by Cameron Judd
Melinda had entered the crumbling house with a sense of playful glee as her only sentiment. This house was not part of her personal heritage and she knew nothing, directly, of the lives lived here. For her the entry and exploration were no different than other times she had made her way into abandoned buildings and explored them for fun, a questionable recreation she and a gang of other high school girls had pursued years ago, delighting in the risk of being caught. Astonishingly, they never were.
She wrinkled her nose at the smell of mold, mildew, staleness, and rodents. “Should we open the windows and air this place out, Eli?”
“If it were ours, I’d say yes. But the people who own it now live, if I recall rightly, in Oklahoma. They were here two, three years at most, then went west. Why they haven’t sold the place, I don’t know.”
Melinda looked around at the peeling wallpaper. “If I were rich, really and truly rich, this is exactly the kind of place I’d love to buy and completely renovate. Wouldn’t this be a great place for children to grow up! If it were cleaned up and fixed up, I mean.”
“Hey, if I ever propose and you say yes, who knows?”
“I was thinking the same thing, Scudder-friend.”
They stood in the midst of the empty living room and kissed. “Would you be willing to get in some preliminary practice in the kind of thing you do if you want children?”
“What kind of girl do you think I am, young man?”
“A hot one. But most of all, one I’ve fallen in love with. And hot. Did I mention hot?”
There had been no plan to make either romantic or propositional pronouncements during this excursion; Eli had followed the impulse of the moment.
She locked her gaze with his. “Do you really mean that? The part about love?”
“I do. I really do.”
“Right back atcha, big boy.” And she gave him a kiss that nearly dropped him where they stood.
“Melinda Buckingham, I’m glad you’re in this world,” he told her. “And I’m sure glad I’m sharing it with you.”
She smiled into his face, and for a moment realized how glad she was to be away from dark Harvestman Lodge, especially after hearing the things Feely had told them.
“Eli, show me this house, and tell me its stories.”
“You’ve not heard enough stories from old empty places today?”
“Not enough happy ones.”
“C’mon, then. Let’s explore.”
FOR ELI, BEING BACK inside a house where he’d spent some of his childhood Christmas mornings and eaten several Thanksgiving dinners, and outside which his father and grandfather had taught him to shoot a rifle and to make a throwing knife flip the right number of times to make it stick into a tree, was a wistful experience. He kept waiting for voices he would never hear, and shadows of people moving in the next room who now were no more than shadows themselves.
“I miss them,” he said to Melinda.
“They were good people, your grandparents?”
“The best. When we were here I felt like this was as much my home as theirs. My grandfather, especially, seemed glad to have me with him. He told the best stories, that old man did. I think he helped steer me toward wanting to write stories of my own, though I doubt he ever had the first thought about any such thing.”
“I wish I could have met them. Do you feel sad, being here?”
“A little, but also grateful for the good things that happened here, and the good people responsible for them. If Harvestman Lodge is haunted, it is probably by unhappy ghosts. Here, I think any ghosts, if there are such a thing, are happy.”
“That’s a nice thought, Eli.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“What’s upstairs?”
“What you’d expect. Bedrooms, a big closet or two. My grandmother’s old sewing room, where she’d sit and stitch, or knit, and look out the window and watch the world outside.”
“Was there a bathroom here?”
“Originally, no. By the time I was born, they’d updated the house, though, and there was a bathroom put in. I hope you aren’t asking because of any, er, personal need, because there’s no water turned on here anymore. But the good news is the old outhouse is still standing outside.”
“I’m fine. I was just wondering what all this house included.”
The kitchen, with a big row of windows above the sink that illuminated it far more brightly than the other rooms, was as degraded and neglect-filthy as the rest of the house, yet seemed more inviting because of the light. At least until they stepped onto the middle portion of the floor and felt the sagging of rot-weakened wood beneath their feet. Gingerly they stepped onto a firmer part of the floor.
“If we’d fallen through, what’s below?” Melinda asked.
“Under this part of the house, just a crawlspace. The kitchen wing was a later addition, you see. Now, in the center den area we crossed through to get to this side, if that floor gave way we’d have been dumped into Grandpa’s old cellar. Which was a place he never let me go. I suppose he thought there might be snakes or black widow spiders or the like. And there was a family story that, when he was a boy, his mother sent him to the cellar to fetch up a jar of preserves, and a skunk had gotten down there and let him have what skunks have to offer. It took days and days to get the smell off him, they said.”
“Cellars … I love cellars. My own grandparents have a cellar, and I love the smell of it. The earthen walls, you know.”
“You’re weird, Melinda. You realize that?”
“I do. And accept it as part of who I am.”
“Might as well, huh?”
“Can we go to the cellar?”
“Let’s look upstairs first. Then we’ll see about the cellar.”
UPSTAIRS HELD NO PARTICULAR enticements, and they explored it with dispatch and came down the creaking stairs again.
“How do you get into the cellar?” Melinda asked.
“There’s a big trap door out on the porch. When it’s closed and latched down, it’s part of the porch floor. Lift it up, and there’s stairs below.”
