by John Everson
“That’s it, I’m done,” he said. “This place is rotting, stinking and creepy. It should be left alone to rot into the earth and disappear. That’s what it was in the middle of doing when we started trying to save it. There are animals in the walls and fucking devil worshippers apparently hanging out here at night. I don’t want any more part in it.”
“Whoa, calm down, man,” Perry said. “We’ll work this out. I need you to finish this now, I really do. We’ve got the set builders and decorators ready to come out in two or three weeks to start working on the rooms. I can’t lose even a day now.”
“I’m not working in a place where people are killing things,” Mike said. “For all I know, they’re just waiting around in the trees and I’m going to be their next human sacrifice.”
Perry laughed on the other end of the line. “It’s just kids screwing around. You’re overreacting. But I get it, I do. You’re kind of remote out there. How about this? We’ll put a night watchman on the place from now on, so nobody can get in there when you’re not around.”
“I don’t want to work in this craphole,” Mike complained.
“Nobody does,” Perry said. “Trust me, I asked around.”
“I thought I was your first choice?”
“You’re my friend,” Perry said. “But originally I tried to get a couple of bigger contractors in to do this job faster.”
“Well, I suggest you give them a call again,” Mike said.
“Time and a half,” Perry said. His voice sounded panicked. “We’ll give you a watchman and time and a half for the rest of the month.” His voice calmed then, and he said softer, “I need you to finish this, Mike. Please.”
At that moment, Katie walked into the room, and leaned against the doorway. Her eyebrows lifted in askance, as if to say, ‘what are we gonna do today?’
His fear of devil worshippers suddenly dissipated, and Mike thought of the opportunity to work with Katie at his side all day.
“Okay,” Mike said into the phone. “But only because it’s you.”
And only because Katie is here…his mind added.
Perry said something that he only half heard. And then Mike was mumbling goodbye and thumbing the end call button. He dropped the phone into his pocket and took a step toward the doorway.
“Hi,” he said. “I thought I’d scared you off for good.”
Katie smiled and shook her head. “Can’t scare me,” she said. “What’s the project for today?”
It was Mike’s turn to smile. “Well, after I bury a bunch of dead animals, we’re going to put down a wood plank floor and make sure that nobody can stumble on any other hidden coffins or blood puddles from sacrificed animals. Basically, we’re going to make the scary basement not scary so that they can come in with a bunch of paint and props and make it scary again.”
“Seems like a waste of time,” Katie said.
“Yep,” he agreed. “But you know, it pays the rent.”
* * *
Katie held a plastic sheet as one by one, Mike clipped the strings that held the animals suspended from the beams. When all of the bloody balls of fur were lying on the sheet, he grabbed the opposite side of the plastic and walked it to her. When his hands brushed hers, he felt a spark shoot down his spine. His skin grew strangely warm. He was sure he saw a glint in her eyes as he took the plastic from her hand and pulled the ends together so that he could drag the plastic out of the cellar without losing any bodies. Or blood.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Whatever you need,” she answered. Her voice was soft. Like rose petals.
He dug a hole on the edge of the cemetery, away from the house, and dropped the animals in. Katie moved boards into the basement as he piled dirt back in the hole and retrieved his saw from the truck.
“How’s this?” she asked, as he came down the steps to find a neatly stacked pile of 5/4x6 boards on one side of the door, and 2x4s on the other. Emery stood nearby, leaning against one shadowed basement wall. He nodded at her but she didn’t move.
“Um, perfect,” he said to Katie. “We’ll frame it out with the 2x4s today and depending how far we get, slap down the wide boards tomorrow.”
With Katie’s help, the rest of the day passed quickly. And at the end, she brought him his cooler as they sat on the edge of the deck near the entry door. He popped the top on a PBR and almost couldn’t wait for the telltale sound of the hiss of carbonation to down the first gulp. He hadn’t eaten or drunk anything in hours, he realized. But he’d been more productive than he’d been on a job in months. Maybe years.
“Thanks for your help today,” he said to Katie. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”
“Whatever you need,” she said again with a slight smile. “I just want to help you get it done. My friends and I are looking forward to a haunted house this Halloween.”
“Well, they will have you to thank for it,” he said.
Katie smiled, but said nothing.
* * *
Over the next three days, Katie turned up shortly after Mike arrived, usually with Emery in tow, and they helped him carry, cut and measure wood as he framed out and ultimately hid the dirt floor of the basement. Mike had covered the earth beneath the wood with a heavy plastic sheet to help keep the dampness and mildew odors contained.
“Why do you always use that?” she asked at one point, as he slapped a square on the board he was measuring. “My dad used to just mark wood really fast using another board.”
“Maybe I’m not as good as your dad,” he said. “This helps me make sure my cuts are always ninety degrees.”
“Does it even really matter down here?” she said. “I mean, it’s a basement floor that is just to give people something dry to walk on. It doesn’t have to be perfect.”
