In my ears, their individual whimperings combined into a single line that had the cadence of a prayer. Only a god could save them now, and I could tell from the tears rolling down Teri’s face that she understood this, too. Then I saw her face harden beneath the tears, and as she subconsciously raised her hatchet, I knew she was thinking of Frank, and that any man who could torture people like this did not deserve to live.
I wasn’t convinced they were not already dead, but even if they were, if Frank was somehow tormenting them beyond the grave, it was still an act so evil that it could never be forgiven.
“Let’s get out of here,” Teri begged.
We turned to leave through what was positioned as the front door of the shack. The door was actually closed, and I pulled it open to reveal a round room beyond, a strange room with multiple doors, and walls, floor and ceiling that were all painted a strange sickly yellow. Throughout the cylindrical chamber, there were shadows where shadows should not have been, and in their inky blackness I sensed life. Perhaps not life as I’d always understood it, but, still, a consciousness, a claim to sentience that was completely at odds with such unformed shapes.
It was not the shadows that captured my attention, however, but the female figure suspended upside down from the center of the ceiling.
Irene.
“I can’t take much more of this,” Teri said, and I could tell from the sob that caught in her throat that she was telling the truth.
Slowly, I approached the hanging body. Frank’s wife was definitely dead and had been for some time. Her remains were skeletal, almost mummified, though the aspects of her face that had frightened me as a child were still there and scared me even now. The shadows in the round room grew visibly active as I drew nearer to Irene, one of them along the edge of the wall swirling in such a way that it almost coalesced into a shape I recognized. I stopped walking and the shadows stopped moving.
Something did not want me getting too close to Irene.
Glancing around the circular chamber, there seemed to be a purposefulness to its setup, a reason for its existence. The doors were evenly spaced in the curved walls, and Irene hung in the center like a pendulum. I was reminded of a clock, and though I knew the room was not a clock, I could not help thinking that it served a definite function in Frank’s world.
I took a step back, away from Irene, and the shadows simmered down.
“Which door?” I asked.
Teri shook her head, beyond caring, but before I could choose a route to take, one of the doors opened, and an old man wandered into the room. Bearded and disheveled, dressed in raggedy clothes, he looked furtively around upon entering, saw us, then made his way around the edge of the wall, carefully avoiding all shadows.
Teri squinted at the old man as he approached, and I felt her grip on my hand tighten. “Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, God.”
“What?”
“It’s Evan.”
She was right. I saw it now, and gazing into his wrinkled bearded face made me wonder how long we had been in here.
Years? Decades?
The thought filled me with dread and panic. Maybe everyone I knew was already dead. Maybe I’d been a missing person for so long that my house and belongings had been sold at an estate sale. A feeling of hopelessness and despair washed over me.
Evan reached us, still glancing around as if afraid he might be overheard. His voice was little more than a hoarse whisper. “Daniel?”
“Evan?”
He nodded. “You look the same,” he rasped. “Both of you.” He looked from me to Teri and back again. “How’s that possible?”
“How long do you think you’ve been in here?” Teri wondered.
“I have no idea, but—” He pulled on his long beard, ran a hand through his wild hair. “—a long time.”
“Where’s Owen?” I asked. “Where’s Twigs?”
“I haven’t seen them in years.”
Years.
As in Frank’s other house, the laws of physics, the realities of time, apparently did not apply here.
“Two days,” I calculated, taking at face value the disorienting time we’d spent in our own house in those sham lives. “We’ve been here for two days.”
Evan started crying.
I didn’t know what to do or how to respond. I turned to Teri for help, and she handed me her hatchet and gave him a hug. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all right.”
“No,” he sobbed. “It’s not.”
I glanced around. The shadows weren’t moving, but they were still in places they should not have been, and they still gave off an aura of consciousness. A slight breeze was blowing in through the doorway Evan had entered, and Irene’s upside down body was swaying a little, spinning on the rope from which she was suspended. The sight disturbed me, and I had to look away.
Evan was drying his eyes. “Sorry,” he croaked. “Sorry.”
“No reason to be sorry,” I told him.
Teri patted his back. “You’re with us now. We’re going to get out of here.”
Even amidst all this craziness, I felt compelled to understand the practical aspects of Evan’s existence. “What have you been eating?” I asked. “Where do you get your food? Or sleep? Or go to the bathroom?”
He sighed wearily. “There are plenty of kitchens, plenty of bedrooms, plenty of bathrooms.”
“What about Frank? Have you seen Frank?”
“No. I haven’t seen him. I’ve been avoiding him. But I know where he is.” There was a pause. “I can take you there.”
Teri and I shared a glance. Was this part of the trap? No. One look at Evan’s devastated face told me that the suffering he’d experienced was real. There was no way he had been co-opted. He wanted out of here as much as we did. Probably more.
I reached out and put a hand on his shoulder, and he flinched at my touch. I could feel the bones beneath his skin. “Let’s go,” I said. “Let’s find Frank and put a stop to this once and for all.”
