Dread

by Jason McIntyre

  I let out a laugh. “No way,” I said.

  “Yuh, me neither. But I’m gonna see about getting the utilities switched over to the estate account and then I’ll be at Joe’s. You good?”

  “Yuh. Good,” I said. He handed me the stack of envelopes and file folders. I guessed we weren’t going to talk at all about Doc’s missing cadaver or the birthmark on some missing welder named Campbell.

  “Can you take these in for me?” Mac said, “Put ‘em on Ma’s phone table, wouldja?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “Try not to think about all that Frank Moort stuff. And everything Doc told us. Just get some rest. I’m gonna need your help with all this estate shit.”

  “Okay,” I said, getting out of the old truck with the stack of papers, file folders and envelopes. I headed up the hill of the front lawn and turned to wave back at Mac, but by the time I did, he’d already done his u-turn and was heading back towards downtown. I dropped my idle hand from the aborted goodbye and headed in.

  11.

  I didn’t have any dreams, nothing like Mac had been having. Nothing at all, in fact. I didn’t dream at all anymore. Not since those nasty nightmares after Da died back when we were kids. Teeny was home with Ma and Da when it happened but we never talked to her about it. We never talked about anything in the McLeod family.

  The story made local news, of course. And it reached the mainland. As far as I knew, it didn’t hit the national media, but it might have and we didn’t know about it. The Cove was as isolated as it gets.

  Da had gone after Ma with a hunting knife. That’s what my brother and I had pieced together, though no one had told us. He’d sliced her back open right here in this house and Sis had seen it all. She was five or six at the time, I can’t remember exactly. After Da ran out of the house, he made it all the way downtown, barefoot, and got himself shot by the former deputy. They came in here with Geiger counters and rubber gloves, thought the uranium Da had been shipping by train was what made him sick. Ma recovered over the next year and a half—with therapy and her church friends coming by a lot. She spent every day since then rolling around this big house in a wheelchair. The rail company paid out a handsome policy, though, so much that I thought she’d never have any problems. At least none financial.

  I woke in a dim room, Teeny’s old one from when she used to live here, and the one I’d been sleeping in since I got back to town. I lit up a smoke, then lay still, listening to the house tick. I wondered if twenty-odd years of mostly that is what drew Ma to do it. She took pills, according to the town’s new coroner. It didn’t take a brainiac to figure it out, he told me and Mac, though not in those words, mind you. He said they’d found a note written by her hand right there on the bed, plus the bottle with the name of the sleeping aid on them. They weren’t over-the-counter, but usually by prescription. A friend must have given them to her, the coroner told me when I asked how she’d come by prescription pills without a prescription. He looked at me like I was an idiot twice during that conversation. This was the first time.

  And the second was when I had asked about the note she left.

  “Where was the pen found?”

  “The pen?” he had said.

  “Right. She’s in a wheelchair,” I had said this to him as if it would be obvious. What I meant was, Did she write the note at the telephone table out in the living room and then wheel into the den where her bed’s been since we were kids? Or did she pop the pills, then drive herself to bed and write the note in there as she drifted? Don’t you know the answers to these basic questions?

  I can’t imagine someone setting out to do what she did and then composing her note at the table, wheeling into the den, struggling with those rods in the ceiling to get up into bed and then still going through with it. It seemed like that would offer too much time to renege on the deal. Maybe. I didn’t know how a suicidal mind processed information. More likely, I imagined, she got a glass of water, the pill bottle and got into bed like she always had. She probably had a Sears catalogue or some other hard surface under the steno note paper and wrote it as she lay propped in bed—either before or after the pills went down her throat.

  But the coroner—the new coroner—didn’t know where the pen was. His knowledge probably ended with the fact that she’d used black ink. “We found the note written by her hand,” he had said to me again. And he had left it at that.

  12.

