Night Conjurings: Tales of Terror Page 5

  We tried to maintain some dignity, strolling slowly through the dining room toward the kitchen door as if neither of us were frightened, but before we got to it Crank shrieked, “Shit! Shit! Listen!”

  It was a car, and a noisy one, not far beyond the barn and heading toward us. We ducked down and peered over the windowsill, a dusty curtain of spider webs clinging to our faces, but we couldn’t see headlights, just heard the chugging of an engine in bad need of a tune up coming closer.

  “Goddammit, look, it doesn’t have its lights on!” Crank’s voice was a hoarse whisper.

  It took me a couple more seconds to see it, but there it was, almost to the barn now, a big black pickup truck, old enough to have bulbous fenders, chugging slowly toward us, slower and slower, and then almost stopping to—

  “Jesus H. Christ!” Crank rasped.

  —to turn slowly onto the weeds, lumber up to the barn, and sit there idling noisily while someone got out of the passenger side and slid the barn doors open.

  “Now we’re fucked,” Crank said. “Now we’re good and fucked.”

  The truck lurched suddenly forward and pulled into the barn. The man who had opened the doors glanced toward the house and we ducked down.

  “He saw us!”

  “Maybe not. Keep down!”

  Too late to run out the kitchen door. What about the front door? I didn’t even have a key for it. Maybe out a window. Too late, I could already hear the barn doors sliding shut, we’d be trying to pry open a window and they’d be on top of us. Upstairs. Shit, we’d be trapped, we’d have to get a window open, climb out to the porch roof and jump off, and we’d probably break our necks.

  I could hear them coming toward the house, talking and coming closer. Then I remembered the basement had an outside entrance; we could run down there, open the door to the yard, and sneak out before they knew we were there.

  “Basement,” I whispered.

  They were nearing the side door; I could hear them talking. I tiptoe-ran to the basement door and eased it open—that horrible smell of dead animals again. I let Crank go first down the dark stairs. They were at the kitchen door now, talking and fooling with the lock. I slipped down the steep steps behind Crank and eased the basement door shut, and a second later the kitchen door squeaked open.

  Dark and suffocating—we couldn’t see a thing and could scarcely breathe, stench of stagnant water mixed with something dead, more than a rat, more than a raccoon, more like a hundred dead raccoons. Nothing to do but blindly feel one stair at a time with our feet, one step down and then another, hoping the rotting wooden stairs wouldn’t creak or collapse.

  “Ya forgot tuh lock it,” I heard one man say.

  “I did too lock it.”

  “Bullshit ya did. It weren’t locked.”

  “You was the one that locked it last time.”

  “Bullshit it was me.”

  “I didn’t leave nothin’ unlocked.”

  “Bullshit you didn’t.”

  “What was ya in that hutch drawer for?”

  “I wasn’t in no drawer.”

  “Then why’s it hangin’ open?”

  “I didn’t open no drawer.”

  Down we crept, one blind stair at a time, praying not to make a sound, down into reeking darkness. At last I felt the floor, and I moved my foot like an insect’s antenna, feeling the blackness and trying not to trip over anything. My hand found Crank frozen in front of me, and a spasm of hilarity seized me as I pictured what he must look like, staring like the statue of an owl. I wanted to giggle.

  I saw spots, but they didn’t add up to anything; the windows were either boarded up or black with grime. The men were tramping around in the kitchen above us. Minutes passed—tramp, tramp, tramp—and the spots began to merge into a hint of a picture, some cracks and chunks in the window boards pulsating with faint moonlight. The horrid smell tickled my throat, and I had to swallow to keep from choking.

  At last we heard the men tramp away through the dining room to the living room. We could breathe again, but who wanted to breathe in that stinking air?

  The spots were beginning to sharpen a little, but the picture was still hazy like a TV tuned to a faraway station. We were watching The Twilight Zone after all, I thought. Lumps of darkness started to take shape, maybe barrels and boxes and maybe that was a wheel barrow.

