“I’m so hungry,” Ichiro said, looking longingly at the hutch. “Why didn’t we think to bring some snacks?” He slid open a drawer and gazed inside. It was filled with silverware. “Hey, Jake. Look at this.”
He pulled out an old photograph that had been hidden under the cutlery. The paper was wrinkled and the image was sepia toned. It was a picture of a man and woman on their wedding day, dressed in old-fashioned clothing. The stern-looking, bearded groom sat on a wooden chair while the skinny, dark-haired bride stood behind him holding a bouquet of flowers. The whites of her eyes seemed unnaturally bright, as if the photograph had been overexposed in places.
“The corner’s ripped,” Ichiro said.
Jacob thought of the empty photo frame in the front hall. It had a small piece of torn paper in it. He reminded Ichiro of the frame. “The picture must’ve been ripped out and hidden in the drawer. Maybe the couple had a fight?”
“You’re a genius.”
Jacob shook his head. “Not really. I’m just good at connecting dots. Turn it over,” he said, pointing at the old photograph.
Ichiro did so, revealing cursive handwriting on the back:
James and Tresa, 1906
A grand adventure is about to begin.
“Tresa?” Ichiro said. “I’ve never heard that name before.” He turned the photograph back over and stared into her piercing eyes. “She sure was pretty.”
The fine hair on Jacob’s forearms stood on end. He scanned the room quickly. Ichiro was still the only other person there, but he had briefly felt like he was being watched. He stole one more glance behind him and then looked back at the photo.
“They must have lived here a long time ago,” Jacob said. He wondered if anyone had lived in the house since the early 1900s. If anyone had, they hadn’t done any redecorating. Thanks to the antique furniture, the phonograph and the ancient photograph, it was easy to picture James and Tresa still living there today.
“Hey,” Jacob said, as a thought dawned on him. “Shouldn’t this place be, like, empty?” He remembered a house in his neighbourhood that had been boarded up a couple of years back. He and Ichiro had snuck in and wandered around. There wasn’t a single piece of furniture in any of the rooms, and the walls were covered in spray paint, obscene messages and crude drawings no doubt left behind by teenagers. “Why did the last people who lived here leave all their stuff behind?”
“Maybe someone still owns the house. Maybe it’s just rundown, not abandoned.”
Jacob raised his eyebrows and nodded, impressed. “You’re probably right. Look at the big brains on you!”
Ichiro placed the photograph back in the hutch and took a bow. “Thank you, thank you.”
They carried on to the next room, at the back of the house, which turned out to be the kitchen. Jacob opened an old-fashioned wooden refrigerator (a gold plate on the front door read McCray 1905) and a gust of hot, mouldering air assaulted their noses.
“Close it, close it!” Ichiro shouted. He took a step back and waved his hand in front of his face.
Even after the door was closed, the odour languished in the room. Jacob crossed the kitchen and knocked over a chair in his haste. It clattered to the tile floor. The sound echoed hollowly throughout the kitchen. Jacob bent to pick up the chair. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a shadow pass through the kitchen.
“Did you see that?” he asked. It had happened so quickly, he couldn’t be sure of what he’d seen.
“See what?” Ichiro asked.
“Nothing,” Jacob said. He shook his head and rubbed his face. “I guess this place is making me jumpy.”
There was another phrase on the wall near the breakfast table:
Bless the food before us,
the family beside us,
and the love between us.
Amen.
“James and Tresa — or whoever lived here last — sure loved signs with lame expressions,” Ichiro said. He forced a laugh, trying to lighten the mood.
Jacob didn’t respond. The signs might have been homey when the house had been lived in, but now they felt unsettling.
Ichiro shrugged and said, “Let’s move on. This kitchen stinks.”
Jacob nodded, eager to put the whole situation behind them. They exited the kitchen through a different door and found themselves back in the front hall. There was a door that led to the east wing of the house, but it was locked. Without pausing to wonder what was concealed behind it, Jacob moved down the hall to the next door. It swung open when he pushed on it, so he and Ichiro entered the room.
