The Siren and the Specter

by Jonathan Janz

  Ralph spat. “Can you understand English? No, I didn’t see it, I was told about it. I’d no sooner set foot in that house than I’d use my testicles as catfish bait.”

  “Damn, Ralph.”

  “The part that keeps me up nights…the part I’ve never gotten over…it’s that what happened to that family…those poor kids…it happened on my watch.”

  David arched an eyebrow. “Your ‘watch’? Don’t you think that’s going a bit far? You bought a house on the river. You didn’t sign on to be some kind of sentry.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Ralph agreed. “But after what happened, I did discourage folks from buying it.”

  Ralph glanced toward the lane. David followed Ralph’s gaze and saw Chris Gardiner’s black Mercedes rolling toward the Alexander House.

  “Those idiots wouldn’t listen,” Ralph remarked, watching after the Mercedes. “The others, they’d turn white when I’d tell them the story. But not those two. They were hell-bent on buying it. And when they brought you here…. I woke up last night in a cold sweat. I’d dreamed that your head was staring at me from the mantle.”

  “On that note,” David said, “I’ll be on my way.”

  The fishing line jerked. Ralph gaped witlessly at it for a moment. Then his trance broke and he removed the reel from the iron sheath. “Feels like a big one.”

  “Bet it’ll taste like tobacco spit,” David muttered as he walked away.

  Chapter Twelve

  When he jogged nearer, Katherine Mayr made no pretense of averting her eyes. Instead, she stared at his chest, his stomach, his crotch.

  “I knew it,” she said. “I pegged you for a fitness junkie.”

  “Where’s Chris?” he asked.

  She nodded toward the house. “Stomach complaint. Chris gets diarrhea more than anyone I’ve ever met.”

  And I’m sure he’d be delighted to know you were making that information public, David thought.

  “Have you experienced anything unnatural yet?”

  He hesitated, then regretted it when she smirked at him.

  “Look, Katherine….”

  “You can admit it, David. Everyone feels it.”

  “Then I’m in the minority,” he said with more heat than he’d intended. “Because I haven’t felt a goddamned thing.”

  She favored him with a speculative look. “You will report any occurrences, won’t you?”

  David crossed his arms. “Calling me a liar won’t help your cause.”

  “Don’t be so grumpy! I only meant that men can let pride get in the way.” She gave him a comprehensive glance. “Would you like to shower before we talk?”

  David glanced at the house. “Isn’t your husband using the facilities?”

  “Go upstairs.” She smiled. “Unless it makes you nervous.”

  Unable to formulate a comeback, he broke eye contact.

  He spotted the adjustable dumbbells on the gravelly edge of the driveway. Good thing it hadn’t rained. He made a mental note to store them in the house when he was done lifting. He dialed the weight up to sixty on the dumbbells, pointedly faced the dock so he’d have his back to Katherine, and began to squeeze out a set of twelve shrugs.

  The knowledge of Katherine behind him proved distracting. Come on, Chris, he thought. Finish your gastrointestinal explosion and save me from your rapacious wife.

  But Chris didn’t appear. Between sets David glanced back at Katherine, and sure enough, she was eyeballing him. Scowling, he completed his shrugs and dialed the weight down. He positioned his left hand on his right hip, hoisted the thirty-pound dumbbell above his head, and began cranking out triceps presses. After ten reps, he switched hands and repeated the exercise.

  He’d performed three sets when the front door opened with a creak, and Chris appeared on the porch. He was sweating and red-faced.

  David strode toward his friend and said, “Hey, buddy. Let’s you and I talk in private.”

  Chris shot Katherine a nervous look, but she said, “Fine. I’ll walk the grounds.” She glanced at David. “That is, if you don’t mind.”

  David shrugged. “Your house.”

  With a sphinxlike smile, she headed toward the dock.

  Chris joined David in the yard, both men watching after Katherine.

  Chris’s grin was shy. “She’s something, isn’t she?”

  David studied his old friend’s face. “You were in there awhile.”

  Chris touched his belly gingerly. “I get gurgly when things get tense.”

  “Everything kosher with you and Katherine?”

  “It’s this house. She’s obsessed with it. Talks of nothing else. She would’ve been here last night if I hadn’t persuaded her to give you some space.”

  David grunted. “She started firing questions at me the moment I was within earshot.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  Chris looked crestfallen.

  “I thought you didn’t want there to be ghosts,” David said.

  Chris ran a hand through his thinning hair and moved toward the water. “I gotta tell you…it’d make my life easier if Katherine got her way. She’s adamant.”

  “I’m not sacrificing my career to placate her.”

  Chris peered toward the dock, where Katherine stood gazing toward the opposite shoreline. The deadfalls.

  David nodded that way. “Why didn’t you tell me what was over there?”

  Chris grew very still.

  “On the other side of those trees,” David continued. “Where that big bay begins. That’s Oxrun Park, the place Anna—”

  “Don’t say her name,” Chris snarled.

  David drew back. Chris’s round face was livid. His hands had balled into knots, and for a crazy moment David was sure his friend would strike him.

  In a measured voice, David said, “I know you were fond of her….”

