**********
By the time the story came around to the end, most of the little girls had drifted away to more absorbing distractions, leaving one lone, blond girl of about eight to finish the tale.
“And when the police got there,” the little girl continued, “they heard all the noise and went in the house, guns drawn. They found the parents, knifed to death just inside the doorway, but not Jenny or Lisa. The screaming and bellowing went on and the walls kept shaking while the cops were there. They stayed just long enough to make sure that there were no signs of life. I’ve even heard that one of them went upstairs to check, even with the walls shaking around him. He never came back to work again.
“The whole time the bodies were being removed, the shaking and pounding and laughing went on. No-one ever found out where the noises were coming from, and nobody could stand to stay in the house for very long. In the end, I think the city just decided to padlock the house and put a fence around it. It wasn’t much more than six months before everybody around it had moved out. Even the hobos and homeless wouldn’t stay in the abandoned houses and they were eventually torn down.”
“And,” I asked, “are the noises still there?”
The little girl looked at me without artifice or cunning.
“Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t go in there.”
“And what,” I asked her, “do you think happened to Jenny and Lisa?”
Instead of answering, she simply pointed at the window on the upper floor of the house, the only one that wasn’t boarded over.
I let my gaze follow her pointing finger. Standing there, quite plain to see, was an old woman with brittle, gray, scouring pad hair that streamed down to her shoulders. The blue of the bride’s maid dress she wore was faded, threadbare, and torn, and her eyes were sunken and as dull as chipped marbles. Her face told the story of a thousand nights of terror, each one etched into a different line on her slack face. She seemed to be looking right at me and I’m not ashamed to say I was frightened. Then she was gone, in her place only a tattered white curtain moving tantalizingly in the breeze.
I turned back to my host and was surprised to find that she had vanished. Looking up and down the street and at the other little girls, I satisfied myself that she was, indeed, gone.
A little shaken, I approached her mother.
“Where did your daughter go?”
“My daughter,” she said curiously.
“The little girl I was talking to, yes. Your daughter.”
“She’s not my daughter. I’ve never seen her before. I thought she was your little girl.”
The woman must have seen the bewildered look on my face because she asked me: “Is something amiss with her?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. I looked at the weed troubled fence around the blighted house, the locks and boards on the windows and doors, and the solitary curtain waving in the open window on the second floor. “I think maybe she finally got back at her big sister.”
Once Ago
By
Victor Allen
Copyright © 2014
All Rights Reserved
“Jesus,” the boy groaned. “Not again.”
He rolled from his back to his stomach in the damp grass. A grasshopper, sluggish in the morning chill, made a clumsy arc above his nose as he held a sheet of paper at arm’s length against the sun.
“Another one?”
It didn’t sound like much of a question from the girl sitting next to him. She was a very pretty girl with auburn hair and a constellation of seven freckles scattered over the bridge of her nose. She was careful not to get her dress soaked in the dewy grass.
“Yeah,” the boy said. “‘We are sorry, but your story does not meet our needs at this time. Thank you for your interest.’
“Christ, they oughtta get a rubber stamp. It would save time and ink.” He sighed.
Anne looked at him seriously. “Maybe that’s your problem, Michael. You act like you’re writing for machines, not people. Editors aren’t machines, you stooge.”
“Sometimes I wish they were machines,” he said. “At least machines don’t form opinions about you.”
He seemed depressed, but Anne thought he was enjoying the fleeting morning light as much as he was. He didn’t even seem to mind the wet patches on his shirt from wallowing in the grass. A momentary breeze blew his dark hair away from his brow.
“Maybe they’re forming good opinions about you,” she suggested.
“Ha!” he snorted. But it was a humorous snort. “Easy for you to say. You’ve always been better than me and you keep getting better. I’ve had the whole summer to write and what happens? Zilch.”
“Summer’s over,” she agreed, not unkindly.
“So it is,” he said, as if only now noticing. He sounded terribly adult, much older than his sixteen years. That was something she hadn’t heard before.
“Do you have a new one?”
He grinned. Annie could always see right through him.
“I wanted you to read it later,” he said. “But I guess there’s no time like the present.”
Anne’s smile was dazzling in the brittle, morning glow. She sat up, the entire hilltop sky a pale blue backdrop for her.
Michael dug in his notebook for some papers. He found them, hauled them out in a bundle, and presented them to Anne with a flourish.
“I decided to write something a little different this time. It might just be off the wall enough to get noticed. Editors dig on that, I think.”
Anne reached for the fluttering pages.
“Let me see.”