Evil Stalks the Night

by Kathryn Meyer Griffith

  When I was a child I hadn’t actually believed it was true. But now a days I wasn’t so sure. Because she’d also said, “There are more things in heaven and in Earth...”

  Disgusted with myself, I pounded the pillow into a ball with my fist and plopped my head down. I needed sleep. Why was I tortured night after night with old, dead words from my past? Why didn’t they leave me alone?

  My body was so tired it ached in a hundred places. Arthritis at thirty. No wonder Jonathan hadn’t wanted me anymore, I was falling apart.

  Jonathan. How I missed him, especially at night. I sent him out a silent agonized cry: Remember me. Remember I loved you. The pain I felt was still so great, how could he not hear me? Even now, with so much time, distance and betrayal between us he should be able to feel my sadness. I laid my hand lightly on my son’s shoulder through the thin blanket, remembering.

  No, I wasn’t as bitter as months, even weeks, ago. My whole life I had been a compromiser and it’d allowed me to accept things for what they were, not what I wanted them to be. I knew a person could never have everything they wanted and tried to live by it. I was grateful for what I did have.

  I had Jeremy. My brother Jim. I had my talent and intelligence and I had a home. A real house no one could take away from me. It was mine, I thought fiercely. I thought about the house. As it was now and as it once was, or as I remembered it as a child. Amazingly, I found myself looking for excuses to stay and live in it ourselves and to not ever leave it. I was becoming fascinated with the prospect of fixing it up and keeping it.

  My own beautiful house.

  It’s a wreck. A pile of termite-eaten boards and weeds. Spider webs and ancient dust.

  The gift of a house wasn’t something to take lightly. When would I ever be given another free house? I frowned, knowing the answer. As a divorced, unemployed woman with a child I couldn’t buy a house on my own now even if I sold my soul.

  Mine. Free and clear.

  There was no heat, no electricity. Did it have water? Yes, there was a well in the back. Yet it was in such bad shape my parents hadn’t even tried to sell it.

  My mind kept striving to be heard over my heart.

  I’d loved the house as a child and they didn’t make houses like it anymore. It’s so big and the high, beamed ceilings, remember those? It has an upstairs and lots of ground for Jeremy to play on. Flowers and bushes, rose bushes, my heart cried.

  If only.

  I untangled myself from the sheets and strolled over to the window. Just what I needed, it was snowing outside. The flakes weren’t large though, and I hoped they wouldn’t stick to the ground. I also hoped it’d stop soon and the sun would oblige us tomorrow and come out shining. The thought of tackling a decrepit mountain of aged wood in the wet cold, didn’t appeal to me. I had to get in first, execute an extensive junk-gathering campaign and a major clean up. With what was in the trunk, I was prepared for anything.

  I found myself feeling excited to get started. Something else occurred to me as I stood in my nightgown surveying the snow outside; I’d never heard anything mentioned about my grandmother’s furniture. She’d been an avid collector of anything beautiful or unique. I loved old furniture and had always dreamed of owning a house full of hand-picked antiques one day. I began to fantasize about my possible house full of treasures. I could clean, refinish and rearrange them if I wanted to. Shampoo the mildewed rugs. I could buy plants to put on the wide window sills and hang more with macramé from the tall ceilings.

  I could make it the home I’ve dreamed of.

  If only. Those two words loomed above me, a message of pie-in-the-sky dreaming. What was I thinking? I’d sensed that entity out in the woods earlier. Or had it been the dying shreds of my childish fear; a memory lurking in those woods by the ruins of my childhood home?

  So wasn’t us coming here or even contemplating remaining, playing with fire? It could be suicide. I didn’t know. But what choice did we have?

  I weighed what I had to gain with what I had to lose. I glanced at my son and shook my head. I had a lot to lose. But if I ran from Suncrest as my family had done so long ago, would it make any difference?

  I had to face up to something I hadn’t wanted to before. My family had run away, but we hadn’t hidden very well, had we? They’d died anyway. Coincidences or destiny, if we were cursed, did it matter where we lived?

