Megan sighed. The town of Braddock didn't even have a shopping mall, no place for kids her age to hang out and be seen. Nor was there a skating rink, public swimming pool, or teen club. The only hot spot seemed to be the local Dairy Queen, and that was only because it was at the end of the official car cruising strip. She had gone there with her family the previous evening, watching as carload after carload of kids had pulled into the parking lot. With horns honking and lights flashing, they circled the building once or twice before driving back off in the direction from which they had come.
At first she thought it was different cars she was seeing, but then, after a half hour or so, she noticed it was the same vehicles over and over again: beat-up pickups, late-sixties muscle cars in need of mufflers and body work, Japanese imports with low-profile tires and dark tinting, a 1957 Chevy with red flames painted on the hood. Apparently this was the local wild bunch: bored teenagers with nothing but time on their hands, no place else to go, and absolutely nothing to do.
Looking upon the local youth of Braddock she wondered if she too would end up like them in an attempt to escape what would probably turn out to be a boring life in an equally boring town.
Megan's thoughts of her future life in HudsonCounty were shattered by the appearance of a big yellow school bus barreling down the narrow gravel road. The bus looked prehistoric, like a creature spawned in the dim darkness of the Jurassic Period. A man-eater. She took a deep breath and tried to calm her fears, but her heart started to jackhammer.
"Damnit Dad, how could you do this to us?" she muttered under her breath. "How could you do this to me?"
"What did you say?" Tommy asked, turning to look at his big sister.
She shook her head. "Nothing. I was just talking to myself."
Tommy looked at her a moment longer, then smiled. Megan was glad he accepted her answer, because she would catch hell from her parents for upsetting him on his first day at a new school. Though they were in different levels, and went to different schools, the grade school and high school were located next to each other on the same street. Both schools started and ended at the exact same time so students could share the same buses. That made her Tommy's official baby-sitter during the bus ride.
The bus slowed to a stop in front of them, the door opening with a squeak as sinister as that of a coffin lid. Grabbing the handrail, Tommy climbed the three steps to get into the bus. Megan swallowed hard and did the same.
The bus driver was a heavyset woman with flaming red hair. She greeted them with a smile. Tommy said hello back to the lady; Megan only nodded as she turned to look upon a sea of faces she did not know. She stood there, searching for a seat, feeling every eye upon her. There was no talking, laughter, or other sounds normally associated with children on their way to school; silence had descended over the passengers as she and Tommy climbed aboard.
Megan wanted to turn and flee the silence, but she put on her bravest face and ushered her brother forward, choosing an empty seat a few rows behind the bus driver. Despite the bus being almost filled to capacity, the one seat remained strangely vacant, as though it had been deliberately left for them. Did the others know there would be new kids riding this morning? If so, did the empty seat mean no one wanted to sit with them?
Megan felt her face warm with embarrassment as she sat down. The bus started moving, yet the silence remained. Only a few whispers from the very back of the bus broke the quiet.
Feeling as if every eye were still upon her, she faced forward, not daring to turn her head and look at anyone. She managed to seal a few glances from the corner of her eye, and was greatly relieved to discover no one was wearing bib overalls or straw hats. Nor, from what she could see, was anyone going to school barefoot. So much for how television portrayed country kids.
Judging by the boys and girls sitting in the seats across the aisle from her, kids in HudsonCounty seemed to dress in much the same way as those back in New York City. Though none of them appeared to be wearing expensive brand names, they were dressed in modern apparel: baggy jeans, pullover shirts, and basketball shoes for the boys; knit tops, casual shoes, and shorts or dresses for the girls.
She should have known from the giggling around her that something was amiss, but Megan had never been the victim of the viciousness of other children. At the private school in New York she had been popular with her fellow classmates, never threatened by anyone. She didn't know a trap had been set until something struck the back of her neck.
Ouch.
Grabbing her neck, Megan discovered she hat been hit by a tiny wet ball of paper. A spit wad. Horror seeped through her as she realized she had just touched someone else's saliva. Throwing the spit wad to the floor, she quickly wiped her fingers off on the leg of her jeans.
A second spit wad buried itself in her hair. Megan felt it hit, combing her fingers through her hair until she found it. She had just flung the second spit wad to the floor when a third hit Tommy hard on the right cheek, nearly bringing tears to his eyes.
"Ow, Megan, what was that? Something hit me."
Angry, Megan turned around in her seat. She looked past a sea of smiling, giggling faces searching for her attackers. It only took a moment to find the culprits, for they made no effort to conceal their identities.
The spit wads had been fired by a group of older boys sitting in the last row of seats. Tall, hard-muscled boys who looked much too old to still be in high school. Dressed alike in blue jeans, T-shirts, and ball caps, they sported tans that spoke of long summer days working the fields of their family farms. One of the boys held the casing of a cheap Bic pen in his left hand, a makeshift blowgun from which to fire the nasty projectiles. The boy looked at Megan defiantly as he popped another small piece of paper in his mouth and began chewing, openly daring her to say or do anything.
