At the last minute, self-preservation trumped fear, and I found myself backing up, toward the front door of the A-frame through which I’d entered. Behind me, my fingers found the knob, but it wouldn’t turn. I was trapped, with no way to escape, and I instinctively reached for the hammer in my waistband.
The Dark Wife had reached the edge of the kitchen counter, and in a strangely formal, oddly courtly move, Frank reached for its hand. There was a sickening fusion of flesh where his rough fingers met the white rounded stump.
I had to get out of here. Filled with an almost animalistic desperation, I turned to the side, keeping one eye on the horrifying couple, and used the hammer to shatter the window to the right of the doorway.
The reaction was instantaneous. The Dark Wife visibly blanched, and Frank’s face contorted with rage. “What are you doing?” he yelled, apoplectic.
There was nothing beyond the glass other than an inky blackness so thick that it seemed to have mass. I could not get out through there, but I was still desperate to escape, and, remembering how cheap the walls of our pre-fab home had been, I shifted my efforts to the space between the window and the door, swinging the hammer as hard as I could and using it to punch a hole in the painted drywall.
“I built that!” Frank screamed.
I hit the wall again.
And again.
The house around me flickered, and behind our vacation home I saw the bones of the surrounding structure, a primitive hodgepodge of beams and supports, rafters and planks. Teri and Evan were there as well, nearby, and they saw me at the same instant I saw them, just before the A-frame reasserted itself around me.
I hit the wall again, then swung the hammer hard at the door itself.
“Stop!” Frank ordered, and there was not just anger but fear in his voice. I’m sure he wanted to attack me and most certainly would have if he’d been able to do so, but his hand was attached to the Dark Wife, and the Dark Wife was not doing well. Each swing of the hammer was like a blow to its body, and it was rooted in place, even its slow progress halted.
The Dark Wife was connected to the building, I realized. Not just our little vacation home but the enormous outer structure in which it was enclosed.
A broader realization came to me. It was the house that was holding all of this together, Frank’s construction that had trapped us and everyone else in this place. It had always been Frank’s handiwork—his interred bodies and stolen materials—that had been at the root of everything, that had summoned whatever power granted him the ability to do what he had done.
My hammer punched another hole in the drywall, and then Teri and Evan were by my side, using the opportunity of that flicker to pass through the temporarily dissolved walls. For the first time since we’d found him again, Evan seemed confident and enthusiastic, sensing possibility in the weakness we’d found.
Frank had not stopped screaming a profane string of threats, but he was sidelined and impotent, and I told Teri to use her hatchet to start whaling on anything she could find. I quickly led Evan over to the boxy 1980s entertainment center against the wall opposite the couch. My dad had kept tools in a junk drawer below the shelf holding the television, and I opened it, gratified to find that the replication of our house was accurate down to the level of cabinet contents. I found a claw hammer, handed it to Evan, and we began attacking the nearest wall in earnest, working in tandem to create and widen an opening in the cheap building material.
Drawing back my arm, I swung again and practically fell forward when I encountered only air. The wall was gone, the A-frame was gone, and Evan, Teri and I were in that other room I had briefly seen through the flickering walls. Billy and my dad were gone, too, and their absence wrenched at my heart. I knew they weren’t real, but the fact that I had not been able to say goodbye to…whatever they were…filled me with a deep sense of sadness. I had lost them again, though I had not really had them back, and that loss filled me with regret.
It also renewed my hatred for Frank and made me determined to stop to him once and for all.
This room was far more crudely constructed, like a clubhouse a not-particularly-handy dad would make with his son. Ill-fitting sheets of plywood were hammered with too many nails onto randomly joined two-by-fours that acted as an off-center frame. On the unpainted walls were random letters and strange symbols drawn in red. This was a room I could tell Frank had actually built, and without pausing, the three of us assaulted its walls. We needed to tear down as much as we could as quickly as we could. It was the only way to fight back.
Frank and the Dark Wife had disappeared, although whether that was for their own safety or in order to prepare for an attack I had no way of knowing. I also couldn’t afford to wait and find out. Assuming that those letters and symbols had some sort of mystical purpose, I called Teri over to where Evan and I were bashing our hammers against the wall and told her to use her hatchet to obliterate as much of the red writing as she could.
The results were remarkable. From behind the plywood came the sounds of lumber falling and concrete cracking, and when I looked through one of the interstitial breaks in the badly built wall, I saw the collapsing of other rooms beyond. Teri kept chopping, smashing into splinters a circle connected to the letter X. There was a whoosh of air, a sensation of falling, as though the rudimentary room we were in was dropping down an elevator shaft, but there was no resultant crash that followed. The feeling of movement simply stopped, and when Evan and I managed to knock a hole in the plywood and then pull off a section of wall, we saw what looked like a crypt or vault, a chamber with a dirt floor and stone sides, dim flickering light issuing from a kerosene lantern hanging from a hook.
