Night Conjurings: Tales of Terror Page 3

  He did a reasonably competent job of backing out of the garage. Brad watched him turn onto the road and then went back in, got the butcher knife, and sat in the chair beside his aunt. Though she appeared to be asleep, he wondered if she’d heard Butch say he was going to push Earl’s truck into the ravine.

  His hands were no longer shaking, but now he began to sob uncontrollably. His shoulders shook and his throat was soon tight and sore with crying. He hoped he could get himself under control before his mother came back.

  He heard a whispering sound and saw his aunt’s lips moving. “Trouble,” she said very faintly. Her eyelids were shut but fluttering, and she kept saying the word over and over. “Trouble, trouble.”

  ***

  Aunt Jenny stopped whispering, and then there was only the sound of a fly buzzing against the lampshade. After a long time Brad heard his mother pull into the driveway. He wiped his wet face with his bandana, returned the knife to the kitchen, and went out to the car to help her carry in groceries.

  “Where’s Earl?” she asked, looking at the open garage door.

  “I don’t know.”

  He carried in some bags of groceries and started putting things in the refrigerator. There were packages of frozen lasagna for dinner, more pop, and several more bottles of wine. It looked as if the women were intending to feel no pain.

  “Where’s Butch?” Mother asked.

  “Outside I guess.”

  “Hey, cuz, bring me a bottle of pop,” Butch called through the screen door. He was sitting out there on the back stoop, as if he’d been there the whole time.

  “Get it yourself,” Brad said.

  He went back to the sickroom and sat beside his aunt until supper was ready. Butch was unusually cheerful and polite while he devoured his food and washed it down with cherry pop. He even asked Brad’s mother if her room was comfortable and said he was enjoying her visit and hoped she would continue to visit after his mother was gone.

  Brad knew he was trying to butter her up so she would adopt him, and he knew there was nothing he could do about it. He scarcely touched his lasagna, which looked too much like Earl’s mangled face. The women were pouring down plenty of wine again, and Katy soon pushed her plate aside and lit a cigarette so she could concentrate on her drinking.

  “It’s nice not having that asshole Earl around,” she said. “He must be in town getting drunk.”

  Butch smiled sweetly and said, “Why don’t I wash up them dishes while you ladies relax.”

  Brad said he was tired and went upstairs to Butch’s room. He lay down fully dressed on his air mattress and stared at the darkness, wondering what he should do. Though he’d barely slept the night before and was exhausted, he didn’t think he’d be able to sleep.

  But he soon drifted off and was still soundly asleep several hours later when a scream awoke him. He sat up, too terrified to move. There was enough moonlight coming through the window for him to see that Butch’s bed was empty, nothing there but the teddy bear staring at him. The woman was still screaming, and he couldn’t tell if it was Katy or his mother.

  He sat paralyzed with fear until the bedroom door burst open and Mother came rushing in. “I think there’s an intruder in the house. Are you all right, honey? Where’s Butch?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We need to barricade this door,” she said. She grabbed Butch’s chair, wedged it against the doorknob, and asked for his cellphone.

  Brad stood up, still fully dressed, and got it out of his shirt pocket. His mother’s hands were shaking so badly he had to dial 911 for her. She grabbed the phone and started whispering into it, as if afraid somebody in the house would overhear her, and her voice was so hoarse and hysterical that the operator kept making her repeat everything.

  “It’s horrible, horrible,” she was saying. “I got up to go to the bathroom, and her bedroom door was wide open, and there she was, laying on the floor in a pool of blood. It’s my niece Katy, I already told you that. Her throat’s been cut open and it looks like her whole body has bloody wounds all over it. It’s horrible, horrible.”

  While she was talking, Brad pulled the chair away from the knob and opened the door. He stuck his head into the hallway and yelled, “Butch! Where are you?”

  “I’m with my mother,” Butch replied, his voice coming from downstairs.

  “Butch, you have to let me and my mom go. She’s never hurt you in any way, and neither have I. I haven’t squealed, I swear I haven’t.”

  “Come down here, cuz, and we’ll talk about it,” Butch said.

