by Ike Hamill
Once the mice were all relocated, she moved the shredded paper that had served as their nest. Covered up, she imagined that the mini-mice were much more comfortable. It wouldn’t last long. She wasn’t a cruel person, but she didn’t have any place in her heart for rodents. Kate made sure the door was unlocked and stepped through the side door out into the cold sun. She walked across the lawn to the edge of the woods before she turned the container upside down.
“Sorry, mice.”
She didn’t look at them on the ground for fear that they might gain her sympathy. Instead, she jogged back to the warmth of the kitchen and shut the door tight.
With the dryer pulled away from the wall she tried to solve the mystery. There was a hole in the exhaust pipe, but that couldn’t be the problem. Still, she made sure that there was no lint clogging the exhaust and found a roll of foil tape to patch the hole. While she worked, she ran an empty load through the washer, infused with vinegar. The sound and antiseptic smell gave her comfort. It brought a little life to the laundry room.
The inside of the dryer was completely intact. There was no way for a mouse to get in or out unless the door had been slightly ajar.
“That has to be it,” she whispered.
Kate stood up at the sound of someone moving around in the front part of the house. She started to move in that direction, eager to consult with someone else over the mystery of the mice. About halfway down the hall, she realized that it wouldn’t matter. It had to be June, and she wouldn’t come down to look at the dryer. From what Auggie said, June took her laundry into town.
“Hello!” Kate called as she opened the door to the front room. She stifled the urge to knock.
The room was empty.
# # # #
Kate looked everywhere, even stepping out to the front porch so she could verify that no car had pulled up. A cold wind blew across the porch. Kate hugged her arms close and shivered.
“I heard something,” she said to herself. “The door was unlocked. Either someone is here or that furnace has gotten up and started walking around the cellar.”
To be fair, a couple of other possibilities occurred to her. Maybe the air in the pipes had migrated to the upstairs loop. Auggie was pretty good at making things work but he wasn’t all that good at fixing things correctly. It would be completely in character for him to get the heat going in the kitchen while moving the problem to a different part of the house. Maybe that problem came with unexpected noises.
Still, it wasn’t out of the question that one of the other guests had arrived. Auggie’s Uncle Tommy had come by cab one year. He could be upstairs right now.
Kate went back inside.
After closing the door, she waited for a full minute, listening to the sounds of the house. June’s electric heat clicked and then ticked as it came on. The refrigerator gurgled. Deep in the house, a motor or pump ran—that sound probably belonged to the water pump. The washing machine must be on its final rinse cycle.
“Hello?” she called, turning her eyes to the stairs. There was no answer.
Kate called one more time as she began to climb and then decided that she wouldn’t do it again. She didn’t get spooked—she just didn’t—but the sound of her own voice echoing in the empty house was a little creepy. If someone was going to answer, they would have already. There was no need to keep calling.
Upstairs, she remembered what Auggie had said about their first night there. The girls had been spooked by something that they heard, which turned out to be their own cousin, Gus. More accurately, Millie had been spooked. Isla was more like her mother. She was more curious than anything when she heard or saw something unexpected.
Auggie had argued that there was no need to change the sheets in that first room. He was probably right. With the beds made, nobody would know the difference. The upstairs bath was in pretty good shape, too. Kate didn’t know why Auggie was always held responsible to “redd up” the place every year, but as long as it was his responsibility, she was going to make sure that he did it well. She moved down the hall, opening the door to the next room and inspecting that one as well. As usual, he hadn’t done anything about the dust under the bed, but it was probably fine.
The window rattled in its frame. Kate saw the problem. The storm window wasn’t down all the way. She forced it into place and then closed the antique window as tight as it would go. It looked down onto the north side of the house. That yard was strange and lonely. The shadows down there had the look of a forbidden place. She was probably just projecting.
In the house where she had grown up, the north side was dominated by bamboo and poison ivy. Her father had always warned her and her sister from playing down there.
“It’s all snakes, rashes, and thorns out there,” he said. They had grown up believing every word he said. Even after he had gotten an excavator out there to dig up all the bamboo, the girls had still never played on that side of the house. By that point, they had developed their own aversion to it. Her sister didn’t like the moss that pervaded the grass. Kate didn’t like the smell of it.
It reminded her of…
“Snakes, rashes, and thorns,” she whispered.
Somewhere in the house, a door slammed.
Kate spun.
# # # #
Systematically, Kate searched the house. It took a long time. There were a few locked doors. One, she knew about—The door to Uncle Tommy’s room was always locked. As far as Kate knew, even Auggie had never been in there. The man was strange and private and everyone in the family seemed to respect that.
She knocked. There was no light coming from underneath. Kate was satisfied that there was nobody home back there.
“Uncle Tommy?” she called. She couldn’t even imagine what she would say if he opened the door. There was no way in hell that he would recognize her. The first time she had met Tommy, he had barely seemed to recognize his nephew, Auggie.
