The Haunts & Horrors Megapack: 31 Modern & Classic Stories

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  I don’t know how long I stood there. No thoughts entered my head.

  * * * *

  Sam grabbed my hand, and I blinked. It seemed to me the light had shifted on the trees outside. I glanced at my daughter.

  “I’m hungry,” she said.

  I locked our rooms and we left, drove thirteen miles to town, where we found a chowderhouse.

  I watched Sam eat. One piece of cheese toast and half a bowl of chowder—not enough; my own bowl of chowder had disappeared, I assumed into me, though I couldn’t remember eating it. “Come on, honey. Eat some more.”

  Sam frowned at me and pushed her bowl away.

  “Something wrong with it?” I asked.

  “I’ve had enough.”

  I couldn’t remember what Amaryllis did to get Sam to eat. Was it ever a problem before? Sam had always been skinny, but now she looked gaunt. “Want some dessert?”

  “I’m not hungry anymore.”

  I wasn’t sure what to do. I couldn’t forcefeed an eight-year-old. Maybe she really had had enough. How much fuel did such a small body need? I signaled for the check.

  “Let’s go shopping,” I said after I paid for our meal.

  We went to a supermarket, and I bought things. Sam didn’t say what she wanted, even when I asked her questions. I watched her eyes and bought anything I saw her glance at. We drove back to the lightkeepers’ house and I put the groceries away, then filled a kettle and set it on a burner. I made two cups of instant cocoa and tried to remember how to talk.

  I brought Sam her cocoa. “Hey, is this place still creepy?”

  She had plopped down in one of the armchairs in the front parlor that faced the big front window. From here one saw the mouth of the river where it spilled into the sea, the arched highway bridge over it, and the forested slope of the coastline across from us, with the road climbing it. A tall yard light had gone on as twilight deepened, but I could still see the foamy lace on the waves below as they on the beach. Light flashed through the gap in the trees toward the west, the lighthouse’s beacon warning even land-going ships that they were approaching a border between one world and another.

  “Sure is.” She sipped the cocoa. I sat in a chair beside her and stared at the view. “Don’t you feel it, Dad?”

  “Feel what?”

  “It looks nice on top, but there’s something crawly underneath.”

  I studied my daughter’s profile. Her eye glowed pearly sea-gray in the westering light. “Do you want to leave?” I asked.

  She studied me for a long moment, then shook her head.

  I cupped my hands around my cocoa mug, but I couldn’t feel the heat. Ever since Amaryllis’s death, my fingers had been icy.

  Samantha got a pennywhistle out of her pack and played a verse of “Greensleeves.” Each note sliced into me. Amaryllis and Sam and I had played a lot of music together; it was one of our evening things, and “Greensleeves” was the last tune we had practiced the night before the accident.

  “Did you bring your whistle, Dad?” Sam asked me.

  “No.” I no longer did anything I had done with Amaryllis. At school I had started practicing clarinet. I had played clarinet in high school marching band, before I had met Amaryllis, but I hadn’t picked one up again until recently.

  “I brought two.” Sam rummaged in her pack. “Play with me.”

  “No!” I couldn’t bear it.

  Sam’s sea-gray eyes widened, and she flinched as though I had struck her. She dropped her whistle into her pack, where it clanged against something.

  We sat without moving.

  I got up. “I think I saw some cards on the bookshelf.”

  We spent the evening playing Rummy at the dining room table, and went up to bed early. After I turned out my bedside light, I stared at the ceiling and wondered what we were doing here. It was a beautiful place. We still had nothing to say to each other. I didn’t know how to take care of my daughter.

  I needed a plan. It was so hard to think. My mind kept turning, turning, back to that moment when Amaryllis died; I had been stuck there ever since. Horrible in that bright stop-time way, to see something so close, so inevitable; I couldn’t fight it or forget it.

  Something scraped across the ceiling, then scraped again.

  A chill brushed me.

  It was nothing. Maybe a tree branch against the side of the house.

  There weren’t any trees near the house.

  Whish. Whish. Someone was sweeping above me.

