The Homecoming

by Carsten Stroud

  He followed the cone of his flashlight through the door and found himself in what must have been, at one time, a very nice room.

  It still had its oak flooring. Four tall windows, each with its glass intact, let in a pale glow that had to be coming from the rising moon.

  Reed went to the window, looked out, and saw Division Street far below, through the screen of live oak branches. It was still deserted, as was the entire block, but the forceful silence that seemed to choke off all the sound in the rest of the house wasn’t as strong here.

  Faintly, across the tops of the forest that Gracie lived in, he heard the shouts of laughing kids, and the wheezy music from the merry-go-round. Even the air in here was sweeter and fresher.

  He turned around and looked at the room. It wasn’t large, but the shreds of an Oriental carpet in the middle of the room carried an appealing pattern of white flowers and green vines that reminded him of the painted doorway at the end of the upper hallway in Dad’s—no, Kate’s—house.

  There were marks on the carpet, deep indentations that could have been made by furniture. They were spaced in a way that suggested a bed rather than a couch. A large lamp, green tin, in a cone shape, the kind of lamp you saw in old factories and brand-new loft condos, hung from a chain in a way that would have lit up the middle of the bed. The room had an arched roof and the walls were capped with ornate crown molding.

  Except for that ugly damn lamp, the effect of the room, even now, was sort of appealing, and it stood in stark contrast to the Victorian-prison feel of the rest of Candleford House.

  What really troubled Reed about the lamp was its positioning. It was directly over the middle of the carpet and if he was right about those marks having been made by a bed, then it would have put all its harsh factory light down on the bed in a way that would have been pretty useless for anyone who wanted to use it to read by. Instead, it would have lit up the middle of the bed like a spotlight.

  Or the person lying in the middle of the bed.

  Which struck Reed as not only odd, but damn creepy, as if the idea of the room was for a person to be able to stand at the end of the bed and watch someone lying on the bed, under the harsh glare of the hanging light.

  He looked up from the carpet and put the light of the flash around the walls. They were covered in flowered wallpaper, faded and peeling, but pretty, in a fussy, old-fashioned way. There was a lighter spot, a square shape, where a picture must have been hanging, and placed pretty low, for a picture, only about halfway up the wall.

  Rather than step on the carpet, which he was unwilling to do, though he had no idea why, Reed came around the edges of it and stood looking at the lighter square in the wallpaper.

  There was no nail or hook in the space. Now that he was close, he could see that the wallpaper inside the square didn’t match the pattern around the edges. It was the same paper, but the piece in the square had been cut from a different part of the wallpaper and patched in.

  Why?

  Reed tapped the center of the square.

  It gave off a hollow-sounding thump and the square shifted a bit. Reed looked around the edges and saw seams. This board had been cut to size and put in this square to cover … what?

  A window?

  He tapped around the edges of the board.

  It rattled and the bottom left corner popped out a bit.

  Reed got the blade of the bolt cutter and pried at the corner. The entire square popped free, and he was looking into a dark space.

  He put the light into the square and saw a small closet-like space, windowless, about five by three. In the middle of the space was a large padded chair covered in moth-eaten velvet cloth, at one time purple. There was a table beside the chair, with an ashtray and something that looked like it might have been a tobacco box. The chair was placed so that anyone sitting in the chair could see directly through the opening. There was no getting around this one. The meaning of it was unmistakable.

  A rape room, that’s what this pretty sitting room was set up for.

  And a rape room with a closet and a window where someone else could watch the rape take place.

  He looked back into the closet space and saw the vague outline of a wooden panel door that had been cut into the back of the closet. So the person watching the rape, or the torture, or whatever it was, could come and go without being seen.

  Reed stepped back, and then kicked out at the wall under the open square. It cracked and bent.

  He booted it again, and again.

  The wall cracked wide open. He kicked the opening into shards and splinters, stepped into the closet, shoved the chair aside, and slammed his boot heel against the door in the paneling.

