Three Incidents at Foster Manor

by P. T. Phronk

  “I can walk. I’m fine,” Marcus said in clipped breaths.

  But that wound was in his left side, just below his chest, dangerously close to his heart and even closer to his lungs.

  We stumbled back into the main hallway, coming out near the ball room. When we all stopped coughing for a moment, the house was silent, as if nothing had just happened.

  We passed the alcove leading to a room that looked like the lobby of a movie theatre. A blinking light from some kind of speaker—obviously battery-operated—lit up the dormant popcorn machine, and I allowed myself a moment to realize how hungry I was.

  “You know my dad didn’t have anything to do with this, right?” Jasmine asked.

  “Honey—” Marcus said.

  I interrupted. “I know, I know. It’s their fault. Whoever those people outside are, it’s their fault. Trista, the strange noises, the flying wine glass—maybe they poisoned us, somehow. Made us hallucinate. It must have been those men all along.”

  Jasmine wouldn’t make eye contact with me. “Yeah. Maybe.”

  I stopped, forcing all of us to stop, since Jasmine and I were practically carrying Marcus between us. “What do you mean maybe?”

  Her gaze darted up the hall, where we were headed. “Caleb has been sitting by the windows, watching the lane to the house. Sometimes he watches the back paths. He says odd things about what’s out there. Sometimes he mumbles to himself when he thinks no one else is in the room. He … he almost acts like he knew this was going to happen.”

  I thought of what the man in the pink raincoat had said: Who the fuck is Trista? “What are you saying?”

  She nudged us forward. Marcus winced as she propped him up. “I’m not necessarily saying anything. Just … just let’s keep an eye on Caleb.”

  Sure enough, Caleb was in his usual position peeking through the curtains of the family room. Craig manned his own window across the hall in the kitchen. Both of them jumped when I coughed to announce our presence.

  “Watch out, he’s back,” Ash said, raising his hands a little too dramatically. He’d been cleaning the food and shattered glass from the floor.

  “He’s been shot, you asshole,” Jasmine said.

  Craig rushed into the hallway to help take some of Marcus’s weight from us. “We heard the shots outside. Ash thought it was Marcus pulling something, but …”

  “Pulling something? You’re still listening to this idiot?” Marcus said. “Two men in gas masks are out there, with guns. Yeah, those were gunshots, so stay away from the windows, okay? You people are so damn white.”

  We propped Marcus against the hallway wall, out of the line of sight of any windows. With his weight off of me and a moment to catch my breath, I realized how hard it was to breathe. I’d only been in the storm for two or three minutes, but it was the largest dose of the environmental catastrophe I’d exposed myself to since the beginning, and the storms were less severe back then. My lungs screamed, like the first and only time I’d tried weed. My skin itched, too, but I knew scratching would only make it worse.

  “First aid?” I asked between coughs.

  Caleb stood up to get medical supplies.

  I pointed at Caleb. “Someone should go with him.”

  “Jesus, fine, Ash, will you go with him?” Craig said. He crouched beside Marcus, shaking with nerves. “What happened out there?”

  We told him, and it seemed to convince him that there had been a horrible misunderstanding. Marcus didn’t murder Trista, and the real enemies were outside with guns, likely intent on getting in and robbing the place. And on top of all that, séances weren’t real.

  But if robbery was the motive, why would they lock Trista in the safe room, kill her, then go back outside? If they had locked her in the room while the rest of the family was away, wouldn’t that be the perfect time for a robbery? It made no sense.

  Ash returned with a first aid kit, which he tossed at Craig’s feet.

  “Where’s Caleb?” Craig asked.

  “He freaked out. Said he needed to protect Trista. I told him, too late, but then he said he meant he had to find the crowbar he left by the safe room. I think he’s lost it. And I’m being charitable by assuming he ever had it.”

  I crawled to the kitchen. The curtains were closed, so the risk of getting sniped from outside was low, but I could see bobbing lights backlighting the fabric. They were still out there. I put the security sign down on the counter of the kitchen island, then returned to the hall to help patch up Marcus. “Do you have any guns?” I asked Craig.

