Cages and Those Who Hold the Keys

2

Sort your materials into separate stacks, double check to make certain all detailing accessories have also been gathered and properly assembled into groups that correlate with their respective patches.

* * *

Marian knew that coming here first might be a mistake but, wanting to put off facing her brother, she came anyway. If the morbid tone of the phone call from Aunt Boots was any indication of what waited for her at the house, she wanted to avoid going there for as long as possible. After the paralyzing wreckage of the last few days she needed a quiet place to be alone, to find her bearings, to begin recovering from the awful thing that had happened and steel herself for whatever else was coming.

A small group of ghosts moved in the distance, bags in one hand, flashlights in the other, each giddy with anticipation of the treasures waiting— the candied apples, the chocolate bars, the popcorn balls and licorice sticks. Marian found herself envying them. The one night of the year when everyone— young and old, adult and child— cast away their fear of the dark for the sake of enjoying some good old-fashioned scares, decorating their houses with multicolored corn strung across doorways, pumpkins, stacked sheaves of straw leaning against the porch railings, even monster-masked scarecrows waiting on the steps.

The ghosts chanted: “Tonight is the night when dead leaves fly/Like witches on switches across the sky…”

Her smile widened as she remembered the path that ran next to the north side of the gate at Cedar Hill Cemetery, providing the trick-or-treaters with a shortcut through the gravestones. On many Hallowe’ens past she’d taken the shortcut herself, climbing the tiny embankment and following the path through this place of the resting dead until it emerged near North Tenth. Every town has that one special street where all the ghouls, withes, goblins, and their like head toward on Beggar’s Night, that special street where the people gave out the best goodies in town, and in the case of Cedar Hill, that street was North Tenth. At least, that’s the way it had been when Marian was a child. She wondered if that were still the case.

On those Beggars’ Nights, so long ago, as she and Alan skulked their way past the tombstones and crypts and eternal flames, she would listen for the rhythmic thudding of the dead trying to beat their way out of their coffins— Let-us-OUT! Let us OUT!— all the while gripping her brother’s hand very tightly as he spooked her with stories of warlocks and demons and fog-shrouded moors where rotting hands suddenly shot up out of graves to snatch away innocent children and drag them down into the pits of darkness where some terrible, slobbering, hairy, starving, unspeakably grouchy Thing waited. God, what fun it had been!

As the first group of ghosts disappeared into a thick patch of trees, another, smaller group of creatures emerged next to the gate and moved stealthily along; there were devils in this batch, werewolves and misshapen monstrosities followed by a princess or two who looked over their shoulders at a fast-approaching vampire brigade, who chanted around their plastic fangs: “Tonight is the night when pumpkins stare/Through sheaves and leaves everywhere...”

Not wanting to pull herself away from the sights and her memories, wishing there was some way she could avoid having to deal with any of this, Marian sighed, felt a small shudder snake down her spine, and, with a smooth deliberation she’d spent most of her adult and professional life perfecting, turned to the business at hand.

“Well, you two,” she whispered, “looks like you can meet the rest of the family now.” Then she chuckled, albeit a bit morbidly, under her breath. There was as much truth as there was displaced irony in that statement.

In the early days of Cedar Hill when the Welsh, Scotch, and Irish immigrants worked alongside the Delaware and Hopewell Indians to establish safe shipping lanes through places such as Black Hand Gorge, the Narrows, and Buckeye Lake, a devastating epidemic of cholera swept through the county. People died so fast and in such great numbers that corpses had to be collected in express wagons every eight hours. People were dying faster than healthy men could be found to bury them. But the “…plague” (as it was referred to in the journals of the time) passed, the town began to rebuild its citizenship (many widows and widowers moving beyond the barriers of their “own clans and communities” to marry and procreate), and later, in 1803, Cedar Hill Cemetery was established by the town’s remaining founders as a place to permanently inter those who had died during the epidemic. Even though bodies were scattered for nearly seventy-five miles in all directions, groups of volunteers were assembled whose duty it was to locate and identify as many of the dead as possible, bring them back to Cedar Hill, and ensure each was given a “…burial befitting one of a good Christian community.” Since most of the bodies had been buried with some sort of marker, locating them wasn’t too difficult, nor, surprisingly, was identifying them, despite the ravages of time and disease on the bodies; every “…Hill citizen of Anglo descent” had been buried with a small Bible whose inside cover bore the name of its possessor, as well as those of his or her immediate family. Once found and returned, the bodies were placed in the cemetery according to family or clan, and over the decades it remained that way, albeit by unspoken agreement; members of families directly descended from Cedar Hill’s founding fathers were buried in or as near as possible to the plats where their ancestors slept. But such were the ways of nearly two hundred years ago that a majority of people in Cedar Hill (both the cemetery and the town) were now related by ancestral blood; some within three or less generations, others quite distantly.

