Dove wheeled on us and said, “Move your asses already!”
The three of us tore down the closest row of scrapped cars, shoes pelting the dirt, adrenalin redlined. This, I knew, was different than running from a schoolyard bully like Terry Vreeland. The worst Terry would ever do was put your arm in a chicken-wing or deliver a few skull-ringing rabbit punches. If the bearded stranger caught us, there was no telling what he’d do.
I’ll never forget the fear-fed momentum I felt running through that moonlit scrapyard. I swear my body expanded under my skin, an on-the-fly growth spurt born of sheer necessity, as if my pituitary gland had said, The kid needs it NOW!
Billy cut around the row at the yard’s edge. “Oh no.”
We’d run down the wrong path. The rip in the fence wasn’t there. Our bikes weren’t there. Somewhere in the depths of the yard there arose a glittering howl.
Billy flicked his head, instructing Dove and me to follow. We slunk over two rows, ducked like soldiers in a trench, skirted a stack of cars and crouched lower. It was hard to hear anything over the sound of my own tortured breathing. I willed myself to inhale deeply—deep but ooooh so quiet—to calm the drumming of my heart.
Billy poked his head around a bumper and scanned the fence. He ducked back and pointed up the row. Dove and I dogged his heels without making much noise on the gravel. I willed my footsteps to be light and as nimble as a fox, not to crunch the dead weeds or step on jags of metal.
The row emptied back into the central hub. We broke into a crouched run around Cube-A-Saurus Rex. My tongue felt coated in dust. We clustered, shoulder to shoulder, our eyes ticking over the yard….
The scrapyard lights thunked on. They were the same kind you find at the baseball diamond: sodium vapour lamps set atop metal stalks. Were they set on timers to switch on at dusk? If not, this meant the man must have found the control box and switched them on.
Squinting across the yard, I tried to find the row we’d come down, the row that led back to our bikes, to escape, but they all looked the same—
The man heaved into view fifty yards away. Except he didn’t look like a man at all now. He had become a Beast: an enraged half-burnt thing, the sort you’d see crawling out of a grave as maggots pitter-pattered from its eye sockets. Charred holes were smoked through its shirt and it moved with a twisted-ankle limp. A ragged ring of soot occupied the middle of its face and it was clutching a tire iron.
The feral eyes of the Beast locked with my own as it began to shamble towards us.
“Go!” Dove hissed.
We raced down one row and fled back up another. Through a gap in the cars I saw the Beast stomping down the row we’d vacated. When Billy made it to the head of the row, he did something that struck me as either daring or suicidal: he went back down the row the Beast had only just left, doubling back on our own footsteps. He hazarded a glance at his sister, nodded, then scrambled under the nearest car.
Dove grabbed my elbow so fiercely that she could have pulled it out of its joint, though at the time I barely felt a thing. She dragged me under a car on the opposite side of the row. We lay flat on our stomachs, staring across at Billy. My breath puffed up clouds of dust. Black dots popped before my eyes. I thought I’d faint—then I caught Dove staring at me with a flinty intensity that said: If you faint I won’t be able to help you, so don’t.
Gravel crunched under the Beast’s heels as it approached. I heard a grinding sound: the tire iron dragging over the dirt. The Beast’s boots entered my sightline. My body went rigid and my lungs locked up. The Beast inhaled as if it was smelling the air, trying to locate our scent. It spoke to itself, in a blistered rasp. “You sewered me. Now I’m gonna sewer you.”
It snarled, bashing the tire iron against the car we lay under. My heart seized as flakes of rust rained down.
“Nobody’s here,” the Beast muttered to itself. “Do it. You’ll like it. Do it. It’s easy. Do it and hop the next freight out of town…go for it. Do it.”
The Beast continued down the row. I heard it break into a trot, then a run, then the scrape of its boots blended with the other furtive sounds of night.
We waited, flattened to the ground. At last, Dove wiggled out from under the car. She crept forward on her toes and fingertips, hunched in the middle of the row, scanned both ways and waved us out. Billy joined her, but I couldn’t. My fingers clawed into the dirt and my limbs were paralyzed.
