Piercing the Darkness: A Charity Horror Anthology for the Children's Literacy Initiative Page 8

  Peering around the edge of the door and out onto the cracked pavement reveals nothing except the lazy onset of twilight; the air is heavy, stars twitch into life in the vermillion canvas that hangs above Marrow Lane. A neighborhood dog yips and growls, yips and whines like a violin with ill-tuned strings. Someone yells: “Shut that damn dog the hell up,” and is ignored.

  Tom frowns and shivers at the autumn chill insinuating its way through the fabric of his coat. Just as he is about to shut the door, he catches sight of an old woman standing by the streetlight a few feet down from his house, her hair a wild halo of sodium fire. She is dressed in nothing more than a housecoat and slippers and appears to be staring right at him, sending an unwelcome spark of unease through him and he backs away from the door, starts to ease it closed.

  The old lady moves.

  He pauses, one eye peeking through the inch-wide space between door and jamb, watching though now he feels as if he has donned a coat of snakes, his skin crawling as the shadow-faced woman moves along the sidewalk with short, stiff steps, the orb of fuzzy darkness hiding eyes that may or may not be fixed on him. She shuffles closer still and he realizes this is the sound he heard earlier. Shhhnick! Shhhnick! Shhhnick!

  He wants to close the door, an action that will leave his sudden inexplicable fear outside with the old woman, but he is powerless to do anything but watch.

  She reaches the mailbox—a simple black tin semi-cylinder staked in Tom’s garden but jutting out over the pavement—and stops, cocks her head and brings a gnarled hand toward it.

  Is she pilfering the mail or what? he wonders, his unease no less potent as the idea of confronting her is rapidly abandoned.

  He hears the soft scraping sound of the mailbox door being opened and watches in disbelief as the old lady stoops down and peers inside. After a moment in which he imagines he can feel the victory radiating in icy waves from her skeletal frame, her hand emerges clutching a small white rectangle. Clutching the letter to her chest, she swivels on her heels and shuffles back up the street, passing through the orange glow from the streetlight much quicker than she had on her way to steal the mail.

  I should have done something. He watches the shadows swallow her. That letter might have been important.

  The kettle shrieks and jars the thought from his head.

  ««—»»

  Later that evening, he stands at the threshold to a time capsule, held in place by a feeling of unreality that almost makes him dizzy.

  Over the last few years his visits to this house have been infrequent and he has never stayed, had in fact come armed with a plethora of excuses should such a thing be suggested. As a result, he has never come upstairs and seen his old room.

  He is shocked to find it is exactly the same, from the crimson toy chest at the foot of the bed to the Mickey Mouse wallpaper. His old teddy bear Rufus, now missing an eye, sits atop a once white pillow, arms splayed in frozen greeting. The carpet whispers as he advances further into the sanctuary of his childhood, head pounding, eyes wide with the strain of trying to absorb the sudden rush of familiarity.

  A small oak desk, rescued from the local dump and restored to nothing like its former glory by Tom’s father in one of his rare charitable moods, stands solemnly before the small white-framed arched window overlooking the neighboring rooftops.

  Through one of the four panes, a thin crack like mercury lightning streaks an eternal path in the glass from top to bottom. Beyond that, the darkness rolls over the silent neighborhood, dampening the sounds of life and nodding its ethereal assent to the night creatures and the hunters waiting for their time to shine.

  Tom shakes his head, looks down at the pockmarked surface of the desk and remembers... Just as his father jabs the kitchen table with his knife or fork or the stub of his carpenter’s pencil, so Tommy waits until he is alone and punctuates his own confused anger with the corner of a ruler, or pen, or…

  “Did I hate him?” Tom asks the empty room. “Did I hate them both and not know it?”

  He kneels down before the desk as if it is the armrest in a confessional, his knees quickly growing sore on the threadbare carpet. He studies the indecipherable doodles and unfinished scribbles printed on the table. Only one is clear and etched with an angry hand into the wood:

  HAVEN

  This one he understands, even if he can’t quite remember carving it.

