Thing Four: Horror

The Skull.

A Micro Short Story by Sean McGovern.

For Sarah Lynn Sutor – who makes noise in a band.

Here’s a memory, one I spent a good deal of time convincing myself that it was a lie.  That was easy, since I was rarely brave, and the thought of my ending up in such a situation was almost inconceivable.  But each town has its stories, and I guess at some point wondering gives way to “fuck it, I’m going to go see for myself”.  And that was how I found myself trudging across the soccer fields behind the elementary school, towards the woods as the world went dark.  There were two ways to get to the Rodgers’ Ranch – one taking the roads from Penndel to Hulmeville, and the other was the woods.  Showing a lack of foresight that probably should have played a larger role in my childhood, I chose the woods.

Now, up to this point, I had never actually been in these woods…well, to tell the truth, at this point in my life (sixteen) I had pretty much established an orbit that involved whatever job I had (book store by that point), school, and the basement of my home where I had made an ersatz apartment where I could find a kind of peace away from anything interesting to other people.  Once a day I took a walk around town.  That bit, the walks, that was how I had heard about Rogers’ Ranch, nestled in the hills of Hulmeville.  It was the town elder – which wasn’t an actual position, but what other phrase could you use for someone who had been old when you were forming your first memories.  The elder’s name was Miss Waits, and she seemed to know everything about the history of the town, and she told me some of them when I took breaks from mowing a few of the lawns down the main street.

“The old Rogers’ place,” she had said, and motioned to the south, “is haunted in its own way.  Not like the Almer’s down on Jefferson.  That’s a proper haunted house.  The Rodgers’, though…that’s not a ghost.”  She said that while stroking her large black dog.  The dog looked like it had just over a touch of the wild to it, and one of its front legs was missing.  It’s funny, but I can never remember which leg it was – just that it was one of the front ones.  “Places get haunted.  People, sometimes, sure, but it always seems to be places.  The side of the road where there was an accident.  Or a house.  Any building, really.”

“And the Rodgers’ place is haunted,” I said, hoping guiltily that this would speed up her story and I could make a more polite escape to my discman and the roar of the mower.

“No,” she said.  “It’s something inside that’s haunted.  Have you ever seen a ghost?”

“Only in movies,” I said.

“Do you believe in them,” she asked.

“Sure,” I said.  And I did.  Why not – I had been raised on a lot of different stories from a lot of different places and eventually everything came back to ghosts.

“What about other things,” she asked.  And that tripped me up – she could have been referring to peanut butter for all I knew.  ‘Evan Richardson, do you believe in toast, cars, and the pacific ocean?’  But I just nodded because there’s something that’s always unsettling about someone who’s most likely age is dead.  “Whatever is in that house isn’t a ghost.  But it is haunted.”

I came out of the woods, and saw the house.  It was still a distance away, but it didn’t look like the standard fare haunted house that I had come to expect from a steady intake from the horror sections of video and/or book stores.  The size was right – three floors up, looking down on a few acres of private land that was slightly over grown – but in the pale light of dusk I could tell that nothing was really out of place.  The crickets and cicadas were signing, and a few birds chipped as they settled in for the night.  I could hear a dog off in the distance, and some kids catching fireflies to the south, down the hill into Hulmeville.  That all was what I heard around the Rodgers’ Ranch – a building with no shattered windows or fence posts, no shingles out of place, and a lawn that looked like it had missed it’s suburbia mandated manicure by maybe two weeks at most.

But there were no lights on.  That was true.  Lights are a talisman in the burbs, the externals and floods go on in the gloom, and the living rooms on timers.  Passing by them, the homes are warm and welcoming and happy.  And watchful.  There was always that – the quiet glow warning away thieves and other, equally unsavory types, by letting them know that those within were awake, and that they should pass by.  Houses running dark, especially at night, looked run down, abandoned and forgotten by the family that should have filled them with laughter and quiet moments of togetherness.  Dark houses felt wrong in the suburbs.

The Rogers’ Ranch felt wrong.  It didn’t matter how well maintained it was, or how picturesque the late summer night was – the house just felt fucking wrong.  And as I said, I was rarely brave.  I was a public coward, always assuming that so long as there was another person, they’d be dumb enough to stick their neck out and deal with whatever was happening.  But alone, when no one was watching…no one but me…then I had to be different.  I could deal with others thinking I was a scared little shit, a runty scarecrow of a boy, but that was because I knew – knew – that every now and then I could do something amazing.

