The Year's Best Horror Stories 6

by Gerald W. Page (Ed. )

  Alice and sometimes even that baby Edith used to tease me in those days by screaming, “Frank’s Allegra’s sweetheart! Frank’s Allegra’s sweetheart!” I used to chase them, but I suppose it was true: he liked me best. Of course he was about sixty years old, though not so old as I am now, and I was a little thing. He used to take me through the swamps and show me the muskrats’ houses. The first time he took me on such a trip, Mama raised her eyebrows when he was out of the room, but the General said, “I’ll warrant Frank: I have his papers.”

  Alice and Edith might just as well have shouted, “Frank’s Allegra’s slave!” He read to me—oh, Robert Louis Stevenson’s poems and all sorts of books. I never had another sweetheart, partly because almost all the young men left Anthonyville as I grew up when there was no work for them here, and the ones that remained didn’t please Mama.

  We three sisters used to play Creepmouse with Frank, I remember well. We would be the Creepmice, and would sneak up and scare him when he wasn’t watching, and he would pretend to be terrified. He made up a little song for us—or, rather, he put words to some tune he had borrowed:

  “Down, down, down in Creepmouse Town

  All the lamps are low,

  And the little rodent feet

  Softly come and go

  "There’s a rat in Creepmouse Town

  And a bat or two:

  Everything in Creepmouse Town

  Would swiftly frighten you!”

  Do you remember, Celia, that the General was State Supervisor of Prisons and Reformatories for time out of mind? He was a good architect, too, and designed Anthonyville State Prison, without taking any fee for himself, as a model prison. Some people in the capital said that he did it to give employment to his county, but really it was because the site was so isolated that it would be difficult for convicts to escape.

  The General knew Frank’s last name, but he never told the rest of us. Frank had been in Anthonyville State Prison at one time, and later in other prisons, and the General had taken him out of one of those other prisons on parole, having known Frank when he was locked up at Anthonyville. I never learned what Frank had done to be sentenced to prison, but he was gentle with me and everybody else, until that early morning of January 14.

  The General was amused by Frank, and said that Frank would be better off with us than anywhere else. So Frank became our hired man, and chopped the firewood for us, and kept the fires going in the stoves and fireplaces, and sometimes served at dinner. In summer he was supposed to scythe the lawns, but of course summer didn’t come. Frank arrived by train at Anthonyville Station in October, and we gave him the little room at the top of the house.

  Well, on January 12 Father went off to Chicago on business. We still had the General. Every night he barred the shutters on the ground floor, going round to all the rooms by himself. Mama knew he did it because there was a rumor that some life convicts at the Prison “had it in” for the Supervisor of Prisons, although the General had retired five years earlier. Also they may have thought he kept a lot of money in the house—when actually, what with the timber gone and the mines going, in those times we were rather hard pressed and certainly kept our money in the bank at Duluth. But we girls didn’t know why the General closed the shutters, except that it was one of the General’s rituals. Besides, Anthonyville State Prison was supposed to be escape-proof. It was just that the General always took precautions, though ever so brave.

  Just before dawn, Celia, on the cold morning of January 14, 1915, we all were waked by the siren of the Prison, and we all rushed downstairs in our nightclothes, and we could see that part of the Prison was afire. O, the sky was red! The General tried to telephone the Prison, but he couldn’t get through, and later it turned out that the lines had been cut.

  Next—it all happened so swiftly—we heard shouting somewhere down Main Street, and then guns went off. The General knew what that meant. He had got his trousers and his boots on, and now he struggled with his old military overcoat, and he took his old army revolver. “Lock the door behind me, girl,” he told Mama. She cried and tried to pull him back inside, but he went down into the snow, nearly eighty though he was.

  Only three or four minutes later, we heard the shots. The General had met the convicts at the gate. It was still dark, and the General had cataracts on his eyes. They say he fired first, and missed. Those bad men had broken into Mr. Emmons’ store and taken guns and axes and whiskey. They shot the General—shot him again and again and again.

  The next thing we knew, they were chopping at our front door with axes. Mama hugged us.

