Dark Hollow (19 page)

“Adam, we don’t have to do this. We haven’t slept. We could go see Ramirez right now and tell him what we know.”

I shrugged him off. “No. We do have to do this, if not for us, then for our wives. You saw what we’re up against, Dale. I know I did—but I still don’t understand it. We need to find out. Arm ourselves.”

He closed his eyes and nodded.

I slowly descended into the darkness, and when I got to the bottom I looked back up at them. They looked like three blue-collar angels, their faces silhouetted in the sunlight.

“You guys coming?”

Reluctantly they followed. Merle started humming “The Itsy-bitsy Spider,” and Cliff punched him in the arm.

We let our eyes adjust to the darkness. Despite the warm spring day it felt like winter in the basement. Our breath hung in the air. The cold crept into our bones, rising from the cracked and pitted concrete.

Another staircase led up to the first floor. Judging by our position, I guessed that the kitchen was directly over our heads.

I trailed the flashlight beam around the cellar. The walls were made of cracked cinder blocks. Moisture seeped in through the fissures. Black-green mold grew in the crevices like slimy tendrils, glistening in the flashlight’s beam. The air was thick with rot and decay, and we all breathed through our mouths. The cellar was filled with debris, and in the shadows everything took on sinister shapes. Rust covered the furnace and hot-water heater. Moldering cardboard boxes, stuffed to overflowing with old newspapers and magazines, sat stacked up against one wall. Empty wooden crates occupied another corner. All around us were the castoffs of another family’s life. A ten-speed bike, the spokes entwined with cobwebs; rusty tools; threadbare furniture; forgotten toys; an unused coal-burning fireplace; oak storage chests, their contents hidden beneath the layers of dust on the lids; rags; old brooms and mops. A worktable stacked with rusted paint cans, plastic and metal jugs of turpentine and gasoline, and bottles of spray paint. A potato bin contained blackened, stinking lumps that must have once been potatoes but now looked like shrunken heads. One wall was lined with steel shelving, and the shelves were filled with self-canned goods—peaches, apples, squash, green beans, peas, corn, and beets. A faded, delicate scrawl labeled each jar, identifying the contents—the handwriting of a dead woman, thrown to her death from an attic window at the hands of her husband.

“It’s chilly down here,” Merle whispered.

“Yeah.” I rubbed my arms. “It is.”

“Should we be breathing in that mold?” Cliff asked.

“Probably not,” Dale answered. “But I wouldn’t worry. We won’t be here long enough for it to have any effect.”

“You hope.”

I cocked an ear, listening for mice or rats. I saw evidence of their existence: nests made from newspaper and mildewed scraps of clothing, and scattered rodent droppings on the eaves and floor, but nothing alive. The cellar was silent, and somehow that was the chilliest part of all.

Cliff lit a cigarette, his lighter flaring. The darkness seemed to gather around the flame, as if trying to extinguish it.

“Why are we whispering?” His voice echoed off the walls. “Ain’t nobody here.”

Above us the floorboards creaked.

We froze. Dale reached out and grabbed my arm. I held my breath. My heart thundered in my chest, trying to leap into my throat.

“Somebody’s upstairs.” Merle’s voice was so quiet we had to strain to hear him. Despite that, his terror came through loud and clear.

“Can’t be,” I whispered. “There weren’t any cars out front.”

“They could have walked.”

“From where?” Dale hissed. “There’s nothing around for miles.”

He was breathing heavily, and I wondered if his heart was okay. The last thing we needed in the midst of all this was for Dale to have a heart attack here in the cellar of an abandoned farmhouse.

“The house is old,” I reasoned. “It’s just the wood settling.”

The floorboards creaked again, once, twice, three times. The sound was spaced apart—like footsteps. Then they fell silent once more. The darkness seemed to grow more powerful, pressing against us like a solid entity. I resisted the urge to lash out at the gloom. The noise was not repeated.

The flashlight beam reflected off Merle’s face, which was bathed in sweat.

“What if Dale’s right?” he asked. “If there’s nobody here except us, maybe it’s Patricia LeHorn.”

“A ghost?” I whispered.

“Let’s go,” Merle insisted. “Just get out of here and go home.”

