Terrifying Tales to Tell at Night

by Stephen Jones

  Graham had tired of the werewolf suit before his bedtime. He’d undone the belt all by himself, and left the suit in a pile on the floor. “I want a vampire!” he said. “Or a zombie!” Mummy and Daddy told him that maybe he could have another monster next Christmas, or on his birthday maybe. That wasn’t good enough, and it wasn’t until they suggested there might be discounted monsters in the January sales that he cheered up. He could be patient, he was a big boy. After he’d gone to bed, Granny said she wanted to turn in as well—it had been such a long day. “And thank you,” she said, and looked at Sarah. “It’s remarkable.” Daddy said that she’d now understand why he’d asked for all those photographs; to get the resemblance just right there had been lots of special modifications, it hadn’t been cheap, but he hoped it was a nice present? “The best I’ve ever had,” said Granny. “And here’s a little something for both of you.” And she took out a check, scribbled a few zeroes on to it, and handed it over. She hoped this might see them through the recession. “And merry Christmas!” she said gaily.

  Granny got into her nightie—but not so fast that Sarah wasn’t able to take a good look at the full reality of her. She didn’t think Granny’s skin was very much different to the one she was wearing, the same lumps and bumps and peculiar crevasses, the same scratch marks and mottled specks. Hers was just slightly fresher. And as if Granny could read Sarah’s mind, she told her to be a good boy and sit at the dressing table. “Just a little touch up,” she said. “Nothing effeminate about it. Just to make you a little more you.” She smeared a little rouge on to the cheeks, a dash of lipstick, mascara. “Can’t do much with the eyeballs,” Granny mused, “but I’ll never know in the dark.” And the preparations weren’t just for Sarah. Granny sprayed behind both her ears from her new perfume bottle. “Just for you, darling,” she said. “Your beautiful little gift.” Sarah gestured toward the door, and Granny looked puzzled, then brightened. “Yes, you go and take a tinkle. I’ll be waiting, my sweet.” But Sarah had nothing to tinkle, had she, didn’t Granny realize there was no liquid inside her, didn’t she realize she was composed of dust? Sarah lurched past the toilet, and downstairs to the sitting room where her parents were watching the repeat of the Queen’s speech. They started when she came in. Both looked a little guilty. Sarah tried to find the words she wanted, and then how to say them at all, her tongue lay cold in her mouth. “Why me?” she managed finally.

  Daddy said, “I loved him. He was a good man, he was a kind man.” Mummy looked away altogether. Daddy went on, “You do see why it couldn’t have been Graham, don’t you? Why it had to be you?” And had Sarah been a werewolf like her brother, she might at that moment have torn out their throats, or clubbed them down with her paws. But she was a dead man, and a dead man who’d been good and kind. So she nodded briefly, then shuffled her way slowly back upstairs.

  “Hold me,” said Granny. Sarah didn’t know how to, didn’t know where to put her arms or her legs. She tried her best, but it was all such a tangle. Granny and Sarah lay side by side for a long time in the dark. Sarah tried to feel the necklace under her skin, but she couldn’t, it had gone. That little symbol of whatever femininity she’d had was gone. She wondered if Granny was asleep. But then Granny said, “If only it were real. But it’s not real. You’re not real.” She stroked Sarah’s face. “Oh, my love,” she whispered. “Oh, my poor dead love.”

  You’re not real, Granny was still saying, and now she was crying, and Sarah thought of how Granny had looked that day at the funeral, her face all soggy and out of shape, and she felt a stab of pity for her—and that was it, the pity was the jolt it needed, there was something liquid in this body after all. “You’re not real,” Granny said. “I am real,” he said, and he leaned across, and kissed her on the lips. And the lips beneath his weren’t dry, they were plump, they were moist, and now he was chewing at her face, and she was chewing right back, like they wanted to eat each other, like they were so hungry they could just eat each other alive. Sharon Weekes was wrong, it was a stray thought that flashed through his mind, Sharon Weekes didn’t know the half of it. This is what it’s like, this is like kissing, this is like kissing a boy.

  THE CHEMISTRY OF GHOSTS

  LISA MORTON

  HEY, APRIL? I think I did something really bad.”

  When your nine-year-old brother says that, it’s never good. When he whispers it while you’re walking home from school and there’s nobody else around for at least a hundred yards, it’s just weird.

  Normally, I would’ve called Matt a dweeb or mocked his whisper, but today hadn’t been a normal day. Our school had been visited by police officers who were investigating a missing classmate, but not just any classmate: they were looking for Benny Salazar, also known as my brother’s best friend. I knew they’d pulled Matt out of class to talk to him, but I didn’t know what had been said.

  “Okay, Matt. What’d you do?”

  He looked around guiltily, slowed down, and then finally stopped and turned to me, although he didn’t look up. “I told the police that Benny texted me last night and said he was going to sneak out and go to Broadmore College. He heard they closed one wing there because it’s supposed to be haunted, and he wanted to go see for himself.”

