by Tim Curran
They could call it outsourcing all they wanted to, but when you put a guy in office and he allowed jobs to be shipped down to Mexico so that corporations could make obscene profits, then it was just a dirty shame. Rape was rape no matter what fancy tag you hung off it.
They passed through the remains of the industrial graveyard and then property values began to shoot up and you had lots of nice parks and schools, thriving business sectors, blocks upon blocks of ranch houses and prefab mansions. Things started to sink back the other way as you entered the surviving older sections of Genessee that sloped down towards the river. Where there had been but four or five inches of rain in the streets of yuppieville, down here where the old saltbox and two-story framehouses stood, there were a couple feet of standing water washing down the lanes. But it was no problem with Tommy’s Dodge Ram which was jacked so high you had to jump up into the cab anyway.
“Looking for four-oh-three Wilbur,” Mitch told him. “That’s where Lisa Bell lives.”
Tommy pulled onto Wilbur Avenue and studied the house numbers in the rain. It was still coming down, but not excessively. He moved the truck along slowly, leaving a foaming wake behind him that slopped into flooded yards. A few people were moving up the drenched walks in raincoats. They did not look as the truck passed.
“If I wasn’t seeing people,” Tommy said, “I would have thought this whole neighborhood was deserted.”
And there was that feeling, Mitch knew. He saw a few cars parked in the streets and a few more in driveways, but nowhere near the amount of vehicles you would have expected. There was that same feel you got here as you got over in the empty industrial sector, that sense of desertion and abandonment. While over there it was easy to see why, here…well, it was like driving through a ghost town and wondering what exactly had depopulated it.
Tommy said, “There it is.”
He touched the brakes a little too quickly and the truck jerked.
“What?” Mitch said.
Tommy brushed the back of his hand over his mouth. “Thought…thought I saw someone sitting in the swing on the porch. Nobody there now, though.”
Mitch looked at him, swallowed, and looked away.
Tommy pulled the Dodge into a driveway, just behind a parked Neon. Then they sat there looking up at that narrow L-shaped clapboard house with its high-peaked roof. There was the bracket for an old TV antenna up there that had bled rusty stains over the green shingles. Just a house like any other house you might stumble across in the Midwest…yet, as Mitch looked up at it leaning out at him, it was every empty house on every weedy lot he had suspected of being haunted as a kid.
He knew the very idea was ridiculous.
The Bell house was neither rundown nor shabby, shunned nor shadowy. The windows were not planked over and no rusty FOR SALE sign creaked on dry posts. It was actually a very nice house, old—probably late 19th century like most of the older homes in that section—but well-maintained. There were flower boxes out front and neatly-trimmed hedges, a flagstone path leading up to the front door. Definitely not a ghost house of any sort and if it hadn’t been for the sullen, leaden hues of the day washing it down with a grim uniformity and giving it roughly the same coloration as a cemetery monument, it would have been very pleasant.
But it was not pleasant.
Mitch could not adequately express even to himself what he was feeling, just that the house inspired dread in him, filled his belly with shards of broken glass he felt would slit him open if he dared move. Maybe it was nerves and maybe it was the knowledge that on days like this sundown could drop very fast and leave you groping. Maybe it was that and maybe something else.
“Cmon,” Tommy finally said, grabbing his Savage four-ten pump from the rifle rack and pumping shells into the breech. “Let’s get this done.”
“I’m not seeing Heather’s Bug around.”
“No, they’re probably not here…but I suppose we better check.”
They hopped out, Mitch in the lead. He went up the path to the porch, splashing through that foul-smelling water with his rubber boots. The rain was pissing down in gray sheets, stirring up a sluggish groundfog, and visibility was low. Looking in either direction down the block, he could not see anyone out and about. But he couldn’t see very far, either. He shook the rain off him and climbed the porch. There were a few flowerpots with withered plants in them. Nothing unusual for late September in northern Wisconsin. Most of the trees had already been stripped of leaves. Something which didn’t usually happen until mid- to late-October. Orange and yellow carpets of them bobbed in the street.
Tommy was looking at the porch swing.
It was wet like maybe a pile of soaking laundry had been set there. On the porch beneath it there was a puddle of gray water with bits of black debris floating in it. Kind of funny because the roof overhang had kept the rest of the porch pretty much dry. But Mitch figured rain could have been following a beam and dripping all afternoon.
Or maybe somebody very wet had been sitting there.
He let that go, went up to the door and knocked lightly. But there was no sound from inside.
“Maybe you should knock harder,” Tommy said.
So Mitch did and then thumbed the doorbell a couple times, hearing the ding-dong echoing from the depths of the house. Still silence. No approaching feet or anything. He supposed if someone got a look at them, particularly Tommy with his shotgun, they might not be so inclined to answer the door.
