House Haunted

by Al Sarrantonio

  He hoisted himself up off the arms of the wheelchair, grasping the doorjamb, and tried to reach at the top shelf. He just missed, and fell back. Filled with naked frustration, he bent over and took the wingtips and hefted one back and threw it at the shelf.

  The shelf flew up off its wooden brackets and settled at an angle.

  “SHIT!” he shouted. He threw the other shoe, knocking the shelf sideways, down onto the floor of the closet.

  Ray examined the shelf, feeling along the edges for any-thing taped to it. He threw it down in disgust. He rolled the wheelchair to the bed. He pulled the coverlet away, then the blanket, the sheets, the under pad. He felt along every inch of the mattress top, then turned it over and checked the bottom.

  He checked the box spring. He was pulling the gauzy covering that was stapled to it off to check around the inside of the foundation when his hand hit the bedside table holding the lamp, knocking the slim drawer in it partway open.

  He pulled the drawer out.

  There it was.

  Now he remembered putting it there. He remembered taking out the plastic bag and laying a line on top of the bedside table, then putting the bag in the drawer. He remembered snorting the coke, then lying back on the bed for a little while, telling himself that this would be the last one, that he would get himself under control after this one.

  He remembered thinking she would be sorry, after this one.

  He had been thinking that for two days.

  He pulled the bag open with barely controlled fingers, fumbled with the tiny straw, jabbing it down into the coke and then lifting the straw to his nostril and snorting it straight up.

  He felt in back of him for the bed to relax on, found only the stripped foundation. Ripped you off, man, he thought, and began to laugh. He felt the coke untensing his muscles, his brain. He crawled over the box spring, pulling the mattress back on top of it. The covers were in a heap on the floor. Hell with it. He found the pillow and propped himself against the headboard, turning off the sallow bedside lamp. He studied the fading slats of moonlight against the wall, which abruptly disappeared into clouds.

  “Handle you tomorrow, Bridget,” he said out loud. Soon as I get straight. Then a better thought occurred to him. I don't have to get straight. He liked that better. He liked the sound and feel of it a hell of a lot better than the alternative. He would handle her just like this.

  “As I said,” he spoke, to the slats of moonlight, “the alternative sucks.”

  Tentatively, he felt down below his knees. Dead, so far. Maybe he could reenter that dream and play basketball some more. He'd like that. As I said, the alternative—

  There was a sound downstairs.

  He heard the front door of the house open, close. Other times in the past two days he had heard sounds, comings and goings; at the height of a coke snort, he had rolled out onto the landing to see, through the slats of the railing, a girl enter the house. Silence after that; then later, after another line had gone up his nose, he had seen a tall person with a long coat and red scarf come in. Hurrying back to his room, he had heard a heavy tramp on the stairs and then a door opening and closing.

  Another noise downstairs.

  Sounded like someone bumping into things in the dark. A muffled shout, someone falling down. Weeping.

  Bumped your knee? That's certainly not Bridget.

  A rise of well-being flooded through him. This often happened to him on cocaine, especially on this wonderful Colombian stuff he'd had in the house for the past two years. For the next half hour or so nothing could go wrong. At home, at the height of his self-imposed “medical” treatment, he had tried rolling down the cellar steps in his wheelchair once, just to try it. Miraculously, he had bounced straight to the bottom, his hands working expertly on the wheels as brake and accelerator, without tipping over. After coming down off the drug, he had thought about it and couldn't stop shaking for an hour. He had even crawled back up the steps pulling the wheelchair behind him.

  Let's try it again!

  The weeping downstairs intensified. Whoever it was was banging on something and cursing.

  Super Ray to the rescue! Giggling, he rolled to the door and pulled it open.

  Darkness. A few bars of cloud-filtered moonlight colored the landing from the west windows. Rather than wait for his eyes to adjust to the deeper darkness, Ray willed himself to see. He rolled straight to the railing and looked into the vestibule below.

  See. Nothing at first, the outline of a chair, the ponderous grandfather clock that loomed over the front entranceway.

