SHUDDERVILLE TWO (2 page)

When I was 12 years old, a tall, thin man moved in with Mama and me. He was sickly pale and sported a long, unkempt beard that collected crumbs whenever he ate. He wore a gray shirt, gray tie and dark pants, and he liked to pull his thinning greasy hair into a ponytail. He stayed with us for six months, and on my 13th birthday, he totally lost his marbles and killed Mama just as I was blowing out the candles on my cake. He attacked me, too, and left me for dead. He raided our refrigerator, took all the money Mama had stashed away, and headed out the door whistling a breezy tune.

After he left, I crawled over to Mama, looked into her blood-filled eyes and saw something there so horrific I’ve forgotten it to this day.

The police never found Baldilocks. My aunt and uncle took me in, and the bullying at school got worse. I tried to hide my scars, but gym class made that impossible. I figured a way to get back at the bullies, though. I found out where they lived and killed their dogs, and if they didn’t have dogs I killed their cats, and if they didn’t have cats I killed their parakeets or their pet turtles or whatever the hell else I could get my grubby hands on.

I ran away from home when I was 16 and never looked back. How did I survive? By lying, cheating, stealing, maiming and killing. And I’m getting better at it as I go along. I’m honing my craft.

Now I fixed the wobbly bedside table and shoved the roll of duct tape back in my duffel bag. I wouldn’t be needing it. Yet.

“Pow! Take that!”

I went out into the hallway where the boy was shadowboxing.

“Howdy, neighbor,” I said with a wink.

He beamed at me, this pudgy ugly kid. “Howdy, Mister!”

“You can call me Clarence.”

“My name is Andy Edison Kincaid,” he shouted as if I were deaf.

“Cool.” I noticed a hand-written sign taped to the bedroom door at the far end of the hall. It said, “BUSY—please knock.” I got a real kick out of that. It made me laugh. I asked the boy, “Whose room is that?”

“Olive’s.” He waved a dismissive hand. “You can’t go in there. She’s always busy. And that one over there is Mom’s room. And this is our john.” He pointed. “We get it all to ourselves.”

“Cool.”

“Cool! No girls!” He grinned and pulled a lucky rabbit’s foot out of his pocket. “Hey, Mister. See what I got? It brings you good luck.”

I looked at the dead thing in his hand, an amputated animal paw dyed lime-green and dangling from a keychain. He was too dumb to realize that a lucky rabbit’s foot wasn’t going to protect him from the likes of me.

*

Dinner was pretty awful, salty and overcooked. No wine. No beer. I couldn’t find an ashtray, so I decided to smoke outdoors after supper. The widow blushed a lot. All during our stilted conversation, the little girl and her brother stared at me as if I were a TV set. I made faces at them when their mom wasn’t looking, and they got a real kick out of that. Kids are easy. It’s the adults you have to watch out for.

Delilah was the kind of woman who would soften and sag her way into middle age, not particularly fighting it, not particularly resenting it. A once-beautiful, easy-going woman whose eyes would always be piercing blue, even as they became enshrouded in wrinkles.

After we finished eating, I offered to help with the dishes, but she shook me off, so I went outside for a smoke. I stood in the back yard, which sloped down toward a swampy area before the land rolled up into a field of wild clover. In the distance were the woods.

I stretched a little, shaking the stiffness out of my joints, and thought about settling in here for a week or two. There was no rush, and besides I was drained from my latest excursion in Arizona. Wow, speaking of handfuls. As I stood watching the far fields, I could hear music coming from the house. Classical music. Mozart. Cool, I thought. I liked Mozart—he preferred a big canvas, too.

The day was gradually drawing to a close. The velvet sky sneezed out a handful of stars. I spotted a pair of bats fluttering overhead, swooping back and forth between the rooftop and maple trees that grew in the yard.

I looked up at the lone attic window facing north. A light blinked on. I tried to hear beyond the swell of the music—a cry, maybe a conversation. I wanted to eavesdrop on their lives. I felt a great tension inside me, a yearning to know what was going on inside that house. I’d never been so curious before. Usually, people bored me to tears. They were so predictable. But I wanted to know what was in that attic. What wasn’t I supposed to see? And why was Delilah covered in cuts and bruises? What the hell was going on?