  In here, in this room, he had been permitted to believe the misery wasn’t endless, that someday his father would arrive home wearing a smile in place of his ever-present scowl and smelling of wood and sawdust instead of whiskey. In here, solitude had provided the perfect movie screen for the illusions his hope projected and as long as he stayed here, nothing could break the spell imagination wove around him. Here was peace, love and happiness. Out there, over the moat and a million miles away, were misery, hate and pain.

  Tom lifts his head and looks out at an encroaching darkness unique to the season. He pictures the dying leaves caught in a maelstrom, spinning round in a mindless vortex like lost souls and he realizes nothing has changed.

  As he gets to his feet, he sees himself again, youthful body hunched over the desk, hiding the bruises on his face, weeping as he mourns the death of another fantasy at the vicious hands of reality.

  He decides then that he will not stay here tonight. Even though he has long since dismissed the idea that adolescent fantasies can soften the edges of life, he doesn’t want to sleep in a place where that very belief died.

  This room is haunted, but not by ghosts. He can sense his childhood self here, the child that has stayed in this room, poring over the marks on the table, still hating the Mickey Mouse wallpaper, still trying to figure out why his daddy beats him while his mother watches with tears in her eyes. He is still angry and probably still dreaming of a better life he will never get.

  “But my life did get better,” Tom tells the silent room, surprised by the lack of conviction in his voice. The taste of stale coffee clings to the back of his throat as he swallows and turns to leave.

  Stop lying to yourself. This was the only safe place.

  The voice in his head is devoid of malice but filled with determination. He ignores it for it is just another unwanted memory and one he has the luxury of dismissing.

  With a rattling sigh he slowly makes his way back downstairs and wonders if it might be better to put the house up for sale, to let someone oblivious to the horrid memories make it their home, someone immune to the tapestries of pain fashioned from the dust itself and the sting of sharp tongues still lingering in the air.

  He thought it would be different coming back here, that his mother had been the only remaining anchor to a past too dreadful to contemplate. A foolish assumption.

  If anything, her presence had allowed him to think only of her part in the shadow play that had been his childhood. With her gone, the curtains were thrust open, every room a set upon which the dramas of a miserable youth waited for an audience.

  But the fact remains that he has no place else to go.

  He supposes a few weeks here won’t hurt, just until he comes up with something better. Perhaps an extended vacation, to clear his head and relax for the first time in as long as he can remember.

  He stops at the bottom of the stairs; sure he hasn’t heard what his brain is telling him he has. A few moments of listening yield nothing to confirm there has been any noise and the tension begins to ebb from his muscles. Then it comes, softly, seeping under the door like floodwater: Shhhnick! Shhhnick! Shhhnick! He doesn’t move; waits instead for what he is now certain will follow.

  A brief scratching like nails on a garage door.

  Or an old mailbox being opened.

  This is crazy.

  It takes a great deal of effort for him to swallow the knot of inexplicable fear that has lodged in his throat but he is suddenly tired of being afraid, can’t remember the last time he hasn’t been, and a surge of uncharacteristic resolve brings him to the door, makes him wre
nch it open, propels him down the garden path and delivers him to the mailbox and the old lady standing before it.

  She is peering once again into the bulbous darkness inside.

  “Excuse me,” he says, his voice brittle in the cool air.

  She ignores him, apparently too intent on her felonious task, but this close he can see that she is a lot older than he first thought, the myriad lines in her sallow face retaining the shadows as if they are an intrinsic part of her. The black pools of her eyes are curved at the behest of a toothless smile as she retrieves her second prize of the night from his mailbox.

  It occurs to him that he has seen her somewhere before but is not altogether surprised. Marrow Lane is a small neighborhood.

  “Excuse me but what do you think you’re doing?” He wants to tap her on the shoulder, to grab her elbow or anything that might bring her focus round to him, but for some reason he senses that touching her would be a dreadful mistake.

