GHOST STORIES

AND OTHER TALES OF HORROR

AND TO SEE HIM SMILE CONTINUED......

"That's the worst part of it," Jack said.  "The old folks all say don't ever be without one, not if you want to have a chance.  But they say sonething else too: they say if it ever comes down to running right smack into him, and he smiles at you, why, then that cross ain't gonna be enough."
  It was rediculous, of course, but the man's face was dead serious.  Lloyd that afternoon, feeling a little foolish, walked up to Twelfth Street to a shop he knew and bought himself a silver cross and chain.  He hadn't worn one since he was a kid, and he wasn't wearing one now  because of Jack's wild story; he just felt like wearing it, and he didn't have to have a reason.  Not as a free person living in a rational age.
Or so he prefered to think.

It was the middle of November, with the sky turning blustery and the nights bitter cold, that he first saw something himself.
Even though his unemployment benifits and his savings were running dangerously low, he had walked uptown and treated himself to a movie, which had let out rather late.  He was coming along Ipswich Avenue and nearly home when, walking past the enterence to an alleyway between his building and the adjacent one, he glanced down the dark crevice between buildings and thought he glimpsed a suggestion of movement somewhere in there.
   He quickened his pace, but not before someone leaned close to him  out of the shadows.    I was all over in a moment, but that moment he had the crazed impression that he was lookng for a veiled face, throught he face itself, or what was visible of it, was apparently a man's.  The eyes bulging from beneath great shaggy brows, were bright and transfixing, almost feverishly so, and Lloyd had to will himself to smap his own gaze away from the strange half-face, noting, nevertheless, that the mouth was covered by what looked not so much like a scarf as like the tattered fringe of some larger filthy garment that lay below.  Dashing up the steps into his building, Lloyd didn't realize until he was halfway up the stairwell that his hand, back there, had unconciously gone to his pendant cross, which he was still clutching when he locked himself in his rooms.
         He didn't sleep much that night, but it was just as well, because he didn't think that he would have liked his dreams.
The day after that encounter, he had tried to tell Jack about it, but Jack seemed either not to want to hear it or to know already what Lloyd was going to say, or both.  Lloyd found this disappointing, because he needed to talk about it.  Also about this time it begain to happen that when he passed other tenents on the stairs or in the hallways, their curt nods seemed to contain something more, about the eyes, than they had contained before, a subtle little expression that might have said: You know now, don't you.  You've seen.  Old Mrs. Day in particular fixed him with a look that he found somehow intolerable.  Had gossip gone around--or could they just tell from looking at him?  If they could then his nerves nave begun to suffer more than he knew.
He resolved to keep his mind on healthy subjects, and indeed largely succeed in doing this, mostly by stepping up his job search, which was for a while longer, still unfruitful, but which served to direct his mind away from unpleasent thoughts.  In the end he did find a job washing dishes in a diner over on Fifteenth Street, replacing a boy who had suddenly stopped reporting for work.  It wan't a spectacualr job, by Lloyd was glad to have it.
  The only thing was, it was always dark by the time he got off work.
But despite the disturbing memory of the encounter at the entrance to the alleyway, he made up his mind to brook no more nonsence--this wasn't the Middle Ages, or the mountain passes of Transylvania, and he was not going to be afraid, like some wide-eyed and superstitious schoolchld, to walk home in the dark.  Now that he had at least a small income again, he realized, upon reflection, that a person unemployed and depressed and insecure could all to readily become credulous, foolishly imaginitve, and even downright gullible.  He felt like telling that character Jack what he thought of his idiotic folktales, except that he hadn't seen Jack around for a while.  Anyway, just because the old-timers were uptight about some loony dereilict haunting the building, there was no reason to imagine crazy things.  In short, it was god to get his composure back.
He kept it for nearly a week.
           The first few walks home, past the alley opening, were uneventful.  Fleeting impressions of movement within the maw of darkness between the buildings were surely nothing more than the late autumn wind twirling bits of paper rubbish; with the nearest street lamp half a block away, the light here was uncertain, but at least no febrile-eyed wraith leaned to him out of the shadows.
On the night after the first light snowfall, in fact, the walk along Ipswich Avenue was quite pleasent, with the clouds clearing away to unveil a gibbous moon that made the snow sparkle on the sidewalks and in the doorways where the wising wind silted  it in gossamer drifts.  And strolling past the alley he  felt emboldened even to go back and explore a bit.  There was about an inch of snow on the ground, and even the fact that there  were vague footprints in the snow around the alley entrance didn't particularly bother him.  He  followed them back some distance into the alley, where the moon  rode  just high enough ove the brick walls  to show him that the prints angled rightward  to approach the shattered remains of a basement window dimly outlined in the shadows.  He was sure this was the sheltering place of some poor homeless wretch who might well have been living in the building's basement for years.
  Or he would have been sure of it, had the two yellow eyes that smoldered there look more nearly human.
Lloyd was back out at the alley entrance, down the sidewalk, and halfway up the steps to his building before he realized that he was running.  He comes in the night in the pale moonlight, some corner of his mind intoned as he flung open the door and bolted inside and up the stairs.  He was on the second-floor landing before he looked back down the dusky throat of the stairwell.  Was something moving down there?  He comes when the cold winds sigh.  Lloyd was bounding up the next flight of stairs, sprinting down the dimly lit hallway, and fumbling with his key in his door.  He comes from the gloom
of his terrible tomb.  The key tured in the lock, thank God, and he was inside, slamming the door shut and locking it.  His heart pounding, he leaned on the inside of the door and tried to get his wind back.  When his breathing calmed he listened with an ear against the door; outside in the hall everything was quiet.  And then  the singing begain.

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