Devils in Dark Houses

by B. E. Scully

  Which is why, Cal told himself, I have to keep an eye on the whole property—the old bone of a house and its decrepit apple-tree guardian standing watch in the corner. Cal had to watch it right back. To spy, in other words.

  Jackson was taking his good old time tonight, and Cal turned off his flashlight. A sliver of hard white moon was throwing shadows along the canal path. At Roy Crampton’s house, a light came on in the back bedroom window.

  The back bedroom window—a cold finger of fear probed Cal’s stomach every time he thought about what he’d seen there one day. He’d been out clearing weeds from Crampton’s side of the yard when he heard a terrible high-pitched squealing coming from the dog sheds—he’d have thought Crampton was over there beating the poor things if the sound hadn’t been so high-pitched and weird—more like the sound a rabbit in a trap might make than a dog.

  Cal and Roy Crampton only ever spoke across the fence behind Crampton’s house, but now Cal raced over to where their yards met.

  “Hey, what’s going on over there?” he yelled. There was no answer, and within seconds the high-pitched squealing stopped.

  Cal called out one more time, but Crampton’s place was silent. Cal crept along the property edge, following the line of barbed wire fence. He made his way around an overgrown holly bush and through a tangle of blackberry brambles that tore at his socks and ankles. When he cleared the overgrowth, he found himself standing in front of a window. Cal was less than ten feet from the side wall of Roy Crampton’s house, closer than he’d ever been before.

  This must be his bedroom, Cal thought, though he had no reason to think so. This must be where he sits and spies on us—

  All of a sudden a clutch of white fingers appeared at the edge of the tightly drawn curtains. The fingers drew the curtains back just a sliver, and one watery blue, wide-open eye appeared, staring straight at Cal.

  He stumbled backward and tripped over an exposed tree root, went down on one knee and then struggled to his feet, cursing. He didn’t dare look back at the window, yet when he looked anyway, the eye was gone.

  If his neighbor had been anyone else, the situation might have been funny—being caught spying on someone because that same someone was spying on you. But his neighbor wasn’t anyone else, and the situation was anything but funny.

  Cal stood there in the corner of the yard until it came to him—it couldn’t have been Roy Crampton at the window. Cal was certain Roy Crampton had brown eyes, and the eye peering at him from behind the curtains had been blue—watery, wide-open, and definitely blue. And yet Roy Crampton lived alone—had always lived alone. So who had been staring at him with that watery blue eye?

  For a few days following the eye incident, Cal avoided walking behind Crampton’s house. He took Jackson the other way, past the farm, or even out on the highway. Then when he couldn’t stand it anymore he crept back over to Crampton’s side of the yard. He didn’t go near the window again, but he did figure out why Crampton loved the apple tree so much. The thick, gnarled branches provided the perfect cover for a grown man to stand among them and not be seen. The late summer apples had fallen and were piled along the ground, scenting the air with a sharp, vinegary aroma that made Cal think of moonshine. Standing beneath the tree breathing in the rotting-apple scented air, it occurred to Cal that Crampton could be standing right on the other side of the tree and Cal wouldn’t even know it.

  The next day, Cal resumed his regular walking schedule. Roy Crampton was waiting beneath the apple tree just like always. Cal had been afraid Crampton would bring up the incident at the window, but if Crampton knew he’d been spying on him, he didn’t mention it.

  Instead he said, “You a chess playing man, Goodman?”

  “A little bit, in college. Haven’t played in years though. No time, I guess.”

  “Got all the time in the world now,” Crampton said, though Cal couldn’t imagine what made him think so. “I play every day, myself. Haven’t missed a day in over ten years, and that was only because I fell so sick that one winter when influenza was going around.”

  Cal wondered if his chess partner was the owner of the watery blue eye. “Must be tough to find a partner way out here. Who do you play with?”

