Liz dropped the book and Jack leapt from his seat. They darted down the hall and burst into Joey's room, but he wasn't there.
What the hell, Liz thought. Is this what it takes to make Jack believe? Don't make it this.
"Joe?" Jack asked. "Where are you?"
He wasn't on his bed, or on the floor playing with his super-heroes. Liz looked under the bed, but he wasn't there, either. They stood wondering, and Liz finally heard something. Joey was crying, she could hear it clearly, but he wasn't anywhere. Then she saw his closet door was cracked.
She opened it and found Joey sitting against the wall, crying into his hands, his knees pulled to his chest. He looked up at the light, then at Liz and Jack, and started crying again.
Jack pulled him from the closet and Joey struggled, but Jack got him out. He sat on the edge of Joey's bed, his son cradled in his arms, rocking him, trying to calm him down.
"What's the matter, Joe?" he asked. Joey whined, but wouldn't say anything. They stayed with him to comfort him, and they were patient, until he finally stopped crying and just sat silent on Jack's lap, staring at the wall. "What's wrong, Joe?" Jack asked again.
"You scared me," Joey said.
"I'm sorry," Jack said. "We heard you crying. What were you crying for?"
"Because you scared me, I said."
"No," Jack said. "I mean what were you crying about the first time?" Joey sniffed, then his crying started again, just a few huffs, but Jack knew if he got started, it would go full-blown within seconds. "Calm down, babe. Tell me what happened."
"I was hiding in the closet," Joey said. "I was gonna scare you when you came in here, but you opened the door and scared me first."
"I know that," Jack said. He was beginning to get annoyed. Why couldn't Joey just tell him what had happened? "Okay, why did you scream, then?"
"Because you scared me when you got in the closet.
"No," Jack said. His anger was a knot in his stomach. "Joe, we were watching television. We heard you scream, then we came in here to see what happened. We found you in the closet, then I pulled you out and asked you what happened. So what happened that made you scream in the first place?"
Joey said, "I mean the first time you came in here, you scared me."
"I didn't come in here a first time," Jack said.
"Yeah," Joey said, "when I was hiding and you opened the door and scared me, then closed it again and left."
Jack looked at Liz and Liz hoped her face was showing confusion. She knew what had happened, but she didn't want to go over everything with him right now.
"Joe, I was watching TV," Jack said. "I never came in here. And I certainly wouldn't have scared you then left."
"You must have fallen asleep playing," Liz said. "You fell asleep in your closet, then had a bad dream and it woke you up." She hated saying that. She knew it wasn't the truth and she knew Joey'd never think of her as a mother if he didn't trust her.
"Yeah," Jack said. "That's what happened. Come on, we'll go watch cartoons. That'll make you feel better."
Joey looked at Liz as Jack carried him into the hall. Liz thought his face was pleading, telling her I didn't dream it. I didn't. Don't make me go with him. But no matter what Joey thought--and he and she both knew he hadn't dreamed it--she also knew Jack hadn't left the couch.
They went into the living room and Liz hung back. She put her head into the closet and stared at the walls. "Don't ever do that to him again," she whispered. "You can mess with me all you want. I'm not afraid of you, but he is and you'd better keep your fucking hands off him."
She closed the closet door and left the room. Tomorrow afternoon, she told herself for the thousandth time that day. She felt a chill in her spine and knew something moved behind her in the hall.
Suddenly something crashed and Liz jumped, but a hand to her chest, and whirled around. The sound came again. Not a crash, a loud knock on the front door.
Jack came out into the hall and slapped her ass as he passed her.
“Charley’s here,” he said. “We’re gonna go out in back for a little bit.”
“If you’re gonna be loud, let me know and I’ll take Joey shopping.”
“His shoes are by the couch,” Jack said before taking the stairs two at a time to the first landing.
They played for an hour before either needed a break, both showing off a slew of styles and techniques--Jack watched in silent admiration while Charley fingerpicked with a dexterity Jack knew he’d never achieve--and falling into rhythm with each other like they’d been at it for years.
Jack thought it felt great to have someone beside him, someone to play off of, someone to follow if he wanted to hang back a little, and someone who’d follow him if he had a line he wanted to show off. Watching him, Jack wondered why someone with Charley’s talent was working the box cell in a place like Fett Tech.
Same reason you are, was the answer he came up with. Because this is fun, but it’s not my real life.
Finally Charley lifted his guitar--that big fat Gretch White Falcon--over his head and said, “Okay, I gotta take a piss. Where’s your bathroom?”
Charley went inside, rested his guitar against the couch, and proceeded down the hall.
Afterward, he turned off the light, pulled the door closed behind him, and stood quiet in the hall. He heard Jack outside, still playing, but he tried to shut it out and listen to the house.
Stories around Angel Hill were myriad about this house, not just concerning the Denglers, but there were still stories about the first family to live here, the Keepers. The preacher, his wife, and their twins. This place hadn’t been good to the families who’d lived here.
Charley wondered briefly how long he’d been gone, then he heard Jack outside again and wondered if he was even missed.
He went upstairs to the second floor.
