My mother screamed when she saw the room. My father swore.
Splotches of mud tracked across the carpet where Mooncat Jack had stood. The rain had soaked my bed. I turned, squared in the turmoil of the open window, and said, “Mooncat Jack took Matty, and he’s running toward the woods.”
I followed my parents as fast as I could as they fled downstairs. They didn’t bother with coats and my father hardly paused when he grabbed the flashlight by the side door. They raced into the yard, calling for Matty. The mud sucked at our feet and we stumbled through deep puddles, plunging headlong toward the stream. My father spied something and skidded to a halt. He had picked out footprints in the soft soil. He forged ahead, tracing them with his ray of light. The storm-gorged brook rose far up its banks, nearing the edge of our yard and beginning to pool around the legs of our picnic table.
Dad paused, swinging the flashlight left and right. Something splashed in the wild stream, and he honed in on it. Fifty yards downstream the weak circle of light picked out Matty, sputtering and splashing, struggling to keep his head above the rushing waters. Gripped like iron around the back collar of Matty’s pajama shirt was Mooncat Jack’s distended, grimy hand, tugging my kid brother through the torrent.
“Matty!” Dad screamed.
My mother shot after him, tears pouring from her eyes and vanishing instantly in the cascading downpour. My father’s flashlight glowed briefly underwater then extinguished.
I waited on the black edge, trembling and cold, my feet sinking into the mud, my pajamas sticking to me like a second skin. My teeth chattered and the rain slicked my hair against my skull. I cried but there was no one to hear me. I listened to splashing in the darkness and the voices of my parents gurgling as they choked and cried out for my brother. Then silence. No sound but the awful raging of the storm, no movement but the sky pouring out its blood like an uncontrolled hemorrhage. Raindrops pricked my eyes. Black clouds roiled overhead, charged every few minutes by the flashbulb glare of distant lightning.
“Dad!” I yelled, then “Matty!”
I couldn’t stop, then, and I cried out Matty’s name until my throat hurt, screamed for him to come back, demanded Mooncat Jack let him go. The soft ground gave way, and I toppled to a sitting position in the mud. My senses began to shut down, but I forced myself to remain alert. I tried to slither loose and climb back to my feet, but the wet earth held tight.
I stopped struggling when I heard footsteps squishing along the bank.Mooncat Jack had returned. This time I couldn’t run or scream, but found only quiet tears while I waited for him to take me away with my brother. But when he opened his coat and revealed Matty bundled inside, I saw he was warm and mostly dry and sleeping, unaware of the storm thrashing around us. Mooncat Jack sat on his heels and placed his hand on my forehead. A terrible cold filled me and set me trembling, and the rain seemed to fade as blackness overwhelmed my sight like a fog rolling in. Only Mooncat Jack remained. He grew, ballooning to the size of a giant, his body consuming the night, his face pressed close to mine with one awful, deep eye peering into me. I lost all sight of Matty, then, and of everything else. Mooncat Jack’s grubby flesh crowded out the world. The abyss of his mouth hung below me and I was sure I would be swallowed. I wanted Matty back. If I could pull him free, maybe Mooncat Jack would leave him and take me away in his place.
When it seemed Jack could become no larger, Mooncat Jack diminished, deflating in a heartbeat back to the size of a man. Feeble warmth returned to me as he removed his hand, and before I could clear the haze from my sight, he pressed Matty’s small, hot body into my lap. I clutched and hugged him and slid back from Jack as best I could. The Mooncat grinned, pleased with what he had found within me, and then he turned and danced away, his gangly frame spiraling and whirling, his feet moving to a foolish, irregular beat that only he could hear. He shrunk as he went, like someone racing rapidly into the distance, until his face became only a pale shimmer and then that, too, disappeared. The remnants of the strange darkness lifted and all at once the storm thundered back upon us, the rain hammering down, the wind screaming through our thin pajamas.
I heard my father’s voice and gazed toward the water as he emerged from the shadows, clambering up the bank.
