by T L Barrett
“Postmaster Cooney also asked if you had any more of that apple pie of yours, Mrs. Hall. I’d actually be hankering for some myself. So if there’s not enough for both of us, I suppose we could all keep it a secret.” The sheriff grinned.
“Well, it’s Marla here that can really cook a pie, Sheriff, I’ll not deny it. But, I’m afraid we are plum out for the moment.”
“Well, that’s a shame. But really, that’s why I’ve come. Is Mr. Hall around the place?”
“He sure is Sherriff. He’s just gone into the barn to mend a trace, I think.”
“Good, my men caught a vagrant that broke into the Purina building in town to sleep the night. I brought the old wino up. Got him in the back of the car. I figure he’d be good help in keeping those little trees of yours growing,” the sheriff said.
“Why that’s mighty kind of you, Sheriff. I can go and fetch Homer if you’d like,” Mother Hall offered.
“That’s all right, Mrs. Hall, I’ll find him. You folks, have a fine day, all right?”
Marla thanked the sheriff and moved to the window to better read the letter that her love had written to her. She took a moment and looked out at the rows of little apple trees that had grown so remarkably fast this past season. Some of them were already sporting tiny green apples. In a year, Marla believed that the trees would be producing a great load of apples for the entire county to enjoy.
She sent out a prayer of love that her Donnie would be back by then, and they could sit down under the apple trees together.
The House on Dearborn Street
I saw the boy standing in the rain when I was eleven.
Every summer, I spent two hot glorious weeks with my cousin Keith and his family in Franklin Mills, New Hampshire. Thinking back on that day on Dearborn Street is like moving through a sunlit room and coming upon an inexplicable cold spot, or swimming out in a late August reservoir to be encompassed suddenly by the chilling grip of autumn.
On an overcast day in late July, we rode our bikes across town to the school yard to play catch. We tried to ignore the thunderheads that were piling up, but late in the afternoon, Keith, who had graduated middle school that June, looked up and said we had to pack things up and head home. No sooner had he said that, when the first huge drops of rain started hitting the school yard around us. We got on our Huffy bikes and rode the length of Dearborn Street.
In a word, I was a dreamy kid. When I didn’t have my nose buried in a monster magazine or a science fiction novel, I was staring out the window, dreaming. I still slept with a light on when I was alone in a room, and I held my breath whenever riding in a car past cemeteries.
As my humming bike wheels started to pass an ancient crumbling house on Dearborn Street, its gothic presence entranced me. The gray and pointed house stared over the street from darkened, broken windows. Debris lay across the front, overgrown yard. A lone willow tree hung down its melancholy branches beside the cracked front walk.
Spaced out as I was, I didn’t notice that my bike had turned slightly toward the raised side walk. My pedal hit the curb. The bike jarred to a stop, and I flew over the handlebars and fell against the road side. I tried to stop my fall with my hands and they and my left leg took the brunt of my fall. My hands were stripped and bleeding. My leg was bruised and scraped. I sucked in my breath from shock and pain and rose up from the rain-darkened cement. I might have let out a wail when I caught my breath, but I noticed I was being watched. Looking up, I saw that a boy stood and watched from under the hanging branches of the willow tree in front of that spooky house. There was something off about this boy. The world took on a grainy quality from the pain I felt and the darkening day, but I thought that the boy had black eyes, no iris or pupils, just black.
“Lee, let’s go!” my cousin commanded. He grabbed up my bike under his arm and pushed his own. Hurt and confused, I followed him. With kindness and a clean, rational mind, Keith never failed to beat back my lingering childhood fears in his presence. It was out of character for him to ignore my painful situation. Looking up into the blackening sky, with thunder booming overhead, I limped along, sure that we must be in serious danger.
We got home wet, and my aunt took to cleaning my wounds and bandaging them. My cousin went to his room and read a James Bond novel. After dinner, I asked him about the boy I saw in front of the old spooky house.
“You didn’t see anybody. There wasn’t anybody there,” he said, his back turned, as he washed dishes at the sink.
“Yes, I did.”
“No, you didn’t.”
I’m sure some of what started to come out of me was due to being tired and sore, but I was also hurt and confused by my loving cousin’s sudden shift in temperament.
“I did so!” I shouted and started to cry, trembling.
“Is everything all right in there?” my uncle called from behind the Wall Street Journal in the living room.
“Yes, dad,” my cousin called back. “Listen,” he said in a quiet voice, turning from the sink and drying his hands. “I’ll tell you about that place tonight, but you have to calm down and not say anything about it till then.”
We slept on a bunk bed in a room at the top of the stairs. That night, in the quiet dark after the storm, Keith told me the story about the house on Dearborn Street. It wasn’t like any story he had ever told me before, and that had a marked effect upon me.
