#here's a little ramble of ghosts and kissin' and having feelings about the californian landscape | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

chiropteracupola · 2 years

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(that rare thing around here - an original spooky story...)

Clapboard always seemed to get oak-leaves stuck in it, clinging in the layers of siding and sticking to the spiderwebs that draped the corners of the porch. Curtis brushed them away with the tip of his broom, and damned the spiders as a sticky leaf fell into his hair. There was always more to be done in early fall, as the spiders were now out in full force, well-fed long-legged things the size of half-dollars. As Curtis swept another layer of crackling-dry leaves from the edges of the porch, he turned, half without intention, to look back at the shelves visible through the front-room window.

The jar, of course, was nowhere near the door, most precious gem of Lucas’s collection as it was. In all the tiny parlor-museums that had sprouted in the new-built towns like mushrooms after a rain, very few could boast of possessing such a relic. But old Lucas had come by the jar and its contents somehow, long years before he had had need to hire on an assistant at all, and there it stayed in the glass-fronted case between bits of carved stone and painted pottery. Curtis had disliked the thing at first, hating to look at the distorted face of the thief behind the glass. But in time, he had found himself stealing glance after glance at it, and in occasional dark spaces of sleeplessness, imagining how the thief had lived and died.

The wind that day was on the chilly side, and it stung at Curtis’s face, not so much as a reminder of further cold to come as a suggestion of what might have been. Resenting it, he hunched his shoulders up a little further, and pulled the scarf a little closer around his neck, fingering the softness of yarn as golden as the autumn-dry grass on the hills. As he did so, Curtis thought of the thief’s head again, in its jar inside. He ran a finger and thumb along his own neck, feeling over the roughness left by a slight edge of stubble, and wondered if it had been quick. Surely they had not taken the head until the man was dead already, cut it neatly from his shoulders with care that they surely would not have offered to him in life. The head was a prize to be taken, and thus maintained well — one wouldn’t want the preserved face of an outlaw to be smashed ’til it was unrecognizable, though the grisliness of the trophy was of course unavoidable.

But beyond the roughly-severed stump of the neck and the softened, puffy eyelids, there was an odd fascination to the thief’s appearance, in dark hair floating in the preservative like smoke from a just-snuffed candle and eyes that seemed to follow onlookers around the room, though they were shut tight. It was not only as he moved about the museum-room itself that Curtis felt watched, but in his own rooms, and as he slept.

In dreams, the thief came to him with his head in his hands, staring clear and brown-eyed up at Curtis. Cautious, careful, he reached out and took the head, feeling the hard arc of the jawbone in his hands, the weight of it startling. Then, reaching carefully up, Curtis placed the head back on the ragged stump of the neck, all snagged and bloodied where the knife had stuck against the vertebrae, and held it there. The thief did not speak, only looked at him with those deep sad eyes, and Curtis looked back. With the head back in its place, the thief was of a height with him, and it was no difficulty at all to take the scarf from his own neck and wrap it about the thief’s, tying it fast and tucking the ends down under the collar of the thief’s worn jacket.

Curtis woke, cold under damp sheets, his own hand splayed across his throat, and saw his own steps outlined before him in the late-coming sunlight on the floorboards. The day that followed passed slowly and dimly, still webbed over with traces of dreaming, and only when night fell did he feel that he had properly come to himself again.

The sun was not too long gone, and the last curls of sunset light caught between the hills. At that bowed, obscured horizon, fog had begun to trickle into the valley below, pouring syrupy-slow down over the forest. Lucas had gone out for the evening, for it ought to have been a night for merriment, for sloshed-out cider and jarred fruit finally stirred into spice-cake. Curtis had begged out, saying he had no head for merriment, and it was true, he had not. But the keys of the cabinet were in his own trouser-pocket now, and it was with quiet steps and careful movements that he crossed the front-room and put his hand upon the lock.

There — he was in, but he could yet turn back, and ignore the plan that had awoken already so neatly-formed in his mind. Curtis imagined leaving the task undone, going back to the routine he had so long followed in Lucas’s service. He would polish glass, and dust cabinets, and light the lamps when evening fell …and through all of it the thief in his jar would watch him, baleful and betrayed behind the glass. Curtis could not turn and leave him, not when every day he would have to look…

He straightened his shoulders and resolved himself to the task, then turned and placed the lantern on the desk, just far enough out of the way that it would still cast light upon the blotter. His own shadow moved strange against the shifting pattern of tree branches cast through the window, the shapes of oak-leaves splaying out like a mantle over its shoulders.

