Those Most Apt to Crash: A Halloween Story - Part 2

[Begin with Part 1]

            “Okay, Kara. Now, when I first heard the story, it came from those boys. They said the twin girls’ grandma died, and they wanted to talk to her. So they got their hands on a Ouija board and tried to talk to her—do you know how those work?”

            “Yes, I know what a Ouija board is. You’re not supposed to use them because you never know who you’re really talking to.”

            “Well, that’s just the problem they had. The boys said those two girls conjured a demon, and at one point it actually showed up. They were running their hands over the board, getting answers from somebody they thought was their grandma. The whole time they were getting tricked into reciting some incantation that let this hideous monster escape from wherever he came from.”

            “What’s an incantation?”

            “It’s like a prayer or a magic spell. Like if you say the wrong words, you can curse someone or call for some supernatural being to appear. And that’s what they said happened. They followed the demon’s instructions on how to release him and then he was able to come right into the basement. The girls of course were terrified and ran from it. That’s why they ran up here. That’s why this place is still standing here empty. Because apparently the girls opened some kind of portal, so demons can come and go through the basement whenever they want.”

            “Crystal, you said the story wasn’t scary!”

            “Just listen. That was the story I heard from that group of boys a couple years ago. Then just a few weeks back I talked to Mike and the other guys down the street. He said he heard the story from his older brother’s friend. And here’s the kicker, he never heard anything about a Ouija board. He said he never heard anything about the girls’ grandmother dying either.”

            “So the story’s not true at all?”

            “Oh, Mike told me a completely different story. He said one of the twin girls started acting really strange, like waking up screaming in the middle of the night and tearing her clothes off in school, crazy stuff like that. So the parents called a priest to perform an exorcism—that’s when you cast an evil spirit out of someone’s body.”

            “I know what an exorcism is.”

            “Guess where the priest took the girl for the ritual. That’s right, the basement. Things got really intense in there, and the girl’s sister heard her screaming through the door. She thought they must be hurting the girl because it sounded so bad. Like they were torturing her. So when things got quiet for a second, the girl burst in, grabbed her sister by the arm, and ran out with her. They ran all the way up here, and, well…” Crystal turns and gestures toward the window. “According to this story, the priest succeeded in casting the evil spirit out of the girl before the sister rushed in and took her away. And some people say it’s still here. Ooh-whoo-oo.” She holds up her hands, wiggling her fingers around the device she’s holding, splashing the mess of light over the floor and windows.

            Kara, frightened and frustrated, squints her eyes accusingly at her sister. “How do you know that story isn’t true? How do you know they’re not both true?”

            “Why? Are you scared of the demon—the two demons that hang out in this place?”

            “Crystal, you said the stories weren’t scary. And, no, I’m not scared. I’m just mad because the stories aren’t like what you said.”

            “Keep listening then. It gets better. About a week ago, I went to Mom and asked her what happened in this house. And the story she told me didn’t have any dead grandmothers or demons or possessed girls at all.”

            “What story did she tell you?”

            “She says this house was originally built a couple decades earlier than most people think. It’s just been renovated a few times. The story she heard growing up was about teenagers, not little girls, and one of them got pregnant. This was back when everyone freaked out anytime a girl got pregnant before she was married, and abortion was illegal. You know what an abortion is, right? That’s when you end a pregnancy, so it’s basically killing the baby. Now, some people say the baby can’t feel anything yet. But some people say it’s just murder. Anyway, it was illegal back then, but now it’s not. Back then, you had to find a doctor who would do it in secret. Basically, if you just went on and had the baby your life was ruined because no one would want to marry you. And if you put the baby up for adoption, everyone would still know you’d been pregnant, so it wouldn’t matter.”

            Kara understands, dimly. Babies need dads. If there is no dad, you can’t have a baby. But didn’t there have to be a dad for her to get pregnant? Where did that guy go? Why didn’t the girl’s parents make him marry her? Maybe he just refused.

            Crystal continues. “So the girl’s parents find a doctor who will do a secret abortion. Guess where he does it. Here’s the thing, though. The doctor didn’t even put the girl to sleep first. So when he starts, she starts screaming bloody murder. Once again, who shows up to save her? You guessed it. Her sister bursts through the door, grabs her by the arm, and runs with her up here. The doctor is trying to get the girl back downstairs so he can finish doing whatever he was doing. So it’s out the window. What Mom heard was that the girl who fell and died was the one who was pregnant, and she’s the one who’s haunting the house till this day. That’s why people kept moving in and then moving out. They all found out it was haunted. That was until about eight years ago, when people just stopped buying the place and no one has lived here since.”

            “Mom said this story is true?”

            “No, she never said it was true. She just said it’s the story she heard growing up.”

            “Do you think that story is true? Which one do you think is right? Maybe they all are?”

            “Hang on a second. You see, after asking Mom what she knew about this place, I went to Dad. He said he’d heard a ghost story about this place growing up too. The story he heard is about an evil dad who took his twin daughters into that room in the basement and did gross stuff with them he shouldn’t be doing. Sexual stuff. One day, the girls put up a fight, and they managed to get past their dad. They ran out the door and up the stairs to where we are now. Or was it that one of the girls came back to rescue the other? I can’t remember. Anyway, the dad chased them, and so when they got up here, they had to go out the window. One of them died, just like you heard, and the other escaped but walked with a cane the rest of her life. In this version too it’s the girl who died whose ghost haunts this place. But then it’s the same as in Mom’s story where a bunch of people move in and out over the years because it’s haunted.”

            “That’s a horrible story. They’re all horrible stories. I don’t understand. Did they all happen? That would make this place just plain evil. Let’s just get out of here and talk at home. Please.”

            “Don’t you see, Kara? This place isn’t evil. It’s just an abandoned house that looks creepy because it’s out here in the middle of nowhere. For some reason, it’s sat here empty a long time, and people started telling stories about it. Before long, no one could tell if the stories were supposed to be true or not.”

            “But why would they make up stories? Why would they make up stories like that?”

            “That’s what I asked Dad. You know what he said? Stories start out simple. Like maybe one of the girls really did fall, and maybe the family that lived here really did have to move out. But then everyone who tells the story changes it a little, because they want to impress people—like your friend Gloria. Everyone changes it just a little bit, so they don’t feel like they’re lying. But as the story goes from person to person, year after year, it can change into something crazy. Pretty soon, people have different versions to choose from. They may hear one of the other versions of the story, but then just forget it because it doesn’t mean much to them. But if it does mean something to them, then they’ll start believing. He said Mom is a feminist. And abortion is a big deal to feminists, so that’s the story she likes. If you’re Catholic, you like the story about the exorcised demon. Do you see how it works?”

            “But I don’t like any of the stories.”

            “That’s just it. People look at this empty house, and they fill it with what scares them. They tell the scary story that’s scariest to them. Because everyone agrees this place is scary. They just can’t agree on what’s scary about it. And the thing is, I’ve been afraid of this place since I was a little girl, before I heard any of the stories. And I don’t want to carry that fear around with me the rest of my life. Or maybe it’s like Dad said, I want to be more mature, more adult, so I need to conquer what I’m most afraid of. If I don’t, I’ll just get old and go through horrible stuff and not get anything I want in life. That’s why I had to come in here. And that’s why I’m going down to the basement now. It’s all made up anyway.”

             The sound of a car passing the end of the driveway draws both girls to the window. They see it safely off before turning back to the room, back to the dead animal swinging gently from the ceiling, back to the message, back to the emptiness where battling stories retreat in despair of ever achieving primacy. Crystal sighs, reaches over to squeeze Kara’s hand, and walks to the door. Kara takes a good long look around the room. Does she feel dread? If she does, what would that even mean? She tries to conjure an image of demons or little ghost twins. All she comes up with is a group of stupid boys trying to outdo each other by making things up. Still, when she hears Crystal’s footsteps nearing the top of the stairs, she’s halfway down the hall before deciding to take a step.

            On her way down the stairs, Crystal stops and cranes to ask, “Are you going into the basement with me?” Kara thinks she will. Then she thinks she won’t. Crystal says, “You don’t have come in. You can wait outside the door. I only want to go in long enough to get a good look at whatever’s in there. It won’t take more than a minute. Then we get our butts back to our bikes and ride home before Dad gets there.”

            They continue down the steps in silence. Kara still doesn’t know if she’ll go in with her sister. Maybe the stories aren’t true. But it’s so dark. She wishes she’d taken the time to find another flashlight for herself before leaving the garage. Does she really need to go in there? Is there anything worthwhile she could take from the room, like something she could use against Gloria? Maybe, but then Crystal will let her know. Yes, that’s the idea. She’ll wait outside until Crystal has checked it out, and then maybe she’ll go in herself.

            “You go in and check, and then I’ll come in. Okay?”

            “Yeah, that’s what I’ll do.”

            They stop on the ground floor landing to look over at the living room and the boarded entryway. Kara has an impulse to run to the door and rush home. She’s got so much to think about for one thing. Her journey seems complete in that she’s already learned enough for one night. Going any farther feels like tempting fate.

            “Okay,” Crystal says, turning the flashlight back onto the descending stairs. “Here we go.” Kara knows she’s scared but forcing herself to go down one step after the other regardless. The flashlight shines on a small exposed concrete area at the bottom of the stairs and a door a few feet beyond, a perfect space for Kara to wait while Crystal takes an initial look in the main room.

            “Nothing ever happened here,” Crystal mutters, mostly to herself. “It’s just some stairs and a basement, nothing to be afraid of.”

            When Crystal steps onto the concrete, stained dark gray by patches of moisture, she turns back to see Kara hesitating a few steps up. “Is that all the farther you want to go?”

            “No, I’ll come down.”

            Crystal turns back to the door. Kara watches her shoulders rise theatrically as she gulps down a giant breath. Then she closes her eyes tight. When she opens them, Crystal is gone. The light folds and pinches out as the door seals shut. Alone, Kara is overcome with desperation to join her sister. She inches down the remaining steps in the darkness, slides her feet across the concrete, and gropes for the doorknob. Her hand drops abruptly back to her side when she hears Crystal scream.

            Kara stands rigid, staring at the door she can barely see. A moment passes before she hears her sister shout, “Kara, don’t come in here.”

            “Why did you scream? What’s in there?”

            “Just wait please. I need a minute. It’s fine. I’m safe.”

            Kara opens her mouth to protest but halts when she hears voices from upstairs. Then she hears stomping and scraping, someone pushing through the board covering the doorway from the porch. Stupidly, she first imagines it’s their parents. Then she remembers the animal carcass dangling from the ceiling on the second floor. What kind of person does that?

            “Crystal.”

            “I said wait a second.”

            “Crystal, someone’s here. Upstairs. I can hear them.”

            Laughter infused with exaggerated defiance, maybe a touch of cruelty, cascades down the darkened staircase. A guy’s voice is saying, “…telling you we were just here and whatever you heard at school it ain’t true.” A girl responds, “I know it isn’t true, but there could be a crazy bum in here for all we know.”

            Kara recognizes the voice. She turns back toward the door as the sound of more people squeezing through the front entrance reaches her ears. She and Crystal are trapped. There’s no way to escape. These are kids she knows from school. But she senses both she and her sister are in danger. She backs up against the door and listens intently.

            The guy’s voice booms, “Alright, First-timer, you get to do the honors of going upstairs first.”

            Now, a second girl’s voice responds, “Fine, but if any of you idiots tries to scare me somehow, I’m going to kick you in the balls.”

            Kara springs away from the door. Her body, which felt soft and exposed, shifts into a forwardly inclined attitude. The voice belongs to Gloria, and Kara heard one of the guys she’s with say this is her first time here. “Gotcha,” Kara whispers.

            “Don’t worry, Gloria,” says another guy’s voice. “I won’t let them pull anything, and I’ll be right behind you.”

            Kara can identify this voice too. The doorknob twists behind her. She turns to look at whatever may be emerging from the room her sister disappeared into but sees nothing through the darkness.

            “Kara,” Crystal whispers.

            “It’s Gloria,” Kara says. “And Nick is with her, and some other guys.”

            Kara stands there in the dark wondering what her sister will do. A plan starts forming in her own mind. They can let the newcomers all go upstairs after Gloria, and then they can run up the stairs and out the front door to their bikes. But what if they don’t all go upstairs? Maybe she and her sister can rush past them anyway.

            “Don’t tell them I’m down here,” Crystal says. “I have an idea. See if you can get them all in the ground-floor living room, away from the stairs.” Kara hears the door sealing and the latch sliding into its slot with a metallic knock. Astonished, she lets her hand shoot toward where she remembers the knob resides.

            “Hey, who’s down there?” The tiny space she occupies explodes into view in the abrupt jerking beam of a flashlight. “What in the world are you doing down there?” Kara doesn’t know this voice, and all she sees up the stairs is the yellow-white burst of the light pointed at her face. “Oh crap, you didn’t go in there, did you?”

            “No,” Kara says evenly. “I’m exploring. I was about to go in when I heard you guys coming in.”

            “You came here by yourself? And you were going in that room without a flashlight?”

            Before Kara can answer, he turns back to the living room to say, “You’ll never guess whose bike that was by the tree out front.”

            The bikes. Kara’s mind travels back to when she and her sister first rode up to the house. She’d been desperate to salvage her plan after realizing Gloria could have someone else read their message. Where did Crystal leave her bike? Searching her memory, she finds nothing but blankness. But hadn’t he, whoever he is, just said they only saw one bike? Briefly, she turns her head to see if the door is still closed. What can this idea of Crystal’s be?

            “Kara? Oh my God.” It’s Gloria. “You came here by yourself? Holy crap! Nice pajamas.”

            Now the guy says, “Why don’t you come up here with us? Gloria was about to go upstairs and check out the room where those two girls jumped out the window. It’s her first time here.”

            “Shut up Larry! I’ve been here before.”

            The sides of Kara’s lips slide slowly up over her gums and back across her molars. Her hand leaps up to cover her mouth. “Hey, would you get that light out of my face?” she says, disguising the gesture. “I’ll come up there and check out the upstairs with you guys.”

            “You weren’t really going in there by yourself?” Gloria asks, though it sounds more like an accusation. Kara can hear the shame in her voice and imagines red blotches blossoming beneath the clusters of brown freckles on her dollish cheeks. “And in your pajamas no less. That’s kind of a creepy thing to do, don’t you think?”

            Plagiarizing her sister, Kara says, “I’ve been afraid of this place since I was a little girl, and I don’t want to carry that fear around with me the rest of my life. So I’m here to check this place out and prove to myself there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

            Gloria laughs. “Well, aren’t you a brave little hero?”

            “Braver than you.”

            The older kid, Larry, backs away laughing. “Ooh, she’s got you there.”

            “Shut up, Larry. She’s here because this is a creepy place and she’s a creepy little girl. She’s probably playing with herself down there.”

            “I am not!”

            Gloria has never said anything outrightly mean to her before.

            “Give her a break, Gloria,” Nick says. And there he is at the top of the stairs, his complicated eyes severe in the shadows. He reaches up and pulls at Larry’s arm to redirect the flashlight. “You really came here by yourself? That’s hardcore. Why don’t you come up here and we’ll check out the upstairs first. Then, if you two are up for it, we’ll come back down to check out the basement.”

            Kara picks up from his suggestion that they don’t want her to go through the door. There must be something inside they don’t want her to see, the same thing Crystal saw that made her scream. But what is she supposed to do? She waits long enough to make sure Crystal isn’t going to say anything, and then she starts climbing back up the stairs.

            “So,” Gloria says, “you just decided to jump on your bike and ride out here to wander around in this dark house with no flashlight?”

            “I told you, I wanted to overcome my fear. So I forced myself to come in here. And I wanted to do it in the scariest way I could think of.”

            “That takes courage,” Nick says.

            “Well, that takes something,” Gloria says. “I’m not sure courage in the right word.”

            Larry chimes in, “It’s more courage than any of us had.”

            “Yeah,” Gloria says, “I’m not convinced. What were you really doing down there?”

            “I told you!”

            “You two shut up,” Larry says. “Gloria, you want to do the honors?” He stands aside, his mouth deranged by a mocking, conspicuously half-concealed grin, as he lifts his hand palm out to usher her into the hallway at the top of the stairs.

            Kara’s lips pull back again, but this time it’s dark enough she doesn’t have to hide it. Gloria inches toward the room at the end of the hall. Kara knows what’s in store for her. The one-sidedness of the knowledge fills her with amusement and pride. But what’s all this about playing with herself? What’s she saying exactly? Kara understands just well enough to be embarrassed. How can she respond when Gloria says it again? She has an idea.

            “Hey, Gloria, what’s taking you so long?” she says. “Are you playing with yourself over there?”

            Larry convulses with laughter, startling Kara. Even Nick can’t resist some shoulder-bouncing chuckles he tries to muffle.

            Gloria whips around and glares, her eyes full of hate. “If you’re so brave, what are you doing back there with the guys protecting you?”

            Kara steps casually out from behind Larry and strides purposefully, fearlessly, down the hall, breezes past Gloria, who now looks more stricken than angry, steps into the room, and turns with her arms out to her sides, presenting herself undeterred, unharmed, triumphant. Her victory is overshadowed by her noticing that Larry and Nick are exchanging a troubled looked in the half shadow behind the flashlight.

            Gloria storms down the hall and springs into the room. She seizes up when her gaze finally reaches the dangling animal. “Oh gross! What the hell is that? Oh my God. Did you guys hang that thing up there?”

            Nick and Larry are making their way down the hall, followed by another guy and another girl. “Well, in point of fact, we didn’t hang it there,” Larry says. “But we did think you might get a kick out of finding it. Too bad creepy pajama girl here had to ruin the surprise.”

            “Creepy pajama girl!” Gloria repeats before leaning back and crowing with laughter. “That’s why you weren’t scared to come in here. You were probably in here playing with yourself before you went downstairs.”

            Kara turns toward Nick, who laughs along with the others. She closes her eyes to think hard about how to respond, but her insides are turning liquid and oozing into heavy puddles weighing down her chin, her shoulders, her belly. Her knees feel like they’re about to give out. Finally, she manages to disgorge the words, “I wasn’t playing with myself. I came up here to conquer my fear. I bet none of you are brave enough to come in here alone.”

            Larry says, “Yeah, that’s because we’re not creepy little perverts who wander around the dark in our pajamas.”

            Gloria bludgeons Kara with her guffaws, hurling them at her, trying to beat her down with them. “That’s right. And your sister is a creepy little pervert too,” she says.

            “My sister is braver and smarter and… and just better than any of you.” She’s never hated her own words so much, never felt their inadequacy with such abject shame. Gloria continues with her fake laugh, barely putting any effort into making it sound genuine.

            Nick breaks in to say, “Hey, maybe we should get out of here. It might be a better idea to just come back another night.” He lifts his eyebrows at Larry as he tilts his head toward Kara, who’s too dejected to wonder what the gesture could mean.

            Larry sighs and runs his left hand over his stubbled scalp before turning toward the wall to shout, “Shit!”, startling Kara. “You know what?” he says. “No, we’re not going to leave, but we’re going to send creepy pjs here on her way. Time to go home, creepy little girl.”

            “I’m not going home if I don’t want to,” Kara says, realizing that’s exactly what she’d most like to do. But there’s no way she’s going to let these guys find her sister downstairs and start harassing her too. “You’re just mad because you wanted to scare your girlfriend and now you can’t.”

            Larry whips around and grabs Kara by the top of her arm. “Oh, you don’t think I can be scary just because you decided to come here to play with yourself tonight?”

            Nick reaches over to clutch Larry’s other arm, saying, “Hey man, take it easy. She’s just a kid.”

            “Oh, I’m not going to hurt her. But you can be damn sure I’m about to escort her out. Now listen, Kara. We wanted to show this place to Gloria, and we were going to initiate her into our group. Nothing personal, but our initiation is secret, and you’re already disrupting it. So what we’re going to do is we’re all going to go downstairs and see that you get nice and safe to your bike.” He dons an exaggerated, ghoulish smile. “Then you can get the hell out of here and go home. I’m guessing your parents don’t know you’re out here. I bet they’d be grateful if I told them.”

            Kara’s only concern now is figuring out how to clear a path for Crystal to escape. Her intuition tells her these kids pose a real danger. They’ll be mad when they find her sister, just like they’re mad at Kara right now, only worse. And this Larry kid is a total jerk. He’s the one who seems the most determined to scare Gloria like they planned. Now that he’s already furious because she’s ruined the first phase of his plan, there’s no telling what he’ll do if Crystal ruins the next. The only way out is through the front door. Maybe there’s another door in the back, but it’s probably boarded up more securely. Kara’s failure to come up with a solution frustrates her, and her frustration eats away at her patience with Larry.

            Swinging her arm up over her head to break his grip, she says, “I bet my mom and dad wouldn’t be too grateful if I told them about you grabbing me, you jerk.” She rubs her arm, even though it doesn’t hurt. “But, fine, I’ll go home. I don’t want to know what your stupid secret club does anyway. I just think you all should check out the tree outside before you go down to the basement.”

            “Why?” Nick asks. “We already saw the tree. Is there something we didn’t see?”

            “It’s just what you should do. The girls who lived here, they ran up to this room after what happened to them in the basement. Then they jumped from these windows into the tree. So now that you’ve checked out this room, you should go look at the tree next. And then you can go downstairs.”

            “Uck,” Gloria says, flaring her arms out to her sides. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why are we listening to creepy pajama girl anyway?” She flounces out of the room. Nick shakes his head and turns to follow her. The other two kids make their way down the hall after them.

            “Well, congratulations,” Larry says to Kara. “You’ve ruined our fun for the night. But maybe we can still have a little.”

            “I wasn’t trying to ruin anything. If you guys want to scare Gloria, it makes no difference to me.” Kara says this as she steps in front of Larry to leave the room. She’s hoping to get to the ground floor before the rest of them so she can direct them all outside somehow. “But I’m telling you, check out the tree. It’s probably better than whatever’s in the basement.”

            Larry lifts his hand. He leaves his fingers unclenched and barely touches her shoulder, but his arm makes a barrier she would have to push past. “What’s out by the tree, Kara?”

            Cornered, Kara looks to the door and then back toward the windows. Maybe she could jump out, like she imagined doing earlier, and they’d chase her out of the house. But just then Gloria’s voice reverberates down the hall. “Hey, Larry, come on. We need the flashlight.”

            As frightened and desperate as Kara is, the thrill of Gloria’s own failure of courage breaks through.

            “I’m coming,” he yells, before turning back to Kara. “Let’s go pajama girl.”

            She walks to the door and turns back. Larry gestures for her to continue down the hall. He follows close behind her until they reach the stairwell, where he steps around and squeezes past the other kids to light the way down. When he reaches the landing on the ground floor, he turns around and shines the flashlight in Kara’s face. “You know what?” he says. “Let’s get her out of here. Seth, would you make sure she gets on her bike? We’re going to take Gloria down to the basement, and then we’ll see if there’s really anything out by the tree.”

            Kara tries to look past Larry to the basement, wondering if Crystal has heard. Is she really in danger? If they get mad enough, will they hurt her? Kara decides she won’t take that risk. There’s no way Crystal would let them harm her, so she can’t even give them the chance to harm Crystal. Larry shining the light in her eyes infuriates her—and gives her an idea. Before she has a chance to envision it through to the end, she’s putting her plan into action. Roughly jostling past Gloria and Nick, she springs down the stairs and snatches the flashlight out of Larry’s hand. Enraged voices fill the house as Kara bolts toward the door. Already she knows she’s made a calamitous mistake. There won’t be time to pull back the board covering the doorway. Sure enough, as she slows to reach for the edge, a body crashes against her, enormous, its powerful arms wrapping around her shoulders and chest. Larry has her.

