Piercing the Darkness: A Charity Horror Anthology for the Children's Literacy Initiative

by Joe R. Lansdale

  He sighed with disappointment, but knew he could do nothing to get that moment back. His eyes were heavy and even now he had not come fully awake. Sleep called him to return, and though he knew the memory would retain little clarity come morning, he began to succumb.

  A sound halted his eyelids at half-mast, and a slight frown creased his forehead. Tick-tock, tick-tock, but it wasn’t a clock. Teddy listened with half an ear, trying to sort out the origin of that familiar sound. It grew louder, though still muffled, and he opened his eyes fully and stared at his bedroom window. He did know that sound. Not a tick-tock, but the clip-clop of a horse’s hooves.

  His bedroom lay draped in indigo darkness, enough light provided by the streetlamp in front of Mr. Graham’s house to silhouette the furniture, but not enough for him to make out the time on the clock by his bed. Who rode a horse down his street in the middle of the night?

  A terrible possibility rushed through him—Mr. Hatton. Had the rancher learned of his trespassing and come to confront him? Teddy’s heart pounded in his chest for ten full seconds before the absurdity of that idea made it crumble apart. Mr. Hatton might be the only one living around here who kept horses, but the old man would not come riding up in the middle of the night just to scare a fifth-grader.

  Don’t be stupid, Teddy, he thought to himself, and smiled.

  But the clip-clop sound began to slow, and curiosity dragged him out of bed. If not Mr. Hatton, then who could be out riding so late? It occurred to him as he went to the window that, since he didn’t know anyone else who owned horses, maybe someone had stolen one from Mr. Hatton. Teddy might be able to get a look at the thief and tell the police. He might even get a reward!

  On the book shelf next to the window was a little lamp, but Teddy didn’t turn it on. If he managed to get a look at the horse thief, he didn’t want to be spotted. Instead, he crouched beside the window and peered around the edge of the dusty curtain. A quarter moon hung low in the sky and the street lamp down in front of Mr. Graham’s flickered a little, like maybe it would go out soon, but despite that illumination, for a few seconds he didn’t see anyone out there at all.

  Then movement caught his eye, and he heard the slow clip-clop of hooves again. Teddy narrowed his eyes as he saw the rider—all dressed in black and astride a black horse—and then he blinked and his eyes went very wide. With his black cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes and the long black coat he wore, the man on horseback looked even more like a gunfighter than the cowboy’s ghost.

  Holding the horse’s reins loosely, the man in black sat up high in the saddle, and his coat fell open to reveal the moonlit gleam of black metal at his hip. He watched as the rider urged the horse forward at an achingly slow pace. The man in black studied the Grahams’ house as he passed, and then glanced across the street at the Sullivans’, like he might be searching for a certain house but didn’t know the exact address.

  The thought froze the breath in Teddy’s throat. He stared, eyes widening further as the man passed through the dome of yellow light from the street lamp, and he realized he could see right through both horse and rider.

  Shivers went up his spine and he bit his lip. From downstairs he could hear the hiss of the radio, the sound it made when the world had stopped broadcasting.

  Clip-clop, clip-clop, the rider came on, more and more slowly. Right out in front of Teddy’s house, he seemed to pause a moment and tilt his head slightly to the side, like he was listening for something.

  “No,” Teddy whispered, there alone in his darkened room. “Keep riding.”

  For another breath, the black rider hesitated and then, almost reluctantly, spurred the horse onward. The animal’s hooves clacked on the pavement, and Teddy felt pretty sure it had picked up the pace a little. Still, he stared, watching as the black rider and his horse moved on, past the Hesses’ house and then the Landrys’.

  Teddy’s lower lip trembled and his eyes began to fill. He slid down and leaned against the wall, taking long, steadying breaths, unable to put together even just in his own thoughts why such fear had gripped him. A single tear traced its way down his cheek and he sighed with relief.

