Hell Is Empty

Hell Is Empty

Somewhere in Alberta, close to the southern Saskatchewan border, is Empty. The old road is gone; it's grown over. Just outside a shrinking clearing is a wood sign that barely reads Empty Alberta: Full of heart. That sign is part of the bush now whether the bush wants it or not. People don't see Empty. It isn't on any maps. The satellite images look as though somebody's blurred them out. Empty, Alberta is a place that wants to be forgotten.

Southeast of Dunnage, the last town on Township 182, deep in the bush and over the foothills of the dried-up countryside, there's an abandoned township with old forgotten homesteads. There's a few of them; gray wood and broken windows, ancient, rusted nails. There's a dilapidated church with a collapsed steeple that God hasn't been to for a very long time. And north of what was once a busy lane is the skeleton of an old schoolhouse. That building is a bad place. Nothing ever goes there. Not a single thing. The wind doesn't even venture in. Outside there's a thread of clearing that seems to call. It's not a path, but maybe it was a hundred years ago. If you were standing in that back doorway on that sunken old porch you would know. It calls you away from this bad place into a worse one. It's something you feel more than see. But it's there. It's cold and it has the reek of heartache.

Empty is heartache. It's Hell.

Hell is Empty.

One morning in the early summer of 1913 Nucky met Tom out on the lane at the end of his path. He was excited and stuttering about a surprise Madame Barthe had for the class today.

"I hope it's a-a-apple c-cake. Last night I went to her place and filled a large b-basin from the p-pump for her to wash apples in... She told me there would be a surprise for us today," Nucky said, looking up at the schoolhouse.

The day was still and getting warm. It was a beautiful day.

"Yeah, you think?"

"Well..." He furrowed his brow in concentration. "I couldn't give a d-damn what it is, as long as it isn't a t-t-test."

They shared a laugh and started walking up the lane, but as they were getting closer to school Tom realized there was a different feeling in the air today, one he couldn't put his finger on before it started slipping away. He looked up the road and watched Judy's skirt bounce as she went up the stairs into the school, a flower tucked into her hair. Nucky was doing simple math under his breath and gently wringing his hands like he would often do.

As they walked and that feeling of uncertainty faded, Tom worked out what it must have been. When Nucky was having trouble with something Tom felt it too, and in some ways he liked feeling it. He liked that he could explain something, or even just say a few words, and it would make Nucky more comfortable.

Tom knew they were a little late, but feeling the weight of whatever seemed to be bothering Nucky, he paused anyway.

"Nuck?"

Nucky looked down at Tom, stilled his hands and quit his math.

"What's going on? You okay?"

He furrowed his brow again and looked serious. Tom thought he looked funny when he concentrated like that.

"I dunno. I just wonder 'bout the s-surprise," he smiled. "I really h-hope it's apple cake."

As they stepped up to the door, they could hear the class buzzing with excitement. Inside the children were laughing and visiting. Madame Barthe stood up front, in a white dress, her black hair put up carelessly. The classroom smelled faintly of lavender and wood and her pipe tobacco. Judy looked up at Tom and smiled as he walked past her to his desk, playing with the flower in her hair. Nucky had stopped with the math and was taking in the vibrant feeling of the classroom.

"Children." Madame cooed. "Children, you will sit down now."

"Today will be a very special day. Throughout the morning, we will all go out into the back to see something wonderful. It is something beautiful that most people don't get to see anymore."

She looked at the guitar in the corner and smiled to herself.

"I haven't found one of these since I was a little girl in Belgium."

She brought her smiling gaze back up to the children.

"So today you will get to see this magnificent thing. It is a beautiful day for me to share this with you."

She broke from her reminiscent gaze and, still smiling, perked up.

"I will have everybody read aloud from the bible at the front of the class, starting with Michael. After you have read as many verses as years you have lived, you will quietly come out back to me and I will show you what I have found. We must come one at a time to make sure we don't frighten it, and you must keep quiet. If you try to peek out back, Nucky will let me know and I will have you write one page of the dictionary on the chalkboard."

"Michael will come up here, read, then go outside, followed by Doris and so forth down the row. Then back up to the front of the next row and do the same until everybody has finished and has been introduced to this wonderful surprise. Nucky, you will count to ten ten times after Tom has read the bible and closed the door, and then you will come out back too. Do you understand?"

Nucky smiled and nodded. He loved the responsibility of making sure the other students followed Madame's rule. He, like the rest of the students, loved her. His job as guard was more of a gift than a necessity. None of them would've disobeyed her. She had made them feel like they were her own children, and the schoolhouse had made them all brothers and sisters.

"You all must remain calm and quiet as you come around the back of the school."

She looked around the room as she stood in the doorway. Then she turned outside and softly closed the door. Her footsteps were faint as they rounded the house to the back porch. Nuck could hear her softly humming.

Michael walked up to the front of the classroom and read through the first eight verses, then set the book down for Doris and beamed as he got to take the first look at Madame Barthe's surprise.

Over the next little while child after child happily read their verses, then laid the bible down and went outside. John Neilson was the last student before Tom, and even though he had the most verses to read he finished them quickly. Madame Barthe had been helping him with his reading after school, and it had improved greatly this year. He gently set down the bible and smiled at Tom and Nucky.

"The suspense has gotta be killin ya!"

Tom and Nucky agreed. Then John was outside, quietly closing the door behind him.

"Well, I'm pretty sure it's not apple cake," Tom said to Nucky. "But what beautiful thing would you find in Belgium and in Canada?"

Nucky didn't know.

"When she t-told us to be quiet so we don't scare it, I guessed it was a b-b-bird."

