Cooper said nothing, giving him space.
The policeman inhaled deeply before he spoke. “It was in that old Yellow Front building past the corp yard. The one they’re tearing down now for The Store. It’s been empty for a long time, but some lady reported seeing teenagers breaking in. So I went over to check it out.” There was a brief pause. “The shadows were in there.”
He didn’t seem inclined to say more, so Cooper pushed him. “What happened?”
Another deep breath. “Oh, kids had been in there. Probably over a period of years. There were broken bottles, junk food wrappers, used condoms, graffiti on the walls. The usual. I was shining my light around and there, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move. I thought it was an animal at first, a cat or a dog, but my light couldn’t find it. Then I saw the shadow of a man…or a woman. Something with wild hair. It was dancing in the circle of my light, but there was no…there was nothing there that could make a shadow. I was shining my light against the wall, and there was nothing between me and the wall—but the shadow was there, dancing.” Terry licked his lips. “Then there were more shadows. A small person with a big head. That cat thing I thought I’d seen. A skinny stick figure.” He shivered. “I ran away. I’m not proud of it, but there it is. Those shadows scared the shit out of me, and I haven’t stopped thinking of them since.” He nodded toward Cooper, acknowledging the kinship of their experiences. “You know what I mean.”
Cooper thought of the narrow aisles winding through the debris in the house on Calvin Street. The bones. The penis. “Yeah,” he said honestly. “I do.”
They’d reached the parking lot. There seemed little more to say, so Cooper bade the policeman goodbye, and the two of them walked separately to their cars.
The rest of the workday was normal, and he managed to drive home without swinging down Calvin Street, which he counted as a victory. Once inside his own house, he flipped on the TV, switching it to CNN, then grabbed a beer and a bag of Doritos from the kitchen. Settling on his couch, he checked his phone for messages.
There was a voicemail from Amy.
Cooper hadn’t talked to his ex-wife since the divorce, and it was weird hearing her voice now. He recognized it, but just barely, and he wondered if her voice had changed or if he’d just forgotten what she sounded like.
“Coo?” she said (she was the only one who’d ever called him “Coo”). “Can you hear me? Can you hear me, Coo? Coo?”
And that was the extent of the message.
How had she gotten his phone number? he wondered. It was unlisted, and not only did he live in another city now, but he’d moved several times since they’d last had contact. He didn’t know her number, either, but it apparently wasn’t blocked and so was displayed on his list of incoming calls. He listened to the message again, unsure of why she’d called him, unsure if she wanted him to call her back.
Did he want to call her back?
Not really.
He put the phone down, finished his bottle of beer. Their breakup had been hard, and it had been final. He’d never been one of those modern liberal people who stayed on good terms with his exes and remained friends. As far as Cooper was concerned, once it was over it was over, and he could not remember the last time he’d even thought about Amy.
Besides, it was his fault the marriage had ended.
Because he hadn’t been able to get over the rape.
It had happened in the parking structure of the office building where she’d worked, and the assault had been hard on both of them. He’d understood her feelings after the attack because they were the same emotions he was experiencing: rage, hate, hurt. And he’d been there for her, supported her. He hadn’t insisted on intimacy, was willing to let that aspect of their relationship come back whenever it did, whenever she felt comfortable. He’d held her hand and hugged her when she needed reassurance, backed away when he knew she needed space.
Then he’d found out that she’d had an orgasm.
He wasn’t sure why he’d asked about that and didn’t know why she’d answered, but she’d admitted that she’d come when the man had been inside her. It was a purely physical response, she insisted. She hadn’t wanted it to happen; it was something that had been horrifically forced upon her and had occurred completely against her will. But, still, the fact remained that sometimes when Cooper was in bed with her, she wasn’t able to have an orgasm, even though she did want to, even though she was trying to, and the idea that the rapist had made her climax was something he had not been able to get past. It had led to arguments, led to tears, led to accusations and recriminations, led to the end.
He thought after all these years that he’d put all of that behind him, but hearing her voice again, it all came back.
But was it her voice?
There still seemed something different about it, though he did not know what exactly had changed. It was probably just a fault of memory due to the years that had gone by, but he replayed the message again and the discrepancy between how her voice sounded and what he thought it should sound like nagged at him.
That seed of doubt was why Cooper called back the displayed number. He couldn’t believe he was so nervous, but his palms grew sweaty as he listened to the phone ring, and he thought he might hang up once she answered. But she didn’t answer. The ringing was interrupted by three discordant tones, and the recorded voice of a robotic woman informed him that the number he’d dialed was no longer in service.
He tried again, just in case he’d pressed a wrong digit, but the result was the same. Just as well, he thought. He wasn’t sure what he would have said to her anyway. Putting the phone down, he reached for a Dorito. The phone rang again, and he picked it up. “Hello?”
“Coo?”
It was the same voice. Her voice, he knew, though it still sounded different.
“Can you hear me?”
It was the same message as before, and from the same number.
