Excerpt: The One With The Spooky House
I’ve been going through old stories to put together some collections for publication, and it turns out I have enough under both my names to make a collection for each, which was a nice thing to discover. This is a light, fun one, but I liked it enough to read on a live reading a couple weeks ago, and so I’ll publish it again here. It originally appeared in Anthrolations 5 in 2001 (it is out of stock, but the back cover had an illustration for this story), and was reprinted in Will Sanborn’s collection Alone in the Dark.
I don’t think this is technically horror, but it’s horror-adjacent, and as I dip back into that genre, it’s nice to look back on other stuff I wrote and realize that oh yeah, I’ve been enjoying this genre for a long time.
Three little white-tipped russet tails twitched back and forth behind the bush. Three sets of gleaming eyes peered out of the bush at the tall metal fence, and the forbidding house beyond. Peeling white paint covered the old wooden boards of the house, and on the roof, dark patches showed where shingles had dropped off over the years. The dark windows reflected the starlight—all except for one, and that was where the eyes were focused.
“I told you you threw it too hard, Sharlin,” one voice whispered.
“I think we should go get Mom and Dad.”
“Hush up, Crystal.” Sharlin looked at the shattered window and chewed his paw.
“Well, if we don’t get them, how will we get our ball back?”
“I think Sharlin should go get it. He threw it.”
“You’re the one who was teasin’ me, Bridgie!”
“You still threw it.” Bridget smiled smugly and rested her muzzle on her paws. “Anyway, I din’ say you should throw it at the old house. I just said you throw like a girl.”
Sharlin bit back a reply. It didn’t do any good to tell his sisters they threw like girls too. He looked at the old house again and listened. No sounds came over the breeze to him except the creaks of settling wood.
“Maybe they’re not home,” he said.
“Of course they’re home,” Crystal said. “That’s why Daddy said never to go in there.”
“If he never goes in there, how would he know? Maybe they don’t live there any more.”
Bridget snorted. “Don’t be stupid.”
Sharlin flattened his ears and growled his best big-fox growl. “Well, how do you know they still live there?”
“The gate’s locked. They wouldn’t move out and leave the gate locked.”
“Well…maybe they went out and locked the gate behind them.” Sharlin hated it when his sister was right. He lifted his nose to the wind. “Besides, I can’t smell them.”
“The wind’s coming from behind us, dope. You’re just afraid to go in there.”
He tossed his head in the direction of the house. “Am not! Those old biddies don’t scare me!”
“Then why don’t you go in and get our ball?”
“I…” No use; she had him well and truly trapped now. The house seemed to sneer at him in the shadowed starlight, and then the moon came out from behind a cloud. White sticks below the door gleamed at him like the bones of foolhardy fox cubs.
“I heard there was a cub who went in there and he was so scared his fur turned all white and he had to go away and if you said ‘boo’ to him now he might die.”
“Oh, hush, Crystal,” Sharlin said, shifting his paws. “That couldn’t happen.”
“Gregory’s fur is all white.”
“His mom and dad are white, too. They’re from somewhere where it snows all the time.”
Crystal flicked her ears. “So? They had to get all white somehow.”
“Yeah,” Bridget chipped in. “Maybe they went in there and got scared and were so scared even their cub went white!” She seemed excited by the possibility.
“Hmph. Well, maybe if my fur goes white, yours will too.”
Crystal dismissed that with a paw. “An’ did you hear Mommy and Daddy talk about Miss Poplar? They said she had her nerves break down. I bet she saw something scary.”
“Maybe she looked in the mirror.” Bridget giggled.
“Jake said she had mange and had to go ’way,” Sharlin said. “Anyway, I’m not some ol’ vixen. I’m a big tod! I bet I coulda chewed up whatever scared her.”
Bridget sniggered. “As long as it didn’t look like a grasshopper.”
Sharlin felt his ears flush and he pinned them back. “That was two years ago!” Bridget laughed, and he pounced on her. The bush shook with their tussling for a few moments as Crystal backed away from the yips and growls.
“Ow! Okay, lemme up!” Sharlin squeaked finally. Bridget clambered off him and sat in front of the bush while he licked his fur back into place, tail curled under himself sulkily. “You’re still scared to go in there,” she taunted him.
“Am not.” He felt he had something to prove now, and stood up, arching his tail behind him. “You’ll see. I’ll get the ball back.”
“You’re not really going in, are you?” Crystal said as he padded towards the fence.
“Sure I am.” The fence looked cold and forbidding, making him pause. “I gotta get our ball back.” And show Bridgie I’m not scared, he said to himself.
“I think we should get Daddy.”
“Oh, Crystal, go get him yourself, then. I’m gonna get our ball.” He marched resolutely toward the fence, barely noticing when Crystal took off up the hill. At the fence, he sat on his haunches and looked up at the metal links. They rose up several feet higher than his ears, and gleamed in the moonlight. He put his paw on one of the links. He could climb it. Probably.
