‘Where are we going?’ Kelly Mack said, her voice sharp, fed up. She’d been sick of us, lately. Sick of Peter.
‘Yeah,’ I said, rousing myself. I didn’t want to soap car windows or throw rocks at street signs or put on rubber masks and scare trick-or-treaters, exactly, but those were the things we did. And we had no supplies.
Peter closed his eyes, leaned his head back, took a deep breath of the rushing air and held it. He looked almost peaceful. I couldn’t remember seeing him that way. It was startling. Then he stuck one trembling arm out in front of him, pointed at me, and his eyes sprung open.
‘Do you know . . .’ he said, his voice deep, accented, a perfect imitation, ‘what that bell does?’
I clapped my hands. ‘That bell. . .’ 1 said, in the closest I could get to the same voice, and the Mack sisters stared at us, baffled, which made me grin even harder, ‘raises the dead.’
‘What are you babbling about?’ said Kelly to Peter, but Jenny was looking at me, seawater eyes curious and strange.
‘You know Mr Paars?’ I asked her.
But of course she didn’t. The Macks had moved here less than a year and a half ago, and I hadn’t seen Mr Paars, I realized, in considerably longer. Not since the night of the bell, in fact. I looked at Peter. His grin was as wide as mine felt. He nodded at me. We’d been friends a long time, I realized. Almost half my life.
Of course, I didn’t say that. ‘A long time ago,’ I told the Macks, feeling like a longshoreman, a lighthouse keeper, someone with stories who lived by the sea, ‘there was this man. An old, white-haired-man. He ate lutefisk - it’s fish, it smells awful, I don’t really know what it is - and stalked around the neighborhood, scaring everybody.’
‘He had this cane,’ Peter said, and I waited for him to go on, join me in the telling, but he didn’t.
‘All black,’ I said. ‘Kind of scaly. Ribbed, or something. It didn’t look like a cane. And it had this silver dog’s head on it, with fangs. A doberman—’
‘Anyway . . .’ said Kelly Mack, though Jenny seemed to be enjoying listening.
‘He used to bop people with it. Kids. Homeless people. Whoever got in his way. He stomped around 15th Street, terrorizing everyone. Two years ago, on the first Halloween we were allowed out alone, right about this time of night, Peter and I spotted him coming out of the hardware store. It’s not there anymore, it’s that empty space next to the place where the movie theater used to be. Anyway, we saw him there, and we followed him home.’
Peter waved us out of his yard, toward the locks. Again, I waited, but when he glanced at me, the grin was gone. His face was normal, neutral, maybe, and he didn’t say anything.
‘He lives down there,’ I said, gesturing to the south, toward the Sound. ‘Way past all the other houses. Past the end of the street. Practically in the water.’
Despite what Peter had said, we didn’t head that way. Not then. We wandered toward the locks, into the park. The avenue between the pine trees was empty except for a scatter of solitary bums on benches, wrapping themselves in shredded jackets and newspapers as the night nailed itself down and the dark billowed around us in the wind-gusts like the sides of a tent. In the roiling trees, black birds perched on the branches, silent as gargoyles.
‘There aren’t any other houses that close to Mr Paars’s,’ I said. ‘The street turns to dirt, and it’s always wet because it’s down by the water. There are these long, empty lots full of weeds, and a couple of sheds, I don’t know what’s in them or who would own them. Anyway, right where the pavement ends, Peter and I dropped back and just kind of hung out near the last house until Mr Paars made it to his yard. God, Peter, you remember his yard?’
Instead of answering, Peter led us between the low stone buildings to the canal, where we watched the water swallow the last streaks of daylight like some monstrous whale gulping plankton. The only boats in the slips were two sailboats, sails furled, rocking as the waves slapped against them. The only person I saw on either stood at the stern of the boat closest to us, head hooded in a green oil-slicker, face aimed out to sea.