            “Nice try you little bitch.”

            One of his hands works its way down her arm and pries the flashlight out of her hand. With one side free, she turns to see the other four kids rushing into the living room. She’s done it. But how can she let Crystal know? She lifts her right foot to stomp on the floorboards, but Larry whips her around by her other arm, sending her down on all fours.

            Nick steps forward. “You got the flashlight. Just let her go home man.”

            Kara twists to see Larry’s chest heaving. He’s gripping the flashlight in his right hand. His left is squeezed into a fist.

            “I can’t wait to get to school tomorrow,” he says with a clenched jaw, “so we can tell everyone how we found creepy pajama girl here playing with herself in the creepiest place in town.”

            Kara, convinced he’s about to kick her or jump on top of her, turns and crabwalks toward the wall. “Get away from me! Or I’ll tell everyone how you were trying to scare Gloria away so you could have your boyfriend Nick all to yourself.”

            The words come out of her mouth, but all she grasps of their meaning is that they’re insulting. Seth and the other girl explode with laughter. Larry steps toward her, raising his right hand over his head, the hand with the flashlight. Kara notices two things simultaneously: Nick pushing on Gloria’s shoulder so he can step around her to intercept Larry, and Larry halting mid-lunge, catching himself. She knows instantly that she and her sister are in no real danger—no physical danger anyway. But before she can adjust to this assurance, a full-throated shriek fills the room.

            In the half second it takes Kara to guess it’s her sister screaming, she releases a squirt of pee. She brings her knees together and scrambles to her feet, not wanting anyone to see a wet spot. Startled shouts and whimpers reach her ears, but she doesn’t see whose mouths they come from. Now come footsteps resounding angrily as they storm up the stairs from the basement. Larry manages to direct the light onto the landing just as a blood-slicked mass dashes across the framed doorway. More whimpers and screams echo through the bare room as everyone backs away from the stairwell—everyone but Kara, who steps forward. Was that Crystal? If it wasn’t, whatever it was must’ve hurt her. Hurt her bad.

            The kids all stand frozen in silence as the stomping reaches the top of the stairs and continues down the hall. Kara looks at the faces surrounding her, all the flashing eyes pointing up at the ceiling, and she thinks now is the time to hurry away and find her sister. But her feet are stuck in place.

            They hear a tinkling crunch, glass breaking. Then they hear the clacking and crackling of branches, someone leaping into the tree from the window, followed by the sickening thud of a heavy weight landing on the ground in front of the house. Kara is the first at the window, the first to see the obscene mess of a body lying a short distance from the base of the tree. Her mouth falls open to release a sound between a retch and a grunt. Bodies are churning all around her as the light jumps and swings erratically. She doesn’t look at the others. They’re speaking, shouting. She doesn’t hear the words. She hears creaking and snapping as hands grip the board covering the front entrance by the edges to work it free of the nails. Finally, she turns, desperate to get to her sister, if that is her sister, and pursues the others onto the porch. The second her foot crosses the threshold she hears the bone rattle of clattering branches high in the tree again. They all rush out to see a second blood-spattered body suspended over them. Only this one is still moving. This one, human in shape, is working its way toward the thicker branches closer to the trunk. Then it stops, turns to face the cluster of crazed kids, thrusts its head forward and catapults its banshee roar at their quivering silhouettes. Kara stands paralyzed on the porch as the bodies around her scatter and retreat across the lawn.

            The older kids are already running alongside and springing onto their bikes when the blood-drenched girl in the tree starts climbing down. Kara backs her way under the eaves, eying her own bike. She’s completely alone now to face whatever this is. But she won’t leave Crystal. She can’t. Her gaze drops from the tree to the lump on the ground. She turns and looks into the black of the gaping doorway. Should she rush downstairs first? Or go examine whatever that is that fell out of the tree? How can she with the demented ape still in the branches?

            Or is that Crystal up there? Kara steps forward again and leans down to look up from under the eaves. “Crystal?” she murmurs, too quiet to be heard. “Crystal,” she says louder, “is that you?”

            Laughter, Crystal’s laughter, rings out. Then scraping, snapping, an inrush of air through familiar teeth, a breathy grunt, all mingle in a desperate moment, forcing Kara to smash her eyelids together and hold her breath. She hears the sickening collision with the ground as two hollow beats in rapid succession—feet then upper body.

            “Crystal!” she shouts, leaping over the steps.

            A hiss, a growl, more laughter—Kara still can’t tell if she’s running toward the demon who will slash, maul, and dismember her. She runs nonetheless. And she sees it really is Crystal. And she really is covered in blood, or something that looks like blood.

            “Are you hurt?”

            “I hurt my damn foot!”

            “But you’re bleeding all over. You’re covered in blood.”

            “It’s not my blood. It’s his.” She points to the mass that fell from the tree.

            Kara turns and stares. “What is it? Oh God, it smells.”

            “It’s a goat. Those sick jerks cut it up, pulled its skin back to make it look gross and scary. They had it lying in the middle of a pentagram to make it look like someone sacrificed it to the devil.”

            “They killed a goat?”

            “Who knows if they’re the ones that killed it? But they must’ve been the ones who carved it up.” Crystal, wincing, rocks on her butt as she squeezes her foot with both hands. “I think it’s broken.”

            “Crystal,” Kara says tearing up, “you’ve got that goat’s blood all over you.”

            “I know damn it!”

            Kara backs away. How can she know this really isn’t a demon, one disguised as her sister? How can she know her sister isn’t possessed?

            “I’m sorry,” Crystal says. “This really hurts. I didn’t want to let the body and all the blood scare me. When I saw it, I screamed, and then I went and looked closer. I didn’t understand why it was there, why it was really there, until I heard those idiots talking. Then I figured it out. And I got mad. So I decided to scare the hell out of them. And I didn’t think they’d be scared of me in my pajamas. They were already teasing you about yours. I still wasn’t sure I could do it, but then I heard them getting rough with you. You know I’d never let them hurt you.”

            “They wouldn’t have hurt me, I don’t think.”

            “Tell that to him.” She points at the flayed goat.

            Kara finally goes up to her sister to help her to her feet. “Do you think you can pedal your bike?”

            “I don’t have much choice, do I?”

            Kara grabs Crystal’s wrist, ducks under her arm, and holds her up as she pogoes toward her bike.

            “My pajamas have blood on them now too. I think I might get sick.”

            “We’ll have to throw them away when we get home. Don’t worry about that now. Let’s just get out of here before they figure out what I did and come back.”

            “How do you know it was them who killed the goat and drew the devil symbol?”

            “Well, they seemed pretty damn eager to scare Gloria, don’t you think? And they were pretty damn mad at you just for being here and messing up their plan.”

            “You carried that thing all the way upstairs and threw it out the window?”

            “First, I threw it across the landing. Did you see that? It wasn’t easy. It’s heavy as hell.”

            “I can’t believe you did that.”

            As they round the corner of the porch to where Crystal leaned her bike earlier, Kara has a thought. “Hey, I think I want to go down in that basement too. I would’ve been way too scared to do what you did, but I think I need to conquer my fear, like you said. Or else I’ll get old and never get what I want and see horrible stuff along the way.”

            Crystal pulls her arm away and turns to face Kara, clasping her by the shoulders, using her for balance. “Listen to me.” They’re close enough for Kara to see the fire in her sister’s eyes. “We’re done with this place. Do you understand? I want you to promise me you’ll never come back here, alone or with anyone else.”

            Kara stares into her sister’s transformed face.

            “Promise me!”

            “Okay! I promise! But, Crystal, why can’t we come back? You said it was all made up.”

            Crystal releases her, takes two hops toward her bike, and then turns back. “Kara, I was standing there in the dark with that thing for a long time. I almost couldn’t stand it. I was shaking. I heard those boys talking, and that ditz Gloria, and I made my plan. But right after I heard the scuffle by the door above me, right before I just said to hell with it and picked the damn thing up, I heard something. I heard it clear as day.”

            “What, Crystal? What did you hear?”

            “I heard a little girl crying. And then I heard another little girl saying, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll never let him hurt you again.’”

***

More Halloween Stories

CANNONBALL: A HALLOWEEN STORY

JAX: A HALLOWEEN STORY

KEMOA: A HALLOWEEN STORY

TANGLE AND ROWDY: A HALLOWEEN STORY

Those Most Apt to Crash: A Halloween Story - Part 1

            Kara only discovers her bike is leaning after she rounds the bend and collides with a gust of cold air that easily seeps through her pajamas. The shock sends her juddering upright, her gaze lifting from the crumbling road before the lead tire into the night-blackened trees beyond. She braces against the chill before being distracted by the hulking silhouette of the house edging into view, its upstairs windows gazing back at her through a delta of inky black branches spilling skyward in thin rivulets carved into the yellow gray clouds. With her eyes involuntarily locked on their invisible cracked glass, she succumbs to a liquid slackening of her features and her limbs.

            The stories all the neighbor kids tell about this place typically end with some mysterious figure seen through these same windows, a sight to send even the bravest middle schooler scampering home. Kara sees nothing through the dark but the white wooden frames she knows from daylight visits to the end of the driveway are fading and flaking to a dull gray. She peers deeper. Rising from the seat and leaning over the handlebars, she barely notices her cold-stiffened skin bunching up around her eyes as the wind bites into her fingers. When she glimpses movement, she can’t tell if the shapes are real or something she’s imagining. Glaring with such intensity, she forgets to watch for the entrance to the driveway, until she’s moments from reaching it.

            Suddenly aware of her surroundings again, Kara feels her breath catch in her throat. Something is wrong. She pulls her eyes from the house to scan the road ahead. Crystal is coming up on the driveway, but she’s not slowing down. Kara watches as her sister stands up and makes a straining lurch to her left, forcing the pedal down with all her might before springing back to her right to start again. This graceless bobbing from side to side picks up momentum as the mottled white blur of her pajamas recedes into the gloom.

            She’s more mad than frightened. Crystal must be playing a joke on her. Still, determined as Kara is not to fall for it, she has no idea what to do. She thinks about turning into the driveway Crystal has already raced past and waiting defiantly at the end of it. Probably a better idea, though, to turn around and ride home.

            Yes, that’s what she should do.

            It’s decided.

            Kara passes the driveway, gathering speed, wondering what’s keeping her chasing after her sister. She wants to catch up to Crystal so she can ask her why she didn’t turn and ride up to the old spooky house like they planned. Because it isn’t a joke, as much as Kara wants it to be. The way Crystal lifted herself off the seat, driving one pedal down then the other, it tells Kara she saw something. Or heard something. She must have. Finally, she manages to take in enough air to shout, “Crystal, what are you doing?” The white of Crystal’s pajamas continues to fade. Kara lowers her head and drives down hard with one foot then the other.

            Far beyond the driveway that was supposed to mark their destination, they reach a slope that has them speeding up even more. Icy streaks of wetness stream across her cheeks and whimpers burble from her mouth even as she tells herself not to panic. The road is dark. It isn’t safe to be hurtling down the hill this fast. She keeps lifting and pushing with her feet as hard as she can. The only thing more distressing than the breakneck speed is the thought of watching the white blur ahead shrink to nothing. Now the tears are sailing toward her ears. Her mind roars with the thought, “You have to stop!” even as she strains to move faster, to keep her sister in view. The tension between thought and action fills her with a frenzied elation, like she’s breaking through some unacknowledged barrier into a new frontier of untrammeled chaos.

            They’re approaching the highway now. She won’t ride into traffic, Kara assures herself. She won’t try to cross. She can’t. Oh, what can she be thinking?

            Accepting she has no chance of catching up to her sister before she reaches the intersection, Kara keeps her head up and her eyes on the distant shape in the road. The wind splashes cold and loud over her wetted ears, but she knows if she stops she’ll hear the rushing traffic. Oh God, what if she wants to kill herself? What if this is how she’s doing it? Her elation reduces to panic. She pedals harder, as hard as she can. The road evens out. She’s losing speed. Crystal must be slowing down too.

            The bike jounces beneath her. Kara looks down for the pothole she’s ridden over as she desperately grips the handlebar, releasing a loud cry as she overcorrects in a vain search for her center of balance. She knows she’s about to crash. She squeezes shut her eyes. Moments later, she opens them to find herself still upright, still pursuing her sister. God, why is she doing this? Why won’t she just stop and tell me what happened? There’s the highway ahead now in full view, traffic lights and all. Kara has another terrifying thought. This is the road their dad takes on his way home from work, and he’ll have ended his shift by now. He’s going to see them both on their bikes in their pajamas when they should be home getting ready for bed.

            “Crystal!” she tries calling again.

            But where is she? Kara has been so distracted by the hole and the thought of their dad catching them she’s failed to notice the ghostly blur has vanished. “Crystal!” she cries again, putting her head down for one last burst. She thrusts her feet down against the pedals with all the strength she can muster, grunting pathetically, before looking up to see she’s coming up on the intersection. Crystal is nowhere to be seen. There are only the glinting colors of cars whooshing past, each bulldozing its own giant scoop of light over the pavement.

            She slows to a stop, her face contorting in preparation for a sob as she pants, snot blocking the flow of air into her nostrils. All she can do is stare ahead with wet, frantic eyes, as she’s too acutely bereft to resist taking in the horrific tragedy she knows she’s about to discover. The opposite side of the road is visible from where she stands on her toes with the bike between her legs. Where is it? Where did Crystal’s body fall?

            “Kara, get down here! Dad might be coming home right now.”

            She leaps away from her bike, letting it clang noisily to the asphalt. There’s her sister, crouched in the grassy trench running alongside the highway, her bike lying next to her. Kara has her arms around her sister’s neck before she hears, “Get your bike out of the road! Hurry up!” She drops her arms and springs back to her bike. Picking it up and turning back toward Crystal, she thinks of her mom’s habit of saying one of her kids “could be lying in a ditch on the side of the road for all I know.” Well, here is Crystal, not lying, but squatting in a ditch cut parallel to the highway, her darkening blond hair still pulled neatly back in a ponytail, her pajama legs tapering into the tops of her gym shoes.

            “Crystal, what are you doing? Why did you ride past the house? Dad’s going to see us here and we’re going to get in trouble.”

            “Just get down and be quiet for a second. I need to think.”

            “Think about what? I don’t understand what you’re doing. I was really scared. I thought maybe you were going to—”

            “I just needed to get away and think because I got really mad and I just… I just wanted to pedal as hard and as fast as I could. I don’t know why. That’s why I need a minute to think.”

            Kara hears her sister panting and notices her eyes are roving violently over the scene. “Okay,” she says, “but can we get away from the highway. I don’t think we should be this close and we need to get back home before Mom figures out we’re gone.”

            “I’m not stupid! I know we need to go home. Do you really want to go past that house again?”

            Kara opens her mouth but can’t think of a word to say. So Crystal really did see something when they rode past. She turns to look up and down the length of the highway. “Is there another way to get home?”

            “I don’t think so, but that’s the other reason I need to think.”

            The girls sit on their heels by their bikes, watching the cars and trucks stream past. Kara wants to ask more questions, but she knows Crystal doesn’t want to talk yet. Sometimes, Kara knows, you have to arrange your thoughts before you speak, and it’s annoying when someone keeps asking you questions before you know what to say.

            She can’t help turning now and looking at her sister from the side of her eye. Sure, thoughts get jumbled up, and it’s hard to figure out why you seem the way you do to someone else. But something else is going on with Crystal, something strange. Lately, it’s as if two Crystals were living in the same body. The first is the one Kara has always known. The other makes no sense. And old Crystal is always struggling to account for this new Crystal’s weird behavior. Kara figures it must be feelings, which are often confusing, at the bottom of this struggle. Yes, Crystal must be battling new feelings, wild ones, pushing and pulling her this way and that, as she stumbles, trips, and staggers to keep to some straightforward path ahead. Mom says it will happen to me too, Kara thinks, when I’m a teenager.

            “Okay, I’ve got it,” Crystal says. “There’s no other way back. We could go along the highway and take the next road, but we would end up going in a big circle and we wouldn’t be home for over an hour. So we have to go back along this road, back by the house. What we’ll do is cross to the opposite side of the street when we pass the driveway and go as fast as we can get these bikes to go.”

            “Crystal, did you see something when we passed before, something scary? Is that why you didn’t stop? Is that why you started pedaling faster?”

            Kara watches Crystal in the dim light cast by the headlights of a few passing cars. Her sister never bothers about her looks, so she has an unkempt, sporty appearance, with a habitual expression of mild impatience, like anyone she encounters is keeping her from some important task she would otherwise glide effortlessly toward completing. Now an edge of serious intensity tinged with bewilderment eclipses that natural ease of intention. Her eyes go blurry for a moment before she says, as if reading aloud in class, “No, I didn’t see anything. I just felt like I needed to go, to go as fast as I could.”

            “But why didn’t you stop like we planned? We were going to leave a message for Gloria, one she would never see. Remember? Because she wasn’t telling the truth about going in that house. Because she was too scared and we were going to prove it.”

            “I remember. It was my idea.”

            “Then why didn’t you stop?”

            “I just told you.”

            Crystal lifts her head to check the highway in the direction their dad will be coming from. Then she stands with a determined air and hoists her bike upright. “Come on,” she says walking at a tilt while gripping the handlebars. “We’ve had enough time to catch our breath.”

            Kara realizes she’s still breathing hard but thinks better of asking for more time. She lifts her own bike and hurries to keep up. But then, without deciding to, she stops. “Crystal!” she yells suddenly, almost angrily, surprising herself.

            Her sister stops and turns to face her. “What?”

            “I was really scared. Please don’t take off like that again. Please don’t leave me behind.”

            Crystal squints her eyes and presses her chin into her chest. She didn’t mean it. She didn’t want to leave Kara behind. Something just came over her. “Okay, Kara. You’re right. I never should’ve taken off without you. I promise I won’t do it again.”

            Kara opens her mouth to ask again why she did. Seeing Crystal turn around, swing her leg over the bike and raise herself up over the seat with the effort of thrusting herself onward, she decides she can ask again when they’re safe at home. She takes a few running paces alongside her own bike before leaping on.

            When they reach the hill, Kara is alarmed by the tiredness in her legs and the strain in her lungs. She stands to crank the post, hearing the teeth of the main gear grip the links of the chain. In her imagination, she jumbles the creak of steel against oily steel with the jagged ache on top of her thighs. Maybe muscles are like chains and gears. What makes them all go? How do they know when the right time is? Maybe one of Crystal’s chains has a jammed link that somehow made her need to go fast when she wanted to stop. Kara tries to feel herself forming the intention to drive her foot down before it starts its descending swoop. But all she’s aware of is the desire to move forward, after her sister, and the effortful churning of her legs, as if they somehow already know exactly what they must do. If there are chains inside her, she has no sense of them.

            Crystal, true to her word, maybe a little tired herself, takes to the hill at a medium pace. Through the darkness, Kara watches her head droop between her arms, bent at the elbows, as she leans forward to chug up the incline. No, Kara thinks, there can’t be chains or anything like that inside her sister. What’s going on under her skin and beneath her skull isn’t like some machine with tiny blocks and springs you could take apart to find out how it works. That’s the stuff that goes on in boys, which is why they like machines and trucks and tools. This is a different kind of mystery, more like what goes on in the woods when it’s dark and all the people are in their beds, a girlish type of mystery.

            Cranking her own way up the hill, Kara tries to keep her eyes on the trees to either side of the road. It’s a game she often plays to imagine all the hidden goings on in the forest surrounding their neighborhood, where no humans dwell. Even now, she thinks, if you look hard enough into the black spaces, you’ll be able to see strange movements, like you saw through those windows before you had to chase after Crystal. Yes, that kind of thing is probably much more like what’s going on with Crystal’s insides. Some shadowy figure is moving around, messing things up. You have to look close though. And even then you can’t be totally sure you saw it.

            Even though Crystal is pedaling at a more relaxed pace, Kara is frustrated to find she needs to work hard to keep up, especially since what she really wants is to ride up alongside her. What she definitely doesn’t want is to be this far back when they pass the house. Will Crystal slow down for her when they get close? But then they’d both have to speed up in another minute anyway. Kara’s own insides start to go shaky again as the distance to the house dwindles with each revolution of the main gear. Had Gloria, just one year older than Kara, two years younger than Crystal, really gone inside the house as she claimed? Sure, she opened her dark-lined eyes big and told everyone she’d been scared to death the whole time. But had she really gone? Or did she just want to tell everyone a story?

            Kara thinks back to that afternoon. Her sense of there being something off about Gloria’s story was too irritating. She had to speak up. “My dad says awful things happened to the girls who lived there, and there’s no point poking around that place now.” She knew she’d made a mistake as soon as the words left her mouth.

            “Oh, you should really listen to your dad, Kara. I’ve heard those stories and they’re not for small children. He’s right about the house too. There’s no reason to go anywhere near there. It’s just dirty inside, with lots of broken glass and things to trip on. It’s no place for kids.”

            “That’s not what I meant, Gloria. I could hear the stories too if I wanted. And I’m not afraid of glass or tripping.”

            “It’s okay, Kara. I only went myself because there were older kids going. I was scared the whole time. I didn’t mean you couldn’t go. I’m sure you would be fine. I’m just saying there’s no point, you know.”

            Kara pedals harder. Gloria talked to her like a baby. And she did it on purpose, in front of all their friends—well, in front of a couple of her friends. Kara wanted to say something witty, something that would make it plain to everyone what Gloria was doing, but without sounding too mean, without making them think she was mad. She remembers fantasizing about digging around for some of Gloria’s secrets. Then the next time she talked down to her, she would be ready to hit back. She might not even have to mention anything out loud, as long as Gloria knew that she knew. But when she told Crystal about what Gloria had done, her big sister came up with an even better idea.

            “That Gloria,” Crystal said as they sat on the couch that evening vacantly flipping through channels, “she gets under my skin.”

            Kara was surprised Crystal even knew who Gloria was. “Why does she get under your skin?” She couldn’t imagine her sister letting Gloria talk down to her.

            “So,” Crystal said, ignoring the question, “she was telling you and some other girls about how she went to that old house on Campbell Road. But you don’t think she actually went there?”

            “Well, I just don’t think it sounded like she did. She said stuff like, ‘It’s dirty.’ But she didn’t tell us anything interesting, you know? Maybe she did go and the place is just boring. But I don’t think she was there.”

            “You know what we could do?”

            That’s when Crystal hatched her scheme. Kara loved it. It was perfect. The only problem was when Crystal got to the driveway, instead of turning in, she kept going. She pedaled all the way to the highway as fast as she could. Now they’re topping the rise on their way back, and Kara knows they’ll be passing the house again soon. She leans forward to pedal harder, determined to catch up to Crystal before it’s time to sprint past the place again.

            She makes up the distance faster than she expected. Crystal is slowing down for her. Kara comes within ten feet of Crystal’s back tire at the same time the stand of trees hiding the house emerges from the gloom. Worried she may have used up the last of her energy, Kara stands up on the pedals, preparing for the sprint. To her astonishment, Crystal remains seated, pedaling almost idly. This is maddening. When she’s supposed to stop, she speeds up. When she’s supposed to speed up, she slows down. Kara gets closer, a vague reticence taking hold so that even though she’s desperate for answers, and even though she’s getting a little mad, she keeps her mouth shut. There’s no telling what that growing wildness inside Crystal will make her do next.

