The End in All Beginnings

by John F. D. Taff

  His hands trembling, he pulled the backing off, slid the glass and photo out, turned the picture around.

  Uncle Frank.

  Although the memory was dim and blurry—and the man in the photo was dressed in the clothes of someone far older—it was him.

  Chris removed the photo, slid the glass back into the frame, and placed it gently in the drawer.

  When the sound of a door opening into the room startled him.

  He spun around and saw Uncle Joe emerging into the room through what appeared to be a hidden passage.

  “Liv?” he said. “I thought I heard you…”

  Ben gasped, and Chris quickly stuffed the photo of Uncle Frank down his shirt.

  “What the hell are you two doing in here?” Uncle Joe demanded, surprised and confused and very frightened. “Your aunt is not going to be happy when I tell her this.

  “Didn’t take you long, did it?” he snapped at Chris. “She got rid of you once, you little shit. And she can do it again. You, too, you ungrateful little bastard!”

  As Chris straightened, prepared an explanation, he saw Ben close his eyes tightly.

  Then, an amazing thing happened.

  Uncle Joe disappeared.

  Without a sound, a flash. He neither faded nor flickered.

  He simply ceased to exist.

  “What?” Chris asked, his mouth open to its limit. He turned to Ben, who looked at him like a child who knew he had done something wrong. “Did you do that?”

  Ben nodded his head.

  Taking a deep breath, Chris closed the desk drawer.

  “Come on,” he motioned for Ben to follow him through the secret door Uncle Joe had used. Chris could not remember ever having seen such a door, and suspected that no one else knew about it either.

  In fact, if what he was thinking turned out to be correct, the existence of the passage was knowledge shared only by Aunt Olivia and Uncle Joe.

  And, quite possibly, Uncle Frank.

  * * *

  The door led to a set of narrow stairs. At the top, another opened into a small, rumpled bedroom.

  Uncle Joe’s.

  Somehow, this did not surprise Chris.

  Without pausing, he led Ben by the hand down the dark hallway back to their room. Once inside, Chris pulled the photo out of his shirt, set it on the table.

  And he and Ben talked.

  * * *

  PART FOUR

  “You have it, don’t you Ben?” Chris whispered, sitting on the bed next to the young boy. “You know what I’m talking about. The gift Aunt Olivia and I have.”

  Ben looked scared. He may have been thirty-four years old chronologically, but he was still only a 10-year-old boy, and a frightened one at that.

  “Mom…” and here his voice caught. “Mom told me not to tell anyone. Ever. She said I’d get into a lot of trouble. That Aunt Olivia would take me away from her and Dad. Just like she did…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Just like she did to you,” he stammered.

  And another memory, long buried, dropped onto his head with the emotional weight of an anvil. Aunt Olivia had taken Chris himself away from his mother when he was very young. Probably when she found out he had the power. And she’d scared away his father. That’s why he’d written only occasional letters, which became ever more occasional before ending completely.

  “So, Aunt Olivia doesn’t know?”

  “No, no.”

  “What did you do to Uncle Joe?” Chris asked, his mouth going dry.

  “I…umm…remembered him.”

  Chris frowned. That was not the way the power worked. When you remembered people they remained, they continued to exist just as they had in your memory. It was when you forgot people that they disappeared.

  “I don’t understand,” Chris said. “You mean you forgot him.”

  “I remembered a fishing trip he took me on about eight years ago to the Northwest Territories in Canada. In the middle of nowhere. I remembered him as far away as I could.”

  In an instant, Chris realized what he meant. That was not the way his power worked, but

  Ben’s power obviously manifested itself differently.

  “You mean, now he’s in…”

  “Canada,” whispered Ben.

  “Holy shit,” Chris muttered.

  “I’m sorry, Chris,” the boy said. “I didn’t mean to. I was scared. He was going to hurt you again, and me, too.”

  Chris hugged him close.

