by Ellen Datlow
Jasper climbed to his feet. His eyes fell on the sagging chicken coop, a dozen feet away; its door, always locked tight, leaned open.
Jasper ran. The night was huge and clamorous around him. The sounds of things in the wood beat against his ears. A cold presence bellied from the night, driving him faster, lighting his brain with fear. He passed the opening in the trees where the beehives droned. A heavy shape crouched beneath one, its mouth affixed to a hole it had torn in the wood. Angry bees swarmed around its tangled hair as it slurped what was inside. He kept running, heedless of the branches cutting his skin or of the roots that tripped and staggered him. When he finally saw the single lit window of his house, he sobbed with relief.
Jasper locked the door behind him. But a door was no barrier to ghosts.
His father was nowhere to be seen. In his panic, Jasper hadn’t looked at the honey jars outside. Were they there at all? Had they been broken? He was too afraid to look again.
“Dad?”
Not on the couch, not in the kitchen where he’d fallen. He was about to look in the bedroom when he noticed the door to the root cellar was open. Jasper paused, then looked inside. His father lay still at the bottom of the stairs.
Jasper crept down and turned him on his side. The bruises he’d sustained from the fight with Uncle Kyle had swollen and darkened. His face was misshapen, his eyes open and unfocused. The pupils were different sizes. Blood crusted in his ear. Jasper knelt and put his ear to his father’s lips; he felt with gratitude the breath stirring his hair.
The cellar was dark but for the spill of light from the kitchen. The honey jars were arranged in dim orange ranks. There were thirty-seven of them, unlabeled, unremarkable save a single strip of paper suspended inside each. Jasper could barely see the paper strips in the dark, but he had been down here enough when it was light to know they were there. He could not make out the writing on any of them, nor was he meant to. These were his father’s secret crimes, each a morsel to attract the dark spirits that beleaguered them. Within each sealed jar a trapped devil.
And now, he noted with horror, each of them uncapped, their lids in a discarded pile on the floor. His father had opened the cages.
There were four full jars which had not been set as traps, but were instead set aside for delivery to Mr. Wiley. These were labeled in his father’s careful script: Walt & Mabel Dodd’s Honey Farm. Maybe four would be enough. Jasper took them into his arms and climbed the narrow stairs to the kitchen, where he unscrewed the lids and arranged them in a little arc in front of the door. The light was welcome, but it still seemed small and weak in opposition to the pitch darkness outside. He stole a glance through the window, but could see nothing through the reflection of the house’s interior. All kinds of things might be moving out there.
Jasper took out his handbook and placed it by the open jars. He paged through it quickly, knowing exactly where to find what he was looking for.
There: the notes about Mama speaking in the angels’ tongue, about the times she told him how sweet his bad thoughts would taste to the spirits in the wood. He tore the page out, and added a note to it: Mama went crazy and then I didn’t like her anymore.
And there: Lily dead in the well. The vanishing thoughts in his mind every morning, the tail ends of a lonesome dream. The last words he ever spoke to her just another threat.
I didn’t protect Lily.
Mama gone too, a glint of reflected light at the bottom of the well that might be her scooter, that might be her staring eye.
I didn’t protect Mama.
He stole a glance toward the living room window, but all he saw was the reflection of the lit interior. The night, and what lived there, was invisible behind it.
He wrote down the last and most damning note. I’m glad you’re gone. Don’t come back. I don’t want you here anymore. He paused, and added another line. If you come back I will beat you harder than Dad ever did.
Heart fluttering, he tore each sin from the book, and pushed each one deep into the honey of a separate jar. Then he placed the lids carefully beside them. He took a storm candle from the pantry and lit it with the lighter they kept in one of the kitchen drawers. He switched off the light and the darkness swarmed in.
Through the window, he saw a single light bobbing far behind the tree line. Someone—something—coming home.
Jasper descended into the root cellar once more, closing the door behind him. His father pulled each breath from the air with slowing regularity. The honey jars gaped like open graves. He took them down from their shelves and arrayed them in a circle around his father and himself. The reflected light from his candle gave them a Halloween glow. Unless he was quick, the spirits would soon find their way out, and consume his father before his eyes.
He recalled his dad bleeding on the floor as Uncle Kyle kicked him again and again, while he cowered with indecision. Quaking like a little boy, just like he had when his sister needed him. And maybe just like when his mama did too.
He kissed his father on the forehead. “I’m gonna save you, Dad.”
Taking the closest jar, Jasper sank his fingers into the honey and scooped a heavy portion into his mouth. It was thick and wonderfully sweet. It trailed warmly down his hand and onto his wrist, fell in heavy dollops onto his shirt. In an earlier time, this would earn him a beating. He would welcome it now.
The next swallow of honey brought with it the rasping tickle of paper in his throat. His father’s sin, consumed. The spirit absorbed. What dark crime had it held? What horror crawled inside him now?
