A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre: Halloween Is Going to Be Jealous

GHUNT

by Lee Thomas

Sally turned on the faucet and splashed cold water over the eggs. She’d placed a dozen Grade AAs at the bottom of the pasta pot, careful so as not to crack their white shells. Stepping back, she put a hand on her hip and looked through the window as the water level rose. Gray sky. Wind pushing the tops of trees. Her gaze roamed to the distant edges of the yard, the rows of rose bushes on the left and the six-foot hedges on the right. Straight ahead at the end of fifty yards of immaculate emerald grass, stood a blonde brick wall held in place by lines of dove-white mortar. The striking grid between the bricks caught her attention for a moment, but it was the play set beyond the patio that pulled her gaze like a magnet.

Eric called it a swing set. When she’d heard that he’d ordered such a thing for their daughter, Sally had expected one of the metal tube and rubber seated constructions of her youth. She should have known better. Eric did nothing cheaply. It had taken a fourteen-foot truck to haul the thing to Sally’s house. Two men who looked like extras from a Mafia movie had hauled the pieces and parts to the backyard and had spent two days building the thing, which was part tree house, part jungle gym and yes, part swing set. A stainless steel slide twisted from the second story to the patch of sand below. Mary had been thrilled by the structure. She’d jumped up and down, clapping her hands, squealing and racing toward the edifice with such joy, Sally had felt guilty for trying to talk her husband out of buying it.

Of course the set was too extravagant—ridiculously so—for a four-year-old. Not only was it enormous, it cost more than Sally’s first car had. Further, she just didn’t see the point. At her daughter’s age, Sally’d had only a rusted bicycle, handed down from her older brother, Mitchell, and random toys—a few dolls, a couple of puzzles, an incomplete set of Lincoln Logs and another of Tinker Toys—and they’d kept her occupied well enough. Granted, she would never wish her childhood on Mary; she wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

All beautiful plants start buried in crap, Eric had told her.

Her husband, a font of bumpersticker wisdom and Hallmark sentiment, was, nonetheless, wonderful. She just wished he could forgo this one tradition: the eggs; the hunt. She found Easter and its trappings distasteful, but she’d kept such feelings to herself, choosing instead to pretend disinterest in the springtime festival.

Sally turned off the tap. Water covered the eggs. Ripples ran over the surface, and she stared into the pasta pot, unnerved by the sudden idea that each egg would have eventually become a chick, a living creature if only it had remained untouched. But did it matter? Either way—whether hard-boiled or allowed to gestate and hatch and sprout feathers—the things were still low rungs on the food chain. At least this way they weren’t forced to push toward maturity through suffering and perplexity.

None of that for these little guys. Just some water. A bit of flame. A pool of scald. Oblivion before sentience.

She carried the pot to the stove and set it on the front burner, and then ratcheted on the gas flame.

SALLY IS TEN YEARS old. It is nighttime and she peers through her bedroom window. A man stands in the yard below—a shadow with just a smudge of pale where his face should be. He lights a match, revealing coarse, familiar features, and lifts it towards the cigarette in his mouth and the fire catches in his eyes and they burn like a rat’s eyes, and she sees his lips spread away from the cigarette butt, rising at the edges into a horrible smile. He clamps onto the cigarette with his prominent front teeth and the cherry of the smoke burns the same color as his eyes and Sally feels dread like streams of ice on her back. She leaps away from the window and races to her bed. With the covers over her head like a shield, she squeezes her eyes closed and breathes heavily and curls into the smallest ball she can manage.

THE WATER BOILED. SALLY checked the digital timer on the range. She pinched the phone between her shoulder and ear, listening to her mother babble on about the holiday, and Sally mumbled and grunted, agreeing with her mother while forcing herself to hear nothing the woman said. A big family event. Everyone will be there. The whole Carter clan. Mitchell and his family. Cousins whose names she couldn’t keep straight—was Kelly the one with epilepsy? Or was that Karen? Had Jim just returned from Germany or was that Jimmy, Jim’s second cousin? Her aunts. Their husbands. And Henry.

