by Dan Poblocki
Ping pointed in the direction from which she’d stumbled. Mr. and Mrs. Yu were busy trying to contain her two little brothers, who’d decided that a race around their own wide spot of lawn would be a fun way to pass the time until the movie began. “Aren’t they a little young for Jaws?” Deb asked, glancing over her shoulder. Finally, Mrs. Yu noticed and waved.
“They’re only two years younger than me. Mom says if they get too scared, they’ll head home. If they do, can I catch a ride with you guys?”
“Of course,” said Deb, waving back to the Yus, nodding at Ping and giving a thumbs-up.
“Cool,” said Ping, settling onto the blanket, as if she were now part of a new family. She grabbed a handful of kettle corn and shoved it into her mouth. As she did so, she leaned in, whispered, and chewed. “I begged … my parents … to take me here after we ate dinner. I knew you guys were coming … and I had to see you tonight. When my dad got home from work, he told me about the Chambers house.”
“What about it?” asked Joey, stiffening.
“How they moved it,” Ping answered with a dark smile. “And why.”
PING EXPLAINED AS MUCH as her father had learned.
The map that Joey had found at Junkland was accurate. The old house that had once marked the entrance to Chambers Farm, where the Chase McMansion stood today, was indeed the same house that sat in the woods beyond their cul-de-sac. Fifteen years or so ago, when Owen Chase had offered to purchase Aidan Chambers’s land, the old man had at first refused. Aidan had grown up in that house, he’d said. It was in his blood. Unfortunately, according to Chase’s proposed design, the perfect geographical entry from the main road ran right through the property.
Aidan had been intrigued by the price Chase had offered, but insisted that he be allowed to keep his house and the parcel of land on which it sat. Mr. Chase had countered that they move the house up the hill, into the Estates themselves. Up in the woods, detached from the rest of the new houses, Aidan could maintain his privacy. Chase knew it would be an expensive effort, but if it was the only way to get Chambers to budge for the lot, it was worth it. Aidan took the bait. A year or so later, a group of contractors disassembled the old farmhouse and put it back together at the opposite side of the land that had been in the Chambers family for over a hundred years.
“That doesn’t sound so mysterious,” said Joey, disappointed. “Mr. Chase bought the land. They moved the house. Big deal.”
“Right,” Ping nodded. “But that’s not all. According to my father, people around Whitechapel say that after the move, Aidan Chambers became a different person. Suspicious. Frightened. They say he claimed that his house was now haunted.”
“Why would moving a house up a hill make it haunted?” Cassidy asked.
“Maybe it wasn’t the house that was haunted,” Ping said. “Maybe it was the land that they put it on.”
“Can land be haunted?” asked Joey.
“Anything can be haunted,” said Cassidy, thinking of her own trip to the cemetery in Brooklyn years ago. She shifted her weight on the blanket. “And according to the stories, both Aidan and Ursula seemed to change once they lived in that old house in its new location. Right?”
Ping nodded as Deb chimed in from behind them. “I remember when Ursula first came to the neighborhood.” The three on the blanket flinched, unaware that she had been listening. “You’re right, Cassidy. She was a different person. Very sweet. Generous. I was really young, but I remember her coming over, chatting with mom and dad. I think, once, she even babysat us.”
“She did?” Joey said, aghast.
“But she changed. Stopped talking to people. Stopped leaving her house. It was really weird.”
“She lost it,” said Julia, looking up from her phone. She’d interrupted her text message to chime in. “You guys saw what they pulled out of that house this week. Would a sane person have lived that way?”
Everyone was quiet for a moment. The sky was growing purple now, the stars creating a light show unlike anything Cassidy ever saw in the big city.
“It’s complicated,” Joey answered quietly.
“I’ve heard stories,” Julia added, her eyebrows raised. “Our friend Hal says he’s seen Ursula every night this week.”
Cassidy turned around and grabbed Julia’s ankles. Julia squealed in surprise. “Hal who?” Cassidy sputtered. “What has he seen?”
“Hal Nance,” Julia said, chuckling. “Deb’s boyfriend.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Deb said. “We went on one date. Last year.”
