Hollow House

by Greg Chapman

  Ben shook his head. “Forget it. The story’s happening right now and it’ll make a great front page. What could be better than having one of your reporters living on the same street as the crime? Besides, you know there’s no one better than me to cover it.” There was a momentary pause, and Ben could just picture Jacob stroking his salt and pepper beard.

  “Fine, Traynor. But don’t expect me to pay you any overtime. You’re supposed to be on vacation.”

  Ben smiled. “Come on Jacob, the news is in my blood!”

  ~

  When Darryl Novak looked at the Kemper House, he felt it look back at him.

  He didn’t feel afraid when he studied its scarred walls and grimy windows, instead he felt aroused. He could tell the building had touched him and left an imprint, like a piece of grit you can’t remove from the corner of your eye. He’d seen the commotion from the kerb and had found his curiosity too hard to resist. He rarely mingled with other people, but the all-too-familiar smell drew him in. Standing amongst the milling crowd, Darryl noticed a man writing in a notebook and fastidiously playing with the buttons on a Dictaphone.

  “I had no idea anyone lived in that filthy old house,” Darryl said.

  The man gave him a sideways glance. “Yeah, me neither. I only just moved in across the street.”

  “You’re a reporter, huh? I’ve always wanted to meet a reporter.” He offered the man his hand. “The name’s Darryl. I live up in number 61, the white cottage.”

  The reporter visibly flinched. He refused to shake his hand. “Uh, yeah… it’s nice to meet you, Darryl. Look, I’m kind of in the middle of something.”

  “Oh, sure, I totally understand. You’ve got a story to chase. Maybe we can catch up another time? We are neighbours, after all.” He flashed a grin, but the man had already started to ignore him.

  Darryl licked his lips and let his eyes wander back to the Kemper House. Men in blue overalls mingled at the front door. There were also a number of police officers within reaching distance, and Darryl decided it was time to leave. He could almost feel the weight of the Kemper House’s shadow in his mind as he started to walk away.

  Blinking wildly in a bid to shift the house’s silhouette, Darryl almost ran into a woman standing on the kerb.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. She was tall and lithe, with long curls of brown hair. He hated curly hair.

  “It’s fine. The name’s Darryl.” He forced himself to be the gentleman, offered her a smile and a handshake. She never accepted his hand and he saw the corners of her mouth tighten in distaste.

  “Megan,” was all she said.

  The Kemper House pulsed inside his mind’s eye; it cascaded down into his groin and he felt himself stiffen. “Sorry,” he said, and quickly walked away, the sound of his mother’s heckling in his ears.

  ~

  Ben slipped the Dictaphone into his trouser pocket and pushed through the crowd to get a closer look at the crime scene.

  The air was roiling with the smell of decay. The police officers all wore masks, and although Ben wished he had one, he told himself it was all part of the job. His vacation had ended as soon as the smell had touched his senses. Few had the privilege of getting this close to death, and he would use his talents to uncover the truth. He didn’t even care that it was so close to home. He knew none of his neighbours and was, therefore, prepared to go out of his way if it increased his chances of getting a better story.

  Ben had attended many crime scenes in his five years as a reporter, and he was always entranced by the spectacle of it all. Still, having one right outside his front door was a first, and it was an opportunity he was not about to waste. He approached the uniformed officer guarding the house, doing his utmost to exude confidence, when there was a sudden surge of activity at the front door.

  Two forensic officers emerged, wheeling a large black body bag on a stretcher. Their bright blue overalls faded from Ben’s vision; all he could see was the sun bouncing off the slick surface of the body bag. The uniformed officer on the outside of the tape had seen Ben approach, but he too was mesmerised by the macabre entourage as it made its way to the unmarked van.

  “So there is a dead body,” Ben said.

  The officer recoiled. He held up a hand. “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to stand back.”

  “Were they murdered?” Ben’s eyes locked on the stretcher as it was collapsed and rolled inside the van.

