Aunt Bee's Lantern
You knock on Aunt Bee's door — and it opens before your second knock. She is not sleepy. She is not surprised. She is standing there in her boots and her work coat, holding a lantern in one hand and, in the other, an old iron bell the size of a teacup.
“Heard it too, did you,” she says. Not a question.
“What's the bell for?”
“Cold iron.” She steps past you down the hall. “Some things that ride in on storms don't care for it. My grandmother's, this was. Stay behind me, Madison-love, and if I ring it, you hold your ears and don't run. Things that hunt like to chase.”
That is the scariest sentence anyone has ever said to you in a hallway. You follow her out into the booming dark, and the violet lightning shows you the barn door standing open, and grey patches in the grass like missing puzzle pieces.