Dark Tales

by Shirley Jackson

  “Well, we’ll soon have you home,” she said, and started the car. The wheels slipped and skidded in the mud, but found a purchase, and slowly Ethel felt the car begin to move up the hill. It was very muddy, and the rain was heavier, and the back of the car dragged as though under an intolerable weight. It’s as though I had a load of iron, Ethel thought. Poor old lady, it’s the weight of years.

  “Is the child all right?” she asked, lifting her head; she could not turn to look at them.

  “He wants to go home,” the old woman said.

  “I should think so. Tell him it won’t be long. I’ll take you right to your door.” It’s the least I can do, she thought, and maybe go inside with them and see that he’s warm enough; those poor bare feet.

  Driving up the hill was very difficult, and perhaps the road was a little worse than Ethel had believed; she found that she could not look around or even speak while she was navigating the sharp curves, with the rain driving against the windshield and the wheels slipping in the mud. Once she said, “Nearly at the top,” and then had to be silent, holding the wheel tight. When the car gave a final lurch and topped the small last rise that led onto the flat driveway before the Sanderson house, Ethel said, “Made it,” and laughed. “Now, which way should I go?”

  They’re frightened, she thought. I’m sure the child is frightened and I don’t blame them; I was a little nervous myself. She said loudly, “We’re at the top now, it’s all right, we made it. Now where shall I take you?”

  When there was still no answer, she turned; the backseat of the car was empty.

  *

  “But even if they could have gotten out of the car without my noticing,” Ethel Sloane said for the tenth time that evening to her husband, “they couldn’t have gotten out of sight. I looked and looked.” She lifted her hands in an emphatic gesture. “I went all around the top of the hill in the rain looking in all directions and calling them.”

  “But the car seat was dry,” her husband said.

  “Well, you’re not going to suggest that I imagined it, are you? Because I’m simply not the kind of person to dream up an old lady and a sick child. There has to be some explanation; I don’t imagine things.”

  “Well . . .” Jim said, and hesitated.

  “Are you sure you didn’t see them? They didn’t come to the door?”

  “Listen . . .” Jim said, and hesitated again. “Look,” he said.

  “I have certainly never been the kind of person who goes around imagining that she sees old ladies and children. You know me better than that, Jim, you know I don’t go around—”

  “Well,” Jim said. “Look,” he said finally, “there could be something. A story I heard. I never told you because—”

  “Because what?”

  “Because you . . . well—” Jim said.

  “Jim.” Ethel Sloane set her lips. “I don’t like this, Jim. What is there that you haven’t told me? Is there really something you know and I don’t?”

  “It’s just a story. I heard it when I came up to look at the house.”

  “Do you mean you’ve known something all this time and you’ve never told me?”

  “It’s just a story,” Jim said helplessly. Then, looking away, he said, “Everyone knows it, but they don’t say much, I mean, these things—”

  “Jim,” Ethel said, “tell me at once.”

  “It’s just that there was a little Sanderson boy stolen or lost or something. They thought a crazy old woman took him. People kept talking about it, but they never knew anything for sure.”

  “What?” Ethel Sloane stood up and started for the door. “You mean there’s a child been stolen and no one told me about it?”

  “No,” Jim said oddly. “I mean, it happened sixty years ago.”

  *

  Ethel was still talking about it at breakfast the next morning. “And they’ve never been found,” she told herself happily. “All the people around went searching, and they finally decided the two of them had drowned in the creek, because it was raining then just the way it is now.” She glanced with satisfaction at the rain beating against the window of the breakfast room. “Oh, lovely,” she said, and sighed, and stretched, and smiled. “Ghosts,” she said. “I saw two honest-to-goodness ghosts. No wonder,” she said, “no wonder the child looked so awful. Awful! Kidnapped, and then drowned. No wonder.”

  “Listen,” Jim said, “if I were you, I’d forget about it. People around here don’t like to talk much about it.”