            Kara is so focused on her sister’s bizarre behavior she barely registers the approach of the driveway. When Crystal slows even more and turns onto the gravel, Kara is too dumbfounded to be scared—at first. Swerving in behind her sister, she casts a wary glance at the windows, which always seem to be glaring right back at her, before turning to Crystal and shouting in a whisper, “Did you change your mind? Are we going inside now?”

            Crystal coasts to a stop, leaning to post her right foot on the ground. Kara grips the break and softly skids to a halt beside her. “Listen Kara. I wasn’t forthcoming with you earlier.” She doesn’t whisper, but her voice is low.

            “Forthcoming? I don’t know what that means.”

            “It means there was something I wasn’t telling you.” Her shoulders rise and collapse as she releases a dramatic a sigh. “A couple days ago I saw Gloria talking to Nick.”

            Kara already understands. Crystal likes Nick. Not that she’s ever said she does. Kara can just sort of tell. She talks about him a lot, for one thing, often criticizing or complaining or making fun. Whenever she talks about him, Kara gets the sense that she’s putting too much effort into pretending to be casual. Her dismissiveness is a charade. Or not a charade but a mask. Kara only recognizes this in her sister because she herself likes a boy named Keith, but she’d be mortified if anyone knew about her crush—at least before Keith lets her know if he likes her in return. Kara feels compelled to commiserate but decides to keep silent in case Crystal is embarrassed.

            “I don’t even know what they were talking about,” Crystal says. “I just saw her put her hand on his forearm and then lean back and laugh and he seemed really happy and I hated it. I don’t know why. I don’t even like him. Well, I sort of like his eyes. They’re, like, complicated. But I never thought about going on dates with him or anything like that. It’s just—I don’t know—I thought he maybe liked me. And even though I don’t like him I liked him liking me. Does that even make sense? And Gloria is all frilly and tries to be all sexy and important. It drives me nuts.”

            Kara wants to say something reassuring, but she’s at a loss. She opens her mouth to tell Crystal Nick does like her, but then she’s not sure that’s what Crystal wants to hear. Does she want to hear that she’s pretty too, that she could maybe get more of Nick’s attention if she wore dresses and did up her hair like Gloria always does? Or would that make her mad? These new wild feelings are impossible to navigate around.

            Crystal turns to look at her. It’s easy enough for them to see each other’s outlines in the dark, but making out expressions is hard. Somehow, Crystal seems to see Kara is distressed. “It’s so stupid. I don’t even know why I’m telling you. I just want you to know I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m your big sister and it’s my job to look out for you. I shouldn’t have taken off and left you behind like that.”

            “Why did you?”

            “I got mad. When we rounded the bend, I saw the upstairs windows and I stared in as hard as I could. I thought I saw something move, like something swaying back and forth. But I kept looking and it was gone. Then I didn’t know if I’d seen anything at all. Maybe I imagined it. Maybe it was just a reflection, or something in my eye. I couldn’t see it. But then there was the driveway and I… and I…”

            “You didn’t want to turn in.”

            “I couldn’t, Kara. I was terrified.” She chokes back a sob. “And that made me so mad. It made me mad because I wanted to help you prove that Gloria was lying about going into the house. I wanted to embarrass her so Nick stops liking her. But I’m the embarrassing one. Plus, I wanted to go in because I don’t believe the stories. I think they’re stupid and made up. And there’s no point in being scared. But I couldn’t help it. It made me furious.”

            “It’s okay, Crystal. I won’t tell anyone what you just told me. I promise. What are we going to do now, though? Aren’t we going home?”

            “Even if you don’t tell anyone, I’ll still know. You’ll still know. And I can’t have you thinking your big sis is a fraidy cat. If you’re too scared to go inside, it’s okay. But I have to go. I’m going to do what we said we were going to do.”

            “Crystal, I thought I saw something too. It was just like you said. I looked hard and thought I saw it, but then I kept looking and it was gone. I don’t think it’s a good idea to go in there. Can’t we just go home?”

            “You can wait here if you need to, but I have to go.”

            “But why? I don’t want to wait out here by myself.”

            Crystal drops her head again. Then she lifts her gaze toward her sister. “Kara, I’ll ride home with you if you really want me to. I’ll have to come back though. If Dad is getting home, I’ll wait and sneak back out after he goes to bed. I’m going in that house tonight. I already decided.”

            Kara thinks she’s about to tell Crystal that she does want to be taken home first. Instead, she sits silent on her bike, listening to the breeze wend its way through the millionfold branches surrounding her and her sister. If Crystal takes her back home first, she’ll be out for at least another hour. She’ll be at much greater risk of getting caught. And she’ll be right back here, by herself.

            “What do you say? You up for an adventure?”

            Kara sits not saying anything, sinking in a vat of dread. She can’t go in that house. She can’t leave her sister here on her own. The tears well up in her eyes. A sob starts to bubble up from her throat.

            “Kara,” Crystal says, “I wouldn’t take you in there if I thought there was any real danger.”

            Kara covers her mouth with her hand until she’s able to swallow back her urge to cry. “Okay, Crystal, but if anything happens, we run back to our bikes and go home as fast as we can. I mean, if we see anything. Or hear anything. Or…”

            “Kara, it’ll be fine. I won’t let anything happen to you. Now, let’s get in there, write our message to Gloria, and get our butts back home before Mom notices we’re gone.”

            Kara closes her eyes and holds her breath for three beats before saying, “Okay, let’s go, but don’t go anywhere without me. I’m really scared.”

            They both push off with their planted foot and continue their ride up the gravel drive. Kara keeps her eyes on the space in front of her tire. A strange feeling of weightlessness and warmth, like soda left in a hot car, flows out along her arms and legs. It may be that every joint in her body is about to lock up, causing her to topple like a block of wood onto the ground. It may also be that if the situation calls for it, she’ll be able to jump ten feet in the air and remain hovering there until she needs to come back to earth.

            Kara’s pulse throbbing in her ears brings her attention to her tingling lobes and the dry hollow crunch of her tires pinching the gravel, the drawn-out owlish querying of the wind, and the creaking and clacking of the cold-hardened branches. The air is heavy, despite the cold, and smells of grass and asphalt and wet dirt. She tells herself it’s just rocks and trees and mud on a cold spring night. It doesn’t have to be scary just because it’s nighttime. You’ve got to be brave for Crystal. Whatever is going on with her, you don’t need to understand to know she needs your help right now. Plus, you’ll be able to go back to school tomorrow and tell everyone you were here, that you left a message, and that whoever wants to prove how brave she is can go see what it says.

            But what if Gloria just has some older, braver kid go in the house and read the message for her? Kara, horrified, squeezes the break and skids to a stop. The whole plan is unraveling. She looks up and sees she’s only a short distance from the giant beech tree that stands in front of the house, the one the girls tried to jump into from the windows she was looking into from the road. That’s what the stories say anyway. Crystal has already dismounted and leaned her bike against the far side of the porch. Kara is so eager to salvage their plan, she forgets to monitor her intensifying fear, almost forgets she’s afraid. “Crystal,” she shouts again in a whisper. “The plan isn’t going to work because Gloria will probably just have someone else go in the house and read the message for her.”

            Crystal, standing before the stairs leading up to the porch, leans back to look the house up and down before turning toward Kara. “How much will it matter by then?” Her voice is still low, but there’s a new facet to its tone—impatience or defiance or a seriousness that won’t be derailed by anyone’s foolishness. “Everyone will know you were here. And if she’s able to tell us what the message says, then we just ask her about the other message in the basement. If she comes back to read the message in the basement, well, she’ll just look stupid for letting you make her go back and forth.”

            After considering this strategy, Kara moves toward the porch with her sense of mission restored. Then she realizes there’s a problem. “But we can’t go in the basement. That’s where it happened. That’s where they say the horrible stuff happened to those girls.”

            “Kara, do you even know what people say happened down there?”

            A sliver of the rage she felt during her encounter with Gloria returns. “It’s not because I’m afraid,” she says, forgetting to whisper. “I just thought we weren’t supposed to talk about it. Dad said it was awful stuff and there was no reason to go poking around.”

            “Then Gloria comes along, talking all big, and you find out she not only knows the story, but she’s even been to the house. That’s why you got so mad, right?”

            Kara looks down at the hastily tied laces of her shoe. “Will you tell me?” she mutters. “But not now! Will you tell me after we’re done? When we’re back home?”

            “I talked to Dad about this place last week,” Crystal says, still facing the entrance. “Turns out, he had a lot to say. One thing he told me, which I’ll tell you now, is that as kids we all want to be the most mature. It’s like a contest. A race. There’s a whole world of adult stuff waiting for us, he said, and we look up to the kids who seem to learn about it all before the rest of us. But he said parents try to protect their kids from that same stuff they’re trying to learn about, because it’s too confusing or too scary for them. Kids need to learn how to deal with their emotions first because adult stuff makes you feel really strong ones. He said it’s nice to be kids and think the world is great and you can do anything. Once you’re old, you look around and see everyone else just gets old too, and no one gets what they want, and there’s a lot of horrible stuff that happens along the way.”

            Crystal puts her left hand on the banister and mounts the first step before craning to face Kara. “So us kids try to learn about all the adult stuff to impress our friends, but if we find out too much before we’re ready, life can start to seem worse than it really is. He said, ‘Don’t worry about the kids who are going faster. They’re the ones most apt to crash.’ But you know what I say? The slow ones are the ones most apt to get left behind. If being an adult is all about handling your feelings, then I’m going to make myself learn how to handle mine. I don’t want to just watch horrible stuff happen while I get old and never get what I want. That’s just not acceptable. That’s why I’m going inside. We’ll go upstairs first. Then I’m going in the basement. You can wait at the top of the stairs. Then when we get home I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

            “I don’t understand why you have to go in the basement.”

            “Because I’m scared!” she says stepping down and turning to face Kara full on. “I’m so scared of going down there I hate it. Look at me, I’m crying just thinking about it. But I know there’s nothing down there that can hurt me. I’m scared for no reason. So it’s a perfect opportunity to learn how to not be afraid.”

            Kara wants to object, but now she understands. Now she thinks maybe it’s a good opportunity for her too. If she goes inside and sees there’s nothing to be afraid of, she’ll have passed Gloria in that race Dad talked to Crystal about. There’s only one point in her sister’s reasoning Kara has doubts about. “How can you be sure there’s nothing down there that can hurt you?”

            “I can’t,” Crystal says, swiping at her eyes. Is she smiling? “But I’m about to find out.” She turns, climbs the stairs, steps up to the door, and twists back to say, “You coming?”

            Kara takes a fortifying breath and wills her right foot to take the first step toward the stairs. The trick she uses to overcome the fear holding her in place is to imagine Gloria’s face as she hears all about what’s really in the house, beyond the dull and obvious dust and glass and things to trip on. What’s really propelling her onto the porch and through the front door—a sheet of particle board held with loose nails to the inside of the frame, easily pushed in at the corner—is the sight of her sister entering the house in front of her. She understands now that she’ll go wherever Crystal goes. As strong as her fear is, though, the fantasy of putting Gloria in her place still proves useful.

            Ducking and slipping under the board, Kara sees the beam of Crystal’s flashlight brushing the walls, passing over peeling wallpaper with faded graffiti overwritten with fresh markings in bolder, shinier colors. None of it is legible. The vandals’ letters are too jazzy. But Crystal lets the light linger on some snatches long enough to make Kara wonder if she’s looking for some mark in particular. The air inside the house is still, even as the wind murmurs through the cracked and missing windows. Kara listens close to the ticks and creaks and scrapes of their feet on the desiccated wood floor. The only thing to really hear or see, she discovers, is the yawning emptiness of this main room. Maybe Gloria was right about there being little more than dust and glass after all. There’s not even much of a smell to the place.

            What Kara wondered about when she pushed through the doorway was whether she would immediately feel the dread all the stories refer to. That’s the word the older kids always use, dread. They say it hangs in the air, pursues you throughout the house. It’s this dread that obliterates all doubt about the stories being true. Now Kara steps closer to her sister, turning to look into the dancing oval of illumination, and if anything she feels a greater sense of calm. Having overcome her horror at the prospect of entering the house, she’s too numb or too disoriented to feel much fear. There’s nothing in here, nobody home. You can perceive it in the stillness. Kara worries now they won’t find anything she can use against Gloria.

            The other thing that’s keeping Kara calm is her sister’s air of purpose. Crystal isn’t just scanning the walls with the flashlight. She seems to be searching for something specific. “Come on,” she says, “let’s check out the upstairs.” The beam darts toward the stairway. Kara takes a half step closer to her sister, with dueling fears battling it out in her mind. There could be something up there. There could be nothing. She climbs the first few steps on her sister’s heels, noting how the completely dark room behind her suddenly seems less certain of its emptiness.

            The stairs creak as Kara figured they would. But nothing scary happens in the stairway, and nothing greets them in the hallway they step into at the top. The room where the girls supposedly jumped from the window is directly ahead of them, at the end of the hall. When they’re two thirds of the way there, Crystal stops and turns with her finger to her lips.

            “Stay right there for a second,” she whispers before moving slowly on, careful not to make a sound. With each step she seems more delicate in her movements.

            Kara assumes she’s checking the room to make sure it’s safe before she waves her in. It occurs to her now though that Crystal may have heard something she wants to investigate. Kara slowly shifts her weight to lift her foot and move it forward. She doesn’t want her sister going in that room alone. She also doesn’t want to disregard her instruction. So she walks mincingly, only making it halfway to the room by the time Crystal is stepping inside. Then she jogs two steps before her sister’s voice rings out through the empty hall.

            “Okay, don’t be scared when you come in here. There’s something gross hanging from the ceiling, but there’s no one here, nothing to be afraid of.”

            Kara freezes. Something gross? She’s already close enough to the doorway to see in the glow beyond the flashlight beam that something is indeed swinging by a string in the middle of the room. An odd moaning sound emanates from her throat instead of the question she intended to ask.

            “It’s okay, Kara. It’s just a dead animal. Someone must’ve hung it up here as a joke. Or to try to scare other kids, just like us.” Crystal continues her hasty survey of the room’s contents, which as far as Kara can see amount to little more than some scraps of paper in the corner and the long thin carcass swaying on its string. Is it a squirrel? A ferret? “I knew I saw something through the window when we were riding past,” Crystal says as she finally turns back to inspect the animal.

            Kara, arms folded over her chest, shuffles into the room. She can see enough in the indirect light to satisfy herself that it’s empty, just as Crystal assured her it was. Her eyes gravitate back to the animal, under which she sees the dark remains of puddled blood. Even though the wind freely flows in through the one glassless and the other broken window, the smell of rotting guts finds its way to her nostrils. She covers her mouth and her nose with her hand. “Why would they do this?”

            Crystal sighs. “I guess because this place is supposed to be scary. If you work up the courage to come in here, like we just did, and you don’t find anything, maybe you feel like you should leave something for the next kid who comes. You know, so they’re not as disappointed as you are. They probably didn’t even kill it themselves. I bet they got the idea when they came across this thing already dead, lying beside the driveway or something.”

            This makes so much sense to Kara the panic threatening to overtake her subsides. Gradually, something like indignation sets in instead. If Crystal’s take is correct, it means these other kids misled them, lied to them, and were gross about it. But weren’t the kids who tied this thing up trying to help in a way? Weren’t they trying to give the kids who came after them a taste of the experience they themselves were denied? And, most importantly, hadn’t they given her something to work with in her contest against Gloria?

            Kara walks to the window. The branches of the beech tree outside, ghostly pale in the dark, reach like twisted finger bones in all directions. Could she, if she was desperate, leap far enough out from the window to grasp onto one of those branches? She could reach them, sure. But hold on? No, she would end up falling just like the girls in the story. Would Gloria make it? The question forms a lens for Kara’s focus, intensifying it, so that now she’s looking for the nearest, sturdiest branch while considering the steps and swings she could take to reach the ground efficiently and safely. Maybe she could pull it off after all.

            “Looks like someone beat us to it,” Crystal says.

            Kara turns from the window. Crystal is pointing the light at a spot in the middle of the wall facing the door they both entered through. A message she has no trouble reading is scrawled in bright yellow spray paint:

To any child who reads this,

Congratulations,

by coming here, you’ve killed yourself.

Crystal drops the light a couple feet so they can read a second part:

To any child who didn’t come alone,

Your time is coming too.

Just wait.

            The girls turn in unison to look at the upturned angular shadows cast by each other’s features.

            Crystal snorts with laughter. “Wonder why your friend Gloria didn’t mention this.”

            “Did you know this was here? Did someone tell you?”

            “Mike from the end of the street told me there was a message written inside. He said he couldn’t tell me what it says. All the guys he was with took some oath to never speak of it. I think that’s kind of a tradition with this place. You can tell people there’s a message, but you’re not supposed to tell them what it says.”

            “So your idea about how to trick Gloria—you knew there was already a message here?”

            “Well, I didn’t know for sure, but we both do now, don’t we?”

            Kara considers how this may change her plan. Really, that Gloria said nothing about a message suggests she was never here. But how can this new information be used to prove to everyone else she was lying? There may be something more urgent to worry about though. “Is it supposed to be a curse?”

            “The guys dare each other to come here alone, so it’s just a way to mess with their heads. I’m not sure what the point of the second part is.”

            “Neither of us came alone.”

            “I guess we haven’t killed ourselves yet then.” She turns from rereading the message to look at her sister. Seeing her worry, she says, “Listen, Kara, don’t take this too seriously. I know the type of kids who would do stuff like this. You do too. Mike said he’s been here messing around with a group of guys on a few occasions. It could even be one of them who put this here—or someone else we know.”

            Crystal’s efforts at calming Kara only frighten her more. Her initial shock and confusion freely mingled with curiosity until she considered how the message might apply to them personally. Now she’s wondering if there isn’t some way to counteract the curse, some ritual they can perform, just in case. “I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe Dad was right.” She looks from the painted letters to the window and shudders. “Maybe we should have never come here.” She’s not sure if it’s dread she feels, but the possibility alone is enough to start a self-accelerating cycle.

            Crystal exhales roughly, exasperated, before walking over and draping her arm over Kara’s shoulders. “You want to know the real story of this place? You don’t have to worry about getting too scared.”

            “How long ago did you first hear the story?”

            “The first time someone told me a story about this place, I think I was younger than you. But only by a bit. It’s not because I was more mature or anything like that. I was just hanging out with some kids who happened to be talking about it. Just like a couple weeks ago I happened to be hanging out with Mike and Stan and a few other guys when they started talking about it. They call me a Tom Boy because I’m interested in stuff like this, and in sports too. It’s weird to them I’d want to hear what they’re saying, that I’m not just interested in hanging out with other girls. They don’t know what to make of me. But after a while they just start acting normal. Boys talk about different things when girls aren’t around. And I think that’s what was going on.”

            Kara considers this. It’s true. Crystal hangs out with boys all the time. Mom says she’s more “rough-and-tumble than most girls,” beaming with pride when she says it, leaving Kara to suspect it’s a positive trait, one she lacks. So maybe Crystal did only hear the story first because boys know more about this stuff, and Kara seldom goes anywhere near the boys. All they do is fight and talk about how tough they are. Or tell fart jokes. She’s always thought they were stupid, even if she likes the look of some of the older ones.

            “So the story’s not scary?” Kara says.

            “Well, it’s hard to explain. But once you hear all of what I found out you’ll understand.”

            “Don’t we need to get out of here? We’re going to get in trouble for sure now, aren’t we?”

            “Kara, we haven’t even been in here five minutes yet. If you don’t want to know, or if you want to wait until we’re home, that’s fine.”

            “No, I do want to know,” she says, sounding much surer than she feels.

            “What do you know already?”

            “I heard there were twin girls who lived here with their parents. One night something horrible happened to the girls in the basement, so they ran as fast as they could to get away. They ran right up to this room with the windows you can see from the road. Then they tried to jump from that window right there into the tree outside. But they didn’t make it. One of them died in the fall. The other walked with a cane the rest of her life. She died anyway, though, just a few years later. Maybe she killed herself or got in a car crash or something. I’m not sure.”

            “Did you ever hear anything about what happened in the basement? Do you have any idea?”

            “I think it was supposed to be something scary, like they saw a ghost. But maybe someone just did something bad to them.”

            “Is that all you know about this place?”

            “Crystal, just tell me!”

Continue to Part 2

Tangle and Rowdy: A Halloween Story

[This is the 4th in a series of Halloween stories. Follow the link to start with the first.]

Early fall sunshine with a fleeting chill fading before the afternoon. Unseasonably hot until the last two days. Only the vaguest hints here and there of a few leaves with a change of color on their mind. It was four weeks ago when I sat down to comb through people’s stories in my email, looking for candidates to attend our yearly gathering to celebrate all things mysterious and frightening. I came to the task reluctantly, wondering how we’d gone from charming stories told among friends to wild tales of truly terrifying tragedy. I came to the task weighed down by an unaccustomed despair.

            But miraculously I found a story I liked. Now, it’s time to share. At the same time, I’m looking back, wondering what was wrong with me. Wondering too why Steve’s story affected me when so many others, some more spectacularly macabre, fell flat.

            The beating heart of good ghost stories is a search through the dark. You know the type of scene I’m referring to. The protagonist wakes to a strange sound. Or comes home to find the door open. Or enters a spooky house as a show of courage or to find a lost sister. The shadows move in a way they shouldn’t. You hear noises impossible to identify. Edging in and out of our peripheral vision, something horrific. The mysterious lurker in the dark. These are the scenes that make us hesitate to leave our beds in the wee hours to go wee. But here’s the problem: after hearing dozens, maybe hundreds of these stories, the search-through-the-dark scenes had begun losing their ominousness. I can’t even watch a scary movie around Halloween anymore without sighing and rolling my eyes at all the hackneyed devices for making a walk through a poorly lit house scary.

            When I’m in an analytical mood, I wonder whether the purpose of these narratives isn’t to add some new dimension to the mundane, as Steve suggested in the midst of telling us this year’s featured installment. For kids, I get the sense that the appeal comes from the intensity of the emotions they evoke. If you manage to master feelings of terror induced by an experience you can end by closing the book, turning off the TV, or tuning out your friend, then you’re one step closer to being able to master yourself when the horrors are tougher to evade. In a sense, you’re one step closer to adulthood. Not that kids think all this exactly. They must just have the intuition that the stories they obsess over provide lessons worth learning—or rather training in preparation for what’s in store for them, what most of us for whom adulthood is already an inescapable reality are all too familiar with. That’s why it doesn’t matter that the premises are far-fetched. The point isn’t acquiring some new conceptual understanding of life or the world. The point is to develop the capacity for equanimity in the face of life’s inscrutable and uncontrollable reversals and transformations. The fact that it’s monsters after you and not some chaos engulfing your whole life makes the powerful emotions less confusing to grapple with. It’s not randomness and entropy. It’s a fight, hopefully one you can win.

