The Horror Megapack_ 25 Classic and Modern Horror Stories ( PDFDrive )

If no one else listened to her, if no one else believed her, there was always this
other, this answerer, who did.
Once she even asked the darkness, “What am I going to be when I grow up?”
and a voice like a winter wind rattling dead leaves replied, “Anything you want.
Anything at all.”
II
That must have been a dream about her mother saying she loved her, because
when Caroline came back home, Mom had a new boyfriend, whose name was
Jack. He pretended to be her uncle, but wasn’t. He didn’t like Caroline at all.
Mom would not let “Uncle” Jack hurt her, and once she even grabbed his wrist
when he raised a coke bottle to smack her, but otherwise Mom did everything
Jack told her to do, as if she were his slave. The two of them were away a lot, or
when they were home they were locked in the basement (which had been
converted into a laboratory of some sort; Caroline was never allowed down
there), and sometimes there were the awful smells and noises.
In summer, Caroline took to sleeping on the porch, or in the hammock in the
back yard. This was encouraged. She wasn’t wanted in the house.
She always brought a pillow to scream into.
She pretty much raised herself. When she was twelve, she decided she wanted
to be a dancer when she grew up, and in the times when Mom and Jack were
somewhere else, she would spend long hours curled up in front of the TV
watching videotapes of Fred Astaire and Ginjer Rogers movies, sometimes with
the sound off, just watching the two graceful black and white figures whirling
across the screen, while the darkness whispered to her in the voice she had
known all her life.
Meanwhile, Jack started to bring strangers into the house, a lot of them, late at
night. Sometimes they didn’t seem to arrive. They were merely there. They
spoke with foreign accents or even in foreign languages, or chanted, or sang
behind closed doors, and the smells were worse then. Caroline could tell that her
mother didn’t like this. Mom looked hollow-eyed and even afraid, exhausted all
the time, but she still wouldn’t say anything to Caroline, who knew that when
this sort of stuff was happening, it was time to make herself scarce.
She spent hours in the local library, doing her homework, reading books about
far places, or drawing leaping, flying, costumed figures in her notebooks. She
had given up on the idea of being a dancer by the time she was thirteen, because