Hauntings by Ellen Datlow Read Free Book Online

moment of light made it seem darker than ever.
    â€œI met this kid at school today,” Jeremy said, “and when I told him where I lived he said, ‘No way, Mad Dog Mueller’s house?’ ‘Mad Dog who?’ I said. ‘Mueller,’ he said. ‘Everyone knows who Mad Dog Mueller is.’”
    â€œI don’t,” I said.
    â€œWell, neither did I,” Jeremy said, “but this kid, he told me the whole story. ‘You ever notice there aren’t any kids that live out that end of town?’ he asked, and the more I thought about it, Si, the more right he seemed. There aren’t any kids.”
    The thing was, he was right. That’s when I figured it out, the thing about the kids. It was like one of those puzzles with a picture hidden inside all these little blots of color and you stare at it and you stare at it and you don’t see a thing, and then you happen to catch it from just the right angle and— Bang! —there the hidden picture is. And once you’ve seen it, you can never unsee it. I thought about the neighbors, this scrawny guy who was always tinkering with the dead El Camino and his fat wife—neither one of them really old, but neither one of them a day under thirty, either. I remember how they stood out front watching us move in, and Mom asking them if they had any kids, her voice kind of hopeful. But they’d just laughed, like who would bring kids to a place like this?
    They hadn’t offered to pitch in, either—and people always offer to lend a hand when you’re moving stuff inside. I know , because we’ve moved lots of times. I could see Dad getting hotter and hotter with every trip, until finally he turned and said in a voice just dripping with sarcasm, “See any thing that strikes your fancy, folks?” You could tell by the look on Mom’s face that she didn’t like that one bit. When we got inside she hissed at him like some kind of animal she was so mad. “Why can’t you ever keep your mouth shut, Frank?” she said. “If you kept your mouth shut we wouldn’t be in this situation.”
    All of which was beside the point, of course. The point was, Jeremy was right. There wasn’t a single kid in any of the nearby houses.
    â€œSee,” Jeremy said, “I told you. And the reason is, this guy Mad Dog Mueller.”
    â€œBut it was some old lady that used to live here,” I said. “We saw her the first day, they were moving her to a nursing home.”
    â€œI’m not talking about her, stupid. I’m talking like a hundred years ago, when this was all farm land, and the nearest neighbors were half a mile away.”
    â€œOh.”
    I didn’t like the direction this was going, I have to say. Plus, it seemed even darker. Most places, you turn out the light and your eyes adjust and everything turns this smoky blue color, so it hardly seems dark at all. But here the night seemed denser somehow, weightier. Your eyes just never got used to it, not unless there was a moon, which this particular night there wasn’t.
    â€œAnyway,” Jeremy said, “I guess he lived here with his mother for a while and then she died and he lived here alone after that. He was a pretty old guy, I guess, like forty. He was a blacksmith.”
    â€œWhat’s a blacksmith?”
    â€œGod you can be dense, Si. Blacksmiths make horseshoes and shit.”
    â€œThen why do they call them black smiths?”
    â€œI don’t know. I guess they were black or something, like back in slavery days.”
    â€œWas this guy black?”
    â€œNo! The point is, he makes things out of metal. That’s the point, okay? And so I told this kid about those tools I found.”
    â€œ I’m the one who found them,” I said.
    â€œWhatever, Si. The point is, when I mentioned the tools, the kid who was telling me this stuff, his eyes bugged out. ‘No way,’ he says to me,