The mystery of Eliza’s money exasperated Jason. He couldn’t wrap his mind around the size of the Legacy. How had she kept such a fortune secret? They’d never lived like multimillionaires. Eliza clipped coupons for fabric softener and had yard sales and bought her Diet Dr. Pepper in cases to save fractions of a cent. She’d never been extravagant – the opposite, actually.
The whole question of the money wounded Jason’s heart and muddled his head. Yes, he was a very rich young man. But also broke, everything tied up in accounts that he couldn’t access without Hadewych’s signature. Eliza had left him this wonderful gift of a fortune, but why had she hidden it from him? Was she ashamed of it?
He knew almost nothing about his grandfather, Arthur “Artie” Pyncheon. His mother hadn’t even known the man. Dianne had been born six months after her father’s funeral. Eliza called Artie her one true love. He’d been her high school sweetheart and she’d never been satisfied with any man afterwards – though not for lack of trying.
Jason imagined Grandpa Pyncheon as a tall, dark-haired man with a lantern jaw and a deep voice, like the cartoon Brom.
So he’d been fantastically rich, huh? And Eliza had kept the money hidden for all these decades, keeping it safe from her fortune-hunting husbands? This is what exasperated Jason. Had he ever even known his grandmother? And now he couldn’t ask her.
In one hand he held the picture of the two of them standing in the field. In the other hand he held the bar of gold. He didn’t have to check the spot price to know which of the two was more precious. He put the bar down and collected the pictures into a stack.
He was glad of the gold, of course. It meant that he would have more than enough to live on until he turned eighteen. But – he would trade it all to have Eliza back.
Just for one more game of Scrabble.
Lightning struck again. Thunder boomed. And something upstairs laughed.
It was a woman’s laughter, a snide and echoing sound – sniggering from the bottom of a well.
Jason stood.
“Hello?” he called.
He heard it again.
“Hello?”
Someone else was in the house.
30 THE HOUSE THAT LAUGHED
“Hello?”
Jason walked into the kitchen.
The kitchen window hung open. Rain had dappled the sill. He closed it.
Another giggle…
“Who’s there?” he said.
The sound came from… from…
He and Eliza had never done anything with the downstairs guest bedroom. The laughter came from there – down the hall in that spare room.
Laughter, and something else – a knocking sound?
“Hello?” he said again. He stepped gingerly around the davenport, past the stairs and into the hall. Portraits of long-dead ancestors drifted past, faces captured in sepia and amber: women leaning on old cars – men saddling horses – an unpleasant couple sitting stiffly, she in her Sunday black bonnet and he strangled by a high starched collar. These dead frowned at Jason as he passed by. How dare you not know our names.
The light was off. He reached inside and found the switch. The guest room appeared normal – stuffed with boxed books and lamps and a mattress turned on its side.
But something didn’t feel right.
Was someone hiding behind those boxes? Jason stepped inside the room, fading to his left, craning his neck, but he didn’t see a thing. He’d found the source of the knocking, though. A twiggy branch of the persimmon tree that grew in the side yard beat its soft fruit against the glass. The battered fruit refused to fall, clinging stubbornly to its twig. It left pulpy marks on the glass as the storm tried to beat it to death.
Something black pounced from a crevice and ran toward Jason, streaking between his legs. He jumped, caught his breath again and cursed.
“Charley, bad dog!”
As Jason turned to go, he thought he saw a woman’s hand and shoulder swimming in the shadow behind the door.
“Hello?” he whispered.
He turned sideways, extended his right foot and snagged the knob with his fingertips, jerking back. He’d seen a mop loitering against the wall – its ragged hair knotted like dreadlocks.
See? Nothing.
Light blazed behind the persimmon branches – a close lightning strike – and thunder cracked his ears. He shut his eyes at the sound. A moment later he opened them – or had he?
He had. But the lights had gone out.