  “I’m not at liberty to say, sir. Now, please step back, this is a crime scene.”

  Ben pinched his nose. The putrefaction had trailed the body bag out of the house and all the way to the street.

  “Hey look, I’ve seen enough CSI to know those guys only wear overalls when they have to handle a dead person.” He tried to play it vague, but not stupid and watched the crime scene officers close the doors of the van. The sight of it was etched onto his memory. “Were you the first responder?” he asked.

  The officer, whose badge carried the surname Dawes, stared at the van as it drove off.

  “Officer?”

  The policeman jerked to attention. “Look, sir, this is a police matter, and again, I’m going to have to ask you all to return to your homes.”

  Ben reached inside his shirt pocket. He retrieved his press pass and waved it in Officer Dawes’ face. “Okay, I’m actually a reporter with The Gazette. Is there a detective, or a senior officer here I can speak with?”

  Dawes frowned. “Sir, any questions or comments will have to go through the department’s official channels. Now please, if you could step back.”

  Ben turned away and kicked a stone across the road in frustration. He grabbed his phone, eager to contact the police department. He looked over his shoulder, and was grateful that the creepy neighbour he’d met earlier had cleared off.

  He jogged back towards his house. The whole time, he feared that he and his new wife had moved into anything but a normal neighbourhood.

  ~

  Amy Cowley watched the unmarked police van drive past her bedroom window at Number 65. Her fears had been confirmed when she saw the body bag, and she felt simultaneously appalled and fascinated. She’d never seen a dead body before, yet the thought of death, and all its aspects, had always been at the back of her mind. Often she’d dreamed of what it would be like, to leave the world, to be dead and gone.

  She turned away and reached for her phone. She logged on to Facebook and posted a status update.

  Somebody has died on my street.

  She waited a few moments to see if any of her “friends” would reply, or even like her status, until her impatience was interrupted by her younger brother Dale, who charged into her room.

  “Amy! Amy! Did you see?” His face beamed with excitement. “There’s cops all over the place and they just took a dead body away. I knew that smell was really bad.”

  “You can’t just barge into my room!”

  Dale’s excitement melted. “Jeez, sorry!”

  “Just get out of my room!” Amy pushed her brother towards the door.

  “Don’t push me!”

  “Get out!”

  Amy shoved him again. She resented his very presence. He was always lurking around her room, sticking his nose in her business. Nothing was private anymore, all because of Dale. If he’d stayed out of her room, he would never have found her journal and her mother never would have found out about why she did what she did. Now, her every thought and feeling was scrutinised and poked—all because of her stupid brother. “Get out you little jerk!”

  “Amy!” The girl turned to find her mother standing at the door, her face a fierce scowl. “What is going on?”

  Amy quickly hid the phone behind her back. “Dale… he just came into my room without asking…”

  Alice glared at the boy. “Is that true? Don’t you remember the rule I set about going into Amy’s room?”

  Dale stood open-mouthed. “I only wanted to tell her about the police outside.”

  “I have eyes. I’m
not blind.” Amy interjected.

  “That’s enough, both of you,” Alice said. “What’s going on up the street is none of our business. Now, both of you need to finish getting ready for school.”

  “But Mom,” Dale whined. “I want to watch the police some more. It’s cool.”

  Alice pointed out Amy’s door. “Go and get ready—now.”

  The boy stomped from the room and for a moment Amy felt like her mother was on her side. “Thanks, Mom.”

  Alice’s glare hadn’t wavered yet. “You need to hurry up as well. Remember you have a counselling session today.”

  The girl sighed. “I know Mom.”

  Her mother was already on her way out the door. “Then don’t be late. I have to get to work.”

  Amy dropped onto the edge of her bed and felt tears prick at her eyes. She took a deep breath and urged the thoughts back down; thoughts of failure, ugliness and regret. She knew they could spiral down into darker imaginings if she wasn’t careful, so she recalled one of her counsellor’s tactics to stay focused, by asking herself questions. But there was only one question which came to mind.

