The Year's Best Horror Stories: XVIII

On The Dark Road by IAN MCDOWELL

Elias Walkingstick leaned back in his creaking rocker and sucked on his corncob pipe, the sputtering firelight limning the canyons and gullies of his seventy-eight-year-old face. "Years and years and years ago," he began, "before the war and the war before that and the war before that, there was a Cherokee woman who lived alone with her baby up on Bear Ridge.

"Her people had come back from Oklahoma, back from the Trail of Tears, and out there they'd picked up the habit of carrying their children strapped to their backs, the way the plains Indians do. One night, her baby began to cry, and when she picked it up, it seemed warm with fever. But there was no water with which she could cool its brow, for the well had gone dry that very day, and there was nothing for it but to go down the valley to the nearest spring.

"Even sick, she did not want to leave the baby alone in the cabin at night, so she strapped it on her back and started down the trail. The spring she was heading for was in a sacred place, surrounded by tall pines in a valley where no other pine trees grew. But the woman had been long in Oklahoma, and had forgotten the old ways of the hills, and so she was not afraid to take her water there.

"Finally, she came to the spring, and there she filled her bucket, and when she stood up, and made to go, she felt breathing on her neck, and knew something tall was standing right behind her. And a voice, which didn't sound like anything she'd ever heard, whispered in her ear, and this is what it said:

" 'Woman, you take water from my sacred place. Now I will take something of your own.'

"A white woman would have screamed or fainted or even turned around, but she was Cherokee, for all her Oklahoma ways, and more sensible than that. Instead, she bolted like a deer, running up the trail as fast as her strong legs could carry her.

"And when she was safe in her cabin, with the door barred and the shutters latched, she unstrapped her baby and went to unwrap his blankets. And there was blood on the blankets, and she began to scream, for that was when she found that the baby's head had been bitten clean off."

Jesus Christ, thought Steve, stopping the tape and shifting uncomfortably on the hardwood floor. Beside him, Monica sat perfectly still, her elbows on her kneecaps and her eyes half-closed, the firelight shimmering off her straight black hair. "God," he whispered to her, "this is such cheerful stuff you're collecting."

As usual, she ignored him. "Bitten off? By what?"

Mr. Walkingstick smiled, exposing surprisingly good dentures. "Who can say?" He took another puff on his pipe. "Nowdays, they call the whole valley where that spring was Callie Hollow, and make like it's named after some old white woman named Callie who used to live there. Actually, Callie just comes from the old Cherokee word, Tsulkala. Maybe that's what done it, the Tsulkala."

Steve leaned back against the warm stones of the hearth wall, surreptitiously running his index finger down the inside of Monica's jeans-covered thigh. Shifting her weight, she moved away from his hand. Irritated, he looked at Mr. Walkingstick and tried to smile. "Soocallie? What's that?"

"Suhl-ca-la," corrected Monica before the old man could answer. "It's some kind of local woods spirit or demon. A shape shifter."

He'd heard that term in the movie on HBO the other night — either Wolfen or The Howling — he was always getting those two mixed up. "You mean, like a werewolf?"

"No," said Monica with pedantic patience. "More like the Algonquin manitou. It can take on the form and personality of anything it wants to — the deer you've spent half a day tracking up a mountain, the black horse you find in your stable at night, the strange woman you meet on the road. Even people you know."

Mr. Walkingstick nodded. "In some stories, it can look like them and talk like them and tell you things only they could tell you."

"Oh, like a Cherokee version of The Thing."

Monica looked pained, as she always did when he mentioned the things he knew about. His enthusiasm for popular culture clearly embarrassed her. Sometimes he thought he embarrassed her. One day he meant to have a talk with her about that. After all, it was not his hobby, it was his field, for Christ's sake, a field just as valid as hers. He never made fun of her for studying old folklore.

Mr. Walkingstick interrupted his brooding. "If you're interested in the Tsulkala, I know another story about the critter."

Monica smiled that peculiar smile that changed her face from horsey to striking. "Yes, please. Turn the tape back on, Steve."

"It's getting late. Your parents will worry."

"Let them. My dissertation is worth it."

Knowing better than to argue, he put a new cassette in the machine.

"Not long after the war they fought to free the slaves," began Mr. Walkingstick, shifting back into his formal, story-telling mode, "there was a white family that lived down on the creek that runs through what they now call Callie Hollow. One evening, when the cicadas were first singing and the air was starting to get cool, they were just sitting down to supper when there was a knock at the door, and in walked the local circuit preacher, all tall and thin and wearing his black suit and big black hat. They weren't glad to see him, not being terribly Godly folk, but they made him a place anyway, and he took a seat, all without a word or a nod or even a tilt of his head.