Dad fell to his knees. He coughed and spit out water, his chest heaving until he caught his breath. When he saw Matty, he threw his arms around both of us and hugged us to him. He helped me to my feet and pressed Matty to his chest with arms like steel bands, and led us into the house. There he lay Matty on the sofa and ordered me to get some towels and blankets while he called 911. With the rain, it would take the police extra time to get to our house.
I took all the towels from the bathroom, wrapped a big one around me and covered Matty from head to toe, saving one for Dad as he settled next to us. When the ambulance came, they treated us all for hypothermia, and took Matty and me to the hospital. Dad stayed with the police to look for our mother who had not come back from the woods. They found her an hour later, trapped in a tangle of tree roots, most likely dragged there by the current, and unable to get free. She was in shock and suffering from exposure, and three days passed before they would let us see her in the hospital.
A week later I went back to school and learned the truth about Wilt. He hadn’t been sick the day of my party. He had gone out in the yard Friday before dinner and never come back. No one knew where he was. By Saturday the police decided he had been kidnapped. A second-grader who lived across the street told the police she saw a white van parked outside the Corman’s house, but Chris said that was his when he stopped by to grab some food between deliveries. I heard Mr. Corman tried to help, but I guess he made Mrs. Corman uncomfortable, because he didn’t stay around too much and soon after that he moved away to another state.
A month after my birthday, the police found Wilt’s body in the woods where it had been left after someone had beaten and choked him. I stayed home from school for a week after hearing about it, crying most of the time. As horrible as it sounds, some of those tears were shed in relief for knowing what had happened and for the fact that it hadn’t happened to Matty or me, when it seemed like it easily could have. My family went to Wilt’s funeral, and his Mom acted like she was moving through a dream that she hoped would end if she could only wake up.
Matty didn’t remember much about the night Mooncat Jack came to our house, which was probably for the best. Mom and Dad never liked to talk about it, and when anyone asked what happened they said Matty fell out the window while sleepwalking, landed in the soft, muddy ground and wandered down to the stream. But after that night Mom and Dad drove us to school both ways every day, and Dad changed all the locks in the house and put flashlights in every room. In the spring he put a six-foot fence across the yard, closing off the stream. Mom started giving me strict curfews and made me call anytime I would be late, and there was usually hell to pay when I forgot. And they argued less about Dad’s job and paying the bills and all the other things that used to get them angry at one another.
Both of them once told me that they had never before known fear like they felt when they were wrapped in the freezing water of the stream, blind and alone in the dark, and found all they could think of was not losing Matty or me and what we must have been feeling. Mom said she had a lot of time to think about that before she blacked out. She started to tell me about weird things she saw and heard before they rescued her, visions of a dark man with murky flesh and a bone-scraping laugh who visited her and whispered of terrible, sinister things. She sensed the iciness of his body, but when he stretched the flap of his coat around her, it felt warm, and if she didn’t know better, she told me, she’d think that he had helped keep her alive. The phone rang, then, and she answered it and never got back to talking about it again.
I think about Mooncat Jack a lot, though I doubt I’ll ever see him again. There are millions of towns out there for him to visit, hundreds of millions of children to choose from, all of them unwanted at least fo
r a moment in somebody’s heart, which is long enough to draw the Mooncat down. But whatever he is, demon or ghost, monster or manifestation of the blackest parts of the human soul, I think he sees what he does as a service, one he’s happy to render. It’s why he laughs and smiles so often and why he approached me to introduce himself. But there’s something else to Mooncat Jack that Joey Reagan’s stories never mentioned, and it’s both terrible and beautiful. Sometimes, I think, Mooncat Jack takes kids to a better place. Maybe, for some like Wilt, he brings them to the twilight world of shadows I once imagined, where they become free and powerful and happy, and he leaves behind their broken bodies as punishment for those who neglected them. But for others, like Matty and me, I think he means to test us, and I think we passed. That night he led our family into the worst of our own horrors, and when it most counted, we threw away care for our own lives, plunged into the stormy dark to rescue my little brother and proved our love for one another. But had we failed, I have no doubt we never would have seen Matty alive again.
