The Third Macabre Megapack (23 page)

UNHALLOWED HOLIDAY, by O. M. Cabral

The front door slammed with a gusty bang, and Julia Lathrop jumped nervously, dropping the book she had been reading. From the hallway came the sound of a child’s clear treble, then light, running feet.

“Virginia!” Julia called, trying to suppress the strange quaver in her voice, the sudden hard beating of her heart. “That you—Gin?”

“’Course it’s me, mother!” And Gin came into the room.

The child was thin like a growing reed, awkwardly graceful and tall for her nine years. She as proud of her missing front tooth and her two taffy-colored braids which were still too short, really, to ever stay braided. Julia noted the look of luminous happiness on the child’s delicate face, the wind-ruffled hair like a fine, spun web, the too-bright eyes that had of late become a little secret and remote.

“Must you, darling, slam the door when you come in?”

“It wasn’t me,” Gin protested, a trifle sulkily.

“Virginia!”

“Well, but it wasn’t. It was Tommy, really. He came in when I did, but he ran right out again—”

Julia’s lips tightened a little as she studied the child’s face. She could discern nothing but candor there. Virginia’s hurt air of being misunderstood seemed real enough.

“Virginia—you’re not to tell that story again, do you hear? It’s silly—just something you made up. There isn’t any such person, and you know it! I know it’s just a game, but it’s a wicked one, and—”

Virginia stamped her foot. Her childish face contorted with grief and anger. Two huge tears squeezed out of her stricken eyes and worked their way down her smooth apple cheeks.

“It isn’t!” she sobbed. “It isn’t just a story! It’s true—every bit! Tommy’s real! We—we played tag in the orchard before we came in! He isn’t a fib, I didn’t make anything up, I didn’t!

Frightened, Julia jumped up and crossed the room in quick strides. She grasped the thin, heaving shoulders and looked down into Gin’s tearful, accusing face. Trying to mask the unsteadiness in her voice, she spoke casually:

“Don’t do that, Ginny—don’t cry. Mother didn’t mean anything bad. Here’s a hankie—that’s better, isn’t it?” Her fingers flew, smoothing the fine, taffy-colored hair. “You must have been playing tag with the wind! Look—you’ve lost a ribbon and torn your skirt.”

“Tommy runs faster than me,” said the child, more calmly. “I chased him but he got away in the briar patch. I guess that’s how I tore my new dress.”

Suddenly Julia swept the taffy-colored head close. She didn’t want Gin to see her face just then.

“Seems to me,” Julia said gaily, “this Tommy of yours is always running away. He must be quicker than a rabbit. Is that why I’ve never seen him?”

“Oh, Mother! He’s scared of people!”

“Yes? And why?”

“Because—well, because.”

The childish voice trailed off. The room was very quiet. Julia stiffened, staring fixedly over Gin’s bowed head—staring through the wide-open casement windows, at the clean, warm, yellow afternoon sunlight.

Beyond the white sashes were the massed blooms of the hollyhocks, trim, precise and sane. Beyond the flower-bed she could see a shaven slope of lawn, and still further away the ripe grass uncut at the foot of the old orchard.

The orchard, she thought frantically—forcing herself to think—was frightfully run-down. The twisted, wind-tortured trees assumed such grotesque shapes at night. Those dead husks should have been cut down long ago—they were unsightly, and spoiled the place. The orchard field itself was grown over with lank weeds and sparse wild hay that had seeded itself on the wind. She watched how the wind wove a path through the tall grass of the orchard field—invisible feet retreating from the edge of the lawn back toward the shadows of the twisted apple-trees.

She watched intently how the yellow grass rippled at the base of a gnarled trunk, and a big sooty crow suddenly flapped from a dead limb, rancously crying.

At first, Julia had been crazy about the place. The sprawling white house on a hilltop had seemed exactly what they were looking for. The land itself was considerably run-down, but for that reason rather wild, very charmingly diversified, and not really like a farm at all.

Cliff Lathrop had joked to their friends about their recently-acquired thirty-acre “estate.” It had, he proudly boasted, a hill, a gully, a house, a red barn, a private road, an orchard (no good), a strip of woods (second growth), and a private, spring-fed lake.

Yes, the pond (really a lake to their city-bred eyes) had just about clinched the sale. It lay in a hollow behind the house and at the base of the hill—far enough away so that they were not really troubled with mosquitoes that must have bred in the strip of swamp that surrounded the pond.

