Eve Morton

Tag: spirit season

  • 31 for 31: The Institute by Eve Morton

    Happy Monday!

    What’s a better way to celebrate the start of the week than a horror story about institutions and the way we can sometimes eat each other alive to get out of the four walls we spend the bulk of our time inside?

    That’s what “The Institute” is more or less about; instead of dreading a 9-5, our narrator dreads the eating disorder program she’s forced to spend her life inside as she purportedly gets better. Whereas most places that claim to heal are inspiring–or at the very least, boring–this narrator is forced to reckon with a callous system, neglectful counsellors, and a horrible ritual that will allow her to be free–but only if she can swallow it.

    I wrote this story back in 2015 and had it published in 2016. It was a tough time for me personally. The television show Hannibal, oddly enough, was my main comfort show around then. A lot of my academic writing was about it–and I suppose, this short story is yet another Hannibal-inspired tale. It’s also inspired by my own experiences in a similar program, though of course, I got out without the horrifying ritual.

    (Or did I?)

    If you hate hospitals, or are easily upset by discussions around eating disorders, I would recommend skipping this one. Tomorrow, I assure you, there will be a different kind of story with a new and spooky monster. I can’t wait!

    The Institute

    By Eve Morton

    They called us shadow women. Trinket girls. When we checked into the hospital, the nurses whispered about us and our small bodies. Only a thin layer of skin separated us from our bones. As we stepped on the scales, we were weighed in double-digits. The staff wanted to know our secret formula, our magical cure for fat. But then the doctors diagnosed us all with anorexia nervosa and the nurses stopped asking questions. They stopped speaking to us all together. 

    From the hospital, we were sent to the institute – a large treatment facility just outside of a busy highway. We were to spend our days here, eating all our meals on campus, so we could return to normal life – and normal weight – all over again. We would have therapy. We would get better. Our parents dropped us off on the institute’s doorsteps after our electrolytes were balanced and our family GPs had written our condition down on prescription paper. 

    “Your daughter is sick. I can’t help. These people can.” 

    “Anorexia Nervosa is a tricky illness. It affects the body, but also the mind. It has the highest mortality rate out of any mental illness.”

    “Anorexia nervosa is a permanent condition. You only cope. You cannot hope for a cure. These people will help your daughter to cope.”

    The doctors talked about us like we were not inside the room, like we really were the shadow women the nurses saw. Everyone had had about enough of us, anyway. We were too visible to forget about, but not present enough to treat inside our homes anymore. So the institute welcomed us inside.

    I was the last to arrive. 

    “Good afternoon,” a tall, blonde woman greeted me. She shook the hands of my parents first, before she looked down at me. Her eyes x-rayed my body, sensing all the bones under my clothing. She sighed, sadly, and then turned back to my parents. “We will take good care of her.”

    My parents drove away without worry, as the woman, named Rhonda, and I walked around. 

    “I’m one of your counsellors. You will be given the best treatment here. Lots of therapy, lots of group discussions. You’re one of many, here. You won’t be alone.”

    She said the last part more like a threat than a comfort. 

    “What will you do?”

    “Me?” Rhonda smiled. “I help you eat.”

    “How do you do that?”

    “Don’t get too far ahead. You need to rest here.”

    We walked through the sterile doorway of the institute. Black writing on all the doors marked rooms for therapy, rooms for examination, and rooms for eating. I felt as if I was walking into a fairy tale. The oak doors looked vaguely like gingerbread.

    “The first case of anorexia nervosa was a girl who wanted to be a saint,” Rhonda began. “She starved herself because she thought it would take her closer to God.”

    Rhonda opened the door at the end of the hall. We walked into a small kitchen with a long, rectangular table in the centre. The girls sat on the sides of the table, all of their eyes down. A different counsellor, one with red hair, sat at the head. Her name was Kellie.  

    “You’ve got to eat,” Kellie stated. She looked directly at me as she spoke. “The doctor told the first anorexic girl that she could honour God by eating. God is all around, even in our food.” 

    “We do not need divine light,” Rhonda stated. She moved towards the curtains over the windows, and closed them tightly. “Any more than anyone else. Please. Sit now.”

    I sat next to a small girl with sharp bones protruding from her wrists. There were eleven of us at the table. We were missing our last apostle, our Judas. With the counsellors watching us, there were almost thirteen people in the room. 

    “You need your humanity back,” Kellie said. “Humans are hungry. They will always need to eat. Show us you are human. Thinking about the Divine is okay, but human – that is what you all are.”

    “And what exactly are we to eat?” another girl, a patient with sallow hips, snapped. 

    The two counsellors looked at one another. They smiled.

    “You will see,” Rhonda said. 

    “Just give it time,” Kellie echoed.

    The next day, the first man went missing. 

    ***

    In psychiatry, many doctors believe that patients are forced to repeat their traumas, until they find what they are and face them. This is why confession is important. You must confess your indiscretions so you stop repeating them. Binging and purging was one of the many symptoms of an eating disorder. But, if you purged your anxieties, your family history, and your nightmares, then you weren’t sick anymore. You were ahead of the curve, ready to get better and face your fears. 

    As the days went on in the institute, the meals we all shared became our new traumas. They were our new rituals that we were all forced to repeat. 

    Meal times were half an hour. All food must be consumed during those times. Then, for half an hour after the meal, no one was allowed to leave the table. Even when we were lucky enough to go to the bathroom, someone would remain on the other side of the door, listening in to make sure the only thing we purged was our psychic revelations.

    Our group therapy sessions were an hour long, with a break in between for snacks. 

    Three girls in group therapy claimed abuse when they were younger. Two were real, I thought. Another was a false memory produced from the ether, so the counsellors would stop asking questions. 

    Melanie, the first girl-victim, was abused by a man with dark hair. On Tuesday, during lunch, a man with dark hair was presented on the table. His thighs were cut, his skin peeled back to the bone, so the flank could be cooked inside the small kitchen in the institute. He was made into a victim, into a piece of meat. 

    Kellie set up the timer for the meal. “Three minutes, everyone. Then we can begin.”

    As soon as the buzzer went, Melanie picked up her knife and fork. She ate the man so she was not a victim anymore.

    The rest of us had our standard meals, issued by the institute’s dietician. Applesauce and egg sandwiches. Normal, bland food. Only Melanie, with her sandwich full of human meat, got to indulge in order to heal.

    “How did you choose him?” I asked. “If we’re not God, then how are you playing his game?”

    “He got too close to school children,” Rhonda stated. “He was bad news from the start.”

    I nodded, considering this. Melanie grabbed another piece of bread, adding mustard to it, before she ate more of him. Her dark eyes turned blue. The colour came back to her skin. She was getting better – and we all despised her for it. 

    “In some parts of the world, some people believe that when you eat your enemy, you gain their strength,” Kellie said. “You are getting his strength, Melanie. You are becoming something different than before. No longer a shadow or a trinket. But real.” 

    She nodded and smiled. The clock ticked on, another three minutes to go before the meal was over. Melanie ate in a sudden fury, cleaning her entire plate as the buzzer rang. 

