by Anni Taylor
Luke painted the living room walls red with the same paint he’d once stolen from his parents’ garage (to paint our billycarts, back when we were eight).
My contribution was to set up the living room like a murder scene on a film set. I dragged in a mannequin that a fashion store had thrown out in a Dumpster, and I dressed it in a vintage suit from an upstairs closet. I positioned the dummy on a chair like he were dead, a whiskey bottle taped to his hand and a cigar hanging from his mouth—and a knife in his back.
I videoed vignettes of us every time we were there at number 29. Like a recorded history of who we were. Sometimes, I made everyone act in skits, and I videotaped those too.
Bernice did pretty much nothing but just hang around on the fringes, sometimes helping with exploits to get signs or things for the house. She was a thin, gangly girl then, on the cusp of becoming a teenager.
A year after we started coming to number 29, we discovered that the knives were missing from the kitchen. There had been six pearl-handled knives sitting in a knife block on the narrow, dirty bench top. We used them sometimes to scratch messages into the wall. Someone else had been in the house, and they’d taken our knives.
We were rattled about the knives for a week or two, until we forgot all about them.
Then came the day we found out that Bernice had chosen to do something in secret to make the house her own, something we didn’t find until the day Sass decided we should all play dress ups with the old clothing in an upstairs bedroom. When we pulled the clothing out, we found that the back of the wardrobe had been hacked away with a saw, exposing the wall. On the wall, all our names were written in capital letters. All six. Embedded in each of our names was a pearl-handled knife. Except for Bernice’s name. That solved the mystery of what had happened to the kitchen knives.
Bernice put on the waterworks after the discovery and said that she hadn’t meant anything bad. She told us she’d been feeling left out of the group.
Kate and Pria were the first to forgive her. Sass and Luke and I were not so merciful. We held a meeting and decided that Bernice was out. Three against two. Luke declared that the knives should stay in place as a reminder of what he called Bernice’s traitorous treachery.
Bernice started hanging around the local boys after that.
When Bernice turned eighteen, she suddenly became useful to us again—she was old enough to buy the alcohol that we couldn’t. She got invited back to number 29.
A few months later, after she’d turned nineteen, she did the thing that made all of us stop going there.
It was late afternoon, almost sunset. Number 29 was dim as always, thin slashes of light spearing through broken blinds, the smell of cigarettes and pot and bourbon dominating the mustiness of the old timber and furniture. Sass had sourced the pot. Bernice had bought the cigarettes and booze. The house stunk of cat piss too—Pria often brought her rescue cats there. Sometimes, we dressed the (indignant) cats up in doll’s clothing and laughed at them like drunken idiots (which we often were).
We were lounging on the broken, propped-up furniture, already drunk and stoned. I stumbled out to the kitchen to pour myself another shot of bourbon.
Luke came up behind me and kissed my ear then turned me around to kiss me fully. He’d asked me to be his girlfriend the month before—I hadn’t been sure if I wanted that. But it was the year of experimentation, and I told him we’d try it out and see what happens. And so he and I had been going upstairs to make out over the past weeks. Even Kate and I had decided to kiss one drunken night three months back—we’d both decided that we liked it but didn’t want it to go further. Kids’ stuff, I guess.
Luke took my hand and led me upstairs. I didn’t know why it was always like that, why I never took his hand and led him upstairs. Maybe, with him taking the lead, I never had to take responsibility. This thing between us, whatever it was, could remain Luke’s idea and I didn’t have to think about it or consider whether it was a good thing or not.
We went to the largest bedroom, because it was the only room with a bed. And we kissed more and rolled around on the bed together and made the old springs protest and squeak.
A sharp noise rang out from the bedroom at the end of the hall. An alarm clock. Luke and I ran together down the hall to check it out.
Luke pushed the bedroom door open.
Immediately, a coppery stench hit me in the face. I recoiled, gagging.
A single clock sat on the middle of the bedroom floor.
