He disappeared deeper into the labyrinthine hallways, probably looking for his own room, farther into the recesses of the house. Alice sat on the bed a bit longer, stewing, wondering why her brother was always such a jerk. When she finally got back up, she heard the unmistakable sound of her father cursing while her mother laughed uncontrollably. Apparently, the fridge wouldn’t fit through the front door.
“Well, shit! I guess I got to take the doors off this fucker.…”
Debra was still grinning when she rounded the corner, holding a water bottle. She stopped in Alice’s doorway and stared into her room.
“Getting set up all right?”
Alice bent over one of the open boxes and began digging into it in a poor attempt at looking busy. Debra laughed.
“Were you just lounging around in here?”
Alice shrugged. It was clear that her mom didn’t understand her, that she always mistook her daydreaming for laziness. Alice had tried to explain how busy her mind was, that what looked like laziness was anything but. It was tough though, especially when she was compared to Dean. Her brother had always been a hustler, even if his teen years had brought on a sense of surliness that none of them seemed to care for. He had a drive that made him pretty substantial on the basketball court or the baseball diamond. It was an unfair comparison, her and her brother, especially considering how alike Debra and Dean were.
“You are your father’s daughter,” Debra said, smiling. “It’s fine, honey. If I thought I could get away with it, I’d take a nap right about now.”
It was a lie. She never took naps. Alice didn’t care though, and when Debra sat down on the floor, clearly ready for a break, Alice sat back down on the mattress.
“Sooo…” Alice said.
“So what?”
Alice wrinkled her nose. “I dunno. You came in here. Had to be for a reason.”
Debra sighed. “You’re too smart for your own good,” she said. “All right then…what do you think?”
“About what?”
“All this. I mean, it’s a mess. I wouldn’t have picked it in ten years, but if I squint, I can see some of the charm.”
“It’s okay.”
“Jeez…you lie like him too.”
“What does that mean?” Alice asked.
“It means your brother’s the good liar. Don’t sweat it. It’s not a compliment to him. At least I know what you’re up to.” Debra popped open the top of her bottle of water.
“I saw it happen when we were out here a few weeks ago,” Debra added. “It got you. Somehow, this hunk got its hooks in you just like it did your dad.”
Even from a distance, it was clear to Alice that her dad had a tendency to drive her mom nuts, but somehow, over the course of eighteen years, her mom had learned to just roll with it – for the most part. Alice could see her struggling with all the craziness of the day, and all the craziness to come, but the simple fact that she could laugh at her husband as he wrestled a refrigerator told the story well enough. She was in, for better or worse.
“So I’ll ask it again…what do you think?”
The smile on Alice’s face had a mind all its own, creeping up from some hidden place, refusing to obey her command.
“That’s what I thought. Ahhh, this place.”
“I think it’s just…neat, I guess. Like a mystery or something. The old house was fine, but this one…”
Debra laughed. “Lord you sound just like him.…”
“What? It was fine, but this feels like…I dunno. An adventure.”
Debra smiled that same, weary, been-here-before smile. “I get it. I need to be more fun. But fun can cost you. Adventures take a lot of work.”
Alice slid off the mattress and sat down on the floor, letting her head drift over to her mom’s shoulder.
“We’ll make it work,” Debra added. “But it will take a lot of elbow grease…from all of us. You and your brother included.”
“I know.”
“I’m holding you to that. This is your room,” she said, waving the bottle around. “Unless there’s something you can’t do on your own, I’m not touching it. Hanging pictures or blinds, anything like that, I’ll help you out. But all this stuff is yours. It goes where you want it to. You got it?”
“Yeah,” Alice said, leaning a bit closer.
“Who knows? Maybe it will be worth it. Hopefully, by the time summer comes this will be home.”
Alice nodded. “Better than home.”
* * *
Alice spent the next few hours with a drive that she rarely had. She had turned on the Michael Jackson Pandora station and just let it play while she worked. Her clothes were still in the drawers, but most of her old toys, school supplies, picture frames, and everything else that she considered hers had to be sorted through and emptied. There were five deep boxes with her name on the side of them, and she diligently set to work getting the room as close to ready as she could. By the time she was ready for a break, her father appeared in the doorway, red-faced and sweaty with a screwdriver in hand.
“You ready for me to put the bed together?”
She left him in relative peace, ignoring the occasional shits and fucks that emanated from the room, followed by the sounds of the clattering bed frame. No doubt he’d be in there for a while; it was time to continue exploring the stranger corners of the place.
On the back side of the staircase, just across from the front entrance, was a green-painted door that she’d somehow missed until then. She tried the creaking handle, marveling at how heavy the door was as she swung it open. This was the type of door she simply didn’t see in their old house, a sturdy counterpoint to the light, hollow doors she was used to. Within, a single light hung above her, and with a click, a sickly yellow beam lit up an absolute nightmare of a descending staircase. Each unfinished wooden step was black with slick-looking mold; the walls were an ocherous yellow. It looked like it led to less of a basement and more of a cave, something carved out of the earth itself. Alice heard, or thought she heard, a stirring from deep within the hellish corners below. For a moment, she leaned forward, never daring to place a foot onto the top stair. Then, something brushed against her leg. She squeaked out a quiet little scream, then looked down.
