FICTION BY JIM WRIGHT
Jim Wright lives in central New York State. He writes short stories when he can and works as a school psychologist when he must. He is a past member of the Downtown Writer’s Center in Syracuse.
A HUNGRY HEART
by Jim Wright
On a crisp February day, George Levy strolled the gravel paths of the cemetery. Crunching through patches of snow, he wondered how many of these tidy graves cradled the remains of the abandoned and lonely. Did they forever keen in grief over their broken hearts, even as they crumbled to dust?
George had recently fled to the little town of New Bohemia as a refugee from the frantic pace and prying eyes of the city. His burning interest was to explore the twilit boundary between life and death, which is why he bought the house directly across the street from the creepy cemetery.
He was convinced that demons stalked and souls fluttered like moths. He was interested in the Kabbalah, the ancient Jewish mysticism that shared his beliefs. There was no better place for him to pursue his dark passions than a cemetery.
On this particular winter day, George was walking down a colonnade of poplars that ran through the center of the cemetery when he passed a large, untended grave plot. On this patch, the ground cover had grown tall as prairie grass, and brambles and scrub bushes stood waist-high. This desolate riot of plants made George shudder. Why would this particular plot be ignored? He wondered who was buried here and why this person was rejected by the community.
He studied the sculpture. The face was beautiful. He felt his heart pine for her. What would it be like to have such a woman? He found himself wishing he had known her before she died.
The pedestal once bore an inscription, but George saw that the letters had been crudely chipped away. He stared for a long while up at the shrouded, anonymous woman, meeting her potent gaze.
At first, her image lodged in his head like a fragment of faded memory—of one locked away in the grim prison of eternity. Then George had the eerie impression that someone was standing next to him. He looked around, startled, only to see that he was still alone by the grave.
Yet now when he met the eyes of the statue, they seemed somehow alive, half-lidded, tracking him as he paced the perimeter of the grave plot. Whenever he looked away from the woman for even a moment, he thought he saw in his peripheral vision the sinuous, writhing motions of some shadow creature. George turned reluctantly to head home. As he trudged toward the street, he felt the woman regard him behind his back from the high pedestal like a delicate bird of prey.
*****
Over the next few days, George thought often of the statue of the woman whose name was erased. He wondered who had tried to scrub out her memory and why her grave lay neglected.
And he pondered the animating power of words and names. Of the Kabbalah’s teaching that a figure of clay could be brought to life as a golem if the Hebrew word for “truth” were inscribed on its forehead. He also considered the ancient Egypt belief that statues bearing a name are alive and that those that are nameless are dead.
George was convinced that these ancient beliefs were on to something.
He leafed through his volumes of magic, on the hunt for a spell that could harness the power of a name to raise the dead. After days of searching, he found it—in a tattered manuscript by Menachem of Antioch that contained an enchantment which promised to resurrect a corpse and compel that revivified being to pursue the heart of the magician who brought it back.
He realized as he read this incantation that he had an overwhelming urge to conjure the body of the bronze woman with the bold stare. To see her. To smell her. To hold her. To win her.
But to proceed, he had first to learn her name.
The next morning, George looked out at the cemetery from the window of his study and saw Henry, its caretaker, crouched by a gravestone just inside the high wrought-iron fence. A few snowflakes fell as George hurried across the street. Coming through the cemetery gate, he saw that the grounds were blanketed in a fresh coating of snow that glowed celestial-white.
Approaching the grave, George observed that Henry had jammed a jack under a crooked headstone and was cranking the stone back into its proper position. As he came up, the caretaker struggled, and puffed as he rose to his feet. Henry was a tall, stooped man dressed in custodian-green and a shabby knit hat. He wore grimy glasses that shrank his watery eyes to pinpricks. The rest of his face hid behind a thicket of gray whiskers.
“Morning, Henry,” George said. He jabbed a finger in the direction of the statue. He was smiling but shot his words out rat-a-tat. “I have a question. Do you know the name of the woman buried under that bronze statue near the poplars?”
Henry tilted his head back and looked at George. He seemed to close in on himself, as if shielding a secret.
“Don’t have a name,” said Henry. “It was scraped off the stone.”
