A Haunting Collection

by Mary Downing Hahn

  Corey and I stepped through a gap in the hedge. A cloud drifted across the sun and turned the day cold.

  “Who were you talking to?” I whispered.

  “Nobody.” Mrs. Brewster frowned at Corey and me, her face grim.

  “You were talking to them!” Corey’s voice shook. “They’re here, I can feel them all around us, watching, listening.”

  Hoping to calm her, I took my sister’s hand, but she snatched it away. “Tell us who they are,” she cried. “Tell us what they want! Tell them we’re sorry. Tell them—”

  “‘Sorry’ can’t change nothing,” Mrs. Brewster interrupted. “It’s got to run its course now.”

  “But can’t you just tell us who they are?” I asked.

  “I can’t,” Mrs. Brewster said, “but maybe they will.” With that, she pushed past us and strode off toward the inn. Even her shadow looked angry.

  For a moment, I thought Corey was going to run after her and keep begging for answers, but she stayed where she was, head down, staring at the numbered stones.

  “Come on.” I reached for her hand again. “Let’s go back to the inn.”

  The cloud had moved past the sun, and the day was hot again, thick with humidity and buzzing, biting bugs.

  Corey watched a butterfly drift from one stone to the next, pausing to fan its wings. “I never really believed in ghosts before,” she said.

  “Me, either.”

  As I spoke, a pebble hit my cheek, then another and another. Suddenly, the air was full of pebbles, striking Corey and me but too small to do more than sting. At the same moment, the giggling started. And the whispers.

  Corey and I ran toward the hedge, pebbles flying after us, but before we reached it, a shadow detached itself from the deep shade and blocked our path. Corey covered her face with her hands, but I stared into the darkness so hard my eyes stung. Someone was there, but I couldn’t see more than a vague shape.

  “Who are you?” I whispered.

  “Who are you?” it whispered back, coming a little closer.

  “What do you want?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Stop copying me!”

  “Stop copying me!” it yelled in a shaky voice just like mine. “Stop copying me, stop, stop.”

  Laughter erupted all around us. A hand pulled my hair so hard I saw strands floating away.

  Corey cried out in pain and stumbled backward, holding her cheek, the skin red from a slap.

  “You’d better be scared,” someone whispered. “We’re the bad ones, the lovely bad ones, the bad, bad, bad ones.”

  Corey and I ran, but we couldn’t escape the laughter or the pinches, slaps, and yanks at our hair. It was like being chased by a swarm of stinging hornets. Only worse. When hornets sting you, you know what they are. You can see them.

  Somewhere near the grove, our pursuers gave up and let us escape. But we kept running until we reached the inn and stumbled through the kitchen door.

  Mrs. Brewster looked up from the chicken she was preparing and scowled. Before she could say a word, we rushed past her and headed for the library. Neither of us wanted another scolding.

  10

  We collapsed on a couch in the library, breathing hard and soaked with sweat, our skin dotted with red marks left by the pebbles. The afternoon sun slanted through the tall windows and lit the bookcases on the opposite wall. Dust motes floated in the columns of light. The air was quiet, undisturbed. The only sound was the drowsy hum of bees in the flower boxes.

  In other words, everything felt normal. Ordinary. On the surface, at least.

  Corey picked up an old New Yorker. She leafed through it, not even pausing to read the cartoons, then threw it aside.

  As restless as my sister, I prowled around the room, studying the books on the shelves, wishing I could find something to read but knowing I was in no mood to sit quietly. Something was going to happen—I could sense it in the air like electricity before a thunderstorm.

  Suddenly, a pamphlet slid off a shelf and fell to the floor at my feet. Corey gasped, but I picked it up and read the title—The Strange History of Fox Hill, as Recorded by the Reverend William Plaistow.

  “They must have knocked it off the shelf,” Corey whispered.

  We looked around the room uneasily. The back of my neck prickled as if someone was watching me, but I heard no giggles or whispers and felt no slaps or pinches.

  “They want us to read it,” Corey said.

  Cautiously, I opened the pamphlet. With Corey pressed close to my side, I began reading out loud.

