Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Vol 15

All of which was beside the point, of course. The point was, Jeremy was right. There wasn’t a single kid in any of the nearby houses.

“See,” Jeremy said, “I told you. And the reason is, this guy Mad Dog Mueller.”

“But it was some old lady that used to live here,” I said. “We saw her the first day, they were moving her to a nursing home.”

“I’m not talking about her, stupid. I’m talking like a hundred years ago, when this was all farm land, and the nearest neighbors were half a mile away.”

“Oh.”

I didn’t like the direction this was going, I have to say. Plus, it seemed even darker. Most places, you turn out the light and your eyes adjust and everything turns this smoky blue color, so it hardly seems dark at all. But here the night seemed denser somehow, weightier. Your eyes just never got used to it, not unless there was a moon, which this particular night there wasn’t.

“Anyway,” Jeremy said, “I guess he lived here with his mother for a while and then she died and he lived here alone after that. He was a pretty old guy, I guess, like forty. He was a blacksmith.”

“What’s a blacksmith?”

“God you can be dense, Si. Blacksmiths make horseshoes and shit.”

“Then why do they call them blacksmiths?”

“I don’t know. I guess they were black or something, like back in slavery days.”

“Was this guy black?”

“No! The point is, he makes things out of metal. That’s the point, okay? And so I told this kid about those tools I found.”

“I’m the one who found them,” I said.

“Whatever, Si. The point is, when I mentioned the tools, the kid who was telling me this stuff, his eyes bugged out. ‘No way,’ he says to me, and I’m like, ‘No, really, cross my heart. What gives?’“

Jeremy paused to take a deep breath, and in the silence I heard a faint click, like two pieces of metal rubbing up against each other. That’s when I understood what Jeremy was doing. He was “acting out”, which is a term I learned when I forgot Mr Fuzzy at Dr Bainbridge’s one day, back at the clinic in Starkville, after I got suspended from school. When I slipped inside to get him, Dr Bainbridge was saying, “You have to understand, Mariam, with all these pressures at home, it’s only natural that he’s acting out.”

I asked Dr Bainbridge about it the next week, and he told me that sometimes people say and do things they don’t mean just because they’re upset about something else. And now I figured Jeremy was doing it because he was so upset about Mom and stuff. He was trying to scare me, that was all. He’d even found the little bundle of tools under my bed and he was over there clicking them together. I’d have been mad if I hadn’t understood. If I hadn’t understood, I might have even been afraid — Mr Fuzzy was, I could feel him shivering against my chest.

“Did you hear that?” Jeremy said.

“I didn’t hear anything,” I said, because I wasn’t going to play along with his game.

Jeremy didn’t answer right away. So we lay there, both of us listening, and this time I really didn’t hear anything. But it seemed even darker somehow, darker than I’d ever seen our little bedroom. I wiggled my fingers in front of my face and I couldn’t see a thing.

“I thought I heard something.” This time you could hear the faintest tremor in his voice. It was a really fine job he was doing. I couldn’t help admiring it. “And that would be bad,” Jeremy added, “because this Mueller, he was crazy as a shithouse rat.”

I hugged Mr Fuzzy close. “Crazy?” I said.

“Crazy,” Jeremy said solemnly. “This kid, he told me that all the farms around there, the farmers had about a zillion kids. Everybody had a ton of kids in those days. And one of them turned up missing. No one thought anything about it at first — kids were always running off — but about a week later another kid disappeared. This time everybody got worried. It was this little girl and nobody could figure out why she would run off. She was only like seven years old.”

“She was my age?”

“That’s right, Si. She was just your age.”

Then I heard it again: this odd little clicking like Grandma’s knitting needles used to make. Jeremy must have really given that bundle a shake.

“Shit” Jeremy said, and now he sounded really scared. Somebody ought to have given him an Oscar or something.

He switched on the light. It was a touch of genius, that — his way of saying, Hey, I’m not doing anything! which of course meant he was. I stared, but the bundle was nowhere in sight. I figured he must have tucked it under the covers, but it was hard to tell without my glasses on. Everything looked all blurry, even Jeremy’s face, blinking at me over the gap between the beds. I scooched down under the covers, holding Mr Fuzzy tight.

“It was coming from over there,” he said. “Over there by your bed.”

“I didn’t hear anything,” I said.

“No, I’m serious, Si. I heard it, didn’t you?”

“You better turn out the light,” I said, just to prove I wasn’t afraid. “Mom’ll be mad.”

“Right,” Jeremy said, and the way he said it, you could tell he knew it was an empty threat. Mom had told me she was sick when I’d knocked on her bedroom door after school. I opened the door, but it was dark inside and she told me to go away. The room smelled funny, too, like the stinging stuff she put on my knee the time Jeremy accidentally knocked me down in the driveway. “I just need to sleep,” she said. “I’ve taken some medicine to help me sleep.”

And then Jeremy came home and made us some TV dinners. “She must have passed out in there,” he said, and that scared me. But when I said maybe we should call the doctor, he just laughed. “Try not to be so dense all the time, okay, Si?”

We just waited around for Dad after that. But Jeremy said he wouldn’t be surprised if Dad never came home again, the way Mom had been so bitchy lately. Maybe he was right, too, because by the time we went up to bed, Dad still hadn’t shown up.

So Jeremy was right. Nobody was going to mind the light.

We both had a look around. The room looked pretty much the way it always did. Jeremy’s trophies gleamed on the little shelf that Dad had built for them. A bug smacked the window screen a few times, like it really wanted to get inside.

“You sure you didn’t hear anything?”

“Yeah.”

Jeremy looked at me for a minute. “All right, then,” he said, and turned out the light. Another car passed and the crab-apple man did his little jig on the ceiling. The house was so quiet I could hear Jeremy breathing these long even breaths. I sang a song to Mr Fuzzy while I waited for him to start up again. It was this song Mom used to sing when I was a baby, the one about all the pretty little horses.

And then Jeremy started talking again.

“Nobody got suspicious,” he said, “until the third kid disappeared — a little boy, he was about your age too, Si. And then someone happened to remember that all these kids had to walk by this Mueller guy’s house on their way to school. So a few of the parents got together that night and went down there to see if he had seen anything.”

It had gotten colder. I wished Jeremy would shut the window and I was going to say something, but he just plowed on with his stupid story. “Soon as he answered the door,” Jeremy said, “they could tell something was wrong. It was all dark inside — there wasn’t a fire or anything — and it smelled bad, like pigs or something. They could hardly see him, too, just his eyes, all hollow and shiny in the shadows. They asked if he’d seen the kids and that’s when things got really weird. He said he hadn’t seen anything, but he was acting all nervous, and he tried to close the door. One of the men held up his lantern then, and they could see his face. He hadn’t shaved and he looked real thin and there was this stuff smeared over his face. It looked black in the light, like paint, only it wasn’t paint. You know what it was, Si?”