He scooped out another mouthful, and another, and he kept going until the sweetness overwhelmed him and he was forced to stop by a cramping in his stomach. Doubled over, he stared at his father, who lay with his back to him. The candlelight limned the dark, bruised swelling of his temple, pushed light through his tousled hair. Jasper thought he looked beautiful. Almost innocent.
The cramp passed and Jasper kept going. He finished the jar. He started on the next. And then the next. And the next.
Sometime during the night, after vomiting twice, he paused, shuddering by the still form of his father, listening for the soft tread of a little foot on the floor above.
Not yet, he thought. Please not yet.
He still had such a long way to go.
His Haunting
Brian Evenson
1.
Three times in his life someone or something unknown had opened Arn’s door as he tried to sleep, silently sliding it ajar and then standing immobile in the gap. That was all, just standing there, unmoving, just barely visible in the darkness. It wasn’t even all that threatening, he told his therapist, not really. What had disturbed him most about it was not knowing who or what it was. In the darkness he could make nothing out beyond the door’s frame and the silhouette of the figure enclosed within. A large figure, male almost certainly, hulking, head nearly scraping the lintel.
“Who is it?” he had asked that first time, sitting up in bed. How long the figure was there, he wasn’t sure—it felt at once like a very long time and no time at all. The figure didn’t answer—nothing about it made Arn believe it had heard him. But as soon as he threw his blanket off, the door began to creak shut, the latch sinking into the slot just as he reached it. By the time he fumbled the door open and peered out, the hall outside was deserted.
• • •
That first time, he hurried through the small house, searching for it. He turned on the lights and looked into the other rooms, peered into closets and cabinets. No one was there. He felt he should be frightened—and part of him was, but another part was surprisingly calm and unafraid, as if already dead.
Hoping not to have to wake her, he saved his aunt’s bedroom for last. But finally, having looked without success everywhere else, he knocked softly on her door. When she didn’t answer, he opened it.
It was very dark inside. He could not see her, could only hear thickened breathing.
“Aunt,” he whispered. Ther
e was no answer.
“Aunt, is it just you in there?” he whispered.
The breathing sputtered, ceased. He heard something move in the bed. He thought he could vaguely make out motion in the darkness, though perhaps this was his imagination.
And for an instant he felt torn in two, as if he were both the person just waking up in bed watching and the figure framed in the doorway—for hadn’t he just been the one and now was the other? Only when his aunt shrieked did he begin to feel like a singular person again.
• • •
He needed help to sort through them, these three brief moments that were dark little holes drilled in his life. He would come once a week to this office with its aggressively modern furniture and sit in a chair across from the therapist who he had quickly come to think of as his therapist and spend forty minutes circling around what his husband liked to call jokingly “your haunting.” Arn had trained himself to smile whenever his husband said that, as if it were funny. But it wasn’t funny, not really.
And please, he warned his therapist, don’t think this is about my resentment of my husband. I have no more resentment than most spouses. I love my husband. I understand he’s trying to make me feel better. But it is my haunting—that’s what he doesn’t understand.
• • •
“I saw something,” is what he’d explained, once he’d gotten his aunt calmed down and they were sitting together in the kitchen, lights blazing.
“I saw something too,” said his aunt. “It was standing in my doorway looking in at me as I tried to sleep. Turned out to be you, Jack. What the hell were you thinking?”
“I’m not Jack,” he responded. Jack had been his father’s name. It wasn’t even close to his own name. He hardly even looked like his father.
Don’t write that down, he said to his therapist, and then, What are you writing down?
Does my writing make you nervous? asked his therapist.
But no, this was not what he was asking for—he was not asking for the experience to be analyzed, not yet. This was precisely why he hadn’t managed to talk about the haunting, his haunting, before now—even though he increasingly recognized that it was what had driven him to therapy in the first place. No, he just wanted his therapist to put the notebook down and listen to what had happened, to take the words in before deciding what they meant.
• • •
There at the kitchen table, his aunt held her head in her hands. “I’m so sorry,” she said. And then, “Don’t worry, I know who you are.” It was not until she said this that Arn considered the possibility that at least for a moment she might not have. That it wasn’t that she’d misspoke, but that she’d glimpsed someone or something else in his face.
And then she recovered. “What were you thinking, Arn?” she asked. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was looking for it.”
“For what?” she asked.
Once he explained, her hands started to shake. Even knowing he’d already searched the house, she insisted they each arm themselves with a knife and search again. They found nothing, nothing and nobody was there. They went outside with flashlights and shined them along the ground near the flowerbeds, but there was nothing there either, no footprints, no signs of disturbance. They played their flash beams up at the roof and saw nothing but roof. They opened the storm cellar and descended, but there was nothing down below, either, just the faint, sour smell of rot.
And yet, from that day forward his aunt treated him differently, with caution, as if she wasn’t sure she recognized him.
• • •
Time passed, said Arn.
And so you forgot about it, said his therapist.
No, said Arn, I never forgot. Every time I fell asleep I expected to open my eyes and see that door open again with a darker silhouette standing within its dark opening.
