Evil Stalks the Night

by Kathryn Meyer Griffith

  Dad had me pose by my shiny car and he took one of those Polaroid pictures that developed itself in two seconds; then I insisted on taking a picture of both of them in front of the car, too, wanting to capture their rare smiles on film forever. I knew they couldn’t afford such an extravagant graduation gift, and the rest of the expensive items we’d ever had. They were all eventually traded in, hocked, or sold when the desperate need for money arose again—which it always did. But for a while it was mine and I pretended to be happy. I did everything I could to make them proud in those days, for I knew it’d only be a matter of time before their happiness would unravel again.

  I’d heard sobbing in the night.

  Charlie loved my car. I caught him hiding in it at different hours of the day and night, imagining he was driving it. He was thirteen that summer and all he talked about was being sixteen and borrowing it. He drove me crazy with his chattering on about it. How pretty it was. How fast. How cool looking. Once he even stole my keys and drove it off; before my dad could run him down he drove it into a tree and smashed up the front fender. I wanted to kill him that night. I refused to speak to him for a week, I was so mad.

  It was afterward, I remembered how badly I’d treated him and I couldn’t look at the car and not think of Charlie.

  The night of the violent storm the tree behind the house, the one Jimmy and I used to shimmy down from the forbidden roof, was pulled up by its roots and slammed to the ground. The storm pummeled our house and the sound of breaking glass was everywhere. We lost our electricity until dawn, the yard flooded and water seeped into our basement. The next morning the water was three feet deep down there.

  It was the night Charlie died.

  No one knew why he went to the woods, but me. He’d been called and lured there.

  In their grief, no one believed my story about something ancient and evil living, waiting, in the woods to kill any children who wandered among the trees. What sane person would believe such a crazy thing? I couldn’t tell them what the evil was, why it killed or how to find it, only that it existed. Always had and always would. I didn’t know how to destroy it. Grandmother’s ghost wouldn’t or couldn’t tell me.

  This time we found the body right away. I led the police straight to it.

  I knew where he was because my grandmother’s ghost had told me.

  Poor Charlie, his body battered and bleeding, alone in the spooky woods. After his death you could smell the fear in the town and people had begun to talk about us…about me. They avoided me and it hurt. They stared and pointed, whispering.

  This time my mother had her way and we moved away from Suncrest that summer. She believed there was a curse on us and we had to flee.

  We left our home and moved to a new place, a fresh start, where we were unknown and weren’t pariahs. If only it could have been so easy, and we could have forgotten what had happened there…could have truly escaped.

  Not even selling my little red car helped. Nothing helped.

  What was to happen happened anyway. The carefree happy years were gone forever and we were never to recapture them.

  While the woods kept silent and hid its crimes well.

  We tried to go on with our lives and some of us nearly succeeded.

  Chapter Five

  Suncrest 1984

  I stood in the doorway with Jeremy’s small hand in mine and together, we murmured our final good-byes to the apartment that had been our home for the last eight years. It was the only home my son had ever known.

  “Don’t cry now, Mom. You’re doing real well.” His voice was gentle. The pressure on my hand increased. I glanced down at his thin, freckled face and thoughtful blue eyes and offered a faint smile.

  “Don’t worry, son. If I cry now, who’s going to drive? We’ve got a long way to go today and I’m afraid, for you, nine is still a little too young to be fighting the morning rush.” I threw in a tiny laugh and tousled his long blond hair. As usual it fell across his eyes and with an exaggerated gesture he pushed it away from his face.

  “Ah, Mom, give me a chance. I’ll show you who can drive a car,” he replied stubbornly.

  “Sure you will—over my dead body.” I bantered with him while my eyes kept sweeping the bare walls and stacks of neatly labeled boxes in the room around me. All that was left after ten years of marriage was an empty apartment and an empty heart. The boxes looked like giant children’s scattered blocks, forgotten and unwanted. I didn’t want to leave, but I had no choice.

  On impulse, I knelt down on the familiar threshold and ran my fingers lovingly through the rug’s deep peach colored pile. Jonathan and I had picked the carpeting out last year. Was it only last year? As I laid my hand on the wall for support to stand I could see my reflection in the gold-veined mirror tiles on the opposite wall. Yellow sunbeams danced over their glossy surface and made the woman in them look golden, even beautiful with her long light brown hair and slim gracefulness. But looking back into her green eyes I could see the sadness, see the drawn face and the lips which had forgotten how to curve into a genuine smile anymore.

  I’d lost twenty pounds since my divorce and still had no appetite. What I hungered for couldn’t be found in a shopping cart.

  I’d again lost something precious and not known why. I could help so many other people, strangers really, but not myself. My psychic gift applied to everyone but me. It was as if receiving the gift sometimes forced me to shoulder the ill luck I saved others from. Someone else might take the lashes but I felt the pain in one way or another.

  I smiled at the lady in the mirrors and took one last look at the apartment. I was flooded with memories as elusive as mist. Jeremy as a baby, romping from one room to the next. Jonathan reading the paper in his favorite chair by the fireplace as I sketched my pictures at the drawing table in the corner…it seemed so long ago. I put out my hand as if I could see and touch him now, as if there was a magic door into our past waiting for me to enter and undo all that had occurred in the last six months.