“Don’t play with me, Henry,” George said. “New Bohemia’s a small town. Everybody knows everybody. I’m sure you know her name.”
Henry’s face made no movement, but George thought he saw malice spark in the man’s eyes.
“I heard stories she was a great lady—maybe even a witch,” Henry said. “Somebody you wouldn’t want to meddle with, for sure.”
“Yes, yes,” said George, waving a hand with impatience. “It’s her name I need. What was her name?”
Henry looked at the ground. He cleared his throat and held out a cupped hand.
“So, it’s a bribe you want,” said George. “Well…” He pulled two twenty-dollar bills from his wallet and handed them to Henry. The caretaker waited. George whispered “son of a bitch” under his breath and handed over another twenty.
Henry tucked the bills into his pocket with a look of satisfaction.
“Her name was Miss Leonore Cosgriff.”
George pulled his phone from his pocket. “Can you spell it?”
“No, no,” Henry said, suddenly stepping back and holding his hands up as if to block a blow. “You shouldn’t be spellin’ her name out like that. It could start something….”
George ignored the caretaker and typed the name into his phone. When he looked up, Henry had returned to cranking the stone jack. As George walked back to the gate, Henry spat loudly behind him and George wondered if it was a symbolic statement as to what Henry thought about him.
*****
Late that afternoon, George slipped back into the cemetery, knowing that Henry would be gone. The winter sky had cleared and the setting sun cast a fugitive light over the headstones. The cemetery was deserted, giving it an eerie feel as darkness crept over the tombstones.
He had to perform his spell once the sun went down, not before.
George made his way to the overgrown plot that housed the mystery so-called witch. He imagined as the bronze woman came into view that she was looking only at him, as if longing to be set free. He pulled from his pocket a slip of paper and a small piece of chalk.
His heart raced as he recited from the paper the strange Hebrew syllables of the resurrection spell: “Chai l'eshet ha-metah. Life to the dead woman.”
When he finished, he reached through the overgrown foliage surrounding the statue with a trembling hand and scrawled on the pedestal in chalk the precious name: Leonore Cosgriff.
The spell was complete.
He stood in the quiet of the evening, waiting. From far away, a dog barked. An owl screeched as it flew overhead, released by the absence of sunlight. But within the gravesite, there was no sound, no movement.
He waited, not realizing he was holding his breath. He felt the first tentative prick of disappointment as he let his breath escape with a whoosh.
Suddenly he heard a muffled, rustling sound, faint at first, then growing louder. It seemed to come from under his feet, an energetic, almost mechanical scrabbling. He listened for a long while, eyes locked on the tangled gravesite.
At last, as darkness fully settled over the cemetery, a scrap of ground under the bushes popped up and a spider shape emerged, writhing in the chill air. George recognized with horror that the apparition was a skeletal hand. This was not supposed to happen! He was supposed to be resurrecting a living woman!
He half-stifled a cry as the earth buckled and an arm of moldy bone shot up and flailed the hand against the bushes. The hand grasped spasmodically as it dragged itself forward by its fingertips. It lunged suddenly, grasping George’s foot. He gave a howl, stomped on the hand, and staggered back from the grave.
He felt earth heave under his feet as if something large and relentless were struggling to break through to the surface. Terror overwhelmed George, and he shrieked with fright.
He turned and blindly started running, not even aware in which direction he was fleeing, He found himself racing through the pool of light cast by the lone streetlight at the gate, crossing the road and bounding up the front steps and into the familiar security of his house. He rushed upstairs into his study, slammed the door, and collapsed, panting like a rabbit, into his desk chair in front of the window.
He swiveled his chair to face the window and opened the glass. Leaning forward in the chair with his elbows on the sill, George watched the small circle of light cast by the streetlamp at the cemetery entrance. He was terrified that perhaps he had unleashed upon the world something that he neither expected nor understood.
An occasional car passed but for a long while the circle remained empty. He heard his wall clock strike eight o’clock, nine o’clock, ten o’clock, but still he remained on guard in his chair. Nothing stirred.
