The Haunting of Gabriel Ashe

by Poblocki, Dan

  Gabe’s eyes burned with unexpected tears. How? he wondered. How had his grandmother known? There was a ringing in his ears, so loud and sudden that the rest of the house seemed to have gone quiet. He looked up toward the window, but saw only his reflection in the glass, behind which was the darkness of night. He pushed back his chair and stood. With a few cautious steps, he approached the window, brought his face close to the pane, and strained to look beyond his reflection. No luck.

  He shut off the desk lamp. After several seconds, his eyes adjusted to the darkness. He could again discern the details of the library—the walls, the shelves, the books, even the rocking chair in the far corner. The window was now transparent.

  Down the hill, at the line of trees, a large shadow stood among the darker shadows, wavering in the night. It looked like the opposite of candlelight, if there were such a thing. After a frozen moment, Gabe recognized a difference in the figure that he hadn’t seen before—were those two licks of blue flame where its eyes should have been?

  Panic rose from his chest, into his esophagus and throat, over his tongue and escaped, like a siren, past his lips—a sound he could barely hear, and yet, so loud that his whole family came running.

  A FEW MINUTES LATER, Gabe sat shivering in the high-backed chair in the living room. The cup of tea his mother had brought him was steaming on the coffee table. She’d retrieved the book from the desk in the library and held it against her chest. Elyse stood in the doorway, observing the scene, expressionless, like a scientist, detached, researching a colony of aliens from afar.

  “I checked everywhere,” said Glen, kneeling beside his son, rubbing at his shoulder. “Flashlight. The whole shebang. There was nothing.” Gabe could feel the chill emanating from his father’s sweatshirt. He’d only just come back in. “I swear, we are alone up here on this hill.”

  Gabe took a deep breath and glanced at his grandmother. She looked quickly away.

  “Tell me again what it looked like,” said Dolores.

  Gabe pointed at the book. “Page eighty-five.”

  Confused, his mother opened the cover, turning pages until she came to the image he’d meant for her to find. “The Hunter?” she read, then glanced up at Gabe. “I don’t understand. This was what you saw by the woods?”

  His answer spilled forth in a thoughtless rush. “It’s the monster from that game me and Seth were playing at the end of the summer. The one I told you about. The cannibal thing.”

  They all stared at him like he’d just had some sort of fit, but there was more that they needed to hear. The Hunter’s eyes stared up from the page, daring him to confess. “Grandmother Elyse’s drawing looks exactly how Seth described him. I don’t know how, but I saw the…the Hunter watching me through the window just now.” He glanced once more at his grandmother. She refused to meet his eyes. “I’m pretty sure this wasn’t the first time. And I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one.”

  “Have you considered that Seth may have seen this book before?” Dolores asked. “That maybe he remembered your grandmother’s drawing of the…the, what’s it called?”

  “The Hunter,” Elyse mumbled.

  “That Seth borrowed your grandmother’s Hunter and used him in his story?”

  “It wasn’t a story. It was a game. And it’s not like that. Stuff has been happening. Bad stuff. You’ve all seen it. Dad’s puppet was stolen. The M-80s went off at the bake sale. My classmates are saying that a big, sort of shadowy figure has been following them home from school. And then last night—”

  “Here we go,” Glen muttered.

  “Someone snatched the blanket off my bed!”

  “And we already told you,” said Dolores, frustrated, “it was a dream.”

  Gabe closed his eyes, speaking slowly now, trying to sound sure of himself, like an adult. “If that’s true, then a whole bunch of us at school had the same dream.”

  “Gabriel, my son,” Glen said, “when you’re older, you’ll understand how easy it is for ideas to spread, especially among people your age. A story can start with one person. That person tells another person. Someone else lays claim to it too. And so on. Soon, everyone wants to be in on the joke.” He paused. “You know how kids are.”

  “It wasn’t a joke,” said Gabe. “And we’re not kids. We’re in eighth grade. We’re…” He didn’t know how to finish, but he knew that what his father had said just wasn’t true, not in this instance anyway. “We’re…in between.”

