The door opened a crack. Not enough so I could see Miss Carstairs’s face. Just enough so she could see mine.
“Hello, Bud,” she said. I was pretty sure that she had a weapon aimed at me, or at least held at her side.
“Miss Carstairs,” I said. “Just checking up on you.”
“Mmmm, I can see why. Any idea why that van’s parked in front of my house?”
“Nope.” I glanced over my shoulder and stopped to blink.
The door on this side was open. Jim had already walked over to check it out, his thumbs tucked under his belt and his elbows sticking out a little. No doubt to show whoever was inside that he was armed.
“Nothing’s painted on this side,” I said.
“What’s painted on the other side?”
“‘Something borrowed, something blue, something terrible is going to happen to you,’” I said. “Sound familiar?”
She shook her head. “Other than the obvious note that it’s the rhyme for good luck at a wedding, gone wrong.”
Jim was beside the van now, sticking his head inside the back. I wanted to shout at him to back off—I could just imagine the door slamming shut and popping his head off like the head of a dandelion. I have that kind of imagination.
But by the time I unstuck my mouth to say something, he’d pulled his head out again. “Empty,” he said. “Nothing in the back but some ratty orange carpet. Not a goddamn speck of blue, as far as I can see.”
“You didn’t see it pull up, did you?” I asked Miss Carstairs. “Or hear anything?”
“No. It was here when I woke up, that was all. You?”
“I didn’t hear anything either.”
“Kids?”
I thought about not telling her, but…if I was losing my marbles, better than more people knew about it rather than less. “I think something’s going on a couple of houses down. The place with the hole in the floor.”
“The Sandersons’,” Miss Carstairs announced. “They had two boys who liked science fiction. Moved to…moved to Madison.”
I nodded. She would know. “I saw a woman inside. Looked like a real estate agent.”
The door twitched. I still couldn’t see her through the crack in the door. “A real estate agent?”
I grimaced. “Jim said he saw a big black dog. Either way, we both saw whatever it was walk straight across the big hole in the floor. And before you ask, no, I haven’t been drinking.”
As soon as I said it, I realized that I hadn’t wanted to check up on Miss Carstairs to make sure she was safe—I’d wanted her to tell me what it was that we’d seen. Put a name to it, no matter how unbelievable it was.
She frowned. “Did you recognize the real estate agent?”
“No.” I corrected myself. “Although she reminded me of a character I used in a book a while ago. Nobody important. Just someone who dies in the apocalypse. Killed by looters.”
“I’d like to see it,” she said. I assumed she didn’t mean the book.
“We’re headed over there to check it out,” I said. “You can follow us over to the sidewalk and take a look if you like.”
The door opened. Miss Carstairs was dressed in a snap-fronted house dress and slippers. One of the pockets of the dress sagged like she’d put something heavy in it. She stepped out of the slippers and into a pair of thick-bottomed nursing shoes. She wore bifocals attached to a gold chain whose links caught the morning sun.
She leaned over, picked up her keys and phone off a stand by the door, and put them in her other pocket. Then she took the keys and locked the door behind her.
“All right. Let’s see if you’ve checked out at last, Bud Rozanski.”
Ha, ha. Her tone was pure sarcasm. Despite the bad joke I still felt relieved.
Someone with some sanity should probably witness what was going on here.
· · ·
The three of us stood in front of the Sanderson house. The sidewalk was cracked like a jigsaw puzzle. The grass was short along the sidewalk, but got longer and messier right up along the house. We took turns mowing the grass in front of the abandoned and burnt-out places. It was kind of like getting ready for a forest fire. Putting up fire breaks to keep something nasty from spreading.
The big front porch was maybe half a foot off the ground, only one brick step up from the sidewalk. A pile of mail littered the porch just past the step—the mailman obviously hadn’t been walking up to the front door to put it in the brass-fronted mail drop. Couldn’t blame ’em.
The windows weren’t boarded up, unlike most of the rest of the abandoned houses in the area. And there was no tarp over the rotted hole in the roof. There was no pretense of anyone owning the place, not even a bank.
Unlike other abandoned houses that I’d seen, the weeds and saplings weren’t taking over the interior yet. They butted up against the house; they even leaned into the windows, but they weren’t growing in the cracks of the sidewalks and they hadn’t started growing up among the cracked bricks of the front porch. Either they hadn’t breached the house’s defenses or they didn’t want to.
“Flashlight?” Miss Carstairs asked.
Jim pulled one out of his pocket. I patted the sides of my coat and cursed, then started to turn around.
Before I took a foot off the sidewalk, I froze.
The door of the van had closed.
“Either of you hear that?” I said, and pointed.
Jim cursed and Miss Carstairs’s lips thinned out into a pink minus sign.
“I don’t like it,” Jim said.
“If that’s how it’s going to be,” Miss Carstairs said. Her nostrils flared.
“You know something about this?” I asked.
“I read books.”
Whatever that was supposed to mean, I didn’t know for sure. But it sounded like a hint not to ask any further. I took it—it wasn’t like having the door of the van mysteriously close without the sound of a door slamming was going to change the fact that we needed to find out what was going on in the house.
