“Jesus,” I said with a grimace. The anger had gone from me like air from a deflating balloon, replaced by a sense of shock so deep I thought my knees would give out on me. I was stunned and hurt all at the same time. I couldn’t believe that old bastard Carlisle had deceived us in this way.
“Carlisle’s been trying to sell this place for years,” Farrington said. “Locals won’t have anything to do with it. There’s a whole list down at the police station of other unexplained things over the years in this area. And there are a lot of folks who insist this house is in some way connected.”
“Jesus,” I said, my mind reeling. My hands felt clammy and my mouth had gone dry. “What unexplained things?”
“Deaths, disappearances, hauntings. There’s even been white lady sightings out on the main road.” Farrington chuckled.
“Is this supposed to be funny?”
“No, sorry, Mr. Cabot. My intention is not to alarm you. I mention these things only because I want to emphasize how ridiculous I think they are. Let’s face it, every community in America has a white lady. And most have at least one haunted house. I personally don’t put much stock in any of it.” Farrington paused. As if by magic, he produced a cigarette and a wooden match. He struck the head of the match with a yellowed thumbnail and touched the flame to the end of the cigarette. He inhaled deeply and let the smoke trickle slowly from his nostrils. “I got my own little theory about all this,” he said finally. “You see, folks always got to have something to blame everything on otherwise they ain’t happy. Makes people feel better if they can lay their hands on the perpetrator, that way they don’t have to suspect one of their own.”
“So you’re saying this house is the perpetrator?”
Farrington flapped his hand in dismissal. “I told you, the place has got a reputation, that’s all I know. Imagine others will be telling you the same thing. I wouldn’t fret too much about it. Appears you got yourself a fine home here. It’s about time somebody took an interest in her. Like I said, I don’t believe in any of that supernatural crap. As far as the two murdered teenagers are concerned, I tend to lean more toward the escaped convict theory.”
“But why would escaped cons take the time to dismember a couple of adolescent boys when they should have been running for their freedom? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Evidently those two guys were both in for the duration. Couple of tough career criminals with a history of atrocities; murder, rape, you name it. They were free for the first time in years. Maybe they just wanted to have a little fun.”
“Fun?” I said. Truth is I felt like puking.
Farrington smiled and it was chilling in its ferocity. To me it wasn’t a smile at all, but a gaping grimace that showed more fear than mirth. In the next second the unsettling expression had passed and Farrington leaned in close, his eyes darting back and forth as if he was making sure no one was listening. He touched his dry lips with his tongue. Leaves continued to gossip overhead. “Those guys are long gone,” he whispered. “But the old man’s still around.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Farrington cocked a thumb in the direction of the open cellar doorway. “If I were you I’d keep a close eye on him.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Mysterious old duffer. No one actually knows much about him. Just seems to come and go, you know, like a ghost. One minute he’s there, and the next, well, he’s gone, and most folks just seem to forget about him until he suddenly appears again.”
For a long moment I stared silently at Farrington. In truth I didn’t know what to say. He was right, of course. I felt the same way about Carlisle. He just seemed to come and go without leaving much residue. I liked it that way. The less needy folks were, the better, as far as I was concerned.
I said no more, and neither did Farrington. There wasn’t much more that needed to be said. The conversation left me decidedly uneasy, however. It would be a lie to tell you otherwise. But it wasn’t long before other priorities had taken precedence. I didn’t forget what Farrington told me, but neither did I lose any sleep over it. I didn’t say anything to Linda about it, though. I’m not sure why I didn’t. I suppose in retrospect it was because she was too happy and I was determined not to be the spoiler.
But it was funny, or perhaps not so funny now that I look back on it. From that moment on, every time I went into the basement, my overactive imagination saw those two boys cut up like butcher shop offerings and stacked up in front of the heating system’s giant maw. Why? I kept asking myself. Why would anybody do such a thing? But I believe now that I knew the answer to my own question, even then, but didn’t want to admit it to myself. The knowledge began to eat at me, and in the weeks that followed I began to feel more and more drawn to that fiery entity, and I was powerless to control those urges.
Chapter 8
I hold many stirring memories of that summer, some fond, some frightening, some satisfying and some horrifying, but the one which stands up tallest in my mind, the one that will live with me forever, was the afternoon I surprised Linda in an upstairs bedroom. It was a moment of intimacy I believe has as much right to be told as any part of this tale.
The afternoon was sunny and languid. Sean was in town shopping with Meg, and Carlisle was on one of his many hardware store runs.
It was the last day of July and Linda had been wallpapering in one of the upstairs bedrooms. She was turned away from me when I found her; she was stretching her arms up over her head smoothing out some lumps which had occurred between the new paper and the wall. I stood watching for a long moment, marveling at her incredible beauty. She was wearing pink shorts and one of my old faded chamois shirts. She had pulled the tails around in front and tied them together in a knot just below her breasts, exposing her midriff. I remember thinking that even in these sexless garments she must still be the sexiest woman alive. She moved like a graceful dancer, unaware of her silent witness. Wisps of shoulder-length blonde hair would cross her mouth and nose as she worked and she would take her hand and brush them back out of her face with more than a hint of innocent, impish provocation. I snuck up from behind and encircled my arms around her bare midriff. She turned, surprised, and our lips met.
