The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

my feet and run past her and escape but the woman stood in my way blocking my way leaning over me breathing damp and warm her breath like a cow’s breath in my face. Don’t hurt me, I said, and she said, “You know you have to be punished – you and your pretty blond sister.”

“She isn’t my sister,” I said.

“And what is her name?”

The woman was bending over me, quivering with laughter.

“Speak up, miss. What is it?”

“I don’t know—” I started to say. But my voice said, “Mary Lou.”

The woman’s big breasts spilled down into her belly, I could feel her shaking with laughter. But she spoke sternly saying that Mary Lou and I had been very bad girls and we knew it her house was forbidden territory and we knew it hadn’t we known all along that others had come to grief beneath its roof?

“No,” I started to say. But my voice said, “Yes.”

The woman laughed, crouching above me. “Now, miss, ‘Melissa’ as they call you – your parents don’t know where you are at this very moment, do they?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do they?”

“No.”

“They don’t know anything about you, do they? – what you do, and what you think? You and ‘Mary Lou.’”

“No.”

She regarded me for a long moment, smiling. Her smile was wide and friendly.

“You’re a spunky little girl, aren’t you, with a mind of your own, aren’t you, you and your pretty little sister. I bet your bottoms have been warmed many a time,” the woman said, showing her big tobacco-stained teeth in a grin, “. . . your tender little asses.”

I began to giggle. My bladder tightened.

“Hand that here, miss,” the woman said. She took the willow switch from my fingers – I had forgotten I was holding it. “I will now administer punishment: take down your jeans. Take down your panties. Lie down on that mattress. Hurry.” She spoke briskly now, she was all business. “Hurry, Melissa! And your panties! Or do you want me to pull them down for you?”

She was slapping the switch impatiently against the palm of her left hand, making a wet scolding noise with her lips. Scolding and teasing. Her skin shone in patches, stretched tight over the big hard bones of her face. Her eyes were small, crinkling smaller, black and damp. She was so big she had to position herself carefully over me to give herself proper balance and leverage so that she wouldn’t fall. I could hear her hoarse eager breathing as it came to me from all sides like the wind.

I had done as she told me. It wasn’t me doing these things but they were done. Don’t hurt me, I whispered, lying on my stomach on the mattress, my arms stretched above me and my fingernails digging into the floor. The coarse wood with splinters pricking my skin. Don’t hurt me O please but the woman paid no heed her warm wet breath louder now and the floorboards creaking beneath her weight. “Now, miss, now ‘Melissa’ as they call you – this will be our secret won’t it . . .”

When it was over she wiped at her mouth and said she would let me go today if I promised never to tell anybody if I sent my pretty little sister to her tomorrow.

She isn’t my sister, I said, sobbing. When I could get my breath.

I had lost control of my bladder after all, I’d begun to pee even before the first swipe of the willow switch hit me on the buttocks, peeing in helpless spasms, and sobbing, and afterward the woman scolded me saying wasn’t it a poor little baby wetting itself like that. But she sounded repentant too, stood well aside to let me pass, Off you go! Home you go! And don’t forget!

And I ran out of the room hearing her laughter behind me and down the stairs running running as if I hadn’t any weight my legs just blurry beneath me as if the air was water and I was swimming I ran out of the house and through the cornfield running in the cornfield sobbing as the corn stalks slapped at my face Off you go! Home you go! And don’t forget!

I told Mary Lou about the Minton house and something that had happened to me there that was a secret and she didn’t believe me at first saying with a jeer, “Was it a ghost? Was it Hans?” I said I couldn’t tell. Couldn’t tell what? she said. Couldn’t tell, I said. Why not? she said.

“Because I promised.”

“Promised who?” she said. She looked at me with her wide blue eyes like she was trying to hypnotize me. “You’re a goddamned liar.”

Later she started in again asking me what had happened what was the secret was it something to do with Hans ? did he still like her? was he mad at her? and I said it didn’t have anything to do with Hans not a thing to do with him. Twisting my mouth to show what I thought of him.

“Then who – ?” Mary Lou asked.

“I told you it was a secret.”

“Oh shit – what kind of a secret?”

“A secret.”

“A secret really?”

I turned away from Mary Lou, trembling. My mouth kept twisting in a strange hurting smile. “Yes. A secret really,” I said.

The last time I saw Mary Lou she wouldn’t sit with me on the bus, walked past me holding her head high giving me a mean snippy look out of the corner of her eye. Then when she left for her stop she made sure she bumped me going by my seat, she leaned over to say, “I’ll find out for myself, I hate you anyway,” speaking loud enough for everybody on the bus to hear, “– I always have.”

Once upon a time the fairy tales begin. But then they end and often you don’t know really what has happened, what was meant to happen, you only know what you’ve been told, what the words suggest. Now that I have completed my story, filled up half my notebook with my handwriting that disappoints me, it is so shaky and childish – now the story is over I don’t understand what it means. I know what happened in my life but I don’t know what has happened in these pages.

Mary Lou was found murdered ten days after she said those words to me. Her body had been tossed into Elk Creek a quarter mile from the road and from the old Minton place. Where, it said in the paper, nobody had lived for fifteen years.

It said that Mary Lou had been thirteen years old at the time of her death. She’d been missing for seven days, had been the object of a countrywide search.

It said that nobody had lived in the Minton house for years but that derelicts sometimes sheltered there. It said that the body was unclothed and mutilated. There were no details.

This happened a long time ago.

The murderer (or murderers as the newspaper always said) was never found.

Hans Meunzer was arrested of course and kept in the county jail for three days while police questioned him but in the end they had to let him go, insufficient evidence to build a case it was explained in the newspaper though everybody knew he was the one wasn’t he the one? – everybody knew. For years afterward they’d be saying that. Long after Hans was gone and the Siskins were gone, moved away nobody knew where.

Hans swore he hadn’t done it, hadn’t seen Mary Lou for weeks. There were people who testified in his behalf said he couldn’t have done it for one thing he didn’t have his brother’s car any longer and he’d been working all that time. Working hard out in the fields – couldn’t have slipped away long enough to do what police were saying he’d done. And Hans said over and over he was innocent. Sure he was innocent. Son of a bitch ought to be hanged my father said, everybody knew Hans was the one unless it was a derelict or a fisherman – fishermen often drove out to Elk Creek to fish for black bass, built fires on the creek bank and left messes behind – sometimes prowled around the Minton house too looking for things to steal. The police had records of automobile license plates belonging to some of these men, they questioned them but nothing came of it. Then there was that crazy man, that old hermit living in a tar-paper shanty near the Shaheen dump that everybody’d said ought to have been committed to the state hospital years ago. But everybody knew really it was Hans and Hans got out as quick as he could, just disappeared and not even his family knew where unless they were lying which probably they were though they claimed not.