by Harvey Click
Chapter Thirty
Unable to see, hear, smell, or move, he was a rock seething with panic and pain and plans. For a while, so very long ago across a black, soundless chasm of time so wide it was meaningless, he had still been able to feel the crawling things and the stifling air, but those sensations too had faded as the last of his nerve endings flickered out, and when they were gone he missed even the itchy inching of the worms on his skin.
Many times his mind had roamed into the farthest reaches of madness, and many times returned, until it was impossible to tell any longer what was madness and what was sanity, so that even now, as his hour seemed to be drawing near at last, he couldn’t know if the rescue he anticipated was real or merely another delusion.
But he had learned to treat each delusion as if it was reality, believing that if he exercised his powers to control the elements of each lunatic scenario, then eventually his will would prevail and would shape the means of his escape. And now, if this unlikely scenario should prove to be real, his escape was close at hand, the final key delivered at last to the one he had groomed and tutored to unbolt the dark.
But even now, with the climax of his lunatic plan approaching, he sensed enemies wandering into his realm intent on sabotaging his work. He would not allow them to succeed. For endless years he had roamed through the farthest reaches of madness, so no one better understood its bottomless terrors, and madness was the weapon he would use against them. He would snuff their sanity like candlelight and bathe the intruders in the pure blackness of their own souls.
In the blackness, they wouldn’t have a chance. Black always wins.
***
Ben got a flashlight from his trunk. The front porch didn’t look safe, so he and Sarah entered through a side doorway near the back, its door rotting in the weeds beside the house. This must have been the dining room. There was nothing much to see: no furniture, just a sagging wooden floor bare except for beer bottles and cans, cigarette butts, broken window glass, and other rubbish. The walls were riddled with holes and scrawled with graffiti. A closet door gaped open, revealing nothing but tangles of dust and an animal’s nest.
They moved to the front room, where a condom and a pair of panties on the floor suggested that some couple had been brave and crude enough to have sex here. Birds had built a nest in the ceiling chandelier and wasps’ nests clung to ceiling corners.
There was a small room behind the dining room which must have been Eva’s bedroom. The skeleton of a metal bed remained, its bare springs littered with leaves. They went to the kitchen: a filthy old sink with a small hand pump; pieces of a smashed wooden table on the floor. Some joker had stuck a scarecrow in the broom closet. Sarah could feel the floor give a little beneath the weight of her body.
“I think Ed may have oversold the place,” Ben said. “I’ve seen better haunted houses.”
“It’s not much,” Sarah agreed, not sure if she was relieved or disappointed. They certainly weren’t going to find anything useful here.
“No point in going upstairs,” Ben said. “We might fall through the floor.”
“There’s the basement.”
“Yeah,” he said without enthusiasm.
The door to the basement was in the kitchen. It was the only door that remained securely shut, as if even the drunken teenagers who vandalized the place had wanted to keep whatever was down there sealed in. It was stuck, the frame warped from water and settling, and Ben had to yank hard to get it open.
A stench of damp dirt and worms and fungus and rotting animals belched up from the dark bowels. He aimed his powerful police-style flashlight down the stairs. Its narrow white beam looked strong and bold for a few feet, but then seemed to be swallowed by darkness.
Sarah followed him down the creaking stairs. She had descended only two or three steps when she felt cobwebs clinging to her face. When she reached the dirt floor, it felt damp and slippery. Odd that it would still be wet after this long dry spell.
She thought she could feel bugs crawling on her bare arms and legs—surely her imagination. She wished she were wearing shoes instead of sandals; snakes or rats might be waiting in the muck. The stench of mildew and dead animals was overpowering.
Shelves with buckets and cans seemed to sway in the puny beam of Ben’s flashlight. Sarah glanced up at the doorway glowing faintly at the top of the stairs. Its light seemed to stay up there, unable to penetrate this reeking gloom. There were things crawling on her feet and ankles. She lifted one foot and then the other, slapping them again and again, but the invisible crawlers weren’t deterred.
