House of Echoes: A Novel

by Brendan Duffy

  Then Ben had gone outside again. He was going to find their baby if she didn’t find him first.

  Ben was depending on her to search the house, and that’s what Caroline would do. She was sure that the sound in the walls would show her the way. All she had to do was stay focused and—

  “There!” she said. A cry from somewhere behind the drywall. She was sure of it. “Did you hear it?” she asked Charlie.

  “I don’t know,” Charlie said. “Maybe.”

  “It was definitely from this wall.” Her ear rang as she pulled it from the wall for the first time in many hours. Some pictures hung above her: a photograph of Bub and Charlie in front of Belvedere Castle; a watercolor of a line of elephants holding one another’s tails. She tossed them into a corner, the shattering of their glass adding more voices to the conversation that rang through the hidden spaces of the Crofts. “But how do we get to him?”

  “But…but how could he have gotten in there?” Charlie asked.

  She smiled at him and ran her fingers through his hair. The boy was so young, but a child should know better than anyone. Impossible things happened all the time. No better proof of this than the fact that Bub had gone missing in the first place.

  There was a grate by the door between Bub’s room and the hallway. Some kind of heating vent.

  The vent’s grate was fastened into the wall. She could have pried it from its brackets with a screwdriver, but she didn’t have a screwdriver. She picked up a rocking chair and used one of its angles to batter the grate.

  After a few tries, the vent’s cover finally buckled. Caroline kicked aside the warped metal and brushed away fragments of drywall.

  I knew it, she thought as she peered into the opening. This was part of the heating system their renovators had added. This was why the wall’s original plaster had been replaced with drywall.

  “Bub?” she yelled into the space. The vent was made of slick aluminum. “Bub!”

  Faintly, a call came from the distance.

  She hammered at the drywall. When the rocking chair came apart in her hands, she picked up a large geode from the floor and used that. Cracks spread across the wall as the grate’s housing came loose. The vent was far too narrow for her to get into, but if she dislodged it she might be able to access the main duct connected to it. Once there, Caroline thought, she might be able to tell if Bub was above or below her. Figure that out and she’d finally be making some progress.

  She cut her finger on a prong of bent metal. In the shadows, the blood looked black. But Caroline found herself choking back a laugh. All those people in the woods, and Bub had been here the whole time.

  She slammed the geode against the wall with all her strength. Flakes of yellow paint and fragments of crystal rained onto the carpet. When Caroline succeeded in widening the hole, she tore at its edges with her hands. Sinewy clumps of drywall collected at her feet. Once she’d cleared enough room for her shoulders, she forced herself into the space between the walls.

  This house had taken her baby, and nothing was going to stop her from getting him back.

  40

  Seized with cold, Ben stood in front of the bathroom mirror. His hands trembled under the water from the tap. The flow from the faucet felt like a blowtorch, but it was the fastest way to get feeling back into his fingers. In the cold room, the water created billows of steam.

  He wiped the fog from the mirror and was surprised by what he saw. Other than his greasy hat-pressed hair and two days of growth, he looked the same. Tired around the eyes, but it was still him. It didn’t seem right.

  That night, after Charlie told them where the man in the smoke had gone, Chief Stanton ran into the night. The tracks he’d found led him to the edge of the forest before he lost the trail. The snow had been too powdery to hold any footprints for long. The chief had called in the abduction, and the FBI arrived early the next morning.

  The agents had been most interested in Charlie’s story, but Ben doubted they’d be able to do much with it. Charlie had told them that he woke up to Bub crying, and Bub hardly ever cried. So Charlie went into one of the cabinets that connected their rooms. He’d wanted to see what was wrong with Bub. That was when he saw the man. Charlie had remained hidden in the cabinet when the man went into his room, looking for him. He’d stayed there until Ben and the chief arrived.

  The agents had Charlie sit down with a sketch artist, and the result was a drawing of a gaunt, heavily bearded man with wild hair, who looked like a character from any child’s nightmare. The agents hadn’t questioned how an eight-year-old had gotten such a detailed look at the face of a man he’d seen in an unlit room through a crack in a cabinet door. Ben doubted they would have gotten a satisfactory answer if they had asked. Ben knew he would have to be the one to get it out of Charlie.

  The FBI also had a lot of questions for Ben and Caroline. Most couple’s children did not suddenly go missing, and this was the second time in just over a year it had happened to the Tierneys. Whether this was terrible luck, incompetence, or something else entirely was of understandable interest.

  The agents had taken rooms in Exton and were coordinating with the state police, while Chief Stanton assumed control of the searches of the Drop for traces of the kidnapper. Yesterday’s searches had been fruitless, but the chief pushed for them to continue. If they discovered the kidnapper’s trail, they might learn something about the vehicle he drove, which would give the investigators something concrete to work with.

  It had taken Ben more than a day to reach his brother. Ted was in Los Angeles, but he promised to get to Swannhaven as soon as he could. Ben wanted him to take Charlie back to the city: someplace where Ben knew his son would be safe.

