For a while nobody talked, and the atmosphere got pretty strange inside the car. I knew I'd done okay. If I was ever going to turn them back, I'd just taken my best shot. I'd made it weird and spooky. It was so quiet in there you could hear the wind whistle over the hood and the tires thumping over bad road. And there was nobody around for miles.
Pretty good place for a ghost story.
It hung in the air a long moment. I could feel the chips stacking up along my side of the table.
For a second or two I thought I had it. Then Casey calmly cut me
Her voice was so ordinary-sounding you'd have thought I'd been reciting as hopping list. But at least Steve was a little nervous.
"Jeez, isn't that enough?"
"Of course not. It only makes it better. Clan, I want to ask you something. Do you really believe there's anybody in there?"
"There could be."
"I didn't ask you that. I asked you if you really believed there was.
The truth, Clan."
"I'm really not nuts about going in there, Case."
"You're hedging."
Ill
I could have lied to her. I could have said, sure, I'm about ninety percent certain the devil's rolling around in there-but I didn't. I couldn't. We'd both said a lot to each other just the night before. It wasn't a great time to start lying.
"Okay. No, I don't think there is. But I want you to know... there
As limp as wilted lettuce.
Casey smiled. "See? Just as I said. The possibility makes it all the nicer. It was a good try, Clan. Don't worry. If the cops show, we'll cover for you."
"Great."
How she meant to do that I didn't know. Only that she'd read me like a book. And knowing her, I couldn't entirely put it past her. Maybe she had some disappearing act for me in that green bag she was holding in her lap-holding very tightly. I wondered what was in there besides the army shirt. It looked bulky.
I kept kicking myself. Maybe I'd played it badly. Maybe if I'd told them sooner.
We were off to do something dumb again.
Maybe we'd done things just as stupid before but about this one I had a very bad feeling. I could have said forget it, take me home. I could have said I'd wait in the car. I considered both things, then rejected them. It wasn't that I was proving anything, that I was worried about Casey's reaction. I'd have lost a few points. But she'd have gotten over it.
The problem wasn't that. The problem was that without me it would be the three of them alone there. She'd do it anyway. And the way Kim was giggling beside me again and the way Steve was driving they'd go along no matter what I did. The three of those clowns alone in there.
That thought bothered me.
If anything went wrong I wanted to be inside. I didn't want to depend on Kim and Steve to keep her safe and healthy. Nor did I trust her to take care of herself particularly. She was smart and she was strong, but she took chances. Bad chances. I worried about her.
And there was another thing. Something that now, today, I'm pretty ashamed to admit to.
You see, there was this idiot voice inside me, already creepy-crawling through a dark house in the middle of the night. The voice snickered.
It was very cute, very wised-up and cynical.
Besides, it said, you never know.
It could be fun.
I knew of a safe place to put the car, off a narrow access road through the woods about a quarter of a mile from the house. Nobody would notice it there, at least not till early morning. By then we'd be gone.
Even with the moonlight it was dark. It was one of the few places around where the trees grew tall and spread wide, covering the sky, black pine and birch and poplar. We parked beneath a stand of white birch. When we cut the headlights the trees seemed to carry a glow as though we'd irradiated them with light.
Beyond that it was black.
You could already hear the sea. A distant rumbling. There was no wind. The trees were still. Just the dry scrape of crickets and the faraway tumble and boom of ocean.
"Clan, you know this road, right?"
"Sure, Case."
"Any surprises?"
"Shouldn't be. No big storms this season."
"Then douse the flashlights."
"Why?" There was a tinge of whine to Steven's voice I didn't care for.
"Try it."
I knew what she was after. There we were in the dark, with the smell of damp earth and overheated car around us, listening to the mix of strident arid scrapings and liquid thunder.
"See?"
"Spooky," said Kim.
"That's it."
For a while we just stood and listened, and then Steve said, "I guess that's what we're here for," and the tone of it was more relaxed, and I liked it better. I suppose it's a problem, being rich and spoiled.
Even if you grow up pretty decent the only things you have to fall back on are the old, obnoxious habits, and they never make you look like much. In times of stress they come flying back at you like ghosts of squalling children.
We started off down the road, me in the lead, the two girls together behind me and Steve bringing up the rear.
The road was rough and pitted, strewn with rocks and studded with holes, more weathered than I'd thought it would be. If somebody twisted an ankle, it was going to be a very short evening. So I went slowly. For the first couple of yards all you could hear was the four of us scraping along. Then the road got a little better and our walking that much quieter.
