Mumma's House

by Ike Hamill

  “I have an idea,” she said before she could stop herself. Her own toes sank into the sand. June untied Sam’s shoes and loosened the laces. Sam was pointing the light down and watching her work.

  June looked up to catch his eye and see if he understood.

  Sam was shaking his head.

  June nodded yes, trying to convey her intentions with her eyes. It was no use. He either didn’t get it, or he was afraid of being barefoot in the cellar. She gripped his leg and pulled. After several good tugs, with Sam bracing himself against her hunched shoulders, she felt the foot beginning to come free. The boney fingers clamped down even tighter and Sam whimpered. In response, his other foot began to sink.

  June didn’t have any choice. The crisis was accelerating out of control. She put her shoulder to his waist, slung an arm around Sam, and thrust her legs, using her whole body to extract him from the sand.

  Sam moaned in pain and his footing disappeared completely. June was in a tug of war with the denizens of the underworld and Sam was the rope. She let out a grunt as she straightened, feeling her own feet sink.

  Above them, Sam grabbed something—a pipe or a beam—and a little of the weight was lifted, giving June the opportunity to kick and struggle. She worked her way out of the dirt inch by inch.

  “Let go,” she said when she tipped forward, towards the stairs.

  He did and their momentum began to build. Sam, on her shoulder, dragged her off balance enough that all she had to do was pump her legs and they gathered speed. He dropped the light and the yellow beam flashed and spiraled towards the floor.

  June practically threw him towards the stairs as her footing went out again.

  He landed and scrambled and then turned when his feet were firmly planted on the boards.

  June remembered a similar situation with Gus, out in the yard. That had been years ago and Sam was much bigger and stronger. When he pulled, it made a real difference. June kept her teeth clenched to hold back any sound as she wriggled and worked her legs. As soon as she managed to get her arms around the stair tread, she was able to make some real progress. With one final flip, she rolled her body onto the stairs and pulled up her legs.

  “Damn,” she said with a big exhale. “I thought we were…”

  The stairs shifted and then dropped. Their foundation below had sunk.

  June pointed up to the rectangle of light above.

  Sam didn’t wait to see if she needed help. He ran. June clawed her way up the stairs behind him.

  She didn’t speak again until they were back upstairs with the cellar door closed.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get you back to your parents.”

  They ran down the hall, hand in hand, stumbling and staggering. The door was shut.

  June tried the knob and jerked her hand back from the heat.

  “It’s not real,” she said. “There is no heat.”

  She was wrong. When she gripped the doorknob, the hot glass seared her hand. She forced herself to keep her grip and open the door, throwing it open with a pained scream.

  Chapter 41 : Kate

  KATE REACHED THE DOOR and momentarily took her hand from Millie’s shoulder so she could reach for the knob. Jules had just closed the door a minute before, but the knob was somehow too hot to grip. She jerked her hand back in pain.

  A moment later, the door was flung open.

  June and Sam spilled in.

  Deidra jumped up and swept Sam’s body into her arms. The boy went limp as she hugged him to her chest.

  “Where’s your shoe?” Henry asked.

  Deidra set his feet back on the floor as she sat down. She furiously smoothed his hair down and then pulled him to her chest again.

  “What happened to your shoe?”

  June kicked the door shut and then hugged Gus. She collapsed into a chair, still gripping Gus’s hand. He stood next to her and she threw an arm around him. June turned her hand up, looking at her palm as she stretched and then clenched her fingers.

  Kate led the girls over to June.

  “Is there a fire? Why is the door hot?”

  “It’s an illusion,” June said. “Check it again. I’m sure it will be okay. A second ago, I thought I had burned all the skin off my hand. It still hurts a little, but look.”

  She showed Kate an unblemished palm.

  Kate sniffed at the air as she returned to the door. It still seemed a little smokey, but it could have simply been her imagination. Honestly, she didn’t know if there was still any smoke or not. June was right—the knob was barely warm. After a moment’s hesitation, Kate pulled the door open. The hallway looked normal.

  Auggie came to her side.

  “It’s almost done,” he said in her ear. “Just one more test and then we can get out of here, okay?”

  She squared herself to Auggie and held his gaze. “I’m not sure it is okay.”

  He nodded.

  Kate led the girls back to their seats. At the moment, it seemed like the safest thing to do. She didn’t yet know precisely what was going on. Until she did, it might be best to follow the rules.

  June led Gus around the table, back to the chair that he had sat in for most of the evening. June didn’t sit down. Instead, she walked to the head of the table and stood next to Allison.

  “I’m ready for the third test,” June said.

  Allison collected the document and flipped through the pages, licking her finger before she turned to the last page.

  “The final test has to be requested by the person you love most,” Allison said, looking up at June.

  June’s eyes were on Gus.

  With a nod to her son, June said, “Go ahead, Gus. No matter what happens, remember, it’s not your fault.”

  Gus appeared too frightened to speak.

  “It’s okay, Gus,” Kate said. “All you have to do is ask.”

  He glanced at her and then looked back to his mom. Gus shook his head.

