The Agony House

by Cherie Priest

  “What is this stuff?” Denise asked, wanting to run to her mom, and not wanting to step in any of that garbage.

  Mike came down the steps behind her, covering his mouth and nose with the bottom of his shirt. “Insulation. Maybe … vermiculite? Or rock wool? Whatever it is, don’t touch it. Don’t breathe it, if you can possibly help it. We should get out of here.”

  Denise followed Mike’s lead, pulling up her collar so she wasn’t flashing her bra at anybody. “Oh my God, yes. As fast as possible.”

  “Why?” Sally demanded, even though she was wiping at her eyes and coughing.

  “Best case scenario, there’s mold and bug crap in this stuff. Worst case scenario, it’s asbestos,” Mike said unhappily. “In a house this old, the odds are too good to risk it. Everybody, to the bathrooms and wash up—then go pack an overnight bag. We’re getting a hotel.”

  “With what money?” Sally asked, loudly, and with a shrill undertone of despair. “We can barely pay the electricians and the plumbers and I just bought pizza for the neighbor kid … and now this?” She stood in the wreckage of the parlor, where all the holes in the floor were covered by drifts of brown muck. More quietly, and with more exhaustion than sorrow she added, “I’m all tapped out, and we can’t get the next portion of the loan disbursed until the pipes and the wires pass code.”

  “I’ve got some space on a credit card,” Mike told her softly. “I’ll find us a Motel 6 or something. Let’s not panic just yet. The electricians already told me that there wasn’t any asbestos in the walls, so there might not be any in … in whatever this brown stuff from the ceiling turns out to be, either. I’ll go to Pete’s hardware and get a test kit tomorrow, and then we’ll know for sure.”

  “They make kits to test for asbestos?” Denise asked.

  “Yes, they do,” he confirmed. “And we’ll spend one night in a hotel, as a precaution. Tomorrow, we’ll know if we need to borrow more money, or if we just need to use the Shop-Vac. We’ll figure it out. Now go on, get out of here. Both of you,” he extended the gentle command to his wife, as well. “Nobody needs to be breathing this junk. Let me get my phone, and I’ll find us a place to crash.”

  Denise didn’t like how tired he sounded, and how hard he was trying to sound strong and positive; but somebody needed to keep cool, and her mom was wound up so tight you could bounce a quarter off her. “Mom?” she said. “Be careful, don’t forget there’s a hole in the—”

  “I know there are holes in the floor,” she snapped. “I’ll find my way to the bedroom without breaking an ankle, don’t worry.” With that, she waded through the dry, dirty debris and off to her bedroom.

  Denise looked up at Mike, who was still standing on the stairs a little bit above her. She wasn’t sure what she wanted him to say, or do. He was already saying and doing everything he could. She really, really appreciated it, and she hoped that the look in her eyes got that message across, because she was too close to tears to say anything out loud.

  “Go on,” he said. “I’ll take care of your mom.”

  She whispered, “Okay. Thanks.” He stood aside to let her pass.

  Up in her room, she was all alone but she felt like she was being watched and it drove her crazy. She wanted to check under the bed, and in the closet that still didn’t have a door.

  She didn’t check. She grabbed her messenger bag, and picked up the old duffel she’d thrown on the floor in a corner. She selected a black tee from the shirt box, a pair of long shorts from the bottoms box, and to hell with it—a pair of flip-flops from that pile of shoes by the door. She had enough makeup in her purse to fake it for tomorrow. A fresh pair of underwear and her toothbrush topped off her whirlwind of packing, and that was it. Even a Motel 6 would have some soap, right?

  She was ready to go. Her duffel was slung over one shoulder, and the messenger bag weighed down her other one. Lucida Might and the House of Horrors was lying facedown on the floor at the foot of her bed, right where she’d tossed it when the ceiling caved in downstairs.

  Just like the ceiling in the story.

  She didn’t want to touch that book. But. She couldn’t leave it lying there, not like that—all rumpled and upside down. Not if someone was going to pay money for it, and that lady in New York wanted to read it, so … she couldn’t just walk away from it.