There was Baxter, the pitch-black family cat curling around her leg. He wasn’t a particularly sweet cat. He had an almost endless supply of energy, which seemed to translate into a wariness with people that bordered on outright dislike.
“You scared the crap out of me,” she scolded. He looked up, mewed at her, then stared down the stairs.
“Don’t even think about it.” She reached down to move him out of the way. He hissed, which was perfectly normal for him, before darting away. Alice was still staring down the steps when her father’s heavy footsteps came clomping up the hallway.
“Looks like he’s having fun,” he said, watching Baxter flee down the hall. “We won’t find him for a week if I had to guess. Oh, and you found the basement.” He took one look down, wrinkling his nose. “Yep, lots of work to do down there.”
“Do you hear that?” Alice asked.
He tilted his head, listening.
“Furnace, I think. There was a sump pump down there too. I haven’t plugged it in yet. Looks like it gets a bit of flooding whenever it rains for more than a day or two. Definitely some work to be done there. Probably won’t be turning it into a guest room anytime soon.”
Alice glared down, feeling like she were standing on the edge of a cliff, that sensation that you might be suddenly, uncontrollably compelled to leap to your own death. She’d had that feeling before on one of their camping trips, standing at the precipice of a hundred-foot bluff, wondering what the air would feel like blurring through her hair, how the rocky ground would look racing up to meet her. But underneath all of it, a stronger, more persuasive sensation, a questio
n, the question.
What would it feel like to no longer exist?
The black voice, whispering in her brain.
“Careful now,” her father said, putting a hand on her shoulder. Alice started and realized with some embarrassment that she was leaning even farther in. “Steps are a little rickety. Probably best to steer clear until I have a chance to straighten things up.”
He drew her back, closing the door, and Alice felt the odd shadow over her heart lift a bit.
“I don’t think I’d want to go down there anyway,” she said quietly.
Alice didn’t dwell on the basement. There were simply too many corners to explore, more bits and pieces that seemed at odds with each other. She walked through a tiled sunroom out near the pool, which boasted one entire wall of solid glass, clearly another late addition to the structure. The whole pool area was vaguely modern, the orange tiles summoning something from the late Seventies, unlike the vastly more ancient hardwood found throughout the majority of the house. The sunroom was ice cold, the winter sun doing little to warm it.
Even without a jacket, she decided to take a quick stroll around the pool and was greeted by a stench that made her gasp. The wall of foul air hit her the moment she came within five feet of the pool’s edge. Hand cupped over her mouth, she leaned over, peering into the black water. A thin layer of ice was forming, but it did little to stop the smell. The previous week had been unseasonably warm, but now the weather was beginning to turn. Soon, she realized, this dark little pit would be frozen solid, maybe enough to lock all that stench inside until spring. But as disgusting as it was, she could still picture it all fixed up, blue and deep and inviting.
Alice stepped up onto the diving board, which creaked and moaned under her weight. She stepped nimbly to the edge of the board, hovering above the grotesque pit.
It shouldn’t stink this bad, the gloomy voice whispered.
Alice considered the idea. She’d been around ponds and lakes, some of which were pretty foul, but this was something different. It reminded her more of the sewage backup they experienced a few years ago, the black muck bubbling up into the bathtubs and the stink that refused to leave your nose. The idea of falling into it made her shudder, and she shuffled carefully onto the back end of the diving board.
From her slightly raised perch, she could see over the fence that ringed the pool area. It was her first, fleeting glance into the woods that surrounded the house. The trees, tall and gaunt, drooped over the pool like a poorly kept roof. Past that, she saw mostly the same. Trees. Tall, dead grass. Silence.
And something else.…
Yes. There was something else. A small, foot-worn path.
I bet it’s deer, a brighter voice whispered.
Yes, of course. There had to be deer everywhere around here. And rabbits, raccoons, possums, a bit of everything.
Deer didn’t make that path.
Alice shivered and stepped down from the board. Back inside, Dean talked on his cell phone as he carried in a tiny box, wedged beneath one arm, from the moving truck. There were footsteps here and there, random bits of conversation, and beneath it all, the creaks and whistling breezes that seemed like the heartbeat of the old house. She was lost in thought as she made her way through the house, thinking about the woods, the basement, the trails through tall grass. Then, she glanced up and saw it.
It was in the hallway leading to her room. On an empty patch of wall across from the stairs, she found a curling piece of wallpaper that she’d barely noticed before. Alice stared at it, gripped by that too-young feeling of wanting to break something just to see what might happen. She’d been there before, just like all kids were there at some point or another. Her mother had screamed herself nearly hoarse when she’d found a five-year-old Alice drawing on the wall with her lipstick. She’d been too old to do something like that back then, and her mother had let her know it, but it didn’t change the fact that she’d felt powerless to ignore the idea once it crept in. Afterward, she could remember the feeling as she sat in bed, crying, her mother still fuming, her father telling them both to calm down, that it was fine, that he would clean it up. Alice wasn’t stupid, but she had done something remarkably stupid, and she couldn’t begin to understand why.