Around the clock, five large rats—black and grey—were sprawled on the floor around the clock, eviscerated. A kitchen knife was stuck in the belly of each of them.
The broken wardrobe was open, and we could see the names that Bernice had drawn on the wall there years ago. But the knives were missing. The knives were now in the bodies of the rats. Pearl-handled knives.
Luke yanked out one of the knives, his face darkening as he roared with anger. He ran from the room.
With vomit swilling from my stomach, I stumbled backwards, needing to get back downstairs and away from that sight and smell. Luke followed, the knife in his fist.
I knocked hard into someone behind me. I spun around to see a woman of about sixty. A bag lady. Dressed in dirty, worn clothing. The door of the middle bedroom was now open, and I could see a large handbag and an empty bottle of alcohol and gear on the floor. The homeless woman must have been drunk and sleeping it off in there. I guessed the alarm clock had woken her.
Her hooded eyes filled with raw fear as she glanced from me to Luke, her eyes fixing on the bloodied knife.
She rushed ahead of us to the stairs.
A loud cracking sound rang out. She shrieked as the stairs gave way.
The middle of the staircase just disappeared, crashing downward. The woman’s arms flew into the air as she fell into the dark space that had opened up, dust and dirt spraying as the stairs landed on the floor below.
Luke flung the knife down. He and I raced along the bottom edge of the staircase railing. Moths flew up from the huge gap in the destroyed stairs, fluttering manically all around us, their wings torn ragged by the falling wood.
Sass, Kate and Pria were already flinging open the door that led to the area underneath the stairs. Kate shone a light from her phone in the interior of the dusky space. Bernice moved up behind them, peering over their shoulders. She turned and ran from the house, slamming the door behind her.
Luke and I stopped midway on the stairs, shocked rigid at what we could see of the woman.
She was lying on her back, splayed over the broken stairs. Her head had hit something hard on the way down and had bent sideways at a macabre angle. The worst thing was her eyes. Her pale-blue eyes were open and staring up at us, as wild as the fluttering of the moths’ wings. But then her eyes glazed and dulled. Slowly, slowly, specks of dirt that were swirling in the air settled on her eyes and face.
We’d witnessed the last seconds of the woman’s life.
We didn’t know who she was or why she’d been there in the house, but she was dead.
We should have called the police straight away, but we didn’t.
The only person who could have done this was Bernice. But we were all here, too. And we were underage and drinking and smoking pot. Not to mention defacing a house that wasn’t ours.
Instead, we told Mrs Wick what her daughter had done. And Luke told his own mother. I didn’t dare tell my parents.
Luke’s mother commenced a clean-up operation, rushing to number 29 with gloves and a bucket. She was scarily efficient. Our alcohol, cigarettes, and pot were disposed of, except for a small amount of it that she placed beside the bag lady’s gear in the second bedroom. Our names were scrubbed off the wall behind the wardrobe. Even the rats were taken away and the blood cleaned. Only then did she call the police herself and tell them she’d heard a disturbance next door in the house that was supposed to be empty.
The police found that the stairs appeared to have been cut with an electric
saw rather than just rotting away. The cuts were fresh underneath the old carpet runner. The stairs had been held up underneath by two A-frame ladders. The ladders had somehow collapsed right at the time the woman was running down the stairs. We guessed that Bernice had pushed them over right at the time that the lady was coming down the stairs. The police said they believed a broom had been used to tip the ladders over.
The police carried out a door knock on our street as part of their investigation. None of us told them anything about that day. Mrs Basko—Luke’s mother—didn’t let anything slip either.
We saw the bag lady in the newspaper a few days after her death. She was Grace Louelle Clark, aged forty-four. Not anywhere near sixty, as we’d thought. Plagued by an untreated mental illness, she’d been homeless for eleven years. She was known to the police for multiple counts of petty theft. The only photographs of her from the past fifteen years were mug shots, and the mug shots were what the newspapers printed.