“Anyway,” Julia went on. “He’s seen her ghost too. He said she seemed really mad that he took something from her house. What if all that junk is cursed?”
Cassidy remembered the dark-haired boy she’d talked to in the supermarket last Monday, the one who’d let her use his phone. His name had been Hal. She blinked and saw him lying in a coffin, his skin tinged pale blue, his voice ringing impossibly in her ears: Too late, too late, too late.
“You have to call him now!” Cassidy said. “Tell him he has to put back whatever it was he took!”
Julia laughed and Cassidy blushed. Julia held up her phone, revealing her past few texts. “Tell him yourself,” Julia said. “He’s just getting off his shift at work. He said he’d stop by here and watch the movie with us for a bit.”
“He did?” Deb asked, flipping her hair over her shoulder as if trying to look like she didn’t care, though it was obvious she did.
“Maybe,” said Julia, glancing back at her phone, as if a new text would spring up and provide an answer.
Just then, the screen at the front of the lawn lit up white and a voice rang over the speaker system. “Welcome to Whitechapel’s Movie under the Stars!” The crowd, who’d grown substantially since Cassidy had last looked around, roared with applause. “Tonight, we’ve got a classic,” said the announcer, a man wearing a green parks department T-shirt standing at the edge of the screen holding a microphone. “A real scary one.”
Cassidy promised herself that when Hal showed up, she’d make him listen to her, even if she had to drag him to his car and drive him up to Ursula’s house herself.
The man by the movie screen laughed evilly, hamming it up, adding, “I wanna hear you all scream!”
A few minutes later, the movie started, and for the next couple hours, the audience obliged his request over and over and over.
HAL NANCE STROLLED across the parking lot, his eyes fixed on his car, an ancient El Camino that several generations of extended family had fixed up and handed down in a line that had last year brought the keys into his own hands. He loved the car, even though, according to most anyone who saw it, it was strange looking. The two-seater had a pickup bed in the back, like a truck, which Hal found useful for carting around various things for his friends and family. Within the past few weeks, he had carried a pair of amps for Ted Walsh’s band’s gig a couple towns away, a couch that his mom was donating to a local church charity, and a new barbecue grill his dad had purchased at the home and garden center by the highway.
The current cargo, however, was weirder — an antique sewing mannequin, a female torso made of cardboard and pressed tin attached to a wooden stand with four little rolling wheels at the base. He’d taken it from a dead-end driveway at the crest of Chase Estates that week, planning to use it in an art project. Now, the thing sat in the back of the El Camino for no other purpose than Hal had wanted to get it out of his house and hopefully out of his life.
He checked his watch, but the indigo sky was the true indicator of time. The movie must have started by now.
As he approached the car, the form seemed to glow beneath the phosphorescent light high above the parking lot. He could not stop himself from imagining how very much it looked like a dead body. He’d almost hoped that someone would have stolen it during his shift, but no such luck. He slowed, not wanting to be so close to it, and remembered the strange visions he’d had since visiting the Dumpsters in Ursula’s driveway
.
His pocket buzzed, and he jumped. Hal pulled out his phone and glanced down at the screen. A text from Julia Freundlich. He sighed and tucked it back into his pants. He’d promised her that he’d stop by the movie they were showing in the center of town, but seeing the mannequin again now propped in the back of his car, as if waiting for him, only made him want to stick with his original plan: to drive the creepy old thing back up to the driveway and leave it there, like the old woman had asked him to.
Hal had been visited by Ursula on the night he’d taken the mannequin home. He’d woken to find her standing at the end of his bed, next to the dressmaker’s tin dummy, one clawlike hand resting on its shoulder. He’d scrambled backward against the wall. At first, he figured that what he was seeing was a dream, but the vision didn’t fade. Though she was transparent, she wore what looked like a faded jogging suit. Her wide eyes were black and imploring, her mouth sagged, her lips moved as if she were about to speak. Sadness and anger and frustration crowded into the room like smoke, and Hal nearly choked. As soon as he’d spoken — “What do you want?” — Ursula’s form disappeared like condensation wiped from a mirror. But the mannequin remained.
