by Adam Vine
Carter’s girlfriend, Natalia, with whom he shared the master bedroom of our house, was just as attractive. Talia was born in Ukraine, but raised in the U.S. Her hair was obsidian black and her face delicately pretty, heart-shaped, and distinctly Slavic, with high cheekbones and secretive eyes. Her skin was pale and flawless, her figure, thin and feminine, the kind that made you remind yourself not to stare.
Despite the fact Natalia never liked me much, I considered her one of my best friends. She was needlessly cruel to me anytime I said something she didn’t like, and I never understood why, but she usually smoked me out, and when we got high together, at least, her wall came down, and she’d laugh at my jokes and stop acting like I was a walking waste of air. Part of me thought she was jealous of my and Carter’s friendship. I also got the impression she felt like I was beneath her, and Carter, too, and that Carter should know it. I think our friendship baffled her.
“Hey,” I said, giving Carter the shoebox. “Check this out. This was buried under our house.”
Carter stared at me, eyes crimson and watery. He paused his show. “What the hell are you doin', diggin' shit up under the house at four in the fuckin' morning, Thunder? And why are you puttin' said shit in my lap?”
Thunder was my nickname. Lightning was Carter’s. Together, we were The Storm. Stupid, and maybe a bit juvenile, but it had stuck, and I was glad.
“Just open it,” I said. “Careful. It’s old.”
Natalia leaned over his shoulder and kissed him on the neck. "Babe…?” she said.
Bea and I sat down on the carpet next to them. Carter opened the box. “I don’t know,” he muttered, fingers surfing over waves of ancient Polaroids. “This was under the house?”
“Buried inna hole,” Bea said.
Carter spread the pictures out on the floor. “How many you count, Miss Bumble Bea?”
“You counttem.”
“I would, but I’m higher than one of Khaleesi’s dragons right now.”
“Ugh. Fine. A hundred and thirteen,” Bea said. She must have been counting in her head while they were bantering, I thought.
Natalia’s eyes flickered. “Night, guys. I’m going to bed. Fill me in tomorrow morning.”
She got up, and gave Carter a long, tongue-sucking kiss. “Night, boo,” she said.
When she was gone, the three of us sat amid the snoring bodies to contemplate the box of pictures. Now that I could see them in the light, I realized the vast majority of the pictures had been taken inside the house, twenty or more years ago, and featured the same cast of people: two men and three women, all young and normal-looking, except for their early nineties clothes.
I assumed that the five good-looking young adults had been roommates who lived in our house at some point in the past. I quickly realized something else: that they had partied even harder than we did.
The déjà vu I got looking through those pictures, the similar scenes of college students taking shots in our same ugly kitchen, the wild parties, the lines of cocaine off the bathroom mirror, the days laying out in the sun on the huge deck on top of our garage, suddenly felt more like vertigo, and for a few seconds, despite that my fat butt was sitting firmly on the wilted shag carpet of our living room floor, I felt like I was falling, plummeting towards something dark, something cold, that wanted me to be cold, too, that wanted me to fall forever. It was the same feeling I always had when I went under the house, magnified a hundredfold.
I tried to shake it off and focus on what Bea was saying.
“Look: 1993,” Bea said, holding up a picture of a group of shirtless young men in scary Halloween masks. “Someone wrote it in the margin.”
I examined the picture. A note there in blue ink read: Monsters’ Ball ’93. Most of the photos featured similar margin notes, all in the same sloppy handwriting, the same blue ink:
- Gangsters and Mafia Queens Party. Fall ’93.
- Rock ‘n Roll New Year’s Eve. Winter ’93.
- Jell-O Shot Night. Spring ’94.
They could have been us, twenty years ago, I thought. The only differences were the clothes, the makeup, the poofy hair, the Reebok shoes, the stonewashed jeans and bright, gaudy colors. That, and the fact there were four of us, while there were five of them.
“Just a bunch of roomies partying,” Bea said. “So, why would they bury it like this? Why would you get rid of all your college pictures? Didn’t they want to remember the good times?”
