by Dan Padavona
She started to cry again. My throat constricted. I was close to joining her.
“Where did you go after he passed?”
“Plattsburgh, New York. The Thompson family—Karl and Jill. And that was the worst. I could tell it was a bad situation as soon as I put my bags down. They had another daughter, Sandy, also a foster kid. She was a year older than me, pretty, the sort of girl who’d have been on the high school cheerleading team under different circumstances. It didn’t take long to figure out something was wrong. She wouldn’t look you in the eye when she talked, you know? And she always walked quickly with her head down and her arms folded over her chest, like she was afraid someone would snatch her up.
“We shared a bedroom, a tiny room that was barely big enough for the beds. The Thompsons slept in separate rooms on opposite ends of the hallway, which was a red flag. I woke up one night and saw Sandy curled up on her bed with her arms wrapped around her knees, crying. I had the covers pulled over my head so she wouldn’t know I was awake, but I could see. The next day, Sandy wouldn’t talk to me about what happened. She all but turned and ran whenever I approached. Then the next night, it happened again. For a while, I thought she was sick to her stomach. Maybe she had the flu. But it kept going on night after night, and I started to have my suspicions.
“I wanted to figure out what was going on with Sandy. So I decided to stay awake and watch. I pretended to be asleep, hidden under the covers. I left a little fold in the blanket I could see through. A little after midnight, I heard someone coming down the hallway. Then I couldn’t see the hallway at all. A huge shadow stood in the doorway. I was terrified. I thought someone had broken in and wanted to hurt us. I realized it was Karl. He started walking toward me. I froze up. He stood right over me. I could hear him wheezing; his asthma acted up at night. I just lay there under the blanket, praying he would go away, frightened but not sure why.
“My eyes were closed when I heard him step away. When I opened them, he was standing at Sandy’s bed. He reached for her, and she slunk against the wall. She begged him to leave her alone. He snapped his fingers as if she were a dog, and she flinched. He did it three or four times, I think, before she submitted, took Karl’s hand, and disappeared down the hall with him.”
“That’s terrible. He didn’t touch you, did he?”
“I never gave him the chance. While he and Sandy were in his bedroom, I crawled out of bed and slipped on my clothes. I kept worrying he’d hear the floor squeak as I was grabbing my belongings. But he mustn’t have heard me, or maybe he was too busy with Sandy to care. I crawled out the window and vowed I’d never allow myself to be a victim again. How can I say this? I left Sandy alone. I ran because I could, and maybe because she couldn’t.”
I didn’t know what to say. No words in my vocabulary did justice to the anguish I felt for Becca.
“That was three years ago. I’ve been on my own ever since. A lot of times I’ve thought about going back…maybe I could convince Sandy to come with me. But most victims never flee. It’s like they can’t envision a life without oppression.”
Becca was quiet again. It was as though the old house was under a glass dome, the rest of the world unconnected and unreachable. Maybe it was.
“Luckily, it was summer, warm enough for travel. I hitched back to Ithaca. I guess I needed the familiarity of the last place I’d been happy. I got by stealing food off delivery trucks and sleeping in a tent outside of town. I’d had the idea of breaking into houses for a while. I just needed a system for determining which houses were most likely to be vacant. That’s when I decided to code my program using the knowledge the professor gave me. The rest, as they say, is history.”
I held her for awhile, worried I’d never be strong enough to pull her out of her situation.
“Help me get my mind off this,” she said.
“Anything you want. You wanna talk about something else?”
“I appreciate the offer, but I think I’m all talked out now.” She pulled her feet out from under her and pointed at the television stand. “So what’s on the DVDs?”
“Hopefully a bootlegged comedy or two. You up for a movie?”
She yawned, stretched, and settled contentedly against my shoulder.
“Sure. Let’s see what the owner left us.”
I started sifting through the identical-looking, untitled disks—except for a scratch here or a smudge there, there was no telling them apart—speculating over what they contained. I pulled a DVD from the middle of the stack and inserted it into the player.
The machine whined. Something inside rattled. I wondered how much dust and grime had accumulated inside the player. After a bit of whirling and searching, the player read the DVD.
As I settled next to Becca, the television screen filled with blue. One side of the screen wavered, obscured by a band of static, a surefire sign that a home movie was to follow. A second later, dashboard camera footage appeared.
So much for movie night.
I started to get off the couch, and she pulled me back.
“Let’s see what it is first.”
The movie took us up and down side streets in what appeared to be a small town. Now and then, a pedestrian would shoot past on the sidewalk. The car moved too fast to make out faces.
The recording cut to a new scene: a suburban Cape Cod home with a row of flowers fronting a deep porch, where two unoccupied rocking chairs flanked a wreathed door. A compact car, maybe a Kia, sat in the driveway. The shakiness of the video marked the footage as handheld. I could hear the dampened laughter of children down the street and the bark of a dog; whoever was recording the video obviously had the windows rolled up on his vehicle.
