The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

He shook his head. “Nope. Seen my share of woodpeckers, though.” He got a few more steps away before he stopped again, something seeming to rise up that he hadn’t thought of in twenty years. “Now that you mention it, I remember one from Aunt Pol about what she called Old Hickory Bones. It didn’t make a lot of sense. ‘Tall as the clouds, small as a nut,’ that sort of nonsense. You know old women and their stories.”

“Right.”

He looked like he was piecing together memories from fragments. “The part that scared us most, she’d swear up and down it was true, from when she was a girl. That there was this crew of moonshiners got liquored up on their own supply and let the still fire get out of hand. Burned a few acres of woods, and some crops and a couple of homes with it. Her story went that they were found in a row with their arms and legs all smashed up and run through with hickory sticks… like scarecrows, kind of. And that’s how Old Hickory Bones got his name. I always thought she just meant to scare us into making sure we didn’t forget about our chores.”

“That would do it for me,” I said.

He laughed. “Those cows didn’t have to wait on me for very many morning milkings, I’ll tell you what.” He turned serious, one big hand scrubbing at his beard. “Why do you come to ask about a thing like that?”

I gestured at the house. “You know how it is going through a place this way. Everything you turn over, there’s another memory crawling out from underneath it.”

Later, I kept going back to what I’d said when Gina and I had first walked in and looked at Grandma’s chair: that it seemed like she’d finished her book and set it aside and peacefully resolved it was a good day to die. It’s the kind of invention that gives you comfort, but maybe she really had. She kept up on us, her children and grandchildren, even though we were scattered far and wide. She knew I had a vacation coming up, knew that it overlapped with Gina’s.

And we were her favorites. Even Mrs. Tepovich knew that.

So I’m tempted to think Grandma trusted that, with the right timing, Gina and I would be first to go through the house. She couldn’t have wanted my mother to do it. Couldn’t have wanted my father to be the first up in the attic. Some things are too cruel, no matter how much love underlies them.

Maybe she’d thought we would be more likely to understand and accept. Because we were her favorites, and even though my mother had grown up here, and my aunts and uncles too, they were so much longer out of the woods than we, her grandchildren, were.

It broke the agreeable calm of Saturday afternoon, Gina and I in different parts of the house. I was in the pantry, looking through last season’s preserves and had discovered an ancient Mason jar full of coins when a warbling cry drifted down. I thought she’d come across a dead raccoon, a nest of dried-out squirrels… the kind of things that sometimes turn up in country attics.

But when Gina came and got me, her face was pale and her voice had been reduced to such a small thing I could barely hear it. Shae, she was saying, or trying to. Shae. Over and over, with effort and an unfocused look in her eyes. Shae.

I didn’t believe her while climbing the folding attic ladder; still didn’t while crossing the rough, creaking boards, hunched beneath the slope of the roof in the gloom and cobwebs and a smell like a century of dust. But after five or twenty minutes on my knees, I believed, all right, even if nothing made sense anymore.

There was light, a little, coming through a few small, triangular windows at the peaks. And there was air, slatted vents at either end allowing some circulation. And there was my sister’s body, on a cot between a battered steamer trunk and a stack of cardboard boxes, covered by a sheet that had been drawn down as far as her chest.

The sheet wasn’t dusty or discolored. It was clean, white, recently laundered. Eight years of washing her dead granddaughter’s sheets — my head had trouble grasping that, and my heart just wanted to stop.

Gradually it dawned on me: With Shae eight years dead, we shouldn’t have been able to recognize her. At best, she would’ve mummified in the dry heat, shriveled into a husk. At worst, all that was left would be scraps and bones, and the strawberry blonde silk of her hair. Instead, the most I could say was that she looked very, very thin, and when I touched her cheek, her skin was smooth and stiff but pliable, like freshly worked clay. I touched her cheek and almost expected her eyes to open.

She’d been nineteen then, was nineteen now. She’d spent the last eight years being nineteen. Nineteen and dead, only not decayed. She lay on a blanket and a bed of herbs. They were beneath her, alongside her. Sprigs and bundles had been stuffed inside the strips of another sheet that had been loosely wound around her like a shroud. The scent of them, a pungent and spicy smell of fields and trees, settled in my nose.