August 17, 2025 • 26 mins
Childhood memories are often the sweetest, but even in childhood there are evil things that find their way to you. "Moonlight, Starlight" is a ghost story written by Virginia Layefsky, which was included in an anthology called "Ladies Of Horror, Two Centuries Of Horror By The Gentle Sex".
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Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/nightshade-diary--2765110/support.
Host - M.P. Pellicer
www.MPPellicer.com
SUPPORT VIA DONATION
Buy Me A Coffee - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/Marlene11
Miami Ghost Chronicles: www.MiamiGhostChronicles.com
Nightshade Diary: www.NightshadeDiary.com
Stories of the Supernatural: www.StoriesoftheSupernatural.info
Eerie News - www.Eerie.News
Stranger Than Fiction Stories: www.storiesofthesupernatural.info/strangerthanfiction
MY BOOKS:
Amazon: http://amazon.com/author/marlenepardopellicer
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/17113386.Marlene_Pardo_Pellicer
SIGN UP FOR MY NEWSLETTER ON SUBSTACK:
https://marlenepardopellicer.substack.com/
You can find me on major video and podcast platforms, just look for MP Pellicer or Miami Ghost Chronicles.
Hypnosis DIY - https://www.hypnosis-diy.com
Music - Pixabay.com, Purple-Planet.com
Narration always by a human, no A.I.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/nightshade-diary--2765110/support.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
From the macabre minds of Laughing Devil production comes another
story from the night Shade Diary. You know what that means.
Check under the bed and make sure no one or
nothing is there. Is the closet door securely shut. Then
leave your disbelief behind, amp up your imagination and hang
(00:49):
on tight for another ride into terror and mystery. And
like all good horror stories, just imagine it's a dark
and stormy night, and remember her screaming like a little
girl is permitted. Moonlight Starlight by Virginia Laevsky. The genesis
(01:22):
of the idea for the party was in an old
Halloween costume Anne Carrie found packed in a box in
the attic. It had been made thirty years ago for
a seven year old and by her mother. She had
been a woman who threw nothing away. After Anne inherited
the large Victorian spaces her mother had swept and garnished
(01:42):
most of her life, she often came upon pieces of
her own life up until her marriage, at least neatly
labeled and stored here or there. She was apt to
find them on those first days of her husband's occasional absences,
when she used house cleaning as a bomb for initial loneliness.
(02:02):
The costume she found that day was so beautifully sown
and carefully packed that its state of preservation was remarkable.
When she shook out its folds, the coins, which her
mother had sown individually on the bodice long ago, clinked
with a special sound that set up a painful, little
echo of disappointment in her forgetful heart. Though she remembered
(02:28):
clearly then the smell of grythansimum's and sewing machine oil
in her mother's room the day the costume was fitted,
she could not have said why the sound of the
coins oppressed her with such a profound sense of loss.
It had to do with a party she had lost.
Of course, it was to have been her very own.
(02:51):
The games had been planned and the decorations made, Invitations
had already been sent. Due to the death by drowning
of two small cousins and upstate New York, the party
was canceled. The accident had happened the day before they
were to leave to visit Anne. She had been broken hearted,
(03:11):
not for the cousins, whom she had never seen, but
for the party, which was canceled. In time, she was
able to forget everything about it, but the sense of
loss which persisted unacknowledged of to day when she opened
the box to find the costumes still waiting there. And
that was the reason why Halloween became the occasion for
(03:34):
the only really large children's party and Carrie ever gave.
She made a costume less carefully done for her nine
year old son, and dressed her daughter in the gypsy
outfit she herself was to have worn long ago. The
party was a resounding success. Children remembering it asked her
(03:56):
for months afterwards to give her another, but she never did,
nor did she tell the reasons why it became the
last children's party of any kind that she ever gave.
The arrangement seemed so simple at first. She told her
son Bobby he could invite the entire fourth grade, with
all its younger brothers and sisters. Games and refreshments were
(04:20):
no problem. Now that Anne thought of it, she remembered
the entire program of the beautiful party planned long ago.
The bobbing for apples, followed by pintailna donkey and musical
chairs marched through her mind in a succession, almost as
orderly and magical now as then. There would be none
of the professional entertainment that had figured recently in some
(04:42):
of the more ambitious neighborhood parties. What she wanted was
a real old fashioned Halloween party. It was something she
was to repeat often during the week to the friends
who called her with warnings and advice. Had she a
first kit, she would probably need one and be sure
(05:03):
to omit the booby prizes. Children who won them were
apt to weep, considering them a disgrace. The warnings began
to include, unpleasantly often the names of the Usher children.
