“This is the house you bought?”
“Yeah,” Mike said. “It’s not very big, but it’s got plenty of space, which is being maximized with this remodel--we’re adding three rooms to the basement, plus a second full bathroom--and expanding the kitchen. It’s gonna look really nice when we’re done. Plus, it’s got a great location--”
“On Irving,” his dad said, “right across from the park. I remember this house.”
“Remember it?” Mike asked.
“Yeah. It was a long time ago. I know you said the house you bought was on Irving, but I didn’t make the connection. I remember it now. When your mother and I were dating in college, she was friends with the girl whose parents owned the place. Black girl, I don’t remember her name. But I picked your mother up from there once or twice. Never got to see the inside, but to be honest I wasn’t impressed enough with the outside to care. These are the before pictures, huh?”
“Yeah,” Mike said, suddenly feeling a creeping sensation in his gut, as if something were climbing up from inside him to gnaw on the inside of his stomach. The list was growing. Michelle. Paul. Lynette. Sean Ellis, the black man who used to own the house, whose aunt or mother might have known his own mother. All of them had been inside the house, all of them were dead. Now his mother as well could be included.
He told himself yet again it was just a coincidence, but Jesus Christ the coincidences were piling up around this place.
“Well, make sure you send me some of the afters, too.”
“I will,” Mike said, battling a sudden case of intense cottonmouth.
The time came and his father drove him to the airport where Mike checked in then took a seat until boarding time. He had a layover in Denver, then flew to KCI where he picked up his car five and a half hours after leaving Phoenix.
The drive back to Angel Hill went faster than the drive to the airport, but the return trip always does seem to take less time, he thought.
He wanted to go by the Irving house and check things out, but he needed to stop at his place first. He needed to take his suitcase inside and charge his phone while he took a shower and got something to eat. The meal on the plane had been small and unsatisfying and he was starving, feeling as if, upon returning home, he had awakened from a week-long nap and he needed a sandwich or something before he collapsed.
Forty-five minutes after walking in the front door for the first time in five days, he left again and made the drive over to Irving.
It was nearly eight when he got there, and he barely recognized the place.
“What the fuck?” he muttered. “Are you kidding me with this?”
Even in the dark, the house was barely recognizable. The enclosed porch made the house look bigger, and he could tell the outside had been painted. He couldn’t tell the color, but he’d see it better in the light of day tomorrow.
“Holy shit,” he said as he stepped out of his car. Keith and Steven’s cars were parked outside, Brian’s most likely in the garage, and the lights burned in the house. He looked around, but didn’t see Kevin’s car, nor any of his crews’ either. They obviously had already left for the day.
Mike went up the sidewalk, then the porch steps and into the enclosure. He could hear voices inside, familiar and happy. He hated the idea of ruining what sounded like three good moods with news of his mother’s death, but he knew it was the first thing they were going to ask. He’d tell them, but not dwell too long. If they wanted to know more, he’d tell them later, maybe tomorrow.
He knocked, then opened the door anyway, with a “Hello hello, look who’s back in town!”
Brian was hanging a Doctor Who poster in the living room and Mike thought, And that’s why you’re not getting laid, dude. Steven and Keith came in from the kitchen where they had been sliding the refrigerator into place and plugging it in.
“Hey now,” Steven said when he saw Mike.
“What’s up?” Keith said, smiling.
“How were things in Phoenix?” Brian asked.
“Not great,” Mike said. “Mom died a few days back. Her funeral was day before yesterday.”
“Damn,” Keith said, “I’m sorry, man.”
Mike shrugged and said, “There was no stopping it, that shit ate her up quick. She looked terrible.”
“That sucks,” Brian said.
Mike nodded.
“Place looks awesome, though. We killed it on this, didn’t we?”
Brian looked around, nodding and smiling, and said, “Yeah, we pulled it off. You were right, we can do this, and as long as we can find the buyers, I think we’ve got a good thing here.”
“The buyers are easy,” Mike said. “Everybody has to live someplace, right?”
They all nodded. Mike looked around and asked, “Kevin and his guys already took off, huh? I’m wondering if we should bother bringing him back for the next one, or do we just try to find another contractor? He’s a good guy, and I like his prices, but, come on, he lost over half his crew in the few weeks they were here.”
Everyone was silent.
“Unless Andrew and Gary came back? I mean, if he’s only down one guy, he can find another plumber, right?”
Still with the silence. And he realized he didn’t like the way they were looking at him.
“Alright,” he said, “what’s up?”
“Kevin ain’t gonna be around for the next flip,” Keith said.
Mike shrugged. “Okay, that’s not a problem for me, we just get someone else.”
“No,” Steven said. “Kevin won’t be around for anything.”
“He killed himself day before yesterday,” Brian added.
Mike felt everything slip out of touch for a second as he digested what Brian had just said. “What the fuck?”
Brian was nodding.
“Why?” Mike asked.
“Well,” Steven said, “when Ed got murdered, he--”
“Wait a minute, Ed got what? When? How? Where the fuck was I?”
“It was the night you left,” Brian said. “You all had left here, and he and Kevin had left earlier, and Ed was gunned down in a gas station robbery, it looked like.”