“I’d rather be in Philly,” Ben said.
His voice, like the light, seemed to dissolve in the darkness. He swept his flashlight across the floor, searching for the graves.
“There they are,” he said, his voice crumbling so quickly that Sarah wasn’t certain he had said anything.
They moved carefully on the slippery dirt toward the two adjacent holes. The light seemed unwilling to enter them; the most the flashlight could do was make them glow vaguely. Surprisingly, teenage wits had not filled them with beer cans—the gaping graves were immaculate in their muck. Black water lay at the bottom of each hole.
Sarah heard a deep rumble, followed by the hiss of rain. Time seemed to collapse, annihilating the distance between this moment and the rainy day when Darnell had been found in one of these holes, the rotting body of Angela in the other. It seemed to her that two powerful fists had compressed all the sadism of history into two wads of black horror that gaped hungrily at her feet, wanting her too, wanting her and Ben, one wad of horror for each of them. She felt the basement’s darkness press heavily against her shoulders, weighing her down, absorbing her strength and giving it back as despair.
“Let’s go,” Ben said, but his words were scarcely audible, shaped of heavy darkness instead of air.
Sarah tried to move, but her legs felt like rocks. Lifting one and forcing it away from the hole was too much work. The effort was sapping her strength, and the despair that replaced it seemed to be saying: Join us in the sanctuary of the dark. We’ve been waiting here just for you.
A clap of thunder shook the fetid air. The flashlight died, and in the darkness she absurdly couldn’t remember where the graves were. She felt something on her shoulder, Ben’s hand, and he said, “Let’s go.”
Or had he spoken? Another voice, deeper than his, was speaking more clearly. “This is your home,” it said. “This has always been your home. One bed for each of you, now lie down and sleep.”
Ben had a hold of her arm now and was tugging her toward the stairs. She resented his meddling. She wanted to stay. A dark figure standing beside the graves was speaking, its deep voice quiet and crackly as if the vocal cords were dead.
“Your name is Angel, and this is your home,” it said. “It has always been your home. All else is delusion.”
Ben was also speaking, saying something about staying in focus, but his words decayed as soon as they were spoken. They were dust in her ears. The other voice was saying, “Who has a right to live in a world that tortures children? All of them must die. This is the true world, Angel. The world is woven of darkness and pain, and you shall lie in the darkness and sleep in the box forever.”
“Try to keep in focus,” Ben was saying, but he seemed to be somewhere miles away even though he had a hold of her hand and was tugging her toward the stairs.
Sarah tried to think of Johnny, but Johnny, too, had suffered and died and was buried in a little box. What right did she have to live? But Johnny had loved her, and love was a beacon of light.
She lifted rock-heavy legs and trudged in the direction Ben was pulling her. Johnny, Johnny, she repeated as a mantra in her mind. Lead me out of here, Johnny, lead me back up to the light. She pushed through the heavy air as if walking underwater.
At last they were at the foot of the stairs, but Sarah could see only a stain of filthy light in the doorway above them. Ben was behind her now, trying to urge h
er up, but she weighed too much to climb stairs, the gravity of history crushing her, the misery of millennia muttering in her ear, “You can’t leave because you belong here, Angel. Truth is the grave and the box is your home.”
“It’s not easy for me either,” Ben said. “You’ve got to help. Climb, climb.”
She made it up one step and then another. Ben’s hands pressed against her back, forcing her on. She conquered another step, and thunder roared its disapproval, making the air tremble and ring like a tuning fork.
The faintly glowing rectangle of doorway was not so far away now. She believed she could make it. Another ponderous step, and then another.
The doorway was just in front of her now, but as she gazed at it she saw with horror that the rectangle wasn’t above her but beneath her. And it wasn’t a doorway but a grave.
Her grave.
Ben was struggling and panting behind her, trying to push her down into the hole. But it wasn’t Ben—it was something heavy and monstrous and reeking of death.
