Within These Walls

by Ania Ahlborn

  For a moment, all he could do was sit and stare. This was it, the scene of the crime, the house that nobody but Halcomb truly understood. Lucas’s chest tightened along with his fingers, which were gripping the wheel. Was this a good idea? Was this really the best way to get his next book? Was it right to usher Jeanie through that front door and into a sleeping nightmare?

  It’s just a house.

  The assurance bumped against the inner curve of his skull.

  There is no such thing as haunted places, only haunted people.

  He had read that somewhere once, and at the time he hadn’t been so sure. The absence of haunted places meant that life was finite, that after we exhaled our final breath, there was nothing beyond the door. Lucas didn’t like that idea. His ever-present love for all things morbid demanded he believe there was more to death than that.

  But that house was glaring at him—glaring, and yet, simultaneously inviting him in. Come, it whispered through the darkness. Welcome. Don’t be shy.

  Lucas looked away from it. His gaze drifted along the wooded property, pausing on a couple of empty beer cans abandoned at the base of a pine. People had been here, more than likely kids that were a carbon copy of who he had once been. He couldn’t count the times he and his friend Mark had climbed fences, ignoring signs that warned trespassers of prosecution. He couldn’t remember how many windows of abandoned houses they had peered into, or how many supposedly haunted tunnels they had walked. And yet, here he was, the lover of all things dark and mysterious, wondering if taking up residence in Audra Snow’s old house was worth the risk.

  What are you going to do, Lou? Turn the truck around and drive back to New York? You don’t live there anymore. That life is gone. You’ve been abandoned, excommunicated, forgotten, or has that already slipped your mind? With Caroline’s sister Trish on hand in case of an emergency, the house in Briarwood was locked up for the two weeks Caroline was overseas. Who knew what she’d do with it once she returned? Perhaps, on top of signing divorce papers, he’d also be signing a sales agreement. The New York City real estate market was ripe for the picking. She could list it on a Monday and have a deal wrapped up by the weekend.

  “Jeanie.” Dropping a hand from the wheel, he caught his kid by the ankle and gave her a light squeeze. “Jeanie, wake up.”

  Jeanie exhaled a muted groan, her fingers prodding at her still-closed eyes. “What?” she mumbled, her voice dry with sleep.

  “We’re here.”

  “We are?” She sat up, her hair wild and luminescent with the glow of the dashboard. “This isn’t it, is it?” She squinted at the place, yawned, then gave her father a dubious look through the shadows of the truck’s cab. Lucas leaned back against the U-Haul’s bench seat and let his hands drag across the thighs of his jeans. “Dad?” Her attention bounced from the house ahead of them to her father’s face.

  He had seen it online, photographed in the daylight with sun shining off of its wood-paneled, stone-covered front. It had reminded him of the Brady Bunch house, complete with its front double doors and badly worn shingle roof. In the sunshine, the place looked welcoming. But now, it was nowhere near what he imagined.

  “Hang on . . . Dad. It isn’t even near anything.” She was twisting in her seat, getting a good look at nothing but trees. “You said it was close to town. Close to the movies, to something . . .”

  Lucas chose to ignore his daughter’s complaints and nodded toward the house instead. “Come on, let’s check it out.”

  Jeanie let out a dramatic sigh and shimmied across the long seat toward the passenger door. She was unhappy, not to mention cranky from being woken up, but it was too late now. They were here, and Lucas wasn’t putting another mile on the odometer tonight.

  They dashed through the rain and across the gravel driveway, the truck’s headlights illuminating their way. Ducking beneath the awning above the front doors, Jeanie shivered and pretzeled her arms across her chest, impatient to get inside. Her trepidation had buckled beneath the cold.

  “I bet there’re going to be bugs everywhere. It’s going to be like a haunted house inside, isn’t it? Spiderwebs and everything?”

  “There aren’t any bugs.” Lucas pulled a silicone key chain from his pocket and slid the key into the lock. From his research on a few real estate sites, he’d learned that the property had been on the market for years. It had only recently been purchased by someone who, lucky for Lucas, had decided to use it as a rental.