“Cool! Very mysterious sounding … ‘The two furtive lovers descended the cellar stairs into the darkness below … ’”
“I like that.”
“Maybe I should write a novel of my own. A romance.”
“I meant I like the ‘lovers’ part. How about we make that come true?”
“I thought we already established that we love each other.”
“The proverbial ‘next level’ and all that. That’s what I’m thinking about.”
“You’re a male. Of course that’s what you’re thinking about. But not today, Romeo. One of these days, after we stand up in front of Reverend Feely and say a few vows, then we’ll start going to ‘next levels.’”
“You are one old-fashioned girl, to be living in these modern times.”
“I am who I am, and what I am. Take it or leave it.”
“I’d be glad to take it, if you’d just let me.”
“But you’ll keep me around, regardless, right?”
“I don’t want anybody else.”
“Hey, Eli, what’s that locked closet there?”
The dark-varnished door was in the hallway near the base of the stairs, and blended so well into the wall that it was easily overlooked. Eli had forgotten it existed.
“That is what I always called ‘Grandpa’s closet,’ because he kept it locked and never once opened it it my presence. And he’d never tell me why.”
Melinda tried the knob. “It’s still locked. I wonder if it’s been locked ever since your grandfather’s time.”
“Probably not. This house was occupied by others after my grandparents died, and I’m sure they had a key.”
Melinda thumped on the door, ear pressing the wood.
“What? You expect somebody to knock back, or open it from the inside? Because if that happens, I’m going to make a new access to the yard by running through the wall.”
“Just checking the sound inside this door. I’ve got a theory, and I think I’m right.”
“Come on outside. Let’s see if that trapdoor to the cellar will still open.”
THE HORIZONTAL CELLAR DOOR on the porch had been nailed shut sometime in the years since Eli had known this place. “No cellar visits today, it appears.”
“Hold still, Eli. I’m going to check something.” Melinda trotted down the porch steps to the yard and over to an ancient shed in its corner. The shed door was absent. Melinda picked up a stick and with it cleared the doorway of cobwebs before vanishing inside.
What the heck is that girl up to? Eli thought to himself. If she’s looking for the outhouse, she’s on the wrong side of the yard.
Melinda came bounding back out, holding a very rusted old flathead screwdriver. Back up the steps, not a word to Eli, and back into the house. In a moment he heard something like the scratching of a gigantic rat coming from inside.
Eli went to the door to see what she was doing in there, and found her just as she was popping open the door of “Grandpa’s closet.”
“Aha! Just as I thought!” she said triumphantly. “This isn’t a closet at all, Eli! It’s stairs!”
She was right. A steep, straight flight of stairs led into darkness below. The earthy smell coming up those stairs confirmed Melinda had just located an alternate route to the cellar, a way Eli had not known existed.
“Ha!” he exclaimed. “So that’s why Grandpa wouldn’t ever let me see this door opened! He didn’t want me knowing there was a way to reach the cellar from inside the house!”
“Be a pal, Eli, and run out to the Bronco. I keep a couple of flashlights in the glove box. We’re about to play Raiders of the Lost Cellar!”
They descended with disturbing awareness of the creaking looseness of the stairs and the fact their wood was old. They reached bottom, however, with nothing giving way and no one falling.
In the lightless cellar, the flashlights cut through the black like lasers, revealing rows of homemade wooden shelves upon which still stood jars of beans, pickles, beets, tomatoes. Eli suspected some of the dust-covered home-canned vegetables went back to his grandmother’s day. She had been a proficient preserver of garden products, so much so that her husband had complained about how endless seemed the task of carrying laden jars down to the earthen room below, only to haul them back up again for use … a seemingly endless Sisyphean cycle of labor.
“How did you know we’d find stairs behind the door?” Eli asked.
“The sound when I knocked … with my ear to the door I could hear the resonance on the other side, and the space clearly was bigger than a closet would be. It was easy to guess it was probably stairs.”
“Odd, being down here,” Eli said. “This was always forbidden territory me as a kid. There’s not really much to see, though. Shelves and jars. Some boxes over there in the corner. I think I’ll head back up.”
“I’m going to explore a little more,” Melinda said. “Be back up in a minute.”
Eli saw nothing left to explore, so just shrugged and left Melinda to it. He waited for her in the hallway, and she joined him three minutes later.
“Find anything interesting?” he asked.
“Dirt walls, shelves, jars and boxes,” she replied. “But I do love that earthen smell.”
“What are you hiding there, Melinda?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve got your hand behind your back. You picked up something down there.”
“I didn’t.” She brought the hand around and showed it empty, not letting Eli see that she’d tucked the item she’d been holding into the waistband of her jeans. As they did some further exploration of the house, Melinda removed the item and palmed it, magician-style, making sure Eli did not notice it. An elderly neighbor next door had been an amateur magician when Melinda was ten years old, and had taught her how to palm coins, cards, and other items. For a couple of years after that, she’d developed a habit of keeping her hands busy manipulating coins to distract herself during times of boredom, such as math classes during which she had to sit bored while other students slowly struggled to master concepts that Melinda had grasped the first time the teacher presented them.
