by Ike Hamill
When Dean found out, he was livid. That might have been when he first considered getting rid of Trudy.
“I’m stalling,” June whispered to herself. Her hand was still in the same position, halfway to the doorknob. Maybe the point of the test was to see if she could face her fear in order to put the family first.
If that was true, she was failing.
She was afraid of Dean’s room.
June reached out and turned the knob.
# # # #
The door swung open to reveal a blue glow coming through the window, and leaking around the shade. In real life, there would have been few furnishings left in Dean’s room—a bed frame without a mattress, a desk, and a chair. This was the older version of Dean’s room. This was back when Dean’s room had an oval rag rug in the middle of the floor. One wall was covered with posters of women in bikinis. Another wall featured shiny cars crouching in predatory poses.
June flipped on the switch and soft orange light spilled down from the overhead fixture. She expected to see Dean stretched out on his bed on his side, reading a magazine. When she thought of him, that’s the way she pictured him. He never read books or watched TV. It was always magazines with Dean, and they were often the type that had women with even less clothes than the ones in his posters.
Trudy always told June to stay away from Dean’s room.
“He’s a creep, June,” she would say. “Just because we’re related to him doesn’t mean that he’s not a creep.”
“He’s never done anything, has he?” June had asked.
“For every creep, there’s always a first time,” Trudy had said.
June stepped across the threshold and the scent hit her. Dean’s body odor had been pervasive. The only things worse, in June’s opinion, were the three different horrible colognes that he always wore to try to cover it up. The combination of sweat and spray was unimaginable.
June nearly gagged as she took in a breath of the stink. He wasn’t here, but the odor suggested that he had been fairly recently. She might not have much time. She couldn’t afford to stand there, choking. She started under the bed, throwing up the comforter to look at the dust bunnies. Dean had cherished old ammo cases, buying them from the surplus store whenever he found them. They were waterproof and he could fit a lock on them. If he had stashed the poison somewhere in his room, it was probably in one of those.
His closet was even smellier, but it was mostly the body spray odor in there. She could deal with that as she pushed his shirts to the side and then pulled down an ammo case from the shelf.
This one wasn’t locked. June opened it and flipped through the magazines and the small stack of cash and a handful of coins. He would have kept the poison in some kind of sealed container. She didn’t see anything likely in there.
She put his ammo case back up on the shelf.
June took a step back to asses the room with fresh eyes. There might be something in his desk, but she doubted it. Dean would have chosen somewhere really hidden. In fact, there was a good chance that he hadn’t even stored it in his room. June folded her arms, recognizing that she was leaning towards the idea of getting out of there. That instinct was powerful, but it wasn’t rooted in a desire to seek the truth. If she fled, it would be out of fear, not because she really thought that the poison was somewhere else.
She moved towards the closet again—there was something behind the stack of shoes at the back. The shoes were too perfectly piled, like they were trying to hide something. When she began to throw them to the side, she knew she had something. There was tiny door there. It was like the one in Jules’s room—it would lead to the triangular space below the roof and outside the half-wall of one of the adjacent rooms. It was almost like a tiny attic space.
June pried with her fingernails, trying to pull the door out. Accidentally bumping the bottom of the little door, she discovered its secret. She could press on the bottom and the top tilted out from the frame. She removed the little panel and saw two ammo cases with locks.
“Ah!” June whispered, smiling. She pulled out the cases and set them on the rag rug behind herself.
Something bumped in the hall and she froze. Her eyes were locked on the doorway, expecting to see Dean come around the corner and catch her in the act. She finally let out her breath after a few seconds. He wasn’t there, but she had to remember the smell. Dean could come back at any moment.
# # # #
The locks on the ammo cases were the kind where a number could be dialed in with little wheels. June was just about to try his birthday as the combination when she noticed the lock on the other case. All the numbers were lined up exactly right except the first one. It was slightly askew.
Dean had been lazy, and he had probably been in and out of the cases on a daily basis. She rolled the first digit one way and then the other. Snapping it down to the next digit, she felt the mechanism click. The lock opened.
June smiled again.
She threw open the case and began to search the contents. It was, as far as she could tell, holding exactly what it was intended to. The case was full of boxes of bullets.
The second lock was locked in the same lazy way. All the digits were correct except the first one. June rolled it until the lock disengaged and she could open the case. Again, she was disappointed. It was his case of vice. There were condoms, weed, pills, and a small, unopened, bottle of tequila. Trudy had been poisoned with a concoction that Dean had distilled from the leaves of the black cherry tree out back. June was almost certain that the poison wasn’t hidden in either of these cases.
There was more space back through the tiny doorway. She knew that she could fit through—she had been through the door in Jules’s closet a million times when she was younger. Jules had made a little clubhouse on the other side of the house. In the winter, when the roof was insulated with a foot of snow, his little clubhouse had been a great place to hide and read a book. Jules had lined the interior with tongue-and-groove pine that he had found out in the barn.
