Philomena bit her bottom lip, straightened her back, and forced herself away from her friends, still trembling. “We’ve come this far. If we don’t do this now, we’ll never be brave enough to come back.”
“I’m not brave enough now,” said One-Eyed Kate.
“You broke my hand,” Johnny wheezed at Big Moose.
Philomena looked at each of them, and then told them what she wanted. Kate set Stumpy gently against a smaller tree before they all stepped to the big fishhook and picked it up, even Johnny, who was holding back tears of his own. Together they walked to the edge, the impaled bait pulsing before them, with Big Moose paying out the chain.
An even colder wind curled up out of the ravine, bringing the pungent smell of dead things, making them shiver and wrinkle their noses. Dried leaves spiraled up into the turbulent sky as they eased the hook and bait out over the edge, then as a group, began to lower it by the chain. As the glowing hook descended it began illuminating the walls of the ravine, revealing rock formations shaped like tortured faces, each twisted into a rictus of pain or horror. Some appeared to scream soundlessly, others to stare blankly, mouths agape, and still more appeared to be laughing, deep in the clutches of some unknown madness. But nothing moved as the hook was lowered deeper.
Once the hook reached the end of the chain, the children let go and lined up at the edge, peering down. The glow from the bait was much smaller, moving back and forth slowly as the hook swayed in the wind. They waited a long time.
Nothing.
“This is dumb,” said Johnny, deciding there was no candy to be found in his pockets, exploring one nostril with a pudgy finger instead.
“Maybe it’s not hungry,” offered One-Eyed Kate. Stumpy was back in her arms, and he grunted his agreement. Moose just stared into the ravine.
Philomena frowned, tapping the tip of one pointed shoe against the chain in annoyance. “I think we need to get its attention.”
Johnny shook his head. “You said the bait was irresistible. You said!”
“I know what I said, and it is.”
“Uh, I think it’s resisting, Phil.”
“Someone’s gonna find out how deep that ravine is,” Philomena sang softly, and One-Eyed Kate punched Johnny in the side of the head.
They stood there in silence for a while, except for Johnny, who couldn’t decide if he wanted to whimper about his hand or his head or both. Then Big Moose looked up from the ravine.
“Saturday,” he said.
The children just stared at him.
“Saturday,” he repeated. “No school.”
Philomena snapped her pointy little fingers. “He’s right! It’s Saturday! The Crusk has to know his food doesn’t come out here today!” And then she was off, sprinting towards the bridge, pointy knees and elbows pumping once more, red ringlets of hair flying in the wind. She started making loud, hooting noises. Her boots hit the wooden planks and she pounded across, CLICK-CLACK-CLICK-CLACK!
“Cruuuuusk! Come and eat me, Crusk! Lunchtime, big fella!”
The kids watched in horrified amazement.
Courageous Little Philomena reached the other side without being eaten, so she turned around and ran across again, boot heels slamming the planks, hollering and waving her arms. “Cruuuuuusk, Cruuusk, here Crusky! Yummy crunchy din-din!”
A rumble from deep in the ravine. A black mass speeding up through the air, spines and tails and teeth, oh, so many teeth.
Philomena reached the center of the bridge and stopped, gripping the weak railing and jumping higher and higher, screaming into the ravine. “Come and get it, you big BOOGER!”
A mighty mouth yawned open as it aimed at the morsel on the bridge.
Then suddenly the mass jerked left, its attention pulled by the wriggling, glowing, irresistible blob dangling by the ravine wall. It hit the hook, jaws crunching down, and a moment later the chain snapped taut. The chestnut tree creaked against the weight, but Philomena had chosen well, and it held, roots deep and solid in the ground. The moment the Crusk hit the bait there was another deafening, inhuman shriek and the sky was once more split by lightning. The creature banked away from the wall of the ravine and roared towards the little girl on the bridge, but a full thirty feet before it got there it was jerked up violently short and let out a terrible yelp.