"And there he sat, not taking off his hat, or speaking, or eating the food they pushed in front of him. Figuring he was touched, they went about wolfing down then- stew, and were just pushing their plates away when the door busted open and a cousin came running in.

"It seems some neighbor had found the Reverend's trap wagon up on the ridge, with his black suit on the seat all in tatters, and pieces of the Reverend in the tatters. So who was sitting in front of them, looking like the Reverend and dressed like him, and wearing his hat at table?

"Right then, the stranger cleared his throat, and looking at him, everybody found they couldn't move, that they were as fast in their seats as if they'd been nailed there, as stiff as the sparrow when the black-snake looks him in the eye. And the stranger stood up, stood up taller in the firelight than the Reverend could ever stand, so tall his big hat brushed the roof beams, and his eyes were glowing like the eyes of a bobcat in a birch tree when you shine your lantern at the branches. And this is that he said:

" 'Here you all are, with your bellies fat and full of food and my belly empty, and what shall I have for my supper?'

"Couple of days later, a traveling man found the door open and no family in the cabin, just bits of cloth and chewed bone all over the floor, and under the table, all their shoes, with all their feet still in them."

Mr. Walkingstick leaned back and shut his eyes like a musician waiting for applause. "Y'know, Monica," said Steve, not bothering so much to whisper this time, "I think I prefer the stories you used to get, the ones about buried treasure, and skeletons in the graveyard, and black horses with red eyes at the crossroads at night, and ghost trains, and the devil showing up at poker games. All those stories are Disney material compared to this."

She actually moved closer to him and gave his thigh a squeeze, reassuring him for once. "Don't be a wussie," she said, but the gesture cut the harshness out of the words.

Getting up, she stretched her lanky frame before the fire. "Thank you very much, Mr. Walkingstick, for the stories. It's material I don't think anyone has collected before."

The old man rose somewhat unsteadily out of his wicker-backed chair. "Well, I thank you and your friend for the visit, Missy — I don't see many people anymore. Do they really study old tales and such down at the University?"

Monica shook his hand. "Oh, yes, they study all kinds of things these days. They're even letting Steve write his thesis on old comic books and movies."

Steve winced, although he should have gotten used to her jibes by now. "Not just comic books and movies. It's an overview of popular culture."

The old man nodded as if he actually understood what Steve was talking about. "You want to hear some more stories, you come on back up here any time." He took Steve's hand. His grip was dry and firm and surprisingly strong, and for a moment Steve thought there was going to be a contest to see who would stop squeezing first. "Sure you young people won't stay for supper? I'd be glad to have ye?"

Monica looked at Steve as if she found the idea attractive. You never knew what might appeal to her. "Well…."

"I shot a possum last Monday. Still got most of him in the icebox. It's really tasty with collard greens and sweet taters."

Monica didn't need Steve's imploring glance. "No thanks. We couldn't impose."

"We're on a diet," Steve added weakly.

Mr. Walkingstick nodded. "You diet, boy?"

"Yes, sir."

"What color?"

The old man cackled like a chicken. "That's a joke, son." Steve made himself smile. The calculated folksiness was beginning to grate.

Mr. Walkingstick followed them to the door. "You take good care of this young lady, son."

Somewhat reluctantly, Steve shook his hand again. "Don't worry. I intend to."

Monica laughed. "Actually, I usually have to take care of him."

Mr. Walkingstick shook his head and looked suddenly solemn, like a contemplative turtle. "That's just because he's a stranger here. You go back north with him, to the big cities, and he'll do the looking after you."

Steve smiled. "I don't know about that, but thank you. Right now, I've got to get her back to her parent's house before they have a heart attack." Taking Monica'a arm, he stepped through the doorway and out onto the gravel path. Mr. Walkingstick shut the door behind them.

Outside, the air was surprisingly cold. The car was a dark shape on the pale river of the dirt road, with the elms and birches a darker mass behind. Something moved on the gravel, causing Steve to recoil. "Jesus, a snake!"

Monica calmly took a penlight flashlight out of her purse. "Where?"

He pointed. The light picked up a thick shape with a blunt head and raised snout coiling on the flinty pebbles. Monica walked to it.