  “It’s just a picture, honey.” Dolores turned toward her mother-in-law. “Isn’t that right, Elyse? You and Mr. Olmstead made it up. Just like the rest of the ghosts and monsters in this book.” She stared at her mother-in-law with a thin-lipped smile as if to say, Please don’t make me regret offering those books to him in the first place.

  Elyse scratched at her neck with her short red fingernails. “Yes,” she said, nodding slowly, “most of the entries in that particular book are stories and nothing more. Some are based on legends and myths. But the rest, we just made up.” She looked right at Gabe when she said that last part. Gabe thought he read something in her expression. There’s more to it. Much more.

  “There you have it,” said Glen, rising to his feet. “The Hunter is just a story.”

  “But that’s not what she said.”

  “Well, that was the gist of it. Right, Mom?”

  Elyse sighed. “The gist of it. Yes.”

  Gabe couldn’t look at her anymore. What was she hiding? He reached for the tea mug and sipped too quickly, spitting out the liquid and wincing as the hot tea nearly scalded his tongue.

  Dolores closed the book and took his mug, leaving them both on the coffee table. “Honestly, Gabe, I’m worried about you. I think that Seth boy is a bad influence.”

  Gabe grew warm, and he knew it wasn’t from the tea. “I’m not even friends with him anymore.”

  “You’ve gone down to his house this week,” she said. “If you’re not friends, what have you been doing there?”

  “We’ve been trying to figure out what the heck is happening in this town!”

  “I think it might be best if you stay away from the Hopper house for a while. Is there something we can do to make that easier for you?”

  Infuriated, Gabe glanced at each of them, realizing that he was now alone in this—impossibly stuck with a monster that had the ability, at any moment, to show up in his bedroom in the middle of the night.

  “No, but thank you,” he said in a pointedly polite tone. “I’ll be fine alone.”

  WHEN GABE GOT INTO BED LATER, he closed the window curtains and left the lamp glowing beside him. Every time he felt he might finally doze off, a noise from outside his bedroom door would knock him right back into consciousness. His parents were in the bathroom brushing their teeth, whispering to each other. Downstairs, he assumed, his grandmother was going through her own nighttime preparations. By the time everyone had settled down and the only sound within the house was the boiler’s distant hum, Gabe felt so wide awake, he wasn’t sure how he’d function at school the next day.

  A floorboard squeaked. Gabe sat up and stared at his bedroom door, begging for the sound to have been in his mind. It came again, softly. Someone was walking through the house. Squeak. Footsteps. Coming up the stairs. He ducked his head under his blanket, remembering that the old-fashioned doors in Temple House had locks you could only turn with a key, all of which had been misplaced long ago. There was no way to keep an intruder out of his room.

  The illustration of the Hunter flashed through his brain like a poorly animated movie. Frame by frame, the monster held out his satchel for Gabe to see. The child inside had stopped moving; its small arm hung limp. A red stain pooled at the bottom of the sack, dripping—plop, plop, plop—to the forest floor. Gabe knew it was only a drawing, an interpretation of a fantasy, like Seth’s game, but he couldn’t help fearing that he’d end up the same way, that tomorrow, his parents would find his bleached bones laid carefully on the front steps of Temple H
ouse—a taunting gift from the monster who now lurked just outside his bedroom door.

  By the time Gabe heard the knob twisting, he realized too late that he might have saved himself by moving his grandmother’s old wooden bureau in front of the door. With a slight squeal, the hinges gave way. Blind beneath the blanket, Gabe tried to still his frenzied breath, but now he was shaking. Uncontrollably.

  A presence stepped briskly into his room, stopping by his bedside table. The muted light that seeped through the blanket shifted as the shape leaned toward him. And when he felt fingers clutch his shoulder, he covered his mouth to contain his fear.

  “Gabriel?” came his grandmother’s voice. “What the heck are you doing under there?”

  A few moments later, Elyse sat at the end of Gabe’s bed, wearing her usual black robe, as well as an expression of shame. She closed the bedroom door and apologized for scaring him. Gabe leaned back against the bed frame as she spoke. “Your parents have had enough on their plate, with the baby and their work, so I didn’t want to say anything in front of them earlier.”

