Best New Horror #26

BILL HUGHES WATCHED the children fall under the storyteller’s spell. The kids—Bill’s eight-year-old son Casey among them—were sitting on an enormous rug, wreathed around the feet of the old woman weaving tales from a wooden rocking chair at the back of the library. With Halloween days away, tonight was the final instalment of New Bethel’s annual ghost story festival: The Witching Hour.

In an exaggerated wail, the woman said, “Give me back my bones,” extending her arthritic fingers toward her devoted audience. Casey twisted around to look at his dad. Bill supplied a brief, reassuring smile before his son hooked his own fingers into tiny claws and mouthed: Give me back my bones. Bill nodded, silently indicating that Casey should return his attention to the storyteller.

The combination of pausing at critical transitions, channelling eerie voices, and calling up the occasional witch’s cackle, brought an unsettling authenticity when paired with her austere features. To Bill, it was as if one of Macbeth’s Weird Sisters had crawled off the page and slid into the creaking rocking chair. She was dressed in grey, a black shawl wrapped around her hunched back and knobby shoulders. Her wiry, iron-coloured hair was spooled into an un-ravelling bun; the ghost of a smile played at the corners of her mouth as she peered at the rapt faces of her young listeners.

Nestled near the centre of the town’s prim bosom, the library had remained frighteningly unaltered since Bill Hughes had been a kid. Originally a courthouse, the building was a repository of custodial antiquity—marble floors reflecting the green gleam of reading lamps; massive, lacquered bookcases; the warm aroma of age-worn paper. Having lived here all his life, Bill was familiar with most of these stories. His own parents had brought him to these festivals when he was a kid, and he hoped Casey would find similar contentment with the provincial tales of ghost lights, phantom trains, banshee screams echoing under bridges.

He recognised a few folks here and there, deftly side-stepping the opportunity for anyone to strike up a conversation. Bill’s threshold for tolerating these questions had grown narrow over the past three or four years. He didn’t need to rehash his humiliation every time some busybody got nosy. Of course, none of them cared about him or Casey, they just wanted more gossip, more small town dirt on Vicky.

Bill’s wife had been killed when Casey was three years old, and everyone in town, Bill was certain, had their own perverse account of what had happened—the maliciously myopic, grown-up counterpart of the children’s story circle. While Casey wasn’t the only youngster in town living in a single-parent home, he was the only kid whose father was a widower. Only in the past few years had Casey started articulating those painfully inevitable questions: “How come kids at school have a mommy and a daddy?” On these occasions, Bill sloppily cobbled something together to mollify the boy. But Casey was getting smarter, his innocent inquiries becoming more acute.

Throughout the evening, Bill abandoned being a member of the audience, opting to aimlessly pace the aisles in solitude. Lean and lanky, Bill had the aspect of a rangy farmhand. He’d played basketball seventeen years earlier in high school—the same school where he was now a science teacher—and had since strictly maintained the appearance (down to his high-and-tight haircut) of a soft-spoken ball player.

Bill checked his watch and then gave a glance through one of the skinny windows. The orange-to-mauve tint of October twilight had nearly faded completely. Night’s lithe fingers had pulled darkness up to the town’s chin. Despite this being a Friday (neither having to cope with school tomorrow) Bill still had the uneasy urge to head home.

“All right, children,” said the old spinster, steepling her crooked fingers, “are you ready for a final twilight tale?” The kids collectively acknowledged that they were. From a wicker basket near her feet, the woman produced a saddle-stitched chapbook. “Well then…our last story is a local legend…the legend of the Aikman Farm.”

Bill’s thin grin faded, his face slackened. Good God, he thought. Do people still talk about that place? But why be surprised—the town had barely changed over the past three decades, why should its superstitions?

He half-listened to the latest permutated tale of the Aikman place. Experimentally, he tried to imagine what Casey was envisioning—a grey, windowless farmhouse on a hill, under a sky the colour of dirty wool. Drifting through knee-high witch grass, he floated across the yard, toward the house, through a black, coffin-shaped threshold beneath the shadow-draped porch. By-passing a parlour covered with shattered plaster, dead leaves and debris, his imagination is dragged up a crooked flight of stairs, it slows on the second floor, and stops at a door with a gleaming brass knob. The door yawns open, revealing a narrow corridor of scuffed, severely-angled stairs leading up to the attic, up to a figure standing at the top, up to Vicky. He twists his mind away before she can do something obscene.

