Evil Heights, Book II: Monster in the House Page 4

  Lee nodded, but wasn't about to tell him about the glass eye.

  "I'm sure what you found was nuthin',” he continued. “For a while, just before we hit the limestone bedrock, all this nasty stuff started turning up in every scoop. Old Mr. Ballard, he come down and had us fish some of out it out, rotted pieces of dresses and men's clothes, doctor's stuff, needles, bottles with corks, then pieces of arrowheads, and lots of charcoal, all kinds of junk. He fished through it keeping some of it, but most of it, he made us toss it all in the river."

  Lee could see a picture in his mind of exactly what Blondie was describing. He'd seen some of it, too. There was all this moldering stuff clotted into the clay. It was like the residue from a forgotten cemetery, which had gone to seed, and the caskets had caved in, and whatever hadn't entirely decomposed was left still caked in the dirt.

  "But let me tell ya’ boy, that ain't even the half of it.” Blondie leaned in a little closer to Lee and let his voice drop down a peg. “Ever since I was just little, and that's a long way back, folks have talked about this here place. Some say the roots of the problems goes way back to the time when there weren't nuthin’ or nobody here ‘cept the Indians."

  He pointed over to the little house. “Look at that. Any other place and you'd say what a pretty little room. If you was rich, like the Ballards, you might even want to fix it up and use it for garden parties and such. Or maybe, if you had kids, you might let your little girls play house in it."

  He shook his head. “That place there,” his finger shook as he kept his arm outstretched and pointing, “it scares the hell outta me. Look how it just sits out there. I mean, look at it. It ain't natural somehow, but I can't for the life of me figure out why it gives me the heebie-jeebies. But I'm telling ya there ain't a time I go by that I don't get some kind of shivery feelin'. Like it's waitin'. I ain't sayin’ it's alive, but it's waitin'. I know it. You might say ol’ Blondie's crazy, but you couldn't get me to set foot in there for no amount of money. No sir. That air in there is poison. Hell, you can see it through the windows. I bet if you was to go in there it would smell just like a room where too many people have slept with out letting the windows open. You know, that sour smell. Something ain't right in there. It was the same with that hole for the bomb shelter when we dug it out. It was like the air itself down in the ground had gone bad, soured. I know that sounds crazy, but that's what it was like, all still and quiet, just dead, like the bottom of an empty grave on a cold night. But it wasn't cold. Usually when you dig a hole it's cold. But this wasn't. It was hot, hot as hell."

  He motioned with a shrug over towards the main house. “And that place,” he jerked his thumb over his shoulder keeping his flat eyes on Lee, “has seen more misery than any ten graveyards. It don't pay to stay ‘round here for no time, no sir. There ain't a family or a person who's stayed here that didn't have a whole lot of bad happen to ‘em. The Ballard's ain't no exception, neither."

  Blondie snapped his lunch box closed.

  Lee was thoroughly captivated. “Like what?"

  Blondie smacked his lips running his tongue around inside. “When I was a little child, this house went empty for a long while. It had been vacant, mostly, ever after the Civil War. After the Yankees left, it had gone back to the owners. I can't rightly recollect their name any more, but it don't really matter anyway, ‘cause they only lived in it for a short while before movin’ out themselves. They tried renting it out, but people just wouldn't stay. Rich families would move in and then skedaddle right back out. After a while, word got around, and the owners couldn't find nobody that would live here no matter how cheap they made the rent. It was abandoned, and like most places where nobody lives it got tore up real bad. People stole just about everything that wasn't stuck down to the foundation. After a spell, men who rode the rails, hobos and such, hard men, both colored and white, learned ‘bout the house. They'd hop off the train before it hit the rail yard and spend a night, maybe two at most in the old place before movin’ on, and movin’ on real quick like. Lot's of places up and down the tracks the Sheriff would have to come ‘round every now and then to roust out the vagrants, to keep ‘em from settlin’ in, but not here. They left on their own."

  Blondie pulled himself back out into the sun and immediately put on his wide, straw hat. To Lee, still sitting on the ground, he looked almost a mile tall.

