Charnel House

by Anderson, Fred

Through gaps between the trees he saw the town of Belleville spread below them on the left, the tiny homes and businesses lined up in neat rows. Brilliant yellow leaves rustled in the breeze and chased one another to the ground. The sun beat down on the three boys, stretching their shadows up the road before them, and under different circumstances he thought it would have been a pleasant walk. The lead ball in his belly seemed to grow heavier with each step and he wanted to slow down to postpone the inevitable, but he knew he couldn’t. Not only did his reputation ride on this, now his wallet did too, and that seemed somehow more important.

  Starsky and Hutch wouldn’t be scared. Maybe not, he reasoned, but they were grownups. Grownups weren’t supposed to be scared. That wasn’t how the world worked. Besides, they had guns. If Jeremiah Barlowe tried anything on either of them, he’d find himself full of holes, blam blam blam. If a gun would even stop a ghost.

  Bobby took a deep breath, then another, willing himself to calm down. Think about something else. Something happy. Like Amy Carmichael, who was in his Science and Social Studies classes at school and also went to the same church he did. Her blond hair shone like the sun itself, and when she smiled at him it felt like his heart was going to explode. She was an angel from heaven, Bobby thought, and even prettier than Farrah Fawcett. What he wouldn’t give to be her boyfriend, to sit with her at lunch every day and hold her hand during P.E., and maybe one day even kiss her! The morning seemed suddenly warmer and he pressed the backs of his hands to his face to cool it.

  “Watch out, faggot!” Joey cried from right in front of him.

  Bobby hitched guiltily, the beatific face of Amy Carmichael driven back into the recesses of his mind by the irritating voice, and caught himself just in time to keep from walking into the older boys, who had stopped and now looked up the hillside. He turned to follow their gaze, his heart—which just a moment before had seemed so light and buoyant—sinking down to somewhere in his gut. A faint path was visible among the trees.

  “That’s the driveway,” Tanner said, pointing. “Almost there now.”

  “Get your money ready, chickenshit,” Joey said with a grin, and stepped off the roadway. “I can practically taste my candy.”

  Bobby followed the boys up the weedy path, the murmur of gravel underfoot the only conversation. The sun was higher now and the leaves looked like they were on fire, tiny flames dancing among the branches. From time to time, Bobby caught glimpses of the house between the hoary trunks as they climbed, a whitish-gray thing painted with splashes of light. The black ball of fear in his belly shrunk a little. That doesn’t look so scary. Not in the daylight.

  They rounded a bend and the driveway spread into a large cleared area that had once been a lawn but was now crazy with brown weeds. In the middle of it sat the faded house, slumped like a horse ready for the glue factory. The tin roof had gone to rust the color of ancient dried blood. A few behemoth trees grew up around the building, hickory and oak, and kept it mostly shaded. Old-time air conditioning. An ivied chimney stood at this end, splitting it down the middle, dark windows like blind eyes on either side of it.

  “Looks like the front door’s this way,” Tanner said, striking out through the waist-high grass. It swirled around him like flowing water, rustling softly. Bits of chaff and downy seeds rose in a spray behind him and were pushed away by the breeze. He led them around the end of the house, giving the old building a wide berth.

  With each step Bobby grew more bold. The house looked liked something from a postcard, not the terrible place his cousin had made it out to be. All it needed was a weathered sign with SEE ROCK CITY painted on it poking out of the grass to complete the picture. His mood lightened. Joey was going to have to admit to being a big chicken after all. Bobby could practically hear the bawk-bawk-bawk sounds in his head, and the thought brought a smile to his face. The scariest thing about this place was its reputation. He was starting to wonder how much of the Jeremiah Barlowe story was real and how much was legend, the tale passed around again and again until the version he heard bore little resemblance to the actual events. A real-life version of the game of post office, so to speak.

  Tanner stopped and pointed. “You can go in up there.”

  Joey snorted. “You still think he’s going to?”

  His voice had the slightest waver to it.

