Property Condemned (pine deep)

by Jonathan Maberry

  Property Condemned

  ( Pine Deep )

  Jonathan Maberry

  Pine Deep short story prequel to Ghost Road Blues.

  Jonathan Maberry

  Property Condemned

  -1-

  The house was occupied, but no one lived there.

  That’s how Malcolm Crow thought about it. Houses like the Croft place were never really empty.

  Like most of the kids in Pine Deep, Crow knew that there were ghosts. Even the tourists knew about the ghosts. It was that kind of town.

  All of the tourist brochures had pictures of ghosts on them. Happy, smiling, Casper the Friendly Ghost sorts of ghosts. Every store in town had a rack of books about the ghosts of Pine Deep. Crow had every one of those books. He couldn’t braille his way through a basic geometry test or recite the U.S. Presidents in any reliable order, but he knew about shades and crisis apparitions, church grims and banshees, crossroads ghosts and poltergeists. He read every story and historical account; saw every movie he could afford to see. Every once in a while, Crow would even risk one of his father’s frequent beatings to sneak out of bed and tiptoe down to the basement to watch Double Chiller Theater on the flickering old Emerson. If his dad caught him and took a belt to him, it was okay as long as Crow managed to see at least one good spook flick.

  Besides, beatings were nothing to Crow. At nine years old he’d had so many that they’d lost a lot of their novelty.

  It was the ghosts that mattered. Crow would give a lot — maybe everything he had in this world — to actually meet a ghost. That would be… well, Crow didn’t know what it would be. Not exactly. Fun didn’t seem to be the right word. Maybe what he really wanted was proof. He worried about that. About wanting proof that something existed beyond the world he knew.

  He believed that he believed, but he wasn’t sure that he was right about it. That he was aware of this inconsistency only tightened the knots. And fueled his need.

  His hunger.

  Ghosts mattered to Malcolm Crow because whatever they were, they clearly outlasted whatever had killed them. Disease, murder, suicide, war, brutality… abuse. The causes of their deaths were over, but they had survived. That’s why Crow wasn’t scared of ghosts. What frightened him — deep down on a level where feelings had no specific structure — was the possibility that they might not exist. That this world was all that there was.

  And the Croft house? That place was different. Crow had never worked up the nerve to go there. Almost nobody ever went out there. Nobody really talked about it, though everyone knew about it.

  Crow made a point of visiting the other well-known haunted spots — the tourist spots — hoping to see a ghost. All he wanted was a glimpse. In one of his favorite books on hauntings, the writer said that a glimpse was what most people usually got. “Ghosts are elusive,” the author had written. “You don’t form a relationship with one, you’re lucky if you catch a glimpse out of the corner of your eye; but if you do, you’ll know it for what it is. One glimpse can last you a lifetime.”

  So far, Crow had not seen or even heard a single ghost. Not one cold spot, not a single whisper of old breath, not a hint of something darting away out of the corner of his eye. Nothing, zilch. Nada.

  However, he had never gone into the Croft place.

  Until today.

  Crow touched the front pocket of his jeans to feel the outline of his lucky stone. Still there. It made him smile.

  Maybe now he’d finally get to see a ghost.

  -2-

  They pedaled through dappled sunlight, sometimes four abreast, sometimes single file when the trail dwindled down to a crooked deer path. Crow knew the way to the Croft place and he was always out front, though he liked it best when Val Guthrie rode beside him. As they bumped over hard-packed dirt and whispered through uncut summer grass, Crow cut frequent, covert looks at Val.

  Val was amazing. Beautiful. She rode straight and alert on her pink Huffy, pumping the pedals with her purple sneakers. Hair as glossy black as crow feathers, tied in a bouncing ponytail. Dark blue eyes and a serious mouth. Crow made it his life’s work to coax a smile out of her at least once a day. It was hard work, but worth it.

