by Bill Crider
She’d done pretty well, and the neighbors found the late Mr. Findley hacked into six pieces on the blood-soaked cellar floor—legs, arms, torso, and head.
He was in the cellar, Mrs. Findley explained, because he woke up when she was coming at him with the axe and he had run from her. She didn’t know why he hadn’t awakened sooner, say when she was sharpening the axe on the grindstone. Anyway, she had chased him all through the house, and he might have eventually gotten away if he hadn’t stubbed his toe on a rough stone in the cellar floor. He fell down, and that was when his wife finally caught up with him. He never had a chance to get up.
County records showed that Mrs. Findley had never been brought to trial. Folks seemed to think she had as much a right to do unto Mr. Findley as he had to do unto her, and Rhodes thought there was a kind of rough justice in that.
Several families had lived in the house after Mr. Findley’s violent demise, but none had stayed long. There were reports of strange noises in the cellar—ear-splitting screams, the sound of an axe blade ringing on stone. Some people claimed to have been standing outside when those noises occurred, and they swore that they had looked through the basement window and seen sparks being struck from the cellar floor. They swore that when they had looked inside, they could see the bloodstains bright as new, though other people, just as reliable, had looked later and seen nothing.
The other well-known story was about a man named Laughlin, the last occupant of the house. He had complained for weeks about the noises he heard at night, saying that he hadn’t slept well for weeks. His friends encouraged him to move out, but he’d made a joke about it, saying that no ghosts were going to get his goat.
No one knew what had happened to Laughlin during his last night in the house. He was never able to tell them. When they found him the next morning, he was foaming at the mouth and talking nothing but gibberish, completely insane. The story was that his hair, which had been coal black, had turned entirely white. He never spoke another coherent word.
Rhodes thought that probably half the little communities in Texas had a house like Obert’s Haunted House. And probably half of those had the same stories told about them, the same ones or extremely similar ones.
That didn’t make the house’s legend any less potent. Rhodes or one of the deputies had to go there about once a year, usually around Halloween, to investigate reports of screams or strange lights. There were never any ghosts, never any sign of one, and no tangible trace that anyone had been there. There had certainly never been a hanged man, like the one Rhodes had found in the ghostly college building.
But the legend nevertheless persisted. No one wanted to have much to do with the Haunted House, but Rhodes thought it was possible that Claude and Clyde hadn’t heard the stories. They didn’t associate much with the people of Obert, and to them the house might have appeared to be nothing more than just another deserted building.
Rhodes got out of the car and slammed the door. It was a loud sound in the late afternoon silence. The house was surrounded by old cedar trees that shrouded it in shadow, and the sun was very low. It would be dark in less than half an hour. Rhodes opened the door again and got out his flashlight. He was pretty sure he would need it.
Rhodes looked at the cold stone front, the empty windows and door. He felt a shivery chill run up his back and thought he might be wiser to wait until the next day to go in the house. And that he should get someone to go with him.
Then he laughed at himself. He was a grown man, and he didn’t believe a word of those stories about the house. Well, not most of them. Besides, he was armed. And the worst thing he would find in there was the twins.
Rhodes crossed the yard. There were few weeds and very little grass. The shade from the cedars stopped most of the growth.
He reached the four stone steps leading up to the porch. He took them one at a time, listening to the sound his shoes made as they scuffed on the rock. When he got to the top step, he stood silently, listening. There were no sounds from inside the house, no sign of anything suspicious, but that didn’t matter, not according to the letter and intent of law, even though there was a “No Trespassing” sign nailed to the door facing.
Rhodes did not need a probable cause to enter the building. The Haunted House was abandoned property, and as far as the law was concerned that gave Rhodes a right to search it without a warrant, just as he’d searched the gym and the dormitory. The owner didn’t have to give up his property rights for the property to be classified as abandoned. The “No Trespassing” sign didn’t apply to law officers.
Rhodes went through the doorway, shining his light on the floor. There was thick dirt in the entranceway, but it had been disturbed. Someone had been walking there, and not too long ago. Rhodes felt sure he was in the right place this time.
He shined the light around. There was a tiny skeleton on the floor, some kind of bird, he thought. It was partially covered with dirt and looked as if it had been there for a long time. There were a few twigs and thin pieces of string nearby, the remains of the bird’s nest. Spider webs were thick on the walls.
To Rhodes’ right there was a stairway going up. It did not look safe; the railing appeared rotten and was leaning outward at a dangerous angle. The fifth step from the bottom was broken through.
Rhodes walked along the hall beside the stairway. At the back of the stair was a doorway with no door in it. It was very dark inside the doorway. Rhodes shined his light inside. There were steps leading down into the cellar. They didn’t look any safer than the ones leading up to the second floor; if anything, they looked even more treacherous.
There was no stair rail at all, not attached to the steps. It had fallen off, and Rhodes thought he could see what was left of it lying on the stone cellar floor down below. The right side of the stairway was unprotected.
