“Y-yes.” Billings’ hands were laced tightly across his chest, laced tightly enough to show a white moon at each knuckle.
“Was there anything in there? Did you see the—”
“I didn’t see anything!” Billings screamed suddenly. And the words poured out, as if a black cork had been pulled from the bottom of his soul: “When she died I found her, see. And she was black. All black. She swallowed her own tongue and she was just as black as a nigger in a minstrel show and she was staring at me. Her eyes, they looked like those eyes you see on stuffed animals, all shiny and awful, like live marbles, and they were saying it got me, Daddy, you let it get me, you killed me, you helped it kill me . . .” His words trailed off. One single tear very large and silent, ran down the side of his cheek.
“It was a brain convulsion, see? Kids get those sometimes. A bad signal from the brain. They had an autopsy at Hartford Receiving and they told us she choked on her tongue from the convulsion. And I had to go home alone because they kept Rita under sedation. She was out of her mind. I had to go back to that house all alone, and I know a kid don’t just get convulsions because their brain frigged up. You can scare a kid into convulsions. And I had to go back to the house where it was.”
He whispered, “I slept on the couch. With the light on.”
“Did anything happen?”
“I had a dream,” Billings said. “I was in a dark room and there was something I couldn’t . . . couldn’t quite see, in the closet. It made a noise ... a squishy noise. It reminded me of a comic book I read when I was a kid. Tales from the Crypt, you remember that? Christ! They had a guy named Graham Ingles; he could draw every god-awful thing in the world – and some out of it. Anyway, in this story this woman drowned her husband, see? Put cement blocks on his feet and dropped him into a quarry. Only he came back. He was all rotted and black-green and the fish had eaten away one of his eyes and there was seaweed in his hair. He came back and killed her. And when I woke up in the middle of the night, I thought that would be leaning over me. With claws . . . long claws . . .”
Dr. Harper looked at the digital clock inset into his desk. Lester Billings had been speaking for nearly half an hour. He said, “When your wife came back home, what was her attitude toward you?”
“She still loved me,” Billings said with pride. “She still wanted to do what I told her. That’s the wife’s place, right? This women’s lib only makes sick people. The most important thing in life is for a person to know his place. His . . . his . . . uh . . .”
“Station in life?”
“That’s it!” Billings snapped his fingers. “That’s it exactly. And a wife should follow her husband. Oh, she was sort of colourless the first four or five months after – dragged around the house, didn’t sing, didn’t watch the TV, didn’t laugh. I knew she’d get over it. When they’re that little, you don’t get so attached to them. After a while you have to go to the bureau drawer and look at a picture to even remember exactly what they looked like.
“She wanted another baby,” he added darkly. “I told her it was a bad idea. Oh, not forever, but for a while. I told her it was a time for us to get over things and begin to enjoy each other. We never had a chance to do that before. If you wanted to go to a movie, you had to hassle around for a babysitter. You couldn’t go into town to see the Mets unless her folks would take the kids, because my mom wouldn’t have anything to do with us. Denny was born too soon after we were married, see? She said Rita was just a tramp, a common little corner-walker. Corner-walker is what my mom always called them. Isn’t that a sketch? She sat me down once and told me diseases you can get if you went to a cor . . . to a prostitute. How your pri . . . your penis has just a little tiny sore on it one day and the next day it’s rotting right off. She wouldn’t even come to the wedding.”
Billings drummed his chest with his fingers.
“Rita’s gynaecologist sold her on this thing called an IUD – interuterine device. Foolproof, the doctor said. He just sticks it up the woman’s . . . her place, and that’s it. If there’s anything in there, the egg can’t fertilize. You don’t even know it’s there.” He smiled at the ceiling with dark sweetness. “No one knows if it’s there or not. And next year she’s pregnant again. Some foolproof.
“No birth-control method is perfect,” Harper said. “The pill is only ninety-eight percent. The IUD may be ejected by cramps, strong menstrual flow, and, in exceptional cases, by evacuation.”
