by John Manning
Maybe it was good that Karen was gone. What business did Paula have trying to salvage the relationship if she knew she could never give Karen what she wanted? Why should she try to change Karen’s mind and bring her back? It was better that she stayed far away from the madness of Paula’s family.
She was beginning to feel drowsy, but still sleep wouldn’t come. Great. The Ambien was making her disoriented but not knocking her out. She turned onto her side and squeezed her eyes shut. She tried to convince her subconscious mind that Karen was right beside her, just as she had been the last five years. All she had to do was reach out her hand and she’d feel her hair. She’d feel her warmth. Paula would know she wasn’t alone. That she had someone who loved her. Who wanted to make a life with her.
Tears began forcing their ways out from her tightly closed eyelids.
“Oh, baby,” she whispered.
Instinctively she reached out her hand toward the other side of the bed, the place where Karen had slept…
And she felt her.
She felt Karen’s hair.
Paula opened her eyes.
Karen was there. She rolled over and looked at Paula and smiled.
“Can’t sleep?” she whispered.
“How…?” Paula couldn’t form the words. “How did you…? When…?”
“Shh,” Karen said, and her eyes seemed to sparkle in the dark. “Do you hear? The baby’s crying.”
“The…baby?”
“Listen.”
Paula was silent. There was indeed a baby crying. From the far distance. So Karen hadn’t left at all. She was right there, right beside Paula. Everything was okay. All their problems were gone. Karen was there, and they had a baby. They had a baby…
“The baby’s crying,” Karen said again, more forcefully this time.
It was almost like an order. Paula nodded. “Yes, yes,” she said. “The baby is crying…”
She sat up and swung her legs out of the bed. Her bare feet touched the hardwood floor. The clock on the side of the bed now read 1:37. Paula stood.
“Bring me the baby,” Karen implored.
Her head was muzzy. The Ambien, she thought to herself. But Paula pushed her way through the dark, out of the bedroom and into the hallway. She could hear the baby crying from somewhere in the apartment. But where? The apartment was spacious, with two bedrooms, a dining room, a living room, and a study. But the sound seemed to come from someplace much farther away than any of those rooms. Maybe from another part of the building. Where was their baby? Someone had taken their baby!
Paula began a mad scramble from room to room. The guest bedroom was empty. Was that where they had set up the crib? No, no, it was in the dining room. It was easier to get to the baby…they’d put the crib there. But the dining room was empty. Just a roomful of shadows, sliced through by the moonlight seeping in from between Venetian blinds. Paula was beginning to panic. Where was the baby? Where was the baby?
Through the kitchen she ran into the living room, but no baby there. She listened. The crying continued. Still far away, but maybe a bit closer. She threw open the door and ran out into the corridor. Upstairs. The crying was coming from upstairs! Someone had kidnapped their baby and taken it to an apartment upstairs! Paula tried to shout, to tell her baby she was coming-but she realized she didn’t know her baby’s name.
When had they gotten the baby?
Did I give birth? Paula wondered. Did I…bring a baby into this world?
I shouldn’t have.
Oh, God no…
She began running up the stairs. They went on and on. She never knew how many stairs there were in this building. She hadn’t realized the building was so high. How many floors were there? She just kept running up and up and up…
And always the crying, just a little ahead of her. Her baby…
Finally the stairs ended at a single door. She worried the door would be locked, but it wasn’t. She flung it open and bounded inside-
And there was Karen, sitting on the couch, bouncing the baby on her knee.
“He’s fine, he’s fine,” she kept saying, even though the baby was still crying.
“What is his name?” Paula asked.
Karen lifted her eyes to her.
“You mean to say,” she said coldly, “that you don’t know?”
“Please, may I hold him?”
Karen’s eyes turned colder. Her lips tightened, and she pulled the baby to her bosom. “No,” she spit. “He’s not for you.”
“He’s my baby! I gave birth to him! I gave birth to him for you!”
“So you could give him to that room!”
“No!”
Karen stood up. She was thrusting the baby at her now. “Go ahead then! Take him! Take him!”
Paula took a step backward. “No, not now…”
The baby had stopped crying.
She could see that the child in Karen’s arms was dead.
Dead and blue. Its head dangled as if its neck had been broken.
Paula screamed.
She sat up in bed, still screaming, her heart pounding in her ears. Even though she knew now it had all been dream, she screamed once more, just to release the last of the terror that had accumulated inside her.
As if one scream could do it.
She looked over at the clock. It read 2:02.
“Dear God,” she said, bringing her hands to her forehead. She sat there in her bed, breathing heavily.
And then she realized the nightmare wasn’t over.
The baby was crying again.
She looked off into the darkness. Was she still dreaming? Was she going to have to relive that horrible experience again?
She swung her feet out of bed. Bare skin touched hard wood. She padded across the floor, opening the door to the hallway. The crying continued. But closer than it had been before. It was here this time. Here in her apartment.
This was no dream.
She peered into the spare bedroom. Nothing. Out into the dining room. Just as it been in her dream, the moonlight sliced through the darkness in a pattern of stripes from the blinds. Paula steadied herself against a dining table chair. The crying was coming from the living room.