“Wow,” Mike said. “That’s fucked up. Two of his four-man crew dead.”
“Not two,” Keith said. “They’re all dead.”
“Holy what the fuck?” Mike asked. “What the fuck are you talking about they’re all dead? Andrew had a stomach bug or something--”
“He had an ulcer,” Brian said. “A perforated ulcer. Apparently a really bad one, because he died from it a few days ago.”
“But what about Andrew? He just hurt his foot.”
“It got infected, and by the time he finally got around to making it to the hospital it was too late.”
“They all fucking died?” Mike asked in shocked. “Jesus.”
“Kevin came in the last day all super depressed,” Brian said. “We saw it on the news the next day, he went home that night, closed his garage and choked on his exhaust pipe.”
“Jesus, that’s so fucked up,” Mike said. “Are you sure you’re not just messing with me?”
They all shook their heads and he could tell by their expressions that they weren’t. This was a coincidence too big to ignore. He couldn’t just write this off as nothing, the “curse”, for want of a better word, had to be real. Sean Ellis said it, everyone who comes into this house dies as soon as the house is finished with you. But how do you know if it’s finished with you? How would these four know? What did it want?
Did it want to be sold? Brian had already bought it. Did it want to be fixed up? He looked around and saw they weren’t done with it. But what would happen when they were? Would it kill them with a carbon monoxide leak? Would a spark near the gas line blow them up? What was going to happen when they were done?
He didn’t know, and he didn’t want to find out.
“So, what else is left to be done?” he asked, looking around. He hoped there was something big left, something he could st
all on and keep them from finishing. He was thinking maybe if the house wasn’t technically done, it would still need them.
But he doubted that would be the case. After all, as soon as the plumbing was done, Paul died. Looking around, there was nothing left undone that could possibly require all four of them, so if this Ellis theory held true, if it would only need one or two of them for the finishing touches, then the others could be in danger.
Then again, he thought, you don’t know that what it wants is to be finished. Hell, for all you know what it wants is to be torn down. Or expanded. You have no idea.
That’s right, he thought. You don’t know because it’s just stupid. No matter what that dude said, no matter how it could be seen to look, houses don’t kill people, they don’t give them ulcers or fatal infections, they don’t make them put a rubber hose in their mouth, and they don’t give them cancer.
So maybe coincidence wasn’t the right word, but it was the closest thing that fit because it simply was all that remained. The house hadn’t killed Paul, he slipped and fell. It hadn’t killed Andrew; Mike had no idea about Andrew’s life leading up to coming to work here. It hadn’t killed Gary, that was poor medical care, probably the hospital’s fault. And it sure as shit didn’t hurt Kevin, or cause him to hurt himself. And finally, he thought, it certainly didn’t give mom cancer. She had been here decades ago, so fucking what. He came back to what he’d thought before, that everyone who has ever been in any house anywhere has died, or is going to die. It was simple logic.
Sean Ellis’s girlfriend had a stroke in this house, from which she died a few days later. Tragic and unfortunate, but the house didn’t make it happen.
He needed to get his head around this and realize it once and for all and stop having ridiculous doubts. What was going to happen in the next house, Brian’s parents’ house? Because they used to live there but had died in a car accident, was that place cursed to kill everyone who set foot inside it?
Of course not. And if Brian told him that, he’d tell him he was a dumbass if he actually thought that, and to wake the fuck up.
So why did he keep giving thought to what Sean Ellis had said?
He didn’t know. But he was going to stop doing it, because whatever evidence he had thought he’d seen was stuff he had wanted to see. People read signs and forebodings into anything. Oh no, just as I said I hope I get that promotion, a cloud went in front of the sun. That must mean I’m getting fired!
People were stupid, he thought, and would believe anything if they saw enough “proof”. But Mike hadn’t seen any proof, because it wasn’t there, and he’d still found himself entertaining the notion.
No more. Sean Ellis and his inattentiveness had gotten him killed, not this house just because he had once been inside it.
“So let’s see the place,” Mike said.
“Living room is done,” Brian said. He had a couch and a chair. He’d bought a television and a coffee table, all of which had to be new because he’d been to Brian’s house enough times to know this wasn’t his parents’ furniture.
“Where’d you get all this?” he asked.
“I had it in storage,” Keith said. “Old stuff I’ve gotten rid of over the years, but there was nothing wrong with it, so I just put it away.”
“Except the TV,” Brian said, “I bought that yesterday. Dining room is in here, as you know. No table, but I don’t plan on eating in there, so it’s just where the computer is.”
He’d also bought a cheap computer desk for $100, put it against the wall with a kitchen chair in front of it and his laptop on top.
So far, the walls were the neutral colors Mike had picked out before he knew Brian was buying the place. Off-white in the living room, beige in the dining room.
“The bedroom has a bed and a dresser, also courtesy of Keith,” Brian said. “Which reminds me--” he handed Mike his house key.
“I can’t imagine how much sex that bed has seen,” Mike said. “You sure you want to sleep there?”
“Correction, the frame is from Keith, the mattresses are new. As are the sheets.”
