Mustn’t tell what’s in the well.
The policemen who handled the body had gagged at the foul jelly-like substance that covered it. I explained the reason for Devlin’s visit, that there was an unidentifiable toxin in the well and that he was here for a sample.
“But how did he fall?” the policeman, a Lieutenant Atkins kept asking me.
Each time I gave him the same answer, which was: “I don’t know.”
“But you say you were standing right behind him?”
“Yes,” I said for the umpteenth time. “He must have slipped or something. I just don’t know. One minute he was there and the next he was gone.”
Atkins nodded, but I could see that he wanted more from me.
“Are you insinuating that my husband might have done something to cause his fall?” Linda said outraged.
“No, of course not, Mrs. Cabot,” the lieutenant replied. “But we do need to get to the bottom of this.” He looked back at me. “Mr. Devlin had rope burns on his hands. Can you explain how they got there?”
“No,” I said again. “Maybe it didn’t happen here. Maybe it happened on his last job.” My voice sounded insanely calm, insanely reasonable.
“We don’t think so.”
“And what am I to assume by this?”
“By what?” asked the lieutenant, as if he didn’t know.
“This interrogation,” I said, nearly losing my temper. “Am I under arrest?”
“No, of course not, Mr. Cabot,” the lieutenant said, a small acerbic smile on his smug puss. “I can see no reason for that. There doesn’t seem to be a motive.”
They fished in that murky well for the remainder of the afternoon and all they brought up were buckets-full of toxic sludge that looked and smelled like shit from the bowels of something unholy. They took several samples for testing. After what happened, after all was said and done, they should have been back there like gangbusters filling that hole into hell with whatever they could lay their hands on. But I never heard from them again. I wasn’t surprised. I’d seen the looks on their faces when they’d brought Devlin up, and I’d heard the men gag when they’d taken the samples.
No one ever went down there, either, as far as I know, but before leaving they recapped the hole and warned us to stay away from it. As if we had to be told. It’s even possible Devlin’s death was listed as an accident. I couldn’t say for sure. Shortly thereafter I received a letter from the state informing me that someone else would be coming out to do more tests. I wasn’t holding my breath. They weren’t coming back. That thing I mentioned I had that was about ten floors beneath visceral, well, I think it got those guys, too. Not in quite the same way as me, but it got them, and told them to stay the fuck away. Whatever lived within the periphery of Farnham House and its devil’s half-acre could twist your mind into whatever it wanted from you. I wasn’t allowed to talk and I don’t think they were allowed to remember. But I remembered. I found myself thinking about that well a lot after that, and one night I dreamed that there was an underground passage connecting it with the basement and that some unspeakable thing, something slimy and black and hungry, something with the implacable, almost comical face of the mask slunk there in the dark between a sane world where logic reigned and some other world that had most probably tipped dangerously off its axis.
Chapter 17
But, even in a disjointed world, things have a way of normalizing. At least that’s the way it felt. To me anyway. I remembered several years earlier living and working in a combat zone, the fear, the apprehension, the uncertainty, and how after a time even that had somehow seemed normal. So I guess it’s a matter of perspective.
Sean began bringing home pictures he’d drawn of black cats, jack-o-lanterns, and witches flying on broomsticks in front of gigantic bone-white moons, cold and inhospitable moons that were somehow prophetic in their unyielding and callous equanimity. I shuddered when I looked upon them; my son had innocently drawn them, of course, but I sensed some sort of twisted truth in their alien light, some sort of affirmation that their creator, my son, had tipped slightly off his axis as well.
On Halloween eve, I drove a three-foot ghost through the neighborhood, stopping at houses that belonged to neighbors I had yet the opportunity to meet.
One particular neighbor seemed very afraid when I explained who we were, reinforcing my belief that something in my life, hell, something in our lives was tipping dangerously off balance. The woman, a Mrs. Miller, put her hand to her mouth as if to stifle a cry and her body winced. She was frightened. This much was clear. Her bugged-out eyes never left mine as she absently dropped several large handfuls of candy into Sean’s trick-or-treat bag.
“So, you’re the folks livin up there at the old Carlisle place,” she said, her stare icy. “I’ll be damned.”
“Yes,” I said, “but it’s no longer the Carlisle place.”
“Scuse me?” she said.
“Well, the place is ours now.”
Mrs. Miller gave a short, dry little laugh that might have been an asthmatic’s version of a cough. “Right,” she said. “Let me tell you somethin, mister. It’ll always be the Carlisle place.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Well, I’ll tell you then. Back in the day, long before the Carlisles owned it, when it was still Farnham House, there was a Carlisle in residence.”
“A Carlisle in residence?” I said confused. “How do you mean?”
“If you look back in the records—and believe me, I’ve done it—all the way back to the early eighteenth century, you’ll see that the original innkeeper, a man by the name of William Farnham, brought his own builder and handyman with him from England. And you know what his name was?”
Before I could get a chance to speak Mrs. Miller answered her own question. “His name was Francis Carlisle!” she said. What do you think of that, Mr. Cabot?”
