24.
Late morning, a half-hour after Florida left, we entered the woods, Leonard carrying a shovel, me with a flashlight clipped to my belt, my remembrance of Uncle Chester’s diagram folded up in my pants pocket.
At first the going was easy, as the woods were made up mostly of well-spaced pines and there were soft paths of straw to walk on, but soon the trees sloped uphill and there were hardwoods, vines and brambles, and the pines grew closer, and the going wasn’t so good. It was humid too, and the smell from the pines and sweet gums became cloying, like being splashed with a bucket full of cheap perfume.
We scouted around until we found a little animal path and made our way down that. Traveling became easier. We startled birds and a deer. About an hour later the trail trickled out at the edge of a little dry creek bed. We didn’t cross. Leonard led along the edge of the creek and deeper into the woods. We fought our way through the vines and brambles, and finally, thorn-torn, tired and hungry, we broke into the section of woods that held the house hostage.
Leonard leaned on the shovel, “I was set up right here when I painted it. It’s in worse shape now. I don’t remember a damn thing about the insides. There were fewer trees around it then.”
The house was huge and had once been elegant. Two-story, with a porch that went all around, lots of windows and a railed upper deck, now sagging, like a dental plate hanging out of a drunk’s mouth. There were some fallen-down outbuildings nearby and a tumbled-over rock well frame, and around the old well vines twisted and young saplings sprouted.
Trees were growing close to the house, and it appeared as if they were holding it up. An oak had erupted through rotten porch boards and was crawling up the front of the place, poking a limb through a glassless window frame, like a bully poking a big finger in a sissy’s eye. The house’s lumber had gone gray as cigarette ash. At one side, a persistent hickory had grown to the height of the house and was still growing, and in the process, one humongous limb was lifting a corner of the roof as if tipping a hat.
We carefully mounted the porch, watching our step as it protested our weight. A burst of birds exited a nearby window with a noisy flutter. I said, “Shit.”
“Just yellow-bellied finches,” Leonard said. “Not known man-eaters.”
The front door was still intact, but when I took hold of the rusted doorknob, it budged only slightly before jamming. The hinges were rusted tight.
The window from which the birds had exploded was our next bet. Leonard kicked out the few remaining fragments of glass and broke apart the wood trim that had held the glass in the frame, and we climbed inside.
The room was large and decorated with vines and dust and a peeling, bubbled wallpaper that had a faded design on it that must have been colorful and jim-dandy about 1928. There was an old fireplace filled with trash from hunter and/or hobo camps. A chicken snake, big enough to play a starring role in a Tarzan movie, slithered quickly across the floor and disappeared in a gap in the wood.
The first-floor ceiling was mostly gone, and you could clearly see the roof was pocked with holes, and the shadowed sunlight through the gaps was like spoiled cheese oozing through the splits in a food grater. The flooring was also gapped, and there were sections where it was bowed up and the boards had popped and split from weathering.
We made it across and into the next room without falling through, and the flooring there was better because the ceiling was complete and less water had dampened it. The room was smaller and contained an old-fashioned chifforobe. The wood of the chifforobe had swollen and cracked. There was a bird’s nest on top of it, and dried birdshit streaked its sides. The wallpaper here was good, and you could recognize the pattern as a series of pale green shamrocks.
In the next room, the kitchen, there was a black, dust-covered wood stove with white porcelain facing, and a long table shoved up against the wall. The table was weather faded but sound, with thick carved legs that terminated in lion’s feet. Above the table, on the wall, the wallpaper – sick beige with no pattern – had water-stained itself in an interesting manner. The stain was dark and shaped like a face and there were darker dots on the face, like splash marks, and the shape of the face was familiar.
Leonard said, “The Wallpaper of Turin, or rather, of LaBorde, Texas.”
“I read once about this Mexican gal saw Jesus’s face on a tortilla,” I said, “but I think we got her beat here.”
“I don’t know,” Leonard said, “get tired of it, you can’t eat it.”
We went over to the table for a closer look. Leonard stepped back and glanced down, said, “Check out the floor.”
I saw what he meant immediately. A large section of the floor we were standing on was newer wood. It was dark, as if weathered, but it was, in fact, treated lumber. About the size of a Ping-Pong table. You looked close enough, you could see it was all of one piece. You might not have noticed it, you weren’t looking for something suspicious.
I got out the floor plan I had drawn from memory. I said, “According to this, if I recreated it right, and the basic design certainly fits this house, there are no graves at this spot.”
“Yeah, but I think, good friend, we have just found the doorway to hell.”
We got off the square of flooring, and Leonard worked the tip of the shovel into a corner of it and lifted. The square of wood creaked up. When it was high enough, I grabbed hold of it and helped raise it. It wasn’t too heavy.
We pulled the section back and looked down. It was about three feet to the ground. You could smell the dampness of the earth. The ground was packed down there, as if it were well traveled.
I lay down on the floor, leaned over the edge of the gap, and looked underneath the flooring with my flashlight. There had been a lot of new wood put under there for support. About three feet to my left there was a metal container about the size of a personal safe, pushed back against the rotten wood skirting that went around the house. I flashed the light in the hole some more, looking for snakes. I didn’t see any.
I climbed down there and got the metal box and handed it to Leonard. The box was made of tin. It was like an oversized breadbox. It rattled when I moved it. There was nothing but a slap-and-snap latch to keep you out of it.
I climbed out of the hole and watched Leonard open the box. Inside was a large Bowie knife, a small hacksaw, about a dozen child pornography magazines, a purple tablecloth, two candlesticks, and two new white candles.
I noted something was sticking out of one of the pornography magazines, an undersized page that didn’t seem to belong. I pulled it out. It was a page from the Bible. The Psalms. I checked the other magazines. Each contained a page from the Psalms.
“I’ll be damn,” Leonard said. “Read a little Psalms, whack off to kiddie porn, read a little Psalms. That’s some combination.”
I unwrapped the purple tablecloth. It was stained in the center with something crusty, and at either end there were white stains that were obviously candle wax.
“Let’s slide the lid back on the floor,” I said.
“Aren’t we going to look down there?” Leonard asked.
“Humor me. I need it to stand on.”
We put the flooring back. We stood on it, and I ran a finger through the dust on the table. I said, “The dust here is a lot thinner than the dust everywhere else. Now, watch this. I think.”
I pulled out the purple tablecloth and spread it on the table. It fit nicely. I took off my shirt and used it to pick up the candlesticks at their bases so as not to leave prints. I put one at either end of the table where the cloth had remnants of wax staining it. I shoved the candles into the sticks, tossed the porno magazines on the table for the hell of it.
I said, “Is a picture starting to form?”
Leonard let it cook a moment. “It’s like an altar. And if that crusty stuff in the middle of the cloth is what I think it is, could be what we have here are sacrifices to a water stain of Jesus?”