The joke didn’t do much to cover my fear. As you could imagine, my nerves were frayed, like the unraveling end of a rope. I was on alert for any signs of mice, expecting them to swarm from the creepy old mansion at any moment, spilling from every window and crack.
“Don’t think Nana is the only one who plays with forces beyond human understanding,” Tabitha said. “That would be a big, big mistake, and I don’t think you can afford many more mistakes.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s always more going on than what we can see. How else would all these bizarre coincidences make sense? Plane crashes, political strife, earthquakes.”
The mind cannot continue with extreme horror and panic at the forefront of one’s thoughts, just like a car cannot constantly run at its maximum speed, because sooner or later it’s going to shut down. Well, my mind wanted to chalk this up as one hell of a bizarre dream. Actually, in all reality—”reality” being the key word here—that was probably the most likely occurrence. I had been napping and dreamt the whole shebang. Maybe the whole day. Maybe I was still dreaming.
Shit, if I could only be so lucky. I refused, however, to pinch myself.
Get real, I told myself, this is no dream. Amanda’s dead and if you want to live long enough to save your kid, you better man up and walk in there and face down your new second-greatest fear.
Deep breaths, big guy. Keep breathing. Good. There you go.
Okay, better. There, some of the panic and dread I had felt—once so extreme that I had thought I would have a heart attack, or drop dead from a stroke right there—was fading to the background. My resolve was working like liquor, getting my blood pumping and working me into an aimless rage.
We had to speak with her grandmother and end this madness.
We continued down the sidewalk and reached a door set into the iron fence. The door was about ten feet high, tall enough for a giant or somebody wearing a high, pointy hat, or maybe flying in on a broomstick. To my surprise, Tabitha separated a large key from her key ring and opened the door.
“I thought you didn’t go down the...that whatchyamacallit, the left-handed path?”
“I didn’t, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know the way.”
The tumblers rattled like a skeleton as the key turned. The door screeched when she pushed it open, and I cringed, for the sound seemed to resonate in the marrow of my bones. We moved forward onto the grounds.
And then my foot hit something, and I fell forward, sprawled on my belly. I lay there for a moment, just barely comprehending that I had tripped and fallen like a fool, smelling the moist, musty scent of freshly turned soil. The smell of a graveyard. Tabitha stopped and came back and knelt before me.
“Are you okay?”
“Define ‘okay.’”
She laughed a little. “You need any help?”
And then I saw a mouse scurry under some bushes ten feet away.
I bounced to my feet. “Did you see that?”
“What?”
“Forget it. Let’s just get this over with.” I dusted myself off, looking nervously around but not seeing any more movement. That was probably the only thing that would have made me eager to enter that brooding house.
I followed Tabitha along the stone path. I was a nervous wreck, to say the least, and the slightest noise made me jump like a nervous cat. If I were a cat, those mice would really be in for it.
The silly thought didn’t calm me, and neither did all my fond memories of Halloween, candy corn, masks, and scarecrows. This spookhouse ride was for real.
We came to a heavy wooden door, imbued with a yellow glow from a porch light set high and to the left of the door. The dark driveway looped just in front of the door and led back to the iron gate. The driveway also branched off to lead around to the back of the huge house, no doubt for Jeeves and the rest of the creepy servants. Tabitha produced another key from her key-chain, but this door, however, opened smoothly. I was hit instantly with cool air that smelled like old socks. Or the smell of old people. Or maybe that was the aroma of bat-wing potions and cauldron smoke.
Inside, the foyer glowed with a whiskey-colored light. A big maple desk sat just to the right of the foyer, where an equally big lady sat. The big lady was dressed in something that resembled a nurse’s uniform, her hair in a tight bun that looked painful. Her frown, something that seemed to dominate her wide face, turned to a smile when her eyes fell on Tabitha. I had the impression that she was more sentry than nurse.
“How are you, Tabby?”
“Fine, Mrs. Haggard. We came to see Nana.”
