Aaaiiieee

by Jeffrey Thomas

  They were an obscene Madonna and child for this Christmas eve. It was not a funeral mass, but a midnight mass, after all. See? The great cross above the altar—out of her range on TV—had even been inverted for the occasion.

  The head priest recoiled, lifting one arm to shield himself—itself—from Devin’s offering. But it was not for him anyway. She knelt before the bodies of the sacrificed, gently positioned her hands over the brow of her son, with his sad, troubled face.

  Much of the water had wound down her wrists, despite her efforts. Only drops remained, but they splashed his small round head. Devin even shook loose the last two drops onto the head of the Madonna.

  A howling of wind or voices erupted, and the congregation rushed into that dark doorway in the corner. The head priest went last, casting one last hateful look over his shoulder. The touch of his gaze made Devin scream.

  The door slammed shut.

  * * *

  One of the nurses found Devin there, on the floor of the chapel. She screamed also.

  It was first thought, naturally, that Devin had somehow stolen both the body of her stillborn son and that of the woman from the emergency ward, and moved them into this room. After all, a nurse had inadvisably told Devin about the victim. But after interviewing her, and talking with the nurses from postpartum recovery, police were willing to at least accept the possibility that some sort of cult had broken into the hospital and transported the bodies into the chapel. After all, one drugged and hurting woman could scarcely have turned that heavy cross upside-down by herself.

  She was released after questioning, though there were problems with her story. For instance, there was no door in that shadowy comer of the chapel where she claimed the congregation had emerged, and fled.

  It was no wonder they thought her responsible, at first, and still wondered about her later. For when the nurse found her, Devin was sitting beside the body of the murdered girl, and rocking her dead son in her arms. And laughing, of all things. Laughing as if with joy. Or at least, with relief. And her words sounded like the rantings of a madwoman.

  Because she was laughing, “I saved him. I saved him.” Over and over. Her eyes bright and fervent, like those of an acolyte.

  The Yellow House

  When I was a boy the Yellow House was as much a part of Halloween as the jack-o’-lanterns it so closely resembled on that night, its black windows gaping sightlessly in its bright yellow face. You could see the Yellow House way down the street, glowing in the dark, almost, and the dread excitement would build. We had to go up the walk and knock on the door. Every year we did this and no one answered, but we were always convinced (okay, half convinced) that this would be the time the door would crack open and there would stand some resurrected something-or-other, decayed, grinning and glaring at the same time. So we’d knock and then run, screaming and laughing. That’s how we confront what we’re afraid of, right?—give it a quick close look and a touch and then run. But without having really seen inside.

  Every town has its Yellow House, so to speak: a house where a mad old woman (witch) lived, or where someone had been murdered, or where the Devil once looked out of the fireplace. The Yellow House wasn’t located up on some desolate hill, and structurally or architecturally speaking, my old family house looked much, much more foreboding. It was a small two-story crammed between two similar houses, with only a scrap of front yard. But it had that weird color, for one. A sort of traffic sign yellow, the yellow they paint bulldozers and such. And damned if I ever saw anybody repaint the thing, but the paint never peeled or flaked away or faded in all those years I knew it as a boy. My father remarked on it more than once. As did my grandfather whom I helped repaint our family home, and he knew his painting. Of course, I moved out of state for nine years, and in that time only saw the house on a few occasions during visits home, but once I asked my father if he’d ever seen anyone adding new paint to the house, and he hadn’t. The house stood empty for most of my boyhood (and all those Halloweens) after the mysterious disappearance of its owner, but the funny thing is that the family who finally bought the house didn’t repaint it a new color. I intend to find them and ask them if they ever added a new coat. Maybe they liked the color, and didn’t want to change the personality of the famous Yellow House. The young yuppie-type couple living there now must think it’s neat, and they put up new black shutters and painted the door black. It looks quite striking, like a big plastic toy house. I’ll have to talk to them, too, now…see what they may have learned, if anything, by living inside the Yellow House.

