“I went around to the driver’s door and opened it. The inside light come on, and I looked at that special odometer that she set for trips . . . and what I seen there was 31.6.
“I looked at that for a bit, and then I went to the back door. She’d forced the screen and broke the glass by the lock so she could get her hand through and let herself in. There was a note that said: ‘Dear Homer—got here a little sooner than I thought I would. Found a shortcut, and it is a dilly! You hadn’t come yet so I let myself in like a burglar. Worth is coming day after tomorrow. Can you get the screen fixed and the door reglazed by then? Hope so. Things like that always bother him. If I don’t come out to say hello, you’ll know I’m asleep. The drive was very tiring, but I was here in no time! Ophelia.’
“Tirin! I took another look at that bogey-thing hangin offa the grille of her car, and I thought Yessir, it must have been tiring. By God, yes.”
He paused again, and cracked a restless knuckle.
“I seen her only once more. About a week later. Worth was there, but he was swimmin out in the lake, back and forth, back and forth, like he was sawin wood or signin papers. More like he was signin papers, I guess.
“ ‘Missus,’ I says, ‘this ain’t my business, but you ought to leave well enough alone. That night you come back and broke the glass of the door to come in, I seen somethin hangin off the front of your car—’
“ ‘Oh, the chuck! I took care of that,’ she says.
“ ‘Christ!’ I says. ‘I hope you took some care!’
“ ‘I wore Worth’s gardening gloves,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t anything anyway, Homer, but a jumped-up woodchuck with a little poison in it.’
“ ‘But missus,’ I says, ‘where there’s woodchucks there’s bears. And if that’s what the woodchucks look like along your shortcut, what’s going to happen to you if a bear shows up?’
“She looked at me, and I seen that other woman in her—that Diana-woman. She says, ‘If things are different along those roads, Homer, maybe I am different, too. Look at this.’
“Her hair was done up in a clip at the back, looked sort of like a butterfly and had a stick through it. She let it down. It was the kind of hair that would make a man wonder what it would look like spread out over a pillow. She says, it was coming in gray, Homer. Do you see any gray?’ And she spread it with her fingers so the sun could shine on it.
“ ‘No’m,’ I says.
“She looks at me, her eyes all a-sparkle, and she says, ‘Your wife is a good woman, Homer Buckland, but she has seen me in the store and in the post office, and we’ve passed the odd word or two, and I have seen her looking at my hair in a kind of satisfied way that only women know. I know what she says, and what she tells her friends . . . that Ophelia Todd has started dyeing her hair. But I have not. I have lost my way looking for a shortcut more than once . . . lost my way . . . and lost my gray.’ And she laughed, not like a college girl but like a girl in high school. I admired her and longed for her beauty, but I seen that other beauty in her face as well just then . . . and I felt afraid again. Afraid for her, and afraid of her.
“ ‘Missus,’ I says, ‘you stand to lose more than a little sta’ch in your hair.’
“ ‘No,’ she said. ‘I tell you I am different over there . . . I am all myself over there. When I am going along that road in my little car I am not Ophelia Todd, Worth Todd’s wife who could never carry a child to term, or that woman who tried to write poetry and failed at it, or the woman who sits and takes notes in committee meetings, or anything or anyone else. When I am on that road I am in the heart of myself, and I feel like—’
“ ‘Diana,’ I said.
“She looked at me kind of funny and kind of surprised, and then she laughed. ‘O like some goddess, I suppose,’ she said. ‘She will do better than most because I am a night person—I love to stay up until my book is done or until the National Anthem comes on the TV, and because I am very pale, like the moon—Worth is always saying I need a tonic, or blood tests or some sort of similar bosh. But in her heart what every woman wants to be is some kind of goddess, I think—men pick up a ruined echo of that thought and try to put them on pedestals (a woman, who will pee down her own leg if she does not squat! It’s funny when you stop to think of it)—but what a man senses is not what a woman wants. A woman wants to be in the clear, is all. To stand if she will, or walk . . .’ Her eyes turned toward that little go-devil in the driveway, and narrowed. Then she smiled. ‘Or to drive, Homer. A man will not see that. He thinks a goddess wants to loll on a slope somewhere on the foothills of Olympus and eat fruit, but there is no god or goddess in that. All a woman wants is what a man wants—a woman wants to drive.’
“ ‘Be careful where you drive, missus, is all,’ I says, and she laughs and give me a kiss spang in the middle of the forehead.
“She says, ‘I will, Homer,’ but it didn’t mean nothing, and I known it, because she said it like a man who says he’ll be careful to his wife or his girl when he knows he won’t . . . can’t.
“I went back to my truck and waved to her once, and it was a week later that Worth reported her missing. Her and that go-devil both. Todd waited seven years and had her declared legally dead, and then he waited another year for good measure—I’ll give the sucker that much—and then he married the second Missus Todd, the one that just went by. And I don’t expect you’ll believe a single damn word of the whole yarn.”
