Terrifying Tales to Tell at Night

by Stephen Jones

  So we’ll stop by and have a couple of beers and talk about the town and rag each other, and the pleasure’s just in shooting the breeze and it don’t really matter what’s said, just the fact that we’re all still there to say it.

  But Tom, he was different. We all remember the first time we saw him. It was a long hot summer like we haven’t seen in the ten years since, and we were lolling under the fans at Jack’s and complaining about the tourists. Kingstown does get its share in the summer, even though it’s not near the sea and we don’t have a McDonald’s and I’ll be damned if I can figure out why folk’ll go out of their way to see what’s just a quiet little town near some mountains. It was as hot as Hell that afternoon and as much as a man could do to sit in his shirtsleeves and drink the coolest beer he could find, and Jack’s is the coolest for us, and always will be, I guess.

  Then Tom walked in. His hair was already pretty white back then, and long, and his face was brown and tough with gray eyes like diamonds set in leather. He was dressed mainly in black with a long coat that made you hot just to look at it, but he looked comfortable like he carried his very own weather around with him and he was just fine.

  He got a beer, and sat down at a table and read the town Bugle, and that was that.

  It was special because there wasn’t anything special about it. Jack’s Bar isn’t exactly exclusive and we don’t all turn round and stare at anyone new if they come in, but that place is like a monument to shared times. If a tourist couple comes in out of the heat and sits down, nobody says anything—and maybe nobody even notices at the front of their mind—but it’s like there’s a little island of the alien in the water and the currents just don’t ebb and flow the way they usually do, if you get what I mean. Tom just walked in and sat down and it was all right because it was like he was there just like we were, and could’ve been for thirty years. He sat and read his paper like part of the same river, and everyone just carried on downstream the way they were.

  Pretty soon he goes up for another beer and a few of us got talking to him. We got his name and what he did—painting, he said—and after that it was just shooting the breeze. That quick. He came in that summer afternoon and just fell into the conversation like he’d been there all his life, and sometimes it was hard to imagine he hadn’t been. Nobody knew where he came from, or where he’d been, and there was something real quiet about him. A stillness, a man in a slightly different world. But he showed enough to get along real well with us, and a bunch of old friends don’t often let someone in like that.

  Anyway, he stayed that whole summer. Rented himself a place just round the corner from the square, or so he said: I never saw it. I guess no one did. He was a private man, private like a steel door with four bars and a couple of six-inch padlocks, and when he left the square at the end of the day he could have vanished as soon as he turned the corner for all we knew. But he always came from that direction in the morning, with his easel on his back and paint box under his arm, and he always wore that black coat like it was a part of him. But he always looked cool, and the funny thing was when you stood near him you could swear you felt cooler yourself. I remember Pete saying over a beer that it wouldn’t surprise him none if, assuming it ever rained again, Tom would walk round in his own column of dryness. He was just joking, of course, but Tom made you think things like that.

  Jack’s Bar looks right out onto the square, the kind of square towns don’t have much anymore: big and dusty with old roads out each corner, tall shops and houses on all the sides, and some stone paving in the middle round a fountain that ain’t worked in living memory. Well in the summer that old square is just full of out-of-towners in pink toweling jumpsuits and nasty jackets standing round saying “Wow” and taking pictures of our quaint old hall and our quaint old stores and even our quaint old selves if we stand still too long. Tom would sit out near the fountain and paint and those people would stand and watch for hours—but he didn’t paint the houses or the square or the old Picture House. He painted animals, and painted them like you’ve never seen. Birds with huge blue speckled wings and cats with cutting green eyes; and whatever he painted it looked like it was just coiled up on the canvas ready to fly away. He didn’t do them in their normal colors, they were all reds and purples and deep blues and greens—and yet they fair sparkled with life. It was a wonder to watch: he’d put up a fresh paper, sit looking at nothing in particular, then dip his brush into his paint and draw a line, maybe red, maybe blue. Then he’d add another, maybe the same color, maybe not. Stroke by stroke you could see the animal build up in front of your eyes and yet when it was finished you couldn’t believe it hadn’t always been there. When he’d finished he’d spray it with some stuff to fix the paints and put a price on it and you can believe me those paintings were sold before they hit the ground. Spreading businessmen from New Jersey or some such and their bored wives would come alive for maybe the first time in years, and walk away with one of those paintings and their arms round each other, looking like they’d found a bit of something they’d forgotten they’d lost.