“First, you have to promise, not to tell Mom, and you can’t get all scared of the dark, or anything.”
I promised, but I’ll never forget the tale he wove in the dark, his voice rising up with the terrible details.
***
About six or seven years ago, a boy about my age- named Mark- lived on Dearborn Street. Every day he had to bike the length of Dearborn Street to school and back. Every time, he had to pass that old decrepit house with the willow tree out front. He had heard all kinds of stories about it from other kids. The tales of murder and witchcraft didn’t keep him up at night, but on dark, lonely days they kept him pumping the bike pedals hard to pass by the old place.
One afternoon, early in the autumn, a light rain had started to fall. Mark, preoccupied with imagining rebukes he would make to a physical education teacher who he felt treated him and his friends unfairly, hit the curb with his own front tire. He fell to the sidewalk, and upon getting up, knew someone was watching him. He looked up and spied a boy standing in the rain just underneath the hanging branches of the willow tree in front of that spooky old house. The boy had a desperate, pleading look on his face; but it was the eyes that caught Mark, froze him to the spot and sent a desperate chill through him.
The boy’s eyes were black. They had no iris, no whites, but stared out as two terrible pools of midnight. Then, as if from a great distance, the front door of the old house opened with a tired creak of protest.
“Come in, boy! It’s time for dinner!” an old woman’s voice cried out.
The boy’s head snapped to the old woman’s call. Mark’s eyes, released from that dark stare, turned to see the figure of a stooped old woman standing in the open doorway of the house. Without a pause, and his heart beating wildly, Mark picked up his bike and ran on down the road, until he could gather himself to mount up and ride home.
That night he told his parents at the dinner table what he saw.
“You must have been mistaken, son,” his father said around a mouthful of mashed potatoes. “There is no old woman or children living in that house. It’s been abandoned for over twenty years. The place should have been condemned years ago, and torn down. For that matter, it isn’t safe. I don’t want to hear of you putting one foot on that lot. You’ll only get yourself hurt. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, father,” Mark said. But, what child truly understands his or her parents, much less the things they say to them?
Mark knew what he had seen; he also told his friends about it the next day at school.
“Are you going to go back, and check it out?” Anthony Bussiere had
asked over lunch.
“Yeah,” he said. Having sealed his own fate, Mark parked his bike in the bushes on the edge of the old lot and walked quickly through the too loud grass and leaves to the side of the house. A porch wound around this side from the front. Taking a deep breath, he stepped up onto the front porch. The boards announced his presence with a loud creak. Mark winced and steadied himself. Taking three creaking steps, he peered into the broken side window.
The afternoon light came into a central hall of the house in slanting, dusty bars. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust.
Something moved rhythmically at the far end of the hallway.
The old woman rocked in her chair, head down in slumber or deep thought. All of a sudden the old woman’s head jerked up, and she fixed her dark, black eyes upon him.
“Come in boy,” the old woman cried out. “It’s time for dinner!” She rose, too quickly for an old woman, and rushed forward, as if smoothly leaping the distance between Mark and her. All the while those black eyes bore into his.
Then she was at the window sill, her gnarled hands reaching out.
Mark jumped back and fell off the side of the porch. His right eye came inches from impaling itself on a rusty spring that lay in the tall grass. Getting up, he dashed from the yard and ran all the way home.
“Mark,” his father called, that night upon returning from work. “Did you forget and leave your bike out back again? I don’t know how many times I have to tell you, if it rains, it’ll rust.”
Mark realized with horror that he had forgotten his bike in the bushes beside the house. But in the dark of night, what was he to do? He confessed his visit to the place.
“I specifically told you to stay away from that place. You could have been seriously hurt. Now, you’ve gone and left the bike- which was bought with the money that I earned- for anyone to just come along and take it for themselves.” Mark looked down andwaited for the coming decree of doom from his father. “Well, we are going right there right now, mister; and when we get back, that bike is being put up for the winter above the garage. You’ll just have to walk your way back and forth from school from now on.”
Later, when they arrived at the old house, Mark avoided looking toward it the entire time that he went into the bushes to fetch his bicycle.
And now, he had to walk past that house every day, back and forth from school. Mostly, when no one was around, he ran by it, holding his breath and screaming some desperate prayer in his head.
Life went on thusly until the week before Halloween.
The afternoon was clear and sunny. Jack o’ lanterns grinned from doorsteps, and witch and skeleton effigies hung from porch roofs. It was that sleepy time of day when everyone is still at work, or out doing errands. In any case, no one had passed or crossed Mark’s path on his long walk home from school. He was lost in deep thought when he realized a large white van had pulled up beside him.
The driver side window rolled down and a bald, fat man wearing an old t-shirt leaned out the window.
“Hey, kid, come here a second, would ya.”