Sally had asked her mother to rescind Uncle Henry’s invitation, but her mother had wanted a reason for excluding the man, and Sally couldn’t give a reason.

To make matters worse, her appeal to keep Henry out of the holiday had caused an inquisition, which she was in no condition to face. So, Sally had decided to keep her branch of the family tree—her Eric, her Mary—at home. Naturally her mother had refused to let it rest. She’d gone through Eric, had played her guilt games and the bullshit family-is-everything card, and Eric too had wanted an excuse from Sally, and she hadn’t provided one. No reason. Nothing she could verbalize.

The eggs boiled. Sally looked through the bubbles at them. One of the shells had cracked. A thin white tail grew from the slit, tried to rise on the scalding tide.

Sally suddenly felt ill, and she covered her mouth with a palm. She looked away from the pot.

Her mother prattled on like an adult in a Peanuts cartoon, all warble and distortion. Sally grunted and said, “I really have to get back to the eggs,” noting another three minutes on the timer. There was no rush to finish the eggs; she wanted off of the phone. She couldn’t bear her mother’s shiny, happy voice and her exhilaration of reunion with the various spawn of the Carter family. Sally believed the only thing to celebrate regarding her family was distance.

“Happy Easter, honey,” her mother said. “We’ll see you soon.”

Happy Easter. Now there was an oxymoron. A grotesque joke. An impossibility.

Did her mother even know what she was celebrating? Really? The woman thought it was a grand celebration of Christ’s rebirth, but Easter had been celebrated long before the Christians had co-opted its lunar date. Tammuz. Semiramis. Ishtar. Ester. Those were the first deities recognized with springtime bacchanals.

But the Christians had invaded pagan lands. Strategy and weaponry had given them victory, but they wanted more than compliance; they demanded converts. Faith had to follow flesh into submission. Like all good molesters, they presented the pagans gifts to make them compliant. They offered to allow, even encourage, the pagans’ festivals of spring, but over time added their own philosophy to the goings on, and eventually the church absorbed the power of these events.

And so Easter was born, with its bunnies and its bonnets and its marshmallow candies and its eggs.

The egg.

A symbol of fertility. Of actual birth, not rebirth.

And what did the fucking misguided children of Christ do with that symbol? They took the egg, and…

—Here is your innocence. Here is your unblemished whiteness. Let’s harden it with scalding water and then make it up with dyes and paints and bits of glitter and then we’ll break it open and peel away its alluring costume before we devour it whole.

YOU DON’T WANT TO stain your pretty white dress. Take it off.

ONE EGG DROWNED IN the blue dye and another soaked up green pigment like toxic waste. These were the last two. The once-white shells were now stained sickly pastels. After they dried, Sally would attack them with the glue stick and the glitter. She’d use the pre-printed decals and the paint pens to finish them off.

Normally, decorating and hiding the eggs was Eric’s job. Sally had made it clear that she would have none of it, but this year Eric had pleaded with her. He’d been called into the hospital three days running and he hadn’t had the chance to decorate eggs for their daughter. Sally had insisted that the ritual was unnecessary, but the misery in Eric’s eyes and the sadness in his voice when he asked her to “please reconsider,” had clearly indicated how important the ritual was to him, so Sally had relented.

Her eggs would never look as nice as the ones her husband made. He used crayons to create relief in the dyed color and expertly stenciled intricate designs. Eric made genuinely beautiful holiday eggs—a feat well beyond her capabilities. But she had to try. Despite her disgust with the holiday, she still wanted everything to be perfect for her daughter. Sally was just happy she’d remembered to use the wire egg ladle, paper towels and some latex gloves (a benefit of having a doctor in the house) so her fingers didn’t get decorated as well.

The cracked egg nestled in a kitchen towel, unaccompanied. The broken thing rested alone, as if Sally feared its damage was contagious.