  After a few seconds of struggle, he got the dead bolt to slide back and pushed open one of the doors. Jeanie ducked inside before he could hit the lights. He slid his hand along the wall while she stood in silhouette, the truck’s high beams at her back. Finding a dimmer switch to the left of the door, he turned the little plastic wheel and the overhead lights faded on.

  “Oh God.” She breathed the words while stepping farther into the foyer, rain water spattering the redbrick floor at her feet.

  The living room was recessed, nested a good eight inches into the floor with steps leading into it from both the foyer and kitchen. The interior was a weird mishmash of colors and textures. Green-painted wood paneling and gray stonework gave the place an undeniable retro feel. The red brick skirted the living room in a raised L shape, stopping at the foot of a staircase that led to three upstairs rooms. A stone fireplace butted up against the brick walkway, giving way to a sea of ugly beige carpet that looked recently replaced.

  A distinct hint of bleach hung acrid in the air, more than likely wafting out of the recently scrubbed bathrooms. Lucas had made it clear to the property management company that he expected the place to be move-in ready. He didn’t have time to play housemaid with his impending trips to Lambert Correctional, and with all the research he had to do. What Lucas hadn’t told them was that he knew the history of the house, and it was only now that he realized that had been a risk. If there was graffiti somewhere on an outside wall—a 666 or someone’s idea of a clever throwback to the murder/­suicide that had occurred—Jeanie was bound to find it. But despite this worry, and the relative cleanliness of Audra Snow’s former home, he couldn’t bring himself to look away from the low-pile rug. He wondered if the carpet had been the same shade of tan in 1983—the same color, at least, until it had been soaked in blood.

  “This is bigger than our house back home,” Jeanie said, trying to make the most of the place. “It’s, like, totally disgusting-looking, but it’s definitely bigger.”

  Before Lucas had the chance to note that they now had two bathrooms instead of one, she ducked into the shadows of the kitchen. He followed after her in silence, his hands deep in the pockets of his jeans.

  The kitchen was trying for sixties mod, but it looked far more sad than fashionable. The brown cabinets clashed against an ugly orange backsplash and Formica counters to match. And while someone had updated the appliances in recent years, they were still in questionable shape. But the place was perfect for Lucas’s purposes. Sitting quietly among the trees, the house was a time capsule. Preserved by former owners and tenants, it was as if the house had been waiting three decades for Lucas to arrive and reclaim his career.

  Jeanie fiddled with the dials of a countertop stove, then flashed her dad a look. “I’m gonna go pick out my room.” She stepped across the kitchen and back into the living room, making a beeline for the stairs.

  “Not the master, kiddo,” he called after her. “That belongs to your father.” Her Converse sneakers stomped up the risers beneath the patter of rain. He leaned against the island and exhaled, his attention drifting over the foreign details of the room.

  He wondered how many people had lived at 101 Montlake Road without knowing what had happened in the past. Who had been given the job to pull up the carpet that had grown tattered with age? Had they seen the blight of blood that had seeped into the very foundation of the house?

  Did you recognize what it was? he wondere
d. Did you stand over it with an appropriate sense of dread? Of course not, especially if the carpet installers hadn’t known the significance of the address. They would have dismissed the stain as something unremarkable and mundane, something as innocent as grape juice or wine. What a party. Lucas’s skin crawled at the thought.

  It was at that moment that, as if picking up on his manner of thinking, the house groaned on its foundation. A series of loud pops came from deep within one of the kitchen walls, the entire room sighing at its lack of emptiness. And while anyone would have written off the popping as nothing but wood expanding and contracting with fluctuations in temperature and humidity, it still gave Lucas the creeps.

  On edge, he pushed himself away from the counter and coiled his arms across his chest. There was an odd energy here. Something didn’t feel right. He flipped off the lights, ready to leave the dated kitchen behind, but it was the shadow in the corner, not the weird vibe of the place, that stopped him in his tracks. There, in a dark corner of the kitchen, was a shadow within a shadow. For a moment he was convinced he could see the curve of a shoulder, the outline of an arm. What the hell is that? Hesitant, he took a couple of forward steps to close the distance between himself and the light switch, inadvertently cutting the space between himself and the figure in half. The silhouette faded with his every step.

