Tell My Sorrows to the Stones

by Christopher Golden

  Now he couldn’t sleep. It felt like Christmas. Not the excitement of Christmas Eve, knowing that Santa would be coming within hours, but the following night, after spending an entire day opening presents and celebrating and running over to Sedesky’s so they could compare notes about what they’d gotten.

  There had been no comparing notes with Sedesky tonight. He had to think about what he wanted to say about what had happened to him today. Maybe if he tried to arrange for Sedesky and Rachel to come over tomorrow, and the ghost came back, they would see him, too. If not, he knew they would never believe him. They might wish they could see a ghost themselves, but if they weren’t going to get to see one, they weren’t going to allow the possibility that Teddy had, either. Sedesky and Rachel were his friends, but fair was fair. He understood that.

  Teddy yawned. His eyes burned, he was so tired. Really, it wasn’t so much that he could not have gone to sleep, as that he did not want to. No matter how excited he might be, if he just closed his eyes and turned over, he knew he would drift off eventually. But the events of the day were crystal clear in his mind—fully real. And he worried that if he slept, when he woke in the morning the hours he spent with the ghost would have blurred some, and started to seem like maybe they were a dream. He hated that idea. Teddy wanted to hang onto the certainty of the memory as long as he could.

  Yet amidst the nearly giddy aftermath of his day, something else lingered, niggling at the back of his mind, and that gave him another reason to stay awake. If he drifted off to sleep, he knew his thoughts would turn in that direction, and he did not like the troubling things that waited there.

  After target practice at the Hatton ranch, Teddy had rushed home as fast as his legs could carry him. Twice he’d had to halt and drag up the gun belt before its weight pulled his pants down to his knees. In the gathering dusk he had raced along Navarro Street as lights came on inside some of the houses, families sitting down to dinner. He had cut through the Mariottes’ backyard and into his own. Breathing hard, more than a little frantic at the idea of going in through his front door wearing his daddy’s old ratty sweater and carrying his gun, Teddy had looked around for a hiding spot. He’d pulled off the sweater and wrapped up the gun and belt, then tucked the whole package behind the coiled up garden hose before rushing inside.

  He needn’t have worried. Ma had still been asleep. It had been a simple thing to retrieve the gun and return it to its rightful place, and all the while she hadn’t stirred. It worried him.

  The radio voices still filled the house, and there his ma lay, curled up on the sofa, snoring lightly. The last of the day’s light filled the room with a blue gloom, and after he’d put the gun away, Teddy went and clicked on the floor lamp by the sofa. He knelt beside his ma and shook her gently awake.

  “Ma, you’re still sleeping,” he told her, and the words sounded so dumb to him. “Sorry I’m so late. I was out with Mikey and we kinda lost track of time.”

  Such a weak excuse, and he hated to lie to her. It made him feel ashamed. But Ma had smiled sleepily and then, as she sat up and saw the darkening windows and realized the time, she had frowned deeply.

  “Look at the time,” she said. “You must be starving, and I haven’t fixed anything for dinner.”

  “How about breakfast for dinner?” Teddy had suggested.

  Sometimes, as a special treat or when they were in a hurry, his ma would make bacon and eggs for dinner. They always made a big deal out of it, like they were getting away with breaking the rules somehow.

  Tonight, it had not seemed so special. His ma had barely touched her eggs and only had a couple of pieces of bacon. Teddy had been famished, but the weight of guilt slowed him down and when the eggs got cold he stopped eating. His ma had asked him to clean up the dishes, apologized, and then gone back to the couch, and when Teddy asked if she was okay, all she would say was that she was a little under the weather.

  “I’ll be right as rain, tomorrow,” she had promised.

  By the time Teddy finished up with the dishes, she had fallen asleep again. He had left her with her radio voices and gone out back to retrieve the sweater and the gun belt, quickly returning everything to the painted-over closet in the front hall.