  I stubbed out my smoke and went downstairs. It was either late afternoon or early evening. I must have slept five hours or so. I felt better, at least physically. My mind wandered over the strange yarn spun by the ol’ doc earlier on. They had been a wild set of ramblings, stuff you’d hear in a bar in some two-bit port down the coast. Some of it made a strange brand of sense. Most of it sounded like what a man his age would call hogwash.

  My headache was gone. I was hungry.

  But instead of the kitchen, I went to Ma’s telephone table in the space along the back of the living room right before the doorway to the den. The den was closed. As I mentioned, I hadn’t been in that room. Neither had Mac, I don’t think.

  A cricket chirped. And then again. I cocked my ear and waited for it. Nothing.

  I opened Ma’s drawer and found again the stack of mortgage notices wound up in the rubber band, probably one from Harlow’s produce section. Someone was just itching to get this house. Or, more likely, it was just a matter of due course, and as long as they dotted their I’s and crossed their t’s by sending out the proper notifications, they’d have it. Hell, someone from National might show up on Ma’s doorstep tomorrow first thing to collect her belongings for her and find her a hotel for the night. Certainly, Chief Birksie would be notified and he’d give us a heads-up. And certainly, the bank rep wouldn’t yet know of Ma’s premature...end.

  But maybe I gave this world too much credit. Or maybe I didn’t understand how any of it worked. Maybe I was stunted at the age of eleven by what had happened and never learned how to be a man.

  The cricket chirped again. To my right-hand side, I thought, and turned my head, waiting for it. There it was. Two more chirps. It sounded like it was coming from the den.

  I pulled out Ma’s yellow steno pad. Again, I saw the leavings of two sheets torn hastily at the coiled top. They had different tear patterns, not similar in the least, which probably meant they had been ripped off separately. I reached into Mac’s envelope from the lawyer’s and hunted for the note. The Note. I found it, saw the corner of yellow and the blue lines. I took a breath and pulled it all the way out. I read it.

  Macedonian, David and Tina, my lights of life—

  I can’t bear it any more. I see his face everywhere and I’ve decided that this will be easier for everyone. My house is in order. When you see your father, tell him I loved him. I can’t seem to go do it myself.

  Ma

  Mac was right. He always was. The note was vague. There was no instruction of how we should carry on, live our lives without her. And there was no real understanding of the final straw. Who knew? Maybe Ma had been planning it for months and years and just finally came to it, like how she would sometimes put off doing the dishes after supper but then I’d see her scrubbing them at nine, knowing she’d never sleep if she went to bed with a dirty kitchen.

  And it would be just like her to tackle this like it was next on her list of chores.

  I let out a little laugh to myself, then felt guilty for it.

  A thought struck me. Ma was organized. To a fault in some ways. Even after years of going to the same grocery store—Dovetail Cove could boast of three markets—she would always write out a list even though she’d been buying the same things for how many years. She liked being prepared, she told me. She did not like surprises.

  She gave mounds of her money away to the Zionist parish but Teeny said it was usually when the reverend came here for an afternoon of tea and prayers. Her amount of support was notorious in town and I’d bet we’d find it delicately recorded in he
r chequebooks going back fifteen years or longer. She unwittingly canvassed the congregations of every DC church to invest money in a Ponzi scheme that bilked hundreds of thousands of retirement dollars. I bet she had a notepad with dollar figures and pledges copiously recorded in there, thinking she was doing the Lord’s work. I always wondered what convinced Ma to get involved. I imagined Delia Smythe concocted some story to make Ma believe the church would get some of the investment interest. That’s the only way I could believe Ma hounded her neighbours and parishioners for all that money.

  For Sunday service, Ma always gave the same amount, always had it in a sealed envelope ready for the collection plate—but she always came home and wrote it in her chequebook.

  And she made lists for everything.

  It wouldn’t surprise me at all if she had made a final list. A list that said something the rest of the world might find ridiculous.

