Child's Play

by Andrew Neiderman

  When they came down for dinner, they were as clean and neat as they were at the start of a day. What was more amazing though, as far as Sharon was concerned, was their renewed energy. They were vibrant and alive. There no longer was any sign of their fatigue. They talked excitedly, ate with ravenous appetites—which pleased Sharon and made her work even harder on the meals—and went at their schoolwork with just as much eagerness as they had before Alex had devised all the physical labor. Of course, Alex claimed all this proved Pa’s point: good, honest work was necessary.

  She couldn’t deny it; there was very little she could deny now. Things were going like clockwork. Alex had put up a bulletin board in the entranceway, and the children were told to pin up their good school papers as soon as they entered the house. The board was covered with A-papers and hundreds and nineties. Little Donald had won a handwriting contest in his class and was given a medal with a blue ribbon. It was pinned to the center of the bulletin board.

  One bright, sunny afternoon after they had been working on the Manor for a while, she stepped out of the house and walked down over the rebuilt front step and new cement patio. The air was warm and the leaves of the trees had turned a rich green. The lawn smelled fresh and full, having been trimmed only that morning. Alex and the children were down at the lake having some well-deserved recreation: a rowboat race. Dinky was sitting at the bow of Richard’s boat looking like the coxswain. The children had adopted the dog and he had adopted them, but she didn’t mind losing her pet’s attention. The cats were still indifferent to everyone equally, and she thought it would have been very selfish of her and an illustration of petty jealousy to complain about Dinky’s spending so much more time with the children than he did with her.

  She watched them rowing across the lake, their shouts and laughter echoing through the small valley. It was truly a wonderful sight. Then she turned and looked up at the house, at the freshly painted and refastened shutters, at the whitewashed moldings and the cleaned windows, at the neatly trimmed hedges and the immaculate grounds around them, and she thought, I’ve been wrong about everything. Alex is a wonderful person and he has done wonderful things with these children. She chastised herself for all of her earlier fears and jealousies. She took a deep breath of the air in her new world and she felt more alive than she had for years.

  That night, they had just finished supper and were preparing for the cleanup when Richard asked a question that caught Sharon’s attention.

  “Will we go there before or after our homework?”

  “After, Richard,” Alex said.

  “Go where?” she asked. She had gotten up and brought the butter to the refrigerator. The children turned to her as though they just realized she was in the kitchen, too. Then they looked to Alex. Sharon smiled. “Where are you taking them, Alex?”

  “We’re not going far,” he said. She waited for him to go on, but he didn’t.

  “To town?”

  “No.”

  “Well, is it such a secret?” Her smile widened and she looked from one child to the other. Each looked down. “Is it?”

  “No, it isn’t,” he said, pronouncing his “t’s” sharply. “I’m going to show them Pa’s secret room,” he added.

  The butter dish slipped from her fingers and clattered to the floor. Miraculously, it didn’t break. But from the way Sharon stared at it, it might as well have shattered.

  The Echo Lake Manor, like so many of the tourist houses in that part of the Catskill resort area, had originated as a much smaller farmhouse. Farming had been difficult at best. The ground was rocky; the growing season short and unpredictable. For the immigrants who had come to America at the turn of the century and made their way up to the Catskills—either on their own or as part of a relocation program instituted by the Jewish Agricultural Society working out of the New York City ghettos—the livelihood was meager, survival unpredictable. With the expansion of the railroad, tourism began to flourish, and it was only natural that the struggling farm families would take in guests. Soon they had expanded their housing and created larger and more accommodating tourist houses. Some even became hotels and big resorts.

  The room that Alex had come to call “Pa’s secret room” was located in the basement of what was barely discernible of the original portion of the Manor. The rest of the structure had been built up around it, swallowing the past in a gulp of construction. The oldest portion, located in the rear of the Manor, still had the original fieldstone basement walls. The room’s main purpose had been the storage of foodstuffs, the canned fruits and vegetables. No floor had ever been built; it still consisted of hard-packed dirt and stone. There was no electricity in the old basement, either. The lighting had come from kerosene lamps. There had been two windows on the west end, but they were boarded up by the walls of the newer additions.

  The room could never be reached from inside the house. One had to walk around back and enter through the plank door, which now hung on rusted hinges. The wood had long since lost its color and turned a pale grey. Just inside the door were three stone steps leading into the old basement. A kerosene lantern was hung just above the top step so that anyone entering could light his way immediately.

  The children had seen the door and had asked Alex about it, but he would only tell them that it wasn’t time yet for them to know about that room. The door had no lock on it, but none of them would violate Alex’s prohibition. Now that they learned it had a special meaning for Alex, they were even more intrigued. They had all worked hard and fast on their homework, knowing a trip to the room and the story about it was their immediate reward.

  Alex was reading in the living room when the four of them appeared. Sharon, claiming a splitting headache, had gone up to their bedroom. It was quiet in the house. Alex had not put on any of his music. The silence seemed to be more appropriate as a prologue for what he was about to do.