Mark stopped and looked at the man.
“Listen, I picked up all this Halloween candy, and I got too much. You want some?” the man asked.
Mark shook his head, and started walking again.
“Hey, kid, don’t be rude,” the man called. “I just want to give you some candy.” Mark knew enough not to talk to strangers, much less accept candy from them. He quickened his pace, hoping that if he just looked ahead, someone would happen to come by, or the man would give up and drive away.
“Kid, come here! I want to give you some candy,” the man called, but Mark continued to walk.
Suddenly, the van’s engine roared. The van swerved to the left and drove up over the curb in front of Mark.
“Come here, kid,” the man said. The door of the van started to open.
Without thought, Mark ran past the van onto the nearest yard. He looked up to see the weathered gray points of the spooky house looming over him. He ran down the cracked path and up the old porch steps. He grabbed the front door knob and wrenched the door open. He went into the darkened hall way and slammed the door shut behind him. It hit so hard, the rusting bottom hinge broke, and the door fell askew over the door way.
Mark ran down the hall way and, turning, spied the old woman rocking in the dusty bars of sunlight. He could hear the grunts of the fat bald man, struggling with the front door.
The old woman rose, and her black eyes fell upon Mark.
“Please, you have to help me. There’s this man, some kind of pervert. He’s going to…”
With a stuttering flash, the old woman was in front of him. She grasped his hands in her gnarled claws, her fingers as cold as January ice.
“Come in for dinner, boy?” Her face wrinkled with concern around the black eyes. “You’re burning up with a fever. You go wash up for dinner,” she said and released his hands.
“Come here, boy,” the fat man panted from the front hall. “I want to give you some candy.”
Mark ran past the ancient rocker to the broken window he had stared in weeks before. He dove through the window. Glass and rotting wood shattered around him, and he fell to the porch boards beyond. The glass cut into his arms and his side. He scrambled across the porch, cutting himself heedlessly, and fell down into the rusting debris on the lawn.
From inside the house, he heard the man call to him one more time.
Then he heard the old woman call out that it was time for dinner, followed by a terrible scream from inside.
Mark struggled to his feet and ran and bled and sobbed all the way down Dearborn Street.
When he arrived home and his parents saw him, they rushed him to the emergency room with alarm. The police were called.
They went to the house on Dearborn Street to investigate. They found the van, still running, door open, parked on the sidewalk. It was registered to a sex offender from Maine. Going inside the house, they found an old rocking chair in the hallway and the stained t-shirt of a fat man lying on the floor.
***
Mark recovered quickly, as boys do. His mother drove him to school and back from then on. He had an interesting story to tell his classmates and some scars to prove them true.
Time passed, so did winter, and the much anticipated spring came to New England once more.
One Sunday, an old man was out walking his dog and came across a boy picking flowers on the side of the road.
“Are you picking those for a lucky young lady?” the old man asked.
“No, I’m bringing these to an old lady. She saved my life last fall when a bad man was chasing me,” the boy said. The old man remembered the encounter with Mark and what he looked like very clearly; it had made quite an impression on him. He had thought the boy very sweet. He was able to give the description to the police when they came through the neighborhood looking for Mark. That old man was the last person to ever lay eyes upon Mark alive.
But, even to this day, in this new century, the old house on Dearborn Street remains. Word is, that if you’re traveling down that long street in Franklin Mills and it’s raining, you might just see a boy, with the saddest, most desperate expression, looking out from under the willow tree branches.
If you wait there for a moment, the front door may creak open, and a figure will lean out and call:
“Come here, boy. I want to give you some candy!”
The Scholomance on Spring Street
Andy Cooper felt skeptical that he and Todd had been invited to Clint Heywood’s club house on the forested hillside on the back side of Spring Street. Clint, a good two years older, wore black leather jackets, even in the summer, and smoked cigarettes. The quintessential bad boy, the other boys secretly loathed him; and he starred in the girls’ secret fantasies.
No one fantasized about Todd Gingue. A notorious video game addict, Todd at twelve stood an unimpressive four foot, ten inches, just shy of five feet in his orthopedic shoe
s. At his most impressive he was effete, at his least he was a whining, fragile nerd with thick glasses.
Andy didn’t know if anyone fantasized about him. In his dreams his sixth grade math teacher did, but then in his dreams she would often go topless and award him for getting Smartboard problems correct by fondling her massive mammary glands in front of the class. Certainly, he was more of a catch than Todd Gingue, his best friend since second grade, but he had just started to shed a lot of that baby fat that had haunted him since he was eight years old. He was a hell of a lot braver than Todd, and had gotten in plenty of scrapes defending the smaller boy. He was also a bit savvier.
“You don’t think he’s just going to drop flaming bags of poop on our heads if we go up there?” Andy asked.