“Amy?” he said.
“Why am I back?” she asked. “How did I come back?”
A chill raced down his spine. No. It couldn’t be.
“Can you hear me, Coo?”
She was dead.
She was calling him from beyond the grave.
He switched off the phone, throwing it away from him on the couch as though it was contaminated with a plague virus. He didn’t want to believe it, but he knew it was true, and he was more scared than he’d ever been in his life.
What if she didn’t just try to call him but tried to visit him?
There have been sightings of the dead.
He checked to make sure the door was locked and the windows were closed, but beyond that, he didn’t know what to do. Should he call Lewis? His friend had been the one to tell him about the rash of ghosts that had been seen around the city and might have some ideas about what he should do, but Cooper was afraid to use the phone in case he heard her voice when he tried to call.
He finished off the Doritos and dropped the bag on the floor where it joined a growing pile of cans, bottles and wrappers that had been accumulating over the past several days. He turned up the television to mask the sound of anything that might be trying to get into the house, even though he was pretty sure that ghosts could not be kept out by physical barriers like walls, windows or doors.
Ghosts.
It was amazing how quickly his worldview had adjusted to include a supernatural world that until recently he’d been certain did not exist.
Keeping the channel on CNN, comforted by factual accounts of the events of the day—a murder, an earthquake, weather, a presidential veto—he turned on all of the lights in the house and made himself a quick sandwich before plopping himself back on the couch for the rest of the evening.
He went to sleep early.
And dreamed of a maze of piled boxes in a dark dirty house. At the end of the
maze was a filthy bed. Next to the bed, the wild-haired squatter from the Calvin Street house was pulling up his pants. On the bed, naked and spread-eagled was Amy. “I came,” she moaned. “I came.”
The next morning, after checking in at the station, he headed out to a junior high school for a scheduled annual inspection. It was summer, so the school was empty. A janitor unlocked the gate and let him into the rooms, and he dutifully checked the pressure of the fire extinguishers and determined whether the smoke detectors were functional. Everything went smoothly, as expected.
Until it didn’t.
He was in one of the locker rooms, opening the “In Case of Emergency Break Glass” cabinet to check the status of the folded hose. The janitor had left to attend to his own duties in another part of the school, having unlocked both the boys’ and girls’ locker rooms, the PE offices, and the gym so that Cooper could continue with his inspection. There was no one in the locker room but him.
So who was laughing?
He stopped what he was doing, stood still and listened. The long room was dark, the aisles between the rows of lockers lit only by the muted illumination seeping down from a series of clouded skylights, the showers at the rear of the space shrouded in a gloom that might as well have been night.
And from somewhere undetermined came the disturbing sound of cracked laughter.
Gooseflesh covered his body. Moving slowly and quietly, as though afraid of being discovered, he closed and locked the door of the glass cabinet without even bothering to look at the hose. All he wanted to do was get out of there.
The noise seemed to be coming from one of the shower stalls, but sound echoed in this empty space so it was impossible to determine its actual origin. Just to be on the safe side, he decided to exit through the gym, in the opposite direction of the showers. Accompanying the laughter, beneath and between it, he could now hear another noise, fainter, higher. It was almost a creak, and something in its timbre grated on him.
Cooper grabbed his materials and, as softly as he could, padded out of the locker room into the gym.
Where he saw a shriveled figure in a wheelchair facing him from center court.
He stopped where he was. The laughter hadn’t been coming from one of the shower stalls. As impossible as it seemed, this was the origin of the sound, and in the openness of the gym, the laughter was loud and frantic, tinged with madness. Even in the dim light, he could see that the withered figure in the chair was an elderly woman, and with a squeak of long-unused wheels, she began pushing herself in his direction. Her arms moved faster, and faster, and faster until she looked like a bird flapping its wings, the wheelchair gaining speed, until the crone was racing toward him, cackling insanely. One eye was bigger than the other, he saw now, and her off-center mouth had many missing teeth.
He tried taking an officious attitude. “Excuse me,” he said. “What are you doing here? This is—”
And then she was gone.
He didn’t know how—had he blinked and missed it?—but something had happened, and she was suddenly nowhere to be seen. The gym was dark, silent and empty, and he hurried out, through with the school. Quickly tracking down the janitor, Cooper told him he was done with the inspection, then retreated to his car in the parking lot, where, for the first time in his life, he falsified the results of an inspection.
But that was not his only odd encounter.
In the restroom of a crowded bar where he’d been sent to assess the maximum number of occupants, he was frightened by the silent presence of someone—
something?
—in one of the stalls. He’d only gone in to wash his hands, but he’d instantly known that the second stall was occupied. The metal door was closed, although that was not the reason for his certainty. It was a sense of presence that emanated from behind the door. There was no noise at all in the restroom. It was as if he’d entered some type of soundproof cubicle. Chilled, he decided that his hands didn’t need to be washed that badly—he had Purell in the car—but before he turned to go, he ducked down and took a quick peek under the stall door. In the space between the dirty floor and the bottom of the metal, he saw black dress shoes, gray pant legs—and caught a split-second glimpse of a wrinkled ankle that appeared to be made of dried wood.
