Babysitter, page 17
“The woman attacked me.”
“Isn’t that what you people always say?”
Just as she started to tilt the small bottle of blood onto the skull, the ropes worked loose enough to free Marietta’s hands.
There was little time left. Nikki had explained that Helen’s ghost could not function without sacrificial blood. It would not be able to fully take control of the girls without the sacrifice taking place. Marietta chose to believe that this meant her daughter was not yet beyond help—
She sprang from her feet, her hands out viselike to seize her throat. She slammed Nikki into the wall, knocking the bottle of blood from her hands. She glimpsed it peripherally. She had left the cap on. Nothing seemed to have spilled.
She stabbed her once in the shoulder and once more in the area of her rib cage. She had been distracted by the bottle flying from her hands. She had produced the dagger with calm expertise and cut her with almost clinical skill.
For the first time tonight, she felt herself becoming hysterical. The blood was flowing from her so fast.
5
By the time they reached the cabin, both Jody and David were out of breath and pasty with sweat that stung eyes, nostrils, and lips.
The smell reached Jody immediately. She turned her head away from the porch and cupped her hands over her nose. “God.”
“I wonder what it is,” David said.
Jody had dropped her hands. She straightened her back. “Let’s go inside.”
Neither of them had forgotten the scream that came from there a few minutes ago.
Jody went up on the porch. The whole cabin tilted and the aged wood groaned. The odor—like that of a wet dog —grew worse the closer she got to the screen door.
She opened the door and went inside. “David, come here.”
Two steps behind, he drew up close enough to put his hand on her shoulder. Jody pointed to a large, twisted form on the floor. A gray-haired woman. She had been stabbed.
David walked over to her, knelt, raised one plump arm to search for a pulse. He shook his head and placed her arm gently back on the floor.
By now Jody was looking around. The cabin was a junk heap of broken furniture, shabby clothes, and foodstuffs of various kinds that had been left to spoil in the ninety-degree heat. There was no light except for the shadowy illumination offered by a stray patch of moonlight and a gently swaying bulb hanging naked from the ceiling.
She was just about to speak to David when they both heard the noise from beneath them. A wailing sound.
“How do you get down there?” Jody asked, frantic now.
“Must be some kind of trapdoor.”
They fell to their feet and began crawling around the floor, looking for the seams of the door. Jody’s left hand inadvertently slid into a puddle of warm, sticky blood. She knew better than to scream. But she did groan.
“Here,” she said after a minute. She had found the metal ring that pulled the trapdoor up.
Her mind sensing that Jenny was below, she acted without caution, yanking the trapdoor back and peering into the watery green glow below.
The chill and the even worse odors of the basement got to her immediately. She clamped a hand over her mouth, afraid she was going to vomit.
The roaring began then. Her second husband had twice gone big game hunting, bringing back for his trouble not trophies but films of the safari. On one film he’d captured the sound of a bull elephant dying, a cry that seemed to shake the African sun itself. That’s all she could think of now. That cry.
“No! Please!” she heard a girl call out from below. Then came the sound of bones breaking, that peculiar snapping sound of a human being crushed. Then the girl was silent.
“Jody,” David said, pulling her back from the trapdoor. They spoke in whispers.
“Jenny’s down there!”
“It won’t do any good for you to get killed. We should get some help. We don’t know what’s going on down there.”
“It’s too far for help.” She nodded across the room. “I tried the phone. Somebody tore the cord from the wall.”
They heard the sharp sound of the metal ladder being righted once more. Heavy footsteps began to clang their way upwards. In a few moments, whoever it was would show his or her face.
Jody and David crouched in the shadows behind a large cedar chest. Jody dug her nails deep into David’s hand, deep enough to draw blood. David held her.
They both kept their eyes fixed on the open trapdoor.
The clanging of the ladder was now joined by a moaning sound. All Jody could think of was somebody on a life support system.
The closer the clanging came, the closer the tortured moans came, the angrier Jody became. Certainly this had to be the person who had taken her Jenny from her.
Her mind reeled at the sight of the hand that came out of the square opening of the trapdoor. It wasn’t a hand at all. Not a human hand. It was glowing and diaphanous and seemed to Jody from some other realm entirely.
David held her tighter. In the slender patch of moonlight, he saw the glowing hand, too.
