The Handyman

by Bentley Little

  No answer.

  “Twigs?”

  Silence.

  “Are we going in?” Mark asked.

  I hefted Mr. Sluggo. “We’re going in.”

  Teri took my hand. “Lead the way.”

  The two of us stepped over the threshold.

  Behind us, Mark screamed at the top of his lungs.

  And the door slammed shut, locking us in.

  THREE

  We tried desperately to open the door, but there was no knob or handle on the inside and of course it did not budge. It also appeared to be soundproof. Mark’s scream had been cut off in mid-cry, and even putting our ears to the door we could hear nothing. I pounded on the wood, calling Mark’s name, but there was no response. What had happened to him? Was he injured? Was he dead? There was no way to tell, and I kicked the door as hard as I could with my right foot, trying to break it down the way I’d seen cops do in television shows, but all I got for my efforts was a hurt heel and a sore shin. I might as well have been kicking a concrete wall. Moving into a batting stance, I used Mr. Sluggo to whale away on the door, swinging as hard as I could, but though a few slivers of dried paint disengaged themselves from the spot I was hitting, the wood itself was not even scratched.

  We were trapped in here, and Mark was…was…I had absolutely no idea.

  Teri looked at her watch, obviously thinking about the last time I’d been inside one of Frank’s houses. “Look,” she said, holding out her hand and wrist.

  I glanced down at the watch, which had stopped dead.

  Dead.

  I pushed that word out of my mind.

  “Evan!” I called. “Owen!” The two writers and Twigs were somewhere in this house, and finding them was our first priority. Teri was right: there was safety in numbers. And we were not safe. An active air of menace hung over not only this room but the entire structure, permeating the atmosphere. There was very real danger here. I understood why Kayley had felt the need to flee, why she had not been willing to enter the house, and even though my perceptions were much less acute, I felt overwhelmed by all that confronted us.

  Teri was trying to use her phone, but there’d been no access outside the building and there was none inside either.

  “Evan!” I called again. “Owen! Twigs!”

  The house was silent.

  Either they were so far away that they could not hear me, or…

  I refused to even consider it.

  “What do we do?” Teri asked.

  I had no idea. I glanced toward the open archway at the other end of the foyer and saw only darkness beyond. As though responding to my thoughts, a series of lights and lamps switched on in the next room.

  Up close, the interior of the house did not appear to be as professionally constructed as the outside. Even in the well-appointed foyer, I saw the outline of a bulging board behind the wallpaper, a section of uneven floor, gaps where segments of molding did not meet. The couch, I noted, was a replication of ours, and, from this vantage point, not a very good one. Fabric similar to that covering our couch had been inexpertly tacked onto an entirely different sofa in order to make it appear as though the furniture was ours, only the fabric had not been measured properly, and near the bottom, the original material showed through.

  Typical Frank job.

  “Evan!” I called again. I paused. “Frank!”

  “Maybe we should try to find a window,” Teri suggested. “I know I saw windows from outside.”

  Moving slowly and carefully, with me in the lead and Mr. Sluggo ready for action, we stepped out of the foyer into an old-fashioned, western-looking drawing room. There was a writing desk and a piano, a bookcase, some sort of fainting couch, and, in the center of the space, tables and high-backed chairs placed in a formal seating arrangement. On the walls were paintings of cattle drives and cowboys, interspersed with the mounted heads of buffalo and javelina. Nothing about this room seemed even remotely familiar, and certainly nothing in it put me in mind of Frank.

  There was no one in the room, but there was a doorway at the far end that opened onto darkness. Another room? A closet? Something else? I had no idea, but the darkness made me nervous. “Evan?” I called out. “Owen? Twigs?” No one answered, but from somewhere came the sound of faint music, a song that was familiar but that I could not immediately place.

  “I don’t like this,” Teri whispered.

  “I don’t either,” I told her, holding tight to the bat.

  “Is this some sort of—” Joke, I thought she was going to say, but she went with “trap?”

  Both seemed appropriate.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I didn’t want to go through that dark doorway, but there were no other options. It was either that, or remain in the drawing room or the foyer while waiting for a rescue that, judging by the abandoned cars outside, was never going to come.

  I peered into the blackness, trying to make out the outline of…something. “I wish we had a flashlight.”

  “The phones,” Teri said, taking hers out.

  “You’re right!” Our phones might not have cellular access, but they had lights, and I immediately turned mine on, adjusting the settings until the screen emitted a white luminescence. Together, we faced forward, moving slowly, aiming our beams into the dimness, but most of the light was swallowed by the gloom, allowing us to see only the vague outlines of what looked like furniture. I’d given up calling out names, but let out a generic “Hello!” to see if there was a response from anyone—

  anything

  —in the room ahead.

  “Do you think Frank’s in here?” Teri whispered.

  “Somewhere.”

  Phones extended, we walked through the doorway—

  —and were home, sitting on the couch, watching TV. We were in the middle of a Breaking Bad marathon, and Teri had just made popcorn. I turned to her and said, “After this one’s over, let’s go to bed. I’m getting tired.”

