The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

by Peter Haining

  When I try to remember Hans Meunzer after so many decades I can see only a muscular boy with short-trimmed blond hair and protuberant ears, blemished skin, the shadow of a moustache on his upper lip – he’s looking at me, eyes narrowed, crinkled, as if he understands how I fear him, how I wish him dead and gone, and he’d hate me too if he took me that seriously. But he doesn’t take me that seriously, his gaze just slides right through me as if nobody’s standing where I stand.

  There were stories about all the abandoned houses but the worst story was about the Minton house over on the Elk Creek Road about three miles from where we lived. For no reason anybody ever discovered Mr Minton had beaten his wife to death and afterward killed himself with a .12-gauge shotgun. He hadn’t even been drinking, people said. And his farm hadn’t been doing at all badly, considering how others were doing.

  Looking at the ruin from the outside, overgrown with trumpet vine and wild rose, it seemed hard to believe that anything like that had happened. Things in the world even those things built by man are so quiet left to themselves . . .

  The house had been deserted for years, as long as I could remember. Most of the land had been sold off but the heirs didn’t want to deal with the house. They didn’t want to sell it and they didn’t want to raze it and they certainly didn’t want to live in it so it stood empty. The property was posted with No Trespassing signs layered one atop another but nobody took them seriously. Vandals had broken into the house and caused damage, the McFarlane boys had tried to burn down the old hay barn one Halloween night. The summer Mary Lou started seeing Hans she and I climbed in the house through a rear window – the boards guarding it had long since been yanked away – and walked through the rooms slow as sleepwalkers our arms around each other’s waists our eyes staring waiting to see Mr Minton’s ghost as we turned each corner. The inside smelled of mouse droppings, mildew, rot, old sorrow. Strips of wallpaper torn from the walls, plasterboard exposed, old furniture overturned and smashed, old yellowed sheets of newspaper underfoot, and broken glass, everywhere broken glass. Through the ravaged windows sunlight spilled in tremulous quivering bands. The air was afloat, alive: dancing dust atoms. “I’m afraid,” Mary Lou whispered. She squeezed my waist and I felt my mouth go dry for hadn’t I been hearing something upstairs, a low persistent murmuring like quarreling like one person trying to convince another going on and on and on but when I stood very still to listen the sound vanished and there were only the comforting summer sounds of birds, crickets, cicadas; birds, crickets, cicadas.

  I knew how Mr Minton had died: he’d placed the barrel of the shotgun beneath his chin and pulled the trigger with his big toe. They found him in the bedroom upstairs, most of his head blown off. They found his wife’s body in the cistern in the cellar where he’d tried to hide her. “Do you think we should go upstairs?” Mary Lou asked, worried. Her fingers felt cold; but I could see tiny sweat beads on her forehead. Her mother had braided her hair in one thick clumsy braid, the way she wore it most of the summer, but the bands of hair were loosening. “No,” I said, frightened. “I don’t know.” We hesitated at the bottom of the stairs – just stood there for a long time. “Maybe not,” Mary Lou said. “Damn stairs’d fall in on us.”

  In the parlor there were bloodstains on the floor and on the wall – I could see them. Mary Lou said in derision, “They’re just waterstains, dummy.”

  I could hear the voices overhead, or was it a single droning persistent voice. I waited for Mary Lou to hear it but she never did.

  Now we were safe, now we were retreating, Mary Lou said as if repentant, “Yeah – this house is special.”

  We looked through the debris in the kitchen hoping to find something of value but there wasn’t anything – just smashed china-ware, old battered pots and pans, more old yellowed newspaper. But through the window we saw a garter snake sunning itself on a rusted water tank, stretched out to a length of two feet. It was a lovely coppery color, the scales gleaming like perspiration on a man’s arm; it seemed to be asleep. Neither one of us screamed, or wanted to throw something – we just stood there watching it for the longest time.