  1. Count pills, 2. Take pills to nightstand, 3. Take two glasses of water to nightstand, the second in case the first spills or I need more water for swallowing, 4. Take black pen and two sheets of notepaper to nightstand, 5. Wear newest grey flannel nightgown, 6. Close windows in house, 7. Check stove.

  It sounded ludicrous. Even to me, her second son, one of a handful of people in this world who knew her habits and knew that she was unchanged even after years of not coming home to see her.

  Standing in the quiet, I tilted my head back at the ceiling, easing the strain on my neck. And then the cricket chirped again. I was certain it was inside the den. It let out a few more, got up to a regular rhythm, and kept going. I wondered if someone had left a window open in there. I knew I hadn’t been in and hadn’t seen Mac go in. The door had been closed since I’d gotten to the Cove a few days ago. Maybe someone had left it open in the wake of their short investigation around finding Ma.

  I got up and I went to the door of the den, still with the yellow note in my hand. I put my hand on the knob and it was, as I expected, cold. Chirp, chirp. That cricket was inviting me in. Or tempting me. Or was it a dare?

  It didn’t matter what it should be called. The insect was loud in the empty vacuum of the still old house. I’d read the note. I could certainly go in there and take a look around. It’s not like she would be waiting for me inside. It would only be a damned cricket.

  I took my hand off the knob. I turned and surveyed the living room, the telephone table, the old furniture. Silence now, no cricket. Nothing except for the ticking of the wall clock in the dining room. Stark silence. I wondered what time the Yankees would see Duke Snider’s ceremonial first pitch at Dodger Stadium. Everyone was probably sitting in front of a TV somewhere watching the pre-game. I wondered if I’d locked the back door. Damn, I was a chip off the old woman. I went into the kitchen and checked it, locked. Then, for good measure, I went and checked the front. Locked as well. We never locked our doors growing up and I doubt that Ma did either. Maybe in her later years. We told her to but ironclad habits were hard for Ma to change.

  I went back to the telephone table and picked up the phone from its cradle. Satisfied that there was a dial tone, I put it back and looked down at the yellow sheet with black writing in my hand.

  The cricket began its rhythmic chirping again. This time, louder.

  Finally, I went to the door of the den and turned my best ear to it. The cricket continued. With an abrupt turn of the knob, I opened the door.

  Within the shaded space, I could make out nothing at first.

  It was musty in there, but not as bad as the whole second floor had been when we’d arrived. My eyes adjusted with the backlight of the living room casting in to help me. The window wasn’t open and I wondered if the cricket might have been behind a baseboard or heard from down below in the dirt basement instead. The air was thick. I went to the window to open it but decided not to bother. I would only snoop around for a few minutes. My heart was racing. I felt like I was going to be caught, like I shouldn’t be in my mother’s room. A holdover from youth, I supposed. I tried to even my breathing, calm my racing heart.

  Let’s get this over with, I thought. I flicked the switch and the gloom disappeared. So did the chirps of the one lonely cricket. Nothing to see, no junk on the floor, no naked man and no Ma. Just a pink and brown bedspread in a room without a closet, once Da’s den, the familiar dark oak floors and trim and the pale green wallpaper Da had put up when the space had been his.

  The bed had been hastily made. By Mrs. Walsh, I suspected. Chief Birkhead and his deputy wouldn’t have thought to do it. Neither would the thickheaded coroner. I seriously doubt Doc had been privy to the goings-on. He wouldn’t be welcome at a scene like this, not since his retirement. I paused for a moment. Something the Doc had said gave me the impression he had seen or talked to Ma in the last while...though I couldn’t remember what.

  I got down on my hands and knees to look under the bed, then realized I couldn’t see across to the other side. I had to lay down on the floor, part of me on the cold dark oak and part on the area rug, which was in serious need of a vacuum.

  Nothing under there but dust clouds. Wait. I peered in the dim light and saw something in the shaft coming down from above the headboard and illuminating the dust bunnies.

