On the Edge of Twilight: 22 Tales to Follow You Home

by Gregory Miller

  The Key

  “Again.”

  “Yes. Again.”

  The two men, both on the far side of middle age, stared at the abandoned house from the safety of the sidewalk. At their feet, on the edge of the overgrown front lawn, what had once been a cat lay rigid and desiccated, lips pulled back in a rictus sneer.

  Richard Hawthorne spit.

  Emil Braddock sighed.

  “Something should be done,” said Hawthorne.

  “And what,” said Braddock, “do you propose?”

  Hawthorne stubbed the toe of his shoe against the cracked edge of the walk. “Well, Mayor, I have a couple ideas. Both involve demolition.”

  “Demolition involves people demolishing,” Braddock said impatiently. “No one will do it. We’ve been over this. For years and years, we’ve been over this.”

  “We could hire people from out of town,” Hawthorne continued. “They’ll value the work.”

  “I can’t have that on my conscience, Dick.” Braddock looked up at the darkening sky. “Here, it’s almost sunset. Let’s go to Schooner’s and grab a beer. I don’t want to see her again.”

  “No. No, we can’t have that. No. Me neither.”

  * * *

  For years 101 Sycamore had been an unassuming house. Then, sometime during the course of its long history, things had taken a bad turn. The place was old and had been rented out as flats around the turn of the century, so the exact circumstances of the problem were hard to pinpoint. Too many people had lived there, and records were scarce. But shortly before half the men in town left for World War I, the house began to develop a reputation. By the time the surviving doughboys returned, it was abandoned.

  And shunned.

  Hawthorne took a pull of beer and sighed. “You know whose cat that was, Emil?”

  Braddock nodded. “Your granddaughter’s. Yes, I’m well aware. We’ve all lost pets to it, Dick. You can’t take it personally.”

  Hawthorne leaned forward. “It’s not about taking it personally, goddamn it. It’s about taking care of this problem once and for all. The children of this town should be able to grow up without having to pay for therapy later! They should—”

  “Lower your voice.”

  Hawthorne looked around. “Sorry,” he said, addressing Schooner’s few other patrons, then turned back to his drink. “It’s just… this town is dying, Emil. When the kids grow up they move away and don’t come back.”

  “That happens in lots of small towns, especially when the mines close.”

  “But we all know it happens more in Still Creek. And we all know why.”

  They were silent, both ruminating on encounters they wished to forget. After dark, the ghost that haunted 101 Sycamore was indiscriminate—it appeared to whoever happened to be passing by—staring out this window, leering out that, peering from the rotting cupola. One didn’t forget the sight.

  And then there were the animals.

  The house, as anyone who chose to venture near quickly discovered, was invariably ringed with dead birds, squirrels, rabbits and chipmunks. Sometimes the bodies of fox, deer, dogs, and cats could also be seen, slowly putrefying in the brown, knee-high grass and weeds. And beneath them, like rotting strata, was layer after layer of desiccated skin, matted fur, and weather-stained bones.

  “I saw it when I was seven.” Hawthorne emptied the last of his pint and clunked the glass down on the scarred table. “That was the first time. I remember like it was yesterday. So many memories fade but that one doesn’t. That says something, huh?”

  Braddock grunted.

  “I was walking home from Johnny Crane’s. Remember him? Killed in the war? Well, he had a late birthday party. It was a great party. I’d won a goldfish. Dark had fallen and on I walked, poking at the bag, not heeding anything else, and before I knew it that damned house was on my left and I happened to glance up. And there she was, standing on the front porch. Her body glowed. She had on a mildewed white dress. Her arms were folded across her chest like a corpse in a coffin, and they were beastly thin, and her hair was all tangled and wet. And her eyes—”

  “Oh shut up, Dick. I know about the eyes. We all do.”

  “There were no eyes, just huge, gaping sockets. And the lips were gone—her mouth a big, bloodless gash for her teeth to poke through.”

  Braddock shook his head. Once Hawthorne started, all you could do was be patient and let him finish.

  “Well, I stood there a moment, thinking it was some kind of prank, then remembered the stories, all those horrible stories, and that’s when she opened her mouth and shrieked.

  “I dropped the goldfish. I remember the splat, the water gushing out on the sidewalk and the fish flapping around silently, pulling in air, dying, and then I ran. I ran like never before. I ran and I ran, on and on, until I slammed through the front door of my house and started hollering to wake the dead. Daddy had to throw a blanket over me and tackle me to the floor before I calmed.

  “For weeks following I woke up screaming, night after night. Seeing her, it deadened the world for me. Every time I started enjoying something I remembered her, remembered that shriek, and all the fun went out of it. I wasn’t the same for years. And Emil, little Barney Stover saw her just last week. He’s only five years old, Emil. Think of it.”

  Braddock rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “Maggie Stover was an idiot, taking her boy for a walk at dusk—never a brain in that pretty head of hers. I’ve always said so.” He paused. “It doesn’t do good to talk of it. Talk’s cheap. There’s nothing we can do.”

