The sun was setting earlier and earlier. By half past three on a crisp, late October afternoon, it was already below the tree line. Not long now thought the woman driving north from Andover to the small town over the border that on some days seemed like it was a hundred miles away. She gripped the Chevy’s wheel, tight enough to make her hands hurt. It’ll be dark out soon. A shiver teased the nape of Diane’s neck. She fought it, lost, and shuddered.
The sun, a giant orange orb behind the pines lining the interstate, reminded her of a monster-sized version of the pumpkin she’d brought with her from her parents’ place on Foster’s Pond. Carving it into a jack-o’-lantern would give her something to do tonight until Len got home, and might take her mind off the worries creeping in now that day was slipping closer to night.
She turned off the exit and into the remote village of Windham, New Hampshire, Diane’s new place of residence. But Foster’s Pond and her old life within the safe, familiar walls of the old New Englander with her mom, dad, and younger brother still felt like her real home.
She remembered Len needed cigarettes, and pulled the Chevy into Barlow’s Country Store. The bowed windows bookending the glass door were covered in Halloween decorations. Paper skeletons and fake rubber vampire bats greeted her on the inside. The Frankenstein monster, its face an effigy of Boris Karloff, its arms and legs made of crêpe paper accordions, hung from the ceiling, near the cash register. A trio of pumpkins from the farm stand across the street brooded beneath, none as magnificent as the one she’d picked from dad’s vegetable garden during her lunch break.
Len and his cigarettes. It struck her as both odd and infuriating how quickly he was going through them this week. She bought another full carton and again worried about their financial situation as she handed two ten dollar bills across the counter. The house had cost them $9,900. They owned two cars. Granted, Len’s Falcon was the car he’d been driving when he picked her up for their very first date, but it already had a lot of miles on it even then. Money was tight. She would be forty-eight years old by the time they paid off a thirty-year mortgage in the distant, futuristic world of 1993. Providing, of course, that a bomb or any number of bogeymen from overseas or outer space didn’t blow up the country first.
Diane accepted the change, three singles and a handful of pennies, and dropped it into her pocketbook. She carried the oblong paper bag back to the car. The Chevy, with its array of fins, looked more like a spaceship from one of those creature feature movies Len watched Saturdays on the channel out of Boston. She backed out and again picked up Range Road, dismissing her current train of thought. Monsters and aliens, she tisked. She was a sensible modern woman of eighteen, not a girl of eight. It was 1963, not 1563. The Earth was no longer flat, and science had banished the supernatural through the dropping of two powerful bombs the same year she’d been born.
There were no monsters, ghosts, or ghouls lurking in the shadowy woods around her new home. Still, turning from Range Road onto Armstrong and driving down that long rural stretch through the cathedral of brooding pines, the day growing ever darker, it was easy to give in and believe such things existed.
127-E Armstrong Road was a small, dark brown cottage with harvest-gold shutters. Contained within its knotty pine walls were two bedrooms, a bathroom with a standup shower, no tub, and an open area that served as living room, dining room, and kitchen, cut partway down the middle by a long countertop.
Diane closed the front door behind her. Immediately, she smelled a bitter trace of cigarette smoke. The panic that had dogged her from the gravel driveway and up the flagstone walk to the unlit house cooled, while other embers were re-stoked. The rule had been that he wasn’t going to smoke in their new house. Cigarettes, she just knew even if he denied it, were killing her dad, and she hated that her new husband was also a slave to the habit.
She hung her coat on the rack beside the telephone and glanced at her watch. 4:30 p.m., still too early to call her mom down at Foster’s Pond. Rates were cheaper after five, and with a house, two cars, and plenty of bills to pay, every penny counted. Diane rounded the countertop. There was little stored on the shelves beneath: plates, kitchen matches, cans of vegetables, oatmeal, and powdered milk. She shoved the carton of cigarettes, bag and all, onto the top shelf. Len was smoking more than usual. Was it the stress of being married, the burden of owning a house, or all the responsibility that had been heaped upon their young shoulders? For not the first time, Diane questioned whether getting married had been the right thing to do. Most girls her age walked down the aisle right after walking down another to receive their diplomas. Marriage was a way to get out of the house and free from your parents’ rules. But had living under Wally and Rachel’s roof with a great kid brother and an overprotective mutt ever been truly unbearable to her?
Diane’s anger softened. She moved the pumpkin from just inside the door to the dinner table and felt the caustic sting of tears at the corners of her eyes. Being here, she certainly felt like an adult, and adult felt alone. Len wouldn’t be home from work until sometime after eight. Diane’s only connection to the people she loved was the telephone, but she couldn’t dial a friendly voice for another half hour.
