Terrifying Tales to Tell at Night

by Stephen Jones

  Stevie was making them hot dogs for dinner when their dad came in from work. Living with him was weird, like living with a stranger—which he was, a distant figure they only saw a couple times a year until suddenly they had to move in with him. He tried, she’d give him that. Every once in a while he turned up with a pizza and a clutch of Blu-rays, announcing it was “Family Night!” They took dutiful part. The movies were usually too young for either of them. Their father always fell asleep before they were over.

  He looked faintly surprised to see them there in the kitchen, as he often did, like he’d forgotten he had children. Stevie said, “Hi, Dad. Want me to make you a hot dog?”

  He shook his head. “What are you kids up to tonight?”

  “I’m taking Toby out trick-or-treating.”

  “Well, don’t be late.” He opened the fridge, stared in it for a while, and then closed it again without taking anything out. “And be careful,” he added as he left the room, like he remembered those were the kinds of things dads were supposed to say.

  The moon was nearly full and peeking at them through the black branches of trees as they headed out. They passed a gaggle of Harry Potter characters and several princesses.

  “All of these houses have their lights on, why aren’t we stopping?” Toby asked.

  “There are better houses further on,” Stevie said. She wanted to get away from their neighbors, go to some streets where nobody knew who they were and would answer the door without that expression that said it’s those poor children with the dead mother. Where they could just be regular kids. She also wanted to keep them moving in the direction of the Beaumont House, which was a couple of miles’ walk away, kind of far for Toby, but she hoped that the trick-or-treating would distract him.

  “My bag’s too heavy,” he said eventually.

  She poured half of it into her bag and handed it back to him.

  “Now you have all the candy!”

  “You can have it all when we get home.”

  “My feet hurt.”

  The moon scudded behind clouds and they found themselves walking through an older part of town with no streetlights. Just as Toby started in with, “I don’t care about the haunted house any longer, I want to go home,” they were there.

  Stevie had not been able to find any photos of the Beaumont House online, but what they saw before them was better than her imagination. Set back from the road, surrounded by an iron gate, a dark and dilapidated form against a darker October sky. She and Toby stood there for a moment.

  “I don’t like it,” Toby said. “Let’s go home.”

  “It’s haunted, you know,” came a voice from behind them.

  Kids from school: Stevie recognized them, a set of twins, a boy and a girl. They were both tall and pale with short dark hair, and tonight they were wearing black jeans and black hoodies.

  “Are you guys urbexers too?” the girl asked. Stevie remembered her name then. Taylor. And her brother was Tristan.

  “What’s an urbexer?”

  “Urban explorer,” Tristan replied. “We explore abandoned places.”

  “We just came to see the haunted house,” Stevie said.

  “That makes you an urbexer. As long as you do it right,” explained Tristan.

  “What’s doing it right?”

  “Stay calm. Don’t mess with anything. Leave it the way you found it. Don’t get caught.”

  “That was the plan,” Stevie said. “But I’m not an urban explorer. I’m a ghost-hunter.”

  Taylor said, “We’ve never explored a place that was supposed to be haunted before.”

  Four seemed like a lot for a ghost hunt. If you had too many people, the ghosts probably wouldn’t show themselves. That was why you never heard about ghosts turning up in, say, football stadiums, or malls.

  On the other hand, as the saying went, there was safety in numbers.

  Stevie said, “You know that show, True Hauntings? They might come here and investigate it. I’m checking it out for them.”

  “Why would they hire a kid?” asked Tristan.

  “It’s not like a hiring thing,” Stevie said. “It’s like a consultant.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Taylor said.

  “Anyway, that show’s about fake stuff,” Tristan added. “This isn’t fake. Our grandmother knew that girl. Kathleen Beaumont. They were friends. She remembers when it all happened.”

  “What does she think happened to them?”

  “She said she didn’t think Kathleen would hurt anybody.”

  “What about that Sideways Lady?”

  Taylor spoke up, “I knew someone who saw her once.”