  He clasped his hands in his lap so hard that it felt like he was squeezing the blood out of them.

  “When Nathaniel Olmstead asked me to collaborate on a big, illustrated book about all spooky things, I was beyond excited. I loved working with him, but I didn’t say yes at first. I agreed on one condition: that he let me add a story of my own, a story that deserved a life it had long been denied.”

  “What story?” Gabe asked.

  “The tale of the Hunter,” she whispered, “was something I heard when I was your age, when I lived with my parents here in Temple House, in this very bedroom.”

  “This was your room?”

  She nodded. “Why else do you think I offered it to you last July? With this view, it’s the most spectacular room in the house.” Gabe chuckled despite himself. “The story stuck with me through the years. Memorable mostly because of the person who told it to me—a boy in my class at school. A neighbor. A friend. His name was Mason Arngrim, and he stayed just down the hill, through the woods, on the property where your friend Seth lives now.”

  Gabe was speechless. It felt as though his grandmother had just cracked open the planet and revealed a gleaming new Earth hidden inside.

  “I think the story of the Hunter has stayed with me all these years because it’s tied, fundamentally, to Mason’s own story. I can’t help but recall his face whenever I’ve looked out over the woods between our houses for the past fifty years. I’ve never shared this with anyone, not even your grandfather, God rest his soul, but Mason Arngrim was the reason I started drawing my little monsters, the ones that eventually led to my first illustration work just out of high school. That boy changed my life.

  “After what happened to Mason, I felt that his creation, his Hunter, deserved to live on, even if only in the pages of a book.”

  Gabe shivered. He didn’t like the way she’d put that. Live on? “What happened to him?” he asked. “To Mason?”

  Elyse smiled. “That’s the thing,” she said. “I’m not quite sure. And the only person who may have known died long ago.”

  ELYSE TEMPLE, KNOWN TO HER CLASSMATES as Leesy, was born in the brick mansion that sat upon the highest hill in a small town south of Boston, a few miles inland from the rocky coast and cold waters of Massachusetts Bay. The mansion was famous in Slade, for at the time, it was visible from nearly all corners of the town. Built in the late nineteenth century by the famed industrial baron Mordecai Temple, its deed had passed to his children, and his children’s children, and thus the building had become known throughout several local counties as Temple House. But if you lived nearby, you could probably have skipped the surname and referred to the gothic-looking manse simply as the House and no one would have questioned your meaning.

  Growing up on a famous estate, as the lone great-granddaughter of the man who’d once been the wealthiest in the five closest towns, Leesy was unaware of how most people saw her. No one dared call her spoiled to her face, and even if they had, they’d have been wrong, for “spoiled” implies that the gifts one bestows upon a child changes them, makes them rotten, and Leesy was far from that. In fact, she was a shy, observant girl whose favorite activity was watching the clouds from her bedroom window, imagining faces winking at her and inventing brief stories about who and what these wispy, white creatures might be.

  But her demeanor did not stop her classmates from whispering behind her back, that she was a faker, a liar, a cheat, that deep down, at her core, she must be terrible. In fact, the nicer she tried to be, the more distant they all became. By the time Leesy reached high school, despite all the privileges of the family that she’d been born into, she had no true friends.

  Leesy had become so solitary that one day at school, when she found a tall gangly-looking boy staring at her from across the cafeteria, she wasn’t aware that he was her next-door neighbor, or that she even had neighbors. If she hadn’t spent so much time looking up at the sky from her bedroom, she might have perceived the cottage swaddled in greenery across the slope of her backyard, in the distant cradle of the hill.

  On the day Leesy had caught him staring at her in the cafeteria, the boy had just eaten for the first time in two days and only because the woman in the serving line took pity on him when he’d turned out his empty pockets and had scooped a small helping of beef Stroganoff onto his plate. In fact, he explained to her later, he hadn’t so much been looking at Leesy as he’d been looking through her, toward a hungry chasm inside his mind, filling it with bits and pieces of memory from his previous life, the one that had existed before his parents’ accident, before he’d come to Slade.

