The Night Visitors

by Carol Goodman

  “She was imagining it,” Mattie says with a sigh. “She was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. I tried to talk to my father about her but he was too busy with his own worries. Some of his past cases were being reviewed by the state . . .” She pauses again and I guess this is something else she’s leaving out. I let her. I’m getting impatient with this story; I want to find Oren.

  “And . . . ?” I prompt.

  “So he was holed up in his study poring over his files all day and late into the night. He told me my mother was just high-strung and Caleb was just going through a phase. The thing is not to coddle the boy.”

  Mattie’s voice lowers on this last part and I shiver. It doesn’t even sound like her. It sounds like some hard-ass judge.

  “I tried to keep Caleb busy and out of their way. The third Star Wars movie had just come out.” Her voice softens. “I took him to see it three times. Each time we came back the game became more complicated—there was a whole plot having to do with Han Solo on Endor with the Ewoks . . . well, you can imagine. That’s when he hid Yoda down in the hollow behind Stewart’s.”

  It takes me half a second to realize what she’s saying and then I feel as cold as if we were still standing in that frozen hollow. “Like the one Oren found? You think it was the same Yoda? But how . . . ?”

  “I don’t know,” Mattie says. “Maybe it’s just that two boys in the same situation think the same.” She sounds unsure but goes on. “Caleb was straying farther and farther from home. I was afraid that he was going to run away. We started playing in the house more. That’s when he found the house inside the house.”

  “That’s what Oren wrote in his note. What does it mean?”

  Instead of answering me Mattie opens the door. Even though the electricity’s out, the room has a muted glow: a Milky Way of plastic glow-in-the-dark stars across the ceiling, walls, and even the floor, hundreds of them. Mattie walks into the center of the room, her face tilted up to the ceiling, turning around in a slow circle as if she’s as weirded out by the spectacle as I am. I kneel and check under the bed, just in case, but Oren’s not there. When I get up I find Mattie running her hand along a pattern of stars on the wall.

  “That’s the same pattern that’s on all the windows,” I say. “Does it mean something?”

  “It’s the constellation Virgo,” she says, her voice small and far away.

  “Was that Caleb’s zodiac sign?”

  “No,” Mattie says, “it stands for Justice. It’s a story from mythology that my father liked to tell.” She’s still tracing the pattern of stars with her fingertips. Then she looks down at her feet. There are stars there too, but the pattern is interrupted by an old rag rug. She picks it up and flings it aside. There’s the pattern again, pointing toward the floor under the bed.

  “Wow, Caleb really went to town with these stick-on stars,” I say, just to be saying something. It creeps me out that the stars point under the bed.

  Mattie shakes her head. “These ones on the floor weren’t here before.”

  “But then who . . . ,” I begin, but then I stop at a sound from downstairs. Mattie hears it too. Breaking glass.

  “Come on.” Mattie pushes me to the floor and begins scrambling under the bed. It’s crazy; we’ll never both fit under there. There’s got to be a better place to hide.

  “Where the hell are we going?” I demand as Mattie pushes me against the far wall under the bed.

  “To the house inside the house,” she says as the wall gives way and I begin to fall.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Mattie

  I’D FORGOTTEN ABOUT the drop. It’s been thirty-four years since I used the sliding panel under Caleb’s bed that leads to the closed-off back stairs. Before the stairs were blocked off I asked my father what the panel was for and he told me it was a laundry chute to make it easier for the housemaid to collect laundry from upstairs. There would have been a wicker hamper underneath it. Now there’s a three-foot drop to hardwood floor.

  I hear Alice’s aggrieved curses as she hits the floor. I scramble down to put my hand over her mouth and shush her. “Do you want to give away where we are?” I hiss. I feel her head shake no. When she’s still, I reach up and slide the panel shut as slowly and carefully as I can. Then I crouch next to Alice and listen.

  The breaking glass sounded like it came from directly under Caleb’s room, which means it came from my father’s study. Even after all these years I feel a shock at the violation of the sanctity of that space. Sancta sanctorum, Frank, an ex–altar boy, jokingly called it when we snuck up the back stairs, past the now blocked-off door that led to the study.