Or did we?
On the one hand, we didn’t. As far as we knew, there was nobody inside who needed to be rescued. We could all go home, come back at four in the morning with a couple of gallons of gas and lighter fluid, and burn the place down. Problem solved.
Or I could buy myself a plane ticket to see one or the other of the kids. Or to someplace with white sand, lots of booze, and pretty girls to bring it to me. I could even buy tickets for Jim and Miss Carstairs. Problem also solved.
But, on the other hand, I think we can establish that I wasn’t that kind of problem solver. Not the kind that ran away, and not the kind that burned a place down before finding out what was inside.
I was already planning out how to put this in my next book. You know I was.
When Miss Carstairs reminded me that she read books, she was trying to remind me of every time that the intrepid explorers went into the haunted house to discover…the unknown. Of course, doing that usually ended badly for at least one of the intrepid explorers.
Jim said, “If we’re gonna do it, let’s do it.”
I said, “Get your damn flashlight out.”
Jim pulled it out of his jacket pocket and turned it on. It was the kind of flashlight that you could use to knock a bear out. First you just have to distract the bear…
The three of us walked up to the porch. Jim gave me a look and held out the flashlight. I took it. My call, my neighborhood.
The grip of the flashlight was warm and just a little sweaty. I shone the beam into through the front door.
No dogs, no real estate agents. Just a big hole in the floor. The exterior walls, dark brown brick, were splotched with something dark—could have been spray paint, could have been mold. The interior walls, two-by-four studs covered with drywall, had been busted up so the copper wires and pipes could be pulled out. The textured ceiling had suffered the same, which had just accelerated its destruction. The plaster had been soaked through and rotted yellow a
round the edges, turning to black where the water had pooled up and finally pushed through. Whole sections of the ceiling dangled like abandoned cake frosting.
“What do you see?” Jim asked.
“Gimme a minute, will you?”
I shone the light through the doors further into the house. The doors had been pulled out, including the frames and hinges. Light shone through the busted windows, turning the shadows green.
I turned the light toward the hole in the floor.
The hardwood floor had been ripped out, exposing the slats of the underfloor. In the center of the room, the slats had been either pulled up or rotted away (I guessed that it was both, to get at some of the wiring), exposing the support beams under the flooring. The center of the floor looked like something heavy had dropped from above and fallen through.
In the basement, the light hit nothing but a jumble of rotten wood—black with rot and mold. Not a speck of metal glinted back at me.
“Damn it, Bud, what’s down there?” Jim asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Sure is taking you a lot of time to see nothing.”
“My eyes had to adjust.”
“See the dog?”
I shone the light around the corners of the room, checking for a sleeping area or piles of dog turds. I didn’t spot any.
“No,” I said.
I thought that if we had to, we could edge around the sides of the room and be all right. But it would probably be better to find the back door and go in through that way, if we needed to see inside the rest of the house.
I shone the light downward again. “I think we were seeing things,” I said.
Miss Carstairs cleared her throat. I looked back at her, of course shining the flashlight right into her eyes for a second. She raised her arms up as if to fight off an attacker.
I lowered the light.
Over her stick-like shoulder I could see that the van had pulled up in front of the Sanderson house.
Two doors down from its original position.
Jim shuddered all over and stumbled off the porch, walking toward it.
The white van was still facing the same direction—to the north. But the blue letters had moved from one side to the other.
Or else someone had, in complete silence mind you, pulled up behind us and spray-painted new words on the other side of the van.
It said, “Something odd, something true, all the monsters come into view.”
Jim missed the step off the porch and swung both arms out, trying to catch his balance. He did after a step or two.
“Jim,” I said. “Don’t…”
He threw me a dirty look over his shoulder, then patted his jacket. I shook my head.
I’d tried to get Jim to read one of my books once. He hated it. Not the way that a person who doesn’t like to read books hates books. No, Jim hated the book the way a man who loves fishing hates to see his favorite stream polluted. He got mad at me—red-faced, shouting-match mad at me.
I’d given him a novel where a night watchman has to fight off an alien invasion. Big slug things take over the basement of one of the malls he’s watching and start crawling all over the neighborhood, breaking into an apartment house and getting into the walls. The main character’s a big hero. He saves a couple of women, a baby, even a dog. In the end he chases the aliens off with their tails between their legs.
Jim took offense to it. “That’s not how it is! That’s not how it is!”
I asked him what I got wrong. I was expecting him to say some detail about being a night watchman. I was expecting him to be mad that I’d put the watchman at a mall, for Christ’s sake, instead of the industrial park where he worked. (I don’t know why I put it there myself; when I thought about it later, the industrial park would have been more interesting. But the words go where they want to, I just type ’em in.)
He said, “There’s no such thing as aliens.” And then he marched off and didn’t talk to me for six weeks.
I never spoke to him about it again. But I couldn’t help but notice that he changed the subject when it came to TV shows and movies that we’d watched. Cop shows, forensics, gang shows, mafia shows—you name it. He had a taste for violence. Serial killers, he loved those.