  He heard crying, saw the back of a person: feet and legs kicking feebly at the point where vestibule met living room.

  SUPER RAY!

  Grinning, Ray launched himself toward the top step. He balanced nimbly. A quarter inch forward movement and he would be off the edge.

  “Yaahhh-HOOOO!” His voice echoed through the open spaces below.

  He pushed himself off into space.

  He rode the stairs as expertly as he had the first time in his cellar. He was even disappointed; here, the steps were wide and flat and he hit no loose boards. After bouncing down five steps he stopped with a jerk. He leaned back in perfect balance.

  Silence from below.

  “Yaahhh-HOOOO!” He set off again, reaching the landing in four bouncing jerks before spinning a tight circle. He spun until dizzy. He couldn't decide whether to take the left or right stairways.

  He jerked to a stop and rolled toward the right staircase. “No!” He stopped dead, spun around and rolled as fast as he could toward the left.

  “YESSIREE!” He flew off the top step. For a brief moment ecstasy seized him. He was in midair. He had the oddest feeling that he might, if he wished, continue in a straight line and fly.

  “SUPER RAY!”

  He laughed. He felt the jolt of the wheelchair landing precisely in the center of the third step down the stairway. He yanked back on the wheels and stood perfectly still.

  “YAAHHHHHH-HOOOOOOOOOOO!” He launched him-self forward, bouncing down the remaining steps expertly.

  He came to a breathless stop at the bottom. The wheels butted up against the tassels of the living room rug that began there.

  “ALL RIGHT!”

  The rush continued. He rolled up onto the rug, around to the front of the stairs. The cavernously dark parlor spread out before him, chairs and sofas and tables like obstacles.

  “I'm coming, baby! Super Ray to the rescue!”

  His voice died to echoes, and he listened.

  Nothing.

  He pushed ahead into the front room. He brushed a Sheraton couch, nicking the end table next to it. The front entranceway became visible. It looked empty.

  “Hey, where are you?”

  He laughed, pushing the wheels harder, deliberately bumping, bouncing off of, a club chair. “Wheeeee!” he said, feigning a harder collision, spinning his wheels in opposite directions to make himself circle furiously. “I'm flying! Ha ha!” He stopped with a jolt and roared off, making car-revving sounds, toward the front entranceway.

  The barred red stained-glass window in the top half of the front door was filled with a tentative gray glow. Dawn was approaching. There was a sprinkle of rain on the window. Ray turned to look into the parlor, saw that the shadows were lifting from the furniture, outlining them easily.

  Down the vestibule, Ray heard a whimper.

  “Ah-ha! “

  He rolled furiously into the entranceway, stopping just before crashing into the front door. He heard rain spattering outside. He wheeled and surveyed the short hall.

  “I see you!” he giggled. He jerked toward a shadowed spot between an empty thick wooden coatrack and the grandfather clock. The grandfather clock sounded, five deep bongs. Ray heard an intake of breath, saw a leg twitch out into the hall, then retreat.

  Ray stopped at the spot and looked into it.

  Abruptly, the edge left his coke high. He felt instant panic. Off in the recesses of the ho
use he heard Bridget laugh. The bag. Where is the bag? His mind locked on the bag, saw it in the drawer on the bedside table.

  He knew where the bag was.

  Everything was fine.

  He pulled in a long breath; the edge came partially back. “Hey,” he said, into the hiding place.

  The shadow moved; formed into human shape, fell out into the entrance hallway.

  Morning cranked up a notch: rose to dull scarlet. The figure stood up and pushed Ray away and ran off into the house.

  Its face imprinted on Ray's memory starkly: young and black. The look was of a frightened animal, nostrils flared, lips pulled back over teeth. Ray already knew the look: it was his own.

  The edge was gone, as if someone had reached down and switched it off. Her laughter came again.

  Ray shivered. The light outside was cranking up. He thought of trying to open the front door, but knew that it was a waste of time. Fools check in, but they don't check out.

