Hide and Seek (13 page)

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-packs 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

"That's probably it," I told them. "I didn't notice." We went into the kitchen. The door was built into the internal wall off to the left opposite the back door to the house, so that the steps ran under the stairwell. I saw why I hadn't noticed it at first.

Standing at the window you were blind to it. The door was tiny-only about four-and-a-half feet tall. It looked more like a storage closet.

It was locked.

Casey dug into her book bag. "Try this," she said and handed me a screwdriver.

"You're very resourceful."

"This is news to you?"

The fit between the door and the molding was uneven, so it was easy to slip the screwdriver between them and pry, and I guess the groove was worn away pretty badly, because it gave almost immediately.

"There you go."

"Our hero," said Kim. There was nervous laughter.

The door fell open. Our flashlights played over the old rotten stairs.

There was a rough railing constructed of two-by-four pine reinforced with irregular lengths of cheap planking, dark and weathered, as though it had been pulled off some barn and tacked hastily in place. Off to the left you could see the stained, rusted hulk of a boiler.

It was hard to see the rest through the cobwebs.

"I think they're growing 'em big down there," said Steve.

Kim put her hand on Casey's arm. "Do we really have to bother?"

"Of course. It's hideous. Come on."

I offered her the flashlight Steven had appropriated hers when she'd gone digging for the screwdriver. She gave me an ironic look and took it from me and stepped carefully down the stairs. Halfway down she turned around. The three of us stood there like passengers waiting for a train. I was leaning against the doorframe, a little hunched over, scratching my chin. Kim stood behind me with her arms folded over her chest. Steven wasstaringatthe ceiling, tapping his foot impatiently.

We imagined the view from where she stood and broke out laughing.

"You guys," she said.

I turned to Kimberley, ignoring her.

"You hear anything?"

"Nah. Nothing but spiders down there."

"I must have heard spiders, then."

"Big, imperious ones."

"I'm giving you five seconds," said Casey, "the three of you, and then I start screaming

"Coming, Mother," said Kim. "Don't scream.

"Jesus, no," said Steve. "You'll wake the spiders!"

We started down the stairs. Casey held her light for me so wouldn't go crashing into her. Suddenly, with four pairs of feet on the staircase, things got very noisy.

It's funny how when you're a little scared noise helps.

Maybe you figure that if you announce yourself, the goblins cut and run.

We looked around.

"Gross," said Steven.

It had been a kind of workshop once; you could see that much. Beyond the boiler, against the wall to the far left, was a long, broad wooden table covered with dust and grime, warped and rotting away in places, cluttered with debris from the broken shelves above it. Spilled boxes of nails, broken mason jars that had probably held screws and fittings.

A rusted wood plane and a broken rusted hacksaw. The spiderwebs were thick here. I wondered if the doctor

There was a strange thick smell in the air. I guessed it was mold and mildew, some of it wafting up from a greasy, almost liquid-looking pile of rags off to the far right corner, and some of it from the piles of wood shavings that surrounded the table like gray-yellow anthills. Some of them were near three feet high.

I could also smell paint or varnish, but I couldn't find its source at first. Then Kim brought her flashlight around beneath the table and I could see cans and cans of them, tumbled and spilling all over, their contents freezing them together like some crazy sculpture.

There was another smell too, but I couldn't figure that one.

Kim straightened up. "I take it they weren't big on housekeeping."

"Guess not."

The area toward the back of the house was worse. It looked like the debris of generations there. There was a big grandfather clock, its face broken as though someone had smashed it with a

Jsledgehammer, its works spilling out over the cabinet ledge to the floor. The double cabinets themselves looked dusty but in pretty fair condition. Propped up beside it was an old tin washtub big enough to bathe in, its underside rusted clean away.

Here, too, were all the old accoutrements of farm life. I guessed there hadn't been much lost when the barn burned down. Most everything was in here. A small plow with a broken handle, hoes, rakes, a couple of pitchforks with splayed and broken tines. In one corner a mound of scrap reached halfway up the wall-shovels, an old harness, horseshoes, buckets filled with nails and keys and doorknobs, a currycomb, locks, window fittings, a dog's studded collar, pots and pans, a gunstock, rimless wheels, a pair of flatirons, a whip, buckles, belts, work gloves, knives, a dull pitted axe. We stood back and looked. You didn't want to get too close to it at all.

"This place is crawling with antiques," said Kim.

"Junk," said Steve.