‘Think I could hit him from here?’ said Peter, and I flinched, looked at his fists expecting to see stones, but he was just asking. ‘Tell them the rest,’ he said.
I glanced at the Macks, was startled to see them holding hands, leaning against the rail over the canal, though they were watching us, not the water. ‘Come on, already,’ Kelly said, but Jenny just raised her eyebrows at me. Behind her, seagulls dipped and tumbled on the wind like shreds of cloud that had been ripped loose.
‘We waited, I don’t know, a while. It was cold. Remember how cold it was? We were wearing winter coats and mittens. It wasn’t windy like this, but it was freezing. At least that made the dirt less muddy when we finally went down there. We passed the sheds and the trees, and there was no one, I mean no one, around. Too cold for any trick-or-treating anywhere around here, even if anyone was going to. And there wasn’t anywhere to go on that street, regardless.
‘Anyway. It’s weird. Everything’s all flat down there, and then right as you get near the Paars place, this little forest springs up, all these thick firs. We couldn’t really see anything.’
‘Except that it was light,’ Peter murmured.
‘Yeah. Bright light. Mr Paars had his yard floodlit, for intruders, we figured. We thought he was probably paranoid. So we snuck off the road when we got close and went into the trees. In there, it was wet. Muddy, too. My mom was so mad when I got home. Pine needles sticking to me everywhere. She said I looked like I’d been tarred and feathered. We hid in this little grove, looked into the lawn, and we saw the bell.’
Now Peter turned around, his hands flung wide to either side. ‘Biggest fucking bell you’ve ever seen in your life,’ he said.
‘What are you talking about?’ said Kelly.
‘It was in this . . . pavilion,’ I started, not sure how to describe it. ‘Gazebo, I guess. All white and round, like a carousel, except the only thing inside was this giant white bell, like a church bell, hanging from the ceiling on a chain. And all the lights in the yard were aimed at it.’
‘Weird,’ said Jenny, leaning against her sister.
‘Yeah. And that house. It’s real dark, and real old. Black wood or something, all sort of falling apart. Two storeys, kind of big. It looked like four or five of the sheds we passed sort of stacked on top of each other and squashed together. But the lawn was beautiful. Green, mowed perfectly, like a baseball stadium.’
‘Kind of,’ Peter whispered. He turned from the canal and wandered away again, back between buildings down the tree-lined lane.
A shiver swept up the skin on my back as I realized, finally, why we were going back to the Paars house. I’d forgotten, until that moment, how scared we’d been. How scared Peter had been. Probably, Peter had been thinking about this for two years.
‘It was all so strange,’ I said to the Macks, all of us watching the bums in their rattling paper blankets and the birds clinging by their talons to the branches and eyeing us as we passed. ‘All that outside light, the house falling apart and no lights on in there, no car in the driveway, that huge bell. So we just looked for a long time. Then Peter said - I remember this, exactly - “He just leaves something shaped like that hanging there. And he expects us not to ring it.”
‘Then, finally, we realized what was in the grass.’
By now, we were out of the park, back among the duplexes, and the wind had turned colder, though it wasn’t freezing, exactly. In a way, it felt good, fresh, like a hard slap in the face.
‘I want a shrimp-and-chips,’ Kelly said, gesturing over her shoulder toward 15th Street, where the little fry-stand still stayed open next to the Dairy Queen, although the Dairy Queen had been abandoned.
‘I want to go see this Paars house,’ said Jenny. ‘Stop your whining.’ She sounded cheerful, fierce, the way she did when she played Dig Dug or threw her hand in the air at school. She was smart, too, not Peter-smart,
but as smart as me, at least. And I think she’d seen the trace of fear in Peter, barely there but visible in his skin like a fossil, something long dead and never before seen, and it fascinated her. That’s what I was thinking when she reached out casually and grabbed my hand. Then I stopped thinking at all. ‘Tell me about the grass,’ she said.