Everyone hoped they had not been invited, although on being questioned,
no one seemed able to tell ann more than that
(05:25):
they were considered strange, the rather menacing unknown quantity in
the local algebra of human relationships. They were not much
liked by other children, and then everyone knew how strange
the parents were, living off by themselves as they did,
never associating with anyone. Had she seen a father's work.
(05:49):
Grewesome decadence, stuff that no one who hadn't a morbid
streak would think of painting, And according to rumors, it
was just as well they did keep to themselves. It
seemed Usher had a sense of humor that to say
the least was sardonic. It could be they had heard
very ugly at times by that time. However, it was
(06:11):
too late the older children. The girl was in the
fourth grade. She and her brother had been invited along
with the rest on Halloween, Anne, where the two children
stood in the golden porch light welcoming their guests. The children,
in various disguises, began to come shortly after dark. They
all seemed to arrive at the same time, coming out
(06:33):
of the gloomy, old fashioned lane like a small army
of faceless grotesques. Every child was masked. For an instant,
Anne felt invaded by a force of nameless, not necessarily
friendly strangers. Only the shadows of parents, coming from the
obscurity into familiarity assured her that beneath the grinning skull
(06:55):
or monstrous face was a dimple or a freckled nose.
She knew the party had become a reality. At last,
each adult whispered instructions of various sorts to each small
mystery at his side, before setting it free to join
its wriggling, hopping contemporaries. As they took leave of Anne
(07:15):
with compliments and thanks, there was an unmistakable look of
relief on most of their departing faces. She had said
she could manage alone, even with her husband absent on
business for his firm. By eight o'clock, when the party
had had been passed out and the last parent had gone,
almost every one who had been invited was there. The
(07:38):
party began in good order. They all pinned the tale
on the donkey, waited patiently, good children, all in a line.
Each child was blindfolded and sent with cardboard tale in
hand towards the donkey on the wall. Only one very
young black cat, anonymous to Anne, cried because it had
(08:00):
pinned its particular tale to the donkey's nose. It was
quite easily comforted. The second game passed gaily, even hilariously.
The children unmasked as they went to the big tin
washbowl full of apples floating on top of the water
that filled it. At the sight of laughter on small faces,
(08:21):
freed so recently from the horrors which had hidden them
from sight, Anne was charmed with a sudden feeling of felicity.
The children, hands held behind their backs, bobbed to the apples.
She watched them, holding to her moment with a sweet
satisfaction of fulfillment down to the last detail, from the
(08:42):
sound of the children's shrill, excited voices, to the orange
and black crape papers and balloons, the festive smell of
candle wax heating the pulpy bumpkin. She had her party
at last. It was well that she held to the moment,
listening to the laughter, seeing the children's warm cheeks and tender,
(09:03):
perspiring necks, her own daughter thrilled awareness of her multi
colored petticoats. For shortly after that, the party began to change.
It started during the next game, which was musical chairs,
and at first it was almost imperceptible, perhaps because it
(09:23):
was the third rather strenuous game of the evening. Anne
noticed some of the children showing signs of being overtired.
Some of the smaller one's cheeks were too flushed or pale.
They had put the chairs in a row themselves, working
rather wildly with some petty wrangling. There were quarrels in
the air before they even started, and at the same
(09:46):
time something else, an odd feeling of restlessness and destruction,
as though their minds were somewhere else, watching them march
around the chairs and the way each scrambled for a place.
Once the music stopped, Anne decided she never had liked
the game. It demanded a ruthlessness in the end that
(10:09):
she found unpleasant. Disliking the ultimate winner, she was glad
when it was over, and she had settled the children
to making funny men and animals out of the marshmallows, gumdrops,
and toothpicks she had set out on card tables. A
drooping rabbit's ear, a cat's tail hanging from its owner
(10:29):
down the back of a chair, A warned sneaker sticking
out beneath a ghost shroud seemed charming to her still,
and yet she felt less delighted than before. The room
became quiet enough for her to hear the children's labored
breathing as they concentrated on their efforts. As they reached
for the colored candles to fit them awkwardly on the toothpicks,
(10:54):
Anne was unable to get rid of the slight depression
settling over her. There was that furtive, restless quality creeping
about the room, as though all the small figures bending
over their nonsense or less intent than they pretended to be.
There was a sense of shifting, of lifting the head
to listen, though no child did these things. In the
(11:18):
near silence, she heard the wind rising outside. It was then,
too that she heard the front gate creak as it opened.