It was eerie. Walking in front of everybody, I had the feeling of great aloneness-we four in the empty night. And even we seemed insubstantial. Just sounds of motion like the sea and the raspings of insects. Kim stumbled and cursed and Casey laughed, but aside from that nobody spoke a word. We were made of shoe leather and silence out there, and that was all.
The road got bad again. But the trees broke apart overhead, so you could see a little better. There was a dead branch ahead, and I kicked it out of our way. It made a rustling, crackling sound in the bushes, like a fire burning. Pebbles rolled along with it. On the dry road they were hollow-sounding. The air was heavy with the scent of evergreen.
Off to the left something moved in the brush. I stopped. The footsteps behind me stopped too. A moment later I saw cattails waving a few feet further on. We'd startled something. A raccoon, maybe.
Something roughly that size.
"What was that?" You could hear the thrill in Kim's voice.
"Coon. Possum. Grizzly maybe. It's hard to tell."
There was a moment's pause and then she laughed and called me a bastard.
"Could be a rattlesnake. They grow 'em big around here. So watch your step."
"Could be one of those cockroaches," said Steven. "The big ones. The kind that carry off babies."
"We had them back in Boston," said Kim.
Then they were giggling back there for a while. There was a little tussle going on. I turned around and saw him tickling her. She started squealing. I looked at Casey.
"I don't think we've scared 'em yet. Do you?"
"Just wait."
We turned a bend in the road and then just ahead you could see where the trees stopped and the clearing began, the long grass, weeds and brambles. Framed in the last arch of birch trees you could see the Crouch house, a single black mass against the starry sky.
I'd never approached the house this way at night before. So it was sort of shocking. If ever a house looked haunted, it was the Crouch place. Suddenly all the stories we'd told about it as kids came back to me all at once, and looking at it, you had to wonder if there wasn't a grain of truth in them, as though maybe we'd all had some instinct about the place, some knowledge in the blood and marrow.
How do you credit the creature under the bed? The monster in the closet?
you oo uui you oon l.
It was black, solid black, and because there was nothing but the sea behind it, it seemed to drop right off into nowhere. Like the end of something.
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The house at the end of the world.
It was bad enough remembering the real things, the things I knew to be true about the place. The dogs. Starved and eaten. The smell of animal waste and bodies bloated with heat and death. The stacks and stacks of newspapers-in a house where nobody could read. The smeared, discolored walls inside.
But there was all the other stuff too. Ideas I'd grown up with, shuddered over, laughed at, scared myself with over and over again.
The vampires and the evil and the dead. All that came back too, like
a sudden childish vision of madness and cruelty. As we moved through the last stands of trees, as the sky grew bigger overhead, I thought of those things and wondered what I was doing here, like a vulture visiting old corpses.
And I thought about Ben and Mary.
Of idiocy taken to its very extremity. And, in that extremity, made evil.
We broke through to open clearing. Once it had been a pasture. All at once the night sounds seemed to shift and alter around us. Steps were softer. The sea was louder. We were in tall grass now. The crickets screeched us a jib bering welcome.
"Wow," said Kim.
We stopped and looked straight up where she was looking. A huge pool of stars, gouging light into the blue-black sky. The moon was so clear you could see the gray areas against the white.
I've seen a thousand nights like this from a thousand fields, and they never cease to calm me. This one calmed me now.
After a while I said, "Come on."
I've told you I have this habit of staring at the ground ahead of me when I walk. I'd been doing that back on the road, but I wasn't now.
I was focused on that house. Not so nervous now but still focused.
Fascinated.
For a while it was nothing but a dark bulk rising off the flatlands, beyond which was nothing you could see. I knew what was back there. A short spit of land and then a cliff dropping down to the sea. I recalled a porch back there and a kind of widow's walk on the second floor.
And then as we got closer you could make out some of the details in front. Gray-brown barn board covering the porch and the entire front of the house, just as it had been in Ben and Mary's time. Three windows on the second floor, shuttered. Two on the first floor, with one of the shutters torn or blown away and an empty pane where the glass should be. Off to the left, an outhouse. A newer wood there it looked like pine to me. I thought how foul Ben and Mary's must have been, and I guessed the old doctor had replaced it. I would have.
Once there had been a barn. But that had burned down some years ago.
I remembered where it was located. The grass grew somewhat longer there.
There were four steps up to the porch. The wood was old, spongy and gave underfoot. So did the porch beams.
