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Chapter 2
Elisabetta
Saturday.
I got up late, around eleven. Usually,
I didn’t allow myself that indulgence, but I’d been out late the night before. I
was a regular at the weekly Friday Night Swing Dance at the American Legion
Hall. After Gina, I accepted the fact I would never marry or have a long-term
romantic relationship with a woman. Still, the dances gave me a chance to enjoy
the company of women. The organizers offered a free lesson before each dance,
and I had developed some finesse on my feet over time. Some of the ladies
seemed interested in me. Straight, unmarried men my age, unencumbered by crippling
child-support payments, are apparently rare. I was tempted to ask out some of
them, but I could never pull the trigger. If I couldn’t make it work with Gina,
what made me think it could work with them?
What if the nightmares came back?
No, I was better off alone.
After completing my morning
grooming rituals, I had a light breakfast at my computer. I went to the webpage
of the Baltimore Sunpapers to check the death notices. I checked every day for
my cousins. My family appeared unscathed. Then I started making memorials for
the deceased on Resting Place. I was lucky today. Another local contributor,
who called herself Tombstone Teri, also combed through the local death notices.
If I started too late in the morning, she would memorialize the dead before I
had the chance. I didn’t know if she considered me a rival, but I certainly
viewed her as one. Tombstone Teri was racking up some very impressive numbers.
I posted about sixteen thousand memorials over the past four years. Teri was
only a member for two years and was already up to nearly fifteen thousand
memorials. I couldn’t let down my guard for a second.
While memorializing someone buried at
Eternal Faith cemetery, I noticed a new photo request. I paused. The cemetery
sat about five miles from my home. It would be easy to go over and snap the
picture, but I always approached the place with a heavy heart. Eternal Faith
Memorial Gardens was slated to be my own final resting place. My father, Stan
Bakos, bought six plots and joked that we could have them on a first come first
serve basis. He snagged the first one himself a short year or two later, when I
was nine-years-old. My older brother Lenny got the next one. My mother Alice
followed him. Only my sister Janet and I remained on this side of the grass,
and it looked like we were going to leave an empty plot unless one of us got
married.
Something told me not to go to the
cemetery, but fulfilling that request was a matter of pride. Tombstone Teri put
up some good numbers, but she was lazy. She generated most of her memorials
from Internet newspaper death notices and funeral home listings. Her fieldwork
was weak. According to her profile, she only fulfilled three photo requests. I
had fulfilled forty-nine more than that. I couldn’t resist making it an even
fifty. So I slipped on my shoes and headed out into the world.
Eternal Faith Memorial Gardens was a
perfect example of the kind of cookie-cutter cemetery I had grown to despise
over the years. It gave me no comfort to know I would be buried there one day
myself.
To preserve the so-called natural
appearance of the grounds, the management only permitted flat markers, dull
rectangles of granite topped with bronze nameplates and the occasional ceramic
photograph. Spare me. A person will rest under their monument for a long time. They
should be entitled to choose one indicative of their personality. Throughout
our lives, society forces us unceasingly into conformity. Shouldn’t we have the
freedom to express ourselves in death? A
philosopher could argue that the cemetery policy satisfied some egalitarian
impulse. The graves of the rich and the poor and the famous and the common are indistinguishable
at Eternal Faith. Whatever. I suspect the real reason for the policy involved was
cost. It is cheaper to cut the grass with these flat monuments.
When I turned my trusty, red Toyota
Corolla into the cemetery, our family plot came into view. The graves lay near
the top of a small rise about a hundred-and-fifty-yards from the service road. A
sheltering willow tree stood nearby, making the spot extremely easy to find,
but I averted my eyes quickly. While I often felt a mystical connection at the
graves of my distant ancestors, that sensation wasn’t repeated at the graves of
people I actually knew in life. All I felt when I stood at their graves was
their absence. And I didn’t want to feel that today. It was too bright and
sunny. Life was still too alluring. I preferred to think about Andrea, a girl
who had asked me to dance three times the previous night. She was someone I
could see myself dating, if I were
dating. Then again, so was Rita Falstaff. At least on the days she tolerated
me.
Rita was the receptionist at the
cemetery office. She was about thirty-two-years old and always
professionally-dressed. Her hair was blonde, but her roots made a lie of that
on occasion. She possessed a friendly smile, and she always seemed relieved to
talk to someone who wasn’t in mourning, unless said person was a genealogist. Genealogists
were the bane of her existence. Our questions always sent her to a wall of
black filing cabinets in the unventilated back room. She despised rummaging
through those file cabinets, complaining the whole time about her predecessor who
only had a passing knowledge of the alphabet.
