In a Dark Place: The Story of a True Haunting

by Ed

  Yesterday she thought she'd bought two six-packs of soda, even remembered putting them in the refrigerator. That evening, they were gone; none of the kids had drunk them, hadn't even seen them. She tried to find the receipt, knowing she'd bought them and wanting to prove it to herself, but she couldn't.

  She'd blamed it all on her preoccupation, told herself she'd just made a few absent-minded mistakes. But somehow, that just didn't work. So she buried it all by worrying about everything else.

  As Carmen lit another cigarette, a female caller on the radio said, "Well, my problem is, like, I'm not sure of myself, you know? I'm not sure who I am. Like, am I a wife? Am I a mother? Am I a daughter? And no one seems to understand the crisis I'm having, or the space that I need to work it all out."

  Carmen glanced at the radio and blew smoke as she chuckled coldly, "Get a life, lady." Then she went back to her magazine.

  At roughly the same time, Al could not sleep either. He sat up in his motel room drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette. The room was dark except for the flickering light from the television, which was playing silently. Al was watching the images on the screen without really seeing them. Instead, he was, like Carmen, lost in his thoughts...thoughts about his last visit home. He could not get it out of his mind. He'd been thinking about it on the job as well as off. Even going to the occasional movie in the evening failed to stop the constant replay of the memory.

  Oh, he had plenty of other things to worry about, there was no doubt about that. Stephen's illness, the gradual change in his personality, and Al wasn't sure he liked Stephen's friendship with that odd kid Jason, although he hadn't said as much to Carmen and was unaware that she sometimes felt the same way. And of course there was the matter of money; he would be getting less pay soon and they had to struggle enough as it was to make his current salary cover everything. But, in spite of all that, it was last weekend that weighed the heaviest on him.

  The first thing had happened on Friday night....

  He'd been awakened quite suddenly by the sound of movement and voices in the house. He lay in bed for a while, listening. The voices were muffled, the sounds of movement made up of bumps and scuffles. And there was music, terribly soft, almost inaudible, tinny and...old, like music from a bygone era playing on a gramophone, its scratchy warblings coming from a yawning horn above a cranked-up turntable. It didn't sound like something any of the kids would listen to, but still...

  He got out of bed, careful not to wake Carmen, and went down the hall in his undershorts. The sounds grew closer. He stopped and listened and realized they were coming from downstairs.

  Quiet voices, soft, mournful music—obviously there was a gathering of some sort taking place down there. Al suspected Jason was involved somehow; in fact, it was probably his idea to sneak a bunch of kids into the house from the beginning.

  But why were they listening to that music?

  Stepping carefully in the dark, he started down the stairs, but stopped halfway down.

  There was no light coming from down there, no light at all. It was as dark as the rest of the house. Al frowned, listened some more.

  He could still hear the voices and the music, still heard the sounds of feet moving over the floor. He took the remaining steps cautiously, although he wasn't quite sure why.

  In the bedroom below, he heard the boys' steady, sleepy breathing, and suddenly— Nothing else. There was only the breathing. And the darkness.

  The voices and music had stopped.

  Al opened one of the French doors and leaned into the next room.

  The empty darkness was silent, but cold. Al stepped all the way into the next room, squinting in disbelief. It was so cold in that room that he was pretty sure that if it weren't so dark, he'd be able to see his breath; it was like a meat locker. Concerned that a window might have been left open, he took a few more steps into the room, then stopped, realizing that, even if a window was open, it wasn't that cold outside.

  Then he suddenly realized that the cold was gone. The room had returned to a normal temperature, but Al's skin crawled with goose bumps anyway.

  He thought about it a moment, wondering how it could have happened, then decided he didn't want to know and backed out of the room.

  He listened again to the boys' breathing. Yes, they were asleep, there was no doubt about that; Stephen was even snoring quietly, but a genuine snore, not a silly one that a kid might fake at the last minute to keep from being caught awake by a parent.

