New Fears 2: Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre

ON CUTLER STREET Benjamin Percy

This isn’t a neighbourhood where bad things happen. You can tell just by looking at it. The 1920s bungalows have been lovingly refurbished. Flowered pots hang from porches. The gardens are freshly mulched. Lush, knuckly oak trees reach their branches across the street and create a sun-dappled archway. A sprinkler hisses. An American flag ripples with the warm breeze. A boy with a soccer ball chases around his yard, dodging imaginary opponents, and a girl on a bike with pink streamers pumps her little legs and calls out, “Pumpkin? Pumpkin, where are you?”

Her name is Sadie and Pumpkin is her cat. That’s how she thinks of the cat anyway—as hers—even though her parents haven’t officially said yes. Yet. The cat showed up yesterday, pawing at the screen door with a plaintive meow. The cat didn’t wear a collar, but it was clean and purred when scratched behind the ears, and Sadie begged, “Please, please, please, can we keep her?” This is the kind of neighbourhood, after all, where everybody has a pet—dogs and cats and turtles and even one African grey parrot—everybody except Sadie. So it was only fair.

When her parents put out a saucer of milk and a plate of tuna, the cat would only sniff it. “She must not be hungry,” Sadie said, scooping up the cat so that it dangled pendulously from her arms. “Or maybe my kitty only eats mouse lasagne.”

She played with the cat the rest of the day, kneading her fingers into the orange fur of its belly, rolling a tennis ball across the living room for it to pounce on. When it was time for bed, she begged to sleep with Pumpkin, and though her parents tried to refuse her, saying the cat wasn’t a stuffed animal, Sadie kept up her argument.

“What if she has a disease?” her parents said, and Sadie said, “Then I already have it.”

“What if the cat is dangerous,” her parents said, and Sadie rolled the cat around and flopped its tail and squished the fur around its face and said, “See? She’s perfectly friendly. She loves me.”

It is easy to believe in love on Cutler Street. Whatever war or crime or monstrousness afflicts the rest of the world, you are safe from it here. You can leave your doors unlocked and your windows open. You keep the weeds picked and you keep an eye out for each other.

The Petersons sometimes grill out with the Jacobsons. And the Whites sometimes have the Lordans over for cocktails. And the Bergmeyers don’t really like the Stotts, but their children are friends, so they tolerate each other. During the winters, everyone strings coloured lights from their gutters and keeps their sidewalks shovelled and salted—and during the summers, everyone washes their cars in their driveways and fertilizes their lawns, mowing the grass into tidy stripes.

Even now, a mower growls, the only sound. Herb Adams is pushing it. He wears a white undershirt and gym shorts and flip-flops, his feet stained green from the clippings. Something catches his eye and he looks toward the end of the street.

An orange tabby cat scurries along, and then pauses in the road, looking back the way it came.

Something is there. Something is coming.

The lawn is only half finished, but Herb releases the handle and the mower engine powers off. “What in the name of—”

That is when the gunshot cracks. Herb startles back and nearly trips over the mower, burning his calf against the exhaust. A chunk of asphalt dislodges from the street, and the cat leaps and goes running again.

Herb holds out his arms and says, “No, no, no,” and rushes toward the source of the gunfire, toward the heavy old woman in the floral-patterned nightie with the pink bathrobe flapping around her. One foot wears a slipper; the other foot is bare. No makeup. No dentures. Her hair sleep-mussed, white filaments floating behind her. She is the picture of vulnerability. Except for the rifle she carries.

This is Mrs Flanders. Over the past few years most of the neighbourhood has turned over to younger families, but she and her husband have been living here since the sixties. Now she is trying, with some difficulty, to eject the casing of the round fired and load another bullet.

She manages to blast off another shot—once again missing, the cat now dodging off into a hedgerow.

And then Herb intercepts her, wrestling the rifle away. She barely seems to recognize he is there. She is determined to kill the cat, continuing her pursuit of it. And when Herb holds her back, she lets out a desperate, keening wail.

A sound that ten minutes later warps into the noise of an ambulance. The vehicle comes to a jerking stop outside a small blue house with a hydrangea bush skirting the porch.

The front door is open. Like a gaping shadowed mouth. Mrs Flanders’s other bedroom slipper lies on the stoop, abandoned there.

When the EMTs hump into the house, hefting their equipment, they move uncertainly through the shadowed interior. Past a living room with a box TV and an afghan thrown over a La-Z-Boy recliner. Past a hallway staggered with family photos in wooden frames. To the bedroom.

In the doorway they pause. They don’t say anything. Because they don’t need to. The siren—wailing, wailing— speaks for them.

They don’t notice the crocheted pillows and beige drapes and porcelain figurines. Their eyes are on the bed. Here lies an old man, Mr Flanders. His body has been rent and bent in so many unnatural angles that he seems like a puzzle pulled apart and fitted together incorrectly. One of his legs has been hurled against the wall, leaving behind a sunburst of blood.

Everyone on Cutler Street is standing on their flowered porches or on the swept sidewalks or on their deep-green lawns, holding up their hands to shade their eyes from the sun, calling out to each other, “Do you know what’s going on?” Their faces wrinkle in confusion. This sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen here.

Everyone except for Sadie. She has finally found her kitty, her stray, her little Pumpkin. The cat lounges in a sunbeam in the living room, flicking her tail and purring, and Sadie curls up beside her and licks her thumb and cleans off a stain of blood on her muzzle and says, “Did you find a mouse? I bet there are lots of mices here. I bet you’ll like it here. Yes, you will. You’re the best thing that ever happened to this boring old neighbourhood.”