Gary A. Braunbeck - Cages and Those Who Hold the Keys

The sound of leaves skittering along the darkened streets became the blacked fingernails of a corpse in its coffin scratching at the lid, serenaded by the trick-or-treaters.

“ Who moved in the shadow? Who rustled past unseen? With the dark so deep I dare not sleep/All night on Hallowe’en.”

Gulping down air and panic, Marian ran on....

6

If you failed to place strip sets together before cutting, place two segments right sides together, checking to be sure the colors and seam allowances oppose each other, and sew into a four-patch.

* * *

Boots opened her front door and Marian, without saying a word, dashed past her and into the safety of the bright living room.

“Marian, honey...what is it?”

It all came out in a rapid, deadly cadence (except for the part about the back of Alan’s skull; Marian still couldn’t bring herself to believe it and didn’t want to sound crazy), broken only by a swallow here or a breath there to steady the beating of her heart.

Boots put her arm around Marian’s shoulder and guided her to a chair. “You sit right here and calm yourself down some more. I’ll go fetch some stuff to take care of that wrist of yours.”

Marian leaned forward and pressed her head against her knees, breathing deeply. Boots returned with a legion of medical supplies and two cups of cinnamon tea sprinkled with peppermint schnapps. Marian took three swallows, not minding that it burned her throat, then sat in silence as Boots cleaned and bandaged her wound.

Afterward, she began to cry. God, how she hated crying in front of someone else! “I’m sorry, Aunt Boots.”

“No need to apologize, honey. I had a nice crying jag myself after I saw your brother a couple of days ago. He and that house just seem to have that effect on people.”

Marian smiled at her. Good old Boots. It seemed like everyone eventually turned to her. Fifty-seven and didn’t look a day over forty-five, provided you didn’t stare too closely at the amount of pancake she wore to cover the thin, jagged scar that ran from the left corner of her mouth and down her chin, only to curve back and go halfway up her jaw. Marian never knew how Boots had come by that scar, but she suspected that, like the marks on Dad’s back, it was courtesy of their mother.

As she let go of her aunt’s hands, it occurred to Marian there was a lot about Boots she didn’t know, save that she used to play the organ at her church every Christmas, had never married, and always made sure no visitor to her home left without something hot in their stomach.

“Now,” said Boots, brushing back a strand of her brilliant white hair, “tell me the whole thing one more time, from the beginning. I want to make sure I got it right.” “This is going to sound silly,” whispered Marian, “but could you answer a question for me?” “If I can, hon, sure.” “Why do we call you ‘Boots,’ Lucille?” She laughed rather loudly at first, the quickly silenced herself. “I shouldn’t make so much noise. I don’t want to wake Laura—” “Laura’s here?” “Uh-huh. Said she talked to you on the phone last week.” “Can I see her?” “When she wakes up. Now, take another sip of tea and tell me everything again, just a bit slower this time, okay?”

Marian did, hitting on more details. Boots considered everything with an even, unreadable expression, her eyes never looking away, tilting her head to hear better, and asking all the right questions when Marian fell into confused and frightened silence.

When she saw that her niece was finished, Boots half-smiled, rose to her feet, and walked to her front window; pulling back the curtain, she watched as a few costumed children ran down the street, then let the curtain drop back into place. “Honey, I think your brother has made you a part of his craziness. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t doubt for a minute that he’s made himself some kinda scarecrow and is calling it ‘Jack’; I don’t doubt that for a second. He’s alone there with some pretty powerful grief.”

“I know,” whispered Marian. “And I feel awful about it. I know that I should’ve come back the minute I received the telegram, but —”

Boots raised a hand. “You don’t owe me any explanation. I don’t blame you at all for not wanting to be here. I saw your father during that last week. He wasn’t nothing more than a skeleton with a bit of skin on him. Scared me so much I could hardly look at him. I’ve been having bad dreams ever since. A death like that isn’t something a parent would want their child to see, so don’t feel guilty about not getting back here. A human being’s expected to take only so much.”

“But Jack...that thing...it spoke to me! I saw it at the cemetery!” She held out her bandaged wrist. “It cut me.”

“I’ll say it again, Marian. Grief can do things to a person, make them see things that aren’t there. Maybe you cut yourself on a busted pop bottle or something that was on the ground near your parents’ graves and didn’t notice. You said yourself that you’d been thinking about how your mom used to read to you when you was a kid, how you used to think Jack Pumpkinhead was your secret friend. Please don’t look at me like that. I know something terrible’s happened to you, I’m just trying to make some sense of things. Come on in the kitchen with me. I got a craving for some more of this nasty-ass tea.”

When they were both seated at the kitchen table with a fresh hot cup, Boots lit a cigarette and watched the smoke curl around her. Her face tensed as she thought of something, then she spoke up. “When the funeral was over, a bunch of folks came to the house with food and stuff for Alan. I hung around to help him clean up after they all left. He wasn’t in no condition to do housework, so I told him to go take a nap. ’Bout twenty minutes later I’m in the front room emptying ashtrays and hear Alan upstairs talking to himself. It was the damnedest thing. I swear that I could feel his heartbreak all around me, like it was as real as I was; I half-expected it to come through the front door and ask me where its supper was.

“Then I heard another voice — sounded enough like your dad’s to give me the heebie-jeebies. So I left. Didn’t bother to say good-bye or put away the cleaning supplies or nothing. I just wanted to get away from your brother and his grief and that house as fast as I could. I think there’s a kind of sadness that gets to be so terrible a person can’t be around it for too long without going a little crazy themselves. I got enough people who think I’m batty. I don’t need to go hearing a dead man’s voice.”

Marian inhaled the peppermint fumes from her fresh cup of tea. “How bad was it for Dad near the end? Did he really feel that...forgotten?”

Boots took a deep drag from her cigarette, coughed, then sipped her tea. “Let me tell you something about your dad. When him and me were growing up, he was always made to feel like a failure by the other kids in the family. Our parents weren’t the kindest folks in the world, they never had much money and even less patience. Pop wasn’t too bad but our mama was one mean-tempered gal. She used to take off her one of her high-heeled shoes whenever she got mad and beat your dad on the back with it, making little holes until you couldn’t see his skin for the blood. Well, I saved up a bunch of money from collecting pop bottles and scrap metal and newspapers and such, and I bought Mama a new pair of boots. They fit her just right and she said they were comfortable. She took to wearing them quite a lot. So I either hid or threw away all her high-heeled shoes, that way, when she got the hankering to pound on your dad, she never made him bleed. Oh, she left some nasty bruises, but never again did she leave him scarred and bleeding. He was so grateful that he hugged me and said, ‘Thanks for the boots.’ That’s how I got my nickname.”