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Cackling and the Crypt

Paul Reagan Smith

    It was one a.m. and I lay nude above layers of sweat soaked sheets. It was unusually hot for spring as the heat pulled the salty liquid from my clammy skin that beaded and rolled off my body. It was so quiet and still that my ears rang in defiance. I stared at the ceiling as the perpetual night absorbed my consciousness and had it float above my body, swirling and mixing with the stale air. I could see myself. I could feel my physical body yet I doubted that I was really there. Not even a dream held any essence of me. That night I abandoned the world.
    The morning dew washed away the sweltering night as frosted sunlit peaks reflected the sun’s bursting light along the eastern horizon. The air was fresh as it whistled through the still dark thicket and its coolness caressed my brow as I had my morning coffee on the front porch. I closed my eyes to the calm that came over me as I listened to the tree bird’s lyrical treat that truly invited the day. I was still a little shaken from the heat wave and confusion I experienced the night before, yet the normality of the dawn grounded me and gave me peace.
    However sweet, the early bird’s singing eventually made me think of my departed mother’s beautiful voice that beckoned my smile as a child. Then sorrow crept from my mind’s eye into my belly as I thought of her and my haunting image of her last moments on this earth. Suddenly I heard its voice from the thicket that made my coffee ice cold. It was a high pitched cackling that sounded of some unnatural beast that would make ears bleed and little boys soil their sheets. That monster; that wretch of a being that haunted my presence there and made me prostrate with fear. What does it want from me? Can it read my mind each and every time I fantasize about the living, breathing woman that I had adored more than my own life?
    Better to brave the fear than fear the brave, I thought, as an unnatural chill made my muscles stiff, making the mere act of walking an ordeal. The wooden porch squeaked and squawked as I stammered step after step, trying to loosen up my joints. I must enter the forest and show the beast that I will stand my ground, that I will not falter to a mere sound, no matter how much it froze my cadence on foot. No matter how much that deafening screech made my ears bleed. I must at last go to the crypt, my own mother’s forlorn crypt.
    So I crossed my small rutty lawn into the thick underbrush, into the shadowy wood that had me flirting with partial paralysis of body and mind where my deepest fears remained. Then another cackling shriek shriller than before pierced my left eardrum, the pain unfathomable, as I heard an entire ocean suddenly swimming in my head, and felt a hot rush of blood come out of my ear and down my cheek and neck. And still, however slowly or painfully, I pushed on, a son’s love a compass to his mother’s resting place.
    I lost track of time, maybe an hour or two of walking, tripping, falling, and crawling toward and away from the Godless cackle, through muddy ruts, through clumps of poison ivy, around ponds and threatened beasts, and bitten by all species of blood craving insect, I pushed on, until I hit the wall. That wall of delirium encompassed me, turned to white mist, which my mind readily absorbed. My head started spinning as I sank waist deep into the earth, then chest deep, and then neck deep. I was numb. My spirit weakened by this experience, finally dislodged itself from my physicality, and it floated above my body. My consciousness free from the burden of flesh, I willed it further into the forest, into the unknown.
    Some things were very different as I floated through this new wilderness, this new plane of consciousness; it was the wilderness of the spirit world. Everything shrouded in black and white, I was moving through a living photograph of space and time. The latter seemed to have little relevance here, however, for creatures of the dead moved forward and reverse. I witnessed children running backwards, leaves falling up instead of down and a man who, appearing to be talking in tongues, I realized was actually talking backwards. Not much made sense and yet, it was all too familiar. I had been here before.
    Drifting, constantly drifting, through the forest of ghosts, none of the dead were silent. They laughed and cried, whispered and yelled. It was a maddening soup of sound and the more I tried to separate each voice, the more I tried to discern each man or woman, girl or boy, the more it all became a singular undistinguishable hum. But then there was a sound I could separate, in fact, I knew this sound. It was my mother’s voice, singing to me the song she sang when I was a child. Her voice was bitter sweet and if I had eyes they would have been gushing.
    My spirit stopped, for some queer fear of seeing her after all these years, even if it was only the ghost of her, it was all that was left, and this frightened me, I didn’t want her to go away, I didn’t want to break her. I imagined her fragility, as if the mere sight of me would make her disappear into oblivion. After all, I was just spirit form. What if she thought I was dead? What then? Would it crush her spirit, her very life force? But in the end it wasn’t up to me, for I was being summoned by her song, by her deep interest in me. I was being pulled in her direction. I could not stop.
    Even in black and white, she radiated beauty and youth. I came before her and she smiled. A smile that made the bleak netherworld feel like home. She stood there and said, “Hello, my son. You have grown into a fine man. A man with the compassion and the moral compass that points you in the right direction to do the right thing because of the size of your heart and your ability to do good. Time doesn’t exist here and because of this, I have the ability to remember every day, every minute of your life with the utmost detail. Everyday you were in my womb, your birth, your days as a child and a young man. I have not forgotten you. I am so sorry I left you and missed your early adult life, your birthdays and your sad days that everyone has. But yours are mine because I am your mother.”
    “Mother, I missed you so much. I love you. I am sorry, so sorry.”
    “Sorry for what my son?”
    “You say I am good, but I am not. I am not a good son, for I have never attempted to visit your crypt before today, out of grief and fear of more grief. I am a coward.”
    “That does not make you a coward. On the contrary, that makes you the very best son any mother could have. Your love for me was all that you could bear. You wouldn’t accept my death. That is not your fault. None of this is. This place has no memory for you, but you have come to visit me countless times, like you are doing now. You were here last night, after all!”