FOUR
Evan knew his way around. He did not roam aimlessly, as we had been doing. He lived in this house and was familiar with its rooms and hallways; he knew which doors led where.
Following his steps, avoiding the shadows, we exited the round room through the same door he had used. He stopped us before we walked through. “We have to stay away from the Little Man,” he said. “Whatever you do, don’t let him see you.”
The Little Man.
Something about the appellation sent a shiver down my spine. “Who is the Little Man?” I asked.
“I don’t know who he is. I don’t know what he is.” Evan shuddered. “I just know what he does. Stay away from him. Don’t let him see you.”
He led us through a maze of passageways. The air grew warm again and fetid, as it had in the other passage, and I was suddenly struck by the absurd notion that these concrete corridors were not hallways for people to pass through but heating ducts supplying warm air to different parts of the house. If that were true, the inhabitants of this dwelling would have to be giants, and though I knew the rooms were built for people of normal size, it was an image I could not shake.
Several times, I thought I heard footsteps behind us, though when I looked back, I saw no one there.
I was struck once more by not only the elaborate construction of the building, the way it incorporated disparate elements of the forgotten town of Plutarch into its composition, but by the professionalism of its assembly. Yes, there were parts that were clearly the result of Frank’s substandard skills, but others were astoundingly well-made. How could the incompetent handyman who’d lived across the street from us in Randall have created such a perfectly fused amalgam of styles? It was inconceivable to me, and it reinforced the idea that he had access to a power we could not even comprehend. I imagined a scenario in which Frank kept adding
onto the house, never stopping, until the structure spanned the surrounding desert, reached San Antonio, and continued on, engulfing other cities until the entire country was incorporated within its walls. It sounded crazy—and it was—but when I thought about all we’d encountered, recalled what Owen had said about Kayley’s theory of increased supernatural activity building up to something, the impossible didn’t seem quite so impossible.
Where was Kayley? I wondered. Had she managed to contact the law and bring someone back? If she had, it hadn’t mattered. We’d been here for God knew how long, and no one had come to rescue us.
Maybe the rescuers had become trapped as well.
There seemed no end to this nightmare, and I was convinced that the only way to stop it was to dispatch Frank and burn this house to the ground.
Dispatch Frank.
Did I really think I would be able to kill the man if it came down to it? I was a suburban real estate agent who had never even fired a gun. Was I really going to use the hammer tucked in my belt to smash in Frank’s head? If given the opportunity, could I actually perform such a brutal act?
I thought of Billy.
Yes, I could.
Evan had led us to a large dark gallery that reminded me of the Hall of Mammals in the Natural History Museum. At the museum, dark wood walls were broken up every few yards by lighted dioramas populated with taxidermied animals placed in scenes that resembled their native habitats. Here, the layout was the same, only instead of nature scenes, the lighted squares revealed offices and bedrooms, kitchens and art studios, family rooms and libraries. There were people living in the displays. Ensconced in rooms that were essentially their own little living quarters, they ignored us as we passed. We saw a well-heeled woman primping in front of a dresser mirror, a middle-aged couple sitting on a sofa and staring blankly into space, an older man at a workbench whittling something out of wood, a younger man in a rocking chair reading a book. Were they alive or dead? People or ghosts? Did they know where they were, or were they trapped as Teri and I had been, living in their own alternate reality?
“Who are they?” I asked.
Evan shrugged.
“Did you ever talk to them?”
“I tried. Years ago. They didn’t want to talk to me. I’m not even sure they talk to each other. Or know where they are.”
It was odd conversing with this sober Evan. There was no sign of the showbiz obsessed, easily excitable television writer I knew, and I wondered when that spirit had been leeched out of him.
Teri approached a room on the right, where a young woman using a treadle sewing machine was making a flower-print dress. Dozens of other dresses hung on racks behind her. “Excuse me,” Teri said. “Can I ask you a question?”
The woman looked at her, confused. She did not answer, and there was a haunted look in her eyes that belied the work her busy hands were doing.
I turned to a man in the room opposite, a guy about my age in a bare monastic cell furnished only by a cot. The man was on his knees, praying. “Hello,” I said. He looked up. For a brief second, I saw a flicker of hope in his eyes, then it was washed away by what seemed like bafflement and an overwhelming despair. Immediately, he returned to his prayers.
Evan was right. They did not seem to know where they were. I got the same sense from them as I had from those ghosts we’d encountered in the passageway, that they were lost and searching for something: meaning, purpose, a redeemer, a god. Ultimately, it didn’t matter that they were here. No matter where they were, they would have felt trapped and lost in a pointless existence, and Teri turned to me and said, “They’re not going to give us any help.”
We kept walking. Between two of the rooms was a stairwell, and Evan took us up the steps one flight, two flights, three flights, four, until we were in a large empty space that looked like the floor of an abandoned factory. Suspicious ambient light illuminated the vast room, and within the accordion ceiling I saw glowing skylights. Were we at the top of the house? Was there a way to break through those windows onto the roof and find a way out and down?
Evan didn’t stop but continued on, certain of where he was going, and Teri and I followed. We could always come back here, I reasoned. Far off, from some other room, came the faint but unmistakable sound of infants screaming in agony.