  The door was just a piece of shaved spruce. It flew back on rusty hinges, and he was looking at a large high-ceilinged room with a wall of leaded-glass windows running along one side.

  The light of the moon was pouring into the room. There was a massive four-poster bed in the middle of the room, bare wood now, the mattress and bedsprings long gone. It was covered with dust but it was still intact. It was set in the middle of a Persian carpet, the rug white with dust and slowly rotting into pieces from the damp.

  There was nothing else in the room except a tallboy dresser on the wall opposite the windows, all its drawers pulled open, as if it had been ransacked by a thief in a hurry.

  Reed walked over to it and put a light into the top drawer. It had been lined with newspaper, now yellow and cracked and peeling. He pulled at one sheet and it came up.

  It was a page of ads for farm tools, straight razors, curling irons, suspenders, hair oil, dentures, all of them in faded sepia. There was a dateline in the upper left corner.

  September 23, 1930

  He pulled the drawer out, turned it over. Nothing. The next. Nothing. And more nothing.

  But on the underside of the bottom drawer a maker’s mark was branded into the wood:

  J. X. HUNTERVASSER & SONS

  OGILVY SQUARE SAVANNAH

  FINE CABINETRY TO THE GENTRY

  There was a small square of yellowed paper glued to the drawer bottom, just below the maker’s brand. It was a typed form, the letters faded but legible:

  KINGSFIELD STANDING DRESSER

  GENTLEMEN’S DELUXE MODEL B-2915

  CUSTOM MADE FOR

  MASTER ABEL TEAGUE

  GIFT OF HIS FATHER COLONEL JUBAL TEAGUE

  DELIVERY CHRISTMAS DAY

  Reed held the light on the drawer for a while, and then he set the drawer on the floor.

  Was this what Leah Searle had found? If she had, there was obviously an easier way to get into this room than kicking down two walls. But it was proof that Abel Teague had been … what?

  Living in Candleford House, or at least staying in this room whenever he was in Gracie, until at least 1930? Clara Mercer had been forcibly remanded to Candleford House on June 14, 1924.

  Because of the fire in the Niceville archives in 1935, no one knew who had signed that order. The documents had been destroyed. Was Leah Searle closing in on a copy? If so, what would it prove?

  Well, for one thing it might prove that Abel Teague arranged to have Clara Mercer taken away from the Ruelles and brought here to Candleford House as a captive toy for his amusement. Which, after everything he had done to her already, was a refinement of sadistic cruelty almost too bloody awful to contemplate. It meant that Clara Mercer had spent seven years locked away in Candleford House, enduring unspeakable abuse at the hands of the same man who ruined her young life all those years before. The paper lining might mean that Teague was still living here, or at least coming here on a regular basis, when Clara got pregnant. Clara went into Crater Sink in 1931.

  Was it possible that Abel Teague left here shortly afterwards, and in such a hurry that he forgot to take a family heirloom, a Christmas gift from his father, and left it to rot in this room?

  It certainly would explain why Glynis Ruelle would have carried a hatred for Abel Teague that would have sea
red her soul black for the rest of her years. But Glynis Ruelle died in 1939.

  And all of this was ancient history now.

  Why would Miles care enough about any of it to murder Leah Searle and his own wife? And then take his head off with an antique Purdy? The fact that Miles Teague had an evil relative wasn’t news to anyone in Niceville. The bitter memory of London Teague’s crimes was the reason the golf and country club in Niceville was named after Anora Mercer.

  Whose signature was on that order of committal? And why was Abel Teague occupying the nicest room in Candleford House? Was Candleford House being run for Abel’s personal amusement?

  An entire hospital full of victims, and an elaborate facility set up on the top floor to cater to his corrupted tastes. Why would the people who ran Candleford House take that risk?