  "Stuff happened here over those years most proper folks don't want to remember much less talk ‘bout. It was a relief to the whole town when Mr. Ballard took the place over and fixed it back up. Though them same folks who was happy ‘bout it said he was crazy to do it."

  "What do you mean?” Lee stretched up his arms lacing his fingers together and popping is knuckles. “What kind of stuff, Blondie?"

  "Bad stuff, killin's, rapes.” His wide, white eyes grew wider. “You want a fer instance?"

  Lee nodded.

  "All right. Here's you one I bet you ain't never heard about. There was this family, a family of real poor folks on hard times,” he counted off using his fingers, “mamma, papa, two little girls and a boy ‘bout your age, they got themselves tore all to pieces so's it was hard to tell who was who and what was what, and ain't nobody ever got caught for it."

  Lee was wide-eyed. “For real?"

  "As real as I'm standin’ here,” Blondie came back. “Those folks was dead. They say whoever did it messed with the bodies after he killed ‘em and put the corpses in unnatural positions. Crazy stuff. Sex stuff. It was real bad."

  Lee had no doubt Blondie wasn't kidding. The man looked down at him as seriously as Lee had ever seen anybody.

  Blondie pulled his straw hat down. “I'd best be getting’ back to work."

  Lee watched the big man tuck his battered lunch box under one arm and shamble off slowly towards where he'd left his mower on the other side of the house. Lee noticed the seat of Blondie's Levi's overalls was worn and faded to where the denim was almost white, and the backs of the cuffs of his pants legs had been frayed away and tattered by the heels of his boots.

  Blondie suddenly stopped and turned, facing back to Lee.

  "You live ‘round here, boy?"

  "Yes, sir.” Lee called him sir for the first time. “We live just over at the next house, yonder.” ‘Yonder’ was another one of those words Maggie hated, but it seemed to fit when talking to Blondie, and Lee usually did tailor his speech to fit whoever he was speaking to. “Used to be my grandma's place."

  The black man took a single step coming back toward Lee and then stopped. “I'll tell ya something, and you listen to ol’ Blondie. You stay away from here at night. Don't you come any closer than you have to. You'll be a damn sight better off. Ya hear me, boy? I ain't foolin’ ‘round."

  Lee could only nod, remembering Mrs. Barton's voice as she had told him almost the exact same thing. “You'd do best to stay in at night, Lee."

  Carrying his lunchbox, Blondie walked off, leaving Lee all alone.

  Wadding up his crumpled paper bag Lee rolled it out on the grass by the wheelbarrow. Feeling stiff, he peeled himself up from the ground and felt a big, luxurious yawn coming on. Stretching out as the yawn came out, he looked up at the big house. Brenda had opened all the windows on the second floor to help cool the place, as any breezes around here seemed to run high. The white, lacy curtains hung still in their places, and despite the bright sun it was dark back behind. Suddenly, washed over by a cold spasm that shivered his spine, Lee thought he could smell a trace of that old, musty smell from the parlor, though surely it was just in his mind. And there was something else mixed in. It was that oily, frying odor he'd noticed the time he'd passed through the kitchen following Brenda. Remembering his home safety merit badge in Cub scouts, he knew whoever was cooking should turn that flame down; the oil was too hot. Oil that hot could burst into flames.

  Maybe it was just that Blondie's story of the murdered family was a little too fresh in his mind, but he did feel something catch at him when his eyes came across this one par
ticular window, second from the corner. That was the room, he imagined, the room that family had stayed in. Somehow he felt, or rather he knew, they'd chosen that particular room because it was one of the few which still had all of the panes of glass remaining in its window, and the father had said it would be less cold and drafty there. They'd been hungry and tired that night. Tomorrow morning they'd planned to drag into town to look for work or just beg. With nothing to eat, the kids had snuggled in close to their parents, as under a clear moonlit sky it had turned unusually cold, and they had but one blanket.

