The Ragged

by Brett Schumacher

  Music drifted over from the nightstand, a soft jazz shuffle tune playing as his alarm went off. He untangled himself from Celeste and turned it off before swinging his legs over the side of the bed and placing them on the ground. One stretch and a few good rubs of his eyes later, Andrew was getting up for the day.

  A strange wave of familiarity washed over him as he walked across the hall to the bathroom, that special kind of nostalgia that only came from returning to a path you used to walk daily. Andrew decided to lean into it. After all, he was alone until Celeste woke up, and he knew that he needed to let himself process his feelings at some point. Why not now?

  Looking in the mirror as he brushed his teeth, Andrew saw himself as a teen again, first feeling stuck in that house, but eventually growing to love it. It had always been a run-down, beaten-up, piece-of-junk old farmhouse, but that became part of its charm. Countless stories echoed within those walls.

  Andrew thought back to the time that Corvus had tried to teach him how to kill a chicken. The old man preferred to buy his food fresh, and nothing was fresher than a meal that was still alive when you picked it up. About a month after Andrew had moved in, Corvus walked into the living room with a small cage containing two chickens. He set it down, grunted at Andrew, then stepped back and crossed his arms.

  He looked from the cage to his grandfather and back again before the man spoke.

  “There’s supper,” he said. “Kill ‘em.”

  Corvus was never a man of many words. Andrew always assumed he just didn’t have much to say, but he also had a quieter theory that he never told his grandfather. Fewer words meant less room for discussion. You can’t talk back to a man who isn’t talking. Of course, that never stopped him from trying.

  “You can’t be serious,” he protested. “I’m not going to kill them! I don’t even know how.”

  “Then pay attention.” Corvus stalked over to the cage and took one of the birds out. It ruffled its feathers a bit in protest but otherwise didn’t struggle as he tilted its feet up and reached a hand down to hold its neck. He gripped right below the base of its skull between his pointer finger and middle finger and tilted its head ninety degrees to the right.

  “You get it like this,” he explained. “And then you pull.”

  Corvus jerked quickly down, and Andrew could hear the neck crack from where he was standing. The bird spasmed and twitched, trembling as it died. He recoiled at it all, fighting the urge to vomit.

  “What!?” He choked back tears. “ I can’t do that!”

  The man paid no attention to Andrew’s hysterics. His grandfather’s face might as well have been stone.

  “Sure you can,” he said plainly. “Just do what I did.”

  “Why can’t you just buy a dead one at the store?”

  “Because I’m trying to teach you something about life, boy!”

  Corvus carried the dead bird by its feet as he stomped past Andrew and into the kitchen, heading toward the back porch. He paused halfway through and turned around to address his grandson once more, cooler this time.

  “Every burger you ever ate was alive once. Life doesn’t happen without a little death to feed it.” He turned back around and kept walking, calling over his shoulder as he did, “You either kill it or you go hungry.”

  Andrew chose to go hungry that night. Of course, Corvus still made him sit down at the dinner table to watch him eat. You always sat down for dinner as a family. When he woke up the next morning and went downstairs, Andrew found that chicken sleeping soundly in its cage. Corvus was sitting in his rocking chair a few feet away from the bird. He looked up at Andrew and set his face.

  “Same offer as yesterday,” he said. “Kill it or go hungry.”

  It was almost dinnertime before Andrew decided to abandon his hunger strike. He never forgot the feeling of its little neck bones breaking between his fingers.

  A small shudder went through Andrew at the remembrance of his first kill. Corvus managed to have a small shred of mercy for the struggling teen under his roof, so he only made Andrew prepare a chicken once or twice a month.

  Thinking back on his time with his grandfather, Andrew never knew exactly how to feel. A large part of him was grateful for the old man taking him in and teaching him values the only way he knew how, but another, almost equally large, part of him was furious at the old man for being so cruel and hard at times. He knew it was mostly just the generational gap that made Corvus seem so unkind, but he also had a difficult time excusing his behaviors. Ultimately, he just wished that he understood the man.

  Afraid of burning himself out by feeling too much too quickly, Andrew splashed water in his face and pushed his emotions to the side for the moment before heading downstairs to make breakfast.

  ***

  Celeste rolled over and stretched, basking in the small sliver of morning sunlight that came between the curtains. Andrew was gone, which didn’t surprise her in the slightest. He always woke up at the most ungodly hours, even on weekends, so Celeste was used to waking up alone.

  It upset her at the beginning of their relationship, but she grew to love those last few minutes before he got out of bed. He would always pull her close and hold her. Sometimes she was awake enough to notice, but most of the time she wasn’t. It didn’t matter to her though, because she always started her day feeling safe and warm.

  The scent of bacon wafted into the bedroom, making her stomach growl. That was another big upside of Andrew’s early rising. She never had to cook breakfast. She climbed out of bed and stumbled into the bathroom, still drowsy. After sitting on the toilet for a few minutes playing games on her phone, Celeste felt awake enough to go downstairs and start her day.

