RAGE AGAINST THE NIGHT
Supernatural Tales of Triumph over Darkness
Edited by Shane Jiraiya Cummings
Ebook edition, published December 2011 by Brimstone Press.
Anthology copyright © Shane Jiraiya Cummings 2011.
All stories copyright © their respective authors.
Cover image © copyright Dreamstime.
Layout and cover design by Shane Jiraiya Cummings.
All rights reserved.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes:
This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. Except in the case of short-term lending, if you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the editor and authors.
All characters in this book are fictitious.
No reference to any living person is intended, except where noted.
* * *
For Rocky: You’re a champion, mate. Through your efforts, you brought horror communities from around the world together. Rage Against the Night is a token of our gratitude to you.
* * *
SPECIAL THANKS
The editor would like to thank the wonderful contributors who donated their stories, time, and goodwill to this anthology. Thank you for your generosity. Thank you for supporting Rocky.
In particular, thanks to Hodder & Stoughton in London and Scribner in New York for their kind permission to reprint Stephen King’s story, “Fair Extension”, which was specifically requested by Rocky Wood for inclusion in this anthology.
Thanks, too, to Angela, for your endless patience and support under sometimes trying circumstances.
* * *
Introduction—Shane Jiraiya Cummings
The Gunner's Love Song—Joe McKinney
Like Part of the Family—Jonathan Maberry
The Edge of Seventeen—Alexandra Sokoloff
The View from the Top—Bev Vincent
Afterward, There Will Be a Hallway—Gary A. Braunbeck
Following Marla—John R. Little
Tail the Barney—Stephen M. Irwin
The Nightmare Dimension—David Conyers
Roadside Memorials—Joseph Nassise
Mr. Aickman's Air Rifle—Peter Straub
Agatha's Ghost—Ramsey Campbell
Sarah's Visions—Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
More Than Words—David Niall Wilson
Two Fish to Feed the Masses—Daniel G. Keohane
Rocky Wood, Skeleton Killer—Jeff Strand
* * *
There is usually little hope in the horror genre. The courageous protagonist often finds him/herself overwhelmed by the forces of darkness, and too often, the struggle to defeat evil is futile. Horror is about fear, about rising dread and unknown terrors, and in the face of such nightmares, the acts of good people can seem insignificant.
Not so in Rage Against the Night.
In this anthology, you will find stories of brave men and women standing up to the darkness, staring it right in the eye, and giving it the finger. These are stories of triumph, but triumph doesn’t necessarily come without cost. To conquer evil, sacrifices must be made. Battles may be lost to ultimately win the war. Heroes may fall to inspire the masses. Many stories in this anthology fall into this category of sacrifice for the greater good. A few even subvert the trope and offer a grim or somewhat tangential view of what constitutes triumph against evil. Overall, though, the forces of darkness meet their match in the pages of Rage Against the Night. Read on to see who (or what) gets their comeuppance.
There is another reason for the theme of triumph over darkness—a guy named Rocky Wood. All proceeds from the sale of Rage Against the Night will go to Rocky. He is the President of the Horror Writers Association, one of the world’s leading scholars on the works of Stephen King, and a Bram Stoker Award-nominated author. For many years, he has toiled in the background, bridging the horror writing communities in Australia with our cousins across the Pacific. Like a true and selfless gentleman, he has devoted himself to strengthening the international horror community, while at the same time, chronicling the career of his favourite author, Stephen King. To better understand Rocky’s devotion to the works of King, I would urge you to buy and read one of his books.
But Rocky is fighting his own battle with dark forces. Earlier this year, Rocky announced he had been diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease (MND), also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. For specifics, you can look up MND on Wikipedia, but suffice to say, it is a nasty disease that progressively shuts down the muscles in the body, and the prognosis is always fatal. Rocky is a great bloke, and when I heard he had chosen to sell his extensive collection of Stephen King books and memorabilia (one of the largest collections of its type in the world!) to pay for his medical expenses, I was outraged and devastated on his behalf. So I did something about it and contacted a few mates.
Rage Against the Night is the international horror community’s effort to repay Rocky for his years of behind-the-scenes service. As a testament to the high esteem in which Rocky is held, you will find the megastars of dark fantasy and horror in this anthology. I was especially pleased Stephen King could contribute “Fair Extension”, which Rocky specifically asked to have included (given his affinity for the protagonist). Having Steve involved in an anthology for Rocky has a nice circularity to it, given Rocky’s books about Steve.
Your hard-earned dollars in buying this anthology will help Rocky purchase an eye gaze machine. This marvel of technology will allow Rocky to communicate as his disease progresses. An eye gaze machine will be a lifeline that will improve Rocky’s quality of life as his health deteriorates. The machine costs $25,000, and I reckon we can make a big dent in this target.
Join me and the contributors in our rage against the unfairness of life. Help us give the finger to darkness. As Dylan Thomas wrote: Do not go gentle into that good night ... Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Join us, and rage against the night!
Shane Jiraiya Cummings
Perth, Australia, December 2011
* * *
When Shane Jiraiya Cummings approached me with the idea for this anthology, my first reaction was, ‘Why Me’—a not dissimilar reaction to when the specialist gave me the awful news that I had Motor Neurone Disease (ALS in North America). It seemed to me I was no more special than any other person who suffers from a terminal illness and therefore undeserving of a signal honour such as this.
But then I got to thinking—thinking about the many, many people who were offering to help me and to help my family as they heard about my illness. Of course, some of them were old friends and family members—the sort of close people in your life you help yourself in times of need. But there had been, and has continued to be, a flood of offers from my wider range of friends, associates, and people I had only met once or twice. And another flood of support from people I really hadn’t known at all before I was diagnosed. What did all this mean?