Megan could not physically challenge the boys, nor could she report them to the bus driver. Being labeled a snitch would destroy any chance of her making new friends. It would also put her and Tommy in danger of retributions from the boys if she got any of them into trouble. She couldn't fight back, nor could she ask for help from anyone. Her only option was to retreat.
Turning back around, she slouched down in the seat until her head was no longer a target. A quick tug on his wrist caused Tommy to do the same.
As a barrage of spit wads sailed over their heads, the other children openly laughed at them. Several kids even yelled out taunts, and a rhyming little ditty about the insanity of Megan's great-grandmother, Vivian Martin.
Old lady Martin has gray hair
Claims to see them everywhere
Boogers in the attic, boogers in the walls
Boogers under the bed nine feet tall
Come, let's get them before she's dead
Let's get the boogers out of Martin's head
Megan was stunned by what was being said. Did everyone in town know about her great-grandmother's apparent insanity, and were she and Tommy now being labeled social outcasts because of it? If so, then they were doomed to a life of torment and unhappiness in their new school and community. The bus rides alone would be unbearable. Better to die now than face this kind of humiliation every morning.
Damnit, Dad. Why did we have to leave New York? Why did you have to inherit that stupid house?
A tear formed in the corner of her left eye. She wiped it away quickly, not wanting Tommy or the other kids to see it. She dared not let anyone know they had made her cry; it would only make things worse, ensuring such torments were carried out on a regular basis.
Nor could she let Tommy see her cry. If he saw her tears, he would know that what was going on around him was more than just a harmless game. He would feel badly for her, fell bad for himself, and his tears would come. Not just a drop or two, but in great sobbing buckets. She couldn’t allow that to happen, because it would label him as a crybaby. The other kids would take great delight in picking on him in the hope of making him cry again.
Wiping away the tear, Mega
n clenched her jaws and sat staring at the seat in front of her. The taunts and laughter eventually faded out, and so did the spit wads, as the children grew bored with the game. Her anger, on the other hand, burned all the way to school.
7
The house was slowly shaping up. Very slowly. There seemed to be no end to the cleaning still needing to be done. Practically everything was dirty with years of accumulated grime. That which had not already been replaced or painted needed to be scrubbed and disinfected. Moldings, drawers, woodwork, bathroom fixtures — all were in need of a loving touch and plenty of serious elbow grease.
Holly stood in the middle of the library trying to decide what to clean next. The room looked a thousand times better than when she first laid eyes on it — the new carpeting helped — but there was quite a bit of cleaning left to do. The walls were paneled so they had not been painted, and the books adorning the walnut shelves all needed a thorough dusting, as did the shelves themselves. Cobwebs hung down from the ceiling like finely spun cotton candy, covering the upper rows of books and the shelf containing the kachina dolls.
Deciding the cobwebs were just too much to tackle right then and there, she focused her attention on the hideous masks hanging on the one wall. They were hand-carved and obviously quite old, the wood almost black with age. Like something from a late-night horror movie, the twisted features of the masks sported crooked mouths, bulging eyes, and devilishly long tongues. Some were painted with bright paints, mostly reds and blues. Others had been left unpainted, their eyes formed with hammered sheets of copper inserted into the wood.
Notches had been carved in the outer edges of the masks, a place to fasten leather cords, so Holly knew the masks were made to be worn. She wondered if any of them had ever been used in ancient ceremonies to ward off evil demons, conjure up spirits, or cure the dead.
Maybe the masks had been used by old men to frighten naughty children on cold winter nights, when the wind howled and a full moon caused leafless trees to stretch shadowy fingers across new fallen snow. Such masks would surely have frightened her when she was a little girl, causing her to pull the covers tightly over her head for protection.
Perhaps the masks were not American in origin, coming instead from the mysterious black forests of Northern Europe. Maybe they had been carved by a lonely woodcarver in a country where legends of vampires and werewolves still filled the land, and where portly housewives hung garlic over the windows to keep out unwanted night visitors. They could also have come from Africa, or South America, born in the jungles where ancient medicine men held control over tribal people through terror, intimidation, and ritual magic.
Holly shook her head. For some strange reason she didn't think the wretched masks had been imported from another country. There was something about them that made her feel the masks were definitely Native American in origin. It was almost as if she could visualize the men who had once worn them: half-naked savages with bronzed skin, dancing around shimmering fires in forests of towering oaks and pine trees, carrying out ceremonies of ancient magic and medicine. Tied to a wooden post next to the fire was a beautiful woman, her body trembling with...
She smiled at the image suddenly filling her head, chiding herself for letting her imagination run away on her. "Enough of that. Leave the make-believe to your husband. You don't have time to stand here and daydream."
No matter what the origin of the masks — be it Africa, Europe, or a toy shop in Cleveland — they had to go. Period. Mike had promised to remove them, but they still remained on the wall. Being a horror writer, and having a deep fondness for the strange and bizarre, he was probably hoping she would change her mind about getting rid of them.