“Yeah. Or you can take it out.”
“That’s possible.”
“So what’s next? She’s knitting little things, singing in the shower, and eating pickles like crazy. Sitting on my lap and saying things about how it must have been God’s will. Piss.”
“The baby came at the end of the year after Shirl’s death?”
“That’s right. A boy. She named it Andrew Lester Billings. I didn’t want anything to do with it, at least at first. My motto was she screwed up, so let her take care of it. I know how that sounds but you have to remember that I’d been through a lot.
“But I warmed up to him, you know it? He was the only one of the litter that looked like me, for one thing. Denny looked like his mother, and Shirl didn’t look like anybody, except maybe my Grammy Ann. But Andy was the spitting image of me.
“I’d get to playing around with him in his playpen when I got home from work. He’d grab only my finger and smile and gurgle. Nine weeks old and the kid was grinning up at his old dad. You believe that?
“Then one night, here I am coming out of a drugstore with a mobile to hang over the kid’s crib. Me! Kids don’t appreciate presents until they’re old enough to say thank you, that was always my motto. But there I was, buying him silly crap and all at once I realize I love him the most of all. I had another job by then, a pretty good one, selling drill bits for Cluett and Sons. I did real well, and when Andy was one, we moved to Waterbury. The old place had too many bad memories.
“And too many closets.
“That next year was the best one for us. I’d give every finger on my right hand to have it back again. Oh, the war in Vietnam was still going on, and the hippies were still running around with no clothes on, and the niggers were yelling a lot, but none of that touched us. We were on a quiet street with nice neighbours. We were happy,” he summed up simply. “I asked Rita once if she wasn’t worried. You know, bad luck comes in threes and all that. She said not for us. She said Andy was special. She said God had drawn a ring around him.”
Billings looked morbidly at the ceiling.
“Last year wasn’t so good. Something about the house changed. I started keeping my boots in the hall because I didn’t like to open the closet door anymore. I kept thinking: Well, what if it’s in there? All crouched down and ready to spring the second I open the door? And I’d started thinking I could hear squishy noises, as if something black and green and wet was moving around in there just a little.
“Rita asked me if I was working too hard, and I started to snap at her, just like the old days. I got sick to my stomach leaving them alone to go to work, but I was glad to get out. God help me, I was glad to get out. I started to think, see, that it lost us for a while when we moved. It had to hunt around, slinking through the streets at night and maybe creeping in the sewers. Smelling for us. It took a year, but it found us. It’s back. It wants Andy and it wants me. I started to think, maybe if you think of a thing long enough, and believe in it, it gets real. Maybe all the monsters we were scared of when we were kids, Frankenstein and Wolfman and Mummy, maybe they were real. Real enough to kill the kids that were supposed to have fallen into gravel pits or drowned in lakes or were just never found. Maybe . . .”
“Are you backing away from something, Mr. Billings?”
Billings was silent for a long time – two minutes clicked off the digital clock. Then he said abruptly; “Andy died in February. Rita wasn’t there. She got a call from her father. Her mother had been in a car crash the day after New Year’s and wasn’t e
xpected to live. She took a bus back that night.
“Her mother didn’t die, but she was on the critical list for a long time – two months. I had a very good woman who stayed with Andy days. We kept house nights. And closet doors kept coming open.”
Billings licked his lips. “The kid was sleeping in the room with me. It’s funny, too. Rita asked me once when he was two if I wanted to move him into another room. Spock or one of those other quacks claims its bad for kids to sleep with their parents, see? Supposed to give them traumas about sex and all that. But we never did it unless the kid was asleep. And I didn’t want to move him. I was afraid to, after Denny and Shirl.”
“But you did move him, didn’t you?” Dr. Harper asked.
“Yeah,” Billings said. He smiled a sick, yellow smile. “I did.” Silence again. Billings wrestled with it.