Mitch knocked a few more times and as he did so, a chill went right up his spine and spread over the backs of his forearms. He suddenly had the damnedest, most uncanny feeling that somebody was standing on the other side of that door, just waiting there like a kid playing hide-and-seek. The door itself was old hardwood with an oval glass panel set towards the top. A heavy cream-colored curtain covered the glass from the inside. You couldn’t see through that curtain exactly, but Mitch was almost certain that a form was throwing its shadow against it.
He reached down for the brass doorknob, but it was locked.
A second after he’d let it go, it rattled of its own accord like somebody was shaking it from inside.
“There’s somebody in there,” Tommy said.
Mitch knew it was true. He led Tommy off the porch and around through the sideyard, the water splashing up around the tops of their boots. The rain abated for a few moments, then came down heavy again. Off and on, off and on. They tried the backdoor and it was locked, too. All the windows were hung with sheers, so you could not actually see inside the house, but more than once Mitch was certain that a shadowy form passed by a window like somebody was watching their progress through the yard.
What the hell is this about?
They went back around front and stood at the bottom of the porch steps. The feeling that someone was standing behind the door watching them had not abated…it had grown to a near certainty.
18
“We could always go grab a beer and a burger, think this out,” Tommy said, his voice almost hopeful.
Mitch would have liked that very much. But as the minutes passed, he became more and more worried about Chrissy. Maybe she was home right now. Maybe this was all a wild goose chase. But he couldn’t let it rest at that. He loved her like his own flesh and blood and if getting some answers, or at least putting his mind to rest, meant he had to go inside this coffin, then he was going.
He charged up the steps in kind of a childish gesture so that whoever or whatever was in there would see he showed no fear, that he was ready to kick some ass. Without hesitation, he tried the knob and it was unlocked.
It turned easily in his hand.
He looked at Tommy and Tommy was starting to look a little pale.
“I ain’t liking this,” he said.
“Me either,” Mitch admitted. “But I guess…I guess somebody wants us to come in.”
“Don’t mean we have to,” Tommy said. “I tell you about my cousin Ginger? When she went in that house uninvited?”
“You got an awful lot of cousins, Tommy.”
“Don’t I know it.”
Mitch gripped the knob and threw the door open, stepped inside like he owned the joint and almost went on his ass. There was a puddle of water on the floor. Dark, dirty water like the run-off from a septic tank. And it didn’t smell much better, either. In fact, the whole house had a stagnant, vile stink to it like all the old pipes had burst, all the sediment and silt spilling out. It was the smell of seepage and old sewer lines.
“Smells like they got the rot in here,” Tommy said. “Got it bad, too.”
Blobs of water led from the doorway into the living room. Mitch could now make out distinct muddy prints in the blue shag carpeting. The smell was stronger in here. Tommy went over to a recliner. Its cushions, both bottom and back, were stained dark. He pressed the butt of the Savage into the ass cushion and water oozed out. A magazine—Newport News—was laying at the foot of the chair. The pages were mangled, streaked with dirty fingerprints like somebody with shit all over their hands had been leafing through it.
“C’mon,” Mitch said.
He led them through a dining room and into the kitchen. On the wall over the dinette table, somebody had scrawled a message in something like mud:
NOBODY’S HOME
The letters were more of a looping childish scrawl than anything and whatever material was used had dripped like horror movie print.
“That supposed to be a joke?” Tommy said.
Mitch didn’t answer, because as he came around the table he saw the refrigerator. It was a pearl white Amana and the door was standing wide open. The shelves in there had been pretty much cleared, eggs shattered on the floor, mixing in with the contents of a milk carton, a shattered orange juice bottle, mustard, mayonnaise, a glop of pasta. There were dirty handprints all over the door and smears on the shelves inside.
Somebody had been looking for something.
And then Mitch saw what it was. Where the kitchen opened back into the hallway, there was a ceramic plate and strands of shredded butcher paper that were pink with blood. Bits of hamburger were stuck to them. Somebody had torn it open, eating it raw and—judging from the trail of bloody hamburger fragments—had been walking away as they did so, clots of raw meat dropping from their mouth as they went.
“Not much on housekeeping, these Bell’s,” Tommy said, trying to be funny and failing.
A series of black, watery prints led away into the hallway. Mitch peeked into a bathroom and saw nothing. And right about then, Tommy let out a little surprised shriek.
“What?” Mitch said. “What the hell is it?”
Tommy’s mouth was moving but nothing was coming out. He had his Savage up and he was looking wildly from a mirror hung on the hallway wall to the stairs leading to the second floor. “Saw…saw a girl standing there,” he managed, his breath coming very fast and shallow-sounding. “Saw her in the mirror…girl just standing there in a dirty dress or something, hair stuck to her face. She was looking at me.”
There was no one there now.
