by Joe McKinney
“None that I’m aware of,” Udoll said. “And there were none of the classic warning signs of depression like you mentioned.” Udoll shrugged helplessly. “He was a good man, one of the most level-headed, well-adjusted men I’ve ever known.”
“I see.”
“But there at the end...Ah, I got so worried about him. That last month, I thought he was mad at me or something. He stopped calling. He stopped e-mailing me. I went over there a few times, and he acted like he barely knew me. I tried to convince myself he was just being a jerk, that he’d snap of it and apologize, but at the same time there was a part of me that just didn’t believe that. He didn’t look well. In the back of my mind I knew something was wrong. I just didn’t listen.” He paused for a long time, looking down at his drink. “It’s awful looking at one’s hands and still being able to see the dirt from where you buried your best friend.”
Robert took another drink, surprised to find he’d reached the bottom of the glass.
“There is one thing...” Udoll said.
“Yes?”
“Brian called me one night. He was delirious. He sounded crazed. He kept saying something about the room at the top of the – “ Udoll broke off there. Evidently he saw the distress on Robert’s face and licked his lips. He put his drink down and got so close to Robert that, under different circumstances, he would have found creepy. “Ah!” he said. “So you have seen something in Crook House. You have, haven’t you?”
“No,” Robert said, waving his question away. “No, nothing.”
“Will you tell me about it? Please.”
Robert realized then that they had been talking around this point for the last fifteen minutes, that this was the truth both of them wanted – no, needed – to tell.
Robert held out his empty glass.
“Give me a refill first?”
Udoll took his glass. “Absolutely.”
*
Back at Crook House, Kaylie Ross sat on the couch sharing a bowl of microwave popcorn with Angela. On the TV, George C. Scott was playing the part of Scrooge, cowering before the chained ghost of Marley. “I wear the chain I forged in life,” Marley intoned. “I made it link by link and yard by yard. Is it patent strange to you, or would you know the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was as full, as heavy, and as long as this seven Christmas Eves ago. You have labored on it since. It is a ponderous chain!”
The words echoed around the room.
“Wow,” Kaylie said. She laughed at the goosebumps on her arms and fell back against the couch.
“Yeah,” Angela said. She swallowed. “Wow is right.”
Kaylie glanced down at her. She had a pillow pulled up under her chin, her eyes wide and glowing blue from the light of the TV. “Is it too scary? You want to watch something else?”
Angela shook her head. On the TV, Marley rattled his chains and sent George C. Scott scurrying behind his chair.
Kaylie put a hand on Angela’s knee and smiled. “You sure it’s not too scary?”
Angela shook her head again.
Kaylie grabbed the remote and paused it. “Okay,” she said. “Too scary.”
“No, really, it’s okay,” Angela said. She was a cute kid, trying to be brave like that, and Kaylie liked her. As far as babysitting jobs went, this one was pretty good.
“You sure? It’s scaring me too. Let’s watch something different.”
“No, I’m okay,” Angela said. “I’m just gonna go get a drink. You want another Coke?”
“Nah, thanks though.” Angela jumped off the couch and headed for the kitchen. “Hey,” Kaylie yelled after her, “you want to watchA Christmas Story?”
“Okay. I’ll be right back.”
Definitely scared her, Kaylie thought, turning back to the TV. She’d never seen this version ofA Christmas Carol before, and she wasn’t lying when she told Angela it’d scared her too. The guy who played Marley was really creepy.
She flipped through the channels, past all the usual Christmas movies. For a moment, she toggled back and forth between Bill Murray inScrooged! and Ralphie getting his mouth washed out with Lifebuoybefore finally settling onA Christmas Story. She’d seen it a million times, but at least there were no ghosts.
Kaylie checked her Facebook on her phone and commented on a couple of posts, only half watching the movie. She didn’t need to, really. She could do the entire script by rote. Ten or maybe fifteen minutes went by before she realized that Angela hadn’t come back from the kitchen.
“Hey Angela, you okay in there?”
She waited, and when Angela didn’t answer, she got off the couch and headed down the hallway toward the kitchen.
Angela wasn’t there.
Bathroom probably, she thought, and tried to remember where that was. The house was so damn big.
Kaylie followed the hall out to the entranceway and paused. “Angela?” she called out. “Angela, where are you?” She looked down the length of the east wing, then up the two enormous staircases that seemed to hug the entranceway like powerful arms. The image gave her the creeps. This whole house did, really. She’d sensed it before, but it was really strong now, here, at the foot of the stairs. Growing up she’d always been sensitive to such things. That was how her Mom had put it, sensitive. Not in any sort of weird Stephen King kind of way, but still totally sensitive, so much so that it frightened her sometimes.
As a little girl, her parents would take her to see her great-grandmother in the nursing home. The woman was ninety-seven at the time, bedridden, feeding through a tube. She never spoke, just laid there, a total veg. For a restless little girl of ten there was nothing to do but run the errands, getting her parents Cokes from the cafeteria, taking bags out to the car, stuff like that. Ten minutes of listening to her Grand Nana pulling air through a tube was usually all it took before Kaylie was ready to run any errand they could invent for her.
