Spookshow Read online

  So, what else was left?

  “Yeah,” I nodded, not looking at Todd. “Okay, let’s do it. Let’s sign up for good old Uncle Sam.”

  When I did look up, Todd’s eyes were beaming.

  “Swell, Eddie! That’s swell!” He grabbed my arm with a warm grip. “I’ll talk to the sergeant and get it lined up. We’ll get the physical and stuff, and there won’t be any stuffy books and school teachers this fall. We’ll be driving tanks and giving the Reds what-for!”

  I’d barely noticed that the truck had slowed, coming to a stop at the base of our driveway. I put my hand on Todd’s as I pulled away, nodding.

  “Sure, sounds great!” I put my hands on the side of the truck bed and catapulted over in a way that I hoped looked cool.

  “See you soon, you creep,” Todd waved with a smile. “Put a steak on the fat lip, or something!”

  I stood there and waved back, my other hand absent-mindedly reaching up to touch the still-swollen lip. The truck pulled away in a cloud of gravel dust and gas fumes, and I watched until the tail lights were out of sight, until the frogs and crickets drowned out the truck motor.

  I stood there in the dark for a long while, confused and sure I was doing the wrong thing.

  Chapter 3: Home

  After what seemed like forever, I turned and started crunching up the gravel drive. Ma and I lived in one of the old, crumbling, two-story, brick houses that used to be at the center of large farms. Once, it was owned by a man called Pearce, who almost had the nearby town of Secrets Crossing named after him.

  His time had passed, like all things do, I guess, and my uncle got hold of the property. Dad used to work it before his time at sea. It’s the only home I’ve ever known.

  I looked up at the place, only part of it visible, lit up by a porch light that buzzed and swirled with the shadows of fuzzy moths. The kitchen light was on, and I saw the thin, familiar shadow of my mother standing in the doorway, watching me.

  I sighed, suddenly a hundred times heavier than I was just a minute ago. She was supposed to have gone to bed, not to have waited on me. I felt a flutter of resentment flutter somewhere down in my stomach, flipping it a bit. I stomped maybe a bit harder than I could have as I went up the cheap concrete steps and thudded onto the wooden porch with a hollow boom. She stood there with the door open, holding a glass of milk and smiling at me with baggy, sad eyes.

  “Hi, honey,” she sighed, dropping her eyes from mine. I still wasn’t used to being taller than her, something that had happened in the past year. Her hair looked very gray in the yellow bulb in the kitchen ceiling, and it struck me for a moment that she looked like someone who was just impersonating my mom….someone old.

  “Mom, you were supposed to go to bed. You promised.” I was whispering, but I wasn’t sure why, because we were the only two in the house.

  “I know, “she said softly. “I just have such a hard time sleeping when-“she cut off, her eyes widening as she took a step forward and reached for my chin. Here it comes.

  “What on earth happened to your face?” She reached out fingers for my lip, but I caught them and turned my head to hide it.

  “Nothing, Ma! It’s nothing…no big deal.” I took a step away, but she grabbed my shirt and pulled me back to face her.

  “No big deal? Edmund Allen Quick, nobody gets a lip like that for ‘no big deal’, so don’t give me that.” She turned toward the icebox, quickly wrapping some of the larger chunks of ice with a washcloth from the sink. “Who hit you?”

  She pushed the cool, rough fabric against my throbbing lip, and it felt pretty good. I took it from her and held it in place, mumbling around it.

  “Uh dunt gnow, Ma…sumb big ked. It wab dark.” I felt a little stupid, like I was telling on someone…running to my mom like a kid again.

  “Lord, Eddie. Why did he hit you? Who started it?”

  “Uh dunt….Uh wab just…..” What was I supposed to say? Whenever I tried to think through what happened, it all just seemed like some crazy dream…like the thoughts melted when I got close to them. I closed my eyes to sort things out, but I just got more frustrated. The police were there. What if they had seen me? What if I got in trouble…got thrown in jail? I took the cloth away from my lip and looked down at my feet.

