Shadows Burned In (2 page)

“The crime in Houston is terrible,” he said for the
umpteenth time. “The traffic is worse—”

“And the pay? Did it beat this small-town practice?”

He looked at her from under wary lids. “We’re doing okay.
When was the last time you couldn’t buy something you wanted, or something for
Elizabeth?”

“But you sit in front of this damn 3V screen getting
‘up-to-the-minute world market news,’” she said, quoting the
Web Report
slogan. “If we’re so ‘okay,’ why are you so glued to the news?”

“It interests me,” he said evenly.

“Mmmm,” she said mockingly. “Does your daughter interest
you? How about what your wife wants? Does
that
interest you?”

“What do you want from me—”

“
Why did we come back here
? All you’ve ever told me
is how much you hate this place. How much you hated him and—”

“I never said I hated him,” he said, his index finger in the
air, on top of a fist. “I never said any such goddamned thing.”

“No, that’s true, you hardly ever say anything,” she said.
“But I’m telling you we’re suffering for having come back here. This town is
too small. I need a city. I need to go back to school. And Elizabeth needs her
friends.”

“Mmmm,” he said. “Well, I tell you what . . . when you think
you can make it out there, you go right ahead.”

Susan’s heart sank. She knew things were bad, but not this
bad. What was he saying?

He saw he’d made an opening and pushed through it. “You go
right ahead, Susan. I did us a favor by bringing us here. It’s a small town,
and that’s a good thing these days. Living expenses, particularly top-rated
webschools, are cheaper. I don’t have to worry about presenting surveillance
photos in divorce cases to prove infidelity here. I don’t have to wonder if I
break down on the wrong side of town that I’ll get the crap beaten out of me.
And I don’t have to play the fucking
game
anymore.”

“But what about
us
, David?” She was close to tears
now but determined to hold them back.

“Why didn’t you say something when I first proposed this?”

“I
did
! You brushed it aside because moving here was
what
you
wanted to do. You’ve never given me
half
an ear of
consideration over this whole issue.”

“If you didn’t want to come here, you always had a choice.”

She drew back, totally thrown by his revision of history.
She had all but begged him not to bring them here, once even with a bawling
Elizabeth at her side who didn’t want to leave her friends. But they were here
all the same. “
What
choice?”

“That one,” he said, pointing to the front door. “Volume,
normal.” The commentators on the international stock and labor reports came to
life again, speculating on speculation.

“David, you—”

“Volume, up.” The voices got louder.

“You can’t just shut out the—”

“Volume, up.”

“. . . without the necessary capital investment up front,”
the commentator was saying.

“Why don’t you—”

“Volume,
up
.”

“. . .
bringing better consumer prices from competition
. . .”

“God
damn
you!” she yelled, stalking out of the room,
hands clamped over her ears.

When he heard her steps in the kitchen, he sighed heavily.
“Volume, normal.”

From behind her bedroom door, Elizabeth heard her dad mute
the 3V. She knew what was coming, so she put her headphones on to finish her
lessons in solitude. It was almost ten
P.M.
when she finally finished her homework. Her mother
would be coming in soon to tell her it was bedtime.

“Not enough time to play anything online,” her 3V voice
complained. “Thanks a lot!”

Elizabeth scrunched up her face, lay down on her bed, and
curled up.

“Would you like to go offline?” queried the computer.

She blew out a breath, as if the air tasted bad.

“What do
you
think?”

The system didn’t even give her the satisfaction of being
offended by her tone. “Please repeat.”

“Go offline and video off.”

“Thank you.”

The low metallic hum faded and the room went black. It had
gotten dark while she did her homework, and now the only light in the room had
switched itself off. Last year the lack of light might’ve bothered her, but now
she found it strangely comforting. It was like a blanket of black air that kept
her safe. She thought about earlier and how her dad kept telling her she’d
never amount to anything if she didn’t apply herself. She never really knew
what he meant by that. She thought she was trying. She was sure of it.

“Who cares? It’s no fun,”
said her 3V voice.

“It’s not supposed to be,” she whispered back. “It’s
school.”

“There, see? You’re not so dumb.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Michael will help you. He likes you, you know.”