  She is holding the small white envelope up to the streetlight and he has almost conceded, is in fact formulating a parting caveat when she suddenly turns and says: “You always had a great imagination, Tommy” before once again shuffling off into the shadows, leaving him helpless to do anything but watch.

  “Wait, who are you?” he cries after her and she looks back over her shoulder at him, her face a creamy blur in the darkness but then even the shuffling ceases and the sounds of night rush back in.

  Only the soughing of the wind answers him.

  Frowning, he goes back inside.

  How did she know my name?

  ««—»»

  In the hallway, Rufus sits against the wall.

  Tom stands paralyzed, the door clicking shut behind him, muting the wind.

  “Hello?” he asks the hallway and thinks that if the teddy bear turns his head in response he will most certainly drop dead of a heart attack. While the old lady was bizarre, she certainly wasn’t beyond rational explanation. This however, is dancing on the boundaries of sanity.

  He clearly remembers seeing the toy seated on the bed in his old room. He hadn’t moved it, would recall if he had. How then, has it ended up down here?

  Horrible images of the teddy bear carefully navigating the stairs while he was outside flash behind his eyes and he scoffs, a little too casually and feels his hackles rise.

  “To hell with it.” He rushes forward and scoops up the stuffed toy, then marches up the stairs, the loud clumping of his boots deliberate and reassuring. If someone else is here, they will know he is coming and that he isn’t happy.

  He reaches the landing and takes a deep breath, steels himself for whatever he might find in his old bedroom. With his heart chiseling its way through his ribcage, he stalks into the room. And comes to a dead halt.

  A little boy, sallow-faced and sheet-white, has replaced Rufus on the bed; an ugly bruise purpling his left eye and most of his cheek. He is dressed in Mickey Mouse pajamas, Tom’s old pajamas and as Tom watches, the boy raises his hands to receive the bear. Despite the surrealistic feel reality has draped over its shoulders, Tom tosses the bear to the child and tells himself to remain calm.

  “Who are you?”

  The boy looks at the bear as if he’s addressing not Tom, but the toy. “You know who I am. Who do I remind you of?”

  In truth, this is a question Tom has been hoping the boy doesn’t ask, because the answer is something he is not prepared to face so he says: “I don’t know.”

  The child looks amused and Tom feels his nerves fraying at the edges, unraveling. “How did you get in here?” he asks.

  “I’m the one who makes stuff up, not you. So stop pretending you don’t already know these things you’re asking me.”

  To accept what is presenting itself as the truth, as reality, as normality is to Tom, opening the door wide to insanity. So for now, he will keep on pretending that the child sitting on the bed is not a younger version of himself. He carefully makes his way over to the desk and sits down, his finger absently tracing the striations in the surface of the table that form the word: HAVEN.

  “I couldn’t do it you know,” the boy says, fingering Rufus’s eye. “I couldn’t bring her back.”

  “Who?”

  “Mom. I guess I thought I’d be able to. After all, I was able to make Gramma come back.”

  Tom feels his skin grow cold and the old lady at the mailbox flashes before his eyes. She had seemed familiar. Now he knows why and it brings to mind the sepia-toned pictures of smiling strangers down in the living room.

  Without thinking, he blurts: “But she isn’t dead. She’s in a home in Harperville.”

  The boy nods. “She found her own safe place. I brought her back here where she belongs though, just like I thought I could bring Mommy home. Just like I brought you home.”

  Tom rubs a hand over his face and leans forward. “And who do you think I am?”

  “Still pretending you don’t know? You’re me, the part of me that went on and left me behind, the part of me forced to leave the safe place. You’re what escaped.”

  Tom chuckles at that but it is a sound so far from mirth it frightens him and his face draws tight with worry. “This is madness, you do see that don’t you? This is like a literal translation of what shrinks mean when they talk about people talking to themselves. I’m expecting to wake any moment in an asylum.”