With a creak of nails, we pulled off another piece of ply board, tossing it aside. I pounded off the two-by-four behind it, and the way was clear to exit the room we were in and enter the larger darker chamber. Was it a basement? It looked and felt like it, but there was no way to know. The room had a permanence, however, that had been lacking in the other rooms we’d encountered. Even the concrete corridors had seemed less substantial than this dark rock vault, and I realized that we were in what had to be the heart of the house.
There was a huge hole in the center of the dirt floor in front of us, and, sticking close together, the three of us approached. Glancing into its inky depths gave me a disorienting sense of vertigo, and I stepped back, afraid of falling.
“What…What is it?” Teri wondered.
We both looked toward Evan, but he shook his head. As familiar as he was with the house, even he was stumped.
“What do you think’s down there?” Teri asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
Evan had moved over to the wall on our left, and he began chipping away at the stone with the claw end of his hammer. It was a good idea. If vandalizing the A-frame and taking apart that plywood room had started things unraveling, destroying what we could of this vault should speed up the process even more. That mysterious hole had convinced me that this room was the key to whatever Frank was doing, and the fact that the room had been built like a fortress around the pit, as though to protect it, made me confident that this was indeed the key to the house.
I raised my own hammer, about to strike at the stone, but a hint of movement off to the right revealed the presence of another man, watching us. He’d been standing so still that I had not noticed him before, but as I glanced in his direction, I saw others as well, immobile against the wall, their skin bleached of all color, as if they had been bred in the darkness of the pit. They were wearing the uniforms of police officers, and I knew they belonged to those abandoned patrol cars outside. I didn’t know what was wrong with them or what they were, and while I did not believe they were dead, I did not think they were alive either.
Teri was hitting the wall now, too, using the dull edge of her hatchet to attack the stone, and though I kept my eye on the cops, the
y made no effort to stop us. I was chipping away at the wall myself, gratified to see small chunks of rock break off and fall to the dirt, but I was making no real progress and neither was anyone else. The room was too well-constructed.
Which led me to believe that Frank had not made it himself.
Where was Frank? Hiding? No, that was not his style. He was watching, waiting, planning something. Tearing down what he’d built had enraged him, but it also seemed to have weakened him. His strength was connected to the durability of his creation, and judging by what we’d seen of the disappearing rooms around us, Teri’s obliteration of the writing and symbols on the wooden walls had probably debilitated him further. Was there something in here that we could employ to similar effect? I looked over at Teri and Evan, all of us with our puny little tools masquerading as weapons, and thought that we’d better find something. And quick. Because when Frank did return, he would be armed for bear.
We weren’t gaining much traction attacking the stone wall, and I was about to say that we should go back into the previous room and wipe out what was left of the red—
blood?
—markings on the plywood, when I glanced in that direction and saw movement behind the open beams, a small dark figure that seemed to emerge from the wood itself, from a complicated scribble that took up a large lower section of a ply board sheet. Evan saw it, too, and cried out in fear at the sight, clearly recognizing it for what it was. The figure moved slowly around the other room, disappearing for a moment, and was out of sight until emerging into the opening through which we’d come, illuminated by the dim light of the kerosene lamp.
I knew instantly who it was and understood why Evan had screamed.
The Little Man.
He was ancient and Asian, and he had to be the excommunicated cleric who had mentored Frank in Vietnam. He was wearing Vietnamese peasant clothes, what Americans had always derisively referred to as “pajamas,” and he clutched what looked like some type of ceremonial knife in his tiny hands. Had he shrunk, I wondered, or had he always been this small? He poked his head into the vault and looked carefully in all directions to make sure there was no attacker lying in wait. He seemed to be neither dwarf nor midget, although his proportions were those of a child. He was an evil man, I knew that, and the expression on his face was one of undisguised malevolence.
I glanced from Evan to Teri. Could we take him? There were three of us and we were bigger. Two of us had hammers and one a hatchet.
But he had emerged from a wall, clutching some sort of ceremonial knife in his hands, and was God knew how many years old, with who knew what powers. No doubt he could kill us easily, and our wandering spirits would be absorbed into the house, with no one ever the wiser.
There was nowhere to run, no way to escape, but as the Little Man approached the edge of the pit, glanced dismissively at us, then stared into the blackness, I understood that he was not going to kill us. He didn’t care about us at all.
He was here to kill Frank.
He hated Frank.
The realization shocked me. My assumption had been that everything within the walls of this structure was working together as one cohesive unit toward a single common goal. But I remembered how in the rest home Dang Nguyen had told us that the outcast cleric who had been Frank’s mentor had been killed by his disciple. So, if indeed this was him, he had a definite reason to hate Frank. Not only that, but, if he was here, that meant he had been taken from his country and installed in this Texas monstrosity. Talk about the wandering dead. He could not have gotten any farther from where he was supposed to be than where he was.
The Little Man began chanting. The words were in Vietnamese, and even though I did not know the language, I could tell there was something off about them. This was not the musical dialect Dang and May had exchanged; it was harsher, darker, with accents and cadences that seemed dissonant and discordant.
