“Swapsies, no takeabacks!”
That was what my little brother Dylan used to always call out when I traded candy with him, especially around Halloween. He was six on our last Halloween together—old enough for me to take him trick-or-treating alone and for him to really appreciate it. I still remember that last time well all these years later.
One reason for that is because even at nine I appreciated that I was lucky to have such a sweet little brother. Old enough for me to baby him, but close enough to my own age to have fun with him too, we had always been close since he was born. Another reason was that the following year, two weeks before Halloween in 2005, Dylan died in his sleep.
They told us it was a congenital heart defect that had never been caught, and that most likely he had just…stopped. Breathing in and out those soft sleep breaths I used to listen to when we had shared a room just a year earlier, and then moments later just silence, stretching on through the dark hours until our mother found him and began to scream.
It destroyed our family. Even leading up to the funeral, my parents were alternating crying, consoling each other, and arguing over nothing. They wound up getting a divorce two years later. For my part, I cried some, but most of the time was reserved for hating myself, thinking about how if I hadn’t made a big deal of getting my own room just a few months earlier, I might have heard him stop breathing. Might could have gotten him help in time.
My parents told me that wasn’t so, that the doctors said it was just one of those things that couldn’t be helped. But all that made me wonder was who was lying. My parents or the doctors?
The week after his funeral, I went back to school. We had a substitute teacher I’d never seen or heard of before—She said her name was Mrs. Grackle and she was going to be replacing our normal fourth-grade teacher, Ms. Horne, until she got over the flu. She’d been there for the latter part of the week I’d missed, so the other students in my class seemed pretty much used to her. But she made my skin crawl in a way I couldn’t fully understand.
She wasn’t dressed weird and was well-kempt, there was still something off about her. Her pale skin was smooth and tight, but almost too-much so, as though she had somehow been birthed as a fully-grown woman with flesh that had not seen the sun or been touched by air. I heard some of the boys whispering at lunch about how pretty Mrs. Grackle was, making the vague and clumsy innuendoes that young boys do, and she was objectively attractive, with refined features and a trim figure framed by long, curly brown hair. But her eyes…they stared out like a doll’s eyes—dark, hard and inscrutable.
And as the week wore on, I found that they kept focusing in on me.
It was that Wednesday that Mrs. Grackle asked me to stay after the final bell rang. I felt the knot of unease that had been growing in my belly since Monday morning tighten into a painful ball of fear. I didn’t want to stay—as I watched my classmates and friends rush out of the room, I wanted to run with them, to keep running until I was home again and upstairs in Dylan’s room. I had taken to sleeping in there again, and while…
“Elizabeth? Can you come up here please?”
I flinched at the words, my name sounding oily and sinister on her tongue. Swallowing, I glanced up and nodded before sliding out of my desk and approaching the front of the room. “Yes, ma’am? Is something wrong?”
The woman smiled, her perfectly even teeth gleaming like white stones between the red ring of lipstick expertly lining her lips. “No, nothing like that, dear. I just wanted to check in on you. See how you were doing.” When I stared at her without response, she went on. “I heard about your little brother’s passing, you see. Just a few days ago, I understand.”
My chest tightened. The only blessing about school now was that it wasn’t home. It gave me a forced reprieve from all the sad reminders of Dylan’s death, an occasional moment where I forgot to hate myself. And now…”Um, yes ma’am. That’s true.”
Mrs. Grackle made a clucking noise deep in her throat. “So very sad. He was what…five or six?”
Why was she asking all of this? I wanted to tell her it was none of her business, to get my brother out of her rotten mouth, but I was young and she wasn’t just an adult, but a teacher, albeit a substitute one. So I just jammed my hands in my jeans and nodded, trying to avoid her unblinking stare. I heard her breath quicken slightly at my nod, and despite myself, I looked up.
Just in time to see her wiping away a spot of drool from her pale and perfect chin.
Her eyes locked on mine again, seeming to hold me where I stood. “Was…was he buried fresh and whole?”
I didn’t understand what she was asking, yet I heard myself say, “Yes, whole and fresh and only four days in the ground.” My own heart was hammering so hard I knew it would burst any second, and she just kept staring at me, not letting me move, weighing something secret and terrible behind those dark eyes.
And then I was home.
I woke up on my bed, a moment of vertigo sending the room spinning before my brain acclimated to where I was. My mother was calling me to come down. It was time for us to go to Wednesday evening services at our church.
My family had always been casually religious, but I could already tell that my mother was becoming more devout by the day. I didn’t fault her for finding comfort in the church, and I’d always enjoyed Sunday school well enough, but if not for her wanting me to go, it was the last place I’d have wanted to be. The strangeness of my encounter with Grackle aside, I didn’t savor the idea of being buffeted between groups of well-meaning strangers as they murmured sympathies and gave pitying looks. I wanted to be alone with my memories of Dylan and my guilt and my pain.
