Black Acres- The Complete Collection

by Ambrose Ibsen

  He was shaking by the time he made it into the kitchen. Fiddling with the coffee maker for a short while, he was placated by a weak brew and carried his mug with him to the back door. Julian took his coffee near the fire pit, his arms and legs exposed to the biting cold of late autumn. It was a sunny morning, early yet, and dew could be seen to glisten throughout the yard. And yet, as he gripped at his steaming mug for comfort and walked barefoot through the sprawling lawn, the usual dreariness about the scene prevailed. The woods; those awful, jagged, colorless woods, stared out at him, the bald trees like so many hateful strangers. He cursed them silently, wondered whether Kim had disappeared into them the night previous somehow. “No,” he said under his breath. “That's impossible. A dead woman can't walk. A dead woman couldn't have escaped to the woods. And it happened so quickly... I was only downstairs briefly...”

  The stirrings of a fresh headache made themselves known. Taking a gulp from his mug, Julian studied the yard for signs of an intruder, for signs of any activity whatsoever. The grass, though, was immaculate and untrodden as far as the eye could see.

  What happened last night? You go upstairs, you find her in the closet. He trembled at the remembrance. Then you run downstairs to grab a phone, call an ambulance. Couldn't have been more than thirty seconds or so. When you got back up there, she was gone. Gone... And then you spent the whole night looking for her till you fell asleep. Didn't call anyone because there wasn't anyone to call. Without a body, the police won't take you seriously, and it's still too soon for the missing person's thing...

  He coughed, paced for a while, and tried to clear his head. If there was so much as a single kernel of reason to be grasped in all of this, he was keen to find it. Kim claimed to see people outside the house, people looking at her through the windows. I didn't believe her, but maybe there was something to it... it's possible that someone got into the house... that someone had a hand in this and moved her body. But why? Just to fuck with me?

  The more he puzzled, the less things made sense. It was clear he'd need outside perspective to get his thoughts in order, but who could he call at such a time? Family? Friends? No, none of them could possibly understand what was going on. None of them knew much about the way the two of them had been living in this out-of-the-way estate. None of them knew the house and what its remoteness could do.

  But Edwin did. Edwin Kelley, the man who'd sold them the house, was Julian's best bet. He resolved to call him after his search of the grounds was complete. “He's the only one,” he muttered, “that can help me here. If anyone knows what the hell is happening here, it would be a local like him.”

  Coffee drained, he set the empty mug on the edge of the fire pit and began pacing around the yard. Julian went as far as the edge of the woods, and strayed well past the borders of the property on both sides, but a half-hour's search yielded nothing but a curious discovery some distance from the house. Where he could have sworn there'd been an unmarked grave in the tall grass, Julian found now only a deep aperture. The sunlight was strong enough to elucidate for him the inside of the thing, and in it he found what he recognized to be his shovel.

  “What the hell?” he thought, shooting a quick glance to the surrounding woods and then to the hole. “Did she... did she dig this herself? No, there's no way. And what for?” Growing steadily uncomfortable on the cusp of this deep opening, Julian extended a hand feebly towards the handle of the shovel, which stood out awkwardly from a mound of fallen earth. He couldn't reach it.

  The shovel was no great loss and he could always go back for it later. What troubled him most was the emergence of this great hole. Who had made it, and why? This had been, he felt quite sure now, the site of that curious unmarked grave they'd stumbled upon after a jaunt in the woods. And Kim had come home, he now remembered, covered in dirt...

  His mind whirred like a machine well on its way to overheating. Had Kim or someone else dug up this unmarked grave and found something? Had the grave been left unmarked for a reason-- intended, perhaps, for Kim herself? No, this was foolishness, all of it. Kim had probably just been dirty because she'd fallen in. She'd said nothing of the grave since their discovery of it, hadn't talked at all about going for a dig. But there was his shovel just the same...

