The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16

by Stephen Jones

  Her memories seemed to date from the afternoon of her cousin Grace’s funeral. Grace, the younger child of Mary Rose’s sister Teresa, had been carried away by a quick and virulent form of childhood leukaemia. Now everyone was busy pretending that she had been a saint among nine-year-old girls. With the terrible unambiguous eye of an adolescent, Melly saw only hypocrisy in this. Grace hadn’t been any saint; she was actually kind of a sneaky kid who liked to pinch smaller children when no grownups were looking. Melly had loved her, but didn’t see the need to pretend she was now perched on the knee of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

  The Stubbs family was gathered in their regular pew at St Peter and Paul, a dusty old brick church in downtown New Orleans, and Melly was having a hard time staying awake. She didn’t usually sleep during regular Mass, let alone funerals, but a scratching in the wall of her bedroom had kept her up last night. She’d meant to ask her father if he would buy some rat traps, but the memory of wakefulness had left her as soon as she brushed her teeth and combed her long, coarse dark hair. She had the Sicilian colouring of her mother, a former Bonano, as did most of the other kids; only Gary was shaping up to be Irish-fair like their father.

  Now, though, she began to nod off. Her brother Little Elmer, the next oldest after Melly, extended a finger and poked her in the ribs. “Father Mike ain’t that boring,” he whispered.

  “Shhh,” she replied. Father Mike was young, with soft dog-eyes and a thick shock of wavy hair, and Melly had a little crush on him. Not a sexy crush, it would be almost a sin to think about a priest that way, but a little warm feeling in her chest whenever she saw him.

  “You the one falling asleep, not me—”

  “Y’all both hush,” their father murmured from Melly’s other side, barely audible, and they shut up. Elmer Stubbs was a mild-tempered man, but there’d be misery later if Mary Rose caught them talking during a funeral Mass. Fortunately she was at the far end of the pew, twisting a Kleenex in her small, expressive hands. It was warm for March, and occasionally she’d reach up to blot the sweat from her brow, though she always pretended she was patting her jet-black beehive hairdo. How Melly loathed that beehive! “It’s 1974, Momma,” she said frequently, “time to comb it out.” And Mary Rose always replied, “Nuh-uh, babe, I don’t want to look like a hippie,” as if a slightly more modern hairdo would transform her from a diminutive Italian housewife into a pot-smoking flower child.

  Melly sat up straighter in the pew, stretched her eyes open, and hoped the rat would depart for more attractive horizons by tonight. They lived in a poor neighbourhood, the Lower Ninth Ward, but their house on Delery Street was clean. Melly knew it was, because she had to do a lot of the cleaning. Some of their neighbours’ yards were full of chicken bones and crawfish shells and Melly didn’t know what all else, scattered among rusty garbage cans and hulks of old cars. Surely a rat could fill his belly more easily at one of those houses.

  Her wishes went unanswered for the time being; at home later, as she was changing the baby in the upstairs bedroom he shared with four-year-old Rosalie, she heard more scratching and a series of bangs behind the wall. “What you doing, Mr Rat?” she muttered. “Building you a whole ’nother house back there?”

  Gary laughed and showed her the clean pink palms of his hands, as he did when anybody spoke in his presence whether they were talking to him or not. He was the sweetest-natured baby she’d ever seen, and the only one of her siblings who made her think she might want kids of her own someday. He had a little fluff of sweet-smelling curly hair on the top of his head and his eyes were the warm brown of pecan shells, not so black you couldn’t tell the irises from the pupils like her own. She pinned his clean diaper shut and hoisted him onto her shoulder. “You gonna kill that old rat for me?” she asked him, and he laughed again.

  Life went on as usual in the big old clapboard house, Little Elmer and Carl playing touch football after school, Henry with the other seven-year-olds in the decrepit playground down the street, Melly watching after Rosalie and the baby while Mary Rose went to Mass or fixed dinner. The house smelled of garlic and red gravy, of boys, of the sweet olive bushes that bloomed on either side of the stoop in March. They were nothing to look at the rest of the year, but every spring they turned even the poorest corners of the city luxurious with their scent.

