The Agony House

by Cherie Priest

  The hall at the top of the stairs was blacker than black, even when she thrust her phone forward. It was a knot of the shadows that wiggled and writhed. She put out her hand and could feel them, cold and clammy, like the air that spills out of a freezer unit. The shadows pushed back. She pushed forward. She pushed harder. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Her room was a straight shot to the right, and that’s where Lucida Might was waiting—on her bed, where she’d been reading it, certain she was almost finished with it.

  She held her breath. She closed her eyes.

  She pushed through the sticky, slimy shadows and ran—both hands outstretched to catch herself, in case she fell.

  Her legs collided with something soft. She stopped, knees knocking against the side of her mattress, and she almost sobbed because she’d made it. Her bedroom was dark, but only dark in the ordinary way. It smelled like roses and lilies, and her phone-light showed no twitching shadows. Only fresh cobwebs, and boxes of clothes, and an unmade bed with an old comic manuscript lying open across it.

  “I think I’ve got it, Vera,” she breathed.

  She climbed onto the bed and flipped the book open. She couldn’t be sure but the last few pages looked more quickly drawn. They’d been done in a hurry.

  Denise slapped the book shut and the house shuddered, like she’d slapped it too. She tucked Lucida Might under her arm, and ran. The hallway felt like a fun house, dark and wobbly, rocking back and forth. She fell and caught herself on one hand. She didn’t drop the book. By the time she was back on her feet and headed down the stairs, she could hear Terry loud and clear. He was saying, “Ow,” a lot, and thanking Mike and Sally for getting him out of there.

  “One more board ought to do it,” Mike said. He swung the sledge down, got the end under the next plank, and pulled back, straining against the stubborn wood. It split and popped free of the nails, making a hole big enough for Terry to climb through.

  With a little help from Sally, he hauled himself up over the edge and lay on the floor, panting. He was even whiter than usual—ghostly and blanched, from fright or blood loss. No, not blood loss. Denise ran her phone-light over him from top to bottom. She saw a lot of dirt, some bruises, and a couple of scrapes on the palms of his hands. “Dude.” She leaned over him, and put her hands on his shoulders. “Get up. You’re fine. I need your help.”

  “Give me a minute …”

  “We may not have a minute!”

  Mike nodded, and leaned on the sledge. “Pull yourself together, Terry. We’re getting out of here. Sally, help me grab another couple of boards. I’m not a kid, and I won’t fit through that hole.”

  “You want me to go back down there?” he squeaked.

  Sally whacked at the hole with the pry bar. “Yes!”

  “No!” Denise argued. “Terry, get up. I finished the book. I know what Vera’s trying to tell us.”

  “What’s going on in here?” he finally asked, like he’d only just noticed that the house was shaking itself apart, and there was no electricity, and the living room buzzed with that otherworldly hum. He sat up and looked around. “Is this the ghosts? Denise, are the ghosts doing this?”

  “One of them is, and I think I know how to shut him up.”

  He asked, “How are you going to do that?”

  “I’m gonna let him pick on somebody his own size. I mean … his own … level of deadness. Um. Just follow my lead.” She shoved the book into his hands, so she could grab him by the wrist and hold her light at the same time. “Vera wants us to find her, and let her out. She wants to help.”

  With this, the swirling blackness that had filled the floor grew even colder; it felt like hands scrambling around her ankles. She squealed and turned around, looking for the shape of Joe and finding it in the doorway, twisting and forming, and reforming around those dead, empty eyes.

  She smacked Terry on the shoulder and started running. “Come on!”

  Over her parents’ protests she fled back up the stairs, Terry hustling in her wake. He stumbled, but she helped him up and they both kept going. At the top of the steps, she turned a hard left and stopped at the attic door. “She’s up there.”

  “You think Mrs. James is right? You think there’s a body up there after all?”

  “I’d bet money on it. I’d bet my whole life on it.” She grabbed the knob and pulled. It stuck. She pulled harder, and she said out loud, “Or I’d bet somebody’s life, anyway. Vera! If you can hear me up there, let us in!”