“Maybe not,” he said. “But I don’t work sloppy. Every cut you make says something about the carpenter. Whether I’m building a treehouse or a mansion, I make my cuts true. It’s just how I roll.”
She shrugged. “Just was curious. That’s good, I guess.”
Once they finished the floor, Katie helped him place plywood sheets over the frames he’d put from floor to ceiling on two sides of the basement. Perry had asked him to divide the basement into three rooms since they were taking the time to floor it. The division gave them two additional rooms to ‘haunt’ come fall.
He didn’t bother to put full doorways on the carve-outs, since people would just be filing in and out anyway. The decorators would probably hang plastic or beads or something to screen them off.
“Just hold it right there,” he said, as Katie held the last piece of plywood square to the ceiling. Her arms were outstretched, crucifixion style, to press the board in place, and he came up behind her with the nail gun to reach over her head, press the trigger and shoot the top nails in. His chest pressed the back of her head as he bent forward to hold the gun in place. When he’d set the last nail, he dropped a hand to her shoulders. He knew he shouldn’t touch her that way, but he couldn’t resist. Every hour she was near he found himself more and more drawn to her. He said things to her as they worked just to hear her talk. When he got in his truck at night to go home, he found the silence without her voice almost deafening.
He craved her company, almost as much as he craved a cold one.
You’re fucked, a voice in his head noted.
“All right,” he said, looking at the plywood that sat snug to the beam. “We are officially done down here. They can paint these walls or put spiderwebs on them or whatever…but the walls and floor are in. Now it’s time to move upstairs.”
“What room is next?” she asked, not moving from beneath the press of his hand.
“I thought we’d start in the attic and work our way down,” he said.
“Sounds like a plan,” she agreed.
She moved away from him, but not wi
thout a knowing look in his direction, and the faint hint of a ‘I kinda liked you touching me’ smile.
He led the way back up out of the basement, which now smelled like clean fresh-cut lumber instead of mold and blood and rot. Maybe not the best prerequisite for ‘haunting’. But that wasn’t his problem.
They passed into the house through the kitchen and walked up the creaking steps to the attic.
“If we find any dead deer or raccoons hanging from nooses from the rafters, I’m leaving,” Mike said.
“I’ll be right behind you,” Katie said. “That’s gross.”
There were no dead animals in the attic. But there was a lot of dust. And a dry smell of age. The heat was palpable; the air felt thick enough to cut with a knife.
“We need to get these windows open,” Mike said. He walked to the right side of the long room and pulled with all his might on the handle of a window. It didn’t move.
“Shit,” he said. Crowbar time again.
“I got this one,” Katie said at the other end of the attic.
The window squeaked, but seemed to rise easily under her hands.
“How did you do that?” he said, walking across the attic to join her. “The other window is dry-rotted shut.”
“Magic,” she said with an eyeroll.
He ran his hand over the edge of the window sill and shook his head. “Magic is what we’re going to need to keep this place from falling down once hundreds of people start walking through it.”
“I thought you fixed all that,” she said. “I mean, all of the stuff you did in the basement made it more sturdy, right?”
He shrugged. “Well, I don’t think the first floor is going to fall into the basement,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean this place is sturdy. Look at this wood. It turns to sawdust under your fingers.”
As he said it, a chunk of the window frame snapped under his fingers, and an inch-long piece fell to the attic floor.
“See what I mean?”
She grinned. “Well, I guess that just means you can show me the best way to fix a rotted-out window.”
“I’ll tell you how,” he said. “In this place? Just board it up.”
He ran a hand around the window frame, and then pounded a fist against the wall. He repeated the motion a foot or so out from the window, and then stepped down the wall and did it again, cocking his head to listen at each spot.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Just trying to get a feel for what shape the walls are in up here.”
He stomped a foot on the floor, close to the wall. His face filled with worry lines as he did it. He stepped a couple feet away from the wall and tried again, looking as if he expected to punch one boot through the floor. After several stomps, his face lost its look of trepidation.
“I’m shocked, but happy,” he said. “Amazingly, it sounds pretty solid up here.”
Then he put his foot down again and frowned. “That will teach me to open my mouth.”
“What is it?” she asked.
“That sounded hollow.”
He stomped again, a few inches away, and then dropped to the floor. With one finger, he followed a line in the wood. A gap.
“I think there’s a trapdoor here,” he said. “You almost can’t see it, because the handle is fashioned to drop down into the wood and basically disappear.”
Mike slipped his fingernails between two indentations a few inches apart and lifted. A slim wooden handle rose from the floor.
“Now that’s craftsmanship,” he said. “Nicely done.”
He began to raise the door, but Katie put a hand on his shoulder. “That’s probably just an old laundry chute,” she said. “I don’t think we want to go down there.”
He raised it a foot, and could only see blackness below. A cloud of stale, foul air filled the corner of the room as he peered below. “It looks wide for laundry.”
She shook her head. “All these old places had them. And there would be a small ladder, in case something got stuck on the way down and you had to go chase it.”
