Crooked House

by Joe McKinney

  Then he went into the kitchen to make himself a drink.

  *

  Because Gainesville’s airport didn’t have service to San Antonio, Jay Carroll had to drive eighty miles north, to Jacksonville, and catch a flight there.

  The Southwest ticket counter was dead when he got there, and the bored, middle-aged black woman at the counter barely managed a smile. Jay had his backpack over one shoulder and a locking briefcase in his left hand. He set both down and worked his way through the screens at the automated check in terminal.

  When he was done he put the briefcase on the scale between them.

  “You’re checking that?” she asked. “You’re allowed two carry-ons.”

  “Got to,” he said. “I got my pistol in there.”

  She didn’t even bat an eyelash. “What’s your destination?”

  “Texas, ma’am. San Antonio.”

  “It’s not loaded, is it?”

  “Oh, no ma’am. Got to be careful with a firearm. Sure wouldn’t want any accidents.”

  December 22

  The morning after the Anson’s Christmas party the Bell family set up their tree in the downstairs library. Sarah had Robert bring in the boxes of ornaments from the garage and she and Angela got down on the floor and began sorting them. The tree was smaller this year than the one they’d had in Gainesville, and not everything was going to be able to find a home on the branches.

  “What about these, Mommy?” Angela said, holding up a box of clear glass bells, each painted with a different scene from “The Night Before Christmas.”

  Sarah thought about them, frowning. They were cheap looking, and they’d never been favorites of hers. They were gifts from one of Robert’s faculty buddies back in Florida, one of the biggest pompous windbags she’d ever met, and over the years they’d lost a few and broken a few and now they only had fourteen of the original two dozen.

  She glanced back at Robert to see if had anything to say about the matter and of course he didn’t. He was still staring at the tree – or rather, through it – lost in his own head.

  Sarah turned back to Angela, gave her a look that said, “Well...” and was delighted to see Angela smile back. It happened less and less as Angela got older, but there were still times, like now, that Sarah and her daughter could connect at a core level with just a word, or even a shared smile. Warmth moved through Sarah and she beamed at her daughter. Even with all this madness going on around them, a simple little moment like this, just a smile, could erase all the frustration and uncertainty and even heartache. At least for a time.

  She glanced at Robert, and her fingers went to her throat, where her shell casing necklace usually hung. She’d taken it off for the party last night and hadn’t put it on this morning, and now she could feel its absence.

  “Mommy?”

  “Hmm?” Sarah said, and then caught herself. “Oh, yeah. Here, I’ll take them.”

  She took the box of glass bells from Angela and extended them to Robert. He made no sign of noticing.

  “Robert, will you put those back for me, please?”

  He took the box from her without comment and put it in one of the packing boxes. Sarah watched him for a second, and just like that her good mood was gone. This house, she thought, it’s like some kind of black hole. It just sucks the life out of you. It was certainly doing that to Robert, and it came pretty close to doing it to that poor girl from the night before.

  What a wreck that had been.

  And she had no idea what she was going to say to Jean Bernall when she heard about the girl’s experience.

  Robert would be no help there. She hadn’t said anything to him last night or this morning about what happened when she took the babysitter home, and he hadn’t asked. Of course, there wouldn’t have been much to tell even if hehad asked. Kaylie rode the whole way back to her apartment curled against the passenger door, sobbing to herself. Sarah had tried to engage the girl in conversation, get her to tell her something about what happened, but the closest Sarah got to an explanation was a sniffle and a confused, frightened glimpse from Kaylie’s bloodshot brown eyes. It was enough to silence Sarah the rest of the car ride, and when she finally dropped Kaylie off at her apartment, Sarah had to practically force her pay for the evening into the girl’s hands.

  So it was just as well that Robert hadn’t asked.

  It wouldn’t have gotten them anywhere. He’d been doing the silent routine since she got home, not intentionally avoiding her, but acting remote and disconnected. When she spoke to him, she was lucky to get a nod or a grunt. He seemed preoccupied, not so much lost in thought as genuinely lost. And the sad thing was the party really had seemed like the very thing they needed, like a reset or something. She’d had a great time, and though Robert spent most of the night talking to that prim-looking little fat man, he seemed to be more engaged than he had since he first described Crook House to her.

  But that window was closed now. He was back to staring off into nothing.

  And scratching.

  She forced her attention back on Angela. “So, I saw all the microwave popcorn in the kitchen. You guys ate like four bags, huh? Little piggy.”

  “Mommy.”

  “Did you like Miss Kaylie? Did you at least have fun?”

  “Oh sure,” Angela said. For a moment she looked so mature, so much older than she really was. She looked that way when she was serious. “Miss Kaylie’s nice. She’s pretty. But I don’t think she’s going to be coming back here again.”

  “What makes you say that?” Sarah said, forcing a level tone.

  “She went into that room at the top of the stairs. The bad room I told you about. I think it scared her pretty bad.”

  What Sarah wanted to ask was: Have you been in that room? What do you know about it? But she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer to that, and instead she asked: “Why do you suppose she did that? Weren’t you guys downstairs all night?”

