MELVIN MICHAELADIS SHORT STORY
AN UNWELCOME RETURN
Melvin Michaeladis knew that sooner or later the boy would come.
Bartlett was too much like his grandfather. A good man can never stand by and let bad things happen. It just wasn’t in their nature to do so. No matter how angry or bitter or violent that boy might become, and Melvin sensed he could become very violent, it seemed that it was James Bartlett down at the bottom. The good man who would never let go of his integrity even after James’s father destroyed James, himself, most of his family, and their town by choosing his pedophile brother over James.
Melvin was seated in his wheelchair in his living room, staring at the red maple tree on his horse property in Maplewood that had grown near the empty stables, noting the leaf stems were still red but, as it was June, they were mostly green, when he heard the sound of the front door opening and the sounds of footsteps approaching from behind.
He nodded soberly as the footsteps approached from behind and said, “I knew you would come.”
“I’m so glad—”
Fear hit Melvin so hard that his heart seemed to burst in his chest and the rest of the words spoken were drowned out under the pain! That wasn’t the boy! That wasn’t even a man!
But it couldn’t be her! Not her!
He was suddenly having a heart attack right then and there, right at that exact moment, and oh, it came as a relief! He was looking forward to dying! He did not want to deal with her! Not again, not ever again! She was dead!
And she gosh darned well was supposed to stay dead!
A hand suddenly reached around him, rested on his chest and he almost screamed as his heart started to calm unnaturally. He knew what it was and it filled him with abject horror.
She was healing him with her magic.
“Oh God!” he murmured. “Oh, sweet God!”
The woman behind shushed him gently and his eyes grew wider and wider as he remembered that unique, weird tone. “Love,” she whispered. “I have been dreaming of you for so long.”
“Why didn’t I kill myself when I had the chance!” he whimpered. “Why didn’t I run off to California or China or something?” He was sweating and he instantly had another heart attack but the hand healed it again. “Oh God!”
He sensed amusement in the figure behind him.
“God is ‘mother’ in a child’s eyes.” She wrapped her arms around him and he felt extremely bony limbs create a gentle hug. “You are my treasure, Melvin,” she said into his ear. “You are my one true love. I would never let any harm come to you.”
Melvin said nothing. He did not know what to do or say or anything. He felt a sort of growing sense of horror that was beyond all the horror he had already felt and he was starting to even grow numb from it. He should have died. He was way too old for this but she wouldn’t let him.
“Uh…” his voice was weak and it trailed off. “I—”
“Say it,” she whispered.
“Mother,” he said, still staring at the red maple tree. “Hello, Mother.”
Madge Michaeladis was smiling. He could sense it somehow as he always had but he sensed something else as well. He looked down and saw, with no particular surprise, that her hand seemed fleshless under the loose gloves. She had been dead for so long that by then she could have become a complete skeleton.
“Oh,” said Madge. “Someone’s coming.” She leaned over toward his ear and said, “Do not mention me or I’ll be very cross with you.” She reached around and playfully poked him in the nose and skipped away.
And then she was gone.
He sat there, feeling very strange, and actually wondered if it was all a nightmare. If he had just fallen asleep and imagined everything. Was that possible? He sure as heck hoped so.
For a moment, he felt nothing, and the falling asleep theory began to feel reasonable. Madge Michaeladis had died, shot fatally through an upper-level window of Beechwood, although by whom was still a mystery. The Huntress was a possibility, of course, since she seemed to know everything, but the entire black community was another. They didn’t know what she was about but Melvin knew they knew enough. He could see it in their eyes sometimes.
He supposed it was only a matter of time before somebody took matters into their own hands. Any one of the Merricks could have done it. The females were just as deadly as the males and none of them would have any qualms with “shooting a lady.” They never found who did it, never matched the bullet, and it seemed most people in town, including the Saturnine, let out a sigh of relief when it was over.
When was that? It was when he was a teenager, thirteen or fourteen or something.
Melvin recalled going to her funeral and weeping but a few days later, they found her grave was open and her body was missing. The groundskeeper had told him that it had looked open from the inside.
Evidently, the man wasn’t just trying to frighten him.
“Melvin,” said a voice.
He turned his wheelchair around and faced Ethan Bartlett. Something was really wrong with Melvin’s state of mind because, looking at him at that moment, Melvin suddenly thought he was looking at James Bartlett. For a split second, he was literally him: the same hair, that fifties dark gray suit with matching hat, everything, but he had a hard look on his face that was unique to Ethan Bartlett and that broke the illusion.