  Benny was a weird kid; he totally believed in ghosts and his phone was loaded with all kinds of ghost-hunting apps, so I could see why he’d do something like that. Me, on the other hand—I may be only three years older than Matt and Benny, but I laugh at scary movies. I’m a total science nerd, especially when it comes to chemistry; I mean, I have a poster on my bedroom wall of the periodic table because I think it’s just the coolest thing ever that the whole universe is made up of just ninety-eight naturally occurring kinds of atoms (and twenty more that are man-made). I like the way the table looks, with each element having a little block and a number that indicates how it’s made up. My parents keep trying to talk me into something like a business degree, even though I already know I have to go into science.

  In fact, I wanted to go to Broadmore someday, because one of history’s greatest chemistry professors, Dr. Cole Addison, had taught there until he’d died last year—he’d had a heart attack right in the middle of teaching a class. My friend Ling, whose mom taught economics at Broadmore, had even known Dr. Addison, although Ling said she’d never met him herself. “Mom said he was scary,” Ling told me.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that. Cole Addison was a genius, but he was also supposed to be the toughest teacher ever. His tests were incredibly hard, he never complimented any of his students, and he had supposedly popped a vein in class yelling at some kid and keeled over dead right there. Me, I liked tough teachers and thought I could’ve gotten a rare “A” in Cole Addison’s class. I was sorry I’d never get to find out.

  If Addison had been scary in life, he was apparently even scarier dead. A week after he died, a janitor cleaning his old classroom had freaked out when “something hit me in the back of the head, but there was no one there.” A few days after that, a physics teacher had been working late in her office when Cole Addison had walked through a wall and then turned into a skeleton in front of her. She was a pretty tough professor herself, but after that encounter she refused to return to that building, and so had a lot of other people. Finally the college had closed the wing until they could figure out what to do with it.

  Ling also told me that her mom said the police had indeed been searching that very building earlier today for Benny. “Are you trying to tell me Benny went to Broadmore to look for ghosts?” I asked.

  Matt shuffled, bit his lip, and I thought, Uh-oh, this is BIG. “Well, yeah, but . . .” He broke off and finally looked me in the eye. “First, you gotta promise not to tell anybody else, especially Mom and Dad.”

  “Fine, I promise. Just tell me.”

  “I . . . I snuck out last night and went with Benny. We rode our bikes over to Broadmore.”

  I’m sure my jaw fell, because Matt blurted out, “You promi
sed not to tell—!”

  “I won’t. What happened?”

  “We found the closed wing. Benny said he saw an episode of Haunt Hunters set there and it was really awesome, so he wanted to see for himself.

  “We found an open door, and Benny went in.” Matt broke off, and I realized he was crying. My sarcasm vanished and I pulled him in for a hug.

  “Ahh, Matty, whatever happened, it can’t be that bad . . .”

  “Yes, it can,” he said, his voice muffled by my jacket, “because I didn’t go in. I started to, but I got this really bad feeling and I chickened out, and then I heard Benny scream, and I ran.”

  I held him for a second before I gently pushed him away. “But you did the right thing: you told the police you thought Benny might be in that building, and they searched it.”

  “But they didn’t find him.”

  “Right . . .” I didn’t get where he was going with this.

  “And I know he’s there. I know it. And maybe none of this would’ve happened if I hadn’t chickened out.”

  “But the police searched the building and didn’t find him.”

  Matt snuffled once, rubbed away his last tear, and said, “Then I will.”

  I grabbed his shoulder to let him know I was serious. “Matt, you are not going back there. If the police didn’t find him there, what makes you think you will?”

  “I don’t know, but . . . I gotta try, April.”

  Matt pulled away from me and stalked off. I knew he was going to do it, and that I wouldn’t be able to stop him.

  And that was when I knew I’d have to go with him.

  We waited that night until after our folks had checked on us and gone to bed. Matt texted me, NOW, and it was on.

  I met Matt down on the front lawn. He was already on his bike, backpack on—and a baseball bat sticking out of the pack. “What’s with the bat?” I whispered.

  “Protection. There could be rats or something in there.”

  I had to hand it to my kid brother: he hated rats, but he was willing to face them to save his friend.

  It took us ten minutes to ride our bikes through our sleeping ’hood; it was both strange and exciting to be wheeling past the dark houses, heading for a midnight adventure. We reached the Broadmore campus, rode past some dorm buildings and a football field, and finally saw the abandoned wing in front of us. I followed Matt, since he knew where the entrance was.

  We reached the double doors, got off our bikes, and looked around. It was quiet; we were alone, and the building had no lights on. I nodded at the doors and asked, “In here, right?”

  Matt gulped and nodded, but was too scared to talk.

  “You sure you want to do this, Matt?”

  “I’m sure.” He gripped his baseball bat, bravely marched up the three steps to the doors, opened them, and stepped in. I followed a few seconds later.

  We were standing in a long hallway, lit only by outside light spilling in through a few windows. I could barely make out the doors lining either side of the hallway.