  “That’s okay. I think Uncle Joe had it coming for a long time. Besides, I don’t think you hurt him.”

  “Are…are you still going to take me with you when you leave?”

  “You bet. But first, I’m going to need your help. How early can you get up in the morning?”

  * * *

  The sun rose on a clear morning that belied the frigid November temperatures outside. From Chris’s window, the grass, burdened under the weight of the frost, looked like the lank, grey hair of a corpse.

  He glanced at his watch. 6:45 a.m. The old lady would be having her breakfast about now. Time to take a shower and get down there.

  “Hey, kiddo,” Chris shook Ben. “It’s show time.”

  * * *

  The photo of Uncle Frank was tucked inside the front of his shirt, rubbing uncomfortably against his belly as Chris clumped down the staircase. She was waiting there, impatient, looking at her watch.

  “Did you forget the time?”

  “I’m sorry, Aunt Olivia,” he said. “Two years of sleeping late, sleeping practically all day at the institution, is a hard habit to break.”

  “Well, no matter. We’ll just be a little late, that’s all,” she said as if not hearing him. She pulled on her long, rabbit fur-lined gloves with a small flourish. “Do you know where we’re going today?”

  “Yes,” he answered, and she looked up at him, surprised.

  “You do?”

  “Yes. My choice,” he said, offering his arm. She took it slowly, looking askance.

  “Well, what is your choice, dear boy?” she asked, smiling. And this nearly ruined Chris’s whole plan, for it was the first genuine smile he’d seen from her since he’d returned to Mission Springs. It lit up her face, smoothed away the years and the bitterness and the anger. In an instant, she looked younger than she had when he saw her only yesterday morning.

  He knew that it was because of him.

  He was beginning to remember her.

  She placed a gloved hand on his cheek, planted a tiny, musty kiss there. He could smell her sachet, violets and powder, and his heart ached in his chest. He remembered her caring for him when he was a child. How she had looked on most everything he had done with delight and pride. How she had been father to him when there was only his mother, and both when even she had gone.

  Then he realized why Aunt Olivia was smiling. Because she thought she had her old boy back, before he learned the secrets, before he became difficult.

  Before he challenged her.

  “Well,” he said. “If memory serves, my surprise.”

  He drew away from her, opened the front door of the house, and closed the door to his heart.

  They spoke as they walked, and Chris noticed a slight pause, a hesitation on her part as he chose his path. There were very few houses along this stretch of the county road, so she came this way seldom.

  “You simply mustn’t keep an old lady in suspense,” she said. “Where are you taking us?”

  “Well, you remember the Hunters, don’t you?”

  “Why yes,” she said, clapping her hands like a delighted child, her smile returning. “You never did like Mike Hunter, did you? Well, I’m afraid that I’ve let things slip since you’ve been gone. I wasn’t able to hold Mike all by myself.”

  Cold mist rose off the sparkling grass of the pastures they walked by as the sun struggled over the low hills. The freshly asphalted road nearly shone, looking as if no car had ever touched it.

  “I’ve been mean
ing to ask you about something,” Chris said, and her hold tightened. “You weren’t able to keep Mike Hunter. Is that what happened to the townspeople?”

  Silence for the span of several footsteps.

  “I’d hoped that you would help, that you would stay here,” she breathed. “But, you wanted something else. It’s so hard to do it all alone. And, other than you, no one in the family inherited the power.”

  She looked away, down the road, at nothing in particular.

  “Without someone to help me, I’m beginning to age, and everything that entails. Including the loss of my memory,” she said. “I’ve always thought how ironic it is that our power works on everyone but ourselves. If we want to be remembered, we need another. You can’t remember yourself.”

  Chris thought back on his experience in the institution, to his struggle with the strange shit man and his encounter with the scab woman. And he knew that what she said was not so.

  It was possible to remember yourself.

  “Without you around, dear boy,” she said, patting his hand, “I’ve no one to remember me.

  So, everyone in the town suffers.”