  “Really?”

  Taylor nodded solemnly. “She said it was terrifying, what she did.”

  Stevie was almost too afraid to ask. “What was it?”

  “She—” Taylor stopped. “She stood sideways.”

  “Don’t be mean, Taylor,” Tristan admonished, but Stevie was embarrassed. The evening was going to ruin. She wanted to take Toby and go home, but she didn’t want them—Taylor especially—to think she was a coward.

  The four of them stood and looked at the house before them. Stevie had the feeling that the house stared back, that its blank windows were eyes.

  Stevie and Toby stashed their bags of Halloween candy in the bushes—Taylor and Tristan didn’t have any—and picked their way across the overgrown yard. The closer they got to the house, the tighter a little ball in Stevie’s stomach curled.

  Tristan whispered, “Did you bring flashlights?”

  She shook her head.

  “First rule of urbexing is you should always be prepared,” Tristan explained, and pressed one into her hand. “Don’t you have any ghost-hunting equipment?”

  Kev and Lori, the hosts on True Hauntings, always went prepared. Stevie hadn’t even thought about how they were going to get into the house.

  That, at least, did not seem to be a problem. As they stepped up onto the porch, she could see that the front door was slightly ajar.

  Stevie hung back and let Tristan and Taylor go in first before following behind, holding Toby’s hand tightly. They played their flashlight beams along the ceiling, the walls. They were standing in an empty foyer, a hallway that disappeared into darkness, doors on either side, a stairway in front of them. Wallpaper hung in strips. She couldn’t discern the pattern, but it made her shudder all the same because it suddenly made her think of flayed skin. What if houses were like people? What if they hurt, what if they were full of all these complicated emotions that people carried inside them?

  What would happen if you opened a door and let those feelings out?

  Taylor whispered, “Let’s go upstairs.”

  And then someone said, “What are you children doing in my house?”

  The woman staring at them, holding a lantern up next to a wrinkled face framed by wild white hair, was wearing a white, high-necked, old-fashioned nightgown. Her feet were bare. She must have come through one of the closed doors in the hallway that stretched before them into darkness, but they could not see which one.

  For a long moment, none of them said a word. Then the woman continued, “If you’ve come here to steal from me, I don’t have any money. There’s nothing here to take.”

  “Oh!” Stevie didn’t know she was going to make a noise until it was out. She was horrified that the woman thought they were thieves. “No! We—thought nobody lived here.”

  “Nobody does,” the woman said. “I’m nobody.”

  Taylor asked, “Are you Kathleen Beaumont?”

  “That name sounds familiar,” the woman replied. “But I don’t think I’ve ever had a name.”

  Stevie said, “We’re very sorry. We’ll go.”

  “You can’t go yet,” the woman responded. “It’s Halloween night, is that right? Come and sit with me. I have some cakes I can give you. That’s what you want on Halloween, isn’t it? Sweets?” She smiled, but when she did, her grin reminded Stevie of the wol
f in a fairy tale, a mouth stretched back from long canine teeth.

  Stevie said quickly, “No, we—”

  “I’m so lonely,” the woman continued. “No one ever comes to see me. Now I have my own little witch and little wizard visitors, and even they don’t want to stay.”

  Stevie remembered that they were supposed to be ghost-hunters. When you were a ghost-hunter, when somebody invited you further into a haunted house, you weren’t supposed to say no.

  They followed the woman into a room off the foyer. It had been a grand room once, you could tell, but now it was empty save for a crumbling fireplace, a chandelier that had fallen at some point and been placed in a corner, and dozens of candles the woman had lit and set about on the floor. They had to move carefully to avoid them.

  “Wait here, my dears,” she said, and there was that horrible parody of a smile again. “I’ll be right back,” and she went through another doorway.

  To Toby, who had never been so quiet, Stevie warned, “Don’t eat anything she gives you.”

  “Well, she’s not standing sideways, so aside from her being crazy as hell we’re probably okay,” Taylor said.

