The Man Who Called Himself Marigold

A wolf doesn't have to eat you for it to swallow you whole. That's what I learned in the Summer of 1980. I was about to meet the man who called himself Marigold. It was just after Mount St. Helen blew her top and the world wobbled a little differently, the Summer that strange things happened and mysteries found their way into my life. It was the Summer I died.

I found myself walking the little dirt road to his house around noon, the Sun sitting high over me, bright and cheerful. My head felt fuzzy, confused about where I was and why. But I kept walking.

The place felt familiar, like a memory just out of reach. I hugged myself and followed the deep ruts carved in the little lane before me, imagining the many tractors with their wagons filled with tobacco cutting the dirt a little deeper each year, rolling their way from field to barn and back again.

I took notice of the field to my right with all its marigolds. There was something about their musky scent and bright golden colors that didn't quite sit well with me. I shrugged them off and kept walking.

I was more interested in the little farmhouse ahead of me. Small, old, and needing enough repairs to justify a bulldozing, and yet it looked cozy and inviting. It looked lived in. It looked like a mousetrap made for lost souls.

A tall man was folded before a little patch of flowers in the latticework of a shaded part of his yard. His back to me, I could faintly hear him whistling an old tune I was sure I had heard my grandmother hum hundreds of times years before.

---

He was an odd sight, big straw hat, dress shirt, tidy looking blue jeans, expertly wielding garden tools that had the kiss of years marked across their surface. He was two images tied together by one piece of flesh, in one image he was gentle, kindly, and aging with a degree of grace. And in the other image, he was…something…other.

He was stocky build, soft in places and iron-strong in others, he slowly turned to face me. His eyes smiled before his mouth did, and when his eyes smiled there was a playfulness to them that didn't look natural.

"What do we have here?" he said, half-singing the words. He wore curiosity like a favorite pair of glasses.

"Hello," I said. "I wonder if I can use your phone?"

"A spot of trouble?" he said, leaning to one side so he could peer up the road behind me.

"My car broke down," I said. Not entirely sure why I did. It might have been broken down, but the truth was, I couldn't remember if I even had one at that exact moment. My head was filled with mysteries.

The man in front of me grunted as he climbed to his feet and revealed his towering height and stocky strong body. His hands were large but otherwise, perfectly ordinary. He held his right one out to me.

"You can call me Marigold," he said.

"Anna," I said, surprised at the sudden clarity of who I was and the tumble of memories connected to my name. My head was clearing a little, although all the parts relating to where I was and why remained a perfect puzzle with several missing pieces and no whole picture revealed as of yet.

I stood at the edge of the yard just beyond the little dirt road and considered my next steps carefully. I looked up the dirt lane and considered the long loneliness of empty fields, rusty barbed wire fences, and the bleak hollow space between where I stood and the next closest house was. I hugged myself at the chill climbing the ladder of my spine.

I turned back to the man who called himself Marigold and gave a half-smile. He had crossed more than half the distance between us, his hand still awkwardly held out to me. He cast a long shadow, one almost long enough to touch me from where he stood some six feet away. A coffin's length.

"About that phone?" I asked.

"You from around here?" he asked, there was a sharpness to his eyes. "The old Church that used to sit not far from here and its little graveyard. You know it?"

"Graveyard?" I asked. I turned back and looked at him.

He studied me, and then he closed the gap between us. I felt myself shrink back before I even realized I was doing it. He pushed his hand toward me. I took it and suddenly understood what a bird felt when the snake charms it.

His hand closed over mine with a gentle but fierce strength and then he shook. My whole body felt each heavy lift and tug of the three hard pumps that followed.

"The phone is in the study. I'll make us some coffee," he said. "I have an exotic blend I've just been dying to share with someone. It's been too long since I've had a new face around here."

---

Marigold led me through his simple but comfortably lived-in farmhouse. He looked over his shoulder and smiled. He pushed open a door near the back of the entry, sitting next to a cozy and well-worked kitchen.

I stepped through the door and looked around. It was a room bursting with books on an eclectic collection of subjects: The Occult, Ritual Magick, Vampirism, and books upon books of Metaphysics of every other variety.

One stack of books was being used as an impromptu table for a small traveler's typewriter.

"Are you a reader or a writer?" Marigold asked, suddenly uncomfortably close in the small space.

"A little of both before college," I said and then remembered I was a college student. The baggage of my memories came tumbling along after that, as though who I was and my very essence was being sewn back together but still at a distance.