            For us grownups, it’s more subtle. What difference does it make after all whether you die an excruciating death at the hands of some otherworldly beast with glowing transparent flesh or from some nauseatingly soul-withering combination of cancer and chemotherapy? Are ghosts more frightening than car crashes? Is it worse to have a demon possess you than to have your identity unravel from dementia? But if we can get a little bump of adrenaline from something that’s not even real, if something interrupts the unrelenting grinding down of our day-by-day existence into so many slick and polished ruts, we feel nothing but gratitude—even though most of us never bother to partake after a certain age. Defamiliarization is what literary critics call it: turning everyday experiences we barely take any note of anymore into something new and mysterious. In this case, you’re turning a walk through your house into a terrifying adventure, because the novelty is worth the terror, up to a point. Storytellers are careful to reveal their ghosts and creepy creatures gradually. The mystery is the powerful element, not the monstrosity.

            I think that’s why one part of ghost stories I still enjoy is the initial effort at setting a scene and establishing a tone. I love to read about old, eerily gnarled trees remembered from childhood. Or dilapidated abandoned houses kids once dared each other to break into. Or backcountry roads in the middle of nowhere with bizarre flashing lights. Or musty old basements. Or attics. I love the sense that something happened in this place, something consequential, a harbinger of even more consequential happenings to come. Each one of these scenes represents an exquisite promise. The problem is I can no longer help suspecting these promises will invariably be broken.

Whether you’re a believer or not, when you hear as many ghost stories as I do, you can’t help finding most of the details painfully tedious. After spending a couple months every year collecting tales of the unexplained for almost a decade, I’ve slid back from the edge and sunk deep into the back cushion of my seat. Now, I begin wondering at the midpoint of each new story how I would direct the scenes myself if I were authoring it, how I would make it optimally surprising, maximally horrifying, the most profoundly indelible. Beyond the upcoming turning point, I look ahead to the finale, and on to the big picture of the plot. How would I shape this material? Should the entire premise be scuttled?

When I first started trying to anticipate upcoming developments, my guesses were terrible, and the actual stories usually turned out better. But over time, I started becoming disappointed near the one-third point of most, because my own twists were better integrated thematically, more impactful. Eventually, the stories just started generally falling short of what I thought they could have been. The odd thing about all this was that the stories I was hearing, the ones I was considering writing up and sharing with my not huge but not completely insignificant following, well, they were all supposed to be true. I began to wonder if ghost stories are like a drug. You need more concentrated doses over time to get the same effect.

            Last year’s contribution introduced a new element. It wasn’t really a story so much as a cry for help. Ken, our storyteller, came to find out what our group would make of his daughter’s dealings with her imaginary friends. He knew from previous years’ stories, which I’d written up and posted on my blog, that we were a mix of skeptics and believers. He was particularly interested in what my mom would have to say, since of all the storytellers we’ve hosted over the years she seemed to have the most wisdom, at least according to my own biased accounting. The story and the ensuing interventions, led by my mom, entailed such a farrago of fiction and true facts, of a child’s fancies and an adult’s realized fears, that I’m still trying to force the details into some viable formulation. But that will have to wait until another time.

            This year, our Halloween gathering featured a story by a man I’m calling Steve. He too seemed to want something from our group besides a sympathetic hearing. For some reason, I’ve started taking that as a sign of authenticity, this reluctance to speak, this mild embarrassment, the impression that the teller is suffering under a heavy burden. Is it also a sign of truth? That’s an entirely different question, one I’m realizing more every year it’s impossible to answer. Steve’s story opened with a creepy warehouse loft, one that reminded him of a spooky attic in his grandparents’ house. That caught my attention. I couldn’t help steeling myself for the ensuing disappointment.

            Here’s the story as Steve told it:

            “That loft looking out over the Sentech warehouse always gave me the creeps. I think it was because for some odd reason it reminded me of my grandparents’ attic. Until I was ten, they lived in this house they’d bought right before my dad was born. Apparently, it had quite a history, but I wouldn’t find that out until much later. Back then, all I knew was someone in the family who lived there before had hanged himself in the attic. I knew this because my younger cousin Shelby told me, claiming she’d heard it straight from our grandma’s lips. I only bring this up because that attic was the eeriest place I’d ever been. You could put floodlights in every corner up there and somehow it would still be dark. What was up there? Scraped, splintery gray wood floors. Exposed beams and joists, appropriately covered in dust and cobwebs. Light beaming through the lone window as if through glue. Lots of boxes. And naturally some furniture covered in fraying sheets. I can’t picture it in my mind without conjuring the smell, a combination of musty old clothes and something sharp, cedary, almost chemical. Old cigar smoke maybe. There were tons of knickknacks scattered about, but I never got far in my sifting explorations because I was only ever up there on a dare, and I couldn’t resist bolting down the stairs for more than a minute or two at a time.

“Once, when two of my older cousins, Mike and Derek, slammed and bolted the door behind me before, for all I knew, taking off—I later found out they were listening outside the door the whole time—I managed to look around long enough to see that I could have gotten to the roof through the window, if only I could get it to open. As much as I strained and grunted though, the damn thing wouldn’t budge. When I turned back toward the center of the attic again and saw it from this new vantage within the dormer, I was simultaneously struck with two conflicting impressions: first, that this place looked completely normal, that it was just a bunch of junk in an old house, and second, that something was very wrong with this scene, like it had somehow been contaminated. I knew if I stayed up there, I would be totally safe. But I also knew if I didn’t get out of there soon, I might never be the same.

“I know, it’s silly kid stuff. Any one of us could go into that same attic now as adults—though I’m pretty sure they tore the house down—and we wouldn’t think anything of it. As a kid, though, your memory isn’t so cluttered with the detritus of years, so your perceptions are slower to sink in and more impactful once they do. Experiences you have when you’re young are higher resolution. Untrained in what to look at, your vision has much more scope. Plus, you have yet to discover that most of the stories you hear aren’t true, that they tend to be comprised of plagiarized elements of old fictions rearranged to varying degrees, so hearing about things like people killing themselves in a particular place really adds dimension to what you see.”

Steve’s seemingly jaded speculations about why the old attic stayed with him into adulthood struck a chord with me. Outwardly, his appearance was amazingly average: late 30s, slightly overweight, jeans, a hoodie, a beard that looked to be less about style than minimal effort, and an overall unassuming aspect. When he spoke, though, you almost couldn’t help leaning in to listen close. His conspicuous lack of interest in getting or maintaining anyone’s attention made it seem like he had some sort of secret wisdom. He wore glasses with nondescript frames and thick lenses that magnified his otherwise minute expressions. His nonchalance promised profundity. His speech, though rambling at times, often flirted with the literary.

He went on:

“Aside from a few nightmares after getting locked in there by my cousins, nothing happened in that attic—that I’m aware of anyway. I mention it here because there was such a distinct feeling associated with it. You all must have places like that you remember, haunted places from childhood that remain haunted in your mind no matter how cynical and disenchanted you become in later years. I had glimmerings of that feeling whenever I stepped onto the loft overlooking the warehouse at the Sentech office.

“Let me explain the layout of the building. It was offices in front and a big warehouse in the back. The office ceilings were low, so there was a lot of space on top of them where the loft extended. If you were up there and stood at the railing, you’d see the large overhead door where the trucks would back up to drop off or pick up our products. Around the walls of the warehouse, large racks held pallets of shrink-wrapped boxes high up, and lower down were rows of boxes the guys back there would take products from as they prepared shipments to our customers. It was a huge open space with a few workstations. When you came in the back door or through the overhead, you could see the wooden stairs leading up to the loft along the back wall, close to the door to the front of the building. From down on the warehouse floor, the area up there was usually completely dark.

“I was the last to leave the building most evenings, so I’d walk through the warehouse, which afterhours was itself only lit by a few safety lights, and over my shoulder was this entirely black space looming. Then there were the sounds. Sitting in my office, I could hear pretty much whatever was going on in the loft above my head. I seldom paid any attention. But I remember more than once being relatively sure I was alone in the building when I heard pounding or shuffling. A couple times I even wandered out to the bottom of the stairs out in the warehouse to investigate. Neither time did I end up climbing those stairs.

“When I first started working at Sentech, they told me there was an older guy who used to manage the warehouse, picking, boxing, and stacking all the products to ship out and unpacking and sorting all the incoming inventory. The company was just a four-man operation when it began, and Glen was the one in charge of keeping product moving in and out. Ten years on, there were enough guys back there helping for him to retire without feeling like he was leaving anyone in the lurch.

            “The company sells these infrared and sonar sensors that manufacturers put on cars and trucks. They hired me to work on the website and do some basic marketing for them, which meant I spent most of my time in an office. I only met Glen once, when he stopped in one day while I was working. Nadine, the woman who did a lot of the order processing, introduced us. That’s when I found out Glen had stored a bunch of his old belongings in the loft. He looked to be in his sixties or seventies, with thin whisps of white hair over what must have at one time been a square-jawed, hard-featured visage. He made irreverent jokes, first about how it was too bad they’d had to hire another dude who looked like everybody else in the building, and then about the decline in the quality of music sounding over the workstation speakers. But he seemed kind and had a gentle, almost peaceful way about him. He struck me as a pretty typical country grandfather type—maybe nicer and more at ease in company than most of that sort. Wittier.

“Glen had stopped in that day to pick up a snowblower from his little area upstairs, so I went up to help him get it down the stairs. I hadn’t been in the loft more than once or twice helping one of the other guys move stuff around. It was creepy. I don’t want to exaggerate. It wasn’t like some old, haunted house by any stretch. It was just a big space with particle board floors and the usual girders holding up the high roof. It took the lights up there a few minutes to warm up, and when they were burning full steam, they cast this sepia light over the sundry boxes and parts and materials. Mixed in with the typical warehouse stuff, though, were children’s toys and old lawnmowers and snowblowers. Apparently, Glen had a side hustle where he bought old equipment, refurbished it, and sold it for profit. But he had personal stuff up there too. I wasn’t ever told not to touch it, but there was a general attitude of avoidance when it came to that space. Plus, like I said, I barely ever went up there. We got the snowblower to Glen’s truck, said our goodbyes and nice-to-meet-yous, and that would be the last I ever saw him.

“Then some weeks later I get a call late in the afternoon. I don’t know a delicate way to say it, but the guy on the other end of the line had a—ahem—thick rural accent, if you catch my drift. He told me his name was Tim and that he was Glen’s grandson. Glen had just died in the hospital from a stroke, and now Tim was trying to locate a book his grandpa may have stored with his belongings upstairs. He seemed impatient when I offered my condolences, because he was so eager to locate the book.

“‘What does this book look like?’ I finally asked.

“‘You’ll know it when you see it,’ was his response.

“My first thought was to send Sam, our new warehouse guy, up there to look for it. But Sam wouldn’t be in again until the next morning and Tim was pressuring me for an answer. Finally, I told him I’d go up there and look, though I might need some more information. Glen had quite a bit of stuff up there.

“‘Well, I bet it’ll be someplace safe,’ was all he said.

“So I jogged out to the warehouse and back to the circuit breaker by the overhead to flip on the lights. They were just starting to produce their low yellow glow as I reached the top of the stairs. Everything had that sepia hue and was contoured by darkest shadow. Glen’s stuff was in the corner straight back from the stairs, and when I saw how much of it there was back there in the slowly intensifying light, I said aloud, ‘Well, are you going to stay late trying to find this damn book?’ Just as I said it, the phone started ringing again. I grumbled and headed downstairs to grab the handheld at the shipping station.

“It was Tim again. ‘Hey, do you mind if I run over there and help you look—or I could just look for it myself. I know you must be busy.’

“‘Listen, I’m just finishing up here for the day,’ I told him. ‘I’ll need to be on my way home in about ten minutes. Why don’t you call tomorrow when Nadine will be able to help you out?’

“‘No, no, not Nadine,’ he blurted. ‘Come on, man. This is something I have to do quick. I can’t explain, but… how about I pay you a hundred dollars to stick around and help me find the book?’

“‘A hundred dollars? Listen, I’m not even sure I should be letting you take anything from here. I only met Glen once. I’ve only been working here a few weeks. I’m going to need to talk to someone before I let some guy I’ve never met rifle through Glen’s stuff. And I definitely can’t let you just wander off with anything. It sounds to me like this book is valuable. So how do I know it’s not meant to go to some other family member?’

“‘It’s not. It’s for me. I swear. And I need it tonight. I need it as soon as possible. How’s this? I’ll give you two hundred dollars. I’m on my way now.’

“I started to shout at him not to come but the line went dead. I was irritated as hell because I wanted to go back to my office, sign out, and drive home. The only problem was my finances weren’t in a state that would allow me to turn down two hundred dollars for twenty minute’s work. The smart thing to do would have been to go back to my office get my stuff, lock the doors, and be on my way. But that’s not what I did.”

Here I lost focus on Steve’s voice and got wrapped up in a thought: this is another trope common to ghost stories—the good person making a bad choice. To win your sympathy, protagonists must have some virtue, some quality that makes you want to see only good things happen to them. But there has to be a fork in the road where the character takes a wrong turn. They make a deal that brings on a curse. The rest of the story details the playing out of that curse, including its ultimate resolution. Recognizing the common device and anticipating the upcoming search through the dark, I relaxed back in my chair, resigning myself to the budding disappointment.

“Instead,” Steve spoke over my thoughts, “I went back upstairs and searched with some urgency, hoping to find the book before Tim got there, just to have a better sense of what I was dealing with. The lawnmowers and snowblowers created a barrier separating the main part of the loft from where Glen’s boxes were stacked. Two tall shelves with more boxes in a variety of sizes stood in the corner. These seemed promising, so I shuffled and hopped my way back there. Later, I would attribute the sound I heard to all the stuff I’d pushed and moved around. It was a series of clicks. At least, that’s what it sounded like at first. They came at a slow pace that didn’t correspond to any movement on my part. After a few moments of doubt, I froze. Then I whipped around to scan the rest of the loft. By now, the lights were at about half power, bright enough for me to see I was alone up there, unless someone was going out of their way to hide.

“All at once, the dilemma Tim had presented me with was no longer taking up enough space in my mind to crowd out my typical reaction to the loft. What the hell was I doing up there anyway? I should just get my stuff from my office and leave, making extra sure to lock the door and set the alarm on my way out. But I had begun my search, and now I wanted to have a look at this book. Tim had said I’d know it when I saw it. Did it have a gilded cover? Was the artwork horrific? Was the damn thing bound in human flesh? Once I had the book in hand, I would be in a better position to decide on a course of action. That’s what I told myself anyway. It could have been that I just wanted to find the book and hand it over for the two hundred bucks before my better sense kicked in.

“The moment I turned back toward the shelf I’d been searching I heard the slow series of clicks again. More curious than startled this time, I pricked my ears to see if I could tell what direction it was coming from. The clicking came in intervals of a few seconds. It didn’t sound mechanical, and it came too slow to be from something tipping or falling. I walked all around Glen’s section of the loft looking for the source, but the sound ceased almost as soon as I stepped away from the shelf. When I returned to resume my search for the book, though, it started again. And it was more recognizable. Once again, I was frightened, petrified. The sound wasn’t clicking. It was growling, almost like a deep muffled groan. Unmistakably angry. No sooner had I identified the sound—though I’d later question myself—than I heard a pounding at the back door. Under other circumstances, I may have been reluctant to open the door. At that moment, though, I was glad to have a reason to rush down the stairs.

“‘Hi, I just talked to you on the phone,’ the man said as I pushed open the door. I said my name as I offered my hand. He took it enthusiastically. He was on the short side and skinny, wearing clothes that were way too big for him. Baggy jeans and a hooded jacket his slouching shoulders formed into a pouch for his pocketed hands. His hair was cropped close to his scalp, and his skin looked papery. He darted a glance at my face before looking up toward the loft, his eyes almost twitching with eagerness. Giving my hand a quick squeeze, he said, ‘Hey, I hope I didn’t give you the wrong impression—I’m not up to anything underhanded, you know. It’s just that I have to leave for a few days, and I’d really like to have this book so I can use it to write a eulogy. My cousin says the funeral will be right around the time I get back into town.’

“It occurred to me this sounded like a story you’d cook up on the drive here if you wanted to keep someone like me from asking too many questions. ‘In that case, you really don’t need to pay me anything to take it. But I really do have to call Nadine or whoever else I can reach before I can just hand it over.’ Tim looked stricken. ‘Why don’t you run up there and look for the book while I make the call? It’s right up these stairs and back on the right. You’ll see the lawnmowers and snowblowers.’

“Without a word, Tim rushed up the stairs. I opened my mouth to say something about the sound I’d been hearing but wound up turning to head back to my office without saying a word. What would I have said anyway? Now that the two hundred dollars was off the table, I shifted my efforts back to getting home as quickly as I could. I wanted to get my dogs out to the park in our neighborhood before my wife got off work. I’m always trying to squeeze in a bit more time with them, but I obviously want to be around for my wife too. Looking back now, it’s clear I shouldn’t have left Tim alone up there without getting more information. I didn’t even know if he was really Glen’s grandson.”

Chris, seeing Steve’s expression brighten, chimed in for the first time, saying, “What kind of dogs do you have?”

Steve reached for his pocket to pull out his phone. “Here, I’ll show them to you,” he said, brimming with pride, overcome by a surge of joy incongruous with his usual demeanor, a sunbeam poking through a storm cloud. “This is Rowdy—he’s the kid brother. He just turned three. And this is Tangle. He’s the wise old man. He’s 8. Rowdy is an Australian shepherd. Tangle is a border collie.”

“They look like trouble,” Cindy said through a fawning smile.

“They’re my boys. But, yeah, they’re a pain in the ass most days too, especially when they don’t get enough play time.”

“I see why you were so eager to get home,” I said, momentarily disarmed.

“Exactly. Anyway, I returned to my office and sat down at my desk to call Nadine. She’d left to pick up her daughters from school just a couple of hours earlier, but her phone rang through to voicemail. I left her a message and began to steel myself to deliver the bad news to Tim: even if you find the book up there, I’m not going to be able to let you take it until I talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. I figured I could persuade him to leave it here with me until tomorrow at least. Before I went back to the warehouse, though, I logged out of my computer and gathered up my stuff to go home. Not two steps from my desk, I heard the office phone ring. I rushed to grab it.

“‘Nadine?’ I said.

“‘What? I’m sorry, no, this is Sarah. Is this Sentech?’

“‘Yes, it is. I’m sorry, I was expecting a call from someone else. What can I help you with Sarah?’

“‘Well, I think my cousin might try to reach you. You see, he’s after a book he should know isn’t his. I don’t even know if it’s there, but if it is, it should be up with my grandfather’s stuff on that second floor you have. Did you work with Glen?’

“‘I started after he left, I’m afraid, but I did meet him once. And I should tell you, there’s a guy here now who’s up there looking for the book. What’s your cousin’s name?’

“‘His name is Tim, and if he’s there you shouldn’t let him out of your sight.’

“Just as she said this, I heard a commotion overhead, like a shelf being knocked over and its contents spreading across the floor. I froze for two beats to listen. But Tim’s scream startled me. I was already in the hall when I heard his feet stomping down the stairs. I picked up my own pace, hoping to head him off if he was running toward the door, but then another sound stopped me in my tracks. Something else was moving from Glen’s corner of the loft to the top of the stairs. At least, that’s what I thought it sounded like. And I could have sworn I could hear claws clicking against the wood flooring with each step. I reasoned that Tim must’ve brought a dog in with him to help him search—but that would mean he came down the stairs, went out to his truck, and then came back in without me hearing any of that, without me hearing the dog at all before Tim decided to rush down the stairs.

“When I finally managed to force myself to open the door to the warehouse, it was just in time to see Tim stepping through the door into the sunlight. By the time I reached the backdoor of the warehouse myself, all I could do was watch him drive away in his rickety old Ford pickup. Remembering the woman on the phone, I hurried back to the office and picked it up again.

“‘He’s gone. Something crashed upstairs and—and…’

“‘Did he have the book?’

“‘I didn’t get that good of a look at him. He may have. I’m sorry, I need to go upstairs and see if he broke anything.’

“‘What did you hear?’

“‘There was a loud crash followed by what must’ve been stuff sliding across the floor. Then it sounded like something was chasing him.’ I’d blurted it out before I could think better of it. The other end of the line remained silent for what seemed like a long time. Finally, I said, ‘Sarah, I’m going to run upstairs to see what happened. Then I’m going to go home. Please stop by sometime tomorrow and we’ll see if we can’t find that book.’

“‘I hate to ask,’ she replied, ‘but could you call me back and tell me what you find?’

“I was annoyed by the request, but in the circumstances, it seemed perfectly reasonable, so I agreed. I hung up the phone and went back to the warehouse. By now, the lights in the loft were on full blast, and when I reached the top of the stairs, I was surprised to see that both the large shelves remained upright. What had I heard crashing down and spilling its contents? Or had I completely misconstrued the sound? I approached Glen’s corner, and the mystery only deepened. There didn’t seem to be anything on the floor that wasn’t there before. In fact, after a quick scan of the corner and then the loft as a whole, I couldn’t detect any sign that Tim had been up there at all. So what had all that noise been?

“Rather than calling Sarah back from my office, I typed the number into my personal phone so I could talk to her on my way home. From work to home is a twenty-minute drive for me. Even with the phone to my ear, I managed to catch a glimpse of something on the floor. It was a tiny piece of metal in the shape of a bone with a loop at the top. Being a dog owner myself, I knew what it was right away—a tag for a collar. It had some flecks of red on it still, but it was so dinged up I couldn’t find any legible words on it. I stood there squinting for lettering for a few seconds before it hit me: the tag must have fallen out of the book. It must have been tucked in the pages like a bookmark. Where else would it have come from?

“And that meant Tim had indeed fled with the book in hand.

“I returned to my office to grab my things, came back out to the warehouse to switch off the lights and activate the alarm, and then went out and got in my car. I waited till I was on the highway before calling Sarah back. I told her I was pretty sure Tim had the book and that a dog’s tag had fallen out of it. ‘What’s the name on the tag?’ she demanded, cutting me off mid-sentence. I told her it had worn off. All I knew was that at some point the tag had been red. Sarah wanted to come to the warehouse and confirm that the book wasn’t there, but when I told her I’d already left she agreed to come the next morning.

“‘What’s this about?’ I asked before letting her hang up. ‘What is it about this book that makes it so special?’ After a long silence, I raised my voice to say, ‘Are you still there?’

“‘I’m still here,’ she said. ‘I just don’t know where to begin.’

“She told me Glen had brought the book home from his travels after he finished his tour in Vietnam. He’d really gotten around apparently, finding menial jobs in several countries, not feeling enough like himself to return to his old life. He’d bought the book as a gift for the love of his life back home, the woman he’d go on to marry. Unfortunately, she was diagnosed with leukemia two years after the wedding, and she was dead a few years after that. Glen remarried quickly, but almost as quickly got divorced. Tim, it turned out, was the son of one of his ex-wife’s daughters, so sort of a step-grandson. A few years after the divorce, Glen got remarried, to the woman who would become Sarah’s grandmother. Decades after that, when Sarah was just a little girl, Tim, already in his twenties, somehow found out about the book. He did some digging and discovered it was worth a lot of money. When he brought this information to his grandpa, suggesting they sell it, Glen dismissed the idea out of hand. Tim got mad and was later caught trying to steal the book. That was when Glen moved it out of his house. Sarah hadn’t been sure the book was in the Sentech loft until I told her about the tag. But she assured me Nadine would corroborate much of the story I’d just heard—which I realized was why Tim reacted so strongly when I said I needed to talk to her before letting him leave with any of Glen’s belongings.

“‘But what is this book?’ I asked just as I was pulling into my driveway. ‘What’s so special about it?’