  Come about six o’clock Tom would finish up and walk across to Jack’s, looking like a sailing ship among rowing boats and saying yes, he’d be back again tomorrow and yes, he’d be happy to do a painting for them. He’d get a beer and sit with us and watch the game and there’d be no paint on his fingers or his clothes, not a spot. I figured he’d got so much control over that paint it went where it was told and nowhere else.

  I asked him once how he could bear to let those paintings go. I know if I’d been able to make anything that good in my whole life I couldn’t let it out of my sight, I’d want to keep it to look at sometimes. He thought for a moment and then he said he believed it depends how much of yourself you’ve put into it. If you’ve gone deep down and pulled up what’s inside and put it down, then you don’t want to let it go: you want to keep it, so’s you can check sometimes that it’s still safely tied down. Comes a time when a painting’s so right and so good that it’s private, and no one’ll understand it except the man who put it down. Only he is going to know what he’s talking about. But the everyday paintings, well they were mainly just because he liked to paint animals, and liked for people to have them. He could only put a piece of himself into something he was going to sell, but they paid for the beers and I guess it’s like us fellows in Jack’s Bar: if you like talking, you don’t always have to be saying something important.

  Why animals? Well if you’d seen him with them I guess you wouldn’t have to ask. He loved them, is all, and they loved him right back. The cats were always his favorites. My old Pa used to say that cats weren’t nothing but sleeping machines put on the Earth to do some of the human’s sleeping for them, and whenever Tom worked in the square there’d always be a couple curled up near his feet. And whenever he did a chalk drawing, he’d always do a cat.

  Once in a while, you see, Tom seemed to get tired of painting on paper, and he’d get out some chalks and sit down on the baking flagstones and just do a drawing right there on the dusty rock. Now I’ve told you about his paintings, but these drawings were something else again. It was like because they couldn’t be bought but would be washed away, he was putting more of himself into it, doing more than just shooting the breeze. They were just chalk on dusty stone and they were still in these weird colors, but I tell you children wouldn’t walk near them because they looked so real, and they weren’t the only ones, either. People would stand a few feet back and stare and you could see the wonder in their eyes. If they could’ve been bought there were people who would have sold their houses. I’m telling you. And it’s a funny thing but a couple of times when I walked over to open the store up in the mornings I saw a dead bird or two on top of those drawings, almost like they had landed on it and been so terrified to find themselves right on top of a cat they’d dropped dead of fright. But they must have been dumped there by some real cat, of course, because some of those birds looked like they’d been mauled a bit. I used to t
hrow them in the bushes to tidy up and some of them were pretty broken up.

  Old Tom was a godsend to a lot of mothers that summer, who found they could leave their little ones by him: do their shopping in peace and have a soda with their friends and come back to find the kids still sitting quietly watching Tom paint. He didn’t mind them at all and would talk to them and make them laugh, and kids of that age laughing is one of the best sounds there is. It’s the kind of sound that makes the trees grow. They’re young and curious and the world spins round them and when they laugh the world seems a brighter place because it takes you back to the time when you knew no evil and everything was good, or if it wasn’t, it would be over by tomorrow.

  And here I guess I’ve finally come down to it, because there was one little boy who didn’t laugh much, but just sat quiet and watchful, and I guess he probably understands more of what happened that summer than any of us, though maybe not in words he could tell.

