by Hamill, Ike
I suppose it could have been Jack, trying to deflect suspicion. I later found out that Jack hated me too. I was never popular in that school.
The pickle jar maneuver almost succeeds. I slosh a little on my hand when I try to get the lid on. With the pickle jar back on the shelf, I get the giggles. I’m picturing the new homeowners. They will get this place at auction after I’m declared dead. They’ll finish the job I started of cleaning out my uncle’s possessions. Then, they’ll turn their attention to the pantry.
“What a strange man,” the wife will say. “Why are there rotted pickles in the graham cracker box?”
Just then, the husband will open the jar and take a whiff of what’s inside.
I laugh out loud.
I stop when the tapping comes back. They’re still out there, waiting for me.
(Is this how people go crazy?)
Is this how people go crazy?
I’ve always enjoyed time alone. Sitting solo at a restaurant never bothered me. Going to the movies by myself is a treat. I don’t understand people who don’t enjoy the silence of their own company. At least I never understood them until now.
The tapping has stopped again. If I shift my position against the door or even cough, I know it will come. I’ve revised my opinion. It’s not some kind of echolocation. The tapping is meant to make me crazy so that I will run out of the pantry and into their teeth. Either that or they’re trying to hypnotize me.
I can’t imagine how many hours I’ve been in here.
The light from the truck fire has gone out. The smell of the burned truck is horrible.
For a while, I hoped that someone might see the flames from a distance and call the fire department. Then I thought that the power company might come to investigate the outage. I’ve given up on both of those. Out here, they rely on the residents to report things like vehicle fires and downed power lines. We’re expected to be self-sufficient.
One summer, when my mom came up to spend a long weekend with us, we all went to the lake. She was horrified when Uncle Walt took off his overalls and started wading into the water.
“What happened to your leg?” she demanded.
Uncle Walt looked down. For a moment, he looked just as shocked as she was.
“Oh. I cut it.”
I had seen the scar already. It was a jagged purple line on the side of his shin where the skin was puckered and the muscle bunched in funny ways when he walked. I hadn’t thought anything of it. Mom seemed both disgusted and fascinated.
“Cut it? It looks like you split your whole leg in two.”
“Yeah,” he said with a bemused laugh. “I guess I did. It will be fine.”
He waded in and swam away, closing the subject.
I didn’t bring it up again until Mom had gone back south.
“Did you really split your leg open?”
He nodded. “Yup.”
“Who fixed it up for you?”
He glanced down, like the answer might come from his flesh.
“Nobody. I just pushed everything back into place and wrapped it up. The body knows what to do if you let it. If I had seen a doctor, they probably would have cut it off.”
“But what happened?”
“Fell off the ladder,” he said.
Uncle Walt was always comfortable on a ladder. After his knee started to give him trouble, he was almost too comfortable up there. On the top rung, he would shake and rattle the ladder to a new position instead of climbing down to move it over a few inches.
“My foot got hung up in the rungs when I tumbled and I split my calf.”
That was enough information for me. At the time, I figured that he had been too embarrassed to seek help. Whenever I hid an injury, that was always why. I never wanted to admit that I had done something stupid and needed help. But later, as I thought about Uncle Walt at his funeral, I realized that he enjoyed asking for help and he was never shy about admitting his own mistakes. There had to have been another reason why he had wrapped his leg himself and not told Mom about the injury. I wondered if maybe the whole thing had been a lie. There was no way to find out now.
People who live out in the country are expected to be self-sufficient. Some people take that idea way too far.
There’s a box of cereal up on the shelf across from me. My leg is asleep. I stretch it out and poke around with my toe until the box topples and lands in my lap. I suppose I would make a pretty good blind person. I’m adjusting fairly easily to a world without light.
When I pop the cardboard top and find the plastic liner, I know what’s going to happen when I tear it open.
“You want some of this?” I ask.
The tapping responds immediately. It’s coming from both doors now—the kitchen and shed. I shake my head and sigh in the darkness before shoving dry cereal in my mouth.
“Needs milk,” I say.
The tapping speeds up.
They’re nothing if not consistent.
I’m startled when tapping comes through the wall to my left. They can’t tap on the wall at my feet—on the other side of that is the old chimney.
“I believe you have me surrounded,” I say.
(I must have fallen asleep mid-chew.)
I must have fallen asleep mid-chew.
There is cereal stuck to my lip. I wipe off my face with the back of my hand and jump when a shape passes in front of my face.
I freeze.
Wiggling my fingers, I see that the shape is my own hand.
I look down and see the dawn light leaking from under the kitchen door.
“Hello?” I whisper.
I clear my throat and wish that I had something to drink. Even the pickle juice would taste good right now.
I cough and try again.
“Hello? Are you there?”
I bang and twist against the stepladder so I can press my face to the floor and look under the crack. I see nothing but unbroken light reflecting off the floor. There are no shadows moving around. My heart thuds in my chest as I contemplate doing the unthinkable—I’m going to open the door.