No child looked up as Anne listened for the footsteps
which should have sounded on the porch. Afterward, each child
seemed to concentrate more obliviously than before. When Anne crossed
(11:43):
her room to the entrance hall, she felt she was
being watched. It was such a strange feeling. She turned
to look back. No one had even seen her go.
Nothing but the wind, rushing into the hall like some
belated guests, met her at the open door behind it.
In darkness that crept away from the porch light, she
(12:05):
could see no one. It was when her eyes searched
the old garden at the side of the house that
she saw them. They were standing by a small stone
sundial Anne's grandfather has set there three years ago. A
boy and a girl hand in hand. They stood looking
(12:25):
at her, motionless as It was not until she called
to them, inviting them inside it they moved forward. As
they came through the dark of the porch steps. Anne
felt at last, how truly starless the night was, How
like these particular parents to send them out alone. They
(12:47):
passed in silence through the door she held open for them.
Once inside the hall, they waited, making no move towards
the living room, standing always together in their peculiar stillness. Anne,
for some reason unknown, not only closed but bolted the door.
(13:08):
They were staring wordlessly up at her. When she turned
back to them, she found herself struggling with a feeling
of aversion for them, since now that they had arrived,
she realized how relieved she had been earlier at their absence.
The girl was a head taller than her brother. Though
both were identically costumed, neither of them was masked, yet
(13:31):
it was only one face that both turned to her,
the boys being simply a smaller version of the girls.
To Anne, they had the look of having been drawn
by their father instead of procreated in the usual way.
She thought she even recognized Usher's personal style in the
deliberate exaggeration of line and the faintly corrupt, half graceful
(13:54):
proportions of that face with its twofold glance. The eyes
in particular, were as overly large as the ones he painted.
They were a flat tobacco brown. It was to that
expression in them that she owed her feeling of aversion,
for both pairs held a fixed, impersonal intentness that was
(14:16):
less childlike, she thought, than inhuman. Still, they were only children,
just come to a strange house. Anne, feeling slightly guilty,
pointed the way to the living room. They walked ahead
of her, docilely enough, not seeming to notice when Anne,
following them, suddenly stopped still. She had noticed at last
(14:40):
what they were wearing. She felt a sense of affront
of somehow being publicly insulted. If friends had called Usher's
humor unpleasant and sardonic, she had not known up until
then what those words could mean. For even to Anne
no authority on such matters, it was obvious he had
sent them dressed in costumes representing the grave clothes of
(15:03):
children what past generation. Both wore on their heads wreaths
of stiff formal leaves, and were dressed in folds of
white cloth from shoulder to foot. The costumes were draped delicately,
and from a distance at least, looked as beautifully sown
as their own child's dress. That each detail had the
(15:26):
stamp conscious artistic effect only added to the cynical horror
of the idea. Though the other children looked up as
they injured the room. They remained sitting at their tables, and,
sensing the general withdrawal on their part, came closer to
her new guests, intending to reassure them, close enough to
(15:48):
the buoy, in fact, to feel she had seen the
worst ultimate point of the joke, for the material of
their costumes had the limp suppleness of age. The hands
sown lace on them was yellow. After their initial drawing back,
the children began to speak again, to laugh, get up
from the tables and show her what they had made.
(16:10):
They began and came a blind man's bluff. It was
not one of the game's planned for the evening, but
Anne took advantage of it to go away to privacy.
For a few moments. She stood alone in the gaily
decorated dining room with its rows of shining waiting plates.
She frowned, moving her lips slightly like a child over
a mathematics problem, wondering uneasily how the children of such
(16:34):
a father might be expected to behave a need to
see what was happening as urgent as the need for
privacy had been a few minutes before, cent her to
the door of the room. What she saw reassured her.
The two children, along with the others, crouched hiding from
the blindfolded child, who groped after them with outstretched hands.
(16:57):
She saw the boy shrink away in his turn from
the blind man, giggling softly. His eyes were shining childishly.
She reproached herself, Yet the party was changed. The mood
of it began to resemble more nearly the wild playouts
of our childhood summer nights, when the long, soft dusk
encouraged the feeling of lawlessness, of perilous emotions, a sort
(17:22):
of childish debauch. There was a feerish, tense look on
some of their faces. Anne had gone to the kitchen
before the party went out of control. The children had
begun to choose their own games by that time, and
had been playing a comparatively quiet one when she left
the room. It was an ancient game, a sort of ritual,
(17:44):
she remembered, having played herself known as old Witch. I'm
going downtown to smoke my pipe, and I won't be
back till Sunday night. And if you dare let the
old Witch in, I'll beat you red, white and blue.
