by B. E. Scully
The old man emerged from beneath the apple tree and gave first Cal, then Rachel a long, steady look. “Where’d you folks come from?”
Calvin let his hand drop. “From California. Los Angeles, specifically.”
Their new neighbor nodded as if that explained everything. “People here along the canal way don’t use this path behind the houses. Always been that way, in all the years I’ve been here. I don’t much like people traipsing up and down behind my property.”
Calvin tried to keep his tone light. The last thing he needed was trouble before they’d even moved in. “The path is public access, right?”
“Yep. You’ve got every right to walk back here. I’m not saying otherwise. It’s just that it’s not the way things are done around here. I have enough trouble with that crew on the other side of you.”
Rachel stood up, keeping a tight hold on Jackson’s leash. “You mean the lavender farm?”
“That’s right. Nothing but a bunch of damn hippies and potheads over there.”
Rachel looked at Calvin, and he could see she was trying not to laugh. But he didn’t find anything funny about this arrogant old man telling him where he could and could not walk. “Well, this is the best way to get to the bridge. And the bridge is the only way to get to the main path, as far as I can see.”
“Highway leads to the bridge.”
“Right, if you don’t mind the eighteen-wheelers roaring past at sixty-five miles an hour. Hon, let the leash out a little, okay? You’re choking the poor dog half to death.”
Rachel frowned down at Jackson without loosening the leash. “Let’s just go, okay?”
“Jackson needs a walk.”
“We can go in the other direction, behind the farm. Please, Cal. Let’s just go.”
The old man tugged the brim of hat down so far it almost covered his eyes. “Seems like lots of folks moving up here from California lately.” He spat out the state name like a virus, dragging out the syllables so it came out sounding like “Cal-ee-forn-ya.”
“Good to get new blood in a place,” Cal said, still attempting to lighten the mood. “New blood in Blood House, right?”
But the old man’s frown didn’t budge. “Depends what kind of blood. You see, people move into places like this to get away from the things they didn’t like about where they just left. But then they try to bring those very same things along with them. And once a place starts changing, before you even know it, it’s not the same anymore.”
Rachel started back toward their house, Jackson bounding along beside her. “Come on, Cal. Let’s go.”
As Cal turned to follow, he caught a glimpse of the old man making some kind of rude gesture at them—just a glimpse, but Cal would have sworn to it just the same. The old geezer’s lips were pulled back into a lewd leer, and he’d formed an “O” with his thumb and index finger and was darting his tongue in and out of it. Cal recognized the gesture as the same one he and his friends used to make when they were too adolescent-stupid to even know what it meant. He sure as hell knew what it meant now, though.
Cal whipped around to face the old man, but he was just standing there rubbing his nose with his hand just like any other ordinary old man you ever see. Cal shook his head. He must have imagined the rude gesture—after all, what kind of a grown man would do a thing like that anyway?
They walked in silence past Blood House and down the path toward the lavender farm until Jackson found a suitable spot of weeds to do his business.
The silence continued until Cal worked up his best mock-redneck voice. “Nothing but a bunch of damn hippies and potheads.”
Rachel stayed silent at first, but then added her own redneck to the conversation. “All them fruits and nuts from Caaaal-ee-forn-a! And once a place starts changing, why, then it’s gosh-darn different!”
“And different is bad, gosh-darn it!”
“Can’t let different happen, can we?”
“Laws no!”
They both burst out laughing as Jackson turned frenzied little circles of joy. The late afternoon sun danced across the canal water in glittery little ripples, and Cal and Rachel turned to look at their new home.
“It does look sort of look like a castle,” Rachel said, reaching out and entwining her fingers in Cal’s. “Complete with a mad, crazy king next door.”
Cal gave her a quick glance, anxious not to lose the good mood. But Rachel was still smiling, and all of a sudden Cal knew everything was going to be okay. After what they’d been through in the last year, things had to start being okay.
Back at the house, Cal unloaded their bags while Rachel began exploring.
“Cal?” she called down from one of the top floor rooms. “I think this room up here should be our main bedroom. But come up here a minute, would you?”
Cal climbed the rickety old stairs, adding one more thing to the fix-up list. The room Rachel had chosen as their bedroom had been painted a vile shade of sea-green. “Someone sure had some rancid taste in home décor.”
“Yeah, it needs repainted just like the rest of the house. But that’s not why I called you up here. Take a deep breath—something smells really funny in here, and not in a good way.”
Cal took a deep breath, hoping it was just Rachel being over-sensitive. But she was right. The room did smell funny—dry and dusty, but not just from age. Underneath the mustiness was something sharp and animal—something almost feral.
“It’s strongest over here,” Rachel said, tapping a long board nailed to the wall. “I think this used to be an old heating system. If I’m picturing it right, it goes up to the old chimney on the right side of the roof. The one that looks about ready to collapse.”
“They must have stopped using the chimney years ago and just boarded up the space in the wall.” Cal pried his fingers beneath a corner of the board and pulled. “Should come off pretty easy. This wood is as old and worn out as—”
All of a sudden the board gave way and they discovered the source of the smell. Spilling out of the wall and gathering at their feet in a pile at least three-feet deep and just as wide was at least two decades’ worth of pellet-sized, dust-dry, feral-stinking bat shit.
