by Hamill, Ike
“Shit,” I whisper.
“Sir?” the female officer asks.
I try to smile. “I just realized that in the horror movies, it’s always the woman who survives.”
Maybe the female officer is the protagonist. She just stares at me.
We’re standing above the freezer. It’s completely empty. White mist is spilling over the lip. I wave my hand at the vapor.
“Was the door at the top of the stairs latched?” I ask.
“No,” she says.
“It was when I left. Maybe the person in here wasn’t dead. Maybe I frightened them and they got up and left.”
I’m thinking about the thumping on the stairs, but I don’t mention it.
“I don’t think that door stays latched,” she says. “It didn’t the other day.”
We’ve had this conversation before. Everything was so hectic with Mr. Engel that I forgot about it. She and I already discussed how the cellar door wouldn’t stay latched.
She’s staring at me—studying me.
It’s amazing how easily a calm person can sweep away my fear. I take a step back from the freezer. To go through the whole story again would be too embarrassing. With no evidence, I’m very aware of how crazy I must seem.
“Look, I’m not going to apologize for calling,” I say. “I know that it’s impossible for you guys to believe me because there’s nothing here that matches what I saw, but I’m certain of what I’m telling you. But I understand. I understand.”
I’m backing towards the stairs.
“Can you guys shut off the power before you go? I told Amber that I would and I was about to when I stopped to check the freezer. I’ll be at my house if…”
“Wait,” the male officer says. He takes out his flashlight and clicks the button. His beam cuts through the mist and into the interior of the freezer.
The two officers lean closer to the freezer.
“Right there,” he says.
“Sir?” the female officer says, waving me over.
I’m helpless to disobey her command.
When I get close enough, she reaches out and takes my hand.
Before I can ask what she’s doing, she examines my hand front and back and then turns back to the freezer. I see what they’re looking at.
“Much smaller,” she says.
In the ice buildup on the side of the freezer, we’re looking at a handprint. The fingers that left the print are much smaller and more delicate than mine. The female officer leans in even closer. I hear her take a deep breath and hold it before her head breaches the confines of the freezer.
When she comes back up, she says a single word.
“Hair.”
They nod to each other.
She turns to me.
“You can go home. Please don’t mention this to anyone else. We’ll notify you when we’ve reached a conclusion.”
She escorts me out of the cellar.
(It's lonely at home.)
It’s lonely at home.
At least I have visual contact with the efforts over at Mr. Engel’s house. I see more vehicles pull up. Cars are shuffled. It’s hard to tell through the telescope, but I think that the female officer leaves. I’m trying to remember if they said they would turn off the power. It doesn’t really matter. I’m not ever going back into Mr. Engel’s house. If Amber calls again, I’ll just hang up.
Maybe she will sell the place and I’ll become friends with the new people who live there.
After hours of people moving in and out of the house, I spot the police rolling a big object around the side of the house and lifting it into a van. I believe that they’ve impounded the freezer.
It would probably best to not be friends with the new people, if any do move into Mr. Engel’s house. When I lived in apartments, I always found that it was difficult to be friends with my nearest neighbors. They always know when you’re coming and going, so there’s an accidental intimacy that doesn’t allow any wiggle room. You can’t lie and say that you’re going to be gone all day if they ask you for a favor. You can’t have company over without them wondering why they weren’t invited.
Mr. Engel’s house is a little too close. Maybe that’s why Uncle Walt wasn’t really friends with him.
I pull the blanket around my shoulders. It’s too warm up on the barn deck, but the blanket helps with the mosquitoes. I adjust my telescope so I can see through the upstairs window. Someone is moving around in Mr. Engel’s bedroom. I guess maybe they found more evidence up there.
When the phone rings, I panic and fumble to shut off the sound. The people in the lens of the telescope look close enough that they might hear it.
It’s the policewoman. She asks me if I can come in tomorrow and record a statement about what I saw. I ask if I’m in trouble and I immediately regret the question. That’s the kind of thing a guilty person would ask, and it’s the kind of question that she would ever answer honestly.
“No, of course not. We just would like to get your statement clearly recorded.”
I agree. What else would I do?
A couple of years ago, I watched a video posted by a lawyer on why one should never talk to the police. It was a long video—two parts, that I believe ran more than an hour—but it was really interesting. The lawyer had broken down every angle in a way that wasn’t scummy at all. It made me realize how technical lawyers are. Perhaps this is obvious to everyone else. I used to think that lawyers were very creative and intuitive. The way that this guy examined his thesis from every possible angle, I began to think of lawyers like physicists. They take a statement or an idea and then they probe it, scientifically, from every possible perspective, looking for weaknesses.
In the end, I had been completely convinced. It is never advantageous to talk to police. Any sort of statement can be misconstrued and used against you, regardless of your innocence. Even if you’re the person who is making a complaint, you can be cornered and accidentally implicate yourself without even knowing it.
Talking to the officer on the phone just now, I had agreed immediately to come in and make a statement. How dumb is that?