  Far in front of us at the north wall, I saw a dark rectangle where the outside door must be, and I began to inch toward it. Halfway there, my foot hit something like a big sack of grain, and I tottered. Did I dare use my flashlight? Surely its weak light couldn’t find its way through some hole in the floor to the men upstairs?

  I turned it on and heard Crank suck in his breath, startled by the light. Now I could see a bit and, yes, there was the door. I shined my light onto the floor and made my way carefully around the lumps, not sacks of grain but some lumpy somethings covered with moldy canvas.

  I made it to the outside door and listened for the men, but they were still safely away in the living room, where I could hear their creaking footsteps. I slid the rusty bar that locked it, gently eased the door open, brushed spider webs from my face and looked up the concrete steps at the slanting bulkhead doors that led to the yard.

  We were in luck: there was no padlock, just a heavy plank resting in metal brackets to bar the two doors. I merely had to lift the plank without making any noise, nothing too difficult about that, and I set about doing it, quietly, quietly.

  My flashlight died. Crank’s was on, but he was several feet behind me, aiming his light at the floor so it was no real help to me. But I had ahold of the plank and it was moving, and then it was actually free, and I just had to set it down quietly and we’d be out of this reeking prison.

  But then Crank made a strangled sound behind me, too loud for comfort, and I almost dropped the plank. He had his flashlight aimed at a piece of canvas, or at something sticking out from under it.

  “Jesus fucking God!” he hissed.

  He’d spoken too loudly, and I was so furious that I wanted to bash him with the plank. I tried to shush him but he said, “Jesus fucking God!” again in a way-too-loud whisper.

  I decided if he wanted to lose his mind there was nothing I could do about it, but I was going to get the hell out of there. I leaned the plank against the stairwell and started to ease open one of the doors, slowly so it wouldn’t groan, and as the moonlight flooded in he whispered again so loudly I was sure the men would hear him.

  “It’s a goddamn woman!” he hissed. “Look. There’s her pussy.”

  Finally I got the door fully open and rested it quietly against the weeds. There was the outdoors, moonlight and fresh air, which I drank into my burning lungs. I started back down to grab Crank before he went totally nuts and began shouting or something, but with moonlight illuminating the basement I saw why he was acting like a lunatic.

  He was standing over one of the canvas-covered lumps, and a woman’s leg and groin were sticking out of the canvas.

  I stood reeling on the bottom step, my knees like melting wax. Crank lifted the canvas with his foot and kicked it back, revealing a belly slit clear up to her ribcage, her guts hanging partway out. I noticed another canvas-covered lump and another and another, all of them shaped like bodies.

  All the strength drained out of my limbs. As I leaned back against the stairwell I knocked over the plank that I’d placed there, and it fell with a ringing clang to the floor.

  “What’s that?” someone yelled upstairs.

  “There’s somethin’ in the basement!”

  Footsteps raced toward the kitchen. Crank shot past me so fast he nearly knocked me down, and before I could recover there were feet thundering down the basement stairs.

  “Someone’s down here!”

  I raced up the steps behind Crank. We ran behind the house, scrambled over the wire fence and sprinted through the hayfield in the bright moonlight.

  “There they are! It’s a couple a boys!”

/>   “Goddamn you fuckin’ brats!”

  “We’ll break your goddamn necks!”

  I saw them clambering over the fence, skinny scarecrows in the moonlight, and then heard them racing after us.

  “We’ll catch you goddamn pricks!”

  “We’ll cut ya in tuh little pieces!”

  “We’ll bust your nuts!”

  “We’ll cut off your little peckers!”

  “Ya can’t outrun us!”

  “We got long legs!”

  I heard those long legs right behind us. We had to get to the cornfield a little way to the south and somehow get over that barbwire-topped fence before the men were on top of us.

  I kept shouting, “Cornfield! Cornfield!” but Crank ignored me and kept running more west than south. His eyes were better than mine: he had spotted an opening where the fence had been knocked down, and we hurtled over it and hauled ass through the corn, nice and tall that year, taller than our heads, the leaves cutting our faces and the men thrashing behind us panting and swearing.