By comparison, Dean’s little attic wasn’t decorated at all. She could see a couple of boards on the joists and then insulation below. June took a deep breath before she lowered down and tried to look into the darkness.
Backing out, she jumped up and pulled down the orange bandana that Dean had pinned over his light fixture. With that additional light, she was able to see under the eaves. There was another box back there.
“That’s it,” she whispered. Certainty filled her up. She knelt down and crawled towards the tiny door, locking her eyes on the target as her body blocked out the light from the room. Taking a deep breath and bracing herself against the insidious cold of the eaves, she began to wriggle through the hatch to the unfinished space.
When she pressed down on the joists below to raise up her hips and slide them over the lip of the doorway, the light from the room was snuffed. She was alone in that dark winter hole that was both inside and outside the house. The darkness had gathered around her, but she was so close to her goal. Stopping was impossible to contemplate.
The wood beneath her creaked as she put her knee down. It was unused to supporting weight. June tried to picture which room was below her and discovered that she couldn’t decipher the geography of this place.
Working as a cleaner, she had been inside dozens, maybe a hundred, houses. They all made perfect sense. Short hallways led to rooms. Living rooms opened up to dining rooms. Every inch of a house could be mapped in one’s head without confusion. But June had grown up in Mumma’s house, where rooms had been added and subtracted haphazardly. In Mumma’s house, outside and inside dimensions didn’t necessarily add up. Doors didn’t always lead where they had led the day before. Mumma’s house defied the constraints of its architecture.
She still couldn’t see anything, even though her feet must have pulled through the doorway. The rafters above her and joists below her seemed to be compressing the space. She could feel them closing in, macerating with wooden teeth. Her h
and, reaching for the last ammunition case in the darkness, found something warm and sticky. Her skin burned at the contact.
Chapter 29 : Kate
“IS SHE GOING TO be okay?” Kate asked Auggie. She whispered over Millie’s head. Kate still had her arms draped around her kids, holding them close to herself. With her eyes, she gestured down to Allison, who was still slumped in her chair.
Auggie shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess the shock was too much.”
“That was her son, right? She was the only one who believed that he was still alive, right? Shouldn’t she be happy?”
“Huh!” Jules laughed, overhearing.
Kate raised her eyebrows at Auggie, asking him to explain.
Auggie licked his lips and looked down while he prepared his answer. When he looked back up at her, his eyes couldn’t stay locked on hers.
“It’s complicated. First, we have to assume that since he’s here, but not really here, he must be dead, right?”
“Auggie,” she started.
He put up a hand to ask for her patience while he continued.
“Second, it sounds like maybe Horace is over there in the darkness. Andrew chose Horace over her, so she probably still feels betrayed by that.”
Kate looked at Allison’s dejected form again and then back to her husband. She shook her head.
“I’m not following. Horace was her brother-in-law, right? Didn’t he die?”
“Technically, Mom never married Horace, but he was, supposedly, my father.”
“Your…”
“And, yes, he died, but the horse was born soon after. It became clear, I guess, that Horace was reincarnated as a horse.”
“Oh, bullshit, Auggie,” Kate said, putting one hand over Millie’s ear as she whispered the bad word.
Auggie shrugged. “After everything you’ve seen tonight,” he said, spreading his hands to the room around them. “That isn’t even the most outlandish piece of information you’ve received, is it?”
Kate frowned at him.
“Obviously, nobody guessed that the horse was Horace until later. It came as a shock to Allison, and she demanded that Andrew get rid of him. She drove him away. That division might be what caused her to fail the test to claim her title. You never know.”
“So her son, and your father reincarnated as a… You know, you never told me that Horace was your father. You said that your mother was seeing him, but I always got the impression that you didn’t really know who your father was. This whole thing, Auggie…”
Kate looked to the door. She vividly remembered how they had been called to the dining room. She had endured the terrible vision of the baby while her kids were apparently battling a rabid fox intent on eating them. Then, it had felt like an earthquake was going to level the house. Running to the dining room had seemed like the only course of action. If forced to admit it, Kate would say that the house seemed to want them all to congregate, and it hadn’t settled down until they had.
But the door to the dining room was still open, and June had successfully exited. Maybe it was time to revisit the idea that they should stick around for this madness. Auggie had given up the pretense that he believed in logic. Maybe the onus was upon her to extract herself and her children.
Kate unwound her arms from around Millie and Isla.
“I’m going to step into that hall. If everything is fine, then I’m taking the girls and leaving,” she said.
Auggie nodded. “While the house is busy with June. That is not a terrible idea. I have to say that it seems a bit preoccupied with her. And, honestly, I think the shaking subsided when she was drawn in here even though she wasn’t the last one in.”
Kate shook her head, dismissing most of what he had said. She stood up and rounded the table, resisting the urge to put a comforting hand on Allison’s shoulder as she passed. The woman was in pain, but Kate didn’t know her well enough to guess if the gesture would be well received.