  “This treatise is dedicated to those who suffered at Fox Hill Poor Farm, especially, if I may borrow a few lines from John Greenleaf Whittier, the children:

  The happy ones; and sad ones;

  The sober and the silent ones; the boisterous and glad ones;

  The good ones—Yes, the good ones, too;

  and all the lovely bad ones.”

  “Poor farm?” Corey stared at me. “What’s that?”

  “It’s where they used to send people who didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “Like the workhouse in Oliver Twist?”

  “Yes.” I turned the page and went on reading.

  “Built in 1778, Fox Hill Farm was originally the home of Jedediah Cooper. Unfortunately, Jedidiah’s great-grandson, Charles Cooper, amassed enormous gambling debts, which made it impossible for him to pay his property taxes. After repeated warnings, the county seized the farm in 1819 and attempted to sell it at public auction. When no buyer stepped forth, the county put the property to use as a poor farm in 1821.

  “Mr. Cornelius Jaggs was appointed overseer of the poor. He chose his sister, Miss Ada Jaggs, to supervise the children. These two ran Fox Hill for the next twenty years. Apparently, their harsh, perhaps even cruel, treatment of the helpless people in their care eventually caused an outcry from the local populace. After a public hearing in 1841, the two were dismissed from their positions, and the poor farm was shut down.

  “Cornelius Jaggs left the area at once and vanished into the fog of history. Deserted by her brother, Ada Jaggs hanged herself in a grove of trees not far from the house.”

  Corey and I looked outside at the grove. Even though there was no breeze, the leaves of the tallest tree stirred and its branches swayed. A bunch of crows rose into the air, cawing, and flew away as if something had disturbed them.

  The page turned all by itself. A cloud drifted across the sun, and the dim light made it hard to read the faded print.

  “Ada Jaggs is buried at Fox Hill, along with many poor souls who suffered and died on the farm.

  “Among her dead companions are at least a dozen boys whom she singled out for her most severe punishments. Guilty of no more than normal high spirits, these boys, my lovely bad ones, had their lives cut short by a cruel and wicked woman.”

  The whisper I’d been expecting now ran around the walls. “Bad, bad, bad. She was the bad one. Bad beyond telling, bad beyond belief.”

  The whisper died away, but no one giggled. No one pinched or kicked or slapped. Sorrow filled the room. It pressed down on us, heavy and dark and so full of pain we could hardly breathe.

  A cold hand touched my face. “Don’t be afraid.”

  With Corey pressed against my side, I focused on the shadow standing in front of me. Slowly, a boy took shape, maybe ten or eleven years old, his face pale and freckled, his clothes ragged. He stood as straight and tall as he could and stared into my eyes.

  “I’m Caleb,” he said. “That’s Ira, and Seth.”

  Two boys stepped out of the shadows. Ira was about the same age as Caleb, dark and melancholy. Seth was the littlest of the three, with a tangled head of red curls and two missing front teeth. I guessed he was about seven.

  “There’s more of us,” Caleb said. “But we’ve been chosen to do the talking.”

  “I’m sorry we scared you,” Ira said, “but—”

  “I ain’t sorry,” Seth said. “We’re the b
ad ones! We got to live up to our name.”

  Giggles ran along the shadowy walls like a stream running over pebbles, chuckling to itself. “Bad ones, bad ones, bad, bad, bad.”

  Speechless, Corey and I huddled together like scared sheep and stared at the boys—the ghosts, that is. The bad ones.

  And they stared at us. Seth made a sudden lunge as if he meant to pinch us, and we scooted backward. The giggles got louder.

  “What do you want?” Corey whispered.

  “You woke Miss Ada up with your tomfoolery,” Caleb said. “And she woke us up. Now you have to put us back to sleep.”

  “And her, too,” Seth put in.

  “So we can rest easy,” Ira said. “Without her coming after us, over and over and over. Didn’t she cause us enough grief when we were alive?”

  “But—but how can we?” I stuttered and stammered, unable to say anything that made sense. “I mean, what can we do, we’re just kids. We aren’t—”

  “I told you it wouldn’t do any good to talk to them,” Ira muttered to Caleb. “The living know nothing.”

