by Harvey Click
Probably the man raking hay was a nearby farmer who rented the fields. So somebody was getting money off the land, but nobody cared about the house and buildings and the weird old stuff inside. I knew nothing about the Hess family except their last name and a vague impression, gathered maybe from something my father had said, that they were an old couple who’d died four or five years ago. Maybe they had no kids, maybe there was no one to want all this cool stuff.
Crank was swearing and making a lot of racket, and I returned to the threshing floor to find him trying to rip one of the sides off the wagon.
“Let’s get back,” I said. “My old lady’ll bitch if we’re late for supper.”
“Fuck that. We’re not leaving till we get inside that house.”
“We’ll come back after supper. When it’s dark. Dark and spooky. Course that might be too scary for big bad Crank.”
“The only thing that scares me is your face.”
I was standing in the large empty area between the wagon and the big sliding doors at the front of the barn. One of the hayloft windows shed a bright beam of dusty light at my feet.
“Look here,” I said. “Tire tracks.” I knelt to examine the dry dirt floor, shrouded with old hay chaff. “Somebody’s been parking a car in here, pretty recently too.”
Crank stopped his vandalism to look. “Yeah? What makes you think they’re recent, Sherlock?”
“Just look at them,” I said. “Don’t they look fresh?”
“Shit. You think you’re so fucking smart. They’re just old tire tracks in the dust. Nobody comes here.”
We heard another car coming around the bend from the south, moving slowly as if it intended to pull into the driveway. I started scurrying up the ladder to the hayloft, half the wooden rungs missing and the other half loose, and Crank ran to the room where the sleigh sat, but the car went on by.
Once it was safely in the distance, we got our bicycles out of the stable where we’d hidden them. We rolled them out the side door cautiously, looking both ways, unnerved, but neither of us admitting it.
“Just a goddamn car, chicken-butt,” said Crank. “Nobody comes here.”
We walked our bicycles through tall weeds to the road, climbed on them and headed toward my home. The hayfield was soon hidden by the cornfield on our right, but I could still hear the farmer’s old tractor putt-putting in the distance.
***
After supper Crank and I went to my father’s tool shed. The building leaned, looking as if a good breeze might push it over, but it had canted like that for many years without falling. It had once been a tiny house with two small rooms downstairs and a single room upstairs, now filled with birds’ nests, bird shit and wasps. With its rusted tin roof and weathered siding, it was in worse shape than most of the outbuildings at the Hess place. For that matter our farmhouse probably wasn’t in much better shape than the Hess house.
The slanting floor of one downstairs room was crammed with old furniture, a rusted potbelly stove, and other junk that probably had been sitting there since before my father was born. The other room had a big wooden chest full of my father’s tools and a worktable covered with tin cans containing nails, screws, washers, nuts, none of them sorted, and above it a single bare grimy bulb, so you could never find what you wanted or see what you were doing.
I’d brought out an old mortise box lock to demonstrate my lock-picking skills. I remove the side and showed Crank how the bolt was locked by a single lever that could be pushed up with a bent wire, but he wasn’t interested.
“You think you’re so fucking smart.” He sneered and lit a cigarette.
“Hey, put that out. Dad might come out here.”
Crank flicked his ashes onto the floor and ignored me.
“He’ll see those ashes,” I said.
“Shit. In all this mess?” He blew a thin stream of smoke, his face dark with sarcasm. “No wonder your old man’s so crazy, all this goddamn junk would drive anyone nuts. Does he save every rusty screw and tin can he’s ever found? Looks like something out of Snuffy Smith.”
“He’s not crazy.”
“Coulda fooled me. He’s bat-shit crazy and so’s my old man.”
My father probably was half crazy, but I didn’t like to admit it. He was old, already fifty when I was born, and now bent over with arthritis. He’d spent his whole life toiling just to stay poor on that lonely farm, enough to drive anyone nuts. For the past few years he’d been in a world of his own, ranting out loud to himself about politics and the tragic nature of all things while he worked the fields on his old Massey-Ferguson tractor and watched the farm and its buildings deteriorate a little more each year.
