Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013) (25 page)

“So nobody’s lived there since the Grantleys?”

“No, not unless some freeloaders broke in and squatted it. We put a lock box on it, but that happens sometimes.”

“Here, let me take down that address, and the month of sale.”

“You already did, Mr. Naughton. You all right?”

“Yeah. Tell me how to get there, will you? And how about the key to that lock box?”

Hopkin was about twenty miles southwest, off of Highway 277. Birchwood was two turns off the main route, to the north, then west again. It was a long straight road with mailboxes every hundred yards or so. The asphalt was gray and the gravel on the shoulders almost white, and the sumac growing down to the shoulders was dark green in the spring light. The houses sat well back from the street, under canopies of trees and hedges and sagging power lines. The houses had porches and the porches had swings. Nice houses once, I thought, but sliding downhill now, neglected and alone as old people.

The Grantley place had a rusted mailbox with the metal flag up to signal outgoing parcels. The weeds had grown up around the stanchion and the house was hardly visible through the trees. I passed it once, then doubled back and eased into the driveway. I lowered the window, killed the engine and sat there. The house was clearly vacant. I could see through the glass of one of the windows, straight to a blank interior wall. The other front window had a shade drawn down most of the way. Nothing on the patio. The “For Sale” sign leaned back like an outfielder watching a home run. The lawn was dead except for the green on the sides, where a fresh crop of weeds had grown. The weeds climbed over a pink crenelated divider and spilled onto the walkway. The house was painted gray and the paint was starting to peel. Cicadas trilled from the black recesses of a huge elm tree and a mockingbird sang an insane melody to himself.

I got the house key from the lock box on the garage door. Through a chain-link fence I could see the second unit in the back, overhung by a big walnut tree. Back on the porch, the screen door creaked as I held it open and worked a rusty key into a rusty lock.

The first thing I smelled inside was bacon. Then dust, mildew and old carpet. The living room was the first thing you walked into. It was small and square, with a doorway leading to the kitchen and another to a hall. The fireplace was brick, with a mantelpiece of painted wood. There were three bedrooms, all small and dark in the eternal shade of the big trees outside. The wall-to-wall carpet was a pale blue. The kitchen had a little cheer to it—yellow tiles on the counter and yellow linoleum with white flecks in it. The wallpaper was yellow and white. The flooring was dark and warped up where the refrigerator had stood. The only furnishing in the whole place was a small end table with a phone on it. I picked up the earpiece and got nothing but silence and the muted cicadas and mockingbird, still at it in the trees outside.

When you stood in the backyard you couldn’t see the neighbors or the street. Just the back side of the house and the front of the second unit, which was a small, rectangular version of the main house. It had a little porch and a screen door. I stood there in the middle of the dead lawn and kicked the hulls of the walnuts, which lay thick and cracked over the tan grass. There was a birdbath tilted and empty, the dish stained black. When I looked up, it was all foliage and power lines with a swatch of light blue sky in the middle. The day was warm but the yard was cool, and I had the feeling that I could have done just about anything I wanted here, and nobody would see.

I went through the lock-box routine for the second unit and let myself in. The feeling inside was altogether different. The first smell I got was faint and fecal, but it wasn’t a human smell, or a canine one. Different. The floor was hardwood and dusty. The walls were paneled in dark wood, there were still shelves up everywhere, the kind you attached with L brackets to set the planks on. There was a fireplace, but it was just a facade painted black in the middle to give it the illusion of depth. The kitchenette was off to the left. Nothing much remained: two cardboard salt-and-pepper shakers, a filthy tumbler, an empty plastic half gallon of generic tequila on the floor in the corner. Beside it was a brown pasteboard box, with partitions inside to protect bottles in shipping. I pulled up the empty bottles one at a time: more generic tequila. A fellow cactus addict, I thought. Something beside the box caught my eye, though, so I picked it up: a little triangle of white net material, just a scrap, no bigger than a stamp. Like the girls were made to wear. Robes. Nets. Wings. Webs.

My heart jumped.

You got to the back room through the kitchen. I opened a door with a loose glass knob and pushed through.

The fecal smell was stronger, but I still couldn’t identify it. Maybe it wasn’t fecal after all, but it had a meaty, digested, though not foul aroma. A smell like you might think coyote shit would have, all that fur and bone processed by the body for the little muscle it contained. It was almost rodentlike, maybe. Old.

But there in this back room, you could actually see. Muted rays came in through a skylight panel on the roof. There was a bathroom off to the right. To my left was another wall filled with empty shelves. The far wall, though, that was the weird thing—one long pane of glass from floor to ceiling. Behind the glass I could see what looked like a place for tropical plants, or an animal, or birds perhaps. The floor was built up a couple of feet with rough cement that was shaped to look like rock. There was an empty pool at one end. It looked like the deceased version of one of those vivarium displays you might see in a store—a store that carried tropical plants, or birds, or fish … or snakes. I felt the hair on my neck quiver and a cold little tingle break out on the skin of my back.

I got behind the glass through a full-sized door at the right end. There were four heavy-duty slide locks on it—top, bottom and two on the side. I wondered what kind of wildlife required four locks to keep in. Not canaries, bromeliads or chameleons.