‘It was like a circle,’ I said, my fingers still, my palm flat against hers. Even when she squeezed, I held still. I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t want Peter to turn around. If Kelly had noticed, she didn’t say anything. ‘Cut right in the grass. A pattern. A circle, with this upside-down triangle inside it, and—’
‘How do you know it was upside down?’ Jenny asked.
‘What?’
‘How do you know you were even looking at it the right way?’
‘Shut up,’ said Peter, quick and hard, not turning around, leading us onto the street that dropped down to the Sound, to the Paars house. Then he did turn around, and he saw our hands. But he didn’t say anything. When he was facing forward again, Jenny squeezed once more, and I gave a feeble squeeze back,
We walked half a block in silence, but that just made me more nervous. I could feel Jenny’s thumb sliding along the outside of mine, and it made me tingly, terrified. I said, ‘Upside down. Right side up. Whatever. It was a symbol, a weird one. It looked like an eye.’
‘Old dude must have had a hell of a lawnmower,’ Kelly muttered, glanced at Peter’s back, and stopped talking, just in time, I thought. Mr Andersz was right. She was smart, too.
‘It kind of made you not want to put your foot in the grass,’ I continued. ‘I don’t know why. It just looked wrong. Like it really could see you. I can’t explain.’
‘Didn’t make me want not to put my foot in the grass,’ Peter said.
I felt Jenny look at me. Her mouth was six inches or so from my hair, my ear. It was too much. My hand twitched and I let go. Blushing, I glanced at her. She looked surprised, and she drifted away toward her sister.
‘That’s true,’ I said, wishing I could call Jenny back. ‘Peter stepped right out.’
On our left, the last of the duplexes slid away, and we came to the end of the pavement. In front of us, the dirt road rolled down the hill, red-brown and wet and bumpy, like some stretched, cutout tongue on the ground. I remembered the way Peter’s duck-boots had seemed to float on the surface of Mr Paars’s floodlit green lawn, as though he was walking on water.
‘Hey,’ I said, though Peter had already stepped onto the dirt and was strolling, fast and purposeful, down the hill. ‘Peter,’ I called after him, though I followed, of course. The Macks were beside but no longer near me. ‘When’s the last time you saw him? Mr Paars?’
He turned around, and he was smiling now, the smile that scared me. ‘Same time you did, Bubba,’ he said. ‘Two years ago tonight.’
I blinked, stood still, and the wind lashed me like the end of a twisted-up towel. ‘How do you know when I last saw him?’ I said.
Peter shrugged. ‘Am I wrong?’
I didn’t answer. I watched Peter’s face, the dark swirling around and over it, shaping it, like rushing water over stone.
‘He hasn’t been anywhere. Not on 15th Street. Not at the Black Anchor. Nowhere. I’ve been watching.’
‘Maybe he doesn’t live there anymore,’ Jenny said carefully. She was watching Peter, too.
‘There’s a car,’ Peter said. ‘A Lincoln. Long and black. Practically a limo.’
‘I’ve seen that car,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen it drive by my house, right at dinner time.’
‘It goes down there,’ said Peter, gesturing toward the trees, the water, the Paars house. ‘Like I said, I’ve been watching.’
And of course, he had been, I thought. If his father had let him, he’d probably have camped right here, or in the gazebo under the bell. In fact, it seemed impossible to me, given everything I knew about Peter, that he’d let two years go by.
‘Exactly what happened to you two down there?’ Kelly asked.
‘Tell them now,’ said Peter. ‘There isn’t going to be any talking once we get down there. Not until we’re all finished.’ Dropping into a crouch, he picked at the cold, wet dirt with his fingers, watched the ferries drifting out of downtown toward Bainbridge Island, Vashon. You couldn’t really make out the boats from there, just the clusters of lights on the water like clouds of lost, doomed fireflies.
