A Book of Horrors

by Stephen King

  ‘Hey Ray? Silly question, but …’ I said. ‘Your Aunt Polly, your own grandma, your mom, anybody … when you were a kid, did any of them ever tell you stories about something called the Woodwalker?’

  He shook his head. ‘Nope. Seen my share of woodpeckers, though.’ He got a few more steps away before he stopped again, something seeming to rise up that he hadn’t thought of in twenty years. ‘Now that you mention it, I remember one from Aunt Pol about what she called Old Hickory Bones. It didn’t make a lot of sense. “Tall as the clouds, small as a nut”, that sort of nonsense. You know old women and their stories.’

  ‘Right.’

  He looked like he was piecing together memories from fragments. ‘The part that scared us most, she’d swear up and down it was true, from when she was a girl. That there was this crew of moonshiners got liquored up on their own supply and let the still fire get out of hand. Burned a few acres of woods, and some crops and a couple of homes with it. Her story went that they were found in a row with their arms and legs all smashed up and run through with hickory sticks … like scarecrows, kind of. And that’s how Old Hickory Bones got his name. I always thought she just meant to scare us into making sure we didn’t forget about our chores.’

  ‘That would do it for me,’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘Those cows didn’t have to wait on me for very many morning milkings, I’ll tell you what.’ He turned serious, one big hand scrubbing at his beard. ‘Why do you come to ask about a thing like that?’

  I gestured at the house. ‘You know how it is going through a place this way. Everything you turn over, there’s another memory crawling out from underneath it.’

  Later, I kept going back to what I’d said when Gina and I had first walked in and looked at Grandma’s chair: that it seemed like she’d finished her book and set it aside and peacefully resolved it was a good day to die. It’s the kind of invention that gives you comfort, but maybe she really had. She kept up on us, her children and grandchildren, even though we were scattered far and wide. She knew I had a vacation coming up, knew that it overlapped with Gina’s.

  And we were her favourites. Even Mrs Tepovich knew that.

  So I’m tempted to think Grandma trusted that, with the right timing, Gina and I would be first to go through the house. She couldn’t have wanted my mother to do it. Couldn’t have wanted my father to be the first up in the attic. Some things are too cruel, no matter how much love underlies them.

  Maybe she’d thought we would be more likely to understand and accept. Because we were her favourites, and even though my mother had grown up here, and my aunts and uncles too, they were so much longer out of the woods than we, her grandchildren, were.

  It broke the agreeable calm of Saturday afternoon, Gina and I in different parts of the house. I was in the pantry, looking through last season’s preserves, and had discovered an ancient Mason jar full of coins when a warbling cry drifted down. I thought she’d come across a dead racoon, a nest of dried-out squirrels … the kind of things that sometimes turn up in country attics.

  But when Gina came and got me, her face was pale and her voice had been reduced to such a small thing I could barely hear it. Shae, she was saying, or trying to. Shae. Over and over, with effort and an unfocused look in her eyes. Shae.

  I didn’t believe her while climbing the folding attic ladder; still didn’t while crossing the rough, creaking boards, hunched beneath the slope of the roof in the gloom and cobwebs and a smell like a century of dust. But after five or twenty minutes on my knees, I believed, all right, even if nothing made sense any more.

  There was light, a little, coming through a few small, triangular windows at the peaks. And there was air, slatted vents at either end allowing some circulation. And there was my sister’s body, on a cot between a battered steamer trunk and a stack of cardboard boxes, covered by a sheet that had been drawn down as far as her chest.

  The sheet wasn’t dusty or discoloured. It was clean, white, recently laundered. Eight years of washing her dead granddaughter’s sheets – my head had trouble grasping that, and my heart just wanted to stop.

  Gradually it dawned on me: With Shae eight years dead, we shouldn’t have been able to recognise her. At best, she would’ve mummified in the dry heat, shrivelled into a husk. At worst, all that was left would be scraps and bones, and the strawberry blonde silk of her hair. Instead, the most I could say was that she looked very, very thin, and when I touched her cheek, her skin was smooth and stiff but pliable, like freshly worked clay. I touched her cheek and almost expected her eyes to open.

