“You won’t end up like Rusty, I promise,” Cameron said. “I’ll get you out of this.”
Billy looked up at him, and Cameron could see that he believed. The kid stood up and waited for the next instruction. Wordless, Cameron rose and waved him to follow.
They distanced themselves from the sound of the dog. Cameron was looking for the place that he’d told none of the other boys about, the place he’d selfishly kept only for himself. He found it along the thicket that edged the sea cliff. It was marked by a single stone on the ground next to the wild hedge, almost imperceptible to the eye. But Cameron knew what to look for. This place had been his salvation during many a game.
He pulled aside a blind of brush that he’d constructed long ago, and he waved Billy into the tunnel it revealed. The kid crawled through and Cameron after him. They came out on the far side of the high wall of brush. A dozen feet to the west, the land dropped away. Cameron crawled to the cliff edge and signaled Billy to come to his side.
Below them, the sea had retreated from the talus at the foot of the long drop. Fifty yards of sand lay between the cliff and the reach of the waves.
“You can climb down,” Cameron said. “There are footholds and handholds all the way. You just have to be careful. Promise me you’ll be careful.”
“Aren’t you coming?”
Cameron shook his head. “When you get to the beach, go south.” Cameron pointed so Billy would know the direction. “There’s a town that way. I don’t know how far, but if you keep going, you’ll find it. Ask someone for help.”
“What about you?”
“I have to stay.”
“Come with me, please. I don’t want to go alone.”
“You always go alone,” Cameron said. “And I always stay.”
“I don’t understand.”
“That’s because you’re not part of the end of tonight’s game. You never are. You get away, Billy. You always get away.”
The dog howled, the baying much nearer.
“Go,” Cameron said.
“Please come with me.”
“Go,” Cameron ordered, so sternly that Billy flinched.
The kid looked down at the long, difficult climb ahead of him.
“Don’t worry,” Cameron said. “You make it. You always do.”
Billy eased himself over the side and began slowly to work his way down the face of the rock. Cameron watched for a minute—not to be sure; he was always that—but to hold for a moment longer on the image of the kid he loved, the kid who got away.
“Don’t forget me,” he whispered. “Don’t ever forget me.”
Then he crawled back through the tunnel in the brush and drew the blind closed behind him so that it was nearly impossible to see where he’d been. He stood a moment, imagining Billy free, thinking of the times he could have escaped himself. But he’d always been so sure of his ability to win the game and so trapped by the pleasures that were his each time he did.
He heard the baying of the hound, which seemed to be almost upon him. He turned and ran in the opposite direction.
Almost immediately, he found himself coming around a blind corner and there was the great house again, with Sister Hepzibah on the steps. This time, he didn’t spin and run. He walked toward her, and as he came, she seemed to sense his presence and turned to him.
“Cameron?” She sounded surprised. And then she sounded angry. “Where’s the other one?”
“I ditched him,” Cameron said.
At his back, a harsh voice spoke. “You were supposed to teach him the game.”
Cameron didn’t have to turn around to know that it was Brother Ezekiel who’d spoken. And he could hear the pant and the slobber of the hound the man held on a long leash.
“We’ll find him,” Brother Daniel said. “He’s new. He doesn’t understand a thing.”
“Is that true, Cameron?” Sister Hepzibah asked, with seductive slyness. Her face was blue in the light, like the ice that sometimes formed on the windows of the great house on very cold winter nights.
“The kid’s an idiot,” Cameron said. “He’s out there running in circles.”
“Why aren’t you out there, too?” Brother Daniel spoke at his back, so near to him that Cameron could smell the brandy on his breath. Brother Daniel always drank a snifter of brandy before the game began.
“I thought I heard ‘Olly oxen free.’”
“Oh, Cameron,” Sister Hepzibah said. “That’s such a shame. I’m going to miss you.”
“But,” Brother Daniel said, grabbing both of Cameron’s arms in his strong grip, “we’re going to have such a good time before you go.”
Cameron looked into Sister Hepzibah’s dark eyes, saw the hunger there and knew exactly how the game that night would end. He couldn’t help screaming. Screaming long and loud and desperately. Screams that at a distance might have sounded like the cry of an exotic bird in a jungle movie.
• • •
“What was that?”
It was dusk, and the real estate agent replied, “The night birds, that’s all.”
“Night birds?” The husband half of the couple looked skeptical. “I’ve never heard a bird like that.”
“Relax, Dickie,” the wife half said. “This isn’t Manhattan. I’m sure they have lots of wildlife out here that we’ll have to get used to.”
“Isolated as the house is, the grounds are frequently visited by many of our native animals,” the agent told them with a reassuring smile. “We’ve had reports of deer and fox and all kinds of birds. If you’re careful and stand at the edge of the cliff, you can see seals on the beach and even whales sometimes out in the water.”
“Whales?” the wife said with a broad grin. “Oh, Dickie, did you hear that? Whales.”