  A small gust of air puffed out from under the door.

  “Do you smell that?” Terry asked, wrinkling his nose, trying to figure out what he was sniffing.

  “Yup. That’s Vera. She’s stuck up here.” Denise took another crack at the knob and this time, it opened as smoothly as if that’s what it always did, every time anybody tried it. Then she thundered up the narrow, dark steps, her phone’s light waggling wildly. She caught herself on the wall, bouncing back and forth; she tried not to break the phone in her hand as she stayed upright by luck and force of will and some lingering memory of gymnastics tumbling, back in middle school.

  She reached the top, just as the first curls of black mist tickled the bottom step behind her.

  Terry reached it half a dozen seconds later, wheezing all the way. “We already … looked around … up here …” he said between deep, ragged breaths. “All we found … was the book.”

  “Give it here,” she commanded. He forked it over. She flipped to the next to last page, with the drawing of the attic interior. “See?” She tapped it. “In real life, Vera Westbrook is the one who wrote the Lucida Might stories!”

  “Then who was Joe Vaughn?”

  “Some dude,” she said. “I guess she didn’t want to go to the conventions, or public appearances, or whatever. Maybe she had another job, and she didn’t want people to know she was writing forbidden comics on the side. Who knows? The point is, Joe Vaughn didn’t create any of this stuff. Vera did, and when she told him she was pulling the plug, I think he killed her. He wanted to keep the comic going, and take all the credit for it. Take all the money for it too.”

  “How do you know he hid her body up here?”

  “Because they found his body at the bottom of the stairs. Those stairs.” She pointed back at the stairwell. “He hid her in the attic, then he tripped and fell on the way back down.”

  “Evil and clumsy. Wow.”

  “Yeah, he was a real winner.”

  Frantically she looked from the page to the stuffy attic interior; she shined the light back and forth between them, and the vast, mostly empty room where four columns of brick rose up from the floor below, and went up past the roof overhead. Downstairs, these columns led to fireplaces. Above the roofline, they became chimneys.

  Denise squinted down at the attic scene. “I think he stuffed her inside one of the chimneys.”

  “What!?”

  She held the manuscript up, and shined her light on it. “It’s obvious that she based the house of horrors on this house, right? Well, there are four chimneys here in real life, and only three in the comic book.”

  “So?”

  “So, at the bottom of each chimney is a fireplace, right? We have one fireplace in the parlor, one in the living room, and there used to be one in the kitchen.”

  “Okay, then where’s the fourth fireplace? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.”

  She held the light under her chin, and smiled like a maniac. “Terry … we don’t have one.”

  He was swift on the uptake, she had to give him credit. He lit up like the Fourth of July, and immediately ran back to the narrow stairwell. He stumbled and tumbled down—yelling all the way, “Mr. Cooper, Mrs. Cooper—we need the sledgehammer!”

  Then he said, “Oh God … oh wow …”

  “Oh God what?” she hollered.

  “This black stuff … it’s everywhere …”

  “Just get the sledgehammer!”

  While he ran that quick errand, Denise pond
ered which tower of bricks wasn’t original, and didn’t match up to things downstairs. The house wailed and sighed on its foundation; the frame itself squeaked as the old timbers twisted and stretched. “I’m coming for you, Vera. I’ll get you out of there, so you can save your house. So you can save us …”

  She closed her eyes and pictured the house’s layout.

  The brick tower to the right, and a bit behind her … it would go straight down to the parlor. The extra wide one looked like it’d bottom out in the kitchen. The other two … it was harder to say. They were rather close together.

  Either one might go down to the living room.

  But when she ran her light over the bricks, they weren’t the same at all. One column was made with red bricks, and one was built with brown bricks. The mortar was different too. Was one newer than the other? How was she supposed to tell?

  Around her shoes, she felt a cold gust that coiled tight, and there were footsteps on the stairs. Big, heavy ones. Slow ones. Not Terry, and not Mike, and not her mom—she would’ve known their feet. This was somebody else. Something else.