Underneath the neighborhood sound came the slow, controlled rasp of a large man breathing.
My skin crawled with worry. It appeared the camera operator was scoping out the house.
A burglar?
The recording continued for several minutes, the camera sometimes zooming in on a window and panning across the sides of the house.
I waited for someone to step out onto the porch, felt sympathetic stress with the unknown man behind the camera that he’d be caught.
“What do you think he’s doing?” Becca asked.
“I don’t know, but I don’t like it. Maybe we should watch something else—”
“No, wait. I want to know what he’s up to.”
My mind grasped at straws, searching for a reasonable explanation.
“Could be a real estate salesman,” I said. “They take pictures of properties to show to buyers.”
“I don’t see a for sale sign.”
A queer thought popped into my head and elicited a nervous laugh.
“Maybe he’s like you and me, and the homeowner is about to leave on vacation.”
“Pretty brazen of him to record the house in broad daylight.”
Brazen was the correct term. The car was parked directly across the street in plain view of the owner.
“I bet he’s a private investigator,” I said.
“Oh, I like that idea. Makes the video a little more enticing.”
“Right.”
“What do you think he’s investigating?”
“My theory?” I thought for a moment and grinned. “The woman inside is having an affair with one of her neighbors, and her husband paid the P.I. to spy on her.”
“Obviously, it has to be the woman who’s having the affair.” She rolled her eyes. “Maybe the husband is having sex with the maid and it’s the wife who hired the investigator.”
“Interesting theory. But what if the maid is a guy—”
Before I could finish my thought, the scene cut off. The screen was blue again, then black.
“That’s the end of the movie,” I said. “Two out of five stars.”
“So odd. I wonder if all of the DVDs are like that.”
“You want me to try another?”
“Sure, why not? We have plenty of time to kill.”
I replaced the disk in its case and thumbed through the stack of twelve—yes, I counted them again—this time randomly removing a disk from near the bottom.
“This better be more exciting than the last one,” I said.
The player obstinately accepted the new DVD, sucking it out of my hands and swallowing it. I figured I’d never get the disk back.
“Too bad we don’t have popcorn.”
“If you’d asked, I would have grabbed some off the truck. They had whole boxes of microwavable popcorn.”
As I squeezed my way onto the sofa, Becca leaned her head on my shoulder. Our clothing, which we hadn’t been able to wash since our stay at Ji Lin’s house, had begun to smell dingy. I imagined dust clouds following me around like in the Peanuts cartoons. Yet she smelled fresh and clean, redolent of springtime. The spikes of her hair tickled at my nose.
At that moment, I could almost relax and feel comfortable. She made me forget our drab surroundings and the sleet and cold trapping us.
The video started and took away all feelings of comfort.
The unsteady footage told me the camera was amateur and handheld again, the shakiness making me dizzy.
I saw an old wooden table, scratched and gouged as though someone had gone at it with a pitchfork.
On the table was a mask.
A Halloween mask. Clown-like, but gray and peeling like flesh off a corpse.
The camera centered on the mask.
I could hear the man breathing behind the camera. As he zoomed in on the mask, the breathing intensified.
“What the hell is he doing?” Becca asked.
Her eyes locked on the television.
“I don’t…”
The hunger of his breathing choked off my reply.
An arm, made absurdly long by the perspective of the lens, reached out and grabbed hold of the mask.
He pulled it on, and now the lens recorded the world through two eye holes.
“It’s like a horror movie,” I said. “Maybe he’s a wannabe filmmaker.”
“I don’t think so.”
The screen went black.
I sighed audibly when the movie ended. My skin felt clammy and cold.
“What the hell was that?” I whispered.
“I think that’s enough for movie night.”
“I agree.”
I flipped on the local station. A banal comedy I’d never watch under different circumstances washed away the sick feeling gurgling in my stomach. Becca’s strained attentiveness to the comedy told me she actively worked to forget what we’d just watched, too.
It took several bad jokes and predictable scenes for my heart to slow. She’d snuggled close to me again, her body warm against mine.
Her eyelids grew too heavy to hold open.
“Why don’t you try to sleep?” I asked.
“That’s a good idea.”
She thanked me again.
“For what?”
“For listening.”
I offered to help her to the bedroom, but she waved me off. I watched her slowly climb the stairs through the darkness.
The bedroom door closed, and I was alone again.
Try as I may, I couldn’t exorcise the memory of what she’d told me of her past. It would haunt me for a long time. The sensation of being in over my head returned, and this time I was drowning.
I turned off the television and stepped out the back door, hoping the fresh air would clear my head.
The cold clung to me like a dead thing. It felt sharpest where Becca’s tears soaked my shirt. The generator rumbled. I wondered if it had enough fuel to get us to Wednesday.
Thinking of Becca upstairs alone, I felt I understood where I fit in her life. I was nothing more than a brief stretch of roadway, a detour riddled with potholes. My highway didn’t stretch far enough for her to reach her destination.