  I was such a fool.

  Quietly, I pulled the door closed and locked it. Inside I could hear the ghosts whispering. Snickering. But I couldn’t stay. I had to make a new life for us now the old one was dead. I couldn’t live in the past any longer. I couldn’t remain bitter, I had to nurture and cherish the good memories.

  I slipped the key under the door in the exact place I’d told Jimmy he could find it. He was coming by in a few days to pick up the heavier furniture I’d had to leave behind. He’d fit most of it into his pick-up truck or rent a trailer.

  “Are we going now?” Jeremy asked.

  “Yes. It’s time to go.” The sun was a huge bright ball overhead. “Here, you can take these.” I handed him two carry-all bags and we walked out to the car together. Jeremy didn’t glance behind once. Originally we’d planned to start out at dawn, but it was already after ten o’clock. A beautiful last day of March, even if it was as cold as January.

  I slid into the front seat of my red Pinto and closed the door. Jeremy thumped down in the passenger seat and for a few seconds we busied ourselves arranging the extra bags. I adjusted my seat and waited for the car to warm up.

  At least it wasn’t snowing. The winter had been horrendous. I’d never seen so much snow.

  Whenever I remember that winter, I remember grayish-purple skies and storms. Then endless snow. Night after night lying alone in our queen-sized bed, contemplating the white darkness with a heavy heart. The sky had been so white with flakes, it’d been like daylight. It was the worst time, the days and weeks right after Jonathan had walked out on me for another woman. For the first time in my life I was totally alone.

  For weeks, a terrible apathy held me in its grip and I’d go to bed early to muffle my tears in my pillow and watch the snow fall outside my window. I lived in my own sad world of make-believe and memories, purposel
y shutting the real world away. Over and over I kept asking myself what had I done wrong? How could someone I had loved so long and so much do what he’d done to me…to all of us? How could he not love me anymore?

  How could he have stopped the love and more importantly, how was I going to stop loving him? It’d been a painful rebirth for me, these past few weeks. I worked in an ad agency as a commercial artist in St. Louis and had taken a couple weeks off. I couldn’t face the world, I couldn’t face myself.

  Who was I now? I slept, I read, I dreamed about the past, carefully wrapping it in the gossamer tissue of my bewildered tears, a priceless jewel, to be tucked away forever. I sifted through my life up until then and tried to make some meaning out of it. All the work, the love, and the loss. With every tear I mended myself, with every day I drew closer to the first light in a dark tunnel and made my way back to the world of the living.

  Jonathan was gone. It was simple. I had to start my life over again. In the space of a few months I’d lost a husband, a home, and a job. Before I could return to work I got a telephone call to tell me not to bother. The agency was folding. We’d lost two of our largest clients and there wasn’t any work; what had been started so hopefully three years ago was no more. Blame the economy, God, or human fickleness, the result was the same. No work, no money, no agency. I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I’d expected it long before, but the timing couldn’t have been worse. I had no tears left when I went in to empty my desk and say my good-byes. I’d miss my friends more than the job.

  Then there was the house.

  The house my grandmother had left me when she’d died all those years ago. The old house on Suncrest. It was mine free and clear. It had been for some time and I’d run out of excuses to claim my inheritance.

  There was nothing to hold me here anymore. I’d be a fool to stay. I had no job, no husband, and no way to pay the fancy rent on the overly big, plush apartment.

  Yet, God, I fought going back to Suncrest where the horror had begun. It was bitterly ironic that after so many years of trying to run away from the past I was now literally trapped into returning. Heaven knows, I tried to sell the old place for years, but, for some reason, it wouldn’t sell. It’d sat there patiently waiting for me. Waiting until I was forced by unavoidable circumstances to reclaim it when I’d never dreamed I would.

  I told myself as I had so many times before we wouldn’t stay there long. We were only going to fix the old place up enough to sell it, or rent it out, that’s all. We’d use it as a pit stop to someplace else.

  If only.

  I hadn’t had any visions for years. None about the evil in the woods. Perhaps, I’d talked myself into believing, it wasn’t there anymore. Whatever had been in the woods was gone, its bloodlust satisfied, and it’d moved on. I hadn’t felt it lurking in my dreams for so long, way before my mother had died. Over six years ago.

  I could hope. I could be a damn fool as well.

  But we were going back. After so many years a dead woman would finally have her way and we’d live in her house on Suncrest. It was either that or we spent what little money I had left on a seedy motel somewhere. I couldn’t do it to Jeremy.

  Thank God for my brother Jimmy, I thought as I reversed the car out of the driveway and steered into the muddy road. There was a thin crust of ice cloaking everything. Jeremy was making words with his fingers on the frosted windows and humming softly to himself. I honestly didn’t think I’d have the courage to go back to my childhood neighborhood, if it weren’t for Jimmy. He was driving down to load up the rest of our furniture and afterwards would meet us at our grandmother’s house.

  It hadn’t been a simple thing to track Jim down. He wasn’t usually an easy person to find, on the road with his country western band playing two and three night stands across the state. It was hard to believe, the small intense boy picking on a used Fender guitar a dozen years ago now could play the best guitar in the state.