  Our legs stretched, gobbling the corn rows. The men seemed to be falling behind, confused by the way our noise was getting lost in the leaves. We could hear them cussing and thrashing, getting farther behind us all the time. After a while we couldn’t hear them, and that was worse because every rustle of the corn leaves sounded like a nearby whisper or a footstep on the dirt.

  At last we stopped running and began to walk quietly, heading west for a while along a row, then moving a few rows to the south, then west again along a row, a zigzag that would eventually bring us to a road, not the road with the Hess house but the road perpendicular to it to the south. But did we really want to be on that open road? I tried to recall which fields along that road had corn to hide us, but I’d never paid much attention.

  We didn’t speak, and the rustling of the corn sometimes sounded so much like voices that we’d stop and wait till the breeze died down. Then we’d go on, a little to the west, a little to the south. At last we came to the fence, and there was the road.

  Across the road was an oat field—no cover there. We traveled west, hidden inside the final row of corn, until the cornfield ended at a pasture. Some cattle stood beside the fence staring at us, such lucky beasts, and that worthless oat field was still across the road. But it ended about a hundred yards to the west, and there was a nice dark woods.

  That hundred yards looked awfully long, but we had no choice. Crank went first and was halfway over the fence when we heard a chugging sound from the east. We dove back into the corn, and the pickup truck lumbered into view, its headlights still turned off.

  It was damnably slow, chugging along with all the time in the world. Finally it was right in front of us, and I could see the man on the passenger side staring straight into the corn, directly into our faces, and when I saw his long narrow face with that odd cast in the eyes, I recognized one of the boys in the picture, but middle-aged now, and uglier for the years. I had the feeling he could see right into that corn, but the old truck chugged slowly by, and at last its noise died away in the distance.

  “Okay, let’s do it,” Crank said.

  We climbed over the fence and tore down the road. We must have made the woods in half a minute, but it was a long half-minute. It was a good thick woods, all the cover we could hope for, rough going with its fallen logs and dense brambles and blackberry patches, but when we needed to we’d turn on a flashlight for a few seconds to get free from the thorns.

  We each found a strong club, just in case, but we felt pretty safe now, light-spirited and almost giddy. No way those bastards could find us now! We’d seen a real dead body, a dead woman with her guts hanging out! We’d broken in and we’d broken back out, and we were alive to talk about it! Life was good, life was an adventure, and we were smart and fast enough to take whatever crap it could throw at us.

  We sat down on a log deep in the woods and laughed like lunatics.

  ***

  It took us another hour to reach home, trespassing across farms to keep far from the roads, still clutching our clubs and swaggering like tired cavemen who’d just killed the mother of all mammoths. Reality began to dampen our spirits as my parents’ farm came into view.

  “We gotta call the cops,” I said.

  “Like hell we do.”

  “Like hell we don’t.”

  “And what do you plan to tell them, Professor Peter? Well, officer, we just broke into this house and ran across some bodies. That’s called breaking and entering, in case you’ve never heard of it. We’re talking house of detention till we’re twenty-one years old.”

  “Eighteen,” I offered weakly.

  “Yeah, because after you turn eighteen they throw your ass in a real prison, and you’ll sit there till you’re twenty-one.”

  “We don’t have any choice,” I said. “We’ve got to tell. All those bodies—they must’ve been killing people and hiding them…”

  “No shit, Sherlock. I thought maybe they just crawled in there and died. Look, we’re not talking about getting grounded for a couple weeks. We’re not even talking about a belt on your skinny ass. We’re talking B and E, house of detention, prison. Bend over in the shower and you won’t be able to shit for a week.” He snickered. “You’d probably like that, but it’s not my kind of thing.”

  “So we make an anonymous call.”

  “Yeah, and then what do the cops find in the barn?”

  Somehow I’d forgotten about our bikes. The cops would find out we owned them, and then they’d know we had called and know we’d broken into the house.

