Three tales of twisty horror in the EC Comics tradition.
A Solitary Grave
The Foleys were twin brothers. Identical ones, in fact. (The entire plot of this story depends on it.)
Once they were grown, Joe moved to Portsmouth for work while Dale stayed around North Fork. He married their neighbor Lanie Kiser and inherited the family farm up Planck Hollow when Ma and Pa Foley passed.
Joe visited Dale and Lanie about every six months or so. He would take the bus from Portsmouth to Gatesville where Dale would pick him up and take him to the old home place.
“You know, we ought to go visit grandpap up on the hill,” said Joe, the last time he ever visited.
“I ain’t been up there in years, Joe. I’m sorry to say I ain’t been keeping it cleared since Ma and Pa died. It probably looks downright shameful back there.”
“That’s alright. We don’t have to mow it. I ain’t about to work on a Saturday. Let’s just go up there and pay him a visit for old time’s sake.”
Lanie came, too. She even packed them a picnic.
The grave of Lewis Henry Foley stood all by itself on a cleared knoll surrounded by forested knobs on all sides. The only other cleared land visible from that vantage point was Dale and Lanie’s place far below.
The gravestone was badly faded from sun damage. The name and dates on it (1867-1940) were as scraggly as if they had been carved with nothing more substantial than the blade of a buck knife.
The grass was knee-high in places. Not one person had paid their respects since Ma and Pa had died.
Or so Dale would have assumed. And it would have been a safe assumption if it was not for the shovel that he found lying on the far side of the stone.
“Would you look at that?” he asked. “Some fool brought a shovel all the way up here and went and left it.” He turned, smiling curiously, and saw Lanie lift the top of her picnic basket open.
“It was me,” replied Joe. He reached inside the picnic basket. “I brought it up here last night while you were sleeping.” Then he pulled out what Lanie had packed him.
It wasn’t a sandwich. It was a hammer!
“What are you -“
Joe hit his brother in the head, repeatedly, until Dale fell down, kicked a little, and died.
He dropped the hammer and picked up the shovel. He didn’t have time to waste. It was going to take an awful lot of work to dig up his dead grandfather’s grave.
“Tonight,” he said, between worked-up breaths, “I’ll take Dale’s truck back north.”
“We’ll have that scarecrow with a hat over its head in the passenger seat,” Lanie said, all proud-seeming. That little detail had been her notion.
Joe flung dirt over his shoulder. “I might even actually drive on to Portsmouth. Just to time it right. Dump that scarecrow somewhere along the way. Then come back.”
“That isn’t quite right now,” said Lanie.
He looked at her sharply.
“Am I forgetting something?”
“Yeah.” She smiled. That might have been the word for it. “You don’t ever come back, Joe. Dale does.”
He nodded. “That’s right, ain’t it? I better keep that in mind. I am my brother now.”
Lanie sat with the basket on her lap on a veritable couch cushion made of grass. She was trying her best not to look at the original Dale.
“There is one thing that worries me,” she said. “How can you be sure no one will come looking for you? For Joe?”
Joe leaned against the shovel.
“I run off what few friends I had left when we hatched this little scheme. Quit my job, too. Ain’t nobody up in Portsmouth likely to miss Joe Foley much. They’ll be glad to see him go.”
The shovel struck the aged coffin. Joe cleared the earth from its lid. He flung the shovel to the side and asked Lanie to hand him the hammer.
She didn’t want to touch the thing that he had used to kill her husband. She told Joe so.
He slammed his right fist against the earth.
“Am I gonna have to do everything around here?” he asked her. “I kill the man, I dig the grave, and you won’t even hand me a goddamn hammer. Listen, Lanie, and you listen well because I won’t say it twice. You don’t want me to have to get out of this here grave.”
He said the last part in a tone she’d never heard him use to her before, just about Dale.
Lanie leaned forward from her seated position, grabbed the hammer by its handle, and tossed it underhand to Joe. She was sorry when it didn’t drive his teeth in for him. She was sorry when he caught it.
“That wasn’t so hard, now was it?” he asked her.
Then Joe bent low into the mouth of the grave and pried the rusted and broken nails of the lid loose. He climbed out and laid down on the ground so that his arms dangled into the grave.
From that prone position, he dug the back of the hammer into the sill and yanked the coffin open.
Joe Foley had expected to find a pile of bones inside . . . not the living corpse of his grandfather, reaching out to seize him around the throat!
The mummy’s cracked lips busted open in a flurry of dust. “Didn’t I always tell you to play nice with your brother?”
