This room wasn’t as welcoming as my grandmother’s. The smell was the first difference. The tiny room lacked the natural mustiness and old wood smell of my grandmother’s mudroom, but instead, the not-so-subtle odor of iron, earth and oil permeated the air. And bleach. The scent of bleach alone hovered in the room like a lost cloud. The close confines of the windowless space made it worse. There was nowhere for the caustic air to go, and the odor was so strong that I wondered how we hadn’t smelled it even from outside.
I gagged just a bit, and Garrett put his hand on my arm. I fought back another reflux, took a slow breath of air through my nose and nodded to my friend that I was alright. Or, at least I nodded to where I thought he was. With the door closed, it was difficult to see much else in the pitch black room.
“Cellphone,” Garrett whispered, and once again I nodded.
Together, Garrett and I flipped our phones open. The intent was to use them for light, but that didn’t stop me from checking mine for service. The screen showed one bar for a moment and my eyes perked up. But, before my thumb could hit the button with the outline of a phone on it, the bar was gone again, replaced with a tiny white X. I was once again in a dead spot and, after holding the phone up at different angles with the same result, my focus returned to shedding some light on our situation.
We held our cells out before us like cops displaying badges, and the first thing we spotted was a tilted and wobbly looking washer and dryer unit positioned against one wall. Why the hell was there a washer and dryer sitting in an abandoned church? I mean, they fit the décor—old and rickety—like I expected everything else in this building to be. But, the sheer fact that they were even here seemed strange to me. Both were covered in a dark substance that could have been either rust or mud or something else altogether. Garrett motioned for me to lift the lid on the washer, and I told him what I thought of the idea with my middle finger. His blue-shaded alien face broke into a grin, and it was comforting to see.
I turned away from Garrett in the efforts of revealing more interesting things in the room. Actually, it was mostly to discourage any more of his suggestions. The soft blue light illuminated a room that was barely large enough for two people to move around in. In the corner beside the washer and dryer sat a bucket. The long wooden handle of a stringy mop stuck out and rested against the wall. Oddly, in contrast to the appliances beside it, the bright red bucket looked relatively new. The sticker on the side looked to be just as fresh as the day it was put on at the factory.
A narrow shelf clung to the wall just above the washer, supporting an assortment of small plastic bottles, their faded labels fuzzy from the thin layer of dust on them. Beside the old bottles sat a cleaner one, a fat white bottle with the familiar blue and red Clorox label stretched across its belly. Resting on the shelf beside it was a small blue cap, and I understood then why the room smelled as it did. My first impulse was to reach up and put the cap back on the bottle, but then I decided against it. The imprisoned air was already thick with the smell of bleach, and I wasn’t planning on sticking around much longer anyway. Besides, I felt like a child being towed into a store full of fine china and glassware. The voice in my head took on a parental tone.
Don’t touch anything!
Leaving the cap where it sat, I moved beyond the dryer, washer and the shelf above it, to where things got real interesting. Back toward the door we’d just entered sat a couple of pairs of old boots, piled in a heap. Old mud clung to the soles in dry, cracked clumps. The evidence of another person’s belongings in the church was enough to send a shiver up my spine, but what we saw next beat that all to hell. Just above the boots, on a crooked and rusty nail, hung a raincoat. A wet and muddy raincoat. Dripping. Glistening.
I almost pissed my pants.
Garrett and I exchanged looks that said we’d both noticed the same thing. Part of me had hoped that my eyes were playing tricks on me in the dim light, but Garrett had seen the raindrops on the coat as well. My heart started beating overtime, and I gasped when the light from my phone went black. In the instant before I could turn my phone back on, the weak light from Garrett’s phone illuminated something else we hadn’t noticed. I pushed the button to refresh the backlight on my phone and swept it around to where Garrett’s had just been. Cast in a shadowy blue haze were two wooden steps leading up to what must have been the entry door to the main part of the church. Tall and imposing from my vantage point two steps below, the wooden door looked like it guarded the entrance to somewhere far more menacing than an abandoned church out in the country.
A thin sliver of dim light eked from beneath the door, illuminating nothing. In fact, it barely shone brighter than the rest of the murky area, but, if you looked close, it was definitely a light, and thoughts of the raincoat came rushing back.
Dripping wet. Glistening.
“Shit! We’re not alone,” I hissed, shutting my cell phone down, as the thumping inside my chest became deafening. Without moving my eyes from the dim strip of light, I blindly reached behind me to Garrett’s damp jacket. I gave it a couple tugs, and after some shuffling of feet, I could feel him beside me.
“What’d you say?” he asked.
“Check it out,” I whispered, although my voice was an octave higher making is sound more like a squeak. “The light. The raincoat. Someone’s actually here!” With its dark windows, the thought that someone might be in the church had never even crossed our minds. At least I know it hadn’t mine, and I was pretty sure Garrett would have mentioned it had it crossed his. But, the signs were quickly stacking up in the favor of us not being alone in the church.
“Maybe,” Garrett replied. “Think we can get the door open without making any sound?”