The applause of children shook Bill from his self-induced trance.

Parents were converging. Casey rose to his tiptoes and caught sight of Bill. Grinning, Casey jogged forward, chattering in eager tones. Bill gestured for his son to slow down and lower his voice. Casey obeyed.

In a hush-rushed breath, Casey said, “Oh my gosh, Dad, it was so spooky.”

“I’m happy to hear it. Did you thank the storyteller?”

Zipping his windbreaker, Casey turned toward the still-seated woman. “Thank you,” he said, supplying a timid wave.

The old woman remained in character—part crone, part bucolic prophet—raising several feeble fingers. “You offered some very fine questions about the fables, my boy. Perhaps there’s bit of a storyteller in you.” Casey’s face lit up. She flicked her rheumy gaze onto Bill. “You have a bright little light bulb on your hands, Mr Hughes.”

Bill was seized by a preposterous suspicion: That this was somehow the same woman who’d told stories at The Witching Hour when he was a kid. His left brain understood the impossibility of such a thing (that old fabler had been ancient thirty years ago). This idea was small, like a struck match momentarily flaring in a dark room, but it guttered with a dangerously playful possibility: that if Bill allowed his mind to get carried away, he could convince himself to believe it.

He patted Casey’s shoulder. “Oh, yes. Too precocious for his own good.” Bill cleared his throat, uncomfortable with how alive her eyes were. “Well, good-night.”

The frail woman remained rocking, staring, silent.

Casey was recapping the evening as they stepped out of the library. It was full night now. A breeze had picked up, anaemically urging clusters of brittle leaves to chatter along the sidewalk.

“We better get home,” Bill said, and shifted his voice to a light-heartedly sinister tone, “before we drift into the witching hour.”

Appearing momentarily startled, Casey looked up at his father; but he read playfulness in his dad’s expression. “Yeah, right.” As they passed under the amber halos of street-lamps lining the sidewalk, Casey drew his fingers into little claws and gave a mournful moan. Now it was Casey’s turn: “Give me back my bones!“

—They were nearly clear of Main Street when Casey said, “Do you believe in ghosts?”

“Well,” Bill began, taking the same tone as when one of his students caught him off guard. He glanced over at Casey, a sincere little frown between his large eyes. Sometimes he looked so much like Vicky. Panels of shadows passed over the boy’s face as they moved through sparse light. “I suppose I don’t.” In his periphery he saw Casey’s shoulders slump as he turned away. “But it’s all supposed to be for fun, right?” Casey mumbled something. Bill scratched his cheek. “I mean, what would Halloween be without ghosts?” This time there was no reply.

Bill slowed at an intersection, idling under a red light for a few seconds before it clicked to green and he steered onto Northeastern Avenue. After several minutes without speaking, Bill said, “Do you believe in ghosts?”

Casey, hands folded neatly on his lap, peered out the passenger window. His small voice was resolute. “I think ghosts are real.”

Bill gave an earnest nod. “And there’s nothing wrong with that, son. I believed in ghosts at your age.”

Casey shifted a bit, glancing askance at his dad. “Really?” His tone was more eager than incredulous.

“Sure,” Bill said, steering onto the road which led directly home. “You may not believe this, but when I was a kid—although quite a bit older than you—me and some of my friends used to ride our bikes out to the Aikman farm.”

“Seriously?” Casey pressed forward against the taut seatbelt. “That lady wasn’t making that up? The Aikman place is real?” He was beaming, the energy of their special evening returning.

“If I’m lying I’m dying,” Bill said, trying to sound at ease.

“What was it like?”

“The Aikman place?”

“Uh-huh,” said Casey.

