Charnel House (21 page)

Bobby scrambled up onto the ledge behind his cousin. The steel beam chilled his hand where he touched it, but he found its solidity reassuring. The thought of so much concrete overhead was a little daunting. Tanner had crawled all the way to the far end of the
(throat)
tunnel,
keeping the lit match in front of him, and was turning to take a seat against one of the beams. As Bobby crawled in, his cousin lit a new match from the sputtering flame. The thin white smoke tickled his nostrils.

“Damn, man, how’d you know about this place?” Joey said from behind him.

“You ain’t the only one who goes fishing with his dad,” Tanner said. “He brought me here a couple of months ago and I went exploring because we weren’t catching shit.”

The match singed his fingers and he dropped it with a hiss of pain. Bobby took a seat next to him and Joey folded himself against the other beam, his knees crooked up so high they nearly brushed the concrete roof. Traffic rumbled above, the heavy vibrating hum more felt through the steel against his back than heard with his ears. This far in it was as dark as night, and the opening to the outside seemed far away, like that Narnia place Dana loved to talk about. His eyes hadn’t acclimated yet, and the other boys were little more than blurs in the gloom.

“You ready to hear the story?” Tanner asked.

“I guess so.” Tanner seemed a lot more interested in this Jeremiah Barlowe thing than Bobby was. Scary stories weren’t usually his thing, because he got his fill most Sunday mornings from Brother Peavey, who liked to wax poetic on Satan and the way he roamed the earth like a ravenous beast, reaping the souls of the weak. Hair-curling stuff. Who needed ghost stories when the real world was already terrifying?

“Jeremiah Barlowe was
born right here in Belleville, just like me and Joey,” Tanner said. “His pop ran the only bank in town, and even though he was practically rich everybody liked him because he was a good guy and cut people some slack if they were having trouble making payments.”

“My daddy says there’s no such thing as a good banker,” Joey said.

“Maybe your daddy didn’t know this one.” Tanner paused, waiting for a comeback, but Joey stayed quiet. “Jeremiah was a pain in the ass from the beginning, always in trouble in school when he was a kid, and then with the law when he was older. When he was eighteen, he got caught in a haymow with a girl. A
thirteen
year-old girl.”

“I’m thirteen, and I wouldn’t mind getting it on with a girl who was eighteen,” Joey said. “Have us a little horizontal bop.”

“You wouldn’t know what to do if you got the chance,” Tanner snorted. “
Any
way, he ended up in front of a judge, who gave him a choice: sign up to be a doughboy or go to jail. Some choice, huh?”

“What’s a doughboy?” Bobby asked. Was Tanner messing with him? The only doughboy he knew about was in the Pillsbury commercials he saw when he was watching TV with his folks.

“You sleep through history class, or what?” Tanner sneered. “An Army boy. Infantry. He got sent to France to fight Jerry in World War I.”

“That’s the Germans,” Joey said.

“I knew
that
.” But he hadn’t, not really. Maybe he
had
been sleeping during history.

“He came back with a bum leg and a medal,” Tanner said. “Jerry nearly took his leg off with a trench mortar, but not before he had been in raids on two machine gun nests and killed eight Germans. The medics saved his leg, but only barely. Good old Jeremiah maybe wasn’t such a bad guy after all, it turned out. At least not then.”

“I think he got a taste for killing over there,” Joey said.

Tanner’s eyes flashed in the darkness. “Don’t get ahead of me, man.”

Something big went over the bridge and for a moment the only sound was the thrum of tires as it passed. Bobby’s eyes felt like they were jittering in their sockets. His cousin was an idiot for bringing them into a place like this for his story.

“They threw a parade when he got home,” Tanner continued. “The governor came up from Montgomery to ride in the back of the car with him and everything. He was a real hero. People forgave him and started to love him like they had his dad—he died of a heart attack while Jeremiah was overseas—at least until he bought the old house on Hickory Hill and started to lose his mind.”

Bobby perked up a little. A spooky old house sounded interesting, like something right out of the Three Investigators books. Jupiter Jones and his buddies weren’t quite as awesome as Frank and Joe Hardy or Starsky and Hutch, but they were pretty great in their own way, always investigating supernatural happenings. Like Scooby Doo and the gang. Plus, they got to hang out with Alfred Hitchcock, who was an honest-to-goodness real person. “What old house?”

“You see that hill when we were walking to the store?”