I thought then and I now know it means all the good things about humanity that we often talk about, and hear of, and even contribute to, but oftentimes don’t really understand how much it means to those who receive it. It’s humbling, it’s moving, and it’s deeply helpful when one tries to come to terms with one’s mortality, and in the case of MND/ALS, the difficult path one must follow. I made a decision to accept these offers of help to fund an Eye-Gaze Device, which enables profoundly disabled people to communicate. MND sufferers generally reach a point where they cannot move at all, except for their eyes, and this relatively new technology allows them to communicate through that eye movement. For a person whose whole life has been communication, the discovery of this device has, to be frank, kept me sane. I made the decision to sell my Stephen King collection so that I was myself contributing to gathering the required funds. And I have ensured the device will be passed on to another sufferer, whose family cannot afford the $25,000 or so that this technology costs.
I have come to embrace the love and help so many people have so freely offered me and have tried to return it in any way I can.
Anyone’s life is marked by phases, and in some ways, defined by the varying communities we choose to be part of. In my life, I’ve had the great fortune to be a member of many communities—sometimes even as a leader—my family, my Rugby Union mates, my cricket teams, my political affiliations, my involvement in the study of whether this Earth has been visited in the past by aliens, certain employers where I made lifelong friends, and of course, writing.
Writing: the art of putting words on paper that someone else actually wants to read, and then enjoys! A strange pastime—in many ways, a very solitary one. But the last community I want to talk about is quite the opposite of solitary—it is welcoming, and that’s the horror writing community. When I decided to resume my writing career a decade or so ago (I had earned good income as a freelance journalist outside my corporate career back in the late 1970s and into the 1980s), I chose to write about Stephen King and all his works.
Little did I know then that making that choice would lead me deep into the welcoming heart of the horror writing community, exemplified by the Horror Writers Association (HWA), presenters of the famous Bram Stoker Awards, and the Australian Horror Writers Association (AHWA). I joined HWA and began to build a small network of online friends and then was fortunate enough to receive a Bram Stoker nomination for Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished, that led me to attend the Bram Stoker Awards Banquet and World Horror Convention in Toronto in 2007. And just like that, I was introduced to dozens of people who became literally instant friends and our friendships continued to build online.
It’s rather obviously a long way from Australia to North America, so we Aussies and Kiwis (I get to be both) don’t get to do the convention circuit that so many in America and Canada do, where they might attend two or three, or even a half dozen of more ‘cons’ every year and catch up with their friends and colleagues. But I enjoyed my first overseas horror con so much I never looked back, going to WHC in 2008 (Salt Lake City, Utah), 2010 (Brighton, England), and 2011 (Austin, Texas) and the Bram Stoker Weekends in 2009 (Burbank) and 2011 (Long Island). I expanded my group of horror writer, editor, and publisher friends each time and even got a new publisher through attending one of these cons.
And of course, being me, I volunteered to help HWA, which snowballed to the point where I became President in 2010! I’ve enjoyed giving back to the genre—history’s oldest; and I hope to continue to do so in the remaining time I have, as we expand the reach of HWA in support of dark fiction’s writers, publishers, and readers.
When I look at the Table of Contents for this anthology, I realise I’d never been in contact with a single one of these fine authors a scant decade ago but now I can call almost all ‘friend’. I am humbled that Stephen King donated “Fair Extension”. If you don’t know the story, perhaps you should read that first, as you will soon see why I empathise with its protagonist. Steve has been very kind not only to me but to untold thousands over the years through his generous support of the genre, the publishing industry, literacy, and the art of storytelling. He is one cool dude!
There are many ladies in our genre—and I mean ‘lady’ in the way one would say ‘gentleman’—people who earn respect not just through their work but the way they carry themselves through life. I was fortunate to meet Quinn (Chelsea Quinn Yarbro) for the first time at a convention here in Melbourne, Australia. She is one of the most interesting people I have ever met, and she is generous with her time and advice. Lisa Morton has become one of my dearest friends—and now a co-author in our graphic novel project, Witches! A fine writer, a lover of books and movies, and the hardest working member of any voluntary Board I have ever served on. Sarah Langan, Nancy Holder, and Alex Sokoloff are all great writers who give more back to the literary world than they will ever take. I am deeply honoured all these ladies have contributed.
As to the gentleman, even reviewing the names is a little awe-inspiring. I have been reading Peter Straub since not long after I took up my King habit, but I did not get to meet him until early in 2011 at the World Horror Con in Austin, following which I got to host him as Special Guest of Honour at the Bram Stoker Weekend two months later. As with the ladies, the word gentleman attaches itself to Peter with little fuss but a lot of meaning. Here is one of the world’s most brilliant wordslingers (a King term) who treats all around him with respect.
Others on the list I would describe more as ‘mates’ in the Australasian vernacular—guys I’ve grown to enjoy having a drink with, shooting the breeze, and considering the wider philosophical questions of life in the small hours of a convention: Gene O’Neill (who memorialises the underclass so well), the slightly dangerous Wes Ochse, Joe McKinney (I suspect he has more spine than any of us), F. Paul Wilson (the life of every party), John Little (a man with a very special writer’s viewpoint), Jeff Strand (a guerrilla funny man), Bev Vincent (a fellow SKEMER from way back), Dan Keohane (a class act if ever there was), and Jonathan Maberry, the hardest working writer I know, a man who deserves all the success that is now coming his way like a freight train.