  The deer path spilled out onto an old forestry service road that allowed them once more to fan out into a line. Val caught up and fell in beside Crow on the left, and almost at once Terry and Stick raced each other to be first on the right. Terry and Stick were always racing, always daring each other, always trying to prove who was best, fastest, smartest, strongest. Terry always won the strongest part.

  “The Four Horsemen ride!” bellowed Stick, his voice breaking so loudly that they all cracked up. Stick didn’t mind his voice cracking. There was a fifty-cent bet that he’d have his grown-up voice before Terry. Crow privately agreed. Despite his size, Terry had a high voice that always sounded like his nose was full of snot.

  Up ahead, the road forked, splitting off toward the ranger station on the right and a weedy path on the left. On the left-hand side, a sign leaned drunkenly toward them.

  PRIVATE PROPERTY

  NO ADMITTANCE

  TRESPASSERS WILL BE

  That was all of it. The rest of the sign had been pinged off by bullet holes over the years. It was a thing to do. You shot the sign to the Croft place to show that you weren’t afraid. Crow tried to make sense of that, but there wasn’t any end to the string of logic.

  He turned to Val with a grin. “Almost there.”

  “Oooo, spooky!” said Stick, lowering the bill of his Phillies ball-cap to cast his face in shadows.

  Val nodded. No smile. No flash of panic. Only a nod. Crow wondered if Val was bored, interested, skeptical, or scared. With her, you couldn’t tell. She had enough Lenape blood to give her that stone face. Her mom was like that, too. Not her dad, though. Mr. Guthrie was always laughing, and Crow suspected that he, too, had a lifelong mission that involved putting smiles on the faces of the Guthrie women.

  Crow said, “It won’t be too bad.”

  Val shrugged. “It’s just a house.” She leaned a little heavier on the word “just” every time she said that, and she’d been doing that ever since Crow suggested they come out here. Just a house.

  Crow fumbled for a comeback that would chip some of the ice off of those words, but, as he so often did, he failed.

  It was Terry Wolfe who came to his aid. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, Val, you keep saying that but I’ll bet you’ll chicken out before we even get onto the porch.”

  Terry liked Val, too, but he spent a lot of time putting her down and making fun of whatever she said. Though, if any of that actually hurt Val, Crow couldn’t see it. Val was like that. She didn’t show a thing. Even when that jerk Vic Wingate pushed her and knocked her down in the schoolyard last April, Val hadn’t yelled, hadn’t cried. All she did was get up, walk over to Vic and wipe the blood from her scraped palms on his shirt. Then, as Vic started calling her words that Crow had only heard his dad ever use when he was really hammered, Val turned and walked away like it was a normal spring day.

  So Terry’s sarcasm didn’t make a dent.

  Terry and Stick immediately launched into the Addams Family theme song loud enough to scare the birds from the trees.

  A startled doe dashed in blind panic across their path and Stick tracked it with his index finger and dropped his thumb like a hammer.

  “Pow!”

  Val gave him a withering look, but she didn’t say anything.

  They rounded the corner and skidded to a stop, one, two, three, four. Dust plumes rose behind them like ghosts and drifted away on a breeze as if fleeing from this place. The rest of the song dwindled to dust on their tongues.

  It sto
od there.

  The Croft house.

  -3-

  The place even looked haunted.

  Three stories tall, with all sorts of angles jutting out for no particular reason. Gray shingles hung crookedly from their nails. The windows were dark and grimed. Some were broken out. Most of the storm shutters were closed, but a few hung open and one lay half-buried in a dead rosebush. Missing slats in the porch railing gave it a gap-toothed grin. Like a jack-o’-lantern. Like a skull.

  On any other house, Crow would have loved that. He would have appreciated the attention to detail.

  But his dry lips did not want to smile.

  Four massive willows, old and twisted by rot and disease, towered over the place, their long fingers bare of leaves even in the flush of summer. The rest of the forest stood back from the house as if unwilling to draw any nearer. Like people standing around a coffin, Crow thought.