  I turned on my phone to use as a flashlight, but Matt reached into his backpack and pulled out a couple of real flashlights. As he handed one to me, he said, “Here, these are better. I made sure they have fresh batteries.”

  The flashlight beam was stronger and wider, so I put my phone in my pocket. The first thing I saw were some framed photos on the wall near us; most showed sports teams and players, but one was of a tall, thin man holding a big trophy of some kind. The man looked familiar, so I read the little engraved plaque beneath the photo:

  DR. COLE ADDISON WINS THE BOONE SCIENCE PRIZE IN CHEMISTRY, 2002

  “Whoa—it’s Dr. Addison!”

  Matt pushed past me. “Whatever. C’mon, we got a lot of ground to cover in here.” He shouted, “Benny!”

  I was turning away from the photo when it moved—nothing huge, just a small motion of Dr. Addison’s head. I stared hard at it, but nothing else happened. A trick of the light, right?

  But I really had seen it move.

  “Any time, April!”

  I gave the photo one last look before turning to follow Matt. We worked our way down the hall, opening doors as we went. The first ten opened onto offices; each office had a sign with the room number and the occupant’s name. The offices were small; they didn’t even have closets, no place to hide a kid. They were numbered D-1 through D-10; D-7 had the name DR. COLE ADDISON on it.

  “Wow, this was his office.” I was in awe. Although most of Dr. Addison’s stuff had been cleared out of the room, I still felt a thrill of recognition at seeing that he had a wall chart of the periodic table that looked just like mine. There were a few books left in a bookcase, a few scattered papers, and not much more.

  Just past the offices, the main hall had two restrooms, each with three stalls, and ten classrooms about the same size as what we had at our school; the classrooms were numbered D-11 through D-20. They all held about thirty student desks, a teacher’s desk, chairs, a blackboard, and a small coat closet. We looked in all the closets; it was kind of spooky that some still had coats hanging in them, even though these rooms hadn’t been used in at least a year.

  As we went, we both called out Benny’s name a lot and then listened, but the building was completely silent. “I don’t think he’s here, Matt,” I said, as gently as I could.

  Matt nodded at a double door at the end of the hallway; the sign next to the doors read D-100. “We haven’t been in there yet.”

  On the other side of the double doors was an amphitheater classroom, one of those where the seats are in tiers, with a desk and podium at the bottom in the center. This room could easily have seated two hundred. There was a locked emergency exit at the bottom, a small storage room behind the teacher’s desk, and a door at one side that gave access to the structure beneath the tiers.

  But there was no Benny.

  “We’ve done the whole wing now,” I said, as we left the big classroom.

  Matt sighed heavily. “Okay.”

  We trudged back down the hallway until we reached the doors we’d come in through. I started to reach for the knob, but Matt held back, looking around. “Did we search everything? I just keep getting this feeling like he’s here.”

  I thought for a few seconds before saying, “How about this: tomorrow’s Saturday, right? So let’s come back tomorrow when we can see more. Maybe we can even get other people to help. Sound good?”

  Matt reluctantly nodded.

  I shivered, suddenly cold. I was so ready to be home again, in my nice, warm bed. I reached for the knob—

  It wouldn’t turn.

  I pushed down a jolt of panic and shook the knob, thinking maybe it was just old and rusty. It was immovable.

  “What’s wrong?” Matt asked.

  “It’s locked.” Now I was really banging on the door.

  “But it can’t be—we came in this way.” Matt tried the knob for himself.

  I was about to say something when I shivered again and saw my breath come out in vapory puffs. How cold was it in here?

  My flashlight died. I hit it against my palm, but it didn’t come on. “I thought you said you put fresh batteries in here,” I said to Matt.

  “I did.” He grabbed his phone out of his pocket. “Hey, my phone’s not working.”

  I checked mine. It didn’t work, either. We were alone in an abandoned building that we couldn’t get out of, where the temperature had suddenly dropped, and where the only light came in through the windows in the doors.

  Except . . . it wasn’t the only light, because something was happening in the corridor behind us. The air was filling with a blue shimmer that got brighter as we watched, paralyzed.

  “April, what is that?”

  I was too scared to answer.

  The light started to come together in a shape—a human shape. In a few seconds we were looking at (and through) a tall, thin man in a suit.

  It was Dr. Cole Addison.

  I gasped, and blurted
out, “But you’re dead—!”

  Beside me, Matt half-whispered, “Do you believe in ghosts now?”

  The figure of Dr. Cole Addison floated six feet away, looking at us. Then the mouth began to move, and I heard a voice that sounded like it was coming from the end of a tunnel and wasn’t quite matching up to the lip movements.

  “Your friend Benny is here.”

  Matt jerked forward, hefting his baseball bat. “Where?”

  Dr. Addison smiled, but it wasn’t friendly. “If you want to know that, you have to pass my test.”

  “Your test . . . ?” I remembered what I’d heard about how hard Cole Addison’s tests were.

  I asked, “What if your test isn’t fair?”

  “If you fail, you will remain here, with the other one.”