  “You’re right. Talk is cheap. People want a man of action, and you’re mayor of this town. Haven’t you heard the grumbles? Unless I’m mistaken, there’s an election coming up and Sam Kolbrenner’s chomping at the bit for a piece of you. It’d pay to listen to me.”

  That silenced Braddock. Glowering, he sat back.

  “No demolition,” continued Hawthorne. “No out-of-town contractors. Fine. I understand. That leaves one option.”

  “What?” Braddock said, looking like he’d just sucked a lemon.

  “Let’s you and me head on down to the gas station.”

  * * *

  Wheezing and out of breath, Braddock and Hawthorne crouched behind a dead bush in the deepening twilight.

  “I don’t see how this is going to get me re-elected,” Braddock growled. “I’m more likely to be arrested. Imagine what Kolbrenner would do with that.”

  “A good deed doesn’t go unnoticed,” Hawthorne replied, fiddling with the cap of his gas can. “Word spreads through odd channels. The town will thank you.”

  “Sure, sure. You take the front of the house. I’ll take the back. And for God’s sake, make it quick and keep your eyes down. If that thing appears on the porch, I’ll shit myself.”

  “That’ll make two of us.”

  “Go.”

  They went.

  Ten minutes later, a warm, bright glow flickered all down Sycamore Street and outshone the full moon.

  * * *

  “It’s gone, Mayor. Every bit of it.”

  Emil Braddock stood on the sidewalk staring up at the smoldering ruins. A crowd milled around with him, over a hundred all told. Like a nice day at the fair, he thought. Should I make a speech?

  Truth be told, he felt like it. He felt good. As he looked at the faces in the crowd—familiar, all of them—he saw nothing but relief, quiet pleasure… and approval. They couldn’t know, could they? But like Hawthorne said, “Word spreads through odd channels.”

  “Yes, it’s gone,” he replied, turning to Mrs. Perkins, the old lady who’d had the misfortune of living in 103 Sycamore for over two decades. “You have nothing to worry about now, Dorothy. Nothing at all. You can pull the boards off your western windows a
nd walk down the street on warm summer nights.” He smiled. “This is one fire I can’t feel too awfully bad about.”

  The relieved chuckle that went up from the crowd stayed with him all day and into the evening. It sustained him, lulled him, perked him up and pleased him.

  Late in the evening, after a relaxing supper, he called Hawthorne to tell him about it—to tell him about how he’d been right—and to thank him.

  He smiled, thinking how surprised Hawthorne would be. Braddock hardly ever said “Thank you,” so people knew that when he did, it really meant something.

  But Hawthorne didn’t answer.

  “Funny,” he said, and stumped back down the hall to the living room as the sirens from the fire station began to wail. Hawthorne always answered his phone after dark; he never went out, unless with him. And the fire station? They never conducted drills after sundown. A real fire, just a day after the one he’d set? What were the odds?

  His ruminations were cut short by a startled yell, then a scream, then a dog barking frantically before yelping and falling silent.

  “Something,” he murmured in his darkened house, “isn’t right.”

  Another noise, persistent and severe: frantic pounding on the front door. Bemused, Braddock answered it.

  “We never thought!” Hawthorne said, hair wild, eyes wilder.

  “Get in here, dummy, and calm down.”

  “No! Not in there. Not anywhere. We have to leave!”

  “What are you talking about? What’s going on?”

  Braddock stepped out onto his porch. The whole town seemed to be coming alive in what should have been a quiet, peaceful night: lights blinking on, doors slamming, a scream, a cry, the screeching of brakes…

  “Every animal dead in every house, every yard, every field!”

  “What! What?” Braddock dragged the frantic, protesting man inside and shut the door.

  “It’s loose,” Hawthorne panted, hand over his heart. “Burning it? We were wrong, Braddock. All that smoke, all that ash. I didn’t think! It landed… why, it landed everywhere.”

  Braddock’s eyebrows furrowed. His lips pulled back. Then his face went slack.

  “You mean—”

  Hawthorne’s eyes widened, focusing on something over Braddock’s left shoulder. His lips turned blue. Silently, almost gracefully, he collapsed.

  “You mean,” Braddock continued, voice surprisingly calm, “that instead of destroying it, we gave it the Key to the Town.”

  He sighed. Something rustled behind him.

  “This doesn’t bode well for Election Day,” he muttered.

  Braddock turned around.

  Seventeen

  Seventeen years. He didn’t know where to begin, so he began with Google, typing in her name and the last address he had. She and her family were long gone. Then the college she’d attended. Nothing. Then the city nearby. Still nothing, and God knew where she lived now. She was probably married, too. If so, her old name wouldn’t be much help anyway.

  Memories flood back at strange times. Michael knew that. Married six years, father to a three-month-old son, and suddenly, or perhaps slowly but insidiously, his thoughts had shifted back to the past. High school. The summer before he started college. And those first few months of new classes in a great, strange place where beginnings had ushered in endings and the future, quietly but irrevocably, had begun to narrow.

  “You’re online an awful lot now,” Zola said, walking into the garage he’d converted into a den a few years before. “Want to come say goodnight to Danny and watch Extreme Home Makeover with me?”

  He looked up from his laptop with a sigh, surprised by how much the interruption annoyed him.

