Image by Barbara A Lane from Pixabay
The awareness of the box's contents dripped slowly in Joelle's mind, coagulating like a graceless Rorschach's blot. Bones. Tiny tapered bones, standing out against the mahogany bottom.
The unusual item jolted on the worn chair, reacting to the vibrations of the old diesel-powered train. The convoy, the last of his lineage, still fulfilled its duty along the Brașov-Sighișoara route allowing students to return to their homes every weekend. To the rhythm of joints and sleepers, the whiteness of the remains continued to dance tremulously before the eyes of the young woman as the frames of her glasses slipped slowly from her nose.
In a tinkling clink of bracelets, the student closed the lid of the box and moved away as far as possible from it, crushing herself against the seat's padding. The lazy air of the air conditioner stuck to the bottom of her dry throat an acrid plastic taste.
And then she saw him. The old passenger had returned and was staring at her through the windows that led from the corridor of the car to the cabin. She listened to her own scream erupting and fill the cramped cab.
"I didn't want to scare you, young lady."
"N-not scared. No worries, sir." Somehow, Joelle managed to gather the few polite words her manners demanded. She could not have said how long he had been watching and if he had seen where curiosity had taken her. The glasses, temples up in the air, laid on the seat beside her.
The old man was tall and lanky, his burnished skin resembled the ancient scales of a dragon. Dressed in work trousers and a raw cotton shirt, he gave the impression of being one of those peasants whose families had inhabited the Carpathians for centuries.
Joelle's gaze passed involuntarily from the man to the funeral urn disguised as a biscuit tin: the representation of a merry-go-round in a lacquered colored wood and graceful workmanship. The children were swirling with their bent busts, perhaps because of the speed of the carousel. Their mouths were wide open and their hands clung to the poles skewering the horses. With a lump in her throat, she remembered the fleeting memory of just a few hours before, when a train was huffing at the central station and a gentle old man asked her help because he couldn't open the cabin door. She felt like something ruined down from her lungs to her guts.
"I see that you like my craft" In the silence, she could detect the old man's fingers caressing the box inlays.
"It's adorable. A gift for a grandchild?" Joelle realized only now that the object was his only baggage. In the warm twilight, the colors of lacquered wood seemed even more lively. The conifers thickened on the sides of the train, sliding quickly to the edges of her field of vision.
"Oh. A gift, says the young lady. Like a toy, perhaps?" The old man's eyes were two black bottomless pits. His gaze had slowly become vitreous like that of a deep-water fish, yet at the same time penetrating.
"Yes, a toy. I like how you see it, miss." The passenger continued, his voice getting thinner.
Only then, Joelle realized where they were heading: the train had just passed the old mill and would soon pass through the tunnels beneath the mountain.
"You may have noticed how I depicted all these children. Observe, miss, between a horse and the other: they are not alone." By pronouncing the last vowel, which he abnormally prolonged, his voice tone had become a slow and drawling rattle.
It was still too early for the wagons' lights to turn on and the tunnels were preparing to swallow the convoy.
A sound of nails carving into the wood tore the thoughts of the young student.
Joelle shivered as the mouth of the tunnel, a gaping maw of blackness, grew larger with each passing second. She stared through the window. An ocher smear of mud weaved a pattern from flood run-off down the side of the mountain like a Rorschach's blot. It warped from a Bat into a cruel raptor diving from the hillside, until finally the pattern resolved into a face, lean and gaunt.
The train hit the tunnel. Blackness descended just as she looked back at the old man's grinning face. Needle teeth protruded from grey scaly skin, a maw to swallow the last vestige of twilight from the train. The scream died in her throat, muffled from sheer terror.
The monkey chased the weasel
The monkey thought 'twas all in fun
Pop! goes the weasel”
Joelle chased her cousin Cristian around the rhododendron. His mousy brown hair ruffled from forcing his way through the hawthorn hedge into the woods at the back of her aunt’s garden earlier. In the brown gloaming of the canopy among the woody smell of rot and woodlice, they had found the corpse. The deer had been a mess of protruding bone and garish red of sinew where wolves had rent the doe.
“You’re the monkey.” She laughed as she shook off the memory, pointing at Cristian’s ruffled hair and disheveled waistcoat.
“Monkey, monkey.” She teased and then shrieked as he reversed the chase, hands waving at his arm pits, screeching like a chimp in the forest.