  The intruder is in the study. Thank God I took the gun out of the desk drawer. And thank God the study door locks from the outside . . .

  Assuming I remembered to lock it. Did I? I’d been upset about seeing that pattern in the dust. Could I have forgotten to lock the door from the outside, like I forgot to let Dulcie in? I strain my memory, but while I remember dropping the key in the crystal bowl, I don’t remember locking the study door. At least I have a gun. I reach to feel its comforting cold bulk in my pocket, but before I can touch it Alice grabs my hand.

  “What is this place?” she whispers. Her voice sounds much younger.

  It’s creepy, Frank had said when I showed it to him.

  “It’s just the back staircase,” I whisper. “My parents had it blocked off when I was fourteen.”

  “Why?” Alice whispers back.

  I sigh. This is not a story I want to tell, but at least it might take Alice’s mind off her murderous ex (Could it be? I wonder. Did Davis have time to get here from New Jersey?) rifling through my father’s study. “I used to use the stairs to sneak out at night—and then I got in trouble and was sent away.”

  “Where to?” She’s not letting anything go.

  “To juvenile detention,” I reply, glad it’s too dark to see Alice’s expression. This is not something I often tell people. Doreen once said I should own what happened to me, that I was a survivor of the antiquated juvenile corrections system and that by sharing my story I would empower other survivors.

  That was the only time I ever told Doreen to fuck off. No matter how enlightened people think they are (woke, the interns call it), they look at you differently when they know you were in JD. But I don’t have to see how Alice is looking at me. Her voice is awed when she asks, “JD? A judge’s daughter?”

  “Yeah, I know, ironic, huh? But my father had this idea that if he went easy on me people would call him a hypocrite. He had a reputation as a judge who was tough on juvenile delinquents. He thought the world was going to hell in a handbasket because parents were too permissive and kids didn’t have to face up to the consequences of their actions. So when I got picked up for making out in a parked car—”

  “That’s a crime?”

  “‘Public indecency,’ my father decreed.” Slutting around, my mother called it. “He thought he had to treat me the same as any other miscreant. I got sent to the New York Training School for Girls in Hudson.”

  Alice is silent for a moment. “I’ve never heard of that place,” she says at last.

  “They shut it down in 1975, two years after I finished my time there. It . . . It wasn’t a very nice place.” And just like that the black hole we’re sitting in becomes the windowless basement cell used for solitary confinement, Hudson’s preferred method of punishment. I can hear even now the drip, drip, drip from the leaky faucet in the hall and the tread of the guard’s footsteps on the stairs.

  “Shit,” Alice says in a tone of commiseration.

  “Yeah,” I agree. “When I came home the back stairs were boarded up. My mother said it was because of the new baby—Caleb—that she was afraid of him falling down the stairs, but I knew it was a message to me. There’d be no more sneaking out at night.” It had felt, when I came back, like a piece of me was gone too, like that rebellious girl who would sneak out to meet Frank Barnes down in the hollow had b
een erased. I had thought I might find her again when I saw Frank, but Frank had been sent straight from boot camp to a military school, and then he joined the army. Although I’d caught glimpses of him on holidays, it was another ten years before I really talked to him again.

  “Wow,” Alice says, “what a weird-assed thing to do.”

  I almost laugh. Weird-assed, indeed. It’s like we’re two teenagers on a sleepover, cuddled in a closet, telling each other ghost stories. “Yeah, but then Caleb found the sliding door underneath his bed the summer he was ten. The house inside the house, he called it. I didn’t know what he was talking about at first. I’d forgotten about the stairs. But then he took me here and I thought, yeah, this is what he needs: a house inside the house, another place with a different family where he could be a normal little boy without my parents carping at him every minute. It became our place.”

  I listen for a moment and hear a step and the creak of casters—my father’s chair being moved. The intruder’s still in the study. Then I turn on the flashlight, aiming it at the ceiling. It’s still here: a night sky and a million stars and tiny spaceships hanging from invisible fishing lines. A galaxy far, far away that I made for Caleb a lifetime ago. I don’t know what I thought would have happened to it—I’ve barely let myself think of it in the decades since Caleb’s death—but it feels like a miracle that it has survived.

