The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13

by Stephen Jones

  ‘It was like a circle,’ I said, my fingers still, my palm flat against hers. Even when she squeezed, I held still. I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t want Peter to turn around. If Kelly had noticed, she didn’t say anything. ‘Cut right in the grass. A pattern. A circle, with this upside-down triangle inside it, and—’

  ‘How do you know it was upside down?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘How do you know you were even looking at it the right way?’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Peter, quick and hard, not turning around, leading us onto the street that dropped down to the Sound, to the Paars house. Then he did turn around, and he saw our hands. But he didn’t say anything. When he was facing forward again, Jenny squeezed once more, and I gave a feeble squeeze back,

  We walked half a block in silence, but that just made me more nervous. I could feel Jenny’s thumb sliding along the outside of mine, and it made me tingly, terrified. I said, ‘Upside down. Right side up. Whatever. It was a symbol, a weird one. It looked like an eye.’

  ‘Old dude must have had a hell of a lawnmower,’ Kelly muttered, glanced at Peter’s back, and stopped talking, just in time, I thought. Mr Andersz was right. She was smart, too.

  ‘It kind of made you not want to put your foot in the grass,’ I continued. ‘I don’t know why. It just looked wrong. Like it really could see you. I can’t explain.’

  ‘Didn’t make me want not to put my foot in the grass,’ Peter said.

  I felt Jenny look at me. Her mouth was six inches or so from my hair, my ear. It was too much. My hand twitched and I let go. Blushing, I glanced at her. She looked surprised, and she drifted away toward her sister.

  ‘That’s true,’ I said, wishing I could call Jenny back. ‘Peter stepped right out.’

  On our left, the last of the duplexes slid away, and we came to the end of the pavement. In front of us, the dirt road rolled down the hill, red-brown and wet and bumpy, like some stretched, cutout tongue on the ground. I remembered the way Peter’s duck-boots had seemed to float on the surface of Mr Paars’s floodlit green lawn, as though he was walking on water.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, though Peter had already stepped onto the dirt and was strolling, fast and purposeful, down the hill. ‘Peter,’ I called after him, though I followed, of course. The Macks were beside but no longer near me. ‘When’s the last time you saw him? Mr Paars?’

  He turned around, and he was smiling now, the smile that scared me. ‘Same time you did, Bubba,’ he said. ‘Two years ago tonight.’

  I blinked, stood still, and the wind lashed me like the end of a twisted-up towel. ‘How do you know when I last saw him?’ I said.

  Peter shrugged. ‘Am I wrong?’

  I didn’t answer. I watched Peter’s face, the dark swirling around and over it, shaping it, like rushing water over stone.

  ‘He hasn’t been anywhere. Not on 15th Street. Not at the Black Anchor. Nowhere. I’ve been watching.’

  ‘Maybe he doesn’t live there anymore,’ Jenny said carefully. She was watching Peter, too.

  ‘There’s a car,’ Peter said. ‘A Lincoln. Long and black. Practically a limo.’

  ‘I’ve seen that car,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen it drive by my house, right at dinner time.’

  ‘It goes down there,’ said Peter, gesturing toward the trees, the water, the Paars house. ‘Like I said, I’ve been watching.’

  And of course, he had been, I thought. If his father had let him, he’d probably have camped right here, or in the gazebo under the bell. In fact, it seemed impossible to me, given everything I knew about Peter, that he’d let two years go by.

  ‘Exactly what happened to you two down there?’ Kelly asked.

  ‘Tell them now,’ said Peter. ‘There isn’t going to be any talking once we get down there. Not until we’re all finished.’ Dropping into a crouch, he picked at the cold, wet dirt with his fingers, watched the ferries drifting out of downtown toward Bainbridge Island, Vashon. You couldn’t really make out the boats from there, just the clusters of lights on the water like clouds of lost, doomed fireflies.

  ‘Even the grass was weird,’ I said, remembering the weight of my sopping pants against my legs. ‘It was so wet. I mean, everywhere was wet, as usual, but this was like wading in a pond. You put your foot down and the whole lawn rippled. It made the eye look like it was winking. At first we were kind of hunched over, sort of hiding, which was ridiculous in all that light. I didn’t want to walk in the circle, but Peter just strolled right through it. He called me a baby because I went the long way around.’

