Dark Shadows: Wolf Moon Rising

by Lara Parker

  “I wanted it to be a surprise. If I put aside a little cash, he’ll be really impressed. What do you say?” He waited.

  “Don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  Exasperated, David shook snow off his jacket. “Okay. You win.” He shrugged. “I’ll just break in.” Willie only grunted and David felt a flood of irritation. “What’s the real reason I can’t go back there?”

  Willie stared at him a minute. “You’ll probably just think I’m crazy.”

  “No, I won’t—”

  “Then I’ll tell you.” His mouth was working again. “Them places is haunted.”

  David laughed. “Wait a minute. What did you say?”

  “I said they’re haunted.”

  “Haunted? Oh, come on.”

  “You remember what happened in the swimming pool, don’t you?”

  David felt a tremor of guilt. “Uh, yeah, some little kid. But that was a long time ago. You don’t need to bring that up.”

  “You weren’t s’posed to be back there. You were playin’ chicken—and skating the pool.”

  “Not fair, Willie. Gimme a break.” David remembered crying in Roger’s arms, saying it wasn’t his fault. A kid had fallen off the coping, a younger boy who had tried to do a really difficult maneuver on his skateboard. An ambulance had come and taken the kid away, and he had been forbidden to ever play there again. David sighed, wondering if he would ever live it down. “So you think that boy’s ghost is back there?”

  “Him and a lot others.”

  “But that’s stupid.” David was ready to lose his temper. Thinking about the past always gave him qualms. The splinter was bothering him, and he decided to go in the house and get some tweezers. “Never mind, Willie. It’s a big waste of time talking to you. I’ll just look around in the basement.”

  “This basement?” Willie jerked up.

  “Yeah. There’s a lot of junk down there. Fishing poles, golf clubs, guns, lots of old tools. I could have a yard sale. And maybe the portrait is there, too.”

  Willie looked at him, his eyes widening. “Now wait a minute. There ain’t no painting down there. Don’t you be going down there either, you hear me?”

  David sighed and sucked on his hand. The splinter had hit a nerve. “Okay, this is getting crazy. What’s the matter with the basement?”

  Willie shook his head.

  “No, Willie. Tell me. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. There’s something weird about this house, isn’t there? And about my family. We live alone out here and there are secrets, things no one talks about. What’s wrong with us? You’ve been around a long time, ever since I was a little kid. Do you know what it is? When you say the outbuildings are haunted, what do you really mean?”

  Willie slammed another armload of wood in the wheelbarrow. “I’ll get you the damn keys. Don’t blame me if you fall in the swimming pool. And just stay out of the basement. Too much junk, too many things to trip over. And there’s nothing down there. You understand?”

  By the time he got the keys from Willie, who, in his dim-witted confusion said he had forgotten where he had put them, David was too late to meet Jackie. The bus would have come and gone. She would already be at home, and if he went to the Old House he would have to make pleasant conversation with her mother and endure those thinly disguised looks of disapproval.

  Nevertheless, still determined to pursue his goal, David decided to look for the painting alone. If he were going to search the old pool house, which was the place he was most curious about, he would have to hurry not to miss the light. It was snowing again when he climbed on his snowmobile and jerked the pull cord. The engine rumbled into a satisfying whine as he pressed in on the throttle. He skimmed along the sea road, relishing the motor’s increased performance, and practiced carving the hillocks, shifting his weight in the turns, dodging the trees and half-buried rocks, and his heart beat faster as he felt himself become one with the machine.

  Three

  It had been snowing all day, and Jacqueline had watched the storm from her seat in the classroom, mesmerized by the dance of windblown flakes outside the glass. The schoolyard had faded to a misty black-and-white photograph hanging behind a gauzy scrim. Then it was a Japanese print, then a tissue paper cutout. The sky had floated down and swallowed the earth.

  But by the time school let out, the snow had melted at the back entrance under the overhanging shelter of the boarding area, and—along with a blast of hot air—the students burst screaming from the building. The school bus had been delayed by the storm, but it was filled up with noisy teenagers, soggy stocking caps and scarves, and jackets reeking of wet wool and nylon when Jackie slipped into a seat next to a fogged-up window and pulled her legs up under her.