  They must have heard the stories; you can’t have lived in town a year or two without having heard them. And it was for these stories more than because of its strange color that the place had become our town’s official haunted house.

  First of all, the town’s all-time prize loony had owned the Yellow House, and painted it himself, as the town was very much aware at that time. It was no quaint town tradition or landmark then, but a plain old eyesore. So kids began rapping on the door and running away laughing on Halloween night even back then in the forties. Supposedly one kid got shot with a BB gun by the owner—at least my mother seems to remember that story.

  His name was Edwin Phillips, the town dog officer. Another great reason for banging on his door. One time, my mother has never forgotten (the reason she curses him to this day, obsessive animal lover that she is), three dogs were found shot in Phillips’s back yard—two of them still clinging to life, a mother and pup. The mother died, the pup was saved. The dogs had been picked up by him only the day before, not held for the proper amount of time before humane termination. It reached the papers, death threats came even from out of state, and Phillips was out a job. At that time, cages were found in his basement—his own kennel—though, oddly, no one had ever complained of undue barking at his house. There was talk of digging up his yard and some pressure from humane society people but it was never done.

  He never worked again, apparently, and how he sustained himself I haven’t as yet determined. He was well known as an amateur inventor, however, so maybe one of his inventions had become successful somewhere down the line and he lived off that. For lack of a town witch, the kids called him a mad scientist, or Dr. Frankenstein. Maybe he was assembling a Frankencanine out of various parts of dogs he’d slaughtered, they no doubt joked.

  It was because of the dog stories that Crazy Ed Phillips became the suspect in town gossip when those two old men disappeared in 1950. Both were boozers with no real family and they lived in the rooms over the little center pub my father still frequents today. The first, Gregory Hitchings, vanished on or about January fifteenth. The second man, old Frankie Allen, the town drunk of the day, was discovered missing (a funny expression) February seventeenth. Gone without a trace, both men, no clothes packed, and both boarders at the little center pub…two streets over from the Yellow House.

  There was another funny story about Ed Phillips and the two missing men, but first a little background. Phillips himself occasionally visited the pub for some brews alone in the corner, and the other men would taunt him a bit. Kill any dogs lately? How’s the mad scientist business these days? Well, apparently several times Phillips had lashed back at the men, his tongue loosened by beer, and cursed their stupidity and ignorance at not recognizing his greatness, for not respecting his important work, which would change the world forever. The standard mad scientist lines. So the men would laugh harder, send him over some beers which he would drink in brooding silence.

  But in early 1950 Phillips became a feared and hated celebrity again as the rumors spread. One man whom Phillips had raged at in the pub claimed that Phillips had alluded to “experiments in human longevity,” and suggested that he had kidnapped the two old-timers to use as human guinea pigs, figuring they wouldn’t be missed much. Others quickly took up this belief. Finally it was brought to the attention of the town chief of police, Richard McGee. He found the rumors ridiculous and groundless, and Edwin Phillips was never
officially questioned about the disappearances. But Greg Hitchings and Frankie Allen were never heard from again, and even McGee couldn’t offer a plausible explanation.

  And now the funny story. In May of 1950 a boy of about twelve was found wandering around the sand-pits across from the reservoir. He seemed dazed, maybe deaf and dumb (he didn’t respond to questioning), his over-sized clothes were in tatters and he was seriously under-fed and dehydrated. In police custody, he died of cardiac arrest no more than two hours after he’d been picked up. The “Mystery Boy” was photographed and his picture run in the papers, but he was never identified and was ultimately buried in the potter’s field corner of Pine Grove.

  The thing was, the pitiful Mystery Boy had a large pink C-shaped scar on his temple near his right eyebrow. I’m looking at it now, quite distinct, in a copy of that yellowed old newspaper my grandmother had fortunately saved all those years (zealous child lover, gossip lover and collector that she had been).

