Evil Stalks the Night

by Kathryn Meyer Griffith

  Those were the good years before I was shown the horror there was to be later in my life. I forever froze those memories in my child’s mind, like butterflies in amber. Secret talismans of happiness.

  “Sarah? Come on in here and help me set the table for supper.” It was my mother calling me. I ran down the steps, impulsively plucked a rosebud and went in and stood before her.

  “It’s nice you could grace us with your presence, young lady,” she said sharply. “Where have you been?” It was forever the same. She didn’t mean to sound so short tempered, but sometimes dealing with seven rowdy kids pushed her to the end of her patience.

  “Out playing, Mom, but here I am. See?” I smiled, withdrawing and presenting my gift to her, as I moved to lay out the plates.

  “About time, too,” she remarked, but not as sharply as before. She was wearing one of her flowered sun dresses I remember so well, and she was sweating from the heat of the stove on a summer’s day.

  She twirled the rose in her fingers and leveled steel-blue eyes at me. Eyes that echoed Charlie’s like a mirror, yet managed to hold a special warmth that was hers alone. She was still a beautiful woman, after seven children and years of broken dreams. She smiled a rare smile. I sighed, knowing I was off the hook, and dinner ran its usual course.

  Mother once confessed to me she’d once wanted to be a nurse. But we children had stolen the dream from her.

  “But Mom, you are a nurse.” I’d smiled back at her, trying to make her see. “You get to nurse all of us.” She only nodded and planted a kiss on my cheek. Had it been sadness I glimpsed in those blue eyes?

  She’d told me, “For you, Sarah, it’ll be different. Remember to follow your dreams to the end, girl, and never give up. I let mine go too easily, but you, you’ll never let go. You’ll make it, I know.”

  “Are you sorry you had us all, then?” I’d asked, taking her work-worn hands in mine. “Do you hate us for it?”

  She’d given me a wistful smile, and shook her head. “No, child, I’m not sorry I had you kids. I love you children and, well, against dreams I suppose love wins every time. Love is more powerful than dreams or anything. Don’t ever forget it.”

  She’d looked at me as if she were trying to tell me some great secret. I knew she loved us very much. I never doubted it and I promised her, I’d never give up my dreams. Never.

  “I’ll be an artist someday, Mom. I’ll be an artist or… a writer. Truly. I promise.”

  She’d laughed and hugged me. I think there were tears in her eyes. “I just bet you will, Sarah-girl. You’re one of those special ones fate has laid a heavy finger on, and you’re bound to be something special, too.”

  Of course, I thought she’d only said that because I was her daughter, with no thought she might have been foretelling what was to come. Don’t all parents say encouraging things to their offspring? And don’t all parents hope for better for their children than what they’ve known?

  My mother and father had it rough, especially with all us kids. It affected my mother, though, in more ways than my father. In general he was an easy-going kind of individual. My mother would worry and fret herself sick over money and bills, and where the next meal was coming from. While he took an it’s-life attitude; saying everything would work out in the end. When it rarely did.

  My father was a salesman for a building company which did siding and small home improvements, and the money was sporadic or at times nonexistent. One day we’d be as rich as kings and the next as poor as beggar mice, and it drove my mother up a wall. If there was no food for the table or money to fend off the bill collectors, Mother was practically impossible to live with. Her fiery temper matched her red hair, and she sometimes vented her frustrations on us children, but almost always on our father. I would lie in bed at night listening to their angry voices bouncing through the house, trying to block out the misery with a pillow squeezed over my ears. I loved them both, and I couldn’t see for the life of me why they’d take out their anger on each other, when they were supposed to love each other so. I thought it would have been easier if they’d pulled together at those bad times, instead of pulling apart. What did I know, I was just a kid.

  I, champion of the underdog, usually sided with my father. I felt so sorry for him when he came dragging home late at night, without the promised money from the big deal and had to confront my mother’s wrath. I tried to ease his banishment in any way I could. I’d fix him the supper my mother was too angry to bother with and serve him like a condemned prisoner. He failed, sure, but he’d tried. He deserved something for that, didn’t he?