  The ride home was the worst part of her day, and she always dreaded sitting in a seat by herself, ignoring the stares and snickers aimed her way. Already ringing in her ears were the cruel jibes the four boys she hated the most made from the back of the bus, teasing that she endured silently, even though she fantasized turning them all to stone. She would become an enraged Medusa, her mouth gaping open and her head crawling with snakes as she watched them freeze into motionless statues with rigid scowls on their faces.

  Sometimes the girls pretended to be friendly but traded whispers behind her back, girls with blunt-witted minds. Rudderless skiffs floundering in the murky waters of their lives. Today they only deadpanned and giggled when she looked over at them, as if they had heard some mortifying rumor about her.

  David would already be waiting for her. He always worried when she was late, and he had promised to help her search for the painting. The outbuildings behind Collinwood were the most obvious storage places, and he had said he would find the keys to the old swimming pool and the bowling alley. He had assured her over and over that they would find it together.

  The Collinses were wealthy, and David had always been schooled at home. For a month they had been fellow students, and they had studied Greek mythology and Roman history, chemistry and algebra. It had been so comforting, sitting in the sunny kitchen with David, reading about the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece together and laughing at their human foibles, or watching his lips move as he worked out congruent triangles and not blurting out the answer before he found it. But her mom had run out of money, spent it all to redo the Old House, and so she had been forced to return to the local high school.

  She flipped the hood of her coat up over her head and thought of her mother’s advice. “Just ignore them. They’ll leave you alone.” Today she was in a black mood, and there was an ache from loneliness inside her rib cage. She could feel tears welling up. She could have accepted her solitude, but her classes were disorganized, and the teachers spent most of their time trying to control the classroom. The gloomy redbrick school building had been an abandoned woolen mill back in the fifties, and it was attended by the sons and daughters of loggers and fishermen, none of them interested in going to college. Her only escape had been art class, where she could ignore them all and follow her paintbrush into her own dreams.

  Ping! Something hit her on the back of her head—a pencil, probably.

  “Hey, weirdo, you smell funny. What’s the perfume?”

  She knew without turning around that would be George Claggard—the brutish one, the ape with hairy knuckles whose father was a longshoreman. He always wore a red-and-black plaid wool coat, leather work boots, and a hat with fake fur earflaps over his kinky curls. Once he sat down beside her on the bus and she thought he was trying to be friendly, but he leaned into her and whispered that he wanted to show her something—his father’s hook, a lethal tool used for loading crates at the docks. She could smell his garlicky breath, and she had stared into his tiny eyes before she bit out, “Get away from me!”

  “Could it be bat shit?” he sang down the aisle. “Ummmm…”

  It was one of their favorite taunts, and for good reason. A bat had followed her out of the forest one day and it had chosen to
stay on her shoulder. She had liked stroking his soft brown fur, kissing his tiny turned-up snout, and even wearing him upside down on the collar of her coat, just to freak everybody out. When he unfolded his wings and took off, the girls screamed hysterically, especially when he landed in someone’s hair. But she had taken him home to the woods. Had he whined for her when she left him behind?

  “Phew! Your clothes must be stiff as cardboard.” The boys guffawed as if this was hysterically funny. Ernie Slavic, the snub-nosed weasel, was the clown of the pack, a skinny, dark-haired boy with a foul mouth and sneering gaze. He always wore a sweatshirt, even in the coldest weather, the hood pulled over a New York Mets baseball cap that shadowed the deep-set eyes in his thin face and his reddened, pimply complexion. She suspected that Ernie was the ringleader, smarter than George, and the instigator of their plots. She knew, for instance, that Ernie was the one who bought the weed.

  “Yeah! How come you always wear that same ol’ dirty coat?”

