As she stands frozen, looking at the remains of what was once her home she weeps....She weeps not for the house that no longer stands but for the children.
All of these children surrounding her with nowhere to go. No one but her and the doctor to protect them, to provide for them, to love them.
She peers at all of those faces. She sees the weakness in their frail bodies from the journey all this way. She sees the fear as if it were a blanket smothering their souls. And she sees the last bit of hope float from their tiny forms up to the midnight sky.
She tries to steady as she stares back at the rotten pile of timber surrounded by nothing but this ebony wood. And the memories fly through her head like a swarm of bees stinging her mind.....
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My mother was outcast. Outcast by a small town full of judgement. Outcast because she was young and in love and created a being out of wedlock. She was pushed out of town to the outskirts of a deep wood in what was once known as Old Madison.
The townspeople destroyed her name. As time passed my mother became nothing more than a rumor that everyone grew to fear. My mother became nothing more than a story. A story told to children to frighten them into behaving.
“You’ll go to the woman in the wood. They’d say.
She’ll hold you tight till you drift away.
She’ll trap your spirit and curse your soul.
She’ll drown you in darkness and destroy you all.
You’ll go to the woman in the wood. They’d say.”
I was born on the first night of Autumn. My mother was alone and scared. She said that before I was born she thought she was going mad. With only her thoughts and the sounds of the wood. But that night that I came she said everything changed. She said that the world that was set out to destroy her was the world she would now conquer.
The seasons changed and I grew older. As I grew older mother grew weaker.
Mother turned ill......
I pleaded with mother to let me travel to the edge of the town. We desperately needed medicine. She grew worse with each passing day.
She forbid me to go.
“Do you not understand what I have been teaching you all of these years? Have I not taught you well? Have I not taught you of what they will do? Of who and what they are?!”
Mother had taught me well....
She burned into every inch of my mind what lie beyond the wood. She spoke of the monsters and the evil. She spoke of the ones with the twisted image. She spoke of those that could bare two faces. That the people would wear masks to disguise. That they would play tricks and lure. They would entice with treats and promises of pretty things. She taught me that people came in all forms only to subdue and capture.
This was the world that I knew of....This was the world that I believed in.....This was the world that I feared....And this was the world I found out to be all but true.....
Mother left that day.
She promised to return.
She never did.
Mother made me promise to her that I would never leave our home in the woods. That I must never go to the town no matter the circumstance.
I kept that promise for two full changes in seasons.
Autumn was on its way......
September 1922.
The seasons changed for another time. The air cooled her lungs and her breath steamed the wind. The small braille of bumps raised the hairs on her arms and her lips cracked with the bite of each exhale.
The leaves were falling now.....
The animals began to hide.....
The soft chirps of the crickets became silence....
Silence she no longer wanted to hear.
With the cold came death. And death had come for her.
She longed for her mother....
She would not survive here....
She could stay no longer. Wait no longer.....
With every step she took, every crack of the leaves beneath her feet and every thud coming from her chest, she could hear her mother’s voice piercing her ears...
“Turn around! Go back Lilith Cane! They’re out there! Watching you....They’ll catch you....lure you.....TREATS FOR TRICKS! TRICKS FOR TREATS!”
She clawed at her ears until skin was under her nails and her face streaked with blood. She ripped at her hair until it fell to her hands tangled between her chilled fingers. She bit at her tongue until the taste of silver filled her throat only to keep her from drowning the silence with the shrill screams of her madness.
She was insane.
“Stop it mother.” repeatedly hummed in her head as she pressed against her temples. “Stop it.”
She was insane.
But do insane people know they are insane?
As she opens her mouth, tearing her chapped crusted lips, to scream she is quickly hushed by the faint whisper of a lullaby. A lullaby she heard sang only once in her life. But one she would never forget.
“Hush little baby, don’t say a word, Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.....”
The world her mother has forewarned her of was found.
And it came with bright lights and fast movements, with things that spun and blended the colors. Smells that watered her mouth and confused her mind, with melodies that soothed and burst of sounds that chilled. It came with fire and smoke and shrieks of laughter.
And with all of this came the faces....
The faces burned into her childlike mind. The faces that came to comfort her in dreams and imagination.
They were twisted and pulled. They were mangled and beautiful. They were bones covered in a thin layer of flesh. They were two of one soul. They were of woman and man together as one. They were vibrant colors and strange grins. They were of cloth and stitches, small smiles and eyes of the innocent. The faces she at once loved....those of the children.
The circus came to town that September. And that September the circus came to know Lilith Cane. And Lilith Cane soon became known to all as Mother.
She looked at them wide-eyed and afraid. They looked at her the same. She had never seen such things....such faces. And they knew that she belonged. They looked at her wide-eyed because she had arrived and was damaged. They were afraid not of her but for her.