A small voice chanted the words behind her as she
(18:06):
entered the kitchen. For a time, she busied herself pouring
side her warming plates, mentally counting heads as she concentrated
on her own activities until the lights went out. The
entire house was suddenly dark. Someone she knew had pulled
a switch. When she called out anxiously, she was answered
by her son's cheerful voice. They had decided he called
(18:29):
to play Moonlight Starlight. The name heard aloud made a
children over Anne. She hadn't thought of it for years.
As a child, it had been the only game she
had feared and hated. She felt intolerable anxiety as she wondered,
while knowing at once had suggested it. The party was
(18:51):
out of hand. She groped across the kitchen to the
drawer that led to her husband's flashlight, disguising from reasons
fear with irritation at her son for pulling the switch
without permission. Someone had taken and forgotten to return the flashlight.
As she turned away, trying to think where she had
(19:11):
put candles, she was remembering, against her will, the way
the game was played for Moonlight Starlight was an outdoor game,
another part of the summer nights. Children played it only
after dark. Anne remembered it well. The child who was
it The ghost hid in some dark and secret place.
(19:32):
Each child's separate and alone, had to wander in search
of it. On finding it, they too became ghosts, until
at last only one child was left to wander alone,
watched by all the secret ghosts, who would in the
end pounce upon it. There were no candles. She set
out in darkness. The switch box was located across the
(19:56):
living room in an alco which had been built in
a small conservatory with French doors opening into the garden.
Even in the blackness of the hall, Anne knew exactly
where it was. The house, except for small sounds and
sudden scamperings, was silent. It seemed to take a long
time to walk the length of the hall In darkness.
(20:20):
The house grew larger, as large as she had thought
it as a child, and now more nearly child than adult.
She walked forward with dread. At any time, now it
changed from the familiar playmate to some nameless horror could
jump suddenly upon her from its hiding place. For like
(20:43):
it or not, she too was a player. Now her
hand touched the living room wall, and she groped forward,
angry with herself for the way she shrank against it.
She had reached the doors leading to the conservatory before
she heard the whispering came from inside the room, and
there was a quality in it that froze her motionless,
(21:06):
hardly breathing for a few seconds. Her faculties were turned
inward on her own pounding heart. It was only gradually,
as she realized she had not been noticed, that she
calmed somewhat. She found she was able to see dimly
the three small figures standing inside, the white garments of
(21:28):
two of them, even shone slightly, though so little light
came from the night which waited outside in the garden.
When she was able to hear something beside her own pulse,
she listened to the phrase that to a white whispered
again and again, distinguishing at last the words come out,
(21:50):
come out into the dark, Come with us. They whispered
it together, excited, persuasive, with an urgent, secret sibilance that
beheld an increasing seductiveness at each repetition. The third child,
so Entice, whimpered once and stood quiet between them. After that,
(22:13):
it had been the small sound of an animal so
full of fear as to be beyond outcry. It released
Anne from the fear that held her, for the voice
had been her daughter's. Thus she leapt forward. She made
no attempt to reach her child. Her urge was a primitive,
overwhelming one, for light to chase away the darkness. The
(22:36):
hands that had fumbled so often before moved with the
speed in sureness of fear, which is beyond panic. And
if the taller of the two, the girls swayed gently
torture with smiling teeth. At the same time, lights blazed
throughout the house, and her own child was in her arms.
(22:57):
They stood alone in the class enclosed room. Other players
who had been wandering about downstairs, blinked their eyes in
the sudden light, calling reproachful questions. Every child had come
back into the living room before Anne, with trembling hands,
shut the French doors, which had been swinging open in
the wind from the garden. No child asked where two
(23:20):
of the guests had gone. No one mentioned them at all.
Through the final stages of the party, Anne, having had
to choose between illness and anger, chose tight brightly. It
was anger that sustained her through the refreshments, the collecting
of coats, and the arrival, thanks and good byes of parents.
(23:41):
It was faithful through the night. She went to bed angry,
and it was with her when she woke the next morning.
She guarded it carefully as she planned the call she
would make to Usher that day, since if she lost,
as she feared, what might take its place. In the end.
It was missus Usher who called Anne first. She had
(24:04):
a pleasant voice, crisp and courteous, though rather impersonal sounding.
She called, she said, to explain why her children had
not been able to attend the party. They had had
fever all day, and she believed it might be developing
into a light case of chicken pox. Both she and
they had been so disappointed she had made their customs herself.
(24:27):
They were to have gone as a cat and a mouse.
The voice seemed to fade out on the next few sentences.
