The Croning (16 page)
“Still bemused by this turn of events, I showed up at Coolidge’s that evening. Herb handed me the keys on his way to his twice a month wild Friday night at the Elks Club; he wore his orange blazer and a bowtie—I can’t adequately express the dizzying effect of that ensemble. From what I understand, Monday mornings he’d skip into the store chipper as a squirrel; the one day he wasn’t sober as an accountant. To this day I’m a little curious what he got up to at those soirees. Maybe he hit the jackpot with one those old flames he’d reminisced about on occasion.
“After Herb made his getaway, I got busy with the mountain of heavy boxes waiting for me in the receiving area, which was sort of a warehouse attached to the rear of the building. Metal racks went to the roof, jammed with stuff and crowded in tight. It’s by the grace of God nobody ever got clobbered by a loose unit of tile, or an unsecured fridge toppling from the top shelf. We stacked that junk to the rafters, literally.
“Coolidge inherited an antique forklift when he bought the store, the type with a clutch. Ben usually drove the pallets in and dropped them close to the main display room. No way I was getting on that thing in those tight aisles, so that meant hand-trucking the deliveries inside one or two pieces at a time. No fun, particularly because the place was dark and lifeless the way buildings are when they empty for the day and everything falls quiet—and Coolidge’s Department Store was huge. Remember? You guys used to get camping supplies there. Two floors and half of a third with a crappy escalator and narrow stairs with awful carpeting—lime green!—steering the mobs from women’s clothing to sporting goods and housewares. God, that place was so packed with merchandise only three or four people could stand on queue without doing the bump and grind.
“I realized this was the first time I’d been alone in the place. It was gloomy in there, but I was leery of lighting the building like a Christmas tree. I contented myself with switching on everything in the storage room, which sorta helped, although the effect left much to be desired—everything turned sickly green and there were plenty of shadows in the deeper stacks. It didn’t do a thing for the main floor which was illuminated by light strips inside the display cases and two or three puny brown bulbs upstairs. Honestly, I glanced over my shoulder every five seconds, sort of expecting to see a Halloween mask of a face leering at me. Every shadow was a menace waiting to pounce.
“About nine o’clock Nelly banged on the glass of the front door for me to let her and the Gloomy Gus twins inside. The sisters were so pale and sickly they could’ve doubled for ghosts themselves, or walking corpses. They sure as hell stumbled around like mini Boris Karloff clones and communicated in monosyllables. Real charming.
“Those girls were all business, though. While Nelly stood over them, twitching and frittering, Samantha and Cassie broke out the tools of the occult trade—black and red candles, white chalk and a thick black book bound in faux leather—and meticulously scribed a pentagram, or pentacle, or whatever, and a slew of arcane symbols on the concrete floor near the tool department. Coolidge was a first class cheapskate. When the contractors hired to renovate the store for its grand reopening had gone over budget, leaving unsightly loose ends such as bare sheetrock in the loft and carpet that ended ten feet short of the end of some aisles, he booted them from the premises and called it ‘close enough for government work. Who looks at the floor, anyway?’
“The circle—as Nelly informed me, tittering in her sudden anxiety at committing black magic rituals in the sanctity of the family business—served as a conduit and symbol of protection. Basically, it was supposed to suck in and trap any evil spirits floating around. I thought they were all effing loons and abandoned them to their fun. Oh, not so fast! I was in the middle of unpacking another pallet of boxes when Nelly rushed over and informed me everybody’s waiting. Waiting for what? I received an answer soon enough after she herded me back to where Sam and Cass had lighted the black candles and were hissing incantations. The tool aisle smelled of bubbling fat and burning hair. One of them had chopped off a hank of their hair, tossed it into a tin bowl and doused it with lighter fluid. Whoosh! Too bad the sprinklers didn’t trigger. That woulda been classic.
“Meanwhile, the black candles were melting in gloopy puddles. Nelly clung to my arm as the red glow of the makeshift brazier lit the scene. It must’ve looked like something from the cover of a pulp comic. Normally, I’d have enjoyed Nelly Coolidge pressing her heaving bosom against me, but I was transfixed by the sisters rocking on their heels, babbling in tongues, fragments of which definitely referred to
Beelzebub
and
The Prince of Darkness
.
