Haunted Nights

by Ellen Datlow

  “He’s cutting himself other places too, Mom. I saw him do it.”

  “Shut up, buttwipe, or I’ll cut you too.” He sounds like a boy again. The curtain that momentarily lifted to expose a glimpse of the future has fallen.

  “He poops in a jar, Mom.” The girl smirks until a pillow whacks her on the head.

  I breathe in and in and in. There is not enough air left in the world.

  Should I tell him he’s confused the name of Gabriel the angel with the name of Ariel the little mermaid? Is this the kind of thing other teenagers say? I’m afraid to ask other parents. I’m afraid to ask. I’m afraid—

  “Little snitching bitches get stitches.” The boy pounces on her and knocks her onto the disgusting futon.

  The girl giggles instead of cries for once. They really do like each other in spite of the evidence.

  “That’s enough. Stop using language like that.” This is hardly the worst of it, but there are so many things I need to say and to put a stop to, I don’t know where to start.

  The attic smells of dirty socks and something fermented. I let my eyes crawl across the magpie tangle of clothes, game cards, buttons, dice, shoes, bags, cups, comics, bits of string, feathers, candles, cigarette butts he says were here all along and shiny unidentifiable detritus. They fall on a two-quart mayonnaise jar. I can’t deal with this right now. I can’t deal with this. I can’t deal—

  I don’t even know what to say to a kid who poops in a jar.

  “Come downstairs. It’s time for dinner.”

  “I want hamburgers,” the girl says. She sprints to the stairs. “Hamburgers and french fries.”

  The boy rolls over on the mattress and closes his eyes.

  Somewhere in the gloom of the rafters the dark angel Ariel flaps her wings to warn of the coming cold times, or perhaps it’s a bat. Most likely it’s a bat.

  “You too. Put on a shirt but don’t button it. I want to put medicine on that cut.”

  “I’m not hungry.” He opens one eye and looks at me. Even lying down, his chin has that defiant tilt.

  “Get up and go downstairs.” I reach to grab his arm and help him along, but he rolls away onto his feet. His head grazes the rafters. He’s tall for fourteen. He takes after the men on my side of the family. Before long he’ll have a beard he can braid like his Viking ancestors.

  I’d send him out to tramp through the woods on his first hunt if I could track down any of those cousins or uncles who were everywhere when I was growing up. It would be good for him.

  “What are we having, anyway?”

  “Toast.”

  He raises an eyebrow and makes a face.

  “With apricot jam,” I say definitively before he can get his complaint out.

  I watch as he digs a shirt from the pile and shuffles down the stairs. As I bring up the rear, I glance through the dormer window and notice the trash fire has grown. Thick black smoke billows from the bin.

  As I round the landing, there’s a knock on the front door.

  Little feet scurry.

  “Tigis!” the girl cries. The doorknob slams into the wall. A sprinkle of plaster from the hole I need to repair ticks to the wooden floor.

  “Don’t slam—” I don’t even bother finishing my sentence as I hurry across the room and reach for the door to pull it away from the wall. Words circle around and back. They’ve lost all meaning through repetition. I need a new language.

  Tigis steps inside and pushes a pot into my hands. She is the type of woman I would take care never to stand by when I used to go to the club, petite, fragile. Next to her I look hulking. She just barely looks me in the eye, not giving me enough time to decline or be embarrassed. I wish we could be better friends than we are because she completely understands food stamps don’t come for another five days.

  She says something I don’t understand. I’m not sure what language she speaks. Is Ethiopian a language? I always mean to look it up and check out a dictionary from the library. I’m going to get her something with the tips I earn on my shift tonight. I can’t imagine what she might like, though.

  “Take me with you.” The girl clings to Tigis’s arm. “I don’t want to stay here. Please!” Tigis smiles and strokes my daughter’s hair.

  “Stop that.” I get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach when the girl says things like this. Nothing is so terribly wrong at our house. The angel isn’t a real harbinger of cold to come. The angel isn’t real. The angel—

  I want to hug the girl and let her know everything is okay, but I have the pot in my hands. There are bits of chicken, and the sauce smells exotically spicy. “Come and eat now.”