The graves of Marian’s parents were located in front of a small abandoned church on the cemetery grounds. The long-forgotten architect who’d designed the church had, like Marian’s dad, been an admirer of Antonio Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona. She thought of Gaudi now because he’d been something of a hero to her father, a man who laid bricks, cut lumber, and balanced beams for a living. Her parents had married on Hallowe’en nearly forty years ago (hence that day being the Big Celebration Day in the Quinlan household), then honeymooned in Barcelona where her father was awestruck by Gaudi’s masterpiece: She could still recall the wonder in his face whenever he spoke of the experience, shaking his head in amazement that the plans for the cathedral’s construction were so vast, complex, and precise it would take hundreds of years to complete.

“I wish I had that kind of talent,” he’d said. “To be able to create something like that, something that you don’t just build, but something your soul goes into, something that will go on being created hundreds of years after you’re gone, so you’ll never be forgotten.”

“You know,” said Mom, “in that pamphlet they were giving out, it said that Gaudi was partly inspired by a quilt his mother had made when he was a child. I always wanted to get back to that quilt I was working on.”

Dad laughed. “Well, then; you got your dream project and I got mine.”

A soft rustling of leaves somewhere behind told Marian that yet another band of demons and wizards and ghoulies was making its way through, but she did not turn to look; her gaze was still fixed on the crumbling church before her. Dad had always been fascinated by the church’s obvious, though less extravagant, Gaudi influence, disregarding that the structure was merely the echo of another man’s genius; from the blue marble inlay to the ominous gargoyles to the reproduction of the Virgin Mary over the rotting and sealed oak doors, the building seemed to apologize for what it wasn’t rather than boast of its own virtues. Over the years sections of the front and side walls had collapsed, revealing parts of the interior. From where Marian stood she see exposed portions of both the belfry and the organ loft. Her dad once put in a bid to renovate this church, seeing it as his one and only chance to leave behind something to equal the glory of the Sagrada Familia— a wild and improbable dream, to be sure, but one that he’d nurtured for over half his life. It helped him to pass the long nights when his back pain kept him awake and the bills outweighed the bank balance— both conditions being part and parcel of an independent contractor’s chosen occupation. The city later decided that renovating the church wasn’t as important as building a new shopping mall and so dropped the project. Still, her father had kept the family gravesites near the structure; if he couldn’t rest near his greatest triumph, he would rest near the symbol of what might have been.

Marian stared at the decaying church and sighed. Even in death her parents had to settle for second best. Their tombstones were side by side, with a third spot reserved— at his own request— for Alan.

There was no space for Marian; they’d always known she’d be the one to break away completely, to build a new life far away from this sad and tired little town that liked to call itself a city.

She hoped that her dad knew how hard she’d tried (but not all that hard, said something in the back of her mind) to get here in time.

Tried and failed.

As the beggars’ retreating footsteps crunched through the dried leaves, Marian knelt down and placed one rose on each of her parents’ graves, whispering a prayer taught to her by her mother at a time when the Mass was still spoken in Latin, the language of worship Mom had always preferred:

“Intra tua vulnera aescode me,” she said, hoping she was remembering it correctly.

She heard the approaching footsteps but paid them no mind.

“Ne permittas me separari a te. Ab hoste maligno defende me. In hora mortis meae voca me; Et jub me venire ad te, Ut cum Sanctis tuis laudem—” She saw a shadow slowly rise up behind her to stretch over the graves. Spindly, almost twig-like arms and hands; a slender, tubular trunk; and a large, rounded head with its stem jutting upward. She smiled and felt a tear slip from her eye.

For a moment, kneeling there under the entwined shadows, she was six years old again, listening as Mom read to her from L. Frank Baum’s The Marvelous Land of Oz, describing how Tip came to build Jack Pumpkinhead who would be his partner as they went in search of the Tin Woodsman and the Scarecrow. Jack Pumpkinhead, with his round eyes, three-cornered nose, and mouth like a crescent moon, living under the watchful gaze of Mombi the Sorceress. Jack had been Marian’s imaginary friend through most of her childhood, always next to her during math tests at school, sitting by her bed at night after the Friday chiller movies to guard against the creatures she feared were waiting under the bed or crouching in the closet. Only she could see him then.

Just like now.

She was so pleased to have him with her again she almost couldn’t finish the prayer.

“In sa ... sa ...”