  His mother was tugging at his arm, trying to pull him back into the bedroom, but she was so weak with fear he scarcely felt her. He stepped out into the hallway and crept slowly down the stairs, his mother behind him, pleading with him and trying to pull him back up.

  In the dim light of the living room lamp he saw Butch lying in his mother’s sickbed. Kadava was there too, lying naked between him and what was left of his mother. Her torso was ripped open from abdomen to sternum, and Kadava had one of her hands inside the carcass, reaching beneath the bare ribcage.

  Brad’s mother screamed, then sank into a chair and fell silent. From beneath Aunt Jenny’s ribcage, Kadava extracted a white slimy mass of flesh, and Brad realized it must be a tumor.

  She stared intently at Brad while she chewed it delicately, as if it were a gourmet treat. Her eyes looked just like Butch’s, like dark blue polished stones. She was larger now, as tall as Aunt Jenny. Her breasts had swelled, as if she were pregnant, and greenish yellow pus was seeping from their swollen nipples.

  Butch was lying on his side holding her like a lover as he watched her chew the tumor. “I’m gonna let you and your mother go,” he said. “But you better get outta here right now, ’fore I change my mind.”

  “The cops are coming,” Brad said.

  “I know, but it don’t matter now. I won’t be here. Kadava’s gonna take me with her. We’re gonna slip through the doorways of space and go someplace better.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To her world. Don’t worry ’bout me, cuz. Me and Kadava will be together, and that’s all I want. I love her.”

  Butch leaned his head down and began to suck the yellow pus seeping from her nipple.

  ***

  Brad’s mother was so faint he practically had to drag her to the car. They were halfway to Clarkton when they saw the sheriff’s car coming toward them, and Mother got it to stop by flashing her lights and honking. When the sheriff and his deputy arrived at the house, Kadava was no longer there, but Butch was. Lying in a fetal position in the cot beside his dead mother, he was quietly weeping.

  The next morning they found Earl’s remains out back. Though Brad claimed he knew nothing about how Earl died, he told the police about Kadava. Mother also told them she had seen “something” in the sickbed with Butch, though she wasn’t sure what.

  The police didn’t believe the stories about Kadava, and the coroner’s report stated the bite marks on all three bodies perfectly matched Butch’s jagged teeth. The papers labeled him the Cannibal Boy.

  While Butch was incarcerated in a juvenile facility awaiting trial, he somehow managed to get his hands on a wire coat hanger. He straightened out the wire and plunged it through one of his eyeballs deep into his brain.

  Despite everything, Brad felt sorry for him. Butch had believed Kadava would take him away with her, and they would slip like spirits through the doorways of space to a better world, but instead he had been abandoned by yet another parent.

  The Hess House

  The Hess house sat well off the narrow road, half-hidden behind trees. A large barn stood north of it, its tin roof sagging, and between them the ghost of a gravel driveway led from the road to a heap of wood and tin that had once been a garage. The yard was crabgrass, burdock, plantains, dandelions, milkweed, and plenty of tall thistles. A sprinkling of merry daisies looked out of place, like clowns at a funeral.

  The dense
leaves on the maples and oaks bathed the house in unrelieved shade; the only time it was touched by sunlight was in the winter, when the trees were bare, and now it was the middle of July. The asbestos siding had once been white but now was gray with grime, brown with water stains, and green with mold, which thrived in the sunless gloom.

  In front of the house an enormous dead elm stretched one skeletal arm over the steep roof while another limb, brought down by the hard winds of the previous winter, lay precariously on the roof on a bed of broken slate, waiting for a good gust to bring it crashing down onto the front porch roof one story below. But otherwise the roof looked sound, and the house was remarkably intact after more than four years of uninhabited neglect. The doors were still tightly shut and the windows unbroken.

  Crank wanted to take care of that, his dark eyes already searching for the best window to shatter first. His real name was Hank, but no one except teachers and parents called him that. He was ten months older than I, having turned fourteen on Christmas day, and though I was taller he looked years older, his narrow, meatless face already etched with sarcastic lines, his large hands callused like a man’s, his arms covered with black hairs, his lean muscles strong as cables and always ready for trouble.

