As he turned down the drive, a Jeep flew past him heading away from the house. One of its headlights was out.
Was that Riggs behind the wheel?
The Prius choked, and Peter pumped the gas. It stuttered a bit, then roared back to life. As if a switch were suddenly flipped, the knocking and the wheezing from under the hood ceased.
Now, you cooperate.
Peter pulled up the drive and parked under the outstretched branches of a protective elm. He got out of the car and briefly considered hauling his new audio equipment into the house but decided to wait for the next break in the rain. He’d maxed out a card on the additional speakers and cables—no reason to risk soaking the stuff.
The light coming from the front windows told him that Hannah was home, and he girded himself for the barrage of questions he knew would be coming his way.
Where have you been? Why didn’t you answer your phone? What the hell happened to your face?
He didn’t have a story ready, but—banking on his ability to come up with one quickly enough—he opened the front door and stepped inside.
“Hannah?”
The pungent air that hit his nose nearly knocked him to his feet. It was sickly sweet, like fermented flesh. The scent set off alarm bells.
“Hannah!”
The upstairs was dark. The light was coming from the kitchen. As he took a step forward, a shockwave of sorrow struck him. It was a tangible thing, like heat from a fire. Tears welled at the corners of his eyes, and he thought of Juan—Juan who had never come back.
The hallway seemed to flicker as if there were a short in reality. And then the grey man stepped into the hall.
Quiet, you little shit!
Peter didn’t hear the words so much as feel them. They were like cold fingers clawing at his skin.
Be quiet!
The grey man lurched toward the back of the house, and as he did, his foot struck something lying on the floor. A dull metal sound. The spirit—for that’s what he was, wasn’t he? A goddamned ghost?—cursed under his breath and lumbered onward.
As soon as the man disappeared around the corner, Peter made a dash for the hall. He made it as far as the kitchen before forcing himself to stop. On the floor before him lay the tea kettle he’d gotten Hannah a number of Mother’s Days ago. And next to it, two discarded socks.
He heard the unoiled groan of the basement door as it opened.
“Peter?”
Hannah. She was downstairs.
Tossing worry aside—for what would hesitation serve should he find those ghostly fingers around Hannah’s neck—he raced down the hall. When he reached the top of the stairs, he found the grey man already halfway down, belt in hand. The boy lay at the bottom of the stairs, the darkness gathering around him. A nightmare in duplicate.
But this time, Hannah was down there too.
“No!” he shouted.
As before, the grey man turned, and as he did so, Peter rushed him, trying to slip past and get to Hannah. To shield her from the madness.
But as he attempted to sidle past, an attraction drew him into the grey man, and then he was the grey man. Trapped beneath his rotting skin.
His thoughts warped and overlapped those of the dead man.
Time to do it. The little shit! Snap his neck, stop his breath. Easiest thing in the world. Then I’ll sleep. Little shit. Little SHIT! Be rid of him. Just like his mother. Down he’ll go. Into the drink. Down with her. Down, down, down!
Images flashed before Peter’s mind’s eye. The boy lying in a wet bed. The mocking face of an alarm clock. A woman with black, flowing hair and bulging eyes screaming. And he felt rage, old and bitter. A moldering anger that insisted he follow it down the stairs, insisted he raise the belt and strike.
He saw the boy cowering below and felt nothing but loathing.
Little shit. Mama’s boy! Step. I’ll shut your mouth. Bind it tight. Step. C’mere and gets some. Step. C’mere!
Peter tried to look away—he knew what came next—but his eyes were locked in place, his vision borrowed from the seething, snapping man on the steps. He watched as the blackness overtook the boy, flowed into him. Watched as the boy, newly invigorated, leaped to his feet and scrambled up the stairs. He felt his small arms wrap about his neck, felt the wood crack beneath them, the step becoming a trapdoor and—
“Peter!”
The grey man and the boy tumbled away. The room brightened with a sudden shock. Peter felt the chittering darkness recede into the shadows.
Hannah was on the steps below him.
“Jesus, Peter! What happened to your face?”
Hannah held her questions until she had marched Peter to the upstairs bathroom where she cleaned and dressed his wound. After tending to the burn on her foot, she let loose.
After tending to the burn on her foot, she let loose.
“What is that?” she asked, indicating the gash that now lay beneath gauze and tape.
Peter’s mouth moved, but he had yet to formulate an answer. “I…I’m not sure.”
“Any deeper and we’re talking stitches, Peter. What gives?”
He toyed with the idea of a fanciful tale—a run-in with an angry local and switchblade—and gave in to a version of the truth. “I really don’t know.”
Hannah sat on the edge of the tub and stared at him. He couldn’t look her in the eye.
“I’m sure you know I had to get a ride. I’m sure you know I called—”
“Hannah, I’m sorry—”
“I know the funeral was hard on you, and I know…” She paused and nodded toward his face. “Did you do that to yourself?”
He felt the urge to grab at the lifeline she was throwing, to admit to self-mutilation while in the throes of grief, and yet, he thought otherwise.