Someone dug a three-foot hole beneath our house to bury a box of pictures, I thought. It’s like in Sinister, when Ethan Hawke finds the box of snuff movies in the attic of his new house only to discover they contain the spirit of an evil demon. My arms prickled with gooseflesh. For the first time in my life, I regretted loving horror movies so much. There’s something bad here that we’re not seeing.
“This was before Facebook and Instagram,” I offered. “There was no digital record back then of everyone’s drunken exploits, like there is today. Maybe they were buried for safekeeping.” That sounded weak, even to my own ears. But it was the only thing I could think of that didn’t involve theories about ghosts and modern-day surfer vampires.
My voice trailed off. Carter had put a picture in my hands. It was from the same sequence of the blonde guy, Andy, digging the hole in our basement, but much later. In the picture, the hole was halfway up his thigh.
The caption read: Grave Robbin’ the Hood.
Carter handed me another photo, an extreme close-up on Andy’s face, captioned: Andy digs deeper.
You still couldn’t see what he was digging for. He was a handsome guy, with a strong jaw and a good tan, but there was something wrong with his eyes.
Maybe he was on drugs, I thought. Maybe this was after they did all that cocaine in the bathroom.
“Oh, shit,” I heard Carter say, and the next picture fell into my hands.
“What is it?” Bea said.
I looked twice to be sure of what I was seeing.
No.
No, they did not find that under our house. A guy named Andy did not dig that up under our house, in our basement. I did not want to believe it. Could not.
“Drew…?”
I sighed, and threw the picture on the carpet where Bea could see.
“Bones,” I said. “They look human.”
***
Everyone fell silent. Our eyes all converged on that picture. It was like a black hole, swallowing anything we might have said.
The picture was of Andy’s Air Jordans standing at the bottom of the hole, next to a porcelain-like dome still half-buried and caked with dirt, covered by a familiar network of spider web cracks, the crown of a human skull.
Some of the teeth and part of the eye socket were visible in the next picture. Most of the teeth were missing. Pieces of other bones poked out of the dirt as well: a clavicle, a femur, a few broken ribs. The caption read: ???
“Oh, hell no,” Bea said. “Hell no. Hellllll no.”
Carter took a bong rip. “Guys, this is weird. Don’t you think Alfonso should’ve told us if a dead body was found underneath our house?”
“That’s an unmarked grave,” I said. “They weren’t just buried here. They were murdered.”
“Not necessarily,” Bea said. “There could be a buncha different reasons someone was buried inna unmarked grave. Just like that one movie. Wazzit called, Drew? The one inna house, with the ghost, and the things.”
“Poltergeist?”
“Yeah!”
“I hate Poltergeist.”
“Carter, mind if I getta hitta that? The room’s spinning,” Bea said.
“I’m not sure weed is the best idea, Miss Bumble. This is some chronic-ass purple.”
“There was a dead guy unner your house.”
He shrugged and passed her the bong.
There were no more pictures of the excavation, but there were quite a few of Andy posing with the skull.
Andy and the black guy, Marty, partying with the skull, feedin
g it shots and holding joints up to its broken yellow teeth.
Andy contemplating the skull like a bad production of Hamlet.
A photo taken from the skull’s perspective (probably being held by Andy) of the two female roommates hiding in one of the bedrooms, their eyes wide where they peered out from behind a crack in the door.
Andy holding the skull to his crotch, pretending to fuck it.
The three girl roommates bowing to the skull.
Andy sitting on the living room floor with sunglasses and a bandanna on, smoking a joint and holding a pistol in each hand, the skull displayed in front of him with two more pistols, a sawed-off shotgun, a few hundred rounds of ammo, about a thousand dollars in cash, and a gallon zip-lock bag full of weed.
What was wrong with these people? I wondered.
“What. The. Fug,” Bea said.
“Can you guys seriously shut the fuck up? You’re being hella loud,” Rob said from behind the couch.
“Sorry. Didn’t realize this was the Hilton,” I said.
“Suck my dick,” Rob muttered.
