Halloween Is For Lovers, page 10
Lily looked up at the mirror, her eyes swollen and red. Down deep she knew the answer to Gilda's question, but that answer didn't count anymore.
Frederick's main gate was on the south wall of the estate. Thick iron spears arched across the opening and were gathered in the center by an elaborate coat of arms that Steve had designed himself. The shield had a calligraphic F at its center. Two foxes dashing outward in the top left quadrant signified direction and purpose. In the top right was the sun, master of the planets and giver of life. In the lower left quadrant was a swan, signifying motherly sacrifice for future generations. Finally, in the lower right was a water-ski boat, signifying mastery of speed and foot over the viscosity of water. Around its circumference was a phrase in Latin that read, loosely translated: As anointed by his fellow man the champion goes forth and prospers, sunning himself in his own eternal glory.
With a clank and a ratchet the gate came to life, splitting down the center as it opened outward. A white Cadillac Escalade with gold accents drove through and Frederick began closing his gates, gathering the luxury car to his elegant bosom.
Hugh leapt out of hiding but misjudged how quickly the gates would close. As he sprinted across the wet pavers he hesitated with a slip and a skid, a hesitation bred out of a nagging sense that his desperate attempt to see Lily was somehow wrong. He shook himself. No. This was his only chance for life and love. He charged forward.
It seemed like the gates sensed his attack and reacted by closing more quickly. Hesitation be damned, Hugh dove headfirst into the closing gap. His head made it to the other side but his shoulders and the rest of his body didn't. The powerful gate closed on Hugh's neck. He screamed. With a grinding of gears and a whine of motors, Frederick's gates snapped Hugh’s spine.
Morton looked on in horror. Frozen too long to help, he ran to Hugh's lifeless body and tried to pull it free. The gates doubled down with a crunch and a hiss, holding tighter their prey.
"Hugh? Buddy? Can you hear me?" Morton frantically banged his fist on the coat of arms, yelling at the top of his lungs, "Open the gates! Open the gates! Call 911!" He grabbed the iron spears and pulled with a roar, trying to separate them, but it was no use. They had snapped Hugh’s neck and choked out what little animation he had left in him.
A black Land Rover with an off-white leather interior pulled up to the gate. With a belch, the gate burped open and released Hugh's limp carcass.
Morton dragged him to the side and pleaded with the driver for help. "Call an ambulance!"
The occupants responded by rolling up their windows and lurching the car in a quick arc around Hugh's corpse and through the gate. A well-dressed, middle-aged lady in the passenger's seat hid behind a large wedding present.
Morton knelt over Hugh, checking his pulse, shaking his head. "Oh, no." He felt for a heartbeat and startled when he laid his hand on Hugh's chest. "He's already cold, dead cold." He reached up and gently wiped Hugh's eyes close. "Why, God? Why?"
Hugh's eyes snapped back open. Morton shook his head and pushed them closed again. Like spring-loaded window blinds, Hugh's lids rolled open with a slap.
Morton shook his head, almost crying, and he wrestled himself out of his sport coat, draping it reverently over Hugh's head. Looking from side to side, he grimaced and muttered, "Now I really need a drink."
A tiny muffled cough came from beneath the navy blue burial shroud. Another cough and a wheeze. Morton turned to look as Hugh sat up and pulled the coat off his head.
"What the—" the blood drained from Morton's face and he trembled in horror.
Hugh slurped and wheezed through his tilted head. "Did I make it?" He tried to steady his head but the gate had broken his neck. He no longer had control of his cranium, and it flopped from side to side. Finally he swung it to the right and back, the muscles pulling his mouth agape. "I thought I was going to make it," he moaned from his maw. "Wow, that gate closed fast. Seems like that could be a safety issue."
He swung his head to the side and noticed Morton trembling in fear. "What's a matter?"
"I ... I saw you die," Morton stuttered. "I saw the gate close on your neck and choke you to death."
"Seriously? How long was I out?"
"You were dead, no pulse, your body was cold, stone cold."
"Yeah, about that, there's something I should probably tell you."