It was filled with mismatched furniture that seemed odd and disjointed: large antique office furniture (a desk, a chair and a wooden filing cabinet) and baby furniture (a crib, a changing table, a rocking chair). Behind the crib was a closed door. The wooden walls had been painted shades of light blue. Perhaps the oddest item was a medical skeleton that stood on a pole near the door, and there was yet another framed motto on the wall:
Let them sleep,
for when they wake
they will move mountains.
Jacob felt more uncomfortable with every passing second spent in the house.
“This is the weirdest baby’s room ever,” Ichiro said. He sat in the office chair. It groaned and squealed, a grating sound that dug into Jacob’s eardrums and made him wince. “This desk is old, man. Like, super old. Even older than most of the junk you see out at the flea market.” He tried to open the drawers but they were locked shut. He swivelled the chair around and it screeched loudly again.
“Cut it out,” Jacob pleaded.
“Sorry.” He stood up and crossed the room, where he examined a picture frame that leaned against the wall. He picked it up and looked closely at it. “Hey, check it out. It’s a medical diploma. Speaking of the flea market, I wonder if I could sell this to someone out there.”
Jacob peered over Ichiro’s shoulder at the old certificate written in elegant script on yellowed paper.
A dozen names and titles followed the Dean’s name, running down to the bottom of the diploma.
“So the guy with the beard in the photograph, James Stockwell, was a doctor,” Jacob said. “Explains the skeleton, and how they afforded such a big house on their own private island. But it doesn’t explain why it’s been empty ever since they died.”
“How can you be sure no one else has lived here since the Stockwells?”
“There’s no modern furniture, no TV, nothing that seems to have been made after, like, the early 1900s. Just a bunch of antique stuff, a black-and-white photograph dated 1906 and a medical diploma from 1899. And a phonograph.”
“With a German record in it,” Ichiro said. Then he added, “Not that that’s helpful to add.”
“Maybe it’s not completely useless. Tresa sounds like a German name. We can probably assume that the record was hers.”
Ichiro laughed. “You’re being generous. It was a pointless observation.”
Jacob shrugged and offered a sheepish half smile. “Yeah, it was pretty pointless.”
“I might not be as good at the sleuthing as you are, but this is really fun.”
“It’s like our very own escape room with a mystery to solve and the added benefit that we’re not actually locked in.”
“And it doesn’t cost anything to play.” Ichiro offered a fist and Jacob bumped it with his own. “Boom.”
Tee-hee-hee.
Jacob flinched and felt his entire body — every muscle — tense up.
It was the trilling, carefree sound of a boy’s laughter. Such a happy sound under normal circumstances, but it wasn’t a happy sound here, and certainly not now. It had come from behind the door that was blocked by the baby’s crib.
Worse than the sound was the realization that it hadn’t been created by his imagination; it was real. Ichiro had also jumped and cursed, and he was also now staring at the crib, wide-eyed and horrified.
“You heard that too?” Jacob asked breathlessly.
�
��Yeah, I heard it,” Ichiro said. “Help me move the crib.”
“Are you crazy?”
“It sounded like a kid. We have to check.”
“No way.”
“Jake, if there’s a kid back there he’s probably trapped. We can’t just sit here and do nothing. We have to help.” Ichiro crossed the room and put his hands on the crib.
“Are you sure you want to go through that door?” Jacob asked slowly. “Maybe it’s been blocked for a reason.” Or, if someone’s trapped, why are they laughing? He decided to keep that question to himself.
“Are you going to help me or not?” Ichiro asked, sounding exasperated.
Jacob didn’t move. His feet felt like they had been frozen to the ground.
“Fine,” Ichiro said. He pushed the crib away from the wall, enough to open the door and slip through. Before he disappeared from sight he said, “Stay here and do nothing if you want.”
And then he was gone.
