It was Frank.
He let out a huge sigh of relief, a sigh that turned into a belch. “Hey,” he said.
“I need your help,” Frank told him.
“Okay,” Randy said warily. The fog was coming back in as adrenalin receded. He thought that it seemed awfully late to show up asking for a favor. “Help with what?”
“With a girl.”
“A—”
“Girl,” Frank said. “A little girl.”
Randy’s brain was buzzing. Whatever this involved, it was definitely prohibited. He was not supposed to have any contact with minors. Any violation and he could be sent back inside, no questions asked. But he was well-oiled, and right now a little girl sounded really good, so he asked Frank exactly what he needed.
“Help,” Frank repeated.
“Yeah, but, I mean, what do you want me to do?”
“Help me.”
They were going around in circles, and Randy was starting to feel confused. “The girl…”
“She’s in the back of the truck, under a tarp.”
“The back of the truck?”
“I accidentally killed her.”
That sobered him up. Randy started backing away, tried to close the door. “Nuh-uh, dude. I can’t—”
“Can’t what?” Frank’s eyes bored into his. “I’ll dump her out right here, call the cops and tell them you fucked her before you killed her. Is that what you want?”
Randy shook his head, frightened.
“Good. Then help me. We need to take her to the site and put her in the cement where no one’ll find her. We’ll pour a layer tonight, then add on tomorrow, and once the building’s up, no one will ever be the wiser.”
He accompanied Frank out to the pickup, where he lifted a section of tarp to take a peak. Underneath, the girl’s body was broken, as though it had been folded in on itself. He had never seen anything like it and didn’t even know how such a thing could have been done. What blood he saw was dried, although there seemed to be very little considering the damage. “Cover that up,” Frank said harshly. “We have to get going. There’s a lot to do before morning.”
They reached the site ten minutes later, a half-house they were building that would connect to an existing shotgun shack and hopefully make the place saleable. Randy hadn’t realized it until now, but Frank had left a section of the cement foundation unpoured, and within the open square of dirt was a deeper hole lined with pelts.
Pelts.
He’d obviously planned this ahead of time. Working by moonlight, they carried the girl’s twisted body from the trunk to the hole (if Frank had gotten her into the truck by himself, Randy wondered, why was he needed to help get her out?). The concrete was already mixed and ready (when had Frank done that?), and they poured it over the girl, filling up the hole, then the entire frame, before smoothing it out.
Randy was completely sober by this time. Sober and scared. Despite what Frank had said, there was no way the concrete would be set by morning. It would be two days, at the least, before the cement would be dry enough to add another layer. What if some neighborhood kid came by in the meantime and poked a stick in there or something? What if the body was discovered?
Frank seemed to know what he was thinking. “It’ll be fine,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“I just—”
“It’ll be fine.”
And it was fine.
The cement dried. They put in posts and added another layer. They started on the walls and the wiring, and, as Frank had promised, no one was the wiser.
It happened again about a month later.
Another late night knock. Another child in the back of the truck. This one a boy. They were drywalling the half-house by this time, so the boy’s body could not be buried in the floor.
Frank had plans, though.
He’d already rented a tar kettle, though they wouldn’t be roofing for at least another week, and he’d heated up the tar. “We just throw him in,” Frank said. “Let him simmer for a week or two. There’ll be nothing left of him by then, and anything that is left will be gluing down shingles.”
Randy had not asked any questions the first time, and he didn’t this time either. They carried the kid—about four or five, staring blankly at nothing, dried rivulets of blood descending from both ears—out of the truck, tucked him into the tar kettle, closed the lid and let the body burn.
Who were these kids? Randy wondered. Why had Frank killed them? Randy didn’t know, and he didn’t want to know, but working for Frank was getting to be too heavy, and he needed to find a way out. If it were up to him, he’d just leave and relocate, go to another part of the state or another part of the country, even. But the terms of his parole decreed that he could not leave the area. And he doubted that his truck could get him more than sixty miles away without breaking down. And…
And he was afraid of Frank.
That was the main reason. It wasn’t logical—would Frank really skip out on a paying job to hunt down an easily replaceable day laborer?—but it was how he felt. The man was wrong. Sure, Randy liked little girls. He even liked to be rough with little girls. But Frank was on a whole other level.
Frank was scary.
The third time Frank showed up at his trailer at night, the child with him was still alive. It was a girl and she was naked, and Randy liked that. But he knew what Frank was going to do to her, and the thought made him feel sick inside. He was in way over his head, and for the first time he considered trying to kill Frank. He could save the girl, be a big hero, tell the cops about the other two kids, and…
“What are you thinking?” Frank said softly. He looked as though he knew exactly what Randy was thinking.
Taking a deep breath, Randy tried to smile. “I’m thinking about how cute she is.”