Nate Kenyon, Scott Nicholson, Gary Braunbeck, David Niall Wilson, David Conyers, Joe Nassise (a fierce proponent for our genre), David Conyers, Stephen Irwin, Gary Kemble and Ramsey Campbell are gentlemen I know more through our online interaction but each is a fine writer, committed to our genre and the sort of person one would want on one’s side if there really was a zombie apocalypse (although we all need Maberry on our left, McKinney on our right, and Ochse on point if that ever comes to pass).
I thank all these authors for their generosity in donating their wondrous stories for your reading pleasure and to assist with my fundraising. I am sure you will enjoy every word.
Finally, let me thank Shane for conceiving this anthology, putting it together, and getting it into your hands. You are a legend, mate.
Motor Neurone Disease/ALS is an awful disease—one with no cure. And no treatment but one—the love of friends and family. As to that treatment, my glass is full to overflowing.
Rocky Wood
Melbourne, Australia, November 2011
* * *
Joe McKinney
For Manly Wade Wellman
Sheriff John Morison was a big man, six-three and two hundred and sixty pounds in his boots, slack-brimmed Stetson cowboy hat, and chocolate brown suit. He had a strong, proud chin, a drooping, Teddy Roosevelt-style mustache, and sleepy, nut-colored eyes that had seen much and feared little. People around Sabine County said he’d come home from the Great War with his eyes like that—sleepy, yet with an intensity behind them that withered most men.
He was the only man from my youth with the stones to stand up to my Daddy when Daddy was on one of his benders, and growing up, I respected him, and even feared him, because of that power he seemed to have over other men.
And now, sitting in his office, a lazy metal fan turning on the windowsill with a steady clack, clack, clack, I had those eyes focused on me again.
Two days before I’d been in a hotel bar in New York City, sipping mint juleps with a lovely flaxen-haired gal from Iowa, the two of us enjoying my recent release from the Army, when I’d received a telegram from Morison telling me my cousin Mike had got himself into some serious trouble.
Now my cousin Mike has a problem. He stutters. People hear him talk and they think he’s retarded, which he ain’t. When the two of us were kids, folks took to calling him Machine Gun Mike. He hated it, and I hated hearing it.
Still, it was pretty accurate, far as nicknames go, because his stuttering makes him sound like he’s spitting bullets.
But when Morison told me why I’d just raced halfway across the country, I nearly laughed in his face.
War will do that to you. The giants of our youth become merely men, and sometimes even the objects of our pity.
“A girl?” I said, staring Morison square in the eye. “You called me back here because Mike is having trouble with a girl? Is that why you got him locked up?”
“That’s for his own protection.”
“From who?”
He held up both hands and patted the air like that was supposed to calm me down. “Let me explain,” he said.
“I bet it’ll be a riot,” I said.
And it was, too, because what he told me was a lunatic’s tale.
Recently, there’d been seven murders along County Road 153, the dirt road that winds north past my cousin’s house, into the pine forests of northern Louisiana, and from there to God knows where.
Mike and I had wandered that road many times in our youth, and I knew most of the folks who lived along it. They were all poor, just good old fashioned backwoods folks, their homes simple weather-beaten shacks that were even smaller and humbler than the little house Mike and I had shared with his Dad after my Daddy died. All seven victims had come from those simple folks, two men and five women.
The bodies had been chewed to pieces, like a pack of wild dogs had done it, and the whole county was up in a roar.
Armed men started patrolling the road at night—hard drinkers with rifles, most of them.
Two nights before my arrival, at the same time I was enjoying the company of my flaxen-haired Iowa nurse, those patrols had seen a large doglike thing skulking through Myrtle Ferguson’s back yard.
They shot it, and they saw it fall, but when they checked to see what it was they’d shot, all they found was the naked body of a young, black-haired woman named Rosalinda Villalobos.
“Now there were witnesses,” Morison assured me. “All those men swear up and down that what they shot was a dog. Or a wolf. Something like that.”
“They were drunk,” I said, unimpressed. “They made a mistake.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “I thought of that. First thing, that’s what I thought. But you see, this Villalobos woman, she had a reputation.”
“What kind of reputation?”
He sighed. “People ‘round here claim she was a witch.”
“A witch?”
He nodded.
“I see.” I looked briefly at my fingernails, then back at Morison. In that moment I realized the number of sacred monuments from my youth had just been reduced by one. “Do you mind telling me what this has to do with Mike?”
“She’s the one Mike was involved with,” Morison said. “He was crazy in love with her, Tom. I mean crazy. You know the way some men get? Wild in the head.”
That floored me. My first instinct was that this girl had talked Mike into doing something illegal. It hadn’t even occurred to me to think of Mike falling in love. I guess even I hadn’t figured he had that kind of emotional sophistication. Not the Gunner.
But then the implications of what I was thinking hit me, and I was ashamed.
I lowered my voice. “Has he tried to hurt himself?” I asked.
“No, not yet.”
“So why did you put him in a cell?”
Morison looked down at his desk and pushed the blotter around, fidgeting with it. “Look, Tom, it’s like this. Folks ‘round here believed that woman was bad news. I don’t believe she was a witch any more than you do, but those people were terrified of her. Still are. After they killed her, they chucked her body in the peach orchard up near the start of the pines.
I licked my teeth while I thought about that. The peach orchard hadn’t been a working orchard since before the War with the Union. Sabine County’s always had a lot of poor people, both black and white, and the peach orchard was where the blacks buried their people that didn’t have family or friends to pay for a grave marker. For those people up in the pine country to toss a white woman—even a white woman with some Mexican blood in her—into an unmarked grave in the peach orchard, they must have really hated her.
