Carmen could not sleep, so she sat at the dining-room table— her favorite spot in the house—and smoked as she thumbed absently through a back issue of Vanity Fair and half-listened to the radio call-in talk show that played softly.
Once Stephen's treatments had come to an end—for the time being, at least—Carmen expected him to change. For the better, of course. He'd been so quiet and brooding since they'd moved into the apartment, so unlike himself. She told herself it was due to his illness and, perhaps even more so, because of the grueling daily treatments for it. But the only change she noticed in him during the weeks following his final treatment was that his mood seemed to grow quietly and gradually darker.
At least Stephen had Jason to cheer him up. Jason's parents both worked and he was alone a lot, so he'd started spending most of his time at their house. Carmen didn't mind. She didn't like the thought of the boy's being alone so much, so she tried to make him feel at home.
Although she was glad that Stephen had a friend, Carmen was disturbed to see that the only time Stephen seemed truly happy was when Jason was around; otherwise, he was silent, depressive, and, if she asked him what was wrong, he made no more than a vague, monosyllabic reply.
She worried about him, but told herself that he'd been through a lot and might not be through all of it yet; as long as he had a friend who made him happy and was doing well in school, she was satisfied.
The only problem was Jason. There was nothing wrong with him that she could put her finger on—he was a nice enough boy, friendly and polite when spoken to but otherwise pretty quiet—he just seemed...different, like the kind of boy who might find it difficult to make friends. And yet he and Stephen had hit it off famously. Oh well. So they were friends. As long as they weren't knocking over liquor stores or burning down buildings for kicks, what was the harm?
You're just being a mother, she told herself. Too much of a mother.
She wasn't so hard on herself when it came to Stephen's idea that there was something evil about the house. Since Michael had picked up on it, Carmen often found the boys and Stephanie whispering among themselves, only to fall silent when they found they weren't alone. That had been going on for some time between Stephen and Stephanie, of course, but since Michael had come home, it seemed to happen more often. It got on her nerves, but she kept her feelings to herself.
On the weekends, Al didn't seem to notice the children whispering secretively. His mind was on other things. One hundred and six miles of driving every weekend was taking a toll on him, as was the stress of knowing he would be taking a step down and making less money once his transfer went through, making their financial bind even tighter than it was already.
When he was home, they didn't talk about anything important or too serious. He'd go fishing (although Stephen didn't seem interested in going with him anymore) or spend time watching television. When they made love, he acted distant, preoccupied. And he didn't seem to be sleeping well at night, either. The last time he'd been home, Carmen had awakened very early on Saturday morning to find herself alone in bed; a couple minutes later, he'd come into the bedroom and gotten back into bed looking worried, his face twisted in a frown of creases made to look even deeper by the faint glow of moonlight outside the window.
"Whasmatter?" Carmen had asked.
Her voice startled him and he looked at her for a moment, that frown clinging to his face, then said, "Uh, nothing, nothing, go back to sleep."
So Carmen had more than her share of things to worry about: Stephen, his illness, and—no matter how hard she tried not to— his friendship with Jason as well; and money and Al. But, for the first time she could remember, she was actually relieved to have those worries. Those worries gave her a welcome excuse for some of the odd things she'd been doing...things she thought she'd been doing, anyway.
There was, of course, the voice she'd heard that day while she was alone in the house. She'd chalked that up to missing Al.
Then the plates and silverware had appeared to take themselves back into the kitchen the day Michael came home, and her purse had disappeared and her car keys had gone from the kitchen counter to Stephen's bed downstairs.
Last week, she'd found the bathroom faucet running and steam billowing up from the scalding water.
Yesterday she thought she'd bought two six-packs of soda, even remembered putting them in the refrigerator. That evening, they were gone; none of the kids had drunk them, hadn't even seen them. She tried to find the receipt, knowing she'd bought them and wanting to prove it to herself, but she couldn't.
She'd blamed it all on her preoccupation, told herself she'd just made a few absent-minded mistakes. But somehow, that just didn't work. So she buried it all by worrying about everything else.
As Carmen lit another cigarette, a female caller on the radio said, "Well, my problem is, like, I'm not sure of myself, you know? I'm not sure who I am. Like, am I a wife? Am I a mother? Am I a daughter? And no one seems to understand the crisis I'm having, or the space that I need to work it all out."
Carmen glanced at the radio and blew smoke as she chuckled coldly, "Get a life, lady." Then she went back to her magazine.
At roughly the same time, Al could not sleep either. He sat up in his motel room drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette. The room was dark except for the flickering light from the television, which was playing silently. Al was watching the images on the screen without really seeing them. Instead, he was, like Carmen, lost in his thoughts...thoughts about his last visit home. He could not get it out of his mind. He'd been thinking about it on the job as well as off. Even going to the occasional movie in the evening failed to stop the constant replay of the memory.