The chanting was answered by a voice from the pit, a smooth, almost liquid voice that responded in a manner that I had never heard before, that no one had ever heard before. These were new words, words that had been spoken before only in Hell, and the sound of them rocked me to the core, grating against everything I knew or thought I knew, conjuring images I would not have believed myself capable of imagining.
I staggered back against the stone, feeling as though my brain was about to explode. From the agonized expression on Teri’s face, I could tell that the words had the same effect on her, and she dropped her hatchet, using both hands to cradle her head. On the other side of me, Evan was whimpering, and when I turned toward him, I saw that he had fallen to his knees.
From the center of the pit rose the Dark Wife. Or what had been the Dark Wife. It was not wearing clothes anymore but was nude, and despite the fact that Frank had dressed it as my mother, its unadorned body possessed no feminine features. It was neither mother nor wife but some sort of embryonic…creature. What I felt in my bones to be an emergent god. For there was something distinctly larval about its appearance, and I realized that it was not yet fully formed, not completely finished. What would happen when it was, I did not even want to guess.
I only knew that Frank needed to die in order to stop its evolution.
The would-be god was still speaking in that abhorrent tongue, its hateful language drilling painfully into my brain. The Little Man continued his chanting as well. The two were not engaged in a dialogue but were talking at each other, around each other, past each other. He was summoning it from the pit, and it arose from the darkness as though stationed atop a rising platform. There was no platform, however, and seconds later the slimy white stumps of its unformed feet floated above the hole’s edge and alighted on the dirt floor.
The cacophony was becoming unbearable, and I was forced to drop my hammer in order to plug my ears. It helped only a little. Even muffled, the hellish duet bored, unwanted, into my skull.
The Little Man stepped forward, ceremonial knife extended. With no preamble, no muss, no fuss, he thrust it into the creature, its point entering the slimy white flesh just above the thigh. He moved the knife to the left, to the right, up, down, carving a symbol into the being as its liquid voice devolved into a series of disgusting grunts. The nascent god’s substance was like butter, the blade slicing through it with seemingly no resistance, and the Asian mystic stepped back as sections of flesh slid away from that carved symbol in gelatinous segments, slipping to the dirt where they reformed into four smaller facsimiles of the original figure. Those repulsive grunts, like the sound of gargling glass, were issuing from four mouths now, in a higher pitch than before but in perfect synchronization.
Suddenly Frank was standing next to the split forms of the god. Had he been there all along, had he come through some concealed door in the room, or had he just appeared out of thin air? I didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. He was here now, and while he looked frighteningly old—the age he should have been—he was by no means enfeebled. He started purposefully toward the Little Man, an expression of undisguised wrath on his sallow wrinkled face.
Ignoring the pain in my head, I reached down, grabbing my hammer for protection.
The Little Man definitely wanted to kill Frank. Until now, he’d been unable to do so—otherwise he would have finished off the man long before now—but he appeared to have faith in the weapon he wielded. His face filled with rage and hate, he held the knife with supreme confidence. Having stopped chanting, he shouted at Frank in Vietnamese, and Frank responded calmly in the same language. Frank had killed his mentor the first time, so the Little Man was already dead, but I was still hoping for an epic fight. It was not to be. The Asian man thrust quickly with the knife, but Frank easily stepped aside and avoided the blade. Bellowing with fury, he picked up the Little Man from behind and threw him into the pit.
And that was it.
There was no prolonged battle between two powerful necromancers or whatever-they
-were. There was only a brief one-sided attack: a lunge, an apprehension, and then the Little Man was tossed into the black hole, disappearing instantly, the whole thing literally over and done with in seconds.
But the knife fell onto the dirt in front of the pit.
Had he dropped it accidentally or had it been intentional? I had no idea. I only hoped Frank had not seen it. Because that thing did seem to have power. It had cut the embryonic god into pieces, and the Little Man had obviously thought it had the capacity to take out Frank as well.
The kerosene lamp dimmed for a moment. If it had been an electric bulb, I would have assumed a power surge, but this was something else, and when the illumination brightened again seconds later, the miniature gods looked more fully formed and actually female. There were chest protuberances that hinted of breasts, budding clefts where the thighs met, separations in the formerly solid appendages that were supposed to be hands and feet.
My eyes were on that knife.
Teri, Evan and I were huddled together. We had all retrieved our weapons, and either the sounds assaulting our ears were not as horrible as they had been or we were getting used to them, because we were able to speak. I nodded toward the knife, making sure Frank was not looking in my direction, and, speaking low, said, “Spread out. Evan, go to the left. Teri, go to the right. Kick the dirt, scratch the walls, make noise, do whatever damage you can. I’m going after that knife.”
Teri shook her head furiously. “You can’t. It’s too close—”
“Go!” I whispered, and pulled away from them.
They had no choice but to follow my orders. I hung back as they drew Frank’s attention with their cries, and was gratified to see him flinch as Evan clawed stone with his hammer, as Teri used her heels to dig indentations in the dirt floor and randomly struck sections of the wall, both of them circling around the edges of the room. All four incarnations of the god did that flickering thing from the A-frame, and their cries slipped out of sync.
The Handyman Page 32