  She picked it up off the floor, and smoothed the pages back down. She closed it, and before she could change her mind, she stuffed it into her bag and zipped the whole thing shut.

  The voice on Terry’s recorder had said, “I keep what’s mine.” Was the ghost talking about the book? What would happen if she took it out of the house? Would the terrible coincidences follow her, even to a hotel?

  Out in the hall, the dust from downstairs had wafted and settled on the floor, the doorknobs, and the handrail leading to the stairs. It wasn’t the grime that made her throat go dry, and it wasn’t the musty smell. It was the footprints leading to her room: broad, flat, square-toed imprints, made by a large man’s dress shoe.

  The footprints went in. They didn’t come out.

  Denise fled to the top of the staircase and took the steps down to the living room as fast as she could.

  But she stopped near the bottom, because she heard her mother talking softly. She didn’t mean to overhear her, but when someone talks softly, you have to listen hard to hear them. So you do listen hard, even when you’re not supposed to.

  “I don’t know what I heard. All I know is what I think I heard, and I don’t know what to make of it.”

  “Well then, what do you think you heard?” Mike asked, using his best sympathetic ear voice.

  “I thought I heard a woman, and I know I smelled a woman.”

  “I’m sorry, say that again? One more time?”

  Sally took a deep breath. “I heard a woman say, ‘Get out of the way!’ and I felt something shove me. Something … somebody … I got pushed, Mike. Right out of the way, like some kind of dang guardian angel was watching out for me, or something.”

  “And you smelled this guardian angel?”

  “Yeah, she smelled like … like perfume. Roses and lilies. Old lady perfume.”

  “Your guardian angel is a pushy old lady. Got it.”

  “Sweetheart …” Sally was tired and exasperated. “I don’t know. All I’m saying is, something moved me, and if it hadn’t? That big support beam would’ve cracked me right in the head.”

  “You swear you aren’t hurt?”

  She cleared her throat. “No, I’m fine. It just scared the bejeezus out of me, is all. You know, if there’s asbestos up there—”

  “No, don’t go down that road. Not yet. Don’t borrow trouble. We’ll find out tomorrow, for sure.”

  Denise didn’t like to eavesdrop … or at least, she didn’t like to look like she’d been eavesdropping, so she slowly descended the last handful of stairs. She cleared her throat to get their attention, and cautiously poked her head around the wall at the bottom.

  “Mom? I don’t think you have a guardian angel. I think we have a ghost.”

  “A ghost?” Sally narrowed her eyes. “Is that what we’ve come to, making up ghosts?”

  Denise hopped off the bottom stair and into the living room, where she sheepishly stood in the wreckage of the ceiling. “Are ghosts any crazier than angels? Look, there are two dead people still hanging around this house,” she explained. “I’m basically sure of it.”

  Sally looked at Mike, who hemmed, hawed, and said, “Sweetheart, hear her out. I’ve heard some weird things too.”

  “Both of you? You both think we’ve got ghosts? Were either of you planning to tell me about them?”

  “I’m telling you now, okay?” Denise said, trying to head Mike off at the pass. She could take the damage on this one. She didn’t mind. “Don’t be mad at him; it’s not his fault. I told him not to say anything,” she fibbed.

  “She’s been doing research,” Mike said, trying to lend a hand. “Tell her what you learned, k
iddo.”

  Quickly, before Sally could spend any time getting mad about feeling left out, Denise said, “One of our ghosts was a guy named Joe Vaughn, who died here back in the 1950s. He’s a jerk, but there’s another ghost—a lady. I don’t know her name, but she’s nice. I bet she’s the one who pushed you. And I bet Joe’s the one who brought down the ceiling.”

  Sally held very still and did not argue, but her eyes flickered between her daughter and her husband and the gaping chasm above their heads. “I knew something funny was going on,” she finally said. “I keep smelling perfume, and finding stray nails lying around the house—in places they shouldn’t be, places where they could hurt somebody.”

  Denise was both delighted and appalled to hear that her mother had discovered more nails. “Joe was a carpenter, supposedly,” she said. Now that she thought about it, Desmond Rutledge was a developer. That was kind of the same thing, wasn’t it?

  “And a jerk,” her mother confirmed.

