Dark Duets

by Christopher Golden

  Looking through the windows proved useless because upon closer inspection, I realized they had been blacked out with paint. I was left with no other option. It was time to go in.

  I pushed at the front door to no avail. It groaned a bit, but it didn’t budge. I backed my way down the rickety old steps and shined my light around the base of the house. Near the far left end, behind the overgrown and twisted-up hedges, I spotted a broken window close to the ground that looked just big enough for me to crawl through if I sucked in tight and thought about celery while I shimmied. I pulled back the limb of a bush, gently kicked out the remaining fragments of glass, and in a feet-first motion I slid inside the basement with one swift, effortless move.

  Despite the off-putting appearance of the outside, the inside looked pretty normal save for large amounts of a superfine, sparkly dust covering every surface. It looked as though nothing had been moved or cleaned in years and, ironically, could use a woman’s touch. Unless it was my touch. All that would get you was a pile of dirty laundry in the corner and enough drain hair to create a rope doll.

  I left my tiptoe footprints in the shiny dust like a mouse tracking over a snow-covered hill. After several minutes of searching, I started to feel the churn of my gut lessen. I was pretty sure I was alone in the house. Still, I opened the basement door that led upstairs and connected into the kitchen with the stealth of a hired assassin, just to be sure. I bobbed my light around and once again found nothing but that dust. It was all over the house and where there were cracks and gaps in the old rotten roof, the moonlight shimmered on the dust and made it glitter.

  I coasted out of the kitchen and into a large room with bulks of cloth-covered furniture, backed myself against the wall, and leaned there in the shadows. I let the weight of my thumb come off the button of the light, causing it to go black, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness.

  I was really nervous now, and since I had not found Erin, or anyone, in the house, but had found her car and recognized the cars of some of the other women from the eye-gazing party, I assumed I had enough material to take to the police. I could leave my suspicions about Thirteen’s magic eye and my astigmatism out of the explanation when I spoke to them and would probably be the better for it.

  It would certainly be smarter than wandering around a dark house and having the squeaking floor give way and drop me into the basement faster than green grass through a duck’s ass to lie in a heap of lumber, broken bones, and if I knew my luck, my mom jeans hanging on a snag above me.

  It was then that one of the pieces of furniture that I had taken for an ottoman stood up with a sound like cracking walnuts and a dislocation of sparkly dust that drifted across the room and fastened itself into my nostrils tighter than in-laws at Christmas.

  The dust, however, was my least concern. I was more troubled by the fact that the ottoman was not an ottoman but a moving wad of clothes and flesh that, though I couldn’t see it clearly, I felt certain was Thirteen. How he had been bundled up like that on the floor, I have no idea, nor did I have the inclination to ask him, but I can assure you, the sight of him coming into human shape that way was enough to make my legs go weak.

  I wondered if I had been seen, or if the shadows concealed me, but that was all decided for me when the dust in my nostrils decided to exit by way of a loud sneeze. It was like a starter’s pistol being fired, and here came Thirteen, shuffling through the dust, coming right at me. Track had never been my sport, but right then I wished it had, because I broke and ran. Behind me I heard the floorboards squeal and the pitter-patter of feet, and then Thirteen had me.

  HIS HAND CAME down on my shoulder, and I’m ashamed to admit it, but I let out a scream that would have embarrassed a five-year-old girl with its earsplitting intensity. I was yanked back and it caused me to wheel about on my heels, and I was looking right into the shadowy face of the little man.

  I clicked on the key-ring light in my hands, lifted it quickly for a look. I can’t explain it. It was just a reflex. Thirteen’s eyes were still flat and uninteresting, but then something moved in them, and I actually heard a crackling as if a fuse had shorted, and for a moment it seemed as if his eyes had slipped together and become one. I blinked, and then he looked the same, bald and doughy with ugly gray eyes.

  We held our places.

  I swear I smiled, and once more, the light went off and I dropped it, along with the key ring to my side, said, “Have you seen Erin?”

