by Ronald Malfi
Her eyebrow came together. “Is something wrong? You seem upset.”
“I guess you could say I just got a little spooked.” Then he laughed nervously. He didn’t think it helped him look any less like a madman to this poor girl.
Karen glanced at her wristwatch then shot a look over her shoulder into the kitchen. “I’m still on the clock for another twenty minutes.”
“I can wait.”
“Not here. There’s a bar across the street called the Rude Rabbit. I’ll meet you there.”
“It’s no trouble, is it?”
She shrugged. “Buy me a drink and it won’t be no trouble at all. Besides, you look like you could use someone to talk to.”
* * *
The Rude Rabbit looked just like the type of joint he’d get his teeth punched in for saying the wrong word to someone. It was no different than the rustic little taverns all across the U.S., right down to the sticky vinyl barstool cushions and fingerprint-smeared mirrors behind the bar. Thankfully, the place was mostly empty, instilling in him a nonspecific anonymity through which he found some semblance of comfort. He went directly to the bar and ordered a Hendrick’s and tonic from a bored-looking female bartender with a hairy upper lip, then took his drink over to a small booth in one gloomy corner of the place. When he brought the drink to his lips, he found that his hand was shaking with such ferocity he feared he might chip a tooth on the glass. Quickly, he set it back down then wrestled both his hands into his lap. He had rushed out of the house on Tar Road so quickly he had forgotten to take any of his anti-anxiety meds with him. After he counted to one hundred silently in his head, he got up and returned to the bar where he asked the bartender with the hairy upper lip if she happened to have any aspirin or anything.
“I’ve got a raging headache,” he told her.
The bartender peered disinterestedly beneath the bar, but she was already shaking her head. “Ain’t nothin’ down here, hon.”
“Nothing at all?”
She had already relocated over to some highball glasses that were drip-drying on a rack. “Sorry, hon.”
Trembling, he returned to the booth and sat down like someone who’d just been reprimanded by a judge. With both hands, he gripped the rocks glass and managed to bring the gin and tonic to his mouth without busting any of his teeth, though some of it sloshed over the rim of the glass and formed a constellation of droplets on the tabletop curiously in the shape of the Big Dipper. The laugh that threatened his throat made him nervous.
Across the room, someone loaded up a jukebox with coins. Bruce Springsteen came on, singing “Atlantic City.” Sam stared at the doors across the barroom, as if to do so would will Karen Kilstow to come through them. One leg bounced restlessly beneath the table. Not for the first time in his life, Sam Hatch believed he was losing his mind.
“Hey.” The woman’s voice startled him. He looked up, expecting Karen Kilstow, but instead found himself staring at the hairy-lipped bartender. “Found these in my purse.” She set a bottle of Excedrin down on the table.
“Oh. Thanks.”
“Sure,” she said, and left him alone with the bottle.
He popped off the safety cap then shook three tablets out onto one blistered palm. In the poor lighting, the tablets looked overly white and hardly real at all, as if summoned into existence by special effects. He slammed all three tablets into his mouth then washed them down with a healthy swig of his Hendrick’s and tonic. The drink burned his throat. Before replacing the cap on the bottle, he stared down into it, holding his breath and thinking, This is the story of Curious Bunny.
Wearily, he blinked his eyes and thought he could imagine Annie sitting opposite him in the booth. “What?” he said. “What do you want?”
“That’s what I was going to ask you,” said a woman’s voice, causing his blood to turn to ice.
He turned and found Karen standing there, dressed now in blue jeans and a Baysox T-shirt, a sensible handbag slung over one shoulder. He almost didn’t recognize her out of her waitress uniform.
“Sorry,” he said. “I was talking to myself. Please, sit down…unless you’re sufficiently creeped out enough and changed your mind.”
She slid into the booth across from him, saying, “Oh, heck, I know plenty of creepy guys. You’re no exception.” Her eyes were large and beamed at him. “What did you say your name was again?”