  The creaky staircase announced her arrival long before she reached the bottom, and she rounded the corner to find a peculiar scene. Andrew was looking like the dream husband that he was, flipping pancakes on the stove with a kitchen towel draped over his shoulder. The rest of the image, however, was grimy and dismal. The overall messiness and creepiness of the living room and kitchen stood in direct contrast to the wholesome image of Andrew cooking. She couldn’t help but smile at the juxtaposition. Even in the darkest places, that man managed to be her bright spot.

  Celeste walked up behind Andrew and slipped her arms around his waist before giving him a peck on the cheek. He caught her before she could pull away and gave her a deep kiss in return, which she happily accepted. All those years later, and the two of them still felt like they were honeymooning.

  “Good morning, gorgeous,” he grinned like an idiot as she pulled back, his eyes barely open.

  “You better watch those pancakes, iron chef,” she slapped his butt. “They’ll burn if you don’t pay attention.”

  While Andrew was finishing up cooking, Celeste started looking around for dishes to set the table. He noticed this and said, “Plates are in the top left cabinet, cups are in the cabinet to the right of that, and silverware is in the drawer to the left of the sink.”

  “Impressive,” she said, pulling out two of each dish they would need.

  “It’s like riding a bike.”

  “Yeah, a bike that has a porcelain graveyard.”

  “A bike that used to have a porcelain graveyard,” he corrected with a wink as he put food on the plates. “One that I don’t recall you helping to clean.”

  She gestured vaguely around her as the two of them sat down at the table. “I think I’ll more than make up for it with how much I’m about to clean up around the bike.”

  They chatted over their morning meal, discussing their plan for the day. After breakfast, they both headed upstairs. Celeste brushed her teeth, and each one of them put on some working clothes. Celeste put on one of Andrew’s flannel shirts and tucked it into a pair of old jeans before putting on the boots that she would wear while doing field work.

  Celeste was an ecologist who specialized in soil. Most people’s eyes would glaze over as she told them that, and she completely understood why. From t
he outside, studying dirt seemed comparable to watching paint dry, but she loved it. She was on unpaid leave for the duration of their time in Georgia but was determined to make the most of the trip by getting some soil samples to bring back to Massachusetts.

  Andrew, on the other hand, was a marine biologist, which garnered him far more attention than Celeste ever got when he talked about his career. She understood that too. Marine biology brings to mind playing with dolphins, helping baby sea turtles, and scuba diving. Soil ecology brings to mind literal piles of dirt. She didn’t mind that, though. Andrew may have been the rock star, but she was happy to be the roadie.

  She had always preferred to be in the background. She liked to just do her work and let that be its own reward. Receiving recognition always made her uncomfortable, to the point where she almost skipped her college graduation. She ended up attending, but only because she knew that her parents would’ve been devastated if she didn’t.

  After they were both dressed for their first day of cleaning, Andrew announced that it was time for the tour and led Celeste toward the end of the hall, declaring that the best place to start was, in fact, the attic. He stopped short as they approached the old pull-down ladder. She followed his gaze and saw it too; there was a padlock on the door.

  Andrew looked around the hallway briefly before spotting a stool in the corner. He pulled the stool over and sat it underneath the entrance before stepping up onto it. Celeste watched as he inspected the old padlock, a look of dismay darkening his face.

  “The skeleton key definitely won’t fit this,” he said. “But I don’t know where the old man kept his keys.”

  “Didn’t you ever go up there when you lived here?” Celeste asked.

  “Nope. He never let me. Always said it was too dangerous,” he stepped down off the stool and returned it to the corner. He fixed his gaze on the lock and scratched his chin. “Come to think of it, I only ever saw the guy go up there once or twice himself.”

  The two of them stared up at the locked door, tantalized by the mystery. Celeste thought about how there was no faster way to pique someone’s interest than to put them in an old building with locked doors. But quickly after that thought came, her mind drifted to all the other work that needed to be done around the property, and she decided it wasn’t worth wasting time over at that moment.

  “Maybe we’ll find the key while we’re going through his stuff,” she shrugged.

  “Not if I find some bolt cutters first,” he replied. “I don’t have the patience to search for a key in this mess. I want to clean it up just enough to sell it to the state. I can almost guarantee there’s nothing in this house worth keeping.”

  “I think you might be surprised, babe. Just promise me you’ll at least look through things before you throw them away?”

  He looked sullen for a moment, and Celeste could see the gears turning in his head, searching for a protestation worth trying. She smirked with satisfaction as his search proved fruitless and he gave up.

  “Alright, you win. But I don’t have to like it.”

  She gave him a quick kiss and a slap on the butt as he continued their tour. The two of them went from room to room in the upstairs hallway, starting with the closet next to the bathroom. Celeste nearly screamed when she opened the door and found it full of spiderwebs. She threw herself back against the opposite wall and demanded that Andrew close it immediately, a plea he responded to by scooping up a small strand of the webbing and waving it in front of her face.