At the first words Anne heard, there had been a slight,
sickening wrench somewhere inside her. It was a relatively mild one,
considering that it was a displacement of whatever held her
being secure in its particular place in the universe. The
(24:54):
voice wanted to know if most of the other children
had been able to make it. Some of them, it knew,
had to come a long way. The invitations had been
on orange paper, she remembered them. Her mother had let
her cut out and address them herself, guiding her hand
(25:14):
as it made fat, wavering letters on the envelopes. She
had been so proud that they were to go all
the way to upstate New York. Anne's voice, when she answered,
was steadier than the room, still wheeling crazily around herself
and the telephone. Yes, she said, some of the children
(25:39):
had had to come a very long way. Children would
do almost anything not to miss a party. The voice
said yes. Anne said all the children had come.
From the macabre minds of Laughing Devil production comes another
story from the night Shade Diary. You know what that means.
Check under the bed and make sure no one or
nothing is there. Is the closet door securely shut. Then
leave your disbelief behind, amp up your imagination and hang
(00:49):
on tight for another ride into terror and mystery. And
like all good horror stories, just imagine it's a dark
and stormy night, and remember her screaming like a little
girl is permitted. Moonlight Starlight by Virginia Laevsky. The genesis
(01:22):
of the idea for the party was in an old
Halloween costume Anne Carrie found packed in a box in
the attic. It had been made thirty years ago for
a seven year old and by her mother. She had
been a woman who threw nothing away. After Anne inherited
the large Victorian spaces her mother had swept and garnished
(01:42):
most of her life, she often came upon pieces of
her own life up until her marriage, at least neatly
labeled and stored here or there. She was apt to
find them on those first days of her husband's occasional absences,
when she used house cleaning as a bomb for initial loneliness.
(02:02):
The costume she found that day was so beautifully sown
and carefully packed that its state of preservation was remarkable.
When she shook out its folds, the coins, which her
mother had sown individually on the bodice long ago, clinked
with a special sound that set up a painful, little
echo of disappointment in her forgetful heart. Though she remembered
(02:28):
clearly then the smell of grythansimum's and sewing machine oil
in her mother's room the day the costume was fitted,
she could not have said why the sound of the
coins oppressed her with such a profound sense of loss.
It had to do with a party she had lost.
Of course, it was to have been her very own.
(02:51):
The games had been planned and the decorations made, Invitations
had already been sent. Due to the death by drowning
of two small cousins and upstate New York, the party
was canceled. The accident had happened the day before they
were to leave to visit Anne. She had been broken hearted,
(03:11):
not for the cousins, whom she had never seen, but
for the party, which was canceled. In time, she was
able to forget everything about it, but the sense of
loss which persisted unacknowledged of to day when she opened
the box to find the costumes still waiting there. And
that was the reason why Halloween became the occasion for
(03:34):
the only really large children's party and Carrie ever gave.
She made a costume less carefully done for her nine
year old son, and dressed her daughter in the gypsy
outfit she herself was to have worn long ago. The
party was a resounding success. Children remembering it asked her
(03:56):
for months afterwards to give her another, but she never did,
nor did she tell the reasons why it became the
last children's party of any kind that she ever gave.
The arrangement seemed so simple at first. She told her
son Bobby he could invite the entire fourth grade, with
all its younger brothers and sisters. Games and refreshments were
(04:20):
no problem. Now that Anne thought of it, she remembered
the entire program of the beautiful party planned long ago.
The bobbing for apples, followed by pintailna donkey and musical
chairs marched through her mind in a succession, almost as
orderly and magical now as then. There would be none
of the professional entertainment that had figured recently in some
(04:42):
of the more ambitious neighborhood parties. What she wanted was
a real old fashioned Halloween party. It was something she
was to repeat often during the week to the friends
who called her with warnings and advice. Had she a
first kit, she would probably need one and be sure
(05:03):
to omit the booby prizes. Children who won them were
apt to weep, considering them a disgrace. The warnings began
to include, unpleasantly often the names of the Usher children.
Everyone hoped they had not been invited, although on being questioned,
no one seemed able to tell ann more than that
(05:25):
they were considered strange, the rather menacing unknown quantity in
the local algebra of human relationships. They were not much
liked by other children, and then everyone knew how strange
the parents were, living off by themselves as they did,
never associating with anyone. Had she seen a father's work.
