Chapter Seventeen

SIX MONTHS LATER

 

Like the family from Poltergeist, Zane and I sold our house and moved to a safer neighborhood in town.

Life went on, uneventfully, at least for a few months. Until a night in November when I started having bad dreams again, waking in the early morning hours, gasping and sweating, seeing eyes glowing at me in the dark and hearing the rustling of whispers from something or someone in the blackness.

But there was nothing in the bedroom but us.

I rarely woke Zane with my unexplainable nightmares. One night, in early November, I thought I heard somebody walking around in the house downstairs. A door closed, then opened, and a cache of childish laughter followed, the sounds murmuring through the house as if their souls were lost.

When I went downstairs to check, no one was there. It was just the house moaning and settling and falling back into its own restful state.

I couldn’t go back to sleep some nights, and during those times I made myself tea and sat in the living room staring around the silent room, listening. Mostly to my own thoughts, my heart pounding, ticking like a malfunctioned watch.

One evening, by the end of the month, around ten o’clock when I was coming home late from work after closing the bar (my current job), the house was empty and too quiet and strangely eerie as if I had walked into the wrong residence. Zane was still at the police station, working a double shift. I had heated a generous amount of leftover lasagna in the microwave and was going to eat it in the living room in front of the TV when there was a knock at the front door, a soft, barely noticeable single rap.

I thought somebody had followed me home from the bar. That drunken college student who was hitting on me throughout my shift, telling me his sad life story that he was looking for a new boyfriend after the messy breakup with his violent ex. “He’s not a very nice guy. I thought he was cheating,” he said, “and when I asked him, he hit me and told me I was wrong.”

He had short blond wavy hair, Hollywood good looks. He told me he liked to surf, was a beachgoer. He had a cocky smile on his twisted lips when he looked at me and grinned. I wouldn’t forget his ambiguous comment to me at the end of the evening when I called, “Final orders at the bar!”

Except for a few regular stragglers, he was the only customer hanging around after hours. I gestured to the front door for him to leave. He downed the rest of his whiskey, then slammed the glass with enough force to rattle me as I wiped beer glasses behind the bar. It was the cockeyed expression on his strange circular face and those deep, green eyes that told me he wasn’t leaving. “How’d you like to keep me company tonight? My dorm room is a few blocks from here.”

“I’m taken.”

He chuckled. “He’s a lucky dude.”

I threatened to call the police if he didn’t leave.

He laughed again, a sinister snicker. A nervous Joker’s laugh, unsettling.

Eventually, he left, after asking if he could use the restroom. He was in there taking a ten-minute piss.

Before he left, he slapped a twenty-dollar bill on the bar and winked at me, wishing me a good night and propositioning me again to join him at his dorm. I refused, pretending to count cash in the register, my back to him. I panicked, even after I heard him leave, the door slamming hard behind him. I turned and watched him from the large plate-glass window in front of the bar, his body swaying in the shadows, stumbling down the potholed sidewalk in the direction of the college campus.

I locked up the place and walked home shortly after. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the young man, even when I approached my yard.

Now, on the couch in the warm safety of my house, I glanced nervously across the room to the front door. There was a soft, barely noticeable single rap. It came in a fitful jab.

Then—silence.

I thought about calling Zane. But he had called me earlier at the bar to let me know that he’d be home no later than ten thirty, eleven at the latest.

I stood, walked leisurely to the door. Parting the curtain with my left hand, I looked out onto the front yard, squinting through the formless shadows floating in orbit around the fuzzy outline of bare tree limbs and telephone poles. I flipped on the porch light. The front porch stoop and snow-covered slate path leading to the front door were untouched. My footprints from earlier were buried in the heavy snowfall.

There was nobody there.

A sharp wind caught up in the treetops, howling and slamming against the front windows of the house, wailing like a banshee. Trembling, I closed the curtain, shut off the porch lights, and turned and walked toward the kitchen for a beer. On my way back to the living room, I checked the time before making sure the front door was locked.

Ten after ten.

Door lock was secure; I looked out the window a second time, out of habit. A landscape of snow fell from a slate-gray sky, blanketing the peaceful street. Satisfied, I climbed the stairs to the upstairs bathroom to draw a hot bath.

I was in the water for half an hour, finishing my beer, when I heard a car door slam. Zane was home. It was his wheels crunching up the driveway that identified him.

I waited for the front door to open and Zane to call up to me, “Honey, I’m home,” but it never came. I sat still in the lukewarm water, listening.

The only sound I heard was the incessant barking of a neighbor’s German shepherd alerting someone’s presence in the alley out back.

The dog eventually stopped, but it was ten minutes later when I got out of the tub, dripping water across the floor, as I padded to the window, the chill in the air prickling my naked body.

