by Ronald Malfi
Still clutching the plastic forks (they were now leaving impressions in the palm of her hand), Kelly advanced toward the closet. Mouse was a bit older than she, and sometimes the girl would take pleasure in frightening Kelly, or would surprise her with wacky dances and outlandish acrobatics. In fact, it was this sense of character that had initiated Kelly’s openness: Mouse, whose real name was Jennifer Sote, had become her only friend at the institution.
Kelly stopped just outside the closet. Squinting, she tried to see inside.
Two dead girls, she thought. Two dead girls and now it’s probably haunted in there. Two dead girls and now it’s probably full of ghosts.
“Mouse?” Her voice shook.
“Kellerella,” Mouse said from inside the closet. Her voice sounded sour, gritty with sleep.
“What are you doing in there?”
“This is where the dead girls go,” Mouse said.
“You’re not dead.”
“Just tired.”
“I’ve been looking for you.”
“No you haven’t,” Mouse said. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Something occurred to Kelly then: “I’m dreaming.”
“Do you remember him?”
Again, Kelly felt her skin break out in gooseflesh. Jarred by a clacking sound, she looked down and realized she’d dropped the forks. Some had even spilled across her bare feet.
“Come in here,” Mouse said.
“Can’t,” she whispered back. “Scared.”
“It’s just me, Kellerella.”
“Stop saying that.”
The door creaked open wider. A strip of light caught motion from inside. Kelly saw white skin and a tattered nightdress the color of bad teeth.
“Come on.”
“I’m scared,” Kelly said again. She’d taken a step away from the closet.
“You weren’t scared before.” Again, some movement within the closet—something brushing up against something else. Then, with sudden understanding, Mouse added: “You’ve forgotten, haven’t you, dear? I should have known that.”
“What?”
“We’ve been in here before, you and I. Together. One time. Do you remember?”
And it was as if those words carried Kelly back to that night—the creaking stairwell, Mouse’s slender shadow moving against the corridor, the hushed disturbance of their breathing. The sound of their bare feet patting against the floor was like a muted ovation. The closet was closed that night and it had been Mouse who’d opened it. It opened without a sound, Kelly remembered. And why had they gone to the closet in the first place?
“It was the only place you felt safe,” Mouse said suddenly, bringing her back. “It was your idea. It was the only place you felt safe telling me about him.”
A shudder wracked her body and she suddenly felt the need to urinate. “God,” she croaked, pushing herself back against the wall.
“Do you remember?”
“I can’t remember anything,” she sobbed.
“This is all half-real, Kellerella,” whispered Mouse. Another shuffling footstep inside the closet.
Kelly’s body tightened. “Who else is in there with you?” Her voice fell like icy darkness pushing up through her throat. “You’re not alone in there. Who is it?”
A muffled giggle. The sound of heavy breathing.
“Mouse!” Kelly screamed and sprung forward. With both hands she grasped the door and swung it open with such force that it slammed against the wall and nearly rebounded closed.
Mouse was not inside the closet. The two girls Kelly saw were naked and emaciated, their skin blue and hairless, their eyes bulged to reptilian exaggeration. The two dead girls, Kelly thought instantly—but no, they weren’t dead, they were alive, were moving…
One of the girls bolted into a sitting position as if her body were on a spring. When she opened her mouth, Kelly saw her teeth and gums were black.
“Kellerella,” croaked the dead girl.
Kelly screamed.
Her fever broke two days later and she awoke hungry and dehydrated. Glenda stood above her bed, smiling down at her.
“There, darling,” Glenda said. “You’re back with us now.”
“I don’t feel well.”
“You’ve had a fever. What in the world possessed you to go outside in such weather?”
“Outside?” She hardly remembered. “What happened?”
“Mr. Kildare found you halfway down the embankment on the side of the house. It is a good thing. Lord knows how long you’d been out there.”
She remembered going outside, remembered seeing something in the woods…
“I’m thirsty,” she groaned.
“Here.” Glenda poured a glass of water from a pitcher resting on the night table and handed it to Kelly, who drank it in three large swallows. “Bad dreams?”
“Just strange. Why?”
“Talking in your sleep.” Glenda smiled. “You used to do that often as a child.”
“The amazing Kelly Kellow.” Surprised at how easy the name slipped from her mouth, she just shook her head and set the empty glass back on the night table. She suddenly felt overcome with weakness. “Becky?”
Glenda sighed. “The doctors are still coming around. I’m afraid there has been no change in her condition. Poor dear.”
“I’m worried about her.”
“We all are.”
“Sure,” she said, recalling the way her parents stood idly by during each visit from Becky’s doctor.
Glenda slipped around the side of the bed and produced what appeared to be a large leather folder with brass buckles. “Your suitor has been worried about you as well, Sleeping Beauty.”
“Gabriel?”
“Such a nice boy.” Glenda placed the folder on Kelly’s lap. Scrambling to sit up, Kelly leaned against the headboard and unbuckled the brass clasps at the bottom of the folder. “He’s certainly had you on the brain, I’d say.”