  “It seems that there’s a lot fewer people than I remember,” he said after a minute.

  “Forgotten.”

  A simpler word never held more damning meaning. She was losing her grip on the town because she was losing her memory. And the one thing the townsfolk probably most desired was coming true, and hurting them as badly in the long run.

  He thought of his father-in-law, how badly he wanted to die. How close he came. He remembered that, just a few years ago, he wouldn’t have even gotten that close.

  They walked a while further in silence, passing several white clapboard farmhouses. No smoke rose from the chimneys of one or two, and Chris wondered if their owners were still there. Or if they’d simply disappeared one day when Olivia Hardison had forgotten them.

  “And the rest of the family?”

  She shook her head. “I could only hold on to so many. And the fights. Ahh, after you left, more of them felt braver, freer to argue with me. It was all I could do to keep Uncle Joe.

  “And, Ben!” she chuckled. “Now there’s a puzzle. He stayed no matter what. He’s never manifested object permanence, but he must have some low-grade version of it protecting him.”

  If only you knew.

  “Surely you’ve come back to help me, even after our fight. You see the good in it. So many people gone. So many,” and her voice caught, tears welled in her eyes.

  “I can see this much,” he said. “It’s wrong to hold people in our memories like this, no matter how good you think it is. It’s wrong. Who appointed you to decide when and if a person should die or live forever?”

  Her grip on his hand loosened, and she looked away.

  “You didn’t feel that way about Mike Hunter,” she snapped. “Not about Emma or her family.”

  That stung him.

  “I was wrong, I know that now. Emma knows it. She’s forgiven me.”

  In the distance, the landscape changed, a small dip in the road masked the little glade that was his goal. He needed to keep talking, to keep her off balance so she wouldn’t realize where he was headed.

  “So,” she said, her voice flat and dull. “You do remember. I’d thought we might be able to start over. I can see that I was wrong. Again.”

  “Again,” he reiterated, increasing his pace as much as she would allow. “I can see you still haven’t learned. Didn’t you see the pain that you caused yesterday morning at my in-laws’ house? Didn’t you see how badly Mr. Archibald wanted release? To die?”

  She spun on him, her face a twisted mixture of contempt, spite and hatred. “How can you say death is best? How can you argue that wanting to die is good? It’s not. That’s what’s really evil. To want to be forgotten, to desire death.

  “What I have is a great gift, and I share it with everyone that I know and love. What do I get in return? Fear. Hatred. Betrayal. Has that stopped me? No. Because, it’s for their own good!”

  Almost there. The photo still chafed reassuringly.

  “No,” he said, beginning to walk again. “It may have been good at one time, for a while maybe. But not for as long as you’ve done it. Not for centuries. That’s selfish.”

  Her demeanor changed, and she looked at him through narrow eyes. “How long have you known that?”

  “That you’re older than you claim? Not very long.”

  “How?”

  He held his answer in check. He stopped, and she turned to face him, not realizing or even caring where they were.

  The elaborately scrolled cast-iron gate simply read, HOLY MOUNT CEMETERY.

  “It was Uncle Frank at first, wasn’t it?” he said, giving this bombshell plenty of time to hit the target before going on.

  It had the desired effect. She gasped, shocked beyond measure. It had always been family taboo to even mention his name.

  “What?”

  “I mean you two had the power at first, right? He used it on you, you on him,” Chris said, the words beginning to spill from his mouth. “But that wasn’t good enough for you, was it? Next, it was your children. Uncle Frank went along with that. Then, it was the rest of the family. Your sisters, your grandchildren, nearly everyone related to you.

  “I suspect that’s when Uncle Frank began to have a problem. But when it really started was when you wanted to remember the town; to hold it—and everyone in it—this way forever. So that nothing would change, nothing would grow old. And no one would die.”

  She stood before him as if physically stunned. Her jaw hung open, and her hands went limp at her sides.