Bartlett saw something in Beechwood and that something came to Melvin one night to ask him about Bartlett.
Oh, but he didn’t want to think about that thing. Never again would he ever let her into his mind. She scared him even more than his mother.
“Tell me about the Saturnine,” said Bartlett coldly.
“They’re a club,” he said simply. It wasn’t a lie. It was a vast understatement considering what he was really asking but technically not a lie. “A sort of cult but you know that.”
“Do they have the book?”
“Book?” His eyes grew wide as he read Bartlett’s face and the fear of that peaked out above his other, more pressing, fears. “What book?” he asked even though he knew exactly what book Bartlett was talking about.
“You know which book,” Bartlett replied very stiffly. “I can see it in your eyes.” Melvin didn’t know what to say, he was so scared. “I’m going to destroy it.”
Bartlett meant it. Melvin could see it in his eyes, and that was very, very, very good if and only if he could do it.
“It’s gone,” Melvin told him. “I haven’t seen it for years. Some kids stole it in the fifties but I got it back after that Aberdeen girl went missing. A weird forest magician man gave it back to me. Said it was haunting his dreams and he couldn’t destroy it for some reason. I don’t know how you will. No one else can.”
“The last one wasn’t hard for me. I think it may have surprised Courtney a bit when I did it.”
Melvin’s eyes went wide. “Is she—” his eyes grew wider and he saw his mother’s head appear out of the corner, looking at him worriedly, and she was so terrifying that he almost started to shriek “—dead…” his voice gasped.
The flesh of his mother’s face was completely gone, just a bleached skull, but inexplicably, she had that recognizable hair of hers, dark brown, parted in the middle, and hanging around her chin in imitation of Clara Bow. Somehow, he sensed she was smiling, even though her lips were gone.
She pressed one white-gloved index finger vertically right where her lips had once been.
“—truly dead?” Melvin’s voice finished in a whisper.
Bartlett looked back, but Madge had slipped back before he could see, disappearing into his bedroom, and then Bartlett looked back at Melvin suspiciously.
Melvin’s eyes went wider as he looked at Bartlett’s face and he shook his head. He couldn’t believe it. He knew something had shifted behind the scenes. One of the Saturnine had come by one night, threatened him, terrified and anxious, and that was why. He could see the truth in Bartlett’s eyes.
Black Courtney was dead. She was really, truly, dead.
Melvin nodded awkwardly and said, “I see.”
“Listen, I, uh—” Behind Bartlett, in the open doorway, his mother slipped out again. She lifted her index finger in her white glove and wiggled it back and forth at him. In his mind, he thought he could hear her saying, “No, no, no,” in that tsk, tsk voice of hers.
She quickly slipped back as Bartlett tilted his head back again over his shoulder. Bartlett looked back at Melvin and said, “Why do you look so damn scared all of a sudden?”
“I, uh, d-do I?” He grinned awkwardly at him.
Bartlett looked at him and he knew, somehow, that it was not the Saturnine or the book or anything that Melvin was looking at or was worried about. Bartlett knew something new was up but if he found what it was, he was in for one hell of a surprise.
He said nothing and backed up to the open doorway into the hall that led to his bedroom.
Get her! Melvin thought. Get her, good! He was suddenly hoping they would meet. He didn’t know if Madge could truly die, being that she came back from the dead once already, but magic and violence might just do the job. Maybe.
Hopefully…
Ethan leaned into the doorway, looked around the hall for a moment, then slipped back out. “What’s going on?” he asked him.
“What do you mean?” He didn’t know what else to say.
“You were looking at something over here,” he said, thumbing the hall behind him. “Something that scared the living shit out of you.”
A thought suddenly crossed Melvin’s mind. He wondered if he was genuinely mad, just as his mother had been, and that he was now, at the end, finally at a hallucination stage. He was old and maybe dementia had finally caught up to him. Honestly, it was the one problem he didn’t have, but would have liked. To be able to forget about everything and just be left to die somewhere, babbling in the peace of never fully comprehending the horrors of his past seemed lovely to him.
It was horrible for most people but he wanted to forget everything. His mother, those poor black children, and the Butcher, most of all.
Melvin shrugged at Bartlett.
