Tales from the Nightside (16 page)

“It’s okay,” he said, grateful for the chance to get to his feet "Nothing’s happened yet. Do you want to sleep some more?”

“No,” and her voice was younger, smaller than the size of her years. “Do you think she’ll do it tonight? It hasn’t been regular for a long time.”

Eric shrugged, stretched up to his toes so he could see the house across the street “Her light is still on.”

“It always is. Even in the day.”

“You want something to drink? I think Mom left some pop in the kitchen for us.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t want to leave here, not yet Maybe we should call Jackie and see if she can come over, too.”

“She’s always crying, Caren. She can’t help. Besides, she’s too young to understand. We have to do it alone.” He placed his hands on his hips, a gesture his father used to indicate finality. “Do you think you can remember enough good things?”

Caren nodded, rubbing at her eyes, then began swinging her legs. The room seemed large with shadows in the corners, but neither of them made a move to turn on the lights embedded in the white ceiling. Instead, they stared at the backless clock on the far wall and willed the hands to sweep to nine.

Caren marked the seconds by tapping a nail against her palm.

Eric wondered why no one else knew.

The fingers that rested on the piano keys were like ten wings of five sleeping hummingbirds, and they were slender and long. They hesitated, as if undecided about waking up and what to do when they did. The ivory was yellowed in blotches and stains, but the velvet-coated hammers were young and deep blue. The old woman breathed deeply to draw in what she felt, assimilated it and translated it to the language of the wings that fluttered now, darted and glided, a polka and waltz; and from the depths of the piano the music came back.

Hawthorne Street was a community unto itself, and no one who lived there would have had it any other way. Along its entire length, all families were neighbors and all children friends. The seasons were shared with garden-hose batons, snow-blower basso; pets roamed freely, and every yard but one had a hole in its hedge for the passing of gossip. Tree houses sprouted, sidewalks were chalked, but the unofficial leader was Eric because his home faced the unlucky Number 136. Of all the houses on the street, only this one could not keep a family; three in less than two years, not because it was haunted, but because the people were not able to penetrate the tightly meshed lives of everyone else.

Then, Eric remembered, came last September, and the smallest moving van he had ever seen pulled into the ragged blacktop driveway and unloaded one odd-angled piano a disturbingly deep black, one polished cedar hope chest that took three men to carry, one graying wicker chair slightly unstrung and a bench of burnished copper. He and Caren had loitered on the curb waiting for signs of children or pets but there was nothing else in the van and after one of the men had relocked the front door, it pulled away and did not return.

A week passed, and suddenly Caren had pounded on the front door, dragged Eric into the street. In Number 136, in the dirt-streaked picture window, were wine-red curtains. A light glowed behind them, and no one ever saw it go off. Four days more to a Saturday waiting for autumn, and an old, very old woman, appeared on the front lawn. She sat like a weathered totem in the wicker chair, her head covered by a sunhat whose brim dropped to her shoulders. She did nothing but sit. Watch. And sit until dark. Repeated every day until November’s cold drove her inside.

One by one, or in reassuring groups, the children passed by, waving, and receiving no response. Eric had been the only one with nerve enough to call her a greeting, but only a breeze moved.

“I think she’s blind,” he said to Caren on the way to school just before the Thanksgiving holiday.

“Deaf, too,” she said, grinning, receiving a grin in return.

And though they pestered their parents daily, they could get no satisfactory answers about the odd woman’s origins, her designs, why she never invited anyone in for tea, or cookies and pop.

She became, simply, the Old Lady, and a superstition instantly born prevented any of the younger children from passing her house on her side of the street.

And then, one cold and snow-ready night, when Hawthorne Street stayed home and huddled, richly, front of fieldstone fireplaces and gleaming Franklin stoves, the music began. Precisely at nine o’clock, the November chill was warmed by glittering sparks that sifted through windows and doors and startled the people who heard.

Hey, a circus, Eric thought, running to the living room to look up and down the street.

Hey, Mom, Caren had called, there’s one of those guys with the monkey and the thing that you turn.