  Unless it was Abel Teague’s money that created Candleford House in the first place. And kept it going. Did he pay for the staff and the guards and the quacks? Was it Teague money that got the archives burned? If Teague family money created and supported the most notorious private hell house in the Deep South, would Miles Teague kill Leah Searle and his own wife to keep that a secret?

  Hell yes.

  Reed turned to leave.

  A young woman was standing in the middle of the room, glowing in the moonlight shining through the windows. She was barefoot, and wearing a dress made of very thin fabric. It looked gray in the moonlight but might have been green. She was pale but pretty, with wide eyes and long auburn hair. She was naked under the dress, her lovely body outlined by the moon’s glow. She cast no shadow on the floor in front of her. Her hands were folded together and resting on her rounded belly. She was looking at him with an odd expression that Reed realized was curiosity.

  My first ghost, was the thought in Reed’s mind. He felt no fear, only that he wanted to be very still and silent and not to do anything that would make this image flicker and disappear. The woman looked around the room, and then back at him.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  Her accent was pure Savannah, her voice low and soft and clear.

  “My name is Reed Walker.”

  She seemed to take this in.

  “Your mother is Lenore, isn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s with Glynis now. She’s happy.”

  “Is my father there?”

  “No. I’m sorry. Nothing took him. Nothing keeps him. Nothing keeps everything it takes. Nothing is in this place right now. Can you not feel it? You need to go.”

  “Are you Clara Mercer?”

  “Yes. I used to live in this place. Now I live with Glynis. Why did you come here?”

  “To find out what happened here.”

  She looked around the room.

  “Terrible things happened here. This was Abel’s place. For a long time I lived here with him. And with nothing. They fed on me. They were one thing and no thing at the same time. They still are.”

  “Why did you come here?”

  She looked around the room.

  “I come to remember that I am not here anymore. Sometimes I find that I cannot remember that. Glynis says that coming here helps me to remember. But I don’t stay. You should leave too.”

  “You said Abel Teague is still alive?”

  She shook her head.

  “No. Not in the way you mean it. Not in the way you and I are alive. Glynis has him digging in her fields. He suffers there. And does no harm in the world. Sometimes I go down to the fields to watch him. But nothing is trying to get him back. Through the boy. You must see that this does not happen.”

  “How will I do that?”

  “Nothing is using the boy to bring Abel back. He’s already changing. You must stop that.”

  “How?”

  “He still has the power to turn away from that path. If he does not, you must kill him.”

  She turned her head, stood very still.

  “Nothing is here. I have to go. So must you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because nothing is thinking about you.”

  And she was gone.

  But the room wasn’t empty. It was as if a compressor was pumping air into the room. Reed felt the pressure building on his skin, in his lungs, in his throat. His ears ached, as if he were sinking down into deep water. The pressure was coming up from the floor and closing in from the walls.

  Reed backed up to the windows and faced the room. There wasn’t a sound. The silence was crushing. Reed couldn’t hear his own heart beating but he could feel it hammering in his chest. He had the sensation that the silence and the pressure were part of the same thing. And it was close now, almost touching his skin. Hovering there, an inch away from his face. And there was a mind in it. Cold and alien and profoundly different from Reed Walker and all of his kind.

  He felt himself being studied.

  Considered.

  Appraised.

  He knew that if he opened his mouth the silent thing would pour itself into him and stay there forever, feeding on him. He pulled out the bolt cutters, smashed the glass, and rolled backwards out the window. He fell for a long time before he crashed into the branches of a live oak, tumbled again, struck another limb, clutched at it, managed to stop, and then felt it give way, and he was dropping again, the branches lashing at him, and then the branches were gone—a moment of silent falling—he hit the grass hard, bounced once, and he was out cold.

