Shivers 7 (14 page)

I rarely drink alcohol; I don’t like the way it interferes with my perceptions. But I had half a bottle of brandy in a kitchen cupboard and I poured myself a small glass, rationalizing that it was to calm my nerves. I had barely sipped it when the doorbell rang and, before I could possibly have reached it, rang again. When I opened it at last, I was startled to find Ted Kramer standing on my doorstep. It was the first time to my knowledge that he had ever ventured onto my property, preferring to send his four legged emissaries instead.

He was wearing a torn, sleeveless tee shirt and had a can of beer in one hand. I felt almost physically repelled by him even before I saw the expression on his face, which made me take an involuntary step backward.

“Hey, Vardoger, I want to talk to you.”

“I’m just on my way out,” I lied. “What do we have to talk about?”

He pushed his way past me into my house, a violation of my physical environment that I found so offensive that it overwhelmed my nascent alarm. “Seems like you’ve got plenty of time to talk when it suits you.”

I had no idea what he was getting at and told him so. If anything, this seemed to make him even angrier. Kramer was a big man, topping six feet easily, broad shouldered, running more than a bit to paunch but certainly not soft. He stepped toward me and I retreated again, determined to keep a small circle of my own space. “Someone’s been calling the insurance people, telling them I’m cheating them out of money.”

I’d fantasized about doing that very thing, of course, but I’d never followed through. “Well, it wasn’t me. Would you please leave now?”

“Who the hell else would know I dug out the garden Monday afternoon? Someone would have to climb up and spy over the fence to see that, and the Nelsons next door are out on Cape Cod for the week.”

“Then maybe someone came into their yard and watched you,” I said with a trembling voice. “It certainly wasn’t me. I would have been at work, remember?” But that wasn’t true. I’d taken Monday morning off to have my teeth cleaned. I was still at the house until 10:30, but I hadn’t spied on the Kramers and I hadn’t called anyone.

My quasi-lie seemed to have penetrated, however, because Kramer looked less certain of himself, though no less upset. “You just better watch your step, neighbor,” he said belligerently. To my great relief, he started toward the door. “I don’t like busybodies and I don’t like snitches. You keep your eyes off my property and your hands out of my business, you understand?”

I closed the door the moment he was outside. But I didn’t slam it, as much as I wanted to.

Instead I experienced a burst of quiet rage more intense than I’d ever felt before in my entire life. I stormed from room to room, as if trying to reach a place where my memories of the conversation couldn’t find me, but they always did. At times I talked aloud, berating myself for not standing up to Kramer, rehearsing what I should have said one moment and raging incoherently the next. I’m not sure how long this went on before I returned to the kitchen and the brandy, but some time after that I had another reason to complain. The bottle was empty and I was still conscious. It all seemed unfair.

I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to go next door, tear up the Kramer’s garden, cut down their apple trees, strangle the dogs, slash the tires on their truck, and then burn down the house. If the Kramers were trapped inside, so much the better. Eventually the brandy caught up to me and I fell asleep on the couch, staring at the blank screen of the television.

Wailing sirens wakened me.

Initially I was disoriented by the sound, by the darkness, by the fact that I was not wearing pajamas and lying in bed. There were flashing lights close by, very close, and the sirens abruptly stopped, but the echoes seemed to be trapped inside my head and I kept hearing them for quite a while afterwards. When I tried to stand, I nearly fell. My head ached, my stomach rumbled, and one of my legs was all pins and needles. I waited until the room slowed to minimal rotation, then carefully walked to the bathroom and vomited efficiently and refreshingly into the toilet.

I’m not sure how long it was before I took interest in the outside world again. It might have been an hour or more because I fell asleep with my forehead pressed against the white porcelain of the toilet. When I next opened my eyes, it was just before three in the morning. There were still flashing lights outside and voices talking loudly, and at irregular intervals the crackle of a police radio. I washed my face, checked my appearance in the bathroom mirror, then walked to the front door and stepped outside. It must have rained earlier in the evening because the grass was wet and the lights reflected oddly.

The Kramers’ house was a smoldering ruin. Two hoses were still playing on the ashes but it was clear that the fire was effectively out. I blinked, wondering if I was dreaming, and glanced toward the apple trees, half expecting to find that they’d been cut down. They hadn’t. I came as close as the firemen would allow, joining several other neighbors, all of whom were talking in hushed tones. The Kramers’ pickup truck was still there and its tires were flat, melted rather than slashed. There were three police cars and an ambulance, which had driven up onto the lawn and was now parked in the garden, the front wheels in the marigolds, the rear mashing down daffodils. The back of the ambulance was open and there were two stretchers on the ground nearby. No one seemed to be in a hurry.

