House Haunted (17 page)

In the dark place, he controlled the tremor in his skin, turned his face into part of a smile.

“It's a girl, Mum,” he lied, but even in his lie a relief flooded through him because he was able even to pretend to unburden himself to her.

“Oh?” She lifted her face up, and the only dim surprise she registered told Ricky that he had hit something along the lines of what she had expected. “And who would this girl be?”

“I . . . can't tell you that.” He was filled with panic, not knowing where to go next.

“I see.” She was silent, turning her face away from him, hands in her lap, thinking. Ricky knew for certain now that he had said the right thing.

She turned her face back to him, patting her hand on his knee below the sheet and leaving it there. “I had a feeling we might be having this talk someday,” she said. “Thinking about this day coming made me wish—and that was the only time I ever wished such a thing—that you had been born a girl. For I don't really know how to go about it.” She looked away uncomfortably, then back at him with a level gaze. “Did you get her pregnant?”

“What?” Ricky almost laughed. “Why, no, Mum, of course not!”

He saw her task immediately made easier. “Then what is this trouble? Do you feel love for her and she doesn't love you?”

Ricky reached quickly, thinking of Reesa. “She loves me, Mum. But she already has a boyfriend.”

“I
see
.” His mother now seemed to be relishing her role, playing out daytime soap opera plots in her mind. He imagined she knew whom he was talking about. “And would this boyfriend be one of your
best
friends?”

So caught in his own lie that he half-believed it now, Ricky blushed.

“Ah,” his mother said. She squeezed his leg and stood up leisurely, reaching around to rub at her back. Ricky saw that there was a smile, a sad, perhaps memory-drenched, smile on her face.

“Ricky,” she said tenderly, looking down at him with all the love a mother could contain (down in the dark place he trembled, seeing her, briefly, flat on a table with three screw-drivers in her chest and the look of “Why?” on her frozen features), “Ricky boy, there's nothing anyone can do for you. You're filled with love like a puppy, and you have to let things work their way out. It's something we all do.” She gave a relieved sigh. “You had me so worried! Ricky,” she said, putting her hand to his face, “this will pass. Believe me it will. What I say may sound foolish to you now, and may be foolish, but we all must be our own fools in our own way. One thing I know,” she said, slapping his cheek playfully, “is that you cannot stay in bed forever. You have to drink up sunshine. And rain, too. You have to live in the world. Now get up out of your bed and let your problems live in the world, not in your poor head.”

She smacked him again, and he found himself almost laughing—and then actually laughing, sliding on the bed away from her playful smacks, finally yelling, “All right! All right, Mum!” He hopped out of bed. “I'm up! See me? I'm up!”

“
Good boy
!” she said, taking his face in her hands and kissing his forehead. “Now go outside where you belong.” She shook her head and sighed as she walked from the room. “Oh, for heaven,” she added as she walked from the room, “it's times like these I wish your papa were still alive . . .”

Twenty minutes later, Ricky was heading to Spook's house on his motorbike. It was the only thing he could do. A false burden had been lifted from him by his mother; perhaps Spook could help to lift the real one.

Spook was not home; nor was Spook's father. The lawn chair sat empty on the front lawn. Of course, Spook's father would be at work. It was Saturday, and his shifts had begun to run through both Saturday and Sunday, leaving him two days midweek to sit on his lawn and get quietly drunk and think about his rotten wife, Spook's mother, who was a fine woman but never good enough.

There was only one place that Spook would be. Feeling a twinge of guilt at the story he had just told his mother, and feeling a tiny guilty poke because he really
had
begun to notice Reesa as more than one of the chums, and maybe if Charlie didn't want her for anything more than a friend there might be a chance for him with her yet, he gunned the motorbike onto James Road and off the long side street down to the ferry dock.

They were all there. A ferry had just left, tooting its horn merrily, tourists waving lazily at the three of them, and at Charlie especially, who was wet and had obviously just completed one of his trick dives into the water. Sometimes he jumped in and held to the bottom of the boat with his flat palms, letting it take him out until he had to breathe and pushed himself away and up, popping through the surface like a dolphin, then swimming slowly, clownishly, back to the dock.

“Did I miss much?” Ricky said, trying to put on a convincing smile.

“Ho! Who's this fellow!” Charlie crowed, still huffing from his swim, dripping water to the concrete. Reesa smiled and Spook held his hand over his heart and stumbled back in mock surprise.

“Risen from the dead!” Spook said.

Coldness went into Ricky, but he held his smile.

“Say, what's been wrong with you?” Charlie said. “Been sick or something?”

Ricky nodded simply. “Much better now. How's it going?”

“Same as ever,” Spook said. He came up close to Ricky, peered into his face. He did it in jest, but something he saw there made him start. “Sure you're all better, Ricky?”

Ricky flashed a smile and hit Spook on the back. “Bad cold, Spook. Just about gone.”

Charlie was toweling himself off; behind him, over the water, the ferry boat had dwindled to a paddling churn of water and steel and wood. The late afternoon sky was lowering; the sun had become orange, and there was the slightest of chills in the air.

Charlie shivered, finished with rubbing his hair, and folded the towel under his arm. “Coming, Reesa?” he said, approaching his bike.

“Sure,” she said. She came to Ricky and looked at him; his guilt rose again briefly as she smiled. “Missed you, Ricky.”

He nodded as she turned to retrieve her own bike from against its wall and mounted it to ride off after Charlie. “See you!” she called back.

“Sure!” Ricky shouted with false brightness.

When he looked back at Spook, he saw that he hadn't fooled his best friend for a moment.

“Let's talk about it,” Spook said.

