The Trappings of Fall

The memory spider inside my brain spins her webs, silken threads of moments. She spins a colorful October of red, orange, and yellow. The colors fall around me, they float down the street, they hide under my feet. My October web smells of leaves, campfires, and sweet candy. My October web looks like glowing Jack-o-Lantern faces, full white moons, yellow glowing eyes of a black cat in the alley. 

A sound makes my October web vibrate,rattle, and shake. It’s the sound of a child’s cry. A scream. I can’t get the scream out of my memory web. It’s stuck there, clinging to the sticky strands. Even now, 30 years later. It still shakes in my head, tugs my eyes closed, and makes my heart run. Run and run, faster until it catches the drops of sweat running from my face. Or, were those tears? That memory gossamer has detached, drifted, and I can’t catch it now to examine the details. 

I followed the scream sound. That was my first mistake. I made 8 mistakes that night. And that was my first. It took me down Whispering Lane, and pulled me closer and closer to 733. Odd house, odd numbers, and I’ve never liked odd numbers. That’s why I made 8 mistakes that night. An even number. Perhaps an odd number would have made things right. 

When I arrived at 733 Whispering Lane, I could hear the scream once again. On the old, wooden, peeling painted gray steps I counted 3 pumpkins with candle glow faces looking at me. I took a pumpkin with its gourd toothed face and I threw it into the night. To get even. That was my second mistake. 

“There you are! You’re the kid who’s been smashing all the pumpkins on the street! Now I’ve found you! Where are you? Get back here, you brat!” a man’s angry voice erupted like red hot lava from the cold black night. I ran up the stairs and counted two pumpkins. One two, even number. I sighed in relief. I ran up the stairs and in through the door to escape the wrath of the volcano man. Mistake 3. 

I leaned against the cold, unwelcoming door, and listened for the lava. It seemed to have stopped flowing. I took two deep breaths. 

From inside, 733 Whispering Lane looked abandoned in its dark and dusty silence. The full moon’s light touched a rickety brown banister. So did I. My finger traced a swirl in the dust, then I blew its gathered puff of white and gray from my fingertip. It turned to glitter in the moonlight. The floorboards above my head groaned and moaned, upset with footfalls upon their sleepy backs. Someone was upstairs. 

I looked to my feet and told them to hush. I told them to tip toe tip up the stairs without making a noise. They’d be to blame if we were caught. 

A slow succession of sixteen stairs led me to a dismally dark hallway. A single candle burned at the end, its flame like a drowning man reaching up and grasping for air, repeatedly. Air, light, air, he gasped. 

I walked invisibly as the darkness of the hallway ate me up and dissolved me into the walls, floor, ceiling. I stopped at the dying, gasping candle and squeezed the life out of it, pinching the fire and leaving black lines of its death on my thumb and pointer. Black suits me, I had thought. 

Again, the sound of a child’s scream shook my head, the house, the door that lay in front of me. I was about to make Mistake 4. 

I took the chilled brass doorknob in my sweating palm, enclosed my fingers around the metal so very slowly. I turned the knob and released an elfin squeak from the rusted relic. Pushing open the door, I went inside. 

The room unfurled itself in fourths around me. First, the unnervingly high walls. Second, the soft plush carpet. Third, the cracked glass windows shrugging away from thin veils of curtain. Fourth, the single bassinet in the center of the room. 

It was not the scream of a child, but the scream of a baby. I should have turned around, silently slipping back into the October night. But instead, I committed Mistake 5. I crept closer to the white oval lined with lace. I wondered if there would be a boy or a girl baby nestled inside. 

Mistake 6. I peered cautiously into the crib. It was not a boy baby or a girl baby. It was two babies, both babies. Four arms, four legs, and four eyes staring up into my childish face. I wanted to reach in, touch a soft fleshy face of milk-fed fat baby cheeks. As I reached in, the baby in blue screamed. The baby in pink gurgled its baby sounds. I pulled back my hand as if the scream pierced my flesh as well as my ears.

Mistake 7. I tried shushing the baby in blue, who screamed again. Wanting to soothe the screamer, I quickly scooped him up, snug in his swaddling blue blanket littered with smiling puppies. I swayed the screams out of him. Or maybe back inside him. I asked if he wanted to go with me. He didn’t have his words yet to flow from his brain to his mouth, but I think he would have said, “Yes, this house is not safe, they are not safe, it’s why I scream.” 

  I heard a sound on the stairs. 

And now Mistake 8. 

I put him back down. I ran to the hall. She was coming quickly. The mother. Dripping drops of milk from a bottle to her wrist, sleep stored in dark punches under her eyes. She didn’t see me in the darkness and her dimness of consciousness. 

First ducking in the dark, then silently crawling on fours past her, I ran into the street with the sound of the baby’s scream following close behind. Tapping my shoulder. Telling me to go back, I made a mistake. I made 8. 

The morning brought light, clarity, resolve. I set back toward 733 Whispering Lane. There were the pumpkins: one two. There were the stairs, gray and peeling. There was the mother, holding a pink baby rocking on the porch. Where was the blue baby? 

“The twin baby’s sleeping then, ma’am?” I said as I paused, hands in my pockets, rock kicked from my shoe.

“There’s no twin baby screaming,” she said. 

“I said ‘sleeping’, not ‘screaming’,” I said with a frown. 

“Sleeping…” she said, and looked to her left, looked to her yard. 

I followed her gaze to a man in the garden. Digging the cold October earth speckled with leaves. Red, yellow, orange and brown.

“Odd time for gardening, ma’am,” I said with a frown. 

“Odd, yes, indeed,” she said as she rocked her one baby. 

I left the house, the woman, and the man. I left the pink baby, but…the blue. Where was the blue? I never should have left the blue. And now, he won’t leave me. The screams never go away. I hear them in my sleep. I hear them when I’m awake. Mistake 8. I should have ran with him that night. The ghost of blue baby, the boy in the swaddle of pups, forever chasing and screaming, trapped in October.