There was nothing wrong with Joey. And Jack knew there certainly wasn't anything wrong with himself. That only left Liz and he didn't have to think hard to make a list of her strange behavior lately.
He heard her in the kitchen banging things around as she made supper.
Then again, another part of him pointed out, you have to admit, you don't really see him that much. Not as much as Liz does.
All the more reason I'd notice changes in him, he reasoned. Because if the change is gradual, she won't see it if she's here all the time. But I would. It's like seeing a person gain or lose weight. If you're around them all the time, you don't notice the change until afterward when you're looking at the before picture.
He looked at the picture again, scanning the whole thing this time, looking at Joey, at the house, at the girl in the third floor window--
He blinked, furrowed his brow, and looked again.
Yes, there she was, faint and half-obscured by sun glare.
But I'll be damned if it doesn't look like there's someone standing in the window.
Is that what touched me last night?
Shut up. Nothing touched you. You dreamed that.
Right. I forgot.
He looked at the picture again and she was gone, if she'd ever been there. Yes, there was still something in the window, but now that he really studied it, it could be anything from reflected light to distortions in the glass or smudges on the camera lens when Liz snapped the photo, all of them made to look like a girl in the window by suggestions from Liz and Jack's subconscious working together.
Then he wondered if Liz had seen the image. Maybe unconsciously she had and that had been the seed of her ghost theory. That made sense, didn't it? And ever since, every noise or shadow suddenly becomes a ghost.
Yes, that was it. His wife wasn't crazy, just impressionable.
Everyone will suffer now.
You can't save yourself.
The words went through him via his spine, expelling themselves through the goose bumps on his arms.
That had been his dream. And he'd heard it before, from the prank calls they'd gotten.
But that's all it was. Everything was fine. The world was normal. He'd figured it all out.
While his mind worked to convince him of this, Jack turned over and stared at Lily.
Liz had lost count of the dinners they'd eaten in silence.
While her frustration had begun to fade, she didn't know about Jack and if she tried to talk to him and he came back with a sarcastic or spiteful response, she knew she'd be right back to pissed, too.
So she kept quiet, ate her pork chops, shoveled mashed potatoes into her mouth, and tried like crazy to think of something to say that would have nothing to do with ghosts.
Joey had eaten half of his mashed potatoes, a few kernels of corn, but hadn't touched the pork chop.
Jack and Liz noticed it simultaneously, and they both said, "Joey, eat your supper."
Joey laughed at the stereo quality, but still only brushed at the food with his fork. Jack and Liz chuckled, glanced at each other, then stopped and looked down at their plates.
Joey said, "I'm full."
"You're not full," Jack said. "Eat."
Joey poked his fork at a piece of corn, but couldn't pierce it.
"Scoop it up," Liz said, demonstrating with her own fork.
"I like doing it this way," Joey said, then continued to try to spear the kernels that eluded him.
The silence dragged on another few minutes before Liz said, "So did anyone say anything about you being gone so long today?"
"Who's to say anything?" Jack asked.
Liz shrugged. She cut off another bite of pork chop.
"No," Jack said. "The load wasn't leaving today, so everything went okay."
"No calls from Aurora?"
"Oh no, they called. They always call. God forbid a day goes by that they don't call half a dozen times with three dozen things they need next day."
"I can't believe no one says anything to them about that." She chewed her pork chop. Joey slid some of his corn toward the potatoes, trying to hide them. "Eat your corn," she said.
"Why would they?" Jack said. "They pay for the shipping and every part they get from us they have to buy, also. Each plant is individual and anything that goes from one place to another better come with a bill and a receipt."
"Is that normal?"
"I don't know, really. It makes sense, I guess."
"I kind of figured company property meant company property no matter where it was."
"Maybe," Jack said, shrugging. “I don't know.”
After Jack and Liz finished their food and Joey had convinced them he was done, too, Liz sent Joey in to take a bath.
After she put the dishes in the sink and threw away what little was left, she headed for the bathroom.
Jack was in the bedroom, leaning against the headboard with Lily resting against his knee. When he saw her pass by, he leaned toward the hall.
"I'm sure he's capable of washing his own hair."
"I'm sure he is," Liz said. "He's also capable of drowning if he slips and falls."
Jack went back to Lily, knowing he wasn't going to convince her of Joey's independence on this issue.
Liz closed the door and sat sideways on the toilet lid. Joey filled a plastic cup with bath water, then dumped it out, watching the silvery-clear stream fall.
Liz's breath caught and her vision blurred, then cleared and she wiped sweat off her forehead. The few stray strands of hair she'd found on Joey last night were thicker now, and there were more of them. She tried not to stare, and tried not to let it affect her like it had last night.
She'd had the day to think it over and she knew now that Joey was involved, too. She could handle this now.
She dumped water over his head, washed his hair, and rinsed it. He asked if she was going to wash him off, but Liz said, "No, I think you're old enough now to do that yourself."
He said okay and rubbed soap over his stomach from side to side like children do.