“Well,” Bill took a deep breath and squinted as if straining to see through fog. He was back in front of his classroom, back in control. “It was a deserted farm house out on Haymaker Lane, mostly a place kids dared each other to explore—coaxing one another to run up and knock on the front door on Halloween, that sort of thing. The house was—” he struggled for the right words “—exactly something you’d imagine a haunted house would look like: two storeys with a few dormers around the top…a sagging porch around the bottom. I don’t think anyone really knew why it’d been abandoned…” He trailed off. Bill didn’t know if this was true or not. He’d always just accepted (and perpetuated) whatever legend or lie was circulating at the time: The Aikman woman murdered her husband and kids and buried them in the root cellar before hanging herself from the rafters out in the barn…the Aikman’s eldest son came home from college during winter break and poisoned the entire family Christmas morning before dumping the bodies out in the limestone quarry out east…the Aikman father smothered his wife and kids while they slept, placing their corpses in the cornfield shortly before tumbling them to pieces in the rusty pickers of his combine at harvest time. Grim as it may have been, Bill had always relished the autumn elements of the last legend, but was reticent to share any of these particular tales with his impressionable son.

Yet beneath all this there was that persistent image—the impression he’d suppressed since long before the library—of Vicky at the top of the stairs, only now it had taken on the photographic effect of a negative—all the colours inverted…the whites to black and blacks to white: Vicky, her teeth now pearly black, her penetrating pupils had reversed to white marbles rimmed with black sclera, her once dark hair now shredded grey drapes. Bill stifled himself from murmuring, Not real.

“Dad?”

Bill shivered. “Hm?”

“Why do you keep saying was?”

Bill said, “How do you mean?”

“Like”—Casey licked his lips—”you keep saying was and looked and used to be, and I want to know why everything is in the past.”

His son’s question had momentarily rendered Bill without words; he haplessly stammered for a few seconds before saying, “Stories, tales, are written that way—with all those past-tense verbs—so that we can…” he was desperate to conclude his impromptu lecture, “so that we can better understand the past, and help us know more about ourselves now in the present, and maybe far off in the future.”

Casey’s face was stern. “No, I mean, is the house still here in town? Is the farm somewhere out there?” He gestured vaguely at the screens of trees, at the passing fields of parchment-coloured cornstalks.

Bill inadvertently twitched a frown, uncertain. “Yes.” He supposed the sprawling property was still owned by the Aikman relatives. But the house? It was beyond condemned twenty years ago, it had surely collapsed by now. Or burned down by hoods. “I don’t know why it wouldn’t be out there.”

Casey waited a while before speaking. “Can we go see it?” Bill was already shaking his head before verbally dismissing the suggestion, but Casey pounced on his father’s hesitation. “Oh, please. We’re already having such a good time…it would be like an adventure and it would be such a nice memory… please?”

Bill stopped shaking his head. A nice memory. Guilt now. Guilt again. An odious title wormed its way into his head: Widower’s kid. He sucked in a breath. “Casey,” his delivery was sober, determined. “If we drive out there, we’re only going to look, okay? Nothing else—we stay in the car, got it?”

In the dim light cast from the dashboard, Casey’s smile was radiant. “Oh, I promise, it’ll only be for a minute.”

Bill turned the car around in a gravel driveway.

A sepia-mottled moon was lying rather low on the horizon, giving the illusion of being trapped in the black lacework of nearly bare tree limbs. They coursed along back roads, which grew narrower as they drew closer to the secluded Haymaker Lane; and each time that black-and-white image of Vicky reasserted itself, he distracted himself by entertaining Casey with another elaborately fabricated legend. All lies.

The house on the hill was worse than Bill could have imagined or described. Of all the things he’d told Casey, nothing could have prepared him for what the car’s headlights fell on. A wood-decaying horror.

After finally arriving on the cattail-lined lane, Bill had pulled the car partway into an overgrown driveway. Casey complained that he couldn’t see the house from the road. It was true—a jagged wreath of elms and pin oaks had created a barrier around the house, which was nothing more than a shapeless, night-shaded mass within the inky tangle of trees. Begrudgingly, Bill eased off the brake and the car crept forward. Making their way up the hill, he and Casey jostled and jounced over the rutted trail. Bill heard odds and ends rattling around in the glove compartment—matches, maps, junk.

Now, with the engine idling and the headlights creating a torn curtain of shadow against the house, Bill said, “Well, this is it,” startled to find his voice so thin.

With the exception of the high attic dormers, the windows had been completely knocked out—by vandals, Bill assumed—leaving only shards of glass around the casings. With the muntins and sash bars having been broken away, the black rectangles gave the illusion of absorbing light; and even with that stark illumination falling over the house, it did little to bring any colour to it. The paint had faded and flecked away, exposing rotting wood-plank siding, giving the exhausted structure a uniform slate appearance.