In the sky one of those big flat-bottomed clouds moved enough to disclose the ghost of the moon—half-full and pale as milk. And something in my heart leaped up at the sight, half in fright, half in love.
“I do though,” I said. “Every frigging damned word. And even if it ain’t true, Homer, it ought to be.”
He give me a hug around the neck with his forearm, which is all men can do since the world don’t let them kiss but only women, and laughed, and got up.
“Even if it shouldn’t ought to be, it is,” he said. He got his watch out of his pants and looked at it. “I got to go down the road and check on the Scott place. You want to come?”
“I believe I’ll sit here for a while,” I said, “and think.”
He went to the steps, then turned back and looked at me, half-smiling. “I believe she was right,” he said. “She was different along those roads she found . . . wasn’t nothing that would dare touch her. You or me, maybe, but not her.
“And I believe she’s young.”
Then he got in his truck and set off to check the Scott place.
That was two years ago, and Homer has since gone to Vermont, as I think I told you. One night he come over to see me. His hair was combed, he had a shave, and he smelled of some nice lotion. His face was clear and his eyes were alive. That night he looked sixty instead of seventy, and I was glad for him and I envied him and I hated him a little, too. Arthritis is one buggardly great old fisherman, and that night Homer didn’t look like arthritis had any fishhooks sunk into his hands the way they were sunk into mine.
“I’m going,” he said.
“Ayuh?”
“Ayuh.”
“All right; did you see to forwarding your mail?”
“Don’t want none forwarded,” he said. “My bills are paid. I am going to make a clean break.”
“Well, give me your address. I’ll drop you a line from one time to the another, old hoss.” Already I could feel loneliness settling over me like a cloak . . . and looking at him, I knew that things were not quite what they seemed.
“Don’t have none yet,” he said.
“All right,” I said “Is it Vermont, Homer?”
“Well,” he said, “It’ll do for people who want to know.”
I almost didn’t say it and then I did. “What does she look like now?”
“Like Diana,” he said. “But she is kinder.”
“I envy you, Homer,” I said, and I did.
I stood at the door. It was twilight in that deep part of summer when the fields fill with perfume and Q
ueen Anne’s Lace. A full moon was beating a silver track across the lake. He went across my porch and down the steps. A car was standing on the soft shoulder of the road, its engine idling heavy, the way the old ones do that still run full bore straight ahead and damn the torpedoes. Now that I think of it, that car looked like a torpedo. It looked beat up some, but as if it could go the ton without breathin hard. He stopped at the foot of my steps and picked something up—it was his gas-can, the big one that holds ten gallons. He went down my walk to the passenger side of the car. She leaned over and opened the door. The inside light came on and just for a moment I saw her, long red hair around her face, her forehead shining like a lamp. Shining like the moon. He got in and she drove away. I stood out on my porch and watched the taillights of her little go-devil twinkling red in the dark . . . getting smaller and smaller. They were like embers, then they were like flickerflies, and then they were gone.
Vermont, I tell the folks from town, and Vermont they believe, because it’s as far as most of them can see inside their heads. Sometimes I almost believe it myself, mostly when I’m tired and done up. Other times I think about them, though—all this October I have done so, it seems, because October is the time when men think mostly about far places and the roads which might get them there. I sit on the bench in front of Bell’s Market and think about Homer Buckland and about the beautiful girl who leaned over to open his door when he come down that path with the full red gasoline can in his right hand—she looked like a girl of no more than sixteen, a girl on her learner’s permit, and her beauty was terrible, but I believe it would no longer kill the man it turned itself on; for a moment her eyes lit on me, I was not killed, although part of me died at her feet.
Olympus must be a glory to the eyes and the heart, and there are those who crave it and those who find a clear way to it, mayhap, but I know Castle Rock like the back of my hand and I could never leave it for no shortcuts where the roads may go; in October the sky over the lake is no glory but it is passing fair, with those big white clouds that move so slow; I sit here on the bench, and think about ’Phelia Todd and Homer Buckland, and I don’t necessarily wish I was where they are . . . but I still wish I a smoking man.
Are You Afraid of the Dark? by Charles L. Grant
Charles L. Grant was born in New Jersey in 1942 and has lived in that state most of his life, except for four years at Trinity College in Connecticut and two years as an MP in Vietnam. Grant’s first story was published in 1968, while he was a high school teacher. He turned to writing full-time in 1975. He has published some twenty books—novels and short story collections—and has edited almost as many anthologies, most notably the Shadows series for Doubleday. In addition, Grant has published over eighty short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and (under the pseudonyms Felicia Andrews and Deborah Lewis) he has written a dozen gothic novels. His most recent books include Night Songs, The Tea Party, and The Long Night of the Grave, as well as the anthologies, Shadows 8, Midnights 1, and Greystone Bay. In 1984 Grant contributed one-third of the three-author anthology series from Dark Harvest, Night Visions, and in 1985 he is guest editor of Night Visions 2.
