Uncle Jack
“If you step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back,” they say over and over like a parrot on a perch. They don’t know what it means. They don’t even know all of it. Sammy sure didn’t. But he would learn.
Back then the children’s chant was contained to Sammy’s school, Sammy’s street. His cousins didn’t know it. Not until he told them. Then the twins couldn’t stop. “If you step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back,” they said over and over, whispering it even under their breath in their sleep. Sammy made sure to keep his light up shoes off of any cracks. He always did. But it wasn’t easy. It made pins play up his spine.
The next day he was determined to figure out where it came from, because if he could find the source, maybe he could stop it, just like his dad did with the termite infestation. His big brother Billy, who knew everything, said that it came from the house at the end of the street. Sammy felt a rush of ice course through his hot veins. Everyone knew the house at the end of the street. At least everyone knew to avoid it. All the moms turned their noses up at the overgrown lawn and lowered their voices when they judged the dark exterior. But then their hands would go to their hearts and talk about the “shame of it all” and the “poor things” that live there. “Things,” they said. The dads would grunt in agreement behind newspapers, shaking them as their hands shook. Sammy didn’t like the sound of “things.” “Things” that go bump in the night made goosebumps appear on his arms.
Needless to say, Sammy didn’t want to go anywhere near the house at the end of the street. He just—he couldn’t take the pressure anymore. Cracks in the pavement were everywhere he looked, taunting him, daring him. They were like bare tree branches. Some so fine he could barely make them out and so numerous he had to go the long way home. Part of him said it was stupid to listen to a dumb rhyme, but he couldn’t risk it. Not his mother’s back. His mother made him hot chocolate, sang to him when there were “things” under his bed, and gave the best hugs. She couldn’t hug him if he messed up.
Sammy and his family walked into church that Sunday, but not before his close call; his foot nearly touched the curving crack on the papal blacktop. After service he decided he would get his bike and go to the house at the end of the street. Sammy rode his bike, asking everyone he came across to join him; he wanted to try and end his constant torment. Some laughed at him. Some went pale and pedaled away. Many told him he was doomed. Even Becky Stephensons, who’d eat any bug for a quarter, told him it was too dangerous. He stared over at a fractured sidewalk from his perch on his bike. He knew he had to go. Did they not understand the pressure he was under? The cracks were everywhere.
He pedaled on alone until he reached the end of the street. The houses stopped and the forest began. The house on his left was empty. An abandoned ‘For Sale’ sign was stuck in the ground with a faded woman still smiling, watching him. The house on the right had a number of items scattered across the lawn, like the Benston’s frisbee. Even old Man Jensons’s rocking chair creaked against the wind. Sacrificed baseballs and red rubber kickballs were better left in the weeds of the house at the end of the street. It wasn’t worth the sacrificed lives, he thought. Molly Hanson, who lived next door, was never the same after her dog, Snuffles, disappeared past the broken fence.
Sammy shivered. He whittled away the hours searching for allies, so long that the sun made long shadows of the house at the end of the street. He laid his bike on the sidewalk near the ‘For Sale’ sign, keeping his eyes on the house. Sammy was certain it would come alive and eat him¾that the dark panels of a splintered wooden porch and the white door speckled with dirt and dust would suddenly crack open like a wicked maw with wooden teeth and a worming tasting tongue—all to swallow him whole. At least he would die in his Sunday best. Mother would like that. If they found him, a voice like Billy’s echoed in his head. His small frame shivered in the windless autumn dusk. He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t approach a stranger’s house. Not without someone by his side. He’d never gone to a stranger’s house on his own before. He worried his top lip. He was alone and this wasn’t just any other house on the block. This demon house full of “things” was going to kill him and then he’d never see his mother again.
He thought of his mother reading in her nook. Her gentle voice as she helped him with math homework. He hated math. He steeled his shoulders. Letting out a breath, he slowly began to cross the street, careful of the cracks. The wind rustled the leaves like the hushed whispers of a crowd. Only they watched his daring approach. He could do this, could protect his mother’s back like she protected him. As he reached the gate and took in a breath of pine and ash, a deep hoo sounded and fear shot through him. In his young imagination a demon had cried, but the owl in the trees blinked curiously after him as he ran back to his bike and sped away.
At school that Monday, everyone was surprised to see him alive. He was telling them of his close call, of the deep demon’s voice that had bellowed out demanding “Who goes there?” When he caught sight of the Stenson sisters playing hopscotch and chanting “If you step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back. . . .” and the words and the moment left him. With each thunk of stone on the pavement, they sang it as they hopped. Sammy’s ears rushed with blood and his breathing stopped. Time seemed to slow as Sally Stenson’s foot nearly landed on the arcing crevice in the black. He liked Ms. Stenson. She coached his soccer team. If her back cracked, who would coach them? What would the Stenson sisters do? It wasn’t until her pink butterfly speckled shoes landed firmly on the unscarred yellow chalk-dusted ground that the world and the insistent questions of his classmates came back to him.