It wasn’t long before the panicked scream of Lanie Foley bounced off the hilltops.
The sound died when she did.
***
It took a week for the nearest neighbors of Dale and Lanie Foley to report them missing.
During the subsequent search, a deputy sheriff happened to climb the hill where Lewis Henry Foley was interred. But he found nothing there beyond one solitary and long undisturbed grave.
Five More Fingers
Roy Wells heard the whistle blow from the yard. Since he hadn’t been the one to blow it, and it was neither the beginning nor the end of the workday, he knew it spelled trouble.
When he stepped outside his office, he saw that most of the men in the yard had gathered around the saw.
The throb of the machine faded. An odd, prolonged but low-pitched moan swept out from the circle of men. Roy knew then that more than lumber had been cut that day.
“Make way,” he told the men, and they parted for him.
Fred Johnson held a bloody handkerchief wrapped tight around his left hand.
Ad Hall bent over Fred. His left boot was uncomfortably close to another handkerchief. That one was open.
And in its gory center lay most of Fred Johnson’s index finger.
Ad Hall met Roy’s gaze. “He slipped.”
Roy crouched beside Fred. The wounded man made eye contact but his gaze shifted unsteadily like a fish bobber in a wavy lake.
“I got too close, boss,” said Fred.
“That’s alright.” He patted Fred on the knee. “Ad’s gonna take you down to Doc Bradley’s now. Gonna get you patched up.” Roy looked around at the men gathered around. “Jergie, you go with them.”
Jergie Stevens had taken his cap off. Now he put it back on. He and Ad helped Fred to his feet and started to lead him away.
“Don’t forget my finger,” Fred told them.
Roy looked down at the digit in question. So did the other men gathered around. But no one volunteered to pick it up.
I’m in charge, ain’t I? thought Roy and he reached for the finger. He folded the ends of the handkerchief around the finger before he picked it up. He stood to hand it off to someone.
But Ad and Jergie had their hands full carrying Fred and Fred had his right hand full keeping his left hand bandaged. Roy did the only other thing that came to mind.
He stuffed Fred Johnson’s finger in Fred Johnson’s overall bib pocket. Its ruined end peeked out above the rim like a chewed-up cigar.
“Much obliged, Mr. Wells,” Fred Johnson said. The other two bore him away.
Roy watched the three of them cross the lumber yard towards the road. “Let’s get back to work gentlemen. Ain’t nothing we can do about it now.”
He walked back to his office. He heard the sound of the saw coming back to life. He locked the door behind him and closed the curtain to the window that looked out over the yard.
He sat down at his desk and put his head in his hands, the same way they had been just before the whistle blew.
In the corner of the room was a safe. The three hundred and forty-six dollars that had been in said safe were now stacked on his desk. Besides the money, dozens of receipts had spilled from the mouth of a money bag.
There was also a nub of a pencil on a notepad whose page was riddled with figures and indentations.
Roy Wells was near to being ruined. That was all there was to it.
Sure, there were reasons. That drive-in theater in Rayburn had been a good idea. A money-making notion. But then God had made that wildfire burn it all down before they could even get it open.
Now the insurance company was fighting them tooth and nail over paying out and crying arson investigation, too.
Compound that with those late-night poker games Roy had been losing at lately. Plus there was that thing with that Foley girl. Lord help him if someone told Dot about her.
“Now here’s another hit to my insurance,” he cried out, thinking of Fred Johnson’s index finger. “I’m about busted. What I wouldn’t give for one thousand dollars about right now . . . “
As if on cue, someone knocked on the office door.
Roy jerked up. “One moment,” he told them. Then he put the money and the receipts back in the money bag. “Be right here.” He tossed the bag in the safe, closed it, and turned its combination at random.
He settled back in his seat. “Come in.”
It was no one Roy Wells expected. Moreover, it was no one Roy Wells knew.
The stranger wore a dark suit with a red tie and he sported a beard cropped into what might have been considered a fashionable goatee, in places other than Gates County, Kentucky, that is.
The man didn’t so much as nod at Roy before he stepped inside and closed the door. Roy registered the golden ring on the man’s right pinkie with unease. Now that sort of thing really didn’t go over in Gatesville.
“Can I help you, mister?” he asked him.
The stranger had a voice like a Methodist preacher – bluegrass sweet and enunciated. “Actually, Mr. Wells, I am here to help you.”
“Maybe I don’t want your help.”