“I had to!” he barked finally. “I had to! It was all right when Rita was there, but when she was gone, it started to get bolder. It started . . .” He rolled his eyes at Harper and bared his teeth in a savage grin. “Oh, you won’t believe it. I know what you think, just another goofy for your casebook, I now that, but you weren’t there, you lousy smug head-peeper.
“One night every door in the house blew wide open. One morning I got up and found a trail of mud and filth across the hall between the coat closet and the front door. Was it going out? Coming in? I don’t know! Before Jesus, I just don’t know! Records all scratched up and covered with slime, mirrors broken . . . and the sounds . . . the sounds . . .”
He ran a hand through his hair. “You’d wake up at three in the morning and look into the dark and at first you’d say, ‘It’s only the clock.’ But underneath it you could hear something moving in a stealthy way. But not too stealthy, because it wanted you to hear it. A slimy sliding sound like something from the kitchen drain. Or a clicking sound, like claws being dragged lightly over the staircase banister. And you’d close your eyes, knowing that hearing it was bad, but if you saw it . . .
“And always you’d be afraid that the noises might stop for a little while, and then there would be a laugh right over your face and a breath of air like stale cabbage on your face, and then hands on your throat.”
Billings was pallid and trembling.
“So I moved him. I knew it would go for him, see. Because he was weaker. And it did. That very first night he screamed in the middle of the night and finally, when I got up the cojones to go in, he was standing up in bed and screaming. ‘The boogeyman, Daddy . . . boogeyman . . . wanna go wif Daddy, go wif Daddy.’ ” Billings’ voice had become a high treble, like a child’s. His eyes seemed to fill his entire face; he almost seemed to shrink on the couch.
“But I couldn’t,” the childish breaking treble continued, “I couldn’t. And an hour later there was a scream. An awful, gurgling scream. And I knew how much I loved him because I ran in, I didn’t even turn on the light, I ran, ran, ran, oh, Jesus God Mary, it had him; it was shaking him, shaking him just like a terrier shakes a piece of cloth and I could see something with awful slumped shoulders and a scarecrow head and I could smell something like a dead mouse in a pop bottle and I heard . . .” He trailed off, and then his voice clicked back into an adult range. “I heard it when Andy’s neck broke.” Billings’ voice was cool and dead. “It made a sound like ice cracking when you’re skating on a country pond in winter.”
“Then what happened?”
“Oh, I ran,” Billings said in the same cool, dead voice. “I went to an all-night diner. How’s that for complete cowardice? Ran to an all-night diner and drank six cups of coffee. Then I went home. It was already dawn. I called the police even before I went upstairs. He was lying on the floor and staring at me. Accusing me. A tiny bit of blood had run out of one ear. Only a drop, really. And the closet door was open – but just a crack.”
The voice stopped. Harper looked at the digital clock. Fifty minutes had passed.
“Make an appointment with the nurse,” he said. “In fact, several of them. Tuesdays and Thursdays?”
“I only came to tell my story,” Billings said. “To get it off my chest. I lied to the police, see? Told them the kid must have tried to get out of his crib in the night and . . . they swallowed it. Course they did. That’s just what it looked like. Accidental, like the others. But Rita knew. Rita . . . finally . . . knew . . .”
He covered his eyes with his right arm and began to weep.
“Mr. Billings, there is a great deal to talk about,” Dr. Harper said after a pause. “I believe we can remove some of the guilt you’ve been carrying, but first you have to want to get rid of it.”
“Don’t you believe I do?” Billings cried, removing his arm from his eyes. They were red, raw, wounded.
“Not yet,” Harper said quietly. “Tuesdays and Thursdays?”
After a long silence, Billings muttered, “Goddamn shrink. All right. All right.”
“Make an appointment with the nurse, Mr. Billings. And have a good day.”
Billings laughed emptily and walked out of the office quickly, without looking back.
The nurse’s station was empty. A small sign on the desk blotter said: “Back in a Minute.”
Billings turned and went back into the office. “Doctor, your nurse is—”
The room was empty.
But the closet door was open. Just a crack.
