The Waiting

by Joe Hart

  “Da,” Shaun said, pointing at the dog in the puzzle.

  “Yep, that’s right. Do you have one? Downstairs?”

  Shaun’s brow furrowed, and he looked at the puzzle. “Da?”

  The whine came again, this time farther away from the door. It filtered up through the floorboards beneath their feet. The keen of it raised the hairs on Becky’s arms, bringing to mind images of an animal hurt or dying. Was that why Evan said she wouldn’t need to go downstairs? Because he had a mistreated dog down there?

  She stood, the sound of her chair sliding across the floor akin to the wailing below. A part of her wanted to stay upstairs, but another part, larger and kinder, couldn’t stand the sound of an animal in pain.

  “I’m going to be right back, okay?” Becky said, placing a hand on Shaun’s shoulder.

  Thoughts of what she would do if she found a beaten or abused pet cascaded through her mind. She would have to call someone, that much she was sure of. She would never turn a blind eye to a child being neglected, and she couldn’t ignore a pet in the same situation.

  Shaun made an agitated noise behind her, but she didn’t turn. Her hand already lay on the doorknob, which was cold. She wrenched the door open, waiting for an injured dog to come racing past her and into the kitchen, but the stairs stood empty. Darkness clung to the steps, and she could barely make out a platform farther down. Her hand found a switch inside the stairway, but when she flicked it upward, no light bloomed below. At that moment she nearly shut the door. She hadn’t heard anything really, and Evan seemed like a nice man who loved his son, not the kind that would lock away a tortured dog.

  As she began to shut the door, the dog whined again down in the dark. The sound was so full of anguish her heart ached. She could already feel its fur beneath her fingers and its grateful tongue licking her face.

  Becky stopped on the landing, only then realizing she’d traveled down the stairs to get there. The black of the basement looked like swirling ink before her eyes. She’d never encountered darkness so thick. Not even when her cousins locked her in a closet when she was six. The gap beneath the door had let a little light in, enough to spur hope of getting out.

  But now, her breath was trapped in her chest. She stepped forward, finding the next stair with her outstretched foot. Her hands groped before her, and she imagined what she would do if something reached out and touched her fingers. She would die, she knew it in her heart. There would be no scream, or even time to register the pure terror; she would simply drop, dead as a swatted fly.

  Instead of the slimy touch of something unimaginable, her hand brushed a wooden post. Following it down, mostly for support, she felt the edges of an electrical box, and after an excruciating beat, the switch flipped up, coating the basement with dim light.

  Becky stood motionless on the steps, her fingers pressing the switch up as though it might snap down on its own. A doll stood near the bottom of the stairs, its lifeless blue eyes gazing across the room. If they’d been trained on her, she might’ve screamed, losing all will to venture further. A few boxes and an old desk sat to her right, but the object at the far end of the space was what held her attention.

  The biggest grandfather clock she had ever seen stood there, its hulking three-towered bulk taking up most of the wall. Its black finish looked like fabric cut from a midnight sky, and its face seemed to stare at her, pinning her to the spot on which she wavered.

  “Puppy?”

  Her voice sounded weak and small. The word died so quick in the basement air she wasn’t sure she’d even said it.

  “Hello? Are you hurt?”

  A quiet whimper came from the other end of the room, and Becky squinted beneath a makeshift worktable set up in front of the clock. Shadows cloaked the area, and she couldn’t see if anything lay there.

  “It’s okay, I’m not gonna hurt you.”

  She waited for the jingle of a collar or another noise, but none came. She moved down the last few stairs and onto the basement floor. The air was definitely cooler down here, and it smelled. What was the smell? Something sharp and acrid but organic. She’d smelled it before.

  Blood.

  “Are you hurt?” Becky said, forcing herself to walk toward the table.

  She ignored the sensation of being watched, and completely struck down the idea that the clock was the one watching. A clock watching. She nearly let out a strangled laugh through her tightened throat but cut it short.