At the doorway, she took a breath and paused. The hall looked normal. The lights had burned with feverish intensity when the house was shaking, but now they appeared fine. Her foot crossed the threshold to the hall. Goosebumps ran up her leg before the cold fire burned her toes. She jerked her foot back from the sensation. The real pain didn’t set in until her foot was safely back in the dining room. The feeling began to return to her foot and then the pain throbbed like a burning tide. Kate doubled over, clawing at her shoelaces. It felt like her foot had been dipped in lava and then frozen in ice.
At the end of the table, she could hear Travis cackling at her misery.
Before she could get her foot free from her shoe, the painful waves began to recede. She caught her breath and then exhaled through pursed lips. The gentle pressure of her shoe was soothing on her toes. If she took it off now, she might assault the skin even more. Besides, she had no desire to see the damage associated with that pain.
Without tying her shoe again, Kate limped back around to her chair and sat down.
“Are you okay?” Auggie asked.
“Shut up,” she whispered.
“What did I do?”
Kate studied him closely to see if he was really that ignorant. He looked away with shame.
“I thought this was all cute, Auggie. I thought it was a fun little superstition that you and your family played at every year. You knew how dangerous it was and you let us come here. You let our children come to this place.”
“You weren’t supposed to be here,” he said. “It was the storm.”
“We could have gone home. You suggested that it would be nice to spend New Year’s together for once.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this. This was the year we were going to change things,” he said. He still wouldn’t look at her.
Kate put her arms around the girls.
She could feel her pulse throbbing in her toe.
Chapter 30 : June
AS SOON AS SHE touched the cool metal of the ammo case, the burning in her fingers began to subside. It felt like a chemical burn—her flesh being melted by whatever comprised the gooey substance. Somehow, the ammo case was the antidote. She stretched and strained, trying to get her fingers around the handle so she could drag the thing out of the darkness.
Her hand plunged deeper into the wet mess that had enveloped the case. It sucked at her wrist and then forearm as she reached. June turned her face away. The thought that the substance might touch her face was unbearable. She would let go of the case and abandon the quest if that’s what it took. Mercifully, before her elbow delved into the goo, she found the handle and latched onto it.
Pushing against a joist with her other hand, she dragged it back.
The sticky goo pulled at her hand. The metal box was trapped in the vacuum. She was a monkey gripping a chunk of salt—her fist too big to fit through the opening with its prize.
It tore as she tugged. In the dark, she felt its grip diminishing as hers remained tight.
The goo threw out fresh tendrils, slapping against her arm and inflicting fresh pain.
June felt her feet push back through the tiny doorway into Dean’s closet and the light began to seep through. She jerked and tugged, breaking the slimy grip that the attic had on Dean’s ammo case.
An insane, triumphant laugh began to bubble up through her chest and June clamped her teeth shut to keep it inside. She couldn’t afford to gloat—she wasn’t yet free.
Once her knees were through the hole, she spread her legs, bracing her thighs against the closet wall so she could use her legs to help pull. The case was straight out in front of her and June could see the mess of sucking slime that still had her arm trapped. A purple tongue of it was wrapped around her wrist. She saw it pulsing with its effort. While she tried to liberate the case, it was still trying to drag her in.
June got her shoulders through the doorway and braced her arm against the frame. She pulled even harder with slow, steady pressure. When something in her shoulder popped and strained, she re
alized that tugging was a bad idea.
The purple tongue released, sliding back into the blob. Her hand was free. Only the goo was holding the case, and the leading edge of it was already exposed. With a final pop, the thing came free and June fell backwards.
The attic space was empty—the goo had disappeared. Or, maybe it had settled back into the camouflage of the scattered insulation. She didn’t care, as long as she was free. June shut the little door on the crawlspace and then dragged the final ammo case out to the rag rug, with the rest. Until that point, she hadn’t allowed herself to consider that she might have been wrong. She might have just risked life and limb in order to find another case of porn.
None of the digits on the lock were askew. She memorized the number before she reached to roll the first number to the next position.
“Wait,” she whispered. The numbers, if they were like a date, would be…
“February seventeenth. If I just make the year double zero, then…”
The lock popped open. She fished the hasp through and tossed back the lid.
Packed in between bags of dried leaves, she found a mason jar with a metal lid. She fished it out carefully, touching only the glass. The lid had been secured with melted wax. On the top, Dean had written the same numbers from the combination. She knew that his murder had been premeditated, but it still shocked June to see that he had documented the date twice.
She shook her head as she contemplated the white crystals in the bottom of the jar. It was impossible for her to imagine how Dean could have done that to anyone, let alone Trudy.
June dropped the jar back in the ammo case with the bags of dried leaves. She had found his stash of poison. Now she simply had to figure out how to dispose of it.
The image that popped into her head was too horrible to contemplate.