by Rick Hautala
“Someone has to know what happened,” said the gentle feminine voice. “Someone has to know … and remember … everything that happened out here … or else …”
The last word was whispered like a slow hiss of steam.
“Fuck you!” another voice suddenly shouted. “Fuck you all!” No one has to know shit, and I say we can’t fucking make him do any—”
“Please, please watch your language in my place,” said the woman with the Scandinavian accent. Brian wasn’t sure, but he thought whenever she spoke, he could also hear the distant sound of a baby, crying. It was faint, just at the edge of hearing, winding up and down, reminding him of something … something he had heard before.
When? Where?
“Fuck you!” the man’s voice shouted. “This is my fucking place as much as it’s yours. Maybe more!”
“If it’s a question of whose place it is, we should ask Rachel.”
“Well, Rachel … what do you think?”
“Rachel?”
There followed nothing but a prolonged silence that stretched out like a long, dark road. As it lengthened, a chill rippled like a spider’s touch up Brian’s back. He glanced nervously over his shoulder and saw that the sun had already set. Dark evening shadows spilled from the corners of the cellar and spread like ink stains across the dirt floor. The darkness pressed in close around him, and he had the sudden overpowering sensation that he was no longer alone in the dark.
No!
Not at all!
There were several people, maybe dozens of them, standing nearby, lurking in the shadows just out of sight, watching him. As the cellar steadily darkened and Brian’s panic rose to new heights, these unseen presences shifted closer to Brian. He could feel them reaching out for him with hands that he could just barely see—or imagine—in the thickening gloom.
Terror choked him. A small corner of his rational mind whispered that he had to be imagining all of this. He was scared and all worked up, and his imagination was running wild because he’d heard his crazy Uncle Mike’s wild ramblings. That had to be it! Uncle Mike was doing all of those voices, carrying on a seven- or eight-way conversation with himself.
Was something like that even possible? Could people be that crazy?
Goddamned right they could! Brian thought. He wanted to run, screaming from the mill, but was immobilized with fear. Uncle Mike had been stuck in the mental hospital for a goddamned reason!
As the silence continued unbroken, Brian started worrying, wondering if Uncle Mike was okay. He wanted to slide the door open—just a crack—and have a peek inside the room, but the fear raging inside him held him back. Instead, he turned and, on trembling legs, started walking toward the stairway, stumbling as he went.
He felt only a slight measure of relief when he made it out into the open air and started for home. As soon as he was on the dirt road, he looked back over his shoulder, convinced that Uncle Mike or someone else—someone quite possibly more dangerous than his uncle—was following him. Wave after wave of fear crested inside him until he broke into a run, dashing full speed into the woods along the dark, uneven path.
In the dense shadows under the trees, everything seemed threatening. Branches lashed out at him like angry, slapping hands. Roots tripped him up and grabbed at his feet. The night air roaring into his lungs was as thick as hot honey. He was dimly aware that he was whimpering as he swatted branches away from his face and bounced off unseen trees. If he could have taken a deep enough breath, he might have screamed.
He was afraid he’d taken the wrong path, but at last, he saw the Old Witch Lady’s house up ahead. With a final burst of speed, he crossed the back lawn and made it up the stairs and onto the back porch. His body was slick with sweat and trembling when he threw open the door and went inside. Fortunately, his father, who had gone out to a town planning board meeting, wasn’t home yet, and Dianne wasn’t downstairs. She was probably upstairs in her bedroom with the door closed and—hopefully—hadn’t heard him come in. Trembling with fright, Brian locked the door and went straight up to his room. He resisted the temptation to wedge his door locked with the back of a chair or his bureau.
Later that night, alone in his room long after his father had peeked in to say good night, Brian lay wide awake, staring at the ceiling until well past midnight. He was trying like hell to figure out what must have really happened out there at the mill, but he wasn’t at all sure what he wanted to—or dared to—believe.