There was a lullaby, a love song, memories of dance bands, carnivals and boardwalk calliopes on a hot August night

For thirty minutes to the second before it stopped, and the notes fell like powdered snow to vanish into the ground.

“Eric?”

He spun around, blinking, then glaring at Caren’s silent laugh.

“What’s the matter, did I scare you?”

“Not me,” he said. “You kind of just snuck up on me, that’s all. What’s the matter? You need something, or something?”

“I was thinking about the time she came,” and she shivered an aggravated chill, making him laugh. “Remember the time we tried to sneak a look through the back window, and Jackie started sneezing because of her hay fever, and we didn’t stop running until we must have got all the way to the park?”

“I wasn’t scared then, either.”

“I didn’t say you were, silly.”

“Then why’d you have to say all that? Don’t we have enough troubles?”

“I was just trying to remember, Eric, that’s all.”

“Okay, I’m sorry, but you’d better save it. I think I can feel it coming.”

Remember, he thought in disgust. Just like a girl to waste time remembering when we got things to do more important. And what good would it do asking for things to be the way they were anyway?

Throughout that winter, it seemed as if what rainbows there were had all spilled into a vast shimmering pot called Hawthorne Street, and all on the heels of the music.

Caren’s brother was accepted into a European university with full scholarship honors; Eric discovered he had a natural talent for musical instruments, and horns in particular, and his teacher told him in all honesty that he would someday be famous: Jackie Potter’s family won a state lottery and planned a trip across the country during Easter vacation; and there seemed nothing at all wrong in standing by the front window and listening to the piano drawing them closer, stirring their emotions while it accompanied snow onto the lawns, ice onto puddles, and guided the wind to cradle dead leaves softly into the gutters. The snowmen were bigger, the snow forts more elaborate and Eric’s father came home twice with promotions and once with a car big enough to hold thousands.

Eric scrubbed his cheeks dryly. It was no good remembering things like that because it wasn’t that way anymore, and it was all because of a vampire witch who sucked them dry with her music.

It was April when the weekly concerts stopped, and while most of the people worried for awhile, no one thought to visit the old woman to see if there was anything wrong. It was as if the children’s superstition had been universally accepted, and when Eric suggested they try again to sneak a look into the Old Lady’s house, Caren became angry and told him to leave the poor thing alone.

In May, a fire destroyed the oldest house on the street; Caren’s brother was arrested for possession of drugs and assault with a deadly weapon; and Eric’s grandfather died in the guest room, in his sleep. New grass was planted, was washed away during three consecutive storms that knocked out power for three days, flooded every waterproof cellar and uprooted a maple that was reputed to have been planted by the town’s original settlers.

Caren’s puppy was killed.

Eric’s father was forced out of work and into a hospital bed by a series of massive heart attacks.

The elms rotted from the inside, and the willows crawled with worms that soon stopped their weeping.

The music came again, at odd hours for nearly a week, stopped just as abruptly, and what grass was left began dying in the middle of a shower.

All the houses needed painting, gardens weeding and red brick shaded to brown.

Something had been taken away, something was missing, but few people cared, fewer still knew.

“Hey, listen, if you’re going to sleep, I’m going home.”

Eric grinned stupidly. He was sitting against the wall again, and his head felt stuffed with cotton like a baby’s toy.

“I thought we weren’t supposed to be thinking yet.”

“Okay, I’m sorry again,” he said, crossing the room to sit with her on the couch. “I just can’t help it.”

“I know what you mean. Do you . . . do you think we can fight her?"

He looked at her carefully before nodding,

“What if we’re wrong?”

“We’re not, I told you.”

“Then let’s get going.”

The music. It came at them through the dead leaves and grass and age-bent trees. The melody varied, wavered, changed.

“Maybe we should put cotton in our ears or something.”

“Eric, I’m frightened.”

There was a sliver of a tear in the corner of her eye, and he looked away to avoid seeing it slither down her satin cheek. “Don’t be,” he said. “Just remember that time we put the snake in Mrs. Green’s desk.”

“That was dumb.”