“Cassie looked at me and Nelly; Goth girl’s pupils were dilated to the max. She ordered us to sit Indian style. Of course I said, not no, but
hell no
. Nelly gave me a look like you wouldn’t believe. Her queen of the realm glare that spoke volumes—it was a
I’d never work in this town again
warning via telepathy. She brushed her lips against my ear and whispered,
Cluck, cluck, cluck!
I sat and we all joined clammy hands while Sam called for the ‘restless spirit’ to show itself. Deep down, despite being cold to the scene, in my heart of hearts I wanted to see what happened next. Nelly’s fascination was contagious.
“This went on until my butt started to ache from the concrete; then Cassie pulled a dagger out of her purse and pricked her finger. It wasn’t actually a dagger, just a cheap replica she’d picked up at a Chinese gift shop. She dribbled blood into the bowl. Sam went next and then Nelly. I said nope, no way, and passed it back to Cassie. She smirked and poked me in the forearm. Dull as a letter opener, but she’d jabbed me hard and I was on my feet, cursing like a sailor. She flicked blood droplets from the point of the blade and into the brazier. I’d thought the thing was cold because the hair and powder and God knows what else had burned to ashes. Damned if flames didn’t shoot forth again, two, three feet high. The flames died and I stood there swearing. Nobody else uttered a peep; they stared into the bowl, swaying as if they’d been smoking the reefer.
“The power died. For a few seconds it was pitch black. The girls screamed. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. That freaked me a tad. To top that, the air felt electrified, thick as if a humid fog bank had settled over me. Maybe ten feet up the aisle, someone laughed—just once; high pitched and drawn out, it cut through the caterwauling. Mocking us.
“The light in the office suddenly kicked in. It flicked on and off, repeatedly, faster and faster in a strobe effect. Between flashes I saw…someone standing in there, watching. Coolidge kept some mannequins in the front window to model the flannel jackets and ladies’ underwear, that whole bit. I convinced myself later that Herb left one of the dummies in there, propped in front of the desk. Another cycle of flashes and it was gone. Now
I’m
considering joining the scream fest. The phones started ringing. We had seven or eight—one at each till, the office, at a kiosk on each upper level, another in storage—and they all went simultaneously. I covered my ears and decided it was high time to bail. Great minds think alike: the girls almost knocked me over as they scrambled for the exit.
“We piled onto the sidewalk, stood, gaping into the black pit. The darkness was shot through with the wildly flickering light way in back. It was chilly and lonely. Damp wind swirled up from the bay. There weren’t any cars moving, nobody walking. Just the four of us clinging together and whimpering. A pay phone across the street rang, and a tick later, the one by the old drugstore. I made the ballsiest move of my entire life—I walked over to the door and locked it, and went through the alley and made sure the receiving door was locked too. I wouldn’t have gone inside for a million bucks, but I didn’t want Coolidge to skin me alive if somebody looted the place after we ran away. Which we did.
“And…that’s it. I handed in my resignation the next day. Didn’t give two weeks, which royally pissed off Coolidge. Nelly dropped me like a hot rock and went steady with one of the defensive linemen, not that I cared at that point. I had nightmares until Thanksgiving and would come to in the middle of the night with the cold sweats.
Don’t think I got more than four hours sleep an evening during that stretch
.”
3.
Lying awake later that night, Don stared into the dark. Michelle snorted and mumbled; Thule curled on the bed at their feet, a ninety-pound lump. The dog twitched and moaned with each flash of lightning, each crack of thunder rolling down the valley. Blue-white pops and sizzles illuminated the room, sent bony shadows of tree branches raking across the ceiling, across the bedcovers and Michelle’s humped form; spectral claws intent upon peeling back the sheets to have at sweaty, naked flesh. Don counted between the stroke and the clash—one, two, three, BOOM! The jar of water on the dresser vibrated, and his dentures bobbed, distorted in the momentary glare. At least the rain had slackened and the wind died down to intermittent gusts.
