When the school year started, things returned pretty much to normal. Almost.
Except, I noticed Jimmy never went into the woods alone again. It wasn’t unusual because no one went into those woods alone for many years afterwards.
The night after our strange experience we’d observed police cars, with sirens blaring and lights flashing in wide circles, as they made their way to the woods. During the day and the following night, they were searching for something.
I didn’t need to be told what they were seeking. Shep and Brian hadn’t returned home, though the police and concerned neighbors scoured the woods for days afterward, their bodies were never found. They’d been friends of ours but not best friends. It upset us to hear they’d disappeared, but being children ourselves, soon other things took over our thoughts.
It would have ended there for Jimmy and me except for my burden. I’d heard the voice and felt the danger I carried was greater than Jimmy’s.
A uniformed policeman knocked at our door a couple of days later and wanted to ask us questions.
Did we know the missing boys, and when had we seen them last, and a mess of other senseless enquiries. Could we tell him anything?
I couldn’t turn my eyes away, as Jimmy did, in silence, and pretend their vanishing hadn’t affected me. I had to tell the truth.
“Yes, I knew something! Yes!”
The young man with short blond hair and a shiny new badge, listened eagerly to what I had to say. The hope in his eyes dwindled and betrayed him before my story was finished. He obviously didn’t believe me. I don’t blame him. I can understand why he thought I was only an overly imaginative child, carried away with the gruesome excitement.
He thanked me, his thin face nodding knowingly at my parents, who had listened with genuine shock at what I’d said, and then he went away.
I’d tried. It wasn’t my fault no one understood or believed me. I tried to help. I knew they’d never find the bodies. I knew that.
Afterward, Jimmy refused to discuss that night ever again—and me? I was labeled as a little strange. Oh, people were nice about it, but all the same I was either crazy or an out-and-out drama queen, attention-seeking liar.
It was the first true lesson about my unwanted gift I learned and remembered. My face still burns when I think of the way the cop stared at me as I was telling my story. It was horrible, but it would become the pattern of my life.
I heard my mother and father discussing me late one night when they thought I was asleep.
“Mary, I’m worried about the girl.” It was my father’s voice coming up the stairway. “Have you noticed how thin she’s become, how quiet she is now? Sarah was never like that, Mary. Do you think we should take her to see a doctor or something? I mean, it’s not normal for an eleven year old to be like this.”
My mother’s voice was muted. “Sam, she’s going through a hard time since that…night. They were her friends. No matter what, she believes what she said. Perhaps it’s how she’s coping with their disappearances. Making up all that crazy stuff. Don’t worry, she’ll grow out of it. Time will help her to forget. Get her back on an even keel. You’ll see.”
“Forget what?” His voice sounded slightly irritated. I could imagine my mother gently laying a hand on his shoulder to ease his tension. They could be very close at times. They did love each other.
“The nightmare or whatever she thought she’d seen that night. The dream she believes really happened.”
“You think so?”
“Dear, I know so. Children are like that. Something that seems real and important today means nothing to them tomorrow. I know our Sarah, she’s got a brain in that pretty head and she’ll snap out of this before you know it. She’s a very special child. Artistic and imaginative. It’s in her nature to be emotional. All children do it to an extent. Look at Charlie.” And then they’d laughed together.
I sat at the top of the steps in the shadows, hung my head in shame, and suffered their laughter. They, of all people, should have believed me. If they didn’t, then who would? Who would heed my warnings; who could I go to for help? No one. I was alone.
I returned to bed with the hard truth twisting in my head, never to go away. Never. But I still didn’t suspect how hard it would all become someday. The visions. Other people not believing. The ridicule and doubts. I had no idea then. I was lucky. At least some of my childhood was carefree.
* * * *
“What are you reading now, Sarah?” my mother asked me one chilly autumn evening. I was curled up on the edge of my bed, alone, where she found me with a thick book. It was one of the few books I’d allow her to find me reading. There were other books I’d never let anyone see, books I read late at night, hidden under my covers with my light turned off and a flashlight in my hand as I turned the forbidden pages. Books I could never begin to explain to my family. Really shocking books on ghosts, witches, and demons, because the authors were renowned psychics or true believers with scientific facts and interviews to back up their words. Then there was the pure fiction written by those who only wanted to make a buck, by scaring their readers out of their wits with invented nonsense. I read every book on the occult, serious or entertaining drivel, that my local library had. I set out to learn all there was to learn. I had to.
“It’s about witches and warlocks, that kind of spooky stuff, you know, Mom.” I smiled my sweetest smile and held the book up for her to see the title. It was a harmless book, any kid my age would have wanted to read for fun. I wasn’t going to learn much from it but I wasn’t going to skip it because of that.
My mother merely shook her head and after laying a kiss on my forehead, reminded me it was nearly bedtime; then went back downstairs.
The next morning as I was getting ready to go to school, she said to me in a nonchalant manner, “Sarah, if you’re so interested in the supernatural, you should ask your Grandmother Summers about it. She’s an expert.”