She turned on the television. The dark screen, suspended atop four modern-looking wooden legs, crackled as it warmed to life. Snow stabilized into a black and white picture. A scene of tension was playing out between a handsome, brush-cut young man and a waifish blonde girl with a sad face. A soap opera, she thought, probably “The Edge of Night.” It was too soon for the news and weather. She turned the dial to another channel, then adjusted the antennae. There were days when a station out of Rhode Island came in clear enough to watch. Today was not one of them. She lowered the volume and returned to the soap opera, hoping the noise of the TV would offer a distraction.
For days now, she’d felt a sense of unease that was difficult to identify. However, she’d discounted it as being a simple case of the jitters. Diane’s job in Andover was going well. She was a young bride, but coping with married life most of the time. No, whatever this was, it was tangible. It had started on Monday afternoon; by Thursday, it was everywhere she turned, creeping silently through the house with her.
Diane moved to the kitchen and flipped on the light. The fluorescent ring’s cold white glare, like the crackle and blather from the TV, had the opposite effect. Instead of dispelling her anxiety, the harsh light preyed upon it. If only Len was here, she thought while pacing along the counter. She glanced toward the telephone, then the little clock on the stove. Minutes were passing with the weight of hours. Diane didn’t realize she was holding her breath until the last one she’d taken began to boil in her lungs.
The phone. This one time, she couldn’t wait for the rates to drop.
She dialed her parents’ number, messing up not once but twice. Diane slammed the receiver down, listened for the tone, and resumed. The rotary dial circled back with maddening slowness. She clutched the receiver, closed her eyes, and waited.
On the sixth ring, Rachel answered. “Hello?”
“Mom,” Diane said, her voice nearly a sob.
“Hi, honeybunch. I almost didn’t answer. It’s still early.”
“I know. I just…”
“Is something wrong?”
“No. Yes,” she corrected. “I’ve got the shakes. The woods around here are so dark, like something out of the Brothers Grimm. I feel like I’m living on a different planet.”
“You’ll get used to it,” Rachel said. “The woods up there aren’t much different than the ones down here. Once you’ve got neighbors living next door, you’ll feel better about being there.”
Diane took in a deep breath, held it, and then just as deeply released it. “I’m already feeling better. Thanks, Mom.”
A sharp bark sounded over the line.
“Sandy, be quiet,” Rachel said.
Diane envisioned her dad’s faithful blonde shepherd-mix and smiled. She’d told Len she wanted them to get a dog, now that they owned a house and enough land, and she regretted that it hadn’t yet happened. She shuffled in place, leaned against the knotty-pine wall, cradling the phone between her shoulder and ear. “What’s my brother up to?”
“The usual. He said he was doing homework, but he’s up in that pigsty he calls a room reading comic books.”
“And Dad?”
“He just finished raking leaves.”
“Wish I was there to help him.”
“You hate raking leaves.”
“I don’t hate raking leaves with him.”
“Make sure you tell him that. He misses you.”
“I miss him, and you, too, Mom. And that little mad scientist kid brother of mine.”
“We all miss you, honeybunch. But you know where we are, and we know where you are, and it’s really not that far away.”
Diane forced a smile. “You’re right. I’m just being a baby. I better let you go. I’ll call again tomorrow, and next time I’ll wait until after five.”
They said goodnight, and Diane returned the receiver to its cradle. She had just started feeling guilty for wasting money on an unnecessary long distance charge when the eerie malaise that had preyed upon her for days surged back, twice as powerful as the last time. The tickle of an invisible finger brushed her spine. The house briefly went out of focus around her as she shivered. When things again stabilized, she knew she was being watched. Slowly, Diane turned toward the nearest window.
The muddy gray of twilight had deepened, but enough of the day remained to make out the fretwork of leafless maple and birch branches and the empty blue shell of the cottage next door. The house was nearly identical to theirs except for its color and the floor plan, which was laid out like a reflection of their home, with bedrooms to the left instead of the right, front door to the right of the house as opposed to the left.
There was one other difference. 125-E Armstrong Road was unsold, unoccupied, empty. But as gooseflesh broke across her arms, and as Diane’s eyes found the other cottage’s dark window pane opposite from the one she stared out of, she shuddered again.
Someone, something, was over there, and it was watching her.
Illustrations by Kate Harper
She carved the jack-o’-lantern and was in bed by the time Len got home. His dinner sat on the stove, the plate wrapped in foil.
“Why’d you lock the front door?” he asked. “Why’s every light in the house turned on?”
Diane closed the paperback copy of the scandalous Peyton Place she’d lost herself in and made up an excuse to answer his questions, which had come off sounding more like accusations. Even so, with Len here she felt safe again. Exhaustion soon overwhelmed her, and Diane surrendered to sleep.
The next morning, she percolated coffee on the stove, packed a brown paper bag lunch for Len, and took steaks out of the freezer, leaving them on the middle shelf of the fridge. Len kissed her goodbye and was gone by seven, dressed in his blue mechanic’s shirt with his name stitched on the chest pocket.
