1The Tar-Faced-Woman

I can't remember which crappy Stephen King book it was in, but in one of them he asks the question, "What if the dying wasn't the end? What if dying drove you insane?" I think it fits in well with my story.

When I was ten, my dad took a new job in another town a few hours away from where we lived. We moved into a new house on the fringe of a small town. It was a two story home with dirty-white siding that sat back away from the road on a small hill.

The yard was empty except for a few scrub-like bushes and a concrete walkway lined with flowerbeds. The back yard was a long, flat field with quite a few acres of woods and hills behind it.

One of the first things I noticed when we first arrived were two tall chimneys sticking out of either side of the house. Two fireplaces! Our old house didn't even have one. I thought about how cool it was to have a fire inside your house, I could hardly wait for winter.

Once inside, the first thing I did was to check out the fireplaces. The first one was downstairs in the living room. It was made out of red brick and had a large slate-gray slab for a mantle.

I saw the second fireplace through the door to an upstairs room. The room was smaller than most of the others in the house, but the fireplace was gigantic. It was squeezed in there, barely fitting. The fireplace was painted white with ornate, twisted moulding circling around and down two carved pillars made to look like columns on old stone buildings.

The inside of it was deep- cavernous, even. My brother and I could have sat in it side by side with room to spare. I looked up and saw the chimney stretch away from me like a tunnel to space. A candles-worth of daylight could be seen far, far at the other end.

It was massive, a fantastic find even if it did seem out of place in the room.

I was so fascinated by it I nearly tripped over it's grating as I walked out.

I stumbled and scratched my shin on it, a fireplace grating circling it like a tiny fence. The bars were rough and almost sharp, ending in pointed tips. It was about a foot and a half high.

My brother and I ended up taking two different rooms in the upstairs hallway. I had one at the very end of the hall, and he had one across the hall from the room with the fireplace in it. The room with the fireplace was left empty for several years before my mom turned it into a guest room. It was weird seeing that room for all those years entirely bare except for the hulking fireplace.

Adding to the weirdness of the room were the two windows that bordered the fireplace on either side. As the sun sank during the evening, reddish-orange light would stream in low through the windows, casting the fireplace in a bizzare light, making it seem bigger and even more cavernous that it did during the day.

We lived there for a few months before I began to make good friends.

It was then that I found out my house was haunted.

I was riding around town on bicycles with two of my friends one evening in the fall. It was nearing dinner and they were riding back with me to my house before continuing on to their own.

I skidded to a halt in my driveway, pulling a nice 180 in the gravel with my bike. My friends obviously weren't expecting me to stop so suddenly and went skidding past me. They managed to brake after a while and turned around to look at me. Jeff talked first while Aaron said nothing and stared at the second story window.

"What are you stopping here for?" Jeff asked.

"This is my house."

Aaron blinked and looked at me sideways, surprised.

"You live here?" he asked.

"This is the tar-lady's house," Jeff said softly.

"Haunted house..." Aaron began.

My mom yelled my name from the front porch, scaring me horribly.

"Dinner, Alex! Get inside."

My friends drove away, but Jeff promised to call me after dinner to tell me the story.

I got off my bike and walked up my driveway, staring at the window Aaron looked at when we pulled up. The fireplace window.

The light was low now and it would be casting weird shadows on the fireplace.

Dinner that night was an ordeal. I picked at my food and pushed it around the plate with my fork. I kept seeing Aaron staring at the second story window in my head.

A tar lady. Tar lady on the second floor of my house.

The phone rang after an eternity and I raced for it. Jeff had shoveled his dinner in as fast as he could so he could get to the phone and talk to me. I dragged the phone as far away from the kitchen as the cord would let me. When I was far enough away from my parents, I sat down and told Jeff to tell me about the tar-lady. He spoke softly, trying to keep his voice low enough so his parents didn’t hear. His voice whispered in my ear from across town.

For kids, there’s a wealth of legends in every town. They’re all tied to locations. There’s the empty ally where Ben Hatch beat up four highschool kids at once. There’s the tree in the park with an old piece of twine around the topmost branch where a kid named Andy hung himself. There’s a run-down barn where teenagers went to make out and drink. There’s a cemetery where cults sacrificed children’s stolen pets.

