Dark Terrors 3 by David Sutton Stephen Jones

hoping for guidance, maybe; hoping for approval, or just for contact. That was why she’d not had to feign interest in the news of Aunt Maureen and Uncle Everett’s grown children, her cousins whom she knew little and liked less, although it had been necessary to conceal her jealousy as their mother talked fondly, worriedly, proudly, knowingly about them. It was why she’d found herself worrying at odd moments about whether she was carrying on a conversation sufficiently polite, about how the things she told of her life were sounding to Aunt Maureen, about whether there was cat hair on her clothes since assuredly no fur-bearing animal had ever set foot in Aunt Maureen’s house.
     
    Wanting to please Aunt Maureen was also the main, though perhaps not the only, reason she’d acquiesced in coming here and standing on this hill in this bright cold autumn afternoon and looking at grave markers neatly embedded in the family plot. Dark grey metal rectangles with raised inscriptions she assumed to be bronze, they were all partially obscured now by leaves skittering in a breeze she couldn’t yet feel but would soon enough. Aunt Maureen pointed out those for Cecelia’s grandparents, Harry Harkness, whom she remembered without much emotion one way or another, and Martha Harkness, who had died young in childbirth. Those for Elizabeth and Frances Harkness were next in line, separated from the rows for the next family by a blank space which Cecelia found a trifle unsettling.
     
    She couldn’t refuse to listen to the story Aunt Maureen had to tell her, nor even let her attention wander for fear her aunt would notice and disapprove. But apprehension made her pulse skitter like the leaves.
     
    ‘When your Aunt Libby died,’ Aunt Maureen declared, ‘I was the only one at her funeral. I stood right here, where we’re standing now, and I watched the funeral procession come up that hill, and there was just the hearse and the undertaker, and I was the only mourner at the graveside.’
     
    ‘Why didn’t my mother come? Aunt Libby was her sister, too.’
     
    ‘Dad said Helen and Libby were close when they were girls, but once they were grown they didn’t get along.’ Aunt Maureen shook her head briskly, as though dismissing the squabbles of her two much-older sisters. But something about the set of her shoulders or the cast of her glance piqued Cecelia’s attention.
     
    Maureen was a tiny woman, even shorter than Cecelia’s mother had been, considerably thinner, and equally formidable. Cecelia thought she remembered Aunt Libby, the eldest of the Harkness girls, being taller and lean, gaunt to Maureen’s wiriness and the stocky sturdiness of her mother Helen. But Aunt Libby had died when Cecelia was no more than three years old, so she hardly remembered her, and she’d discovered that her images of her mother shifted from time to time. She thought about her a good deal and, of course, remembered her vividly, but what she remembered changed. It wasn’t as if she’d forgotten what her mother had looked like, but as if she’d never exactly known.
     
    ‘It was a chilly fall day like this,’ Aunt Maureen continued, and as though to illustrate pulled her navy blue sweater tight around her and crossed her arms over it.
     
    Cecelia caught her breath. Her mother used to make a habitual gesture like that. It had been a bright pink sweater with embroidery on the collar, and she’d pull it snug around her just like that and cross her arms, tucking her hands in. The memory, which had been buried until this moment and had the feel of very early childhood, pierced and hummed like an arrow that had hit its mark, as though it meant something.
     
    The air wasn’t moving, but in it was the anticipation of chill golden wind and sleet. The grey-gold sun through layers of hardwood leaves, compressed this late in a Michigan October, had a metallic sheen, a wet-metal taste. Cecelia fumbled for a comment so Aunt Maureen wouldn’t think