I shut off the light so I could see the outline of the neighbor’s yard more clearly. Nothing—no movement.

Wrapping myself in a towel, I stepped out into the hallway and stared down the long, dark staircase. “Zane, you there?”

No answer. Maybe he didn’t hear me.

Sometimes he would enter the house from the back door. Set his work clothes over the back of the kitchen chair. He’d open the fridge and pull out a beer. But tonight, it was dead quiet, except for the house breathing on its own. I cocked my head to the thickening silence, listening to the refrigerator humming and the walls creaking from the driving wind.

I descended the stairs, gripping the railing with a damp hand, and holding the towel tightly with the other to keep it from slipping. A few steps rasped out in protest beneath me. When I reached the bottom, I yelled Zane’s name and stared across the weakly lit hallway to the living room.

There was no answer.

It had sounded like Zane’s truck, I thought, stepping off the landing and padding down the hall toward the edge of the living room. An unnerving chill slipped down my spine.

The TV had been muted, a local late-breaking news story playing out on the screen. I had left the sound on before going upstairs to take a bath, I thought.

But then, as I turned toward the kitchen, a tingling feeling skated across my bare skin. I turned slowly, the hairs on my neck prickling. Fear reached out to me in the dark.

Gasping, I stumbled backward, hitting the wall hard, and wincing.

The college student whom I had befriended earlier in the evening at the bar, the beach bum jock who didn’t want to leave me alone, was hanging in front of me from a noose tied to the ceiling fan in the living room.

I clamped my eyes shut, shook my head. The lean body hanging limply in the still air from the cord unsettled me. A nervous tremor twitched in my tightfisted hand. Heat rose in my face.

I opened my eyes and dashed down the dark hall to the kitchen. As I scrambled to the corner of the room to hide, I heard more footsteps following me. I stood bunched up in the corner, clenching my hands, my muscles tense. The sound of the neighbor’s large dog started up again, deep, disruptive piercings throughout the neighborhood.

A light at the end of the hallway flickered on and off.

On.

Off.

I fell to the floor, curled up in a ball in the corner, and envisioned the young man’s body hanging from the fan in the living room.

Then, I heard a door shut, and a blurring shadow of a figure appeared from around the corner, standing in the shadows at the end of the hallway, staring at me. From the angle in which I had been lying, the blurred figure looked bent like the gnarly limbs of a tree, its long, gangly arms hanging lifelessly at its side.

But when I heard a voice calling me, I recognized Zane’s familiar tone. He raced toward me, the fuzziness of his face appearing clearer, sharper. He crouched beside me, pulling me into his arms. “David?”

A sharp pain hammered my head, like a chorus of cicadas buzzing in my brain.

“Can you hear me?” He was shaking me lightly, but my thoughts were scrambled with the horrible images of that body hanging from the fan in the living room, the cord creaking slowly back and forth.

I pointed over his shoulder as if I had seen something stirring in the darkness.

He turned around then looked back at me, shaking his head. “What is it? Did you see something?”

I swallowed hard and croaked, “The living room.”

Before he looked over his shoulder as if somebody was standing there, I could see the deep lines of fear carved into his face. He had gone pale, slack jawed, the whiteness of his complexion ghostlike.

The neighbor’s German shepherd was still barking, the sound of its growl mounting, furious as if rabid.

Zane let go of me and stood. He walked slowly down the hall through the shadows, turning once to glimpse me. I was propped up in the corner, clenching the bath towel around my waist.

He stood in the doorway to the living room and froze, staring into the room, motionlessly. It felt like hours instead of minutes, but when he turned back to me, I knew he saw what I had seen earlier.

Then something changed in his expression. He shrugged. It was a slight jerk of his shoulders, but they lifted and fell, as if he was adjusting and relaxing his body. Arms outstretched, he shook his head.

I sat up, leaning forward, straining to hear the noise in the room beyond. Listened to see if I could hear the sound of the body swinging from the rope in the living room. The house was dead silent, except for the murmuring of voices coming from the flat screen TV.

Wait.

What was happening? I looked to Zane. He stared back, his arms akimbo, palms turned outward in question.

I stood up awkwardly, fumbling in the dark, walking through the hall in a hypnotic sleep state. Taking a deep breath, I reached Zane at the end of the hall. I stayed off to the side, not wanting to see the dead body around the corner hanging from the fan.

I glared at Zane, frightened and confused. He held his hand out to me. I looked down at it, then back up at him. I wondered if he could read the nonplussed expression on my face.

He gestured with a tic of his head to come closer. He didn’t look scared. Color had returned to his cheeks. His face was distorted in confusion. I couldn’t read him. But I reached out and palmed his hand with mine. His was dry, firm; mine was dewy, brittle and shaky.