By the time we were halfway through the service, I had half-convinced myself the conversation with Grackle had just been a dream. I had been exhausted for going on two weeks and waking up at home like that…well, it made more sense than a substitute teacher talking to me about Dylan and his burial like that. It also made me realize something else.
I could go visit him. Dylan’s actual funeral had been in a sanctuary at one of our local funeral homes, but he was buried in one of the far, new lots of our church’s cemetery. I felt a stir of sad excitement at the thought of going to visit him, and even though it was getting dark as we left the service, when I asked my mother if I could go see him for a minute, she only nodded absently before going back to talking with two of her commiserating friends.
I ran across the first cemetery lot and on to the second—I had spent time playing around these tombstones for years, so it wasn’t hard to pick my way toward his grave even in the dimming twilight. It was that familiarity and expectation of what I should see around his grave that first gave me pause as I got closer. There was some kind of small hill close to his gravestone, a roundish mound that hadn’t been there last time we’d visited a few days before. Even more strange, there was someone already at Dylan’s grave.
And they were digging.
I felt confused anger and fear as I picked up speed again, yelling “Hey! Stop!” even as the figure stood up and turned to face me. In the orange glow of the fading October sun, that pale skin seemed to blaze in the dark, the cascade of brown curls looking now more like dark vines twisting down into the mires of some forbidden swamp. Mrs. Grackle smiled at me briefly before returning to her digging.
“Stop, I said! Stop!” I didn’t know what was going on, but I knew it was wrong in a way that went beyond anything I’d ever experienced before. I didn’t know words like “desecration” or “sacrilege” yet, but in my heart, every thundering beat screamed bad, wrong, stop, no in a staccato rhythm that permeated my whole body and weakened my knees.
But she didn’t stop. She kept digging, her long, thin-fingered hands churning up the dirt as she made quick work of the earth between her and her prize. Within a few seconds she had uncovered the small white coffin where my brother lay and drug it out of its grave with surprising ease. I started screaming at her again, but trailed off into silence as I saw where she was taking it.
The strange new hill wasn’t a hill at all. It was a person…or at least part of one. Hulking and covered in rags, the figure was incomplete. Somehow…as impossible as it seemed, it stood there with a large cavity in its middle. There was no head, and below where it should be, a ragged darkness gaped out from between the folds of tattered cloth. I was still staring at it dumbly as Mrs. Grackle reached it.
She let go of Dylan’s casket, and giving me a quick, wry glance, she pulled herself into that larger body, her flesh twisting and flowing to fill the chasm and complete the towering thing before me. Her head looked different now, and in truth, she was wholly unrecognizable except for those same damned black, staring eyes. She swung those eyes toward me and twisted her mouth oddly before speaking in a deep and rough voice.
“You say no. But what do you offer in exchange?” The thing paused as though considering, but I could tell from its tone that it was simply playing a game, mocking me. “Yourself?”
I had felt frozen to the ground before, but now I started backing away. “What? Exchange?”
A short, coarse laugh. “A trade. Dylan goes back in the hole and you come with me.”
I stopped again, in spite of my fear. “Go with you? Where?”
A longer, nastier chuckle. “Oh, you’ll see. What do you say? Just remember, if you say yes, the deal is struck.” It held out its hand to me, and then in a higher voice, like that of a child, it screeched, “Swapsies! No takeabacks!”
I ran. I ran through the deepened shadows, terrified that any moment that enormous, long-fingered hand would close on my shoulder or seize my ankle. I ran back into the church, and when I clutched my mother with tears streaming down my face, she looked down and began to cry herself, sweeping me up in her arms and carrying me back to the car to go home. She thought I was just upset at visiting the grave, and it wasn’t until the next day that her and my father started questioning me more intently.
After the church groundskeeper found what had happened to Dylan’s grave.
I lied, of course. They would never have believed me, and I was too upset for them to press me hard. I later wondered if that lie, unknown but possibly somehow still sensed by my parents, was what solidified the distance that continued to grow between the three of us. They were still good parents, or good enough, and I know that they loved me. But that final loss of my brother—the terrible mystery of how and why and where he was taken—was what finally killed the laboring heart of my family forever.
There was one other lie I told to my parents, though this was more one of omission. I never told them about the note I found on my desk when I finally returned to school on Friday—the first day of Ms. Horne’s own return. It was written in small, slanted blue letters on a neatly cut square of yellowing paper, a light smudge of pink staining the top right corner. Holding the paper in my trembling hands, I read the words over and over. Even now, there’s not a day I don’t see them in my mind.
Thank you for the num nums, Elizabeth. I enjoyed them last night and they were delicious!
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