The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

“Okay. I know you know.”

“No you don’t.”

I close my eyes. “Okay, I don’t.”

“Maybe you want to know what I saw. Maybe you should. Maybe then you’d stop looking at me like that.”

“I’m not looking at you like anything,” I sigh, standing to start negotiating her back toward my car.

“That’s what I mean,” she says, starting to cry. “So I’m going to tell you.”

We’ve attracted attention, finally. A curtain has stirred in the apartment next to our old one. Mr. Busby’s old place. And across the side-street, a stoop-backed old woman with a basket on her wrist and a long, white cane has emerged onto the sidewalk. Her hair is some crazy L.A. old-lady color, practically fuchsia in the twilight. She has a hand shading her eyes, as though even the echoes of orange in the west are too bright for her.

“Hey, Mom? We should probably go. I think it’s time to get you home. Simon Cowell and the gang are waiting.”

“I don’t know what made me call them,” she says. “The undertakers.” The sky has gone royal blue, and even the blue is draining away as though it’s being siphoned. The breeze has developed a bite, too, and the old woman across the street has made her way to the crosswalk, and now she’s inching in our direction. She’s thin, all in white, her stoop so pronounced that she almost looks likes a cane herself, for the shadows to lean on.

“Mom?” I say, with even more force than I intend. “I want to go, even if you don’t.”

“I hadn’t seen Evie in a while. I went up and knocked a few times. Mostly, there was no answer. I thought she’d finally gone away to see her sister or something. But then sometimes I’d hear her through the door. She sounded so small. I could hardly understand her.

“Mr. Busby tried a few pranks. ‘Going to lure her out,’ he’d say. ‘Get her blood going. Leyton knows what the ladies need.’ He’d stop every Jehovah’s Witness and Mormon missionary he saw and direct them to Evie’s door. One night around midnight, he came out on the grass with a ukulele and sang ‘Tiny Bubbles’ at the top of his lungs, except he kept saying ‘Tiny Evie’ instead. But she never appeared at the window. We had this possum family that took up residence by the dumpster, and he made a trail with orange peels and lettuce right to her door and got the whole family to camp outside it. But as far as I know, she never saw them.

“And then one day… you were still so sick. I was so worried about you. I’d spent all my summer pay to bail out your dad, and my reward was having him call in a drunken stupor every night to tell me either that he was going to make it up to me, somehow, or that he was going to kill me. Depended what he’d been drinking. I think it must have been the possums that made me even think of it, because to be honest, I didn’t have time or energy to worry about Evie. She’d stopped moaning. But instead, she kept prowling around up there, every single night, at any hour. I think she was barefoot, at least. I could barely hear her. Just these little scratches. Little slides. Back and forth, in little lurches. All blessed night. Just enough to keep me awake. It also made me even more sad. And tired. I’d never been so tired in my whole life. This went on and on.

“Until that one day. The last day.” She takes a huge breath and holds it, as though trying to cure hiccoughs. She does that for so long that her knees start to wobble.

“Mom, come on,” I say.

“I came home.” Her voice shakes. “And I saw the possum family at the top of her steps. And the spider webs all up and down the stairwell, as though no one had used it for years, which was ridiculous. The mailman went up there every day, for one.

“But something about it gave me this weird feeling. And it set me thinking. I hadn’t been invited to Stan’s funeral. Evie hadn’t said anything about it whatsoever. I was sure she would have invited me, or talked to me. I went inside and found the number of the undertakers, and I called them.

“And that’s when I found out. They’d come, alright, on the day I’d summoned them, and knocked at the door. Evie had answered them through it. She said everything was taken care of. And the undertakers said okay and left.

“I hung up. I had no idea what to think. Then you started crying. And your father called. Then he called again. And you cried some more. And I started crying. I think I just switched on the tv and left you in the living room with a popsicle and a blanket and ignored you when you yelled for me. I locked myself in the bedroom to try to get some sleep before Evie started pacing again. I think somehow I must have got some, too. Because this time it was the screaming that woke me up.”

“Jesus,” rasps the old woman in white, right next to us, and I jump forward and whirl around. How is it possible for something that slow to sneak up?

She’s got a crooked, stumpy hand in my mother’s hair. Holding on to her braid, like a child grabbing a cat’s tail.

“It really is you,” she rasps, her voice so honeycombed that it might be the wind talking.