  Frankie Allen, fifty-eight at the time of his disappearance, had had a large pink C-shaped scar near his right eyebrow, from a time when he’d fallen down drunk and bashed his head a good one on the curb.

  And that was how the Yellow House got so famous. And to top it all off, Crazy Ed Phillips himself vanished sometime in the summer of 1957, a few months before I was born. He hadn’t packed, either, and no trace of him ever turned up. Some now say a serial killer had claimed Greg Hitchings and old Frankie (maybe had something to do with that boy, too)…then came back and got old Crazy Ed. In any case, his house stood empty a long thirteen years, for whatever legal reasons, until 1970. I mean to look into that oddly lengthy delay.

  When I came back to live here this past spring, I went out of my way one day to walk down to the Yellow House with my fiancé, to point it out to her and tell her the stories. She had to know them if she were to become an official resident of this town. She acted disgusted and irritated by the whole thing…that’s how I could tell she was becoming afraid. I ate it up; I’ve always loved a good nasty mystery.

  “The Mystery Boy was old Frankie Allen!” I told Pammy.

  “Oh grow up,” she said, hugging her arms and anxious to go. But as we walked on, her curiosity wouldn’t let up, and she meekly asked me, “So what did he look like; have you seen an old picture?”

  “What, of Frankie Allen? No.”

  “No, of Ed Phillips. What did he look like? Creepy? Like a mad scientist?”

  “Of course. I don’t have a picture, but my mother told me he had sunken suspicious-looking eyes and wild uncombed red hair, and he was always unshaven.”

  “How old was he when he disappeared?”

  “In his fifties, I guess.”

  “So he could conceivably still be alive today.”

  “Yeah, he’s got a cabin in Tibet with Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa. The guy would be—what—ninety almost, now.”

  “So?”

  * * *

  Of course Halloween has always been my big day, and so it was natural and inevitable that on this first Halloween back in my old home town I should want to walk to the Ed Phillips place. It was this impulse that has led to my current investigation of what went on in Crazy Ed’s “kennel.”

  I couldn’t convince Pammy to go with me…she thought it was immature and stupid, and she was irritated and disgusted (afraid). So I told her fine, I’ll go alone. I put on a rubber monster mask (a cheapie; it was a balding old man with frizzy white hair—a mad scientist, very consciously chosen for the occasion), and took an orange plastic pumpkin to go trick-or-treating at the age of thirty-three.

  I even hit a few other houses on the way. “I am Edwin Phillips,” I proclaimed in a deep voice behind muffling rubber on the step of one house.

  “Oh, you’re terrible!” laughed my mother, a hand to her heart.

  As I turned onto the street at last, my heart actually began to beat with that old dread excitement, with the extra thrill of reliving a nostalgic memory. I felt foolishly jubilant in my mask, wet inside with my breath. I wondered where my old best friend Dicky Evans was, and wouldn’t it have been great if he and Ronny Hall and David Porter were with me now, daring each other to be the first to run up the walk and knock. Here with me now to witness, for the first time, someone actually answering our knocks. Some pleasant yuppie man or woman, and yet still my heart was deliciously pounding.

  As it was, I never made it to that newly painted black door to knock. The house was glowing, the yellow paint undiminished after all this time. Maybe it was one of Crazy Ed’s inventions, I now thought…and if so, it certainly would have changed the world, in its way, if he’d lived to market it. An enterprising person (myself? I thought) might scrape off a sample, have it analyzed and find a way of producing it somehow. Just a fantasy.

  The house was glowing, and I felt like I hadn’t seen it with Pammy in the day, hadn’t seen it since the last, long-ago Halloween I’d come up this street. A chilly gust of wind sent leaves scampering across the road and my sneakers, like yellow flakes of paint finally fallen from the house to blow away. I heard children laughing in the darkness ahead—ghostly echoes from my past.

