by J. A.
"Not me!" said Becky.
"Not me either!" said Theresa.
"I haven't! I haven't!" Kyle pitched in.
"He's not hiding in the van?" I asked them. "Maybe under your feet?"
"No way!" said Becky.
"Are you suuuuuuuuuure?"
"Yes way!"
"Seriously, Andrew," said Becky's mom, "we didn't see him come out of the house. Do you think he's okay?"
"Yeah, he's fine," I muttered. "We should just leave him here."
"Yeah, leave him! Leave him!" proclaimed Becky, while my own children giggled.
"No, no, we're not going to leave him," I said. "We'll just wait for him to come out by himself. Boy, will he feel dumb."
"Is everyone up for another game?" asked Becky's mom. At the children's vigorous assent, she began. "I spy, with my little eye..."
* * *
Ten minutes later, Roger still hadn't come out of the Taywood house, and I was concerned.
Yeah, he was sometimes obnoxious, and immature, and had an almost religious dedication to being a smart-ass, but he really wasn't prone to these kinds of pranks. Even if it had only been the two of us, it would have been out of character to drag it out this long, but with the children present it was just plain mean-spirited. Sure, I was talking it up like it was a big game, but if I hadn't been doing so Theresa and Kyle would've been worried sick.
"It's Kyle's butt!" said Becky.
"That was my next guess!" Theresa insisted.
"Becky! That's not very nice! You apologize to him!" said her mother, in that Scolding Parent voice I've never quite been able to perfect.
"All right, I'm going back inside," I decided. "I'll give him one last chance to come out."
"What if he doesn't?" asked Becky's mom.
"I don't know yet. I'll be back in five minutes, tops."
I returned to the house and stepped into the living room, which was still empty. Once again I got that creeped-out feeling, along with the already present feelings of anger and worry.
"Roger, you're taking this way too far," I announced in a loud voice. "Theresa's in the car crying. Come on out."
No response.
"If you don't come out, I'm going to have to assume that something happened to you, and I'll have to call the police. I'm pretty sure you don't want to explain to the cops that you were hiding out in an abandoned house just to play a joke on some kids. Get out here."
Still nothing.
Fine. I'd do one last quick search of the house, and then contact the police. What a lousy Halloween. No candy, no creative use of the candy after the kids were asleep, possible trespassing charges...Thanksgiving dinner with the in-laws was looking better and better.
I went back upstairs and waved my flashlight in every possible place that Roger could fit, all the while sharing a loud running commentary about what I was going to do to him when I found him, which included a list of the top five locations on his body that might serve as the flashlight's final resting place.
He wasn't anywhere upstairs. And there was simply no way he'd let the joke go on this long.
Something had happened to him. It was officially time to go for help.
I went back to the staircase. As I headed downstairs, my flashlight beam shone across the face of an old man standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at me. I recognized the face from the newspaper photos. Jarvis Taywood.
I tried to say "What the—," "Holy—," and "AAAIIIIEEEE!!!" all at the same time. It came out as an incoherent gurgle. I dropped the flashlight, which bounced down the stairs and rolled away. The figure was gone.
It took me a good fifteen seconds to realize that I needed to breathe, and another fifteen seconds after that to actually regain the ability to do so. One track of my mind kept insisting that there was a perfectly logical explanation, while another kept saying, "I do believe in spooks! I do believe in spooks! I do I do I do!"
No, I didn't. There was a perfectly logical explanation for this. Roger wearing a Jarvis Taywood mask, for example. Everything would be explained as soon as I walked down the stairs to investigate.
The dark stairs.
I walked slowly, carefully, making sure I didn't fall and kill myself, which would've been a pretty major act of party pooping if this did turn out to be a joke. I reached the bottom without any death on my part, then hurried over and retrieved the flashlight.