  She looked down, surprised at the insult. She loved her coat, even the frayed sleeves. Her mother had bought it for her one sunny autumn day in Boston, and they had spent a happy afternoon, choosing the quarter-length navy jacket that suited her best and brought out the color in her eyes. Afterward they had gone to Schrafft’s for hot chocolate.

  For the first time she noticed buttons were missing and the sleeves came to above her wrists. Her mother, who spent all her time with Quentin now, had stopped buying her clothes. When she was a little girl, they played, took long walks, sang songs together. She remembered one and hummed it to herself:

  Black is the color of my true love’s hair

  His kiss is something wondrous fair

  The truest eyes and the bravest hands

  I love the grass whereon he stands.

  Would she ever have a love like that? As she often did, she thought of her past lives in bleak and foggy Salem where she had been in prison, and in sun-drenched Martinique where she had first met Barnabas. She had inside her something no one could see—only the doctors, but they hadn’t been able to blast it out of her. She stared out the window and softly sang the words.

  I love my love and well he knows

  I love the ground whereon he goes

  If he on earth no more I see

  My life would quickly fade away …

  Jackie could smell the pot coming from the back of the bus, and it reminded her of her mom still in bed that morning and hung over, her mascara blurred and hair a mess. They had argued again about the missing portrait.

  “You did so much of the renovation,” her mom had insisted. “Don’t you remember a thing?”

  It was true that Jackie had taken an enormous interest in the Old House. The burnt-down mansion had so captured her imagination that she had become obsessed with restoring it, taking off on one of her manic highs for weeks. Her mom had driven her to neighboring towns and dropped her off at flea markets where she searched all day for replicas of fixtures and furniture, or she combed old hardware stores for matching wallpaper and flooring. She had even used a spell or two when nothing else worked, and now she was paying for it big-time.

  “It must have been you,” her mom said. “You moved everything around. And I’ve always wondered, how did you find all the things you found, the rugs, the lamps, the pieces of cornice?”

  “In antique stores…”

  “Sure you did. Then why can’t you find the picture?” Her mom’s tone grew sarcastic. “What about your visions?”

  “I can’t do that.”

  She had tried to see it, and all she could find in her mind’s eye was a dark place, closed away from the world. It could have been any locked closet, or any tomb. Where are the tombs of my childhood where the deep roses grow?

  Her mother made an exasperated sound. “Well, you’re the one with the magic, not me. Find it, do you hear me? Don’t go to school. Stay home until you find it.”

  But she had not wanted to miss her painting class. Her teacher, who was an old man in his fifties, and who smoked pot like her mom—she could smell it—had had some New York shows. He wore overalls covered in paint, and he told her she was talented, something she already knew. Today she was working on a still life: an apple, a shell, a goblet half full of wine, and a rose, all gathered together on a Chinese tapestry, but dragons kept coming to life in the weaving, and flying birds fluttered under her brush.

  “Hey, bitchy, itchy, witchy girl, come cast an evil spell on us.”

  By the lame taunt and the nasal sound in the voice she knew it was Paul Dingleton, the wimpy one, the sick rabbit. He was a follower, always straggling behind, but maybe even more annoying, since he always had to prove himself. He wasn’t smart and he wasn’t muscled. She shivered if she caught him looking at her, with his puffy cheeks and pale pink eyes. Most of the time she thought it could be her imagination, as she had reckless and free-ranging suspicions and was given to all kinds of freakish visions she had to keep under control; but when she looked into his mind, she knew he was plotting to do her some kind of harm.

  The air in the bus had become thick with chewing gum breath, candy bar saliva, and pot. She felt trapped, as if she were riding in a cattle truck on its way to a penitentiary. She wiped the mist from the scummy window with her fingers, and stared out at the woods. She tried to drink in winter’s artistry, but instead she only felt despondent. The dark trees thrust their branches into the air with such ferocity, and the mounds of snow on the rocks looked to her like bodies wrapped in shrouds.

  The snowy woods took her back to Salem. It had been cold like this, she remembered, misery in every house and fear in every heart. They had hated her there, too. She had worked until her hands were raw. She had swum to the beavers’ den. And she had died on the scaffold with her bleeding child in her arms.