In the approaching dusk they sat on Spook's front lawn. The rum bottle had found its way out from the bushes. “The old man's on till midnight,” Spook explained. “Mum won't be home till nine.”

They passed the rum and sat in silence. The clouds were high soft wedges, bottoms tinged with sunset. The breeze brought sea smell to them.

Spook drank, then said, “So tell me, Ricky boy.”

Ricky stared at the passed rum bottle for a few moments, then drank from it quickly. “There's a ghost in Chambers House.”

There was true silence, and then Spook exploded in laughter. “What!”

“No joking, Spook. There's a ghost and I saw it. It talked to me.”

Spook fumbled for something in the near-dark. He abruptly turned to Ricky and hissed, widening his eyes, opening his mouth, showing off the glowing plastic vampire teeth he had put on.

“I said no joking, Spook,” Ricky said quietly.

Spook continued to stare at him; he reached into his mouth and took the plastic teeth off and put them away.

“It was a
real
ghost, Spook—”

“There
aren't
any real monsters, Ricky—didn't you know that?”

“I'm not talking about your stories, Spook, I'm talking about something real.”

Spook took the bottle from Ricky's hand and drank. “That's just the point, Ricky boy. They're
all
stories. You think H. P. Lovecraft believed all that crazy stuff he wrote? It's just
stories
. For
fun
.”

Ricky looked at his friend, and then he told him everything, including Mr. Harvey's stories, right through the horrible vision Ricky had been shown in the cellar. Somewhere in the middle of the telling, Spook began to drink seriously from the rum bottle. At the end, he stared at Ricky and laughed.

“Man, you ought to write that down, make some money on it.”

Anger, born of frustration and alcohol, crested up through Ricky. “I
told
—”

“Settle down, boy. Settle down.” Spook put one of his large hands out and checked Ricky's forehead for fever. “Ricky, you're as sane as the night. You have to show me this ghost.”

“
No
.” Ricky stood up, knocking the lawn chair over.

Spook looked up at him calmly, cradling the nearly empty rum bottle in his hands. “I said take me there, Ricky, or there's no way I can believe you.”

“It said it would hurt you! It said it would hurt all of you if I didn't do what it said!”

“And what was that?”

“Nothing, yet. But I
know
it doesn't want anyone else near.”

“How do you know that, Ricky?” Spook said reasonably. A bright, captivated gleam had come into his eyes. “Well..

“Exactly!” Spook rose from his chair, handing Ricky the rum to finish. “Wait here, Ricky boy, and then we'll do what we have to do.”

Not wanting to think, Ricky finished the rum in his hand. But thoughts flooded him. He had been desperate to share his frightening secret with someone; now that he had, fear had grown to encompass guilt. A dim part of him said that he was right to trust in Spook's knowledge; the brighter, keener edge of his mind said that he had merely acted a coward and dragged his friend into his problem.

He saw the night, the darkened clouds moving across the winking stars, the close-cropped sweep of Bermuda leading to the ocean spread before him over Spook's front lawn. And suddenly a fear so deep and true and cold possessed him that he was out of his chair, nearly weeping, and trying to kick start his bike when Spook reappeared.

“Ricky, what you doing!”

A stifled sob escaped him; he kicked and kicked at the starter, but it wouldn't catch.

“This is how you do it,” Spook said from behind him. Spook mounted the bike, forced Ricky's foot away from the pedal, and instantly snapped it down into life with his own sneaker.

They tore down the driveway into the road. Spook laughed. “Don't you worry about any old ghosts.” He held a zippered bag up in front of Ricky's face. “Everything we need to fight ghosts is in here.”

Spook laughed again, and Ricky, finally, gave himself up to the relief of having his friend with him.

The shutters at Chambers House were closed tight. That in itself made Ricky feel the beginnings of security, because that was the way it was supposed to be. They rode the bike through the gate and up to the front porch, dismounted, and Ricky leaned it against the steps.

Spook was already bounding up to the front door, flashlight pulled from the kit bag and snapped on, its beam bouncing up the stair.

“No, the back door,” Ricky said.

Spook bounded ahead, then waited impatiently while Ricky fished his key from his pocket. He took Spook's hand with the flashlight and swung the beam toward the kitchen window next to the back door. It, too, was shuttered tight.

“All right,” Ricky said, breathing deeply, and pushed the key into the lock, snapping the metallic mechanism open.

The door swung back into darkness.

They hesitated on the threshold. Spook handed Ricky the flashlight and told him to shine it on his kit bag. He opened it and rummaged around inside, getting Ricky to pull the light right over the lip of the bag. “Son of a . . .” Spook said, but then he said, “Ah,” and pulled two large crucifixes out of the bag, handing one to Ricky.

“You think this is a
vampire
, Spook?” Ricky asked. His faith in his friend began to evaporate.

“Nothing evil can stand up to the cross,” Spook said. “I've made a study of it. In the books, a ghost is nothing by itself. To act, it has to have power behind it. If it's an evil power, the crucifix will guard against it.”

Spook stared at his friend levelly. “
Believe
me, Ricky boy.”

Eager to prove his point, Spook snapped closed the kit bag, took the flashlight from Ricky, and pushed ahead into the house.

He moved past the opening to the kitchen, ignoring it. Ricky, following, looked in to see, for the briefest time, in the moving shadows of the flashlight, another shadow move against it.

“Oh, Jesus, Spook,” he said, clutching his friend's arm, pointing into the kitchen. “Something's in there.”

“Let's see.” Spook moved into the kitchen entrance, nearly filling it with his bulk. He played the flashlight over the floor, the ledge, the fireplace grate, the ceiling, the furniture.

“Don't see anything, Ricky boy,” he said. He rotated the beam out of the room toward the back door they had entered, stopping it dead.