Ravenous Ghosts (11 page)

"
Another thing about Ben was that he was a pleasant character and made friends easily, whereas I was perfectly happy to stay at home, cooking and cleaning. I doubt there are very many women left these days who'd be so content with that!"

She chuckled and Andy grinned awkwardly, the humor lost on him.

"He began to do work for his friends, a favor here, a favor there, until word began to spread about the quality of his work. Soon the jobs were pouring in and so was the money. We went from being a struggling couple, held together by love and not much else, to a relatively well-to-do couple that could afford things we'd only dreamed about in the past.

"
We moved out of Haybury and into this fine house, with plenty of money left over to think about starting a family. And so, we did. The day your father was born changed everything for us."

She stroked Andy
's hand with her forefinger, a rueful smile on her face. The boy found his interest piqued despite himself and he abandoned his study of the cobwebs in the far corner of the room.

"
We knew raising a child would not be easy and as Ben was up to his neck in work he'd been contracted to do, I was left with the task of bringing up your father. However, there were times when my husband would find himself summoned from his much needed slumber to deal with the wails of a hungry baby. Even when the child was distressed and filled the house with screams, Ben's hands would soothe it back to sleep. There was nothing he couldn't do. More pie?"

Andy was confused for a second by the change of subject and, when he realized what she was asking, shook his head and thanked her.

She nodded and continued to stroke his hand. Her skin was soft and supple on his.

"
This went on for a year or so. If I was so tired that I wouldn't wake immediately, Ben would go to the baby and feed him, change his diaper, or stroke him back to sleep. I should have known at the time that he would not be able to continue like that without it having some kind of adverse effect on him."

"
Adverse?" Andy interrupted, now so engrossed in the tale he didn't want any of it to pass him by.

"
Bad. I knew it would end in disaster. We never argued. Well, not enough to worry about anyway. So when he began to grow irritable, I put it down to the long workdays and the inconvenience of having to tend to the baby whenever I deserted my post."

She took her hand away and clasped them together beneath her chin.

The sunlight that filtered in through the kitchen window to Andy's left made her eyes glisten and he found himself hoping she wouldn't weep. Such an outburst of emotion from his grandmother would leave him embarrassed and helpless.

"
But it eventually came to a point where I was beginning to question whether or not he loved me anymore. His bouts of irritation turned to anger too fast for me not to be concerned. His hours grew longer and longer until seeing him home at all became a rare treat. He told me he'd been given a lot of work at the Fallon Mansion where that weird old guy Howie Phillips lived. For much of the time, your father kept me distracted, but lying alone in bed at night I had plenty of time to worry.

"
When I confronted him about his hours, he would fly into a rage as if he thought I was accusing him of something. The arguments would end with my questions unanswered and my heart more wounded than ever. As for Ben, he would storm off and lock himself into the room beneath the stairs, where he would continue to work long into the night. As you can imagine, the clamor of his labors upset the child and I would be left dealing with a cranky baby the next day. I grew miserable and lonely."

When
Andy spoke, his voice was tiny. "What did you do?"

Her eyes seemed to brighten at his obvious interest and she grinned slightly.
"The only thing I could. I walked in on him in the room beneath the stairs and locked the door behind me, blocking any attempt he might have made to escape me."

Andy
's eyes widened. A needle of fear pricked the back of his neck. "You didn't…"

Gramma West looked shocked.
"Oh Dear Lord, no! I would never have done anything to hurt him. You must understand, Andy, that despite the fact he seemed to have lost all love for me, I still cared for him as much as always. The thought of losing him was unbearable and because he wouldn't speak to me, I imagined all sorts of unpleasant things he might be doing while not in my company.

"
That night, he was outraged at my invasion of his sanctuary and tried to throw me out.  I stood my ground, more out of shock than defiance. I could hardly believe what my eyes were showing me. But when he noticed that I had seen the fruit of his labors, he seemed to slump, and for the first time in months he spoke to me like the Ben I remembered, the man I loved."

Andy found himself leaning forward slightly, eager to hear what his grandfather had hidden in the room he, himself, was so curious to see.

"He had been in the middle of carving something. A figurine. From what I could see of it, it looked to be a rendition of a woman. It would go perfectly well with the thousands of others piled around him. Some of them were scattered about his feet, others stacked against the walls so high they squeezed beneath the slope of the stairs. All of them were carved from a light wood, maple perhaps, but not all of them were the same.

"
As I scanned them in disbelief that he should be forsaking his family for such a repetitive hobby, I noticed that, amid the stacks of wooden men and children, there were monsters. Here was a representation of a woman with her hands to her face, screaming. There, an ill-formed, man-shaped thing with lovingly carved tentacles sprouting from its chest.

"
Some were cowering wolf-like creatures with mouths full of jagged teeth and wild eyes. Others were so vile it hurt my eyes to look at them. And in the center of them all with a work-in-progress clutched tightly in his fist, stood my husband.

"
He told me I should have stayed away from things that were none of my concern. This made me laugh out loud, Andy, it really did. I told him he was my concern and that I had only come to his little room to find out what was keeping him from his family, what was so important to him that he preferred their company to ours."

She sighed and fingered a curl of silver hair, her eyes boring through the kitchen table and Andy found himself wondering if his grandfather had made it.