“Oh, Sam,” she said, delighted and a little bit flushed. “I’m all covered with wallpaper paste, and what if Carlisle comes back?” Her eyes danced.
“What if?” I said, “This is our house now.”
Linda giggled. We slid to the floor and she told me how happy she was. I told her how lucky I was. We made love right there on the floor and it was one of those rare times that you measure all the other times against. Warm sunlight slanted through windows and played off our naked bodies. The beating of our hearts, the quickening of our breath; Linda’s soft whimper, “Oh, Sam please, yes, I love you.”
I shall never forget that time for it was one of the best, and . . . sadly, one of the last. From the time of the discovery of the mask, which was not long in coming, Linda’s and my relationship deteriorated rapidly.
The few precious weeks that followed were the sweetest of my life. It will always be a baseline that I use to measure personal happiness, and sadly, success, money, everything in my life, since all pales in the face it.
Chapter 9
We moved in as planned and had a house-warming party the following Saturday night. We invited all of the people who had helped us in our endeavors: Carlisle, of course, John and Meg and, as an afterthought, I invited the Farringtons. Although I had not confronted Carlisle with the things Greg Farrington had shared with me about the house’s reputation, I was secretly, and a little bit perversely, hoping that it would come out while the two men were together in the same room.
We toasted our new home and good fortune with champagne and settled down for food and conversation. But the Farringtons did not show and it wasn’t until 8:30 or so when I overheard Linda talking with her mother that I realized something was wrong.
“Oh, my God,” Linda exc
laimed. “No I didn’t read the morning paper. How on earth did it happen?” Her face had clouded with concern.
“I didn’t know you’d invited them, dear,” Meg said. “It completely slipped my mind until you mentioned it.”
“Yes,” Linda replied, all the color now drained from her face. “Yes, we did invite them.”
“What’s this all about, Meg?” I said, crossing the room.
“Such a shame,” she said. “Such a nice man.”
“Sad story, isn’t it”? Carlisle commented without emotion. “About him dying that way.”
“Dying what way?” I asked, perplexed. “What are you talking about? Who died?”
“Why, Greg Farrington,” Meg said. “The man who did your roof. He fell off a roof yesterday over in Richmond. It seems he was all alone at the time, nobody there to help him.” She pursed her lips and gave her head a sad little shake. “His boys were off on a dump run. When they returned, they found his body.”
“Oh, Christ,” I said stunned.
“Landed on one of his ladder jacks,” John said. “Evidently the damned thing was lying there on the ground with the metal jack part of it sticking straight up. Paper said it impaled him like a sword.”
“Killed just like that,” Carlisle said, snapping his fingers. “Out like a light. Never knew what hit him.”
“Oh, my God,” Linda said again, sitting down heavily on the couch and putting her face in her hands. “I think I’m going to be sick. Those poor boys. His poor wife.”
I sat down next to her, feeling a mixture of shock and extreme sadness. Farrington’s story suddenly leaped out of that secret little place in my psyche—the place reserved for hidden and unpleasant information—and began swimming through my mind in crazy circles. Had it been coincidence that he’d been killed? I wondered. Or was there something more menacing at work here? Of course it was coincidence, my rational mind answered back. Just a terrible accident. Nothing more. But I couldn’t convince myself of that. No way. No matter how much I wanted it to be so.
The news of the death put a damper on the party and so it broke up early. After everybody went home, Linda and I went upstairs, but before going to bed we looked in on Sean. We stood for a long time holding each other, silently watching him sleep. A terrible fear went into my heart; I had the strong sense that something in my life had gone slightly askew. I felt like I was teetering on the brink of some unknown precipice. I won’t lie to you, I knew it then, even before the mask and all that it foreshadowed. I don’t think Linda suspected anything. Not yet anyway. That would come later. Dear, God, yes, it certainly would.
*
I could not sleep. I lay awake staring at the ceiling listening to Linda’s soft, rhythmic breathing. Sometime near dawn I slipped out of bed. Dressed only in robe and bedroom slippers I tiptoed downstairs. I hesitated at the cellar door for a long time, fighting the mixed emotions inside me; shame, guilt, exhilaration, like a cheater stealing off into the night to meet his secret lover. It was not the first time I felt I had lost something fundamental in the war on terror, something more than the piece of elbow that had been pulverized by a hot, whirling fragment of shrapnel. Or perhaps I had found something over in that terrible no-man’s-land, something no man should ever bring home with him. No matter, I knew I was going down into that basement. It wasn’t debatable. I’d been there before, and I’d go there again, and again. I needed to go there. I needed to look upon the Hulk. I needed to commune with it. I needed to understand.