“Sure.” It was the only one around. He’d have to have been blind to miss it.

“That’s Hickory Hill. Jeremiah Barlowe’s house is up there, on the top. That’s where he killed his whole family and three little kids back in the forties.”

Bobby felt a cool finger trace a path down his spine. A real murder house, barely a mile away! He found the thought simultaneously horrifying and fascinating. “Why did he do that?”

“In a minute.” Tanner shifted, making himself more comfortable, warming to the storytelling. “He spent the next few years after the war managing a cotton gin just this side of Huntsville—he couldn’t do a lot of physical work on account of his gimp leg—but that place went out of business in 1935 because the price of cotton had dropped so much they couldn’t afford to keep it open. You know what that crazy fool went and did then?”

“What?” Bobby asked. Despite himself, he was getting caught up in the story.

“Ran for sheriff in 1936,” Tanner said, sounding almost as proud as if he’d done it himself. “Nobody thought a half-cripple stood a chance in the election, even if he was a hometown war hero, but the son-of-a-bitch
won
. Old Jeremiah Barlowe and his bum leg, shot to shit in the first World War, got himself elected to the highest office in the county!”

Joey hooted with delight. “Holy shit, you never told me that part!”

“Sometimes it pays to hang around Crossen’s when the old geezers are in there swapping stories. You can learn all kinds of good old-timey shit.”

The old folks always know the town’s secrets,
Bobby thought. He said, “What about the house?”

“He bought the place in 1941, during his second term.”

“He won
twice
?” Joey seemed to think this was the funniest thing ever, and laughed so hard he began to wheeze. Tanner leaned across the tunnel and whacked him on the back and told him to knock it off.

“But that means... means he was... the one in charge...” Joey began, then dissolved into gales of laughter.

Tanner grinned, but there wasn’t much humor in it. “Jeremiah planned to retire when his second term was up—he got married in 1937 and his wife had twins in 1938, and she was afraid he’d get killed and leave the babies without a father—and got it into his head that a bed and breakfast would be a good idea for Belleville. The Japs had bombed Pearl Harbor and we were about to get into another world war. The Army decided to put a base over by Huntsville to make munitions and—”

“Redstone Arsenal!” Bobby said. “My dad works there.”

“That’s the place, only they called it Huntsville Arsenal back then. The Army bought up land from the river almost all the way to Belleville, and kicked everybody out. Jeremiah knew there’d be a lot of people coming in to visit, generals and politicians and whatnot, and decided they needed someplace to stay. Someplace with
real southern hospitality
. That’s what Hink—Blaylock, he’s the one who told me the story—said. Back in those days there weren’t hotels everywhere like now.”

“So he bought the house on Hickory Hill,” Joey said. He rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands.

“So he bought the house on Hickory Hill,” Tanner agreed. “After everyone in town told him not to because even a damn fool knew that old place was haunted. That’s why it had been empty so long.”

“It was an old place in the forties?” Joey asked. “Jesus Christ, how long has the thing been up there?”

“Hink said the house was built in the 1820’s and has spent more years empty than not. Lots of people die up there.”

The finger skittered down Bobby’s spine again.
Lots of people die up there
. What had happened to all of them? He tried to conceive of a house that might be over a hundred and fifty years old and couldn’t. The country itself wasn’t much older than that!

In the fourth grade, his whole class had piled onto a bus one sunny spring morning and driven over to Pond Spring, where General Joe Wheeler—some bigwig in the Civil War—had lived. The general’s boxy white house had seemed impossibly ancient at one hundred, and Tanner was talking about one half again as old. He didn’t remember much else about the tour except that the woman guiding them through the mansion had pointed out to them a plaster foot—
cast from the general himself
, she told them—resting on the mantel in the parlor, and said that people who stayed in the house at night sometimes heard that foot thumping and bumping on the stairs. Her story had sent the same delicious chill down his back that he now felt.

“Why don’t they just tear the house down?” he asked.

Tanner shrugged. “All I know is that it’s been around forever, and Jeremiah bought it and moved his family in the spring of 1942. Hink says that’s when he changed. When he started to go crazy.”

Maybe they
can’t
tear it down
, whispered the voice in Bobby’s head.
It won’t let them.

“He start talking to telephone poles?” Joey asked.

“Did your mother drop you on your head when you were a baby?”

Bobby snickered. His cousin’s jabs were kind of funny when they weren’t directed at him.

