When Things Get Dark

by Ellen Datlow

  She shuddered. “Every night. All night. Someone pounds on the door, then it stops. Another pound. Then it stops. At first I looked, but there was no one there. But I won’t look any more. I thought about why this was happening, and then I thought maybe it’s about the money of the dead. I know you two put out money and got what you wanted, but I didn’t put anything out. It seemed sacrilegious. So, I put out half of it because of all the banging, and the next night it was two knocks each time. I put out the rest, and it was three knocks. All night long. Does that make sense? The money is gone, so why are they so mad? What do they want from me? How do I make it stop?”

  “I don’t know,” Alberto said. “I’m sorry. Laura and I asked for specific people, and that’s what we got. They obviously knew you had the money. I don’t know why they won’t stop.”

  “And who are they?” Laura asked. “Do you have any idea?”

  Stella’s eyes blinked. “I think it’s the woman who died here. I think it’s her and anyone else who died here. I think they want to come back in.”

  She looked away for a second, then gathered herself together. “I’m leaving,” she said. “I’ll stay at a hotel until I decide where to go. The rent’s paid. I’ll get someone to come for my things.”

  “But you’ve been here so long!” Laura said. “And all they do is knock?” She bit her lip as Stella glared at her.

  * * *

  Three days after Stella left, the screams began in Gerald’s apartment. They were sickening. Laura stood in the first-floor hallway, on her way out to the store, her heart thudding. She couldn’t bring herself to knock on his door—what could she do? She glanced through the front door and saw Alberto outside, his shoulders hunched. He lifted his head and saw her, and came in.

  “I hear it,” he said stiffly. He took her elbow and they walked back down the hall, to the stairway. “But it’s his own fault. It was all a lie, this whole business. He told me yesterday. He put the money outside our doors, as a joke. He said he found a package outside a funeral home in Chinatown.” He frowned. “He took someone’s offering to the dead.”

  “But the screams—”

  “I told you. He said he had a buyer. Maybe whoever that money was originally meant for, I don’t know. There’s nothing we can do now. We’ve invited them in, each of us, in one way or another.”

  Laura looked back along the hallway to the glass front door. She would have to go past the screams to reach the street now. If she actually made it outside. There was a new heaviness weighing her down when she left Brian, a weariness and worry. What was he doing; was he calling her? She wanted to be free of him, beyond the door, outside, but didn’t that prove her failure as a mother? How could she feel the way she did? What kind of person hated their son, dreaded him, hated the sound of his voice?

  He called for her a lot now, sometimes just repeating, “Mommy Mommy Mommy,” from across the room or right next to her, and nothing she did would shut him up. She was beginning to hate that looming face and the sound of his voice. “Mommy Mommy Mommy Mommy.”

  Another scream tore through the hallway, and Alberto drew his breath in. “We’re stuck with what we’ve done,” he said finally.

  But she hadn’t stolen the money. And she had returned it, after all. Was that true? Had she returned it? Or used it?

  Upstairs, a voice called from inside her apartment. “Mommy!”

  They stood still, heads cocked, listening. There was another scream from Gerald’s apartment. Laura felt a layer of regret folding the two of them together. “Can we send them back?” she asked. Was there any way to undo this, to change what she’d done, to go back to a time when she could have made a different choice? But which choice had been the one to bring her to this point? “Can we?” She could see that small face, those eyes of his—her child, her tormentor. The question was aimed at herself more than at her neighbor.

  Behind her, upstairs, she heard him again. “Mommy!”

  They lifted their eyes upwards, the lines of bannisters and railings like the inside of a telescope, narrowing and narrowing their vision. Alberto’s eyes met hers and he stepped under the stairway to hide, in a move that seemed perfectly justified, and she called up to Brian and rose slowly back to him.

  “Why were you talking to him about me?” he asked, once she was inside.

  “I wasn’t,” she said immediately, but he looked annoyed. “I mean, we know each other and we ask about each other’s lives. That’s what neighbors do.”

