Was Frank as imaginary as everyone claimed the dead boy was?
Was he as crazy as everyone seemed to think he was?
You were at the house with him thirty-five years ago. What are the chances you’d run into him again now—now that you’ve come back?
All he had to do was turn around and look.
But that was the problem. He didn’t want to turn around and look, because he was afraid the voice might be right. And if Frank really wasn’t back there...
Garraty squeezed his eyes shut and pressed the palm of his hand against one temple. This goddamn place was doing it to him again. Nothing made sense, and he thought maybe that was just what the house wanted.
Or something else, not part of the house at all.
He forgot about the body moldering in the hole before him, forgot about Bobby Frank and the questions about his own sanity. The hair on his neck rose to attention, and his old friends the butterflies spread their delicate wings in his gut. The house seemed to be bearing down on him again, crushing him the way it had when he was under there with the boy the last time. With the boy and the other thing.
Garraty could barely take a breath. The other was in here with him—with them, he told himself, but did he really believe Bobby Frank was back there anymore?—right now, watching him (them) through those great black hollows. He could practically feel its gaze skittering around on his flesh like a cockroach.
Playing the light across the cramped expanse, Garraty saw nothing looking back at him. Not even any rats. Don’t let your imagination get away from you. He wriggled on his belly to turn around, letting the flashlight beam lead the way. It was time to settle this thing once and—
Garraty’s eyes widened with recognition and disbelief as the dagger of light fell not on Investigator Frank but on the living boy, crouched just this side of the sagging beam, his green eyes full of hate. He was completely whole now, as if he’d never been tumbled under the Prius like so much detritus and stowed down in Jeremiah Barlowe’s hidey-hole. Even the missing shoe was on his foot.
“I knew you couldn’t stay away from me,” Garraty said, his voice filled with resignation.
But what say we let bygones be bygones and pretend nothing ever happened between us?
The boy didn’t reply. Instead, he skittered forward on all fours, lips peeled back in feral fury. Sparks of light chased one another on the joists and subfloor, reflected off the shiny steel clutched in one of the boy’s hands. Almost before Garraty registered the movement the boy was on him, sliding the paring knife between two of his ribs slick as butter.
This isn’t my time!
A runaway train of pain roared through him. Garraty screamed and flopped away from the boy like a speared fish, his breath bubbling wetly through the fresh hole. The knife jabbed at him again but this time he got an arm up and it carved through the meaty flesh of his triceps instead of plunging into his chest. Hot blood sprayed in a fan, and the arm went limp and useless. Jesus, so fast! The flashlight rolled away from them, knocking up puffs of dust.
“What did you do to me?” the boy demanded, and lunged at him a third time. The smell of fresh shit washed over Garraty, pungent and outhouse-thick, as the blade sunk to the handle in his throat and gagged him on a sudden glut of blood that filled his mouth. He tried to scream again but only succeeded in coughing up a red mist that glistened in the backwash of light.
Garraty scrabbled away, but he was slow. Fading. The ground behind him was hard and dry—though it would be muddy soon enough, he thought—and dragging across it sent jangles of pain through him. The grave is gone, the voice in his head registered, dimly. Gone because he’s out here now. Nothing made sense anymore, but confusing things was what the house did best, wasn’t it? The house specialty, you might say. The boy glowered at him, limned by the glow from the flashlight.
Not my time.
Jesus, he was getting weak. It felt like a little more life leaked out of him with every beat of his slowing heart. He got one leg under himself and pushed back. So slow! He found himself thinking of Tina and the kids, how good he’d had it, wishing life had do overs. Where had his gone so wrong? Another bright blossom of pain as the blade effortlessly slipped into his thigh. He bleated and kicked away, bringing up his good hand so he could ward off the next jab. With every bit of strength he had, Garraty shoved himself deeper into the crawlspace, almost to the far corner. The boy slithered after him, never looking away. So this is it.
“You ruined me,” the boy whispered.
