We reached Poplar, and Callum peered past me. “Looking for the dogs?” I said, grinning.
“I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Then slow down, man, before I drop where stand.”
He glared at me, and slowed down, and we reached the corner and Thorn Road. Where we stopped. Hands in pockets. Looking for all the world like two men who didn’t want to be where they were, and were there only because one didn’t want the other to know how scared he was.
“Stockton,” Callum said, “was a nut.”
I shrugged.
“Well, he had to be, right?”
I shrugged again. But I didn’t laugh. Callum was learning what I’d learned years ago.
“Shit,” he said softly after a few minutes waiting. “This is crazy. I’m going home. My true love is probably waiting for me on the porch right now, ready to take what I have to offer, no questions asked, and serve me hand and foot for the fest of my days.” He sniffed. He looked down the street, toward Rimber Nabb’s house. “Shit.”
“Callum,” I said. And stopped.
He looked at me then as if I’d set him up for a practical joke, and paled briefly when I shook my head.
We turned then and headed back for the center of town. I had no desire to see what the Nabb house looked like now. Last week, in daylight, I had driven past it, and had seen the plywood nailed across the windows, the weeds dying in the yard, the gap in the slate roof, the chimney canted and ready to fall at the next windstorm we had; I saw that the hedge had been trimmed to within a foot of the ground; I managed a glimpse of the dead rose bushes in the backyard. Then I drove on.
Mandolin.
Thinking about how I was going to explain this to Callum without him thinking me mad.
Guitar.
Wondering if maybe listening to Abe Stockton all those years had finally made me something I hadn’t been the first day I’d come here.
Fiddle.
“You put that damned album in the cellar,” Callum told me when we reached the intersection of our parting. “You put it in there, okay? and you forget it.”
“I intend to.”
He nodded once, sharply.
He walked away, turned around and came back, and shook my hand. “You coming next Friday? I got a real bad one for you.”
“Wouldn’t miss it.”
“Right.”
He left again.
His head cocked like mine, and I knew he was listening to the night in Oxrun Station, to the song of the nightwind, to the pages he had read and refused to believe, even now.
Even now, long past midnight, with the sweet note of a dulcimer trailing shadows in the dark.
And the guitar, and the fiddle, and the mandolin not far behind.
The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant Volume 3: Dialing the Wind (Neccon Classic Horror) Page 18