  “Fond,” Chris repeated, his face twisting.

  “I cared about her too.”

  “Would you drop the bullshit niceties?”

  David half smiled. “It was almost a quarter of a century ago.”

  “So it didn’t happen?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Or it doesn’t matter?”

  “I never said that.”

  “Did you even cry, Davey? Did it even bother you when you heard Anna killed herself?”

  And staring at his old friend, David was forcibly reminded of the time his pet dog, Lady, had developed a festering wound on her forepaw. David was ten or so, his mom on the verge of checking out for good, so a vet was out of the question. Way too expensive, and David had no way of getting the suffering animal – a good-sized black lab – all the way across town. So he’d raided the medicine cabinet and found an old tube of congealed Neosporin and attempted to spread the ointment over the wound. Afterward, he’d try to remember if there were warning signs, but of course there hadn’t been. One moment Lady was lying on her belly, her forepaws spraddled on the olive-green living room carpet; the next she was sinking her jaws into his hand and shaking it like a rabbit. David had been home by himself, and it had taken a good ten seconds to free his hand from the viselike grip of Lady’s incisors. When he’d escaped, the sight of his savaged flesh made him woozy. He’d somehow made it outside, where, eventually, a woman who lived one block over found him stumbling down the sidewalk, a steady patter of blood trailing after him.

  At the hospital, they’d sewn him up, pricked him with needles, fed him more than he usually got at home. When his mother had shown up, the doctors and nurses had been frosty with her, and maybe, he decided when he was old enough to view his childhood with more objectivity, that was when the state’s mechanism for removing him from his home and placing him in foster care had been activated. Whatever the case, his mom
had treated him with nothing but resentment for causing so much fuss, and the next day had informed him, “Lady got put down because of you.” He remembered not only her wording, but her manner. It was as though he’d applied poison rather than medicine to the dog. His mom hadn’t even liked Lady. He’d been feeding Lady portions of his own food for months since his mom seldom purchased dog food. But now his mom behaved as though David had murdered her dearest friend.

  The part that stayed with him was being bitten by Lady, the radical change in her. He read the same vicious intensity in Chris’s eyes now.

  David sighed. “Look, buddy—”

  “Don’t ‘buddy’ me,” Chris said. He took a step forward, prodded David in the chest. “Don’t act like you care. We both know you don’t. We both know you were born without that trait, the one that gives a shit about people.”

  “You act like I’m the Zodiac Killer.”

  Chris stepped closer. “Anna was worth a thousand of you. She would have done anything. All you had to do was let her down easy, and then maybe we could have….”

  Chris trailed off, and with a mental thud, the idea slammed home. My God, how had David not seen it before? Did Chris really believe he and Anna would have ended up together, had she lived? As ludicrous as the notion was, he could see that, yes, this was precisely what Chris believed.

  In the silence that followed, Chris hiked his belt up, but his ample belly pushed it back down. He took a few aimless steps away, moving in the direction of the house, and as he did David discovered something. The weeds on this side were in dire need of pruning, but beyond them, down in a shadowy swale, there was a door at basement level, its white paint peeling in leprous curls.

  “What’s down there?” David asked.

  When Chris didn’t answer, David took a step in that direction.

  Chris finally said, “The cellar.”

  “What do you guys store in there?”

  “Stay out,” Chris said flatly. “Katherine?” he called. “We’re going.”

  Without a backward look, Chris stalked to the Mercedes. Katherine glanced inquisitively at David but didn’t ask what had happened. She climbed inside, and the Mercedes reversed, made a half turn, and rumbled off down the lane.

  David glanced down at the cellar door.What’s inside? he wondered.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Disturbed by the conversations with Chris and Ralph, and knowing he couldn’t write any more that evening, he figured exploring the cellar would be diverting enough to take his mind off the house’s past.

  More importantly, off his past.

  It was 7:35, the gloomy dusk making it seem much later. He waded through the knee-high weeds and tried the doorknob on the off-chance it was unlocked.

  It was.

  A surge of adrenaline coursed through him at the discovery. He drew open the door, but it scraped the ground stubbornly, and after moving a few inches it stuck fast. A formidable odor, wet earth and dank cinder blocks, assailed him. David glanced down, saw the rotted base of the door lodged in the dirt. He’d have to locate an implement to scrape the earth away so the door could swing wide enough to accommodate him.

  Problem was, he hadn’t seen a spade or any other gardening equipment anywhere. There was no garage. He could head down to Ralph’s, borrow a hand tool, but at the moment David preferred being alone.

  Come on, he told himself. Think.

  He set off toward the Rappahannock. Without making a conscious decision, he moved toward the tip of the peninsula, the spur of rock and crabgrass that pointed toward the island. His tennis shoes squelching in the sodden grass, he found what he was looking for: a slender rock with a keen edge.

  He moved back through the yard, the evening blowing damp breath over his skin. Storm approaching, he thought. Fine. Maybe it would wash away some of the brooding atmosphere that had, like some unseen but toxic gas, pervaded the property.

  He stepped down the decline and knelt among the weeds. He elbowed the door shut and began scraping the dirt and grass with the flat edge of the river rock. Though the weeds rasped over his bare arms, the work was satisfying in an elemental way.