And on one such errand, a can of Coke in each hand, she’d wandered down the long, empty hallway that led back to her Grand Nana’s room. Several of the rooms she passed had open doors, and she could look in on the old people inside, rotting away in their beds. And then she stopped. The hallway, the very air around her, had suddenly seemed...different somehow, hazy. There were smells in this place, cleaning products and old flowers and too much perfume, but those faded, and it was their almost palpable absence, more even than the weird glow in the air and the curious tugging in her belly that pulled her toward the room on her right, that frightened her.
Feeling very small, she turned toward the room and stared into the open doorway. A man was in there, an old man on his back, the machines around him chiming rhythmically as they helped him breathe.
He’s dead, she remembered thinking. Oh my God, somebody help. He’s dead!
But she was unable to speak. She couldn’t scream, even though she tried. Her voice was too big to get out, and the curious tugging in her belly was stronger now, pulling her into the room.
Without quite realizing what she was doing – she certainly couldn’t stop herself – she walked into the man’s room and stood beside his bed, staring at his face.
When he rolled over, she dropped the Cokes.
His eyes sprang open, and when he spoke, it wasn’t in the croaking moan so common to the residents of this place, but with the powerful, clear voice of a younger man.
“So much still to do,” he said, and his tone was bitter, angry.
He held out a withered, palsied hand, reaching for her.
Kaylie backed away, and before the old man could speak again, she ran from the room. She went back to her parents, frightened but unable to say exactly why (because nothing had reallyactually happened, had it?) and sat close to her mother for the next forty-five minutes, not saying a word.
It wasn’t until they left, and they were passing the old man’s room, where now a doctor and a nurse stood over the old man’s corpse, and one of the Coke cans glinted at her from beneath his bed, that Kaylie finally
let the scream out.
She hadn’t thought of that afternoon for years, but now the memory seemed fresh in her mind as she stood in the entranceway of Crook House, enfolded by its enormous staircases, barely breathing. And again she felt that same tugging sensation in her belly, that need she was neither strong enough nor aware enough of to resist.
She glanced up at the landing and called for Angela.
Nothing.
“Come on, Angela, answer me! Where are you?”
Kaylie shivered. She was desperate. She could hear it in her voice. She looked around, and felt, much as she had as a little girl that day in the old folks home, so very small.
“Angela, please!”
Nothing.
Then, the sound of running footsteps in the upstairs east wing.
“Angela?”
Kaylie headed up the stairs, getting nearly to the top before she saw the open door just to the left of the landing.
And there she froze.
Her head swam with the strangest sense of déjà vu. And just like when she was a little girl in the empty hallway of that old folks home, the air seemed illuminated with a hazy, yellowish light, like a dream. The doorway tugged at her. She felt it in her belly, just as that old man’s open door had tugged at her half a lifetime ago, and she began to walk, uncertain if this was a memory or a hallucination or some weird combination of the two. But despite that uncertainty, the open door called to her, pulled her inward with a gravity she was helpless to deny.
Outside, the wind gusted under the eaves. She turned her head toward the front of the house, and when she turned back, she half expected the feeling to be gone. Déjà vu was like that, wasn’t it? It was a fleeting thing.
But when she faced the open door again, the feeling was stronger than ever, and, like a sleepwalker, she stepped forward into the room.
She saw old-fashioned chairs arranged around delicate little tables, a mirror on the wall to the left, a piano in the back of the room. This was, she knew from the movies she’d watched, the kind of room ladies of another age used as their retreats, their offices for the business of socializing.
A parlor? No. A sitting room. Yes, that was it.
It was dreadful to her, the idea of being caged in here like a delicate creature in a menagerie. She wondered what it must have been like to waste a lifetime in a room such as this, and she felt sick to her stomach. A sitting room. Oh God, it was more of a prison.
She heard a voice behind her. A whisper, not really understood.
She turned around just as a woman in the clothes of a bygone era, a Great Gatsby kind of woman, only hideous, her face wasted and twisted by rage and neglect, slammed the door in her face.
She jumped. She backed away, uncertain by what she’d seen and trembling.
A moment later, Kaylie advanced on the door and tried the knob. It wouldn’t turn. “Hey!” she said. “Hey! Angela, open the door.”
She beat against it with her fists, but only a few times.
Something was wrong with her hands, her arms. She took a step back from the door, her fingers fanned out in front her. They were cracking and blistering right before her eyes, the skin turning red, then black. No, she thought. No. Stop it. Don’t!
But it was spreading. She could feel a corruption moving over her skin like fire ants. Kaylie backed into the room, knocking over a chair, a table, stumbling like a blind woman over the remnants of a broken chair toward the mirror along the sidewall. The shriveled, decomposing hag that stared back at her was not her. The eyes were not hers. Those eyes were filled with hate, with rage that couldn’t be sated. She raised her hands to her ruined face as flakes of her charred skin fell away.
“No,” she said. “No!”