“After another pause, Sarah said, ‘What’s special about it is that my grandfather gave it to his first love, his first wife, a woman he cherished right up until the time he stood by watching her lowered into the ground. It was a sort of scrapbook, but not that exactly. What makes it valuable is that it’s a few hundred years old and contains sections from some ancient mystics, but the format also encourages you to make your own contributions, if that makes any sense.’

“‘It doesn’t really,’ I said. ‘I can’t say I’ve ever heard of anything like that. It seems once someone started writing in it, the value would depreciate.’

“‘Oh, you don’t write in it,’ she said. ‘That’s not the kind of contribution it invites.’

“With that, I thought I understood: the book must lay out rituals or prayers or incantations. It didn’t encourage contributions so much as participation. But I figured it was pointless to keep trying to pull any more information out of her. ‘And the tag I found?’

“‘Baltus,’ she said, almost whispering.

“Now I was parked in the garage. I knew my own dogs would be going nuts inside. ‘Your grandfather’s dog?’ I asked.

“‘Well, yeah, originally, but reportedly he came to be quite devoted to Vivian—Grandpa’s first wife. Grandpa used to say he was afraid if he ever raised his voice to his wife, his own dog might maul him. I guess he was a big rottweiler, intimidating in appearance but gentle and sweet—most of the time. After Vivian died, Baltus was soon to follow. Losing them both in such a short span nearly ruined my grandfather. But he only started talking about them both when I was in my late teens.’

“Impatient to get in the house to let my dogs out, I realized there was something I needed to say before hanging up. ‘Listen, Sarah, I’m sorry I let Tim run off with that book. It was stupid of me. I was in a hurry to get home, so I just didn’t want to deal with it. It was irresponsible. But I’ll help you look for it tomorrow—even though I’m pretty sure he got away with it. I’ll do whatever I can to help you find it.’ I didn’t mention the two hundred bucks Tim had offered me.

“She assured me she understood and that it wasn’t my fault before signing off. Between the car and the door from the garage into the kitchen, I had a thought that induced a shudder. The sounds I heard above me when I was in my office. The clicking noise while I searched the two shelves—the growl. The crashing and shuffling and sliding as Tim fled. The nails on the floorboards. And that damn tag falling out of an ancient book of spells. But ten seconds later I was inside the door being smothered inside a Tangle and Rowdy tornado.”

Cindy chimed in here to ask, “Did you ever get confirmation from this Sarah woman that it really was a book of spells? Did you ever see it?” Our demure and giggling Cindy—she looked worried as she spoke, making me realize my fellow group members were less lacking in enthusiasm for our old Halloween storytelling ritual than I’d grown. Of course, they weren’t the ones responsible for sifting through dozens of stories sent in by email every year in search of someone who may make a worthy contribution to our ever-growing collection.

Steve replied, “I never spoke to Sarah again after that, and I never saw the book. I talked to Nadine about all of it, and Sarah was right about her corroborating what she told me about Glen. But Nadine didn’t know anything about the book.”

“Wait, so Sarah never showed up the next day to look for the book?”

“Nope, she never did. But I found out from two police detectives that the book was found with Tim.” Steve paused as we all looked back at him with stunned expressions. “I’ll get to that part,” he said. “Let me put this all in chronological order.”

“So what happened after you got home?” Mike asked.

“Well, first, as is my normal routine, I leashed up the dogs and got them over to the park in the middle of our neighborhood so we could play for about half an hour before heading back home to greet my wife. When we got there, the weather was beautiful, and throwing the ball around for them both, I finally stopped thinking about Tim and feeling guilty for letting him in to steal his grandfather’s book—his step-grandfather’s book. It was difficult for me to wrap my head around how enticed I’d been by the promise of money. That’s not me; at least I didn’t want to think it was. At the time, though, I was more strapped than usual. But that’s another story. Anyway, we had our fun at the park. By the time we were heading home, there were rain clouds rolling in. We jogged home.

“By seven o’clock, as I was sitting down to dinner with my wife, the rain was pounding against the windows and the sides of the house. Crashes of thunder had the lights in our dining room flickering, and we got up from the table long enough to get out some candles and find a couple flashlights to keep close at hand. The most intense part of the storm only lasted about half an hour, but the dogs were stuck inside, which meant they were both play fighting in the kitchen and living room most of the night.

“Now, I know you said you’d alter any identifying details before you publish this story, and I’d prefer not to reveal anything too personal. But I have to add some backstory for what happened next to make sense. You see, my wife and I had been trying to have a baby for a couple years. When all this happened with Glen’s grandson and his book, we’d already been to see a doctor on a few occasions. Meanwhile, at thirty-seven, after years of freelancing as an online marketer, and now with my second full-time gig, I was looking down the barrel of an established career—one I hadn’t chosen for myself but instead fell into as I tried to make ends meet. This despite my long-held ambition to be a serious journalist and all-around writer: poetry, novels, travelogues. I still have boxes filled with notebooks bursting at the seams in my attic. Ha, another haunted attic. There are other aspects to what was going on I could mention here, but that should suffice.

“While I was running the dogs up and down the stairs with their tennis balls to wear them out, and then while I was sitting on the couch watching TV with my wife, I kept having these horrible thoughts. I brooded over the two hundred dollars and how it had led me to make such a stupid decision. That line of inquiry led me straight to a bone-deep sense of self-loathing. I was a failure. I had nothing to contribute to the world. I was a burden, the weight tied around my wife’s neck, dragging her down, ensuring her unhappiness. The idea was a poison coursing through my intestines, casting a pall over everything I saw, felt, or thought. I couldn’t even fulfill the one function that accounted for my biological existence. The world would be a much better place without me in it.

“My self-hatred radiated from my guts to contaminate every cell in my body, transforming each into a tiny black hole gulping down all the surrounding light. My wife noticed me sinking into myself on the couch and asked what was wrong. I lied and said I had heartburn and was a little worn out from not having slept well the night before. So when the power went out again—even though the thunder had eased to a series of intermittent drawn-out rumbles—and didn’t come back on, she said, ‘Why don’t we just go to bed?’ It was only about a half hour before our usual time, so I figured it was a good idea. I was hoping to feel better the next morning.”

This inward shift to Steve’s story had me sitting up and listening more intently. I knew a second search-through-the-dark scene was next, but the route through Steve’s own doubts and disappointments struck me as not just revealing with regard to his own story, but as providing a larger insight into the hidden workings of these narratives in general. As a kid, you read Poe’s overheated stories about beauty and lost love as if they were a play on abstractions, their power deriving from the staggering vastness contained within the symbols. When you grow up and read stories about hauntings and possessions, though, you respond as you would to real individuals who’ve experienced real losses, because you have experienced similar ones yourself. So much heartbreak in even the most blessed lives—how can you not be haunted by it? Isn’t the instant of starkest, most all-consuming terror preferable to facing the reality of the inevitable demise of everyone you love as you struggle through your own drawn-out decline? All of this is to say I found it easy to relate to Steve’s inner turmoil.

“My wife went upstairs cupping a candle flame, the dogs close behind. I meanwhile set to my ritual of flipping off the light switches, turning down the heat, and checking to see if all the doors were locked. But after walking out into the garage to check the back door at the far corner, I got stuck. I felt so bad I could barely move. I found myself scanning the length of a beam along the ceiling, looking for a place I could fasten a rope. Then my gaze gravitated toward my car. My key fob was still in my pocket. I could start the engine and wait. With the noise from the rain, my wife probably wouldn’t hear. I had taken two slow steps toward the driver’s-side door when I heard scratching at the locked door I’d just checked.

“I was relatively certain both dogs had gone upstairs with my wife, but what else would be scratching to get in? I was in no state for caution or fear. So I walked over, unlocked the door, and turned the knob. Just then a gust of wind hit like a freight train, pushing open the door and knocking me back against the hood of my car. I rushed back to force the door closed, but then I remembered the scratch. So I put my hand against the door frame and thrust my head out into the lashing rain to see which of the dogs had managed to get trapped in the storm. Not seeing anything, I turned back to look for a coat or something to drape over myself. I ended up grabbing an old gray tarp, wrapping it over my shoulders, and running out into our backyard.

“The rain had intensified again, and the wind was batting me around with powerful gusts. The motion sensor by our door from the garage kicked on as I stepped past—meaning the power must be back on—but I could still barely see anything. Making a circuit of the yard along the fence, I saw that neither of our dogs was outside. I was in the back corner, farthest from the gate and the door to the garage, when I thought I caught a glimpse of something moving by a stand of trees about fifty yards outside our fence. Straining my eyes, I could just make out the outline. It was black. An animal. Maybe a dog. If it had come from somewhere around our house, its trajectory would take it right to the highway running alongside our neighborhood. So I ran to the gate and then to the stand of trees, clasping the corners of the tarp to my chest.

“I made it all the way to the sidewalk beside the highway, a few hundred feet from the neighborhood entrance. Out of breath, I stood staring through the curtain of rain, turning from side to side to see if I could spot the dog in the streetlights. But there was nothing. With nothing left to do but get back to the house and out of the rain, I found myself stuck in place again, thinking I’d failed at yet another task. It took me right back to the loathsome mental place I’d been before leaving the garage. When a semi’s headlights appeared on the distant highway, two menacing yellow eyes burning through the wet gloom, I thought, you can step right out in front of it. Gloria will wonder what you were doing out here, what you might have been looking for or chasing, but she probably won’t suspect you killed yourself. So this is it. Just wait for the right moment and step out into the road. It’ll be over before you know it.

“I have to say here I’d been down for a while, as I explained. But aside from some overdramatic episodes in my early dating life, I’ve never been the type to even think about suicide. I’ve always considered myself a writer, so all experience is good, you know. When things are bad, I try to focus on how I can turn what I’m going through into something poetic or literary, something to sharpen my perspective, make my engagement with life in all its facets more profound. More beautiful. But when I tried this thought on as I stood waiting for the perfect time to step in front of that truck, it led me straight to the fact that I was old enough now to know I’d never really be a writer, not one who got paid anyway. Meanwhile, my life insurance would pay my wife a lot more than two hundred bucks. I felt so horrible I couldn’t see beyond any of this. My mind had squeezed tight like a fist,” he held his up to demonstrate, “crushing this one idea in its palm. I had stopped breathing.

“Now, here was the truck approaching at last. My lungs finally loosened enough for me to draw in a sharp breath and hold it. The only way I can describe the feeling is that my despair and my pain were so intense, the prospect of oblivion promised bliss. I was desperate to be squashed, blotted out of existence. The lights whooshed closer. Five more seconds. Three. I lifted my foot and felt it moving forward. I closed my eyes and abandoned myself to the abyss.

“The next thing I knew, I was stumbling backward. There was a flash of white. And a sound like a roar. I watched the truck hiss and splash along the road in front of me as I sat with my butt in the soaking grass and fallen leaves. My missed opportunity. Maybe there’d be another soon. But the sound I’d heard wasn’t from the truck, I was sure. It sounded like an animal. It sounded like a larger and angrier version of what I’d heard up on that loft earlier in the day. At last, I started to come back to myself. And I was scared. I looked around frantically and saw Tangle, drenched, facing away from me, toward something I couldn’t see behind a wall running along the sidewalk. Tangle, ha, my bestest buddy. He’d poked in his nose and run right between my legs as I was stepping into the road. Only a border collie would think to do that. He knocked me backward. He fucking saved my life. Then Rowdy was there too, turning one circle around me as I sat in the grass beside the sidewalk, then another. I got to my feet and saw him bolting back toward our house.

“I must’ve left the door from the house to the garage open—or they found a way to open it. The door from the garage to the backyard, the gate, I was sure I’d pulled them both closed behind me. But Rowdy and Tangle had found a way. Maybe they’d just come to investigate when they heard the door open. Maybe they knew something was wrong.”

Here Maddy interrupted to echo in a mutter: “They know.”

Steve went on: “And now Tangle still looked like he was facing off against something obscured by the rain and shadow. I stepped forward to see what had his hackles up, staring deeply, but then drew back when I heard that fucking growl again. It set Tangle to barking wildly.

“I was still in an odd state, which must be why I was eager to see what was there. I’d left the flashlight in the kitchen, but the street was lit well enough. There was only so much darkness behind the wall to hide in. But I couldn’t see anything. Tangle finally stopped barking and turned to look back at me. As he did, my mind cleared even more. Suddenly, I couldn’t figure out what the hell I was doing out here. Trying to save a dog I wasn’t even sure I saw?

“I bounded past Tangle to have a look behind the wall. When it was clear there was nothing to be seen, I turned back, pulled the tarp tight over my shoulders, and called for Tangle to follow me back to the house. I ran, feeling the squish of the wet grass, my thoughts weighing heavy, my whole body feeling—I don’t know—shaky. Buzzing. And this is where things got scary. I was maybe a third of the way from the sidewalk to my yard, running along the back of my neighbor’s fence, with Tangle well ahead of me. That’s when the tarp caught on something. My feet tried to whip out in front of me as I twisted my body, but I managed to stay upright. I still had the edge of the tarp gripped in my hand and I turned to see what it had gotten snagged on. That’s when it was violently jerked out of my hand. Here I question my own memory. Or maybe it was some trick of the darkness and the driving rain. I thought I saw the opposite edge of the tarp dart back and forth, as if in the jaws of a huge dog shaking it side to side. But there was no dog. There was nothing to be seen at all.

“Tangle ran up and stopped by my side, his hackles up again, and we both stood dumbstruck as the tarp was pulled back toward the road, by the wind obviously, because what else could it have been? The rain picked up, breaking the spell, and I ran back toward the gate with Tangle. We were just behind our own fence when I heard Gloria calling me from the back door. I shouted back telling her I was there and heading for the door to the garage. Rowdy, still soaking wet, had alerted her that something was wrong, and she’d come to look for me.

“Inside, I explained to Gloria I thought I’d seen a dog heading for the road and gone to save it. I didn’t tell her the rest. The lights kept flickering as we were toweling off the dogs. I no longer felt any desperate urge to bring my existence to a halt. I was confused. Stupefied even. And I didn’t get much sleep that night. But that horrible feeling was gone, and I’m happy to report it’s never come back. Not really.

“The next morning before work I went out to look for the tarp. I found a few pieces scattered behind the line of yards and out into the highway. There were only a few strips, but I imagined the whole tarp being shredded. I never found any more of it.

“Naturally, I was anxious to see Sarah the next day at work. I wanted to ask her for some more details about that damn book her cousin had stolen. Would I have told her what happened to me the night before? As embarrassing as it might have been, I think I would have, if only because I remember being worried it might happen again. Unfortunately, she never showed up. She never called. I went home feeling apprehensive. But it was a peaceful night. I left work early so I could spend some extra time with the dogs.

“The day after that I got a call asking if I would be willing to answer some questions posed by a couple of detectives. I suspected it had something to do with the stolen book, but obviously thought it was odd that detectives would bother with such a thing. I agreed to talk to them at work and show them around the warehouse. When they got there, I was surprised how normal they seemed. Just two guys asking simple questions and writing notes, no good cop-bad cop games or anything. It was from them I found out Tim had been found hanged to death in his neighbor’s barn. I told them everything that had happened, minus the strange events of the night before last. Before they left, they asked me if I had a dog. I told them about Tangle and Rowdy. They wrote something down in their notebooks, thanked me, and left through the back door.

“The question about my dogs made me wonder. I got online and looked for any accounts of the death in the news. Sure enough, there was a short piece on the website of our hometown’s lone newspaper. The death was clearly a suicide, but the police were investigating some odd details. In particular, it appeared as though the man, before climbing up and slipping his head through the noose, had been attacked by some kind of animal. He had bite marks on his left ankle and thigh. And his jeans had been ripped at the cuffs.”

Steve looked down, seemingly dazed. We all waited, but he didn’t seem as though he had any more to say.

“Did you get anymore answers?” Tom asked. Tom’s own story for the group had been cast into doubt two years earlier when my dad informed him the ghosts he thought he heard out in the woods belonged to living women. “Did anything else happen after that?”  

“Let me tell you,” Steve said, “I had some sleepless nights for a while. And for about a week I made sure to keep Tangle and Rowdy close by wherever I went. But that was the last of it.”

“How long ago was all this?” Mike asked.

“Year before last.”

“I’d say you’re in the clear.”

“Here’s hoping,” Steve said, chuckling.

Chris, standing up from the couch, said, “Now we’re all wondering what you personally make of everything that happened to you.” He went over to the kitchen island where the snacks were arranged, ladled himself another cup of spiked punch, and turned back toward Steve. “And what did your wife think of it all?”

“I never told my wife any of it. She believes in all that crap, and I didn’t want to scare her. That’s why it’s been so nice to talk to you all about it. As for what I personally think happened, that’s not so easy to answer. My general attitude toward supernatural stuff is that it’s bullshit. But I admit I’m as susceptible to getting freaked out as anyone. The sounds are really the only thing I can’t explain, the animal sounds, the growling and later the roaring. Still, I was standing by a road, in a storm, when I heard the roar. The noises up on the loft—it wasn’t like there was no one else there who could’ve made those sounds somehow. The tarp could have been caught up in the wind and torn when cars ran over it. And it’s not that big of a mystery why I had a sudden attack of self-loathing. I’d just let a stranger come into work and steal something because I was tempted by the prospect of earning a couple hundred bucks doing essentially nothing.”

“So you don’t believe any unseen forces were at play?” Maddy said. “You have it all down to natural explanations?”

“I wish I could say that. But I’m not so sure. For all I know, I had some kind of”—he twirled his hand in the air as he searched for the word—“psychological episode. Maybe I was poisoned and hallucinating. Maybe it really was just a bunch of unlikely and weird events happening in sequence. But damn—it didn’t seem like any of that. At the time, it felt like something truly strange, something truly inexplicable was happening. So let’s just say I wasn’t a believer before all this happened, and I’m not really one now—but I’m far more open to the idea than I was.”

“And now for the really important question,” Cindy said. “How are Rowdy and Tangle doing today?”

Steve laughed, and his big cheesy grin remained even after his mirth faded. “They’re doing great. Though I can’t believe Tangle is ten now. That’s a little hard to accept, because I know—well, five or so years doesn’t seem as long a span of time as it used to. And I wouldn’t be standing here talking to you if it weren’t for him. It wasn’t just the maneuver to knock me back away from the road, you know. It was like he gave me his vote to continue living, at a time when I felt like nobody would care if I died. Even if he and Rowdy hadn’t been as deft in their intervention as they were, their determination to save me was enough to make me see through the shadows in my head.”

I felt my eyes welling, so I turned away. You may be thinking I chose Steve’s story this year because it included dogs, like the other stories I’ve chosen over the years. Maybe I did. But there were at least three features of the tale that appealed to me, aside from Tangle and Rowdy. It began with a recollection of a haunted attic remembered from childhood. The search-through-the-dark scene came with a twist, an inward shift that made it truly affecting. And, finally, it ended on a note that reminded me of my mom’s contribution to our Halloween storytelling event a few years ago. What ultimately makes these stories worth telling and hearing, she’d opined, is not that they point to meanings and beings beyond our mundane existence; it’s that they show our willingness to face off against the most extraordinary and monstrous of perils to protect the ones we love; it’s that we’re willing to follow the most unbelievable and inscrutable of prompts if they point to a possible avenue for us to save the ones we hold dear from danger. For whatever reason, Steve had a deadly bout of suicidality. You could say Tangle saved him by poking his snout behind his knee to prevent him from stepping in front of a truck. But that dog saved him just as much by being there to show he wasn’t going to let his master, his friend, die without a fight.

When you’re young with the boundless expanse of your undetermined future yet to live out and your fate perfectly mysterious, it’s so easy to feel like you’re the author of your own story. You hold the pen. You create the next turning point in your own character development. You’re responsible for the overall structure of the plot. You decide how it ends. The older you get, though, the more you realize that the most significant parts of the story will be authored by characters and developments that are not only beyond your control but, moment by moment, tend to operate outside of your awareness. Being happy or fulfilled isn’t about exerting the awesome cosmic force of your own willpower to wrangle the best possible story for yourself into existence; it’s about taking all the elements that get thrown in while you’re barely paying attention and arranging them into a story you can live with. The most blessed of us all are the ones lucky enough to have a character or two show up at some point who just desperately want to see us get to a happy ending without going through too much awfulness along the way. And it hardly matters what species those characters are.

            “Now that I think about it,” Steve said, “I can’t really say nothing else has happened—I’ve been hearing those damn shuffling noises above my head after everyone leaves the warehouse almost every day.”

            Yes, I thought, and our whole lives are a search through the dark.

***

CANNONBALL: A HALLOWEEN STORY

JAX: A HALLOWEEN STORY  

KEMOA: A HALLOWEEN STORY

THE TREE CLIMBER: A STORY INSPIRED BY W.S. MERWIN

Kemoa: a Halloween Story

[This is the 3rd in a series of Halloween stories. Follow the link to start with the first.]

“When she started telling me stories about little creatures with bizarre names, I figured she’d gotten it all from a book or a TV show. By now I’ve googled every permutation of the names I can think of. They’re not from any show I can find. She doesn’t read like she used to before Janelle passed away. So where was she getting it all? Maybe I’m too indulgent with her. It’s not like I haven’t considered that. Dads are supposed to dole out the tough love, right? But how am I supposed to be tough when…. Excuse me. Let’s just say I often find myself at a loss. What can I do but spoil the hell out of my daughter?

“I know your next thought too. Mind you, I openly admit I’m as susceptible to fantasies of my daughter’s creative genius as the next parent. At first, I encouraged her in what I thought were flights of imagination. Two things changed my attitude over time. First, the stories were just so elaborate. Leena is only eleven, and I figured keeping so much stuff like that straight in her mind would take more concentration than a girl of that age tends to be able to muster. Second—and this is what sent me in search of help—some of the characters started getting scary. But I’m getting ahead of myself.”

Ken, our featured guest at this year’s Halloween gathering, is a trim, youthful-looking man in his late thirties or early forties. Aside from his eyes’ red rims and the heavy dark crescents beneath them, he looks like a guy who takes care of himself. He’s in decent shape, well-groomed, and was neatly but by no means ornately dressed. At just under six foot, he carries himself like a white collar professional, courteous, thoughtful, but with an undercurrent of seriousness, even urgency, like he’s only ever being polite long enough to get back to work without causing offense. He seemed almost embarrassed to be addressing our group, but mostly he seemed mutedly desperate. He really needed help. 

“Here, let me give you an idea what I’m talking about,” he said. “I recorded this on my phone. I’m not a hundred percent sure I should be recording my daughter without her knowing and then playing it back for a room full of strangers. But I’m running out of ideas. I’ll just ask that if you talk to anyone about this or write up the story, you change the names and any identifying details. Please just be discreet.”

Ken held up his phone and did some swiping with his finger until the tiny voice had everyone leaning forward. Ken helpfully increased the volume.

“They’re like fish,” the little girl’s voice said when the playback started afresh, “but they don’t swim in the ocean. They swim through the clouds. On some bright days, if you look really close, you can see them. But only because they dart around so much when the sun is shining. They don’t look much like fish either—though the way they look changes depending on what they see going on in the world. When I see them, they usually look like tiny people, but their skin or scales or whatever are all different colors—green, blue, purple, black, yellow, any color you can think of. The same one will be a different color from one day to the next. I suppose it’s like us with our clothes; every day we wake up and decide what we want to wear. They just choose the color they want to be instead.