    We were no longer Gods, I thought between the sounds. But monsters. 

    ***

    There was a rose garden around the institute. I was always dropped off too early for therapy, so I followed foot trails made by other people, who often dragged their IVs behind them and left marks in the dirt. This morning, I followed a trail to the back of the garden, near the woods. 

    In between two pine trees, I saw a man with dark skin. His eyes were black and his legs were large, like the back haunches of a wolf. I stepped closer. We were too close to a highway for it to be a real wolf. The skin was too dark and the bones were too prominent. He looked like a dishevelled man with oil over his body, as if he had been tarred and feathered. As if he had been shamed. 

    “Hello?” I asked.

    He extended one of his long fingers, pointing towards a hill. Fresh dirt lined the area. I walked closer to him, only to watch as he disappeared in sunlight. The creature was a shadow too. 

    I began digging where he had pointed me to. I got down on my knees, feeling the dirt against my skin. I found a finger bone first. Then, I found a jawline with teeth, rearranged and out of order. I kept digging, knowing that I would be late for therapy. 

    Was this skeleton of the man? I asked myself. Was he an old patient, one who had refused treatment, until his body had folded in on itself and starved to death? I didn’t know, but I grabbed the clavicle from the dirt. 

    “I will be back,” I told the bones. “I promise.” 

    Inside the institute’s examining room, I kept the bone under my arm, as if he were a part of me. When Kellie came into the room to weigh me, I asked, “Have you ever had men at the institute?”

    “Anorexia nervosa primarily affects women. Young women.”

    “But there are outliers, right?”

    She narrowed her eyes at me. “You need to be weighed today. Don’t worry about the past patients.”

    “Has anyone ever failed? What happens then?”

    “Anorexia has the highest mortality rate for any mental illness. I suggest you not test its limits.”

    “But—” 

    “Take off your clothing,” Kellie demanded. “Put on the gown. Get on the scale. You should know the drill by now. We need to see how much you’ve improved. No weighing yourself down.”

    “Okay, okay.” 

    Kellie came closer to me, her green eyes inflamed. “You are to wear nothing. You know what happens if you lie, right?”

    I nodded. Even as she left me alone, I still held the bone close, under the stiff gown they gave me. When she came back in, I tipped the scales.

    “What are you doing? What are you hiding?”

    Kellie found the bone right away. She held it up to the light and then began to search through my stuff. I was pulled into a new room like a child, cornered like a dog, and treated like a criminal.

    “I told you not to lie to me,” Kellie said. “Why didn’t you listen to us?”

    “Is this where you want your life to go?” Rhonda asked. “Why are you preventing your own therapy? Do you want to die?”

    “Or maybe you just like being thin. You like your bones, don’t you? You think you look good? You’re signing your own death certificate with this type of behaviour.”

    “This condition is permanent. But it does not have to be deadly. We are only trying to help.”

    “What else was I supposed to do in the mornings?” I asked, snapping out of the interrogation. “I’m bored. I wanted to be alone, so I went for a walk. And then I found him – I found his bone. I was walking because I wanted to leave, but I knew I would never get very far.” 

    Rhonda and Kellie exchanged looks. They questioned me more, but I refused to tell them where the rest of his body was. They called my parents instead. 

    “Her behaviour must stop. This excessive exercise, the secrecy… She will never get better at this rate.”

    I stood in the corner of the room as they talked. They acted as if I was the one who killed him. As if I was the one who put the bones in the ground, instead of discovering them. I had uncovered atrocities, and they could only focus on the steps I had taken, the exercise I was trying to sneak in.

    “It’s part of her condition. She must walk and walk and walk, as if she’ll run away from problems.”

    “But I carried the bones back,” I argued. “I told you what I found. I kept them safe, under my arms.”

    No one heard.

    “What is wrong?” Kellie asked me after she hung up the phone. “What are you keeping hidden? What are you running away from?”

    I held my breath. I had no memories to bring forth, no confession hidden under my skin. Not like Melanie or the other girl-victims. Not like anyone else here. 

    “I have nothing to confess,” I said. “I have done nothing wrong.” 

    Kellie only shook her head. She wrote something down in my file and then slid it away. 

    “We can talk about this later,” she said. “For now, there is more work to do.”

    As Kellie led me out of the room, I saw Rhonda devour the bone from the corner of my eye. When I looked back, she only smiled. 

    ***

    Every Thursday, we had something called “food desense.” Short for food desensitization. We would gather around and pick a forbidden food to eat. Not apples, not usually. According to the counsellors, we were all afraid of cake and soda and unhealthy things. So, to counter to most doctors’ orders, we were set out on a mission to gather junk food. 

    On an April afternoon, we were sent out beyond the institute’s walls. We held hands like wandering children, with Kellie at the front and Rhonda at the back. There was traffic all around us and a concrete bridge to the left – no escape possible. We couldn’t run even if we wanted to. 

    There were only eight of us now. After Melanie, two more girls had eaten their final meal to pass the test. Gained the weight to hide their bones. They were called cured and sent on their way home.  

    “Here we are,” Kellie stated. We stopped in front of a McDonald’s in a mall. Some girls groaned, but most had learned to be quiet about their food preferences this far along. We were only allowed two “dislikes” for the institute’s menu. Most people had used their “dislikes” for chocolate or milk; butter and gravy; sometimes brussel sprouts and green beans. Valentina, a small girl with dark hair, had used her two dislikes for chicken and beef. She was the only person in the McDonald’s without a burger. She ate ice cream and fries, as the rest of us were given Big Macs and told to stay together.

    We sat at another long table, stretched out, facing the jungle gym. We all ate sad beef and greasy fries and called it therapy for the eating disordered. 

    “Be normal,” Rhonda said. “This is how normal people eat. Not all the time, but every so often.”

    “Shouldn’t we be worried about death?” one girl, Ashley, asked.

    “The cows are fine. Don’t worry about them,” Kellie said. “All life must come from death. If you want, you can thank the cows for their sacrifice. You deserve to live too.”

    “No, I mean the workers. The corporations,” Ashley said. She was a hippy. She had gone too vegan, eating nothing but salads before she came into the hospital walls. It was a simple mistake, really. Most of the girls that sat at the table were nothing but simple mistakes, spelled out with poor food choices and too few calories. 

    Rhonda and Kellie shrugged. “One life leads into another. Don’t worry. Just eat.” 

    “Even sacrificial cows should be worshipped,” Valentina said, sipping her milkshake. “When you sacrifice an animal, it must be well. You cannot use one that’s sick, or else it’s a bad omen. It becomes the conscience of the tribe or the group it represents. This is one of the reasons I can’t eat meat. I just can’t.”

    “Why?” I asked. 

    She looked at me, almost begging. “Because my conscience won’t let me.”

    “Girls,” Kellie said. She narrowed her eyes at us. Rhonda tapped her fingers, beating a tattoo like the time from the institute. “You only have an intrinsic responsibility for your own life. No one else’s. And we are almost out of time.”