Trick
The old man stands by his window and stares out on the close of day. As dusk takes the sleepy neighborhood, twilight shadows line the dead-end street, and the silhouette of leaf-barren branches lends the concrete the appearance of shattered glass. The dusty scent of autumn rides the air through window screens and into the old man's quiet house. It is a scent he knows well and he breathes it deeply into his tired lungs. He has spent his afternoon preparing for visitors. The half-open, inner front door beckons. A bowl of colorfully wrapped chocolates gleams on the low table in the foyer. Dying sunlight streams through the murky glass of the storm door. Twice during the day, the doorbell rang, but the old man, unready, ignored it. Now he seats himself in his worn, familiar chair and waits.
Outside goblin children overrun the darkening block, their wildest energies released in a sugar ecstasy of anonymity and candy-hoarding. Their visages vary wildly—ghost, pirate, princess, witch, pumpkin, hobo, super-hero—but their voices sing the same song. Excitement. Anticipation. The thrill of rare freedom. They flash from house to house, making their way up one side of the road and down the other before moving on to the next block and the next one after, and hopefully home before supper. The bright colors of their outfits flash, and from behind their masks, their high laughter crackles through the clear fall air.
But the old man sees their true faces; he sees them for what they truly are.
Not always did he know their secret. Not in the all long years stretched out behind him when the business of living and making a living provided suitable distractions from the ugliness. Not even in the few peaceful years he shared with Belle after they retired.
Without thinking he drops his forearm across the arm of his recliner so that his hand lies palm up on the arm of Belle's chair beside it, ready for the warm grasp that greeted it so many times before, but which does not come tonight and will never come again.
Now the old man makes no mistake. Now he knows their true nature.
This year he is ready.
It took time to learn the truth, but time he had after Belle went away. More time than he ever cared to spend on his own. And little by little he began to crack their facade, to notice the little oddities in their routines, their comings and goings at strange hours, the way a neighborhood cat disappeared, and the effort they spent to keep their houses so neat and perfectly groomed in order to deflect suspicion. He spent hours watching and noting, observing their rituals and the faint, strange lights that sometimes burned in the windows of the children's rooms at night. One time he watched a group of children squirm their way beneath the chain link fence that ran along the train tracks at the end of the road. God knows what hidden lairs they kept in the tangled weeds beyond the barrier. And one afternoon, a child fell from his bicycle to the hard pavement after bumping into the curb, and as he sat in the street crying and unaware of the old man's desperate gaze, he let the face he showed the world falter and the old man saw the horror that lurked beneath.
Two children run across the edge of his front lawn in their mad door-to-door dash to collect goodies. One wears a wizard's cloak and tall speckled hat; the other the delicate fringes and tight leotards of a dancer. He watches them eagerly, but they ignore his weed-cracked front walk and move on to the next house. They have been warned by their parents, he thinks, to stay away from the old man who has seen their secret faces.
Perhaps, he hopes, they fear me?
Across the street paper decorations clutter the front window of his neighbor's home. A jaunty white skeleton. A creeping green witch. Foam tombstones dot the front lawn. At the house next door electric-orange, jack-o-lantern lights trace the edge of the porch roof and false cob-webbing clings at the corners.
The old man closes his eyes and sees his other neighbors' homes along the road, all similarly attired in this garish manner with icons of mischief and images of the wild spirits rumored to roam free on nights such as this. Every year they accrue these baubles and ornaments and slowly transform the block to suit their tastes. Do they think he doesn't know what the signs and symbols mean? Do they think he doesn't see them, their decorations and parties, their fancy candies and disguised children, mocking him and everything his life has meant? Everything Belle's life meant?
They taunt him for what he knows. Their secrets aren’t safe with him. Let them parade their depravity in public once a year, costumed from the unknowing world in the guise of a child's holiday. Let them raise their terrible monsters in plain sight. Let others walk in ignorance. I will no longer be misled, he reassures himself.