I was living in one of those locations. My house was the home of the Tar-Faced-Lady.

Many years ago, as the kids said (and still say), my house was the home of a single middle-aged woman. She lived alone in the house with a few cats. The number of cats was different every time I heard it, sometimes four, sometimes nine, sometimes thirty.

She lived alone with her cats and kept her house warm in the winter by burning both fireplaces at once. Twin plumes of smoke circled out of the house’s chimney’s all day long during the cold months. This was all the setup I got from Jeff. Kids, when telling ghost stories tend to cut right to the gruesome part.

She died- somehow. And she burned- kind of.

Her body dropped next to one of the roaring fireplaces in my house and laid there. Her head was nearly in the fire, but she didn’t burn. No - she roasted, then began to turn black. Her face grew bloated and cracked with the heat and melted fat dripped down her cheeks in big black gobs.

She haunts the place. That’s basically all Jeff said. She haunts the place, a deformed corpse with a tar face and brittle hair. She sometimes stares grotesquely out of the second story window and will look right at you if you see her from the street.

My house was a test of bravery for the younger kids. When it was empty, teams of kids would come to my house late at night and stand on my front porch, peering in through the windows. If they waited long enough, if they made enough noise they would catch a glimpse of her stumbling down the stairs angrily. She would be ready to fling the front door open and grab one of the kids, dragging them inside to burn them until they were as deformed as she.

My heart was plummeting, I could feel fingers of cold stretching up my back and down my spine. For the first time in my life I was truly terrified, but I couldn’t tell Jeff to stop. Jeff continued with more stories of her.

Jeff said that one of his sister’s friend’s cousins was nearly caught by her one night. He lost a bet with one of his friends over a flag-football game in gym class. As a forfeit, he had to stand on the Tar-Faced-Lady’s porch from sundown until midnight. To make sure he stayed, his friend said he’d stop by randomly to check on him. At midnight, his friend would return and he could get off the porch.

It was fall, the sun went down well before seven and he stood on the porch. Hours and hours passed and his friend never showed up to check on him. He stared in the window at the stair steps, occasionally, probably out of a mix of fascination and fear. Around ten, he heard a bump coming from somewhere behind the house and nearly bolted. He nearly ran to his bicycle, but stayed out of fear that his friends would make fun of him the next day if they came by and didn’t find him.

He stayed despite yet another bump that sounded like it was coming from inside the house.

He pretended he didn’t hear it and still sat on the porch steps, facing the street looking out for his friend.

Randomly, on a whim he looked behind him in the window. He saw the Tar-Faced-Lady.

She was scrambling down the stairs, already halfway down, rushing madly for the door. Her hand reaching for the handle.

He froze for just a moment and saw her flower-print dress swish in the window. Right. At. The. Door.

Leaping from the porch, he ran shrieking for his bike, not turning around to see if the door was standing open or not. He began peddling as fast as he could down the street to his home, nearly crying.

He rounded a turn on his bike and saw her out of the corner of his eye, running down the street after him. Her bloated face was bouncing after him and thin plumes of smoke twisted away into the night air from her smoking dress.

I hung up. I couldn’t find the words to say that I had to go, but I simply couldn’t listen any longer. My house was one of these legends- the worst kind. I was living in it. Wether she was real or not, I lived in the same house inhabited by the Tar-Faced-Woman.

I had to tell my brother. He had to know about this. I couldn’t keep this. Some things are too horrible to keep to yourself.

I turned on every light on the stairs and tried not to imagine her scrambling down them as I walked up. I started walking down the hallway to my brother’s room, holding my hand up to the side of my face to shield my peripheral vision from the fireplace room.

I told him everything. I included every last disgusting detail that Jeff told me on the phone. My eight year old brother cried nearly the entire time. He kept twisting his bed sheets around and looking out of his door to the fireplace room.

I shouldn’t have talked to him. I apologized for scaring him and made him promise not to tell our parents that I said anything. He promised and actually thanked me for telling him. When I left, he was staring flatly at the wall.

