Doorbells at Dusk

by Josh Malerman

“What?”

  “Something. Is. Beneath. Adam’s. Bed.”

  “What the fuck is wrong with you, Ronnie? Are you on drugs? Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Turn the fucking lights on! What’s under his bed? A spider? What the fuck is wrong with you? Is he alone?!”

  “I’m here. He’s not alone.”

  “Are you in his bedroom? Look under the fucking bed! Did you call the police? Get on your knees and–”

  Ronnie hung up. He called the police.

  “Police?”

  “Hello hi, this is Ronnie Stern.”

  “Sir, can you speak up?”

  Ronnie was standing at the foot of the stairs. When did he walk there?

  “This is RONNIE STERN. You guys came by my house today.”

  “Mister Stern? Is there another problem?”

  “There’s something beneath my son’s bed.”

  A pause.

  “Can you say that again?”

  “THERE’S SOMETHING BENEATH MY SON’S BED.”

  “Can you elaborate? What’s beneath his bed?”

  Claire called. Ronnie didn’t switch over to answer her.

  He looked to the top of the stairs, to last trickle of light coming from Adam’s bedroom window.

  “Send someone,” he said.

  He hung up.

  He took a huge gulp from his drink, set the glass on the floor.

  He climbed the stairs.

  Two steps from the top he got on his knees and put his ear to the hall carpet. He tried but couldn’t quite see into Adam’s room.

  There might be a prowler beneath your son’s bed, Ronnie thought. GET UP AND FIND OUT.

  He got up.

  Then, trembling, he ran to Adam’s room.

  He turned on the light, saw Adam already wide eyed, clutching his red comforter to his chin.

  “Daddy,” Adam said. “There’s someone under my bed.”

  Ronnie looked to the floor.

  That’s an arm, that’s a real arm. That’s green hair at the elbow. Those are fingers gripping the bed frame. That’s a face, THAT’S A FACE, Ronnie, not a mask, no mask, looking at you, has eyes, looking at you, Ronnie, looking right at you.

  “Jump!” Ronnie yelled. He saw the eyes under the bed, deep in a troll’s wrinkled face, roll up toward Adam. “Now!”

  Adam jumped. Landed hard on the wood floor. Went to his dad.

  Ronnie gripped him and ran.

  Not a mask, no mask, not a man.

  Adam clung to him, whining, crying, yelling in his ear.

  Down the stairs, down the hall.

  Ronnie kicked the front door, realized he’d just locked it. He unlocked it, shaking.

  Police lights outside, red and blue. Not green.

  “Help!” Ronnie called.

  The officers were out of their cars, guns drawn, surprise in their eyes but not like the shock in Ronnie’s.

  “He’s in there.”

  Ronnie turned to point but it was already there, standing in the doorway, lifting its hand to wave.

  “Adam!” it called.

  For a moment, even the officers didn’t move. Then they were upon him and the stranger dropped like drapes to the threshold.

  “Jesus CHRIST!” Ronnie yelled. He gripped a hard hand over Adam’s eyes.

  The officers cuffed the man, telling him what he could and couldn’t do. But they didn’t remove his mask. Not yet. And Ronnie stared into the green folds that covered his eyes.

  “You’re not gonna be able to take off his mask!” Ronnie said. “It won’t come off!”

  An officer went to Ronnie. Put a hand on his shoulder.

  “It’s okay, Mister Stern. We got him.”

  “But the–”

  The other officer removed the mask. In the cruiser lights Ronnie saw an unshaven man looking back at him.

  Not a mask, no mask, no.

  “Same man from earlier today?” the officer beside him asked.

  Ronnie only stared. What he’d seen upstairs. This man was not what he’d seen under Adam’s bed.

  “Mister Stern?”

  Ronnie lowered Adam to the driveway. He walked to the front door.

  Just a man. Thin. Brown long johns. Green construction paper.

  “Let me see that mask,” Ronnie said.

  The officer held it up.

  No, Ronnie thought. No.

  “Just another Halloween nut,” the officer said. “Glad you two are safe.” Then, “All that matters.”

  But it wasn’t all that mattered. Not to Ronnie.