The Yellowbirds looked at me beseechingly. Billy held his hand out and mouthed, “Please, Jake.” Taking his hand, I was able to squirm out. We crept down the row to the yard’s edge, where I spied the rip in the fence. Had I ever seen a more beautiful sight than our bikes canted carelessly against those rail ties? We slipped through the rip, hopped on our bikes and fled, standing high in the saddle as our legs churned the pedals, not daring to sit down until we’d reached the outer suburbs.
We reached my street slicked in sweat. I couldn’t shake the possibility that the Beast had followed us. I pictured it lumbering out of the shadows, past the street lamps, its tire iron kicking up sparks on the pavement.
“Come to my house?” I asked the Yellowbirds. “My dad can drive you home.”
“Nah,” Dove said with a casual wave of her hand.
I parked my bike in the garage and snuck past Mom and Dad, who were watching St. Elsewhere. I slipped upstairs and collapsed into bed. Then I got up and made sure the window was locked. I stunk of sweat and fireworks. I peeled off my shirt, wadded it up and swabbed my armpits before burying it at the bottom of the clothes hamper.
I never told my parents what happened that night. Now I wonder: How often must that occur? A boy comes within an ace of death or disappearance, then returns home and goes to sleep and his parents never suspect a thing.
I closed my eyes and thought about how serene the Yellowbirds had been. Then I thought of how their mother walked with that limp, which forced me to consider the fact that their father wasn’t in the picture. Dove and Billy had never brought him up, not once.
A thought flashed through my mind. Could their father have been the one who’d given their mother that limp? Had there been nights when he’d thundered through the house like a storm, raining down blows on his wife and children? Nights when only Billy and Dove’s wits and resilience had prevented him from laying lifelong marks upon their bodies? Was that what had instilled in them the calm I’d seen in the scrapyard?
In fact, I now know this to be true, at least partially. Years later, I would talk with Billy in the dorm room we shared as freshmen, and he would tell me that yes, his father had been a monster, but that it was his father’s father, Billy’s grandfather on his father’s side, who had clouted his mother with a length of stove wood and crushed her kneecap. The only way Billy’s mother could ensure the poison didn’t leach into her own children’s lives was to get away….Billy had sat on his dorm-room cot with his “I Want to Believe” poster tacked to the wall and told me all this without flinching, his voice calm and measured, though his hands were shaking just a bit.
As a boy, when I’d looked at the houses down my block, and all over Cataract City, I’d believed that the lives unfurling behind those doors were much the same as my own. Every boy and girl had good parents like my parents. Every child went to bed with a full belly, in a warm bed, knowing they were loved. That was the life every child was supposed to have, wasn’t it?
I slipped into sleep thinking about Mrs. Yellowbird’s limp, which I decided she must have earned confronting a ticked-off wolverine back in Slave Lake. She’d fought that threat, sacrificing herself to protect her children.
As this was the most comforting possibility, my young mind embraced it as fact.
ii.
The second-to-last meeting of the Saturday Night Ghost Club—and, as it turned out, the last one Billy would attend—found us standing inside the whistling black skeleton of a house that had burnt to cinders before I was born. The usual suspects were present: Uncle C, Billy, myself and, som
ewhat reluctantly, Lexington Galbraith.
My uncle had proposed the foray a few days prior at So Beta! Billy and I had been browsing the empty aisles—Billy had his eyes on a copy of Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker—while Lex ate jujubes behind the counter, all except the red ones. It was around then that a woman stalked into the shop.
“Where is she?”
Lex feigned nonchalance. “Where is who, Jan, my dear?”
I peeked over the rack with fresh interest. This must be Janet Templeton, Lex’s ex.
“You damn well know who. Becca. I thought she’d run away!”
“How can you be sure she hasn’t?” Lex wanted to know.
“Because your next-door neighbour Edna Simms told me she’d seen Becca on your landing. Of all the sneak-thieving, low, skunky-ass things to do—”
“Hold on a sec, pump your brakes.” Lex balanced an elbow on the counter, index finger pointing at Janet. “Who’s the one who stole her in the first place?”
