Or hers.
But the truth was that the damn place smelled like a catbox. Santa Ana winds hit just right, and the foul stench of that yard even made it over to my house. I could imagine what it was like for Ed and Tony. Not to mention the fact that Frank sometimes played over at his friend Johnny’s house next door. I didn’t like the idea of my boy being exposed to germs and rats and who-knows-what-all over there.
So I’d signed the petition, but nothing came of it. Ed said the city sent someone down, some inspector, but that the old lady was never home. He was trying to get them to go to the junior college and hit her up where she worked, serve her with a subpeona or some son of notice ordering her to clean up her yard, but they weren’t willing to go that far. So there it sat.
I’d never heard of this shrine before, and I don’t know why I believed it was really there, but I did. I remembered neighborhood legends and secrets from when I was a kid, things that parents didn’t know existed but that we’d seen or sometimes even built with our own hands. There was a whole separate world that parents didn’t know about, and I’m sure the same thing was true today.
Aarfy was barking, straining at his leash, getting anxious. “Here,” I said to the Pittman boy, handing him the leash. “Take my dog home. Tell my wife what happened, and call 911. I’m going to go over there and check—”
“Don’t, Mr. Marotta! That monster’s still there! It’s small but it’s …Jesus Christ! I’ve never seen anything like it!”
The monster was the one part of his story I definitely didn’t believe.
“Look, I’ll be fine. Get to my house, tell my wife, call 911. I’m going over there now.” What had just occurred to me was that his friend Paul might still be alive and in need of emergency medical attention. I didn’t know CPR, not exactly, but I’d seen it in movies and on TV and figured I knew enough to keep the kid alive until police or paramedics came by.
The boy stood there stupidly, holding on to the leash.
“Go!” I told him. ‘ He ran off toward my house, Aarfy leading the way, and I hurried away in the opposite direction. All the homes on the circle had backlit curtains and porch lights on, but the professor’s house was totally dark. With the bushy trees around and behind it, all individual features obscured, it looked like a giant amoeba, like The Blob or something, but I pushed that thought away. I didn’t want to let that kid’s fear and paranoia get to me, and the last thing I needed to do was start thinking about monster movies.
I thought of knocking on the door first, but it looked pretty unlikely that the professor was home, so I cut across her driveway and ran by her front window toward the side of the house, nearly tripping over a rock or some other hard object half-buried in the ground.
I slowed down when I reached the side yard. It was just too damn dirty and crowded to go running through. I didn’t want to slam my shin against something or cut myself on a rusty piece of metal. Besides, I was almost out of breath just from running across the street to get here.
I walked carefully through the rubbish and into the backyard. This was a comer lot—if there could be corner lots on a circle—and was bigger than most of the other backyards. Bigger than mine, that’s for sure. It was also a bona fide health hazard, filled with more junk and garbage than I had ever seen before. It looked like a fucking dump. Not “dump” as in ratty place but “dump” as in landfill. It literally looked like four or five garbage trucks had tilted their backs over her fence and deposited all their contents on her dead lawn. There were a lot of trees and bushes here, but there were even more garbage cans and moldy cardboard boxes and pieces of rusted scrap metal. I walked past a garage door opener propped against a drawerless wooden dresser, the hood of a white car piled high with broken clay pots and bags of charcoal.
I made my way down a narrow path through the debris. There, between a collapsed playhouse and a sticker bush that appeared to have overgrown a rotted woodpile, was the shrine. I knew what it was immediately, and the sight of it sent a shiver through my bones. It was the creepiest thing I’d ever seen, and I wished I’d thought to bring a flashlight. Hell, I wished I’d stopped by the Christensens’ house, gotten Ed off his dead ass and made him come back here with me. I might be an adult, but this place was spooky, and it wouldn’t’ve hurt to have someone else along for the ride.
The shrine was a Catholic-looking adobe thing, like one of those old altars in a Mexican village or something. But there was no saint in its alcove, only a black empty space. It wasn’t like the statue of a saint had been stolen or anything, it was more like that black space itself was the thing being worshiped. I can’t explain it any better than that, but that’s how I felt and it scared me.
There was no dead body, though, no little fire-roasted monster, nothing that would indicate that the Pittman boy (what was his name?) had been telling the truth. I’m not sure why I thought it would be otherwise, but I’d honestly expected to find the dead corpse of a teenager laying there and some sort of doll-sized monster eating his flesh.
This place encouraged that kind of thinking.
I turned to look back at the house. It occurred to me that the woman who lived there might not know about the shrine. Her yard was so overgrown, was so densely packed with crap, that someone could hide or even live in it without her knowing. So maybe she didn’t know it was back here, maybe someone else had snuck into this fucking pig sty and set up this altar for … what? Witchcraft? To perform satanic services?
Whatever it was, it was nasty, wrong, and even if there was nothing here now, I knew the Pittman kid was telling the truth. His friend had died in this spot. I didn’t know where the body was now, but it had been here earlier. I was sure of that.