The wind dashed the persimmon fruit against the glass, over and over. Charley barked from somewhere in the house. Jason’s eyes adjusted and he felt his way down the hall. He tried a few switches but the electricity was as dead as the people in the photos. He stepped into the dining room and peered out the bay window. The houses down the hill were still lighted. The grid wasn’t down.
So his fuses had blown. And he didn’t know what to do about it. Where was the fuse box?
He felt like a silly starlet in a horror movie, about to be murdered by the guy in the scare mask, or bitten by a vampire bat swinging from a fishing line.
Crap crap crap. Get a grip.
Jason cursed his damn imagination – his photographic recall of every slasher and horror flick he’d ever seen. Which one was he in tonight? Friday the 13th? The Haunting of Hill House? The Blair Witch Project? Were hordes of zombies out of Night of the Living Dead about to crash through his bay window? Should he grab a hammer and start building barricades? He imagined Redcoat zombie Joey reaching in through boarded windows – all gnashing teeth and vacant eyes and that ridiculous purple wig.
Headlights splashed in the rainy window, fell away as the car turned.
Where is the fuse box?
He walked through the kitchen. The back porch light had gone dark too, and no moon broke through the storm clouds. He stumbled into the utility room. He ran his hands along the wall and swung his arm at darkness. He knocked over something cardboard and caught it as it fell. Powdered detergent poured through his fingers. He wiped the grit away on a dimly perceived pair of boxer shorts. His hand stank like an over-chlorinated swimming pool.
The persimmon beat on the window of the guest bedroom. Thump thump thump thump. Endlessly in the distance.
Could the fuse box be in the entry hall closet?
No. It isn’t there. You know where the fuses are.
Still, it couldn’t hurt to check. Jason sleepwalked through the kitchen and into the living room. He barked his knee on the davenport. Charley barked from beneath it, startling him again. He should spray-paint the poodle white, he thought – for moments like this.
He felt behind the coats in the hall closet. No, the fuse box was not here. The sword from the Van Brunt tomb fell across his shoes.
Jason kicked the sword aside. He hated being right.
The fuse box was in the cellar.
It would be, of course. He was in a horror movie. The cellar was the most terrifying place in the house. It was only natural that the fuse box would be there, and he’d been an idiot to consider any other possibility – it was a dark and stormy night, after all.
Brom… Brom… Brom…
He looked up and backed away from the stairs.
Brom… Brom… Brom…
The House that Shouted was shouting again.
This wasn’t a vision. He wasn’t touching anything. This wasn’t a memory or a vivid daydream either. Something was in the house. Something was in the house with him.
Brom… Brom… Brom…
He’d heard this same creepy shout on the day he’d met Hadewych and Valerie.
Brom…
Tiny scorpions of fear skittered up the back of his neck.
“Hello?” he said, whispering up the stairs.
Brom… Brom… Brom…
It was a woman’s voice. The shout wasn’t angry, exactly. It was insistent, harsh – an old woman calling for her servants. Calling for help? Yes – calling for her son. Her son Brom.
Agathe
. This is Agathe’s voice.
He recognized the texture of it now. Ancient Agathe from the vision in the tomb. Yep. That was her. His own grandmother had gone, but Dylan’s grandmother was throwing a tea party upstairs.
Oh, right. Her body was never found…
Jason hit the wall with one fist. What was next? Was the house built on a sacred Indian burial ground too? Ever since he came to Sleepy Hollow it had been one ghost thing after another…
Brom… Brom… Brom…
His hand drifted to the staircase rail. No. He would not go up there. Not with the lights still off.
Call me a chicken-shit, but no way.
Brom… Brom…
“Shut up!” he yelled.
He didn’t want to go down to the cellar either – not without light.
Something moved in the vicinity of the fireplace. The little scorpions of fear bit him now.
“Charley?”
The dog was in the kitchen.
His steps made a cross-rhythm against the endless persimmon massacre still unfolding in the back bedroom. He rummaged through the kitchen drawers. He found batteries, but no flashlight. He found spoons, forks, a lemon squeezer and a broken egg timer. He found a cheese grater and brought his fingertip to his mouth, tasting blood. He was more careful exploring the next drawer and did not slice himself on the butcher knife there.