‘Even the grass was weird,’ I said, remembering the weight of my sopping pants against my legs. ‘It was so wet. I mean, everywhere was wet, as usual, but this was like wading in a pond. You put your foot down and the whole lawn rippled. It made the eye look like it was winking. At first we were kind of hunched over, sort of hiding, which was ridiculous in all that light. I didn’t want to walk in the circle, but Peter just strolled right through it. He called me a baby because I went the long way around.’
‘I called you a baby because you were being one,’ Peter said, but not meanly, really.
‘We kept expecting lights to fly on in the house. Or dogs to come out. It just seemed like there would be dogs. But there weren’t. We got up to the gazebo, which was the only place in the whole yard with shadows, because it was surrounded by all these trees. Weird trees. They were kind of stunted. Not pines, either, they’re like birch trees, I guess. But short. And their bark is black.’
‘Felt weird, too,’ Peter muttered, straightening up, wiping his hands down his coat. ‘It just crumbled when you rubbed it in your hands, like one of those soft block-erasers, you know what I mean?’
‘We must have stood there ten minutes. More. It was so quiet. You could hear the Sound, a little, although there aren’t any waves there or anything. You could hear the pine trees dripping, or maybe it was the lawn. But there weren’t any birds. And there wasn’t anything moving in that house. Finally, Peter started toward the bell. He took exactly one step into the gazebo, and one of those dwarf trees walked right off its roots into his path, and both of us started screaming.’
‘What?’ said Jenny.
‘I didn’t scream,’ said Peter. ‘And he hit me.’
‘He didn’t hit you,’ I said.
‘Yes, he did.’
‘Could you shut up and let Andrew finish?’ said Kelly, and Peter lunged, grabbing her slicker in his fists and shoving her hard and then yanking her forward so that her head snapped back on its stalk like a decapitated flower and then snapped into place again.
It had happened so fast that neither Jenny nor I had moved, but Jenny hurtled forward now, raking her nails down Peter’s face, and he said, ‘Ow!’ and fell back, and she threw her arms around Kelly’s shoulders. For a few seconds, they stood like that, and then Kelly put her own arms up and eased Jenny away. To my astonishment, I saw that she was laughing.
‘I don’t think I’d do that again, if I were you,’ she said to Peter, her laughter quick and hard, as though she was spitting teeth.
Peter put a hand to his cheek, gazing at the blood that came away on his fingers. ‘Ow,’ he said again.
‘Let’s go home,’ Jenny said to her sister.
No one answered right away. Then Peter said, ‘Don’t.’ After a few seconds, when no one reacted, he said, ‘You’ve got to see the house.’ He was going to say more, I think, but what else was there to say? I felt bad, without knowing why. He was like a planet we visited, cold and rocky and probably lifeless, and we kept coming because it was all so strange, so different than what we knew. He looked at me, and what I was thinking must have flashed in my face, because he blinked in surprise, turned away, and started down the road without looking back. We all followed. Planet, dark star, whatever he was, he created orbits.
‘So the tree hit Peter,’ Jenny Mack said quietly when we were halfway down the hill, almost to the sheds.
‘It wasn’t a tree. It just seemed like a tree. I don’t know how we didn’t see him there. He had to have been watching us the whole time. Maybe he knew we’d followed him. He just stepped out
of the shadows and kind of whacked Peter across the chest with his cane. That black dog-head cane. He did kind of look like a tree. His skin was all gnarly, kind of dark. If you rubbed him between your fingers, he’d probably have crumbled, too. And his hair was so white. A tree that was way too old.
‘And his voice. It was like a bullfrog, even deeper. He spoke real slow. He said, “Boy. Do you know what that bell does?” And then he did the most amazing thing of all. The scariest thing. He looked at both of us, real slow. Then he dropped his cane. Just dropped it to his side. And he smiled, like he was daring us to go ahead. “That bell raises the dead. Right up out of the ground” ‘
‘Look at these,’ Kelly Mack murmured as we walked between the sheds.
‘Raises the dead,’ I said.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 13 - [Anthology] Page 54