  But Crampton ignored the question. “Castling—you know the move, Goodman? It’s where you move your king two squares toward a rook on your opponent’s first rank, then move the rook to the square over which the king crossed. It’s the only move in chess where a player can move two pieces in the same turn. But the catch is, castling can only be done if the king has never moved and if the rook has never moved. And the king can’t be in check or end up in check, either, of course.”

  “To each castle its king,” Cal said, and then thought, What the hell am I talking about? What the hell am I doing here?

  Roy Crampton had laughed—a smug, gloating laugh that knew things Cal Goodman didn’t. “And each tower its rook.”

  Jackson came trotting up, pleased with himself for completing his nightly mission. Cal reluctantly turned his attention away from the lone lit window in Roy Crampton’s house and cast a guilty upward glance at his own bedroom window. The light was on there, too, which meant Rachel was still awake, probably reading.

  “Come here, boy, back on the slave chain,” Cal said, bending down to latch Jackson back onto his leash. But suddenly the dog sat up, ears cocked and back legs stiff in high-alert mode. And then quicker than Cal had ever seen him move before, Jackson took off at a dead run toward Roy Crampton’s house.

  “Jackson! Come back here, boy—Jackson!”

  Cal was shouting now, and running. But not fast enough. He reached Crampton’s house just in time to see Jackson slip right through the hole Crampton had cut in his fence and disappear around the front of the house.

  “Jackson! Here, boy—Jackson?”

  Cal stood in the dark, panicking.

  Get a hold of yourself, Cal told himself, but all that kept running through his mind was king or rook, king or rook, king or rook, over and over again until the words stopped making sense.

  He couldn’t go back and tell Rachel that Jackson was gone, let alone explain how he’d gotten off the leash in the first place. One way or the other, he had to get that dog back. Jackson had gone through the hole in Roy Crampton’s fence, so he had to be in there somewhere. And since Cal meant to find him, that meant only one thing.

  One way or the other, Cal Goodman was going to find that dog. Which meant that one way or the other, Cal Goodman was going onto Roy Crampton’s property.

  2

  Rachel pushed the floor with her feet to make the chair rock harder. The harder she rocked, the harder she cried, and she had no desire to let up on either. After all, she’d been crying for two days straight, stopping only long enough to make it through nine hours of work, come home and rummage through the fridge for something to warm up in the microwave, then stand at the kitchen counter not tasting one bite of whatever it was she was eating. With those obligations out of the way, she’d go up to her turret room to rock and cry until she finally dragged herself to bed at night. Sometimes she didn’t even wait until she got home to start crying, but broke down right in the car on the way home so she could greet her husband all puffy-eyed and ready to go for the evening.

  Speaking of her husband, she didn’t know what he was eating for dinner these days. In fact, she didn’t even know what he was doing with himself now that she was holed up in the turret room most of the time. She did know that her constant crying made Cal feel even worse than he already did, but she didn’t care. She didn’t even care that every single one of the laurel bushes she’d planted along Roy Crampton’s side of the yard were dead even though the staff at the local greenhouse told her they were one of the most indestructible shrubs money could buy. Rachel also didn’t care that as far as she knew, Mary still hadn’t returned to the lavender farm. All Rachel cared about was getting Jackson back, and until that happened, the entire canal way could have exploded into flames and sh
e wouldn’t have cared one bit.

  The goofy jester grin that woke her up each morning—gone. The warm little body curled up next to her on the rocker—gone, leaving only the little blue-and-white striped blanket behind. The frenzied “welcome home” dance that let her know she was the most important thing in the universe, at least to this one small creature—gone, gone, gone, just like everything else in Rachel’s life ever since moving to this cursed house on this cursed damn canal.

  Luckily today was Saturday, so Rachel didn’t even have to put in her nine non-crying hours. She could make it a forty-eight-hour affair until Monday morning if she wanted to. And right about now, she definitely wanted to.

  At first, Cal hadn’t told her the whole story about what had happened to Jackson. He had to at least admit he’d let the dog off the leash, but he left out the part about why Jackson had run away and, even more critical to the outcome, where he had run to. Frantic as Rachel had been about Jackson running off, she initially took comfort in the fact that she’d updated both his collar tag and his microchip with their new address and contact information before they’d left L.A.

