In Silent Graves

by Gary A Braunbeck

  She was crawling, pulling knees and feet behind her.

  A few feet along, the hand prints disappeared, replaced by the footprints of bare feet belonging to a child of perhaps two or three years of age.

  The closer Robert got to the house, the larger the footprints became.

  Here, they looked to have been made by a child of five; closer still, a child of six or seven.

  The last two footprints—these on the two steps leading onto the back porch—belonged to a child at least ten years old.

  From the porch on, there were no prints, just clumps of snow and earth or puddles where the snow had begun to melt or had already melted.

  Over the threshold, across the kitchen floor, then a sharp left—

  —into the basement.

  Go home, Willy, so you can find—

  —both cats were now at the edge of the counter, craning for a look.

  “What the hell is it with you two?” said Robert, scratching the top of Tasha’s head and hoping to restore some sense of normalcy. “You act like this is no big—”

  The top of Tasha’s head was damp.

  Ditto The Winnie’s.

  Damp and cold.

  Ice cold.

  Or recently-melted-snow cold.

  He pulled his hand away and wiped it on his coat.

  “Getting friendly with burglars now, are you?”

  The cats paid him little mind.

  He looked into the basement.

  Something wasn’t right. The shadows cast by the light fell at angles different from those he remembered when he was here this morning.

  He stepped onto the first stair.

  The shadows slanted right instead of left. Denise’s work area was on the right and that was the light he’d left on.

  Someone had turned it off. Now the only light came from the bulb that hung over the washer/dryer; that’s why the shadows looked wrong.

  There was a sudden thunk! from the basement, followed by a hiss, then a series of progressively softer whump-whump-whumps as the washer went into its spin cycle.

  This was too much. Someone breaks into the house, locks the door behind them, pets the cats, then does the fucking laundry?

  Robert ran down the stairs. The first thing that registered was the absence of the shovel and garden spade he’d thrown down the stairs three nights ago. He made his way to the washer, watching it vibrate, then—out of curiosity—touched the door of the dryer.

  It was warm. Inside was a load of clothes that had only finished drying a few minutes ago.

  He crossed to a set of shelves left of the washer, took down his toolbox, and removed a hammer, then stormed to Denise’s side of the basement. He kicked over a few boxes along the way to make sure the intruder wasn’t hiding behind them, checked the dark corners around the water heater and furnace, and was reaching up to turn on Denise’s light when he became aware of his heart beating furiously in his chest. He could feel it in his temples.

  How long he stood that way—one arm at his side, gripping the hammer, the other lifted in the air, fingers gripping the thin chain of the light—he couldn’t say. He was only aware of time passing. The washer finished its spin cycle and fell silent. Robert remained still, listening to the faint, irregular drip of water as condensation fell from the pipes. He could hear his own breathing. He wet his lips, admitting to himself that he was scared. He squeezed the wooden handle of the hammer for reassurance. No good; he was still petrified.

  Then came a sound from behind him.

  Soft.

  But close.

  Every muscle in his body seemed to unwind at once; his skin broke out in gooseflesh and his breath suddenly caught in his throat. Whirling around, he yanked so hard on the light cord that it snapped off between his fingers, but the light came on and Robert was able to see—a moment before it rolled off the table and clattered lightly onto the floor—what had made the sound.

  One of Denise’s detail brushes—a thin, camel-hair number—had fallen out of the rack.

  Robert knelt to pick it up (that’s what he told himself, anyway; the truth was that it was either kneel or allow his knees to buckle from the sudden relief) and saw the small spatters of red it had left on the floor. The hair of the brush was still wet with paint.

  He rose slowly and was about to lay the brush back on the table when he saw that, except for a plain brown box in the center of the table and about half a dozen brushes soaking in a jar of cleaning fluid, Denise’s work area, her fiercely-guarded corner of privacy, had been stripped clean.

  She had once yelled at him for having come into this area while she wasn’t home. He couldn’t remember what he’d been looking for—undoubtedly something he could have found elsewhere in the house—but whatever it was, he’d figured that it wouldn’t bother her.

  She’d gone ballistic when she found out, screaming that he’d violated part of her.

  He never forgot her rage, nor the hurt on her face and in her voice.

  But mostly he never forgot her rage.

  That rage was now his. Rael—or whoever had gone through the trouble to stage this parlor trick from hell—had come down here and sheared away all traces of Denise’s work, probably stuffing everything into that goddamned box—

  Robert slammed the hammer onto the table and ripped the lid off the box, hoping that he could remember how she’d had everything arranged. He thought he might be able to reconstruct it well enough if he—

  —his hand froze inside the box.

  No pencils, no paint tubes, no sketch pads or Exacto-knives.

  He carefully removed the two matryoshka dolls and set them side-by-side on the table, then turned on the small jeweler’s lamp whose neck jutted out from the side of the hutch.

  He needn’t have bothered; even with a minimum of light he would have recognized Denise’s face on the largest doll—roughly the size of a pineapple, his own on the smaller, this one no bigger than an average gourd.