A siren howled in the distance and Hugh swung his head toward the crescendo of its approach. "But first we should get out of here."
Hugh got to his feet and stiff-legged it into the woods. His spastic jog made his head flop from side to side. If ever there was a better example of a stereotypical zombie lurching through the Halloween night, Morton hadn't seen it. He thought and tried to make sense of things. This was the strangest of nights.
With the sirens approaching, Morton was torn between waiting for the cops and fleeing into the woods where the ghost monster was lurking. He did a quick analysis of his options. Following a zombie into the dark woods on Halloween night could lead to a frightening death. But cops meant questions, possible trespassing charges and a hot night of sweaty sobriety in a cold jail cell. His choice was clear. He followed Hugh into the woods.
In Frederick's east wing a lone silhouette stood motionless in a window. Lily looked out at the night sky and then down at her engagement ring, a three-carat pink diamond in a platinum Tiffany setting. If only the ring could make the marriage, she thought. In the palm of her other hand was a much smaller engagement ring, point eight two carats set in fourteen-karat white gold. The kind of ring a guy could barely afford after spending a summer insulating attics. She squeezed the ring tight in the palm of her hand and stared at the Halloween moon. In a sad whisper under her breath, she pleaded, "Let me go."
Hugh found a culvert under Frederick's north wall. The opening was two feet in diameter and half full of a swampy mix of algae, muck and black water. He crawled down next to it and flopped his head over to look inside. "It's too dark to see, but don't you think if it had a grate they'd put it on this side?"
Morton, who was keeping his distance, hunched his shoulders. "I don't know what to think, about anything, really. To tell you the truth, I'm starting to think that none of this is real. Maybe I'm dead under that bridge back there. Maybe you're a devil tricking me into following you down that pipe, probably right to hell."
Hugh sat on the culvert and held his head with one hand in as natural a position as he could. "You're not dead ... but I am. It's a crazy story, messed up and crazy, so I didn't tell it to you."
"Try me."
"I died three years ago on my wedding day. I crossed over from the Kingdom of the Dead to see her, to tell her I love her, but I only have tonight."
"You're a ghost. The dead can cross over on Halloween. None of that's true." Morton shook his head.
"Go see for yourself. My gravestone is in the cemetery on the hill. Hugh Rudd." He pointed into the night, toward where he felt the cemetery was.
"Maybe I will." Morton plugged his hands into his pockets and turned to leave but then turned back. "If you really are a ghost, why can't you just walk through this wall or float over it or, I don't know, just appear in her bedroom?"
"I don't know. I've never been a ghost before. I guess it doesn't come with any special powers, which is really kind of crappy." Hugh waded into the dark pool and squatted down in front of the culvert. "I don't have much time."
Morton nodded. "Just one more thing. Is it scary?
"Is what scary?"
"Dying."
"No, dying's not that scary, but being dead sure sucks." Hugh ducked down into the culvert. Morton watched and listened as Hugh's complaints echoed and faded down the black tunnel. "Aw man, it's full of spider webs, and the sides are all slimy, and it smells like cow manure ..."
Morton stood for a moment in silence, wondering if any of it had happened. He rattled the pill bottle he had taken out of the ambulance and decided to head back to that bottle of peppermint schnapps he had stashed in the bushes.
Hugh flushed from the pipe’s mire into Frederick's interior. Covered in green muck and tangled in spider webs, he tried to pull the long strands of slimy brown moss off his warm-up jacket. At least he hoped it was brown moss. He wiped his eyes clean and emptied the liquid mud out of his shoes. Pulling up his pant leg, he noticed dozens of fat black leeches attempting to feed off his legs. He didn't bother to pull them off. As soon as they got a mouthful of the stale air in his blood vessels, they dropped off and searched for a living host.
The full moon had just crested Frederick's highest ridge and bathed the east gardens in a lunar glow. Hugh slid and scraped in the shadows, making his way to the house. He stopped and leaned on a tree. A beam of moonlight caught his face and he rocked his limp head around and looked up at the warmly lit window in Frederick's east wing. Spiders inched through his hair and spun webs from his ears to his shoulders. Something came over him and for no apparent reason he let out a horrible moan and lurched toward the house.