Diane readied for work. She took another sip of coffee, picked up her pocketbook, and was out the door. A crisp and sunny October morning greeted her though, according to the weather man, rain was on its way. She started her car, backed out onto Armstrong Road, and motored away from the house. As she passed the empty blue cottage with the For Sale sign in its front yard, a flicker of movement drew her gaze toward its kitchen window.
There, for only an instant, Diane saw a hideous face. She gasped, blinked, and it vanished. Fresh terror surged through her blood. She drove forward in a daze, convinced she was losing her mind. Not only was she feeling things, now she was seeing them, too!
Later that day as predicted, ominous clouds blanketed the state. On Diane’s drive home, they dropped a cold, steady rain, forcing an even earlier night. The rain bleached out most of the day’s color, transforming everything into shades of gray, black, and white, leaving the world looking like what you saw on television shows.
She turned onto Armstrong Road and plunged into the tunnel beneath the cathedral of pines. The vast farmer’s field beyond the trees and rock wall at her left rolled past, deep woods and swampland on her right. She reached the elbow that turned Armstrong Road east and continued past a cluster of empty seasonal camps on the shore of the pond and the first and largest of the two hayfields, until finally catching sight of the four year-round cottages, theirs the third in line.
Diane stared straight ahead and didn’t blink until she was past the red cottage, then the blue one, and she’d reached the brown house with the harvest-gold shutters. The race to the front door passed in a blur. Diane hurried up the flagstone path, barely feeling the rain.
Run, Diane! There’s a monster at your back, something with fangs and red eyes and sharp, dirty claws that are right now only inches from your throat!
Diane reached for the doorknob. She started to turn, only to realize the door was already standing partway open. She froze where she stood. Night was falling behind her, while ahead loomed the house’s unlit interior, and God only knew what was lurking among those shadows.
She moved through the house, turning on lights while brandishing one of Len’s badminton rackets. Steeling herself, she opened the last closet door. The shapes inside revealed themselves as being a stack of boxes and winter coats, not goblins or vampires. With the house investigated from front to back, Diane lowered the racket. She gave it a look and started to laugh. What kind of protection would a flimsy wooden fly swatter provide if something ghoulish sprang forth from a shadowy corner?
The racket was the first object she’d pulled out of Len’s sports duffel. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to her that there were also baseball bats and hockey sticks in there. What she really needed, she thought as the laughter powered down and was replaced by barely-contained terror, was a crucifix, a string of garlic, holy water, silver bullets, and mustard seeds.
Diane checked the front door and the back for the second time and made sure both were locked. She took in a deep breath and realized the house smelled ashy again, along with another heavy odor she couldn’t place at first. She called her parents.
“The door was open, Mom.”
“Are you sure you closed it all the way when you left for work this morning?” Rachel asked.
Diane shrugged. “I don’t remember. I could have sworn I did. But there’s something else. Last night, after we hung up, I felt like someone was watching me. And this morning, I saw a face in a window next door.”
“I thought you said there was nobody living there?”
“There isn’t supposed to be.”
“Do you want to come over here?”
Yes, Diane thought, more than her mother could imagine. But what about Len, and supper? More to the point, what about looking like a brave and capable young wife, living in her own home, with her own life?
“I could send Dad to get you,” Rachel continued before she could answer.
Tears welled in Diane’s eyes. She gripped the phone hard enough to make her knuckles go white. “No, Mom, I’m okay.”
“You don’t sound okay, honeybunch.”
“I will be.”
She said goodnight and hung up, then turned toward the table and the grinning face of the jack-o’-lantern. Diane reached under the counter, found the box of kitchen matches, and lit the fat, waxy white candle hidden beneath its lid. A wan glow flickered from its hollowed insides. She’d done a good job carving the pumpkin—her brother would have been proud of its malevolent expression. Diane soon regretted creating that face, given her present state of mind. She blew out the candle and leaned down to return the box of matches to their place under the counter.
The carton of cigarettes she’d purchased at Barlow’s only the day before was gone, the brown paper bag crunched into a ball and left on the shelf. Impossible! Even at the worst of times, a pack of cigarettes would last Len two days. A whole carton? What was he doing, giving them away to his friends?
Diane straightened. In a daze, she moved to the refrigerator. Supper, yes, cooking the steaks, baking the potatoes in her clean, new oven would busy her hands and distract her thoughts from this latest unwelcome mystery. She opened the refrigerator, but the steaks weren’t where she’d left them on the middle shelf.
In a panic, Diane pushed jars and glass bottles aside in search of the paper-wrapped cuts of sirloin. A bottle of orange juice tipped. She caught it. Pickles, olives, and a jar of grape jelly didn’t fare as well and toppled. Where were those steaks? Then, Diane remembered the other smell married to the ashy stink of cigarettes she’d earlier detected while searching the house. It was the lingering odor of grilled meat.