He lit the gas stove. The pilot light clicked and a wreath of blue tipped with orange spun into existence. Now he could see. Yes. There was the sink, the cabinet, and the refrigerator. The light inside the refrigerator wouldn’t come on of course. It was as dead as the people in the pictures and his grandmother and the old lady haunting his attic.
Why don’t you just stop now and eat all the ice cream before it melts? Wouldn’t that be sensible, Jase? Much more pleasant than facing the cellar or the thing upstairs. I think we have rocky road…
In the last drawer he found a small paper bag with candles inside. Birthday candles. Eliza had bought them in preparation for his seventeenth birthday – November first, a few days away. Had she ordered a cake too? Was some bakery frosting a birthday cake that no one would ever pick up? There would be no birthday for Jason this year. He would be spending his birthday in the RV, escaping from Hadewych.
He found a card inside the bag. One of those cards with a music chip inside. It played “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.” He held it up to the stove. The front read “Showers of Kisses on your Special Day.” Eliza hadn’t had time to write anything inside.
Brom… Brom…
“Leave me alone,” he muttered. “I’m having a moment here…”
He killed the music and set the card down. He lit a birthday candle on the burner, but blew it out again. He should wish for brains, he thought, since he wouldn’t be able to carry a lit candle through the storm. He found safety matches on top of the stove. Yes. Good. This was progress. He turned the stove off, stuck the candles and matches in his pocket, and opened the back door.
He ran down the thirteen steps as quickly as he could, rain pelting the back of his neck. He had his keys out before he reached the bottom. He concentrated on getting the door open and avoided looking at the spot where he’d found Eliza. Helpless to quiet his own brain, he remembered the blood on the key ring when he’d found it on the welcome mat. He twisted the key and the door swung outward. The cellar was black and wet. He put a shoe on the stair and lit a candle.
He found the fuse box right away, just behind the water heater below the utility room. He cycled the switches and ran outside to see if the lights had come on, but the kitchen windows remained dark. He cursed Tom Edison and went to find the fuse box again. His candle had blown out. He fished for the safety matches.
The cellar door slammed shut, plunging him into darkness.
Just the wind. Just the wind. But he’d seen too many movies to believe that.
The door wouldn’t open again, of course. He pushed hard, bracing his feet on the stairs. He beat on the door with his fists, making his hands ache. It didn’t budge.
A light grew and flickered behind him, and now he could make out the red flakes on the rusty door. But the overhead bulb still wasn’t working – this was a soft light, like the light of tallow candles.
Made from the fat of unbaptized infants… No, stop it. Stop it!
The light seeped from around the edges of a second door at the opposite end of the cellar. Had he seen that door before? No. He had never ventured that deeply into the dungeon that extended under his yard. And he didn’t want to do so now.
But it might be the way out. Maybe it leads to…
Oh.
Oh, crap.
The door leads to the aqueduct tunnel beneath Gory Brook Road.
Brom had built the aqueduct too. The Van Brunt Quarry broke the stone for those weirs and shafts along the trail. So Brom built his mother’s house above the aqueduct – why? So she’d have access to fresh water? Jason didn’t like it. The thought of endless tunnels under the house freaked him out.
He stepped around the boxes and beams, drawing near to the light. He heard a distant rushing sound beyond the door. Yeah, the aqueduct was in there.
He reached for the knob.
“Jason…” someone whispered.
He snatched his hand back, stumbling backwards.
The door in front of him flew open and the light went out. He saw the dim shape of a woman standing overhead, a faint blue outline made from his memory of the gaslight. He twisted away and kicked a path through the boxes. The spirit – whatever she was – strode past him, blasted open the cellar door and turned in the direction of the stairs. The dog yipped above.
“Charley?” Jason said.
He ran from the cellar and up the thirteen steps.