  “Someone will find him,” Rachel kept repeating after she and Cal spent half the night roaming the canal pathway with a flashlight and driving the car up and down the highway and back roads. “I mean, where could he go out here? As long as he stays away from the highway, someone will find him. He’s got all of our information on him. So someone will find him and call us, right? Don’t you think, Cal?”

  When Cal didn’t answer, Rachel tried again. “Cal, don’t you think someone will find him and call us?”

  That’s when he finally confessed the full story.

  “You mean Jackson is on that man’s property?!” Rachel had shrieked. “Oh my god, Cal, Roy Crampton will kill that poor little dog! Don’t you see that’s what he had planned all along? Don’t you see that he somehow lured Jackson onto his property in order to harm him? This is all revenge for us walking on that stupid pathway behind his house!”

  “Honey, listen, I know you’re upset—”

  “Upset? Upset? I’m not upset, Cal, I’m damn near out of my mind at the idea that our dog is being held captive by a maniac right next door, that he might be doing god knows what to the poor little thing as we speak, or that Jackson is already dead and apparently you’re not going to do a goddamn thing about it!”

  “I did try to do something about it, but I’m not going to give that lunatic over there an excuse to shoot me in the head for trespassing—”

  “Like I said, apparently you’re not going to do a goddamn thing about it.”

  “So what are you saying—you want me to just charge onto Crampton’s property and get shot?”

  “You do not want me to answer that question right now.”

  “Listen, on Monday I will either talk to him face-to-face or go onto his property myself if I have to—”

  “Why wait until Monday? Why not right now? And how exactly are you going to talk to him face-to-face? He doesn’t even leave his house anymore.”

  Cal hesitated, and then decided now wasn’t the best time to tell Rachel about his afternoon chats with Roy Crampton. “Rachel, I’m going to get Jackson back one way or the other. I promise you that. This is completely the last straw with Roy Crampton, as far as I’m concerned. This is it. This is war.”

  That had been two days ago, and still no Jackson. Apart from posting “Missing Dog” signs all over the canal with the word “Reward” printed in huge boldface letters, so far Cal’s promise was turning out to be as empty as all the others.

  All Rachel could do was make it through the day until she could come home and sit in her rocking chair and cry and mourn her missing pup.

  But Rachel knew that she was also mourning her missing self—the one she’d left behind in L.A. Or maybe she’d left that version of herself behind long before they’d ever crossed the county line.

  Cal’s brother might make jokes about “Sports Star Ken and Barbie,” but growing up in the bland, freeway-ribboned suburbs of Los Angeles, Rachel had felt more like misfit-cousin Midge. She had always been the kind of girl who was pretty, but not beautiful; smart, but not brilliant; hard-working, but not ambitious. Almost, not quite, nearly, close but no cigar—all of her life, it seemed as if Rachel was destined to be the kid who came in second. Even her childhood dream of becoming a surgeon somewhere along the line got watered down to anesthesiologist—nothing to complain about, but not quite what she’d originally hoped for.

  And then Cal came along. Tall and blue-eyed with a charmingly casual tousle of light brown hair across his forehead, not only was Cal not a second-place kind of person, he was first place all the way—captain of the debate team and high school track star; honor student for all four years of ivy league college and then a six-figure job waiting before he’d even graduated.

  There was nothing “almost” about Cal Goodman. It wasn’t uncommon for Rachel and Cal to run into old friends or acquaintances who would perfectly remember Cal while only vaguely recalling Rachel, if at all—even when they’d been her friends first. Memorably handsome in contrast to Rachel’s bland prettiness, outgoing and charming compared to what an old boyfriend had once called her “icy reserve,” Cal’s glass was always effortlessly half-full while Rachel struggled not to spill her half-empty one.