  “You think you’re so fucking smart, Peter, but while you’re daydreaming about getting butt-fucked in prison Uncle Crank’s been making a plan.”

  We’d made it to the yard now, and through the window we could see my father sitting in the dining room in his rocking chair, reading.

  “Just don’t say a word,” Crank warned as we climbed the back porch steps.

  My father, absorbed in his reading, scarcely noticed us. Mom was already in bed. The fans rattled, and the house felt comfortable and safe. My face was scratched, my clothes were dirty, and my jeans had gotten torn by barbwire, but there was no drastic damage.

  We got some pop and potato chips and went to my room. It was packed with monster magazines, paperback books, and plastic models of monsters, and in the moonlight their familiar shapes were everything that a home ought to be. We sat on the floor with the lights out, drinking pop and peering out the window that faced the road in case the truck came by.

  “So what’s your brilliant plan?” I asked.

  “We’re gonna go get our bikes.”

  “You’re crazy. You’re fucking nuts!”

  “Tomorrow night. I’ve got it all thought out.”

  “We need to call tonight,” I said. “Otherwise there won’t be anything for the cops to find. Right now those bastards are clearing out the bodies.”

  “No they’re not. Right now they’re getting their asses as far away as they can because they’re afraid we called the cops. They’re thinking they’ll lay low for a week or two and watch the news, and if nothing happens then maybe they’ll clear the bodies out. Except of course it’ll be too late then because we’re gonna call the cops as soon as we get our bikes outta there.”

  “They’ve probably already found our bikes.”

  “No they haven’t. We hid ’em in that stable, remember? They’re not searching the barn right now, they’re getting far away. What you gotta remember is, they’re more afraid of us than we are of them. We got the dirt on ’em.”

  We argued, but it did no good to argue with Crank. I was a college-prep student and he was essentially factory-prep, but my scholastic skills were no match for his willpower. Just as he’d done ever since I met him, he was leading me down another dark and dangerous path.

  After a while we removed the window screen and stuck our heads out so we could smoke cigarettes. My father had his night-time array of electric fans going,
one at the bottom of the stairs blowing cool air up, one at the top of the stairs pulling it up, another at the end of the hall, and their noise covered our talk. Before long he came upstairs and went to bed. It was quiet, just crickets and fans, and already it was hard to believe that any of this had happened.

  And then we heard a chugging sound down the road, coming closer. We pulled our heads in and ducked down so our eyes were just above the windowsill. It was the old truck, driving down the road very slowly with its lights out. Someone was shining a flashlight out the window, searching the fields for two boys.

  When the truck got to my house it stopped out front and sat there idling. By now Crank and I had our heads below the windowsill, so we couldn’t see what was going on, but pretty soon the flashlight beam shined in through my open window and moved around on my bedroom ceiling, searching.

  After several minutes the truck moved on down the road, very slowly, still searching.

  ***

  Crank had everything planned out. We followed the same surreptitious route back that we’d used to escape, but with one difference. There was a cornfield across the road from the Hess house, so this time we sneaked farther east and approached the house through the cover of corn.

  When we were directly across the road from it we hid near the fence, just inside a corn row. We watched and listened.

  Crank had been unusually silent during our trek. He’d put on his deadly serious mood, the mood I saw only when we were doing something really stupid and he wanted to convince me there was nothing stupid about it.

  It was true we didn’t want the cops to find our bicycles, but our real reason for doing this was to prove we had the guts to do it. We were both outsiders, and if you were an outsider you didn’t dare to be a sissy or your schoolmates—and the world—would make your life hell. It was better to get killed than to be a sissy, so maybe Crank was right, maybe there was nothing stupid about doing this.

  The house and barn were perfectly silent. North of the barn was another cornfield, so we headed that direction and then darted across the narrow road to the field. Now we were staring at the north end of the barn, where there was no door. We would have to run across the weedy barnyard and then sneak around the back of the barn to the south end, where the side door hung off of one hinge.