But it didn’t happen again. Not in that house anyway. Not around his aunt. That was the odd thing, he told his therapist: He’d always thought of hauntings as being bound to a place—a house, a pool in which somebody had drowned, the site of a fatal car wreck, that sort of thing. He’d wasted a lot of time trying to figure out what it was about his aunt’s house that had led to him seeing the silhouette appearing at the threshold of his room. Native American burial ground? Decades-old murder? Previous residence of someone who died alone and neglected? But there was nothing.
So, said his therapist once he fell silent. You were already thinking of it as a ghost.
Oh yes, Arn said. As a haunting. But not yet as my haunting.
• • •
“You must have dreamed it,” his aunt said as he kept talking, kept quizzing her down about the house. “It’s just an ordinary house, built just a year or two before you were born. Before that, this was an orange grove.”
“But there must—” he started.
“Sometimes dreams can be so vivid as to seem real,” his aunt said firmly. “You dreamed it.”
• • •
Your aunt raised you, ventured his therapist. But I’m afraid I’m confused about what happened to your parents.
So am I, said Arn.
His therapist tented his fingers, gazing at Arn over them, eyes steady. He waited.
I never knew my mother, Arn finally said. She died when I was born. My father . . . vanished.
Vanished?
Arn nodded. One day my father woke up and he no longer looked like himself.
What did he look like if not himself?
I don’t know. I remember sitting at the breakfast table with him, looking for something in his face, unsure what. All I knew was, it wasn’t there. And then I realized he was looking at me, too, staring. He was trying to pretend he was reading his paper, but he was staring over it at me. Whatever he was looking for he was finding, and it frightened him.
I left for school, Arn continued. When I came back that afternoon he was gone. I never saw him again.
What do you think happened to him?
I don’t want to talk about it, said Arn. Not today.
This is a safe place—, his therapist began, but Arn rapidly cut him off.
You believe my haunting will tell you something about my relationship with my missing father, he said, that that’s the point of me telling it to you. Maybe so. You can tell me that next time if you’d like. But for now let my haunting be my haunting.
• • •
But Arn seemed to have lost the thread. For a moment the two of them just sat there, faces blank, expressionless. Then his therapist cleared his throat and spoke.
She thought you were dreaming, he said. Your aunt, I mean.
Yes, so she said.
Have you considered she may have been right?
Yes.
And?
Not remotely possible.
How can you be sure?
I’m sure.
But how?
Arn, humming softly under his breath, ignored him.
And the second time? asked his therapist.
Excuse me? said Arn.
There were three times, you said. What about the second?
Ah, said Arn. Yes.
2.
Time marched on. Arn grew up. He was admitted to the local college. He moved out of his aunt’s house and into a dormitory.
More time passed. He was studying something, working toward a degree. It did not matter what he was studying, he told his therapist: It had no bearing on his haunting. He was a junior in college and suddenly was living alone, his room-mate having received academic probation followed by a semester of suspension.
He was lying on his bed trying to sleep. It was perhaps two in the morning. There were still noises coming from the hall despite the time being late enough that quiet hours were supposedly in effect. His door was closed, the light from the hallway shining through the crack beneath it. Occasionally the light would flicker as someone walked down the hall and past his door.
At some point he
drifted off. Maybe he was asleep just for a few minutes, maybe for several hours.
He awoke to the impression that something was wrong. He remained in bed, blinking, trying to see. Why couldn’t he see? Usually he could, even at night, even if only just a little. But now he couldn’t. Suddenly he realized why: The light in the hallway was no longer on.
But the light in the hallway was always on. There wasn’t even a switch to turn it off. All night it seeped beneath the door enough for him to dimly make things out, as if in sleep he remained lodged in a colorless facsimile of the actual world.
There was a light of sorts, but exceptionally low and at a great remove, like a single flickering candle held cupped by a hand at the far end of the hall. He could see nothing at all of the room around him. The only thing he could see, barely, was the outline of the doorframe.
Even seeing this, it took his mind some time to register the fact that the door must be open. But once it did, he began to see the silhouette crowded into the doorframe, hunched, almost too large to fit, waiting, immobile, watching him.
How do you know it was watching? interrupted his therapist.
I thought I could see its eyes, he said. Or not eyes exactly, but a gleam or glister where I knew eyes should be. Which led me to believe its eyes were open and looking steadily at me.
“Hello?” Arn had said. “Who are you?” Because he did want to know. He was frightened, of course, but above all else, he wanted to know who or what it was.
The figure did not respond. It seemed again, just like that first time, years before, not to have heard him.
Carefully, slowly, he started out of the bed and crept toward the door. But the door was already closing, and even though he rushed it at the end, he was not quick enough to stop it from slamming shut. Or, rather, he managed to get two of his fingers around the edge of the door before it closed in its frame, but the door closed anyway.
He lifted up his hand, showed his therapist the awkwardly crimped ends of his middle and index finger where the last joint of both digits had been sewed back on. He had felt the severing, the brief, sharp pain of each joint being sheared off, followed by the warm throb, enough of a distraction that he almost missed that something had changed: He could see.