It was definitely summer in Angel Hill. Even with the open grand room, the air was thick.
“Nothing up here,” he said, and turned to go up to the third floor.
Rounding the stairs on the final landing, he glanced back and thought, That’s where he hung, then.
At the top of the stairs, he looked around. He took a deep breath, but the air up here was almost too thick to breathe. It hung around him like a plastic bag and his arms were immediately covered in a wet sheet of sweat.
“This is it,” he said. He moved through the other rooms, stopping for a second in the corner room to stare at the wall and wonder how horrible it must have been to see those children, dead, lined up along the wall. He shivered despite the stifling heat.
“God, those poor kids,” he said. “What the hell made you do something like that, Milo?”
He couldn’t answer that. No one in Angel Hill could. Milo’d left no note. And Angel Hill wasn’t so small that everyone knew everyone’s business. Most of the town had never even heard of Milo Dengler until the day the story hit the news. And the house, it wasn’t the only big house in town. But it was definitely the most infamous now.
Charley wandered back to the center room and stood back by the wall.
“How could you?” he asked.
Suddenly a rapid pounding came from above. He looked up and saw he was standing under the crawlspace door. The sound came in a fierce pattern, almost desperate, and it scared him with its intensity.
“Fuck that,” he said, and hauled ass back down the stairs and out the back door.
He had to go back inside to grab his guitar, but when he got outside he told Jack, “Hey, I gotta take off. I didn’t see it was so late.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “I’ll see you at work.”
“Cool.” He put his guitar in its case, unplugged his amp and wound the cord, then headed to his car.
Charley drove home as quickly as he could without getting pulled over. He went into the house, put his guitar on the couch and his amp on the floor. Without a word to his wife, he grabbed the phone and dialed.
His sister answered and without a word of
greeting, Charley said, “I was in the house.”
She didn’t have to ask what house, they’d talked about it since Charley told her he worked with the man who bought it.
“And?” she asked.
“And that place is haunted, I don’t care what anyone else thinks. I was up on that third floor and I’m telling you I heard some stuff that almost gave me a heart attack.”
“Really? Like what?”
Charley told her about sneaking upstairs and about the machine gun pounding on the roof he’d heard.
“On the roof?” she asked. “That’s weird.”
“Might have been in the crawlspace,” he said. “I was right under the door. I don’t remember anything about any crawlspace.”
“What do you think it was?”
“I don’t know. If anything, I hope it was one of those twins and not one of the kids.”
“But what if they really did just vanish? Went off somewhere and started over? Couldn’t have been too hard back then.”
“If that happened, then it was one of the kids, but I can’t imagine what it would be doing up in the ceiling.”
“I don’t know,” his sister answered.
“Anyway, I just wanted to tell you I was up there tonight. There’s stuff in that house, that’s one story you can definitely believe from now on. I’m gonna call Ron and tell him.”
“Okay, I’ll talk to you later.”
Charley hung up and talked to his brother Ron for twenty minutes before finally going back to his wife in the living room.
“What happened?” she asked.
He told her and she shook her head and said the same thing everyone said.
“Those poor kids.”
Later, everyone lay in bed.
Jack was dreaming of flowers growing wild when footsteps next to the bed woke him up. He opened a bleary eye and leaned his head up.
"Joe?" he asked. "What's wrong?"
Before he got an answer, he'd gone back to sleep and the footsteps retreated out of the room.
Liz heard them, too. She wasn't asleep yet and doubted she would be by morning.
The footsteps weren't the first noise that night. Something was going on upstairs. Two floors below, Liz could hear them up there, knocking the walls, thumping the floors. She snuggled closer to Jack, not so much for protection, but for the simple presence of another living person.
Joey dreamed, too. But he didn't dream of flowers. He dreamed of running. He ran because he was being chased.
The dead girl was screaming at him, "Your father's a killer, your father's a killer!" She chased him but when he looked back, she was smiling. Her face didn't show the least sign of meanness. In fact, she looked pretty happy. She laughed as she screamed at him.
He searched the park as he ran, hoping someone else might be here, anyone who could get the dead girl away from him. A grown-up. As soon as the thought formed, he spotted someone. A man stood under a tree at the other end of the park.
I'll never make it, Joey thought. She'll catch me before I get there.
And what would she do, he wondered. He hadn't thought of that. All he knew was that she was chasing him, and when people chased you, you ran. So that's what he did, ran full blast for the man under the tree.
The girl was at Joey's heels, screaming, "Your father's a killer!" But he managed to stay ahead of her. His foot slipped once in wet grass, but he kept his balance and pressed on, pumping his legs and swinging his arms, wishing for faster shoes, and then finally collapsing in front of the tall man under the tree.
"That girl's after me," Joey panted. "She's chasing me and screaming."
He looked up into the adult face and then back at the girl who had stopped just behind him. The faces were the same, dead and green. Puffed, broken skin. Crazy smiles.
"I've been looking for you Adam," the man said.
"I'm Joey," he replied, hoping this correction would save him.
