Michael R Collings (32 page)

Someone on the other side of the door laughed again...quietly.

She went on down the hall to join Willard in the family room.

That Friday, no one woke up in the middle of the night.

“Daddy! Mommy!”

Two young male trebles, high-pitched and full of terror.

A single, drawn-out shriek from a small girl.

“Yaaaap!” That was Sams’s voice, breaking into tears.

Catherine sat bolt upright in bed.

Daylight struck her eyes. As she always did now, she reflexively glanced to the far corner of the room, where the patching plaster had been inexorably drawing away from the popcorn-textured ceiling. It was a dry year. The soil was compacting. She caught a glimpse of sunlight through the small slit that had formed.

Then she was on her feet and grabbing for her robe.

Willard threw himself onto his side, facing the far wall, and grunted angrily, “Damn those kids….” Then he, too was on his feet and racing around the end of the bed. He was out the door before Catherine. She heard his bare feet slapping against the hall floor.

A door opened, slamming against the wall.

A beat.

“Catherine! Get in here!”

She ran down the hall.

What now?

When she shot through the open doorway, Willard was standing by the low table beneath the window. All four kids were huddled together by the closet, tears either streaking their cheeks or still streaming from their eyes. None of them was speaking, although Sams—pressed against Will, Jr., whose hand curled protectively around his little brother’s shoulder—was whimpering softly.

“Look!” Willard stabbed one finger toward the table top.

Toward the cage where, now solitary, the single remaining hamster lay crushed against the side. The wire door hung open along the front. A few cedar chips lay strewn on the table top, looking in their roughly rectangular shapes like tiny, toppled tombstones.

Catherine crossed the room.

“Willard, why are you yelling at me?” she started to whisper. After all, they had just gone through this a short while ago with Yip—another small, dead hamster, one of the expected traumas of childhood, given the average lifespan of the little creatures. This shouldn’t be
that
unexpected. She felt her blood pressure rise. Willard had been angry before—now she was too.

Until she drew close enough to see clearly into the cage.

The little thing was, indeed, dead. Anyone could see that.

Including, unfortunately, the children.

Its fur, rather than being fluffy and full, even in death as Yip’s had been, clumped matted against its body, stiff and crusted with russet brown that could only be dried blood. Blood had spattered all over the cedar chips lining the floor of the cage, all over the plastic exercise wheel now silent and still at the back, all over the thin wire of the cage itself.

It was even spattered on the desk top for several inches beyond the cage.

Catherine stared at the cage, then at Willard. His eyes were already fixed on her, dark with anger and fear.

“What happened?” Catherine’s voice emerged thin and shaky.

“He was like that when we woke up,” Will, Jr., answered from behind her. “We all saw him like that, then Sams started crying and Suze yelled and....”

“Shut up!” Willard roared, not even bothering to turn to look at his children. “Not another word!”

He grabbed the cage, twisted the wire door closed, and lifted the whole thing. Below, a clean square showed where it had been sitting—all around the square was a rough circle of dark brown splotches.

“Clean that up,” he ordered as he passed Catherine.

The door slammed behind him.

“Okay, kids,” she said, as calmly as she could. “I want you all to sit right here on Burt’s bed”—she noticed that the blanket tent-wall had been pulled down—“until I get back.”

She ran to the bathroom, drenched an old wash cloth with a spurt from the faucet and, water dripping from her hands, returned to the bedroom.

White-faced and frightened, the children were sitting on the bunk, arranged in age and size from Will at the farther end to Sams at the nearer. Catherine crossed in front of them, and with a few judicious swipes of her hand scraped the brown crust from the table top. She wadded the cloth and dropped it in the waste basket by the table.

“Mom,” Will began. Suze and Burt had opened their mouths to speak, as well. Sams sat stonily on the edge of the bunk, his blanket jammed against his cheek.

“I…I don’t think we should say anything until Daddy gets back. He…I…. Let’s just wait for him.”