  She’d been nineteen then, was nineteen now. She’d spent the last eight years being nineteen. Nineteen and dead, only not decayed. She lay on a blanket and a bed of herbs. They were beneath her, alongside her. Sprigs and bundles had been stuffed inside the strips of another sheet that had been loosely wound around her like a shroud. The scent of them, a pungent and spicy smell of fields and trees, settled in my nose.

  ‘Do you think Grandma did this?’ Gina was behind me, pressing close. ‘Not this this, that’s obvious, but … killed her, I mean. Not on purpose, but by accident, and she just couldn’t face the rest of us?’

  ‘Right now I don’t know what to think.’

  I shoved some junk out of the way to let more light at her. Her skin was white as a china plate, and dull, without the lustre of life. Her far cheek and jaw were traced with a few pale bluish lines like scratches that had never healed. Gently, as if it were still possible to hurt her, I turned her head from side to side, feeling her neck, the back of her skull. There were no obvious wounds, although while the skin of her neck was white as well, it was a more mottled white.

  ‘Do me a favour,’ I said. ‘Check the rest of her.’

  Gina’s eyes popped. ‘Me? Why me? You’re the hard-ass prison guard.’

  It was then I knew everything was real, because when tragedy is real, silly things cross your mind at the wrong times. Corrections Officer, I wanted to tell her. We don’t like the G-word.

  ‘She’s my sister. She’s still a teenager,’ I said instead. ‘I shouldn’t be … she wouldn’t want me to.’

  Gina moved in and I moved aside and turned my back, listening to the rustle of cotton sheets and the crackle of dried herbs. My gaze roved and I spotted mousetraps, one set, one sprung, and if there were two, there were probably others. Grandma had done this, too. Set traps to keep the field mice away from her.

  ‘She’s, uh …’ Gina’s voice was shaky. ‘Her back, her bottom, the backs of her legs, it’s all purple-black.’

  ‘That’s where the blood pooled. That’s normal.’ At least it didn’t look like she’d bled to death. ‘It’s the only normal thing about this.’

  ‘What am I looking for, Dylan?’

  ‘Injuries, wounds … is it obvious how she was hurt?’

  ‘There’s a pretty deep gash across her hipbone. And her legs are all scratched up. And her belly. There are these lines across it, like, I don’t know … rope burns, maybe?’

  Everything in me tightened. ‘Was she assaulted? Her privates?’

  ‘They … look okay to me.’

  ‘All right. Cover her up decent again.’

  I inspected Shae’s hands and fingertips. A few of her nails were ragged, with traces of dirt. Her toenails were mismatched, clean on one foot, the other with the same rims of dirt, as if she’d lost a shoe somewhere between life and death. Grandma had cleaned her up, that was plain to see, but hadn’t scraped too deeply with the tip of the nail file. Maybe it just came down to how well she could see.

  I returned to Shae’s neck, the mottling there. Connect the dots and you could call it lines. If her skin weren’t so ashen, it might look worse, ringed with livid bruises.

  ‘If I had to guess, I’d say she was strangled,’ I told Gina. ‘And maybe not just her throat, but around the middle, too.’ Someone treating her like a python treats prey, wrapping and squeezing until it can’t breathe.

  We tucked her in
again and covered her the rest of the way, to keep off the dust and let her return to her long, strange sleep.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ Gina said, and when I didn’t answer: ‘The kindest thing we could do is bury her ourselves. Let it be our secret. Nobody else has to know. What good would it do if they did?’

  For the first minute or two, that sounded good. Until it didn’t. ‘You don’t think Grandma knew that too? It’s not that she couldn’t have. If she was strong enough to work the soil in her garden, and to get Shae up the ladder, then she was strong enough to dig a grave. And there’s not one time in the last eight years I heard her say anything that made me think her mind was off track. You?’