“Hold on,” I whisper. “Just hold on.”
It looks really bright out there. My eyes have been in the dark so long that it might still, technically, be before dawn. There’s no harm in waiting another minute or two to be sure.
I start counting, moving my lips so I can throw some Mississippis between the numbers to keep them spaced out. When I get to a hundred, I look again.
It seems brighter.
My heart starts thudding again.
“It’s breakfast time,” I say, raising my voice. “Who wants cereal?”
There’s nothing—no tapping and nothing moving around in the light.
Another idea occurs to me before I move the ladder out of the way. I dig in the bag and pull out a big handful of round cereal. Weighing them in my hand first, I chuck them at the gap under the door, sending them out into the kitchen. They’re my little ambassadors, checking to see if the natives are friendly out there.
“Want any more?” I ask.
Silence.
“Want to count them?”
I throw another handful.
When I’m certain that no unnaturally-long fingers are going to pick up the pieces of cereal, I allow myself to move the ladder. Before I even think about moving the broom, I gather myself and climb to my feet. I stretch my legs and wiggle my toes inside my shoes. Every muscle has to be ready for what might be waiting.
This is it.
I pop the broom free and grip it like a weapon. My shoulder pulses with a deep ache when I squeeze.
I open the door and pull it towards me slowly, letting my eyes adjust to the morning light.
Everything is perfectly still.
I take a step—unearthing myself from my coffin.
It seems too quiet.
I take another step and glance down. There are a few big chunks of glass on the floor—blasted in with the explosion, but the small shards have all been
cleaned up. The side door is ajar. I can’t remember if I left it open when I fled.
I pull it open and regard the dooryard.
Uncle Walt’s truck is a blackened husk. The power and utility lines look like charred serpents. I step out, free myself from the house, and run. I’m in the middle of the road before I stop.
I turn back and regard everything from this distance. I try to see it all with fresh eyes.
It looks like someone drunkenly crashed the truck into the telephone pole, it fell, and the truck caught on fire. That’s what I would guess.
My notebook is still there, beyond the truck. The body is gone. The one that cut my gas line and burned up in the explosion has been taken away or turned to dust. Without any evidence, one guess is as good as the other.
It’s starting to occur to me that I need to form a plan. In the best-case scenario, I can walk up to Mr. Engel’s and use his phone. The house is probably locked up now, but I’ll get in. I think Amber will understand. I don’t have any identification and my cellphone is lost somewhere in the grass on the other side of the barn. All that is secondary.
I take a step backwards. I’ve taken the first step towards Mr. Engel’s house.
If I can get out of here in one piece and get back to sanity, it’s a win.
Is it though?
Does getting out of here in one piece put a tick in the W column?
What happens after that?
I’ll need my driver’s license, birth certificate, or passport at some point. All those things are in Uncle Walt’s house. What am I going to do, ask the police to go inside with me? That will require a story of some sort. I’ll have to say that someone tried to break in and then what? Do I say that I crashed the truck? They’re going to suspect that I was drinking. Do I care?
But, seriously, what’s next after that?
Am I going to try to sell the house as it stands now?
What happens when the realtor tries to show the house and the prospective buyers ask to see the cellar? What are they going to find down there?
Light
(I start with the notebook.)
I start with the notebook.
I add the following:
“Listen—you can call me crazy if you want to, but I was attacked. I crashed the truck, but they cut the fuel line. They were the same ones from Mr. Engel’s cellar. I’m well aware of how this sounds, but I believe they were vampires. Call them what you like, but I believe they were parasitic predators, trying to feed from my blood. If that’s not a vampire, I don’t know what is. I spent all night locked in the pantry while they tapped on the doors. Now, I’m going to take my house back.”
My hand is cramped from squeezing the pencil. The hasty text is barely legible.
I toss the notebook in the driveway and approach the house.
This is my uncle’s house, regardless of what currently infests it. One could argue that they might have fled in the night to find a better place to roost, but I know they’re here. I can sense it.
I know something else, too—I know they can die.
Standing back, I reach forward and shove the key into David’s door. It goes easily this time and I turn the handle. I push it open with the broom. The hinges creak. Light spills into the hall and I lean forward to look right, left, and up. Next stop is the sliding door. With that open, the shed has a decent amount of light. I head for the woodshop and glance around under the dusty counters before I get to work.
I use a handsaw and chisel to sharpen both the end of the broom stick and a shovel handle that Uncle Walt was saving.
When Mom would make cookies, she would hand me two, saying, “One for each hand.”
I’m holding two sharpened stakes.
“One for each hand,” I whisper to myself.
My shoulder feels limber and strong even when I squeeze the broom handle hard.
I feel ready.
As I move through the shed, I close doors behind me. I cross the floor of the barn fast and unlock the big doors to throw them open. Light rolls into the lower floor of the barn.
If feels like something is missing as the dust swirls in the shafts of morning light.