Morison went on.
“Mike was real upset by that, Tom. Sometime during the night, he went up there and dug her up.”
I wanted to scoff at him, to tell him that Mike would never do something that stupid or crazy, but when I looked into his sleepy, world-weary eyes, I knew every word of it was true.
“A couple of boys found her body the next morning.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Mike’s front yard.”
My stomach turned over.
“Folks up in the pine country was plenty pissed. They took the body and pitched it back into the peach orchard, then they came back lookin’ for Mike. When I got there, they was fixin’ to lynch him.”
My mind raced through the options, trying to figure out what, if anything, I could do for Mike. The old big brother instincts I’d always had for Mike were stronger than ever, like I’d never been gone at all, and I knew the only I could do to help him was to keep him close.
“You mind if I take him home?” I asked.
“I was kind of hopin’ you would,” Morison confided.
He led me back to the cells, which I remembered well from all those horrible Sunday mornings when I’d wake up to Sheriff Morison banging on the screen door of our house, yelling for me to get dressed and come with him to fetch my Daddy.
Little had changed. Many of the same faces looked out at me, their hands gripping the bars, their faces staring at me like morose, drunken butterflies in some grotesque bug collection.
Morison opened Mike’s cell and Mike came out, head hung low, shoulders stooped. He looked like he wanted to disappear into the shadows.
He was sadder than I’d ever seen him before, which was maybe why he looked older than I remembered. But little else had changed. He still wore his pants hitched up too high and his skin still had that flabby, unhealthy paleness to it. He hadn’t combed his hair.
I pulled him into the yellow circle of light that an overhead lamp made on the floor and straightened his hair.
“You okay?” I asked him.
He muttered something.
One of the other prisoners yelled at him. “Hey Gunner, what day is it?”
I hadn’t heard anybody use his nickname out loud since Mike and I started to run around together, and the sound of it snapped something inside of me.
Mike looked up at the man with watery eyes that wanted so much to be liked. “S-S-S-Saturday,” he stuttered, and that brought a loud, braying laugh from the cells.
I went over to the man’s cell and punched him through the bars, laying him out on the floor.
The laughing stopped.
“You mind if I take him home now, Sheriff?” I asked.
“No,” said Morison, staring at the man in the cell, who was on his back, breathing noisily through a red, blossoming flower of blood that had once been his nose. “Go ahead.”
#
We drove back to Mike’s house in the ’27 Ford his Daddy had left him and stopped in the driveway, a cloud of white dust settling across the trash strewn yard ahead of us. Mike hadn’t said a word since leaving the jail, and I didn’t push him. I figured he’d come around sooner or later.
The house where I had grown up was an absolute wreck. Mike’s Daddy had been a good man, a kind man, but not a strong one. In the last years of his life he’d let his home slide into shabbiness, and when Mike took over, the slide just sort of kept on sliding, but at an accelerated rate.
I looked up at the gray, two story wood frame house and sighed. A corner near the kitchen window had been threatening to cave in since I was a kid, but still hadn’t fallen. It drooped over the yard like the brim of an old hat. The porch sagged in the middle and its support beams tilted at uncertain angles. The roof, no doubt full of holes, looked like a checkerboard of black and gray tar strips and the whole place was up to its waist in yellowing alkali grass.
I was wondering how bad it was inside when Mike finally spoke.
“I been m-m-meanin’ to p-p-paint it,” he said.
I put my hand on his shoulder and guided him towards the front door. “It’s okay,” I said. “We’ll do it together.”
The inside was as bad as I’d thought, so crowded with ruined furniture that I barked my shin with every step. Water had come through a hole in the ceiling and the wood floor near a far corner of the living room was dark and probably rotted through. I made my way to the kitchen and sat down while Mike made us coffee.
Outside the sky was coloring with the pink and gold and darkling purple of an East Texas sunset, the kind I’d missed so much during the war. A cool breeze stirred the curtains of an open window in the dining room and I smelled the scent of country pine mingled with the dust.
“Tell me about her, Mike?” I said.
Mike put our coffees on the table and sat down next to me. It occurred to me then that the truly remarkable thing about Mike was the honesty of his expressions, for another man might have tried to hide the naked pain of lost love I saw in his face.
“I l-l-loved her,” he said with a stiff set to his mouth and chin that almost dared me to challenge him. “And she loved m-m-me.”
That seemed to say everything that needed to be said in his mind, and I nodded.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” he answered back, like we’d settled something.
I waited.
“I have a p-p-picture,” he said. He got up suddenly and went into the living room. When he came back he put a picture frame in my hand.
I took it and studied the girl I saw there.
“This is Rosalinda?” I said.
He nodded.
She wasn’t an attractive woman, to be sure, but her eyes were full of a vital spark that gave her face character, and kindness. They were as black as her hair, tucked in beneath a large, heavy brow line that shaded her face with one continuous, unbroken eyebrow.
He told me how they met. She’d wandered onto the property, looking for milkweed root, and came upon him while he was trying to fix the burned valves on his tractor’s motor. The two of them talked all afternoon, and by the time Mike went to bed that night, he was hopelessly in love.
It was at that point I realized how unfairly I’d judged him when I doubted his ever falling in love, for he clearly loved Rosalinda Villalobos in that same absolutely honest and genuine way in which he expressed all his emotions. He was like a child in the uncomplicated purity of his heart.
