by Ray Garton
I heard what sounded like her shoes clapping on wooden planks. Then a loud creak. She laughed again, but the high, musical sound was cut short by the slam of a door.
Hurrying through the small cemetery, something struck me about the gravestones, something odd enough to make me slow to a stop. I passed the flashlight beam back and forth slowly over the stones around me. It took a moment before I could identify the oddity.
They were all so close together. Too close. Looking closer, I realized they were very small graves. At first, I thought it might be a pet cemetery, but something in the lower part of my guts told me that was not the case. I went to one of the stones—a marble cross that was being smothered by ivy—and put the light on it. In block letters carved into the base of the cross were the words, OUR BABY MICHAEL—3 DAYS OLD. The one next to it had a simple flat stone on the ground, surrounded by weeds. It read, BABY JESSICA—WITH US ONLY 9 HOURS, WITH GOD FOR ETERNITY. The graves in the old cemetery held babies. A lot of babies.
I did not want to think about it. I broke into a jog and went through the same gap in the fence that Amanda had. I had put the graveyard a few yards behind me when I was finally close enough to see the house.
It was large and tall and looked as dead as the occupants of the small graveyard in front of it. Boards had been nailed over all the windows, like eyes sewn shut, and the old decaying gray house looked ready to collapse under the pressure of a light breeze. I called Amanda a few more times as I got closer to the house, until I stood at the foot of the crooked wooden steps that led up to the covered porch.
Amanda did not respond, but I could hear her laughter in the house, the clump of her low heels on wood.
I went up the steps carefully, opened the creaky door. Aimed the flashlight into the nearly impenetrable darkness inside.
“Amanda?” I called. “I…I’d like to go, if you don’t mind.”
After a moment of silence, I heard her say something—she had gone upstairs—but not to me. Another garbled voice responded to her. A male voice, deep. Then another, female, broke into raucous, throaty laughter.
“Amanda!” I shouted angrily, but I was more nervous than angry. I stepped into the house. The floor was dirty, gritty, and crunched beneath my feet as I went through what was once probably a beautiful foyer. The damp air smelled of mold and…something else. Something like sour body odor.
My flashlight beam passed over sheet-covered furniture hunkering in the dark. A black, dead fireplace with a huge framed painting of some kind on the wall above it, the picture obscured by thick layers of cobwebs and dust as dense and heavy as the sheets on the furniture.
Footsteps sounded overhead. I turned the light upward to the ceiling, held it for a moment on an old chandelier that appeared to be made of cobwebs. I recognized the sound of Amanda’s shoes, but there was another set of footsteps that was quieter. Bare feet. Then another, heavier footstep—a single footstep—followed by the whisper of something being dragged. Thump—ssshhh… thump—ssshhh… thump—ssshhh. More voices, pleasant chatter, a girlish laugh.
There was a sound to my right, not far away. I swept the flashlight in the direction of the sound until the beam found an archway that led to another room, and more darkness. It was a shuffling sound accompanied by rapid thumping. I took a couple of steps closer and sent the flashlight beam through the archway. It was a short hall that led to another large room. I saw the corner of a table. Possibly a dining room. I heard the sound again, and the flashlight beam landed on a pair of bare feet. The owner of the feet was on his or her knees and leaning forward. Crawling on the floor, it seemed. But all I could see were the feet. The person in the next room made a sound then, a gurgling, giggling sound, and a quiet, almost whispered stream of nonsense, baby-talk. The voice, like the feet, belonged to a large adult.
Gooseflesh crawled beneath my soaked clothes and my heart pounded in my ears as I turned and rushed back to the front door. But I did not go through it. I still needed the keys to my car.
Then it occurred to me that Amanda was naked. She had nowhere to put the keys, and she had not been carrying them in her hand. So, she had left them in the car.
“Amanda!” I shouted. “I’m leaving! If you want a ride, come now!”