  This morning, Ben had been out before the sun. He thought the predawn silence might tell him something. The snow had made the forest strange. There were no birds, but the woods were alive with sound. From the ground, the rapping of icy branches across the heights of the ancient trees was disorienting. The shrieks of broken treetops punctuated the morning.

  With a flashlight, Ben had walked the edges of the forest. From the ruined outbuilding by the gravel drive, up and around the lake, and down the Drop beyond the charred husk of the elder tree. He’d returned to the Crofts as the first angels of dawn tested the sky.

  While drying his hands, Ben could hear the sounds of Caroline breaking through the walls of the floor above him. Like Ben, she hadn’t slept or eaten since Friday. She’d become convinced that Bub was trapped somewhere within the Crofts. Of course it was insane, but it was no more crazy than standing outside the Holland Tunnel all night, searching each passing car for a child’s face. A week ago, Ben might have tried to stop her, but if this was how she needed to look for Bub, he wouldn’t stand in her way. If it came to it, he’d help her tear this place down to its foundations.

  In the kitchen, Charlie was at the sink, standing on a chair, trying to do dishes. The kettle went off, and Ben saw that Charlie had boiled water for tea.

  “Should I go to school tomorrow?” Charlie asked.

  “Do you want to go to school?” Ben asked.

  “No.”

  “Good, because I don’t want to drive you.” Between the police, search parties, and FBI, yesterday had passed in a whirlwind. Ben hadn’t yet asked Charlie the questions that had to be asked. With Charlie, they had to be asked in just the right kind of way. Now they festered in Ben’s chest, to the point where he almost feared letting them out. “Did you eat any fruit for breakfast?”

  “This is breakfast.”

  Ben looked at the clock on the microwave and saw that Charlie was right. It was nine o’clock in the morning. He had lost all track of time. “I’ll get out the applesauce.”

  The sledgehammer blows thundered from the ceilings.

  “Mom’s making holes in the walls,” Charlie said.

  “It sounds that way.”

  “I want to help you today.”

  “You want to help.” Ben rolled the words a
round in his mouth. He ladled a few spoonfuls of applesauce onto a plate in front of Charlie. As he did, he hit the spoon hard enough against the plate to make the boy jump. “How do you propose to do that?”

  “I want to go with you. Into the forest,” Charlie said. “To look.”

  “It’s really cold out,” Ben said.

  “I know the forest.”

  “The snow is deep in places.”

  “I’ll be careful. I’ll step in your footprints.”

  “Uncle Ted’s flying from Los Angeles,” Ben said. “He’s coming to take you back to the city tomorrow.”

  “Why?”

  “It will be better there.”

  “I want to stay with you.”

  “It’s just for a little while,” Ben said. He looked at Charlie when he didn’t say anything. His son’s eyes had flooded with tears. Ben wondered if the boy would begin to cry again.

  “But I can help you today.” Charlie choked out the words.

  “Fine,” Ben said. He looked at his son’s plate and wondered if he should eat something. But he was too tired to eat and too afraid to sleep. All he could do was search.

  —

  Ben put on a long-sleeved shirt over his T-shirt, slipped a heavy sweater on, zipped up a track jacket, then wrapped a scarf around his neck before putting on his winter coat. Charlie wore long underwear underneath his snowsuit.

  “You have to tell me if you get too cold,” Ben told him.

  “Okay.”

  They stood on the steps outside the kitchen and looked at the vast white world.

  “Where are we going?” Charlie asked.

  “You tell me,” Ben said. “Where did you see him?”

  Charlie stared at his feet.

  “The man in the smoke. I know he’s real. I saw The Book of Secrets. I saw his fingerprints on it.”

  “I—” Charlie started. He glanced up at Ben. Today his eyes were gray like the sky. “I didn’t know he’d take Bub. I didn’t know that’s what he wanted.”

  Ben looked out over the valley’s dusted treetops.

  “The lake,” Charlie said. “Let’s go to the lake.”

  They climbed the slope to the lake. When they got there, they were met by the flat white plain that the lake had become. A rim of dead cattail husks was the best evidence of its outline.

  They walked along the woods to the east of the lake, picking up Ben’s footprints from earlier. Ben was so exhausted that moving his feet felt like hoisting stones. Charlie stopped at the tree line, just outside a small clearing.

  “I saw him here last time. At night.”

  “What was he doing?” Even his speech was slurred with fatigue.

  “He scared me. He—he killed a deer. He said I was going to die, too. Alone in the cold and the dark.” Ben saw Charlie shiver. “I didn’t know what to do, because he wasn’t scary before. He’d leave me dead animals, like a cat does. Like they were presents. I’d find them sometimes when I followed the sounds in the forest.”

  “He left you dead animals?” Ben asked. He tried to keep his voice even as he processed what he was hearing.

  “Sometimes.” Charlie pointed farther along the lake. “I saw him try to fish once, but he was doing it wrong, so I let him borrow The Book of Secrets, because Hickory Heck and Shoeless Tom always helped each other in the forest. You’re supposed to help people when they need it, aren’t you?” Charlie asked.

  “Tell me everything, Charlie.” Ben didn’t want to know, but he had to know.

  “He used to write things like go and leave by the dead animals,” Charlie said. “He’d write it in blood or with their insides on the trees where he staked pieces of them.”