Kate had remembered standing in the kitchen, with her hand out like a dog trained to shake, waiting for Uncle Tommy to acknowledge her and trying not to laugh. Auggie had described him as such a formidable presence. To her eyes, he looked like a cross between the Skipper from Gilligan’s Island and Robin Williams. To be fair, the Robin Williams part was probably just all the hair poking out from the top of his shirt.
Tommy had stared at her with cold, hard eyes and didn’t give off even a hint of, “Nice to meet you,” or even, “Welcome to the family.” But aside from the fact that he wasn’t at all nice to her, his face told a much different story. His face was creased with happy lines curving up and away from his eyes and smiling creases around his mouth. He never took her hand, but he looked like maybe he had just shared a joke with someone in the next room and then had received bad news when he saw her.
Later, Auggie had said, “I told you—he’s a hardass. He doesn’t like anyone, as far as we know. At least he didn’t say anything insulting to you. That’s about as close to a compliment as anyone ever gets from Uncle Tommy.”
“Why do you put up with him?” Kate had asked. “Why don’t you ask him to stop coming to your family New Year’s Eve party?”
That was before she knew about the contract. It was before Kate understood how invested all these people were in Mumma’s house.
Kate was still standing there in front of Uncle Tommy’s door. She smiled when she heard a creak and a footstep from down the hall.
“I’ve got you now,” she whispered to herself.
Old Uncle Tommy didn’t frighten her. He was just a sour old man and she had dealt with plenty of those. It would be fun to find out his secret hiding places and report them back to Auggie. Maybe she could help deflate some of the mysterious facade that Tommy had constructed in Auggie’s head.
# # # #
Kate had never been through this new door. When she had conducted her thorough investigation of the house, it had been locked. She was sure of that. Now, it stood slightly ajar, just begging her to come in.
In her
family, growing up, Kate was the one who would walk away from a horror movie. It wasn’t because they frightened her. It was because they always pissed her off with their illogical behavior. There was always some scene where a logical person would never in their life step out into the night because of a strange sound in the distance. Or a group of able-bodied young people would split up into easily-chopped-up individuals.
Kate knew a deathtrap when she saw one.
She used her toe to push the door open and smiled as it creaked. The door banged to a stop. Three stairs led down to a small landing and then the stairs turned a tight corner and continued down. Kate was in the wing, standing on the red and gold Oriental runner. In any other house, she wouldn’t hesitate to find out where the stairs went. Here, she owed it to herself—the younger, horror-movie-hating self—to think this through.
This was the second floor of the wing. The hallway was long enough that she should be at the far end of the building. There were no windows, but based on the jog in the hallway, she had to be pretty close to the north wall. Snakes, rashes, and thorns should be on the other side of the door, not a weird set of stairs that doubled back.
“Uncle Tommy? Did you go down there?”
Kate looked up while she waited for an answer. There was a light mounted over the door, so there had to be a switch somewhere. There was no reason for her to be staring down into pooling shadows, wondering what was around the corner.
The switch was behind the door.
“Of all places,” she whispered.
Keeping her feet planted on the red and gold Oriental runner, Kate leaned on the doorknob so she could reach around the door. The switch was one of those heavy, old switches that snapped upwards like it resented being engaged.
The overhead light warmed up slowly. It didn’t want to be here anymore than she did.
“I do want to be here,” she told herself. She wanted to be the one who figured out the mystery. Auggie talked about how his Uncle Tommy would come and go so inexplicably. His truck would pull up, they would see him messing around out there, and then he would be gone. A minute or two later, they would hear a door slam upstairs and then feet pounding around behind Tommy’s door. Nobody knew how he pulled off the trick. Kate was pretty sure that these stairs had something to do with it.
Kate reached a hand up over her head. Her shadow obediently appeared on the wall below. The shadow wasn’t fully black though, which is what Kate was expecting. There was another light source coming from the lower part of the stairs.
She wasn’t descending into complete darkness.
“Okay,” she said, shaking her head. “Stupid woman abandons reason and goes exploring after her husband leaves her alone in the haunted house. I have become everything that I despise.”
She started her descent.
# # # #
By the time she reached the landing, she had her phone in her hand. It didn’t get any signal, of course, but it had a flashlight and she could at least send Auggie an email over WiFi if she had to.
“Dear Auggie,” it would say, “I thought I heard someone banging around in the depths of your childhood house so I started chasing noises, found a door that was magically unlocked, and now I’m trapped in a coffin with a skeleton that resembles the Skipper from Gilligan’s Island. Wish the girls a Merry Christmas for me tomorrow.”
Kate smiled as she looked at the four stairs and the lower door. There was nothing sinister around the corner, and the lower door was probably locked. Taking one more look to make sure that the upper door was still wide open, Kate descended.
The knob on the lower door was one of those fancy, oval-shaped ones with metal bumps. It was warm in her hand.
“Huh,” Kate said. The upper knob, and everything else in the wing, had been fairly cold. The door opened away from her. It seemed unusual, but made sense considering how close the bottom stair was to the door. It could hardly work the other way.
