Whistling Past the Graveyard (30 page)

The wind gusted and Mr. Pockets closed his eyes and leaned into the wind like he enjoyed the cold and all of the smells the breeze carried with it. Lefty thought the wind smelled like dead grass and something else. A rotten egg smell. Lefty wasn’t sure if the wind already had that rotten egg smell, or if it came from the hobo.

Mrs. Conner tensed and took a single threatening step toward Mr. Pockets.

“Get your disgusting ass out of my yard, you filthy tramp,” she growled. “Or I’ll make you sorry.”

“You’ll make me sorry?” said the hobo, phrasing it as if it was a matter of great complexity to him. His speech was still southern mixed with some foreign accent Lefty couldn’t recognize. “What in the wide world could that mean?”

Mrs. Conner laughed. Such a strange laugh to come from so pretty a throat. It was how Lefty imagined a wolf might laugh. Sharp, harsh and ugly. “You don’t know what kind of shit you stepped in, you old son of a bitch.”

“Old?” echoed Mr. Pockets, and his smile faded. He sighed. “Old. Ah.”

Lefty tried to pull away but the single hand that held him was like a shackle of pure ice. Cold, unbreakable. The fingers seemed to burn his skin the way metal will in the deep of winter.

“Let me go,” he said, wanting to growl it, to howl it, but it came out as a whimper.

“Let him go,” said Mr. Pockets.

“He’s
mine
.”

“No,” said the hobo, “he’s mine.”

Mrs. Conner laughed her terrible bark of a laugh again. She shook Lefty like a doll. “You really don’t get it, do you shit for brains?”

“What don’t I get?” asked the old man.

“You don’t know what’s going on here, do you? Even now, you don’t get it? You’re either too stupid or you’ve pickled what little brains you ever had with whatever the fuck you drink, but you just don’t get it. I’m telling you to leave. I’m giving you that chance. I don’t want to dirty my mouth on you, so I’m letting you walk away. You should get down on your knees and kiss the ground where I’m standing. You should pray to God and thank Him for little mercies, ‘cause I—”

“No,” said Mr. Pockets, interrupting.

“What?”

“No, my dear,” he said and there was less of the southern and more of the foreign accent in his tone, “it’s you—and anyone like you—who doesn’t understand. You’re too young, I expect. Too young.”

She tried to laugh at that, but there was something in Mr. Pocket’s voice that stalled the laugh. Lefty heard it, too, but he didn’t know what was going on.

Or, rather he did know and could not imagine how any thought he had, any insight he possessed, or any action he took could change this from being the end of him. The hardness in his pants had faded and now he had to tighten up to keep from pissing down his legs.

The woman flung Lefty down and he hit the gatepost, spun badly and fell far too hard. Pain exploded in his elbow and knee as he struck the red bricks, and as he toppled over he hit the back of his head. Red fireworks burst in his eyes.

Through the falling embers of sudden pain, he saw Mrs. Conner bend forward and sneer at Mr. Pockets. Her face contorted into a mask of pure hatred. The sensual mouth became a leer of disgust, the eyes blazed with threat.

“You’re a fucking idiot for pushing this,” she said, the words hissing out between gritted teeth.

Between very, very sharp teeth.

Teeth that were impossible.

Teeth that were so damned impossible.

“I will drink the life from you,” said Mrs. Conner, and then she flung herself at Mr. Pockets, tearing at him with nails and with those dreadful teeth.

Lefty screamed.

In stark terror.

In fear for himself and for his soul.

But his fear became words as he screamed. A warning.

“
Mr. Pockets
!”

However Mr. Pockets did not need his warning. As the woman pounced on him, he stepped forward and caught her around the throat with one gray and dirty hand.

And with that hand he held her.

She thrashed and spat and kicked at him. Her fingernails tore at his face, his clothes. Her feet struck him in the groin and stomach and chest.

He stood there and held her.

And held her.

Every blow that landed knocked dust from him. Lefty could feel the vibrating thuds as if they were striking him, the echoes bounced off the front wall of the Conner farmhouse.

And Mr. Pockets held her.

