Black Static Horror Magazine #2 Page 15

  "It's always something.” Nana shook her head as she filled two mugs and passed one to Ivy. “The man came to look at it and he said he didn't see a problem."

  "Well, do you want me to put another light bulb in here for you?” Ivy took one sip of her coffee and set it down; it tasted old, and her mouth was gritty with grounds.

  "I'm not helpless. I know your mother made it sound that way, but I'm not. She never believes a word I say.” Nana leaned in closer. “I know she comes here, looking for me. She gets in at night and she prowls the walls and the ceiling. And sometimes I can hear her in the pipes."

  "Who? Who's getting in here?"

  Nana whispered it. “Ash-Mouth."

  * * * *

  It had been Holly's idea.

  "I don't want to,” Ivy had said.

  "Scaredy-cat.” Holly's eyes got narrow and mean. “Chickenshit.” They were sitting across from one another in a booth at the Mini-Burger, eating corndogs.

  "I heard that,” Big Ray said from behind the counter. “You don't be talking to your little sister that way.” Big Ray was always scolding you like you were one of his own, even though his kids had all been grown up forever. He'd run the Mini-Burger for as long as the girls had been alive, maybe the whole forty years it had been open. When the owner had died a couple of summers back, his son had come down from Atlanta and tried to ‘update’ the menu. According to Ray, “We run that Yankee on back out of town so fast he didn't know what hit him."

  "Atlanta ain't Yankee,” Holly had whispered to Ivy when Big Ray told them this story.

  "It is to Big Ray,” Ivy had whispered back. “Don't say ain't."

  Just then, Holly was ignoring Big Ray. “When school starts back, I'm telling everyone you're scared of everything."

  That was how it had started, and so it was all Holly's fault, and she ought to leave, that was what she ought to do; it was Holly's fault and nobody else's that she hadn't come out of the culvert after scaring Ivy the way she did, scaring her screaming out onto the flat dead-grass lots of Milltown. Behind her, the big concrete drainage pipe cut into the hillside, and above it ran a disused railway track that had once carried passengers, then freight, then nothing at all. The opening of the pipe looked ragged and wounded with branches from above hanging down over it. All around her, the vacant lots where kids went to drink and get high on weekends were littered with crushed beer cans, cigarette butts, the occasional spent condom. Ivy kicked at an empty vodka bottle. It was hot, her arm itched under her cast, and she wanted to go home.

  All Holly's fault. If we find Ash-Mouth, maybe she won't take Nana away.

  Ash-Mouth came for you when you died, according to Nana. She knew this because when she was a little girl, her cousin had died of polio, and she had seen Ash-Mouth steal into his room on the night he died. Nana had described Ash-Mouth to them. She had bone-colored hair, and a sludgy-looking smoke trailed from her fingertips. Her hair gave off sparks. In place of a heart, she had a piece of coal burning at the center of her chest, and her teeth—which were very sharp—were made up of diamonds brought up from the core of the earth, where monsters still lived. Her mouth itself was the yawning maw of a grave; her breath stunk like a crematorium: burning flesh, cold damp ashes, and death.

  I bet there's no such thing, Holly had whispered in Ivy's ear the first time Nana told them about Ash-Mouth, but Ivy knew better, because she could close her eyes and picture her just the way Nana described her. So it was easy enough for Holly to talk about looking for Ash-Mouth when she only half-believed in it, if that much. She had been like that all summer: bossy and insufferable, a word Ivy had learned in the school spelling bee. Holly was insufferable because Ivy was what her parents called precocious, and due to that precociousness she was going to skip right over the sixth grade and move up to the junior high with Holly. Holly wasn't happy with this arrangement. Their parents argued about it, but their parents argued about everything. Ivy had stood in the doorway of the kitchen watching them fight, and they were so angry at one another they never even noticed her there.

  Ivy's father said it wasn't good for either one of the girls. “What are we supposed to do, then?” their mother had said. “Ivy's bored to tears, and it's not like this town has a private school, even if we could afford one.” That wasn't strictly true; there was a Christian school operating out of Bethel Holiness Church where about fifty kids (all of them white) made up the entire student body, but Ivy didn't think that was the kind of private education her mother meant. She went on, “We're not going to handicap Ivy just to save Holly's feelings."