  Denise bobbed her head. “A total jerk. So you believe me?” She didn’t mention her own encounter with the nails. Give her mom one new thing to worry about at a time, that was her thinking.

  “More or less,” Sally said, not quite ready to commit to having confidence in the afterlife.

  But it was good enough for her daughter, who smiled feebly. She said, “Well you two, I’m all packed up. It’s getting late. Mike, did you find us a hotel?”

  Mike reached around the corner and collected a duffel bag. “Yeah, but it’s a couple miles away. You’re right, we’d better get going.”

  The hotel was more like ten miles away, and it wasn’t a Motel 6—but a mom-and-pop place with a neon sign that was half burned out, advertising GLF SD OTL rather than GULF SIDE HOTEL. They parked between a Dumpster and an old ice machine that looked like a great place to hide a dead body.

  The room itself was clean enough, but nothing matched—not even the soap and shampoo samples. Still, when Denise checked all the sheets for bedbugs, she didn’t find anything. She took one of the beds, and Mike and Sally took the other. By the time everyone was settled in, it was after eleven o’clock.

  The lights went out, but Denise couldn’t sleep.

  Over the roar of the old AC unit, she heard the honks of boat horns and the rumble of car engines on the busy street nearby. Flashes of headlights peeked around the curtains, and the hissing hum of the neon sign buzzed, fizzled, and turned the room orange when it flickered.

  She reached over the side of the bed for her bag, and pulled out Lucida Might and the House of Horrors. She also retrieved her phone. As quietly as possible, she pulled everything under the covers, and drew the blanket over her head. One thing she’d give the GLF SD OTL—the AC was powerful enough to keep her chilly, even with the blankets all tented up.

  She called up the flashlight app, and turned it on.

  Denise’s reading was interrupted by a text message from Trish, saying good night and that she hoped that the ghosts didn’t bite—a message accompanied by the traditional ghost emoji with its tongue hanging out.

  Denise didn’t reply to that one. Not even with a lazy thumbs-up.

  Her phone battery was running low, so she closed out the flashlight app—then found the outlet beside her bed and plugged it in. She pushed Lucida Might onto the nightstand, and fluffed her pillow, trying to make it feel less like a flat feather rock. When it was as comfy as it was going to get, she dropped her head down, and closed her eyes.

  On the next bed over, Mike was snoring softly and Sally wasn’t making any noise at all, so she was probably awake. She probably knew that Denise had been up too late, reading under the covers. She must not have cared. For all the trouble her family was taking to keep worries off her plate, she still had too many other things to worry about.

  Denise’s brain itched. It was hard to sleep when the AC unit rattled and howled a few feet away, and the neon light fizzled through the curtains. It was difficult to nod off when the bed was lumpy and the sheets smelled not so faintly of bleach.

  She thought about Lucida Might. It was better than thinking about this miserable hotel room, or the Agony House, or tetanus shots that should’ve happened—but didn’t. And as she finally drifted off to sleep, she considered how weird it was, how the villain talked about Doug like he was an object, and not a person.

  But that was silly, wasn’t it?

  Unless Joe Vaughn wasn’t really talking about a character named Doug. Maybe he was talking about something else. As Denise finally, restlessly drifted off to sleep, she couldn’t help but wonder what.

  The hotel alarm clock went off at oh-God-thirty and Denise shot awake in a panic, wondering where she was. She sat up in a tumble of sleep-pressed hair and dried drool, flailed around for her phone, found her phone, realized her phone wasn’t making the alarm noise, and then slammed her hands up and down along the nightstand, trying to find the source of the buzzing horror.

  Mike found it first. He rolled over and slapped it silent.

  Only then could Denise stop freaking out, and take a moment to remember what was going on, and why she was in a hotel, and how come the alarm had gone off and it was still so early.

  Was it early? It felt early.

  “Oh yeah,” she mumbled. Her brain gradually came back online.

  Groggily, Denise groaned and stumbled into the bathroom, where she skipped a shower because to hell with it, that’s why. She was only going to the po’boy place to kill time with the Internet over breakfast; she wasn’t glamming up for a beauty pageant.