  The two cops got the man standing and walked him quick to the cruiser.

  Then, more bright lights. Another car in the driveway.

  Claire. Oh, Claire.

  “Adam?! ADAM?!”

  She was running up the drive.

  Ronnie met her at Adam.

  “We’re spending the night at your house,” Ronnie said. “No argument.”

  “What’s going on? What happened?”

  Then Claire was on her knees, hugging Adam. One officer had the man in the car as the other explained it to her. Ronnie stared at the man’s face through the glass.

  No mask, he thought. No man.

  “You’re just gonna . . . take him away?” he asked.

  The officer looked confused. “What would you have us do?”

  Get rid of it, Ronnie thought. Erase it from this world.

  Later, after Ronnie had told the story ten times, told her about the man in the yard, about hiring the clowns, about the party, the boating, about putting Adam to bed, about seeing it, down the hall, about calling, about seeing it then for real, not a mask, real eyes, peering, wise eyes, old eyes wedged into deep green folds, Ronnie laid down on Claire’s couch and looked to Adam, sleeping on the floor under a blanket.

  Claire didn’t speak. Bless her. If she spoke, if she said Ronnie had done something wrong, Ronnie might’ve gone mad, might’ve leapt from the couch and ran out of her house, onto the street, tumbling, mumbling no mask no mask no man as he fell then got up and ran again, still chanting no mask no mask no man.

  Instead, he lay as still as he could, looking into Claire’s eyes, and raised a finger to his lips, silently telling her to listen, do you hear that? Do you hear something breathing inside this room? Behind this couch?

  Under it?

  Can you, Claire? Can you hear it? Maybe it’s not breathing I hear. Maybe it doesn’t breathe. But it lives all the same.

  Can you hear it living in this room, Claire?

  Living under the couch I lay on?

  Living under Adam’s bed?

  KEEPING UP APPEARANCES

  Jason Parent

  The old lady screamed as Lisa tore the pearls from her neck. White globes bounced like marbles off the hardwood floor.

  Samson ended the old woman’s noise with the butt of his Glock, and she crumpled to the floor.

  Carlos watched her go down, wincing as if the blow had landed against his own forehead. Although his trusty sawed-off shotgun was tucked under his arm, he didn’t like using more violence than was necessary. The old bag’s caterwauling had needed to stop, but he might have chosen duct tape in lieu of Samson’s brute force.

  Before Lisa had touched her, the lady of the house had composed herself with dignity, which was more than could be said for her limp-dick, Daddy Warbucks-looking fruitcake of a husband, who was pissing himself and whimpering in the corner. Carlos stared at the pathetic excuse for a man, watching as urine pooled on the floor around him.

  I should have stayed in school. Carlos sighed, his hot breath whistling against the inside of his Donald Duck mask. And what better night for masks than Halloween? He wanted to take it off. The plastic edges were scratching against his skin.

  But he had made the rule, and it had been a good one: the masks stayed on at all times. If no one saw their faces, no one had to die.No one had died since he’d begun running his own crew—Carlos
, Samson, Breck, and Lisa. They were two years death-free, which was a lot more than he could say for the other crews he’d run with. Maybe I should tack up a poster like they got at job sites. This crew has been murder-free for seven hundred days.

  Carlos glanced at the old couple, one sniveling and one unconscious, and wondered, not for the first time, if he would have been better off commercial fishing like his brother. He shrugged. “Tie them up.”

  “Yes, sir,” Breck said, snickering as he danced around Carlos and over toward the unconscious woman.

  Carlos grimaced. His young associate, and sometimes loose cannon, looked a bit too apropos in his costume, which consisted of an untied straightjacket and a bite mask that reminded Carlos of Hannibal Lecter.

  Breck waggled a Bowie knife the size of Excalibur as he passed. He called the blade his “all-purpose tool,” but as far as Carlos could tell, it only had two purposes: slicing and stabbing. After the last time the crazy asshole had brought the knife, Carlos had been tempted to veto weapons altogether, but his eagerness to leave his shotgun at home ranged somewhere between not going to happen and fucking hell no.