  Now, lying in bed, he could still feel the weight of the gun tingling in his hands, and he could still hear the low murmur of radio voices drifting up to him from below. His ma had slept on the sofa before, but she had never been asleep when it was time for Teddy to go to bed, not even when she had the flu. Tonight he had brushed his teeth and put on his pajamas and gone down to say good night, but he had not wanted to wake her, so he had kissed her softly on the cheek and gone upstairs.

  He didn’t like sleeping upstairs all by himself, but if his ma had the flu again, he wanted her to get the rest she needed. She had promised she’d be right as rain come morning, and he hoped she was right. But deep down he doubted that, and it made him wonder if she doubted it, too.

  Teddy opened his eyes slowly, only vaguely aware of the hiss of static from downstairs. The radio station had gone off the air for the night. As that bit of information formed in his mind, he realized with no little surprise that he had fallen asleep after all. Quickly he remembered the ghost, and almost as quickly he wanted to see the cowboy again. As he had feared, already the image had lost its sharpness in his mind, and he could not summon a complete picture of how the ghost had looked when he had first seen it, out on the street in front of his house.

  He sighed with disappointment, but knew he could do nothing to get that moment back. His eyes were heavy and even now he had not come fully awake. Sleep called him to return, and though he knew the memory would retain little clarity come morning, he began to succumb.

  A sound halted his eyelids at half-mast, and a slight frown creased his forehead. Tick-tock, tick-tock, but it wasn’t a clock. Teddy listened with half an ear, trying to sort out the origin of that familiar sound. It grew louder, though still muffled, and he opened his eyes fully and stared at his bedroom window. He did know that sound. Not a tick-tock, but the clip-clop of a horse’s hooves.

  His bedroom lay draped in indigo darkness, enough light provided by the streetlamp in front of Mr. Graham’s house to silhouette the furniture, but not enough for him to make out the time on the clock by his bed. Who rode a horse down his street in the middle of the night?

  A terrible possibility rushed through him—Mr. Hatton. Had the rancher learned of his trespassing and come to confront him? Teddy’s heart pounded in his chest for ten full seconds before the absurdity of that idea made it crumble apart. Mr. Hatton might be the only one living around here who kept horses, but the old man would not come riding up in the middle of the night just to scare a fifth-grader.

  Don’t be stupid, Teddy, he thought to himself, and smiled.

  But the clip-clop sound began to slow, and curiosity dragged him out of bed. If not Mr. Hatton, then who could be out riding so late? It occurred to him as he went to the window that, since he didn’t know anyone else who owned horses, maybe someone had stolen one from Mr. Hatton. Teddy might be able to get a look at the thief and tell the police. He might even get a reward!

  On the book shelf next to the window was a little lamp, but Teddy didn’t turn it on. If he managed to get a look at the horse thief, he didn’t want to be spotted. Instead, he crouched beside the window and peered around the edge of the dusty curtain. A quarter moon hung low in the sky and the street lamp down in front of Mr. Graham’s flickered a little, like maybe it would go out soon, but despite that illumination, for a few seconds he didn’t see anyone out there at all.

  Then movement caught his eye, and he heard the slow clip-clop of hooves again. Teddy narrowed his eyes as he saw the rider—all dressed in black and astride a black horse—and then he blinked and his eyes went very wide. With his black cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes and the long black coat he wore, the man on horseback looked even more like a gunfighter th
an the cowboy’s ghost.

  Holding the horse’s reins loosely, the man in black sat up high in the saddle, and his coat fell open to reveal the moonlit gleam of black metal at his hip. He watched as the rider urged the horse forward at an achingly slow pace. The man in black studied the Grahams’ house as he passed, and then glanced across the street at the Sullivans’, like he might be searching for a certain house but didn’t know the exact address.

  The thought froze the breath in Teddy’s throat. He stared, eyes widening further as the man passed through the dome of yellow light from the street lamp, and he realized he could see right through both horse and rider.

  Shivers went up his spine and he bit his lip. From downstairs he could hear the hiss of the radio, the sound it made when the world had stopped broadcasting.