  It was with no little difficulty and hesitance that Julian lowered himself into the pit. He wanted nothing more than to walk away from it, to put it out of his mind, but that it held some significance in the matter of his missing wife he couldn't deny. Dropping down some five or six feet into the earth, he landed softly. His hands trailed the rough sides of the hole, knocking loose a bit of dry soil. When he was sure of his footing, he looked upward, to the uneven ring of blue sky and natural light he'd left behind, and then to his immediate surroundings.

  To his surprise, the hole was only the beginning of what appeared to be an underground tunnel. How far it spread or where it went he couldn't be sure, and his cautious forays into the earliest reaches of this newly-discovered passage did little to throw light on the matter. Perhaps with a flashlight he could see his way through, though the very notion sickened him. He wouldn't find his wife in there; if anything, the tunnel felt suddenly like a well-laid trap. He'd come down here, leaving the relative safety of the open field, and entered into the lair of something much unaccustomed to human company. To venture any farther, to dwell in the pit much longer, was to put himself at considerable risk. He backed out of the passage and immediately sought out the most expedient means of extricating himself, but not before stealing a glance upward at the ring of open sky above him, which was clouded over now with a dark silhouette.

  There was a man standing over the opening of the pit, his features rendered darkly, uncertainly by the light at his back. He seemed old if his hunched posture was any indication, though the faint mutterings that reached Julian's ears served to further reinforce this impression. He was dressed in blue jeans and a flannel shirt

  The old man spoke, raising a shovel and knocking a few piles of earth down into the pit. Julian was pelted in soil and pebbles. That the man meant to bury him was clear. “You damned thing,” he said, his voice simmering with hatred. “I told you to leave, to never come back. Ever since you entered into our lives you've brought nothing but madness, misery. But now you're done for. Now you're finished. I've set things right. You stumbled into this little pit of mine just as I wanted you to, and here you'll stay. Good riddance,” he finished, adding a heaping shovelful of dirt to the pit.

  Julian exclaimed, shielding himself with his arms and staggering a few paces back. His heart pounding, he held onto the edge of the pit and thought to claw his way up onto the surface before the old man could continue. “What the hell are you doing?” he demanded, knocking soil from his face and hair. “You trying to kill me? Who the hell are you?”

  The man did not reply.

  In fact, as Julian soon learned after a careful upward glance, there was no one there at all.

  White in the face, he clawed his way up, giving a weak jump that allowed him to grasp the edge of the aperture. In this way he hoisted himself out, half-expecting to find the man waiting for him with his shovel. As far as could be seen however, from the field to the nearby woods, there reigned only a pronounced silence. An autumn breeze ambled by, chilling him further and seeming to taunt him with its normalcy. Everything was as it should have been.

  Was he hallucinating, then?

  Covered in sweat for his struggles and made uncomfortably cool by the wind, Julian massaged his temples and reexamined his surroundings, sure that at any moment an old man with a shovel would make himself known. When the expected arrival did not occur however, he found himself laughing not a little hysterically, baffled and frightened at his recent proclivity for sighting phantoms. The previous night, in the cellar, he'd seen something under the stairs. Now this. “Jesus Christ... you need to get out of here,” he said, his voice carried off by the wind on the back of an unusually forceful gust. “This place is doing things to your head
. The stress and...”

  Reaching for the commonplace explanations gave him no solace.

  Julian began a rapid march back to the house, Throwing open the back door, he stormed through the kitchen and picked up his phone. It was time to get some answers. That there was something going on in the house, something that he could not account for despite his rationalism, was undoubtable. Too many things had occurred within the space of a single night, too many things that he could not manage. And he felt, in some way, that things were coming to a head. He needed badly to figure out what had happened to his wife before he could inform the authorities, and decided he would reach out to the only person who knew about the peculiar little property.

  After a brief search in his phone's history, he tracked down Edwin Kelley's number and dialed it.

  Thirty-Seven

  Julian was surprised when an answer came after only two rings. The jovial voice of the fellow sounded in his ear, brimming with its usual cheerfulness. “Morning, this is Edwin.”