“C’mon! You had something behind your back … ”
She deftly spun around and showed Eli he was mistaken.
They moved on, after one last walk through the house, Eli imagining the phantoms of gone relatives in every corner. Then they were out, climbing in the car and heading for Tylerville.
THE PICKUP TRUCK HAD kept its distance throughout the morning and managed to escape notice as it followed the powder-blue Bronco. The driver fumed bitterly, knowing Melinda and her new boyfriend had been together and in private, hidden places.
And why, above all, would that nutty preacher have joined them at the old lodge building?
What was going on with that gal?
Thinking back to his time with her, Rawls Parvin vaguely remembered Melinda once having said something about enjoying the exploration of old and empty buildings. It had made little sense to him then, or now.
He gave the truck a little more gas and dared to get a little closer to them, though he made himself be wary and make sure they would not notice and identify him.
He glared at the powder-blue Bronco and vowed he would find a way to make her regret ever having rejected Rawls Parvin.
AT HOME IN HER ROOM that night, Melinda examined the item she’d found secreted in the cellar of Eli’s grandparents’ empty old home, and managed to sneak out undetected.
It was by almost pure chance she’d found it at all. Randomly examining some of the ancient home-canned vegetables on a shelf, she had noticed a place on the earthen wall behind the shelf where the smooth dirt looked slightly different than the rest of the wall. A closer look with the help of her flashlight had revealed there was a slight, square recessed area there, an area that proved to be the door to a small sheet-metal box built into the wall itself, like a crude and homemade wall safe. Dirt had been daubed over the little door to make the spot blend in with the wall as a whole, but the passage of time had caused the daubing to dry and crumble, allowing the little door behind it to rust and crumble as well.
There had been nothing inside except the one item that Melinda now held in her hand: a cartridge of exposed Super 8 film, apparently 1970s vintage. She wondered what was on the film, and why it had been hidden for years in such an obscure location as the cellar of Eli’s old family homeplace.
She would find out soon. This was a time when it was definitely advantageous that her family operated the kind of business it did. She’d transferred so many old Super 8 home movies onto videotape that she could nearly do it blindfolded. The first good and private opportunity she found, she’d take a look at what was on this film cartridge, and depending upon what she found, decide whether to tell Eli about it or simply throw it away.
Somebody had gone to a good deal of effort to hide the film cartridge in a very obscure hiding place. There had to be a reason for going to that much trouble.
Tomorrow night, she decided. Her parents would go to Sunday evening services, and she’d claim a bad headache or a sore throat and stay home. When they were gone, she’d go to the family video transfer shop and solve the mystery of why an old Super 8 cartridge had been hidden in a farmhouse cellar.
Chapter Thirty-One
KYLE FEELY WAS HONESTLY surprised the next morning when he saw Melinda Buckingham and Eli Scudder slip into the sanctuary of the Perkins Creek Presbyterian Church for Sunday services. Never mind that both had assured him the day before that they would attend; Feely was accustomed to receiving such pledges from people who never had any authentic intention of darkening a churchhouse door. He gave the pair a subtle smile and nod as they found a seat on a back pew despite the fact that plenty of seating was available farther up.
Eli looked vaguely uncomfortable in this setting. His eyes cut continually back and forth, studyi
ng others present and taking in the sanctuary’s stained glass windows, polished hardwood paneling, and various framed images of biblical scenes and figures from Reformation and Presbyterian history. For a small rural church it was well-outfitted, to the point that Feely wondered if maybe the obvious expense that had gone into the place sent a message of misplaced church priorities. Not that it actually involved him. Perkins Creek Presbyterian Church, often called PCPC, had been built years before Feely had begun his ministry. What was here was inherited.
As, from the vantage point of his pulpit, Feely watched Eli Scudder fidget and whisper, clearly not feeling at home in a church setting, he wished he could send a message to the young man, telling him to relax. Feely was not a pastor who sought to make his congregants uncomfortable so he could tell himself he had brought them under “spiritual conviction”, when all he really had done was make them socially ill-at-ease. Feely was glad to leave such manipulation to the revival preachers and “special guest speakers” who hop from church to church to give the same old emotion-driven sermons to the gullible kind of listener, and leave with their latest “love offering” safely pocketed.
Feely had a low tolerance for such.
Feely’s sermon was more of a gentle, reasoned offering of spiritual sustenance than a force-feeding of dogma, and Eli was fast caught up in it. His theme was the ultimate inability of humans to reject the reality of a transcendent moral law; Feely declared that, at some point, every person, regardless of culture, religious belief or lack thereof, philosophical sophistication or simplicity, education or ignorance, either outright affirms, or acts consistently with the affirmation of, an intrinsically obligatory moral order existing above and behind all reality.
“We declare that we are free beings, obliged to no one or no higher law than ourselves, then spend the rest of our days proving that yes, we are obliged indeed, and in our hearts know it,” Feely said. “There is a moral order that we are compelled to acknowledge, even when we wish not to do so.”