Go in, he thought—but he hesitated.
Because he remembered what had happened to him the last time he’d gone into a kudzu-covered building—admittedly, it had been fake kudzu, but it didn’t matter. The terror was still real.
It was 1977, before the kudzu had completely invaded, and the most exciting event all year had arrived: the church carnival. It was usually crappy—the same three tired, dilapidated kiddie rides: a helicopter contraption, a bug roller coaster, and a mini-train that chugged past grotesque dioramas of fairy tale characters (Little Miss Muffet’s spider scared the daylights out of him, mostly because of its red eyes and foaming mouth). But the year Will turned six was different: the buzz had been that the children’s corner was getting a new ride.
A haunted house.
His older sister, Cyn—who’d just turned thirteen and was cusping on all things forbidden—salivated for months. “Get all fired up, Will, ’cuz that spook house is gonna be the first thing we go on!”
But on that morning, Will stood, hesitating, in front of the towering, fake-kudzu-covered house that was Creepmore Manor. Owls, their yellow eyes bearing down on him, popped from the plants. A mummy strapped on a big spinning wheel wailed and moaned, and a moving mannequin dressed as a gypsy—a pretty woman that reminded him of his mom with her bundle of dark hair, ruby-red lips and glittering purple gown—shrieked and pointed at him. The owls hooted, the mummy spun faster and faster, the gypsy taunted him, and then, suddenly—
—a door above the Creepmore Manor sign flapped open and out thrust a pair of long, green, gnarled hands. “Come on in, kiddies! Hee hee hee hee hee!”
Will jumped. “I can’t, Cyn!”
“Can’t what, you big ol’ chicken?” She set her hands on her hips. She was wearing a Wonder Woman costume, because all the kids liked to dress up for the carnival. Will never participated; he didn’t see the need to pretend to be something he wasn’t. “Go in there? Come on, it’s the hottest thing!”
Will took a step back, feeling the candy apple edge up his throat. “No.”
“There’s nothing scary in it. It’s for kids, you know, and aren’t you bored of the same old stuff like me? I know you are. So, so bored. And if it doesn’t do good, this might be the only year they have it, you know.”
Two of the boys from his first-grade class—T.K. and Jimmy—skipped ahead. Actually, he hadn’t known Jimmy too well just then. He wouldn’t become Jimmy’s best friend until weeks later, when they collided in the movie theater, spilled both of their popcorn tubs—and pooled their money to get a replacement to share.
Well, the other boys were going. Will supposed he could, too.
Cyn grabbed his hand, tugged him to the ride entrance, and presented the man with six red paper tickets. They bounded up the platform, which felt like it was about to give way, and the carnie ushered them into a two-seated bright pink car. The front was the purple-striped, yellow-eyed face of the Cheshire Cat. Will didn’t like the teeth—they were fangs. He was sure, from the Lewis Carroll picture book he’d read, the Cheshire Cat didn’t have such big fangs. But they climbed in, and the car rolled forward and hooked a sharp right into the darkness.
A sneering, clown-faced bunny leapt from a panel in the side wall and startled the hell out of Will. He screamed and shut his eyes, and throughout the rest of the ride, he didn’t open them—not once—but the noises and the threats and the coarse laughter were enough to do the damage, and Will was sure his heart had stopped when, just before their car burst forth back into the light, a deep, throaty voice snarled, “I’ll never let you out of here!”
That voice echoed in his head for so many nights afterward. He’d wake up in his room, expecting to see whatever it was that had said it—he hadn’t seen it, but what had it been? A raccoon with a bloody face? An evil witch with a salivating grin? A troll with rotten teeth? Each time he woke screaming, he envisioned something different.
He vowed to never go anywhere under kudzu again.
Now, as he sat in front of Planket’s, he was in the grip of that fear. You’ve been in there hundreds of times, he thought.