“It’s not as high as the tree you fell out of last summer,” Bridget teased him.
“I’m goin’, I’m goin’!” He put a paw further up the fence, then jumped up onto it, catching his hind legs on some links at the bottom.
It took him a few minutes to get the hang of climbing the fence. More than once he snagged a claw in a link and had to work it free. He looked back at Bridget when he did, but she was back under the bush and he could only see the shine of her eyes watching him.
He placed his paws carefully on the jagged top of the fence and surveyed the yard. It was empty and still, scattered with patches of feeble weeds that looked sickly and pale. Dead grass littered the open spaces, gleaming pale against the dark ground. Sharlin swallowed and gathered himself to jump down.
His paws sank into soft ground, softer than outside the fence. The house smelled old and rank, now that he was closer, and behind the old wood he could smell the mustiness of cobwebs, dead bugs, and a whiff of something else. Yes, they were home. He stood still in the yard, not even letting his tail twitch, then cautiously put one paw forward. Nothing stirred. He looked around and then, bolder, took two steps toward the door. A glance back across the fence confirmed that Bridget was still watching him, her eyes glowing with reflected starlight.
Resolutely, he padded as quietly as he could up to the door, ignoring the white sticks (they were definitely only sticks, he was sure) and nosed at it. It creaked open slowly, and he jumped back. He could smell more of the interior now, and hear rustlings and murmurings. Tentatively, he poked his nose into the door again, and then stepped inside.
The inside of the house seemed, strangely, to be one big room. Lofts rose up along each wall, evenly spaced, the lowest just high enough that he could see over it. He could see the starlight through the dirty windows near the ceiling, and every so often a waft of fresh air drifted through the broken window and down to his nose.
He could see as well as smell them now. Three lofts lined each wall in the lowest tier and there was someone asleep on most of them, in a rough bed of straw. Sharlin lifted his nose and was surprised to find that amidst the old, decayed smell of the house, their smell was oddly alluring. His cub’s curiosity grabbed hold of him for a moment and lifted his muzzle up to get a better look.
Some were dark and some were light. They were not much bigger than he was, but they were curled up so that he couldn’t see their heads (if they had heads, a little voice in his mind whispered). Eyes wide, he inched his nose closer to one of them, drawn by the smell. Only a couple pawlengths away, his eye was distracted by a white gleam in the corner. Their ball!
Forgetting his curiosity, he padded across the floor. The ball was on one of the unoccupied lower lofts, amidst a pile of straw. He headed toward it quietly, walking as carefully as he could, but his paws still raised clouds of dust. It crept into his nose and eyes, making him blink, and as he sat up next to the ball, he could feel a pressure in his muzzle.
“Aaahh..” Oh no! He clamped his paws over his muzzle, eyes watering.
“MmmMMMMM…” He tried to bring his tail over his muzzle, but it only made things worse. The tickling in his nose was getting worse and worse. He grabbed the ball with one paw and got two steps toward the door before the pressure became irresistible. He staggered forward, trying to keep going as his eyes squeezed shut and his head snapped forward. “Ah-CHOO!”
Bridget had watched Sharlin creep into the house. After a few minutes of silence, she crept up to the fence and put her paws on it, ears cupped forward. She heard a small noise from inside, and then a chorus of shrieks and screams surprised her enough to make her jump backwards. Some thumps and cracks were added to the din, and just when she was convinced they were beating up her brother, he came bolting out the door with their ball in one paw. His eyes were wide as saucers, and if his fur wasn’t white, it was at least bristled out so he looked twice his normal size. He sprang for the fence as the first of his pursuers came hurtling out the door after him, followed by a dozen of her sisters. Their white and brown feathers were fluffed out in fury and their beaks clacked fiercely.
“Climb, Sharlin!” Bridget shrieked.
“I can’t, I can’t!” He had latched three paws onto the fence about halfway up, but couldn’t climb any higher without letting go of the ball.
“Throw it!!”
Sharlin yelped as the beaks grabbed at his tail. Desperately, he lofted the ball high over the fence in a perfect lob, then scurried up the metal links, out of reach of the outraged hens. Bridget backed up, paws over her head to catch the ball. “I got it!” she called, and closed her paws around it as it fell.
* * *
Sharlin maintained stoutly thereafter that he sincerely thought he had grabbed their ball, and in his rush to get out hadn’t noticed how odd it felt. He pointed out how he had offered to help lick Bridget’s muzzle clean after the egg burst in her paws, covering them and her muzzle in sticky goo. Bridget, for her part, only knew that he’d been laughing so hard he practically fell off the fence, and claimed he had planned the whole thing on purpose, even down to Crystal returning with their parents at that precise moment. She sulked the whole time their mother was licking her clean, and even after their father got them another ball, it was months before she would play catch with Sharlin again.