“You are quite literally terrified out of your mind. I can see it on your face. You weren’t scared of me or anything the last time I was here. You had and have the look of a man who wants to die, which should make you fearless, so what is it that has you so frightened now? We both know it’s not death and you’re far too old to be tortured. You’d just die.”
Melvin shrugged again and awkwardly smiled, his eyes completely opposite the smile. Actually, it was death, he thought, but just not the kind Bartlett was talking about.
Bartlett took a step forward and, suddenly, Melvin blurted out with, “The basement in the country club! The secret basement past the full-length picture of the founder, that old pastor, Christopher Edwards, but they may have moved it! All your answers will be there! I think the book might be there too!”
That had to be the bravest thing he had ever said in his life. If the Saturnine ever found out…
Then again, there was his mother…
“That asshole was the founder of the country club too?” asked Bartlett.
“Yeah,” he said. “He founded Edwards Grove. Drove all the negros out into Applewood. That was before—” he hesitated, not wanting to talk about what he knew of that, but then he saw the boy knew something of it too “—h-how d-did you know about Christopher Edwards—”
His mother’s head reappeared and Melvin’s eyes darted toward her without moving his head.
Madge shook her head but then slipped back before Bartlett could see her. He had jerked back like a bolt of lightning, and when he hadn’t seen her that time, he followed after.
“Get her!” hissed Melvin under his breath. “End it! Please, God, end it!”
Bartlett came back after a while and Melvin believed he had been thorough. He did not know how Madge hid, if she was even real at all, since Bartlett must have opened every door and checked the walk-in closet beyond the bathroom.
But Bartlett clearly didn’t find her. If he did, there would be a notable “something” that would have followed.
He walked up to Melvin and said, “Just like that, you’ll tell me the secret of the Saturnine?”
Melvin looked up at him and said, “I’ve got bigger problems to deal with these days, Ethan.” And then, he wasn’t sure why, he said, “Beware the clown.”
“Clown?”
“Oh yes. The clown.”
Melvin had been there when it was created. It was not a pretty sight, that summer in the 1940s, when Hitler was invading Europe and the president was in a wheelchair. Melvin was still in Bartlett Bay, a week from setting out into war, when that boy, that weird, skinny boy who was always hanging around the country club, hoping to gain a few friends, was lured into the basement.
God, what they did to him…
“June of 1942,” he told Bartlett. “Look it up.”
“Okay,” Bartlett said and then straightened his back, his face suspicious but he was, surprisingly, also sympathetic. “There’s something off about you.”
“What do you mean?” he asked. He said it by instinct, feeling that a response was necessary, his eyes drifting back toward his mother, who had not reappeared, and then back.
“You are more a victim than a killer.” Melvin did not know what to make of that. “You know a lot but you aren’t dead. Why is that?”
Melvin didn’t answer. The truth of it was, he didn’t know why he was alive, but he had an idea that it had something to do with his mother. He wouldn’t have made that leap until ten minutes ago but now that he had seen her, it seemed clear. If they knew she might come back one day, and he was pretty sure they did, they would be deadly scared of killing him. Scared of what Madge would do to whoever she thought responsible.
That was just about the only plausible reason he could think of.
“I, uh—” a gloved hand stuck out of the hallway and wiggled its finger at him before slipping back. Bartlett looked back again but, again, Bartlett saw nothing.
But he must have suspected. Like James, he was no fool.
“What the fuck are you looking at?” he asked Melvin.
“Nothing,” he told him. Melvin had the idea that Bartlett wasn’t going to find Madge this day.
He wasn’t getting out of this that easily.
And he didn’t quite have the nerve to tell Bartlett she was there. He was deeply frightened of what would happen to both of them if he learned of Madge’s existence from Melvin himself. He wasn’t exactly certain Bartlett could destroy Madge and he was pretty convinced the Saturnine couldn’t either and God only knew what Madge would do if she felt Melvin had betrayed her.
“There is something just weird as hell about you, Melvin,” said Bartlett. “And something’s gotten a lot worse since we last talked.”
“My situation has changed and change is an inevitable part of life,” Melvin replied bitterly.
“Cute,” Bartlett said. “I’ll find that secret basement and if I don’t find the answers I need down there, I’ll come back for more.”
“Fair enough,” he told him. Honestly, Melvin liked him around. It made him feel safer.
Bartlett turned around and walked out without another word.
