The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

I had done as she told me. It wasn’t me doing these things but they were done. Don’t hurt me, I whispered, lying on my stomach on the mattress, my arms stretched above me and my fingernails digging into the floor. The coarse wood with splinters pricking my skin. Don’t hurt me O please but the woman paid no heed her warm wet breath louder now and the floorboards creaking beneath her weight. “Now, miss, now ‘Melissa’ as they call you – this will be our secret won’t it . . .”

When it was over she wiped at her mouth and said she would let me go today if I promised never to tell anybody if I sent my pretty little sister to her tomorrow.

She isn’t my sister, I said, sobbing. When I could get my breath.

I had lost control of my bladder after all, I’d begun to pee even before the first swipe of the willow switch hit me on the buttocks, peeing in helpless spasms, and sobbing, and afterward the woman scolded me saying wasn’t it a poor little baby wetting itself like that. But she sounded repentant too, stood well aside to let me pass, Off you go! Home you go! And don’t forget!

And I ran out of the room hearing her laughter behind me and down the stairs running running as if I hadn’t any weight my legs just blurry beneath me as if the air was water and I was swimming I ran out of the house and through the cornfield running in the cornfield sobbing as the corn stalks slapped at my face Off you go! Home you go! And don’t forget!

I told Mary Lou about the Minton house and something that had happened to me there that was a secret and she didn’t believe me at first saying with a jeer, “Was it a ghost? Was it Hans?” I said I couldn’t tell. Couldn’t tell what? she said. Couldn’t tell, I said. Why not? she said.

“Because I promised.”

“Promised who?” she said. She looked at me with her wide blue eyes like she was trying to hypnotize me. “You’re a goddamned liar.”

Later she started in again asking me what had happened what was the secret was it something to do with Hans ? did he still like her? was he mad at her? and I said it didn’t have anything to do with Hans not a thing to do with him. Twisting my mouth to show what I thought of him.

“Then who – ?” Mary Lou asked.

“I told you it was a secret.”

“Oh shit – what kind of a secret?”

“A secret.”

“A secret really?”

I turned away from Mary Lou, trembling. My mouth kept twisting in a strange hurting smile. “Yes. A secret really,” I said.

The last time I saw Mary Lou she wouldn’t sit with me on the bus, walked past me holding her head high giving me a mean snippy look out of the corner of her eye. Then when she left for her stop she made sure she bumped me going by my seat, she leaned over to say, “I’ll find out for myself, I hate you anyway,” speaking loud enough for everybody on the bus to hear, “– I always have.”

Once upon a time the fairy tales begin. But then they end and often you don’t know really what has happened, what was meant to happen, you only know what you’ve been told, what the words suggest. Now that I have completed my story, filled up half my notebook with my handwriting that disappoints me, it is so shaky and childish – now the story is over I don’t understand what it means. I know what happened in my life but I don’t know what has happened in these pages.

Mary Lou was found murdered ten days after she said those words to me. Her body had been tossed into Elk Creek a quarter mile from the road and from the old Minton place. Where, it said in the paper, nobody had lived for fifteen years.

It said that Mary Lou had been thirteen years old at the time of her death. She’d been missing for seven days, had been the object of a countrywide search.

It said that nobody had lived in the Minton house for years but that derelicts sometimes sheltered there. It said that the body was unclothed and mutilated. There were no details.

This happened a long time ago.

The murderer (or murderers as the newspaper always said) was never found.

Hans Meunzer was arrested of course and kept in the county jail for three days while police questioned him but in the end they had to let him go, insufficient evidence to build a case it was explained in the newspaper though everybody knew he was the one wasn’t he the one? – everybody knew. For years afterward they’d be saying that. Long after Hans was gone and the Siskins were gone, moved away nobody knew where.