Again, Curtis checked the lock on the outer door. Still shut, and giving a little shake of his shoulders, he wondered to himself why he had expected that it might be otherwise. As the wind shifted in the leaves, the lantern-light shone brightly for a moment on the tightly posed teeth of the stuffed bobcat atop the cabinet, still gleaming-sharp in death. Curtis made a mental resolution to take down the thing and dust it, when he had the time, for its fur was beginning to look a little moth-eaten with the years. That was, if he still had employment when the morning came around.

Soon enough, the cabinet door fell open smooth and slow, its hinges oiled by his own hand only a few days earlier. In his way, he had done the best he could for the thief’s head, polishing his jar when he could and pointing him to face the window. It had made a difference, he had hoped, to offer what little care he could. Curtis shifted aside the other objects in the case, the pottery and the stones, and the snakeskin tacked neatly to its polished piece of board. Last of all he moved the label from the front of the jar, read over again Lucas’s carefully printed handwriting. The name on the label was not the thief’s own, he was sure. Lucas liked bright things and legends, but there was no chance that the head of such a well-known outlaw as that had wound up in a no-account town like this, in a one-room museum in an old man’s dusty front-room. A dollar for a few minutes’ sight of the celebrated head of California’s own Robin-Hood, that was a rather high price for the asking, but one that a fair number of visitors were willing to pay. Having cleared the rest of the shelf, Curtis slid his intended prize free, pressing the cold glass against his chest as he got his arm half around it and carried it to the desk. The lantern-light turned the preservative liquid to a dark gold, and the head itself to a blurred mass of shadows.

Mindful of the sloshing of preservative and the scrape of glass on glass, Curtis lifted the lid from the jar. The alcohol within was cool against his hands as he reached inside, feeling carefully in the depths of the jar for the head. His fingers brushed against silky hair, floating gently in the liquid, and after a moment, tangled there. Curtis locked his hand in place, and tugged, and after a moment’s work, the head came free with a thick, squishy sound. It was heavy, and Curtis had to readjust his grip before he could get a good look at the thing.

Without the distortion of liquid and glass between them, Curtis saw that the thief was younger than he had expected, the twisted, pained death-look not so strong upon his face as Curtis had seen before. The skin had gone pale and spongy from long years under liquid, the dark hair slick and trailing down where Curtis had not gotten a hold on it. With his free hand, he brushed it away from his face, tucking it behind each ear. The lobe of one was torn — perhaps it had once held an earring, gone missing with the years. In those early days of gold-hunting, Curtis had heard that such earrings had been more common, but it had evidently been a mark of wealth to those that had brought the thief in as much as it had been to the man who had first worn that gold ring. He ran a careful finger over the ragged place the earring had left behind, sorrowful.

“I’d return it to you, if I knew where it is now,” he said softly, wishing with all his heart that he did know. But he did not, and instead sat silent and watched the way the lamplight caught in the thief’s alcohol-soaked hair, shining on the dripping preservative that had spread all down the desk and onto Curtis’s trousers. Something twitched under his hand, and Curtis blinked, only grasping the oddness of the movement a moment later.

The thief’s eyes flew open, and they were brown, the same soft sodden-leaf brown as they had been in Curtis’s dreams. The thief’s mouth curled, showing teeth, and as he smiled slow, Curtis nearly dropped him to the desk.

“You’re the one who polishes the glass.”

“How…?”

“Don’t you think I’d know your hands by now? They’re nicer than the other fellow’s, too — not nearly so bony. Can’t trust a man with hands like spiders, I say.”

“Did he—“ Conjectures clicked through Curtis’s mind, clattering and chilling. He had never heard the story of precisely how Lucas had come to own the jar, after all.

“Old Bony-Hands? No, he didn’t kill me, if that’s what you were fixing to ask. Now, I heard you had some intention of giving my earring back—“ The thief’s eyes flicked sideways, as if trying to gesture towards his torn ear without having hands with which to do so.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know where it is.”

“Ah, don’t mind it, then. Whoever has it now has got my curse to his name just as well as my gold.”

“Your curse…?” faltered Curtis, still a little unsure of where he stood in this conversation. The thief blinked at him rather dramatically.

“Didn’t anyone ever frighten you with ghost-tales? No sitting in the dark hearing about enough ghosties and ghoulies to make your hair stand on end?”