“Sam Hatch.” He reached across the table and shook her hand, nearly knocking over his drink in the process. “Thanks for coming. Can I get you that drink?”
“I’ll have a beer.”
He was about to get up and go to the bar when Karen waved a hand at the bartender and held up one finger. Wordlessly, the bartender nodded then fished a bottle of Miller Lite out from beneath the bar. “How’s it goin’, Karen?” the bartender asked after she’d come over and set the beer down on the table.
“Doin’ okay, Mae. How’s Bobby?”
“Doctor’s got him wearing this harness thing, looks like straps from a backpack or something.”
“Poor kid. For how long?”
“Couple of weeks.”
“Well, that’s not too bad. Tell everyone I said hello.”
“Will do,” said Mae. She turned and disappeared back behind the bar.
“Harness?” Sam said.
“Her son Bobby broke his collarbone. Fell out of a tree.”
Sam nodded. “Clavicle fracture. It’s common in kids. He should be okay.”
Karen laughed. “You some kind of doctor?”
Sam ignored the question. “I wanted to talk to you about the house.”
“What about it?”
“You said you were surprised I was living there, and that the house…I think you said it creeped you out.”
“Actually, what I asked was if it creeped you out. What I said was that I thought the house looked like it grew up from the ground straight from Hell.”
“Yes, that’s it. I remember. Why do you think that?”
Karen knocked back a swig of her beer. “You mean, other than because it looks like something out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre?”
He pointed in the general vicinity of her left arm. “That mark on your arm. You said the house bit you. What did you mean?”
She glanced down at her arm while simultaneously rotating her wrist so that the horseshoe-shaped scar was clearly visible to both of them. She looked at it now, Sam thought, as if she’d just remembered it was there.
“I was being facetious,” she said. “Well, sort of.”
“So that didn’t happen to you in that house?”
“No, it did.”
“What exactly happened, Karen?”
She said, “I was just a stupid kid. My brother and I used to play in those fields and down by the water with friends when we were younger. It was inevitable we’d eventually end up exploring that old house. A group of us broke in, and we were playing hide and seek in all the rooms. There was a closet off the downstairs foyer, and I hid in there. It was small and pitch-black, and I was only in there for about five seconds before I was suddenly overcome by the sensation that someone else was in there with me.”
Sam’s leg stopped bouncing beneath the table.
“I began to panic and went to open the door, but my arm went straight out and I couldn’t feel the doorknob or the door or the wall or anything. It was like the closet had suddenly grown huge all around me. Then it got really hard to breathe, though that could have just been because I was starting to hyperventilate. I jumped forward, knowing the door had to be there. It was, of course, and I eventually found the doorknob and pushed my way out. But before I did, I felt something bite into my arm.”
“An actual bite?”
“I don’t know, but it’s the best way to describe it. At first I thought I caught my arm on an exposed nail or something—the pain was quick and hot—but later when my brother and I looked at it, we couldn’t deny that it looked like a bite mark.”
“Your brother Jake,” Sam said
. “The cop, right?”
“Yes. He was worried it might have been an animal with rabies that had been hiding in the closet—a raccoon or a bat or something—so he went back to look, but there was nothing in there. The closet was completely empty.”
“Do you think it was an animal?”
“I guess I did back then. If Jake said so, then it was.”
“Is that what you believe now?”
“It was a long time ago.”
“But what do you believe?” he pushed.
She rolled her shoulders and looked suddenly bored. Running a finger down the neck of her beer bottle, she said, “What I think is that house didn’t want us there. It wanted us out. Besides,” she added, reaching up and running fingers through her hair, “no animal I’ve ever heard of could do something like this.” She twirled a sprig of hair out from behind her left ear, startlingly silver-gray against the mousy brown that was the rest of her hair. “It was instantaneous. It happened when I was in the closet. I cut it out a few times but it always grows back the same color. So I’ve just learned to live with it, keep it tucked away back there.” She groomed the silvery strands back beneath the tufts of her natural hair, hiding it.