As she closed the refrigerator door, another chill alerted her to that ghostly sensation of being watched. It was coming from the same window, the one facing toward the empty cottage next door. Diane willed her feet out of their paralysis and into motion. She made it over to the corner of the house and calmly lowered the shade.
“Somebody’s over there,” she whispered aloud. “I’m not imagining it!”
Now safe from the prying eyes of the night, she choked down a dry swallow, nodded, and marched through the house, headed toward the back door.
Stepping outside into the rainy, windswept darkness was the single most terrifying decision she’d ever made. Diane moved quickly across the yard to the metal shed that marked the property line. From there, she snuck through the stands of Austrian pines, maples, and birch trees with their paper-white skeleton’s limbs. The blue cottage loomed in front of her, the focal point, she now believed, of her own house’s haunting.
Diane snuck along the side of the cottage, past the twin propane tanks, ducking beneath the line of windows. Her position now afforded a clear view of her own house. If she hadn’t lowered the shade, she would have been able to look straight in at her living room and kitchen.
She worked her way toward the blue cottage’s next window and peered in on darkness. Breathless seconds later, the house’s ominous pitch-black landscape ignited with a spark of golden light. The light burned down into ruddy embers.
A cigarette lighter, Diane thought. Whoever was in there was smoking!
Just as she made this connection, the silhouette of a face barely illuminated by the lit cigarette leaned forward. The lighter flicked on again; in its flame, Diane saw the same hideous, evil face beyond the glass that had briefly appeared in the kitchen window that morning, more sinister than any Halloween horror because it was real.
The horror looked back and saw her.
Diane screamed and ran in the direction of her house. Terrifying seconds later, as she passed the metal shed, the blue cottage’s back door banged into place. The scuffle of footsteps across the wet ground followed. The monster was chasing her!
She made it up the back steps and into the house. In one fluid motion, Diane closed and locked the door. From there, she raced to the front door, locking that, too. A second after she did, the knob turned, jiggled.
“No!” Diane yelled, bracing her back to the wall. Her shoulder pressed against the telephone’s hard plastic casing. Diane grabbed the receiver off the cradle. Despite shaking hands, she managed to dial “O.”
A pleasant voice said, “Operator, may I help you?”
“Yes, there’s somebody outside my house trying to break in. I need the police!”
Silence answered.
“Hello?” Diane shouted. She clicked a finger down on the hang-up button. A ticking sound issued out of the receiver. The line was dead. That’s because the monster cut the wire, an inner voice announced.
Diane dropped the receiver and heard it bang against the knotty pine wall. She grabbed her purse, found her keys, and, on instinct, turned in the direction of the back door. If she ran fast enough, she’d be in her car and speeding away toward help.
She unlocked the back door; it pushed inward immediately. The monster had already rounded the house. Diane turned again in the direction of the living room. Getting there seemed to take forever, the seconds passing with the sluggishness of running through waist-deep water in a nightmare. Finally, she reached the front door, unlocked the lock, and pulled on the knob.
In the frightening instant it took for her to open the door, she stole a look at her pursuer. He was not some supernatural creature of the night, but a man dressed in a dirty white T-shirt and blue jeans. His hair was long and looked unwashed, and his face prickled with several days’ worth of stubble. The man was only a man, but no less terrifying than any horror from the crypt she’d dreamed up over the last several days.
Diane ran out into the storm, car keys gripped tightly in hand. She’d only gotten a few steps when she sensed the man close behind her.
In her haste to escape, she hadn’t seen that another car was just pulling into the driveway until its taillights flooded the front yard with a blood-red, telltale glow. Was it Len, returning early from work on the one night she needed him most? Diane shrieked his name.
The driver’s door opened, and another dark shape sprinted toward her, this one running on four legs. The car wasn’t Len’s, but her dad’s. And he’d brought Sandy with him!
“You probably owe that dog your life,” the policeman said. “Our man here’s wanted for assault. Not against a lady, not yet and hopefully never, but he’s got a whole laundry list of other charges to answer for. He probably walked down from the interstate. Saw the pond, figured there wouldn’t be anybody around for the winter, that he could shack up and nobody would be the wiser.”
Diane shot a glance at the second police car parked in front of the house, where the monster was contained in handcuffs. She fought the urge to shudder, and this time won. Wally’s arm slipped from her shoulder as she leaned down to pat Sandy’s head. “She’s a great dog.” She then offered her father a tired smile. “And you’re a great dad.”
“Your mom was worried. So was I,” Wally said. “Officer, if you’re done now, I’d like to take my daughter home.”
Another car carefully worked its way past the procession of vehicles in front of the small house. Diane saw that it was Len’s Falcon and shook her head. “Thanks, Dad, but I already am. Home, that is.”