  Through a row of scraggly privet Bobby saw the front porch, faded and sagging, nestled in the corner formed by part of the house that jutted forward like an obstinate jaw. An old sign nailed to the door facing advised in washed-out letters that there was to be NO TRESPASSING. The peeling paint had gone the color of a weathered skull and revealed dark pitted wood underneath. The door itself stood half-open; shadows waited beyond.

  Just a house.

  Bobby looked over at Joey and saw that the sneer had slipped away, only to be replaced with a look more pensive. More scared. Good.

  “Sure you guys aren’t coming? Last chance to show you’re not chickens.” He tucked his hands into his armpits and flapped a couple of times, grinning at them.

  Almost before he registered the larger boy moving, Joey sprang forward and gave him a vicious shove toward the house. Bobby’s hands popped free and flailed wildly as he stumble-walked across the yard, trying to keep his balance. He stepped on a rock hidden in the tall grass, his foot rolling inward. Bright glassy pain flared in his ankle and he drew in a sharp hiss of breath.

  “Quit fucking around and go!” Joey shouted. “We know you’re just stalling.”

  Tanner snickered and Bobby felt his face grow hot. If he said anything about his ankle they wouldn’t believe him. They’d think he was trying to get out of the bet. He took a couple of tentative steps, testing. It hurt, and he limped a little, but it was manageable.

  Nothing broken, he thought. To heck with those guys. He’d show them who was chicken.

  He turned and started toward the house, trying not to favor his injured foot too much. The building seemed to lean toward him as he approached, looming. Hungering. He shook this last thought off, pushed the dull pain in his ankle out of his mind, and instead pictured Amy Carmichael, looking at him through her sweet blue eyes as hazy sunlight shimmered in her hair. What would it feel like if he ran his fingers through it?

  He stepped into the growth around the house, hands raised to protect his eyes from any poking branches. Dewberry brambles, their berries long gone, plucked at his shirt like greedy birds. He felt like he was making enough noise to wake the dead, har dee har har. The opening under the porch seemed to absorb light like a black hole, and he could make out nothing under there... not that he was looking too hard, in case there was actually something to make out.

  Jeremiah Barlowe’s lunatic face, for example.

  Bobby hobbled up the steps and across the pine planking, his footsteps booming hollowly, and then he was at the front door. He looked back for a moment. Joey and Tanner stood shoulder to shoulder about fifty feet away, eyes wide and faces pale. Joey’s hands were clasped in front of him, squeezed together so hard his knuckles had turned white. One sound and I think they’d scream and jump into one another’s arms like a couple of girls. Unwelcome laughter bubbled up and he bit his tongue to keep from guffawing. There’d be plenty of time to laugh at them later. Right now, he had to prove a point.

  Plus, there was no sense alerting Jeremiah Barlowe’s ghost to his presence, if it was down there.

  When he reached out and pushed the door all the way open with one hand, the ancient hinges squealed in low protest and the bang of the knob against the wall echoed through the empty rooms. A thick layer of dust coated the tongue-and-groove pine floor. No one had been up here in years, he thought. Maybe decades. The yellowed wallpaper hung in peeling tatters, but no graffiti decorated the walls and no trash littered the entryway. Beams of filtered sunlight fell through holes in the ceiling where leaks in the roof had rotted through the upstairs floor.

  Bobby stepped through the doorway carefully, testing the floor. It looked solid e
nough, but if he went through it because he wasn’t paying attention he was pretty sure his ankle would be more than just a little sprained. Probably broken, and there was no telling how much trouble he’d get in if his mom found out he was up here traipsing through a tumbledown murder house when he was supposed to just be going for a walk.

  It was cooler in the house, almost chilly. To his right and left were open doorways, and ahead a staircase climbed into the gloom. There was a third doorway beyond the stairs, leading into the depths of the house. Into its belly. He thought he’d save that one for last; there was no sense going any further into this place than necessary. That seemed like it would be tempting fate, or the devil.

  Or Jeremiah Barlowe.

  Bobby shivered. This wasn’t the time to think about such things. He needed to find the bloody handprint, if it even existed, and get the heck out of here. Tanner had said the mayor found the wife almost right away, lying on the floor under the handprint, so it seemed logical that she would be in one of the rooms to either side of him. Left is for luck, he thought, and walked through the doorway on that side.