But those occasions had been different: you remember, it was starting to get covered with the kudzu when you were in high school, but Mr. Planket was always out there whacking at it with a machete, cursing, to the point where if Mom was going to pull in there and she saw him, she’d change her mind and drive right by. “Such foul language,” she’d say. “It’s the kudzu, that’s what it does, cursin’ at it doesn’t make it better. Plants don’t respond to that kind of thing.”
Will knew that wasn’t true. He’d read a study on plants in one of his many science magazines. Some botanists filled two soundproof rooms with plants. In one room, they pumped classical music, and the plants grew toward it and flourished. In the other, they played acid rock, and the plants shied away from the speakers, some of them even shriveling and dying.
By the time Will was eighteen—two years before he roared out of town for good—the kudzu was harder to control. Some of the houses had succumbed, the abandoned ones in particular, like Mrs. O’Dell’s, which everybody joked was haunted anyway. He’d always felt that in those houses a certain evil lurked, like the place’s very walls would know what was in his soul, all of his wrongs, all of his mistakes—
Stop it, Will. Planket’s isn’t one of those houses. What’s wrong with you? Just go in, buy an Icee—and maybe somebody can shed more light on your sister’s accident. As was typical of everyone in town, Officer Marcus, who had called him about Cyn’s death, hadn’t been that forthcoming:
“Wilson. Wilson Hale.”
“That’s me.”
“Good.”
There had been a long silence.
“Who’s this?”
“This is Sheriff Daniel Marcus.”
Another long silence, and Will remembered feeling he hadn’t been sure how to react. Baltimore didn’t have a sheriff. It had cops, but not anyone who referred to himself as sheriff. “Uh . . . listen, if it’s about that parking ticket I got last week . . .”
“I’m in your hometown, Wilson.”
A pit of acid had opened up in his stomach then, because he had known something was wrong. He’d crossed his office, outside of which his secretary sat, typing away on her computer, and closed the door. “Yeah?”
“Sorry to have to tell you this, but your sister, Cyn . . . she’s been in an accident. She . . . passed away.”
Will had sunk into his chair and stared at the ashtray Cyn had sent him for Christmas—an unusual gift, considering he didn’t smoke. Suddenly it had hit him that he wasn’t that surprised by her death . . . a couple of years before Will had moved away, there had been something . . . not quite right about her. She’d started doing all sorts of strange things—burying her childhood teddy bear, painting the bathroom mirror black, making herself vomit—and her eyes had had a haunted look, like something else was in control. And then she’d just let herself, her looks, her body, everything . . . go.
At the tender age of twenty-four, she’d given up.
And she’d never left Wodeston.
“What kind of accident?”
“Car.”
Long silence.
“Did she hit someone, or did she just run off the road, or what?”
“Nope, no other vehicles involved.”
“Did someone check out the car?”
“Yup.”
“Did they find anything?”
Another long silence.
“Nope.”
That had been the extent of the conversation, but Will had known a chunk of his vacation time was about to disappear. There was no one to bury his sister but him—he’d have to go down and make the arrangements. And that house of his mother’s that Cyn had lived in needed to be cleaned out, fixed up, and sold—that was, if the kudzu hadn’t completely eaten it alive.
Now, he heard a door bang and saw someone emerge from around the back corner of Planket’s. A man in a ratty T-shirt
and mud-spattered jeans stopped and shielded a hand over his eyes, looking at Will. Then the man jerked—as though he’d been hit with several thousand volts of electricity—and bolted straight for Will’s car, wailing and waving his arms in the air.
Will panicked, rammed the stick into reverse and backed out. What the hell was that, he thought, heading out of town toward the direction of his sister’s. The farther he went, the houses and structures were more and more smothered by kudzu, to the point that he wasn’t even sure he’d be able to find his sister’s house, and if he did—
—if he did, would he want to go inside?
He shuddered.
He rounded a corner, startled by the back end of an inert, bright red hatchback thrust across the lane directly in front of him. He slammed on the brakes—
The last thing he remembered was the shock that went through his body as the cars collided.
