Dead By Dawn by A.E. Rought
Copyright 2008 Lyrical Press, Inc.

  • Dead By Dawn
  • A.E. Rought


    • PAST MIDNIGHT

    I was nine years old, and I hated going there. Everyone knew it, but still Daddy would drop me off at the end of that long dirt driveway and leave me to walk alone to Grandmother's house.

    I'd look back at that brown boat of a car, yearning to scramble back into its safety. Daddy would shake his head and silently point down the drive. I remember the last time; my shoulders slumped as I turned to face that house.

    The house squatted at the end of the dusty drive, its whitewashed clapboard siding chipped and pock marked by the blistering sun. Before I pushed open the gate, I cast a longing backward glance at the inviting shadows beneath the trees beyond the road's embankment. The gravel crunched like insect carcasses beneath my Charlie Brown shoes as I walked, heaving my bag behind me and dreading each step. There was no denying my sequestered summer when I put my sole on that creaky first step. One stair, then two-each creaking as if in warning to flee. I could not, however, so I banged my suitcase up the stairs, and then hesitantly rapped my knuckles on the doorjamb.

    Once settled in at Grandmother's house, I took up my normal chores as the oppressive summer heat suffocated, squeezed the air from my chest and sweat from my skin.

    We sat for hours outside; Grandmother in her rocker and me snapping beans. I remember how the brittle planking of the porch floor creaked and groaned beneath the rockers of Grandmother's chair. She sat there, rocking, rocking while my little fingers grew tired from ripping the stems off the long green beans. I would look at my grandmother through sweat-blurred eyes. Grandmother always seemed dazed. Her glazed eyes constantly searched the tree line of the forest which sulked alongside her property line. Her thin lips worked against the curses she spewed beneath her breath.

    "Ain't goin' back there…" she muttered.

    "Go back where?"

    The rocker stopped, the floorboards grew silent, but the sweltering heat refused to release its grip; I wheezed for air. Grandmother's face was pallid, and a sweaty sheen made her skin appear greasy when she turned her gray eyes upon me. They were haunted, the grey-blue irises resembled tattered ghosts. She hummed a moment, as if confused, before she answered. "The house in them woods…"

    "But why not? I like the woods… At least it's cooler beneath the trees."

    "Never mind the heat, girl. That place is worse than cursed," she croaked. "Don't go in them woods past midnight…"

    Even at nine years old, I thought my grandmother must be crazy. Something about that forest attracted me, pulled me toward it-I liked it, I wanted to go in there. That forest had a voice, and it whispered to me. One time, that last year I visited, my ball rolled uphill toward those trees as if pulled on an invisible string. I chased after it and stopped beneath a twisted oak.

    "Leave that ball!" Grandmother shouted from the porch. Each time she caught me lingering near the trees she would shout until I scurried home.

    That summer was the last I spent at Grandmother's house. My family moved states away when my father's job transferred his position. I should have been relieved to leave that crabby old woman behind, but some part of me missed the creaking boards and suffocating heat. Some part of me missed Grandmother and her obsession with those woods.

    And, as I grew older, that obsession and its source became mine. By night, my dreams were filled with tree lines and hidden houses. By day, I haunted the libraries, absorbing every scrap of information I could find on the West Michigan area, researching every urban legend and rumored haunted house.

    Nothing satisfied me, and I knew nothing short of returning would ever quell the compulsion within me.

    WAILING WINDS

    No amount of prayer could save John and Synthia's children from the illness which swept from bed to bed like a thief in the night. The four eldest children, too sad to watch, too scared to leave, stood in a loose ring around their mother's rocking chair as she held their baby sister. Jennie, aged only one year and one day, was the first victim.

    Their father John's fist curled, his lip stiffened. Synthia, however, broke into haunting wails that faded only when she collapsed into sleep.

    After her twin brothers Samuel and Isaac's funeral, Eliza's father turned into a man as rigid and unforgiving as the trees outside their home, but her mother melted in the heat of the same fever that stole their children. Synthia lay in the bedroom behind the brick chimney, curtains drawn over the empty doorway to keep the heat in, and quiet the cough clattering in her chest.

    The horrid death rattle followed Eliza as she set about her remaining brother Josiah's chores, which had become hers the night the fever took his life.

    She walked past her father with her head bowed, contrite in action but terrified. Death stalked her family, and every time as she slipped her feet into her mother's boots and trudged out into the deepening shadows to gather twigs for kindling, she walked among the shadowed roots, the haunted trees with wailing voices.

    Eliza flinched and cried at each crackle of twig, certain the spirit haunting the woods wanted her for its own. The branches pulled at her, the roots tricked her feet, and the paths she followed led ever deeper, but never out of the woods. Tear-streaked and pale she returned to the back door of their home and then hurried to bed, where she pulled curtains tight over the windows and against the ghostly images of impatient trees.

    Synthia succumbed to the long sleep of death in early September, leaving John and Eliza. Ghosts sat on the empty furniture, poltergeists knocked books off shelves and apparitions hunkered on the beds in the children's room. On the nights when the wind screamed in the pines, Eliza even heard her mother's cough. But then, on All Hallow's Eve, everything changed.

    The temperatures dropped and an icy bank of fog rolled in. Eliza sat at the kitchen table, her insides turned as cold and inert as the murkiness outside the glass. She cast her father a hopeful glance. Maybe this night she could avoid the woods, the clutching branches, their frightening whispers.

    John stood, taking his bowl with him to the dry sink. "Mind your manners and your chores, Eliza."

    "But, Papa...the woods scare me." She shivered, pulled her shawl tighter against the chill and silently prayed she would not be sent out that night.

    He stood, the hump of misery straightening from his shoulders when he turned, eyes dark and finger pointing toward the empty tinder bucket beside the fireplace. "Do not test me, child.