  Jim’s calling had turned out to be his music. By the time he’d graduated from high school he’d caught the fever pretty bad and was already playing, out with a band on weekends for extra cash. He’d never had another job since. He’d gone through so many nameless bands since then I’d lost count. Yet he loved playing and writing his music, because it was his life and he was extremely good at it.

  It was strange he’d called me last week, out of the blue, as if he’d sensed in some way I needed him. I found myself confiding everything about Jonathan, the other woman, the divorce, the ad agency folding, and finally how Jeremy and I were being forced by financial circumstances to return to Suncrest and live in grandmother’s house. Now our house.

  He was sorry about my job, but was shocked at the divorce. “God, Sarah, you can’t tell me you didn’t have some suspicion before this when he was fooling around on you? Big, famous psychic that you are? You didn’t know?” He’d laughed trying to put some humor into a lousy situation.

  Then, from my heavy silence on the other end of the phone, he’d shrewdly switched tactics.

  “Oh, Sis, I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry. I couldn’t help myself. You know how I’ve always detested the sacrilegious creep you married. A hunk of stone with a shiny badge for a heart wasn’t for you. All he ever cared about was making collars, promotions, and how much of each of your paychecks you could stash away in his bank account. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say. Cheer up, Sis. He wasn’t good enough for you and someday you’re going to find…”

  “No don’t say it,” I’d moaned into the phone. My heart felt as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to it. Fresh tears froze in my eyes and my vision blurred. No matter what my husband had done to me, I still remembered how he’d once been and the love we’d shared. Letting that image of him go was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do.

  “I’m sick of people saying one day I’ll find someone who’ll love me better. I don’t care what he did to me. I loved him and as far as I’m concerned, there’ll never be another love like that for me.” Hidden in my damaged heart I knew what I really meant was, I’d never be able to trust anyone as I’d trusted Jonathan. He’d betrayed me and our love. There was no greater crime, and nothing would ever be the same. My innocence was gone.

  “It’s over, he’s gone and that’s that. I lost the game, never learned the rules apparently, and I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” I had Jeremy to love, and Jimmy. “I’ll make it.”

  “I know you will. Aren’t we two survivors?” he said softly.

  “We sure are.”

  “What has Jonathan said about you and the boy moving so far away?”

  “To be truthful, I don’t know and I don’t care. I haven’t talked to him in over two months. I don’t know what he’s thinking. Jeremy told him.”

  “You mean he hasn’t seen Jeremy in two months?” Jim was surprised.

  “No.” I rubbed my eyes tiredly. If I had the answers to the strange way my ex-husband was behaving, then I’d probably hold the secret to life. Psychic or not, I wasn’t shown everything. When it came to my own life, my own personal danger or future events, I was in darkness. It was probably better that way.

  “Jeremy’s called him a few times, but his father says he’s been too busy to get over to see him. At first, before Jonathan moved in with her, he’d come over and spend time with Jeremy when he could. Lately, he hasn’t even called him.” It was difficult talking about it. It’d happened so quickly, the alienation between father and son. I kept remembering my own childhood. The love of my parents and family, even as brief a time as we’d had, had been the foundation of my life. Jeremy would be deprived of it. We were moving so far away it’d give Jonathan a plausible excuse not to see him at all now, one with little guilt attached because of the distance factor. At least Jeremy could accept it easier than apathy.

  “I’m sorry, Sarah.”

  “It’s not your fault.�
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  “I feel bad anyway.”

  “Well, don’t.” How could I convince him? Hard to tell whose fault it was. Perhaps mine as much as Jonathan’s. Who knew?

  I’d gone over the same territory countless times and still didn’t have any real answers. The trouble between Jonathan and me had begun two years ago. There was a day I’d glimpsed a scrap of our future and been frightened. The vision was clear. I’d warned Jonathan, he’d soon be in a serious accident, and begged him to be careful. He’d stared at me in the strangest way and shrugged his shoulders, smiling sarcastically as he’d buckled on his shoulder holster and walked out the door to another day’s work.

  “What happens, happens.” He’d laughed and given me a weak kiss on the way out. By the end of the day he was in a collision in his squad car. His partner was killed outright and Jonathan was in the hospital for three weeks; his leg broken in two places. But it was the least of the damage. Afterwards, he’d looked at me with the eyes of a frightened animal. I’d catch him staring at me, a funny look on his face, and he’d turn his head away as if my gaze could hurt him.

  Nothing was right between us afterwards. It was okay for me to help other people or write my articles on my psychic experiences for the world to read, but quite another matter when he was the victim. We started to drift apart. He began to act strange. Detached. He was gone a lot. There were times I was so lonely and missed him so much I thought my heart would break.

  It would have been better, I often thought, if he’d died in the crash, because to me and Jeremy he was as good as dead. Having been a cop’s wife for ten years had prepared me for death, but not for what was happening.

  I made excuses for his cool behavior. It was his work, or the accident had made him realize he was only mortal, everything but what it was. I knew he was unhappy and in time I learned the solution he’d found to combat his unhappiness.