The swamp didn’t matter, for it was not unsightly. Thick rhododendron grew there, a mass of pink bloom in the late spring. And there were trees and ferns and purple iris. In the muddy shallows of the water grew thin, tall sedge-grass, water-lilies and graceful cat-tails. A shallow ridge of cleared, dry ground—maybe once an old wagon-road—led from the house itself down through the woods to a small floating dock built by some previous owner.

They had planned such a grand summer, but Julia was beginning, now, to hate the place. Even in the bright sunlight she would remember suddenly, and shiver wondering if, after all, the place were really some sort of trap in which, slowly, sanity slipped away until at last you came to accept as a matter of course that which was beyond reason or credibility.

Virginia…

What was happening—what in heaven’s name was wrong with the child? From the first, just as they had hoped, she had blossomed happily in the clean country air—frolicked and played from dawn to dusk. But Julia, watchful and puzzled, alert to every nuance of strangeness in Gin’s behavior, could no longer deny to herself that there was something weirdly wrong with the child. For either Gin had become obsessed with some vast, elaborate and very complicated kind of lying, or else—

But the alternative she refused, steadfastly, to permit herself to believe, even yet.

“But why be upset?” Cliff asked innocently when, at last, Julia brought herself to speak to him about Gin’s lying. “Kid’s are always making up things—it’s only harmless imagination working overtime.”

“It isn’t—exactly,” Julia said slowly, choosing her words with a certain amount of care. “And you musn’t scold her about it—it has the strangest effect. She gets upset, terribly unnerved. And it frightens me because—well, because I can see that she really believes in this imaginary playmate. Oh, you don’t know what it’s been like! It frightens me—but I didn’t want to say anything to you until I was really sure!”

Cliff’s mouth opened. He looked at his wife curiously.

“Sure of what? Of her belief, you mean? Well, suppose she does believe, sort of, in this fictitious Tommy? Maybe she’s lonely—maybe he’s real, in a sort of way, to her childish imaginations—you know, the way people in fairy-tales were real to her, when she was younger? It’s just a fad, and she’ll outgrow it—maybe get tired of the game when she sees we don’t take it very seriously. Seems to me that’s the thing to do—tease her out of it, not pull a long face and get all wrought up about something that doesn’t even exist—”

But at dinner Cliff’s teasing brought unexpected results.

“Well, I hear Virginia’s got a beau, eh, Julia?” Cliff winked at his wife, ladling out a liberal helping of cold chicken for the child. “Young man name of Tommy—or so I’ve been told.”

“Who told you?” Virginia’s clear cyes clouded with suspicion. The bantering tone was evidently not to her liking.

“Who told me?” Cliff mocked his small daughter. “Well, now—is it a secret?”

“Yes,” the child answered, with a scowling glance at her mother. “Sort of.”

“Oh! Well, since the secret’s out now, might we be told where the young gentleman lives? Seems to me he must do quite a cross-country hike to get out here from—well, wherever he’s from.”

“Oh, no!” The child’s eyes, round and serious, were vaguely troubled. She hesitated, then as though under some dim necessity to make herself somehow understood, added quietly: “You wouldn’t understand. He lives right nearby, you see—”

“Oh—some little boy staying at the Jackson farm?”

“Daddy, don’t be silly! He lives right here on our place—in the pond. That’s where he goes when he goes back in again—and I know ’cause I’ve seen him.”

Not again that evening did they make any reference to Gin’s queer obsession—for otherwise the child behaved normally enough. Cliff played checkers with his small daughter and allowed her to beat him twice. After that, she went happily and triumphantly to bed.

Afterward, with the child asleep upstairs and the eerie moonlight glistening like frost on the clipped lawn, Julia abruptly drew the curtains over black panes.

“Heaven knows,” said Cliff, amused, “we’ve no lack of privacy out here!”

“I—was just jittering,” Julia confessed, unable to tell him just then how she had felt—that overpowering warning instinct of being watched, of not being alone. That the moonlit lawn had been bare, without blur or shadow, had only made the feeling somehow more terrible. “Cliff—what are we going to do?”

“About Gin? Well—I think she’s lonely. You ought to send for one of her friends. Having some other kid around will chase this funny idea out of her head quick enough—what say?”