  ‘I called you a baby because you were being one,’ Peter said, but not meanly, really.

  ‘We kept expecting lights to fly on in the house. Or dogs to come out. It just seemed like there would be dogs. But there weren’t. We got up to the gazebo, which was the only place in the whole yard with shadows, because it was surrounded by all these trees. Weird trees. They were kind of stunted. Not pines, either, they’re like birch trees, I guess. But short. And their bark is black.’

  ‘Felt weird, too,’ Peter muttered, straightening up, wiping his hands down his coat. ‘It just crumbled when you rubbed it in your hands, like one of those soft block-erasers, you know what I mean?’

  ‘We must have stood there ten minutes. More. It was so quiet. You could hear the Sound, a little, although there aren’t any waves there or anything. You could hear the pine trees dripping, or maybe it was the lawn. But there weren’t any birds. And there wasn’t anything moving in that house. Finally, Peter started toward the bell. He took exactly one step into the gazebo, and one of those dwarf trees walked right off its roots into his path, and both of us started screaming.’

  ‘What?’ said Jenny.

  ‘I didn’t scream,’ said Peter. ‘And he hit me.’

  ‘He didn’t hit you,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, he did.’

  ‘Could you shut up and let Andrew finish?’ said Kelly, and Peter lunged, grabbing her slicker in his fists and shoving her hard and then yanking her forward so that her head snapped back on its stalk like a decapitated flower and then snapped into place again.

  It had happened so fast that neither Jenny nor I had moved, but Jenny hurtled forward now, raking her nails down Peter’s face, and he said, ‘Ow!’ and fell back, and she threw her arms around Kelly’s shoulders. For a few seconds, they stood like that, and then Kelly put her own arms up and eased Jenny away. To my astonishment, I saw that she was laughing.

  ‘I don’t think I’d do that again, if I were you,’ she said to Peter, her laughter quick and hard, as though she was spitting teeth.

  Peter put a hand to his cheek, gazing at the blood that came away on his fingers. ‘Ow,’ he said again.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ Jenny said to her sister.

  No one answered right away. Then Peter said, ‘Don’t.’ After a few seconds, when no one reacted, he said, ‘You’ve got to see the house.’ He was going to say more, I think, but what else was there to say? I felt bad, without knowing why. He was like a planet we visited, cold and rocky and probably lifeless, and we kept coming because it was all so strange, so different than what we knew. He looked at me, and what I was thinking must have flashed in my face, because he blinked in surprise, turned away, and started down the road without looking back. We all followed. Planet, dark star, whatever he was, he created orbits.

  ‘So the tree hit Peter,’ Jenny Mack said quietly when we were halfway down the hill, almost to the sheds.

  ‘It wasn’t a tree. It just seemed like a tree. I don’t know how we didn’t see him there. He had to have been watching us the whole time. Maybe he knew we’d followed him. He just stepped out of the shadows and kind of whacked Peter across the chest with his cane. That black dog-head cane. He did kind of look like a tree. His skin was all gnarly, kind of dark. If you rubbed him between your fingers, he’d probably have crumbled, too. And his hair was so white. A tree that was way too old.

  ‘And his voice. It was like a
bullfrog, even deeper. He spoke real slow. He said, “Boy. Do you know what that bell does?” And then he did the most amazing thing of all. The scariest thing. He looked at both of us, real slow. Then he dropped his cane. Just dropped it to his side. And he smiled, like he was daring us to go ahead. “That bell raises the dead. Right up out of the ground” ’

  ‘Look at these,’ Kelly Mack murmured as we walked between the sheds.

  ‘Raises the dead,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, I heard you. These are amazing.’

  And they were. I’d forgotten. The most startling thing, really, was that they were still standing. They’d all sunk into the swampy grass on at least one side, and none of them had roofs, not whole roofs, anyway, and the window slots gaped, and the wind made a rattle as it rolled through them, like waves over seashells, empty things that hadn’t been empty always. They were too small to have been boat sheds, I thought, had to have been for tools and things. But tools to do what?