The steps themselves did not inspire Rhodes with a spirit of adventure. Mainly they made him want to look for another way to get in the cellar. He thought that there was probably an outside entrance, but he didn’t know that for sure. He might as well give this one a try. He couldn’t tell with certainty, but it looked as if someone had made the trip only recently, and he could do it if they could.
He started down.
He walked as close to the wall as he could, going on the theory that if the wood was rotten it would break in the middle, which would be the weak point of the boards. He shined his light in front of him as he went.
There were two broken steps in a row, about halfway down. Rhodes stretched his legs and stepped over them, leaning into the wall. The next step took his weight and held, but it creaked loudly. When he pulled away from the wall, he could feel spider webs peeling off along with him.
The creaking step had eliminated the element of surprise, he thought, not that there was much chance of catching anyone unaware after driving into the yard and slamming the car door. He wasn’t trying to startle anyone, anyhow. He didn’t want the twins, if they were there, to think he was dangerous. That might scare them, and scared people were sometimes more hazardous to one’s health than people who were more or less relaxed.
The cellar was dark as a dungeon, and the air was dank, or that’s the way Rhodes thought of it. He didn’t have much experience with dankness, not having spent much time in dark, cool, humid environments. There was a damp, musty smell in the air.
His right arm brushed the dense coating of cobwebs on the wall as he descended and he stopped to wipe them off his shirt, along with the ones he had accumulated when he leaned against the wall. They stuck to his hand and he shook it hard. The cobwebs drifted to the steps.
He went on down, testing each step with his foot before putting his full weight down on it. He wondered if he would be as worried about breaking through if he had exercised regularly on the stationary bicycle and lost a few pounds. He decided that he probably would be.
He reached the bottom of the stairs without incident. Standing on the solid stone floor, he looked around with the help of the light.
There was a faint light in the room to his left, and Rhodes assumed that it was coming from the outside.
He shined the light down at the floor. It was dirty, but the dirt had been scuffed around. He didn’t see any ninety-year-old blood stains.
“Anybody here?” he called. “Claude? Clyde? This is Sheriff Rhodes. I want to talk to you.” His voice echoed hollowly from the stone walls.
There was no answer to his call, but then he hadn’t really expected one.
“I’ll wait right here by the stairs for a minute. Why don’t you two come in here where we can talk?”
There was still no answer. Rhodes listened closely, but he could hear no movement in the other areas of the cellar. Maybe he had been wrong. Maybe Claude and Clyde weren’t down there after all.
He counted to sixty twice and was about to move into the next room when he heard something in there scrape against the stone floor.
It might have been a rat, but then again it might have been something else. He waited for another minute, but the sound was not repeated.
“Claude? Clyde? Is that you? I just want to talk. Your daddy’s in jail, but your mother and sister are all right. You can see them later if you come with me.”
The twins, if they were there, weren’t talking. Rhodes was going to have to go looking for them.
He decided to try the room with light coming in, not that there was much light at this time of day. That room was where the sound had come from, however, and if he were hiding out in a cellar, he wouldn’t want to be in complete darkness.
The part he didn’t like was going through the doorway. He’d seen it done in the movies often enough, heroic cops getting a running start and lunging through the door in a forward roll, coming up with their .44 Magnums blazing, but he didn’t want to shoot anyone, and besides, he was holding a flashlight that he didn’t want to drop.
The fact that he didn’t think he could do a forward roll on a stone floor, or any other kind of floor for that matter, entered into it, too.
He stepped to within a foot of the door and shined the light inside. There was nothing he could see there but stone walls and spider webs. There was a small rectangular window on the wall opposite the door. The last of the late afternoon light leaked through it.
Rhodes extended his arm, pushing the flashlight through the doorway.
Something came out of the darkness to his right and smashed into the light, sending it crashing to the floor. The lens cracked on the stone and the halogen bulb shattered. The light went out.
Rhodes was through the door and across the room almost by the time the light hit the floor. He hadn’t known for sure he could move that fast, but he was glad to see that he could. No forward roll, though.
He didn’t have a .44 Magnum, but his short-barreled .38 Police Special was in his hand and he was pointing it at the two dark forms that hulked against the opposite wall on either side of the doorway. One of them was holding something that looked like a three-foot length of two-by-four.
“You boys are mighty hard to find,” Rhodes said.
The one with the two-by-four took a step forward.
“You better stay where you are and put that thing down, Claude,” Rhodes said. “Or Clyde.”
“You gonna make me?” the twin said.
Good grief, Rhodes thought. He wished people would come up with some new way of making conversation with him.
“Yes,” he said. “If I have to.”
Claude, or Clyde, hesitated longer than Rhodes liked, but then he tossed the plank to the floor. It clattered against the stone, bounced, and lay still.
“Is there another way out of here besides those front stairs?” Rhodes said.
The twin who had thrown down the plank said, “No.”
“Well, what do you say we go up those stairs and have our little talk, then,” Rhodes said. “This place is getting on my nerves. You two can go first.”
The twins didn’t seem to like his suggestion, but after looking at one another briefly they turned and went through the doorway.
Rhodes followed them. “Go on up,” he said when they got to the stairs. “One at a time, and be careful. It’s dark in here. You go first, Claude.”