  The woman was back faster than Stevie expected, carrying a tray with four small china plates, each with what she guessed was a piece of cake on it. It was hard to tell in the candlelight. The woman passed them out and they all stood there awkwardly, holding them. Stevie finally thought of an excuse. “I can’t eat gluten,” she said. “Neither can my brother.”

  “What, dearie?”

  “I’m so sorry,” Stevie said.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” the woman said. “Whatever that is, I’m sure there’s none of that nastiness in my cakes.”

  Taylor asked, “Do you live here alone?”

  The woman didn’t answer for a while. Then she said, “I think there used to be others here with me. I think I had a family once.”

  Then Toby blurted out, “Did you kill your family?”

  Stevie hissed, “Toby!”

  But the woman turned her gaze on him. She looked at him for a while, and then smiled her unsettling smile.

  “I believe I may have,” she said. “Chop, chop, chop, into little pieces.”

  Toby gaped.

  “I’m only teasing, honey! I can’t remember, but I think they made up stories about me. You know how small towns are. It was such a long time ago. Will you excuse me for a moment?” The woman got up and went back through the door she’d come out of. The children sat frozen for a moment, then Stevie looked at her cake.

  “Guys,” she said.

  The cakes, they could now see, were black lumps of mold. A terrible smell came off them, and Stevie saw something white moving on hers. Maggots. She let out a little cry and dropped it. And then, as though a draft had blown through the room—though they felt nothing—the candles extinguished themselves.

  They didn’t need to discuss their next move. The four children bolted from the room and back into the foyer. Taylor grabbed the door and yanked it. It would not budge.

  Tristan tried; they all did.

  “You’re the ghost-hunter,” Tristan said. “What should we do?”

  “I’m not really,” Stevie admitted. “I just want to be one someday. Really I’m a witch.”

  “Stop lying,” Taylor snapped.

  “I’m not. And this is a witch’s dress.”

  “If you’re a witch,” Tristan said, “could you get us out of this?”

  “That,” said Taylor, “would be super helpful.”

  “I don’t even know if she’s a ghost or not.” They were all talking at once now.

  “I think she’s real. A person.”

  “I don’t think she killed anybody.”

  “I think she killed everybody.”

  “I don’t know what she is.”

  “I don’t care what she is.”

  “If she’s a ghost she can’t hurt us. She’s just like a movie that shows you scary things.” That was Toby. “That’s what our mom used to say about scary movies.”

  Tristan pointed out, “This isn’t a movie.”

  Everyone talked at once again.

  “She’s so old, it’s not like she can do anything to hurt us.”

  “She can if she has an axe.”

  “I bet she’s never hurt a fly.”

  “Who is she, anyway? Is it her?”

  “It might not be her. She might be a demon.”

  “We could break one of the windows in that room and climb out it.”

  “I’m not going back in there.”

  Stevie wondered what Kev and Lori, the ghost-hunters, would do, but the worst thing they ever had to contend with was a cold spot in a house or some creepy noises.

  Still, it gave her the courage she needed. “I’ll do it,” she said. “The front door probably swung shut in that breeze and locked. She’ll have a key.” She turned and shoved the door open that they’d just come through. “Ms. Beaumont!” she called out, and was surprised at how steady her voice sounded. That made her feel even calmer.

  Stevie called out again. “Ms. Beaumont!” She went to the other door and pushed it open.

  She expected it to be a kitchen of some sort, but it was just another big, dark, empty room. The woman was standing over in the corner by a window. Just standing there, not doing or saying anything. Stevie tried to say her name again, but nothing came out.

  She took a few steps into the room and felt the temperature drop. It was just like Kev and Lori talked about on True Hauntings. The dark felt solid, like it was pressing in on her chest. It seemed like there was something wrong with the woman—more wrong than anything they’d already observed—but she couldn’t put her finger on what the problem was. Stevie found her voice at last and asked, “Are you okay?”