  His name was Billy McNeill, and he was Jim Valentine’s kid. Jim used to be a mechanic, worked with Ned up at the gas station and raced beat-up cars after hours. Which is why his kid is called McNeill now: one Sunday Jim took a corner a mite too fast and the car rolled and the gas tank caught and they never did find all the wheels. A year later his Mary married again. God alone knows why, her folks warned her, her friends warned her, but I guess love must just have been blind. Sam McNeill’s work schedule was at best pretty empty, and mostly he just drank and hung out with friends who maybe weren’t always this side of the law. I guess Mary had her own sad little miracle and got her sight back pretty soon, because it wasn’t long before Sam got free with his fists when the evenings got too long and he’d had a lot too many. You didn’t see Mary around much anymore. In these parts people tend to stare at black eyes on a woman, and a deaf man could hear the whisperings of “We Told Her So.”

  One morning Tom was sitting painting as usual, and little Billy was sitting watching him. Usually he just wandered off after a while but this morning Mary was at the doctor’s and she came over to collect him, walking quickly with her face lowered. But not low enough. I was watching from the store, it was kind of a slow day. Tom’s face never showed much. He was a man for a quiet smile and a raised eyebrow, but he looked shocked that morning. Mary’s eyes were puffed and purple and there was a cut on her cheek an inch long. I guess we’d sort of gotten used to seeing her like that and, if the truth be known, some of the wives thought she’d got remarried a bit on the soon side and I suppose we may all have been a bit cold toward her, Jim Valentine having been so well-liked and all.

  Tom looked from the little boy who never laughed much, to his mom with her tired, unhappy eyes and her beat-up face, and his own face went from shocked to stony and I can’t describe it any other way but that I felt a cold chill cross my heart from right across the square.

  But then he smiled and ruffled Billy’s hair and Mary took Billy’s hand and they went off. They turned back once and Tom was still looking after them and he gave Billy a little wave, and he waved back and mother and child smiled together.

  That night in Jack’s Tom put a quiet question about Mary and we told him the story. As he listened his face seemed to harden from within, his eyes growing flat and dead. We told him that old Lou Lachance, who lived next door to the McNeill’s, said that sometimes you could hear him shouting and her pleading till three in the morning and on still nights the sound of Billy crying for even longer than that. Told him it was a shame, but what could you do? Folks keep themselves out of other people’s faces round here, and I guess Sam and his drinking buddies didn’t have much to fear from nearly retireders like us anyhow. Told him it was a terrible thing, and none of us liked it, but these things happened and what could you do.

  Tom listened and didn’t say a word. Just sat there in his black coat and listened to us pass the buck. After a while the talk sort of petered out and we all sat and watched the bubbles in our beers. I guess the bottom line was that none of us had really thought about it much except as another chapter of small-town gossip, and did I feel ashamed about that by the time we’d finished telling it. Sitting there with Tom was no laughs at all. He had a real edge to him, and seemed more unknown than known that night. He stared at his laced fingers for a long time, and then he began, real slow, to talk.

  He’d been married once, he said, a long time ago, and he’d lived in a place called Stevensburg with his wife Rachel. When he talked about her the air seemed to go softer and we all sat quiet and supped our beers and remembered how it had been way back when we first loved our own wives. He talked of her smile and the look in her eyes and when we went home that night I guess there were a few wives who were surprised at how tight they got hugged, and who went to sleep in their husband’s arms feeling more loved and contented than they had in a long while.

  He’d loved her and she him and for a few years they were the happiest people on earth. Then a third party had got involved. Tom didn’t say his name, and he spoke real neutrally about him, but it was a gentleness like silk wrapped round a knife. Anyway his wife fell in love with him, or thought she had. As Tom spoke these words some of us looked up at him, startled, like we’d been slapped across the face.

  Rachel did what so many do and live to regret till their dying day. She was so mixed up and getting so much pressure from the other guy that she decided to plough on with the one mistake and make it the biggest in the world.

  She left Tom. He talked with her, pleaded even. It was almost impossible to imagine Tom ever doing that, but I guess the man we knew was a different guy from the one he was remembering. The pleading made no difference.