  Angela nodded. “It doesn’t matter though, Mommy. It calls to you. The room, I mean.”

  Sarah glanced at Robert, then back to her daughter. She was on the verge of breaking out in a cold sweat. She could feel her heart beating against her ribs and her hands going numb.

  “Does it...does it call to you, Angela?”

  The girl shook her head. “It doesn’t like me.”

  “What do you mean, it doesn’t like you?”

  “I hear voices up there sometimes, mean voices.”

  “Do you know whose voice it is?”

  “She keeps calling herself Mommy. It’s not you though. It’s somebody else, somebody mean, angry.”

  “No, baby, it’s definitely not me.”

  She wanted to reach out and take Angela in her arms, but just then Robert got up and walked out of the room.

  “Robert?”

  “Getting some orange juice,” he muttered without turning around.

  She watched him go. Angela was pulling little golden balls from a box and hanging them on the tree, humming a song to herself as she worked. The ornaments were pretty, the way they caught the morning light and sparkled. What a contrast to all the weirdness she’d dealt with this last week. Between the voices and the weird smells, Robert’s incessant scratching and Angela’s getting lost inside the house, and her own weird vision up in that room, that awful room, Sarah felt more than ever that she didn’t belong her. For too long now the strangeness of it had just simply shut her up, kept her quiet, but not anymore.

  “Angela,” she said, “I’m going to go make us a snack. What do you say to some cheese cubes and carrot sticks?”

  Angela shrugged. “Okay.”

  Sarah went into the kitchen and found Robert drinking orange juice from the carton.

  “Hey Robert, you mind if I ask you something?”

  He mopped his lips with the back of his hand and turned to face her, the fridge still open. “Sure,” he said, though his tone seemed strange, like he was mocking her with his own private joke. “What’s
on your mind?”

  This is stupid, she thought. He’s going to tell you it’s stupid.

  “I want to get some video cameras and put them around the house. You know, like in those movies.”

  He put the orange juice back in the fridge.

  “I’m not following you.”

  “Like in those movies, you know?”

  “No, what in the hell are you talking about?”

  There was such sarcasm, such loathing, in his tone. It shocked her. She recoiled from him and her hand once again went to where the shell casing had once dangled from her neck.

  “God damn it, Sarah, stop making me guess. What the hell are you getting on about?”

  “I want,” she said, and caught herself. She took a breath and looked him in the eye. He wasn’t going to bully her on this. Not a chance. “I want to put some video cameras around the house. In Angela’s old room, maybe in your study, and in that room at the top of the stairs.”

  He’d been looking at his feet up to that point, but when she mentioned the room at the top of the stairs, his gaze locked onto hers.

  She didn’t look away.

  “I think it’s important.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Robert, seriously? Something’s happening in this house. Something’s in – ”

  “Yeah, I know something’s happening in this house. You know what it is? I’ll tell you what it is. I can’t get a – ”

  “Robert, don’t shout at me.”

  “And don’t fucking interrupt me. Jesus, I fucking hate that. You’d think a man could fucking talk in his own house when he felt like it.”

  “Robert, please. This isn’t you. This isn’t us.”

  He rolled his eyes in disgust. “Whatever.”

  “Robert, I think...I think we need to do this. Something is happening in this house. You feel it, don’t you? You feel that we’re not...alone here. This house is...”

  “Is what? Spit it out. You think we live in a haunted house? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  “Well, Robert, I...don’t you?” She waited, and when he didn’t speak, she said, “Robert, I know you’ve felt things here. This house, that room up there...”

  “It’s nothing.”

  She shook her head and hugged herself. “I don’t believe that. And I know you don’t either.”

  He looked away.

  “Robert, I’m gonna get those video cameras.”

  He laughed. “With what? We’re broke, remember?”

  “We have four hundred in the account.”

  “Which I owe to Verizon for our cell phones.” Under his breath he added: “It’s more than that, actually.”

  “You can pay them next month. You get paid on the first.”

  “Yeah, and that money’s already spent on other bills.”

  “I’m not gonna argue with you about money, Robert. I want to do this because of what Angela told me just now, about that room up there.”

  He turned back to the fridge and started rummaging around for something to eat.

  “Would you stop that please?”

  He pulled out the milk and the eggs and a bag of parsley and went back to rooting around in the fridge.

  “Robert, please. Would you stop that and look at me?”

  “What don’t you get?” he said. “We’re broke. How hard is that to understand?”

  “Please. I’m asking you to look at me.”

  He slammed the refrigerator door closed and wheeled on her, his arms folded across his chest. “Well?”

  “Angela told me she’s hearing voices upstairs. She says whatever it is up there doesn’t like her.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Robert, that’s...that’s not normal. You know that.”

  “Hearing voices is not normal, I agree.”

  “I mean, it’s supernatural. It’s not normal.”

  “That doesn’t follow from what you said, but whatever.”

  “How come you’re being like this?”

  “Like what?” He waved that away. “No, never mind. You want to do the wholeGhostbusters thing. Okay, fine. You have any idea what you’re doing? Seriously, do you know the first fucking thing about ghosts? And I’m not talking about what you saw on some stupid ass TV show. Do you know the first fucking thing about ghosts, yes or no?”