    We ate the rest of our meal in silence. We walked back into the mall and towards the elevator that would take us outside again. A woman with blonde hair approached us, staring intently, as she shook her head.

    “The stairs are right there, you know.”

    “We know,” Kellie said. “Thanks.”

    “Why don’t you use them?” she asked.

    Kellie stared daggers at the woman. I knew that stare. It was the same one I had been given in the examination room, the same one that felt like x-rays. I looked away. 

    “I told you: we don’t need the stairs. We need the elevator.”

    “But you all look fine,” the woman argued.  

    “You don’t know these girls,” Rhonda said. “You don’t know their stories.”

    The woman sneered at us like we were leapers, as if we had grown a skin with disease over our shadows. 

    “It’s good to be healthy so easily,” Kellie said, staring at the woman. “Appreciate it while you can.”

    I felt the hair on my neck stand up. I closed my eyes, not wanting to see what I knew was coming from inside Kellie’s threat. The woman muttered under her breath. Her flip-flops smacked against the tile floor as she walked down the stairs, just as our elevator came. 

    “Let that be a lesson to you, girls,” Kellie said when we were inside. “Never let anyone tell you you’re not sick. You all are. And you must follow us in order to be well.”

    On our way outside, we formed a line. The woman who had called us out before moved ahead of us on the sidewalk, her eyes on us. Disgust evident. As she stepped out onto the road, she was struck by a car. 

    We kept walking. No one said a word.

    That night, Valentina ate the woman’s brains, finally breaking her vow of not touching meat. 

    And the next day, she was allowed to go.

    ***

    I had dreams of food often. Real food – not what they gave us wheeled in on carts day in and day out. Not the fast food places or overly sweet cakes they gave to us. Not even the men that they put on the table as therapy. I wanted food, like the kind I ate before I got here. The kind my parents gave me for lunch every day. But the institute kept us starving near the end, knowing that it would cause desperation. No matter how much I said I wanted to eat, they would put it off. 

    “A calorie is a calorie is a calorie,” Kellie said with a wide grin. “If you can’t eat what we tell you to eat, then how can we expect you to survive in the real world?”

    Because I want to eat that food, I thought. I remained silent. She sat down next to me, placing a heavy hand on my shoulder. 

    “Eat the meal. Then you can go. We will know you’re loyal, then.”

    “Loyal to what?”

    “Your recovery. Yourself.”

    I sighed. I thought I was loyal. I thought that was what turning up every day meant and ignoring the bodies and bones on the front stops. I wanted to get out so badly. I tried to be a model patient. But the rules they gave me made no logical sense. When I followed them, they changed. The only way I could leave was eat, but there were too many forbidden foods, too many meals repeated until they were traumas. Everything became divided. The food always had two sides, two stories. In order to get past all the trauma, all the things that had turned me into their patient with anorexia nervosa, I had to break the final taboo.

    Alive and dead. Flesh and bone. Life and death. Monster and God. Even if I was still human.

    “Anorexia nervosa is a permanent condition,” Kellie reminded me. “But not if you eat where you came from. Not if you eat someone healthy.”

    “You are what you eat,” Rhonda said. She strummed her fingertips again. 

    The rest of the girls – there were only four now – stared at me from the table, their faces sunken in. They waited for my response, to see if they could get free too. We all needed one another, but not for comfort – for sustenance. We all needed to eat. We all needed to survive.

    “Let me survive,” I said, turning to Kellie. “I want to eat. Please.”

    “We need to confer with others. We need to see what the doctors would say.” 

    “Why don’t you trust me? I’ll eat.”

    “You got yourself this way,” Kellie said. “You’ll get yourself right back if we are not careful. We have already worked so hard, we don’t want it all falling apart.”

    “I am not a bridge or a building,” I said. “I don’t require an architect.”

    “You are damaged.”

    “I am not a car, either,” I demanded. “I am a person. And I want to eat.” 

    Rhonda and Kellie looked at one another. They looked back at the fridge. 

    “Okay,” Rhonda said. “You’re next.” 

    ***

    On Tuesday, the table was set. They brought out the body from the back cellar. The man was older, one of the oldest bodies yet. His skin was pale and his hair was grey. I heard the scratching of the counsellors’ pens as they wrote their field notes, judging my response like all the others. 

    “She has come so far.”

    “She has gained twenty pounds since treatment began.”

    “She can go home soon. Almost. She is so close.”

    I looked away from the man’s eyes and his navy tattoos. I tried not to think about his backstory as I cracked open his ribcage. The noise was so sickening and yet so full of pleasure, like cracking knuckles. The counsellors smiled at me, proud of my accomplishment. The four girls looked at me with wide eyes, horrified and hungry, as I slipped my hands under the man’s skin. 

    I took out his heart. This was my designated piece to eat. The heart was one of the largest muscles, yet still a delicate organ meat. It looked too small, too light – and like it was still beating. I placed down on my plate as Kellie passed me a napkin.

    “Go on,” she encouraged. “Eat up.”

    I stared. I took another breath, fear gripping me. 

    “Are you okay? Do you need the tube?”

    I blinked. The tube – no, I thought, shaking my head. Too many other girls had had the gastro-intestinal tube shoved down their throat like an amoral organ, where their liquid meals were fed into them before they were forced to swallow. I closed my eyes. 

    In my mind, I saw a creature from the woods. I saw the skinny body leftover from the program, a patient who had refused to become a monster and had died instead and was now buried like a bad omen. I saw the boy that had been tarred and feathered and forgotten about. He hovered over me like my conscience, reminding me not to become a monster. 

    “Are you going to eat?” Rhonda asked. “Or are you wasting our time?”

    I looked up. The buzzer clicked on, the seconds passing by. 

    The black creature from the woods shook his head. He said no. But he was the thing to fear, wasn’t he? He was a totem of my death and permanent destruction if I didn’t do what I was told, right? I saw the boy covered as a shadow, a former self lost inside bones and under dirt. I turned away from the creature and looked down at my plate.

    I raised my knife and fork in my hand – and then ate the heart of the stranger. I thanked the man I didn’t know for giving me life again, closing my eyes in a silent prayer. I tasted iron and rot, my nose filled with the smell of blood.

    When I was done, I looked up at Kellie and Rhonda with blood around my mouth. I wanted to move onto them next, to tear them apart limb from limb. They were the ones who had made me into a monster, who had taken the very thing I thought made me who I was. But my stomach heaved. 

    Now, for the first time in a long time, I was full.

    “Wonderful,” Kellie said, placing a hand on my shoulder. “You’ve done a great job.”

    “Yes,” Rhonda agreed. She rose from her chair. The girls’ eyes followed her as she moved around the table and placed another hand on me. “I think you’re ready to go.”

    I was silent. I worried my voice would never come back again, and if it did, I would speak in a language that was not my own. 

    When the bell rang on the buzzer, Rhonda and Kellie allowed me to rise. I gathered my coat and clothing that I had worn when I came into the institute. They gave me my discharge papers and called my parents. Finally, they took me out through the institute’s door, crossing over a small pond and bridge by the front parking lot where my parents would soon come. 