“Was,” Frank said, and twisted her neck. There was an audible crack! and then the gagged child in his hands went limp. “You can do what you want with her, then we’ll plaster her up in my basement.”
“I can’t do anything with her,” Randy responded. “She’s dead.”
Frank shrugged. “We’ll put her away, then.”
He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to have anything to do with this. But he had no choice.
They were partners.
Frank had made sure of that.
Over the next several months, they “put away” three more little kids, incorporating one into the wall of a house they were remodeling, coating the other two with plaster and putting them in Frank’s basement, where they stood with two others like statues against the wall. Part of him wanted to get caught and put an end to it all. But another, scarier part, was actually beginning to enjoy the process. The missing children were all over the newspapers and the television. The last one had even made the national news, an example of a large and frightening pattern in contemporary America. He was astonished that it seemed so easy to get away with such heinous acts when he had been caught so quickly for his own earlier transgressions, but obviously Frank knew something he didn’t. Maybe it was the relatively straightforward simplicity of it all, the hide-in-plain-sight aspect of Frank’s deeds that kept them from being caught.
Did he still want to be caught?
Randy wasn’t sure.
But he continued to feel uneasy around Frank, and if the contractor happened to die in a construction accident or a car crash, Randy certainly wouldn’t shed any tears.
He was deep asleep, dreaming his usual dream, a nightmare of his mother beating him with his own baseball bat, when he was awakened by a crazed pounding on the outer wall of his trailer. The noise traveled, as though someone was running around the trailer and pounding on it as he did so. “Asshole,” Randy muttered. He got out of bed and, still in his underwear, hurried out to the living room, grabbing the ax he kept for just such occasions. He swung open the
door, ready to run off whoever was out there.
A sharp and terrible pain hit his stomach at the same time he heard the familiar piston-like click of a nail gun. He looked down to see a long framing nail protruding from his midsection, blood welling around it, soaking his t-shirt and dripping over his boxers. Another click, another horrible stab of pain, and a nail was sticking out of his right thigh.
Those first two had been intentionally staggered, their shooting deliberately paced, but the nails came at him fast and furiously now, hitting his legs, his arms, his chest. ClickClickClickClickClick. He screamed in agony, dropped the ax, tried to go back inside, but as he turned, nails embedded themselves in his side, in his back, in his buttocks.
ClickClickClickClickClick…
He stumbled, falling forward, against the wall next to the door.
“Sorry,” he heard a man say beneath his screams, and the man’s voice was Frank’s.
Then Frank was in front of him, holding the nail gun. “I’m almost done here in Denver, and I’m afraid I can’t trust you to—”
“You can trust me!” Randy yelled through the pain. “You can trust me!”
Frank leaned forward, smiling. “But I need you for attic insulation.”
And he pressed the flat metal of the gun against Randy’s forehead and shot a nail into his brain.
FIVE
AMARILLO, TEXAS 1999
Cooper Michaelson had never seen anything like this.
He’d been a fire inspector in Amarillo for the past half-decade, in Galveston for eighteen years before that. But nothing had prepared him for the house on Calvin Street.
It was a code enforcement officer, signing off on a newly built patio across the street, who had noticed the state of the house and had called it in. Cooper had already been scheduled to inspect carbon monoxide and smoke detectors at a nearby nursing home, so he was drafted for this assignment as well.
Even pulling up out front, he knew why the code enforcement officer had called, and he was surprised that none of the neighbors had lodged a complaint. For the low slung brown house had a wood shake roof that was completely covered with a layer of dry sycamore leaves, and a front yard consisting of dead grass grown waist-high.
The outside was a mess, but it was the interior of the home that was so shocking. Inside was a pack rat’s dream—or nightmare. Scraps of wood, lengths of pipe and other construction site castoffs were nailed, screwed, soldered, welded or otherwise affixed to windowsills, doorways, and the beams that were exposed through holes torn in the walls and ceiling. Tables, chairs and couches were piled high with newspapers and magazines. The floors were littered with garbage, and there were bones amongst the debris—including several that appeared to be human. In the kitchen, in cloudy water within a glass pickle jar, floated a small severed penis.
He had been let in by an old man who looked more like an old woman, a bent-over figure with long hair, long fingernails, and delicate facial features beneath deep intersecting wrinkles. As Cooper stepped in, the old man stepped out and from that point disappeared. Where did he go? There was no car in the driveway. Did he just walk away, or did he scurry to some hiding place? Was he afraid he would be arrested? Cooper didn’t know, but the old man had not given him a name, and he wondered now if the guy was a squatter rather than the owner.