  Sighing, I crawled into bed with Jeremy again and willed myself to sleep. I could think tomorrow. Even though it’d be a waste of time, as I was afraid I’d already decided what I had to do.

  We had nowhere else to go and I ached to put down real roots.

  The house was what I wanted. Needed. I wanted to stay. For a while, anyway. We’d stay and see what happened.

  * * * *

  “Breakfast,” Jeremy muttered, rubbing his eyes and yawning, as I once more prodded him. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I was fully dressed, waiting for him to come to.

  “What do you want for breakfast?” I asked again, pulling the covers off his face where he’d yanked them up. I was anxious to get going.

  “Jesus, it’s so bright out there,” he mumbled, covering his eyes with his dirty fingers. I tugged them away, smiling.

  “Gee, you’re a regular dirt ball.” I turned his hands over in mine, studying them. “I said, what do you want for breakfast?”

  It was beginning to soak in. His eyes flew open and he tossed the covers off. He was a growing boy in one of those “eating stages.” He attacked anything that wasn’t tied down or wouldn’t eat him first. It was embarrassing. People stared as if they thought I never fed the kid.

  “Food? Let’s go. I’m starving.” He was awake at last, his eyes feverish and his face flushed with sleep. He slid out of bed, gave me a quick hug and lunged for his pile of clothes on the floor. “Can I have pancakes, Mom, with gobs of strawberry syrup? And biscuits and coffee milk, please?”

  “Hold on there.” I pointed at the pile of clothes clutched in his skinny arms, motioning downward with my hand. “You need a shower first. Have you looked at yourself lately in a mirror?”

  “Ah, but Mom,” he protested. “Do I have to? No one’s going to see me and I’ll just get dirty again.”

  “Move. Bathroom’s behind you. I don’t take dirty boys out to breakfast. I’d be ashamed.”

  “Mom?” He grinned sheepishly.

  “Go.” I tried not to return his grin. He was a stubborn little cuss at times.

  He dropped his clothes and ran for the bathroom like the place was on fire. I heard the shower running and a few minutes after it stopped, and he was running back out with a wet towel draped around his waist. “Fast, huh?” He beamed and started to squirm into his clothes, his back to me, after I’d turned my head. He was modest for his age.

  “Uh, huh, Superman’s got nothing on you,” I said.

  “Funny, Mom.”

  I gathered the rest of our stuff and crammed it into the suitcases as he dressed. I’d hardly slept. I couldn’t stop thinking of our house and what I wanted to do to it. I’d awakened early and had thought of my childhood at Suncrest and my family. Most of the memories were precious, but many were overshadowed by the horrific ones. Coming home had called them out of their tiny cracks and crannies.

  “You wouldn’t believe this dumb dream I had last night, Mom. Whew, was it wild.” He spoke with his back to me, buttoning his shirt. When he turned, he still hadn’t seen my reaction.

  “A dream?” Something flashed through my mind.

  “Crazy. I dreamed I was running through a bunch of trees, I think. Something was chasing me but I couldn’t see it very good.”

  “Something?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know what it was, but I knew I didn’t want it catching me, no way.” He looked up and met my eyes. “I was real scared. I remember that. In my d
ream I was real scared, I mean.”

  Inside of me, ominous whispers fluttered around my heart and I hoped my son couldn’t see the sparks of fear in my eyes. For a second, I didn’t move. Barely breathed.

  “It’s only a dream, son. Everyone has those kinds of dreams. They’re symbolic. It means something but not always what you think.” I zipped up the suitcase and smiled at him.

  “What did it mean, then?” He cocked his eyebrow at me, waiting.

  “Well, I think I read somewhere, it’s the anxieties you don’t want to express during your waking hours, fears of the world and the unknown. You’re trying to run away from the things which upset or frighten you. Makes sense with what you’ve gone through. It’s pretty common so don’t worry about it.” I lifted the suitcase and swept my eyes one more time over the room to see if we’d left anything. I wanted to move on and forget what we’d been discussing.