  I hear a clunk from the study below us. We have to find Oren. I sweep the beam of my flashlight across the landing from the stairs that lead up to the attic to the ones that lead down to the first floor and basement. The light comes to rest on a figure standing on the newel post of the downward stairs. It’s Princess Leia, holding her hands up, as she does in the first movie when she appears as a hologram begging for help from Obi-Wan Kenobi, only here she’s holding a Post-it note. Alice grabs it and shines the flashlight on it.

  “You’re our only hope, Obi-Wan Kenobi,” it reads. “Return to Dagobah for more information.”

  “Dagobah is the planet Yoda lives on,” Alice says.

  “When we were playing in the house, Dagobah meant the basement. There’s a crawl space there that reminded Caleb of the cave Yoda lives in.”

  “Can we get to the basement from here?” Alice asks. I notice that she doesn’t question why Oren would know something that Caleb knew. Earlier she accused me of bringing Oren back here so that he could communicate with Caleb, and she wasn’t wrong. But the idea that he is actually doing that now is not something I want to dwell on.

  “Maybe. My parents didn’t wall that door up, they just stacked boxes in front of it. I moved them just enough so I could get by when Caleb and I started using the stairs again and I haven’t moved them since.” I sense Alice staring at me, but if she thinks it’s odd that I haven’t touched the boxes in my basement for thirty-four years she refrains from commenting, so I go on. “The stairs go by the study, though, so we’ll have to be really, really quiet. And we’d better turn off our flashlights.”

  I turn off my flashlight and Alice follows suit. When we’re plunged into darkness, for a moment I can’t move. Once Caleb found these stairs again I used them regularly to sneak out. At twenty-five, home from graduate school, I shouldn’t have had to sneak out, but my parents never trusted me after I got back from Hudson. It was as if, having consigned me to that hellhole, they blamed me for what happened to me there. I was tainted. And the worst thing was that a part of me agreed with them. When I ran into Frank again—back from military school and two years in the army—I sensed that same whiff of damage in him.

  I told Caleb I’d come back for him the next summer, when I’d gotten my MSW and could get a job. My mother was carping and shrewish, so consumed by her own anxieties that she had to control everything—and everyone—around her. I knew she squelched every boyish desire in Caleb’s heart, but he had such a big heart I thought it would remain intact. My father was strict, but his punishments were always impartial and cold. No dinner. Extra chores. Time-outs. Carefully calibrated punishments that left you feeling ashamed.

  I thought that Caleb could survive them both for another year. At least that’s what I told myself. Really, I wanted that year to myself. I wanted to answer that siren cry of the train whistle calling me to New York City. That’s nothing to be ashamed of, Doreen tells me. You wanted what any young woman would want. And you did come back.

  I could have come back after college.

  And worked at Stewart’s? You wanted a good job so you could take care of him. You were going to take him with you once you graduated.

  I hadn’t counted on my father’s own sense of shame.

  I feel Alice’s breath on the back of my neck and her hand on my elbow, ready to be led into the darkness. Trusting me. As Oren has. As Caleb did.

  And then I see something glowing faintly on the first step. I look closer and see that it’s a plastic Day-Glo star. There’s one on each step going down, a trail to follow. A lifeline, like the one we’d used in Lava to navigate the treacherous terrain of our own home.

  It unfreezes me now. Only, as I step forward, I can’t help thinking that a lifeline tossed by a ghost might be anything but.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Alice

  WALKING DOWN THESE dark stairs feels like the scariest thing I’ve ever had to do. Scarier than the time I ran away from my last foster home and had to sleep in a bus station two nights in a row. Scarier than the stint I did at Pine Crest JD, the nice JD, which wasn’t that bad but still felt like shit.