  His grip tightened around its stock. The shotgun was as much for colleague control as it was for crowd control. That sparkle in Breck’s eye and the jig in his step confirmed the need for double-barrel deterrence.

  “I’ll do the lady.” Breck tittered with excitement. He pulled a zip tie from his pocket, gyrating his hips as he straddled the old woman.

  “If by ‘do’ her,” Carlos said, “you mean ‘tie her up,’ then be my guest. Just make sure you do it tight . . . and not to a table leg. Let’s not repeat the shitshow we put on at the last house.”

  Breck laughed and tugged at the woman’s arm. He lifted her to a sitting position. Unable to pull her up any farther, he dropped her arm and let her collapse back against the floor. “Well, I give up.” He wiped his brow, slapped his thighs, then danced over to the man cowering in the kitchen corner, waving his knife as if he were composing a symphony with it. When his foot splashed down in a puddle, he turned his nose up in disgust.

  The man in the corner buried his face in his hands and wailed.

  “S?” Carlos called, careful not to use his partner’s real name. “Would you kindly silence our other host?”

  Samson, who was built like a rhino, raised his pistol.

  “Nicely,” Carlos added.

  A man of few words, Samson grunted. He lowered his weapon, his face impossible to read beneath his clown mask. Carlos found the mask’s toothy smile ironic since there was no humor in Samson. The man had the personality of a walking refrigerator.But he was a capable partner, one Carlos could count on. Samson grabbed a roll of duct tape off the kitchen table and spiraled it around the homeowner’s head, covering his mouth.

  And he’s got more sense than the other two. Carlos glanced at his girlfriend. Lisa scooped up the pearls that had broken off the chain. Pink pigtails flopped like rabbit ears over her furry mask and its wicked grin full of sharp, bloodstained fangs.

  Carlos shook his head. Lisa was a decade younger than him. She still lived for excitement—sex anywhere, party anytime—making his life more worth living and his lifestyle more likely to get him killed. She’d never done any real time and didn’t know what it was like to be locked away.

  Carlos, on the other hand, liked to play it safe—as safe as crime could be anyway. He took only those jobs that seemed like sure things, and those he planned generally involved an absence of people, security measures, and threats to his life or freedom. His work was neither glitzy nor glamorous, but he got by, rarely hurting anyone in the process.

  But instead of mellowing out, Breck had become too wild, and Samson didn’t know his own strength. Lisa was Carlos’s biggest concern, though. When, half in jest, he’d suggested they use the cover of Halloween to go door-to-door and rob the rich in their secluded mansions, she’d jumped all over the idea. She hadn’t stopped talking about it until Halloween night had arrived and the talking became doing.

  What a sight she was. Her nipples tented the fabric of her T-shirt, which was spattered with blood from the owner of the second house they’d hit, a man who’d thought himself a hero. Her body was so fine and tight and young, while Carlos’s own was beginning to sag in all the wrong places. He thought he loved her, the kind of love that was equal parts wet dream and nightmare but addictive as all fucking hell.

  And that made him wonder how the night was going to end.

  They tied up the old couple and removed the man’s duct tape just long enough for him to spill where he kept his most prized possessions, a task that took all of eight seconds. Then they tossed the place, nabbing anything that caught their fancies.

  When they finished loading up their van with trash bags full of loot, Carlos tossed his mask onto his lap and turned the key in the ignition. He smiled at Breck and Samson, who were crammed in the back with the trash bags. They’d pulled it off, come away with a nice haul, and were safely on their way ho—

  “Can we do one more?” Lisa asked from the passenger seat.

  “I don’t know, babe,” Carlos said. “Third time’s the charm, right? We did good. Best not get too greedy.”

  Breck poked his head between the front seats. “But this street’s a freaking gold mine. Big houses with giant yards. No one can see dick going on at their neighbors’. People opening their doors for four grown-ups in masks without even thinking it might be a bad idea. I say we make the most of what we’ve been given. I say we hit up the whole damn street, cash and jewelry only, here on out.”

  Carlos frowned. “Samson, what do you think?”

  Samson grunted and shrugged.