Tom smiled, looked at Judy's empty desk and then at Nucky, before he picked up the bible and began to read.

He finished with Genesis 4:8.

"And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him."

Tom set the bible down and looked at Nucky. Nucky was quietly doing math and pulling his ear. Tom felt that feeling again, but he also felt powerless to help. It was heavy for a ten-year-old, but had gotten lighter since the first time his heart had felt like this. Was Nucky apprehensive about staying alone? Maybe. He didn't know why he felt the urge to relieve Nuck’s unease so bad, it was just something pure in his unadulterated soul. Tom’s ma was a nurse and had always been so quick to ease the pain of others. This disposition modeled for him had worked the fibers of empathy deep into his heart.

As he sat there feeling helpless his young mind wandered to Judy's face. He imagined that he had put the flower in her hair that he noticed earlier. Then he thought about the surprise outside and left the daydreams in his head to come back to the classroom. That surprise in the back, Madame Barthe had assured them, was something wonderful to see. He smiled wanly at Nuck and without saying anything stepped through the open door into the warm outside before he softly closed it behind him.

Nucky sat alone in the classroom.

He listened hard through the wall but heard nothing, not even Madame's humming or the children stirring outside. He shuffled to the front and counted to ten, ten times, marking each round in chalk. When he finished, he set the chalk down and headed for the door.

He cracked the door open and the sun spilled through the jamb. Motes of dust danced lazily in the beam. It was beautiful. The old guitar in the corner had a sliver of light cutting across the strings, and Nucky noticed one was missing. Or was it? She had plucked the strings and sung softly on the porch and in the class countless times, but now he couldn't remember if one tuning peg had been unstrung before or not. He looked back at the swirling dust and wondered about the surprise again. Opening the door wider the warmth lit his face up; he listened for the excitement of the other children, but the air was still and everything was quiet. He stepped out and closed the door a little too hard, cursing himself for making noise.

The sun shone brightly on the big red water pump he had used to fill the basin for Madame yesterday. The trees were green and full, the sky a flawless blue. Then he counted the soft, uneven sound of his leather soles on the boardwalk as he headed for the back.

He came around the corner of the schoolhouse and froze. Madame Barthe's beautiful dress was stained deep vermilion. The basin sat at her feet, full of blood. All around her were handprints, small bloody handprints. She was sitting in her rocking chair, smoking her pipe, staring thoughtfully into the bush out back. Red drops glistened in her now dirty, gray hair. The guitar string Nucky had noticed was missing was coiled in her lap. It looked rusty, but it wasn't rusty.

"Hello Nucky." She croaked at him.

Her voice was no longer the soft, smooth voice she had taught with. It was full of gravel and sounded like she had been smoking that pipe for hundreds of years.

"Tom's in the back bush."

She lifted her hand and pointed past the railing of the deck, her long, knobby finger ancient and gray. Nucky let his eyes follow her arm up to her terrible old face.

He was scared. He didn't want to look at her anymore, but he couldn't stop himself.

"They're all back there."

Nucky tore his stare from that horrible face and followed that corpse's finger toward the bush. The path from the porch to the woods had been clawed up by the children. He started whispering math problems and pulling his ear.

"You should go home Nuck..."

She drew from her pipe.

"There are no more lessons."

He looked at the basin again, and at the step. It too had been clawed by the children's fingers, and it was covered in flecks of what had to be fingernails. There was so much blood. How could he not have heard this?

He was whimpering math problems now.

"Tell your mom what you found... or Gordon... or Walt." She trailed off, pulling on her pipe, never looking away from the woods.

He couldn't stand to look at her anymore. He cast his eyes down, and at his feet, in between two deck boards, the gory nub of a child's finger pointed back to the woods.

Tom's finger, he thought. Then he felt sick.

Madame Barthe started laughing as he stumbled away. She laughed a heinous cackle that sounded like it had graveyard dirt in it. Her laugh turned into a coughing fit before opening to more maniacal laughter that dug into his ears like maggots.

Nucky limped around the porch and went home to his bedroom. He pulled the curtain over his window before getting into bed.

Sun set on the broken town of Empty. The classroom was quiet. The corner where the guitar had sat smelled of sour death. The air was so thick with guilt and hurt and grief that a person could throw up from it. She left there nothing. Nothing except the mottled, tortured hearts of the families of Empty.

A part of every person in Empty died that bright summer day in 1913. The men scoured the forest and down the creek for any sign of that devil woman and found nothing. All that had been left behind were small scraps of the children's clothes. The bloody flower from Judy's hair sat unnoticed on the ground beside the back stairs of the porch.

The town dissolved. Nobody stayed long after Barthe's final lesson. They spread out, never wanting to look again at the faces they had seen so filled with pain. A face filled with that kind of sorrow can't ever come all the way back, and to the people of Empty each of those faces was an unbearable mirror. Newspapers ran the story, but everything stayed vague. Nobody who knew wanted to remember. People didn't want to hear about the Witch Lady of Empty. It was too real to be a ghost story. It needed time for that spilled blood to be drunk up by the ground. It needed time to be forgotten.

Today, if you were standing in that eerie yard southeast of Dunnage, past the end of Township 182, right near the Saskatchewan border, you'd understand. You would feel everything the ground holds. It's not a story that wants to be told. It's not a place that wants to be endured.

Empty is a Hell that wants to be forgotten.

---- I wrote this many years ago. The original version was about 3 times as long, with a lot of back story and a different dynamic between Nucky and Madame Barthe. This was edited down for CBC's short story contest. I never entered it. Instead i give it to you, here.

Thank you dear reader,

--Bryce