“No, I don’t have time for you, Rick,”
she said, groaning audibly when I stepped through the door. “We’ve got three
interments today.”
“Only one name, Rita,” I said. “Please.”
“Is it a relative?”
I hesitated.
Her eyes narrowed. “Are you going
to make me go back there for that stupid website?”
“I’m doing a favor for someone.”
“I’m the one who’s doing the favor.”
She sighed as she picked up her pen. “What’s the name?”
“Matilda Ritter.”
She didn’t even bother writing it
down. “She’s in the mausoleum. Third tier, on the left.”
Forty thousand people buried at
Eternal Faith, and she knew the one I wanted right off the top of her
head? I was skeptical. “Are you sending
me on a wild goose chase?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Somebody was just
in asking about her.”
Oh, no. “Was it Tombstone Teri?”
“Who’s Tombstone Teri?”
“Describe her.”
“White. Mid-thirties. Kind of stiff–like
a high school math teacher or librarian,” Rita replied. “Is that her?”
“Don’t know. I never met her.”
“Then why did you ask me to
describe her?” she replied, pointing to the door. “Get out, and don’t come back
this week.”
“Thanks, I owe you.”
“Damned right you do!”
I jumped into my car and drove over
to the mausoleum. There weren’t any cars parked out front. That meant Tombstone
Teri got her picture already, but I could still beat her to the punch. If I
uploaded my photo to the website before she did, I could still get the credit
for fulfilling the request. I smiled. Talk about snatching victory from the
jaws of defeat. The day was getting better by the moment.
I opened the heavy glass double
doors of the mausoleum and stepped inside, shivering instinctively. Outside,
the temperature hovered around eighty-five degrees and humid, but inside the
mausoleum, it felt like sixty-five degrees. The white marble walls and floor sucked
the heat right out of the air, leaving only a clammy humidity. I wrapped my
arms around myself for warmth. As I did, I felt goose pimples rising on the
exposed skin. I suddenly realized I was afraid, really afraid.
I couldn’t believe it. My genealogical
journeys have taken me into catacombs and crypts. I have seen exposed human
remains on numerous occasions, but I have never been afraid. There are no such
things as zombies or vampires or ghosts. The dead were simply dead. Unmoving.
Uncaring. Unknowing. They were worthy of respect for who they once were, not
for what they had become. The dead couldn’t hurt you, aside perhaps from some
living disease brewing in their decay. I know all of that, but I was still
afraid. It was crazy. I had been in this mausoleum many times before, and I had
never felt this way. It had to be the cold. The sudden shock to my system
sought a supernatural cause where none was necessary.
The vault housing Mrs. Matilda
Ritter’s casket was slightly above eye level, but the camera angle wasn’t too awkward.
I brushed away the brittle, dead flowers in the bronze vase partially blocking
her name. The flowers disintegrated as if they were a thousand years old. The
tiny fragments fluttered slowly to the marble floor. That was when I noticed
the other flower fragments. The floor was littered with them.
Dead stalks rose up out of the
vases of the nearby vaults. Their petals lay brown and crinkly on the floor. I
was surprised. This wasn’t like Eternal Faith at all. The cemetery was young
and viable with thousands of empty plots for sale and dozens of new burials a
week. They had the money and staff to police the grounds properly. Jose Garcia,
the groundskeeper, was particularly meticulous. The grass was always cut. The trees
and bushes were neatly trimmed. The dead flowers were always discreetly
discarded.
This was sloppy. Creepy, too.
Once again, an unnatural fear
tugged at me. My heart rate increased, and my breath caught in my throat, but I
immediately pushed the fear from my mind. There had to be a rational
explanation. At first I theorized that the unnatural cold of the mausoleum
killed the flowers, but that didn’t make any sense. You refrigerated flowers to
preserve their freshness. They should have thrived near the clammy marble. Nevertheless,
they were dead, all of them in the building.
Well, no. Not all of them.
A veritable forest of flowers
bloomed beneath a vault at the end of the building. I thought it had to be a
new interment of a much beloved individual. After snapping a quick photo of the
Ritter grave for the webpage, I found myself walking toward the vault, but the
colorful array of flowers brought me no joy. If anything, each echoing footstep
shouted a warning.
Stop.
Don’t do it.
I didn’t listen. If I stopped, I
would be giving into superstitious fear. That was an affront to my rational
mind. I kept walking, but I couldn’t shake the strange feeling my steps were
pre-arranged and pre-determined. I felt like a chess piece being moved into
position by a force beyond my control.