Dark Reflections
The sun was setting earlier and earlier. By half past three on a crisp, late October afternoon, it was already below the tree line. Not long now thought the woman driving north from Andover to the small town over the border that on some days seemed like it was a hundred miles away. She gripped the Chevy’s wheel, tight enough to make her hands hurt. It’ll be dark out soon. A shiver teased the nape of Diane’s neck. She fought it, lost, and shuddered.
The sun, a giant orange orb behind the pines lining the interstate, reminded her of a monster-sized version of the pumpkin she’d brought with her from her parents’ place on Foster’s Pond. Carving it into a jack-o’-lantern would give her something to do tonight until Len got home, and might take her mind off the worries creeping in now that day was slipping closer to night.
She turned off the exit and into the remote village of Windham, New Hampshire, Diane’s new place of residence. But Foster’s Pond and her old life within the safe, familiar walls of the old New Englander with her mom, dad, and younger brother still felt like her real home.
She remembered Len needed cigarettes, and pulled the Chevy into Barlow’s Country Store. The bowed windows bookending the glass door were covered in Halloween decorations. Paper skeletons and fake rubber vampire bats greeted her on the inside. The Frankenstein monster, its face an effigy of Boris Karloff, its arms and legs made of crêpe paper accordions, hung from the ceiling, near the cash register. A trio of pumpkins from the farm stand across the street brooded beneath, none as magnificent as the one she’d picked from dad’s vegetable garden during her lunch break.
Len and his cigarettes. It struck her as both odd and infuriating how quickly he was going through them this week. She bought another full carton and again worried about their financial situation as she handed two ten dollar bills across the counter. The house had cost them $9,900. They owned two cars. Granted, Len’s Falcon was the car he’d been driving when he picked her up for their very first date, but it already had a lot of miles on it even then. Money was tight. She would be forty-eight years old by the time they paid off a thirty-year mortgage in the distant, futuristic world of 1993. Providing, of course, that a bomb or any number of bogeymen from overseas or outer space didn’t blow up the country first.
Diane accepted the change, three singles and a handful of pennies, and dropped it into her pocketbook. She carried the oblong paper bag back to the car. The Chevy, with its array of fins, looked more like a spaceship from one of those creature feature movies Len watched Saturdays on the channel out of Boston. She backed out and again picked up Range Road, dismissing her current train of thought. Monsters and aliens, she tisked. She was a sensible modern woman of eighteen, not a girl of eight. It was 1963, not 1563. The Earth was no longer flat, and science had banished the supernatural through the dropping of two powerful bombs the same year she’d been born.
There were no monsters, ghosts, or ghouls lurking in the shadowy woods around her new home. Still, turning from Range Road onto Armstrong and driving down that long rural stretch through the cathedral of brooding pines, the day growing ever darker, it was easy to give in and believe such things existed.
127-E Armstrong Road was a small, dark brown cottage with harvest-gold shutters. Contained within its knotty pine walls were two bedrooms, a bathroom with a standup shower, no tub, and an open area that served as living room, dining room, and kitchen, cut partway down the middle by a long countertop.
Diane closed the front door behind her. Immediately, she smelled a bitter trace of cigarette smoke. The panic that had dogged her from the gravel driveway and up the flagstone walk to the unlit house cooled, while other embers were re-stoked. The rule had been that he wasn’t going to smoke in their new house. Cigarettes, she just knew even if he denied it, were killing her dad, and she hated that her new husband was also a slave to the habit.
She hung her coat on the rack beside the telephone and glanced at her watch. 4:30 p.m., still too early to call her mom down at Foster’s Pond. Rates were cheaper after five, and with a house, two cars, and plenty of bills to pay, every penny counted. Diane rounded the countertop. There was little stored on the shelves beneath: plates, kitchen matches, cans of vegetables, oatmeal, and powdered milk. She shoved the carton of cigarettes, bag and all, onto the top shelf. Len was smoking more than usual. Was it the stress of being married, the burden of owning a house, or all the responsibility that had been heaped upon their young shoulders? For not the first time, Diane questioned whether getting married had been the right thing to do. Most girls her age walked down the aisle right after walking down another to receive their diplomas. Marriage was a way to get out of the house and free from your parents’ rules. But had living under Wally and Rachel’s roof with a great kid brother and an overprotective mutt ever been truly unbearable to her?
Diane’s anger softened. She moved the pumpkin from just inside the door to the dinner table and felt the caustic sting of tears at the corners of her eyes. Being here, she certainly felt like an adult, and adult felt alone. Len wouldn’t be home from work until sometime after eight. Diane’s only connection to the people she loved was the telephone, but she couldn’t dial a friendly voice for another half hour.