I’m sorry, kid. You didn’t deserve any of this. That’s what he wanted to say, but his body didn’t want to obey. Garraty’s head lolled in the dust. He could see the golden rectangle of light beyond the boy, tantalizingly out of reach. God, what he would give to see the sunlight one last time! Real sunlight, not just the muted facsimile he was looking at, shaded by growth and the damnable porch.
And blocked by the goddamned house.
But he thought his days of real sunshine were past, and the glowing rectangle was all he had left. He was all out of time. Garraty stretched out his good arm, reaching for the brightness he longed to touch. Wishing he could undo all the things he’d done to the boy.
Thinking about his family, and longing to see them one last time.
Out of time.
He was smiling when the knife thrust forward again.
21
Screeeeee.
The sound sliced through the black fog where Garraty drifted, waking him. Bones and bricks, the voice in his head muttered in a dreamy drawl, but he didn’t know why. He opened his eyes slowly. The wan light spread in a fan from the flashlight, barely making it ten feet before the darkness swallowed it. Mostly dead. Just like me.
Of the boy there was no sign. In the distance, far beyond the support beam that bowed downward like it wanted to kiss the spoiled earth, the rectangular opening to the porch had gone the purple of midnight, the faintest lessening of darkness in the crawlspace. He was alone. Why did they all leave me? The blood coating his hand and arm was dried into a maroon crust, cracked like the crazed glazing on an old piece of china.
But he was alive.
Garraty tried to raise his head and discovered that he couldn’t. The goddamn thing felt like a lead bowling ball attached to his neck. His cheek pressed into the powdery soil, and each rattling breath that eased out of him stirred up tiny rolling clouds of dust. Every part of him felt like it was on fire.
Screeeeee. The chitinous sound of fingernails scraping on masonry widened his eyes and sent tendrils of fear twining down his back.
“Who’s there?” he wheezed, and hated the tremble he heard in his voice.
Some sallow slumped thing crept out of the blackness into the weak spill of light from the dying flashlight. It regarded him—God, but doesn’t the thing almost look amused? the fading voice in his head said—through great hollows where eyes had once been. Garraty wanted to scream, but his throat wouldn’t work right and nothing escaped him but a thin croak. The thing crossed the yawn of space between them in a blink.
Stay away from me! he cried, but only silence reached his ears. Sudden wet heat spread between his thighs.
“Joseph,” the slumped thing whispered, and stretched out a thin bony finger to stroke his burning cheek. “I know your sins.”
And as the darkness closed in around him, Garraty found that he welcomed its touch.
The House (II)
As the seasons march forward, the house on Hickory Hill waits. Summers bring a blanket of heat that swells its aged joints, and at night it pops and creaks, speaking the secret language of old dry wood; winters bring cool days and cold nights and the same dark mutterings; the seasons between bring the tornadoes, which the house has managed to survive so far, not for lack of trying by the weather. Times change, and as they do, the people change with them. They grow forgetful and confident.
And eventually, they come to the house.
In the late spring of 1978, when a man named Henry “Hink” Blaylock
sat in a tired wicker-seated chair in front of an unlit woodstove in a country store named Crossen’s Crossing, regaling a Belleville boy with the story of Jeremiah Barlowe and the taste he developed for small children, he was eighty-one and still almost as hale as he’d been in 1943, when he’d seen Barlowe’s handiwork up close and personal at forty-six. The boy was a newly minted thirteen, sent to the store for a pack of spaghetti noodles and lured into the tale as surely as if he were a hungry bear and it a honeypot. When he got home, an hour later than expected, his father was waiting for him with his belt curled loosely around one hand. All things considered, the boy thought the stinging welts on the backs of his legs were worth it.
Hink had no trouble recalling the details of the Barlowe tragedy, but despite his good health a few old memories had slipped through the cracks, as old memories in old men tend to do. Before Jeremiah Barlowe the people talked about Norman Peabody, a blacksmith who went missing from Hickory Home—which it was called in those days, before Jeremiah Barlowe’s purchase branded it with a new name—in 1908. While he lived in the house, Norman developed his own taste for children, but it was one of a different sort than Jeremiah Barlowe.