  It was the pen I’d asked the coroner about.

  And it looked like there was a yellow sheet of paper under it, one tell-tale curl of a corner peeking at me, whispering a secret I couldn’t quite make out yet.

  13.

  I had to move the bed. I tried laying down on top of it, diagonally with my chest on Ma’s pillows, the ones that took her tired head before going to sleep that last time. I almost had my index and middle fingers on the black pen by reaching down to the dusty floor between the head of the mattress and the space under the headboard. But I gave myself the creeps thinking about Ma’s greying hair on the pillows beneath. It felt...not right...to be in that spot.

  So I got up, went to the foot of the bed and pushed it out and away from me on an angle that created a space between it and the wall. The feet of the bed squealed on the wood floor and the area rug caught and pulled itself up into a messy contortion. I don’t know why that bothered me. The house was messy and this room was a haven for dust. I guess it just looked so...disturbed. From the way Ma had it, that was.

  It was a second sheet of paper, face down under the black pen. I could see the darkness of handwriting bleeding through from the other side. I picked it up and set it on the bedspread with the other note and pushed the bed back into place with another craggy squawk. I fussed with the area rug until I had it looking respectable again.

  I realized I wasn’t breathing. My breath was a big ball in my gut. I let it out in a huff, snatched up the two papers, the black pen and flicked off the light.

  Outside the den, with the door closed, I realized my anxiety was leaking away, but I looked up with a start. I don’t know who I expected to be standing there in front of me at the telephone table. Ma, ready to scold me for going into her room like she would have when I was a kid? Da, ready to tan my hide because he found the gun caps Mac and me had hidden in the garage?

  No one was there. More silence and that tick-tick-tick of the wall clock in the dining room. There was no chair at the telephone table, hadn’t been in years, so I stood by it, put the papers and the pen there and leaned on it, staring down.

  On the left, Ma’s note from the lawyer’s office and Mac’s stack of papers. On the right, the newly retrieved yellow sheet from under the headboard. Down the middle, the black pen, like a divider. I didn’t read the new sheet yet, couldn’t. Instead, I opened the drawer and got the steno pad back out. I matched the frayed edges to the leavings on the coils. The new sheet seemed to match as the first of the two to be torn out. The second to be ripped off had been Ma’s final note to the three of us kids.

  Finally, I read it. I wondered in a flash if I should sit down before setting eyes upon what was undoubtedly more of Ma’s handwriting. It’s not every day you stumble across two messag
es from the dead.

  It wasn’t sentences. Only fragments. It read:

  Why now???

  Possibly: ghost, hallucination, spirit, angel, something else???

  North island, King’s Corner...Meet at Pelée Lighthouse.

  Write it down so I don’t forget...

  Said he loved me...said I needed to do this...

  ...only way to get the kids home...

  Two things occurred to me as I re-read it a second, third and then a fourth time. One, I needed to find Mac and two, Ma had sold Da’s old Buick. She must have. It wasn’t in the garage. Mac’s Ford had been there and, after some fussing, he got it running, but I was without wheels.

  I read the rambling note again. And then I looked at the original.

  She’d written her rambles first, a kind of stream of consciousness after...what? Had something happened? It sounded, as crazy as it may be to admit it, but it sounded like she’d had an encounter with the Frank Moort lookalike, the naked feller with all the tattoos and the angry, snarling face.

  Had the Moort-Man wandered in here a week ago and startled Ma? Did she see that eagle across his chest and think it had been Da? With Ma so heavy on the gospel according to the Zionists, I thought it sounded, well, reasonable. Teeny had talked of Ma discussing spirits and saviours, that some form of God on earth would swoop out of the shadows to save them after all the money had been taken in the Ponzi scheme a few years back. The few times I’d talked to Teeny, she’d said she worried about Ma and that Ma had become distant, fading like a flame running short of fuel. When I heard about Ma last week, my first thought was that extreme beliefs had driven her to do something rash.