But cross from the realistic to the fantastic, and Jim turned the conversation elsewhere.
He could imagine a gang of kids breaking into his house and killing him and his wife. He could describe to me in vivid detail what they would do to him if he didn’t protect himself.
But introduce an element of the impossible, and he got mad.
I never could decide whether his imagination was that bad…or that good.
“Jim,” I said, as the man stomped toward the van as if it had personally offended him. “Wait for me.”
He didn’t.
The door of the van cracked open, then lifted out along the tracks. It slid open silently, the black shadows inside getting wider so slowly that I could almost convince myself the door wasn’t moving.
Inside was…well. I caught a glimpse of the real estate agent, a vapid, friendly look on her face.
Miss Carstairs gasped. Not the kind of extravagant gasp that women give in movies. It was more of a wet sound that started with a smack of her lips, then a sigh in reverse. A soft, spitty sound that you wouldn’t make if you knew you were making it.
“Dooley,” she said.
Who or what Dooley was, I didn’t have time to ask. Jim had almost made it to the side of the van. He was pulling something out of his long coat—something that looked a lot like the butt of a sawed-off shotgun.
I shoved the flashlight toward Miss Carstairs and ran for Jim. I made it down off the front step and about halfway down the sidewalk before I tripped.
I was too late anyway. He was standing beside the van, aiming his sawed-off into the darkness.
“Come out,” he said.
Then I heard a tearing sound and Jim rocked back on his heels. The sawed-off slid out of his hand and landed on the sidewalk beside him, the one that crossed from house to house to house. It went off.
I heard the shot, then the rattle and ping as buckshot ricocheted off the front of the van, the sidewalk, even the snap on wood as it hit a tree in the front yard of the next place down.
Jim fell backward, arms windmilling.
Landed on the sidewalk.
Skidded backward a foot or so.
His head flopped backward onto the cracked cement. He landed spread-eagled on his back on the sidewalk leading back toward the house.
And right in front of me.
I expected…I don’t know what I expected. No, that’s not true. I expected to see a bullet wound of some sort in his chest. Something had to have hit him, and hit him hard. That was the only thing that made sense.
I lifted my head up and got onto my elbows. The wind had been knocked out of me but I hadn’t noticed it. My mouth was open and I couldn’t get any breath.
Jim’s chest had blown outward.
If you’ve ever had the kind of car accident where the front air bags deploy, that’s what I mean. The driver’s bag in the steering wheel blows the front of the steering wheel off. Everything gets shredded and tossed everywhere.
The front of his jacket looked blown apart. His shirt, too. All gone. The other weapons that he’d had in his pockets stuck out of the cloth like bits of bone exposed out of the middle of a piece of flesh.
His chest looked like newspaper in a hurricane. Sodden pulp. The liquid inside his rib cage sloshed around like water in a washing machine.
The breeze carried the smell toward me. It was Hell warmed over.
I looked inside the van, counting the few seconds I had left until I, too, was dead.
It was empty.
· · ·
After a few seconds of dumbfounded terror, I grabbed Jim by the shoulders of his coat—he was that close to me—and pulled him backward along the sidewalk like I was back in ’Nam. He left a trail of blood behind him.
The door of the van closed.
Slowly.
Without slamming.
In perfect silence.
I kept telling myself that I wasn’t seeing what I was seeing. It was like the real estate agent—I was seeing something that hadn’t happened. Jim had seen something in the van and it had given him a heart attack. All I had to do was calm down enough to give him CPR. The hole in his chest wasn’t a hole in his chest. It was just my imagination.
I tried not to look. When that didn’t work I tried not to figure out what it was that I was seeing.
But I could no more stop trying to find a way to describe it than I could have cut my own hand off. His heart was gone. His lungs were wadded up balls of bloody lace. The ends of his blood vessels dangled like loose shoelaces. But his heart, the dark meat of it, that was gone.
It had leapt out of his chest. That’s what it was. It had burst right out of him like it was being pulled by some kind of magnet.
The side of the van was white except for the blue paint and some blood splatter on the side of the van between the passenger and side doors. A few fresh dings marked the front panel where the buckshot had hit it.
I made it back to the front porch and dragged Jim up onto the safety of the brick, such as it was. Miss Carstairs stood over me with the flashlight like it was a sword.
I laced my fingers together and put them onto Jim’s chest.
It was no good. My palms sank below the level of his chest and scraped bone.
I looked over my shoulder at Miss Carstairs. Her face had gone like stone.
“Is he gone or am I just seeing things?” I asked.
Her voice was a like a wood floor creaking. “He’s gone.”
I leaned back on my heels. The fear was settling in. My heart was racing and my breath came in shallow, strained gulps. It wasn’t a heart attack but I could feel something like one coming on. Painful. Like a hand that got itself around my heart and my throat.
I knew it wasn’t going to burst out of my chest, though. At least there was that. I pulled my cell phone out of my inside pocket and dialed 911. The operator asked me what the emergency was and I told her the address and that my friend was having heart problems. She told me to perform CPR and to stay on the line, help was on the way.
Something Borrowed, Something Blue Page 2