Mitch, something tensing in his belly, looked into the mirror. It reflected the stairs, part of the living room. He went over to the stairs. There was a pool of water soaking into the carpet like somebody dripping wet had been standing there. More of those filthy prints went up the stairs.
“I’ve had enough of this spooky shit,” Tommy said, breezing right past him. “Somebody’s playing games and I got a new game they never heard of.”
He mounted the steps and Mitch was at his side. They were both frightened now, afraid of things they could not see and maybe more frightened of those things that could see them. They moved up the stairs slowly. At the top they could see part of a plaster wall and a painting of flowers in a brass pot, but nothing else. They could hear each other’s labored breathing and the rain striking the house.
Then above, the sound of a door creaking open followed by footsteps that were wet and mucky like someone was walking around up there with sponges strapped to their feet.
Somebody was up there, just around the bend of the corridor.
Mitch could smell them…the stink of things stranded by a tide, briny and noisome.
Then a door slammed so loudly from above, they jumped.
But they kept going, knowing in their hearts that if either of them had been alone they would probably have run right out the front door. More of those stinking, wet prints were in the hallway above as if their owner had been tramping through the black silt of river bottoms.
There was a long muddy streak along the wall like an oily rag had been dragged along it. But it hadn’t been a rag, Mitch knew, but a hand.
The dirty prints ended at a closed door. There were others shut or half-opened, but whoever was up there was behind this one. There were black stains all over its panels.
Mitch tried it, brushing muck from the knob.
It was locked. From the inside.
He looked over at Tommy and they understood each other. Tommy brought up the four-ten and Mitch made ready. At some unspoken, but understood moment, he brought up his size eleven boot and kicked out with everything he had, giving it the old Kwai Chang Caine treatment. It was just a cheap hollow door and the lock gave instantly, the door slamming right open. And then both Mitch and Tommy charged in there, becoming comically wedged in the doorframe as they tried to vault through shoulder to shoulder like Moe and Curly. Mitch pulled back because Tommy had the gun, a manic voice in his head saying, spread out, you knucklehead.
The room was probably the master bedroom. It was quite large with an oak four-poster bed and powder gray carpeting. There were muddy prints all over it, of course. As they stepped across it, standing water seeped up from the fibers. The embroidered coverlet on the bed was black with a foul, slimy stain like somebody especially grubby had laid there. And the stink was almost overpowering…pipes clogged with hair and grease and rotting scraps, heaps of decaying leaves…and maybe a worse undersmell of the noxious thing that had been laying in such filth.
None of this interested Mitch and Tommy, though.
There was a doorway leading to a bathroom and that’s where this person had to be. The closet stood open—more dirty smudges on the clothes in there as if polluted fingers had been sorting through them—and they could see everything in there. No room for the girl to hide.
She had to be in the bathroom.
Tommy started towards it. “You better cross your legs, you little bitch, because here I come.”
There was no one in there.
But there had been. The tiled floor was stained with crud and silt. There were black, muddy prints all over the mirror. The tub had been filled and there was a gray scum on the water…but nothing hiding beneath. A small square of window, about large enough for a little kid to squeeze through was standing open, the curtains billowing, a wet mist blowing in. The sill was absolutely black.
“She must’ve went out that window,” Tommy said like he couldn’t believe it.
Mitch started over to it, some slightly neurotic voice in his head crying out, what in the hell happened here? Some dead and waterlogged thing came into this house, sat in a recliner and paged through a magazine? Laid on a bed and drew a bath, rummaged through the clothes in the closet? It was madness. What the hell could it possibly be about? But maybe the dead clung tightly to the daily rituals of life and this thing, this girl, had just been going through the motions.
You can’t know that!
Yet, he felt this was as close to an answer as his brain could furnish him with. There were patterns, insane ones perhaps, that were still in play in dead brains. He wanted to think that this girl had been some living waif, but his heart and maybe his soul would not accept this.
“What the hell is that?” Tommy said.
Amongst the settled black goo on the windowsill, there was something fleshy and white curled like a bloated angleworm.
Mitch tried to swallow and couldn’t. “I think…I think it’s
a finger.”
Tommy prodded it with the barrel of his shotgun and it moved, it unfurled like a sleeping caterpillar and dropped to floor, squirming. Mitch made a disgusted sound and kicked it behind the toilet. He looked out the window at the falling rain. Felt it in his face and it was good to feel connected to something real. This thing, this girl had certainly not been alive…she was filthy and rotting, spilling some festering black juice like the ink of a squid. And she had been so soft and pulpy, she had been falling apart.
He stuck his head out the window, certain he would feel two spongy hands wind around his throat. There was nowhere to jump. Just a straight drop to the wet grass below. Nobody was down there. Nobody at all. Mitch craned his head and looked up…well, there you go. There were greasy, ebony stains going right up the vinyl siding to the roof overhang like some mucky human spider had climbed right up its face. Rain blew into his eyes and he wiped it free.