Somehow Grant found time from his busy schedule to be Guest of Honour at Fantasycon IX in Birmingham, England this past fall. It was in the Fantasycon IX Programme Booklet that “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” first appeared. The story is one of Grant’s best, and it is a pleasure to be able to present it to the wider audience it deserves.
The storm began moving just below the horizon, setting houses and trees in sharp silhouette, freezing the clouds in grey and roiling white; it buried the sunset and drove off the stars and replaced the moon’s shadows with strobic shadows of its own.
Yet it was harmless out there, far enough away to make people smile, glance at their watches and walk only a bit faster. There was no warning in the forecast, and its own warning was muttered, softened by the spring air just an hour ago filled with sun and new flowers and leaves brilliant green on the trees along the curbs.
Then the breeze became a wind, and the storm turned around, a panther stalking the night with flashes of lightning where its claws touched the ground, grumblings of thunder when it spotted its prey.
The breeze became a wind, and the temperature dropped, and all that was left was the waiting for the rain.
The padded deacon’s bench had been turned around to face the picture window in the den. The floral draperies had been pulled back, the lights had been turned off, and the backyard was visible only between the blinks of an eye, as the storm moved overhead and crashed down on the house. Lightning escaped the confines of black clouds, flaring, crackling, giving the trees angled movement and turning the back hedge into a huge black wall. The ornamental wishing well, the birdbath, the tool shed in the corner, all of them curiously flat when the air burned blue-white ahead of the thunder. The leaves were silver, the grass pale grey, and the reflections in the pane were bloodless and transparent.
“She’s right,” Jeremy Kneale said, squirming on the bench but not wanting to leave. “Bernie’s right, it’s just like a movie.”
“It is not. It’s stupid. It’s dark out, can’t you see that?” Stacey flinched at the next lightning bolt, but he still wasn’t impressed. “It’s dumb. I wanna watch TV.”
“Bernie says we can’t,” Will reminded him. “She says we have to wait until something good comes on.”
“Her real name,” said Stacey, “is Bernadette, and Bernadette is a real pain in the ass.”
Jeremy winced at the way his friend talked about their new babysitter, but he didn’t say a word. Scolding Stacey Parsons was a waste of time. He knew that. He had heard his mother tell his father that a hundred times, and heard them wonder how the boy’s parents managed without strangling him. That part was a joke; at least, he thought it was a joke.
Behind them, through the swinging door that led into the kitchen, they could hear Bernie working. Making popcorn. Fixing trays. Getting glasses from the cupboard and pouring them soda.
“I feel stupid,” Will confessed at last.
Jeremy did too, but he wouldn’t admit it. He was in enough trouble already, and the one thing he didn’t need was Bernie telling his folks that he was being difficult again. Yet it wasn’t his fault. He liked to explore things, go places, find new games to play with his best friends in the whole world. Just because it sometimes got him into trouble with the neighbours, or with people he didn’t even know, didn’t mean he was bad. Like the window this afternoon at the toy shop. He didn’t mean to break it, but Stacey had ducked when he’d tossed the rock at him. Not a throw, just a toss, and it must have hit the pane just right because the next thing they knew there was glass all over the pavement and lots of big people reaching for them so they wouldn’t run away.
It was an accident.
His parents didn’t believe him.
And parents, Stacey had said once, never believed the kid when there was a grownup around. You had to be big to be believed; you had to be able to defend yourself with something else besides tears.
“I’m hungry,” Will Young said, standing and walking away from the window. He turned on a lamp, blinking at the light.
“Yeah,” said Stacey. He stood, gestured, and he and Jeremy turned the bench around where it belonged. Then he closed the drapes and sat again, hands in his lap, feet swinging. “I wish she’d hurry up.”
“It’s like prison,” Will said, rubbing his hands together and grinning. “Bernie is the guard, see, and our parents are off to see the governor, to find out when they’re going to throw the switch.”
“Where’d you hear that?” Jeremy asked.
“Saw it in a movie.”
Jeremy shook his head. “I saw that movie, and you got it wrong. They’re supposed to find out if the governor is going to stop them from throwing the switch.”
“Sure,” Stacey said. “Did you see the look on my father’s face when he found out what happened today?” He shuddered. “I know t
hat look. He’s gonna be right there by the guy with the black mask. He’s gonna throw the switch himself.”
Jeremy had to agree. He had never seen any of their parents so angry before. As if he and his buddies had deliberately set out to find trouble, or cause it when they couldn’t find it, and lied about it when they did. Of course, they didn’t always tell the truth because then they’d really get clobbered. As it was, they were supposed to stay on their own property for a whole two weeks, and the only reason they were allowed together tonight was because his father had decided it was time the six grownups got together and decided what to do about taming their hellions.
He didn’t know exactly what hellions meant when he heard his father on the phone with Mr. Young the other night, but he did know it wasn’t good. And he knew that this time they weren’t going to be able to cry or beg or pout their way out of whatever punishment there was going to be. Staying home wasn’t punishment; staying home was only getting ready for whatever big stuff was coming after.
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