  Celia dear, writing all this has made me so silly! I feel a little odd, so I must go lie down for an hour or two before telling you the rest. Celia, I do hope you will love this old house as much as I have. If I’m not here when you come up, remember that where I have gone I will know the General and Father and Mama and Alice and poor dear Frank, and will be ever so happy with them. Be a good little girl, my Celia.

  The letter ended there, unsigned.

  Frank clumped downstairs to the Sunday parlor. He was crying, for the first time since he had fought that professional heavyweight on October 19, 1943. Allegra’s letter—if only she’d finished it! What had happened to those little girls, and Mama, and that other Frank? He thought of something from the Holy Bible: “It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.”

  Already it was almost evening. He lit the wick in the cranberry-glass lamp that hung from the middle of the parlor ceiling, standing on a chair to reach it. Why not enjoy more light? On a whim, he arranged upon the round table four silver candlesticks that had rested above the fireplace. He needed three more, and those he fetched from the dining room. He lit every candle in the circle: one for the General, one for Father, one for Mama, one for Alice, one for Allegra, one for Edith—and one for Frank.

  The dear names of those little girls! He might as well recite aloud, it being good practice for the approaching days on the long, long trail:

  “I hear in the chamber above me

  The patter of little feet,

  The sound of a door that is opened,

  And voices soft and sweet . . ."

  Here he ceased. Had he heard something in the passage—or “descending the broad hall stair”? Because of the wind outside, he could not be certain. It cost him a gritting of his teeth to rise and open the parlor door. Of course no one could be seen in the hall or on the stair. “Crazy Frank,” men called him at Joliet and other prisons: he had clenched his fists, but had kept a check upon himself. Didn’t Saint Paul say that the violent take heaven by storm? Perhaps he had barked up the wrong tree; perhaps he would be spewed out of His mouth for being too peaceful.

  Shutting the door, he went back to the fireside. Those lines of Longfellow had been no evocation. He put “The Long, Long Trail” on the old phonograph again, strolling about the room until the record ran out. There was an old print of a Great Lakes schooner on one wall that he liked. Beside it, he noticed, there seemed to be some pellets embedded in a closet doorjamb, but painted over, as if someone had fired a shotgun in the parlor in the old days. “The violent take it by storm . . .” He admired the grand piano; perhaps Allegra had learnt to play it. There were one or two big notches or gashes along one edge of the piano, varnished over, hard though that wood was. Then Frank sank into the big chair again and stared at the burning logs.

  Just how long he had dozed, he did not know. He woke abruptly. Had he heard a whisper, the faintest whisper? He tensed to spring up. But before he could move, he saw reflections in the tall mirror.

  Something had moved in the corner by the bookcase. No doubt about it: that small something had stirred again. Also something crept behind one of the satin sofas, and something else lurked near the piano. All these were at his back: he saw the reflections in the glass, as in a glass darkly, more alarming than physical forms. In this high shadowy room,
the light of the kerosene lamp and of the seven candles did not suffice.

  From near the bookcase, the first of them emerged into candlelight; then came the second, and the third. They were giggling, but he could not hear them—only see their faces, and those not clearly. He was unable to stir, and the gooseflesh prickled all over him, and his hair rose at the back of his big head.

  They were three little girls, barefoot, in their long muslin nightgowns, ready for bed. One may have been as much as twelve years old, and the smallest was little more than a baby. The middle one was Allegra, tiny even for her tender years, and a little imp: he knew, he knew! They were playing Creepmouse.

  The three of them stole forward, Allegra in the lead, her eyes alight. He could see them plain now, and the dread was ebbing out of him. He might have risen and turned to greet them across the great gulf of time, but any action—why, what might it do to these little ones? Frank sat frozen in his chair, looking at the nimble reflections in the mirror, and nearer they came, perfectly silent. Allegra vanished from the glass, which meant that she must be standing just behind him.

  He must please them. Could he speak? He tried, and the lines came out hoarsely:

  “Down, down, down in Creepmouse Town

  All the lamps are low,

  And the little rodent feet . . ."

