I lost my sister in the rectory. We lived there in the mid 1980s. It had been sold after the related church burned down sometime prior. I was little, four, when we moved in, and don’t know all the details.
What I remember is rarely consciously recalled. I’ll smell woodsmoke and the rectory basement and terror will tear through the years I’ve worked to forget to ruin my world again.
The cold too. Every room felt coated in frost in the gigantic building. There were a lot of fireplaces because the furnace in the basement had no chance of adequately heating the four stories.
We were a family of four. My dad worked long days. My mom had two little ones to look after. Nobody had time to look after multiple fires. So we were bundled up constantly. Lots of hide n’ go seek in our winter boots, clomping around the house.
My parents thought we were lucky to find the rectory. It was cheap, and huge. They had ideas about staying there for good until after actually sleeping in those bedrooms for a few days. I remember a lot of phrases like, “When we find our next place,” and “We can’t live like this forever.”
The arguments that accompanied these words were frequent.
There were other conflicts too. A person in the neighbourhood around the rectory often confronted my mom. We’d be on our way to the grocery store, and a dirty looking grandma would scold us for where we lived.
“You should move,” she said, I think, or something like that. “It isn’t safe. It isn’t right.”
My mom ignored her until one day she lost her temper and told her, “Shut the fuck up! Don’t you think we want to leave?!” More words were exchanged but I can’t recall what they were. The dirty old lady looked defeated. There were tears on my mom’s face.
I don’t know how much time passed between that day and Easter morning. Barbara, my sister, leapt into my bedroom and said, “Where’s the chocolate?” I giggled and she tickled my neck. “Come on, let’s hunt.” She was going to be six in two weeks.
The sun hadn’t come up, and our parents were asleep. Armed with baskets left at the top of the stairs, we followed a trail of foil wrapped chocolates. I squealed with each new find. There seemed to be no end. Our rooms were on the top floor. We hesitated at the open basement doorway.
It had always been shut. I don’t believe we’d ever been down there before. A white egg sat in the darkness on the first landing. As I moved to retrieve it, Barbara grabbed my arm.
“Wait,” she hissed. She looked worried.
“What?” I asked. I wanted more chocolate. There was chocolate. What was her problem?
“Let me go first.” I think Barbara sensed something amiss but couldn’t understand or express what exactly. Becoming more cautious, protective, was the solution.
The path continued into the gloom of a severely unfinished basement. Packed dirt comprised the floor, extending around the wooden steps to stone walls that didn’t meet the ceiling. It smelled bad, like heated pee, humid and cloying.
I wanted to leave, but the chocolate…
The trail snaked around a wooden post into a large shadow cast by the stairs. I started collecting because Barbara had stopped.
“Hey,” I said, “this isn’t chocolate.”
She’d noticed before me that the basement eggs were larger and lost their bright tinfoil. They were real, and many were broken. Reddish yellow goo remained in the shards.
Someone had smashed them. In the gloom, I heard a squeak followed by a sucking noise. An open mouth chewed somewhere in the dark.
Barbara pulled my arm. “We need to go.”
“I want the chocolate! Let go!” I didn’t understand the problem yet and wanted to be sure we hadn’t missed any chocolate. Surely, the real eggs had been an oversight or a joke.
Running across the dirt floor, the trail became more erratic and sparse. Little malformed birds, pink and featherless, sat motionless in the bottom of their shells.
Rough hands appeared from the deepest dark corner and twisted open another egg. The baby inside protested weakly. One hand placed it down in the row while another retracted to a chorus of sloppy licking sounds.
A silence more disturbing followed, and my underdeveloped survival instinct failed to get me out of there.
“Hello?” I asked. Here is where images conflate, the way they always do when thinking back on distant memories. I thought it might be the Easter Bunny, and because of this idea, what I saw, I think, became mingled forever with the frightening reality.
She came out of the shadows, almost on her hands and knees, clawing the air, and catching the sleeve of my pyjamas.
