by Thomas Cater
I removed enough earth from Elinore’s coffin to open it, then climbed out of her grave and pulled the child’s coffin close. They would both be easy to open. The coffins had begun to deteriorate around the brass hinges and the wood parted easily. I opened the small box slowly so as not to disturb the child in its unending sleep. It seemed quite oblivious to my presence, or so I thought.
The ragged remnants of the swaddling cloth were clinging to its tiny bones. There was a smile, a toothless, infantile smile masking its tiny skull. The skeleton, although infinitely smaller than I had imagined, was in a state of total repose. I knew that Elinore would appreciate what I was doing for her. I believed she would leave the house and me alone, once she reunited with her child.
I repositioned the flashlight to illuminate her casket. I took the pick into Elinore’s grave and worked its sharp point into the lock and seal. It split separating easily the cover from the coffin. The rank odor of putrefaction billowed out. I held my breath and tried to prepare my senses for what lay within. Elinore had been dead for too many years. Depending on how well the mortician had done his job, it was possible the process of decomposition was not complete.
I worked my fingers beneath the lid and pried open the top. I could feel the soft satin that lined the coffin. The odor grew stronger. I raised the top swiftly and stood back. The sickening odor swam passed, its vile poisons invading my nostrils. I turned my face away and held my breath.
The flashlight only partially illuminated the coffin’s interior. I could see one arm, one thin bony arm with the barest suggestion of dry cankerous flesh still clinging to the wrist and hand.
I scrambled out of the hole and grabbed the light. With my feet on firm ground, even this ground, I felt secure. I passed the light slowly over her corpse. Her hair lay in a knotted grey pile beneath her skull. Her scalp had deteriorated and the flesh and vomer had fallen from her cheek and nose revealing the ethmoid, a jagged hole that once covered her nose. What passed for lips had retracted back over her teeth and exposed a grimacing skull. A ragged remnant of scarified epithelial tissue clung to one cheek and covered her remaining bones.
Her eyebrows had grown to an astonishing length and there were closed leathery lids covering her eyes. I focused the beam directly on her eyes and noticed that despite years in the grave they were intact and still sewn tightly shut! It seemed an irreconcilable cruelty to me that even in death, Elinore’s eyes were closed by heavy lids; heavier than any I had ever seen before. They only appeared to be heavier because they had not begun to decompose like the rest of her flesh.
I searched my pocket for the nail clipper that dangled from my key chain. I opened it and tested its cutting edge on a nail. The clipper seemed more than adequate to do the job. I stepped back into Elinore’s grave, kneeled down on the coffin and held my breath. Cautiously, I sniffed the air for lingering traces of decay. The odor, I noticed, was not as offensive as it had been. There was instead a peculiar fragrance of cloves coming from the coffin, a strange refreshing scent amid the mold and mildew.
There was a one inch-long stitch in each eye. I inserted the clipper’s point between the threads binding her eyes and slowly, one by one, cut them, grabbed the loose ends and pulled them through the leathery flesh. Each one came out easily. Her lashes had grown several inches in length. I cut the stitches from the other eye. After I finished, I moved the light over her face. Her eyes remained closed, as if in sleep. I speculated on the remote possibility of her eyes surviving the silent retribution of years in the grave. I focused the light on the lids. They were keenly rotund, as if something existed beneath them.
I closed the clipper and gazed upon her empty skull. With my right hand, I placed two fingers on her lids and pushed them back to reveal her eyes. The glowing orange orbs were incredibly alive. The fiery pupils stared directly into my eyes and sent a bone-chilling fear churning through my mind. Eyes that should have ceased to be were growing bright with a hideous orange light! Before I could climb out of the grave, I heard her scream … that long terrifying scream that silenced everything else in the world. It filled my mind and drove me shrieking out of the grave.
She came howling out of the coffin. It sounded as if she would never be silent again. I staggered back and away from the grave, but she rose up and came after me. I stumbled over the child’s coffin and struck my head against a gravestone.
Before my eyes closed, I saw her rising above me like a flame, coming down upon me, screaming and screaming until the sound of her voice was like an ice pick driven between my eyes, separating the imagined from reality and my mind from consciousness.
*
It was midmorning when I awakened. A cloudless blue sky stretched endlessly above. I marveled at the depth and beauty of its color. Balancing my weight on one elbow, my eyes delighted in the explosive brilliance of fall: the green conifers, the flaming reds and yellows of maple trees, the varying shades of dying weeds and grasses, and the dark earth tones of the soil.