  Tigis says something in her language.

  The girl grins like she understands and lets go of the woman’s arm. “She says I can come over later.”

  “We’ll see.”

  I say, “Thank you,” to Tigis with a smile. I don’t like this secret code she and my daughter share, but I don’t want to be rude. The girl is mine. I’ve given up all of my dreams and possessions to keep her happy.

  Tigis turns and walks down the stairs that were probably once the centerpiece of the grand old house, a stage for debutantes to descend, but are now only a path from one section-eight apartment to another. There’s a man huddled into a puffy coat like he doesn’t want anyone to see him waiting at her door.

  The last time the girl went downstairs she came home with ten dollars and fingers smelling like cat pee. Tigis’s husband gave it to her for helping put weed in little Ziploc bags. It’s just weed, but still. And people I don’t like the looks of, like that man in the puffy coat, come and go all the time. It’s no place for a kid, a girl. Bad things can happen to girls in the blink of an eye, things they won’t ever fully recover from. Maybe there’s a chance I can keep her safe just a little longer. At least here there aren’t cousins and uncles on the safe side of the locked door.

  “Close the door now. Lock it,” I say. “Go and sit down.”

  I follow the girl to the kitchen and place the pot in the center of the Formica table that came with the apartment. It’s cool and vintage looking. When I first saw it, I could imagine how my new china would look on it as we all sat around it and talked about our day. We haven’t done that yet.

  The girl throws herself in the chair by the window.

  The windows of the house next door glitter behind her head. Another old grand dame of a house carved up to shelter people it was never built for. The orange and yellow flickering in the glass is the exact shade as the Halloween pumpkin on the refrigerator. The fires have taken the place of the blazing sunset. There won’t be any dark tonight as the devils cavort.

  I place a plastic bowl in front of the girl and ladle chicken stew into it. I haven’t been able to get the new china yet.

  There’s another fire. This one looks like a pile of leaves in the alley. There are a bunch of teenagers gathered around it throwing trash on to make it blaze higher. Even through the closed window, I hear a crash and the chime of glass sprinkling the ground. I hope this will all be over before the little kids go out tomorrow night. Where are the police anyway?

  “I’m not eating this.” The girl pushes her bowl away. “It stinks.”

  “Tigis made that just for you.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Then you can just go hungry and take yourself to bed now.” Anger surges in me, filling my mouth with words as sharp as broken glass. Why won’t she just eat? It’s a miracle we have chicken tonight.

  “I’m never going to bed again.” Her face is screwed up like she’s going to cry. Her pigtail has come unbraided, and a strand of it trails into the bowl. “There’s a monster in the mattress. He has a knife.”

  “You are going to bed.” I tip her out of the chair because I don’t trust myself to grab her. The sharpness inside me might hurt her.

  The girl screams. It’s not her best work. She reserves the worst of her screaming for three a.m. The shrill siren of her five-year-old voice conju
res up mayhem and murder and rips me from sleep nightly. The boy told her the monsters aren’t under the bed or in the closet. They are in the mattress, and there is no way to escape them.

  If it wasn’t for the screaming, I’d admire the brilliance of this little twist to the tale. He has conjured the ultimate horror. No squeezing eyes tight or covering every inch of skin will keep a kid safe from a monster in a mattress.

  “Quiet, now. Go get ready for bed.”

  “No!”

  For a second I think about slapping her….She earned it. But that will only make things worse.

  The pediatrician says she needs consistent discipline, and time-outs are the way to go. It makes sense in theory. I can pick her up and put her in bed. She won’t stay. I’ll have to hold her there. How is that different from hitting?

  “Do you want some toast?” I say instead. I suppose this is about as consistent as I’m going to get tonight.

  She bobs her head with much more enthusiasm than heated bread deserves. I put two slices in the toaster and push the lever. “Where is your brother?”

  A shadow flickers by the kitchen door. I think I hear a flap of wings. I hesitate only a second until the front door creaks.

