Listen, children ... listen!

By Wallace West
The old man was long dead—but his widow still awaited his return. And one night she heard....
The elements of horror are as many and varied as the threads in a Gobelin tapestry—with special stimuli for each of us. Perhaps terror lies in the howl of a coyote, in the noises of an old house, in a blaze of fire. Or perhaps it responds to the mournful creak of wheels on a gravel road, to moonlight reflected from a huge old mirror.
My grandmother was fey. At least that's what the neighbors said. She could predict the weather by the way her left heel eetched. She always knew by some sixth sense when any of her blood was coming down from Indianapolis to visit our tumbledown farm. She insisted she heard angels singing (or sounds considerably more terrifying) during funerals at the New Harmony Church over the hill.
In the eyes of myself and my sister Annette Maw was as old as the gullies which cut up our clay fields. Probably she was about sixty when I first remember her. She still carried her lean body proudly though her back was bowed. She had a gift for mimicry and a merry smile marred by the fact that she had been salivated by taking too much calomel to fight off fever'n'aiger. This misfortune had caused her gums to recede and gave her a snaggle-toothed look. Some of her fangs moved when she ate but, to our eternal wonder, they never fell out.
She had the untiring wreck of a fine alto voice and regaled us with renditions of bloody old hymns or ballads like The Ship's Carpenter ( And three times 'round went our gallant ship e'er she sank to the bottom of the sea ) or an endless garbled song about a girl who masqueraded as a soldier to join her sweetheart in the wars between Tors and Highlanzer.
I still have nightmares about those childhood years. The Brown murder was a recent memory—Patriarch Brown and his blind wife had been slaughtered by persons unknown in a hemlock-shrouded farmhouse half a mile from our cabin. Repercussions of the trial had hardly died away.