  “You should have been here,” he whispered into the dark, thinking of the cowboy, and then realizing that the words had not been meant for that ghost, but for his father. His heart hurt his chest.

  Then he froze once more.

  Outside, the clip-clop had ceased. Teddy rose up to his knees and peered out the window, hoping for a moment that the black rider would have simply vanished, the way the cowboy’s ghost had earlier in the day. But no, the figure remained. The rider had come to a halt in front of the Landry house, but wasn’t looking at the Landrys’ or at the Mansurs’ across the street. The black rider hung his head, hat tilted almost straight down. He seemed almost to have fallen asleep in the saddle.

  Then, without looking up, he tugged the reins and the black horse turned. Slowly, the rider raised his head, facing Teddy’s house, and though the brim of his hat covered his eyes, Teddy knew the dark man was looking right at him, that the rider could see him despite the darkness in his bedroom.

  With a tug on the reins, the black rider started back toward Teddy’s house. Clip-clop, clip-clop. His coat hung wide open, and in the moonlight, the black metal of his gun seemed to wink.

  “No,” Teddy whispered. “I won’t let you.”

  The rider snapped the reins and the horse leaped into a gallop, and then Teddy was up and running. His bare feet squeaked on the wood floor as he raced into the hallway and sprinted for the steps. The hiss of the radio grew loud in his ears as he gripped the banisters and half-ran, half-slid down the stairs. His face burned with the desperation of tears he refused to shed, and he tried to steady his heart the way that his hands had steadied his father’s gun that day.

  And he knew why the ghost had visited his house.

  At the bottom of the steps he came face to face with the front door, and he heard the thunder of hooves right outside, could practically feel it shaking the floorboards as he turned from the door and ran down the front hall. In the room on the left, he could hear his mother coughing in her sleep. It was an awful sound, almost like choking, and the wheeze that went along with it seemed to match the static hiss of the radio.

  Teddy grabbed the handle of the door under the stairs and yanked hard. Thick with old paint, it stuck.

  The sound of hooves had stopped, but now he heard the tread of boots on the front stoop, and the doorknob rattled. The frame creaked as the rider tested its strength.

  The little pantry door under the stairs gave a shriek of warped wood as he forced it open. Desperate, he snatched the old cookie tin off of its shelf, popped off the cover, and let the tin clatter to the ground as he hefted the weight of his daddy’s gun.

  As all fell silent at the front door, he twisted around to see the black rider step right through the door, just as easily as the ghost had passed through the screen earlier, his head still dipped, face half-hidden behind the brim of his hat. Hands shaking, Teddy nearly dropped the gun, but he managed to lift it and take trembling aim.

  “I won’t let you,” he said, and somehow his voice did not quaver, and then his hands went still.

  The rider lifted his head as though taking notice of him for the very first time, and Teddy nearly screamed. Where his face ought to have been there was only emptiness, darker than the darkest night and deep as forever.

  The rider went for his gun, and Lord he was fast. Teddy pulled the trigger three times. His daddy’s gun bucked in his hands but made not a sound. The rider staggered backward and fell through the door, like it wasn’t even there.

  Whispering silent prayers, and sometimes private thank-yous to a gunfighter whose days had passed, he stood with the gun aimed at the front door for as long as he could keep his arms raised. When he could no longer hold them up, he sat on the floor and leaned against the frame of the open pantry door, the gun cradled across his lap, listening to the hiss of nothing on the rad
io.

  ««—»»

  Ma woke him in the morning, flushed with color, eyes bright with anger and confusion, wondering what he thought he was doing sleeping in the hallway.

  Teddy caught hell for playing with his daddy’s gun. Even got grounded for a week, which meant he had to spend every second he wasn’t at school right there in the house with his ma.

  He didn’t mind at all.

  — | — | —

  HAVEN

  KEALAN PATRICK BURKE

  “It’s your mother. I’m afraid she’s passed away.”