  “Really?” he asked, his eyes shining with calculation. “You were talking about how to get rid of me. Us.”

  Her heart lurched.

  * * *

  “What does your friend say to you?” Laura asked Alberto. She didn’t know if “friend” was the right word.

  Alberto winced. “That he would have lived if I’d been kind to him. I don’t remember what I told you. We argued. I swore I would never see or speak to him again.”

  “And yet you called him back now.”

  “He left me a suicide note,” Alberto continued. “I’ve never been able to forget that note.”

  When they met, they often found themselves standing silently together, lost in thought.

  “I told Brian once that I hated him,” she said finally. “More than once. He was a cruel man. Evil. I said I wished he was dead.”

  He nodded, and after a while he said, “It isn’t love that haunts us, but regret.”

  * * *

  She found it increasingly hard to leave the apartment, and she often stopped at the building’s front door, too uncertain about where to go and what to do.

  The tenants on the first floor and on the second floor above Gerald’s apartment moved out because of the screaming. The owner came through one day, knocking on doors and asking those who were left about the screams, which didn’t happen while he was there. “Yes,” she said, “there are screams.” Brian came up next to her. “I didn’t hear any,” he said. “Mommy.”

  “He doesn’t go out very much,” she said weakly.

  The owner looked thoughtfully at Brian. “Cute kid,” he said. “That’s a good age. Wait till he’s a teenager.” He grinned, cast a last look around, and left.

  She remembered those years, of course, the constant fights and threats and stealing and everything else. Was it her fault he’d turned out that way? Had she given up on him and left him to crumble? She looked at Brian. “Are you happy?” she asked. “Were you ever happy?”

  He frowned and said, “I’ll always love you, Mommy. Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!” His voice kept getting louder.

  “Stop that,” she whispered.

  * * *

  The next day she woke up choking, and found Brian in bed with her, clutching her, his hands wrapped around her throat. She reached up and grabbed his fingers, prying them off as she gasped. “What are you doing?” she finally cried.

  “I missed you. I wanted to be close to you.”

  He had crawled into bed twice before, and she had told him not to do it again. He had said the same thing: “I missed you.” She sat up, her back to him, trying to make it seem normal somehow. But it wasn’t normal.

  “You’re too old for this,” she said, and he pressed against her, his arms reaching around her shoulders. “Mommy Mommy Mommy,” he said.

  From that night on, she locked her bedroom door. She pulled pillows over her head, but she would wake in the middle of the night and hear him whispering through the door, “Mommy.”

  * * *

  She found Alberto standing at the front door again, looking out. “How far can you go?” he asked, and she realized then that her orbit had been closing in. Now, she only went to the small grocery store across the street.

  “I’m getting extra food every time I go out,” he said. “Stocking up. You should do the same.”

  She had thought that once and then forgotten it. When she was away Brian filled her head completely; she could only think of him until she returned. There was no reason for her
to put up with any of it. He might be her son (she certainly recognized him) but she had wanted the kind son and he certainly wasn’t that. He was the adult Brian in the boy’s body. That wore her out.

  The next time she met Alberto it was at the bottom of the stairs, where he told her more about his friend.

  “He said I never cared for him, still don’t, that I have no ability to feel for another. Do you think that? He says there are other people I’ve affected, he knows it, other people I’ve driven insane. He says I pushed him to it, after all.” He cast his eyes down and frowned, then looked at her intently. “I can love people, don’t you think? He says I can’t, but I’ve been a good friend, a good neighbor, haven’t I?”

  She wanted to say yes—she wanted to shout it and touch his hand, but her throat hardened and all she could say was, “I always found you kind of reserved, but we’re just neighbors. Some people are like that.” On another day she might have made it sound better; but this was, she thought, still a fair statement. They were neighbors, not friends.

  It was getting harder to leave, and Alberto stood next to the front door the next day, just standing there. He nodded, and she stood beside him, looking through the glass-paned door. She supposed they would stay there until someone came in or out.