  Like with Charlie, I could help but couldn’t cure. It made me feel so helpless.

  My maternal grandmother hit it on the head. “You can’t cure all the evils of the world with a tender heart, child,” she warned me.

  Grandmother was unusually astute in her observations. Mary Elizabeth Summers was undeniably Old German. She’d come over from Austria a penniless immigrant when she was a child of ten, and had married a hard-headed second generation German. She’d had only one child, my mother. My Grandmother had ached for a large family, but had to be content with one child because Grampa was a frugal, practical man and it was the Great Depression, after all. Thing was, he lived long enough to see his seventh grandchild, Samantha, born, yet he died before Samantha was old enough to call him Grampa.

  Grandmother had loved him deeply but she adapted quickly.

  Everyone knew we children were her whole life and she adored us. Grampa’s thriftiness had left her with a sizeable bank account, which Grandmother promptly lavished on us whenever our famine, or her fancy, struck. She owned an ancient, monstrous house with the mortgage paid in full. It was down the street from us and Grandmother lived there the rest of her days.

  Grandmother Summers was eccentric, to say the least, and there were those in the neighborhood who said she was more than a little strange…and some thought she was a witch. Looking back, I understand why. I believe she had the limited gift of foresight. What really made her a candidate for unflattering speculation was her keen, if not obsessed, interest in the unknown.

  Her old house was as spooky a place as any child could dream of, and she collected books on the supernatural. She believed in ghosts, angels and demons and didn’t care what the world whispered about her sanity. She conducted séances in her sewing room, and some swore they’d contacted their lost loved ones. Everyone, but us, was deathly afraid of the old woman.

  My grandmother, in the years before Grampa died, would visit and keep an eye on us; we never went without if she could help it. But in the later years of her life she became an invalid and a recluse, but still saw us kids. She took to having us three older children overnight or for the weekend. Perhaps she was afraid of being alone, and wouldn’t admit it, but we didn’t care what her reasons were, because staying with Grandmother was a treat. We loved it. I, especially, loved to help take care of her and listen to her strange stories.

  “Have I told you the story about the girl who died…but wasn’t really dead?” She’d always start it the same way, even though each of us had heard it since the day we were old enough to listen. No one could tell a story the way my grandmother could. She’d sit in her wheelchair huddled under a crocheted blanket and shake her bony finger at us. Since Grampa had died, she’d aged almost overnight. Her once beautiful blue eyes and lively smile had faded into shadows of their former selves, and her lovely red hair was nothing but ghostly wisps. Sometimes I’d see her staring out the windows or at the walls, as if she saw something beyond them we couldn’t and there was fear in her dull eyes. It used to frighten me. I thought, though, it was her age and Grampa being gone; her being alone and old. Helpless.

  I was wrong.

  We’d sit on the floor at her feet, our eyes wide and riveted as we urged her to go on and tell the story again. The lights were dim in the h
ouse, it was late, and the television was turned down, casting its feeble, flickering light over the walls of the front room like bony fingers. My oldest sister, Leslie, hung on her every word. I was more skeptical.

  Grandmother’s smile was grim as she looked at me.

  “You don’t believe me, do you, Sarah?” Her voice crackled, the German accent still detectable, and she cocked her head.

  I humored her. I wanted to believe. “Yes, Grandmother, I believe you.” I whispered, hoping God wouldn’t hear my boldfaced lie and strike me dead on the spot. “Go on with the story.” I grinned.

  “Well, child, it did happen, I know for a fact.” Her hand reached out and touched my shoulder, resting there as though she were afraid I would run off. “Back in those days, medical science wasn’t what it is today and people were very superstitious. Things they couldn’t understand got labeled as witchery or the like.