  If only he had the coke with him now. If only it wasn't up in the room.

  If only he had the coke, then he could face her.

  Her laughter rolled around the walls, a faint echo, like the dawn, rising into his head.

  “Ray . . .”

  He rolled slowly back into the parlor, shivering. The furniture looked like furniture now, a hint of chintz here and there, blue velvet visible on a wing chair. Everything looked ominous. He moved his wheelchair as if moving through a minefield. He rolled to the base of the stairs he had wildly descended.

  Painfully, the cocaine leaving him by the minute, panic edging in around him, only the need for more of the drug spurring him on, he began to ascend the stairs, one crawling step at a time, dragging his wheelchair behind him.

  Reaching the landing, he saw the fearful young black man regarding him from the depths of the still-shadowed hall leading to the kitchen.

  “Don't worry,” Ray said, soberly, knowing he was speaking to himself. “There's nothing super about me.” He continued his ascension.

  A half hour later, as full light suffused the house, he reached the top landing, pulled himself back into his chair, and rolled, shaking, back to his room.

  He slammed the door and moved hastily to the bedside table. He yanked open the drawer, pulled out the bag of white powder.

  He laid a neat line across the table top, cut it with a credit card, and used the spoon he kept in his wallet to snort it up into his head.

  There was an immediate, topping rush. He straightened the bedclothes, hoisted himself into the bed and lay back, closing his eyes.

  “Come on, come on,” he said, the trembling in his body and mind melting, easing into half sleep. After this one, she'd be sorry.

  “Please ...”

  And then he had it. He walked tall in the sunshine. There were men following him, and he felt his legs hard and sure beneath him. He threw the ball to one of the men, and then he made a move and one of them threw the ball back to him. He rose up, jumping on his solid legs into the air, and placed the orange ball—orange as the rising sun—into the round metal hoop, laying it as gently as a kiss.

  17. THE ASSISTANT

  As Gary Gaimes put his key into the lock of his Datsun, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

  Somebody's been in here.

  He glanced back at the cop in the caged-in booth who had just given him his receipt for the seventy-five-dollar impounding fee. The cop looked quickly away, but Gary was sure he had been staring at him. He turned to open the car door then spun quickly to catch the cop, who was still hunched over his desk.

  Calm down. You're invincible.

  But he couldn't calm down. The feeling of violation persisted when, wincing with pain at his taped ribs, he got into the car. Somebody's been in here. It just didn't feel right; it felt like everything had been gone over lightly and left just as before. He flipped open the glove compartment; all of his maps were in there, his flashlight, but it looked as if the flashlight had been moved from one end of the compartment to the other. A candy wrapper was on top of the maps. He was sure it had been on the bottom.

  He began to shake with rage. He forced himself to be calm. Easy. He checked under his seat: the huge wrench he kept there was where it should be. The scatter of papers and empty McDonald's bags in the bag looked undisturbed. A quick glance out the window showed the cop attendant still ignoring him.

  Take it easy.

  He had already had to control his rage once today, when the rent-a-car bastards had refused to believe him outright when he'd told them something had been wrong with the steering on the van he had plowed into the Deegan highway overpass. Have to be an investigation, they'd said. I'll give you an investigation, Gary had wanted to say; I'll tear your fucking eyes out and investigate the inside of your empty fucking skulls. But he had kept cool then.

  He'd keep cool now.

  He pushed the key into the ignition. The dangling, empty string tied to the rearview mirror caught his eyes. He searched the seat next to him, sliding the flat of his hand down behind it, but found nothing. He put his hand back under the seat, moving it away from the wrench toward the middle, and he found what he was looking for: a pine-scented hanger, a blonde with her hands behind her head in a copy of the Marilyn Monroe red-satin Playboy magazine pose, naked to the waist, ample breasts (bigger than Monroe's) thrusting out like two big pine trees. He examined where the string had broken through; it looked as if it had been pulled, not worn.

  Red rage engulfed him. He pushed open the car door, grasping the huge wrench before coming to his senses enough to leave it where it was. He got out of the car and stalked to the cage. The cop tried to ignore him.