  The boy looks at him, his coral blue eyes glistening. “You’ve often thought there was something missing in your life, haven’t you?”

  Tom says nothing.

  “So have I.” For the moment, the stuffed toy is forgotten. “I thought in here nothing could touch me and for a while it worked. I got to stay where it was safe while you carried on living in the real world, forgetting the make-believe and acting like everyone else. I tried to bring Mommy back when she died but it didn’t work. Gramma came back and you came back, even though you still won’t believe.”

  “What do you want from me?” Tom asks in a voice little more than a whisper.

  The child looks back to the toy. “My safe place is crumbling. I can’t be here on my own anymore.”

  “Why? If you’ve been here this long…” What the hell am I saying? Am I actually buying this?

  But what the child says next dismisses all doubts because in the instant the words reach him, he is once more afraid, a fear that transcends all others.

  “Daddy came back.”

  It is irrational, but by now Tom is coming to expect nothing less. He gets to his feet and looks down at the boy, at the fear etched on his face, a terror so suddenly familiar and personal that he believes everything without question, simple as that. Denying this reality any longer will drive him mad.

  “He hurt you?”

  The child nods. “He slipped through once, when I fell asleep and forgot to close the door all the way. I woke up and saw him standing over me, just a large shadow with gleaming white teeth. Now, I keep the door closed.” He looks toward the door and Tom follows his gaze.

  “Will you stay with me?”

  “I don’t know.” His eyes are fixed on the door. It’s open just a crack, but that crack is now as deadly as a yawning abyss.

  “There is nothing out there for you. You know that. You’ve felt it ever since you left.”

  Tom mutters agreement but can’t look away from the door or the shadows crawling up the walls of the stairs beyond.

  “Please.”

  He thinks of the word scratched into the desk, the word he carved there all those years ago when he believed it to be true. Now he realizes it still can be.

  Three paces and he is across the room and slamming the door closed.

  The boy looks at him and smiles. “We might not be able to keep him out forever.”

  Tom walks to the bed and sits just below the boy’s slippered feet. “We’ll see.”

  His eyes are on the door.

  “I missed you,” says the boy.

  Tom tries to ignore the creaking of the stairs.
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  — | — | —

  BRAVE GIRL

  JACK KETCHUM

  “Police operator 321. Where’s your emergency?”

  “It’s my mommy.”

  The voice on the other end was so small that even its sex was indeterminate. The usual questions were not going to apply.

  “What happened to your mommy?”

  “She fell.”

  “Where did she fall?”

  “In the bathroom. In the tub.”

  “Is she awake?”

  “Unh-unh.”

  “Is there water in the tub?”

  “I made it go away.”

  “You drained the tub?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Good. Okay. My name is Officer Price. What’s yours?”

  “Suzy.”

  “Is there anybody else in the house, Suzy?”

  “Unh-unh.”

  “Okay, Suzy. I want you to stay on the line, okay? Don’t hang up. I’m going to transfer you to Emergency Services and they’re going to help you and your mommy, all right? Don’t hang up now, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  He punched in EMS.

  “Dana, it’s Tom. I’ve got a little girl, can’t be more than four or five. Name’s Suzy. She says her mother’s unconscious. Fell in the bathroom.”

  “Got it.”

  It was barely ten o’clock and shaping up to be a busy summer day. Electrical fire at Knott’s Hardware over on Elm and Main just under an hour ago. Earlier, a three-car pile-up on route 6—somebody hurrying to get to work through a deceptive sudden pocket of Maine fog. A heart-attack at Bel Haven Rest Home only minutes after that. The little girl’s address was up on the computer screen. 415 Whiting Road. Listing under the name L. Jackson.

  “Suzy?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “This is Officer Keeley, Suzy. I want you to stand by a moment, all right? I’m not going to put you on hold. Just stay on the phone. Sam? You with me?”

  “Yup.”

  “Okay, Suzy. Your mommy fell, right? In the bathroom?”