  “Many people died, especially among the poor in winter, when there was no work or food to be had. Sometimes there were no doctors to say what they died of. Those were bad days. Ignorant people didn’t know any better. They dropped their dead into pine boxes and lowered them into the cold earth to wait for Judgment Day. The dead were mourned and forgotten. If you were poor, you lived, you died, and that was the end of it. It made no difference if you were a child or an old person. You worked in the fields until death claimed you.” She shrugged her stooped shoulders and paused for effect, her eyes gazing somewhere far away.

  “Sarah!” she suddenly snapped, singling me out again.

  “Yes, I’m listening, Grandmother.”

  She’d go on slowly.

  “There was a girl, about fourteen, and the people of the town were afraid of her. She was a strange one, always keeping to herself. She heard and saw things that no one else could see or hear.”

  “She was a witch, Grandma,” Leslie piped up, smugly.

  “No.” My grandmother seemed annoyed. “She wasn’t. Her neighbors thought she was, but she wasn’t.” Her voice was sad. “She had a gift, and they didn’t understand. She’d been a frail child, and had done only good for others. Yet one morning her brother found her at the fringe of the woods near the end of town and she couldn’t talk, couldn’t move and she died a few days later. No one knew how or why.

  “Her parents had loved her a great deal and their grief was almost too much to bear, but they dried their tears and buried her at the forest’s edge, where she’d been found. She had loved the woods and the open skies, and in those days they didn’t keep bodies around too long, particularly in her case. The townspeople had been suspicious over her curious death.”

  “Then what?” Leslie had asked, her eyes bright as she licked her lips.

  “They buried her in a shallow grave.”

  We held our breaths, shivering in the darkened room.

  “But the mother grieved for her daughter and began to have terrible dreams. The child was calling her, begging for her help—telling her, she wasn’t really dead. People thought the woman had gone mad with grief.”

  I felt as if someone had brushed my shoulder, when there was no one there to do it. It was as if someone had walked across my grave, and it frightened and confused me. I wasn’t one who easily scared. Seeing something in the corner of my eye I looked closely at the window. There was nothing there. I glanced at Jimmy, he was so silent whenever my grandmother told her stories. He was staring at the window, too. I shivered.

  “Tell us,” Leslie prompted, her face rapt, “about the ring.”

  “Ah, yes. The girl had this ring. It was a keepsake her great-grandmother had given her for her birthday years before and it was a pretty thing of intertwined golden leaves. It was her treasure. Her parents could have taken it and sold it for money, for they were poor, but her mother wouldn’t dream of it so it was buried with the girl.

  “But there were those who had less scruples. When the girl had been laid to rest, one of the grave diggers had taken a fancy to have it. A peasant with six hungry little ones at home, the man was desperate. He’d never robbed the dead before, a despicable thing, but one of his children was gravely ill and might not live to see the next sunrise if he didn’t get her medical help.

  “So the first night after the girl had been buried, he crept through the dark woods to the grave. He’d have the ring though he had to dig up a corpse to get it. He was sure God would forgive him because his need was just.

  “There was a storm that night and he was filled with fear at what he was about to do. He hurriedly dug up the pitiful grave, opened the lid of the coffin and bent to slip the ring off the small finger.

  “It wouldn’t come off. Cursing, shaking with the wet and the dread, he knew the only way to get it was to slice the finger from the hand and flee with it. Later he could cut the ring free.”

  We’d been as quiet as the graveyard, waiting. Every noise and unearthly shadow seemed endowed with its own sinister intention. It’d begun raining outside. The wind moaned. The house grew chilly and we shivered beneath the blankets we’d been given. Our grandmother had stopped to stare out the window.

  “Go on!” we all begged. All, except Charlie. He’d sit and watch us as if he enjoyed our fright. He grinned when we grimaced, giggled when we gasped. Silently, he turned back to the sound of our grandmother’s voice.