(05:49):
Grewesome decadence, stuff that no one who hadn't a morbid
streak would think of painting, And according to rumors, it
was just as well they did keep to themselves. It
seemed Usher had a sense of humor that to say
the least was sardonic. It could be they had heard
very ugly at times by that time. However, it was
(06:11):
too late the older children. The girl was in the
fourth grade. She and her brother had been invited along
with the rest on Halloween, Anne, where the two children
stood in the golden porch light welcoming their guests. The children,
in various disguises, began to come shortly after dark. They
all seemed to arrive at the same time, coming out
(06:33):
of the gloomy, old fashioned lane like a small army
of faceless grotesques. Every child was masked. For an instant,
Anne felt invaded by a force of nameless, not necessarily
friendly strangers. Only the shadows of parents, coming from the
obscurity into familiarity assured her that beneath the grinning skull
(06:55):
or monstrous face was a dimple or a freckled nose.
She knew the party had become a reality. At last,
each adult whispered instructions of various sorts to each small
mystery at his side, before setting it free to join
its wriggling, hopping contemporaries. As they took leave of Anne
(07:15):
with compliments and thanks, there was an unmistakable look of
relief on most of their departing faces. She had said
she could manage alone, even with her husband absent on
business for his firm. By eight o'clock, when the party
had had been passed out and the last parent had gone,
almost every one who had been invited was there. The
(07:38):
party began in good order. They all pinned the tale
on the donkey, waited patiently, good children, all in a line.
Each child was blindfolded and sent with cardboard tale in
hand towards the donkey on the wall. Only one very
young black cat, anonymous to Anne, cried because it had
(08:00):
pinned its particular tale to the donkey's nose. It was
quite easily comforted. The second game passed gaily, even hilariously.
The children unmasked as they went to the big tin
washbowl full of apples floating on top of the water
that filled it. At the sight of laughter on small faces,
(08:21):
freed so recently from the horrors which had hidden them
from sight, Anne was charmed with a sudden feeling of felicity.
The children, hands held behind their backs, bobbed to the apples.
She watched them, holding to her moment with a sweet
satisfaction of fulfillment down to the last detail, from the
(08:42):
sound of the children's shrill, excited voices, to the orange
and black crape papers and balloons, the festive smell of
candle wax heating the pulpy bumpkin. She had her party
at last. It was well that she held to the moment,
listening to the laughter, seeing the children's warm cheeks and tender,
(09:03):
perspiring necks, her own daughter thrilled awareness of her multi
colored petticoats. For shortly after that, the party began to change.
It started during the next game, which was musical chairs,
and at first it was almost imperceptible, perhaps because it
(09:23):
was the third rather strenuous game of the evening. Anne
noticed some of the children showing signs of being overtired.
Some of the smaller one's cheeks were too flushed or pale.
They had put the chairs in a row themselves, working
rather wildly with some petty wrangling. There were quarrels in
the air before they even started, and at the same
(09:46):
time something else, an odd feeling of restlessness and destruction,
as though their minds were somewhere else, watching them march
around the chairs and the way each scrambled for a place.
Once the music stopped, Anne decided she never had liked
the game. It demanded a ruthlessness in the end that
(10:09):
she found unpleasant. Disliking the ultimate winner, she was glad
when it was over, and she had settled the children
to making funny men and animals out of the marshmallows, gumdrops,
and toothpicks she had set out on card tables. A
drooping rabbit's ear, a cat's tail hanging from its owner
(10:29):
down the back of a chair, A warned sneaker sticking
out beneath a ghost shroud seemed charming to her still,
and yet she felt less delighted than before. The room
became quiet enough for her to hear the children's labored
breathing as they concentrated on their efforts. As they reached
for the colored candles to fit them awkwardly on the toothpicks,
(10:54):
Anne was unable to get rid of the slight depression
settling over her. There was that furtive, restless quality creeping
about the room, as though all the small figures bending
over their nonsense or less intent than they pretended to be.
There was a sense of shifting, of lifting the head
to listen, though no child did these things. In the
(11:18):
near silence, she heard the wind rising outside. It was then,
too that she heard the front gate creak as it opened.
No child looked up as Anne listened for the footsteps
which should have sounded on the porch. Afterward, each child
seemed to concentrate more obliviously than before. When Anne crossed
(11:43):
her room to the entrance hall, she felt she was
being watched. It was such a strange feeling. She turned
to look back. No one had even seen her go.
Nothing but the wind, rushing into the hall like some
belated guests, met her at the open door behind it.
In darkness that crept away from the porch light, she
(12:05):
could see no one. It was when her eyes searched
the old garden at the side of the house that
she saw them. They were standing by a small stone
sundial Anne's grandfather has set there three years ago. A
boy and a girl hand in hand. They stood looking
(12:25):
at her, motionless as It was not until she called
to them, inviting them inside it they moved forward. As
they came through the dark of the porch steps. Anne
felt at last, how truly starless the night was, How
like these particular parents to send them out alone. They
(12:47):
passed in silence through the door she held open for them.
