The Grim Keepers

  THE

  GRIM

  KEEPERS

  An Anthology of Spooky Stories

  Written by 15 International Authors

  Copyright © 2015 CW Publishing House

  All rights reserved.

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated to all writers who aspire to be published. Make connections, reach out to other writers, and dare to dream. This book was written by 15 people who came together in an online writing community and threw around ideas that became an exciting, scary anthology. The team chose the name, the cover, and critiqued each other’s work to give you the best reading experience possible. We have some very established writers and some newcomers. Keep writing, keep believing, and keep dreaming!

  ABOUT CW PUBLISHING HOUSE

  CWPH is a new publishing company, set up with the primary goal of publishing CWC Collaborative Fiction Novels. CWPH intends to open its doors to all forms of Collaborative Fiction in 2016, and has plans to publish a wide variety of Anthologies. For more information, please visit:

  www.cwpublishinghouse.com

  Summer is Dying...

  Her energy is spent and waning. Collapsed on the forest floor, her body drifts steadily into decay. The cool autumn wind sings her eulogy through the veining limbs as trees lose their amber-honey leaves. The bride of our sultry season beckons us to meet her with corpse-like fingers. And in her horrid state she will not be denied. Her entreaties, hyphenated by malice for refusal, ask you to lay down on a mattress of moldering leaves to fall asleep beside her. She has macabre tales to whisper into you, and she insists that you listen!

  By Roy Laurence Daman

  CONTENTS

  And You Will Not Be Afraid - By Kathrin Hutson

  Annie's Fetch - By Virginia Carraway Stark

  Bollywog - By Sharon Flood

  Cherry Oak Road - By Laura Callender

  Crafted With Daddy - By Cayce Berryman

  Crepuscular - By Rachel Fox

  Darkness Calls - By Charlotte Rose Lange

  Evil Eye - By AJ Millen

  Lethal - By Jason Pere

  Remus - By Tony Stark

  Resident 7K - By Rachael Steele

  The Dead Ringers - By Kevin Grover

  The Man in the Black Hat - By Alex Benitez

  The Open Door - By Crystal M M Burton

  Tip of the Hat - By Roy Laurence Daman

  And You Will Not Be Afraid

  By Kathrin Hutson

  The bus was cold. I pulled my jacket closer around my shoulders and tightened my grip on the handlebar overhead as the bus made a sharp, bumping turn. My other hand fingered the silver cross hanging from my neck—not out of faith so much as habit. I had all but completely lost the faith. My fingers kept the muscle memory.

  The bus stopped to let me out. I hadn’t asked for a stop, I didn’t know where we were, but it was the last drop-off on the bus route before the driver had to turn around and start it all over again. So, why not get out now?

  I headed down the few stairs toward the bus doors as they hissed open, thanked the driver, and stepped outside. A gust of wind hit me, and I turned my back to repel it, hearing only the revving of the bus as it left me in the road.

  My eyes caught on a bright yellow piece of paper dancing across the street—a flier. The wind died down, and the paper landed face up in front of me. I read it from where I stood.

  Saint Elizabeth’s School

  For Young Girls

  Come to our Open house

  Sunday, October 30th

  1342 S. Preston St.

  Below these words was a black and white print of a large estate house—big enough, grand enough, old enough to be a boarding school. Private and religious, no doubt.

  As soon as I had swept my eye over the printed building, the wind built up again, tearing the flier from me. I whipped my head to look after it, but it was soon lost, flapping between the trees and climbing higher. Oh well.

  I turned toward the side of the street and stopped. Frowning, I blinked several times, but it was still there. The house. St. Elizabeth’s School for Young Girls—right in front of me. I glanced behind me quickly, sure that somebody would be laughing at my surprise. But the streets were empty except for the few last leaves falling off the near-bare trees. I sighed, the wind pushing me toward the building, and so I went to it.