Melvin felt no relief when he was gone and waited. Several minutes passed with nothing happening and he started to feel a false sense of relief. Maybe, just maybe, he really had hallucinated her. He had fallen asleep and was still partly asleep, and then when Bartlett came by, he just sort of—
Madge stepped out of the doorway, her gloved hands behind her back, wearing a light blue, long-sleeved dress with white polkadots that he distantly recognized from somewhere. She looked toward the front door where Bartlett had gone, her head tilted slightly as though in thought.
She moved back and forth on the front and back of her feet like a child, a gesture he actually recognized.
Then she stopped, stiffened and he recognized that too but as something “bad.”
Madge tilted her head over her shoulder and her skeletal face looked at him strangely, and her eyes would probably have narrowed if she still had eyes and eyelids. “Oh God,” he said softly. Madge said nothing for a moment, just staring at him. “Oh God, oh God, oh God—”
Melvin stopped as Madge walked up to him, sucking in air and expecting the worst.
“Melvin,” said his mother and he blinked and looked up at her. “I’m not going to hurt you.” That did not comfort him in the slightest. “I am cross with you, though.”
He swallowed a lump down his throat. “Well, uh, I’m sorry, Mother, if I upset you—”
“You know how I feel about swearing, don’t you?” He did. That was why he did not ever swear. He did not think he had ever said the F word his entire life. Not even in the service during World War II. “And what possessed you to tell him about the basement?”
“The clown will get him, no problem,” he lied. That wasn’t why he did it but the clown was a plausible lie. That thing had killed lots of people. It killed someone every decade or so when the bloodlust came over it and no one had fed it a victim in a while. It would creep out from wherever its lair was down under the city and drag them screaming down into the dark but it rarely failed to kill anyone who entered its basement who didn’t have Saturnine magical protection.
That didn’t mean Ethan Bartlett couldn’t handle it but the Saturnine were scared of it themselves and that was not a great sign.
“You know about the clown?”
“We’ve met,” she said simply. Maybe she knew about it, maybe she didn’t. She often lied and it was sometimes hard to determine whether it was a lie, something she believed in her semi-permanent delusional state, or the truth.
“Bartlett already knew about it,” Melvin lied, staring up at her cold, dead expression she always gave him when she was angry. The skull made it much worse.
Madge just looked at him for a moment, frowning and thinking. “I don’t like you playing with that boy, Melvin,” she said after a few moments. “He’s too rough for you.”
“Uh—” Melvin swallowed “—okay.”
“Is he picking on you?” she asked, her head tilting slightly.
“No,” he told him. “We have a—” he tried to think of something appropriately childlike “—little quarrel. We’re making up.”
“I don’t like him,” she said. “I think he’s picking on you and he’s too old to be playing with little boys like you.”
“He’s not picking on me,” said Melvin awkwardly.
“All the same, I think I’ll let my big brother take care of him.”
Melvin’s eyes went wide and he was so scared that he almost had another heart attack. He thought that whole thing was over! He knew the boy had done something to Beechwood but it wasn’t its destruction. Another step needed to be done.
Or maybe two? Perhaps three? It could even be that Madge just undid all his work. It was hard to say.
He supposed that Hanged Man was still hanging around in there too. Still watching and waiting. Still a part of all that.
What a terrible night that was when he discovered where that creature was hiding. He did not want to think about it.
“Please, Mother, don’t hurt anyone!” Melvin half-whimpered. “I can take care of myself!”
“Do not tell your mother what to do, Love,” she told him. “I will handle this ruffian. He will not bother us again."
She seemed to have smiled, leaned forward, her back bending until her monstrous skeletal face was an inch from his. She didn’t require a lot of bending since she was only five feet or so. “Melvin,” she said in that disturbingly human voice of hers. “Look at me, Melvin.” He slowly looked up into the empty socket of her eyes. “One does not put out a fire with more fire.”
“I was scared,” he told her and felt confusion permeate his brain. He didn’t know what she meant by that. Were they even talking about the same thing?
She seemed to be smiling again and straightened her back. “Would you like me to make you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, Love?”
“I’ll pa—” her head tilted “—uh, sh-sh-sure.”
She seemed to smile again. “That’s my boy.” She touched his face and he could feel the bones in her gloves, minus all their flesh, of course. Then she reached down and as she touched his chest, he felt another healing wave of magic go through him. “You best take care of yourself,” she told him. “A mother must never outlive her child.”