Immediately after entering the house and seeing that appalling interior, he first phoned his supervisor to lay out the situation, then called the police. The rubbish and wreckage were too overwhelming for him to be able to conduct anything close to an orderly inspection, but he went through the rooms while waiting for the police to arrive. The smell within the house was powerful but not nearly as unpleasant as it should have been, competing odors of rot and decomposition combining into a single immersive stench that, like some landfills, was vaguely redolent of mint. This was when he found the bones, and the penis in the jar, though it would take another full week before everything in the house could be sorted out and those looking through the debris would discover the desiccated remains of a long dead woman shoved into the back of a closet stuffed with bags of rags and paper napkins.
Police easily found the creepy old man who’d been living in the house, but Cooper’s instincts had been right: he was a squatter. It turned out that the owner of record, a Chilton Teager, had been dead for over a decade.
His wife was the desiccated corpse at the rear of the closet.
Eventually, crews were called in to clean out the house and haul everything away. Over the next several months, the house itself was auctioned off, and the new owner had it repainted, remodeled and the yard landscaped before putting it up for sale.
Cooper continued along as he always had, inspecting buildings throughout the city.
But the pack rat house haunted him.
He found himself driving past it whenever he was in that part of town. Sometimes he would even go out of his way to go down Calvin Street, just to see it. The place might be all cleaned up now, but he still remembered the way it looked when he’d been called in. He even had dreams of wandering endlessly through those narrow maze-like passageways winding between the piled boxes and bags. In some of those dreams, he ended up in rooms piled high with body parts. In others, he wound up in a black empty space with no walls, no ceiling, no floor, only the sense that he was not alone, that something sat in the darkness with him.
It felt wrong taking such an interest in the house on Calvin Street, though he couldn’t put his finger on exactly why. He did notice that he’d started to accumulate extraneous items in his own home. Not to the extent that there was a fire hazard—his house would still pass any objective inspection—but though it could never have been said about him before, such an eventuality was now definitely within the realm of possibility. He had a stack of magazines piled on top of his coffee table that he’d picked up for a quarter at the tail end of a library book sale, and a broken VCR on the kitchen counter that he’d taken from the station before it was thrown out. It was comforting to have things in his house that only he appreciated, and though Cooper knew he should be worried by that attitude, he was not. If Amy were still with him, things might have been different, but they’d divorced over six years ago, and now he was all alone.
And haunted by the pack rat house.
Haunted.
It was his friend Lewis, one of the city’s building inspectors, who first told him about the ghosts.
“There have been sightings of the dead,” Lewis told him.
Sightings of the dead.
It was, as much as anything else, the stilted formality of his friend’s statement that made Cooper take it seriously. That and his own unexplainable obsession with the house on Calvin Street.
Something was happening in Amarillo, something that couldn’t be explained in ordinary terms. He’d always been a rational man, a practical man. He was neither superstitious nor religious, but he was not closed-minded, either. And when he encountered things he did not understand, he was willing to admit it. He knew he’d been acting strangely since entering that house, and he sensed that his behavior was being influenced by something outside of his control.
Either that or he was going crazy.
But if he was going crazy, everyone else was, too. For Lewis was not the only one talking about ghosts. Cooper heard it from another firefighter as well. All over the city, it seemed, people were seeing spirits—
sightings of the dead
—and they weren’t all flakes and weirdoes. An accountant, a cop, a married couple, a mechanic, an entire family had all admitted to supernatural encounters. These weren’t people looking for publicity, and ordinarily, most of them wouldn’t have confessed to anything as potentially embarrassing as glimpsing a ghost, but what they’d encountered had frightened them so thoroughly that they were willing to risk public humiliation in an effort to find out what they’d really witnessed.
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Cooper slightly knew the cop, a patrolman named Terry Hutchings, and he made a special effort to talk to the man when he saw him one day at city hall. He waited until they’d both finished their business inside, then caught up with him on the lawn on the way to the parking lot.
“Terry!” he called.
The policeman turned around. “Cooper. Hey.”
He wasn’t sure how to ask what he wanted to ask, so he just blurted it out. “I have a question about the ghost.”
Terry’s face hardened, and he turned away, walking purposefully toward his patrol car.
“Wait! I’m not making fun of you. I saw something, too,” he lied.
Terry stopped, turned toward him. “What? What did you see?”
It was a challenge, not a question, but Cooper had an answer ready, and he described in detail the pack rat house. Even if he hadn’t actually seen anything supernatural, the feeling was the same, and what he’d encountered in that house had affected him the way the ghost had affected the policeman. He knew that close wasn’t good enough, though, not with Terry, so he threw in a wavy black shape that he claimed to have seen moving around the edges of the room with the penis jar.
The policeman relaxed considerably. “We’re not the only ones, you know,” he confided. “A lot of other people have seen things.”
“What did you see?” Cooper asked.
They continued their walk toward the parking lot, albeit more slowly. “Shadows,” Terry said, and his tone of voice made the hairs prickle on the back of Cooper’s neck. “I saw shadows.”
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