It was about six o’clock when our “company” arrived. Anne had gone out into the yard for some birch twigs to make an auxiliary broom. I was on my knees in bedroom debris. Suddenly, from the doorway at my back, a voice said, “You ain’t gonna live here, are you, mister?”
I swung about, startled half out of my skin. There on the threshold stood a sickly, emaciated little girl about twelve years old. Pity for the poor creature overwhelmed me, and I stood up slowly for fear of frightening her. “And who are you?” I asked. “A neighbour of ours?”
“I used to live here. I’m Susie Callister.”
Jedney Prentiss had mentioned the Callisters. They were local people who had rented the place for a time. After the death of Jim Callister, his wife and little girl had moved out.
“You people must be crazy, movin’ into this place,” the child said. “My ma says it’s haunted.”
“Really?”
“She’d lick the tar out of me if she knew I was here!”
“And do you come here often?” I asked.
“Yep. Pa died here. He was swell. I come here to talk to him.”
“You come here to what?”
“Well,” she said defiantly, “maybe I don’t talk to him like me and you are talkin’. But I talk and he listens. I sit on a box down in the cellar and tell him how ma won’t let me come here. He whispers back, sometimes. He died there in the cellar, from a heart attack.”
“Peter!” That was Anne’s voice from downstairs. “I’ve made coffee and sandwiches. It’s after six, and I’m starved!”
“Gee!” Susie Callister whispered. “Is it that late? I’ll get kilt!” She turned like a frightened rabbit, then stopped. In a low, pleading voice she added, “Can I – can I come here sometimes to talk to pa? Can I? Please?”
Something told me there was a story in this little girl, so I said she could come as often as she liked. She fled downstairs and out the front door, slamming it behind her. When I got downstairs, Anne was standing in the hall shadows, a queer look on her face.
“Who was that, Peter?”
I told her, and she seemed relieved. We sat down to our supper in the kitchen. Anne was oddly quiet.
She was tired, I supposed, Walking around the table, I put my hands on her shoulders and said, “You’re working too hard.”
She smiled a little and relaxed against me. But she was trembling, and suddenly looked up at me.
“Peter – before we do anything else after supper, will you go down into the cellar and look around? I was down there a while ago and I think we have rats. I heard the strangest whispering sounds over near an old work-bench . . .”
“I’ll exterminate the vipers,” I said lightly. But Anne was afraid. I knew it by the way she clung to me.
I didn’t go into the cellar right away. Our purchases arrived and we had to arrange furniture. Night was upon us in earnest before I got around to the rats.
Clutching an antique oil-lamp, I groped down the steep, treacherous cellar stairs, put the lamp on the work-bench, and looked around.
It was a huge room with floor and walls of rough concrete, the floor unfinished, or long ago torn up for some reason, in the corner under the bench. My mind played with a distressing mental picture of Susie Callister, poor child, sitting here alone in the dark, pouring out her sorrows to her dead father. Something would have to be done about Susie Callister, and about the rats whose whisperings she believed to be her father’s voice!
The rats? Seated on an upturned box, I waited. Presently I, too, heard a furtive whispering. It seemed to come from that section of the cellar where the floor had been torn up.
Noiselessly I stalked the sounds. Rats? I was not so sure. This odd, subtle whispering was too – seductive. I could have sworn it was trying to tell me something.
On hands and knees I crept toward the corner where the floor was bare. The sounds ceased. Carefully I explored every inch of the packed brown earth, but found nothing. Had the rats bored a tunnel beneath this part of the cellar? Did rats make tunnels?
I took a step toward the lamp, and stopped. Something unbelievably cold, yet soft – soft as the touch of a woman’s lips! – caught at my left ankle. My heart missed a beat. Through me swept the kind of thrill that might seethe in a man if a beautiful woman were suddenly to appear naked before him out of nowhere.
I looked down and could have sworn, though nothing was there, that something like a human hand had hold of my foot. Then a dull, creaking noise stiffened me. I jerked loose, raised my head, and saw that the bulkhead at the far end of the cellar was being raised. There was the explanation of my “clutching hand” – simply an inrush of cold air from the night outside.