  Outvoted. Carlos slouched in his seat, resting the back of his head against it as he stared at the ceiling for a moment, searching for a good reason to veto them. Thinking of none, he slumped over the steering wheel, put the van in drive, and climbed the hill to the next house.

  Lisa jumped in her seat and turned to look out the window. “Whoa! I’d sell my soul to live there.”

  Carlos peered over her shoulder. He couldn’t make out much of the house. It sat at a distance, atop a sprawling estate that was accessed by a long, winding driveway. But he could tell it was big—big enough to make all those celebrities feel small back in their Beverly Hills mansions. A wrought-iron fence—its nine-foot posts resembling lances that stabbed at the night—bordered the property as far as he could see. Through the bars, he saw fancy gardens, statued fountains, geometrically patterned hedges, and still ponds that he bet were well stocked with koi. But the ponds were overrun with leaves, and the hedges and gardens had grown into tangles and thickets.

  “Now we know who was responsible for the water shortages this summer.” Carlos pointed at the untrimmed hedges. “Looks like the gardener finally gave up, though.”

  “Who lives here?” Breck asked. “Edward Fucking Scissorhands?”

  “Look!” Lisa pressed her face against the window, her mask squeaking as it slid along the glass. “The gate’s open.”

  Breck slid between them. “No way!”

  “Guys.” Carlos threw up his hands. “A house like this has got to have security, staff—”

  “That’s what you said about the last one and the one before that,” Breck said. “Oh no. We gotta go in there.”

  Lisa tilted up her mask. Pink hairspray ran in sweaty rivulets down her face. Her big, round eyes, so beautiful and innocent in appearance, stared at him from underneath batting lashes, and he knew he could not deny them.

  He sighed and sat up straight. “Fine. But we do this my way. Any sign of danger, we hightail it the hell out of there. Agreed?”

  Nods and grunts answered him.

  “Okay. Get your masks on.” Carlos pulled through the open gate and stopped at an unmanned security box. “That’s funny.”

  “What is?” Lisa asked.

  “The security booth. There’s no one in it.”

  Breck laughed. “As my mother
used to say, ‘Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’”

  Carlos didn’t respond. The unmanned booth filled him with unease.

  He continued up the drive and circled around to the front steps. No lights came from the house or anywhere else on the estate, yet everything glowed under the bluish light of the waxing moon. No spiders, skeletons, or witches decorated the yard or home. No pumpkins or candy or costumed brats begging for treats could be seen. Carlos could find no reason at all to believe the homeowners were receptive to company. If anyone was at home, they were not expecting any trick or treaters. The few kids they’d seen in the neighborhood probably thought the house’s long driveway wasn’t worth the effort.

  Breck laughed. “Where’s their Halloween spirit? Maybe no one’s home, and we’ll have the place to ourselves.”

  “I don’t like this.” Carlos checked the rearview, and his stomach gurgled with the feeling he’d just driven into an ambush. He gripped the wheel a little tighter and checked each window for anything hidden behind pretense, but he wasn’t sure exactly what he was looking for.

  Breck tapped him in the back of the head. “Man the fuck up already.”

  The strike was hard enough to stir Carlos’s anger but also enough to jump-start his rational thinking. The house wasn’t decorated because either its occupants didn’t celebrate the holiday, or more likely, given the deserted look of the place, they weren’t home to celebrate. He couldn’t have asked for better circumstances.

  His teeth clenched, and his heart chugged along a little faster. “Samson, check for alarms and cameras while I take the kiddies trick or treating. Everybody out. Quietly.”

  They got out of the van. Stealthy despite his size, Samson started his circle around the house, peering in each window he passed. Lisa headed toward the front door, a pillowcase under her arm that doubled as a supply cache and candy collector.

  As his girlfriend climbed the steps, Carlos grabbed Breck by the arm before he could race her to the doorbell. “Let Lisa go first. Even with that mask on, you can’t pass for anything less than a teenager with a receding hairline.”

  “I know, I know,” Breck whined. He shook his arm free and started toward the door. “I’ll hang back a bit.” Then in a lower tone, he said, “Never lets me have any fun.” The giant knife swung at his side.