Cages and Those Who Hold the Keys

8

Once you have reached this step in the process, the base-patches should reveal to you the overall pattern you need to follow in order to complete your quilt. How wide to make it and how many patches should be included is up to you. You’re on your way to having a patchwork quilt! Congratulations! Now, go back, and repeat steps 1-7 as needed.

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Marian and Jack came out with Boots by their side. Alan stood by the Mom-thing’s along with everyone else. Marian walked over and embraced her brother. “Okay, Alan. I know the rest of it.” “You’ll have to stay here now, you know?” “I know.” “Can you accept that?”

“Someday, I think.” Marian then caught sight of a new figure entering the cemetery, and smiled when she saw Laura walking toward her. Her sister-in-law’s skin was cadaverous, her eyes blank. She had been torn open from the center of her chest on down. Her stomach, liver, and uterus dangled within shiny loops of grey intestine, caught there as if in a spider’s web. Everything drooped so low it nearly touched the ground.

She was carrying something that was almost too big for her to handle.

Walking up to Marian, Laura handed over her Story-Quilt-wrapped burden, then took her place by her husband’s side, draping one cold-dead arm around his waist, resting her head on his shoulder. Alan kissed her cheek and pointed to the spot where they would rest come morning.

Marian pulled back a corner of the quilt and looked into the baby’s face.

Its head was so much larger than the rest of its body, semi-round with deep horizontal grooves in the flesh as well as the skull beneath. Its eyes were so abnormally large and round, its mouth deformed, its nose misshapen and dwarfed by the rest of its features.

Marian wept joy for its hideousness and blessed the night for the pain it was in, a pain that she was now more than willing to share, to savor along with this creature, her nephew, her son, her lover-to-be.

The Quinlan bloodline would remain pure. She could almost see the faces of the children she would have with this after it grew up. How glorious they would be.

She checked her watch. It was nearly midnight. At sunrise on All Saints’ Day the dead would have to return to their graves and wait for next Hallowe’en to come around before they could rise again. She studied the pile of stones and human heads. “A family cathedral,” she said. The thing in her arms cooed and coughed in approval.

There was a stone quarry not too far away. The lumber mill was even closer. She had the whole town here; young and old, the living and the dead.

They had until dawn.

Plenty of time for a good enough start.

She faced the crowd. “We all know what has to be done. If we don’t finish tonight, we’ll meet here again next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. However long it takes.” She stroked the surface of the Story Quilt, knowing what illustration she’d use for the final patch once this project was completed. She could be patient. She was not alone.

She never would be again. She lifted her head and faced the crowd once again. “Let’s get to it.”

Everyone smiled, the Hallowe’en moon grew brighter as the church bell gave a triumphant ring, and, as a family, they began to raise a dream from the silent, ancient dust of death.

In Loving Memory of My Father,

Frank Henry Braunbeck

May 22, 1926 - June 15, 2001

“No, good sir; the privilege was mine.”