Like a running dog on a short leash.
And Johnny understood.
The Crusk thrashed at the end of the chain, the hook sunk deep in its jawbone, never to come out, the bait deep in its gullet. It wailed and jerked and hit the end of the chain again and again until finally, exhausted, it sank back into the darkness, trapped and impotent.
At the ravine’s edge, the children clapped and cheered. Out on the bridge, Courageous Little Philomena swept her pointed little hat off her pointed little head and took a bow.
Laughing, One-Eyed Kate cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted across to her friend. “Philomena, what was that bait?”
In an Indiana mental facility, a man lunged against the full restraints which held him to no more than a sitting position. Former celebrity children’s book author Peter Thomaston opened his eyes and gasped.
“My soul.”
THE HOUSE ON MOHAWK
It rested on a corner, a large cape with two upstairs dormer windows and a one car garage. A giant beech tree dominated the front yard, one of its roots buckling the cement walk that led from the step to the mailbox. A hedge, brown and dying, shielded the front and side yard from the road, marching in an uneven line with the asphalt as Iroquois met Mohawk. The flower beds were untended, and the curtains were drawn. The house appeared vacant.
Jennifer knew better.
She sat in a rental car half a block up Iroquois, the heater running against the early November chill. The sky was indigo as the sun settled, and a street light a block away clicked on, casting the front of the house in a deeper gloom.
She watched, hands clenched in her lap. Beside her in the cup holder was a single key on a ring with a silver heart. Her eyes never left the house as a rising breeze made the tree branches sway like arms, dead leaves chasing across the browning lawn. She watched the curtains for movement.
How many years had those limbs cast shadows on her bedroom wall? She’d been two when they moved in, so it had to be fifteen years? Until she went away to college. But the bedroom had still been hers for years after that, and the tree wasn’t the only shadow that crawled in there.
As she’d left their little Connecticut town for A.S.U. – a place as far from here as she could get - she had sworn to never put a foot inside again. That hadn’t lasted, of course. It was her home, where her parents lived until Mom passed away two years ago, and where Dad had lived alone until he joined her two days ago. Since going away for school she had been back inside exactly three times. Jack had only been there once, and little Collin had never been, nor would he ever be, inside that house.
“I hate you,” she whispered.
Jennifer wasn’t supposed to be here until tomorrow. She and Keri were going to meet some aunts and cousins for coffee, go to the mortuary to make arrangements, then come back here to plan for the house and Dad’s things. In the daytime. Not that the time of day had ever really mattered on Mohawk.
She turned the heater knob up one setting.
Jack and Collin were back in Phoenix, despite her husband’s protests that he should be here to support Jennifer and pay his respects. She had been firm, however, and Jack relented. Over the years she had told him everything, and though he didn’t believe it all, or even most of it, he knew that she did.
People say we don’t remember events from early childhood, but Jennifer knew she had dreamed about the house before she ever saw it. Dark dreams of watching windows and rooms that listened. Jack smiled his patient smile and told her they were false memories. He meant well, but then he’d never heard his name spoken when he was alone in the house.
It started shortly after they moved in, two-year-old Jenny in he
r high chair while Mommy was in the kitchen. A glass of orange juice two feet away on the table had floated slowly into the air, then up-ended and crashed to the floor. Little Jenny had cried at the breaking glass, and Mommy had yelled at her for somehow causing it. The next day she was back in the high chair, and this time it was a glass bowl of fruit that lifted, shuddered, and shattered on the linoleum. Again, well out of her reach, but she had gotten a spanking for it just the same.
It wasn’t the last floating object, or the last spanking. Books shot out of her bookcase and hit the far bedroom wall, and her parents had been angry, thinking she was throwing a tantrum. Jars of finger paint rose from their tray on her little easel as she watched, hurling themselves against the walls and ceiling to explode in rainbows of dripping color. Her toy box lid banged open and shut, open and shut, making her run from her room, crying.