Carter yawned. “Ah, maybe we should go to bed. You guys are hammered. And this weird ass shit will still be here tomorrow.”
“I’m not hammered,” Bea said.
Carter got up. “G’night gumshoes.”
“I’m not ready to go to bed yet,” Bea said when he was gone.
“Let’s go to my room,” I said. “Maybe there’s something about it online.” I asked Bea to wait in my room while I locked the garage.
The wind caterwauled through baleful gusts of rain as I descended the outside stairs. The storm was heavy enough that I could just barely make out the shapes of the fruit trees in the backyard.
I shivered under my hood and slid the garage key into the knob. There was no deadbolt, but the carport door was heavy steel and could only be opened by remote. Locking the doorknob had always seemed like enough to prevent someone from getting in. Besides, we never kept anything of value down there, except maybe Sam’s speakers.
But suddenly, I wondered.
***
“You have so many movie posters. I’ve never heard of half of these.”
“You’ve never seen The Shining?” I said.
Bea reached up to touch the posters on my bedroom wall. “Of course I’ve seen The Shining. And Jaws. And I guess I’ve heard of The Conjuring and Insidious, but what are these: Event Horizon, Zombieland, Evil Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Oculus, Slither, Suspiria, Dark Water, Audition, The Birds? Like, what’s Ringu? Is that the same as The Ring?”
I gently moved Bea’s hand away from the giant image of Sadako crawling out of her infamous T.V. screen. All of my posters were movie theater originals, and I didn’t want her smudging them with her fingers.
“Ringu is the original Japanese film. Way scarier than the American remake,” I said.
Bea nodded, already losing interest, but she gasped with excitement when she crouched down in front of my revolving CD rack, where I kept my classic survival horror video games.
“Jesus, Drew! I've never seen this many games in one place.”
Nostalgia flooded through me, as it always did when I looked at those ancient CDs and DVDs that had devoured my childhood.
Silent Hill 1 through 4, all the Resident Evils, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, Dino Crisis 1 and 2…
Bea gave the rack a spin with her finger. “Dude, you are a horror fiend.”
“Horror fanatic,” I corrected her. “You’ve never been in my bedroom before?”
“Nope.” Bea shook her head. “First time for everything. Whoa!” she said, moving from the CD rack to the diorama of Ghostbusters toys arrayed on my bookcase. She picked up my plush Slimer doll and moved his arms up and down a few times. “I didn’t know you were such a Ghostbusters fan.”
I carefully took down the replica stream gun I’d made for a convention when I was eighteen. “Who you gonna call?” I said, aiming the stream gun at Bea, as if to capture her in a ghost box.
She raised an eyebrow at me. “Did you make that?”
Quickly, I set the gun back in its place on the bookshelf, behind Slimer. “It was for a cosplay. See?” I showed Bea the photo of my friends and me in our costumes at Comic Con with a girl we’d met who was dressed like Chun-Li. It was one of the only pictures of me in existence that I actually liked.
Bea gave the picture a cursory glance and put it back on the shelf. “I can see you being a Ghostbuster, Drew. Why not? You do look a little bit like Dan Aykroyd.”
Th-thanks.
Her eyes wandered over the myriad other action figures, play sets, and collectible plush toys in my room. “If I knew you liked toys this much, I would’ve brought you my old Beanie Babies. They’re sitting in a box in our attic.”
I shook my head. “Why? Beanie Babies are lame.”
Bea ignored my comment. “Holy crap! Is that an original NES? Why is it still in the box?”
I all but leapt to snatch the ancient cardboard out of her hands. “Don’t open that. It’s mint condition. What’s wrong with you?”
She made a face. “Yeesh. Sorry. So, uh… how many video games do you own? I noticed you don’t have any books on that bookcase.”
“Over 500. It’s a modest haul, but I’ve got a few gems in there.”
“Do you have a favorite?”
I pulled out an ultra-obscure PlayStation One game called Clock Tower. “This one, for sure. Got it when I was five. The horror games on the PlayStation One were the best of all time.”
