Scary Out There (41 page)

They had most of the lights out except for that little pole lamp by the couch. Mom and the boyfriend were sitting
there, and Joey was on the floor in front of them, dancing to that ridiculous bongo and guitar and flute music. At least she guessed it was supposed to be dancing. Joey didn't know how—he must have just been imitating something he saw on TV. He was twisting his body around and around, and kicking his legs up, and wiggling his head. Maybe it was his little clown dance—it looked like he was suffering from some kind of tragic nervous condition. It was hard to watch for long—it made Aria's head hurt.

Whatever it was supposed to be, Mom and the boyfriend were howling with laughter, the boyfriend making that hooting sound, his arm around Mom, rubbing her shoulders. It was upsetting to see. Aria studied her mother—was she really having a good time, or was she nervous, or maybe even scared? Aria couldn't tell. Mom's pregnant belly looked a lot bigger than it had at dinner—it hung so low, like the weight of it might drag her right off the couch and onto the floor.

Aria tried to focus on Mom's belly, the way it moved. Was that just the laughter shaking it, or was the baby doing a clown dance? She shut the door carefully and sat back down on her bed, put the earphones on, and took them right off again. She was too nervous to do anything, to even know what she
should
be doing. She sat that way for hours.

Eventually, things got quiet again. She heard Mom put Joey to bed and then Mom and the boyfriend go into their bedroom. There was still laughter sometimes, but eventually
the apartment grew silent. Aria still waited. Finally Mom's bedroom door opened again. That's what Aria had been waiting for. She walked carefully to her door, opened it, and peeked out. The boyfriend went out almost every night. She'd heard him many, many times before. And there he was, standing in the living room rubbing more greasepaint into his face. But this time he bent down, and when he bent down, she could see that Joey was standing there with him. The boyfriend was putting more paint on Joey as well.

Then the boyfriend and her little brother left the apartment together. She should tell Mom, but wouldn't that just put Mom and the baby in danger? She didn't want to, she was terrified to, but Aria waited a few minutes and then followed them outside.

Joey and the boyfriend moved swiftly over the empty field behind the apartment complex, their dark shapes cutting through the tall grass, the moon making the tops of their heads glow silver. It might have been beautiful if it hadn't been so frightening. They almost looked as if they were flying, and Aria's chest pounded and her legs ached trying to keep up. Finally, they paused at the far edge of the field, and the boyfriend looked around. Aria crouched down so he wouldn't see her. His white greasepaint made him look zombielike, and when he opened his mouth, it looked like he had the largest, reddest tongue she'd ever seen on a human being. Suddenly, he reached down into the tall grass and
came up with a furry, struggling thing. Was that a rabbit? He thrust it into his mouth, and the struggling stopped.

Aria leaned her face into the grass and started crying. She desperately wanted to run back to Mom, but how could she leave Joey out here?

She raised her head a bit and peeked. The clown was shaking his head back and forth, blood and bits of fur flying everywhere. Then he spit it all out with a great
ptui!
sound. Then he laughed. Worse, there was a smaller laugh rising up beside him.

They were moving again, and Aria was moving with them. They got to the little kids' playground on the edge of the field, and the clown leapt on top of the jungle gym. He jumped from one bar to the next, not holding on to anything. Then he reached down and pulled Joey up there with him. Aria gasped and started leaking tears again, she was so afraid.
Stop it! Just stop it!
She made herself calm down. She wasn't helping Joey any by crying.

When they leapt off together, it was like two apes, or maybe two fierce cats. If she hadn't already known, she would never have guessed that the smaller shape was a little boy's. It looked like something wild and brutal.

At least playing around the jungle gym had slowed their forward progress some, and Aria was close enough to see their faces as they ran into the busy street below. There was a crowd of shabby, swollen-looking men there, and some of them
seemed to know the clown, because they laughed out loud, and shouted his name, and slapped him on the back. And the clown shouted back, and he made little Joey perform for them, and when Joey did his silly clown dance they laughed even louder, and a couple of them tried to pick Joey up, but they dropped him. Aria just wanted to yell at them, but she was so terrified, and knew she shouldn't show herself yet. Joey turned on them with a red face, and jumped up on them, and they screamed. They were actually screaming because of something her little brother was doing to them.