Quickly inside, through an unlocked patio door, Hugh made his way secretly into the mansion’s interior, lurking in one hiding spot and then bursting across the hall to another. His legs were giving him more trouble than usual. If he had taken the time to read the ministry’s pamphlet on haunting, he would have known that unequal stiffness in the legs was a symptom of being dead in the Land of the Living. Now it was his right leg that wouldn't bend at the knee as he tried to climb the stairs of Frederick's east wing. He leaned against the wall, sliding his way up and smearing drainpipe mud along the Venetian plaster wall.
Upstairs he ducked into an alcove. The house seemed empty. He turned and caught a reflection of a monster in a hallway mirror. He froze in terror, but the trembling turned to despair when he realized the monster was him.
What have I become? What am I doing? I'll scare her to death. This is wrong, I shouldn't have come. He swallowed hard and looked away from the mirror.
I should ... I ... I need to see her.
No longer hiding, he dragged his stiff leg down the center of the hallway toward a door decorated with lace and white ribbon. The word Bride embroidered on a satin heart hung at the center of the top panel. He stood in front of it, his face pinched with anguish.
This is wrong ... so wrong ... but I have to see her.
He reached out, grasped the doorknob and opened the door.
Remember the Kingdom
Darkness continued to loom over the Kingdom, and a low, undulating cello note sobbed somewhere in the gray nothing. The streets were vacant except for a fog of dust that hung in the air like a crucified veil.
At the Ministry of Life Accountancy Ms. Swindon fine-tuned her position of recline. Hidden snack wrappers crinkled and crunched as she reached to adjust a mirror and get a better view of Hugh's desk. "Excuse me, could we have Hugh's desk moved?" she directed.
Lifeless men hanging in the shadows like stale coats shuffled to Hugh's desk and picked it up.
"Bring it here, close to me."
The men delivered it with a collective sigh and plodded back to their haunts.
Ms. Swindon looked down at the frumpy desk and its hard, cruel chair and imagined her new son-in-law just beneath her. With no need to shout across the room, she could sigh her requests under her breath and they'd waft down onto the broken and bowed man at her feet like a settling gloom.
She looked over at Missy, who was needlepointing a new cover for her chair doughnut—gray cloth with two black skulls kissing. The feminine skull already had Missy embroidered under it in monastic calligraphy. She had just started working on the name under the male skull, which began with an H.
"Tell you what," Ms. Swindon called out to her dusty drapes slumped along the walls. "Let's have the desk right here between Missy and I."
Missy looked up with a smile but quickly tucked it away. Smiling was considered quite rude in the Kingdom. Her eyes kept smiling, though, as the men moaned and dragged Hugh's desk into the dusty little wedge between her and her mother.
A wrinkled stablehand blew the dust off a reel of black-and-white film and threaded it into a rickety projector. The pegasi rammed their beefy heads out of their stables and watched as the projector came to life with a clickity-click. On a faded gray sheet hung from the rafters, spliced-together film clips played. Bucking broncos throwing their riders, jockeys being carted off the track in neck braces, polo players helplessly scrambling for cover under a tempest of hooves. A ten-year-old boy in a birthday hat being dragged to his death by a riderless Western pony wearing a cowboy hat. Grisly let out a whinny and applauded with clomps of her right front hoof.
In the barracks, Leroy and the other reapers took slugs off a bottle of brown whiskey as thick as motor oil, their faces still hidden deep in leather hoods, their eyes windows into a blast furnace of torment. Chuck wiped the whiskey from his lips with his remaining sleeve. "So what about this one." He looked around the room. "You ride in after a big accident, like a plane crash, and you say, ‘Did someone call for a garbage pickup? Cause it’s time to take out the trash.’"
The reaper sitting next to Leroy hunched his shoulders. "Ehh."