  He looked up from his reading with some surprise when the children stepped into the living room doorway. The door framed them in a picture that pleased him. Little Donald was to Richard’s left and Richard had his arm around his shoulders. Elizabeth and Carl were to his right, but very close to each other. Their unity was strong. What’s more, they had come down the stairway so softly he had not heard them approaching. That brought a smile to his face. How quickly they had learned the power of silence.

  “We’re ready, Alex,” Richard said.

  “No one rushed his work and did it poorly?”

  “I helped Donald,” Elizabeth said.

  “And Richard helped me with my math,” Carl said. Alex nodded.

  “All right, then. Let’s go.” He got up, put the book down on the small wooden table to his right, and looked upward as though he could see through the ceiling and observe Sharon. Richard anticipated his thoughts.

  “I think she went to sleep,” he said. “The lights are out and there’s not a sound in the room.”

  “Good,” Alex said. “Sharon means well, but sometimes she doesn’t understand.” He started out of the room. The children didn’t follow him until he reached the front door. He opened it and they walked out into the darkness with him.

  The night sky was unusually clear; the half-moon brighter than ever. Alex paused at the top of the porch steps and gazed up. He breathed in deeply, as though he could smell the stars. The children looked up, too. The moonlight cast a magical glow over the walkway and the grounds of the Manor. They could see part of the lake and see how the moon turned the surface of the water into a shimmering layer of glass.

  “The nights were often like this,” Alex said, “when Pa took me to his secret room. You could almost feel how special it was…how special it is.”

  “I feel it,” Elizabeth said. She didn’t mean to whisper, but Alex’s voice was so low.

  “Me too,” Richard said.

  “Yeah,” Carl said.

  “I like all the stars,” Donald said.

  “Come,” Alex said without looking back at them. He descended the
steps and walked slowly toward the left side of the house. The children followed close behind, little Donald now holding tightly to Elizabeth’s hand. Alex paused only once before he turned the corner. He looked up at his and Sharon’s bedroom window. The children looked too, but they saw nothing. The window was dark. When they looked back at Alex though, they saw a smile on his face. He shook his head and continued on to the rear of the house.

  Just before he reached the doorway, he turned because he heard Dinky barking madly. The dog had slipped out of the house in pursuit of the children. It enraged him. It was as if Sharon had sent the animal to spoil the moment.

  “BACK!” he screamed as the dog approached. “GET BACK TO THE HOUSE, DAMN YOU.”

  The dog paused, but didn’t retreat. Richard seized the initiative and chased him even further away. Alex was pleased, but he still glared in the animal’s direction. Finally, satisfied that the dog wouldn’t bother them, he turned back to the door.

  “Some places,” he began, “are special because they have a sanctity to them. It’s as though God spent time there and left something of His essence there. When you go in, you feel it; it’s all around you. You’re afraid to speak too loud; you’re afraid to curse or to think bad thoughts. Sins of the flesh and of the spirit and of the mind are greater when they are committed there. Do you understand?” he asked, looking at them as though he had just remembered they were with him.

  “Yes,” Richard said first. The others nodded.

  “Good. I wouldn’t want you to go in there and not respect what it was…what it still is. I’d rather you not go in at all than do that.”

  “We won’t,” Elizabeth said. The anticipation was beginning to get to her, too.

  “Because at first you will think there is nothing to this room. It’s so simple, so old, with its dirt floor and its stone walls. Why do I make so much of it? you’ll wonder. But if you listen hard to what I say and try to feel what I feel, you’ll understand. You’ll know how important it is.” He paused, and they thought he would open the door, but he held his hand on the knob and lowered his head first. Then he lifted his head and turned to them. “My father,” he began, “my father is in this room. Even now,” he added, and he opened the door.

  Sharon had pulled back from the window when Alex stopped to look up at it. Even so, she felt he had seen her. Alex was extraordinary that way. His ability to sense what she was going to do sometimes, before she even did it, was uncanny. She didn’t want to be so predictable, but she couldn’t help it. She didn’t have Alex’s subtleties; she couldn’t deceive. Sometimes she thought he had married her only because of her simplicity. He needed someone he could lord it over, not that he didn’t lord it over anyone who came within his reach. Look what he had already accomplished with the children. Look what he was about to do.

  She shuddered at the thought of his taking them into that room. She had been in it only once herself, and that was when the old man was alive. Alex had said she was impolite, but she’d told him she was frightened sitting in the dark with that single lit candle throwing a pool of thin yellow light over his and the old man’s faces. Alex hadn’t forced her to go in there again, and then, after the old man died, she’d forgotten about the room and hadn’t realized Alex was still going in there from time to time—until that terrible night.

  For almost a week before it had happened, Alex had been unusually withdrawn and depressed. She couldn’t remember his ever looking so sad and so weak. He had spent hours in the living room, sitting in his chair, staring into space. Talking to him did no good; he seemed deaf to everything but his own secret thoughts. He ate poorly, rarely left the house, and watched no television. He read a little, but often after starting a book, put it down and didn’t pick it up again for hours. She’d been worried about him and even suggested he go to see a doctor. He’d looked at her as though she were crazy.

