The Graveyard Shift (13 page)

I snapped the lamp’s chain free and amid a shower of falling sparks the stained glass globe plummeted downward like
a ball of lightning. It connected with Jack’s shoulder, throwing him off balance. I was a house and every single piece of my anatomy was mine to control. All this pathetic man had done was strip me of my jewelry. He had forced me into a bare-knuckled fight. And because of that I would bludgeon his body with my own until he was dead.

I felt my rage intensify tenfold as the end drew near. Anticipation of the kill, of ridding myself of this human pestilence, coursed through me like adrenaline. Windows knocked open and shut throughout the house and billowing gusts were drawn inward.

“Shit,” Jack spat. “You son of a bitch. I’m going to end you.”

My mind reached f
or another chunk of plaster and dropped it like a bombardier. But Jack saw it coming. The three foot chunk barely clipped the heel of Jack’s bleeding foot as he bounced forward in a sprawl. He dragged himself to his feet and continued to amble along at a quickening pace.

I fired more nails, but the next dozen shots hit nothing. His movements were erratic and I could only focus my will enough to shoot the shrapnel straight upward. Steel fasteners ricocheted off the ceiling, bouncing lamely to the floor again in Jack’s wake. He was breathing hard and I could feel his body cut through the air as he ran, buffeting a draft toward my walls.

Within ten feet of the staircase, Jack purposefully leaped past a shut closet as fast as he could. But I was far ahead of him. I had sensed the polished panel of the door as one of my own, one of the few that he had left intact as part of his intended haunted house gimmick. I blasted the cherry door free of its hinges and slammed its full fifty pounds into his back.

Jack cried out, an inhumane sound, and I wondered hopefully if I had managed to break his spine. He skidded across the last few feet of hardwood, the skin of his
forearms and knees burned in an audible skid with the friction of his fall.

“Fucking cocksucker!” he shouted. It was an obscenity I had never heard before, and I rather disliked it. It was bestial language, the sort of thing that no civilized gentleman would ever be caught uttering, even under duress. I hated him more for it. Jonath
an Everton would have hated him as well. And that fact filled me with furious strength. Silvery flashes bolted upward, and somewhere beneath the collapsed door I heard Jack scream as at least one of my flooring nails hit its target.

Jack began to crawl again. One of his arms emerged from beneath the topmost corner of the door, and then the other. The door began to shake as he made his escap
e and I knew that I had to act fast.

The hallway had reached a dead end, the two walls meeting i
n an L-shape to Jack’s front and left. To the right lay the staircase. And his head became visible as he shrugged the door off his back and onto the floor. He laid a hand on the banister, swaying. I focused all of my will on the L-shaped walls, on not just the plaster, but the wooden beams which framed the walls behind it. The walls began to tremble, cracks running along the corners like a fracturing iceberg.

Jack glanced back fearfully then turned to regard the looming staircase once more. He wobbled, favoring his left knee, where another of my nails had landed. There was no way he could navigate the stairs to escape. Not in time.

I pulled harder, feeling the strain darken the corners of my perception. But I thought of my family, remembered my duty to protect their memory. And I tore a hole in my body the size of a Model-A Ford. The sound was deafening, especially within my own mind. Pain seared across my essence, momentarily blinding me. The world went black for a moment and when my senses returned, moonlight cut a clean white swath into my insides. Plaster dust and debris swirled out into the open night.

And I heard Jack give a sharp groan. I was shocked to see him climb off the bottom of the banister railing, coughing. It did not take long to realize what he’d done. Theodore Everton had ridden that banister tail-first a hundred times in his rambunctious days.

Jack was within five feet of the front door. I reached out automatically to lock it, but was reminded in my burgeoning horror that the replica was not mine to control. It was Jack’s. The man hobbled forward with unwavering resolve. He was going to escape. I fired more nails from the floorboards, none of their erratic numbers landing a hit.

I wanted to
cry out as he arrived at the door. I reached for everything I could sense: trim, loose plaster, even ancient wallpaper buried beneath layers and layers of crusted paint. But confusion overtook me just then. Before I attempted to collapse another wall—an action that would have likely killed me—I was shocked into giving pause. Because Jack did not touch the front door. He didn’t even look at it. The concussed fellow just kept on running, like an aimless madman, right past his own certain salvation.

“You’re gone, fucker. You’re so fucking gone.”

And then, just before he was about to enter the den, Jack opened the door to the hall closet and disappeared inside.

Did he think me some ghoulish apparition, a spiritual remnant from the beyond which occupied this house, rather than the house itself? It did not matter. He could not hide from me. Not inside my own walls. I sensed his weight shifting there in the closet. But I could not see him. Even the darkness of the cubby should not have prevented such a thing. Something was blocking me. I realized that among his other minor renovations during my recovery, the fool had done something to block my presence from this closet.

It was an idiotic thought. Why would he have gone to the trouble to blind me from such a tiny room? And no matter its size, how dare he perform such an amputation upon me. As said before, I could feel his 200-pound frame rocking across the newly carpeted subfloor of the room. The carpet was like a wig to me, but the subfloor, that was something to collapse.

I gathered my furious strength and leveled it at the floor beneath Jack’s feet, imagining him as he fell to his death in the cellar. The square area of
plywood started to splinter, cracking audibly as I split the floor joists beneath into toothpicks.

And just as the room and a two foot radius beyond it began to sag downward, Jack burst from the depths of the shielded closet with grated teeth. He was wincing, no doubt, from the pain in his battered body. The sight of him in such disrepair did my spirits a great deal of good. But pain was not the only element in that rictus. With my attention diverted, the floor ceased its immediate collapse and so did the sounds of cracking wood. And tha
t was when I heard Jack.