Inches above the ground.

Then, with infinite slowness, he pulled her toward him. Toward his smiling mouth.

He said to her, “Oh, you are so young. You and those like you. Even the ones you think are old. What are they anyway? Fifty years old? The oldest living in these mountains, the one who came from far away and settled here, the one who made you, he isn’t even three centuries old. Such a child. A puppy. A maggot that will never become a fly.” As he spoke, spit flecked her face.

Mrs. Conner squirmed and fought; no longer trying to fight. She tried to get away.

Mr. Pockets pulled her close and licked the side of her face, then made a face of mild disappointment.

“You taste like nothing,” he said. “You don’t even taste of the corruption you think defines you. You haven’t been what you are long enough to lose the bland flavor of life. And you haven’t acquired the savory taste of immortality. Not even the pungent piquancy of evil.”

“You don’t…know…what you’re…doing…”

Mrs. Conner had to fight to gasp in little bits of air so she could talk. She didn’t need to breathe, Lefty understood that now, but you had to breathe in order to speak, and the hand that held her was clamped so tight. He could hear the bones in her neck beginning to grind.

Mr. Pockets shook her. Once, almost gently. “You and yours hunt these hills. You are the boogeymen in the dark, and I suspect that you feed as much off of their fear of you as from the blood that runs through their veins. How feeble is that? How pathetic.” He pulled her close, forcing her to look into his eyes. “You think you understand what it is to be old? You call yourselves immortal because some of you—a scant few—can count their lives in centuries. You think that’s what immortality is?”

Mr. Pockets laughed now, and it was entirely different from the lupine laughter of Mrs. Conner. His was a laughter like distant thunder. A deep rumble that promised awful things.

Lefty curled into a ball and wrapped his arms around his head.

“If you could count millennia as the fleeting moments of your life, even then you would not be immortal. Then, all you would be is old. And there are things far older than that. Older than trees. Older than mountains.”

His hand tightened even more and the soft grinding of bone became sharper. A splintery sound.

“You delight in thinking that you’re evil,” whispered Mr. Pockets. “But evil itself is a newborn concept. It was born when a brother killed a brother with a rock. And that was minutes ago in the way real time is counted. Evil? It’s a game that children play.”

He pulled her closer still so that his lips brushed hers as he spoke.

“You think you’re powerful because monsters are supposed to be powerful. But, oh, my little child, only now, I think, do you grasp what
power
really is.”

“…please…” croaked Mrs. Conner.

Lefty’s bladder went then. Heat spread beneath his clothes, but he didn’t care.

“You think you understand hunger,” murmured Mr. Pockets as gently as if he spoke to a lover. “No. Not with all of your aching red need do you understand hunger.”

Then Mr. Pockets opened his mouth.

Lefty watched him do it.

He lay there and watched that mouth open.

And open.

And open.

So wide.

So many white, white teeth.

Row upon row of them, standing in curved lines that stretched back and back into a throat that did not end. A throat of teeth that was as long as forever. Mrs. Conner screamed a great, terrible, silent scream. Absolute terror galvanized her; her legs and arms flailed wildly as Mr. Pockets pulled her closer and closer toward those teeth.

As Lefty Horrigan lay there, weeping, choking on tears, pissing in his pants, he watched Mr. Pockets eat Mrs. Conner. He ate her whole. He ate her all up.

He swallowed her, housecoat and shoes and all.

The old man’s throat bulged once and then she was gone.

The world collapsed down into silence. Even the crickets of night were too shocked to move.

Lefty squeezed his eyes shut and waited for everything he was to die. To vanish, skin and bone, clothes and all, like Mrs. Conner.

He waited.

Waited.

The cold breeze ran past and across him.

And he waited to die.

-8-

When Lefty Horrigan opened his eyes, the yard was empty.

Just him and his bike.

The rotten, shattered apple lay where it had fallen, visible only as a pale lump in the thickening darkness.

Mr. Pockets was gone.

Even so, Lefty lay there for a long time. He didn’t know how long, but the moon was peering at him from above the mountains when he finally unwrapped his arms from around his head.