Chuck tried again, waving his remaining hand for effect. "Okay, how about this. You swoop in and land right in front of them with your sickle fully cocked, ready to swipe, and you say," lowering his voice to a grumble, "‘Mortal, your life has come to an end.’" He slapped his thigh. "Now this is the good part because they're all like, no, not me, please God no, sniff-sniff, cry-cry. And you lower your sickle and you pretend like you're not going to take them. You're all like, gosh, maybe it isn't your time to die, maybe there was a mistake. Sorry if I scared you, buddy. And they're all like, really, I get to live? And then," slapping his thigh again, "you say ‘Sucker!’ And chop their heads off. Huh? Huh? Is that a good one or what?"
The reapers' eyes sunk to the floor with a groan and they shook their heads.
Rusty huddled in a hallway with a few council ministers that were sympathetic to his cause. He whispered his pitch. "Now, I'm not saying we have to give up on all the sad stuff, you know, the le désespéré Crain is always pushing. I'm just thinking we could take it in a new direction. Instead of all doom and death it would be more akin to ... I dunno, riding into the sunset on a pale horse. You know, spirit walkers, dust devils and the sort. Three days’ ride to Goshen, fixin' to lasso a dream buffalo and the like ..." The others tried to understand and subtly nodded in agreement.
In a small café, Patrick sat staring out a window while a sullen old man with a bald head and a shocked goatee recited a dour poem. "The pyre is heaped with the souls of the forgotten, the unloved, the unlovables. Set aflame by white bolts of lightning, sorrow ignited, smoldering darkness, the limp embers of torment roast the blinded sky."
Patrick snubbed out his cigarette and allowed himself an unspeakable indulgence. He parked his head in his hands and stared at the Kingdom's nothing sky. Imagining a galaxy of stars, he took a little breath. Under those stars he imagined a living, breathing world and his dear friend Hugh draped in the arms of the woman he loved. It was too painful to picture it, the dream was too wonderful to imagine; it choked him and he started to cry. He lit another cigarette and called out to the poet, "Again, again with the pyre, the smoldering darkness and all that." The poet nodded and repeated his sinking fugue of torment.
Ana sat huddled in her illustrated garden, where she had rubbed a section of the wall clean with the sleeve of her robe. She drew two flowers, gently swept up with each other, their stems intertwined. One was graceful and slight, the other a bit gregarious, its petals a bit ruffled. Next to them a flower twice as tall was watching over them, protecting them. She gently stroked the tall flower and stared far, far away.
Crain paced the oak planks around the enormous gears, chains and springs that made up the Kingdom's soul clock. Above, in the tower's dome, an elaborate tangle of moons, stars and planets impaled on brass rods slowly trembled and ticked out the passing of time. A frail butterfly made of gold and perched on a silver cherry blossom descended into the dark center of the clock. The end of the season of life, spring and summer, was just a few hours away. From the clock’s dark center, a chamber cracked open and an all-consuming blackness bellowed out. The season of cold dying death was rising. Crain's eyes lit up and welcomed it.
He exited the clock’s mechanism chamber through a small hatch held open by Jerry. "There are only a few hours left, then the season of death takes hold."
Jerry nodded. "Is there any chance he'll find it, you know, find L-O-V-E?"
"How could he find something that doesn't exist?"
"Then why did you let him go?"
"When he returns, heartbroken, despising that life he once cherished, I'll hold him up for all to see. His complete failure will finally put an end to these grumblings about L-O-V-E.”
Jerry slowly nodded again and they walked out onto a balcony where the entire Kingdom sprawled out at their feet. Crain propped one of his dance shoes up on the parapet. "Without L-O-V-E, the Land of the Living has nothing. The sooner they realize it's a myth, nothing but a fantasy, they will bow to despair and be blinded by darkness. This season of dying will last for eternity."
Jerry was confused. "Forever? But the season of life will return, right?"
Crane cracked a sinister grin. "There is no immutable law that life must exist."
Jerry shook his head. "But that's crazy."
Crain slowly nodded, his body swelling with the echoes of souls in despair. "Can you sense it? A gathering storm, a swelling night ascending." He put his hand on Jerry's shoulder. "I have a vision of eternity. When the brokenhearted spirit returns, I will ignite my prophecy."