I looked in the room on my way out. I couldn’t help it. Through the doorway I could see half of the immense fireplace, as if it was peeking out from around the door at me. The mouth of the fireplace was and empty black hole. I saw the grating that stuck up from the floor like angry metal spikes.

Looking back, I’m able to better articulate what I was thinking as I stared at the grating: “What if dying makes you go mad?” You’re alone in your house, walking around your fire place and a stupid accident happens. You trip, possibly over one of your stupid cats. You trip and you fall forward. It’s a long dizzying spin to the floor after you crack your head on the fireplace mantle, now you’re unable to move or change anything that’s about to happen next.

Downward.

Downward until your throat connects with one of those beautifully ornate metal spikes. A sharp pain in your throat, blood spills and you feel one thing as you start to drift away from consciousness:

Heat.

Heat and pain.

What if dying made you go insane? Insane enough to lunge for children who came too close with fiery murder in your heart. Insane enough to torture and kill, your bloated face twisting in an expression that may be glee as you feel them squirm under you.

I shouldn’t have told him anything because over the next few weeks my brother developed night terrors. They struck randomly and went on for years. Some nights, I’d wake up to hear him shrieking in his bedroom. They were so intense on some nights that he clawed his face as he slept.

The whole story reduced him to terror. I’d see him nearly every night cautiously walk to the fireplace room’s door (now my dad’s office), clutching his stomach as if he would be sick. He’d weakly pull its door closed every night. If the door was open, he couldn’t sleep.

But he never said anything about it.

And he never grew out of it.

Years passed. I, however, was lucky enough to grow out of my fear of her. In my ignorance, I hardly noticed that my brother was still gravely affected by the story I told him nearly five years ago.

He stayed awake most nights, sometimes not turning his light off until two in the morning. I was never sure what he did in there, as our parents forbid us to have any televisions in our rooms because they didn’t want us to be awake that late watching TV.

My brother still had night terrors on almost a monthly basis. I heard him in his room screaming one night that I was awake so I called out to him.

The screams cut off nearly immediately and he called out a hesitant.

“Yeah, I’m alright. Nightmare...”

The very next day my parents asked me to empty the trash cans in the house. My brother was out somewhere with his friends so I let myself into his room to empty his garbage. I was thinking about the night before. We lived in a house cursed by a childhood legend. I grew out of it, but on some level my brother was still in it. She still was very much in the house with us because of this.

I had a chill, but I smiled just a little while thinking about it. It was like some crappy plot twist in a movie. The boogeyman is only as real as you’ll let him be.

A couple pieces of crumpled up paper fell out of his garbage can. I bent over to pick them up to find that something was written on one of them.

One sentence: “She said she’ll burn me if I tell and her door won’t stay closed.”

Horror.

On the back was a pencil drawing. A woman in a flower print dress with long black smears where the head should be. Fumes twisting off of her hair.

Real or not, the Tar-faced-woman lives in our house.

That night, as I was unable to sleep. I heard a door in the hallway creak slowly on its hinges. I clutched the sheets of my bed. I clutched them tighter as I heard my brother begin his thrashings in his room. I had to get up and go to him. I walked quickly down the hallway toward his room. I had to wake him up and --

The door to the fireplace room was standing wide open.

I turned quickly and threw my brother’s bedroom door open, smelling the stink even before I grabbed the handle.

A flower print dress was hunched over my brother’s bed, my brother was writhing under it. The beginnings of a scream were beginning to work their way out of his mouth. The room was dark but I still saw her when she turned to stare at me.

Her fat, bloated face in the dark. Her grey eyes shrunk and shriveled with heat. Green pus dribbled out of the gaping holes in her neck. Her mouth dropped open revealing almost perfect teeth. She turned back to my brother and leaned close.

She had been chewing on my brother. The first of his screams hit me like a fist as she gingerly bit down again on his cheek.

What if dying makes you go insane? Insane enough to visit a child nearly every night for years and years to do nothing more than torture him while he sleeps. To shamble out of your room, throwing the door open to his as he cowers away from you. Your face twisting with something like joy as you straddle him and stare down with shrunken eyes. To stick your rotting face next to his and bite down. And bite down. And bite down. And bite.