  “Can we just talk about this later? I’m pretty wiped out, Ma.”

  There it was. A distance that seemed like it came more and more often as I got older, like some kind of bridge we didn’t know how to cross. I stared at the cracking yellow and white linoleum on the floor, feeling achingly alone, aware of the hollow house around us, surrounded by the empty fields.

  I heard her draw in a breath that I knew meant there were tears in her eyes. She touched my arm with cold fingers, and I saw her shadow on the floor nod.

  “Okay. Okay. We’ll talk tomorrow. You go get some sleep, ok?”

  I turned and mumbled something through the melting ice, just wanting to be anywhere else.

  “…I love you, Eddie,” she said after me.

  “Me too,” I replied.

  ***

  I left the kitchen and made my way down the pitch-dark hallway that led to my bedroom. Closing and locking the door behind me, I took the familiar steps over to the dresser by my bed and snapped on the small lamp there.

  My bedroom had once been a sleeping porch, one wall was the brick wall of the house, and the others were white painted wood with a couple of small windows. I glanced up and saw my reflection in the mirror. My t-shirt was grimy and my hair looked like overgrown blades of black grass, while my lip looked like it had been cut open and stuffed with a rock. It shocked me when I saw it, and I was actually amazed that it didn’t hurt worse than it did. I guess that was my one lucky break for the night.

  I walked back to the dresser, the clock ticking along to almost 2:30. As if just seeing the time did it, I gave a yawn and reached into my pants pocket to pull out the pocket knife my dad had given me, along with whatever change I’d been lucky to wind up with after my night at the Palace.

  My hand came out with a ring.

  I blinked at it a couple of times before my brain actually went along with what my eyes were seeing, and I sat on my small bed to see it better.

  It was a heavy thing made of a dirty-looking bronze, pitted and scratched. The band gradually thickened and swelled until the front split open, revealing an egg-shaped, dark green gem. The overall effect was like an eye, with the eyelids being bronze and the eyeball an emerald that glistened like it was wet. Even though I had just pulled it from my jeans pocket, the thing was cold to the touch.

  It was definitely not a cheap, glass trinket. It was definitely not something I had seen before. How the heck did it get into my pocket? I sure didn’t put it there, and the only people that I’d been close to had been Todd, that creep who gave me this fat lip, mom, and…

  The girl.

  The chorus of crickets outside my window stopped as I tried to put my head around the situation. Sure, the suddenness of her kiss (what a kiss!) would have been enough to distract me from noticing her putting the ring in my pocket (in my pants!). My face flushed with memory and with the thought of being used like that. I frowned and stood, pacing slow circles around the room.

  Why had she done that? Why me? What was so special about the ring?

  I turned and held up the ring to look at again. I didn’t see any kind of inscription or writing of any kind. Was there some kind of message hidden inside….like a riddle? I slipped the loop of cold metal over the ring finger of my left hand….

  …and suddenly a man was standing right in front of me, yelling.

  Chapter 4: With this Ring

  “Get out of this house! You’re in danger!”

  The man was taller than me, with white hair slicked back from his lined face, and grey eyes that seemed to reflect the light like a cat’s. From what I could see, he was dressed in a tailored, black tuxedo, complete with tails. I couldn’t make out much because he seemed to fade away as
his legs got closer to the floor, disappearing into a mist that wasn’t there.

  “Get out, you fool!”

  He also seemed pretty determined.

  “Who are you? How the heck did you get into my room,” I asked, taking a step away from him. His scowl darkened and his eyes shifted past my shoulder, looking behind me.

  “It’s too late,” he growled.

  I turned my head to look behind me, just in time to see the brick wall burst into flame. I wasn’t even sure what could be flammable about a solid, brick wall, but the fire spread, yellow tongues of flame growing and then appearing in other places, connecting together to form the rough outline of a man.

  “Ma! Fire!!”