  Really. I did. He didn’t respond, just leaned forward giving me the hairy eyeball, and then I got it; he was waiting on me to swoon. He couldn’t figure why his evil eye wasn’t working, why the hoodoo didn’t do whatever it was supposed to do, and that’s when I brought my keys up again and raked him across the face, cutting his flesh in the way a knife cuts paper. I shoved him and raced past, into the big room.

  Glancing over my shoulder, I was horrified to see he was pursuing me, but on all fours, moving fast and light as a windblown leaf. Now I was in a hallway, and there was moonlight creeping in through a rent in the roof. I had a pretty good view of everything, and one of those things was my reflection in a huge mirror with a small table next to it supporting a pitcher of some sort. I grabbed the pitcher, wheeled, and struck Thirteen on the forehead, causing him to stumble back and fall. It was a short-lived victory. He rose to his feet and came at me with his doughy arms spread wide, making a noise like a cat with its tail caught in a door.

  I turned, took hold of the table, and saw in the mirror that his image was contrary to what I had been looking at. Now he was little more than a skeleton topped by a bulbous head centered by one big eye, but when I turned, he looked just the same, a stumpy, balding man in an ill-fitting suit, his mouth open wide and his arms outstretched, ready to nab me.

  By now adrenaline was running through me like a pack of cheetahs. I swung the table as he lunged. It was a good shot, resulting in the table coming apart in my hands, but I had caught him upside the head, and his head moved farther to the side than I thought a head could move. He did a little backward hop, dropped to the floor, lay there shaking his head like he was collecting his brain cells one by one. On the floor the shards of the mirror winked fragments of my reflection. It was not a happy face.

  I darted down the hallway, figuring the jammed or locked front door might be more trouble than I had time for. I came to a stairway, decided on the closest port in a storm, hurried up it silently, pranced along until I saw a hall closet with sliding doors. In my great wisdom as one of the world’s worst hide-and-seek players, I carefully opened one of the two wide doors, slipped inside, and snicked the closet shut, plunging myself into total darkness.

  IT WAS A choice a two-year-old might make, but until you’ve been chased by an unknown creature, a supernatural being, an alien from the planet Zippie, or whatever Thirteen was, don’t judge me.

  I lifted my key-chain light near my face, not yet having released my grip from attacking Thirteen, clicked it on, and flashed it around. There were clothes on a rack, and I pushed in among them. At my feet were piles of shoes, and I must admit I spotted one really nice pair of high heels that I thought I might take with me when I finally decided to depart my hiding place, jump through a second-story window, and hope my legs didn’t get driven up through my ass. Most likely I would be found with the high heels clutched tight in my teeth. They were that cute.

  The cuteness factor faded, and I made a little noise in my throat when I realized that the clothes hanging in the closet looked familiar, or some of them did. They were outfits the women at the eye-gazing party had been wearing—okay, I’m shallow, I take note of those things—and one of those outfits belonged to Erin. There was something odd about the clothes. They were all pinned there by ancient clothespins, but drooping inside of them were what at first looked like deflated sex dolls (I’ve seen them in photos), but were in fact the skins of human beings. One of those skins belonged to Erin. I couldn’t control myself. I reached out and touched it, but . . . it was not wh
at I first thought. It was her, but all of what should have been inside of her had been sucked out, leaving the droopy remains, like a condom without its master in action.

  How I felt at that moment could best be summed up in one word: ill. That’s when I heard the squeaking steps of Thirteen on the stairs, then the shuffling sound of feet sliding down the hallway. I pushed back behind the hanging clothes and skins, feeling weak and woozy. I clicked off the light and held my breath.

  After what had to have been a world-record time for breath holding, I heard the steps make their way back to the entrance on the hall and heard the squeak of the stairs again.

  Flooded with relief, I cautiously let out my breath. At that moment there was a rushing sound in the hallway and the doors slammed open, and there I was, glancing through the skins and clothes, looking Thirteen dead in the eyes once more.

