Unusual Suspects: Stories of Mystery & Fantasy

by Dana Stabenow

  We were outside the Weirdman House, looking at it. Which felt stupid but, you know, going inside, that wasn’t something you did without thinking.

  Not that there wasn’t a lot to look at anyway. The house was big, and had turrets and towers jutting out from all the corners and that wooden lacy stuff they call gingerbread (I don’t know why) from all the roofs and around all the windows.

  It was probably the oldest building for miles, maybe in the whole county. It had been standing there in its field, falling to pieces, for longer than anyone could remember. My granddad said that it had been haunted when he was a kid, and that was like a hundred years ago, because he died when I was little, and he was really old then.

  It wasn’t haunted, exactly, just… weird. Which is why we were talking about names.

  It was really named the Weildman House, anyway that’s what the paper called it when they had articles about the people trying to raise money to restore it, and that’s the name on the old photographs in the local museum, where our class was going next month. Back in September, Bee had dragged me through the museum, which was one of her favorite places, so I knew about the photos. Except that maybe there was a typo somewhere, or maybe it was only logical, that one letter changed it and gave it a different name.

  Bee shook her head, disagreeing with me like usual. “That place would be weird even if it had been called the Smith Place, or Casa Thingummy. Weirdman comes from the place; the place’s vibes don’t come from it.”

  Bee is in love with the past, the clothes and the people and especially words like “vibes” and “far out” that you never hear except from people like my mother, who’s never recovered from the sixties. Bee uses lots of words no one else knows, except maybe me, only I never use them in the open, and she does. And even I wouldn’t choose to sneak out of the county fair to go to a historical museum—I mean, you’ve got to be a little nuts to prefer a dusty collection of old stuff to the pig races and the Tilt-A-Whirl.

  Can you guess we’re the geek squad at Henrietta Shore? Can you guess who is still hanging around the computer lab when the last bus pulls out of the driveway?

  Yeah: Bee, and me—I’m Brad—and AJ always, and the Kim twins sometimes if they don’t have music lessons or something. And some others, but mostly us. I’m the new guy—we moved here over the summer, me and Mom, back to the town she’d grown up in and moved away from when she went to college. And because we lived miles from anyplace where kids went, I had to start a new school without knowing anyone, which just sucks, really. But the first day when I sort of sidled into the cafeteria trying to be invisible, Bee saw me and marched up to me and asked me about the book she’d seen in my backpack during third-period English.

  Which led to Bee and AJ and me, on a cold-but-sunny February day, sitting just inside the bushes that make a square wall around Weirdman House (what was, once upon a time when actual people lived in the place, a garden—sometimes one of the wild bushes bursts into flower, and you realize that it’s a rose or a daffodil or something). AJ had brought food, I’d brought drinks, and Bee had brought herself.

  “So why Weirdman?” AJ asked. He had a mouthful of some disgusting candy called Snapquick. He always brought gross food but never seemed to gain an ounce.

  “You don’t know the story?” Bee asked. Half our conversations had Bee using that phrase at some point, at the beginning or the end, because she also liked old stories. Sometimes I thought she liked the past because it gave her a kind of escape, but I would never tell her that.

  “Which story?” I said.

  “Is there more than one?”

  “I know three,” I said, which was an exaggeration, but not much. “You tell the one you know.”

  “Well, the place has been deserted, like forever,” she began. “The last Weildman just up and disappeared in the fifties or something. The mail wasn’t picked up, the dog began to howl, finally somebody called the cops and asked them to check up on the old lady. And they never found her.”

  “Yeah they did,” I told her. “She had Alzheimer’s and wandered off, and they found her down in Monterey and put her in a home.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s what my mom says.”

  “Yeah, but your mom probably wants to reassure little Braddy so he doesn’t have bad dreams.”

  I would have punched Bee then if she’d been a boy, but she wasn’t, and besides, she hit harder than most boys. And she was probably right, anyway. My mom was always trying to keep what she called my imagination under control. Maybe all single mothers did that—when you were working two jobs at once, it was easiest if your kid was no trouble. So I tried.

  Anyway, there we were, and there was Weirdman House looking at us looking at it. Our excuse was that we were researching the house for our class’s local history project.

  “You want to go in?” AJ asked.

  “Nah, not right now,” I said. “It’s nicer out here.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I been in there,” I told him. “Lots of times.”

  “Twice,” Bee said. Really, I was going to hit her. Except I wouldn’t, because her father did, and there was no way I was going to be like him in her life, no way at all.

  “So let’s make it three times,” I said loudly, and I stood up and walked toward the house.

  Weirdman House really was just plain weird. Like I said, it sat by itself out in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of fields no one farmed even though it was farming land, surrounded by roads that didn’t seem to have any view of it. Mom and I were about the closest neighbors, half a mile away, and the fact that, although I’d been in the garden a lot, I’d only been inside the house itself twice tells you something about its… well, its vibes.

  I’m not a nervous kind of a person. I read a lot, sure, but my imagination pretty much shuts off when it’s on its own, unlike AJ, who lives in a dream most of the time. And so in the summer, one day when Mom was off shopping or something, I wandered down the road and sort of pushed my way in through what had once been the front gate.