    “It’s okay,” Kellie said. “You don’t need to say goodbye.”

    When they left me there, I turned around, back towards the glass. No one was there watching me. They had truly let me go. 

    I walked towards the rose garden and found the bones of the body I had left behind. He was incomplete now, because they had taken the bone I carried with me. All of my bones were gone, too, now hidden by layers and layers of flesh. 

    It was okay, I figured. I didn’t need to see them anymore to know that they were there. 

    When I looked up, I saw the black creature. He moved towards me slowly, his eyes dark and judgemental. I had eaten the thing I promised I would not.

    But I had done it to survive.

    “I’m sorry,” I whispered. 

    The creature merely stared at me, like my own former shadow. I raised my hand, hoping he would touch it. He lifted his dark fingers, twisted like tree branches, just as a car pulled up. I blinked as a horn honked. Then he was gone.

    “Hey, Emma,” my parents greeted. Their car engine idled. “How are you feeling?”

    “Okay, I guess.” 

    “Would you like to go home?”

    “Yes,” I said. I raised my eyes. “I would.”

    “Who were you talking to before?” my mom asked once I was inside. I looked out at the woods, from the backseat of the car, and saw the creature wave me a goodbye.

    “No one,” I said. “Just a friend.”

  • 31 for 31: The Ghost of Sunday Dinner

    Another ghost story!

    “The Ghost of Sunday Dinner” is yet another ghost story in my 31 for 31 challenge, and another story about mental illness & how we hide things from ourselves, even if it means becoming haunted. I wrote this while pregnant with my second son, as a warm-up exercise for the morning before I headed into work to teach writing. I ended up loving the process of writing, and so sent it to the feminist horror publication The Last Girls’ Club & it was accepted right away. That happens rarely in this industry, so I was thrilled.

    Please note: This story deals with subtle abuse/neglect and eating disorders, but also the comfort that can come from being seen, especially if we feel invisible.

    I don’t want to say too much else–I just hope you read and enjoy! Or if you need to skip because of the content, I hope you return again for another story tomorrow.

    The Ghost of Sunday Dinner

    By Eve Morton

    Cassandra was staring at the mashed potatoes when she saw the ghost for the first time. She was wondering whether or not to eat, like always. She thought back to Hamlet, studied in her makeshift classroom in the hospital, and rephrased that famous line as ‘to eat or not to eat?’ She laughed. She thought she was being clever. 

    That was when the ghost showed up. Straw-white hair, as if bleached. Bony, but then again, most of the girls she saw from Monday to Friday in the eating disorder clinic in downtown Toronto were bony. Barely 100 pounds, if that. Could ghosts have weights? What about ideal weights, current weights, and statistics that she and the other girls on the ward traded when the docs and counselors weren’t looking? Cassandra’s head was a mess of thoughts and her hunger made it hard to focus on anything but the calories of the dinner in front of her. Four hundred ninety-five. That’s if the package is correct. This one looks heavier than the others in the grocery store. For a while, she didn’t even care that something supernatural was happening to her.

    She just cared about her weight. She cared about disobeying the doctors and counselors, proving them right and wrong at the same time as she continued to participate in her own eating disorder.

    When the ghost disappeared, she dismissed it as nothing more than a fainting spell. She’d had those before. She threw out the rest of her dinner and went to bed early. 

    *

    “You’ve lost weight,” the counselor told her on the Monday weigh-in cycle. Her dark eyebrows narrowed and she tsk-tsk’d through her gap teeth. “Have you been following the meal plan?”

    Cassandra didn’t say anything. She stepped off the scale. She was naked under the hospital gown, so she couldn’t weigh herself down artificially with rocks or water bottles. She started to slip on her jeans. She grabbed her socks.

    “You’ll have to speak to the doctor about this,” the counselor said. “We need you to hit your goal weight before you ever leave here. Do you want to leave?”

    “Yes.”

    “Then you need to gain weight. You need to, or you’ll die. You do know what the mortality rate is for someone with an eating disorder, right? It’s the highest among any mental illness.”

    Normally, Cassandra tuned out the guilt lectures on mortality and beauty image, but now she was interested. “Anyone ever die in this program?”

    “Of course.”

    “What did she look like?”

    “That’s the wrong focus.” The counselor sighed again before leaving the room. Cassandra dressed hurriedly, a chill creeping up the notches of her spine. Just before she shut the door, she remembered what the ghost had been wearing. A gown like she had, but there were stones sewed into the side. 

    *

    The ghost finally spoke to her on the following weekend. Throughout the week, Cassandra had thought she’d seen her again, but the phantom turned out to be a new girl in the program with translucent skin from a lack of vitamins, a malfunctioning air conditioner, or her own lack of body heat making her tense up. As Cassandra microwaved a TV dinner that the dietician had approved, as long as she added a glass of milk to it to fill out the nutrients, she finally heard the ghost speak.

    “You don’t have milk.”

    “Because milk is terrible,” she said, as if this was normal. The microwave beeped. Steam wafted up from her food and made the ghost seem mundane, rather than spooky. “What’s your name?”

    “Jenny.”

    Cassandra huffed. “Everyone’s named Jenny. Or Emily. We’ve had like six of them so far in the program. That’s so boring.”

    The ghost didn’t say anything. Cassandra sat at the table while Jenny floated in the kitchen. Her feet did not touch the ground. She was see-through. She was a real ghost, whatever that meant. Cassandra twirled her fork through the chicken dinner, not bringing it to her mouth. “What was your final weight?”

    “You don’t want to know that.”

    “Why do people keep telling me what I want?” She pushed the food away. “I don’t want anything.”

    “You do, but you think you can’t have it.”

    “Is that what happened to you?”

    The ghost didn’t say anything. Cassandra was worried she’d leave–she seemed to get more transparent, thinner by the second–and so she kicked out a chair at the table. “Come and sit.”

    The ghost didn’t move. “Where is your family?”

    “This is a boring conversation.” When the ghost still didn’t respond, Cassandra shrugged. “Maybe the casino? A friend’s house? I don’t know.”

    “But they take you to the hospital,” she said. “They care about you.”

    “I take the subway there. And I’m only there because I’m sixteen and can’t check myself out without their permission, and this seemed like a gold mine to them. Someone else is responsible for me now. Huzzah. Let’s party.”

    “You are responsible for you.”

    Cassandra huffed again. “Says a ghost. Were you that responsible if you’re dead now? Clearly not.”

    “I left,” the ghost said. “You assume I died there, but I left.”

    “The treatment wasn’t very effective then, was it. Knew it. Those docs don’t know how to treat us. After all, eating disorders do have the highest mortality rate. Why should I bother listening to you?”

    “I was hit by a car.”

    “Oh.”