But not even the hand could prepare them for what came next. Curiously, when she saw the dagger in the other hand, Jody did not scream. Rather she drew in tighter to David and thought back through the years to her thirteenth summer, when she had been pursuing the man now at her side. That summer . . . and the matricide she had seen silhouetted on a curtain.
The ghost appeared.
The specter’s entire body glowed from within as it floated up the ladder. It was like a hallucination, a vivid dream almost.
“Sit tight,” David said, seeing that the spirit was looking around the room and would in moments find them. “There’s a tire iron over there,” he whispered.
He was halfway to the crowbar when the creature saw him and turned with bulky precision in David’s direction.
With a hand capable of almost invisible speed, the ghost’s gnarled fingers reached David’s throat and began squeezing. Jody could see the glow in the old woman’s arms begin to get brighter, deeper.
David dangled from the ghost’s grasp for nearly thirty seconds before Jody could reach the tire iron. With the metal rod, she slammed the ghost’s head from the rear and watched as it passed right through it. There was a wailing—once again, elephant-like —but the creature did not drop David. Indeed, it put a second hand on his throat and began to squeeze.
Jody moved around to the front of the ghost this time. Between David’s head and the spirit’s shoulder was a space of perhaps half a foot. If she could only hit the thing on one of its bulging eyes.
She had no warning that the specter was going to take its right arm away from David’s throat and reach out and grab her.
The pain and loss of breath came instantly as the creature began choking her.
How could something so intangible cause her such pain?
In vain she tried slamming the tire iron against the head. She tried kicking, biting, scratching, but it became obvious quickly that the creature was not affected by any of it.
She saw David slip into unconsciousness. One moment he had been fighting with fists and feet, the next he was a dangling mass of flesh. His legs and feet swung like pendulums as the ghost first lifted then hurled him into the corner. He smashed through a wobbly kitchen table on the way down to the floor.
Now the specter had two hands to use on Jody.
In the basement, Jenny came to awareness with a blinding headache and a body covered with chilled sweat. She had no idea where she was. Her last memory was of sitting in her bedroom with her new Maroon Five album when the babysitter had asked her if she could come in and talk. Flattered by an older girl’s attention, Jenny had of course said yes.
Then— she remembered—
Here her mind paused. It did not want to recall what had happened next. The buzzing sound in her head, the changing contours of the baby-sitter’s face. The words that she chanted endlessly. Jenny’s own screams and useless cries for help—
But where was she now?
She felt cold, damp walls. She felt hard-packed floors. She reached forward and felt a rounded piece of metal. She reached further up and felt an identical piece of metal.
She tilted her head way back and looked up at the square patch of shadowy light. There was an entrance way at the end of the ladder. She could climb up and—
It was then that she heard Grandma Jody. Most definitely Grandma Jody. Jenny knew she was not imagining this.
Pressing her hands down flat so that she could push herself up, she brushed against a body. In the darkness, she felt enough of the face and chest to know that the body was a human. But she also knew, because the body was so still, that the person was dead.
She pulled her hand away. As she did so, her wrist banged against something sharp, cutting her instantly. A knife.
Grandma Jody shouted again, though Jenny could tell it was getting more and more difficult for Grandma Jody to even open her mouth.
The basement was dark but for that one patch of light above her, but the back of it was semi-lit with an eerie glow. For some reason she couldn’t explain, the symbols on the floor and walls seemed familiar to her. And they scared her.
She could make out Hedley’s body in the dim glow. The girl looked as if she were sleeping. And in the center of the largest symbol – the one on the floor – was a human skull.
Chills race through her but she fought the stark white terror which gripped at her heart. Grandma Jody was up there and she needed help.
Running purely on instant, Jenny side-stepped the sleeping Hedley and laid her hands on the skull. It wasn’t cold as she thought it would be, but hot and the surface of it pulsed against her hand. There was blood on the skull too and the feel and smell of it made her wince.
Without thinking, Jenny grabbed the skull and ran over to the metal ladder.
As Jody was driven backwards by the creature, her hands moved about wildly, hoping to find something heavy she could pick up and use as a weapon. Once, her fingers touched the handle of an iron skillet. She felt an absurd optimism. She would pick it up and smash it down on the spirit’s head.
Just then the specter, apparently enraged that it had not yet killed Jody, spun and slammed her into the wall, doubling the strength of its grip on her throat.