The warmth of the little room crept up around her before the door was even fully open. At the far end—which wasn’t too far—there was a small square window set so low into the wall that the bottom trim was flush with the floor. It was the only place the window would fit. The ceiling sloped down to almost the top of the window.
Her father would have called this room a “munchkin hole.” In her childhood home, she and her sister had made a munchkin hole in the closet under the eaves. With a lamp and some pillows, they had sat in that stuffy place for hours, reading books and writing in their journals.
This munchkin hole was much nicer. The long winter light streamed through the square window. There was a comfy couch on the left wall and an antique TV on the right. It was one of those old floor models with a wooden cabinet.
As Kate stepped into the room, she realized the old TV might be the source of the warmth. There was a blizzard of static on the glass tube screen. The thing must have been on for years.
Kate stepped down onto the blue and green rug—soft and welcoming—and hunched over as the ceiling encroached. She tried to push in the big switch on the front of the TV. She assumed that it controlled the power. The switch flipped, but it didn’t have any impact on the disposition of the device. The static still rolled.
Kate tried the volume knob next. Clockwise, the speaker began to emit white noise. Counterclockwise, the noise fell away but the TV remained on.
“I’m stumped,” she said.
She wasn’t, really. There was one thing that would certainly work. She pulled the corner of the TV, sliding the heavy beast away from the wall.
“Ha!” Kate said, barking out a laugh. It wasn’t even plugged into the wall. Instead of a plug, the power cord had been stripped and twisted directly to the ends of a cloth wire that came out of a hole in the floor.
“I can’t believe this place didn’t burn down years ago,” she said, shaking her head.
Before sitting down on the couch, she lifted the cushions to look for mice. After finding the nest in the dryer, and hearing Auggie’s story about mice in one of the beds, she was paranoid. It was clean.
She took a seat and fiddled with her phone. Kate pointed it, taking pictures of the window, TV, door, and couch. That covered it. Those were all the features of the space. In the drafty old house, she had to admit that this little munchkin hole might be the coziest place. Somehow, it felt even more inhabited than the front room where June and Gus were squatting. It was probably the warmth from the TV. That warm, dusty smell reminded her of childhood winters, leaning on the radiator and looking out at the falling snow.
It would be a good place for a nap, but if this were a horror movie, that would certainly be when the killer tracked her down.
She hit the button on her phone, sending the email with all the pictures off to Auggie.
Before she moved to the door, she bent over and took one more. She still couldn’t believe that the TV had been hardwired all these years and nobody had noticed. It had to be making a sizable impact on the power bill.
Back through the door and ascending the stairs, Kate wasn’t surprised at all to hear someone moving around somewhere in the house. She still hadn’t tracked the ghost, or Uncle Tommy, or whatever was making all the noises. She left the light on and the door to the stairs open, knowing that she would be bringing Auggie there later. Kate practically ran down the hall towards the source of the noise.
At least it was consistent this time.
# # # #
Running down the stairs to the front room, Kate stopped abruptly.
She tried to erase the shock that must be on her face and replace it with a bright smile.
“Oh!” June said, putting her hand to her chest. “I didn’t think anyone was home.”
Her hands were loaded with grocery bags. Kate moved fast, crossing the room and reaching to help June carry her bags.
“Sorry to startle you! I got in this morning and then Auggie wanted to take the girls and Gus into town to get some last minute things. He said that you wouldn’t be h
ome until this afternoon.”
June looked slightly puzzled and then finally had a hand free. June threw one arm around Kate’s shoulder and gave her two hard slaps on the back. For June, this was a her idea of a warm hug. Kate leaned in and gave her sister-in-law a peck on the cheek to complete the transaction.
“Where are we headed?” Kate asked, gesturing with the bags.
“Oh!” June said, laughing. “We’re just going to have to fit things in where we can. Actually, maybe you can take a few things back to the big kitchen. I was thinking I could keep them cool out on the porch, but the refrigerator back there would make more sense. You never know when the coyotes are going to get bold.”
“You have coyotes?”
June nodded. She squeezed her bags on the counter and then took the ones from Kate. So far, Kate had moved them all of three feet—she was really helping.
“There’s a pack that patrols these woods. In the warm months, when the windows are open, we can hear them yipping and calling in the night. It’s so spooky.”
June raised her shoulders and shivered with a big smile on her face.
“I just love that kind of thing. It’s like when you hear the train whistle late at night from the crossing over on the Crank Road?”
Kate nodded along. June rarely seemed so excited. It was nice to see.
“There’s something so chilling and homey about it. I’m not going to miss much about this place, but that’s one thing I will never forget, you know?”
June squeezed an admirable amount of stuff into her tiny fridge. There were a couple of things that would never go. She handed Kate a plastic bag that was big enough and heavy enough that it had to contain tomorrow’s turkey.
“Be right back,” Kate said. She disappeared through the door and jogged down the long hall to the big kitchen. On the way, she realized that she should have waited to see what else June had to go out back. She was always trying to impress her sister-in-law and she had no idea why. This time, it was like she wanted to prove her worth by delivering the turkey to the safety of the big fridge—in a place that June couldn’t, or wouldn’t, go.