Then I waved the flashlight beam all over the living room, trying to catch a glimpse of Jarvis Taywood or his ghost. Nothing. Rationally, I knew that the best course of action was to rush outside and tell Becky's mom to call the police, but I also knew that Roger could be in immediate danger. I headed into the kitchen.
Nothing there, either. No place to hide except the pantry.
Inside the pantry, something fell. I let out a rather embarrassing yelp.
I held up the flashlight at a suitable angle for bashing somebody's head if the need arose, then threw open the pantry door and quickly stepped back.
It was empty. A can of spinach rolled against my feet.
Could a ghost topple spinach? Would it have any reason to?
And then, with a barely audible creak, the inside wall of the pantry slowly began to swing open, like a door.
I pulled it open all the way, revealing another room slightly smaller than the pantry, containing nothing but a ladder leading down into a hole in the dirt floor.
"Whoa," was the best I could think to whisper to myself, and I'm pretty sure I didn't even pronounce it correctly.
This was definitely the time to call the police.
Roger screamed from down below.
There was definitely not time to call the police.
I peered down into the hole, but while there was a definite flickering below, I couldn't see anything else. I didn't dare shine my flashlight down there, or even climb down the ladder, not if I wanted to take the old man by surprise. Instead I turned around, praying that this meant I'd be facing the right direction when I landed, stepped backward, and dropped down into the darkness.
I wasn't sure how far I fell. It was far enough that I dropped to my knees with a jolt of pain, but not far enough to shatter any bones.
When I looked up, the first thing that caught my attention was the old man rushing at me with a meat cleaver.
I jumped to my feet and swung the flashlight, bashing him across the face. The old man was knocked to the side, the weapon still in his grasp. He struck the wall and began stumbling back toward me, so I gave him another solid bash with the flashlight and he hit the floor. He didn't move.
We were in what looked exactly like a mobile home with reinforced walls. It probably was a mobile home with reinforced walls. There was a large shelf of canned goods, as well as a shelf of books. The place was lit by a couple of candles and a kerosene lamp.
Roger lay on a bed, his arms over his head and his wrists handcuffed to the metal bedposts.
"The guy's crazy!" he shrieked. "He's a total lunatic! A total complete lunatic! Crazy! I'm not kidding, he's crazy! Oh my God he's crazy!"
"I sort of got that from the meat cleaver," I said, walking over to the bed. "Do you know where the keys to the handcuffs are?"
"They're in his pocket! He's crazy! He was going to eat me!"
I frowned. "He was going to eat you?"
"Yes! He was going to eat my freakin' leg! Have you ever had some crazy guy say he's gonna eat your leg? It's disturbing! It's really disturbing!"
So in the course of about a minute I'd gone from exploring a haunted house to dealing with a meat-cleaver wielding cannibal. Life is quaint sometimes.
"Just calm down," I said. "I'm not going to let him eat your leg. I'm going to go over there, get the keys, set you free, and then we'll go back upstairs where nobody ever gets eaten."
"Are you sure he's unconscious?"
"No. That's why I'm going to drop a can of..." I picked a can off the shelf, "...yams on his head."
"Maybe a book would work better,"
Roger suggested.
I looked over at the other wall. "They're all paperback."
"No, I saw a hardcover one."
I surveyed the bookshelf, and there was indeed a thick hardcover novel. I pulled it off the shelf. " The Stand! Perfect! He'll be out for hours!"
"Maybe you should drop the can of yams too, just to be sure," said Roger.
"Good thinking."
I turned around and saw that while I'd been trying to find a suitable object for dropping on his head, the old man had recovered and was sitting against the wall, meat cleaver balanced on his knees. "I'm sorry," he said, giving us a sheepish smile.
I really wasn't sure what to say to that. "I'm, uh...sorry, too."
The old man nodded as if my apology were acceptable. "I'm Jervis Taywood."
"It's Jervis! I knew it!"
"I knew I was going to be discovered sooner or later," said Jervis. "But I just couldn't do it. I couldn't stay below all the time. Sometimes you've got to get up and wander around the house, you know?"