“I don’t understand,” I said, and it was true. Was it possible that Carlisle’s ancestors had stayed on and eventually bought the property from the Farnham estate? Had the original Francis Carlisle had a son who’d had a son and so forth down the line? I stopped as another terrible yet tantalizing possibility began playing around at the fringes of my psyche, a possibility that my sane and rational mind would not allow me to seriously entertain. I could see by the look on Mrs. Miller’s face that she knew what I was thinking.
“That’s right, Mr. Cabot.
I backed up a step, stunned, totally unable to make sense of any of this.
“The place is tainted by the devil himself,” she said. “And his name is Francis Carlisle. Everyone who comes in contact with that place gets tainted. So I’ll thank you to stay away from my house from this day forward,” she added.
“What did you say?” I asked, suddenly and totally taken aback. The thought crossed my mind that I had encountered a mad woman.
“You and that boy.” She pointed at Sean and her eyes narrowed down into hateful little slits. “You’ve both got it, especially him. I can feel it livin in him like some awful sickness. Like somethin dead that’s not really dead. Like death that refuses to die.”
“What in God’s name are you talking about?” I said, taking Sean by the shoulder and drawing him back away from that hateful woman.
“God’s got nothing to do with it,” replied the witch. “Maybe the devil, but not God. It comes from Carlisle. He’s a cursed soul who wants only blood and sacrifice. It’s what got my mother! The same thing everyone who spends time in or around that place gets! Somethin worse than death! Someone should’ve burned that evil place to the ground years ago.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” I said.
“Of course you don’t,” she replied. “The ones that come under its spell never do.”
“Who is your mother?” I asked, but thought I knew.
“Her name was Hattie Dowd. She was Carlisle’s old man’s housekeeper and she died at the insane asylum up at Augusta. She died babbling like a
mad woman about what she’d seen and felt in that house and about what got inside her. And you’ve got it too, I can feel it in you, so please, go away and don’t you ever come back here again.” With that, Mrs. Miller stepped back and promptly slammed the door in our faces.
*
I was shaken, totally and unequivocally.
So my reaction to what happened when we returned home and I opened the door should not have shaken me further. Yet it did.
I wondered why the house was dark. Not even the porch light burned. In the car’s headlights, Farnham House looked like a lonely and abandoned tombstone rising up out of some long-forgotten hilltop graveyard. A sudden and overwhelming fear crawled into my bones. Linda was in there alone.
Oh, God. Where are all the lights? Has something happened to her?
I got out of the car, hurried around to the passenger side and got Sean out. I cradled his small hand in mine and pulled him toward the house’s front door, fighting back panic. I turned the knob and pushed the door open. Just beyond the threshold a disembodied face, fluorescent green and horribly grotesque came at me and Sean from out of the gloom.
“Get away!” I screamed stumbling back across the threshold, reaching for my son. I missed him and went down. Sean stood transfixed as the green, disembodied face danced toward him with menacing glee. “Get away!” I screamed again, struggling to my feet, hoping to reach him in time. I thought my pounding heart would burst through my chest. In that split second I saw the mask that had been waiting, biding its time in that old attic trunk, I saw the Hulk’s grinning, fiery maw, I saw the face in the well, the death of my parents in an automobile accident in 1988, the horror I had endured in the Afghanistan war. And I saw a reflection of the terrible thing I was becoming, or perhaps the thing I had always been but had never accepted in my true heart. I believed that in that heart-seizing moment of sheer and utter terror, my life, my true life, was in focus as it never had been before. Nothing was sane. Nothing was safe. Madness was beneath everything.
In a blinding flash, the porch light suddenly illuminated, and there stood Linda wearing the mask from the attic. It did not help to know that. My seizing heart went right on seizing. Only now rage had become a part of the mix. I felt like the mask had burned my brain, scorched my soul in some hellish and incomprehensible way. In short, I had become one with the cursed thing. Unwittingly, Linda had allowed me an ominous yet still unreasoned glimpse of a past marred by some indefinable tragedy, a future filled with grief and madness. I stumbled across the threshold toward my wife and angrily ripped the mask from her face, making her wince and draw back in fear.
“Why did you do this?” I screamed, now totally beyond reason.
Linda shrank back against the wall, her mouth slack, her eyes large and round and filled with fear. “It was just a joke,” she said. “It’s Halloween. Why are you acting this way?”
I dropped the mask abruptly, uttering an unwitting cry of revulsion. It felt as though the loathsome thing had burned my fingers. The touch of it made my skin crawl, and even as it did so, although I was not prepared to admit it just then, I felt it bonding somehow with my flesh, my soul, my being, letting me know that it was all right to slip a little deeper into its hellish spell.