“No he doesn’t!” She felt funny about speaking out loud to
herself. Her dad told her men in white coats would come and take her away if
anyone heard her talking to herself. But she didn’t believe him. Not
really
.

Would that be so bad if they did come and take you away?
she
wondered. “Michael doesn’t like me,” she said softly, though no one would hear
her in her room, behind her closed door. “He tried to scare me today.”

“Exactly. He
likes
you.”

Now
that
made sense. Not.

Thinking about Michael and his attempts to scare her made
her think about Old Suzie’s house again. It was just up the street from her own
home, a fact that both thrilled and frightened her. According to Michael, all
the kids her age at least threw a rock through a window in the house when they
moved into seventh grade, just to show they weren’t babies anymore. In the
seventh grade, closets were no longer gateways to other dimensions full of
misshapen monsters. Beds no longer hid long-armed creatures with claws for
hands just waiting for children to fall asleep before reaching up, slithering their
hook-hands under the covers, and grabbing their ankles to pull them down into
whatever torture pits they lived in. At least, that was the theory. And the way
to prove the theory, to make sure it was true? Take a rock in your hand and break
the eyes of the house, knock them clean out of their sockets.

“Then it can’t see you when you pass by, and if it can’t
see you, it can’t find you at night,”
teased her 3V voice.

But Elizabeth didn’t believe that. She’d felt the empty eyes
on her, seeing her from way back inside the lonely house.
Spirits don’t need
eyes to see
, she thought.

The more adventuresome, newly minted seventh graders
actually went inside the house, into the monster’s lair, braving the cockroaches,
rats, and moldy furniture. Some ran, others crept on tiptoe past the gauntlet
of gray shapes scraping and pungent smells floating on a sea of spores,
challenging any who dared disturb Old Suzie’s house.

Because Old Suzie was dead.

Chapter 3

As she laid her head down on the pillow, Elizabeth recalled
the stories Michael had told her about Old Suzie. The postman had found her
sitting in her chair in the parlor, staring at an old television set. He’d
knocked on the door first, then entered the house, calling “Mz. Suzie?” Her
mailbox had been full of ads for stores seventy miles away in Houston and
clearinghouse $10 million giveaways and guaranteed credit card offers.

No one had seen Old Suzie for a while, which was how they
preferred it if you’d asked them and they’d been honest. But the postman had
smelled something. And it hadn’t smelled good.

What he’d found was a two-week-old corpse, still sitting in
a dilapidated, greenish recliner, staring gape-mouthed and slack-eyed at her
“shows,” as she’d called them. No one really knew what she’d died of, but the
story went around that it was something old people tend to die of a lot. Her
position in the chair and the fact that dead bodies don’t always know they’re
dead yet had forced her bowels and bladder to take their normal course. The
hanging rot of flesh combined with the smell to impress an image on the postman
he would not forget as long as he lived, which wasn’t long. He soon retired
from the postal service and from life shortly thereafter.

They brought in the fire department to move her. She was a
big woman, muscle and fat mixed together as they often are in people who had
once made their living with their backs but then reclined away everything hard
work had built.

Suzie had been a spinster widow for nearly three decades
before she was found in her chair. Her husband had run off right after he’d
successfully settled with his company regarding injuries sustained during the
blowout of a natural gas well. Suzie had never remarried and made her own
living mostly from driving a tractor for local cotton farmers who couldn’t
afford to own their own equipment. When the larger, conglomerated farms took
over production of the cotton fields, Old Suzie was out of business. She was
close enough to retirement that she retreated to her home to live out the rest
of her life watching reruns of
Wheel of Fortune
and
As the World
Turns
.

The house around her began to crumble, but Suzie lost her
will to care. “My give-a-shitter’s broke,” she’d say to anyone who’d listen.
The house had been the center for a small but prosperous cotton plantation 200
years before, though the land itself had been sold off in parcels over the last
few decades. Its banisters were less oak than spruce, and it had no tall
columns out front the way you might expect from seeing
Gone with the Wind
.
Still, the house had a quiet elegance that reminded people in the little town
of Hampshire, Texas, of a proud Southern past. The county’s historical
preservation society had (around the turn of the 21st century, when Suzie still
had interest in such things) gotten her permission to restore the house. But
the effort had stopped partway due to lack of funding, and the sun continued to
assault the old frame, bleaching and fracturing its naked wood. Still, as long
as Suzie could get her mail and the local grocery store clerk could deliver the
groceries without fear of falling through the porch, she was content to live
inside the rot.