  Mary Lou didn’t have a boyfriend any longer; Hans had stopped coming around. We saw him driving the old Ford now and then but he didn’t seem to see us. Mr Siskin had found out about him and Mary Lou and he’d been upset – acting like a damn crazy man Mary Lou said, asking her every kind of nasty question then interrupting her and not believing her anyway, then he’d put her to terrible shame by going over to see Hans and carrying on with him. “I hate them all,” Mary Lou said, her face darkening with blood. “I wish—”

  We rode our bicycles over to the Minton farm, or tramped through the fields to get there. It was the place we liked best. Sometimes we brought things to eat, cookies, bananas, candy bars; sitting on the broken stone steps out front, as if we lived in the house really, we were sisters who lived here having a picnic lunch out front. There were bees, flies, mosquitoes, but we brushed them away. We had to sit in the shade because the sun was so fierce and direct, a whitish heat pouring down from overhead.

  “Would you ever like to run away from home?” Mary Lou said. “I don’t know,” I said uneasily. Mary Lou wiped at her mouth and gave me a mean narrow look. “ ‘I don’t know,’” she said in a falsetto voice, mimicking me. At an upstairs window someone was watching us – was it a man or was it a woman – someone stood there listening hard and I couldn’t move feeling so slow and dreamy in the heat like a fly caught on a sticky petal that’s going to fold in on itself and swallow him up. Mary Lou crumpled up some wax paper and threw it into the weeds. She was dreamy too, slow and yawning. She said, “Shit – they’d just find me. Then everything would be worse.”

  I was covered in a thin film of sweat but I’d begun to shiver. Goose bumps were raised on my arms. I could see us sitting on the stone steps the way we’d look from the second floor of the house, Mary Lou sprawled with her legs apart, her braided hair slung over her shoulder, me sitting with my arms hugging my knees my backbone tight and straight knowing I was being watched. Mary Lou said, lowering her voice, “Did you ever touch yourself in a certain place, Melissa?” “No,” I said, pretending I didn’t know what she meant. “Hans wanted to do that,” Mary Lou said. She sounded disgusted. Then she started to giggle. “I wouldn’t let him, then he wanted to do something else – started unbuttoning his pants – wanted me to touch him. And . . .”

  I wanted to hush her, to clap my hand over her mouth. But she just went on and I never said a word until we both started giggling together and couldn’t stop. Afterward I didn’t remember most of it or why I’d been so excited my face burning and my eyes seared as if I’d been staring into the sun.

  On the way home Mary Lou said, “Some things are so sad you can’t say them.” But I pretended not to hear.

  A few days later I came back by myself. Through the ravaged cornfield: the stalks dried and broken, the tassels burnt, that rustling whispering sound of the wind I can hear now if I listen closely. My head was aching with excitement. I was telling myself a story that we’d made plans to run away and live in the Minton house. I was carrying a willow switch I’d found on the ground, fallen from a tree but still green and springy, slapping at things with it as if it were a whip. Talking to myself. Laughing aloud. Wondering was I being watched.

  I climbed in the house through the back window and brushed my hands on my jeans. My hair was sticking to the back of my neck.

  At the foot of the stairs I called up, “Who’s here?” in a voice meant to show it was all play; I knew I was alone.

  My heart was beating hard and quick, like a bird caught in the hand. It was lonely without Mary Lou so I walked heavy to let them know I was there and wasn’t afraid. I started singing, I started whistling. Talking to myself and slapping at things with the willow switch. Laughing aloud, a little angry. Why was I angry, well I didn’t know, someone was whispering telling me to come upstairs, to walk on the inside of the stairs so the
steps wouldn’t collapse.

  The house was beautiful inside if you had the right eyes to see it. If you didn’t mind the smell. Glass underfoot, broken plaster, stained wallpaper hanging in shreds. Tall narrow windows looking out onto wild weedy patches of green. I heard something in one of the rooms but when I looked I saw nothing much more than an easy chair lying on its side. Vandals had ripped stuffing out of it and tried to set it afire. The material was filthy but I could see that it had been pretty once – a floral design – tiny yellow flowers and green ivy. A woman used to sit in the chair, a big woman with sly staring eyes. Knitting in her lap but she wasn’t knitting just staring out the window watching to see who might be coming to visit.

