8
Mike and Holly were sitting at the kitchen table, discussing the recently formed crack in the library wall and what to do about it, when the kids came home from school. Tommy came bursting through the front door, anxious to tell his parents all about his new school. Grabbing a cookie from the jar sitting on the counter, he described his school, teacher, and some of the other kids.
"Mrs. Wilson. That's my teacher. She's nice. But she has these funny glasses that make her eyes look real big." He set down his cookie and made circles with his fingers to show how his teacher's eyes looked. "Like this. Big eyes. Kind of like a frog. They look funny when she's looking at you."
"Just don't call her frog eyes," Holly warned. "I don't thing she would like that."
"I wouldn't do that," Tommy said, shaking his head. "She might get mad at me and send me to the principal's office. I heard she can be mean if she wants to. That's what Jimmy Foss said. That's a boy in my class. He sits next to me. Jimmy said Mrs. Wilson can turn into a witch when she wants to. Today she sent two boys to the principal's office just for talking."
"You didn't go to the principal's office today, did you?" Mike asked, teasing.
"Oh no. But I saw it."
He described the principal's office as a circular glass enclosure in the middle of the school. While the office was a highly unusual structure, what really impressed him was the cases of stuffed birds lining the walls directly across from it. Dozens of cases. Hundreds of birds. Everything from a tiny blue-green hummingbird to a bald eagle. They were dead, of course, and their eyes were glass, and some of the feathery bodies were aged to the point where they were starting to fall apart. But they were still pretty neat, at least according to Tommy.
"Are you sure they were real birds?" Holly asked.
"Oh yes. They were real. I even asked my teacher about them. She said they've been there since the school was built."
Despite keeping a smile firmly in place, Holly did not share in her son's enthusiasm about a collection of murdered and mounted birds. She thought wildlife should be just that, wild, and not part of someone's morbid collection. She worried what kind of message such a collection could be giving to young children, especially those brought up in a rural country where guns and hunting were a way of life.
Megan entered the house a minute or two later, her demeanor the complete opposite of her brother's. Her first impression of her new school had obviously not been a good one. She didn't like her classes, teachers, or fellow classmates.
"You have to give it a chance," Mike said. "It's only your first day. Things will get better once you make friends. You'll see."
"Give this a chance," Megan said, obviously upset. She reached into her jeans pocket and pulled out a carefully folded paper napkin. Unfolding the napkin, she deposited several tiny balls on the kitchen table.
"What are those?" Holly asked, leaning forward to get a better look.
"They're spit wads," Megan replied, her voice angry. "I pulled six of them out of my hair this morning on the bus."
"Yeah, I got hit in the face," Tommy said, his mouth filled with a cookie. "It hurt, but I didn't cry. Did I, Sis?"
"No, you didn't cry," Megan said, trying to ignore her brother. "All the kids on the bus were saying things. Mean things."
"What sort of things?" Holly asked.
"They were saying things about Dad's grandmother, how she was crazy in the head. Some of them even had a little poem about it. I can't remember the words, but it wasn't very nice." Megan's eyes started to glisten and Mike knew she was fighting to hold back tears of anger. "I think the kids on the bus hate us because of Vivian Martin. I think they think we're crazy like her because we live in the same house."
"Old lady Martin has gray hair. Claims to see them everywhere. Boogers in the attic, boogers in the walls. Boogers under the bed nine feet tall.," Tommy said, remembering some of the words to the poem the children on the bus had been singing. He giggled suddenly, perhaps thinking what it would be like for an old woman to have boogers under her bed.
Holly arched an eyebrow, giving Mike a look that said she wanted an explanation. Mike looked at his wife and daughter, trying to come up with something soothing to say to make things better. He knew kids could be cruel, but still he suspected the spit wads had been fired in jest rather than maliciousness. When he didn't say anything, Holly spoke up.
"I'm going to call the school and put a stop to this right now."