  “There were arguments, I remember that from when I was little. Uncle Frank was a quiet man, but not as weak-willed as you came to think. And when that failed, he used his power to counteract yours. Because, in the end, he was more powerful than you, wasn’t he?”

  She said nothing, stared at him unbelievingly.

  “So, you killed him. I don’t mean forgetting him. I mean you really murdered him. Or was it Uncle Joe, his own brother?”

  “I don’t think Frank even knew we were having an affair,” she whispered. “Frank didn’t see the good in what I wanted for this town or our family either, just like you. He was a fool. But, Joe… He didn’t have the power, but he had the will.”

  “How did he do it?” Chris asked, shivering at the flood of cold memories that she was dredging up.

  “With a hammer to the back of the skull. Quick, relatively neat. The police, of course, knew. But what could they do? I threatened them and their families.

  “He never had the gift his brother had, though his brother used it on him. I don’t know how old they were. I do know that Frank had been alive during the Revolutionary War. The tales he told of it…”

  She drifted off at that, and Chris took the opportunity to fish the photo out of his shirt.

  “You know that I’m not here to help you,” he said. “I’m here to stop you, to put everything right again. Just like Uncle Frank tried to do.”

  “Of course I know that, dear boy,” she said. “But you can’t stop me. I killed Frank. I sent you away once.” She spat the last word at him, a sarcastic taunt.

  “I always have Joe to take care of you in more mundane ways, should that prove necessary,” she smiled again, tinged with the malice he was accustomed to.

  “That’s where you’re wrong. Joe’s far, far away. I made sure of that. I did remember to bring some help with me,” he said, whipping the photo out and taking a long look at it before he held it out to her.

  “Where did you get that?” she screamed, tearing it from his hand and recoiling.

  Chris ignored her. He concentrated on the face in the photograph, formed an image in his mind, closed his eyes.

  “What are you doing?” she yelled, grabbing his arm and shaking him.

  “Dear lord,” she breathed. “Dear lord, you can’t mean to… Oh my God! You can’t remember
him. He’s dead!”

  The image formed, held.

  There was a sound nearby, from within the tiny cemetery. It was a gentle, scraping sound, as if something were pushing through the earth.

  A groan vibrated low on the air, rattling the ribs in Chris’s chest.

  Movement, an eruption of soil.

  A headstone fell.

  The clink of stone against stone.

  Something rose from within the shadows of the little glade, pushed its way from the ground.

  Aunt Olivia fell to her knees.

  The shape stood to its full height, then ambled stiffly toward them.

  The gate creaked open, and the figure walked into the early morning light.

  Chris felt like falling to his knees, too.

  Uncle Frank.

  He was nothing more than an articulated skeleton, his skin drawn taut and shiny and a peculiar color of dried brown across his bones. His hair was long and disheveled, and stood out in waves from his head. The smooth outline of his skull was interrupted by two distinct holes; one near the crown, the other toward the side. They were ragged and quite large, and they glared darkly like two dead eyes. The remnant of a black suit clung to him, tattered and worm-eaten.

  He took another step toward them, the bones of his shoeless feet scraping the asphalt as he shambled forward.

  Aunt Olivia uttered a tiny, barely audible squeak.

  “Who?” he asked, in a booming, strangely distance voice.

  “Me,” Chris answered, bracing for whatever came next.

  The dead man looked upon Aunt Olivia, and his face twisted in confusion.

  “I remember you,” he said more softly, reaching out to stroke her grey hair with his gnarled, leathery hand.

  She screamed, scrambled from his touch.

  “No, no. I’m sorry. I’ve apologized to you every night since then. If I could have brought you back, I would have.”

  “It is good that you didn’t,” the dead man rumbled. “Perhaps you’ve learned.”

  “No,” Chris said, his voice breaking. Uncle Frank snapped his dead eyes back to Chris. “She hasn’t learned. She’s held the town in her memory ever since you died. I have the power, as well, and she’s trying to get me to help her. But I won’t.”