Shades: Eight Tales of Terror (19 page)

“Oh thank God!”

Janie dove for the opening. At the same time she felt a hand grab at her back. It got a bit of cloth, enough to jerk her blouse painfully up against her throat, before momentum tore her free and she tumbled through the gate.

“Close it, now!” Jacqueline’s voice barked from the balcony above, followed by the metallic sound of the gate crashing shut.

Janie tumbled on the ground, then rolled to her back and crabbed her way backwards to get further from the gate. She didn’t know whether to trust Jacqueline’s claim of this being safe ground or not. But the elder Danford woman had known of her continued danger before, and it appeared she was correct about the ghost’s limitations now.

The phantasm
had stopped, and now glared in fury at her through the metalwork. Its black teeth clenched in frustration. The horrific thing grasped the bars in its fists, as if willing them to part and let it through. She was surprised it didn’t try and shake the gate.

“Rosaline
!” Janie cried. “Get away from the gate! It can reach you through the bars!”

The blonde took a hurried step away from the side entrance, but looked at Janie in confusion.

“
What
will reach me through the bars?”

Janie was dumbstruck. She looked from the woman to the very tangible entity at the gate in disbelief. How the hell could the Rosaline miss it?

“You don’t see that?”

“See what?” Rosaline now stared at the gate in curiosity, “Are you saying the ghost is right there, right now?”

Janie couldn’t answer, now only capable of staring at the phantom in despair. Apparently it existed for her…and her alone. It ignored the other woman, still glaring in at her like death with a vengeance.

And then, as if accepting the race were over,
it stopped. The dead boy released the bars and let its hands fall back down to its sides. Its thin, pale face became calm. For a moment it did not move, and just stared at her through the bars as if memorizing every detail. Then it lifted one hand and pointed a meaningful finger at her.

“Blood
will
answer for blood.”

It wasn’t a threat, it was a pro
mise. A promise the terrified girl realized it had carried out many times before. Then it turned and walked back down the path and into the darkness.

It was gone.

She was safe.

Or at least as safe as she ever would be again.

***

One week later, the new lady of Magnolia Rise stood on her balcony and gazed out through the night at the distant lights of Houston.

I guess I should consider myself lucky,
she mused.
At least it’s the twenty-first century, and a person can do a lot without ever leaving the house.

The stack of journals on the little table behind her told the tales of previous heirs, and the
lives they lived in this house—if you wanted to call them lives. They were how Jacqueline had known the nature of the phantom and the curse. Now they were her responsibility. She figured she would start one of her own someday.

So many dead.

So many destroyed lives.

All because the inhumane gr
eed of one man had unwittingly twisted the soul of a mentally challenged boy into a hate filled monstrosity. And all because his family couldn’t risk losing the wealth they never earned by walking away and starting over for themselves. They just couldn’t let it go. So they sacrificed their own on the altar of their avarice, and when they ran out of their own they came looking for her.

They live in a different world with different rules, and that makes them different people.
Her grandmother’s voice rose unbidden again.
Don’t ever forget that. Just stay away from those types because they will eat you up. That’s what they do. That’s who they are.

“Yep,” Janie sadly agreed. “Only I’m one of them now, Grandma. Funny how life works out, huh.”

Most of the heirs had been much older than her, some of them too old to win the race back from the tree. And most of them had died within three to five years of taking ownership. Staying in a house seems like a simple thing, until that house becomes a prison—even when that house is a mansion.

Sooner or later, they all tried to escape.

Some lasted a few hours, others actually made it a few days. But in the end, Andre Puscasu got them all. Each one died of some form of strangulation or suffocation.

Evelyn Danford died of carbon monoxide poisoning while sitting in her car in traffic. Karl Danford somehow hung himself in a movie theater bathroom, even though nobody saw him go in with a rope. Roger Danford ran straight to the airport and made it all the way to Venice before mysteriously drowning two days later in a canal. And on, and on, and on…

A century worth of corpses that decorated a tree somewhere in hell.