  After a few minutes’ toil, he tried the door, and though he’d only bought himself about six more inches, the passage was now broad enough for him to slip through.

  Inside, the smell was appalling, like someone had distilled all the clammy basements in the Southeast and piped the formula down here. Images of rats and cobwebs and cisterns flickered through his mind. It occurred to him he hadn’t bothered with a flashlight.

  He was halfway out the door when he remembered his iPhone. He retrieved it, activated it, saw the battery was down to seven percent.

  Damn. It would almost certainly work long enough for this brief expedition, but in the past few weeks it had been behaving erratically, shutting off without warning, claiming it had plenty of battery when it was actually nearing a temporary death. For one alarming stretch it had actually made calls to the wrong people, like the time David pressed a colleague’s contact info and instead phoned up the garage that did occasional tune-ups on his Camry.

  He swiped the screen, selected the flashlight button, and the basement lit up.

  It was a disaster. Like someone had made a bet about how much junk could be piled inside the thirty-by-thirty space. Lawn chairs of several different species were stacked to the seven-foot ceiling, the chair legs in a couple spots wedged between ceiling joists. There were half-deflated rafts and inner tubes draped like molted skin over jagged junk piles. Dented crab buckets and damaged cages were strewn at weird angles, their rusty faces tinseled with cobwebs. Splintery oars protruded from the shadows.

  David ventured toward the nearest heap of rubbish, the phone light unsteady in his grip. He lowered the phone to better illuminate the heap, but despite the light’s brilliance, its reach was curiously limited, as if, in touching the nearest surface, it lost its nerve and refused to penetrate the deeper shadows. David made out a fishing net with a rusty frame, a beach ball skewered by a tent spike. On the grimy cement floor he spotted the faded red handle of an oversized whiffle ball bat. David loved those bats as a kid. The sensation of squaring up a tennis ball and knocking it to kingdom come…God, how exhilarating.

  Smiling, David reached for the handle and a rat the size of a Chihuahua clambered over his fingers. Hissing, David jerked his hand away. The rat was dark gray, mangy-looking, its tail dragging like a rubber cord as it disappeared inside a spill of cardboard boxes. As he watched after the rat’s tail, a shivering fit gripped him. He straightened his arms to get the willies out of his system, and the iPhone winked out.

  The darkness was shocking. Either he’d been in here longer than he’d suspected or the clouds outside had grown denser. Whatever the case, the cellar resembled a crypt now. He thumbed on the phone, but it was unresponsive – seven-percent battery, my ass – and the only thing to do now was to get the hell out of the basement and come back with an honest-to-goodness flashlight instead of a treacherous iPhone.

  David turned and discovered a small child barring the door.

  Chapter Fourteen

  His scream wasn’t exactly soundless – he was aware of noise emanating from the depths of his throat. But it was a breathy, impotent sound.

  The outline of the child clarified: dark hair, slumped shoulders, bony limbs. His mind leaped to the story of the Rafterys, of Clara the radiologist and her poor, vivisected children.

  When the child spoke, David gasped, staggered back, half sprawled on a pile of plastic chairs and fishing nets.

  “What did you say?” David demanded.

  “Mom and Dad are raging,” the boy said.

  David squinted at the boy. “Mike Jr.?”

  “Don’t call me that,” the boy said. “Don’t care what you call me, but don’t call me that.”

  David stepped closer, noting as he
did how Mike Jr. took a step backward. He felt a moment’s fury. They’d better not be hitting the kids, he thought. So help me God, Honey and Michael, if you’re hitting these kids….

  “Smells like shit in here,” Mike Jr. said.

  “Watch your mouth,” David muttered and cried out as thunder shook the house.

  Mike Jr. stared fearfully up at the ceiling joists. “Fuck.”

  “C’mon,” David said, taking the boy by the shoulder and guiding him toward the door.

  “We supposed to get a storm?” Mike Jr. asked.

  “I look like a meteorologist?”

  “What’s a—”

  “Weatherman,” David said, shooing Mike Jr. through the door. “Move it.”

  David was halfway through the door when a squiggle of lightning lit up the western sky. He mentally counted to three before the thunder rolled over them.

  “Storm’s close,” he said in an undertone. He put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “We gotta get you home.”

  Mike Jr. swatted his hand away. “Ain’t goin’ home. I told you Mom and Dad was raging.”

  Rain began to patter the yard, wetting David’s cheeks and mingling with the sweat in his hair. “What do you mean ‘raging’?”

  “Mom starts talking about fuckin’ some other guy, and Dad gets pissy ’cause he didn’t get to watch.”

  David made a face. “Could you not…I’d rather not hear the details.”

  “You asked.”

  “What I meant was…did it get physical?”

  “You mean the fucking?”

  “Jesus. No, I didn’t mean the— I’m asking you if they hit each other.”

  Mike Jr.’s snort was horribly world-weary. “Hit each other all the time. They like it.”

  It was out of his mouth before he knew it. “You don’t belong in that house.”

  Mike Jr. gave him a wry look. “Hell, I know that. Why you think I’m over here?”

  “I meant…ah, come on.”