The Forgiving

by Wesley McCraw

  “We’re no threat to you.”

  “You can’t keep us in here,” Grip said.

  “I protect my own! Fifty.”

  Isabel's eyes teared up in frustration. “You can’t do this.”

  “Forty-five.”

  “You crazy bitch!” Howard said.

  “Forty.”

  “We’re going! Don’t shoot!” Howard led the way as they jogged across the gravel driveway, around the fountain, and to the front of the house.

  From up on the veranda, they looked back, and the Puritan woman was still standing there behind the gate. She raised her gun back up to her shoulder and aimed.

  “Twenty!” she shouted. “Don’t think I can’t hit you from here!”

  The threesome went inside, having no other choice.

  “Well, that was insane,” Grip said, his heart pounding. “I can’t believe this. How long do you think she’ll wait out there?”

  A keening moan went through the house and the lights flickered. The three looked up the stairs at the red doors. Supposedly, a flashlight was up there.

  Grip hugged himself. “You feel that right?”

  “It’s just a draft,” Howard said. “It’s probably why people think this place is haunted. These old houses—”

  “I know, but you're freaked, right?”

  “Yeah, I'm freaked,” Howard said. “That woman. She seemed like some kind of fanatic.”

  Isabel sniffed her runny nose. “I think I might have wet myself.”

  Grip put a hand to his chest; his heart still pounded. “At least I’m not the only one.”

  Isabel shifted her weight back and forth. “No, I really need to pee.”

  Howard noticed her prance. “Seriously?”

  “I'll be quick. It'll only take a second.”

  ◆◆◆

  Isabel had the men wait outside the restroom and, in a stall, peed with great relief into a rust-stained toilet. Despite the rust, the prohibition era restroom seemed clean enough and smelled like freshly tilled earth. She pictured the layout of the house. The bathroom was in the northeast corner, not far from the greenhouse that ran along the north side of the house.

  A rifle! That woman outside had aimed a rifle at them! Isabel had never seen a gun pointed at a person in real life before. And what was the psychopath wearing? She resembled a Puritan from The Scarlet Letter or a handmaid from The Handmaid’s Tale.

  Isabel’s panties were damp from pee, but not enough to remove them. They would dry in a bit.

  She prayed: “Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done . . .”

  The daylight that shined through the beveled exterior windows was fading fast.

  ◆◆◆

  Grip poured a shot of brandy at the bar. True, there was a crazy woman outside, and they were all trapped, but right now, there was just the shot. He knocked the bar top with his knuckles.

  Like knocking on a window to the past, he thought. The house’s history occurred to him in a quick succession: first the Johns of the parlor house, then the mentally ill and the violently insane of the asylum, and then, finally, the practitioners of the cult church. The Cross of the Lamb still inhabited the chapel. Lingered here. Echoed here. Its pastor spoke here of sin and sacrifice, and Grip imagined it as Howard’s deep and authoritative voice. Grip loved Howard’s voice. It was a turn-on. Perhaps the transition from whorehouse to insane asylum to church had been a seamless one. Maybe there had been no dividing lines.

  Grip felt alone, as if he'd sunk to the ocean's inky bottom. He held on to the bar to steady himself. The wind had stopped. That’s why he felt isolated, he realized: the silence.

  “Grip.” Howard stood next to him, had been standing next to him the whole time.

  Grip wanted the comfort of Howard's arms but instead took comfort in the liquor. “Just to calm my nerves.” Grip downed his shot. His medication. His communion.

  ◆◆◆

  With a prayer passing through her lips, there was less room for fear. “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.”

  She reached and found the toilet paper holder empty. She bent down, still on the cold seat, and looked under the partition into the next stall.

  In the next stall on the tile floor was a toilet paper roll still wrapped in its brown paper.

  Without getting off the toilet, she reached under the partition, blind to where she was reaching.

