He closed his eyes and remembered Heidi, her soft features, how her skin used to feel beneath his fingertips, the scent of her perfume, which he could summon at will…her beautiful dark eyes, the picture of her he used to have on his desk when they dated, before Cody, before the birth of life and love and death and the end of everything.
No, not everything.
Not yet.
* * *
He and Cody left the den. They went around turning on all the lights in the west wing of the first floor. Half of them were burned out, and none of the working bulbs were particularly bright. They entered the kitchen and found it in working order, relatively clean, as his mother would have left it. He checked the large pantry and it was about half-full of food, including some canned goods that he made note of for later. There was a drawer of emergency items from which he took matches, candles, a flashlight and new batteries. The dining room was stark and empty, its long wooden table, chairs, and candelabras reminding him of times he’d rather forget. It was almost as if he could see the dim shade of his father brooding at the head of the table, so he steered Cody from the room.
He wouldn’t enter the east downstairs wing—from the foyer, a single tall door with an arched window above it closed that wing off from the rest of the house. It had always been deserted. Just a massive area and empty rooms gathering dust and silent spaces of time. He stood at the base of the long staircase and looked up. Her room was upstairs. At least, it used to be. Perhaps as she’d grown old and frail she’d moved into one of the rooms down here…in that dark and empty space beyond the door to the east wing.
No, he wouldn’t go in there. Wouldn’t take Cody into that section of the house.
Upstairs first.
They took a few steps up the stairs. The wood beneath the mildewed carpet creaked like old bones under their weight. Cody clutched Bruce’s hand. Bruce switched on the flashlight.
Something banged on the door to the east wing.
Bruce jumped. His entire body shuddered from the inside out and Cody burst into tears, clutching Bruce’s leg. Bruce gathered his boy into his arms, softly comforted him even as he tried to regain a hold on himself.
“It’s okay. It’s nothing, calm down, we’re okay…”
Cody’s eyes brimmed with tears. The look of fear in them stabbed like a spear through his soul.
Something banged on the door again. Another solid hit. It rattled the transom window above the door.
They sat on the stairs. Bruce watched the door. His eyes sought to penetrate the darkness beyond that arched window above, but he wouldn’t dare shine the beam of the flashlight through there.
Maybe it’s Mother. Maybe she’s trapped…or ill. Maybe she fell.
Then why doesn’t she call out?
“Come on.”
“No, no, Daddy. No…” Cody started to cry again and pulled on Bruce when he tried to lead them back down the stairs.
“It’s okay, buddy. I have to check. Something might be wrong.”
Something is definitely wrong.
“It might be your mommy…” As the idea occurred to Cody that it might be something explainable, something completely normal pounding on that door, he calmed down a little bit.
“She might be hurt.” He stretched out his hand. “Come on.”
They went down the stairs again. Reaching the floor of the foyer, they walked as lightly as possible until they stood before the door to the east wing.
Something slammed hard against it, violently shaking the frame
Bruce made a gasped, choking sound. Cody clutched him again.
Breathe.
“Mother?” It came out a whisper not even a mouse on his shoulder could hear. He cleared his throat and said again, “Mother?”
Silence on the other side of the door.
In his right hand he gripped the flashlight, prepared to use it as a bludgeon as he reached down and grasped the doorknob with his left. The smooth metal was cold, so cold it instantly sent an ache into his knuckles and wrist. He slowly turned it. The latch came loose.
He pulled the door open.
The vast hall beyond was dark with a wintry gloom. Stillness rested in deep shadows. He could only see a few feet in front of them before the dusty reaches of the unused rooms swallowed all light.
Bruce turned on the flashlight against his better judgment.
The beam barely illuminated the end of the hall, but the farthest reaches of its dim glow touched on something unnatural—vague shapes that didn’t look at all like flat walls. His eyes couldn’t make sense of it—long, ropy things like gnarled coils, tangled and thick where the wall should have been—and he wasn’t willing to walk farther into the hall to take a closer look. The doors of the rooms near that end of the hall stood open, beckoning them. The ones closest to that strange formation had colorless tendrils reaching across the floor out into the hallway like the tentacles of some mystical sea creature.
The scent of recently dug graves he’d detected upon first entering the house emanated from down there. The smell of wet, earthen decay.
But no one was there.
He closed the door and they backed away.
Bruce realized at some point he’d picked up Cody again and the boy clung to his neck, face buried in Bruce’s shoulder. He held his son and glanced up the stairs. He would check Mother’s room, and if she wasn’t there, he’d call out for her again, and if she didn’t answer, he was going out to the maintenance barn to search for gas. If there wasn’t any gas, he’d search the garage for a vehicle to drive out of here, and if that failed, he’d call a tow truck. It might cost the last bit of credit he had left on his card, but it would be worth it to get them out of here. Anywhere but here.
I was a fool to come back here. I was a fool to bring Cody.
Bruce started up the stairs toward Mother’s room. He held his son in one arm, the flashlight in his other hand as he climbed into the darkness.