  The dog whimpered again, and she tried to make out its form under the table. A dark shape lay there, but it looked wrong somehow.

  An overwhelming urge to backpedal to the stairs hit her like a bat to the head.

  You should run.

  Instead, she took another step forward and squatted by the table to examine the darker shadow. Becky placed her hands on the floor and leaned forward, trying to make out the shape of the dog.

  Something wet touched her fingers, and when she looked down, she saw why the form beneath the table looked so strange.

  The pool of blood that she’d thought was a dog rolled toward her, a black puddle moving like quicksilver. Becky pulled her hand up, revulsed, her face crumpling. She opened her mouth to scream—she had to, there would be no getting around it now—but the dog whined again, louder this time, and she realized where the sound came from.

  From inside the clock.

  “No,” she gasped.

  Her muscles, the ones she’d meant to work on and tone up for Greg so he wouldn’t leave her for someone thinner, shook, and her attempt at standing resulted in falling flat on her ass. Her air left her, and all at once she was a child again, lying on her back beneath the weeping willow she’d been climbing until a branch broke and released her to the cruel arms of gravity. A small amount of air whistled into her lungs, and it was this sound she thought she heard as she tried to crab-walk backward. But when her breath heaved back out, the noise continued, drawing her eyes upward.

  The three bare light bulbs were slowly unscrewing themselves.

  “No,” Becky said, this time getting some force behind the word, like an admonition to the turning bulbs.

  The bulb closest to the stairs dropped free of its fixture, winking out like a falling star before exploding in slivers of glass behind her. Becky yelped and stopped moving backward, a painful spine of glass poking into her palm. She watched in horror as the next bulb in line finished unscrewing and plummeted to the cement floor.

  Darkness moved in closer, like something alive and ready to pounce the second the light vanished. Far away, she heard Shaun call out for her upstairs. Her arms shook, trying to hold her upper body up. Tears slid down her cheeks, but it was like watching someone else cry. The last light twisted with agonizing slowness, drawn out by an unseen hand, but it wasn’t this that held her attention.

  Becky stared ahead, her eyes bulging as the grandfather clock’s middle door swung open, and the last light bulb fell, shattering on the floor.

  15

  Evan slowed the van to a crawl and read the fire number poking from the bushes beside the country road.

  Checking his notes, he saw the number matched, and turned the vehicle onto the driveway. No tar or gravel covered the drive, unlike most of the other homes he’d passed on the way out of Mill River. After dropping Selena off in front of a low office building a short distance from the park, he’d taken Main Street north, leaving the quaintness of town behind for the truly rural feeling that only wilderness can bring. The road wound around massive stands of pines, their reaching branches forever green against the marbled sky, and beside Long Lake at times, before the water ran out and the vegetation of spring took over completely.

  It hadn’t taken long to find Crux Drive, and Evan kept checking the clock, not wanting to be gone from Shaun more than a few hours. He’d actually driven past Cecil Fenz’s driveway at first, because there was no mailbox at the head of the trail. Now, as he bumped through the dense woods, the gray light from above dimming further amongst the
budding trees, he wondered if the directions on his phone were correct. The narrow drive twisted twice, hard, like a bend in a river, before straightening out again. The van traveled up a short hill, and then the cover broke, a yard and house coming into view before him.

  The house surprised him, not only because it was such a contrast to the one he’d just left but because it didn’t look like the home of a recluse. It was two stories and wide, a covered front porch adorning its front. The roof drew his eyes upward, with its slatted tile shingles and curved peaks. The eaves were delicately carved, ornamental wood, and it became apparent when he parked the van close to the house that the designs were constellations. A small garage stood next to the house, humble in its low shape, and a tilled patch of earth, nearly fifty yards square, sat beyond the garage, neatly placed stakes marking rows in the dirt.