  Gina shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘Then she was keeping Shae up here for a reason.’

  We backed off towards the ladder because another night, another day, wasn’t going to do Shae any harm.

  And that’s when we found the envelope that Gina must have sent flying when she first drew back the sheet.

  ‘How you react to what I got to say depends on who’s done the finding,’ our Grandma Evvie had written.

  I have my hopes for who it is, and if it hasn’t gone that way I won’t insult the rest by spelling it out, but I think you know who you are.

  First off, I know how this looks, but how things look and how things are don’t always match up.

  Know this much to be true: It wasn’t any man or woman that took Shae’s life. The easiest thing would’ve been to turn her over and let folks think so and see her buried and maybe see some local boy brought up on charges because the sheriff decides he’s got to put it on somebody. I won’t let that happen. There’s plenty to pay for around here, and maybe the place would be better off even if some of them did get sent away for something they didn’t do, but I can’t help put a thing like that in motion without knowing whose head it would fall on.

  If I was to tell you Shae was done in by what I always called the Woodwalker, some of you might believe me and most of you probably wouldn’t. Believing doesn’t make a thing any more or less true, it just points you towards what you have to do next.

  If I was to tell you you could have Shae back again, would you believe it enough to try?

  In the kitchen that evening, across the red oilcloth spread over the table, Gina and I argued. We argued for a long time. It comes naturally to brothers and sisters, but cousins can be pretty good at it too.

  We argued over what was true. We argued over what couldn’t possibly be real. We weren’t arguing with each other so much as with ourselves, and with what fate had shoved into our faces.

  Mostly, though, we argued over how far is too far, when it’s for family.

  Living with this has been no easy task. What happened to Shae was not a just thing. Folks here once knew that whatever we called it, there really is something alive in the woods and fields, as old as time and only halfway to civilised, even if few were ever lucky or cursed enough to see it. We always trusted that if we did right by it, it would do right by us. But poor Shae paid for other folks’ wrongs.

  She meant well, I know. It’s no secret there’s a plague here and it’s run through one side of this county to the other. So when Shae found a trailer in the woods where they cook up that poison, nothing would do but that she draw a map and report it.

  Till the day I die I won’t ever forget the one summer when all the grandchildren were here and the night little Shae spoke up to say she’d seen the Woodwalker. I don’t know why she was allowed at that age to see what most folks never do in a lifetime, but not once did I think she was making it up. I believed her.

  The only thing I can fathom is this: Once she decided to report that trailer and what was going on there, the Woodwalker knew her heart, and resolved to put a stop to her intentions.

  I spent half of Sunday out by myself, trying to find what Shae had found, but all I had to go by was the map she’d drawn. There was no knowing how accurate it was when it was new, and like the living things they are, woods never stop changing over time. Trees grow and fall, streams divert, brambles close off paths that were once as clear as sidewalks.

  And whoever had put the trailer there had had eight years to move it. What it sounded like they’d never had, though, was a reason.

  I had the map, and a bundle of sticks across my back, and like any hunter I had a shotgun – not my granddad’s, since that one had yet to turn up, and it’s just as well I went for the one in my trunk, carried out of habit for the job – but sometimes hunters come home empty-handed.

  At least I came back with a good idea of what else I needed before going out to try again.

  I don’t want to say what I saw, but it was enough to know that it was no man using all those vines to drag her off towards the hog wallow, faster than I could chase after them. By the time I caught up, it had choked the life from her.

  It didn’t do this because it wanted to protect those men for their own sakes. I think it’s because it wants the plague to continue until it finishes clearing away everybody who’s got it, and there’s nobody left in this county but folks who will treat the place right again.

  These days you’ll hear how the men who’ve brought this plague think they’re beyond the reach of the law, because their hideaways can’t be found. Well, I say it’s only because the Woodwalker has a harsher plan than any lawman, and blinds the eyes of those who come from outside to look.

  But Shae always did see those woods with different eyes.