  Now that I saw this place in reality, I felt suddenly drawn to it. It was a large, white plantation house, three pillars in the front on the porch and two plank swings hanging on one of the large oak trees. I counted twenty small windows on the second floor, and the walls of the ground level floor were simply windows, separated by the front door and what I thought would be a hallway inside. The grass was green and well-groomed, even this late in the fall, and the large building seemed freshly painted and well-kept. Another gust of wind blew, and I heard a wind chime dangling on the front porch. The rest of the silence was almost too eerie.

  As I stepped both feet onto the walkway that cut up the middle of the yard toward the porch, the great oak front door opened, and a jangle of conversing voices flooded out. The people followed.

  Most of them were older women, those probably here as grandmothers or older mothers of those ‘pretty little Catholic girls’ they wanted to send to a respectable and unisex boarding school. They flooded out in their flower-print dresses and floppy sun hats. The sun had come out suddenly, as if just for them, and the wind died down. It was fall, yet it suddenly felt like mid-summer. I stopped, gazing at the porch as it steadily filled with chatty women.

  One in particular, a significantly portly old woman with dimpled cheeks, droopy eyes, and a tightly drawn bun of gray hair caught sight of me, and immediately dismissed herself to head my way. I noticed all she wore was a loose, plain brown dress that hung away from her body as it passed her jutting chest. She waddled to me, and took my hand in hers. My arm went awkwardly slack in her grasp and I tried to be gentle. She did not look like she could break easily—she was weather-worn and year-tried—but I did not know her.

  “Hello, deary, hello,” she exclaimed, and patted my hand exuberantly, smiling from rosy cheek to rosy cheek. I returned a fake smile and a quick nod, glancing about uncomfortably. “You must be here for the open house.”

  “Umm, not really,” I answered slowly. “Really, I just…” To tell the truth, I didn’t even know why I was here. Telling her that I’d seen the flier wouldn’t have convinced her of the coincidence.

  The woman caught a drift of my discomfort and laughed heartily, her body bouncing. “Well, no matter. No matter at all. Come join us. After all, the operative word is open. Have some lemonade.” Her grip tightened on one of my hands and she dragged me across the yard toward the other chittering women. “Oh, by the way,” she began again. “My name is Bernadette, and I’m the dean of this school.” She said this rather slowly, her voice bouncing through highs and lows. She asked me my name. I couldn’t answer for the suddenly dry state of my mouth, but as soon as I opened it to say something, anything, she squealed in delight and handed me a Dixie cup of lemonade.

  I took an unconscious sip, watching all these old women, not feeling particularly included—I had no idea what the school was like at all—but not feeling particularly left out, either. I was just here. I sat on one of the nearby plank swings, setting the cup down, and pushed my feet back and forth. I kept thinking it was such a nice day.

  Another woman, one much younger than the others yet still older than myself, came to sit beside me on the other swing. She had flaming red hair and soft eyes that made her look rather tired. We introduced ourselves, she explaining that she had an older daughter she wanted to transfer here, and then she asked me why I wore such dark clothing for a day like th
is. I could not come up with an answer for the life of me. What did it matter?

  “Black just makes you seem so…dreary,” she began in a slow voice. And then she carried on about the negativity of black, such as my jacket. I sighed, preparing to never find someone interesting to talk to while I was here, and I glanced around the gigantic front yard of the school. My eyes stuck on the oak front door, glistening brown in the light, and then it opened.

  My heart jumped to my throat and stopped beating there. An occupied woman let herself onto the porch from inside, but I did not pay attention to her. I could see perfectly down the hallway leading into the school, and it seemed to loom closer and grow more pressing the longer I stared at it. All the sound from the surrounding women faded away, and the extent of my awareness suddenly lay within that doorway. I had to get in there.

  Distractedly, I excused myself from the red-head’s company and made my way across the lawn to the front porch. My eyes never left the doorway and my heart never seemed to start working again. I felt pulled—pulled by some invisible line attached to the core of my being—and I even tried to pull away, just once, but to no avail. Slowly, I stepped both feet onto the oak floors, my hand brushing the matching door, and I was inside.

