by The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares- The Haunted City (retail) (epub)
—
The renovations began. Sam put his own business on hold and did most of the carpentry. It was a full-time job. He fitted new pipes for the plumbing. He installed new fixtures, bringing in outside help only to replace the termite-ridden ceiling beams. Martha took a couple weeks off and did most of the painting (Sand Dollar subtle velvet from Restoration Hardware).
Their dog, Dave, was just happy to no longer be confined to a minuscule Manhattan apartment. The white German shepherd was content to spend his days in the backyard consuming mulch and, subsequently, his own feces.
Max loved having such a big house to explore. It was so big he skateboarded between rooms. Max’s favorite room was a walk-in cupboard built beneath the staircase. His mom called it a broom closet. One day, Max snuck inside the tiny, spandrel-ceilinged room. He spun three times around and pronounced: “Levitas vominos!” like his favorite boy wizard. Dizzy, Max dropped his pencil/wand between the floorboards. Bending down, he noticed a small ring embedded in the wood and lifted up a hatch in the floor, revealing a small storage space.
Behind a wall of cobwebs and dusty canned goods, Max found a doll about his size. Its body was made of sticks tied together with twine and its head was a burlap bag filled with twigs. It didn’t have hair and it didn’t have clothes. Nothing cute about it. Which was fine by Max. He hated cute toys.
He pulled the doll out and asked, “What’s your name?”
—
Max went down into the basement, where Sam was putting the final touches on his studio, using an electric belt sander on a sheet of Baltic birch. Max knew all the tools by name. Almost before he could walk, his dad had taught him the basics of furniture fabrication. Max knew about the mattock axe. The mallets. The C-clamps and tenon cutters. He even knew the dowel jig and spokeshave. He also knew that tools were not toys. Never play with power tools. Especially the DeWalt. Max thought DeWalt was a funny name. Was it short for DeWalter?
“Hey,” Sam said. “What’s going on, Mad Max?”
Max showed his dad the old doll.
“Wow, buddy. This is quite a relic. Must be fifty years old. I’m amazed the moths didn’t destroy the burlap.”
Max said, “His name is Mr. Sticks.”
Sam turned the doll over. On the back of its burlap head, he saw a faded symbol. Hand drawn. A circle inside a circle. “Well,” Sam told the boy, “this old piece of junk is probably besieged with bedbugs. We should probably get rid of it.”
“But he’s my friend.”
“There’s nothing friendly about bedbugs, Mad Max.”
Martha appeared at the top of the stairs, holding groceries. “C’mon, boys, I need your help. DEFCON 3. We’ve got a party to prepare for.”
—
The housewarming didn’t feel like a party to Sam. Probably because he didn’t feel drunk. Probably because he wasn’t drinking. Those days were done. He drank coffee instead. He’d need heavy fuel to survive the fusillade of facile insults: “Crown Heights is totally up-and-coming.” “The neighborhood is so diverse.” “Does Crown Heights even have Seamless?”
The house was filled with Sam’s friends from RISD. Martha’s friends from law school. Friends of friends. Everybody had tattoos. Everybody had beards. Dancing and debating the literary merits of Patricia Lockwood’s tweets. Scream talking over the vinyl Gogol Bordello: “Franklin Avenue is having a renaissance. You have to wait an hour to get into Barboncino.”
“I think I saw Colson Whitehead buying brie at Wedge.”
“Doesn’t Anthony Mackie own a nightclub next to Mayfield?”
“I’m telling you, man, Crown Heights is well on its way to becoming Greenpoint. For God’s sake, there’s an organic Laundromat next to Café Rue Dix!”
Sam stoked another Duraflame as people congregated around the fireplace. Everybody drinking penicillin cocktails and/or PBR while they dissected the recessed bookshelves filled with Sam’s books from art school (Bosch to Banksy) and ate the goat burgers Martha had bought from Whole Foods.
“Is the goat too gamey?” Martha called out from the kitchen. Sam swooped in behind and clutched her waist. “No, honey, the goat is not too gamey.”
“Do people like the house?” she asked.
“People love the house. They hate how much we paid.”
“Manifest destiny, bitches. We’re totally pioneers.”