I took a step forward. No one had built this thing recently. It was old. It had been here a long time. I bent down and saw underpants and caps and photos. People had been coming here for years, making pilgrimages to this place. But who? Neighborhood children? The thought terrified me. Had Frank been here? Did he know about this place? Was he involved in a cult or some sort of River’s Edge thing? I didn’t think so, but you could never tell. Parents were always the last people in the world to find out what their kids were really like. 1 did know that Lynn and I kept a close watch on what he did and monitored him pretty closely. He wasn’t allowed out at night unless we knew exactly where he was going and with whom. I didn’t know what had happened here tonight, but thank God Frank was home right now, in bed, not roaming around like the Pittman kid and his friend.
I looked closer. There were also little white snippets of stuff that looked like fingernails and beneath the fingernails a folded piece of paper that looked familiar—the petition we’d signed to have the health department investigate this place.
I didn’t like that. As far as I knew, Ed had sent the petition to the city and had kept the only copy for himself. What it was doing here was a mystery. Although since the Pittman boy had said they’d come out here tonight to ask the shrine for money, I couldn’t help but think that someone had left the petition here and asked the shrine for something else. What that something else could be, I had no idea.
An icy cold passed through me.
I stood, glanced around the darkness. There was no reason for me to stay, I’d checked what I’d come to check and nothing was there. No dead body, no monster. Now I was trespassing pure and simple. But the certainty that something very bad had happened here, all appearances to the contrary, made me decide that I needed to confront the woman who owned the house. Either she had no clue what was going on in her backyard and needed to be told, or she did know and needed to be questioned. Whatever the case, I knew I had to talk to her.
I walked away from the shrine without looking behind me, and made my way back down the path and through the side yard, then across the dead lawn to the front porch. I knocked on the door, waited, knocked on the door, waited, knocked, waited. I must have done this for five full minutes, but there was no answer and I heard no noise from inside the home.
A car was in the driveway, an old Ford Torino, and though she could have walked somewhere, could have gone someplace in someone else’s car, I didn’t think that was the case. She was in there. And she might be in trouble.
I felt suspicious and more than a little scared, and a practical part of me said to get my ass home and call the cops. But another pan of me said the Pittman kid had already called the cops, who would be here shortly, and they could rescue me if I failed to rescue the professor.
After only a moment’s hesitation, I walked around back again and then up the rickety wooden steps that led to a screened-in porch. Not only was the door unlocked, it was open, and a primitive superstitious pan of my brain thought that it looked like someone or something was inviting me in. I thought about walking back down the stairs and rooting through that trashy yard for a pipe or some sort of weapon, but I was already at the top and decided just to go in.
The porch was as filthy as the backyard, piled high with old furniture and boxes. “Hello?” I called out. “Anybody home?”
If anybody was, they weren’t talking, so I walked a little ways down the porch to where the door to the house itself was. This door was open, too, and the hair on the back of my neck prickled. I almost turned around then and there, but some mule-headed bit of stubbornness refused to let me be frightened off like a nervous little girl, and instead of leaving I stepped into the darkened house.
“Hello?” I called.
There was no answer, and I felt around on the wall next to me for a light switch. I found one and flipped it on.
I didn’t know where in the house I thought I was. Some sort of foyer, I suppose. Or a laundry room. I was in a bedroom, though. It was empty, but the bed looked like it had been slept in recently—or else it always looked that way because the professor never made it. That I could believe. The bedroom was as messy as the porch, with books and newspapers strewn all over the hardwood floor, thick black strings of cobwebs that had collapsed in on themselves hanging from the stucco ceiling. The room smelled of must, dust, old sweat and dried urine, and hanging over an antique chair with ripped upholstery was a nightgown stained with fresh blood.
I wished I had brought a weapon, but it was too late now, and I stuck my hand in my pocket, grabbed my keys and held them in my fist for a makeshift set of brass knuckles. I walked into the next room, another bedroom.
And there she was, sitting in front of a vanity mirror, combing her hair.
“Oh Jesus,” I said, and my voice was a whisper that felt like it was going to turn into a scream. “Oh Jesus.”
The fat woman’s skin was transparent. I remembered hearing a story from a guy at the plant that in pre-war Vietnam, the upper class used to breed rats, force feeding them nothing but ginger root. They’d do this for several generations, and somewhere down the line, when the female rats gave birth, the babies would be transparent and the Vietnamese would eat them as a delicacy because of the subtle ginger flavor that permeated their meat. That’s what this reminded me of. Only this was a person not a rat, and I was pretty sure that she had not been born this way; she’d become this way.
It was the professor, I assumed, and from the books piled on the bed, it looked like she was a philosophy not physics instructor. I don’t know why I noticed that; it had nothing to do with anything.
She was still seated in front of her vanity, but she’d turned away from the mirror and was staring at me. There was a sly smile on her lips, and I could see the white fat of her cheeks through her clear skin, the orangish muscles that worked her mouth. “Which one are you?” she said.
I turned tail and ran. It would have been shorter, probably, to continue on through the house and speed out the front door, but I had no idea what awaited me in other rooms, and my sole thought was to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. I ran back through that first bedroom, down the length of porch, then leaped the steps and hauled ass around the corner of the house.