  I rolled my head and glanced at the clock. It was only about ten-thirty. Still, an odd time to do housework.

  A faint tinkle, as of glass chips scattering before a broom.

  Did Mrs. Travis really have to clean things right now?

  I lay under an excellent down quilt and debated whether I wanted to get up, put on a robe, and figure out how to get to the attic so I could ask Mrs. Travis to sweep tomorrow. The bed had been so cold when I crawled into it, and it was warming now. If I got up and left its comfort, how long before it would warm again?

  Was I even going to sleep? I hadn’t had a deep sleep in weeks. If I wasn’t going to sleep anyway, maybe I shouldn’t let a little noise disturb me. I could turn the light on, read one of the books I’d found on a shelf downstairs and brought up to the room.

  I reached toward the lamp switch, and the sweeping stopped.

  * * * *

  Sometime later, I woke with a start.

  “Daddy?”

  Samantha’s voice sounded low and uncertain, and came from the direction of the doorway.

  “What is it, honey?”

  “I heard a noise.”

  I tried to get my bearings. Where were we? It trickled back to me. The lightkeepers’ house on the Oregon Coast.

  I had been asleep. That surprised me.

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes?”

  “Can I come in?”

  This time I didn’t miss the note of fear. I sat up and switched on the light. “Of course, Sam. Come in.”

  She rushed across the room and jumped onto the bed, curled against me. “There’s something in this house,” she whispered.

  “Of course there is. There’s us. There’s Mrs. Travis. Maybe even a Mr. Travis around somewhere. Didn’t she mention a Mr. Travis when we first got here?”

  “There’s something else.” She clung to my arm. “I’m scared to go back in my room, Daddy.”

  Sam had grown out of night frights two years earlier. The first time Ryllis and I woke up to hear Sam screaming in her room, we pulled on our robes and went in together to comfort her. When she saw us, she thought we were monsters, and screamed even louder. It took a couple hours to calm her down. She screamed again the next night, and we went in to her. Ryllis was wonderful with her; no matter how tired she was when she went to bed, if Sam screamed, Ryllis was ready to comfort her, and I did my best to imitate my wife, to forget my own problems and desires and just be there for Sam. In time I got better at it.

  Then Sam had stopped screaming.

  Once Ryllis had mentioned, after we turned out the lights, that she sort of missed it. I thought she was nuts. I thought about it all day.

  As Sam grew older and needed us less, I realized what Ryllis had meant. There was something sweet about having someone depend on you.

  “Baby, you wrap up in my quilt. I’ll go get yours from your room. You can sleep in here.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  I lifted the quilt so Sam could slide under, then slipped out into the frigid air. Goosebumps rose on my arms and legs. I was wearing a comfortable pair of briefs and nothing else. I grabbed my robe and put it on, then padded across the hall to Sam’s room.

  The floor was even colder in her room than it had been in mine. I heard a faint sound and stood, trying to decipher it. A murmur? A croon? The mutter of water in pipes? A radio playing half a house away?

  A lullaby. A voice, humming a thread of melody. My hair rose and prickled at the sound, even though it was ple
asant.

  I snatched the quilt off Sam’s bed, strode back into the hall, and closed the door of her room. I paused a moment and listened, but I didn’t hear anything.

  Sam had curled up in the center of my bed and already dropped off to sleep. Fortunately the bed was a full-size. I wrapped Sam tighter in the quilt and edged her over to the side, then wrapped up in the second quilt and lay beside her. I decided to leave the light on in case she woke up and wondered where she was.

  Or maybe in case I did.

  The sound of her slow breaths comforted me. I drifted off to sleep.

  * * * *

  “So,” said Mrs. Travis, as she set a mug of coffee in front of me, “did you hear anything strange last night?”

  I rubbed grit out of my eyes. “Pardon me?” I had slept better than I had since Amaryllis died. Still, I needed that coffee.

  “Any manifestations?”

  “Manifestations? Of what?” Sam asked.

  “Did our gray lady visit you?”

  I drank coffee. Unpleasant suspicions pricked my mind. “Are you saying this place is haunted?”