  She had not seen anyone else in weeks. “Have all the other tenants left?”

  “I think so,” Alberto said. “Or they don’t come out when we’re around.”

  She drew in her breath. What a strange thing to say.

  “Haven’t you noticed how quiet it is? Even Gerald’s screams are getting quieter.”

  Alberto tapped on the front door; it made a very faint sound. She reached out and touched it too, as if to make sure it was real. They stood there in the quiet until they gave up and turned back.

  She could no longer hear her own footsteps in the hall.

  That was the last she saw of Alberto, or anyone except her son. The front door to the building had become too heavy to move. When she gave up and went back to her apartment, the door opened easily going in, but after a few days it wouldn’t open out at all. Brian stood there grinning and saying, “You were never enough, Mommy. You were never enough!” and he’d scream with joy, then, his face contorted, and she felt her body grow heavy too, with the weight of his hatred. Never enough? She had wanted that part of her life back, the part she’d thought was successful. She had wanted his love back, and she had assumed he’d wanted hers. But all this time he’d judged her. She had thought he was the one who’d failed! Imagine that!

  She could barely walk and began to crawl, and he watched with glee. “Try harder, Mommy, try hard as you can!” and she thought, finally, that there was no end to the hatred the dead held for the living; that no matter how much she had tried (had she tried?), she had no real love for Brian, and he would never forgive her. She would be stuck with him for as long as she lived, and then, she was certain, for even longer after that.

  Hag

  Benjamin Percy

  THE rental home was a cedar-shingled Cape Cod, one of many on the forested island. In the driveway sat a Mercedes, polished to an opal glow. Several suitcases waited on the porch. In an hour, the ferry would take them back to the mainland.

  A girl walked down the steps—eight years old, wearing a yellow dress with a matching ribbon in her hair. She carried a stuffed tiger, a pillow, and a small backpack. She opened the rear door of the car and hefted everything inside. Then a voice sounded behind her, and she startled.

  “You can’t go already,” it said.

  The fog was thick this morning, and it took her a moment to see through the gray filter of it and find the stranger standing among the trees that edged the property. The two of them were about the same age, both with brown hair, but the other girl wore sneakers and jeans and an overlarge sweatshirt. “Not until we’ve played,” she said.

  “My dad says we have to get ready to go.”

  “There’s plenty of time,” the girl said and reached into her pocket, withdrawing a bandana that would serve as her blindfold. “Come on.”

  * * *

  The gulls were screaming. They swirled overhead, winging the air, their gray and white bodies dodging past each other, and the sand rippled with their shadows. Their hunger had been interrupted.

  The deputies would only allow Ellie to get so close. Crime tape rippled in the wind, staking off an area roughly thirty square feet. But she could see, from her vantage at the top of the dune, the remains.

  A jogger had spotted them near the damp line of sand that marked high tide. An arm, laced with seaweed, the skin grayed and blackened with rot. Crabs and gulls nibbled at it.

  This wasn’t the first time this had happened. That’s why The Globe agreed to send her here—to the coast of Maine.

  A deputy named Wallace with a thick black brush of a mustache said, “Sometimes it’s just a foot. Sometimes a hand. One time a head. For as long as I been working here, the ocean likes to cough up its dead. Usually happens this time of year, too. Really gets you in the holiday spirit.”

  This was December, and Ellie wore a fleece and jeans, her hair in a ponytail knocked around by the chill wind. She gripped a notebook. The pages fluttered as she scratched down fast ciphers. She once lost an entire interview to a digital error, so she preferred the permanent memory of paper and ink.

  “Do you mind if I take a closer look?” she said. “I came all the way from Boston.”

  “What do you think you’re going to see there you’re not going to see here?”

  She shrugged her answer. “Devil’s in the details, we like to say.”

  Wallace hesitated a moment, before lifting the tape and waving her through, saying they had already searched and bagged and photographed the area, so what the hell.