  Together, though, their glass was filled all the way to the top. For a while, it had even overflowed. In that perfect sliver of time when they’d first gotten married, they read all of the right books and attended all of the right shows and exhibits. They had a diverse set of friends who also read all of the right books and attended all of the right shows and exhibits. Rachel’s closet had been filled with the most stylish clothes from the best boutiques. Every weekend was booked solid with poolside parties and café brunches, opening nights and glittering engagements. For the first time in her life, Rachel felt like she was the kind of person she’d always wanted to be, with the kind of life she’d always envied other people for having.

  And then one day the show closed down and left town without so much as a goodbye note.

  Maybe it had started with the way Cal would mess up little things, like writing down incomplete addresses so they’d end up halfway across town on east 9th Street instead of west, or the way Rachel would have to remind him a dozen times to take care of some piece of business, even important things like doctor’s appointments or getting the toilet fixed. Rachel already knew by now to leave Cal a detailed list of anything she wanted done, and if she really wanted it done promptly and correctly, to just do it herself.

  Even Cal’s brilliant coat-of-armor charm eventually began to lose its shine. At all of those weekend parties and coffee house dates, she began to predict with almost stomach-turning accuracy the point where Cal’s subtle flattery and slightly sarcastic but always edgy wit crossed over into obnoxious sycophant and snarky know-it-all. In public situations like conferences or meetings, every time Cal’s hand went up to make a comment or ask a question, Rachel would hold her breath and pray he wouldn’t say something purposefully provocative, mortifyingly absurd, or, when he was really on a roll, both at the same time.

  Cal’s glitter was gold, all right, but it didn’t take long for it to start wearing away. And so far, there seemed to be nothing underneath but flimsy plastic.

  By the time Cal started being passed over for promotions and raises, Rachel had already begun to suspect that it had less to do with Middle Eastern immigrants and more to do with Cal’s chronic incompetence. After four years of marriage, Rachel had to admit that her husband was incompetent—at least compared to the alpha dog she thought she’d married. After he’d settled into a job that required relatively little effort to stay afloat, Cal had decided that treading water was far preferable than pushing ahead. Rachel still shook her head at the memory of Cal telling her he wasn’t going to put in for a major new project because he didn’t want to “live at the office for the next six months.” Less than two yea
rs later, that particular problem, at least, had been solved—now his living room couch was his office.

  Or was it?

  Rachel suddenly stopped rocking. With the landslide certainty of a long-denied suspicion finally forcing its way into fact, she went downstairs, unplugged Cal’s laptop, and carried it back upstairs. She and Cal knew all of each other’s passwords in case of an emergency, but they also would never dream of invading each other’s privacy for anything less than an emergency.

  If a kidnapped dog doesn’t qualify as an emergency, then I don’t know what does, Rachel told herself, flipping open her husband’s computer without any further hesitation.

  She went to Cal’s browser and hit “Show All History.” Instead of the usual shopping, news, or porn sites she expected to find, the earliest entries were for legal sites featuring topics as innocuous as “Guidelines to Oregon’s Public Access Laws” to the far more sinister “Self-Defense and the U.S. Citizen—Know Your Rights.” Scrolling backward through Cal’s search history was like looking at a reverse record of his state of mind—the bizarre conspiracy theory forums and legal handbooks gave way to home improvement sites and do-it-yourself message boards with topics no more dangerous than the occasional out-of-control power tool. Further back, in an even more hopeful time, the search history revealed “Top Ten Tips for a Hassle-Free Move,” and “Best Middle Income Neighborhoods in the Pacific Northwest.” Rachel clicked on “Last 7 Days,” but Cal hadn’t run any recent searches.

  Before he’d decided to go Luddite and abandon his laptop, her husband had been a busy man. But one thing he hadn’t been busy with was a job—Rachel had turned up everything from how to lay concrete to what constitutes making a terrorist threat in Oregon, but one thing she hadn’t turned up was even one link connected with the “freelance programming” Cal claimed he’d been doing ever since being fired from the insurance company.