They never saw any of it.
Jennifer watched the house, knowing it watched her back. Hadn’t it called her tonight? And hadn’t she come?
The footsteps in the hall outside her door would wake her up at night, pounding feet running back and forth. At first she had actually had the courage – or the lack of sense – to open her door to see what her parents could possibly be up to, but the hallway was always empty. Worse was when the footsteps approached her, like when she was in the family room watching TV or reading in a living room chair, slow, heavy steps coming up behind her and stopping. The hairs on the back of her neck lifted as she looked back to see nobody there.
Then there were the lights, flicking on and off in empty rooms, or sometimes waiting until she turned off a wall switch and walked away before snapping back on. Her father grumbled about his electric bill constantly. She almost got used to the lights, and the house must have sensed that, for they started going off when she was alone in a room, leaving her in darkness.
Then something would whisper her name.
Jennifer cranked the heater knob all the way over, warm air blasting into the car as she hugged herself against a cold she knew the heater couldn’t chase away. The dark blue had all but faded, and the house on Mohawk sat quietly under a starless sky.
When she was a teenager she found any excuse in good weather to spend nights out on the lawn in her sleeping bag, often with friends. She felt better there. At least in nature you knew what the noises were. At least outside you didn’t have to listen to the basement stairs creak as someone walked up them, aware that both your parents were in the same room with you.
And it was the basement which frightened her the most.
Keri was three years younger. For a little sister, she was a good listener, and always believed what Jennifer said she heard and saw. But she swore nothing ever happened to her.
Even at a young age Jennifer saw the lie in her little sister’s eyes.
Keri said she never heard her name called. Never heard the stereo turn on in an empty room. Never saw a smoky blob lurking in ceiling corners.
Jennifer did, and more. It escalated around the time she turned twelve. That was when her name, once whispered from the end of an empty hall, would instead be screamed in her ear. That was when her bed began to shake in the night, vibrating and slamming the headboard against the wall hard enough to leave marks. At first Mom and Dad yelled about rough-housing, then adolescent tantrums, and once in high school, Mom even accused her of somehow sneaking a boy into her room.
On nights the bed didn’t shake, her pillows would slide from under her head, down between the mattress and the headboard, slowly, steadily, as if someone under the bed were pulling them down. Jennifer grabbed for them…once…and had them jerked out of her hands, SNAP, under the bed. Something shrieked her name in her ear, and the bedroom lights flicked on and off like a strobe until she fled to the living room to cower in a corner of the sofa.
She never fought for her pillows again.
Jennifer shut off the engine and sat in stillness for a while. Then she took the house key from the cup holder and slowly climbed out of the car. A night breeze lifted her hair about her face as she shut the door, putting the key in her jacket pocket.
The people started showing up in her mid teens, at first only when she was alone in the house. Once she had looked out the front windows and seen an old man in a straw hat standing on the lawn, arms limp at his side, looking at the house. She opened the front door to see if he was lost, but then he wasn’t there. Another time she had been alone at the kitchen table studying and saw a man in a white dress shirt pass by the kitchen doorway in the hall, not looking at her.
Then her bedroom door slammed, and the snarls of an animal started from inside.
It was four days before she slept in her room again, and then only with the lights on.
Until the house switched them off.
They grew bolder. She and some friends had been in the living room, Jennifer in the recliner in the corner, with Dennis, one of the boys from the neighborhood, on the couch across from her. He had been talking, laughing, and then just stopped and stared towards her as a dark stain spread across his crotch. He ran from the house, and Jennifer chased him three blocks before she caught up to him. He was crying and embarrassed about wetting himself, and it took nearly an hour of talking to him and calming him down before he managed to tell her he had seen a wrinkled, bald man slowly peek out at him from behind the chair Jennifer was sitting in, like he had been curled up and hiding back there.
Dennis never came back to the house, and stopped talking to her at school.