Chapter Eighteen
Shadow Show
“Who was that?” Dianne asked after Edward hung up the phone in the hallway and walked back into the kitchen. A perplexed look played across his face as he sat down at the table, picked up a fork, and began twirling it around in his hand like a magician, trying to make it disappear.
“That was Andy Jones, from the fire station,” Edward said, heaving a deep sigh. “He finally got an answer on how the fire got started in the kitchen.”
“And—?”
And now you know, Edward! Dianne thought with a tingling rush. You know I started it by leaving the coffeepot on, right?
“—And … it looks like it started between the walls somehow—something wrong with the wiring.” Edward shrugged casually. “Who knows? Maybe a mouse or chipmunk or something got in there and chewed on them. Or else they were just old enough and frayed enough to cause a spark to jump and then—poof!”
I don’t believe you! You know, and you’re hiding it from me!
That was Dianne’s first thought, but she didn’t say it out loud. Smiling weakly, she turned back to the eggs she was frying for her husband. She looked longingly at tin food—real food. As usual, all she was having for breakfast was a Carnation Instant Breakfast—the only complete breakfast you can drink through a straw!
“So it—it wasn’t arson, then … like Andy first suspected?” she said. Her voice trembled and was barely audible above the snap and sizzle of frying eggs. She glanced at the square of morning sunshine shining on the floor through the opened screen door. Warm air wafted into the room, but that didn’t stop her from shuddering.
“I guess not,” Edward said. He took a deep breath and added, “Mmm, that smells good.”
Dianne’s grip on the spatula was white-knuckled as she turned back to her job and looked down at the food, practically swimming in a brown-skimmed pool of melted butter in the old, blackened frying pan.
Evelyn Fraser’s frying pan! she thought bitterly. The room seemed to darken as if a cloud had passed in front of the sun. And Evelyn Fraser’s old gas stove in Evelyn Fraser’s kitchen because everything I had to cook with was destroyed in the fire!
She flipped the eggs over and stared down at the two round, yellow egg yolks as if they were a hypnotist’s eyes.
A surge of … of what, she wondered—resentment? relief? fear?—rippled through her. A sudden tightening caught her chest as emotions welled up inside her. She found herself speaking before she could hold back the flood of words.
“Are you sure you didn’t start it?”
She was horribly aware of her distant, hollow tone of her voice. She didn’t turn and look at Edward, but she could sense him stiffen and stare at her back. She withered beneath his look, frozen like a fox caught in the sudden glare of headlights.
“What did you say …?”
She knew this was her chance to take it back, to unsay it, but she spoke again, feeling almost as if someone else was controlling her mouth.
“I said, are you sure you didn’t start it? The fire in our house, I mean.”
Edward gave a quick, snorting laugh as if he couldn’t possibly take her seriously, then said, “Now why would I do something like that?”
“Why?” Dianne said.
Her face flushed with a hot rush of blood. Her vision went all blurry as she turned around slowly and regarded her husband with a steady, hostile stare.
“Why?” she repeated, her voice sounding strained and muffled by the wires holding her jaw in place. �
��Why, so you could make us all move back here, into your mother’s house! That’s why!”
She made an angry sweep with the spatula that flung hot grease in an arc. Edward cowed back, although the grease didn’t come close to hitting him. Behind her, the sound of sizzling food grew so loud in her ears it sounded like the pulling rush of the tide. Her anger—hot, red, and irrational—grew stronger with each hammering pulsebeat in her ears.
“We’ve been married—how long? Less than a year, and in all that time, it seems to me whenever you even thought about this place, much less visited it, you’d get all … all weird or whatever … as if you—” She raised her fists and shook them with pent-up frustration. “I don’t know what! It’s like you—you wished you somehow had never grown up or something—like you’re still a little kid, and I’m—I—”
“Come on, Dianne. Cut it out,” Edward said. He made a quick move to get up from the table and go to her, but then reconsidered and sat back down. “You’re sounding like—”
He cut himself off before he said it, but Dianne finished for him. “—Like I’m crazy, right? That’s what you were going to say, isn’t it? That I’m sounding crazy?”