“I think you will.” The stranger picked up a chair in the corner of the room, carried it over, and placed it in front of Roy’s desk. He sat down. “I have one thousand dollars that says you will.”
Roy Wells didn’t know what a goosebump was supposed to feel like but he recognized a sweat bee sting when he got one.
“Tell me what you want, mister.”
“It’s not about what I want,” he said. “It’s about what you want. What you would like. What would ease your troubles.”
“And what’s that?”
The stranger’s teeth were very white. Roy saw that when he smiled. “To make a deal.” The man intertwined his fingers. The gold band of his ring shone. “With the devil.”
Roy slapped the flat of his desk.
“Who the hell sent you? Don’t tell me, you got a document, you want me to sign away my soul?” He brayed. “Oh, boy. You must be one of Gene’s pals.”
“You’re wrong,” replied the stranger, “both on what is to be exchanged and for doubting the sincerity of my offer. Your brother did not send me. No one did. This is not some practical joke. I am quite serious.”
“Yeah, right.”
Roy’s tone changed dramatically between the word, “Yeah,” and the word, “right” because in the moment between him speaking those two words a coiled rattlesnake materialized on his desk. Its rattle shook.
He studied it. More importantly, it studied him.
“Look up, Roy Wells, and see my true face.”
Roy heard him but he wasn’t about to take his eyes off the snake. “I don’t reckon I better.”
“It’s alright,” said the stranger, and like that the snake was gone. “He isn’t the one you have to worry about biting.”
Roy looked up. The figure seated across from him was the devil, alright. It would have been pretty silly to deny it. The stranger still wore the same goatee but his skin had turned red as a firetruck in a musical and he didn’t have hair on his head, he had goat horns.
“You are him.”
The devil nodded.
Roy shook his head. “But I ain’t about to sell you my soul, mister. I ain’t fool enough for that. I intend to be resurrected some distant day.”
“I don’t want your soul, Roy Wells.”
“Then what is it you do want?”
“Simply this.” The devil raised his left hand and spread his fingers out, his nails coal-black and witch-long. “Five more fingers.”
Roy couldn’t comprehend it.
The devil continued. “I want five fingers, cut by your saw, seemingly by accident. In exchange for these five fingers, I could make you the biggest man in Gates County.”
“I don’t understand -“
“Yes, you do. I explained it clearly enough. But to prove to you that I do indeed have the power to do as I say, and so as to earn a token of your trust, here’s that one thousand dollars.”
A small but substantial stack of bills appeared on Roy Well’s desk. He jumped back, mistaking it for the snake again in his peripheral vision, then saw what it actually was, and jumped forward.
“You can keep that money,” the devil told him. “Even if you don’t accept my offer.”
The lumberman cut the stack in two like a deck of cards and flipped through it. He counted the cards the devil had dealt him. He looked up. “Just five fingers?”
“Five mere fingers.”
Roy whistled. “Why, it ain’t unheard of. That saw has taken a thumb and a finger since I bought this place. And that’s not counting Fred Johnson.”
The devil shook his head. “I’m afraid we won’t be able to grandfather the results of any prior accidents in. It will have to be five fresh fingers.”
Roy tilted his head from side to side. “What are five more?” he asked himself. “Lumber is a dangerous business. Always was.” He met the stranger’s gaze. “Assuming that you take them here and there . . .”
“Assuming,” went the devil.
Roy Wells thought about every church he’d ever been in. He thought about every lesson his father taught him. He thought about how he had to drop out in third grade to work full-time on their landlord’s farm.
He thought about that Foley girl.
And held out his hand.
“You got yourself a deal, mister.”
The devil’s handshake felt like touching the forehead of a sick little child who was ate up with fever.
Roy wiped the sweat off his palm. “Is there any paperwork I should sign?” he asked the devil.
“That won’t be necessary. I only go in for legalese with the urban crowd. Out here in God’s county -” the word apparently came easily to him “- a handshake should suffice.”
The devil stood. “Our arrangement is complete. And, I might add, final. Tomorrow you shall find fifty thousand dollars deposited in your bank account. More will arrive after that on a monthly basis. You should be a millionaire by Christmas.”
Roy couldn’t believe it. “I’ll be bigger than any of those stiff-collar boys in town.”
“Spite,” said the devil, “is my favorite motivation. Farewell, Roy Wells. May you have no regrets without your due reward.”
The devil ceased to be standing in the room. He didn’t walk from it, he simply vanished. He went the way of the snake.
But the one grand didn’t.