“Now, shall we look at the kitchen?” the agent suggested. She was in a hurry. She wanted to finish showing the property before the evening got any darker. She hated scheduling a showing this late, but sometimes circumstances demanded. The couple from New York seemed eager to buy and had told her that they were pressed for time and needed to see the house right away.
She led them back through the broad dining room, which the development company had spent a fortune restoring to its former glory, and then passed into the kitchen.
The wife caught her breath. “It’s magnificent. Simply magnificent. Oh, Dickie, think of the parties that could be served from here.”
The kitchen was lit by the soft blue glow of evening sifting in through the big windows. Although the agent should probably have flipped the switch to illuminate the room more fully, she liked the effect of this muted lighting.
Dickie said, “It’s nice. The whole damn place is nice.” He leveled a cool eye on the agent. “Why is it such a bargain?”
“The isolation,” the agent replied with practiced aplomb. “Not everyone is eager to have this kind of peace and quiet.”
“This is just what we’ve been looking for,” the wife told her with a broad smile.
In the next moment, however, another series of cries came from somewhere far beyond the kitchen windows.
Dickie was big and, so far, had remained rather cool in the face of the agent’s enthusiasm for the house. But now a look of concern cracked his stone-faced demeanor. “That’s no bird. That’s someone in pain. Great pain.”
His wife, who’d gushed at every turn in the great house, was clearly affected, too. Her eyes grew big, huge whites in the gloom of the evening.
“What’s the story?” Dickie demanded. “The straight dope now. Why’s this place listed so cheap?”
Full disclosure dictated that the agent, at some point, tell them the truth. She would have preferred to wait until they were in her office, where the familiar and mundane confines might make her story sound less terrible. But they’d asked, here in the fading twilight, and b
ecause she was herself eager to quit the property before it got much darker, she took a deep breath and began.
“The house, as I told you, was built in the late eighteen hundreds by Cyrus Brigham, who’d made a fortune outfitting Forty-Niners in the gold rush. He was, by all accounts, a sternly religious man and, apparently, a cruel one. Children came to him late in life, and he raised them in the isolation of this property. There were rumors of, well, mistreatment. What today we would call child abuse, I suppose. At any rate, when Brigham passed away, his three children inherited the property. There were two boys and a girl. None of them ever married, but as the Brigham fortune waned, the result of bad investments by the old man near the end of his life, the children were forced to seek other means of income. They turned the house into an orphanage for boys.
“This was about the time of the Great Depression. Families had migrated west from the Dust Bowl, looking for work that never materialized. They were desperate. They often simply broke apart, leaving children abandoned. The authorities of the day were only too eager to send some of these parentless boys here. As I understand it, the care that the Brighams provided wasn’t carefully monitored. I suppose it was because of the confusing times. But I also sometimes wonder if it was just that no one really wanted to acknowledge the true horror of what might be going on here. At any rate . . .”
The agent paused. She was never certain how to tell the rest of the story, the really gruesome part. In the silence as she considered, there was another outburst of screams, these much nearer and so clearly the voice of a child in terror, in pain. In the dark of the kitchen, the agent was certain that the faces of Dickie and his wife paled. She hurried on with the story.
“Apparently, the Brighams played a game with the boys. They called it Hide and Seek. But a more appropriate name might have been Hunted and Hunter. They sent the boys out into the grounds to hide, and then, using a bloodhound, they tracked the children. Those who hid successfully were rewarded. Those who were caught—”
The couple waited, and the wife reached out and took her husband’s hand as if she needed his strength to bear what was about to follow.
“Well, when the authorities finally came to check on things, they found devices in the barn that could have come directly from the Inquisition.”
“You don’t mean . . .” Dickie’s wife couldn’t say it.
The agent nodded. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
“What made the authorities come here?” Dickie asked.
“One boy finally escaped. He made his way to town and told about the Brighams and the game. No one could ignore it then. The brothers and sister were arrested and tried. The brothers were hanged, but the sister spent the remainder of her life in a secure institution for the criminally insane. The remaining boys here were all placed in legitimate facilities.”
Another series of cries broke the quiet of the deepening evening, whose dark blue had begun to feel actually painful to the agent.
“Not birds,” Dickie said. He was a man who looked practical and sound, the last to believe in such things, yet he said, “Ghosts. That’s why this place is so cheap. It’s haunted.”
Normally the agent might have argued, might still have tried for the sale, but she was eager to be quit of the place, away from the evil that was so thick in the air she felt she was actually breathing it.
“Fine,” she said. “Call it haunted. I suppose you’re not interested.”
“On the contrary,” the man said. “This is just the kind of place we’ve been looking for. We’ll take it.”
He and his wife exchanged smiles that made the agent’s blood run cold.
“It’s perfect, Dickie,” the wife purred. “Absolutely perfect.” She faced the agent, who saw in the woman’s eyes a darkness that was like a deep well, a bottomless hunger. “Shall we come to your office tomorrow? The earlier the better. I’m so eager to move in.”