"Careful," he warned, "It might be poisonous."

She kneeled and poked at it. "It's a hognose, out looking for toads. They're not poisonous; in fact, they never even bite. Watch." She poked it again and it rolled limply on its side. She picked it up.

"Instead, they play dead. See? It's like the poor thing's fainted."

She advanced with it and he took a step backwards, almost off the path. "Put it down or I'll faint, too."

She laughed, but not meanly, and put the snake down. "Steve, you are such a wimp," she said, walking toward him.

They embraced. "I love it when you call me names," he said, just glad that she was touching him. A gastric rumble interrupted their kiss.

She pulled away. "What the hell was that?"

"My stomach, mad that I skipped lunch."

She pulled him close and bent her head to kiss him. "Poor baby. We'll just have to get you something to eat on the way back."

"Do we have time? You parents…."

"Can worry all they want. You need to be fed." She kissed him again and he was happy.

The neon sign atop the diner advertised: PIZZA MOUNTAIN TROUT. Steve wondered if it was a single dish — fried fish on pizza crust with tomato paste and mozzarella cheese, maybe with black olives in the eye sockets. He hated the way all the little restaurants on the parkway served rainbow trout with the head still on and the eyes looking at you. Inside, he ordered a burger.

There was a glass case full of imitation Cherokee artifacts beside the cash register, while the walls were decorated with folksy sayings like "Chief Redman says: Don't speak evil of your neighbor until you've walked a mile in his moccasins." The red Formica table had several old mustard stains on it.

"Mr. Walkingstick is a very accomplished storyteller," said Monica, sipping her Diet Pepsi. "Maybe too accomplished."

"What do you mean?" He absentmindedly squeezed the bottle of ketchup, which was shaped like a squaw in a blanket, a Cherokee Mrs. Butterworth. A bubble of the thin red liquid appeared atop the figure's head, making her look as if she'd been scalped.

"His stories are too polished, almost literary. That means they may not be authentic folk tales."

"Really?"

She nodded. "I remember once when I was Dr. Corum's graduate assistant. He was doing a book on Appalachian 'jump tales,' and I was helping him record them. There was one old preacher up near Boone who told this great story about a mean old man who was looking for a buried treasure that was supposed to be sunk at the bottom of this abandoned well. The only trouble was, the well had some kind of demon guarding it."

She lit a cigarette, which annoyed him, as she'd once again promised to quit. "Okay, at the climax of the story, the old man was out by the well at midnight, pulling on this wet, slimy rope that went down into the water, and feeling something heavy on the other end. Just then the moon went behind some clouds, and he couldn't see anything, but he kept on pulling. Whatever it was at the end of the rope got stuck under the lip of the well, so he reached down and got his hands under what felt like a big, wet canvas bag, full of mud and maybe something else. He'd just got it up to the level of his face when the thing that felt like a bag reached out and put its arms around his neck."

She looked at him and grinned, waiting for a reaction. He smiled. "It was the demon and it killed him."

"Right. It was also the climax to some old ghost story by someone named James — not Henry, someone else. The preacher told the same story. In fact, the ending was almost word for word. It turned out they had several collections of classic ghost stories in the Sunday School library."

The waitress brought his hamburger and fries. Despite the bright orange dye in her hair, she looked almost seventy years old. "You want anything, honey?" she asked Monica.

"Just some water." While she was getting it, Steve took a bite of the hamburger. It tasted like a charred hockey puck. He decided he might have been better off with Mr. Walkingstick's leftover possum. Monica began to steal his fries, but he didn't say anything, even though they were the most edible thing on the plate.

The waitress came back with the water. "Sure you don't want anything, honey? We got some nice pie in the icebox. Some cobbler, too."

Monica shook her head. "No thanks, I'm on a diet." He wondered how she could say that with a straight face between mouthfuls of his fries. "Besides, we have to eat and run — we're due back in Boone by nine thirty, and it looks like we're going to be late." Fine thing for her to be worrying about that now, he thought.

"You can make it," said the waitress, "if you take the short cut."

"Short cut?" asked Monica. "I didn't know there was one."

"Sure. This highway out here loops around the valley, but old Callie Road cuts right through it. Once you get down the mountain, there aren't any lights, of course, but turn on your high beams and you'll be okay."

"Old Callie Road?"