“What!?!” I exclaimed, in a combination gasp and whisper. “You’ve seen this place. All old and creaky and shit. If there’s even a possibility that someone is here, we should back out now and knock on the front door. We didn’t even think of that, did we?”
I would have described the look on Garrett’s face as skeptical, if not doubtful. But, then, as distorted as his face looked in the haunting light of his cell phone, any emotion or expression was possible.
“Is that really what you want to do?” he asked. “Go back out in the rain and knock on the front door?”
“No,” I said in a more hushed voice than I was feeling. “What I really want to do is go back to the fuckin’ boat, motor my ass back to the truck and drive it back home so I can get out of these fuckin’ wet clothes and get warm!” I closed my eyes and started rubbing my temple at my outburst. I was freaking out over the entire situation, and that wasn’t doing either of us any good.
Garrett gave me a moment before speaking up.
“Are you finished?”
Without opening my eyes, I continued rubbing my temples and nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “I just wanna take a peek. The light’s not very bright, so I doubt it means anyone’s nearby. Who knows? Maybe it’s one of those security lights that comes on automatically, like the one on the shed. Maybe it’s just a light from an exit sign over the door.”
“And the raincoat?”
“I don’t know. Maybe somebody lives here.”
“Yeah, like a vampire maybe,” I said. I regretted it the moment the words left my mouth. No, earlier. The moment the image formed in my head, once I’d seen the way all the windows were covered. Even though I knew what was coming, my skin still crawled.
“Vampires?” Garrett asked. “Really?” He shook his head slowly. “Your mom might be right about you taking a break from the horror flicks. Nothing more than PG stuff for you. Gonna have to stick to Disney.”
“Stuff it,” I said in my defense. “I don’t mean like real vampires. But maybe some twisted guy who thinks he’s a vampire, or even just a hermit who doesn’t fancy intruders. And what are we doing? Intruding.”
“Okay. I’ll give you that everything about this place spells weird. But I want to know what its story is.”
&
nbsp; Like every decision since the boat broke down, I was pretty sure this, too, was a bad idea. But, Garrett was the one in control. It was his boat and his idea to come on this excursion, so by default, this was his command. And as freaked out and afraid as I was, that meant his judgment was more trustworthy. He was a good leader, a better friend, and he’d never steered me wrong. Besides, if he was truly set on checking out the rest of the church, the last thing I was going to do was walk away and leave my friend behind.
“New Congregational Church,” I said, after a quiet moment. “What religion does that sound like to you?”
“What?” Garrett asked, the shadows on his face taking on a quizzical nature.
“The sign. Out front. It says New Congregational Church on it. Just wondering what religion that might be.”
“Does it really matter?” Garrett asked.
I let my shrug answer for me. It didn’t really matter; it was just a stall tactic on my part.
Garrett reached for the knob as I backed him up with the light from my cell. With my heart in my stomach, I watched his hand close around the knob and marveled at the fact that it wasn’t shaking. Mine were. The light from my phone was shimmering on the walls like a strobe in a dance club. And I couldn’t quite remember how to breathe.
The knob turned in his hand and a faint click was heard as the latch disengaged. My pulse kicked into high gear as Garrett calmly turned and looked at me, a wry grin on his pale blue face.
“So, when was the last time you played Rip the Drapes?”
And that was when my internal warning system went through the roof, sirens blaring, as my eyes reacted to the implications of what he was asking. They had to have been the size of Ping-Pong balls. They had to have been full of alarm.
Chapter 17
She’d had enough. The students were being unruly and uncooperative, and she was done with them. They were talking when they should have been listening, answering questions without raising their hands and giggling when someone would give the wrong answer. All the things they knew better than to do. They knew how things were supposed to work in her classroom. They’d been doing this a long time now.
So they were sitting in silence with their heads down, being punished, while she retreated upstairs to her side of the bedroom she shared with her father. The students would be lucky if she even returned this evening. She didn’t think she would. Maybe in the morning. Make ’em suffer.
She used the rickety wooden handrail on the stairs, even though she could easily do it without its help. She’d probably gone up and down these stairs a thousand times in the dark. Maybe even a hundred thousand. Father didn’t like using the lights, and rarely did, even though they still worked. Didn’t like using candles even, allowing their use only in times of necessity. Or sometimes when she was playing school, but he preferred her do that during the day. At first he’d said no this night, but the thunder and lightning had chipped away his resolve. No one would be out in this weather to see the light. And he knew the students’ company comforted her while he did his work. The students might be dolls, but they played a bigger role when the loneliness became unbearable.
She jumped over the last step at the top of the stairs, not because she was worried someone would hear the creak that it made, but because the shrill sound was like fingernails on a chalkboard to her ears. It was a high-pitched, slow emanation of sound that she couldn’t stand, so she always tried to remember to hop up onto the second floor landing without waking the monster. Especially when she was taking the stairs at night and all around her was dark.
Inside the room, she crawled across her father’s bed, nothing but a stained mattress thrown onto the floor, and set her feet down on the worn wood on the other side. The loft itself was tiny, and the old mattress stretched from one end to the other. Crawling across it was the only way to reach her bed.