She got up and started toward the phone, but Mike stopped her. "You don't want to call the school about this. Not yet."
"Why not?"
He held up his hands, trying to calm her. "Look. I'm sure this was nothing more than a harmless prank being played on the new kids. Things will be different tomorrow. You'll see. Besides, if you call the school the bus driver will yell at the kids and things will only get worse."
Holly turned and stared at him. "I will not have my children terrorized on the bus."
"Neither will I," he said. "But let's give it a day. Okay?"
Holly thought about it for a moment, then nodded. "All right, I'll wait. But if this happens again, I'm calling the principal."
"Fair enough." Mike nodded. He turned to the kids. "What about you guys?"
Megan knew how bad things could get if she snitched on the other kids. "Okay," she said. "But tomorrow I'm going to wear a helmet."
"Me too," Tommy said. He pulled another cookie out of the jar, but the cookie slipped out of his finger and rolled under the table. Not wanting his afternoon snack to get away, he chased after the cookie.
"Hey, Dad. What's this?" Tommy asked, retrieving the chocolate chip cookie from beneath the table.
"What's what?" Mike asked, scooting his chair back to see what his son had found. Tommy was pointing at a dark stain on the floor directly beneath the table, an irregular oval about six inches long and four inches across.
"That wasn't there earlier when I swept," Holly said, looking under the table.
Mike looked at the stain for a moment, wondering what possibly could have caused it. The pale yellow tiles had just been installed the day before; maybe the workers had spilled something on the floor and it had taken this long for it to soak up through the tiles. Leaning forward, he ran his fingertips over the stain. The tiles weren't wet, or sticky.
"I'm not sure what it is," Mike said, straightening back up. "Something must have soaked through from the other side. It doesn't feel like mildew. Maybe it's just a piece of bad tile. I'll give the workers a call in the morning and have them come out and replace it."
"You'll never get someone out on such short notice," Holly said, staring at the stain.
"Sure I will," Mike argued. "You forget we're living in the country now. There can't be that much work for contractors going on around here. I imagine most people do their own repairs, especially when it comes to something as simple as laying floor tiles."
"It looks like a face," Tommy said, interrupting them.
"What was that, son?" Mike asked.
"It looks like a face."
Mike looked back down at the stain. He hadn't noticed it before, because he was looking at it from a different angle, but the stain did look sort of like a person's face, minus the ears. There were two darker patches within the stain that formed the eyes, with another dark smear making up the mouth. And it was lighter where the cheekbones and the bridge of the nose would be.
"It's just the way the light is hitting it," Holly said, studying the stain.
"No, it isn't, Mom. See." Tommy stepped closer to the stain, blocking the glow from the overhead lights. The image didn't change. As a matter of fact it now looked more like a face than it did moments before. Exactly like a face.
Though Mike knew what he was looking at was nothing more than a discoloration on the tile, he couldn’t stop the chill that suddenly marched down his spine. The stain did look eerily like a face, as if someone or something was peering up at him from the floor, looking through the tiles as one
would look through a window.
"It's just a funny-shaped stain. That's all," he said, reassuring Tommy before the boy's imagination ran away with him. Still, from deep inside Mike's head a little voice whispered that what he was seeing was much more than just a stain. Much, much more.
9
Awakening early the first Saturday in their new house, Mike found Tommy sitting in front of the television watching cartoons. They still only had about six channels, but it was obviously more than enough to keep the boy happy. At least he wasn't screaming about missing his favorite shows, which Mike knew from experience would happen if his son missed an episode of whatever was currently at the top of his list.
No matter what his current favorite show was, Tommy was at the moment watching an old Bugs Bunny cartoon. Bugs and Daffy were arguing in front of Elmer Fudd about whether it was actually "Rabbit Season" or "Duck Season." Mike paused in the doorway to watch for a moment, smiling when Bug Bunny pulled the old word switch-a-roo, making Daffy say that it was duck season. Quick as a flash Elmer Fudd pointed the business end of his trusty shotgun at Daffy's head and squeezed the trigger, blasting the duck's bill around to the back of his head.
