The Year's Best Horror Stories 7 (14 page)

"They're late," she said, blowing upward to fend off a strand of black hair drifting down toward her right eye. "I told them before dark."

"The place is still new," he answered, wrinkling his nose at the carbonation splashing into his face while he drank. "If they get lost, they'll call."

"Grace will," she said with a smile, "but not Abbey or Bess. They've got dollar signs in their eyes already, or didn't you notice."

He laughed and swept a plate of shortbread toward him, picked up one of the flour-and-butter cakes and bit into it. They take after me. Grace is all yours." Then, with a frown: "Are you worried?"

She shrugged. "Not really, I guess. I just don't want them to have all their fun before the vacation is over, that's all. To get it all out on the first big night in town will make everything else seem… well, quiet."

"Dull," he said. "What you mean is, dull."

It was her turn to laugh, lightly, mocking the sigh of the breeze now turned to wind.

Ten o'clock, and the muttering of a car coughing into silence. Nels hustled Kelly into the front room, grabbed at a magazine and switched on the television. Then he thumped at the cushions on the dark quilted sofa, waved his wife to an armchair, and snapped open the first page before the front door swung in and his daughters arrived.

Physically, they were Kelly; from the black hair and eyes to the dark lips and slender figures to the nearly sickly pale complexions made disturbingly erotic by the nips of pink at their cheeks. Twenty, nineteen, eighteen, all in college, all with glasses, all standing with hands on hips staring in at their parents. Grace tsked, Abbey sighed, and Bess walked deliberately over to her father and turned the magazine right side up. "You're impossible," she said, kissing him on the cheek. Nets shrugged and asked how it went

Grace and Abbey slumped to the braided rug by the raised brick hearth and pulled their heavy sweaters over their heads, shook their hair back into place, and folded the sweaters neatly in their laps.

"They may be rich," Grace finally said, "but you cannot believe how incredibly dull they are."

"God, Pop," Abbey said, pulling at her lower lip, "we went to some place called the Chancellor Inn. There's a restaurant upstairs-it's an old farmhouse, see, I think-and there's a poor excuse for a disco on the first floor. Lots of noise. No action."

"They thought we were rubes or something," Bess said, knocking his legs away so she could sit on the couch with him. "Hicks. I think they think we're going to move in here forever. Raise chickens or ducks, or whatever they do on a place like this."

Kelly looked up from her knitting-a sweater for Nels in muted blues and grays-and smiled sympathetically. Then she looked to her husband, frowned when he lit a cigarette, but said nothing when he studiously avoided her glare.

"Did you guys have a good time?" Abbey said, looking to her father.

"We watched the sun set over that tree in the field."

"Great," Bess said. "That's really… great"

"We heard some geese, too."

"Oh my God," Grace said. "I don't think I can stand any more. I'm tired, folks. I think I'll go to bed."

"Me, too," Bess said quickly. "It's the country air, or something."

Abbey alone stayed behind when the footsteps on the stairs faded into running bath water and the shouts of who gets in first and who uses what towel. She picked up a long splinter of kindling and drew roads between the bricks, connected them, drew them again.

"What's the matter, Abbey?" Nels said softly. "Aren't you tired?"

"Nope," she answered without taking her eyes from the hearth. "Just… I don't know. I guess I was expecting something different"

Nels stretched out on the couch again and pillowed his hands behind his head, stared at the dark-beamed ceiling and the shadows that lurked there from the lamp next to Kelly. The vacation in May had been his idea, what with all his daughters' schools ending early and he and Kelly climbing the walls from a particularly harsh winter. The farm had been a quick-growing inspiration, sparked by a friend at the office who had lived in this same house once and remembered-so he claimed-the great times he and his own family had had. Rediscovering the land, roots, the whole mystique of a Nature without city. Not to mention, it had been added slyly, the preponderance of wealth in Oxrun Station and the young men who were attached to it. Kelly thought that part of the argument crass and almost unforgivable; Nels didn't think of it at all. His daughters were, in temperament, much like himself-what came, came, and if it didn't- whatever it was-well, there was no use crying. Time never cried for a flower that died. But Abbey was bis special flower, hence her middle name, and it disturbed him that she should be disappointed, that the unusual vacation had turned sour for her already. Normally, she was prepared for anything, to try anything, at least to give everything half a chance to prove itself worthy of her attention. But this, he thought, had somehow killed her enthusiasm before she had given it that one half-chance.