I stared. Framed in the aperture was a pair of legs garbed in coarse black stockings. Then a groping hand appeared, followed by a woman’s face. Furtively the intruder descended the old wooden steps to the cellar floor.
Apparently she did not see me – and that was strange, for the lamp still burned. Slowly she advanced. Her dress was a cheap black rag that accented the paleness of her face and throat. Prowling past the bench, she stopped. Her voice, a sibilant whisper, scratched along the cellar walls.
“She’s been here again, Jim Callister, hasn’t she? I know it! I could tell by the look in her eyes when she got home. She comes here more often than I know, and you talk to her, you put ideas into her head. But you ain’t goin’ to get her, damn you! I’ll take her so far away, you won’t never get your hellish hairy hands on her! You hear? I’m defyin’ you! I stood up to you once, and I’m doin’ it again!”
She shook her fist. Her calcimine face was shapeless with hate. I swear I could hear the machine-gun beat of her heart beneath that ragged black dress. Sharply I said, “Wait, Mrs Callister!”
She stopped as though stabbed. Her glittering eyes searched for me and finally found me. I realized then why she had not seen me before. She was half blind.
“It’s quite all right, Mrs Callister,” I said. “I’m Peter Winslow and I’ve bought this house. I’d like to talk to you if—”
Flinging herself backward, she whirled toward the bulkhead, and before I could make a move to stop her, the darkness outside had swallowed her. Bewildered and afraid, I went upstairs.
That night we heard the rats. Anne pressed herself against me, her sweet body trembling with terror. I tried to comfort her, but even while doing so I thought darkly, The rats are in the cellar. Susie Callister’s father died there. Susie is a strange child and her mother is a strange woman. No ordinary rats ever whispered like that. . .
In the morning I drove alone to the village, to buy traps. The proprietor of the general store was a thin, bony man. “So you’re the feller bought the old Prentiss place,” he said when I introduced myself. “Like it there, do you?”
“I think we might when it’s fixed up.”
He gave me an oblique look. “Paint and repairs will help a heap, but they won’t alter what happened to Jim Callister. I’m the undertaker here, and I prepared Jim for buryin’. You can’t tell me he died natural, and I said so till I was hoarse, but nobody’d listen.”
“What do you mean?” I demanded.
“Well, he was workin’ down in the cellar the night he died. Seems he spent most of his spare time workin’ there. So this night it was mighty quiet down there and his wife got worried, and she went down and found him layin’ there. Or so she said.” He snorted. “Doc Digby called it a heart attack. But I took care of the body, like I said, and I never heard of a heart attack growin’ hair on a man.”
“Hair?”
“Outside of his face, there wasn’t an inch of Jim Callister that didn’t have hair on it. Hair like you’d see on a dog, or a wolf!”
I gave him a long, hard stare, trying to figure him out.
“Another thing,” he said. “When I pumped Jim Callister clean, I didn’t like what came out of him.”
I could only stare at him and say weakly, “I don’t understand.”
&nbs
p; “Smelled funny and looked funny. If you ask me, he was poisoned.”
“But what – why—?”
“Can’t talk to you no more. Said too much already, I expect.” Abruptly he turned his back on me.
I thought about it on the way home, and decided to have another look at that cellar. And to have a talk with Dr Digby at the first opportunity. Then I found a car of rather ancient vintage parked at our gate, and its doctor’s emblem indicated our caller was a medical man.
He was. A bald little man in his sixties, he stopped talking to Anne and introduced himself as Everett Digby. The hand he offered me was like a wet rubber glove.
“Thought I’d drop in to say hello,” he said with a mechanical smile.
You thought you’d drop in to see if we actually intend to live here, I mentally corrected. You know something about this house – about Jim Callister – that you don’t want us to find out.
We talked for half an hour about nothing. Finally, after a cautious build-up, I said, “The fellow at the store seems to think there was something strange about Jim Callister’s death.”