  ‘Remember what Grandma used to call her?’ Gina asked. I was ashamed to admit I didn’t. ‘“Our little wood-elf”,’ she said, then, maybe to make me feel better, ‘That’s not something a boy would’ve remembered. That’s one for the girls.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ I said, and peeled the blanket open one more time to check my sister’s face. I’d spent the last hours terrified that there had been some magic about our grandmother’s attic, and that once she was carried back to the outside world again, the eight years of decay Shae had eluded would find her at last.

  One more time, I wouldn’t have known she wasn’t just dreaming.

  Instead, the magic had come with her. Or maybe the Woodwalker, spying us with the burden we’d shared through miles of woodland, knew our hearts now, too, and opened the veil for our eyes to see. Either way, I’d again followed where the old map led, and this time Shae had proven to be the key.

  ‘Do you think it goes the other way?’ Gina asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If we stood up and whoever’s in there looked out, would they see us now? Or would they look straight at us and just see more trees?’

  ‘I really don’t want to put that to the test.’

  The trailer was small enough to hitch behind a truck, large enough for two or three people to spend a day inside without tripping over each other too badly. It sat nestled into the scooped-out hollow of a rise, painted with a fading camouflage pattern of green and brown. At one time its keepers had strung nets of nylon mesh over and around it, to weave with branches and vines, but it looked like it had been a long time since they’d bothered, and they were sagging here, collapsed there. It had a generator for electricity, propane for gas. From the trailer’s roof jutted a couple of pipes that had, ever since we’d come upon it, been venting steam that had long since discouraged anything from growing too close to it.

  Eventually the steam stopped and a few minutes later came the sound of locks from the other side of the trailer door. It swung open and out stepped two men. They took a few steps away before they stripped off the gas masks they’d been wearing and let them dangle. They looked glad to breathe the cool autumn air.

  I whispered for Gina to stay put, stay low, then stepped out from our hiding place and went striding towards the clearing in-between, and maybe it did take the pair of them longer to notice than it should’ve. They each wore a pistol at the hip but seemed to lack the instinct to go for them.

  And the trees shuddered high overhead, ev
en though I couldn’t feel or hear a breeze.

  ‘Hi, Ray,’ I called, levelling the shotgun at them from the waist.

  ‘Dylan,’ he said, with a tone of weary disgust. ‘And here I believed you when you said you weren’t no narc.’

  For a while I’d been wondering if he’d simply dropped by while visiting his great-aunt and Shae had suspected him for what he was and followed him here, righteous and foolhardy thing that she could be.

  I glanced at the gangly, buzz-cut fellow at his side. ‘Who’s that you’re with?’

  ‘Him? Andy Ellerby.’

  ‘Any more still inside?’

  Ray’s fearsome beard seemed to flare. ‘You probably know as well as I do, cooking is a two-man job at most.’ He scuffed at the ground. ‘Come on, Dylan, your roots are here. You don’t do this. What say we see what we can work out, huh?’

  I looked at his partner. Like Ray, the edges of his face and the top of his forehead were red-rimmed where the gas mask had pressed tight, and he gave me a sullen glare. ‘Andy Ellerby, did I know you when we were kids?’

  He turned his head to spit. ‘What’s it matter if you did or didn’t, if you can’t remember my name?’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘That makes this a little easier.’

  I snapped the riot gun to my shoulder and found that, when something mattered this much, I could again aim at something alive and pull the trigger. The range was enough for the twelve-gauge load to spread out into a pattern as wide as a pie tin. Andy took it in the chest and it flung him back against the trailer so hard he left a dent.

  I’d loaded it with three more of the same, but didn’t need them, so I racked the slide to eject the spent shell, then the next three. Ray looked confused as the unfired shells hit the forest floor and his hand got twitchy as he remembered the holster on his belt, but by then I was at the fifth load and put it just beneath his breastbone, where his belly started to slope.

  He looked up at me from the ground, trying to breathe with a reedy wheeze, groping where I’d shot him and not comprehending his clean, unbloodied hands.