  “One of its chief draws,” Mrs. Travis said. A door slammed somewhere above. “That’ll be Ike. How do you like your eggs?”

  “There’s a ghost here?” Sam asked.

  “You didn’t know? Your friend didn’t—oh, dear. Someone should have told you. Yes, we’re famous for our ghost. She seems like a kindly soul. Never harmed anyone.”

  “Does she sweep?” I asked.

  Mrs. Travis nodded.

  “Does she...does she sing?” asked Sam.

  Mrs. Travis stopped and stared at Sam. “Well, now.”

  “Well, now,” repeated a man from the doorway.

  Ike Travis was tall, gray-headed, and twisted. Under his dark mustache, he had a lightning smile, brilliant, gone so quickly you wondered if it had happened at all.

  “Did you make pancake batter, Lucy, my love?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Would you rustle me up a stack of pancakes?”

  “Company first,” said Mrs. Travis. She raised her eyebrows at me and Sam.

  “I’m not very hungry,” Sam said.

  “You’re a growing child. Of course you’re hungry. Eggs or pancakes?”

  Sam frowned.

  Ryllis had read somewhere that if you let a child eat when and what she wanted, she would be healthier, not so inclined to go anorexic or out of control. That phase in our child-rearing experimentation had lasted for a very aggravating month. Still, we did try to let Sam choose her food and decide how much. But Nick had said Sam was too skinny. God, I didn’t know what to do. Ryllis would have known. If she hadn’t known, she would have found a book at the library that explained everything, or called one of her friends and gotten a recommendation, or talked to a doctor. Something.

  “Pancakes,” Sam said.

  “Good choice. Will pancakes do for you, too, Mr. Wilcox?”

  “That would be great,” I said.

  Mrs. Travis went to the stove, where a nonstick frying pan already sizzled with melted butter. She ladled up some batter and dropped dollar-sized dollops into the hot butter. There was a satisfying hiss, and a wonderful smell. “We’ve got good syrup here, too. Say, Ike, I was just telling them about our ghost.”

  Mr. Travis limped over and poured himself a mug of coffee. There was something wrong with the placement of his hips. I straightened the silverware at my place and watched Mrs. Travis flip the pancakes.

  Ghosts. I had never believed in ghosts.

  If there was one ghost, might there not be another?

  “Who was she?” I asked.

  “No one rightly knows.” Mr. Travis pulled out a chair and lowered himself into it. “She’s got to be an assistant lightkeeper’s wife, doesn’t she, if she died in this house? There was a period around the turn of the century when the keepers either didn’t keep good logbooks or the records got lost, so we don’t know who all was on the job at the lighthouse. From the man who saw her, we get clothing details that make us think she’s from around that time. She wore one of those pouter pigeon suits, with the nipped waist and the pushed-up front, and a long A-line skirt. She had her hair piled up with a knot at the top, like a Gibson girl.”

  “Who saw her?” asked Sam.

  Mr. Travis pursed his lips. “Fella working on repairs in the attic. He was repairing the window. Saw a reflection. Thought it was his assistant, bringing him the hammer he asked for, but then he turned around and saw her, and his hair stood on end. The lady stood there, staring at him. At first he thinks, funny clothes, somebody from a play wandered up here, where’d she come from? She’s staring at him and coming closer. He looks down and sees that the hem of her skirt is—”

  “—It doesn’t touch the ground. He can’t see her feet. She’s floating. She reaches for him,” continued Mrs. Travis, “and he’s out of there like someone lit a fire in his pants. Fell right out of the attic, raced down the stairs, stopped just long enough to collect his assistant, and their pickup truck was screeching out of the driveway before we even knew what happened.” She set plates of pancakes in front of me and Sam, poured syrup from a warm pan on the stove into a little pitcher, and put that on the table where we could reach it. A plate with a stick of butter on it sat nearby.

  The pancakes smelled great. I buttered and syruped my stack and ate, even though the story disturbed me more than I wanted to admit.