Later in the afternoon, Mary would hunt eggs in the backyard of her grandmother’s house, along with her cousins and second cousins. As far as Sally was concerned, one hunt should have been more than enough, but Eric was a creature of habit. Traditionally, he gave their daughter a special gift at Easter, and this year was no different. He’d bought Mary a lovely silver bracelet and a cheap plastic egg in which to hide it. Since he didn’t want to take the chance of another child finding the prized egg and throwing a fit when they couldn’t keep the treasure inside, a pre-extended-family backyard hunt was his answer. The bracelet was yet another extravagance and something else Sally would have to keep track of. Mary was too young to understand the value of jewelry beyond the aesthetic pleasure of sparkling metals and glittering stones. The bracelet, like the earrings Eric had bought his little girl for Christmas, would go in Sally’s jewelry box to be issued to her daughter for special occasions.

A little girl shouldn’t have to worry about losing such things.

THE KITCHEN IS TOO hot. It is always too hot.

Her mother and aunts race from oven to Frigidaire to counter to oven again. The air is honeyed with the scent of ham glaze and rich with the earthy scent of baking sweet potato casserole. Sugar cookies cool on wire racks. But the wonderful smells are tainted by the tangy stink of cigarette smoke. All of the grownups smoke, it seems. Aunt Sheila stirs the ambrosia salad. A cigarette teeters precariously on her lower lip as she scoops great spoonfuls of Cool Whip and canned fruit. Sheila’s husband sits in the corner; Henry adds nothing to the women’s babble. He smokes a cigarette of his own as he’d done in the side yard the night before, staring up through Sally’s window. With a penknife he cleans his fingernails and pauses only to ash his cigarette in the bulky glass tray on the windowsill.

Sally tries to not look at the man. Every time she does, he is looking back at her, and his eyes still look fiery, his front teeth are still too large. Henry has full, rounded cheeks, covered in a rough fur of stubble, and it’s Easter so Sally immediately thinks of bunnies—not rats the way she had the night before. Had she warmer feelings toward him, she might feel grateful to have an uncle Easter Bunny. Only Henry doesn’t look like the dapper, well-groomed Peter Rabbit from her storybook; he looks like a sickly and mean cousin to that magical creature.

“Sally,” her mother barks, “you get on out of here. I don’t want you getting muck on your dress. You go on up to your room until it’s time for church.”

“Don’t badger the girl, Millie,” Uncle Henry says, sounding uncommonly protective.

“Mind your business,” Aunt Sheila snaps at her husband.

Sally doesn’t move. Leaving the kitchen means passing by Uncle Henry, and Sally doesn’t want to get near the man.

Impatient, her mother says, “You go on, now. I won’t tolerate a disobedient child. Go on.”

Sally turns and encounters her Uncle’s sick-bunny eyes. He smiles at her and shrugs as if to say, I tried. She lowers her head, focuses on the light playing off the toes of her black shoes, and hurries out of the too-hot room. Her mother’s voice is trailing after her: “And don’t forget your basket. You won’t get many eggs if you don’t have your basket.”

She trudges through the house, avoiding the screeching, silliness, and roughhousing of her cousins. In her room, she closes the door and sits on the edge of the bed, wishing the holiday were over so the family would go away—so Henry would go away.

ERIC AND MARY WERE at the sunrise service held in St David’s Lutheran Church. Even if she hadn’t been charged with decorating the eggs, Sally wouldn’t have joined them. She hadn’t been to church in thirty years, not even for her wedding. Another point she refused to discuss with Eric, or anyone else.

She was glad her daughter enjoyed it, though.

Sally’s faith had never been allowed to fully form before it had been broken. Sometimes, she regretted her belief in religion’s impossibility. The comfort. The hope. To shed life and rise into glory. To one day know the grand plan, to feel swaddled in its calculation and reason. It would be amazing to believe that everything had a purpose, and the guiding force of all things was a being of good. Wonderful. Sally so wished she could look forward to such a revelation. But she couldn’t. Life was life. Death was death.

