Halloween Is For Lovers, page 12
Hugh stood in front of his gravestone, focusing on the blank space under his name. No wife, no kids, no grandkids. Just his name, the dates of his brief life and nothing else.
"So how did that go?" Morton asked.
"She forgave me. I said I was sorry and she forgave me."
"Well, there you go. Mission accomplished." Morton raised his bottle to Hugh. "Now you can rest in peace."
"I wish."
"What's the problem?"
Hugh lightly kicked his gravestone with the toe of his shoe. "I don't want to go back to being dead."
"Gosh, I don't know if there's anything you can do about that." Morton took a long slug off his bottle.
Hugh took the beer bottle cap out of his pocket and set it on top of his gravestone. Under his breath he mumbled, "Better to let go."
"I wish I could cheer you up, kid. We all gotta die, right? I mean, I'll be down there pretty soon myself. I bet it's all creepy and scary. Sort of like a dungeon with stuff dripping from the ceiling and ..."
"There's no dripping, it's really dry down there."
"Well, that will be good for my allergies. You know, maybe you haven’t got things so bad. You got to come back and see her, she forgave you, maybe things will be better for you now."
"But I still love her."
"Yeah, well, you're dead, she's not. She's got a new guy, long life in front of her, you don't. It's just the way things have to be."
"It's not fair. I really love her. True love is supposed to conquer all. I'm supposed to come back to life." Hugh kicked his gravestone.
Morton watched, studying him. "I'm starting to realize what it is you are. You're not just a ghost, you're a tormented spirit, unable to rest peacefully in your grave. You've come back on Halloween to mess with the living. Don't get me wrong, it's understandable, maybe even justifiable, but it's a real jerk thing to do. Sort of like you're a poor loser."
"Don't you get it? I had to come. I love her."
"Yeah, but you rising up from the dead, slinking around, sliding through tunnels all creepy, trying to see her, that's not love. That's called haunting and you're doing that for you."
"I didn't mean to haunt her, I just wanted to hold her." Hugh reached his arms out slightly and imagined Lily between them. He held her close, not letting go.
"I bet you scared the crap out of her. You know, if you really loved her you would have stayed dead, not come up here and scare her to death on her wedding day. Think about it, you ruin her first wedding by not showing up and dying. Now the night before her second wedding, look who's back to spoil things. Yep, that's an asshole move, buddy."
"It's not like that. I'm doing this because I care about her. I love her."
"You know what you are? You're an evil spirit, plain and simple. But you're so wrapped up in yourself and what you want you can't see it. Yeah, you think you're doing good, but you're really doing bad."
Hugh yelled, eyes wide and angry, "But I love her!"
"Yeah, and you told her that, right? Now it's time for you to go."
Hugh grabbed his head with both hands, his mouth slack. "I didn't. I told her I was sorry but I didn't tell her I loved her." He looked up at the moon, his voice quick and nervous. "How much time do I have?"
Morton shrugged. "I don't wear a watch. I gave up on telling time, I'm letting time tell me."
Hugh gazed out at the eastern sky. "There's still plenty of time, there has to be." He lurched into the night and back toward the church.
Morton watched him go. Crossing his arms and getting comfortable, he wondered if this was a dream or a nightmare, and he wondered when it would end.
Collective Hysteria
Steve's dad, George, hovered around Lily's mom, Patricia, in Frederick's grand ballroom. The room was a cathedral of cherry wood finished in a satin lacquer. Impressive wrought chandeliers cascaded from the vaulted ceiling and gave the room the perfect golden glow. The pumpkins had been pulled from the rehearsal dinner centerpieces and replaced with miniature ears of Indian corn and bright red oak leaves.
Guests were finishing their entrées of Cornish hen served with a parsnip puree and rosemary-infused cranberry glaze. Lily's mom had the vegetarian option, which was pumpkin ravioli in a white sauce that had just a hint of maple syrup. George timed his approach perfectly, knowing that halfway into their conversation he would be called to the microphone to deliver the first of many toasts. Always leave them wanting more, that was George's motto.