  I took a step back and reached for a blanket from my bed to smother the flames, but before I could get close, something walked through the wall and fire and smoke. It was a small, bald man whose skin looked like it had been blasted and melted by a blowtorch. I had heard from G.I.’s who told stories of burned corpses they saw in the war, and this looked like one. Flames crackled down his arms and I could hear the skin sizzle as black smoke carried the smell of burning fat into the room. He looked like the fire was coming from inside him…the skin lit up like a lampshade, all of the veins showing through in red. His closed eyes snapped open and focused on me, roasted, bloodshot things with sticky blue irises. His face cracked open in an awful smile full of blackened teeth, and he came toward me.

  I backpedaled hard and slammed into the red dresser, sending the lamp to the floor. I didn’t need it though, because the burning man lit up the room like a spotlight. I hissed and crouched as I felt the heat from him baking the skin on my arm like an oven. He took a swipe at me, brushing my left shoulder. I sprung to the right to get away, but my feet got caught on something and I wound up falling hard on the floor. My shoulder throbbed where he had touched it, like I’d leaned against a hot stove.

  The inky smoke rising from his shoulder concealed his face for a moment, but he leaned forward and stuck those pus-colored eyes on me again. He let out a barking laugh like a cough, sending out a belch of smoke, and turned his body toward me. I scrambled to get my feet back under me, but I was afraid to look down at what was tripping me up…afraid that if I did, he’d be on me in an instant.

  My mom’s voice came from outside my bedroom door.

  “Eddie? Eddie! What’s wrong? Open the door!” The white door shook as she pounded on it. Crap, why did I lock it?

  “Mom! Get out! There’s a fire!” I got to my feet and instantly took a lung full of smoke. I coughed and closed my eyes for a second… and he was on me, pinching my windpipe shut with a hand like a clamp. It was there only for a moment before I felt the fire bite into the skin of my neck, jerking my body tight like a current had gone through it, filling every fiber of me with a pain so shocking that I wasn’t even sure it was pain at first. I tried to scream, but I just managed a choked growl that pushed more needed air out of my lungs. I was burning alive. I was choking, vomit rising into my throat.

  I was dying.

  “Boy!”

  I closed my eyes to keep them from being burned. I heard my mom screaming and the burning man’s thick laugh, but the deep, insistent voice of the white-haired man sounded like it was right next to my ear.

  “Boy! I can save you! Let me save you!”

  I couldn’t speak, so far down in the primal thought of tortured animals that I barely understood. I tried again to gasp in smoke, air, anything, feeling the burning man’s fingers digging deeper into my throat.

  “The ring! Use it to let me in! Tell it to let me help!”

  I couldn’t tell if I was standing or lying down, my head spinning, pounding. I opened my eyes, but they were pulsing with red and black. My ears were ringing.

  “Yek,” I gurgled, pushing out stale, burning air though my throat. I pushed again, clawing at the hands at my throat.

  “YES!”

  Ice shot down my spine. Flowing like bursts of light, it pulsed down my arms and legs, feeling as if I had just plunged into the coldest, deepest waters of my life. Power came with it, burning through my brain, pushing away the sensation of pain, of darkness, making me feel like every sense had been pushed into overdrive. I realized, suddenly, that I was laughing.

  My eyes popped open and the room looked different. The walls were violet and purple, with thick, black shadows; the fire was an eerie green that turned yellow as it got closer to the burning man. The bald man himself was tinged with blue, his eyes nearly white as he looked up at me with a bewildered expression.

  With a sudden motion, my legs shot down like pistons, driving my feet to the floor. Simultaneously, my hands came down, joined in a giant fist, and then shot up between the burning man’s arms. With a jolt, his hands tore away from my neck and he staggered backward.

  I watched this with some detachment, like I was watching someone in a dream. My mouth opened and the gravelly voice of the white haired man came out.

  “You have no power here, shade! Reveal to me who sent you or be destroyed!”

  The burning man’s head twisted to the side with a snap and he scowled. A blast of smoky flame gushed from jagged cracks in the skin along his shoulders and charged at me with a howl like a dog.