“In saecula saeculorum,” said Jack Pumpkinhead behind her. “Amen.” “Amen,” echoed Marian. Something brushed against her shoulder, then rested there. A soft whisper, full of October melancholy: “Let’s sing our special song.”

She reached up and, not turning to look, touched the twig-fingers of Jack’s hand. She knew his being here was just a bit of childhood whimsy she had never been able to discard (after all, a good actress was supposed to be able to recall feelings and experiences to enrich her performances), but, still, it amazed her how easily she was able to slip back into the Marian of childhood and find she still fit.

The shadow softly sang: “Ol’ Jack Pumpkinhead lived on a vine/Ol’ Jack Pumpkinhead thought it was fine...”

She thought there was something different about his voice, but not wanting to ruin this wonderful surprise by analyzing it to death, she answered in song, just as she always had: “First he was small and green, then big and yellow/Ol’ Jack Pumpkinhead is a very fine fellow.”

She rose to her feet and turned to embrace him, dearest Jack who’d come back one last time to protect her from the grief and guilt she couldn’t face.

His eyes glowed a sickly orange-red, casting diseased beams through the early evening mist. He was hunched and shuddering, a soul-sick animal.

“I thought you had forgotten about me,” he said, and it was then that Marian knew what was different about his voice; it was no longer the light, happy tenor that she’d given him, it was the sound of an empty house when the door was opened, an empty bed in the middle of the night, or an empty crib that never knew an occupant; dead leaves skittering dryly across a cold autumn sidewalk; the low, mournful whistling of the wind as it passed through the branches of bare trees; it was a sound so completely, totally, irrevocably alone that hearing it just in a whisper’s instant made her long for the warmth and safety of home and hearth: even if her company there was now superfluous, at least she wouldn’t be alone as that sound.

A thin trickle of blood dripped from the corner of Jack’s mouth.

She closed her eyes, wishing away this friend from her childhood, this dear friend who had been so horribly changed and misshapen—

—but why?

She felt the twigs that were his fingers grip her wrists. “I’ve really missed you, Marian. Please don’t be afraid. It’s so cold here, so lonely where everyone is sleeping and you have no friends.”

She opened her eyes, knowing— praying— that his return to her was just an hallucination brought on from lack of sleep the past three days. Maybe she’d just seen one too many houses where the children had constructed horrible Hallowe’en effigies from straw and old clothes, then set them on the front porch to scare the monsters away.

One of Jack’s twig-fingers broke through her flesh. She felt the warmth of her blood as it seeped out, staining her blouse’s white sleeve.

Jack was wearing one of Dad’s old shirts, the one Marian had bought him for Christmas last year.

“Jack Pumpkinhead is still a fine fellow,” he whispered to in that voice. “The quilt’s almost finished. And we put a light in the window for you.” The wind grew stronger. One of the bells in the church steeple swung back, then forth, ringing twice. “Please come home now,” said Jack. “You’re needed.” Her blood was soaking into the bark of his hand. Her legs began to buckle as Jack leaned forward to cover her lips with his crescent mouth in a welcome-home kiss.

Something moved in the distance; another group of tiny spirits broke through the bushes on their way to claim sugary treasures, singing: “A goblin lives in OUR house, in OUR house, in OUR house, a goblin lives in OUR house, all the year round...”

Marian broke away, slipped, and fell on top of her father’s grave, half expecting his desiccated hands—

—Let us OUT! Let us OUT!— — to break through the soil and grab her. The church bell rang once more, a brassy chime, Mom’s voice singing to her when she was young and sick with fever. The children’s laughter lingered as the bell fell silent. Autumn-dried leaves blew past her, a few clinging to the hem of her dress.

Jack Pumpkinhead began to fade; color went first, draining away until Jack and everything surrounding him looked like part of an old sepia-toned photograph, disappearing very slowly, an image retained on the inside of the eyelid for an instant, then gone.

Rising unsteadily to her feet, Marian saw the second set of footprints that followed her own and stopped at the edge of the graves.

No. It wasn’t him. It couldn’t have been. Someone must have been here before me and I just didn’t notice the prints, that’s all.

As convincing an argument as it was, it still didn’t stop her from half-sprinting out of the cemetery to her car. She needed to rest but couldn’t until she saw her brother. Maybe seeing Alan after all this time would help to purge her of whatever had made her resurrect Jack.

She started the car, saw the ghostly effigies resting on the porches of nearby homes, and noticed the small gash on the side of her wrist.

Some of her blood dripped onto the steering wheel.

“Goddammit,” she whispered, bandaging the wound with her handkerchief. “Welcome home.” Then, trying to force away the image of Jack’s glowing eyes and the mournful echo of his voice, drove away toward the place she once called home.