"I just don't see how I can help you, Mr. Anthony. A break-in isn't a break-in unless someone actually breaks in. Nor is it a robbery unless something is taken." He stepped past Mike and started up the stairs.
"What about the broken kachina doll?"
The sheriff stopped and looked at him. "What about it? I'm sure you have plenty of replacements. If not, I suggest you get yourself a bottle of Elmer's glue. You might also want to get yourself a shovel and bury your cat before your kids get home from school."
With that parting shot, Sheriff Douglas climbed the stairs and left, leaving Mike alone in the basement. Alone and very angry.
15
Mike buried Pinky out behind the barn, taking time to cover the grave with dried leaves and grass. He and Holly didn't want the children to know what had happened to their pet. Not yet anyway. Moving into a new neighborhood, adjusting to a new school, was upsetting enough without adding to the situation. The would tell them later, at a more appropriate time.
Patting down the grave with his shovel, Mike wondered if a few words of remembrance would be appropriate. He had never buried a family pet, and wasn't sure what were the proper procedures. Did one say a prayer, and if so, why? He wasn't sure if animals had souls, so he didn't know if a few words directed toward the big kahuna in the sky was the right thing to do. Was there a kitty heaven, a place where felines romped and played to their hearts' content? He didn't really think so, but it was still nice to imagine that such a place existed.
As he stood there, leaning on the shovel used to dig the grave, he could almost picture Pinky in a place where cats spent the days lounging around on feathery clouds, sipping from silver chalices filled with cream, and snacking of bits of fresh liver and tuna. There would be no dogs in kitty heaven, only fat, tasty mice to swat about and chase. They wouldn't need wings either. Nope, no angel wings in kitty heaven, because they would get in the way of daily grooming. No need for wings when you could run, jump, roll, and tussle with all the other cats in the kingdom.
If there was a kitty heaven, then he was quite certain that's where Pinky had gone. The big cat was probably already up there, stuffing himself on bowls of his favorite treats. It didn't matter if three wasn't really a kitty heaven, because that's what he would describe to Tommy when it came time to tell the boy that his beloved cat was dead.
A wave of anger surged through Mike, turning the corners of his mouth down in a frown. Someone or something had killed his cat. Pinky had not died of old age, as the sheriff had suggested.
The more he thought about what Sheriff Douglas had said, the madder he got. The sheriff didn't believe Pinky had been killed by a person. Fair enough. Every man was entitled to his opinion. But he hadn't believed anything Mike had said, going so far as to openly insult him. His looks, his gestures, everything about the man told Mike that he was being looked down upon, silently laughed at like he was some sort of nutcase.
Just like he used to laugh at my grandmother.
A chill danced up his spine as another, long forgotten piece of childhood memory clicked into place, playing on the magic movie screen behind his eyes. The bit of data had been all but forgotten, eradicated from his memory bank as efficiently as if someone had pressed the delete key. But now it was back, in living color, complete with sound.
It had only been a few months after he had come to live with his grandmother, a few months after his parents had been killed in that god-awful car wreck. Mike was in the upstairs bedroom, the same bedroom Tommy now claimed as his own. Funny, but up until that moment, he had also forgotten that the room his son stayed in had once been his.
My memory has so many holes in it.
He had been in the upstairs bedroom, lying on the bed and reading a children's book his grandmother had gotten for him at the library. He couldn't read all of the words, but that was okay because the book was lavishly illustrated with paintings of distant worlds and magical kingdoms. What he couldn't read he could figure out from the pictures. He had become enthralled with the story when he heard shouts coming from the front of the house, and the roaring of a car engine.
Curious, he had laid the book on the bed, carefully marking the page he was reading. The sound grew even louder as he walked down the hallway and descended the stairs. He had to go down the stairs slowly so as not to trip over the boxes and bags lying in the way. Even then his grandmother had not been right in the head, but she wasn't nearly as bad as she later became.
The downstairs was flooded with bright light, every bit as sinister as the light portrayed in movies about alien abductions. But the light he saw did not originate from a spacecraft; it came instead from a more down-to-earth vessel.
Mike had moved slowly forward, nearly blinded by the brilliant white light, seeking the source of it and the noise he heard. He was halfway down the hallway before he realized the front door stood open. This concerned him because his grandmother never left the front door open, especially at night.
"Gramma," he called, his tiny voice swallowed up by the roaring engine sound. He didn't call her name again, because he was afraid. He wanted only to run back up the stairs and seek the safety of his bedroom, seek the safety of the book he was reading. But he couldn’t run away. He had to look.
The lights scared him most of all, because they made him remember bad things. There had been lights the night his parents were killed: the lights of the car driven by the drunk driver who had crossed the center line and hit their vehicle. The blinding white light of pain as Mike had been thrown forward from the collision, striking the back of his mother's seat. The lights of other cars stopping on the road, and the flashlights of policemen and firefighters as they sawed through twisted metal to free the victims of the accident.
The lights had turned everything bright white that night, bleaching the color from all that he saw. But the lights hadn't bleached all the colors away. The color red appeared twice as bright as any red he had ever seen before. And the color red was everywhere. It was poured across the front of his favorite Batman T-shirt, splattered in big, gooey droplets across the shattered windshield and crumpled dashboard of his father's Chevrolet.