The police, unable to discover what had happened in house number 29, eventually let the case drop. No friends or relatives of the woman came forward to demand that the police keep investigating.
Even Kate and Pria had no forgiveness for Bernice this time. Bernice swore she had nothing to do with the rats or the stairs. But it didn’t shock us that she didn’t admit to it. Who would admit to killing someone? She was over the age of eighteen and no longer a minor. She would have been tried as an adult in court.
We were sure she’d wanted to get us back for throwing her out of our group when she was fourteen. Maybe she didn’t think someone was going to die. Maybe she just wanted to scare us.
We’d never know for sure.
I sat up in bed, scenes of that incident from thirteen years ago still flashing through my mind.
A sudden cold sweat pricked my skin.
The moths with the damaged wings.
The woman’s wild, fearful eyes.
The pearl-handled knife.
The three things I’d been handed in my dreams—I’d seen them all that day in number 29.
And I’d been dreaming of them over the past few days. I’d dreamed them so intensely. So vividly.
I’d ended up convincing myself that the dreams were random. Meaningless.
I was wrong.
Those images were all connected to number 29.
But why had I dreamed of things connected to number 29 and Tommy in the same dreams?
The answer flashed into my mind.
Whatever had happened to Tommy was linked with that house.
Was it Bernice who took Tommy? Was she the abductor?
Panic tightened my chest. Even all these years later, she might still be holding onto her hatred.
At dawn, I had to do the thing I said I’d never do again.
Go back to number 29.
I had to.
I waited out the next hour between four thirty and five thirty.
Then it was time to go. Dressing in dark colours, I pulled a hood over my head.
If Nan heard me leaving, I’d say I was going for a walk. The sun would be rising soon.
Misting rain coated my skin as soon as I left the house. The sky was moonless, dead dark. The street quiet. I stepped quickly down Nan’s path, hoping no one who knew me was about at this early hour. I closed the gate.
I jumped as a figure seemed to appear from nowhere, walking towards me. We both stopped short, each of us startled by each other. A man, hooded like me, stood in the street a short distance away.
I ran a checklist through my head. Was this the man I’d seen that night near my mailbox? He wasn’t wearing the same cap or a jacket—he was wearing a dark, hooded raincoat. From here, I couldn’t tell if he had a beard.
He began walking again. I tried to see him as he passed, but it was between streetlights and he kept his head down. All I saw was that he had facial hair. More than a goatee. A full beard. If he was the same man Kate had seen, his beard might have grown. In one hand, he held a briefcase. In the other, an umbrella. I stared after him. The umbrella had the carved head of a duck on the wooden handle.
Bernice had the same type of umbrella. The exact same umbrella.
The night swallowed him, and I couldn’t see him any longer.
I made my way past Mrs Wick’s house to number 29.
The gate was unlatched, swinging on its hinges. I glanced back down the street. The man had come out of number 29. I was sure of it. The street had been empty, and then he’d just materialised in this spot. There was no other house he could have sprung from.
A rash of nerves crawled over my skin as I continued down the path. The front door was locked. It’d always been locked. The key—if it was still in the same place as it used to be—was under the welcome mat. Luke had once painted un in front of the word welcome on the rubber mat, but it had washed away, probably a long time ago.
Crouching, I lifted a corner of the mat. An object glinted dully. The key was there. When I picked it up, the metal didn’t seem as cold as it should. Did the man just have the key in his hand?
I unlocked the door and pushed it open. The thought of closing it behind me made a shiver pass down my back, but I had no choice. I didn’t want anyone to pass by and notice the door open.
Slipping my mobile phone from my pocket, I switched its light on and shone it around the room.
The walls were still red, just as Luke had painted them. The store dummy still sat on an armchair, the sole occupant of the house. (At least, I hoped he was the sole occupant of the house right now.) Saskia’s stolen signs were still in place.