“That’s unbelievable,” Sam said.
“Still freaks me out to think about it.” She hugged herself and smiled prettily at him.
“Do you know of other stories? Things that happened to other people? There must be other stories similar to yours.”
“You would think so, but if there are, I’ve never heard them. It’s funny, but a house like that, you’d think it’d be a beacon for every troublemaking kid in the neighborhood, right? You’d think a place like that would hold some sort of fascination over little kids. But it doesn’t. No one ever talks about it. At Halloween, no one throws eggs at its windows or dares other kids to go up and knock on the door, at least as far as I know. Everyone just steers clear of it, like it gives off some subliminal warning we’re not consciously aware of but we feel it nonetheless. Even when my brother and I went in there that day to play, it wasn’t as if we’d sought that house out. We were just playing in the field and then it was like it was just there, boom, right out of nowhere.”
“Straight up from Hell,” Sam said, giving her own words back to her.
“Yeah. And then…well…”
“What?”
“I had a boyfriend who once asked about the scar. I told him it happened when I was a kid, playing in that creepy old house on Tar Road. He looked at me all funny and said, ‘What house? There’s no house on Tar Road.’ I actually had to drive him past it and point it out to him. He was shocked when he saw it standing there. See, here’s a guy who lived his whole life here in town and he’d never noticed the house before. It was as though the house had hid itself from him, the way some animals use camouflage to blend in with their surroundings.”
The notion made Sam uneasy. He recalled what the other waitress had said to him earlier that evening, when he had gone into the diner searching for Karen—There’s a house on Tar Road? Now, he shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
“So what’s your deal, anyway, Sam? Why the big interest in what happened to me?”
Sam leaned across the table, his brow dimpled with sweat and something akin to a feverish chill racing through his system. “Strange things have been happening there,” he told her. “I don’t know how to explain it.”
“Are you saying it’s haunted? Because if there’s a haunted place on the planet, that house is as good a contender as any.”
He eased back in the booth. In front of him, the gin and tonic sweated condensation onto the tabletop. Ghosts. Yet a memory fluttered its mothy wings to the surface of his brain: Marley cooing and pointing to a darkened corner of the old townhouse, sometimes laughing, sometimes just staring, following something with her big eyes. Something that neither he nor Annie could ever see. Always the same dark corner…
He shook his head and cleared his mind of the memory. “I don’t know if that’s what I’m saying. It’s not like I’ve seen any ghosts or anything.” He told her about the floor beneath the floor, and about how random items tended to reposition themselves or simply disappear when he wasn’t looking.
“Poltergeists can move objects,” Karen suggested. “As for the floor…well, I don’t know what’s so supernatural about that…”
He wanted to tell her it was the same floor from the house in Philly, the house he had shared with Annie and Marley and their German shepherd Duke, but he couldn’t find the words. The thoughts got caught in the sticky web of his mind.
Karen frowned. “You okay?”
“I’m sorry.” He attempted a soft smile but it felt foolish and, he thought, almost hideous. “I must come across as a lunatic. You don’t even know me.”
“Do I look about ready to jump up and run screaming for the cops? You heard my story, didn’t you? Do you think I’m crazy?”
“Not at all.”
“Then there you go.” She was better at smiling than he was. “Anyway, what’s your wife think about all this?”
He felt something heavy lodge in his chest. “My wife’s dead,” he said flatly, and he saw the smile fade from Karen’s face. “We had a daughter and she’s dead, too.”
Karen set her beer bottle down. “Christ. I’m sorry.” She grew noticeably pale. “I feel sick.”
He looked down at his half-finished drink. He wondered now if it was just a coincidence that the checkerboard floor beneath the wooden one was the same as the floor in the house in Philly. He suddenly felt ridiculous asking this stranger out to talk with him about a rundown old house in the middle of nowhere.
