Cook toyed with the idea of hammering his way through Saks with his fists, but instead he just picked up the book. Blank page after blank page. All of them yellowed and going to pieces.
What was the point?
Then he saw. More writing.
A single sentence repeated, but at the intervals of a year each time:
March 27, 1956
Another lovely day!
March 27, 1957
Another lovely day!
March 27, 1958
Another lovely day!
In fact, the rest of the diary was just this repeated again and again every March on the anniversary of Lydia Stoddard’s madness. Something about that really sucked the wind out of Cook. The funny thing was, the real disturbing thing, was that these cryptic little entries continued right to the present year… but went no farther. As if Lydia’s ghost showed up once a year to scribble in the diary.
“She must… she must have written these entries back in 1955,” Cook said, knowing it sounded thin as a sliver.
“And she just happened to pick this year as the year to stop?”
“C’mon, Saks. You’re a little too hard-headed to believe in ghosts.”
Saks smiled. “Ghosts wasn’t what I was thinking. Not exactly.”
“Then what were you thinking?”
But Saks did not answer that. “Do you know what today’s date is?”
“No. My watch stopped working-”
“Well, my digital works just fine. Today is the twenty-seventh of March.”
Cook felt a chill on his arms. Sure, it was easy to believe absurd, frightening things like that and especially in this cabin with the drifting dust and age and that oppressive atmosphere that just seemed to drain you dry minute by minute. But Cook wasn’t going there.
He said, “Maybe… maybe Makowski forged this shit.”
“You don’t believe that, Cook, and neither do I,” Saks said. “Unless you’re willing to take a real wild leap here and say he wrote the entire thing. But that’s a woman’s writing and we both know that. The entries from the fifties are faded, the newer ones pretty fresh. .. now how would that fucking idiot pull that off?”
Saks was right. The forgery angle was silly… but there had to be an explanation, didn’t there? Or was it just this place? This goddamn nameless dimension where anything went. Because, deep down, that’s what he was thinking. Lydia Stoddard went slowly and completely insane here. All alone, her mind went to pieces. Who could blame her? She was long dead, certainly, but what if her madness was not? What if it came back once a year? If that was even remotely possible, they were all in serious danger.
Saks said, “You heard what that freak Makowski was saying, stuff about her coming back and her not wanting us here. Jesus, Cook, I’m getting some ideas here and I don’t like ‘em.”
“We better get back. I don’t like the idea of leaving the others alone.”
Saks picked up the diary, paged through it. “What the hell?” he said. He dropped the book on the desk, backing away from it.
Cook knew and did not know. He picked up the diary, thought it felt warm in his hands, like something alive. He saw today’s entry.. . then he saw something else which had not been there five minutes before. What he was seeing could not possibly be… but it was there, glaring and fresh, daring him to talk it away with nonsense like logic and reason. But Cook could not talk it away, could not make sense of it, he could do nothing but stand there, terror oozing out of him like bile… hot and sour and rancid-smelling. He could hear himself breathing with a dry, rattling sound like a dying breath blown through straw.
He kept staring at the diary and what he saw, just beneath what had been the last entry, was this:
March 27 i am waiting i am waiting waiting waiting hear me creeping i am coming now
Cook dropped the diary with a little cry of revulsion, for in his mind, he suddenly saw it sprout segmented legs, becoming not a book, but something bloated and pale and hairy. Something that like to creep.
He looked over at Saks and Saks’s face had gone bloodless, his eyes were huge and wet and filled with a wild sort of horror.
“Listen,” Saks said. “Listen… ”
And there it was, coming down the corridor: a high-pitched, mournful whistling/wailing sound, like some eerie dirge piped from a throat stuffed with ashes and dry things. It carried a profane melody to it.
Jesus. Cook felt his heart suddenly just stop dead in his chest like something had gripped it… it stopped, then began to beat so fast he thought he would pass out. Droplets of cold sweat burst out on his forehead. His lips felt as though they’d been tack-welded shut.
Saks was scared.
Scared like Cook had never seen him before and never wanted to see him again. All that tough-guy machismo had melted away into a tepid shivering puddle. The gray streaks in his hair looked positively white and those bags under his eyes were like pouches.
Cook could only imagine what he must have looked like.
That whistling came again… only it was not so distant now, it was closer and more shrill. And there was something morbidly seductive about that melody it carried, made you want to stay put until you could see the mouth that sang it.