Digby laughed. “Better take Ben with a grain of salt. He makes his own liquor and it does queer things to him.”
I thought, One of you is lying. Anne excused herself and went to prepare lunch. Then Digby suddenly changed his manner.
Leaning toward me, he said in a low voice, “You were insane to buy this place, Winslow What Ben Nevins told you is right, or partly right, anyhow. There was something odd about Callister’s death, and this house was the cause of it. If I were you, I’d clear out!”
“Why?”
He shot a glance at the kitchen door. “I’ll tell you what I know, and leave out what I think. Jim Callister came here to live three years ago. At first everything went fine. Then he built a work-bench down in the cellar and things began happening. He got thin and worried. His wife begged me to look at him and I did, and it stumped me. There wasn’t a thing wrong with him that I could discover, yet his skin was turning soft and white, and little clumps of hair were growing out of it. And he was changing mentally. Jim had been a fine fellow with a big, hearty laugh. Now he was grim as a grave and becoming sort of sly and stealthy.”
“He got worse before his death?” I asked.
“Well, I wouldn’t know about the condition of his body. After that first examination, he wouldn’t let me look at him again. But according to his wife, he got more surly by the day. She and their little girl went through hell.”
“And you believe this house had something to do with it?”
Digby looked away, moistening his lips. “Something changed him. I don’t know what. All I say is, you ought to clear out of here for your own safety. There are things in this world we don’t understand, Winslow. I don’t know what turned Jim Callister into a vicious, hairy beast, but—” He caught himself, but it was too late. Anne was there in the doorway.
Digby stood up, little lines of sweat forming on his bald head. “Got to be going,” he mumbled. “Said more than I meant to.” He hurried out to his car.
When he had gone, Anne turned to me and said quietly, “What did he mean about Jim Callister, Peter?”
“Nothing, darling.”
“I want you to tell me.”
I told her, selecting with care the words I used. “I’ve a feeling something unpleasant happened in this house and he may have had a part in it,” I concluded. “My hunch is that he wants to scare us out of here before we find out about it.” But even as I put my arms around her and kissed her, I was thinking of something else. Of those whispers in the cellar.
That evening while knocking down some old shelves in the kitchen, I felt a sharp, shooting pain in my ankle. It disappeared almost at once, but at the first opportunity I went upstairs, shut the bedroom door behind me, and removed my sock.
A patch of graying white skin, peculiarly soft, extended from my instep to a point an inch or so above the shin bone. Thoroughly scared, I smeared it with salve and bound it, replacing sock and shoe. Then I began thinking of the cellar again. I had to go down there! Furtively I began seeking some excuse for leaving Anne upstairs, so that I might be alone down there, to wait.
Wait for what? The whispers?
The opportunity came just before bedtime. Anne had undressed and donned her pyjamas. We were having a nightcap in the kitchen. As a bridgroom, I should have been gazing at my wife and thinking something like This lovely woman is mine, to have, to hold and to love. But what I said to her was, “You go on upstairs, darling. I have to set those traps in the cellar.”
She looked at me queerly, but I turned away and went down the cellar stairs, closing the door behind me.
Unerringly my feet took me to that patch of brown earth near the work bench. There I waited. Ten, fifteen minutes I waited. Then – the whispers again! Out of the earth they came, or out of the walls – sibilant, seductive sounds that seemed almost to be words.
My hands trembled. My whole body quivered with excitement. Dropping to hands and knees, I crawled toward the source of the sounds. And suddenly my hands were claws, frantically digging in the earth!
Now the whispers mocked me. They beat against my brain, tormenting me, spurring me on to greater efforts. I clawed like an animal, like a dog digging for a bone. Before long I had dug a hole nearly two feet deep and encountered wood.
It was a cistern cover. I could not budge it. But I found a crowbar back of the furnace and worked like a madman, with sweat rolling down my face and arms, until slowly, bit by bit, I broke the seal of concrete that held the cover in place. Then, using all my strength, I pried it up and managed to move it to one side.