Searching the darkness, her thin fingers fell upon the dingy sheet that served as a curtain, separating the two sides of the room. She pulled the rough linen along the rope until it stopped, taking care not to pull the hook out of the wall again. Father hadn’t been happy with her carelessness last time and had let her know about it. She’d learned the lesson and had been extra careful ever since.
She stretched out on her bed, just another mattress on the floor, and let the darkness consume her. The students had given her a headache, and she was happy to be alone. Her father was off somewhere and the curtain was hardly needed. Still, the sheer piece of cloth made her feel like she had her own room again. A place she could retreat to when she wanted, at least for awhile. Soon enough, Father would be done with his work for the night and would come upstairs looking for her. Soon enough, she would no longer be alone. Soon enough.
Chapter 18
When Garrett and I were kids, we used to turn off all the lights at night and take turns ripping open the drapes and pressing our faces against the windowpane. There was just something about the nighttime on the other side of the glass that made it scary. The unknown, and what could be out there lurking around. It was supposed to be a fear factor type thing to see which of us already had balls at that age. But it usually only resulted in giggles and boasts of yet untested bravery. I’ll never forget, though, the night with my cousins at my aunt’s big, old house on the edge of town. Similar to the church, her house was surrounded on two sides by thick clumps of evergreens. Behind the house was nothing but a patch of woods that went for almost a half mile. Figuring we were in a secluded enough area, my cousins and I played the game without fear, all of us fairly confident in the odds.
That confidence, however, proved short lived.
Everyone else had already taken a turn without incident when I finally got my chance. But when I threw open the drapes, someone was in the backyard. Dressed all in dark clothing, everything but the man’s face was cloaked in black, blending into the night. His white eyes stared at me, watching as I stumbled backward so fast that I fell over my youngest cousin and we ended up in a heap. I scrambled to my feet and flung the drapes shut as quickly as I’d opened them, my young heart having just aged probably ten years.
We never found out who the man was, or what he was doing out there. With the game at an abrupt end, we spent the rest of the evening huddled on the couch, calming our nerves by telling ourselves it had just been our Uncle Joe sneaking a smoke. That explanation worked for some of us, even though others swore they’d heard Joe’s voice in the kitchen at the time of the ripping.
Whoever it was, life went on and I got over it without any trips to a shrink or developing a bedwetting issue. But, standing in the church’s back room, not knowing what was on the other side of this door, I was pretty sure that if Garrett ripped open that door like we used to the drapes, the panic alone would put me on a psychiatrist’s couch for years.
Thankfully, he didn’t do it. Instead, he eased the door open slowly. Maybe he thought that ripping it open would have been too much for me to handle, as if he knew what I’d been thinking. Or, just maybe, he wasn’t as confident as his cockiness let on.
The softest ray of light crept into the mudroom as the door inched inward. It was immediately obvious that the light wasn’t coming from the main room. It was too faint, not even bright enough for us to see clearly. But, it was enough that we could at least make out our surroundings, and allow us to snap our cellphones closed. Through the doorway, a section of the cavernous sanctuary revealed its shadowy expanse. We could just make out a few rows of pews closest to us. We each took a deep breath and exchanged hopeful looks, before cautiously climbing the two steps up into the room. Garrett in front, then me.
The light looked to be coming from a small room directly across the sanctuary from us. I couldn’t see far into the lit room, but there was no movement, there were no sounds other than the wind howling outside, the rain hitting the roof and the moaning of the church in response to it all. But, there was definitely a light coming from the room.
Judging by the building’s lack of size, the
sanctuary itself was larger than I expected from the outside. Maybe the shadows stretching out from the lit room on the other side just made it look that way. Who knows? We hesitated just beyond the doorway, unsure what to do now that we were inside, and for the most part, unable to enjoy the fact that we were out of the rain. We stood there, taking it all in.
One of the first things I noticed were the long strips of heavy, black cloth that hung on the light colored walls every six or seven feet. Just about the same distance as the locations of the windows. Another strip, not nearly as long, but just as wide, hung in the middle of each of the doors at the entrance. Garrett must have noticed them about the same time, because we looked at each other with a nod of understanding. The strips of cloth were the reason we hadn’t been able to see in the windows.
The makeshift drapes intrigued me enough that I put aside my fear and followed Garrett as he took a couple of steps farther into the room. I couldn’t speak for him but I, for one, was enthralled. I’d never been inside, much less explored, an abandoned building. If I weren’t shivering in my clinging wet clothes, I would have found the whole thing very cool. Maybe Garrett felt the same, because he kept going, with me right beside him. We were still cautious, but now more curious than anything else.
Rows of wooden pews with their deep purple cloth either ripped or eaten by mice took up the majority of the sanctuary. We passed a lonely black organ, covered in cobwebs and a thick layer of dust. A wooden and equally neglected bench rested beside the organ. One of its legs was broken and angled inward, causing the bench to lean awkwardly to the side. I half expected the organ to start playing by itself, like in some Bela Lugosi classic. Vampire movies came to mind, sending a chill down my spine. Thankfully, the organ hadn’t seen any of those movies. It didn’t know its designated role.
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