I stood smoking my cigarette and contemplating the possibilities, when the widow came outside a few minutes later. I heard the porch door slam shut behind her. I saw her look around wildly for a moment. I was over by the trees, and she didn’t see me standing there in the dark. She mopped her brow with her slender arm, sighed heavily, stared at the distant twilit fields, and took off across the yard. Where was she going? I had to find out. I stomped out my cigarette and watched her clamber over an old stonewall separating the Kincaid property from the neighboring pasture. Then she headed into the grassy field.

I decided to follow her. I could see exactly where she was going, so I stealthily circled around her. I didn’t want to alarm her. Between the setting sun and the full moon, it was light enough out not to require a flashlight. I hurried diagonally up the hill toward the woods, where I spotted a deer. I froze in place and watched as it paused, too, studying me. It snorted a warning, and I just waited. After a moment, the deer tensed and bounded into the woods, its tail flashing white.

I bumped into Delilah at the bottom of the hill. She was walking along in a distracted manner with her head bowed, eyes on the ground. She took brooding strides.

“Hello,” I said as I reached the dirt road.

She looked up without smiling. “Oh. Hello.” She sounded irritated.

“I was just walking off that delicious meal.”

“Delicious? Ha. You must be joking.”

We headed for the babbling brook, where something large plopped into the water as we approached. I could sense the panic of its movements—frenzied, startled. The water rippled, and we stood on the bank, looking down, but saw nothing.

The air throbbed with the sound of our silence.

I stubbornly waited her out.

She was such an odd woman, rapidly chewing on a piece of gum. She blew a gray bubble, and it popped. I stared at her upturned nose in the moonlight. I stared at her girlish hands. The more I studied her, the younger she appeared to be. “Where did you get those cuts and bruises, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“It’s nothing,” she muttered, looking startled and tugging on the sleeves of her blouse. “It’s from working in the garden.”

“The garden, huh?” I couldn’t hide my skepticism.

“I grow roses,” she said nervously, popping a succession of bubbles. “I have a tendency to… cut myself on the thorns. Sometimes I… trip over things. I’m a… clumsy person.”

Wow, I thought. What is she hiding?

“Cigarette?” I offered, and she glanced around as if somebody might be watching us before she spit out her gum and nodded. I lit one for her. “It must be difficult, raising two rambunctious kids all by yourself.”

She inhaled deeply, as if she were taking in the mountain air. “It feels like my life has gone horribly astray,” she confessed.

“What do you mean?”

She shrugged. She left a whole lot unsaid.

“Why has your life gone astray?”

“It’s difficult bringing children into this world and then watching them suffer.”

I nodded, trying to sound sympathetic. “Yeah, that’s rough.”

Who was suffering? Oliver? Andy?

She kept her mouth shut.

I didn’t push it. You couldn’t get too nosy too soon.

“You’ll be okay,” I said in my most soothing voice.

Her lips began to quiver. Her eyes welled with tears. It was a poignant moment. She finally let her guard down. I leaned in close and kissed her.

She drew back in terror. “Don’t,” she gasped.

“Why not?”

“Because we can’t.”

“Why not?”

“We just can’t.”

“We’re two adults, aren’t we?” I said, a little peeved.

She dropped her cigarette in the dirt and crushed it underfoot. She tensed all over before bounding across the field. Just like the deer.

*

I didn’t have to wait too long for the rest of them to go to bed. By nine o’clock, the kids had brushed their teeth and changed into their pajamas and crawled into bed. So had the widow. Her light remained on under her bedroom door until eleven, though. Reading or correcting papers, I don’t know. Does it matter? I waited with enormous patience for her light to finally wink out.

While I was waiting, I sat on my bed and found last month’s tabloid in my duffel bag and read the article again. You’d think that by 1971 they’d be printing color pictures, but the black-and-white’s were gruesome enough.
Phoenix
, Arizona
. Police discovered the body of a middle-aged female victim in her home on Thursday morning after responding to a call from the paperboy, who noticed the newspapers piling up on the front porch and alerted authorities. The victim was found lying in a pool of blood, with her head wrapped in duct tape. The police chief made a brief statement yesterday. ‘We are shocked at the grisly nature of this horrendous crime and are doing everything we can to solve it. I am asking any witnesses who may have seen or heard anything suspicious to come forward so that we can prevent further crimes like this from happening in our community.
’

I examined the morgue photographs carefully. The woman was thick around the middle with colorless hairs on her arms and legs. Her head was completely wrapped in duct tape, like a mummy. Duct tape covered her eyes, nose and mouth, and stopped at her chin. You could make out the shape of her face through her shroud—the triangular points of her ears and the small protuberance of her nose.