Then his dead mother turned around and trotted off happily toward the kitchen.
Title
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Melvin Michaeladis knew that sooner or later the boy would come.
Bartlett was too much like his grandfather. A good man can never stand by and let bad things happen. It just wasn’t in their nature to do so. No matter how angry or bitter or violent that boy might become, and Melvin sensed he could become very violent, it seemed that it was James Bartlett down at the bottom. The good man who would never let go of his integrity even after James’s father destroyed James, himself, most of his family, and their town by choosing his pedophile brother over James.
Melvin was seated in his wheelchair in his living room, staring at the red maple tree on his horse property in Maplewood that had grown near the empty stables, noting the leaf stems were still red but, as it was June, they were mostly green, when he heard the sound of the front door opening and the sounds of footsteps approaching from behind.
He nodded soberly as the footsteps approached from behind and said, “I knew you would come.”
“I’m so glad—”
Fear hit Melvin so hard that his heart seemed to burst in his chest and the rest of the words spoken were drowned out under the pain! That wasn’t the boy! That wasn’t even a man!
But it couldn’t be her! Not her!
He was suddenly having a heart attack right then and there, right at that exact moment, and oh, it came as a relief! He was looking forward to dying! He did not want to deal with her! Not again, not ever again! She was dead!
And she gosh darned well was supposed to stay dead!
A hand suddenly reached around him, rested on his chest and he almost screamed as his heart started to calm unnaturally. He knew what it was and it filled him with abject horror.
She was healing him with her magic.
“Oh God!” he murmured. “Oh, sweet God!”
The woman behind shushed him gently and his eyes grew wider and wider as he remembered that unique, weird tone. “Love,” she whispered. “I have been dreaming of you for so long.”
“Why didn’t I kill myself when I had the chance!” he whimpered. “Why didn’t I run off to California or China or something?” He was sweating and he instantly had another heart attack but the hand healed it again. “Oh God!”
He sensed amusement in the figure behind him.
“God is ‘mother’ in a child’s eyes.” She wrapped her arms around him and he felt extremely bony limbs create a gentle hug. “You are my treasure, Melvin,” she said into his ear. “You are my one true love. I would never let any harm come to you.”
Melvin said nothing. He did not know what to do or say or anything. He felt a sort of growing sense of horror that was beyond all the horror he had already felt and he was starting to even grow numb from it. He should have died. He was way too old for this but she wouldn’t let him.
“Uh…” his voice was weak and it trailed off. “I—”
“Say it,” she whispered.
“Mother,” he said, still staring at the red maple tree. “Hello, Mother.”
Madge Michaeladis was smiling. He could sense it somehow as he always had but he sensed something else as well. He looked down and saw, with no particular surprise, that her hand seemed fleshless under the loose gloves. She had been dead for so long that by then she could have become a complete skeleton.
“Oh,” said Madge. “Someone’s coming.” She leaned over toward his ear and said, “Do not mention me or I’ll be very cross with you.” She reached around and playfully poked him in the nose and skipped away.
And then she was gone.
He sat there, feeling very strange, and actually wondered if it was all a nightmare. If he had just fallen asleep and imagined everything. Was that possible? He sure as heck hoped so.
For a moment, he felt nothing, and the falling asleep theory began to feel reasonable. Madge Michaeladis had died, shot fatally through an upper-level window of Beechwood, although by whom was still a mystery. The Huntress was a possibility, of course, since she seemed to know everything, but the entire black community was another. They didn’t know what she was about but Melvin knew they knew enough. He could see it in their eyes sometimes.
He supposed it was only a matter of time before somebody took matters into their own hands. Any one of the Merricks could have done it. The females were just as deadly as the males and none of them would have any qualms with “shooting a lady.” They never found who did it, never matched the bullet, and it seemed most people in town, including the Saturnine, let out a sigh of relief when it was over.
When was that? It was when he was a teenager, thirteen or fourteen or something.
Melvin recalled going to her funeral and weeping but a few days later, they found her grave was open and her body was missing. The groundskeeper had told him that it had looked open from the inside.
Evidently, the man wasn’t just trying to frighten him.
“Melvin,” said a voice.
He turned his wheelchair around and faced Ethan Bartlett. Something was really wrong with Melvin’s state of mind because, looking at him at that moment, Melvin suddenly thought he was looking at James Bartlett. For a split second, he was literally him: the same hair, that fifties dark gray suit with matching hat, everything, but he had a hard look on his face that was unique to Ethan Bartlett and that broke the illusion.