  I catch the boy with his hand on the doorknob. “Where do you think you’re going?” I sound exactly as ineffectual as my own mother did.

  “Out,” he says.

  “No you are not. Not tonight. Especially not tonight.” I don’t have time for this argument. I have to be at the restaurant for my shift in an hour and my gas tank is close to empty. “You have homework.”

  The boy makes a sound like a serpent and stomps down the stairs.

  If he goes through the main door out into the night, he’ll be lost. He’ll become one of the devils of the night starting fires and smashing windows. I can’t let it happen.

  “Get back here—now.” I run after him and grab his arm.

  “Get off me.” He shakes his arm and gives me a shove.

  The sole of my shoe glances off the edge of a stair. I teeter. An inevitable gravity grabs me. I’m falling. It’s a loss of control I haven’t felt since I was a kid. My knee, my hip, my shoulder hits the face of the stairs. I land in a heap in the foyer right in front of Tigis’s door, which in olden times must have been the door to the parlor or salon. I’m not hurt. I don’t think.

  The boy stomps down the rest of the stairs and steps over me. His face is expressionless. He jerks the front door open and steps out.

  The boy is mine. The teenaged brain isn’t fully formed. He’s made a mistake, an error in judgment. Or is something truly coming unwired and crossed?

  “Is that the kind of man you are going to be?” I had heard my mother say these words a hundred times to my uncles and cousins. She never did find the language that would deliver the message. She never once was able to shame them or cause them to change their behavior. I feel my words decaying like I’ve rung the same old bell.

  The boy’s shoes hit the porch steps. I don’t get up right away; instead I stare through the door into the deep violet sky. The air smells of burning plastic, but under it all there’s a hint of snow. I’m going to have to find the box with the mittens in it soon. It’s somewhere in the attic with the knife and the spiders and the poop in a jar. I’ll have to beat back wings to get into the darkest corners because the cold times are coming.

  What am I going to do now? If one wheel falls off, the whole cart collapses. Who’s going to take care of the girl tonight? The boy is trouble. Is troubled. The boy—I should find a better place for him with someone who knows what to do. There might still be a chance to save the girl. I doubt I have the recourse to do this. I doubt I can. I doubt—I don’t get to throw one kid under the bus to save the other. It has to be both or neither. That’s the rule of mothering, isn’t it? That’s the only justifiable decision.

  I swear I hear a flurry of fluttering wings outside the front door.

  The boy peeks his head in, then steps inside. He holds out his hand to help me up. “Sorry, okay?”

  “Okay,” I reply. I take his hand. It’s exactly as cold as the night.

  “I…” His face is flushed like he has a fever.

  “I said okay.” Things are far away from okay, but the word means something specific only to me in the language I speak. “Can you put your sister to bed? I’ve got to get gas for tonight.”

  The boy looks at me longer than he has for a while. I think he’s disappointed that I didn’t hand out a grand punishment. He’s just done the worst thing he’s done so far. I’ve been unveiled, revealed as a fraud and a coward. I’m powerless to keep anything intact. I can’t stop him from breaking things. I can’t stop him from breaking. I can’t stop him—

  I step out into the night, gas can and plastic tubing I stash in the foyer in hand. Fires are blazing. It’s much worse than it looked from inside. The flames from the eviction heap lick high into the sky. Higher than the second story where the items in the pile once furnished a home.

  Devils skulk on stoops or duck into the alley. They carry liquor bottles pre-stuffed with oily rags. They are kids by daylight but something else entirely tonight.

  It’s too late to sneak into the neighbor’s backyard and siphon gas from his old RV with the flat tires. I’ll never make it to work on time. Not a chance. It’s too bright for that in the firelight, anyway. It’s too late to continue on this half-baked ill-conceived plan. It’s too late to continue. It’s too late—

  I stick the hose into the gas tank of my car, and it hits some sort of obstacle. This works just fine on the old RV around back. I guess my old beater isn’t old and beaten enough. I slump against the hood and stare into the blazing heap of trash next door. I’m out of energy and ideas about what to do next. I’m out of energy. I’m out—

  A shadowy figure emerges from the flames. Black wings beat the thick gray smoke until it swirls.