I wearily hauled myself off the ground to a sitting position, while balancing my weight on one arm. Sun kissed breezes washed over my skin. I struggled to my feet and walked cautiously to the grave I had opened the night before. The child’s tiny coffin was empty and Elinore’s cadaver was nowhere in sight. The lid on her coffin was undisturbed and back in place. Pick in hand, I reached into the grave to open the coffin once again, but decided against it. Instead, I began the less arduous task of refilling the grave.
There was a powerful clarity in the sky and a sweet fragrance in the scent of the earth, one I had failed to notice previously, or one that had not existed before. It created a wild anxiety inside me, unlike any I had ever known. For the first time, I felt as if I had accomplished a meaningful act with my life; it was as if I were sentenced to penance and been granted a reprieve. I wanted to sing out while I completed the task of restoring the earth to its former condition. Music however was no longer in my head and heart; it had found a greater depth in which to celebrate. I ladled shovels full of dirt back into the ground, delighted with my efforts.
*
Peace has found its way to the Ryder house and land. I know because there have been no more incidents. Elinore, the source of the disruption, has joined her long-lost child; the love child she lost eighty years ago. Not by a cruel and selfish whim of her father – as I once assumed -- but to more complicated causes.
Samuel, too, is at peace. He has reconciled with Elinore and Frank. The transgressions committed by all appear rectified. He no longer walks in guilty torment through the protective prison he built around his family. He sleeps now in a deep and peaceful grave.
When Samuel threatened to close the mine, he deceived Frank into going underground and setting off explosives. Frank was unable to escape and reportedly died in the mine. An underground fire raged out of control for years, poisoning the mine water, earth and air with sulfurous ash and carbon monoxide gas. The fires scorched and baked the surface of the earth from within, while deadly fumes from the burning coal escaped to the surface and drove sheep, cattle and wildlife mad.
“Elinore, my lovely Lorelei, will never abandon me to sleep in a coal miner’s hovel!” Samuel had warned. “I’d rather see her wed to that baboon!” At that moment, the ring that bound the two wayward lovers together wound up on the animal’s finger. I use the word wayward for good reason, which I will explain at a more appropriate time.
As for Grier and the other spirits trapped within the walls and land, where have they gone? No one knows. They absconded the moment the music and Orphic blasts from my van’s diesel horns breached the indestructible walls.
There is another, however, who wanders among us. I am not sure who it is, but his presence brings a great deal of pleasure to Elinore. I think it is Frank, or their child. When I ask about her baby, who has since vanished, Elinore assures me that ‘her little boy has finally returned.’
There is a strong resemblance, they say, between the two of us, Frank and I. We even share a
common destiny. The similarities amuse everyone, even the baboon. It surrendered its tormented eyes to Elinore and saved me from an uncertain fate when I strayed into the Klikouchy’s attic nest.
All is calm now that the Klikouchy -- those crazed screaming things -- who built their walls of living flesh and bones, have scattered to the far ends of the universe.
“They meant no malice,” Elinore says. “They have always lived in abject fear.”
I regrettably have not yet had the good fortune to meet the mansions transient guests. Elinore is however my link between both worlds. She keeps me advised. We sit on the porch at night and watch the stars shine through the trees surrounding the house.
She has also confided to me the family’s deepest and darkest secret. She is not the ‘love child’ of Mary Cadle and Samuel, as I suspected. She is Samuel’s wife. They met and married in California, She was previously married to a mortician, the mother of three sons, Quilp, Ballsitch and Scratch. She taught her youthful sons and her new husband how to mine gold from the teeth of dead men. All but Samuel were accursed with the dreaded DNA gene that transmitted Geonlinger’s disease.
Elinore’s enterprising sons eventually earned their fortunes working underground on abandoned mining claims. The three sons would delve ferret-like into dark caves and tunnels, while retrieving lumps of gold and silver. When the minerals ran out, they turned to scavenging, while Samuel and Elinore panned for gold.
When Samuel and his new family returned to Vandalia, he managed to secure work for his stepsons in the hospital’s boiler room, Because of their strange affliction, they soon made good use of coalmine shafts to burrow into country graveyards and mine gold from the teeth of dead men and women.
Because of her youthful appearance, everyone believed Elinore was Samuel’s daughter. Eventually she tried to run away with Frank. It was a desperate attempt to rescue her sons from a ghoulish life of crime and drudgery. Her plans failed after Frank’s death, and she reunited with Samuel.
Her sons, however, preferred life underground. They eventually decided to live in darkness and forego the menacing lights and troubling gazes of Vandalians.
*
I have been living in the house with Elinore now for more days than I care to remember. Sometimes at night, I have a deep sense of her presence. That is when she can most easily access my mind, stimulate my imagination and provide me with strange and often wonderful pleasures, unlike any I have experienced.