I sucked in a cold, musty breath of air as I trained the light on the staircase. The missing section of stairs was back in place. Maybe the police had put it back when they were investigating the case of the dead woman all those years ago. Or maybe someone else had put it back. The section would have to have been repaired—because it had broken apart when it’d smashed to the ground.
I stepped closer. Were the stairs sturdy enough to walk on? I couldn’t trust that they were.
My heart squeezed as I went to open the door that led to the small storage area underneath the stairs. I was sixteen again, seeing the face of the dead woman, watching dirt particles settle onto the whites of her eyes.
I shone my phone light inside the space.
The two ladders were in place again.
Surely it would be impossible for one person to have replaced the section of stairs by themselves? If Bernice had done this, had she had help? But who would help her?
I checked the kitchen and the laundry next—all the nooks and cupboards. The laundry was external to the house. There used to be an outside toilet room too, but it had fallen down long ago, when I was still a kid. There was nothing else downstairs.
Biting down so hard on my bottom lip that it hurt, I headed back to the stairs.
I collected myself. I was here in this house looking for my own child. But it wasn’t a game of hide-and-seek. If I did find Tommy’s remains here, would I be wishing like hell it hadn’t been me who found him?
I’d lost all credibility with the police. I wouldn’t be able to convince them to come and search. I had no evidence whatsoever—just my dreams and an old memory.
I had to force myself to climb the stairs.
Clutching the railing, I made my way up slowly. I couldn’t stop myself from turning back every few steps, terrified that the stairs would collapse. Terrified that the man might appear behind me. Why had he even come in here? Was he looking for something? Or was he trying to hide something?
The room Luke and I used to make out in when we were sixteen looked exactly the same as it had before. I moved quickly, looking under the bed and in the wardrobe and drawers.
The second bedroom seemed to be the victim of a roof leak. An overpowering smell of mould made me gasp. The dead woman’s belongings were still lying on the floor, covered in black mildew. If any friends or family who’d known the lady had heard about her death, none of them had
cared enough to come and collect her things. Holding my breath tight and wishing I’d brought gloves, I checked the room.
The only room left was the third bedroom. It stood at the far end of the hall, its door closed. I could still remember the fetid stench of the mutilated rats and their stiff, open mouths.
The old boards of the hallway were rickety beneath my feet as I made my way along them. I kept picturing the boards giving way and me falling to the bottom floor, like the bag lady had done. Two days ago, I’d wanted to die. But I didn’t want to die here in this house. And there was a chance that I had something to hang onto again now: my dreams hadn’t been random.
I turned the handle of the third bedroom. An almost sweet, pungent odour met me. Marijuana.
There were objects all over the floor. Not dead rats. Just . . . things.
Bric-a-brac mostly. Books. Framed photographs. A funeral wreath. A vase of dead flowers. A government demolition sign. A kewpie doll. A garden gnome. Men’s jackets and hats. A frilly corset. Umbrellas hanging on hooks on the walls. Golf clubs and tennis racquets. Used shoes—all types and sizes.
Why would anyone want to go to the trouble of bringing all of this up here? The room didn’t give the appearance that a squatter was living here. It didn’t look like anyone was actually living here at all. The things were old but clean and neatly ordered. Like a collection.
I walked among the items, poking through them with one of four walking sticks that I’d found against a wall.
The photographs ranged from old black-and-white pictures to modern, all seemingly random. None of them seemed to be of the same family. I recognised a few people who used to live on the street.
A book sat on the dresser, its cover reflected in the mirror. I recognised the image on the cover. A moose. It was a children’s book, simply called The Moose. When Sass and I and the others first came to this house as ten-year-olds, we’d found this book. It was about an ancient American Indian myth, in which the east wind brought mists and a change in weather. Saskia invented the game, and she made us take it seriously. If there was a change in the weather, one of us could invoke The Moose. We had to then write down our names and throw them into a hat. Whoever’s name you pulled out, you had to become that person all day. Luke had struggled with the game the most, having no choice but to act like a princess (his words) for a day. There were no other boys in our little group.