He hurried out of the restroom, out of the bar and drove away from the area as quickly as possible.
Later in the week, he ran into Terry outside city hall. The policeman looked pale and gaunt—
haunted
—and he wasn’t in the mood to talk. He barely acknowledged Cooper’s greeting and quickly hurried away to avoid any interaction.
The shadow stretching out behind him was not his own.
For some reason Cooper could not put his finger on, he was convinced that all of these incidents were connected to the pack rat house on Calvin Street. He became increasingly sure in his mind that if the house had been left as is, none of this would be going on. There was absolutely no reason to think such a thing: he had no proof to back it up, not even anything that amounted to a coherent theory. But Cooper began to believe that all of the mess, all of the clutter—the newspapers and bones, the pipes and boards, even the jar with the penis—had acted as a type of counterbalance to ward off the intrusion of the dead.
It was why he had started to work on his own house.
In truth, he had already started, if completely unintentionally. But it was now a conscious decision to pack his house with as many diverse items as he could, to build up a fortress of protection between himself and the spirit world. While he was not a timid man, the supernatural occurrences he’d heard about from others and encountered himself terrified him like nothing else ever had. He was constantly on edge now, waiting for the moment when something utterly horrifying and completely unknown would casually reveal itself to him.
On his days off, on his lunch hours, he scoured junkyards, garage sales, thrift shops, even the dump, looking for items that caught his eye and that would help him fill up the house. By the end of the month, the living room was almost impossible to navigate, with narrow pathways leading from the door to the couch to the kitchen, and his bedroom was piled high with clothes, towels and bedding, both his own and those he’d been buying in bulk from Goodwill and the Salvation Army.
He never answered the phone, just let it go into voicemail, because Amy kept calling.
Dead Amy.
“Can you hear me, Coo?”
He did keep going to work, however, hanging out at the station, maintaining his normal life. He was determined to keep adding to his defenses without succumbing to obsession like the people on Calvin Street had. He just wanted to reverse what he feared he had set in motion by his inspection of the pack rat house.
Another week went by, and it actually seemed as though his plan might be working. He encountered nothing out of the ordinary during his daily routine, nothing supernatural, and he thought perhaps that he’d been successful in rebuilding the wall that he had helped tear down. He was reflecting on that as he lay in bed, wondering when he could quit collecting and storing. This couldn’t be an endless proposition. He had only so much room in his home, and at some point, he had to stop.
A soft sigh sounded from the corner of the room.
The hair on his arms bristled. The bedroom was dim, a large pile of linens partially blocking the floor lamp that provided his only source of light. The sigh came again, and though he could see nothing, he sensed movement, as though something was moving from the corner into the center of the room, toward the bed.
Cooper had no idea whether any of this was real, but he quickly decided that the best course of action would be to get out of the bedroom. Better safe than sorry. He threw off the covers and took a single step down the narrow pathway toward the door—
Before it was blocked.
He stopped in his tracks, staring at the thing before him. It was mad
e of dirty laundry, a shuffling shambling figure three feet high, moving blindly through the room. There was a noise coming from deep within the pile of filthy clothing, that soft sigh again, and something about the sound chilled him far more than any piercing shriek could have.
It was then that he saw the shadows.
They were shapes that were almost, but not quite, recognizable, and they danced on the walls against a wavering light as though they were the silhouettes of creatures cavorting around a fire. Only there was no flickering fire, just the standing lamp. And there were no creatures. In fact there was nothing in the room that corresponded even remotely to the shapes on the walls, and Cooper thought of what Terry had told him.
The small linen figure had turned in his direction, as though sensing his presence, and was shambling toward him, changing as it did so, sloughing off a dirty handkerchief that floated to the floor, adding a sock that attached itself to the pile as though it were made of Velcro.
There was power in this room. He could feel it, and he knew that there were other entities here he could not see. He’d been wrong, he realized. The house on Calvin Street had not served to ward off the dead.
It had contained them.
Now they were being contained in his house.
He needed to get out of here. His mind raced. He’d spend tonight in a motel, and tomorrow he’d throw out all of the crap he’d been collecting, clean house. He had a sneaking suspicion that it was the dismantling of the accumulated debris at the Calvin Street home that had unlocked and unleashed these spirits onto the community, and perhaps that would happen again when he threw out all of the collected garbage from his own house, but that was someone else’s concern. He needed to purge his own residence before—
There was a sharp stabbing pain in his leg.
Crying out, Cooper looked down to see what appeared to be a snake wrapped in a rose-colored sheet. It was attached to his ankle. Those were teeth he was feeling, and he kicked at the sheet only to see it crumple and collapse. There was no snake, nothing within the sheet but air, though his calf was bleeding profusely from a deep bite.
The Handyman Page 22