"What?" he said finally, as she knelt on the hearth and arranged the logs to start a fire. "Come on, girl, what's up?"

"They told us there was a lynching here, back before the Civil War. Some abolitionists were hanged from the tree in the field out back. Four of them, I think. I didn't know they did stuff like that in Connecticut''

"You think the farm is haunted, then?" Kelly said, her disbelief evident and marked with the nail of her practicality.

"No, Mother, of course not"

Kelly looked at Nels, set her knitting in the carpetbag by her side and folded her hands in her lap. "Then what, dear?"

"I don't know, I told you! Let's just say the place doesn't feel right, okay?"

She rose then and hurried from the room, up the stairs and into the giggling storm that erupted when she opened a bedroom door. Nels listened to the laughter for a while and allowed himself a drop of sweet reminiscence, when they had lived in another house in another state, when the girls were younger and going to bed meant only another opportunity to invent new games and friends and create chaos from careful order. And now they were drifting away. It made no difference that he understood the inevitability of it, that young ladies and fledglings soon enough stretched their legs and their wings and discovered that the horizon moved when you approached it. That didn't make any difference at all when the sun had set and his girls were asleep and he could remember pajamas with feet, and dolls with calico dresses, carriages and plastic tea sets and braces and boys.

Maudlin, Nels, he told himself; watch it, or you'll next be thinking how close to fifty you are, and that would crimp this week faster than you can sneeze.

Nels, it doesn't feel light, Kelly said with her hands roaming gently over her swollen stomach.
Nonsense.
A mother knows these things, Nels.
All right then, we'll call Dr. Falbo and see whafs what.
It's not that kind of feel.
Then ifs the Irish in you and the Norse in me. A combination of fey not seen since the world's creation. Don't worry about it, love, he'll be fine.
And what makes you so sure it'll be a he?
Fey. 1 told you. I have the sight, incase you didn't know.
And what if ifs another girl?
Two girls? Are you kidding? How the hell can I possibly afford two weddings? But…
.
if ifs a girl, we'll name her Kelly Rose, after you and your mother.
Abbey Rose, she said with a grin. After my mother and the theater in Dublin.
If it is a girl, I'll want another shot at it.
You'll keep your distance, Nels Anderson, or you'll be singing soprano in some damned fey choir.
 

Early the following morning, Grace and Bess took the car into Oxrun to see, as they explained, what was so special about all the fancy jewelry stores clustered there. Kelly ensconced herself in the kitchen to test the reputation of homemade bread. Alone, then, Nels wandered across the fallow field, jumping at startled grey mice, watching a pair of hawks riding the wind beneath a softly blue sky. He stopped every few yards to overturn a rock, dig around a burrow, marvel at die life no city ever maintained, marveling more that such continual amazements could become so mundane that the previous owners of the farm had given it up and moved to Los Angeles. At last, at noon and in no hurry, he reached the tree he had claimed for his own. It was a chestnut squat with age and broad with a crown that was flecked with new green. Weeds and grass grew up to its bole, surrounded knees of roots that nudged through the rocky soil. He had never seen anything quite like it, and as he grabbed at a twig dangling in front of him, wondered if even the yard of their suburban home would ever seem the same.

"Gruesome," a voice said behind him, and he jumped, a hand to his chest, his mouth open.

Abbey laughed delightedly, clutching at her stomach, stepped backward and fell, her legs splayed and her hands behind her to prop her up. Nels shook his head in rapidly diminishing anger, somewhat embarrassed, and pleased that she had come. He sat where he stood, crossed his legs and rested his palms on his knees. "Now that you've assured me ten years less of a magnificent life, kid," he said, "you can tell me what was really bothering you last night"

She had been having dreams of dying the past few months, each one sending her screaming into her parents' bed; in the last one, she had risen from her coffin at the church to sit beside her father.

Nels prayed they hadn't started again.

"Come on," he said gently, leaning forward slightly. "Come on, Abbey. You can tell me and the tree. We're old friends, the three of us."

