The old priest leaned forward and patted Mr. Cummings’ hand. “We will go to Longbury, you and I, and when it is dark, we will read the burial service over the ground, after praying for absolution of their sins, eh? If their poor bodies are not there; well, there’s no harm done. If they
Mr. Cummings rose and held out his hand. “Thank you, Father O’Connor. I believe you are right and I should value your company and your help in righting my neglect.”
They duly went, and I can only report what Cummings said subsequently. The cottage has been refurbished and occupied without incident. The Wash House has been demolished and his nephew and family are happily installed.
MRS. HALFBOOGER’S BASEMENT
by Lawrence C. Connolly
Lawrence C. Connolly is another of the new writers in the science fiction/fantasy field who got a start in the pages of the patriarchal
It was early summer. It was early night. And Mrs. Halfbooger hadn’t been out of the house in nearly a week, the group of nine-year-old boys noticed.
Buckeye was thinking seriously about going home when Max Swanson got the window open. Lanny Rosenberg looked at Max’s puffed cheeks, then up at the window, then back at Max. “Can’t you do any better?”
Max stopped straining against the window and looked down at Lanny like he was looking at a maggot. “Maybe you can do better, booger face.”
“Maybe I can but don’t want to.”
“Maybe I can come down there and break your nose.” Max was standing on an old 7-Up case that Buckeye had found lying by the creek. Buckeye had picked it up, figuring it was valuable, but Max had taken it from him. Max was one of the bad things that had entered Buckeye’s life since being thrown out of Mother of Christ Elementary School. If it hadn’t been for Max, Thomas Edison Elementary might have been heaven. Most of the new friends he’d met there were pretty wimpy, except for Max.
“Sure don’t look very wide, Max,” said Willy Haynek, standing on his toes to get a look at the open window.
Max gave another push. “I think it’s warped, or something.”
“Can you get through?” asked Lanny.
“What do I look like? A rail?”
“What about Sean?” asked Lanny. “I bet Sean could get through.”
Max smiled. “Hey, yeah.” He looked around. “Hey, Buckeye! What’re you doing over there, Buckeye?”
That was another thing Buckeye didn’t like about Max. Max called him Buckeye like it was something creepy, and it made him feel like a weirdo every time the fat kid said it. He was beginning to wish he’d never told anyone at Edison that his old friends had called him Buckeye.
Not that it mattered. Max went through life looking for things to pick on, and Buckeye, who’d had an accident with a garden rake a few years back, was an easy mark. It’s hard not to be obvious with a left eye that looks like a horse chestnut.
“Hey, Buckeye! You dreaming, or what? Get over here.”
“What?”
“You’re going inside,” said Max.
Buckeye looked at the tight space between window and window sill. The light was bad. The sun had gone down. The round summer moon wasn’t up yet. And there wasn’t much to see—a thin strip of darker shadow in the dusk-grey wall of old Mrs. Halfbooger’s house.
The house was an old thing with peeling wood and sagging gutters. And it leaned—though that wasn’t so noticeable up close. Up close it just looked old—almost as old as Mrs. Halfbooger, who was at least a hundred. You could tell she was a hundred by the way she walked. Mrs. Halfbooger was the stoopingest woman in West Fenton.
The four of them had been watching her nearly three weeks now, sitting across the creek, on a tree-covered hill almost as high as the one Mrs. Halfbooger lived on. They would sit in Lanny’s tree fort, drink Orange Crush, and fight over Buckeye’s telescope.
There wasn’t much to see. Her name was Eva Hofburger. Calling her Halfbooger had started as a joke. No one laughed at the joke anymore, but the name lingered out of habit.
She was fifteen years a widow and all her life lonely. Albert Hofburger had “lived away” for the better part of the marriage. They had no children. And all the boys ever got to see from their across-the-creek tree fort were the comings and goings of an old, empty-eyed woman. Sometimes she would return home carrying packages from Kiddy Mart. Other times she would go out an hour or so before dark and not return until after the boys had gone home…
But these were mysteries too mundane for nine-year-old boys looking to fill an empty summer. They watched her because the tree fort made it handy. They made her a witch because she was old.
They would watch her driving away, spotted hand perched on the steering wheel of her ’47 Buick, and they would scare themselves silly with made-up stories about where she was going—about things she was going to do. They filled their stories with monsters, and ghouls, and werewolves, and bloodsuckers…
But they didn’t start getting close to the real horror until one day when Mrs. Halfbooger didn’t go out. That had been Tuesday.
They didn’t see her Wednesday either.
They saw her Thursday evening. She came out dressed in neat old-lady clothes and stood by the Buick. She looked sick. Lanny had the telescope, but the other three could tell just as well without it. She put her hand on the hood and stared down the hill, out toward the road that led to Kiddy Mart, out at the setting sun and the hazy glow that was Philadelphia. She stood that way a long time. Then she wiped her eyes and went back inside.
She didn’t come out Friday.
Saturday it rained. The tree fort didn’t have a roof, so they got together at Willy’s and told stories about her.
When she didn’t come out Sunday, Max said they ought to see if she was dead. But they didn’t.
Nor did they go when she didn’t come out Monday.
But when it was Tuesday again—when the long boring afternoon began fading to dusk, they decided to have a look. And a look was all it was supposed to have been until Max got the window open.
Buckeye stared at the window and wondered if being part of this was such a good idea.
“I don’t think I’ll fit, Max.”
“Don’t be a creep. You haven’t even tried.”
“What am I supposed to do if I get in there?”
Max jumped down from the 7-Up case. He was fat—probably the fattest kid Buckeye had ever seen. There were a few older kids at Edison who could get away with calling him Maximum Swanson or even Tiny Tuba. But the only nine-year-old who’d ever tried it had ended up having to eat a green fly before Max would get off him. That kid had been Buckeye. And the green fly had been worth it.