  “They wouldn’t tell me,” Ethel said, and laughed again. “Our very own ghosts, and not a soul would tell me. I just won’t be satisfied until I get every word of the story.”

  “That’s why I never told you,” Jim said miserably.

  “Don’t be silly. Yesterday everyone I spoke to mentioned my driving on that road, and I bet every one of them was dying to tell me the story. I can’t wait to see their faces when they hear.”

  “No.” Jim stared at her. “You simply can’t go around . . . boasting about it.”

  “But of course I can! Now we really belong here. I’ve really seen the local ghosts. And I’m going in this morning and tell everybody, and find out all I can.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t,” Jim said.

  “I know you wish I wouldn’t, but I’m going to. If I listened to you, I’d wait and wait for a good time to mention it and maybe even come to believe I’d dreamed it or something, so I’m going into the village right after breakfast.”

  “Please, Ethel,” Jim said. “Please listen to me. People might not take it the way you think.”

  “Two ghosts of our very own.” Ethel laughed again. “My very own,” she said. “I just can’t wait to see their faces in the village.”

  *

  Before she got into the car she opened the back door and looked again at the seat, dry and unmarked. Then, smiling to herself, she got into the driver’s seat and, suddenly touched with sick cold, turned around to look. “Why,” she said, half whispering, “you’re not still here, you can’t be! Why,” she said, “I just looked.”

  “They were strangers in the house,” the old woman said.

  The skin on the back of Ethel’s neck crawled as though some wet thing walked there; the child stared past her, and the old woman’s eyes were flat and dead. “What do you want?” Ethel asked, still whispering.

  “We got to go back.”

  “I’ll take you.” The rain came hard against the windows of the car, and Ethel Sloane, seeing her own hand tremble as she reached for the car key, told herself, don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, they’re not real. “I’ll take you,” she said, gripping the wheel tight and turning the car to face down the hill, “I’ll take you,” she said, almost babbling, “I’ll take you right back, I promise, see if I don’t, I promise I’ll take you right back where you want to go.”

  “He wanted to go home,” the old woman said. Her voice was very far away.

  “I’ll take you, I’ll take you.” The road was even more slippery than before, and Ethel Sloane told herself, drive carefully, don’t be afraid, they’re not real. “Right where I found you yesterday, the very spot, I’ll take you back.”

  “They were strangers in the house.”

  Ethel realized that she was driving faster than she should; she felt the disgusting wet cold coming from the backseat pushing her, forcing her to hurry.

  “I’ll take you back,” she said over and over to the old woman and the child.

  “When the strangers are gone, we can go home,” the old woman said.

  Coming to the last turn before the bridge, the wheels slipped, and, pulling at the steering wheel and shouting, “I’ll take you back, I’ll take you back,” Ethel Sloane could hear only the child’s horrible laughter as the car turned and skidded toward the high waters of the creek. One wheel slipped and spun in the air, and then
, wrenching at the car with all her strength, she pulled it back onto the road and stopped.

  Crying, breathless, Ethel put her head down on the steering wheel, weak and exhausted. I was almost killed, she told herself, they almost took me with them. She did not need to look into the backseat of the car; the cold was gone, and she knew the seat was dry and empty.

  *

  The clerk in the hardware store looked up and, seeing Ethel Sloane, smiled politely and then, looking again, frowned. “You feeling poorly this morning, Mrs. Sloane?” he asked. “Rain bothering you?”

  “I almost had an accident on the road,” Ethel Sloane said.

  “On the old Sanderson road?” The clerk’s hands were very still on the counter. “An accident?”

  Ethel Sloane opened her mouth and then shut it again. “Yes,” she said at last. “The car skidded.”

  “We don’t use that road much,” the clerk said. Ethel started to speak, but stopped herself.

  “It’s got a bad name locally, that road,” he said. “What were you needing this morning?”

