That’s when I saw something begin to move between my hiding place and the Hi-Fi. The little orange light, my connection to the world, went out – was blocked out – and I began to scream like a teeny little girl.
* * *
At work, office employees get free coffee. Bone doctors – they get free skeletons.
“Roger is now lecturing down at the boys’ school on an appropriate Halloween subject, the skeleton,” wrote my mother in October, 1959. “He brought it from his office and it now stands in lonely dignity in the Music Parlor, lending a rare atmosphere of horror to the gleefully told ghost stories Kip and Jeff concoct.”
This skeleton was the real thing. It wasn’t made out of plastic; it was made out of a person. To preserve it for medical study, the bones had been dipped in shellac and they all bore tiny ink markings, as if the worms that had picked them clean left notes, like food critics.
During the day, we little ones had nervous fun with the skeleton, making it wave its hand at the passing dog (or perform some worse indignity). But at night, the skeleton exacted revenge simply by standing there in the moonlight, dangling from its support pole in all its clickety marionette horror, a scarecrow for boys – a scareboy.
What made the scareboy especially frightening wasn’t so much its toothy gravestone grin or the twin dark crypts of the eyes. It was the idea that this skeleton was once a living person; a man, with a name.
“It used to be … a reeeeallll guy,” Jeff told us, leaning in for effect.
“It’s Kevinnnnnnn ...”
One of our favorite ghost stories was W.W.Jacobs’s The Monkey’s Paw. But the ghost story Kip and Jeff told that night at the foot of the skeleton (the feet rather), this story used the great size of the surrounding Millstone and its 30 rooms to good effect.
“It happened one night in a house just like this one,” Jeff would say with a gesture to the rooms looming around us. He probably cribbed the plot from a Twilight Zone (none of us remember now), but he expertly adapted the story to happen in our own house and to a man who could’ve been our father: “… a famous photographer, who once lived all alone in a big house.”
* * *
And this photographer, he had a darkroom downstairs in the basement, just like Dad has here. So, one night he’s down in the darkroom developing pictures and he’s got the radio on listening to music when the announcer comes on: “We interrupt this program to bring you a news bulletin. A convicted murder has just escaped from the local mental hospital.”
This wasn’t just any murderer. No, this was “Ol’ One-Eye,” a psycho with a birth defect that left a huge black hole where his left eye should’ve been, … kinda like Kevin’s eye hole right here. Aaaanyway, the thing is, after Ol’ One-Eye murdered his victims, he GOUGED OUT their left eye and ATE IT, always hoping that it would help him grow a new eye.
Well, since the famous photographer guy is all alone in the big old house, the news is too scary, so he just turns the radio off. But now in the silence, somewhere overhead, he hears a footstep. Just one footstep. Someone’s in the house with him.
He realizes that to call for help, he’s gonna have to make his way up to the kitchen where the phone hangs on the wall. As he starts creeping out of the darkroom he hears the footsteps overhead again. But this time the steps seem to be coming from farther away, the sound quieter. The guy thinks, God, please let him be leaving the house.
He finally makes it up the stairs to the phone and just before he dials, he stops to listen. There’s no sound anymore and he notices the front door is standing wide open. He quickly dials the police department and next thing you know the whole driveway is just full of cop cars with lights flashing and police are everywhere with guns drawn. They go through the entire house … but find nothing.
Later, out on the front steps as the squad packs up to leave, the photographer walks up to the lieutenant and apologizes for the false alarm. The lieutenant guy, he just brushes it off, says no big deal and then the photographer goes, “Hey, as a favor, what say I take a professional portrait of you and the squad? You know, to put up back at the precinct?”
The cop says sure why not and soon the whole squad is lined up on the front steps of the old house, posing with hands on gun belts. He takes a few pictures but they’re no good because none of the cops is smiling.
“Come on, you guys, smile.”
The cops finally all light up and he gets his picture. “I’ll develop it and bring it downtown first thing tomorrow, okay?” He waves. “Thanks again, everybody.”
The cops all drive away and the guy goes back inside. This time he locks the door.
Back down in the darkroom, he starts developing the pictures. He exposes the best negative, the one with all the smiles, and drops the photographic paper into the tray of developing chemicals. He watches the image slowly form.
Yep, there’s the lieutenant, standing in front with a big smile. And there are all the cops lined up by the front door. They’re all smiling too. Perfect. He got the shot.
And that’s when he notices it.
Up high in the dark, just beyond the lights of all the cop cars, looking down from the attic window is a white face. It has only one eye. The worst part is, the face is looking right at the camera. And it too is smiling.
* * *
At the Millstone, the food chain went like this: big brothers scared the bejesus out of little brothers and never the other way around.
Our father had set the bar quite high for scaring the family. So to truly horrify a little brother, you had to do something so frightful you could make his little bottom slam shut hard enough to snap a pencil.