“You’re the first ghost I’ve met.” Curtis felt, all of a sudden, very much out of his depth. “Is there anything else I could give you, if I can’t give you your earring back?” That seemed the right way to go about it, to make straightforward promises and smooth over what he couldn’t fulfill.

“A proper grave might be nice—“ the thief closed his eyes musingly “—better yet if it’s in church-ground. I’m sure the rest of me’s in a ditch somewhere, but fetching it’s too much to ask, even of a kind fellow such as yourself.” He smiled, dripping lips pulling apart in an awkward grin.

“That I can do for you, and happily.” Curtis gathered up thief and lantern, and, locking the door again behind him, stepped onto the porch. The lantern-light glinted faintly on a new spiderweb in one of the upper corners, and Curtis chuckled ruefully before starting out into the road. The cemetery was no great distance, and for the moment, there was still moonlight to see by as well as the flame he carried. As Curtis and the thief watched, threads of fog drifted across its face, covering and uncovering it in slow, uncanny patterns.

“A rogues’ moon. That’s what my grandmother used to call it, anyhow.”

“Ah, your granny was right,” said the thief, laughing murkily. “And a grand night it is, for a fine pair of rogues like us.” Curtis felt his face grow warm, and looked carefully away, hiding his smile in his scarf. But his comfort did not last for very long as he walked onwards, for as the fog covered the moon in earnest, he found that the light of his lantern did not carry far, and as he found the narrow path that led to the cemetery, the thief’s still-wet hair grew cold indeed against his hand.

In the daylight, the little square of ground with its scattering of pale, neatly maintained headstones was a pleasant enough place, built on the side of the hill so that visitors might stand and look down into the valley. Curtis had often walked there of a Sunday afternoon and paused in the shade of one of the few scraggly cypresses by the low wrought-iron gate, but he had always turned and taken himself elsewhere when the sun had begun to sink, and been in town again before the last stray bit of sunlight fitted itself into the keyhole of the hills. Now, it was full dark, with the sky so patched over with fog that any familiar stars were invisible, and Curtis, though he knew the path well, felt that he must surely have lost his way.

Strange fear overtook him — not the fear of any tangible pursuit, but the sort of terror that waits in shadow and comes creeping into the heart when one is alone in the hills. Hardly knowing what he did, Curtis broke into a run, the lantern in one hand, the thief’s head in the other. The breeze, turned cool with the night’s fog, chilled his face, the tips of his ears prickling with the cold. The tip of his shoe caught against a stone, and he stumbled, barely catching himself on one knee.

“Have a care!” griped the thief, his head swaying in Curtis’s uncertain grasp.

“Yes, yes,” said Curtis, breathing a little more heavily now, and awkwardly got to his feet, uncertain without the use of his hands. Dust clung to his trousers, tiny flakes of dead leaf sticking to the heavy cloth. All the summer had left behind was that dryness of the ground, dusty earth crumbling under his feet as he climbed the final rise of the path. He placed his lantern on the ground, then clambered over the low fence, holding the thief’s head high.

“Any preference on the place?” Curtis panted, his free hand pressed against his knee for balance as he tried to catch his breath.

“I’ll give you your pick of it,” said the thief, as if he was offering a fortune in gold. The thief’s head was heavy, and Curtis’s arm had long since become tired from holding it high, but words spoken in such a way did seem to be nearly reward enough. Finding a spot at the foot of a tree where the soil seemed less compacted, he accordingly began to scrabble a hole one-handed, the thief looking on from the safety of his other hand. But before Curtis could get very far, the thief made a little click of his tongue to stop him in his tracks.

“One more thing I’d ask of you, for your kindness. I’d have just one kiss of your lips, to keep me warm when I’m buried down below.”

“It’ll not be so cold as that, not here,” said Curtis in reply, “but yes, you may have it and gladly.”

“Aye, you’ve got a brain in your head, more than I ever had,” said the thief, and smiled, his teeth still shining-wet in the moonlight. Curtis laughed, and hefted the head in his hands again, lifting it so that his lips just brushed against the thief’s. With the same brief fluttering contact as the beat of moths’ wings against the glass of the lantern, they kissed, and Curtis felt the thief’s lips part against his, a final grin that would not be hardened in place by death.

#em writes stuff #oc time again hehe #jarstory #hey! happy halloween!#here's a little ramble of ghosts and kissin' and having feelings about the californian landscape

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