“Thanks, Mom.” I kissed her goodbye and dashed out the door. I was late again. Too many books with pages that held me captive until the early morning hours. If I missed any of early mass again Sister Helen was going to kill me.
That was the year my parents decided we lacked religion and had arranged to send us to a Catholic school. Mother patiently explained as we donned those hated blue uniforms, that seven-year-old Jonathan and his twin, Ann, could receive Holy Communion with their class while the rest of us heathens would take catechism lessons after school and walk up en masse with the rest of the people to take the sacred blood and body of Christ.
“It’s time you children learn what being Catholic is all about. Time we put the fear of God into you. Your father and I have been remiss in our duties long enough. I’ve talked to Sister Helen at Holy Family and she’s agreed to take all of you, except baby Samantha who’s too young, in this year so you can become part of the true flock.”
What my mother meant, was the distasteful question of money had been settled. I knew how expensive Catholic school was and I imagined she’d gotten a discount rate because there were six of us in school with another coming up fast. We only stayed at Holy Family a few years, but I’ve been grateful for those years ever since. I’d always been religious and devout in my own maverick way, and for the first time in my life my hunger for religion was assuaged. I learned about God. I’d look up at the blue skies and pray He really existed. Someday I might need Him.
It was an ironic twist of fate, because, at the same time I was learning about God, I was also learning about the Devil. I always felt the two went hand in hand and to be able to fight evil, you had to be able to recognize it as well as goodness. They were merely flip sides of the same coin.
As I walked to school that morning with Leslie and Jimmy grumbling ahead of me and the twins, grumbling behind, I thought about what my mother had said about speaking to my grandmoth
er. It was cold for October and I tugged my sweater tighter around my thin body. I’d grown so much that year that my uniforms, practically new, were already short on me. My grandmother. Why hadn’t I thought of her before? I think I had, but was afraid of what I’d learn about myself.
In the years to come, though, I was so glad I hadn’t thought of it sooner. If I had she wouldn’t have lived even as long as she did. A year is such a miniscule slice of a person’s life and it’d been over a year since Shep and Brian had vanished, yet it was a year longer we had with grandmother, because I’d kept her out of it.
She could have taught me a lot if time would have allowed it, but we never had it. I saw her three times after I decided to seek her advice and then she was dead. Another door closed.
The last time I saw her was a few days before her sixty-fifth birthday, and I remember worrying over her frailness as she sat in her wheelchair, listening to what I was telling her. In those final visits I disclosed my secrets and she didn’t laugh at me once. Instead, she closed her weary eyes and laid her frail hands weakly on my arm in silent sympathy. I saw tears glisten on her cheeks and when she spoke, it was with a whisper of a voice as if she were fearful someone or something would hear us.
“I was afraid, especially after what happened to you last year in the woods, Sarah. Oh, child!” She engulfed me in her weak embrace and held me close. “I was scared for you and now I’m even more so. If only you knew…” Her words died away as if words could not begin to explain what she had to tell me.
“You might have the gift. I can’t be sure, but you might. I don’t have it, but I’ve known many through my life that have. They’re rare. In my opinion, they’re to be pitied. It isn’t something I would have wished on you because it’s a heavy burden. I think, at times, it’s a curse.”
She shook her white head and I noticed how old she’d become, with her eyes so dull and her skin so wrinkled. When had that happened? Time, it heals wounds and opens graves.
“The gift?” I stammered. “What’s that?”
She studied me and I could see how she fought with herself over what she should reveal and what she shouldn’t.
“Do you know about psychics and mediums?”
“Yes. I’ve read about them in books.”
“So you know about them?”
“A little.” My eyes were guarded by then, my heart raced. I’d read about people who could see the future or talk to spirits and I also knew, sometimes they were considered freaks. Unbalanced. Con people or worse. But sometimes they were true seers. I didn’t want to see the things they claimed they saw. It must have shown in my face because my grandmother kissed me and soothed me with hugs. She understood.
“Your great-great-grandmother, the girl with the ring, was one, though we don’t talk about her much.” My grandmother stared out the window.
“What happened to her…later?”
She sighed and kept her face away from me. “They burned her for being a witch at thirty. So young. Those were treacherous times.” She gazed at me and smiled encouragingly at my look of shock. “It’s better these days. They don’t burn people with paranormal abilities anymore.”
But I knew there were other things that could happen to them, and I might find out what they were someday if what my grandmother believed about me turned out to be true.
We sat there in her silent house hugging each other close that morning, each of us with our own private thoughts.
“Don’t worry, Sarah,” she told me lovingly. “Don’t be frightened. I’m here. I’ll help you. I promise.” I kissed her goodbye that sunny morning in October of 1961 and went home. They were the last words she ever spoke to me. It was the last time I saw her alive.
She was dead before the sun came up the next morning. They said it was a heart attack. Now who’d help me? Who’d protect me? She’d promised me but by dying she’d broken her promise.
