The Haunting of Gabriel Ashe

by Poblocki, Dan

  Then the muddled pattern of his quilt appeared, hovering beside his bed, as if held out, Gabe assumed, by the visitor. He fumbled for the nightstand lamp. Orange light blinded him momentarily. A blurred shape stood only a few feet away. It raised up the blanket. With his pupils dilated, Gabe hadn’t made out details, but he’d seen enough to realize that the shape didn’t seem distorted or monstrous. The shape had been Gabe’s height, with a slight frame. For a moment, he felt relief. “H-hello?” Gabe sputtered.

  Then the intruder growled, tossing the blankets at Gabe’s head with such force, he almost fell off the opposite side of the bed. He scrambled to snatch the blanket away from his face, but the fabric was heavy. Tangled. He whined, expecting at any second to feel a chomp of razorlike teeth. But then the bedroom door opened and slammed shut with a resounding echo.

  Gabe pulled off the quilt. He was alone. Footsteps came down the hall. The doorknob turned, and as the door began to open, he felt darkness seeping in from the edges of his vision.

  “Gabriel?” It was his mother’s voice. “What’s going on in here?” By the time she’d stepped fully into his room, Gabe had fallen against the brass rail above his pillow, knocked his head hard, and, for the first time in his life, passed out.

  “It was a nightmare,” said Glen, handing Gabe a glass of warm milk. Dolores sat beside him at the small table in the kitchen, rubbing his back. Elyse stood in the doorway, dressed in her silk robe, arms crossed over her chest, her face like stone. He’d woken everyone except Miri. “Sometimes dreams can feel real.”

  Gabe nodded sheepishly, but only to appear agreeable. It hadn’t been a dream. How could he make his parents understand? Someone had been in his room. Someone had laughed at him. Someone who’d been no taller or broader than any of Gabe’s classmates. He could tell them that he’d accidentally raised some sort of dark entity from the woods. Then a different idea crept into Gabe’s mind: What if the visitor had been an ordinary boy? Seth had admitted earlier that evening that David had taught him how to pick the locks of Temple House. No. It couldn’t be….

  With a burning sensation in his stomach, Gabe sipped at the soothing milk, wondering if he should tell his parents about the Hopper brothers’ nighttime escapades, about the objects the two had stolen from his grandmother’s library. Surely, his parents would call the police. Would they arrest Seth this time? Lock him away? And what if they didn’t? If Seth was in fact still the problem, what might he try next? For half a second, Gabe actually thought, Wait ’til Seth hears about this! Immediately afterward, he realized he needed to talk to Mazzy as soon as possible.

  Upstairs, he said good night to his parents again, assuring them that he’d be fine now, even though he felt anything but.

  Passing his sister’s bedroom, he heard a noise just inside. He pressed his ear against the door. The noise came again—a high, surprised squeal, followed by a ripple of Miri’s contagious laughter.

  Yanking open the door, Gabe found Miri standing by herself, grasping the bars of the crib, her face illuminated softly from below by a Sesame Street nightlight. He’d half expected to confront a large shadowy figure standing over her crib, claws raised, mouth open a crack, noxious liquid drooling out onto the mattress. The baby glanced at Gabe, but went right back to staring at the nothingness that hung over her, as if she could see something that Gabe could not. She giggled again and pointed at the space above her as if to say, Look, Gabriel! A visitor!

  BY THE TIME GABE ARRIVED at school the next day, strange stories were floating around, like a contagion.

  During first period, Gabe overheard a pair of bubbly girls, Justine and Sarah, whispering behind him. They had each awoken the night before to find a shadowy figure by their beds. Sarah swore she’d heard a growl. Her parents told her that she must have been dreaming. Justine’s mother had believed the story. When she called the police, the dispatcher told her they’d be delayed. Since midnight, the station had received a rash of reports of mysterious intruders from all over Slade. Dozens of people were all telling the same tale: Someone had been watching them sleep.

  Gabe felt as though his brain was shutting down. Maybe he’d never woken up at all? Surely this was a dream, a purgatory version of reality. A few rows away, soft laughter echoed. Gabe didn’t know if it was genuine or if he was hearing things.

