by Shaun Hamill
“You’re going to build a whole house?” Eunice said.
“It won’t be a whole house, dummy,” Sydney said. “Just like the bounce house for your birthday wasn’t a whole house.”
“Sydney, don’t call your sister names,” Margaret said.
“She’s rude, but she’s right,” Harry said to Eunice. “It’s only a name. I’ll build everything in the garage and we’ll put it together in the backyard.”
“So it will be more like a haunted yard,” Eunice said.
“Technically, yes,” Harry said. “But if we do it right, people will forget it’s our yard while they’re inside it. They’ll think they’re actually seeing monsters and ghosts.”
“Why would we want to scare people?” Eunice said.
“Because it’s fun to be scared sometimes,” Harry said. “And I think we’ll be good at it. I’ll do most of the design and construction myself, but you can both design a room of your own and I’ll build it.”
“I can make up whatever I want and you’ll build it?” Sydney said.
“Within reason,” Harry said.
“I can make the costumes,” Margaret said, surprising herself. She hadn’t meant to volunteer, but now found herself wrestling with the central problem of her adult life. She’d never wanted children. Harry had. She’d hoped that the arrival of her first baby would somehow transform her into a natural mother, the sort of woman who glowed with pride over her brood. Instead, both Sydney’s and Eunice’s births had left her cold. She did her duty, nursed, played, sang, read to, and fed, but she never felt the deep wellspring of fierce love for her children that she felt for Harry. It would have been comforting to think that maybe all parents felt this way, that it actually took years to fall in love with your children, but Harry had cried when each girl was born, and seemed genuinely excited to see them every day after work. He didn’t seem to mind the erosion of his personal time and space, and Margaret thought the girls somehow instinctively understood the difference between his heart and her own. She always felt at a disadvantage with them, eager to demonstrate an appropriate level of love.
“Are you sure?” Harry said. He looked surprised and grateful.
“Yes,” Margaret said.
For the rest of the evening, they all sat around the kitchen table and drew up plans on graph paper.
My father the engineer was an obsessive collector and fastidious record keeper, so most of these designs survive. I keep them in a notebook in my desk, along with my sisters’ drawings of their own ideas: a room full of doll heads, a room where a mummy could chase you around, and, my favorite, a room that looks ordinary, like maybe you’ve come to the end of the haunted house, but then the lights turn out and disembodied voices begin to whisper ugly truths. Eunice’s notes on this drawing call it “The Bad Secrets Room.”
At the end of the evening, Harry took all of these disparate ideas and laid them out on the kitchen table. He rubbed his chin and frowned.
“Right now we have a bunch of random scary things,” he said. “What we need to do is pick one big scary idea, and let all the little scares come from that big thing. I think,” he said, tapping his eraser against his papers, “I think we should do a cemetery. We can make fake grave markers and a pointy black fence for the front of the house, and then, in the backyard, we’ll build a tomb. Each room can be a different kind of tomb or crypt. Maybe we do an Egyptian tomb with a mummy, and another could be like one of those aboveground burial places in Louisiana.”
“Why do they bury people aboveground in Louisiana?” Sydney said.
“Because Louisiana is one big swamp,” Eunice said. “When they try to bury people underground, the bodies wash up out of the earth. They won’t stay down.”
Both Margaret and Harry looked at Eunice in surprise. She appeared startled by the sudden attention.
“Is that true?” Sydney said.
“Yes,” Harry said. He remained focused on Eunice. “How did you know that?”
She cast a guilty glance at the bookcase in the living room, then stared at the table. “I don’t remember.”
6
Life rolled on. Harry went to work in the mornings, and Margaret sent off for an application packet for the University of Texas at Vandergriff. In the evenings, Harry turned his pile of lumber into modular walls, ceilings, and floors. Sydney kept him company in the garage, wearing child-size safety goggles and doing her homework while he measured and cut.
Sydney started ballet lessons, and Janet Ransom said she was a natural. Whenever Margaret caught Sydney moving through the five positions in front of her bedroom mirror, she noticed an expression of fierce concentration on her face, a sort of ecstatic agitation. She seemed driven to perfect the poses, to execute them with grace. Eunice took to her new computer with a similar fervor. She retreated to her room every day after school, parked herself in front of the bulky brown keyboard, and didn’t move unless ordered to do so. Harry had made good choices with his gifts. Margaret would never have thought to do either of these things herself. It stung to realize that even though he spent the workweek away from his daughters, he still somehow intuited their needs and desires better than she could.
As far as his own needs, Harry ran out of lumber before he finished the basic skeleton of the Tomb and took to trolling the neighborhood after work, for unattended construction sites, for homeowners tearing down fences. He accumulated so much wood that he ran out of room in the garage and had to leave a large pile under a tarp beside the house. From this new supply he built more walls and floors, plain and unthreatening surfaces stacked like thin building blocks in the garage. Harry and Margaret now had to park in the driveway to give the project room to grow.
For a while, everything seemed fine—until the night Margaret was yanked from sleep by a scream.