  They were just as wondrous as the ones she’d made for Lynn—no, scratch that: if anything, these were even more stunning and exquisite. Viewing the painstaking details through the magnifying lens of the jeweler’s lamp revealed that much.

  The subtle upward sweep of her thin eyelashes, the tongue-in-cheek melancholy of his own grin, the arc of shadow at the corners of their eyes, shadows that seemed comfortably indigenous and did not alter their shape or position when either doll was turned this way or that, into or out of the light.

  Denise was dressed in a sarafan and kerchief, both tinted in gold. She looked like a wandering princess separated from her family: Anastasia among the ruins.

  She had worn a similar costume two years ago at Halloween, when she had insisted they both dress up to give out the candy. It had been an odd request but he’d gone along with her whim, having—despite the self-consciousness at the start—a great deal of fun.

  He couldn’t remember what costume he’d worn that night. Too bad; it seemed important, somehow.

  The Denise doll’s kerchief even had the same small stain near its center, the result of his having tripped with a tray of treats, baptizing her in a shower of not-quite-dried candied apples. God, how they’d laughed about that.

  He lifted the top off the Denise doll and removed the smaller matryoshka inside, then removed the one inside that.

  He looked at the faces on the other two dolls and felt his knees give. He pulled up Denise’s chair and fell into it.

  From left to right, the dolls portrayed Denise, Amy Wilder, and Debra Jamison: Denise in her Halloween costume from two years ago; Amy as she had looked at the cemetery this morning, right down to the color and style of her coat and the Joan-Crawford hat with its veil pulled back; and Debra as she had been only a couple of hours ago. The faces might as well have been photographs, they were so precise.

  He picked up the Debra doll and shook it; it felt and sounded as if there were two, possibly three other dolls inside of it. Try as he did—for the better part of three minutes
, grunting with effort—he could not get the two sections of the doll separated so he could see the others hiding within. He thought about getting a screwdriver and forcing it open, but turned his attention to the matryoshka that bore his own likeness.

  Unlike the other dolls, this one did not have a groove circling its middle; there was no way to separate the top half from the bottom.

  He shook the Robert doll.

  Paused.

  Then shook it twice more.

  It was hollow.

  He set it on the table and wiped his eyes, wondering if Denise, like her mother with her pictures of the wedding and battlefield, had been trying to tell him something with this doll. Perhaps she’d made it one night while he was at work, one of the many nights she was alone while he was out fighting the good fight to advance his career. Maybe she’d been hurt, or lonely, or frightened, or disappointed, and had created this hollow matryoshka out of anger toward him. Maybe that’s why she’d made it hollow—her way of letting him know she thought he was turning into some kind of shallow, self-centered—

  —speaking of self-centered, how typical to take something like this and make it all about you.

  He set the doll down next to the others and swung the jeweler’s lamp over to see if there was anything in the details that he’d overlooked.

  “OhGod....”

  The doll was dressed in the exact clothes he’d worn to the funeral—the same clothes he was wearing now; not only that, but in its left hand it clutched a piece of paper—

  —he moved the magnifying lens closer—

  —and could just make out the words Send me a picture of the daughter....

  In Denise’s handwriting.

  “Rael,” he whispered, then: “RAEL!”

  He jumped to his feet, hands fisted in rage, and screamed, “RAEL! Goddammit! If you’re in this house and can hear me then say something! Right now! If you were telling me the truth and I don’t have to be afraid of you, then show yourself.”

  He yelled so loudly that the cats leaped from the counter and ran in fur-shedding, skitter-claw panic to their secret hiding places.

  “Now, Rael! If you’re in this house then show me YOUR GODDAMNED FUCKING UGLY FACE RIGHT NOW!”

  He grabbed the hammer and started for the stairs but was stopped by the echo of laughter.

  A child’s laughter.

  He took the steps three at a time, bolted through all the rooms and turned on the lights, then, finding no one hiding down there, ran upstairs, kicking open every door as he came to it, flipping on lights, and searching each room as thoroughly as his panic and anger would allow.

  By the time he came to the bedroom he’d shared with Denise, the child’s laughter had been joined by that of other children, one of them singing, “Olly, olly, oxen-free!”

  Then the pitter-patter of little feet rushing down the stairs.

  Robert chased the sound, his eyes darting from side to side at the smallest hint of a shadow where he didn’t remember one, and he nearly fell over his own feet at the top of the stairs. Grabbing the bannister, he steadied his balance and quickly descended, hitting bottom as three more sounds simultaneously invaded his world: the scrape of something metal being dragged across the concrete floor of the basement, one child’s laughter becoming weeping, and the screen door banging shut.

  He entered the kitchen and saw that someone had unpacked the groceries and laid out everything he’d need in order to bake cookies, including the ingredients, the battery-operated mixer, a mixing bowl, and three cookie trays (all of them only a few weeks old, and none of which Denise had lived to use). He flung open the back door and saw that both the flower pot and flagstone were gone, the garden lights had been set back into their original positions, and the garden was as it had been a little while ago.

  The box had either been taken or re-buried because it was nowhere to be seen.