  A few shouts and punches later, Andrew was rubbing his arm as he led her past the bathroom and his bedroom, all the way to Corvus’s door. She held her breath as Andrew pushed it open, letting out a small sigh of relief when it looked nothing like it had looked in her nightmare from the other night. She didn’t know what she would have done if her dream had contained a perfect depiction of a room she had never seen before, but it wouldn’t have been rational or helpful. She knew that much.

  The room wasn’t nearly as creepy as she had imagined it to be, outside of the fact that a man had died in it a week ago. The furniture was well maintained, if not a little bit dusty, and nothing stood out of place. Surprisingly, it was a normal-looking old man’s bedroom.

  The tour continued as the couple went down the stairs, the cacophonous creaking sending Gracie, who had been sleeping in a sunbeam in the living room, running. They had seen the main floor plenty. There was a living room directly inside the front door, a bathroom off the living room, a kitchen separated by a low wall, and a mud room connected to that, which contained the back door. The whole space was a mess, and Andrew and Celeste spent a little bit of time sitting on a couch amongst the clutter of the living room, strategizing how they would tackle the massive project.

  They decided that their best bet would be to divide their focus between the organizational tasks inside and the moving tasks outside, and of course Andrew cracked a joke about how excited he was to let her do all the heavy lifting out on the porch. Celeste rolled her eyes at his corniness, but she was secretly just glad he was making jokes again. She loved him with her whole heart, and it hurt to see him mourn and grieve for the past week. She knew the process was far from over, but the progress still brought a smile to her face.

  “Okay,” Andrew said as he stood up from the couch they were lounging on. “Time to finish leg one of the tour off with the basement.”

  “What’s leg two?” She asked.

  “The barn. We’ll need to clean it out and then search the fields for any tools or equipment Corvus might have left out.”

  “Maybe the barn can wait until after we’ve finished with the house,” Celeste suggested as they walked over to the basement door, which sat next to the bathroom.

  “That’s fine by me, but I want to go out there and look for a pair of bolt cutters after we wrap this up.”

  “Then I’ll follow you out to get some soil samples.”

  Together, and with Gracie in tow, the couple opened the door and went down into the basement.

  ***

  A rush of cool, dank air flew out from the basement below as Andrew opened the door. He reached over to the wall next to him and flipped a switch. A few seconds passed with no response before a dim yellow light illuminated the stairs in front of him. He led Celeste down into the cramped space. The ceiling was barely seven feet tall, forcing Andrew to duck underneath floor supports and the single bulb that hung down from one of the beams.

  The basement was unfinished and nearly empty. The dirt floor and haphazard walls gave Andrew the impression that it was more of a walled-off part of the crawlspace than it was a true basement. The only things down there were an ancient water heater and furnace, each one with a few pipes or vents leading away from it and running out beyond the wooden planks that served as walls.

  Gracie bounded past the two of them at the edge of the stairs and immediately took to sniffing everything. Seemingly aware of the extra crawlspace that lay on the other side of the walls, she started intently examining a portion of one of them. Andrew and Celeste watched her for a moment before stepping into the middle of the room.

  “Well,” he said. “This is the basement.”

  “This tour has truly been incredible,” Celeste deadpanned.

  “Were you expecting more?” He asked.

  “Not necessarily more. I guess the dolls just made this place seem worse than it was. For example,” she gestured to the water heater and furnace. “I really thought the basement would be way creepier than this.”

  A small crack echoed from behind them. Andrew and Celeste both turned to look at each other before slowly pivoting around to see what had produced the sound. Gracie was rolling on the floor, happily wrestling with a long piece of wood that she must have broken off of the wall. Both of them let out a small sigh of relief that no real damage had been done, then they moved forward in unison to pet the cat and try to get the wood away from her, a maneuver they had attempted countless times.

  Having been satis
factorily petted and managing to keep ahold of her new toy, Gracie hopped up and strolled away, dragging the lumber back up the stairs with her. The couple watched her go, laughing to themselves about who owned whom. Andrew stooped down to look at the board she had broken. The last thing he wanted was to have to spend money to make the home sellable.

  The walls were made up of thin four-foot by four-foot sheets of plywood fastened to the support beams of the house. Gracie had broken the corner of the sheet closest to the stairs, revealing a small little opening. Curious, Andrew pulled out his phone and turned on the flashlight before holding it up the hole and pressing his face in close. There was mostly just dirt and rocks as he passed the light around, but he could have sworn he saw something sitting right up against the wall, just too far to be seen from his vantage point.

  “I think there’s something back there,” he said, debating whether or not it was worth prying open the wall to find out.

  “Andrew Wilson,” Celeste said in the tone that she reserved for when she thought he was trying to mess with her. “If you’re trying to scare me, I swear to God I will leave you alone out here to rot.”

  “Celeste Wilson,” he replied in the tone that he reserved for reassuring her that he was, in fact, being serious. “I legitimately think something is back there.”

  He stood up and examined the plywood panel, shining a light around until he found where the nail was embedded with their heads slightly lifted off the board. He looked over at the other boards and saw that their nails were all flush to the wood. Something was back there.

  “These nails aren’t fully driven in,” Andrew announced. “If I had a hammer, I could pry them up.”