After his wife died of the flu in the spring of that year his son, who was twelve and the object of Norman’s affections, gutted him while he slept, then rolled up the body in bedclothes and buried it under the house. Back inside, he went to the kitchen and cooked himself three fried eggs and a slab of salt-pork and ate it at the table, thinking of the way his father had looked at him through great dark eyes when he slipped between the sheets at night, and how thin and bony his fingers felt on his flesh. He rode his horse down into town to report Norman missing later that day and was eventually made a ward of the state of Alabama. He lived to be seventy-seven and never returned to Belleville. But of course the boy in 1978 heard not a word of this. Hink Blaylock never told him, because time is a raging river that sweeps both good and bad memories away like litter and by then Hink had spent more than his fair share of years buffeted by its flow.
The house is not frail like men, and stands strong in this river, resisting it. Before Norman Peabody, a carpetbagger named Hiram Walton moved to Belleville in 1869 to cash in on reconstruction efforts, only to hang himself from the rafters of the master bedroom four years later... but not before taking a hatchet to his sixteen-year-old wife and infant son, then dragging them into the crawlspace to feed the starving ground. Hickory Hill had been known as Walton’s Mountain in those days, a fact that would have surely brought a smile to the face of the enthralled boy had he known it. Like the river of time, the darkness that has spoiled the ground where the house stands has no beginning, no middle, and no ending. Hiram Walton and family were not the first to die, nor will Joe Garraty be the last, because as long as the house stands, it will hunger.
November 1978
The Tale of Bobby Frank
1
The rotting stumps jutting out of the water looked like old black teeth to Bobby. The station wagon in which he rode with his mother and younger sister Dana was crossing the causeway out of Decatur, and he glared out the window at the passing river. Sometime in September the engineers who ran Wheeler Dam had begun to slowly lower the level in anticipation of the coming winter rainfall and the old trees had risen from the murk, first as dim shapes and now as slimy crumbling piles that trailed out of sight in the muddy stew. Real horror movie stuff, despite the sunshine. They empty the reservoir to prevent floods, Mrs. Hughes had said in science class when someone asked her. Otherwise we’d be in a world of hurt when the wet season came. Alabama would look more like Louisiana. She would be pleased that he remembered, he thought.
He was ticked off because he was in the station wagon with his mom and little sister on the way to Belleville instead of parked on his behind in front of the TV, watching Super Friends. The commercial for this week’s episode during Scooby Doo had shown the Wonder Twins fighting some giant space monster. Bobby liked seeing Superman and his buddies battle Lex Luthor and the Legion of Doom, but he loved when Wonder Twin Jayna was on, with her exotic slanted eyes and skintight purple costume. She really activated a wonder power in him, that was for sure. So what if she wasn’t real? She was fine.
The morning had started out so well, too. Saturdays were his favorite when school was in session, because they belonged completely to him. No racing around the house getting ready for church like on Sunday, and no racing around the house getting ready for school like during the rest of the week. Just him, a couple of bowls of cereal, and several hours of quality cartoons. Who could ask for more? By the time The Pink Panther came on at ten-thirty he’d usually had his fill and was ready to move onto something else. Only retards watched that show, which was evidenced by the fact that Dana liked it.
But today had been different. Today, Mom had glided into the den not long after Super Friends started, before he’d even finished his second bowl of Lucky Charms. “Turn off the television, Bobby. We’re going to your Aunt Cindy’s.”
Bobby let the spoon clank into the bowl, the cereal forgotten. “What for?”
“To visit.”
Only the worst reason in the world. To visit was Mom lingo for stay for a lifetime and do nothing but talk with Aunt Cindy while you slowly go crazy from the boredom of hanging out with your cousin Tanner. Bobby and his cousin were nothing alike. Where Bobby loved to settle down somewhere quiet with his old friends the Hardy Boys—Frank and Joe were the best, practically real detectives just like he wanted to be when he grew up—or the Three Investigators or even, in a pinch, Nancy Drew (not that he would admit this to anyone, but he thought Nancy was as fine a specimen as Jayna the Wonder Twin and knew that he would be a much better boyfriend than Ned Nickerson), Tanner was loud and obnoxious and played football, and believed books were a source of punishment instead of pleasure.