Yet he moved from one emotional extreme to another with furious speed. As he told me how the mob had denied Rosalinda a decent burial—even as he knelt over her dead body and pleaded with them—he became so angry I thought for a moment he might start throwing things around the room.
“They t-t-told me she d-d-deserved to rot in the s-s-street like a d-d-dog,” he said, his voice thick with sobs.
I looked him straight in the eye and asked him if he’d dug up her body.
“No,” he said, and the word sounded like a judge’s gavel pounding the bench.
“Then how?” I asked.
“That was her,” he said. “She was trying t-t-to come b-b-back to me.”
I let out a long sigh, seeing a long road to recovery ahead of him. I tried to reason with him, asking him all sorts of questions designed to get at the truth, but the honesty never left his face. He stood firmly by the belief that death was not the end for his beloved Rosalinda, and that not even the grave could keep her from coming back to him.
Though I never lost my patience, I finally got to that point where I couldn’t listen any more.
I sent him to bed.
As for myself, I slept only in fits, tossing and turning on the couch all night.
#
The next morning Rosalinda’s body was waiting for us on the front lawn.
I was angry, and for the first time in my life, I yelled at Mike, convinced now he’d lied to me. I accused him of sneaking out behind my back, of digging up that poor girl and dragging her corpse back here.
But his motives were a mystery to me, for he flatly denied any wrong doing, and though the words ‘sick’ and ‘perverted’ lingered on the tip of my tongue, I couldn’t bring myself to say them.
“Let me see your hands,” I said, taking them in my own and studying his fingernails for tell-tale signs of dirt.
I saw none.
“Come with me,” I said, and led him upstairs to his room. I searched everywhere, looking for sweaty clothes or dirty boots or anything that would confirm my accusations.
“She c-c-came back to me,” Mike said. “I t-t-told you she would.”
“Shut up,” I roared at him. It took us both by surprise, the anger in my voice. He backed into a corner and hung his head while I ran my hands through my hair, wondering what in the hell to do.
“Tell me the truth, Mike,” I said. “Did you dig that girl up?”
He shook his head.
“Look me in the eye and say the words,” I said.
He did. He looked me straight in the eye and pleaded innocent.
“She came b-b-back to m-m-me,” he said. “She loves m-m-me.”
“Okay,” I said. “Come on.”
“Where are w-w-we going?” he asked, following me down the stairs and out onto the lawn like a puppy.
“We’re going to bury your girl good and proper.”
#
Looking at Rosalinda’s face, I felt a tinge of panic. This was not the same girl I had seen in Mike’s picture frame the night before—or, rather, she was, only changed.
Those eyes, those eyes that had seemed to possess such kindness in the photograph, no longer seemed kind. They were bloodless and mean, wide open and fixed. To my surprise, they hadn’t milked over with cataracts, the way they usually do in a dead body. I looked deep into them and shuddered.
The prominent brow ridge was gone too, and with it, the single eyebrow. In its place was a delicate, decidedly feminine brow, high and smooth, sensuous.
She was pale. I expected that, of course. But not the rosy, shapeless patches on her cheeks. Those seemed unnatural, definitely not right.
I knelt down next to her and looked at her hands. Her fingernails and the palms of her hands were caked with brown ditch mud, the kind found all through the peach orchard further up the road. Her simple white dress was stained with dirt, too.
“What are you d-d-doing?” Mike asked, as I ran my finger along the leading edge of Rosalinda’s top teeth.
“Nothing,” I said, and took my hand away. But it was at that moment that a new thought took shape in my mind.
#
Back in the war, my platoon was part of Patton’s spearhead through France. At one point, we got so far ahead of the main force that we had to stop and spend two days in a little town on the banks of the Saone River.
As I washed the dust from my hands at a pump on the side of our house and watched an angry crowd of about twenty men coming up the gradual rise of the front lawn, I thought about those simple folk in that French village and all the funny superstitions they’d shared with me over dinner and endless bottles of wine. I didn’t find those superstitions quite as funny now as I had then, though.
Mike, whose face was still glowing with the childish faith that his lover had come back to him, smiled stupidly from the porch down at the lynch mob.
I grabbed an axe handle and came up next to Mike as one of the men was mounting the steps to the porch. I hit the man in the gut with a hard backhanded slap that doubled him over. Then I kicked him in the face and sent him sprawling onto his back at the feet of the crowd.
Two more men charged us. A moment later, both were on the ground, one holding his shattered knee, and the other on his hands and knees, swaying drunkenly while he spit out teeth and blood onto the grass.
“Get off our land,” I said, walking down the steps toward the crowd.
They backed up a few steps before somebody in the back yelled, “That retard done crossed the line.”
There was a murmur of agreement as the others took courage from the defiant voice and stopped retreating. Several of them muttered threats.
“Bring us that witch’s body,” somebody yelled.
“She’s not here,” I said. That was a lie, of course. She was underneath a tarp in the woodshed, waiting to be buried.
“We know that retard dug her up,” the crowd shouted.
“Look,” I said, staring at each of them in turn, “I’ve just come back from the war and I’m having a rough time of it. If you don’t get off this land I’m liable to shoot the lot of you and tell the sheriff I thought you was all a bunch of Germans. Now get yourselves gone.”
I did my best to look insane, and I think more than a few of them bought it. I am Tom Gilley’s son, after all. The apple don’t fall far from the tree. They took a collective step back.
One of the crowd, I couldn’t tell who, shouted that our house was likely to catch fire one night soon. I looked around for the one who’d dared to say it, but before I could respond, a single rifle shot split the morning air.
