by S. A. Hunt
An intricate red carpet runner had been laid down by the real estate agent, new and clean. Regardless, every shuffling footfall, every little noise they made, and every word they spoke reverberated in short, hollow echoes throughout the house.
“Hello?” called Leon.
For a terrifying second, Wayne almost expected to hear an answer from upstairs. He loved it. “Do you think it’s haunted?”
Leon tucked his hands in his pockets. “Who knows?”
The den was a cozy space, unfurnished as of yet with anything other than empty bookshelves and a cushioned reading nook in the front window. The walls were painted the same rainy blue as the outside. A modest fireplace occupied one wall, dark and empty.
“Need to see if one of our neighbors might be able to give us a hand with the sofa.”
“I can help you.”
“I don’t know, it’s big. Don’t want to see you get hurt. We barely got it out of the apartment.”
They passed into the kitchen, where the walls had been wallpapered in yellow sunflowers that probably should have looked cheery, but were more forlorn and drab than anything else. Fridge was a new side-by-side slab of black humming efficiently in the corner, and the countertops were dark marble over dark cherrywood cabinets.
Wayne decided the kitchen would not be his favorite room. Leon went around to all the windows, parting the curtains and letting sunlight in. Dust drifted in the soft white beams.
The pantry was surprisingly large, a narrow ten-foot space lined with three tiers of shelving. He started to climb them to see what was on the top shelf, but his father shut him down with a hand on his shoulder. “Nope. Come on, let’s go look at the bedrooms.”
The stairs were steep and creaked as if they were made of popsicle sticks, groaning and cracking and thumping.
1168’s second story seemed somehow more spacious than the first. As soon as they stepped up onto the upper landing, a narrow T-shaped hallway led some twenty or thirty feet toward a window at the bottom of the T, flanked by a pair of doors. The right one opened onto the master bedroom, unfurnished, with a walk-in closet that stank of mothballs. The left went into a bathroom, with a claw-foot bathtub and a porcelain sink.
The bathroom’s wainscoting was done in rose-pink and teal tiles, but halfway up the walls and ceiling became painted drywall. Leon touched it. “I just realized—this is gonna be hard to keep mildew out of. I am diggin’ this pink, though.”
Wayne screwed up his face. A big hoop of metal was bracketed to the ceiling, and a diaphanous plastic curtain hung into the tub. “What kind of bathtub has feet?”
Back in the hallway, he stood dejectedly with his hands in his pockets. “Where’s my bedroom?”
“Ah.” Leon searched the hallway, even looking out the window and peering into the master suite again. “Thought I forgot something. I guess you’ll have to sleep in the garage, chief.”
Wayne’s heart sank. “You’re full of crap.”
His father rubbed his goatee, then thrust a finger into the air and hustled away as if he’d suddenly remembered something. “One last place we haven’t checked. There’s a closet out here on the landing you can sleep in, if you can fit.”
“A closet?”
“Yeah, like Harry Potter.”
“Harry Potter lived under the stairs.” Wayne followed him in a daze back out to the end of the landing, then traced the banister down to a window that cast out onto the back of the house. From here, he could see a rickety tool shed and a huge backyard.
Next to the window was a door, which Leon opened to reveal a set of stairs leading up into soft sunlight and around a spiral, climbing out of sight.
Leon shrugged. “After you.”
Wayne ascended them, hitching his knees high, almost clambering up them on all fours. The stairs spiraled once and a half, opening onto a small room inside a dome of windows that made him think of the belfry in a church steeple. The room wasn’t a perfect circle but an octagon, with eight walls.
The ceiling was just high enough his father didn’t have to stoop, but he stood there with his fingertips pressed against it as if he were trying to hold it up.
“It’s called a cupola,” said Leon. “What you think?”
The “cupola” seemed small, but as Wayne went from window to window assessing the view, the room proved to be larger than he initially gave it credit for. Plenty of room for his bed, and each of the four windows stood atop a small nook bench that folded open to reveal storage space. He climbed onto one of them to look out the window.
