House Haunted

by Al Sarrantonio

  It was crushed tight, wouldn't open.

  “YOU FUCKER! YOU FUCKER! I'LL KILL YOU. I'LL KILL EVERYONE!”

  Gaimes managed to turn half around in the front seat. He clawed at Brennan, struck at him in the cramped car interior with the curve of steering wheel. Brennan shouted as the wheel hit him behind the ear.

  Clawing over the front seat, Gaimes pulled himself half free and grabbed at Brennan's shoulders. He moved his hands up to Brennan's face, gouging at his cheeks with his fingernails.

  Brennan kicked at the glass shards in the window to his sight, pushed them out into the rain. He stopped to pull Gaimes's fingers from his face. Gaimes flailed over him, pulling at his hair, grunting in effort to free his pinned legs.

  “. . .KILL . . .YOU . . .”

  Ted Brennan threw himself out of Gaimes's grasp and toward the open window, bound hands first. He closed his eyes, pushing his head through after his arms. There was a burning slice of pain up his left side. He kept struggling. Gaimes pounded at Brennan's legs with his fists, trying to keep him in the car.

  “. . . FUCKER!”

  Brennan's left arm throbbed with agony. He forced his hands against the side of the window frame and wedged himself out. He kicked at Gaimes.

  Brennan fell out onto the grass. Rain pelted him. Fighting for breath, he pushed himself to his knees, then to his feet.

  In the car, Gary Gaimes struggled and screamed. His voice became inhuman, a sound of rage like that of a wounded beast.

  Ted Brennan lurched away from the car. Rain-darkened night assaulted him. A cold wind was blowing, a November gale filling the world with water. He stepped in puddles, began to shiver.

  He stumbled to the driveway.

  Behind him, the cries continued.

  Brennan stood looking up at the house. It pulsed like a living thing, red lights through all the windows growing bright and then dimming. Brennan heard an unmistakable low hum that seemed to grow from the house into the ground itself. He felt as if he were standing on a generator; he could feel the vibration into his bones. Despite the rain, the tearing flame of the wound in his arm, the tight cold fear that Gary Gaimes would lurch toward him from the remains of the car and murder him where he stood, he was mesmerized.

  The Compass Cross.

  Terrified elation filled him.

  Yes, the house said to him. You've found me. Come see.

  Brennan heard a wrench of metal from the car in the back. Gary Gaimes shouted triumphantly.

  Come see.

  Brennan backed away.

  Come . . .

  “KILL YOU!” Gary Gaimes shrieked.

  Brennan reached the wet street. Rain roared in torrents down the curbs.

  Come. . .

  Brennan splashed through the street river. The burning in his left side flared to unbearable heat. He collapsed, began to black out.

  “No!” he shouted at himself. He rolled onto his back, in the middle of the street, rain soaking into his mouth. No . . .

  His mind slipped. The rain soothed him, beat on his face like on a tin roof, lulling, singing to him.

  No . . .

  With his last tiny flare of consciousness, Brennan reached his bound hands over his body, straightened his fingers, and drove them straight into the open wound on his side. He screamed. He dug his fingers into the wound, raking pain up until his eyes opened and he rolled onto his knees, panting and crying.

  “God, oh, God ...”

  Up the driveway, he saw the top of the house above the trees. The red glow brightened, dimmed.

  Come . . .

  Panting, Brennan rose and staggered on. His left side was numb. He concentrated on it, blocked everything else out, his shivering, the call of the house, Gary Gaimes's cries, his fear. When his eyes began to close, his knees weaken, he dug his fingers into the numb area, stoking pain into it like a waning fire.

  He prayed for a refuge, a house, a school, a country store. There was nothing. Only night, whipping trees, the sky open like God's screaming wrathful mouth with rain, and wind, and cold. Pain.

  There was a sound behind him. He turned, saw nothing. There was a car.

  It moved along the curb, slowly, lights off.

  Brennan's heart moved into his mouth.

  He crossed to the other side of the street. The car silently turned, rolled after him. It was closer to him now; he heard the humming purr of its engine.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Brennan sobbed. He dropped to his knees in the road.