Everybody wheeled around, and there stood Morison, a smoking rifle on his hip, his sleepy eyes shining.
“There ain’t gonna be no fire,” he said. “You folks get back to your homes.”
A murmur spread through the crowd, but the rifle shot seemed to have broken their resolve.
“Go on,” Morison said.
Slowly, grumbling their frustration, they started to disperse.
When they were gone, Morison stepped on to the porch, looking with disapproval at my axe handle.
“Some men,” he said, “they come back from a war and they still got the war in their heads. How about you, Tom? You still got the war in your head?”
I handed the axe handle to Mike and told him to put it back in the shed.
We both watched him go.
“I’m pretty well adjusted,” I said, once Mike was gone.
Morison spit in the grass. “Well?”
“Well what?”
“Don’t play dumb with me,” he said, his finger in my face. “That’s twice I’ve had to do this, so don’t. You know what I want to know.”
“He didn’t do it,” I said.
Morison looked deep into my eyes. “I have your word on that?”
“You do.”
“Okay,” he said, his voice softening to a husky grumble. A few minutes later he was gone, a cloud of white dust in his wake.
#
We buried Rosalinda in the backyard, beneath a majestic, moss-covered black elm. No more peach orchard for her.
Mike went out to the roadside to gather blackberry blossoms for her grave while I sat on the porch, whittling one end of the axe handle to a sharp point with my knife.
That night, I put Mike to bed and promised him when he woke the next morning, everything would be just fine. Then I went downstairs, opened the back door, the one that looked out on Rosalinda’s grave, dropped down on the couch, and waited.
It was nearly two o’clock in the morning when I heard footsteps on the back porch.
Without bothering to get up I said, “Hello, Rosalinda.”
“Hello,” she said, and smiled wickedly. Two sharp white points poked out from under her upper lip.
“Come in. You’re invited.”
Her smile widened.
“Where is Mike Gilley?”
“He’s upstairs,” I said. “Sleeping.”
“I want to see him.”
“Yeah,” I said, sitting up, “I bet you do.” I reached under the couch and pulled out the axe handle. “But that ain’t gonna happen, Rosalinda.”
She glared at the pointed end of the stick and then at me. “Fool,” she said. “Who do you think you are?”
“His guardian angel.”
“I love him,” she hissed. “And he loves me. I’ve come for him.”
“I know you loved him,” I said, standing up. “And for that I thank you. But you can’t have him.”
She ran at me, dagger-like fingernails slashing the air between us. I ducked the blows and plunged the point of the axe handle into her heart. She died, this time for good, with a scream still trying to escape her lips.
#
By sunrise I was done reburying Rosalinda, and as I brushed the dirt from my clothes, I wondered what I would tell Mike. How could I make him understand the murky complexity of superstition when my own mind was stretched to the breaking point trying to take it all in? I could tell him of creatures of the night, how a werewolf killed in her animal form is doomed to return as a vampire, but what would be the point? He was too fragile for that, and it might cause him to snap.
But then, as I mounted the stairs, it occurred to me that I didn’t need to tell Mike anything. He had all the answers he needed. He’d loved honestly and deeply, and had been loved in his turn. That was a prize few men could ever claim. For hadn’t Rosalinda, of all the possible places she could go, chose three times to return to Mike’s door?
I imagined her struggles to claw her way out of the ground, and then the long, moonlit walk to Mike’s door, before she ran out of the cover of night and the morning’s light caused her to shut down, to slip into a catatonic state just a few steps short of her destination, and her lover’s neck.
Mike didn’t need to know any of that. He only needed the assurance that his love had meant more to Rosalinda than death itself. Let him take strength from that.
And let time cure him of his grief.
* * *
Nate Kenyon
—1—
My sister wrote to me the other day. Since the letter arrived and I risked the frigid stretch of road to fetch it from the mailbox at the end of the driveway, I’ve been sitting in pretty much the same spot. Front door locked tight. Shades closed. This chair in the corner of my dark little living room in my dark little house is the only place that seems safe to me anymore.
But I’m going to have to get up soon and do something about it, one way or the other. I can’t live the rest of my life this way. Lately I’ve begun to wonder if it couldn’t get out and come after me, even here. And that, my friends, is nightmare enough to drive anyone insane.
The letter is addressed to me, with the words please forward scrawled in my sister’s spidery hand across the front.
Dear David: I hope this finds you well. People are dropping like flies out here in Colorado—worst flu in twenty years, they say. Most of the deaths are old people who have gone the winter with little or no heat in their mountain cabins. Reminds me of the old days, waking up at 3 am with the fire out and my toes like blocks of ice, even with the three blankets and the dog on top of that. Do you remember?
Where to begin? We haven’t spoken in years, and I suppose it’s my fault—I’m the one who left. I always hoped that you would leave too, but somewhere in my heart I knew you wouldn’t. You still feel responsible, don’t you? And so you stay in Maine. And I keep running.
I have to know. Is it still there? God, I shiver when I think about that black water. I still can’t sleep at night. I think about it shriveling up under the sun, or somebody coming along with a bulldozer and turning it into a parking lot. But that would be too easy, wouldn’t it? So I sleep with the lights on and I try not to dream.
And there’s something else. I think it’s awake again. I have them send the White Falls Gazette out here to me—I read and I hold my breath and I look for you, David, I look to see if you’ve gone missing. Well, I haven’t seen your name and I thank God for that every single night, I do. But if you’re still alive and still there then you know why I’m writing because you read it too.