All the stalls are empty. Uncle Walt lost or gave away all of his animals before he became too frail to care for them. I would like to see it filled again—a winter refuge for cows, sheep, goats, and horses. The barn was a perfect tiny ecosystem.
I work my way from one stall to the next, checking every corner. I inspect the milk room, standing back as I lift the lid of the old cooler in there. I look under the stairs, making sure no hands will shoot out and trip me up before I climb, and then I peer around the lofts.
When I’m satisfied that the barn is empty, I turn back for the house.
Searching the barn and shed were a formality, really. I didn’t expect to find anything there. I needed a warmup.
I’m back at the pantry door. The last thing I want to do is step through that space again. It doesn’t feel so bad when I open the door from the shed. The space is infused with kitchen light now. The endless black expanse of it has been returned to reality.
I step through.
There’s enough light in the kitchen now that I can see tiny glints from the floor. When they cleaned up the glass, they missed the slivers. Flies are already buzzing near the fridge and I smell something sweet over there. It’s no surprise. Uncle Walt’s refrigerator isn’t as old as Mr. Engel’s, and it doesn’t have a hard latch on the door. Without power for a night, the food in there is probably already spoiling.
I use my stakes to flip open the biggest of the cabinets and even some of the smaller ones.
The kitchen is clear.
I mean, aside from the cellar door, it’s clear. I’m saving that for last.
Before I leave, I turn back and have second thoughts. It’s not enough to keep it closed, but I slide the table over from its normal spot so I can push it against the cellar door. A strong hand could shove it aside, but I’ll hear the noise if they do.
I grab a flashlight from the hall closet and tape it to the broom handle. I can point the light and jab with the same hand if I need to. The rest of the first floor doesn’t take much time. There aren’t that many hiding places aside from two closets and under the table in the dining room. I pull the tablecloth like a magician and get ready to jab. There’s nothing there.
The only evidence I see of them consists of smeared fingerprints on the windows. Leaning close, I try to make out swirls and circles in the oil. Their prints don’t look like ours at all. It almost looks like the marks were made by scales. That revelation sends a shudder through me. I’m not a big fan of snakes.
Uncle Walt always used to say, “They can’t hear you screaming at them like that, and if they can, they don’t understand you.”
It didn’t stop me from yelling every time I lifted a bucket and found a coiled snake underneath.
“There are no venomous snakes up here,” my uncle would always say. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t reacting out of a fear of envenomation. The fear was fundamental. It still is. I don’t even like watching snakes on TV. The way they move is unnatural.
I’m standing here at the bottom of the stairs, lost in memory, because I’m afraid of what I might find on the second floor. The bedrooms upstairs are supposed to be safe. If I find something up there, I’ll never be able to fall asleep in this home again.
I tap my sharpened stake on a stair tread and take a step.
(I swear I heard something.)
I swear I heard something.
The room next to the bathroom is the one that Uncle Walt always used to call “Grandma’s room.” When Mom would come to visit, he would say, “You can take your mother’s things up to Grandma’s room, of course.”
That would cause Mom to make a face and backhand Uncle Walt while he feigned injury.
Uncle Walt was thirteen months younger than Mom.
My uncle would hold up a bulb before he changed it, and say something to her li
ke, “When you were my age, did they have these fancy lightbulbs?”
Mom always gave him the same dry laugh. In every way, Mom seemed much younger than Uncle Walt, but the comments about her age always offended her.
I can see under the bed in Grandma’s room from the stairs. That’s one hiding spot I can check off the list.
I start with the bathroom, sweeping aside the shower curtain and jabbing into the empty space. I look behind the door and declare the room clear. In Grandma’s room, I look in the wardrobe and see the clothes that I’ve managed to forget about. Mom always left clothes up here for her visits so she wouldn’t have to travel with a big suitcase. Back at home, she went through clothes pretty fast. Using Goodwill like her extended closet, she cycled outfits for the season and her changing moods. Up here, she wore a pretty consistent uniform.
“What does it matter?” she would say. “There’s nobody up here worth looking good for.”
“Not at your age,” Uncle Walt would say.
That would earn him another hit.
Grandma’s room doesn’t have a closet. It’s quickly finished.
I move on to Uncle Walt’s room.
His room is still filled with mysteries. With my broom handle, I lift the skirt on his bed and peer underneath. This seems like a horrible invasion of his privacy, even though I only find dust bunnies under there. I haven’t even started to empty out this room. I’ve been leaving it for last.
Uncle Walt never hesitated to answer any direct question, but he still seemed like a very private man.
On one visit—I must have been in my early twenties—we were sitting at the kitchen table when I finally got up enough nerve to ask, “How come you never had a girlfriend… or a boyfriend?”
He smiled and laughed.
“I did. Once. It ended poorly and I decided that, for me, the risk wasn’t worth the reward.”
“What risk? Getting your heart broken if it doesn’t work out?”
He shook his head. “No. Not that. Infection.”