




                     listen, children ... listen! By Wallace West

                    The old man was long dead--but
                  his widow still awaited his return. And one night she heard....

    _The elements of horror are as many and varied as the threads in
    a Gobelin tapestry--with special stimuli for each of us. Perhaps
    terror lies in the howl of a coyote, in the noises of an old house,
    in a blaze of fire. Or perhaps it responds to the mournful creak
    of wheels on a gravel road, to moonlight reflected from a huge old
    mirror._

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
               Fantastic Universe October-November 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] My grandmother was fey. At least that's what the neighbors said. She
could predict the weather by the way her left heel "eetched." She
always knew by some sixth sense when any of her blood was coming down
from Indianapolis to visit our tumbledown farm. She insisted she heard
angels singing (or sounds considerably more terrifying) during funerals
at the New Harmony Church over the hill. In the eyes of myself and my sister Annette Maw was as old as the
gullies which cut up our clay fields. Probably she was about sixty when
I first remember her. She still carried her lean body proudly though
her back was bowed. She had a gift for mimicry and a merry smile marred
by the fact that she had been salivated by taking too much calomel to
fight off fever'n'aiger. This misfortune had caused her gums to recede
and gave her a snaggle-toothed look. Some of her fangs moved when she
ate but, to our eternal wonder, they never fell out. She had the untiring wreck of a fine alto voice and regaled us with
renditions of bloody old hymns or ballads like "The Ship's Carpenter"
(_And three times 'round went our gallant ship e'er she sank to the
bottom of the sea_) or an endless garbled song about a girl who
masqueraded as a soldier to join her sweetheart in the wars between
"Tors and Highlanzer." I still have nightmares about those childhood years. The Brown murder
was a recent memory--Patriarch Brown and his blind wife had been
slaughtered by "persons unknown" in a hemlock-shrouded farmhouse half a
mile from our cabin. Repercussions of the trial had hardly died away. There was talk of another investigation and the _persons_--well known
to everyone but the law--were prowling the countryside, flashing dark
lanterns under doors and shouting threats of what would happen to
neighbors who dared tell what they knew. Paw woke one night and fired
his squirrel rifle at what he thought was a lantern but which was only
a suddenly-flaming fireplace ember. The bullet knocked a newel post off
my bed. Despite the campaign of terror Paw just had to drive to the county seat
once a month for supplies. Always he promised to be back by sundown. Always he met some old Butternut cronies--comrades-at-arms in the
Knights of the Golden Circle during Civil War days. And in talking
about how they had outfoxed and outfought the National Guard sent to
punish them for desertion from the Union Army he usually would be
delayed until the night closed in. Then, as Annette and I lay in our bed beside the fireplace, refusing
to go to sleep because we knew Paw would bring us presents, Maw would
open the front door, hook her bare foot around it and listen, tense
with a fear which communicated itself to us. The katydids might be quarreling. Or the baying of Mr. Morningstar's
coon dogs might drift through the fall or winter air. A screechowl's
sobbing might cause us to cling together in a shiver. Finally we'd start whimpering. Then Maw would twist her wrinkled
head back through the crack in the door and whisper, "Shhh! Listen,
children.... Listen! I think I hear Josiah's wagon. They hain't got him
this time." Often the belated team turned down some side road. And she would
murmur, hardly louder than the katydids, as she resumed her vigil,
"Shhh! Listen, children.... Listen!" When the hours of tension had set my whole body aching with what folks
who don't know call "growing pains" and when the half-opened door had
made the room almost as chill as the night, we would actually hear the
faraway mournful creak of wheels on the gravel road, the jingle of
trace chains, the rumble of a half-empty jolt-wagon bed. "Thank you, dear just God!" Maw would breathe at last. Then she would
follow her bare foot through the door and bustle about reheating the
supper coffee and fixing a snack for Paw. We would hear the wagon rumble into the yard. Next Paw would cuss Old
Nell for her contrariness as he unhitched and led her to the stable. And at last a great grey-bearded man, his arms laden with bundles,
would stumble through the front door to be greeted by two elves in long
underwear, dancing about him and screaming, "Whatcha got for me, Paw? Whatcha got this time?" Usually it was jawbreakers or peppermint sticks. Once, when we sold the
hogs, it was a store doll for Annette and a marvelous steamboat for me
that you wound up with a key and sank the first time I tried it in the
branch. *       *       *       *       *

He always brought something pretty and useless for Maw too. And she
always scolded and loved him for buying it. Then he'd go over to the
creaky chair where Aunt Ellen rocked slowly, pat her plump shoulder
and hold out a shell comb, a cheap ring or a handkerchief. And Aunt
Ellen would look away from the mirror--for the first time that day,
perhaps--take the thing in her plump white hand, and smile. I should have mentioned Aunt Ellen before but I forgot. In fact,
everybody forgot Aunt Ellen. She wanted it so. She had been deeply
in love when she was a girl, they said. But her young man had had to
see the world before he settled down. So he set out for that strange
half-mythical land called Europe. And he never returned. After she was sure he would not come back Aunt Ellen stopped speaking
to people. She took her seat and just looked into the mirror. I
remember the rockers of that chair were worn almost through from
constant use. The mirror fascinated Annette and me. It was big--big as our front
door and placed against the wall directly across from the entrance, so
that if you didn't look closely you thought it _was_ another door. And
it had a great deeply-polished frame carved with intricate lacelike
patterns that hurt your eyes if you looked at them too long. I now know that it was the only thing of real value in the draughty
log cabin. Maw said it was a "hear-loom," brought from Virginia by her
parents, the Whites, who had been "quality" in the Old Dominion before
they migrated after the war of 1812, were stampeded by land agents into
"locating" in the wrong part of the state and rapidly dissipated their
means on an unproductive wilderness. Maw had made up a song about that mirror.