“Look no further then, we’re the fellas for the job.”
“Damn straight,” Steve said.
There were four steps leading up to the door, the brass knocker shaped like a Chinese dragon. Steve pressed the doorbell and he and Al waited for a glimpse into the type of house in which they’d always dreamed of living.
Several seconds ticked by with no response. They were beginning to wonder if anyone was home, whether they should walk down the street to the next house, when footsteps sounded from inside. Hurried, frantic footsteps, as if someone was running down the hallway to answer the door.
“Sounds like someone’s glad to have visitors,” Steve said.
The door was wrenched open, hard enough that it swung wide and banged into the wall inside the house. A young woman stood framed in the doorway, blonde hair swept up in a sloppy bun, her eyes wide and wild, her breathing ragged. She wore faded jeans that came a few inches short of her ankles and a T-shirt with the word ‘Superstar’ printed on the front in silver spangles. The shirt was too small for her, exposing her midriff and stretching the word across her chest.
“Oh my God,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “You’re here. Someone’s really here.”
Steve and Al cut sideways glances at one another, not sure how to reply. Finally Steve held out his hand. “Hi, my name is Steve, and this is my friend, Al. Our car broke down across the street and—”
“Fred!” the woman shouted over her shoulder. “Fred, hurry. Someone’s here. Get Gracie.”
A man appeared beside the woman. He wore corduroy overalls that were at least three sizes too large for him and a pair of glasses that slid down his nose to perch on the tip like a gargoyle on the side of a building. “I can’t believe it. Linda, are we dreaming? After all this time, it’s too good to be true.”
Al tugged on the sleeve of Steve’s shirt and began to back away. “If this is a bad time, we don’t want to bother you. We’ll just be on our way.”
“No!” the couple in the doorway shouted in unison. The woman, Linda, spoke quickly, “Your car broke down, right? You’re stranded, you need help.”
Fred stepped aside. “You can use our phone. Please come in, the phone is in the living room.”
Steve and Al hesitated on the doorstep, a welcome mat with silly cat designs at their feet. Linda and Fred seemed like one seriously disturbed couple, their eagerness to have Steve and Al in their home on par with that of the witch’s to get Hansel and Gretel into her oven.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Linda said with a smile that dimpled her cheeks in the most delightful way. “I know we’re acting peculiar, you’ll have to forgive us. We’ve been having an argument and you interrupted us.”
“Yes, yes, that’s right,” Fred said. “But we’re not going to turn away two gentlemen in need of help. Please, feel free to use our phone.”
Al looked at Steve. Steve was the stronger personality of the couple and Al usually followed his lead. Steve considered for a moment then nodded once. “If you don’t mind, we’ll only be a minute. Call for a tow and get out of your hair.”
Fred and Linda stepped back, and Steve and Al stepped over the threshold and into the house.
They stood in a large foyer, a crystal chandelier overhead. The floor consisted of maroon tiles, an oval-shaped oriental rug covering a large section of it. A curving staircase stood to the right, as well as an archway leading into the living room. A hallway stretched ahead. Steve and Al looked around them, drinking in the luxury with their eyes. Linda and Fred smiled at one another, idiot smiles like those worn by the children Al worked with at the Center. They seemed to be in the grips of a euphoric joy that sprang from nowhere.
“So, your phone?” Steve asked, rocking on the balls of his feet. “Where is it?”
Fred backpedaled down the hall. “I’ll get Gracie. She’s in the library.”
“I’ll go get our stuff from upstairs,” Linda said, rushing toward the stairs. She paused halfway up, glanced back at the stranded men and said, “Sorry,” then hurried to the second floor, leaving Steve and Al alone in the foyer.
“What the fuck have we walked into?” Steve asked, not bothering to keep his voice low.
“Twilight Zone would be my first guess, or Tales from the Crypt.”
“Oh, Jesus, let’s find the phone before that cackling Crypt Keeper shows up.”
