Enchanted with the Pale
Fiction by Egon Baxter
It came to me, suddenly.
I arrived in the dark and quietly shut the car door. Turning around, my eye caught the cars rushing on the parkway. In summer, the parkway shoulders are shrouded in leafy abundance separating it from the winding and equally green county road, but now in winter the cold air, snow cover and sweeping, grand view of the bridge was glistening, dramatic and somehow soothing. I looked toward the river through the barren trees, the glittering, frozen river beneath the cliffs. The air was brilliantly clear and the lights of the city sparkled through the trees. There was a scattering of snow on the ground.
It came to me…again, “As I am now so you shall be.”
Had I heard it somewhere? A song? Why had I thought of it? Strange. “As I am now…”
I sat across from my grandmother in her living room near the glass-enclosed main entrance. I felt love here. Her home had that fine, glass-enclosed vestibule. A minor bit of grandness for the pleasing, pleasant, ivy-cloaked brick house. She had even built a fire for me in the fireplace. Something I prized. Her daughters were away together on vacation. They were in their 50s and had never married. It was odd for her to be alone. Her husband—my grandfather—had died almost five years ago and her loneliness was clear to me.
‘As I am now, so you shall be.’
After just about an hour’s visit I left my grandmother waving at me from her kitchen doorstep, telling her I would return that night. I already knew I was not going back to my place in the city. But before that, I had decided to find someone I had known as a child that I accidently found listed in a local newspaper. I had to find Farrow. Farrow, my best friend as a child who had once been so popular in grade school.
The car turned over and then started abruptly. I headed north for the state border up the river on the same parkway that seemed to graze my grandmother’s house with its lovely park. The lights of smaller cities and suburban and country towns were not as bright farther north across the grand river, but still glistened in the dark, frozen air, and the snow almost seemed to glow in the late, black night on the east bank of the Hudson.
I didn’t really know what I would find up there past the dark trees, the black, sleek pavement, the looming, low but nevertheless strangely tall mountains that seemed to embrace me even as they towered over me.
Had he been the same Farrow that I had known in sixth grade? The social, sociable, slightly odd and effeminate boy? My closest childhood friend. I wanted to find out. I needed to find out.
Because I was going to see his grave.
I had found his obituary by mistake. 39 years old. Odd to die so young. The name of the cemetery was printed in the obituary. I was also an odd one, parking on the roadside alone and then finding and penetrating the cemetery trees with my flashlight so late at night: more like a forest, not a gravesite.
It was a bit difficult due to the darkness and the dense trees shutting out moonlight, but I saw the graves radiating out near the parking area year by year, mostly, and I thought I would find his this way. And I did. But I found more. Strangeness.
A small, open meadow with a full moon cast a pale but enchanted light on an eerie scene that I seemed to hallucinate rather than see. Because I soon discovered that I was not alone. Vaporized forms in the chill air. I gasped.
A procession of corpses, I realized to my horror, those whom I knew who had died in their youth or recently, so many, too many, walking, stepping in unison: Farrow ahead, along with fellow students gone too soon: Billy, Ken, Sean, Sam, and Lauren, as well as past friends dead in the past year; Edward, Thomas and Terry, their staring, dilated eyes fixed ahead, a bizarre procession followed by the halting, broken steps of the sorry cabal of my departed co-workers…Thomas, Pat, Steven, Emily, Damon, and Donna, all pale, stepping high, their deadened eyes staring and lifeless but somehow bright and fixed at the same time, the gray pallor of their skin gleaming in the dead of night in this snow-glazed ground. So many gone! What was the point of living when those close to me were now corpses?
Knowing my despair, they paraded past my gradually fading and drowsing self, almost transparent, muttering a dull hum of something from their mouths that did not move their decomposing gray lips. I watched the repulsive beings who now showed me the path that I knew I had to find. I was beguiled and seduced by the almost glowing skin of the staggering things in a delirious, horrible enchantment.
They guided me in that small woodland graveyard beneath towering trees to the stone which read, “As I am now so you shall be” at top, followed beneath by my name on the tombstone and “As you are now, so I once was,” as Farrow himself intoned to me in a throttled groan, grasping across the dank hole in the ground ready for me. And I screamed, an impotent challenge to the dark night and their dead, beckoning, gasping faces.
But I awoke to Life, my vibrancy, suddenly, and I fled the cemetery’s decay and void and I was back to grandmother’s faster than I thought could ever be possible. The warm lights of her kitchen greeted me, with my grandmother opening the side door to the kitchen asking me if everything was alright.
“Oh, yes,” I practically screamed, “let me in, let me in,” running up to her full, warm embrace in the doorway, “hold me, hold me, please…”
BIO: Egon writes “literary,” mystery, and humorous fiction as well as ghost stories. He has lived in Boston, Athens and Amsterdam and has stopped riding horses. He has published 23 short stories thus far in addition to 11 reprints.