  In that moment, the moon must have moved from behind a cloud, because a shaft of moonlight fell through the window and across the figure.

  It wasn’t the same woman who had welcomed them into the house earlier.

  It was a young woman dressed in clothes of some long-ago period, her profile that of a beautiful lady with hair pulled back from a flawless face. But she held herself with a peculiar kind of tension.

  And then she turned.

  Only one side was the beautiful young woman. The other was a gaping horror. That face, that entire side of her body, had rotted away, an eye in a ruined socket, teeth set in a clacking jaw of bones, a bare ribcage with tattered pieces of flesh and soft tissue hanging from it. All about the figure there was a great darkness. Its eyes fixed on her, and its mouth opened, and it let out a howl that seemed to go on forever. It raised its hands and spread its fingers, five thin, pale, flawless digits and five bony claws.

  The thing flew across the room. The mouth opened wider and wider, impossibly wide, as though it would swallow her whole. Stevie’s legs didn’t work; her voice didn’t work. I’m a witch, she thought. I’m a witch. I’m a witch. Magic in every stitch.

  I’ll be with you in the moonlight and the wind.

  The world went black.

  Someone was crying.

  “Stevie!” It was Toby’s voice. The first thing she saw was his face, hanging over hers. The next was the night sky behind him, and the moon.

  Toby burst into tears.

  Stevie pushed herself into a sitting position. They were sitting on the sidewalk, just on the other side of the gate from the Beaumont House.

  “I saw her,” she said. “The Sideways Lady. She’s real.”

  “Whatever you saw, it gave you superhuman strength, or something,” Taylor told her.

  They all started talking at once again, but from what she could gather, she had come bolting out of the room—“Your feet weren’t touching the ground,” Toby said—past the foyer where they were gathered, and yanked the door open like it had never been stuck. They had raced across the yard and through the gate when she had collapsed, and they had been trying to revive her for a good ten minutes.


  “If you saw the Sideways Lady,” Tristan asked, “then who was the woman we met in there?”

  Stevie’s head felt like someone was hitting it over and over with a sledgehammer. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Maybe it was her in another form, trying to trick us. Maybe a ghost.”

  “But ghosts don’t get old.”

  “I don’t know what ghosts do,” Stevie said.

  Toby cried part of the way home because he was so scared and so relieved and the rest of the way home because he’d left his candy behind. Stevie had to promise him she’d get him more candy, and that night she slept on the floor of his room—so he wouldn’t be scared, she told herself, but it was really for herself.

  She hung her witch’s dress in the back of her closet, where she knew it would be safe but she couldn’t see it. She wasn’t sure she ever wanted to look at it again.

  For weeks she often woke, startled, with the sense that someone had just slipped out of her room. Over time, the fear dissipated, though she still slept fitfully. At school, she and Tristan and Taylor avoided each other. She thought Taylor might have said some mean things about her to some of the other kids, because people started ignoring her even more than usual. A few times she tried to write a letter to True Hauntings, but she didn’t know what to say, and she eventually abandoned the project.

  In the spring, a ferocious tornado ripped through town. It took the roof off a gas station and broke some windows at the high school, but it seemed to have a special fury reserved for one place, in particular.

  Stevie got a copy of the local newspaper, the Ellington Herald, that reported on the destruction. She cut out the relevant article:

  ELLINGTON’S GRANDEST HOME IS NO MORE

  by Kay Herndon, staff writer

  A structure known locally as the Beaumont House, that has stood for more than a hundred years in Ellington and for centuries before that in its original home in the English countryside, received the brunt of yesterday’s destructive storm. Winds measuring at over 150 miles per hour tore through town, but it was the Beaumont House that was the focus of the storm’s force and much higher winds. Nearby buildings were left undamaged.

  The Beaumont House was lived in for fewer than three of its nearly 120 years in Ellington. The short-lived residencies of its two owners and the mysterious circumstances surrounding their deaths or disappearances gave rise to rumors of hauntings.