“Are you going back, Sammy?”
“Of course, he’s not going back, Mikey!”
And Sammy found himself saying, “I’m going back,” as he watched the stone soar through the air and the girls chanted “If you step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back. . . .” and giggled to themselves. He would go back. He would enter the demon’s house at the end of the street. For his mother’s back. For all mothers’ backs, he thought as the recess bell rang.
That’s how Sammy found himself in front of the house at the end of the street. Again. With his bike safely resting against the fence and a shaking hand, he reached for the hook on the gate. No voices or owls cried out as his fingers touched the cool rusted steel. With a screech, it came loose. The gate swung open in front of him and he shivered.
The house was still. It was light enough now he could see the ghostly white curtains that wavered behind aged glass. One black shutter hung loose as if it wished to jump to its’ death to the weeds below. It wasn’t like the other houses in the neighborhood. Maybe that’s why the moms didn’t like it. Sammy had to agree that it looked like a blackened wound. A scar. Sammy had never seen a house so old and dying. Sammy had never seen a house so still and quiet. Every other house he passed on his bike he saw children playing, dads mowing lawns, moms with backs bent over flower gardens. But not this house. Not even the rocking chair creaked. Not even the forest wanted to reach out and touch it. The tree roots curled, snarled out, and rounded the house twisted and wrong, as if the shadows burned it. Sammy inched closer. The faded woman on the ‘For Sale’ sign across the street was his only witness.
He bit his lip as he studied the house, like it was a trapped snake or a patient spider. Any moment the shadows could spring to life and lash out at him. His palms sweat and little needles played up and down his spine. This was the furthest any neighborhood kid had ever ventured. On near tiptoes, he crept down the tan walkway. He kept his movements slow and measured as if he were approaching a lion. The sky was darkening by the time Sammy reached the middle and that’s when he saw it. Just three stone slabs from the front steps there was a spiderweb of cracks, making Sammy freeze in his tracks. His breathing came in short gasps. He couldn’t avoid those. He couldn’t risk his mother’s back. If he slipped just once . . . . he could see her doubled over in pain, back snapped in two like thin spaghetti. He’d come home to find her lying on the couch, or worse, the floor, unable to move or hug him ever again. A wave of icy horror washed away the feeling of bugs crawling on his skin. I can’t do this, he thought. He turned on his heels and ran. The gate slammed behind him as he grabbed his bike. He didn’t look back. His heart didn’t settle until his mother made him her famous hot chocolate, her back intact.
Sammy vowed that he would never go back to the house at the end of the street that night as he told Billy this story. Billy, who knew everything, laughed and ruffled his hair as he passed a sulking Sammy. This didn’t comfort Sammy. He wasn’t one to question Billy, because he knew everything, but Sammy hoped beyond anything that Billy was wrong. That the house full of “things” at the end of the street had nothing to do with this cursed rhyme.
The next day at school he was hiding from his classmates’ questions in the basement bathroom when he heard it again. “If you step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back.” The words were slowly spoken, like how time passes in math class. But the words were strong and sure like when his dad would scold him. It was a warning. It sounded again. Sammy followed it as it echoed off the linoleum hallway. But he could never find the source. His classmates, when questioned said it was probably Mason O’Malley, the little boy who hid in the shadows of the playground. He was part vampire, some said. Mikey argued that he was part werewolf. Becky swore he was part demon and Molly confessed that she’d seen him in the house at the end of the street. In a hushed tone, she admitted it happened so quick that she didn’t believe it. He must be part ghost, she swore.
There was something strange about Mason O’Malley. Sammy knew that. Everyone knew that. He rarely spoke. Sammy didn’t know of any other O’Malley, which was weird on its own. Everyone had another someone with their same name. It’s how it worked: everyone in town knew everyone, despite how his mom often complained about this. When he got home from school, he wanted to ask Billy, but he was at hockey practice. His mother hummed to herself as she stitched. The sharp needle flashed through the white as he sat with her. He wanted to ask her, because she knew so much. But as he watched the red thread tighten into a solid line, he couldn’t bring himself to worry her. Dad was always saying things like that, that he mustn’t worry his mother now. She glanced up at him and smiled like sunshine and ran a warm hand through his hair. She asked him with a little crease between her brows if he was alright. Sammy nodded at her too solemnly for a child and marched upstairs.