"He had fallen in love with his own ability to create. And still, I tried to rationalize what I was seeing. Perhaps he had fallen into debt and been forced or consigned to produce thousands of odd little figurines in return. Perhaps it was just a large order he had received from someone, someone like Phillips. I thought these things and tried to tell myself that it had to be something that innocent. Only the look of shame and fear in my husband's eyes convinced me otherwise. That, and the sinking feeling in my bosom that whatever had taken hold of Ben wouldn't ever let him go.

"
Eventually he told me everything."

She let her eyes drift around the room, settling on the window as she spoke.

"He told me it was his hands. He told me that the very things he relied upon to keep his family content were now responsible for trying to take them away. I didn't understand and I told him so. He sat down and hung his head, looking defeated and exhausted, and I went to him. When he flinched at my touch, I almost cried, deciding in that instant that I would fight his demons for him if it came to a point where he was unable to do so himself.

"
His love for his work had died almost without him noticing, but he had snapped to attention one night in the middle of carving one of the figurines and realized that he had been in a daze, a trance of some sort and had made almost three-hundred of the ghastly things in an hour. He was up to his ankles in wood shavings with no recollection of ever carving them. He said that some of the statues were imitations of the child and me. Others, he didn't know quite what they were, but they were all things he had seen in dreams…or nightmares.

"
He was being driven by some unwanted compulsion, what he called 'an outside influence,' to carve these things, and it scared him half to death whenever he came back to himself and found he had made a hundred more. Would it continue to make him work until they filled the house, the streets, the town?

"
He had no answers for his own questions and I could not answer for him. I was just as scared by his revelations but not for the same reasons.

"
I was beginning to doubt his sanity, you see. I thought that perhaps he had overworked himself into a fever and the threads of his composure were beginning to unravel. I felt guilty not believing him, but who would?

"
His story continued in the same vein. He was not in control of his hands. A higher power was using him as a tool to make these ugly wooden statues. He did not know why but suspected its motives were not entirely wholesome. He begged me for help and as I held him in my arms in that small little room beneath the stairs where my husband carved out his madness, I promised I would help him."

She looked back to Andy, who
was hanging on her every word. He had already made up his mind that if his grandmother had a vault of such stories he would be back again to hear them. These tales, undoubtedly embellished but no less powerful because of it, were like some of the stories he read in his brother's
Weird Tales
magazines. Gramma West's stories were a lot scarier though, simply because their roots were buried in truth somewhere. Half the appeal for Andy was not knowing how much was real and how much was made up.

"
I took him from the room, his workshop, and brought him upstairs to bed, where he slept fitfully for a few hours and awoke weeping. I sat vigil by his side watching the sleeping pills take effect and his hands carve figurines above his chest. My own tears were silent as I watched whatever sickness held him in its grasp using him like a puppet. At times he would wake screaming, howling unintelligible phrases at the ceiling. As he slept, his hands would carve, and sometimes his nails would peel the skin from his hands until I gently pried them apart and set them on his stomach.

"
I watched him die, Andy. I watched the terror his mind inflicted on him act itself out in one final display of shrieked gibberish and wide-eyed panic until his heart gave out and he collapsed back onto the bed leaving his final breath hovering in the air above him."

She leaned closer to Andy and he swallowed.

"But that's not the worst of it, Andy. Not by a long shot. The worst of it was that, as I watched over his body that night, as I prayed and wept aloud at last, as I rocked myself back and forth and listened to the baby cry in the next room, I was fascinated. Fascinated by his hands, that they could continue to carve their images from the air even as he lay dead beneath them."

"
Woah," Andy breathed. "Is that why you didn't want to show me the room? Because you kept the figurines, right?"

The old woman fixed him with a look of intense sadness and slowly shook her head.

The figurines...

As he looked at he
r, his eyes widened in horror. He remembered the faint scraping sound from inside the room, the feeling of being watched in the garden.
A thousand hungry eyes.

Gramma sighed.
"I'm afraid I kept a little more than that, Andy."

SYMBOLS

Apart from my writing, I also edit anthologies. For one of them,
Brimstone Turnpike
, I needed to come up with a character and a location that would link five novellas together. The character was an old man named Johnny Divine. The location was a place called Joe's Gas & Gulp, which in the anthology has been long abandoned.

The following is a piece that does not appear in
Brimstone Turnpike
. It was written for the sole purpose of helping me discover what exactly
did
lead to the ruination of that little diner…

"Hey lady, any hope of getting some service? I'm starving over here."

It was the wrong thing to say and had the kid been a regular at Joe
's Gas & Gulp, he might have known that. But he wasn't and everyone turned to look at him as Daisy spun around, stub of pencil tucked behind her right ear like a mildewed horn, half-full coffee pot sloshing dangerously close to spilling in her left hand.

Daisy had taken over Joe
's after Joe himself got run over by a drunk driver back in 1984.

Everyone had been a mite shocked about it to tell you the truth. The takeover that is, not Joe
's death (hell, we'd all seen
that
coming. Any man who gets wasted and goes wandering along the center line of the highway after dark is asking for disaster). It had seemed as if Daisy and Joe had detested the sight of one another, always bickering and cussing and bitching. So, when it was announced that Daisy McFarlane would be running the business from now on, people were understandably confused. But in time, people stopped wondering and continued to fill their seats at the dusty little diner about halfway down Brimstone Turnpike off Route 71.