            “They all have little fans on the outsides of their legs and arms. That’s how they swim around in the clouds. It’s also how they glide down to the ground where we live, but only when the air is just right. Sometimes, if they really need to tell us something, they’ll swoop down even if the air isn’t right, but it’s dangerous, so they only risk it when what they need to tell us is urgent. 

            “The thing you have to remember is that they don’t fly. They can only swim when they’re in the clouds. So, when they come down here to talk, they have to catch a ride back up to the clouds from birds or hawks or something. That’s not usually a problem because they all have friends who are birds or hawks who are happy to help. That’s because they do such a good job stirring up the clouds and moving them to where the sky most needs them. See, that’s what they do, move the clouds and change them so the sun shines clear to where the trees and flowers need them, so the ground has shade and fields don’t dry up and crops can grow big and strong.”

            “Do they have a name?” Ken’s voice asks.

            “Of course! They all have names.”

            “No, I mean, what do you call them in general?”

            “Piltok says they’re called eckyura.”

             “Piltok?”

            “Yeah, Dad, you know about Piltok. I told you about him.”

            “The guy you talk to by the creek? The one who lives underground?”

            “He lives in the tunnels connecting all the lakes and ponds. He tells a joke I don’t really get, but maybe you will. He says he looks like what you’d get if you bred a boulder with a tree and then raised it in a family of moles. He laughs whenever he says that. Even though he looks a bit scary, I like his voice. He sounds strong and wise.”

            “And how does he know about the—what did you say they were called? The eckyura?”

            “He talks to them all the time, silly. He especially makes a point of checking in with them when it storms.” 

            “Let me guess, they make it storm when they’re angry?”

“No, goofy! It storms because the eckyura are fighting the adabo. The adabo live on the eckyura’s blood—only it’s not blood like ours. It’s light like air. The adabo bite into the eckyura’s chests and breathe in the blood mist, which glows blue in the dark.” 

            “That’s horrible. Does it kill them?”

            “Usually, the adabo only get a little before each eckyura’s friends manage to rescue him. But sometimes they do die, and it’s really sad. But the thing is, the eckyura only live three or four days anyway.”

            “What? That’s it?”

            “Piltok says he knew one that was five days old, but he’s never known one older than that. Here’s the other thing you need to know: when the adabo breath in the eckyura’s blood, their minds are connected. That’s how the eckyura find out what’s going on where the adabo are from. That’s where they get information they need to share with us sometimes. That’s also why Piltok always goes to talk to them after a storm.” 

            “How often do you talk to Piltok?”

            The ensuing pause lasts long enough to make us all wonder if the playback has stopped. Finally, Leena’s voice returns: “Dad, can I go outside? I don’t feel like talking anymore.” 

            “Okay, but before you go, answer my question please.” 

            “What question?” 

            “How often do you talk to Piltok?”

            “Um…”

            “You’re not in trouble. I’m just wondering.” 

            “I talk to him every time I go outside. Well, not every time. Sometimes, he doesn’t come around, or he doesn’t want to talk. I don’t know what he’s doing, but he just doesn’t answer, you know. Can I go outside now?”

            “Okay, honey. Just stay close enough for me to see you.” 

            Ken reached for the device as the clip ended. “Okay,” he said, “that gives you some sense of how she speaks about all these characters. She never hesitates with a response like she would if she had to make up an answer on the spot. Whenever I press, she’s ready with more details. And she’s—what’s the word? She’s cagey, like she understands all this business is bizarre but can’t quite put her finger on what might be wrong about it. But this next clip is the part that first got me worried.”

            He held up his phone again.

“Leena,” his voice sounded from the device, “you started talking about the grentroleems. You said they’re two-foot-tall black and gray monsters who hide out near children’s beds.”

“That’s right,” Leena said. “They use their power of weaving nightmares and making fears worse in the wee hours so they can frighten their victims to death. Piltok told me what the grentroleems are and how to deal with them. He said if I ever get too scared and can’t handle them, I can call him and he’ll come stomp them to death.

“But anyone can do the tricks that make them go away—I mean most of the time. What you do is take deep breaths and remind yourself that nothing is as bad as it seems when you’re lying awake at night. You see,” the voice continued, with a gravity out of place in an eleven-year-old, “the thing with fear is that it feeds on itself, until you start mixing the bad feelings from the fear with the bad things you’re afraid will happen and that makes everything seem just horrible, which just adds more fear to your mind, which makes things seem more horrible. To stop it, you remind yourself that you’ve gone through bad things before, and a lot of times—most times—they didn’t end up being as bad as you thought they would. As bad as they were anyway you got through them. And all the worry and fear you put into working yourself up and not falling asleep didn’t end up helping at all.”

            After a pause, the voice begins again. “That’s really hard though when what I’m worried about is people dying.”

“Are you afraid of people dying?” Ken asked.

“Well, Dad, everyone is going to die eventually, right?” 

“Do the grentroleems make you afraid any particular person might die?”

“Sometimes.”

Ken pauses the clip to tell us how her expression hardened as she turned away. She didn’t want to talk about it. More than that, it pained her to talk about it.

He hit play again so we could hear him changing tacks: “Your friend Piltok comes and kills the grentroleems? And then you feel better?  But you said Piltok is a salobog, and salobogs only live a few months. How long have you known Piltok? Hasn’t it been a few months since you started talking to him?”

“Now you’re being a grentroleem, Dad.”

“I’m sorry dear. I’m just wondering who will come help you when Piltok is dead.”

“Piltok is my friend. I don’t like to think about him dying. But he has talked to me about it. He says if the grentroleems, or anyone else, are really getting to me and he’s not around, I can call Kemoa. She’s a six-foot-tall shaggy beast with black and white fur and glowing blue eyes. Kemoa loves children and babies. She can shoot invisible fireballs—well, invisible to us—that turn the grentroleems into statues of ash.” 

Ken stopped the recording again to say, “This part was really interesting to me because it was the first time I thought I knew where she was getting her ideas. You see, I read your story Cannonball to Leena—eliding a few of the adult parts. She loved it. I think I read it to her three times, and each time she made me repeat the part at the end where your mom tells you how dogs like your old husky scare ghosts and goblins away so children can sleep soundly.” 

He pokes at his phone again.

“How long does this Kemoa live?”

“Piltok never said. From the stories he tells me she’s been around like a hundred years. So she’ll always be around for me. The problem is, there’s only one Kemoa, and she has kids all over the world to look out for. Sometimes I get scared that when I call her, she’ll be busy saving someone else.” 

Ken let the recording continue playing through a heavy pause. I looked up to see an expression of intensity, and perhaps regret, darken his features. Then his voice emitted again from the phone, almost a whisper. “Honey, you know the grentroleems are just make-believe, right? I really love that you have such a wonderful imagination, and someday I hope you write down all these awesome stories. But some of these guys seem like they’re upsetting you, and I don’t want you to be frightened. I don’t want you to worry about people dying.” 

Silence.

“Honey, you know it’s all make-believe, right?” Ken pleaded.

“Yes, Daddy, of course,” she said abruptly, and then didn’t say another word. 

***

Ken had reached out to me after discovering the writeups I did for some of our group’s earlier stories. Cannonball was my mom’s story about how our old dog Kea had saved her—sort of—from a guy who got rough with her after she changed her mind about bringing him home. Our group of friends has been getting together every Halloween for nine years now to share our ghost stories as part of our very own holiday tradition. Two years ago, Mom told this story that shocked me at first and then moved me for weeks afterward, until I felt I just had to write it down. Apparently, it’s moved some others as well. Since I posted it to my blog, the number of views keeps going up. The next year, I posted a story my dad told at our gathering, and the same thing happened, though to a lesser extent. It was this online footprint that led Ken to our stories, and then to me personally. 

He said he got online to search for information about when imaginary friendships constitute a warning of some underlying problem. “I want my daughter to have a rich fantasy world. Her mother and I always encouraged that. I probably wouldn’t have worried so much if it weren’t for all these creatures’ ridiculously short lifespans. And then there were the ones who wanted to scare her, even hurt her. I mean, I’ve never heard of kids coming up with scenarios that dark. I thought imaginary friends were basically a step beyond having pretend conversations with yourself, you know? We all do that on occasion.” 

After coming up dry with several searches, he typed in something about kids and scary stories, and that’s how he found my blog. When I got the first email from him, I responded that neither I nor anyone else in the group is a psychologist—though Mike has a degree in psychology. Ken assured me Leena had already seen a therapist, which led to some interventions that, at least for the time being, only made things worse. He said he wasn’t so much expecting a solution to his problem as he was simply looking for a nonjudgmental audience he could trust to tell him if he was being crazy, an audience that wouldn’t necessarily assume as much from the outset. He wanted a sounding board. He particularly wanted my mom to be there, which is of course perfectly understandable to me. 

Unfortunately, Mom couldn’t make it to our Halloween party this year, for reasons I won’t go into here. Ken was nevertheless happy to share his story with the rest of us.

***

“It’s not so insane to think a kid might try to work through her grief over her mother’s death through her fantasies. I figured that’s why so many of her creatures were so strikingly short-lived. And, like I said, I was proud of her creativity. There was even some wisdom in what she said about how the grentroleems try to work you up into an anxious frenzy in the wee hours, and how you can ward off their attempts. Still, she didn’t seem to be interacting with any actual friends, not at school, not around the neighborhood. I was afraid I might lose her to her fantasy world for good. So I started taking her to a therapist every week.

“It was Dr. Thurman who first suggested some of the intricacies I was so blown away by in the stories may have come from Janelle, before she died. It’s entirely possible, she pointed out, that the two of them had a story world they visited together but kept from me, if for no other reason than that stories told in secret are more fun. Dr. Thurman’s main message to me, though, was that I needn’t worry so much about the imaginary menagerie, but I should make a point of getting her around other kids so she could strike up some real friendships. And that’s exactly what I did.

“Leena unfortunately fought me on this tooth and nail. She wanted to come home after school and go to the woods to see Piltok. That’s where she wanted to be on the weekends too. She didn’t want to go to any park or hang out with any of the neighbors I knew who had kids. But I kept at it. Then one night, I woke up to her screaming what sounded like, ‘Get away from her!’ over and over again. I bolted to her bedroom, expecting to find her in bed in the middle of a nightmare, but she wasn’t even in her room. She was wide awake, standing at the top of the stairway. ‘Honey, what’s the matter? Who are you screaming at?’ 

“‘It’s nothing Daddy. I was just having a bad dream.’

“‘Then what are you doing out here?’

“‘I was scared and I thought I heard something, so I came out here to look. But it must’ve just been part of the dream.’

“She was lying to me. I knew it to a certainty. But Dr. Thurman had advised against pressing for information about Leena’s fantasy world when she seemed reluctant to offer any. So I took her downstairs for a snack of granola and milk and then put her back to bed. 

“The next time she woke up screaming was only a few nights later. This time, she was screaming, ‘Get away from me,’ and ‘Don’t touch me.’ I found her at the bottom of the stairs this time, in the foyer. She started violently when she heard me coming down the stairs, whipping her head around to see who it was. But it was the same as before. She had no answers to give. Only there was something different this time. She had three scrapes on her left forearm, deep enough to draw blood. They formed parallel lines, like someone had scratched her. When I asked if she’d done that to herself, she pressed her lips tight together. I demanded to know how she’d gotten those scratches. She burst into tears. 

“You guys are all parents. You understand. I know Dr. Thurman didn’t say to stop her from talking to her friends. When she said it’s important that Leena have some real-life friends though, I took it to mean the imaginary ones were better left behind. Now, she’d woken up screaming on two separate occasions, so it wasn’t a stretch to conclude something was seriously wrong. What would you have done? 

“I’ll tell you what I did. I gave her a silver cross that Janelle had given me to wear around my neck. I told her—did my best to impress upon her—that it would keep anything that wanted to harm her away. I told her it would also keep away everything else of the sort that I couldn’t see or talk to but she could. I told her the visits to the woods had to stop. And I signed her up for a creative writing club after school—so she wouldn’t have a chance to go have one of her chats with Piltok or whoever. I forbade her from talking to her invisible friends. I offered her the cross partly as a consolation. Believe me, it was hard for me to part with. But mostly I figured I needed a charm or a talisman to psych her out, to give her a reason to think her imaginary friends wouldn’t be showing up anymore.”

“What did the therapist say when you told her you’d taken that step?” Chris asked.

“Dr. Thurman was… Well, she’s professional enough not to dress me down for going against her recommendation, but I could tell she thought it was a bad idea. ‘Foreclosing on this fantasy world of hers could be dangerous,’ she said, pointing out that it was likely some kind of coping mechanism. ‘But I’m not sure the damage can be reversed by you giving her your blessing to return to it again. I would wager she knows now that you think her visits to her friends are cause for concern.’ Her upshot was that we would have to see what Leena would do next. Maybe with all the new people and the new club activities, she’d move back toward the real world again.”

Ken cast his eyes downward as he drew in a rough breath before saying, “That’s not what happened.” 

***

Ken lifted his phone again, scrolled down a few swipes, and then started another clip.

“Honey, you were telling me about a new character you’ve been talking to. Didn’t I tell you I didn’t want you talking to anyone I can’t see or talk to myself?”

“Yes, but I didn’t go to the woods to talk to her. She came here.” 

“You mean she came in the house?”

“She comes to my room at night, almost every night. I think she’s there even when I’m not awake.”

“Do you know what she wants?”

“She says I’m in danger and she’s come to protect me.” 

“Protect you from what?”

“She says she has to protect me from Piltok and Airdol and Skirm and Leetoria—all the friends you told me not to talk to anymore. She says there’s no such thing as a salobog or an eckyura or an adabo or any of the others. She says the grentroleems are the only ones who are real, but they’re not really trying to scare me. They’re the ones trying to help me.”

“What did you say this woman’s name is?”

“Belcane. Her name is Belcane. Piltok told me about her before I ever saw her. I don’t know who to believe anymore.” 

“What does Belcane look like sweety?” 

“I only ever see her outline, you know, her silhouette. She’s short. Her arms are really long though, and her fingers are twice as long as they should be. Her voice is creaky, but sweet. She sounds like somebody’s grandma. I never see her eyes, but I can somehow feel them, like she’s looking at me really hard, trying to see something that’s not easy to see. And she always wears a coat or a cape or something, with these weird points that stand up on her shoulders.”

“Honey, if Piltok and the others aren’t real, why would Belcane have to protect you from them? Does she say they want to hurt you?” 

“She doesn’t say they’re not real. She says they’re not what they say they are. She says all the stories about eckyura flying through the clouds and salobogs living in tunnels between lakes is a trick. She says Piltok is a demon, sent by the devil to lure me away from the house, away from everyone who would protect me, so he can keep me from signing my name in her friend’s book.” 

“Leena, I need you to tell me something honestly. No stories. No fantasies. No make-believe. Where did you hear about demons and the devil and signing your name in a book? Did someone tell you about all that in school?” 

“It’s not make-believe, Dad! Belcane told me all of it. But before I ever saw her, Piltok told me about her, and he said she’d try telling me lies to get me to only listen to her. He told me about the book and said I should never sign my name. Daddy, I don’t know which one of them is telling the truth.”

“I don’t know either, sugar plum. I think maybe the best thing to do is to stop talking to either of them for a while, until we can get it all sorted out. And obviously don’t sign anything.”

“But Dad, you already won’t let me go talk to Piltok. And Belcane comes to my room every night. She talks to me whether I answer back or not.”

“Yes, we’re definitely going to need to talk to Dr. Thurman about what to do with this Belcane character. In the meantime, here’s what I want you to do. If you wake up and she’s in your room, I want you to reach under your nightgown and pull out Mommy’s cross. I want you to hold it up between you and her and say, ‘You have to go away now, and God won’t let you stay.’ Can you do that for me?”

“Yeah, I can do that. But Dad, what if she’s telling the truth? What if she really is protecting me?” 

“Do you think she is? I don’t see any reason her friend would want your name in his book. Do you think Piltok or any of the others would hurt you?” 

We all listened rapt as Leena considered her answer.

“Never,” she said at last. 

“Has Piltok ever come to the house?”

“No, but I see the eckyura here all the time. And the grentroleems, they’re here most nights too.”

“You said the eckyura wouldn’t hurt you either. And Belcane doesn’t protect you from the grentroleems. You know how to do that yourself, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do. Thanks to Piltok.” 

“Okay, so for now, I want you to tell this Belcane to keep away from you. We see Dr. Thurman again in two days. We’ll ask her what she thinks and then maybe we can have Belcane back. And honey, if you would just spend some time with some real flesh-and-blood kids, like the ones from your writing group, I may even let you go back to the woods to talk to Piltok again.” 

“It won’t matter,” she said glumly. “I doubt Piltok will be alive for more than a couple weeks.”  

***

Halloween fell on a Sunday this year. We had our party, the one where Ken told us all his story with the help of his recordings, on Saturday the weekend before. As I see the numbers of views on this site grow every day, I’m becoming more heedful of the details I share. Plenty of people who know my mom, for instance, have read her story, and I’m not sure she’d have wanted to share it so indiscriminately. I’m applying the rule here that I’ll only share details that are crucial to a clear storyline, and even if they are I’ll leave them out or change them if they could be tied to any individual. 

We each took our turn to tell our old stories as per tradition, and we even got to hear some new ones. But Ken’s took centerstage, provoking intense discussion. One theme that took hold was that it was too tragic that Leena might not get to talk to Piltok before he died. Still, Ken couldn’t be convinced to let her go talk to him again, not until he could be reasonably sure it was safe. By the time everyone was getting ready to leave, I had the impression he was happy with how his visit turned out. Mike invited Ken to bring Leena over to meet his own daughter. He also said it was okay if Ken wanted to call him in the middle of the night should Leena wake up with another of her screaming fits. Chris said if Mike didn’t answer to call him next. None of our group members had any answers or solutions, but I think Ken just wanted some support. His daughter wasn’t the only one in need of some new friends. 

The introduction of Belcane to Leena’s lineup of invisible interlocuters upped the ante for Ken. He said he’s considered himself Christian his whole life, but he’s never been especially devout. Having gone to Catholic school as a kid, he was plenty familiar with stories about demons and the devil trying to get people to sign his book. Unless one of her classmates told her about that stuff, though, he couldn’t think of how she may have learned about it herself. Worse, he had an inkling that Belcane showing up was a direct result of his aggressive response to Leena’s night terrors. That’s how her original and charming stories were suddenly hijacked by more traditional, far darker themes and characters. He felt guilty. More than that, though, he was scared for his daughter. 

I only hoped, watching him sidle into his car and back out of the driveway after the party, that he’d been reassured that he had people who believed and supported him, people who’d come to his aid if more trouble ensued. None of us thought we’d heard the end of the story that night. But I was thoroughly unprepared for the next call I got from Ken, which culminated in a plan for another gathering, this one the night before Halloween. And this time, my mom was able to attend. I took quite a bit of time filling her in on the details she’d missed. She said she’d be glad to come to the gathering and hear Ken’s story, but she probably wouldn’t be of any more help than any of my friends or the girl’s own therapist.

I smiled before hanging up the phone, thinking, yeah, I’m not so sure about that.

***

“It wasn’t Leena’s screams that woke me up this time. It was a commotion outside my own window. Mind you, both our bedrooms are on the second floor of the house, so I’m not at all used to being woken up by anything thumping on the casement. I started from a dead sleep and turned to see the blankness beyond the glass. For a long time, I was too startled to move. The last thing I wanted to do was get out of bed and walk toward the sound I thought I’d heard. By the time I finally put my feet on the floor and started creeping up to the window though, I’d already resolved to go down the hall and check on Leena. First, I needed to see what was outside.

“With my face against the glass, I looked out and then down at the ground beside the house. There was nothing out of the ordinary, but it was too dark to see much of anything. Then, just as I was turning away to walk toward the door, I caught a glimpse of something darting past the window. In the second and a half my eyes managed to light on it, I saw it was a bird. Just a bird. I’m no expert on species. I imagine it was a finch or something. What I did see for sure was that it flew away from the house along a vertical course up into the sky. I stood there struck dumb for a couple seconds. Then I hurried out to the hall and toward Leena’s bedroom. 

“That’s when I heard the scream. Only it wasn’t Leena, I knew right away. I sprinted to the door and burst in just in time to see a shadow streaking across the floor, up the wall, and along the ceiling. Bewildered, I reflexively looked over at the plug-in night light next to the closet. That’s when I realized Leena’s bed was empty. I scanned the room frantically, ran to the closet to see if she was in there, dropped down to look under the bed. Then I bolted from the room, horrified that she may have sleepwalked to the stairs. Just as I was imagining her little body as a crumpled pile at the foot of the stairs, I heard the front door open. I shouted for her to stop. But before I made it to the stairs, I heard a crunch from her bedroom. The sound stopped me in my tracks. Was she still in her room? If she wasn’t, who was? Who had just opened the front door? 

“A crunch?” Mike said.

“Yes, that’s what it was. I was even sure I knew what had made the noise. The window was cracked, by something pushing against it from inside Leena’s room. I hesitated just long enough to review my search of the room in my mind. Leena wasn’t in there. As much as I wanted to investigate the sound, I had to make sure she was alright first. So I threw myself down the stairs and rushed out the front door, trying to look every direction at once. With the yard lit by the porch lamp, she wasn’t hard to find. I caught sight of her running toward the woods. I called out to her. She heard me but she didn’t stop. When I called out again, she turned back and said, ‘Dad, I have to see Piltok—I have to!’ And then she turned back toward the woods and kept going. I ran after her.

“She was by the creek when I caught up to her, an old spot I’d shown her years ago. She was sobbing. ‘I did what you said,’ she managed to say. ‘I held up Mom’s cross and I told Belcane she had to leave.’ I asked her if Belcane had said anything. ‘She told me Piltok is dead, that I’ll never get to talk to him again.’ So, that was why she’d run out of the house. Next, I asked her what happened after she told Belcane to leave. ‘She screamed and started making a commotion.’ 

“‘Honey,’ I said, ‘the window in your room is cracked.’ I waited. She didn’t say anything. ‘Do you know what happened to the window?’ She sniffled. Then she started sobbing again.”

This was when my mom first spoke. “I’m guessing she was plenty mad at you for forbidding her from speaking to Piltok in his final days.”

“She was indeed—she still is. As we were walking back to the house, she pulled away, shouting, ‘You made me stay away! You’re the reason I couldn’t talk to him! I had so much to tell him. I had so much to ask him.’ She tried to run back into the woods, but I caught up to her and picked her up. She wailed the whole time I carried her to the house.”

“And the window really was cracked?” Mike asked. 

“The window was cracked. Leena must’ve done it somehow. She must’ve. Maybe she threw something at it or hit it. Maybe it caused a smaller crack at first, but then the wind picked up. I don’t know. It’s not like it was windy that night. Maybe pulling open the front door… I don’t know.”

“But the voice,” Chris objected. “You said you heard a scream, that you knew it wasn’t Leena. And wasn’t Leena already on her way downstairs?” 

“Listen,” Ken said, exasperated. “I don’t know what you want me to say. That I have proof some ghost or demon was in my house, saying God knows what to my daughter? I came here to talk to all of you because I thought you could be reasonable but wouldn’t dismiss me out of hand as crazy. But all of this is crazy. I don’t believe in demons or grentroleems or salobogs or any of it. Jesus, it sounds asinine just saying those names out loud.”