  Lucas hit the lights. The corner came up empty.

  “Okay,” he murmured to himself. “Keep that imagination in check.”

  But he nearly yelped in surprise when Jeanie yelled from the upper floor.

  “Dad!”

  Her abrupt calling down to him assured him that this was a bad idea. She’d found something. Goddammit, not even an hour into their first night and it was over. He should have never considered living here a possibility.

  He rushed into the living room while picturing the worst, the impossible. A bloated, rotten body in one of the rooms, somehow missed by cleaning crews, past residents, and the Realtors who had handled the listing for so long. He saw Halcomb’s followers spread out on the living room floor; Audra Snow half-gutted yet somehow still alive. Her mouth opening and closing while she gasped for air.

  But when he skidded around the corner, he saw nothing but Jeanie hanging over the upstairs banister. Her hair framed her face in twin swaths of gold. For half a second, excitement glinted against the green of her eyes. Her mouth turned up into a smile that reminded him of how she used to be, before the blight of his and Caroline’s problems had eaten away at their kid’s happy innocence.

  “There are two bathrooms . . .” Her excitement faded midsentence, as she spotted what must have looked like panic on his face. “Dad?”

  Anxiety had jammed his heart up into his throat.

  “Are you okay?” The lightness of her expression was gone, replaced by leery concern.

  “Fine,” he said, forcing a smile. “Sorry. You just freaked me out for a second.”

  “Freaked you out.” She parroted the words back to him, her worry taking on a far more skeptical intonation. “Why would I have freaked you out?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “How do you not know? I just said Dad and you—”

  “I thought something happened.” He cut her off. “Never mind.”

  “What would have happened?”

  “I said forget it,” he snapped.

  Jeanie blinked at him. Her face went taut with emotion. Just when he was sure she was about to yell down at him, YOU forget it! she turned her back on him and pushed away from the balustrade.

  Lucas squeezed his eyes shut. Get it together. “You are Lucas ­Graham,” he murmured to himself, his right hand gripping the handrail. “You can do anything.” A mantra he’d picked up from a self-help book—A State of Mind: How to Overcome Obstacles and Get What You Want. “Your failures are only failures in your mind.” That was a hard one to swallow, especially when his failures were printed on royalty statements that didn’t make a dent in his bank account. “You will only succeed if you believe you deserve it.” He had to believe, even if it seemed crazy, even if this whole plan was insane.

  If Halcomb’s devotees could put their faith in a crackpot, Lucas could surely believe in beating the odds.

  EXCERPT FROM “THIS CHARMING MAN”

  By Daniel Gould

  Rolling Stone (Issue 456)

  September 12, 1985

  Sandra Gleason was only fifteen when she met Jeffrey Halcomb, a name that, over two years ago, became synonymous with cults, murder, and devil worship. Back then, she went by Sandy—a moniker she’d picked up on account of her love for Grease and Olivia Newton-John. Sandy was a runaway, wandering the streets of San Diego, when a dark-haired stranger swept her off her feet. “He was very charming,” Sandy recalls of Halcomb. She sits across from me at a chic Los Angeles café, sipping on a cappuccino despite the summer heat. “He called me Sunrise. Once I met him, I couldn’t think of anyone else,” she tells me. “I was sort of in love with this other boy for a while, but after I met Jeff . . .” She shakes her head, as if to say forget it. “[Jeff] was magnetic, you know? He was infectious. Once he got in your head, he was in there for good.”

  Few members of Halcomb’s group have come forward since the murder/mass suicide. Sandy is the only who claims to have known each of the eight members who took their lives on March 14, 1983. “I knew them all,” Sandy tells me. “Gypsy and Sunnie. All of them. But not Audra Snow.” Gypsy was Georgia Jansen. Sunnie was Shelly Riordan. Every member of Halcomb’s group was renamed, as if to separate their past selves from the people Halcomb wanted them to become.

  Audra Snow came well after Sandy left the group. “She was my replacement,” Sandy explains. “At least that’s as much as I can figure out. Jeff had a thing for blondes. He sought them out, like Adam looking for his Eve.” A strange Biblical reference for a man whom the media has deemed a satanist. “I don’t know where they got that from,” Sandy tells me when I bring up the theory. “Jeff never mentioned the devil or much about religion at all. He was about love and togetherness and rejecting material possessions. He was, like, a walking representation of the peace-and-love generation. But he also made no secret about believing in God.”

