What Haunts the Newbuild?

by Meagan Kane

If the dead who loved her haunt an old home’s bones, what haunts the newbuild? What makes her creak and moan? Every house is a violence—and a weathered house knows this better than most—but if the trees that once stood on her land form an old home’s dead-spirit frame, what drywall-and-laminate ghosts have lent their souls to the joining of foam and caulk?

The old house asks herself this as she watches her new neighbor assemble herself, fresh foundation and fragile frame tin can telephone line close to her stucco-and-old-growth self. The girl’s paint hasn’t finished drying yet. Her floors teem with gasoline planking; she treasures the feature enough to name herself after it.

“What do you think to eat off of, little one?” asks the old home. “However will you make yourself strong?”

“I am light as air,” says LUXURY VINYL FLOORING. “You are good bones. You sink down heavy and crackle to dust; why will you not strip yourself clean and live as I live, free of wood and worries?”

Life runs through the old home’s halls. Wood windows open on broken sashes, propped up by wood blocks and least favorite books, lead paint atomized into elemental inhalants. An old man coughs upstairs; children play in the yard. There’s a pink plastic slide; a little girl catapults down it over and over, laughing as she hits the mud, the first thaw fresh about her. In three months’ time, the old man will slip down too-steep stairs during a coughing fit, slide down them just as the girl does, the same head-first tilt. His soul will settle in the dappled light coming through the stained-glass window. The girl will spend her whole life fretting over railings, taking steps one at a time, searching for bungalows: in this way, the house will never leave her.

“Come,” says Good Bones. “I will teach you.” (Continue Reading…)

Faith, Hope and Charity

By Irvin S. Cobb

Just outside a sizable New Mexico town the second section of the fast through train coming from the Coast made a short halt. Entering the stretch leading to the yards, the engineer had found the signal set against him; the track ahead was temporarily blocked.

It was a small delay though. Almost at once the semaphore like the finger of a mechanical wizard made the warning red light vanish and a green light appear instead; so, at that, the Limited got under way and rolled on into the station for her regular stop.

But before she started up, four travelers quitted her. They got out on the off side, the side farthest away from the town, and that probably explains why none of the crew and none of the other passengers saw them getting out. It helps also to explain why they were not missed until quite some time later. (Continue Reading…)

The End Of The Story

by Clark Ashton Smith

The following narrative was found among the papers of Christophe Morand, a young law-student of Tours, after his unaccountable disappearance during a visit at his father’s home near Moulins, in November, 1798:

A sinister brownish-purple autumn twilight, made premature by the imminence of a sudden thunderstorm, had filled the forest of Averoigne. The trees along my road were already blurred to ebon masses, and the road itself, pale and spectral before me in the thickening gloom, seemed to waver and quiver slightly, as with the tremor of some mysterious earthquake. I spurred my horse, who was woefully tired with a journey begun at dawn, and had fallen hours ago to a protesting and reluctant trot, and we galloped adown the darkening road between enormous oaks that seemed to lean toward us with boughs like clutching fingers as we passed.

With dreadful rapidity, the night was upon us, the blackness became a tangible clinging veil; a nightmare confusion and desperation drove me to spur my mount again with a more cruel rigor; and now, as we went, the first far-off mutter of the storm mingled with the clatter of my horse s hoofs, and the first lighting flashes illumed our way, which, to my amazement (since I believed myself on the main highway through Averoigne), had inexplicably narrowed to a well-trodden footpath. Feeling sure that I had gone astray, but not caring to retrace my steps in the teeth of darkness and the towering clouds of the tempest, I hurried on, hoping, as seemed reasonable, that a path so plainly worn would lead eventually to some house or chateau where I could find refuge for the night. My hope was well-founded, for within a few minutes I descried a glimmering light through the forest-boughs, and came suddenly to an open glade, where, on a gentle eminence, a large building loomed, with several litten windows in the lower story, and a top that was well-nigh indistinguishable against the bulks of driven cloud. (Continue Reading…)

The Book

By Margaret Irwin

On a foggy night in November, Mr. Corbett, having guessed the murderer by the third chapter of his detective story, arose in disappointment from his bed and went downstairs in search of something more satisfactory to send him to sleep.

The fog had crept through the closed and curtained windows of the dining-room and hung thick on the air, in a silence that seemed as heavy and breathless as the fog. The atmosphere was more choking than in his room, and very chill, although the remains of a large fire still burned in the grate.