  There was no question in my mind he saw me. I did my squeal again, ducked down, grabbed the high-heeled shoe, and came out from under the hanging rod, right at the dumpy, little man. I was thinking about what I had seen downstairs in the mirror, his true image as a bony creature with a big head and a single gooey eye in its center. That’s where I struck. I was on target. It was as if his forehead were made of liquid. The heel of the shoe plunged into his skull and went deep. There was a shriek and a movement from Thirteen that defied gravity as he sprang up and backward like a grasshopper, slammed into the wall, and fell rolling along the hallway, the heel still in his forehead. No sooner did he hit the floor than his body shifted and squirmed and took on a variety of shapes, which included a paisley-covered ottoman (nothing I would buy) and finally the shape I had seen in the mirror.

  I pushed against the wall, trying to slip along it toward the stairs, taking advantage of his blindness. He staggered upright on his bony legs, weakly clawed at the shoe in what was left of his eye, jerked it loose, and began waving his arms about, slamming into the wall, feeling for me. He stumbled into the open closet, knocked the clothes rack down, scattered the clothes and deflated bodies all over the hallway. When I got to the edge of the stairs, I turned to look back. He lifted his blind head and sniffed the air, then shot toward me. I wished then I had not had the vanity to wear the perfume I was wearing, but I bought it in Paris and had made a pact with myself that I would use it once a week, even if I was merely shopping at Target.

  He had smelled me, and now he was springing in my general direction on all fours, and before I could say “Oh shit,” he was nearly on top of me. But, smooth as a matador, I stepped aside and he went past me, scratching the air and tumbling down the stairs with a sound like someone breaking a handful of chopsticks over their knee. He hit just about every step on his way down, finally tumbled to the base of the stairs, and came apart in pieces.

  The pieces writhed and withered, then turned into piles of blackened soot. No sooner was that done than the house was full of an impossible wind that sucked up the sparkly dust that coated the interior, whirled it in a little tornado, and started up the stairs. Quite clearly, even in the dim light, I could see the faces and shapes of women in that dust. I saw Erin, whipping around and around, her long hair flying like straw.

  The black soot piles that had been Thirteen did not move, no matter that the wind went right over them with its dusty passengers. As the dust twirled neared the top of the stairs I stepped back, watched it hit the upper hallway with a howling sound and smash into the closet.

  I followed and watched the dust dive into the mouths of the deflated women lying on the floor of the closet. It filled up their bodies, and they filled up their clothes. They tumbled out of that closet and lay in the hallway blinking their eyes, unaware of what had just happened.

  “What the hell?” one of them said, and then I saw Erin, rising to her feet from the pile of women, looking blankly around, gathering thoughts slowly, her hair in a knotted clump around her head and shoulders.

  I laughed out loud at their confusion, laughed too because I was alive and not an empty skin dangling on a clothes rack by a set of grandma’s old clothespins. I began to weep a little with delight, mixing laughter and tears. I grabbed Erin and hugged her tight.

  “What happened?” she said. “Where are we?”

  “You were eye-gazed by a monster of some kind and all your essence was sucked out and turned to sparkly dust for no reason I can figure and you were a skin hanging in a closet inside your clothes and I rescued you by killing the monster with a shoe to the eye, causing the dust to crawl down your throat and fill you up again.”

  “Oh,” Erin said. “Wait. What?”

  “I think this is going to take some time,” I said, watching as the women scrounged through the closet looking for their proper shoes, knowing that one would be hobbling her way downstairs, “but I prefer we talk about it somewhere else.”

  As we descended the stairs, the others following, chattering among themselves, I saw that the black piles of soot, all that remained of Thirteen, had turned gooey and were sinking unceremoniously into the pores of the wood like ink into soft paper.

  Trapper Boy

  Holly Newstein and Rick Hautala

  When the shouting started, John knew exactly what was going to happen next.

  He crept down the hall and through the kitchen to the back door and let himself out. The rotting floorboard of the narrow porch creaked underfoot as he made his way down to the weed-choked backyard, where Mama’s chickens pecked in the grass.

  Shep, John’s dog, was cowering in his doghouse. He also knew what was coming. He looked at John with a mournful expression in his dark, soft eyes.