This time she felt it for sure. A peculiar chill, a cessation of sensory data that she knew to be death. It was mostly a cold, harsh odor in her lungs and nostrils. Sight went, then hearing, then even smell. The ceaseless pressure of the creature’s hands on her throat and the vague knowledge that her head was being smacked, and smacked hard, against the wall.
At first, she did not recognize the significance of what was taking place behind the creature. When she did understand it, she rejected it as illusion. It was impossible, her dying fantasy of rescue.
She watched as the fantasy, in the form of Jenny bearing Helen’s skull, came up carefully behind the creature and placed the skull on the worn table. That vile thing had been inside her head, controlling her, making her do things . . . terrible things. At the same time, it had imparted some unforeseen knowledge in Jenny’s mind. It told Jenny how to kill it once and for all.
Jenny reached to the side, where only moments ago Jody had dangled from the thing’s grasp. The skillet was still there and she grasped the handle tightly in both hands, lifting it above her head.
“Hey, Helen!” Jenny shouted, the cast iron skillet poised high over her head.
She waited until the thing turned, until Helen could see her fate. And then she brought the skillet crashing down on the skull with every ounce of strength that she had.
Once again, Jody was able to hear. The creature’s cry was, at the same time, repellent and pitiable.
Jenny yanked pulled the skillet away from the skull. For all her efforts, she had produced nothing but a thin crack on the top of the skull. Jenny brought the skillet down again, deepening the crack. The sound was exquisite.
The cry this time was even more chilling.
The specter, apparently given to panic, let Jody slide to the floor, and turned its attention to Jenny. The glow had softened. It extended less far from her actual form and had gotten measurably dimmer.
Jenny, seeing that the creature was about to lunge at her, skillfully moved herself to the other side of the table. She dragged a chair over and pushed it into the wall, trying to make the creature’s passage as difficult as possible.
Jody, her senses gradually beginning to return, still watched all this as if it were a fantasy, or some improbable TV show. She tried to feel the reality of the moment. Jenny. Spirit. Jenny in trouble.
Now Jenny was screaming—
The ghost had moved through Jenny’s fragile little fortress with no difficulty at all. Quickly, competently, its hands lashed out and took Jenny’s throat, just as they had taken Jody’s.
It raised Jenny up and put her flat against the wall. It would not take long for a little girl like Jenny to die—
Jody forced herself to her feet, shaking her head, and shouted, “Stop! Stop!”
Her voice sounded faraway and unreal. Was that really her?
By instinct she found the handle of the tire iron. She wasted no time. Tire iron ready to use, she came up behind the creature and began smashing it against the skull.
Long after Jenny had sunk to the floor, unconscious but alive, Jody went on smashing the skull, thinking of all the young girls that wretched spirit had destroyed. With each crashing blow, the specter screamed, its glow diminishing and its form becoming less distinct. Finally, it let out one long shriek and then it was gone.
Sometime during her frenzy, David Fairbain came to consciousness, saw what was going on, and came over to take her hand from the tire iron.
The first thing they did was splash water on Jenny’s face and bring her to. The first thing Jenny did was to tell them about Hedley and Marietta Stover in the basement.
Epilogue
Two weeks later, on a mild summer afternoon when the grass was a blue-green and the sky a flawless blue, Jenny, Sam, David Fairbain, and Jody got into David’s big yellow Buick SUV and drove to the train depot. Earlier, they had stopped by the hospital to see Marietta and Hedley, who were doing fine (“We’re going to be brave about it and have a good life, aren’t we, honey?” Marietta said as she stroked Hedley’s hand).
Jenny insisted on sitting in the backseat with Grandma Jody. She also insisted on holding her hand and kind of snuggling with her every few minutes.
The route they took brought them past the old neighborhood where Jody had grown up. She saw the house where she and her parents had lived, first her mom and her real dad and then her mom and Uncle Bob. Sight of the house almost shocked her. It was much smaller than she’d recalled and, given its general state of disrepair, shabby to the eye. She felt cheated and foolish, as if memory had played a cruel joke on her, reminding her in the harshest terms that memory is the biggest illusion of all.
“Grandma Jody’s crying,” Jenny said.
Sam turned around. David looked at Jody in the rearview mirror.