  He was not permitted to finish. Wow! There came a light tug at the curly white hair on the back of his head. O to talk with Allegra, the imp! Recklessly, he heaved his bulk out of the chair, and swung round—too late.

  The parlor door was closing. But from the hall came another whisper, ever so faint, ever so unmistakable: “Good night, Frank!” There followed subdued giggles, scampering, and then the silence once more.

  He strode to the parlor door. The hall was empty again, and the broad stair. Should he follow them up? No, all three would be abed now. Should he knock at Mama’s Room, muttering, “Mrs. Anthony, are the children all right?” No, he hadn’t the nerve for that, and it would be presumptuous. He had been given one moment of perception, and no more. Somehow he knew that they would not go so far as the garret floor. Ah, he needed fresh air! He snuffed out lamp and candles, except for one candlestick—Allegra’s—that he took with him. Out into the hall he went. He unfastened the front door with that oaken patch about the middle of it and stepped upon the porch, leaving the burning candle just within the hall. The wind had risen again, bringing more snow. It was black as sin outside, and the temperature must be thirty below.

  To him the wind bore one erratic peal of the desolate church bell of Anthonyville, and then another. How strong the blast must be through that belfry! Frank retreated inside from that unfathomable darkness and that sepulchral bell which seemed to toll for him. He locked the thick door behind him and screwed up his courage for the expedition to his room at the top of the old house.

  But why shudder? He loved them now, Allegra most of all. Up the broad stairs to the second floor he went, hearing only his own clumsy footfalls, and past the clay-sealed doors of the General and Father and Mama and Alice and Allegra and Edith. No one whispered, no one scampered.

  In Frank’s Room, he rolled himself in his blankets and quilt (had Allegra helped stitch the patchwork?), and almost at once the consciousness went out of him, and he must have slept dreamless for the first night since he was a farm boy.

  So profound had been his sleep, deep almost as death, that the siren may have been wailing for some minutes before at last it roused him. Frank knew that horrid sound. It had called for him thrice before, as he fled from prisons. Who wanted him now? He heaved his ponderous body out of the warm bed. The candle that he had brought up from the Sunday parlor and left burning all night was flickering in its socket, but by that flame he could see the hour on his watch: seven o’clock, too soon for dawn.

  Through the narrow skylight, as he flung on his clothes, the sky glowed an unnatural red, though it was long before sunup. The prison siren ceased to wail, as if choked off. Frank lumbered to the little frieze window and saw to the north, perhaps two miles distant, a monstrous mass of flames shooting high into the air. The prison was afire.

  Then came shots outside: first the bark of a heavy revolver, followed irregularly by blasts of shotguns or rifles. Frank was lacing his boots with a swiftness uncongenial to him. He got into his overcoat as there came a crashing and battering down below. That sound, too, he recognized, woodchopper that he had been: axes shattering the front door.

  Amid this pandemonium, Frank was too bewildered to grasp altogether where he was or even how this catastrophe might be fitted into the pattern of time. All that mattered was flight; the scheme of his escape remained clear in his mind. Pull up the chair below the skylight, heave yourself out to the upper roof, descend those iron rungs to the woodshed roof, make for the other side of the highway, then—why, then you must trust to circumstance, Frank. It’s that long, long trail a-winding for you.

  Now he heard a woman screaming within the house, and slipped and fumbled in his alarm. He had got upon the chair, opened the skylight, and was trying to obtain a good grip on the icy outer edge of the skylight frame, when someone knocked and kicked at the door of Frank’s room.

  Yet those were puny knocks and kicks. He was about to heave himself upward when, in a relative quiet—the screaming had ceased for a moment—he heard a little shrill voice outside his door, urgently pleading: “Frank, Frank, let me in!”

  He was arrested in flight as though great weights had been clamped to his ankles. That little voice he knew, as if it were part of him: Allegra’s voice.

  For a brief moment he still meant to scramble out the skylight. But the sweet little voice was begging. He stumbled off the chair, upset it, and was at the door in one stride.

  “Is that you, Allegra?”