The back door was locked now. He hadn’t locked it.
He wiped rain from the window. Inside, the stove was burning though he hadn’t left it on. The corner of the birthday card had caught fire and the drapes would be next. Jason knocked the glass out of the window with his elbow and opened the door. The flames roared a foot high. The room was hot. He twisted the knobs of the stove but they came off in his hands. He threw the burning card in the sink and turned the water on. The card gargled its little song. He threw handfuls of water at the curtains, stuck the knobs back on the stove, and twisted the gas off.
The ghost of Agathe laughed at him hysterically from upstairs.
“Bring it, bitch,” Jason said, burning the last of his testosterone, trying to mask the terror he felt. He tripped over his moving boxes and recovered in the living room, where he spread his arms and shouted up the stairs. “You just come down here and bring it!”
A crack of thunder scared the dog and she ran into Eliza’s room.
Jason panted and seethed. He stumbled across something as he neared the stairs: the sword. He grabbed it and drew the blade.
“Don’t make me come up there.”
Brom… Brom… Brom…
“Brom’s dead and so are you,” he said. “Get out!”
The persimmon fruit beat itself frantically on the guest room window, louder and louder. He heard an explosion of broken glass and the rhythm stopped. Agathe giggled again.
“I’m coming up…” he said again, but with less confidence.
One step.
Two steps.
The birthday card began playing in the kitchen: distorted, dirge-like notes. Raindrops keep fallin’ on my head on my head on my head head head head head heeeeaaaaadddd…
It was a decapitation song.
The ghost giggled again.
Three steps.
Four.
“I want you gone,” Jason said.
Five.
Six.
“The power of Christ compels you!” he called, quoting The Exorcist and feeling stupid.
Seven.
Eight.
He heard the sound of a faucet left on. He bounded up the remaining steps.
The floor of his bedro
om ran with water. He felt it through his shoes. He knelt and splashed the floor. Lightning lit his bedroom window. He looked up and saw that the stain on his ceiling drooled like an open mouth. He threw down his bedspread and some dirty clothes to absorb the water and ran up the second flight to the attic. He stopped himself halfway, remembering the sword in his hand.
Do not run with sharp objects, kid.
He continued at a more deliberate pace, until the black square of the open attic door engulfed him. A flash of lightning lit the octagonal window at the far end. Thunder followed, rolling through the darkness.
He heard the water rushing in before he saw it. He found the leak with his hands. It poured in through the crack in the eaves where Debbie Flight said the sycamore had broken through. He pressed his hand across the hole. It was like trying to block the nozzle of a fire hose.
Brom! Brom Brom Brom! Agathe shouted. The water’s bleeding in...
Jason saw her figure at the attic window. Hair in a tight bun, black dress, pearl buttons. Her form brightened and dimmed – drawn in the air and erased again, over and over.
Brom? she sang, raising bloody hands. Brom… the water’s bleeding in...
Jason crossed the space and swung his sword at the dead woman, but hit empty air. Her face reappeared in the rain on the other side of the window. Was she on the roof? He wrestled the window open.
No. Nothing there but the rain.
Agathe laughed from downstairs now. From his bedroom?
“Go away,” Jason said. He splashed down to the second story. Agathe stood on the roof above the kitchen, just outside Jason’s bedroom windows.
Bleeding in the waters… she giggled.
Cold droplets hit his neck from the leak in the ceiling. He tore open the window and swung the sword. The figure vanished again. Charley barked. Jason whirled. Agathe stood on the stairs! Rage filled him. The thing was baiting him, toying with him, making him crazy. He wiped his face, got detergent in his eye, gritted his teeth and raced after her. He bounded down the stairs two at a time.
Brom! Brom Brom Brom!
The knocking sound had moved. Something beat on the front door now. Beyond the wet windows he saw Agathe’s figure standing on the porch. He threw the door open and swung the sword blindly…
Sleepy Hollow: Rise Headless and Ride Page 27