At the top of the food chain was our oldest brother, Kip. He was an Eagle Scout. And given his proficiency at scaring the bejesus out of me, he must have had a merit badge somewhere, one embroidered with the icon of a fifth grader and Jesus bursting out of his chest.
Kip’s best early work was a minimalist piece, thrown together really, a forerunner of Christo, come to think of it. He draped himself in one of Mom’s dark tablecloths and stood outside in the night wind in the middle of the yard, motionless. He’d arranged for his co-conspirator Jeff to casually mention to me, “Go out and get Kip ‘cause Bonanza’s almost on.” A quick sprint around the Millstone brought me screeching to a cartoon halt in front of the dark ghost. That it didn’t move, rattle Marley’s chains, or say even “Boo” made the specter all the more horrifying. It just stood there. I did not.
Chris was the next to win a merit badge in scaring the bejesus out of a little brother.
It was a cloudless night in September of 1963. Mom and Dad were hosting a Mayo Clinic party and Chris and I were outside. The Millstone was lit like a ship on dark water and from an open window on the deck came Erroll Garner on piano and the sound of grown-ups laughing at grown-up things.
Eavesdropping, then losing interest, we wandered away from the house and decided to climb the crab apple tree at the far end of the driveway. Reaching the top we settled on branches to view the stars.
Chris began to talk quietly. Just some thoughtful big-brotherish musings about the heavens – how far away stars were, how unchanging the constellations. Then his talk drifted to some “recent scientific exploration.” For instance, this new thing scientists were studying. “Have you heard about The Horrid Light?” asked Chris.
“The Horrid what?”
“Nah, never mind.”
“No, tell me about this … this Horrid Light thing. Actually, I think I did hear about it.”
I shifted on my branch.
“Well, apparently…”
And it was the way he lilted the word “apparently” that did the trick. “Apparently” meant “Personally, I’m not sure about this, but scientists in white lab coats said it and who are we to question men with short haircuts?”
“Apparently” meant there were very likely remaining horrors out there, beyond drunken fathers yelling in the night; horrors undiscovered, even uncategorized. New
nightmares to pile on top of all the other fully documented menaces to life and happiness at the Millstone.
“Apparently,” he went on, “there is a single star up there that once every, I don’t know, million years or so sends out a disintegrating ray that just fries you.”
“Disin… a what?”
“Well, and again, I’m only summing up what I’ve heard, but apparently, it’s like a bolt of lightning that’s … sort of straight, like a ray, that comes down from this one star. The good thing though is that it only happens about once every million years.”
The trick to achieving pencil-snapping horror in a fifth-grader was to raise the threat level, lower it ever so slightly, … and then strike without mercy. The timing must be perfect; his was.
Seconds after assuring me that people were turned into bacon only once every million years, he said, “Oh, Jesus, that’s the star! Right there! I see the Horrid Light! It’s coming!” He leapt out of his perch, dropped the story-and-a-half onto the soft lawn below and ran into the warmth of the safe and distant house – leaving me alone, stuck high in a tree like an hors d’oeuvre on a toothpick served up to an interstellar horror traveling towards me at 186,000 miles per second.
I jumped.
Falling, I felt a prickle between my shoulder blades where I was certain the Horrid Light would strike. The Horrid Light would then travel through my body exiting my anus to start a fire on the grass below where my body would land with whatever thump my 65 pounds might make.
Falling, I realized I would die in the air and not have even the final dignity of being able to brace my feet on ground for death’s impact and perhaps allow myself to collapse with some sort of plan. I would be simultaneously dead and in motion, with no say in the position they’d discover my body.
I landed, lived, and while trying to outrun the speed of light realized Chris had pulled one over on me.
Once back in the presence of the adults’ party and unable to retaliate, I consoled myself by giving Chris an especially radioactive version of the hairy eyeball. It hardly mattered. He’d heard me snap the pencil and it was game – set – match.
Chris probably got the idea for the Horrid Light while watching The Twilight Zone with Rod Serling. The television show appealed to our dark little souls and we watched it every week. In fact, watching it with my brothers was a sine qua non; it was too scary to watch alone. (My preferred viewing option would have been in Grand Central Station at high noon surrounded by concentric circles of exorcists and army guys.)
But one night I watched it all by myself.
Mom and Dad were out for the night and my brothers were scattered throughout the Millstone, doing homework, playing records – they were around somewhere but not with me. I was down in the basement fallout shelter with the black-and-white TV.
And Rod Serling.
It was the first airing of the famous episode Nightmare at 20,000 Feet in which passenger William Shatner sees a horrible gremlin out on the wing of his passenger jet.
I made it most of the way through the episode but in the third act, when the thing appeared directly outside Shatner’s window, I cracked and ran out of the basement room with a low moan.