Jacob’s blood pumped through his veins as his heartbeat filled his ears with an odd, pounding rhythm: Boom-boom boom. Boom-boom boom. Boom-boom boom boom, boom-boom-boom.
He rubbed his face, steadied his breathing, and then did something that surprised him: he freed his feet and followed. It was better than waiting alone.
The windows in the barricaded room had been blacked out, making it even darker than the rest of the house. He couldn’t see Ichiro, nor much of anything else.
“Ichiro?” Jacob said, with a quiver in his voice. “You in here?”
A whisper from the far corner of the room: “Yes.”
Jacob looked in the direction of the voice. His eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness. Not enough to make out every detail, but enough to see a shadowy figure that he assumed was Ichiro. He was sitting on something low to the ground, still as a statue.
The floor squeaked as Jacob crossed to his friend.
Ichiro raised his hands at Jacob. “Don’t come any closer,” he hissed. “You’ll scare him off.” After a moment that felt like it stretched out to the length of an eternity, Ichiro added in a whisper, “He’s right behind you.”
Before Jacob could ask Ichiro who was behind him, the sound of music, punctuated by crackling hisses, drifted toward them from the other side of the house. From the parlour.
“The phonograph,” Jacob said. It works. But who’s playing it?
Even though Jacob didn’t understand the lyrics — the recording was of a woman singing operatically in German — the song was instantly familiar. A classic lullaby his mother had sung to him when he was a child.
The sound of feet travelled across the room. Jacob followed the sound but didn’t see anyone pass.
Ichiro stood. Jacob realized his friend had been sitting on the edge of an old cot, one of a dozen he now saw lined both sides of the room (Let them sleep popped into his head). Ichiro followed the sound of the phantom feet toward another closed door. Nail holes lined the door frame. On the ground were scattered two-by-four boards with bent nails sticking out of them.
Before Ichiro reached the door, it flew open on its own and slammed against the wall with a loud clap.
Ichiro looked down — the open doorway revealed a set of rickety stairs leading to the basement. “Stay back!” he yelled.
Jacob disregarded the command and ran to Ichiro’s side.
The stairs leading down were thin and warped. The walls in the basement below were crudely assembled with brick, mortar, wooden boards and patches of cement. The floor was dirt. There appeared to be little headspace, less than two metres from ground to ceiling. A pungent waft of earth and mould and something else — something metallic — rolled up from the depths of the house.
The sound of the phantom footsteps hurried down the stairs, followed by a scurrying noise that sounded to Jacob like a scavenger running away after being spotted.
There was whispering from below, muffled but urgent. It sounded like there was more than one voice, but how many? Two? Three? More? They overlapped and twisted into a coil like a ball of snakes, one nearly indistinguishable from the other.
The whispering stopped. The phonograph’s lullaby ended.
And then, after a pregnant pause, the screaming in the basement began.
FIVE
July 16
There’s an art to walking silently on crushed gravel in baseball cleats. Glove at the ready, Jacob crept toward third base without alerting the runner, a kid named Sebastien, who had taken a good three-stride lead toward home plate.
Sebastien was crouched low to the ground like a coiled spring, his fingers twitching and dangling between his legs a few centimetres above the gravel. He didn’t see Jacob — his eyes were focused on Hannah with hawk-like intensity.
As a lefty, she stood on the pitcher’s mound with her back to third base. Jacob spotted her sneak a quick glance over her shoulder, aware of the potential to pick the runner off and end the game with another victory. She was the Tigers’ best player and possessed a hyper-awareness of everything that was happening across the diamond at all times.
Without warning, Hannah suddenly swivelled and fired a blistering throw toward third.
Jacob caught the ball — a little high — and dropped his glove to tag Sebastien, but too late. Sebastien slid under and touched the base with his hand. Safe.
“Not gonna get me that easy,” Sebastien said, grinning up at Jacob from the ground.
