In The Falling Light (18 page)

People say we don’t remember events from
early childhood, but Jennifer knew she had dreamed about the house
before she ever saw it. Dark dreams of watching windows and rooms
that listened. Jack smiled his patient smile and told her they were
false memories. He meant well, but then he’d never heard his name
spoken when he was alone in the house.

It started shortly after they moved in,
two-year-old Jenny in her high chair while Mommy was in the
kitchen. A glass of orange juice two feet away on the table had
floated slowly into the air, then up-ended and crashed to the
floor. Little Jenny had cried at the breaking glass, and Mommy had
yelled at her for somehow causing it. The next day she was back in
the high chair, and this time it was a glass bowl of fruit that
lifted, shuddered, and shattered on the linoleum. Again, well out
of her reach, but she had gotten a spanking for it just the
same.

It wasn’t the last floating object, or the
last spanking. Books shot out of her bookcase and hit the far
bedroom wall, and her parents had been angry, thinking she was
throwing a tantrum. Jars of finger paint rose from their tray on
her little easel as she watched, hurling themselves against the
walls and ceiling to explode in rainbows of dripping color. Her toy
box lid banged open and shut, open and shut, making her run from
her room, crying.

They never saw any of it.

Jennifer watched the house, knowing it
watched her back. Hadn’t it called her tonight? And hadn’t she
come?

The footsteps in the hall outside her door
would wake her up at night, pounding feet running back and forth.
At first she had actually had the courage – or the lack of sense –
to open her door to see what her parents could possibly be up to,
but the hallway was always empty. Worse was when the footsteps
approached her, like when she was in the family room watching TV or
reading in a living room chair, slow, heavy steps coming up behind
her and stopping. The hairs on the back of her neck lifted as she
looked back to see nobody there.

Then there were the lights, flicking on and
off in empty rooms, or sometimes waiting until she turned off a
wall switch and walked away before snapping back on. Her father
grumbled about his electric bill constantly. She almost got used to
the lights, and the house must have sensed that, for they started
going
off
when she was alone in a room, leaving her in
darkness.

Then something would whisper her name.

Jennifer cranked the heater knob all the way
over, warm air blasting into the car as she hugged herself against
a cold she knew the heater couldn’t chase away. The dark blue had
all but faded, and the house on Mohawk sat quietly under a starless
sky.

When she was a teenager she found any excuse
in good weather to spend nights out on the lawn in her sleeping
bag, often with friends. She felt better there. At least in nature
you knew what the noises were. At least outside you didn’t have to
listen to the basement stairs creak as someone walked up them,
aware that both your parents were in the same room with you.

And it was the basement which frightened her
the most.

Keri was three years younger. For a little
sister, she was a good listener, and always believed what Jennifer
said she heard and saw. But she swore nothing ever happened to
her.

Even at a young age Jennifer saw the lie in
her little sister’s eyes.

Keri said she never heard her name called.
Never heard the stereo turn on in an empty room. Never saw a smoky
blob lurking in ceiling corners.

Jennifer did, and more. It escalated around
the time she turned twelve. That was when her name, once whispered
from the end of an empty hall, would instead be screamed in her
ear. That was when her bed began to shake in the night, vibrating
and slamming the headboard against the wall hard enough to leave
marks. At first Mom and Dad yelled about rough-housing, then
adolescent tantrums, and once in high school, Mom even accused her
of somehow sneaking a boy into her room.

On nights the bed didn’t shake, her pillows
would slide from under her head, down between the mattress and the
headboard, slowly, steadily, as if someone under the bed were
pulling them down. Jennifer grabbed for them…once…and had them
jerked
out of her hands,
SNAP
, under the bed.
Something shrieked her name in her ear, and the bedroom lights
flicked on and off like a strobe until she fled to the living room
to cower in a corner of the sofa.

She never fought for her pillows again.

Jennifer shut off the engine and sat in
stillness for a while. Then she took the house key from the cup
holder and slowly climbed out of the car. A night breeze lifted her
hair about her face as she shut the door, putting the key in her
jacket pocket.

The people started showing up in her mid
teens, at first only when she was alone in the house. Once she had
looked out the front windows and seen an old man in a straw hat
standing on the lawn, arms limp at his side, looking at the house.
She opened the front door to see if he was lost, but then he wasn’t
there. Another time she had been alone at the kitchen table
studying and saw a man in a white dress shirt pass by the kitchen
doorway in the hall, not looking at her.

Then her bedroom door slammed, and the
snarls of an animal started from inside.

It was four days before she slept in her
room again, and then only with the lights on.

Until the house switched them off.

They grew bolder. She and some friends had
been in the living room, Jennifer in the recliner in the corner,
with Dennis, one of the boys from the neighborhood, on the couch
across from her. He had been talking, laughing, and then just
stopped and stared towards her as a dark stain spread across his
crotch. He ran from the house, and Jennifer chased him three blocks
before she caught up to him. He was crying and embarrassed about
wetting himself, and it took nearly an hour of talking to him and
calming him down before he managed to tell her he had seen a
wrinkled, bald man slowly peek out at him from behind the chair
Jennifer was sitting in, like he had been curled up and hiding back
there.

Dennis never came back to the house, and
stopped talking to her at school.

Jennifer started up the street, walking
slowly, her loafers crunching small gravel underfoot. The big tree
in the front yard stopped swaying for a moment as the wind died, as
if the house was holding its breath at her approach.

She turned sixteen, got her license and a
part time job, and bought a used Mitsubishi. One Sunday afternoon
she was driving home, taking a back road, and glanced down a side
street. There she had seen Lisa Portman, a thirteen-year-old friend
of Keri’s, half a block up. She was straddling her bike and talking
to someone in a dark van which had pulled to the side of the road.
Lisa was wearing pink shorts and a blue top. Jennifer took it all
in as she passed; the little girl, the van…she slammed on the
brakes in the middle of the road, threw it into reverse and backed
up.