  “Let’s wreck this dump,” he said.

  “He’ll see us,” I said, meaning the farmer who was pulling a hay rake with his tractor in the field behind the house. He was no more than a hundred yards away, and though we were hidden by trees and outbuildings he would probably see us when we bicycled away, if he hadn’t already.

  This was forty-five years ago, before the farmland started growing cheap houses instead of crops, and in those days most of the houses were a good half mile from their neighbors. Not many boys lived in the area, and the farmer might easily figure out who I was, since I lived just a few miles away.

  “Chicken shit,” Crank said.

  “It’s easy for you to make like some kind of big badass,” I said. “Since you live in town, nobody’s going to blame you for the busted windows.”

  “It’s not my fault you live out here in the sticks and have hog shit on your shoes,” he said.

  “If there’s hog shit on my shoes, you can lick it off.”

  “Fuck you, lick this,” he said. He unzipped his jeans, pulled out his man-sized cock, and waved it at me. “You can lick Uncle Cranky’s big crank, Peter peter-eater.”

  He let out a mean cackle and sent a thick stream of piss into a hydrangea bush a few inches from my foot. “Woops!” he cried, aiming the stream at me so I had to jump back to avoid it. Again he cackled, a familiar and horrible sound that he’d modeled after the wicked witch of the west or maybe Phyllis Diller. I could smell his piss steaming off the weeds.

  “I think you’re a queer,” I said. “I really do.”

  “Yeah?” He zipped his pants. “Well who’s the faggy-waggy afraid to break some windows?”

  He kicked a chunk of concrete loose from what was left of the sidewalk snaking through the yard. He picked it up and took aim at a side window.

  “Come on, man, you don’t live around here,” I said. “I’m the one who always gets his ass in trouble for your stupid shit. You get me grounded and then you run home and pick your dingle berries.”

  “Oh, poor widdle Peter might get grounded,” he mocked, but he let the chunk fall from his hand.

  I was relieved. The previous fall we had smashed at least half the windows in the Marlow house several miles south. But the Marlow house was rotting and empty, its back door hanging open so you could go inside and see that it had no mysteries to reveal.

  The Hess house was different. After all this time vacant, it still maintained the memory of being a home. It still had curtains and drapes hanging in the windows, and when we pressed our faces to the glass and peered past the curtains, we could see chairs, sofas, tables and bureaus smothered in shadows, as if shadows used the furniture now that the people were gone.

  But you couldn’t explain things like that to Crank, and I didn’t try. Instead I reached in my jeans pocket and pulled out a handful of skeleton keys.

  “Check it out,” I said.

  “Shit.” Crank sounded impressed. “Think those’ll work?”

  “Hey, I could open Fort Knox.”

  Keys were one of my interests. I’d found several skeleton keys at home, tucked away in drawers or in boxes of junk in the attic, and I’d augmented my collection by buying every type I could find in the five and dime stores. The door locks here were old and looked easy to open.

  I started with the front door, trying key after key, but none of them worked. We went to the kitchen door at the north side, and while I tried the keys Crank slid the wood cover from the cistern and looked inside.

  “Jesus H. Christ. Ugh. Filthy fucking slimy shit.”

  He cleared his throat and let loose a hawker into the hole. Then he went to the bulkhead cellar entrance just a few feet to the left of the door I was working on. The weathered wooden doors slanted from the top of the foundation out six feet into the yard. He tried to open them, but they wouldn’t budge, so he kicked them and swore.

  “Cover that cistern,” I said. “I don’t want to leave any signs we were here. Besides, some kid could fall in there and get killed.”

  He ignored me and lit a cigarette.

  “Hey, gimme one,” I said.

  “Fuck you. Say please.”

  “Come on, I need a smoke. This is hard work.”

  “Thought you were the big lock picker. Peter Peter, pecker picker. When he sees a prick he likes to lick ’er.”

  Another cackle, but he handed me a cigarette and lit it with his Zippo. He had the wick pulled so high the flame singed my nose. When I jerked my face away he snickered and said, “Your beak’s bigger than your face. It’d be an improvement to burn a few inches off.”