I’d loved her more than anyone in the world, and when she passed away it was as if a part of me died, too. Her house was never sold, but boarded up and left to the mice and cobwebs. It gradually fell into disrepair. The weeds grew tall and wild around the dusty windows and the paint flaked off. For years we’d walk by it and mourned her being gone. We missed her so much.
The house was silently empty. We weren’t allowed in it once it was boarded up and my mother and father never talked about selling it. When I asked why it had to sit there and why we couldn’t move in ourselves, I can still see that glimmer of uneasiness in their eyes. I was told it was my grandmother’s wish that it remain so. “Someday you’ll understand. She wants you to understand, but not now.”
But I didn’t. Why couldn’t we live in the house? It would have been ours free and clear; no more rent. Heaven knows we had so little money it would have been a godsend to own a house. Or my parents could have sold it for something, white elephant that it was, instead of letting it mold away into dust.
“Ghosts, ‘cause that’s why.” Charlie chuckled at me one day. We were outside watching him taunt the poor cat. Charlie had a mean streak through him and if he was in a real bad mood, he’d take it out on anyone or anything that couldn’t fight back.
Our cat, Midnight, was a gentle old blue Maltese that wouldn’t bring its claws out to save its life. Charlie taught it how. Once I came across him swinging the poor animal around and around in dizzying circles by its tail. Then, when it was frantic and screeching in panic, he’d let it go to hit the side of the house or a tree. One time I was so appalled at how he was treating the cat my anger got the best of me and I shoved Charlie to the ground.
From that time on, whenever I saw Charlie around Midnight I’d keep an eye open so he couldn’t hurt the creature again.
“There are no ghosts in Grandma’s house,” Leslie piped up. “Grandmother was too good to be a ghost.”
The rest of us nodded like little puppets. Our grandmother was dead and we knew that. “There’s no such things as ghosts,” Leslie had finished smugly.
Charlie had laughed that cold laugh of his and walked away.
I’d looked towards our grandmother’s house and thought about life and death, and the thin line between the two.
I didn’t believe in ghosts, either. Not then anyway.
Chapter Four
Suncrest 1960 to 1967
When I was twelve, in the early morning hours after a sweltering summer night, I awoke to a glowing globe of light hovering at the foot of my bed. As I gazed it dimmed to a tiny pinprick before my sleep swollen eyes, and as I fell back into dreamland I could have sworn I heard my grandmother’s voice. It was too faint and far away for me to understand her message; if a message was what it was. The next morning I puzzled over it and chalked it up to an unusually vivid dream. I missed her so much since she’d died, that unconsciously I’d beckoned her to wander my night journeys with me. That was all, or so I thought.
The strange presence continued to plague me. For months she wouldn’t come and then, out of the blue, there she’d be.
She was trying to tell me something, but I could never figure out what.
I began to check old newspapers in the library in the afternoons after school, looking for articles on ghostly visitations and psychics. I wanted real life experiences, not fictitious accounts in novel form. I needed to understand what was happening to me; what I should do—or not do. There were times I wondered if I were going crazy.
No matter what I did, though, my grandmother continued to haunt my nights. Yet I couldn’t reach her, decipher what she was saying to me, and she couldn’t make me understand what she wanted.
* * * *
The summer I turned sixteen, I finally began to understand.
On a hot August night I awoke to distant sobbing. It came from everywhere; in my room, outside my murky windows, and high in the blowing treetops.
I
stumbled to the window and peered out into the night. It was then I knew from where the sobbing originated…in the hidden recesses of my heart.
Outside the window, framed in light, I could see my grandmother crying and I knew. I knew she was warning me something very bad was about to happen, or had happened already.
I scurried into the other rooms, waking everyone. When I reached the twins’ room, my heart nearly stopped cold. They were gone.
Like the two boys six years before, they’d simply disappeared.
Eventually their bodies were found in the woods after the whole town had turned out to search for them. Yet the woods remained silent and brooding and refused to give up any of its secrets.
I didn’t know how they’d died until years later and then wished I’d never found out. Poor John. Poor Ann.
Poor us.
It broke my mother’s heart, and she wasn’t ever the same afterwards. My father didn’t laugh at anything again. The heart of our family died with John and Ann. The golden years were over.
We talked of moving away. My father convinced my mother to stay, saying it could have happened anywhere—why blame this place? We had roots there. Moving wouldn’t bring dead children back. It was inconceivable such tragedy would strike twice. No, we would stay.
As the years went by, John and Ann’s rooms were left untouched as if awaiting their return; growing dusty, and echoing with the ghosts of their childish tears, for they were dead and would never come home again.
* * * *
The little Mustang was cherry red and looked as if it had just rolled off the factory line, the day my father and mother handed me the keys with big smiles. “You deserve it, Sarah, graduating with top honors from high school like you did. We’re proud of you, girl. How much you’ll never know.”
Evil Stalks the Night Page 4