  “Joe,” she whispered, and she kicked her feet like she could shake off the frigid squeeze. It didn’t work. “Joe, knock it off.” She shivered and shuddered. Her eyes darted from chimney to chimney. “Where are you, Vera? Help me. Help me, Vera …”

  She didn’t need the microphone, this time. The voice came soft as a sigh, in her left ear: This one, dear.

  Terry came storming up the stairs, and from the sound of it, Mike and Sally were coming up behind him—but her friend was the one precariously waving a heavy sledgehammer like a victory flag. He traded Denise the hammer for the book.

  She took her first swing at the indicated column as Mike and Sally arrived.

  “What the hell are you doing?” her mother demanded.

  It was too late to answer. Chunks of brick broke and flew, and when Denise swung again—then again—she opened a hole the size of her hand. A low, horrible gasp poured out of that hole, followed by a soft whistle and a tune that had become almost familiar.

  Denise jumped back, and dropped the hammer to the floor.

  The gasp kept coming, and it smelled like something worse than death. It smelled like hidden rot and funeral arrangements. It was sorrow and outrage, and loss and missed opportunities.

  It was not only flowers, but fire.

  It flowed like Denise had punctured a balloon, and not a chimney tower. It whistled as it came—soft at first, and then stronger, and stronger. It swept through the attic and around it, in some terrible small hurricane of fury, of burning lilies and scorched roses. It whispered fiercely, and something answered it. Terry held up his recorder and braced himself, planting his feet and narrowing his eyes against the weird maelstrom.

  “What is this?” Mike hollered his question into the wind.

  But Denise was too triumphant to answer. She pumped her fist and shouted, “Go get ’im, Vera!”

  A thin, sour smell of rot and mildew threaded through the perfumed air—it writhed, and fought, and argued, and it was crushed. It was smothered. It was snuffed out with a pop of everybody’s ears, and a groan from the floor and ceiling, and a creak and crack from the nearest small window that looked out over what was left of the Argonne block in St. Roch.

  The house stopped shaking.

  The dull hum faded, until it was so dull that no one could hear it anymore. The rush of air slowed, until it was only a whisper—and then it was only a secret. Only silence.

  The house settled. It sighed. Then it was silent too.

  Everyone stared at the hole in the chimney that wasn’t a chimney at all—but a tomb. It was dark in there. Too dark to see anything at all, until Denise held up her hand all shaky, and shined the phone-light into the hole. She saw dust, and a deserted wasp nest. She saw the other side of dirty brown bricks.

  She saw a faded pattern of crochet and buttons.

  Like the kind you’d see on an old lady’s sweater.

  A small white car pulled up to the house. It hung out by the curb, engine idling, until the driver finally backed up and pulled around to park behind the first of two police cars. A woman got out, and shut the door behind herself. She stared at the key fob until she found the right button to lock the doors with an electronic beep.

  “Who’s that?” Terry asked. He took a bite of breakfast burrito and chewed. Sally had run to McDonald’s, and once again, Terry was present for the fast-food feast. It was early. He was opportunistic. Nobody minded.

  Norman had brought his own breakfast—a little baggie of beignets from Crispy’s. He sat between Terry and Denise and got all powdery while the three of them watched the woman walk away from the car, looking back and forth between a piece of paper and the house. He said, “She doesn’t look like a cop.”

  Denise swallowed a bit of biscuit and took a swig of orange juice from a paper cup. “She looks like she’s lost.”

  It was a white woman in her forties, probably. She had short red hair and black-framed glasses. She was dressed for daytime in a laid-back office. Jeans and sandals, but nice jeans. Heeled sandals. She stepped sideways to go around the freshly reopened hole in the porch.

  The kids couldn’t see her through the dining room window anymore, but the woman didn’t knock right away. Denise figured she was likely trying the doorbell, but it didn’t work, so that wouldn’t get her anywhere. It would be a few seconds before she realized her mistake.