Jennifer started up the street, walking slowly, her loafers crunching small gravel underfoot. The big tree in the front yard stopped swaying for a moment as the wind died, as if the house was holding its breath at her approach.
She turned sixteen, got her license and a part time job, and bought a used Mitsubishi. One Sunday afternoon she was driving home, taking a back road, and glanced down a side street. There she had seen Lisa Portman, a thirteen-year-old friend of Keri’s, half a block up. She was straddling her bike and talking to someone in a dark van which had pulled to the side of the road. Lisa was wearing pink shorts and a blue top. Jennifer took it all in as she passed; the little girl, the van…she slammed on the brakes in the middle of the road, threw it into reverse and backed up.
The van was gone. So were Lisa and her bike.
Jennifer shot down the side road, checking driveways and cross streets, seeing nothing. This was pre-cell phone, so she raced home to call the police and report the abduction.
As the Mitsu roared into the driveway, there was Lisa’s bike lying in the front yard. Lisa was inside with Keri in her sister’s room listening to the Backstreet Boys, and had been there for hours.
And Lisa was wearing pink shorts and a blue top.
That same year, Jennifer was awakened early one morning to her bedroom door slamming open. She sat up to see her mother in the doorway in a nightgown, her hair wild and her eyes rimmed red, smoking a cigarette and pointing a finger at her.
“Do you know what you’ve done?” her mother screamed. “I hate you! I wish you would just kill yourself!” Then she stormed into the kitchen.
Jennifer sat sobbing on her bed, calling to her mother, begging to know what she had done but afraid to go to her, afraid she would make her more angry. He father had stumbled to her bedroom doorway, rubbing at sleep-filled eyes. “What the hell? Why are you crying?”
Jennifer buried her face in a pillow, but managed to choke out, “Daddy, why did Mommy say that? Why is she so mad at me?”
Her father looked confused. “When? Why did she say what?”
Jennifer shook her head, not wanting to repeat the words. “Just now!”
Her father frowned. “Jenny, what the hell are you talking about? Your Mom’s in Tampa at a sales convention. She flew out last night, remember?”
The memory made Jennifer stop in the road. She gripped the house key in her pocket and stood there, squeezing until the key dug painfully into her palm, looking at the hateful house.
It didn’t respond, but she knew it heard her.
She had long suspected that Dad had been the only one to get it. Mom didn’t have time to listen to her nonsense, and Keri was in complete denial. But Dad stopped yelling and blaming her for loud noises, and although he teased her the few times she told him about things that happened, she thought she had seen the lie in his eyes, too. What had he seen and heard, she wondered, never asking. And despite his apparent refusal to believe her, he was always good about allowing her to sleep over at friends, or go with him on errands that kept her out of the house, or encouraging her to join every after-school sport and activity she could.
As she neared eighteen, the tempo rose, as if the house was suddenly in a hurry. More footsteps, more whispering, her name being called from the basement. Sometimes it was her father’s voice, or her sister’s, but Jennifer had grown wary over the years. Then came tugging at the back of her shirt, a shove into a wall, and then a slap out of empty air that left a red handprint on her face and had her father in a rage that evening demanding to know what boy had done this to her.
The shadow people came, standing in corners, peeking out from open closets. One was a little girl who stood silently in the hallway looking at her.
Jennifer always felt that if she hadn’t gone away to Arizona when she did, the house would have taken her. Not simply driven her mad, though she often feared it would and still wondered in a small way if it had, even just a little. No, she was afraid it would actually take her. One afternoon, while she was alone, just snatch her away into whatever cold, dead darkness it was that lived there.
But she had cheated it of its prize.
It wanted her back.
There were times she couldn’t avoid coming home. The first was during summer break between freshman and sophomore year. It had been waiting for her. Touches on her back and neck, followed by painful hair pulling. Each summer afterwards she applied for internships that kept her in Phoenix.
In The Falling Light Page 13