  Endicott Calls upon the Black Widow

  Frankie Maranzano’s newly minted widow was now the only occupant—other than Frankie Il Secondo, the flatulent Chihuahua—of Frankie Maranzano’s 3,200-square-foot two-story penthouse suite in a sixty-four-story green glass obelisk called The Memphis. Although Frankie had retainers—mercenary muscle and gun hands—living in the building, Delores wasn’t ready to be alone with them until she had sorted out where their loyalties were likely to fall. So she was keeping them busy with the funeral arrangements for Frankie and Little Ritchie while she played the Inconsolable Widow up in the penthouse.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t mourn Frankie and Ritchie. Frankie and Delores had been very happy for many years. And then they met.

  Delores thought it might have been Coco Chanel who said, “If you marry for money you earn every penny.” And Frankie was doing a fine job of turning Little Ritchie into his Mini-Me, and the world did not need two Frankie Maranzanos.

  Now that they were gone, her world, especially this suite, felt a lot more like home.

  The Memphis was part of a cluster of towering condo complexes that had sprung up around Fountain Square, the center of the Cap City business and shopping district. It was directly across the Square from the Bucky Cullen Federal Complex, where Boonie Hackendorff, of the Cap City FBI, enjoyed a corner office with a view of Fountain Square, dominated, of course, by The Memphis. Conversely, Frankie Maranzano had a reciprocal view of the back of Boonie Hackendorff’s bald head as he sat at his desk in that corner office.

  Frankie Maranzano, not an admirer of the FBI or of law enforcement in general, had often entertained his guests by aiming one of his high-powered Remington rifles at the back of Boonie’s head—the range across Fountain Square was about a thousand yards, and although a down-angle shot plagued by the tricky crosswinds that swirled around the towers, it was still quite makeable.

  Although not by Frankie.

  But he didn’t know that. Of course all of Frankie Maranzano’s guests would laugh wildly when Frankie would say “POW!” and pretend that the rifle had recoiled into his shoulder. They would laugh like that no matter how often he repeated it.

  And he repeated it often.

  Frankie Maranzano’s sense of humor was not complicated, but his business affairs had achieved a complexity that approached byzantine, and Delores, his ex-goo-may—actually she had ceased being his goo-may when he married her—was extremely awake to the precarious nature of her position.

  She was sitting at Frankie’s desk—a single slab of black granit
e held up by two carved stone Saint Mark lions taken from a piazza in Venice. Evening had come and on the other side of the wall of glass behind her chair Cap City glowed like a constellation of diamonds and emeralds and rubies, but the glittering condos and office towers and hotels filling the skyline behind her blazed in vain upon the back of her neck, since Delores was diving deep into the problems presented by her not-quite-so-dearly-beloved Frankie’s untimely passing.

  The chief problem presented by his sudden-onset mortality experience—this was how she had described it in an e-mail to her mother back in Guayaquil—was that Frankie’s various business associates in Denver and Vancouver and Singapore were having some difficulty accepting that a trashy, gold-digging South American whore should, simply by the accident of being Frankie’s third wife, presume to sit in Frankie Maranzano’s chair and busy herself with matters that no mere putana was capable of understanding, let alone managing.

  One of Frankie’s associates, phoning to express his condolences and inquire into the funeral arrangements, had ended his call by advising her to consider who among Frankie’s business partners she was going to call on to take over the Cap City end.

  When Delores hinted that she might take it on herself, Tony had laughed and said, “Fuck, Delores, you’re a very fine piece of ass and I’ve always liked you, and you kept Frankie in line, fucked if I know how, but you’re not a Guinea piece of ass. That’s the problem. Nobody’s gonna work with a Spic whore. A Wop whore, sure, no problem. But a Spic whore? It just ain’t dignified. No offense, hah?”

  So Delores was feeling under the gun, literally. And when a person signing himself Mr. Harvill Endicott, Private Collector and Facilitator, sent her a personal note, hand-delivered by a private courier, on expensive stationery, accompanied by a Mass card stating that Mr. Endicott had taken the liberty of paying for a novena for her late husband at Holy Name Cathedral to be said on the Sunday next, she was intrigued. The note was simple and direct: