Shadows Burned In

by Chris Pourteau

  “Come on,” said Michael. He was looking back at her, a sneer on his face and utter contempt in his voice. “Baby baby, fraidy cat. It’s just an old house.”

  Elizabeth stared up at the peeling wood as she had that afternoon. It looked to her like skin hanging in strips off an old face. She heard Michael but wasn’t listening. Somewhere in the back of her head she wanted to scream at him that she wasn’t a fraidy cat, that she could take this place at night all by herself, without a flashlight even. Those were the terms of the dare, after all. Walking through the house in the daytime wasn’t enough. Even babies could do that.

  It had to happen at night.

  Without a flashlight.

  Alone.

  Unexpectedly, Michael’s voice turned pleading. “Aw, come on,” he said. “You made me bring you out here and now here we are and you won’t even go in. I could be playing 3V games right now.”

  She swallowed and found, to her surprise, a little spit left in her mouth.

  “All right,” she said softly. “All right, let’s go.” She raised herself off the cool grass and began walking straight for the front doorway. No darting around behind trees, no hulking over and shuffle-running like this afternoon.

  “Hey,” he said, caught off guard by her bravery. Elizabeth was halfway across the high weeds in the front yard before he thought to leap after her.

  The tall grass lay down beneath her tennis shoes with a satisfying crunch. She walked onto what was left of the shale front driveway, fists closing and opening. Elizabeth swallowed, sending less and less spit down her throat each time. When she reached the front porch, she stopped before stepping up.

  Michael caught up to her. “This is it, huh?” His voice had lost its sneer. And did he sound just a little bit scared now too?

  “You can’t go in with me,” said Elizabeth.

  “Um . . . no, I can’t. Else it doesn’t count, right?”

  She nodded, though she wasn’t really paying much attention to him. Staring at the crusty porch, Elizabeth remembered its rotten wood and how easy it was to fall through.

  “Um . . . night’s almost here,” said Michael behind her.

  Icy electricity shot up her spine. As one sinking feeling of dread, all her old fears returned. I was doing so well. She sent the thought to her dream self, which she sometimes did when she knew she was dreaming but needed to reassure herself she was still in control, that it was her dream, after all. She stood there looking at the cracked gray wood of the porch, wondering where to step and only wanting to run away, to get back home and play 3V games.

  “But I’m here now,” she said, more to herself than anyone. “I can’t leave now.” She expected a response from her 3V voice, from Michael, from someone. But there was nothing, and when she turned around, her friend had disappeared.

  “Michael?” Elizabeth realized she was alone, standing before the house, fully clothed but feeling naked, as scared as she ever had been in her life and ashamed of her fear. “Michael?”

  The light faded as the sun gave up for the day. She couldn’t see the tall grass and weeds anymore, or the path her weight had made across the huge, overgrown front lawn. It was as if the grass and weeds had let her pass, then, when she wasn’t looking, reset themselves, trapping her. She felt paralyzed, unable to move backward or forward, a sitting duck for the house’s pleasure.

  “Go on,” she heard her father’s voice say. “What are you, lazy? Want to end up serving drinks in a cyberbar somewhere?”

  Dad, this isn’t homework, she thought back. This is an old house. Her own dream-voice sounded like every exasperated child who’s ever tried to explain something to an ignorant parent. But his voice was gone now, replaced by her other self, the self that wanted to play 3V games instead of doing homework.

  “Come on,” it said, mimicking Michael’s voice. “Let’s go in and have some fun. We’ll show ’em you can do it.”

  With her 3V voice urging her on, Elizabeth found she had life in her limbs again; she could make them move. She started to turn around, glancing backward for the path her weight had made, then remembered it had already been erased.

  “Baby!” charged her 3V voice, mimicking Michael.

  “I’m not a baby,” she answered angrily. “I’m scared. Adults get scared too, don’t they?”

  “Babybabybaby!”

  “All right!” she screamed out loud.

  She stepped onto the porch.

  creak

  She thought she could feel the paint cracking beneath her shoe, revealing the dead wood beneath. The sound it made reminded her of her father standing up from his living room chair, his knees and ankles popping. Elizabeth took a second step

  creak

  and the sound was like a memory waking up, as if the house itself were stirring from quiet years of solitary slumber. When she moved again

  creak

  she glanced back at her first step onto the porch, saw her footprint outlined by displaced dust, a record of her boldness.