"Not this time, mister." She crossed the room and lifted one of the masks from its supporting pegs. The wood was lightweight and smoothly polished. She could almost admire the craftsmanship that had gone into it had the mask itself not been so hideous to look at.
As Holly lifted the mask from the nail holding it on the wall, a strange tingling surged through her hands, as though a small electrical current had passed from the mask to her. She was about to dismiss it as nothing more than a static discharge when the room seemed to groan. It was more of a vibration than an actual sound, coming from deep within the bowels of the house and passing upward through the ceiling. The vibration lasted for no more than a second or two, passing as quickly as it came.
"What the hell?" Startled, she stepped back and looked around. Nothing had changed. She stood there for a few moments waiting to see if the strange vibration would be repeated, wondering if Mike or one of the contactors had briefly switched on an engine somewhere. When the sound wasn't repeated she looked down at the wooden mask she held.
"So you don't like being taken off the wall. Do you?" she joked, dismissing the events that had just transpired as nothing more than static discharge, the settling of an old building, and a bad case of overactive imagination. "Too bad. You're going into a box and that's final."
She placed the wooden mask in an empty cardboard box and then turned back to the wall to remove another one. She almost expected the room to groan again as she removed the second mask from the nail holding it, but nothing happened. No groaning. No shaking. Nor did she experience another tingling in her fingers.
Taking her time to carefully pack the masks, not wanting to damage any of them in case they turned out to be valuable, she was about to reach for the last mask on the wall when movement caught her attention. Something small and dark had darted past the open doorway, gliding quickly down the hall.
"Pinky?"
She crossed the room and stepped out into the hallway, knowing it wasn't the family cat she had seen. Pinky never moved that fast, not even in his younger days. And the cat never, ever passed a member of the family without first stopping for a quick rub. Nor was it a mouse she had seen, or even a rat. It was bigger than that, whatever it was.
Holly looked both ways down the hall. There was no sign of a cat, or any other furred creature. It must have darted into one of the other rooms. Curious, she crossed the hall and entered her studio.
Most of her art supplies had already been put away in their proper places upon the shelves, leaving few boxes left on the floor that a cat or small animal could hide behind. Entering the room, she stepped forward and checked behind the remaining boxes, praying she wouldn't uncover a rodent in the process. Not that she was scared of rodents, but if one suddenly darted out from behind one of the boxes she might scream. Such a cry of terror would result in endless laughter and ridicule from her husband.
Nothing was lurking behind the boxes. No rats, cats, or grinning green goblins. Turning around, she crossed the room and quickly searched through the closet, leaning the paintings forward one by one until she had checked behind all of them. Nothing was hiding in the closet either.
Leaving the art room, she walked across the hall and entered Mike's office, which was a cluttered mess compared to her studio. Numerous boxes, books, and stacks of manuscripts were piled upon the floor, creating places where any number of small furred creatures could easily hide. Switching on the work lamp that sat on top of the desk, she eased forward between the boxes and stacks of books and paperwork, carefully checking behind each stack as she went. She reached the end of the room without finding anything and then checked the closet. Again nothing. The door connecting the office to the library was closed, so nothing could have gone that way.
Okay. Where did you go?
Leaving the office, she followed the hallway to the stairs. At the top of the stairs the contractors were installing new carpeting, so she knew nothing could have gone that way either. Not even Pinky. Had the big tomcat tried to get in the way, the men would have shooed him back down the stairs.
She was about to dismiss the whole thing as a trick of the lighting when a loud noise echoed from the library. It sounded like a pistol shot, or the crack of a wooden baseball bat. The contractors heard it too, for they paused in their work and looked up
.
"Now what?"
Hurrying back into the library, she was surprised to find the last wooden mask, which had still been hanging on the wall, lying in the middle of the floor broken into two pieces. The mask had been snapped in half, broken lengthwise between its slanting eyes.
She stepped forward and picked up the pieces of the mask, wondering what had caused it to fall. The mask was lying a good six feet from the wall, which meant it hadn't just fallen. Instead it had been knocked off the wall, sent sailing with enough force to snap it into two pieces. Holly tested the mask in her hands, attempting to bend the wood. But the wood was solid, and of such strength it would have taken a considerable force to break it.
Perhaps there was a flaw in the wood, maybe a hairline crack, and the normal atmospheric pressures of heating and cooling had finally taken their toll on the mask. Houses and driveways were subject to such conditions, why not a wooden ornament? Maybe the mask had been broken before, though Holly could see no evidence of it ever having been glued.
But even if the wood was flawed, or if the mask had been broken and glued back together, that still did not explain how it had been knocked off the wall.
Turning to look at the place where the mask had hung, she was astonished to discover a large crack running vertically down the wall from floor to ceiling. The crack was over eight feet long, and at least a quarter inch wide. Closer inspection showed that not only was the crack in the wood paneling, but it was also in the wall behind the paneling.
Holly stared at the mask, and then at the wall, wondering what could have caused the damage. "Damn. This place really is falling down around our ears."
Darker Than Night Page 6