The babies, she thought, swimming through the last pink wisps of an evaporating dream. The babies are screaming. She caught up with Harry as he threw open the door to Eunice’s room and flipped on the light. Eunice sat in bed, her body pushed flush against the headboard, emitting that clear and perfectly terrible sound, the alarm system that stops any parent’s heart.
“What’s wrong?” Harry shouted over the racket. “What is it?” He sat down on the bed and took her face in his hands. Her eyes reminded Margaret of Harry’s during his episode at the birthday party. There was something wild there, not quite human.
Eunice worked her mouth open and closed a few times, then pointed across the room at her window, which looked out on the backyard. “There was a man.”
“What?” Margaret said.
“Son of a bitch,” Harry said. He shouldered past Margaret out of the room. As he did, Sydney emerged from her own room, bewildered, her hair a tangled rat’s nest.
“What’s going on?” she said.
“Nothing, sweetheart, go back to bed. Harry, wait,” Margaret called after him. What if there actually was someone in the yard? Harry had no shoes and no weapon.
“I’m not going back to bed until someone tells me what’s going on,” Sydney said.
Margaret felt a momentary desire to slap her belligerent, disobedient daughter across the mouth. It’s what her own mother would have done. But worry overpowered momentary rage, and she jogged after Harry. He’d left the sliding glass door open and was stalking the yard, flashlight in hand. He swept its beam back and forth over the ground before him.
“Go back inside with the girls,” he said.
“Should we call the police?” she said.
“What’s going on?” Sydney had followed Margaret and stood behind her with her arms crossed.
“Go sit with your sister,” Margaret said.
“Goddammit, Margaret, will you please go back inside?” Harry said.
There was sense in the request. Given the circumstances, the girls
probably shouldn’t be alone. As she crossed the patio toward the door, a thin, sharp pain shot through the arch of her right foot. She cried out.
Harry pointed the light at her. “What’s wrong?”
“I stepped on something,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”
She hobbled into the house, turned on the kitchen light, and sat down at the table. She propped the injured foot on her left knee. The sole was so filthy she couldn’t see anything but dirt from outside. She brushed at it with the back of one hand and sent another needle of pain through her nerves. A splinter, then.
She hopped to Eunice’s room, right leg in the air behind her like a flamingo, and braced herself in the doorway. Sydney sat next to Eunice on the bed, holding her hand and whispering. She stopped when Margaret came in.
“Sydney, go get the tweezers from the top drawer in the bathroom,” Margaret said.
“What’s going on?” Sydney said.
“Now, Sydney,” Margaret said. Feeling guilty, she added, “I stepped on something outside and I can’t get it out. Will you help me?”
Sydney got up to obey. Margaret limped over to the bed, sat down, and winced. She held Eunice’s hand and tried to smile.
“What did Daddy find?” Eunice said.
“Nothing yet, but he’s still looking.”
“I really did see a man,” Eunice said. “You do believe me, don’t you?”
Sydney returned with the tweezers and provided a welcome interruption. Eunice and Margaret got on the floor and Margaret laid her head on Eunice’s knees. Sydney sat on the bed with Margaret’s foot propped in her lap. Margaret asked Eunice to hold her hands, not because she needed the comfort but because she wanted to distract her daughter. Sydney located the sliver and, after a couple of tries, extracted it. It exited Margaret’s body with a parting sting.
“Got it,” Sydney said, holding up the tweezers for her mother to see.
“Hold on to it,” Margaret said. “Don’t drop it in your sister’s bed.”
“I won’t,” Sydney said, triumph wilting into sullenness.
Margaret sat up and took the tweezers from Sydney. She examined the object clamped between them: a long, thin sliver of green glass. It must have come from the bottle Harry had dropped at the party weeks ago. She’d swept and swept the patio since then. How was this piece still here?
She applied Neosporin and a Band-Aid to her foot and took the sliver to the kitchen. She meant to throw it away, but for some reason found herself reluctant. Instead, she dropped it into a plastic sandwich bag and hid it at the back of the drawer where she kept dish towels and pot holders. She couldn’t have said why she felt compelled to do this, only that she did.
Harry came back in as she shut the drawer, and he frowned, a question already forming on his lips.
“Anything?” Margaret asked, to distract him.
He set the flashlight down on the dinner table. “I walked the yard three times, but I didn’t see anything. She must have been having a nightmare.”
They tried to get the girls settled again after that, but Eunice refused to believe that she’d dreamt the whole thing. “I know what I saw,” she insisted.
“Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between sleeping and being awake,” Margaret said. “Dreams can seem very real. Why don’t we sleep now and talk about it in the morning?”
“Can I sleep in your bed?” Eunice said.
“No,” Margaret said.
“Yes,” Harry said at the same time.
“I’m coming, too,” Sydney said. “I’m not going to be the only one sleeping alone after all this.”
And so the entire Turner family crammed into Margaret and Harry’s queen-size bed, Margaret and Harry on the outside, the girls on the inside. The girls went to sleep almost at once, and Harry went soon after, Sydney nestled into his side. Eunice, however, had been a kicker from the womb on forward, and every time Margaret began to drift off, Eunice’s foot or knee would land a blow on her hip, stomach, thigh, or back. Around four, tired of the assault, Margaret got out of bed, brewed a pot of coffee, and sat down in front of the TV. She found an old movie on the local access station. It was a silent film about a professional hypnotist who used a sleepwalker to commit murders. By the time the sun rose, she felt even less comfortable than she had lying awake and being irregularly pummeled in bed.