Edith Neal, an elderly widow and chief neighborhood gossip from up the block, saw me and broke away from the group she was with. We weren’t exactly friends because she’d spread some nasty stories about me a while back, but we pretended to be sociable when we met. “Isn’t it terrible, Mr. Vardoger?”

“I’m not sure what happened, Edith. I was asleep.”

She looked at me oddly. “How could you sleep through all of this, Mr. Vardoger?”

“I took some pills,” I lied. “I have insomnia. Are the Kramers all right?” I tried to sound sincerely interested.

Edith shook her head. “Gone, the both of them. They just brought the bodies out a few minutes ago.”

It was the next day before I heard the rest. The fire had started in the kitchen and speculation was that one of the Kramers had left a burner lit on the gas stove and that a stray breeze had blown a curtain into the flame. They had probably been overcome by smoke and died without ever waking.

Edith made a point of stopping by to tell me the details. “I wonder why the dogs didn’t raise a ruckus when the fire started. They were both sleeping in the house at the time. Something doesn’t sound right to me. Those dogs barked if a fly flew in through a window or a car passed on the street. I say they were already dead when the fire started, and that means it wasn’t an accident.”

But the police apparently weren’t seriously bothered by the inconsistency. I wouldn’t have been either except for one thing. When I went back inside, I took off my shoes so that I wouldn’t track water into the house. They’d been dry when I went out, of course, or I would have found evidence on the carpet or in the bathroom. There was no question at all in my mind; I hadn’t set fire to the Kramers’ house while sleepwalking or in a drunken stupor. I hadn’t left the house at all.

But my umbrella was sitting in the hall closet, and it was still damp.

* * *

The next few days were uneventful, but the following week – this past week – has been a complete disaster. One of the apple trees was damaged in the fire, and during a windy rainstorm the trunk split, depositing the bulk of the tree on my property. A call to the police was not helpful; the Kramers had no known relatives and the disposition of their estate—and responsibility for its liabilities—was unresolved. That same evening, another of my neighbors came home late, drunk, and sideswiped my car, which I’d parked in the street to avoid having it scratched by the fallen tree’s grasping branches. I called a local tree service, who removed the debris on Thursday, but they carelessly damaged my lilacs in the process. Friday morning, Mr. Horty called me into his office and told me that because of low sales, they were being forced to reduce expenses, and even though my performance was outstanding, Hector and Dorothy had seniority so I was the one who would have to go. Arriving home, I found my front window broken with a note from still another neighbor saying his son had been playing baseball in the street and they would, of course, pay for the damage.

Earlier this evening I changed into a sweatshirt and jeans and sat in the front room with a fresh bottle of brandy, a full one this time, but even though I drank steadily, I remained conscious and reasonably sober, my fury burning off the effects of the alcohol. It was just after midnight when I felt a bit strange and hastened to the bathroom, assuming that I was about to become sick. The strangeness, however, passed within a few seconds and with no obvious resolution. Just to be safe, I remained in the bathroom, leaning against the side of the shower, trying not to be consumed by my thoughts. By my anger.

I wanted to smash Mr. Horty’s face with a blunt object. I wanted to throttle Mrs. Neal for the unkind gossip she’d circulated when I first moved to Managansett. I wanted to throw the Wilson boy through a window like a baseball, beat Oliver Begley to death for having hit my car, and disembowel the ignorant lout who’d mangled my shrubbery.

The front door closed.

I always lock up when I’m in the house. It seems to me a rudimentary precaution. Nevertheless, I was quite sure of what I’d just heard and, under normal circumstances, I would immediately have started to consider concealing myself from whatever intruder had picked my lock or in whatever other manner gained entry. But the past week had drained all of the emotion out of me, and the brandy probably added another layer of indifference, so instead I boldly opened the door and stepped out to confront my mysterious visitor.

But there was no one there. As I mentioned, I live in a small cottage. There is no place that anyone could have been hiding. I was alone in the house. But the door had definitely closed. I walked across the room and discovered that it was not locked. My hand lifted and I almost turned the knob to secure it, but a flicker of motion out of the corner of my eye distracted me and instead I crossed to the front window and looked out onto the front lawn.

There were several people there, or rather, there were several of the same person there. He was wearing a sweatshirt and jeans and he looked a lot like me. He, they, could have been my twins, and they were all moving away from the house, dispersing now on their various missions.

