“You always say that,” he said, not lifting his eyes from his book. Then, thinking back, he reconsidered. “Why?”
“Just now a cat brushed against my leg.”
“And?”
“And nothing was there.”
He sat up. “Where did this happen?”
“Outside. I was raking leaves.”
Scott was silent a long, still time.
“Think I’m crazy?” Emily asked.
“No. No, I don’t. That cat we fed a few weeks ago—it’s… it’s… I think it’s a…”
He couldn’t bring himself to say the word.
“I’ve been feeding it,” he said instead. “I didn’t tell you because you were upset about it before. I’ve never seen it, even after two weeks. And I should have. But it was never there. Or it was there, but… oh hell, you get my drift.”
Emily went to the window and stared hard into the cold evening.
“You mad at me?” Scott asked.
“Yes,” she said immediately, then turned. “Be sure to put out more food tonight. But put it in the parlor.”
“Inside the house?”
“Inside the house,” she repeated.
* * * * *
In the morning the food was gone.
The following evening something stepped up onto Emily’s legs and into her lap so gently she wasn’t even startled. For the next hour she sat with a rare smile on her face, watching television and petting the warm, invisible motor engine that rumbled contentedly on her lap.
“Why?” she asked later that night.
“I don’t know,” Scott said, although he was beginning to think he did. “The purring… does it sound familiar?”
“I don’t know. It just sounds like a cat.”
He looked at Emily for a long time. She sighed under his gaze.
“It sounds like Hider,” she said finally.
Scott nodded. “He’s come back to us.”
“But why?” Emily’s eyes welled, springs long dry replenished now, suddenly, in the eleventh hour.
“Because we cared for him when no one else would,” said Jacob.
“But he cried and cried by the door, and we didn’t let him in!”
“Yes… and we always went out to see him instead. It was enough. And now he’s finally inside. That’s all we really need to know. And I haven’t sneezed once.”
The room, suddenly warm, brought sleep quickly, and as it took them both they felt the mattress shift as something small and soft lay down between them. And they knew, as sleep gave way to dreams, that for all the winters that followed they would never feel the sting of ice or the oppression of gray skies again.
“Welcome,” Scott murmured, rolling over.
“Welcome home,” Emily said, and took his hand.
Armistice Day
He was 109 years old, and breathed like a brittle leaf harried by cold wind. Lungs rattled, moth-wing ears twitched, and hair like spider silk downed the crown of his head as dreams roved his mind like trenchant guards.
“Mr. Farnon is fading.” A hospital attendant named Ainsworth looked at the doctor’s chart by the foot of the old man’s bed and clucked his tongue. His on-duty partner, Brian Holdman, crossed his arms in the doorway but did not approach. Behind Holdman the halls were shadowed and silenced by midnight, a distant life support machine the only sound that broke the Witching Hour’s calm. Even so, Ainsworth felt uneasy, as if some terrible catastrophe was about to come crashing down on them like an irrepressible wave.
“Come away from there,” Holdman said. “He’s not to be bothered.”
Slowly, looking back over his shoulder several times, Ainsworth did as Holdman said. He closed the door quietly behind them as they left.
In the attendant lounge, Ainsworth took a sip of his Coke and shook his head. “The reporters have been gathering like vultures. Just this morning he granted an interview, can you believe it? Newsweek, I think. But that took it out of him. Doc Jordan said no more, but I don’t think he could give another anyway.”
Holdman snorted through a bite of ham sandwich. “I don’t see what the big deal is. He’s old, and he’s going to die, and that’s the way of things. That happens to lots of people without all this fuss.”
“But he’s the last,” said Ainsworth. “The final one. Fourteen million men fought in World War I, and they’re all gone now. All except him.”
“I know, I know, you keep saying that. It had to happen sometime.”
Ainsworth shook his head. For a moment he seriously considered punching Holdman in the eye. That, he figured, would get through to him better than anything else he could do. But instead he said, very quietly, “I want you to imagine something. Can you do that, Holdman?”
