What I knew right then was that everyone I’d ever know from here on out would talk about me and say, He’s so lucky. He has everything a person could want.
Joyce Carol Oates
The Haunting
Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most prolific and respected writers in the United States today. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978, she teaches creative writing at Princeton University, New Jersey, and publishes the small press and literary magazine The Ontario Review with her husband, Raymond J. Smith.
A winner of the O. Henry Prize and the National Book Award, her published works include Blonde, Wonderland, Them, Broke Heart Blues, Black Water, We Were the Mulvaneys, Beasts, Middle Age: A Romance, I’ll Take You There and The Falls. The author’s short fiction has appeared in publications as diverse as Harpers, Playboy, Granta and The Paris Review, and has been anthologized in The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories and The Best American Short Stories of the 20th Century.
Over the years, Oates’s keen interest in Gothic literature and psychological horror has led her to contribute stories to genre anthologies ranging from Kirby McCauley’s Dark Forces to Ellen Datlow’s The Dark: New Ghost Stories. She has written dark suspense novels under the pseudonym “Rosamond Smith”, edited the collection Tales of H.P. Lovecraft: Major Works, and some of her more recent short stories have been collected in The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque. Oates’s short novel Zombie won the Bram Stoker Award, and she is a recipient of the Life Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association.
It is a privilege to welcome her to the pages of Best New Horror with the following dark and surreal story involving ghostly rabbits…
There’s nothing! you hear nothing. It’s the wind. It’s your dream. You know how you dream. Go back to sleep. I want to love you, stop crying, let go of me, let me sleep for sweet Jesus’s sake I’m somebody too not just your Mommy don’t make me hate you.
In this new place Mommy has brought us to. Where nobody will know us, Mommy says.
In this new place in the night when the rabbits’ cries wake us. In the night my bed pushed against a wall and through the wall I can hear the rabbits crying in the cellar in their cages begging to be freed. In the night there is the wind. In this new place at the edge of a river Mommy says is an Indian name — Cuy-a-hoga. In the night when we hear Mommy’s voice muffled and laughing. Mommy’s voice like she is speaking on a phone. Mommy’s voice like she is speaking, laughing to herself. Or singing.
Calvin says it might not be Mommy’s voice. It’s a ghost-voice of the house Mommy brought us to, now Mommy is a widow.
I ask Calvin is it Daddy? Is it Daddy wanting to come back?
Calvin looks at me like he’d like to hit me. For saying some wrong dumb thing like I am always doing. Then he laughs.
“Daddy ain’t coming back, dummy. Daddy is dead.”
Daddy is dead. Dead Daddy. Daddydead.
Daddydeaddead. Deaaaaaddaddy.
If you say it enough times faster and faster you start giggling. Calvin shows me.
In this new place a thousand miles Mommy says from the old place where we have come to make a new start. Already Mommy has a job, in sales she says. Not much but only temporary. Some nights she has to work, Calvin can watch me. Calvin is ten: old enough to watch his little sister Mommy says. Now that Daddy is gone.
Now that Daddy is gone we never speak of him. Calvin and me, never when Mommy might hear. At first I was worried: how would Daddy know where we were, if he wanted to come back to us?
Calvin flailed his fists like windmills he’d like to hit me with. Told and told and told you Daddy is D-E-A-D.
Mommy said, “Where Randy Malvern has gone is his own choice. He has gone to dwell with his own cruel kin.” I asked where, and Mommy said scornfully, “He has gone to Hell to be with his own cruel kin.”
Except for the rabbits in the cellar, nobody knows me here.
In their ugly rusted old cages in the cellar where Mommy says we must not go. There is nothing in the cellar Mommy says. Stay out of that filthy place. But in the night through the wall I can hear the rabbits’ cries. It starts as whimpering at first like the cooing and fretting of pigeons then it gets louder. If I put my pillow over my head still I hear them. I am meant to hear them. My heart beats hard so that it hurts. In their cages the rabbits are pleading Help us! Let us out! We don’t want to die.
In the morning before school Mommy brushes my hair, laughs and kisses the tip of my nose. In the morning there is a Mommy who loves me again. But when I ask Mommy about the rabbits in the cellar Mommy’s face changes.
Mommy says she told me! The cellar is empty. There are no rabbits in the cellar, she has shown me hasn’t she?
I try to tell Mommy the rabbits are real, I can hear them in the wall in the night but Mommy is exasperated brushing my hair, always there are snarls in my curly hair especially at the back of my neck, Mommy has to use the steel comb that makes me whimper with pain saying, “No. It’s your silly dream, Ceci. I’m warning you: no more dreams.”
Now that Daddy is gone we are learning to be cautious of Mommy.
Always it was Daddy to look out for. Daddy driving home, and the sound of the pickup motor running off. And the door slamming. And Daddy might be rough lifting us to the ceiling in his strong arms but it was all right because Daddy laughed and tickled with his mustache, and Daddy brought us presents and took us for fast swerving drives in the pickup playing his CDs loud so the music thrummed and walloped through us like we were rag dolls. But other times Daddy was gone for days and when Daddy came back Mommy tried to block him from us and he’d grab her hair saying, What? What the fuck you looking at me like that? Those fucking kids are mine. He’d bump into a chair and curse and kick it and if Mommy made a move to set the chair straight he’d shove her away. If the phone began to ring he’d yank it out of the wall socket. Daddy’s eyes were glassy and had like red cobwebs in them and his fingers kept bunching into fists, and his fists kept striking out like he couldn’t help himself. Especially Calvin. Poor Calvin if Daddy saw him holding back or trying to hide. Little shit! Daddy shouted. What the fuck you think you’re doing, putting something over on your fucking Dad-dy? And Mommy ran to protect us then, and hid us.
But now Daddy is gone, it’s Mommy’s eyes like a cat’s eyes jumping onto us. Mommy’s fingers twitchy like they want to be fists.
I want to love you, honey. You and your brother. But you’re making it so hard …
Our house is a row house Mommy calls it. At the end of a block of row houses. These are brick houses you think but up close you see it’s asphalt siding meant to look like brick. Red brick with streaks running down like tears.