Two boys and a little girl pause before the path to his front door. He observes and waits, listening to their whispers.
"Ronny, if you go there, I'm telling Mom," says the girl.
"So?" answers Ronny. "Mom didn't say not to go here. It's just Mr. Louis's house, and you're just scared cause of what happened with Mrs. Louis last year!"
How brazen, the old man thinks and then, Belle, I should have been here that day.
"Yeah, Kimmie. Don't be such a baby," says the older boy. "Besides, Ronny's too scared to go on his own, aren't you?"
"Shut up, Billy! I am not," says Ronny. "I'll prove it, too."
With that the young boy's footsteps move toward his house. He slows as he approaches the door. Something inside tells him he should not be here, but he can’t turn back now. The old man rises and steps into the foyer, a welcoming grin on his face, warm satisfaction welling in his chest as he recognizes Ronny, the boy who found Belle in this very same foyer. Perhaps this is what my beloved saw, he thinks. Her last vision the sight of an “innocent” child, her last impression a lie.
Ronny climbs the steps, holds forth his orange bag of treats and delivers his line: "Trick or treat."
The old man grabs a handful of candy from the dish and pushes the door open. "Oh, it'll definitely be a treat," he says. "Enjoy!"
The miniature chocolate bars spill from his hands, plunking heavily among the other sweets gathered in Ronny's sack.
"Thank you," the boy says.
As the boy returns to the sidewalk, the old man calls. "Make sure you share those with the others. They may be shy…but I know they want some candy, too."
He lingers in the doorway as the trio moves off toward the next house. Ronny hops and bounces, rubbing in his victory before his sister and the older boy, even as he pulls the chocolates from his bag and splits them up among their ready grasps. Together they stop by the next-door driveway as the old man's neighbor, Mrs. Reynolds, backs her car out into the street.
Ronny pulls the wrapper from a piece of chocolate.
Kimmie scolds him, reminding him they'd promised their mother not to eat anything she hadn't checked for them. Ronny razzes her and holds the candy out of reach above her head, teasing her.
Unable to resist such an easy target, Billy moves in from behind and slaps the candy from Ronny's hand, yelling, "He shoots! He scores!"
The candy lands under the w
heel of Mrs. Reynolds' moving car. The heavy black tire squashes it flat, ejecting its creamy filling from the wrapper. Then air pops like a gunshot and hisses a long sigh. The car sags to one side as its tire deflates. Mrs. Reynolds puts it in park and climbs out, moving around to examine the wheel, joining the three children already circled around and pointing at the dull metal gleam protruding from the rubber: the edge of a fresh razor blade.
Ronny turns and stares at the old man in the doorway. The little boy's face is pale and tears pour from his eyes. And then the old man realizes his error. He knew them not at all; he underestimated their power. A clutching tightness seizes his chest, and his pulse throbs louder in his head as its beats slow and then weaken. He falls to the foyer floor, landing in blackness.
An hour later the police officer closes the ambulance door and watches it drive off without lights or sirens. Ronny stands with his mother, clinging to her, his face buried in her side. "Funny," the police officer says. "Mr. Louis dying just like his wife did and Ronny the first to find both bodies.” His voice comes laced with suspicion not quite strong enough to make him speak his mind. “Guess it’s better this way, though, considering what that old man was up to.”
“Yes,” Ronny’s mother replies. “They never did really fit in on a block with so many young families.”
Ronny peers out from behind his mother’s shirt, glimpses the officer and then smothers his face again. If I didn’t know better, thinks the cop, I’d swear that kid was smiling.
Gray Gulls Gyre
Jennifer Truth drove along the street she had not been down in many long years and felt like she was nine years old again. And like that last day she had been here she felt a premonition of silent screams about to explode from behind the locked doors and shuttered windows of the simple houses. It set her gut on edge. She hated coming back, but even long-faded promises still meant something to her.
Resurrection House Page 4