The van was gone. So were Lisa and her
bike.

Jennifer shot down the side road, checking
driveways and cross streets, seeing nothing. This was pre-cell
phone, so she raced home to call the police and report the
abduction.

As the Mitsu roared into the driveway, there
was Lisa’s bike lying in the front yard. Lisa was inside with Keri
in her sister’s room listening to the Backstreet Boys, and had been
there for hours.

And Lisa was wearing pink shorts and a blue
top.

That same year, Jennifer was awakened early
one morning to her bedroom door slamming open. She sat up to see
her mother in the doorway in a nightgown, her hair wild and her
eyes rimmed red, smoking a cigarette and pointing a finger at
her.

“Do you know what you’ve done?” her mother
screamed. “I hate you! I wish you would just
kill
yourself!”
Then she stormed into the kitchen.

Jennifer sat sobbing on her bed, calling to
her mother, begging to know what she had done but afraid to go to
her, afraid she would make her more angry. He father had stumbled
to her bedroom doorway, rubbing at sleep-filled eyes. “What the
hell? Why are you crying?”

Jennifer buried her face in a pillow, but
managed to choke out, “Daddy, why did Mommy say that? Why is she so
mad at me?”

Her father looked confused. “When? Why did
she say what?”

Jennifer shook her head, not wanting to
repeat the words. “Just now!”

Her father frowned. “Jenny, what the hell
are you talking about? Your Mom’s in Tampa at a sales convention.
She flew out last night, remember?”

The memory made Jennifer stop in the road.
She gripped the house key in her pocket and stood there, squeezing
until the key dug painfully into her palm, looking at the hateful
house.

“Why?” she whispered.

It didn’t respond, but she knew it heard
her.

She had long suspected that Dad had been the
only one to get it. Mom didn’t have time to listen to her nonsense,
and Keri was in complete denial. But Dad stopped yelling and
blaming her for loud noises, and although he teased her the few
times she told him about things that happened, she thought she had
seen the lie in his eyes, too. What had
he
seen and heard,
she wondered, never asking. And despite his apparent refusal to
believe her, he was always good about allowing her to sleep over at
friends, or go with him on errands that kept her out of the house,
or encouraging her to join every after-school sport and activity
she could.

As she neared eighteen, the tempo rose, as
if the house was suddenly in a hurry. More footsteps, more
whispering, her name being called from the basement. Sometimes it
was her father’s voice, or her sister’s, but Jennifer had grown
wary over the years. Then came tugging at the back of her shirt, a
shove into a wall, and then a slap out of empty air that left a red
handprint on her face and had her father in a rage that evening
demanding to know what boy had done this to her.

The shadow people came, standing in corners,
peeking out from open closets. One was a little girl who stood
silently in the hallway looking at her.

Jennifer always felt that if she hadn’t gone
away to Arizona when she did, the house would have taken her. Not
simply driven her mad, though she often feared it would and still
wondered in a small way if it had, even just a little. No, she was
afraid it would actually take her. One afternoon, while she was
alone, just snatch her away into whatever cold, dead darkness it
was that lived there.

But she had cheated it of its prize.

It wanted her back.

There were times she couldn’t avoid coming
home. The first was during summer break between freshman and
sophomore year. It had been waiting for her. Touches on her back
and neck, followed by painful hair pulling. Each summer afterwards
she applied for internships that kept her in Phoenix.

When Mom got sick she came back for a week.
Knowing the house was waiting to catch her alone, she had been
careful to keep people around her as much as possible. Still, it
found moments…a suddenly dark room followed by caresses, a shadow
figure watching her from under a table, the cellar door swinging
open silently when she went near it. That was where it really
wanted her. Down there in the dark.

When Mom passed away she brought her
husband, not realizing at the time she was already six weeks
pregnant with Collin. The bed shook violently their first night
there, but Jack slept through it. In the morning, however, he told
her it had woken him up, then asked, “Is that the kind of thing you
lived with?” She nodded, and he held her tight for a long time.
Jennifer was elated that finally, someone had caught a glimpse of
the house’s true nature. That night in the shower, the house paid
her back for her small victory. The water turned suddenly to a
frigid blast, and then a hand she couldn’t see pushed through the
shower curtain and raked deep, red scratches across her belly,
making her scream.

They spent the rest of their time at a
hotel. Her family chastised her that she was breaking her father’s
already wounded heart, but Daddy had helped them load their bags in
the car, and then looked his daughter in the eye and just
nodded.

Jennifer’s feet scuffed up the buckled
sidewalk, past the tree, right up to the front step. A curtain
moved in the front window just the slightest bit, a peek. It had
been waiting, knowing she would come, needing to settle all debts
and claim its own. All her life she had been trying to get away
from here, but kept coming back, as the house knew she would.

And now she was here for her final visit.
She knew what it wanted, could imagine the cellar door swinging
wide in anticipation. What would be waiting for her there, she
wondered? Her sister and cousins would wait for her in the morning,
but she wouldn’t be showing up. They would call her cell phone, but
she wouldn’t answer. They would come to the house, but wouldn’t
find her. She wouldn’t be making any arrangements, wouldn’t be at
the funeral.

Jennifer pulled the key from her jacket
pocket, holding it before her eyes. It looked black, and she could
almost feel it tremble in her fingertips, just as she knew the
house was trembling. She took a deep breath.

Then she dropped the key on the mat.

“We’re done,” she said, her voice clear and
strong.

She turned and strode back up the walk, back
to her rental car. With luck she could catch a late flight and be
in Phoenix in time to have breakfast with her boys.

She knew her Dad would understand.