    “Yeah. I wasn’t even sneaking exercise or anything like that. It was just an accident. Nothing malicious. So I don’t understand,” she added. “Why you’re there. Why any of them are there. You could be free but you’re not”

    Cassandra groaned. “Oh, please. Do not give me a lecture. I’m sick of them. We’re there because there’s nothing else better to do during the week. And we got caught. And we…” Cassandra thought of the other girls’ stories. Some were like her, bitter and obstinate against the rules for the sake of it, while others were simply scared. They wanted to go home again. They lost weight by mistake or had now learned that they no longer wanted to be bones upon bones, but had to wait their turn to reach their goal weight. 

    Cassandra didn’t know what she wanted. She didn’t say anything else. 

    “If you want,” Jenny said. “I can eat with you.”

    “You can’t eat.”

    “Okay.”

    Jenny disappeared. Cassandra felt the emptiness inside the room like a punch to her stomach. It rumbled. The sound was like a dog growling, like someone scratching against the backdoor. When she brought the fork to her mouth, the food was cold. 

    She threw it out.

    *

    She didn’t lose any weight come Monday. She didn’t gain any either, which should have been happening. A different counselor, one with dark skin and eyes, marked the number down without remark. Then she left Cassandra alone in the room. As she put on her clothing again, she realized the gown had been stitched with stones. It had weighted her down. She didn’t know, didn’t intend for that, but it had happened. 

    She debated going back to get the counselor. She wasn’t intentionally lying–but they would think she was. They always thought she was. It was so much easier to lie half the time than to be accused of it. When an icy chilled hand reached over her mouth, she understood that telling the truth as it stood right now was not worth that risk.

    And so, for once, she listened. 

    *

    On the Friday weigh-in, she’d gained weight. She’d not been eating as much during the week, and exercising when she was at home at night and her parents were gone, so it was another surprise. She checked out her stats at home that Friday, and realized the scales displayed two different numbers.

    In the hospital, she was gaining. But in reality, she was losing. 

    She said nothing to anyone. 

    This continued on for two more weeks. Cassandra realized she could do whatever she wanted. She needed to follow the rules during the day at the hospital, sure, but the counselors were no longer watching her as closely. Other problems emerged and took their attention. No one questioned her weekends, her evenings. She got to lose weight, still wearing her goal jeans, but also received all the praise from the doctors for gaining. It was as if everyone else had body dysmorphia, but they saw her as getting healthier, while she knew the reality. 

    “This is very promising,” Dr. Brown, the head physician in the program, told her four weeks into this sudden transition. “You should be able to go home next week. You’ll be at your goal weight.”

    “That’s great,” Cassandra said. There was a bitter taste in her mouth. Harsh, like dead air from her throat. 

    “Your parents will be happy, right? They’ve been good to follow the meal plan on the weekends?”

    Cassandra nodded. It was easier than lying. The rest of the meeting went well, right down to the weigh in, where the scale displayed the seemingly impossible number of a healthy BMI, while she could still feel her ribs and spine against the plastic chairs in the hospital classroom and group therapy. 

    “Fantastic,” the doctor said. “Just fantastic.”

    Come Friday, Cassandra was having her last dinner in the program. There was some fanfare–a goodbye speech from some of the worst counselors, the most aggressive in their proselytizing and guilt tripping–and then some shaky hugs from the other patients. Not even their bony arms seemed to be able to detect her bones anymore. 

    She left the program doors for the last time. While other girls were picked up by their parents in minivans, and driven to nice suburban homes, she was alone. She got on the subway, opened her apartment with a key that had lived around her neck since twelve, and stepped inside. 

    No one was home. 

    It felt like no one would ever be home again. 

    *

    On Sunday night, Jenny came back. Cassandra was relieved. She’d not eaten since Friday, just to see if anything would happen. Nothing ever did, not until she walked into the kitchen and flicked on the light. Jenny was at the table. 

    “Hi,” Cassandra said. She walked to the freezer and got one of those meals. She opened the fridge, before Jenny could say anything, and poured herself a glass of milk. 

    Jenny stayed quiet at the table. Cassandra ate two bites of the lasagna and felt a wave of hunger. Real hunger, true hunger, the kind that the hospital stifled with plans and with numbers. The kind that she felt now as a sudden quest for life beyond this dark apartment and the ghosts of a former hospital stay. 

    “I still don’t like milk,” Cassandra said when she’d finished the meal. “I might get almond or oat or something instead.”

    “Sure,” Jenny said. She smiled. “Sounds like a good plan.”

    END

  • 31 For 31: Crossroads by Eve Morton

    Happy Spirit Season!

    I’ll be at the Homer Watson Gallery today giving readings for the start of my spooky season markets–and since Homer Watson is a famous spiritualist (at least in Canada), I wanted to share one of my historical ghost stories.

    Please note: this story deals directly with suicide. Nothing on the page, but the entire premise–about spirits at a crossroad–is related to people who have passed on via suicide, and how the church handles (or doesn’t handle) their spirits in the afterlife.

    This story was written as a prompt for a friend who wanted something “Ambrose Bierce-y” to read. Bierce is one of America’s most heavily anthologized authors, an early supernatural writer, and his stories influenced the later works of HP Lovecraft. My friend said I delivered with my request–and so did the horror publication Scare Street. They accepted this story for one of their many anthologies, and it was so nice to give this story a second life via them. Now, hopefully, there is a third life this Spirit Season.

    Enjoy!

    ***

    Crossroads

    By Eve Morton

    Father Brown awoke to the sound of terrible scraping. The church was drafty. Surely, the strained shrieks were nothing more than the wind against the brick church. 

    Yet, as he awoke, he grew certain that the deathly scraping was something unearthly, something that required more attention than a prayer in the dead of night. 

    Father Brown rose and dressed hastily. The sound of scraping had continued, along with the sickening thud of something heavy. 

    Footsteps? Thunder? Perhaps. 

    The wind was still strong, and the trees were still lashing the windows, but Father Brown could feel something else deep inside—a presence. He’d only felt something like this once before, on the eve of Easter inside the rectory, and then, he’d hidden away in his room and prayed until he had fallen asleep. 

    As he glimpsed out the window with his oil lamp, he saw a shadow on the horizon. Where the main road crossed with the dirt road to St. Paul’s Church, a man stood hunched over. He seemed to sway with the wind, a stick of a willow tree or something else in his hands, which he plunged deep into the dirt. 

    “He is digging,” Father Brown said aloud. His voice echoed off his sparse room. He donned a jacket over his clothing and set out for the crossroads. 

    The man was still digging when he arrived. His silhouette was clearer, no more than a youth of eighteen, someone who should have been drafted into the army, surely. As Father Brown approached, he noticed the man’s loping gait and the slight tremor in how he held the shovel, beyond what would have been simple fatigue from the digging in the middle of the night. Perhaps he was a cripple, stricken with palsy. 

    Or, perhaps, he was just a drunk one.

    “Evening,” Father Brown said. The wind cut through and shrieked at the moment he spoke. He cleared his throat, pulled his coat around him tighter, and spoke again. “What are you doing, young man?”

    The youth jumped. He had not noticed Father Brown approaching, and he almost raised the shovel in his hand to strike a blow. 

    Father Brown stepped back, his shoes becoming caked in the mud that had formed from the boy’s shoveling efforts. 