Once inside the hall, they waited, making no move towards
the living room, standing always together in their peculiar stillness. Anne,
for some reason unknown, not only closed but bolted the door.
(13:08):
They were staring wordlessly up at her. When she turned
back to them, she found herself struggling with a feeling
of aversion for them, since now that they had arrived,
she realized how relieved she had been earlier at their absence.
The girl was a head taller than her brother. Though
both were identically costumed, neither of them was masked, yet
(13:31):
it was only one face that both turned to her,
the boys being simply a smaller version of the girls.
To Anne, they had the look of having been drawn
by their father instead of procreated in the usual way.
She thought she even recognized Usher's personal style in the
deliberate exaggeration of line and the faintly corrupt, half graceful
(13:54):
proportions of that face with its twofold glance. The eyes
in particular, were as overly large as the ones he painted.
They were a flat tobacco brown. It was to that
expression in them that she owed her feeling of aversion,
for both pairs held a fixed, impersonal intentness that was
(14:16):
less childlike, she thought, than inhuman. Still, they were only children,
just come to a strange house. Anne, feeling slightly guilty,
pointed the way to the living room. They walked ahead
of her, docilely enough, not seeming to notice when Anne,
following them, suddenly stopped still. She had noticed at last
(14:40):
what they were wearing. She felt a sense of affront
of somehow being publicly insulted. If friends had called Usher's
humor unpleasant and sardonic, she had not known up until
then what those words could mean. For even to Anne
no authority on such matters, it was obvious he had
sent them dressed in costumes representing the grave clothes of
(15:03):
children what past generation. Both wore on their heads wreaths
of stiff formal leaves, and were dressed in folds of
white cloth from shoulder to foot. The costumes were draped delicately,
and from a distance at least, looked as beautifully sown
as their own child's dress. That each detail had the
(15:26):
stamp conscious artistic effect only added to the cynical horror
of the idea. Though the other children looked up as
they injured the room. They remained sitting at their tables, and,
sensing the general withdrawal on their part, came closer to
her new guests, intending to reassure them, close enough to
(15:48):
the buoy, in fact, to feel she had seen the
worst ultimate point of the joke, for the material of
their costumes had the limp suppleness of age. The hands
sown lace on them was yellow. After their initial drawing back,
the children began to speak again, to laugh, get up
from the tables and show her what they had made.
(16:10):
They began and came a blind man's bluff. It was
not one of the game's planned for the evening, but
Anne took advantage of it to go away to privacy.
For a few moments. She stood alone in the gaily
decorated dining room with its rows of shining waiting plates.
She frowned, moving her lips slightly like a child over
a mathematics problem, wondering uneasily how the children of such
(16:34):
a father might be expected to behave a need to
see what was happening as urgent as the need for
privacy had been a few minutes before, cent her to
the door of the room. What she saw reassured her.
The two children, along with the others, crouched hiding from
the blindfolded child, who groped after them with outstretched hands.
(16:57):
She saw the boy shrink away in his turn from
the blind man, giggling softly. His eyes were shining childishly.
She reproached herself, Yet the party was changed. The mood
of it began to resemble more nearly the wild playouts
of our childhood summer nights, when the long, soft dusk
encouraged the feeling of lawlessness, of perilous emotions, a sort
(17:22):
of childish debauch. There was a feerish, tense look on
some of their faces. Anne had gone to the kitchen
before the party went out of control. The children had
begun to choose their own games by that time, and
had been playing a comparatively quiet one when she left
the room. It was an ancient game, a sort of ritual,
(17:44):
she remembered, having played herself known as old Witch. I'm
going downtown to smoke my pipe, and I won't be
back till Sunday night. And if you dare let the
old Witch in, I'll beat you red, white and blue.
A small voice chanted the words behind her as she
(18:06):
entered the kitchen. For a time, she busied herself pouring
side her warming plates, mentally counting heads as she concentrated
on her own activities until the lights went out. The
entire house was suddenly dark. Someone she knew had pulled
a switch. When she called out anxiously, she was answered
by her son's cheerful voice. They had decided he called
(18:29):
to play Moonlight Starlight. The name heard aloud made a
children over Anne. She hadn't thought of it for years.
As a child, it had been the only game she
had feared and hated. She felt intolerable anxiety as she wondered,
while knowing at once had suggested it. The party was
(18:51):
out of hand. She groped across the kitchen to the
drawer that led to her husband's flashlight, disguising from reasons
fear with irritation at her son for pulling the switch
without permission. Someone had taken and forgotten to return the flashlight.