I think that it’s because she was there, in the house. I went through a traumatic event and I’m seeking the company of other people who witnessed the same things. It was smart of them to have her call me. I want to talk to her—to find out if she felt the same ominous energy that I did down in that cellar. We had been poking around in a predator’s den with the threat that it might return at any second. It was like swimming in the ocean, far from shore, knowing that sharks lurk below.
PART THREE:
Sacrifice
Visitors
(What was I thinking?)
What was I thinking?
I could have fled. I should have waited for the police to leave Mr. Engel’s, packed a getaway bag, and then hit the road. I could be at the Super 8 near the highway, worried about bedbugs instead of holding my breath and staring at the ceiling.
I swear that I just heard a knock downstairs.
There were no headlights, and I definitely didn’t hear the sound of a car rolling into my driveway. Uncle Walt has a rubber hose across the driveway. He got it from a service station that went out of business when self-serve gas stations took over. If a car runs over that hose, a loud chime sounds in the house. Even a bicycle can trigger it. So I know that whomever just knocked must have arrived on foot.
Assuming, of course, that I really heard a knock.
It’s possible that I was half asleep and the sound was part of a dream.
KNOCK. KNOCK.
I exhale slowly and lower my feet to the floor. There’s no denying it this time.
It has to be the police.
I turn on my light and squint until I can see.
They probably found evidence of a dead body and they’ve moved up my questioning to right now. It’s the only explanation that I can live with, so I act accordingly. My shorts are draped over the chair, but I go to the closet instead
and grab a pair of jeans. Another knock comes while I’m putting on my socks.
“I’m coming,” I whisper. I check myself in the mirror. Unshaven and puffy-eyed, I look a little homeless. Whatever.
I put on every light on my path as I walk through. Moving down the stairs, I realize that I’m already fixing in my imagination what I will find when I open the front door. I’ll see two uniformed officers with their hands vaguely near their belts, ready for anything.
They knock again as I’m crossing the living room.
I’ve never seen this door used—not once. There’s a bird feeder hanging out there, but my uncle never even used the front door in order to refill it. Using an old coffee can, he would walk the birdseed around from the side door. My mother asked him one time why he didn’t open that door, if at least to get some sunlight and fresh air into the living room. His response was, “Open that door? I might let some of the spiders out.”
There’s no light out there for me to turn on. I reach for the lock and pause just before I turn the bolt.
“Who is it?”
There’s a pause. One second passes, two, three, and then, finally, the visitor knocks two more times. The skin on the back of my neck crawls. My mother would say that someone had walked over my grave. She said that whenever I got goosebumps.
“Who is it?”
This time, there’s no response at all. I take a step back from the door, wiping my hands on my jeans. All of a sudden, my palms are sweaty. I’ve thrown away most of the junk that was piled on the floor in the living room, but there’s a trophy next to the garbage can that I haven’t been able to get rid of. Uncle Walt won the trophy for the backstroke in high school. It’s tall and has a thick marble base. I grab it by the gilded body and hold it ready to strike.
Stepping to the right, I angle myself so I can see through the front window at the porch that we never use. The lamp is reflecting off the glass so I click it off.
I see the shadow of a person crouching on the porch, just under the bird feeder. At least I think that’s what it is. It could be some sort of animal. My hand is gripping the trophy so hard that the figure’s little gold arm is digging into my palm.
The thing freezes. Maybe it senses that I’m watching it. The head swivels up and the eyes fix on me. Even though there’s little light falling on it, I can see the eyes. They’re reminiscent of eyes that I’ve seen before. I hold my breath and shuffle forward another step. I want to know—are they the same eyes I saw in the freezer?
Before I can be sure, the thing is sliding away, melting into the dark.
I let out my breath with a shudder.
“It had to be a person,” I whisper. “Animals don’t knock.”
I back slowly towards the kitchen. Before I cross through the doorway, I reach around the wall and flip on the lights. Now, nearly every light on the first floor is on. I rush to the side door and flip on the side porch light as I look down through the window. I’m expecting to see another hunched figure, but the side porch is bare.
After rechecking the lock, I grab the cordless phone.
It won’t dial.
At first, I suspect the battery. The cordless phone is old enough that if I leave it off the charger for a few hours, it will die. But it’s beeping when I hit the button and the base station clicks on when I press the intercom. There’s just no connection to the outside world.
My cellphone is upstairs.
Before retreating, I check the locks. Everything is locked tight—side door, front door, and even the door at the back of the pantry. I leave all the lights on and I peer through every window before I climb the stairs. I have no bars in the house. It’s not surprising. The signal is terrible out here and there’s a metal roof. Sometimes I can get a signal up on the deck on top of the barn, but not always.
I have wifi though—I can text for help.
My message doesn’t go through.
Of course. If the landline is out, that means that my cable connection is down. I have a wifi connection to the router, but the router can’t talk to the outside world.
What was I thinking?
(What other choice do I have?)