Mike was especially pleased to see the cartoon had not been edited by television censors. There was a time when it seemed that every kid's show had come under attack by parents' groups for being too violent for young viewers. The Three Stooges were usually at the top of their hit list, but cartoons also suffered, including the classic Looney Tunes from Warner Bros.
The groups put pressure on the various networks, forcing them to either remove the shows from their lineups or edit them until none of the violence remained. It didn't matter if the supposed violence was slapstick comedy, or a parody. All of it had to go.
It also didn't matter if no one could prove that watching a Three Stooges episode had resulted in a child becoming a violent maniac. Mike had never read about a child watching Curly, Larry, and Moe and then whacking his or her mommy in the face with a frying pan, or putting Daddy's head in a vice.
And did the parental censor groups really believe a child would try to drop a safe on someone as Wily Coyote had often tried to do to the Road Runner? Maybe they were afraid a misguided teenager would paint a tunnel on the side of a mountain, or a building, and hapless motorists would smash their vehicles into it. Perhaps they were terrified that children all across America would save their lunch money to purchase rocket-powered roller skates, or other high-tech gizmos, from the Acme Company.
It was truly a sad world when such groups focused their attention on old slapstick comedy routines, and cartoons, as the cause for all the bad things in the world, rather than face up to the reality that they were just lousy parents. If the same people would take time to teach their children right from wrong, and if those children would be held responsible for their own actions, then the world would be a much better place.
Maybe people were already starting to see things for what they truly were, because many of the cartoons that had come under attack in the 1980s were no longer censored. At least the one Tommy was watching had not been censored. Mike was glad about that, because a Bugs Bunny cartoon wasn't the least bit funny when it had been chopped and shredded to pieces. And he wanted Tommy to receive the same enjoyment he had from watching the classics.
Sitting on the floor directly in front of the television, far enough back so as not to be fussed at by his mother, Tommy cradled a box of Corn Pops in his lap, eating the crunchy sweet cereal right out of the box. He giggled as the antics of Bugs and Daffy continued, totally oblivious that his father watched him from the doorway. Mike considered joining his son in front of the television, but knew if he did he would probably waste the better part of the morning watching cartoons.
Instead he smiled and continued down the hallway to the kitchen. He thought about preparing breakfast, but Holly and Megan were still sleeping and he hated to go through all the trouble of fixing a meal just for himself. Deciding Tommy had the right idea — the quick way was the best way on a Saturday morning — he grabbed a couple of strawberry Pop Tarts out of the cabinet and prepared a pot of fresh coffee.
As he pulled a chair away from the kitchen table, Mike noticed there were now two stains on the tile floor. Like the first, the second stain was a dark gray oval about six inches long and four inches wide.
"What the hell?" He moved the chair out of the way so he could see the stains, annoyed such things should be appearing in a brand-new floor. There had to be an explanation for it. Perhaps moisture was getting under the tiles. Maybe one of the water lines had sprung a leak.
"Great. Just what we need. More repairs."
Setting the Pop Tarts on the table, he crossed the room to the door opening onto the basement. Since moving in, he hadn't had time to take more than a quick look at the basement. If a water line had sprung a leak, that's where he would find it, because the pipes connected to the kitchen fixtures ran along the wooden beams beneath the floor.
Opening the door, he flipped the light switch at the top of the wooden stairs. Two light bulbs came on in the basement below, their pale glow doing little to push back the darkness. Holding onto the handrail, Mike descended the narrow steps. A barrage of odors rose up from the shadows to greet him: the smell of mold, dampness, dust, and perhaps cockroaches. There was also a noticeable difference in the temperature as he descended the steps. The basement was as cool as a cave.