She goes on a while longer, but the rest is not important. Because I do read the paper, and I do know about the little boy who disappeared last Friday in the woods.
I think Alley is right. It is awake again. I think about the lake out there, black as coal in the moonlight, and I remember.
Lord help me, I remember everything.
—2—
We found the lake for the first time during the early spring of 1995.
I was ten, and Alley was eight. The winter had been rough; those days we pumped our water by hand from the well behind the house, and I remember it kept freezing up every night about twenty minutes after the sun went down. Dad tried to keep it warm by running a light and packing it with hay, but that cold just wouldn’t be refused when darkness fell.
The coldest days in Maine are the ones where the sky stays an icy blue, the ground is swept bare in places from the wind and the grass snaps like glass when you step on it. The cold came early that year, and by late December we’d been pounded by three major storms, and had about two feet of snow on the ground.
But around March we had a thaw and we could get outside. I think we’d just about driven Dad crazy by then, chasing each other around inside and playing with Alex, our nosy little Lab mutt. Dad was probably glad for a few hours of peace. We didn’t have much; our mother had died of cancer two years after giving birth to Alley, and Dad worked in the mill for ten bucks an hour. He was gone a lot, and we mostly took care of ourselves, and made do with what we could find.
So on that early spring crisp and clear afternoon we filled a thermos with hot chocolate, threw on our coats and went out to find something to do.
Past the house and short stretch of pockmarked, bare dirt (Dad called it a lawn, but we referred to it as The Moon), the ground dropped off quickly to where a stream ran through the bottom of a shallow ravine. We’d been down there many times before, playing in the water. But we’d never gone much farther than the top of the other bank. Our folks had always told us it was dangerous in that part of the woods, and for some reason, we believed them. Certainly it stretched for several miles without another house or road, and so I suppose we were afraid of getting lost. Anyone who grew up in Maine knew that losing your way in the woods was bad news, with a capital “B.”
As we stood in the shadows of the trees at the foot of the ravine watching the water run black and silent under its coat of ice, Alex ran right over it and up the other bank through the brush. I shouted after him but he didn’t come, so I crossed as carefully as I could and fought my way back to the top, following his paw prints as Alley scrambled up behind.
The woods were deathly silent up there. No birds, or deer, or even wind to shake the trees. Alex might have scared the wildlife away, but the silence seemed unnatural to me. Winter in Maine is a desolate time, but there are all sorts of sounds in the woods if you know how to listen.
Those sounds were gone now.
Not too far away I saw a break in the trees. Nothing more than a deer trail, covered in a foot of snow, crisscrossed with the tiny light prints of rabbits and little birds. But I thought maybe Alex had gone down there.
“What do you think, Alley? Want to go for it?” I asked.
“I will if you will,” she said.
I will if you will. Her typical response. “Would you jump off a bridge if I went first?”
She shrugged, and so I smiled and turned to follow the path, and Alley brought up the rear.
The brambles, so sharp and thick in summer, were brittle now and snapped as we brushed past them. I looked back at Alley once as she dragged her heels through the snow, staring down at the tips of her yellow boots. She wore one of my old jackets that made her look like a big marshmallow, and her cheeks were blotchy pink circles and icy lace from her breath clung to the brim of her hat.
A boy at the age of ten doesn’t waste much time thinking about how he loves his sister, but I remember thinking it then, all right. Our daddy was gone most of the day and night, our mother was dead, and she was all I had.
I will if you will. It made me smile. She was willing to follow me to the ends of the earth, and at that moment, it almost seemed like we’d get there.
We’d been walking maybe ten or fifteen minutes when water began to seep up under a thin layer of ice that snapped and popped under the snow. The sounds were like gunshots echoing in the cold air. I glanced up as we took a bend in the path and caught a glimpse of something flat and dark through the tree trunks. I stopped short, and I heard a short “humph!” and felt Allie’s hand on my back.
Thing was, I hadn’t stopped in surprise. It was shocking to see such open space in the middle of dense woods, sure. But it was the feeling I got that made me freeze in my tracks. The kind you get when a big hairy bug crawls out of the shower drain near your foot. A feeling of mindless disgust.
“David, what is it?” Alley said.
“It’s a lake, dummy. Haven’t you ever seen a lake before?”
“But what’s it doing out here?”
I didn’t answer. Her questions were silly, but I knew what she meant—a lake was the last thing I had expected to come upon, no more than a fifteen minute walk from the house. The chances were actually pretty good that this lake was a well-kept secret. I had certainly never heard of it before, and I doubted if my father had either. This was something that existed apart from and in spite of the human noise that surrounded it; Route 27 maybe twenty miles east, Brunswick with its Air Force base forty or fifty miles away.
Whatever was in that lake could have lived there untouched for years. The thought chilled me in a way the cold never could.
The trees around the lake were all bare, except for the stretch of pines that grew along the far edge. Their razor-sharp needles reached up and cut into the sky, while the others, bare-backed against the snow and ice, seemed to turn inward. Along one section of shore, a series of huge black stones reared out of the shallows like the back of some ancient beast.
I walked to the lake’s edge. The bank was gently sloped, the water still and flat. Strangely, there was little ice here. I reached out a hand.
“Don’t touch it!” Alley cried.
At the sound of her voice I jerked my hand back like it had been scalded. “Don’t be stupid,” I said. “It’s only water. You don’t see Alex getting all freaked out about it, do you?”
That was true enough; Alex was splashing in and out of the shallows, running along the bank and barking furiously at whatever invisible things dogs barked at. But I climbed back up the bank and didn’t touch the water with so much as a boot tip.