  Upstairs the rooms were airless and so hot I felt my skin prickle like shivering. I wasn’t afraid! – I slapped at the walls with my springy willow switch. In one of the rooms high in a corner wasps buzzed around a fat wasp’s nest. In another room I looked out the window leaning out the window to breathe thinking this was my window, I’d come to live here. She was telling me I had better lie down and rest because I was in danger of heatstroke and I pretended not to know what heatstroke was but she knew I knew because hadn’t a cousin of mine collapsed haying just last summer, they said his face had gone blotched and red and he’d begun breathing faster and faster not getting enough oxygen until he collapsed. I was looking out at the overgrown apple orchard, I could smell the rot, a sweet winey smell, the sky was hazy like something you can’t get clear in your vision, pressing in close and warm. A half mile away Elk Creek glittered through a screen of willow trees moving slow glittering with scales like winking.

  Come away from that window, someone told me sternly.

  But I took my time obeying.

  In the biggest of the rooms was an old mattress pulled off rusty bedsprings and dumped on the floor. They’d torn some of the stuffing out of this too, there were scorch marks on it from cigarettes. The fabric was stained with something like rust and I didn’t want to look at it but I had to. Once at Mary Lou’s when I’d gone home with her after school there was a mattress lying out in the yard in the sun and Mary Lou told me in disgust that it was her youngest brother’s mattress – he’d wet his bed again and the mattress had to be aired out. As if the stink would ever go away, Mary Lou said.

  Something moved inside the mattress, a black glittering thing, it was a cockroach but I wasn’t allowed to jump back. Suppose you have to lie down on that mattress and sleep, I was told. Suppose you can’t go home until you do. My eyelids were heavy, my head was pounding with blood. A mosquito buzzed around me but I was too tired to brush it away. Lie down on that mattress, Melissa, she told me. You know you must be punished.

  I knelt down, not on the mattress, but on the floor beside it. The smells in the room were close and rank but I didn’t mind, my head was nodding with sleep. Rivulets of sweat ran down my face and sides, under my arms, but I didn’t mind. I saw my hand move out slowly like a stranger’s hand to touch the mattress and a shiny black cockroach scuttled away in fright, and a second cockroach, and a third – but I couldn’t jump up and scream.

  Lie down on that mattress and take your punishment.

  I looked over my shoulder and there was a woman standing in the doorway – a woman I’d never seen before.

  She was staring at me. Her eyes were shiny and dark. She licked her lips and said in a jeering voice, “What are you doing here in this house, miss?”

  I was terrified. I tried to answer but I couldn’t speak.

  “Have you come to see me?” the woman asked.

  She was no age I could guess. Older than my mother but not old-seeming. She wore men’s clothes and she was tall as any man, with wide shoulders, and long legs, and big sagging breasts like cows’ udders loose inside her shirt not harnessed in a brassiere like other women’s. Her thick wiry gray hair was cut short as a man’s and stuck up in tufts that looked greasy. Her eyes were small, and black, and set back deep in their sockets; the flesh around them looked bruised. I had never seen anyone like her before – her thighs were enormous, big as my body. There was a ring of loose soft flesh at the waistband of her trousers but she wasn’t fat.

  “I asked you a question, miss. Why are you here?”

  I was so frightened I could feel my bladder contract. I stared at her, cowering by the mattress, and couldn’t speak.

  It seemed to please her that I was so frightened. She approached me, stooping a little to get through the doorway. She said, in a mock-kindly voice, “You’ve come to visit with me – is that it?”

  “No,” I said.

  “No!” she said, laughing. “Why, of course you have.”

  “No. I don’t know you.”

  She leaned over me, touched my forehead with her fingers. I shut my eyes waiting to be hurt but her touch was cool. She brushed my hair off my forehead where it was sticky with sweat. “I’ve seen you here before, you and that other one,” she said. “What is her name? The blond one. The two of you, trespassing.”

  I couldn’t move, my legs were paralyzed. Quick and darting and buzzing my thoughts bounded in every which direction but didn’t take hold. “Melissa is your name, isn’t it,” the woman said. “And what is your sister’s name?”

  “She isn’t my sister,” I whispered.

  “What is her name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know!”

  “ – don’t know,” I said, cowering.