Liz stood in front of the sink, staring into the mirror, silently praying to be able to get through this without her reflection doing anything Liz herself wasn't doing, too.
She looked down into the sink and asked, "Joey? The day we went to find the horse rides . . . how did you know where they were?"
"Adam knows."
Her heart jumped a few beats and her stomach felt as if someone had shoved a large rock into the middle of it.
She took a deep breath, looked up into the mirror and asked, "Is Adam someone in the house?"
Joey was silent a second, then she heard the water pouring from the cup again. She glanced over her shoulder. Joey looked up. "Uh-huh."
Finally, she asked, "And when does Adam talk to you?"
"I don't know. Sometimes."
"What kind of stuff does he say to you?"
"I don't know. Stuff. He tells me about the people who used to live here."
"The Denglers?" Liz asked.
Joey nodded. "Uh-huh. But not just them. There was a preacher who lived here, too."
"And does he visit you, too?"
"No. But Adam tells me about him."
Liz felt her chin beginning to tremble and she ground her teeth together to stop it. She wiped her forehead again and sat back on the toilet seat.
"Like what?"
"They built the house for him."
"Who did?"
"The town," Joey said. He scrubbed at his face with a wet rag, then wiped his hand across his eyes. "Angel Hill. The preacher lived some place else, but Angel Hill wanted him to come here so they built the house for him as an insensitive."
"An incentive?"
"Uh-huh."
Liz heard something in the hall and she stood and moved toward the door. The noise faded and she heard Jack in the bedroom, strumming his guitar. Whatever had passed outside was gone.
"And what else does Adam tell you?"
"T
he preacher had some kids and he made them leave."
"What for?"
"Cause they were doing bad things to each other."
Liz frowned. She guessed at what he was talking about, but the whole matter was too disturbing for her to be discussing with her six-year-old stepson.
"They were twins," Joey continued. "A girl and a boy and they slept upstairs all the way and he came up one night and caught them and they had to leave and he didn't see them anymore."
"Does Adam ever tell you things about us?"
She took another deep breath, half-dreading the answer, half-hopeful it would be a no.
"Yes."
Her stomach sank another three feet inside her.
"What does he say?"
"He told me you're going to have a baby."
At this, any thought of further revelations from Adam were out of the question.
It was true; Liz had missed her period. But she hadn't told Jack, she hadn't even said it out loud to herself. And she couldn't be more than a few weeks along, nowhere near showing.
How did he know?
He just told you. From Adam.
"Joey, who's Adam?"
"He's one of the boys who used to live upstairs before his dad killed him. He hit him in the head with a big board. But that didn't kill him, so when Adam came back, his dad swung it at him again and a nail cut his throat and he died."
She could feel the onset of hyperventilation. She hadn't expected this level of knowledge from him. She knew he'd seen things and heard things, but she hadn't known he was talking to them. She stifled the urge to lose it, got control of herself.
"And have you ever seen Adam?"
"Uh-huh."
She got a towel out of the cabinet, set it on the toilet seat.
"He's older. He's got short dark hair, and he's taller."
"Do you know how old?"
"He said he was--" he stopped and looked up--thinking? Or talking to Adam?--and said, "twelve."
She handed him the towel and he took it and stood up. She unplugged the drain. Joey made a clumsy attempt to dry his head and Liz had to take the towel from him to do it. When he was standing on the rug, dried and slipping into clean underwear, Liz forced herself to ask, "Do you know what's going on up there, Joe?"
"Uh-huh."
She waited, but he didn't continue. She had to ask, "What? What are they doing up there?"
"They just want to get out."
"Who?"
"All of them."
"The children? Adam?"
"Not Adam. Adam's down here now."
"Where?"
He didn't say anything, but he stared at her and his eyes weren't his and the face, mostly Joey's, showed signs of someone else in the slopes and tones and the way he held it. She looked at the birthmark under his chin, the ragged run of pink flesh that everyone mistook for a scar. ("The nail cut his throat and he died.")
Then she hugged him and felt herself beginning to cry for the six-year-old boy she'd fallen in love with and who was now only partly here anymore.
Chapter Sixteen
Jack spent that week conducting tours through the department. With Fett Tech in desperate need of customers, they'd invited busloads of people to take a look at their plant in the hopes of winning them over. Jack cringed every time a new group walked through the doors, knowing every second he spent with these people--showing them where the wave solder was, explaining to them that the dope room was for doping compound that went into the junction boxes and some of the cables to make them waterproof--would be time spent letting everything else fall to the side.
How many calls from Aurora was he missing? Not that he didn't enjoy the break from them, but he knew that just because they couldn't get hold of him wouldn't negate their need for box loads of parts sent next day air.
And what about all their other customers? Were their parts supposed to be put on hold, too, just to explain how an intercom is rewired to a bunch of people who probably aren't even that interested? Of course not. And with the hours cut to thirty-six, that didn't leave them a hell of a lot of time to do any catching up.
