by Shaun Hamill
Daddy doesn’t feel good. He is sick a lot of the time but he does not want anyone to know. Mommy is sad but she pretends that she is not. Mommy and Daddy are both pretending all the time. Yesterday I asked Sydney if she thought Daddy was weird now and she said I am stupid. But I do not know if I can trust Sydney. Once I asked her who she wanted to marry and she said she was going to wait until Mommy dyed and then marry Daddy. So Sydney is pretending because Daddy is pretending and Sydney wants to be good for Daddy. Today Daddy fell down and shook like that day in the car. We were in the back yard. Mommy and Sydney were at the store and I did not know what to do. It was over fast though and Daddy made me promise not to tell. So now I am pretending too. I hope Halloween is over soon so we can all stop pretending.
This is worth noting for two reasons. First, it’s proof that my father was withholding information about his health from my mother. Second, and perhaps more important, it reminds me that Eunice was probably not sleeping at the time she claimed to have seen a man at her window. She would have been wide awake, tapping away in the dark, when she glanced over and saw something watching her.
14
The day after the fight over the coffin, Margaret went to her gynecologist for confirmation: she was indeed pregnant. She tried to take the news stoically, but the doctor provided her with the address and phone number for a Planned Parenthood in Dallas, “Just in case.”
When she got home that afternoon, she found Harry in the front yard, putting up a rickety, crooked fence.
“You’re home early,” she said.
“I took some vacation time,” Harry said, not looking up. “Where have you been?”
“Fabric store,” she lied. And then, to account for the lack of shopping bags: “I didn’t find what I wanted.” He didn’t press her on this point, but went on working. She dropped her purse inside and then walked to the school to retrieve the girls. When they returned, Harry had finished with the fence and was planting Styrofoam tombstones in the grass. If you’ve seen a haunted house like this, you know the gag. The grave markers have funny names on them—Frank N. Stein, Dr. Acula, and so on. But Harry either didn’t know or didn’t care about proper fake cemetery etiquette. His tombstones all bore the names of people he knew: Daniel Ransom from next door, Rick and Tim from the highway department, himself, Margaret, and, on two little crosses near the front door, Eunice and Sydney. When Eunice spotted the cross with her name on it, she started to cry.
“Why did you do this?” she said.
He stopped in his work. “It’s supposed to be a signature, like when you write your name on your homework. I wanted people to know who worked on the Tomb.”
“Why do you want me to die?” Eunice said, apparently not processing Harry’s explanations.
“I think it’s a great idea,” Sydney said. “Thank you, Daddy.”
Eunice lowered her head and slammed it into Sydney’s chest. Sydney landed on her back with a croak, and Eunice jumped on her. She pinned Sydney’s arms with her knees and pummeled her with open hands.
“Shut up!” Eunice shouted. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”
Sydney, bigger and stronger, squirmed her right arm free and punched Eunice on the side of the head. Eunice swayed to one side but kept her balance and continued her barrage of open-handed slaps.
“Harry,” Margaret said. “Help me!”
Harry, who had continued to plant his tombstones in neat rows in the grass, finally abandoned the work and walked across the yard, where he swept his backhand across Eunice’s face. Eunice tumbled off Sydney and landed on the grass. She lay there, curled into a ball, hands over her head. Sydney stood and ran past Margaret into the house.
“Why the hell did you do that?” Margaret shouted at Harry.
Harry blinked, looked at Eunice, then at Margaret. Something like regret danced at the edge of his expression before he shrugged. “You wanted help,” he said.
“Don’t you ever lay a hand on any of us again,” she said. “Or I will kill you myself. Do you understand?”
For a moment she thought he might hit her anyway. He stood, breathing hard, jaw working, then crossed the lawn, picked up the tombstone where he’d dropped it, and returned to work.
Margaret helped Eunice up and led her inside to examine the damage. She had a busted lip but otherwise appeared okay. Margaret wrapped some ice in a washcloth and pressed it to her face.
“I’m sorry,” Eunice said. “I was scared.”
“I know, sweetheart.” Margaret had never seen Eunice fight anyone before, even in preschool. Lots of firsts today, none of them good.
“I’m scared all the time now,” Eunice said.
Margaret looked down the hall toward Sydney’s shut bedroom door. She thought she could hear Sydney crying.
“Does Daddy still love us?”
Margaret forced herself to look back at Eunice. “Of course he does.”
Eunice wouldn’t meet her eye after that. She stared at the table and let the ice melt against her face. Margaret ran a hand over her daughter’s limp red hair, and it came to her all at once: she would leave Harry. She’d be smart about it, would make her moves silently—get the abortion, enroll in school, find a job—but she’d be out of this suffocating, awful house as soon as possible, away from the monstrous shade of the man she’d once loved, and on track for a better life.
She massaged the back of Eunice’s neck. “I’ll fix this,” she said. “I’ll fix it all. Just hang in a little longer.”
15
She called Planned Parenthood the next day while Harry worked in the yard. The first open appointment was November 9, and would cost $150 out of pocket. The woman on the phone told her that she would need someone to drive her home after. Margaret said no problem and hung up.