  Why is my life so horrible?

  The questions rolled in like waves on an abandoned shore.

  Why do I prefer virtual friends to my own family?

  She put the phone in her lap and refreshed the Facebook screen. One comment had been made on her earlier status: a comment from a name she didn’t recognise—Persona Non Grata—and she chastised herself for posting her status as Public. She read the stranger’s comment and felt sick.

  Did you kill them, Amy?

  And then her phone screen turned black.

  Chapter Four

  Ben kept one eye on his laptop screen and the other on the performance across the street.

  It was ironic that a crime had coerced him into taking an interest in his neighbours. Admittedly, he didn’t really care who they were, but then who did? Few actually wanted to know who lived next door. Getting to know the neighbours was something people did in the 40s and 50s. Today, people preferred to keep to themselves. Sure, most people introduced themselves when they moved into a neighbourhood, with a casual greeting over the fence, but that was the extent of the relationship. People became strangers because detachment always gave them the impression of safety.

  Ben smiled to himself and grabbed a pen to write down that last thought. He thought he might use it in his story. A moment later he looked up from the notepad and out of his window toward number 72 Willow Street. He would never have known the dark house was even there if someone hadn’t died inside its walls. Now, he found it hard to look away.

  “Irony of ironies,” he said to himself.

  He chuckled and returned to the keyboard, to bring up a new search page in Google. “Number 72 Willow Street” had several entries, including real estate listings, public records and a mention on the local historical society’s page. The state public records showed the house had been built in 1889 by Eric B. Kemper, an architect from Prague. Ben wrote the name down on his notepad for future research.

  The slam of a car door drew his gaze back to the street. The first television news crews were starting to arrive. Hopefully a press conference would be staged outside the house and where Ben could direct his questions to the detective in charge. To get the story, he would need to know who the dead person was and how they’d died. He prayed their cause of death was something more sinister than “natural causes.” There was a chance the dead person was some old codger who’d died of a tired heart, but if that were true there wouldn’t be so many officers guarding the scene. Something disturbing was happening at 72 Willow Street, and the discovery of a corpse was only the beginning.

  Ben ignored the commotion outside and returned to the cache of images on his computer screen. He’d found a number of vintage photographs on the historical society’s webpage, and one of them in particular piqued his interest. The faded sepia image was undoubtedly the house across the street, right down to the dark wood and obelisk spire on the roof. According to the text on the site, the photo had been taken in 1932. Sadly, there was no one in the photograph, only the house, obscured by a shard of early afternoon shadow. Ben reached for his notebook again and penned another reminder:

  Willow Street, 1932. Library archives?

  “Ben?” His wife’s voice from the doorway sent a jolt through him.

  “Jesus, you scared the hell out of me!”

  “I need to speak to you. It’s important.”

  The enigma of 72 Willow Street had him on edge, and any distraction was going to make him lose focus. A bevy of voices rose up from the window. He peered outside to see what was going on. The number of reporters outside the house had now doubled. He felt Megan’s voice at his back.

  “Ben, please.”

  Multiple camera flashes strobed inside the front-facing bedroom window of number 72. He would have given his left arm to be in that room. “Do you remember seeing that house when we first came to inspect this place? Or when we moved in?”

  “I don’t know,” Megan said. “I can’t remember.”

  Ben rose and grabbed his wife’s arms. Her brow twisted in frustration. “You don’t think that house looks like it’s straight from an episode of The Twilight Zone?”

  Megan glanced out the window and Ben watched her blue eyes tracing the house. “It’s just… an old house.” She looked back to him, and he saw desperation there. “Don’t you think what’s going on in our house is more important?”

  “I don’t have time for this right now. I have to work. I promised Jacob a story, and the cops are going to call a press conference any minute.”

  There was a renewed throng outside the window. The media were gathering around a plain-clothes officer.

  “Oh, fuck!” He scrambled for his cell phone and Dictaphone.

  “I need you to hear me,” Megan said. “What are you doing?”