    “What are you doing, young man?” Father Brown repeated. “There is no need for violence. This is St. Paul Church’s property. However, I, the father of this parish, would like to know what it is you seek.”

    “I’m sorry, Father,” the boy said. He truly was a boy. Father Brown could hear it in his soft voice, hardly broken by the chains of puberty. “I don’t mean you or anyone else any harm.”

    “I find it hard to be convinced of this fact. It is the middle of the night, and you bear your shovel like a weapon. Please, tell me. What is it you seek?”

    The boy leaned against the shovel, both hands over it like a thinking post, as his face became ashen with sadness. “I… my uncle, you see, he is here.”

    “Buried here? Or over there?” Father Brown gestured over his shoulder to the cemetery gates on the other side of the church, directly opposite his personal study and bedroom. “That is where our congregation meets their end on the other side. Even if you were in search of your uncle’s grave, you should not be digging it up. You should show respect to the dead.” 

    Father Brown’s voice boomed, each syllable causing his cadence to rise and fall as if he was at the pulpit. 

    The horror of the boy’s words—digging up his uncle!—struck fear into him in a way no specter or vision of the afterlife ever could. This boy was a grave robber, a ghoul, nothing but the deepest darkest sinner he’d ever faced.

    “Are you not fearful for your own soul, my lad?” Father Brown asked, some of his theatrical cadence descending into the personal. “Are you not fearful of the task you take on? Digging up a grave! And in the wrong spot. Who are you? Have we met before?”

    The youth had been staring at his hands and the overturned earth for the majority of the priest’s speech. Now, he met his gaze, his blue eyes suddenly bright orbs in the darkened night. 

    Father Brown stepped back. A demon? He wondered, yet he felt the gaze as he would an angel, bright and feverish with hope. 

    The boy began to cry, wetness like the fresh spattering rain staining his cheeks. “I saw my uncle here, Father, forgive me, three weeks ago. My sister goes to your church. I came to visit her. I attended the afternoon service. You surely do not remember me, but maybe you remember Rebeccah. She was large with child.”

    Father Brown had several women as part of his congregation who were large with child, but there was no need to hunt through those names in his mind. He knew Rebeccah Northrop. He knew of the entire Northrop family and the tragedy after tragedy that had befallen each member. 

    If Father Brown had any notion to believe in curses, the Northrop family would be the basis of such belief. Rebeccah’s father had died in the Boar War from a gangrenous wound he should have survived. He’d left a wife with five children, one with a crippled leg, to raise and no money to do it on. Her brother, Peter, this child’s uncle surely, had moved to their small New England village to help. That winter, three of the children had died of rheumatic fever. 

    During the worst of the illnesses, the mother had found out she was with child once again, her husband’s last brood. But the boy had been born still, a stone in the hand of the midwife. The mother had gone mad with grief and ended her life in the local sanitarium. Then, the uncle had lost his own life, stricken by heartbreak and madness at the terrible hand his family had been given.

    “Your uncle was Peter; am I correct?”

    “Yes,” he said and nodded. “I am also Peter. Named after him. I saw him a few days ago. Right here.” The youth tapped his shovel into the muddy dirt. “I saw him here, and he was lost.”

    Father Brown could not help but feel a chill, even as his words came out with a cool precision. “Son, there is no such thing as specters and spirits.”

    “Then, what was Mary visited by? Then, what was Job stricken with? I must believe in what I see with my eyes and touch with my hands during the day. There must be more to the physical world. There must—”

    “Yes, dear Peter. There is more than what we see. There simply must be, or I shall be a fool spending my life as I am.” Father Brown took in a deep breath, feeling far too vulnerable—and too cold, much too cold as if this boy was dead in front of him—at that moment. “But we must face the living. We must go on with our daily waking worlds. The dead have been buried. Your uncle included, and—”

    “That is the thing,” Peter interrupted. His hand was shaking, but Father Brown noted it was not with palsy but fear. “I know my uncle is dead and buried, so why did I see him here? It must be because his death is not truly his death. I am missing a piece.”

    “What sort of piece could there be?” Father Brown asked. He thought of the cursed family and wanted to truly be there for the boy. “So much tragedy can happen, and it can feel as if the Lord is testing us, like Job indeed. We must let it go and endure those trials. You have done all you can for your uncle. You have—”

    “He died in an unsanctioned way,” Peter cut him off yet again. His young face became older at that moment, his lips hard and firm. “We covered it up, Rebeccah and I. He wanted to die, not being able to face the terrible consequences of his own life, his own struggle. That baby…”

    “Your mother’s child, your lost sibling. It is sad—”

    “The child was his too.”

    Father Brown gasped. This was not the first accusation of evil within a family that he had witnessed, and he’d read many tales within the Bible of men and women within the same bloodline lying together. But those were stories, necessary parables for something greater at their core. Seeing the consequence in the flesh maddened him on the youth’s behalf. 

    “He killed himself,” Peter confessed. “He died at his own hand. And we could not bear the shame of that. So, we covered it up. We shouldn’t have because he does not deserve those lies. He made our mother crazy and then took her only solace. He is the sinner, not us. And now he has come back to prove it. He will not rest.”

    “What do you mean he has come back?”

    Peter stood a long time, hands on his shovel, and gazed into the dirt. A twig snapped in the distance, seemingly impossible given the mud and wet air all around the two of them, yet both men heard it. Their gazes followed the sound. 

    On the main dirt road, a man’s shadow was present. He walked back and forth, a terribly maddening pacing ritual, before he simply disappeared into the ether. 

    Father Brown met Peter’s blue eyes. He pleaded with the man without words. 

    “I refuse,” Father Brown said, turning away. “That was not real.”

    “Yet you saw it. I saw it. That is my uncle, trapped between worlds. I heard a legend long ago that all suicides remain at crossroads. They cannot go to heaven. They cannot go to hell. Something draws them here.” Peter began to dig again. “If I find whatever has brought him here, I can then place his spirit underground again where he will stay. I can bury what I have lost.”

    “No,” Father Brown proclaimed in fear, trembling from the night’s events. He did not want to believe anything that had occurred, yet his shivers told him that even if his mind refused to label it in language, it had happened. He shuddered beyond the cold as if an invisible hand of the otherworld was reaching for him from that pitiable hole. “No, my dear child. I will not allow you to dig here.”

    “You cannot do anything.” Peter continued to toss dirt over his shoulder. 

    The hole was deep, up to his knees. Water from the rain and spring runoff cascaded into the hole, covering his shoes and surely setting the boy up for a fever. Perhaps he didn’t care. Yes, Father Brown could clearly see now that this boy didn’t care about a thing. His blue eyes had become affixed, almost possessed, with his mission of finding his uncle at the crossroads and putting his spirit back to rest. 

    “What are you hoping to find in the dirt?” Father Brown asked. “He was not buried here.”

    “But I see him here. There must be something.”

    “No,” Father Brown said once again. “You are a simple boy, and this is far beyond your capabilities. I forbid it. You must leave now, or I will call the authorities.”

