Malice (4 page)

“What happened?”

“Alex, one of my dad’s deputies, tried to take Derek in on a parole violation. When Alex tried to push me aside, Derek knocked him out. Look, can you help us? Her hands were clasped in front of her, pleading.

He owed Derek. Owed him big time.

“Yeah, of course. You wanna stay in my garage or—”

“No, no,” Samantha said impatiently. “We have a place, an old house. We just need to borrow some stuff from you. I couldn’t think of anyone else, and we were already on our way here to see if you were okay.”

“What do you need?”

“Food, a sleeping bag, light …”

“All right,” he said and turned.

“Lysander,” she whispered, “please hurry. We don’t have long.”

Lysander’s heart was beating a fierce racket as he went back inside to gather the things Sam had asked for. If you included his first shining day at school, he had known Derek for a grand total of ten minutes. But already both he and Sam had stood up for him when he was in trouble. That had to count for something.

***

It was drizzling when they arrived. The house looked old and tired, imprisoned by the weeds and the overgrowth. Over the years a thick blanket of moss had crept up its walls, until the place didn’t look like a house so much as it did a living being. In the front yard, a tall pine resembled a thick and gnarled torso, its leafy branches brushing the roof. One of them intruded through a broken window. Lysander guessed the house was at least fifty years old, maybe even a hundred.

The front door was protected by a gaping hole in what used to be the porch. A yellow ribbon was strung across the door warning all trespassers that the premises were off limits. To rip that yellow tape down and traipse in would be a clear signal to the cops that someone was inside. Might as well plop a sign out front:

Dear Pigs ...

We’ve broken in, come get us.

Signed,

The Dumbasses

Samantha led them around the side of the house to a broken window. Below it was a sad-looking bush, its leaves shriveled and brown. She tossed the bush aside. Behind it, Lysander saw a small crate propped against the wall—a makeshift step ladder.

They slipped in through the window, one at a time.

Inside was the unmistakable odor of rotting wood. In Hayward, Lysander had been in abandoned houses before, but none this old or strong smelling.

“Place has gone to the shits,” Derek noted astutely as he tiptoed around, testing how strong the floors were.

“Does it matter?” Samantha replied, her arms folded over her chest. “You’re not looking to buy the place. Just lay low for a few weeks till it all blows over. Unless, that is, you want to turn yourself in.”

Derek threw Samantha a sharp look.

The floorboards moaned under the added weight as the three came to a large foyer. The smell of old wood was stronger here.

A house like this must be teeming with history
, he thought.

Lysander’s gaze was drawn to the spiraling staircase. He imagined a host of fancy party guests; well-to-do ladies and gentlemen clad in tuxedos and evening dresses drinking martinis. He saw streamers and signs that read: “Victory Europe” and another “Victory Japan.” He blinked, and the image was gone. That was weird, he thought.

The second room beyond the front foyer was the most intact. It had a floor that was relatively dry, and three of its four windows were still intact. On the opposing wall was an imprint from where a desk once stood. Inside it a broken chair balanced against the wall on its one remaining leg. Derek dropped the duffel bag. It clanked when it hit the floor and he sprang with surprise at the noise. He unpacked excitedly, pulling out a wad of crumpled comic books and a shiny green sleeping bag, and tossed them both aside. He came to an old lantern and examined it. His lips pursed as he whistled his approval. “Wow, what antique store you get this beauty from? Does it work?”

Lysander gave him a look, and Derek went back to grabbing awkwardly inside the now supple duffel bag. Suddenly his eyes grew wide. He withdrew a brown bottle with a black label. Jack Daniels.

Samantha was watching Lysander. “You mentioned something in class before Chad…well I’ve been wondering about it.” Sam was scratching at the nail polish on her thumb.

“What happened in Hayden, you mean?”

Sam nodded.

In spite of everything they had done for him and the almost eerie sense of ease he had felt being in Sam’s company, the truth was they didn’t know a thing about each other. Part of Lysander wanted to keep it that way.

“Not much to say,” he said finally. “Someone set our place on fire. My dad ran out of the house with my senile grandmother draped over his shoulder like a case of beer. Everyone was safe and sound except for my dog Sandy.” Lysander grew quiet and Sam put her hand on his shoulder.

“Oh I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

Derek took a swig of JD and swung around so his back faced them. “I can beat that.”

He hoisted the back of his T-shirt up over his shoulders. Stretching from end to end was a full color tattoo of a guy on a Harley Davidson riding against the sunset in open desert.

“It’s about freedom,” Derek said before any of them had a chance to ask.

Lysander and Samantha exchanged a glance.

Derek spoke over his shoulder. “I got it after my brother died. It’s a long story, but that’s him on the bike. He and I always talked about someday opening our own bike shop. He was real smart, my brother, maybe not school-wise, like Sam, but he knew everything there was to know about bikes.” He looked up with a strained smile, then let his shirt fall to his waist.

“Can we talk about something happy please?” Sam pleaded.

Just then the thunderous boom that came from the basement made them all jump.

“What the hell was that?” Sam whispered.

Lysander’s eyes darted around the room. “Thunder,” he said, hardly believing a word of it.

But the fear on Sam’s face wasn’t going away. She turned to Derek. “Coming here was a mistake,” she said to him. “I just didn’t know where else you could stay.”

“Old houses make noise, Sam,” Derek said calmly. “Your nerves are still frayed from earlier. And if it’s that old ghost story garbage that’s got you all hot and bothered—”

“Ghost?” Lysander cut in. “What ghost?”