Even after Hal moved the dummy into the hallway outside his room, he hadn’t been able to find sleep again.
He’d never planned on telling anyone that he’d seen her ghost, but the next day, he heard others’ stories. People who’d visited the Dumpster were claiming that Ursula Chambers had come to them at night, demanding they return what they’d taken.
Hal hadn’t been sure what Ursula had tried to say to him, but he allowed himself to believe her appearance had been a warning. By the next afternoon, he felt comfortable enough to share his own tale with a familiar customer. Julia Freundlich, who was running the register next to his, had overheard him. That was all it had taken for Hal to become one of them: Those Who Had Seen.
Later, driving home, he’d found himself laughing about what had happened and what others were saying. Curses? Ridiculous. Then Mrs. Moriarty died, and his humor dried up.
So, before work, he’d thrown the dummy into the bed of the El Camino. This evening, he intended to drive up to the overgrown driveway where he’d gotten it. Maybe he’d even roll the thing to the rotting porch and leave it there, just to be rid of it, just to be safe.
Now, Hal yanked his key from his pocket and shoved it into the car door. If he drove quickly, he might make it back to the center of town before the scene when the shark chomps the kid on the raft, the blood bubbling in the surf.
Hal chuckled to himself as he slipped behind the wheel, thinking about how the horror of the film should not be a comfort. But when he thought about the moment the kid’s mother slaps Chief Brody’s cheek in anger, he nearly forgot about what was sitting in the car’s bed right behind him or where he needed to drive to dispose of it. Anything distracting was a comfort at this point. He slammed the door shut and turned the key in the ignition. The engine purred to life.
Pulling out of the parking lot and onto the dark road that led over the hill toward Whitechapel, Hal wondered, not for the first time that day, if he was overreacting. People in small towns told small stories — a side effect of being bored, nothing else to do but gossip about the woman who lived in a pile of junk, like a character from a nursery rhyme. Maybe the plan was a bad idea. Maybe he should just go into town and watch Jaws with the girls. Forget about the rumors. About the dreams. Nightmares. He’d felt guilty for taking what didn’t belong to him. But that didn’t mean he or anybody else in Whitechapel was cursed, did it?
Hal switched on the radio but couldn’t get a signal. Every station emitted an odd humming noise. It wasn’t static. It was like a hundred voices singing out of tune. He glanced into the rearview mirror, but he couldn’t see the mannequin. Had it slipped out of sight, fallen flat on the bed? Reaching up, Hal adjusted the mirror. Now, somehow, the dummy was sitting upright in the pickup bed, as if its stand had folded at the hip. If it had a head, it would have been glaring at him.
He slammed his foot against the brake and the car skidded, the tires screeching into the night. A scream of rubber against asphalt. The mannequin slid forward, smashing into the rear window, spidering a crack across the glass.
Pulling over to the side of the road, a line of dark trees easing up the steep hill, Hal spat out some choice words for his passenger, then swung open his door and leapt out into the street. “I don’t need this….” he said, tossing the broken pieces of the mannequin to the side of the road. “Good riddance.” He wiped his hands on his jeans, a job well done, then hopped back into the El Camino and pealed out. Hal Nance was on his way. Back on track. Everything right with the world.
The night whipped by. Hal felt like an elephant had been lifted from his chest. He fiddled with the car radio again, but the humming sound only grew louder. He turned the knob furiously. But there was nothing else coming in.
Oh, who cared!? Jaws awaited. Jaws and Julia and Deb and the stars above. Tonight would be fun. No more worrying about evil hoarders from beyond the grave. Tonight was about sharks. Sharks and girls. And driving fast to get there.
Someone was standing in the road at the top of the hill. As soon as Hal saw her, he knew who it was. He slowed but didn’t stop. When he got closer, he made out details: the jogging suit, the short, messy hair, the black holes where her eyes should have been, the open mouth, the moving jaw. He pressed his foot against the gas. He didn’t want to hurt her; he only wanted her to leave him alone. The woman didn’t move. As he passed through her, static burst from the stereo speakers and a voice screamed at him, Go back! Go back! You must go back!