The thing behind her pushed her to her knees and pressed her face down closer and closer to the grave. The puddle of water at the bottom was glowing pale like swamp gas. It was squirming and growing like an embryo, sprouting arms and legs and a head.
The embryo grew into Johnny, his naked skin death-white and glistening. No longer a child, he had grown into a man, but his grown-up face simpered perversely like a child’s.
“It’s not fair,” Johnny said. “You left me here all alone. There’s no one here to play with me now. Come back and stay with me, Angel. I need you.”
His bone-white hand reached up and touched her face, and cold water trickled from his fingertips down her throat to her breast. “We can play our old games together,” he said. “Come home, Angel, and be my friend.”
His cold wet fingers grasped her wrist tightly and were tugging her down into the grave when she heard Ben let out a terrible cry from somewhere behind her. Then it sounded as if he was falling down the stairs, and he cried out, “No! No! For God’s sake, leave me alone!”
Ben needed her help, so she jerked free from Johnny’s grasp, pushed herself up heavily from the edge of the grave, and stumbled through the dark toward the sound of his cries. She found him sitting on the wet floor at the bottom of the steps, shaking and sobbing with terror. She grasped his sweaty arm and tried to pull him up, but he jerked his arm away and yelled, “No! No! For God’s sake, leave me alone!”
“Come on, Ben, get off your fucking ass!” she yelled. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”
The fear that had sapped her strength a moment before now gave her vigor. She wrestled him upright and started pulling him up the stairs while he struggled weakly and moaned like a madman. She saw a dark shape standing in the doorway, but she kept going. She felt its watery fingers groping her face and breasts as she pushed her way through it, pulling Ben along behind her.
Ben seemed to snap out of his madness as soon as they were upstairs. “Thank God it’s you,” he said. “I thought it was something else.”
But Sarah scarcely heard him. Already she was running out of the doorway, running out of the house into the heavy rain that was drenching the graves of children and adults alike.
Chapter Thirty-One
Sarah sat silently beside him while Ben steered the car through the rain toward Lancaster. Ed Hardin had wanted to collect their stories, but they had told him nothing. The horror was still too raw and frightening to be shaped into folk tales.
They were halfway back to Ben’s house before he said, “Do you mind telling me what you saw?”
Ben listened carefully to her story, his respect for this tough-spirited woman growing. She had lost her brother, her parents, and her friend. The sense and predictability of her life had vanished. Yet she had somehow found the strength to help him an hour ago. If she hadn’t pulled him up the stairs, Ben believed he would have ended up permanently mad or even dead.
“What do you think happened down there?” she asked.
Ben stared through the wipers at the rain pounding the pavement. Lightning still split the sky, but it was some miles behind them now.
“You know what a psychologist is supposed to say,” he said. “All this stress, a new trauma every day, Howard’s death, and the house like a symbol of it all. Add to that Ed’s stories to heighten our suggestibility. Then the darkness of the basement and those stinking graves. Even the thunder played its part. Any shrink worth two cents of his inflated fee would say it was irresponsible of me to let you go down there. Though if you hadn’t been there I—”
“So that’s what you think? You think it was all delusions?”
“No. It was something more.”
“Then what was it?” Sarah asked.
“I don’t know. There’s nobody stupider than someone who knows all the answers. The night I met you, you asked me if I thought Angel’s friend was real. I said then I didn’t know, but now I say yes, Angel has a real friend, and we just had an encounter with it. Who or what it is I don’t know, but I do know it’s dangerous.”
“What did you see down there?” she asked.
“I thought I heard you fall,” he said. “I tried to help you up, but you were unconscious, so I picked you up and started carrying you up the stairs. But when I got about halfway up, the light from the doorway fell on your face, and I saw that what I was carrying wasn’t you after all. That’s when I tumbled down the stairs and went completely insane. She was on top of me then, trying to strangle me.”