“What is this?” Opening the folder, Kelly withdrew a series of watercolor paintings done on thick leaves of cardboard. It was evident that they’d been recently painted—some of the paint had even smeared after being slid inside the leather folder—and it was also evident that the artist had taken great care in their creation. They were done beautifully: forested landscapes, a bridge over a tiny river, a quaint little town square…
“Glenda, will you look at this…?”
It was a portrait of Kelly.
“That’s you, dear,” Glenda said, amused. “Well, now—what do you think about that? Something special.”
“I…yes, I think so. Jesus.”
“Isn’t that just something?”
“When did he come by?”
“This morning. You were sound asleep.”
“Do you think you could get me his number? I’d like to see him.”
“Yes-yes-yes,” Glenda said. “What a nice boy. But be sure you feel better first.”
“I’m all right,” Kelly said, pulling herself from bed. The room tilted briefly to one side before righting itself again. “Thank you, Glenda. I mean it.”
Glenda paused by the bedroom door, warmed by Kelly’s appreciation. “Darling,” she said, and disappeared.
Downstairs, her mother was locked away in her sewing room while her father sat motionless in what had once been his purple hunting room. He caught her from the corner of his eye slipping past the doorway and called to her.
“Kelly…”
“Daddy,” she said.
“How do you feel?”
“I’m okay.”
“It’s a good thing Jeffrey found you when he did.”
“Yes,” she said, wondering what Kildare had been doing out there in the first place. “Is he around? I’d like to thank him.”
“Oh, I guess he’s around somewhere.”
She took a step further into the room and shivered. The curtains were drawn across the immense windows and only a tiny desk lamp at the rear of the room was turned o
n, providing little light. Her father rested in a large cushioned chair in a buttoned shirt and black slacks, his large feet bare. He looked at her with only the most docile observation, as if casually staring out a window and across a field bustling with wildflowers.
“You should open the curtains, get some light in here,” was all she could think to say.
A phantom smile passed through his lips and he looked away from her, hardly waving the fingers of his right hand. “I think…” he began, then paused. “I think your sister’s getting better.”
“Oh?”
“She looks healthier, don’t you think? Her skin color is good.”
“Dad…”
“I hope this doesn’t go on too much longer. She is a good girl, Becky. She’s terribly quiet some—”
“Why were you crying that day?” she said suddenly. It was stupid—there was no way he could remember—yet she continued. “When I was just a little girl. Do you remember? I saw you at the bottom of the stairwell and you were bent over and crying. I can’t remember…I think I went to you and I think you turned away…” The words flooded out of her before she could stop them, or even consider exactly what she was saying. And the words returned the image to her again—her father, crumpled in a heap at the foot of a darkened stairwell.
Her father’s eyes slowly rose to meet hers. They were sloppy and red in their sockets, as if he’d been drinking. Stark and shallow, his eyes were incapable of emotion, empty of passion. Incapable, also, of comprehension, Kelly saw.
“You remember, don’t you?” she persisted, now against her own will. She didn’t want to talk to this man, nor did she want to rekindle any memories he may have doused so long ago.
“You shouldn’t be angry at things,” he said. “You’re still sick.”
“I’m not sick. And I’m not angry. I’m just trying to figure some things out for myself. It’s important to me.”
“Yes.” Her father nodded once then turned to look at the bank of drawn windows. “I don’t think that happened. All that crying you say.”
“I remember it.”
“No,” he said, “I don’t think it did. Strange, though.”
“Dad.”
“It is.” He turned again to face her. “I love you, Kelly. Did you know that?”
She suddenly wanted to collapse to the floor, sobbing. Instead, she closed her eyes briefly and frowned.
Behind her eyelids, the world was spinning on its side.
It was a twenty-five minute walk from the compound to the foot of the hill on which the house rested. Bundled against the cold, Kelly covered the distance by herself, desperate to get away from the house for a while. It was late afternoon and the sky was the color of iron, with thick storm clouds still looming over the horizon. As the wooded hillside gradually flattened out and congregated with the valley and the adjoining town road below, the snow tapered off. The dirt road had been cleared, although she couldn’t imagine too many vehicles occupying it, and the entire valley smelled strongly of cedar and musk. Some distance ahead she could make out the steeple of the town church and some of the taller buildings just beyond a veil of snow-covered trees.
Hands in the pockets of her coat, head down, she walked the circumference of the hillside in quiet deliberation. Several yards off the side of the town road rested the jumble of small hut-like shacks which she recalled seeing the night she’d been driven up the hillside. Too small and depreciated for anyone to actually live in, they looked like a manic depressive’s idea of a gingerbread house. There were maybe a half-dozen shacks spread out along the stretch of road, most of them windowless, their roofs in the process of collapse. A handful of young children played at the foot of the road, bundled in their winter clothes, and Kelly assumed the neighborhood kids had fashioned these little shacks into rather sufficient clubhouses.
She smiled at the children as she passed by. There were five of them, each packaged to the neck in stiff winter clothing. As she passed they turned their heads to watch her go—five cherubic snowmen with rose-red cheeks.
