The Collected Horrors of Tim Wellman (10 page)

"Girls!" Evelyn shouted. They didn't seem to
hear her. "Girls! Right this instant, get over here!"

Her words seemed to break the trance, and they
all jerked, as if waking from a bad dream, looked around, and then
ran toward her.

"Is everyone out?!" a familiar voice said. She
turned to see the Principal standing but badly injured. He was
holding his arm and was covered in blood. "The damned psycho shot
me!" He wobbled a bit and the sheriff helped him stand as they all
left the building.

"Are you okay, Mac" he said. His daughter was
wrapped around his waist as he stroked her hair. "It's okay, baby,
it's all over now."

"Fine, fine," Mac said. "The damned bastard shot
me. Forced me to lock all the doors and then shot me!" He looked
around and moaned loudly. "Oh, it's a hell of a way to start a new
school year!"

"Girls, is everyone okay?" Evelyn said. She
dropped down to her knees and all the girls gathered around
her.

"He stopped us before," Susan said. "He told us
he would kill everyone we loved if we told people what really
happened. We could have saved the boys, but he stopped us. He said
we were demons. That our powers were evil, but he had them too; he
taught us when we were in his class," Betsy said.

"He did bad things to the boys in the class; he
was afraid they would tell on him since he wasn't going to be their
teacher anymore," Becky said. "He had to kill them."

"He caused my daddy to drive into the oven. And
he was trying to kill us just now until your voice woke us up,"
Susan said. She looked at Evelyn and smiled. "You get thirty
percent off."

"I reckon that means he was somehow controllin'
ole' Charlie, too," the sheriff said. He looked at Evelyn. "But,
seems your powers are just a bit stronger than his were," he
said.

Behind them, with the help of three other fire
trucks, the blaze was dying down. The school, nothing more than a
frame, now, was gone. Steve Cross lay dead with his little girl,
killed for no known reason other than he wanted her dead, or
perhaps just as a final act to further frighten everyone who
witnessed the murder. Or, just perhaps, it was his payment to the
devil for the evil, but fleeting powers he had been granted. But in
the arms of their families and friends, smiling and crying, were
all of the students the girls had saved. Would things change?
Evelyn didn't know. Ideas and opinions change very slowly in small
Appalachian towns. Sometimes they don't change at all. But for one
day that started badly and got decidedly worse, the people of
Ceres, population 2613, assuming things were well at the retirement
home, had fifteen young heroes to thank.

Her Own
Devices

As houses go, hers was... horrible. It was an
old pile of logs and poorly hewn timber with a hard clay floor and
no toilet, or running water at all, that had probably been slapped
together as a coal-miner's shack on the wrong side of a hill a
hundred years ago. There were two larger rooms and a smaller third
one that sat off the bedroom and was used as a closet and storage
area. The biggest room held a couple of wooden chairs and a large
table, and in the corner, a wood-burning cook stove also used for
heat. She had a few pots and pans and a couple of other things
handy for a kitchen, but they were mostly things found in garbage
cans and dumpsters on her monthly scavenger hunts into the nearby
small town. There were a few windows and the fact that they had
glass in them was a point of pride, even though they were too high
off the ground for her to look out unless she stood on a chair.

She poured the batter, just flour and water,
into a hot skillet and quickly flipped it over. Breakfast was
ready. As she carried the plate to the big table she dipped an old
stoneware cup into a water bucket, breaking a thin skim of ice, and
sat down to enjoy her meal. Morning was the worst time of day for
her. Waking up always held the promise that perhaps, maybe, she had
just been dreaming. But, the rude shock of consciousness always hit
her like a hammer. Once upon a time she awoke to loving smiles, a
warm, comfortable room, the laughter of her sisters and parents.
She stopped thinking about it; she fell into that trap every
morning, remembering a life that might as well have been someone
else's now. And she was freezing.