  We sat on the crumbling concrete steps and smoked. He must have stolen them from his mother because they were unfiltered Kools, as short as Camels with a narrow orange band at the lip end. I had learned to inhale milder cigarettes, but these were so harsh I had to be careful not to let the smoke go down my throat. I didn’t dare choke, or Crank would never let me forget it.

  “Nothing like a good smoke,” I said, feeling dizzy and half sick.

  A hot humid breeze picked up from the direction of the hayfield, and I could smell the fresh alfalfa the farmer was raking. Though his tractor was hidden from view by a shed, I could hear it in the distance at the far end of the field. It was an old one-cylinder John Deere, one deep-throated putt every second or so.

  “You gonna get this door open or not?” Crank asked.

  “I already tried all the keys.”

  “There’s another door.” He meant the one in back of the house, inside a closed-in back porch.

  “Can’t,” I said. “The farmer’d see us.”

  “Then I’m gonna break a window and climb in.”

  “Not to fear,” I said. I took a handkerchief from my jeans pocket and unfolded it to reveal my lock-picking tools: some pieces of bent coat hanger wire.

  Crank sneered and flicked his cigarette into the open cistern a few feet away. “What’s that crap supposed to be?”

  “It’s beyond your intellect.”

  I got up, tossed my cigarette, and inserted one of the wires through the keyhole to put tension on the bolt. I was fumbling with another wire when Crank said, “Listen. I hear a car.”

  I heard nothing except the old John Deere putt-putting in the distance. Then I heard it too, a car coming toward us from the north.

  “Shit!” Crank said.

  We ran to the barn, where our bikes were hidden. A door dangled open on the south end of the barn, hanging by one rusty hinge, and we both tried to squeeze past it at the same time. Inside, we rushed to the front and peered at the road through gaps in the gray siding, so weathered that the dry rot made me want to sneeze. The car moved slowly past us and disappeared around the bend to the south.

  The barn was s
tifling, dusty with hay chaff, everything caked with bird shit. Barn swallows made a fuss above us in the haylofts.

  “So you think you can open the door with those stupid wires?” Crank said.

  “Yep.”

  “You think you’re so fucking smart.”

  He sneered and turned his attention to an ancient hay wagon at the rear of the threshing floor. One of the wheels was off, lying on the floor, a big wooden wheel with a steel rim, the kind farmers used back in the days when horses pulled wagons. A couple of the wooden spokes were missing. Crank was tugging at the other wheel on that side, trying to make the wagon come slamming down, never happy unless he was breaking something.

  He’d had a dark and destructive personality even at ten years old, when his parents moved into the small town where I went to school. That’s why everyone called him Crank, though I can’t remember whether he’d come up with the name or someone else had pinned it on him. The first time he had ever stayed at my house, way back in fifth grade, we’d lain awake talking late into the night, and even then he was leading me into a view of the world as a dark enemy that would mangle you if you didn’t mangle it first.

  “I was flung into this goddamn world,” he’d said that night. “No one ever asked me if I wanted to be born, so I’m gonna do any damn thing I want.”

  And now he was trying to destroy an antique wagon that a museum would probably be happy to own. “Hey, gimme a hand here,” he said.

  “Asshole,” I said. “That wagon’ll fall on top of you. And then I’ll leave you here to die and rats will chew on your ugly face.”

  I moved through the stables beneath the north hayloft to another room, where a horse-drawn sleigh sat on the dirt floor. I poked the ripped, filthy leather seat, and a mouse darted out of the stuffing. A harness lay on the floor of the sleigh, its leather as stiff as wood.

  Every corner of the barn was crammed with antiques, stiff old saddles hanging on the walls, venerable hoes and plows rusting into the floor, pitchforks and scythes, a cast-iron and wood contraption with a crank for shelling ears of corn. I wondered why anyone would leave all of this wonderful stuff here to rot, why anyone would let this old barn fall to pieces, and why anyone left all that furniture in a house that itself would fall to the rain and wind before long.