  His fingers traced the outline of the lucky stone in his jeans pocket.

  “Jeeeez,” said Stick softly.

  “Holy moley,” agreed Terry.

  Val said, “It’s just a house.”

  Without turning to her, Terry said, “You keep saying that, Val, but I don’t see you running up onto the porch.”

  Val’s head swiveled around like a praying mantis’s and she skewered Terry with her blue eyes. “And when exactly was the last time you had the guts to even come here, Terrence Henry Wolfe? Oh, what was that? Never? What about you, George Stickler?”

  “Crow hasn’t been here either,” said Stick defensively.

  “I know. Apparently three of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are sissies.”

  “Whoa, now!” growled Terry, swinging his leg off his bike. “There’s a lot of places we haven’t been. You haven’t been here, either — does that make you a sissy, too?”

  “I don’t need to come to a crappy old house to try and prove anything,” she fired back. “I thought we were out riding bikes.”

  “Yeah, but we’re here now,” persisted Terry, “so why don’t you show everyone how tough you are and go up on the porch?”

  Val sat astride her pink Huffy, feet on the ground, hands on the rubber grips. “You’re the one trying to prove something. Let’s see you go first.”

  Terry’s ice-blue eyes slid away from hers. “I never said I wanted to go in.”

  “Then what are you saying?”

  “I’m just saying that you’re the one who’s always saying there’s no such thing as haunted houses, but you’re still scared to go up there.”

  “Who said I was scared?” Val snapped.

  “You’re saying you’re not?” asked Terry.

  Crow and Stick watched this exchange like spectators at a tennis match. They both kept all expression off their faces, well aware of how far Val could be pushed. Terry was getting really close to that line.

  “Everyone’s too scared to go in there,” Terry said, “and—”

  “And what?” she demanded.

  “And… I guess nobody should.”

  “Oh, chicken poop. It’s just a stupid old house.”

  Terry folded his arms. “Yeah, but I still don’t see you on that porch.”

  Val made a face, but didn’t reply. They all looked at the house. The old willows looked like withered trolls, bent with age and liable to do something nasty. The Croft house stood, half in shadows and half in sunlight.

  Waiting.

  It wants us to come in, thought Crow, and he shivered.

  “How do you know the place is really haunted?” asked Stick.

  Terry punched him on the arm. “Everybody knows it’s haunted.”

  “Yeah, okay, but… how?”

  “Ask Mr. Halloween,” said Val. “He knows everything about this crap.”

  They all looked at Crow.

  “It’s not crap,” he insisted. “C’mon, guys, this is Pine Deep. Everybody knows there are ghosts everywhere here.”

  “You ever see one?” asked Stick, and for once there was no mockery in his voice. If anything, he looked a little spooked.

  “No,” admitted Crow, “but a lot of people have. Jim Polk’s mom sees one all the time.”

  They nodded. Mrs. Polk swore that she saw a partially formed figure of a woman in Colonial dress walking through the backyard. A few of the neighbors said they saw it, too.

  “And Val’s dad said that Gus Bernhardt’s uncle Kurt was so scared by a poltergeist in his basement that he took to drinking.”

  Kurt Bernhardt was a notorious drunk — worse than Crow’s father — and he used to be a town deputy until one day he got so drunk that he threw up on a town selectman while trying to write him a parking ticket.

  “Dad used to go over to the Bernhardt place a lot,” said Val, “but he never saw any ghosts.”

  “I heard that not everybody sees ghosts,” said Terry. He took a plastic comb out of his pocket and ran it through his hair, trying to look cool and casual, like there was no haunted house forty feet away.

  “Yeah,” agreed Stick, “and I heard that people sometimes see different ghosts.”

  “What do you mean ‘different ghosts’?” asked Val.

  Stick shrugged. “Something my gran told me. She said that a hundred people can walk through the same haunted place, and most people won’t see a ghost because they can’t, and those who do will see their own ghost.”

  “Wait,” said Terry, “what?”

