A Summer with the Dead

by Sherry Decker

  “The sky doesn’t look very light,” Maya said. “And we don’t know what we’re looking for.”

  They pressed their backs against the bookcase wall. From there they had a clear view into the living room to their left, and the entrance to the pantry to their right. A few silent minutes passed. Coty checked his watch again. “Eleven-fifty-eight,” he whispered.

  Maya stepped away from the wall and stood below the skylight. She looked up and saw fir needles scuttling around on the glass. A maple leaf landed in one corner and blew away again. She noticed a design in the glass she had never noticed before.

  “The glass has a line in it,” she said. There’s a beveled line all the way around the glass.”

  Coty glanced up. “Yeah, I know.” He checked his watch. “It’s noon. Right now. It’s noon.”

  They glanced around, eyeing every corner and listening for the slightest sound.

  “What the hell,” Coty whispered. “I don’t see anything.”

  “I don’t either. I can’t figure out what Elly meant … wait. Look there.” Maya pointed to a prism of light on the wood paneled wall. Sunlight hit the skylight window again and shot a colorful beam against the wood. It grew sharper and became a circle of orange, yellow and blue.

  Coty touched the spot on the wall. He slid his finger back and forth. “Nothing there.”

  “Push it,” Maya said.

  Coty pressed the spot and Maya heard a click. Four wide panels slid to one side, revealing a narrow, upward-curving staircase, thick with dust. Coty climbed four steps up and halted. “Drawers,” he said. “Built into the walls.”

  Maya leaned inside. “Where does this stairwell go? It must come out in one of the guest rooms? Or behind them, or, between them?”

  They climbed to the end. Maya pulled open several drawers built into the back wall. “They’re all empty. The stairwell stops here. It goes nowhere.”

  “this drawer wasn’t empty,” Coty said. “This drawer had this inside.” He held up a one hundred dollar bill. “These drawers must have been packed with money. Where do you suppose it all went?”

  “Over a million dollars,” Maya said. “That’s what Fritz was looking for.”

  “Did Elly shoot him too?”

  “No. It was that thing in the basement my mother described.”

  “You saw it too? I thought your mother was just craz … imagining things.”

  “It’s real. It’s a thing made of body parts, all writing and twisting. Somehow it manages to travel.”

  They found and opened twenty-four drawers and carried them down into the skylight room. They stacked the empty drawers in the middle of the room beneath the skylight.

  “Still no Danny,” Coty said.

  “Danny is somewhere in that stairwell,” Maya said. “I just know it, because of Elly’s clue.”

  Coty climbed the first four stairs again and halted. He felt along the curved back wall. “These boards are newer than the others. The nails are different, too. I don’t think this stairwell always had a curved wall here. I suspect there is a corner behind it.” He slid a knife from his pocket and pried at the crack between two boards. He inserted a finger and pulled. The board cracked and then broke loose with a loud ripping sound. Coty pulled a second board and then another.

  “Aw, hell,” he said. “There’s a body bag in here.” He grasped the uppermost edge of the bag and it toppled forward, along with dust and a flurry of hundred-dollar bills. The money was loose, as if it had been stuffed around the body bag like insulation. Coty caught the bag in his arms but it knocked him down. He went to his knees and the bag tumbled past him and into the skylight room. Coty followed and knelt by the bag. He unzipped one side.

  Maya looked away, afraid to see inside the bag. “Is it Danny?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Take the boy and go.” Elly stood in the pantry entrance.

  Coty shouted. “He was only seventeen years old, Elly! Seventeen! And he was a good kid!”

  “I didn’t hurt him.” Elly said. She looked ashamed and averted her eyes.

  “But you let someone else hurt him.”

  A massive silhouette loomed behind Elly, growing larger as it grew closer.

  “Elly!” Maya shouted. “Behind you! Angel!”

  Somehow, Angel had reassembled in an almost-human form. His head sat at an angle on his jagged neck. His shoulders and arms were attached in correct order. His torso and abdomen faced backwards however, his thoracic and lumbar spine faced forward from his collarbone down. The three sections of leg—thighs, knees and calves were arranged in the natural pattern, but his ankles and feet pointed back, causing him to totter and wobble as he lurched forward, his bloodless, blue-white hands reaching for Elly.

  “What the hell?” Coty growled. “Come on, Maya.”

  “Hurry. Go. No time left.” Elly limped into the skylight room. She held the plastic ketchup bottle in one hand, the cap gone and the nozzle cut off short.

  Coty dragged Danny in his body bag through the living room and out through the front door, down the steps into the overgrown garden. “Come on, Maya!” he shouted again.

  “Elly. Come with us,” Maya said. “Please, Elly?”

  “It’s too late.” Elly stood in the square of sunlight beside the stack of empty drawers. A cloud darkened the room. The prism vanished. Elly’s expression changed. Her brows drew together and the corners of her mouth curved down. Her shoulders bent forward, hunched and crooked. It was Mr. Elly who turned to face Angel.

  Angel’s tangled body lumbered to a clumsy halt. His pale, mismatched body parts squirmed, each part flexing on its own, his rotten hair, chalky, bloodless fingers and dry, milky eyes rotated this way and that. His mouth hung open and green spittle oozed from between his lips. “El…ly,” he moaned.