I stood within the cage and looked out. The room became oddly interesting when viewed from inside the glass, like it might be a representative model of
Homo sapiens
-environment, late twentieth century. I felt covert. It was the same feeling I got behind the one-way mirror of one of our interview rooms at the station. The ceiling above me was plywood, and I could tell from the spacing of the screws—about one inch—that it was built to last. The outlines of fixtures were visible every four feet or so, but the fixtures were gone and only the screw holes remained. Lights? Heating or cooling elements? The sides were not glass at all, but a continuation of the rock-look concrete. It must have been molded over a wire-and-wood mold. Same with the back. The old rodent smell was stronger inside. I walked over to the pool and saw the drain at the bottom. Kneeling, I swept my fingertips over the drain grate and brought up a dry smear of what looked like sand. In the far corner of the tank, behind the pool, was a gray football-sized mound of what looked like dried tar laced with milk, or some kind of industrial glue, or, perhaps, some kind of excrement. I leaned into the corner and took a tentative whiff. The smell was stronger. Looking down on the thing, I could see tufts of fur and the outline of a thin bone. It looked like something you’d see in the La Brea tar pits, but dehydrated, like a snack food. Crap. Eagle crap? Maybe, if the eagle was the size of a Shetland pony. Snake shit? Maybe, if the snake was as long as a football field.

Grantley was starting to amuse me.

I went back outside and stood on the dead grass. I walked around the back of the guest unit. The lot was a big one, with a grapestake fence running along each side and all but vanishing in a thick berry patch. Over the berries I could see the back fence erect in the shade. The neighbor’s trees rose up around the property, deepening the sense of permanent dusk. Against the left fence sat an old lawn mower, a bike with flat tires and a barbecue. On the right side, garden tools hung by nails. Beyond the tools was a hutch built off the ground. It was made of wire mesh and two-bys, the kind of thing you could raise chickens in, or rabbits. The ground, up to the tangled patch of berries, was tan and dry and littered with broken, overripe walnuts. And there were more of the black mounds like I’d found in the corner of the cage. More fur, more bones, a pair of curved, side-by-side incisor teeth that either came from a big rat or a small rabbit. I could see that still more of the stuff had been thrown into the berry bushes. A shovel lying against the fence by the patch suggested how it got there. The smell was all around me in the spring warmth—old, rodentine, dank. I stood on my toes to see over the berries, but they were high and thick, and all I could make out was the back fence. I squeezed past the thorny patch by climbing along the bottom support beam of the fence. The area behind the berries was damp and cool. Weeds. Big piles of the black-furry-bony stuff, like they were built up over time. The smell. There were flies and meat bees everywhere, lazy and sated. Against the back fence the shit was knee high. I picked my way through the grim obstacles and climbed up on the support beam again, to see over. It was the back end of another lot, covered with leaves and a junked car up on cinder blocks.

I was looking down to find a clear place for my foot when I saw the pale thing protruding—just slightly—from the heap of dung against the fence. I jumped onto a decent spot. With my pen in hand, I leaned over the pile and touched what appeared to be a white plate. It was hard, locked solid in the dung. I scraped around it, and the black mulch came off easily, but the white thing didn’t pop out, it just got bigger. Finally, I hooked an opening and lifted. There was a muffled crack and the thing got lighter. It dangled there before me, unbalanced, rocking on my pen. More or less round. Bigger than a softball, smaller than a soccer ball. The bigger, rounded end canted down and to my left, the smaller one settled upward and to the right. My pen was through the upper of two large holes. I lowered my head to see clearly around my hand and the extended pen. There were fragments of blackened material still attached in places, but basically, it was stripped clean. The teeth were still there, except for the front two. I studied it, a child’s death head with a gap-toothed grin. I lowered it to the top of the pile, adjusted it for balance, then moved away and knelt down.

The body freezes at a time like this, but the spirit soars because it wants to get away. He was all around me. His ground, his air, his smell, his shade. I’d never been this close to the essence of him—not even in Brittany Elder’s bedroom—and I wasn’t prepared for it. He wasn’t like anything. I had nothing to compare him to. But I could feel all the power of his need, and all the secret, cunning efficiency of his will.

He wasn’t escalating. He’d already been where he was going. At least once. Right here.

Grantley had moved half a continent away, and found The Horridus waiting.

An hour later, I was pretty sure I had the Grantley son’s first name: Gene. The neighbors weren’t positive. And they were even less sure of his last name because Wanda had married “a bunch.” Some said Webb, or Webster, one of those. Some said Vonn. Some said Grantley. Most said they had no idea. But none of the surnames matched my lists from Bright Tomorrows or Dawn Christie; none had listed homes with detached units for sale in Orange County; none of them connected with any names we’d come up with in the Horridus investigation so far.

But the Hopkin neighbors agreed in their assessment of him: late twenties, maybe early thirties; long hair and beard, but neatly trimmed; a well-groomed fella; very quiet; didn’t seem to have a steady job; kept to himself. Ever notice how neighbors always say the same thing about these shitbaskets? They said his mother, Wanda, was small, tense and unfriendly. The young man had a van. Wanda had an older model Lincoln Town Car and the neighbors had often seen her peering under the curve of the steering wheel as she made her occasional low-speed runs through town.

One of them said the sketch from Steven Wicks’s memory was “kinda like him, all right.” The one from Brittany Elder “ain’t him.”