“Why can’t I stay here?”
“Because you’re too young.”
“Mom, I’m practically thirteen. Jeez!”
“So you’re telling me you’re too old to watch cartoons, then?”
Mom logic.
“No fair!”
“You need to get dressed. We’re leaving soon.”
And now here he was, cruising across the river bridge instead of enjoying his one day of absolute freedom. It wouldn’t be so bad if they were going someplace else—even Grandma Rose’s—because he could have taken some books or his Erector Set and entertained himself. At his Aunt Cindy’s, those things would just get him called a fag in Tanner’s high-pitched (kind of girlish, really, when you thought about it) wispy voice. Tanner was too stupid to understand what irony was, Bobby thought.
The stump-filled water gave way to a dense forest of trees busy shedding their red, gold, and brown coats. Last winter, on the way to Huntsville for lunch one Sunday afternoon after church, he’d spotted a group of deer in these woods foraging for fallen acorns, white tails waggling in the gloomy growth. Today, however, he saw no signs of wildlife at all. Pretty funny, when you thought about it, since this place was called a wildlife refuge.
After a few miles the trees came to an end and the flat fields began, endless swaths of red clay stubbled with razed cotton plants. From time to time the station wagon passed one still waiting to be harvested, the white bolls stretching into the distance like a fresh snowfall. On the radio, the Village People quietly advised young men that they could do whatever they pleased at the YMCA.
“Feet up!” Mom said.
Bobby lifted his feet an instant before the station wagon bumped over a set of railroad tracks crossing the highway. The engine dropped in pitch briefly as his mom’s foot came off the gas, then surged again after the car had cleared the rails.
“Get yours up, Dana?” Mom asked, looking in the mirror at his little sister in the back seat.
“Yes’m. Luke’s feet, too.”
Dana was a weird kid, Bobby thought. She was nine and liked to read as much as he did—maybe even more—but her choices were far out
things where kids visited other planets or found wrinkles in time or wardrobes that led to places that didn’t exist. Crazy stuff. When Star Wars had come out the year before, she’d gone to see it like ten times at the theater and spent endless hours making up her own stories featuring Luke Skywalker and the gang. It wasn’t a bad movie, but once had been enough for Bobby. Santa—aka Mom and Dad, but no one had told her dorkness that yet—had brought Dana a set of Star Wars action figures last Christmas and she always seemed to have one with her.
“Good. No bad luck for any of us today!”
There was a tree-covered hill in the distance to the right, almost a mountain by Alabama standards, bathed in the glow from the sun and so yellow from the changing hickory leaves that it looked like it was on fire. A black thread of road meandered lazily up its side. Bet you could just about see forever from up there on the top.
The Village People gave way to Steve Martin telling the hilarious tale of King Tut, and Bobby felt his spirits beginning to lift. The song made him think of the other best part of Saturday, the part a trip to his Aunt Cindy’s couldn’t ruin: sneaking out to the den after his parents went to bed and watching Saturday Night Live with the volume down low. Steve was on the show all the time, being wild and crazy with John Belushi and Gilda Radner and the rest of the gang. Bobby loved it, even though sometimes the skits the audience laughed the hardest at just confused him. By the time the station wagon passed the peeling Welcome to Belleville sign, he found his bad mood completely gone.
“Slug bug green!” Dana suddenly cried. Bobby had an instant to register the rusted green VW beetle coming toward them in the opposing lane before her tiny fist arced over the seat to punch him in the arm.
“Jeezit, numbnuts, cut it out! We weren’t even playing.” Bobby rubbed the spot where she’d gotten him, though it didn’t really hurt. Dana was little and couldn’t hit for squat.
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