by Hamill, Ike
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
The waves crashed and hooves pounded on wet sand. She didn’t say anything. Amber didn’t accept his apology or admit that he was at least partially right. Part of Ricky wanted to apologize again and keep apologizing until she finally accepted or acknowledged it. He couldn’t. He wasn’t as stubborn as Amber, but he was stubborn enough that he had no intention of begging her for forgiveness when his only crime had been to tell her what she claimed to already know.
Eventually, she continued.
# # #
I ran away. I guess I figured that if I was going to have to shoulder all the responsibility for keeping myself alive, I might as well do it on my own. At least that way I wouldn’t have to worry about everyone else at the same time.
The first night away, a giant weight had been lifted off of me. I hiked to the highway and I found a ride that got me most of the way to Raleigh. I was careful and it didn’t seem dangerous at all—not compared to tiptoeing around my house where anything could kill you at any time. I found my way to the apartment of my friend’s older sister. I should have known to keep moving. They found me fast enough. Mom was panicked on the phone. She wasn’t worried about me, she was worried about herself and Dad. With me gone, the house wouldn’t leave them alone. That’s not the way she put it, of course.
It needed us there for some reason. I don’t know why. When I left, the house began to torture my parents to leverage them into getting me back. It stole my father’s money and hid Mom’s checkbook. Dad wasn’t allowed to leave through the front door. For a while, he went through the window and then the house slammed the window down, breaking his fingers. Reasonable people would have fled. My parents weren’t reasonable. Instead of fighting the house, they fought me. Over the phone, Mom practically threatened my cousins. Her niece and nephew were staying with their grandparents. Mom knew that she could lobby to have them come stay with her.
I couldn’t put them through that torture. I begged Mom to just leave. The phone went all crackly and disconnected.
My only choice was to go back. I couldn’t live with the guilt otherwise.
Of course, as soon as I was back, things got much worse.
Dad had trouble working with his broken fingers. He got so frustrated that he told off his boss and they put him on unpaid suspension. We had enough money tucked away to bridge the gap. Even though the weather was hot, the house had turned cold inside. I would have to wear a sweater and long pants. Then, when I went outdoors, I would take it all off and switch to a t-shirt and shorts. I had the idea that the house was punishing me for those few days of freedom. It was saying, “I’m more powerful than you understand. If you leave again, I will really make you suffer.”
It didn’t weaken my resolve to get away. I just changed my tactics. I thought maybe I could force Mom and Dad to move and then we would all be out from under the spell.
I couldn’t burn it down or blow it up. Anything I did near that place, the house would know.
The mortgage was paid off, so there was no way to get a bank involved.
Then I found out about property tax. Mom never balanced her checkbook. It would have been difficult anyway with the checkbook missing half of the time. One of my jobs was to get the mail and take the outgoing mail to the box. I knew the property tax was due soon, so I waited. When Mom wrote that check, I made sure that I had a letter to mail as well and I took both out to the box. Only my letter went in. I ripped up the property tax bill and then I stole the town report when it came out a couple of months later. It wasn’t a great plan, but I was just a kid.
The collector ended up calling mom to talk about the delinquent taxes. She was miffed about the interest, of course, but she just paid that off too. Like I said, we weren’t poor.
I was getting desperate by that point. I couldn’t destroy the house and I couldn’t get the government to take it from my parents.
I had to resort to the unthinkable—I went to the library and I did research.
From what I read, we didn’t have a haunting. The type of activity we were seeing almost had to be demonic, and that’s not associated with a place, but a person. That meant that one of my parents had a demon attached to them. I kept thinking about my Grandpap and the way the house attacked him when he threatened Mom. So it seemed logical that Mom was the one who the demon was attached to. Also, Grandpap was Dad’s father, and it seemed like the demon would have stopped short of killing Grandpap if it was more aligned with Dad than Mom. Honestly, though, I had no way to be sure. All I was sure about was that I didn’t think that it was attached to me. For one, the activity kept going even when I was away. You remember, Dad’s hand was broken while I was in Raleigh. The more I thought about it, things seemed to happen around my mother instead of to her. Still, I had to find out for sure before I could decide what to do.
I got them alone, one at a time.
I waited until I was off from school and then I hid my Dad’s lunch. He couldn’t find it when he was on his way out in the morning, so he figured that the house had taken it. That was a pretty normal thing. I had also taken his money, so I knew he couldn’t buy lunch. In a rush, I knew what he would say—he would ask Mom to bring him something.
I volunteered for the duty.
All I had to do was make him lunch and ride my bike down to the office where he went between service calls. I brought lunch for him and me as well. It was easy to talk him into letting me eat with him. We sat at the picnic table behind the office. It smelled like oil, but it was a good lunch. When he was mostly done, smiling over the sandwich I brought, I introduced my idea.
“Remember when you used to talk about moving south,” I said.
“I talked about that?”
“When Dallas was in the playoffs, you said how much you liked it there, remember?”
