brambles. Framed in the last arch of birch trees you could see the
Crouch house, a single black mass against the starry sky.
I'd never approached the house this way at night before. So it was
sort of shocking. If ever a house looked haunted, it was the Crouch
place. Suddenly all the stories we'd told about it as kids came back
to me all at once, and looking at it, you had to wonder if there wasn't
a grain of truth in them, as though maybe we'd all had some instinct
about the place, some knowledge in the blood and marrow.
How do you credit the creature under the bed? The monster in the
closet?
you oo uui you oon l.
It was black, solid black, and because there was nothing but the sea
behind it, it seemed to drop right off into nowhere. Like the end of
something.
The house at the end of the world.
It was bad enough remembering the real things, the things I knew to be
true about the place. The dogs. Starved and eaten. The smell of
animal waste and bodies bloated with heat and death. The stacks and
stacks of newspapers- in a house where nobody could read. The smeared,
discolored walls inside.
But there was all the other stuff too. Ideas I'd grown up with,
shuddered over, laughed at, scared myself with over and over again.
The vampires and the evil and the dead. All that came back too, like
a sudden childish vision of madness and cruelty. As we moved through
the last stands of trees, as the sky grew bigger overhead, I thought of
those things and wondered what I was doing here, like a vulture
visiting old corpses.
And I thought about Ben and Mary.
Of idiocy taken to its very extremity. And, in that extremity, made
evil.
We broke through to open clearing. Once it had been a pasture. All at
once the night sounds seemed to shift and alter around us. Steps were
softer. The sea was louder. We were in tall grass now. The crickets
screeched us a jib bering welcome.
"Wow," said Kim.
We stopped and looked straight up where she was looking. A huge pool
of stars, gouging light into the blue-black sky. The moon was so clear
you could see the gray areas against the white.
I've seen a thousand nights like this from a thousand fields, and they
never cease to calm me. This one calmed me now.
After a while I said, "Come on."
I've told you I have this habit of staring at the ground ahead of me
when I walk. I'd been doing that back on the road, but I wasn't now.
I was focused on that house. Not so nervous now but still focused.
Fascinated.
For a while it was nothing but a dark bulk rising off the flatlands,
beyond which was nothing you could see. I knew what was back there. A
short spit of land and then a cliff dropping down to the sea. I
recalled a porch back there and a kind of widow's walk on the second
floor.
And then as we got closer you could make out some of the details in
front. Gray-brown barn board covering the porch and the entire front
of the house, just as it had been in Ben and Mary's time. Three
windows on the second floor, shuttered. Two on the first floor, with
one of the shutters torn or blown away and an empty pane where the
glass should be. Off to the left, an outhouse. A newer wood there it
looked like pine to me. I thought how foul Ben and Mary's must have
been, and I guessed the old doctor had replaced it. I would have.
Once there had been a barn. But that had burned down some years ago.
I remembered where it was located. The grass grew somewhat longer
there.
There were four steps up to the porch. The wood was old, spongy and
gave underfoot. So did the porch beams.
The doorway was crude. Strictly post and lintel. It was made of heavy
oak, like the door itself. Tacked to the crossbeam of the lintel was a
faded blue ribbon, and dangling from the ribbon, facing dead ahead like
some bizarre knocker, was a fish head mouth agape. The flesh had long
since rotted away leaving only three square inches of clean white bone,
empty eyed and hollow.
Steve flicked it with his finger. "You put out the welcome mat for us,
Case?"
It rattled lightweight against the oak then was still again. Casey
shook her head.
"Nope. Wish I'd thought of it. But it's kids, I guess."
"Kids, yeah."
We stood there a moment, feeling awkward, silly. Well, here we were.
Kids. Casey gave me a grin.
"Who's going to open it?"
I turned the rusted doorknob and gave it a push.
"Locked."
I looked around. I kept having this feeling that somebody had to be
watching. We were about to break into a house. So somebody had to
know. It was obvious we were going to get caught. I hadn't the luck
for anything better.
"There's a window broken over here. One of us can probably slip
through and unlock it from the inside."
I looked at Steven.
"Not me." He gestured toward the linen pants. "Whites."
So that was the reason for the beach-party outfit. I took his
flashlight from him and walked over to the window. I flicked on the
light. I had plenty of room to get through. The window was at chest
level. I could hop in easily. But damned if I wanted to.
There was one big spike of glass pointing upward from the bottom pane.
I lifted it out of the window and tossed it into the tall grass. There
was no sound of breakage.
I turned the beam on the floor inside. There was a lot of broken
glass there, but nothing that would get in the way of my climbing in. I
swept the bottom pane with the base of the flashlight just to be sure
there were no small pieces of glass to grab me. Then I handed it
back
I turned with my back to the window and reached inside and found the
upper line of molding with my fingertips. I brought my head, shoulders
and chest inside, and was immediately aware of the cool, moldy smell of
the place. Then I pulled myself up and swung my ass and legs into the
room. I set myself down in a crunch of broken glass. Steve handed me
the flashlight.
Once I was in there the adrenaline really started pumping. That was
it. Break-in. From now on they could arrest you.
Chit
OMIT..
The first thing I did was sweep the room with the flashlight. A brief
impression of empty space, an old wooden table and a potbellied stove
left behind. I was in the kitchen. It had been a big kitchen. You
could see the rust stains on the linoleum floor where the refrigerator
had been. There was wallpaper with a fruit-and-berry motif. There
were dirty white tiles over the kitchen sink. I thought that at least
the moldings over the doors and windows had been scraped and varnished,
not painted. The same with the cabinets. Somebody had cared a
little.
A two-year-old gas-station calendar hung from a nail on the wall beside
me. The month was December. There was a picture of a pair of terrier
pups peering over the edge of a Christmas stocking, liquid eyed and
plaintive. Directly down the wall from that, over the baseboard, was
an empty telephone jack. On the floor lay a small broken end table,