Hal swerved to the side of the road, coming to a stop beside a great pine tree. He opened the car door and glanced back up the hill, at the spot where the woman had stood, trying to block his way. Go back, she’d said. The passage was empty now. An ordinary country road.
He looked ahead into the small valley below. The lights of the town filtered up through the trees, misty beacons leading the way to safety. He was almost there. All he had to do was drive. But Ursula’s desperate plea was stuck in his head.
There was something about it that didn’t match the stories people had told. If he could allow himself to process what he’d just seen as something that existed outside of a dream, then yes, her words were a warning. However, they didn’t sound to him like a threat.
Hal sighed as he turned the car around. He drove slower now, keeping a lookout. Soon, he noticed a dull glimmer in the brush — his headlights reflecting off the rusted trim. The mannequin was waiting for him. And, if he understood properly, Ursula needed him to bring it back to her house. No matter what. He stopped. Got out. Knocked the broken glass from the window into the truck bed so he could see through the rearview mirror. He threw the dummy into the back of the car.
The town was deserted. Everyone was up the road and around the bend at the movie. He’d just passed the white chapel and the bridge over the river when the radio grew louder again. That humming noise. It battered his eardrums. Hal switched the radio off. But the noise didn’t stop. It only increased. He felt a rumble in the pit of his stomach, as if he’d eaten a handful of gravel. “What the —” Hal flicked the knob back and forth several times before he realized that the humming, the vibrations, were not coming from the El Camino’s speakers, but from outside.
His spine turned into a stone pillar as he thought of the dummy in the bed, how it had sat up in the hills before town. He’d smashed out the broken glass so he could see through the mirror into the rear, but now, he had a feeling that he didn’t want to see what was back there. And yet, as the humming became so strong it threatened to boil his brain, he knew he had to look.
Once again, the mannequin sat upright. In the ambient light from the dashboard and what was left of the moon above, Hal made out some movement surrounding the object. A dark patch, an obsidian roiling shadow, hovered in the air over the mannequin before swarming forward to embrace the female form
with snakelike tendrils.
Hal felt something squeezing at his throat, and he realized he was screaming. Still, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the nightmare in the rearview. The mannequin now appeared to have a head made of the shadow stuff. Its long hair blew back from its scalp, whipped up in a frenzy of backdraft, and its face … Well, it had no face. Two arms extended from where its shoulders had once simply cut off, now reaching toward him, hands stretching from what looked like black mist, solid fingers whittled into impossibly sharp talons.
By the time Hal realized that the mannequin had breached the broken window, its claws about to slice at his neck, he’d already veered off the road. Slamming on the brakes did nothing. The El Camino’s tires slid in the dew-slick grass. Ahead, the trunk of a wide oak grew blinding white as the headlights approached. At the last second, as a sharp pain pierced the flesh of his neck, Hal managed to twist the wheel. This did little to stop the car from careening forward, except to spin the vehicle so that it collided with the tree from the side instead of the front.
In the instant before his waking world blinked away, Hal’s last thought was, Ursula’s going to be so mad at me….
Imagine you’re walking along a beautiful mountain path, surrounded by everyone who loves you. Janet and Benji are beside you, holding your hands. You don’t know why you’ve all ended up on this hike, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except taking the next step, finding your balance, making your way into the clouds. You get to a point where the path is steep and unclear. No one knows whether to step up onto a rock or down into a gully. The next thing you know, you’ve lost your grip on your best friends’ hands, and you watch as they tumble down the mountain, bouncing as their bodies collide off each other and the rocks, coming to rest on the ground far below. And you know they’re dead.
Then you wake up.
Imagine that you’re following your father into a brightly lit parking garage. He wants to show you his brand new sports car. Together, you’ll drive off with the top down into the night, speeding through city streets, the wind messing up your hair, but you don’t care because of the thrill. You find yourself standing at the back of a red Porsche. A voice behind you tells you to open the trunk. So you do. Inside, the space is empty and padded with black felt. Then, the voice behind you says, “Get in.” You turn around and realize that you haven’t followed your father. You’ve followed someone else. Someone you don’t recognize. Someone with big hands and an even bigger smile.
