The following story was inspired (or more like torn out of me) by memories of the reign of terror of Alan Legere, known as The Monster of the Miramichi. One day I found myself wondering what that period would have felt like to a small child, immersed in the fears of a community besieged by a devil….

Love and sympathy to Miramichi folks who still carry the pain of those days….

ELLA , WHEN THE DEVIL’S ON THE LOOSE

Ella is sitting on the swing. Not moving, though. If she doesn’t move, he won’t see her. She waits, silent.

The buses have gone and the children have dispersed in twos and threes into waiting cars. The last of the teachers has left the parking lot. Mrs. McCarthy stopped, though, and asked Ella if she needed a drive home. “No, thank you, Mrs. McCarthy,” she said, “Auntie Bethany’s coming for me.”

“Mommy said so this morning. Wait on the swings,” she said. So Ella can’t leave, or Auntie Bethany won’t find her and Mommy will get mad. But it’s too quiet and she’s alone. She’s scared. And it’s kind of cold and she needs to pee.

Ella looks longingly at the house across the street from the schoolyard. It’s a big old-fashioned house with an upstairs and a downstairs – she knows, she went in it one day with her Mommy when she was collecting money for hartnstroke. Inside the front door and just past the room that the white-haired lady calls a den, there are stairs that go up. And then there’s a flat place with a small high window that has red-coloured glass. The red glass that makes the rug look like someone spilled cherry Koolaid on it when the sun shines through. Then there are more stairs that go up higher. Mommy says the bedrooms are up there.

That day, she and Mommy walk down the hall past those stairs, then past the room on one side of the hall with the dark table that always has lacy cloth on it and the shiny brown chairs. On the other side, she sees a long room full of armchairs and sofas that Mommy says no one ever sits on. In the long room, one whole wall is a mirror.  Ella wants badly to look at herself in it. At the end of the hall is a doorway into the lady’s kitchen, and that’s where they go.

Mommy and the lady – Mommy calls her Missus Mac – sit at the kitchen table and drink tea. Ella sits on Mommy’s knee because she feels funny in the big kitchen – it makes her feel dizzy and she wants to go home. The lady says “Now, who’s this little girl?” and seems delighted with Ella’s name. “My Momma used to call me Ellie,” she says. “So we have almost the same name!!” She pours Ella some apple juice and gives her a plastic bowl with crackers in it.

There are two more doors in the kitchen. When the crackers and juice are gone, Ella whispers to the lady called Ellie that she wants to open the doors and look. Mommy has her ‘Ella, don’t be a pest’ look on her face but the lady nods and holds Ella’s hand while Ella climbs down. The lady leads her to the door near the corner and opens it and says, “Now, you won’t want to go down there. It’s spooky.” Then the lady closes that door and takes her to the other one and opens it. “These stairs go up to the back room. My little girls loved to play up there when it rained outside. Would you like to go up there?” Ella shakes her head no. The stairs are steep and it’s dark and Mommy is still in the chair drinking tea. She can tell Mommy wants to leave.

Ella tugs on the lady’s hand and draws her back into the hallway, to the French doors that lead to the long room with the sofas and the big mirror. “Ah”, says the lady. They stand together in front of the mirror and look at themselves. “What a pretty braid you have,” the lady says, and she takes it in her hands and twists it into a fat circle on top of Ella’s head. “What do you think? Do you like it like that?” Ella nods and smiles back at the lady’s reflection. Then Mommy comes in and the lady lets her braid go and it slithers down her back once more. Then they walk down the hall past the stairs and the den and out the door, saying ‘Bye, bye’ and ‘Thank you’ and ‘See you later!’

The lady’s house is not like Ella’s house at all where you just have to walk down a little hall to get to your bedroom and everything is all on the same floor. Except for the room down in the basement where she watches TV with her friends when it rains or snows. Or always now that the man got loose.

