My grandfather died a few days ago. He was old and sick and it wasn’t a shock, but my mom is taking it really hard. After the service I went to his house, trying to start the process of who gets what and spare my mom some grief. I found a notebook sitting on his kitchen table. It was right there in the open. I thought maybe it was a will or a goodbye of sorts but instead it was this. Some kind of confession? I really don’t know what to think. I transcribed it below, I tried to remove anything that was identifying or overly personal. I guess I just need someone to help me unpack all of this
***
It’s been a long time. A really long time. So long than anybody else who might remember this, might remember me, is probably dead. God, I hope so. The doctor is saying it’s the end of the line. He says that the treatments will give me weeks not months and certainly not years. He says I should be making arrangements and making myself comfortable. But I can’t go without sharing what happened that day.
I don’t know if I believe in God or an afterlife but I was raised Catholic. If Saint Peter really is waiting for me, I want to get this off my chest before we meet. If we meet.
I was seventeen, I thought I was so grown up then. Looking back now I was barely out of my bassinet, but I thought I was a real adult. I thought I knew better, thought I understood. Don’t you ever wish you could go back in time and slap some sense into yourself?
It was the fall of my senior year. I remember it was cooler than usual. My mama had to bring down our winter jackets from the attic before the last week of September. She was always so worried about us catching a cold. She was a good mother.
Back then, my life was comprised of milkshakes, fast cars, and Friday night football games. If y’all ever lived in a small town then you know if you weren’t at the game on Friday they were quick to say something wasn’t right with you. That’s what they said about Evelyn Goody.
It wasn’t just that Evelyn didn’t go to the games or the school dances. She was just odd. Poor thing seemed to have been born with a sign on her forehead that screamed “EASY TARGET WALKING”.
The kids started to mess with her in elementary school. They’d pour glue in her milk, or try and snip off her pigtails. One time Gordon Locke managed to get a big old handful and sheared one side of her hair down to the scalp with a pair of scissors he had stolen from the art room. Worst part was instead of taking her to Ms. Debbie at the beauty parlor like all the other mamas would have done, Evelyn’s mama took a pair of wool shears they used on their sheep and shaved that girl’s hair clean off. Gordon never got in trouble. Evelyn spent the rest of third grade looking like a prisoner of war.
I’m not proud of how I handled myself back than. If my kids, heck if my grandkids ever sat and watched that kind of torment like I did I would have lost my damn mind. I would have told them you stick up for those who are being put down. You take a stand. Maybe I only feel so strongly because of what happened the Halloween.
I didn’t stand up for Evelyn. Not outright at least. But I did sack Gordon harder than I needed to at practice most days. After he left a dead bullfrog in her locker, I sent him off the field in a stretcher. No one ever said anything to me. Coach just told me to save it for the game.
The problem was I couldn’t befriend her. The girl was a social pariah, anyone who even seemed remotely pleasant to her was marked for certain death. If you didn’t want to find a flaming pile of dog shit on your porch you stayed the hell away from Evelyn.
I know, I know, I’m making excuses. You’re probably wondering what the hell even happened. I think I’m procrastinating, it’s hard to talk about.
That Halloween Gordon Locke died. He was drunk no doubt, everyone who saw him that night could tell you that. But what they couldn’t explain is how Gordon’s insides were found on the outside.
Have you ever seen a man’s large intestine strung around his neck like a noose? Have you ever seen a human-being’s chest splayed open like a displayed butterfly? I can still see it even after all these years. I didn’t know you had so much blood in your body.
After they found Gordon’s body, which was prominently displayed on the football field, they found Mike Peterson, Gordon’s right hand man. Peterson was skewered on his own spinal cord, the thing had been ripped clean from his backside. His poor daddy found him, right on their front lawn. The same front lawn that Mike would collect his dog Colonel’s droppings from for Gordon to then set alight.
It wasn’t until they found the third body that night that it all began. Sure there was panic and police were everywhere, but this was small town. The police could handle a sticky fingered punk or a loud party, this was otherworldly. They had lost control before it had even gotten out of hand.
The third body they found was Linda McPhee, Gordon’s sometimes girlfriend. Years ago she had been an almost friend to Evelyn, their daddy’s got the occasional beer at O’Donald’s before Evelyn’s daddy passed. But once they went to school and other kids pegged Evelyn for a target, Linda decided where her loyalties must lie.