They walked through the archway into the living room. The beige carpet was thick, the furniture antique. A cordless phone sat on an end table by a wooden rocker. Steve picked it up and punched some buttons, listened for a few seconds, punched a few more buttons, grunted, then hung the phone up with some force.
“Let me guess,” Al said, a slight tremor of unease coloring his voice. “Doesn’t work.”
“Dead as Elvis. I suggest we get the hell out of here before Linda and Fred have us for dinner, and I do mean have us for dinner.”
“Right behind you.”
Steve and Al walked through the archway into the foyer as Fred came rushing down the hallway carrying a young girl in his arms. She couldn’t have been more than five years old—pale and hollow-eyed, with a mop of curly strawberry-blonde hair on her head. She wore nothing but an adult T-shirt that hung far below her legs. She had two fingers stuck in her mouth and she chewed on them as she examined Steve and Al with her blank eyes.
“Linda!” Fred shouted up the stairs. “What are you doing? We don’t need everything. Leave it, leave it! Let’s go, for Christ’s sake!”
A second later, Linda bounded down the stairs, two large duffel bags slung over her shoulders. Her bun had come loose and her hair trailed behind her like a comet’s tail. She tripped near the bottom of the stairs. She almost fell down, but steadied herself with a well-placed hand on the banister. “Ready. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Would you two mind telling me what’s going on?” Steve asked. “I mean, you two are crazier than shithouse rats, if you ask me.”
Even in the bizarreness of the situation, Al couldn’t help but smile. One of the things he loved most about Steve was his ability to call a spade a spade in the bluntest of terms and to never take shit from anyone.
In this instance, however, his directness was ignored. Linda and Fred, with Gracie in tow, pushed past the two men and headed for the door. They hesitated at the threshold, staring through the doorway, as if through a portal into another dimension. Finally, with great sighs, they bolted forward, through the door and onto the steps. Here they paused again, their faces slack with shock.
Steve and Al started to follow, but they stopped when Linda and Fred burst into hysterical laughter. Loud, high-pitched guffaws that shook their bodies and caused them to lean against each other for support. Tears mixed in with the laughter, and Gracie clung to her father with the fierceness of someone clinging to a life preserver.
“They are crazy,” Al said. “Not weird, not eccentric. These people are certifiably insane.”
Linda turned her head and considered the men through the open door, as if only now reminded of their presence. “I’m sorry. I wish it didn’t have to be like this, but it’s the only way.”
“Come on,” Fred said, grabbing his wife by the arm and pulling her down the steps.
“Wait a goddam minute,” Steve said and walked through the door.
Or tried.
When he reached the threshold, Steve stopped suddenly, cried out, and stumbled back. To Al, it looked like one of those comical scenes where someone walks into a glass door cleaned so thoroughly as to be invisible.
“What in the name of Jesus,” Steve muttered, rubbing at his forehead.
Outside, Linda pulled free of Fred’s hold and started back up the steps.
“Linda, what the hell are you doing?” Fred asked. “Are you nuts?”
Linda turned back to her husband. “It’s only fair. The folks before us explained things. They gave us some idea what was going on. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if we didn’t do the same for these
guys. It’s the most we can do considering what we’re sentencing them to.”
Fred said nothing for a moment, merely hugged Gracie to his chest and rocked on his feet. “Fine, but don’t go back in. Tell them from out here.”
“I’m not an idiot.”
“Are you sure about that?” Al said, standing close by Steve. “This whole situation seems pretty idiotic to me.”
Linda stopped on the top step and said in a voice that was soft and full of sympathy, “I know this must all seem strange to you, and it’s about to get a hell of a lot stranger. I wish I could tell you what was really going on, but there is a limit to what we know.”
“Lady, what kind of drugs are you taking?” Steve asked, walking back to the threshold but not attempting to cross it.
“This house,” Linda said, ignoring Steve’s comment, “this is not our house. It does not belong to Fred and me. For the past two and a half years, it has been our prison.”