Wrapping the old dirty blanket tighter around
her, she quickly finished her fried bread. "Oh hey, I've got stuff
to do today," she said. "I'm gonna make a broom and sweep the whole
house!" The thing she was talking to, an old teddy bear sitting on
the stone fireplace mantle, didn't answer. She didn't expect it. "I
think the old woman is coming today, too. S'possed to bring more
flour and she said maybe some sugar this time," she said. "Yummy,
huh? Fried cakes!"

She climbed down from the chair and took the
dirty dish to the old rusty sink and took a cup of water and poured
it over the plate. Life was hard for Jenny Stevenson. It would be
hard for any six year old girl living alone in the woods of
southern West Virginia when the entire world had forgotten you
existed. Well, except for an old homeless woman named Stella, as
poor as Jenny but able to get to town more often, who usually
shared her treasures. The only other living person she ever talked
to was the man who brought the bodies. He had just appeared one
evening and chased her around the hollow for hours with a knife
before he fell into a mine vent shaft. She had dropped several
large rocks onto his head until he finally agreed not to kill her
if she let him live. They became friends after she helped him get
out of the hole and he made it a habit of showing up once or twice
a month. She liked him; he was an artist, a sculptor, an
intellectual, though she really didn't understand most of his
works. Then again, he only brought the failed pieces to be dumped
into the old mine shaft behind the shack so it was unfair to judge
all of his art by what she had seen. But he brought her candy and
had always kept his word and been a perfect gentleman around
her.

He had taught her some of the basics of his
craft, and even brought a couple of models for her to practice on,
but she could never get used to the tools; even on bodies that were
already beaten into total submission, art was difficult. They
always squirmed or jerked or something at critical moments and
messed her up. But he was patient and told her she'd get better at
it; it would just take practice. But she wasn't sure she wanted to
make it a hobby. There was always a mess to clean up and the living
canvases
didn't seem to enjoy it at all. But, still, he
seemed to enjoy watching her play and he brought her candy.

"I wonder what day it is," she said. "It feels
like Wednesday." She walked into the bedroom and then into the
small storage room and dropped her blanket and quickly pulled on a
long sweater, meant for an adult, but the bigger size felt good on
the cold morning as the sleeves covered her hands and the hem
draped all the way down to her ankles. "We'll just say it's
Wednesday." She shook her fingers through her short auburn hair and
took a look in the piece of mirror nailed to the wall. She tried
not to question her fate in life, but at times, looking in a
mirror, she wondered if there would ever be more to it. But then
she heard someone knock on the door, smiled, and took off running
to open it. "Sugar!"

Among The Things
Forgotten

Among the things he missed most was the
menagerie of small glass animals his mother kept on the mantle.
They had sat there for twenty years, longer most likely, but he
could clearly remember twenty years, frozen in a colorful zoo,
dusted daily, polished once a week, more often if his mother was
upset or worried. There were other things too, the taste of a
home-cooked dinner, his father's laugh. But there was no place for
those memories, now, no place for him in that world. He enjoyed
what comfort came his way, survived the pain, and struggled forward
in a world that didn't know he existed. When he finally breathed
his last, no one would mourn, no one would remember. No one would
read his name in the paper and drop their head in a silent prayer
or remember him as an old friend who just slipped away. All those
ties were cut so long ago he was certain the lives he and his
childhood friends had together only existed in
his
memory,
now, too unimportant for anyone else to hold onto for a lifetime.
And he didn't expect it, really; why should those old chums
remember, or even his mother after thirty years away.