The whole place had been intimidating to Bill when he was fifteen, but now the dwelling had an almost cognisant quality to it. With the moon glowing on the other side of the house, the crooked columns supporting the sagging porch gave the illusion of crouching spider legs. And all at once, the circle of trees seemed like skeletal sentinels—vacantly faithful suitors holding a vigil at the skirt of this abused muse. It was remarkable but, in the silence of the car, Bill felt the image of the house transform into the medium of actual sound, a warbling whisper—the voice of the librarian. Go away, it repeated in a reedy cadence. Leave this alone. Go away.

A spell of silence had settled into the car. “Turn off the headlights,” Casey whispered, his face fixed on the house, a smile playing at the edges of his mouth.

Bill surprised himself at the ease with which he complied. Yes: this had the potential of being an indelible father-and-son memory; but they were beginning to traipse too close the sensible threshold of Bill’s comfort zone. Under the moonlight, the wild lawn acting as a dark blanket spiked with slivers of chrome.

After a while, Bill said, “We’d better get going, it’s—”

“I want to go up there.”

This time there was absolutely no negotiation—with either himself or his son. He needed to regain some semblance of control. “No, Casey.” He flicked on the headlights, re-illuminating the hideous face of the house, the open cavity that used to be the front door looked like a frozen howl. “I frankly feel a bit foolish for trespassing.”

Bill was reaching for the gearshift when Casey said, “Dad?”

“Mmm?”

The boy’s voice was soft, plaintive. “Will Mom ever come back as a ghost?”

After a second or two, Bill sank back in his seat. He’d rehearsed his answers for years, never properly polishing an adequate response. But each time, Bill had drifted back to the circumstances of Vicky’s death, and his explanations had been distorted by embarrassment and perverted by resentment. What was he going to tell him?—Your mother was sad sometimes, and it got worse after you were born…Never. Your mother was killed in a car wreck…she’d gone out for cocktails after work with a man from her office, a man Daddy didn’t like. A clerk at a local hotel said they’d spent a few hours in a room that evening before abruptly checking out. The man was probably driving Mom back to pick up her car when he clipped a guard-rail, resulting in a really awful accident. The guy lived, your mother didn’t. We went to the funeral…you were little, you didn’t understand…we threw dirt on her coffin. Christ—never.

As if a black straitjacket tightening around the fringes of his mind, the claustrophobic truth enclosed Bill’s conscience.

“No,” Bill said, “she won’t come back.” He glanced over at the pale shape of son. Silence hung between them like a solid thing. Bill peered through the windshield, the moon’s reflection making a silver, Rorschach shape on the hood of the car. “But, son, you have to know that your mother—”

In a blur, Casey unfastened his seatbelt and shoved open the passenger door.

Bill stammered—”Casey!”—and fumbled for his own door handle, making a feeble attempt to give chase before getting yanked back down by his seatbelt. He had a brief glimpse of his son running through the untended grass before disappearing between the columns of tree-trunk shadows.

Bill scrambled out of the car, sprinting up to the house. “Casey!” he called out, frantically scanning the front yard. Not knowing where to begin, Bill darted around the side of the house.

Casey was standing in the side yard, reverently facing a long row of broken windows. Bill’s initial impulse was to forgo speaking to the boy, but rather clutching hold of his son and spanking him all the way back to the car. Instead, relief spilled in to Bill.

“Casey?”

His voice was hushed. “Yes, Dad?”

Bill was panting. “Damn it, don’t ever do that again.”

“Sorry, Daddy. But I wanted to see up close—I wanted to see all that.” Casey gestured at something through the hollow socket that had once been a first floor window. The tall grass made sibilant, hissing sounds as Bill sidled up next to his son, slipping his hand into Casey’s. He was preparing to formulate some sort of scolding before glancing inside the house, into what used to be a parlour or living room. Bill was now as mesmerised as Casey. Helplessly, his mind was pushed backward, back down to his thirteen-year-old self; and while many of those memories had remained smudged and obscure, the sensation of laying eyes on the Aikman place had the effect of adjusting focus, bringing definition through an internal lens.

A memory came. The memory came. A group of teenagers, Bill one of them, a gang of six or seven local kids who’d been running together that summer, a mix of guys and girls. Victoria Sanford was there. Since elementary school, Bill had had a crush on Vicky (most guys did) but she was “wild”. Wild—that was the term Bill’s mother often used. Bill’s term would have been “out of my league”. Although years later in college, he would learn a more accurate word: “indomitable”.

