She wasn’t quite sure when she realized that there’d been no sound up there for a while. She glanced up at the ceiling. What could he be doing? They’d stored a lot of things in the attic, and it suddenly occurred to her that he might be looking through boxes, peeking at their private belongings. Even if that wasn’t what was happening, however, the roofer shouldn’t be slacking off. It was still raining outside, and that leak needed to be fixed.
The hammering started again a moment later, but Laurie still found herself curious as to what was going on up there, and, despite her trepidation, she walked upstairs, stopping at the foot of the ladder that led into the attic. It sounded as though he was hard at work, and it occurred to her to announce her presence, but something kept her from it, and she said nothing as she climbed the rungs and poked her head through the trapdoor opening.
There was a bare bulb light hanging from the ceiling, and its yellow illumination was so weak that she didn’t see the roofer until her eye caught sight of movement in the darkness.
She squinted to focus her vision.
He was nailing the body of a dead squirrel to the underside of the shake roof. Two other squirrels had already been nailed into the wood, and there was a small sack of more dead animals on the floor next to him. He must have seen her in his peripheral vision, because he stopped hammering in mid-swing and looked over at her, caught.
The second their eyes met, she was screaming, and she jumped down off the ladder, running through the house and outside, leaving the front door open as she took off down the street.
****
Tag McKellips had worked at Ammon’s Lumber for the better part of two decades, and he was not surprised at all when he read in the paper about the psycho roofer. He’d had his eye on that weasel from day one. A lot of people came through the lumberyard gates, and Lord knows the construction business did have a high level of transient workers, but there’d been something about that guy in the engineer overalls that had set off Tag’s internal alarm. It was nothing specific, not his appearance or anything he said. But just watching the man walk up and down the aisles, picking out roofing supplies, made Tag feel uncomfortable.
And his instincts had been correct.
After reading the article this morning, he had called the police to let them know the roofer had bought his supplies from Ammon’s. Tag wasn’t sure how the man had paid, but if it was with a credit card, the cops might be able to track him. There might also be other employees who saw and remembered what type of car, truck or van he drove.
The cops had come later in the afternoon and interviewed everyone, but they didn’t seem to have found out much that would help. After all the publicity, Tag figured that the man had probably skipped town. Which was just as well. There was definitely something wrong with the guy, and it was probably only a matter of time before he did something far worse than butcher small animals and nail their body parts to a roof.
It was Tag’s night to close, and after John, Ray and Stuart tallied up their registers, cleared the aisles and made sure no customers were in either the store or the yard outside, he unlocked the front door, let them out, and then locked the door behind them before heading back to the office to turn on the security camera and alarm. The sound of his shoes on the cement floor echoed far out of proportion to its actual volume.
But that was not the only noise in the building.
Somewhere in the semi-darkness, an electronic whirring started. Then stopped. Then started. Then stopped.
As though someone was testing out a drill.
Had someone been hiding when the store was cleared? Tag felt a flash of anger. “Hey!” he called out in warning.
The whirring stopped. But from the last aisle, where the lights had already been turned off, came a loud crash. Something heavy had fallen from one of the shelves.
Fallen…or been pulled.
Seconds later, there was another crash, from further up the aisle.
And another.
Whoever—
whatever
—was pulling items off the shelves was coming closer and would soon be in the same rear section of the store that he was.
Tag felt unaccountably chilled. It was probably some punk-ass teenagers. Or maybe it was the psycho roofer, who’d seen the cops here earlier and was pissed at Ammon’s because someone here had ratted on him.
Those were best-case scenarios.
Worst-case scenario?
It wasn’t even human.
Was he in third grade? How could he even come up with an idea so idiotic and patently ridiculous? Because the hair standing up on his arms and the back of his neck said the idea wasn’t so ridiculous. There was a gigantic floor-shaking crash from the front of the aisle.
Tag knew instantly what it was—a bathtub.
But the bathtubs were on a shelf six feet up and so heavy that they could only be moved by a forklift.
He ran quickly into the office, closing and locking the door behind him, turning on the alarm.
All of the power in the building shut off.
Thrown instantly into darkness, Tag looked toward the alarm control panel, assuming that the alarm had a backup battery and that he would still see a lit red light. No such luck. There were no lights on in the building at all, no illumination…except for a soft bluish glow somewhere near the head of the store’s first aisle.
Where something heavy crashed in the stillness.
Through the window of the office, he could see the blue glow pulsing gently, as if in time to a heartbeat. It shone above the top of the first aisle, partially lightening the exposed beams of the open ceiling high above. Reaching the end of the aisle, it moved out into the open.
It was a ghost.
Tag knew it instantly, though he had never seen a ghost before and had not even believed in their existence until this moment. But the sight triggered a latent recognition in his brain, and his instinctive reaction was to duck below the level of the window so he would not be seen. It seemed suddenly hard to breathe. Though possessing a vaguely human shape, the glowing figure that emerged from the aisle was so fundamentally wrong, so horrifyingly unnatural, that he was afraid in a way he had never been before. Panicked, he scrambled through the darkness, crouching low, hands in front of him to keep from running into any furniture. He knew there was a door to the lumberyard on the opposite side of the room, and his goal was to reach it, run outside and escape. A rational part of his brain knew that he should find the phone and call the police, but there was nothing rational about the terror coursing through his veins. As quickly as he could, he scuttled across the floor, maneuvering around an unseen desk, knocking over a wastepaper basket and passing to the right of a filing cabinet before reaching the door.