He got slowly to his feet. His knee and elbow hurt almost as much as the back of his head. The pee in his pants had turned cold.

He didn’t care about any of that.

The wind blew and blew and Lefty let it scrub the tears off his cheeks.

He limped toward the gate and opened it and bent to pick up his bike.

Something white and brown fluttered down by his feet, caught under the edge of one pedal. It snapped like plastic.

Lefty bent and picked it up. Straightened it out. Turned it over in his hands.

Read the word printed in blue letters on a white background on a brown wrapper.

Snickers.

There was only the smallest smudge of milk chocolate left on the inside of the wrapper.

Lefty looked at it, then he looked sharply left and right. He turned in a full circle. Waiting for the worst, waiting for the trick.

But it was just him and the night wind and the bike.

He looked at the wrapper and almost—almost—opened his fingers to let it go.

He didn’t though.

Instead he bent and licked off the chocolate smudge. Then he folded the wrapper very neatly and put it into his pocket.

He wasn’t sure why he’d taken that taste. It was a weird, stupid thing to do.

Or maybe it was something else.

A way of saying something in a language he couldn’t speak in words. And a way of expressing a feeling that he knew he would never be able to really understand.

He patted the pocket where he’d stored the wrapper. A little pat-a-pat.

Then Lefty Horrigan stood his bike up, got onto it, and wet, cold, sore and dazed, he pedaled away.

Through the darkness.

All the way home.

Author’s Note on “Property Condemned”

Although this is the third Pine Deep story included in this collection, it is unique in three important ways. Firstly because it is a prequel, of sorts, to the Pine Deep Trilogy. Second, because it was the first Pine Deep story I ever wrote. And third, because it was the lead story in the first issue of a wonderful horror webzine,
Nightmare Magazine,
edited by my friend John Joseph Adams.

Nightmare Magazine
is a horror companion to John’s award-winning
Lightspeed
science fiction e-zine. I encourage you to try both of them. And in the meantime, welcome once more to Pine Deep.

-1-

The house was occupied, but no one lived there.

That’s how Malcolm Crow thought about it. Houses like the Croft place were never really empty.

Like most of the kids in Pine Deep, Crow knew that there were ghosts. Even the tourists knew about the ghosts. It was that kind of town.

All of the tourist brochures of the town had pictures of ghosts on them. Happy, smiling, Casper the Friendly Ghost sorts of ghosts. Every store in town had a rack of books about the ghosts of Pine Deep. Crow had every one of those books. He couldn’t braille his way through a basic geometry test or recite the U.S. Presidents in any reliable order, but he knew about shades and crisis apparitions, church grims and banshees, crossroads ghosts and poltergeists. He read every story and historical account; saw every movie he could afford to see. Every once in a while Crow would even risk one of his father’s frequent beatings to sneak out of bed and tiptoe down to the basement to watch Double Chiller Theater on the flickering old Emerson. If his dad caught him and took a belt to him, it was okay as long as Crow managed to see at least
one
good spook flick.

Besides, beatings were nothing to Crow. At nine years old he’d had so many that they’d lost a lot of their novelty.

It was the ghosts that mattered. Crow would give a lot—maybe everything he had in this world—to actually
meet
a ghost. That would be…well, Crow didn’t know what it would be. Not exactly.
Fun
didn’t seem to be the right word. Maybe what he really wanted was
proof
. He worried about that. About wanting proof that something existed beyond the world he knew.

He believed that he believed, but he wasn’t sure that he was right about it. That he was aware of this inconsistency only tightened the knots. And fueled his need.

His
hunger
.

Ghosts mattered to Malcolm Crow because whatever they were, they clearly outlasted whatever had killed them. Disease, murder, suicide, war, brutality…abuse. The cause of their deaths was over, but they had survived. That’s why Crow wasn’t scared of ghosts. What frightened him—deep down on a level where feelings had no specific structure—was the possibility that they might
not
exist. That this world was all that there was.

And the Croft house? That place was different. Crow had never worked up the nerve to go there. Almost nobody ever went out there. Nobody really talked about it, though everyone knew about it.