Across the street, a long gravel drive snaked between a trailer park and a series of cottages, climbing a hill to a building that looked like pictures he’d seen of the Alamo. Mud-pink walls topped with Gothic wrought-iron teeth, brown clay roofing tiles. A man drove a riding lawn mower up the hill out front, cropping dull green grass.
“I like it,” said Wayne. To the south, he could see the tops of buildings in distant Blackfield, rising over the trees behind the house.
“Then welcome to your new Batcave, Master Wayne.”
“The Batcave is underground.”
Leon continued his Atlas impression, hands against the ceiling. “Work with me, here. I’m old and out of touch.”
“Batman’s older than you are.”
“Keep it up and I’ll make you sleep in the garage anyway!”
* * *
As the afternoon wore on, Wayne and his father managed to get most of the boxes and furniture into the house, with the exclusion of the sofa and dining-room table. The most troublesome items by far were Wayne’s mattress and box spring, which Leon could handle well enough by himself (with Wayne pushing helpfully from behind) until they got into the spiral stairway to the cupola. That became an arduous trial of swearing, sweating, and banging around in the stuffy space that left them flustered and irritated with each other.
To get the dining-room table in, they carried the table up onto the front porch, then turned it on end like a giant coin and rolled it through the house. Leon ushered Wayne in ahead of the table, confusing him at first, but when his father started humming the Indiana Jones theme and pretending the table was the boulder from Raiders of the Lost Ark, he couldn’t help but run away from it in slow motion.
As they worked, the gray cat maintained its distance, sitting on the porch railing down by the swing, watching them bustle boxes into the house. A curious intelligence glimmered in the animal’s brilliant honey eyes, as if it were sizing them up.
“You could help, you know,” said Leon.
The cat answered him with a raspy chirp.
Their steel-blue Subaru already sat in the gravel driveway, in front of the U-Haul; Leon had brought it down before the move. They took a break to run to town in the car for hamburgers at Wendy’s, and they came back to failing light as the evening came over the trees to the east.
“Hate to bug anybody this late. These rednecks givin’ me weird looks,” said Leon, unlocking and opening the U-Haul. “But I’d really like to get this truck back as soon as possible. Guess we’ll finish tomorrow afternoon.”
“Hey,” said a husky voice behind them.
A chubby white kid with brush-cut hair was making his way up the driveway, his hands buried in his hoodie’s pockets. He seemed to be about Wayne’s age, if several inches taller. Wayne thought he looked like Pugsley Addams gone mainstream, or maybe the older brother from Home Alone.
“Hey,” said Leon.
As if this were the cat’s cue to vamoose, it leapt off the railing and trotted across the yard toward the trailer park on the other side of the highway.
Pugsley’s voice was the high-pitched rasp of a boy accustomed to shouting. “You guys movin’ in?”
“Yep.”
“Cool.”
A weird silence settled over them. “Nice to meet you,” Leon offered, smiling. “Anything we can help you with?”
Pugsley seemed to snap out of a trance. “Oh! I, uhh, wanted to say hi, and … maybe see
if you needed any help. But it looks like you’re pretty much finished.” He stepped forward and held out a stubby pink hand. “I’m Pete.” Pointing across the street at the trailer park, he added, “Pete Maynard. I live over there. With my mom. I go to school over in Blackfield. Fifth grade.”
Leon visibly relaxed, shaking the offered hand. “Nice to meet you, Pete. Leon Parkin. This here’s my son Wayne.”
Pugsley-Pete shook Wayne’s hand and said to his father, “Welcome to Slade.”
Leon stuck his hands in his pockets. “Well. I reckon since we got you here, you can help if you want.”
3
With much grunting and swearing, the three of them got the sofa down out of the U-Haul, up the front stairs, and into the den. To get it out of the foyer and through the den door, they had to turn it sideways and angle the armrests around the doorframe. Wayne mashed a finger and Leon got pinned against the wall, but they finally managed it.