  “Oh,” he said, trailing me to the door. I opened it and we stepped out into the bright daylight. “It was so real, though,” he added weakly, squinting his eyes at the sun.

  We loaded the stuff into the car after I’d locked the motel door and returned the key to the office.

  “It’s warm out.” Jeremy rolled down his window and leaned out, his face tipped up to the sun’s rays. It had to be at least sixty degrees outside.

  It was the first of April. Snow last night and warm sunlight today. Life and the weather never ceased to surprise me.

  “By the way, what time is it?” He was peering at the scenery. Melting snow and ice.

  I snuck a glance at my watch. “About seven.”

  “In a hurry, aren’t you?” he commented sarcastically, then softened it with an honest smile. “I only get up this early to go to school. Is this a school day?”

  “No. It’s Saturday.” I parked by a sleek Camaro in front of a truck stop. It advertised EAT in huge red letters over the door. Underneath it said: Open Twenty-Four-Hours. Good-Food.

  I wanted to see if the sign was telling the truth.

  “Okay, I’ll fill your belly with gooey pancakes before I put you to work.”

  He was out of the car and in the restaurant before I’d finished the sentence. I followed and spotted him in a rear booth, gesturing at me, a patient waitress standing over him, order book in hand.

  The pancakes weren’t half bad. The coffee was fantastic. I ordered two large paper cups to go and a bag full of goodies to take to the house. There’d be no food there, of course, and the night before we’d left the apartment I’d fried up a mess of chicken and made potato salad to use in an emergency. With what we had in the bag, and the cooler, it should keep us fed for a while.

  When we drove up in front of my grandmother’s house in the sunlight I had a chance to see it for the first time as an adult. It looked better in the daylight; not so ramshackle as the night before. It could have been the sunlight, me or my maturity, but it didn’t look like it had when I was a child; nothing appeared as I’d pictured it all these years. Suncrest was a little country town on the outskirts of a little larger town. It seemed strange not to see houses back to back, doorstep to doorstep as I’d become used to. Everyone knew everyone else and liked it. I wondered if they remembered my family. Probably. Rural people don’t forget scandal and tragedy.

  As I remembered, the streets were narrow, graveled affairs winding here and there like skinny snakes. People didn’t lock their doors at night, feeling safe. How quickly they forgot.

  I’d noticed stores, shops really, here and there and even a larger shopping center at the end of town, that hadn’t been there years ago. A couple of new businesses dotted the main streets and some new houses had been built. Except for these additions, Suncrest was pretty much the same as it’d been when I was a child. I was the one who had changed.

  My grandmother’s house sat alone on a large square of land. It was sheltered by soaring trees and protected by yards of black iron fence. To me, a recent city girl, it was a mansion. The next house had to be a mile away.

  I maneuvered the car up the weed infested driveway on the left of the house, parked and took a deep breath. Here goes nothing.

  “Where’s the hammer?” I turned to Jeremy. He usually seemed to know where everything was.

  “In the trunk in the red box, remember? You put it in there yourself so you wouldn’t forget where you’d put it.” He giggled and got out of the car.

  I unlocked the trunk and hunted through the assortment of boxes and bags until I found the hammer. I walked to the fence where Jeremy was waiting, grabbed the gate and started to push it open. It didn’t move easily and we had to shove at it with all our might. Years of accumulated rust and weeds had jammed it in place. The corroded pieces finally slipped off and fell into the dried bushes. It opened.

  “Well, I’ve got to admit, Mother, you’ve done it this time.” He stood there with his hands on his hips, shaking his head at me. “This place is a real mess. It looks like a reject from the Twilight Zone.” He grimaced as he climbed the porch steps and craned his neck to stare up at the front of the house.

  Reject from the Twilight Zone. Inwardly I wanted to laugh at the way children picked things up. After so many years they’d started reruns of The Twilight Zone episodes and Jeremy was one of their biggest fans. It’d become a weekly ritual, watching the show. He was fascinated with them, and I found myself reluctantly joining him and remembering the twisted plots and twisted remarks my brother, Jimmy, used to make about them.