  That’s what they agreed to, over arguments on who was brushing whose teeth first.

  “I don’t know how long the test takes, and you seem to like it there,” Mike said. “I’ll give you five bucks and you can get some breakfast. Let’s get this cleared up as soon as possible, so we can go back to work on the house, cleaning up that mess.”

  Crispy’s did breakfast, mostly biscuit-related or beignet-related, often with eggs thrown into the mix. Mike’s five bucks felt like all the money in the world at that hour—Denise could even get one of the small combo meals with that much. Did she want coffee? She needed coffee. But she’d rather have Coke, so that’s what she ordered.

  She took her tray to the table which was becoming “hers,” if possession was, indeed, nine-tenths of the law. A couple of kids who recognized her as a regular tossed her a head-nod when she sat down. She gave them a bob back, and pulled out her laptop. She plugged in her phone to let it charge, and felt very sorry for herself—and for everyone else who was up this early in the middle of summer.

  Norman was up early.

  He appeared with a loaded-down tray, boasting two big bacon-egg-and-cheese biscuits and hash browns too. Smoothly he slid into the bench beside her, dropping a messenger bag on the floor. He pushed it under the table with his foot. “Hey there. Fancy meeting you here.”

  “Hey there, yourself. What are you doing here at this hour?”

  “At this hour? It’s not that early,” he argued. “Sun’s up and everything. I’ve already been down at the river, taking pictures. You ever see the sun rise over the delta?”

  “I have not. And I have no desire to, either.”

  “Your loss.”

  “Sunset, maybe,” she said. “You ever take pictures of sunsets?”

  He nodded. “Used to. But I think the sunrises are prettier, and I’m usually not working a pizza shift through those.”

  “Fair enough,” she told him.

  They settled in to eat, fussing about old houses and joking about crappy working conditions. Norman asked about her hand, and Denise was evasive. He asked what she was doing there so early, and she told him about the mess with the ceiling and the maybe-asbestos. “And that’s not the worst of it. On top of everything, we have ghosts.”

  “Ghosts?”

  “One bad, one good. If we’re um …” She was pretty tired. “If me and Terry are reading the situation correctly. Terry, he’s this kid …” she began to expl
ain.

  “I know Terry. Everybody knows Terry,” he said with a grin.

  “Why am I not surprised. But what I’m saying is, if you’re gonna keep working in the house with us, you should definitely ask my stepdad for that hazard pay you were joking about.”

  “I ain’t afraid of no ghost.”

  She chucked a packet of salt at his head. “You should be afraid of ours. One of them is a real jerk, and I think he’s been setting up all these crazy little accidents. I think it’s Joe Vaughn, the guy who wrote that comic book we found in the attic.”

  He plucked the packet out of his lap, where it’d fallen, and tossed it onto the table. “Dang, it sounds like you’ve had a crazy couple of days.”

  “And gross. You should see the floor of our living room and parlor.”

  “I’ve got some free time today, if they want to spring for the help. I can use the money, and I’m not afraid of gross stuff from the ceiling. Especially if there’s hazard pay involved.” He waggled an eyebrow.

  “I’ll mention it. But if it’s asbestos, there’s no way they’ll ask you to help shovel it out. Hazard pay or not.”

  When they were mostly finished eating, Norman asked if she’d brought the comic book.

  Denise nodded as she chewed her final bite, wiped her hands down like she needed them for surgery, then topped off with a smidge of hand sanitizer. She handed him her extra napkins and the tiny travel bottle of sanitizer. “I’ve got it right here, but your buttery hands can’t touch it. Clean up, man.”

  “Do I need a fancy pair of white cotton gloves?”

  “No, but I don’t want butter on it. Or cheese,” she added, pointing out an orange spot on the side of his hand. “Just ask Terry: I like to keep it clean.”

  He accommodated her with exaggerated caution. Clean hands achieved, he wadded up the napkin and tossed it on his tray—then pushed the whole thing out of the way. “Now can I see this majestic manuscript?”

  Denise reached down and brought her bag up onto the bench. She dug down deep into the satchel and pulled out the book, then set it down on the table—edging her butt over so he could see it better.