***
That evening, Roy Wells left his lumber yard in strong – if not quite good – spirits. He did not drive home, he simply walked there since he lived in a house across the highway from the lumber yard.
He found Dot making cornbread in the kitchen. She had changed her blouse since she had brought him his lunch earlier. “How would you like some help?” he asked her.
Dot scoffed. “There’s a first time for everything.”
“I don’t mean now,” Roy said, “I’m talking about a full-time maid here.”
She stopped stirring. “That would be a little rich for our blood.”
“Well, Dorothy, our blood is about to get a whole lot richer.”
Before dinner, Roy helped himself to a little whiskey he had stashed in the old smokehouse. That whiskey was partly to blame for the toast that he gave his children and wife at the table at supper.
“It takes more than hard work to get rich, people,” Roy told them. “It takes guts. It takes brainpower. And it takes blood.” He cleared his throat. “Hopefully someone else’s.”
***
That night Roy Wells dreamed he was standing in the dining room of a fine mansion. He wore a fancy suit and kept one of those fancy one-lens glasses in his breast pocket.
He was drawn towards a majestic tree trunk sculpture at the other end of the room. The trunk was as wide as a piano. Its golden surface shined. There was a silver nameplate on it that said ROY V. WELLS. LUMBER MAN.
Roy noticed a fingerprint smudged on the nameplate. “No need for the butler,” he said in his dream, “why, only my hand is fit to touch it.”
Suddenly he held a white cloth. It was already damp with polish. He pressed it against his trophy and for a moment it felt as smooth as a waxed floor.
Then it felt as if he had jammed his hand straight into the heart of a briar patch.
He woke up to two sounds: a horrible grinding sound and his own screaming. In the soft yellow of the work light, he watched himself feed his right hand through the running teeth of the saw.
His fingers flew apart like fleshy wood chips.
Roy collapsed. There was just too much blood. In fact, he probably would have bled to death if his oldest son Harry hadn’t snuck out that night to help himself to a little whiskey from the smokehouse.
***
One week was the earliest that Doc Bradley would allow Roy to travel. Roy convinced Dot to drive him into Gatesville to the bank. Normally she would have known to wait in the car but she had to be told now that he’d been hurt.
“I just don’t want you to push yourself too far,” she said.
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Roy told her. “Between you and Doc Bradley, I’ll be lucky to get to push a turd out on my own.”
The teller recognized Roy right away. He had been a customer for years, hadn’t he, and there would have been no mistaking his right hand.
Two people were in line ahead of Roy but the teller still excused himself, went into the back, and shortly returned with Ben Crawford.
The teller went back to his customers but the president of the bank came around and greeted Roy Wells personally.
“Mr. Wells. It sure is good to see you.”
“I would like to look at it,” Roy said, and he knew that Crawford knew what he meant. “All of it.”
The bank president nodded. “Of course.”
Crawford led Roy into the safety deposit room and had him take a seat. Roy watched while Crawford and his assistant brought in the devil’s earnings.
The assistant left when the contents of the account were all laid out but Benjamin Crawford remained. Roy Wells sized up the initial fifty thousand.
“Will you be making a withdrawal today?” asked the banker.
“Yes. But only one thousand. I would like you to transfer an additional five thousand into my company’s ledgers. The rest I think we’ll keep in your care.”
Ben Crawford took that statement in with all the decorum of an undertaker who has just happened to sell the most expensive coffin on the market.
He counted out one thousand dollars and scribbled Roy a withdrawal slip. He passed both the slip and the withdrawal across the table.
“You know, Roy -” Crawford cleared his throat. “All the boys back at the lodge were awful sorry to hear about your hand.”
Roy started to reach for the money with his right hand but stopped and then brought the money and the withdrawal slip toward himself with his left hand instead.
“It could have been worse,” he told the banker. He lowered his bandaged hand out of sight below the table. Not one of the fingers on it had escaped the sawteeth intact. “It could have been ten.”
The Haunted House Experiment
Lonnie Slone couldn’t believe it. “You mean to say you looked up at that old haunted house every school day for eight years but never once went up there?”
Marv was trying to build a birdhouse beside him. Lonnie’s gun rack at the workstation looked rather more promising. (Woodshop was the one class where Lonnie had Marv plain beat.)
“No,” said Marv as he attempted to drive a nail straighter. “I never did.”
Lonnie scoffed. “I thought that was a rite of passage for Chaney Creek boys.”
Marv pointed at his glasses. The thick frames said it all. “I never quite fit on Chaney Creek. I didn’t have too many friends who weren’t my cousins.”