Because of her exotic complexion, Vicky had always reminded Bill of a firmly-built Indian girl: nutmeg skin, long, coffee-coloured hair, and eyes so deeply chestnut that they verged on black. Throughout their elementary and middle school years, he liked most everything about her. Except, sometimes, her laugh. It took on a coarse quality as they entered their teens. It was as if there was something bitter inside her laugh now, like specks of glass in an otherwise welcomed breeze.

And there had been gossip—by adults, mostly—that Vicky’s “wild” behaviour was a result of her parents’ separation and eventual divorce, something about her father—something he did; there were even hushed discussions about “it” being something he’d done to Vicky.

It had been overcast that afternoon in July, the sky an endless tumble of soot-dusted cotton.The group leaned their bikes against trees in the front yard. Once inside they found only a few interesting items—a rust-rimmed sink with a few shattered plates, a fireplace in which someone had tried to burn a shoebox full of Polaroids. The floorboards had creaky-weak spring to them, as if a section might collapse and send someone plummeting into the root cellar.

It had been Vicky’s suggestion to explore the second floor.

Once upstairs they split up, giddily searching rooms. Bill was leaving an empty bedroom when he heard Vicky hiss, “Hey, Bill.” He spun around.

She was down the corridor a bit, peeking around a corner; she jerked her head. “Check it out.”

Bill pursued, rounding the elbow of wall.

Vicky was now at the far end of the hall, standing in front of a door, palming its brass knob. Her face held the expression of a magician’s assistant preparing to reveal some sort of wicked trick. Vicky was wearing cut-off jeans, clipped so high that her pockets showed from under the frayed lips of her shorts, and a black, Def Leppard T-shirt, the logo from the Hysteria album.

Bill approached but said nothing.

She turned the knob and the door yawned open. A staircase. The attic. “Come on,” she purred. “You’ve got the guts to go up with me, don’t you?”

Bill fidgeted, suddenly aware of the possibilities. It was humid up there, her cinnamon-tinted skin looked sweat-filmed. For only a moment, Bill was crippled by hesitation. But a moment was all it took.

The other kids were curiously converging now. The attic windows let in some meagre light up there, a dust-and-shadow diffuseness. Silence wore on for a stretch as Vicky scanned the group, her unnerving gaze settling on Bill for a second or two before rolling her eyes. “Jesus, you guys. Who’s coming with me?” The teenage gang murmured noncommittally. “Fine,” she said with no hint of disappointment. She dashed through the threshold, bounding up those scuffed and creaking stairs as the group watched her ascension until she was at the head of the narrow passage, supplying an impromptu victory dance. “Come on, guys, take a look,” she said. “It’s spooky as hell up here.”

And then Vicky Sanford tugged up her T-shirt and peeled down her bra, providing the group with an improvised peepshow. With something very much like awe or admiration, one of the girls, Darlene Zukowski, said, “What a crazy bitch.”

Vicky laughed, an abrasive, teasing noise that Bill would become acquainted with in the years ahead. “Hey, fellas—I’ll give you another peek if you come up and join me.” Blood rushed into Bill’s face, his pulse already hammering in his throat as Vicky—this time swivelling her hips with slow, sensual finesse—lifted her T-shirt again, this time cupping her heavy breasts. Bill’s mouth went dry at the sight of her chest, the inverted-heart-shaped curve lining her cleavage and tracing the lower crescent of each breast, the firm indention between her sternum and belly button.

The small crowd of teenagers chortled, and Bill remembered one of the guys—Luke or Davey—whistling, egging her on, making a joke about “getting it while the getting’s good,” before stepping into the corridor. Most of the others followed, including a couple girls. Only a few kids remained on the second floor, Bill being one of them, milling around while footfalls, muffled laughter, and other noises issued from the attic.

Bill never heard the story of what actually happened up there. Bill never asked.