She swung the spatula several times, cutting the air with a sharp whisk-whisk sound.
“Well maybe I am! Maybe after everything that’s happened to me, I’m crazy as shit! Fucking loony tunes crazy! All right? Does that make you feel better?”
“No,” Edward said, keeping his voice level.
“Or maybe I’m just fed the Christ up with you and the way you … you cling to this old house like it’s some kind of … some kind of relic or something! Christ, I don’t know!”
She took a hissing breath through the wires in her mouth as she glared at her husband.
“All I know is, I’m sick and fucking tired of you holding onto this house like it’s the last piece of your childhood, and you can never let go! Never!”
Edward hooked his hands into the tops of his pockets, leaned back in his chair, and took a deep, steadying breath. Dianne could tell just by the way he was looking at her, with a faint twist of a smile at the corners of his mouth, that he wasn’t taking any of this seriously. That drove her anger even higher. She slapped the spatula against the side of the stove, snapping the handle in half. The eggs in the frying pan sent up a thin haze of blue smoke, but she ignored it as she threw the broken handle into the sink, then clenched her fists and pounded them against the counter.
“I can’t stand it! I just can’t stand it anymore!” she wailed as hot tears ran from her eyes. “I just can’t stand what this is doing to us! To you and me!”
“What? What’s doing what to us?” Edward asked, looking genuinely confused as he kicked back his chair and stood up. But he stopped himself from going over to her and regarded her with deep worry. Dianne could see the genuine concern in his eyes, but it was too late. The floodgates were open, and she couldn’t possibly stop the rush of anger and rage that was directed at him.
“I don’t know what!” she shrieked so loud her voice cracked. “I just—just feel it! This house! You! Me! Brian! Everything that’s happened! I feel like I’m losing my mind! Look at what’s happening to you and me? When I look at you, sometimes all I feel is anger, like I—I hate you so much for what you let happen to me!”
“What I let hap—?” His voice dropped off sharply as if his throat had been cut.
Dianne reached up to her face with both hands, wishing she could reach into her mouth and pull the wires out. Bright bolts of pain shot like lightning through her head. Her vision swirled with tears, turning the old kitchen into a wild kaleidoscope of smeared colors. The smoke rising from the frying pan behind her was thicker now, but the hammering of her pulse in her ears was so loud it drowned out the crackle of the burning food.
“Hey! Watch it! The eggs are burning!” Edward suddenly shouted. He darted forward and reached past her for the pan.
“So what?” Dianne wailed. “Let them burn! Why not?” She dodged to one side, convinced that Edward was going to take the frying pan and nail her on the side of the head with it. “Why not let the kitchen burn? Let the whole goddamned house burn down… just like you did to our house! Who’d give a shit! Then what would you do, huh? What would you do?”
Edward snagged a hot mitt from the counter and wrapped it around the pan handle. He moved quickly to the sink, dropped the pan, and ran cold water over it. A billowing cloud of steam rose in a hissing rush as a gray haze wafted like fog up to the ceiling.
Whimpering like a hurt dog, Dianne turned and raced down the hallway without looking back. She shouldered open the bathroom door, slammed it shut behind her, flipped the lock, and leaned her full weight back against it. Through the heavy door, she could hear a loud clattering from the kitchen as Edward went about cleaning up the mess, but the raging confusion in her mind blocked out everything else.
What’s happening to me?
Jesus—God, what’s happening to me?
She pressed her hands tightly against her head as though it was about to explode. Her whole body trembled, shivering as if she was outside in a raging snowstorm. A hot, sour churning rose from her stomach and filled her throat, gagging her and cutting her breathing into short, painful gasps. She was suddenly afraid she was going to throw up, and the memory of the first few days after the operation when she had vomited blood only made things worse. A hot, rancid taste flooded the back of her throat.
“Oh, my God … my God!” she whispered as she gazed into the bathroom mirror, unable to believe it was really her she saw reflected there. She wiped her hands viciously across her fevered face.