She has the most extraordinary eyes. She can see a great distance through time, backwards and forwards, and distances in miles means nothing. She has also regained the ability to perceive color; not just the narrow band of visible colors most people have been able to access, but the true elemental colors, including ultra-violet, infra-red and those amusing gamma rays.
I have given up all thought of travel, now that I have moved into the mansion. Even the grizzly old tomcat I accused Myra of setting free in my DC townhouse has adapted to its new surroundings. The cat, I am told, is home to the spirit of my beneficent benefactor R.C. Dangerfield, who managed to ‘occupy its body’ while being devoured by his pets.
My RV is still sitting on the side of the hill near the graveyard, but the tires are flat. I never go anywhere, so I don’t really need it. Besides, the battery died long ago and it does not want to be revived. This does seem like such a wonderful place to live.
George says that Satan has loosened his grip upon the county. I told him I was pleased. I said it is so because I breached the wall and now everything is fine, as long as Satan does not know the battery in my van is dead.
A few local acquaintances did occasionally visit, but since I hung the gate back on its hinges, they stopped coming. No, I did not mix blood and bones in the mortar, but I must admit it would have cut down on maintenance.
The Alberichs provide some assistance and irregular maintenance. They have opened and repaired the tunnels from the hospital to the house. They are still secretly smelting precious metals in the hospital’s basement, and Samuel’s treasures, his stocks and bonds, are safe and secure buried in a vault deep inside the earth.
Oh, yes, the stone mason, Nicodemus Thanatos. I found out from Elinore all there is to know. He is alive and working for International bankers in developing Third World countries. She speaks of him with pride and pleasure.
They often walked and spoke together in the garden while he was working on the wall. ‘His head and hands are as hard as the stones he works with,’ she says, ‘but his heart is warm and tender.’
‘The walls he is working on now,’ she explains proudly, ‘will stand as a monument to his genius for generations to come. The walls are much stronger and far more durable than his earlier efforts, especially the Berlin Wall’, which came tumbling down decades ago. ‘There’s only so much you can do with stone’ she warns.
‘The new wall,’ she says, ‘will stretch for a thousand miles and divide nations from each other. It will not only enclose the bodies of the living and the souls of the dead, but it will also enclose the minds of those who struggle to live free.’
*
Recently, I have heard even stranger rumors. I do not know from whom, Elinore, I suspect, or perhaps from other mendicant spirits that occasionally visit. The stories claim that a new owner has acquired the Scary Creek house and property. I don’t know how that could have possibly happened. I took special precautions to see the house and land would never again fall into the wrong hands. I established a trust that provided and secured succession to everything I possess. I left all my worldly possessions to the first child to issue from the inhospitable womb of my estranged wife, Myra, the Polish poetess.
What is even more disconcerting is that I have often heard a repeated statement that I, the previous owner, set fire to the mansion and burned it to the ground …twenty years ago! How could that be? I am still here and haven't aged a day! Under Elinore’s constant care and supervision, the house has once again become a haven and respite for disenfranchised souls …or so it would seem.
Epilogue
It was purely by chance that I stumbled upon a lost missive addressed to me. It was during one of my nightly peregrinations through the house on Scary Creek. I have no recollection of ever having seen it before. It was sealed and unopened and had been secreted among my few possessions.
The letter, signed by an executor of Dangerfield’s estate, was an official of the First National Bank of Washington DC. I suspect he also acted on my behalf as an agent of the courts years ago. I neglected to open it because I thought it was a threatening letter from Myra, my ex-wife and her solicitors, so I quickly thrust it away and then proceeded to forget about it. The letter states:
Mr. Charles Case;
You will be delighted to know that the wishes contained within the last will and testament of your belated benefactor, Mr. R.C. Dangerfield and his spouse Mary Alice Cadle, a member of this bank’s board and the executors of the estate of Samuel and Elinore Ryder of Vandalia, West Virginia, have been satisfied to this bank’s satisfaction.
It gives all of us great pleasure to advise you that as the sole surviving descendant of Samuel and Elinore Ryder, based on documents provided by attending physician, Dr. Ezekiel Grier and Mr. and Mrs. Dangerfield, you are the acknowledged heir and entitled to the Ryder estate. The document also includes a trust fund, property and dwelling in Elanville, West Virginia, and an additional dwelling in Washington DC, previously occupied by R.C. Dangerfield. We trust this informal communiqué finds you firmly established in your recently acquired home.
The letter contained only one bank officer’s signature: Mr. Nicodemus Thanatos.
THE END
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