  He shook his head. “Of course we don’t have any guns.”

  “Axes? Tools? Anything?”

  Craig held up Marcus’s shirt while Jasmine cleaned his wound. She whimpered as she did it, but I had to give her credit for keeping it together, not vomiting or losing control entirely.

  Marcus cleared his throat, and when he spoke his voice sounded thin, like he was working with half an air supply. “The outdoor tools would do some damage. But they’re out in the back of the tiki shed.”

  That thatched-roof hut across the pool deck, where those bobbing lights outside came from. There was no way I’d go back out there. “Damn,” I said.

  Craig shook his head and his eyes watered. “This is what the safe room was for. We could have waited it out in there.”

  “Not an option now, Craig,” Ash said. “If we didn’t have Marcus with us, we could make a run for it. Have we forgotten that he’s the one who made the safe room unusable by stuffing it with your daughter’s body?”

  Marcus just shook his head sadly, but I could almost feel the heat coming off of Jasmine. I backed away, feeling awkward, or even unsafe, hovering in the middle of these people.

  Jasmine shook as she held gauze to her father’s wound. “Still? You still think Dad did this? Why would he do anything to Trista? You’re the one who’s been obsessed with her since she was, what, fifteen years old? Nobody else will say it, but we all thought it was you.” She inhaled through bared teeth. “I guarantee, the moment we saw Trista on that screen, everybody in this family wondered where you were when it happened.”

  For the first time, I noticed Ash express emotion. His lips sucked inward and tightened, his fist clenched. Was it embarrassment? Or anger? He composed himself a second later. “Well then you must have been greatly disappointed when you realized I was talking with you when it happened.”

  I backed away further. I needed something to hold on to, something certain. I turned to the kitchen counter and reached for my security stake.

  It wasn’t there.

  “Yes, you were with me,” Jasmine said. “Which is why I’m blaming the God damn men with guns outside instead of continuing to throw out accusations in here.”

  I crouched to search the floor, because surely the sign had just slid off the kitchen counter as I’d placed it there in my messy state of mind, but in the shadows of the flickering candlelight, I could barely see anything, and as I pawed around I couldn’t feel anything either.

  Dammit. I needed a weapon, in case anything else happened. Like if any of the men managed to get inside.

  Like from the door I’d left open when I ran to help Marcus and Jasmine. The door just on the other side of the kitchen pantry …

  “Oh no,” I whispered.

  I grasped the edge of the counter to pull myself up. Slowly, slowly, slowly I peeked over the edge of the kitchen island until I could see the pantry door.

  Behind the door’s frosted glass, two light patches could have been mistaken for a pair of mugs on a high shelf. But then the two orbs turned toward me, coalescing into the gas mask’s alien-like approximation of a face.

  I ducked back behind the counter. “Guys,” I whispered as loud as I could, but they were still shouting at each other behind me. “Go!” I shouted as I stood up. “Run!”

  The pantry door swung open, and the man pointed his gun at me.

  Chapter 8

  “Run!” I screamed again, then leaped out
of the kitchen, into the hallway. My legs carried me without any effort on my part. They were attached to me, part of me, but it wasn’t me moving those legs, just pure fight-or-flight panic.

  I was carried toward the end of the hall, and once there, I’d have a choice. Up or down. A moment’s hesitation and I’d feel the bullet ripping through my lungs, I knew it. Just like poor Marcus. Up was stupid. It was always the stupid girl who went up the stairs, trapping herself in the house.

  I was halfway downstairs before I realized the basement was just as much of a trap. Hadn’t it already done that job once today?

  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  The open basement where the safe room was located wouldn’t leave many places to hide, so I turned before I got there, ducking into another hallway, then another room. My shoulder rammed into a shelf. I used the dim light of my cell phone screen to determine where I was. Jars full of a dark substance rattled against each other, jingling away my location. More carefully now, I stepped around tall shelves filled with jars, boxes, and toys. I went a row deeper into the room; these shelves housed ancient computers, tools, and other antique gadgets that the tech guys at work would kill to pick through.

