Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions

by John Everson

  For the rest of that night, and on many more to come, when the creaking took over our house, I lay awake, fighting back the nausea in my bed. I no longer feared monsters. I could only wish. Because now the smiling faces of my parents appeared to me as false masks. Beneath those gentle eyes and easy grins lurked the real monsters, the monsters that did unspeakable acts in the night.

  The monsters that made my house creak.

  I grew up a couple miles from Bachelor’s Grove – an original “settlers” cemetery that now exists near a perpetually green-scummed pond behind broken down fencing in the middle of a forest preserve. As a Cub Scout, I learned (no doubt with wide, trusting eyes) that deep in the dark forest near our otherwise treeless suburban town, there was a haunted place where a dead woman walked and a strange house appeared to lure unwary travelers. As an adult newspaper reporter, I found that the hauntings of Bachelor’s Grove were widely reported in the literature of ghost watchers, and as with so many “forgotten” places, it had become a hangout for vagrants, drug dealers and even, reportedly, Satan worshipers. I visited the place for the first time while researching a Halloween feature story on “area haunts” for my newspaper. The vandalized tombstones and forgotten air left me with a sad, spooky feeling that I had to try to capture.

  Remember Me, My Husband

  ’m married to two incredible women – one dead and one alive. Is this bigamy? Or since one of those wives was not married to me beneath the myopic eyes of a preacher, are my romantic dalliances in the graveyard merely adultery?

  They came for my car first. Banks are funny that way. They’ll send a couple of monkey men out to break into and drive away your auto over a couple grand, but when you owe them 50 times that on a house payment, they’ll let it ride and ride. But even then, sooner or later, the man shows up at your door and makes the demand: “pay up or get out.” It’s funny, the guys who come for your car look like goons, but the guy who comes for your house wears a suit and tie, round glinting wire glasses and a nervous laugh. It was after the nervous laugh dissipated – slowly, as a cloud of sewer gas fades on a still-as-death summer day – that my living wife, Joanne, announced that as long as I was losing everything else in my life, she’d be taking a powder as well.

  “I can’t watch anymore,” she cried, the words gurgling up in her fleshy throat from some deep underwater cavern. Her makeup ran like wax, her brown eyes shiny and ringed in mascara. I love you baby, I thought, but said nothing. What more was there to say? I couldn’t blame her. I’d lost my job, lost my backbone, lost me. And with that despair, piece by piece my life was slipping away faster than the laugh of the nervous eviction man had stopped echoing in the empty foyer. It only takes a few months to erase the work of years.

  “I love you but it doesn’t matter,” Joanne was still sobbing. “You won’t DO anything and I can’t help you anymore.”

  She stood in the middle of our dingy living room, suitcase at her feet, shoulders slumped. The 20 or 30 pounds that years of casseroles had congratulated her with were not attractive when she abandoned the strictures of good posture. My own untucked oversize t-shirt couldn’t hide the blessings of overeating and under-activity, either. But as my mind shot Polaroids of Joanne’s pathetic whimpering and my own listless carcass stretched lazily across our old brown sofa, I found I didn’t care. Fat, skinny, tearful, laughing – the extremes of life affected me not in the least.

  Eventually, Joanne’s snuffling sobs and the ultimatum represented by the suitcase both drifted away. The shifting orange of sunset slid across the walls and still I lay motionless. I can’t tell you myself how I came to be there – in this room in my head permitting no caring, no interest in living. There were hard blows, sure, but why they affected me as they did…

  The worst was watching my parents slip into the grave without being able to say goodbye. There wasn’t much left to say goodbye to of dad, and mom never woke from the coma. It was a familiar story – drunk driver hits old couple head-on, he lives, they die. But it’s never real until it’s your own family that chalks up another scratch on the statistic boards. Joanne worked hard to pull me through, and then just as things seemed to be getting better, the factory closed. Mother GM couldn’t afford to lose the millions of dollars a year our plant was flushing down the drain anymore. Those two events – and the thousand tiny fires on the soul that they engendered – burned out my will.