“Who’s she?” Sarah asked.
“My wife.”
Ben tried to put the bloated purple face out of his mind, the bulging eyes that stared at him reproachfully, the lip pulled up in a cat-snarl, the noose wrapped tightly around her neck. Worse even than that were the things she said, hateful accusations, horrible curses.
He focused on the road. The rain made driving difficult. Now wasn’t the time to explain more, and he waited until they were back at his house and had both showered and eaten dinner and were sitting out back at his picnic table watching the sunset, he with a whiskey and she with a cold beer, the grass dry because the rain had not extended this far south, and as they watched the daylight condense and sink into a dark purple bruise he told her about Isabel.
“She taught for the Ohio University art department, a painter. Maybe you noticed some of her paintings in the house.”
“I thought they were yours,” Sarah said. “They’re good.”
“Yeah, she had talent. I saw her paintings before I ever met her, a show in the OU art building in Athens. I kept driving back down to Athens to have another look at them. One afternoon I noticed a woman watching me as I stared at them. Tall, dark hair, dark eyes, pretty damn beautiful. Somehow I knew she was the painter.”
Ben could still clearly see the first glimpse he’d had of Isabel, standing in the corner with a trace of a smile, her dark eyes radiating genial pleasure, enjoying this man gazing at her paintings as some women enjoyed men gazing at their bodies. He had said, “These are yours, aren’t they?” and when she nodded he said, “I like the way you see things.”
“There wasn’t any getting-to-know-each-other phase,” he continued. “No sweaty nervous first dates and all that. We just fell into step as if we’d always been together. I don’t mean we made love right away—that waited a while. But we were together like twins from the day we met.
“It’s a funny thing, because we were very different. Her perceptions were turned up so high that any little thing could thrill her, maybe a clump of goldenrod or a cloud in front of the moon. But there’s a downside to that—things most people would find a little irritating she found downright painful. There’s no way to describe her, really. There’s no one else like her.”
Ben drank his whiskey and poured another. It was getting dark now and the mosquitoes were out. He asked Sarah if she wanted to go inside, and she said no. He listened to the cricket-filled silence, seeing Isabel’s face wherever his eyes
fell. She was everywhere, she was nowhere. His world was still filled with her and empty too.
And here was this auburn-haired woman watching him and listening to his deepest feelings, this woman who had saved him from madness or maybe death. He didn’t know what to think of her, he didn’t know what he felt about her, but he was glad she was sitting here beside him. He ground his boot heel into the grass and continued.
“I don’t remember ever proposing to her. I guess we both just assumed that we’d get married. A month or two after we met we were already talking about how many kids we wanted and when we’d want them. Not right away—we’d wait a few years. Guess it was maybe three months after that day in the art building, we were married at St. James here in Lancaster. This farm was hers—she was raised here and had always lived here except when she was getting her degrees.
“When she got pregnant a few years later we weren’t really expecting it—I was fighting for tenure and she was busy teaching and putting shows together. But we didn’t complain. It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened, for both of us.”
Ben saw what he didn’t want to see, still couldn’t bear to see, Isabel’s rounded abdomen making her sexier and more womanly than ever. He shut his eyes, trying to squeeze out the image.
The rest he told quickly, in a spare summary, the brutal rape, the two men springing like panthers from bushes near the Athens campus, her miscarriage, her depression turning to madness, her doctor wanting to place her in an institution for a while, his own absurd, inexcusable belief that he could help her, that she was better off at home than in an institution, that it was safe to allow her to wean herself from the over-medication the doctor had prescribed, that love and time and her paintings were therapy enough, and all the while as Ben struggled to help her he had to fight the department for the tenure that one person on the committee sought to deny him because he didn’t walk the walk, and while he fought for his academic survival he had too little time for Isabel, too little attention to see that she was sinking further, that she needed her medication, needed in fact to be institutionalized, any idiot should have seen it, there was no excuse to pardon his arrogant blindness . . .
