‘Yeah, I heard you. These are amazing.’
And they were. I’d forgotten. The most startling thing, really, was that they were still standing. They’d all sunk into the swampy grass on at least one side, and none of them had roofs, not whole roofs, anyway, and the window slots gaped, and the wind made a rattle as it rolled through them, like waves over seashells, empty things that hadn’t been empty always. They were too small to have been boat sheds, I thought, had to have been for tools and things. But tools to do what?
In a matter of steps, they were behind us, between us and the homes we knew, the streets we walked. We reached the ring of pines around the Paars house, and it was different, worse. I didn’t realize how, but Peter did.
‘No lights,’ he said.
For a while, we just stood in the blackness while saltwater and pine-resin smells glided over us like a mist. There wasn’t any moon, but the water beyond the house reflected what light there was, so we could see the long, black Lincoln in the dirt driveway, the house and the gazebo beyond it. After a minute or so, we could make out the bell, too, hanging like some bloated, white bat from the gazebo ceiling.
‘It is creepy,’ Jenny said.
‘Ya think?’ I said, but I didn’t mean to, it was just what I imagined Peter would have said if he were saying anything. ‘Peter, I think Mr Paars is gone. Moved, or something.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Then he won’t mind.’ He stepped out onto the lawn and said, ‘Fuck.’
‘What?’ I asked, shoulders hunching, but Peter just shook his head.
‘Grass. It’s a lot longer. And it’s wet as hell.’
‘What happened after “That bell raises the dead”?’ Jenny asked.
I didn’t answer right away. I wasn’t sure what Peter wanted me to say. But he just squinted at the house, didn’t even seem to be listening. I almost took Jenny’s hand. I wanted to. ‘We ran.’
‘Both of you? Hey, Kell—’
But Kelly was already out on the grass next to Peter, smirking as her feet sank. Peter glanced at her - cautiously, I thought. Uncertain. ‘You would have, too,’ he said.
‘I might have,’ said Kelly.
Then we were all on the grass, holding still, listening. The wind rushed through the trees as though filling a vacuum. I thought I could hear the Sound, not waves, just the dead, heavy wet. But there were no gulls, no bugs.
Once more, Peter strolled straight for that embedded circle in the grass, still visible despite the depth of the lawn, like a manta ray half-buried in seaweed. When Peter’s feet crossed the corners of the upside-down triangle - the tear-ducts of the eye - I winced, then felt silly. For all I knew, it was a corporate logo; it looked about that menacing. I started forward, too. The Macks came with me. I walked in the circle, though I skirted the edge of the triangle. Step on a crack and all. I didn’t look behind to see what the Macks did, I was too busy watching Peter as his pace picked up. He was practically running, straight for the gazebo, and then he stopped.
‘Hey,’ he said.
I’d seen it, too, I thought, feeling my knees lock as my nervousness intensified. In the lone upstairs window, there’d been a flicker. Maybe. Just one, for a single second, and then it was gone again. ‘I saw it,’ I called, but Peter wasn’t listening to me. He was moving straight toward the front door. And anyway, I realized, he hadn’t been looking upstairs.
‘What the hell’s he doing?’ Kelly said as she strolled past me, but she didn’t stop for an answer. Jenny did, though.
‘Andrew, what’s going on?’ she said, and I looked at her eyes, green and shadowy as the grass, but that just made me edgier still.
I shook my head. For a moment, Jenny stood beside me. Finally, she shrugged and followed her sister. None of them looked back, which meant, I thought, that there really hadn’t been rustling behind us just now, back in the pines. When I whipped my head around, I saw nothing but trees and twitching shadows.
‘Here, puss-puss-puss,’ Peter called softly. If the grass had been less wet and I’d been less unsettled, I’d have flopped on my back and flipped my feet in the air at him, the seal’s send-off. Instead, I came forward.
The house, like the sheds, seemed to have sunk sideways into the ground. With its filthy windows and rotting planks, it looked like the abandoned hull of a beached ship. Around it, the leafless branches of the dwarf trees danced like the limbs of paper skeletons.
‘Now, class,’ said Peter, still very quietly. ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’
‘I assume you mean other than giant bells, weird eyeballs in the grass, empty sheds, and these whammy-ass trees,’ Kelly said, but Peter ignored her.
‘He means the front door,’ said Jenny, and of course she was right.
I don’t even know how Peter noticed. It was under an overhang, so that the only light that reached it reflected off the ground. But there was no doubt. The door was open. Six inches, tops. The scratched brass of the knob glinted dully, like an eye.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So the door didn’t catch when he went in, and he didn’t notice.’
‘When who went in?’ said Peter, mocking. ‘Thought you said he moved.’
The wind kicked up, and the door glided back another few inches, then sucked itself shut with a click.
‘Guess that settles that,’ I said, knowing it didn’t even before the curtains came streaming out the single front window, grey and gauzy as cigarette smoke as they floated on the breeze. They hung there a few seconds, then glided to rest against the side of the house when the wind expired.
‘Guess it does,’ said Peter softly, and he marched straight up the steps, pushed open the door, and disappeared into the Paars house.