  When he got back to bed, Al found Carmen awake. She asked him what was the matter and he told her to go back to sleep.

  Al, however, did not sleep. Instead, he lay in bed listening for the voices and music again. But he did not hear them.

  The following night, he was awakened again, this time by movement. His eyes snapped open wide and stared into the darkness as the bed vibrated.

  It didn't shake, it didn't jerk, it vibrated.

  Slowly, his eyes closed as he decided it was probably nothing more than the refrigerator coming on in the upstairs apartment. Carmen had mentioned to him that a family would be moving in upstairs. But his eyes snapped open again when he realized that they wouldn't be moving in for another week.

  The upstairs apartment was empty. There was no refrigerator up there.

  He stared at the ceiling as the bed continued to vibrate, its movement humming through him, oozing through his muscles and coiling around his bones.

  Al got up and went to the living room, turning on lights as he walked, his hands trembling. He watched television for a while, smoked, had a couple of beers, and then, warily, returned to the bedroom. He sat on the edge of the bed.

  The vibrating had stopped.

  Although he was exhausted from the sleepless night before, he was unable to doze off for a while. He lay there waiting for the vibrating to continue. It did not. Finally, Al slipped away and slept late into Sunday morning.

  Now he lay awake once again, staring at talking heads with no voices on the television, drinking a beer and filling the dark room with smoke.

  There was a good chance that he would not have given either incident much thought if it weren't for Stephen...if it weren't for the things Stephen had said he'd seen and heard...the things he'd said about the house...

  There was something else, too, something Al hadn't thought about in years. In fact, he thought he'd forgotten about it entirely, which would have been fine with him. It had happened years ago, when he was in the service. He'd seen something back then that had given him nightmares for the longest time. In fact, he still had one now and then. Until he'd seen...that thing...he'd laughed at the supernatural, and his laughter had been genuine. Since then, he's continued laughing, but nervously and without as much conviction as before. He'd told no one of what he'd seen back then, not even Carmen. He wasn't sure he ever would.

  But what had happened at home last weekend had brought it to mind, and had reminded him that he was no longer closed to the notion of things that go bump in the night.

  His transfer would go through soon and he would be able to move to Connecticut to stay with his family. He missed Carmen and the kids and was looking forward to being with them for more than just weekend visits.

  But Al wasn't at all sure he was looking forward to moving into that house.

  10

  Making a Deal

  Stephen knew his parents would not approve of the music he and Jason were listening to in Stephen's bedroom, but he realized that he didn't care. That had not always been the case. There was a time—very recently, in fact, although it seemed like ages ago—when their approval had meant something to him, and the mere knowledge of their disapproval would have been enough to make him think twice about lying there on his bed listening to Ozzy Osbourne's shrieking voice.

  But now Stephen found himself feeling a certain amount of resentment toward Carmen and Al, enough to make him careless of what they might think.

  Al's transfer had gone through and he'd been home f
or the better part of a week now, so there were two people around all the time who didn't believe him, who didn't even seem to trust him. He resented them for that disbelief, as well as for their eagerness to blame him for every little thing that went wrong in the house; they blamed him when the other kids got scared, and they blamed him whenever something in the house disappeared or was misplaced. He wondered what he'd be blamed for next.

  But he didn't care. If they didn't care about what he thought, he would no longer care about what they thought.

  "So, who would you rather sleep with," Jason said, "Madonna or Joan Jett?" He was lying on Michael's bed in the same position in which Stephen was lying on his own: face up, ankles crossed, hands locked behind his head with elbows jutting out at each side.

  The day was coming to an end outside and the fading light of early evening shone through the windows. In spite of that, every light in the room was on. Stephen did that everywhere he went in the house now; he didn't like to be in any room that was not well lit.

  "I don't know," Stephen said thoughtfully. "Which one's worth the most money?"

  "What difference does that make? They're both hot."