  Then one night not long after dinner, he’d left the house. It was early fall and the nights were cool. Darkness came quickly, too. She had asked him where he was going, but he hadn’t replied. He’d seemed like a man in a trance. She looked out the window and watched him drive off. He was gone for hours. Finally, she’d grown tired and gone upstairs. She was just getting into her nightgown when she heard him drive up.

  She went to the window and watched him park the car. He got out, but he didn’t come into the house. Instead, he went around to the trunk of the car and opened it. What she thought she saw him lift out of it drained the blood from her face. She’d nearly fainted. It had looked just like a body wrapped in a shroud, just the way his father was buried up at the old cemetery in Glen Wild.

  He had tossed the corpse over his shoulder and lifted a shovel out of the trunk. Then he went around the corner of the house. She couldn’t help her curiosity. She’d put on her robe and gone downstairs and out to see where he had gone. He was nowhere in sight, so she walked off the porch and went around to the back of the house. She saw the old plank door of the secret room was open and she heard the shovel going into the hard dirt floor within.

  She’d started toward it, but then stopped. She was afraid of how Alex would react to her discovering what he was doing. She thought perhaps he was in some kind of trance. It frightened her, too, to think that maybe his father had reached back from the land of the dead and got him to do this. After a few moments more, she had fled from the scene.

  She’d gone back upstairs and waited. Not long afterward she had heard Alex come in and heard him go to the downstairs bathroom. A few minutes later she heard his footsteps coming up the stairs and she shivered. She was glad she had left the lights on in the room.

  But when he’d opened the door and stepped in, he looked like his old self. There was a nice smile on his bright and energized face. The depression that had hung over him the past week was lifted. And he was clean. There was no evidence of what he had just done. Or had he done it? Could she have dreamed it?

  “Going to bed early?” he had asked.

  “Where were you?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Alex, you left the house hours ago.”

  “Oh, that. I just went to get some pipe tobacco. I think I’m going to use Pa’s old pipe.”

  “But you were gone for hours.”

  “After I came back, I took a long walk. Just didn’t realize the time, I guess. It was a little cool, so I didn’t think you’d want to go, but it was beautiful out by the lake.”

  She’d studied him. He hadn’t looked at all like a man who was lying; he’d looked like he really believed what he was saying. It had frightened her more. Was it possible he didn’t realize what he had done? Or…was it a dream?

  “I didn’t hear you drive up earlier.”

  He shrugged. “You know,” he’d said, going to the closet, “I think I will take that course up at the community college. It sounded interesting. I’d like to get to know more about computers. Might even want to buy one.”

  She had listened to him go on and on in his old vibrant manner. She was in awe of the change that had come over him and decided she couldn’t confront him with any further questions.

  But her curiosity about it couldn’t be quieted. The next day, after he’d left to go up to the college to investigate this new course, she’d gone around to the rear of the house and the old plank door. Her fingers trembled on the handle. She hesitated a moment and then pulled it open, stepping back to permit the full daylight to enter before her. Then she started down the stone steps. When she reached the bottom, she peered in and saw what looked like freshly dug earth. It fascinated her; she went further into the room.

  Just then the door had slammed shut behind her, leaving her in total darkness at the foot of that room.

  She had screamed and stumbled backwards, catching herself before she hit her head on the steps. The cold chills that went down her neck felt like icy fingers. She couldn’t help imagining the old man’s long, prehensile fingers, bony and thin, with those yellowish fingernails,
turning the pages of books.

  She’d struggled to her feet and rushed up the steps and out of the old room, practically tearing the door off its hinges to get it open. When she stepped out into the daylight, she stumbled again. She was crying hysterically now, and when she got to her feet this time, she ran all the way to the front of the house and up the steps onto the porch. Only when she was inside and the front door was closed behind her did she feel any relief. It took her hours to get back to herself. Alex had been away all that time. It could only have been the wind that had slammed the door.

  She had said nothing about it when he returned. She felt foolish for having put herself into such a panic. Besides, Alex would be furious if he found out what she had done. He would accuse her of violating some sacred shrine or something. She was sure of it.

  When she had calmed down enough, she actually felt sorry for Alex. He couldn’t bear the thought of his father’s being away from the house or away from him. She could understand his longing and sadness. After all, what difference did it make to her where the old man was buried? People used to bury their dead on their own land years ago, didn’t they? What was so terrible about it, she thought. Let him have his secret. Look how much it’s helped him already.

  But all that was before the children had come. In the back of her mind had been the hope that he would never share the room with them. After all, he had never shared it with her.

  She was driven by both jealousy and fear. She feared for the children, despite their hardness, their intelligence, and their unity. Gradually, she began to realize why Alex wanted the children so badly. He didn’t want them for himself, as she had at first thought. And he certainly didn’t want them for her.

  He wanted them for his father.

  7

  The children were disappointed, but none of them voiced it, even though each knew how the others felt. They looked at each other quickly and then looked back at Alex. He had lit the lantern and gone down the steps to the center of the room. The kerosene lamp was really not very strong, but here, at the center of such complete darkness, it seemed to have a magical glow. Alex held it chest high and turned it slowly, pushing the darkness to his left as he went. What was revealed was so simple and so uninteresting that the children were confused. Was there something here that they missed?