Standing, Tag opened the door, closed it behind him and dashed outside.
Boards of various size were stacked on metal frames against the wall of the building within a chain-link fenced yard that opened onto the parking lot. No lights were on out here either, but the sky was clear, the moon was full, and the soft illumination from the sky mingled with the diffused light of the surrounding city, allowing him to see where he was going.
Running as fast as he could, he passed the railroad ties and posts, the four-by-fours, the two-by-fours—
And stopped short when a dark figure lurched out in front of him.
Blacker than the surrounding darkness, it emerged from between two stacks of lumber, comprised of shapes that were not supposed to go together, emitting a low noise that sounded like a cross between a moan, a mumble and the hum of a powerful diesel engine. He could feel the sound in his bones, as though the vibrations were passing through him, but he didn’t stop to analyze the situation. He backtracked, ran into another row and, heart pounding crazily, zigzagged between piles of wood toward the front gate and the parking lot beyond. Behind him, he could hear boards falling, th
at low noise rising in volume as though the entity producing it grew in anger.
He reached the gate.
It was locked.
Tag’s heart sank. He only had keys to the building’s door. The gate key was back in the office. He felt overcome with exhaustion, knowing that his only option was to go back the way he’d come. Breathing deeply, he turned around.
And the lumberyard was empty.
He saw boards that had been knocked over or strewn about, but there was no sign of the dark figure he’d seen only moment before or of the glowing ghost from inside the building.
The lights suddenly came on, the alarm blaring.
He breathed an honest-to-God sigh of relief, letting out all of the air his lungs had been holding in one grateful exhalation. It was over. Whatever it was, it was finished, and once again the world was back to the way it was supposed to be.
Before something else could happen, he ran back down the length of the yard to the office, closing and locking the door, shutting off the alarm and using the phone to call the police. He explained who he was and where he was, telling the dispatcher at the other end of the line that someone had broken into Ammon’s and asking her to send some officers down here. There was no way in hell he was going to describe what he saw, but he hoped that if the cops got here in time, they might see something for themselves.
Hanging up, he hurried back through the building to the entrance, unlocking and opening it before stepping gratefully outside.
Two officers arrived fairly quickly in a patrol car with lights and sirens on. In Tag’s telling of the story, he had just set the alarm when it went off. He heard a series of loud noises from down the first aisle and quickly called the police. Running out to the front door, he locked it to keep the intruder or intruders inside.
Tag accompanied the officers as they canvassed the inside of the building as well as the adjacent lumberyard. They discovered plenty of vandalism, saw objects big and small thrown from shelves onto floor, but there were no signs of the perpetrators.
Of course not. They were ghosts.
Henry Ammon himself was called. The owner sped down to the store in less than ten minutes, but it was still nearly two hours later before all questions were asked, all reports taken, and Tag was allowed to go home. Although he was tired, at least the fear had faded, and he drove through the wet streets to his neighborhood, anxious to get into bed and grab some shut-eye.
That wasn’t going to happen, though. He was halfway down the block when he noticed that the lights in his house were flashing on and off. It looked almost like the house at the end of Poltergeist, and he slowed the pickup, his heart pounding so hard he could hear the blood pulsing in his head. He had no intention of pulling into his driveway—he was going to head straight for the police station—but he looked at the house as he drove past and saw a pickup truck almost identical to his own parked in front of the garage. On the roof, clearly visible in the light from the streetlamp, was a man tearing off shingles and throwing them onto the lawn below.
The psycho roofer.
It had to be. He’d found out somehow that Tag had called the cops to help identify him, and he had come for revenge.
Bringing ghosts with him?
None of this made any sense, but Tag didn’t care. He was going straight to the police. Let them handle it. Let them figure out—
His steering wheel was yanked to the left by an unseen force, putting the truck on a collision course with the massive oak tree in front of Nora Domberg’s house. Something pushed his foot down on the accelerator.
He neither saw, heard nor felt the crash. His foot was being pushed down against his will…and then he was opening his eyes to find himself standing in his own hall closet.
Except that he wasn’t really standing. He was being held up. By long thick nails that had been driven through his hands into the closet’s back wall. He felt no pain, though, only numbness. His vision was blurry, but he could see that the closet door had been taken off, and a man crouching down in front of him was meticulously screwing in a wooden panel that covered the bottom third of the open doorway.
Tag knew he should scream, should try to free himself and fight, but his brain was foggy and he didn’t have the will to do anything other than stare.
The man finished affixing the bottom panel and picked up another that he fitted above the one he’d already installed. This one came up to Tag’s neck.
He was being walled in.