“I was your friend.” Lonnie stopped sanding with one last stroke. “Wasn’t I?”
Marv thought about it for a second before he nodded. That second meant what they both knew: it wasn’t quite true. Sure, Lonnie was his friend now, but he wasn’t his friend then.
It took them graduating Hammtown Elementary and moving on to high school to become friendly. It also took a lot of Lonnie’s friends and Marv’s bullies from up on Chaney Creek dropping out. They had been the same group of boys, of course, Lonnie’s friends and Marv’s bullies.
That is what the pause said.
But this is what Lonnie said:
“We oughta go.”
“Huh?” asked Marv.
“To the old Little House.”
Marv pulled out a particularly ugly nail to try again. “What for? It’s not like I believe in ghosts.”
Lonnie humphed. “Some might mistake that for the sound of a chicken. But I know better. They tend to cluck.”
“I ain’t scared. I just don’t think I’ll enjoy it much. I won’t be able to get in the spirit of things.”
“Believe me, Marvin,” went Lonnie, “the house already has the spirits covered.”
“You say that as if you had firsthand experience.”
“I do.”
“Do you mean to say you something there?”
Lonnie leaned in close so that Mr. Blanton, passing between the workstations overseeing the progress of the boys in the shop, wouldn’t overhear. “A gosh-darn ghost.”
“No, you didn’t.”
Lonnie swayed the sanding pad he held from side to side like a slowly rocking ship. “She was just hovering there. A woman. All in white. In an old-timey dress.”
“Come on.”
“Close as you are to me now.”
Marv finally managed to drive a halfway decent nail. “I don’t buy it.”
“Tommy Hinton saw it, too. You can ask him.”
“Didn’t he move away?”
“Yeah, to Muncie. But if you find him there you can ask him.”
Marv reached for another board. “That house can’t be haunted. My grandpap knew Old Man Little. Told me he died in his sleep. No one was ever murdered there.”
“As far as he knew.”
“Well, grandpap’s spent every year of his life except one on Watson Branch and he’s seventy-something so I reckon what he knows goes pretty far.”
“Maybe. But plenty of folks have seen plenty of things in that house, Marv. How do you explain that?”
Marv made a wet clicking sound with his teeth. “They’re lying.”
“I ain’t.” Lonnie didn’t say it mad, but he walked off all the sudden anyway.
He went and stood near the saw and watched Kermit Vance use it. Marv sighed and put down his hammer and went to stand beside him.
“I didn’t say you were lying, Lonnie. I guess I just have trouble knowing what to think. I generally don’t put much stock in superstition.”
Lonnie turned to him. “You put your stock in science.”
“That’s right.”
The saw ate against the pencil line Kermit had pressed into the piece of lumber.
Lonnie said, “Then consider it an experiment.”
“Consider what?”
“Tomorrow night, instead of going to the football game, we’ll go to the Little House. We’ll go over that place inch by inch and see what we see.”
Mr. Blanton’s well-enunciated Western Kentucky drawl called them out from across the room. “Slone, Templeton, ain’t you two got your own work to do?”
“Yes, sir,” answered Lonnie as he swung around like a wooden soldier. Marv thought about it as he followed Lonnie back to their workstations.
“Why, heck,” said Marv. “I guess I ain’t so different from them other boys up Chaney Creek after all. I’m in.”
Lonnie placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Good man.” Lonnie squeezed. “But don’t get mixed up about it, Marv, you’re still one odd duck.”
***
Marv managed to make it through getting home, doing his chores, and sitting down for dinner without his parents ever asking him anything that made him have to tell a lie.
They still thought he was getting a ride to the high school football game when Lonnie Slone picked him up.
The first thing Lonnie said to him after he got in Lonnie’s truck was, “You ready to see some ghosts?”
“No,” answered Marv, with a guffaw behind his voice. “Maybe a large mouse or two.”
“Marvin, this house ain’t been lived in in thirty-plus years. Mice is the least of its infestations.”
It only took them a couple of minutes to reach Hammtown. Marv used to walk to school there every day, and there were other kids who walked from much further than Watson Branch.
Lonnie slowed down before they reached the little community. It wasn’t from any fear of getting pulled over by the police, because there likely wouldn’t be any; it was just that their destination was right there at Hammtown’s edge.
The Little House sat on the hill across the highway from the elementary school. They used to glance up at it at the end of every school day as they went out the front doors.
Now, driving past it from below in the new dark, the house looked to Marv quite like a silhouette backdrop in high school play.