Sam kissed her. After all this time, after all their work, the house did look amazing. So did Martha. With her vintage dress. With her Veronica Lake hair. “You go socialize,” he told her. “I’ll man the meat.” Martha played with his facial hair, kissed him, and headed into the soirée. Sam opened the Whole Foods bag and pulled out another package of ground goat tenderloin, formed a few dense patties, and tossed them into the frying pan. The grease fomented the flames.
Martha made the rounds through the social circles. Dave, the white German shepherd, somehow managed to fall asleep in the middle of the party, in the middle of the living room. “Did someone roofie our dog?” In the dining room, Martha intercepted Rachel, a good friend from undergrad. “Great party,” Rachel said, “great house. I love the high ceilings. The fireplace. The reclaimed wood. When do you guys plan on flipping this shit?”
“Well, actually, the plan isn’t to flip. The plan is to, you know, put down roots. It took like six months to refurbish and we’re not even close to done.”
“Settling down in Siberia, huh? Be careful. I know the crime rates are kind of crazy. How are the schools?” Rachel asked.
“The schools are good. And there’s always charter when Max is older. He just started kindergarten. But enough about me. About us. How are things at Columbia?”
“Academia is a boy’s club. I’m on the tenure track but they keep promoting penises. How’s the not-for-profit world?”
“There’s no profit,” Martha said. “I’m still saddled with all these law school loans. And we just put all this money into the house.”
“Go corporate, girlfriend. Fuck advocacy law. Do patent law. Make some bank.”
“It makes me happy. It’s such hippie bullshit, I know, but I’m basically fighting the good fight. I’m fighting for low-income housing. Tenants’ rights. Rent stabilization. Every day it’s like I’m kicking inequality in the testicles.”
“How are the neighbors? What does everybody on the block think?” Rachel asked.
“Think about what?”
“Think about you guys. Moving in.”
Martha hesitated. Vaguely insulted. “People don’t really talk to us. We don’t really talk to them. Puerto Rican. Russian. You know, language barrier.”
Martha turned and, in her periphery, saw Sam taking out the garbage.
“How is Sam adjusting?” Rachel asked.
“It’s an adjustment for all of us. Crown Heights is a little quieter than the Lower East Side. Max has trouble sleeping without the sound of taxis honking. The drunk people coming out of bars.”
“Not a lot of bars out here,” Rachel said. “That’s probably good. For Sam.”
Martha paused and said, “It’s good to see you, Rachel. I’ll be right back.”
“I’ll be here, Martha. For you. If you ever need me again. If he ever—”
“He won’t,” Martha interrupted. “This is a new house. And Sam’s a new man.”
—
Up in his room, Max wore his dad’s headphones. They were Bose noise-canceling, so he couldn’t hear the party below. He couldn’t hear anything. In fact, it was too quiet to sleep. So he took off the headphones and took out his notebook. He drew pictures of a place that was filled with fire. He drew pictures of bodies burning.
Max heard a noise outside and walked over to the window. It was dark outside. Past his bedtime. The streetlights made shadow puppets. Down below, Max saw his dad taking out the garbage. He was carrying a trash bag and he was carrying Mr. Sticks. His dad stuffed the old doll into the garbage can and slammed down the lid. His dad looked up and saw Max in the window. Max sh
ut the curtains.
He didn’t cry because crying was for little kids. Mr. Sticks was his only friend. The only one he could talk to. The only one who told him the truth. About his father. About the house.
Max heard a noise outside and peered through the curtains. His dad was gone. The street was empty.
From the shadows, Max saw an old woman emerge. Or an old man. Hard to tell. The hood of her winter coat slung over her head, her face hidden by long strands of greasy white hair. White snakes, thought Max. The old woman with the hood opened the garbage and started digging through the trash. From a Whole Foods bag, she pulled out an empty package. Goat meat. The meat was gone. But there was juice left in the plastic. The old woman pressed her face against the package and licked it dry. She took Mr. Sticks out of the trash. Touched his twig arms. Touched his burlap head. It’s not her toy, Max thought, it’s mine. She can’t just take my toy.