It was something hoarse, but rooted deep in his belly. He was laughing
. The sound of it perplexed me, but I was distracted by the shining metal object in his hands.

“I thought things might go down like this. I had hope for you. I really d
id. But now you’re fucked.”

The next thing I saw was searing white pain, accompanied by the chorus of explosion. Jack stepped away from the doorway leading to the
den, holding a metallic, ebony-colored cane at his side. Dust hung in the air behind him, as well as a six inch hole in my plaster. But it wasn’t just surface damage. The wood lathe behind it, and even the plaster on the other side in the adjoining room, had been punched clear through.

It was a gun. He jammed it into the wall next to him and again my mind was seared agonizingly as two more holes were torn through me.

“Had this beauty overnighted to me from a friend in Florida,” Jack said, grinning. “Apparently, they use them to kill alligators down there. Not really my kind of thing, but I think this is more or less the same basic application.”

I found my bearings again, ripped a piece of ornate door trim free. I prepared to hurl it lik
e a javelin but Jack was quicker and pounded his stick against the main post of the banister. With a flash of gunpowder and a lightning crack, wood exploded across the room. It was as if my hand had been blown off by a cannonball. I dropped my weapon—another piece of my body—and retreated to collect myself amid the terrible burn.

“It’s basically a shotgun,” Jack said proudly
as the spent shell was ejected to the floor. “Except it’s pressure activated and holds about ten times the ammunition. Cool, right?”

When he
blasted another hole through the floor, I could do nothing to retaliate. I was too shocked, too rocked off kilter to even think of it. The foyer floor moaned in protest, sagging further downward as Jack stepped away from it. He turned and approached the den. His fancy black dress shoes, taken from the closet in haste, contrasted absurdly with his boxer shorts and bloodied tee shirt.

“
Leave it alone, Jack
, my agent says.
It’s got too much bad juju
. That whitebread motherfucker wouldn’t know
juju
if it kicked him in the ass, but god damn me if he wasn’t right. Right? I should have listened to him.
But nooo
, I said.
It’s got
character
. And it’s just far enough outside the city I might actually get some work done
. Well, I was wrong, wasn’t I? You’re just a wormy apple. Beautiful, but rotten to the core.”

Jack emphasized his point by planting the end of his pole gun into yet another wall, one which had formerly housed Mr. Everton’s favorite painting of dogs on the hunt. That shot hit wiring and sparks
flew from the wound like blood from a clipped ventricle.

“I looked at dozens of places like this. But you, you were perfect. Your layout was too goddamn perfect for a gallery. And now look at me. Look at my house.
My place of business. It’s starting to look like Swiss cheese. Shit, so am I, for that matter. So much for the importance of aesthetics, eh?”

With that, Jack limped across the room and stared up at my fireplace. He planted another round in the floor. It
took my breath away; a great gust of air was involuntarily expelled from my open windows.

“I did my research on this place. You
have
to know that by now. And where the other morons failed to put the pieces together, it doesn’t exactly take Sigmund fucking Freud to figure out what the problem is here. The first owners lived in this place peacefully for, what, fifty years? You and me, we would have been perfect for each other. Who better than an open-minded guy like myself to cohabitate with? We could have helped each other. I would have cared for you. But now, you try to kill me in my sleep? Jesus… I thought my ex-girlfriend was bad.”

The next shotgun blast was aimed at the wall next to the fireplace. My body was
now in so much agony from my previous, more grievous wounds, that I hardly even noticed it. It is well known that when exposed to extreme distress, humans will go into shock. I believe whatever was currently happening to me at that moment was similar. My newfound well of wrathful power seemed to have dried up completely. Soaring as high as I had only minutes before, I never would have imagined such a thing was possible again. That went to show how little I knew.

It seemed that I had learned quite a lot
about myself during these last few weeks. In fact, as my mind drifted away, ushered by that deep black fold of darkness, I thought it quite funny just how much I had learned about myself
after
my life with the Evertons. For the first time ever, it seemed as though I had lived a longer and more varied life with their memory in mind than I actually had spent living
with
them. As Jack prattled on furiously, I felt their memory slipping further and further away, like whispers in the wind.

“I tried and tried to be reasonable, to show you that I wasn’t a threat. But now, I see that you and I, we weren’t meant to be stardust. What’s that you sa
y? I can’t hear you.” Jack leaned forward, rapping on the mantle with the tip of his weapon. “Did you say you’re sorry? That you’ve had enough? That you’ve finally realized that there is no way you can win this fight?”

Jack stood there resolutely, staring at the empty stone fireplace. I watched him with blurring vision, felt his weight shift from heel to heel as he constantly redistributed his balance.

“Well, fuck you,” Jack said. Spit fired from his lips as he seethed the phrase and it misted down to the dusty floor. “This just became a personal matter, you goddamn coward.”

Jack reached his free hand behind him and tugged at the waistband of his boxer shorts. Something had been stowed there, likely taken from the closet. When he held it up to the moonlight piercing the window, I
saw what it was. I had not seen the thing in many years, but I recognized it immediately. Its appearance grounded my straying, battered senses, and brought my vision back to crystal clarity.

“Answer me this, asshole. Who the hell just leaves a family photo album behind? I mean, furniture is one thing, I can see that.
But a photo album? Jesus Christ. Those Everton kids must have
really
hated you to have sold this place so quick that they just up and left family heirlooms behind.”

I shuddered, watching Jack stand there with my entire lifetime hefted in his hands. How had he found the photo book? It had certainly not been within my walls; I would have sensed that.