  A place like that, you’d think a thousand teenagers a week would find their way inside, older kids with bottles and girlfriends, younger kids with cigarettes, all sorts with things to hide. But even though the doors didn’t look very sturdy and I could see one of the windows open from where I stood, it didn’t look to me like anyone had broken in.

  But I did. Well, not break in, and not that day. I liked reading in the garden, and there was a tree with a nice comfortable low branch for reading, but one day I finished my book and just wandered around the place for a while until a way in kind of appeared.

  That sounds nuts, I know. And I suppose what happened was that I hung out long enough to get used to the looks of the place and noticed that the siding in one place was cut into a rectangle, maybe two feet high and one and a half wide. When I looked closer, I saw that it was a small door just set into the side of one wall. It was probably just the pattern of shade from the roofline that had stopped me from seeing it before, but what it felt like at the time, and ever since then, was that the house decided to show me a way in.

  Not to get all Stephen King on you, but it should have been crazy creepy, that feeling. I mean, in a novel, a house that invites you in will turn out to be a house with teeth. But again, it just didn’t FEEL like that. What it felt like was a big, lonely place that decided I wasn’t about to set it on fire, so it tugged back a kind of mental curtain and showed me how to get inside.

  Even then, the house seemed to tease me, getting a little loose when I pulled with my fingernails, then sticking. I took out the pocketknife Mom had given me for Christmas—the one I can’t take to school but carry all the other times—and put the short blade into the crack. The door hesitated, and I thought there’d be an inside bolt, but then it sighed and gave way.

  That first time, I didn’t go in very far. The door opened into this strange metal-lined boxy space that took me a while to figure out was a storag
e place for firewood, next to a fireplace big enough to roast an ox in, or a pig anyway. The room with the fireplace had been the living room, I guess, and wasn’t in all that bad of shape. The windows were covered with spiderwebs, of course, and there was so much dust on the floor that my feet left tracks, but the wallpaper was still mostly up, only a few corners peeling away, and the fancy chandelier overhead looked all in one piece. Which, considering it was in earthquake country, was just about amazing.

  That first day I walked through the living room and found a sort of library next door, although the shelves only had a few books on them and they were so thick with dust even I didn’t want to pick them up. There was another room farther on that had the remnants of curtains on the windows, although you couldn’t tell what color they had been, and I thought that if I so much as touched them, they would fall to pieces.

  I followed my tracks back and found the kitchen, which looked like something from the museum in town, and was about to go into the next room when I heard something from outside.

  I went over to the window, and heard it again: my mother’s voice, a long way off, calling my name.

  I scrambled back to the living room, and found the wood box, but for some reason when I pushed at the door, it stuck, hard. I guess I was sort of panicky, because I knew Mom would have a cow if she found out I’d been in there, and I hadn’t expected her to be home for a couple of hours yet, so that’s why my hands were sort of fumbly and I was probably pushing on the frame of the door instead of the door itself. It didn’t move a hair, and I had this really awful feeling that the house wasn’t going to let me go, but as soon as I thought that, my hands shifted to the middle of the door and it moved, and the door opened.

  I tumbled out into the daylight and ran across the wild garden to the place I’d gotten in. When I turned to look back, I saw that I’d remembered to shut the door, which was hidden again, its seams in the shadow of some of the elaborate trim.

  Mom was on the road, halfway between our house and the Weirdman place, her back to me. I ran hard, circling around this sort of warehouse that stands near the main road, so when she finally saw me, she’d think I was coming from there and not the house.

  She gave me hell for poking around the warehouse, made me promise never to go there again, and took a while to settle down.

  Because the really strange thing? She’d been gone for two hours, and she’d been looking for me more than an hour after that, and in that whole time, all I’d done was find a door and walk through four rooms.

  The second time I went inside the house was about six months later. The first time it had been summer vacation, when we’d first moved there, then school started, and at first it was awful like usual, and then I made friends with Bee. Then AJ found us, and the Kim twins, and it was okay. But the house was just sort of… there, in the back of my head, and so during the Christmas vacation when AJ was off seeing his family in Mexico and Bee was off someplace in Europe (her father’s the manager of a bank, which may explain why he gets away with what he gets away with) and Mom was working all the hours she could at her temp job at the mall, I found myself standing at the gate again, looking for the wood-box door.

  No one had been inside since I’d been there in July. My footprints wandered up and down, and no others. But the house was dim, since it was winter, and the sky was cloudy, so I couldn’t tell if there were older footprints, just mine.

  I stood in the living room, looking at that humongous fireplace and trying to imagine what it would look like with a fire in it. The thing was about six feet across, plenty of room for me to lie down and stretch my arms out without touching the bricks. You could put whole trees in it. And the heat from it—that would make it impossible to sit nearby, wouldn’t it?

  I tried to picture the family, maybe three ladies with needlework and a bearded man, and oil lamps maybe on the walls. What would you do, without TV or video games? Books, sure, but how many hours a day could you read?

  I couldn’t picture it, not very well, so I turned to walk out of the room, when out of the corner of my eyes a flame suddenly flashed up in the cold fireplace, and I heard a sort of creaking noise that reminded me of my grandmother’s rocking chair.