  “Robert, your daughter – ”

  “Is not the one I’m fucking talking to at the moment. I’m talking to the woman who’s about to send me into fucking bankruptcy court because she wants to do her own reality show about ghosts.” He wheeled around, pretending to be scared, mocking her viciously now. “What was that? Did you see that? Something brushed against my shoulder.” He laughed, a cruel sound. “That’s it, Sarah. Go stand in that room up there and do that a few times for the camera. That’s all those guys on the ghost hunting shows do. Better yet, go put on some flimsy little outfit and film yourself with your tits hanging out. It worked for Jennifer Love Hewitt, it should work for you too.”

  Never in the ten years she’d known Robert Andrew Bell had she ever even thought about hating him, but she despised the man who stood before her now.

  “I’m done,” she said. “I’m going.”

  He dismissed her with a flick of his hand.

  She went into the library where Angela was still humming, still putting ornaments on the tree.

  “Do you have your shoes on?”

  “Huh?”

  “Your shoes, put ‘em on. We’re going shopping.”

  “I’ve got ‘em on, Mommy.”

  “Great, let’s go.”

  She took Angela by the hand and led her into the kitchen, made a show of snatching her keys off the counter, and the two of them marched right out the front door. Angela, to her credit, seemed to recognize her mother’s mood and said nothing, simply let herself be led. Sarah wanted nothing more than to get into the car and turn up the radio and put her head on the steering wheel and cry. And she was on the way to do just that when she and Angela stepped outside and got a look at the shrubs and the plants and the trees surrounding the house.

  “Mommy?”

  “I see it, baby.” Sarah put a hand to her mouth. “Oh God.”

  Sarah stepped into the middle of the drive and turned a slow circle, taking it all in. Everywhere she looked, every tree, every shrub, every plant around the perimeter of the house was dead and brown and shriveled up.

  But only on the side that faced the house.

  *

  From the library window, Robert watched them go. The itching was back, stronger than ever, and he scratched his belly absently, thinking of what Anthony Udoll had told him the night before, about how James Crook’s health had taken a steady downward slide in prison, and how it had gotten worse after rebuilding Crook House.

  “It was ringworm,” Udoll said. “That was what started it. The common cure for it back then was bleach, which is what the federal prison used on Crook, but it didn’t get rid of the fungus. Not completely anyway. He still had it when he moved back into the rebuilt Crook House and it led to other problems, infection and fever. I’m guessing the idea of being infected like that was a trigger for his depression. I don’t know that last part of it for a fact, but it seems reasonable to me.”

  “Yeah,” Robert had said. “Sounds reasonable.”

  He lifted his shirt and saw the telltale raised white circles of scaly skin all over his belly. They were on his shoulders and neck and back too. Buy some Lotrimin or something, he thought. Christ, this is disgusting.

  Robert couldn’t look at it anymore. The idea that he was infected with something like this was just too gross for him to wrap his mind around. He lowered his T-shirt and made his way to the upstairs library, where he planned to work on his courses for the upcoming semester. His syllabi were due January 3, but to date he hadn’t done much on them other than make a few margin notes to the American Short Story class he’d taught for six years straight back in Florida. He hadn’t even touched his gene
ral survey classes yet.

  Fuck it, he thought, and went instead for the bat on his desk, giving it a few practice swings in the middle of the room. It felt good in his hands, solid, even after all the years it’d sat there. He took it over to the old baseball pictures on the walls and looked for Crook’s picture. The pictures were yellow and blurry behind their old glass frames, but he could see Crook’s face well enough. The man looking back at him was young, strong, confident. He had wavy brown hair, a high, intelligent forehead, and a strong, rugged-looking jaw, an athlete, a man who knew what he was about. He was smiling, like all the other guys, but his eyes spoke of something else. A darkness within him, perhaps. The eyes certainly suggested that. They had an unsettling, piercing quality to them that made the picture uncomfortable to look at, as though he were passing judgment on him, or hating him for living in his house.

  Robert’s gaze wandered up to the rafters above his desk. Crook had hanged himself from those rafters. And eighty years later, Brian Hannett had taken one hundred and twenty-eight Motrin here in the same house. It was a strange coincidence, to be sure. But it was only that, a coincidence. Eighty years is a long time. Surely it’s long enough to build up some odd coincidences, right?

  That was how he had started out his conversation with Udoll, before he was done pretending that he had seen nothing strange in the house, and Udoll had nodded and said, “True, eighty years is a long time.”

  “Well then...”

  “And two suicides in eighty years is not exactly a gripping statistic, especially when one of the statistics has such a well-documented history.”

  “You mean Crook’s?”

  “Yes, Crook’s.”

  “Two suicides. That’s a mighty small hook to hang a haunted house story on, don’t you think?” Robert said with a smirk.

  “Perhaps,” Udoll said, refusing to take the bait. “But the suicides are not the whole of the story.”

  “They’re not?”

  “Not by a long shot. There have been, all told, fourteen deaths from natural causes in the house.”

  “What? Impossible.”