I thought about Mr. Horty and Mrs. Neal and Petey Wilson and Oliver Begley and the landscaper whose name I didn’t know and it occurred to me that I should warn them, but frankly there probably wasn’t time to convince them that I wasn’t nuts, and even more frankly, I felt a surge of fierce glee at the thought of what was coming to them, of what they had coming to them, and instead I climbed into my car and drove downtown and parked in front of Terry’s Bar & Grille. The clientele there were notoriously unruly and it was not at all difficult to entice one of the older men into starting a fight. He was uncoordinated and clumsy and I managed to avoid any serious harm while prolonging things until the bartender had successfully summoned the police.

And now I’m sitting in this cell, only a few feet from my erstwhile combatant, and the officer who arrested me told me that I was in big trouble and maybe he’s right.

But at least I have an alibi.

Bone by Bone

Scott Nicholson

The evening air of the Appalachian farmhouse tasted of old newsprint, or maybe the dry rot of a diary’s pages smeared with October yellow.

Not yellow like mustard, or the bleeding yolk of a sunny-side fried egg, or the skin of a summer squash. This was the yellow of sulfuric dust, a noxious meringue. Each breath came at a cost. Roger Main had survived hundreds of thousands of breaths, but now they dragged their slow way into his lungs as if propelled by tiny hooked claws.

Blame the cigarettes. That’s what any rational man would do. He’d clung to his unfiltered Pall Malls the way a drowning man clung to an anchor chain. They were an affectation, the prop of the intellectual. But “intellectual” was an inside joke; despite publishing in the Journal of Parapsychology, hooking up with some generous grants through the Rhine Research Center, and writing a few boo articles in the popular press each Halloween, Roger was about as smart-ass as a suicide bomber.

Smart-ass enough to take on the Rominger Place and its run-of-the-mill legend. The assignment had looked like a sucker’s bet on paper. Spend a night, vomit 1,000 words for the Horror Hood webzine, and pocket enough to cover two months of booze and smokes. Horror Hood was the latest start-up, the kind of website that featured blinking pumpkins, bloody eyeballs, and swollen female breasts. Funded by a 22-year-old heir to a motel chain known for its low rates and illegal employees, Horror Hood aimed for the same sort of experience—don’t look too closely at the sheets and check out before the rodents get hungry.

All in all, Roger would rather brave the Rominger Place than one of the publisher’s motels. The Rominger homestead was deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Tennessee, a day’s mule ride from the North Carolina border. Down the end of a long dirt road, tucked at the bottom of a hill, the two-story farmhouse leaned a little to the left, tin roof rusted and buckled. Most of the ripple-glass windows had been shattered, and the outbuildings were nothing more than collapsed heaps of rotted logs. As Roger stood on the sagging porch, he couldn’t resist the urge to knock on the front door.

“Anybody home?” he called. His professional rule of thumb was not to enter if any ghosts ever answered, but so far he was batting a thousand and figured it would stay that way. However, like most abandoned, isolated houses, the Rominger Place looked like the perfect hangout for bums, illegal immigrants, or meth cooks, any of whom could be dangerous.

The door had no handle, only a black, fist-sized hole that oozed cool air and darkness. He kicked it open. “Nobody here but us chickens,” he shouted.

The foyer was mostly bare, sporting only a vinyl sofa of that era when olive green was considered stylish. Only one cushion remained and it was gutted, spilling ocher foam. A mattress leaned against the wall by the brick fireplace, blotched with stains that must have leached from the bodies of diseased travelers. Apparently some of America’s great unwanted knew about this place, though they obviously hadn’t found it to their liking enough for an extended stay. No tin cans, whiskey bottles, or wads of toilet paper marked any recent tenancy.

Maybe the ghosts had scared them away. Roger smiled at the notion, wrinkling his nose against the sick air. Even the dust was fulsome, hanging like a thick growth on every surface. Odd that the local teens hadn’t made the place a party mecca. Scaring the pants off a girl was a tried-and-true approach, despite the horror-movie mandate that all unmarried fornicators must die.

As Roger explored the house, he tried to visualize the crimes that had occurred here: a crazed and jealous husband, name of Hollis Rominger, had killed his wife Maude sometime after the turn of the nineteenth century. Maude’s absence initially had been reported by a member of her church sewing circle, but a search revealed nothing. Rumors flew that she’d hopped a train to Norfolk to meet up with a sailor back from the Spanish-American War, that she’d gotten pregnant, that she had been sent off to an asylum due to a bout of melancholia. Hollis remained steadfast in both his sorrow and his denial of wrongdoing.