The clown grabbed Joey by the arms and pulled him away. Some of the men were lying on the ground. Joey and the clown ran down the sidewalk toward the highway overpass, jumping, celebrating, shouting as if they'd scored the winning goal.

Aria ran through the group of men, trying to pretend they weren't there, that she hadn't noticed them. A few of them said things, but she wouldn't let their words inside her. Ahead of her Joey and the clown were going onto the bridge that crossed over the interstate highway. Even at this time of night the asphalt below ran swiftly with a glowing stream of light. As she got to the beginning of the bridge, she saw the clown leap up onto the short barrier wall. He was dancing and jumping up and down. He was clowning around.

They didn't see her approach. The boyfriend was shouting at the traffic below. Suddenly, he turned around and his red rimmed mouth was large enough to swallow a basketball
with ease. But she didn't think he noticed her, even though she was getting very close. He was far too crazy to notice much of anything.

He reached down and tried to grab Joey's hands to pull her little brother up there with him. And Joey wanted to be up there. He didn't seem the least bit afraid. But he was so agitated, so excited, that their two sets of hands wouldn't quite connect.

•  •  •

Aria ran forward to get between them, or to pull her little brother away from the barrier. Surely, even now he wouldn't try to hurt her? But he was kicking out at her, trying to kick her away. And the clown had one of Joey's hands firmly in his grip.

They were howling. Both of them were howling like wolves. It was like the sound they were making was about to swallow up her mind.

She reached up onto the barrier and grabbed the dancing clown by the ankles. He was so surprised. She would always wonder if he fell because she'd surprised him, or if the small push of her hands had been enough to send him over. Either way he had let go of Joey. She would always understand that it might not have turned out that way. The clown might have still held on, and there would have been nothing she could have done.

They didn't stay. She grabbed Joey by the hand and led him away, and she wasn't about to let go.

He said nothing for a while. Tears and sweat had cleared the center of his face, leaving the rest of his head a mess of colored shadow. Then he said, “Don't tell.”

“Joey—”

“Don't ever tell.”

“Joey, a human being died out here. We can't just—”

“No, no, he wasn't. Don't tell.” She knew it would cost her, but she never did.

A couple of weeks later they had a new baby brother. For the longest time Aria would dread his smile.

Steve Rasnic Tem
is a past winner of the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Bram Stoker awards. His novels include
Deadfall Hotel
and
Blood Kin
and, most recently,
UBO
, a dark blend of science fiction and horror.

Website:
m-s-tem.com

Twitter:
@Rasnictem

Facebook:
facebook.com/steve.tem

ILSA J. BICK

W
ow.” Bethie uncorks her mouth, her right thumb wrinkly as a prune. (Her sucking's way worse since the police came for Dad, though that wasn't on account of Ms. Avery up and disappearing. Mom had filed a restraining order and served papers. Bethie thought Mom fed their dad notebooks for dinner, but what did you expect; her sister was only five. On the other hand,
she
was twice as old, and that was Sarah's first thought too.
Like . . .
Mom,
seriously
? If she'd been Dad, she might've gotten kind of hot, though she wouldn't have axed the bay window.) Bending over Hank's front counter, Bethie studies a fringed leather pouch covered with wiry black hair. (Honestly, to Sarah, it looks like a scalp.) “So that's really
Indian
?” Bethie asks.

“Native American,” Sarah says, but it's automatic. God, when will Mom be done? Snatching a glance out the gas station's window, she sees Mom still chain-smoking and yak-yak-yakking on the pay phone because the phone company cut their landline. They live in the sticks where cells don't work. Even if they
did
, there's no money. (Well, unless
Mom quits sucking cancer sticks and chugging Four Roses.)

Please please please, Mom, can't you just shut up so we can leave?
Normally, she likes Hank's because of all the good smells: yeasty Krispy Kremes, brewed coffee, juicy brats turning on those little metal rollers. But she's dying here. Partly, this is because the station's so superhot, sweat oozes from every pore. She wants to strip and run screaming into the frigid winter air, maybe make a naked snow angel.

Sick.
Skimming her tongue along her upper lip, she grimaces against the taste of dank salt.
Maybe the flu.