  “Babe, I’m sorry. I’ve got to get this story.”

  He ran for the door, and from the corner of his eye he saw Megan standing in the middle of the bedroom, her eyes narrowed in anger. All Ben could think of, as he ran down the stairs and out the door, was that if he didn’t get the answer to the mystery of number 72 Willow Street, his chances of becoming the reporter he’d always dreamed of were well and truly lost.

  ~

  Amy’s mother, Alice, slammed on the brakes, narrowly avoiding a man who was hell-bent on crossing the road to join the media swarming around the house on the corner.

  “Damn reporters!” There was a dozen of them all centred on a man standing on the sidewalk, clearly a detective, or some other type of superior lawman. She negotiated her way around the crowd and kept her eyes on the road, unlike her daughter. “Amy, you shouldn’t gawk, honey.”

  Alice was surprised that something so tragic was unfolding in her street, but like a lot of people, she didn’t have the luxury of time to stop and stare. There was too much to be done; one of which was getting Amy to her counselling session. She was glad Dale was old enough to get the bus to school.

  When she was certain no one else was going to jump out in front of her car, Alice merged on to the freeway for the journey into the city where Amy would attend her twelfth counselling session. She looked at her daughter out of the corner of her eye. The girl was staring out the window, a blank face peering at a blank world of cars.

  “It’s going to be hard to ignore something like that, but you’re going to have to try,” Alice said.

  Her daughter flinched, as if Alice had pulled her out of trance. “I was just curious.” The girl avoided eye contact by looking at her phone. Alice noticed the screen was blank.

  “Is your phone flat?”

  Amy put the phone in her schoolbag. “No.”

  Alice wanted to grab the phone from her daughter’s hands and toss it out of the car window, but the counsellor had advised her to continue to allow Amy her creature comforts, so she took a deep breath and followed another of the counsell
or’s suggestions—to engage her daughter in conversation. “So how do you think the sessions with Dr. Ruskin are going?”

  “Fine.” Amy’s response came far too quickly.

  “You just seem a little nervous today, is all.” The melee outside number 72 Willow Street crossed her mind. “You know, it was probably just some old person in that house, who passed away in their sleep. Nothing to worry about.” Alice slowed at an intersection and tried to study her daughter discreetly. She had to look for signs: was Amy’s hair brushed neatly, was she wearing yesterday’s clothes? It was always hard to tell when you weren’t supposed to notice. She reached out to touch her daughter’s hand. “Amy?”

  The girl flashed her mother a look of disdain. “What, Mom?”

  “You know I love you, and that I only want you to be able to come to me when you’re feeling down.”

  “So you’ve decided to take the “better-late-than-never” approach?”

  Alice felt as though her daughter had slapped her.

  “Can we just not talk please?” Amy said through gritted teeth. “I just want you to take me to the counselling session and not suck at trying to talk to me.”

  Alice opened her lips just as the traffic light turned green and the car behind her honked. She swallowed back her sadness and turned her attention to the road. As silence pervaded the rest of the trip into the city, she wondered if her daughter’s precious soul could ever be saved.

  ~

  After the car almost ran him down as he’d tried to cross the road, Ben decided to wait for the reporters to have their fill. He stood at the back of the throng and watched Detective Baltzer put on a public face. Ben had seen him host press conferences many times and he had a pretty good idea—going by the impatient look on the grizzled detective’s face—that it wasn’t his favourite part of the job. Regardless, he was surprised to see the veteran detective on this case, given the ongoing missing women investigation.

  Ben knew Baltzer wasn’t prone to failure. He was one of the best, which meant whatever the police had found inside 72 Willow Street was serious. Baltzer fielded each question with the subtlety of a man who’d done it hundreds of times before. And yet, as Ben watched him answer the reporters’ clumsy questions about the who, where, what, why and how, he realised that Baltzer’s brave face was just a mask. The way his eyes seemed to dart, and the way he licked his lips, told Ben that there was definitely something strange about this case.