“Then there is something wrong, after all.” Mrs. Haggard scooted back in her chair, got up, and moved her big body gracefully around to the front of the desk where we stood. She was so excited and livid that I thought she was going to plow into us like a bowling ball into pins, but she had the utmost control of that body and stopped just before things got ugly.
The look of concern came over her face, and I realized then she was indeed all nurse. “Your nana is acting very strange, Tabby. I’ve heard some of the strangest sounds coming from her room, and each time I’ve gone to see how she was, she was quick to assure me things were fine. But she was sweaty and red in the face and breathing hard. I asked her if she was taking her medicine on schedule and she said yes.”
Tabitha said, “Well, people act strange at 97, and most of them lie about their medicine.”
“I know. I asked her why she was sweating and she said she was moving some furniture around. A quick peek in her room revealed that she had shuffled some books around, too.”
“As frail as she is, she still has the Mead get-up-and-go. Did she say anything about Amanda?”
“Amanda? No. But did Nana call you? Is she okay? You’ve never come here this late, so something must be wrong.”
Tabitha laughed reassuringly and patted Mrs. Haggard on her arm. “We have some urgent business to attend to that involves my grandmother. But her health is fine. We simply need to talk with her.”
I saw that the nurse was sweating. She really got herself worked up over dear old Nana. Or maybe Mrs. Haggard had been the victim of a curse herself and wanted to stay on the old bag’s good side.
“Well,” said Mrs. Haggard. “I think she’s still up. The light is on in her room, and there are still some odd noises going on in there. She really should be in bed. She needs her rest.”
“I assure you, Mrs. Haggard, when we are done talking I will see that my nana goes right to sleep.”
The lady visibly relaxed, even letting out a long breath. “Please don’t keep her up too late. You know you’re past visiting hours. And we don’t want to make Nana upset, do we?”
I didn’t like the look that passed between them, and I wanted to ask if Nana had gone missing around lunch time. You didn’t expect 97-year-old crones to get downtown and back without any help, but maybe a broom ride was faster than a cab.
“It’s just all so terribly important,” Tabitha said. “Family business.”
Mrs. Haggard looked at me like I had no business in their family business. I shrugged and smiled.
To her credit, Mrs. Haggard didn’t challenge Tabitha. Instead, she stepped aside, thus giving us permission to carry on.
As we moved through the big house, past several sets of rickety-looking stairs, the floor creaked and moaned beneath our feet. Every couple dozen feet or so, more of those whiskey-colored lights illuminated the hall. With the dark brown carpet and tan walls, the place didn’t exactly exude cheery atmosphere. Spaced two at a time, doors lined the hall.
Some were open. I sneaked a peek inside the first open door.
It wasn’t a pretty sight. The old lady, awake and with a lamp on, was lying on her back with a respirator up her nose. Her skin looked faintly purple. An honest-to-God sadness came over me when I realized that the poor lady was waiting for death, done with living.
You don’t know that, I told myself. Maybe she had had a busy day, run
ning errands, seeing and kissing and hugging her many grandchildren, and now she was just catching her breath.
A pleasant thought, but no doubt a wrong one. Probably, she had been dumped here by her grandkids and forgotten. Left to die alone. God, life could suck.
Or maybe she was the one sucking up life, part of Nana’s coven, absorbing somebody else’s spirit so she could sit around the cauldron all night cackling and casting spells.
On that disturbing thought, we suddenly turned right and I followed Tabitha up a stairway that seemed to come from out of nowhere. I found myself in a gloomy tunnel that led steeply up, surrounded by walls on either side and a low ceiling. They could not have possibly created a more dismal place if they tried. At the landing, the second floor was an exact replica of the first.
Tabitha stopped three doors down on the right. I swallowed. What was going to happen? What was Nana going to do to me this time? Would we even be able to talk sense to her? As I remembered our brief encounter, the old lady hardly seemed sane. What if she refused to take back the curse or stop the curse or whatever the hell rewind system these witches used? Was I just to say “Thanks for trying” and walk out with all the damn mice in Fullerton waiting to take a bite out of me?