He had just turned fifty-four as well as he
could figure. A year or two might have gotten away from him, but
the count was close enough. It only mattered to him. He knew it was
on August twelfth and from what he could gather from the weather,
it must have been August. He had found an older watch, gold plated
but worn; it showed the time and the date, but the last time the
police had run him away from a temporary camp, they took it from
him. It was the only thing of value he had, so they took it and
beat the shit out of him and made it clear he needed to find a new
town to call home. But the last time he saw the watch, it was July.
That was up north a bit, near the Pennsylvania border. He never
cared for those people up there, anyway. Western West Virginia was
his home, though he made it a point not to get too close to the far
western tip. He never wanted to be within walking distance of his
old family home because he knew he would go there, and he knew it
would kill him to see the place and not be able to run through the
front door like he had done as a kid and see his mother standing,
as she always did, in the kitchen, habitually wiping her hands on
her apron and smiling, though she seldom had anything to smile
about after his father died.

It was going to be a hot and humid night, he
could feel the heat still in the air even as the sun was dimming
for the evening. He had found a cave deep in the woods last month
after a long illness that he figured almost killed him. He had
thought it a tomb at the time, but as he got better he realized it
was well hidden and close enough to the town of Wayne to walk up
there sometimes and see what he could find in the bins and
dumpsters around the poorer lit areas. He didn't like doing it,
there was always the chance he would be harassed by the police or
ill-mannered townsfolk, but sometimes it was necessary to keep from
starving to death. Twelve Pole Creek was less than a mile's walk
and, being summer, he could sometimes manage to scoop out a few
sunfish or an occasion snapping turtle.

The cave suited him for shelter, though, and he
could burn a small fire without anyone spotting the smoke. It was
deep enough to hide in if he ever had the need, but he had never
been more than twenty feet or so inside because it rapidly turned
pitch dark. He wasn't even sure just how far back it went. He threw
a few rocks into the blackness once and didn't hit a wall, so it
could go on for miles. He had occasionally heard sounds coming from
the darkness, though, and he assumed it was bats or perhaps there
was an underground stream back there. It was the wrong country for
bear or big cats, so he wasn't really worried. The noises were a
welcome disturbance as he spent his hours mostly in silence unless
the little girl came.

The little girl, existing, he was certain, only
in his mind, would visit occasionally in the evenings and sit with
him and talk. Since she was an hallucination, he never bothered to
see where she came from, she just seemed to be there sometimes,
sitting in the darkness of the cave until he noticed her. Then she
would come out into the light or sit around the fire and talk for a
few hours. Then as quickly, she would leave, most times in
mid-sentence and never with a goodbye.

They talked about life, mostly, things past. It
was one of the reasons he knew she wasn't real; she knew too much
about life when he was a boy, even things about him. She always
dressed the same, too, in clothes from a bygone era, perhaps even
older than his own childhood. And even though she was only four or
five years old, she seemed intelligent, more intelligent than most
of the adults he had met in his lifetime. But, regardless, he
enjoyed the company, even if there was every reason to belief it
was just his own.

The sky had turned quickly, confused with
scattered clouds, and had turned the entire landscape an eerie pink
color as he looked out of the cave. It was always surprising, but
he enjoyed it mostly because the odd shade made it easier to see
through the woods. He never felt safe, and he was no longer
physically able to defend himself from most threats, so the better
he could see, the more time he had to react. But he had been there
for weeks and had seen no one except the girl. He knew the roads,
where the various sub-divisions had carved up the wilderness, and
the cave was far enough from both to go unnoticed.

He tossed the fish bones into the little fire
and sat down on a long bench he had assembled himself from fallen
logs. "You never eat, do you?" he said. The child stepped out of
the shadows and joined him by the fire, sitting down beside him.
"I've only just noticed that about you."

"You were thinking about your old home again,
weren't you?" she said. He had also noticed she never seemed to
answer any questions directly.

"I guess," he said. "I think it must be my
birthday today." He poked around the fire, pushing the larger
unburned pieces of wood out of the direct flames so it would go out
quicker.

"I was there today," she said. She tossed
something into the fire that caused the flame to die down but glow
and turn bright white. He had seen her do it many times, in fact
most every time she came and there was a fire. She seemed to enjoy
the light but not the heat. "I visited the house. A new family just
moved in, I wanted to see them."