  The floor in the next room tilted crazily toward the interior wall, which had a wide arched opening through it, and looked like it had dropped almost a foot. Not surprising, as old as the place was. Bobby stepped into the room, mildly disoriented by the lean. It was like being in the funhouse at a carnival, in the part where all the walls and floors were slanted to throw off your balance. He started tentatively for the arched opening, and—

  Something made a noise under the floor.

  Bobby froze, and the fear that had been all but gone was back in an instant, filling him like a thick black syrup that made it hard to think. His heart triptrapped painfully behind his ribs, threatening to break through and flip-flop across the age-darkened pine. It sounded like a whimper.

  Just the kind of sound a child might make.

  His mind told him to run, to simply turn around and truck on out of there and pretend there was nothing under the house making noise. Definitely not the ghost of one of Jeremiah Barlowe’s victims... or of old Jeremiah himself. He stood there for a moment, listening, straining to hear over the sound of his own racing pulse. Nothing. Run, the little voice in his head said again.

  But Starsky and Hutch wouldn’t run, would they? Neither would Jupiter Jones, or Frank and Joe Hardy, Scooby and the gang, or any real detective. They would detect—and find out what made the noise because that’s what they did. They knew there was no such thing as ghosts.

  Besides, running was what chickens like Joey and Tanner would do.

  This realization did little to quell the gallop of his heart, but it did strengthen his resolve. Bobby limped across the room, acutely aware of how much noise he was making, to the spot where he thought the noise had come from. He licked his lips with a tongue that felt as dry as sandpaper and lowered himself to his knees, then bent forward and pressed his ear to the floor. The smooth wood was cool against his cheek. As he listened, he tried to summon up the visage of Amy Carmichael once more to calm his jangling nerves, but Amy was nowhere to be found. Just Jeremiah Barlowe, bursting up through the rotting boards like a malevolent jack-in-the-box to grab him and drag him down into his (hidey-hole) lair. Feeding time.

  From the spot where he knelt he could see through the arched opening into the next room, which was the house’s kitchen. The pine flooring gave way to linoleum that was almost the same hideous shade of avocado as the washer and dryer back home. Along the back wall, dusty white cabinets hung askew, and the window over the sink was broken. Bobby could see a tree through the hole, blocking all the light, and wondered if it had even been there when Jeremiah Barlowe bought the place.

  There was only silence from under the house.

  He waited another moment, watching the tree through the broken window and wishing he were out there in its shade instead of listening for ghosts in the charnel house. Still nothing. Bobby slowly climbed to his feet. A sheath of dust clung to the knees of his jeans and he brushed it off, then wiped his cheek and ear clean. Had he heard something? Maybe. Maybe not. The only thing he knew for sure was that when he was actually listening for it, he heard nothing. He wasn’t ready to write it off as just imagination—that’s what teenagers and grownups did in scary movies, and look how well that worked out for them—but he didn’t think there were any ghosts creeping around under the floor, either. Most likely it had been an animal, more scared of him than he was of it. A house this old was probably chock full of possums, raccoons, and any number of critters.

  As he worked this conclusion out in his head his eyes fell on the wall to the right of the arched doorway, where a small section of wallpaper still hung whole among the tatters. It had once been cream-colored, he thought, but time had yellowed it.

  Centered almost perfectly on it was a brown handprint.

  The fingers were splayed apart, as if Jeremiah’s wife had been trying to swat a fly, and a clean spot in the middle of the palm gave it the appearance of having a hole through it. Just like Jesus. Bobby walked across the sagging floor to the wall, the pit of his stomach light and fluttery like he’d swallowed a handful of moths and they were now trying to find their way out, blindly batting their wings and bumping around inside him.