  (breadcrumbs like in the fairy tales to find your way back, little girl)

  When she turned around, she was facing the front doorway. She looked left on the porch, saw the old swing there, its seat more empty space than wood now, chains rusted a flaky, dull red. The old woman must’ve sat here and watched kids playing in the neighborhood, she thought. Now that’s creepy. Shuddering, she wondered if Suzie’s ghost had sat there and watched her and Michael playing earlier. She wondered if the house was putting these thoughts in her head, stoking her fear. Thoughts not of a nice old woman delighting in the play of children, but of a mean old woman sizing up children to bake in a pie.

  “Come on, babybaby,” her 3V temptress said again. “It’s just an old house.”

  “What would your monitor say?” her dream-father asked.

  She rolled her eyes. He’d probably say I wasn’t completing my homework assignments! she mind-shouted. Yelling back at her father as she so often did, if only in her head, steadied her step. She looked back to the front door.

  The sun had almost totally set now, so she could see only a little ways inside. Slanted rays captured the dust stirred up by the light, dusky breeze. But beyond the snow of dust specks, she could see only dim shapes. Elizabeth looked back at her dusty footsteps again, and already they seemed to be disappearing beneath lightly stirring leaves. Screwing up her courage, Elizabeth stepped through the door.

  Her back felt warm as her eyes adjusted. Mold crept into her nose on itchy feet. She realized her hands were sweating when the cold, heavy air of the house began to tickle them. Somewhere in the back of her head, her father’s voice lectured on airflow and wondered who paid the old woman to air-condition the neighborhood. Looking down the length of the breezeway, she saw the last rays of daylight streaming from the back of the house.

  A light at the end of the tunnel, she thought. The light seemed to dim at just that moment.

  Elizabeth took another step in, wiping her chilled hands on her T-shirt, coughing once as the mold settled in her lungs. Her eyes finally adjusted to the dusk light. To her left, the short, wide entryway led to a larger room off to one side, the parlor maybe, behind two large doors. She advanced slowly, staring at the dull, fuzzy knobs.

  “Open the doors,” said her 3V voice. “Open them and let’s see what’s inside.”

  “No,” she whispered.

  “Babybaby, look at the baby!” Again the voice mimicked Michael.

  “No.”

  I’ve done what I said, I’ve come inside, I’ve—

  (not made it all the way to the back door yet)

  Her thoughts paused. Was this the house speaking to her, then? Something. Not her 3V voice. Not her dream-voice. Not her at all, she didn’t think.

  “Fair enough,” the 3V voice relented. “The back door’s that way.”

  Elizabeth looked up the hallway. The sunlight was gone now. She wondered what time it was. She thought she’d left the house around six, so she ought to have plenty o
f sunlight.

  “Dreams don’t have time,” her 3V voice supplied smugly.

  “Shut up.”

  She took timid, halting steps toward the double doors on her left. She held both hands out away from her, eyes still adjusting to the near-darkness. Elizabeth could taste the mold now, microscopic flakes of seaweed coating her tongue, acrid and slick. She worked her mouth as she walked farther into the house and spit once onto the dusty hardwood floor.

  Elizabeth pushed the doors open. Their hinges creaked. The latch snapped once.

  Even as the doors parted, something in the main hall to the right caught her eye. It was hanging from the ceiling, swaying slightly. An old faux chandelier with broken bulbs and cobweb tendons drooping like cables on a suspension bridge. Her eyes moved to the vague outline of the cherry oak staircase that wound its way upward. It was a sharply steep, circular stair that seemed to reach the second floor too soon, a coiled spring meant to be stretched out more. The staircase looked ancient in its disrepair, its wooden elegance dusty and fragile. On the second floor, Elizabeth noticed, more closed doors invited her to explore. She turned back to the parlor, her eyes landing on what must have been Old Suzie’s chair.

  It rested in the center of the room, facing away from her toward a rickety cart that might have once held an old television set. The chair itself was a dirt-brown recliner, sitting straight upright with what looked like tendrils of gray hair hanging over the back of the headrest, blowing lightly in the breeze. She stopped and stared as the gray hair floated, and she thought of the curly, gray beards drooping outside in the mimosa trees. Elizabeth felt goose bumps as the hair on her arms stood up. Was Old Suzie sitting there? Comfortable in the chair she died in, feet up, watching her shows?

  “Don’t interrupt my shows,” said her 3V voice in a mocking imitation of an old woman who smokes. “I don’t like it when folks interrupt my shows.”

  But the steely strands hanging down from the chair barely moved. Elizabeth thought then about turning around, heading back past the too-steep staircase and the two doors with dull knobs, retracing her fading footsteps across the splintered porch

  (almost as gray as the hair hanging from the chair)

  and running for home. But then she decided to go on, find out if what they said about Old Suzie was true, if she was fat and ugly and had actually become part of the chair itself. She inched her way into the parlor, waved forward by the gray creepers.

  “That’s right. Go on. Don’t be a baby,” her 3V voice said.

  A shriek struck her dumb with fright, her limbs suddenly without energy, unable to move. Elizabeth saw it coming right at her across the floor, and her mouth opened to scream but nothing came out, and she found she couldn’t breathe either. She reached out to try to steady herself, but her arms were leaden, and she was in the parlor now, beyond the support of the entryway walls, and her arm that weighed a ton threatened to pull her over it was so heavy. She just stood and stared at the mouse as it came at her, then veered off and ran under Old Suzie’s chair. Elizabeth couldn’t inhale, and for the longest minute or ten, she felt like she might pass out. Finally, reluctantly, her lungs accepted the moldy air of the old house again, leeching enough oxygen to keep her awake. She instinctively wiped her hands on the front of her blouse and was surprised how soaked they were.

  “God, that was scary, huh?” enthused her 3V voice.

  “Shut up.”

  She was determined now to walk right up to the chair. Whatever the weather had forced into the house over the years now crunched under her tennis shoes, but she took a second step, not letting her 3V voice taunt her with thoughts of what she was grinding into the hardwood floor. A third and fourth step. Now Elizabeth could see the gray hair better, though the chair was tall backed, and she couldn’t see over it.

  “I’ll bet Old Suzie’s sitting right there and that’s why all the kids run through the house, not creep through it like a mouse.”

  Old Suzie’s dead, she thought back.

  “Yes. Your point?”

  Suddenly very angry for scaring herself so badly, Elizabeth took three gigantic steps forward and whirled on the chair, ready to face a skeleton with rotted flesh, its arms open, its mouth shouting obscenities at the little girl who’d interrupted Old Suzie’s shows. What she saw were cigarette burns in the arms of the chair, arms bloated with stuffing spilling out of the leather. Dust coated the old fabric. Elizabeth thought that if she patted the Naugahyde seat

  (where they found Old Suzie, melted back into her chair, permanently joined, never to part)

  a sandstorm might erupt and smother her. The gray hair, she saw now, was nothing more than airy cobwebs draped over the back of the chair, cousins to the hangers on the chandelier. Elizabeth thought she could see stains from years of Old Suzie’s body sitting in the chair

  (or maybe just two weeks)

  as if the old woman had left her shadow behind when she died.

  “This is the chair where they found her,” the 3V voice reminded her. “This is where she started to go bad.”

  Go bad?

  “Like old milk left in the fridge too long. Lumpy and stinking.”

  Elizabeth scrunched up her nose, trying to block the picture out of her mind, which the 3V voice happily held up with a big fat smile on her face for Elizabeth to enjoy.

  “Like old meat left out on the counter too long. Two weeks too long.”

  She turned away from the chair toward the old TV stand, her eyes shut, determined to make the voice shut up. You’re disgusting.

  “Yeah, yeah, and you love it too.”

  No I don’t . . .

  “Don’t lie to me, you.”

  (Elizabeth)

  She started, shaken by the voice. Who said that? It didn’t sound like Michael. It wasn’t her father.

  “It wasn’t me.”

  Who—

  (Elizabeth, it’s time)

  She wanted to turn around, look at the chair again, make sure the shadow hadn’t spoken.

  “Shadows can’t speak,” the 3V voice reassured her. “But corpses can. Bu-wa-ha-haaaa.”

  “Shut up!”

  (what)

  “Shhhh . . .”