Afterward, she sat at the kitchen table and crunched numbers. One hundred fifty dollars for the abortion, plus another ten dollars for her UTV application fee. Several hundred for the deposit and first month’s rent on a three-bedroom apartment. How was she supposed to come up with that kind of money? She wouldn’t call her parents and ask, couldn’t let her crone of a mother know that, yes, her marriage was failing, burning down spectacularly, if you wanted to know the truth. She couldn’t ask a friend, because she didn’t really have any. Hell, she didn’t even know who to ask for a ride home from the clinic.
She chewed on the end of her pencil, looked across the kitchen and into the living room, at the bookcase full of horror novels. All of Harry’s old magazines and comics were still in a storage unit downtown. Boxes and boxes full of things that must be worth something. Harry would never miss a few items, and, if he did, he’d assume something had been lost in one move or another. She hoped she’d be long gone by then.
She called around to a few comic book shops in the area, asked if they bought old pulp magazines. Most did not, but one store gave her the contact info for a local collector named Jamie White, who agreed to meet her at the storage unit the following afternoon.
The next day, Margaret stole the spare key to the unit from Harry’s key ring in the garage and drove to the storage facility, off the highway on the far end of town. When she arrived, she looked around for an older man, someone who might match the voice she’d spoken to on the phone, but the only person in the parking lot was a woman leaning against the side of a car. The woman stood up and approached as Margaret parked and got out. She seemed younger than Margaret, but not by much, her light brown hair tied back in a ponytail. She wore jeans and a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt. Mickey was dressed like Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain, hanging from a lamppost.
“Margaret?” the woman said. She offered her hand, which Margaret shook. “Sally. I think we’re supposed to be meeting.”
“I thought I was meeting Jamie White.”
“Jamie’s my uncle,” Sally said. “He wanted to come h
imself but got delayed with another client. Sometimes I help him out.”
Margaret’s mouth twisted and she clenched her fists a couple of times. She already felt nervous, and deviating from her plan even in small ways made her feel worse.
“I promise I know what I’m doing,” Sally White said. “I deal with this kind of thing all the time. But if you don’t feel comfortable, I’m sure you can reschedule with my uncle—”
“No,” Margaret interrupted. “No, it has to be today.”
“Okay,” Sally said, her voice surprisingly gentle. “Lead the way.”
Harry’s unit was on the fourth floor of the climate-controlled building. Sally whistled as Margaret rolled up the door and revealed the pristine white boxes stacked floor to ceiling, front to back. “May I?” she said, gesturing to one of the boxes.
Margaret helped her pull it down from the top of the stack and set it on the corridor floor. Sally sifted through the contents, gingerly handling everything she touched, occasionally shaking her head or swearing under her breath. She showed Margaret a copy of Weird Tales cover-dated February 1928. It featured a man in a trench coat with a gun in one hand, and a fainting woman in a ball gown collapsed against his side. “The Ghost Table, by Elliot O’Donnell” it read.
“Would you believe this was the first publication of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’?” Sally said. “And it’s not even the cover.” She smirked, disbelieving. “That’s like publishing an issue of Action Comics without Superman on the front. Although they did that, too, in the early days.”
“I don’t know much about comic books,” Margaret said.
“Look,” Sally said. She pointed to a list of names near the bottom of the cover: H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Cummings, Seabury Quinn, Frank Owen, Wilfred Taiman, John Martin Leahy. “Maybe the single most important piece of Weird fiction, and its author is a footnote. Nuts.”
Sally gazed into the unit, at the remaining tower of boxes. “These are all full of the same stuff?” she said.
“Magazines and comics. Film posters. Stuff like that.”
Sally made a face, seemed to be arguing with herself.
“What?” Margaret said. “What’s wrong?”
Sally sighed. “My uncle sent me here today with a check. He told me to offer you somewhere between fifty and two hundred dollars if I thought there was enough here to justify it, and if you’d agree to sell him everything.”
“Everything?” Margaret surveyed the unit. Whatever her feelings about him now, she couldn’t forget the years of love and care Harry had put into building this collection, and how hard it had been for him to remove it from his home and store it across town. This assemblage of boxes was how he built his worldview, his personality. It was how he dealt with his mother’s sickness and his father’s death. She hated herself for this pang of sentiment, but it was there, all the same.
“My uncle had no idea what I would find here,” Sally said, “and if he’d come himself, he might have offered you, I don’t know, maybe five hundred or a grand.”
That sounded like a fortune to Margaret, an instant problem solver. “Can you call him and ask?”
“The problem,” Sally said, “is that you could probably get five hundred for what’s in this box alone, if you knew what you were doing. Usually it’s my job to trick people who don’t know what they have into selling me things that we then sell for much, much more. Usually I’m happy to do that, because it’s only a comic or two here, a box of magazines there, but this”—she waved at the storage unit—“this is too big. You need to catalog it, find out what it’s really worth, and then either sell it yourself or let someone like my uncle or me make an honest offer.”
At another time Margaret would have thanked this woman for her candor, but right now she wanted to scream.
“It’s sweet you’re trying to help me out,” she said patiently, “but I need money today. Why don’t you take this box, write me a check for two hundred dollars, and we’ll call it even?”
