He ran to Stephie’s room, turned on the light. She was asleep with the covers thrown off, pajama-clad knees against her chest. He turned back the way he had come, went into the hall. He stood naked for a moment beneath the chandelier, confused and disoriented, looking wildly about the foyer, the staircases climbing incrementally into shadows.
A fierce bloom of light lit all the windows simultaneously with photoelectric brilliance, coincident to the boom of an explosion and Binder was sunk into oblivion. The silence there in the dark was enormous. It grew and expanded. He seemed deprived of all his senses save touch, sank to the floor. He could feel against his naked body the cold, smooth surface of floorcovering wet with rain driven through the open screen. The walls of the foyer seemed removed. He was lost in windy darkness, and the atmosphere of the house had changed, become profoundly malefic, as if the air had been charged by the switching on of some enormously evil battery.
Out of this silence came a feminine laugh, fey and whimsical, dry as the sound of cornshucks rustling together. The laugh rose in timbre, strangled itself instantly on a high gurgling note like the watervoiced call of a thrush. It was silent again.
I’ve got to get a hold of myself, Binder thought, but it took an enormous effort to remember his name. He sat waiting for the lights to come back on. They did not. The goddamned transformer, he thought, remembering the explosion. He tried to recall what he had done with the flashlight: the nightstand drawer. He arose, felt his way cautiously toward the wall until lightning mapped the room. He made the bedroom door, paused again, gained the wall in darkness, and felt along it until the room was briefly lit.
The flashlight was there. He snapped it on and felt better immediately. He looked at Corrie. He didn’t know how, but still she slept. He hesitated by the door of Stephie’s room, loath to turn and go, but ultimately the thought of someone else in the house was intolerable. There was no way he was going to get back to sleep. He wished the gun had been unpacked. Binder was trying not to think about the hand on his leg.
He was halfway up the stairs when the singing began. Vague, far-off, murmurous, no words he could decipher and maybe no words at all, maybe just the voice filtered through the walls and time and his consciousness, the melody familiar and curiously nostalgic, timeless. He thought desperately of songs he knew, anything to drown out the hypnotic song. The Beatles, he thought, think of the Beatles, listen to the music playing in your head.
He was on the landing, and the music had grown clearer, louder in volume. A feminine voice, a contralto, innocent and pure, a young girl’s voice.
He couldn’t understand the words yet. The beam of the flashlight played about the upstairs hall. All he could hear was the rasp of his own breathing. The singing was coming from behind a closed mahogany door. Cheek laid against it, he could feel the smooth, cold wood and hear the woodfiltered voice singing still.
He threw open the door. It was empty save a bed, a functional-looking chest of drawers. Silent, too, for the singing had stopped at the opening of the door as surely as if he had jerked the tone-arm of a phonograph off a record, cut off instantly in midnote. He could hear, rising above the silence, the wash of rain at the uncurtained windows. Turning with the light he saw only his reflection and the glassed-out silver motion of water. The air of the room felt electric and telluric, as if it had just been quit by the presence of another.
The singing commenced in the next room. Sweet, a capella, for some reason it made him think of a young girl at her toilet, preening before a mirror, singing softly to herself.
He turned with the light, crept stealthily into the hall, approached the bedroom door, twisted the knob gently. Abruptly he kicked the door so hard it slammed against the wall, played the light desperately over the room. Now the singing was behind him, descending the stair, and he began to understand the words:
Lay down, my dear sister
Won’t you lay and take your rest
Won’t you lay your head upon your Savior’s breast?
And I love you, but Jesus loves you the best
And I bid you goodnight…goodnight…goodnight
He descended the stairs two at a time, but the voice had turned a corner in the hall. Shining the light toward the corner he saw for an instant the hindquarters of a black dog. He ran toward it, the light bobbing from ceiling to floor, rounded the corner into the kitchen and swept the light from side to side.
Nothing.
The singing was faint and far off, indecipherable. A man’s hoarse and guttural voice abruptly said something. It might have been curse or invocation. The singing rose in timbre. The man’s voice began again, singsong, a nursery rhyme, patient and slow, as if laboriously explaining something to a child.
A is for ark, that wonderful boat
Noah built it on land getting ready to float.
Silence then except the singing.
The man said patiently,
B is for beast at the ending of the wood, who ate all the children
When they wouldn’t be good.
The voice slurred drunkenly off into an incoherent mumble.
Above the voices Corrie was calling David, David, a rising voice verging on panic.
The lights came on. The refrigerator compressor kicked in, began to hum reassuringly. He could hear the air conditioner whirring from the bedroom. The atmosphere of the house altered, seemed drained of evil.
She was sitting on the side of the bed, a blanket across her lap, hands cupping her breasts defensively, eyes wide with alarm until she recognized him.
Where were you, David?
Looking for something. I heard something.
Heard something? What? Why was it dark, was the power off?
I guess lightning knocked it out and they fixed it. I heard something walking.the door was open. I guess it was a dog.
A dog, she said in disbelief.
She said something else, but Binder did not hear. He checked on Stephie then lay down on the bed. The sheets were damp and cool, the air conditioner was drying the sweat on him. His head hurt. He closed his eyes, aware of her beside him, but he was thinking of the cool hand on his calf, the aching purity of the voice. He wondered at which point his fear had turned to exultance and he was remembering Charlie Cagle on the park bench saying, You let such as that in your own self.lSomehow he had done that, and the thought of his own complicity in it was more frightening than the singing had been.
An Excerpt from The Beale Haunting by J. R. Lipscomb
Jacob Beale was born in 1785 in Halifax County, Virginia. He was the eldest son of Henry Beale, a wealthy landowner and planter of English and Irish descent. For over a hundred years the Beales had been a wellknown English family.
He was educated to the standards of those primitive times, going to school in the wintertime and the rest of the year being trained in the management of the Beales’ lands, and proved to be an exceptional pupil, for almost immediately he began to prosper in the manner of his father and of Beales before him.
In 1809 he began to court a young woman named Elizabeth Anne Cotton. The Cottons were also a highly thought of family, being of good stock and acquisitive of possessions as befits those who would build an empire from a virgin wilderness. In the standards of the time, Miss Cotton had many other admirers, being most comely and healthy, stout enough to be an admirable helpmate, an attribute not to be taken lightly in those harsh times. She was known as Becky to these suitors, and widely sought after.