  I was tired, and I had the sense that I’d just drifted off for a few seconds and dreamed that I was trapped in some funhouse version of a home that Frank had built.

  No.

  That was wrong.

  It was close—but wrong.

  “I’m tired, too,” Teri said. “Let’s finish watching in the bedroom.”

  She used the remote to shut off the TV, I switched off the living room lights, and we walked down the hall to the bedroom, where we each took off our clothes before climbing under the covers. We were both too tired to make love, but that wasn’t to say that it wouldn’t happen sometime tonight if one of us awoke aroused, and we snuggled together as we finished watching the episode.

  I dozed off during a commercial, my mind sinking into a strange half-dream in which I saw Mark Goodwin for the first time since childhood and the two of us took a trip somewhere. I awoke seconds later with the feeling of Teri’s soft fingers between my legs. Apparently, we weren’t too tired, and once she’d gotten me hard, she climbed on top of me, using her hand to guide me in. She was moaning breathlessly, but when I looked into her eyes, I saw a disassociated confusion, the same sort of confusion I was feeling myself. I wondered what that meant, but my brain was foggy, and then we were both climaxing, and I forgot all about it.

  At work the next day, May was at her desk before I arrived, talking to Miles and John. I was surprised to see her because in the back of my mind, I’d thought she was either in the hospital or dead. I was glad to be wrong, though, and I sat down at my own desk to check my daily calendar.

  Miles and John?

  I frowned. Weren’t my other agents Mike and Jim? I glanced across the office, but there seemed nothing out of the ordinary, and the two men were exactly who they were supposed to be.

  Miles and John.

  That still didn’t seem right.

 
I spent the morning driving an entitled older woman all around Orange County to view properties that were “not quite right” for her, and the afternoon hosting an open house in Tustin. I returned home shortly after five to find that Teri had not left the house all day. Not only had she not gone in to work, but she had not bothered to call in sick. Strangely, no one from the bank had called to see what might be wrong.

  “Are we supposed to be here?” Teri asked me. She seemed genuinely confused, and I understood her feelings perfectly because they were identical to my own.

  It was obviously something she’d been thinking about, and I was honest with her when I said, “I don’t know.” My gaze fell upon a framed Ansel Adams photograph of the Grand Canyon above the couch. I didn’t remember that picture. In fact, I didn’t remember half of the pictures on the wall. Suddenly even the couch seemed unfamiliar to me.

  A cat came walking out from the hallway, and this casual illustration of normalcy made me feel more at home, though I was vaguely aware of the fact that we didn’t have a cat. I called out to it, “Here, kitty, kitty,” and it did not run away but turned to look at me, sitting down on its haunches. I reached out my hand as I approached, intending to pet it—

  —and the cat smiled.

  Animals weren’t supposed to smile, and the effect was unnerving. The eyes that appraised me were knowing and sly, and I backed away as the diminutive monstrosity giggled in the voice of a little girl.

  “Teri?” I said, backing away.

  She grabbed my hand, and I saw the look of terror on her face.

  “What’s going on?” I felt as though I knew the answer, but that it was locked somewhere in my brain. I was hoping she could jog my memory, make me see what was right in front of my face but eluding me. Teri was even more bewildered than I was, however, and we both backed away from the hideously cackling cat as I looked around the room, searching for clues to…something.

  We moved into the kitchen.

  And there was a door I did not recognize next to the refrigerator.

  I was about to ask Teri about it, but just as I opened my mouth, she said with a frown, “What’s that, a closet?”

  She didn’t recognize it, either.

  We’d stumbled onto something, and I stepped forward, reached for the knob and tried to turn it. The door would not open, and I was reminded of another door that would not open, though I could not recall where or when that was. Shoving my shoulder against the edge, I tried to make it budge, but there was no give.

  “Maybe I can find a key,” Teri offered, and she started looking around the kitchen for a hook or nail that might have keys on it.

  From back in the living room, the girlish giggling had stopped, but I heard a loud plaintive meow.

  What I need’s a weapon, I thought. Something to use on the cat and to batter down the door.

  Mr. Sluggo.

  I glanced down at my hands. It seemed to me that I’d had a baseball bat at some point, Mark’s bat from childhood, but it was gone, something had happened to it. I couldn’t remember what, however, and couldn’t remember when.

  “I think I found something!” Teri announced. She was holding up what looked like an old-fashioned skeleton key. The door seemed too modern to require such a contrivance, but when I looked more closely, I saw a large antiquated keyhole beneath the knob, and when we put the key in, it fit.

  Because of the door’s location in the kitchen, both of us expected to see a pantry or closet. But behind the door was some sort of workshop, a primitive plywood-lined room with an uneven floor, a too-low ceiling and walls with visible gaps where the wood did not meet. It looked like something Frank would build.

  Frank.

  Frank.

  It all came back, everything, and I turned to Teri and saw the recognition on her face. We were in Frank’s house, that terrible gargantuan structure he had built over the bones of Plutarch, Texas. We had somehow been lulled or hypnotized into thinking that we were back in our regular lives, but we’d been here all along.

  How long had that been?

