahead, and wipe those silly thoughts from your head, Mitch Barron. Smoking can’t hurt something as old as me. The cancer needs something healthy to chew and it would find nothing but jerky and gristle in this old frame. Ha! It’s more afraid of me that I am of it, hear?”
Tommy brought out a cigarette and Wanda snapped the filter off and lit it with a match. She took long, deep pulls off it, sending the smoke out through her nostrils. “Better,” she said. “Better. Now you boys have been playing at warning the neighbors of what might crawl out of the darkness this nig
ht? And what have they said?”
“They’re not answering their doors,” Tommy said.
Wanda smiled, showing them both her nubby yellow teeth. “Of course they’re not. They sense things and feel things, they know that a darkness is coming and maybe that it’s already arrived. Some have fled and others are hiding. For Halloween has come early and there will be a tricking and a treating tonight and certain revelers you dare not open the door to.” She sat there smoking, her eyes glazing over and when she spoke, the years clung to her like carrion birds to rotten meat. “When I was a girl, yes, in Haymarket, Bayfield County, it was. A tombstone winter was followed by a mad dog summer and that October, Matthew Donnegan went insane, did he not? He took an axe after his wife and three children. A cold and windy October it was. No more came the Donnegan’s into town to church nor market, they stayed out at that farm and it was in the icehouse back yonder that Sheriff Wick found them. Those children all lined up like mummies in a Mexican catacomb, frosty and blue and staring, their mother squatting beside them frozen stiff as a shank of beef. Matthew could not say why he did what he did, only that a grave whispering had come through the corn as it does and he had listened. You recall that year? You recall the wild tales and wilder rumors? Oh, it was bad, bad, bad!”
Tommy and Mitch just stood there, wondering if she had slipped away on them. And as they thought this, her eyes—which seemed to be closing as her mind drifted through the years like dandelion seeds in a good blow—snapped open.
“Ha! I ain’t senile, Mister Tommy! Far from it!”
And maybe Mitch had never been exactly adept at reading minds, but right then he could read Tommy’s just fine. That old lady, Mitch, she just read my mind. And Mitch wanted to tell him that, no, of course she hadn’t. It was just that old people are very sensitive, intuitive, but he didn’t say a thing because he knew right down in his bones that what Wanda Sepperly practiced so effortlessly was more than that. It wasn’t some carnival trick; it was the real thing.