The needles and pins that danced their burning icy tips up and down his spine every time his light up shoes came close to a crack told him he couldn’t not go back.
So for a third time, Sammy dropped his bike in front of the house at the end of the street. With Billy’s extra hockey stick in one hand, he pushed the gate open. No voice sounded and no owls cried. The house stood still and ready to snap at him. He wanted to glare at it, dare it. But that icy fear still clung to him. He wasn’t dressed to die. His mother wouldn’t be happy to find he died in Billy’s old hoodie she hated, but made him feel warm. Probably because it was too big for him. He shivered despite it. He had to go forward. He had to.
He began to work his way over the stone slabs and their seams until he came to the spiderweb. He paused and took a deep breath, tightening his sweaty, shaky grip on the stick. He stuck his foot out the side and let it hover over the overgrown weeds. Flashes of the long blades of grass springing and rushing to tangle themselves around his ankle screamed through his mind. Then the vines would pull him, pull him down into a deep dark abyss or toward the house full of “things” that would swallow him up. He scrunched up his face and hunched his shoulders as his light up shoe made contact with a slight crunch. Nothing happened. The air was still. All around him was silence and his own wild beating heart. He placed his other foot on the grass and the same thing happened. Nothing. He breathed out a sigh of relief.
The sky had grown darker when he reached the front steps. The wood was weak beneath his feet. Soft, like flesh. He shivered, and then he was standing in front of the door without a knob. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t have a plan. He’d never been to a house without an adult before, but despite himself, he reached for the cracked doorbell on his tiptoes. The white door speckled with dust and dirt swung open silently. Sammy crept in, his heart thumping away in his chest, hockey stick raised. He stepped across the threshold and the door slammed behind him. He squeezed his eyes shut. This was the moment where he became one of the neighborhood stories. Boy seen entering the house at the end of the street! Was never seen again. Lord help him! He was going to be Molly Hanson’s dog. His knees went weak.
“If you step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back.” It echoed and warned the same as before. He forced his lungs to take in short gulps of stale air. It smelled like the gate outside and the times he’d taken out the trash for his mother.
The ghost’s voice floated through the sound of his thumping heart again.
“‘If you step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back,’ sang Uncle Jack.”
Sammy’s eyes shot open. That was new.
He stood alone just beyond the threshold for a moment more. In front of him, a little to his right, were broken stairs and a narrow hallway about half the width of his hockey stick. Two rooms opened up on either side, like stuffy deflated lungs, and in each, thick sheets hung over the different sized furniture like the dust in the air. They had to be white once upon a time. Now they looked like mummies wrapped in pages of an old book. Were these the “things” the moms talked about in hushed whispers?
The only difference was that the left had one mossy green couch that stood uncovered. It was poxed with burn holes and had a moat of shiny brown bottles like the ones dads would sometimes drink at summer BBQ’s. They reminded Sammy of the dead cicadas the end of summer would bring. Each bottle stuffed with bits of white, and Sammy prayed they weren’t bones. Bones weren’t that small, right? God, he was going to die.
“Uncle Jack is back and he brought his rack.” Curiosity spurred him onward, toward the voice on the left side of the broken stairs. Curiosity was going to get me killed, he thought.
Sammy’s heart stuttered in his chest as his foot stepped out and the floor beneath it creaked like a dying cat. But the voice didn’t stop. It floated still through the dust in the air.
“‘If you step on a crack, I’ll break your mother’s back,’ cried Uncle Jack.” It clung to Sammy like a spiderweb: thin, itchy, and everywhere. He could see so many woven webs in the corners of the rooms. He figured a kitchen lay beyond the hall, and beyond, the backyard that surely held a mass grave of kids stupid enough to enter a demon’s house full of untold “things” and Molly Hanson’s dog—if they didn’t eat his bones too. Along the broken splintering stairs hung faded portraits that watched him through the cracked and dirtied glass. He kept his head down, but he could feel their eyes on him. Were they going to warn the demons? Or the witch that lived here? Or Uncle Jack? Or—Sammy didn’t make it to the kitchen.
He followed the voice like it was a siren’s song until he found Mason O’Malley in an empty hall closet under the stairs that smelled of copper and mold. The other boy was rocking himself back and forth, bony elbows sticking out where he’d wrapped his arms around bony knees. His black eyes didn’t look up at Sammy from under his black mess of hair, but he didn’t stop speaking.
“Uncle Jack is back and he brought his sack. ‘If you step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back,’ warned Uncle Jack.”
Sammy knelt down in front of Mason, who was so white Sammy thought he was dead. His arms were spotted like the couch. The closet held only a thin blanket and the faded backpack Mason brought to school on the days he came. It was really just a pile of loose threads, just like the clothes on Mason’s back.