Until, that was, one of the sheriff’s deputies saw a message scratched in flour on the kitchen wall of the old farmhouse. “Well,” the flour had spelled, in what had been described as an uneven hand. This disturbed the investigators, mostly because the Rominger Place was fed by a spring, through a steel pipe that sent a steady trickle into the kitchen sink. And, of course (at this point in reading the historical account in a staple-bound book in the Stamey County Public Library, Main had stifled a deep yawn), a neighbor had come along who had a reputation as a witchwoman, prone to giving out herbs and muttering folk spells. The old woman dredged up a childhood memory of a long shaft behind the barn, of horses tugging ropes, sweaty men digging, stinky black mud drying in the sun.

The well was located with the help of a terrier, a breed of dog known to explore tunnels and ditch-pipes for rats. The hole had been covered with rotted boards and rusty tin, overgrown with honeysuckle vines that had been recently disturbed. A thoroughly hacked Maude was found in the well, her flesh already turning to cheese despite the cool liquid depths thirty feet below ground level. Hollis Rominger paid for his crime by dancing at the end of a short length of coiled hemp, and that should have been that.

Except—and this was the part of the case that first excited Roger Main—two other small bodies had been found in the well, both reduced to skeletons but obviously thrown into the common grave years apart.

Why hadn’t a flour-dusted finger spelled out their location?
Main had wondered.
And why wasn’t Hollis charged with those crimes as well? Because humans, even the most twisted of the species, were creatures of habit.
If Hollis “went to the well” once, why not over and over again?

The $2,000 question. And, while the story he fed Horror Hood might be just as cheesy as the site’s graphic design, the mystery stimulated him enough to be standing in the kitchen, where kudzu and Virginia creeper vines oozed through the walls. The counters had long ago collapsed, but the pipe still carried water, though there was no sink. The clear stream spouting from the pipe splashed into a ditch carved by decades, running under the house and adding to the rot trapped in the boards.

“Guess I’m on my own for dinner,” he said, switching on his battery-powered lantern in the darkening room. He wasn’t sure when he’d begun talking aloud during his adventures. He’d cultivated the public persona of an eccentric, the weirdo who would explore where no sane paranormal enthusiast would follow. He eschewed the EMF recorders and infrared cameras the serious investigators used to “prove” supernatural activity. To Roger, it was like trying to prove a negative—as with God, you couldn’t prove something that didn’t exist.

But what would he prove here anyway? Even if he encountered something otherworldly, he’d have only his senses and his memory, and both of those had repeatedly proven faulty. The best hope was to turn in a suspenseful, provocative article and clear the check before the publisher folded. With the laptop, he should be finished by dawn.

He set up shop in what must have been the sitting room, where a blackened brick fireplace stood. He propped his lantern so the light rose to the ceiling and bathed the room in honey-edged shadows. Lacking a desk, he leaned against the wall and propped the portable computer across his knees. He was warming up for the lead, something along the lines of, “In the haunted hillbilly country…,” when the sound descended the stairs.

It was nothing more than the Blue Ridge wind pouring unfettered through the numerous holes in the plank siding. And, naturally, as it curled under the eaves and slid along the tin roofing, it would shift into a high, keening moan.

Causing it to resemble a crying infant.

“Hell, yeah,” Roger said. “I can use that. Stephen King got nothing on me, the squirrel-eyed son of a bitch. Next thing you know, the stairs will start creaking, making it sound like Old Man Rominger is walking down from the attic.”

A wooden rapping followed in the ensuing silence, but it didn’t come from above. The front door.

Roger had heard no car engine and the headlights would have swept over the windows. Perfect. A polite bum, just what he needed to round out the story.

He opened the door with a grin fixed on his face, not sure whether he was going to invite the bum in or not. A man in a brown uniform stood at the edge of the porch. The light leaking from the sitting room gleamed off the man’s badge.

“Sheriff’s Department,” the man said, stating the obvious in a neutral voice. “Got a report of trespassing.”

“The property’s not posted,” Roger said, struggling to remain neutral himself. Aside from a high school pot bust and a close encounter on a “domestic-violence-type situation,” Roger had little experience with cops, either as enforcers or protectors. But having one walk up out of nowhere in the middle of the night had put him off his game.

Again came the steady voice: “You’re not a Rominger, are you?”