  Crow nodded. “I heard that, too. It’s an old Scottish legend. The people who don’t see ghosts are the ones who are afraid to believe in them.”

  “And the people who do see a ghost,” Stick continued, “see the ghost of their own future.”

  “That’s stupid,” said Val. “How can you see your own ghost if you’re alive?”

  “Yeah,” laughed Terry. “That’s stupid, even for you.”

  “No, really,” said Crow. “I read that in my books. Settlers used to believe that.”

  Stick nodded. “My gran’s mom came over from Scotland. She said that there are a lot of ghosts over there, and that sometimes people saw their own. Not themselves as dead people, not like that. Gran said that people saw their own spirits. She said that there were places where the walls between the worlds were so thin that past, present, and future were like different rooms in a house with no doors. That’s how she put it. Sometimes you could stand in one room and see different part of your life in another.”

  “That would scare the crap out of me,” said Terry.

  A sudden breeze caused the shutters on one of the windows to bang as loud as a gunshot. They all jumped.

  “Jeeeeee-zus!” gasped Stick. “Nearly gave me a heart attack!”

  They laughed at their own nerves, but the laughs died away as one by one they turned back to look at the Croft house.

  “You really want me to go in there?” asked Val, her words cracking the fragile silence.

  Terry said, sliding his comb back into his pocket, “Sure.”

  “No!” yelped Crow.

  Everyone suddenly looked at him: Val in surprise, Stick with a grin forming on his lips, Terry with a frown.

  The moment held for three or four awkward seconds, and then Val pushed her kickstand down and got off of her bike.

  “Fine then.”

  She took three decisive steps toward the house. Crow and the others stayed exactly where they were. When Val realized she was alone, she turned and gave them her best ninja death stare. Crow knew this stare all too well; his buttocks clenched and his balls tried to climb up into his chest cavity. Not even that creep Vic Wingate gave her crap when Val had that look in her eyes.

  “What I ought to do,” she said coldly, “is make you three sissies go in with me.”

  “No way,” laughed Terry, as if it was the most absurd idea anyone had ever said aloud.

  “Okay!” blurted Crow.

  Terry and Stick looked at him with a Nice going, Judas look in their eyes.

  Val smiled. Crow wasn’t sure if she was sm
iling at him or smiling in triumph. Either way, he put it in the win category. He was one smile up on the day’s average.

  Crow’s bike had no kickstand so he got off and leaned it against a maple, considered, then picked it up and turned it around so that it pointed the way they’d come. Just in case.

  “You coming?” he asked Stick and Terry.

  “If I’m going in,” said Val acidly, “then we’re all going in. It’s only fair and I don’t want to hear any different or so help me God, Terry…”

  She left the rest to hang. When she was mad, Val not only spoke like an adult, she sounded like her mother.

  Stick winced and punched Terry on the arm. “Come on, numb-nuts.”

  -4-

  The four of them clustered together on the lawn, knee-deep in weeds. Bees and blowflies swarmed in the air around them. No one moved for more than a minute. Crow could feel the spit in his mouth drying to paste.

  I want to do this, he thought, but that lie sounded exactly like what it was.

  The house glowered down at him.

  The windows, even the shuttered ones, were like eyes. The ones with broken panes were like the empty eye-sockets of old skulls, like the ones in the science class in school. Crow spent hours staring into those dark eye-holes, wondering if there was anything of the original owner’s personality in there. Not once did he feel anything. Now, just looking at those black and empty windows made Crow shudder, because he was getting the itchy feeling that there was something looking back.

  The shuttered windows somehow bothered him more than the open ones. They seemed… he fished for the word.

  Sneaky?

  No, that wasn’t right. That was too cliché, and Crow had read every ghost story he could find. Sneaky wasn’t right. He dug through his vocabulary and came up short. The closest thing that seemed to fit — and Crow had no idea how it fit — was hungry.

  He almost laughed. How could shuttered windows look hungry?