  (what did you say to me)

  Elizabeth opened her mouth to speak and gagged on her own breath. The mold closed up her throat, plugged her windpipe, and then she wished she had climbed the too-steep stairs, done anything other than be standing here with her back to Old Suzie’s chair.

  “Should’ve run straight for the back door,” she teased herself.

  She felt the hand on her shoulder then, felt the force behind it

  (Elizabeth)

  and started to beat an airless scream against the dam of dust inside her throat. She sat up and opened her eyes wide and saw her mother sitting beside her, shaking her awake.

  “If you don’t wake up, you’ll be late for login,” said Susan. “And your monitor will report it to your father, and then you’ll really be in for it . . . What’s the matter?”

  Elizabeth looked around. She was very cold. She shivered once as the ghost of her fear lifted from her, and then she looked at her mother. “Um . . .” she croaked from a throat full of cotton.

  “Bad dream?”

  “Umm hmmm,” she managed.

  “Well, you’re awake now. Go and shower, get really awake. Fifteen minutes till you’re online.” Susan stood up and started to leave, then turned back to Elizabeth. “You’re okay, honey. It was just a dream, okay?”

  Elizabeth nodded, not really listening. “I’ll be up in a second, Mom.”

  Her mother paused. “Don’t go back to sleep,” she said sternly.

  “No ma’am,” her daughter answered. Elizabeth had no intention of doing that.

  When her mom had left the room and Elizabeth had taken a deep breath, she heard tiny giggling from the back of her head.

  “Now what do you want?” she pleaded.

  “When we get out of the shower . . .”

&n
bsp; Yeah?

  “. . . let’s boot up some 3V games.”

  I can’t. If I don’t get my grades up, my monitor—

  “Will call your dad and then you’ll really be in for it. Yeah, I know, I know.”

  I’m going to take a shower.

  In a mocking imitation of an old woman who smokes, the 3V voice wheezed inside her head, saying, “I don’t like it when folks interrupt my shows either.”

  Chapter 4

  “Give me that other marker,” Wayne Alan Kitts said. His cell mate, sitting across from him on the stone cold floor, handed him the black one.

  “Dis de one?” Stu Metzger asked. “Dat wat you want?”

  Kitts nodded, removing the cap. The water-based marker couldn’t be sniffed, and that was its primary drawback as far as Kitts was concerned. Stu had his nephew bring them in. Kitts and Stu had a reputation around the cellblock as sweet on one another, something they encouraged along with the assumption that, since they were gay, they enjoyed making water-based art using magic markers. They weren’t really lovers, but what other people thought didn’t concern Kitts. Soon enough, they’d see what he was made of. Warden Ramirez in particular.

  Warden fucking Ramirez.

  It took a minute, but he worked the plug from the top of the marker, then poured the ink into a bucket of water he kept under his bunk. Kitts stirred it up a bit.

  “You really tink dis gonna work?” asked Stu. His face held the simple expectant wonder of a child’s.

  “Well, if it don’t,” said Kitts, “we ain’t gonna be around to cry about it.”

  Stu grunted. “We be dead.”

  With the practice of thirty years of patience, Kitts resisted the urge to say, “No shit, you goddamned retard.” Instead he said, “Yep. Dead, Stu.” He pulled the marker out, shedding what black-stained water he could back into the cloudy bucket. “Okay, hand me the next one. And get to work on something, will ya? Do you want ’em to get wise?”

  Stu quickly handed over the kelly-green marker, then moved the rest closer to Kitts so he wouldn’t have to reach too far for them. “No, Kitts, no, ’course not. I just slow sometimes.”

  While Kitts began to pull the plug from the next marker, Stu took up the poster board and began to flesh out his “painting,” as he called it. When Kitts had first cooked up the scheme to dye their clothes, they’d needed a cover story to explain all the markers Stu got in his packages from home. Kitts had demonstrated a serious ineptitude for making art. Stu, on the other hand, had taken pride in his vocation of forgery prior to being incarcerated. He’d taken on the role of prisoner-artiste with gusto. At times he actually seemed more excited about his current project than the notion that he might just one day walk out of Huntsville’s Goree Unit in a blue-black jumpsuit with a Mr. Goodwrench patch embroidered on the front.