  And so Tom had to carry on living in Stevensburg, walking the same tracks, seeing them around, wondering if she was as free and easy with him, if the light in her eyes was shining on him now. And each time the man saw Tom he’d look straight at him and crease a little smile, a grin that said he knew about the pleading and he and his cronies had had a good laugh—and yes, I’m going home with your wife tonight and you want to compare notes?

  And then he’d turn and kiss Rachel on the mouth, his eyes on Tom, smiling. And she let him do it.

  It had kept gossiping old women in stories for weeks, the way Tom kept losing weight and his temper and the will to live. He took three months of it and then left without bothering to sell the house. Stevensburg was where he’d grown up and courted and loved and now wherever he turned the good times had rotted and hung like fly-blown corpses in all the cherished places. He’d never been back.

  It took an hour to tell, and then he stopped talking and Pete got us all some more beers. We were sitting sad and thoughtful, tired like we’d lived it ourselves. And I guess most of us had, some little bit of it. But had we ever loved anyone the way he’d loved her? I doubt it, not all of us put together. Pete set the beers down and Ned asked Tom why he hadn’t just beaten the living hell out of the guy. Now, no one else would have actually asked that, but Ned’s a good guy, and I guess we were all with him in feeling a piece of that oldest and most crushing hatred in the world, the hate of a man who’s lost the woman he loves to another, and we knew what Ned was saying. I’m not saying it’s a good thing and I know you’re not supposed to feel like that these days but show me a man who says he doesn’t and I’ll show you a liar. Love is the only feeling worth a tin nickel but you’ve got to know that it comes from both sides of a man’s character and the deeper it runs the darker the pools it draws from.

  My guess is he just hated the man too much to hit him. Comes a time when that isn’t enough, when nothing is ever going to be enough, and so you can’t do anything at all. And as he talked the pain just flowed out like a river that wasn’t ever going to be stopped, a river that had cut a channel through every corner of his soul. I learnt something that night that you can go your whole life without realizing: that there are things that can be done that can mess someone up so badly, for so long, that they just cannot be allowed; that there are some kinds of pain that you can
not suffer to be brought into the world.

  And then Tom was done telling and he raised a smile and said that in the end he hadn’t done anything to the man except paint him a picture, which I didn’t understand, but Tom looked like he’d talked all he was going to.

  So we got some more beers and shot some quiet pool before going home. But I guess we all knew what he’d been talking about.

  Billy McNeill was just a child. He should have been dancing through a world like a big funfair full of sunlight and sounds, and instead he went home at night and saw his mom being beaten up by a man with crap for brains who struck out at a good woman because he was too stupid to deal with the world. Most kids go to sleep thinking about bikes and climbing apple trees and skimming stones, and he was lying there hearing the shouting, and things breaking, and his mother quietly sobbing when it was over. Tom didn’t say any of that, but he did. And we knew he was right.

  The summer kept up bright and hot, and we all had our businesses to attend to. Jack sold a lot of beer and I sold a lot of ice cream (Sorry ma’am, just the three flavors, and no, Bubblegum Pistachio ain’t one of them) and Ned fixed a whole bunch of cracked radiators. Tom sat right out there in the square with a couple of cats by his feet and a crowd around him, magicking up animals in the sun.

  And I think that after that night Mary maybe got a few more smiles as she did her shopping, and maybe a few more wives stopped to talk to her. She looked a lot better too: Sam had a job by the sound of it and her face healed up pretty soon. You could often see her standing holding Billy’s hand as they watched Tom paint for a while before they went home. I think she realized they had a friend in him. Sometimes Billy was there all afternoon, and he was happy there in the sun by Tom’s feet and oftentimes he’d pick up a piece of chalk and sit scrawling on the pavement. Sometimes I’d see Tom lean over and say something to him and he’d look up and smile a simple child’s smile that beamed in the sunlight. The tourists kept coming and the sun kept shining and it was one of those summers that go on forever and stick in a child’s mind and tell you what summer should be like for the rest of your life. And I’m damn sure it sticks in Billy’s mind, just like it does in all of ours.