2
That night, they came.
Before leaving L.A., Cal and Rachel had made a trip to the largest sporting goods store in the city. They’d never set foot in it before, but now they stocked up on provisions for their transition from sunny California to the moss-covered Pacific Northwest: water-proof rain gear, mud boots, hiking equipment. They also threw in a set of sleeping bags to hold them over until the moving van arrived, while Jackson stuck with the little blue-and-white striped blanket that was his combination favorite toy, safety blanket, and all around best thing in the world.
The first night at Blood House they decided to sleep in the living room because it was the cleanest room in the house, although that wasn’t saying much. Rachel was lying in the dark trying to find a position that didn’t make her shoulders ache when she first heard it—a furtive little scratch-scratching coming from the room where they’d found the bat shit.
She sat up in her sleeping bag, straining to see through the gloom of the darkened room. “Cal? Do you hear that?”
Cal had almost been asleep. “Hear what?”
“That scratching. How can you not hear it?” By now the noise sounded like a thousand tiny claws skittering around the rooftop. “Cal, wake up—the goddamn bats are inside the house.”
Cal sat up and they waited in the dark, listening. Rachel rummaged around in her overnight bag until she found a flashlight—thank god for that sporting goods store.
“They’re in the main bedroom, where we found the shit,” she whispered as she and Cal climbed the stairs to the upper room. Jackson was creeping along beside her, ready to defend the pack.
“Okay,” Cal whispered back. “But why are we whispering?”
At the top of the stairs, Rachel opened the door slowly, certain she would be swarmed by rabid, blood-thirsty wing
ed creatures of darkness. But the room was empty.
“The scratching is coming from the hole,” Cal said.
They crept across the room toward the wall. Blackened and warped by years of heat, the wood and concrete recess looked ominous, like some gaping portal to the underworld.
Rachel could just squeeze the top half of her head into the narrow space. She positioned the flashlight into the recess and looked up. Then she let out a horrified cry and stumbled backward, dropping the flashlight. The bottom came off and the batteries popped out, leaving them in darkness.
“Oh my god, Cal, there are hundreds of bats in there—”
“I seriously doubt there are hundreds—”
“Cal, listen to me. They’re up in the old chimney. There must be a loose screen or something up there. That’s where all the shit came from. They’ve been roosting up there for ages, just roosting up there and shitting and it’s all been piling up right here in the goddamn wall—”
“Okay, Rachel, just calm down…”
“I’m not going to calm down! This house has an infestation of bats, Cal! They never told us that when we bought it. Something like that is definitely grounds for a non-disclosure lawsuit. They can’t just sell you a goddamn house with an infestation of bats in it. They just can’t.”
Even though Cal couldn’t see her in the dark, he knew she was crying. He stood there in the feral-smelling shadows of their supposed-to-be bedroom, desperate for something to say to make Rachel stop crying, to make her happy for once. But all he could come up with was, “I’ll go up on the roof tomorrow and seal up every pipe and chimney, Rachel. I promise.”
He felt a wet warmness on his hand—Jackson giving him comforts licks
Cal turned his hand over and scratched those impossibly soft spots behind the dog’s ears. “It’s okay, boy. It’s going to be all right. Everything’s going to be all right.”
When he felt Rachel’s hand next to his, first scratching behind Jackson’s ears and then taking hold of his hand and giving it a squeeze, he almost believed it.
* * *
The next morning Cal went to the local hardware store and bought a ladder and half a dozen different tubes, tubs, and cans of every kind of sealant for every kind of leak he could find. Then he waited until dusk, which is when all of the “How to get rid of a bat infestation” web sites claimed they left their roosting places to hunt.
At first only a scattering of bats emerged from an opening in the chimney where a ventilation screen had come loose. Then more came—not hundreds, but definitely dozens—until a great black flapping swirl rose into the sky and then disappeared over the canal.
Wasting no time, Cal climbed onto the perilously steep side of roof leading to the chimney and sealed the ventilation hole and every suspect nook and cranny he could find. By the time he was finished, his legs and shoulders ached so badly he had to hobble around the house like an old man. Having spent the day sweeping bat shit into enormous black garbage bags and scrubbing what she now called the “Portal to Hell” so many times her hands were raw, Rachel wasn’t in much better shape.
“We can get someone in here to make a nice set of shelves out of this space,” Cal said. “Its dark past will be completely erased.”
“Maybe,” Rachel said. “But I’m thinking the upstairs room on the other side of the house might make a better bedroom.”
Around midnight, when the bats returned for the night, they stood outside and watched the great black swirl circle the house. Every now and then the bats would swoop toward the chimney, perplexed as to why their decades’ old roosting ground was now closed for business.
Cal couldn’t help feeling pleased with himself. “Looks like we’ve got them beat.”
Rachel watched them make another orbit. “I kind of feel a little sorry for them. I wonder where they’ll go now?”