  The car moved closer.

  Brennan forced himself to his feet. His left side had turned into hard, wet fire. He dropped to his knees, looked back. The car was nearly on him.

  “Oh, God.”

  He saw through a haze of pain. The front of the car was crushed, pushed back like paper to the driver's seat; through the windshield he saw Gary Gaimes's howling, triumphant face, one fist punching toward him in victory.

  “Oh . . . God . . .”

  Ted Brennan fell forward into the road, onto his right hand. The pain did not keep him from unconsciousness, which rose toward him like the wet road, enveloping him, taking him to hard sleep . . .

  Soon after, consciousness pushed him fleetingly back into the world. He felt himself lifted. He opened his eyes. He saw the dull yellow dome light of a car interior. He cried out, then looked into a face that was not Gary Gaimes's—

  He went back to unconsciousness. But as he dropped back to it he heard, like the volume on a radio turning down, Falconi's voice, not altogether filled with animosity, say, “Who's a sorry asshole?”

  23. SOUTH

  A dream within a dream.

  On the bed in the dream house, Ricky slept. So tired. Could you sleep in your dream? Maybe when he woke up, all the dreams would be gone, and he would be back in his bed in his mother's house, and she would shake him gently and say, “Ricky boy, time to get up, lazy boy, no work today, a beautiful day outside, the sun is shining, the sky is blue. Get up and smell the salt air, your friends are waiting ...”

  A dream within a dream.

  He was with Spook, and Spook was not dead, and they were on the ferry dock with Reesa and Charlie. The sky was as blue as Paul Newman's eyes. His mother was right. He never had seen such a beautiful color of sky, or such a beautiful warmth on his skin, or a more beautiful touch of cool, mild salt sea air across his wet skin. He swam, and Spook and Reesa and Charlie swam beside him, and they were like a school of beautiful angelfish swimming in the cool and mild salt sea of his home. When he came up to the surface and shouted happily and pulled soft air into his lungs, he could almost smell the limestone of the houses on his beautiful island. He could almost smell the limestone of his own roof on his own home, with his mother inside cooking dinner for him and singing because she was happy.

  And then his mother was there in the water with him. She was swimming beside him, another beautiful angelfish in the mirror-clear sea, and she rose to the surface with him and shouted happily alongside him and pulled fresh cool-warm air into her lungs and smelled the limestone of the houses with him. She was happy with him. And all the world was happy in the blue sky with high small clouds, trouble so far away, trouble like tiny clouds so high in the sky that no plane could reach them. The blue of the sky overwhelmed the clouds and made them insignificant.

  “And someday,” his mother said to him, “my Ricky will be as famous as Ben Vereen, and sing on Broadway, and be on TV, and I'll watch you on the satellite dish, and I'll be so proud of my boy!”

  “We'll all be so proud!” Reesa said, rising up to the surface next to him and pulling the fresh air into her lungs, and Charlie and Spook rose next to her and said, “Yeah!” and “Yeah!”

  And then Reesa kissed him, and laughed, and dove down into the clear water, and Ricky watched her, and Charlie laughed and dove too, and said before he hit the water, “She's yours, Ricky boy! She loves you!” and Spook laughed too, and then his mother laughed and dove down, and he was about to follow when he looked up into the b
lue-bright sky, and a hand came over the sun, over the sky, high up in the tiny clouds, and grew big and dropped, blotting out the sun and beautiful sky, and a huge shadow of the hand fell across the water, and the shadow of the hand grew toward him as the hand fell toward him—

  —and Ricky cried out and awoke, and the dream within a dream was gone as a hand hit him in the face, and a face stood over him, and he was back in the bad dream in the dream house and the hand rose up where the beautiful blue sky should be, and fell, and hit him again, and he cried out and tried to cover his face, and there was a terrible loud hum in his ears, and brightening red light all around, and he looked up to see a face he knew from that terrible dream hovering over him, a face that belonged to the man who had offered him tea and biscuits, and the man's hand turned into a fist and hit him again, and then again, and the terrible dream began to go away, and the hum receded, and off in the distance, he heard the sea, and saw, vaguely, the blue sky, and the hand pulling up away into the clouds, and he felt himself lifted as the dream within a dream returned—

  —but now he was in Chambers House. He was alone, and it was night, and the house was locked tight and dark around him. Off in the distance he heard something break. There was laughter.