  The woman drew back half sighing half grunting. She looked at me pityingly. “You’ll have to be punished, then.”

  I could smell ashes about her, something cold. I started to whimper started to say I hadn’t done anything wrong, hadn’t hurt anything in the house, I had only been exploring – I wouldn’t come back again . . .

  She was smiling at me, uncovering her teeth. She could read my thoughts before I could think them.

  The skin of her face was in layers like an onion, like she’d been sunburnt, or had a skin disease. There were patches that had begun to peel. Her look was wet and gloating. Don’t hurt me, I wanted to say. Please don’t hurt me.

  I’d begun to cry. My nose was running like a baby’s. I thought I would crawl past the woman I would get to my feet and run past her and escape but the woman stood in my way blocking my way leaning over me breathing damp and warm her breath like a cow’s breath in my face. Don’t hurt me, I said, and she said, “You know you have to be punished – you and your pretty blond sister.”

  “She isn’t my sister,” I said.

  “And what is her name?”

  The woman was bending over me, quivering with laughter.

  “Speak up, miss. What is it?”

  “I don’t know—” I started to say. But my voice said, “Mary Lou.”

  The woman’s big breasts spilled down into her belly, I could feel her shaking with laughter. But she spoke sternly saying that Mary Lou and I had been very bad girls and we knew it her house was forbidden territory and we knew it hadn’t we known all along that others had come to grief beneath its roof?

  “No,” I started to say. But my voice said, “Yes.”

  The woman laughed, crouching above me. “Now, miss, ‘Melissa’ as they call you – your parents don’t know where you are at this very moment, do they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do they?”

  “No.”

  “They don’t know anything about you, do they? – what you do, and what you think? You and ‘Mary Lou.’”

  “No.”

  She regarded me for a long moment, smiling. Her smile was wide and friendly.

  “You’re a spunky little girl, aren’t you, with a mind of your own, aren’t you, you and your pretty little sister. I bet your bottoms have been warmed many a time,” the woman said, showing her big tobacco-stained teeth in a grin, “. . . your tender little asses.”

  I began to giggle. My bladder tightened.

  “Hand that here, miss,” the woman said. She took t
he willow switch from my fingers – I had forgotten I was holding it. “I will now administer punishment: take down your jeans. Take down your panties. Lie down on that mattress. Hurry.” She spoke briskly now, she was all business. “Hurry, Melissa! And your panties! Or do you want me to pull them down for you?”

  She was slapping the switch impatiently against the palm of her left hand, making a wet scolding noise with her lips. Scolding and teasing. Her skin shone in patches, stretched tight over the big hard bones of her face. Her eyes were small, crinkling smaller, black and damp. She was so big she had to position herself carefully over me to give herself proper balance and leverage so that she wouldn’t fall. I could hear her hoarse eager breathing as it came to me from all sides like the wind.

  I had done as she told me. It wasn’t me doing these things but they were done. Don’t hurt me, I whispered, lying on my stomach on the mattress, my arms stretched above me and my fingernails digging into the floor. The coarse wood with splinters pricking my skin. Don’t hurt me O please but the woman paid no heed her warm wet breath louder now and the floorboards creaking beneath her weight. “Now, miss, now ‘Melissa’ as they call you – this will be our secret won’t it . . .”

  When it was over she wiped at her mouth and said she would let me go today if I promised never to tell anybody if I sent my pretty little sister to her tomorrow.

  She isn’t my sister, I said, sobbing. When I could get my breath.

  I had lost control of my bladder after all, I’d begun to pee even before the first swipe of the willow switch hit me on the buttocks, peeing in helpless spasms, and sobbing, and afterward the woman scolded me saying wasn’t it a poor little baby wetting itself like that. But she sounded repentant too, stood well aside to let me pass, Off you go! Home you go! And don’t forget!

  And I ran out of the room hearing her laughter behind me and down the stairs running running as if I hadn’t any weight my legs just blurry beneath me as if the air was water and I was swimming I ran out of the house and through the cornfield running in the cornfield sobbing as the corn stalks slapped at my face Off you go! Home you go! And don’t forget!