“That’s not really south. It’s more west.”
“But you lived there?”
“I did, for a while. It was about as warm as here in the winter, but we didn’t get those evil storms off the coast. In the summer, it was like being under a broiler. That sun would try to cook the skin right off your bones. Still, I liked it a lot. And the football was raucous. Not like here.”
I said the next line with him. It was something he said a lot.
“There’s no football team to root for here,” we said together.
Then, alone, he practically spat when he said, “Carolina Panthers.”
Dad used to love to hate the Panthers. When the team was first started, he went to a couple of games and then something must have gone wrong. He hated them before they even finished their first season. For Dad, football was one of his biggest joys. Living near a team that he respected would have been heaven.
“Your company sends people to work in Dallas sometimes, right?” I asked, already knowing the answer. That’s why he had been in Dallas years before—he was training for the job that he had now. They regularly shipped people back and forth, but people with families were given latitude to stay put if they wanted. Dad’s long tenure in North Carolina was his choice.
“Your mom couldn’t let go of that house,” he said. “She inherited it and it’s never going to be worth as much as she thinks it is.”
He was right that she overvalued the house, but I didn’t think that she was as attached to it as he thought.
“What about the Sevilles? I heard they’re getting their mortgage and then some.”
The Sevilles lived a few houses down. Their place had been upgraded quite a bit compared to our place. All the houses on the block were built at the same time, but some of them had been improved over the years. The Sevilles probably had the best one around with two extra bedrooms and a big kitchen. Mom always said that they had ruined the classic lines of their house. Nobody else agreed. I was making up the part about them renting it out for more than their mortgage. They had rented it when Mr. Seville was relocated, but someone told me that they weren’t m
aking back enough to cover the loan.
“That’s true,” Dad said. “That’s a good point. That would be all profit for us, minus what we paid for in Dallas. Prices were low in Dallas in the right neighborhood. We could actually be better off.”
“I wonder if they have horses out there,” I said. Mom always talked about living somewhere she could afford to keep a horse. There were places around us, but she always found an excuse why they were no good.
Dad gave me a sideways look—I think he figured out that I was playing him, but he didn’t call me out on it. He liked the idea too much so he decided to think of it as his own.
“I’m going to talk to her,” he said, finishing his sandwich. He stood up and went back inside.
# # #
“Let’s walk,” Amber said.
She rolled up onto her feet and put a hand out so Ricky could get up too. They brushed sand off of their clothes and then started to walk down towards the crashing surf. Ricky thought he understood why she wanted to move around. The story was getting too uncomfortable for her to remember and that was making her antsy. He was beginning to feel the same way. The story wasn’t particularly scary yet, but there was something looming in it.
Whatever plagued the house and her family, it seemed like it was watching them from out in the darkness. Maybe it had been called by Amber relating her tale, and maybe it was always there, trailing just behind Amber.
Ricky wanted to tell her that he wouldn’t let anything happen to her, but a part of him also wanted to simply run away and leave her and her problems behind. That notion died a quick death in his head. In a few short months, she had become important to Ricky. Whatever was still following her, it was going to have to deal with him as well.
“This is the longest story ever,” she said. “I can’t believe I’m telling you the whole thing.”
“No, it’s the right thing to do. Context,” he said.
“I guess I’m trying to explain it to you in a way that doesn’t make me sound like the bad guy.”
“Amber, you were a kid. Come on.”
“I’m done making excuses for myself, Ricky. If I want to feel guilty about what I did, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
“Yeah,” he said with a sigh. “Okay.”
They had seen the horses several times, but the shape looming in the dark still surprised Ricky. He stopped in his tracks. Amber moved forward, speaking in a soft voice as she held out her hand and touched the horse on the nose. It jerked its head back from her fingers, but held its ground. Amber turned her body to the side a bit so she wasn’t squared up with the horse and it seemed to relax a little. It let her touch its face.
“You should see him in the daylight,” she said. “He’s beautiful—dark black and shiny. I’ve known him since he was a little colt.”
“That’s amazing. I didn’t know they had wild horses here.”
“They don’t. I mean, technically, they’re not really wild. They were castaways from Spanish explorers I think. That means that they’re feral. They escaped domestication, but they still have roots in animals that worked with people.”
“Is that why they’re so tame?” Ricky asked.
“I have no idea,” Amber said. The horse nosed around near her pocket, looking for more treats, and Amber laughed. At the sound, the animal bolted back towards his herd. Amber stood there, watching them trot off into the night.
“There’s a bench over here,” she said. “If you’re not too cold.”
“I’m from Maine. This is t-shirt weather for me.”
“Really? You looked a little chilly earlier.”
“Yeah, actually. I was trying to be a tough guy but this isn’t my warmest jacket.”
“Let’s go back to the car then. It’s not far.”
They walked side by side along the edge of the wet sand until they reached an access road. It led them back to the car. When they climbed inside, Ricky was relieved that Amber didn’t start the engine right away. He didn’t want their conversation to be over yet. It felt like they still had important things to talk about.
