Hauntings by Ellen Datlow Read Free Book Online Page B

accidentally knocked me down in the driveway. I just need to sleep, she said. I’ve taken some medicine to help me sleep.
    And then Jeremy came home and made us some TV dinners. “She must have passed out in there,” he said, and that scared me. But when I said maybe we should call the doctor, he just laughed. “Try not to be so dense all the time, okay, Si?”
    We just waited around for Dad after that. But Jeremy said he wouldn’t be surprised if Dad never came home again, the way Mom had been so bitchy lately. Maybe he was right, too, because by the time we went up to bed, Dad still hadn’t shown up.
    So Jeremy was right. Nobody was going to mind the light.
    We both had a look around. The room looked pretty much the way it always did. Jeremy’s trophies gleamed on the little shelf Dad had built for them. A bug smacked the window screen a few times, like it really wanted to get inside.
    â€œYou sure you didn’t hear anything?”
    â€œYeah.”
    Jeremy looked at me for a minute. “All right, then,” he said, and turned out the light. Another car passed and the crap-apple man did his little jig on the ceiling. The house was so quiet I could hear Jeremy breathing these long even breaths. I sang a song to Mr. Fuzzy while I waited for him to start up again. It was this song Mom used to sing when I was a baby, the one about all the pretty little horses.
    And then Jeremy started talking again.
    â€œNobody got suspicious,” he said, “until the third kid disappeared—a little boy, he was about your age too, Si. And then someone happened to remember that all these kids had to walk by this Mueller guy’s house on their way to school. So a few of the parents got together that night and went down there to see if he had seen anything.”
    It had gotten colder. I wished Jeremy would shut the window and I was going to say something, but he just plowed on with his stupid story. “Soon as he answered the door,” Jeremy said, “they could tell something was wrong. It was all dark inside—there wasn’t a fire or anything—and it smelled bad, like pigs or something. They could hardly see him, too, just his eyes, all hollow and shiny in the shadows. They asked if he’d seen the kids and that’s when things got really weird. He said he hadn’t seen anything, but he was acting all nervous, and he tried to close the door. One of the men held up his lantern then, and they could see his face. He hadn’t shaved and he looked real thin and there was this stuff smeared over his face. It looked black in the light, like paint, only it wasn’t paint. You know what it was, Si?”
    I’d heard enough of Jeremy’s stories to be able to make a pretty good guess, but I couldn’t seem to make my mouth say the word. Mr. Fuzzy was shaking he was so scared. He was shaking real hard, and he was mad, too. He was mad at Jeremy for trying to scare me like that.
    â€œIt was blood, Si,” Jeremy said.
    That’s when I heard it again, a whisper of metal against metal like the sound the butcher makes at the grocery store when he’s putting the edge on a knife.
    Jeremy gasped. “Did you hear that?”
    And just like that the sound died away.
    â€œNo,” I said.
    We were silent, listening.
    â€œWhat happened?” I whispered, because I wanted him to finish it. If he finished he could do his dumb little mad scientist laugh and admit he made it all up.
    â€œHe ran,” Jeremy said. “He ran through the house and it was all dark and he went down the basement, down where you found those rusty old tools. Only it wasn’t rust, Si. It was blood. Because you know what else they found down there?”
    I heard the whisper of metal again— shir shir shir , that sound the butcher makes when he’s putting the edge on a knife and his hands are moving so fast the blade is just a blur of light. But Jeremy had