  And on that, the night of my necrotic marriage, as the shadows died and the streetlight winked into life across the street, I knew where I had to go. Maybe I’d known it since I watched the green jagged line flatten on the tiny TV screen next to my father’s bed. Or maybe it was my mother’s silent passing, mere hours after his own – did she know somehow? Did she feel him slip away into the darkness? Did he call to her as his heart ceased to hammer?

  I slid from the couch.

  The forest whispered at its violation as my flash bobbed along the trail, sometimes reflecting, just for a second, off a pair of luminescent eyes. In all my years of coming here to bury my troubles, I had never run into another person stalking these trails. The animals lurking just beyond the bounds of my flash were not used to being routed from their hunting schedules by wayward humans after dusk. The stories were responsible for that. The same tales that drew the curious during the day – witness their discarded pop and beer cans littering the brush – kept them locked up safe and sound after dark.

  I think almost every town has a place like Bachelor’s Grove – a place of creepy stories to scare children, a place of midnight magic. Named for the status of the German men who pioneered a settlement here in the 1800s to rough out homesteads before sending back to the continent for their beloveds, little remains to mark their labor now. The forest betrays few secrets. The foundations they struggled to lay down are hidden beneath dirt and vine, the wood of their rustic homes long burnt or carted away. All that remains is a fenced in clearing, tucked inside the whispering forest, a short walk from the turnpike. From that road all that’s visible is a green-scum covered pond. But beyond that rancid water is the subject of many a Boy Scout campfire tale: Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery.

  As a boy, I’d heard numerous ghost stories about the fabled cemetery – the woman who cried in the night as she paced the earth in a hopeless search for her stillborn child, the house of blue fire that beckoned foolish mortals inside to their death – but as numerous as the stories, were the descriptions of where the graveyard lay, and for many years I’d believed that even the cemetery itself was a fable.

  It is not. On a boozing run with some guys in high school, we discovered the grave site during a search for a place to drink and not be seen by cops or parents. Under the harsh glare of a nearly full white moon we walked down a gravel trail and straight into the eerie stand of decaying stones. Being brash and brave as all 17-year-olds, we laughed loudly and scoffed at the stories of Ella Marie Steuben, the woman who reputedly drifted wispily and weepily out of her hallowed earth searching in vain for her baby every now and again. But the laughter fell falsely on the rocky ground and the night ended early. And somehow or other, our group never looked in that particular forest for a drinking spot again.

  But I returned. Call it morbidity or stupidity, the stories of Ella and the blue house and of numerous other ghosts – including that of a manic stagecoach that supposedly appeared and rushed through the trees at breakneck speed to vanish with an audible splash into the green pond – these were the touchstones of my childhood, the cherished adrenaline pumpers that made me both pray that there was a ghostly life after death and at the same time beg that I never encountered it – in this life, anyway.

  An older, more skeptical me returned with some regularity to sit at these stones when life became too thick to move through, but over the years, the thrill of flirting with the supernatural turned to heavy sadness. The latest burial date in Bachelor’s Grove reached back to the 1960s, the earliest readable ones to the late 1880s. No longer, in my adulthood, did these crumbling s
tones speak of mystery or provoke a frantic heartbeat after dark. They stood only as sentinels to the void of death. Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery cried out to me in loneliness, and in it I found a kindred emptiness of spirit. And on the night of my second marriage, this is where I came to die.

  What better place? I thought, as I sat down heavily before the towering gray stone marking the final resting place of Ella Marie Steuben’s bones. Next to the large pillar was a much smaller one, a nameless marker. It read with simplistic and chilling factuality: “baby girl.” This, no doubt, was the source of the ghost stories about Ella’s night walks in bereavement of her child. I uncorked the bottle of Wild Turkey and took a deep swig. “Bottoms up,” I coughed and held the fifth of amber bourbon up in the direction of the tombstone. “I’ll be with you soon, Ella,” I whispered, and took another burning swallow.