  The rat was gone for a week or two, and Melly figured her father must have put down some traps. Then suddenly it was there again, scratching behind the wall above her bed. This time the sound came deep in the night and didn’t seem funny at all. She had shared her bedroom with Little Elmer until last year, when her mother said a growing girl needed her privacy and made Little Elmer bunk with the younger boys. And Melly had certainly been a growing girl: she’d gained five inches last year. She didn’t like sleeping alone, though, had never done it in her life and wasn’t used to the way shadows could mass around you when no one was breathing in the next bed. The creaky old house was no longer the well-known friend of her childhood, but a strange place that wanted to trap her somehow. What would happen when it caught her? Melly didn’t know, but something deep in her gut seemed to liquefy when she thought of it.

  She lay awake listening to the rat in the wall. Little Elmer had moved his toys into the boys’ room, and Melly had put hers away in the attic, certain she would never need them again. Even Trina, the baby doll who’d been with her almost since her own babyhood, was stifling up there in a heavy garbage bag to keep out the dust. The room felt very empty. If a shadow should appear on the wall, she would know nothing was there to cast it.

  The rat gnawed more loudly. Melly sat up, meaning to bang on the wall and scare it away. She did so one, two, three times. The rat banged back in perfect imitation.

  She drew away, in-drawn air hissing between her teeth. No rat could have made that sound, three sharp, deliberate knocks. She extended her fist toward the wall, hesitated, then knocked once more. A mocking flurry of raps answered her, coming from the spot her knuckles had touched, then six feet above that, all the way to the right corner, to the left corner, to the ceiling, and finally under the bed. The mattress quaked. She flung herself off it, crossed the room without seeming to touch the floor, and shot into the hall screaming.

  The next day was Saturday, and Mary Rose had to go to Canal Street to start looking at suits for Henry’s First Communion. Carl tagged along in hopes of getting something from the bakery at D.H. Holmes. In a display of sudden, perceptive kindness typical to Stubbs males, Little Elmer volunteered to watch Rosalie and Gary. “Why don’t you go shopping with Momma?” he said to Melly. “I bet she lets you get a dress or something.”

  “She’s not gonna let me get any dress. I got all my spring school clothes already, and you know the rent’s due next week.”

  “Well, but you like to look at stuff. Go on – I’ll watch the babies.”

  “I ain’t no baby,” protested Rosalie, who was listening.

  “I’ll believe that when you get big enough to quit saying ain’t.” Little Elmer lifted her onto his lap. “Go on, Mel.”

  Full well knowing that her brother had given up a Saturday afternoon of street football in order to let her have a few hours away from the house that had frightened her so badly last night, Melly tried to enjoy herself. The life of Canal Street whirled around them, car horns, billboards, pink and gold neon signs, old ladies in their best shopping clothes, hippies in tattered regalia, a trio of lithe young black men with Afro picks embedded in their fantastic poufs of hair. Every breath was a mélange of exhaust, fried seafood, perfume, and, on the French Quarter side of the street, some mysterious tang that Melly thought might be the smell of burning marijuana. She walked beside her mother and admired the displays in the windows of the big department stores. She didn’t argue when Mary Rose tsked at how short the skirts had gotten. The boys danced behind her making devil horns with their fingers and singing: “Takin’ care of business . . . it’s a crime . . . takin’ care of business and workin’ overtime!”

/>   “They don’t say It’s a crime,” said Melly, who spent just as much time listening to the radio as they did.

  “Yeah?” said Carl truculently. “What they say, then?”

  “It’s all mind, I think.”

  “That don’t make no sense!”

  “Doesn’t make any sense,” said Mary Rose.

  “But Momma, you say ‘don’t make no sense’.”

  It was an old family game, and all three children chorused with their mother: “Do as I say, not as I do.”

  As they were riding up the escalator at Maison Blanche, Melly felt safe enough to say, “Momma, what happened in my bedroom last night?”

  “A bad dream,” said Mary Rose firmly and without hesitation, as if she had been waiting for this question. “You just had a bad dream.”

  “I wasn’t asleep yet, Momma. I was wide awake, and that’s not any rat in my wall.”