  Evan shut the van off and waited for a moment in the quiet. He looked for some movement behind the opaque windows or a sign that he’d been spotted, but none came. The painting in the Kluge mansion floated in his mind’s eye, and he breathed deep a few times, calming the nervous tension that hummed inside him. He grabbed his cell phone and climbed out of the van.

  The cool afternoon air bit into his neck as he walked up the steps and across the porch, his feet thunking on the boards. He wished it would rain and get it over with; for some reason, the feeling of waiting for it to happen was almost too much. He raised a hand to knock on the front door, but a voice filtered out from behind it, startling him, his knuckles still inches from the wood.

  “What do you want?”

  It was the same voice from the phone but with an edge to it. Evan wondered if there was a gun pointed at him right now.

  “My name is Evan Tormer, I called you a few days ago. I just have some questions.”

  “Go away, you’re trespassing.”

  Even though the words sounded menacing, he could still hear a strange lilt to the woman’s voice, something cultured, foreign.

  “Please, I won’t take much of your time.”

  “You’ll take none of it. You’ll get in your car and go while you still can.”

  The metallic click of a cocking gun met his ears. The fear of being shot by this strange woman in the middle of nowhere became overridden by the questions that plagued him, and before he could stop himself, he spoke.

  “This is about your mother, Bella.”

  Evan waited, the threat of rain no longer a concern, but the anticipation of a bullet punching through the door became almost too much to take. The seconds ticked by, agonizing in their unending length, and then a new sound came from inside, one that surprised him. Several locks snapped, and the door cracked open enough for him to see a gray eye surrounded by parchment-like skin peer out.

  “Who are you?”

  This time he heard a touch of curiosity in her voice.

  “I’m looking for information, information about a grandfather clock. It was built by Abel Kluge. I know your mother knew him.”

  The eye studied him, ran up and down his frame before the door slammed shut. The hope growing in his chest flickered and died. But before he could decide whether to call out to her again or give up, another snap came from the door and it opened fully, revealing the woman standing there.

  The top of Cecil Fenz’s head barely came to his shoulder, though it wasn’t because of stooping or a bent spine on her part. She stood straight, dignified, with her shoulders thrown back, not rounded as he’d expected. She had silver hair, the color of the clouds over the house, which draped down her back in a ponytail. Her face had small features with articulate eyebrows that reminded him of the precise carvings in her eaves. She wore a painter’s smock and gray slacks. In her right hand, she gripped a large revolver, not pointed at him, but not at the ground either.

  “Speak fast and clear, and if this is any kind of trick, things will not end well,” Cecil said.

  Evan didn’t doubt her a bit.

  “I’m staying at the house on the island, the Fin. The clock is in the basement. I started off wanting to write an article about it, about its history, but now ...” He shifted and glanced into the woods surrounding the house. “Now I need to know.”

  Cecil studied him for another moment, then let the gun point fully at the floor. “It’ll rain soon, come inside before it does.”

  She stepped aside, and Evan moved past her, into a comfortable foyer lined with paintings on each wall and wooden benches. Cecil shut the door and locked it.

  “I haven’t had another person in my house for five years, and it would’ve been more if the electrical panel hadn’t shorted out.” Cecil walked past him, her slippers slapping against the wood floor as she went. “I pride myself in being able to fix most things. Saves money, saves time.” She gave him a disdainful look over her shoulder. “Saves conversation.”

  “I’m sorry to intrude,” Evan said, following her into a warm kitchen with floor-to-ceiling windows and a long breakfast bar at its center. “I got your name from the twins in town, Arnold and Wendal—”

  “Peh!” Cecil swung her hand through the air in a violent motion. “Insolent old men have nothing to do besides meddle in others’ affairs and rest their sagging bottoms in chairs all day.”

  Evan couldn’t help but smile at the old woman’s vehemence. She turned on her heel and went to an industrial-looking stove, where she banged a pan onto the top and began to heat water.

  “You like coffee?”

  “Yes, that would be great.”