Once they’d gotten it into the room, screwed the feet back onto the bottom of it, and pushed it against the back wall, the boys sat on it to rest. “So what are you guys doin’ out here?” asked Pete, watching Wayne buff his glasses with his shirt. “Don’t think I know anybody that dresses up to go to work.”
Leon had taken off his jacket and loosened his tie. “I took a teaching position at Blackfield High School.”
“Yeah?”
“Gonna teach literature.”
“Cool. Maybe I’ll be in your class one day. I like to read.”
“Maybe. That’s good. More kids your age should read. Hey, you had dinner?” Leon took the tie off. “I got us ice cream for when we got done with everything.”
“No,” said Pete, “but I don’t eat dinner most days.”
Wayne’s head tilted. “Why not?”
“Just … not really hungry. My mom says I eat like a bird.”
He couldn’t imagine that. “Birds eat their own body weight in food every day. That’s what I heard, anyway.” Pete’s hoodie was straining at the sides under his love handles. The slope-shouldered boy was taller than the short, gangly Wayne by several inches and outweighed him by a dozen pounds.
The ice began to settle again.
Wayne broke it. “You like Call of Duty?”
Pete rubbed his forehead. “I don’t know. Guess it depends on which one you’re talkin’ about. Only got the first one for the Xbox. I haven’t, uhh—haven’t really played any of the new ones.”
“Sounds like you guys have your evening figured out,” said Leon, standing up. “Pete, does your mom know you’re over here?”
“Oh yeah. Yeah—she’s cool.”
Leon rolled up his tie like a giant tongue, giving Pete the teacher stink-eye. “That sounds suspiciously like a no.”
“She knows I came over here. She don’t really care when I come back, as long as she knows where I went and I stay out of trouble.” Pete sounded noncommittal, lax. Wayne got the feeling he was accustomed to being autonomous. “And I’m not like my dad. I stay out of trouble.” He jerked up straight all of a sudden and put up his hands as if to ward off a blow. “Oh, I can head out of here if you guys—”
“Oh no, no-no, you’re fine, man.” Leon picked up his suit jacket and beat the dust out of it, laying it over his arm like a sommelier with a towel. “You look like a good kid to me. And Wayne needs friends. He’s the FNG. The F-in’ New Guy, remember?”
Pete smirked, but Wayne gave his father the side-eye.
“So yeah, hell. Hang out, by all means, this creepy-ass house is gonna need some cheerin’ up anyway. Me and him, we can’t fill it up all by ourselves. We’re from Chicago, we’re not used to this kind of quiet, you know?”
“Okay,” said Pete, in obvious gratitude.
Leon looked pointedly at Wayne. “Why don’t you head upstairs and start on putting your clothes up and make your bed? When you get done, feel free to play video games to your heart’s content. Once you start school and start getting homework, your downtime is gonna be at a real premium.”
Wayne feigned belligerence. “Do I gotta?”
“How are you gonna sleep in a bed if you ain’t made it? At least make the bed. We’ll worry about unpacking when that’s out of the way.”
The two boys got up and left, creaking and crackling up the stairs to the second landing. They sounded like two colonial Redcoats marching across bubble wrap. “I can hook up the TV and PlayStation while you make your bed and stuff, if you want,” offered Pete.
“You got a deal.”
Wayne led his new friend across the landing. When he opened the closet door to reveal the steep second set of stairs, Pete seemed impressed, if confused. “Wait, your dad’s got you in the tower?”
“Yeah. It’s the only other bedroom in the house. If you can call it a bedroom.” They started up the almost ladderlike stairs. “Why? What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothin’, man, nothin’. I think it’s freakin’ awesome. I’m surprised, is all.”
With the dressers and the bed in it, the cupola was a lot less spacious. Wayne and Pete had just enough room to sit on the floor between the bed and the television, a modest flatscreen set up on one of the windowsills. There weren’t any power outlets in the cupola, so his father had bought a dropcord on their dinner trip and run it up from an outlet on the landing. The cord draped down the stairs for now, but they’d use nails to pin it out of the way later.