  In a matter of steps, they were behind us, between us and the homes we knew, the streets we walked. We reached the ring of pines around the Paars house, and it was different, worse. I didn’t realize how, but Peter did.

  ‘No lights,’ he said.

  For a while, we just stood in the blackness while saltwater and pine-resin smells glided over us like a mist. There wasn’t any moon, but the water beyond the house reflected what light there was, so we could see the long, black Lincoln in the dirt driveway, the house and the gazebo beyond it. After a minute or so, we could make out the bell, too, hanging like some bloated, white bat from the gazebo ceiling.

  ‘It is creepy,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Ya think?’ I said, but I didn’t mean to, it was just what I imagined Peter would have said if he were saying anything. ‘Peter, I think Mr Paars is gone. Moved, or something.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Then he won’t mind.’ He stepped out onto the lawn and said, ‘Fuck.’

  ‘What?’ I asked, shoulders hunching, but Peter just shook his head.

  ‘Grass. It’s a lot longer. And it’s wet as hell.’

  ‘What happened after “That bell raises the dead”?’ Jenny asked.

  I didn’t answer right away. I wasn’t sure what Peter wanted me to say. But he just squinted at the house, didn’t even seem to be listening. I almost took Jenny’s hand. I wanted to. ‘We ran.’

  ‘Both of you? Hey, Kell—’

  But Kelly was already out on the grass next to Peter, smirking as her feet sank. Peter glanced at her – cautiously, I thought. Uncertain. ‘You would have, too,’ he said.

  ‘I might have,’ said Kelly.

  Then we were all on the grass, holding still, listening. The wind rushed through the trees as though filling a vacuum. I thought I could hear the Sound, not waves, just the dead, heavy wet. But there were no gulls, no bugs.

  Once more, Peter strolled straight for that embedded circle in the grass, still visible despite the depth of the lawn, like a manta ray half-buried in seaweed. When Peter’s feet crossed the corners of the upside-down triangle – the tear-ducts of the eye – I winced, then felt silly. For all I knew, it was a corporate logo; it looked about that menacing. I started forward, too. The Macks came with me. I walked in the circle, though I skirted the edge of the triangle. Step on a crack and all. I didn’t look behind to see what the Macks did, I was too busy watching Peter as his pace picked up. He was practically running, straight for the gazebo, and then he stopped.

  ‘Hey,’ he said.

  I’d seen it, too, I thought, feeling my knees lock as my nervousness intensified. In the lone upstairs window, there’d been a flicker. Maybe. Just one, for a single second, and then it was gone again. ‘I saw it,’ I called, but Peter wasn’t listening to me. He was moving straight toward the front door. And anyway, I realized, he hadn’t been looking upstairs.

  ‘What the hell’s he doing?’ Kelly said as she strolled past me, but she didn’t stop for an answer. Jenny did, though.

  ‘Andrew, what’s going on?’ she said, and I looked at her eyes, green and shadowy as the grass, but that just made me edgier still.

  I shook my head. For a moment, Jenny stood beside me. Finally, she shrugged and followed her sister. None of them looked back, which meant, I thought, that there really hadn’t been rustling behind us just now, back in the pines. When I whipped my head around, I saw nothing but trees and twitching shadows.

  ‘Here, puss-puss-puss,’ Peter called softly. If the grass had been less wet and I’d been less unsettled, I’d have flopped on my back and flipped my feet in the air at him, the seal’s send-off. Instead, I came forward.

  The house, like the sheds, seemed to have sunk sideways into the ground. With its filthy windows and rotting planks, it looked like the abandoned hull of a beached ship. Around it, the leafless branches of the dwarf trees danced like the limbs of paper skeletons.

  ‘Now, class,’ said Peter, still very quietly. ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’

  ‘I assume you mean other than giant bells, weird eyeballs in the grass, empty sheds, and these whammy-ass trees,’ Kelly said, but Peter ignored her.

  ‘He means the front door,’ said Jenny, and of course she was right.