“Those are babies!” Teri cried, distraught.
Evan did not respond.
“They’re torturing babies!”
“They’re just crying,” I said placatingly, but I knew she was right. We both did. As faint as they were, the screams were unlike anything I’d ever heard.
Evan’s voice was sober. “It’s the Little Man. That’s what he does.”
We strode quickly across the empty floor, and while there was no fluctuation in temperature, no variation in the feel of the air, nothing physical that was in any way changed, something had altered, although I had no idea what it was, or where or when it had happened.
I grew gradually more aware of my arms as I walked. They felt awkward to me, and I wasn’t sure if I was walking the way I usually did. Was I swinging them out too far? Not far enough? I couldn’t tell. Everything I tried felt wrong, and I started wondering about my steps. Was my stride too long? Too short? Something about the way I was walking felt off, and I glanced over at Teri, unnerved to see a disconcerted expression on her face that perfectly mirrored the way I felt. Evan was walking so fast he was practically running, and it occurred to me that he was moving quickly through the room on purpose, so as not to let whatever we were experiencing affect us or sink in.
“Hurry up,” he croaked. “We’re almost there.”
We were rapidly approaching the opposite end of the room, and in the center of a bleak industrial wall was a perfectly round opening that looked as though it belonged in a submarine.
“Through here,” Evan said.
We ducked through the doorway.
And…
Teri and Evan were gone.
I was in the living room of our A-frame as it had looked in the 1980s. My dad and my brother were sitting on the couch, playing with the primitive electronic game Simon. Wedges of primary colors lit up randomly on the circular toy to the accompaniment of synthesized musical tones, and the two of them took turns pressing down on the colors, trying to replicate the pattern.
A painful pang wrenched my heart. Billy looked just as he had when we’d first gotten the vacation home, but it surprised me how much I had forgotten about his appearance. His hair was lighter than I recalled, his smile more innocent. Time and memory had made him seem more mature in retrospect, perhaps because I’d been close to that age myself. But I saw now that he’d been a true child, a little boy. He’d had his whole life ahead of him, a life he’d been denied, a life that had been taken away from him.
By Frank.
I’d never been entirely sure whether Billy’s death had been intentional or the result of Frank’s incompetence, but at this point it didn’t matter. After all I’d learned about Frank, I knew he was guilty of far more than I ever could have suspected.
My dad looked up at me, and he smiled in the way that he had before Billy’s death but that I had never seen after. “Daniel? You want to play?”
I wanted to more than anything else in the world. I wanted to sit on the couch next to my dad and my brother and be with them again. But even though they were pretending I was still ten years old, I was an adult, and it was this heartbreaking discrepancy that kept me grounded in reality, that made me realize they were not really there and this was a false echo of a reunion that could never be.
“I’ll beat you this time!” Billy told me, grinning as he held up the Simon, and my eyes teared up.
There was a noise from the rear of the A-frame, what sounded like someone bumping against a wall.
“Are you okay?” my dad called out, glancing in that direction.
“Mommy?” Billy said, Simon lighting up red-yellow-blue and making beep-bop-boop noises in his hand.
It emerged from my parents’ bedroom into the short hall beyond the kitchen and turned in my direction.
The clothes it wore were my mother’s, but the being inhabiting those clothes was unformed, pale arms ending not in hands and fingers but in vaguely rounded stumps, the pallid face so ill-defined that I was not even sure it had features.
I froze at the sight of it, and realized that any fear I had felt before this moment was nothing compared to the all-encompassing terror that unformed figure instilled in me. It began creeping toward the living room, moving slowly, and I was reminded of the way a snail propelled itself forward through undulations of its slimy body.
Descending footsteps sounded on the stairway that led to the loft where Billy and I had had our beds, and seconds later Frank stepped into the living room. He was dressed as always in engineer’s overalls, and his eyes peered out at me from behind his thick black-framed glasses. “Daniel,” he said. “Glad you could make it.”
He did not seem as arrogant as he had at the other house. There was a subdued quality to his voice, a subservience in his manner, and when he stepped forward so he could peek around the corner and see into the hall, I realized what that thing masquerading as my mom had to be.
The Dark Wife.
It continued to creep slowly forward, and Frank awaited its arrival in the room with a mixture of anticipation and submissiveness. He didn’t go to meet it, though. He waited, and that told me a lot. On the couch, Billy and my dad remained unmoving, like two robots whose power had been suddenly shut off. The Simon in Billy’s hands was the only sign of life, its flashing lights and electronic sounds continuing unabated.
And still the Dark Wife advanced with its snail crawl, faceless and utterly silent. Frozen in place, frightened beyond words, I could do nothing but watch in horror as the thing approached. I could feel its power, rolling over me in unseen waves. I did not know what it was. I could not know what it was. The explanation for its existence was utterly beyond my comprehension. I believed it was the god for which those lost souls we’d encountered were searching, a god that Frank had been serving since he discovered it in Vietnam.
The Handyman Page 31