  In the night, the boy had gone off; he'd needed to pee. He'd been afraid of the house; Lee could just feel it. This was a kid from the streets, one who'd grown up on hard times, but in this house he'd not even wanted to go wandering around looking for anything worth stealing. He just stepped out into the hall and was using the wall in the corner. Lee could see it, clear as day. It was cold; steam was rising up off of the stream as the puddle of urine built up on the floor.

  Lost in the daydream, Lee was standing out in the sun looking up at that window as motionless as Mrs. Ballard in the little house staring at the back door. He saw it come at the boy, suddenly emerging up as a shadowy form out of the pitch darkness down in the stairwell. Not even finished, the boy, terrified, saw it too, and tried to run. It caught him before he ever made it to the door. It dragged him back into the darkness, by an ankle. The boy was screaming for his father, scratching and clawing at the floor.

  Lee suddenly remembered the marks he had seen in the hardwood floor of the upper hallway. With what he was seeing he knew now those weren't scratches from some heavy piece of furniture being carelessly moved.

  Just as in one of those nightmares of Lee's own, the boy's screams somehow didn't wake the others. The family slept, just on the other side of the wall, while it pulled him into the darkness and then tore him apart.

  Lee could see it. In his mind he actually was there. In the long darkness of the hallway he saw a vivid shadow of the boy's death, like some kind of terrible animation, framed in moonlight and projected on the wall. The violence of the act was devastating in its savagery; the thing holding him down with one hand and tearing at him with the other. The way its arms moved, the splashes of blood slinging off the fingers and spattering the walls. The boy, pinned down, kicking and struggling, still screaming and screaming ‘til the very last. Why didn't the others wake up? Why didn't they do something?

  When the boy was dead, mercifully, the echoes of the screams ceased; but the bleeding had only just begun. It was unbelievable the quantity of blood pooled on the floor and dripping and running down the walls and stairs.

  Lee was still standing out in the sun, looking up, looking into that one window, mesmerized. In his imagination he started to form another picture, as real as any of those hanging on the walls along the hall or in the parlor. It hadn't been satisfied with just the boy. What do they say? “It'd merely wet its whistle."

  What Lee saw now was flashed in a mental image drawn in the blacks and whites of moonlight, the bodies, all of them, heaped upon one another in the most awful way: mother, son, father, and the two small daughters. The scene resembled something from a gothic painting, a vision of severed limbs and writhing torsos, an orgy of the damned suffering sin in a pit from hell.

  A long, bent cross was cast on the wall by the door, formed from the shadow of the window's framing in the moonlight. As Lee watched, steam was rising up out of the fresh cuts and gashes. What a few minutes before had been human beings now resembled only so much mangled meat. One of the little girls, she was so terribly small and thin, the exposed ribs of her rent torso reminded Lee of meat he had seen in the butcher's shop but a few days before. Her head had been severed from her neck, and the killer had placed it between her father's bare feet, which he'd positioned together out on the floor. Madness! What it had done with their bodies was even worse than the killing in that it was so sick, so absolutely insane.

  They'd all been stripped naked. The family was so poor their clothes were really just rags, and now the dresses and the father's faded, blue over-alls lay heaped in a sodden pile over in the corner, lit by the same wedge of silvery moonlight angling up the wall. Their blood was everywhere, even spattered across the ceiling and freezing in drops and runners to the frosted glass of the windowpanes.

  And it was still there; Lee saw it when it moved, just a shadowy form, nothing more. Maybe it was a man, maybe not. But he could feel its glee, like a spoiled baby. It had stayed, remaining long after the bodies had cooled and stiffened, admiring its work, pacing around, moving the parts, getting it just right.

  Carried in the fleeting, hypnotic images Lee could see, but could not shut out, he suddenly thought he could hear something new. It was all dark. He was somewhere else now. He heard the soft sounds of Maggie and his dad making love last night. The thing was in their room, just down the hall from his own. His parents weren't alone. There was that thing; it was in there with them, laughing under its breath, scuttling about, always keeping to the darkest shadows. In this pitch-blackness, Lee thankfully couldn't see the bed. But he could hear the sounds, the sounds of Maggie and his dad making love. For fleeting seconds he began to catch glimpses of those eyes, those awful, yellow eyes. They cast off yellow pools of light, highlighting the details wherever they fell. Even when the eyes winked out, and he could again see nothing but darkness, he knew it was still there; he knew it, as surely as he knew it had been there, running right behind; this very same thing was the thing that had chased him, that night, through the darkness down Seminole Road.