“What’s wrong, Mom?” Sam asked, obviously concerned.
“Oh, nothing.” Jody laughed through her tears. “I just realized that I’m getting old. And starting to suffer old people’s delusions.”
David said, “It better not be a delusion that you’re coming back here in two weeks, and that we’re getting married.”
She reached forward and patted his shoulder. “That part’s not a delusion, David, I promise.”
“Goody!” Jenny said, hugging Grandma.
Jody turned her eyes once more to the neighborhood. If she listened carefully, she could hear her own young voice calling out instructions in a sweet spring dusk for pom-pom pull-away or doing her Jack Black impersonation. And if she watched just so, she could see herself on her Schwinn, and in her first pink party dress, or watching with fastidious attention the exploits of “Star Wars.”
Distantly, she could hear the summer circus and see herself on the midway, all cotton candy and kewpie dolls, yearning for this or that boy boldly standing up inside his Ferris wheel box and dispensing papal-like smiles to all the girls below.
Had she ever really been young, or was that just an old person’s delusion as she’d said to Sam?
Then they were out of the neighborhood, the Buick finding its bright confident way to the ancient red brick depot, Jody in the backseat feeling strangely isolated from those she loved.
She had quit crying now, but she knew the tears would come again. She wasn’t even sure what the tears were about. She supposed they were about her memories of her frail Grandpa and busy bustling Mom and handsome Dad, all long gone now. She supposed they were about the way sunlight and shadow played on the surface of Cummings Creek and about the thrill of listening to music on the radio in the darkness of her bedroom. She supposed they were about the way her three-month-old kitten had been hit by a Packard one day.
Yes, those were the reasons for her tears—those and so many other memories that she felt insane with their number and richness—because somewhere in the middle of those memories was a frightened, lonely girl named Jody.
A girl who had inexplicably become Grandma Jody. She reached out and touched Sam’s hand. She was going to get better, Sam was. Jody was going to see to it. Jody was now going to become the mother she’d never quite been—it was never too late to wrap up your child in your love. Never.
She reached over now and drew Jenny to her. She hugged her all the rest of the way to the depot while Sam looked at them and smiled.
Gorman, Ed, Babysitter
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“Isn’t that what you people always say?”
Just as she started to tilt the small bottle of blood onto the skull, the ropes worked loose enough to free Marietta’s hands.
There was little time left. Nikki had explained that Helen’s ghost could not function without sacrificial blood. It would not be able to fully take control of the girls without the sacrifice taking place. Marietta chose to believe that this meant her daughter was not yet beyond help—
She sprang from her feet, her hands out viselike to seize her throat. She slammed Nikki into the wall, knocking the bottle of blood from her hands. She glimpsed it peripherally. She had left the cap on. Nothing seemed to have spilled.
She stabbed her once in the shoulder and once more in the area of her rib cage. She had been distracted by the bottle flying from her hands. She had produced the dagger with calm expertise and cut her with almost clinical skill.
For the first time tonight, she felt herself becoming hysterical. The blood was flowing from her so fast.
5
By the time they reached the cabin, both Jody and David were out of breath and pasty with sweat that stung eyes, nostrils, and lips.
The smell reached Jody immediately. She turned her head away from the porch and cupped her hands over her nose. “God.”
“I wonder what it is,” David said.
Jody had dropped her hands. She straightened her back. “Let’s go inside.”
Neither of them had forgotten the scream that came from there a few minutes ago.
Jody went up on the porch. The whole cabin tilted and the aged wood groaned. The odor—like that of a wet dog —grew worse the closer she got to the screen door.
She opened the door and went inside. “David, come here.”
Two steps behind, he drew up close enough to put his hand on her shoulder. Jody pointed to a large, twisted form on the floor. A gray-haired woman. She had been stabbed.
David walked over to her, knelt, raised one plump arm to search for a pulse. He shook his head and placed her arm gently back on the floor.
By now Jody was looking around. The cabin was a junk heap of broken furniture, shabby clothes, and foodstuffs of various kinds that had been left to spoil in the ninety-degree heat. There was no light except for the shadowy illumination offered by a stray patch of moonlight and a gently swaying bulb hanging naked from the ceiling.
She was just about to speak to David when they both heard the noise from beneath them. A wailing sound.
“How do you get down there?” Jody asked, frantic now.
