Kelly woke suddenly. She wasn't sure if she had actually heard something or if it was the last fading memory of something she had dreamt. She sat up on one elbow and reached for the light. Her hand brushed something cold and she recoiled with a gasp. She reached out again and found the switch of her bedside light. She looked about the room and listened intently, staring through her open door toward the hallway leading downstairs.
For the last few nights, she had been waking in the middle of the night with vivid visions of someone digging. It had seemed that it was a little girl, but sometimes she was sure it was the girl's mommy. Yesterday she even found herself wandering to the garden shed and looking at the tools. She had absently picked up a shovel and proceeded to dig a shallow hole in the edge of the old sand pile before she noticed that she didn't really have any reason to be digging there.
Kelly hadn't thought too much about it at the
time, but it creeped her out now as she thought back on it. Why had
she felt compelled to dig? Something nagged at her. There was
another of those headaches, too. She stopped staring down the stairs
and reached for the bottle of ibuprofen she had begun leaving on the bedside.
She popped two into her mouth and swigged on the water bottle that she had
brought to bed with her.
As she swung her legs over onto the edge of the bed, she noticed a
terrible odor. She almost gagged from the sudden intensity of it.
"Just what we need," she thought, "another dead mouse in the wall."
It was one of the less pleasant aspects of the coming of winter in her country
home. She vowed to give up poisoning them and stick to mousetraps and
her trusty cat, Basket, from now on.
As she headed to the bathroom, the smell remained quite powerful. "Funny," she murmured to herself. Usually the smell of a dead critter in the wall was pretty well localized to the spot where it had died and could be covered up with Lysol for the few days that it lasted. "I don't need this, " she hissed through her teeth. Just this morning her sister Kathy had told her a story that she had heard about the house on Cedar Street that was Kelly's new home.
It seemed that a ex-convict had moved into the neighborhood sometime in the 50's. No one knew him , but as stories will always do in a small town, it came to be general knowledge that Fred had been sent to prison as a child molester. He had been known to sit on his front porch and wave at any one who walked by. Especially little children. He had even been spotted wandering around the neighborhood on summer evenings. All the parents told their little girls to "watch out for Fred," and to "keep away from Fred." The lone patrol car in town had seen him out several times at night and had politely "suggested" that he get on home.
Then one day nobody saw Fred around anymore and within a few weeks there was a small pile of furniture and clothes on the curb for the used furniture scavengers to take and then there was no more thought of Fred. The good part of the story was that this house on Cedar street had been the reported scene of several sightings of Fred's ghost. He was supposed to wander around the back yard late at night with a huge knife sticking out of his back. The realty company hated for anyone to repeat the story, because it made it very hard to rent the house.
As Kelly started back to bed, she thought she saw a movement at the bottom of the stairs. It looked like a little girl of about 5 or 6. She started down to see her, but as she got closer, there was nothing there. She looked around at the bottom of the stairs and a pale glow caught her eye. It was coming from the back yard and Kelly moved slowly along the hall to the back of the house. She lowered her head and peered through the window in the back door.
There in the spot where she had turned over the few spadefuls of earth just yesterday was a sight that sent a shiver through her. A stout woman was digging furiously while a little girl stood near her and wrestled with a shovel that was twice her size. It was plain that she was trying to help dig, but she was not helping much. A little boy stood to the side watching. Clear in the moonlight next to their hole lay the body of a man with a knife protruding from his back.
Kelly gasped and reached for the backyard light switch. She turned it on and looked back out to the yard. Nothing remained but the newly mowed lawn bathed in harsh lights. She opened the door and took a cautious step onto the small porch. She looked a the shovel leaning on the back fence right where she had left it the day before. She noticed the smell of death out here too. She walked straight to the shovel and grasped it firmly. She stepped hard on the shovel and felt how uncomfortably thin her slippers were for this job.
As she turned over spade after spade of the sandy soil, she noticed how much easier it was to dig now that she had gotten through the grass and roots. Eagerly she tossed the dirt onto the steadily growing pile. She turned her eyes down to plunge the shovel into the earth again and saw something white. The yard light cast a deep shadow into the hole and Kelly reached down to have a better look. It took a heartbeat for her to realize that she was holding a crumbling ... human ... skull. Kelly's scream pierced the night and then slowly, slowly her limp body slumped down into the sand. © 2000 Alan D. King
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