Steve made as if to walk through the door again, but instead he shuffled back a few steps. It appeared as if he bounced back. “What the hell is this?”
“Two and a half years ago, the three of us—Fred, Gracie, and I—were invited to a birthday party for one of Gracie’s friends from pre-school, held on this street. We got the address wrong, unfortunately, and we came to the door of this house instead of the house where the party was being held. An elderly man came to the door, and when we explained what had happened, he graciously invited us in to use his phone.
“Once we were inside, he began running around frantically, packing and calling out to the others in the house, much the same scene that you experienced with us. There were two others, another elderly man and an elderly woman. We were dumbfounded, and they fed us some preposterous story before running out the door and leaving us alone in the house. Soon after they were gone, we discovered that the story was true.”
“What are you talking about?” Al asked, approaching the doorway with the wariness of one approaching a lion’s den.
Linda sighed. “We were unable to leave the house. When we would try to walk through the door, we were stopped by some invisible force, which I believe you have had a taste of yourself. The windows would not open nor break, and believe me we tried. The phones did not work. We would stand at the open door and yell at the top of our lungs, and no one heard or saw us. We were trapped in the house. The next morning, we discovered that our car—which had been parked in the drive out front—was gone. It simply vanished.
“We’ve been here ever since; for two and a half years we have not set foot outside this house. Until today. Everyday fresh food would be in the refrigerator and cupboards, appearing as mysteriously as our car disappeared. No new clothes appeared, though. We had to make do with what was already in the closets here.”
“Okay, I see,” Steve said. “You’ve been trapped in the house for two and a half years. Why are you suddenly able to leave now?”
Fred stepped up next to his wife. “Are you dense or what? Can’t you figure that one out? The three people who were here when we first set foot inside the house told us that we would be stuck here until someone else came along and entered the house of his own free will. Once that happened, we would be free to go and the new arrivals would be the prisoners, at least until someone else came along and walked through the door.”
Steve and Al were silent for some time.
Steve, as usual, was the first to speak. “So you’re saying—”
“I’m sorry,” Linda said for the third time. “By simply stepping through the door, you’ve freed us, but you have inadvertently imprisoned yourselves. Like I said, I wish it didn’t have to be like this, but the house demands its prisoners.”
“Help us then,” Steve said. “You know what’s going on here, so get help.”
“We can’t.”
Fred hugged his wife and said, “We were told that if we tried to rescue those who came after us, great misfortune would befall us.”
“Great misfortune,” Steve repeated. “That’s a vague pronouncement.”
“We can’t risk it,” Fred said, his wife and daughter both crying in his arms. “We’ve had enough misfortune for one lifetime.”
“And us?” Al said.
“Your misfortune is only beginning.”
Without another word, Fred led his wife down the steps and toward the street. Steve called out to them, but they did not stop and they did not look back. They turned right at the street, and walked on until they were out of sight.
“Is this some kind of sick joke?” Al asked in a strained voice. “They’re fucking with us, right?”
Steve held his hand out to the open doorway. “I don’t know. Feel this.”
Al reached out. His fingers reached the doorway but would go no farther. Steve knew what he felt. Some force, not hard like a wall, but solid and spongy, like the feel of one of those gel wrist pads that came with some mouse pads. There was some give but no penetrating it.
“What is this?” Al asked.
Instead of answering, Steve placed both hands open-palmed against the invisible blockade and pressed as hard as he could.
“This is crazy,” Steve said, panting. “I can’t get through it.”
Al strode into the living room. “This can’t be. It can’t be.”
Al picked up the wooden rocker and swung it into the bay window. It shattered into a thousand fragments—the rocker, not the window. The window remained intact, not even a crack.
Steve placed a hand on Al’s shoulder.