A strangled cry caught in my throat. I went limp. The moment remains an eternal trauma played out in my recurring nightmares, and idle daydreams, an invading few seconds that changed everything for the worse.
It was the old woman that always shouted at us. Yet, it was not. Her hair stuck out in greasy clumps that unfortunately slightly resembled large ears. With her free hand, she nibbled at the top half of the eggshell and licked the goo that dribbled down her filthy chin.
“Almost time for the babies,” she said. “You should have moved.”
Barbara slammed all of her six-year-old body into the crone. They tumbled together into the shadows. My sister screamed and kept screaming, an anguish comparable to burning. The old lady kept whispering to her and laughing. I started crying.
Our parents charged down the steps, but it was too late. They only found Barbara and I and no sign of the intruder besides the broken eggs.
“What’s going on? What’s happening?” my mother screeched. She grasped my shoulders.
“It was the Easter Bunny,” I said, apparently. At least, that’s what my parents told me years later. They tried to turn it into a humorous recollection, but it didn’t work because the fear of that woman and where she’d gone never left.
Plus, it simply wasn’t funny to watch Barbara disappear into her own head each time they brought it up, every Easter that went by, and soon, each morning she woke up.
No more would she leap into my room on any holiday to wake me up for a holiday hunt. No early presents or chocolate or pre-dawn Halloween candy the first day of November.
Barbara began to avoid me altogether until the natural worries of adulthood drove us to opposite sides of Bridal Veil Lake.
It wouldn’t be until years later, when I had a wife and two children, who had never met their Auntie Barbara, that my parents finally told me I hadn’t imagined the old woman.
She’d been using the cellar door to get in and steal food because the priest that used to occupy the rectory had given her a key. There actually had been other food scraps around her, but a kind of confirmation bias only burned the shattered eggs into memory.
“Those eggs weren’t from our fridge,” I pointed out. “They didn’t come from a grocery store. Not with chicks in them.”
My parents exchanged a look. “That’s true.”
It became another unsolved and unexamined mystery.
A few years after that, Barbara and I got drunk in her apartment, and I asked her, “What did that crazy lady say to you?”
Through the drink, she considered me, her little brother, all grown up. Tears came fast, swarming the limits of her red rimmed, perpetually exhausted eyes.
“She said, ‘You’ll kill him some day. It’ll be you. He won’t see you coming or the hatred growing up with you and the question: Why didn’t he run that Easter? You would have been saved if only he’d been smart enough to run.’”
I asked her if she could seriously blame me, practically a baby at the time. “You took us down there.”
She cried some more. “I know, I know, it doesn’t make any sense, but I’m afraid.”
“Why?” I’d already grabbed my coat.
“Because she was right. She’s right about the hatred. It’s been there ever since. And if she was right about that…”
I grabbed my coat.
“You don’t know everything!” she shrieked as she stood up and pulled the collar of her t-shirt aside, revealing two rows of inverted scars. That crazy woman had bitten and taken a chunk out of Barbara.
“I didn’t know.” I don’t remember blood or a wound or hospitals. She never mentioned being bit. Of course, we never really talked about the incident at all.
“That’s right,” she said, “you were more interested in chocolate. You were stuffing your face, while mom and dad looked after me.”
“I was four, Barb.”
“I know! I’m sorry. I still hate you.” Anger and sadness sought dominance in her expression. The first emotion seemed to win out as her empathy departed.
“I think I’d better go,” I said.
She didn’t say goodbye.
I was afraid she might do it as I walked away, my back turned.
I planned to never see Barbara again.
If I do, the thought of what’s to come, what she’s about to do will be there:
My sister is here to kill me. Barbara has come to finally get revenge on her little, baby brother.
Last Sunday, I saw an Easter egg my kids had neglected on the basement landing, and it brought this all back.
I miss Barbara. I’m so afraid I’ll see her again.