Ghost Stories

AND OTHER TALES OF HORROR

This is a tale out a great book you will have to check out.  The Book is called 100 Vicious little Vampire Stories.  I liked this one because it is creepier then some of the others.  Enjoy!

AND TO SEE HIM SMILE

All the old timers knew the legend and the song.  That mych Lord Baily came to know, but not until he had lived in the building for a while.  Most of the people in the other apartments, he found, were pretty much inclined to keep to themselves.  It wan't just that they didn't talk much to him, the new tenent; they really didn't talk to one another much either, so far as he could tell.  People drifted down the dreary hallways, nodded to you perhaps, went behind doors, and were gone.  It was a lonely place, all in all,  if you were used to a more outgoing life; but in his current economical doldrums he guessed he was lucky to have anywhere to live at all.
  He had been in the building the last stale and sultry weeks of summer and the first few slate gray days of autumn when he first heard the song, heard it from the lizard-visaged lips of an old woman out on the crumbling front steps  Squatting there like a gargoyle, she was crooning to a pack of ragamuffin children gathered on the dirty sidewalk:
  "He comes in the night in the pale moonlight, he comes when the cold winds sigh; he comes from the gloom of his terrible tomb, and to see him smile is to die."
  Surely a fine thing to be singing to impressionalble children, Lloyd thought, annoyed.  The kids merely jeered at the old woman and scattered, but he thought he detected, on their grimy faces, a certain furtive apprehension mingled with their defiance.  As they dispersed, there might have been a ghost of a smile on the old woman's face, or there may not; it was hard to tell.  But if there was, it was a smile that carried with it not the faintest trace of humor.
                  Lloyd spent the rest of the day, as he had so many others, in fruitless job hunting, returning to the bleak old building on the corner of Ipswich Avenue and Twelfth Street only late in the day and with only minimal enthusiasm for comming home.  It was hard to feel at home in a place which you had come down in life, a place in which you had no roots and no real friends.  And as the mid-October sun had set by the time he climbed the stairs to his third-floor apartment, he thought anew about someting that had crossed his mind a number of times before.
                        With a rare expression, no one ever seemed to be out and about in the hallways or the stairs after dark.  Even outside, on the infrequent occasions when he went for a stroll and a smoke, the sidewalks were generally deserted, at least near the building.  If you walked far enough down Ipswich Avenue or far enough up Twelfth, away from this corner, you would eventually meet up with some of the usual scowling little knots of sullen teenagers or the quiet older couples walking dogs; but around the building where he lived, the sidewalks were peopled only by rows of wanly lit windows where unseen hands drew dingey blinds down to shut out the night.  On these occasions, Lloyd found his loneliness giving way to another, less comprehensible feeling, a vauge nervousness that made him wish to be off the streets as well.  Increasingly, he found himself spending whole evenings indoors.
      Among the other tenents there seemed to be only one who, in time, proved to be a little givin to conversation.  This was a retirement-age chap who had introduced himself simply as Jack, and Lloyd ran into him in Phillips Park over on Thirteenth Street one crisp Saturday morning;  they sat on a bench drawing their collars tight to their throats, talking quietly and smoking, Lloyd brought up that troubling memory of the old woman and the song. and jack arched an eyebrow.
  "So you heard the song?  Well, you'd have to sooner or later.  I'm not surprised you heard it from her.  Old Mrs. Day.  She's been in this building longer than most anybody can even remember, I guess, and her family before her.  Some of those families have lived ther for generations.  Place was built in the 1830's, you know.  Mrs. Day's father and my grandfather was playmates in the building when they was kids if you can believe that.  Mrs. Day has seen everything that ever happened around the place.  She could tell some stories, I imagine, but she doesn't talk much."
  "Huh,"  Lloyd said.  "Just sings her creepy songs to the kids."
  Jack shook his head.  "Not songs.  One song.  And it ain't hers.  My grandfather taught me that song when I was a kid, and he knowed it when he was a kid."
"I don't understand," Lloyd said.  "Why___"
"Nobody's told you about ---- him."
"Who?"
"Him. the one the song's about.  Ther is a whole legeand about him."
"Go on."  Lloyd said, intrigued.
"Well, he's supposed to  to be around the place sometimes.  Outside, or in the halls or in the stairwells.  At night.  His kind can only be out after dark."
Lloyd laughed.  "Oh,  come on. Gimme a break.  A vampire?"
Jack shrugged, and did not look amused.  "Call him what you want, don't make no difference what you call him.  There's them has seen him.  My  grandfather seen him.  My mother seen him,  I seen him once myself, from a ways off.  Half the folks in the building probably seen him, if you could get them to talk about it.  And other folks has disappeared, from time to time.  Like that little Jameson girl last summer.  They say he probably got her.  And maybe he did."
  Amazing, Lloyd thought, the bizarre folklore that could grow up around a place.  "Well, what's he supposed to look like?"
"Just an old man."  Jack said, lighting another cigarette and looking thoughtful.  "An old man in ragged cloths and a big heavy overcoat throwed over his shoulders like a cape, you know, kind of the way a wino might look.  And always has a scarf or something covering up the lower part of his face.
Lloyd thought outloud about the song.  "And to see him smile is to die."
"You got it," Jack said. "That's the story they tell.  If you ever run across him and he drops the scarf or whatever it is and you see his mouth ----- well."
The man fished something up from beneath his jacket; it turned out to be a little silver cross on a chain around his neck.  "I ain't never been all that religious, but I wear this.  All the time.  You'll say it's silly, I suppose."
"No, no,"  Lloyd protested, "Not if you're really afraid.  It's just that---well, I mean, after all those old stories and movies about---and here you are telling me there's really a-- is that cross really supposed to protect you?"

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