Charlie went over to where Aura Lee was standing. Suddenly, she dropped to her knees. Putting her hands on the bare boards, she set her face down on the floor, pressing her right ear against it, her mouth open. It was the way doctors used to listen to a patient’s heartbeat before they had stethoscopes, Charlie caught himself thinking.
“Listen there.”
“Maybe it’s Hank,” he said, though his voice was barely audible.
“I done called out for him,” she said. “But there was nothing. Just that scratching. Keeping on and on.”
“You wait here,” Charlie told Aura Lee, half way onto the front porch already. “He could be hurt.” Running to his car he nearly fell into a gulley, but steadying himself, he opened the door and pulled his flashlight out of the glove compartment. The flashlight was supposed to be waterproof, but still, he hadn’t actually tested its claim until it had fallen into the shallows earlier.
The flashlight came on. Charlie made his way through the tall weeds on the side of the house, shining the light at the lattice that surrounded most of the crawl space, searching for an opening that would allow him to squeeze under.
“Shit,” he whispered, tripping over an old pot. He knocked it out of his way and kept walking until he came to the back of the house.
It was dark all around, except for the yellow beam of the flashlight. Shining it up in front of him, he saw where the kudzu had engulfed what used to be a toolshed.
He looked around. The crickets were still not making a single sound, as if they were out there, hidden in the bushes, watching something Charlie couldn’t see.
Turning back around, he pointed his light at the corner of the house and there he saw it, an opening in the rotted lattice-work just big enough for a man to crawl into.
Charlie kneeled down and shone his flashlight inside.
“Hank?” he called out. “You in there?”
He stood up. If the noise was coming from under the parlor, then Hank had to be a good way into the crawl space. Nearly in the exact center of it. Damn.
Charlie kneeled hack down and took a deep breath, then peeked into the crawl space.
“Hank?”
Charlie did not move. Already he could feel it, the fear spreading through him like something physical, reminding him of when he had been knocked out for an appendix operation years before. For a terrible, dizzying instant he had actually felt the anesthetic as it coursed through his bloodstream, then nothing. Only now it just kept on, moving through his system, leaving a taste of cold metal in his mouth. Lifting his flashlight, he ducked his head a bit lower and slipped into the darkness. He stopped a foot inside and shone the light around him.
“Hank?”
He scanned the light over the piles of debris. Old coils of hose, buckets, cans, pipes. He crawled a few feet farther, clanking through junk. Then, raising his hand, he felt for the coarse, unsanded underside of the floorboards. They were only inches above his head. He would have to keep crawling on his knees.
Again he called out Hank’s name.
But now even the scratching had stopped, and he couldn’t tell where it had been before.
There was no sense to it. If Hank had been making the noises, why would he have stopped right when help was at hand?
“Hank?”
Ahead of him, in the weak beam of the light, was a wall partitioning one part of the crawl space from another. In the center of it was a little opening, just big enough to wiggle through. Charlie didn’t move. He was about to call out Hank’s name again when he heard a rustling noise. Something was on the other side, and it was moving now. Charlie waited. That was the part of the crawl space underneath Aura Lee’s parlor. That was where the scratching originally had been coming from.
He hesitated, then crawled forward.
“Hank, it’s just me, Charlie. There’s nothing else down here to hurt you any. I just want to get you out and take you back—”
He stopped. Again he had heard the sound of something moving on the other side of the partition. He pointed the light into the opening. Suddenly the light began to go dim.
“Damnit to hell,” he muttered to himself, knocking the flashlight on the dirt beneath him. The light flickered on, blinked off again, then everything was dark. Charlie couldn’t make out a single thing, not even the opening through which he had entered. There was only the after-image of the light looming up against the darkness.
I knew you were always there. You just didn’t want them to find you, Sadie’s voice echoed in his head. The sound was closer now. He moved back, carefully as he could. He held his breath and listened. Somehow he just couldn’t picture Hank making it. Not to mention some kind of animal. There was something too deliberate about it, like someone trying to be as quiet as possible and yet still creeping closer. Charlie reached around behind him, groping blindly for an unobstructed path back out of the crawl space. But his hand knocked against something sharp and cutting. He put his hand to his mouth, unable to tell in the darkness if he was bleeding. He must have gotten turned around in the darkness. And unless the flashlight came back on there was no way for him to get out without groping along inch by careful inch, which would probably take fifteen minutes. He banged the flashlight on the dirt, but there was only a momentary flicker. You just didn’t want them to find you, did you?
Don’t think about it, he thought. Sadie was crazy. Everybody in Lucerne knew that. He wants your Larry. Just like he wanted my little Catherine.
Stop it, Charlie. Just be calm until your eyes adjust and you can see the moonlight coming in. But as he sat there, it didn’t seem to be getting any less dark.
He jerked around, his heart jumping into his throat. From someplace in the dark he had heard it again. Holding his breath, he listened.
“Hank?”