My rage diminishing in nauseous waves, I told Linda never to pull a stunt like that again. She gawked at me with eyes that were oversized wet jewels, bright with terror, wondering, I’m sure, what horrible stunt she had pulled. She slid along the wall acting as if I might strike her at any moment. And I might have. She scooped a now weeping Sean up into her arms and ran with him for the stairs, sobbing and cursing God for leading us to this terrible place and time in our lives. And I cursed myself for being what I was becoming, for being what I was, even as a part of me rejoiced at the enthralling metamorphosis. I rushed into the bathroom, slid down onto my knees in front of the white porcelain bowl and heaved until I thought the lining of my stomach would come loose. Then I traced my oh-so-familiar route, walking trance-like into the kitchen, down the cellar stairs where I spent the next three hours stroking that loathsome fire-breathing monster, absorbing its sick, prickly heat as it whispered instructions to me in its alien language.
Chapter 18
Linda did not sleep. She wept off and on all through that long night. I lay half in and half out of delirium, hearing whispers in my ears and seeing the mask in my mind, its piss-colored eyes, its gleeful yet merciless grin, feeling its hot, prickly, hellish texture, knowing that it lay on the floor in the living room downstairs inviting me to come and wear it, to become it. I did not give in to its dreadful invitation, at least not on that night. Instead I lay in silent torment, torn between light and darkness, sanity and madness, flesh and its myriad corruptions.
The next morning, I arose early and while the house slept, I stole downstairs fully intending to burn the cursed thing in the kitchen woodstove. I walked gingerly around it even as its blank eyes stared implacably up at me. I kindled a fire and made coffee, patiently waiting for the flames to become hot enough to do the job. Then I took the stove poker and carefully picked the mask up off the floor, afraid to touch it with my flesh. I stood transfixed as the thing stared back at me from the end of the poker. Its gaping mouth, studded with large, almost comical-looking teeth, its blank, yellow eyes burning cigarette-holes into my soul. I was unable to draw my gaze from it. It mocked me, I swear it did. You cannot destroy the force of my determination, it said, for that force now lives within you. In the end it won; I could not destroy the cursed thing. Instead, I took it to the basement and hid it behind an old work bench against the far wall, out of sight, but from then on, never very far from my thoughts.
*
Linda’s and my relationship deteriorated to the point of collapse after that. The mask would not go away. If anything, it grew larger inside of me, and it continued to haunt my dreams. In my true heart I understood that it was only a mask, a harmless collage of paper and glue. There was a part of me, however—the part that was about ten levels beneath visceral—that knew it was a symbol for something far greater, something that I could not fathom or reason. In those dreams I began to draw a correlation between the mask, the killer-well in the back yard, and the fiery engine in our basement that now, as winter drew near, seemed to run almost all the time, filling our house with a sick and prickly kind of heat that felt very much like fever. And as this correlation began to crystallize I became more and more determined that there was a secret here, a riddle of some kind that needed to be unraveled, even as my very sanity was unraveling.
I should have taken my family and left that place the day I set eyes on it, but even then it was too late, I was just too blind to know it, and now, the part of me that needed to unravel the mystery was far more persuasive. I had become a prisoner of Farnham House and its terrible secret, and in so doing I had unwittingly doomed my family.
*
Linda did her best to steer clear of me. Thinking back on it now, I realize what a horrifyingly lonely time it must have been for her. We were like strangers in some strange and twisted time-wrinkle that neither of us had the courage or the sense to escape. In a way, Linda went through her own kind of metamorphosis. She was stronger than I ever gave her credit for, assuming the posture of cool matriarch of the new and increasingly ugly Cabot household, tiptoeing around on eggshells so as not to disturb this strange, ugly Frankenstein monster who sat day and night hunched over his laptop computer. I did not sleep much in those days. When I wasn’t writing dark passages I was in the basement stroking that vile metal monster while it repeated its instructions to me over and over again in its alien language.
It went on like this, a seeming endless silence, the only thing breaking the monotony, the sound of the Hulk muttering in the basement as it radiated an oily, repugnant heat that permeated our souls like the plague and did little to take the chill out of the November winds that now howled mournfully around the eaves of Farnham House.
Chapter 19
Somet
ime toward the middle of November, I awoke one night haunted by a new dream. The bed-sheets were soaked where I had lain tossing feverishly, my face was covered with a pillow and my body was shaking with sobs. My tongue was injured and my mouth tasted of blood. I must have cried out because Linda stirred.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said, trying to sound normal. “Everything’s okay. Go back to sleep.”
Linda rolled over and did as she was told.
I got up, wringing wet in my bedclothes, went into the bathroom and rinsed my injured mouth with salt-water. The mirror showed an emaciated, nearly unrecognizable man with hollowed cheeks and sunken, dark-rimmed eyes. I was unable to stop trembling as that terrible reflection stared back at me. In a rare moment of clarity, of perhaps even sanity, I wondered what I had become in the months since coming to this house. Had my family succumbed as well? Would I be able to recognize it if it was so?
I went downstairs to my favorite living room chair and sat in the dark waiting for the panic to subside while reflecting on the dream. The grim reaper had been there, hooded and malevolent, shoveling earth into an open grave. The sound his shovel made in the dry, pebbly soil reminded me of the dream I’d had months before where I’d been frantically trying to escape shadow people with glittering eyes while I visited with my long dead parents. In that dream I’d been haunted by the sound of a shovel scraping against dry, pebbly soil. I hadn’t been able to articulate that sound until now.
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