  Ethel thought, and finally said, “Clothespins, I guess I must need clothespins. About the Sanderson road—”

  “Yes?” said the clerk, his back to her.

  “Nothing,” Ethel said.

  “Clothespins,” the clerk said, putting a box on the counter. “By the way, will you and the mister be coming to the PTA social tomorrow night?”

  “We certainly will,” said Ethel Sloane.

  The Summer People

  The Allisons’ country cottage, seven miles from the nearest town, was set prettily on a hill; from three sides it looked down on soft trees and grass that seldom, even at midsummer, lay still and dry. On the fourth side was the lake, which touched against the wooden pier the Allisons had to keep repairing, and which looked equally well from the Allisons’ front porch, their side porch or any spot on the wooden staircase leading from the porch down to the water. Although the Allisons loved their summer cottage, looked forward to arriving in the early summer and hated to leave in the fall, they had not troubled themselves to put in any improvements, regarding the cottage itself and the lake as improvement enough for the life left to them. The cottage had no heat, no running water except the precarious supply from the backyard pump, and no electricity. For seventeen summers, Janet Allison had cooked on a kerosene stove, heating all their water; Robert Allison had brought buckets full of water daily from the pump and read his paper by kerosene light in the evenings; and they had both, sanitary city people, become stolid and matter-of-fact about their backhouse. In the first two years they had gone through all the standard vaudeville and magazine jokes about backhouses and by now, when they no longer had frequent guests to impress, they had subsided to a comfortable security which made the backhouse, as well as the pump and the kerosene, an indefinable asset to their summer life.

  In themselves, the Allisons were ordinary people. Mrs. Allison was fifty-eight years old and Mr. Allison sixty; they had seen their children outgrow the summer cottage and go on to families of their own and seashore resorts; their friends were either dead or settled in comfortable year-round houses, their nieces and nephews vague. In the winter they told one another they could stand their New York apartment while waiting for the summer; in the summer they told one another that the winter was well worthwhile, waiting to get to the country.

  Since they were old enough not to be ashamed of regular habits, the Allisons invariably left their summer cottage the Tuesday after Labor Day, and were as invariably sorry when the months of September and early October turned out to be pleasant and almost insufferably barren in the city; each year they recognized that there was nothing to bring them back to New York, but it was not until this year that they overcame their traditional inertia enough to decide to stay in the cottage after Labor Day.

  “There isn’t really anything to take us back to the city,” Mrs. Allison told her husband seriously, as though it were a new idea, and he told her, as though neither of them had ever considered it, “We might as well enjoy the country as long as possible.”

  Consequently, with much pleasure and a slight feeling of adventure, Mrs. Allison went into their village the day after Labor Day and told those natives with whom she had dealings, with a pretty air of breaking away from tradition, that she and her husband had decided to stay at least a month longer at their cottage.

  “It isn’t as though we had anything to take us back to the city,” she said to Mr. Babcock, her grocer. “We might as well enjoy the country while we can.”

  “Nobody ever stayed at the lake past Labor Day before,” Mr. Babcock said. He was putting Mrs. Allison’s groceries into a large cardboard carton, and he stopped for a minute to look reflectively into a bag of cookies. “Nobody,” he added.

  “But the city!” Mrs. Allison always spoke of the city to Mr. Babcock as though it were Mr. Babcock’s dream to go there. “It’s so hot—you’ve really no idea. We’re always sorry when we leave.”

  “Hate to leave,” Mr. Babcock said. One of the most irritating native tricks Mrs. Allison had noticed was that of taking a trivial statement and rephrasing it downward, into an even more trite statement. “I’d hate to leave myself,” Mr. Babcock said, after deliberation, and both he and Mrs. Allison smiled. “But I never heard of anyone ever staying out at the lake after Labor Day before.”

  “Well, we’re going to give it a try,” Mrs. Allison said, and Mr. Babcock replied gravely, “Never know till you try.”