A tree that had a rope with her name on it.

Janie picked up a glass of five thousand dollar wine, downed it in a gulp, then flung the crystal vessel far out into the night. She looked down into the darkness of the trees on the other side of the fence. Somewhere out there, she knew a hollow pair of eye sockets stared back in patient anticipation. Sooner or later…sooner or later.

Her turn would come.

It could wait. It had all the time in eternity.

Maybe that would give her time to figure out who the monsters really were.

Storm Chase

September 1961

Bernie Morlin clutched the top of the old sawhorse by the toolshed, and stared through the gathering darkness at the white figure down the hill.

The thing flapped wildly in the wind, yet remained fixed in one spot…near the tractor in the back corner of the tilled field. The howl of the rising storm swept away any noise it may have produced. Hurricane Carla approached from the south, its massive clouds already turning the late afternoon into dusk, and that presented a problem. If the Brazos River rose in the coming downpour, it could wash the tractor away and he couldn’t afford to replace it.

But there was another problem, as well. Maybe a worse one.

The other problem was, the pale shape near the tractor stood exactly where he had buried Charlotte, three years ago..

Bernie chewed a knuckle and squinted against the gale. The wind already felt heavy with moisture. The rain approached, and when it got here it would be too late. The radio inside blared about the looming monster storm and warned all listeners to seek shelter.

He needed to get that tractor quickly.

But Bernie had no eagerness to face the figure he could feel staring back up the hill at him from her anonymous grave. At this distance, the logical part of his mind told him it could be a lot of things. Yet his gut knew better. He had buried Charlotte in her nightgown and wrapped her body in a bedsheet…

…just like the one flapping around the distant figure rocking back and forth across the field.

Indecision churned his guts, his pragmatic nature at war with the fear of the unknown. A thin volley of wind whipped drops stung his face. Time had run out, and if he intended to still own a tractor tomorrow then he needed to act at once. No tractor meant no spring planting…and that would mean no more farm. He would lose it all. He needed to go down there.

Down there where the figure waited.

Blam!

Bernie almost leaped out of his hide at the sound. He whirled to see Millie descending the back steps of the little farmhouse. She grasped her thin wrist and flexed her fingers where a gust had torn the back screen door from her grip. Her delicate features were gathered in an irritated scowl, as if the cyclone screaming around them only existed to vex her. She looked as incongruous on this lonely farm as a china doll on a shelf of clay pots. Bernie wondered why she left the relative comfort of the house.

“Bernie!” she called through the roaring din. “The lights just went out!” She clutched the useless scarf covering her hair while trying to shield her face from windborne dirt and debris. “Why are you still out here?”

Bernie couldn’t care less about the electricity. The only answer he had for her was to point down the hill, where the distant thing whipped wildly in the howling gloom.

“What?” She frowned as she approached. Following the direction of his pointing finger, she squinted against the storms assault. “Oh, I see. What is it?”

He didn’t answer, preferring her to arrive at her own conclusion. She had assisted in Charlottes burial, so she had the same facts at her disposal as him. Perhaps she could come up with a different answer than his. Maybe her agile mind could concoct a simple explanation that would allow him to retrieve the tractor without fear.

Instead, she suddenly grabbed his arm, her nails piercing his chilled skin.

“Holy God, Bernie! What is that thing!”

The edge of hysteria in her cry told him she already had her answer, and it looked an awful lot like his. A quick glance revealed her already pallid face to be white with fear. Her stricken eyes met his, begging him to answer with anything but her own conclusion. Unfortunately, he couldn’t do that.

“I think it’s Charlotte,” he choked out. “I think she’s waiting for me down there.”

“Millie swayed as if he struck her. Her nails now drew blood from his arm, and she squeezed her eyes shut as if she could deny this by refusing to see it. Her nature leaned toward being high-strung, and Bernie wondered if she was about to faint.