That's when he woke up. His first inclination was to cry, but he decided then that he'd done enough of that and if he ever wanted to get bigger, he'd have to stop crying, because bigger kids didn't cry. Instead, he lay under his thin blanket, his eyes open, his breath even, but his heart fluttering as he listened to the whispers from upstairs, inviting him to play with them.
Chapter Eight
The heat came to Angel Hill that Monday. Liz was beginning to think summers here would be wonderful. Nice weather. Neither too hot nor too humid, breezes every now and then, like an extended, warmer spring. Their house in Texas had had central air, so the Kitches had no fans. Liz would have to buy some when Jack came home from work. She went upstairs once that day, she couldn't remember why, but when she came down again, she thanked God they lived on the first floor. It was darker down there, and cooler. For all its warmth on the bottom floor, the second floor was plain hot. She imagined the third floor was sweltering.
She busied herself the whole morning cleaning, straightening things, and making sure the dirty clothes were actually in the basket, instead of hanging out like limp tongues. Joey spent most of the morning on the floor in front of Cartoon Network. Finally, she was able to give him his lunch and tell him it was naptime.
She'd closed his closet door while she was cleaning. She didn't mention it to him. If he noticed, he might remember whatever had happened yesterday and not want to go to sleep. She had about an hour before the priest should be here, and she wanted Joey plenty gone by then.
She took a chair to the second floor and sat at one of the front windows, going through one of her books while she kept an eye on the front yard, waiting.
He pulled up in a new car, a Cadillac, it looked like. She wondered where priests got such nice cars all the time. She'd never seen one in a Datsun or some ancient piece of crap. It was always nice new cars.
He knocked and she shook her head, loosening all thoughts of cars so they fell out, and she went to answer the door.
He was tall. She had to look up to see his face. His head was rectangular with short-cropped hair. He was thin. She thought he looked like a cardboard cutout in need of a display. He smiled and introduced himself and she showed him downstairs, telling him her son was asleep, but they could go into the living room.
They talked for a few minutes, but Liz wished he'd just get on with it. If this didn't work, she'd have to think of something else, and so far none of her books were offering any suggestions. She told him they were new in town, that they were starting over in Angel Hill, and that she wanted to start with having their new home blessed for their family.
"Always a good idea," the priest said.
"Where do we start?" she asked.
"Nothing you need do," he said, "except have pleasant thoughts. I'll start in the kitchen, if you'd like, and just work my way through to the stairs."
"Okay."
He went into the kitchen and set a small case on the counter. Liz hadn't noticed the case at first, then she decided it must have all his stuff. Surely he'd need stuff, wouldn't he? She didn't know. She didn't even know what blessing a house entailed.
She heard him muttering something, but couldn't tell what. She imagined it was a prayer. What else would a priest use to bless a house? He stopped and she thought he was on his way back through. Before he did, she left the room to find something to do. She was curious about the process, but she wasn't sure how he felt about someone watching him work. Instead, she'd go about her business and keep praying it worked.
She went upstairs to check the mail. It hadn't come yet. She stepped out to the end of the porch and looked down the street, searching for the mail truck. It wasn't there. The summer air surrounded her in a cocoon and she wished for Jack to get home so she could buy some fans. Maybe they could get central air by next summer. She turned back to the house and froze, wondering if anyone across the street could see the man standing in the doorway, staring at her. He was grey, vague, but his eyes were all there and they pierced her, full of hate.
"You can't hurt me," she
told him.
He sneered and nodded his head once.
What did that mean? Could he? What could he do? No, Liz thought, the blessing has to work.
He went dim and stepped back into the house. Liz heard the priest mounting the steps and the man turned toward the second floor, then vanished. The priest rounded the landing, looked up, smiled at Liz, and went about his prayer, sprinkling holy water onto the stairs. He climbed to the second floor.
Liz went inside and closed the door behind her. The priest blessed the main room. Liz heard a crack behind her. She turned to see the beveled glass in the front door had a lengthwise hairline split down one side. She frowned at it.
The priest blessed the second floor bedroom, the room Jack would use for an office. Liz felt a rumbling in her stomach, a burning that threatened to burst through her skin. She put her hand to it, hoping to calm the pressure. She went downstairs, hoping she didn’t puke in the hall.
The priest moved to the second floor bathroom. Liz dashed to the toilet and unloaded a flood of toast and oatmeal.
The priest blessed the second floor kitchen. Liz heaved again, but her stomach was empty and all that came up was a thin trickle of stomach acid. She put her head against the rim and wondered what had made her so sick.
Then she saw the face again, the pissed off man in the doorway. She knew what he meant now. He could do something. He could do this to her. What else could he do?
She heaved again, so violently she ended up coughing out the rest of it, her lungs empty of breath. She wanted to go tell the priest to stop, that he was finished, so this would end, but another part of her said Let him finish and it will be over for good. No more midnight footsteps, no more thumping, no more dead people in the house.
She grabbed onto the bowl and heaved once more. She coughed out a wad of blood, then suddenly the pressure in her stomach was gone and she felt fine, if exhausted. A layer of sweat covered her like another skin. She flushed the vomit, then got a drink from sink, swishing it in her mouth and spitting it out. She went into the living room and collapsed on the couch.
The Third Floor Page 10