It was the same feeling now, staring at the wallpaper, wanting nothing more than to peel it away. There wasn’t anything hiding there, no secrets, just the ever-present urge to see what happened. It was a scab, a loose piece of skin after a sunburn, a sore on the inside of her cheek, or a hangnail that was still dangling, still teasing even after it started to bleed. No amount of parental glares, no logical explanation of why it was a bad idea, nothing on earth would prevent her from picking at it until the pain told her it was time to stop.
Alice glanced back, checking if anyone was in sight. The voices were still there, but she was alone.
Besides, no one would notice it.
Was that the dark voice? There was darkness in it, but something new had been stirred in. Something playful.
Just do it. You know you want to, girl.
She did want to. More than anything in her life at that moment. The satisfaction in it, the crunchy, tactile sound of it ripping off. Everything had to be fixed in the house anyway, and that included old, yellowed sheets of wallpaper. It was ugly as sin, and her mother would never let it stay for long.
Then stop thinking about it and do it.
This new voice was confident and convincing, and Alice didn’t want to argue. With a grin, she grabbed the corner and began to tug. The sheet came away in a dry hunk, pulling further and further with a shredding sound that set her teeth on edge. It was dangerous, she knew it, but the more she pulled, the more she wanted to pull. Like a sheet of dead skin, the wallpaper just kept going, peeling away. Any attempt to pretend it was an accident or had just been that way all along would be impossible to argue at that point. Even so, she just couldn’t stop.
The wall underneath was dry and flaking, and the bits of drywall and old glue began to shower the tops of her shoes. Finally, with a satisfying rip, the sheet fell away. In her hand, she held a strip of curled paper over four feet long, and the exhilaration was instantly replaced with fear.
You’ll have to explain this.
This was the glum part of her, returned to let her know that her bad idea was, in fact, a bad idea. A sick feeling began to bubble up in her stomach, but only for a moment, as it was replaced by some other, more powerful feeling of strange curiosity.
“Daaadddd. Mommmmm.”
Chapter Three
The four of them gathered close in the hallway, huddling together to get a better view of what Alice had discovered. Alice was struck by how tightly packed they were, and she realized she could smell them. It was a strange thing, a reminder of the four of them giving group hugs after ball games or funerals, the good memories and the bad mixing in strange ways. From the soft scent of her mom’s deodorant to the sting of her dad’s sweat to the cheap cologne that Dean had started to wear, she could pick each member of the family out individually.
“What the hell…?” Frank asked.
“Did you just find it like this?” asked Debra.
“Yeah,” Alice replied, “I was just walking by, and a box snagged the corner and started pulling back the wallpaper.”
Dean cast a cockeyed glance at her, skeptical, but he didn’t say anything. He, like everyone else, was taken aback by the scene before them.
It was a painting, a crude, simplistic depiction of a family. It was hard to tell exactly what had been used to create it, either colored markers or some sort of finger paint. Most of the colors had been removed, stuck forever to the back of the sheet of wallpaper. All that remained was the dull, lifeless imprint of the original shapes, like a film negative. It was, Alice realized, an anti-picture.
“It’s really creepy,” Dean said finally.
“
No,” Debra answered. “Just a kid’s painting. Probably soaked into the drywall, so they just had to put the wallpaper up.”
Frank was grimacing, turning his head this way and that like a cat studying a laser pointer.
“No,” he muttered, “it is pretty strange.”
“Good Lord,” Debra replied. “Once again, I’m the sane one. Come on, we’ve got too much work to do.”
She turned to walk away, and the others did the same. Only Alice remained, still staring, still puzzling over it. She glanced down at the sheet of wallpaper, at the phantom colors still stuck there.
“Wait!” she said suddenly. “Come back. Look at this.”
The others returned, Debra and Dean in eye-rolling defiance, Frank with bright, inquisitive eyes.
“Look,” she said, holding up the old paper. It was a mirror image of the painting on the wall.
“Cool,” Dean said, “still creepy.”
“The colors,” she said.
They all took a good, long look, but only Frank could see where she was headed.
“Ohhh…” he said.
“What?” Debra asked.
“Look,” Alice replied, “the mom has blond hair. Just like you. The dad is tall with black hair,” she said, pointing at her father. “There’s an older son, tall and skinny with freckles.…”
“I don’t have freckles,” Dean said defiantly. The others paused for a moment, staring without a word.
“What? I don’t. It’s a tan.…”
“And then the youngest,” Alice continued, ignoring him. “Black hair and blue eyes.”
She gave a short pause, letting the weight of it sink into them. Of the three, only Frank seemed to understand the strange enormity of it.
“It’s…it’s us…” he said.
For a moment, no one spoke as the similarities became too much to ignore. Debra was the one who finally broke the spell over them.
“Nope,” she said with assurance. “Look…there.”
She pointed at the shape just off to the side of the family. A dog with floppy ears.
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