The house across the road, the lady’s house, has big windows on either side of a red door. Ella thinks the house has a smiling face and the windows are wide friendly eyes. Sometimes at recess, Ella looks over at the big house and sees the lady walk out the red door and down the three steps and along the grey walkway that splits the green lawn. The lady sometimes looks over at the children in the schoolyard and smiles and then she walks down the hill to where all the stores are. Never up the hill to where the train tracks are. She wears blue jeans and white sneakers when she walks and she looks in a hurry.

Ella wishes the lady would walk out the door right now and look over and see her alone on the swing and come over to stand beside her until Auntie Bethany comes to get her.

Then she remembers what Mommy said to Daddy at supper last night: Sonny and the lady aren’t home. Sonny went away to work and the lady went to Noba Skosha to be safe with her daughter. And why was that? Ella tries hard to remember what they said. Oh, yes! Because the lady is old and can’t stay home alone.

Because the man got loose. That’ s what Daddy said. He called the man a bad word and said he got loose. Daddy had a scary look on his face when he said that. Ella is tired of the man being loose and Daddy looking scary and walking around the back yard with his rifle he uses for getting the moosemeat. Mommy hates having to look at that rifle, she says, but then one day she was crying and she said to Daddy “Show me how to shoot, Brad.” That was the day Ella stayed with her Nana in her house with all the doors and windows locked up tight and Mommy and Daddy went to the feeooneral. A lady who had babysatted Mommy when she was little died. Her sister died too and they went to heaven. And it was because the man got loose. And when Mommy came home from the feeooneral she cried and asked Daddy to show her how to shoot his gun. Ella sat in her closet with her Polly Pocket toy and tried not to hear Mommy crying bad words until after it got dark and it was bedtime and she had to ask Daddy to come read her a story because Mommy was still crying in her bedroom.

Now Ella climbs down from the swing and shifts her weight from foot to foot. It would be better, she could maybe get warm, if she jumped up and down, but if she does that, he might see her and come out from where he is hiding. When the neighbours come in to sit around the kitchen table and play cards at night, they say the man runs from place to place, hiding in the woods and you never know where he is. He could be in your garage, or your shed, or sleeping under your shrubs. “What does he eat?” they ask each other.

Ella heard them say ‘murder’. That’s what she heard everyone say. Murder, and then the lady who babysatted and her sister went to heaven. Auntie Bethany said it: “He’s doing murder all up and down this river.” Mommy told her to shut up: “Little pitchers,” she said, and looked right at Ella when she said it. And then doors got locked and nobody played outside anymore.

She tries to remember what it felt like before the man got loose. She tries to remember what Hallowe’en was like last year, what her neighbourhood was like when people went out walking and running after supper and kids played road-hockey and skipped rope until the streetlights came on. It doesn’t seem real that you could play outside alone. Only this is real: the silence, the scurry-hurry from car to door, people yelling when they get scared, other people saying ‘sorry, sorry’ when they scare someone. How awful it is when, suddenly, you find yourself alone.

He could be looking at her right now. He could walk right into the schoolyard and do murder to her. Nobody is here to make him stop, to make him go away, back to the woods, into a shed, under a bush. What does he look like? she wonders. Some of her classmates say he is so tiny he can hide anywhere and when he wants to do murder, he holds his breath, holds the air in until he grows bigger and bigger and then he runs like the wind over the river from Chatham to Newcastle so fast no one really sees him until he stops. And he only stops to do murder. She gets a bad feeling in her tummy when the boys pretend to be him and they grab the girls by the arms and swing them to the gravel ground of the schoolyard. She knows they do that because they are scared, too, and they don’t want to be. When the boys do that, she finds Mrs. McCarthy and walks beside her, up and down the schoolyard, until the bell rings and they can run into the dark cool shelter of the old stone school.