  “Well, it’s home, so respect it.” I took the hammer and jammed it viciously under the ends of the wooden slats. They came away easily, rotted and broken. “Beggars can’t be choosers.” Jonathan had loved clichés and after years with him, some of them still popped into mind and out of my mouth before I could stop them. I hated clichés.

  “You’re saying we’re beggars?” Jeremy was taking the boards from me as I pried them off and piling them neatly on the corner of the porch.

  I eyed him seriously over my shoulder and grinned. “No man’s a beggar who has love.” Another cliché? Jesus.

  “We’ve got plenty of love. Pretty good, Mom.” He nodded, laying another board aside. On closer inspection, I thought the porch looked well preserved for its age. It was standard slate gray. I could see the planks were only rotted through in a few places. I would repaint it and was thinking of using a warm chocolate brown. I might even go ahead and paint the whole house in shades of browns and tans. That’d look nice. It’d be a big job, though, because I could tell there’d be hours of back breaking scraping to do first. The house looked like it had leprosy.

  “There.” I yanked the last board off the door, and went on to the windows. “There’s no use in going in until we let light into the place.” I grunted, already breathing harder at the exertion. “Otherwise, we won’t be able to see a thing.”

  “Kinda like a spook house, huh?”

  “Something like that.” We moved from one window to another until they were all open. I counted three broken panes. Which was nothing less than remarkable for how long the place had been left alone and untended. “We’ll patch them with cardboard for now and fix them later.” When I’d known we were going to claim the house and the lawyer told me what kind of shape it was in, I’d gone out and bought a set of those ‘fix-it-yourself’ books. I thought we’d have to do most of the work and if it was written down in clear instructions, I should be able to do most of it myself, or die trying. I was a great believer in self-teaching and learning by experience. I’d try anything once. Well, almost anything.

  “Let’s go in. After you.” I waved my hand and bowed towards Jeremy. I handed him the key the lawyer had sent me. Jeremy turned it until there was a click and the door swung open. We clapped.

  He stepped aside after peeking in. “Moms first.”

  Years of dust clung to the surfaces like barnacles o
n the bottom of a sunken ship and long thick spider webs hung suspended in the stale air before us. I brushed them away with a wooden slat. I couldn’t stand to touch them.

  “Was this place ever clean?” Jeremy asked as we looked at the inside.

  It was so huge compared to what we were used to. There were white lumps everywhere, furniture covered with sheets and blankets. I shoved the mottled, dirt-encrusted curtains apart, uncovering the windows. Some drapes I ripped off the rods because they were in such bad shape.

  Jim would be bringing my curtains with the furniture. I thought what a good idea it’d been carefully packing away the apartment’s old curtains as I bought new ones. I liked change and after a year or two I’d grow tired of a color or pattern and the curtains would be packed away. It was a good thing the apartment’s motif had been country. Modern would definitely not look good in this house.

  The dust could have choked a horse. “Yes. Yes,” I muttered as I went around the rooms and yanked sheets off chairs and dressers. Memories flooded back and I felt a lump rise in my throat. “My grandmother had been an immaculate housekeeper when she was alive. Her home had been a showcase. Nothing was ever out of place.”

  I felt sad looking at it. Seeing her home made me remember how much we’d loved her and I found myself missing her and the joy she’d brought us all over again. The place wasn’t the same without her. It was as if the heart had gone out of it.

  I’d have done anything to have revisited those innocent childhood days. Before the troubles anyway. I yearned for the familiar smiles, the sound of stomping feet and the people I’d once loved so much. I missed my family and coming here had only made the ache and loss more acute; much more so than it’d been in many years.

  What was I doing? How could I be happy here?

  I made my way through the rest of the house, my mind harvesting memories as I rambled through the rooms. Jeremy seemed to sense what I was feeling and respected it by lagging behind me.