The dining-room bookcase was the only considerable one in the house, and held a careless, unselected collection to suit all the tastes of the household, together with a few dull and obscure old theological books that had been left over from the sale of a learned uncle’s library. Cheap red novels, bought on railway stalls by Mrs. Corbett, who thought a journey the only time to read, were thrust in like pert, undersized intruders among the respectable 19th-century works of culture, chastely bound in dark blue or green, which Mr. Corbett had considered the right thing to buy during his Oxford days; besides these there swaggered the children’s large, gayly bound story books and collections of fairy tales in every color.

From among this neat, new, clothbound crowd there towered here and there a musty sepulcher of learning, brown with the color of dust rather than leather, with no trace of gilded letters, however faded, on its crumbling back to tell what lay inside. A few of these moribund survivors from the Dean’s library were inhospitably fastened with rusty clasps; all remained closed, and appeared impenetrable, their blank forbidding backs uplifted above their frivolous surroundings with the air of scorn that belongs to a private and concealed knowledge. For only the worm of corruption now bored his way through their evil-smelling pages. (Continue Reading…)

Tailpiece

by Harry Graham

My son Augustus, in the street, one day,

Was feeling quite exceptionally merry.

A stranger asked him: ‘Can you tell me, pray,

The quickest way to Brompton Cemetery ?’

‘The quickest way? You bet I can!’ said Gus,

And pushed the fellow underneath a bus.

Whatever people say about my son,

He does enjoy his little bit of fun.

The Second Awakening Of A Magician

by S.L. Dennis

The evening show was over. From the flapping entrance of the circus tent a small audience trooped out into the windy darkness: a few couples drawing closer as they disappeared into the night; a string of tittering girls, arms linked, bubbling with excitement and glancing back over their shoulders at the group of noisy youths slouching behind; two or three smart people who had been sitting self-consciously in the special screened-off enclosure, grown-ups in whose hearts, perhaps, a delight in spangles and sawdust had lingered since childhood, and who, in spite of a feeling of disappointment after every visit, still returned to the fruitless search for the glamour of those dream days; and last but not least a straggling, shouting, ragged mob of urchins, sticky with sweets and oranges, most of whom had crawled under the sides of the tent and evaded with practiced ease all efforts to catch them.

(Continue Reading…)

A Rose For Emily

by William Faulkner

I

When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old negro manservant—a combined gardener and cook—had seen in at least ten years. (Continue Reading…)

Christmas Eve In Beach House

By E Lynn Linton

It seemed as if the Mackenzies were under a spell, and that none of the men were ever destined to die in their beds. We sometimes see this strange law of persistent accident run through a family, and generation after generation fulfils what looks like the ordained decree, either of violent death or loss by fire, either of shipwreck or that mysterious and sudden disappearance when a person goes under like a stone in the water, and is never heard of again. I, who write this, know of a family where the law of “running away” has been in force for four generations; one or more lads of each brood having run away from home, school, or legal master as the case might be—some turning up again after a season of wild-oat-sowing, perhaps all the better for the process, but others gone forever, and their ultimate fate a mystery, never cleared up. 

The law of the Mackenzies was, as I have said, a violent end. Old Zachary the grandfather, and Michael the father, of Captain Charles, had both died of their sins or, as the traditional phrase went, “died standing;” and Captain Charles himself had disappeared. He was a married man, but a wild one, according to the way of the Mackenzies; and ten years ago had been serving with his regiment in Cornwall, while his wife and two children left behind in London never knew more of him than that he was reported absent when he should have returned to his quarters at Truro after a week’s leave, and that from that time to this he was missing, and had left no trace behind. Every effort had been made to find him, but without success; and his family had by now almost given up the hope not only of seeing him again but of knowing what his end had been; though indeed his widow, poor soul, who loved him as certain women do love scampish men, handsome, affectionate, generous, and unfaithful, still clung to hope against hope, and refused to wear the conventional weeds, or do more than “provisionally” administer to his effects. Still, there the mystery of his fate remained, and it looked likely enough to remain a mystery to the end of time. Meanwhile the son grew up, and went out into the world; and now the daughter Alice had just married Walter Garwood, a young man of some means and roving habits, and so had begun life on her own account when this story opens. (Continue Reading…)

Cyanide Constellations

By Sara Tantlinger

In the daylight, I pretend nothing can hurt me, but we both know that has never been true. What hides in shadow or creeps through the night must exist during dewy mornings and August afternoons.

I stretch my limbs beneath the buttery warmth of late summer sun, using the dirt of our never-planted garden as my bed. Heat penetrates defenseless skin, burning flesh with strips of red along my arms and legs where the dress you loved offers no protection. I should go inside, keep the lights off and hide within the cool darkness of air conditioning, but here I remain, glued to the soil as if the sun melted my body into gooey strips, pinned down like butterfly wings mounted on a board, my brittle body to be sold as art. Who would buy the art of me if there is no you? (Continue Reading…)