The waitress nodded. "Take the ramp right here beside the diner — that turn off between us and the Shell station. Look out for potholes, though. It'll take you straight across the valley, then ends in a dirt road that goes up the far ridge. It was supposed to cut across the edge of the Reservation, too, but there was a big set-to between the county and the tribal council and the federal people, and it never got any further. It was one of those C.C.C. roads Roosevelt's people were building back in the Depression." For a moment, she looked embarrassed. " 'Course, that was all before my time, so I don't know much about it."

Monica nodded gravely. "Maybe I will have some of that pie after all," she said, taking Steve's last French fry.

Outside, bats were swooping through the parking lot lights and the cicadas were singing in the trees. Sure enough, there was a road winding down the mountain to the pooled darkness of the valley. Beside it was a railing with several telescopes, a picnic table, and a lighted sign showing a bonneted old lady pointing and the words CALLIE SAYS: WHOA BUD, THIS VIEW'S TOO GOOD TO MISS.

"Why is the sign lighted?" asked Steve. "You can't see anything at night."

Instead of answering, Monica walked to the railing and stared down at the disappearing line of lights. "Callie Hollow, like in Mr. Walkingstick's story."

Steve nodded. "Right. It's probably full of spirits and demons."

"It could be." She sounded like she took the idea seriously.

"Are you afraid?"

She sat on the railing, already seeming to have forgotten about the need to be back in Boone. Steve wondered what she would do if she didn't have him to herd her around and see she got places on time. "No, I'm not afraid," she answered, still sounding as if she thought his question had been a serious one. "Are you?"

"I'm a city boy, remember?"

"Some of the most superstitious people I've met have been city boys."

"Well, I'm not one of them." An idea struck him; she was always accusing him of being too timid and earnest. "But I know how to deal with spirits and demons."

He jumped up on the picnic table and began to intone, trying to sound like an actor in one of the outdoor dramas so popular here in North Carolina. "Spirits of the mountain, hear me!"

"Steve, don't," she said softly.

He ignored her, determined to carry this through without her making him feel embarrassed. "Hear me, O Spirits of wood and stream. Hear me and give us safe passage through your lands. Leave us unharmed, that we may buy rubber tomahawks and rock candy at the tourist shops of your people, that we may purchase their leather goods at outrageous prices, and get our pictures taken with the Chiefs in the fiberglass teepees on main street, and pay homage to the Live Bears at every service station."

The echo faded, and with it his sudden burst of high spirits. He looked down, feeling stupid again, hoping for a smile but not really expecting one. But Monica wasn't looking at him at all. Her face wore an expression of intense listening.

"What is it?"

"All the cicadas and crickets and the rest — they just stopped."

He listened. The insect chorus was as loud as ever. "No they haven't."

She shook her head. "No, just for a minute, while you were chanting that stuff. It was like there was a break in the rhythm, or it was all on a big record that skipped a groove."

"I didn't notice." He jumped down and put his arm around her. At least she wasn't mad at him for acting like a clown. "C'mon, we do need to get going." She gave him one brief kiss before she slipped back behind the wheel.

Not long after they passed the last light pole, the road leveled out, and they were driving a fairly straight two-lane strip of asphalt that ran between dark fields and darker stands of trees. Once, their headlights picked up what Steve at first thought was a pair of Great Danes playing beside the road. As they bounded away, he saw they were baby deer.

Monica drove silently, steering past potholes. He envied her skill with the stick shift, and her ability to navigate treacherous mountain turns. Still, Mr. Walkingstick had a point; get her in a New York traffic jam and she might not be so hot.

He fiddled with the radio dial, catching a few words amid the buzzing."… sinners… not saved… holy retribution…." Several times, he heard the word AIDS spoken with a particular vehemence.

"Turn it off," said Monica in a tired voice. "All you ever get up here is static and preachers."

She sounded beat. The road was fairly straight and the moon was out, making the landscape ghostly but quite visible. Even he shouldn't have any trouble driving here, he thought. He was about to ask her to pull over and let him take the wheel when they hit the pothole. The car lurched, scraping something on the asphalt, and bounced out the hole. Then a tire blew. They went over the embankment and into the ditch.

Monica turned off the engine. He could hear the night noises, the ever-present cicadas and the rest of the choir, even with the windows rolled up. They sat still, held fast by the seatbelts that had kept them from being thrown into the dashboard or against the doors, both of them staring straight ahead. "Shit," said Monica after what seemed like a long time.

Steve got out. The car was completely in the ditch, having slid sideways down the grassy bank. It had come to rest on almost level gravel and was pointed parallel to the road. He heard Monica's door open. "Help me with the spare," she said tonelessly.