She made sure that whenever Evelyn ran to the girl’s bathroom to seek solace from Gordon and his cronies, she would be there waiting. The kind of planning it must take to fill a whole gallon jug of piss and wait for someone to cower in a stall before dumping it all over them, it’s almost sickening.
They found Linda, her breasts exposed to the night air, and her body was laying several feet away. The slight irony being she had wet herself just before she died.
By then the town was in a frenzy. Parents were sobbing openly in the streets, hurrying their children inside before the “monster” could hunt them too. My own parents locked all the doors and my father sat with his shotgun poised on his lap. It was Gordon’s mother who first said the word. She was the first one to run into the street screaming “Witch!”
It was mass hysteria, it had to be. I’ve never seen a group of people turn so quickly from terrified to blood thirsty. They marched in the streets, carrying their guns and their rosaries. They pulled Evelyn from her home. They dragged her through the mud and horse shit and flung her, bloodied and bruised, onto the town hall steps.
They screamed at her, accusing her. They spat at her, kicked her, tore at her nightclothes. The whole time the poor girl screamed and cried and begged for them to stop. I watched from my bedroom window as they began to build the pyre.
They strung up her broken body, the fight had left her, she just hung there like an old doll left out in the rain. She had accepted that the town that condemned her for existing would condemn her to death. As the fire licked at her toes, scorching the soles of her feet, Evelyn let out one last primal scream before shouting over the roar of the blaze “I curse you all! I curse every single one of you! May you burn as you’ve burned me!” As the fire enveloped her body, I felt the cold hand resting on my shoulder.
It wasn’t Evelyn, it never had been. Her biggest crime was being born. It was me who killed those people. Well, I didn’t do the killing but it was me who gave their names to the creature who had answered my call.
I wanted out of that town, I figured if I worked hard enough I could get a football scholarship. It didn’t need to be for some fancy school just anything that would pull me from the cesspool that generations of people who never went further than the town line created.
Problem was, I just wasn’t good enough. Sure I was better than most guys on the team but to get noticed, to have a scout pick you from the crowd and say “Aha! That’s the next big thing,” your town needs to be more than blip on the map. Even then, you have to have the right stuff and I just didn’t.
I always heard my mama talking about how Hollywood stars must have made a deal with the devil for all their fame and fortune. I didn’t need all that I just needed out. So one night I called for somebody, anybody, to help me. That’s when she appeared.
She was tall and slender, her eyes a wet black like spilled ink. Her touch was always ice cold. I told her I’d give her my soul in exchange for a way out of this town. She told me she didn’t need one, and she didn’t need mine. Instead she needed three. I gave her the names, I admit I did tell her who but I didn’t know…I didn’t think I really understood. I was trying to give Evelyn the revenge I had always thought she wanted, that she deserved. I didn’t know how it would happen.
After Evelyn was killed, my parents packed up and fled town. We left only a few hours after her smoldering body was cut down from the structure. We started fresh in Massachusetts. Same small town same people. What’s that phrase? Out of the frying pan and into the fire? I should have known better than to trust a demon. Things in Massachusetts weren’t much better. But at least the last time they had burned an innocent woman alive was a little less recent.
I’ve carried what I did to those people, all those people, for decades now. I’ve tried to live a good life, to make up for what I did but I’m not sure it’ll matter in the end. You see, I know I’m dying I have been for awhile but until last night I had had the foolish idea that maybe I had done enough to right the wrongs of my past. But I saw her, I saw Evelyn.
Last night as headlights illuminated my room as a car drove down the street I saw her standing in the corner. Her blonde hair was blackened, her skin still smoking. I tried to speak I tried to say I was sorry but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do much of anything except watch her stand there, the slight breeze from my open window making the remains of her nightgown flutter, carrying with it the smell of fire.
I know I’ll see her again tonight. It will probably be the last thing I ever see.
For anyone reading this. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But mostly for Evelyn, if the fires of Hell come for me, maybe then I’ll finally get it, I’ll understand. May God have mercy on my soul.
***
And that’s everything he wrote. I feel sick, and scared and I need to get out of this house. I keep trying to tell myself he was sick, maybe he had dementia and we didn’t know about it. Maybe it was some sort of sick prank. But that doesn’t explain the smoke stains on the wall of his bedroom or the faint stench of burning flesh.