  This is worse because I know Davis is here. I don’t care if Mattie thinks it’s her redneck Stewart’s guy; I know it’s Davis. I can feel him, like a cold draft rising up through the cracks in the floorboards, that prickle I get at the base of my skull when I’m around someone really bad. Cray-dar, one of the girls I met in lockdown called it: creep-radar.

  When we go past the boarded-up door that Mattie said leads to her father’s study, I feel like there are a million bugs crawling over my body. It’s not Davis’s face I picture, though, it’s that smug sonofabitch judge from the newspaper story. Mattie’s father. What kind of an asshole sends his own daughter to lockdown? That’s what’s off about this house.

  One of the things about my foster mom Lisa was that she was really sensitive. The least noise would make her jump. Do you have to walk so loud? Can you not make the whole house shake? Can you lower your voice? Can you only use the toilet before nine P.M. and after nine A.M.? Do you have to toss and turn and make the bed creak?

  Tamara, a big girl from Yonkers, said, She’d like for us to crawl inside the walls and stay there.

  The image of us all stuck behind the walls—literally stuck in the walls—haunted me, woke me up in the middle of the night because I’d dreamed I was smothering in plaster. And now it feels like we’re inside the walls of this old house, where the mice crawl and the ghosts dwell. That’s what Oren felt when he stopped on the path outside the house. He felt Caleb’s ghost.

  Oren, who always knows things, like what town to buy the bus tickets for, and who can make things disappear, like the poltergeist. Oren’s been talking to dead Caleb and now he’s leading us down these dark stairs to the basement, where it’s cold and damp as a grave. I stumble at the thought, and when I reach out to steady myself I feel cold rough stone and something slithers over my hand. I bat it away and trip down the last few steps, banging off something soft and squishy and landing on my hands and knees on the floor—only it’s not even floor, it’s dirt. I can smell it. It smells like worms. It smells like a grave. Of course, that’s what the ghost wants, to drag us down into its grave. I can feel a scream clawing its way up my throat when a hand clamps over my mouth.

  “Alice!” The voice is in my ear, hoarse and rough. It doesn’t sound like Mattie, but then her big capable hands are on my shoulders and she’s shushing me like a mother would hush a scared child, and I just collapse into her and cry as quietly as I can and Mattie sits by me in the dirt with her arms around me until I�
�m good and done.

  “It’s just the basement,” she says, “see?” She turns on the flashlight and moves the light over the dirt floor, rough stone walls, and beams that look like they were hewn out of whole trees. Boxes are stacked in front of the stairs we just came down so that you wouldn’t even know the stairs were there. There’s another long flight that probably goes up to the kitchen and a shorter flight of stone steps leading to slanted doors that look like they came from a movie set in Kansas. Metal shelves with junk and cloudy-looking jars line the far side of the room, and a huge hulking furnace lurks in an alcove that looks like it was carved out of the rock face. I remember Mattie said she replaced the old one after it killed her family, but still, there’s something scary about it. As I stare at it something moves in the shadows behind it. Something boy shaped.

  I get up and march over there, shining my flashlight into the alcove. It’s more like a cave than an alcove, and it goes farther back than my flashlight reaches.

  “Oren?” I call. “Come out of there right now!”

  “Did you see him in there?” Mattie asks, adding her flashlight beam to mine. “There’s a crawl space back there where Caleb got stuck once.”

  The last thing I want to hear about right now is Mattie’s dead brother—or anything called a crawl space—but that would be mean to say. I can see Mattie measuring the distance between the wall and the furnace, but the truth is she’s too wide in the beam to clear the narrow space.

  “I’ll go,” I say, pushing past her. I flatten myself against the stone wall, imagining centipedes and spiders crawling into my hair, and inch my way past the hulking machine. It’s not really that hot; it must have turned off when the electricity went out. Still, I find I don’t want to touch it. It’s greasy and dirty and somehow just . . . bad.

  “Thanks a lot, Oren,” I mutter. I hear a muffled sound that could be giggling—or sobbing. Damn. If Oren’s really gotten himself stuck in here he must be scared shitless. “It’s okay, sweetie,” I say, backtracking. “It’s just a smelly old basement. I’m coming to get you out.”