“Really, he oughta clean up this goddamn dump.” Crank ground his cigarette butt into the floor.
“Come on, pick it up,” I said. But he didn’t, so I had to.
We got on our bikes and headed out the long gravel driveway. The sun had sunk below the woods across the road, but there was still a pink smudge of light above the ragged tree tops. Pink faded to deep purple, and by the time we turned onto the road with the Hess house everything was pure black, no moon, no stars.
We heard the corn rustling to our left but could barely see it, just dark specters swaying in the hot breeze. It was hard even to see the narrow road. We didn’t speak until we were rounding the bend and Crank suddenly hissed, “Jesus! Look!”
I’d been watching the dark road, trying not to ride into the ditch. We stopped and looked. Beyond the cornfield, the house and the trees around it were a mass of blackness.
“I don’t see anything,” I whispered.
“I saw a fucking light in the window, I swear to God. Real dim.” Crank was whispering so quietly I could scarcely separate his words from the rustling of the corn.
“Maybe it was a reflection.”
“Shit. There’s nothing to reflect out here.”
We stood still for a minute, straddling our bikes, staring and listening, but there was no sound and no light. We began to creep forward, not riding our bikes but scooting them silently with our feet.
As we got closer to the mass of blackness, everything got quieter. The corn stopped rustling and even the crickets sounded far away. Somewhere a cow lowed, but it was too distant to be any comfort.
We were close enough by now that we should be able to separate the trees from the house, make out the porch and windows and doors, but somehow it was still just a clump of heavy darkness, daring us to come closer. The house didn’t come clearly into view until we stopped in front of it, and even then it looked like a charcoal drawing on dark gray paper.
Crank suddenly hissed, “There!” and I saw it too, a faint glowing rectangle, a draped front window with a hint of light inside. We stood frozen on our bikes and stared.
The shadowy fold of the drape seemed to twist as the light shifted, and we heard a kind of moaning, quiet but horrible, so muffled and weird you couldn’t tell if a human was making it or something else, but whatever was making it seemed to be in pain.
A minute went by and I don’t think either of us breathed.
The moaning suddenly stopped, and the light twisted again among the folds of the drapes and disappeared. After a moment, the silence was broken by faint but diabolic laughter. It sounded scarcely human and seemed to be coming from more than one throat, like two or three demons laughing together.
The laughter died, the light twisted again among the folds of the drapes and disappeared, and suddenly we were plunging through the darkness on the narrow road, pedaling as fast as we could away from the Hess house.
***
Nearly a month passed before Crank and I got back there. I spent the time toiling on the farm with my father while Crank spent it vacationing with his parents. It was only to visit his aunt in North Carolina, but at least she lived near the ocean. I had never seen the ocean. I’d never seen much of anything.
The moon was nearly full in a perfectly clear sky, but even in that cold bright light the Hess
House looked dim and bleak, hiding behind the shadows of its trees. We crept into the barn past the door hanging by one hinge and hid our bikes behind a stable wall. We lit cigarettes and gazed out at the house, really nothing to be frightened of, but I wanted very badly to go back home. We could make popcorn and watch The Twilight Zone on TV; we could drink ginger ale and pretend it was beer.
But enter the house we must. Nothing in there could be worse than cowardice. Or so I hoped.
We hurried soundlessly through the weeds to the side door, and Crank pulled restlessly on his cigarette and watched the road while I slipped my bent wires into the lock and turned them just so, hoping they wouldn’t work, but they did and the door fell open an inch before I could even touch the knob.
We stared at each other in the moonlight, swallowing, scarcely breathing, and then Crank flicked his cigarette into the weeds, pushed the door open a foot and stuck his head in.
“Stinks,” he whispered. He switched on his flashlight and stepped inside.