  “Is this how you cops take care of other people's property?” he sputtered.

  The cop looked up slowly. He was young and looked just a little nervous. He smiled. “Is something wrong, sir?”

  “Somebody went through my goddamned car while it was here.”

  “I'm sure—” the cop began.

  A sudden realization came to Gary, and he threw the nudie air freshener down. “Forget it.”

  “Sir, if you'd like to file a complaint—”

  A sudden, horrible realization came to Gary Gaimes. He trotted back to the Datsun, got in, and yanked open the glove compartment door. He pulled everything out—flashlight, maps, candy wrapper.

  It was gone.

  The knife he had used on Marilyn Fagen was gone.

  Shit.

  He rammed the key into the ignition, turned on the engine, and pulled out. As he rolled past the cage he saw the young cop talking frantically into his phone, following Gary with his eyes.

  Shit. Shit.

  Gary pulled out into traffic. Immediately, a brown Dodge eased out behind him, two grim faces in the front seat.

  Shit. Fuck.

  Gary made a quick left, heading toward Chinatown. The Dodge followed. He prayed that Mott Street would be relatively empty; if he could get through that to Broadway he could lose the cops.

  Mott was jammed solid, delivery trucks halfway out on either side. A UPS truck sat in the exact center of the street. The delivery man unloaded cartons from the open back. Gary came to a halt three cars behind him. The UPS man finished, took his time closing the truck up and getting his customer, a small excitable Chinese man who kept counting the boxes on the sidewalk and gesturing at the spot on the delivery man's clipboard where he was supposed to sign. The two cars in front of Gary began to honk their horns. The Chinese man and the UPS driver blithely ignored them, lost in their calculations.

  Gary looked into his rearview mirror. The Dodge was four cars behind.

  Fuck.

  Gary turned off the engine, pocketed the keys, and pushed open the door to the Datsun just wide enough to slip out. Keeping down, he pretended to study the ground for something he had dropped. He made his way to the sidewalk, shielding himself behind the stack of cartons the UPS man had just delivered. He kept walking toward Broadway. Beyond the brown delivery truck,
he stopped. He looked back over the crowd. The UPS man had finally gotten the Chinese to sign and was slamming the back door of his truck.

  Down the street, the brown Dodge sat patiently, the two cops still in the front seat.

  Invincible.

  Smiling, Gary turned and walked to Broadway.

  As he was about to descend into the subway, he changed his mind and hailed a cab. They would be watching the subway exits near his apartment.

  He flagged a yellow checker, giving it an address, and watched out the back window for signs of pursuit. The brown Dodge was history. No other cars followed them. He laid his head back against the seat and smiled.

  He left the car four blocks from his apartment. Two blocks away, in front of an entrance to Gramercy Park, he saw the first police cruiser. The two young cops inside looked more like they were on their lunch break than waiting for a big bust.

  He backtracked, coming behind his apartment complex. There was an alley shared with the building behind that led to a locked door into the laundry room. It hadn't been opened since a mugger had beat up Mrs. Garfinkle and taken her husband's wallet ten years ago. At one time the residents had used the courtyard to dry their clothes. Now all the lines were gone, leaving only the skeletons of the metal hangers. There was nothing but garbage in the alleyway, in the courtyard, now.

  Another blue and white police cruiser guarded the back street. Gary passed them on the opposite curb, crossed the street, and came back toward them. He slipped quietly into the alley of his building's twin. He moved crates aside, passed into the courtyard, negotiating it quickly and then passing into the other short alley. He stopped before the locked door and pulled out his key chain.

  His mother had had this key since 1946, when she had first moved into the building. She had told the super it was lost when he collected them all. Gary knew that the lock hadn't been changed; the landlord was so cheap he had tried to charge Gary's mother for the lost key.

  He fit the key into the lock. For a moment he felt panic when it didn't move. Then he pressed it further in, finessing its age. Something clicked. The key turned and the door cracked open.