A Haunting of Horrors: A Twenty-Novel eBook Bundle of Horror and the Occult

by Chet Williamson

  Mom just kept saying, “No, no,” as if she couldn’t stop, and Dad tried to hug Rae, but she pushed him away. Lucy complained, too, that they wouldn’t let her go, but secretly she was glad. She spent the night at Stacey’s, and they stayed up till two o’clock in the morning eating popcorn and watching scary movies on the VCR, and Lucy didn’t have any nightmares.

  “What did it look like?” she asked Mom when she got home.

  “Oh, honey, I don’t know.” They were folding laundry, and Mom bent her head over the towels.

  “I mean, could you see anything wrong with him?”

  Mom sort of stared off through the bay window where all the plants were. “He didn’t have any wounds, if that’s what you mean, any cuts or bruises. He was awfully thin and pale, as if he’d been sick. The word I kept thinking was ravaged.” Her voice broke.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Used, sort of.”

  Lucy shook her head, bewildered. “What—”

  “Patches!” Mom yelled, and the cat jumped down from the window seat. A piece of spider plant stuck to his fur. When he shook himself and high-stepped away, the leaves like spread fingers and the tiny white flower like an eye dropped onto the floor behind him. Somebody would step on it there, Lucy thought a little frantically, or vacuum it up.

  Stooping to rescue the broken plant, Mom was crying. It was dumb to be upset over a plant, Lucy thought, especially a spider plant; there were always so many of them. On top of the refrigerator were three or four cups of water with spider-plant cuttings floating in them, waiting for roots, and there must be ten hanging or sitting in pots around the house. They always caught. Mom said it would be a shame just to let them die when they were so easy to save, even though she had all the spider plants she wanted and so did everybody else she knew, so she couldn’t even give them away.

  “It wasn’t him, was it?” Rae was standing by the table, but she didn’t fold anything. Lucy snapped a towel at her. Rae caught the end, yanked it out of her hand, and dropped it back onto the table.

  Still crouched on the floor with the broken spider plant in both hands, still crying, Mom nodded. “Of course it was. It was Ethan.”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “Stop it, Rae!”

  Lucy fished a pair of tiny Mickey Mouse underwear out of the pile. Dominic’s. They fit over her fist like Grandma’s toaster cover. A red striped tube sock dangled off the edge of the table; there was no mate for it anywhere in the jumble of still-warm clothes.

  Rae sighed, too, and Lucy looked up sharply, sure she was being mocked. But her sister’s eyes were on their mother, who had stood up and was saying, “Rae, honey, I know how hard it is, but we all have to accept it. Ethan is dead. His funeral is today.”

  “You’re glad! You hate him! You and Dad both!”

  “You’re wrong,” Mom said dully, as if she’d run out of words. She poked at the plant in the palm of one hand with her other forefinger. “Have you talked about this in your therapy group? Maybe Jerry could help you—”

  “You leave Jerry out of this!” Rae yelled, enraged.

  Mom just stared at her. Lucy held her breath. A car went by on King Street with its radio blaring. Then Mom said, “I miss Ethan. I’ll always miss Ethan.”

  “Gee, now he can’t give you guys any more trouble, can he?”

  Lucy added another folded washcloth to the teetering pile. Hit her, she thought grimly. If you don’t make her shut up, I will. The washcloth had pretty blue designs on it; flowers, she thought, or birds. It was a new one, and it was folded, so you couldn’t quite tell.

  Mom said to Rae, “Oh, sweetheart, you don’t understand. We loved him. We still love him. We’ll always love him.”

  Mom and Rae were standing in the middle of the dining room, hugging each other. Lucy kept folding laundry. She found the missing sock balled up inside the corner of a fitted sheet. Rae was actually a little taller than their mother now, but Mom was stronger, steadier. Lucy supposed Mom used to hug Ethan too, although it was hard to remember a time when he’d let anybody in the family come that close.

  “But he did all that—stuff!” Rae was saying into Mom’s shoulder. “How can you love somebody like that? He did drugs. He dropped out of school. He wouldn’t quit stealing. They finally locked him up in that place, that Nubie, and he still wouldn’t straighten up.”

