The Handyman

by Bentley Little

  “I know, I know,” Evan said. “But just in case…”

  “There is no case.”

  “Got it.” He turned toward Teri. “How about you? Do you mind if we—”

  “Yes,” she said. “I mind.”

  Mark was the person they really wanted on the show, so they stopped there, not wanting to be rejected off the bat, thinking they could approach Mark at a more propitious time. Introductions were made all around. I finally got to meet Kayley, the psychic, and she gave me an enigmatic smile as she daintily shook my hand. “So you’re the one,” she said.

  I had no idea what that meant, so I just shrugged. “I guess I am.”

  There were seven of us on the small plane, fully half of the passengers on the flight. As we checked our bags, Owen suggested that we rent a van in San Antonio that could hold us all, in order to save money, but Evan and I argued for two vehicles. “We’ll be hundreds of miles out in the boonies,” Evan said. “What if we break down? We need a backup vehicle. Who knows how well-maintained rental vans are in Texas?”

  “And if we did break down,” I pointed out, “who’s to say there’ll be cell service? We might not be able to call for help.”

  But that wasn’t the real reason I wanted two vehicles.

  I was thinking we needed an escape car.

  In case something happened at Frank’s house.

  No one talked much on the plane, other than Evan and Owen, who chatted happily with each other about their TV show. One of the civilian passengers overheard their conversation, made the mistake of asking about it, and, over Arizona, Evan conducted an hour-long infomercial for what they were tentatively calling “The Hunt for a Monster.” Toward the end of the flight, the two writers cornered Mark, who, despite my warnings, agreed to tell his story and be filmed.

  “We need to get this out,” he told me.

  “Exactly,” Evan agreed.

  We’d called ahead to the rental car agency, and there was a van and a full-sized car waiting for us when we landed. Evan, Owen, Kayley and Twigs grabbed the van, while Teri, Mark and I took the car. It was already noon, California time, and according to my GPS app, Plutarch was a two-hour drive away. I didn’t like the timing. We’d be getting there in the late afternoon and wouldn’t have time to do much before dark.

  “Perfect,” Evan said, Owen nodding. “Night shots are exactly what we want.”

  “We’re staying the night here,” I said firmly. “We’ll go out in the morning.”

  Teri, Mark and the psychic agreed. Twigs didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

  I faced the writers. “I don’t think you understand the danger…” I began.

  “Fine, fine,” Evan said, annoyed. “Cheap lodgings, though. This is costing us an extra day.”

  “You’re sounding more like Scott by the minute,” Owen told him, grinning.

  Evan punched his partner’s shoulder. “Asshole.”

  We checked into a single-story courtyard motel called The Pioneer Inn. All of the rooms had HBO, and there was a pool in the center of the complex, although no one had thought to pack a bathing suit. Still, the weather was nice, and Teri, Mark and I sat out by the pool, sharing a six pack, while the others went off somewhere to shoot background footage. Teri eventually got bored and went in to see if there was something on the Food Network or Travel Channel for her to watch, but Mark and I stayed outside.

  “Doesn’t seem like they have much of a budget for their show,” Mark noted. “This motel isn’t exactly The Reata. And only one cameraman? No other crew?”

  I shrugged. “Travel fast and light, I guess.”

  “Seems like it should be more professional.”

  “I don’t really care, to be honest. I’m just after Frank. Whether they get a TV show out of it is up to them.”

  Mark nodded. “I hear you.”

  We continued talking, catching up on old times, and the conversation gradually turned more personal as the sun went down.

  “Is this where you thought we’d end up when you were a kid?” Mark asked, finishing off his last beer.

  “At a motel in Texas?” I laughed. “No.”

  “No. I mean…our lives. Is this what you thought you’d be doing when you grew up? Is this how you thought things would turn out?”

  There was a wistfulness in his voice, and I knew exactly what he meant. It was the same conversation I’d had with myself many times. I shook my head.

  “I sure wouldn’t have expected you to become a real estate agent,” Mark admitted. “You were the smartest kid I ever met. You knew all that stuff about old movies, and you were into rocks and shells and science. You had that insect collection.”

  I’d forgotten that.

  “You were just into a lot of things. You had a lot of interests. I thought…I don’t know. You didn’t seem like someone who’d go into real estate.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  Mark smiled sadly. “Did you know my dad wanted me to be a lawyer? His dad was a lawyer, and he was hoping I’d go into corporate law, be one of those guys paving the way for companies to do business overseas, have offices in New York, Paris, Brussels, Hong Kong. Then…Frank came along. Now I teach people how to exercise their leg muscles in Tucson.”

  “Physical therapists do a lot more good in the world than corporate lawyers,” I said.

  He stood. “Yeah. Let’s keep telling ourselves that.” He dropped his beer can into a recycling container next to the fence. “I’m getting hungry. It’s about dinnertime, isn’t it?”

  ****

  We were on the road early the next morning. Owen had stopped by each of our rooms the night before, telling us to set our alarms for five. Apparently not trusting us to follow through, he pounded on our doors before dawn to wake us up. He and Evan had coffee and donuts to pass out by the time we were packed and ready to go, and our two-vehicle caravan was heading out of the city before San Antonio’s rush hour even started.