Holdman muttered something unintelligible.
“Close your eyes,” said Ainsworth, and closed his own without waiting to see if Holdman complied.
“I want you to picture,” he continued, “Yankee Stadium on a packed fall day. Now imagine two hundred packed Yankee Stadiums. That’s how many people fought in World War I.”
Silence from Holdman.
“Now imagine the front lines of the trenches, like Wilfred Owen described in his poems.”
“Who?” asked Holdman.
“Imagine ‘No-Man’s Land,’ bodies rotting in the sun and rain, yellow pools of toxic sludge filling up around them, men watching the carrion birds from deep-dug trenches laced with barbed wire, and machine guns popping dull and thick without any rhythm, incessantly, all day and into the night. The charges. The disease. Biplanes scattering men like ants…Mr. Farnon saw it all. When he dies …”
Ainsworth opened his eyes. Holdman was gone.
He walked back down to Mr. Farnon’s room and stood outside the closed door for a long time.
When he dies, Ainsworth continued silently, fourteen million men die with him a second time. Every single one of them becomes a second-hand story … or, worse, nothing. Not even a name in a faded ledger. He keeps them alive, all of them, in that egg-shell fragile body. Even the ones he never saw or met. Because he breathed their air, drank their drinks, shared their world…
When he dies, Ainsworth thought on, a generation winks out of existence. When his eyes close for the last time, no one will ever again look into eyes that saw the first tanks trundle across the blasted fields of the Somme. When his mouth shuts for good, no one will ever again hear a voice that shouted up at the Red Baron as he flashed overhead, a hated, dazzling streak of lethal elegance.
He opened the door to Mr. Farnon’s room quietly, carefully, and sat down gingerly on the edge of the old man’s bed.
Ainsworth wanted to ask Mr. Farnon a question. Very badly, he wanted that. As far as he knew, no reporter had ever asked it before. Even if one had, Ainsworth didn’t care. He wanted to hear it from the man himself.
The question he wanted to ask was, “What was it like at the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month? When you were eighteen years old and the guns went silent?”
But he hadn’t the heart to wake Mr. Farnon. There are some lines that even the deepest desires shouldn’t cross.
Without a word, Ainsworth stood up and left the room, silent as a moth.
* * * * *
Just before dawn, Holdman popped his head in the door of the public bathroom where Ainsworth was washing his hands.
“Your friend just bought it,” he said simply, and ducked out again.
Ainsworth turned off the water and waited for the last drop to fall from the faucet. Then he left the bathroom and walked over to Mr. Farnon’s room a short way down the hall.
No one had arrived yet except for one doctor, who was now at the main desk making some hurried phone calls in a low voice.
Holdman stood beside Ainsworth and they both looked into the room, now completely shadowed, and at Mr. Farnon, now completely still.
Neither man said anything for a long time. Finally, Ainsworth spoke.
&nb
sp; “Hear that?” he asked quietly.
Holdman stared at him like he was crazy. “No, man, I don’t hear anything.”
“Silence,” Ainsworth said. Somewhere deep, a part of him had expected fourteen million voices to raise shouts against time, a thunderous barrage.
Holdman walked away, shaking his head.
“Complete and utter silence,” Ainsworth added.
“I wonder…” he finished, “…if that’s what it was like?”
Hollow’s End
The forest stretched across long-abandoned fields and deep red-rust valleys. It hedged back roads leading to lonely whitewashed houses and dipped through night streams that inhaled leaves and exhaled cold. As the sun sank and the day died, icy wind flowed down from the high October sky. Boughs creaked and clattered, a desolate cacophony that roused owls to flight and sent mice scurrying for shelter. And in a sunken field between two hills on the outskirts of a nestled country town, all darkness was doubled, all creatures red-eyed.
In one small house at the end of a thin dirt lane at the far end of that town, James Holt, ten years old, listened to the wind rattle skeletal bonewood trees and felt his blood run cold.