  “Yes. And there’s a lot you don’t know.”

  “Like what?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Tell me! He was my brother! I have a right to know!”

  “No, you don’t. What you have a right to know is that parents keep loving their kids no matter what the kids do. That’s what parents are for.”

  “It is?” Rae’s baby voice made Lucy sick, but she buried her face in Molly’s cotton nightgown with the pink ribbons and held her breath and listened for Mom’s answer.

  “Yes. It is.”

  “Well, I’m never having kids.”

  “There were a lot of wonderful things about Ethan. There were a lot of good times. Joyous times. I wouldn’t have missed having him.” Mom’s voice broke.

  “Like what?”

  “Remember the time you and Ethan were butterflies for Halloween? You were barely two years old, so there were just the two of you.”

  “I don’t remember that,” Rae said suspiciously.

  “We have pictures. You’ve seen the pictures.”

  “You and Dad think I’m turning out just like him.”

  “I don’t think anybody ‘turns out.’ You’re only fourteen. You’ll keep growing and changing all your life.”

  “You’re lying! You’re just trying to get me mixed up! You think I’m just like him!”

  “Well, Rae, in some ways you are. That’s not such a terrible thing. He’s not—he wasn’t a monster. For instance, you look a lot like him.”

  “No! My hair is blond!”

  Lucy said loudly, “Bleached.”

  “You both like to read. You both hate enchiladas. Or he used to, anyway, before he disappeared.”

  “I don’t want to be like him! I hate him! You’re his mother, so you have to still love him, but I don’t and I hate him!”

  “Rae, you’re not just like anybody. You’ll make your own choices and you’ll do things your own way.”

  By now Rae was sobbing, her head down on the table, and Mom was standing behind her, rubbing her back. Mom seemed to have forgotten about the broken piece of spider plant, dropped it or broken it some more. Or maybe she’d put it in her pocket to keep it safe until she could stick it in water. “I love him,” she heard her sister say. “He was the only big brother I ever had. I’ll miss him.”

  “Me, too,” Mom said, very softly. “Oh, me, too.”

  Me, too, Lucy thought deliberately, but she didn’t know yet if it was really true. I’ll miss him, too, she made herself think, but she wasn’t even really sure that he was gone; he didn’t feel gone.

  The laundry basket was empty. Mom and Rae didn’t seem to know she was there. She gathered up her pile of clothes and went up the stairs to her room. Ethan’s funeral was today. She had to get ready.

  She didn’t know what to wear. She couldn’t do anything with her hair. She stared into her closet for a while, into her mirror. Then she grabbed her diary and a pencil and shut herself into the bathroom with them. She turned the water in the tub on full force and straight hot; maybe she’d take a bath for Ethan’s funeral and maybe she wouldn’t, but she liked the noise and the steam.

  She ought to write something about sadness. She ought to write something about death. Instead, she flipped through the diary’s gold-edged pages, not looking for anything in particular except proof that there had been life and thoughts and words before this day.

  There were lots of blank pages left, even though the year was more than half over. She didn’t write in the diary very often. Most of the time, the things she thought about didn’t stay still long e
nough to get written down, or didn’t come to her in words.

  She stopped to read a couple of entries about Jeremy Martinez, how cute he was, how one day he’d stolen her pencil and rolled it under the teacher’s desk in math class, and they’d both had to stay after school. Dad had told her that boys Jeremy’s age acted like that when they liked you.

  Dad didn’t know what he was talking about. She didn’t know how you knew when a boy liked you, but that wasn’t how Rae would know. She’d ask Rae. She couldn’t imagine how she’d ever thought Jeremy Martinez was cute. Jeremy Martinez was a dog. She had the fleeting, disturbing thought that she really hadn’t written that, that somebody else was sneaking words into her diary.

  Here was something about a spring day. Lucy remembered writing that one. “Now I know what the word glorious means.” The word glorious stirred her, like listening to Tawanda Robinson play taps on her trumpet at the beginning and end of the sixth-grade assembly. She clearly remembered that particular day, that particular moment, the feel of the pencil moving across the paper, filling in the pale blue lines with shiny gray-black writing that was now smudged a little. The day had been filled with bird song and the smell of lilacs.