Her family would be gone until ten-thirty, and then Eric would bring their daughter home to begin the hunt for the things Sally had been charged with hiding: the plastic egg holding the silver bracelet and most of the eggs Sally had decorated that morning.

Most of them.

She drank from her coffee and opened the fridge and knelt down to open the crisper. There, the decorated eggs rested on a white cloth like vivid tumors. Sneering at the display, Sally placed her coffee cup on the counter and reached in for the fabric nest. Her hands shook, and she closed her eyes. Took a deep breath.

Once the eggs were on the counter, Sally transferred them to a wicker basket she had filled with green plastic confetti. Mary would use the same basket to gather the colorful atrocities later that morning. Joyful and ignorant of the ritual’s meaning, her daughter would push aside leaves and crouch behind stones…

Such a lovely, ghunt.

“Don’t,” Sally whispered, choking back a sob.

All she had to do was get through the next ten minutes. Hide the eggs and come back inside. She didn’t have to watch Mary. Didn’t have to watch the…

Ghunt.

SALLY SITS ON HER bed. Uncle Henry fills the doorway. Though not tall, he is an adult and built wide, so he looks like a wall erected between her and the rest of the house. He holds a sugar cookie out to her, but she shakes her head.

“You look pretty,” Uncle Henry says, bouncing the cookie in the air like he’s trying to lure a dog inside. “Why you have to look so pretty?”

“F-for church,” Sally says, wondering why her uncle is asking her a question when he already knows the answer. “F-for the pi-nic and the eh-ghunt.”

“For the what?” Uncle Henry asks. A terrible grin pulls at his lips.

Her uncle steps into the room, and the reek of cigarettes pours from him like skunk and Sally is all the more unsure. She can barely think, and when she tries to tell her uncle about the church’s picnic and Easter egg hunt, all that comes out is, “Ghunt.”

“A ghunt, huh?” he says. “Tell me about your ghunt.”

Now he’s really smiling, but something has changed in his eyes. They look like the eyes of a painting. Flat. Hard. Fixed on an image Sally cannot imagine. Startled by this transformation, she forgets to speak.

“Cat got your tongue?” Uncle Henry asks. He pushes the cookie into his pants pocket and draws out a pack of cigarettes, never breaking eye contact with Sally. “Such a lucky pussy,” he says. Then he chuckles and slides a Marlboro between his damp lips.

Sally doesn’t understand the filthy sentiments adrift on her uncle’s foul breath. She doesn’t want to know. Something tells her to move, to get out of the room, so she stands from the bed. Before she takes her first step, he says, “Sit back down, now. Your mama don’t tolerate a disobedient child, so you do what you’re told.”

“But, I have to get ready for church. Mama’ll be cross if I make everybody late.”

“Your mama’s already left. I told ‘em I’d get you there. Ain’t a problem. Church is just down the street. Hardly a walk at all.”

“She left?”

“You sound worried. Nothing to be worried about.”

Sally tries to speak but her throat is completely closed as if she is being strangled.

“We got things to talk about,” Henry says and closes the door.

ONE EGG WENT BENEATH the rose bush on the south edge of the lawn and another went behind the bleached stone beside the patio. Sally put another at the base of the redwood play set and then, as an afterthought, she climbed the narrow ladder and put another in the corner of the play set’s second level.

Carefully, she climbed down the ladder and began walking to the back of the property.

“SEE THAT?” UNCLE HENRY whispers, his voice dry and rasping. “Just like an egg.”

Sally can see little through the scrim of tears. She doesn’t want to see.

“And what do we do with eggs?” Uncle Henry asks.

SHE DROPPED THE EGG on the grass and stared at it, half expecting the dyed shell to emit a scream of terror, of pain. Sally took a step back and closed her eyes, pushing out the tears pooled on the lower lids.

“YOU DON’T TELL ANYONE what you did,” Uncle Henry says. “You understand that? You never tell a soul what you did to me.”

She doesn’t know what she’s done to him.