Mike sneezed then, the cloud of dust and mold from below hitting his sinuses like a sledgehammer. He dropped the door and fumbled in his pocket to look for a tissue.
“Maybe you should build, like, a wall or platform or something here to block this corner off, so you don’t have a bunch of people stepping on the door?” she suggested.
Mike stood up and sneezed again and again. When the fit passed, he nodded. “Probably not a bad idea. First thing is to make sure the rest of the floor is solid I suppose. I think I’ll need to come back with a dust mask and a flashlight to check the chute out.”
He blinked his eyes to clear the tears, and went back to stomping on the floorboards, slowly moving away from the trapdoor. His thumps got harder and faster as he felt more and more confident that the floor was still solid.
Just before he reached the other end, a bell chimed from his pocket. Mike pulled his phone out and shook his head. “Damn, it’s four-thirty already,” he said. “I don’t think we’re going to start up here tonight. I should start packing things up.”
Katie shrugged and looked at him with wide eyes designed to ensure a positive response. “Do you have time for a beer before you go?”
“If you have time to drink one with me,” he said.
“Only one?”
“Bad girl,” Mike said. But he couldn’t help grinning as he said it. “I am pretty sure there are a few still in the cooler.”
Chapter Nine
“We have to go back there tonight,” Jillie said. She punctuated that statement by pointing at him with a long, fresh-cut French fry. They were having lunch at Nicky’s Carryout, arguably the best greasy spoon in the south suburbs. It had been there on the corner of 143rd Street, just a couple miles down the road from Bachelor’s Grove, for decades. There was history in that grease stuck to the old tile walls.
Ted shook his head. “What’s that going to accomplish? You’ve already lodged a complaint with the county, and you know what that got us. Exactly what you expected. This state has just about the biggest debt in the nation; there’s no way they’re going to turn down some easy money on a broken-down old house because somebody thinks there might be angry ghosts.”
“I just need to know,” Jillie said. “I want to feel what the state of the place is. Are the spirits dangerously angry? Are they quiet?”
“And if they’re pissed off and grinding skull teeth, what are you going to do about it?” Ted said. “Do you think the county board is going to act differently if you go in to their board meeting in August and say, ‘You can’t open that haunted house, the dead are really teed off about it’?”
Jillie shot him a just-shut-the-hell-up glance, but said nothing.
“This isn’t your fight,” Ted said. “Don’t go to war on something you can’t win.”
“Is that what you would have told Washington and Jefferson and the rest?” she asked. “Don’t bother, you can’t win?”
Now it was Ted’s turn to roll his eyes. “What, you’re the daughter of the Revolution now? Look, all I’m trying to say is—”
“I get it,” she interrupted. “But that doesn’t change things. I understand Bachelor’s Grove. I know what could happen there if things really get tilted. I have to at least try my best to not let that happen. It’s my responsibility.”
“So, we go there tonight and…what?” Ted asked.
“You bring the EMF meter and full spectrum camera, and I’ll just listen. I want to see what kind of activity there is now that this guy is in the house all the time.”
“You think we’re going to pick up a lot of stuff?”
“I would make sure your battery is charged and you have plenty of memory,” she said. “Yes.”
“Okay,” he said. “Pick you up at eleven-thirty?”
“Perfect,” she said. Then she looked at his plate. “Are you going to eat your pickle?”
* * *
The Midlothian Turnpike was dark and empty when they edged over to the side and parked Ted’s car on a gravel shoulder close to the small bridge near Bachelor’s Grove. Fleetwood Mac was singing ‘Go Your Own Way’ on the radio and the reflection of the radio LED tinted Jillie’s face a strange electric blue.
“This is it,” Ted said.
She nodded. “Kill the lights before anyone else sees us.”
He did, and then got out and pulled the sensing and recording equipment from the trunk. Most of it was stuffed in a backpack, which he shrugged with a grunt over his shoulders. A minute later, they were trudging down the weedy gravel path that led past the old fence beneath the heavy tree cover and into the cemetery grounds.
“Did you bring the flashlight?” Jillie asked as they moved down the darkening path away from the turnpike.
A second later, a light flicked on, and Ted pointed it ahead of them at the path.
“I can always count on you,” she said.
“Remember, I have a digital recorder,” he said.
“Anything recorded can be erased,” she countered.
He snorted. “Not if it’s saved to the cloud.”
“Trust me,” she said. “Everything on the cloud is going to get wiped out one of these days by a thunderstorm.”
“Always so negative about progress,” he said.
“I didn’t tell you to carry cassette tapes, did I?” she asked.
“Touché. Shhh,” he said, pointing ahead. “There’s a car here.”
“Interesting,” Jillie whispered. They approached the dark shape carefully, but once they arrived at it and peered into the windows, she pronounced it safe.
“Maybe someone drove it off the road and abandoned it here,” she suggested.
“Or someone’s in the house,” he said.
“I guess we’ll see,” she said. “But I don’t think so. Nobody that we can see with our own eyes, anyway.”