Lou Darin was very uncomfortable with all this. He thought himself quite reasonable. And reasonable people did not believe in ghosts and dead men walking. That was the realm of superstition and folktale. And those things were not part of who and what Lou Darin was.
“We just better stay here and wait this out,” Russel said. “When morning comes, we’ll be able to figure things out.”
“The sunlight will drive them back into their holes,” Margaret said.
“We can only hope, we can only hope,” Miriam told them, though she did not sound at all convinced. “This is the doing of those eggheads up to Fort Providence. Make no mistake about that. Genetic engineering and cloning and God only knows what. Maybe it’s that and maybe Hell has opened its gates.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Lou Darin said.
“Is it, Mr. High and Mighty? Is it really? Are we back to that again, hmm? Well, then, since you’re so brave and rational, why don’t you go out there? The rest of us will stay here and rattle our gourds and conjure our spirits…you go out there and see for yourself.”
“I’m not about to go out there.”
“Any why not? There’s nothing to fear.”
They all looked over to the door that Miriam, ever resourceful, had secured with a couple boards laid across it and bracketed just like in an old-time frontier cabin. Course, she had to do that because she had blown the lock off with her shotgun. Nobody was mentioning that or the ugly black eye that Rita Zirblanski had given her. Better off to pretend otherwise.
“Well?” Miriam said. “Go ahead, Mr. Hot-Diggety-Dog.”
Lou was in a spot here and he knew it. You could only espouse theories so long before somebody wanted some proof, some evidence, and now they were expecting him to provide it.
“I’m not going out into the storm and catch my death while I wait for the zombies to show up,” he told them, trying to sound logical. “I’m a little too old for that nonsense and so are all of you.”
Which made Miriam chuckle. “Scared, eh? Well, rightly so, I’m thinking. There’s death out there and things walking that have been beyond the veil and have returned again. So it’s okay to cower with your yellow tail between your legs, Mr. Lou Darin. Nobody will slight you for common sense.”
Lou reddened, but could not bring himself to say anything.
“Listen to me,” Miriam said to one and all. “We can hope that day does come and hope that the National Guard will get us out, but we should be thinking also that those things might not happen. That what’s happened here might have gone beyond Witcham now.”
“Oh God…the whole Midwest?” Margaret said.
“Maybe the country,” her son added.
“Exactly.” Miriam nodded her head. “We’ll never know what sort of devilish horrors those eggheads were up to out at Providence. Opening doors that were meant to remain closed, letting things crawl through that should never have moved amongst men and women. But these things have happened before. The door of hell has opened a crack from time to time and we shouldn’t any of us be surprised.”
Lou Darin was having to clench his jaws shut not to say anything.
But Miriam saw him. “No matter, Mr. School Superintendent. No matter at all. For that door creaks open from time to time, only now those idiots have swung it wide. What I tell you now, my mother told me on her death-bed. During the First World War?which was just called the Great War before WWII showed up?over in East Genessee on Flank Street, there lived a tailor named Robert Hultz. He was a German immigrant and my mother grew up not three doors down the block from the Hultz tailor shop. Now, Hultz, seeing the devastation his own countrymen were causing Europe, sent his only son off to war. Conrad Hultz, my mother said, was a fine young man who tooled around on a motorcycle and was engaged to a pretty flower shop girl named Rose Kline. She promised to wait for him, but he never did come back. Poor Conrad died in France in 1918 during what they called the Battle of the Argonne. Back then, bodies were not returned to family and Conrad was buried on a French hillside with hundreds of others.
“Now all of this was bad enough on Mr. and Mrs. Hultz?she would die not three years later from an embolism and her husband would hang on another ten?but it was absolute and utter devastation for poor Rose. She rented an upstairs room from a family named Connor across the way. Well, Rose began to get a bit soft upstairs. People would run into her on the street and she would speak in great length of poor Conrad…as if he was still alive. Telling them about the fine picnic she and Conrad had had down at Millbury Park by the river or the plans for their wedding and honeymoon. A real effing tragedy, I’m thinking. Well, now here’s where things go from bad to worse. The Connor’s started becoming a bit concerned for Rose would sit up in that room of hers talking to people that were not there until all hours of the night and often just sit staring at a candle in her more lucid moments, wishing and wishing for her lost love to come back to her.