  “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us—”

  ◆◆◆

  The shot glass slammed down with a clack on the bar. Grip poured another. He hated being afraid. He wanted to think about anything but the woman outside. Back in the eighteen hundreds, he'd have been a patron of the parlor house. He imagined himself as a mountain man, lined up with the other bearded men at the bar as much for the male camaraderie as for the ladies soon bought with coin. Dressed in ragged cloth and animal skins, all the men would smell like wet dog or worse.

  Even before the image fully formed, his thoughts moved forward in time. The missionaries had cleaned up the menfolk, the men now dressed in their Sunday best: bolo ties and spit-polished boots. “These girls French kiss,” Grip would say. “My wife just isn’t that kind of lady.” The other men would nod in sad appreciation and raise their glasses.

  But now he was an asylum patron amongst the insane. “I can’t leave yet,” he'd insist to an orderly dressed in hospital scrubs. “One more shock treatment and my homosexual tendencies could be a thing of the past.”

  “You might as well just chug from the bottle,” Howard said sarcastically, bringing Grip back to the present.

  Grip took a short chug from the bottle.

  “Grip!”

  “What? You told me to.”

  “I think the Cross of the Lamb used that for communion.”

  “It’s brandy.”

  “Brandy is used for communion. It’s made from grapes.”

  Crashing glass startled the two men.

  The mirror had fallen off the mantel. How long had it hung there, only to fall just now?

  Isabel exited the ladies room. “What was that?” She looked around as she wiped her hands on her slacks.

  “It wasn't us,” Grip said, guilt-ridden over his drinking.

  Isabel walked over to the broken mirror on the floor. The shards stayed mostly within the border of the frame. The backside of the mirror was just as reflective as the front, and as she looked down into the floor, her eyes looked back up at her. A dark spirit from the past no longer seemed so out of the question. A demon had followed her from the exorcism room below her class at Lumen Christi. It had been watching her for weeks, biding its time. Maybe demons and ghosts were real, and it was arrogant to think otherwise.

  While she was occupied, Grip downed the shot. He couldn’t un-pour it. Howard gave a disapproving look that he failed to notice, too distracted by the thought of the red doors waiting at the top of the stairs.

  10

  Up the Stairs

  Night had fallen.

  The threesome stood at the bottom of the entry room stairs. Around them, the sounds of the house caught their words before they spoke. Presumably, a draft jingled the cut-glass chandelier hanging above the staircase, but now the cause seemed like it could be anything. Ghosts. Demons. Psychic energy.

  Isabel looked through the coatroom and down the front hall, which led all the way around to the dingy workroom and the circuit breaker. They could wait in the workroom for Ophelia; they could turn the power on if it went out again. But the thought of descending into that lower hall made her breath catch and her skin crawl. The place was evil. She didn’t even want to stay in the entry room because the lower hall was just around that corner in the distance, lurking out of sight.

  Moans emanated from the chapel behind her. The lights flickered and threatened total darkness. A skittering sound flittered back and forth, though quiet enough that it could have been a memory.


  “This place sounds so creepy,” she said. “It’s like we’re on a creaking ghost ship or something. You feel that?”

  Having broken the tension by speaking, she was finally able to move and went to lock the front door. There wasn’t a deadbolt or a latch; the door couldn’t be locked without a key. She peered through the trefoil window. The Puritan woman still stood outside the gate under the light of the street lamp with her rifle at her side. The key to the gate was right there behind the tree. The crazy woman could just come in if she wanted.

  Howard put his hand on one of the newel posts, on the head of a lamb. “Come on. We need to get the flashlight while the power is still on.”

  Going upstairs was a bad idea, and getting a flashlight seemed to Isabel like an exceedingly poor motivation. Nothing seemed like a good idea, though, and she refused to just stand around while her fear kept intensifying.

  Grip would follow their lead. He'd do whatever they thought best.

  So without argument, the three climbed the stairs, dreading what they would find behind the red doors, yet climbing anyway. The steps creaked underfoot as if in pain.