I opened my mouth to reply, but Cliff snatched the flashlight from my hands. Then he grabbed the .30-06 from Merle and worked the bolt, putting a round in the chamber.

“Fuck it.” His voice echoed across the cellar. “We came for answers and we’re gonna get them. If somebody’s up there, then they can answer this shit for us. Ghost or not.”

He stalked toward the stairs, picking his way through the debris.

“Cliff,” Merle stage-whispered. “Get back here!”

“Hello,” Cliff shouted. “Anybody home? Yoo-hoo? Mrs. LeHorn? Goat man?”

Silence.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are, or I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down!”

“Goddamn it, Cliff.” I raised my voice. “Stop it.”

He looked back at us, flashed a grin, and then started up the stairs. They creaked under his boots, but the floorboards above us were still.

“We’re coming up,” he continued yelling, purposely stomping his feet to punctuate each step. “Put away your eyes of newt and frog toes. We’re just here to talk about the goat man!”

Sighing, Dale hefted the Mossberg. “Come on. If there is somebody in this house, they know we’re here now. All we can do is damage control.”

We started up the stairs—Dale in the lead, me in the middle, and a now-weaponless Merle bringing up the rear. When we reached the top Cliff handed the flashlight to Dale, who handed it back to me. Then, still grinning, Cliff slammed the Remington’s butt against the doorknob. The door shuddered in its frame. He rammed it again and the wood splintered.

Dale grabbed his arm. “Cliff, what the hell is wrong with you?”

Cliff laughed.

He’s scared,
I realized.
He stayed awake all night. He’s exhausted and just as scared as the rest of us, and this is how he’s coping. He believes more than he’s let on.

Cliff brought the rifle down several more times, and the door finally burst open. Cliff tumbled through.

“Hey, goat man! Come on out.”

We leaped after him. I’d been right: The room above us was the kitchen. Like the cellar it was dark and deserted. No residents, no squatters, not even a mouse. Nothing to account for the footsteps we’d heard. Cracked linoleum floor. Wallpaper peeling away to reveal cracked, dingy plaster. Appliances—refrigerator, oven, and sink—all dead and covered with dust and splotches of black mildew. Wooden cupboards, several with the doors hanging open, empty except for cobwebs and dust balls. No people, and no ghosts—at least, none that we could see.

We could feel them, however. Feel something. None of the other guys mentioned it, but I could see it in their actions, read it in the expressions on their faces as they looked around. The air felt oppressive. Heavy. It seemed
wrong
. Like it had in the cellar, but stronger now. Closer to the surface. I got the impression that the house was watching us, determining whether or not we were a threat. The shadows seemed to swell.

Craving sunlight, I approached one of the kitchen windows that wasn’t boarded up and parted the blinds. The windowsills were piled high with dead insects, almost an inch deep in some places: flies, bees, ladybugs—and others, their shells too desiccated to determine their type. For a moment I wondered what had killed them. Fear? Did bugs know fear? Had they fluttered helplessly against the windowpanes while that same oppressive darkness closed in on them? Had the darkness
squeezed
them before completely enveloping their bodies?

Merle nudged me. “Anybody outside?”

I shook my head and let the blinds fall.

Cliff’s temporary madness had drained away. He stood in the center of the kitchen, staring about sheepishly. He clutched the rifle, and when Merle tried to retrieve it again he backed away, shaking his head.

“We shouldn’t be here,” he said. “You guys feel it too, don’t you?”

“I thought you were the skeptic?” Dale muttered.

“Just because I don’t believe in the goat man doesn’t mean I ain’t spooked. This place feels wrong.”

There were two exits from the kitchen. One led to the dining room. From where I stood I could see the corner of the table and several chairs. What lay beyond the second exit was concealed behind a dirty curtain hanging over the doorway. Cliff and Merle crept into the dining room, alert and ready to jump should the mysterious floor walker decide to reveal itself. Dale quietly opened a few cabinets and peered inside. I poked my head through the curtained doorway, looking into a laundry room. The washer and dryer were covered in dust, and there were mouse tracks trailing through it, along with small nuggets of rodent feces and more dead insects. At the rear of the laundry room was a door leading out onto the porch. Taped above it was a yellowed scrap of paper that said:

I.

N.I.R.

I.

SANCTUS SPIRITUS

I.

N.I.R.