  Julian couldn't help himself. At the sound of a familiar voice, the words promptly spilled from his lips, and he didn't finish speaking until he'd said everything that plagued him. “Edwin, this is Julian. Julian Taylor.” He paused to clear his throat, cutting off Edwin as he stammered on. “L-listen, I'm awfully sorry to call you, awfully sorry, but I need your help. You're the only person, in fact, that I can trust on this matter. You see, it has to do with the house, with the property. Something's happened to Kim, my wife. You remember her, of course? You were in contact with her recently. She'd called you, wanted to know more about the house's history, and was, well, probably a l-little worked up over something, I take it? Right, well, I'm not saying that there was or wasn't cause for her concern, but something's happened to her, and... I'm not sure what, but I need help, I need answers, Edwin. Something happened to the people who lived here before, too... and now something is happening again, do you get it? My wife, she's missing, and when I last saw her, well...” his throat tensed and he found trouble in finishing the thought. “Please, if at all possible, come by. I need to speak to you, to get things straightened out. I'd have called the cops about it, believe me, but... things don't seem to work out here the way they do in the city and I'm not even sure I can trust my own mind. Things have been odd, Edwin, so odd.”

  The line was silent for a time. Then, drawing in deep breath, Edwin replied. “I see...” He was obviously hesitant to accept the invitation, perhaps unwilling to be caught up in Julian's situation, but something, maybe the fright in the caller's voice, had roused some pity in him and saw him agree to a brief visit. “Mr. Taylor,” he began, “this isn't really a job for me, and I'm not sure what you think I can help you with, but if you need me, I'll be there. Don't hesitate to call the cops, though... I do understand what you mean, about things being different around these parts where that's concerned. The sheriff from the next town over might be of assistance, but maybe not under these specific circumstances, eh? I see, I see. Yes, you're right to say that the old Beacon place has its own way about it, and if the disappearance of the Reeds is to be taken into account then who's to say that something strange like that mightn't happen again? I'll be over, soon.” He finished with a sort of resignation. Stopping by still didn't sit well with him, it was clear.

  Upon hanging up, Julian felt only relief. Whether anything would come of the visit he couldn't say, but he did know that another person's company might help him to get his head straight. Perspective; that was what was needed, and considering his knowledge about the property's history, Edwin seemed in as good a position as any to give it.

  Julian paced around the kitchen, hands in pockets and eyes glued to the yet unfinished floors beneath his feet. They were dusty, and his shuffling steps left long passages in the dust like the trails of fat, writhing worms. The day was young. He was going to get to the bottom of this, was going to find Kim, set things right and, if necessary, get the authorities involved. He was still clinging to the hope, no matter how fervently he sought to deny it when forced to approach matters logically, that she was still alive.

  It isn't possible, he told himself. But at the same time, it's the only sane answer to all of this. Rapidly, from a place of worry and anguish, he crafted a plausible scenario. She went upstairs last night, had a kind of nervous fit. Ended up hiding in the closet, maybe passing out or having a kind of health incident that made her seem dead. A spider bite... He shook his head, thumbnail between his teeth, as he cemented the details of his fantasy. Then, when I went to get the phone, she sprang up and ran off in a confused daze. Kim is sick, she's been sick for a while, and maybe she's out there somewhere, hanging around in the woods or wandering some lonely road in search of home. She could never handle living all the way out here, in this isolation, and now with all that's happened, I can see why. It's getting to me too, damn it. Taking me for a ride. But I'll find her. And I'll get her the help she needs. And we'll get ourselves the fuck out of this house the first chance we get.