I opened the door and slipped quietly down the stairs in the dark. The Hulk seemed benign as I approached it. In the dark it was just an aging and sagging lump of sheet steel and cast iron; the one we’d seen on that first day here months ago, a heating plant that had reached the end of its long life and just wanted to be left alone to die. But of course it was no longer a sad and drooping metal monster. When I flipped on that dusty light it came alive in some incomprehensible way. All shiny chrome, stainless steel and whirring valves, a living thing that seemed to burn with a sort of cold inner-fire that I did not have the capacity to resist. For a long time, well into that night, I stood on the earthen floor in that dingy basement with the flats of my hands pressed solidly against the Hulk’s iron skin, talking to it in a fevered gibberish that had no meaning. And it spoke back to me in an alien language known only to the Hulk and me and its servants of darkness.
Chapter 10
August slipped through our fingers like magic and was gone before we knew it. Linda and I were so busy that I didn’t notice until it was almost too late that she too was slipping away from me. She’d become distant and preoccupied, her moods dark and pensive. One morning I noticed tears in her eyes.
When I tried to speak to her about it, she was uncommunicative, passing it off as nothing more than a bad dream. I knew what bad dreams were all about, I’d been having my share of them. With Linda, I thought perhaps it was something more. I had noticed the bottle of Valium on her bedside table the week before. She had gone to the doctor for what she’d called a routine checkup and the Valium had just appeared there. She’d never said a word to me about it. She had never before used drugs to go to sleep. Twice I pressed her on the subject; both times she avoided it. It was as though she had become afraid of me. Sometimes when I watched her there was accusation, or even fear in her eyes.
I was frightened now of pressing her too hard, for when I searched my mind for a possible answer, my stomach tightened with fear. I did not want to admit that these changes in her could possibly be my fault. I was changing too, and I didn’t like what I saw in the mirror. So instead of dealing with it I ignored the changes in us both and in time we grew apart.
*
With Carlisle’s work mostly completed, we didn’t see him every day any more, but we did see him two or three times a week. He lived in a small apartment near the Davenport pier—or so we were told, never once having laid eyes upon the place. Occasionally throughout that summer, if it was raining or if I was going his way anyway, I would offer him a ride home. He always refused. He said he didn’t like cars and most of the time preferred riding his bicycle, which he usually did.
“Keeps the old blood circulatin,” he’d stated in his infectious Down-East accent. “If more people rode bicycles there wouldn’t be so much heart disease or cholesterol problems. Why, nobody had those kinds of problems when I was a young feller, before everyone had cars.”
I couldn’t argue with his logic. I imagined that any medical doctor worth his salt would have told me the same thing. Just the same, later I would think that it was unlikely that Carlisle was old enough to boast that nobody had cars when he was a young feller. That would make him much older than what I assumed was his seventy-something years.
Most of the time, though, Carlisle would just simply appear or disappear without explanation. And this had become an accepted given in the Cabot household. It was almost as if he still had some sort of lease on the place, and we supposed that in a way, he did. We would see him early in the morning pumping the pedals of that streamlined 1950s fat-wheeled bicycle up the long graveled driveway from Farnham Road. He would wheel it up to the shed, lean it against a corner post without using the kickstand, go about his business, and sometime later in the day, he and that improbable old bike would just simply disappear. On many occasions, an entire day would go by without our paths crossing even once.
And when they did cross, and we would speak, it was almost as if the things he had to say were somehow forced, as if he might have been happier to just be left alone to his tasks. I got the feeling that whatever thoughts passed behind those eyes were his alone, secret somehow.
So it came as no small surprise the day Carlisle did finally accept a ride to town. One morning late in the month, we awoke to a light rain falling and I was amazed to see Carlisle pumping the pedals of that old bicycle up the drive toward the shed. What could possibly be so important here that he would chance catching a cold or possibly even pneumonia? By noon it was raining
in torrents accompanied by a fierce northeast wind. The weather report said we were in for the season’s first nor’easter. The thought crossed my mind that a bicycle ride four miles back to town would be sheer insanity for a man his age.
In the late afternoon, Linda decided to take Sean and go to town for a visit with her mom and dad and then go to the grocery store. I tried to talk her out of it, but she would not be swayed. In the end I relented, but uneasily, cautioning her to be extra careful.
As a polite afterthought—and pretty darned sure he would not accept—Linda offered to give Carlisle a ride home. At first, he was hesitant, and then to our great astonishment, he actually accepted the invitation. I was flabbergasted. All the times I’d offered he’d refused and now he had agreed to ride with Linda and Sean. Wonders would never cease.
Although I was nervous about Linda driving in the storm, part of me was a little bit delighted, if you want the truth. I would be alone for the first time since I couldn’t remember when, and although improvements to the room that would become my office weren’t complete and I hadn’t yet set up my computer, the thought of curling up on the couch with a pad of paper and several newly-sharpened pencils while the storm raged outside was appealing. Some ideas had been forming as I’d worked on the house, and I thought it would be a welcome opportunity to flesh them out. I worked for several hours until the house began to darken with the coming of night, and in the midst of a thought, I fell asleep and dreamed.
The Haunting of Sam Cabot (A Supernatural Thriller) Page 6