Harry and the kids staggered out of the bedroom a little after six, summoned by the smells of bacon and toast. Conversation at the table was limited to simple requests—pass this, can I have, et cetera. Margaret saw Harry off to work, walked the girls to school, and once she had the house to herself, she took the broom and dustpan onto the porch and swept it again. And again. And then a third time. After each pass, she peered into the contents of her dustpan, but found only dirt. She knew she ought to be relieved, but she felt instead a vague disappointment, as though she’d missed a clue, or sign.
She leaned the broom against the side of the house and walked over to Eunice’s bedroom window. Small and rectangular, it looked like it belonged at ground level, illuminating a basement, instead of here, high in the wall. Someone would have to be pretty tall to even be seen from the inside, let alone climb through from the outside. Why would you even try it when there were lower, full-size windows in the other bedrooms? Because this was the only window not visible from the street? You’d need a ladder to stand high enough to pry it open—or you’d need to be strong enough to lift yourself with one hand and fiddle with the window with the other.
She went inside, put the broom away, and retrieved a step stool. She took it into the yard, planted it in the soft dirt beneath the window, and climbed up for a closer look.
A low, sick feeling began in the pit of her stomach. Three deep gouges ran through the brick to the right of the window, and the left side of the screen frame had been bent outward by at least an inch.
She grabbed hold of the window frame to steady herself, turned her head, and vomited into the grass. Her fingertips scraped against the unyielding brick as her body convulsed and her chest burned.
7
When Harry got home from work, she made him climb up and look for himself. He ran his fingers over the brick, touched the window, and glowered.
“You see it, right?” she said from her spot on the ground.
He climbed down. “I see some imperfections in the brick, and the screen is out of joint, but neither necessarily means anything. Every brick has little flaws, right? That one could have been like that when they built this place. And the screen could be normal wear and tear. I don’t know. I haven’t kept up with maintenance out here like I should.”
“So you’re saying—”
“I’m saying I don’t see any reason to panic.” He folded the stool to carry it back inside.
“I know how it sounds,” she said, following him across the patio. “But after what Eunice saw last night, don’t you think—”
Harry pitched the stool against the house and turned around so fast that Margaret took a step back.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Will you fucking drop it?”
She took another step back.
“Do you have to invent new problems for me to solve?” he said. “Are you that bored?”
“Are you out of your mind?” she said. “In what world is this a made-up problem? Eunice saw something, and the window looks weird. I don’t think that makes me hysterical.”
He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. “No, you’re right,” he said, the fight going out of his voice. “But I didn’t find anything else last night, so unless something flew in, I don’t know how there could possibly have been anyone out there. Eunice is a kid. We can’t let her nightmares dictate our waking hours.” He picked up the stool and carried it inside.
Instead of following him, M
argaret sat down on a patio chair. It was the first time he’d ever raised his voice to her without apologizing. How could he say he saw nothing wrong with the window? Was he crazy? Was she?
8
Even working every weeknight from dinner until bedtime and all day on weekends, Harry continued to fall behind on the Tomb. In the first week of October, he started working late into the night and sleeping on the couch when he slept at all. He made papier-mâché masks, built rubbery monsters, painted the modular walls, and argued with the girls about their room ideas until they settled on an orphanage tomb for Eunice, and a vampire ballerina tomb for Sydney.
He brought home cans of spray webbing, little packages of toy bugs and plastic vampire teeth. The accoutrements of Halloween accumulated in the garage and spilled over into the kitchen, where Margaret had set up her sewing machine at the table. She’d never done much sewing before—her mother had taught her how, but had also given Margaret the impression that it was “low” work, that Margaret ought to find herself sewing only in an emergency (i.e., a torn shirt while on vacation, or extreme poverty). Margaret was surprised and delighted to discover a real knack for it, her first few costumes coming out as well as or better than the patterns from the fabric store.
“Wow,” Harry said, when she showed him the artfully ragged white suit with long coattails that she’d made for him. The fabric, though new, somehow conveyed over a hundred years of decomposition, and the stitching was just crooked enough to unsettle the eye. “You could do this for a living.”
She couldn’t quite enjoy the praise. She was throwing up almost every morning now. She’d done the math: she was two weeks late. She sewed and put off thinking about the issue.
Harry began outdoor construction. He turned his modular walls into a labyrinth of rooms and corridors in the yard. He worked past sundown every night, duct-taping two flashlights to a hard hat so he could see as he hammered and drilled. When his work stretched past eight, then nine, the neighbors began to complain. Instead of changing his work habits, Harry recruited them to help build, cast them as characters, or, in Janet Ransom’s case, brought her in as a “movement consultant” for the actors. He flattered his new coconspirators about their heretofore unsuspected talents, and they were suddenly okay with (perhaps even excited about) the construction noise.