  Between bells, Gabe managed to gather Malcolm, Mazzy, Ingrid, and Felicia by the door of the auditorium. They all looked worried.

  “You’re not the only one who lives in monster land anymore, Gabe,” said Felicia.

  “He visited you guys too?”

  “All of us,” said Ingrid. Malcolm and Mazzy nodded. “And you?”

  “I thought that would have been obvious.”

  “Someone wants to scare us,” Malcolm said.

  “Or send a message,” Gabe suggested.

  “Yeah,” Felicia went on. “The message is: I’m totally psycho.” She raised an eyebrow. “Has anyone seen or heard from the kid?”

  Gabe began to feel increasingly uncomfortable with Felicia’s tone. He glanced at Mazzy, remembering her warning about getting revenge. “I heard he got suspended.”

  “For what he did at the bake sale?” Felicia asked. When Gabe nodded, she added, “Where’d you hear that?”

  “He told me.”

  “You talked to him?” Felicia looked disgusted.

  “Yesterday afternoon,” he whispered. “He met me at the bus stop. He begged me to believe that he’s innocent.”

  “Do you?” Mazzy asked.

  An idea had been bubbling all morning, and it suddenly screamed forth like steam from a kettle. The investigators had determined that David Hopper had run away from home. But what if there was something they’d overlooked? Yes, David had disappeared. But what if he wasn’t gone? Gabe felt a tingling sensation at the tips of his fingers. David had been a loner in school. It wasn’t difficult to imagine him camping out in the woods, trying to escape from a life he’d hated. Was David trying to help out his little brother by getting back at the bullies? Or worse, what if the two of them were in it together?

  “Gabe?” Mazzy touched his shoulder. “You there?”

  Gabe glanced at the group. They were all staring at him. “I-I just thought of something.” He sighed, annoyed with himself that he couldn’t just spit it out, but he wanted to be sure before he started any more gossip. “We need answers. I have an idea how to get them, but I’m going to need help.”

  Hours later, right before last period, the group came back together, meeting in the same alcove by the auditorium doors. Each clutched one of the town maps that Gabe had printed from a library computer following their morning conversation.

  Throughout the day, they’d each spoken to as many of their classmates as possible, inquiring about the nighttime visitations. Now Gabe collected their papers. They’d scrawled notes across their maps of the town, just like he’d asked. He promised them he’d share more once the last bell rang, after he’d organized the data they’d collected.

  Sitting at the back of his next class, he kept the project covered by his textbook, peeking at it every now and again, jotting down notes of his own. It took nearly all period, but he managed to compile a master map. With a bright red pen, he marked the location of every reported break-in he knew about, along with the approximate time it had occurred.

  Gabe connected the dots, tracing the intruder’s alleged route. When he finished, he sat back in his chair, taking in the bizarre drawing. What he saw on the page made no logical sense. Each of his theories died in an instant, marred by a long scrawl of red ink.

  “IT’S A SPIRAL,” said Mazzy, leaning over the table in the library where the group had gathered after school, examining Gabe’s master map. The room was quiet. Many of the other students had gathered in the auditorium for the presentation of the English department’s Halloween story contest. Ironic, Gabe thought, since the scariest story he’d ever known was happening right here, in real life, to all of them.

>   “More of a bull’s-eye,” said Malcolm. “Don’t you think?”

  “And look at what’s right in the center,” said Gabe, pointing to the page.

  Ingrid looked confused. “The woods behind your house?”

  “Behind Seth’s house too,” Felicia added with a smug smile.

  “The line actually seems to end at my grandmother’s house,” said Gabe, “but since we haven’t spoken to Seth yet, I can’t be sure whether or not he was visited too. His house might be the final spot on the map.”

  The group all glanced up at him in confusion. “But how would Seth visit himself?” Ingrid asked, seemingly for all of them.

  Gabe shook his head. “That’s just what this map proves,” he said. And more, he thought to himself. There was no way David and Seth could have accomplished this together or alone. “Look at the time I noted at each location. Sure, some of them are off, but I guess that’s to be expected when you interview a large group of people. Not everyone looked at the clock last night, and those who did might not have remembered correctly, but one thing is clear—no one person could have moved between these locations this quickly. This map of Slade encompasses at least three square miles.”