  “You make an Act of Contrition tomorrow, babe. That rat ain’t gonna bother you no more.”

  “An Act of Contrition?” Melly didn’t know what she had expected her mother to say, but it wasn’t that. “Why I gotta make an Act of Contrition? What’d I do wrong?”

  “Nothing, Melly, nothing.” They reached the top of the escalator. Mary Rose stumbled as she stepped off it, and Melly reached to steady her. “It’s just to be safe.”

  Melly saw that her mother’s eyes were frightened.

  “Just to be safe,” Mary Rose repeated. “It never hurts to be safe.”

  St Joseph’s Day fell on a Tuesday that year, and Melly was allowed to miss school to join her mother on her altar-visiting rounds. They went to the altar at St Alphonsus and the one at Our Lady of Lourdes, then a tiny one belonging to a lady in their own neighbourhood, and last to the altar of Mary Rose’s sister Teresa. It was generally known in the Stubbs and Bonano families that Teresa was rich; her husband Pete was whispered to make more than $10,000 a year. They lived across the parish line in Chalmette, in a one-storey brick house smaller than the Stubbs’ but far newer. No one had expected Teresa to make an altar so soon after the death of her child, but Teresa said St Joseph had been helping her all these years and she wasn’t going to turn her back on him now. “This year is more important than ever,” she had told Mary Rose, and while Melly wasn’t certain what she meant, Mary Rose seemed to take comfort in the words.

  The altar was set up in the carport, three long tables groaning with roasted fish, stuffed artichokes, anise cookies, devotional candles, a big gold crucifix, and a tall statue of St Joseph holding the baby Jesus. The statue was wreathed with Christmas lights that blinked on and off, creating an intermittent halo effect. Mary Rose tucked a few dollars into the brandy snifter that had been set on the altar for donations, took a lucky bean from a cut-glass bowl full of them, and grabbed herself a plate of food. “You want some spaghetti?” she asked Melly.

  “No, Momma.” Melly did, but she had vowed to go on a diet for Lent. She was already planning to make the Rosy Perfection Salad she’d found on a Weight Watcher’s card, even though the picture looked like a bad car wreck garnished with parsley. Instead she joined some other kids, mostly cousins and neighbours, to hear the music in the side yard.

  Teresa had bragged about having a live band, but it was just an accordion player and an old man with a microphone. As was often the case at any Italian party, they were playing “Che La Luna”. The kids began a circle dance as the old man sang, “Mama dear come over here and see who’s looking in my window . . . It’s the baker boy and oh, he’s got a cannoli in his hand . . .” The circle parted to let Melly in. On her right was her cousin Angelina. On her left was a boy she didn’t know, maybe her age, with big brown eyes and a Beatles haircut. In fact, he looked a little like Paul. She hoped her hand wasn’t sweaty as he grasped it. “In the middle!” cried the old man. The kids screamed with laughter as they raised their arms and crowded toward the middle of the circle. The music went faster and faster, and the dance followed suit. Caught up in the moment, she squeezed the boy’s hand, and she was almost certain that he squeezed back. A strange warm feeling welled up just under her ribcage, like a line of electricity being drawn out of her.

  She thought the shrieks of the women behind her were part of the festivities, so she didn’t know anything was wrong until something hit her in the back. It didn’t fall away, but clung there, heavy and hard between her shoulder-blades. A bug was her first thought, but reaching back, she could feel that it was bigger than even the largest New Orleans cockroach. Something cold, with four arms and a lumpy part in the middle. A crucifix – it felt like the big metal one that had been on the altar. Melly couldn’t understand how it was stuck to her, and she couldn’t pull it off.

  “Get it off me!” she yelled. The band stopped playing with a squeal of accordion feedback. The other children backed away. The boy who looked like Paul wiped his hand on his pants as if cleansing himself of her touch. She knew the gesture was probably automatic, but that made it hurt all the worse.

  “Please get it off me!”

  Here came Mary Rose, pushing through the crowd of children, spinning her daughter around and yanking hard at the crucifix. It clung to Melly’s back as if some immensely powerful magnet were buried deep inside her, perhaps where her heart should be. “Please, Momma,” Melly sobbed, and Mary Rose yanked even harder, but the crucifix didn’t budge.