A lamp was plugged into it. Wayne turned it on.
To get them out of the way, he had already pinned up his posters on the narrow strips of wall between each of the cupola’s windows.
One of them was a movie poster for a Friday the 13th movie, with a full-body shot of the hockey-masked Jason Voorhees coming at you with a machete. Another depicted the cast of the TV show The Walking Dead, with the character Rick standing on top of a school bus aiming his giant revolver. Romero’s original black-and-white Night of the Living Dead. The popular zombie game Left 4 Dead 2.
The mattress was naked and had four cardboard boxes on it. Wayne opened a box and found it full of clothes. The next one had the video games in it: a PlayStation 3, a tangle of wires, and a handful of disc cases. “Here we are.”
Pete carried the box over next to the TV and went to work on untangling the adapter and video cords. Wayne opened another box to find his bedclothes.
He was on his hands and knees trying to pull the fitted sheet over a mattress-corner when something occurred to him. “Hey,” he said over his shoulder. “Uhm. Do you know if this house is … Do you know if it’s haunted?”
Pete stared at Wayne as if he hadn’t said anything. His eyes were flat in the arcane honey-glow of the lamp, but he slowly reached up and rubbed his cheek as though he had a toothache. The gesture seemed self-comforting, as if he were petting his face. Took him a full seven seconds to answer. “I don’t know. Never been in here. But some people say it is.”
“Why?”
“Well.” Pete got to his feet and pulled the TV cart out, examining the connection jacks on the back. “You really want me to tell you?”
Wayne’s curiosity was a bonfire, straining for secrets. “Are you serious? Of course I want you to tell me.” He turned over and flopped down on his butt at the edge of the bed, the sheets forgotten. “Let me guess—what is it, there’s an Indian burial ground under the house? ‘They never moved the bodies! They never moved the bodies!’”
“No, there’s—”
“A serial killer used to live here?” The more he talked, the more animated he became. He was clenching his fists in anticipation. “And he buried his victims in the basement?” Made him wonder if they even had a basement, and what it looked like. He made a mental note to go check in the morning.
“No, dude, somebody died in this house.”
“Is that all? Man, tch … people die in houses all the time. Somebody died in the apartment next to ours back in Chicago. If people dying in a place made it haunted, nobody would be able to go into a hospital because of
all the ghosts.”
Pete grinned a creepy grin. “Why do you think hospitals freak people out so much?”
Wayne deadpanned at him and went back to making his bed.
“Anyway, this one, people say she was a witch.”
“A witch.” Wayne was incredulous. “You’re shitting me.”
Both boys looked down the stairwell to listen for Mr. Parkin, then Pete continued. “No shittin’.” He sat down on one of the thin-cushioned windowsill seats. “The cops and the newspaper said it was an accident at the time, but I hear she was pushed down the stairs by her husband.”
“A witch with a husband?”
Pete shrugged.
Wayne made a face. “I didn’t even know witches could have husbands. Anyway, maybe it was an accident. Maybe he didn’t mean to push her. I can’t believe Dad didn’t tell me about this.”
“I don’t know,” said Pete, going back to untangling the controller cables. “My mom says he used to beat her and her daughter.”
“So what happened to the husband?”
“I heard he died a few months later in prison.”
“What killed him?”
“Nobody knows. I heard it looked like tubber—ta-bulkyer—”
“Tuberculosis?” Wayne asked helpfully.
“Yeah, that. But they never could find anything. What’s this?” Pete held up the tangle of cords so he could see underneath them. He laid the tangle down on the floor and reached into the box, lifting out a Nike shoebox. Wayne abandoned what he was doing and politely took the shoebox, putting it on the bed.
“It’s, ahh … just some old stuff.”
Inside was a pile of photographs, a bottle of perfume, a gold ring with a simple ball-chain through it, the kind of necklace that usually has dog tags on it. Wayne took out the ring and reverently lowered the chain around his neck, letting the wedding band rest on his chest.