A ceramic photo of the deceased was
attached to the vault above her name. I smiled briefly despite my growing dread.
I always appreciated when people included a photo of the deceased on their grave.
A photo gives you a definite feel for the dead person. This black and white
photograph revealed an attractive woman in her mid-to-late forties. Her dark
hair and eyes didn’t surprise me. My years of walking through cemeteries taught
me that Italians, Jews, and Eastern Europeans were most likely to memorialize
their loved ones with photos, so I expected her to have stereotypical dark
features.
My assumptions about her ethnicity
could have been confirmed by looking down at her name, but her eyes wouldn’t
release mine. They drew me in and pulled me forward. They were not inherently
intimidating or scary. The eyes, much like the half-smile lingering beneath
them, hinted at a world-weary wisdom. They shimmered with the power to seduce
but lacked even a hint of love. The dark lady seemed to possess a cynical
secret that empowered her, but at a terrible price. People spent centuries
speculating on the meaning of the Mona Lisa’s smile, but I didn’t want to know
the reason behind this dark woman’s smile. I knew instinctively it would
terrify me.
Still, I walked forward until we
were practically face-to-face. Only the wall of flowers stopped me. The smell
of flowers could charm me in the wild, but their scent in enclosed areas often
sickened me. They brought back memories of all the funerals I dutifully
attended. Now, however, I wasn’t thinking of the emotionally neutral funerals
of my many aged cousins who contributed mightily to my family tree. I found
myself instead at Rucks Funeral Home staring down at the powdered face of my
dead mother, Alice Ann Bakos, nee Sullivan. Eyes shut. Jaws wired tightly. Lips
twisted into a smile she never made naturally. Blinking quickly, I travelled a
year further back in time to that same room to the closed casket funeral of my
poor, doomed brother Lenny where mother’s mournful wailing filled my ears.
I shut my eyes, hoping the darkness
would break the spell. It did. I rested in the soothing darkness for a moment,
my heart calming, before finally opening my eyes. I resolved not to meet the
woman’s eyes again, but I was too curious to turn away. I had to know more
about her. I turned to the inscription:
Elisabetta
A. Kostek
September
19, 1942 – November 15, 2014
The date of death surprised me. From
the abundance of flowers, I assumed she recently died, or experienced an
anniversary. Perhaps it was a wedding anniversary, but no husband was listed. Vaults
generally sold in pairs. The names of surviving spouses were usually listed in
neat bronze letters on the marble, waiting only the inevitable date of death. If
she was single, who left the flowers?
And why were her flowers still
fresh when all the others were dead?
I took a step back, and then
another and another. I thought I was leaving, but instead, I found myself
raising my camera to photograph her grave. First, I took a wide shot, capturing
the entire front of the vault. Then, with some trepidation, I zoomed in on the
photograph of Elisabetta A. Kostek until her face filled my viewfinder. I
half-expected her eyes to hook me again like they did earlier, but this time, she
simply stared blankly. Still, call me crazy, but it seemed like the corners of
her lips had crept up a little bit.
-->
Once the camera found the proper
focus, I snapped the shutter and turned away. In the back of my mind, I hoped
whatever drew me to the grave would release me once the pictures were taken.
That wasn’t the case. I felt the dark lady’s eyes boring into me as I walked.
My pace was brisk at first, but my speed steadily increased. The bright
sunlight just outside the glass doors seemed like oxygen to a man swimming up
from the depths. I was practically running by the time I reached the doors. My
heart was thumping in my ears, practically drowning out my footsteps. An irrational
fear suddenly overwhelmed me that the doors wouldn’t open when I pushed them,
but they did. Still, I didn’t slow down until I was out of the shadow of the
building itself and bathed entirely in the purifying light of the sun. My heartbeat
slowed as I sucked in the fresh air. Before long, the chill of the mausoleum
left me. Fear left, and reason returned, but I had no explanation for what
happened.
Other Chapters:
Prologue - My Mother
Chapter 1 - RestingPlace.com
Chapter 2 - Elisabetta
Chapter 3 - The Upload
Chapter 4 - The Kobayashi Maru
Chapter 5 - Gina
Chapter 6 - Tombstone Teri
Chapter 7 - The Holy Redeemer Lonely Hearts Club
Chapter 8 - A Mourner
Chapter 9 - War Is Declared
Chapter 10 - The Motorcycle
Chapter 11 - Suspended
Chapter 12 - The Harbor
Chapter 13 - Bad News Betty
Learn more about the book Here.
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