  The sun was shining, pouring down, and Lee was standing alone, rigid, staring up at that window.

  Off in the distance Blondie's mower started up, echoing off the bricks, but Lee didn't hear it. The daydream's vision had changed again, and something else crept into his mind, a new mental picture, this time in full color, of the slaughtered tribe of Indian women and children Javier had described, the ones whom Osia had attacked in the woods after murdering their men. The huge Indian had emerged from the foliage just after they had eaten their meager morning meal of berries and a few scavenged bird eggs a lucky child had found. Osia had stood there, grinning that wolfish grin, those yellow eyes afire. He was holding his staff, the one with the quartz crystal blades fixed at either end. Not a one had gotten away. At first, he'd been careful to cripple rather than kill. Dead, they weren't nearly as much fun. Terrible things had been done to their bodies. Awful things. Pieces were in the trees. Drops of blood and clear fluids were dripping down and laying slick upon the grass and leaves. Something he couldn't even imagine was twisting in the breeze.

  Lee forced himself to snap out of it. Letting it all go, he looked away from the darkness standing behind that one, particular window and decided he'd better get back to work. This was crazy. He was used to letting himself fall into bouts of daydreams, but this had seemed so much deeper. The eerie sensation of the lingering feel of what he'd just imagined he was seeing wasn't just in his mind. The back of his neck and his toes felt chilled, and it was ninety-eight degrees in the shade.

  He could have easily finished up in the early afternoon, but since Mrs. Ballard had chosen to remain in the little house later than usual, he kept up a steady rhythm between the river and the house though it was really just for show.

  Around three, Brenda came out with another glass of water. Lee met her half way between the main house and the little house. He had taken to wandering around with a little fresh dirt in the wheelbarrow, patting down the soil, and adding a little wherever it was needed.

  Brenda looked around and handed him the glass. “I'd say you're done."

  Lee drained half before putting it down.

  "I'm supposed to work ‘til five."

  "I think it'll be all right for you to go home a little early today. You've earned it. I got to admit I've never seen a boy your age work this hard for this long."

  Lee felt pride wash through him rather than the usual awk
ward feeling when complimented by an adult. Brenda was just too sincere to make him feel like she was pulling his leg.

  Brenda, keeping her smiling eyes on him, fished around in the front pocket of her apron and produced the brown envelope.

  "Take the wheelbarrow and shovel back to the shed and then you go on."

  Lee looked back at the little house.

  "Maybe I should say something to Mrs. Ballard. You know thank her."

  Brenda shook her head.

  "You'd do best to leave her alone. Today's the anniversary of Mr. Ballard's passing.” Brenda nodded at the little house. “She probably won't come out of there until dark."

  "You really think it'd be all right?"

  Brenda put the envelope in Lee's hand. “Go on. Skedaddle."

  Lee finished the last of the water and handed the glass back to Brenda. She tousled his head almost pulling off his cap.

  "Thanks, Brenda,” he said, the sincerity of what he felt welling up in him.

  "Don't worry about it,” she came back. “You're a good kid. Glad to do it. Now you go on home."

  CHAPTER THREE: LUCKY PUP

  Lee put the shovel with the others and leaned the wheelbarrow up against the wall. He closed and latched the rickety old door of the musty smelling shed and then headed straight for home.

  For some reason, as he walked under the shadows of the trees, he didn't want to open the envelope just yet. He had it stuffed down in his pocket and kept his hand there as he half walked, half ran between the dead tree trunks cutting straight across the Ballard grounds.

  When he got to their fence, which ran from the back of the house down to the train yard's fence he was met at the chain link gate by an ecstatic Flapjack who'd obviously heard him coming. The big duck was so eager to greet his boy he almost didn't let Lee slide through the gate.