She turned on the television. The dark screen, suspended atop four modern-looking wooden legs, crackled as it warmed to life. Snow stabilized into a black and white picture. A scene of tension was playing out between a handsome, brush-cut young man and a waifish blonde girl with a sad face. A soap opera, she thought, probably “The Edge of Night.” It was too soon for the news and weather. She turned the dial to another channel, then adjusted the antennae. There were days when a station out of Rhode Island came in clear enough to watch. Today was not one of them. She lowered the volume and returned to the soap opera, hoping the noise of the TV would offer a distraction.
For days now, she’d felt a sense of unease that was difficult to identify. However, she’d discounted it as being a simple case of the jitters. Diane’s job in Andover was going well. She was a young bride, but coping with married life most of the time. No, whatever this was, it was tangible. It had started on Monday afternoon; by Thursday, it was everywhere she turned, creeping silently through the house with her.
Diane moved to the kitchen and flipped on the light. The fluorescent ring’s cold white glare, like the crackle and blather from the TV, had the opposite effect. Instead of dispelling her anxiety, the harsh light preyed upon it. If only Len was here, she thought while pacing along the counter. She glanced toward the telephone, then the little clock on the stove. Minutes were passing with the weight of hours. Diane didn’t realize she was holding her breath until the last one she’d taken began to boil in her lungs.
The phone. This one time, she couldn’t wait for the rates to drop.
She dialed her parents’ number, messing up not once but twice. Diane slammed the receiver down, listened for the tone, and resumed. The rotary dial circled back with maddening slowness. She clutched the receiver, closed her eyes, and waited.
On the sixth ring, Rachel answered. “Hello?”
“Mom,” Diane said, her voice nearly a sob.
“Hi, honeybunch. I almost didn’t answer. It’s still early.”
“I know. I just…”
“Is something wrong?”
“No. Yes,” she corrected. “I’ve got the shakes. The woods around here are so dark, like something out of the Brothers Grimm. I feel like I’m living on a different planet.”
“You’ll get used to it,” Rachel said. “The woods up there aren’t much different than the ones down here. Once you’ve got neighbors living next door, you’ll feel better about being there.”
Diane took in a deep breath, held it, and then just as deeply released it. “I’m already feeling better. Thanks, Mom.”
A sharp bark sounded over the line.
“Sandy, be quiet,” Rachel said.
Diane envisioned her dad’s faithful blonde shepherd-mix and smiled. She’d told Len she wanted them to get a dog, now that they owned a house and enough land, and she regretted that it hadn’t yet happened. She shuffled in place, leaned against the knotty-pine wall, cradling the phone between her shoulder and ear. “What’s my brother up to?”
“The usual. He said he was doing homework, but he’s up in that pigsty he calls a room reading comic books.”
“And Dad?”
“He just finished raking leaves.”
“Wish I was there to help him.”
“You hate raking leaves.”
“I don’t hate raking leaves with him.”
“Make sure you tell him that. He misses you.”
“I miss him, and you, too, Mom. And that little mad scientist kid brother of mine.”
“We all miss you, honeybunch. But you know where we are, and we know where you are, and it’s really not that far away.”
Diane forced a smile. “You’re right. I’m just being a baby. I better let you go. I’ll call again tomorrow, and next time I’ll wait until after five.”
They said goodnight, and Diane returned the receiver to its cradle. She had just started feeling guilty for wasting money on an unnecessary long distance charge when the eerie malaise that had preyed upon her for days surged back, twice as powerful as the last time. The tickle of an invisible finger brushed her spine. The house briefly went out of focus around her as she shivered. When things again stabilized, she knew she was being watched. Slowly, Diane turned toward the nearest window.
The muddy gray of twilight had deepened, but enough of the day remained to make out the fretwork of leafless maple and birch branches and the empty blue shell of the cottage next door. The house was nearly identical to theirs except for its color and the floor plan, which was laid out like a reflection of their home, with bedrooms to the left instead of the right, front door to the right of the house as opposed to the left.
There was one other difference. 125-E Armstrong Road was unsold, unoccupied, empty. But as gooseflesh broke across her arms, and as Diane’s eyes found the other cottage’s dark window pane opposite from the one she stared out of, she shuddered again.
Someone, something, was over there, and it was watching her.
Illustrations by Kate Harper
She carved the jack-o’-lantern and was in bed by the time Len got home. His dinner sat on the stove, the plate wrapped in foil.
“Why’d you lock the front door?” he asked. “Why’s every light in the house turned on?”
Diane closed the paperback copy of the scandalous Peyton Place she’d lost herself in and made up an excuse to answer his questions, which had come off sounding more like accusations. Even so, with Len here she felt safe again. Exhaustion soon overwhelmed her, and Diane surrendered to sleep.
The next morning, she percolated coffee on the stove, packed a brown paper bag lunch for Len, and took steaks out of the freezer, leaving them on the middle shelf of the fridge. Len kissed her goodbye and was gone by seven, dressed in his blue mechanic’s shirt with his name stitched on the chest pocket.
