Tales Around the Jack O'Lantern (3 page)

“The next morning, when I got off shift, I went onto the
computer,” Sean added. “And sure enough, Augustus Bates had been the City
Sexton during the time the old City Cemetery had been closed down.”

“Did you ever see him again?” Mary asked.

“A couple of times I thought I caught a glimpse of him,” he
admitted. “And I thought he waved at me. But it was always dark, so I guess I
could have imagined it.”

“But you don’t think so, do you?” Mary asked.

Sean paused for a moment and then shook his head. “No, I
think what I saw was real,” he said. “I never thought I’d actually believe in
ghosts. But there it is.”

Mary nodded. “Yes, there it is,” she repeated. “And I never
thought I would believe in ghosts either. But sometimes—”

She looked over at her mother and smiled shyly. “So what is
the statute of limitations on not quite telling your parents the truth?”

Margaret studied her daughter for a moment and then sighed
loudly. “Seeing that it’s Halloween, you have one free pass,” she replied.

“Thank you, Ma,” Mary said with a slight nod of her head.
“So, let me tell you how I came to believe in ghosts.”

The noon bell had just rung and the young girl stood in the
doorway of her sixth-grade classroom watching the flurry of students, all dressed
in the green and blue plaid of their Catholic school uniforms, rush towards the
staircase that led to the lunch room on the ground level. She waited until
their noise had died down before she pushed herself off the door jamb and made
her way downstairs to eat her own lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwich,
homemade cookies, carrot sticks and ranch dip that her mother had lovingly
prepared.

“How are you this morning, dear?”

Mary paused to smile at the elderly nun coming from one of
the rooms at the end of the hall.
 
It had
become a daily occurrence for Mary to greet the woman every school day.

“I’m fine, Sister,” she replied. “How are you?”

With a twinkle in her aging blue eyes the Sister would
always smile at Mary and repeat the same phrase. “It’s always a good day when
you get to meet a friend. Have a good lunch, dear.”

With a smile on her face, Mary would climb down the stairs
to the lunchroom and wait in line to buy a carton of milk before she found an
empty spot at one of the tables in the corner of the room.

But today was different.
 
Once the milk was purchased, someone across the room called her name.
“Mary! Mary O’Reilly! Come here and sit with us.”

Mary looked over to see Janice Heppner standing at a table
on the other side of the room, waving at her.
 
Janice and her friends had been in Mary’s class since first grade.
 
Even then there had been a distinct
separation of the girls who would be popular and the ones who wouldn’t.
 
Even back then Mary was one of the girls who
ate alone and played alone at recess. She looked at the other girls at the table;
their heads all turned in her direction and wondered if she had to strength to
just walk away.

No.
 
She had to admit
that a part of her dearly wanted to be one of them.
 
So, curiosity and peer pressure forced her
feet to move her from the quiet side of the lunchroom to the table where Janice
and her friends sat.
 
They slid over and
opened up a spot for her at the end of the bench.
 
Putting her sack and milk down in front of
her spot, Mary sat down.

“Hi Mary,” Janice gushed. “Guess what? I’m having a
Halloween party on Friday night.”

Mary
unwrapped
the plastic from
around her sandwich and picked up half. “That’s nice,” she replied before
biting into it.

“Don’t you want to know
who’s
coming?” Janice asked.

Knowing that her name would not be on the list, Mary
shrugged. “Sure,” she said, and bit down again.

“Everyone
who’s
cool is coming,”
Janice said.

Yes,
Mary thought,
that would leave me out.

“We were all thinking that it would be nice if you could
come,” Janice added.

Mary nearly choked on her next bite of sandwich. “Me?” she
coughed.

Janice nodded her head. “Yes, and maybe your brothers could
come with you.”

Ah, here was the real
purpose for the invitation
, Mary sighed. Her twin brothers, Art and Tom,
were several years older than she and they were star athletes at the high
school.
 
If Janice could get them to come
to her party, she would have been in the same league as the high school popular
girls.

“Yeah, well, they don’t go to parties much,” Mary hedged.
“They mostly practice and work out.”

“But
it’s
Halloween night,” Janice
argued. “There wouldn’t be any work outs on Halloween.”

She had a point,
Mary thought.
 
However, she couldn’t come
up with a polite way to tell Janice that her brothers wouldn’t be seen dead at
a middle-school girl’s party. “Well, I’ll ask them and see if they want to
come,” she finally said.

The girls around the table burst into excited chatter about
the twins, taking Mary’s polite response as sure thing.
 
Didn’t any of these girls have brothers?
 
Didn’t they know the last thing older
brothers wanted to do was anything that made their younger sister happy?
 
Sighing, she took another bite of her sandwich,
which now tasted a little like sawdust, and tried to keep a smile on her face.

“Oh,” Janice announced as a polite afterthought. “Even if
they can’t, you know, come to my party.
 
If you want to, you can just come by yourself.”

#
  
#
  
#

Why is it
, Mary
wondered nervously as she stared at her costume in the mirror on Friday
evening,
that when you want time to fly
by it never does? But when you want it to just stand still, it flies by?

She was dressed as witch; black stockings, black tulle skirt
that went to her knees, a black turtleneck and a witch’s hat.
 
Her brown hair had been caught back in a bun
and she actually had been allowed to wear make-up.
 
Not the kind that made you look like a clown,
but real make-up that accented your eyes and made your cheeks
appear
more distinct and rosy.
 
She felt older and a little braver than
normal, she felt sophisticated.
 
The
crowning accessory to her costume was the glittering, black domino mask.
 
It was just beautiful in its simplicity;
silver glitter and sparkling beads outlining the edges and the eye holes. It
covered enough of her face that she was disguised.