  "Yeah, but after I've had 'em, they'll be so grateful, they'll wanna shower me with expensive gifts and lotsa cash, so I want the one that's got the most." Concealed laughter was hidden in Stephen's voice.

  Jason tossed his head back and laughed, then said, "You're so fulla shit, your ears stink!" Then he laughed some more before adding, "Madonna's got bigger boobs."

  "Think so?"

  "Oh yeah, yeah, I know so. Show you." He sat up and leaned down to get a brown paper bag on the floor beside the bed. It was full of rock magazines he'd brought over with him that he and Stephen hadn't looked through yet. He dumped the bag on the bed and began searching through the stack for the one he wanted.

  Stephen liked Jason for a number of reasons, among them the fact that, unlike the only people he'd been able to hang around with back in Hurleyville, he was cool. Back home, being in all those damned special-education classes had kept him from being accepted by the popular kids at school; he'd ended up spending his time with the other boneheads in those classes while the kids he really wanted to be with had spent their time picking on him, laughing at him, and calling him names.

  Well, maybe Jason wasn't what they would consider cool, but he was a good friend to Stephen and he had lots of cool things, like all those rock magazines he bought every month, a great collection of tapes, a boom box to play them on and—or so he claimed—a bunch of pornography (although Stephen had seen very little of it because, understandably, Jason had to be careful about flashing it around). He liked some of the same music Stephen liked—pop music, mostly— but had introduced him to a lot of stuff Stephen hadn't listened to in the past...because he knew how much his parents disliked it.

  But what Stephen liked most was that Jason believed him when he talked about the things that had been happening. Not only did he believe Stephen, he accepted the stories to be true as nonchalantly as one might accept a newspaper headline to be true. He hadn't shown a flicker of doubt.

  "Yeah, yeah, here it is," Jason said, holding one of the magazines open—it was a back issue of Rock Scene—as he got up and went to Stephen's bed.

  Stephen sat up and looked at the picture Jason indicated: a shot of Joan Jett onstage at a concert wearing a very tiny black bikini.

  "See?" Jason said. "Great bod, but flat as a board."

  "Yeah, but how much money does she have?" Stephen said, and they both laughed, until—

  Jason's laughter stopped as if he'd choked on it.

  Stephen looked up to see Jason's eyes opening wider than seemed possible as they stared to Jason's right. His mouth opened and closed several times, but he made no sound, just dropped the magazine onto Stephen's lap as his face lost some of its color.

  Following the direction of Jason's eyes, Stephen's gaze fell on the French doors and on the old man who stood beyond them.

  Stephen kicked his legs and tumbled clumsily off the bed until he was on his feet, then spun around toward the French doors.

  Both boys stood frozen in place for a long moment, staring.

  The man's skin was white. It wasn't clown-white or sheet-white or even merely pale; it was the white of skin that had been drained of blood, of life, a sick, milky, splotchy white. The skin was wrinkled beyond the effects of old age, unnaturally wrinkled and flabby, as if nothing lay between it and the bones beneath. What was left of his white hair was stringy and hung in thin patches to varying lengths. He wore a dark suit that appeared old in both style and condition; it looked ragged and tattered, even dirty. The white hands that dangled from the sleeves were gnarled, and long thick nails curved downward over the fingertips.

  The old man did not move, just faced the boys. He would have been staring at them had there been anything besides empty, glassy white orbs in his eyesockets.

  Jason ran first, but Stephen wasn't far behind him. They quickened their pace as they rushed past the French doors, then thumped loudly up the stairs, leaving the music playing in the room behind them.

  They were halfway down the hall when Carmen stepped out of the dining room and snapped, "Why do you always have to run up those damned stairs! How many times have I told you—" She stopped when she got a good look at their faces and saw that they were gasping from fear rather than exertion.

  Stephen pointed back down the hall and said, "There was a-a...w-we saw a-a-a man..."