I could not get out of that house fast enough, did not even bother to pull the door closed behind me. One of the wooden steps cracked beneath me, but did not break.
When I reached a corner of the cemetery, I heard Amanda’s running footsteps slopping through the mud behind me. She giggled as she passed me, ran ahead.
“Party pooper!” she shouted.
I ran to catch up, to get to the car before Amanda and get my keys. But just before I reached it, she opened the driver’s side door, ducked into the car, then stood and held up the keys, made them jingle, laughed.
“If you want ’em,” she said, grinning, “you’re gonna have to take ’em from me.”
I lunged at her and swiped at the keys, but she jerked them out of my reach, hopped into the car and slammed the door. I suddenly felt as if my feet were made of lead as I went around the car. I did not want to get in, did not want to talk to her.
What had happened back in that little graveyard? What had she done to me?
What was it that had slid wetly between my shoulder blades? I knew what I thought it had been, but it made no sense because it was physically impossible for her to have licked my back from her position. How had she squeezed my erection the way she had, when both hands were on my shoulders? How had she touched me down there? And with what?
Amanda started the engine and I got into the car. She made a U-turn and drove away from the graveyard.
“Look, I’d really like to call it a night, okay?” I said. “So, if you don’t mind, just drive to wherever you’re going and I’ll drop you off, then I can go home. Okay?”
“Okay.” When she came to the narrow, curvy road that had brought us to the graveyard, she turned right without stopping instead of going back in the direction we had come. She drove in silence for a while, didn’t even turn the radio back on. We were going farther up the mountain.
I had never been so uncomfortable in my own car. I kept my eyes front, wondering if, perhaps, I was losing my mind, going a little crazy. At a fork in the road, Amanda went to the right, up a steep incline. I realized I didn’t have my seatbelt on and quickly fastened it.
“It’s not far,” she said. “But you’ll have to come in. I want you to meet the folks.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Oh, I think so,” she said with a chuckle.
I ignored the remark. “Who were you talking to? Back there? In the house?”
“What makes you think I was talking to anyone? Maybe I was talking to myself.”
“But I heard—there were other—I saw someone crawling in the—” I took a deep breath and it trembled as it came out. I tried to still the chaos inside my head and organize my thoughts. “Who does the house belong to?”
“All the houses around here belong to my family.”
“So those were relatives?”
She clicked the radio on, turned Joan Jett up loud as she drove through a large, open wrought-iron gate.
And there it was, right in front of me. The house that climbed this side of the mountain. It was not quite as spectacular up close as it was from a distance because I could only see the front rather than the entire, sprawling structure. But looking at it, I could sense its massive size. Had I not known how big the house was, I would have been able to feel it, even sitting there in my car.
Amanda slowed down as she went around the circular driveway and stopped in front of the house. In the center of the circle was a pond and fountain being smothered by ivy. Two black gargoyles sat back to back, wings spread, heads raised, fanged snouts open wide. No water came from their mouths. The fountain looked like it had not been in use for decades.
Amanda turned off the engine, the headlights. “All right, let’s go, Andy. You really mu
st come meet the folks. Especially my little brother Dexter. I think he’ll like you a lot, and he doesn’t have any friends, so it would do him good to—”
“I’m sorry, but I’d rather just go home.”
“Oh. Okay.” She opened the door and got out.
“Um, you’re still naked,” I said.
She leaned back into the car, grinning, her soaked hair flat against her skull, and got her dress, mask, and clutch from the back seat as she said, “Oh, Andy, you have such a delicious grasp of the obvious.” She slammed the door and hurried toward the house.
With my keys.
“Dammit!” I shouted as I got out of the car, flashlight still in hand. “Hey, you’ve still got my—”
Amanda interrupted me in a sing-song cadence: “If you want ’em, you’re gonna have to come get ’em!” She hurried up the enormous bell-shaped marble stairs that led to the dark, wooden double doors of the house, each with a large knocker in the center.