She had been alone for years and walking for days. She was a thin pallet of skin covering knots of bone. Her hair only in patches now. Her cheeks and ears torn with dried lines of red. Her clothes barely there, no shoes on her feet. White scabbed lips parted to show a mouth full of crimson and the stench of a soul already taken.
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She didn’t speak for weeks. We didn’t know if she could speak at all. She was so damaged. She cowered at every movement. She flinched at every sound. We all tried to comfort her. We all watched over her. It was as if we could feel her. Feel her inside our hearts, our souls. Feel her inside our minds. It was as if we could hear her speaking through those wide-eyes that never rested. Wide-eyes that were always searching....looking. Moving left to right, right to left. So dark, as if no light had ever touched them. We all cared for her. We all loved her as if from first sight.
The only time she seemed to ease was when the doctor came........
Dr. Steamcap came to be with us twenty years before Mother had arrived. He stayed with us for twenty six years. We never knew what or why Mother was so drawn and attached to Dr. Steamcap but she was. We all always thought it was because he took care of the children. However, it never made perfect sense because she was soothed by his presence before she knew of him fixing the children.
When Dr. Steamcap was found by us all those years ago, he was lost just like so many of us.
In our magical mysterious ways we have all came to be found. What brought us together, what force pushing our spirits, we may never truly understand.
Dr. Steamcap had practiced medicine for several years before he arrived at our circus. A doctor of Osteopathic Medicine. He was an outstanding doctor whom had never lost a patient. People came from around the globe to be treated by Dr. Steamcap. His conduct was strictly by the book. He obsessed for what he learned and for what he learned he lived by.
That was his ways until the time came to operate on a young boy of the age eleven. Nearing the end of the operation things took a turn for the worse.
The boy’s death forever remained a mystery.
The doctor became mad with the loss of the young boy. The boy stayed forever in his thoughts. Haunting and stealing away every inch of his sanity. The doctor never ate....he never slept....he only searched. He just replayed it over and over. Step by step. Again and again there was nothing. Nothing he could have changed. Nothing he could have done better. Nothing more he could have learned. Nothing. He was lost. Damaged. Mad.
Slowly everyone turned their eyes from Dr. Steamcap. Slowly he was shunned from the world of medicine. He buried himself in his own research. He stayed forgotten.
It wasn’t until we stumbled upon Dr. Steamcap that he broke free from his burden.
He sat alone staring at the flow of a whispering river. It was as if her were trapped there. Frozen in his own self. He had stood so long that his feet had sunk down into the chilled soil so that only the laces of his boots could be seen. He shivered as if he were a beaten animal. He was dressed in a sleek black suit. His arms and legs seemed stretched to the depths of hell. He was as tall as the heavens and you could see his fight with both twisting through his insides. He was in a war within himself.
We brought him into our family. He helped us all. He fixed what was broken. He mended what was torn. He stitched the seams that had come undone.
The children became his passion. His purpose.
We took in the children that nobody wanted. The lost. The abandoned. The children that had no family. Nowhere to go. The children that no one would love. We gave them a home. We gave them family. When the doctor came he gave them hope........
Dr. Steamcap listened to the children. He listened to every word....every breath. Every painstaking cry. He listened as they tore themselves apart. Screaming that they were ugly and mangled, that they were damaged and disfigured, that they were hideous and offensive. That they were freaks......
But they were his freaks.....
His little innocent oddities....
He labored day and night. One by one he restored what was fractured. He sewed the unfinished, he tacked the neglected. He hemmed and seamed the disregarded and ignored. He created something out of each and every one of the pure.
He fixed them.....
And what he had fought so hard to fix....others tried to break....Others tried to steal and unravel his work.....
And for that they would pay......
They. Would. Pay.
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October 1928.
The smell of popcorn and sawdust filled the air. The vivid hues blazed through the sable sky. The howl of hysterics rang through as the rapture took over the company that had filled our tents. The visitors filled our booths, they overflowed the grounds. They packed in like cattle, arriving in droves. They pushed and shoved their way through one another with nothing but delight and grins from ear to ear beaming across their faces.
Laughter shinned through our circus that night as if it were a dream.....
An ageless spectacle adorn by all.....
It was then that the wind began to dance. A frigid mist swept through to cover us all. The sky became a playground of luminescence.
A storm was coming....
The thunder made the earth move beneath our feet. As the resonant grumble below and above shuddered through our bodies, we felt trapped in ourselves. All of us frantically peering to one another....fear....confusion....
Something was wrong......
Lightning crashed down upon us like a thousand swords. Piercing....
We saw the smoke.....
Lightning struck a small tent hidden along the circus edge covered by trees and undergrowth. The faint wails and bellows of the children calling to us...they were terrified.
Their cries silenced every life. Every breath suspended in air.
The abrupt snap back into our physical existence became something of nightmares. The rupture of panic was immense. All any of us could do was flow toward the pleas for rescue. It was as if we were a murder of crows answering to distress calls.