  Clip-clop, clip-clop, the rider came on, more and more slowly. Right out in front of Teddy’s house, he seemed to pause a moment and tilt his head slightly to the side, like he was listening for something.

  “No,” Teddy whispered, there alone in his darkened room. “Keep riding.”

  For another breath, the black rider hesitated and then, almost reluctantly, spurred the horse onward. The animal’s hooves clacked on the pavement, and Teddy felt pretty sure it had picked up the pace a little. Still, he stared, watching as the black rider and his horse moved on, past the Hesses’ house and then the Landrys’.

  Teddy’s lower lip trembled and his eyes began to fill. He slid down and leaned against the wall, taking long, steadying breaths, unable to put together even just in his own thoughts why such fear had gripped him. A single tear traced its way down his cheek and he sighed with relief.

  “You should have been here,” he whispered into the dark, thinking of the cowboy, and then realizing that the words had not been meant for that ghost, but for his father. His heart hurt his chest.

  Then he froze once more.

  Outside, the clip-clop had ceased. Teddy rose up to his knees and peered out the window, hoping for a moment that the black rider would have simply vanished, the way the cowboy’s ghost had earlier in the day. But no, the figure remained. The rider had come to a halt in front of the Landry house, but wasn’t looking at the Landrys’ or at the Mansurs’ across the street. The black rider hung his head, hat tilted almost straight down. He seemed almost to have fallen asleep in the saddle.

  Then, without looking up, he tugged the reins and the black horse turned. Slowly, the rider raised his head, facing Teddy’s house, and though the brim of his hat covered his eyes, Teddy knew the dark man was looking right at him, that the rider could see him despite the darkness in his bedroom.

  With a tug on the reins, the black rider started back toward Teddy’s house. Clip-clop, clip-clop. His coat hung wide open, and in the moonlight, the black metal of his gun seemed to wink.

  “No,” Teddy whispered. “I won’t let you.”

  The rider snapped the reins and the horse leaped into a gallop, and then Teddy was up and running. His bare feet squeaked on the wood floor as he raced into the hallway and sprinted for the steps. The hiss of the radio grew loud in his ears as he gripped the banisters and half-ran, half-slid down the stairs. His face burned with the desperation of tears he refused to shed, and he tried to steady his heart the way that his hands had steadied his father’s gun that day.

  And he knew why the ghost had visited his house.

  At the bottom of the steps he came face to face with the front door, and he heard the thunder of hooves right outside, could practically feel it shaking the floorboards as he turned from the door and ran down the front hall. In the room on the left, he could hear his mother coughing in her sleep. It was an awful sound, almost like choking, and the wheeze that went along with it seemed to match the static hiss of the radio.

  Teddy grabbed the handle of the door under the stairs and yanked hard. Thick with old paint, it stuck.

  The sound of hooves had stopped, but now he heard the tread of boots on the front stoop, and the doorknob rattled. The frame creaked as the rider tested its strength.

  The little pantry door under the stairs gave a shriek of warped wood as he forced it open. Desperate, he snatched the old cookie tin off of its shelf, popped off the cover, and let the tin clatter to the ground as he hefted the weight of his daddy’s gun.

  As all fell silent at the front door, he twisted around to see the black rider step right through the door, just as easily as the ghost had passed through the screen earlier, his head still dipped, face half-hidden behind the brim of his hat. Hands shaking, Teddy nearly dropped the gun, but he managed to lift it and take trembling aim.

  “I won’t let you,” he said, and somehow his voice did not quaver, and then his hands went still.

  The rider lifted his head as though taking notice of him for the very first time, and Teddy nearly screamed. Where his face ought to have been there was only emptiness, darker than the darkest night and deep as forever.

  The rider went for his gun, and Lord he was fast. Teddy pulled the trigger three times. His daddy’s gun bucked in his hands but made not a sound. The rider staggered backward and fell through the door, like it wasn’t even there.