“And you’re not going to score a run that easy, not with her closing,” Jacob said. He tossed the ball back to Hannah and stepped away from the base. It would have been nice to pick off Sebastien and win the game, but Jacob was happy that he caught the ball at all. He’d already made two big fielding errors earlier in the game and had batted 0 for 3, having struck out twice and grounded out once. His head wasn’t fully in the game. How could it be? In the days since he and Ichiro had run away from Summer’s End and canoed home as fast as they could, he’d thought about little else than what had happened there — the sound of laughter and footsteps followed by whispers and screams, not to mention the phonograph that played on its own. The lullaby had filled Jacob’s head in a nearly continuous loop for five days. In the swirling mess of his mind, he could hardly concentrate on anything else.
And despite the fear he felt when he thought of Summer’s End, something was calling him back.
Jacob shook his head as if he could toss the memories out of his mind the way a dog shakes water off its back. He had a baseball game to win. He needed to focus.
To his left, playing shortstop, Ichiro called out some encouragement. “Let’s go, Tigers. Strike the batter out, Hannah.” He didn’t seem to be as preoccupied as Jacob was with what had happened in the old house. He always had an easier time letting things go and moving on. Jacob wished he could live as carefree as Ichiro appeared.
Hannah held her glove in front of her chin and fiddled with the concealed ball, getting her fingers in just the right spot for her next pitch. Jacob couldn’t see what she had in store, but he had a pretty good idea. He assumed the batter could probably predict what type of pitch was coming next too, since he knew Hannah better than anyone else on either team.
Standing tense at the plate, bat raised above his right shoulder, was Hayden.
He’d been upset earlier in the month when they’d found out Jacob, Ichiro and Hannah had all been placed on the Tigers and he’d been placed on the Athletics. And now here he was, facing off against his sister. In the ninth inning. Down by one with the tying run on third. The count was two balls, two strikes.
With two strikes on the board, Hannah always went with her knuckleball. After a couple of fastballs and a curve or two, she knew batters were eager to swing, and the knuckleball took full advantage of that. It was a deceiving pitch.
Hannah continued to fiddle with the ball. The afternoon sun baked Jacob’s skin. He wiped sweat from his eyes. C’mon, Hannah, he thought impatiently. If he didn’t know you were setting up to throw a knuckler before, he does now.
A heater.
Hayden didn’t swing. Expecting a knuckler, he watched the ball fly past his waist in a straight line, right down the middle, before he could wrap his head around what had happened.
“Stee-rike three!” the umpire shouted as he pointed two fingers toward the home team’s bench.
The Tigers cheered and Hannah pumped her fist in the air. Jacob clapped and walked to the mound to congratulate Hannah.
“What was that, Hayden?”
Jacob stopped and turned. It was Sebastien pacing toward home plate, his cheeks blood red. He tore off his batting glove and threw it in the dirt. “She served it up and you didn’t even swing!”
Hayden stood beside the plate, staring down at his cleats, as if he couldn’t believe what had happened. He looked up at Sebastien, his teammate, but didn’t answer.
“Hey, man,” Jacob said. “Calm down. It’s just a game.”
Sebastien didn’t pay attention to Jacob. “You’re gonna lose us a lot of games this season, aren’t you? Figures I’d get stuck on a team with you.”
Hayden finally found his voice, or maybe he just heard Sebastien’s taunts for the first time. “I feel the same about you,” he said.
“Me?” Sebastien laughed. It was a sound like a question mark, punctuated by disbelief and rounded out by anger. “I’m not the one who lost the game. I’m not the one who got struck out by a girl.” He picked up his pace and barrelled toward Hayden.
But he didn’t reach him.
With a few long strides Hannah caught up to Sebastien and grabbed the back of his collar. She pulled him backwards, hard. His eyes bulged in shock as his jersey dug into his neck and she dragged him down to the gravel.
Hannah dropped a knee onto his chest as dust swirled around her head. “Look at that,” she said, raising a clenched fist. “You are the one who got struck by a girl.”
Summer's End Page 4