There was also red on the woman's hand that protruded from the white sheet in the middle of the road. That's all he saw, one hand. It lay palm-up in the middle of the highway, attached to the mangled body hidden beneath the bloody white sheet. Another bloody sheet lay a few feet beyond the first, carefully pulled over a somewhat larger body.
Mike had seen the sheets when they pulled him out of the car, and somehow he knew that the bodies of his parents lay beneath them. He didn't cry, or scream, because he could not find his voice. Instead he just stared at the once perfect hand of his mother, white as fine porcelain under the bright lights. Stared at the redness of her fingernail polish, and the crimson blood that ran down her hand to encircle her wrist like a bracelet of death. Red. Red. Red. The color was everywhere, bright as a lover's lips in the harsh white lights.
The lights had come again to his grandmother's house, and the roaring of the car engine. They were the lights of a sports car pulled dangerously close to the house, the front bumper just inches away from the porch. Behind those lights faces leered out at him from inside the car. The twisted, grinning faces of demons trapped behind a sheet of glass. They were the faces of drunk teenage boys, out for a night of troublemaking. Mike recognized the faces, because he had seen them before. The face behind the steering wheel belonged to Jody Douglas.
Blinking from the glare of the bright light, he heard his grandmother shout at the boys in the car. She stood on the porch, standing behind one of the wooden pillars. A little woman, terribly thin, armed only with the broken handle of a rake. She stood behind the wooden post and shouted at the boys to go away and leave her alone, pleaded with them for her safety and that of her grandson.
The shouts had no effect on the teenagers. They laughed at the old woman. The driver gunned the engine and inched even closer to the porch, threatening to drive the vehi
cle right through the front of the house. The car suddenly lunged a foot and Mike cried out, screaming because he knew the car had come to take him away, as one had taken his parents from him. He saw the lights of the teenagers' car, and he saw the lights of the drunk driver's car, superimposed one over the other.
His scream of terror startled his grandmother, caused her to turn in his direction. She had been standing behind the safety of the post, but nothing lay between Mike and the threatening car. Alarmed she crossed the porch at a run, she grabbed him roughly by the wrist and dragged him back inside the house. She slammed the door and locked it, hurrying him into the living room. There they knelt and hugged each other, waiting until the teenagers grew tired of their game and drove away.
Four teenagers had been in the car that night. Jody Douglas was one of them. It wasn't the first time he had tormented Mike's grandmother, nor would it be the last time.
The image of that night faded, leaving Mike shaking and short of breath. So many of his childhood memories had been forgotten, pushed deep down inside of him, to the place where he kept the memories of the night his parents had died. When one of those memories broke loose and floated to the surface, it left him physically drained.
The memory was all but gone now, leaving only anger in its place. Anger over the death of a family's housecat, and anger at the county sheriff.
* * * * *
Tommy and Megan arrived home at 3:30 p.m.. Both asked almost immediately if Pinky had come home yet, and if they could go looking for him in the van. Mike reassured them that Pinky was probably just out exploring the area and would no doubt be back soon. He hated lying to the kids, and wasn't sure how long he could keep at it, but for now his explanation seemed to satisfy them.
To change the subject, Holly asked them how things were going at school. It would seem that things were gradually getting better, at least Megan and Tommy hadn't been the target of any spit wad attacks on the bus since their first day. And while they weren't exactly Mr. and Mrs. Popular, they had both made a couple of friends from fellow classmates.
A couple of the students in Megan's gym class had suggested she try out for the volleyball team with them. They were quite impressed by the fifteen-year-old's athletic ability, and felt she would be a shoo-in for the team. Megan had never played on a volleyball team, other than an occasional game at school back in New York, but she could do just about anything once she put her mind to it.
"So why don't you try out for the team?" Holly asked, encouraging her daughter.
"I don't know. I might," Megan said, considering the possibility. "The uniforms are pretty lame, and I don't have a ride to practice or the games."
"I'm quite sure that even a geeky uniform will look good on you," Mike smiled. "I tell you what, you make the team and I'll make sure you get to all of the practices and games on time."
Megan said she would think about it, and then left to watch a little television before doing her homework. Tommy raced after her in an attempt to get to the television first.
After dinner, Mike grabbed his glasses and a Clive Barker novel and went out on the front porch to do a little reading. He rarely read horror novels, despite writing them, preferring instead to read something outside of the genre he worked in. He loved thrillers and mysteries, and sometimes even indulged in a western or two. He had only read a few pages in the novel when Holly called him from the library.
"Now what?" he said, setting the book down and standing up. Things were supposed to be quieter in the country, but there seemed to have been more peace and quiet back in New York City. Allowing the screen door to bang closed to protest his displeasure over being interrupted, he walked down the hallway and entered the library. Holly was standing at the other end of the room, staring at the wall.