  The fighting happened whenever Da came home late from the saloon after a hard day’s work in the coal mine.

  John leaned forward and slapped his thighs with both hands, clicking his tongue and whistling.

  “C’mon, boy,” he called softly to Shep.

  He unhooked the chain that tied Shep to his doghouse, and together they left the yard and started up the hill that rose behind the house. The hillside was so steep that even on summer days daylight didn’t hit the house until well after ten o’clock in the morning.

  With Shep leading the way, John followed the well-trodden path up the slope. From time to time, he would pause while Shep bolted off into the brush after a rabbit or squirrel. John laughed at the old dog, but his laughter was thin and unconvincing because he was deep in thought . . . and worried about what might happen to Mama.

  John took a deep breath of the cool afternoon air, trying to clear his mind as they pressed onward, up the hill until they reached the top. There, in a small clearing, a lone maple tree stood, taller than any of the other nearby trees. Its leaves were brilliant flames of gold and orange in the slanting September sunlight.

  John shivered as he sat down under the tree in the shallow depression he had worn in the turf and picked up a twig. Without consciously thinking about it, he began to scratch pictures in the dirt. First, he did a quick sketch of Shep as the dog lay in the shade, panting heavily from the climb and the chases. His tongue lolled out onto the grass, and his eyes were shut. Then, almost absently, John began to sketch other animals, letting his hand—not his head—do the work.

  “You know what they’re arguing about, right?” John said, addressing Shep.

  The dog opened one eye and gazed at him.

  “Da wants me to get a job in the mines, but Mama—she wants me to go to school.”

  John paused and looked down into the valley squeezed on both sides by towering hills. A dark cloud of gray coal dust hung suspended in the air like a pall of smoke over Coalton, with its wooden company houses built along narrow streets, and the big brick company store in the center of town.

  As if trying to read his thoughts, Shep made a huffing sound and rolled his eyes to look at John without raising his head.

  “I don’t wanna go into the mines, that’s for sure,” he said, scraping the ground with his stick, “but Da says it’s about time I started earnin’ my keep.”

&nbs
p; John kept staring at the town below, wishing there was some way he could escape from it all. The late-afternoon light did little to improve his view of his hometown. Far off down the valley, the hulking structure that was the J. C. Harris Mining Company was etched against the silver strip of the Susquehanna River, with the slag pile rising behind it. A train whistle wafted up from the valley, and John shifted his gaze to watch the locomotive pulling a mile-long line of cars filled with anthracite, heading to Pittsburgh or Philadelphia. A funnel of black smoke belched into the sky from the engine, looking like a lopsided tornado.

  John sighed. He had never been anywhere outside of Coalton—not even to nearby Scranton, and as he often did, he wished he could hop a train, taking Shep with him, and make his way to the city.

  I could be an artist in the Big City . . . Pittsburgh or Philadelphia . . . or maybe even New York, he thought. He had read something a while ago in one of Da’s newspapers about a man in Atlantic City who drew charcoal portraits for any passersby on the Boardwalk who had a few pennies to spare.

  “I could do that . . . easy,” he whispered, staring blankly at the figures he had scratched in the hard-packed earth. Beside the profile of Shep, he had drawn a rabbit, its ears straight up as though hearing a warning, and a large rat. The rat was looking straight ahead, its eyes two deep holes John had drilled into the ground with the tip of the stick. The rat’s eyes looked bottomless . . . and evil.

  Realizing what he had done, John was surprised. He had been so deep in thought and worry that he was barely conscious of drawing the figures—especially the nasty-looking rat. They all looked so lifelike.

  Easing his back against the tree, John looked up at the fluttering leaves. As much as he wanted to, running away meant leaving Mama behind . . . alone . . . with Da. And that was something he could never do.

  AS SHADOWS LENGTHENED, and the sky got dark, John and Shep started back down the scarred hillside toward home. In the yard, he chained the dog and then pumped a bowl of fresh water for him and put it next to the doghouse. John made his way as quietly as he could up the steps to the back porch and then slipped into the house. He listened for his parents.