After she died, the place stood empty. No one would buy it.
Most thought it was a money pit, and rumors of strange occurrences kept the
weak-hearted away. Suzie had no family, and her will had given the house and the
rest of her meager estate to the town of Hampshire on the condition that the
old house be left standing until someone else bought it for market value. This
was her last demand of the community that had promised to preserve the old
structure and failed to deliver. These last wishes confounded those who desired
to demolish the house—the same crowd who’d opposed the house’s restoration in
the first place—but the law was the law, and the court had upheld the will. Not
even the great fire that had taken out much of the town years earlier had
touched the weathering splendor of Old Suzie’s house.

And so whenever people moved to Hampshire—which wasn’t often
if you trusted the census, and too often if you asked the townsfolk—or made a
move within the little town, which was never, the local real estate agent (who
was also the county clerk) made some attempt at selling the place. But since no
great commission was attached to it and it was such an eyesore to begin with,
he never made much of an attempt and he never made a sale.

So there the house still stood behind its mimosa and oak
trees and too-tall grass and weeds in the yard, a dare place for kids and a roach
motel. Typical of the Victorian style of its heyday, the structure’s great open
doorways at the front and back encouraged what little hot and humid breeze
could be coaxed through the house in August. Nowadays, the two doorways formed
the start and finish lines for children-cum-teenagers as they dashed out their
dares to prove they weren’t scared anymore of closets and things under their
beds and dead old ladies’ houses.

Because no one really knew Old Suzie after she’d retreated
to her television set, the local kids made up stories about her they passed
down to one another, usually in the dark or around campfires on boy scout
cookouts. Old Suzie, they said, was a tough old witch who wore a cowboy hat
instead of a pointy one and who loved to play tricks on children on Halloween.
The mailman had died so soon after finding her, they said, because he had
disturbed her shows. She had finally gotten her wish and transferred her spirit
into the TV through incantations and spells, and by finding her and having her
corpse carted away, the mailman had made it impossible for her to ever reenter
her body again. So she’d killed him, the stories said. And now her spirit
moaned on the wind as it crept through the house, her broken eyes watching from
jagged windows, waiting for someone to move in with a new television, her means
to escape her own haunting.

This was more or less how Michael told the story to
Elizabeth, and that same story, more or less, had been told to him by his older
brother. Lying in bed and thinking of the house, Old Suzie, and Michael,
Elizabeth had let her fear of the school monitor’s report fade away. The sheets
felt cool, the pillow soft beneath her head. She wondered if this is how it
felt to lay in a coffin, on display for mourners. She’d been to several
funerals for family members she barely knew and thought it funny, this ritual
of painted people on display. Were they comfortable in their narrow beds, their
heads resting on satin pillows, while the dearly undeparted wept over them? She
wondered if anyone had come to Old Suzie’s funeral. Slowly but surely her own
fatigue overtook her, and Elizabeth began to dream of what death must be like and
Old Suzie’s house.

“Come on,” said Michael. He was looking back at her, a
sneer on his face and utter contempt in his voice. “Baby baby, fraidy cat. It’s
just an old house.”

Elizabeth stared up at the peeling wood as she had that
afternoon. It looked to her like skin hanging in strips off an old face. She
heard Michael but wasn’t listening. Somewhere in the back of her head she
wanted to scream at him that she wasn’t a fraidy cat, that she could take this
place at night all by herself, without a flashlight even.
Those
were the
terms of the dare, after all. Walking through the house in the daytime wasn’t
enough. Even babies could do that.

It had to happen at night.

Without a flashlight.

Alone.

Unexpectedly, Michael’s voice turned pleading. “Aw, come
on,” he said. “You made me bring you out here and now here we are and you won’t
even go in. I could be playing 3V games right now.”

She swallowed and found, to her surprise, a little spit left
in her mouth.