None of the rest of us moved or spoke. Around us, tree-branches tapped against each other, the side of the house. For the second time I sensed someone behind me and spun around. Night-dew sparkled in the lawn like broken glass, and one of the shadows of the towering pines seemed to shiver back, as though the trees had inhaled it. Otherwise, there was nothing. I thought about Mr Paars, that dog-head cane with its silver fangs.
‘What’s he trying to prove?’ Kelly asked, a silly question where Peter was concerned, really. It wasn’t about proving. We all knew that.
Jenny said, ‘He’s been in there a long time,’ and Peter stuck his head out the window, the curtain floating away from him.
‘Come see this,’ he said, and ducked back inside.
Hesitating, I knew, was pointless. We all knew it. We went up the stairs together, and the door drifted open before we even touched it. ‘Wow,’ said Kelly staring straight ahead, and Jenny took my hand again, and then we were all inside. ‘Wow,’ Kelly said again.
Except for a long, wooden table folded and propped against the staircase like a lifeboat, all the furniture we could see had been draped in white sheets. The sheets rose and rearranged themselves in the breeze, which was constant and everywhere, because all the windows had been flung wide open. Leaves chased each other across the dirt-crusted hardwood floor, and scraps of paper flapped in mid-air like giant moths before settling on the staircase or the backs of chairs or blowing out the windows.
Peter appeared in a doorway across the foyer from us, his black hair bright against the deeper blackness of the rooms behind him. ‘Don’t miss the den,’ he said. ‘I’m going to go look at the kitchen.’ Then he was gone again.
Kelly had started away now, too, wandering into the living room to our right, running her fingers over the tops of a covered couch as she passed it. One of the paintings on the wall, I noticed, had been covered rather than removed, and I wondered what it was. Kelly drew up the cover, peered beneath it, then dropped it and stepped deeper into the house. I started to follow, but Jenny pulled me the other way, and we went left into what must have been Mr Paars’s den.
‘Whoa,’ Jenny said, and her fingers slid between mine and tightened.
In the dead center of the room, amidst discarded file folders that lay where they’d been tossed and empty en
velopes with plastic address windows that flapped and chattered when the wind filled them, sat an enormous oak rolltop desk. The top was gone, broken away, and it lay against the room’s lone window like the cracked shell of a dinosaur egg. On the surface of the desk, in black felt frames, a set of six photographs had been arranged in a semicircle.
‘It’s like the top of a tombstone,’ Jenny murmured. ‘You know what I mean? Like a . . . what do you call it?’
‘Family vault,’ I said. ‘Mausoleum.’
‘One of those.’
Somehow, the fact that two of the frames turned out to be empty made the array even more unsettling. The other four held individual pictures of what had to be brothers and one sister - they all had flying white hair, razor-blue eyes - standing, each in turn, on the top step of the gazebo outside, with the great bell looming behind them, bright white and all out of proportion, like the Mountain on a too-clear day.
‘Andrew,’ Jenny said, her voice nearly a whisper, and in spite of the faces in the photographs and the room we were in, I felt it all over me. ‘Why Struwwelpeter?’
‘What?’ I said, mostly just to make her speak again.
‘Struwwelpeter. Why does Mr Andersz call him that?’
‘Oh. It’s from some kids’ book. My mom actually had it when she was little. She said it was about some boy who got in trouble because he wouldn’t cut his hair or cut his nails.’
Jenny narrowed her eyes. ‘What does that have to do with anything?’
‘I don’t know. Except my mom said the pictures in the book were really scary. She said Struwwelpeter looked like Freddy Krueger with a ‘fro.’
Jenny burst out laughing, but she stopped fast. Neither of us, I think, liked the way laughter sounded in that room, in that house, with those black-bordered faces staring at us. ‘Struwwelpeter,’ she said, rolling the name carefully on her tongue, like a little kid daring to lick a frozen flagpole.
‘It’s what my mom called me when I was little,’ said Peter from the doorway, and Jenny’s fingers clenched hard and then fell free of mine. Peter didn’t move toward us. He just stood there while we watched, paralyzed. After a few long seconds, he added, ‘When I kicked the shit out of barbers, because I hated having my hair cut. Then when I was just being bad. She’d say that instead of screaming at me. It made me cry.’ From across the foyer, in the living room, maybe, we heard a single, soft bump, as though something had fallen over.
With a shrug, Peter released us and stepped past us back into the foyer. We followed, not touching now, not even looking at each other. I felt guilty, amazed, strange. When we passed the windows the curtains billowed up and brushed across us.
‘Hey, Kelly,’ Peter whispered loudly into the living room. He whispered it again, then abruptly turned our way and said, ‘You think he’s dead?’
‘Looks like it,’ I answered, glancing down the hallway toward the kitchen, into the shadows in the living room, which seemed to have shifted, somehow, the sheet some way different as it lay across the couch. I couldn’t place the feeling, it was like watching an actor playing a corpse, knowing he was alive, trying to catch him breathing.