As she turned away, trying to think where she had
(19:11):
put candles, she was remembering, against her will, the way
the game was played for Moonlight Starlight was an outdoor game,
another part of the summer nights. Children played it only
after dark. Anne remembered it well. The child who was
it The ghost hid in some dark and secret place.
(19:32):
Each child's separate and alone, had to wander in search
of it. On finding it, they too became ghosts, until
at last only one child was left to wander alone,
watched by all the secret ghosts, who would in the
end pounce upon it. There were no candles. She set
out in darkness. The switch box was located across the
(19:56):
living room in an alco which had been built in
a small conservatory with French doors opening into the garden.
Even in the blackness of the hall, Anne knew exactly
where it was. The house, except for small sounds and
sudden scamperings, was silent. It seemed to take a long
time to walk the length of the hall In darkness.
(20:20):
The house grew larger, as large as she had thought
it as a child, and now more nearly child than adult.
She walked forward with dread. At any time, now it
changed from the familiar playmate to some nameless horror could
jump suddenly upon her from its hiding place. For like
(20:43):
it or not, she too was a player. Now her
hand touched the living room wall, and she groped forward,
angry with herself for the way she shrank against it.
She had reached the doors leading to the conservatory before
she heard the whispering came from inside the room, and
there was a quality in it that froze her motionless,
(21:06):
hardly breathing for a few seconds. Her faculties were turned
inward on her own pounding heart. It was only gradually,
as she realized she had not been noticed, that she
calmed somewhat. She found she was able to see dimly
the three small figures standing inside, the white garments of
(21:28):
two of them, even shone slightly, though so little light
came from the night which waited outside in the garden.
When she was able to hear something beside her own pulse,
she listened to the phrase that to a white whispered
again and again, distinguishing at last the words come out,
(21:50):
come out into the dark, Come with us. They whispered
it together, excited, persuasive, with an urgent, secret sibilance that
beheld an increasing seductiveness at each repetition. The third child,
so Entice, whimpered once and stood quiet between them. After that,
(22:13):
it had been the small sound of an animal so
full of fear as to be beyond outcry. It released
Anne from the fear that held her, for the voice
had been her daughter's. Thus she leapt forward. She made
no attempt to reach her child. Her urge was a primitive,
overwhelming one, for light to chase away the darkness. The
(22:36):
hands that had fumbled so often before moved with the
speed in sureness of fear, which is beyond panic. And
if the taller of the two, the girls swayed gently
torture with smiling teeth. At the same time, lights blazed
throughout the house, and her own child was in her arms.
(22:57):
They stood alone in the class enclosed room. Other players
who had been wandering about downstairs, blinked their eyes in
the sudden light, calling reproachful questions. Every child had come
back into the living room before Anne, with trembling hands,
shut the French doors, which had been swinging open in
the wind from the garden. No child asked where two
(23:20):
of the guests had gone. No one mentioned them at all.
Through the final stages of the party, Anne, having had
to choose between illness and anger, chose tight brightly. It
was anger that sustained her through the refreshments, the collecting
of coats, and the arrival, thanks and good byes of parents.
(23:41):
It was faithful through the night. She went to bed angry,
and it was with her when she woke the next morning.
She guarded it carefully as she planned the call she
would make to Usher that day, since if she lost,
as she feared, what might take its place. In the end.
It was missus Usher who called Anne first. She had
(24:04):
a pleasant voice, crisp and courteous, though rather impersonal sounding.
She called, she said, to explain why her children had
not been able to attend the party. They had had
fever all day, and she believed it might be developing
into a light case of chicken pox. Both she and
they had been so disappointed she had made their customs herself.
(24:27):
They were to have gone as a cat and a mouse.
The voice seemed to fade out on the next few sentences.
At the first words Anne heard, there had been a slight,
sickening wrench somewhere inside her. It was a relatively mild one,
considering that it was a displacement of whatever held her
being secure in its particular place in the universe. The
(24:54):
voice wanted to know if most of the other children
had been able to make it. Some of them, it knew,
had to come a long way. The invitations had been
on orange paper, she remembered them. Her mother had let
her cut out and address them herself, guiding her hand
(25:14):
as it made fat, wavering letters on the envelopes. She
had been so proud that they were to go all
the way to upstate New York. Anne's voice, when she answered,
was steadier than the room, still wheeling crazily around herself
and the telephone. Yes, she said, some of the children
(25:39):
had had to come a very long way. Children would
do almost anything not to miss a party. The voice
said yes. Anne said all the children had come.
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