He immediately felt irritated, like she was trying to prove something. "You can't change the tire here," he said, trying to keep his annoyance out of his voice.

She opened the hatchback and tossed out the jack. "Why not? The car's pretty level and the ground's firm enough."

"Maybe. But we can't drive in the ditch, and we won't get out of it without a tow truck."

"We'll see." She got the tire out without waiting for him to help her.

He gave in. "At least let me do that. That way I'll be the one the car falls on."

She went on jacking up the front end. "I've changed more tires than you have, city boy. Get the dry cell flashlight from the back and set it on the ground beside me."

He did, angling the bulb so it pointed at the wheel. "You always make me feel like Steve Trevor."

"Who?"

"Wonder Woman's boyfriend — the one who always stood around and looked pretty while she bashed Nazis. Or maybe what's-his-name, the guy who was always in the background holding Sheena of the Jungle's spear while she wrestled with the lion. What was his name?"

She grunted. "How should I know? You're the student of popular culture." Standing up, she removed the flat and sent it rolling down the ditch. "And you think my degree is a worthless one."

He'd never said that, of course, but he didn't want to argue now, not when she was in the middle of her competent woman act. The car seemed to teeter precariously on the jack. He was debating the merits of saying anything when she walked toward him.

"Look, I'm sorry if I'm making you feel like a useless male sidekick. Why don't you walk down the road past those trees and see if you see any houses?" She pointed to where the road went into a bend that snaked through a stand of pines, obscuring what lay beyond.

"It's not very safe to leave you here."

"You won't be out of earshot. Now go on, while I put on the spare tire. Here, take my penlight." She pressed it into his hand. "And look out for snakes." She kissed him on the cheek.

Feeling like a child sent off to do something useful, he clambered up out of the ditch and started down the road, keeping to the shoulder even though no oncoming car could be within a mile without him hearing it. Behind him, the light of the big dry-cell flash dwindled. His loafers crunched on the gravel.

Something twisted sinuously on the asphalt, its coils black in the moonlight. Wanting to run, he turned the beam on it. It was thin for its length, and did not have the triangular head Monica had once told him to look out for. "It's harmless," he told himself, several times.

He was under the pines now; their smell was very strong. The dark branches creaked, he heard a soft "who?", and then a huge winged shaped drifted silently through a patch of moonlight. It was the first time he'd ever seen a wild owl. He kicked a pinecone into the ditch and tried to whistle, but the notes were wrong, and sounded strained and hollow and distant. A cool wind pressed the fabric of his shirt into the small of his back and caused the needles overhead to rustle. Somewhere nearby, frogs were singing, and he heard water bubbling over stones.

The pine canopy was a claustrophobic ceiling, and he was glad when he was out of it. Pausing for a moment, he looked up, at the dark palisades of the surrounding mountains and the necklace of light that was the parkway, then higher, at the stars. Up on the main roads, they'd been blotted out by sodium and neon, almost as much as they were in the city. Not so down here. He felt like he could fall up and up, the way kids are supposed to feel when they lie on their backs at night and look at the sky.

That had never happened to him in the city, but once, when he was very young, his parents had closed the store for a weekend and taken him on a trip to the Catskills. He'd slept the whole way, and when he woke up it was dark and they were at a motel and everybody was getting out of the car. The lights in the parking lot had been burned out and he'd looked up and suddenly felt sick and afraid, and had buried his face against his mother's breast until they were inside. The memory embarrassed him, and he tried to make it go away.

Across the road, the untended rows of a vast field lay etched in gray and silver. Not more than a hundred yards away was the dark bulk of a house.

The grass in the yard hissed around his feet, and burrs pierced his socks. He thought of snakes again, but forged on. The steps of the porch creaked alarmingly. Under the porch roof, the door was a black rectangle, with air moving in stale currents from within. He smelled dust and mildew and rot. The house had to be deserted. Beyond it, the road snaked on, through more trees and past further fields. There was another dark shape that might have been a barn or another house, but no lights. Realizing that he was close to being out of earshot, and more afraid of what some trucker might say to him if the man found he'd left Monica alone than really worried about any danger to her, he decided to turn back.

He found her sitting on the hood, smoking a cigarette. The jack and the flat tire were both stored in the back of the car.

"You got the spare on okay?"

She nodded. "No problem. Unfortunately, the banks of the ditch are slick and steep, and I don't have the room to turn to make at them head on. You were right. Without a tow truck, we're stuck here."