  Ivy was ashamed to be the source of so much trouble between her parents and her sister. She resolved then that she would try to do worse in school, but when the time came the test or the homework assignment was always so babyish she couldn't pretend it wasn't effortless. Anyway, Ivy planned to be an astronaut when she grew up. She didn't have that kind of time to waste, not even when the kids called her that name, Poison Ivy, not even when Brandi Henderson, who was big and mean, grabbed her in the bathroom and said Ivy better let her copy off her test paper or she'd stick her head in the toilet. Ivy kept her tests carefully covered after that, and avoided the bathroom at all costs, even if it meant eating and drinking nothing at all from the time she woke up in the morning until she got home from school.

  At the junior high, at least, she wouldn't have Brandi to worry about. With any luck, Brandi would never make it past sixth grade.

  "Hey,” someone said behind her, and she jumped, but it was only Greg, a boy who lived over in Milltown, a boy who was a grade ahead of Holly in school. Holly had a crush on him.

  "Hey,” Greg said again, “what are you doing?"

  He was wearing a white muscle shirt and blue shorts that hung down to his knees. Grownups didn't like Greg. Ivy and Holly's father had told them to stay away from Milltown altogether—because it was full of drunks and addicts and poor white trash—and Greg in particular—because his brother Rusty was mixed up with some Mexican drug dealers and his father had done time in prison. But their father had moved out of the house at the beginning of the summer, a betrayal so acute that nothing he said could hold sway over them any longer.

  "Where's your sister?” Greg asked.

  "I don't know,” Ivy said. “She went in there,” pointing at the culvert.

  "What'd she do that for?"

  "We were playing a game,” Ivy said, vague. “I think she's trying to scare me. She's hiding somewhere. Playing a trick on me.” Ivy hoped that this would turn out to be true.

  Greg grinned. “We should play one back at her."

  "We shouldn't,” Ivy said. “We should tell her to get on out of there right now."

  * * * *

  Nana had gotten sick at the beginning of the summer, right after Ivy broke her arm, and since then she had been in and out of the hospital for something the girls’ mother wouldn't talk to them about. She was the last of their grandparents; indeed, the only one they'd ever known. People said her husband, their grandfather, had just up and disappeared one day, but Nana had told Holly and Ivy that wasn't true. What had happened was that Nana woke up in the morning and realized he hadn't come to bed the night before. She went downstairs to look for him and all she found was a pile of ashes in the seat of his favorite leather chair, a singed spot on the arm, and one shoe.

  "He burned himself up?” Ivy said in amazement.

  It looked like he had just caught on fire, but how could that happen without anything else burning up too? Nana cleaned up what she could. It was only one of many strange things that happened to Nana in her lifetime, and she hadn't liked him much by then anyway, so she took it in her stride. But for the rest of her life she kept half-expecting that he'd come through the door, and she was scared people would say she'd done away with him. Years later she read a book about other, similar cases, and when she told Holly and Ivy the story she showed them a picture from the book: spontaneous human combustion, the caption read, and below it a hard-to-make-ou
t photo that the text beneath explained was a shot of the unblemished kitchen where a woman had gone up in flames before the shocked eyes of her family.

  Nana told them other stories, too, frightening, extraordinary stories. When I was a little girl, Nana said, I didn't realize the stories in books were made up. I thought they were true.

  That had confused Ivy. All stories in books were made up, but that didn't mean they weren't true.

  I have always seen ghosts hovering round. It took me half my life to learn to hold my tongue until I was sure whatever I was looking at was bound to this earth.

  Nana's family had been very religious, and had tried to cast the devil out of her when she was a little girl. Later on she spent time in a mental hospital (we don't call them insane asylums, the girls’ mother would tell them, her mouth tight, when she overheard them talking about it, and anyway, Mother's not to be telling you stories like that). Nana said they had drilled electricity right into her brain; Ivy pictured her with all her hair standing on end and lightning shooting out of her ears.