Diane readied for work. She took another sip of coffee, picked up her pocketbook, and was out the door. A crisp and sunny October morning greeted her though, according to the weather man, rain was on its way. She started her car, backed out onto Armstrong Road, and motored away from the house. As she passed the empty blue cottage with the For Sale sign in its front yard, a flicker of movement drew her gaze toward its kitchen window.
There, for only an instant, Diane saw a hideous face. She gasped, blinked, and it vanished. Fresh terror surged through her blood. She drove forward in a daze, convinced she was losing her mind. Not only was she feeling things, now she was seeing them, too!
Later that day as predicted, ominous clouds blanketed the state. On Diane’s drive home, they dropped a cold, steady rain, forcing an even earlier night. The rain bleached out most of the day’s color, transforming everything into shades of gray, black, and white, leaving the world looking like what you saw on television shows.
She turned onto Armstrong Road and plunged into the tunnel beneath the cathedral of pines. The vast farmer’s field beyond the trees and rock wall at her left rolled past, deep woods and swampland on her right. She reached the elbow that turned Armstrong Road east and continued past a cluster of empty seasonal camps on the shore of the pond and the first and largest of the two hayfields, until finally catching sight of the four year-round cottages, theirs the third in line.
Diane stared straight ahead and didn’t blink until she was past the red cottage, then the blue one, and she’d reached the brown house with the harvest-gold shutters. The race to the front door passed in a blur. Diane hurried up the flagstone path, barely feeling the rain.
Run, Diane! There’s a monster at your back, something with fangs and red eyes and sharp, dirty claws that are right now only inches from your throat!
Diane reached for the doorknob. She started to turn, only to realize the door was already standing partway open. She froze where she stood. Night was falling behind her, while ahead loomed the house’s unlit interior, and God only knew what was lurking among those shadows.
She moved through the house, turning on lights while brandishing one of Len’s badminton rackets. Steeling herself, she opened the last closet door. The shapes inside revealed themselves as being a stack of boxes and winter coats, not goblins or vampires. With the house investigated from front to back, Diane lowered the racket. She gave it a look and started to laugh. What kind of protection would a flimsy wooden fly swatter provide if something ghoulish sprang forth from a shadowy corner?
The racket was the first object she’d pulled out of Len’s sports duffel. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to her that there were also baseball bats and hockey sticks in there. What she really needed, she thought as the laughter powered down and was replaced by barely-contained terror, was a crucifix, a string of garlic, holy water, silver bullets, and mustard seeds.
Diane checked the front door and the back for the second time and made sure both were locked. She took in a deep breath and realized the house smelled ashy again, along with another heavy odor she couldn’t place at first. She called her parents.
“The door was open, Mom.”
“Are you sure you closed it all the way when you left for work this morning?” Rachel asked.
Diane shrugged. “I don’t remember. I could have sworn I did. But there’s something else. Last night, after we hung up, I felt like someone was watching me. And this morning, I saw a face in a window next door.”
“I thought you said there was nobody living there?”
“There isn’t supposed to be.”
“Do you want to come over here?”
Yes, Diane thought, more than her mother could imagine. But what about Len, and supper? More to the point, what about looking like a brave and capable young wife, living in her own home, with her own life?
“I could send Dad to get you,” Rachel continued before she could answer.
Tears welled in Diane’s eyes. She gripped the phone hard enough to make her knuckles go white. “No, Mom, I’m okay.”
“You don’t sound okay, honeybunch.”
“I will be.”
She said goodnight and hung up, then turned toward the table and the grinning face of the jack-o’-lantern. Diane reached under the counter, found the box of kitchen matches, and lit the fat, waxy white candle hidden beneath its lid. A wan glow flickered from its hollowed insides. She’d done a good job carving the pumpkin—her brother would have been proud of its malevolent expression. Diane soon regretted creating that face, given her present state of mind. She blew out the candle and leaned down to return the box of matches to their place under the counter.
The carton of cigarettes she’d purchased at Barlow’s only the day before was gone, the brown paper bag crunched into a ball and left on the shelf. Impossible! Even at the worst of times, a pack of cigarettes would last Len two days. A whole carton? What was he doing, giving them away to his friends?
Diane straightened. In a daze, she moved to the refrigerator. Supper, yes, cooking the steaks, baking the potatoes in her clean, new oven would busy her hands and distract her thoughts from this latest unwelcome mystery. She opened the refrigerator, but the steaks weren’t where she’d left them on the middle shelf.
In a panic, Diane pushed jars and glass bottles aside in search of the paper-wrapped cuts of sirloin. A bottle of orange juice tipped. She caught it. Pickles, olives, and a jar of grape jelly didn’t fare as well and toppled. Where were those steaks? Then, Diane remembered the other smell married to the ashy stink of cigarettes she’d earlier detected while searching the house. It was the lingering odor of grilled meat.