Abbey puffed her cheeks. She was ready to deny him, then sagged and began pulling at green blades by her thighs. "They thought we were hicks," she said. "Kind of a reverse snobbery, I guess. Dumb country folk from the city, if you know what I mean. First they tried to get us drunk. Then they tried a few old-fashioned wrestling holds. We'd left the car at one of their houses… Frank's… he's the one who came out and introduced himself so nicely, remember? We left the car at his house. By the time we got back there, we were a mess. But…" and she grinned broadly, suddenly, "our virtue was, for the moment, ladies and gentlemen, still intact. Speaking for myself, that is." And her grin became a laugh.

Nels felt the warmth rising from below his collar, saw that she'd recognized his protective anger and coughed to keep himself calm. He reached blindly over his head, caught at a thin branch and pulled until his fingers had stripped a handful of leaves into his palm. He rolled them into a cylinder, pressed, rolled, and felt the moisture released and rubbed into his skin. It was a good feeling and an uncommon one. When he looked up, he saw bis daugher staring at him.

"You're all right, though," he said awkwardly.

"If you're asking if you have to buy a shotgun, the answer is no." She twisted until she was kneeling, took the crushed leaves from his hand and laid them to her cheek, her neck, across her forehead with her eyes closed. Then she stared at the tree and back to him. "Dad," she said, "if you only knew how natural you looked, sitting there."

"Ah," he said. "The primeval in me, that's what it is. One with the land and all that."

"No," she said, frowning as she puzzled it out. "Not quite. But it feels right for you to be here."

"Like it doesn't feel right to be in the house?"

She nodded, quickly shook her head and rose. "It's more like my room back home. I belong there more than anyplace else. You, though… I think you belong here."

"So I'll quit my job and we can play farmer for the rest of our lives."

She grinned, brushed at her jeans and smoothed her plaid shirt over her breasts. "Dad, what would you do if I got married?"

"I'd cry a lot and wish the boy luck. Lots of it."

"You'd let me? You'd let me go?"

He swallowed quickly the wisecrack that rose, sniffed and spread his hands helplessly. "I'd have to," he said quietly. "But I sure wouldn't want to."

"Neither would I," she whispered, knelt and kissed him on the cheek. "I love you, Dad. I don't say it enough. I know, but I love you."

Nels watched her leave. And the sadness that suddenly cloaked him grew when his hand absently touched at his close-cropped hair, blond turning white. That, he thought, is what New England does for you, pal; autumn in the spring. He knew there was a tear in his left eye, but he refused to acknowledge it by wiping it away. Soon enough, too soon, far too soon, it was gone, and he turned on his buttocks to stare at the bole, to follow its winding configurations and ease his mind into a state of near-trance. And it wasn't until a shout floated across the field that he came out of it, pushed himself to his feet stiffly and trotted back toward the farmhouse. He saw Grace standing on the back porch, waving her arms, and the trot became a run, the run a dash when his eldest leapt from the steps and raced toward him. She was crying as she dropped into his arms, sobbing out a garbled story of the three men they had met the night before; they had cornered her and Bess in a luncheonette, pressing until the girls had become frightened, following them to the turnoff from the main road and sitting there in their convertible waiting.

"I'll have a look," he said as he led her back into the house. Kelly was not in the kitchen, but he heard soft sounds from upstairs and knew she was busily comforting the youngest Grace sniffed loudly and borrowed his handkerchief. Ordinarily, had it been Abbey and Bess, he would have fallen instantly into the comforting father role he played for skinned knees and elbows, nightmares and thunderstorms. But Grace was twenty, a woman, and not easily shaken. Those men must have been more than simply crude, more than only playfully threatening. He set his daughter in the living room's armchair and slipped into his windbreaker.

"Stay there," he said. "Get yourself a brandy and light a fire. It'll be cold tonight. A Connecticut May is more like March."

He waited until she had reached for the decanter on the sideboard, then unhurriedly stepped outside and slid in behind the wheel of the car. The keys were still in the ignition and he fired the engine, turned around the oval drive marked with a birch in its center, and drove the half-mile in its center, and drove the half mile to the stone pillars that flanked the farm road's entrance. He braked, got out and walked to the main road that led in a direct line back to the village. There were no cars, no trucks, nothing at all that he could see save another field across the way and the faint rise of the low hill that marked the village park. Not a hill, really, he thought incongruously; more like a bump that the trees came to like.