‘But the car’s here,’ Peter said. ‘The Lincoln. Hey, Kelly!’ His shout made me wince, and Jenny cringed back toward the front door, but she shouted, too.
‘Kell? Kelly
‘Oh, what is that?’ I murmured, my whole spine twitching like a severed electrical wire, and when Jenny and Peter looked at me, I pointed upstairs.
‘Wh—’ Jenny started, and then it happened again, and both of them saw it. From under the half-closed door at the top of the staircase - the only door we could see from where we were - came a sudden slash of light which disappeared instantly, like a snake’s tongue flashing in and out.
We stood there at least a minute, maybe more. Even Peter looked uncertain, not scared, quite, but something had happened to his face. I couldn’t place it right then. It made me nervous, though. And it made me like him more than I had in a long, long time.
Then, without warning, Peter was halfway up the stairs, his feet stomping dust out of each step as he slammed them down, saying, ‘Fucking hilarious, Kelly. Here I come. Ready or not.’ He stopped halfway up and turned to glare at us. Mostly at me. ‘Come on.’
‘Let’s go,’ I said to Jenny, reached out on my own for the first time and touched her elbow, but to my surprise she jerked it away from me. ‘Jenny, she’s up there.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she whispered.
‘Come on,’ Peter hissed.
‘Andrew, something’s wrong. Stay here.’
I looked into her face, smart, steely Jenny Mack, first girl ever to look at me like that, first girl I’d ever wanted to, and right then, for the only time in my life, I felt - within me - the horrible thrill of Peter’s power, knew the secret of it. It wasn’t bravery and it wasn’t smarts, although he had both those things in spades. It was simply the willingness to trade. At any given moment, Peter Andersz would trade anyone for anything, or at least could convince people that he would. Knowing you could do that, I thought, would be like holding a grenade, tossing it back and forth in the terrified face of the world.
I looked at Jenny’s eyes, filling with tears, and I wanted to kiss her, though I couldn’t even imagine how to initiate something like that. What I said, in my best Peter-voice, was, ‘I’m going upstairs. Coming or staying?’
I can’t explain. I didn’t mean anything. It felt like playacting, no more real than holding her hand had been. We were just throwing on costumes, dancing around each other, scaring each other. Trick or treat.
‘Kelly?’ Jenny called past me, blinking, crying openly, now, and I started to reach for her again, and she shoved me, hard, toward the stairs.
‘Hurry up,’ said Peter, with none of the triumph I might have expected in his voice.
I went up, and we clumped, side by side, to the top of the stairs. When we reached the landing, I looked back at Jenny. She was propped in the front door, one hand on the doorknob and the other wiping at her eyes as she jerked her head from side to side, looking for her sister.
At our feet, light licked under the door again. Peter held up a hand, and we stood together and listened. We heard wind, low and hungry, and now I was sure I could hear the Sound lapping against the edge of the continent, crawling over the lip of it.
‘OnetwothreeBoo!’ Peter screamed and flung open the door, which banged against a wall inside and bounced back. Peter kicked it open again, and we lunged through into what must have been a bedroom, once, and was now just a room, a blank space, with nothing in it at all.
Even before the light swept over us again, from outside, from the window, I realized what it was. ‘Lighthouse,’ I said, breathless. ‘Greenpoint Light.’
Peter grinned. ‘Oh, yeah. Halloween.’
Every year, the suburbs north of us set Greenpoint Light running again on Halloween, just for fun. One year, they’d even rented ferries and decked them out with seaweed and parents in pirate costumes and floated them just offshore, ghost-ships for the kiddies. We’d seen them skirting our suburb on their way up the coast.
‘Do you think—’ I started, and Peter grabbed me hard by the elbow. ‘Ow,’ I said.
‘Listen,’ snapped Peter.
I heard the house groan as it shifted. I heard paper flapping somewhere downstairs, the front door tapping against its frame or the inside wall as it swung on the wind.
‘Listen,’ Peter whispered, and this time I heard it. Very low. Very faint, like a finger rubbed along the lip of a glass, but unmistakable once you realized what it was. Outside, in the yard, someone had just lifted the tongue of the bell and tapped it, oh so gently, against the side.
I stared at Peter, and he stared back. Then he leaped to the window, peering down. I thought he was going to punch the glass loose from the way his shoulders jerked.
‘Well?’ I said.
‘All I can see is the roof.’ He shoved the window even further open than it
already was. ‘Clever girls!” he screamed, and waited, for laughter, maybe, a full-on bong of the bell, something. Abruptly, he turned to me, and the light rolled across him, waist-high, and when it receded, he looked different, damp with it. ‘Clever girls,’ he said.
I whirled, stepped into the hall, looked down. The front door was open, and Jenny was gone. ‘Peter?’ I whispered, and I heard him swear as he emerged onto the landing beside me. ‘You think they’re outside?’
Peter didn’t answer right away. He had his hands jammed in his pockets, his gaze cast down at the floor. He shuffled in place. ‘The thing is, Andrew,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing to do.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘There’s nothing to do.’
‘Find the girls?’
He shrugged.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 13 - [Anthology] Page 55