* * *
He stood outside Mother’s bedroom, which lay in the gloom beyond the scrolled rail of the balcony’s balustrade, the second door on the right, above the east wing. Her door stood open about an inch or two.
With sufficient space between them and the strangeness downstairs, Cody felt confident enough to walk on his own again. Still, the boy stayed close to his father.
Bruce stared at the door, frozen in place and time. There was no sound beyond. Not even a whisper of dying breaths. He pushed it open with his fingertips.
The hinges squealed slightly as the door swung open to reveal his mother’s bedroom. It smelled of mothballs and dust and light perfume. More alarming was the scent of old age, mortality taking its withering measure, death creeping into brittle bones. He flicked on the switch and a lace-shaded lamp came to life atop the nightstand. The bed was situated across the room, near the window. A still figure lay huddled beneath the sheets.
“Mother?”
“Is she sick, Daddy?”
“Shhh…”
They crept to her bedside. Her shape was distinct beneath heavy covers. He could see the mottled skin of her head through wispy white hair. Frail and weak, his own mother lay before him and something kicked deep inside and hurt his guts.
She’s been dying here all this time, and I left her here. I left them all.
No. She called, and he came. They were here for her now.
He reached out one hand, laid it gently on her withered shoulder.
He gave her a soft nudge. There was no give to her neck. She was stiff. He gently pulled her toward him. Her face titled toward the light and he could see she was dead. As he tried to turn her over, she went up on her side like a plank and there was the sound of something ripping under the sheets, like grass being pulled from the earth by its roots.
Bruce slowly lifted the covers so he could see her. With his free hand he instinctively shielded Cody so he wouldn’t see.
He pulled the blankets away to reveal more of his mother’s torso. She wore a long blue
gown strangely complementing the white of her hair, the ashen pallor of her skin. He realized there should have been some bruising where the blood had settled on the side where she had lain, but her corpse looked, and felt, like an empty husk. He tossed the blankets back so they revealed her down to her thighs.
It took a moment to accept what he was seeing. He blinked at the sight before him, revulsion rising in his throat. He pulled Cody so the boy’s face was pressed against his thigh, gripped him as if death were contagious and he could protect his child from catching it if only he couldn’t see. But this other thing, it didn’t make sense. Something had happened to her chest and stomach.
“What the…?” he breathed the words, his breath tinged with mist in the chill air of the room.
It looked as if the hairy roots of some huge corded plant had grown out of the mattress and into Mother’s torso, burrowing into her. The sound of grass ripping hadn’t been far from the truth. The fabric of her gown looked rotted away in the shape of an oval from her withered breasts down to her abdomen. Branch roots had overgrown that area of her body in a thick mesh. He could see thick taproots, whitish pink in color, plunged deep into her guts—or where her guts might once have been. The corpse was so desiccated he couldn’t imagine anything was left inside but dust.
His recent memory, his childhood sense that she had been the last line of defense against whatever powerful influence threatened to claim the house for its own, came back to him. Now that she was gone, the stories his father had told him of the history of the property rushed back to him. Staring at her like this—seeing what had happened to her, whatever had happened to her—he knew those tales to be true. Not that he had ever disbelieved his father, but he’d never been faced with such ghastly evidence.
His memory perceptions of her as a barrier against strange forces at work on these grounds came back to him. If she had ever protected him at all, she had protected him from the energies stirring here, hungering for vengeance from beyond some spiritual veil.
Now she’s gone, he thought. And now it’s unleashed.
While he knew the truth of it in his heart, he had no idea what “it” was. Some supernatural manifestation of the tragedies that had happened on these grounds a century ago, or a more focused influence with a will of its own?
In any case, his mother was gone.
Consumed.
Bruce’s head swam. He began to feel dizzy and realized he wasn’t breathing.
He took a deep breath and covered the corpse of his mother, pulling the edge of the blankets up to cover her sunken eyes.
Cody shuddered. Bruce knelt and they embraced. He held his son and closed his eyes, almost wishing for tears, though he felt more fear than grief.
Cody used a stilted baby voice. He’d talked like that a lot since Heidi had died, but now it seemed righter than ever, the way his little boy spoke, meek but with words carefully enunciated against Bruce’s chest. “I want to go home.”
“Me too. Come on.”
They left the room, shutting off the light and closing the door. They had just reached the catwalk that connected the east and west wings, heading down the stairs, when a deep rumble trembled through the house. His stomach went up into his throat. He swallowed and looked around. For just a moment he could have sworn the whole house was moving, dragging its stone foundations across the earth—but no. It was thunder. Outside, a storm was still brewing.
The sound was of little comfort. A storm right now was the worst thing that could happen—whatever kind of winter fury was about to fall from the skies, it wouldn’t leave them much time to escape this hell.
They hurried down the stairs.
* * *
Behind the house was a wide-open field encircled by more elder trees. The forest beyond the immediate circle loomed with sycamores, oak, and black locust, massively tall and dense, tangled and wicked in their bare winter forms. The backyard was dead, with patches of snow where the sun never reached its harbors of shadow.