“So nice,” the voice from the closet said. “So nice.” The words sounded as if they might have come through a mouthful of rotted seaweed.
Billings stood rooted to the spot as the closet door swung open. He dimly felt warmth at his crotch as he wet himself.
“So nice,” the boogeyman said as it shambled out.
It still held its Dr. Harper mask in one rotted, spade-claw hand.
Appendix
Haunted House Novels: A Listing
Anson, Jay The Amityville Horror (1978)
Based on a true story about a family of five including three children, who move into a new house on Long Island and are subjected to a terrifying plague of strange voices, extreme cold and green slime issuing from the walls.
Bangs, John Kendrick Toppleton’s Client, Or A Spirit in Exile (1893)
A young American lawyer takes over an apartment in London which is haunted by a ghost who induces him to act as his attorney in a long-running dispute.
Barker, Clive Coldheart Canyon (2002)
When ageing actor Todd Pickett has a facelift that goes wrong, he retreats to a house on the outskirts of Hollywood. The owner is Katya Lupi, a film star of the 1920s who has not aged a day, and Pickett is soon surrounded by a plethora of ghosts of past stars and creatures from the dark realms of hell.
Bessand-Massenet, Pierre Amorous Ghost (1957)
Amusing story of a haunted building where a female ghost establishes a conversational and ultimately sexual relationship with a young writer.
Blackwood, Algernon Jimbo (1909)
Young James Stone, nicknamed Jimbo, is terrified of an empty house near where he lives, believing it to be haunted, and when he unwittingly finds himself inside, requires all the assistance of his former governess to escape a terrible fate.
Blatty, William Peter The Exorcist (1971)
Horror story inspired by a haunted plot in Washington and focusing on a young girl whose personality and actions are drastically affected by the weird sensations occurring in the family home.
Bradbury, Ray From The Dust Returned (2001)
Dwelling in an ancient, legend-haunted mansion in the heart of the American Midwest are a family destined to live forever. But a sense of doom is slowly gathering around the house and its inhabitants as they prepare for a grand gala reunion.
Crompton, Richmal The House (1926) [USA: Dread Dwelling]
Weird novel by the British author famous for the “Just William” children’s series, about an old Tudor mansion which evokes madness and death among its inhabitants.
Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves (2000)
Osten
sibly a many-layered critique of a documentary film, The Navidson Record, about a house in Virginia inhabited by the family of photographer Will Navidson. The humdrum place is supposed to be his haven from danger-filled shoots in the Third World, but instead proves to be very far from normal.
De Morgan, William Alice For Short (1907)
The ghosts of a beautiful woman dressed in eighteenth-century costume and a man carrying a sword haunt an old house in Soho, regularly re-enacting a murder until the mystery is solved by the discovery of some bones in the cellar below.
Dick, R. A. The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1945)
Coastal house haunted by the ghost of an old sea Captain who does not take kindly to the strong-willed widow who moves in, but is ultimately won over by her charm.
Falconer, Lanoe Cecilia De Noel (1891)
Novel, highly regarded by M. R. James, about a ghost who materialises at a house party in Weald Manor and influences all the guests in different ways.
Hall, Leland Sinister House (1919)
A lone ancient house amidst a new development in Boston is haunted by the ghost of a man and woman, its former owners, who prey on the new residents.
Herbert, James The Ghosts of Sleath (1994)
Psychic investigator David Ash risks his sanity when he delves into the mysterious events terrorising a small community in the Chiltern Hills.
Herbert, James Haunted (1988)
Another case for ghost hunter David Ash, when he spends three nights in the terror-ridden house called Edbrook trying to solve its nightmare past.
Heyse, Paul The House of The Unbelieving Thomas (1894)
Two ghosts haunt a German town house, appear at seances and also intervene in the affairs of the residents to prove their actuality.
Horsnell, Horace Castle Cottage (1940)
The maid in a beautiful Regency home learns the secret of two ghosts – a young man and woman – and tries to help them escape their fate.
The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books) Page 71