The next few minutes passed in painful, devastating silence.

“Now,” Willard said, half-sitting on the table, precisely where the cage had stood. “Let’s have the truth.”

Catherine noticed that the back of the jeans he was now wearing was darker than the rest. The table top must still have been wet. Willard either didn’t feel the dampness or he didn’t care.

It took a moment for what he had just said to filter through her mind. When it did, she stared at him in disbelief.

“Willard, you can’t….”

“The truth now.
All
of it.” With one hand he sliced at the air between him and Catherine—peremptorily, she thought—meaning
Stay out of this.

The four children hadn’t moved.

They hadn’t spoken either, neither to Catherine while Willard was gone nor to him when he stalked back into the room.

“I’m waiting.”

“Daddy, where’s Yap?” That from Burt—he was probably the closest thing to a “master” the hamsters had had. Will, Jr., had his dog, Crud; Suze had her dolls; and Sams had his blanket.

“Gone.” Willard’s jaws clenched with the word.

“Gone? Where? We haven’t had his funer….”

“There won’t be a funeral for him, for
it.
” His eyes flashed, cutting off whatever Burt—and Will and Suze—was about to say. Sams disappeared further behind his blanket. Even he could tell that Daddy was mad, madder than ever before.

“There won’t be a funeral, and there won’t ever be another hamster in this house. That I can promise you. Maybe never even another pet.”

“But Crud….”

“Be quiet.”

Will, Jr., closed his mouth and bit his lips.

Catherine tried again. “Willard….”

“Be quiet, all of you. There’s something I’m going to say, and I want you all to listen to it. Very carefully. Understand?”

The children nodded. Catherine started to speak but a glance from her husband warned her that this was not the time to disagree with him.

“Something happened here last night. To that hamster. I want to know what it was,” Willard said.

Silence. A long silence.

“I’m not going away until I find out. Nobody leaves this room until I find out. First Yip, and now this.

“
What the hell happened
?”

The kids exchanged terrified glances—it seemed that they were as frightened of speaking up to their father as they were about what had happened during the night...who or what had killed the hamster.

“I was asleep the whole night,” Burt finally said.

“And so was I,” Suze added. “I was asleep right here”—she patted Burt’s bed—“and I don’t know anything about it.”

“Asleep,” Sams’ added timidly. “Asleep the whole night.”

Willard swiveled his head to face his eldest. “I guess that leaves you, Will, unless one of the others is lying. Are they?”

“I, uh….” Three sets of eyes were riveted on him. He could see how close the younger kids were to tears. Yap was dead, and now Daddy was acting like
this.
Daddy
never
acted like this.

“You, uh, what?”

“I didn’t see anything, either. I slept through the night, too. When I got up this morning, I went over to feed Yap and saw…and saw…him. I didn’t know what to do. We promised Mom last night that we would be quiet when we got up this morning so you could sleep late.”

“Thanks.” The sarcasm in the word was so heavy that even Suze seemed to know something was wrong. Will, Jr., visibly flinched. Only Sams seemed oblivious.

“Um, I stood there watching for a long time, then Suze came over, and Burt. And then Sams, and he started crying, and then we were all crying and…and we couldn’t help it, we wanted you guys to come in and…and help us…and make everything right.”

By then tears were streaming down Will, Jr., cheeks.

“Make everything right? And how in the hell was I supposed to do that!”

Will winced, swallowed, and tried to continue. “I think…I think it was him. You know…the man.”

Burt and Suze nodded slowly in agreement. Sams said, “The man. The man in the dark.”

Willard’s hand slammed against the table. The crack startled everyone, perhaps even Willard, since he raised his hand almost immediately and seemed to study it for a moment.

When he spoke again, his voice was tight, controlled, as frosty as an iceberg.

“The man you see at night? The naked man?”

The children nodded. They had no words at this point.

“
There is no man in here
!” Willard stomped to the closet and tore armful after armful of shirts and coats and school pants from their hangers and flung them onto the floor. “
There’s nothing in here!
There never was!