  A whisper of mutterings swept around the room, from shadow to shadow. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” someone chanted. “Don’t know nothing—either one of you.”

  “Pinchy, pinchy, pinchy,” someone whispered, plucking at my skin.

  “Ouch, that hurts!” I shouted, trying to evade the invisible fingers.

  “Stop it!” Corey flailed her arms as if she was trying to hit the shadows romping around us.

  “Boys, boys,” Caleb called. “Leave them be. They can’t help being ninnies.”

  The voices whispered to themselves, but they withdrew to the corners of the room and sulked there.

  “Pay the shadow children no mind,” Ira said. “They don’t mean any harm.”

  “Now,” Caleb said to us, “you read about Miss Ada. I reckon you know she’s in the grove.”

  Seth giggled. “You might say that’s where she hangs out.”

  Caleb and Ira whirled to face Seth. “Hush your foolish mouth!” Caleb yelled. “Don’t make mockery of her.”

  “Do you want her barging in here and hurting us again?” Ira asked.

  Seth’s mouth turned down, and he looked at the floor. “She don’t come out till dark,” he whispered. “She can’t hear what we say in the daytime.” He raised his head and looked at the older boys. “Can she?”

  “She always had a wicked sharp ear,” Ira said. “No telling what she can hear and when and where.”

  Caleb nodded. “So it’s best not to go making jokes about her way of dying.”

  “She blames us for it,” Ira said.

  “She blames you for what she did to herself?” Corey asked.

  “She’s the blameful sort,” Caleb said. “All that she did to us was our fault.”

  “We made her do it,” Ira said.

  “If we’d been good children, she’d have fed us cookies and milk,” Seth said, “and put us to bed under blankets soft as clouds and warm as cats.”

  “But we was bad, baaaaaad, baaaaaad,” the shadow children whispered.

  “And so she punished us,” Ira said. “For our own good.”

  “Even though it pained her most horribly to hurt us,” Caleb added in a voice as sweet as the sweetest lie ever told.

  “She loved the stick she beat us with,” Ira muttered. “And that’s the truth of it.”

  “She beat us for her good,” Caleb agreed. “Not ours.”

  “Baaaaad, baaaaad,” the shadow children hissed. “She was baaaaad.”

  “Badder than us,” Seth said, “badder than the devil hisself.”

  Grandmother appeared in the doorway. “Corey and Travis, I’ve been looking all over for you. It’s time for dinner.”

  It was clear she didn’t see the bad ones. Caleb shrugged and grinned. “Like most folks, your grandma only sees what we do. She don’t see us.”

  “Watch this.” Without even taking a step, Seth was standing in front of Grandmother, waving and grinning at her. “Hi, there, Granny!”

  Grandmother shivered. “It feels cold all of a sudden. Is the window open?”

  Caleb frowned, but Seth giggled and kicked Grandmother’s shin lightly—just a tap, really.

  Puzzled, Grandmother stared around the room. “I could swear someone just kicked me, but—”

  In a second, Seth was at the reading table. Grabbing a couple of magazines, he tossed them at Grandmother. They zoomed past her head and fluttered to the floor behind her.

  “What in the world?” As Grandmother whirled to look at the magazines, Ira grabbed Seth’s right arm and Caleb grabbed his left arm. All three vanished. A draft of cold air followed them past Grandmother and out the door.

  “Did you see that?” Grandmother asked. “The wind blew those magazines right off the table.” Her voice shook, but she crossed the room briskly and began closing the windows. “It must be the cold front the weatherman predicted.”

  As she shut the last window, the dark clouds I’d noticed earlier burst, and the wind drove sheets of rain against the glass.

  “Looks like we’re in for a bad storm.” Grandmother led the way toward the dining room, thunder crashing and lightning flashing. “I hope we don’t lose the power.”

  While we waited for our meal, I asked Grandmother if she knew the inn had once been the county poor farm.

  “Poor farm?” She looked at me in amazement. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

  I laid the pamphlet on the table. “I found this in the library.”

  She picked it up and read the title out loud. “My goodness, I went through all the books in the library when I bought Fox Hill, but I swear I never saw this.”

