My hometown of Cedar Creek, Colorado had a woman who everyone loved to hate. Her name was Ms. Gatlin and she was both my elementary school’s janitor and the scapegoat for all unfortunate events around our town. The Cedar Creek elderly despised her for having a son out of wedlock, and the town parents scorned her for giving said son too much freedom—a parenting style which had supposedly led to his death at the hands of our town’s eponymous river. As for the children of Cedar Creek, we didn’t care at all about social conventions or parental negligence, but we all agreed that Ms. Gatlin was an ugly lady, and that was enough to warrant our cruelty.
My best friend at the time was a curly-haired menace to society named Isaac who, by fifth grade, had established himself as a ringleader amongst the neighborhood boys. He did his best to inconvenience Ms. Gatlin, though his pranks did little to rattle her. If we spread rumors about her poor hygiene just within her earshot, Ms. Gatlin didn’t bat an eye. If we released bugs inside her janitorial closet, she’d calmly sweep them outside. If we stuffed rotten food inside her locker, she’d clean it out quietly and without complaint. Our usual tricks never worked on Ms. Gatlin, and all of us unimaginative kids were stumped by how to best a woman whose job was to clean up messes of all kinds.
In my last year of primary school, Hanukkah fell a week and a half before we were dismissed for winter break. All of the Jewish children thoroughly enjoyed showing off their gifts to the rest of us, who had to wait an eternity for our presents. Thanks to Kim Possible, Spy Kids, and Totally Spies, every kid in Cedar Creek was obsessed with espionage, so Isaac’s gift of a Spytech Kit for Kids made him even more popular than usual. Most of the kit was cheap plastic junk, but there was a small “spy radio” that seemed very well manufactured. It consisted of an earpiece and a button-sized microphone that was supposedly capable of transmitting audio up to a radius of five miles. Isaac, myself, and the rest of our crew spent most of the week before winter break running around town and testing the capabilities of the device. The audio quality was surprisingly good, although the earpiece and microphone could only be separated for about 3 miles before the sounds became too distorted to understand. It was a novel concept for a few days, but after a while we grew bored of playing walkie-talkie. Isaac wanted to use it for its intended purpose, surveillance, and he had the perfect target in mind.
On the last day before winter break, Isaac and I glued the button sized device to the back of an old brooch we had found in his sister’s jewelry box. We covered it up with a strip of velvet and then glued on the pin and catch, and by the time we were done, you couldn’t tell anything was amiss. We put it in a small white box, which we put in my backpack for later. We determined that I should be the one to deliver it, given Isaac’s reputation as a prankster. After school, I found Ms. Gatlin in the staff break room. She barely looked at me as I walked into the room. I noticed, along the far wall of the break room, a wall of cubbies, each one marked with the name of a staff member. All of them were filled with gifts and letters, presumably from parents or other employees at the school. All of them, that is, except one.
“You can’t be in here, kid,” Ms. Gatlin said to me in her gruff voice.
“I know,” I swung my backpack onto my stomach and fished around for the box. It had gotten a little banged-up in my bag, but I figured she wouldn’t really care. I procured it and held it out to her. “But I wanted to give you this before the break.”
She stopped packing up, turning fully toward me. For a long moment, she just stood there, staring suspiciously at the box. Setting her bag down, she took a few steps forward and grabbed the box out of my hand. She gave it a slight rattle, and then opened it slowly. When she saw the brooch, she gingerly took it out of the box and turned it around in her hand. Then she paused again, looking between the glittering, fake-emerald and me.
“It’s not new, sorry; it used to be my mom’s.” I told her, going off of the script Isaac and I had conceived to add more authenticity to the hand-off. “She doesn’t wear it anymore, but I thought you might like it.”
Ms. Gatlin kept staring at me, her expression unreadable. I half expected her to chuck it into the garbage bin in the corner of the room, but to my relief, she gave me a single nod.
“Thank you.” She said, and pinned the brooch onto her cardigan carefully, like it was a precious gem and not some cheap hunk of plastic. I gave her a smile that she did not return, and then she shooed me away.
Isaac was waiting for me in the woods outside school. I flashed him a thumbs up and he slapped my back twice in congratulations. He pulled the earpiece out of his backpack and held it between us. I put my ear next to the speaker and was delighted when I could hear movement. The sound was slightly more muffled now by the velvet backing, but the audio quality was still really good. We heard the sound of snow crunching under Ms. Gatlin’s feet as she walked herself through the woods home. We listened giddily for a few minutes, then raced back to my house to celebrate our success with hot chocolate. Since we had the attention span of two ten year old boys, we forgot about our triumph until just a few minutes before Isaac’s mom came to pick him up. When I remembered, I pulled out the earpiece, which we had decided would live at my house since it was closer to Ms. Gatlin’s, and listened.
“—more than last year, but not as much as the year before last. What do you think about it? Do you like it? Can you feel it? … I see. Me personally, I’ve loved it since I was a little girl. It falls so prettily.”
“What the heck is she saying?” Isaac asked me, as if I had any clue. The better question, in my mind at least, was who the heck was she talking to? She had no kids or husband and didn’t have any friends as far as I knew.