She wouldn’t go in there. She knew what she would find. A baby. A bloody baby with its neck broken. Dean had seen such a thing once. Years ago, when Linda was pregnant with the twins. He’d woken up very much like she had tonight and seen a dead baby in his living room.
The creature screamed harder, seeming frustrated and angry that Paula would not come through the door and look upon it. She turned and headed back to her bedroom. She got back into bed and pulled the sheet up to her chin. She would not give it the satisfaction of her fear. Not twice in one night.
It cried harder and harder, breaking her heart. Surely the baby meant her no harm. Surely it was just a terrified creature, trapped between this world and the next.
But it was part of that room. It came from that room. It was part of the curse that had killed her father.
Paula lay awake for a long time, listening to the crying from the living room, refusing to give in. Finally, at 3:15, the crying ceased. Still Paula lay there, not moving, not thinking. Only as the first pink light of morning began to slip into the room did she finally fall asleep.
Chapter Nine
It wasn’t until the pilot had lifted the plane off the short runway that Douglas, pressed back into his seat by the force of takeoff, turned to Carolyn beside him and asked, “So what the fuck goes on down in that room?”
Uncle Howie had arranged for his private plane to take them from the small landing strip outside Youngsport to the nearly as small airport in Hyannis, Massachusetts, about forty minutes away by air. There a driver would meet them and take them to see a man named Kip Hobart, who had apparently tried to end the curse ten years before-and failed.
Carolyn turned her eyes to Douglas as the little eight-seater plane rose up into the clouds. “I have no idea,” she admitted.
&nbs
p; They hadn’t discussed what Mr. Young had told him until this very moment. After their breakfast encounter the day before, Carolyn hadn’t seen Douglas for the rest of the day. Disturbed by what he’d been told, the young man had hopped onto his motorcycle and zoomed off down the highway. Mr. Young fretted all day, worrying the “little hoodlum” as he called him, would crack up his bike. “He kept saying it wasn’t possible,” Mr. Young said. “But I could see all of it coming together in his head. The manner of his father’s death. The suicides of his mother and his aunt.” Douglas hadn’t returned until very late in the day. By then Carolyn was hunkered down in the study with all sorts of papers and reports. She had also spoken with Kip Hobart to arrange a meeting. She didn’t intrude when she noticed Douglas and his uncle sequestered in the parlor. In fact, she didn’t get a chance to speak to him until this very morning, when he’d announced he was going with her to talk with Kip. Mr. Young was agreeable.
But not until they were actually in the air did Douglas bring up the horrors he’d learned about his family.
“I want to say it’s all a bunch of superstitious hooey,” he said, closing his eyes. “But all those deaths…there’s no faking that.”
“No, there isn’t,” Carolyn agreed.
“And I saw her, you know.” Douglas opened his eyes and turned again to look at Carolyn. “I saw the woman. Beatrice. The servant girl who was killed in that room.”
“You did? When?”
“When I got here. She ran across the road, and I fell off my bike. Then she followed me up the cliff. I tried to tell myself she was just an illusion, but now it all makes sense.”
“How do you know it was Beatrice? Your uncle wouldn’t-or couldn’t-admit to me that Beatrice is the apparition that appears to family members.”
Douglas seemed puzzled. “He admitted it to me. When he told me about that ghost of a woman, I said I’d seen her-and he nodded and said, ‘That’s Beatrice.’”
“Odd that he was vague with me.” Carolyn glanced out of the window. They were high enough now that she had a grand view of the Maine coastline. “Did he tell you how she died in that room?”
“Yes.”
Carolyn was stunned. “He claimed to me that he didn’t know. Or at least-that he couldn’t say.” She looked at Douglas intently. “Tell me how she died.”
“She was murdered.” He was clearly uncomfortable speaking the words. “Impaled on the wall by an iron pitchfork.”
“The man…” Carolyn said.
“Yes,” Douglas said. “Family members have often reported seeing a vision of a man with a pitchfork.”
“It’s horrible,” Carolyn said, shuddering. “No wonder the room holds such bad energy. But why is your uncle withholding details from me and not from you? What possible reason could he have? It’s almost as if he wants to make it as hard as possible for me to find an answer to all this…almost as if he doesn’t want me to…”
Douglas looked at her with surprise. “Uncle Howie wants this horrible curse to end. He wouldn’t withhold any details unless there’s a reason. I’m sure of it. All the tragedy he’s seen…” He shook his head. “No, if he’s not telling you something, it’s because he can’t.”
Carolyn sighed. “Perhaps the curse will permit him only to tell outsiders so much.”
“Yes,” Douglas said. “It must be something like that.”
It might well be, Carolyn thought. But why did she feel that Howard Young had his own reasons to control the flow of information?
She shuddered again. That wall…where she’d seen the blood.
A woman had been impaled there.
Douglas was clearly becoming anxious. “I have to ask you, Carolyn. If you have no idea what goes on that room, why did Uncle Howie hire you? No disrespect, but you’re a private eye, not a Ghostbuster. You track down missing people, real live missing people. You go after insurance frauds-not avenging ghosts.”