Bartlett saw something in Beechwood and that something came to Melvin one night to ask him about Bartlett.
Oh, but he didn’t want to think about that thing. Never again would he ever let her into his mind. She scared him even more than his mother.
“Tell me about the Saturnine,” said Bartlett coldly.
“They’re a club,” he said simply. It wasn’t a lie. It was a vast understatement considering what he was really asking but technically not a lie. “A sort of cult but you know that.”
“Do they have the book?”
“Book?” His eyes grew wide as he read Bartlett’s face and the fear of that peaked out above his other, more pressing, fears. “What book?” he asked even though he knew exactly what book Bartlett was talking about.
“You know which book,” Bartlett replied very stiffly. “I can see it in your eyes.” Melvin didn’t know what to say, he was so scared. “I’m going to destroy it.”
Bartlett meant it. Melvin could see it in his eyes, and that was very, very, very good if and only if he could do it.
“It’s gone,” Melvin told him. “I haven’t seen it for years. Some kids stole it in the fifties but I got it back after that Aberdeen girl went missing. A weird forest magician man gave it back to me. Said it was haunting his dreams and he couldn’t destroy it for some reason. I don’t know how you will. No one else can.”
“The last one wasn’t hard for me. I think it may have surprised Courtney a bit when I did it.”
Melvin’s eyes went wide. “Is she—” his eyes grew wider and he saw his mother’s head appear out of the corner, looking at him worriedly, and she was so terrifying that he almost started to shriek “—dead…” his voice gasped.
The flesh of his mother’s face was completely gone, just a bleached skull, but inexplicably, she had that recognizable hair of hers, dark brown, parted in the middle, and hanging around her chin in imitation of Clara Bow. Somehow, he sensed she was smiling, even though her lips were gone.
She pressed one white-gloved index finger vertically right where her lips had once been.
“—truly dead?” Melvin’s voice finished in a whisper.
Bartlett looked back, but Madge had slipped back before he could see, disappearing into his bedroom, and then Bartlett looked back at Melvin suspiciously.
Melvin’s eyes went wider as he looked at Bartlett’s face and he shook his head. He couldn’t believe it. He knew something had shifted behind the scenes. One of the Saturnine had come by one night, threatened him, terrified and anxious, and that was why. He could see the truth in Bartlett’s eyes.
Black Courtney was dead. She was really, truly, dead.
Melvin nodded awkwardly and said, “I see.”
“Listen, I, uh—” Behind Bartlett, in the open doorway, his mother slipped out again. She lifted her index finger in her white glove and wiggled it back and forth at him. In his mind, he thought he could hear her saying, “No, no, no,” in that tsk, tsk voice of hers.
She quickly slipped back as Bartlett tilted his head back again over his shoulder. Bartlett looked back at Melvin and said, “Why do you look so damn scared all of a sudden?”
“I, uh, d-do I?” He grinned awkwardly at him.
Bartlett looked at him and he knew, somehow, that it was not the Saturnine or the book or anything that Melvin was looking at or was worried about. Bartlett knew something new was up but if he found what it was, he was in for one hell of a surprise.
He said nothing and backed up to the open doorway into the hall that led to his bedroom.
Get her! Melvin thought. Get her, good! He was suddenly hoping they would meet. He didn’t know if Madge could truly die, being that she came back from the dead once already, but magic and violence might just do the job. Maybe.
Hopefully…
Ethan leaned into the doorway, looked around the hall for a moment, then slipped back out. “What’s going on?” he asked him.
“What do you mean?” He didn’t know what else to say.
“You were looking at something over here,” he said, thumbing the hall behind him. “Something that scared the living shit out of you.”
A thought suddenly crossed Melvin’s mind. He wondered if he was genuinely mad, just as his mother had been, and that he was now, at the end, finally at a hallucination stage. He was old and maybe dementia had finally caught up to him. Honestly, it was the one problem he didn’t have, but would have liked. To be able to forget about everything and just be left to die somewhere, babbling in the peace of never fully comprehending the horrors of his past seemed lovely to him.
It was horrible for most people but he wanted to forget everything. His mother, those poor black children, and the Butcher, most of all.
Melvin shrugged at Bartlett.