  As I advanced along the street I saw the dark form of a man standing on the sidewalk directly in front of the Yellow House.

  There were three children on the step, and the door to the house was open, but away from me so that I couldn’t see who it was on the other side dropping things into their proffered pillow cases. My attention was torn back and forth from the man to the open door as I continued advancing. The man must be waiting for his children, I reasoned. If I had small children I’d want to accompany them just to be safe. So why did I keep looking back at him, away from the door?

  The door closed, the children turned and ran down the walk. Past the man. On to the next house. The man didn’t move.

  Now I was really looking at him. Straining to see detail. A lot of my nostalgic thrill went right out the window, and I had a strange impulse to just keep on walking past the man once I got to him, and not stop at the Yellow House.

  I was coming up on the man now, and I could discern that he was, as I had feared, quite an old-looking man.

  Then another strange impulse came to me. Despite my sudden anxiousness, I must talk to this old man. I must find out who he was.

  I saw him turn his head to watch the last of my approach, no doubt distracted by my scuffing of leaves. I felt guiltily intimidating, a grown man in a horror mask, but also safely hidden behind it. Anonymous, my true self shrouded.

  Luckily I didn’t have to begin a casual conversation. He started.

  “Little big for trick-or-treating, aren’t ya?”

  I came within a few paces of him. “Ah, I’m on my way to a masquerade party.” I was surprised that my voice was shaky, like when I’d first asked Pammy out.

  The old man glanced down into my plastic pumpkin. “Looks like you been trick-or-treating to me.”

  “Friends’ houses…as a joke,” I stammered. I was defensive, as if interrogated, pulled over by a patrol car. “How about you? You trick-or-treating?”

  “Ha,” the old man laughed, “I could, with this mug, is that what you mean?”

  “Oh no…I didn’t mean that. We all get old, right?”

  “I suppose.” The man became serious. His eyes looked like they wanted to get through my eye holes. My eyes, thus exposed, felt vulnerable.

  “You live here in old Ed Phillips’s place?” I asked. Supposed to sound casual. My voice broke.

  I am Ed Phillips, I thought he would say then. “Nope. Not if you paid me.”

  “Don’t I know you? You look familiar,” I lied. The only face that reminded me of this man was the one I had on.

  “Lived in town until 1960,” the man replied. “Then moved on to Shrewsbury. I used to be chief of police here…”

  “McGee? Richard McGee?”

  “That’s me. You know me?”

  “Oh…no…not personally. I know of you.”

  “You a
townie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your family must’ve known me. I’m seventy-seven now.” McGee looked at the Yellow House again and wagged his head, dumbfounded, as if he had aged from the thirty-seven of 1950 to the seventy-seven of 1990 all at once, just before I walked up to him. “Seventy-seven,” he repeated, his breath coming out in ghostly steam.

  I was much less nervous now, much more intrigued. “You know a lot about this place. Ed Phillips’s place.”

  “Nobody knows a lot about Ed Phillips’s place, son. Nobody should, I’d say.” His breath steam reached me now. I smelled alcohol in it.

  “I’m pretty interested in the place, myself. You must be. You were staring at it a minute ago.”

  “I come here about every Halloween night, boy. Just like everybody else does. Like the place ain’t here except on Halloween night. It is but it ain’t.”

  “Very true. But why do you come…to look?”

  “I look.” The old man was lost in his staring again. He appeared troubled. Uncertain. Afraid. “I best be moving on,” he mumbled to himself. “It’s cold…”

  “A lot of funny stories.”

  “What’s so funny? You wouldn’t think it was funny if you seen those cages in the cellar.”

  “What about them?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what about them.”

  “You think he was up to no good?”

  “Absolutely, boy. We don’t want to know what he was up to.”

  “Yes we do. We both do…that’s why we’re here. But I thought you were the one who said that Phillips couldn’t have had anything to do with the disappearance of those two old guys. That’s what I always heard.”