"Absolutely," I agreed.
"I felt horrible abandoning my family and all, but these...these rages... I got to the point where I couldn't control them."
"So these are like, drag people to your underground lair and threaten to eat their leg kinds of rages?" I asked.
Jervis nodded. "Yes, basically." He glanced over at Roger. "I wouldn't really have eaten your leg. I may have scooped out a forkful, but it never would have made it to my mouth."
"Shut up you crazy lunatic son of a—!"
"Chill, Roger," I said, setting a reassuring hand on his leg, which was probably not the best location for a reassuring hand at that particular time and which elicited a shriek of horror.
"I don't know what sparked the rage tonight," Jervis said. "Okay, well, I do. It was that whole 'ghostie ghostie ghostie' thing and that annoying whistling. It just set me off. But I never meant to grab your friend and drop him down here. I guess I wasn't expecting to see him standing right there when I opened the pantry door."
"I can understand that," I said. "It's not the best sight in the world. So you faked your death and went to live down here, huh?"
"I didn't fake my death. I just disappeared."
"What about jumping into the vat of molten plastic?"
"Who said I did that?"
"I heard it...uh, I dunno, somewhere..."
"Did you hear it from the legitimate news media?"
"No, probably not," I admitted.
"That's a pretty dumb way to commit suicide, don't you think?"
"Yes, probably."
"Just how old are you?"
"All right, knock it off," I said. "I don't need to be lectured by somebody who goes into cannibalistic rages."
We sat in silence for a long moment.
"So what now?" asked Jervis.
"I'm not quite sure," I said.
We sat in silence for another long moment.
"I guess we leave," I decided.
"That works for me," said Jervis. He removed a small pair of keys from his pocket and tossed them to me. "Sorry about the handcuffs. They're meant for me. You know, when I get those rage things."
I unlocked the cuffs. Roger immediately sat up and began vigorously rubbing his wrists, trying to restore circulation.
"Don't worry," said Jervis. "I'll try to do better in the future. You're not going to tell anybody about me, are you?"
"No, your secret is safe with us," I said.
"This is the police!" a voice shouted from above. "If anyone is down there, make yourselves known!"
Jervis shrugged. "I'll get psychiatric help rather than jail, right?"
"Yeah, I think that's probably a safe bet."
"Okay. Could you guys maybe, you know, go up there and kind of plead my case before they come down here? Maybe not your friend so much," he said, looking at me, "but you seem nice enough."
"Sure," I said. "Come on, Roger."
We walked over to the ladder. "We'll be right up!" I announced.
* * *
Jervis was gone when the officers went down the ladder.
My first thought: "Oh my God, he was a ghost after all!"
My second thought: "Check the closet, moron."
They did. And the fake back wall revealed a small tunnel, which eventually emerged into the pantry of the "abandoned" house next door.
The police never did find him.
And yes, I got in a lot of trouble when Helen came home.
So to close, I just want to say that if you hear eerie sounds in your house at night, and you have a pantry, and your home was built under circumstances that would have enabled it to be constructed over a buried mobile home, you can never be too careful...
Oh, and on one final Halloween-related note, who in the world decided that those piddly little miniature candy bars should be called "Fun Size?" That's not fun size! Fun size would be a block of chocolate the size of a wooly mammoth!
Thank you for your attention.
THE NECRO FILE
A Harry McGlade Mystery by JA Konrath
Chapter 1
“It’s my husband, Mr. McGlade. He thinks he can raise the dead.”
The woman sitting in front of my desk was named Norma Cauldridge. She had the figure of a Barlett pear and so many freckles that she was more beige than Caucasian. She also came equipped with a severe overbite, a lazy eye, and a mole on her cheek. Not a Cindy Crawford type of mole, either. This one looked like she glued the end of a hotdog to her face. A hairy hotdog.