“You are quite literally terrified out of your mind. I can see it on your face. You weren’t scared of me or anything the last time I was here. You had and have the look of a man who wants to die, which should make you fearless, so what is it that has you so frightened now? We both know it’s not death and you’re far too old to be tortured. You’d just die.”
Melvin shrugged again and awkwardly smiled, his eyes completely opposite the smile. Actually, it was death, he thought, but just not the kind Bartlett was talking about.
Bartlett took a step forward and, suddenly, Melvin blurted out with, “The basement in the country club! The secret basement past the full-length picture of the founder, that old pastor, Christopher Edwards, but they may have moved it! All your answers will be there! I think the book might be there too!”
That had to be the bravest thing he had ever said in his life. If the Saturnine ever found out…
Then again, there was his mother…
“That asshole was the founder of the country club too?” asked Bartlett.
“Yeah,” he said. “He founded Edwards Grove. Drove all the negros out into Applewood. That was before—” he hesitated, not wanting to talk about what he knew of that, but then he saw the boy knew something of it too “—h-how d-did you know about Christopher Edwards—”
His mother’s head reappeared and Melvin’s eyes darted toward her without moving his head.
Madge shook her head but then slipped back before Bartlett could see her. He had jerked back like a bolt of lightning, and when he hadn’t seen her that time, he followed after.
“Get her!” hissed Melvin under his breath. “End it! Please, God, end it!”
Bartlett came back after a while and Melvin believed he had been thorough. He did not know how Madge hid, if she was even real at all, since Bartlett must have opened every door and checked the walk-in closet beyond the bathroom.
But Bartlett clearly didn’t find her. If he did, there would be a notable “something” that would have followed.
He walked up to Melvin and said, “Just like that, you’ll tell me the secret of the Saturnine?”
Melvin looked up at him and said, “I’ve got bigger problems to deal with these days, Ethan.” And then, he wasn’t sure why, he said, “Beware the clown.”
“Clown?”
“Oh yes. The clown.”
Melvin had been there when it was created. It was not a pretty sight, that summer in the 1940s, when Hitler was invading Europe and the president was in a wheelchair. Melvin was still in Bartlett Bay, a week from setting out into war, when that boy, that weird, skinny boy who was always hanging around the country club, hoping to gain a few friends, was lured into the basement.
God, what they did to him…
“June of 1942,” he told Bartlett. “Look it up.”
“Okay,” Bartlett said and then straightened his back, his face suspicious but he was, surprisingly, also sympathetic. “There’s something off about you.”
“What do you mean?” he asked. He said it by instinct, feeling that a response was necessary, his eyes drifting back toward his mother, who had not reappeared, and then back.
“You are more a victim than a killer.” Melvin did not know what to make of that. “You know a lot but you aren’t dead. Why is that?”
Melvin didn’t answer. The truth of it was, he didn’t know why he was alive, but he had an idea that it had something to do with his mother. He wouldn’t have made that leap until ten minutes ago but now that he had seen her, it seemed clear. If they knew she might come back one day, and he was pretty sure they did, they would be deadly scared of killing him. Scared of what Madge would do to whoever she thought responsible.
That was just about the only plausible reason he could think of.
“I, uh—” a gloved hand stuck out of the hallway and wiggled its finger at him before slipping back. Bartlett looked back again but, again, Bartlett saw nothing.
But he must have suspected. Like James, he was no fool.
“What the fuck are you looking at?” he asked Melvin.
“Nothing,” he told him. Melvin had the idea that Bartlett wasn’t going to find Madge this day.
He wasn’t getting out of this that easily.
And he didn’t quite have the nerve to tell Bartlett she was there. He was deeply frightened of what would happen to both of them if he learned of Madge’s existence from Melvin himself. He wasn’t exactly certain Bartlett could destroy Madge and he was pretty convinced the Saturnine couldn’t either and God only knew what Madge would do if she felt Melvin had betrayed her.
“There is something just weird as hell about you, Melvin,” said Bartlett. “And something’s gotten a lot worse since we last talked.”
“My situation has changed and change is an inevitable part of life,” Melvin replied bitterly.
“Cute,” Bartlett said. “I’ll find that secret basement and if I don’t find the answers I need down there, I’ll come back for more.”
“Fair enough,” he told him. Honestly, Melvin liked him around. It made him feel safer.
Bartlett turned around and walked out without another word.