As she careened around the far side of the rhododendron her stomach lurched and silence descended like a burial shroud. Pushing through the hawthorn hedge at the back of the garden a ripped and ravaged face emerged. Thorns pierced eyes like ripe apples as the doe emerged stumbling on broken legs. It turned to look at Joelle, dead eyes misting into black bottomless pits.
Needle teeth gleamed as it opened its bile flecked mouth and a voice as dry as parchment froze her to the spot.
“Pop goes the weasel.”
The blackness of the tunnel. The rhythmic rattling of train on track and the hissing breath of the old man near her ear. Joelle’s blood was ice, she sat paralyzed, tongue lolling in her mouth.
A penny for a needle
That's the way the money goes
Pop! goes the weasel.”
Joelle looked at her mother singing her favourite song as she wrapped the thread around her finger. The pin, the instrument of torture clasped between her lips.
“It’s only a splinter darling. Hush up now crying and look away. If you don’t look it won’t hurt as much and it will be out before you can say, pop goes the weasel.” She reached down with her finger and pushed gently on Joelle’s nose.
“Now look away sweetpea.”
Joelle did as her mother asked. The momentary thought that her mother was a cruel person doing this out of malice lingered like the expectation in her belly. The sting of the pin in her finger shocked her and she tried to pull her hand away but it was held, as if in a vice.
She turned betrayed eyes on her mother and bile flooded her throat in horror as her gurgling scream rent the air. Her face resembled a corpse, grey flesh hanging in strips around lipless mouth. One long cruel fingernail pierced her finger like a frankfurter on a stick.
The abysmal darkness. The rhythm of train on track like a sickening pulse. Her blood still ice, as long fingernails caressed her throat
Half a pound of treacle
Mix it up and make it nice
Pop! goes the weasel.”
Joelle weaved through the crowds, leading the carnival boy a merry chase as she sung.
She liked him, well she thought she did. The way his hair fell in his eyes and that peacock strut, all raised new feelings that were both exciting yet scary.
She rounded the candyfloss store and spotted a merry-go-round. Golden lights illuminated this spinning flare of crimson and blue. Horses flew past, bedecked with shimmering bridles and silk flowing from white tails. Children whooped and shrieked in joy as it picked up speed before slowly coming to a halt. She started toward it after checking her pockets for the required Leu.
An arm grasped her roughly. The carnival boy pulled her toward him but she pushed him away.
“I’m going on the merry-go-round.” She pointed, smiling at him. “You can join me if you want.”
“That’s for kids.” He pushed his hair from his eyes looking at her sulkily. Joelle decided she wasn’t so keen on this rough boy. Welts were already raising red on her arm where he’d grabbed her.
“Suit yourself.” She ran and payed the man, entering the maze of horses. She jumped on one and noticed that the boy had followed, seating himself on the horse behind. She turned and grinned for the sheer joy of the carnival. Music blared and the horses started their gallop.
The horses picked up speed and the world whirled around her fading into a blur of faces. Colour flashed past and the smears of pink candyfloss motion. A strange sound mingled with the tinny music of the ride.
Cer-chunk, cer-chunk, cer-chunk.
It settled into her soul causing a deep and immediate panic. Sickness flooded through her as the intensity of this noise grew and she glanced back at the boy. He grinned wildly, seeming to have lost all his previous distain for the merry-go-round.
Joelle’s heart leaped into her mouth as four long claws burst from his chest in a shower of blood which misted her face. A shape rose up behind him and as she looked around she saw that all of the children lay lolling in their saddles similarly pierced. Twenty versions of the demon stared at her, black eyes watching as the children choked on their own blood.
A wide smile split its face as a lizard like tongue flicked around needle teeth.
Suddenly, Joelle felt her chest rupture as the demon appeared behind her claws twisting her insides as he stared right into her eyes. It whispered a chant through the mix of fading colour. Smears of horses stretched endlessly away into a blackness so deep that even sleep couldn’t compare.
and bones to build an easel
a few keepsakes in my biscuit box
Pop! goes the weasel.”
The train bloomed into light as it emerged from the tunnel. Andrei walked into the eerily quiet cabin.
“Tickets please.”
He paced along the row of seats confused, sure that there were passengers in this cabin when he’d passed through last.
On the final seat there lay a strange biscuit tin, lid half open. Carved in its lid was a fairground scene, with a merry-go-round at the center. Inside, some small bones rattled around a large golden bracelet which gleamed in the last fading light of the twilight’s death.
The end.
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