Sally stares at the floor, but it isn’t there. There are no boards, no nails. Beneath her is the surface of a swirling black lake, like a swamp filled with grease and bile and…

The fluid ripples and twists under her feet like the mouth of a maelstrom and she wishes it would pull her down and away—even drowning would be better than enduring her uncle’s stare. His voice is like pennies in a grinder, and her mind pulls away, so far away, until his words are lost in the gurgle of the whirling bog. She shivers and closes her eyes and begins to whisper a prayer to the black fluid, but then she is being shaken and drawn back from the whirlpool of filth, and she is looking into the diseased-rabbit face of her uncle and his foul breath is on her skin and his grinding-penny decree demands her oath.

“You say it,” he insists.

“I promise,” she says.

“Promise what?” Uncle Henry asks.

“Promise I’ll never say anything.”

“About what you did?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get out of here,” he tells her with a chuckle. “We don’t want you to be late for your ghunt.”

She shuffles to the door.

“Get yourself a bushel of eggs,” he says.

He laughs, and the sound is wet and horrible and far worse than his speaking voice. Sally shakes all over as if emerging from a frozen lake. She hurries to the bathroom and vomits and vomits until her body feels like it’s been crushed between two cars.

SALLY WALKED IN FROM the backyard. A single egg remained in the basket—the cracked one with the red bottom and the halo of glitter. She traced the crack from the narrow dome to the fat base with a finger. She carried the basket to the basement door, opened it, and descended the steps. At the bottom, she again regarded the egg and again touched it as if it were a good luck charm.

She was still infuriated with her mother for including Uncle Henry in the family Easter. Sally had protested vehemently, going so far as to nearly break her promise and reveal what the sick old man had done to her all of those years ago, but Sally couldn’t get the words out. She couldn’t explain about the egg.

How could her mother not see his disease? Filth and sickness covered every inch of him. He was woven from perversity. Carved from shit. How could her mother let him anywhere near her?

How could Sally let him anywhere near her daughter?

In the basement, she crossed the cold cement floor to the door to the fruit cellar and pulled it back, allowing a wedge of light to drape along the plank stairs and puddle on the mud-caked feet below.

The simple answer was: she couldn’t.

As she descended the stairs, Uncle Henry was slowly revealed to her. He lay motionless. Naked. Damaged.

The dark dirt beneath him coiled and swirled and turned darker still, and together they road the surface of the gloomy bog. Nail heads jutted from his eye sockets; they had punctured the orbs and released a greasy pale fluid along with blood to dribble down her uncle’s stubbled cheeks—the juice dried to a crust, now. His upper lip had receded in rigor, adding prominence to his bucked teeth. His jaw lay open, propped against his second chin. Blood clotted the frayed gray hairs and made dark veins in the creped skin of his chest and belly. Before the drill, she’d used the clamps, and she’d used the hammer and she’d used the pliers. She’d used the blowtorch. Between his legs was nothing but a blackened terrain that looked no more threatening than a scoop of scorched casserole. The holes in his torso—ragged, clotted, and numerous—had been bored over the course of thirty minutes. The third aperture, the one through the hairy flesh above the old man’s heart, had been the last wound her uncle had protested—though he’d done so with little more than a hiss of breath. After that one, he’d lay still. There were twelve holes total: an even dozen.

“I know what to do with an egg,” she said.

Sally knelt down and placed the decorated egg against her uncle’s prominent front teeth. She forced the shell and the tumescent content through his parted lips, and worked it back and forth, trying to insert it whole. It cracked further and broke apart. When a piece fell to his chest, Sally retrieved the yellow scrap and worked it between his cold cheek and gums. Additional bits of yellow and white began to rain from his lips.

Unsatisfied, Sally retrieved them and worked them into his gums as she’d done with the first piece. Then she took the hammer from the floor beside her. She swung it with all of her strength. The steel head smashed her uncle’s lips and shattered his buckteeth, sending them and the bulk of the egg deep into his mouth and to the rim of his throat.

“Swallow it,” she whispered.

Then she pulled back the hammer and swung again.