Maybe he had escaped the moving skeleton. Maybe it had peacefully returned to the grave, realizing it did not belong in the world of the living. Hell, maybe he had dreamed the whole thing.
Then a figure scuttled into the light. His heart raced and he could hear the pounding in his ears. He felt lightheaded with fear and he willed himself to not lose consciousness. He was so focused on what he saw crossing the street that he didn’t even realize he was wiping sweat out of his eyes.
He had expected a beautiful woman to come out of the grave, not this abomination.
The Lady was moving jerkily toward the road like a palsied marionette. Under the streetlight, he saw her boney arms trace wild shapes in the air. She was half-wrapped in a rotting length of stained cloth, her hair swinging in ragged braids still attached to a bony skull. In the streetlight, he could see the black voids where her eyes once were looking up at him as he sat, paralyzed, at the window.
His thoughts raced and he told himself that he was safe in his own house. He was cocooned in a well-built building and he had locked his front door…hadn’t he? Then he realized that even if he had locked the door, would it be enough to prevent a creature to enter that didn’t even consider the border between life and death a barrier?
Her head tilted sideways and her jaw began to saw open and shut. The monster darted out of the light into the gloom of the street. Even though he could no longer see her in the shadows, somehow he knew she was coming…for him. Would she seek revenge against someone who disturbed her eternal rest?
George was unaware of the tears now streaming down his cheeks. He was so focused on the monster approaching his house that he didn’t notice that he was actively sobbing. He was aware though, of his desperation, and of the fear that clutched his throat.
Panicked, he rose to his feet. He need to either run or hide, his “fight or flight” instincts finally kicking in. He looked around the upstairs bedroom wildly. What to do? He hesitated a moment too long, because he heard his front door burst open. Now he couldn’t run downstairs! That left the window. But he was on the second floor! If he jumped, he would surely break a leg, leaving him vulnerable if the dead abomination decided to go back outside.
He could hear shuffling across the hardwood floor in the parlor. Suddenly George heard nothing and realized that the monster must be pausing. Oh my god, was that sniffing? Did he hear sniffing sounds? It seemed to be coming from the foot of the staircase. Then he listened to the clumping of bone on wood as footsteps crept up the steps, ever closer to his bedroom door.
He was trapped.
*****
A van pulled up in front of the house and parked on the street. Emblazoned on the vehicle were the words “Bio-Pure Home Cleaning Service.” A man stepped out and rubbed his salt-and-pepper beard as he studied police tape strung on wooden stakes that fenced off the driveway.
A woman in a business suit came briskly down the porch steps to the road, carefully pushed down the tape, and stepped over it.
“Good morning,” she said. “I’m Lettie Andrews of Prime Real Estate. Are you Mr. Rodriguez?”
“Yup,” agreed the man. They shook hands.
Mr. Rodriguez lightly tugged at the police tape. “This place still a crime scene?” he asked.
“No,” said the real estate agent. “The cops are finished. It’s all yours.”
He squinted at the house. “What kind of a clean-up are we looking at?”
“Well, you’ll earn your fee today,” Ms. Andrews said. She swept a finger toward the driveway. “See that disturbed dirt that runs along the pavement? It goes up the porch, and inside up the stairs. But the real work is in the second-floor bedroom.”
She gave a little shiver. “There’s lots of blood. All over the room. Everywhere!”
Mr. Rodriguez dropped his voice. “Sounds like a murder scene. No matter, my company can deal with it. What happened, do you know?”
“Oh, didn’t you see the papers?” asked Ms. Andrews. “The dead man was a recluse. Odd guy. They found him because his front door was open and banging in the wind. The cops worked the scene for four days. But now they’ve wrapped it up.”
The realtor hesitated, then said, “They found him lying in his study. No sign of the assailant. And looks like nothing was taken. Except the man’s heart.”
“What?” said the cleaning man.
“His heart was missing,” repeated the woman.
She drew closer to the man and said in a whisper, “I have a friend in the Sheriff’s Department. She says that it looked like somebody just ripped out his ticker. Not with a knife, mind you. With teeth and fingernails. Left a big ol’ hole in his chest. A nasty mess.”
She shook her head. “Hell of a Valentine to give someone this month.”