  They'll do that to you if they find out how weird you are, Holly had said to her.

  So she wouldn't tell Greg what she had seen in the culvert before she lost Holly, down in the earth in the deep dark.

  * * * *

  "It's dangerous in there, you know,” Greg said. “Kids go in and they don't come out the other side. Happens all the time."

  "It does?"

  He laughed. “Naw, it ain't even that long. I been through it a million times. I bet Holly's on the other side, waiting to scare you."

  "No,” said Ivy, “she didn't go out the other end."

  "Come on,” Greg said. “I'll go with you. There's nothing to be scared of, you'll see."

  The only thing worse than going back in there was waiting while somebody else went in and maybe didn't come out the other side. She didn't know what she'd do if that happened, so she followed Greg.

  Just inside the culvert, spray-painted names and obscenities and declarations of 4-ever love covered the concrete. At other times of year a wash ran down the middle but the summer had been so dry that the tips of grasses in the vacant lots and the leaves hanging down over the opening were yellowing.

  Once they passed out of the sunshine, the air was cold, like it wasn't almost a hundred degrees that day. Ivy looked back toward the opening, at the summer day framed there, and the houses of Milltown beyond.

  "You scared about going to the middle school this fall?” Greg said, and Ivy was grateful for the distraction. She shrugged and then realized that in the dark he couldn't tell she'd done so. “No,” she lied.

  "My sister Amy's going into seventh grade. You know her?"

  Ivy thought: pictured a dark-haired girl in too-tight jeans, smoking. “I think so."

  "I'll tell Amy to look out for you. She'll do what I tell her. Now in a minute we'll start to see the light at the other end. See, I bet Holly ran out the other side. She's probably sitting at your house right now, laughing at you."

  "No,” said Ivy, and here was where the ground turned suddenly downward, just like last time, leading them deeper into the earth, not out the other side. Here was where Holly had let go of her hand and grown quiet, then sidled up to her and shrieked right in her ear, panicking Ivy, and then there was something with them in the dark.

  I dare you. That was what Holly had said, to get her to go into the tunnel. I dare you to go in there and call for Ash-Mouth. She lives in places like that, down in the dark, Nana said so.

  "That's weird,” Greg said, “it doesn't go downhill here.” But it did. Ivy wanted to say I told you so, but that sounded bratty, people were always telling her she sounded bratty when she was only pointing out what she knew to be true.

  As they descended the air was damp, not like above, and the sound of their breathing was matched by the drip of water on stone. Ivy put one hand out to feel her way through the blackness by touching the concrete wall, and snatched it back as her fingertips skidded across something slimy. Greg's voice came back, thin and insubstantial, as if he were disappearing just like Holly. “We'll see the other end. Just a few seconds now."

  "Wait up,” she said. She heard a noise and then Greg held a lighter above his head. He was a few feet in front of her, and in the flickering light he looked like a figure out of a horror movie, all eyes and cheekbones and teeth, and his face empty of color.

  "Don't!” she cried, and ran to him, smacking his arm. Whatever had been in the dark with her and Holly before could probably find them with or without a light, but there was no need to expose themselves. The lighter clattered away and with the noise she realized the path beneath them was no longer dirt, but made of stone.

  "Goddammit!” Greg said. “Now what are we gonna do?"

  "I thought you knew your way."

  "We should go back how we came,” Greg said. “There must be a fork in the tunnel. I never heard of that before, but that must be it."

  "Well,” said Ivy, “you said you'd been down here a million times. Can't something change on the million-and-first visit?"

  "That's the stupidest thing I ever heard. Like all the sudden the road starts going in a direction it never went before."

  "Why not?” Ivy said. “Change is constant.” That's what her father had said to her while she sat and watched him packing, putting shirts and socks and the ties she and Holly had given him over a lifetime of Christmases into a big hard-shelled suitcase. She had wished that he would cry or show some sort of emotion, but his eyes just stayed red and he said lots of things about how sometimes people needed to be apart from one another. And he said, Don't think of it as something ending, Ivy; it's just change. Things change. One thing you can be sure of in life, change is constant. But it's nothing to be afraid of.