The scariest part was having to turn my back on the TV, to make for the door that lead upstairs. As any fifth grader knows, that’s when it gets you. It was common knowledge that the retreating, unprotected backs of fifth-graders in flight were the Devil’s dartboard. The Devil must’ve missed because I made it upstairs to the kitchen. But before I could even catch my breath I realized I had to go back down. I’d left the TV turned on and would get in trouble with Dad if he discovered it. And so back down into the fallout shelter I crept, armed this time with big brother Kip’s hockey stick. I had a plan.
I came back around the corner into the room where the TV was now broadcasting a commercial for Kent cigarettes and its Micronite filter. The commercial, I knew, was only temporary. At any moment it might end and the horrible image of the thing on the wing would be back and with it, of course, the Devil’s hands reaching out of the screen for a little bonbon, a sweet something before bed.
My plan was to use Kip’s hockey stick to push in the TV’s off-button, giving me a full five-step head start on whatever it was that was going to come shrieking out of the screen. Creeping towards the TV, I held the stick out in front of me, closer,
closer,
until the tip
touched the off-button
and I pushed it in.
– click –
When you turned off one of the old black-and-white TVs, the picture slowly collapsed into a white dot. A dot that lingered on the screen as the tubes inside ticked and cooled. It was the dot itself I found terrifying. I looked at this horrible white window into Hell and realized I had just angered the thing on the wing and even Rod Serling was probably pissed. I was looking at the white period at the end of my life. That little dot in the middle of the TV screen was the scariest thing I’d seen that night. Snap went the pencil and up the stairs I fled into the arms of my Sweet, Sweet Jesus.
* * *
The Millstone was an old house. And there was no place in it that was not scary. The basement fallout shelter had the evil white dot and Rod Serling. Then there was the attic. It was in the attic brother Jeff earned his merit badge.
Even the word “attic” scared us three youngest boys. We’d sit up in bed at night and experiment with the word’s power, whispering it into the dark just to feel our flesh crawl.
“Aaaaattic.”
I think there’s a law somewhere that says attics must be lit by 15-watt bulbs exclusively. Their wan light was just enough to let you think you could see, while leaving shadows black enough to obscure even the whitest fangs. 15-watt bulbs were like evil lighthouses falsely placed to direct ships onto rocks.
Illuminating the Millstone’s attic was an especially dim bulb we were all certain must have been a rare 14-watter. It dangled on an ancient cloth-covered wire descending from the high dark of the attic’s wigwam ceiling. I stood one night under this light with my brother Jeff. I’d agreed to come only because I was with a big brother, one armed with a flashlight.
But the big draw was what Jeff confided he’d found there. He’d discovered the one artifact fifth-grade archeologists seek above all others; the Holy Grail of pith-helmet-wearin’ kids with buck teeth – a mummified dead animal that still had guts in it.
“It musta crawled in here this summer,” intoned Jeff, his shadow leaping ahead of him into the far corner. “It died and it’s still way down there.”
Only the Millstone could have a “way down there” in the attic.
Behind the chimney in the attic, where it finished its four-story climb through the house, was a deep hole in the floor that dropped 10 or 15 feet down into perfect darkness. Whether it was a contractor’s mismeasurement that had created this column of dead air down the spine of the Millstone or simply a crenellation in the complicated plans of the old house, there it was. And we called it The Hole.
When you looked down The Hole, you were chin to chin with the Abyss. Jeff shined his flashlight beam down its gut and The Hole ate it. The Hole took the dim light of the flashlight and shushed it like you would a baby in church. Shamed it. There was only blackness.
Jeff said, “There it is. I can just see it.”
“Just see what?”
“There.”
My eyes were adjusting and now I could see the flashlight fell on the top rung of what seemed to be a ladder leading down into The Hole.
“Mmmm. That ladder won’t hold me,” observed Jeff. “I’m way too heavy,” said the 110-pound-soaking-wet eleventh grader. “But you, … you’re perfect.”
Nothing felt better to fifth-graders than being informed you were somehow special. Your hunger for compliments of any kind allowed older brothers to use you in all kinds of ways. They could make you run down four fights of stairs to grab them a Coke and run all the way back up just by saying. “You’re the f
astest runner here, no question about it.” Compliments were like the crack of the race-starter’s gun – Pow! – and you were off, doing what only you were uniquely qualified to do.
Now that I was being told my lithe, aerodynamic physique was the final key to the discovery of the Holy Grail, my foot was on the ladder. I began my descent into The Hole.
The well-established inverse-square law of light states that the brightness of light is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from its source. This maxim would seem also to explain the proportion to which the buttocks of fifth-graders squinch ever tighter as they move farther away from the lights of civilization, be they lonely campfires, distant porch lights, or flashlights held by big brothers as you descended into The Hole.
As I felt my shanks tighten, I would test the umbilical cord between Jeff and myself, throwing falsely conversational questions back up the ladder.
Thirty Rooms To Hide In Page 14