Sam cleared his throat and stood up. His movements felt abrupt and awkward. “I’m sorry,” he stammered. He pulled some money from his pants and tossed a few bills onto the table. “Have another drink on me. I apologize. I shouldn’t have brought any of this up.”
“Sam, wait—”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and left.
11
A police car followed him home from the Rude Rabbit. The cruiser picked him up at one of the traffic lights in town and stayed with him until Sam turned onto Tar Road. When Sam turned onto the winding driveway and headed toward the house, the police car continued on Tar Road, its pace slow and deliberate.
The house loomed up out of the darkness to fill the VW’s windshield. The nervousness Sam had felt all evening seemed to subside as he drew the vehicle up the driveway and parked it directly in front of the house. He shut the car down but left the headlights on. Their sharp white light called into existence every nuance of the building’s façade—every crack in the plaster, chip of the paint, dry rot and mold and holes bored into the framework by carpenter bees. Hornets’ nests dangled from the eaves. Thick as a finger, a lone vine scaled one wall. The longer he stared at these things, the less real they became. Shapes moved within the flaking paint and dry rot; he recognized some of them the way summer clouds will suggest certain things. A face. A hawk-headed child. Steamboats chugging upriver. He was eleven years old and his stepfather was teaching him to shoot at tin cans with a bow and arrow. Then he was standing in the baby’s room, Marley’s room, staring into the crib. One minute she was there, the next minute she was gone. He would leave it behind when he left the house. He would leave all their stuff behind. It wasn’t his anymore, anyway.
Then he was back at the funeral, standing at the back of the church. There were people in the pews that flanked the carpeted aisle that ran the length of the nave up to the chancel where the two coffins sat on beds of flowers, but Sam could only see the backs of their heads. As he had not done in real life, he slowly walked down the aisle toward the coffins, his hollow footfalls the only sound. He mounted the two marble steps that carried him up onto the altar, a coffin on either side of him. He looked first at the large one and then at the small one. It occurred to him now that he should have had them buried together. One coffin, one grave. It occurred to him now that he should have—
He heard a creaking sound as one of the coffin lids started to open…
When he woke up hours later, it was daylight and he was sweating in a fetal position behind the steering wheel. He keyed the ignition but the engine refused to turn over, or even make a sound. Cursing to himself, he realized he’d left the headlights on all night.
Inside, the house appeared to have been holding its breath in anticipation of his return. From the doorway, he scrutinized the checkerboard floor and the piles of ripped up floorboards stacked in corners and along the baseboards like funeral cairns.
“Annie?” he called, his voice echoing through the chasm of the house. A shifting, scrabbling sound emanated from somewhere upstairs. Gooseflesh rose up on his arms. He snatched the crowbar off the floor and carried it up the stairs to the second floor. Here, daylight came in through the windows of the rooms and slashed across the hallway. Plaster had fallen from the walls and lay in dusty heaps on the warped floorboards.
The scrabbling sounds ceased. Clutching the crowbar in two hands, Sam moved slowly toward the first room. His shadow shifted ahead of him along the wall. Patchy daylight filtered in through a pair of mud-caked windows. Chunks of plaster were missing from the walls, and the graffiti had bled into vertical ribbons that soaked into the floor. The scrabbling sound came again—an agitated, frantic clatter—and Sam realized it was coming from the other side of the wall. He went back out into the hallway and into the adjacent room. But like the previous one, this room was empty. A muted shifting sound filtered into his ears. Then more of the scrabbling noise. It wasn’t coming from the other side of the wall, Sam realized. It was coming from within the wall.
As he stared at the wall, his eyes fell upon what he had seen on that first day when he went through the entire house: the dull bronze coin poking out from the plaster in the wall. Sam went to it. He picked away some of the plaster and managed to get one fingernail beneath it. The coin lifted out, but not all the way: a thin twist of chain still held it to the wall. Curious, Sam turned the little bronze medallion over in his hand. The underside was coated in plaster dust, but there were words beneath it. Sam thumbed the dust away so he could read the inscription.