She was shaking all over as she bent over the sink and ran the water until it was ice cold, then splashed her face. A slight measure of calm swept over her, and after a while—she couldn’t tell how long—her frenzied nerves began to unwind. Deep muscle tremors rattled her like an earthquake. The muscles in her legs felt hopelessly weak, as if they were about to collapse and spill her onto the floor. She gripped the edge of the sink with both hands and stared long and hard into the reflection of her own eyes.
And then—at last—she realized what that churning sensation in the pit of her stomach was.
It was guilt.
Upstairs in his bedroom, Brian could hear the argument that was going on down in the kitchen. He’d been lying in bed half awake when it had started, not really even aware of the buzzing of voices downstairs until they suddenly rose in anger. A faint stirring of pleasure went through him when he heard his stepmother yell, “Like I’m crazy, right? That’s what you were going to say, isn’t it? That I’m sounding crazy?”
Yes, you’re absolutely right! Brian thought as he sat up in bed and wrapped his arms around his legs, positioning himself so he could hear better. I think you’re crazy as all hell, and I think my dad is even crazier for ever marrying you!
As the argument flared higher, he smiled grimly to himself, taking surreptitious pleasure in hearing Dianne react—or overreact—like this. This wasn’t the first argument he’d ever heard them have, but it sounded like the worst. He had been too young to remember what it had been like when his real parents had been going through their divorce, but he found himself hoping that this was how people sounded when their marriage was heading for the rocks. Another thought registered dimly in the back of his mind, but he knew it was too much for him even to begin to hope … that—eventually—his mother and father might get back together again.
He breathed in shallow sips of air and listened as the voices got increasingly loud. He jumped when he heard a sudden, loud snap followed by a clattering noise.
What, are they throwing stuff at each other now? he wondered as he strained forward and tried to picture what was going on down there. She’s been complaining about how her medication was messing her up. Maybe she’s really lost her marbles and is trashing the place.
He quickly spun out of the bed and tiptoed to the door, opening it just enough so he could stick his head
out into the hallway and hear better. He wished he dared to sneak down the stairs, but he was sure he’d get nailed—bad—if either one of them caught him spying on them.
“I can’t stand it! I just can’t stand it anymore!” Dianne shouted.
Brian smiled, knowing by the crack in her voice just how close to tears she must be.
“I just can’t stand what this is doing to us! To you and me!”
“Yeah, and me, too, you lousy …” he whispered.
His grip on the edge of the door tightened almost painfully. He itched to go downstairs and see exactly what was happening. Maybe he could pretend that he was innocently coming downstairs for breakfast and hadn’t realized they were arguing. But he dismissed that thought, knowing they would no doubt stop fighting as soon as he entered the room. He wanted them to really go at it. He listened as the voices alternated between his stepmother’s rising, angry wail and his father’s lower, steadied tones. Then his father shouted in a voice so loud and sudden that it sent a cold jolt of fear racing through Brian.
“Hey! Watch it! The eggs are burning!”
Using the noise as a cover, Brian took a few quick steps out into the hallway. He was prepared to run the instant he thought they might discover him there. His stomach tingled with tension as he crouched at the top of the stairs. He sniffed the air and caught the first faint traces of smoke. The immediate shock was still reverberating along his nerves when Dianne yelled, “So what? Let them burn! Why not? Why not let the kitchen burn? Let the whole goddamned house burn down … just like you did to our house! Who’d give a shit! Then what would you do, huh? What would you do?”
Then came the sound of heavy footsteps, followed by more crashing and banging noises. Brian saw someone’s shadow—Dianne’s—as she ran into the downstairs bathroom and slammed the door shut. A loud hissing sound and the sound of running water filled the house. When Brian leaned out over the railing, he saw a faint wisp of gray steam wafting from the kitchen into the hallway and chimneying up the stairwell. The burning smell was getting steadily stronger, but still Brian stayed where he was, not wanting to reveal that he could hear what was going on unless he had to. Besides, his father knew he was still upstairs in bed; if there truly was an emergency, he’d yell to him.