I.

“What’s that?” I asked.

Dale shrugged. “Some kind of powwow charm, I guess. Maybe to protect the house?”

I stepped back into the kitchen. Merle and Cliff had ventured into the living room, and I heard them shushingeach other. There was a soft thud, and then Merle cursed under his breath. Cliff apologized for bumping into whatever it was he’d brushed up against.

Dale stared at a photograph on the wall. I joined him. Looking back at us was the LeHorn family in happier times. Judging by their clothes, I guessed the portrait had been taken in the early eighties. Nelson LeHorn looked like your typical, old-fashioned Pennsylvania farmer. He was standing, tall and thin, yet his frame and the set of his shoulders hinted at powerful strength. He was not smiling; his expression was dour and serious. A long black beard framed his narrow, pointed face, curling down to his chest, and his close-cropped hair was slicked back against his scalp. His eyes were like two dots of India ink. His wife, Patricia, stood next to him, smiling and beatific. Yet her smile seemed sad, and her eyes looked haunted. She was heavyset, her hair bland, and she wore no makeup, yet despite this she had a natural beauty that caught the eye, the type of beauty a woman like that retained well into her sixties and seventies—had she not been murdered. Seated in front of them were the kids: Matty, Claudine, and Gina. The girls both had the big-hair style so popular during that era, and Matty looked like a young Tom Cruise, circa
Risky Business
. Obviously he’d taken after his mother, rather than his old man.

I stared at Nelson LeHorn. His frozen black eyes seemed to stare back at me.

The floorboards creaked behind us, and Dale and I both jumped.

“Family portrait,” Cliff observed, looking over our shoulders. Merle stood beside him.

“You guys scared us,” I whispered. “Didn’t hear you coming.”

Merle sighed, fixated on the photograph. “It’s a damn shame. Guy had a beautiful wife and three beautiful kids. The kind of family some of us would give our left nut for.

And he killed them. Killed any chance at happiness they’d ever have.”

Merle looked away from the portrait, and I saw him wipe away a single tear. I knew he was thinking about his Peggy, and I started thinking about the miscarriages. I quickly changed the subject before we grew too maudlin.

“Did you guys find anything?” I spoke a little louder. “Any signs that someone has been here?”

“Nothing,” Cliff said. “There’s an inch of dust on everything. No one’s been here. The whole place is going to shit. Who knows how long it’s been exposed to the elements?”

“What about the upper floors?” Dale asked.

Cliff shrugged. “We didn’t go up, but the stairs are dusty, too. There’d be footprints on them if somebody were here. I’m thinking Adam was right. It was just the house settling on its foundation.”

“Okay,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. “Let’s search it top to bottom.”

Cliff pulled out his cigarettes and offered one to me, which I accepted.

“I still don’t know what the hell we’re looking for,” he said.

“You will.” I borrowed his lighter and lit up. “You’ll know it when you see it.”

“What?”

“Anything that will help us to understand what the hell we’re up against. Books, papers, something like that.”

Cliff took his lighter back. “I still think the cops would have cleaned that shit out.”

“Not necessarily,” Dale said. “Think about it. Nelson pushes Patricia from the third-story attic window. The kids confirm that’s what happened. Nelson flees before they can charge him. They’d be looking for evidence of affairs, insurance policies, stuff like that. Even if they came across something about satyrs, they’d discard it as fantasy.”

“Maybe,” Cliff said, but he didn’t seem convinced.

Animals and the elements had eroded the living room’s interior, turning it into a disaster area. Strips of wallpaper peeled away, revealing more yellow, mildewed plaster. The carpet was a layer of filth, and the hardwood floor beneath it was warped. Rats had chewed holes in the sofa and baseboards. The family had left a lot of personal belongings behind: china, books, photo albums, albums, and cassette tapes. All of it was worse for the wear. Even if some brave soul had actually wanted to loot the LeHorn place, there wasn’t much left that was worth anything.

After spending an hour searching the downstairs, we moved up to the second floor. Conditions were slightly better there; most of the windows were sealed, but there were still signs of infestation: old mouse droppings and chewed papers. My flashlight beam trailed over a pile of dead cockroaches.

A cursory check of the bathroom turned up nothing, so we moved on to the bedrooms, starting with Matty’s.