  "Oh God, Stephen, not again." For a moment, she sounded very weary, as if Stephen had told her she was going to have to take another in an exhausting series of long, uphill runs. Then she sounded angry. "Dammit, Stephen, this is getting really old, and I'm—"

  "No, we did!" Jason insisted. "There was an old man down there, just st-standing there and staring at us!"

  She just looked at them, from Stephen to Jason and back again, silent and stern. Then she said, "It's a good thing Al's not here, Stephen."

  "Where is he?"

  "At the grocery store. He's really getting sick of this business of you seeing people in your room. And so am I. You're liable to get your butt grounded if you keep—"

  "But it's not just me!" Stephen insisted, frustrated.

  "No, Mrs. Snedeker, it's not," Jason added. "I saw the guy, too. I saw the guy first!”

  Carmen's shoulders sagged as she let out a long sigh. "Okay, let's go." She led the way down the stairs.

  As the boys followed, Stephen muttered, "Here we go again. Nothing there...makin' it up...stop lying..." Then he looked at Jason and rolled his eyes.

  Carmen faced the boys at the foot of the stairs, unable to keep herself from wincing at the sounds coming from Jason's boom box on the nightstand between the beds. "Okay, where were you? What were you doing?"

  "We were on the beds," Stephen said.

  "And this, um...music was playing?"

  They nodded. "We were lookin' at rock magazines," Jason said.

  Carmen glanced distastefully at the magazine on the bed, open to a mostly naked, angry-looking woman. She pushed the magazine aside, and sat on Stephen's bed.

  "Okay," she said, "go upstairs. Go outside if you want, I don't care. Just go."

  Stephen asked, "What're you gonna—"

  "Just go." She sounded irritable enough for them to know better than to stick around asking questions.

  When they were gone, Carmen stared at the French doors.

  "Okay, Carm," she breathed, the words barely audible, "what the hell're you doin'?"

  Although it was difficult to think with the rancid sounds pounding out of the speakers behind her, she decided she was calling Stephen's bluff. She'd sit on that bed and watch and wait and see what she could see. The conditions were exactly the same as those under which the boys claimed to have seen this old man. She was giving herself a chance to see him, too, that was all.

  Her inner voice spoke up then, shattering her sense of self-satisfaction, of self-security.
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  Giving yourself a chance to see him? it whispered. Don't you mean you're giving it a chance to finally show itself? Don't you mean you're looking for whatever it is that's been moving things...taking things...talking to you in a familiar voice from an empty room? Of course that's what you're doing...whether you admit it or not....

  Carmen shook her head sharply, as if to rid it of the gnawing voice.

  She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, chin on her knuckles, and continued to stare at the French doors, waiting.

  The music was truly awful and, as she listened to the lyrics, she decided she'd have to have a word with Stephen about what music did and did not get played under this roof.

  As she waited, Carmen thought. No matter how she tried to hold her wandering thoughts in check, they went back to her inner voice, to the things that had been happening to her in the house...and for a moment, she thought she heard the sound of cautious movement from some other part of the basement.

  She sat up straight, her hands clutching together between her knees as she listened.

  Silence, except for the awful music.

  Then the song—if it could be called that—ended and, a moment later, another began.

  Was that more movement Carmen had heard in the brief silence? Was it moving closer? Or was it just—

  Your imagination? her inner voice muttered.

  She suddenly felt as if her skin were shriveling around her bones.

  The hair at the base of her skull bristled.

  Although Carmen tried to listen for the sounds she'd thought she'd heard deeper in the basement—she tried to listen hard— she could not bring herself to stay there a moment longer and bolted from the bed.

  Halfway up the stairs, she tried to slow her hurried pace and calm her rapid breathing. Once she was in the hall, she had returned to what she hoped was her normal appearance; although inside, she still felt icy, unsteady and afraid...but afraid of what?

  "Where've you been?" Al asked from the kitchen.

  His voice startled her. She hadn't heard him come in. She wasn't even sure how long she'd been down there and, as a result, had a silly, almost girlish feeling of guilt, as if she'd been caught doing something she shouldn't.