“Buy some lemonade?” one of the children said. He held up a pitcher with one mitten-clad hand.
“Lemonade?”
“One dollar,” chimed a second boy.
“I have no money,” she said, pausing at the side of the road. “And isn’t it a little cold to be selling lemonade?”
“We make it hot,” said the first boy. One of his friends snickered. “We heat it up.”
“We got lighters,” said a third.
She half-frowned, half-smiled. “Do any of you kids know Becky Kellow?”
They shook their heads.
She pointed to the row of shacks. “Whose houses are these?”
The children appeared to consult one another. One of them had a rubber ball on an elastic string and was bouncing it in the road.
One of the younger-looking boys said, “The skeleton-man lives in one.”
“Skeleton-man, huh?”
“I seen him.”
“He has, lady,” said one of his friends.
“Who’s the skeleton-man?”
Again, the five boys huddled together in consultation. And again, the younger-looking boy poked his head up. “We don’t want to talk about the skeleton-man,” he said.
“You’ve seen him?”
“Jessie Halloran at school saw him. Said he walks around with no skin on and lives in one of those houses. We play there but not at night. At night is when the skeleton-man comes home.”
“Oh,” she said. “Where’d they come from, these houses?”
“We made them,” said the youngest boy. “We made them with wood that we bought and we even hammered some of them together.”
“Is that so? How come?”
The boy shrugged. He turned his head and looked at his friend, perhaps in hopes of acquiring an answer.
“Dumb, stupid houses,” said the boy.
“He’ll getcha, lady.”
“Give us a dollar for some lemonade?” one of the boys asked again.
“Sorry, I have no money with me.”
“It’s good. It’s hot. It’ll warm you. Good.”
“Maybe I’ll come back later.”
“Sure,” the boy said, but she knew he didn’t believe her.
During lunch with Gabriel at a small café in town, Kelly said, “Do you remember anything strange about growing up here?”
Gabriel just shook his head. “What do you mean?”
“Anything at all bizarre.”
“I don’t know.” He grinned. He was very handsome. Kelly suddenly considered what it would be like to run her hands through his hair, to graze his lips with the tips of her fingers. She’d loved him as a child—loved him in that pure, unquestioning way children are capable of loving other human beings. Had he ever loved her? She thought maybe he had.
“Oh,” he said, “Reverend Taylor from the Lutheran church was arrested for selling narcotics to some of the altar boys. You remember that? That was a pretty big thing back then. My father knew him. I remember when the police came and arrested him. I remember he started crying and it scared me.”
Indifferently, she stabbed at her salad. “What about me?” she said then. “Do you remember anything strange about me?”
Gabriel suddenly looked concerned. “What is it, Kelly? Something’s bothering you. Tell me what it is.”
“I don’t know. It just feels like this whole place is pushing down on me, trying to crush me under its weight.” She shook her head. “Or maybe not. Maybe it’s not this place at all and I’m just going crazy. I felt like this for a while back in the city, too.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. I wish I did. I wish something made sense to me right now but nothing does. I’m scared to death for my sister, yet I feel like I’m the one falling apart. I don’t know what it is.”
“This sounds serious.” He looked genuinely concerned.
“God,” she said, not looking up from her plate. “
What about those three hunters?”
“Who?”
“Some detective was at the house, said something about three hunters that disappeared in the woods here last month. Do you know anything about that?”
He dropped his head. “Yes,” he said, “I confess, I killed them, I forced them into the wilderness and fed them nothing but each other’s buttocks—”
She grinned. He suddenly reminds me of Josh, she thought…then quickly chased the thought away.
“I heard about the hunters,” he said, “but I know nothing about them. And what does that have to do with you, anyway?”
“I don’t know. Nothing, really.”
“So what is it? Nerves?”
“I guess so.”
“Well…promise to let me in once you figure out what’s going on, all right?”
She smiled. “Promise.”
“All right. Hey—you want to know a secret?”
“Hmmm?”
He winked. “I think your housekeeper’s cheering for us.”
“She thinks I’m lonely,” Kelly said.
“Well,” Gabriel said, “is she right?”
“And she thinks you’re a godsend.”
“Well then,” he said, “she must be right.”
“Eat your salad,” she told him.
That night, she awoke to a noise. Covered in sweat and breathing heavy, she sat up stiffly in bed—and caught movement in the dark, at the opposite end of the room.
Someone stepped out of her bedroom, closing the door behind them.
“Who’s there?”
She pulled back the blankets and swung her legs to the floor. When she stood, her world seemed to cant to one side, as if in an attempt to shake her off balance. She thought she could hear footsteps creaking down the hallway outside her bedroom. She moved quickly to the door and pulled it open—
—and saw Becky’s bedroom door close at the other end of the hall.
The hallway was dark, but Becky’s bedroom door was awash in the white-blue moonlight issuing from the bank of windows that made up the opposite wall. Beyond that, the hallway was a confusing channel of closed doors and, at the end, a pit of black winding stairs.
There was a light on in Becky’s room. Kelly caught movement from inside through the crack at the bottom of her sister’s bedroom door.