I saw myself suddenly shaking the old lady by the shoulders until she took back her curse. I mean, what was I supposed to do? I sure as hell didn’t kill Amanda, and so I didn’t deserve this shit.
I breathed deeply and knew that these were not coincidences. Tabitha was right, there were weird forces at work. I was in one hell of a mess, and all I could do at that point was to try and straighten things out as best I could.
I had an idea. I reached in front of me and tapped Tabitha on her shoulder, feeling the soft shoulder pad under her blouse. When she had stopped and I took the few steps to catch up, I said, “I’m sorry to bring this up now, but you’ve already talked to the police about Amanda, right?”
“Yeah, I told you that.”
Her eyes began misting in memory, but I pushed forward, eager to have her answer the next question. “Did they tell you who the suspect might be?”
The question took her off guard, and she closed her eyes slowly and I felt like the world’s biggest jerk, trying to cover my own ass when she’d suffered a loss perhaps greater than my own.
I said quickly, “I’m sorry, Tabitha, I shouldn’t have asked.”
She nodded and wiped a tear away. The tear left a wet streak along her index finger. “It’s okay, really. They told me they were investigating Amanda’s recent past, with you and your wife as the prime suspects. Crime of passion, all textbook stuff.”
She studied me, her eyes traveling along the full length of my body in the dim hall. “You want to use this against my grandmother.”
I nodded, feeling a little silly, but knowing that I had to stop this madness at all costs; I would use whatever bargaining tool I could get a hold of. A secret part of me had this little fantasy of shifting the curse from me to Gerda, though I wasn’t sure what Gerda’s greatest fear would be.
“And if you can convince Nana that you are innocent, that leaves your wife as the suspect,” Tabitha said.
“Gerda deserves to be nibbled to death by pointy little teeth if anybody does.”
“No good,” Tabitha said.
“Sounds good to me.”
“You’re forgetting about your son.”
“Son?”
“Peter.”
So he had a name. In all the shock of loss and fear, I couldn’t handle more than an amorphous, doughy image of an infant in my mind. Now she had to go and make it real.
“Peter.” I whispered the name. It sounded solid, and I didn’t dare ask the rest, like whose last name did he have, what was his eye color, and if Amanda ever mentioned my name to him.
Tabitha said, “You shift the curse to Gerda, and what happens to Peter? Even if the mice—or whatever Nana fetches on her—don’t harm Petey, he might not be found before he starves or dies of exposure.”
Thinking like a cop. If I hadn’t been so unmoored, I might even have admired her for it.
Peter. Peter Shipway? Petey Mead?
My thoughts were cut short when I heard a door slam farther ahead and around a corner. Tabitha, ahead of me, faltered in her step. Could the noise have come from her grandmother’s?
I then heard the pounding of heavy footsteps, and suddenly a big man turned the corner, almost filling the entire hallway before us. He was dressed all in black, with a trench coat flapping at his knees. He had a hat pulled low on his face. He was striding toward us like a fat guy late for dinner or a drunk bound for happy hour.
I stepped aside and gasped.
In front of me, Tabitha also stepped to the side, giving the big man as wide a berth as she could, but she continued walking.
I found that my legs did not want to move, could not move. And as the big man approached, his thick lower jaw illuminated by the yellow light, I suddenly couldn’t breathe, either.
I stood there, literally paralyzed.
And blocking the big man’s way.
He stopped a foot in front of me. I could not see his eyes, for they were completely hidden in shadows. I was a relatively tall man at six foot two. The big man, however, loomed over me like a massive, jutting cliff.