  Up close he could see more details, loops and whorls in the fingers and lines criss-crossing the palm like so many roads. Where the dried blood was thicker it had crazed, and made him think of the old ceramic candy dish his Grandma Rose kept on the end table in her front room. A darker line across the fourth finger marked where the wedding band had hit the wall. Had she known it was coming, or was it all a surprise to her? His mental projector started up and he saw a woman stagger through the arch, blood streaming down her face from a horrendous wound in her head, soaking into her dress. Behind her, a crazed Jeremiah Barlowe crossed the kitchen, the bloodied claw hammer gripped in one hand. As Bobby watched, he brought the hammer up, his features twisting into a furious grimace, and then down, sinking it to the haft in her skull. Blood spattered the wall and Jeremiah, and Bobby even imagined he felt it stippling his face in a hot spray. Mrs. Barlowe continued forward for another step, not realizing she was dead, and when she began to pitch forward she reached out to the wall for balance, leaving her final mark. Nobody even remembers her name. That was somehow the worst part.

  Bobby tried to imagine what it would be like if his father snapped the way Jeremiah Barlowe had, but couldn’t. How could he kill his wife and children? A man was supposed to protect his family, not hurt it. Not kill it. Brother Peavey used the word blasphemy a lot in his sermons—usually for such sins as taking the Lord’s name in vain or being an idolatrous Catholic—but what Jeremiah Barlowe did was even worse than that. It was a betrayal to the people who trusted him the most. He became aware that he had unconsciously wrapped his arms around himself. The house seemed colder now. It was time to get out of here; he’d seen what he came to see. But first...

  Bobby stretched out his hand and placed it over the handprint on the wall. The bloody stamp was bigger, but only by a little. He expected it to feel different somehow (though if pressed he wouldn’t have been able to explain how he thought it would feel), but it just felt like wallpaper with a layer of paint on it. For an instant the scene with Jeremiah Barlowe and his wife flashed in his head again, the rise of the hammer, the sickening crackle-crunch of shattering bone. This time, however, the image—the flashback, his mind argued—was different. There was more detail. More color, almost to the point of being surreal. Everything stood out in bright sharp relief, except one thing.

  The other person in the room he hadn’t noticed before.

  In the shadowy far corner of the kitchen in his mind, a still slumped figure looked on as Jeremiah Barlowe brought the hammer down. Only looked might not be the right word, Bobby thought, because the guy (was it a guy? his inner voice murmured) didn’t have eyes, just big black holes on either side of its slitted nostrils. Like the sockets in a skull. Its mouth was
an obsidian gash in the sallow skin, curved into a sickle of a smile. Like it was pleased with what it saw. The hair on the back of Bobby’s neck lifted, and the handful of moths he felt in his belly seemed to have grown into birds, flitting and zooming and beating their wings against his insides. He pulled his hand away from the mark and the image in his head winked out.

  Not real.

  A phantom voice between his ears whispered bringing ’em down here was the only way I could make it stop. Tanner had said the mayor swore Jeremiah Barlowe didn’t have a face when he first looked up, that there’d just been holes where his eyes should have been. Was that thing what he’d seen? Maybe it took over Jeremiah, had possessed him, like Bobby had thought earlier. Brother Peavey would know. Tomorrow morning when the church service was over he could track the minister down and—

  “Jeremiah Barlowe get you?” Joey bellowed from outside, and Bobby almost screamed. An instant before he soaked his underwear a second time he managed to grab himself, pinching his penis between his finger and thumb to stop the flow rushing for the exit. A burning line of fire etched a path deep inside him and he grimaced from the pain. Asshole. The word rose up in his thoughts before he could stop it.

  Maybe it’s not a bad word if it’s true.

  “What’s the matter, being so close to the house got you scared?” he called back through gritted teeth. Then, for good measure, “Chicken!”

  “Hurry up,” Tanner said. “We’re getting tired of waiting. You proved your point.”

  Magic words.

  Bobby took one last look at the handprint on the wall, then turned and walked back into the entryway. The pain in his ankle was fading to a dim memory, and by the time he clomped down the porch stairs to the grass, the fear had left him as well. The other boys were chickens—nay, pussies—and he was the bravest one. The thought buoyed his steps. If only Amy Carmichael could have been here to see him in his finest moment! She’d probably throw her arms around my neck and plant a big wet kiss right on my lips. A delicious shiver ran through him.