She smiled. “Well, I have a bit more experience than that.” She related the paranormal cases she’d investigated, both for the FBI and on her own. Douglas listened intently, particularly intrigued by the zombie guy. Most people were. “But,” Carolyn concluded, “I can’t claim to be an expert on the supernatural. That’s why we’re going to see Kip.”
Douglas made a short laugh. “And that’s why I wanted to come along. Why should we care what he thinks? He failed last time. How can he help us now?”
Carolyn understood Douglas’s bitterness. When Kip had tried to end the curse ten years before, he had given the family hope-and it had been Douglas’s father, in a way, who’d been the family’s test case. Whatever Kip had done, they had hoped it would allow Douglas Senior to survive the night in that room. But their hopes were futile.
“Kip has trained with the very best psychic investigators,” Carolyn said, defending her friend. “He has witnessed some extraordinary things. I’m sure he did his best trying to help your family. Certainly he has some key insights into what goes on in that room. And he may be able to point us to other people who can help as well.”
Douglas seemed pessimistic. “The lottery is a month away. We don’t have a lot of time.”
“No, we don’t,” Carolyn admitted.
Douglas ran a hand through his blond hair. Ever since he’d learned the secret, he’d felt as if he were carrying around a heavy lead weight tied to his neck. He let out a long sigh.
“Uncle Howie said that for the last decade he’s spoken to dozens of people. No one could help. It wasn’t until the eleventh hour that he got a recommendation to meet with you. And now, he said, you’re our last hope.”
Carolyn understood that, and she felt the pressure. Perhaps she had no right accepting this job. What did she know? How could she figure this all out in time to prevent another death from occurring just a month away from now-especially if Howard Young was withholding information from her, willingly or not? She clung to the hope that Kip could help, that he could point her in a direction that might lead to an answer. But all he’d promised her on the phone was to tell her what he knew. “And that,” he’d said forlornly, “was clearly not enough ten years ago.”
Douglas had closed his eyes again. “In a strange sort of way,” he said, almost as much to himself as Carolyn, “learning the secret of that room was a kind of relief. It’s like I always knew that something was going on with the family, that there was some deep dark mystery that might explain my parents’ deaths.”
“It must be a horrible thing to live with,” Carolyn said.
She thought of her own family and the hardships they’d faced. Her parents, too, had died painful deaths. But they’d had their children around them. Friends. The goodwill and support of their community. There were no lingering questions after they were gone. Just grief and loss. On that much at least, she could relate to Douglas.
The plane began its descent over the long narrow arm of Cape Cod. Once they were on the ground, the pilot opened the door for them and guided them down the three steps onto the tarmac. Inside the small airport, a man wearing a crisp blue suit waited. He told them he was Mr. Young’s driver, and he would take them up to Fall’s Church, the tiny village where Kip Hobart lived.
For the entire half-hour ride, neither Douglas nor Carolyn said a word. Douglas gazed out the window, thinking back to the day his father died. He remembered being wakened slightly by his father’s kiss on the forehead. That must have been right after he’d been selected in the lottery, and right before he went down to the room. He was coming to say good-bye, Douglas thought, his eyes filling with tears at the realization, though he would not let himself cry. And Mom…so terrified, so grief stricken, that depression took over and caused her to end her life. She couldn’t bear to live with the thought that I, too, might someday have to spend a night in that room…
Carolyn sat looking out of the other window, consumed by her own thoughts. What if I can’t find an answer? They’ll hold the lottery again. Someone will go into that room… And what if it was the
young man sitting beside her?
At last they pulled up in front of a small cottage along a marshy inlet of the Atlantic Ocean. The sky had gone gray, and Carolyn felt chilled suddenly as she stepped out of the car. The air felt damp. Tall yellow reeds swayed along the soggy banks. A heron touched down into the water ahead of her, flapping its wide wings.
The driver waited in the car as Carolyn and Douglas headed up to the door. Even before they’d had a chance to knock, it was opened by a man wearing a beige cardigan sweater and blue jeans.
“Hello, Kip,” Carolyn said.
They embraced. Douglas was surprised by how young Kip Hobart was. He’d expected an expert in the supernatural would be an old man with a white beard. But Kip couldn’t have been more than forty, and was quite handsome, with a broad smile and a strong jaw. His sandy hair was fading to white at the temples, and there was a weather-beaten feel to his skin, but his eyes were very young. Watching the affectionate greeting Kip gave Carolyn, Douglas found himself a little jealous. The suddenness of the feeling surprised him.
“Kip,” Carolyn was saying, “this is Douglas Young.”
The man’s eyes filled with compassion as he extended his hand. “Your father was a good man. A brave man. Not a day passes that I don’t think of him.”
Douglas shook his hand. He couldn’t speak. He just nodded.
Inside the cottage, the walls were lined from floor to ceiling with books, many of them old and dusty. Douglas had expected to see skulls and crystal balls in the home of a guy who made his living chasing the supernatural, but the most unusual thing in the place was a framed movie poster of Freaks, complete with pinheads. Other than that it was a simple place, with an old sofa covered with a striped afghan, wicker baskets on the walls, and a big conch shell sitting on top of the old television set.