“It was funny, remember?” He turned back, Insistent, a hand reaching to grab her shoulder before it pulled away. “It was funny,” he repeated slowly, and took a breath to laugh.

“Sort of,” she said, hinting a smile, “but not as much as the picnic we went on with the Potters. Remember how you kept falling on your fat face in that sack race thing? I thought you were going to start digging holes with your nose.”

The music, searching for crevices in their conversation, cracks in their memories.

Eric giggled, clamped a hand over his mouth, then leaned back and filled the room with high-pitched laughter.

“You . . .” he said, gulping for air. “You on that stupid pony. You should have seen your face when the saddle fell off.”

Caren winced. “Well, it hurt, dope. Hey, remember the Christmas your father made me that doll? And your mother made all her clothes? I still have it, you know. Of course, I’m too old to play with it, but I like to look at it now and then.”

“Good,” Eric said, jumping onto the couch to look out the window. “Hey,” he shouted, “what about the time we found the bird in the yard.”

“Robin!”

“Right! Remember how we used the eyedropper to feed it until it learned to fly?”

“A cat could have eaten it,” Caren said, shuddering.

“Yeah, but we saved it!”

Eric clambered to the floor and improvised an impatient dance while he slapped at his sides to jog loose more memories, anything at all he could throw at the music.

“Wait a minute,” Caren said. “What about the time we went to the beach that summer? You won me an elephant at the stand.”

He stopped, almost choking in his desperation to find more words. “Nothing to it,” he said finally. “Those bottles are easy to knock down.”

Her hands stopped, and she pushed herself away from the keyboard. Carefully, with the measured steps of the practiced blind, she crossed the bare floor to the old chest and opened it. With deliberate care she pulled out what was once a large black square of satin. It was covered now, except for one small corner, with colors that danced, sang in harmony and laughed; never blending, capturing light, repelling a tear.

“Eric . . .”

“Hey, remember . . .”

“Eric, it’s finished!”

He blinked, listened, heard nothing, and let his small chest sag in relief.

“Hey,” he said proudly, “we aren’t so little, are we?”

She sat on the bench facing the red curtains. Methodically she arranged the satin across her knees, touching each thread-line that led to the corner. A needle sharp with use glinted in her right hand, and a single web of many lights dropped from its eye into a plain brown sack at her feet. Then her eyes seemed to clear, and she waited, poised, humming arcane tunes to herself and the chest that was filled to the brim with bright on dark.

“You probably think you’re pretty smart,” Caren said.

“Sure am. It was my idea, wasn’t it? I put it all together and figured out that the Old Lady was taking away all our happiness with that music we were hearing, didn’t I? And that’s what was making all the bad things happen, right?”

“Well . . .”

“. . . and didn’t I say that we had to show her that we were still doing all right anyway? And now that we did, she'll move away and never come back because we were too much for her. We beat the music.”

“Well, it’s done now,” she said and grinned.

“Sure is,” he said, grinning, wiping his forehead with his sleeve.

The needle shimmered, dipped, ready to extend the rainbow.

“When’s your mother coming home from the hospital?”

“I don’t know. She said she was going to look in on someone, I don’t know who, on her way back.”

They stared at each other across the room, then gathered In air and screeched it out in a victory yell that shattered all their doubts. Eric fetched two cans of pop, opening one and immediately pouring it over Caren’s head.

“I told you I was right, and I was, right?”

Caren grabbed for the other can, but he ducked away. “So what?” she said, laughing. “Nobody’s going to believe us. They don’t know she was some kind of a witch thing.”

“What do you care?” he shouted, leaping onto the couch to avoid her grasp. “We’re still heroes. And everything will be all right, you’ll see.”

The needle darted.

“One of these days,” he said, “I'm going to be the world’s best trumpet player, and you can come to my opening and tell everyone you know me.”

“No thanks,” she said. “You look like an elephant with that horn in your mouth.”

He laughed, leapt over the arm. But he wasn’t fast enough to escape Caren’s hand, and in a minute the second container of pop was emptied over his head, and Caren, for good measure, rubbed it in like shampoo.