  Now here was Aunt Teresa with a little pitcher that had been sitting on the altar, a pitcher labelled HOLY WATER. She upended the pitcher over Melly’s back. A couple of the kids giggled. “Pull on it again,” said Teresa. Mary Rose did, and the image of Jesus came off in her hand, but the cross stayed stuck to Melly. Several women in the crowd crossed themselves and fumbled rosaries out of their pocketbooks.

  Melly pushed away from her mother, out of the circle, out of the little fenced yard. She had never felt more alone and freakish than she did standing there in the sun-baked street, one small person with a big holy water stain running down her back and at least thirty people staring at her from the other side of a fence. The warm electric feeling abruptly left her and the cross clattered to the asphalt.

  Everybody was silent except for one old lady still praying: “Hail Mary, fulla grace, the Lord is with thee . . .”

  “Grace?” Teresa whispered. “Grace?”

  Melly turned her back on all the staring eyes. There was a soft collective intake of breath. Through her thin nylon blouse, it was easy to see the raw red cross-shape that had been printed in her flesh.

  Melly only had disjointed flashes of the next few hours. She remembered repeating through tears, “I’m sorry, Aunt Teresa, I’m sorry” as Teresa stood holding the figure of Jesus and the denuded cross, looking from one to the other as if she couldn’t quite understand how they went together. She heard people telling each other what had happened: “Did you see the way it jumped off the altar, just flew?” She didn’t remember the ride home at all; the next thing she knew, she was in her own bed, half asleep, rocked by some strange nausea that seemed to originate in her chest instead of her stomach. Over and over she nearly drifted off; over and over the bed jerked just as she slid over the edge of consciousness, yanking her back to wakefulness. “Please let me sleep,” she moaned, and a voice answered her.

  “You can sleep when you’re dead, Mary Louise . . .”

  It was a harsh and guttural voice, a voice that might have last spoken a thousand years ago or never. The words seemed to result from an intake of breath rather than an outflow, as if the speaker were suffocating. It was the worst voice Melly had ever heard, and yet suddenly she wasn’t scared so much as angry. If this thing had a voice, then it had a personality, and if it had a personality, then she could damn well tell it why it shouldn’t be pounding on her walls and making holy objects stick to her back. “Who are you?” she said, sitting up.

  “The Devil.”

  “No you’re not. The Devil wouldn’t waste his time scaring some poor girl from Delery Street. Who are you reall
y?”

  Silence.

  “Are you Grace?”

  Still nothing. She felt that she had offended it. And now she was frightened again; how had she dared to speak to such a thing, surely not the Devil but maybe some low minion? Even if it was only a ghost – she laughed at herself a little, thinking “only a ghost” – she oughtn’t to be talking to it.

  Melly sighed, got her beads out of the nightstand drawer, and started saying the rosary. She got all the way to the second decade before the beads were snatched out of her hands and scattered across the room.

  Mary Rose got Father Mike to come over and bless the house. He made it clear that it wasn’t an exorcism, that he wouldn’t perform an exorcism if she asked, that furthermore he didn’t believe the Stubbs’ house was haunted; he was only doing it to put her mind at rest and maybe calm Melly down a little. Melly thought that was ridiculous. Right now she was the calmest person in the house. She found that she no longer had the warm little crush on Father Mike.

  One day when her parents thought she was upstairs, she overheard the tail-end of a conversation between them. Though she knew her father was an uncommonly good man, she would never quite forgive him for asking Mary Rose, “Don’t you think there’s some chance she’s doing all this to get attention?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Mary Rose had replied. “This isn’t the first time crazy things happened in my family. You know that little end table my momma used to keep by her sofa?”

  “I can’t say I do.”

  “You know, Elmer, that little black table with the Italian patterns. It was hand-painted by my great-grandmother in Sicily. Lord, how that woman hated cursing and arguing – at least that’s what Momma told me. Well, she passed away long before my grammaw brought the table to America, but whenever anybody in the house would start cursing or hollering at each other, the table would rise up and beat them!”