Max pounded on the window. The old woman lifted her face and looked right at him. Through her hair, the hair that looked like white snakes, Max saw the old woman’s eyes. They appeared to be black.
A hand grabbed Max’s shoulder and he screamed. His dad was right behind him. “Past your bedtime, Mad Max.”
“Th-there’s a woman outside,” Max stammered.
Sam looked out the window at the empty street. “There’s nobody there,” Sam said, tucking Max into bed.
“Dad. Why did you throw my toy away?”
“I told you. That thing was old and probably covered in mold. I don’t want rat mites in our house.”
“It’s not our house,” Max said. “It doesn’t belong to us.”
“Who does it belong to?”
“Mr. Sticks.”
—
That night, after the party, Sam and Martha made love. The claw-foot bathtub presented some logistical challenges. But ten years into marriage, their bodies were maps and they both knew the cartography. They knew where they wanted to go and how they wanted to get there. What they didn’t want was to be interrupted by the dog downstairs. “It’s two a.m. What’s he barking at?” Martha asked. “Stay here,” Sam told her, toweling off and throwing on boxers.
Sam walked past Max’s room, saw the boy was soundly asleep, and headed downstairs to the party detritus of beer cans and paper plates. Nothing suspicious. Except, of course, the front door, which was inexplicably open and swaying back and forth in the winter wind. Sam looked out at the street. Plastic bags blowing in the gale. He closed and locked the door.
More barking. He followed the noise and found Dave, hackles raised, baring his teeth at the basement door. “Easy, boy,” Sam said as he clutched the closest weapon, a butter knife from a cheese plate, and descended the steps.
In the basement, Sam tentatively inched forward across the concrete floor. Scanning the darkness. Sam approached his workbench and switched the knife for the mattock axe. No one had stolen his tools. No one had touched a thing. At the top of the stairs, the dog was still barking his head off. “What’s the matter, boy?”
Sam looked down and realized he was standing in the middle of a circle. A circle that had been drawn in blood.
—
“Probably just kids. We get lots of graffiti in the area.”
Thirty minutes later, the cops were in the basement. Two beat officers. Young. Hispanic. Bewildered.
“This isn’t graffiti,” Martha said, visibly shaken, “and this isn’t paint. This is blood.”
Officer Rodriguez said, “Well, ma’am, this is probably just a case of drunk punks having a good time.”
“No,” Sam responded. “This is breaking and entering.”
“The front lock wasn’t broken, sir, and we have no proof anyone entered.”
“Proof? This twenty-foot circle drawn in blood on my basement floor looks like proof to me!”
With the lights on, Sam saw it wasn’t just one circle. It was several circles within a circle. Crudely but meticulously painted.
“Can’t you trace the footprints? Do a DNA search? Follicle analysis?”
“We could,” said Officer Diaz, “but we’re not. This isn’t CSI: Crown Heights. That’s a waste of time and resources for vandalism.”
“Does this look like vandalism to you?” Sam got on his hands and knees, inspecting the continuous loop of concentric rings “This is obviously some kind of Black Mass symbol. Devil worship.”
“Don’t devil worshippers do pentagrams?” Officer Rodriguez said. “This is more of a circle.”
“This isn’t a joke,” Martha said. “We have a six-year-old boy sleeping upstairs.”
“We will file a report. That’s all we can do at this point. All you can do is call us with any more suspicious behavior. In my experience, Marilyn Manson fans are actually fairly harmless. We’ll show ourselves out.”
The officers headed upstairs. Sam started taking pictures of the circle on his cell phone. Martha, on the verge of a breakdown, said, “I don’t want this scaring Max in the morning. Can you clean this up?”
“I’m not cleaning it up,” Sam said, taking more pictures. “Not until I know what it is.”
“Who cares what it is? The only thing I care about, Sam, is our son’s safety. We should have never moved to this neighborhood.”
“You’re the one who wanted to leave Manhattan. You’re the one who fell in love with this house.”
“Yeah, and I’m the one supporting this family financially. Maybe if you had a real job we could have moved to a real neighborhood.”
“And maybe you’re a hypocrite who advocates for poor people all day but doesn’t want to live on their block.”