  “Shouldn’t be out here on a night like tonight,” Colonel Carpenter says, “devils will get you.” He doffs his hat at me and leans on his cane.

  I shrug at him. “I guess,” I say. He probably thinks I’m rude. I’m pretty sure he knows I’ve been stealing the gas from his camper, so rude is the least of it.

  “Your boy…”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s running the streets. Making all kinds of noise.” The old man’s eyes are obscured by the brim of his hat. “I’m going to call the police.”

  “He’s inside.” I glance up at the attic window. It’s mostly dark, but I’m pretty sure I see the outline of the angel Ariel’s wings and the glitter of her eyes as she watches me.

  “Last night,” the colonel says. A wisp of his Old Spice cuts through the smell of burning plastic, and then it’s gone. “Ripping and running with his boys, then up there.” He cocks his thumb to the balcony off my living room.

  We don’t go out on the balcony much because the railing isn’t sturdy.

  “Blasting that damn rap music and throwing their empties at cars passing by. Had your little one up there with them knuckleheads.”

  Of course that happened. Of course it did. Why would I think otherwise?

  “I’ll talk to him about it,” I say. “It won’t happen again.”

  But it will. I can’t stop events from unfolding. I can’t stop them. I can’t—

  “You need gas?” the colonel asks with a nod at my gas can.

  “I do.” Now more than ever.

  “There’s a can over there on the side by my mower.” He pushes his hat down. “Welcome to it.”

  “Thank you,” I say as he hobbles off to shake his cane at the rest of the neighborhood.

  I find the colonel’s mower at the side of his house, and just like he said, there’s a gas can. As I grab it, a rag snags on the lawn mower gear shift and pulls loose. Gasoline dribbles from a rusty hole in the can. I’ll have to move fast if I’m going to move at all.

  Seconds flutter by like years unfurling. The cold times are coming. Worse t
imes. Much worse.

  I sprint up the porch steps, then the flight to my apartment. The doorknob slams into the wall and plaster ticks to the floor. One more thing I will never repair. I dash through the living room and even step up on the ugly sofa.

  The girl’s teddy bear still wearing my gaudy earrings gives me a glassy-eyed look of disapproval. I run down the hall for good measure, past the girl’s room with the knife-wielding monster in the mattress, and back again through the kitchen. The pot of chicken stew is congealing into something inedible. I won’t forget to return the pot this time.

  The pan of cloves and cinnamon sticks has boiled dry again. No need to fill it or worry about it tonight. No spice can mask this smell.

  I climb up the flight of stairs to the attic. I stand at the top and gaze into the shadowy depths. Gasoline drips on my shoes. I didn’t think I was gone that long, but I guess I was. The boy and the girl are sleeping. I place the gas can gently on the floor so I won’t wake them. It’s not so full anymore.

  I lie down with them on the filthy black-and-white-checkered futon, as the devil light flickers along the trail I have made.

  The girl snuggles up.

  “It’s hot in here, Mom,” the boy murmurs, not fully awake.

  The boy and the girl are mine, forever and always. They are mine to care for and love.

  I lie still gazing up into the rafters watching the firelight flicker and the shadow wings beat. I try to recall something pithy my mother might say at moments like this, but language is inadequate to describe how something so hot can be the harbinger of something so cold.

  As the air grows thin, I wait for the angel Ariel to descend and cut out my heart because I can better do my job without it. As the air grows hot, I wait for the angel Ariel. As the air grows hot, I wait—

  Witch Hazel

  Jeffrey Ford

  BACK IN THE DAY, in the Pine Barrens of South Jersey, from October 31 to November 2, All Souls’ Day, people who lived in the woods or close to them would pin to their coats, their blouses, the lapels of their jackets a flowering sprig of witch hazel. It’s a shrub that grows naturally in the barrens and blossoms right around Halloween. The flower looks like a creature from a deep-sea trench, yellow tentacles instead of petals radiating from a dark brown center that holds a single seed.