But God forbid any of that matter. Got to get the potential customers through here before dealing with the ones we've already got, right? He couldn't believe he'd ever been impressed with the way things ran here. Those few months ago seemed like years, already.
Someone asked why it was called a "Y" cable.
Jack pointed out the configuration of the assembly, how three separate cables ran from a center box in the form of a "Y", and he wanted to wrap the thing around the moron's neck until he stopped being so stupid.
Liz spent the week going through The Outsider's Guide to Angel Hill, wondering at all the weird crap that had gone on here. She wondered how much of it was authentic and how much hearsay.
On Thursday, she called Arthur Miller personally--the bookstore name and phone number was printed on the back cover--and asked him about her house.
"You live in that house?" was his initial response.
"Yes," Liz said. "We moved here a couple months ago. My husband bought your book and it's very interesting--." He chuckled and thanked her. "--but what I'm wondering is, has anything other than the Dengler thing happened here? Do you know anything about anyone who lived here before or since?"
"Well, the second part's easy," he said. "No one's lived there since Milo Dengler. Just about everyone in town knows the house and knows what happened there. Your case, someone from out of town, is about the only way they were going to unload that place."
I'm not surprised, she thought.
"And what about before? Do you know anything about the first people to live here?"
"Yes," he said. "Some. I know the first occupant was a preacher named Keeper. He and his wife and their children--he had twins, boy and a girl--lived there. Why a preacher with only two kids needs that a big a house, I don't know, but I do know that when the kids was in their teens, Keeper found 'em upstairs together."
Yes, Joey had already told her that.
"Story goes he kicked 'em right out and never saw them again. Now, the story also says the kids were sharing a bedroom upstairs, one more thing I don't get, but that's the story. I mean, even a preacher has to know better than to put two repressed teenagers together."
"But they were brother and sister. Worse, twins," Liz said.
"I'm not saying it was normal, that's just the story. I'm only saying, there are a lot of rooms in that house. Surely those kids could have had separate rooms."
Liz moved away from the phone for a second and listened. Joey was in his room.
"But the preacher kept that extra room for guests, as I hear it."
"There's lots of rooms here," Liz said.
"There's more now," Arthur Miller said. "At first, the bottom floor was a stable. The Keepers only lived on the top two floors. I believe there's a room on the second floor he used as a study. And the bedrooms were upstairs. Well he came up for bed one night, heard 'em in there, and when he looked in to tell them to go to sleep, he found 'em doing stuff no parent ever wants to see their kids doing."
"What happened?" Liz asked.
"He kicked 'em out. Told 'em the devil had no place in his house and he gathered up their clothes, tossed 'em out the window, and that was that. They were gone."
"What happened to them?"
"I don't know," Arthur Miller said. "So far, no one's got a story for that. And since it was almost a hundred years ago, I doubt anyone will."
"And what about after the Keepers? Anything happen with the people who lived here after that?"
"Nothing I've heard of. The Keepers lived there another twenty or so years before the preacher died. I think his wife sold the house and moved away. I don't know, maybe she died, too. It was years before the Denglers moved in, surely someone else lived there in that time, but if they did, nothing happened to call attention. The Denglers were there for a while before . . . it happened."
Liz got off the phone wi
th Arthur Miller with only minimal new knowledge. She wasn't even sure what she was looking for in the first place.
All work on the house had ceased, but she still went upstairs once in a while. She'd sit on the top landing, staring at the spot Milo Dengler had hung from, and daring him to reappear. Her courage came from looking at Joey, wondering where he was going and what would happen when he was gone. She'd watched the air in front of her, expecting to see him form from nothing, but he never appeared.
The girl moved through the room a time or two. And when Liz went downstairs, the noises on the third floor started again. During the night, the thumps and giggles coming down the stairs were almost every few minutes. How Jack could sleep through it, she didn't know.
She'd watch Jack sometimes when he came home from work, wondering if he was going to see the changes in Joey yet, wondering what he would say if he did.
He'll see sooner or later, she thought. He has to. Eventually it's not going to be something he can deny or rationalize away.
But will it be too late by then?
I don't know.
But he hadn't noticed yet.
How could he not? Was he blind, or stupid?
After the night in the bathroom, she never questioned Joey again about what was happening. She saw herself as knowing too much already. She could barely sleep and her appetite was gone. She told herself she had to deal with this and get on with her life because if she really was pregnant, she had more than just herself to think about.
But I have to think about Joey, too.
And you're not going to do him any good if you ruin yourself.
She'd try to take naps in the afternoons, but she could rarely sleep. She'd try to force food down her throat, but after a few bites, she felt she would puke if she swallowed any more.
During the long hot afternoons while Jack was at work, she'd start to feel helpless, knowing something was happening but neither knowing what it was, nor what she would be able to do if it happened right now. Despite the many rooms and three separate floors, the walls of the house began to close in. She'd go outside, but even then the feeling of something inside the house watching her remained. And if not that, the Angel Hill summer sun beating down would drive her back inside.
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