The doorway was crude. Strictly post and lintel. It was made of heavy oak, like the door itself. Tacked to the crossbeam of the lintel was a faded blue ribbon, and dangling from the ribbon, facing dead ahead like some bizarre knocker, was a fish head mouth agape. The flesh had long since rotted away leaving only three square inches of clean white bone, empty eyed and hollow.
Steve flicked it with his finger. "You put out the welcome mat for us, Case?"
It rattled lightweight against the oak then was still again. Casey shook her head.
"Nope. Wish I'd thought of it. But it's kids, I guess."
"Kids, yeah."
We stood there a moment, feeling awkward, silly. Well, here we were.
Kids. Casey gave me a grin.
"Who's going to open it?"
I turned the rusted doorknob and gave it a push.
"Locked."
I looked around. I kept having this feeling that somebody had to be watching. We were about to break into a house. So somebody had to know. It was obvious we were going to get caught. I hadn't the luck for anything better.
"There's a window broken over here. One of us can probably slip through and unlock it from the inside."
I looked at Steven.
"Not me." He gestured toward the linen pants. "Whites."
So that was the reason for the beach-party outfit. I took his flashlight from him and walked over to the window. I flicked on the light. I had plenty of room to get through. The window was at chest level. I could hop in easily. But damned if I wanted to.
There was one big spike of glass pointing upward from the bottom pane.
I lifted it out of the window and tossed it into the tall grass. There was no sound of breakage.
I turned the beam on the floor inside. There was a lot of broken glass there, but nothing that would get in the way of my climbing in. I swept the bottom pane with the base of the flashlight just to be sure there were no small pieces of glass to grab me. Then I handed it back
I turned with my back to the window and reached inside and found the upper line of molding with my fingertips. I brought my head, shoulders and chest inside, and was immediately aware of the cool, moldy smell of the place. Then I pulled myself up and swung my ass and legs into the room. I set myself down in a crunch of broken glass. Steve handed me the flashlight.
Once I was in there the adrenaline really started pumping. That was it. Breakin. From now on they could arrest you.
Chit
OMIT..
The first thing I did was sweep the room with the flashlight. A brief impression of empty space, an old wooden table and a potbellied stove left behind. I was in the kitchen. It had been a big kitchen. You could see the rust stains on the linoleum floor where the refrigerator had been. There was wallpaper with a fruit-and-berry motif. There were dirty white tiles over the kitchen sink. I thought that at least the moldings over the doors and windows had been scraped and varnished, not painted. The same with the cabinets. Somebody had cared a little.
A two-year-old gas-station calendar hung from a nail on the wall beside me. The month was December. There was a picture of a pair of terrier pups peering over the edge of a Christmas stocking, liquid eyed and plaintive. Directly down the wall from that, over the baseboard, was an empty telephone jack. On the floor lay a small broken end table, over on its side.
I went to the door.
It was double-locked, a Segal lock and a bolt type. I turned the one and threw the other. Casey led them in and I closed the door behind them.
"Lights on," she said, and her beam and Kim's joined mine.
Directly in front of us was the stairwell leading to the second floor, right off the kitchen. The planking looked solid enough. The banisters seemed to have been replaced recently.
I was beginning to realize that I hardly recognized the place. For one thing, I didn't remember any stairwell at all. Maybe there had been too much going on that day. And I'd been pretty young. Maybe the place had done some shape-shifting in my memory since then.
I realized it must have been the kitchen where they'd found the bodies.
Inside, though, the house lost a lot of its ominous quality. Except for Casey, I think we all were glad of that. You couldn't get too worked up over fruit-and-berry wallpaper.
I walked past the stairwell into the living room. Casey followed me.
Kim and Steven had a look inside the kitchen.
The living room was pretty empty. A single overstuffed chair and an old couch with half the stuffing ripped out of them in tiny chunks and scattered all over the floor. I wondered if that was mice. Mice would eat nearly anything, or try to. Then there was another end table, this one still standing, beneath the window to the rear of the house. If you opened the shutters and looked out the window, off to the right you could see the dark weathered boards of the woodshed.
There was a fireplace in the room, and an old set of andirons. A standing lamp and a single straight-back chair made of pine, with one of the dowel spines missing. That was all.
Steve and Kim appeared in the doorway. They leaned into the room and looked around.
"Not many places to hide," said Steve. He turned and deposited a brown bag with two six-pack
s of beer inside on the kitchen table.
"We'll find places," said Casey. "There's upstairs, and Clan says there's a basement. There's a woodshed right outside this window, if anybody's interested."
Kim made a face. "Yuchh."
"Did anybody find the basement?"
"There's a door off the kitchen." Steve looked slightly em bar