What other choice do I have?
This isn’t a rhetorical question. I’m asking myself as I stand in the pantry, eyeing the door that leads through the shed to the barn. Everything is locked up. I made sure of that last night. All the doors to the outside are locked. I even locked the bulkhead from the inside. All the windows on the first floor are shut and locked and I shut all the upstairs windows when I grabbed my phone.
I’m realizing how silly locks are. You can break a pane of glass accidentally with a baseball—am I really trusting the windows to keep out whatever was knocking on my door?
“No,” I whisper. “Trusting the windows is not an option.”
The pantry might be a good bet though. It has a solid lock on the door to the shed and I can wedge the door shut from the kitchen. It’s an interior room with no windows. Maybe I could barricade myself in here, wait until morning, and then make a run for it.
“Then what?” I ask myself.
Then what… Leave town? Never come back to this place?
Maybe I could stay at the Super 8 and just come back during the day to finish cleaning out the house and then put it on the market. I could live off a credit card for a while, I suppose. It will be a stretch. I might have to list Uncle Walt’s house for less than it’s worth so I won’t get too far into debt, but it’s a possible solution.
“All because someone was crouching on the porch?” I whisper.
No. I shake my head. If it was just the knocking and the person crouching, I wouldn’t be thinking like this. It’s everything. It’s Mr. Engel and the freezer. It’s the police and the investigation. It’s all of that and the knocking.
I’m a firm believer in taking the damn hint. It was stupid of me to stay in this house tonight and I’m not going to make that mistake again.
So, what choice do I have?
I’m not going to try to sprint across the dooryard to the truck. That would be stupid. Option one is to barricade myself in the pantry. Option two is to go up to the deck on top of the barn and see if I can get a signal on my phone. The cops will take me seriously this time—I’m sure of it.
I stand there, breathing slowly as I weigh the options. It’s such a good phrase—weigh one’s options. The two different options do have a distinct weight. The idea of huddling in the pantry weighs heavier on my heart than climbing up to the deck. I hate the idea of hiding here—pathetic and waiting for death to come.
If I’m honest, it’s not really a choice. I’m not dumb enough to try to sprint across the dooryard to the truck, and I’m not so timid that I can make myself hide in the pantry all night.
I take a breath and reach for the doorhandle.
“Shoes and keys,” I whisper to myself.
Keys—that’s a great idea. I’ll lock the door behind me so the pantry will still be a safe spot to retreat to. When I return to the kitchen, I swear I see something dart by the edge of the circle of light outside. It could have been a bat—there are a lot of them out there at night, swooping and snatching all the summer bugs. The bugs bite me and take my blood, then the bats eat the bugs. They’re one step removed from subsisting off of my vitality.
My shoes are in the kitchen, next to the door. I slip them on and tie them tight.
I snatch the keys and retreat through the pantry, wedging a broom against the door to the kitchen.
(It feels like quiet safety.)
It feels like quiet safety.
I wonder if all barns feel so secure. Maybe this one just feels so peaceful because I’m remembering the way that it used to be. In the summer, Uncle Walt would bring in the cows, sheep, and goats at night. They would munch on hay and sleep. He had one cow that would snore when it slept. The barn would smell sweet from the hay and grain. The atmosphere always made me sleepy when I would come out to fill the water buckets one more time
before bed.
I leave the lights off—no need to advertise my position—and I climb the ladder into the loft. I have to be careful up here. There’s a trapdoor over the horse stalls. I shuffle around that and find the short ladder that leads to the hatch in the roof. I push it open, catching it before it can slam down on the deck.
The stars are a dotted blanket above. This would be a perfect night for the telescope. It’s still pointed at Mr. Engel’s house. The lights are all off over there now. I wonder if the police remembered to turn off the breakers before they left.
Standing on the hatch, I try my phone.
It shows one bar, but I can’t get a call to go through.
It’s amazing that I have gone my whole life without having to dial 911, and now it has happened so many times in such a short period. I pace the deck, trying to find if the signal is any better. I have one bar and then none. Setting the phone down on the railing makes the bar come back. I try a call on speaker phone. For a moment, it sounds like it’s going to ring and then “Call Failed” appears on the display.
I try sending a message and it bounces back immediately.
I climb the railing, lifting my phone high. I know it’s a long shot.
With the phone on speaker, extended as high as it will go between my pinched fingers, it starts to ring.
A new sound draws my attention though.
It’s the sound of the hatch rising up behind me. I turn and see a hand slip through the gap. The door creaks upwards and I can see the eyes.
As soon as I lock onto them, they’re the only thing I see. This is just like Mr. Engel’s cellar. Those eyes were so captivating that I didn’t get a good look at what else was in the freezer. Now, the rest of the world disappears and my focus is completely dedicated to the subtle glow of the eyes that are emerging from the darkness. Maybe they’re just reflecting the starlight, but I don’t think so. I think that they have their own internal source of light, and that light pulses, synchronizing perfectly with my thoughts.