Sam shook her head, eyeing Derek. “This house used to belong to a rich family.” Her voice was trembling. “The McMurphys. They went back generations. Probably the most prominent family in Millingham. One day they disappeared. All seven of them. Not a trace. The police said they all just up and left. But that never really made much sense to most people in town, since every stitch of clothing they owned was still in their closets. No one really knows what happened to them.”

Lysander let out a deep sigh. “Just like the
Mary Celeste
.”

Derek’s mouth fell open. “The Mary what?”

Lysander spun the bottle of JD on the floor and it made a sound like scuttling claws. “The
Mary Celeste
was a sailing ship from the eighteen hundreds, found adrift in the Atlantic. The ship was in nearly perfect condition. Plates with half eaten food, pipes that were still lit. Except when they boarded her, they couldn’t find a soul.”

“What happened to them?” Derek asked.

Lysander shrugged his shoulders. “Heck if I know.”

“Difference here was that the McMurphys were seen again,” Sam said. “At least one of them was. When I was maybe twelve or thirteen, an aunt of mine told me she had seen James McMurphy standing on her lawn.” Samantha leaned forward. “She said his cheeks were all sunken in and his skin was gray like an old piece of steak that’d been sitting out too long. She opened her front door thinking he was sick, that he needed her to call the doctor. She saw he was trying to speak, but when his mouth opened she could see right through to the other side of the road. The back of his head was gone, just as if it had never been there. Said she’d never been so scared in all her life. She slammed her front door, sank to her knees and prayed all night for the good Lord to save her.” Sam looked from Derek to Lysander. “Every small town has skeletons in its closet, I think.”

Derek stifled a laugh. “Amityville, yes. Salem, maybe. But Millingham? The most boring town in the world. We don’t have a shady bone in our whole collective body. I’d stake my life on—”

“Don’t say stuff like that Derek,” Samantha cried. “Maybe it isn’t true. Maybe it is just a story our parents whipped up to scare us into being good. But what if we’re wrong?”

Lysander was thinking about his disturbing encounter with Peter Hume that morning. “
You were warned not to come here
.”

Another crash. This time louder.

He was pretty sure that whatever had made that noise wasn’t a rat.

Peter Hume was startled by the knock at his door. He glanced up from the heavy leather-bound manuscript he was reading: an original copy of Cotton Mather’s The
Wonders of the Invisible World
, perhaps one of six still in existence. A tiny door on the wall sprang open, and from it a mechanical bird danced and chirped. Eight times it called out, dancing and bobbing, before disappearing out of sight.

Little late for visitors, he thought. He slipped into his yellow cardigan, with the initials PH centered over the left breast pocket.

Hume’s house, dimly lit and brimming with pockets of shadow, bore a greater resemblance to something out of Ole Worm’s
Cabinet of Curiosities
than it did to the home of Zellermann’s top insurance rep.

Spotlights drew attention to Peter’s growing collection. Historical artifacts he called some of them. Others, he called wonders. A number of his neighbors didn’t think much of his hobby. Most weren’t sure what to think, and it wasn’t just the rank odor of antique upholstery and aging wood that got to them. Nor was it the plush burgundy wall-to-wall carpeting, which only seemed to add to the unsettling illusion that one had taken a dusty step backward in time.

In these last few months, Peter had developed an insatiable appetite for the more macabre aspects of seventeenth-century colonial life. Pursuing disturbing relics from that era was consuming more and more of his time and money.

On one glass shelf sat three dark bottles, each filled with urine, a pinch of hair and three bent pins—a vile concoction brewed over three hundred years ago as a protection against witchcraft. On a table nearby stood an eerily life-like bust of Jesus Christ, chiseled from solid oak, circa 1630. The man selling it was convinced that he had seen the eyes blink late one night. Said it had scared him so bad he could hardly look at it anymore. For that one Peter had paid cash. But it was when he added these last items that Peter’s wife thought he had gone too far. They were three-hundred-fifty-year-old implements of torture used to extract confessions. The breast ripper was a particularly gruesome item said to have been used in a dozen witch trials.

Not long ago, those same strange and exotic objects had begun exerting a pull over him, a force that was growing stronger with every passing day. In a weird kind of way they were like children to him and he adored them. But their jealousy was threatening to pull his life apart. They had already done all they could to drive his wife away and what few friends he had. Before long, he would no longer be Peter Hume, salesman first class, but Peter Hume: eternal curator of living antiquities. He could feel his artifacts at night, in the darkness, watching him. Even the ones without eyes. They watched closest of all. And just yesterday he had heard one of them speak, hadn’t he? Sounded like something out of a child’s nursery rhyme and he had felt an odd sensation of pride at hearing it, as any father would, hearing his son speak for the first time.

He’s coming
…

It was the bust with Jesus’ warm and loving face that had said the words, its eyes, half whites, peering up at him.

“Who is coming?” he had asked, feeling a touch foolish.

And that was when Jesus showed him Millingham, not the way it was now. The way it was hundreds of years ago. He showed him a man with a black gown and long bony fingers. Then he showed him a witch, writhing in blistering agony. Of course, Peter hadn’t believed him at first. How was any of this even possible? But since then Jesus had shown him lots of things. Things that had made it all clear and they had grown close, as any two people would who spent as much time together as they did. Because time was all Peter had, now that his wife was getting ready to leave him.

It was Jesus, in the end, who had told him to warn Lysander. To tell him, he was who the dark man really wanted. That Peter would be safe if he just hung low.

The bell rang again and Peter went to the door. He was alone for the moment, and because of this his body was calm and relaxed. He unlatched and opened the door.

His demeanor changed at once.

He and his new guest exchanged greetings, and Peter Hume invited his guest in for tea. Peter closed the door behind him and turned the lock. He was thinking about what excuse he might use to save himself from a long drawn-out visit.