Eulogy

by J.R. Godwin

Disclaimer: "Labyrinth" belongs to Jim Henson & Co. There's no money being made off of this. A creative spark hit one day while taking a break from "Fledgling", so you can consider this a (much shorter) side project.

Rating: T

HOGGLE: You know your problem? You take too many things for granted. Take this Labyrinth: even if you get to the center, you'll never get out again.

-Labyrinth (1986)

"When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time - the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes - when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever - there comes another day, and another specifically missing part."

-John Irving

"Where there's a labyrinth, there's a Minotaur, and vice versa! I can't imagine a decent maze that would be caught dead without a Minotaur."

-Catherine M. Valente

0.

When I was ten, I broke my arm falling from a window. Doc Bridges said I was a lucky bastard.

Well, he didn't say it exactly like that, because I was a kid, but you could see it in his eyes. Doc Bridges was a Marine at the Fall of Saigon, the largest helicopter evacuation in history. The guy had seen some wild shit.

So when he sternly told me, "You're a lucky young man", I knew he was just being professional. What he meant to say was: You're a lucky little sonofabitch.

I'd fallen from the third floor of the Taylor House, an abandoned colonial mansion on the edge of town. Nobody had lived in the place for seventy years, not since the last tenant hanged himself in a closet after losing everything in the Crash of '29. Since then, part of the roof had caved in, and in the 1960's an unknown arsonist destroyed the barn in a fire.

Kids said the place was haunted, that Ezekiel Taylor still stalked the halls, ranting about his lost fortune. Town legend said Ezekiel made his millions through a pact with the devil that would've made Faust blush. Nobody knew where this story came from, and schoolteachers yelled at you if they heard you repeat it. The story had no discernible origin, but everyone retold it with the relish of someone who wouldn't recognize the truth if it bit them in the ass.

Breaking into the House became a rite of passage, no matter how many extra patrols the cops did around the place - and it was always called "the House". For a bunch of kids who claimed not to be scared of anything, we couldn't bring ourselves to call the place by its full name. I'm sure the boogeyman has a proper name, too, but nobody ever wants to use it.

On the day Eddie Pannachio dared me to go into the House, I almost pissed myself but said yes because honor was on the line. I didn't see any ghosts inside, just a lot of spiders and decayed furniture, and an owl that had made a nest out of a clock. Rainwater had gotten in through the collapsed roof and eaten away wallpaper and wood like maggots on a corpse.

The place spooked me good ... not because of any real spooks but because of how sad it was. People had lived and loved here, and all that remained were vestiges of their lives: broken toys and old shoes and magazine stacks melted into paper bricks from the rain. A monument to a memory. A living tomb.

My family had a bedroom at home that was like this place.

Suddenly, Eddie yelled from outside that the cops were coming, so I booked it from the hallway to a bathroom, where I could escape into the back yard unnoticed. Unfortunately I slipped on my way out the window and broke my arm on the brick walk below. Officer James said if I'd fallen an inch to the left, I'd have impaled myself on the iron fence and would be talking to Saint Peter instead of him.

Mom and Dad were pissed. I still feel bad about scaring them like that. After all, I was the only kid they had left.

My accident at the House changed my view of ghosts.

I no longer believed in the spooky chain-rattling phantom shit. The movies say ghosts are malevolent spirits itching to do humanity wrong. They lie in wait in derelict buildings, overgrown graveyards, dusty basements. And when unleashed, they possess people and overturn houses.

Insert the best pyrotechnics money can buy, and you've got a blockbuster.

Nobody talks about the other kind of ghosts. They're not spooks but the memories of people we've loved and lost, people who now only exist on Kodak paper and in the shadows of our memories. No part of your life is sacrosanct. Time is medicine for many things, but not for ghosts. They invade every corner of your life and mold it to their own ends.

Where would you be without your ghosts? You'll never know. They shape your life so much that it's impossible to guess. You've come to define your life by a particular void in it.

Our instructors made us read poetry at the military academy. The poetry was the only good thing about that school, and in a library book with a broken spine and pages roughened by damp and cigarette burns, I discovered this passage: "Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell."

Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote that, at the dawn of the 20th century. She was the first woman to win a Pulitzer for poetry.

Jesus, this lady gets it, I thought. It was the first time I can ever recall feeling moved by anything I read in school. Too bad I was expelled a week later. I was sixteen. I enlisted the following year. Figured I'd make something of myself, since school had failed to.

Edna was spot on, though. Ghosts aren't movie monsters. They're the holes in our lives where people used to be.

With all that in mind, let me tell you a horror story. There's no Hollywood magic in it. But as with many horror stories, mine begins with a nightmare.