There was a courtyard behind the manor, but it wasn’t elaborate—little more than a patio really, with stone benches and flower boxes full of dried weeds. At the edge of the courtyard was a cobble path that led to an old three-car garage and a rickety outbuilding that had once been a barn but was converted to a maintenance shed. Night had fallen, the moon obscured by clouds of the oncoming storm. The garage and barn were hulking black shapes against the nocturnal landscape.
Bruce and Cody bundled up, Bruce wrapping Cody with an extra blanket he’d found in the den. They took their things with them and went first to the garage. Bruce tried all of the doors, but they were locked and, despite their age, would have been difficult to break into.
Next, they went to the maintenance barn, following the beam of the flashlight. It was unlocked. Still, Bruce had trouble opening the latch because his fingers were so numb. He finally managed to turn the stay that released the tongue latch and pulled open the wooden door, rusty hinges squealing in protest. They smelled wet hay and oil. Lawn equipment and tools, including a riding lawn mower, littered the structure.
Bruce sat Cody atop the mower, which, despite recent experiences, the boy openly enjoyed, grabbing the steering wheel and making motor sounds.
Bruce turned on his phone. It was a pay-as-you-go deal. It was all they had since everything else had been cut off, but right now, it was all they needed.
If he could just get a signal.
He watched its face as the phone glowed, turning on. And…two bars lit up, signifying a connection to the outside world.
Bruce dialed 911, put the phone to his ear, and silently prayed. It rang once and the operator picked up, asking for his emergency. He told them his mother passed away. Explained that he’d come to visit her, and they found her dead.
Consumed—
“What happened, sir?”
An empty husk—
“Well, she was very old, but…”
Something grew into her, drained her, and now these goddamn root-things are up there drinking her dust—
“…I can’t explain it…you’ll have to send someone to check this out. I’m not an expert. I just need someone out here.”
“Okay, sir, where are you located?”
He told her. She didn’t make a comment to the fact that they were way the hell out in the middle of nowhere, but she did want to verify that they would be there when authorities arrived.
“Well, it’s cold out here. The house is…cold. And I’ve got my four-year-old boy with me. I’m out of gas, but if I can find some gas out here in the barn, I intend to drive into town.”
“Okay, but you’ll be at this number?”
“Yes.”
He hung up. Lightning flashed across the expanse of property behind the house, illuminating the backside of the grim manse. Thunder roared. A tremor shook the earth. A second later, hissing filled the air beyond the door. Frozen rain began to fall. Ice pelted the ground. In moments it was a slashing downpour; the crisp cold of it filled the barn.
“Whoa, dat’s a big stoam, Daddy.”
“It sure is.”
He only hoped that someone would get here before it got really bad. He tried not to think about how that old Cutlass would handle on roads sheeted with sleet. Bruce swept the flashlight’s beam over the contents of the building.
“Sometimes, when I was ’posed to be sleeping, I would look out my window and see da wain.”
Bruce smiled a little as he located two big gas cans. “That’s okay. When I was a boy, I liked to watch the rain, too.”
The gas cans he remembered were still in their customary places, looking discouragingly faded and unused. One of the five-gallon containers was half-full. The other was empty. He sniffed the half-full one and shone the light inside to make sure it hadn’t been mixed with oil. It looked clear. He went to the workbench and scanned the light over the old tools there. Many of them were rusted. There was a yellowed, translucent funnel with a curled tube about three feet long on the end, bu
t he needed something longer.
He went farther into the back of the barn. It unnerved him to step even this far away from Cody. Bruce thought he saw obscured forms hovering in the deep corners of the dilapidated building, ill-defined shapes in the gloom.
The hissing sleet on the roof got louder, but he focused on his task. Next to a hitch-on seed spreader was a pile of old garden hoses. He grabbed one and took it back over to the workbench, locating a large folding knife, which he used to cut a five-foot length of hose. He closed the knife and slipped it into his pocket.
“D’you ’member one time, it was waining, and me and you went outside and splashed in da puddles, and Momma was yelling at us to come inside, but she was laughing, too, and we were all laughing?”
The memory came back to him like an image in a crystal ball. Blurred around the edges, bright and dreamlike, and yes he remembered them all laughing together, Heidi shaking her head at them from the door. He didn’t know why the good memories had to hurt so bad. At least Cody was spared the pain—he seemed to remember things with the joy and reverence they deserved. That was good. That was right.
“I remember it, buddy. I’ll always remember that.”
Bruce knelt at the rear of the riding lawnmower on which Cody was sitting, opened the gas tank, and then siphoned out what was left of the fuel, careful to avoid spilling any. He blinked back impending tears.
“Daddy, did the can-so take your momma, too?”
Can-so. Cancer.
His heart would have broken if it wasn’t already.
Bruce looked up at his boy. In the darkness, he was so small, his little cheeks and button nose and wide dark eyes looking down on him with all the innocence the world could bear.
Elderwood Manor Page 2