  Then the woman knocked, hesitantly at first. She knocked again, louder, more firmly. Like she had business there.

  Mike called, “Denise, could you get that?” He and Sally were still talking to the one police officer in the living room, while the other one was upstairs taking pictures and looking for extra evidence in the attic.

  “Yeah, I’ve got it.”

  Denise got up and opened the door. “Hello?”

  “Hello,” said the woman. She appeared almost surprised, but Denise didn’t know why. “Um … is this 312 Argonne Street? I didn’t see any numbers on the house, but …”

  “This house is missing a lot of things. You’ve found the right place.”

  “Great! Okay. Great. So … is there any chance you’re Denise?”

  “There is a very, very good chance I’m Denise.” She frowned, and cocked her head. “Do I know you?”

  “Yes! Oh God, I hope this isn’t weird. My husband said it was weird.” She laughed nervously. “I’m Eugenie Robbins—we’ve been emailing a little bit? Back and forth? It looks like I’ve come at a bad time, though. I’m sorry. Is there any … um … are your parents home?”

  “Yes, they’re here. But they’re talking to the cops. Did you seriously fly all the way from New York? Like … today?”

  “I took a red-eye. There’s a big independent booksellers’ conference starting tomorrow, and I thought I’d see if I could squeak in early, and catch a word with you.”

  Denise stood aside, opening the door wider. “How did you find the house?”

  “I went rummaging through Dad’s old paperwork and found some correspondence between him and a police officer here in New Orleans. It all had to do with Joe’s death—the cop included the address of the house where he was found, and asked if Dad knew who lived there. I don’t know what my father told him, but I thought I might as well drop by, in case this was it.”

  Denise laughed. “Well, this is it. These are my friends, Terry and Norman,” she added. “Terry was here for the whole show last night, just about. Norman just got wind of the excitement, and came over to see what was up.”

  “And to make sure everyone was okay!” he protested. “We all heard the ambulance and the cop cars …”

  “Hi Norman, and hi Terry. It’s nice to meet all of you. Wow … I can’t believe I found this place. I can’t believe it’s still standing.” Eugenie Robbins talked fast, like her words were all in a race to get out of her mouth.

  Denise led her inside. “You and me both, lady. Especially after las
t night.”

  “Yes, I mean … good heavens. Ambulances? Police? What happened here?”

  Mike, Sally, and some cop whose name Denise hadn’t caught all looked up when they came past the living room. Sally rose, in case this was a proper guest who needed proper hosting. Denise headed that off at the pass. “Mom, this is Eugenie Robbins. I told you about her. Her dad was Joe Vaughn’s agent.”

  The cop looked from person to person, trying to decide what was going on, and if it was important. Finally, he asked, “Who’s Joe Vaughn?”

  Offhandedly, Denise replied, “She’s the lady wrapped in the rug upstairs.” To Eugenie, she added, “We found Vera Westbrook’s body in the attic last night. This was her house, and she was the real Joe Vaughn. I mean, kind of.”

  “Maybe I need a word with you,” the cop said, a pen held aloft and a notepad in his hand.

  “Sure thing. But first, I’m going to take her up to my room.” She jerked her thumb toward Eugenie. “And show her my comic book.”

  Upstairs and down the hall to the right, Eugenie followed them. The whole way, her eyes scanned every inch of the place, taking in all the wonder and glory of the decrepit scenery—which now had a bonus layer of plaster dust and splinters on every surface … and a webbing of police tape across the attic door. “Good god …” she gasped, her mouth hanging open.

  “Vera didn’t do this,” Denise clarified. “It was the other guy—the one who took credit for all her work. Vera wrote about him, in a roundabout way, in this book.” It was lying on Denise’s bed.

  Eugenie sat down on the mattress beside it. “May I?”

  “Go for it.”

  She flipped through the pages with great care, reading quickly and absorbing the art. She skimmed at a crazy speed, admiring everything as she went. Finally, she reached the last page, and scanned all the way down to the signature at the bottom.