We walked around a portion of the lake, sometimes losing sight of it in our efforts to climb over dead brush and fallen trees, always coming back to it again. It was much the same all the way around. We found nothing, not even a discarded beer can or gum wrapper. If anyone had been to this pond before us, they had left no trace behind.
By the time we had explored the whole area and come back around again, the sky above us had turned leaden, the kind of heavy gray that means a coming storm. That was when we both realized that Alex hadn’t been around in a while. I hadn’t heard him crashing around in the underbrush, either.
I got this feeling in the pit of my stomach, a sort of twisting in my guts, like I knew something was wrong. I would feel it again later, when Julie went under and I went in after her—but right then I had never felt such a thing before, and I panicked. I started yelling for the dog. I guess Alley must have felt the same way, because she started shouting along with me.
I yelled myself hoarse but Alex never came, and it seemed like the water was laughing at me. Dark and still and black as coal but somewhere, deep below the surface (and I knew it was deep, all right), something was saying you want your dog? Come a little closer and I’ll give him to you. But you might not like what you see. He doesn’t look much like a dog anymore.
I looked at Alley and she was crying. “We’d better get home,” I said. “It’s going to storm. Alex knows the way. He’ll turn up at the house.”
As we got back on the path I risked a turn and looked back at the lake through the trees. I could have sworn that right then I saw something move in the shallows. Something as big and black as that awful water, sliding back into the depths like a wave that had reared up and broken against the rocks.
I turned back and hurried home, my heart in my throat, and didn’t mention what I had seen until years later, and by then, of course, it was too late.
—3—
Alex never did come back. Not that night, or the next day, or the next. The years did pass, too quickly. When I turned thirteen I started going to the high school in the next town, and Alley and I began to drift apart. I made my own friends, and she hers; a brother and sister can be close as children, but as they go through those early teenage years there are things they cannot discuss together, at least until the awkwardness of that age has passed.
But at fifteen, when I entered the ninth grade and Alley started her first year at the new school, we were together again for a while. We found some of our old affection for each other, and though it had changed into something we held at arm’s length instead of in our guts, it was still good.
And then I met Julie.
Julie was one of my sister’s friends. She lived on the other side of town. She visited our home for the first time on one of those beautiful spring days where the grass turned green and the day lost the final trace chill of winter. The last of the snow had melted about three weeks before, and now the ground was muddy and thick, but the sun was out and things were waking up and moving around, preparing for summer.
Julie was a pale, pretty little thing, with dark shining hair and bright blue eyes. I saw why my sister liked her so much. She had a way of looking at you that could melt your heart, and when she laughed it was like the world had gotten a little brighter. I guess you could say I fell for her, and pretty hard, but she was two years younger and my sister’s best friend, and I didn’t have much experience with that sort of thing.
I guess I wanted to impress her, because walking home from the bus I started talking about the lake. I told her about how we discovered it as kids and my sister listened and didn’t say a word.
“It sounds so cool,” Julie said. “I can’t believe you never went back.”
I wasn’t sure I liked where this was going. Things began coming back to me, the way the water looked under a gray sky, the feeling of the woods, and ... something else. Something I had tried to convince myself I hadn’t seen; that movement in the shallows, a shape slipping back under the surface.
“It’s out in the middle of nowhere, Alley,” she said. “Hidden away. That’s so neat. Clean enough to swim in?”
Alley wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Swim in that? No way.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Might not be so bad.” Maybe I just wanted to disagree with my sister, or maybe it was the thought of Julie and me getting into swimsuits and splashing around together. Dad had probably been right about the dog. A bear had gotten it or some hunter had downed a few too many beers and mistook it for a deer. The point was the sun was shining and all the things that used to haunt my sleep seemed so silly and childish.
It took a few minutes of persuasion but my sister finally gave in. “I will if you will,” she said, looking at me and smiling a little. I guess she hadn’t changed much over the years. Still my baby sister, right?
Alley found Julie a suit and we filled another thermos, with sweet coffee this time. We found the path with no trouble, though it was marshy in places with long feathery ferns hiding the wet, sucking mud of the season. I pushed away small branches of alder and birch as I passed through, enjoying the smell of damp earth and old wood. The shadows painted dark lines on the tree trunks and underbrush. Fresh brambles at the edge of the trail caught and pulled at our clothes, and the trees were thick with leaves uncurling in the warmth.
The lake remained hidden until we were almost upon it, but the ground got wetter until we were stepping out of our shoes in the muck. I walked ahead of them both, and again the woods went silent around us. I remembered the feeling that had come over me years before and it got me thinking. The woods in spring are always full of life. Birds, mice, chipmunks and squirrels chasing each other up and down mossy tree trunks. But now, hell, even the bugs were gone.
It was almost enough to make me turn back. But one look at Julie, and I kept going. I didn’t want to seem like a coward.
The path ended at a big mound of grayish clay that marked the end of a little tributary leading into the lake. I didn’t remember it being there before. Spindly weeds grew out along the water’s dark edges. And Jesus take me if it didn’t look wrong. Unnatural.
Julie came up next to me. I said something like it didn’t look too good to swim in after all, and she went right down to the lake’s edge and crouched. “It’s warm,” she said, dipping her fingers in the murky water. “Like, eighty degrees, at least. It’s like a big bathtub. And the bottom looks kind of sandy in places.”
“Yuck, it smells,” Alley said, and I got a strong feeling of déjà vu. Suddenly it was like I was ten years old again, and my sister was standing next to me in her puffy marshmallow jacket, her cheeks glowing pink with the cold.