  Maya backed toward the open door.

  “Elly says for you to leave now. She says you’re to keep the money because we worked hard for it, all those years.” Mr. Elly’s voice was the familiar growl. “Go now, cuz I’m busy here.” He aimed the ketchup bottle at Angle and doused him with clear liquid. Angel lumbered forward, one hand reaching out, his fingers clawing the dark, dead air of the skylight room. He knocked the ketcup bottle from Mr. Elly’s hands. Maya smelled gasoline.

  Mr. Elly backed up. He pulled a lighter from his pocket, raked his thumb against the igniter and a small flame shot forward. He threw the lighter at Angel but the flamed died and Angel batted the lighter away. It landed at Maya’s feet. He staggered, taking one awkward step and then another.

  Mr. Elly yelled, “It’s past time for you to burn in hell, Angel!” He dove into the monster’s abdomen.

  “No, Elly!” Maya wanted to save Elly from the monster. She squatted, grabbed the lighter, flicked the switch and the flame shot forward. She pointed it toward Angel, but he looked only at Elly. Angle wrapped his arms around Elly. He took two off-balance steps, left and right. “El…ly.”

  Maya ran toward them, stumbled on the empty cash drawers, and fell. She landed hard, bit her tongue and tasted blood. She stretched out one hand and touched the flame to Angel’s toes. The flame shot up his leg, up his backwards spine and to his hair in seconds.

  Angel waved his arms, flinging fuel and flames against the walls and floor. Flames spread across the walls and roared across the ceiling. He stumbled, and then he toppled forward and landed on the floor with a thud, trapping Elly beneath him. He grabbed Elly’s neck and then she was on fire too. The flames engulfed them both.

  Mr. Elly said nothing. His eyes were closed, as if he had gone away—somewhere—and had taken Elly with him.

  Angle’s and Elly’s nightmarish struggle was surrealistic and real at the same time. Orange flames turned black and roared up the secret stairwell. The skylight room filled with thick, rolling smoke. The skylight shattered from the heat. Class particles rained down through the flames.

  “Elly’s gone!” Coty lifted Maya from where she had fallen, and together they ran out th
e front door.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY-TWO

  WAYNE C. MATHESON FROWNED. “My mind can’t seem to grasp it. One hundred-fifty-four graves in those fields! Four more in the basement! My mind froze up after they told me that.”

  Maya sat across from him in the restaurant atop the Space Needle on a sunny mid-October day. She had finally managed to think of him as Wayne instead of Coty. He nursed a near-beer and Maya traced lines in the condensation on her glass of lemonade. The color reminded her of the yellow door and how it froze over when Angel climbed the basement steps. She looked away, toward the star-faced mountain across the sound, not far from Elly’s farm.

  “So the lawyers decided the money is all yours,” Wayne said. “That’s a lot of money.”

  “Too much. Most of it’s going to charity, with some going to your sister for Danny’s burial expenses.”

  “There’s no proof the money came from criminal activity, Maya, if that’s what bothers you.”

  “But it did come from criminal activity. The worst kind. I have no doubt about that.”

  “Remember me telling you about seeing a ghost, a gray man with a gentle face and deep, sad looking eyes?”

  Maya nodded.

  “I saw him again, as Elly’s house burned down. You were in the grass crying your heart out, so I didn’t say anything at the time, but he walked out of the flames and down toward the stream. It was like he was finally free.”

  “What was he wearing?” Maya asked.

  “Odd. I think he was wearing striped pajamas.”

  Again, Maya studied the star-faced mountain. She swallowed and fought back tears.

  Bye, Daddy.

  “You’ve never told me about this guy, Angel,” Wayne said.

  “I can tell you everything now that Elly’s gone,” Maya said. “And more about Harlan too.”

  “What about Harlan?”

  “Judith said Harlan was Elly’s imaginary friend, clear back from early childhood.”

  “You mean, there never was a Harlan?”

  Maya shook her head. “I watched Elly become Harlan … there in the skylight room, confronting that thing that came up behind her. There was no Harlan, but to Elly he was real. She couldn’t accept being a killer … so she convinced herself that Harlan did it.”

  Wayne shook his head with a look of disbelief. “Little Elly killed Grady Goode when she was just sixteen years old, and she killed those two professionals, the guys she called the Franks … and then she killed Angel?”

  “It was Elly.”

  “That’s just plain crazy,” Wayne said.

  Maya nodded at the distant mountain across the bay. “I’m afraid I must agree.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SHERRY DECKER lives in Washington State and tries to write every day—but life gets in the way. Even so, she has written a collection of short fiction titled, Hook House and Other Horrors and a futuristic earth novel titled Hypershot. Her short fiction has appeared, or soon will, in publications such as Cemetery Dance, Black Gate, Dark Wisdom, Best of Dark Wisdom, and Best of Cemetery Dance 2 to name a few.

  One of Sherry’s favorite stories, “Hicklebickle Rock” simultaneously won First Place in the North Texas Professional Writers Association and appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. She has been a Finalist and year’s-end Honorable Mention in Writers of the Future, and three-time Finalist in the Pacific Northwest Writers Association genre contest.

  She also edited and published, Indigenous Fiction ~ wondrously weird and offbeat from 1997 to 2001. She can be found on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin.