Regina tapped her foot tenderly on the first step of the porch as a test of its strength before she felt comfortable enough to rest her full weight upon it. The last thing she needed was to break her ankle and be stuck out here with no one knowing where she had gone. Wind howled through the trees of the yard and Regina took one last look around the property in the light of day before she stepped into the darkness. Her nose burned with the rank odor of must, mildew, animals and only God knows whatever else that was causing the stink. What lie inside the house was no better than what she had seen outside.
The piano room was her first stop.
Several Tuesday nights had been spent in that room with the girls playing simple versions of Ode to Joy, multiple sonatas and if the girls were lucky a new song or two that they had heard on the radio.
“Oh,” Regina drew her hand to her mouth, but it was too late to muffle the involuntary gasp that escaped her at the surprise of running into an old friend.
The piano was still there. Like an old dog unable to leave the only property that it knew, the black instrument sat staunchly in the middle of the room. Making a calculated circle around it Regina made mental note of every scratch and scuff and how they looked from every direction. Surely it had been years since these walls heard music and she contemplated arranging her fingers against the keys and playing something, anything that would allow her to pound out whatever lingering life remained in the keys with her fingers, frantically fighting the instrument with each note, a battle to the end of wills, until she reached a triumphant halt, taking the last breath of the old dog with her coup de grace stroke. She swept her fingers along the smudged ivory keys, but could not bring herself to extract a note from the musical corpse. Regina gazed out the window where the light forced its way in through the soiled surface and offered some relief from the shadows. Golden leaves covered the desolate lawn; the branches of the trees hung low and the drab, but beautiful fall scene outside offered a considerable contrast to this deep inside place.
A resounding emptiness strangled every room of the house. The floor, once a surface of sparkling marble was now a sea of soda cans, pieces of dirty clothing, broken picture frames, and a constellation of other miscellaneous garbage. On the walls, there were empty squares of light where family photographs had hung proudly in a time that now seemed like antiquity. In the next second, she could hear the music drumming up in her ears, but fled the room before it had a chance to pound deep inside of her.
In the formal living room, she walked to the fireplace that stood taller than she. The only thing that remained in the room was the tattered couch that used to welcome visitors and comfort the family. Regina sat down on the couch; it was uncomfortably soft and drooped into the frame. She was running her hands over the dirty and rough surface of the fabric when she suffered an astonishing revelation.
It smells like them! She thought wildly, feeling the muscles in her throat tense, she struggled to swallow.
Families and houses always had particular smells characterized by routine uses of perfume, cigarettes, clothes detergents, or even sometimes spices used in family dinners, depending on the habits and tastes of one’s particular family; the scent of the DeFrank family was embedded in this couch. As soon as Regina sat she could smell them, all of them and suddenly they were inside of her, a ghastly virus. She shot up from the sagging piece of furniture and stood fumbling her hands, nervously spinning so that she could see every part of the room several times over again to ensure that despite the presence of their scent that the DeFranks were gone. The room was so filled with so many things other than air that Regina began to suffocate; she scrambled over to one of the smudged windows. Regina reached out to the window, but jerked her hands back against her chest when she saw the collection of lightning bugs that lay dead on the wooden window seal. Regina drew her face closer to inspect the bugs, wondering how they had all gotten in, but had been unable to get out. Now she could hardly breathe at all, she pushed down her repulsion so that she could put all of her energy into lifting the splintered window that had been shut up for years. Regina heard herself grunting as she tried with all of her power to lift the window that refused to budge. She checked to make sure that the window was unlocked and it was. Taking a moment, she stepped back, caught her breath and went in again with two hands pushing hard upon the windowsill for three…four…five seconds when with a loud sigh and billow of dust the window shot up, letting in a swell of cool air. Regina looked at the ceiling that had creaked just a moment before in symphony with the noisy window. She coughed violently to rid her chest of the dirt that she had sucked in while opening the window.
“Hello,” she was finally able to choke out. The house responded with silence. She crossed back over into the expansive foyer and peered up the mahogany staircase that led to a landing, she allowed her eyes to stroll up through the slats of the staircase that led from the middle landing to the next landing on the second floor. The exquisite home flaunted two staircases that led to the first landing, one from the foyer and another on the other side from the hall.
“Hello,” Regina yelled again. Regina listened until she was sure that she was alone and the only things that she heard were the inevitable moans of an old house. Regina’s eyes wandered along the ceiling until they came to the chandelier that hung in the middle of the foyer. Some of the bulbs were missing and many of the hanging crystals had fallen and still lay sporadically strewn about the floor. She flipped the light switch on the wall, which triggered no luminous reaction.
Regina had been mesmerized by the hanging luxury her first time in the DeFrank home. Her eyes had been drawn to it immediately when the double doors swung open and the foyer burst with brilliant, swirling light. Everything about the DeFrank home had seemed stunning to her as a child. Mrs. DeFrank had been wearing a teal caftan dress that draped her elegantly and she smiled brightly at the enthusiastic girl that stood on her doorstep. Her daughter, Eden, stood behind her mother grasping at the dress and eyeing Regina suspiciously.
Regina sighed at the current condition of the house. She noticed sunlight pouring in from one door in the hallway that was wide open.
The study.
Regina took focused strides toward the study, but could not resist stepping into the guest bathroom that sat on the left side of the extended hall. The bathroom was dark, but she could see that the room was a nest of filthy chaos complete with some type of dead rodent stiff under the toilet and she was glad that she had peed outside. Before she stepped out of the bathroom, a graceful shadow glided across the hall behind her. Tingling seized Regina’s body as the hair on her body rose to fine points. Regina whipped around dubiously looking back into the foyer.
After cursing herself for being unreasonably jumpy, she turned back to her original destination. Her eyes were wide when she crept into the study and noticed that as empty as it appeared, it seemed to have retained the most life of any room that she had seen yet. Mr. and Mrs. DeFrank had an office upstairs and Glen had most use of the study as a place to complete his schoolwork. Glen’s chair sat hauntingly in the stream of sunlight that came in through the window. A lamp that had once sat on a desk that was no longer in the room sat unplugged on the floor. Regina’s eyes stalled on a paper cup and she walked over to discover that it was half-filled with coffee. She wrinkled her face in mental anguish at the thought that someone sat here not long ago drinking coffee, hours ago or maybe days. She listened to the house, for the creaks of someone walking upstairs, she listened for the strained cry of a rusty hinge on a door, but she heard nothing.
There is no one here, Regina!
Her rational mind spat reasoning, fighting hard against the rising emotions that were serving only to keep her terrified.
An old bookshelf stood next to the window at the far end of the room and she was drawn to it. The girl traced her delicate fingers over the old bindings of several classic titles. Her finger settled on a leather-backed, limited edition of Dante’s Inferno. She opened it
and began flipping through a couple of pages before she could no longer stand the hellish images and slammed the book to a close.
Regina reached up to return the literature to its place when she noticed a photograph that had been stuck in between the books. The thin piece of glossy paper was wrinkled and torn at one end. She turned it over to an image that she could not bring herself to admit was printed there on the paper. Regina gasped in horror, letting the weighty book that she still held in one hand crumble to the floor. The photograph revealed Nikki with Glen DeFrank. An adult Nikki Valentine stood next to the slumped man that she said she had not spoken to since they were children. Regina shook her head slightly to throw out any hallucinations that might have crept in, but this was no hallucination. Thought tumbled over thought in Regina’s head.
Footsteps crept along the floor in the hallway. Regina’s heart found a new home in her throat. Picture still in hand, Regina scrambled across the room and looked out into the hall toward the back door where she had heard the footsteps.
“Hello?” she cried, her calls were no longer that of a cautious investigator, but the cries of a frightened little girl. “Nikki? Barron? Sheriff Handow?” she called as she stepped out into the hall and looked toward the stairs. Regina peered up into the slats of the staircase and her mouth dropped open at what she saw.
14
“What the …” she began, but stopped short when she felt the tremendous pressure of something heavy connect with the back of her head. All of the light began to recede, her knees buckled, and she dropped to the floor. Regina lay there on her back as consciousness began to fade. The little girls watched from the staircase, smiling and giggling as darkness settled over her. Wrapping the mahogany slats in their delicate little hands, they poked their sneering faces through so that they would be the last ghastly sight Regina would see. Their glowing eyes plowed into Regina’s eyes, piercing them and burrowing farther down into the head of the girl that was fast losing awareness. The four little girls whispered demonically to each other between the vicious glares that they cast down on her. Regina drifted further and further away, susurrus noise haunting her until she was in a place of total blackness and total silence.
The sun began to set on the run-down house at the end of the lonely road that turned off of Culliver Parkway. Leaves rustled gracefully about the lawn, but everything inside of the house was unmoving, dead with silence, until the halls shook with Regina’s struggle for her first conscious breath since she had been attacked. Regina inhaled deeply the second time and irritating dust particles tickled her nose to a sneeze. Searing pain shot through Regina’s head from temple to temple, as she moaned into a foggy consciousness. Her eyes fought for sight. Lights and shadows began to dance and play hide-and-seek in and out of her vision, she lifted slightly. Automatically, her hand felt for the source of pain that was at the nape of her neck.
“Owwww,” she groaned as she looked at her fingers that were covered in drying blood. On the stairs she saw the glittering eyes still penetrating down into her. Regina squinted to get a better view of the evil girls, their dresses straight and pressed, their hair, gleaming silk, lips painted red with the corners of their mouths turned upright, their faces pulled tight in unchangeable expressions of false delight.
“Dolls,” Regina whispered. She laid flat again, closing her eyes in momentary relief. They looked so real, staring down at her from high upon the stairs. Most likely, they had once belonged to Glen’s little sister. Mesmerized, Regina sat for a moment staring at the dolls that she had thought were little demons set on her demise. In an instant, she realized that she might still be in danger and she jerked in every direction, making sure that there was no one there to harm her. She pulled herself into a corner, cupped her hands over her nose and mouth, and took several deep breaths.
Regina looked down to realize that her hand was empty. The photograph was gone. Frantically, she searched about the floor.
It was hard for Regina to think, her head was a painful cloud of unorganized thought, she imagined a tiny monkey inside of her brain trying to dig its way out with a chisel and hammer. Her parents would be worried; Regina saw through the windows that the sun was dipping low. She got to her feet and dashed out the door, jumping down the porch stairs and sprinting to her car, making sure to keep her eyes open for the person who had attacked her. Regina started the car and sped down the driveway. At the gate she stopped and scrutinized the landscape before jumping out of the car. Her hands trembled with fear as she fought with the latch because she was sure that at any moment Glen DeFrank or Lola’s gruesome corpse was going to come stumbling out of the trees, barreling stiffly toward her with arms outstretched just like in all of the zombie movies. When the latch was undone, she threw the gate open, jumped back into her car, and sped out onto Culliver Parkway in a turn so sharp that her back tires skidded, causing Regina to lose control for a brief moment. As she flew down the open road, back to the town of Black Water, there was only one thing on her mind.
“Nikki,” she whispered.
Night began to fall over the eerily festive town of Black Water. The lights of town soon burned into view and she was strangely relieved to be back to this place. Main Street was blocked off in anticipation of the annual parade. After turning onto a side street, Regina pulled her car into the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant, put the car in park, and ripped her shaking hands from the steering wheel. Sinking into the bucket seat, her wall of strength crumbled and the bank of emotion erupted from her in a tidal wave of tears that she had been struggling to hold back all day. Regina cried so violently that her chest heaved up and down ejecting uncontrollable sobs from her throat. A brief brain synaptic fire instructed her to calm herself, but she swiftly rejected it, reasoning that if she did not get it out now it would erupt in the near future at some most inopportune time. Regina tolerated the cries and the tears until they were tuckered out. Several deep breaths circulated the blood more efficiently in her body allowing her to regain some air of tranquility. She wiped away the final party of tears and reviewed her wrecked face in the rearview mirror. Her first thought was to go to Sheriff Handow, but that was quickly dismissed as the last remnant of irrationality leftover from her emotional breakdown. There were many reasons why going to Sheriff Handow was not a good idea. What would she say? Regina thought to herself.
Ah yes, Sheriff Handow, I was somewhere that I had no business being, looking for God knows what, and someone hit me. Did I see anything? Uhm, no, I have no idea who it was, but my best friend since elementary school, Nikki Valentine, may have had something to do with this whole mess, but quite honestly, I’m not sure of anything.
Regina played and replayed the conversation in her head a million different ways, none of them leading in a direction even remotely beneficial. Besides, she thought, it could have just been some homeless person wanting her out of his or her space. Whoever it was just wanted her to get out of there, if they had wanted to kill her they could have done it. No, there was no good reason to go to the police, she decided.
A breath and a gulp of saliva tangled awkwardly in her throat, causing her to choke at the phantasmal appearance of a ghastly figure standing in the center of her headlights. The demon child’s eyes rolled around in her head, black jumbo-sized lacquered marbles, until they finally came to an abrupt halt that focused on Regina. Greasy hair was flat against her pale brilliant white skin that became purple and blue around the sockets of her sunken eyes, but most gruesome was her smiling mouth, her unnaturally wide grin that was painted with the blood of some unsuspecting victim. The candy apple blood covered her baby teeth and drenched her chin right before it began to drip down unto her veined neck. Regina was forced to look away from the child’s all-seeing eyes.
When Regina looked up again the demonically disguised girl was laughing with two of her friends, one of them dressed like a witch and the other a vampire, which was an absolute contrast to the sheepish woman that followed closely behind them who must have mot
hered at least one of the little devils. The common-looking woman smiled and waved at the girl in the car, which was the normal form of greeting to friends and strangers alike in Black Water. Regina looked at the dashboard clock, which now blinked 5:32 p.m. People were headed for the parade, which probably began at 6:00 p.m. Regina had to get home.
Regina waved to the mother hesitantly, still in wonder as to why any rational adult would allow a child to look like such a wild fiend even on this holiday. A chill coasted up Regina’s spine as she threw the car into reverse and whisked out of the parking lot.
As Regina cascaded into the driveway, she saw that the lights were on in the living room as well as in her parents’ room. She prayed that they were in their bedroom so that she could clean herself up before they had a chance to see her in such dilapidated condition. The woman crept up the porch steps and tried to open the storm door with soundless precision. She pressed her ear to the front door and heard nothing on the other side. The door hardly made a sound when Regina finagled her key into the lock. In the doorway, she took a quick look around before she heard her parents’ muffled voices upstairs in their bedroom. Regina closed the door quietly behind her and began an absolutely noiseless journey up the staircase. Her legs were strained from her effort to be weightless and it took her three times as long as it usually would have to get up the stairs. On the top step, she saw her parents’ bedroom door swing open.
Black Water Tales: The Secret Keepers Page 16