“That is crazy,” she whispered through clenched teeth. “That woman is dead, and she isn’t down there waiting for anybody! It’s just a canvas tarp that blew off some farmer’s trailer when he drove by. Or a sheet from some neighbors clothesline”

Bernie examined her face warily as he pried her fingers off his arm. Already terrified himself, he certainly didn’t need for her to dissolve into  hysterics. Keeping this in mind, he chose not to point out that a tarp would require a pole or some other object to catch on…something that didn’t exist in the plowed furrows of the field.

Her eyes opened, meeting his with a look of desperate determination.

“It’s only a tarp,” she insisted. “It’s only…
Oh, my God! Bernie
!”

She shrieked as she looked past him toward the field. Bernie struggled to disentangle himself from her retightened grip, and twisted around in an effort to see what she screamed about. This proved difficult since Millie practically scrabbled up on top of him. He finally managed to push her off, and only then spotted the cause of her frenzy.

The figure had moved.

The shape now appeared, still motionless, in the middle of the plot. Somehow, the apparition had advanced halfway across the field in the seconds he had taken his eyes off of it. Now that he could see it a little better, he could no longer deny what swayed in the howling landscape below. It could only be a woman, shrouded in a dirty white sheet. Distance and the failing light obscured her face, but he could now make out Charlotte’s long, dark hair whipping around against the background of the tilled field.

“Jesus, Bernie! She’s coming to get us! We gotta to get out of here!”

Bernie continued to stare in mute horror at the phantasm, unable to reply.
He couldn’t believe this was happening. Really happening. Terror and indecision robbed him of words. On  the other hand, Millie suffered no such problem…

“Stay away from me!” she screeched against the gale. “It wasn’t me! I didn’t do  it!”

“I don’t think she’s going to look at it that way,” Bernie managed to gasp. After all, Millie had been the other woman during the last eight months of their marriage, and the cause of the fight that had resulted in Charlotte’s death. And it was Millie who had hustled over after his despairing phone call and hatched the scheme to cover it up—packing up Charlotte’s clothes and toiletries to give the appearance she had left him. Finally, it was Millie who made a point of throwing the first shovelful of dirt into Charlotte’s anonymous grave.

No, Bernie was pretty sure that Charlotte had come back to have a little get-together with both of them.

“This is all your fault, Bernie!” Millie shrieked. “You’re the reason I’m in this! You’ve gotta do something!”

Surprised, Bernie turned to see her glaring at him with eyes shockingly wide, in a face contorted with fear. With her tiny fists clenched at her sides, and the cords of her neck standing out, she looked as mad and spectral in the wind as the approaching horror below. He realized she dangled on the edge of a breakdown.

“Get your stuff,” he hollered against the wind. “We’re leaving! Now!”

A glance over his shoulder revealed the phantom standing even closer than before. He didn’t look at it long, not really wa
nting to get a better view. There were some things in life a man could live without seeing.

Millie blundered her way back toward the house, struggling against the wind in her high heels. Bernie fumbled after her as the rain started to fall. It lashed him across the face, forcing him to shield his eyes with his arm. A violent “slam” exploded ahead of him as Millie opened the screen door and the wind ripped it out of her hand. Cursing frantically, she left it open and stumbled into the dark house. He staggered in behind her, his boots clomping on the wooden floor.

With the lights out, the little farmhouse was a gloomy cave. A cave that groaned and creaked as the storm started to hammer its small structure. The shadows of thrashing tree limbs obscured what little light made it through the windows.

Bernie heard Millie pulling out drawers in the bedroom, wheezing in both panic and exertion. He stumbled down the black hallway, using the sound of her panicked frenzy as a guide. As he floundered to the bedroom door, he could see her dark figure grabbing things out of the closet in a desperate frenzy and stuffing them into a suitcase.

She stood to make another run for the closet, just as a nearby fork of lightning lit up the room with a house-rattling boom.

Four feet away, Charlotte Morlin grinned in at her through the window.

Charlotte’s time in the black loam of her grave had not been kind to her looks. There was just enough time for a stained, skullish impression…laced with worms and small roots…before the lightning faded and she became a ghastly outline against the howling outdoors.