  It’s no wonder Halcomb has fallen under satanic scrutiny, says Sandy. “People look at what he did and, yeah, it’s evil. I mean, he killed a baby.” She looks down at the table, as though trying to place herself in Audra Snow’s shoes. But of the time Sandy spent with Jeff Halcomb and his crew, she insists that she never feared for her safety. “It felt like the safest place in the world to be. Jeff promised to take care of us, and he did.” And while, at times, Halcomb forced his followers to live in tents and eat out of Dumpsters, Sandy insists those types of hardships weren’t a big deal. “We had tough times just like any other family,” she tells me. “But we were always happy.” It’s a wonder, then, that Sandy ever left the group. “Things started getting strange when I found out there was expectation,” Sandy says of her departure. “At first I thought Jeff just liked me more than the other girls, and really, I liked that. Who wouldn’t? Any girl in her right mind would have wanted [Jeff] for herself.” She blushes, then shrugs as if to dismiss her girlish musings just before her expression goes dark. “But things changed. The longer I was with them, the weirder things became.”

  Sandy explains that she met Jeff Halcomb in the summer of 1980. Less than a week after making his acquaintance, she accepted his invitation to tour the West Coast with the group. She remained with them for the better part of two years. Did she ever make the comparison between Halcomb and Charles Manson? Sandy shakes her head at me. “Never,” she insists. “I suppose I would have if [Halcomb and his group] had been scary . . .” She pauses, reconsiders her statement. “Then again, it’s not like I ever met any of the Manson kids. Maybe they weren’t as creepy as I imagine them to be.” But once things got frightening for Sandy, it was the
beginning of a downward spiral. “I found out that Jeff was trying to get me pregnant,” she says. “I was only eighteen. It spooked me. We started arguing. And that’s when I started to doubt him. He couldn’t handle that.” She soon found herself falling out of favor with the group. “He got angry, like I was somehow betraying them all. We got into a fight when I accused him of using me. That’s when he told me I was worthless.” She frowns down at the table. “Obviously, it hurt to hear that. I loved him, and seeing the anger in his face . . . I just left. I guess that’s why they didn’t follow me. What’s the point of chasing someone who you deem a waste of time?”

  But even three years after her narrow escape, Sandy insists Jeffrey Halcomb had the best intentions for those he referred to as his family. “Jeff never wanted to hurt anyone,” she says. “He had some strange ideals, some weird points of view, but he wasn’t dangerous. I’m telling you, he loved everyone who put their trust in him. Sometimes I think that maybe I was wrong in running away. I think that maybe I misjudged him. I reacted that way because he hurt me. I wanted him to love me more than he loved the others, and that was wrong of me. Jeffrey loved everyone equally. My jealousy ruined that.” And of the various crimes the media has tried to pin on Halcomb and his group, specifically the brutal double murder of Richard and Claire Stephenson of Pier Pointe, Washington, Sandy refutes the possibility of Jeffrey being involved. “At times, we had to do things we weren’t proud of to get by,” she tells me. “Yeah, sometimes it involved stealing. But we never went into houses when people were there. Jeff never intentionally hurt anyone.”

  Except that in the end, that was exactly what Jeffrey Halcomb did. Sandy, however, is not swayed by his conviction. “I admit, I miss the camaraderie,” she says. “When it was good, those were the best couple of years of my life.” When asked if she has attempted to contact Jeffrey Halcomb in Lambert Correctional Facility, where he is serving a life sentence for two counts of first-degree murder and eight counts of aiding and abetting, Sandy shakes her head and shrugs her shoulders with a girlish smile. “I’ve thought about it,” she confesses. “But I’m too embarrassed. I left in such a frenzy. I made a fool of myself.” When the waitress stops by our table, Sandy orders another cappuccino. She fidgets with a pack of Virginia Slims as I sip my water, watching her, wondering if she realizes just how close she came to being Jeffrey Halcomb’s personal acolyte.