“I dunno,” I said. “She’s talking about snow, I think.” Though the question, ‘can you feel it?’ seemed an odd thing to ask anyone. We sat there listening to her talk for five minutes straight. I’d never heard Ms. Gatlin talk that much in my life even though I’d seen her most days since I was only five years old. Looking back, I’m not entirely sure what we had expected, but it certainly wasn’t a monologue of that length. We strained our ears listening for another voice, but heard nothing.
“Maybe she’s schido-frensic?” Isaac volunteered. I had no idea what that was, but I trusted his authority. His mom showed up to take him home, and I turned the speaker off to walk him outside. After that, every once in a while, I would turn the speaker on and listen. It seemed that no matter the time, be it early in the morning or late at night, Ms. Gatlin was always talking. She talked about all kinds of things, everything from clothing to stocks to the weather to politics. Sometimes she prayed, talking so quickly and quietly that I could only make out one out of every five or so words. She apologized often, and spoke constantly of a promise. Sometimes, when I turned on the speaker, all I heard were sobs, and sometimes, the conversations were so strange that I couldn’t make heads or tails of them.
“A young woman smiled at me today at the grocery market. Isn’t that just the sweetest thing? I felt like it’s been so long since someone’s smiled at me like that … Yes, I know she was just doing her job. Probably doesn’t even know my name, haha … Oh, how hard this has been, how lonesome. But I am so very close to the finish line. I won’t break my promise now.”
A few days before we returned to school, Isaac and I made the trek over to her house in an attempt to figure out who she was speaking to. I had seen her house a few times before, and each time I was taken aback by how small it was. Isolated and weathered, her home stood at the edge of the southern woodlands on a large plot of land, off of a street with very little through traffic. I remember standing on the side of the road with Isaac, staring at the shack-like house, which must have only had room for a bedroom, a bathroom, and maybe a tiny kitchen.
“There’s no way anyone else lives there,” Isaac said after a while of standing and staring. We were too far away to peer in through the windows, but we were also too afraid to venture any closer. “She’s either a witch, or she’s just some sad, ugly old lady who went crazy from having no friends.”
Isaac got bored quickly, so we left not too long after that. After we had made our way partway down the street, something compelled me to turn around and give the house a final look. When I did, I saw the unmistakable shape of Ms. Gatlin standing on the porch, staring in our direction. I turned away and grabbed a hold of Isaac’s arm.
“She’s watching us,” I whispered to him. His eyes grew wide.
“Shit …” he said. “Should we run?”
“No, that’ll look suspicious. Let’s just keep walking.”
We walked until we were out of eyeshot, and then we ran all the way home. I’m not quite sure what spooked us so badly, but for some reason, even when I was back in the safety of my own home, I couldn’t shake the feeling of eyes burrowing into my back.
“—and soon they’ll all be coming back. It’s hard seeing them sometimes, knowing my Oliver was among them once. Sometimes I think I see him. At least it’ll get easier soon, thanks to you.”
By the time we went back to school, my friends had grown bored of the spy gear. I volunteered to return Isaac’s speaker, but he said it was practically useless now since we couldn’t retrieve the microphone. Surprisingly, Ms. Gatlin continued to wear the brooch every day. It was always pinned to her non-work clothes, so the only time she was “un-bugged”, as Isaac put it, was when she was in her janitorial outfit at my school. Seeing her guard the brooch so carefully made me feel kinda bad. Was that the only gift she had gotten for Christmas? Was it the only gift she had gotten in the past decade? Maybe she wasn’t a witch or crazy. Maybe she was just lonely and had learned to cope by talking to herself.
Months passed. Isaac and company, finally coming to terms with the fact that they would never get the rise they were looking for out of Ms. Gatlin, moved on to terrorizing a curmudgeonly old man who lived across from Cedar Creek Elementary and was always yelling at kids for one reason or another. I was happy for Ms. Gatlin. One day, in March, I found her sitting on a bench at the edge of campus during lunch. I took a seat next to her, not expecting much. She took one look at me, then fixed her gaze back at the sad-looking sandwich in her hand.
“What do you want?” She asked without looking at me.
“Nuthin. Just wanted to sit here.”
She picked at the sandwich. “We’re not friends, kid.”
“I know. You don’t have any friends.”
“That’s right,” she nodded.
“Maybe one day, though,” I said, and to my surprise, she laughed. I didn’t even realize she was capable of laughing. She looked at me properly for the first time in our brief conversation, and I noticed that she was smiling. It was an unpracticed smile, but a genuine one.
“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe one day.”
Ms. Gatlin packed up and headed back to the school building after that. She left a bag of mini-Oreos on the bench next to me. I think she did it on purpose.
I grew accustomed to checking up on her every now and then, listening to her conversations with herself. Sometimes, it almost felt like she was talking to me. Looking back on it now, I realize what a little villain I was, and what an immense invasion of privacy I was committing. I wish that I could take it back now, especially considering what happened next.