He recognized the sound. It was the thing Hank always said, that crazy word of his. A word that seemed to hold some secret terror for the poor afflicted soul but that no one had ever deciphered. Only now there was something wrong about the way it sounded, as though the voice that uttered it was deeper than Hank’s could ever go. Much deeper. And the word wasn’t being repeated at Hank’s rattling speed but slowly. Slowly, like whoever was saying it was moving, speaking and moving at the same time.
“Heapmore...Heapmore”
“Hank,” Charlie said again, though this time he could hardly get the name out. “That you?”
He’s always been here. The whole time. He was just waiting.
“Hank?”
It was right on him. Charlie could almost feel the breath as the word kept coming.
Charlie twisted around quickly and reached through the dark space in the direction he hoped would take him back to the opening. Then he felt something that nearly stopped his heart.
It was flesh. Only too cold to be alive. The flesh of an arm, right above the wrist. It’s him, reaching back up. Reaching . . . And then suddenly Charlie felt it slide away, like a snake slipping out of his grasp, slipping away easily because there was nothing at the end of the wrist to stop the sliding, because there was no hand, only a smooth stump.
“Christ,” Charlie said with a gasp. He tried to jump to his feet, but instead he knocked his head hard against the underside of the floorboards above him. He fell back into the dirt, dropping the flashlight. Suddenly it went on, the light’s yellow beam showing into the hole in the partition. Dazed with the pain and struggling to keep conscious, Charlie blinked and looked at the thing in the light. He saw them. The same eyes he had seen long ago sinking down into the quicksand, eyes that had stared out at him from another man’s face. The ravaged mouth opened and twisted into an obscene mockery of a grin. And then all around him the darkness poured in as he felt the hand reach out and take hold of his. As it pulled him down and down Charlie heard it echoing all around him like a whisper in the bottom of a well. “Heapmore.’’
11
Larry sat up in bed. Blinking groggily, he looked around his room. Then, peering over at the nightstand between the two twin beds, he saw that it was after two o’clock. He was shivering. Both the sheets and the bedspread were on the floor, piled in a heap. In the moonlight he stared down at them, baffled by their condition. Unlike many teenage boys, Larry had never been a rowdy sleeper. Usually, when he woke up in the morning the bedspread was tucked in around the edge of the bed, just as it had been when he went to sleep. Larry picked the spread up. It was almost as if somebody had pulled the covers off him in the middle of the night.
He was putting it back on when he heard a noise—a low, scraping sound. He got on his knees and looked out the open window, next to his bed. “Anybody there?”
He pushed the window screen out. It had been pried loose and unfastened. In the night wind, its bottom edge scraped against the sill. He stared out through the screen at the dark yard, then poked his head through the window and peered down into the azalea bushes a few feet below the sill.
“Anybody—” But this time Larry couldn’t get the last word out. From somewhere inside the room he had heard another noise. Dropping the screen, he turned and looked around, staring at the shadows in every corner. He had to get up, he thought. Get up and turn on the light. Then he could see and everything would be okay. He eased his feet over the edge of the bed, then stopped abruptly.
Something wasn’t right.
He stared down at the sheet that still lay twisted on the floor. At first he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. But he wasn’t mistaken. The sheet was moving, winding slowly in a patch of moonlight, as if something had hold of it by the other end and was twisting it around.
Only the other end was under the bed.
Larry jerked his feet back off the floor.
There was something underneath him. Right under the bed.
I’m having a nightmare, Larry thought. That has to be what it is. This was how his worst nightmares always started. Not being chased by monsters, but in his own room at night, alone, surrounded by darkness. Now the door to his room would open, Larry thought, and something would be standing there. Or maybe the thing had already gotten into the room. Was hiding under the bed.
He pushed himself back into the corner. Wake up, he told himself. Just wake up. That’s all you can do.
And yet all around him everything in the room told him he was already awake.
But that, too, was part of it. Part of the trick. It always seemed real, didn’t it?
He pressed his back harder against the wall and watched as the sheet was drawn underneath the bed.
Larry held his breath. And then he heard scratching noises. They were definitely coming from under the bed.
Suddenly he felt a hand come up beside the wall behind him and take hold of him by the elbow, as if trying to pull him down the narrow gap between the bed and the wall.
Larry sprang up from the bed, collided against the nightstand, and, a moment later, was sprawled on the floor, his face only inches from the darkness beneath his bed. He was trying to scream when he saw the face.
“Goddamnit, Clemson,” Larry said, knocking the boy off of him. “What the hell are you doing here, you son-of-a-bitch?” Larry got to his feet and stared down at the other boy. Clemson was rolling around on the floor, laughing. “It’s not funny,” Larry said. “Get up. You hear?”
Clemson stopped laughing just long enough to emit a few more monsterlike growls, curling his hands into claws. Larry leaned down and picked the other boy up by his collar.
“If you ever do that again, I’ll kill you.”
“Sure bet I scared you, huh?” Clemson McGee said, pulling himself out of Larry’s grasp.
“Course you scared me,” Larry said. “How’d you feel if somebody pulled that kind of shit on you?”
“You piss your pants?”
“No, Clemson, I didn’t piss my pants,” Larry said angrily.