  “Sure. I’ll be right up.”

  “Does that mean one minute or twenty?”

  “I said I’ll be right up.”

  The hunt hadn’t started as an obsession, and he wasn’t certain it had actually become one now, but certainly an urgency had crept into his searching since Danny’s birth. Instead of merely checking his email and CNN.com when he went online, Michael often spent his rare free time searching old lists, class reunion bulletins, Facebook postings, and business profiles. Even as potential leads led nowhere, the memories that the hunt brought forward remained vivid for the first time in a generation—a catalyst between the years which left behind a dull, lasting ache that rose up throughout his busy days.

  “Swenson,” he typed into Facebook for the tenth time as the baby began to cry upstairs. “Mary Swenson.”

  Four dozen matches came up. A fourth of them had photographs, none of which were hers. The others were too young, too old, or had no information posted beside them. As before. As always.

  Sighing again, he closed up the computer and went to change Jacob’s diaper.

  Afterward, he fell asleep on the chair across from his wife half an hour before Ty Pennington asked a happy, newly-saved family to yell out, “Move That Bus!” When he woke up, she was already in bed asleep.

  Michael was grateful.

  * * *

  Things took a downturn in the weeks that followed. Of that there could be no doubt, however much Michael and Zola tried to ignore it.

  Finally, one evening after a silent dinner, Zola said, “You don’t like the baby.”

  She might as well have slapped him in the face.

  “That’s ridiculous,” he said sharply. “I can’t believe you said that. Why? Why would you even think that?”

  “Because you don’t tuck him in. You let me hold him most of the time. You resent changing him or feeding him.” Tears formed in her eyes but her anger kept them from falling. “For years you talked about how much you wanted this, and now that you have it, you don’t.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” he repeated. “Simply ridiculous. And malicious, too. I can’t believe you have the nerve…”

  Zola left the room, leaving him with racing thoughts and a profound silence.

  In that silence, Michael realized that despite his denial, Zola had a point. There was something about the baby that bothered him. Not the baby itself, but in having one. Something that had caught him off guard and left him without the faintest idea of what to do.

  Going to the bathroom and pressing a damp washcloth to his face, Michael looked in the mirror. What he saw shocked him: thinning hair, beginning to gray at the temples, and the start of a sagging double-chin. It made him think of something—someone.

  He knocked on the locked bedroom door. “I’m going to see my father,” he said. He waited for an answer, but none came.

  * * *

  “Calling me out for a beer at ten o’clock at night? What you do, lock yourself out of the house?”

  Michael smiled in spite of himself. “No, just looking for some answers.”

  “No one ever found them in the bottom of a glass,” the old man said, lifting his mug. “But as the barflies all say, it never hurts to look.”

  For several minutes they drank in silence. Michael tapped his fingernail against his glass until his father reached out a hand to stop him.

  “OK, what gives?”

  “Dad,” said Michael. That was all that came. He tried again. “Dad.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Did you ever… I mean, have you… oh, it’s all so damned stupid. I don’t even know what to ask. I’m wasting your time.”

  His father polished off his Yuengling and asked for another. “Yeah, you really know how to ruin my night. Dateline was on. I don’t know how I’ll get over missing that again.” He grunted. “OK, don’t ask questions, just tell me what’s happened.”

  Michael nodded. “The baby. He’s three months old. I should be happy, and I am, but instead of wanting to spend time with him, I find myself trying to get away. And I spend
all my free time on the Internet, trying to track down someone I haven’t seen in years.”

  His father raised his eyebrows. “Who?”

  He sighed. “Mary Swenson.”

  “Mary Swenson? Hmm… oh yeah, the girl you dated your senior year in high school? That Mary Swenson?”

  “Yeah. That Mary Swenson.”

  “What’s she up to?”

  “I have no idea. I can’t find out a thing about her. But I keep trying and I don’t know why.”

  His father nodded, rubbing his gray beard. “Let me ask you three questions. The first two are ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions, so they’re not hard. But you have to be honest. Got it?”

  Michael nodded.

  “Question One: do you love your wife?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Yes or no, please.”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, then.” His father took a swig of his second beer. “Question Two: do you like your job?”

  “Teaching? Sure, most of the time.”

  “That’s a ‘yes.’ OK, Question Three, and this is the toughie: why do you want to find Mary Swenson?”

  Michael grunted into his mug and shook his head. “I don’t know, Dad. I guess that’s what I wanted to ask you.”

  “Just do your best.”

  “Because… because, well, I want to see her. I want to know what she’s up to. See what she looks like. See what she’s done with her life.”

  “Bonus question, then. When you think of Mary Swenson, what comes to mind?”

  “I don’t get what you mean.”

  His father grunted. “I mean just what I said.”

  Michael gazed at the scarred surface of the bar for a long time. “The Fourth of July,” he said at last. “When we sat on the hill at the top of the street and watched the fireworks. And Senior Prom. And the dress she wore. And the smell of her favorite perfume. And me giving her a ten-dollar locket with a rose. And us walking by the stream in Spring Creek Park. And, oh, God, that whole summer. And she was beautiful. It was all so new. Anything was possible. It was all perfect.”