  “He was terribly frightened, and slashed the finger swiftly from the body and then he heard…”

  “What?” Jimmy demanded. The room’s shadows menaced us, and the wind outside the house echoed the screeching of the restless dead in their shallow graves. The trees scratched the windows as if seeking entrance and my grandmother’s voice became one we didn’t recognize.

  It struck a panic deep inside of me and I wondered why. It was only a story.

  “The girl began to moan and stir in her coffin and the grave digger bellowed in terror. The dead had come alive! Not wanting to wait to see what would happen next, he fled the graveyard as if the devils of hell were riding on his coat-tails. He was terrified the corpse was following him, crying for its missing finger, and in his haste he threw it back toward the body as he ran.”

  “She wasn’t actually dead, was she?” Leslie, the down-to-earth one of us, interjected softly, her pretty face pale and dark eyes glazed.

  We knew how the story ended.

  “No, she wasn’t.” There was a peculiar note in Grandmother’s reply. “It seems the mother had such a vivid dream about her daughter, the father promised to go out to the grave himself at dawn and show the distraught woman the girl was truly dead. When the father got to the grave, though, he was shocked to see it open and his daughter sitting up, weeping, in her coffin, her hand wrapped in the hem of her bloody skirt…alive after all.

  “He took her home, thanking God each step he carried her and crying for joy, as his wife did, too. They nursed the girl to health again, grateful to have her returned to them, minus a finger or not.”

  “Good gosh!” John gulped, gripping his twin sister Ann’s arm.

  Ann sucked her thumb, her eyes as big as saucers.

  “They call it the ‘sleeping sickness,’ don’t they?” Leslie enlightened us. “When people have it they fall into a coma so deep they look like they’re really dead, but they aren’t.” She trembled, as we all did. “Ooh, that story still gives me the creeps!”

  “Cutting her finger off started her circulation again and she woke up, right?” I solved the riddle. Jimmy and Charlie remained silent, listening to the night noises outside, thinking.

  “Possibly,” our grandmother murmured spookily. “Though some said she was a witch, others said she was purely lucky.” She’d gazed at me. “But the town was afraid of her afterwards and shunned her. Her life wasn’t a happy one. People hate and try to destroy the things they don’t understand. They don’t know any better.”

  Had there been p
ity in her eyes for me? I looked away, unable to bear her gaze, and something inside me fluttered. Perhaps a warning of things to come.

  “I don’t believe she was bad. I don’t believe she was a witch,” I stated firmly. “If the story’s true at all.” Every time I heard the tale I’d expressed the same doubt, but Grandmother never argued.

  Ironically, years later, before she died, she finally made me believe in it. “The story is true. The girl, you see,” she’d confessed in the end, “was your great-great-grandmother.”

  The sincerity in her eyes and the shock of the revelation had made me speechless. But I accepted what she’d said and never questioned it again.

  I couldn’t. I didn’t want to know the answers.

  It was a very long time ago, and I wish I could forget it.

  Oh, if I only could.

  Chapter Two

  Suncrest 1960 to 1967

  On summer evenings the children of the neighborhood gathered to play hide and go seek. Because it was usually past our bedtime Jimmy and I had to sneak out through our bedroom windows to join them.

  How could we help ourselves? The summer nights were soft and warm and the moon was bright, the dark mysterious fields flanking our house beckoned, and gave us no choice but to follow.

  “Jimmy!” I reached frantically for him. My hand felt emptiness and my brother was nowhere I could reach him. “Wait for me! You know I’m afraid of heights,” I whispered from the edge of the roof. It was a long drop. “Jesus! Where are you?”

  We’d slipped out of the window in my bedroom and scrambled out into the night to play in the fields with some other kids. Our mother wouldn’t be happy if she caught us, outside climbing over the steep roof like monkeys.

  It was still unbelievably hot for as late as it was. I guessed it was about ten or so, maybe later. All our brothers and sisters were sleeping and mother and father were watching television in the front room below us. We had to be so careful and so quiet or we’d alert them to our crime.