  But when I whipped around to see, there was nothing, and no sound.

  The same thing happened in the kitchen, when I had finished looking in the empty cabinets and started to walk out the door: a sudden feeling of warmth at my back, a gust of frying onion and some spice in the air, and the briefest snatch of conversation in the world tickling my ears.

  Then it was gone, and the stove was empty and rusting, the air still and stale.

  The third time the ghostly voices came, I ran, and I didn’t go back.

  Until today, three months later, with AJ and Bee, in the sunshine.

  Maybe the house wouldn’t show us the door, I thought.

  But it did. The outline was right there, tucked under the edge of the peeling paint of the trim. You could even see the dent in the ground underneath it, where I’d hit when I came crashing out last December. I could feel my heart beginning to speed up, just remembering.

  “This is your door?” Bee asked. I jumped when she spoke, because I’d been so wrapped up in myself.

  “Yeah. We don’t have to go in.”

  “I think we do,” she said. “I want to see what’s in there, and we need it for the project. And besides, if we don’t, this is going to bug you forever.”

  “I think it’s going to bug me forever even if we do,” I told her, trying to joke, but she just gave me that look and stuck her fingernails under the edge.

  I opened my mouth to warn her that she’d need my pocketknife, but for her, the door gave way without a trace of hesitation. She pulled it open, and we looked in: a box, lined with metal, nothing more. She pulled herself up, I boosted AJ, and followed.

  We found nothing that day, although we got all the way through the house, a lot more than I’d managed on my own. Most of the rooms were empty, though there were bed frames in a couple of the upstairs rooms and one mattress that was a condo for mice. I began to calm down, and decided that whatever I’d seen that time, it had been my imagination. Nothing else.

  I was standing in the middle of the living room again, the empty and silent living room, when AJ said, “It’s getting dark, and I’m hungry.”

  “You’re always hungry,” I said, but when I looked at the window, it was true, the entire day had gone. It felt like a couple of hours, but when we dropped from the doorway, the sun was low and the air cold.

  “You didn’t see anything this time, did you?” Bee asked me, as we clawed our way out through the bushes.

  “Nope.”

  “Maybe there was too much activity, with three of us.”

  “Maybe there was nothing there the first time.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “There’s a reason this place is called what it is. And it does feel strange.”

  This is why I like Bee: she makes me feel like there are two of us in the world. “You felt it, too?”

  “Sure. And like you said, time in there seems to move really fast. I’d have sworn it wasn’t even lunchtime.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense.”

  “Expectations don’t make sense. And think about it: When people die, where does their energy go? When a house is built to hold a family, and the family lives there for years, then one by one they disappear, what does the house think?”

  “There’s a video game,” AJ piped up. I’d more or less forgotten he was there, which is about usual for AJ. “It’s got this device like a projector that sends characters from the game out into the real world.”

  “That was a movie,” Bee said.

  “Yeah, but it was a game, too. You could call up people out of history and use them in real time, or anyway the game’s real time. Like if you were having a war and you needed Alexander the Great or something, you could troll through history and snag him. Maybe that’s what Brad did, snagged the
Weirdmans and put them in the house for a second.”

  “Weildmans,” she said.

  “Whatever. But I mean, people don’t just go away when they die, do they? It doesn’t make sense. It’s like when you accidentally dump something on your computer, it’s there, if you know how to find it. Same with live people, don’t you think?”

  “Stands to reason,” Bee said. We were both looking at AJ—it was funny, but he sometimes came up with the most amazing ideas, out of the blue.

  “Man,” I said, “it’s really late. You guys agree, that we do our group project on the Weirdman House?”

  “Weildman,” Bee said.

  “Sure,” said AJ. “It’s better than those natural-history choices.”

  “What insane teacher assigns middle school kids a paper on toxic plants?” Bee muttered.

  “I think the idea is so we avoid them, not so we use them,” I said.

  “Still, this’ll be loads better.”

  So we were agreed: the three of us would do a group project on the history of the Weird—I mean, the Weildman House, and present it to the class the week before our trip to the historical museum. The next Saturday we found ourselves back in the jungly garden.

  That time, we saw the Weird Man.

  We met at my house early, at eight. Bee and AJ and me—the Kim twins were supposed to come, but Bonnie called at seven and said their parents had some kind of party they were going to up in San Jose and they had to go, too. Mom had work that day and left even before that, so when the others came, we got together a bunch of food and drink and put it in a backpack. And the big flashlight Mom keeps on top of the fridge for when the lights go out, just in case we wanted to look into a closet or a basement or something.

  The sun was out, and the day was going to be warm, for March. The weeds in the garden were shooting up at a tremendous rate and the first blossoms of the enormous climbing rosebush were out, the size of a teacup and pale pink, with a sweet smell that was almost too sweet. Coming through the garden, Bee paused to take a picture of them with her digital camera and pulled off a couple of petals, dropping them carefully into an envelope she took from her pocket. We couldn’t use the pictures for our school report, of course, not without admitting that we’d been trespassing, but what Mrs. Dender didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.