“No. The car was acting up, and I must have…hell, I don’t know.”
“Were you drinking?”
“No.”
“You swear?”
“I swear. Look, I haven’t been sleeping well. We both know that.” He finally mustered the courage to look her in the face. “Maybe I nodded off behind the wheel. It was raining so hard, and the car was acting up—”
“You fell asleep?”
“I must have hit my face on the dashboard.”
Hannah’s brow furrowed.
“You want me to give you a story that makes sense,” Peter said. “But I can’t. It doesn’t make sense to me. Not at all.” Finally, the truth.
Hannah folded her arms. “Maybe you need some help.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe you haven’t worked out all your feelings about Michael. And then, going to the funeral home—”
“You’re right.” He’d landed on his strategy late, but it seemed to be working. He would ‘yes, dear’ her into submission. Better that than to let her peek into the world in which he was now living—a world where the dead were restless and clawing. He would keep her out this, no matter what. And if he had to trade on his grief for his dead son in order to accomplish that, so be it.
“I’ll look into someone for you to talk to,” Hannah said.
“Okay.”
“Maybe we can go together.”
“Whatever you think is best. Why don’t you go to bed? You look exhausted.”
“I look exhausted?” Hannah said, throwing the roll of gauze at him. “Speak for yourself, husband.”
“I need to go get my cables out of the car.”
“Now?”
Peter rose and walked to the window. The rain had weakened into a drizzle.
“Yeah. You go to bed. I’ll be up in a few minutes.”
Without waiting for a response, Peter headed for the door.
“Peter?”
He stopped. “Yeah?”
“You’re not lying to me, are you?”
She was barefooted and nervous and he wanted to tell her everything.
But that wasn’t his job right now. His job lay below where the cancer in the house resided.
“Never,” he said.
* * *
After retrieving the bags of equipment from the car, Peter proceeded to the basement. The spark in the air, the whiff of the unnatural was gone. And even if it were to rise back up again, threatening to detonate his life, he would not allow it.
“I will not be run off by shadows,” he said as he set the bags down next to the audio booth.
He pulled a fifty-foot spool of speaker wire from one of the bags and got down to work.
* * *
Two hours later, Hannah was awakened by a soft ping. The text message lit up the screen of her phone, and thus, the room. She rolled over and out of a dream.
“Peter?”
The bed was empty, save for her.
With a sigh, she reached for the phone and squinted at the message.
First Market Bank Fraud Alert: Card 6922. Did you purchase $759.96 Iowa City Electronics 30 Sept? Reply Y or N.
Iowa City. Not Galesburg. One hundred miles away. Not sixteen.
She set aside the phone without answering Y or N. She stared at the ceiling, wondering when, and if, her husband was coming to bed that night.
* * *
As Peter mounted his sixth speaker to the wooden beamed ceiling, he knew he was being watched, but he was undeterred. The watcher was curious—of that he was sure. And also amused. Although he had no physical sense of the thing in the basement—no cold rush of air, no half-glimpsed shadows in the corner of his eye—its presence was as sure as his own breath.
With his final bit of assembly complete, he slipped into the booth and fired up the laptop. He pulled out his tablet and navigated to the first of the links Ellen Marx’s had sent him. Removing Negative Entities, Energies and Thought Forms through Sound. The website’s predominant Halloweeny font didn’t give him much confidence. He played the first clip.
A fluctuating harmony filled the booth, and he quickly lowered the volume. A couple of right clicks later, and he had downloaded the site’s entire library.
He opened a new project file and laid down one of the clips as a separate track, then turned to Ellen Marx’s ebook of prayers for the dead. The first was “Prayer for the Well-Being of Earthbound Spirits.”
Screw that.
He flipped ahead and landed on “Two Prayers to Repel the Unclean and Unquiet.”
Bingo.
As he launched into the text—overlapping the dissonant harmonics—he felt a new emotion in the room; a stirring different than the curiosity he’d sensed previously.
It was hate.
“Lord of All, I banish all foulness and relinquish my will to the light—”
The tablet’s screen flickered.
Peter hit a key, and the playhead jumped back five seconds. He continued.
“I banish all foulness…”
Hannah was not surprised to find Peter’s side of the bed empty when she woke.
She found him asleep in his booth. The basement room had been transformed. Cables and wires snaked from the booth like malignant tendrils. Speakers adorned the rafters, surrounding the booth like a halo.
It looked like madness.
Hannah retreated, unwilling to wake him. Whatever this was, it had nothing to do with recording books. This was something gone haywire, and her husband was at the center of it.
I’ve got to get him out of this basement.
And yet, she didn’t dare. To approach him felt…dangerous.
As she turned toward the stairs, her eyes lit once again upon the file folders and papers strewn about. She quickly gathered up the disarray, stuffing folders and envelopes into the boxes. She hauled the first of the two Personal boxes up to the car and then went back for the second. They were rich with the scent of mildew and dust.
Once the boxes were safely shut away in the trunk of the car, Hannah went to the kitchen and fortified herself with a swig of orange juice straight from the bottle. The acid burned her throat.