    The youth continued to dig. Even as Father Brown repeated the threat—arrest, imprisonment, insults at his mental ability—Peter continued on his mission. Father Brown understood the boy was motivated by a higher calling, as he’d once been. 

    So, Father Brown evoked the only thing he could. “Peter, this will damn you. This act is barbaric and against the Lord. I will not stand for it. I will not allow you to dig at the crossroads because it will put your soul in mortal jeopardy.”

    “It already is, Father. You don’t understand that. I’m already damned.”

    “I do understand. I have ministered to your family. And if you continue on in this way, you will only pass the curse on to the next generation. Your sister’s child, Rebeccah’s brood. Surely, you do not want that child to meet the same fate as your lost sibling? Do not damn someone already so innocent.”

    Peter halted. His shovel was in the dirt, but his face was now crestfallen. Father Brown knew that he had struck a note. He had saved the boy. He extended his hand for him to take, to help lift him out of the hole, which he grasped with a chill. 

    Under the oil lamp, Peter was filthy and covered in mud. The only thing clean on him were his blue eyes. Peter opened his mouth to say something, but every time, he seemed to fold in on himself and not utter a word.

    “It is all right,” Father Brown said. “You have done your very best. Go home now. Stay warm. I will see you and Rebeccah on Sunday.”

    Peter nodded. He regarded the shovel as if it was a foreign object and then handed it to the priest. His actions and facial expressions said, I won’t need this any longer, but no words came from his mouth. He slumped up the main road, past where his uncle’s specter had emerged, and then kept going. 

    Father Brown waited at the crossroads until the youth disappeared into the night. Then, he waited for another five minutes to be sure that the ghost did not return as well. When the night seemed empty of spirits and hauntings, he returned to his room, washed as much of the mud and dirt from himself, and then lay under the covers. 

    The terrible feeling persisted until the morning, and he knew he could no longer fool himself that it was the chill. 

    ***

    Father Brown did not see Peter or Rebeccah on Sunday. He’d prepared a sermon on the nature of the afterlife and the sins men have inherited from their fathers, but the homily fell flat on his tongue. Those he needed to administer to the most were not present. What was the point? Though he went through his sermon and the congregation was respectful and kind, he could tell they were not listening. They did not need to hear about breaking family curses and respecting the dead, God-fearing as they were already. 

    After the service, Father Brown shook hands, spoke to people about their small issues, and shared some food with others, and his faith was restored in little gestures. 

    Once he retired to his room, however, the noises returned. A subtle scraping of metal against rock, the sound of earth over his shoulder, a digging chorus of more than just Peter, but a line of gravediggers at their post, as if unearthing the entire Northrop line. 

    Father Brown had been hearing the noises since that night with Peter. And he’d been ignoring them, calling them bad dreams and lingering guilt at his harsh treatment of the youth. But until this Sunday, these spectral noises had only ever visited him at night.

    Now, it was daylight, and he heard the ghost. He’d once been surrounded by the power of his congregation, the living souls of those he could save, and yet he heard the distinct sounds of a man who had not been buried in the proper place, a man who had lain with the wrong woman, and a man who had continued to curse his own brood when he should have been protecting them.

    “Peter Shunn,” Father Brown whispered inside his bedroom. “I see you and hear you. What do you want?”

    There was no answer. Only more noises of scraping, of pacing against soft earth. Father Brown left his room and walked across the stone floors until he was on the other side, at one of the windows facing the cemetery. The grave markers were a hodgepodge of design and prominence. Some of the wealthier families had large stones, while others opted to be modest in death though they could afford angels and carvings like the biggest pieces. 

    Father Brown gathered the birth and death records he kept on the shelf in this room. He located Peter Shunn in his roster,; his death listed as a heart attack at age fifty-five, and struck it out. He didn’t add anything in, but he’d hoped that correcting the register would make the sounds disappear. 

    I am telling the truth now, his actions spoke. Please leave us alone.

    The sounds continued. He sighed and returned to the window. A man was there—spectral, not literal—and he paced the gravestones. He wore a gray outfit, the working-class gear of those who owned a shop but still did all their own repairs, and it was barely visible in the gray mist. He hunched over some of the stones, touching them like they were a child. 

    His child. 

    Father Brown found the listing for the stillborn baby. He had no name, but there was a gender listed. Baby Boy Northrop. He was buried in the cemetery right next to his father, who was not listed on the birth certificate but would join him months later. 

    Father Brown left the registry books on the desk in the room. He gathered a thick coat as he stepped outside. The shovel that the younger Peter had left behind leaned against the back door of the church. He took it now, merely to use it as a walking stick. Or as a weapon, in case these ghosts were violent like the demons in the Bible.

    He walked through the gate of the cemetery, his heart hammering. I have been here any number of times, administering a number of different but no less sacred rites. Yet now I am afraid. “God help us all,” he said as his shoes became caked in mud. 

    The specter turned. The face of the elder Peter was evident, even through the mist and distance. He locked eyes with the priest, his face caught in a rictus grin, and then disappeared. He did not run or hide; he was simply gone. 

    Father Brown regarded the earth where the specter had stood. Footprints, deep into the earth, were present in front of the flat stone where his child was buried. He’d been buried next to the stillborn and next to his mother and father after that. A nice little family plot, usually bought all at once when the head of the household passed, so the family could be together in death. 

    Father Brown stood there for some time, considering his options. His soul, the soul of Peter, and the likelihood of eternal damnation. Then, with another prayer for forgiveness on his lips, he began to dig. 

    ***

    Hours later, as the sun set on the New England horizon, Father Brown walked to Rebeccah’s house and knocked three times. A woman he did not recognize came to the door, her hair gray at the temples and her dress simple yet professional. 

    “Yes, Father?” she asked, but before either one could say anything, a scream came from inside the house. The woman blinked, though she did not falter. “Rebeccah is having her baby tonight.”

    “Oh.”

    “Yes. It is not the best time to come and bless, but I assure you we may need you in the morning.”

    “Is everything all right? I know—”

    The midwife gathered his hands with hers. She smiled warmly, so much like the smiles he gave newlyweds and those who brought their babies into St. Paul’s for the baptismal waters. She was like him; he saw that so clearly at that moment. She dealt with life and death at the beginning, while he seemed to be playing eternal catch-up at the end. “Things are going as they should go,” the midwife said as she let his hands go. “Do not worry about her.”

    “I’m here for Peter,” Father Brown said, remembering his mission with stark clarity. 

    Though he’d dressed again and done his best to wash the dirt off of his face before making the house call, he could see that his nails were ringed with half-moons of dirt. He had not been eating and was thinner in his vestments. He did not look well, not even for the midwife’s typical standards.

    “Is everything all right?” the midwife asked cautiously. “Peter has been a big help to his sister thus far, though I’m sure some of the older children could take his place.”

    “I’d like that. I need to speak with him. It is a private matter.”

    The midwife nodded. She did not invite him inside—not as another scream erupted through the small house—but she bid him wait on the doorstep as she fetched Peter. 