I wouldn’t take my eyes off him as he pulled me closer to him, our hands intertwined at each other’s sides.

“Look,” he said.

I couldn’t, not even with the sound of his easy, comforting voice.

He tightened his grip in mine, pulled me to his side, and narrowed the space between us. “Look,” he said again. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

I still couldn’t muster enough strength to look.

There’s nothing to be afraid of.

I shook my head at Zane, frightened, confused.

“There’s nothing there,” he said.

I shivered, still damp from the shower, my skin itchy from where the sweat was drying on the bumpy knobs of my spine. I wasn’t aware Zane was still holding my hand when I turned to look into the living room, my neck stiff from where the pain was building inside me.

Over the hum of the reporter’s voice on the TV, a harshness of screams languished in the back of my mind. My gaze darted around the room, and I let out a weak grumble of disappointment.

The room was empty. There was no body hanging from the fan. No creepy crawlers on the ceiling. No yellow eyes glowing in the obscure corners of the room.

Zane slung his arm over my shoulder and whispered, “Are you all right?”

I nodded slowly, inhaling deeply, closing my eyes. “I’m having bad dreams again.” I was trembling, thinking unclearly.

He hugged me, kissed my cheek. “Let me make you a cup of tea. Go upstairs and get into some dry clothes.”

I threw my arms around him, cried softly into his neck.

He smelled damp with sweat. “Nothing is going to happen.”

I nodded.

“Hurry up,” he said. “Go upstairs and get into bed. I’ll bring you a cup of chamomile.”

I watched him take off his coat and sling it over the armchair in the hall as he wandered to the kitchen, crouched from exhaustion and a long workday.

I was about to climb the stairs to the bedroom when I noticed a shadow fall across the closed curtain in the living room.

I heard Zane opening and closing cupboards in the kitchen. He turned on the faucet, filled the kettle.

At the door, I parted the curtains. Looked out. Scanned the yard to the edge of the street. There was no movement. Nothing.

As I drew the curtains back into place, something in the darkness caught my eye. On the snow-covered stone path below, there were the deep impressions of footprints stamped into the snow, leading up the porch to the front door.

Before I could call out to Zane, he was already standing behind me, his hand on my shoulder. “Whattcha doing?”

“I didn’t realize it until now.”

“Realize what?”

“I thought you’d come into the house tonight from the back door.”

“I did.”

“Then why are there footprints on our front steps?”

He came around me, pulled the curtain open, and stared out the window. “I don’t see anything.”

I turned the porch light on and pointed to the pathway leading away from the front door. “The footprints on the ground,” I said. “Can you see them?”

He pressed his face to the glass, looked out, squinting. There was a glint of light bouncing off the window, “I don’t see anything.” He raised his hand over his eyes to use as a visor, to get a better look. “There’s nothing there.”

“I heard noises earlier,” I said, sounding paranoid. “I saw things…”

The whistling teakettle broke my train of thought, cutting through my strange version of the evening.

“Maybe the footprints are from raccoons,” he said, releasing the curtain and heading into the kitchen. “We’ve got a lot of them out here.” I heard him turning off the heat and removing the kettle from the burner.

I flicked the porch light off and turned around, looking to where I had seen the body of the young man hanging from the fan earlier. It was off, too, but the background noises of people talking on the flat-screen TV whispered in my ear. I started grinding my teeth, a bad habit I had developed when I was younger.

The erratic, fast-forward movements of Zane setting mugs on the counter and pouring water into them jarred me as I moved through the room in slow motion and stood under the fan. I lifted a hand to touch one of the fan blades, but I had to stand on my toes to glide my fingers across the edge of it to feel it. There were no imbedded grooves in the wood where the rope would have been tied. It was smooth, intact.

Zane was right: there was nobody here—just my overcharged imagination.

I shut the TV off and walked into the hallway, looking back once to glimpse the fuzzy outline of Zane moving around in the kitchen, stirring sugar in his cup, opening a cupboard, and closing it.

I stood in the doorway and stared down the small hall to the back door. It sounded like I had awakened a family of spirits as I crept along creaking floorboards.

I parted the wooden slates of the shade and peered out into the dark backyard. A single white light illuminated the neighbor’s garage, enveloping the acre of thick woods behind our house. A screeching wind wailed like a pack of coyotes. Snow and ice blew across the panes. I heard footfalls behind me.

“I thought you’d be upstairs by now,” Zane said.

I jiggled the doorknob to emphasize my next words. “I was just checking to see if the door was locked.”

“Come to bed. I’ve made you tea.”

I stared out into the vast blackness for a few more seconds, hypnotized as if from a presence in the dark, feeling the weight of somebody watching me.

“David?”

“I’m coming.”