  The impact of him slamming into me barely registered, my whole body numb and distant. He carried me backward with the charge, slamming me into and through the wooden wall of the room. He kept right on running faster than I person should, pushing me along, trailing thick smoke and burning debris.

  I felt it, acknowledging like someone checking off a list that my skull had fractured, that several ribs and my right shoulder was broken. My right leg kicked down and my left fist shot out into the side of the thing’s head. He lost his grip and went spinning to the ground, rolling like a burning wheel a couple of times before he stopped with a sizzle in the wet grass.

  I was up and running toward him in an instant, my skull no longer broken, my shoulder fine. The shock of what was happening started to wear off, and I tried to raise my hand to my face, but it didn’t listen, and I was carried along as I jumped into the air, easily covering the ten feet to the burning man and stomping down hard on his back before he could rise. Fire and embers flew from him, and he slid farther down the grassy hill as I stepped with ease from his back.

  The flames on the thing were greatly reduced, and I saw that covering his burned, black skin was a tattered set of overalls and ratty boots. I leaned down, grabbed him, and threw him hard into one of the old oak trees that dotted the yard. He bellowed when he hit, making a sound like bending metal, and more sparks flew. There was hardly any fire at all now, his skin gone black and only his eyes shining in the dark.

  “I take no pleasure in this, creature,” my alien voice said. “This is for your master.”

  My hand went down and snatched up an old Louisville Slugger baseball bat that I’d left in the yard, gripped it with both hands, and slashed it through the air directly at the man’s head. It landed with such force that the thing’s head simply exploded in a splash of liquid fire and ash, the bat snapping roughly in half. I tossed what remained to the side and watched as the fire went out in the burning man and he dissolved into a pile of dark ash, embers inside dying out.

  Suddenly, the icy cold poured away from me, heat rushing in to fill the void, bringing with it a bone-deep fatigue that nearly knocked me to my knees. I staggered and noticed that the tall stranger with the white hair was standing nearby, his silver pupils shining at me in the dark. I don’t know what it was that made me turn, a sound or a thought, but when I did, I saw our house completely enveloped in a tall column of flame. A voice that I recognized as my own whispered.

  “Oh, no. Mom.”

  Chapter 5: Goodbye

  I was suddenly on the porch of the burning house, with no idea or memory how I got there, no plan but to find Mom. I was bellowing something, calling for her, my throat bringing a metallic taste to my mouth. The double doors in the front of the house
were locked, as they usually were at night, but trying and failing to open them brought my panic to a fever pitch. I peered in one of the living room windows to the right of the doors, but it was dark inside, and I couldn’t see anything but a hazy light where the hallway should have been.

  In slow motion I sprinted around the side of the porch, some detached part of me noticing the smoke that was billowing like steam through cracks around the windows. The kitchen door came at me faster than I expected, and I bounced off of it, howling in frustration before throwing it open.

  Hot smoke blasted me in the face as I charged in, instantly lost in a room I’d been in every day of my life. The kitchen lights, instead of making it easier to see, turned the room into a toxic murk. My eyes burned and my breath caught in my throat.

  “Ma!” I coughed. “Ma, where are you?”

  I bent forward coughing and found it easier to see and breathe, so I dropped into a crouch and spotted the entrance to the hallway leading to my room. The kitchen cracked and popped as fire crawled in from the hall. I was amazed at how quickly it had spread. I jumped toward a collapsed figure by the wash room door, but it was just a bundle of burning clothes that had spilled from a hamper.

  Where was she?

  I plunged into the hallway, the ceiling covered in bubbling flame. It was so hot that I could feel the skin on my ears singe, forcing me to bend into nearly a crawl. Tears poured out of my eyes and my throat was so raw, I wasn’t sure I was even breathing.

  Something above me let loose a loud, wooden crack and I glanced up, sure the ceiling was going to tumble in on my head….and I saw her.

  Mom was curled up into a ball right in front of the door to my room, one hand resting on it.

  “Ma! Over here!” I wailed, forgetting the heat and plunging over to her. I shook her shoulder and she limply slid over onto the floor, her eyes closed. I had to get her out of there.