Roger debated a bluff, and then realized his photo ID bore his real name. Besides, his license plate numbers were easy enough to trace. “No, I got permission from the family to stay here.”

The deputy stepped forward so his face was in the light. A long flashlight was shoved in his belt. A beard covered his chin and neck, which was odd, since the only unshaven cops Roger had ever seen were undercover drug agents on television. The man’s eyes were the color of frozen steel and seemed not to blink. “Well, I’m a Rominger. I don’t recall anybody asking for permission to stay here.”

“Wonderful,” Roger said, affecting a cheerful manner. “Maybe you can help me with my history project.”

The eyes narrowed but became no less intense. “You from the university?”

Appalachian State University was just over the ridge, though in the next county and state, and was noted for its regional collection. Roger had checked its online resources but had found nothing except what was already recorded in newspaper accounts. However, the granite-faced cop might give a little more leeway to an egghead who probably had lawyer friends. “Sure,” Roger said. “My contact was supposed to get clearance from the family. I’m working on a book.”

“Something along the lines of ‘Murder in the Mountains,’ probably,” the cop said in his slow, easy, but troubling voice.

“All I want to publish is the truth.”

“I been around long enough to know the truth is like a snake in dry well. You leave it alone, and it does you and the snake just fine. But when you poke around, one of you ends up snakebit.”

Roger noted the “dry well” metaphor and wondered how he could work it into the story. “There’s a lot of wisdom in that, Deputy Rominger, but—”

“I ain’t a Rominger. I married into the family.”

“Sure, Deputy, but unless I’m breaking some sort of law—”

“There’s the law of the land and then there’s the law of the Rominger Place.”

Roger almost grinned at the man’s Will Rogers homilies, but those metallic eyes spoke of a grim earnestness. “Speaking of wells, do you mind showing me where the bodies were found? The faster I finish my business here, the faster I’ll be on my way.”

The deputy flicked on his flashlight and played it up the stairs, briefly defeating the gloom. “You hear something?”

This time, Roger did grin. That was the corniest trick in the book. Trying to scare off the stranger with spook stories. “Sounded like maybe a fingernail scratching on the wall.”

“Wonder what words she wrote this time.”

Roger figured “she” must mean Maude, who was believed to have written that afterlife message in the flour. The redemption story was older than Christ. Such myths appealed to people’s sense of justice. This whole gig was starting to shape up as a tired episode of “The Ghost Whisperer.”

“How do you know it was Maude that did the writing?” Roger asked. “Has she ever written anything besides ‘Well,’ or does she just write the same thing over and over?” Roger could relate to that, because some of the most successful paranormal writers, as well as those pimping horror fiction, did little more than repeat the same weary tale. Roger had no respect for the hackwork that passed muster in the juvenile world of giggly spooks and jiggly boobs, but he also understood his chosen genre was one of the few where his own limited talents were acceptable.

“Maude’s gone on to her eternal reward,” the deputy said. “Her spiritual suffering ended the day her account was squared.”

Roger couldn’t help casting a glance up the dark stairwell. “So who is doing the writing?”

“Want to go up and see, or would you rather see the well?”

For the first time in his skeptical ghost-hunting career, he was glad for company. The deputy, though a bit melodramatic, was stoic and calm, bearing the look of one who could deal with “situations,” as they were known in cop vernacular.

“Let’s try the well,” Roger said. “Might be dangerous for me to go stumbling out there in the dark by myself. Better to have a tour guide who knows the territory.”

The deputy blinked and raised one corner of his mouth in a gesture that might have been a smile. “Got an extra flashlight?”

Roger nodded. He’d packed a high-powered pen light as a backup. He fished it out of his pocket as the deputy drew out his own flashlight as if it were a battle-ax.

“Follow me,” the deputy said.

Roger let himself be led off the porch, around the house, and down a weedy trail between leaning outbuildings. A sallow slice of moon hung in the sky, dimmed by a gray wreath of clouds. Despite the October chill, crickets worked the night air and dead leaves rattled against bone-dry fence posts. Roger realized one sound was missing: most cops let their car engines idle while making a call, in case an emergency required a fast response.

The deputy’s flashlight beam bounced ahead, throwing a pumpkin-colored pall on the weedy farmyard. Roger’s own light did little to penetrate the black wool of darkness, but it gave him a measure of comfort. He was about to call Deputy Rominger, and then remembered he wasn’t a Rominger. On reflection, Roger realized the officer wore no brass nameplate above his shirt pocket, nor insignia of any kind besides the badge.