  The ceiling loomed above me, seemingly ever upwards, and I gazed upon the vast white walls and the huge portraits of aged women that hung there. To my left, a large room filled with the light cascading through the windows, duplicated in the room to my right. I walked down the short hall, which emptied out into an even grander room. In the center sat a huge staircase, winding up to the second floor banisters that towered over my head. I took this all in for a moment longer, then walked on.

  Moving further toward the back of the school, I came to another staircase, not as large as the first, but still as striking. The floor back here had changed to a white tile, and even my own sneakered feet clicked against them. A much greater number of women bustled about now, far unlike the others who had come to view the school; they worked here.

  Most were older as well, of all shapes, dressed in white, crisply pressed maid smocks. They reminded me more of nurses’ uniforms, yet I doubted that’s what they were. They clamored about with trays of food and pitchers, some with armloads of laundry. A few passed by with little girl’s arms clasped in their hands, hastily taking them to and fro for some important this or that. I heard clanking and rushing water coming from further on, and guessed that must have been the kitchen. I turned another corner to find one more staircase, hidden from me behind wide, windowed double doors. I saw the stairs vaguely through the small square windows, and my curiosity grew intense enough to burst.

  I headed toward those doors, then realized that everyone around me, the maids and the little girls, had stopped doing what they had just been so busy to do. Most of the maids gave me a wary eye and slowly continued to their destinations, wanting to watch but obviously unwilling to involve themselves. Some, however, merely stopped and stared. I caught sight of a lone girl who had just come from the kitchen, and she leaned against the wall that encased the following staircase. She did not seem shy, nor afraid of me as some of the women had. But I had the odd sensation she knew something that I didn’t.

  I took another step toward the staircase, watching the girl. Her eyes widened and she shook her head at me ever so slowly, almost in warning. Trying both to ignore her and to fight the invisible line that still drew me to the staircase, I stepped forward. I came within two feet of the small windows in the doors, and peering up to look in, the sight there froze my blood.

  A girl sat on the staircase, her knees drawn up to her chin. Her face was completely invisible behind a cascade of greasy, wild dark hair, caked with all kinds of grit that I couldn’t make out and hanging in strings down her face. The dress she wore turned my stomach. It was ripped, torn, and soiled beyond imagination. I could tell by the crumbs, drips of food, scattered feces, and the yellow stains on the front of her dress that no one had bothered to clean this girl. No one had bothered to help her at all. A mixture of pity and rage filled me and I tried to catch my breath. Had these people just left her in here?

  I turned around swiftly and glared at one of the nearby maids. “What’s wrong with this girl?” I demanded, looking wildly around. “Isn’t it your job to take care of her?” The maid I accused simply stood there dumbfounded, and like the well-kept little girl leaning against the wall, simply shook her head. What was wrong with these people?

  I turned to the double doors of the staircase again and thrust them open. The maid outside screamed, and suddenly the dirty girl on the staircase jerked her head up to look at me. Her eyes met mine, and I flung my hands over my face, wanting to wipe the picture out of my memory. I backed quickly out of the doors, leaving them to swing violently back and forth before me, and stared into the staircase again. The girl had lowered her face once more.

  Disgusted and utterly horrified, I realized my fingers had gone numb. The girl’s face had been the palest of whites, and I had seen every vein beneath her skin glowing blue with the most awful strain. Tear stains had streamed down that face, caked up against blotches of mud and crumbs, ruining the young face. And those eyes. The eyes that had glared back at me from under the matted hair were black. All pupil and no color—no soul with which to identify another human. They were evil eyes, those which dared me to touch her and cursed me for thinking of it. They were eyes that pleaded for help.

  As quickly as doors had settled I heard more screaming from behind me. I whirled around wildly only to encounter the second most horrible sight. A massive, snarling black dog came barreling around the corner, fangs bared and jowls overflowing with slaver. Its claws clicked upon the tile floor and it hurled itself toward me, beating me down with its own terrible eyes. The word that popped into my head was Jackal.