I wasn’t sure such a road existed.
The forest, too muddled to see clearly on cloudy nights, appeared razor-edged under the moon and stars. The hush of the night was palpable, as though the dark was listening.
I think that’s when I first sensed the danger we were in. It was a nebulous thing, barely enough to make my flesh crawl.
I felt it, nonetheless, watching me from the dark recesses of the barren terrain.
I wrote my unease off to nerves. Like Becca, I was tired, stressed by the creepiness of the strange house and the events in Barton Falls. I’d constructed my own demons, given them the power to exist.
I slipped into the house and bolted the door.
How was I to know the evil was already inside?
“Did you see my phone?”
Becca looked up from the sink before spitting toothpaste down the drain. Pale morning light out of a gunmetal sky seethed in through the bathroom window. It was Halloween.
“No.”
“It was on the charger in the den.”
“Obviously, you forgot where you put it. It didn’t just get up and walk away.”
I felt like I was twelve-years-old again and talking to my mother.
Smelling fresh from the shower, Becca padded barefoot from the bathroom to the bedroom wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt. Even after sweeping the upstairs, you wouldn’t have caught me walking around without shoes. It wasn’t just the rats and the dust. I’d found rusty nails rolling loose on the floor, and some of the boards were badly splintered. Stick a nail through a foot way out here and I’d be in a heap of trouble.
“Maybe your friend took it.”
I knew she didn’t believe Riley would steal my phone. I guess she needed to dig me a little more for telling him about her.
I checked the bathroom again, peering behind the toilet, sifting through the cabinet, even looking inside the bedrooms we rarely entered.
I retraced every step I remembered taking since last night. I looked under the bed. When I didn’t find it there, I pulled back the mattress and box spring and poured the contents of my food sack on the floor.
This was crazy. Maybe I’d misplaced the phone, but there were only a few places in the house it could have been: the bedroom, the den, the kitchen and bathroom. I didn’t spend time anyplace else.
It was gone. Vanished into thin air like a magician’s trick.
Becca offered me breakfast from our dwindling supply of sports bars, then plopped down on the bed and tore the wrapper away on hers. Though I needed to eat, I declined. I’d begun to worry.
“Relax. It’s around here somewhere.”
“Easy for you to say.”
Without my phone, I couldn’t confirm Riley had made it home and was safe.
Who was I kidding? Riley didn’t want to talk to me. Not yet. He’d come around and forgive me after a few weeks like he always did, but for now, I was persona non grata.
The problem was I didn’t have a few weeks to make things right with my friend. In two days, Becca and I would be in another state. I didn’t believe I’d see Barton Falls again.
I had to find the phone. Leaving it behind was as good as stapling my driver’s license to the wall.
Evidence.
So I kept looking.
Searching for the phone seemed almost funny at first. It was like playing a kid’s game. Was the phone in the bathroom? Not here. Hiding in the living room? No dice. How about inside the torn cushion of the couch in the den? Nope. I felt squeamish with my fingers fishing blindly through the stuffing, waiting for something to bite me.
The basement.
A chill crawled on spider’s legs down my back.
How could it be there? The door was locked.
It’s strange how the dead seem to speak in old houses. I felt generations of ghosts following me as I searched the house, trying to warn me that the missing phone he
ld more significance than I understood.
I should have listened.
“It’s not here,” I said.
I heard Becca banging around upstairs, pouring the contents of her bag on the floor and shoving aside debris.
“I still can’t find it.” Her voice echoed down the staircase, sounding very distant. It gave me an edgy feeling as if we were cut off from each other. “Check outside. Maybe you lost it last night.”
Outside.
That was where my phone had to be.
Yet it wasn’t along the back wall of the house, nor was it in the front yard where she’d nearly beaten me unconscious.
The phone was simply gone.
Sighing, I picked up a rock and skipped it down the road. It hopped and kicked up dust until I couldn’t see it anymore. That reminded me of Riley disappearing down the hill, and I started to worry again.
I’d really stepped in it this time. Undoubtedly, my phone would show up once the police canvassed the house. I pictured my mug plastered on wanted posters across Barton Falls.
I needed to keep my wits.
When I came inside Becca was in the kitchen, towel-drying her hair.
“I don’t know how you can stomach cold showers.”
“I want to be clean,” she said, running a hand through her hair to pull out her natural spikes. “Cold water is better than no water at all.”
“It’s a little too painful.”
“Better than smelling like must and dirt, though there isn’t much I can do for my clothes until we find a place with a washer and dryer. Did you find your phone?”
“No. I—”
Thump.
The thud was heavy enough to rattle the floorboards.
My whole body flinched. It was as if I’d put my arm down on a hot plate.
“That sounded like it came from the basement,” she said.
“I think it came from outside.”
“Like something whacked against the foundation.”
“Yes, I think so.”
Sleet pattered against the window. Thunder rumbled out of the valley, the resultant lightning flash too distant to slice into the kitchen’s gloom.