Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

“I started livin’ there, and it wasn’t bad. It had that well, but when I come up on it for a look, I seen that it had been filled in with rocks and such, and there wasn’t no gettin’ at the water. But there was a creek no more than a hundred feet from the place, and it was spring fed and I was right at the source. There was plenty of game, and I had a garden patch where I grew turnips and the like.”

“I would have thought you would have had your fill of turnips in all shapes and forms.”

“I liked that soup my mama made. I still remember it. Daddy didn’t have no cause to do that over some soup.”

“Now we are commanding the same line of thought.”

“Anyway, the place was just perfect. I started to clean out the well. Spendin’ a bit of time each day pullin’ rocks out of it. In the meantime, I just used the spring down behind the house, but the well was closer, and it had a good stone curbin’ around it, and I thought it would be nice if it was freed up for water. I wouldn’t have to tote so far.

“Meanwhile, I discovered the town of Wood Tick. It isn’t much, as you seen, but there was one thing nice about it, and every man in that town knew it and wanted that nice thing. Sissy. She was one of Mary’s daughters. The only one she knew who her father was. A drummer who passed through and sold her six yards of wool and about five minutes in a back room.

“Thing is, there wasn’t no real competition in Wood Tick for Sissy. That town has the ugliest men you ever seen, and about half of them have goitres and such. She was fifteen and I was just five years older, and I took to courtin’ her.”

“She was nothing but a child.”

“Not in these parts. Ain’t no unusual thing for men to marry younger girls, and Sissy was mature.”

“In the chest or in the head?”

“Both. So we got married, or rather, we just decided we was married, and we moved out to that cabin.”

“And you still had no idea who built it, who it belonged to?”

“Sissy knew, and she told me all about it. She said there had been an old woman who lived there, and that she wasn’t the one who built the house in the first place, but she died there, and then a family ended up with the land, squatted on it, but after a month, they disappeared, all except for the younger daughter who they found walkin’ the road, talkin’ to herself. She kept sayin’ ‘It sucked and it crawled’ or some such. She stayed with Mary in town who did some doctorin’, but wasn’t nothing could be done for her. She died. They said she looked like she aged fifty years in a few days when they put her down.

“Folks went out to the house but there wasn’t nothin’ to be found, and the well was all rocked in. Then another family moved in, and they’d come into town from time to time, and then they didn’t anymore. They just disappeared. In time, one of the townspeople moved in, a fellow who weaved ropes and sold hides and such, and then he too was gone. No sign as to where. Then there was this man come through town, a preacher like you, and he ended up out there, and he said the house was evil, and he stayed on for a long time, but finally he’d had enough and came into town and said the place ought to be set afire and the ground ploughed up and salted so nothing would grow there and no one would want to be there.”

“So he survived?”

“He did until he hung himself in a barn. He left a note said: ‘I seen too much’.”

“Concise,” the Reverend said.

“And then I come there and brought Sissy with me.”

“After all that, you came there and brought a woman as well. Could it be, sir, that you are not too bright?”

“I didn’t believe all them stories then.”

“But you do now?”

“I do. And I want to go back and set some thing straight on account of Sissy. That’s what I was tryin’ to tell them in town, that somethin’ had happened to her, but when I told them what, wouldn’t nobody listen. They just figured I was two nuts shy a squirrel’s lunch and throwed me in that damned old cage. I’d still have been there wasn’t for you. Now, you done good by me, and I appreciate it, and I’d like you to ride me over close to the house, you don’t have to come up on it, but I got some business I want to take care of.”

“Actually, the business you refer to is exactly my business.”

“Haints and such?”

“I suppose you could put it that way. But please, tell me about Sissy. About what happened.”

Norville nodded and swigged some water from the canteen and screwed the cap on. He took a deep breath and leaned loosely against the tree.

“Me and Sissy, we was doin’ all right at first, makin’ a life for ourselves. I took to cleanin’ out that old well. I had to climb down in it and haul the rocks up by bucket, and some of them was so big I had to wrap a rope around them and hook my mule up and haul them out. I got down real deep, and still didn’t reach water. I come to where it was just nothin’ but mud, and I stuck a stick down in the mud, and it was deep, and there really wasn’t anymore I could do, so I gave it up and kept carrying water from the spring. I took to fixin’ up some rotten spots on the house, nailin’ new shingles on the roof. Sissy planted flowers and it all looked nice. Then, of a sudden, it got so she couldn’t sleep nights. She kept sayin’ she was sure there was somethin’ outside, and that she’d seen a face at the window, but when I got my gun and went out, wasn’t nothin’ there but the yard and that pile of rocks I’d pulled out of the well. But the second time I went out there, I had the feelin’ someone was watching, maybe from the woods, and my skin started to crawl. I ain’t never felt that uncomfortable. I started back to the house, and then I got this idea that I was bein’ followed. I stopped and started to look back, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Just couldn’t. I felt if I looked back I’d see somethin’ I didn’t want to see. I’m ashamed to say I broke and ran and I closed the door quickly and locked it, and outside the door I could hear somethin’ breathin’.

“From then on, by the time it was dark, we was inside. I boarded up all the windows from the inside. In the day, it seemed silly, but when night come around, it got so we both felt as if something was moving around and around the house, and I even fancied once that it was on the roof, and at the chimney. I built a fire in the chimney quick like, and kept one going at night, even when it was hot, and finally, I rocked it up and we cooked outside durin’ the day and had cold suppers at night. Got so we dreaded the night. We were frightened out of our gourds. We took to sleepin’ a few hours in the day, and I did what I could to tend the garden and hunt for food, but I didn’t like being too far from the house or Sissy.

“Now, the thing to do would have been to just pack up and leave. We talked about it. But the house and that land was what we had, even if it was just by squatter’s rights, and we thought maybe we were being silly, except we got so it wasn’t just a feelin’ we had, or sounds, we could smell it. It smelled like old meat and stagnant water, all at once. It floated around the house at night, through them boarded windows and under the front door. It was like it was gettin’ stronger and bolder.

“One mornin’ we came out and all the flowers Sissy had planted had been jerked out of the ground, and there was a dead coon on the doorstep, its head yanked off.”

“Yanked off?”

“You could tell from the way there was strings of meat comin’ out of the neck. It had been twisted and pulled plumb off, like a wrung chicken neck, and from the looks of it, it appeared someone, or something, had sucked on its neck. Curious, I cut that coon open. Hardly had a drop of blood in it. Ain’t that somethin’?”