Millie’s scream was the ragged sound of sanity starting to tear.

She stumbled, grabbed her suitcase, righted herself, and made a run for the bedroom door all at the same time. She slammed into Bernie and clawed frantically at him to get past.

But he didn’t let her pass. An idea had formed, and along with it came hope. Bernie caught her by the arms while keeping his eyes locked on the shadow outside.

“Dammit! Let me go!” she wailed, losing more ground to panic every second.

“Millie, STOP!” he shouted back, tightening his grip. “Stop and listen to me! You can’t leave yet!”

She fought like an animal, making inarticulate noises as she struggled.

“Millie!” Bernie shook her, while still keeping his eyes focused on the window. “You have to wait! I have to get the car and you need to wait here! She only moves when we look away from her. I need you to wait here and watch her while I get the car!”

“No!” Millie shrieked and twisted in his grip. “I’m not letting you leave me! Don’t you dare! I’m going with you!”

“Millie, listen to me!”

“Let me
go
!”

“MILLIE!” he roared, trying to break through her panic. “If you come with me, she’ll
catch
us! She’ll be waiting for us at the door, or in the next room. Or maybe even in the hallway when we turn around! Do you understand? YOU HAVE TO STAY HERE AND WATCH HER!”

He briefly wondered if he would have to slap her. He didn’t relish the idea since the last time he done that was with Charlotte…and that hadn’t ended well. But just then she quit fighting him. Her arms fell to her sides and she simply leaned against him, not making a sound. He laid a hand on her back, wondering if she had fainted. Then her small shoulders began to shake and Millie began to cry.

“Bernie,” she sobbed. “Please don’t. Don’t make me do this. Please?”

“You have to, baby,” he softly insisted. “It’s the only way I can get to the car out in the garage. Then I’ll pull it alongside the house and honk for you. You stay here and watch her, and then when you hear the horn you run for the backdoor. I’ll watch the backdoor so she won’t appear there and be waiting for you. Got it?”

She cried hard against his coat without answering. He had to remind himself that if the shoe were on the other foot, and she knew how to drive a car, then she would have most likely already left him behind.

“Millie,” he continued gently, “that’s the only way this can work…the only way out of here. You have to do this or she’s got us.”

She didn’t answer right away, but the sobs began to subside.

When she finally met his eyes again, he could tell she had reached the point where despair had become the last refuge of sanity. She didn’t believe him, and she didn’t think he would stop the car and wait for her, but it was the only hope she had left. She was going to do this, even though she truly expected to be left behind.

Bernie took her by the shoulders, then slowly turned her to face the window. Rain hammered the glass, distorting the outline of the horror standing outside. Millie’s eyes were wide and glassy, and she breathed in tiny gulps. She fastened her gaze on the window with a weak whimper.

“Now listen,” he whispered in her ear, “
I’ll just be gone for a minute. Whatever you do,
don’t
look away from her. If you do, she’s gonna be right in here with you.”

He knew he was pushing her past her limit, but he needed her more frightened of looking away than staring at the horror. He needed her to buy every second of time she could. But having strengthened her fear, he now had to give her some hope to hang on to.

“When you hear the honk,” he murmured, “just back out of the room but keep watching her. You watch her as long as you can. Then run for the back door. I’ll be watching so she can’t show up there.”

Millie just nodded in reply, her face so tight he could see the bones under her skin.

Bernie let her go, then slowly backed out of the little room. He backpedaled down the hallway, keeping his gaze focused on Millie’s fragile silhouette in the bedroom door. She never moved, although she visibly trembled. Then, once he reached the kitchen, Bernie whirled and leaped for the back door.

It stood open from their frantic retreat inside a few minutes earlier, and sheets of water blew in across the kitchen floor. The storm now ho
wled in earnest, trees twisting violently in the raging winds. Going out the door was like plunging into a mighty waterfall…that fell sideways. The incredible volume of water filling the air staggered him as it blew by.