“I can’t,” Sally said.
“Please,” Margaret said, desperation creeping into her voice.
Sally studied her a moment. Margaret didn’t like the shrewdness in the look, which made her feel exposed.
“Something pretty serious, then,” Sally said. It wasn’t a question.
Margaret gave a tight nod. Sally searched through the box in front of her again, pulled out about ten magazines, and set them on the floor. She picked up her purse, pulled out a pen and a folded-up check. She flattened it on one knee, filled it out, and handed it to Margaret. It was made out for two hundred dollars.
“I’m still cheating you,” she said. “But not as much.”
“Thank you,” Margaret said.
Sally took another scrap of paper from her purse, scribbled something on it, and handed it to Margaret. “This is my home number. I meant what I said. If you actually want to sell this stuff, I can help you get a fair price. I need time to figure out what you have.”
“Thank you,” Margaret said again.
Sally stood, helped Margaret return the box to its tower, and shut the rolling door. They shook hands.
“Call me,” Sally said. “I’ll work for ten percent of the final sale. That’s cheap, by the way.”
16
Margaret cashed the check at a Western Union and hid the money in an old aspirin bottle at the bottom of her purse. She drove to the admissions office at UTV, paid her admission fee in cash, and put the rest away for the second week of November. She’d worry about the cost of the apartment after Halloween.
Work on the Tomb grew frenzied. The family pulled together again. No one mentioned Harry’s seizures or outbursts. Margaret pushed thoughts of doctors away. It was like they’d made a silent agreement: no more shouting, fistfights, or confrontations until November. It gave them permission to get along and to be courteous to one another, if not warm.
The house was messy, chaotic, more a backstage area for the attraction in the yard than a home. Sydney, who would later have some experience with high school theater, first became acquainted with the strange bouquet of backstage smells in the fall of 1982, in her own house—fabric, glue, sweat, and dust all hanging stale in the air like the ghosts of old shows.
Then, on the morning of Halloween, Harry planted a sign in the yard, which read FREE HAUNTED HOUSE TONIGHT in dripping, bloody red letters. Eunice took a picture of my parents crouched next to it, which I salvaged before I left home for the last time.
In the photo, Mom and Dad hunker on either side of the sign, with the house and fake graveyard behind them. The sun was too bright, and Eunice forgot to turn off the flash, so the picture looks overexposed, faded, like it was taken at the onset of nuclear winter. Dad’s wearing jeans and a Texas Tech sweatshirt. I can make out the dark bags under his eyes, even through the fade. Mom wears jeans and a denim jacket, and looks embarrassed in the universal manner of all moms before a camera lens, but both she and Dad are smiling, and in their smiles I see none of the manic energy and false cheer described to me later. I see only my parents, happy. I see why they could have loved one another to begin with.
Later that morning, Balloon World (the same folks who had supplied Eunice’s birthday party bounce house) arrived with a giant balloon, which they helped Harry install on his roof platform and inflate. It took shape over the neighborhood, rising like a horror from beyond the stars, a giant white ghost visible from far away in the flat, still-undeveloped city of Vandergriff. Around town, children dropped their toys and stopped their games as the beacon entered their field of vision and announced itself, a signal from the spirit world that All Hallows’ Eve had begun. The streets would soon be awash in dark magic and the world beyond the world would show its face.
17
By midafternoon, a crowd of people had gathered on the sidewalk—not only children and
parents, but teenagers and college kids as well. The friends and neighbors who’d agreed to help arrived around dinnertime and found a stack of pizzas waiting for them (“We can’t pay them, but we should at least feed them,” Harry had said). These “Tomb Players” scarfed their food and then stepped into the living room to be made up as vampires, werewolves, and the ghostly dead. Mr. and Mrs. Ransom were on line detail, and already frazzled. The line out front stretched down the block and around the corner.
Back inside, Margaret made panicked, last-minute alterations to costumes while Harry applied makeup. When Mr. Haggarty’s monk costume ripped (he’d put on a few extra pounds since she first measured him), Margaret ran out of thread repairing it. She sent Eunice to find more, but Eunice returned a moment later, unable to locate any.
“I think we’re out,” she said.
“Hold this,” Margaret said. Eunice took hold of the split fabric and held it together over Mr. Haggarty’s belly while Margaret dashed into the bedroom. There was a small chance she’d left an emergency sewing kit in the dresser. She proceeded to rip drawers out and dump the contents onto the floor. When she finished with her own, she started on Harry’s. She dumped his folded-up shirts, found no sewing kit. Next, she dumped his socks and underwear. Again, no sewing kit, but something else, a quick fluttering at the corner of her eye so brief that she almost missed it. She paused, set the empty drawer on the bed with its fellows, then pushed apart the socks and underwear to see what she’d found.
It was a glossy pamphlet that had been folded in half, as if to fit in a pocket. Margaret picked it up and unfolded it. “Glioblastoma and Malignant Astrocytoma” was printed across the top, above a few photographs of generic faces: serious but tough, showing the viewer that they weren’t going to let this thing (whatever it was) beat them. A logo at the bottom informed Margaret that this was a publication of the American Brain Tumor Association.