  “We didn’t know what happened until Bob came back to get his tools. Even then he wouldn’t come into the house,” said Mr. Travis. “He asked me to go up in the attic and fetch his things, and he wouldn’t tell us why until after I did it.” He drank coffee. “He went right home after he saw her and drew a picture of her. Showed it to us. Then he set it down on the porch for a minute, and it disappeared.”

  “Wasn’t the first time things disappeared. Especially for this fella,” said Mrs. Travis. She flipped more pancakes.

  “The ghost didn’t like him. She kept moving his tools. He’d set them down and then reach for them and they’d be gone. Sometimes he’d find them in another room. That didn’t spook him enough to make him leave. It was only when she showed her face that he quit work on the project and hightailed it out of here.”

  “He left things in a mess up in the attic,” said Mrs. Travis. “We were working on some other things down here, and we didn’t get up there to clean up right away. Then one night we heard sweeping on the ceiling.”

  “Whish, whish,” whispered Mr. Travis.

  “We knew the doors were all locked and we were the only people in the house. This was when we were fixing up the house to turn it into a B and B, before we even had any guests. We held each other tight. I don’t think I closed my eyes all night, even though the sweeping stopped after about half an hour.”

  “In the morning, when it was light, I felt braver, and I went up to check it out,” said Mr. Travis. “Dirt and mess all swept up into a neat little pile. Not a broom anywhere in that attic, I swear.”

  Sam reached under the table and slipped her hand into mine. Her fingers were icy. So were mine.

  “We had some kids here one weekend who brought a ouija board,” said Mrs. Travis. “They tried to talk to the ghost. They told us later her name was Rue.”

  “Some people think she’s looking for her little drowned child,” Mr. Travis said. “Daughters of the head lightkeeper from the early years of last century said there was a little gravestone somewhere between the keepers’ houses and the lighthouse, with the name Rose on it. It’s all overgrown now, and nobody knows where it is. I have to say there’s no reason to suspect a connection, but people like to put two and two together.”

  “Ike,” said Mrs. Travis. “The girl here asked about singing.”

  Ike set down his coffee cup and licked his lips. “Singing,” he said.

  I set my fork on my plate. “A lullaby.”

  “You heard it too, Daddy?” Sam asked.

  “When
I went to get your quilt.”

  The Travises exchanged troubled glances.

  “What?” I asked.

  Mrs. Travis shook her head. “It’s nothing.”

  “What?”

  “Really. It’s nothing. Leave it be.”

  “Not many hear her singing. Sometimes she screams or sobs,” offered Mr. Travis. “I hate to hear her cry. It’s just so sad. More often she moves things around, no rhyme or reason, or leaves the cupboards open, even if we close them with latches the night before.”

  “I think she likes reading the labels on the boxes. We have so much strange food now that they didn’t have back in the old days.”

  “Where’s the sense in that?” asked Mr. Travis.

  “You come up with a better explanation.”

  I got the sense they were acting out parts in a play. The lines had the feel of well-worn words, a soothing pattern of sound to pull one away from something one would rather not see.

  “Have you been up to the light?” asked Mr. Travis.

  I was glad he changed the subject. Sam looked pale. Her hand slipped out of mine, and she took a bite of soggy pancakes. “Not yet,” I said.

  “There’s guided tours from noon to four. We’ve got some great volunteers who’ll tell you all about the light and its history.”

  “Daddy.” Sam put down her silverware. “I’m done.”

  She had only eaten about half her pancakes. She had drunk a small glass of orange juice and some milk. Maybe it was enough. I finished off my pancakes and drank the rest of my coffee. “Thank you, Mrs. Travis. That was a great breakfast.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Mrs. Travis. “Bundle up now when you go out. It’s damp this morning. Let us know if you need anything else.”

  “Thanks very much.” I stood and picked up my dishes.

  “Never mind. I’ll take care of cleanup. Part of the service.”

  I put the dishes down again and took Sam’s hand. We left the kitchen and headed up the stairs.

  As we climbed, I felt a crawling sensation on the back of my head, as though someone watched me. I resisted the impulse to turn and glare. Had Nick known this was a haunted house? He couldn’t have. How could he send me and Sam to a place where—?