Friday, May 17th marked the ten year anniversary of Oliver Gatlin’s death. I kept an eye on Ms. Gatlin throughout the day, but she didn’t seem any more dejected than usual. Maybe things were finally looking up for her. In any case, although I hadn’t checked in on her for a while, I decided that evening to see how she was doing. My parents were gone for the weekend, and I was only allowed to stay at home alone if I stayed inside the whole time, so I had nothing better to do. Not long after sunset, as I lounged on the floor of my bedroom, I turned on the earpiece. Ms. Gatlin was talking to herself, as always, but there was something strange about her tone. She sounded more excited than ever.
“Almost there … almost there … almost there … “
She repeated those two words over and over, until, at exactly 11:44 P.M., she let out a sound that I only understood years later to be a cry of triumph.
“It is done! It is done, Dark Angel. Thank you, thank you! Ten years of solitude, and it was worth every second. Now, Angel, bring him back, bring him back to me!”
What was she on about now? Were those song lyrics or something? I strained my ears, listening for another person out of habit, but of course, there was only Ms. Gatlin’s voice. After a moment, her cries of happiness faded, her voice taking on a confused tone.
“What do you mean? No, I … That can’t be true … I kept my promise. I followed every rule. I let no one in, kept no companions, made no friends. I kept my wish a secret, as you told me. My Angel, I …”
I sat up slowly, the building terror in her voice putting me on edge even from miles away. And then, she asked a question that still haunts me to this day:
“What do you mean I had an audience?”
There was a moment of silence, and then the sure-fire sound of the velvet backing of the brooch being ripped away. I could hear her breath, sharper and clearer than ever before, as she repeated a single word.
“No … no … no no nononononononononononononono—”
She withdrew from the microphone, her rapid breaths replaced by what sounded like her front door being thrown open with a bang. There was no more noise from the microphone. I remember standing up in my bedroom, not quite understanding what had just happened, and not quite knowing what to do next. Something told me that I should go downstairs and make sure that the doors were locked, so I told myself to man up and forced myself down the stairs to the dark first floor. I made my way around the whole house, checking the doors and windows. Once I was done, I just … stood there. Somehow, I knew she was coming, and that there was nothing I could do to stop it.
I thought I was hearing the wind, but as it grew louder, I realized I was hearing wailing. I heard it long before I saw her, that gut wrenching cry, that sound that I had previously heard only pale imitations of in movies where a mother loses her child. Standing in the darkness of my living room, I watched her sprint from the treeline towards my house. Her mouth was wide open, her eyes glazed over and her body dressed in a white nightgown. She looked and sounded like something out of my worst night terrors. I dropped to the floor and crawled away from the window, taking cover behind a couch.
“WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY??!!” She howled, her mournful voice rising and falling as she ascended the steps to my front porch and slammed her fist against the door. “WHYYYYYYYYYYYYY??!!”
I needed to get to the phone, but the house phone was right next to the widow, and I was petrified. She hit the door so hard I was afraid that the hinges would give way.
“HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME?!”
I clamped a hand over my mouth. She couldn’t possibly know for certain that I was in the house, could she? The origin of the wailing shifted as she rounded the wrap-around porch, the heavy knocks of her fists against the door giving way to the thudding of her shoes on the wooden porch floor. I stuck my head around the couch and saw no one at the front window, but when I looked to the side window, I saw a face hovering inches from the glass. I screamed at the top of my lungs as her fist came into contact with the glass, shattering it. I was so horrified by the rain of blood-speckled glass that I almost missed the sight of a shotgun scabbard strapped to her torso. Certain I was about to die, I screamed at her to go away, to leave me alone, and she screamed right back at me, asking me questions that I didn’t understand. Dogs had begun to bark at the commotion, and my next-door neighbors’ porch light turned on.
“Please just go away!” I shrieked as I finally found my footing and raced to the phone. I grabbed it from its holder, starting to type 9-1-1 as I decided whether or not I should risk running to the neighbor’s house. When I looked at the broken window, though, she was nowhere to be seen. The wailing had rescinded—growing fainter and fainter until I couldn’t hear her at all. I stood there dumbly until the sound faded entirely, my hand shaking. She was gone, I was sure of it. Should I still call emergency services?
After a moment, I heard another, fainter sound, and recognized the staticy audio immediately as a transmission from Isaac’s spy-gear. I raced upstairs, still clutching the phone, and grabbed the speaker from the floor where I had dropped it. I pressed it against my ear, listening to the faint sound of a familiar voice.
“I hope this was worth it, kid,” it said, calmly and coldly. “I hope you and your friends can laugh about this.”
I heard a bang, and then I heard nothing at all.
It took two weeks for the police to find her body. Her final resting place was deep in the woods, under a thick shroud of junipers not far from the banks of Cedar Creek. As her face was mutilated beyond recognition, her body was identified by the shotgun lying beside her. They say that, although she was covered in enough blood to entice every animal within a three mile radius, her corpse was untouched by the beasts. Even the insects seemed hesitant to feed and the fungi slow to grow upon her body, as though even the lowliest creatures feared contamination by the lonely woman in the woods.
They did not find a brooch on her person.