“Mr. Baldwin,” Mom said, “how did your wife die?”

“What? She had cancer.”

“Did she have it for a long time before she died?” 

“Yes, she had it when Leena was just old enough to remember. Then the treatment started working and it went into remission. Then, after a few years, it came back.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Two years ago. Why?”

“And how much have you talked to Leena about your wife’s passing?”

“I talked to her… Of course, we talked. I’m sorry Mrs. Caldwell, but what are you getting at?” 

Mike, Chris, and Cindy were all staring at Mom now in disbelief. I suppose I felt the same way they did. Was she really going to psychologize this whole thing? How could the hidden mental mechanics of grief possibly account for invisible screamers and self-cracking windows? 

Mom said, “Leena started developing her friendships in the woods about two years ago too, if I’m guessing right. I’d also wager that was the last time you personally visited the spot by the creek you said you originally showed her.” 

“It wasn’t exactly at the same time,” Ken said, “but not long after, yeah.” 

“Don’t you see why the creatures have short lifespans then? Leena’s mom was most likely given a series of updates to her prognosis. She had a year. Then she had six months. Then the cancer went into remission and she was saved. Then she had six months again.”

“Mrs. Caldwell,” Chris broke in to say, “you don’t really think this is all just coming from some emotional disturbance from Leena’s mom dying, do you? I mean, seriously. Emotional disturbances don’t crack windows.”

“Oh, by the time you reach my age, you’ll understand that you’re under no obligation to form hard and fast opinions about things before learning all you care to about them—and you’re almost always far better off if you don’t. To me, it sounds an awful lot like Mr. Baldwin here has a demon in his house, one who’s taken a liking to his daughter. On the other hand, it also sounds like Mr. Baldwin wasn’t quite sure where Leena was when he heard the window splitting. It’s also interesting to me that this Belcane character first arrived on the scene after Mr. Baldwin introduced a traditional religious element to the story—the silver cross his wife had given him. As you said yourself,” she said turning back to Ken, “up till then it had been all original, and if I may, all rather pagan-seeming characters.”

Ken looked down, shaking his head. He was smiling but I saw a tear drop from his eye. “I’ve been beating myself up over that. I knew I shouldn’t have told her to stop talking to them, if for no other reason than that she was so invested in that world. It was so important to her. Hell, she created the whole thing. And I took it from her. Whatever her conversations with Piltok were, they were important to her. And I took the last of them away from her.” 

“Don’t feel bad about it, Mr. Baldwin. Your daughter is trying to encourage your engagement. Her story realm isn’t as sealed off from the rest of the world as you imagine. It’s like a dance. She coaxes you into making a move, and then she responds.”

“But Leena’s not like that. She’s not manipulative. She’s not… histrionic. She’d never pretend to some affliction to get attention.”

“Oh, in her mind, I’m sure the crises are very real—just as they are in yours. I’m not saying either of you is leading this dance deliberately. From each of your personal perspectives, you’re both responding to quite literal realities. Your daughter is receiving all kinds of messages from her new friends, and she doesn’t know how to respond or what to believe about them. Meanwhile, she’s worried that each of them is days—or minutes—away from dying. Then there’s you, Mr. Baldwin. You’re terrified your daughter may be losing her mind, and you’re worried she may hurt herself in the process. Now, with all the special effects, you’re doubting your own sanity, if you’re not wondering if maybe there really is an old witch talking to your daughter.”

            “Special effects?” Chris said aghast. “You can’t really be saying Ken would mistake his own daughter’s scream for someone else’s, Mrs. Caldwell. And he heard the front door open before he heard the crunch of the window cracking. Did she open the door, run back up the stairs, sneak past her dad, break the window, and then run back downstairs, again without him seeing her?”

“Heavens no,” Mom said. “I’m as impressed with these phenomena as you are, Chris. If it’s as Mr. Baldwin says, then it sounds to me like something extraordinary really is happening in his house. You even forgot about the shadow he saw bounding about his daughter’s room when he first came in.” 

Ken finally looked up now. “You’re right, Mrs. Caldwell. I mean, about Leena and me. The fact is, we hardly ever talk anymore. With Janelle’s sickness, things got so intense. I didn’t know how much more my heart could take. So I withdrew.”

“Here you are now, though, unburdening yourself among new friends. Tell me something, Mr. Baldwin. Those nights Leena woke up screaming or had scratches on her arm—did you stay with her the rest of those nights or did you both go back to your separate rooms?” 

“Oh, I stayed with her for a while, but then we both eventually went back to sleep in our own beds. She’s eleven.” 

“I see. Yes, eleven is old enough to sleep alone, barring extenuating eventualities. I imagine you’re not one for staying with someone you’re worried about through the night, because you’ve already done that so many times, and all that ended… not so well.” 

“Yes,” he said with a brittle voice, “not well at all.” 

“Tell me about the spot by the creek.”

“That’s where Leena goes to talk to the Piltok character. That’s where she goes and comes back talking about all these fantastical creatures. That’s where I should have let her keep going while I looked for other solutions to her night terrors.”

“You said you were the one who first showed the spot to Leena. What did it mean to you?”

“To me? I suppose it was just a pretty spot by our house. I did go there sometimes to sort of catch my breath, you know, when Janelle was… going through what she went through. Leena once asked me where I’d been, and I told her I’d needed a minute to gather my thoughts. She pointed out I tended to go to the same place whenever I did that. So I took her there.”

“How often did you go there together after that?”

“Not often. Maybe half a dozen times. We had a couple of really tough, but really good conversations there. Ha, you know, I’m pretty sure that’s where we were when I told her her mom’s cancer had come back, and that it was more aggressive than before.” He lifted his hand to cover his eyes.

“That poor child. Is it any wonder she kept going back there? For answers. For peace. For some kind of connection. Is it any wonder that when you stopped going there yourself, she found another way to get all of those things?” 

Amazed, I looked around the room. Chris sat on the edge of the couch, his eyes focused on the floor in front of him, as if he were puzzling out some mystery etched in the carpet fibers. Mike had one leg propped on the armrest, and he was staring at Mom with his mouth agape. Cindy swiped a tear from her cheek before looking back at me and shaking her head in wonder. Ken, meanwhile, had a choked expression, as if trying to decide whether to erupt or collapse. 

It was Chris who broke the silence. “What do you think Ken should do, Mrs. Caldwell?” Now Ken’s mouth fell open as if he were about to say something but then thought better of it. Everyone in the room turned back toward Mom, who visibly shrank back into her chair. 

“I’m no expert on these things,” she said with poise at odds with her posture. “And I certainly wouldn’t presume to tell you what’s best for your family, Mr. Baldwin. If I were in your predicament, though, I have to say there are a few courses that seem commonsensical to me. The first is that, if you’re concerned about your daughter’s safety, whether the danger is posed by this Belcane woman or by Leena herself, you should stay with her. Bring a cot into her bedroom if you have to. Or maybe there’s a couch one of you can sleep on. That way you can be better assured she’s safe.”

Chris leaned over and whispered something to Mike. I imagine he said something like, “Why the hell wouldn’t you keep your child in the room with you with all that’s going on?” I recalled Mom’s suggestion about why Ken might be reluctant to stay with Leena through the night, though, and I concluded she was right not to think ill of him for it. But both Chris and Mike were probably adjusting to the change in focus from a thrilling exploration of supernatural occurrences to an intervention of sorts.

Ken swallowed hard before saying, “I guess that’s not so unreasonable.” He cleared his throat. “And you probably think I need to talk to Leena more as well, which is also something I probably should have thought of myself.” 

“Yeah, it sounds to me like you tried to get her talking to everyone except you. I know it won’t just be hard for Leena to talk to you now, especially about the things she most needs to talk to you about. It’s going to be just as hard for you. That’s not something you should beat yourself up over. But you also can’t count on the idea occurring to you spontaneously in any given moment. And you’re going to have to overcome some natural reluctance.” 

            “I suppose you understand all this so well because you’ve lost someone close to you as well.”

“Oh, that was such a long time ago. Another life. Sure, I’ve lost not just one by this point. But I do remember back to when Jim died and all I wanted to do was push away the people I most needed to be close to. I don’t know how well I understand what you’re going through. It’s genuinely frightening. I’m just pointing out some things that jump out to me.”

“Maybe I’ll go with her tomorrow to look for Piltok by the creek,” Ken said. He couldn’t make it to the last word of the sentence before breaking down in tears, briefly. With some effort, he righted himself. Mom had nailed it: there really was some emotional block preventing him from going there. 

I turned back to her in still more disbelief. I wanted to express my awe at her insight—we’d all been talking to Ken longer than her but were too distracted by the details of the story. Instead, I heard myself saying, “You said a few courses, Mom. Was there something else you wanted to suggest?”

Mom smiled knowingly. “I may be biased, but my favorite part of Leena’s story is the six-foot shaggy beast that saves children from nightmares. What did you say her name was?”

“It was Kemoa,” Chris said before Ken could answer. 

“Ah, yes. Kemoa. I think maybe you and Leena can go looking for Piltok in the woods together, and if for some reason he doesn’t turn up, the two of you can call on Kemoa. Oh, and Mr. Baldwin, whatever happens, sometime soon I would go to the shelter and get your daughter a dog, preferably one with black and white fur and blue eyes.” 

***

“Well, Chris and Mike were a little upset you turned their scary story forum into a ‘psychotherapy session,’ as Mike called it. But mostly we’re all just amazed at how you saw through to the crux of the whole thing.”

It was Halloween night and I’d called my mom to tell her I’d heard from Ken, who was already feeling much better. He’d even moved an old couch into Leena’s room so he could stay the night with her until they could figure out what to do about Belcane. “Tell your mom I somehow knew from the story you wrote she’d be able to help me,” he said in a tone markedly different from the one he’d spoken to us in before. “I was not disappointed. Tell her I can’t thank her enough. I’m even wondering if I should invite her to go to the shelter with us to pick out a dog.” 

“I don’t have much confidence I saw to the crux of anything,” Mom said now. “Though if I made either of them feel better for a bit, that’s good enough for me. I’m guessing that means Piltok was a no-show. We’ll all just have to hope Leena hasn’t seen the last of him; she did say he doesn’t always come. We don’t have to assume the worst. They may still need his help if Belcane keeps getting more violent.”

“Oh, come on, Mom. I bet you were right and there was something off about Ken’s perception of the timing between when the door opened and when he heard the window cracking. He’d just woken up and was walking around the house in the dark. I know he said the scream he heard wasn’t his daughter, but it’s not like he’s ever heard Leena’s impression of a scary old woman shrieking in fear or rage or whatever. The shadow could have been anything. It could have been nothing. The real issue here was that Leena’s connection to her father was lost right when she most needed it. You saw that right away.”

“I did see that right away, but I’m not sure about the rest of it. Mr. Baldwin doesn’t seem like the fanciful type. As desperate as he probably is himself to make some new connections, he looked genuinely pained—embarrassed—when he was relaying those details. He thinks he’s losing his mind. He may be.”

“Wait. You don’t think there really is something supernatural going on in Ken’s house, do you?” 

“No, you’re probably right. Probably. But I’ll say one thing, thinking about that old creature looming over that little girl sends a shiver down my spine. And even when I was telling him he should sleep in his daughter’s room, I was thinking you’d have a hard time getting me to sleep in there. Yeah, I generally don’t buy these stories you and your friends are so thrilled about, and if I had to bet I’d say it’s all explainable without recourse to the otherworldly. But I’d also bet we haven’t heard the end of Leena’s story. We haven’t heard the last of Belcane.”

The line went silent. I couldn’t think of a way to respond. As I was opening my mouth to ask what she thought we should do, Mom added, “And I keep finding myself staring at clouds in the sky, thinking I really can almost see little dots darting around in them.”

***

Kemoa is the third in a series of Halloween stories. You can follow the links below to the first two.

CANNONBALL: A HALLOWEEN STORY

JAX: A HALLOWEEN STORY  

THE TREE CLIMBER: A STORY INSPIRED BY W.S. MERWIN

Cannonball: a Halloween Story

            “I’m sure I would’ve dismissed it as nothing but a weird dream. I opened my eyes, and I saw a figure standing past the foot of my bed, as if he’d just walked into the room from the hallway. All I could see was an outline, but for some reason I got the sense it was somebody I knew. That’s why I didn’t feel scared, not at first. It was only after I stared for a long time that I started to get freaked out, because whoever it was just stood there, like he was staring right back at me, only I couldn’t see his eyes. I couldn’t see any of his other facial features either. Finally, I was awake enough to say, ‘What’s up?’ –I know, stupid right? But I opened my mouth, and that’s what came out.”

            Nearly all of us had heard Chris’s story before. For six years now, our group of friends has been taking turns hosting these Halloween parties, and each year we gather around a fire—indoors this year—to share our experiences of the eerily unexplained. What made this year’s party different for me was that it was the first time my mom attended. I wondered what she, a grandmother, would make of all these twenty-somethings indulging in such frivolity. I couldn’t resist stealing glances at her as I listened to each of the stories, even though she remained perfectly silent as we each stood next to Cindy’s fireplace in turn, holding forth on our life’s most mysterious moments. 

            “Now, here’s the freaky part,” Chris went on in his typical supercharged fashion, his hands ablur. “The guy didn’t turn and walk out of the room. No, he backed through the door into the hallway. And there was no bouncing or swaying to indicate he was taking steps. It was like he was on wheels or something. I kept blinking, trying to clear my eyes. Then he passed through the door and was outside the room, out of sight. By now, I was more awake and was like, ‘Hey!’ as I climbed out of bed and rushed out to the hallway. Well, you probably already guessed. I looked all over the house—nothing. There wasn’t a soul there but me.”

            “There wasn’t a body there but yours anyway,” Cindy said, daintily lifting her hand to cover her mouth between bouncing shoulders. 

            “It was disturbing as hell, mostly because I’ve never had any dreams at all like that, before or since. I probably still would’ve forgotten the whole thing after a few years if it hadn’t been for the phone call I got—literally the second after I gave up searching the house and sat down on the couch. It was my sister Jen. Some dude had started freaking out after a Tinder date and wouldn’t let her out of his car. I found out later she’d gotten in just to talk to the guy, but then he started the engine and began driving toward his house. As soon as I hit the button to answer the call, I hear her screaming, ‘Stop the car! Stop the car! I want out right now. Stop the car!’ Next, I hear the dude demanding to know who she called. ‘It’s my brother,’ she says. ‘He’s on his way right now.’ That was a lie of course, since I had no clue where she was yet. ‘Chris, if the line goes dead, call the police right away and tell them where I am.’ 

            “The dude apparently fell for it, or else he realized my sister was going to be too much trouble. For whatever reason, he stopped the car. By the time she was stepping out onto the side of the road, I was already pulling out of my driveway.”

            Chris paused, puffing out his chest. A good-looking, fastidiously groomed, dark-bearded man with a slight build, he evinced, beneath his habitual smart-ass attitude, an undercurrent of earnestness that made his story all too believable. 

            “Okay, so you’ve all got it down to coincidence, right?” he said. “I had a weird dream, and then my sister calls because she needs picked up after a date gone awry. Here’s the kicker: no sooner had I pulled back into my lane after stopping to pick her up than we see this asshole barreling down the road, heading right for us. I jerked the wheel to the right and swerved over onto the shoulder, but he still almost hit us. I mean, I was pissed. Jen had to talk me out of turning around and going after the guy. She ended up calling the police after all and telling them what happened. I expected them to come out to the house and interview us or something, but they didn’t do a damn thing. It was kind of an unsettling education in how useless the police are to women frightened of creepy assholes.”

            “And what woman isn’t?” Cindy chimed in again.  

            “Now, here’s the thing. If I hadn’t been awake to get that call from her, I might’ve been another four or five minutes getting to where she was. She would’ve still been walking on the side of the road when that psycho came back. Because of whatever the hell that was that walked—or floated—into my room earlier that night, I was there just in time to save her.”

            Everyone in the room fell silent. I was left pondering how each year’s sharing of stories, which is meant to be fun, almost invariably turns solemn. I glanced at my mom again. She’d been listening intently. Now, she was looking down at nothing. I realized, with a modicum of stupefaction, I didn’t know much of anything about her beliefs when it came to the supernatural. She’s been a Christian her whole life, as far as I know, but even in that realm I could only describe her views generically. You always take your parents’ lives and beliefs for granted, I guess, gathering bits and pieces as the years go by, seldom considering how incomplete your grasp of their stories probably is.  

Finally, Chris added a postscript. “Now, I’m not saying it was an angel or a ghost or anything. But I know one thing: it wasn’t a coincidence.” 

            I looked around at everyone’s faces, amazed by the amount of time passing without anyone making a joke. When I looked back at Mom, though, I saw the faintest suggestion of amusement. Was she quietly laughing at us for taking Chris’s melodrama so seriously? 

            “Okay,” Mike, who’d been sitting quietly nursing his whiskey sour through most of the storytelling, said at last. “Can anyone top that one?” 

            We all knew each other’s stories from the years prior. Still, it was fun to get together and rehearse them as part of our group’s holiday ritual. I’m sure we would’ve all gladly listened as Maddy told us her story about the guy with glowing eyes she once saw crouching beside a country road—as if he were eating something he’d just killed—or as Tom recounted the incident when he was surrounded by whispering shadows while on a darkened forest trail, looking for his lost keys by the light of his smart phone. Chris, however, must’ve seen the same smirk on my mom’s face as I did. 

            “What about you Mrs. Caldwell?” he asked. “Have you ever had any encounters with the unexplained?” 

            “Oh, I don’t know about that,” she said with perfect equipoise. “If you go deep enough, you can say pretty much everything is unexplained.” 

            “So, you’re not a believer?” Cindy asked. “I don’t go in for any of the usual UFO or haunted house nonsense, either, but I have experienced some things that made me wonder. Haven’t you ever had something happen to you that made you think, even for a second—I don’t know—like some unseen force was involved?” 

            I slid into my old habit of looking at my mom as an older, wiser version of myself, despite all my adolescent and early adult thrashings to free myself from her influence. Maybe it was the confusion that comes from a couple failed relationships and the onrushing peril of my thirties, but of late I’d been wanting to hear more of what my mom had to say about things practical and transcendent alike. She scrunched her eyes, her cheeks etched by decades of ready smiles into a mask of hard-won wisdom—or something. Pushing her still-slim body back into the couch, she gathered her thoughts. We really do look alike, I thought, though I’m not sure I’d want my life to in any way recapitulate hers. But should that be the measure of what a woman has to say? 

            “I know that as us ladies get older, we’re supposed to get more attuned to that sort of thing: burning sage to cleanse your house of evil spirits, seances, spirituality—all that spooky stuff that everyone finds so thrilling. That story you told—your name is Chris?—it did remind me of something that happened years and years ago. More than anything else, though, I feel the need to tell you, that ‘unseen force’ you’re talking about, it’s not what you think it is.” 

            “So you actually know what it is? Like—you’ve seen it or heard it?”

            “Oh, yes. So have you. It’s not anything from beyond the grave or anything hiding beneath the fabric of nature. It’s something in your mind that insists on fitting the chaos of life into a pattern—or, more specifically, a story.”

            “Ah, so you’re an unbeliever. Do you think stories like the one Chris just told are random coincidences that we make too much of? Because Chris seems pretty convinced it was something else entirely.”

            “More than convinced. You’d have a very hard time convincing me it was a chance occurrence.” 

            “I’ve had quite a few dreams at this point in my life. Some of them, most of them, have been pretty forgettable. A few of them I remember years later. You said you’ve never had a dream like the one you described before or after the night your sister got into trouble. But, before that, you said you probably would’ve forgotten the dream had it not been for what happened afterward. My question is, how many similar dreams did you in fact forget, simply because nothing happened later to bookmark them as significant?”

            Chris squinted, either thinking hard or exaggeratingly conveying his disbelief.  

            Mom went on, “Memory is a tricky thing, you see, because what you remember is always tied up with what you find meaningful. So, when you examine your life looking for turning points and revelations, it’s easy to pull details from their context. It’s easy to fudge them—or even invent them.”

            “Are you saying I made up that my dream saved my sister’s life?” Chris asked, more amused than insulted. 

            “It sounds like the scene on the road would be difficult to hallucinate. But how close was the guy to hitting you two really? You were angry, you were frightened, and it was the middle of the night. Is it so hard to believe you could’ve remembered it—or even experienced it in the moment—as more dangerous than it actually was? For that matter, is it impossible that, knowing the significance of what happened later, you started to recall the details of your dream differently? I mean, I don’t know about you, but my dreams are pretty murky, pretty open to interpretation. They’re less like movies and more like Rorschach inkblot tests. Then there’s the timing.”

            While Chris had been telling his story, I remembered thinking I’d never heard the detail about how close in time his arrival on the scene to save his sister was to when the guy came back and forced them off the road. As my mom questioned how sure he could be about the precise sequence of incidents that occurred so long ago, I looked to see his expression go rigid, as though he were effortfully concealing his embarrassment. Maybe he really had simply added this part to make the story more compelling, not even realizing he was doing it. 

            Knowing Chris would be eager to defend his account, I jumped in to redirect the conversation. “Mom, you said Chris’s story reminded you of something that happened. Did you have a prophetic dream? If you did, how can you say it’s all about misremembering and fudging details?” 

            “‘A prophetic dream’? Well, I would’ve never called it anything so grandiose.”

            “But you had a dream that tipped you off to something that was going to happen in your waking life?”

            “Not exactly. I had a weird dream that ended up seeming significant.” 

            “What was it?”

            “Do you remember our dog Kea? You were only about six when she died.”

            Kea was a husky-malamute mix, and one of the sweetest dogs I’ve ever known. Some of my earliest memories are of her chasing me around our backyard. In those memories, she was enormous, all soft black and white fur, with ghostly light blue eyes. She had these tendrils of white sprouting down from the otherwise black fur around her ears, and they had tiny striations, as though someone had crimped them. Like all huskies, she was independent—stubborn—but all my mom ever had to do was whisper and that dog would obey. Though “obey” isn’t the right word; it was like they had a rapport. Twenty-three years on, I can still see the heartbreak in my mom’s eyes as she watched Kea get frail with age. My mom loved that dog. She disappeared for a few days when Kea died. Even at six and seven years old, I recognized how devastated she was. It was over a year before she stopped tearing up whenever she talked about her, and she couldn’t seem to help talking about her. 

            “How could I forget Kea? I thought us kids were going to end up in an orphanage after she died. You were so depressed. We loved her too. I couldn’t stand the thought of her lying in the ground—I remember wanting to dig her up. To this day, I think about her from time to time. She was such a huge presence in my childhood.”

            “I don’t know if I ever told you this, but Kea wasn’t really my dog originally. Well, she was, but I bought her for my boyfriend at the time, a man I lived with for four years, a man I loved and thought I was going to marry.”

            “You never told me any of this! That means you broke up with this guy just a year or two before you started dating Dad.”

            “I’ll get to that.”

            “Hold the phone. Who was this guy?”

            “He was Kea’s dad,” Mom said laughing coyly. “The way he used to look at that dog—it drove me crazy for a long time. Eventually, I came to realize that’s just how he was. He formed these insanely strong bonds, not with everybody obviously, but with the people he got close with—and the animals he got close with too.”

            “You lived with him for four years? What happened? Is he still around?”

            “No, he died a year and five months before I started dating your dad, although I’d known your dad for a long time already by then.”

            “You were in love with a man who died right before you got together with Dad—and you never told us about him? How did he die?”