“Now I want to know which one of you killed that hamster!”

“Willard!” Catherine’s voice cut through his like a saber, quick and sharp to his bludgeoning broadsword. “Willard Huntley, I want to talk to you. Now!”

She grabbed his arm with a strength she didn’t know she possessed—certainly Willard had never felt anything like it in their entire married life—and pulled him so hard that he almost lost his footing.

“Outside. Now! And you four stay in here. Don’t any of you move.”

Catherine and Willard disappeared through the door and down the hall.

Behind them came the soft sounds of sobbing. Sounds that grew louder and louder.

10
.

She finally stopped yanking on his arm when they stood at the corner of the back yard, behind the garage and right below the eight-foot slump-stone fence that separated their yard from their neighbor’s.

“I can’t believe that. I
don’t
believe that. You just accused your own children of killing their pet!”

“Let go of my arm.” Every word slow, carefully enunciated. “Now.”

“I don’t know what you’re thinking, but let me tell you….”

Craaack
!

With his free hand Willard swung furiously and struck Catherine sharply, viciously across the face. For a moment she froze, not even breathing, uncomprehending, unbelieving.

“Let…go…of…my…arm.” Not a syllable had changed tone or pitch.

She dropped her hand. Without a word, she spun on her heels and strode into the house, slamming the door behind her. Willard heard the lock
click.

Stunned, he crumpled against the garage wall.

What had he done?

He had
never
struck Catherine, never struck any of the children. Certainly not in anger.

Certainly not in the rage of fury that had overwhelmed him while talking with the children.

His head throbbed.

And his hand hurt, stung, burned like he had thrust it into an open flame.

He slumped to the ground.

What was happening to him? To them?

The house.

Everything had begun to go to hell when they bought this damned house, with its shattered foundation and its disintegrating slab and its web-work of cracks crisscrossing every damned wall in the place.

And now it was shattering him.

Him and his marriage.

Catherine would never talk to him again. Would never love him again.

Nothing was easy.

It wasn’t easy to get back into the house. Every door, every window he tried was locked, solidly, as if barred by solid oak instead of cheap tract-home plywood. He stood by the front door for perhaps five minutes, then turned and trudged down the drive.

It took two hours and a long walk through the Charter Oaks subdivision, following one twining street after another, before he even began to feel a bit like himself. Before his breath calmed and he realized with even greater clarity the horrendous step he had just taken.

In an instant, everything in his life seemed to have changed.

Changed, nothing! It was a full-out train wreck!

He had struck his wife.

As he walked, however, he gradually began noticing things. Perhaps it was his obsession revealing itself to the rational part of is mind. Perhaps it was just that his eyes were finally opened.

Everywhere—
everywhere—
in almost every house, across almost every stretch of sidewalk, every length of drive, he spotted flaws. The corner of one house was literally crumbling away a few inches above the ground, the cement flaking off like layers of too-thick make-up peeling from the cheeks of some ancient hag. In another, every window had thin, spidering lines like age-wrinkles fanning from each corner, some masked by meandering splotches of plaster, others fresh and jagged, painfully black against the stucco. This one had a long front eave that sagged in the center, making the entire place look off-kilter. That one was as sway-backed as an aging nag, its roof line slumping tiredly, as if weighed down by the decades.

It came as a shock. It wasn’t just
their
house. It was every house on every block.

It wasn’t just
him.

When he finally returned to the house at the end of Oleander Place, he found the front door unlocked. That was a good sign, at least.

He moved quietly down the hallway until he stood in front of the back bedroom. The door was closed but he could hear the subdued murmuring of voices inside. He couldn’t understand any of the words—it sounded like ghosts whispering through the labyrinth of dead branches in some midnight cemetery. Rising, falling, rising, falling, but never quite emerging into articulated speech.

He didn’t try opening the door. He tapped with one finger on the smooth surface.
Click. Click. Click.