  A door opened in front of him. The cellar. He saw light, saw a shape move across the light, occluding it.

  “Come down, Ricky,” he heard someone say.

  He found himself moving toward the cellar door, descending the stairs.

  “Come down, Ricky. Come down.”

  When he reached the bottom of the stairs, darkness descended on him again. Then he saw a light on at the back of the cellar. Again, someone walked in front of it, blocking it out.

  “Come here, Ricky,” a voice said.

  He began to walk.

  “Come . . .”

  His legs kept moving, but he found it difficult to walk. He looked down. The floor was covered with blood, rising like a red tide over his shoes to his ankles.

  “Come on, Ricky. Come on.”

  He tried to walk, but his feet could not move. Then suddenly he was moving, his feet pulled by the wash of blood like a sucking tide.

  “Come . . .”

  The tide of blood pulled him around into the cleared area the cellar. Bright light blinded him. Then he could see. Spook stood propped against the back wall of the cellar, holding his own head. The tide of blood washed away from Ricky over the floor and up Spook's body, pulled back into g open neck cavity.

  Spook's head, the mouth smiling, said, “Time to go now, Ricky.” One of his hands rose up, holding a hammer, which suddenly grew very large, the flat front expanding, filling Ricky's entire field of vision.

  “Time to dance,” Spook said

  —and Ricky opened his eyes as the hammer came down at his face. He cried out, trying to deflect the blow, but the flat of the hammer hit him square, and his cry turned to a dull gasp. His vision began to blur as the hammer rose away from him, and again he saw the face of the young Polish man above him. Such a terrible dream. The Polish man raised the hammer high, and then it came down quickly, and now the head of the hammer filled his whole vision again, and he barely felt the blow, and—

  —suddenly he was dancing, on Broadway, at a real theater, not the horrible dream theater with people sleeping on the street outside, but a theater like in a Busby Berkeley movie, and there was wild applause, and there in the audience, in the front row, was his mother and Reesa and Charlie, and Spook cradling his head in his arms and applauding, they were all applauding, and somewhere above he felt another dull blow from the hammer again, but he danced, and when he looked to his right there was Ben Vereen, dancing with him, and to his left was Tommy Tune, and the audience was cheering as the three of them danced into abrupt hard blackness—

  Jan raised the hammer, brought it down again, raised it up, brought it down. On the floor of the cellar, the hammer struck into the inert bony flesh of Ricky's head as if striking a wet sponge. And still Jan raised the hammer, brought it down—

  “Mind if I have a try?”

  The calm voice behind Jan startled him. Panting, dull-eyed, the thick, mindless hum of the house filling his mind, he turned to see a figure standing quietly behind him. A cold breeze moved over Jan's face. Behind the figure, a cellar window was broken open, the floor littered with shards of glass.

  “Here,” the smiling figure said, taking the hammer from Jan's limp hand, edging Jan gently back.

  The figure turned to Ricky's body and shouted, “Yes, you fucker!” bringing the hammer up and down in quick short jerks, moving up and down the body. He began to laugh. The body moved dully with each strike of the hammer. The man moved to the head, the hammer came up high, rushed down.

  “You see?” the man said to Jan, examining his work. He pulled the hammer from the body and turned, striking Jan square in the face with it.

  Jan cried out and threw his hands up. The man hit him again, bringing the hammer around in a wide arc to strike at his ribs.

  The hammer struck again, and Jan fell. Gary Gaimes howled. He kicked the body down flat, then jumped onto it, pulling the trembling hands away from Jan's face to hit a direct blow. Blood came up at him. Gaimes howled louder. He felt the hammer like a fist, a tire iron, an extension of his hand, his soul. He brought it down again and again until the thing under him was an unrecognizable mass.

  “All right!” he screamed. All right!”