Even though Vicky was in most of his classes that autumn semester, he never asked. In the years ahead he reluctantly listened to rumours—the pregnancy rumours which, as far as Bill knew, never turned out to be true; while other stories, the parties where Vicky got drunk, got out of control, were unshakeably accurate. During those four years of high school, Bill watched Vicky pass herself around their small group of friends, and still Bill didn’t ask. And despite their chance meeting at the nearby college—”So, Bill…when are you going to get sick of acting shy and ask me out for a drink?“—and the dates that followed, the quiet out-of-wedlock miscarriage, the hasty and tumultuous marriage, Bill never worked up the courage to ask.

Bill only had the courage to tell—he told Vicky what her problems were. After completing a few college courses, he started using words like histrionic, latent, borderline, disorder, and promiscuous. For Bill, her agreeing to marry him became an opportunity to fix—to teach—that wild girl exposing herself at the top of the stairs.

Now, standing next to his son in the untamed yard in front of this decaying house, Bill shuddered and clenched his teeth, forcibly pulling his gaze away from the high attic dormers.

It was little more than a whisper, but Bill nearly screamed at the abrupt emergence of Casey’s voice. “Dad—Dad, do you see it?”

Bill bristled. “See what?”

Casey lifted a finger, “It’s right there,” indicating a spot within the house. “See it? See it? It’s moving.”

Bill winced, growing impatient, not understanding. “Son, I—”

And then Casey squeezed his father’s hand. “Dad, look—it’s right there.”

Squinting, Bill scoured the fractured ribcage-interior of the house. A breath carrying a question was strangled in his throat, his mouth hung open. Something was…there.

The harder Bill gazed the more vivid the thing became. Vaporous at first, it gathered itself up from the overlapping gloom, squirming shapes contracting into a gauzy figure. It was drifting across the parlour now, a slender shrouded thing.

Bill’s breath caught as a face swam out of that ragged blackness—an angular, expressionless face, like a dirt-smudged cameo carved from bone. A grey hand slid from within the undulating cloak, it fingers hooked and reaching up, revealing a cadaver-pale throat, sliding further down now, exposing a grey slash of collarbone. Bill clasped his free hand to his mouth, his other hand still gripped with Casey’s.

“Do you see it?” Casey said.

Bill spoke, but it was little more than a whimper. “Yes.”

Casey tore his hand away and raced forward, running up to the open cavity where a window had once been and, as if to hoist himself inside, clutched hold of the lower lip of the sill. Casey cried out, spinning around and thrusting his hand at Bill.

“Daddy—I’m sorry, Daddy, I’m sorry.”

In the moonlight Bill saw blood glistening in Casey’s palm. Bill remembered the shards of glass in the casings of the empty window frames. He cradled Casey, calming him, guiding him back to the car, doing his best to disregard the rag-and-shadow figure hovering in the parlour.

Bill settled Casey into the passenger seat and rummaged through the glove compartment, locating a stack of napkins to staunch the bleeding.

Casey was sniffling, still apologising. “I just wanted to get a closer look.”

Bill was nodding. “I know it, I know it. It’s my own fault for coming out here.” He dabbed the napkins against the small laceration, seeing now that stitches would be unnecessary. “You’re a curious kid…it happens. Keep pressure on it…like this.” Casey winced and nodded.

Bill used his knuckles to gently swipe at the channels of tears on his son’s cheeks. He was moving to close the glove compartment when his hand froze, his fingers a few inches away from a tiny box of Ohio Blue Tip Matches. He picked it up. Bill inadvertently flicked his eyes at the house and heard a witch’s whisper. Burned down by hoods. The matches gave a bone-dry rattle as he gave the box an experimental shake.

“Dad.”

Bill trembled, shifting his gaze to Casey’s tear-swollen face. He dropped the matches back in the glove compartment and slapped it shut.

The headlights quaked as the car shook over ruts on the overgrown driveway. Bill checked the clock on the dash before giving a glance in the rear-view mirror. He stared at the vibrating, rear-view reflection of the house on the hill. With moonlight glowing from behind, the house’s silhouette appeared sharp-edged, as if crookedly cut from black paper. Something separated itself from the dwelling, a shroud shape floating into the yard, lingering in the knee-high grass. “Casey?”

His son had been facing the passenger window; now he turned, his expression and the set of his small body at ease. “Yes?”

“Will you tell me what you saw back there?”

Hitching in a breath, Casey told his story, and Bill listened. But with each bump along the narrow country road, Bill heard the box of matches shuffling around in the glove compartment, the brittle rattle of bones.