Janet slapped Lex’s finger away. “When I left, you said I could take anything I wanted.”
“I meant anything inanimate. Books. Cassette tapes. Not my only source of joy in this godforsaken world.”
“How’d you get her?”
Lex’s eyes flicked to us.
“For God’s sake, Lexington. Isn’t there something better you could be doing with your life besides coercing boys into kidnapping cats?”
“He didn’t coerce us,” Billy said. “He paid us.”
Before Janet could react to this fresh outrage, Lex said, “Everybody could be doing something better with their lives, Jan. Name me one person who is doing the best, most righteous thing with their life right this very minute.”
Janet uttered an inarticulate sound of disgust and stalked back out of the shop, pausing only to kick over a life-size cutout of Han Solo as she went.
Upon her departure, Lex turned wistful. “That’s one hell of a lady walking out that door.”
Moments later Uncle C breezed in. I hadn’t seen him much during the dog days, as his shop had been closed whenever I dropped by. I would peer through the glass window into the murky innards of the Occultorium, and sometimes, through lifting motes of dust, I thought I spotted something hovering by the counter. A pair of wet glimmers watching me out on the sunlit safety of the street.
“I’ve picked the spot for our next expedition, boys,” my uncle announced.
I’d never heard of the place Uncle C described to us. But had I been watching Lex, I would have wondered about the apprehension that flitted across his face.
Lex. My uncle’s oldest friend. After it was all over, I would wonder why he hadn’t said anything. Why didn’t he tell my mother: Cecilia, I’m worried it’s starting again? It was only much later that I understood. Unable to stop the momentum, Lex treated what was happening as an unavoidable collision: if he steered into the crash with Calvin, maybe they would both be flung harmlessly aside. And if things were predestined for ruin, well, at least my uncle would hit terminal velocity with an old friend at his side. Lex was wrong in almost all of this, but I could sympathize: my job has shown me that is what people do when those they care for are suffering.
The following Saturday evening I rode my bike to the Yellowbird home.
It was just past seven o’clock but the sky was shading a melancholy blue, as it did towards the end of the summer. The Mister Turtle pool sat at the curb with some sacks of trash. It made me think of Dove, whom I hadn’t seen since that night at the junkyard.
Billy waited in his yard. We rode down Whirlpool Road past the strip clubs striped in garish neon and the no-tell motels advertising hourly rates, turning down a corduroy road edging the Niagara Parks golf course. The corduroy road devolved into a trail skirting the hydroelectric reservoir. Wind scalloped the water, bringing with it the ozone tang of electricity. The station’s twin Tesla coils spiked skyward against the horizon. Blue sparks zipped between them, the sound of the electrical discharge riding the twilight to my ears: zzzzwip! zzzzwip!
“Philadelphia Experiment, man,” Billy said with a nod at the Teslas.
Soon, an incinerated house came into view at the crest of a wind-scrubbed hill, just as Uncle C had described. All that was left of it were support beams partially burnt in the blaze, which poked towards the sky like tusks. We pedalled up lazy switchbacks to reach the crest of the hill. The reservoir was to the west, the Niagara River’s limestone basin to the east, the spume from the falls visible amidst the eighty-dollar-a-night hotels to the south.
Lex’s van appeared around a pine-shielded bend and rumbled up a weedy strip that, at some long-ago time, must have been a driveway. He hopped out and asked, “Your uncle here?”
No sooner had Lex said this than Uncle C appeared at the base of the hill. He stopped, striking a pensive pose in the pooling shadows. I saw him rub his forehead but he was too distant, the light too pallid, to make out his face.
When Uncle C reached us, he gave Lex a wan smile. “Ready for some ghost hunting?”