Or a guilty conscience, sugar?
It's Ms. Avery, staring out from a mirror mounted on the wall behind the front counter. Her face isn't smooth and pretty anymore but darkly marbled with green veins like steak starting to turn. She probably smells.
Maybe something festering in your innards?

She's not real.
Sarah thumbs stinging sweat from her eyes. Ms. Avery's aren't like nice chocolate anymore but as glittery and red as coals.
There's no such thing as ghosts.

Except this one, sugar.
Ms. Avery's voice flowers in a black rose right behind Sarah's eyeballs
. Except the ghost you deserve.

“Actually, it's Ojibwe,” says Hank.

“What?” Jerking her gaze to the old man, Sarah almost blurts,
I didn't know Ms. Avery was Native American.
“You're . . . uh . . . you're Native American?”

“No way,” Bethie says. “Your last name's McDonald.”

“What, you were expecting White Feather? Cut Nose?”
Hank kicks his wizened features into a lopsided smile that shows uneven teeth yellowed by nicotine and years of strong coffee. “My great-granddad was Scottish, come over for the fur trade after the Civil War. Met and married my great-gran, who was from a tribe in Ontario, way up around Michipicoten Island. She was a
midé
, an Ojibwe healer, and this”—Hank gives the mound of black fur splayed on his counter a pat—“was her medicine bag, a
midé wayan.
”

“How's that different from, like, a
bag
bag?” She's grateful to have something else to focus on instead of a very probably dead woman. Then she wants to kick herself:
Stop it. You don't know anything for sure.
The last she'd seen of Ms. Avery, the social worker was striding past the nailed-on boards that scale an old oak to Sarah's tree house and heading for the immense tamarack bog where her dad was laying his muskrat traps way out in the deeper channels. (He'd explained it to Sarah once:
Whatcha do is you lay your line where the rats gotta swim to get to their houses. They take the bait and bam! And what's sweet?
Her dad's lips peeled from pointy incisors in a grin.
Rat saves you the trouble by drowning hisself.
)

Ms. Avery, of course, is not a muskrat or rabbit or any of the critters her dad traps for skins and food. That doesn't make her any less dead, though. Maybe.

Uh-huh.
Ms. Avery's tone is dry.
Tell me another
.

But you knew Dad might be mad. I told you so.
Sarah sneaks a finger to an aching temple. She's so sweaty she can
smell herself. Step outside and she'll steam.
Get accused of abusing kids, and see how
you
feel. I told you: Falling downstairs was an accident.
Even though it's out of the cast now, Sarah's right wrist still tingles with the memory.
It's what I told the doctor, I

(Get the hell out of my way.)

tripped over my own feet.

(Christ, I barely touched her! Is it my fault she's so clumsy?)

So this isn't my fault
, she thinks to the ghost in the mirror
. I didn't
do
anything.

And that's the trouble.
The words
bong
like doom in the middle of Sarah's brain.
You need to tell the police the truth.

She doesn't know what that is. That afternoon, when her dad dragged twenty rats and five rabbits back, he only looked blank when she asked about Ms. Avery.
Never showed
, he grunted, then flung the rabbits onto planks set up on sawhorses by the fire barrel.
Strip out those muskrats first, then get a pot going and do the rabbits. Got my mouth set on bunny stew.

When the police came three weeks later, Dad told them pretty much the same thing.
Never saw her.
Her dad's a stocky, ex–football jock with the neck and shoulders of an ox, so much kinky black hair on his arms and knuckles his buddies say his mom musta married Bigfoot, and a flat face that he knows how to rearrange.
It's real easy to get turned around out here
, Dad said, showing the detectives how the path forks after
a quarter mile before both feeder trails peter out and the trees close in. Deep enough for a lake in places, the bog stretches five miles east and north. Why, you could yell yourself silly, and no one would hear. If Ms. Avery had a gun and fired off a couple rounds, sure, her dad would've heard. But there'd been no shots that afternoon. Sarah told the police that too. Her dad's nasty-looking Glock, as well as his shotgun and .22, were still in the shed where he kept spare traps, and that was the truth. (Now, the fact that no one bothered wondering why she might be
concerned
if one of those guns had developed legs . . . well, that was the truth, too.)