  Better to dream of Martinique, where she had been a mermaid curled in a blue cave, feeding the fish that dove in and out of her fingers. White the foam where the fish feed, dark the waters.

  Don’t drift.

  She shook herself and brought her thoughts back to the present. She looked out the window and tried to reassure herself she had her tabula rasa, her blank slate, and everything she saw against the white world was etched in black ink drawn on the purest paper. She thought when she got home, she would try to duplicate it, every cobwebby twig, every thick trunk. The ink spilled and spreading across the parchment.

  She had tried to tell the doctors she had lived before. Past lives were more real than the one she was living now. The vinyl on the bus seat made her think of the padded white walls, the gurney she was strapped to. They shot her up with electricity—the synapses in her brain pulling apart. Her time in the sanitarium had left her balanced as delicately as a slack ropewalker on a spider’s web. She had been diagnosed—schizophrenic—just to give them a name for it. Shock treatments were meant to blast from her brain all her memories. And all her powers.

  Deep in the ground like a rock lodged in the roots of a tree. Deep, in the sea, circling. Something waited.

  She had told them—although they did not believe her—that first she had been born out of the earth, so long ago, and the trees had been her protectors. She remembered flying among the trees—the souls of her ancestors. Then she had been born of water and the sea her heart’s home. The caves beneath the foam. Those were the happy days before she was taken away. And who was she now? She watched the trees slide by like ghosts and she was a black swan swimming at the far end of the pond. A red beak. A moth floating through the trees, a flying fish in the air. Air. Ah, she was air, invisible. A mobile kissed by a breeze. First the earth, then water … then air.

  Whap! This time it was a wadded-up piece of paper that came flying from the back of the bus and landed in her lap. She knew it was a lewd note and she knocked it on the floor. It was probably Petey, the one who wrote insults but never spoke to her. Several times over the past month one of the other boys had threatened to get off the bus when she did, and walk her home. S
he always ignored them. She refused to even acknowledge they were there, tried never to look at them.

  But for some reason, they did not ignore her. They followed her down the hallway between classes, found ways to jostle her in the cafeteria. Today she had been groped in the lunch line and she had almost spilled her soup. All this week things had been slipped into her locker or left on her seat in the classroom: bugs or slimy slugs, rotting fish heads, stinking sea urchins. The week before it had been pornographic photos of women copulating with goats or posing naked except for garter belts. There were scrawled notes which read “Snooty bitch,” “Trash!” and, always, the word “Witch!”

  Because she was strange and they were a little afraid of her, they called her a witch, but little did they know. They thought witches were people with character flaws, like sociopaths or thieves. It was only another insult in their book.

  “Hey! Who’s the ugliest girl on the bus? Yeah, who gets the prize?” One boy, she thought it was George, sniggered and she knew he had pointed to his crotch because the other boys whooped.

  “Jacqueline? I have something for you,” he was sing-songing the words like a lullaby. “Yeah, I got a nice fat popsicle just for you.”

  One of the girls turned around and said, “Shut up, asshole! You’re sick.” But George was only encouraged by her remark.

  “Hey, Jackie,” he droned on, “what are you? Some kind of kook? Come on back here for once and talk to us.”

  “Yeah,” Ernie yelled. “We won’t hurt you. You know you want me to get you off.” The boys exploded with laughter at Ernie’s bravado, and even the girls giggled. But then they stopped abruptly because she was standing in the aisle at the back of the bus as if she had flown there.

  “Whoa!” said George. The two boys squirmed to find her so close to them all at once, and they looked at each other sheepishly. There was a flame inside her she knew she should snuff out, but the heat was rising to her face, burning her cheeks. She had in her hand something left over from her lunch, a wadded-up peanut butter sandwich, and that would have been enough, but, if she couldn’t stop herself, it would take only a small push—a pulse that would shiver through her—for her to turn it into dog shit just before she shoved it in George’s mouth and smeared it all over his face. She almost smiled a little, thinking about her triumph. The sandwich was gummy and warm in her fist.