  “Can I help you?”

  Sitting in the small booth in the corner of the busy cafeteria, the boy blinked, suddenly aware that a thin girl with dark hair and pale skin had materialized before him, as if by magic. “I-I’m sorry?” he asked. “Help me with what?”

  Leesy’s face filled with color. “Oh,” she said, “I thought you needed something. You’ve been staring at me for the past few minutes.”

  She held back that he’d actually begun to frighten her, and that she’d decided the only way she’d be able to go on with the rest of her day was to confront him face-to-face. But now she saw that she’d been wrong; this boy hadn’t actually noticed her at all.

  “I didn’t realize,” the boy answered, standing up to greet her. “I just…” He glanced down at the empty lunch tray, licked practically clean, that sat on the table between them.

  Sensing his discomfort, Leesy held out her hand. “I’m Elyse Temple. But you can call me Leesy.”

  “I know who you are,” he said. Leesy’s eyes grew wide. He blushed but took her hand in his own and squeezed. “I’m Mason. Mason Arngrim.”

  THEIR FRIENDSHIP WAS NOT IMMEDIATE—that kind of thing did not come naturally to either of them. But the next day at lunch, Leesy felt compelled to offer him the seat beside her.

  At first, they barely spoke, spending the period comforted by each other’s quiet presence. As days passed, they chatted. Eventually, Mason told her how he’d come to be at the Hoppers’ cottage.

  When Mason’s parents were killed in a freak train derailment in Chicago, his aunt and uncle—Verna and Freddy Hopper, whose two sons had both been sent to the conflict in Vietnam—took him in. It was a deed, Verna insisted to anyone who asked, that “any good, God-fearing woman would have done.” Of course, at church services she neglected to share with her fellow congregants that by “taking him in,” she meant she allowed him to sleep in the hayloft in her barn and would only provide him with food after he’d finished his chores.

  Those chores were extensive, ranging from milking the cows to chopping firewood to pulling up large stones from the yard. Coming to Slade from a city, Mason was unfamiliar with most of these tasks. Each job took him time to learn and so, when a particularly difficult chore brought him into the kitchen past sundown, Verna often refused him the meal she’d
promised, comparing him to her own sons, telling Mason that the quicker they’d finished one job, the quicker they’d been able to start another, so next time, he should take a hint from his cousins and plan better.

  In the evenings, after Uncle Freddy arrived home from the mill, he’d disappear into his basement workshop with a drink in hand, not noticing or caring how strict his wife was being with his dead sister’s boy. Once, Mason asked his uncle why he spent so much time down there, and Freddy gave him such a shattered look, Mason later returned to the hayloft pondering the darkness that so clearly lived inside his aunt. After that, Mason decided not to mention to Verna that he had homework, or school even, especially if these “activities,” as she called them, interfered with him being fed.

  Following this revelation, though he never asked and often tried to refuse, Leesy always offered half her sandwich.

  After school, they sometimes walked home together, up the winding road toward the steep density of trees that separated their two houses. Once, on their journey, Leesy removed her notepad from her satchel and showed him some of her cloud-face sketches. Mason was impressed with her skill at capturing tiny, telling details that revealed peculiar personalities. “But I didn’t invent them,” she’d explained. “The clouds did!”

  Afterward, he decided to share his stories with her. Back in Chicago, his mother had taken him to the local library every other week, where he’d borrow stacks of science-fiction and fantasy novels, gobbling up the stories as quickly as he could. But in Slade, Mason had no time to walk to the public library.

  With a deficit of available fantasy, Mason had begun to imagine his own stories, to create his own worlds and populate them with characters of his own design. In his head there lived monsters and heroes; thieves and scoundrels; and kings, queens, and princes. Lying upon his lumpy mattress every night, shivering inside the sleeping bag he’d once used only for camping vacations with his parents on Lake Michigan, he thought of these new worlds as if they were parts of a game, a challenge, and he wondered, if he were somehow able to exist within them, what role might he play?