“Maybe she wished too godblasted hard for the Connors started telling the neighbors how they heard someone pacing up in the attic, saw a white face peering in through the windows, had found bouquets of dead flowers outside Rose’s room. Awful things like that. One night, well past midnight, there was a phone call at the Connor house. Mr. Connor worked for the railroad and was on call, so he was one of the few back then with a private line. Well, the phone rings and he answers it, thinking it’s the Chicago North-Western calling him in, but it’s not. Just a weird, windy sort of voice that he knew was Conrad’s, he claimed. It said to tell Rose that he was coming home. That the war was over. That was all. But enough to scare the Connor family half out of their wits. Well, it wasn’t long before people were no longer laughing off Mr. Connor’s story, for quite a few had seen a young, ghostly, quite pale man walking up the streets. One claimed that much of his head was missing, as was his left arm.
“And Rose? She carried on night after night, speaking with someone in her room and Mr. Connor had gone up there one night at wit’s end and he heard another voice answering her. Yes, the same voice from the phone. It sounded windy and distant, clogged up with something like somebody speaking through a mouth filled with blood. And the smell coming from under that door…flyblown and dirty. Well, it got so Rose had this nocturnal visitor just about every night. And that girl, who had yet to see twenty-one, had white streaks in her hair. She was completely mad. During the day, she would start at just about any noise and begin to panic when the sun went down. And how does this quaint little story end? With Rose screaming one night towards morning. They found her in there, ragged and bloody, her eyes wide and her mouth hooked into a scream. There was black dirt on her and graveworms as if something dead had lain atop her. And I’m guessing that something was Conrad Hultz who had finally bedded his fiance, something rotting and revolting and full of maggots with half its head shot off, something that made love to Rose and chewed on her as it did so.
“Well, a fine horror story, eh? I thought as much and I asked my Aunt Lydia about it. She looked like she was going to have a stroke. Her face went all gray and tight. It was true, she said, all of it. For Conrad had come back to claim his bride. Maybe all that wishing Rose had done by candlelight had kicked open the door of hell just wide enough for him to crawl through and, Lydia said, maybe it wasn’t Conrad at all, but just something pretending to be him. The sort of things that are out in the streets now. Who can say? Who can really say? But this much is true: The Connor’s moved out of that house and never came back. There were things they saw and things they heard which were even worse, local gossip had it. Nobody would live in that house after that. All sorts of wild tales about unwholesome smells and things whispering in the walls by night. An infestation of flies and worms that could not be put down.
“Anyway, one night, as a Halloween prank, my mother, Aunt Lydia, and a few other daring girls went up into that boarded-up old house some ten years after the Connor’s fled one dark night, leaving most of their possessions behind. They went up to Rose’s room to hold a seance as girls will. Lydia said it was a simply awful night of blowing leaves and howling black wind as Halloweens tend to be in this part of the country. A perfect night. Well, the girls were petrified, but they saw it through. They set up their candles and began calling up spirits. Did ghosts begin flitting about and knocking in the walls? No, nothing like that. But the room grew cold and dank as the grave and they heard sounds from the attic as the Connors had. And a smell of bad meat started rising up, a horrible smell that made you want to vomit, Lydia said. Rose’s old bed was still shoved in the corner and about then one of the girls screamed. For there was something on the bed, something covered in a graying old sheet, something that was breathing. Lydia said that’s when they ran. For whatever was under that sheet was trying to speak, except it sounded like its throat was full of dirt. And whatever was under there, it began to rise up, the sheet stuck to it. Lydia claimed that my mother was the last out of that room, that she looked back and saw something with a face