“Must be some kind of trapdoor.”
They fell to their feet and began crawling around the floor, looking for the seams of the door. Jody’s left hand inadvertently slid into a puddle of warm, sticky blood. She knew better than to scream. But she did groan.
“Here,” she said after a minute. She had found the metal ring that pulled the trapdoor up.
Her mind sensing that Jenny was below, she acted without caution, yanking the trapdoor back and peering into the watery green glow below.
The chill and the even worse odors of the basement got to her immediately. She clamped a hand over her mouth, afraid she was going to vomit.
The roaring began then. Her second husband had twice gone big game hunting, bringing back for his trouble not trophies but films of the safari. On one film he’d captured the sound of a bull elephant dying, a cry that seemed to shake the African sun itself. That’s all she could think of now. That cry.
“No! Please!” she heard a girl call out from below. Then came the sound of bones breaking, that peculiar snapping sound of a human being crushed. Then the girl was silent.
“Jody,” David said, pulling her back from the trapdoor. They spoke in whispers.
“Jenny’s down there!”
“It won’t do any good for you to get killed. We should get some help. We don’t know what’s going on down there.”
“It’s too far for help.” She nodded across the room. “I tried the phone. Somebody tore the cord from the wall.”
They heard the sharp sound of the metal ladder being righted once more. Heavy footsteps began to clang their way upwards. In a few moments, whoever it was would show his or her face.
Jody and David crouched in the shadows behind a large cedar chest. Jody dug her nails deep into David’s hand, deep enough to draw blood. David held her.
They both kept their eyes fixed on the open trapdoor.
The clanging of the ladder was now joined by a moaning sound. All Jody could think of was somebody on a life support system.
The closer the clanging came, the closer the tortured moans came, the angrier Jody became. Certainly this had to be the person who had taken her Jenny from her.
Her mind reeled at the sight of the hand that came out of the square opening of the trapdoor. It wasn’t a hand at all. Not a human hand. It was glowing and diaphanous and seemed to Jody from some other realm entirely.
David held her tighter. In the slender patch of moonlight, he saw the glowing hand, too.
But not even the hand could prepare them for what came next. Curiously, when she saw the dagger in the other hand, Jody did not scream. Rather she drew in tighter to David and thought back through the years to her thirteenth summer, when she had been pursuing the man now at her side. That summer . . . and the matricide she had seen silhouetted on a curtain.
The ghost appeared.
The specter’s entire body glowed from within as it floated up the ladder. It was like a hallucination, a vivid dream almost.
“Sit tight,” David said, seeing that the spirit was looking around the room and would in moments find them. “There’s a tire iron over there,” he whispered.
He was halfway to the crowbar when the creature saw him and turned with bulky precision in David’s direction.
With a hand capable of almost invisible speed, the ghost’s gnarled fingers reached David’s throat and began squeezing. Jody could see the glow in the old woman’s arms begin to get brighter, deeper.
David dangled from the ghost’s grasp for nearly thirty seconds before Jody could reach the tire iron. With the metal rod, she slammed the ghost’s head from the rear and watched as it passed right through it. There was a wailing—once again, elephant-like —but the creature did not drop David. Indeed, it put a second hand on his throat and began to squeeze.
Jody moved around to the front of the ghost this time. Between David’s head and the spirit’s shoulder was a space of perhaps half a foot. If she could only hit the thing on one of its bulging eyes.
She had no warning that the specter was going to take its right arm away from David’s throat and reach out and grab her.
The pain and loss of breath came instantly as the creature began choking her.
How could something so intangible cause her such pain?
In vain she tried slamming the tire iron against the head. She tried kicking, biting, scratching, but it became obvious quickly that the creature was not affected by any of it.
She saw David slip into unconsciousness. One moment he had been fighting with fists and feet, the next he was a dangling mass of flesh. His legs and feet swung like pendulums as the ghost first lifted then hurled him into the corner. He smashed through a wobbly kitchen table on the way down to the floor.
Now the specter had two hands to use on Jody.
In the basement, Jenny came to awareness with a blinding headache and a body covered with chilled sweat. She had no idea where she was. Her last memory was of sitting in her bedroom with her new Maroon Five album when the babysitter had asked her if she could come in and talk. Flattered by an older girl’s attention, Jenny had of course said yes.