  In waiting for Edwin to arrive, Julian decided to busy himself by searching through the house. His voice wavering, for he saw the futility in it, he called out to Kim. Only his own voice echoed in reply, the sharp tones ringing out against the pall of silence and hanging in the air for some moments after. The living room was checked, then the closets. He rose the stairs, searched the rooms there. The study, regrettably, was empty, as were the other quarters. On his way back downstairs he gave a half-hearted search through the bathroom before finally admitting defeat. He wouldn't find her. Not in the house. Somehow, he knew it. Even if his dreamed-of scenario proved true, and his wife was still alive but merely in a state of panicked, wandering confusion, there was no way she could still exist in the house without his knowing it. He'd been there the whole while, had searched numerous times since the incident, and hadn't seen hide nor hair of her.

  Returning downstairs, he entered into the living room and sighed, leaning against the mantle and nearly falling once again into tears. He looked out at the room about him, the contents of their kitchen spilling out chaotically about the space, and lamented the lost opportunities. This was supposed to be their home, their castle. They'd intended to raise a family there, someday; to find the peace and happiness that'd eluded them in the city. All of that promise was for naught. The walls, despite the sunlight streaming in from the windows, were painted in dreary tones of shadow, and the room was altogether obscured by a kind of murk. Whether it was merely his mood projecting onto his surroundings or something real he couldn't rightly say. This, maybe, had been the “darkness” about the house that Kim had mentioned numerous times; a thing he'd never much appreciated until now.

  The television sat coldly against the wall. The shelves that Kim herself had arranged, filled with her books, gathered only dust now. The coffee table near the sofa still featured evidences of their last meals together in the form of half-empty glasses and strewn paper napkins. It was such a silly thing, but to see it stirred in him great pain. She'd been there with him just the previous night. And then, just like that, she'd gone away, vanished. It was unfair, monstrously unfair. He was wreaked by guilt, felt sure that this was somehow his fault. Maybe, had he only taken more notice of her, listened to her fears and been more understanding, then things would not have come to this.

  Julian's gaze was drawn then to the sofa, the long, comfortable thing that the two of them had used so many times. There were blankets there, cast about the plush cushions in a multi-colored heap, but curiously, they appeared to shift, breathe, as it were, in a subtle and unnatural fashion. He took a step forward, noting at once the appearance of something uncannily human-shaped beneath the mess of assorted blankets. His eyes widened, chest tightened. There was someone underneath them. The form was largely still, unmoving, except for the rare and nigh unnoticeable respirations. He took another step, his voice caught in his throat. Some furtive twitching or another in the form of the veiled personage gave the impression that it was aware of Julian'
s presence and was merely awaiting discovery.

  Merely feet away from the sofa, he could have reached out and pulled the covers away. But what would doing so reveal? He wanted to call Kim's name, to find whether the form beneath the blankets was indeed hers. Finally, his chest rising and falling with hurried breaths, he chanced to speak. “K-kim... Kim, is that you there, on the sofa?” He staggered back a pace, afraid, perhaps, of getting an answer.

  An answer indeed came, but it was not the one he anticipated. From the mound on the sofa there registered a violent shifting, and then an unfamiliar, feminine voice. It was dry and strained, as if from a thousand years of disuse. The figure could be seen to sit up, the taut borders of the covers only barely managing to keep its visage hidden, as it replied, “This isn't Kim's house.” Then, with more sharpness, “You shouldn't be here. We told you we'd come back. We told you--”

  Julian couldn't breathe. He reeled back, towards the front door, and braced himself against a wall, staring with disbelief at the mound of covers upon his sofa, now ferociously animated. The figure was about to reveal itself, to cast the blankets away.

  Then, there came a knock at the door to his back.

  Julian loosed a yelp and forced his eyes shut. For a moment, the only thing that existed was the thundering of his heart. Opening his eyes just a touch, he found the sofa clear of any presence; the blankets, in fact, were arranged in their usual pell-mell fashion. The knock sounded again, and some moments later, when he'd found it in himself to calm down, a look through the peephole revealed the form of Edwin.

  “Oh, thank God,” he muttered. Palming the lids of his eyes and doing his best not to appear frightened, he unlocked the door, stealing a glance as he did so to the living room sofa. It remained clear, empty. There was no one sitting there, no old woman screaming at him.