The Horror Megapack_ 25 Classic and Modern Horror Stories ( PDFDrive )

and everyone knew it and she lived in a house with a yard that was overgrown
with weeds and looked condemned or haunted or both. So it didn’t matter that
time when one of the goth kids at school sidled up to her in the hallway and said,
“Caroline, are you a witch? Wanna join our coven?”
“Yes,” she said, “I am a witch. I’ve sold my soul to the Devil!”
She said it with such conviction that the goth-kid seemed to just melt. He ran
away, and Caroline laughed so hard and so long and so loudly that it made a
scene, and everybody was staring, and she didn’t give a damn if they did.
But most of them didn’t call her a witch. Somebody saw her scrounging for
pizza out of a dumpster and the next day it was all over school and kids greeted
her with, “Eew, gross…” and said among themselves, but making sure she could
hear them, “Caroline’s going to be a bag-lady when she grows up. Maybe she’s
one already.”
“Yeah, everything’s fine,” she told the counselor again and again.
So she lay in the hammock in the late October dark, on a night when she was
certain that Jack and dear old Mom, who supposedly loved her no matter what,
had murdered someone. She had seen them dragging a girl not much older than
herself, somebody she didn’t know, who didn’t seem to be wearing much
clothing, down into the basement. She had even been able to sneak a glimpse of
what was going on down there, just this once. The struggling girl must have
made Mom and Uncle Jack careless.
The curtains were open, so Caroline, crouching on the back porch, could peer
in through the back door and see down the basement steps. A crowd of people
waited at the base of the stairs, their faces horribly pale, all of them dressed in
black, their outstretched hands like claws—and then the basement door slammed
shut and she knew, as she so often did, that it was time to make herself invisible.
That night, after she’d screamed into her crumpled blanket for a long time and
finally punched a hole through the darkness into that other place where the
answers came from, the darkness began to speak to her, its voice more distinct
than she had ever heard it before. The darkness touched her. Its touch was hard
and warm, but somehow comforting, as if strong, invisible hands caressed her.
That night she looked up from out of her hammock and saw that the whole house
was ablaze with light. She watched as all of the windows of the house slid open
simultaneously, silently. In complete silence her mother and Uncle Jack, now
dressed in black robes, leaned out of the upstairs bedroom and floated into the
air, ascending like smoke, while from all the other windows, even the barred
ones in the basement window-wells, other people rose up, dozens of them, like