  Whispering silent prayers, and sometimes private thank-yous to a gunfighter whose days had passed, he stood with the gun aimed at the front door for as long as he could keep his arms raised. When he could no longer hold them up, he sat on the floor and leaned against the frame of the open pantry door, the gun cradled across his lap, listening to the hiss of nothing on the radio.

  Ma woke him in the morning, flushed with colour, eyes bright with anger and confusion, wondering what he thought he was doing sleeping in the hallway.

  Teddy caught hell for playing with his daddy’s gun. Even got grounded for a week, which meant he had to spend every second he wasn’t at school right there in the house with his ma.

  He didn’t mind at all.

  THIN WALLS

  Tim Graham woke slowly, the sounds of raucous sex drawing him up into the waking world. He frowned sleepily and looked around in the darkness of his hotel room as though he expected to find the perpetrators of the disturbance screwing acrobatically on one of the floral-patterned chairs near the balcony slider. He liked to keep a room as dark as possible for sleeping—something he’d picked up from Jenny—so the heavy curtains were drawn and the only light came from the ghostly glow of numbers on the alarm clock. If someone had been screwing in his room, he would barely have been able to see them.

  But the sounds, he quickly realized, came from the room next door. The bed in there must have been head to head with his own, for he heard the lovers far too well, their grunts and moans and exhortations, the slap of flesh on flesh, the rhythmic tap of the headboard against the wall. Most hotel chains had long since learned to attach the headboards to the wall so they wouldn’t knock against it when guests got busy, but apparently that bit of logic had been overlooked here.

  At first, Tim smiled. Half asleep, he felt a mixture of envy and arousal.

  “Yes, like that!” the woman said and sighed, repeating it several times, making it her mantra. Then she started to plead, almost whining, urging him on.

  After several minutes of this, Tim’s erection brought him fully awake. He closed his eyes and put a pillow over his head, trying to force himself back to sleep, but he could not drown out the sounds. His pulse quickened. He wondered how long they could go on. Unless the guy was young—or old and using Viagra to regain his youth—it shouldn’t take that long.

  He had heard people having sex in hotel rooms before. More than once, he and Jenny had been the people making too much noise. One time an angry old woman had banged on the wall and shouted at them to keep it down and they had laughed and made love even more vocally. Tim had never banged on the wall himself. He didn’t like the idea of interrupting, and he had always felt a little thrill at overhearing.

  So he listened, his erection painfully
in need of attention. Jenny had been gone for nearly a year. He was tempted to masturbate, but the image of a sad little pervert jerking off on the other side of the wall disturbed him, so instead he got up and went to the bathroom. With the light on, the bathroom fan drowned out most of the noise from next door. He splashed water on his face and looked in the mirror at the dark circles under his eyes. He had to wait for his erection to subside before he could aim for the toilet, but at last he managed to piss, then washed his hands and returned to bed.

  The fucking continued.

  “Christ,” he muttered.

  He wanted sleep more than cheap thrills. The voyeur inside him seemed to have given up and gone to sleep, because though his cock stirred and rose once more, it only achieved half mast, apparently tempered by his growing irritation.

  He laid his head back on the pillow and stared up at the darkness of the ceiling. Had they heard him go to the bathroom? The sound of the fan and the flush of the toilet? If so, it had not troubled them at all. If anything, the lovers had gotten louder. The man started to call her filthy names, making her his slut, his whore, his bitch, and she rose to what she seemed to consider a challenge, agreeing with him at every turn. If he’d ever tried that with Jenny he would never have had sex again, but for these two it seemed a huge turn-on.

  Long minutes passed. Tim’s throat was dry, his breath coming a little quicker as his erection returned, more painful than ever. He could not help but start to imagine the scene taking place next door, picturing positions and stiletto heels. In his mind the guy was a blur, but the woman had a body sculpted by desire, with round, heavy, real breasts and hip bones perfect for gripping.

  He rolled his eyes and shook his head, not daring to look at the clock, though he felt sure he had been awake at least half an hour by now, and had no idea how long they had been going at it before they had woken him.