~~**~~
The thing that brought Will back to consciousness was the blaring of the other car’s horn, which in the dream he’d been having was his sister, yelling. She’d opened her mouth, which was black as a pit with dark blue ink leaking from the corners, and out had come that horn sound.
He wasn’t sure how much time had passed; in Baltimore, he could tell from the change of the light, the way it fell between the buildings. But here, the sun—or lack thereof—was falling into the kudzu and being promptly, it seemed, swallowed.
He tried to move, and surprisingly, found that he could. He was sore, but didn’t think anything was broken. Then he realized if the car horn was going off, it meant someone had still been inside the car when he’d crashed—and the person’s head was now probably slumped against the steering wheel. He didn’t remember hearing the horn before the collision.
Suddenly panicked, he reached for the door handle and tugged.
It wouldn’t budge.
He tried again. Nothing.
He tried to peer out the window, which miraculously hadn’t broken, but couldn’t see if the door was jammed. He unsnapped the seatbelt, smashed down the airbag—his face burned, but he was too panicked about thinking he’d just killed someone who might’ve possibly been alive to worry about it—grabbed the door handle and thrust his shoulder into the car’s driver-side door—
It popped, creeled, and came open.
He felt dizzy, so he sat for a minute. The sky was a strange color, not quite blue, not quite gray, and a filmy haze hovered above the road.
He stepped from the car and made his way over to the other vehicle. It had apparently spun and drifted not sideways into the gutter, but head-on; the hood was wedged into a telephone pole so covered with kudzu it looked like a giant sloth Will had seen in one of his dinosaur books when he was a kid. He’d been terrified of that prehistoric sloth: what if he was in the woods and he ran across one? “They’re vegetarians,” his mom had said. “No reason for you to be afraid of a vegetarian—it’s not going to eat you. You really shouldn’t run your life based on fear. Especially of something that died years ago.”
Someone was slumped against the steering wheel, all right.
He wondered if he should call someone. Don’t move the victim, he thought, call 911, but as he circled around to the driver’s side door he was certain he’d seen her someplace—
—she had dark hair.
Like his sister Cyn.
“Uh, hello?” He crept forward.
The horn stopped and the woman sat upright, screamed, then shouted, “Let me go, dammit!” She panted, looking at him.
He took two steps back.
“Your car—you were in the middle of the road, and I—I was coming around the corner, and I hit you.”
A rivulet of blood ran from her nostril. “I . . .” she glanced around, confused, then out at the trees, and screamed again. Then she was still, resting her head against the seat.
“You . . . you feeling okay? I have a cell—”
“No!” The woman was suddenly animated again; Will noticed her eyes were a strange shade. They weren’t quite brown; they weren’t quite blue. “No, no, don’t do that!” She reached for the door handle and began thrusting her shoulder against the door. “Get out. I have to get out—”
“Whoa, whoa, stop!” Will came up fast on the door. “Stop. You’re going to hurt yourself. Now your whole front end’s off its block, so the door’s not going to open. See?” He pointed to the part where the driver’s side door met the hood.
She was still panting.
“See?”
Cautiously, she reached for her seatbelt, unfastened it, and peered out her window at where he was pointing.
“I can get you out through your window.”
Her expression softened, her breathing slowed, and he thought he saw her smile. “Really?”
“Really.”
“You . . .” she glanced over her right shoulder. “You have a car.”
“Well, I do but . . .” He shrugged. “I hit you, and my whole front end looks about as bad as yours. Doubt we’ll be going anywhere in it. And anyway, we should both get checked out. I’ll call 911—”
“No, don’t. Please don’t.”
“I think—”
“Don’t call anyone!” She burst into tears. “Don’t call anyone.”
“Okay!” Will held his hands up. “Okay, okay. I won’t. But you’re bleeding.”