“Mary, you need to hurry or you’ll be late to the party,”
her mother called up the stairs.

She sighed. Her mother had been more excited than she was
when Mary had told her about the invitation.
 
She had gone shopping the next day to put together a costume that would
make her daughter feel comfortable in the midst of the other girls.

“Coming,” Mary called back.
 
She slipped her jean jacket over her costume and jogged down the stairs.

“Oh, no, it’s a lovely night. It’s Indian summer,” her
mother said, sliding the jacket from Mary’s shoulders. “You won’t
be needing
that.”

“But Mom, I’m more comfortable wearing it,” Mary complained.

“Hiding inside it, I’d say,” Margaret replied, with a
no-nonsense look on her face. “You go to the party and have fun. You’ll be the
belle of the ball.”

“Fine.
Thanks, Mom,” Mary sighed,
reaching up and giving her mother a kiss on the cheek. “I won’t be too late.”

“Just have fun, that’s all that matters,” her mother
replied.

The walk to Janice’s house was actually fun.
 
Young trick-or-treaters lined the sidewalks,
their bags heavy with their candy and their eager faces ready for more houses
and more doorbells to ring.
 
They dashed
from house to house as tired parents waited on the sidewalks, calling to their
children and reminding them to say thank you as the treats were dispersed.
 
Mary grinned, it wasn’t that long ago that
she was one of the children on the doorstops, bag held out eagerly, looking for
her favorite treats.
 
She really wished
she was still that age.

She finally reached Janice’s house.
 
Janice’s dad was a doctor and their house was
huge.
 
It was the last house before the
forest preserve on Foster Avenue and took up several city lots.
 
The front lawn was decorated with orange
pumpkin lights, an animated coffin and trees filled with hanging ghosts.
 
White luminaries lined the sidewalk that led
to the front porch and the deck on the side of the house.

With a sigh, Mary started down the sidewalk towards the house.
Maybe I shouldn’t be so negative,
she
thought.
I might have a good time.
 
I might discover that I do have something in
common with these girls.
 
They might
decide they like me and want me to hang out with them.

“She’s coming, but her brothers aren’t?” the loud voice
drifted towards Mary from over the deck rail. “Uh, that’s so lame. We should
have known she would ruin things.”

Mary froze.

“Well, it won’t be that bad,” another voice said and then
there was a pause, followed by a giggle. “Okay, yes, it will.”

“Well, we don’t have to be nice to her,” the first voice
laughed. “We can just sit her down in the corner and give her some food.
 
Just like in the
lunchroom.”

The resounding laughter caused a pit in the middle of Mary’s
stomach, she felt like she was going to get sick right there on the front lawn.
Oh, yeah, that will make my popularity
rise at school,
she thought bitterly.
There
goes lunch-corner puke girl.

Without a second thought, she turned around and walked away,
not aware of where she was going or the tears sliding down her cheeks.
 
She had walked for several minutes before she
realized she was following a path through the forest preserve.
 
She stopped, wiped the moisture from her face
and looked around.
 
The woods were quiet
and the air smelled like moist dirt, it seemed to buoy her spirits.
 
She took several deep breaths and reminded
herself that she knew what those girls were like, so they just lived up to her
expectations.

Now, her only question was what to do with the rest of her
evening.
 
She knew if she arrived home
early her mother would find out what happened and Margaret Mary Elizabeth
O’Reilly would be marching down the street, into Janice’s house and demand an
apology from all of the girls present. That would be mortifying.

Then a thought occurred to her that had her standing up
straight.
 
The Lost Cemetery!

She’d heard stories about the old cemetery that was hidden
in the corner of
LaBagh
Woods.
 
Her brothers spoke about seeing floating
balls of light and hearing voices, but they had always told her she was too
young and she would get frightened. She straightened her shoulders and took a
deep breath.
 
Well, she wasn’t too young
tonight.
 
And she would earn a little
respect when word got out that instead of going to a stupid party; she spent
Halloween in the Lost Cemetery.

She ran down the path towards the wrought iron fence that
separated the woods from its neighbor, Montrose Cemetery.
 
The trees on her side of the fence formed a
line a few feet away from the fence, creating a canopy of bare branches above
and a carpet of dried leaves below.
 
The
lights from the cemetery were enough to guide her along the way without
tripping.

Finally, she came to the old chain-link fence at the far end
of the park.
 
A little way beyond the
fence was the bank of the Chicago River and just before the river, in an
overgrown clearing was the cemetery.
 
Mary followed the chain-link fence until she found the hole her brothers
had told her about.
 
She pushed through
it, catching her stockings on a sharp piece of link and snagging them, but
continued on into the underbrush.

The woods were darker here and she wished she had thought to
bring a flashlight. But there was a full moon and most of the tree branches
were bare, so she had enough light to see.
 
The narrow path to the old cemetery was obvious, stamped down vegetation
and bare dirt marked the way through the trees and brush.
 

As she moved forward, her heart beat with anticipation.
 
Would she see floating lights or hear the
voices of those who had passed away?
 

She slowed her pace as she entered the overgrown woods.
 
Maybe
this wasn’t such a great idea,
she thought, thinking about all of the scary
movies she had ever seen.
This is the
kind of place where people are killed and no one ever finds out what happened
to them.

She swallowed nervously and slowly looked around.
 
The forest separated her from
everything.
 
She couldn’t even hear the
traffic from Foster Avenue any more.

Could anyone hear me
scream?

A noise ahead of her made her jump and caused her heart to
race.
 
Someone was coming.
 
The sound of unruly male laughter drifted
down the path and slurred voices accompanied a litany of words she was not
allowed to use.