  “I don’t want you to do it,” Gus said.

  “Let me finish,” June said, “and then we’ll be done with this forever.”

  He shook his head.

  June’s eyes jumped to the far end of the table and then returned to Gus. Kate twisted in her seat to try to see what had grabbed June’s attention. It was a strange effect. The darkness seemed to be slowly rolling in around Tommy and Travis and the other shadowy figures at the far end of the room. It was deepening, like a tide. Kate imagined the blackness lapping in around Uncle Tommy’s feet—ripples on a deep lake.

  “They’re not going to let us wait forever,” June said to Gus. “You have to decide.”

  Gus was beginning to fold his arms across his chest when he finally saw his mother’s eyes dart to the back of the room. Kate saw the fear on his face when the boy looked for himself.

  “What’s your test, Gus?” June asked.

  His eyes lit up when he thought of it.

  “Find the codicil,” Gus said. He looked to his mother for confirmation. “Did I say it right? Codicil?”

  June’s eyes fell to the table and she bowed her head between hunched shoulders.

  “Yes. You said it right.”

  “He has a point,” Auggie said. “Maybe that would be…”

  “Shut up, Auggie,” June barked. “I heard him.”

  She locked eyes with her son. Unspoken communication passed between them and June sighed.

  “You’re sure?” she asked.

  Gus nodded.

  June moved to him to hug him once more before she headed for the door.

  # # # #

  Everyone migrated into one big clump while they waited. Auggie pulled a chair up to the other side of Isla, so he and Kate were bracketing their kids. Then, he invited Gus to move closer to their group. Since he had sent his mother away on the quest, he looked miserable.

  Jules moved to the other side of Gus and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  Then, maybe to get farther away from Tommy and Travis, Deidra broug
ht her family over to their side of the table. They dragged chairs to the corner of the room, between Allison and Jules.

  Sam took off his remaining shoe and put his feet up in his mom’s lap. Penny swung her legs under the table and propped her chin up on her hands.

  Kate leaned over and whispered to Auggie, “If she finds it, the document will nullify her claim, right?”

  “As far as we know,” Auggie said. “That’s what Mumma Claire hinted at.”

  “You think Gus knew that?”

  “If he knew about it at all, he probably knew that. Pretty savvy move on his part.”

  “It’s a shame,” Kate said. “She went through so much. Now, even if she succeeds, all that effort goes to waste.”

  Auggie pulled back and looked at her. When he leaned in again, he whispered, “Whose side are you on?”

  Kate was disappointed by the question. “Would it be so bad to have June in charge? You always talk about how fair and giving she is. Why are you against her?”

  “I’m against dictatorships.”

  Kate sat back in her chair, cutting off the private conversation. Auggie tried to lean towards her again, maybe to clarify or try to sway her. She stayed put. He could try to justify himself later.

  “How about a story, while we wait?” Allison asked.

  She didn’t get a definitive answer from the group. Most of the responses were mumbled comments, not meant to be heard.

  “Sure,” Kate said. “Why not?”

  Allison flashed a resigned smile at her and nodded.

  “How about the story of Gus’s father?” Allison asked.

  Kate blinked and then immediately looked to Gus. The boy seemed too stunned to answer.

  “Aunt Allison, that’s not your story to tell,” Jules said.

  Deidra was nodding furiously.

  “Gus has made a tough decision tonight. He deserves to know how it will impact his mother,” Allison said.

  “No,” Auggie said, “they’re right. June is going to tell Gus about that when the time is right. You can’t make that decision for her, especially now.”

  “Gus has the right to know,” Allison said. “It should be his decision.”

  Jules stood up, shaking his head.

  Allison slapped her hand down on the table.

  “It should be his decision!” she shouted.

  Gus’s voice was small, but sure.

  “I want to know.”

  # # # #

  “Your mom met Mark at school, but he wasn’t a fellow student. She was only sixteen and he was a teacher’s assistant in the computer lab. Don’t think of him as a predator though. At twenty-three, he was every bit a child as she was, maybe more,” Allison said to Gus.

  Deidra covered her eyes with her hand and frowned down at her lap.

  Auggie shifted in his seat.

  “They didn’t date, but they spent a lot of time together. It was all perfectly chaste.”

  Gus didn’t interrupt with questions.

  “Mark knew the precarious nature of his obsession, and I believe that June knew it as well. They kept their love secret, never even revealing to each other directly the way that they felt, even though it was obvious to everyone else. I believe that your mother was smart enough to realize that there’s a huge gap between sixteen and twenty-three, but that the gap between eighteen and twenty-five is much narrower. And, taken further, there is no stigma at all between twenty-one and twenty-eight. They never made it that far.”

  “What happened to him?” Gus asked.

  Allison patted the air, as if to say, “Be patient.”

  “He was right there at her graduation, clapping with red cheeks and sweat on his brow. I was certain that he was finally going to ask her out on a date, now that she wasn’t part of the school system. There’s no way he could have kept his job, of course. The other parents wouldn’t care that he had kept his hands to himself. They would have assumed the worst and gotten him fired at the very least. There was also the matter of your uncles. Both of them had, at one point or another, threatened Mark’s life if he dared to put a finger on your mother.”