    He came out moments later, his dark hair askew and dark rings under his eyes. He regarded the priest with a polite smile reserved for guests, though it quickly fell away as memories of their last meeting clouded his blue eyes. “What would you like, Father Brown?”

    The midwife closed the door, leaving Peter on the porch. He had grown stronger from her presence, and the boy now crossed his arms over his chest and repeated his question. 

    “I’m afraid I am here to ask for your forgiveness on the matter of your uncle,” Father Brown began. “I believe that you were right. He has been haunting the rectory ever since you left.”

    Peter stood up straighter. “He has? You have seen him?”

    Father Brown nodded and rehashed many of the details that had kept him up at night. The scraping, the terrible howls, and his uncle’s forlorn pacing. “I’m afraid that you were right. Suicides haunt the crossroads, and the church is at a crossroads. This means that there is only one way to rid your uncle’s spirit. We must move him from consecrated ground back to the hole you were digging for him. I am… very sorry it is coming to this. I am also very sorry to your family.”

    Peter held up his hands, silencing the priest. Then, he grew ashamed, having spoken so out of turn. “I am sorry myself. I should have sought council first. I should have—”

    “Hold the apologies. We will need them for God after we get through tonight.” Father Brown drew a deep breath. He plunged his hands into his pockets, only to realize that some of the dirt and silt that he thought he’d rid himself of by changing was now back. He took out a small stone, only to find that it was a finger bone. He held it between the two of them, Peter’s gaze affixed there.

    “May God forgive us,” Peter said.

    Father Brown nodded. He could not have said it better himself. 

    ***

    They left the house of birth and walked into the night towards the house of death. Once his home, St. Paul’s Church had begun to feel unreal as Father Brown dug up the corpse of Peter Northrop and brought it inside piece by piece. 

    The man’s clothing hung off of him in tatters, having been disintegrated by the worms and other bugs after being in the ground for the past year and a half. His skin had mummified in some parts but decayed away to the bone in others. It was a horrible sight truly, one that Father Brown knew he would not rid from himself for years and years if his soul ever recovered. 

    The groundskeeper had filled in the hole by the crossroads the morning after Father Brown had discovered it. No grass grew on the patch, and Father Brown knew that no grass ever would grow there again. It was a worthy sacrifice as long as it meant that they could rid the rectory and the roads of this spirit.

    “I need you to dig again,” Father Brown said. “My back aches after retrieving your uncle.”

    Peter nodded and went to work right away. He grasped the shovel as if it was an extension of his own arm. He dug without relenting, without stopping for a break, and without his leg smarting in pain. Meanwhile, Father Brown transferred the body piece by piece from the rectory hallway to the darkened night. Each time he lay down a new part, Peter regarded it with muted horror. He nodded sometimes as if saying hello to his uncle, while other times, he turned away as if he could hide from what they were doing. 

    Or what his uncle has done, Father Brown reminded himself. They were not the bad men, the true sinners in this equation. They were doing the Lord’s work, rather dirty work, but they would be setting the scales of justice right again. 

    And there would be no more ghosts. Father Brown kept reminding him of that fact, over and over again, until the last piece of the body was brought out. He rested the skull, devoid of skin and possessing only a few wisps of hair, on top of the rest of the body. A beetle, black as the night, crawled out of the mouth and scampered away.

    Both Father Brown and Peter shuddered. 

    “Well,” Father said, “shall we lay him to rest?”

    Now, it was Peter’s job to transfer the body, piece by piece, into the grave that he had dug. He worked slowly, carefully, but soon his hands became a blur of white bone and mud, desperate to get it all underground and behind them both. 

    A driving wind shot up out of nowhere, and the clouds that had been hovering in the sky all day, turning the afternoon gray, now parted in the night sky and showered them with rain. The hole for the body was not as deep as six feet, only three or four at most. 

    But as the rain came, the dirt around them became a mudslide. Peter slipped as he transferred the legs of the corpse, and the rest of his uncle’s body cascaded into the hole, along with Peter.

    “Help!” he cried out, his voice half under the muddy water. He slipped onto the floor of the grave with his face next to his uncle’s skull, which had fallen in during the short mudslide. He screamed for help again. The bones crunched under his feet and added to the horror. Another beetle came out of the mouth of the skull and ran between Peter’s lips as he yelled for help again.

    Peter shot up, spitting, spluttering. His fingers crawled and scraped against the mouth of the grave, pulling more and more dirt over himself as he tried to escape. “Help! Father, help!” 

    Father Brown was silent as stone, watching it all in a lunatic’s trance. The wind and rain had frozen him and made his limbs stiff with fear. Peter reached out for him, desperate to grab onto life again. Father Brown wanted to grasp for him, longed to do so, but he held his position on the side. 

    “Father!” Peter called out, his gasps becoming gurgles. “Please help me! He has me!”

    “The Devil,” Father Brown said, whispering. He drew in a deep breath against the harsh wind and crossed himself awkwardly as if the action was foreign. 

    He tried to get onto his knees, bracing himself against the pain that had never been there before in his joints, and offered a hand to Peter. He grabbed him. He slipped. The sequence was repeated threefold. It seemed they could not hold one another, their fingers transparent as ghosts.

    “We have done the Devil’s work,” Father Brown said. He repeated the words like a chant. He could feel his own soul leaving his body, down into the hole with Peter and the boy’s eternal soul. 

    Father Brown had been forsaken the moment he’d woken up and heard the terrible noise. The moment he’d let the Northrop family into his congregation. The moment he had become a priest. It had all led to this moment, this fearful ruin of a life ended in suicide and two lives, two souls who were desperate enough to end a family line of pain and hurt with the sacrifice of their own souls. 

    “We are dying,” Father Brown said. He held onto Peter’s hand tighter and brought him out of the grave, though he knew Peter was damned along with him, had been damned the moment he was born a cripple, a Northrop. “We are dying, dear Peter. We are already dead.”

    Peter let out a low, almost animal scream as he scrambled up the rest of the grave. He grasped onto Father Brown’s leg, tearing his pants as he finally emerged from the slippery mouth. Peter stood, gasping for air and spitting out dirt. The rest of the grave filled in suddenly, the rain and mud and wind completing the rest of their horrid task. 

    Peter held onto Father Brown’s thin body in a tight embrace. He hugged him tight, tighter than the father had ever been held by family or friend alike. When he finally drew enough strength to hold the youth in return, he felt something slide into place. Not the soul that he lost—he was sure that his eternal life was now in the grave with Peter’s uncle and would remain there until the end of time—but something more primal and freeing. He and Peter had completed a deadly task together. The Devil’s task.

    But they had done it in the right name.

    “Thank you, dear Father,” Peter said as he ended the hug and grasped the priest’s hands in his own. “Thank you. You do not know what this has meant for me.”

    “I do. I do,” Father Brown said. 

    Over the youth’s shoulder, he spotted the place where the main road crested a hill, leaving the rest of it invisible from their position in front of St. Paul’s Church. A man was there, dressed like Peter’s uncle had been dressed in the grave. He paced from side to side, and then he walked down the road. 

    Then, he was gone.

    END