  Lilacs were Lucy’s favorite flower. Mom’s, too. Every year while there was still snow on the ground, Mom worried that the lilacs would bud too soon and get frozen, or there wouldn’t be enough rain at the right time and they’d dry out, or there’d be a big wind right after the buds had opened and they’d all blow away. There wasn’t anything she could do about it, either. One year the ground had been covered with petals like pale purple snow, and Mom had stared out the window with tears in her eyes, holding the baby Cory.

  Here was an entry that at first didn’t make sense:

  Ethan and Mom played hide-and-seek in the basement today. They wouldn’t let me play.

  She had printed it, so the letters were neat. Her cursive was still jiggly, like a little kid’s; she experimented all the time with different sizes and slants and ways to make certain letters, and she didn’t like any of them. She always got a C in penmanship. Once she got a D.

  Mom called the police.

  Quickly Lucy turned the page; gold flickered. Steam from the bathwater made the paper damp. Somebody was calling her. She turned the page back, smoothed it with the flat of her hand.

  Sometimes Mom and Ethan are like the same person. Sometimes they’re like total strangers.

  Lucy tried hard to believe that she’d never written any of this, that somebody was sneaking into her room, into her dresser, into her diary and writing stuff that didn’t have anything to do with her. Trying to get her in trouble. Trying to drive her crazy. She insisted to herself that she didn’t remember this, but she did remember, and the memory curled around her like smoke, hurting her eyes.

  It was a long time ago. Last Christmas vacation, after Christmas, just before they went back to school.

  The furnace was huffing and puffing in its dusty, cobwebby corner of the basement. Lucy liked to think of the furnace as their pet monster, keeping them warm.

  Snow was piled crookedly outside the little, high, dirty windows, like blankets somebody hadn’t folded right to fit on the shelf. Lucy knew there were spiders everywhere, under everything, hanging from every beam, just waiting to spin sticky webs in her face, just waiting for their millions of eggs to hatch. The fact that she didn’t actually see any only made her more sure that they were there.

  She was in Ethan’s room. She wasn’t allowed in Ethan’s room, none of them were, even though Ethan was long gone. Rae wanted this room, and Lucy wanted a room of her own, but Mom wouldn’t let them do it. Once Priscilla had come downstairs wearing Ethan’s green shirt, sleeves rolled like sausages above her elbows, tail long between her legs in front and in back. Mom had had a fit, even though Pris had insisted she’d found the shirt in her laundry.

  Lucy was looking for the John Cougar Mellencamp tapes she was sure Ethan had stolen from her. Mom was in the upstairs bathroom giving Cory a bath; that would take a while. Dad was at the grocery store with a long list. Still, Lucy was being as quiet as she could, and listening hard to all the footsteps that crisscrossed the ceiling above her head. It was weird to think of a ceiling as being a floor, too, having another side, a top and a bottom.

  She didn’t leave his room as soon as she’d found the tapes under his bed because she was also hoping to find a clue. Maybe the grown-ups had missed something. Maybe Ethan had left a message in secret code that only she could decipher. Maybe in all the time his room had been empty it hadn’t really been empty, Ethan’s spirit or something had been hiding in there all the time, or something had grown or worked its way to the surface. If she could find it, she’d be a hero. Then Mom would quit crying, and Dad wouldn’t be mad at her anymore.

  Lucy left the closet door half-open and felt around. Shirtsleeves wriggled. A tennis shoe sat footless on a shelf. The closet smelled like the rest of the room, only more so; smelled like her brother Ethan. Until then she wouldn’t have thought that certain smells went with certain people. Wondering suddenly if she herself had a special odor, she surreptitiously lifted her forearm to her nose. The ceiling light made huge shadows when she moved, even inside the closet.

  She was on her hands and knees, gingerly poking through the clothes and papers and junk on Ethan’s closet floor, trying not to think about spiders, when she heard a commotion, and then the door to Ethan’s room banged open from the inside. Lucy froze. Something had been in the room with her all this time. Something was breaking out.

  With her hands sunk to the wrists in her brother’s things, she crouched and listened. If she turned her head, she could just see out through the opening in the closet door and then through the bedroom door, which she’d carefully shut behind her but which was now wide open, into the dusty, warm, inhabited basement that seemed to stretch on forever underneath the whole house.