  She wore flats and the sand seeped into them when she descended the dune, making every step feel like a chill uncertainty. “To be honest,” Wallace said, “kind of surprised to see you up here.”

  “I specialize in this kind of thing,” she said, and he said, “Crime beat?”

  “I’m an investigative reporter. Part of the spotlight team at The Globe.” She had a reputation for reviving cold cases, some of which led to prosecutions. Everything from the Long Island serial killer to the highway murders of the Tri-state to the missing boys of the Catskills. She helped the dead finish the stories they couldn’t tell themselves.

  Wallace missed a step and nearly tumbled down the rest of the dune before righting his balance. “Well, then I guess you’re in the right place.”

  A woman in a windbreaker that read Forensics across the back was in the process of readying a bag to place the arm inside. “Hold up,” Wallace told her. “Press. Take a smoke break or something.” And then he said to Ellie, “But no pictures, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  Waves boomed. Sand fleas bit at her ankles. The air was cold but her nose was hot with the smell of rot. A gull swooped near, screeching a warning, but she barely noticed.

  A bone stuck whitely out of the purple, fish-bitten flesh. The fingers curled into a claw. Some of the nails were broken, others gone.

  “What is that?” she said, and Wallace said, “What is what?”

  “In the hand,” she said, aiming at it with her pen. “In the palm.”

  Wallace waved over forensics. The woman wore shoe-shield booties that whispered in the sand. “Says she sees something.”

  The woman—her hair styled short and spiked—crouched beside Ellie and snapped on a fresh set of latex gloves. She nudged the dead hand, cranked two of the fingers stiffly back. The skin tore, the grip unlocked. “She’s right.”

  From the hand she withdrew a carved totem. A wooden gull with oversized eyes and a beak that took the shape of a snarl.

  * * *

  Ellie lived in a Cambridge townhome that was never clean. There were always toys or clothes or books underfoot, post-it note reminders stuck to the walls, crayons rolling off counters, dirty dishes waitin
g in the sink. Now, to add to the mess, there was a half-decorated Christmas tree and a tangled ball of lights.

  There was never a time she and her husband didn’t have something hurriedly to do. She was a journalist, he was a financial consultant. They were parents to a busy seven-year-old.

  In the kitchen, her husband chopped vegetables and tossed them into the wok with a sizzle. NPR played from his phone and the noise of the market roundup knotted up with Christmas carols projected from the iPad her daughter was watching in the living room.

  Ellie sat at the kitchen table now with her laptop open. She was studying tide charts, mapping currents. She cross-checked this tab with another open to Google Maps. She dragged it northeast and homed in on a cluster of islands off the Maine coast, then zoomed in until a single island dominated the screen.

  At The Globe, she sat in a hive of cubicles and constant noise, so despite the news blaring and the carols fa-la-la-la-la-ing and the silverware rattling in a drawer, she remained lost in her own zone of concentration.

  “Ellie?” Ron said, and she realized only then that her husband was hovering beside her.

  “I’m sorry, what?” she said.

  “I was just asking you what’s so interesting about Gull Island.”

  “Oh, nothing really—it’s just a story I’m working on.”

  He held a stack of plates in his hands. “Mind shutting it down? So I can set the table?”

  Five minutes later, they scooted in their chairs and hovered their faces over their plates. The chardonnay was cold and crisp and the chicken stir-fry was hot enough to steam on their forks. Their daughter chatted happily between bites. Her name was Lyra and she had a mess of black hair and a gap-toothed smile that couldn’t contain her constant stream of questions. She was always asking things like, “What’s the difference between nice and good?” and, “What’s the difference between mad and angry?” and, “What’s the difference between fun and satisfying?”

  On the one hand, it was endearing and made Ellie proud that she was raising her own little reporter. But at the end of the day, her brain felt gray and frost-bitten and sometimes she had to start a timer and say, “For fifteen minutes, there will be no questions.”