The agent led them from the house, locked the front door behind her, and walked them to their sports car, a sleek little thing, black as midnight. They shook hands, and she felt, as she hadn’t when she’d first greeted them, a sense of dread. She stood a moment, watching them leave. The car headed down the long drive east toward the rising full moon and finally crawled from sight like a bug into a basement drain.
Over the years, she’d shown the property dozens of times, with no success. Despite the recent renovation, the evil in this place was obvious, its presence felt in every room. Most prospects left without seeing the entire house; some even refused to enter it. When they departed, they carried with them a chill that no fire could warm, this because they were decent people, repelled by the grotesque energy that abided here. Something monstrous existed in this place, something born of Cyrus Brigham, perhaps, and passed to his offspring. Or maybe it had always been there, waiting for . . . For what? she wondered.
At her back, another scream rose up.
She’d long ago stopped thinking of them as the cries of some exotic night bird. She knew what those screams truly were. This house had made her believe absolutely in ghosts. She wasn’t a particularly religious person, but a little prayer came to her lips, a prayer for the souls of the boys who’d died there and whose spirits, night after night, were doomed, God knew why, to replay the suffering. She wondered if maybe the evil sustained itself in that way, with the remembrance of pain, like a jackal gnawing on a meatless bone.
Then she recalled the eagerness of the couple to buy this cursed, isolated place and recalled, too, the hunger she’d seen in the woman’s eyes. With a horrible twisting of everything in her that was good, she had a terrible realization. She believed she understood what it was that the house and the grounds had been waiting for all these years, maybe even anticipating: the arrival, one day, of someone who would again feed with real flesh and blood the appetite of the evil there.
For a long, morally agonizing moment, she considered the consequences of transferring the property to anyone actually drawn to it.
But in the next moment a more rational voice spoke to her, one that came from another part of her and out of another kind of evil, perhaps, and the voice said, It’s a sale. And just think of the size of the commission.
She got into her car and drove away, doing her best to leave her conscience behind.
STEPPING INTO THE DEAD ZONE
JAN BURKE
Jan Burke is the author of The Messenger, a supernatural thriller, and a dozen crime novels, which include Bones and Disturbance. Her books and stories have won the Edgar®, the Agatha, and other awards.
Our changing ideas about childhood, a chilling poem by Goethe (written before he penned Faust), and memories of both the fun and misery of grade-school dodgeball are among the inspirations for “Stepping into the Dead Zone.”
They both knew this much: when you’re a military brat, you learn how to survive entry into that most hostile of all territories—a new school.
On Monday, October 22, 1962, Tommy Montrose was one of two new kids in his sixth-grade class at Grant Elementary. The other one was his best friend, Mike Wilshire. Mike’s dad had been transferred here, too. Their dads had arrived at the nearby base before their families did, and both had already shipped out. It made Tommy wonder why they had to move, if his dad wasn’t going to be here anyway, but he didn’t say so. No use arguing with his mom.
The teacher was nice. She didn’t make too big a deal out of introducing them to the class, and best of all, she let them sit next to each other. As usually happened in a new school, the other kids were rubbernecking. Like Tommy and Mike were here from the moon instead of Georgia.
Recess brought the first challenge, which was also the way it usually happened.
A skinny blond kid was walking toward them.
“Rule Number One,” Mike murmured.
Rule Number One of being new was that you never accepted the friendship of the fir
st kid to come up to you. That kid was almost always the weirdest kid in the class, so desperate for a friend that he hoped he could fool you into spending time with him before you figured out that his low standing was contagious.
So when Tommy saw Anton Grünwald coming toward them, Tommy pretended he was just this side of deaf, dumb, and blind. Walked right past Anton and his extended hand and his “Hi, I’m—”
Because Anton had loser written all over him. On top of being smaller than all the other kids, and a little too beautiful, he was super pale, wore glasses, and spoke with an accent. A German accent. Dressed like he thought it was 1955. And he smelled strange. Not stinky, just not right. Kind of like he’d sprayed himself with two types of cologne that didn’t mix.
So on that first morning they breezed past Anton—a boy they soon learned some of the other children called “the Kraut”—and looked straight ahead, relaxed, in charge, not anxious. A long time ago, Mike had advised him that you have to treat other kids as if you are walking past a pack of stray dogs. Aloof works best at first, provided you keep the temperature cool, not cold. And being good at games helped.
It didn’t take long before they were demonstrating how good they were at tetherball and four square. They both held back a little, but that was on account of Rule Number Two: don’t dethrone the schoolyard king, at least not immediately. So the guy Tommy had pegged as recess royalty, Ricky Gibson, was allowed to continue his reign. It didn’t take long to figure out that Ricky was a benevolent leader—good-natured, not the class bully. So they didn’t win games against him. He soon looked upon them with approval. If Mike decided to mutter a warning to Tommy when he saw him watching Anton—who was making a solitary trip around the inside of the far fence, not looking up, kicking softly at dirt clods—that was Mike’s problem. Tommy told Mike he was trying to work on Rule Number Three, but Mike knew that wasn’t true.
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