  Gary Gaimes stood. He raised his voice to a wolf-like howl. His eyes behind his glasses were like two saucers in his face. Around him, deep red light began to pulse like a huge living heartbeat. The hum of the house became a throbbing roar.

  Gaimes whirled and struck a final time at the lifeless body of Jan on the floor, then held the hammer up, muscles tight in triumph.

  “ALL RIGHT, BRIDGET,” he screamed, laughing. “LET'S PLAY!”

  24. FALCONI

  “I hardly know what to say, Lieutenant Falconi. A murderer, you said? To think that something like this could happen just down the street.... Well, I suppose it could happen anywhere these days, anywhere at all. Why, just in the Times the other day there was a story about a man who cannibalized his family. Killed them and ate them. Down in Georgia, I believe. Years ago, you would never have seen anything like that in the Times . . .”

  The voice, gentle, slight, was a susurrus to Ted Brennan's ears. As he rose from unconsciousness, the voice sought to press him back down to it. For a moment he thought it was the voice of Beauvaque, and that he might rise to consciousness in the big bed in the big dark bedroom, with a cat on his lap and the landlord sitting in his dark corner. Then he thought it might be his mother, her face rising like the silver moon in the night over him as he strained to see her, before she was gone and blindness descended on him...

  He forced open his eyes, saw the wide, lighted furnishings of a country living room, homely clutter, a pink brocade chair, mahogany side table, thick velvet curtains over a wide front window, a wide shade drawn down over it. He edged up in his seat: a secretary to the right, open to a scatter of lavender writing paper, a stamp dispenser, an elegant pen laid aside. Dark oriental rug on the floor, an ottoman beneath his feet, his arms on a dark green chair, the left side of his jacket cut away, his side and hand taped with new bandage. There were rope marks where the bindings had been removed.

  He groaned, sat up, turned his head to see Falconi, and a perfectly dressed petite woman with short gray hair who looked to be about seventy-five regarding him with her hands in her lap from a couch beside his chair. There was a tea service on the coffee table before her.

  “Feel okay?” Falconi asked.

  “I'm alive,” Brennan answered.

  The woman immediately rose, pouring and bringing him a cup of tea. He hated tea. He drank it down with wonderment at how good its heat tasted in his mouth. He had a difficult time raising his left arm without a burn of pain rushing through his side.

  “Would you like something to eat?” the woman asked. She
looked like someone you wanted to be your grandmother.

  He started to shake his head, stopped, said, “Yes, please.”

  There were sandwich halves on the tea service. She arranged three of them, along with a cluster of Pepperidge Farm cookies, handing the plate to him. She poured him more tea.

  Before he realized it, he had eaten and drunk everything.

  The elderly woman stood, efficiently gathered the dishes and cups onto the tea service, and went into the kitchen.

  “How did you get here?” Brennan asked Falconi.

  “Minkowski thought Gaimes might fixate on you, because of your interest in Bridget. And you were dumb enough to tell him where you live. I drove up to your place just as he was hauling you off in the car. The son of a bitch almost lost me when he started driving like a madman.”

  “You have him?” Brennan said.

  “He's in the house. There are ten cops, my own and locals, watching the place.”

  Brennan eyed Falconi levelly. “Why haven't you gone in?”

  Falconi was about to answer when the woman returned. “Is there anything else you gentlemen need?”

  “I don't think so, Mrs. Williams,” Falconi said. He made as if to get up. “Thank you—”

  “Mrs. Williams,” Ted Brennan said, “do you know anything about the house down the street?”

  “Oh, yes. I've lived here for almost fifty years.” She sat petitely on the edge of the couch and folded her hands in her lap.

  “Who lived there last?”

  “Oh,” she said, “no one's lived there for almost forty years. The last was the Simmons family. They were there for . . . six months. They said they heard noises and such. No one seemed to want to move in after them. The children around here call it the Haunted House, of course.”

  “Have you ever seen anything strange around the house?”

  “I can't say I have. But the house is well off the road and there's a lot of space between houses around here. And I never was one for snooping. Others around here have claimed noises and lights, but it's hard to know how much of that is just spook stories.”