  “Pieces? He mounted them?” Ben asked. He’d lost the fight for calm. He tried to push images of Hudson far from his mind. Within him, a pendulum swung from exhaustion to adrenaline-fueled terror.

  “But it didn’t make sense, because why would he give me gifts and tell me to leave at the same time? I thought it was part of the game.”

  “Jesus, why didn’t you tell me this?” Ben asked him. “Why didn’t you tell me that some crazy man in the woods was mutilating animals, delivering death threats, and telling us to leave the Crofts?”

  “Because I didn’t want to go,” Charlie said. “But—but now I know I should have told you. I’m sorry.” The boy was again on the brink of tears. He’d been like this since Friday. No one could doubt he was sorry.

  Ben peered into the thicket of trees on the far side of the clearing. The forest went all the way to the mountains and then continued into the state forest preserve. If there were still traces of Bub or his kidnapper out here somewhere, it would take a search party of hundreds to cover those many miles of dense wood. Ben wondered if the FBI had simply given him and the villagers the task of searching here in order to keep them out of the way of the real work. Ben wondered if a person could survive finding the pieces of his baby mounted to the trunk of a tree.

  “Why did the man take Bub?” Ben asked.

  “I don’t know. But the last time…” Charlie trailed off.

  “Last time what? You have to tell me everything, Charlie.”

  “Last time I felt like he didn’t want to kill the deer. He didn’t do it carefully, like with the others. Hickory Heck would only ever kill something for a reason. For food or clothes. The man wore their fur just like Heck. But it was different with this deer. I had to think about it, but now—now I think he did it to scare me, because I think he was scared, too,” Charlie said.

  “You were here when he killed it?” Ben asked.

  “I was in my hiding place.”

  “Show me,” Ben told him.

  They pushed into the clearing. Charlie grabbed a braided rope from the air. It was threaded through whittled branches in a makeshift ladder. Charlie began to pull himself upward. Ben watched him scramble onto a platform a few feet above his head.

  Ben tested his weight against the ladder. The structure above him creaked, but the rope was thick enough to hold him. The platform was not high. Ben thought it was less than ten feet off the ground. When he got to the top, he saw it was constructed from only four planks propped up by a large forked bough. There was enough room for Charlie to sit comfortably, but Ben had to rest on his stomach with most of his legs dangling off the side. Branches framed the view of the lake like a picture window. The frosted tops of the trees in the south woods were behind it, and he could see the frozen valley beyond.

  “You built this?” he asked Charlie.

  “The Book of Secrets showed how. Making the ladder was the hardest part. And learning the knots. The knots were hard.”

  “How did you get the planks up here?” Ben asked.

  “I tied a rope to my foot when I climbed the tree. I threw one end over the branch, then I went back down and tied it to a plank. I pulled on the other end of the rope to lift up the plank, and when it was high enough, I tied my end to a root. Then I climbed up and put the plank in the right place.”

  “Did you ever learn anything else from The Book of Secrets?” Ben thought of the worn book’s blood-streaked pages.

  “I liked the chapter on animal tracks and reading about the stars. And I learned how to see better at night and how to walk without making sound. It was good for watching animals.”

  “There’s a lot of other stuff in the book, too,” Ben said. “Like how to make a fire and catch animals.” Even before finding the man’s bloody thumbprint on the book, Ben had often wondered what Charlie did when he played in the forest. He thought of the burned shed and the piles of carcasses in the pit.

  “I made the boats from bark and leaves and put them in the creek,” Charlie said.

  “Did you ever start a fire? Did you ever try to catch animals?” Ben asked.

  “I had those caterpillars once. And the frog eggs in the jar. I mostly like to watch the animals,” he said. “They’re happier then.”

  “Yeah.” Ben lowered his head to the plank platform. He lay t
here for almost a minute with his eyes closed, letting the cold wood sear his cheek. “Are you cold yet?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, let’s walk around a little more.”

  Ben rolled onto his side, looking for the rope ladder. When he did, he turned toward the trunk of the tree. RUN was carved into the bark, in deep block letters.

  “Did you write that?” Ben asked Charlie. Charlie craned his head to see what Ben was looking at.

  “No.” He spoke the word so softly that it was barely there.

  “Let’s get down,” Ben said.

  “We can pull the rope up,” Charlie said. “I do that when I’m up here.”

  “We have to get down, Charlie,” Ben said. He knew the man in the smoke wasn’t there. Even if he was, Ben wasn’t afraid. The man should be the one to be afraid. “He’s not here. I’ll go down first.”

  Ben lowered himself a few rungs, then jumped the rest of the way to the ground.

  He looked around and saw nothing but trees. Charlie started to climb down, and Ben helped him, even though he didn’t need it.

  “I don’t think he’s here,” Charlie said.

  “No, but we can go back to the Crofts, if you want.”

  “Not yet,” Charlie said. “Do you want to check the creek?”

  “Sure, let’s do that.” This time they walked side by side through the forest. The trees by the mountains were some of the oldest ones on the Drop. In the spring they shut the light away from the ground, but now the corridors were wide and bright between their columns.