His hand tightened even more and the soft grinding of bone became sharper. A splintery sound.
“You delight in thinking that you’re evil,” whispered Mr. Pockets. “But evil itself is a newborn concept. It was born when a brother killed a brother with a rock. And that was minutes ago in the way real time is counted. Evil? It’s a game that children play.”
He pulled her closer still so that his lips brushed hers as he spoke.
“You think you’re powerful because monsters are supposed to be powerful. But, oh, my little child, only now, I think, do you grasp what power really is.”
“…please…” croaked Mrs. Conner.
Lefty’s bladder went then. Heat spread beneath his clothes, but he didn’t care.
“You think you understand hunger,” murmured Mr. Pockets as gently as if he spoke to a lover. “No. Not with all of your aching red need do you understand hunger.”
Then Mr. Pockets opened his mouth.
Lefty watched him do it.
He lay there and watched that mouth open.
And open.
And open.
So wide.
So many white, white teeth.
Row upon row of them, standing in curved lines that stretched back and back into a throat that did not end. A throat of teeth that was as long as forever. Mrs. Conner screamed a great, terrible, silent scream. Absolute terror galvanized her; her legs and arms flailed wildly as Mr. Pockets pulled her closer and closer toward those teeth.
As Lefty Horrigan lay there, weeping, choking on tears, pissing in his pants, he watched Mr. Pockets eat Mrs. Conner. He ate her whole. He ate her all up.
He swallowed her, housecoat and shoes and all.
The old man’s throat bulged once and then she was gone.
The world collapsed down into silence. Even the crickets of night were too shocked to move.
Lefty squeezed his eyes shut and waited for everything he was to die. To vanish, skin and bone, clothes and all, like Mrs. Conner.
He waited.
Waited.
The cold breeze ran past and across him.
And he waited to die.
-8-
When Lefty Horrigan opened his eyes, the yard was empty.
Just him and his bike.
The rotten, shattered apple lay where it had fallen, visible only as a pale lump in the thickening darkness.
Mr. Pockets was gone.
Even so, Lefty lay there for a long time. He didn’t know how long, but the moon was peering at him from above the mountains when he finally unwrapped his arms from around his head.
He got slowly to his feet. His knee and elbow hurt almost as much as the back of his head. The pee in his pants had turned cold.
He didn’t care about any of that.
The wind blew and blew and Lefty let it scrub the tears off his cheeks.
He limped toward the gate and opened it and bent to pick up his bike.
Something white and brown fluttered down by his feet, caught under the edge of one pedal. It snapped like plastic.
Lefty bent and picked it up. Straightened it out. Turned it over in his hands.
Read the word printed in blue letters on a white background on a brown wrapper.
Snickers.
There was only the smallest smudge of milk chocolate left on the inside of the wrapper.
Lefty looked at it, then he looked sharply left and right. He turned in a full circle. Waiting for the worst, waiting for the trick.
But it was just him and the night wind and the bike.
He looked at the wrapper and almost—almost—opened his fingers to let it go.
He didn’t though.
Instead he bent and licked off the chocolate smudge. Then he folded the wrapper very neatly and put it into his pocket.
He wasn’t sure why he’d taken that taste. It was a weird, stupid thing to do.
Or maybe it was something else.
A way of saying something in a language he couldn’t speak in words. And a way of expressing a feeling that he knew he would never be able to really understand.
He patted the pocket where he’d stored the wrapper. A little pat-a-pat.
Then Lefty Horrigan stood his bike up, got onto it, and wet, cold, sore and dazed, he pedaled away.
Through the darkness.
All the way home.
Author’s Note on “Property Condemned”
Although this is the third Pine Deep story included in this collection, it is unique in three important ways. Firstly because it is a prequel, of sorts, to the Pine Deep Trilogy. Second, because it was the first Pine Deep story I ever wrote. And third, because it was the lead story in the first issue of a wonderful horror webzine, Nightmare Magazine, edited by my friend John Joseph Adams.
Nightmare Magazine is a horror companion to John’s award-winning Lightspeed science fiction e-zine. I encourage you to try both of them. And in the meantime, welcome once more to Pine Deep.
Property Condemned
-1-
The house was occupied, but no one lived there.
That’s how Malcolm Crow thought about it. Houses like the Croft place were never really empty.
Like most of the kids in Pine Deep, Crow knew that there were ghosts. Even the tourists knew about the ghosts. It was that kind of town.
All of the tourist brochures of the town had pictures of ghosts on them. Happy, smiling, Casper the Friendly Ghost sorts of ghosts. Every store in town had a rack of books about the ghosts of Pine Deep. Crow had every one of those books. He couldn’t braille his way through a basic geometry test or recite the U.S. Presidents in any reliable order, but he knew about shades and crisis apparitions, church grims and banshees, crossroads ghosts and poltergeists. He read every story and historical account; saw every movie he could afford to see. Every once in a while Crow would even risk one of his father’s frequent beatings to sneak out of bed and tiptoe down to the basement to watch Double Chiller Theater on the flickering old Emerson. If his dad caught him and took a belt to him, it was okay as long as Crow managed to see at least one good spook flick.