  Malcolm leaned back in his chair, “So you’re saying that Seth had an accomplice?”

  “I’m saying that if Seth had anything to do with this at all, he’d have to have had at least ten accomplices.”

  “I doubt that kid even knows ten people,” said Felicia.

  “It’s pretty clear now that Seth isn’t the one doing this,” Mazzy said, placing her palms on the table and sitting up straight. “Unless he’s built himself a jet pack.” Felicia groaned. But Mazzy ignored her, speaking even louder. “That leaves us with…what?”

  “Where are the answers, Gabe?” Ingrid asked. “Ruling someone out doesn’t tell us anything. I mean, forget about being scared to walk through the woods. Now, being at home doesn’t even feel safe.”

  Gabe placed his finger on the page in the middle of the table, touching the center of the red spiral, the bull’s-eye on the map of Slade. “I think what this picture shows us is that these woods are at the center of everything,” he said. “I have a feeling that someone is living there. Someone unlike us.”

  Ingrid’s eyes grew wide. “Unlike us in what way?”

  Gabe chose every word carefully, as someone would search a tree branch for the perfect apple. “Tall. Strong. Fast. Angry.” He glanced at Felicia. “And mean.”

  Felicia rested her head in her palm, not buying it. “If you’re so sure about this, why haven’t we already called the police?”

  “I’ve told my story to cops,” said Gabe, “to the principal, to my parents. And every time, they either don’t believe me, or they blame Seth.” He blushed as he realized that only hours earlier, he’d blamed Seth as well.

  Leaning forward, Felicia went on, “I’m sorry, Gabe, but are you trying to tell me that a large, angry man snuck into school and blew up my cake? Right in front of my face? And no one saw him?” She laughed, a shrill sound echoing up into the room’s vaulted ceiling. “You’re kidding, right?”

  Gabe blinked. “I didn’t say he was a man.”

  “Oh, so now it’s a woman?”

  “Not a man. Not a woman.” Gabe took a deep breath. “Actually, not a human.”

  LATER, GABE HESITATED just outside of his grandmother’s library. Mornings, she worked upstairs in her studio, but in the afternoon she liked to sit down here, watching the wind move through the tree branches just down the hill. He knocked softly, not wanting to bother her, hoping she wouldn’t be there. She’d been quiet lately, even for her. He’d decided that if she answered from the other side of the door, he’d come back after the sun had gone down.

  The fresh laughter of his friends echoed in his head. As soon as Gabe had said the words not a human, he knew he’d made a mistake. After their amusement had died down, Ingrid actually said, wiping her eyes, “Good one, Gabe. You really had me going.” The only one who sat still, silently, had been Mazzy.

  He opened the library door a crack. “Elyse?” When silence answered him, he entered the empty room. She’d told him several times over the past months that he was welcome to borrow any book from her shelves, yet Gabe still trembled as he approached her collection. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was looking for. He’d been thinking of that book he’d read near the end of the summer—The Revenge of the Nightmarys. Nathaniel Olmstead’s descriptions of the pack of ghostly girls—demonlike creatures, veiled in rotting spider-silk damask, who had the power to make your worst fears come to life—had been so vivid, Gabe wondered fantastically if the man had in fact seen them with his own wide eyes.

  According to his grandmother, some people claimed that the author had based his stories on real monsters he’d encountered in his town. She’d thought it was merely a ploy to spark publicity, an effective one at that. The point was, for whatever reason, Nathaniel Olmstead had known about weird things, the inexplicable, the unnameable. Elyse had been there during the creation of these stories, putting images on paper that had once existed only in the author’s head.

  The Nightmarys book had frightened him so completely, he might not have finished it if his mother hadn’t begged him. Since then, Gabe had been too intimidated to return to these shelves, to choose another, but if Seth was right and they had raised something supernatural from the woods, Gabe figured these shelves were a treasure trove on the subject.