  The landscape was flat, barren and unbearably monotonous. West Texas has some of the most god-awful scenery known to man, and along the side of the road dozens of small white crosses adorned with plastic flowers indicated where bored drivers had been lulled into sleep and crashed their vehicles.

  An hour out, we turned off on a narrow barely paved road that was unmarked and probably would have been missed had we not known what we were looking for.

  “Shouldn’t there be a sign for that town?” Teri asked.

  “Plutarch? Probably,” I said. “But there is no town anymore, and I don’t think Frank wants to make it easy for people to find him.”

  “It’s not that hard,” Mark pointed out.

  He was right. It wasn’t that hard. The road did not disappear, and there were no washed out sections of asphalt, no locked gates to finesse, no impediments of any kind.

  After an hour and a half of travelling through a land of windswept desolation, seeing no other cars, no sign of human existence other than the thin strip of bleached macadam, we passed over a small rise to see a wide basin dominated by a single massive structure that towered over the rocks and desert vegetation surrounding it.

  Frank’s house.

  I stared at the structure in awe.

  It seemed so much bigger in real life than it did in the satellite photo. Five stories tall at its peak, with turrets and gables located at odd and inappropriate junctures that gave the entire building a weirdly off-center appearance, it stretched to the left and right for over a mile. I had no idea how far back it went, though I was certain that it stretched behind a considerable distance.

  It had, after all, once been the town of Plutarch.

  It was not merely the size of the house that was impressive, however, but the complexity of its construction. The building contained multitudes. In it, I saw the stores and homes that it had overtaken as well a
s echoes of every structure that Frank had ever worked on, all of it incorporated into one monstrous edifice.

  How was this possible? He had to have had help constructing it; there was no way a single person could do all this, especially one with Frank’s sub-par skills. But who’d assisted him? And where had he gotten the money for all the materials? Sure, he’d stolen a few items here and there, but he could not have stolen this much lumber and concrete in a dozen lifetimes.

  There was nothing about this situation that made any kind of rational sense, and that made me wary.

  Had this always been Frank’s end-game? I wondered. Was this the point of it all? To build a big house? It seemed senseless to me. A lifetime of cheating and stealing—

  and killing

  —had all led here, to this bizarre white elephant in the middle of the Texas desert?

  The road curved to the right in front of the house, continuing on until it disappeared around the side of the structure. We’d been following the van since leaving San Antonio, and when Evan pulled to a stop in front of what seemed to be the entrance, I parked next to him.

  Teri instinctively hated the house. Mark did, too. I could see the looks of revulsion on their faces, as though they were looking upon something disgusting. I understood how they felt, though I did not experience that reaction myself.

  We got out of the car. Evan, Owen and their cameraman were having a field day. They were already dashing about, shouting at each other about things to film and angles to shoot. The psychic remained in the van.

  The air here felt…heavy. I don’t know how to describe it other than that. The temperature was hot, and there was no wind, but that didn’t account for the thickness of the air. If normal air was water, this was syrup, and indeed there was a sense in which it seemed more liquid than gas.

  Wrong, I thought. It feels wrong.

  Did anyone else feel the same way? I looked around to gauge the others’ reactions but was distracted by something I had not noticed before: three law enforcement vehicles abandoned on the drive that ran along the side of the house, a line of empty cars and trucks stretching beyond that.

  “Where are their owners?” Teri’s voice was soft, but I didn’t expect to hear it so close to my ear, and it startled me, making me jump.

  I glanced up at the house. “Lost,” I replied, and imagined the drivers wandering endlessly within that structure, thinking they’d been in there for only an hour or two when they’d really been inside for months.

  “Now call the police,” Teri suggested. She nodded toward the abandoned cars. “I’m pretty sure this classifies as probable cause. Tell them we’re here. Send them a picture. Let them know that if they don’t get off their asses and do their job…”

  “I knew there was a reason I kept you around,” I said.

  She punched my shoulder, and this playful display of normalcy lightened the mood enough that it gave me strength. The air was still thick, the edifice in front of us still gigantic, but I felt stronger, less nervous, and hearing Evan and Owen ordering Twigs around gave me even more confidence. I could do this. I could handle it.

  Taking out my phone, I punched 911.

  There was no signal. Whether that was because we were so far out here or because there was something in the house that blocked it, I did not know. But I can’t say that I was totally surprised. I tried the same thing with Teri’s phone, with the same result.

  “So much for that,” I said.

  “We’ll bring someone back.”

  “After,” I told her.

  She blanched. “You’re not actually thinking of—”

  Mark walked up. “So are we going to go in?” he asked.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “No,” Teri insisted.

  It was as if Mark hadn’t heard her. “Do we just…knock?”

  “We could try it.”

  Teri was hurrying off to tell Evan and Owen, hoping to find an ally, though I knew the writers would be the first ones to advocate entering the house. That was the whole reason they’d brought us here.