The man saw that Tag was awake, and he smiled pleasantly. He was wearing what looked like a train engineer’s outfit: striped overalls with a matching billed cap.
“Nice to meet you,” the man said. “My name’s Frank.”
And he started screwing in the second panel.
FOUR
DENVER, COLORADO 1988
Randy Armstrong was grateful for Frank. Ever since he’d gotten out of prison, it had been damn near impossible to find a job—even though obtaining gainful employment was one of the requirements of his parole. As Christian as everyone always claimed to be, none of them really believed in rehabilitation or giving a guy a second chance. The minute they found out he’d done time, he saw that familiar look pass over their faces, the one that said there was no way in hell they were going to hire him, and he knew that even though he’d paid his debt to society, they were going to lie and say the job was filled, or not pick anyone, rather than put him on the payroll.
So thank God for Frank.
An independent contractor, Frank didn’t have to answer to anyone but himself, and he wasn’t afraid to take a chance on someone who maybe didn’t have the most upstanding background. He knew that Randy was good with his hands and familiar with construction, and that’s all that mattered. Randy had come clean right away, had even ended up spilling details, but Frank hadn’t cared. In fact, he’d understood. Smiling sympathetically, Frank said he knew how sometimes little girls would flirt with you. Didn’t matter how old they were: sometimes they wanted it. And when they started screaming afterward, playing the victim once they’d gotten their jollies, well, they might need to be beaten, shut up for their own good so that other people wouldn’t get the wrong impression.
Frank knew the score. Which was why it was such a pleasure to work for him. Although…
Although sometimes he did things that were a little bit strange.
One time, for example, a neighborhood dog found its way onto the site where they were working, and, grinning, Frank hit it with a hammer. The dog ran off, limping and bleating, and Frank laughed. “Next time,” he said, “that mutt’s going into the cement.”
Another time, Frank showed up in the morning with a bag full of pelts. That’s what he called them, pelts, as though he was some sort of trapper back in the 1800s. Again they were laying concrete, and Frank spread the pelts over the rebar lattice before pouring the cement. “What does that do?” Randy asked. Frank only smiled mysteriously and put a finger to the side of his nose, wiggling his eyebrows up and down like Groucho Marx. It was an odd and unnerving response, and Randy, feeling creeped out, had had to look away.
Frank also liked to tell stories. They were good stories, mostly, and he insisted they were true, but Randy had his doubts. One time, Frank said, he’d been working in California and had been called in to oversee the construction of an addition to Johnny Carson’s house. Johnny was pissed off one day because the night before he caught his wife blowing George Hamilton in the bathroom at a party. He’d gone in to take a leak and had found the tan man sitting on the toilet, pants around his ankles, while his wife knelt on the floor before him, her head bobbing up and down. “I can’t let that stand,” Johnny said, and Frank was with him. So, under the talk show host’s supervision, he put together a Mousetrap-like device that appeared to be part of the construction, but when a smiling George Hamilton toured the site so Johnny could show him how things were comin
g along, he stepped on a spot that, through a series of what appeared to be coincidences, caused a board with a long nail poking out of it to slap him in the crotch. “You should have heard the bastard scream,” Frank said, laughing. “Sounded like a woman getting her ass reamed.” Randy said that he thought the wife should have been punished, too, and Frank said that she had been—Johnny had divorced her and cut her off with no money.
Another story involved a drunk Ronald Reagan who’d hired Frank to install an alarm system in his house. “This was well before he was president,” Frank said. “But after he was governor of California. He was in kind of an in-between stage, and I don’t think he knew what to do with himself. So he drank a lot. Anyway, he tells me that he wants to go joyriding in this crappy old pickup the gardener drove. It was parked in the driveway, and the gardener was in the back. The moron left his keys in the ignition because he thought it would be safe there at Reagan’s estate, and we just hopped in and took off. Reagan was driving, and he was drunk off his ass, almost hit the gate on the way out. We went careening down the road and ended up crashing into a fountain in front of Anthony Quinn’s house. Luckily Anthony Quinn wasn’t home, because Reagan pulled his pants down and took a shit in the fountain. We left the truck there and walked back, where the gardener was panicking and running around, wondering where his pickup was.” Frank laughed. “Then Reagan told me to get back to work and wandered off, said he needed to take a piss.”
These were all tall tales as far as Randy was concerned, but most were funny as hell, and he always enjoyed hearing Frank tell them.
Overall, he thought, he had a good thing going here.
Overall.
He’d been working with Frank for a little over three months the first time it happened.
It was late at night, and he was half-asleep in his lounge chair when there was a loud knock on the door of his trailer. Randy jumped, startled. He wasn’t expecting anyone—and who showed up at this hour anyway? He was more than a little drunk, but even through the fog of alcohol he had enough wits about him to know that it was most likely his parole officer with a spot check. Use of alcohol was prohibited as part of his parole, and he quickly ran into the bathroom, poured some Scope in his mouth, gargled, then swallowed. Looking in the mirror to make sure his eyes weren’t too red (although he could always claim to be tired), Randy hurried to answer the door.
The Handyman Page 20