# # #
So, Dad talked to Mom. He started out sweet and then she began picking apart his plan so he turned nasty. They fought and the house got angry. I thought I smelled gas and I interrupted one of their fights to tell them so. Dad checked out the stove and said I was crazy. Mom was the one who went to the laundry room and figured out that the dryer was leaking. We had to wait out on the lawn while the fire department opened all the windows and made sure that the house was safe.
I wasn’t surprised that Mom blamed me and assigned me the punishment of taking the laundry to the laundromat the next time. She instinctively knew that I was behind my father’s idea to move us away. I underestimated how much she needed to stay with the house. I knew it was tied to her, but she was tied to it just as fiercely.
To my surprise, Dad kept working on her. It took weeks, but he convinced her that it could be possible to have a better life in Texas. Her family got involved at that point. Nobody wanted her to move away, but several of them were willing to live with it if it meant that the house would be up for grabs. They wouldn’t own it, of course, but her sister and a couple of her first cousins wanted the opportunity to rent the place.
I should have known that something big was coming. None of it made much sense. Mom inherited the place, but it wasn’t very old and it wasn’t like it had been in the family very long. Before she died, her aunt had owned the house for seven years. Before that, some other family had lived it in for twenty-some years, having bought the place brand new. So, none of Mom’s relatives should have had a very strong attachment to the place, and yet they were all lining up to rent it.
It was all too strange.
Dad made his preparations. He arranged for a transfer and took a trip down to Dallas to scout various neighborhoods. Mom and I mostly stayed home. The one time we all went as family, we came back and our house was trashed. Furniture was knocked over, food was spread all over the kitchen, and sewage had backed up into the bath tub. There was no talk about a break in and my parents didn’t attempt to make an insurance claim or anything. We all knew what had happened. The house threw a tantrum. After that, Dad traveled alone.
Mom kept quiet about the move. I thought that she had changed her mind, but then I realized that she was just being sneaky. We were grocery shopping one time and I overheard her at a payphone talking to someone about the trip. She was trying to find someone to drive her car down there so she could have it in Texas. From the sound of it, she was interviewing someone by phone. They didn’t pan out.
“I’m not driving there myself. It would be hot as a sauna in that car all the way down there. You know my air conditioning doesn’t work well enough for that,” she said after she hung up and saw me listening in.
“Why take it at all then?” I asked. “Why not find something better when we’re down there.”
“You need to learn that we don’t just throw something away when it’s inconvenient, Miss,” she told me. “Being dependable is a rare attribute. Value it.”
I couldn’t figure out what she was talking about. She just got through saying that her car wasn’t dependable, but then lectured me on the value of being dependable. It didn’t make sense at all. That night, feeling the house breathe around me, I began to wonder about that car. What if the malevolent spirit that inhabited the house could somehow transfer itself into another object. It was possible that the house was only pretending to be upset because it had other plans. When we left, it might somehow come along for the ride.
I don’t think I slept at all that night. I couldn’t bear the thought that we might carry our problems with us. All that effort had to pay off.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to worry. We never made the move, so the demon that was in our house never had to squeeze itself down into a car. Everything fell apart that summer, weeks before we intended on moving.
# # #
“I guess we sh
ould head back,” Amber said. “It will be dawn by the time we’re back home. I can take a quick nap and get cleaned up before we meet the others for breakfast.”
“Wait, what about the end of the story?” Ricky asked.
“It’s a long trip. I’ll tell you on the way.”
“You want me to drive?”
She opened her door before she answered. “Yes, actually. I would.”
They crossed paths in front of the car’s hood. Amber lowered her head and slid around him. Ricky paused for a moment before he went to the driver’s door and got in.
“Don’t adjust my mirrors,” she said.
“Sorry,” he said. “Doesn’t work that way. I’ve taken the responsibility to pilot this vehicle, and safety is my top priority. Would you mind buckling your seatbelt?”
“It is.”
“Please double check.”
She reached down and found it unbuckled. Rolling her eyes, she snapped it back into place.
“Why…”
“Magic,” Ricky said.
“I’ve never liked you less than right now,” Amber said.
When Ricky laughed, she laughed too.
He started the engine.
# # #
We packed everything up. Mom held a little meeting with her relatives to decide who should be allowed to rent the house. Everyone interested gathered in the living room. Mom didn’t say much. I got the feeling that it wasn’t really her decision. She was letting the house assess all of them so it could decide who would move in.
I actually had a glimmer of hope at that realization.
If the house was so concerned about who would be living there, maybe I was wrong about it wanting to come with us.
Mom finished the interview and said that she wanted to think about her decision. The relatives didn’t like that idea. They told her that they would all abide by whatever she said, but they wanted to know right away. After all, we were only weeks away from moving and everyone knew that she was going to demand rent right away. Some of them had leases that they had to get out of in order to afford taking over our house.