Lonnie drove past the post office and turned right onto Wilson Branch and drove past a handful of farmhouses near its mouth. There was a dirt path that swung off the branch up the hill. He turned up it. That path swung around the homes below to end right at the rear of the Old Little House.
“I’m surprised they keep this road up.”
Lonnie jerked his thumb back behind them. “There’s a Burrberry lives there, over the hill. He’s got part of his tobacco crop up here.”
Lonnie cut his engine. He pulled out a pair of flashlights and gave one to Marv. Both boys tested theirs.
“Don’t he mind people parking here?”
“I heard -” Lonnie opened his door. “- he’s too scared to come up here after dark. That’s what they say, at least.” Lonnie leaned back in. “Let’s hope they’re right.”
“Yeah,” said Marv. He got out, too.
There was a buzz from down on the highway as a car sped through Hammtown. It faded into the rattling of cicadas in the trees. Mosquitos flitted before their flashlight beams.
Marv followed Lonnie closer to the rear side of the house. They shined their flashlights on it.
In the middle of the rear of the house, there was an empty frame where a back door had once stood. But the room beyond it was now impassable from rubble, which had rained down when the floor of the second-floor room above had caved in. They raised their flashlights and saw that the outer wall of that room was gone, as well. It was an empty husk in the back of the house.
“Someone could take a running jump,” said Lonnie.
“Yeah,” said Marv, “and break their darned neck doin’ it.”
The boys went around to the front of the house. Marv glanced down at Hammtown below, at the school and the cemetery behind the school, and the Baptist Church a little below.
Lonnie climbed up onto the porch. Marv followed. The post on the corner of the far side of the porch had shifted right off its foundation, but the nearer one seemed stable enough.
The other boy paused at the doorway. The front door lay flat on the floor of the front room. Lonnie looked back. “Watch your step.”
“Why are you whispering?”
“So we don’t disturb the ghosts.” Lonnie grinned. He went in.
Marv turned the corner into the house expecting to catch Lonnie creeping off somewhere quickly in order to jump out and startle him, but when he got inside, Lonnie was waiting for him.
The front room was a parlor – that word must have fit it once – with a rickety set of stairs in its center that led up to a balcony on the second floor. The balcony wrapped around the parlor on three sides.
Lonnie shone his flashlight towards the chimney in the corner. More specifically, at a portrait that hung in a crooked frame above the cobwebbed fireplace.
“That was Old Man Little,” said Lonnie.
The man in the portrait was much more sophisticated than Marv would have imagined. He wore an aristocrat’s suit and sported a pair of tremendous sideburns.
In the portrait, he was standing in that very same parlor. Of course, it was in much better condition in the painting. He was at the foot of the stairs with one arm resting on the railing.
“They say he murdered his entire family,” said Lonnie. “After the war.”
“Maybe they do,” answered Marv, “but my grandpap don’t. He says they all died of natural causes.”
Lonnie shrugged. “Well, something must have happened here. You wait and see.”
The two boys looked around the rest of the parlor. There was no intact furniture left – everything had been either scavenged or broken to bits years before.
Marv spotted some crushed beer cans in one corner and a cigarette butt scattered here and there.
Someone must have even shot off their pistol once. There was a spent round balanced between a crack in the wood floor.
“There’s a kitchen down the hall,” said Lonnie. “I’ll check that out. You can go upstairs.”
“Shouldn’t we stick together?”
Lonnie looked back. “I thought you had nothing to be worried about.”
Marv tapped his flashlight against his pants leg and said, “I don’t.”
He started up the stairs and found out that it was easier to be brave at the foot of them than near the top. He swung his light back down at the parlor below.
Lonnie had already disappeared down the hall.
Marv turned. There were three doorways that led off from the balcony. To the left was another hallway that ran above but parallel to the one Lonnie was walking through downstairs.
In front of Marv was an open door into a dark room with an empty window frame that faced out over the hills along Chaney Creek.
The door on the right still stood, and it was even in good enough condition to be actually shut. Sure, it leaned off its hinge a bit at the top, but it was in better shape than the rest.
Marv would have preferred to choose the front door, that is, the one on the front porch. That realization made him feel like a chicken. A chicken who didn’t even believe in foxes.
He went into the open room ahead.
Marv swung his flashlight beam past a busted chair lying beside a writing desk in the corner to the open window on the far side. He went to it.
From the window, he could see the mouth of the C.C.C. Trail two hollows over. A pair of headlights moved down the highway.