  Mom was standing out there in the basement, facing Lucy. The white streak in her hair made a dull glow, like the snow piling up outside all the windows.

  Mom said, “Ethan!” and held out her arms.

  From between Lucy and her mother, something jumped. There was a sudden, sickening, too-sweet stink, like a sick baby, or like when chicken gets left too long in the back of the refrigerator. It was Ethan. Lucy knew it was Ethan because Mom had called his name.

  Mom cried out and dodged, covering her head. The creature that was Ethan hit the doorframe, which rattled, but only a little, as though he didn’t weigh very much. He crumpled onto the floor like a balloon with the air let out of it, then got up and turned and started after Mom again.

  Mom moaned, “Oh, Ethan, I’m so sorry,” and then ran. Lucy struggled to her feet. Ethan’s leavings on the closet floor tangled around her ankles, but she pulled free and stumbled to the door of the room, in time to see Mom halfway up the basement steps and Ethan—thin, stiff as cardboard, unmistakably Ethan—right behind her.

  He hadn’t come back for her. She’d waited a long time, clutching a split plastic baseball bat because it was the only weapon she could find. As far as she knew, he hadn’t caught Mom, either. She didn’t know what had happened to him that day. Outside the basement windows, which were small as picture frames and not that high above her head, she’d seen feet in boots, big round knees in blue pants as somebody squatted in the snow, a hand with flashing rings wiping the glass, part of a face peering in.

  When finally she’d gone upstairs, trailing the orange bat behind her, the cops were there. The family had been gathered around Mom like football players in a huddle.

  The police hadn’t found anything. No signs of forced entry, they’d said. No footprints in the snow, though it was snowing hard enough, Lucy thought, that footprints could have been covered up while they were standing there talking. Lucy had thought they looked at her mother funny. Lucy had hated them. She’d wanted them out of her house. She’d been afraid to tell anybody that she’d seen him, too, and that she’d also seen so
mebody else—a bigger man than Ethan, a man with blue pants and black boots and rings on his fingers.

  But she’d written about it in her diary. Now, sitting in the steamy bathroom on the day of her brother’s funeral, she smoothed her fingertips over the page again, liking the way they looked against the pink paper.

  Ethan and Mom played hide-and-seek in the basement today. They wouldn’t let me play. Mom called the police. Sometimes it’s like Mom and Ethan are like the same person.

  If anybody ever broke into her diary and read that, they wouldn’t know what it meant. They wouldn’t have any idea what had really happened. But she knew. She turned the page.

  Somebody else had written in her diary. Lucy stared. Thick black letters, sort of halfway between cursive and printing, catty-corner across the top of the page.

  Mom’s handwriting, like when she left a note on the refrigerator that she was at the store and would be home soon, and you were supposed to do the dishes before she got back. Lucy looked at Mom’s writing compared to her own, and was suddenly, giddily, hopeful: someday when she grew up, she’d know what she was doing too.

  Dear Lucy [the message from her diary said].

  Don’t be afraid. Ethan won’t hurt you.

  Love, Mom.

  Lucy read the words over and over, ran her fingertips across them to see if she could feel the words on the page. She lifted the diary to her nose, even touched her tongue to the paper. When had Mom written that? Now that Ethan was dead, would she still say those words to Lucy?

  She heard the phone ringing. The water in the tub was almost overflowing, and not hot enough now for a bath. Lucy turned off the faucet, pulled the plug, and, carrying her diary under her arm, ran for the hall phone. She got to it just before Dominic. He made a face at her, mad, half playing. She poked him in the ribs. When he screeched, she couldn’t hear what the person on the phone was saying, and she stuck her finger in her other ear to shut out Dom and the rest of the house noise.

  Dom went running out onto the porch with his squirt gun. He wasn’t ready for Ethan’s funeral. Lucy told herself it was okay, the funeral wasn’t for hours yet. They had to make it through the rest of the morning and lunch and the first part of the afternoon. Hot morning sunshine streamed in the front window, and you could see streaks in the glass and dust in the air that weren’t there any other time.