It always surprised me how easily people accepted strangers into their homes.

Sometimes I had to remind myself to be careful.

*

The old floorboards creaked and groaned as I tiptoed through the dark in my stocking feet. I got out the linseed oil, poured a few drops into the cracks and rubbed it into the wood with a rag.

I waited for as long as I could—well past midnight—before I ventured out of my room. The widow’s light was off, and the hallway’s large old-fashioned windowpanes let in plenty of moonlight. I decided to bring along a flashlight with me anyway, since the attic would be dark.

The attic door was locked, but that never stopped me before. Navigating those stairs was something else, though. They were narrow and slippery, and I almost tripped. The higher I climbed, the hotter and more stifling it got. I flicked on my flashlight at the top of the stairs. The dusty floorboards were covered with dead flies, and I could hear wasps buzzing lethargically in the eaves.

The old Victorian had a square rooftop, and the attic was wide and long. I spotted a room at the northern end, an enclosed room with a door. It seemed to take forever to navigate through the crazy obstacle course of boxes, tennis rackets, Christmas lights, mothballed winter clothes and hallowed childhood artifacts. Finally, I stood before the enclosed room, switched off my light and opened the door.

The room was all lit up with moonlight and smelled like fabric softener. I could hear a child breathing inside. There was a single curtainless window, and a blanket of moon dust fell over everything. There was a large four-poster bed in the middle of the room, a nightstand crowded with pills and medical supplies, and a bureau off to one side. I could hear a child breathing at the center of the bed. I could see the outline of a small body. She wore a long white nightgown with a pattern of tiny pink roses. She looked about ten years old. She breathed and behaved as if she were living inside a cloud—it’s hard to describe it any other way. She appeared to be floating, although I could plainly see she was rooted to gravity, same as me.

I moved cautiously into the room and noticed that her wrists were bound by velvet straps to the bedposts. The same with her ankles. It was weird beyond belief. Why was she trapped here? Was she being held prisoner? What for? What sickness was this?

I moved closer to the bed and heard something crunch underfoot. More dead flies. The girl had a round unblemished face and pale unscarred skin. She looked like Olive’s twin sister, only she wasn’t half as pretty. She had the same delicate features and dark hair as her sister, but I couldn’t see her eyes. They were closed, although I was sure they were the same startling blue. She had a low forehead that made her look slightly paranoid, and a severe mouth with thin lips. Although she was restrained, she didn’t appear to be uncomfortable or suffering in any way. She was clean and tidy. Her hair was neatly combed.

As I stood there, I felt my worries beginning to slip away. I began to lose the tension in my body. It was the opposite of what I’d expected. In my travels, I’d found proof of mankind’s sins and weaknesses everywhere, buried in the hearts of perfectly normal families. Greed, hunger, longing, pride, obsession, desire, envy, you name it. The American dream could so easily turn into a nightmare. Sometimes I helped those nightmares along.

The girl didn’t wake up. She slept soundly, her ribcage moving gently up and down. It was hypnotic, watching her sleep. I kept expecting something to happen. The truth was, I
wanted
something to happen. I examined the sheen of perspiration on her face and reached out to tickle the bottom of her foot, wanting to provoke some sort of response. Would a monster wake up and growl at me? Would her head spin around? Would her eyes glow hellfire red?

But nothing unusual happened. The little girl stirred in her sleep, shifted her foot away from my hand, and continued sleeping soundly and grinding her teeth. I panned the flashlight beam across the bed and noticed the extra toe on her left foot.

She had thirteen toes.

Now that really resonated with me.

I stood a while longer, hovering like a worried parent, wondering what the big mystery was. Why was she tied up like this? Why did they keep her up here? What was wrong with her? What was wrong with
them
? I exhausted myself with these questions.