  Something scraped the pavement behind me.

  I squatted. Shit. He’d heard me.

  One of them heard you. One of the two, I reminded myself, making sure not to underestimate the trouble I was in.

  I crawled behind some boxes on the bottom shelf and turned off my phone. Quietly, quietly, quietly, I inched further along the row, in case he’d spotted me hiding.

  A flashlight scanned the room, with slivers of its light bursting through gaps in the shelves’ contents to create glowing shafts in the dusty air.

  He stepped into the room.

  I crawled around the edge of the shelf behind me, slipping back another row, trapping myself deeper. The flashlight bobbed, and his footsteps drew closer.

  I searched for a weapon. Something that could be used as a weapon. Anything. This shelf was only boxes. The next one over was piles of folded clothing. The next—

  I gasped and jumped back. Black eyes and gnashing teeth glowed in one of the shafts of light approaching behind me. I thought the dog had reappeared, but no, this time a bear had burst through from the other side of the shelf.

  I scrambled backward. My hand fell onto something roughly cylindrical. I grabbed it from the shelf and held it in front of me, but the bear stayed where it was.

  The man rounded the corner. I held my new weapon in front of me—a knife! I’d managed to stumble upon a knife.

  The flashlight’s beam was blinding. It turned to illuminate the bear.

  “We used to play Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” It was Caleb’s soft voice. He turned the flashlight to illuminate two more bear heads, sitting on the shelf beside the first one. They were only masks, but the eyes and the teeth were frighteningly realistic. “Dad would be one bear, Uncle Marcus would be another, and I felt so special when they let me be the third bear. Trista and Jasmine took turns being Goldilocks, pretending to sleep in her castle while we snuck up on her with our masks on and startled her. Trista was best at playing her. She’d scream so loud, then laugh and laugh and laugh.”

  He lowered the flashlight. His eyes were puffy and red. In his other hand, he held the rusty crowbar he’d used in his attempt to pry Trista out of the safe room. “I keep thinking she’s going to wake up,” he said.

  I took a step back.

  “Bears used to make me happy,” he said, caressing the bear masks on the shelf. “I wonder if they will any more. Dogs used to make me happy too, until Dad’s story about the one in the ball room. Now I hear dogs howling in the woods when I’m scared.”

  I swallowed the lump in my throat and willed my heart to stop beating. “Caleb. We need to keep our voices down and turn the light off. Those men have gotten into the house.”

  He tightened his grip on the crowbar, then set the flashlight down. It cast dark shadows under his already-dark eyes, and I didn’t like him being so close, his crowbar vibrating with pent-up anxiety. I gripped the knife tighter. “Where are they?” he asked.

  “Right above us, far as I know. But one of them saw me come down here.”

  “Is everyone okay?” he asked, still not whispering, still too loud.

  “Shhh. I don’t know.”

  His hand shot out, reaching for my knife. I jerked, and the knife jabbed his hand. He giggled like a little boy, then impaled himself again and stepped back. “I played with that as a kid too.”

  I touched the tip of the knife. It bounced up and down on a spring, the plastic blade retreating down into the plastic handle. “Your fucking toys are going to give me a heart attack,” I said.

  He giggled again. I couldn’t help but smile.

  “Come on,” I said. “We need to protect ourselves, and maybe all these toys will help. Wanna play Goldilocks again?”

  We chatted quietly while we worked. As Caleb opened up, he seemed so innocent, in the sense that all children are innocent. Yet I couldn’t let go of the thought that someone from the house could still be involved in his sister’s death—after all, the man in the pale pink raincoat had asked: Who the fuck is Trista? Plus, innocent children are capable of some horribly guilty things, so what the fuck does that word, innocent, really mean anyway?

  He got moody again when we grabbed some materials from the central room. The one with Trista’s tomb in it.