“James?” His father stepped into his bedroom and looked around. “Hey, champ, where are you?”
“Under the bed,” a soft voice replied.
Mr. Holt sat down on the bed while James crawled out. “Mom’s been calling you down to dinner for ten minutes. She’s going hoarse! What’s the problem?”
“Nothing.” At that moment an especially strong gust of wind gibbered through distant tree trunks and slammed against the windowpanes, insistent, clamoring. James gasped, jumped, and grabbed his father’s arm.
Mr. Holt smiled. “It’s the wind… that’s all, champ. Nothing but the wind.”
“No,” James said urgently. “It’s not the wind—It’s the hollow.”
Gently, Mr. Holt removed his arm from his son’s tight grip. “You still scared of the hollow?”
James nodded, wide-eyed and pale. “Even the wind is scared of it. The wind don’t scream until it reaches the hollow.”
“But you’re home, safe and sound! Bright lights, warm blankets, good food. Speaking of that… come on down for dinner. Mom’s pork chops are getting cold.”
James sighed and followed him down the stairs.
“Oh, hey!” His father turned. “I’m taking off early tomorrow. Wanna pick pumpkins after school?”
“Yeah, sure! But… but the pumpkin patch is through the hollow, Dad. You know that.”
“You went last year. And the year before. We do it every year.”
Mr. Holt looked at his son’s quavering lip and sighed.
“We’ll go while the sun’s still high in the sky.” And under his breath: “Also like we do every year.”
* * * * *
Even by day, the hollow was a dark place. Trees grew thicker in its cool depths, down in the gully between the steep hills of Old Man Turner’s far fields. Ancient trunks rose from loam made thick by a thousand years of fallen autumn leaves. Cobwebs laced across skeletal branches and strange things howled from the shadows of the inner forest where no one ever stepped. Rumor had it there were stone cottages lost among those shifting boughs, unseen since before the Civil War. In there, ghosts held court with murderers, and things that shouldn’t walk crept and slithered on the far edge of sideway sight.
“C’mon, Dad, let’s hurry.”
The thin dirt path cut through the trees like a scar. James walked it like a tightrope.
His father followed behind, pulling a small wagon. “There’s nothing to worry about, you know. I keep telling you but you don’t listen.”
James sighed. “You haven’t heard the stories.”
“Ha! I’ve heard ‘em all! This place is older than Grandpa by five hundred years. It looked the same when I was young.”
“OK then, you ever been deep in those trees?” A branch cracked in the distance and James shot a wide-eyed stare across the orange and red curtain of leaves.
His father shook his head. “Never. When I was your age we was scared, too. Then I grew up and never saw the point. Here we are.”
They stepped into a small, wheat-sifted glade beside an ancient, towering oak. Left over from some long-dead settler’s reclaimed fields, the pumpkin patch grew in coiled russet luxury beneath the lowest branches, its heavy orange blooms shockingly bright in the fading autumn sun.
Together, eager, they started the search.
But finding the right pumpkins took longer than expected. James wanted a thin, tall one and a fat, squat one – no rotten spots, no green streaks. By the time that was done, the sun, much to his surprised horror, had already begun to set.
“We’d better hurry,” he told his father as he raced to load the pumpkins onto the cart.
“What could happen? If some ol’ ghost comes after you, I’ll knock it on its head.”
James didn’t look convinced as they started back. By day, the hollow was a dark place. By night, even by twilight, it was a living shadow, a force to ice his spine and darken his dreams. As long as he could remember, its proximity to his house had impressed him… that something so mysterious, so dangerous, could exist so close to his life.
“Nothing to worry about,” his father added as they strode quickly through the encroaching gloom—James in front and impatient; he lingering behind, enjoying the evening.
It happened just moments later.
A freezing night wind rustled through dead leaves, bringing with it a cry to convulse stomachs and shudder spines. James stopped dead, heart rabbit-pounding, sitting prey to whatever might come.