"You screamed?" he joked, but the smile quickly slipped off his face. His wife was looking at the place where the contractors had repaired the crack in the wall earlier in the day. They had removed the damaged paneling and plastered the wall, replacing the split paneling with a new piece. The repairs had obviously done little good, however, because the crack was back. Not just back, but far worse than it had been before. Now two ragged cracks ran the length of the wall, from floor to ceiling, forming the shape of a giant V.
"This is getting ridiculous," Mike said, walking up to where Holly stood. He ran his fingertips along one length of the crack and was surprised to feel an icy coldness seeping from the wall. The coldness was unexplainable, for the house was anything but cold. Nor was it cold outside. In fact, the temperature was in the seventies.
"It feels cold," he said, speaking more to himself than to Holly.
'But why?" Holly stepped forward to touch the other crack.
He shook his head. "I don't know. It shouldn't feel cold. No reason for it, not unless there's dampness seeping up from the basement."
"But the basement isn't damp," she pointed out.
"I know," he quickly agreed, "but there has to be a logical explanation for it. Maybe there's a broken water pipe upstairs somewhere, that would explain the—"
A sudden movement caught his eye. Mike turned in time to see a shadow glide along the hallway opposite the door. At first he thought it was one of the kids going into the kitchen, but the shadow was the wrong size and shape. It was smaller than a kid, about the size of a dog.
"What was that?"
"What was what?" Holly asked.
"I saw something," he replied.
"Where?"
"Something ran down the hallway."
Hurrying out of the library, he caught a glimpse of something scurrying into the kitchen. He didn't see what it was, spotting only the shadow moving along the opposite wall.
"There", he said, following the shadow. "It went into the kitchen."
"What is it?" Holly asked, leaving the library behind him.
"I don't know."
Mike raced into the kitchen, but when he got there the room was empty. Whatever he had seen had somehow managed to get away. Quickly crossing the room, he checked the back door but found it locked. He also opened the lower cabinets, but found nothing. The door to the basement was also locked.
"What is it?" Holly asked, appearing in the doorway. Mike stopped his search and turned to face her.
"I thought I saw something, but it must have been a trick of the lighting."
Holly looked at him unconvinced. "What do you think you saw?"
He shrugged. "I thought I saw a shadow move past the doorway. Something small. An animal perhaps." He looked around one last time for good measure. "Must have been just my imagination."
Mike had started to leave the room when a funny look came over his wife's face. She was looking past him, at the floor. He turned, dreading what he might see there, but somehow knowing what he would find.
The crack beneath the kitchen table was also back, bigger than ever.
"Son of a bitch," he said, turning around. "They just fixed this. The floor can't be cracked again."
He crossed the room and knelt down beside the table. Leaning forward, he ran his fingertips over the crack. As with the crack in the library wall, there was a feeling of cold ebbing from the crack in the kitchen floor, as though an icy wind flowed up from the basement. But the basement was not that cold, which made him wonder exactly where the chill came from.
As he knelt there, fingertips pressed against the crack, Mike was overcome with the impression that what he felt came from someplace far deeper than the basement. It was as if the cold was a breath of wind issuing from a fissure deep within the earth, a subterranean cavern formed by ancient ice floes. A place of dark secrets where blind things whispered in the blackness. Though he knew this to be nothing more than a writer's imagination, he couldn’t suppress the shiver of fear that walked down his back on a spider's legs. Nor could he stop himself from snatching his fingertips away from the crack.
16
It was a little after 10 p.m. when Sam Tochi entered Jim's Bar & Grill, a quiet little dr
inking establishment that catered to the Braddock working class. Since it was a weeknight, there were only a handful of customers in the place. Selecting an empty stool at the bar, Sam sat down and order a bottle of Budweiser. He wasn't much of a drinking man, but he did enjoy an occasional beer if his mind was troubled. And at that particular moment his mind was very troubled. Very troubled indeed.
Despite the prayer ceremony he had held in his back yard, he still could not remember what had happened to him last Tuesday. The events of that particular day remained lost in a fog, the result of a spell brought on by his ever growing brain tumor. Nor could he shake the feeling that something bad was about to happen, and that really bothered him.
Being raised in the traditional ways of the Hopi, he was to about to discuss such a feeling as nothing ore than an overactive imagination. No way. He was a believer in visions and premonitions, and knew that a bad feeling might be a message sent to him from the spirit world. Perhaps one of his spirit guides was trying to warn him that danger was present, though — except for the tumor — there was little in his life that could be considered truly dangerous. He had no enemies, and knew of no one who would wish him harm. A few of the town's residents might like to see him locked up in a crazy home, but he doubted if they would like to see him physically hurt. At least he hoped this was the case.
Paying for his beer with a pair of crumpled dollar bills, he put the bottle to his lips and tilted his head back. The beer was cold enough to have a bite, and he didn't stop drinking until half the bottle's contents was gone. Setting the bottle back down on the bar, Sam wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
Maybe a good sweat would help him see things more clearly. He had not been in a sweat lodge for several years, so maybe that's what he needed. A goo sweat always helped to open up the pores and cleanse the body. It also helped to put one's spirit back in the proper balance, making it easier to see things for what they truly were. He had build a sweat lodge in his backyard several years ago, but an August thunderstorm had blown it down. Maybe it was time he built another one.
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