I ran next door to Ed’s. I thought about going home to call the cops, but I didn’t want to upset Lynn any more than she was already or let Frank know anything about this at all, so I opted for Ed’s instead. I guess I could’ve gone to the Pittmans’ house and gotten Bill to come with us—it was his kid who’d started this, after all—but I didn’t know Bill Pittman that well and didn’t like him much and, to be honest, didn’t think he’d be much help. He was kind of a dilfy little guy, a scrawny wannabe redneck who was drunk more often than not, and I doubted he’d bring much to the table. Ed, though, was an ex-Marine, a big strapping guy, and while he worked now as a salesman for a drug company, there was still nothing soft about him. He was a good man and a good friend, and while he was a little anal retentive sometimes and a little too by-the-book, he was exactly the type of person I’d want watching my back if I got in a jam.
Ed and his wife were night owls, and I was glad to see that their front door was open. That meant they hadn’t gone to sleep yet. But my relief lasted only a few seconds. Because when I reached the screen door, I knew something was wrong immediately. Ed made sure his wife kept their home spotless, but I could see through the screen that the living room was a mess. It looked like a tornado had torn through there.
It looked like the professor’s house.
With a sinking feeling in my gut, I opened the door and walked in.
They were on the couch in front of the television, Ed and Judy, and they’d been burned beyond recognition. If it weren’t for the fact that they were sitting in their own house on their own sofa and Ed was nearly a foot taller than his wife, I would have had no idea who they were. Their clothes and hair were gone, their faces little more than charred skulls, their bodies blackened bone. The couch itself was not singed, only the bodies, and it looked like they had been killed elsewhere and posed there. I thought of what the Pittman kid had told me about the little burned monster at the shrine, and I knew this was connected. It made no sense, at least not to me, but somehow it did to someone somewhere, and though these were the bodies of my friends, I kept waiting for them to move and start coming after me.
I felt overwhelmed, not knowing what to do or where to turn. Where were the police? Shouldn’t they have been here by now? I glanced at the television set, thought of how I’d left Lynn sitting on the couch, watching a movie. What if something had gotten into my own house, what if something had happened to Lynn or Frank?
I turned, started back out, and saw through the screen a slim shape leaning against the wall at the edge of Ed’s garage, a silhouette of cascading hair.
Lynn?
I opened the screen, and the figure walked casually around the edge of the garage toward me.
The hair was Lynn’s, but the long thin face beneath it was like nothing I had ever seen. Huge eyebrows jutted across sleepy baggy eyes, and strange lumps protruded from the skin of the cheeks and forehead. The mouth was open but not smiling, revealing stained rectangular teeth behind an oversized upper
lip.
But it was the way this creature walked that scared the living fuck out of me. Because it wasn’t marching purposefully toward me, wasn’t trying to chase me and catch me. It simply was strolling over. As though it knew me. As though we were friends.
I didn’t know what it was and didn’t want to know. Ed’s garage and house were close together, only a couple of steps apart, and the thing was already at the doorway. There was no way I’d be able to get by it. I slammed the front door shut, locked it and ran through the house to the back door. I was in the laundry room when I heard the front door unlock, open and close and the sound of casual footsteps on the hardwood floor of the living room.
Ed and Judy had triple-locked the back door—knob, deadbolt, chain—and it took me a moment to get them all unlatched. Then I was outside and flying. I ran around the dark side of the house, terrified and out of breath, sure that at any second that long-haired travesty of a woman was going to grab me. But nothing did, and I made it safely around the front. I looked across the circle at my h
ouse, saw Lynn standing in the open doorway, looking through our screen, as though investigating a noise she’d heard outside.
Or was it Lynn?
Of course it was. Yes, this was a silhouette, too, but I couldn’t be fooled twice. I knew my own wife, goddamn it. I was about to shout out to her that she should close the door, lock it and stay inside, when she did exactly that. In the stillness of the neighborhood, I heard the door slam, and a feeling of relief washed over me. She was safe, she was fine.
But for how long?
I was on the sidewalk now and was going to run home and call the cops, but I thought about that long-haired thing following me and knew 1 didn’t dare let it know where I lived. I had no idea what it was or what it could do, and I wanted to keep it as far away from my family as possible. I looked over my shoulder at the side of the house, but it was still not there, still not coming.
It would be, though.
At its own pace.
In its own way.
It was the shrine that was at the center of all this. I had no idea if it was sitting on some sacred spot and getting its energy from that, or if it had been granted power from some sort of spell, or even if it had been built in such a way that its architecture made it what it was. But I knew it had to be destroyed, knew that if all this was going to stop, I would have to demolish it.
I suddenly thought of a plan.
My friend was coming around the corner, still sauntering in that relaxed unhurried manner. She was far enough away that I couldn’t see the specifics of her strange and terrible face, but I’d seen it once and that was enough. I’d never forget it, and when I saw that long cascading hair, my flesh erupted in goose bumps. My gut instinct was to run, to get as far away from her as quickly as possible, but I needed tools, needed weapons, and I ran up the driveway to the garage.
Four Dark Nights Page 6