I took a last look at the road, the yard, the barn. The trees were motionless, the air paralyzed. Everything was too quiet. A clump of shadow hurtled silently from a tree to the barn, an owl I supposed, and I heard Crank whisper, “Come on asshole, I’m not gonna be the Lone Ranger in here.”
I stepped inside and tried to shut the door behind me, but it wouldn’t stay shut. I jiggled the doorknob till the latch finally caught. A bad smell, dusty, musty, mildewed, the ripe stench of a dead animal somewhere.
“Look at all this shit,” Crank said, training his flashlight on a wooden kitchen table along the east wall. There were still things on it, a sugar can, a salt shaker, a dirty mason jar, a faded box of Wheaties, as if ready for someone or something to come to breakfast. Is this what dead people eat, I wondered—Wheaties turned to dust?
Crank stood in the middle of the room, his dusty flashlight beam moving like a long trembling finger from one object to another: a grimy old range with an iron tea kettle on one unit, an old refrigerator, a sink, cupboards with some doors hanging open, a counter with a toaster and a breadbox and other sad-looking junk, a door to the closed-in back porch, a tall wooden hutch probably from the nineteenth century.
The flashlight beam circled around to my face, shining right in my eyes, and Crank jumped with mock fright. “Jesus! It’s the creature from the Black Lagoon!” He laughed at his own joke, but without much mirth.
“Point that light down!” I whispered loudly. “You want everyone to know we’re here?” My nerves weren’t as good as his, or maybe he was pretending.
“What are you whispering for?” he sneered, but he wasn’t speaking very loudly either. He opened a door in the east wall just past the table and shined his flashlight into a broom closet.
“Anything in there?” I asked.
“A body with its dick chopped off. Looks just like you.” He snickered. “Just some brooms and dead mice. Check that door behind you.”
The door was in a little alcove between the kitchen and the next room. I switched on my flashlight, and it blinked a couple times before letting out something too feeble to be called light. The batteries were old, like everything my family owned. I opened the door and aimed the pitiful beam down a set of rough wooden stairs that ended in a pool of darkness reeking of dead animals and stagnant water.
“The dungeon,” I said, shutting the door.
Crank slipped past me to the next room, but I stayed in the kitchen for a minute because I preferred being close to the exit. I peered out the window of the back door to the porch, where a couple of chairs sat beside a small table with flowerpots. I examined the kitchen sink, rust-colored with some greasy plates and a stained cup at the bottom. Above it, instead of a faucet, there was a pump with a handle. I considered trying it, but the thought of pulling up ancient water from an ancient well seemed somehow horrible, an image from a dream I couldn’t quite remember and didn’t want to.
The tall wooden hutch looked more inviting, maybe because it was closer to the door, so I opened one of its drawers. There were envelopes, receipts, rubber bands, paper clips, pencils, scissors, chewed-up flakes of paper, and an ugly old brooch. Way in the back I saw some interesting-looking keys. I started to reach for them, but something long and thin lying on the bottom of the drawer suddenly twitched. It was a rat tail, and I saw its owner staring at me.
I hurried through a dining room with table and chairs and a china cupboard, and on to the front room where Crank was. It was a living room with sofa and chairs even older and more dilapidated than the ones at our house and a badly stained wool rug that maybe once had been blue. There was a wooden rocking chair with a high narrow back, a table beside it with yarn and knitting needles, waiting for nimble bony fingers to knit a shroud. Crank was standing by the west wall, staring at a framed picture hanging above the fireplace mantle.
“Sometime our houses will look like this,” I said, trying to sound calm and philosophical. “I mean, after our parents die and everything.”
“Yeah? Well I’ll tell you one thing, Professor Peter—even our old ladies don’t look this fucked up.”
I came over to see what he was staring at. It was a big old photograph of a woman, obviously taken in a studio with that stiff, stern pose they used to use. Someone must have thought the woman was pretty important, because the elaborate wooden frame probably cost more than some of the furniture. But my God, what a face, what an expression in those eyes, as hard as iron.