As Marv turned to leave, he noticed a book on the desk. That drew him in. The flashlight beam revealed its torn cover. The blank first page was stained with water damage.
Marv reached out and turned the page.
He expected a primer, or an old history book, or maybe Tarzan. Pretty much anything except a book with the title ORIGINS OF WITCHCRAFT IN PRACTICE.
He pulled back his hand. The author’s byline added to his alarm bells: Thomas van Scratch. He read lower over Starr Publishing Company and 1889.
Marv stepped back. He glanced around the room. Now its emptiness made him question what had once filled its space. Could it have been a bedroom? Who would have slept with a book like that on their desk?
He walked across the room and out onto the balcony, and went to a section of the railing that still stood. He looked over and called below.
“Lonnie?”
He shone his flashlight at the mouth of the hallway that entered the parlor below and waited. Marv glanced back into the room he had just left. The desk was not visible from his angle. He was thankful for that.
“Lon?” he asked again.
Of course, he started when Lonnie leapt into the parlor, waving his flashlight wildly and yelling, “Boo!”
“You jerk!”
Lonnie lowered his arms and aimed his flashlight up at his own chin. “Come on. I had to make sure you weren’t a robot. That you could feel fear like the rest of us.”
“I feel a heart attack coming on is what I feel,” Marv said. “You find anything down there?”
“Just some bottles.”
“Well, I found something up here. Something that’s honestly more than a little creepy. Do you want to see it?”
Lonnie was bounding up the stairs even before he answered, “Do I!”
Once he managed the balcony, he followed Marv into the room. Marv shined his flashlight at the desk.
“Over there,” he said.
“That desk? What about it?”
“Look at the book.”
Lonnie went to it. Marv followed at a distance. Lonnie glanced back behind him as he neared the desk, probably to make sure Marv wasn’t the one going to try to scare him this time.
Marv watched Lonnie shine his beam at the front of the book. The cover had snapped closed as Marv had pulled away from it earlier. Lonnie turned to the front page. He looked back.
“What about it?” Lonnie asked.
“Don’t you think that’s a pretty unusual subject?”
Lonnie shrugged. “A lot of people go for it.”
Marv’s voice caught. “Witchcraft?”
“What are you talking about?” said Lonnie. “I meant poetry.”
Marv wrenched the book away from him. He looked along the light down at it. The cover had changed. Now it read CLASSIC AMERICAN POETRY.
He flipped through it. Verse after verse, and it was the old familiar authors: Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Emily Dickinson. Not a solitary witch among them.
He gently closed the book again. Lonnie was watching him with interest.
“That wasn’t what it was earlier.”
“What was it?”
Marv sighed. “I didn’t make it up.”
“You haven’t even told me what got you so bothered yet.”
Marv considered it. He shook his head. “Is it alright if I wait outside?”
Marv expected him to push for answers or laughingly call him a coward, but he should’ve known better when it came to Lonnie Slone.
“Why don’t we go to that football game after all?” asked Lonnie. “There’s nothing rattling around this old house except beer cans, anyway.”
Marv nodded. “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it. Come on.” Lonnie patted his friend on the shoulder and steered him out of the room and back onto the balcony.
Lonnie lowered his arm as the boys approached the stairs, just before the slow creaking of a door caused them to stop and turn their heads.
The door opened slowly. They waited. The room beyond was drenched in darkness. Nothing seemed to stir in it. But they couldn’t be sure, could they? They listened.
But the sound when they heard it came not from the room to the right, but the hall to the left. It was a rattly, sickly breathing. They passed each other’s wide-eyed gazes as they turned to see what stood there.
It was a woman dressed all in white. Her hair was pitch black and her face was stark white. Her arms were held out to them.
“Save yourselves,” she whispered.
Lonnie didn’t scream. He yelped.
Marv was the one screaming.
They both jumped and turned and fled down the stairs, Marv in the lead, Lonnie close behind.
Halfway down, matters got much worse. That was when Old Man Little stepped straight out of the picture frame above the fireplace below on legs as long as circus stilts.
Marv felt Lonnie’s hand grasp his shoulder hard and pull him short.
He watched with a slackened mouth as the man from the portrait took a second step forward with a shorter but still supernaturally extended appendage.
His mouth dropped open even further when the old man’s right leg folded in two on his next step, and the left leg folded in a similar manner after that. Thus he lowered himself down to normal height and turned.
He clutched an ax in his right hand. It dripped with someone’s blood.
“Thou shalt not suffer!” he yelled at them, and then he dashed up the stairs.