Then— she remembered—
Here her mind paused. It did not want to recall what had happened next. The buzzing sound in her head, the changing contours of the baby-sitter’s face. The words that she chanted endlessly. Jenny’s own screams and useless cries for help—
But where was she now?
She felt cold, damp walls. She felt hard-packed floors. She reached forward and felt a rounded piece of metal. She reached further up and felt an identical piece of metal.
She tilted her head way back and looked up at the square patch of shadowy light. There was an entrance way at the end of the ladder. She could climb up and—
It was then that she heard Grandma Jody. Most definitely Grandma Jody. Jenny knew she was not imagining this.
Pressing her hands down flat so that she could push herself up, she brushed against a body. In the darkness, she felt enough of the face and chest to know that the body was a human. But she also knew, because the body was so still, that the person was dead.
She pulled her hand away. As she did so, her wrist banged against something sharp, cutting her instantly. A knife.
Grandma Jody shouted again, though Jenny could tell it was getting more and more difficult for Grandma Jody to even open her mouth.
The basement was dark but for that one patch of light above her, but the back of it was semi-lit with an eerie glow. For some reason she couldn’t explain, the symbols on the floor and walls seemed familiar to her. And they scared her.
She could make out Hedley’s body in the dim glow. The girl looked as if she were sleeping. And in the center of the largest symbol – the one on the floor – was a human skull.
Chills race through her but she fought the stark white terror which gripped at her heart. Grandma Jody was up there and she needed help.
Running purely on instant, Jenny side-stepped the sleeping Hedley and laid her hands on the skull. It wasn’t cold as she thought it would be, but hot and the surface of it pulsed against her hand. There was blood on the skull too and the feel and smell of it made her wince.
Without thinking, Jenny grabbed the skull and ran over to the metal ladder.
As Jody was driven backwards by the creature, her hands moved about wildly, hoping to find something heavy she could pick up and use as a weapon. Once, her fingers touched the handle of an iron skillet. She felt an absurd optimism. She would pick it up and smash it down on the spirit’s head.
Just then the specter, apparently enraged that it had not yet killed Jody, spun and slammed her into the wall, doubling the strength of its grip on her throat.
This time she felt it for sure. A peculiar chill, a cessation of sensory data that she knew to be death. It was mostly a cold, harsh odor in her lungs and nostrils. Sight went, then hearing, then even smell. The ceaseless pressure of the creature’s hands on her throat and the vague knowledge that her head was being smacked, and smacked hard, against the wall.
At first, she did not recognize the significance of what was taking place behind the creature. When she did understand it, she rejected it as illusion. It was impossible, her dying fantasy of rescue.
She watched as the fantasy, in the form of Jenny bearing Helen’s skull, came up carefully behind the creature and placed the skull on the worn table. That vile thing had been inside her head, controlling her, making her do things . . . terrible things. At the same time, it had imparted some unforeseen knowledge in Jenny’s mind. It told Jenny how to kill it once and for all.
Jenny reached to the side, where only moments ago Jody had dangled from the thing’s grasp. The skillet was still there and she grasped the handle tightly in both hands, lifting it above her head.
“Hey, Helen!” Jenny shouted, the cast iron skillet poised high over her head.
She waited until the thing turned, until Helen could see her fate. And then she brought the skillet crashing down on the skull with every ounce of strength that she had.
Once again, Jody was able to hear. The creature’s cry was, at the same time, repellent and pitiable.
Jenny yanked pulled the skillet away from the skull. For all her efforts, she had produced nothing but a thin crack on the top of the skull. Jenny brought the skillet down again, deepening the crack. The sound was exquisite.
The cry this time was even more chilling.
The specter, apparently given to panic, let Jody slide to the floor, and turned its attention to Jenny. The glow had softened. It extended less far from her actual form and had gotten measurably dimmer.
Jenny, seeing that the creature was about to lunge at her, skillfully moved herself to the other side of the table. She dragged a chair over and pushed it into the wall, trying to make the creature’s passage as difficult as possible.
Jody, her senses gradually beginning to return, still watched all this as if it were a fantasy, or some improbable TV show. She tried to feel the reality of the moment. Jenny. Spirit. Jenny in trouble.