The scream died in her throat.
From behind her, a woman’s voice hissed:Come here, you little shit. Mommy’s not going to hurt you.
Kaylie turned around and stumbled toward the door, the tears coming fast.
“No, please. Please don’t hurt me.”
You make so much goddamned noise.
She fell against the door, her hand fumbling for the knob.
“Please,” she said, and slapped her ruined hands against the door. “Please.”
You little shit, Mommy’s gonna teach you.
From somewhere inside her she found the strength to scream. She began to beat on the door, blood and charred bits of flesh flying from her hands with every blow, and she screamed with every blow.
Then the door opened, and Angela was standing there.
Kaylie looked down at the little girl through a screen of tears. She extended a hand, expecting to see the blackened, ruined claw she’d seen only moments before, but her hand was whole, intact.
“You shouldn’t be up here,” Angela said.
Kaylie looked at her hands,her hands, and then at Angela. “My hands. I was…they were…Oh my God.”
“I’ve been looking for you. Are you okay?”
“You’ve been...?”
“You shouldn’t be up here.”
*
When they got home from the party, a little before eleven, Kaylie was sitting on the front steps. In the glare of the headlights, Robert could see the distress on the girl’s face, her eyes rimmed in red and glassy from crying.
“What’s she doing?” he said.
Sarah got out of the car and ran over to the girl, kneeling beside her.
Robert got out more slowly, his gaze wandering over his wife and the girl, the trees moving with the evening breeze, the dark windows of Crook House’s inscrutable face.
“Robert.”
His attention snapped back to Sarah. She was staring at him, her hands still on the babysitter. “I said keep an eye on her. I’m going to look for Angela.”
Robert nodded.
Sarah ran inside, leaving Robert and the babysitter on the front steps in a pool of light from the lamps over the door. The girl had her face in her hands. He stood next to her, his hands in his pockets. “Hey,” he said. “You okay?”
She looked at him, and in her pained expression he saw hurt and shock still fresh.
“I’m sorry that room scared you,” he said.
The shock didn’t so much leave her expression as change to disbelief, like he’d just apologized for raping her.
“You doing okay?” he asked. “You look like you might get sick.”
“Who is that woman in that room? What does she want?”
“Beats me,” he said.
“Have you seen her?”
“No,” he said. “Did you?”
She shook her head.
Yeah, she’s lying, he thought.
Robert didn’t say anything more. There was no need. The girl had definitely seen something up there, no question about it. She wasn’t going to tell him about it, either. Not while it was so fresh. Of course, he didn’t need to hear anything from her. He and Anthony Udoll had talked for a long time, long enough that Sarah had commented on it when she finally pulled him to the door. Robert had learned a lot about Crook House.
“You two sure got on well,” Sarah had said in the car when they were coming home from the party. “I don’t think yYou barely talked to anybody else the whole night. What were you guys talking about?”
“About our house,” he’d said.
She leaned in and clicked off the radio.
“Tonight was nice,” she said. “Real nice. I liked Jean a lot.”
“Yeah, she’s nice.”
“I think it was good for us, you know?”
He looked at her, but said nothing.
“I don’t know, these last few days, the move, this thing with Jay, all of it, I needed to get out. I think we both did. That party tonight was the first time I felt like I could actually breathe, you know? Do you know what I mean? Did you feel that?”
He smiled, but said nothing. In the silence, she leaned her head against his shoulder and they drove on through the quiet suburban streets. The weight of her head hurt
the sores on his shoulder, but he didn’t make her move. She seemed relaxed, happy, humming to herself contentedly as they glided passed all the Christmas lights in the yards. But Robert didn’t share her contentment. She’s kidding herself, he thought. He remembered waking up that first morning in Crook House, how he’d told himself that he was being silly, that it was nothing.
Then they’d pulled into their driveway, and saw this, the distraught babysitter.
It pained him, angered him really, that right now he shared more in common with this ditzy nineteen-year-old college sophomore than his wife of eight years. How was that even possible? How does a man reach this point?
Sarah opened the door, breaking his train of thought. “Angela’s okay,” she said. “She’s gonna sleep in our room tonight.”
Robert nodded.
“I’ll take Kaylie home,” Sarah said.
He nodded again.
He stood on the front steps and watched them drive off. When they were gone he went inside and tossed his coat on the rack near the door. He was thinking about Sarah and all they’d been through, and the flash of movement at the top of the stairs caught him by surprise.
Robert fell back against the door, his heart thundering in his chest.
For a moment, just the thinnest fraction of a moment, he’d seen a woman in a long, gray, exquisitely dainty dress at the top of the stairs, watching him with wasted, severe eyes. But it was only a flash, like sunlight glinting off a coin in the grass, for she was gone the next instant.
Robert stared at the empty landing for a long moment after that, thinking of something Anthony Udoll had said. “During that phone call with Brian I told you about, the one where he sounded so crazed. He told me he felt like whatever it was that was bad in that house was feeding off him, that the longer he stayed, the stronger it got.”
Like strong enough to finally take shape, Robert thought.