Besides, beatings were nothing to Crow. At nine years old he’d had so many that they’d lost a lot of their novelty.
It was the ghosts that mattered. Crow would give a lot—maybe everything he had in this world—to actually meet a ghost. That would be…well, Crow didn’t know what it would be. Not exactly. Fun didn’t seem to be the right word. Maybe what he really wanted was proof. He worried about that. About wanting proof that something existed beyond the world he knew.
He believed that he believed, but he wasn’t sure that he was right about it. That he was aware of this inconsistency only tightened the knots. And fueled his need.
His hunger.
Ghosts mattered to Malcolm Crow because whatever they were, they clearly outlasted whatever had killed them. Disease, murder, suicide, war, brutality…abuse. The cause of their deaths was over, but they had survived. That’s why Crow wasn’t scared of ghosts. What frightened him—deep down on a level where feelings had no specific structure—was the possibility that they might not exist. That this world was all that there was.
And the Croft house? That place was different. Crow had never worked up the nerve to go there. Almost nobody ever went out there. Nobody really talked about it, though everyone knew about it.
Crow made a point of visiting the other well-known haunted spots—the tourist spots—hoping to see a ghost. All he wanted was a glimpse. In one of his favorite books on hauntings, the writer said that a glimpse was what most people usually got. “Ghosts are elusive,” the author had written. “You don’t form a relationship with one, you’re lucky if you catch a glimpse out of the corner of your eye; but if you do, you’ll know it for what it is. One glimpse can last you a lifetime.”
So far, Crow had not seen or even heard a single ghost. Not one cold spot, not a single whisper of old breath, not a hint of something darting away out of the corner of his eye. Nothing, zilch
. Nada.
However, he had never gone into the Croft place.
Until today.
Crow touched the front pocket of his jeans to feel the outline of his lucky stone. Still there. It made him smile.
Maybe now he’d finally get to see a ghost.
-2-
They pedaled through dappled sunlight, sometimes four abreast, sometimes in single file when the trail dwindled down to a crooked deerpath. Crow knew the way to the Croft place and he was always out front, though he liked it best when Val Guthrie rode beside him. As they bumped over hard-packed dirt and whispered through uncut summer grass, Crow cut frequent covert looks at Val.
Val was amazing. Beautiful. She rode straight and alert on her pink Huffy, pumping the pedals with purple sneakers. Hair as glossy black as crow feathers, tied in a bouncing ponytail. Dark blue eyes, and a serious mouth. Crow made it his life work to coax a smile out of her at least once a day. It was hard work, but worth it.
The deerpath spilled out onto an old forestry service road that allowed them once more to fan out into a line. Val caught up and fell in beside him on the left, and almost at once Terry and Stick raced each other to be first on the right. Terry and Stick were always racing, always daring each other, always trying to prove who was best, fastest, smartest, strongest. Terry always won the strongest part.
“The Four Horsemen ride!” bellowed Stick, his voice breaking so loudly that they all cracked up. Stick didn’t mind his voice cracking. There was a fifty cent bet that he’d have his grown up voice before Terry. Crow privately agreed. Despite his size, Terry had a high voice that always sounded like his nose was full of snot.
Up ahead the road forked, splitting off toward the ranger station on the right and a weedy path on the left. On the left-hand side, a sign leaned drunkenly toward them.
PRIVATE PROPERTY
NO ADMITTANCE
TRESPASSERS WILL BE
That was all of it. The rest of the sign had been pinged off by bullet holes over the years. It was a thing to do. You shot the sign to the Croft place to show that you weren’t afraid. Crow tried to make sense of that, but there wasn’t any end to the string of logic.
He turned to Val with a grin. “Almost there.”
“Oooo, spooky!” said Stick, lowering the bill of his Phillies ball-cap to cast his face in shadows.
Val nodded. No smile. No flash of panic. Only a nod. Crow wondered if Val was bored, interested, skeptical, or scared. With her you couldn’t tell. She had enough Lenape blood to give her that stone face. Her mom was like that, too. Not her dad, though. Mr. Guthrie was always laughing, and Crow suspected that he, too, had a lifelong mission that involved putting smiles on the faces of the Guthrie women.
Crow said, “It won’t be too bad.”
Val shrugged. “It’s just a house.” She leaned a little heavier on the word “just” every time she said that, and she’d been doing that ever since Crow suggested they come out here. Just a house.
Crow fumbled for a comeback that would chip some of the ice off of those words, but as he so often did, he failed.
It was Terry Wolfe who came to his aide. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, Val, you keep saying that but I’ll bet you’ll chicken out before we even get onto the porch.”
Terry liked Val, too, but he spent a lot of time putting her down and making fun of whatever she said. Though, if any of that actually hurt Val, Crow couldn’t see it. Val was like that. She didn’t show a thing. Even when that jerk Vic Wingate pushed her and knocked her down in the schoolyard last April, Val hadn’t yelled, hadn’t cried. All she did was get up, walk over to Vic and wipe the blood from her scraped palms on his shirt. Then, as Vic started calling her words that Crow had only heard his dad ever use when he was really hammered, Val turned and walked away like it was a normal spring day.
