Daddy and I drove past it all the time when he was alive. He’d always start humming an old murder ballad he told me was called “The Old Oak Tree.” He would never sing the words for me, though I loved the sad, lilting melody of it.
Tonight, pale, distant stars shine overhead. The forest behind me sleeps, breathing silently, the pine trees’ top branches finally at rest. The atmosphere feels the way it did when Daddy played his fiddle—like all creation had gone still and quiet, waiting to see what the music would bring.
I wait with the trees and the ghosts, trembling in the warm spring air, my body tuned to a frequency that only sounds like white noise, empty static to my mind. No matter how hard I listen, the silence never resolves into melody.
As I get ready for bed, I still feel restless and on edge—still caught up in that snatch of music I heard in the woods, the spirits’ watchfulness I felt in the trees. I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep, but I guess all of today’s fighting has worn me out. When I fall into bed at ten o’clock, I drift straight from thoughts of the shadowy, restive woods and into familiar dreams.
I’m lying in my little twin bed at the old house—my real home—with the window open to a rare fall breeze. My feet are cold, but I don’t want to close the window because I can hear Daddy’s fiddle playing from the woods. A low, mournful song I don’t recognize drifts in with the usual nighttime creatures’ music. It’s a sad song, but it comforts me, and my eyes grow heavy.
Just then, my bedroom door creaks open, startling me awake, but it’s probably one of the ghosts, nothing to worry about. I pull my quilt higher over my chest, until it’s under my nose. Then I hear heavy footsteps on the floorboards, nothing like the soft patter of the ghosts I’m used to. I turn my head toward the door, where a tall, shadowy figure stands, his features obscured by the hall light behind him.
My heart begins to race. “Daddy?” I say, but I know it’s not Daddy—his fiddle’s still crying in the pines. “Jesse?” I whisper, though the figure’s too tall to be my brother.
I already know who’s standing at my door.
The figure doesn’t speak. He makes his inky way into the room, drawing nearer and nearer to my bed, until he’s standing over me, gazing down into my face. I stare up at him as I have a dozen times before, unable to speak or move or even breathe. The figure has no face. He is darkness. He is nothing.
A hand reaches down toward my throat, and I know I should fight, know I should thrash and kick and bite, but my body won’t obey me. My limbs lie heavy, useless. Fingertips brush my throat, and finally I work up a scream from somewhere deep inside me. It rips from my mouth, cutting through the shadows in the room, making the dark figure draw back his hand.
I scream until I am no longer a girl, no longer flesh and blood, but only sound and terror hurtling through the night.
Warm fingers close over my arm and shake me. “Shady,” someone says. “Open your eyes.” And then I’m back in the trailer, in the room I share with Honey, staring into my brother’s face. Jesse’s eyes soften in relief when he sees I recognize him. I’m still paralyzed, but my eyes flit over the room, searching for a man made of shadows.
“You were screaming,” Jesse says. “I thought you were being murdered in your bed.”
“I was.” A warm tear rolls down my face. When I reach up to wipe it away, I realize I can move again. I sit up, feeling sick and dizzy. “Where’s Honey?” She’s not in the bed across from mine.
“She probably fell asleep in Mama’s room,” Jesse says. He studies me carefully. “Are you having the dreams again, like you did before . . . ?” He can’t bear to say “before Daddy died.”
“Everybody has nightmares,” I say. But that fear’s still sitting there on my chest, heavy as a body. It’s been four years since I’ve had to fight him off—the dark figure who held me down in the twilight space between dreams and waking, who slipped in and out of the shadows, from choking nightmare to screaming waking. He hasn’t visited me since Daddy died.
If he’s back now, will the other dreams come back too? The dead girl in my ceiling, the stinging wasps? A shudder runs through me, making me squeeze my eyes closed. And why now? Why has he chosen to come back?
“Shady, are you all right?” Mama says from the doorway. I must have woken up the whole house with my screaming.
I find my voice again. “Just a bad dream. I’m fine. You can go to sleep.”
Jesse doesn’t speak to her. He gets up and heads back to his room. After murmuring good night, Mama goes too, leaving me alone with the memory of cool fingers on my neck, fiddle music in my ears, a secret I’m half afraid to admit to myself.
The shadow man’s back.
Three
There’s still an expectant, uneasy feeling in my chest when I pull up at Aunt Ena’s the next morning, a Saturday.
The house where I grew up looks like it always has, like it probably always will. The white paint has peeled and turned the same grayish color as the heavy Spanish moss that drips from the massive oak trees in the front yard. The upstairs windows are dark with dirt, and even from my car, I can see the cobwebs. The grass is overgrown, and cracks vein the bricks of the front stoop like spreading kudzu vines.
You’d think the house was empty of the living if it weren’t for the pink azaleas rioting in the front yard, big and fierce enough to make even the oak trees look nervous. Flowers usually cheer up a place, but against the brightness of the azaleas, the house and the woods behind it look more ominous than ever. All shadows and whispers. It doesn’t help that the sky’s overcast, with big, dark thunderheads rolling in.
I head for the door, my arms loaded with bags. I’ve been doing Aunt Ena’s shopping on Saturday mornings since the first week I got my driver’s license. It’s not that she can’t go out; she just doesn’t like to. Crowds make her nervous. And so do open spaces. And fluorescent lights. The grocery store is her idea of hell. Mama says she’s always been like that, but it got worse after Daddy died.
Aunt Ena opens the door, still in her nightgown. “Mornin’, darlin’.” She smiles and stands back to let me in.
Aunt Ena looks so much like Daddy it makes my chest ache. She’s got his naturally fair skin, dark curly hair, and snub nose. Her eyes are blue, though, a rarity in our family.
“Your azaleas are going to overtake the house before long,” I say as I pass through the door. “What are you feeding them?”
Aunt Ena wiggles her fingers mysteriously and then goes to get some cash from her purse. She always gives me ten bucks for my trouble, the only income I’ve got. I’d do it even without the money, though. I like spending time with Aunt Ena, and I know she’s lonely. Plus, I get to missing this old house something fierce if I stay away too long.
I help put the groceries away in the kitchen, and every drawer and cabinet I open sends a memory whooshing out. Daddy boiling a giant pot of peanuts. Jesse and me eating all the chocolate chip cookies while our parents slept. My homemade volcano shooting red froth up to the ceiling.
There are bad memories here too—waking up screaming from nightmares of the shadow man and, even awake, creeping around dark corners of the house, watching for him. I sat right here on the kitchen floor one night after a particularly scary dream, crying and shaking, until Jesse found me.