She was maybe forty, but impossible to tell, ageless in her severity, a big woman judging by the shoulders, soberly clad in the plainest black blouse locked tightly shut at her bullish neck with a brooch that I thought I recognized from the drawer, as if she owned only one adornment, and that one ugly. Her dark hair was braided and done up in a bun as tight as a fist, perched on the top of her head like a guardian spirit that would abide no nonsense. Her face bore no remarkable features except for the glacial expression, the thin lips sealed shut with disapproval so harsh and damning and all-inclusive that I suddenly remembered masturbating the night before in my bedroom, and I felt deeply ashamed and frightened, as if she knew about it and furthermore knew exactly how to fix my foul habit.
Some interesting thoughts must have been going through Crank’s head too, because we both stared at the portrait without speaking until my flashlight began to fail and I had to knock it against my hand to jar the batteries. We turned away, looking for something less gloomy, but the shadows clustered in the big room didn’t have anything cheerful to offer. The silence was as thick as the shadows, as if the world outside was too far away to be heard, and the stifling, foul-smelling air clung to my skin like grease.
“Shit!” Crank said. “This is blood!”
His flashlight was aimed at a large stain on the carpet near the center of the room. It was dark and shaped like a mitten. He was wearing such a fierce expression that I tried to laugh at him but couldn’t quite manage it.
“It’s just a stain,” I said. “It could be anything.”
“It’s blood.”
“It’s probably a water stain,” I said. “That branch on the roof probably broke some slates. It must be right above us and rain’s been getting in.”
“Water my ass,” he said, but he aimed his light at the ceiling. No water stain there, just an ugly brass chandelier hanging by one screw.
“Watch that fucking light,” I said. “You may as well hang out a sign and tell everybody we’re here.”
I turned back to the fireplace and examined the single photograph on the mantle, a black and white eight by ten. This was just a snapshot, no expensive studio production, in a cheap five-and-dime frame. Four people, all standing beside the house, the yard neat and trim, the patch of hydrangeas behind them. The woman on the wall, Mrs. Hess presumably, towered over the others, still dressed in black and clutching a plain, wide-brimmed black hat to her large head, as if a breeze had picked up a second before the shutter was pressed.
Standing beside her, hands
behind his back, was a shrunken scrawny man, leaning a little as if the breeze might push him over, dressed in a suit too big for him, the pants legs crumpled because they were too long for his legs. He was trying to smile and not doing a very good job, his face as crumpled and ill-fitting as his pants.
In front of them were two boys, maybe ten, standing stiffly and solemnly, too stiffly and solemnly for boys, as if they were afraid any second Mom’s big beefy hand would cuff them for breathing without permission. They looked the same: the same age, the same height, the same long, narrow faces, the same odd cast in the same close-set eyes, the same strange expressions, as if their faces were already starting to crumple like their father’s.
“Check this out,” I said. “I bet they’re twins.”
“More blood,” Crank said. He’d moved closer to the north wall and was examining another stain in front of a big upholstered chair. “There’s more over there too.” He pointed toward the sofa.
“Bullshit. Did you find a detective badge in your Cracker Jack box?”
“It’s blood,” he said with finality. “Dried-up old blood.”
“You should know what blood looks like, since you wear Kotex,” I said, but I wasn’t feeling as skeptical as I sounded.
“It’s blood, and there’s a lot of it.”
He seemed even more unnerved than I was. I was pleased to have gained the upper hand and decided to press my advantage. “Well, you ready for the upstairs?” I asked in the coolest voice I could muster.
“Sure.” But he didn’t budge, he just kept staring at the stains. “Look, maybe we should just get the fuck out of here,” he said at last. “I mean it’s getting late.”
I thought of mocking him but didn’t. “Yeah, okay,” I said, and it was like coming up for air after too long underwater.