Her expression changed again. He watched her look down at her blouse, a white and pink-flowered baby doll, and she plucked at the smocking, touching the blood. She leaned into the rearview mirror and checked her reflection, lifting her hair, touching the cut on her right cheek. “It’s not so bad. I don’t live far from here. Can you walk me home?”
Will hesitated. Something didn’t feel right.
“Please . . . I don’t live far at all.”
The low-lying mist on the road thickened; the kudzu around them seemed to move. Will was suddenly aware that another car could come around the corner at any moment and slam into both of them.
“Okay.”
He saw her take a deep breath.
“Now, what you’re going to want to do . . .”
But the girl grabbed the Jesus handle to her left side and pulled herself through the window with almost no effort, landing on her tan spike heels and nearly keeling over. He reached out to steady her.
She stood for a second, teetered a little, then straightened.
“You okay? I mean, to walk? Any pain anyplace?”
“I think,” she said. “I think I’m . . . I’m all right. My head’s sore.”
They stood looking at each other, and Will felt strangely drawn to her. A light scent surrounded her, too, like . . . hot honey and . . . strawberries. “Stay here a minute.” He went back to his car and forced the passenger door open, pulling out a first-aid kit. “I got some stuff in here, we can clean up that blood a little bit—”
She took a step back. “No, no. Just leave it. Really, it’s fine. My parents’ house isn’t far from here.”
Will was puzzled.
“Well, let’s at least call . . . what’s his name? Officer Marcus, or something.”
“No! No, don’t call him.”
“Well, someone’s going to find your car sooner or later. Mine, too.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “Let’s wait until we get to my parents’ house. We can call from there and everything’ll be fine.” She stiffened again, looking nervously over her left shoulder.
“What is it?”
“Nothing, I just . . . thought I heard something.”
He looked around at the road. “Yeah, well . . . I have to admit, this place sure is a lot creepier than I remember.”
She eyed him. “You don’t live here.”
“Used to.” He nodded at her shoes. “You really shouldn’t walk in those things; you’ve been through enough.”
She shook her head. “I’ll be fine.” She pointed back in the direction from which he’d come around the corner, back toward town. “My house
is that way.”
He looked up at the sky again. “You think we’ll get there before dark?”
She nodded. “Yeah, it’s only about a mile.”
They started the trek, neither of them speaking. Will marveled at the quiet for a while, and then, as though his head had cleared, he remembered what he was doing there. And with dread: What would he have to do to get the car fixed, and what about Cyn? She was in the town morgue, and Wodeston didn’t even have a funeral home, but it did have that tiny cemetery—the cemetery they’d all played in as kids.
It had seemed so far away back then, death, something that couldn’t possibly happen to them. Funny—Cyn had been spooked about playing among the tombstones, whereas it hadn’t bothered him at all. “It’s all out in the daylight,” he’d told her once. “It’s not like they bury you in a cave.”
Of course, that was before he was old enough to understand that the stones marked a body. For some reason, he’d never thought a cemetery was anything but a bunch of stones with names on them.
“I’m Helene.”
He was startled, and stopped.
She wasn’t next to him.
He turned. She was standing, apparently, where she’d announced it.
“Oh, I’m . . . Will.”
She nodded, and came up to meet him again. “So, what are you doing here, Will?”
“I’m here for . . . well . . . my sister, actually. She died . . . uh . . . a few days ago.”
He’d taken a few more steps before he realized she’d stopped again. When he turned to look at her, she had a worried look on her face, a pout on her lips.
“You’re Cyn’s brother?”
He was surprised—and more surprised that he was surprised. It was a small town. His sister had never left. There was probably a death here once a year, and everyone would know about it. It made sense.
“Yeah. Did you know—I mean, you know of her, but did you know her?”
She looked down at her feet. “I did, yes.”
“I mean, were you friends, or—”
Helene started walking again, passing him. “Let’s not talk about this right now.”
“Wait!” Will ran to catch up with her; he gripped her arm, and she screamed when he grabbed it.
The Shadows Behind Page 13