  I was afraid to even think about it, and, holding Teri’s hand, I walked into the workroom. There were not just tools on the sagging shelf that ran along the opposite wall and the beat-up, paint-stained table that took up the center of the space before us, but bones and the dried carcasses of small animals. A drill and handsaw lay next to a beagle’s head and what looked like a pile of feline leg bones. Hammers and nails, screws and screwdrivers were scattered about, sharing the tabletop with desiccated squirrels and the skulls of mice. A stack of lumber in one of the corners butted up against what appeared to me to be a bovine ribcage.

  “My God,” Teri breathed.

  I picked up a hammer to use as a weapon should I need it. The grip felt sticky. Blood was the first thought that crossed my mind, but I didn’t want to look down and check. Searching around, I found a small hatchet, and I wiped off the handle on my pants before passing it to Teri. “Just in case,” I said.

  She turned back toward the kitchen, into our house. “You went to work,” she said. “You drove a car there, through the city.”

  “I don’t know what I did,” I admitted. “But I never left Frank’s house. I couldn’t have.”

  We were both silent after that, overwhelmed by the sheer power of what we were up against. Teri recovered first, and her voice when she spoke was strong, as though she had simply decided not to give in but to continue on as always. “How do we get out of here?” she said.

  I did not want to go out the way we had come in; that would only lead us to where we’d been, and I had a suspicion that were we to re-enter our house, our perceptions might once again be manipulated. This room was not that big, though, and I did not see any other doors. I shook my head.

  “How does Frank get in and out?” she wondered.

  It was a good question, and I looked toward the stack of lumber in the corner, thinking there might be some sort of trapdoor behind it.

  There was a rumbling beneath our feet, what felt to me, as a Southern Californian, like an earthquake. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, and when I swiveled my head in that direction to find out what it was, I saw the entire kitchen descending on the other side of the doorway. There was a moment’s darkness, what looked like bare drywall, and then another room came into view beyond the doorframe, a dim antechamber lit by flickering gas wall lamps.

  The workroom was some sort of elevator, which was perhaps how Frank navigated this immense edifice he had created. But neither Teri nor I had pushed any buttons or worked any controls. Did that mean that we had been summoned to this new room by someone else?

  By Frank?

  I held the hammer in front of me, moving slowly toward the open doorway, alert for any sign of movement. Following my lead, Teri held her hatchet at the ready, but we saw no one as we stepped carefully over the threshold.

  If the chamber before had been a workroom, this was what the work had gone into. Bones and body parts were incorporated into the walls of the room we entered. It seemed almost alive, an unholy hybrid of biology and architecture, and though nothing moved, I had the sense that it might, and our short silent trip to the door on the other side of the antechamber was a jittery and unsteady walk. To our right, segments of skin had been stretched and stitched together, forming a sort of wallpaper. Skeletal hands protruded from dark stained wood that was merged with the metal of the gas lamps, and the dancing flames revealed faces and feet used to close gaps in the wainscoting.

  We emerged into a long corridor resembling that of a mid-range hotel, lit by recessed fluorescent bars in the ceiling. I didn’t know where we were in the house. Neither of us did. Without a view of the outside world to set our bearings by, we were lost. We could have been anywhere inside the structure. Teri suggested that we try every door until we found a way out, but I was hesitant to use that approach. What if the sa
me sort of thing happened again, and we ended up trapped in some fictional scenario we didn’t even recognize?

  “Only one of us looks into the rooms,” she said. “The other stays grounded in the hallway here.”

  “And we never let go of each other,” I said, “keep in contact at all times.”

  She nodded. “I’ll open doors, peek in, and you look away and hold onto me. Pull me back if you need to.”

  “It’s as good a plan as any.”

  The first few doors were locked, but the next several weren’t, and we could clearly see how the house was a conglomeration of different parts of the original town, the linoleum floor of a grocery store fusing with the concrete of a neighborhood sidewalk, the metal siding of a service station melding with the wooden planks of a barn, which were nailed on the other end into the rock-and-mortar wall of a root cellar. It was as if bits and pieces of Plutarch had been disassembled and thrown haphazardly together, with staircases that led nowhere, doors that opened onto walls, storefront windows that overlooked closet space. Church altars existed side by side with bar counters, fireplaces with urinals.

  Each room we encountered was empty of people and most were without furniture. There was no indication of occupancy, and the only noises were the ones we made: our footsteps and voices, the clicking of door handles and squeak of hinges.

  Despite the superficial trappings of vacancy and abandonment, I knew Evan, Owen and Twigs were here somewhere.

  And Frank.

  Beyond that, or below that, I could feel the presence of others, could tell that we were not alone, despite the silence, despite the absence of any sign of habitation. It made my skin crawl because I wasn’t sure if those presences I felt were living beings…or the wandering dead.

  Several yards later, around a downward sloping curve, the corridor ended at a red barn door.

  Teri and I looked at each other. It would have been funny if it had been anywhere else at any other time, but nothing was funny here. “Should we…?” I began.

  She nodded, though I could feel her trembling. It was going to need both hands to pull aside the bolt, so I let go of her and slid the hammer into my belt, moving forward. She stayed with me, holding the hatchet out in front of her with two hands. “Ready?” I asked.