“Looks scary. What’s it about?”
“Clock Tower? It’s absolutely terrifying. It’s about a madman who chases you through a labyrinth trying to cut you in half with a giant pair of scissors. The graphics haven’t really stood the test of time, but they were revolutionary back in their day.”
“Wow,” Bea said, eyes wandering over the dusty relics of my boyhood. “I used to play Smash Brothers with my cousins. I dominated.”
I smirked. “Everyone claims to dominate at Smash Brothers.”
“Right. I’m just a girl. What do I know about video games?”
“The only way to prove your worthiness will be in a one-on-one match. Yes, this is a challenge.”
She cringed. “Maybe another time, Drew. I don’t think I’m as into it as you, to be honest. Sorry. It’s really cool you’ve got such an awesome collection, though. This stuff is so neat. I don’t remember half of these games. You ever think about selling them?”
“No way. Are you serious?”
“You could probably get a few hundred bucks.”
“Is that a lot of money to you?”
“Jeez. You don’t need to be a dick. It was just an idea.”
We sat on my bed and searched on my laptop for a story about the unmarked grave under our house. It didn’t take long for us to learn there was no trace on the Internet of a dead body ever being found at 1006 Sunny Hill Drive. Not a single headline, news article, obituary, or blog post.
“Y’know, newspapers weren’t online back in 1993,” I said. “Most people didn’t even have Internet. If these guys did call the cops when they found this buried down there, and if it actually did make it into the paper, we probably won’t find the article unless we go to the library.”
Bea didn’t reply. I looked over to see she was curled up beside me, snoring softly. I got up and turned the light off.
“What?” Bea mumbled at the dark. “Drew?”
“Bumble, you going to crash in here? I can sleep on the couch.”
“Fug you and your Bumbles,” she said, her voice thick with alcohol and sleep. “No, I’ll… go home. The room is like… spinning.”
I sat back down on my bed and smoothed her hair behind her ears. “Just stay here. I’ll sleep on top of the covers.”
“Drew… I think I’m gonna be sick.”
She was asleep before the words had fully passed her lips.
I laid back and pretended to close my eyes, listening to her
breathing. The hall light someone neglected to turn off spilled through the crack in the door, outlining Bea’s vague shape beneath the sheets.
Maybe it was the alcohol, or the highs of the party and the strangeness of what we’d found, but the thought of Bea sleeping in my bed made me rock hard. My skin grew hot and my pulse felt like a strobe in my veins. I rolled onto my side and watched her small form gently rising and falling with each breath, and I started to wonder what she felt like underneath her clothes, those sweet, buried secrets. Was her smooth, olive skin as soft as it looked? How dark were her nipples? How would she taste if I kissed her?
I leaned over and smelled her hair. It smelled sweet, like cherries. Being careful not to wake her up, I gently raised her shirt a few inches and peeked at the exposed small of her back. I remember wanting to kiss her, but not being able to, because I knew it would be an unforgivable violation. This, what I was doing – gazing at a part of her that could’ve been revealed by her rolling over and her shirt riding up – was only childish exploration, or so I convinced myself.
But if I touched her, it would become something far worse, something disgusting and criminal.
My hand lingered there a moment. I held my breath and my heart pounded. Then I rolled over and fell asleep.
***
I dreamed I was wandering through a dark maze. I don’t remember the beginning of the dream, but at some point it became semi-lucid, and I realized the maze of stained carpeted halls and its endless, movie poster-covered walls were inside Sunny Hill.
I followed the serpentine halls to their natural endpoint: the Hobbit door in the garage that led under the house. Behind the door, there was music playing.
I entered the basement and made my way through the dust-covered mountains of abandoned property, suddenly towering so high they went lost in the shadows above my head, all perilous leaning angles bedecked in cobwebs, toward a natural pillar of light falling on something in the back of the storage area.
The beam illuminated the place where Bea and I had dug up the pictures. Only, there wasn’t a hole there anymore. Instead, a rickety table holding a turn-of-the-century gramophone stood in its place.