“The backdoor,” Al said, shrugging off his lover’s hand and running through the archway and down the hall. At the end of the hall was a large kitchen, bright yellow walls with a rabbit theme. Rabbit salt-and-pepper shakers, rabbit-shaped oven mitts, a large rabbit cookie jar. On the far side of the kitchen was a door, a sheer curtain covering glass panels at its top.
“Al, wait,” Steve called out, right behind him. “You’re panicking.”
Paying Steve no heed, Al threw open the door and ran headlong toward the backyard. He collided with the invisible blockade and rebounded into the house, his feet slipping out from under him, tumbling to the linoleum with a soft thud.
“Al, are you okay?” Steve asked, kneeling next to his lover.
“This isn’t real. It can’t be real. I refuse to believe it’s real.”
“Come on now,” Steve said, placing his hands under Al’s arms and raising him to his feet. “Have a seat.” He positioned Al on one of the wooden stools aligned beneath a counter by the refrigerator.
Al leaned forward, burying his head in his hands, and muttered repeatedly, “Isn’t real, can’t be real, isn’t real, can’t be real.”
Steve opened several cabinets until he found the glasses. He filled one with water at the sink and took it over to Al. “Drink this. I’m going to go look around.”
Without looking up, Al took the glass and sipped the water, still repeating his mantra like a prayer.
Steve left his lover in the kitchen and walked down the hall, checking all the rooms. Besides the living room and kitchen, the downstairs also contained a full bath, a spacious walk-in closet full of coats and shoes, a large room filled with wall-to-wall bookshelves and a huge roll-top desk in the center, and a dining room with one of those exaggeratedly long tables that Steve only ever saw in movies. All the windows were sealed shut, and although Steve banged on the glass until his knuckles bled, the panes remained whole and unbroken.
Steve ascended the curving stairwell to the second floor. Here were four bedrooms, the master bedroom with the four-poster bed, larger than Steve and Al’s entire apartment, and another full bath. Same story with the windows. A narrow flight of stairs led up to a musty smelling attic. The circular window that looked out onto the street was as impenetrable as the rest. Steve noticed as he tried the window that the Celica was no longer across the street.
As Steve turned to leave, he caught sight of something from the corner of his eye. At first, in the
failing light, he couldn’t make sense of what he saw, but when he stepped closer it became clear. “Holy shit,” he said under his breath.
Deflated, Steve made his way back to the kitchen. Al stood by the open backdoor, glass of water clutched in his hands so tightly Steve was afraid it would shatter.
“It’s real,” Al said, looking into his lover’s eyes. “We’re trapped in this house like they said.”
“It would appear so. I don’t know how, but there doesn’t seem to be any way out of here.”
Al lowered his head and began to cry, soft but powerful sobs that racked his body. Steve hugged him close, kissing him on the forehead and whispering meaningless assurances that everything would be all right. Steve was wryly amused by the way he and Al were reacting to this impossible situation. Al was the one who thrived on tales of the absurd and impossible, yet it was Steve who had managed to maintain his wits in the face of their otherworldly predicament.
“What are we going to do?” Al asked, his well of tears finally running dry. “I mean, what can we do?”
“I guess there’s nothing we can do right now. We need to think this through, figure a way to get out of here.”
“Did you find anything upstairs?” Al asked.
“Um, no. Nothing useful.”
Al studied his lover’s face for a moment. “Steve, what’s up there?”
“I told you, nothing.”
“Bullshit, there’s something you’re not telling me.”
“You don’t want to know, Al. Trust me on this one.”
“Tell me what it is or you know I’ll go look for myself.”
Now it was Steve who studied Al’s face, examining the resolve he saw there. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
Steve led Al up to the attic, his feet shuffling slowly. Once they reached the attic, Al followed Steve over to one corner of the darkened room. Steve had hoped it would be gone, like the car, but it was still there. Magic-marker scribbled on the wall. Three names—Linda, Fred, Gracie—and several hatch marks, four in a row with a fifth slashed through. Al seemed to be counting under his breath, but Steve had already done the calculations.
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