As she closed the refrigerator door, another chill alerted her to that ghostly sensation of being watched. It was coming from the same window, the one facing toward the empty cottage next door. Diane willed her feet out of their paralysis and into motion. She made it over to the corner of the house and calmly lowered the shade.
“Somebody’s over there,” she whispered aloud. “I’m not imagining it!”
Now safe from the prying eyes of the night, she choked down a dry swallow, nodded, and marched through the house, headed toward the back door.
Stepping outside into the rainy, windswept darkness was the single most terrifying decision she’d ever made. Diane moved quickly across the yard to the metal shed that marked the property line. From there, she snuck through the stands of Austrian pines, maples, and birch trees with their paper-white skeleton’s limbs. The blue cottage loomed in front of her, the focal point, she now believed, of her own house’s haunting.
Diane snuck along the side of the cottage, past the twin propane tanks, ducking beneath the line of windows. Her position now afforded a clear view of her own house. If she hadn’t lowered the shade, she would have been able to look straight in at her living room and kitchen.
She worked her way toward the blue cottage’s next window and peered in on darkness. Breathless seconds later, the house’s ominous pitch-black landscape ignited with a spark of golden light. The light burned down into ruddy embers.
A cigarette lighter, Diane thought. Whoever was in there was smoking!
Just as she made this connection, the silhouette of a face barely illuminated by the lit cigarette leaned forward. The lighter flicked on again; in its flame, Diane saw the same hideous, evil face beyond the glass that had briefly appeared in the kitchen window that morning, more sinister than any Halloween horror because it was real.
The horror looked back and saw her.
Diane screamed and ran in the direction of her house. Terrifying seconds later, as she passed the metal shed, the blue cottage’s back door banged into place. The scuffle of footsteps across the wet ground followed. The monster was chasing her!
She made it up the back steps and into the house. In one fluid motion, Diane closed and locked the door. From there, she raced to the front door, locking that, too. A second after she did, the knob turned, jiggled.
“No!” Diane yelled, bracing her back to the wall. Her shoulder pressed against the telephone’s hard plastic casing. Diane grabbed the receiver off the cradle. Despite shaking hands, she managed to dial “O.”
A pleasant voice said, “Operator, may I help you?”
“Yes, there’s somebody outside my house trying to break in. I need the police!”
Silence answered.
“Hello?” Diane shouted. She clicked a finger down on the hang-up button. A ticking sound issued out of the receiver. The line was dead. That’s because the monster cut the wire, an inner voice announced.
Diane dropped the receiver and heard it bang against the knotty pine wall. She grabbed her purse, found her keys, and, on instinct, turned in the direction of the back door. If she ran fast enough, she’d be in her car and speeding away toward help.
She unlocked the back door; it pushed inward immediately. The monster had already rounded the house. Diane turned again in the direction of the living room. Getting there seemed to take forever, the seconds passing with the sluggishness of running through waist-deep water in a nightmare. Finally, she reached the front door, unlocked the lock, and pulled on the knob.
In the frightening instant it took for her to open the door, she stole a look at her pursuer. He was not some supernatural creature of the night, but a man dressed in a dirty white T-shirt and blue jeans. His hair was long and looked unwashed, and his face prickled with several days’ worth of stubble. The man was only a man, but no less terrifying than any horror from the crypt she’d dreamed up over the last several days.
Diane ran out into the storm, car keys gripped tightly in hand. She’d only gotten a few steps when she sensed the man close behind her.
In her haste to escape, she hadn’t seen that another car was just pulling into the driveway until its taillights flooded the front yard with a blood-red, telltale glow. Was it Len, returning early from work on the one night she needed him most? Diane shrieked his name.
The driver’s door opened, and another dark shape sprinted toward her, this one running on four legs. The car wasn’t Len’s, but her dad’s. And he’d brought Sandy with him!
“You probably owe that dog your life,” the policeman said. “Our man here’s wanted for assault. Not against a lady, not yet and hopefully never, but he’s got a whole laundry list of other charges to answer for. He probably walked down from the interstate. Saw the pond, figured there wouldn’t be anybody around for the winter, that he could shack up and nobody would be the wiser.”
Diane shot a glance at the second police car parked in front of the house, where the monster was contained in handcuffs. She fought the urge to shudder, and this time won. Wally’s arm slipped from her shoulder as she leaned down to pat Sandy’s head. “She’s a great dog.” She then offered her father a tired smile. “And you’re a great dad.”
“Your mom was worried. So was I,” Wally said. “Officer, if you’re done now, I’d like to take my daughter home.”
Another car carefully worked its way past the procession of vehicles in front of the small house. Diane saw that it was Len’s Falcon and shook her head. “Thanks, Dad, but I already am. Home, that is.”