His joints throbbed and he contemplated taking another pill to quiet the pain. Instead, he flopped over to spoon with Michelle. She smelled strongly of night sweat and something deeper; a dank, earthy taint that caused him to recoil and breathe through his mouth. Her hand clamped his forearm, an unconscious gesture. Her flesh was cold, like a fish left to smother on a wet clay bank, a pike hoisted from the depths of a northern lake.
He lay there and held his breath, listening hard to the night sounds, the creaking timbers, the faint, mournful jangle of wind chimes smacking against clapboard. Someone giggled in another room; the laughter drifted through the vent and reminded him of the twins as toddlers whispering their plots and schemes. A frog croaked just outside the window, perhaps trapped in the lee of a dormer, its complaints joined by a dim chorus from the yard among the weeds and the shelter of the magnolias; a gloomy litany, magnified somehow by the acoustics of the storm. The frogs seemed disturbed of late, didn’t they? Perhaps, like dogs, they sensed impending disasters. Mice skittered in the secret hollows of the walls and Don wondered if they should get a cat, then he was asleep.
4.
The storm front passed through before dawn and sunrise lighted the bedroom in pinks and blues. Don could not remember his dreams, but knew they’d been rough from the bags under his eyes when he shaved. His hands quivered with exhaustion and he nicked himself three times and had to stick bits of toilet paper to his face to stem the blood. Making up the bed, he discovered a muddy handprint on his pillow and clods of dirt in the sheets. He frowned and stripped the sheets and dropped them in the linen basket.
A chorus of exclamations brought him downstairs in a hurry. It seemed Kurt had gone sleepwalking during the night—probably in response to the filthy weather and his reliving that decidedly unnerving tale. This happened to him as an adolescent; he occasionally woke up in the closet or the pantry, or the attic. This time he wound up in the greenhouse, sprawled between the tomatoes and the squash. Michelle had stumbled into the kitchen to get an early start on breakfast preparations and discovered the back door ajar.
Kurt didn’t have an explanation and decided he must’ve tripped and knocked himself in the head; a lump swelled over his right ear and he’d received a number of scrapes. Worst of all, a damned rat had bitten him in the hand and arm—nasty punctures, too. That meant X-rays, tetanus and rabies shots and the unhappy revelation rodents had invaded the green house. Don scratched his head over that one. He hadn’t seen any rats around. They were obviously lurking in the cellar or the barn prior to this incursion. Oh, well, while Kurt was getting the needle, Don would nip over to the hardware store and purchase rat traps and poison.
As the others mobilized to pack Kurt into the Rover for a hospital visit—except for Argyle, who sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee with liberal dollops of whiskey—Don grabbed his plaid coat off the hook and noticed that the cellar door hung open by a couple of inches, revealing a wedge of musty darkness. He resented the chill that ran through him, reduced him to a cub scout shivering before the campfire, and slammed the door with his hip on the way out.
Everything turned out okay—Kurt claimed to have heeded the call of nature in the predawn hours, although he must’ve been inebriated because he couldn’t put together what had happened to him after he ascended the stairs. Don, who’d spent ten minutes running around frantically searching for the car keys, until he stuck his hand in his pocket and found them, sympathized completely.
Don saw Michelle to the SeaTac airport on the Wednesday before Labor Day weekend. By his calculations he would be home alone with Thule and the mice for the better part of seven weeks. Luckily, his mornings and early afternoons were full with the panels and the seminars at the Museum, and though he inherently despised the insufferably dull nature of these activities, they provided a respite from his recent bouts of nerves, his spikes of nyctophobia and short-term memory loss.
Don’s memory was faulty during normal operating hours, but his dreams were an entirely different matter. Though these dreams evaporated within a few minutes of waking, while in progress they unspooled in Technicolor with a grainy, yet vibrant and coherent inexorability that forced his mind’s eye to rewind and play events from the ancient past.
On the night Michelle left for Turkey, Don drank some white wine that had languished in the cabinet for the gods only knew how long—the bottle label had peeled away. It was Kurt’s tale of teenage terror, the gangly apparition at the department store that triggered Don’s own dream, perhaps. Whatever the cause, he dropped like a stone into a deep slumber and his consciousness was whisked back to 1980.
The Exhibit in the Mountain House