At the top of the hill was a ramshackle Victorian, eerie as a dream. Lots of gables and chimneys, with a whimsical roofline, like something out of a demented fairy tale. The porch light was on. There were shade trees on the front lawn, and the gutters were clogged with leaves. Half the shingles needed replacing. She noticed the dry rot above the window frames, where the paint was wrinkled and alligatored. A trickle of sweat zigzagged down her neck and between her breasts.
Inside the house, a woman screamed.
One piercing shriek.
It stopped abruptly, like a faucet shutting off. Natalie’s heart stopped with it.
She unstrapped her holster and drew her weapon. Wind chimes dangled on the front porch, creating a twinkly, carnival-like sound. The front yard was an obstacle course of Havahart traps. The night grew suffocatingly close. She glanced back down the driveway, where Samuel had parked his white pickup truck, leaving crisscrossing tracks in the dirt. Ferns grew deep on either side of the road, and all around the property were the towering, impenetrable woods.
All of a sudden, the woman screamed again. It was terrifying. A succession of tortured shrieks tunneled through Natalie, and she gripped her gun and approached the house.
Lightning flashed—so bright, it dazzled her eyes—and the clouds released a stinging rain. She took the walkway toward the porch, hurried up the steps, and tested the front door. Locked.
She followed the sagging wraparound porch around the side of the house and lingered in the shadows. The screaming stopped. The backyard was cluttered with junk—broken appliances and spring traps made of netting. Natalie had seen these traps before. They were meant for larger species of birds. What the hawk eats. Samuel Hawke. Serial killer.
She gripped her gun while beads of rain trickled into her eyes. Twenty yards or so away, in the backyard, was a small barn. The double doors were open. She could see a figure moving around inside, rummaging through an older-model truck, dinged and spattered with mud.
Natalie considered her options. The screen door at the back of the house stood open. Should she take a chance? She peered into the depths of the barn, where Samuel was poking around in the flatbed, hunting for something. He pushed a spine board aside and dug deeper into the flatbed. He picked up a cervical collar and tossed it aside.
She tried to gauge the distance between where she stood on the porch and the back door, primed to make a run for it, when all of a sudden, Samuel abandoned the search and, with a frustrated grunt, walked out of the barn. He unzipped his pants and peed in the weeds. Piss, shake, tuck, zip.
She ducked down behind the wooden railing while he tilted his face toward the sky and basked in a chill blast of downpour. He was dressed in jeans, white athletic shoes, and a blue vinyl windbreaker. His chest was bare. His ears were small and as curved as seashells.
Natalie fought off a burning sense of outrage as she withdrew into the shadows. Samuel turned and hurried up the back steps into the house, moving with energy and purpose. The screen door bumped shut behind him, but didn’t close completely. He’d left it unlocked. Maybe he was coming back soon?
She could smell the animal life in the folds and hollows. The dull green bayberry bushes rustled in the wind. Somewhere in all that lightning-dappled darkness, she could hear a woman whimpering and moaning.
Natalie took a chance and approached the back door. Another lightning strike outlined the bones of the house, good bones, fallen to ruin … and then came silence, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi … and kaboom. Another terrible clap of thunder. She looked up at the second story, and a light at the end of the hallway blinked on.
The rain sounds on the gabled roof were sublime—a sustained orchestral unraveling, accompanied by a flutelike rattling through the gutters, funnels of rainwater pouring through the spouts and soaking into the yard, eroding the soil and exposing the wet round rocks and wriggling earthworms. She hurried up the cracked walkway, slate slabs broken or missing. The splintery wooden steps sighed underneath her weight. She stood on the worn welcome mat and nudged the door open. She could smell the dry rot in the back hallway.
Natalie entered the kitchen, where the breakfast table was cluttered with dirty dishes and empty wine bottles. The room smelled of wet insulation and moldy leftovers. There were stacks of old photo albums, corroded kitchen appliances, eight-track tapes, and a pile of raw meat on a chipped white plate—tiny bloody hearts, livers, and intestines, a rodent’s or bird’s innards. She suppressed her gag reflex, steadied her gun, and moved on.
Natalie brushed past the chalky wall, turned the corner, and pushed through a door. Inside the laundry room was a bucket and mop on the floor, next to a container of bleach. There were greasy tools on top of the washing machine—an old wrench, a rusty screwdriver, a dark-stained hammer.
She moved into the living room, where pale blocks of color dotted the walls where family pictures used to hang. It was chilly in here. The carpet’s padding was rotten beneath the old weave. A dusty red paper lantern dangled from the center of the ceiling, and the warped wooden shelves held an accumulation of mementos from long-ago family trips to the seashore.
Natalie could hear movement upstairs. The floorboards creaked, and she stood very still, fighting an exquisite urge to flee. Let someone else handle it. Let somebody else be a hero. Like Joey used to say, Things start out easy, but they always get hard.
But Natalie knew—it was time to push through the hardness.
The place was so void of life, she felt like a ghost.
The clang of old pipes. The clicking of the radiators.
A china cabinet. A credenza. A musty old sofa. Quaint, prissy choices.
The house was so old, it had baked for more than a hundred summers; it had frozen for a hundred winters; now it smelled of moldering husks and dead insects.
A grandmotherly house. Outdated and creepy as hell.
A pile of papers. She leafed through them. The handwriting was illegible. It looked like some sort of bizarre, rambling confession. On every page were hundreds of tiny, inscrutable words, along with drawings of birds, drawings of maps, hieroglyphics. Signs of hypergraphia.
A loud burst of music came from upstairs, and Natalie shuddered. Everything slowed way down. Her feet became lead weights. Bass, drums, guitars, synthesizer. Edgy, mesmerizing music.
The floorboards cracked overhead, and Natalie glanced up, her stomach contracting powerfully. A lone fly buzzed around her ears, and she brushed it away, then readjusted her grip on her gun. Her father once said, You have to look underneath. Sometimes worms crawl out. She sucked in her gut and dug deeper. She immersed herself in her father’s bravery and kept going.
The parlor was the worst. Melting candlewax. Ceramic figurines flaked with dust. Elderberry-wine-stained doilies. Graffiti on the walls—satanic horns, 666, pentagrams. A fussiness to the décor. A fastidiousness combined with psychosis.
An old sewing machine clutched an accordion of blue fabric, and the windowsills displayed a variety of dead insects. And then—the birds. Dead crows crudely preserved. Whoever the taxidermist was, he’d arranged the beady-eyed creatures into bizarre poses—crucifixions, mummifications, birds stuck with pins, wrapped in barbed wire, soaking in huge vats of liquid.
Rain hammered the roof and bled down the windowpanes.
Inside the bathroom, just off the front hall—an explosion of peach tiles. A square, utilitarian room. Natalie reached for the floral shower curtain and swept it aside.
A bathtub ringed with rust or worse. A foul smell. Quicklime. The stench of acid attacking flesh. The coppery smell of blood.
Now the footsteps thumped across the ceiling, and she looked up. Wooden drawers opened and closed. More footsteps. And then …
Upstairs, a door creaked like the opening of a tomb.