A dim light shone high over the doors and cast Amanda’s broadening shadow, long and black, down the stairs behind her.
I slammed the car door and ran after her, hoping to reach her before she went into the house. I did not want to have to go inside. The house engulfed my field of vision as I ran toward it, went up the steps two at a time. Almost as if it were lunging at me menacingly, trying to chase me away from a place where I did not belong.
Amanda opened the door and went inside before I reached the top of the stairs.
Beyond the open door, I could see only darkness, and Amanda’s shape, a shadow within shadows, turning back to me to say, “Come on, darling, come in out of the rain,” as she held her right arm out straight and jangled my ring of keys from one finger. Then she turned and disappeared into the house.
I stopped outside the open door and called, “Aman—Miss Bollinger, please, I’d like to go home now. Could you…could I have my…” I gave up. My voice seemed to wither and die just inside the house. No one was listening, no one could hear. I had no choice.
With my heart mimicking the sound of the distant thunder, I went inside the Bollinger house.
Six
The foyer was dark, but there was dim light beyond. I neglected to turn off the flashlight as I entered the front room of the house, and I stood there looking around for a while before I realized it was still shining and clicked it off.
The large room seemed to have been cut out of marble. At one time, it probably had been beautiful, all white with swirls of bluish-gray here and there. A reflection of the fire in the enormous fireplace probably once shimmered on the smooth marble floor.
The shelves probably once held rows of books, maybe beautiful, valuable knick-knacks and trinkets. The large rug on the floor was the color of rust, but looked like it used to be a bright red and blue, or perhaps green. But that was a long time ago. Now, in the dim light from bowl-like wall sconces of filthy frosted glass that glowed upward, the room was alive with dust. The walls were a sickly yellowish-gray. The fireplace was a black cave with old ashes piled high in its yawning mouth. Instead of books, the shelves held what appeared to be nothing more than a collection of junk that made no sense: an old toy dump truck, a rock the size of a baseball still clumped with old, long-dried mud, an ancient colander, a fat black dildo rippled with thick veins, the skeleton of a rodent, an old torn boxing glove, a ceramic poodle with the head missing, a child’s birthday card standing open, a small human skull (I did not get close enough to see if it was real or not because I thought it might be), a filthy rusted vice, what appeared to be a real but stuffed iguana, and other equally strange objects, all of them bearing a skin of dust. On the floor along the walls and around the dark wood sofa that faced the fireplace, dust had gathered in large greasy clumps. Grandma called them dust-bunnies. I had never seen them in such great quantity, and something about them made my skin crawl.
The house had a smell similar to the old boarded-up house I had been in earlier.
Stale and moldy, with the odor of unwashed bodies.
There were sounds in the house, but they were not house sounds. Muffled by walls and floors, I could hear constant movement, resonant voices, laughter. Almost like a bus station, or an old hospital busy with activity. The sounds seemed to be coming from all directions at once, but I finally realized they came from above me, upstairs.
Against a far wall, a staircase curved up to the second of four floors. A track ran along the wall beside the stairs. I had seen one like it in a movie once. A chair ran up and down the stairs along the track for someone who was unable to walk. The chair itself was on one of the other floors, or perhaps it had been removed.
A portrait hung on the wall above the fireplace and the figure at its center bled through the layer of dust on the painting. It was a man sitting in a large throne-like chair.
I had trouble making sense of the portrait, so I turned the flashlight back on and aimed the beam at the man in the painting.
“That’s my great, great grandfather,” Amanda said, and I jumped, startled by her voice. She laughed at me. “You just don’t know how to relax, do you?” She had removed her muddy shoes, and was still naked except for her mud-speckled stockings and black garters.
She had a beautiful body, but I was too distracted and nervous, too anxious to leave to pay it any attention. Even if I weren’t, I no longer had any desire to touch her body. Or even get very close to it.
“Are you hungry?” Amanda asked. “Would you like something to drink?”
“I’d like my car keys, please.”