He sat beside her, feeling oddly calm. So much for the idea that helping her record material would make for a nice restful vacation from typing his thesis. Still, maybe later they could look back on all this as an adventure.

He pointed up at the sky. "I'm not used to such bright stars. They look like diamonds on black velvet." She didn't respond to the image. "All right, so I'm a lousy poet." Thank God he'd never shown her any of the stuff he'd written back when he was an undergraduate and an English major.

"Find any houses?" she asked at length.

"One. It was deserted." He slid off the hood. "It can't be too bad a walk back up to that diner. I bet our waitress friend knows somebody with a tow truck.". She took one last puff and dropped her cigarette. "You're right. At least I'll be able to call Mom and Dad."

The embankment directly beside them was very steep and slick, but a few hundred feet back it was more gradual. No wanting to have to struggle up the rise and look foolish, he started walking along the ditch to the place where the climb would be easier. "Wait," she said from behind him. Before he could pause and look back, he tripped over something and went sprawling.

"Steve, are you okay?"

Except for a skinned elbow, he was. Sitting up, he turned the penlight on the dark mass he'd tripped over.

"What is it?" asked Monica, catching up to him.

"Just a bundle of oily rags."

She stared at it. "No," she said at last. "No, it's not."

He looked again, seeing dark cloth and then the darker stains soaking through the tatters. In the middle of the scattered mass was a loop of something that glistened. The light picked out a tennis shoe and then a pale hand. There didn't seem to be any head.

Steve scrambled backward until he couldn't control his nausea, and then doubled over to vomit. Monica bent over him and gently held his shoulder. "We must have driven right past it without knowing it was in the ditch."

"It's a body," he said unnecessarily, not really hearing her.

She held him, although he didn't want her to. "I know."

"What could have done that?"

"A truck maybe — hit and run." Her voice was as calm as a newscaster's. Usually, he envied her strength, but now it just made him feel weaker.

"But the head was gone." He immediately regretted saying that, irrationally fearing she might want to look for it or something.

"Dogs could have been at it," she continued clinically. "Even a bear."

He stiffened at the word. With a bear, you didn't need a hit and run to explain what had happened. He thought of the grunting black things that begged food by the trailer camps, slow and greedy and calm as big dogs. He thought of the reservation, where some loophole in federal law allowed the animals to be kept under even the most cramped conditions, and every service station and rest stop had its own LIVE BEAR sweltering away in a chain link cage with an asphalt floor. If one of those panting brutes ever got loose, it might well want to do something like this. He thought of watching Gentle Ben as a kid and how the big, whuffling bear, supposedly as friendly and loyal as Lassie, had terrified him, so much so that he had begged his parents to change the channel.

Monica suddenly stood up. "Steve," she said softly, her hand firmly grasping his and pulling him upright, "let's start walking slowly the other way. Be calm and don't look back."

He walked and didn't look. "Why?"

"Something big crossed the road back there. Keep walking."

They passed the car. Why didn't they just get inside? He started to say something, then thought of being trapped in there while something large and hairy snuffled against the windshield. The pines loomed ahead.

They were in the resin-scented shadow when Monica let go of his hand. "Run," she said.

They bounded over the gravel, past the whispering, untended field. He meant to point out the bulk of the house, but, ten paces ahead of him, she'd already seen it. Her speed increased as she plunged into the tall grass. He panted, nearly tripping over something metallic, and strove to catch up. The porch stairs groaned under her pounding Nikes. Pausing, she leaned out of the darkness and urged him on.

Almost sure he heard something ploughing through the tangled weeds behind him, he stumbled on, his heart roaring. One of the rotted steps actually cracked under his feet, but he was off it and on the porch before it gave way. Monica was at his arm, first pulling him toward, and then pushing him into, the blackness.

The door to the house must have been open rather than missing as he'd first supposed, because there was a slamming sound behind him and then he couldn't see a thing. He switched on the penlight. It caught peeling wallpaper, holes in the floorboards, Monica's hand's fumbling beside the door frame. Finding a bar, she slid it home, then turned toward him.

He held the penlight on her face. "What was out there?"

She pushed the light away, taking him by the hand and turning off the beam. "Nothing." The darkness rushed in, heavy with mold and something else. What was she doing?

"Monica?"

"I'm not Monica," she said gently. "That was Monica in the ditch beside the road."

The hand holding his began to grow.