“All right,” she said softly. “All right, let’s go.” She
raised herself off the cool grass and began walking straight for the front
doorway. No darting around behind trees, no hulking over and shuffle-running
like this afternoon.

“Hey,” he said, caught off guard by her bravery. Elizabeth
was halfway across the high weeds in the front yard before he thought to leap
after her.

The tall grass lay down beneath her tennis shoes with a
satisfying crunch. She walked onto what was left of the shale front driveway,
fists closing and opening. Elizabeth swallowed, sending less and less spit down
her throat each time. When she reached the front porch, she stopped before
stepping up.

Michael caught up to her. “This is it, huh?” His voice had
lost its sneer. And did he sound just a little bit scared now too?

“You can’t go in with me,” said Elizabeth.

“Um . . . no, I can’t.
Else it
doesn’t count, right?”

She nodded, though she wasn’t really paying much attention
to him. Staring at the crusty porch, Elizabeth remembered its rotten wood and
how easy it was to fall through.

“Um . . . night’s almost here,” said Michael behind her.

Icy electricity shot up her spine. As one sinking feeling of
dread, all her old fears returned.
I was doing so well
.
She sent
the thought to her dream self, which she sometimes did when she knew she was
dreaming but needed to reassure herself she was still in control, that it was
her dream, after all. She stood there looking at the cracked gray wood of the
porch, wondering where to step and only wanting to run away, to get back home
and play 3V games.

“But I’m
here
now,” she said, more to herself than
anyone. “I can’t leave
now
.” She expected a response from her 3V voice,
from Michael, from someone. But there was nothing, and when she turned around, her
friend had disappeared.

“Michael?” Elizabeth realized she was alone, standing before
the house, fully clothed but feeling naked, as scared as she ever had been in
her life and ashamed of her fear. “
Michael
?”

The light faded as the sun gave up for the day. She couldn’t
see the tall grass and weeds anymore, or the path her weight had made across
the huge, overgrown front lawn. It was as if the grass and weeds had let her
pass, then, when she wasn’t looking, reset themselves, trapping her. She felt
paralyzed, unable to move backward or forward, a sitting duck for the house’s
pleasure.

“Go on,” she heard her father’s voice say. “What are you,
lazy
?
Want to end up serving drinks in a cyberbar somewhere?”

Dad, this isn’t homework
, she thought back.
This
is an old house
.
Her own dream-voice sounded like every exasperated
child who’s ever tried to explain something to an ignorant parent. But his
voice was gone now, replaced by her other self, the self that wanted to play 3V
games instead of doing homework.

“Come on,”
it said, mimicking Michael’s voice.
“Let’s
go in and have some fun. We’ll show ’em you can do it.”

With her 3V voice urging her on, Elizabeth found she had
life in her limbs again; she could make them move. She started to turn around,
glancing backward for the path her weight had made, then remembered it had
already been erased.

“Baby!”
charged her 3V voice, mimicking Michael.

“I’m not a baby,” she answered angrily. “I’m
scared
.
Adults get scared too, don’t they?”

“Babybabybaby!”

“All right!” she screamed out loud.

She stepped onto the porch.

creak

She thought she could feel the paint cracking beneath her shoe,
revealing the dead wood beneath. The sound it made reminded her of her father
standing up from his living room chair, his knees and ankles popping. Elizabeth
took a second step

creak

and the sound was like a memory waking up, as if the
house itself were stirring from quiet years of solitary slumber. When she moved
again

creak

she glanced back at her first step onto the porch, saw
her footprint outlined by displaced dust, a record of her boldness.

(breadcrumbs like in the fairy tales to find your way back,
little girl)

When she turned around, she was facing the front doorway.
She looked left on the porch, saw the old swing there, its seat more empty
space than wood now, chains rusted a flaky, dull red.
The old woman must’ve
sat here and watched kids playing in the neighborhood
, she thought.
Now
that’s creepy
.
Shuddering, she wondered if Suzie’s ghost had sat
there and watched her and Michael playing earlier. She wondered if the house
was putting these thoughts in her head, stoking her fear. Thoughts not of a
nice old woman delighting in the play of children, but of a mean old woman
sizing up children to bake in a pie.

“Come on, babybaby,”
her 3V temptress said again.
“It’s
just an old house.”