Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Terror

He stared instead at the walls and the pictures there of his father’s favorite game birds. Then he tried to count the floor’s black-and-white tiles, but his eyes blurred and he had to shake his head to clear his vision. A fly, perhaps the last of the year, darted across the room, swerved toward him, and made him duck. Automatically, his hands unclenched, remembered, and settled again. His knees ached where he had scraped them the day before. Caren sighed.

Through the two windows above the couch he could see the brown-edged leaves of a ribbon of flowers his mother had planted along the front of the house. They had been green once, like all the others in the neighborhood; watered, dusted with aerosol sprays, and caressed with eyes that loved and appreciated them. By stretching very slightly he could see beyond the single row of faded bricks that separated the garden from the lawn. The grass was hidden, but he knew it was dying anyway, a perfect camouflage for the leaves that sailed from the elms and willows.

I wish I knew what I was doing, he thought as he lowered his gaze to Caren again. I never killed no one before. But I guess it’s got to be done or she’ll kill us all first. I know it. I know she will.

Visions of his parents, of Caren’s, of all the others, lying in the street like so much discarded trash.

Visions of television shows, of movies, of twisted evil women burning at the stake and laughing, having their heads cut off and their mouths stuffed with garlic, fading to corpse-grey dust at the first touch of daylight.

Visions, and it was all supposed to be make-believe, and the witch/vampire/werewolf wounds just makeup that washed off with soap.

A strong gust of wind drummed twigs against the windows, and Caren moaned softly in her sleep. As she rolled over onto her back, Eric wondered if he should have talked to some of the others. But he knew most of them would have been too frightened to do anything but call for their mothers. In fact, Caren was the only one who believed all that he said, and was the only one who was willing to join in the fight.

Maybe, he thought, we’re both a little nuts. Even in the stories, vampires only drink blood.

But his father, he recalled, had been complaining about something called deterioration, depreciation, and plummeting values just before he had been hospitalized, and perhaps if Eric understood it more he might be convinced that this was what was killing the street, and all the other streets in all the other towns. He frowned, scratched at his chin, and rhythmically, lightly, thumped his head back against the wall. Maybe. And maybe his father was so involved in just being an adult that he couldn’t see what was real anymore. That’s what Caren had said after her spaniel puppy had been killed by a driver who hadn’t even bothered to stop to say he was sorry.

Murder.

The word popped into his mind unbidden.

“Eric,” Caren had said that afternoon, “we can’tjust break into the house and kill her. How can you kill her?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we can find a gun somewhere, knock her out, and I don’t know, cut off her head or something.”

“You’re being silly.”

“Kids kill people all the time. I see it on the news at night.&iuot;

“Big kids,” she said, pulling nervously at her hair. “We’ll have to think of something else.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, but we’ll think of something.”

He shifted to ease the discomfort creeping up his back, then rubbed his palms against his thighs. The sun went down unwatched, and the windows went briefly black before reflecting the single light from the floor lamp near the steps. He stretched his legs straight out ahead of him, and his heels squeaked on the tiles. Caren jumped, swung her legs to the floor, and sat up.

“It’s okay,” he said, grateful for the chance to get to his feet. “Nothing’s happened yet. Do you want to sleep some more?”

“No,” and her voice was younger, smaller than the size of her dozen years. “Do you think she’ll do it tonight? It hasn’t been regular for a long time.”

Eric shrugged, stretched up to his toes so he could see the house across the street. “Her light is still on.”

“It always is. Even in the day.”

“You want something to drink? I think Mom left some soda in the kitchen for us.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t want to leave her, not yet. Maybe we should call Jackie and see if she can come over, too.”

“She’s always crying, Caren. She can’t help. Besides, she’s too young to understand. We have to do it alone.” He placed his hands on his hips, a gesture his father used to indicate finality. “Do you think you can remember enough good things?”

Caren nodded, rubbing at her eyes, then began swinging her legs. The room seemed large with shadows in the corners, but neither of them made a move to turn on the lights embedded in the white ceiling. Instead, they stared at the backless clock on the far wall, and willed the hands to sweep to nine.

Caren marked the seconds by tapping a nail against her palm.

Eric wondered why no one else knew.

The fingers that rested on the keys were like ten wings of five sleeping humming birds, and they were sknder and long. They hesitated, as if undecided about waking up and what to do when they did. The ivory was yellowed in blotches and stains, but the velvet-coated hammers were young and deep blue. The old woman breathed deeply to draw in what she felt, assimilated it and translated it to the language of the wings that fluttered now, darted and glided, a polka and waltz, and from the depths of the piano the music came back.

Hawthorne Street was a community unto itself, and no one who lived there would have had it any other way. Along its entire length, all families were neighbors and all children friends. The seasons were shared with garden-hose batons, snow-blower basso; pets roamed free, and every yard but one had a hole in its hedge for the passing of gossip. Tree houses sprouted, sidewalks were chalked, but the unofficial leader was Eric because his home faced the unlucky Number 136. Of all the houses on the street, only this one could not keep a family; three in less than two years, not because it was haunted, but because the people were not able to penetrate the tightly meshed lives of everyone else.

Then, Eric remembered, came last September and the smallest moving van he had ever seen pulled into the ragged blacktop driveway and unloaded: one odd-angled piano a disturbingly deep black, one polished cedar hope chest that took three men to carry, one greying wicker chair slightly unstrung, and a bench of burnished copper. He and Caren had loitered on the curb waiting for signs of children or pets, but there was nothing else in the van, and after one of the men had relocked the front door, it pulled away and did not return.

A week passed, and suddenly Caren had pounded on the front door, dragged Eric into the street. In Number 136, in the dirtstreaked picture window, were wine-red curtains. A light glowed behind them, and no one ever saw it go off. Four days more to a Saturday waiting for autumn, and an old, very old woman appeared on the front lawn. She sat like a weathered totem in the wicker chair, her head covered by a sun hat whose brim dropped to her shoulders. She did nothing but sit. Watch. And sit until dark. Repeated every day until November’s cold drove her inside.

One by one, or in reassuring groups, the children passed by, waving, and receiving no response. Eric had been the only one with nerve enough to call her a greeting, but only a breeze moved.

“I think she’s blind,” he said to Caren on the way to school just before the Thanksgiving holiday.

“Deaf, too,” she said, grinning, receiving a grin in return.