Now Jenny was screaming—
The ghost had moved through Jenny’s fragile little fortress with no difficulty at all. Quickly, competently, its hands lashed out and took Jenny’s throat, just as they had taken Jody’s.
It raised Jenny up and put her flat against the wall. It would not take long for a little girl like Jenny to die—
Jody forced herself to her feet, shaking her head, and shouted, “Stop! Stop!”
Her voice sounded faraway and unreal. Was that really her?
By instinct she found the handle of the tire iron. She wasted no time. Tire iron ready to use, she came up behind the creature and began smashing it against the skull.
Long after Jenny had sunk to the floor, unconscious but alive, Jody went on smashing the skull, thinking of all the young girls that wretched spirit had destroyed. With each crashing blow, the specter screamed, its glow diminishing and its form becoming less distinct. Finally, it let out one long shriek and then it was gone.
Sometime during her frenzy, David Fairbain came to consciousness, saw what was going on, and came over to take her hand from the tire iron.
The first thing they did was splash water on Jenny’s face and bring her to. The first thing Jenny did was to tell them about Hedley and Marietta Stover in the basement.
Epilogue
Two weeks later, on a mild summer afternoon when the grass was a blue-green and the sky a flawless blue, Jenny, Sam, David Fairbain, and Jody got into David’s big yellow Buick SUV and drove to the train depot. Earlier, they had stopped by the hospital to see Marietta and Hedley, who were doing fine (“We’re going to be brave about it and have a good life, aren’t we, honey?” Marietta said as she stroked Hedley’s hand).
Jenny insisted on sitting in the backseat with Grandma Jody. She also insisted on holding her hand and kind of snuggling with her every few minutes.
The route they took brought them past the old neighborhood where Jody had grown up. She saw the house where she and her parents had lived, first her mom and her real dad and then her mom and Uncle Bob. Sight of the house almost shocked her. It was much smaller than she’d recalled and, given its general state of disrepair, shabby to the eye. She felt cheated and foolish, as if memory had played a cruel joke on her, reminding her in the harshest terms that memory is the biggest illusion of all.
“Grandma Jody’s crying,” Jenny said.
Sam turned around. David looked at Jody in the rearview mirror.
“What’s wrong, Mom?” Sam asked, obviously concerned.
“Oh, nothing.” Jody laughed through her tears. “I just realized that I’m getting old. And starting to suffer old people’s delusions.”
David said, “It better not be a delusion that you’re coming back here in two weeks, and that we’re getting married.”
She reached forward and patted his shoulder. “That part’s not a delusion, David, I promise.”
“Goody!” Jenny said, hugging Grandma.
Jody turned her eyes once more to the neighborhood. If she listened carefully, she could hear her own young voice calling out instructions in a sweet spring dusk for pom-pom pull-away or doing her Jack Black impersonation. And if she watched just so, she could see herself on her Schwinn, and in her first pink party dress, or watching with fastidious attention the exploits of “Star Wars.”
Distantly, she could hear the summer circus and see herself on the midway, all cotton candy and kewpie dolls, yearning for this or that boy boldly standing up inside his Ferris wheel box and dispensing papal-like smiles to all the girls below.
Had she ever really been young, or was that just an old person’s delusion as she’d said to Sam?
Then they were out of the neighborhood, the Buick finding its bright confident way to the ancient red brick depot, Jody in the backseat feeling strangely isolated from those she loved.
She had quit crying now, but she knew the tears would come again. She wasn’t even sure what the tears were about. She supposed they were about her memories of her frail Grandpa and busy bustling Mom and handsome Dad, all long gone now. She supposed they were about the way sunlight and shadow played on the surface of Cummings Creek and about the thrill of listening to music on the radio in the darkness of her bedroom. She supposed they were about the way her three-month-old kitten had been hit by a Packard one day.
Yes, those were the reasons for her tears—those and so many other memories that she felt insane with their number and richness—because somewhere in the middle of those memories was a frightened, lonely girl named Jody.
A girl who had inexplicably become Grandma Jody. She reached out and touched Sam’s hand. She was going to get better, Sam was. Jody was going to see to it. Jody was now going to become the mother she’d never quite been—it was never too late to wrap up your child in your love. Never.
She reached over now and drew Jenny to her. She hugged her all the rest of the way to the depot while Sam looked at them and smiled.
Gorman, Ed, Babysitter