  “Open it, Frank, please open it!”

  He turned the key and pulled the bolt. On the threshold the little girl stood, indistinct by the dying candlelight, terribly pale, all tears, frantic.

  Frank snatched her up. Ah, this was the dear real Allegra Anthony, all warm and soft and sobbing, flesh and blood! He kissed her cheek gently.

  She clung to him in terror, and then squirmed loose, tugging at his heavy hand: “Oh, Frank, come on! Come downstairs! They’re hurting Mama!”

  “Who is, little girl?” He held her tiny hand, his body quivering with dread and indecision. “Who’s down there, Allegra?”

  “The bad men! Come on, Frank!” Braver than he, the little thing plunged back down the garret stair into the blackness below.

  “Allegra! Come back here—come back now!” He bellowed it, but she was gone.

  Up two flights of stairs, there poured to him a tumult of shrieks, curses, laughter, breaking noises. Several men were below, their speech slurred and raucous. He did not need Allegra to tell him what kind of men they were, for he heard prison slang and prison foulness, and he shook all over. There still was the skylight.

  He would have turned back to that hole in the roof had not Allegra squealed in pain somewhere on the second floor. Dazed, trembling, unarmed, Frank went three steps down the garret staircase. “Allegra! Little girl! What is it, Allegra?”

  Someone was charging up the stair toward him. It was a burly man in the prison uniform, a lighted lantern in one hand and a glittering axe in the other. Frank had no time to turn. The man screeched obscenely at him and swung the axe.

  In those close quarters, wielded by a drunken man, it was a chancy weapon. The edge shattered the plaster wall; the flat of the blade thumped upon Frank’s shoulder. Frank, lurching forward, took the man by the throat with a mighty grip. They all tumbled pell-mell down the steep stairs—the two men, the axe, the lantern.

  Frank’s ursine bulk landed atop the stranger’s body, and Frank heard his adversary’s bones crunch. The lantern had broken and gone out. The convict’s head hung loose on his shoulders, Frank found as he groped for the axe. Then he trampled over the fallen man and flung himself along the corridor, gripping
the axe helve. “Allegra! Allegra girl!”

  From the head of the main stair, he could see that the lamps and candles were burning in the hall and in the rooms of the ground floor. All three children were down there, wailing, and above their noise rose Mama’s shrieks again. A mob of men were stamping, breaking things, roaring with amusement and desire, shouting filth. A bottle shattered.

  His heart pounding as if it would burst out of his chest Frank hurried rashly down the stair and went, all crimson with fury, into the Sunday parlor, the double-bitted axe swinging in his hand. They all were there: the little girls, Mama, and five wild men. “Stop that!” Frank roared with all the power of his lungs. “You let them go!”

  Everyone in the parlor stood transfixed at that summons like the Last Trump. Allegra had been tugging pathetically at the leg of a dark man who gripped her mother’s waist, and the other girls sputtered and sobbed, cornered, as a tall man poured a bottle of whisky over them. Mrs. Anthony’s gown was ripped nearly its whole length, and a third man was bending her backward by her long hair, as if he would snap her spine. Near the hall door stood a man like a long lean rat, the Rat of Creepmouse Town, a shotgun on his arm, gape-jawed at Frank’s intervention. Guns and axes lay scattered about the Turkey carpet. By the fireplace, a fifth man had been heating the poker in the flames.

  For that tableau moment, they all stared astonished at the raving giant who had burst upon them; and the giant, puffing, stared back with his strange blue eyes. “O Frank!” Allegra sobbed: it was more command than entreaty—as if, Frank thought in a flash of insane mirth, he were like the boy in the fairy tale who could cry confidently “All heads off but mine!”

  He knew what these men were, the rats and bats of Creepmouse Town: the worst men in any prison, lifers who had made their hell upon earth, killers all of them and worse than killers. The rotten damnation showed in all those flushed and drunken faces. Then the dark man let go of Mama and said in relief, with a coughing laugh, “Hell, it’s only old Punkinhead Frank, clowning again! Have some fun for yourself, Frank boy!”