The walls had been done in the same off-white as the living room, and it brightened the formerly dark room a lot.
The bathroom still amazed him with how good it looked for having not existed a month ago. Brian had chosen his own color in here, an olive green on top with white tiles along the bottom. It wasn’t a color Mike would have chosen, but Mike didn’t have to live with it.
The kitchen was the biggest shock for him. The countertops had arrived and been installed and even though he still smelled a faint residue of the glue, they looked great. Granite instead of marble, they probably weighed a ton, white with black peppered throughout and a glass and marble mosaic backsplash, which Mike decided had to have been the work of Kevin because it looked too professional.
The floors had been finished and they shone under the bright new light fixture and bulb. For the walls, Brian had gone charcoal to play off the countertops, and everything flowed really well, Mike thought.
The appliances had “secondhand” written all over them, but they fit and, he assumed, they worked, so that was enough. A small black table with two black stools stood in the corner. Cleanup in here wasn’t done, however; a ladder and a can of paint stood in front of the sink.
So they’re not actually done done, Mike thought. He found a slight comfort in that, actually.
“Is the basement done, too?” he asked.
“As done as it needs to be for now,” Brian said.
He took Mike down while the other two, who had seen it already, stayed upstairs.
“This is my comic room,” Brian said, taking Mike into what was supposed to be the guest bedroom. Instead, he saw box after box after box, stuffed full of old comics, most of them with backer boards, all of them in bags, organized alphabetically by title. Along the inner wall, next to the door, were two small three-shelf bookshelves with comics laid out on them in side by side stacks. “These are my current monthly reads, with the back issues, cancelled titles and limited series titles in the boxes, along with anything I used to collect but stopped reading.”
The walls were decorated with super hero posters and memorabilia and Mike thought, Okay, I was wrong; this is why you’re not getting laid.
“So no guest room?” he said.
“Guest rooms invite guests,” Brian said. “Who the hell’s coming over to stay with me? Now, I still need to get the movie room stuff for out here, but that’s probably down the line some time, after we sell the other house.
“What about the office?”
“I haven’t decided yet, but it’s probably going to be for toys.”
“Toys?”
“Collectibles,” Brian said. “Kansas City has those comic conventions and toy shows. You can get a lot of really cool old toys we grew up with for not a lot of money. I always wanted to collect those.”
“Nerd,” Mike said, to which Brian nodded and shrugged and said, “I’m cool with that.”
“So is there anything still left to do, or is this pretty much it?” Mike asked as they climbed the stairs to the kitchen.
When they stepped out, Steven was just coming down off the ladder with a paint brush and he said, “This is it. I just did the last of the touch-up paint. This house is officially renovated.”
“Sweet!” Keith said.
“About time,” Brian said.
Mike remained silent, waiting. Wondering. Expecting.
Carbon monoxide, his mind said. It’s leaking already, can’t you feel it making you drowsy? No, that’s not it, the furnace is going to explode. A spark from the refrigerator compressor is going to ignite a leak in the gas pipe and blow you all sky high.
But none of that happened, they just stood there in the kitchen, looking at each other.
Finally, it was Keith who broke the moment by saying, “So we’re celebrating, then?”
They all looked at one another, nodding, and Steven said, “Sure, let’s
go get some food.”
“I was thinking some beers and chicks,” Keith said, “but I could do with a big old steak first.”
“That sounds good,” Brian said.
“I’ve had, in total today, a piece of toast, a bowl of cold airline asparagus soup, and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I’m all for food right now.”
“So beers and bitches afterward, then?”
“We’ll see about that,” Mike said. “First thing’s first, though. Where we gonna eat?”
“Whiskey Creek?” Keith said.
“I don’t wanna go all the way to St. Joe, though, I just want some food,” Brian said.
“Yeah, let’s just get something in town,” Mike said.
“What about Panda Express?” Keith asked.
“Yeah, let’s go there,” Brian said.
“I could do that,” Steven said.
“Sounds good,” Mike said.
They decided to go in Brian’s car, but before they did, Brian and Steven made pit stops, Brian used the nice upstairs bathroom while Steven went downstairs. Keith and Mike waited in the living room.
Steven went down the stairs and had a sudden flash of memory, a bit of the dream he’d had last night coming back to him. He was in the house, this house, coming down these stairs, like he was now, in the dark, also like he was now, when he heard something from one of the rooms.
He couldn’t tell which one, but it wasn’t the main room, he was pretty sure of that. He came to the bottom and stopped, listened, and thought it was from the rear room, what they had planned on being the office but Brian was going to turn into his action figure room, so he said.
Steven approached the door, hesitantly, wondering suddenly why he hadn’t bothered to turn on the light at the top of the stairs when he thought the noise sounded like a scratching, something small and swift, over and over, like a dog scratching at the bottom of a plastic kennel and getting nowhere.
He got to the door and found it stood slightly ajar, so he nudged it open with his toe, swallowing fear and spit, knowing this was a stupid thing to do, but dreams are full of stupid things and he found himself moving against his own will.
The Flip (An Angel Hill novel) Page 23