Peter’s lie about his trip hung heavy with her, and it made her wonder what else he might be hiding. She realized that she had not been forthcoming about Riggs’ attempt to kiss her the night before, but that was a lie of omission—a completely different animal. Or at least that’s what she told herself.
The world felt unbalanced, like a spinning plate that might—just might—tip over and plunge to the ground if she didn’t take things in hand. She’d call around, find a therapist for Peter to talk to. She’d go through the papers from the basement, see if she couldn’t work up a deal with Lillian Dann to turn them from one-dollar renters into owners. Bring some stability to the landscape.
But first, she needed to get Peter out of the house. She had felt it when she saw him asleep in the booth, laid across his equipment with the speakers pumping otherworldly sounds through the basement. He was festering.
She checked her phone—she had to be at work in an hour. She scribbled a note for Peter on the back of a piece of junk mail and left it at the top of the basement stairs where he was sure to find it.
If he ever comes back up.
Hannah grabbed her purse and headed for the door.
* * *
The pain in Peter’s face startled him from sleep. He flexed his jaw to try to mitigate his discomfort and only succeeded in making it worse.
His audio creation had stopped, the computer screen awash with swirls of color indicating the system had put itself to sleep.
His head pounded as if he had spent his evening pounding shots rather than recording tracks. There were twelve in all—finished audio blending what he thought were the most applicable prayers with the sonic clips he’d selected.
The darkness had departed around three in the morning. He didn’t even question how he knew that fact, but fact it was. Either it waned with the approaching dawn, or his efforts did indeed have some impact. Especially track number four…
You’re batshit crazy. You know that, right?
He extracted himself from the tiny room within a room—his joints cracking and popping—and looked about at his handiwork.
Batshit crazy.
He stank from his night in the booth. He was ready for a hot shower. What he was not ready for was Hannah. As he ascended the stairs, he felt like a rummy stumbling home after an all-night bender.
But Hannah had flown the coop, leaving a note to do the talking.
You need a break. Don’t work today. I’ll come home early if I can. Antibiotic cream in the bathroom. Love you, H.
Work? The idea hadn’t even crossed his mind. He checked his phone to see if there was any follow-up from Ellen Marx. She’d said to sit tight—she’d get back to him. Zip, zero, nada. What he did find was a friendly email from Flatiron Audio. They were looking forward to getting back on schedule.
Peter’s finger lingered over the email a moment before pressing the delete icon.
* * *
The whine of a power drill greeted Hannah as she entered the Blind Rock. A sturdy woman in work clothes looked up briefly, then returned to her work.
Pat Porter waved her over.
“That storm fried the electrics. I hoped Mattie would have them sorted by now, but it looks like we’ll be dark again tonight. Shame. Thursday night of the Fall Festival always brings a crowd. Better luck next year, I suppose. I’ll pay you for the day plus a little extra for tips. Not Riggs, though. That boy’s got his hand in the till more often than not. Don’t you, Riggs?”
Riggs, who was doing his best to hide behind the bar, gave his boss a nod.
“Sorry you had to waste your time coming in.” He turned suddenly as sparks flew from the back of the room. “No, Mattie! Third pipe over, I told you that.” The man stalked off, leaving her alone at the front door.
Hannah looked back to the bar. Riggs had grown a sudden fascination with the towel dispenser. She mad
e a beeline for him.
“Guess we’ve got the day free,” she said.
“Yeah,” Riggs said, mimicking a smile. “I guess we do. I mean, you do. We both do. Separately.”
“Don’t think I’ve forgotten about last night.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You owe me.”
“Sorry. I do?”
“Do you still have those passes for the Fall Festival?”
“You…want to go?”
Hannah shook her head. “I want you to take Peter.”
The man literally gulped. “You want me to?”
“Yes.”
“As a punishment?”
“As a favor.”
“Okay.”
“So, you’ll do it?” She offered him a look that let him know he had no choice in the matter.
“Yeah, sure.”
“When does it start?”
“I’m not sure.” Riggs called out to Pat. “Pat, when does the fair open?”
“Noon,” Pat said.
Riggs turned back to Hannah. “Opens at noon.”
“Well,” Hannah said, tapping her fingers on the bar. “What are you waiting for?”
Riggs grabbed his fleece jacket. “Heading out, boss!” He was out the door like a shot—a man on a mission.
Hannah walked over to where Mr. Porter was pointing out Mattie’s missteps.
“Do you mind if I stick around?” Hannah asked. “Do some work at one of the booths?”
“Sure, if you don’t mind our noise.” He turned back to Mattie. “What are you trying to do? Burn the place to the ground?”
* * *
Peter winced as he applied the antibiotic cream. The wound was angry and hot. He discarded the old gauze which was oily and stained black and replaced it with the biggest bandage in the kit.
He stared at himself in the mirror.
God. It looks like someone shot me in the face.
A pounding sound echoed from downstairs, and at first, Peter thought the whole cycle was starting up again. Only this time, the other world was growing bolder, attempting to break through in the middle of the day.
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