  “We need a little backup first,” Mark told me. He’d been allowed to bring his baseball bats on the plane as long as they were stashed in the luggage compartment where they could not be accessed, and right now they were in the rear seat of our rental car.

  I walked over with him to retrieve the weapons.

  “You can use Mr. Sluggo,” he said, handing it to me. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you. You deserve it.” He closed the car door and swung the other bat in an arc. “But I get first crack at him. I deserve that.”

  “He’s all yours,” I promised.

  We faced the house’s entrance, a large intricately carved wooden door that looked like it belonged on a cathedral, that Frank had probably stolen from a cathedral. The Texas desert was hot, and although in the deep shade cast by the mammoth house, the temperature was much cooler, the goosebumps on my arms were not generated by the chilliness of the air.

  Was there a back door to this place? I wondered. Or a side entrance? Even if there was, it didn’t matter. There was no way to sneak up on the building. With only the one road, anyone approaching would be instantly seen.

  Maybe Frank wasn’t even home.

  He was, though. I knew it. I felt it.

  And he was watching us.

  Teri was standing next to the open side door of the van with Evan, Owen and Twigs, talking to Kayley. Mark and I walked over.

  The psychic looked shaken. “I’m not going in,” she said. “I can’t.”

  Evan motioned for the cameraman to start filming. “Why can’t you go in?” he asked, lowering his voice to what he undoubtedly considered interview mode. “What do you sense?”

  Kayley turned toward him angrily. “Goddamn it! I’m not doing this, Evan!”

  “We need a more professional host,” Owen noted. He addressed Twigs. “Just film her, don’t get him. We’ll have someone overdub your voice,” he told Evan.

  “What’s wrong with my voice?”

  “This is real!” Kayley shouted. “Don’t you assholes get it? There’s no way in hell I’m stepping foot in that place, and you shouldn’t, either!”

  “I get it,” Teri said softly. She shot me a disapproving look.

  “I get it, too,” I told her. I gestured toward Mark. “We get it.”

  Kayley looked at me, peered into my eyes and nodded slowly. “I can see that you do,” she said. She turned her attention back to Evan. “We need to leave. This place is not safe.”

  “Why?” Evan pressed, motioning with his right hand for Twigs to use his camera to zoom in.

  “The dead—”

  There was a noise unlike anything I had ever heard, a deep pervasive rumbling that seemed to come from the earth itself, though we all knew its origin was the house. It was a sound so immersive I could feel it in my stomach, and my instinctive reaction was to turn tail and run. This wasn’t just conjured up by a crazy contractor, this was the growl of something so massive and elemental that there was no humanly way to go up against it.

  That was undoubtedly the point. That’s what Frank wanted us to think, and I was filled with a resolve to come at him with everything at my disposal.

  “Look,” Teri said. Her voice was hushed.

  I followed her pointing finger.

  The front door of the house was open.

  A chill passed through me, and my grip tightened on the baseball bat, which I’d been holding like a cane. Through the open door, I could see a foyer identical to the one in Frank’s other house in Nevada. Our old couch was there again, and I wondered if Frank had had it moved, if one couch was real and one a fake, or if both were illusions.

  “Do not go in there,” Kayley said from within the van, her voice commanding yet at the same time deeply frightened. “Do. Not. Go. In. Ther
e.”

  But Evan and Owen were already hurrying toward the doorway, Twigs between them, each instructing the cameraman about what to film.

  “Why shouldn’t we go in?” Teri asked the psychic.

  “There’s too much.” I moved closer to the van to better hear Kayley’s answer. Her voice was quiet now. “It hurts just being this close. I need to get away.”

  “Too much what?” Teri wanted to know.

  “Everything.” She sucked in her breath. “The dead are not at rest in that building.”

  Evan, Owen and Twigs were already walking inside. I shifted my position so I could see better, searching for Frank within the foyer, but I saw no sign of him.

  “I need to get out of here,” Kayley said. “You need to get out of here.”

  “This is amazing!” Evan called from within the house. I could no longer see any of them, but the door remained open.

  I took out my car keys, offered them to Teri. “Go with her,” I said. “Get help.”

  Teri shook her head. “I know your plan. You’re not getting rid of me that easily.”

  I stepped forward, offering the keys to Kayley. “Here,” I said.

  The psychic grabbed them instantly. “I’m not coming back. But I’ll get the police over here.” She looked into my eyes. “Not that it will help.”

  I turned. “You want to go with her, Mark? Make sure she’s okay?”

  He swung his bat. “Not happening. I’m here to see Frank.”

  “I don’t need any help.” The psychic stepped out of the van, pushed past me and headed toward the rental car. “Don’t go in there!” she called over her shoulder. “You won’t come out!”

  Teri ran after her, opened the passenger side door and took her purse off the front seat. The two of them spoke briefly for several seconds, something I could not hear, then Teri closed the door and Kayley started the car, spun backward on the drive and took off the way we’d come. I watched the car speed away, feeling strangely abandoned.

  I turned back toward the house.

  The door was still open.

  I walked forward, keeping my eye on the room beyond the doorway. “Evan?” I called. “Owen?”