Reaching the basement floor he turned to his right, navigating between an old oil furnace and a small stack of empty paint cans. He walked into a spiderweb, the sticky strands clinging to his face and hair, causing him to jump back in alarm.
"Damn. Damn. Damn," he cursed, tearing off the strands of web and swatting at the imaginary spiders he was certain now crawled all over him. He should have brought a flashlight, but he hadn't known the basement would be so dark. Turning around, he looked for the row of tiny windows set high along one wall that should have allowed light in. The windows were there, but all the glass panes had been painted black.
Mike stood and stared at the windows, realizing he was looking at yet another visible indication of his grandmother's eccentric behavior. The old woman must have painted over the glass to keep anyone from seeing into the basement. Not that there was anything worth looking at.
Making a mental note to purchase a razor blade scraper to use on the windows, he turned back around and counted off his footsteps. Reaching the spot he estimated to be directly under the kitchen table, he stopped and studied the ceiling above him. Where he stood there were no water pipes, nothing to cause a leak or produce enough moisture to stain the kitchen floor.
Knowing leaks had a peculiar way of traveling, he slowly crossed the basement until he found the water lines. Again he found nothing to indicate a leak. No puddles. No drips. Not even any excess moisture.
Determined there had to be a leak somewhere, he followed the lines from one end of the basement to the other. Nothing. He had just started to retrace his steps, double-checking the lines, when he caught a glimpse of movement, a shadow darker than the blackness around it. Something small scurried along the wall beneath the windows. The movement caused him to stop, his heart pounding.
What the hell was that? It must have been a rat. No way. Too bloody big to be a rat. Maybe it's a possum. Or a skunk. Mike sniffed, but didn't smell anything. God, please don't let it be a skunk.
The thought of having wild animals in his basement upset him, especially with the children in the house. He knew there wasn't much chance of them getting bitten, but he was not going to put up with unwanted critters.
His gaze focused on the wall beneath the windows. Mike slowly walked across the room. He moved as quietly as possible, his head cocked slightly, listening for the pitter-patter of tiny feet. The only sounds he heard, however, were those made by him.
It must have left, probably escaped through a hole in the wall or floor. Maybe down a tunnel. I probably scared it off.
He turned
his attention to the area directly beneath the windows, and almost walked into one of the other walls. He stopped, momentarily disoriented by the sudden appearance of the wall before him. Looking around, he realized the basement was not a perfect rectangle. Instead it was shaped like the letter L, and he was now standing in an alcove jutting off from the main room.
Standing there getting his bearings, he spotted something dark and furry directly above his head. Startled, he jumped back, a scream nearly escaping his lips.
Jesus!
He expected the animal to lunge at him, its pointed teeth going for his unprotected throat, but nothing happened. The creature and Mike remained frozen in place, each staring at the other. At least he suspected it was staring at him. He couldn't see its eyes.
All right, big fellow, make your move. Let me see just how bad you really are. If I had a baseball bat right now, I would show you just how bad I am.
A few moments passed. The animal still didn't move.
What are you doing? Sleeping? Or are you already dead? Maybe the cat's got your tongue.
Realizing something wasn't right, he slowly relaxed his stance. He took a step forward, discovering that what he thought to be an animal was actually a carved wooden statue, about twelve inches high, covered with fur. The statue stood on a wooden shelf lining the wall. Other statues stood with it.
Mike let out his breath. "A fucking kachina."
Unlike the other kachinas he had seen so far, this particular doll was completely covered with brown fur. It also wore moccasins, armbands, and a brightly colored apron about its waist. Judging by the menacing clawed hands, and the shape of its head, he assumed the statue represented a bear spirit.
"You gave me quite a start." He turned the statue around to see its face. Like those in the rooms upstairs, all of the kachinas in the basement had been placed on the shelf facing the wall. The bear kachina's face was rather furious looking, with an open snout lined with pointy white teeth. Above the furry snout angry red eyes stared at Mike, challenging him.
Darker Than Night Page 7