  Yes, yes. Old news. Never once has he stopped to think about how odd it is that he is so certain. The knowledge was just there, shortly before the phone rang, manifesting itself as an ability to breathe unrestricted, to straighten his shoulders and not meet the resistance of her eternal gaze, to dust off a genuine smile and use it without feeling it ephemeral.

  Gone, and the days that follow are among the most wonderful he’s ever had. Scarcely had he dared to imagine the release could be so full, so overwhelming, allowing him to tread with lightened step and floating heart. He encounters strangers and rather than showing them the top of his head in a cowl of cowardice and shame, he beams at them and bids them the sentiments in accordance with the age of the day. That these greetings are seldom reciprocated bothers him little, for his resolve is growing ever more formidable now that he has only one shadow trailing behind him.

  Gone, and the nights exude peace, the mattress accepting his tired bones like clay in the hands of a potter. His dreams are golden, exorcized of the heavy cloying darkness that was the signature of life with Mother. There is no doubt that he loved her, but she molded him into a creature of indifference, isolating him in his own little box of shadow where there was never room for any kind of feeling.

  He suspects what little grief he feels at her passing stems from his being accustomed to her constant presence rather than any true emotion on his part. This suspicion in turn ignites guilt, but guilt is something he has learned to master and, aided by his newfound happiness, it is soon beaten into submission.

  The celebration of her death is a tawdry affair and Tom finds himself at the hub of a ring of people he doesn’t know, or care to. The minister is a patrician man at least twenty years his senior, all practiced smiles and Bible passages as he leads them in a chorus of emotionless verse that rises like startled ravens above the gloomy fall graveyard. The air smells of cold earth and dying leaves.

  Tom weathers the condolences, secretly wondering what it is about death that leads people to the assumption that they can immediately insinuate themselves into the lives of the grieving. If anything, he finds a note of condescension in those voices, powered by the look of there but for the grace of God in their eyes. It sickens him and reinforces his need to leave as soon as this stunted procession of sympathy is over.

  When the last bleak face has moved away, he stuffs his hands into the pockets of his dark overcoat and rounds the church, the sympathizer’s last words to him carried on ill-formed tendrils of autumn wind, falling just short of his desire to hear them.

  Grumbling, he slips through the wrought-iron church gate, the spire of St. Andrew’s like a chiding finger at his back, reminding him who might be watching his disregard for all things sacred. The image weighs on his shoulders like the memory of the woman he has left behind him in the ground. A woman he scarcely knows.

  ««—»»

  He has come home to the house on Marrow Lane.

  As expected, his mother complains about the length of his hair, how much weight he has lost and asks him why he has bothered to come visit her after so long an absence. Her frequent wincing and moaning about her incessant headaches render his excuses meaningless.

  “They steal my sleep and it’s getting harder to keep anything down.”

  “You need to eat to keep your strength up,” he replies, feeling achingly redundant and thinking: Who is this woman?

  Her dramatics are almost certainly a cry for attention, a trait not unknown to her and worsened by age. He delivers the customary platitudes and takes his leave of her, ushered out on a cloud of protest only silenced by the thick oak door of the house.

  ««—»»

  Now, standing before that very same door, running a trimmed fingernail over the cracks and ridges in the wood grain, he ponders the irony of her death.

  An aneurysm. If it’s any consolation, I doubt she felt a thing. It would have been very sudden.

  I see.

  Had she been complaining about headaches or dizziness lately?

  No. At least, not to me…

  Realizing he might have been able to save her had he taken her histrionics seriously brings to mind a far darker question: Had you known, would you have done anything?

  Brushing the thought aside, he opens the door of the two-story memory vault he used to call home. As he steps into the hall his senses hone in on the smallest, the slightest

  (Tommy, is that you?)

  of sounds. He waits, the dust settling around him in the chorus of quiet, ears attuned to the soundtrack of the old house. Eventually he straightens, exhales heavily and continues down the hall until he comes to the living room.