Oh, he had plenty of other things to worry about, there was no doubt about that. Stephen's illness, the gradual change in his personality, and Al wasn't sure he liked Stephen's friendship with that odd kid Jason, although he hadn't said as much to Carmen and was unaware that she sometimes felt the same way. And of course there was the matter of money; he would be getting less pay soon and they had to struggle enough as it was to make his current salary cover everything. But, in spite of all that, it was last weekend that weighed the heaviest on him.
The first thing had happened on Friday night....
He'd been awakened quite suddenly by the sound of movement and voices in the house. He lay in bed for a while, listening. The voices were muffled, the sounds of movement made up of bumps and scuffles. And there was music, terribly soft, almost inaudible, tinny and...old, like music from a bygone era playing on a gramophone, its scratchy warblings coming from a yawning horn above a cranked-up turntable. It didn't sound like something any of the kids would listen to, but still...
He got out of bed, careful not to wake Carmen, and went down the hall in his undershorts. The sounds grew closer. He stopped and listened and realized they were coming from downstairs.
Quiet voices, soft, mournful music—obviously there was a gathering of some sort taking place down there. Al suspected Jason was involved somehow; in fact, it was probably his idea to sneak a bunch of kids into the house from the beginning.
But why were they listening to that music?
Stepping carefully in the dark, he started down the stairs, but stopped halfway down.
There was no light coming from down there, no light at all. It was as dark as the rest of the house. Al frowned, listened some more.
He could still hear the voices and the music, still heard the sounds of feet moving over the floor. He took the remaining steps cautiously, although he wasn't quite sure why.
In the bedroom below, he heard the boys' steady, sleepy breathing, and suddenly— Nothing else. There was only the breathing. And the darkness.
The voices and music had stopped.
Al opened one of the French doors and leaned into the next room.
The empty darkness was silent, but cold. Al stepped all the way into the next room, squinting in disbelief. It was so cold in that room that he was pretty sure that if it weren't so dark, he'd be able to see his breath; it was like a meat locker. Concerned that a window might have been left open, he took a few more steps into the room, then stopped, realizing that, even if a window was open, it wasn't that cold outside.
Then he suddenly realized that the cold was gone. The room had returned to a normal temperature, but Al's skin crawled with goose bumps anyway.
He thought about it a moment, wondering how it could have happened, then decided he didn't want to know and backed out of the room.
He listened again to the boys' breathing. Yes, they were asleep, there was no doubt about that; Stephen was even snoring quietly, but a genuine snore, not a silly one that a kid might fake at the last minute to keep from being caught awake by a parent.
When he got back to bed, Al found Carmen awake. She asked him what was the matter and he told her to go back to sleep.
Al, however, did not sleep. Instead, he lay in bed listening for the voices and music again. But he did not hear them.
The following night, he was awakened again, this time by movement. His eyes snapped open wide and stared into the darkness as the bed vibrated.
It didn't shake, it didn't jerk, it vibrated.
Slowly, his eyes closed as he decided it was probably nothing more than the refrigerator coming on in the upstairs apartment. Carmen had mentioned to him that a family would be moving in upstairs. But his eyes snapped open again when he realized that they wouldn't be moving in for another week.
The upstairs apartment was empty. There was no refrigerator up there.
He stared at the ceiling as the bed continued to vibrate, its movement humming through him, oozing through his muscles and coiling around his bones.
Al got up and went to the living room, turning on lights as he walked, his hands trembling. He watched television for a while, smoked, had a couple of beers, and then, warily, returned to the bedroom. He sat on the edge of the bed.
Although he was exhausted from the sleepless night before, he was unable to doze off for a while. He lay there waiting for the vibrating to continue. It did not. Finally, Al slipped away and slept late into Sunday morning.
Now he lay awake once again, staring at talking heads with no voices on the television, drinking a beer and filling the dark room with smoke.
There was a good chance that he would not have given either incident much thought if it weren't for Stephen...if it weren't for the things Stephen had said he'd seen and heard...the things he'd said about the house...
There was something else, too, something Al hadn't thought about in years. In fact, he thought he'd forgotten about it entirely, which would have been fine with him. It had happened years ago, when he was in the service. He'd seen something back then that had given him nightmares for the longest time. In fact, he still had one now and then. Until he'd seen...that thing...he'd laughed at the supernatural, and his laughter had been genuine. Since then, he's continued laughing, but nervously and without as much conviction as before. He'd told no one of what he'd seen back then, not even Carmen. He wasn't sure he ever would.
But what had happened at home last weekend had brought it to mind, and had reminded him that he was no longer closed to the notion of things that go bump in the night.
His transfer would go through soon and he would be able to move to Connecticut to stay with his family. He missed Carmen and the kids and was looking forward to being with them for more than just weekend visits.
But Al wasn't at all sure he was looking forward to moving into that house.