"How was your dinner, Patricia?" He peered down the V-neck of her Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress at the bumps on her sternum. Clearly, this was a woman who did a lot of Pilates.
"It was wonderful. The entire evening has been absolutely wonderful." She smiled.
"I wish we had more time to get to know each other, but let me just say your daughter is very, very attractive. I can see where she gets it from."
Patricia laughed, and George crouched down to meet her at eye level. "I'm not sure if you have discussed this with Lily, but your son-in-law-to-be …" He pulled up his sleeve and checked the time on his Patek Philippe. "… to-be in less than eleven hours, well, Steve stands to inherit a company I started from scratch, and while he's successful in his own right, my baby-furniture empire leads the industry in sales volume ..."
Across the room, Lily pushed her plate away. She hadn't touched the hen. Gilda had advised her that nobody wanted to see the bride tearing into a bird carcass with knife and fork on her wedding eve. If she was lucky she'd have a private moment for a bite out of a flax and sunflower seed protein bar she kept tucked in a small slit cut in the lining of her dress. The truth was she wasn't hungry. She gulped wine and pretended to smile while Steve kept the head table rapt with stories of surgically saving lives with his bare hands and setting world speed records with his bare feet. "Jesus walked on water, I glide across it at a hundred fifty-three miles an hour."
Outside, along Frederick's east wall, a creature floated up from the depths of a stagnant pond. Not bothering to dump the muck out of his shoes or wipe the brown stuff off his face, Hugh lurched toward the house.
George’s timing was off. He hadn't been called to the mic and he was now running the risk of boring Patricia. "Now the child labor laws in South America are vastly different. I'm not passing judgment on whether that's right or wrong, it's their country. If they want to put their kids to work right out of third grade, so be it. My big idea was this. Doesn't it just make plain sense to use child labor to build children's furniture? You know, give them some authorship in the products they use? I mean, think about it this way, Patricia, successful companies with brilliant owners push boundaries. And yes, sometimes those boundaries collapse suddenly and trap children underneath them, unable to breathe. But answer me this, unable to breathe or unwilling to breathe?" It was obvious where Steve got his analogy problem from.
Steve interrupted the murmur in the room by clicking on the mic. "Is this on, can you hear me? Can you hear me now?" The room chuckled with polite laughter and Steve made the mistake of tagging the punch line again. "Can you hear me now?" He laughed. "Thank you so much for coming and sharing this wonderful evening with us. Recently I was performing a hand transplant, it's one of the most complicated procedures out there, and I realized hands are how we touch each other and that's how Lily touched me. She put her hands on me and touched me ... She touched me ..." He fumbled for his notes. "Touched my heart ... and tomorrow when she takes my hand in marriage we will have two hands touching each other." He put down his notes. "So with your hand ... one of your hands, please raise your glass in a toast to hands and touching each other and Lily." The guests complied and raised their glasses.
George got up from his crouch and winked at Patricia. "You'll have to excuse me, that's my cue."
Outside, Hugh slid along Frederick's perimeter, trying to open every door and window. The place was locked up tight. Luckily, the caterers had propped open a back door with a five-gallon bucket half full of rosemary-infused cranberry glaze. Hugh snuck in and made his way to the grand ballroom.
George was on the mic. His voice boomed and he waved his free hand in grand gestures, punching up the I’s in his speech. "When I was a young man, younger than Steve is now, I had a thought. I wondered to myself, wow, there's a lot of babies out there, what are they going to sleep on? They can't sleep on the floor. Well, I guess they could but they wouldn't be very comfortable. And besides, the floor is dirty. Aha, I thought, baby beds. So through very hard work I grew a small company into one of the top baby and child furniture empires in the United States. I think it's more like the top baby and child furniture company in the world, but that's not important. Accountants and businesspeople like myself have different ways of measuring a company’s phenomenal success. Anyway, back to more about me ..."