  Like I’d always done when Todd was miserable, I distracted him. “Caleb, is there a cellar door around here? One that leads outside? It’s how Mae said she got in, but Jasmine said there isn’t one.”

  His head snapped up. “How did you know about that? We talked about it all the time. We saw in some old movie we all watched together—Donnie Darko, I think?—that cellar door is the most beautiful phrase in the English language. Not because of what it means, but just the way it rolls off the tongue, you know?”

  “Cellar door,” I said, too loud, then quieted my voice back to a whisper. “Cellar door, cellar door, cellar door. Yeah, okay, I see it.”

  “So we joked about it all the time, thinking of excuses for saying it. ‘Time to go inside? Let’s take the cellar door!’ You know?”

  “But there’s not actually another door to the basement?”

  “Nah.”

  “So how did Mae get in?”

  He scrunched up his face and studied mine, like he was trying to decide if I could be trusted. The feeling was mutual. “You really saw Mae?”

  I sighed. “Okay, so to tell the truth, I’d just hit my head pretty bad, and I … I possibly hallucinated seeing a big dog right before that. But I saw her. How would I even know who she was otherwise? How would I even know her name?”

  Caleb opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out.

  “I know it sounds crazy.”

  He shrugged. “We all go a little mad sometimes. Isn’t that a line from some fairy tale?”

  I could live with that. We quickly walked back toward the staircase, which was the only real entrance to the basement, carrying armfuls of materials for our little project. I’d gotten inspiration for this project from my husband, Wes, when he had broken his foot just before he went missing forever (but left the car in the driveway, my mind liked to remind me whenever I thought about him). We put the materials down, then headed for the nearby room. The one with the bouncy castle that had so freaked me out earlier.

  Heavy footsteps stomped directly above us.

  Caleb finally remembered to whisper. “Mae hasn’t been here in a while. But I remember her. She told such great stories, and really knew the history of them. Once, she came with her gun—she’s a cop, you know—and that scared me when I was a kid. But she also dressed so funny that I couldn’t really be scared. Not of her, anyway.”

  An idea came to me. Call it troubleshooting, like when a customer had a problem with their safe room system, and I’d tell them various steps to try out. Sometimes I’d tell
them to do something that I knew wouldn’t work, but their ability to carry out the instructions and report back would tell me about the person. The person was just as important as the technology.

  “I noticed she dressed funny. Her big orange hat with the rose on it.”

  Caleb giggled hysterically. “Her orange hat, yeah.”

  We continued with our project, hurrying, knowing that those men could come down the stairs at any moment. The bouncy castle was heavy, and even with Caleb’s help laying it out across the hall, sweat dripped down the back of my neck. My heart still raced from fear, but it was joined by a sort of pride; as Mae had said, this family needed their hero, and I was the only one with the qualifications for that role at the moment.

  “Goldilocks time?” Caleb said.

  “That’s right. If Goldilocks didn’t want those bears coming in, she should’ve rigged up some security.”

  Caleb giggled again, covering his mouth so it wasn’t too loud. “Amy, it was Goldilocks breaking into the bears’ house.”

  I kicked our new security rig to make sure it was solid. It was simple, but it would hold up. It would hurt. I wiped the sweat from my brow and flicked it aside. “Well, then I guess that makes us the bears.”

  A door creaked open. The sound carried through the walls, seeped into the floor, then shot into the basement in such a way that it sounded like it was nearby, though I could not determine exactly where in the house the door was located.

  A moment later, someone yelped, then the stomping of several pairs of feet travelled across the house. The footsteps faded in volume quickly, presumably as the chase led to the second floor.

  “I think that was Jasmine,” Caleb whispered from across the hallway, crouched in the doorway to the shelf room.

  I nodded. My hands shook as I tried to find a good place to put them. If the men upstairs didn’t kill me, the anxiety from waiting for them to arrive would. I couldn’t figure out the motives of the pair of men; was it robbery? Murder? Worse? What did OUR TURN mean? But in any case, they’d search the basement at some point, and that’s when this rough plan would bounce into place.