Melvin felt no relief when he was gone and waited. Several minutes passed with nothing happening and he started to feel a false sense of relief. Maybe, just maybe, he really had hallucinated her. He had fallen asleep and was still partly asleep, and then when Bartlett came by, he just sort of—
Madge stepped out of the doorway, her gloved hands behind her back, wearing a light blue, long-sleeved dress with white polkadots that he distantly recognized from somewhere. She looked toward the front door where Bartlett had gone, her head tilted slightly as though in thought.
She moved back and forth on the front and back of her feet like a child, a gesture he actually recognized.
Then she stopped, stiffened and he recognized that too but as something “bad.”
Madge tilted her head over her shoulder and her skeletal face looked at him strangely, and her eyes would probably have narrowed if she still had eyes and eyelids. “Oh God,” he said softly. Madge said nothing for a moment, just staring at him. “Oh God, oh God, oh God—”
Melvin stopped as Madge walked up to him, sucking in air and expecting the worst.
“Melvin,” said his mother and he blinked and looked up at her. “I’m not going to hurt you.” That did not comfort him in the slightest. “I am cross with you, though.”
He swallowed a lump down his throat. “Well, uh, I’m sorry, Mother, if I upset you—”
“You know how I feel about swearing, don’t you?” He did. That was why he did not ever swear. He did not think he had ever said the F word his entire life. Not even in the service during World War II. “And what possessed you to tell him about the basement?”
“The clown will get him, no problem,” he lied. That wasn’t why he did it but the clown was a plausible lie. That thing had killed lots of people. It killed someone every decade or so when the bloodlust came over it and no one had fed it a victim in a while. It would creep out from wherever its lair was down under the city and drag them screaming down into the dark but it rarely failed to kill anyone who entered its basement who didn’t have Saturnine magical protection.
That didn’t mean Ethan Bartlett couldn’t handle it but the Saturnine were scared of it themselves and that was not a great sign.
“You know about the clown?”
“We’ve met,” she said simply. Maybe she knew about it, maybe she didn’t. She often lied and it was sometimes hard to determine whether it was a lie, something she believed in her semi-permanent delusional state, or the truth.
“Bartlett already knew about it,” Melvin lied, staring up at her cold, dead expression she always gave him when she was angry. The skull made it much worse.
Madge just looked at him for a moment, frowning and thinking. “I don’t like you playing with that boy, Melvin,” she said after a few moments. “He’s too rough for you.”
“Uh—” Melvin swallowed “—okay.”
“Is he picking on you?” she asked, her head tilting slightly.
“No,” he told him. “We have a—” he tried to think of something appropriately childlike “—little quarrel. We’re making up.”
“I don’t like him,” she said. “I think he’s picking on you and he’s too old to be playing with little boys like you.”
“He’s not picking on me,” said Melvin awkwardly.
“All the same, I think I’ll let my big brother take care of him.”
Melvin’s eyes went wide and he was so scared that he almost had another heart attack. He thought that whole thing was over! He knew the boy had done something to Beechwood but it wasn’t its destruction. Another step needed to be done.
Or maybe two? Perhaps three? It could even be that Madge just undid all his work. It was hard to say.
He supposed that Hanged Man was still hanging around in there too. Still watching and waiting. Still a part of all that.
What a terrible night that was when he discovered where that creature was hiding. He did not want to think about it.
“Please, Mother, don’t hurt anyone!” Melvin half-whimpered. “I can take care of myself!”
“Do not tell your mother what to do, Love,” she told him. “I will handle this ruffian. He will not bother us again."
She seemed to have smiled, leaned forward, her back bending until her monstrous skeletal face was an inch from his. She didn’t require a lot of bending since she was only five feet or so. “Melvin,” she said in that disturbingly human voice of hers. “Look at me, Melvin.” He slowly looked up into the empty socket of her eyes. “One does not put out a fire with more fire.”
“I was scared,” he told her and felt confusion permeate his brain. He didn’t know what she meant by that. Were they even talking about the same thing?
She seemed to be smiling again and straightened her back. “Would you like me to make you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, Love?”
“I’ll pa—” her head tilted “—uh, sh-sh-sure.”
She seemed to smile again. “That’s my boy.” She touched his face and he could feel the bones in her gloves, minus all their flesh, of course. Then she reached down and as she touched his chest, he felt another healing wave of magic go through him. “You best take care of yourself,” she told him. “A mother must never outlive her child.”
Then his dead mother turned around and trotted off happily toward the kitchen.