  “Good, because coffee and wine are all I drink, and it is too early for wine.” Cecil’s hand’s worked fast in the cupboards and drawers, but her eyes remained on the clouds outside. “But I may regret that later.”

  Within a few minutes, she handed him a cup of coffee the color of tar poured from a brass pot that chugged merrily on the stove.

  “This is the only way to make coffee, everything else is barbaric.”

  Her slight accent became more noticeable, and Evan paused, his cup halfway to his mouth.

  “You’re French?”

  Cecil shot him a glance and then drank a sip of coffee. “Half. My mother came from France, my father was English, but born here.” She looked around the kitchen and shook her head. “The kitchen is no place for talk. Only gossip and food is made in kitchens.”

  She led the way out of the room through an archway that opened up into a sitting room with an elegant glass table over ten feet long and several overstuffed leather couches. Every wall in the room held at least two pieces of art, and all had the same sublime look to them, their colors meshed and flowing in brushstrokes both bold and gentle. Evan studied the painting closest to him, a beautiful scene set beside a waterfall with stones of all colors bathing in its swirling pool. A boy lay on his side, dragging a flower in the flowing water, his eyes on the sky above him.

  “I call that one A Day’s Dream, for nothing like it could exist in this world,” Cecil said, as she settled into a comfortable-looking chair.

  “You painted this?”

  “I painted everything in this house. Call me egotistical, but I like my paintings more than anything else I’ve seen.”

  Evan took a drink of his coffee and felt a disconsolate wave wash over him, knowing that he’d been drinking swill labeled as “coffee” up to this point in his life.

  “That’s amazing,” he said, then took another sip.

  Cecil nodded. He set his cup down on the glass table and sank into the couch nearby. He folded his hands, then refolded them, not knowing how to begin. Cecil saved him the trouble by speaking first.

  “So you’ve seen it.”

  It wasn’t a question but a condemnation.

  “Yes, I happened on it as soon as we moved in.”

  “‘We’?”

  “My son, Shaun, and I. We’re house-sitting for a friend who owns the island.”

  Cecil said nothing, only watched him.

  “I didn’t know what to think at first.”

  “And you
still don’t, that’s why you came here, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  Cecil sighed and looked down at her coffee. “My mother came from a village outside of Paris. She spent her first fifteen years there before her father shipped her off to America, to a better life.” Cecil made a disgusted look, then continued. “She moved in with her aunt in Wisconsin, a cruel woman who drove her out of the house almost as fast as she’d taken her in. My mother wandered. For a while she worked as a pastry chef’s assistant in a small bakery, until he died of a stroke. After that, she begged for change and rode short distances on a railroad. But after almost being raped and killed, she took a job cleaning and cooking at the house you’ve no doubt just come from. That’s the only way you would’ve known my mother’s name.”

  Evan nodded. “The painting.”

  “That was her true calling, the art that made several men from her country famous. She spent every free moment either drawing or painting on anything she could find. Her hand was true, and her mind had an inner vision most others can only dream of.”

  “Apparently she passed her gift on to you,” Evan said, motioning to the walls.

  Cecil shook her head, slowly, deliberately. “I received but a fraction of what she possessed. If you could’ve seen her work, if you could’ve seen that painting in the room before—”

  She stopped, her small face crinkling with lines.

  “What happened there?”

  His initial excitement at opening up a channel for answers wasn’t as strong. Something dulled it, clouded over it like the weather outside cloaked the sky.

  “To understand what happened, you must first understand what Abel Kluge was.”

  “What was he?”

  “A madman, and a cruel one at that. If he hadn’t needed a maid that could also cook when my mother came calling, he would have turned her away, battered and bruised, no matter. He was not unfamiliar with women looking like that anyway, since he sometimes administered beatings to his wife as well as the rest of the staff.”

  Evan waited, not knowing what to say, and decided not to say anything, in hopes that Cecil would keep talking.