Plus, she smelled like sweaty feet.
Any man married to her would certainly have to raise the dead every time she wanted sex.
But I didn’t become a private investigator to meet femme fatales. Well, actually I did. But mostly I did it for the money. And hers was green just like anyone else’s.
I took a can of Lysol aerosol deodorizer from my desk and gave the air a spritz. Now it smelled like sweaty feet and pine trees. With a hint of lavender.
“I get four hundred a day, plus expenses,” I told her.
I put away the air freshener and tried to sneak a look behind her large round Charlie Brownish head. When she walked into my office a minute ago, I’d been watching the National Cheerleading Finals on cable. The TV was still on, but I had muted the sound to be polite.
“I didn’t tell you what I want you to do yet.”
She was a whiner too. Nasally and high-pitched. It’s like God took a dare to make the most unattractive woman possible.
“You want me to take pictures of him acting crazy, so you can use them in the divorce.”
On television a group of nubile young twenty-somethings did synchronized cartwheels and landed in splits. I love cable.
“How did you know?” Norma asked.
I glanced at Norma. The only splits she ever did were banana.
“It’s my job to know, ma’am. I’ll need your address, his place of work, and the first three days’ pay in advance.”
Norma’s face pinched.
“I still love him, Mr. McGlade. But he’s not the same man I married. He’s...obsessed.”
Her shoulders slumped, and the tears came. I nudged over the box of Kleenex I kept on the desk for when I surfed certain internet sites.
“It’s not your fault, Mrs. Drawbridge.”
“Cauldridge.”
“A man is talking, sweetie. Don’t interrupt.”
“Sorry.”
“The fact is, Nora, some men aren’t meant to marry. They feel trapped, tied down, so they seek out different venues.”
She sniffled. “Necromancy?”
“I’ve seen all sorts of perversions in my business. One day he’s a good husband. The next day, he’s a card-carrying necrosexual. Happens all the time.”
More tears. I made a mental note to look up “necromancy” in the dictionary. Then I made another mental note to buy a dictionary. Then I made a third mental note to buy a pencil, because I always forgot my mental notes. Then I wat
ched the cheerleaders do high kicks.
When Norma finally calmed down, she asked, “Do you take Visa?”
I nodded, wondering if I could buy used cheerleading floormats on eBay. Preferably ones with stains.
Chapter 2
Ebay didn’t have any.
Instead I bid on a set of used pom-pons and a coach’s whistle. I also bid on some old Doobie Brothers records. That led to placing a bid on a record player, since mine was busted. Then I bid on a carton of copier toner, because it was so cheap, and then I had to bid on a copier because I didn’t have one. But after thinking about it a bit, I realized I didn’t really need a copier, and those Doobie Brothers albums were probably available on CD for less than the cost of a record player.
I tried to cancel my bids, but those eBay jerks wouldn’t let me. The jerks.
I buried my anger in online pornography. Three minutes later, I headed out the door, slightly winded and ready to get some work done.
Chapter 3
This chapter is even shorter than the last one.
Chapter 4
George Drawbridge worked as a teller for Oak Tree Bank. At a branch office. It was only three o’clock, and his wife told me he normally stayed until five, so I had plenty of time to grab a few beers first. Chicago is famous for its stuffed crust pizza, and I indulged in a small pie at a nearby joint and entertained myself by asking everyone who worked there if they made a lot of dough.
An hour later, after they asked me to leave, I sat on the sidewalk across the street from the bank, hiding in plain sight by pretending I was homeless. This involved untucking my shirt and pockets, messing up my hair, and holding up a sign that said “I’m homeless” written on the back of the pizza box.
Other possibilities had been, “Will do your taxes for food” and “I’m just plain lazy” and my favorite “this is a piece of cardboard.” But I went with brevity because I still didn’t have a pencil and had to write it in sauce.
I sat there for a little over and hour before George Drawbridge appeared.