  The moon was not obliging this night. The sky writhed in thick roils of cloud, and as the temperature dipped, the ground too was clothed in cloud. It was as if I sat in a limbo between an earth and sky of gray, chillingly damp fog. But the liquor warmed a trail to my belly, and my flashlight lay beside me on the ground, its beam reflecting off the headstone with a sickly glow. 1854-1883 was carved beneath her name. A faded epitaph was still readable in the shadowy light: “She always took care of her own.”

  “Will you take care of me, Ella?” I asked aloud. “I’ve sat with you many nights, you know.” The trees around me shivered in response and a shadow of dread seemed all at once to encircle my heart. Suddenly my witty repartee with the cold earth and stone seemed not altogether wise. I kept quiet then, concentrating on nothing but getting a good drunk going.

  When I’d downed half the bottle, I decided it was time. I needed the steadiness and will of what remained of my sobriety to finish this. Withdrawing a razor from my coat pocket, I rested its edge on my wrist. If I owned a gun, I would have used it instead. I’ve never been a believer in the long drawn-out methods of snuffing oneself. Poison can be long, painful, and ultimately, uncertain. Hanging, if it doesn’t break your neck, can also be a somewhat lengthy process. But without a gun, I thought a steady bleed of life under the anesthetic of bourbon should be relatively painless. Holding my wrist out over the barren earth, I stared at the sky and drew the blade up my arm. The pain was more than I’d expected, and my razor hand was trembling in cold and fear before I finished. With hot red blood leaking out over my other arm, I used my injured hand to inflict a similar wound on my other wrist. I made the mistake of looking at them then, these warm wet crimson hands whose lifeblood darkened the black earth deeper. The blood steamed thick amid the fog. My stomach churned and with a rush of nausea, the liquor and acid of my gullet were abruptly dripping through my nose and mouth to the ground beside me. When it was finished, I wiped my face with a bloody sleeve and slumped back to the stone. Taking a deep swallow of the bottle, I shakily spoke to Ella again. “I’ll be with you soon, now,” I said, as a tear worked its way through the vile smears on my cheek.

  I leaned back and closed my eyes. The forest seemed insubstantial suddenly, as far away as the troubles that drove me here. Leaves rustled nearby, a coon or a possum no doubt spying on the source of the light. It wouldn’t take long, I thought. Already I could feel my strength draining into the earth, my life rushing away from me like a river after the spring thaws. I didn’t think I had the strength now to move, but I could hear every beat of my heart louder than the last. It pounded in my ears so strong that I almost didn’t look up when my light suddenly rolled away and something grasped my leg.

  But I did find the last ounce of strength to look. And that strength then led to a hopeless scream. Rising out of the bloodstained soil was an arm, or rather, an arm bone, its yellowed, worm-ridden hand wrenched my leg with increasing pressure.

  Ella Marie Steuben was trying to pull me into her grave!

  With a ripple of shifting, slurping mud, another arm appeared. Loose slimy earth dripped over my body as the second skeletal arm reached across and wrapped around my waist. I screamed again, this time in pain as Ella used my body – not trying to pull me in, I realized, but used me as leverage to rise. A skull broke earth, shaking the dirt from her eye sockets and gifting my face with the wet splat of decay. Inside my head, a sane voice screamed: “escape!”

  It was like moving underwater, but I willed myself to roll away from the clutching bones and stumbled erect. She stepped fully out of the earth then, and came for me.

  I wet my pants and gagged on my own saliva as my feet stayed glued to the earth. She stood nearly as tall as myself, a bony skeleton draped in tangles of thin dark roots and pink worms and the tatters of something I told myself was once a dress and not flesh. Something thick and glittery hung from her neck and dangled through her ribs. Her eye sockets were menacingly blank, and she stretched out hands lacking several crucial bones in my direction.