He didn’t have any idea which one was Claude, but he didn’t think it mattered.
One of the twins started up the stairs.
“Stick close to the wall,” Rhodes said to the dark shape.
When the first twin reached the second step, Rhodes said, “Now you, Clyde,” and the second twin followed.
Rhodes was close behind. They didn’t get far.
Clyde broke through the third step, which divided with a loud snap beneath his foot. As he was falling, he reached up and grabbed Claude’s pants at the waist, dragging Claude down on top of him. Both of them fell backward into Rhodes, who didn’t have time to get out of the way.
They all hit the stairs together and went crashing through the bottom step. Dirt, dust, and cobwebs filled the air. Rhodes could hear one of the twins sneezing as he tried to get out from under them, and then they were wrestling him, trying to wrench the pistol from his hand.
He refused to let go, and as the gun was yanked this way and that, he was afraid someone would get shot.
He selfishly hoped it wouldn’t be him.
Just as he was thinking about it, one of the twins gave an extra hard jerk, and Rhodes inadvertently triggered off a shot. Red and blue flames leaped from the barrel of the pistol, and the bullet spanged off first one wall and then another before it buried itself in some part of the remaining stairway. The noise of the shot was extremely loud in the stone-walled room, and the echoes seemed to go on forever.
The shot scared Rhodes, but it scared the twins even more. One of them jumped up and was yelling “I’m blind! I’m blind!” over and over, while the other one, still lying on top of Rhodes, yelled, “Claude! Claude! Are you all right?”
Or that was what Rhodes thought the boy yelled. His ears were ringing, and he couldn’t be sure.
Rhodes shoved himself from beneath the remaining twin, Clyde, and got to his feet. Both twins continued to yell, and Rhodes wished that he had his police whistle with him. He was tempted to fire the pistol again just to get their attention, but he didn’t.
He waited for a minute until they had calmed down a bit and then said, “You aren’t blind, Claude.” His voice sounded both dim and hollow at the same time. “You were just looking a little too closely at the muzzle flash. You should have closed your eyes, but you’ll be all right after a while. You’re just lucky you didn’t get your eye shot out, pulling a stupid stunt like that.”
“He didn’t pull nothin’!” Clyde said, still agitated. “It was an accident!”
“He was trying to take the pistol away from me,” Rhodes said. “That was no accident.”
“I meant fallin’ was an accident,” Clyde said. “He didn’t mean to.”
“He meant to try for the gun,” Rhodes said. “It wasn’t a good idea.”
“You didn’t have to blind me!” Claude yelled. “And I’m nearly deaf, too!”
“Listen to me,” Rhodes said. “You aren’t blind. Can you hear that?”
“I can hear you! But I can’t see!”
“You’ll be able to see soon enough. Now be quiet.”
Claude sniffled a time or two, and then he was quiet.
“You don’t have to be so rough on him,” Clyde said. “He didn’t mean nothin’.”
Rhodes wasn’t going to get into that again. He wished his ears would stop ringing, and he wished he could see the stairs better, but it was almost dark outside now and it was even darker in the cellar. It was too bad about the broken flashlight.
“W
e’re going to try it again,” he said. “This time, Clyde you go first. Claude, you go right behind him, with your hand on his belt. You’ll have to tell him were to step, Clyde.”
“I can’t see,” Claude said.
“We get the idea,” Rhodes said. “Take his hand, Clyde. Get him started. Feel along the wall, and you can make it.” He hoped he wasn’t lying.
As it turned out, he wasn’t. They made it to the top that time without incident, even with all the broken steps. It took them five full minutes, with much complaining by Claude that he couldn’t see and he couldn’t hear and that he couldn’t find the steps with his foot and that he was going to fall and break his neck.
Rhodes was willing to break it first, but eventually Clyde got his brother to hush and they finally got back to the first floor.
“Now let’s go out on the porch,” Rhodes told them. “I have a few questions to ask you.”
“I can’t see,” Claude said.
“Help your brother,” Rhodes told Clyde, who guided his twin down the hallway and out the door.
“You gonna read us our rights?” Clyde said when they reached the front porch. “On TV, they always read ’em their rights.”
Rhodes didn’t have to read, since he knew the Miranda warning by heart, and it was too dark for reading in the first place, but he got out the card anyway.
Anything to make sure that life was like TV said it was supposed to be. He didn’t want to disappoint the customers.
Chapter 15
It was quiet on the porch, and the slight evening breeze was a welcome change from the dank air of the basement. Rhodes could smell the cedars, and he could see, off down the road, the lights in the nearest house. He wondered if the people who lived there were eating supper. He wondered if Ivy were thinking about him, and he hoped she didn’t mind, too much, that he wasn’t there again.
The twins didn’t want to say anything, even after having their rights read to them, except that Claude needed a doctor for his eyes. And that he still couldn’t hear well.
Rhodes couldn’t hear too well, either, for that matter, but he persuaded the twins that they would be better off if they just answered a few questions right there. Otherwise, they would have to answer them in the jail, where the atmosphere was much less pleasant.