She laughed. “I guess I put them down somewhere. I’ll have to look for them.”
She turned and walked away.
Before following her, I turned the flashlight onto the painting again. The man in the portrait had no arms or legs. I turned off the flashlight and followed Amanda.
We ended up in the kitchen. It was spacious, well -lit, with lots of pale tiles and red brick. But it looked as if there had been an earthquake. Nearly every inch of counter-space was cluttered with dishes and glasses, coffee mugs and tea cups, bowls and utensils, pots and pans, all unwashed, stained, crusted with old food. Something was piled in the left side of the two-basin, stainless-steel sink. From where I stood, I could see only the top of the pile, a rounded hump of something wet and black with streaks of green. When I realized it was only a pile of rotting lettuce, or perhaps cabbage, I was so relieved that I failed to be offended by the disgusting sight.
“How about a nice ham and cheese sandwich?” she asked.
“No, thank you.”
“Coffee? I’ll start a pot right now.”
I thought of drinking out of a cup from that kitchen and wondered what I might find at the bottom when I was finished. “No. No coffee, thanks. Just…my keys.”
She frowned, looked concerned. Came over to me and raised a hand to place it on my cheek. I almost tripped over my own feet trying to keep away from it, trying to avoid her touch.
Amanda appeared genuinely hurt. “What’s wrong, Andy?”
I wanted to shout, You licked my back while I was on top of you, and you want to know what’s wrong? Something that’s not supposed to be between your legs grabbed my balls, and you want to know what’s wrong?
Instead, I tried to keep my quiet voice steady as I said, “I just want my keys. Please give them to me.”
Amanda stepped toward me again, saying, “Oh, please, Andy, won’t you—” She stopped for a moment when I backed away from her quickly. Her smile fell away and she dropped her arms loosely at her sides beneath drooping shoulders. “I want you to meet Daddy and the others. At least Dexter, you have to meet Dexter. He’s my little brother.”
“Maybe…some other time.” I knew I would never be returning to that house, or even to that side of the mountain, ever. But I was trying to be polite and get my keys.
Amanda sighed as she turned and went to a coffee maker on a corner of the messy counter. She took the pot to the sink, where she ignored the pile of ooze.
As she filled the pot with water, she said, “Well, I’m sorry, Andy, but it won’t be some other time, it’s going to be tonight. So you might as well have a nice hot cup of coffee, because you’re not going anywhere until you meet Daddy. That’s why you’re here.”
“What?”
She went back to the coffee maker, opened the top, and emptied the pot into it. “I didn’t stutter.”
“What do you mean, that’s why I’m here?”
Working around the mess as if it were not there, Amanda did not respond until the coffee was brewing. When she turned to me, I was surprised by her face. The smirking cockiness was gone and she looked sad, vulnerable.
“I thought you liked me,” she said.
I did not know what to say.
“Didn’t you have any fun tonight? I had a good time. Even though we didn’t…finish.” Half her mouth turned up in a smile. But when I did not respond, it went away. She turned her back to me and stared at the gurgling coffee maker as she said, “You think I’m a freak.” Her voice sounded thick, as if she were about to cry. I couldn’t have that.
“That’s funny,” I said, trying to sound light. “I didn’t think I’d ever hear anyone say that to me. It’s usually the other way around.”
She said nothing.
“Look, I…I don’t think you’re a freak, Miss Bol—Amanda. That never even crossed my mind,” I lied. “You’re…you’re beautiful. But what happened in the graveyard earlier…the things you did to me…Well, you scared me. Um, a lot. I mean, that’s the kind of thing you should warn a guy about, you know? What…whatever it was.”
She bowed her head and looked, for a moment, like she was praying to the coffee maker. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“No, of course you didn’t.” I could not believe what I was saying, what I was talking about so casually. The woman’s tongue had gone down the back of my shirt, and something between her legs had moved and squeezed between mine, and yet we sounded like we were talking about her puppy pissing on my carpet.