    “Oh mother, I am so relieved to hear you say that. It makes so much sense now. All those confused nights. I thought there was something seriously wrong with me.”
    “It was your love for me that gave you the power to do that. You have truly transcended.”
    “I did try to visit your crypt today, only I was thrown off course by this malevolent beast in the forest. One that haunts me every time I think of you.”
    “Oh my dear son, you must hear it from me, that is no beast. That is your father.”
    “My father? He’s dead.”
    “Indeed he is, and he should be in hell, yet his rage and hatred for you has him trapped in the living world, in that forest where his bare bones rot. He wants you dead. Your love for me spurns him. It makes him jealous, which I find puzzling.”
    “Why’s that, mother?”
    “It is because he was the one who ended my life.”
    “He said you fell on your kitchen knife because you had the sadness that you could not lift.”
    “Of course he did. He is mean and he is a liar. Listen to me, son. I need your help. This place. It is not heaven nor is it hell. It is a place in-between, and I need your help to move on.”
    “Anything mother.”
    “There is a crypt in the forest, but it is empty. After your father killed me, and before he burned my remains to ashes, he took something from me. A souvenir. He took my heart and put it in a jar and placed it under the floorboards in the corner of your bedroom. It’s chance that it was what also helped you to find me here years ago. Well, I need you to put my heart in the crypt. Then I can leave this place.”
    “Yes, mother. What about father?”
    “I wish I could tell you, but I am not sure. His hatred is so strong. His strength is immense. I love you son. I have faith in you.”
    I woke up wallowing in the mud and the muck under a thick oak, my skin itching and swollen from insect bites. Immediately, I felt the immense pain and pressure in my left ear and as I stood, had to adjust to the bad state of my equilibrium. I certainly expected to hear my father again after I woke, but to my surprise, he didn’t make a sound. With luck, I found my way home just before dusk. My mother’s heart was exactly where she said it would be, in a dirty old jam jar. I took the heart to bed with me that night and cried myself to sleep.
    The next morning I grabbed my satchel and carefully put the jar containing my mother’s heart inside. I also grabbed a knife from the kitchen and put it in my satchel as well. No time for coffee this morning, I had a job to do. I entered the forest again with apprehension, not just the fear of my father’s wrath, but also the fact that I had no idea where I was going. I figured I had no choice either way, so I let faith guide me. Two hours went by of swift motion through the forest and still no sign of the crypt or my father. A half an hour later, it began, the shrill cackle first far away and then close, making my head ache. So loud, I felt my eyes bleed, I was half-blinded by my own blood, and the world now had a tint of crimson. I wiped my eyes with my hands; it helped a little, it was just enough to see in-between my wincing eyelids.
    The ground began to shake, and then a horrific roar startled me to the bone screaming, “BLOOOOD!!!” The earth cracked open beneath my feet and blood gushed from the ground. It looked like an infernal womb birthing the spawn of hell before me. The ground kept breaking at length, gushing blood and continuing into the deep wood and out of site. Out of morbid curiosity I followed this creek of blood. I figured it was a trap that my father set but my new found determination to lay my mother to rest made me care less. About an hour later to my surprise, I saw the crypt for the first time. Forlorn it was. I hurried to it without incident and was able to put my mother’s heart in the crypt, close it and say a prayer.
    I yelled, “Come out Father! Come out you worthless dog! I dare you!” Then, only silence. This angered me even more. “I’m here! Come out and kill me you coward!” The cackle came louder than ever. My head was going to explode. I fell to my knees and screamed. But I got up quickly. “Is that all you’ve got? Face me!” A glimmer...a few quick flashes...And then CRACK. Lightning scorched the ground before me and it started to rain heavily.
    “Oh son, I must thank you,” he laughed. He finally appeared before me. It was a distorted, transparent image of a man. I couldn’t make out a face. He looked nothing like I remembered. Evil incarnate is all I can say. “Your mother was a whore when I met her, a lady of the night on the slime filled streets of the darkest puss-filled recesses of the Godforsaken city. I rescued her from the filth and disease and made her repent before the Bishop. She received fifty lashes as her penance, one tough little shrew.”
    “Why did you kill her, you bastard?”
    “Son, you’re mistaken. She fell on her kitchen knife out of grief, for you.”
    “You lie.”
    “You were a very sick child. We didn’t think you would make it. Your mother thought your illness was caused by her sins from being a whore. The Lord doesn’t condone sodomy, my son. Out of guilt, she fell on her knife. I told the Bishop what happened. He said that she was doomed to walk in hell forever. That’s why I secretly kept her heart from going into the crypt, knowing that would keep her safe from eternal damnation.”
    “No, no! She told me herself to place the heart in the crypt. Now why would she...”
    “Oh, my boy, are you having those dreams again? Since you were a small child you’ve been having that same dream about meeting your mother in the afterlife. It’s only a dream.”
    “Wait a second. Mother said you wanted me dead. But she also said that your hatred for me trapped you here, otherwise you would be in hell. You don’t want me dead. My life is the only thing keeping you out of hell!”
    “Oh, clever boy, you got me. Well, I guess we got some catching up to do, and the rest of your natural life to do it. Plenty of time.” He laughed.
    I pulled the knife from my satchel. “You underestimate me father.” I held the blade with both hands and aimed it toward my chest.
    “Son wait!” he yelled.
    “Mother, I will see you soon!” I plunged the knife into my heart and fell to the rain soaked ground.
    “No!” The earth opened up around my father and the bloodied black claws of hell pulled him in as he screamed and squealed like a little girl.
    I stared at the sky as it absorbed my consciousness and had it float above my body, swirling and mixing with the cool morning air. I could see myself. I could feel my physical body yet I doubted that I was really there. That day I abandoned the world.

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