  As Grip climbed, clinging to the banister, he looked to the ceiling. The arches, spikes, and little crosses of the Gothic crown molding reached out like fingers. He looked back over his shoulder down to the first floor. Blood rushed to his head. The dizziness felt like falling.

  Isabel found that the knobs of the red doors didn’t turn. Liquid waits beyond these doors, she thought. Which was crazy and strange, like a thought from someone else. The doors were a floodgate. “HELP ME” had been written in blood. All the upper story windows were barred. Someone or something is locked behind these doors. What if the prisoner asking for help was guilty of horrific acts? What if the prisoner wasn’t alone?

  “You still have the key?” Howard asked.

  He and Grip watched expectantly, and it didn’t occur to her that she had a choice. Standing on the stairs (how strange that there wasn't a landing), she put the key into the lock. The key turned. The lock rotated and aligned.

  To her great relief, the doors gave slightly but didn't open. “Something’s wrong.” Thank God they won’t open, she thought.

  “Let me.” Howard stepped up. “Get back.”

  She backed down a few steps. Don’t! she thought. Something horrible will happen. We shouldn’t be doing this. “Be careful,” she said aloud, not wanting to sound scared.

  The door didn't open for Howard either, as though someone held it from the other side. He leaned back, using all his weight to pull. “Open, damn it!”

  The doors obeyed and broke open and swung out. Howard fell as if he had leaped backward off the steps. For a moment, there was the weightlessness of flight.

  And then Howard collided into Grip.

  Grip tried to catch him and was instead knocked off his feet. They both tumbled down the stairs, rolling and bouncing together until they landed in a heap at the bottom.

  Isabel froze. The fall reminded her of that priest tumbling down the stairs at the end of The Exorcist, but this wasn’t a movie, this was real life. “Oh God!” She ran down after them, using the banister to make sure she didn't fall too. On the hardwood floor, both men groaned. Isabel stood over them. Grip rolled off Howard.

  “Are you guys okay?” She looked back and forth between them as she brushed her hair out of her eyes.

  Grip, muddled by the impact, looked up at her concerned face. He didn't understand why she was so upset. “I’m fine,” he said from the floor. “Just going to look like a Dalmatian.” He tried to move. “Ow.”

  “You could have broken your necks!”

  “Um, guys?” Howard said, tentative. “My leg doesn't feel so hot.”

  She knelt beside him. “Let me see.” She tried to pull up his pant leg. He cringed in pain and so she stopped. “Can you take off your pants?”

  The pain throbbed with his pulse. It felt like his leg would explode. Taking off his pants was out of the question. With his eyes shut tight, he said, “Just cut the pant leg.”

  “With what?”

  He shifted his weight, pain bringing tears, and pulled the occult knife out of his cargo pocket.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “eBay.”

  “How much?”

  “Five hundred.”

  “Dollars?!” She punched his shoulder.

  “Ow!”

  “We're saving for a house!” She grabbed the knife and sliced his pant leg, revealing his red and swollen shin.

  “Okay,” Grip said to calm himself. “I was expecting protruding bone or something. You probably just bruised it.”

  “Try moving your foot.”

  Howard's shoe wiggled slightly. He hissed, sucking air between his closed teeth. “Damn that smarts!”

  Isabel knew it was worse than a bruise. “You might’ve cracked the bone or something.”

  “Fuck, man!” Grip said. “What if the lights go out again? We’re so screwed!”

  “You can still get the flashlight,” Howard looked to the open doors at the top of the stairs. A hallway ran perpendicular to the entry room, running east to west.

  “Not without you!” Grip protested. “We’re not leaving you to fend for yourself now that you’re hurt!”

  “We’ve already wasted enough time.” Howard craned his neck to look up the stairs. “Hello! Anyone up there?”

  There was no response.

  “Real reassuring,” Grip said.

  Isabel felt like a scared child. Why would God let this happen? Outside, there was a crazy woman with a gun, threatening to shoot them if they tried to leave. But bad things happened to good people, Isabel reminded herself, gathering her wits. This wasn’t God’s fault. They needed to be smart. “We’re not leaving you here by yourself.”

