Will was the oldest in the family, the quiet one who, because of his age, his silence, and the fact that he’d spent the past year living with his father in Albany, was basically a stranger. In fact, by the time things went bad between he and his father, and he arrived in Albion, I had nearly forgotten about him. Thin and quiet, Will kept to himself, was shy with even my mother. He had been just a name while he was gone, a ghost really, and he remained one once he returned home—wandering from room to room without a word. Only a creak in the floorboard or a muffled sneeze would remind us he was there.
Will was in high school and worked at the Swan Library, a job that I had no ability to hold but was jealous of just the same. All those books. When I was fortunate enough to get inside, I’d look through the shelves in the big old building, thinking how unfair it was that Will not only got to be around them so often, but was actually paid for it.
A monk from the library brought Will to his house and stuffed him with sweets. Intrigued by the old man and his fancy home, we begged to go inside for visits when it was time to pick Will up. Sometimes my mother said yes and ran errands while we combed the red velvet cushions of his antique chairs with our fingers.
White as the sugar waffles he always served, the monk told horrible stories while we gathered at his feet, eating caramels by the bagful and dipping our fingers into the powdered remains of those delicate waffles. He’d lean into us and screw up his face, telling us about three sisters who’d stayed out late at a party one night. He’d take his time with his stories, noting how the youngest had hair so blonde it shone in the sunlight and how each of the girls had dressed for bed in gowns of pink and gold and kissed each other goodnight.
“The only problem,” he said in a quiet voice, bringing his white lips close to our foreheads as he spoke, “was that they forgot to lock their doors that night.”
The girls in his stories were always stalked and attacked, their heads cut from the neck. The losing of heads should have ended things, of course, but the monk never stopped there. Heads could be reattached with a well-placed scarf or a pearl choker necklace, he told us, so that his story became one of girls trying to protect the remaining sanctity of their necks. For they truly only lost their heads when they allowed someone too close.
This is what I learned from the monk, as I munched on sweets and swallowed his tales: No matter how smart or how pretty, girls were always conquered in the end. They’d forget their caution, allow some well-intentioned man to unclasp a cameo choker or blue silk scarf, and heads would tumble.
Despite the monk (or because of him) I learned to like scary stories. In fact, my mother came to count on me as her companion for the creepy television shows that only she and I liked. Mainly they were detective shows like The Night Stalker or low-budget horror films involving some form of vegetation gone mad with desire for human blood.
At times she drew an arbitrary line and said I was too young to see a particular show. She did this when Rosemary’s Baby came on TV. No matter how I begged, my mother insisted on watching Rosemary and her devil-baby alone. Certain that I had been wronged, I could not let go and stayed up soaking in whatever blurred sounds of poison-malted shakes and satanic chanting I could manage to catch from the other room. I fell asleep that night, triumphant, listening to Rosemary’s screams.