            “Some kids were trying to save their dog after it fell through the ice on a lake he walked Kea around all the time. One of them ended up falling through the ice himself. Jim got both the dog and the kid out—apparently with some help from Kea—but he got severe frostbite, and then he got a really bad infection. The doctors kept saying he would be fine, but the antibiotics just wouldn’t work. Then he got pneumonia. They think that’s what killed him.” 

            “Mom, how come you never told us about this guy before?”

            “Do a lot of mothers tell their daughters about their dating histories?”

            “Oh, come on, Mom. This was right before you started dating Dad—and you didn’t just break up with him. The guy died.” 

            “Well, maybe it was just something I felt I needed to move on from, not resurrect through retelling, you know? Haven’t you ever gone through something like that, something you need to recover from but never really felt comfortable talking about?” 

            This was when Chris butted in. “It sounds like you two have a lot to talk about, but I’m curious about the dream you were about to tell us about.” 

            “Oh yeah, that.” 

            “Yeah, come on, Mrs. Caldwell. Tell us about the dream.”

            “I had the dream about eight months after Jim died. After the funeral, Kea went to live with my mom and dad. She was home with me that particular night, though, because they were on this big road trip Dad had been planning for years. It was Kea’s first time back in a long time, but she went right to her old spot by the front door. She seemed a little sad from the moment my parents dropped her off, and, really, I just wasn’t paying all that much attention to her. At one point, I was sitting on the couch, doing some work, when Kea started whimpering in her sleep, as if she were having a nightmare, and then she jolted awake. I called over to her, ‘What’s wrong girl? Did you have a bad dream?’ She looked at me, got up, and started walking around the front hallway, as if she were looking for something. ‘It’s okay Kea,’ I said, ‘I miss him too.’”

            “So the dream you’re talking about—it was the dog’s dream?”

            “Not exactly. I only thought about Kea waking up and searching around later. It’s like I was saying, what happened next made my memory of the dog’s behavior seem more significant. Otherwise, I probably would’ve never remembered it at all.”

            “What happened next?”

            “That’s where my dream comes in. It was late at night or early in the morning. I’d been asleep for a long time. The image of Kea appears in my mind; only, it’s not really an image. I’m partially looking down at Kea as she sleeps in her spot by the door, partially inside Kea’s own mind. I don’t know if any of you ever have dreams like that. I’ve had some others, but it’s usually another person’s perspective I step into. I can’t remember it ever being a dog’s.”

            “Ha! So you and the dog shared a dream?”

            “Well, yeah, I guess. I mean, I don’t know if my dream was anything like what Kea had been dreaming, but in my own dream I was sharing the dream with her.” 

            “Okay,” Chris said, “your dream is definitely much weirder than mine.” 

            “What did you and the dog dream then?” I asked. 

            “It wasn’t anything earthshattering. It was just Jim’s voice saying, ‘That’s a good girl, Kea.’ It was in a whisper, like he used when he was saying goodnight to her.” Here, Mom went quiet, staring down at her feet. “He had this way of saying it, like he was talking to a baby. Not sing-songy, but ever so gentle. Sometimes, he’d leave off the t-h-a, so it sounded more like, ‘Suh good girl, Kea.’” 

            She paused again for two deep breaths.  

            “I should probably explain that for the first two years or so after we got Kea, I couldn’t stand her. Jim became obsessed with her the moment we brought her home, and he spent so much time playing with her, training her, walking her—it drove me crazy. For one thing, she was my second husky, and the first I’d trained using a prong collar. I’d learned that the first thing you have to do to get a dog to behave is let them know you’re in charge, that you’re the alpha. And my other husky was a great dog, so I knew those methods worked. 

            “Jim assured me all that ‘dominance training stuff’ was nonsense. He thought it was immoral to deliberately inflict pain on a conscious being in an effort to change its behavior. By his lights, you don’t have to establish dominance to get a dog to listen to you and behave. You just have to have a mutual understanding based on trust and wanting the best for each other. I’d let him go on and on, and just think to myself, ‘I’ll watch you figure it out for yourself when your methods go completely wrong.’ The infuriating part of it was they didn’t go wrong—at least not in any obvious way. His methods just took so much time. It was like he adopted a special-needs kid. I’d want to go out for an evening or take a trip somewhere, and it was always, ‘We can’t leave Kea for that long.’ So we’d stay in. For a while, I really felt like that damn dog was ruining my life.

            “At night, when she finally stopped following him around and harassing him, she’d lay down behind the front door of our old house, and before he went upstairs he’d say goodnight to her like I described. It always annoyed me because he treated her like his baby. ‘Daddy loves you, you’re such a good girl, I’m so proud of you,’ and on and on. I just wanted to shout, ‘It’s a damn dog you idiot!’ And, if I’m being honest now, I think that was a big part of why when we moved into that house, I insisted he train her to recognize the upstairs as off-limits, which he did, grudgingly. 

            “Anyway, in the dream, I was half looking down at Kea as she lay there, half in her head as she dreamt hearing Jim’s whisper. The weird part was I had this dream the same night I’d seen her jolt awake—it was like the dream was showing me what had startled her, why she’d gotten up and looked around so frantically. Now I was jolting awake from my own dream, breaking into sobs, and rushing down the stairs to check on Kea. She licked the tears off my face and lay her head in my lap as I cried.” 

             “My God, it sounds like a really rough time for both of you.” 

            “You have no idea. I guess I should fill in the rest of the context for you. After Jim died, not surprisingly, Kea started having some pretty serious behavior issues. It started with my grandpa’s couch getting chewed all to hell. That alone was enough for me to want to rehome her. Then she started digging like crazy in the backyard. At one point, she even managed to dig under the fence. Lucky for her, the neighbors she ran to had seen Jim walking her a billion times, so they knew right where she lived. I was actually disappointed when they showed up at the door. That’s when I got online and started looking for a new ‘forever home’ for her. But my parents told me to wait and see how I felt after a few months. My compromise idea was for them to take her for a few months, and then I’d decide whether I wanted her back. 

            “Meanwhile, you could say I was having some behavior issues of my own. I don’t need to go into it, I’m sure. Suffice to say, no matter what I did, all I could think about was never seeing Jim again. For months, I was subject to waves of intense emotional pain. I kept obsessing over all the ways I’d been a terrible girlfriend to him, and I’d never be able to tell him I was sorry. That’s a big part of why I gave Kea to my parents instead of just getting rid of her. He loved that fucking dog so much, there was no way. 

            “After about seven months, though, the intense pain gave way, mostly, to numbness, a bone-deep numbness that was close enough to death I wondered every day what the point was of waking up in the morning. On occasion, the feeling would come back, but what was the point to all that suffering if the best I could get back to was this zombie-like state of near oblivion? You’re old enough to understand what can happen to you as a woman when you’re in a state like that. After sleepwalking through life for day upon day, week upon week, month upon month, I started getting desperate to shock myself out of it. 

            “That’s how I ended up at a bar downtown—which one doesn’t matter—hanging on a guy, whose name doesn’t matter. He was the most attractive, charismatic guy on the premises, funny as all get-out, and he was just all-around fun. Was he a good person? I didn’t care in the least.”

            “You went home with him?” I said, unable to conceal my horror. 

            “No, I took him home with me. Now, I’m not judging anyone, but I think you know I was never the type to go in for one-night stands. This was only the second I’d ever had—and the first was the beginning of my relationship with Jim, so I don’t even think that meets the definition.”

            “Wait! You slept with this Jim guy on the first date?” 

            “Oh yeah. I wish you could’ve met him. He was the type who could put you at ease even if your clothes were on fire.” 

            “It sounds like your clothes were on fire,” Cindy said giggling some more—until I turned my gaze on her, silencing her in an instant. 

            “When you two are done, I’d like to hear what this all has to do with your mom’s dream about the dog.” 

            “Well, as you can imagine, I had no idea what I was doing or what I even wanted to happen. When we got to the house, I offered him a drink, but he was impatient to get to the next stage—if you know what I mean. I kept pushing him back and stepping away, trying to stall, realizing now that it was too late that I wanted nothing to do with what I’d led him to expect. In the bar, he’d been so smooth, such a talker, you know. Now, he was, shall we say, straight to the point.”

            “Let me guess,” Chris interjected. “This is when the dog shows up to scare Squidward away.” 

            “Kea scare a guy away?” Mom said. “If you’d ever met her, you’d see how funny that notion is. Oh, I suppose I have seen her get her hackles up on a few occasions, and Jim told me about a couple others. Most likely, her intervening would take the form of pinches with her incisors—husky pinches, we used to call them—or a good goosing in the behind. She just wasn’t an aggressive dog.” 

            “Mom, Kea used to growl and flash her teeth whenever Dad raised his voice at you.”

            “That was much later, dear.”

            I held back telling her about the time Kea inserted herself between me and some older kids who were heckling and intimidating me, even as I marveled at how vivid the memory was. Mom was mostly right about her not being aggressive, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t protective. What I was really interested in just then, though, was whether my mother ended up going through with her second one-night stand. 

            She began again, “No, as far as I knew, Kea was asleep behind the door already. It was late after all, and though she usually greeted me whenever I got home, she seemingly felt no obligation to do so every time. So what did I do? Mostly, I just wanted to stall, so the brilliant idea that sprang to mind was to say we should go upstairs. He fancied that idea, so up we went. 

            “Once we were on my bed, he shifted gears and slowed down again, which was exactly what I’d hoped he would do, though I still dreaded what would come next, what I already regretted setting in motion. At the same time, I felt too guilty for leading him on to call a halt to the proceedings. I think all us girls have been in this particular pickle at one time or another.”

            “You didn’t go through with it, did you?” I couldn’t help blurting out. 

            “Honestly, I may have. I was drunk. I was heartbroken—although that word doesn’t even begin to capture it. Then in walks Kea. You have to understand how strange this was. Not since before the house was finished had she ever been upstairs. Now here she was, five years later, just waltzing in as if it was her nightly custom. I took the opportunity to put the smooching on pause, saying, ‘Kea, what are you doing up here?’ I started to sit up but was roughly pushed back down. And that’s when things got scary.”

            “Mom?”

            “Oh, don’t worry about me, hun. This was all so long ago. Let’s just say the most flashy, bold, and charismatic guys don’t always turn out to be the best human beings. It was a mistake I wouldn’t have made at any other juncture in my life. But that night I made it.”

            “He forced himself on you?” Chris asked, his earnest, heroic self stepping in to relieve the ornery, smart-ass version.

            “He pushed me back down and began unbuttoning my jeans. It took me a few moments longer than it should have to find the air and initiative I needed to tell him to stop, and then to demand that he stop. No matter how loud I got, though, he didn’t seem to mind. His only response was to put his hand over my mouth. What did bother him, though, was that Kea was just sitting there beside the bed, staring at him. 

            “‘What’s with your fucking dog?’ he said, all nonchalant, as if he hadn’t noticed at all how scared I was. I turned my own head to look as he sat up, saying, ‘Shoo!’ I thought the brief halt to the proceedings was a good opportunity and told him I’d take her outside. But he just said, ‘Fuck that,’ and started screaming at her to get out. Finally, he started climbing off the bed, bringing his arm up like he was going to swat her, and that sent her scrambling into the corner on the other side of the room. I figured this was my chance, that if I made it downstairs I could find some way to dissuade him from pushing matters any further. So I jumped out of bed and dashed through the doorway into the hall. 

            “It’s hard to describe what I was feeling then. I’d just made this colossal blunder, you know. It didn’t seem like I should be in any real danger, and I kept thinking at any moment the guy would bust up laughing. I think running down the hall I must’ve had a grin on my face, like it was all so ridiculous. But then I felt his body collide against mine from behind. He hit me so hard it knocked the wind out of me, and I fell hard on my knees. He rode me to the ground—I think I was even laughing at that point, though not for very long. 

            “After a moment, when I realized it wasn’t a joke, I found myself pinned face-down on the carpet. The panic finally kicked in. I tried to scream, but I didn’t have any air in my lungs. The whole time I kept thinking he was about to let me up and start laughing like it was just a big prank. Then I felt his hand snaking its way around my waist to start trying to undo my jeans again. I kept trying to lift myself up, but he would shove my face into the carpet every time I managed to lift my head. I actually had rug burns on my face later.” 

            “Good lord!” Chris exploded. “Please tell me the dog eventually came to save you.”

            “Oh yes, she did. But not the way you’d think. First, I started trying to call her. I couldn’t put much volume into it, but I did my best. When I heard her tags clinking together, the guy did too, and he turned to look at her. The asshole laughed, saying, ‘What’s that dog going to do?’ I could just see her out of the corner of my eye, and sure enough she was just sitting there, her tongue lolling out like she was excited about something, but with what looked like a smile on her face. She definitely wasn’t angry, definitely not trying to intimidate. 

            “Desperate now, I gathered all my strength to try and roll the guy off my back. I almost pulled it off, but then he picked up a lamp we’d knocked over, wrapped the cord around my neck, and told me to shut up and hold still. Somehow, I’d managed to drag us both close to the top of the stairs. I kept thinking my only chance now would be for both of us to tumble down the stairs together. Maybe then he’d get hurt while I avoided injury, you know. Or we’d both get hurt and I could avoid something else, if you know what I mean. Unfortunately, he had the cord tight enough around my neck that the more I struggled the darker it started going around the edges of my vision. Sure I was about to pass out, I put everything I had into one last buck to send us rolling over the edge of the top stair. 

            “It didn’t work out anything like that. I did upset his balance for just an instant, but I couldn’t quite topple him over. As I twisted my body with the last of my strength, I felt his weight beginning to shift back to center. I coughed and whimpered, certain all was lost. But then I hear the tags clinking again. And here came Kea running from the bedroom doorway at full speed. The guy either didn’t hear it or was too busy trying to pin me back down, because when she ran past him, nudging him sideways—just the direction I needed him to move—he was caught completely unawares. I gave another push with my leg and my arm, and he started to lean farther and farther, until I was finally out from under him, rolling over, and pushing him with both hands down the stairs. 

            “I didn’t see much of his fall, but I heard him thudding down and landing at the bottom of the stairs. It was a sound that told me pretty unequivocally I wouldn’t have to do any more fighting with him. Still dizzy myself, I slowly got to my feet and looked down the stairs to see him writhing and bleeding all over the tile. Before going down the stairs to get my phone, I turned to see if Kea was alright. She was standing on the loft, staring into the corner. ‘Kea, what’s wrong girl?’ I said, whispering for some reason. She turned to flash those blue eyes at me for a second but then went back to staring into the corner. 

            “My first call was to your uncle, who lived just three minutes away. My next call was to your grandma.”

            “Why didn’t you call the police?” 

            “Let’s just say in our family we already knew the police weren’t of much use in situations like this. So we took care of it on our own.”

            “What the hell did you do?”

            “A woman has her secrets. The important thing is that I never had any trouble from the asshole again—and I seriously doubt any other woman did either.” 

            “Wait, so the dog just ran past the guy you were wrestling with on the ground? Why didn’t she attack him?”

            “Well, I can think of two possible answers. The most likely one is that she thought we were playing, so she did sort of a flyby. Like I said, she’d been acting weird for a long time—she wasn’t even supposed to be upstairs. She may have just been confused.”

            “What’s the second possible answer?”

            Mom cast her eyes downward, smiling. “Cannonball husky,” she said looking back up, her eyes welling. 

            “Cannonball husky?” I said, verging on tears myself, though I hadn’t the slightest idea what she was talking about.

            “The first time we brought Kea home, it was New Year’s Eve. That’s when she met your grandma, who we always said was her grandma too. When Jim and I came back from the party we went to, your grandparents came back to see the new dog. Kea was so excited Jim had to hold her back, but when he let go she went flying at Grandma—an eight-week old bundle of fluff. Grandma squatted down to catch her, but Kea knocked her back into the cupboard beneath the sink in our kitchen. We all howled with laughter. That was the beginning of the game she would play where she ran full-force at someone—almost always Jim—and tried to knock him down. 

            “Jim said when she was about eight months old, he tried to take her for a run in the woods he loved. She was all over the place though, pulling ahead, stopping to sniff, wanting to go everywhere but forward on the trail. At one point, she pulled him off balance and he tripped over a tree root, losing his grip on the leash as he fell. He said he sat up, surrounded by brush, and Kea was nowhere to be seen. ‘She could have disappeared without any effort if she’d wanted to,’ he said. Instead, after a few tense moments, here she comes crashing through the leaves like a cannonball. He laughed and laughed as she rolled around in the dirt with him. That’s when he started calling her cannonball husky. 

            “I personally only saw it once more, when she got loose at your grandparents’ house on Thanksgiving, which would have been when she was just over a year old. Your uncle unchained her to wipe off her paws before letting her in the house—because he had a lab and didn’t understand huskies don’t come when called—and she was off. Jim came out as I leashed my other husky to try to find her and lure her back. We step outside the back door and here she comes running full speed between the houses and down by the pond. I took my dog down to get her while Jim circled around some other houses in case she turned back. 

            “God, Kea’s face. She was having so much fun. I didn’t think she’d ever stop running, and I was afraid it was only a matter of time before she found her way out to the road. Sure enough, when I got down by the pond, she took off back toward all the houses, right toward where Jim was coming to head her off. Now, she could have easily just run past him, but instead she stopped when she saw him. I was coming up behind her with my dog now, and I saw her kind of hesitate so she could lock eyes with Jim. Then she just bolted right toward him. He got this half grin on his face and squatted down. I was so sure she was going to veer off and run past him and he was going to have to dive after her. But she bowled right into him. It looked like she about knocked him over. When I got there, he was laughing and laughing—and then he whispered something in her ear. Trudging up to them, I was relieved and irritated both at once, because I knew your grandpa would pitch a fit when we brought the dog back with muddy paws. 

            “I ended up snapping at Jim about how idiotic it was that he insisted on bringing that damn dog everywhere we went. Of course she would get out, what with all those people coming and going. It was just dumb luck she hadn’t run straight for a road and gotten killed. Jim took it in silence, as he often did, either trying to ignore me or working out the implications of my anger—I never knew which.”

            She went silent herself now, remembering. 

            After a moment, Chris asked, “You think Kea was doing the cannonball husky thing when she knocked that asshole off of you?” 

            “It’s hard to say all this time later. At the time, though, I was pretty convinced. You have to keep in mind I wasn’t exactly in a good position to see what she was doing. All I know for sure is that she came running right for the guy, and if she hadn’t… Well, we found out later the guy had hit his head in an accident a few months earlier; today, they’d probably call it a traumatic brain injury. He was on a bunch of medication. And he also told us he’d snorted a bunch of cocaine that night.”

            “You didn’t call the police?” 

            “Oh, we took care of it, believe me. You have to understand how horrible the official legal process can be for a woman in cases like this.”

            “But, Mom, that son of a bitch needed to go to prison.” 

            “Well, instead, he got a second severe blow to the head. What he really needed was to be in a hospital—or an institution. At any rate, getting the law involved isn’t the only option to take care of situations like these. But, like I said, an old woman is allowed some secrets.” 

            I felt like pressing her, but before I could say anything else, Chris was asking, “When exactly was this attempted assault—I mean, in relation to the weird dream you and Kea shared?”

            “It was the next night.” 

            “Wait, you have this dream, and then the dog mysteriously shows up upstairs for the first time, and then she ends up saving you from some dude who’s jacked up on who-knows-what—and you still don’t believe there could be otherworldly beings watching out for you?” 

            “‘Could be’ is a different question. Of course, there could be. The real question is how likely is it? You’re focusing on these one-off incidents in our lives. You went to save your sister because you had a dream. Think about, though, how many examples of things like that do you know of? If you live 70 years, how many nights is that for you to dream? Over twenty-five thousand, right? Now, if only one incident occurred every day in your life, that would be the same number. In reality, probably two or three things happen to you every day. What would really be implausible is each of us living a few decades and never experiencing coincidences that strike us as bizarre, or architected, or whatever.”

            “Wow. That’s so… mechanistic.” 

            “Aren’t you trying to be mechanistic when you reason that unlikely coincidences imply ‘otherworldly beings’? The world really does operate on mechanistic principles. That’s what makes it possible for humans to invent machines that fly and medicines that cure diseases. I think what really bothers most people isn’t that explanations need to be mechanistic to be valid. No, what really bothers them is that mechanistic answers fail to offer up any answers to the question of meaning. The significance of your experience with being visited in a dream and saving your sister is that you were meant to be there for her. And that would mean that some invisible person or cosmic force is watching over you and your sister—because you both have meaning. You both have some value to the universe. Of course, we all have a powerful desire to believe that about ourselves, and that desire makes us read significance into the paltriest of evidence, like these prophetic dreams and such.”

            “Let’s say you’re right. Don’t you have that same longing for meaning and significance?”

            “Oh yes, I absolutely do. That’s why I’ve enjoyed sharing my story about Kea with you all so much. And I suppose it would be wonderfully reassuring to believe some angels in the sky watch over and guide me because they think I’m great or because they know of some plan for how I’m going to make the world a better place. When you think about it, though, isn’t all that just a big distraction?”

            “How could that be a distraction? A distraction from what?”  

“Aren’t the living, breathing, flesh-and-blood people in your life more important than any beings slipping between dimensions? You believe this figure in your dream tipped you off about your sister needing help. Maybe he did. Maybe he was a part of your own psyche that simply figured out something was wrong before the rest of you did. Maybe it was merely a coincidence—you roll the dice enough times you’re bound to get snake eyes eventually. To me, none of that is as interesting as the fact that you were ready to jump out of bed in the middle of the night to go help your sister, or that you were so glad to be able to save her that you’re still telling the story to this day.”

“You told us your story too. What’s the interesting part of that, if not the possibility that it meant someone was watching out for you?”

“Someone was watching out for me, just like Chris was watching out for his sister. It’s us. We take care of each other. And that’s what’s so beautiful about us humans.”

“And dogs too.” 

“Yeah, and dogs too.” She turned to look at me now. “During what turned out to be our last argument over Kea before all the trouble with his infection, Jim had said to me, ‘Yeah, I spend way too much time trying to make the dog happy. I’ve put my heart and soul into raising her, and no investment pays bigger dividends than putting your heart and soul into someone you love.’ Skeptical, I was like, ‘Yeah, and what dividends are you getting from her now?’ He said, ‘Oh, you’ll get them too—when you have kids.’ 

“I didn’t think much of it. He was just being cheesy. Maybe I didn’t like that he said, ‘when you have kids,’ not when we have them. Really, it was only much later when I thought about it at all. Kea gave us some headaches after your oldest sister was born, because for a while there was no way we could give her the attention she was used to. It wasn’t long, though, before she became the most devoted babysitter you all ever had.”

“I remember whenever we had nightmares or got scared at night, you would bring in the dog to sleep in our room. You used to tell us that evil spirits hated dogs, so as long as Kea was around they’d stay away. I really believed you for the longest time.”

“Ha ha. After a year or two, she would go to bed every night with you girls first, wait until you were asleep, and then come back to my room and lay in her spot by my bed. She knew when you all would wake up every morning too, and so she’d leave my room and go back to yours. I don’t think any of you ever realized she hadn’t been in there all night. I told you dogs like her keep evil spirits away because it’s true—in the only sense that really matters.” 

[Continue to the sequel: Jax.]

Also read:

The Fire Hoarder

Encounters, Inc.

The Smoking Buddha

Bedtime Ghost Story for Adults