  And as soon as the beast reared itself from behind the corner, a whole pack of others followed in its wake, snarling and skidding upon the floor as they moved to turn, stumbling upon each other and scrambling toward me. Six more. There were seven dogs come to tear me apart. I couldn’t move for terror; my knees threatened to buckle. I couldn’t even think.

  I could only watch as the barking, snarling, and screaming faded from my ears. I suddenly could hear nothing at all. Not even my own heart beat. And then a feint voice filled my head. I will take your hearing, and you will not be afraid. And suddenly I wasn’t. Something came over me so extraordinarily, some warmth in a rush of peace, and I wasn’t. I swallowed and oddly enough squatted on my heels toward the level of the dogs’ eyes, which still glared at me with a passionate hunger I knew would never be sated. I held up my hand.

  The first dog—the largest and fiercest and most likely the alpha—skidded to a halt two inches from my hand and only a few more from my face. It barked once and the other six behind it skidded to a halt much farther behind the two of us. I stared into the Jackal’s eyes, aware of its snarling fangs and the strings of thick, foaming saliva that slinked to the floor like syrup. And then I spoke.

  I had no idea what I said, only that my lips moved and that I still heard nothing. And that I still was not afraid. I said things I didn’t even know I knew, my mouth working over and over. The Jackal’s eyes were locked onto my own and my hand never left its position closely set between our faces. An extraordinary sense of power filled me, knowing somehow that this dog would abide by my will and my words. I felt that power flow through my hand and my throat, and I did not stop. After mere, harsh moments, the Jackal closed its mouth, licked its muzzle, and retreated, squealing and whining away from me. The others followed it, slipping on the smooth tile floor and falling over each other, skidding away as fast as they could.

  I took a moment to breathe myself, then stood slowly from my crouch. I saw the maids standing there, gathered far around me and staring, but I paid them no heed. I turned toward the staircase and watched the girl sitting there. The sight still disgusted me, but I faced it now. The voice filled my head again.

&n
bsp; I have chosen you for this. Satan has entered this place of innocence, and you are here to drive him out. This I could not believe. I shook my head vigorously, unable to take my eyes off of the girl. It couldn’t be. I was no one to do this, no one to perform miracles!

  I am the wrong person for this, I thought. I do not have this power. Choose someone else! I was scared out of my mind and I dare not move to do what I realized I had been sent here to do.

  I have chosen you. It is your time, the voice continued, and I knew, without a doubt, that this was a necessity. I could not alter the course of my purpose, and without doing this, I would never leave this place. I could not ever let this go. I was here for an exorcism.

  I fingered the silver cross still hanging at my throat, now feeling the power and guidance that it gave and that it had lacked for so long. Now was my time. I thrust open the double doors, and walked toward the horrifying girl on the stairs, this time devoid of the fear of her. She looked up at me, branding my soul with those eyes, and then she, like the Jackals, began to snarl. I stepped closer, achingly placing each foot on the step above, and held my hand out to her. She wrenched forward to snap at my fingers. Her forehead brushed against my thumb and she reeled back against the stairs, howling in pain. A burn mark lay upon her skin in the shape of my thumb, and she only snarled at me more. I now knew what power I held in my fingers alone.

  I pressed my whole hand to her head, feeling her skin sizzle and boil at my touch, and I spoke. My lips moved again, without sound and without recognition, and I stared at her, burning her. Her limbs flailed in all directions as she shook her head wildly to get beyond my touch. Many times she struggled away, clawing at me and biting and screaming. But then I finally gained a sturdy hold upon her half-burnt face, muttering those strange words. She could not get away now. And with each soundless thing that flowed from my lips, I felt myself growing weaker, losing my sight. My breath stuck in my throat, and I soon lost the feeling in my hand altogether. All my strength flowed into the act. But I held her tighter.