While George continued his toast, Hugh made his way down the grand hallway toward the double French doors that opened into Frederick's grand ballroom. He hid in a small alcove that housed a bronze bust of Steve and spied on Lily, waiting for an opportunity to get her alone. But George was taking too long. He was now talking about how he tried skateboarding on his sixty-fifth birthday and then went on to win the senior X Game Vert championship later that year. Hugh couldn't wait any longer. He stood up as straight as he could and propped his head upright. He would march in there and tell Lily he loved her.
He stepped out of hiding and grabbed the handles of both doors.
Morton had just woken up from the most spectacular dream. In it he was wearing a white two-button sport coat, jeans and boating shoes with no socks. He was sober and healthy and ... He wasn't sure about this last part. It seemed he was happy or not sad or something. There was a woman in the dream that wasn't his wife and he got the feeling they were more than friends.
Up on his feet, he was a little more tipsy than usual. The pills were amplifying the schnapps and the schnapps was causing the pills to rapidly metabolize. His head was a washy swirl of soft gray. He looked around. He couldn't believe he was somewhat conscious in a graveyard. The night with Hugh was somehow and somewhat real, the white sport coat was the dream.
No, I imagined the ghost.
He stumbled over to Hugh's gravestone. "I made it all up. What are these docs putting in these pills?" But then he noticed the beer bottle cap Hugh had left on top of the stone. Hamm's, slightly bent. They hadn't made Hamm's in bottles in decades. The last time he had Hamm's in a bottle was ...
His heart momentarily stopped. His blood vibrated with electricity and shocked him sober.
Hugh had the double French doors open a crack when a woman behind him came out of the ladies’ room and screamed. He turned and assured her, "I'm not going to hurt anybody."
Too late, the woman had unholstered her pepper spray from her clutch and unloaded the entire contents into Hugh's face.
He coughed and wheezed as he stumbled backward through the French doors and into the ballroom. The guests gasped. He rubbed his eyes and stumbled to the center of the room like an injured animal. He spastically looked up with blood red eyes and let out a terrible howl. The ladies shrieked in horror and the men stumbled over themselves to escape to the walls.
"It's hideous. What is it?" Gilda gasped.
A few of Steve's waterskiing buddies got up the courage to surround Hugh and protect the wedding party. They used chairs, lion-tamer style, and kept Hugh jostled between them.
Hugh looked at Lily and screamed, "I love you!"
Lily took some deep breaths and leaned into Steve to ask, "Honey, how common are mass hallucinations?"
Steve had a strange reaction to Hugh. He wasn't afraid. He even seemed to be a little excited. "That's no hallucination. That thing is real."
Lily shook her head with a fake laugh. "If this is someone’s idea of a prank, I'm not laughing."
Hugh rushed the bridal table and two of the biggest water-skiers grabbed him. Restrained, he cried out to Lily, "I love you, Lily, I can't stop loving you."
Lily gasped. "Stop it! It's horrible. Please make it stop." She buried her head in Steve's chest.
"Don't worry, Lil, I'll protect you." Steve handed Lily to Gilda and the other bridesmaids, who ushered her out of the room.
Hugh moaned, "Lily!" as they twisted him to his knees.
Steve stood over Hugh with a smug grin. "Hey freak-show, you just ruined my rehearsal dinner." He swung with a powerful uppercut to Hugh's right lower jaw. The warm glow of Frederick's grand ballroom faded quickly to black.
Fifteen Babies
Hugh woke up in Steve's secret basement chamber. It was a classy secret chamber, actually classy contemporary. More like an aficionado's wine vault than a torture dungeon. He was chained to a stainless steel chair with black vinyl cushions that had specific places to tie down feet and arms with medical-grade straps. With a few twists of the knobs and pulls at the levers it ratcheted into a table. It was a disturbing piece of furniture. If Hugh had crazy monster ghost powers like he had thought he was going to have, he could have broken free from it easily. He would have busted free and used the chains as a weapon, thrashing and growling his way back to Lily. Gathering her in his arms, he would climb Frederick's steeple and roar at the circling planes, declaring to all the world in his zombie howl that she was his and they were in love.