I pulled a grey bandanna out of my back pocket and fixed it, bandit like, to my face.  I pulled my black, unmarked baseball cap lower on my head, and check my pockets for my flashlight and multi-tool.  And then I started walking towards my target, thinking about comic book heroes and old noir pulps and not thinking about horror movies and ghost stories and how the traffic on Main Street died away fast as I got closer to the Rodgers’ Ranch.  Pennsylvania is still a woodland place, and sound breaks are still easy to come by – even on a clear calm night, if you travel half-a-mile from the train tracks the freight liner might as well be in North Carolina for all the noise it made.  And the rest of the noises filled in for the cars – kids whooping in delight as the last of the summer evening spread out before them, music and canned laughter coming from the windows I passed en route to the dark mass down the street, and the seemingly eternal sounds of nature that scurried and chirped, rustled and barked.  There’s always noise – and as much as we might complain about it, it is reassuring.  There’s a life to it, vitality, in rainfall and motor revs and everything.

And I took some comfort in that because the walk seemed to take longer than it should have.  I still will swear up and down that my feet didn’t falter – no so as I’d notice, at any rate – but it took forever for me to reach that damn door.  I had been right – the house looked as though the Rodgers family had just left for vacation and forgotten to set their timers.  No busted glass to clear out and sneak through.  Nothing more than a slight, dewy scent coming from the patio furniture and mingling with the summer smells of honeysuckle, and dying/recovering flower gardens, and grass.  The bugs made noise in a wave with me at the center of their lull, and they went right back to it as I passed them on the white rocks and flagstone path leading from the road to the door.

I stopped.  Only once.

Some houses have faces, you know?  The windows seem to gaze out at you like eyes in a painting, watching you and reflecting you back, so you can see yourself as they do.  Small.  Distant.

The windows of the Rodgers’ Ranch reflected nothing.  But I felt them boring into me, looking and observing and categorizing me.  I don’t know how I knew, so don’t bother asking – maybe the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, or my stomach tightened three coils too tight.  But it was the first time I felt scrutinized by something unseen and unknowable.  It wasn’t the worst of those sensations, but as I’ve learned, you never forget your first time for damn near anything.  And that house…it felt like it was sitting in fucking judgment over me.  I told myself it was all bullshit, and glared back at the house like doing so would accomplish something.

And I stood still, trying to move for a minute.  And after a minute, I did.

I stepped up onto the porch, and crossed it with faked confidence.  I reached out for the doorknob, and then paused again.  Telling myself it wasn’t nerves but rational, I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the brown driving gloves my parents had given me for my sixteenth birthday – it wasn’t a car, but they were damned cool, and made sure I would leave finger prints.

I slipped on the gloves and reached out for the door knob while fishing in my front pocket for the multi-tool.  The knob turned in my hand and the door swung in, not so much as a whisper escaping the hinges.  I paused at this.  No one, but no one, leaves their front doors unlocked.  Not in these three towns.  Not now, and certainly not then.  I steeled myself, and slipped in, quiet as a shadow, and made sure the door was closed behind me before taking out my flashlight.  The flash was a cheap plastic thing with a bulb that was on its last legs, and red cellophane wrapped around the business end so it wouldn’t screw with my night vision or alert anyone on the outside.

The house smelled like dust.  Not mildew or decaying food or rat shit.  Only dust.  Again, thought played through my mind – the house wasn’t abandoned, and at any moment I’d hear footstep and a light would snap on and some bleary-eyed resident would be looking right at me.  I stopped again, listening.  Only the bugs and birdsong.  Only the dog and the kids.  They were muffled and away – while clear and close, I could hear the blood pumping through my body, the first drips of an adrenaline rush making themselves known.  And my light found the end table.

There was nothing on it save for a small, wooden box – lacquered to a dark finish, so the red-light of my flash made it look more like volcanic glass etched to look like wood, with two small silver hinges facing me.  I went over to it, and turned it around.  A clasp, equally small and silver, was on the other side.  My fingers reached out slowly, with a gentleness reserved for handling newborns, and raised the clasp.  I braced both hands on the sides, and opened the box a crack.

The lid slammed back, and my eyes were giving into the dead sockets of a skull as silence boomed out, ripping a whole in my senses and filling in the jagged places.  My eyes locked to the skull as it tilted back on the hinge of its jaw, and the outside world, all of the reassuring noise blasted away.  There was no humming in my ears, no sound of my heart beating in my chest, even the ceaseless chatter of my internal monolog.  I registered the red-light in my hand shattering just before I felt my eyes go bloodshot and I fell to my knees as my guts wrenched and my brain throbbed.  My hands shook furiously as I reached out for the box, the hair and skin on my hands moving in small waves from the force of the void pouring out of the skull’s mouth.  My blood had turned to tar and battery acid, and I was dimly aware of the bandana growing moist.  I gripped the box like a murdered grabbing a throat.

I screamed.  I know I screamed.

I slammed the lid of the box back down, and it closed with thud.  I knelt there, breathing hard, my breath and blood the only noises for a long time.  I reset the latch, the click almost inaudible over the thunder of my body, and the summer noises coming in the shattered windows of the Rodgers Ranch.