  “I'll be fine, just hurry,” Howard said while they helped him into a sitting position.

  “We're not sep-ar-ating.” Grip hoped no one else noticed he was starting to slur his words. I’m finally drunk, great, perfect! He pounded his fist against the floor.

  “So we're just going to wait here?” Howard said. “We don't even know if Ophelia is coming back.”

  “We don’t know what’s up there!” Grip said.

  “Whatever’s up there, the doors are already open,” Howard pointed out. “It isn’t any safer staying here.”

  “We’ll lock the doors back up,” Isabel countered.

  Howard shook his head. “If the lights go out—” The lights flickered as if on cue.

  “Then we’re taking you with us,” she said.

  “What?” Howard couldn't imagine being hauled up the flight of stairs.

  “We’re not leaving you here by yourself,” she insisted.

  “She's right.” Grip bowed his head. “Put your arms around my neck.”

  “No.”

  “Get on my back.”

  “If we're getting the flashlight, we're doing it together,” Isabel insisted.

  “You guys, you have to go without me.”

  Isabel glanced back down the front hall and imagined a dark figure coming around the corner to kill them. She grabbed Howard's hand. “If you’re not coming with us, we're staying here.”

  “Come on, man,” Grip said. “I can do it.”

  Isabel and Howard stared at each other.

  I don’t have a choice, Howard admitted to himself. They needed to go upstairs before it was too late. “Fine. Get closer.” Howard put his arms around Grip's neck.

  Isabel tried to help, but all she could really do was watch. “Careful,” she said.

  Grip took a moment to get his balance with Howard draped over his back. Howard was a big guy, over six feet and mostly muscle. You can do this! Grip told himself. He played soccer. He worked out. Leg presses and everything. He took a few steps. It felt like carrying a bag of concrete, but he suspected it was only because the brandy was hitting so hard. He lifted his right foot onto the first step. He leaned in; any farther and his
face would touch the polished wood of the staircase. He lifted his left foot onto the first step to join his right. He repeated the process, regaining his balance after each step. This is what it must feel like to walk at the bottom of the ocean in one of those bulky suits, he thought. One of those . . . What are they called? Diving bells.

  Behind them, Isabel watched and helped make sure they didn't fall, not knowing about all the brandy Grip had downed.

  Halfway up, Howard winced and pulled in air through gritted teeth.

  Grip stopped. “You okay?”

  “Just keep going.”

  Grip wavered and then kept climbing. His legs started to quiver. Before he realized what had happened, the steps ended. They were at the top. Out of breath and exhausted, he wanted nothing more than to lie down, but he couldn’t just drop Howard and so stood there, not knowing what to do. A geometric-patterned carpet extended in both directions into darkness.

  “Isabel?” Grip said.

  Isabel quickly found a light switch. With the lights on, the hall looked like it belonged to a hotel from another century. Various generic painted landscapes and still lifes decorated the spaces between the closed doors. Isabel swallowed and nodded to herself, feeling a certain amount of relief; it was far less unsettling than the lower hall at least.

  There was a wooden chair against the wall not far from the stairs, and Grip let Howard down.

  “Can I have a sec?” Howard said. “Just to catch my breath.”

  “I did all the work!”

  Isabel shushed them. They weren’t alone up here.

  Grip leaned against the wall beside her. This was going to be their love nest, and now they feared for their lives. He let his eyes lose focus and his mind escape to the quaint real estate office. Among all the manila folders, Howard shook Ophelia's hand to seal the deal. Howard in a tux carried Isabel over the threshold into Jacobi House. She wore her mother’s wedding dress. Howard hurried back—his bow tie now undone—and came back in carrying Grip, who was in a tacky sleeveless tux to show off his tattoos.

  Grip pulled a sheet from a king sized bed and dust flew everywhere. The threesome coughed. The house would take some work.