  I tried to run, but in my drunken, dying weakness, I stumbled to one knee, and then those bones, ripe with the smell of deep ancient earth, encircled my neck and dragged me backwards. My head hit the ground and whatever will I had retained was lost in pinpoints of angry light. I lay still then, unprotesting, as those bones in incomprehensible animation crawled around my body, coming to rest atop me. I stared into the empty skull an inch from my eyes to see the cloud rumpled sky through her unhinged jaw. She was missing several teeth. The rank perfume of worms assailed my nose and I felt the urge to vomit again. But instead, the skull leaned closer, touching its icy wet teeth to my lips. I slipped out of consciousness then, but in that instant between, I saw Ella not in death but in life: long, flowing golden hair tickled my face as her thick, blood-red lips disengaged from my own. Her eyes glinted blue in the dim illumination still available from the displaced flash, and freckles dotted her nose and cheeks. I think I said “I love you.” She smiled and her teeth were flawlessly white.

  The birds were chirping loud around me when I woke, cold and confused. When I finally forced my eyes open, the sunlight was blinding. Everything hurt. I sat up, reaching out a throbbing, cold hand to rub my pounding head. The wrist was bound with bloody cloth – a shredded piece of my shirt, I realized, and saw that my other arm was likewise bandaged. So even bleeding to death is taken away from me, I thought at that moment, and then noticed the ground beside me. Etched in the ground damp with my blood were four words:

  Remember me,

  my husband.

  Husband? I thought, and absently looked at the fourth finger of my left hand, the finger that for eight years had held my gold wedding band in a disengagable grasp.

  It was bare.

  A sickly white ring of flesh marked where it had once been. On the pinky finger beside it was a new ring. It didn’t fit past the knuckle, but it glinted with the prism of a diamond in the morning light. It was a woman’s wedding band, and I found that my neck was also cuffed by the muddy jewelry of my dead wife: a heavy diamond necklace.

  I stared in disbelief at the words on the ground, the words on her headstone, and thought of the words represented by my new jewelry. I knew that somewhere below my trembling knees, the skeleton of a long-dead, freckled blonde now wore my wedding ring. Would she require a consummation? Had she already taken it?

  Staggering out of the graveyard, I ran for home.

  I probably could have used stitches and a transfusion, but instead I cleaned and disinfected myself, bound my wrists with clean gauze, and slept through the next haze of days. And then one morning, I pulled on my best clothes, got on a bus, and went to a jeweler. They apparently don’t make many diamond necklaces like Ella’s anymore, and I felt awful pawning it, but the money got me a used car for a couple hundred bucks and paid my mortgage back up for awhile. Maybe that’s why she left it with me. But nothing could make me part with the ring.

  Joanne came back to me after I proved that things were turning around. She didn’t even ask “how” when I said my wedding ring was lost, she just nodded quietly and took me downtown to buy a new one. I had one
of the diamonds from Ella’s set in the new band. I didn’t tell Joanne. How could I tell her anything about Ella?

  The new job stinks, but it pays the mortgage – and buys flowers. It’s funny really. It took the love of a dead woman to bring me back to life. And I try to make her happy, I do.

  In this gray, forgotten cemetery haunted by the ghosts of lonely souls, I hear the bones of one freckled blonde rustle with the pleasure of attention each time I lay a bouquet upon that discolored ground where the rain has yet to wash away her bone-etched plea: “Remember me, my husband.”

  Each night, as I gift her grave with roses the color of my blood, I read those words aloud and answer “I do.”

  Love and lust can lead to trust… and trust to games of who can go further. But in the twisted mix of domination and submission, sometimes the line of play and prey can blur. Should you ever trust a lover with your life?

  Wooden

  he grass has stopped waving. I miss the motion.

  But she’ll be back soon. And I miss her more. Waiting is hard. Waiting for the sole sweet drop of honey in a life of poison. Every time she touches my face I shiver, like a cat striving and shaking for just one… more… caress.

  Looking at her eyes, I’m struck mute.