Ella wonders what murder is, and how does it send you to heaven? She wants to ask Mommy, and she starts to one day, but Mommy talks louder than her and puts on the Babar Movie. She even gets to drink a pop and eat cookies and it ruins her supper. And then she forgets to ask later, but the question keeps coming back and it makes her feel strange. She imagines cold fingers on the back of her neck and she thinks she will want to hold her breath so the man’s stink doesn’t sneak into her nose and down her throat. He must stink – he has nowhere to wash or brush his teeth. She pictures him as a snail living under a rock, the smell of wet earth and worms on him. If he was really a snail, she could pick up the rock he hides under and squash him flat with it. But she knows he’s more than that, he must be big and like an animal or a devil or why would he still be up and down this river doing murder all the time?

She thinks she might have to fight with him and she doesn’t know how. Watching boys fighting in the schoolyard, pretending to be Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage, does not comfort or instruct. She stops shuffling her feet and hangs her head in misery.

Here I am, she thinks. You might as well come now. Her bladder releases and a sob escapes her.

She watches her urine stream down upon the gravel of the schoolyard, pungent in the cold November air. She wants to walk away from it, but where would she go? She decides to sit back down on the swing and wait for the man to find her. She pushes herself off the ground with the very tips of her toes and tilts herself back, pumps with her arms and legs, gets a good pendulum going, lets the snot and tears fly off her cheeks and into the air behind her. She sobs gently, like an exhausted baby on the edge of sleep.

She pumps her legs and gazes at the house across the road and imagines herself curled up on the landing halfway up the stairs to the second floor. She’s warm and dappled crimson by the coloured light through the window. She smells apples and cinnamon.

She’s aware of cars as they make their way up or down the road that separates her from the big empty house. The sky has clouded over; the streetlights and headlights are on. She is sad. She has nothing to do with the people in the cars, going wherever they are going, doing whatever they must do. Just as they have nothing to do with the little girl who sits in her urine and waits for the devil.

But two cars are slowing now, one on each side of the road. Each one stops and waits for the other to turn into the driveway next to the schoolyard. One of them is a Town Police patrol car. The other belongs to Ella’s Auntie Bethany.

Bethany pulls in first and jumps out of the car, turns to face the cruiser to see if her favourite officer is driving. Her heart skips a beat when he steps out and leans over the top of the cruiser and she smiles. She knows she looks hot and she can see on his face that he’s aware of it. “Hi, Constable” she murmurs. “I’m running a bit late today. The traffic on King George Highway, you know? Got to get this little girl home to her Mom. Call me later?”

“That’s the plan,” is the reply.  The constable slides back behind the wheel, shuts the door and pulls out of the school driveway. He waves and accelerates down the hill. Bethany, pleased with herself, strolls over to her now silent and motionless niece. The puddle at the little girl’s feet reeks and her face is tearstained.

Ella looks up. “Where were you?” she wails.

“Oh, honey,” Bethany says, “Don’t be such a baby! I was only fifteen minutes late!”

Ella jumps off the swing, picks up her backpack and slams it into Bethany’s belly before slinging it over her shoulder.

“I’m telling Mommy”, she yells. She climbs into the front passenger’s seat, drops the backpack to the floor and pulls the seatbelt over her shoulder. She fastens it, just like Mommy taught her. Her aunt climbs in behind the wheel. She sniffs and smiles and reaches over to stroke Ella’s cheek. “Couldn’t hold it, huh, sweetie?”

Ella’s eyes are dark and angry. Tears have frozen to her eyelashes and they sparkle a little in the remains of the day. The wind has pinched the skin of her mucus-caked face so that it pulls and it stings. Her upper legs are numb. They will soon start to chafe. She pushes away the hand that should offer comfort and stares out the window.

Ella knows now and she’ll know this for as long as she lives: Auntie Bethany left her in the wind like the paper trash that flies from the schoolyard, crosses the road and catches in Sonny’s chain-link fence. Her aunt didn’t care. Ella had been left alone to foul herself and cry, left alone to give up on the small quick joys of her life and the love of her Mommy, and of any small hope there ever could be of making a deal with the devil.

Ella becomes, from this moment, steel.

(She hopes the devil man stays loose.)

She hopes he finds out where her aunt lives.

(She hopes he goes screaming back to hell and takes Bethany with him.)