  Mrs. Brewster chose that moment to arrive with our dinner. “Where did you get that pamphlet?” she asked.

  “Travis came across it in the library.” Grandmother opened the pamphlet, her face puzzled. “Oh, what a pity. Most of the pages have fallen out.”

  Mrs. Brewster turned her sharp old eyes on me. “You just found it on the shelf, did you?”

  “Well, actually, it sort of fell on the floor, and I picked it up,” I muttered.

  She set my plate in front of me. “They’re telling you what they want you to know,” she whispered. “Better pay heed.”

  Grandmother looked at Mrs. Brewster. “What was that?”

  “Nothing. Just telling Travis he’d better eat that chicken before it gets cold. It’s best ate warm.”

  With that, she set the rest of the plates down and crossed the room to take the Kowalskis’ order.

  “Where’s Tracy?” Corey asked.

  “Her mother came for her this afternoon,” Grandmother said. “She promised she’d come back next week to help with a busload of senior citizens arriving on Monday. They’ll be here three nights—twelve people. If she doesn’t show up, I’ll have to put you and Travis to work waiting tables and cleaning rooms.”

  Grandmother took a bite of chicken and glanced out the window at the dark clouds and flashing lightning. “I just don’t understand how a sensible girl like Tracy can be so silly.”

  I heard a creaking sound and looked up. In the center of the ceiling, Caleb perched on the chandelier. Every now and then, he twirled it around, as if it were a swing. So far, no one but me had noticed the noise.

  Ira opened and shut the door to the kitchen, making it appear as if the wind was doing it. Grandmother looked annoyed. “Henry will have to do something about that door,” she said.

  On the other side of the dining room, Seth stole Mrs. Kowalski’s napkin. She asked Mrs. Brewster for another. He took that one, too. And the one after that.

  “I’ve brought you three napkins,” Mrs. Brewster snapped. “What are you doing with them?” She sounded as if she was accusing Mrs. Kowalski of stealing them.

  Mrs. Kowalski looked offended. “I put them on my lap,” she said, “but they keep disappearing. It’s very peculiar.”

  Mrs. Brewster glanced around the room
. To my amazement, she looked right at the chandelier where Seth now perched with Caleb. She frowned and shook her head at him. He stuck out his tongue and laughed.

  “Stop it right now,” she said crossly.

  Corey kicked me under the table. “Mrs. Brewster sees them,” she whispered. “She sees them!”

  I nodded, too flabbergasted to speak.

  In the meantime, Mrs. Kowalski was scowling at Mrs. Brewster. “Stop doing what?” she asked. “I told you I’m not doing anything with the napkins! They just keep—”

  Mrs. Brewster tossed a napkin on the table and headed for the kitchen, her broad back stiff.

  “That woman has no right to speak to me like that,” Mrs. Kowalski told her husband. “I don’t know where the napkins went.”

  Twittering to themselves, the shadow children gathered around the two new guests, Miss Baynes and Miss Edwards, who had checked in that afternoon. Unaware they were being watched, the old women sipped their iced tea and talked in low voices. Their hair was beauty-shop perfect, and their clothes were without creases or wrinkles.

  Suddenly, the casement windows blew open, the chandelier spun round and round, and the kitchen door banged like a series of pistol shots. Thanks to Ira, Mr. Kowalski’s coffee spilled, and Seth dropped a mouse on the old ladies’ table. They screamed as it darted to the edge, ran down the tablecloth, and scurried across the floor.

  It all happened so fast no one knew what to do first. Grandmother leapt up to close the windows. Mrs. Brewster came rushing out of the kitchen to mop up the coffee and bring Mr. Kowalski a fresh cup.

  The old ladies were acting like comic-strip women, screeching and turning this way and that in case the mouse made another foray.

  “I’ve never seen a mouse in the dining room,” Grandmother said, all aflutter with embarrassment.

  “I’ll make sure you don’t never see another one,” Mrs. Brewster muttered with a scowl at the chandelier where Caleb, Ira, and Seth sat grinning at her. “’Tain’t funny, ’tain’t funny a’tall.”

  “The health department would fail to see any humor in a mouse infestation,” Miss Baynes agreed in a voice as frosty as her hair.