“How about that forest right over there, where they belong? Plenty of room for hundreds more bats.”
Most of the leather-wings did adjust to the forced relocation plan, but not all of them. The second night was quiet, but then the familiar scratch-scratching started along the edges of the roof. If the bats couldn’t get in through their trusted chimney, it seemed they’d find another way. By the time he was finished, Cal figured he’d have sealed every crack and crevice from the foundation to the chimney pipes.
After three bat-free days, just when they started thinking they might finally have gotten rid of them, they heard the tell-tale screeching and scrambling in the rain gutter that ran around the front porch. Cal hunted down a small crack between the porch roof and the wainscoting and blasted it closed with sealant foam. Only when he stepped back to admire his handiwork did he realize that the bat was now trapped inside.
It screamed for two days before it finally died. Now every time Rachel went on the front porch, she thought of the mummified bat forever sealed inside its tomb.
Slowly, though, Blood House improved.
After the first week, the moving van arrived, bringing with it the familiar comforts of their old life. In another two weeks, Rachel would start her new job. They had both worried about finding decent work in a city so much smaller than L.A., but Rachel had been hired right away by a mid-sized hospital in immediate need of an anesthesiologist. Her salary was far less than what she’d been earning before, but then again, their expenses were far less, too—or would be, once they got the house in working order. In L.A., Cal had also been earning good money programming software applications for a nationwide insurance company, but he could always scale down to freelance work he could do online. That way, he could put more time into the house.
As Rachel and Cal made their way through the dust and debris, Blood House gave up more of its strange secrets. On a row of shelves high above the kitchen sink, they found dozens of spent shotgun cartridges. Tucked away in the recesses of a corner shelf in what must have been the dining room in long-gone, better times, Cal found a tiny bat skeleton curled into the bottom of a cut-glass egg cup.
“It’s no bigger than my pinky finger,” Cal said, showing Rachel his find. “It must have died right after it was born, to be so tiny. I wonder how it got in there in the first place?”
Rachel took the cup and peered in at the little form. “Cal, look at that—even though it’s mostly a mummy by now, you can still see patches of dried fur and skin. And the way it’s curled up so tight, without a bone out of place—it must have still been alive when it crawled in there and died, and no one even knew it was here all these years. I mean, what else?”
“Anything’s possible in Blood House.”
Rachel handed the egg cup back. “Yeah, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about that. Can we not call it ‘Blood House’ anymore? It sounds so morbid, and this place is morbid enough on its own without adding to it.”
“Okay, no more Blood House. How about Love House instead?”
“Love House I can handle,” Rachel said, laughing. “And Cal—get rid of that bat, will you? Just pitch the whole thing—that egg cup is probably some super expensive piece of vintage crystal, and I don’t care. It’s a bat sarcophagus now.”
Cal put the egg cup into a plastic bag and took it out to the trash. He had the lid of the garbage can open and was ready to toss it when something made him hesitate. He took the egg cup out of the bag and inspected the little skeleton. It had only been partly dislodged from its position, and Cal put his pinky finger in the cup and nudged it back into place. Then he took the egg cup into the shed and hid it on one of the high shelves in the back corner, where Rachel would never look.
In the main hallway, they found a nailed-shut closet with nothing but nails on the inside, as well—hundreds of nails covering every inch of wall space and even the ceiling, with no particular pattern or purpose they could see. The nails weren’t pounded in evenly, so reaching into the closet was like navigating a flesh-snagging landmine of bent and jagged metal. In a few cases, the nails were somehow driven through the opposite side of the wall, a
dding randomly placed, dagger-sharp ends to the whole adventure.
In a small upstairs room with a ceiling slanted at half a dozen different angles, Rachel found a series of lines and dates written in black magic marker on one of the raw wood walls—it was one of the few rooms that hadn’t been treated to the circus big-top color scheme.
The markings formed a child’s growth chart with dates going back to the 1940s, when the house had been built. Rachel smiled at the thought of some long ago child lining up each year to be measured by his or her proud parents, and yet there was something unsettling about the chart—something not quite right.
Rachel studied the wall, trying to put her finger on what was wrong until it finally hit her—the dates and lines were in reverse order. Whereas a child’s growth chart should start with the shortest line and grow taller along with the child, this one started with a line about three-feet high and then gradually grew shorter as the years advanced. The chart started with the year 1946, written above the tallest line. After that, the line grew shorter and shorter as the years went forward—1947, 1948, all the way up to the year 1951, for which the line was written right along the edge of the floorboard.
Added to Blood House’s macabre history was the strange, sad fate of its previous owner, Melvin Stockton, which Cal and Rachel learned when they met their neighbors on the other side.
In addition to selling in bulk to local businesses, the lavender farm had a little shop that sold lavender products and whatever fresh eggs were left over from the chickens that ran loose all over the place. The sign hanging over the shop door read, “Two Sister’s Lavender Farm.”
“Two sisters in need of a lesson in the proper use of possessive apostrophes, is more like it,” Cal said. “I hope their lavender is better than their grammar.”