“It wasn’t real obvious at first,” Tanner continued. “Hink said he stopped going to church regular. Jeremiah wasn’t ever a Bible-thumper or anything, but most Sunday mornings he was down at the Methodist church on Vine Street. It’s something you have to do if you’re elected, I think.”

“Until he bought the house,” Bobby said.

“Yep. Nobody made a big deal about it, but folks noticed. Then he got quiet, Hink said, which
really
set people to talking. Old Jeremiah Barlowe had been one of the chattiest bastards around—that probably helped him win the election—all his life, but when he moved up onto the hill that all changed. Over the winter, he started coming to town less and less. He went to work every day, but with the sheriff’s office over in Decatur, folks here in Belleville didn’t see him much. Didn’t realize anything was going wrong. His wife still came down regular, with Mary and Myra—the twins, who were four—but she was quieter, too. Kept to herself. Hink said you could see something in her eyes. He said it looked like she was scared.”

Bobby shivered, the same way he sometimes did when he peed after he’d been holding it for a really long time. His nuts felt like they were pulling up into his gut. Hiding. This story was
much
creepier than anything the Three Investigators or the Hardy Boys had ever dealt with, and he didn’t think it was going to have a happy, easily-explained ending like the stories in those books. Hadn’t Joey said something earlier about Jeremiah Barlowe and some kids under his house? Maybe he was some kind of pervert. Jupiter Jones and the gang never had to deal with anything like that, for sure. Still, the shiver embarrassed him a little. It was just a story, probably more lie than truth, knowing his cousin.
Cripes, I hope neither of them saw—

“Is it too much for you?” Joey asked. “Cause he hasn’t even gotten to the good part yet.”

Bobby didn’t have to see the mocking grin to know it was there. “No, I’m fine. I just have to pee.”

“Well shit, crawl out there and pee,” Tanner said. “I don’t want you wetting your pants like a baby when it gets scary.”

Bobby felt his face growing warm. “Go on. I don’t have to go that bad.”

“The first little boy went missing in February of 1943. Cal Wexler. Or Waxman. I can’t remember now. He was eight years old, and he disappeared walking home from school one Friday. Practically the whole town turned out to look for him, trekking through the woods and cotton fields and marshy areas—Belleville was a lot smaller then, Hink said, and there was a
lot
of empty ground to cover—for three days.”

“And the sheriff was leading the search personally,” Joey said, giggling. The sound grated in the tight space. “I’m sure he looked really
hard.
”

“They only searched for three days?” Bobby asked. He felt his jaw tightening, more from dread than anticipation. He didn’t want to hear Tanner’s response... but he
had
to.

“No, that’s when the second kid vanished. This time it was a girl, also on her way home from school. Patricia Stinnett. She was nine. The town went bananas.”

Bobby tried to imagine what it must have been like. He’d seen enough of
The Andy Griffith Show
and
Green Acres
to have an idea of life in a place like Belleville in the old days. Simple. Placid. Slow. It must have been terrifying to know there was a monster stalking the town and not be able to do anything about it.

“Her family went to the Baptist church out on Seven Mile Post road, and they had a prayer service for her that Wednesday,” Tanner said. “Got themselves worked into a proper lather, Hink told me.
Spoiling for trouble
, he said. And then someone stood up and said his little boy told him the janitor at the elementary school had been watching him in the bathroom that very day. That’s all it took. A group of men piled into someone’s pickup and they drove over to niggertown.”

“Oh hell,” Joey said. “You didn’t tell me this part, either.”

“I didn’t know it.”

Bobby crossed his arms and tried not to think about the pressure building in his bladder. There was no way he was about to go pee now. “Did they find him?”

Tanner nodded slowly. “They found him, alright. His name was Everett Moody, and he was in the first world war, just like Jeremiah Barlowe. Came home with an injury too, same as Jeremiah. He got fragged by a grenade, and shrapnel in his brain turned him into a retard, mostly. He lived with his mama.”

“Fuck me,” Joey moaned.

“What happened to him?” Bobby asked, even though the sinking feeling in his gut told him he already knew the answer.

“Oh, they killed him. Deader than shit, that’s for sure,” Tanner said, matter-of-factly. “Dragged him out of his mama’s house and cracked his skull with an axe handle to shut up his bawling, then loaded him into the back of the truck and brought him back over to the white part of town. They strung him up from the branch of an oak tree in the schoolyard.”