  Physically, Mrs. Allison decided, as she always did when leaving the grocery after one of her inconclusive conversations with Mr. Babcock, physically, Mr. Babcock could model for a statue of Daniel Webster, but mentally . . . it was horrible to think into what old New England Yankee stock had degenerated. She said as much to Mr. Allison when she got into the car, and he said, “It’s generations of inbreeding. That and the bad land.”

  Since this was their big trip into town, which they made only once every two weeks to buy things they could not have delivered, they spent all day at it, stopping to have a sandwich in the newspaper and soda shop, and leaving packages heaped in the back of the car. Although Mrs. Allison was able to order groceries delivered regularly, she was never able to form any accurate idea of Mr. Babcock’s current stock by telephone, and her lists of odds and ends that might be procured was always supplemented, almost beyond their need, by the new and fresh local vegetables Mr. Babcock was selling temporarily, or the packaged candy which had just come in. This trip Mrs. Allison was tempted, too, by the set of glass baking dishes that had found themselves completely by chance in the hardware and clothing and general store, and which had seemingly been waiting there for no one but Mrs. Allison, since the country people, with their instinctive distrust of anything that did not look as permanent as trees and rocks and sky, had only recently begun to experiment in aluminum baking dishes instead of ironware, and had, apparently within the memory of local inhabitants, discarded stoneware in favor of iron.

  Mrs. Allison had the glass baking dishes carefully wrapped, to endure the uncomfortable ride home over the rocky road that led up to the Allisons’ cottage, and while Mr. Charley Walpole, who, with his younger brother Albert, ran the hardware-clothing-general store (the store itself was called Johnson’s because it stood on the site of the old Johnson cabin, burned fifty years before Charley Walpole was born), laboriously unfolded newspapers to wrap around the dishes, Mrs. Allison said, informally, “Course, I could have waited and gotten those dishes in New York, but we’re not going back so soon this year.”

  “Heard you was staying on,” Mr. Charley Walpole said. His old fingers fumbled maddeningly with the thin sheets of newspaper, carefully trying to isolate only one sheet at a time, and he did not look up at Mrs. Allison as he went on, “Don’t know about staying on up there to the lake. Not after Labor Day.”

  “Well, you know,” Mrs. Allison said, quite as though h
e deserved an explanation, “it just seemed to us that we’ve been hurrying back to New York every year, and there just wasn’t any need for it. You know what the city’s like in the fall.” And she smiled confidingly up at Mr. Charley Walpole.

  Rhythmically he wound string around the package. He’s giving me a piece long enough to save, Mrs. Allison thought, and she looked away quickly to avoid giving any sign of impatience. “I feel sort of like we belong here, more,” she said. “Staying on after everyone else has left.” To prove this, she smiled brightly across the store at a woman with a familiar face, who might have been the woman who sold berries to the Allisons one year, or the woman who occasionally helped in the grocery and was probably Mr. Babcock’s aunt.

  “Well,” Mr. Charley Walpole said. He shoved the package a little across the counter, to show that it was finished and that for a sale well made, a package well wrapped, he was willing to accept pay. “Well,” he said again. “Never been summer people before, at the lake after Labor Day.”

  Mrs. Allison gave him a five-dollar bill, and he made change methodically, giving great weight even to the pennies. “Never after Labor Day,” he said, and nodded at Mrs. Allison, and went soberly along the store to deal with two women who were looking at cotton house dresses.

  As Mrs. Allison passed on her way out she heard one of the women say acutely, “Why is one of them dresses one dollar and thirty-nine cents and this one here is only ninety-eight?”

  “They’re great people,” Mrs. Allison told her husband as they went together down the sidewalk after meeting at the door of the hardware store. “They’re so solid, and so reasonable, and so honest.”

  “Makes you feel good, knowing there are still towns like this,” Mr. Allison said.

  “You know, in New York,” Mrs. Allison said, “I might have paid a few cents less for these dishes, but there wouldn’t have been anything sort of personal in the transaction.”