  He had been wrong, of course. Everything that mattered had changed.

  "Roads don't change on their own,” Greg said. “Not roads, or drainage pipes. Not solid things, just out of nowhere. We have to go back."

  But they found they were turned around, and then they were arguing about which way would take them out and which would lead them deeper in, and Greg said, “Dammit, what did you make me drop my lighter for?” Ivy felt like she'd been spinning round and round in her father's office chair. She remembered reading somewhere about avalanches, how people died trying to dig their way out because they couldn't tell which way was up and only worked themselves deeper into the snow. She opened her mouth to warn Greg about that, and when she did the dark rushed in.

  * * * *

  "Let's go in the living room,” Nana said. “The news is fixing to come on. There's none of them left I know anymore,” like the network anchormen were her neighbors. “You can stay for dinner if you like but I don't each much. I just heat up a can of soup."

  "A can of soup is fine for me, Nana."

  "Well, I only eat half the can at a time. I don't know if half a can is enough for you."

  "I'm not really that hungry. I'm sure it will be all right."

  The living room was as dismal as the kitchen had been, dark and chilly and, like the hallway, smelling faintly of something unpleasant that she couldn't identify. When had Nana's house become so inhospitable? It felt like the home of someone who could no longer manage to look after it, and maybe the coffee had been days old. Maybe Nana wasn't managing to clean or bathe or look after herself. Maybe Ivy's mother was right.

  "Listen,” she said. “Nana, listen to me. You've got to help me out here. Mama's talking like you need to go to a home and I've got to tell her something to reassure her. You have to stop calling her up and scaring her like you do."

  Nana, sitting in a big armchair that made her look small and helpless, was blinking very rapidly. “Well,” she said, and put down the cup of coffee she had brought in with her. “Well,” she said again. “Well. I don't know how to answer that. Some of my group is coming over tonight. They don't treat me like a crazy person. They treat me the way family is supposed to. Maybe you ought not to stay
here with them coming over."

  Ivy kept her face expressionless when Nana talked about her group. The past few years she had attracted a flaky little assembly of lost souls, spiritual drifters who gathered round her after exhausting the extreme outposts of mainstream religions and the obscure secrets of the occult: they came trailing the detritus of Charismatic Christianity and Jewish mysticism, abandoning Sufi dervishes and flying yogis, pagan priestesses and Gnostic apologists. There was something pitiful in their easy acquiescence to belief—about which they were not choosy; any belief at all, it seemed, would do, and when one was used up they simply transferred their fervor to another. Faith was not a problem for them. Finding a suitable focus for it was the challenge, and in Nana they seemed to have done so at last. Ivy had seen them in a photograph Nana showed her once, and she would not have believed it if it had been described to her; an odder assortment of people she had never seen gathered together. They were clustered in front of the blooming dogwood in Nana's backyard: a small shrunken orange-haired woman with a hump on her back, twin albino boys, a small neat gentleman in a turban, a twenty-ish young man improbably clad in a vintage suit several generations older than he was.

  Ivy took a deep breath. “Nana, I'm a scientist. I believe in things I can measure and observe, or at least extrapolate from my observations.” She saw Nana blink at the word extrapolate and barreled on. “What I'm telling you is that I don't believe in any of these things. I don't believe in Ash-Mouth. It's just a story you made up when we were little. I don't know what happened to Holly, I can't even imagine, but I know Mama got it in her head that you had something to do with it and that's just crazy. I'm trying to help you out here. I'm on your side."

  "You leave your mother to me,” Nana said. “I can handle her just fine."

  Ivy didn't know what she was going to say next until it was out of her mouth. “Nana,” she said, “what really happened to my grandfather?"

  * * * *

  "I loved him more than I have ever loved anyone, except for you girls, of course,” Ivy's mother said. Ivy was sixteen and they were driving home from Boston, where she had been offered a full tuition scholarship to the aeronautics program at MIT. They were on the flat and uneventful stretch of highway between Charlotte and Greenville, and had been on the road for too many hours. “When he walked out the door like he did my heart broke, even though I was already grown up and living away from home by then."