  From the doorway, he sees the familiar sight of the old 10” television set in the corner opposite. A miniscule and fog-shrouded representation of himself is all that’s showing on the vapid eye of the screen as he enters the room.

  The beige carpet knots itself beneath his shoes and he resolves to have it torn up as soon as he moves in proper. He suspects that foul, vomit-colored layer of shag is older than himself and he has hated it for as long as he can remember.

  The same goes for the sofa, a bloated brown semblance of intestines passing itself off as Naugahyde. The upholstery is ripped, yellow foam winking lewdly at him from elliptical eye-sockets. Gone, he thinks, relishing the thought of being rid of these particular harbingers of memory.

  His double shadow bids him look up and he nods at the imitation gold chandelier, missing two of its four bulbs, then down to the once white wallpaper, curling from the mildewed plaster beneath…Gone.

  The photographs, sepia-toned and black and white depictions of stern-faced young men cradling even sterner looking women in their burly arms, people he has never met but who he assumes are his relatives…Gone.

  Gone, gone, gone. All of it. Anything not immediately pertaining to his life will be dumped and with an abandon impervious to the wheedling pleas of sentimentality. It is, after all, his castle now.

  Grinning, he makes his way down the hall to the kitchen.

  This room seems smaller than he remembers it and he wonders if it has shrunk in on itself after years of absorbing the auras of subconscious misery from the inhabitants of this place.

  The lemon-hued walls seem to sag as he wanders around the room. He sniffs at the leaky radiator with the small plastic bowl beneath the tap to catch the water and shakes his head at the grease-smeared range, the picture on the wall above it speckled with spots so that the faces of the two watercolor children look positively leprous. A foul smell drifts to his nose from the trash compactor beneath the sink. He decides to investigate that some other time.

  Against the far wall stands a simple pine table with three chairs and it is here his gaze stalls as the bloated corpse of memory rises to the surface of his mind.

  You’re a dreamer Tommy, you’ll always be a dreamer and a man who spends too much time in his own head never gets a goddamn thing done.

  Don’t talk to him like that.

  I don’t remember anyone asking your opinion, Agnes. It’s a sweet life for both of you, living in your daydreams while I’m out busting my ass to put food on the table.

  Tom stems the flow of recollection, feels it swell against his resistance. The surface of the table is pitted with scratch marks and tiny holes where knives have been used to make a point. Coffee rings on the left—his mother’s side of the table—stare up at him like blinded eyes. On the right,
paler circles where his father lost himself in the liquid utopia of liquor.

  And in the middle where Tom used to sit there is nothing.

  He can almost see himself now—a young boy, eyes permanently narrowed in anticipation of a blow that could come at any time, skin sallow, devoid of the youthful glow typical of a child his age, sitting in a chair that only emphasizes his diminutive frame, his parents flanking him like birds of prey, always watching and waiting as if they expect something profound to trickle from his small tight-lipped mouth. But Tommy remains silent as much as possible. It is safer.

  Shrugging off the memory, Tom shuffles over to the range and the bulbous white kettle, the base blackened by time and negligence, the handle loose, screws rattling. He opens it and angles it toward the naked bulb behind him. To his surprise it appears moderately clean. Nevertheless, he rinses it until he is sure nothing untoward will end up in his cup, fills it and lights the gas ring beneath, the thought of piping hot coffee staving off the unpleasant chill reminiscence has brought in tow.

  Suddenly the blue flame beneath the kettle sputters as the kitchen door drifts open. He turns as it groans wide, allowing him to see down the length of the hallway.

  Damn it.

  The front door is standing open. He figures he must have forgotten to close it when he came in so drawn was he by the familiar. He stomps down the hall, grabs the door handle and is pushing it closed when a faint shuffling gives him pause. He listens, glances at his wristwatch: almost eight. Not an odd time for people to be out wandering, surely?