So Terry’s sarcasm didn’t make a dent.
Terry and Stick immediately launched into the Addams Family theme-song loud enough to scare the birds from the trees.
A startled doe dashed in blind panic across their path and Stick tracked it with his index finger and dropped his thumb like a hammer.
“Pow!”
Val gave him a withering look, but she didn’t say anything.
“…So get a witch's shawl on, a broomstick you can crawl on…”
They rounded the corner and skidded to a stop, one, two, three, four. Dust plumes rose behind them like ghosts and drifted away on a breeze as if fleeing from this place. The rest of the song dwindled to dust on their tongues.
It stood there.
The Croft house.
-3-
The place even looked haunted.
Three stories tall, with all sorts of angles jutting out for no particular reason. Gray shingles hung crookedly from their nails. The windows were dark and grimed, some were broken out. Most of the storm shutters were closed, but a few hung open and one lay half-buried in a dead rosebush. Missing slats in the porch railing gave it a gap-toothed grin. Like a jack o’lantern. Like a skull.
On any other house, Crow would have loved that. He would have appreciated the attention to detail.
But his dry lips did not want to smile.
Four massive willows, old and twisted by rot and disease, towered over the place, their long fingers bare of leaves even in the flush of summer. The rest of the forest stood back from the house as if unwilling to draw any nearer. Like people standing around a coffin, Crow thought.
His fingers traced the outline of the lucky stone in his jeans pocket.
“Jeeeez,” said Stick softly.
“Holy moley,” agreed Terry.
Val said, “It’s just a house.”
Without turning to her, Terry said, “You keep saying that, Val, but I don’t see you running up onto the porch.”
Val’s head swiveled around like a praying mantis’s and she skewered Terry with her blue eyes. “And when exactly was the last time you had the guts to even come here, Terrance Henry Wolfe? Oh, what was that? Never? What about you, George Stickler?”
“Crow hasn’t been here either,” said Stick defensively.
“I know. Apparently three of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are sissies.”
“Whoa, now!” growled Terry, swinging his leg off his bike. “There’s a lot of places we haven’t been. You haven’t been here, either, does that make you a sissy, too?”
“I don’t need to come to a crappy old house to try and prove anything,” she fired back. “I thought we were out riding bikes.”
“Yeah, but we’re here now,” persisted Terry, “so why don’t you show everyone how tough you are and go up on the porch?”
Val sat astride her pink Huffy, feet on the ground, hands on the rubber grips. “You’re the one trying to prove something. Let’s see you go first.”
Terry’s ice-blue eyes slid away from hers. “I never said I wanted to go in.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“I’m just saying that you’re the one who’s always saying there’s no such thing as haunted houses, but you’re still scared to go up there.”
“Who said I was scared?” Val snapped.
“You’re saying you’re not?” asked Terry.
Crow and Stick watched this exchange like spectators at a tennis match. They both kept all expression off their faces, well aware of how far Val could be pushed. Terry was getting really close to that line.
“Everyone’s too scared to go in there,” Terry said, “and—”
“And what?” she demanded.
“And…I guess nobody should.”
“Oh, chicken poop. It’s just a stupid old house.”
Terry folded his arms. “Yeah, but I still don’t see you on that porch.”
Val made a face, but didn’t reply. They all looked at the house. The old willows looked like withered trolls, bent with age and liable to do something nasty. The Croft house stood, half in shadows and half in sunlight.
Waiting.
It wants us to come in,
thought Crow, and he shivered.
“How do you know the place is really haunted?” asked Stick.
Terry punched him on the arm. “Everybody knows it’s haunted.”
“Yeah, okay, but…how?”
“Ask Mr. Halloween,” said Val. “He knows everything about this crap.”
They all looked at Crow. “It’s not crap,” he insisted. “C’mon, guys, this is Pine Deep. Everybody knows there are ghosts everywhere here.”
“You ever see one?” asked Stick, and for once there was no mockery in his voice. If anything, he looked a little spooked.
“No,” admitted Crow, “but a lot of people have. Jim Polk’s mom sees one all the time.”
They nodded. Mrs. Polk swore that she saw a partially formed figure of a woman in Colonial dress walking through the backyard. A few of the neighbors said they saw it, too.
“And Val’s dad said that Gus Bernhardt’s uncle Kurt was so scared by a poltergeist in his basement that he took to drinking.”
Kurt Bernhardt was a notorious drunk—worse than Crow’s father—and he used to be a town deputy until one day he got so drunk that he threw up on a town selectman while trying to write him a parking ticket.
“Dad used to go over to the Bernhardt place a lot,” said Val, “but he never saw any ghosts.”
“I heard that not everybody sees ghosts,” said Terry. He took a plastic comb out of his pocket and ran it through his hair, trying to look cool and casual, like there was no haunted house forty feet away.
“Yeah,” agreed Stick, “and I heard that people sometimes see different ghosts.”
“What do you mean ‘different ghosts’?” asked Val.
Stick shrugged. “Something my gran told me. She said that a hundred people can walk through the same haunted place, and most people won’t see a ghost because they can’t, and those who do will see their own ghost.”
Whistling Past the Graveyard Page 24
