The Glaring End of Chapter 4

“Becca!  Look at this.”  Ellen plopped her bag in front of a pointy stone that looked like a smaller and fancier Washington Monument.  “I found the Foggs.”

The Fogg memorial stood in the middle of a big grassy rectangle marked off by low cement stones sort of like the ones my mom always bumps into in parking lots.  Except these were granite and rounded.  In the center towered a marble obelisk with the single name “Fogg” embossed in capital letters.  Lined up in rows and clusters all around were oodles of dead Foggs.  I stepped over one of the barriers, super conscious of the fact I was standing on top of people and skirted between graves to an area that looked older.  Right under a huge pine tree, stones dating back to the 1700’s had creepy winged skulls carved on the tops and eerie, barely-legible epitaphs.  Thick roots bulged up around them like splayed fingers.  I stumbled over uneven ground and, catching my balance, read aloud from Zipporah Jane Fogg’s 1765 grave.  “‘As you are now, So once was I, Rejoicing in my bloom.  As I am now, You too will lie, Dissolving in your tomb.’” 

Ellen sidled up next to me.  “Dissolving?”  She slurped a jolly rancher and exhaled a watermelon-scented cloud.  “Ew.”

“What do you call a group of Foggs?” I murmured.

“Cursed from the looks of it.  Check this out.”  Andi stood in front of a row of matching white stones and pointed.  

I left Zipporah and went to see.  By now, Chris and Becca had come back down to meet us, and they came over to Andi too.  

Becca gave a little squeal.  “Alton!  That’s who built our house.”

A chunky rectangular marker was engraved, “Alton Fogg 1822-1879 and Alva His Wife 1824-1897.”  

The breeze picked up, and Andi disappeared under her hood.  She looked like a bespectacled monk.  “Dude and ‘his wife’ had some seriously bad luck.  Four kids died before the age of twenty.”  She bent at the waist and peered through her glasses.  “Almon at age six years, six months and nine days; Nathaniel at eighteen days; Enid at two; and Caleb at nineteen.”

“A curse of Foggs for sure,” I said.  For a quick second I thought I heard another footstep.  I darted a glance over one shoulder and frowned.  The path was still empty.

Chris crossed her arms and scowled.  “Alva doesn’t even get her own headstone?  She has to share his?”

Ellen unwrapped another candy.  “Why are we whispering?”  She tromped right over the grass and stood in front of little Enid.  

The stone was small and inscribed with slanty italicized looking letters.  Squinting, I made out the words: “Enid Jane aged two years, ten months, and twenty-three days.  She is not dead but sleepeth.”  The idea of a grieving Alva pouring over a calendar and counting the precise number of days to tell the town headstone engraver gutted me like a fish.  I don’t know why, but I wanted to tell Ellen not to just trample all over the place.  It seemed disrespectful somehow.  

Ellen kicked dead leaves from in front of the stone.  “Hey look, someone left flowers.”

Becca came up beside her.  “Those aren’t flowers.”  She picked up a ragged brown bundle and shook off a clump of dirt.  “They’re beets.”

“Just like the ones in your kitchen,” Andi said.

“And in the bathroom.  I found another bunch in the tub the next morning.”  Kneeling, Becca replaced the beets and laid a gentle hand on Enid’s stone.  “Poor little thing.”

“Maybe you have raccoons,” Chris said.  “We should go.”

Leaving Ellen’s bags in care of the Foggs, we trudged the rest of the way up the hill.  The flagpole came into view over the horizon.  A weirdly warm breeze clanged the flag hooks against the pole like something wanted our attention.  A layer of wispy clouds raced across a charcoal sky, but the air was dead still.  The briny scent of mud and fish wafted in from the harbor.  Somewhere down the coast, lightning flickered.  Part of me wanted my earmuffs, and at the same time, my neck felt kind of sticky and hot. We stopped walking at the edge of the circle and stood in a little arc.  

In the center of the circle, Daniel waited alone, looking out over the bay with his trumpet case at his feet,.  

“Hi, Daniel,” Becca called.

Daniel swung around and spotted us.  He had his trumpet in one hand, and it glinted in the glow from the streetlamp.  “Silence please!”  

“Good to see you too, weirdo,” Chris muttered.

She had a point.  Other than maybe the Osties who I still could have sworn were watching us from somewhere, Beets Grove Middle hadn’t exactly thronged to this wackadoo rodeo.

Andi glanced at her watch and dug her hands into the pockets of her hoodie, pulling it across her hips like she was shrink wrapped in sweatshirt.  “Micky says it’s time.”

Ellen bounced and burped watermelon.  “I could use a pizza.”

“In New Orleans they bury people in crypts because if you dig a hole it fills up with water right away on account of the sea level,” Becca whispered.  “Put a casket in the ground and it literally floats.”

“Speaking of dissolving in your tomb,” I said.  The air felt dense.  The woods surrounding the cemetery were as dark as fairytale forests—impenetrably shadowy and deep.  

Standing beneath the lamppost, Daniel glanced at us, and his face was pale.  Beneath his brow, his eyes were black pits—like his eyeballs weren’t even there.

He spun toward the bay and flung out his arms.  “Harpier cries `Tis time, `tis time.”

“Who’s crying?” Ellen hissed.

Becca hushed her with a wave and stepped into the gravel circle.  “Shakespeare.”

Daniel raised the trumpet to his lips, breathed in deep, and let out a sound like a dragon howling.  One endless note bled into another.  The sound made my tummy feel sort of funny, like I ate a bad turkey sandwich, and I started to regret coming.  How long did he plan to play?  Then a mournful tune like a lethargic death march coalesced from the random tones—plodding and deliberate and sort of inevitable all at once.  My back teeth vibrated, and I realized I was clenching my jaw super tight.  I rolled my shoulders and tilted my head until my neck cracked.  The tempo picked up and so did the wind, ripping dead leaves from gnarled branches and shooting them sideways.  I wrapped my arms around my middle and darted a glance around just in time to see what looked like the edge of a swinging white skirt disappear behind a tree trunk.  I nudged Chris.  “Did you see that?” 

Slack-jawed, she gawked at Daniel.  “You mean how Daniel Bertinet can control the weather?”

I stared at the tree, certain Kayleigh or Michelle would pop out any minute with a video camera or something.  The music got faster and louder, driving to Daniel’s big finale.  His cheeks puffed freakishly and his eyeballs, visible now, bulged.  Then the music suddenly went silent.  Somewhere in town a siren howled in the distance, and as if in conversation, Daniel played the final mournful notes of the theme.  I glanced back at the tree, scooting to one side to get a better view.  The music died—the notes drifting away on the wind Daniel summoned over the graves of hundreds of long-dead Mainers and our crummy little town and out to sea where puffins or Coast Guard guys would no doubt hear it and think, “who the heck is playing music way out here?”  I leaned way over and peered around the trunk.  Nothing.  Just a blackness that was darker somehow than actual black. Thick black that was not just a color like paint but the absence of light.  My mouth went dry.  No one was there.  I blinked and felt what it meant to look hard—like my eyes actually hurt.  

No one.

Was there.