“I want to feel safe in my home! How can we feel safe here anymore?” she asked. “What if something had happened to Max?”
“I’m fine, Mommy.”
They turned to find Max standing at the bottom of the stairs.
He was hugging Mr. Sticks.
—
The next day, Sam installed new locks on the doors. He dug up Max’s old baby video monitor and installed the small camera in the basement. The camera streamed in real time and he could access the live feed on his laptop. Sam spent half the day on his laptop, uploading hundreds of cell-phone pictures he had taken of the circle. He sank into the morass of Google results for “satanic symbols.” Clicking through ceremonial pentagrams and inverted crucifixes, he couldn’t find a single match for the circle in his basement. It had no apparent ties to Satanism or paganism or any ostensible occultism. The symbol was as mysterious as its sudden appearance. Maybe it had no meaning. Maybe its only purpose was to taunt Sam. To remind him that his home had been invaded and his family was no longer safe. Sam barged into Max’s room and grabbed Mr. Sticks. Cramming the doll inside the furnace, he watched the burlap burn. His son had plenty of other toys.
Sam started to spend all day every day in that basement. Simply staring at the circle. Unflinching. Two prizefighters taking the measure of their man. Somehow, in some way, Sam knew it was inevitable. Inexorable. Martha was wrong. A Brillo pad wouldn’t do a damn thing. You couldn’t just scrub the symbol off the concrete. That would not be the end of their problems. Their problems, Sam surmised, were just beginning.
—
It began with the heat. “Seems a little hot in here,” Martha said over breakfast, gulping a glass of water. “These steam radiators really dry me out.”
One by one, Sam turned off all the radiators in the house. It didn’t matter. The dog kept panting. Max was eating pancakes in his underwear.
“Um. You need to see this,” Martha said as the butter on Max’s pancakes began to bubble up and boil.
Max and Martha opened the windows, despite the January air. It was unbearably hot—a cloying, adhesive heat. Sam went downstairs and shut down the furnace.
It just got hotter.
By midday, Sam and Martha had moved all the fans in the house into the bathroom. They took all the ice from the ice trays and filled the claw-foot bathtub with cubes. The Rathbones sat i
n bathing suits on the edge of the tub and stuck their feet inside the glacial watering hole. Martha said to Max, “Just pretend we’re on vacation. In Alaska.”
Sam leaned forward and turned on the faucet and a viscous black oil spurted out. Jumping up, Sam, Martha, and Max watched the gurgling sludge fill the tub. It sizzled against the ice and made a noxious steam. The smell of death itself. “What the hell?” Martha asked. Another geyser of black tar erupted from the faucet in the sink.
“I’m calling the plumber,” Sam said, rushing to the various sinks throughout the house.
Tar was egesting out of every faucet. An invasion of creosote. Sam ran into the basement, where the washing machine was vibrating violently. He couldn’t turn it off in time. The fluid slammed against the glass window, forcing open the latch. A deluge converged in rancid runnels.
The tar snaked forward and, inexplicably, formed a perfect ring outlining the large circle on the floor. Sam stopped in his tracks. Baffled. A sudden eruption of flames as the tar ignited. Sam scrambled up the stairs, only to find Martha holding the fire extinguisher.
“Fuck this house,” she said, dousing the flames.
The plumber came an hour later.
“With those old houses, with those old galvanized pipes, what happens is you get rust.”
“No way in hell that was rust,” Sam said. “This was tar. Black tar. It lit itself on fire.”
“Could be sewage backup. Clog in the main line. Tree roots.”
“I snaked the pipes when we moved in.”
“Only one way to be sure,” the plumber said, pulling up his pants. “I’d recommended an overhaul. Lay down new lines. Remove the rusted copper. Put in new PEX piping.”
“How much would that cost?” Martha asked.
Too much, they determined. Way too much. They were already hemorrhaging money on that house. The plumbing would have to wait.
—
It took them twenty-four hours to clean and disinfect the house. They did it as a team. With Max borrowing the mop handle as a de facto broomstick. Finally, there was no olfactory reminder of the plumbing malfunction. But the heat showed no signs of abating.
During dinner (organic chilled gazpacho), Max said, “Mommy. I can’t stop sweating.”