“Uncle Jack is back and he brought you to his shack. ‘If you step on a crack, I’ll break your mother’s back,’ laughed Uncle Jack.” Mason’s voice didn’t waver. His eyes didn’t move. He just rocked back and forth like a windup toy Billy had given him for Christmas.
“Uncle Jack is back and he brought the black.” Sammy placed a shaking hand on his Skeletor shoulder. “Uncle Jack is back and he brought the black. He brought the black.” Mason’s eyes snapped up to meet Sammy’s. Mason’s ice-cold hand gripped his wrist, siphoning the warmth from his bones and Sammy’s heart climbed higher in his throat.
“He brought the black. He brought the black. In his sack. In his shack. He brought the black.” Sammy snatched his hand back as Mason’s voice shook as he begged, ragged from his rhyme. “The black with his sack in his shack. Uncle Jack. Uncle JACK!” His cry was deafening and Sammy didn’t think little boys could wail like that. Only ghosts.
Sammy stumbled to his feet on legs that felt like bees trying to fly through lead and took a step back as Mason’s eyes didn’t leave him for a moment more.
Then Mason settled again in his corner and after a sliver of silence spoke again, like one of his father’s records back on track.
“Uncle Jack is back and he brought his rack.” Mason was looking through him now and Sammy warred with himself. Were his friends right? Was Mason the demon of this place? Or a trick? Or a trap?
“‘If you step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back,’ whispered Uncle Jack.” Mason’s voice was hushed and rough like a river after rain, and Sammy found himself repeating it like he would repeat the answers in math class.
The slam of a screen door echoed down the hall over Mason’s whisper. Sammy’s whole body jolted as the house shook.
“Uncle Jack is back!”
Sammy dropped the hockey stick and bolted as a lumbering shadow filled the unexplored kitchen, cracking the tiles under him. Thumping, lumbering footsteps jolted toward him. It was him. It was Uncle Jack with his sack, coming from the rack and the shack.
“If you step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back.” The words screamed at him, followed him as he ran from the hulking beast behind him. Sammy knew it had been a warning. This was Uncle Jack come to take him and break his mother’s back.
Sammy heard it, “If you step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back,” again and again as he flew down the front steps, across the walkway and to the gate and his bike. It echoed with each beat of his pounding heart. “If you step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back.” He risked one glance back to the doorway, where an outline of a giant man stood. Tomorrow at school it would be a demon twice the size of his father with horns and frizzy hair and eyes the color of blood and fire. His friends devoured his story and basked in awe of him. Only for a few seconds, then no one believed him.
No one understood how Sammy had managed to scramble away from Uncle Jack and the demon house full of “things” at the end of the street and toward his mother and her hot chocolate. Sammy didn’t even understand what Mason had been trying to tell him. Some days in his story, Mason’s human, a boy not much younger than him. Sammy wondered about Mrs. O’Malley on those days. On others, he was a ghost who wasted away so many years ago forced to live with the demon Uncle Jack and his rack. He searched for Mason O’Malley, but no one had seen him.
He asked Billy, who knew everything, if the house at the end of the street had been the O’Malley’s and if Mason had had an Uncle Jack, but before Billy could confess he didn’t know, their mother hushed them and told them not to speak of such awful things as she handed them both their hot chocolates. It was hot against his palms.
He never should have gone looking. He would tell himself that often. He never should have gone looking. He made it worse by looking. He’d picked at the scab and now it was infected.
Eventually Sammy stopped telling the story. It worried his mother, or so his father said.
But the warning never left his head. Step on a crack; Uncle Jack would be back. That looming shadow kept following his every step. His parents soon lost patience in his slow walk down sidewalks. Each annoyed sigh or cross, “Come on”, felt like a hot lash, but he couldn’t help it. They didn’t get it. If he stepped on a crack, he’d break his mother’s back. Every step he took, he could see it, see what a misstep would bring. His mother’s face laced with pain. Her spine shattered in two. Sammy had to watch his feet, even more than before. Because if he didn’t, the shadow of Uncle Jack over his shoulder, waiting with his rack, would ruin everything for that one mistake.
Years later he still heard it with every shattered, fractured piece of earth–blacktop or concrete–he saw at the rifts below his path, and always found himself whispering “If you step on a crack, you’ll bring Uncle Jack back.”
Then he’d sigh to himself as the pins and needles danced their burning icy tips along his spine and say:
“I never should have gone looking.”
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Emma Dailey Mitchell is a recent graduate from Columbia College Chicago. She has been published in StudyBreaks. When she’s not writing, she’s reading, or listening to many stories.