  I don’t even know how Peter noticed. It was under an overhang, so that the only light that reached it reflected off the ground. But there was no doubt. The door was open. Six inches, tops. The scratched brass of the knob glinted dully, like an eye.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So the door didn’t catch when he went in, and he didn’t notice.’

  ‘When who went in?’ said Peter, mocking. ‘Thought you said he moved.’

  The wind kicked up, and the door glided back another few inches, then sucked itself shut with a click.

  ‘Guess that settles that,’ I said, knowing it didn’t even before the curtains came streaming out the single front window, grey and gauzy as cigarette smoke as they floated on the breeze. They hung there a few seconds, then glided to rest against the side of the house when the wind expired.

  ‘Guess it does,’ said Peter softly, and he marched straight up the steps, pushed open the door, and disappeared into the Paars house.

  None of the rest of us moved or spoke. Around us, tree-branches tapped against each other, the side of the house. For the second time I sensed someone behind me and spun around. Night-dew sparkled in the lawn like broken glass, and one of the shadows of the towering pines seemed to shiver back, as though the trees had inhaled it. Otherwise, there was nothing. I thought about Mr Paars, that dog-head cane with its silver fangs.

  ‘What’s he trying to prove?’ Kelly asked, a silly question where Peter was concerned, really. It wasn’t about proving. We all knew that.

  Jenny said, ‘He’s been in there a long time,’ and Peter stuck his head out the window, the curtain floating away from him.

  ‘Come see this,’ he said, and ducked back inside.

  Hesitating, I knew, was pointless. We all knew it. We went up the stairs together, and the door drifted open before we even touched it. ‘Wow,’ said Kelly staring straight ahead, and Jenny took my hand again, and then we were all inside. ‘Wow,’ Kelly said again.

  Except for a long, wooden table folded and propped against the staircase like a lifeboat, all the furniture we could see had been draped in white sheets. The sheets rose and rearranged themselves in the breeze, which was constant and everywhere, because all the windows had been flung wide open. Leaves chased each other across the dirt-crusted hardwood floor, and scraps of paper flapped in mid-air like giant moths before settling on the staircase or the backs of chairs or blowing out the windows.

  Peter appeared in a doorway across the foyer from us, his black hair bright against the deeper blackness of the rooms behind him. ‘Don’t miss the den,’ he said. ‘I’m going to go look at the kitchen.’ Then he was gone again.

  Kelly had started away now, too, wandering into the living room to our right, running her fingers over the tops of a covered couch as she passed it. One of
the paintings on the wall, I noticed, had been covered rather than removed, and I wondered what it was. Kelly drew up the cover, peered beneath it, then dropped it and stepped deeper into the house. I started to follow, but Jenny pulled me the other way, and we went left into what must have been Mr Paars’s den.

  ‘Whoa,’ Jenny said, and her fingers slid between mine and tightened.

  In the dead center of the room, amidst discarded file folders that lay where they’d been tossed and empty envelopes with plastic address windows that flapped and chattered when the wind filled them, sat an enormous oak rolltop desk. The top was gone, broken away, and it lay against the room’s lone window like the cracked shell of a dinosaur egg. On the surface of the desk, in black felt frames, a set of six photographs had been arranged in a semicircle.

  ‘It’s like the top of a tombstone,’ Jenny murmured. ‘You know what I mean? Like a . . . what do you call it?’

  ‘Family vault,’ I said. ‘Mausoleum.’

  ‘One of those.’

  Somehow, the fact that two of the frames turned out to be empty made the array even more unsettling. The other four held individual pictures of what had to be brothers and one sister – they all had flying white hair, razor-blue eyes – standing, each in turn, on the top step of the gazebo outside, with the great bell looming behind them, bright white and all out of proportion, like the Mountain on a too-clear day.

  ‘Andrew,’ Jenny said, her voice nearly a whisper, and in spite of the faces in the photographs and the room we were in, I felt it all over me. ‘Why Struwwelpeter?’

  ‘What?’ I said, mostly just to make her speak again.

  ‘Struwwelpeter. Why does Mr Andersz call him that?’

  ‘Oh. It’s from some kids’ book. My mom actually had it when she was little. She said it was about some boy who got in trouble because he wouldn’t cut his hair or cut his nails.’