“I’ve thought of that,” Julia told him. “I’ve already sent for Elsie. She’s at the seashore now, but her mother wrote that she can come out and stay with Gin for a week or two. Oh, Cliff—you don’t think there’s something wrong? I mean, that she really sees things and—”

“Sick, you mean? Naw! She’s healthy as a chipmunk, eats like a little pig and sleeps like a log. Say, old girl—did it ever occur to you the little tyke might, after all, be real? Up the road apiece, past Jackson’s, there’s a Lithuanian family—plenty of kids, all assorted ages. See, it must be one of them—”

“But, Cliff—three miles away? And besides—”

“What’s three miles to a country kid? And you’ve never seen him because he’s shy, see? But you act as if everything’s natural and maybe he’ll show up one morning with his paw out for a cookie!”

“Oh, Cliff! You think so?”

“Well, it might be so! Personally, I think we’ve been letting Gin’s well-developed imagination run away with us scaring ourselves, and without any reason. Now, look—there’s only one sensible view to take: either he’s a myth—and she’ll out-grow it—or else there really is such a kid, but he’s scared and over-shy. In either case, what’s terrible about it?”

Cliff’s reasoning steadied her, but only for a moment. For it was not only that Julia had watched the child racing across the lawn, followed apparently by none but the wind—gleefully shouting and calling to someone who never answered. It was not only that, for countless days now, Gin had stubbornly persisted in her pretence that she was never really alone any more, that always an invisible child was at her side sharing in her childish games. There was more to it—an indefinite, but horrifying more—the one bit that Julia had held back from Cliff.

The day before she had seen the invisible playmate!

In bright sunlight, grass rippling gently as though some small animal stirred at its roots; a small, furtive round, like the passage of a snake…

She, Julia, had crossed the lawn to call Gin for lunch. The child was sitting quietly under a big beach unbrella, making a crude, crayon sketch. Julia, smiling and looking down over Gin’s shoulder, saw the scrawled likeness of a little boy in blue overalls. Gin had made a round, jack-o’-lantern face wreathed in an exaggerated grin. She had drawn in thick, stubby hair of a bright reddish-orange, and made the feet bare.

All at once Julia had been breathlessly conscious that there was someone else—someone standing in the orchard field just behind her—someone so dim and indistinct that when she turned her head it was as though colors flickered in the bright sunlight—wavered and vanished, like an abruptly dissolving mirage.

But for one breathless instant, for one heartbeat, she had seen something—something, surely! A wavering image, like the warping of air in heat-haze; the shadowy simulacrum of a small figure, standing in the ripe grass of the field.

It had seemed to Julia that the dissolving vision held color—blue tint, like faded overalls; a white shirt; a face unseen because it was surmounted by a big hat of yellow straw.

But afterward when, fingers pressed to her eyes, she tried to recall details that had been blurred—only shadowy suggestion—Julia wondered whether she had not merely imagined it. Heat and glaring sunlight distort vision. Perhaps she had simply projected, in vision, the blue-overalled boy of Gin’s childish sketch—the drawing she had carefully labelled, in angular block letters: “TOMMY.”

It was with unutterable joy that Julie welcomed Elsie. The two children were of the same age, had been neighbors in the city. But curiously, Virginia exhibited no great enthusiasm at seeing her old playmate again. She was indifferent and ignored the other child.

“I won’t stay here any more!” Elsie cried one morning, storming into the kitchen in tears. “I hate it here! I want to go home, please!”

“Oh, Elsie! What’s the trouble? Did you and Gin quarrel again?”

“No, it’s that ugly, horrible boy! He spoils everything! He—”

“Elsie!” Julia snatched the child’s arm and swung her sharply toward her. “You saw him?”

“’Course I saw him!” Elsie looked annoyed. “What do you mean? He comes every day but he won’t come near us. He just stands there, watching, or follows us around—and it’s scarey! I threw stones at him but they didn’t hurt him. He just laughed and wouldn’t go home. And Gin said she hates me. She said I scared him and now he won’t come and play until I go back home!”

With Elsie’s abrupt leaving the household became, to all appearances, normal again. Gin’s impatience to be rid of the encumbering Elsie had been only too evident. Now the invisible other returned, remain at her side throughout all of the long summer day. Gin laughed and prattled and was happy—and under the apparent light-hearted gaiety Julie was aware that horror hid and slowly uncoiled as day slid into day.