He mounted the heat-cracked steps to what had once been the front door. I could see that it had been a small home, probably perfect for a young family. The fire had consumed most of the timber and blackened the brickwork. Situated on the hill with no shelter from the wind and no hydrants for firefighters to tap, it had likely burnt fast. There was no smell of smoke anymore. No smell at all. Only a haunting sterility that made me think of how a moon rock might smell—dusty and lunar. Even dead things here on Earth have a smell: the putrid scent of their own decomposition. But this place—the inner sanctum of the old house, which we now entered—had a non-smell, something that registered to the nose the same way TV static registers to our eyes. I’d never thought that an absence of smell could be dreadful, but now I realized that yes, it could—when your senses encounter that kind of strangeness, something deep in your lizard brain pings a warning.
Danger, Will Robinson—!
“Keep your feet on the supports,” my uncle cautioned. “Just picture walking on a balance beam.”
We followed him across what may once have been a front room or kitchen. The beam made carbon-like fracturing noises under my high-tops.
“Cal, don’t you think we ought to—”
“It’s fine, Lex,” my uncle tutted. “There’s enough solid wood to support us.”
We walked to the other side of the house, steering around what were once the basement steps, now only a steep drop into the shadows. My uncle sat on the foundation wall with his stork-like legs dangling into the weeds.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Everything I know is third-hand, fourth-hand,” Uncle C admitted. “Forgive me, but…it happened a long time ago. A man and a woman lived here. A young couple, just married, very much in love. The man bought this whole hillside, annexed from the city, and had this house built. He figured a house way up on the hill, overlooking the water, far from the hurly-burly…solitude. A good place to raise a child, which was something both he and his wife must have sought.”
A howl kicked up from the woods, a lonely note that ascended through several octaves before joining the low purr of the wind. My uncle had once warned me that a pack of wolves roamed outside the city limits, seven or eight timber wolves who feasted on stray dogs and cats and the deer who made their home on the escarpment. It’s the strangest thing, he’d told me. You will only hear them howling on nights when the moon is full. Must be a coincidence, hmm?
“It happened at night,” Uncle C continued. “A night like this or any other, except in winter. The couple had recently moved in. There were stacks of boxes everywhere, breakables wrapped in newspaper. The edge of night moved in, dropping fast as it does in winter. Out of that frigid darkness, men came. No one knows who they were, or where they came from. Drifters or criminals or just men who’d come together over a mutual joy in terrorizing the weaker of our species. They must have spied the house atop the hill and known, instinctively, that this was where to go.”
>
Uncle C drew in a breath, as if to orient himself on some detail buried within the folds of his memory.
Gently, Lex said, “We’re right here with you, Cal. Isn’t that right, boys?”
My uncle smiled gratefully. “One man knocked on the door. The smallest of them, the rattiest and least threatening probably. He’d got lost in the woods, he claimed. The couple were deceived by his wretchedness and invited him in, never imagining…it’s like with vampires, boys. Once you invite them over the threshold, you’re theirs. The rat-faced man didn’t even take his boots off. He walked into the kitchen tracking mud over the floor and basked in the heat from the wood stove. After looking this way and that to make sure nobody else was at home, he took a knife off the cutting board—the woman had been cutting potatoes for dinner—and sawed through the phone cord. It was then, I’m sure, that the couple got an inkling of the hell they’d invited into their home. Rat-face slunk to the sink and softly, with just the tip of the knife, tapped on the window. Tap, tap, tap, tap—little pig, little pig, let me in…
“The fact, boys, is that ninety-nine percent of violent encounters are decided within the first moments. You have a few precious seconds to understand the threat and make a choice. Your attackers leverage that indecision against you. You believe that maybe, if you do as they say, they might just…go away. People think home invasions happen in other places, to other unlucky people, not us—even while these events are unfolding.
“Some other men came in. They filed into the kitchen one after the other, their bodies unkinking from the cold. Can you imagine it? You open your front door and invite death inside.”
My uncle’s description was so matter-of-fact I couldn’t help but see it vividly. The house locked in a wintry isolation. The vantage in my mind’s eye was omniscient, hovering someplace over the reservoir. Squares of light burnt in the windows—and fleetingly, frighteningly, I saw movement. Dark shapes gliding behind the glass.
The Saturday Night Ghost Club: A Novel Page 12