  Gabe glanced at title after title. The Rumor of the Haunted Nunnery. Curse of the Gremlin’s Tongue. Whispers in the Gingerwich House. Horror of the Changeling. The Secret of the Stone Child. The Wish of the Woman in Black. All fiction. With cover art by his grandmother.

  He removed a book called The Ghost in the Poet’s Mansion. Flipping through the pages, he wondered if the “ghost” of the title might give him a clue about the recent occurrences in Slade. But as the printed words blurred together, Gabe shook his head, understanding that he could never read through all of these—not this afternoon anyway.

  If only his grandmother had an Internet connection, or if he’d thought to search the Web before he’d left the school that day for information on magical objects, monsters, forest spirits, legends of New England, stone walls…anything. Now, unless his mother agreed to drive him back to the town library, he was stuck for the night with nothing but his churning imagination.

  Frustrated, Gabe kicked at the base of the bookcase. Several volumes near his feet shifted, then fell over onto empty shelf space. Looking closer, he noticed that these books were larger in size than the ones on the upper shelves. Heavier too. To his surprise, Gabe saw Olmstead’s name on another spine. He crouched to get a better look. Olmstead’s Incompleat Compendium of the Enigmatic Manuscript.

  Gabe handled it tenderly. One of his grandmother’s familiar black-ink-style sketches stretched across the paper jacket—a simple, shadowy image of a leather-bound book, latched shut by a large locking mechanism, in the center of which was a pitch-black keyhole. Inside, photographic reproductions of ancient texts filled the pages. There were chapters about mysterious symbols, heretical and Gnostic scriptures, various spell books and grimoires. He came across an entry about a book with the odd name of Malleus Maleficarum, followed by an evil-looking and blood spattered tome called The Necronomicon. Though Gabe found the information to be very cool, and very creepy, nothing appeared to be especially useful for solving his immediate mystery. Disappointed, he shoved the book back with the others on the bottom shelf.

  He was about to stand, when once again the name Olmstead caught his eye. His heart beat faster as he reached for this final book—the heaviest one yet. Olmstead and Ashe’s Big Book of Myths, Ghosts, and Monsters. Opening the cover, his jaw went slack. Gabe couldn’t believe his luck. It was an encyclopedic text, arranged alphabetically, each entry illustrated beautifully with a full-page drawing by his grandmother.

  Gabe brought the book over to the desk and sat in Elyse’s wooden sw
ivel chair. The sky had grown darker, spilling a dusky light into the room. He switched on the desk lamp. His grandmother’s name on the book cover was illuminated with a glowing swatch of yellow light, indicating—like a psychic signpost—that he was on the right track. Turning to the first page, Gabe took a deep breath. He had a lot of reading to do.

  As the night encroached upon the little library, Gabe became lost in a series of new worlds. He was amazed that his grandmother had collaborated on such a book. Inside were folktales and legends from all over the globe. Stories of Anansi in Africa, Baba Yaga in Russia, the bean sí in Ireland, the bunyip of Aboriginal Australia, the dragons of China, the Scandinavian fylgja, the golem of Prague.

  It was dark by the time Gabe found exactly what he’d sought—an article so specific, he wondered briefly if he might be seeing things. Staring up from the page was a tall man with a wide torso, standing before a crumbling stone wall in the middle of a dark forest. In fact, his body looked like a few boulders piled one on top of the other—bulky, bulbous muscle and fat. The man wore what looked like tattered and filthy leather armor, rimmed by cuffs of dingy and rotting fur. His chafed head was bald and spotted with what may have been blood. Though his face was mostly in shadow, Gabe’s grandmother had filled the eye sockets with cold light. A quiver of arrows was strapped to one enormous shoulder, a long, wide sheath hung from his belt, and in his hand, he clutched a modest wood bow.

  Gripped in the man’s opposing hand, Elyse had drawn a soiled cloth satchel. Its top was open slightly. Inside, barely visible in the detailed pen work, a small, pale hand poked out, five fingers wiggling helplessly at the air.

  A high-pitched, terrorized wail pierced his memory. He recalled the game in August, when he and Seth had discovered that dirty baby doll, hidden beneath a pile of leaves in the woods.