“That sounded like a wolf,” he whispered.
His father shook his head. “There aren’t wolves around here. Not since Grandpa was a kid and they killed off the last of them. A dog. Old Man Turner’s hound.”
The howl rose and fell, buffeted by currents of air, distinctly close.
Then it faded, ceased, and silence settled… followed quickly by laughter, faint and distant. A child’s voice, somewhere in the dark trees where children never ventured.
“It’s the Crying Ghost!” James hissed, grabbing his father’s hand tight.
“Nothing but a cat,” Mr. Holt reassured him, but James knew better.
Why, he thought, is my father so blind?
* * * * *
Every day after supper the children gathered in the park. Between kick-the-can and catch, they huddled around red picnic tables and rope-board swing sets. Every year, when the first skeleton cutouts appeared in windows and the first Halloween Trees bloomed in yards, their conversations turned to the same thing.
“Grandpa says that sometimes a boy wearing old-fashioned clothes can be seen tramping around among the trees. Always at dusk. If you try following him, he leads you deeper and deeper in, always a dozen steps ahead, until he reaches an old stone well. Then he turns, and you finally see his face, only he don’t got no eyes. And he tries to grab you and drag you down into that ol’ well. Cause that’s where he died a hundred years ago.”
Ed Graybill nodded his head, confident in the truth of his story. The other children murmured, entranced, wide-eyed. James felt cold sweat bead his brow.
Brian Lumley took up Ed’s torch. “I heard there was a p’fessor who went hunting a rare spider back in there. Wanted it for a study. So he went lookin’ deep in, where no one goes, an’ found one of those old stone huts from back before the Revolution. It was as picture-perfect as the day it was left empty, only everything inside was full of spider webs. Floor to ceiling, corner to corner. An’ in the fireplace was the spider he was lookin’ for, only it was big as a dog, an’ all gray and furry, an’ in its webs was all kinds of things—birds an’ rats an’ rabbits an’ squirrels. An’ it made a start for him, so that p’fessor stumbled out, an’ when he came home his eyes was all wide an’ starey an’ he never spoke again.”
Murmurs. Then Sarah Fuller said, “If he never spoke again, ho
w we know what he saw?”
Brian rolled his eyes. “Cause he wrote it down, silly! An’ that’s why you don’t see many animals down in that hollow, an’ why so many’s pets go missing.”
“You ain’t gonna have to worry about that much longer.”
Everyone turned. One of the high school boys, Pete Gifford, stood beside the picnic table, hands in jeans, chewing a plug of tobacco.
“Whatta ya mean, Pete?” Brian asked.
He grinned, displaying stained teeth. “I mean that starting tomorrow, Heinz Construction is gonna bulldoze the hollow clear away. It’s got a new owner, and he wants to plant on that land.”
The children looked at one another in shocked amazement.
“They… they can’t do that,” Ed Graybill exclaimed.
Pete Gifford spit tobacco and straddled the picnic bench, forcing everyone else over. “They can do any damn thing they want… and what’s more, I’ll be running one of the dozers! After all these years, we’re gonna get to the root of all those dumb stories—then shovel over and bury every last trace of ‘em.”
He smirked, spat, got up, and loped away.
No one said anything for a long time. Then a few chimed up:
“I wanna be there to see that!”
“It’ll never happen… the hollow won’t let it happen.”
“I wonder what they’ll find?”
“Grownups ruin everything.”
But James kept silent, though his mind was a turbulent riot of joy and relief.
He smiled discreetly. And when it came time for dinner, he whistled past the entrance of the hollow without a second thought, stopping only long enough to notice the gleaming row of hulking chrome bulldozers lined up and ready to destroy.
“Your days,” he murmured at the ancient trees, “are numbered.”
* * * * *
Gone, he thought that night, no longer under his bed but in it.
Scaring the Crows Page 12