He was smiling and his lips seemed frozen to his face. His teeth were rotten like yellow fragments of shattered rock. There was a smell about him that I could not place, a smell that seemed both foreign and familiar. The smell brought only the image of compost, of freshly turned soil, as if he’d been gardening at night, except I didn’t want to think about what he might have planted. There was something else in the smell, something that I could not place at all.
Perhaps, something rotten.
And he was still smiling.
From the moment I laid eyes on his hulking figure I knew that I knew this man. God help me, but I knew this man.
In much the same way Nana must have known me.
Chapter Twelve
There was no mistaking the man before me, and little wonder he’d chosen to dwell in a chamber of shadows and cobwebs.
He was a creature straight out of nightmares, as he had been, in fact, over forty people’s worst nightmare.
But his reign of terror had ended fifteen years ago when he had been found dead in prison. His last official victim had been a young woman devoid of all entrails, cut in half with fastidious care.
He was dead.
Should have been dead.
But he was now looking down at me, smiling like the lunatic he was. Or had been. Damn, this hex stuff was confusing.
I saw now that his face, or at least his jaw and lips and the bottom of his nose, all of which were touched by the hazy light of the hall, were as milky pale as a stump grub. The darkness beneath his hat brim suggested an endless cavern, and I wondered if the rest of his head was hiding under the hat or if it was only the stuffing of eternal night.
Sweat, as if turned on by a valve, began steadily dripping down my cheek and the back of my neck. The sweat meandered down my spine, stopping and soaking the waist of my black denims. I could have used a sudden, inexplicable chill about then to cool me down, but I’d used up my lifetime’s supply of “inexplicables.”
All the while I stared up at the man, unable to decide what to do, my mind reeling. I was unable to get a grasp on my thoughts, for they were running wildly, mixed and jumbled.
“Albert?” Tabitha asked, fifteen feet further down the hall.
The killer’s smile was fixed in place as if that mouth had eaten the sweetest human organs in the world. I could have easily been looking up at a wax statue in a wax museum. A statue of one of the world’s most notorious serial killers: Max Richter, a.k.a. the Surgeon of Silicon Valley.
Part of me knew, a part that was mixed with the rest of my swirling, distorted thoughts, that I should get out of the man’s way. Just press against the wall and let him pass. Except that idea seemed incapable of fir
mly registering in my brain. Nothing was registering in my brain.
Instead I stood frozen. I peered under the brim of the hat, daring to see those eyes, if any existed. Hoping that his gaze would shock me into action or else confirm that I was mistaken, that this was just another tenant in a perpetual-care facility that seemed to have trouble keeping its clients in bed.
That’s when a hand clamped onto my shoulder.
I squealed a little, or maybe just squeaked. Dear God, he’s going to cut me up like the rest of them!
I felt myself being pulled to the side. I was in no condition to resist. I stumbled and almost fell, wondering if that was how his victims felt, limp and helpless as their fate approached in a sick, silver fury.
Narrow but strong arms held me up. I suddenly was looking into the wide, concerned eyes of Tabitha. She was asking me something, but I was incapable of speech or really even listening. Instead, I twisted around in her arms and watched the big man move quietly down the hall, his feet touching the carpet in soft murmurs.
At least he isn’t floating. Thank God for the little things.
He made a left and in a blink he disappeared down the stairs. He did not look back.
Tabitha stepped in front of me and said my name. It came to me as if through a wall of water, but the firm slap on the cheek brought me around.
“Shipway, don’t get wimpy on me now. We need to do this.”
My eyes refocused from the dark hollow of the stairwell to her concerned face. I was struck with the raw realization of how incredibly beautiful she was, how much of Amanda she carried inside her, and how she was the last surviving link between me and my son. It might have been a little creepy and maybe even incestuous to look for Amanda in her face, but right then, I wasn’t interested in morality. I was interested in any little lifeline to reality I could find.
“Albert?” Her voice was little more than a harsh whisper now. She did not wish to wake the residents, or maybe she was afraid of what they might be cooking up behind closed doors. And no telling what might be lurking in the attic.
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