“I wish you could’ve seen your face! I ain’t never seen nobody so scared in my whole life,” Clemson chortled.
Larry turned around to the window. Alvin Anderson was peeking in through the window. “He scare you, Larry? He done snuck in through your window. Randy, he’s out here waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
Me and Randy and Alvin, we was going to go look at that new retard, Abigail’s orphan.” Clemson explained. “We was all spending the night over at Randy’s house and we done snuck out when his momma and daddy went to bed.”
“You wanta come?” Alvin asked.
Larry frowned. “How you planning to look at him at two o’clock in the morning? He’s in bed probably. Same place you’d be if you had any sense.”
“Ain’t you heard?”
“Heard what?”
“What Miss Eula Watkins told my momma. I just figured everbody’d heard it by now.”
Larry had to admit that Clemson had a point, seeing how Clemson’s momma and Eula Watkins were two of the biggest gossips in the town. Miss Eula, in her eighties, lived in the house cater-cornered to Abigail Parker’s.
“She was telling my momma how two nights ago, she done got up about three o’clock in the morning, and she seen him, just a-standing at one of them windows over in Abigail’s house.”
“What was Miss Eula doing up at three in the morning?” Larry asked.
“I reckon she had to go pee,” Clemson said impatiently. “She told my momma it made chill bumps go all up and down, seeing him a-standing there thataways, not moving a wink, just standing and staring out. Kind of like he was waiting.”
“Waiting for what?” Larry asked with a skeptical scowl.
“Waiting for something to come.”
“She was just seeing things. You know how Miss Eula is.”
“She wasn’t seeing things nohow. Cause the next night, she said she done seen the same thing. She stood peeking out from behind that curtain of hers for plumb half an hour and he didn’t budge, not a bit. My momma says there ought to be some kind of law protecting us from them crazed retards.” Clemson concluded authoritatively, “Anyways, we figured you’d want to come and look at him yourself.”
“I’m going back to bed.”
“Reckon you’re too scared. Ain’t that right? Figure something’s going to come out and grab you?”
“I ain’t scared, Clemson,” Larry said. He got up and glanced back at the clock. Of course, he had a good idea of what would happen to him if his folks found out. But he probably wouldn’t be able to fall asleep anyway. He looked back at Clemson. “Okay. But I still think it’s a pretty dumb idea, if you ask me.”
Five minutes later, the four boys were making their way through the dark streets, dodging patches of asphalt that were illuminated by the moonlight falling through the trees. When they got to the long front yard of Eula Watkins’ house, they crouched down and stopped. Staring up at the dark, hulking side of Abigail Parkers’, Larry shook his head, “I don’t see anything.”
“You just wait.”
“Shit, I’m not sitting out here to no three o’clock.”
“Which window did she see him in?”
“One of them high ones. On the second floor. Way up yonder,” Clemson said. “Miss Eula says she done watched him standing there, just a-drooling.”
“Drooling?” Larry said. “What’d he be drooling for?”
“Don’t you know nothing at all? That’s how retards do. Ain’t nothing in the world can make a retard stop his drooling. That’s how you know they retards.”
“Hank don’t drool,” Randy said.
“Yes, he does. Only his momma wipes it off before anybody sees it.”
“Look.”
It was Alvin who spoke. A fat twelve-year-old, he was the only child of the town’s one undertaker, Tommy Lee Anderson. Alvin pointed up at the side of
Abigail’s house. “Looky there.”
A light had gone on in one of the topmost windows. It was very dim, too dim to be an electric light, and there was something else peculiar about it. “Look, it’s like it’s flickering or something.
The boys, all holding their breath, watched the weak light’s tenuous glow against the windowpane.
“It’s a candle. He got him a candle.”
“I’m going to get me a closer look,” Clemson said, scurrying forward through Eula’s tall unmowed grass, still keeping crouched down.
“Me, too.”
“Wait up.”
Within a few moments, all the boys had crept within ten yards of Abigail’s house.
“What’d you think he’s—”
A shadow had moved to the window.
“Hush, I told you. Ain’t it like I done said?”
“Yeah,” Larry mumbled, looking up at the dark silhouette in the window. Although Larry had heard about the peculiar boy—Abigail’s orphan, as everybody called him— this was the first time he had seen him with his own eyes. He squinted up, moving back a little to get a better view.
The boy was standing at the window, and his eyes seemed fixed on some point in the darkness. Turning around, Larry looked to see if something might not be out there. But all he could see were Miss Eula’s house and the pecan trees that stood around it. And, of course, an open space where you could see the stars. But, aside from that, there was nothing.
“Ain’t it spooky?” Clemson asked, moving back until he was crouched down next to Larry.
Larry frowned. “What’s he doing?”
“Don’t know,” Clemson said, craning his neck to get a better view. “Looks like he’s moving his lips.”
“Like he’s talking to somebody,” Larry said.
“What’s going on?” Randy asked, coming back to where Clemson and Larry were crouched.
At that moment there was a tremendous gust of wind that knocked the pecan trees against the side of Abigail’s house.
“Shit, you feel that?”
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