The only thing strange in Steve's secret chamber besides Hugh chained to a torture chair was a row of pristine bassinets painted new-baby white. Steve walked out of the shadows, brushing his hand along their lace canopies. "My father had these made specially by the finest twelve-year-old carpenters in all of Honduras."
Steve took an armless chair and swung it around to face Hugh. He sat in it backwards, his legs spread, his elbows up on the backrest. "So who or what the hell are you?"
Hugh mumbled through his slumped head, "I'm Lily's old fiancé."
"But you died."
Hugh's chin was tucked into his chest, and his neck was a limp noodle. "I came back for her."
Steve beamed and scraped the chair in a little closer. "You're a ghost, a spirit, the walking dead, a resurrected body." He reached out and touched Hugh's shoulder. "Holy crap." He smiled. "The universe is trying to communicate something to me. What message do you have, celestial spirit walker?"
"I love Lily." Some residual green swamp water leaked from Hugh's mouth. He tried to wipe it off, but the chains restricted his hands to his lap.
Steve popped up out of the chair and paced excitedly. He looked at the stairs leading out of the basement and whispered to himself with a grin, "The cosmos are jealous of the vessel I have chosen for my prodigy. They sent a creature to steal her away. Everything is proceeding exactly as I have planned." He tented his fingers in front of his face.
"What?" Hugh was gaining back his strength and swung his head up and back to look at Steve.
Steve turned to him. "Everything is proceeding exactly as I have—"
"I heard you. Let me go, I don't have much time."
"Ha. You'd like that, wouldn't you. Then you could spoil my plans."
"Plans?"
"Plans have been made, demon, plans have been made. I should have expected unearthly forces would align against me."
"What plans?"
Steve raised an eyebrow and nodded before remounting the chair in front of Hugh. "After the wedding I'll seal off the grounds of Frederick and fill the moat. The perimeter of Frederick's wall will be patrolled by south Texas cattle dogs, The most vicious of the canine breed. They'll attack you from behind before you even know they're there. Dogs, yes, lots of circling, hungry dogs." Steve's mind wandered for a moment, then he snapped back. "Then, in complete isolation, here in Frederick's caverns, Lily will produce fifteen children for me and I will raise them up to carry forth my message to the world."
"You're crazy. Does Lily know about this? Let me go, I need to see Lily."
"Never."
Hugh rocked his head from one shoulder to the other. "If you don't let me go I will ... suck out your soul."
Steve thought for a moment. "If you could really do that, you would have already. Ha, gotcha." He wagged his finger at Hugh. "You're devious. You see, Hugh, yes I know your name, Lily has awoken me many a night with sobs of your name. But you see, not long ago I was being pulled by a helicopter across the water at one hundred seventy-three miles per hour. My bare feet were skimming across a surface that would drown mere mortals. It was then I realized something." His eyes floated to the ceiling. "I realized there was no God, and if there was no God, then by logical definition and quantification I came to the conclusion that I, Steve Moore, M.D., must be God."
Hugh shook his head. "What? That doesn't even begin to make sense. You realized there was no God, therefore you were God. What happened to the there is no God idea?"
"I realized I was God. Duh." Steve shook his head. "I always knew that simpleminded folk wouldn't be able to grasp the reality of what I was saying. That's why I need the kids." He kicked his voice up to an evangelical tone. "And they will know him thanks in part to the gentle sweetness of his childs, the fifteen radiant angels."
"Childs? That's not a word," Hugh spat out, exasperated. "But that's beside the point, this is ridiculous. She can't have fifteen babies, that's impossible, it's biologically not possible."
Steve's eyes lit up. "Fifteen golden warriors. Two batches of sextuplets followed by a final divine batch of triplets." He walked over to a sideboard and reverently pulled out a drawer full of syringes and vials of fertility drugs. "You see, Hugh, the universe has given me the tools and the power to control everything." He slid the drawer closed and looked at his hands in amazement. He walked over to Hugh. "Is the chair comfortable?"
Hugh moaned and fought the chains.
"It's not designed for sitting, it's designed for birthing babies. I added the restraints in case Lily isn't ... What's the word I'm looking for ... cooperative."