  The flagstone was back in its proper place. There was no sign that the garden had ever been disturbed.

  Even the footprints were gone, covered by a fresh whisper of night snow.

  He went inside, locking the screen door and back door, then did the same to the basement door, slamming the bolt lock solidly in place. He grabbed a kitchen chair and jammed its back underneath the doorknob. Whoever was rearranging things down there couldn’t get out unless he let them out; the basement windows were too small for even a child to squeeze through.

  Now it was just a matter of finding whoever else was in the house with him.

  He stood in the center of the middle room, drenched in sweat and gulping air, trying to be as quiet as he could. Blood thundered through his temples, and his mouth was desert-dry. A thin, sharp bead of perspiration cut a smooth path directly down the center of his spine. The lights of the house seemed so much brighter and richer than they had before, streaming all around him to coat his surroundings in bright liquid.

  Too bright: everything was too bright, painfully bright, reminding him of the lights in the hospital—not only the night Denise had died, but all those nights he’d spent in the hospital throughout his childhood, always a sickly child, and clumsy, or healing from a beating given to him by his father when the man was drunk, injuries he and his mother always lied about by calling him clumsy.

  He closed his eyes and tried to summon memories of early childhood that had no connection to pain or confusion or terror and could not do it; before Lynn’s birth when he was nine, those three had been his only constant companions. Even after that night, Dad had hit him so hard Robert’s spleen had ruptured and he spent three weeks in the hospital recovering from the surgery (“He took just about the worst tumble off his bike that I’ve ever seen a child take,” his mother told the doctor in the emergency room, both of them knowing damned well that she was lying and there wasn’t a thing to be done about it). He would wake in the middle of the night and see the slash of corridor light creeping under the door and hold his breath, convinced that Dad would come and hit him again, or call him names like “sissy-boy” or “weakling.” Those names had hurt worse than any fist, because whenever Dad was drunk and called him those names—and worse ones—Robert knew for certain that his father didn’t love him, maybe even wished he’d never been born.

  Still, there was something poking at the edge of his memory about that three-week stay in the hospital. He’d been in the children’s wing, that much he could remember; and when he was able to get up and take short walks through the corridor, one of the nurses—he couldn’t remember her name, just that she was large and grey-haired and always smiled like those Christmas-card drawings of Mrs. Santa Claus—would take him on the elevator and they’d go up and look at all the newborn babies through the glass. That had been nice—

  —and it was that part of the memory that nagged at him suddenly; it seemed ridiculous as hell to be focusing on something so distant when there was a very real possibility in the here-and-now that he was in a house with definitely one and maybe even more intruders...but, still...there it was: an image of him standing there, eight years old and hooked up to a portable IV that he wheeled around like some toy wagon, his face and hands pressed against the glass, making goofy, puffin-face expressions at the babies who were either always crying or asleep.

  The glass was cool, so cool; he’d liked that. Nurse Claus had said it was because of his infection and fever, that the cool glass seemed even cooler because he was still sick. When he asked about the other baby room, the one he could see through the swinging doors, Nurse Claus told him that was the isolation ward, where they put the “real sick” babies so they could get better.

  Nurse Claus—that’s what he’d called her, and she’d laughed when he explained why—kissed the top of his head and told him he had quite the imagination and was such a good boy.

  A good boy.

  Babies behind glass.

  He blinked the nagging memory back into the shadows, then opened his eyes to the still too-bright lights and the oncoming migraine of which they warned.
/>
  He started at the farthest room upstairs, turning off unneeded lights room by room until, at last, he was back in the kitchen, staring at the chair jammed against the basement door.

  He yanked the chair from under the doorknob, gripped the bolt lock, and took a deep breath, making sure that he still had the hammer—he did; sometime during the last five minutes he’d slipped it into his coat pocket, though he was damned if he could remember doing it.

  At the same moment he disengaged the lock, the music started:

  Oh, I don’t know what to make

  Of this life I’m leading....

  He walked into the living room, toward the entertainment center where the lights of the receiver and CD player glowed like the headlights of a car about to crash into a frozen deer.

  A child ever searching to belong

  I’ve got one foot in history and the other in the future

  Something’s got to give before too long....

  John Nitzinger’s “One Foot in History,” the first song he and Denise had ever danced to...and he’d waited until the night he proposed before daring to show her that he was a rotten dancer. He remembered how surprised he’d been that she owned the album—back in the days when vinyl was the only game in town—and how she’d just sat there smiling at him as he raved on about Nitzinger and Bloodrock, the band John Nitzinger had written several songs for. “Two of the greatest 70s rock acts that ‘classic rock’ FM radio has forgotten about!”

  She kissed him when he finished going on about it and asked him what his favorite song from the album had been. He told her, and she carefully cued the record and asked him to dance with her.

  “I’m a lousy dancer,” he’d said.

  “I know, but it’ll be so much more romantic if we’re dancing when you ask.”

  “Ask what?”

  “You were planning to ask me to marry you, weren’t you?”

  “Uh....”

  She slipped one hand around his waist, the other cupped at the back of his head. “Mr. Eloquence, and you’re all mine.”