There in the black depths of the cellar I dropped to my hands and knees to peer into a yawning pit, and from the depths of it rose a sigh, half human, half animal, that seemed to convey all the world’s sadness.
I seized my flashlight and aimed its beam into the pit. The walls leaped into frightening prominence. Gray, wet walls they were, covered with a fungus growth that seemed to writhe in agony as the light touched it. But the depths of the cistern still tenaciously held their secret. Powerful as the light was, it revealed only vertical walls vanishing into a deep, seemingly impenetrable darkness. A whispering darkness. A darkness full of nameless rustlings that called to me!
The cellar had grown unbearably cold. My flesh crawled. I retreated in dismay from the pit’s edge, but a clammy, freezing chill enveloped me as though invisible hands had stripped me naked and were rubbing me with ice.
Sharp, biting pain attacked my chest and arms. Then came the fear – fear of the dark, of the pit, of the crowding cellar walls. Sobbing out my terror, I swung the cistern cover back into place and clawed some earth over it. Then I fled.
When I entered the bedroom, Anne was lying there in bed with a magazine, waiting for me. “Peter!” she cried. “You’re so pale! What’s wrong?”
I crept into bed and crushed her against me, desperately afraid that something might come between us.
“Darling,” she whispered without complaint – though God knows I must have been brutally hurting her – “darling, you’re upset.” Then her lips found mine and my fears at last subsided.
In the morning Anne rose quietly, thinking me asleep and wanting not to wake me. But I was awake. I lay with one eye half open, watching her.
I remembered the whispers, and what they had commanded me to do.
She had planned to drive to Harkness that morning for curtain material and a few other things we needed. I heard her go. Then stealthily I slipped out of bed, peeled off my pyjamas and studied myself, naked, in a mirror.
God help me, I liked what I saw.
I dressed and went downstairs. Anne had left breakfast on the table. I ate slowly, filled with thoughts of her, of what was going to happen – had to happen – when she returned. Suddenly I heard the front door open and the voice of Susie Callister calling anxiously, “Is anybody home?”
The voice with which I answered
her was not my voice. Oh, no. They told me what to say. They told me to invite the child in and humor her.
I called to her and she came timidly into the kitchen and stood staring at me. “You-you said I could come sometimes,” she reminded me. “You said I could talk to pa.”
“My dear child – of course!”
“If I go downstairs, you won’t tell ma I done it, will you?” Her deep-set eyes were pleading with me. Her lips trembled. “She licked me somethin’ awful the last time. She-she says we’re gonna move away from here. Tomorrow, maybe. I want to say goodbye to pa.”
Smiling, I took her by the arm and led her down the hall to the cellar door and opened it, then stood there at the top of the treacherous cellar stairs watching her while she slowly descended into the darkness. She was young, of course. Her frail little body was not very attractive. Still, her skin was white and clear; she had arms and legs and the beginnings of breasts. She was better than nothing.
I heard the whispers, and they were evil. Never before had they been so loud, so commanding. They told me what to do next.
I closed the door softly and turned the key. Then I went back to the sitting-room and sat to wait.
It came at last, and every expectant nerve in my body thrilled to it, as a lover to a subtle caress. A scream of terror pulsed up from the dark cellar. A sudden rush of footfalls sounded on the stairs. Frantic fists beat against the locked door.
Then the scream soared again, this time a wailing, tenuous cry that fluttered for a moment in space, then died. And I sat there smiling, with my twisted mind and sated senses soaking up every last lingering echo, until the house was again quiet.
There were no whispers when I opened the cellar door. Descending, I looked about me. My little friend had said farewell to more than her dead father. She had vanished.
“There will be another soon,” I promised softly. “Just be patient.”
The woman came about an hour later. Angrily she strode up the porch steps and banged on the front door, and when I opened the door to her she thrust her contorted face at me and said shrilly, “Susie came here, didn’t she? Where is she?”
The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men Page 22