"Isn't that supposed to work the other way around?" Marigold said with a laugh and then pointed toward a leather chair that had the visible wrinkles and cracks of frequent use. "The phone is just there."

I looked from Marigold to the chair and then walked across the room, leaving the safety of the door. Marigold watched me, and then he looked at his collection of odd books.

"It's fascinating, the magic that swims around us," he said. "I remember a carnival when I was a boy, the first time I ever experienced true magic. Not the fake variety they put in movies and books. No, this magic was ugly, brutish, bloody, and above all else, real."

He paused, and then he said, "The old man at that carnival had a belief that one could eat the souls of their enemies and gain something of their very life, adding years to their own."

"What happened to him?" I asked.

"He died not long after, an empty bottle at his side, his books stolen, and a look of horror on his face," he said.

We looked at each other for a long aching moment.

"I'll make us that coffee now," he said. He turned and left the room.

---

I looked beside the chair and found the phone, it was an ugly white one with smudge prints across its surface. It sat on a little clear space beside the window that looked out on the field of Marigolds I had passed earlier. I picked the phone up and then realized I didn't know who to call. I couldn't remember my own number, or my family's, and I didn't even know where exactly I was, and I certainly didn't know any mechanics in the area.

I was thinking this over, looking at the field of Marigolds when I noticed a curious and terrible thing. There in the field, tucked between all those beautiful flowers, in perfect rectangles were little patches of freshly dug earth, packed in a little rise just above what looked like…

"I moved some of the bodies from the old cemetery to the field," Marigold said, suddenly just behind me. "It didn't seem right leaving those poor souls all tangled up in that abandoned little cemetery such as they were."

"Isn't that illegal?" I asked.

"Did you make your call?" he asked, looking at the phone still in my hand.

"I didn't know the number to a mechanic here," I said, laughing nervously.

"Let's have coffee and then I'll call one for you," he said.

I turned and looked at those fresh graves with the Marigolds casting little shadows over them and hung up the phone.

---

We sat in the kitchen at a little table that was more storage space than eating space. I sat at the cluttered end, and he sat at what was clearly his regular spot- it was free of mail and newspaper clippings.

He was clearly waiting for me to drink the coffee he sat down in front of me and I wasn't so sure I wanted to. I picked it up and held it, letting its warmth warm me, but it was never enough to free me from the cold choking nervousness his eyes on mine made me feel. I looked at the newspaper clippings beside me, hoping for an escape.

Victim Number Five! The Marigold Murders Continue, one clipping said.

Marigold Murders reach Ten!, read another.

No Leads, Only Marigolds Left with the Victims, read a third.

I looked up and Marigold was looking at me. He slowly nodded and then he smiled, first with his eyes and that horrible playfulness that danced in them.

I started to rise, but he was quicker, already on his feet and between me and the door. Behind me was only the wall and nowhere to go.

"Please, don't think of me as a typical one of…those…" he said, nodding toward the papers.

"A typical murderer?" I said and the sound of that ugly word hung in the air.

"I keep them," he said. "Not just their bodies, their essence. I have to, I have to eat."

I made a look of disgust.

"Not their flesh and bodies," he said, visibly upset that I wasn't following his ramblings. "Their essence, the part that glues them together, that glues us all together."

---

He reached to grab me, but something even worse happened just as he did. I felt a tug as if from somewhere far away, and felt myself slip through his hands - or rather, his hands slipped through me. I was becoming undone, untethered from this world and I felt a sudden jolt, a yanking like a fish caught on a hook.

"You're already dead?" Marigold said, he looked overcome with excitement as he contorted his face into a horrible expression and leaned forward, and began to suck the air around me. I felt some part of myself sliding toward him, into his mouth, into him.

Then came that lightning bolt of electricity and a vision of somewhere else. I heard voices, as if down a long tunnel.

Give her another jolt.

I have a pulse.

She's coming back.

And then lightning and a tug, stronger than before. I looked at Marigold and smiled.

"I've got you, you sonofabitch," I said. "I've seen you, I've seen this place, and I know you."

He smacked his lips and looked at me with the eyes of a wolf and said, "I have seen you too, my dear. And I have tasted you. I know you."

I was suddenly yanked backward and lingered only long enough to hear the last words Marigold said to me before I found myself in an ambulance rushing to a hospital God only knows how many miles away.

"It's only a question of who shall find who first," Marigold said and laughed.