They flew back up them, but lost their footing at the top when the woman in white floated straight through them.
It reminded Marv of the time his mother had coated his fever-sickened chest with vapor rub when he had the flu. It was like being covered in slime.
“Run,” she told them.
The boys darted down the upstairs hallway, but had barely picked up speed before Marv realized he was looking at stars and stopped. The room before them was the one that had caved in below.
Another few feet and the floor was cracked and crumbled.
“Help!” Marv called out. “Somebody help us!”
“Marv.” Lonnie wrenched him by the shoulder. The old man had reached the head of the stairs and turned. He studied them for several seconds.
Then he raised the ax up and ran full tilt at them.
Marv looked ahead again.
“We have to jump,” Lonnie said.
“I – I can’t.”
But he could hear the old man’s uneven steps crashing down behind them.
Lonnie backed up a couple of feet and then took off running. He leapt through the air. He almost didn’t clear what was left of the first floor exterior wall, but then he passed over it like jumping off a rock into a swimming hole.
Marv spun around. The old man was almost upon him. He had started slicing his ax through the air like a rapidly approaching pendulum.
“Stay back!” Marv yelled.
Hot air flew off the next swing. Marv stepped back. Another swing. He stepped again. A third swing.
Marv fell. The second floor had run out.
He slammed into the rubble hard. He felt an old nail drive into the small of his back. He gasped and blinked through the decades-old dust above him.
Old Man Little peered down. He raised up his ax. Marv realized he was actually going to fling it. The boy turned over, painfully, but at least the axhead sank into the rubble on the floor instead of Marv Templeton’s head.
He had lost his flashlight in the fall. He could see Lonnie’s light bounding around on the other side of the blocked back door.
Lonnie pushed his way through the rubble, knocking fallen floorboards and furniture aside, clearing the exit.
“Marv! Are you alright?”
Marv glanced back. Something was flying down the hallway at them. It wasn’t the old man this time. It was the woman in white. And she was yelling, “Get out! Get out! Get out!”
Marv ran across the ruined room to the doorway Lonnie had freed. The other boy got a glance at the ghastly thing coming at them and took to flight himself.
They ran across the hill to the waiting truck and got inside. Marv sat back so hard he drove the old nail further into him.
Lonnie tried to get at his keys. “Don’t do the thing where you don’t start,” he told the truck, and it didn’t. It was loyal to him.
The truck came to life with a belch. Lonnie put her in reverse and backed up in a wild swing and drove her frantically back down the hill and onto Wilson Branch.
Lonnie turned onto Route 32 without even slowing. Marv cranked down his window and flicked the rust-and-blood covered nail he had dug out of the back of his shirt into the dark.
I hope that don’t pop someone’s tire, he thought, and then he actually laughed.
***
The Little House did not simply settle back into silence. For once, its haunts failed to melt into thin air. In fact, they met each other in the parlor.
The woman in white looked at the old man with the ax.
“With this night’s test . . .” she started.
The old man nodded. “It is finally over. Our fifty-year experiment is completed.”
Both the ghosts touched invisible nodules at their left sides. Their very bodies shimmered as their shape-shifting devices switched off.
Their true faces were green and oval in shape with diamond-faceted black eyes and no mouths. Speech they articulated through gill-like slits on their neck.
“We have long studied fear and the human being,” said the alien on the first floor.
The other alien descended from the balcony. “With such information as we have acquired, we shall move on to phase two.” It reached the ground. “The total invasion of the planet Earth!”
The creatures brought their foreheads together in a kind of handshake.
“These humans have too long feared the ghosts of the past,” said one.
“Soon we shall show them the terrors of tomorrow!”
The aliens turned before the fireplace. The portrait above had changed. It no longer showed the more well-furnished version of the room from years past. Now it showed a metal hatchway.
As if signaled, a sort of rubberized stairway folded out of the portrait’s frame. One behind the other, the aliens started up the stairway and climbed inside.
None of the many visitors to the Little House who came in search of a scare ever could have suspected that behind the portrait of Old Man Little was an alien spacecraft.
The aliens climbed into the cockpit. They strapped themselves in. They pushed the necessary dials.
The engines engaged. Outside, the chimney of the old house broke away from its foundation. Bricks rained down from the sides of a sleek metal cylinder that shot off into the air.
No one witnessed the alien rocket pass over the night sky above Hammtown.
All anyone knew about what happened that night, and even Marv Templeton and Lonnie Slone could have hardly suspected the truth, was that the chimney of the old house had at last collapsed.
L.D. Blevins 
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