  Auggie nodded silently at that.

  “He was heartbroken when she moved away.”

  Gus sat up straighter in his chair. Kate was fascinated too. She had never heard a single detail about Gus’s father. The most Auggie would say was, “They were never really together.”

  “I saw him more than once during that time when she was away. He knew how much she cared about that garden of hers, and he was determined to keep it up in case she came back. In his heart, he must have feared that she was gone forever. The way he walked around with that sour expression, he was miserable. I think that working in the garden gave him the opportunity to feel close to her. It was sweet, really.”

  “He was a monster,” Jules said, just loud enough for everyone to hear.

  “Jules!” Auggie said. “Gus is right here.”

  “I’m sorry, but it’s true.”

  Allison shook her head. “It’s not true, Gus. Don’t listen to him. Sometimes love makes people do things that appear monstrous, but your father was never a monster. He followed his heart.”

  “What did he do?” Kate asked.

  “Nothing, really,” Allison said.

  “Nothing?” Jules asked. His chair squeaked as he slung one leg up over the other. “Nothing? People died, Aunt Allison. Others lost their homes. You can’t call that nothing.”

  “You can’t blame that on him,” Auggie said.

  Chapter 42 : June

  JUNE LEFT THE DINING room, where everyone was assembled, and took a left. She could feel the house throbbing around her. She was finally in touch with its rhythm. It had a vibration. Walking in time with the house, she was finally moving with it instead of against it. If she could keep herself open to feeling the dip and sway of the structure, she conceived that it was possible that the house wouldn’t turn against her again.

  All those years, she had been confined to the front room. It was because she had been out of sync with the rest of the house. Now that she could really sense it, it seemed like child’s play to move along with it.

  June put out a hand and trailed it down the wall as she walked. At first, the plaster shrunk from her touch. It swelled back to meet her fingers and she saw a ripple travel down the hall, like she had touched the surface of a pond.

  The illusion disappeared a moment later. The house solidified into hard, solid angles again. June could feel it though. She felt the living nature of the house, made pliable by the influence of generations of her family.

  Pushing through the door to her own quarters, she saw the nest that she and Gus had created. The colors were brighter in the front room. They had shared their breath with that part of the house—blown on the embers. The rest of the house was coming alive again, after so many years of hibernation. The source of that vitality was this room.

  She was sad to move to the stairs.

  It had to be done. Gus had set the task in motion and she had no choice.

  June sighed when she reached the top stair. Down the long hall, her stride slowed. She wasn’t frightened by the idea of going into Uncle Tommy’s room, she dreaded it. It was a cold anticipation of the change that was coming. One way or the other, everything ended tonight. Once she found the codicil and brought it down to the family, it was probably going to end in the worst way. In time, she might learn to be happy about it. At the moment, it felt like she was striking a match that would burn down her fondest memories and trade them for the stability of ash.

  She stepped down into the wing.

  Dean’s room was nearby. It was the modern version of Dean’s room—all the poison had been squeezed out of it by years of emptiness.

  There was a key in the lock on Tommy’s room.

  Something was attempting to make this easy for her.

  She tried the knob.

  The door creaked as it swung inwards.

  When they were kids, Jules
had wanted to set up a haunted house attraction for Halloween. He said they could charge five dollars and make a fortune. Uncle Tommy had laughed away the idea.

  “Before you could set up a haunted house here, you would have to figure out a way to scare away all the real ghosts.”

  Tommy was right.

  June reached in and flipped on the lights. Through the years, never having seen inside Uncle Tommy’s room, June’s imagination had run wild. She was surprised to find that it looked perfectly normal—almost boring. The gray walls looked like steel. The metal bed frame had flanges on the feet that could be bolted to the floor. Tommy had made his room look like it was in the belly of a ship.

  June found the safe next to Tommy’s bed and knelt in front of it. Instead of a dial, the mechanism had buttons to enter the combination. June had no doubt that the codicil was inside. She couldn’t remember where the rumor had come from. All the kids had known that there was supposedly a safe in Uncle Tommy’s room and it contained Mumma Claire’s amendments to the ceremony. According to the rumor, Uncle Tommy kept the document secret because it would dismantle the inheritance system and take him out of the picture.

  June sat on the floor and studied the buttons. They had been used enough that June could see the wear on the one and the nine. When she angled her head to the side, she saw that the surfaces of some were shiny with finger oil. June thought that the one, four, and nine had all been pressed frequently. She thought about that.

  June pondered those digits and shuffled them in her head as she thought about Uncle Tommy. He had kept to himself, never really revealing anything about his nature except that he didn’t like children and was unhappy with the way his life had turned out. Officially, he had been listed as their guardian after Mumma Claire had passed away. For the longest time, June had thought that he was their grandfather. He always looked so much older than their mother in family photos.

  Tommy had been born four years before Claire. According to Allison, Tommy’s gray hair had come from, “Treating each day like it was his last.”