And now, as they moved from the vestibule into the living room, Crow felt as if the house itself was breathing at him with that same stink.
Crow never told his friends about the beatings. They all knew — Crow was almost always bruised somewhere — but this was small-town Pennsylvania in 1974 and nobody ever talked about stuff like that. Not even his teachers. Just as Stick never talked about the fact that both of his sisters had haunted looks in their eyes and never—ever—let themselves be alone with their father. Not if they could avoid it. Janie and Kim had run away a couple of times each, but they never said why. You just didn’t talk about some things. Nobody did.
Nobody.
Certainly not Crow.
So he had no point of reference for discussing the stink of this house. To mention it to his friends would require that he explain what else it smelled like. That was impossible. He’d rather die.
The house wanted us to come in, he thought, and now we’re in.
Crow looked at the others. Stick hung back, almost crouching inside the vestibule and the wild look was back on his face. Terry stood with his hands in his pockets, but from the knuckley lumps under the denim Crow knew that he had his fists balled tight. Val had her arms wrapped around her chest as if she stood in a cold wind. No one was looking at him.
No one was looking at each other. Except for Crow.
Now we’re inside.
Crow knew what would happen. He’d seen every movie about haunted houses, read every book. He had all the Warren Eerie and Creepy comics. He even had some of the old E.C. comics. He knew.
The house is going to fool us. It’ll separate us. It’ll kill us, one by one.
That’s the way it always was. The ghost — or ghosts — would pull them apart, lead them into darkened cellars or hidden passages. They’d be left alone, and alone each one of them would die. Knives in the dark, missing stairs in a lightless hall, trapdoors, hands reaching out of shadows. They’d all die in here. Apart and alone. That was the way it always happened.
Except…
Except that it did not happen that way.
Crow saw something out of the corner of his eye. He turned to see a big mirror mounted on the wall. Dusty, cracked, the glass fogged.
He saw himself in the mirror.
Himself and not himself.
Crow stepped closer.
The reflection stepped closer, too.
Crow and Crow stared at each other. The boy with bruises, and a man who looked like his father. But it wasn’t his father. It was Crow’s own face, grown up, grown older. Pale, haggard, the jaws shadowy with a week’s worth of unshaved whiskers, vomit stains drying on the shirt. A uniform shirt. A police uniform. Wrinkled and stained, like Kurt Bernhardt’s. Even though it was a reflection, Crow could smell the vomit. The piss. The rank stink of exhaled booze and unbrushed teeth.
“Fuck you, you little shit,” he said. At first Crow thought the cop was growling at him, but then Crow turned and saw Val and Terry. Only they were different. Everything was different, and even though the mirror was still there, nothing else was the same. This was outside, at night, in town. And the Val and Terry the cop was cursing at quietly were all grown up. They weren’t reflections; they were real, they were here. Wherever and whenever here was.
Val was tall and beautiful, with long black hair and eyes that were filled with laughter. And she was laughing — laughing at something Terry said. There were even laugh lines around her mouth. They walked arm-in-arm past the shop windows on Corn Hill. She wore a dress and Terry was in a suit. Terry was huge, massive and muscular, but the suit he wore was expensive and perfectly tailored. He whispered to Val, and she laughed again. Then at the corner of Corn Hill and Baker Lane, they stopped to kiss. Val had to fight her laughs in order to kiss, and even then the kiss disintegrated into more laughs. Terry cracked up, too, and then they turned and continued walking along the street. They strolled comfortably. Like people who were walking home.
Home. Not home as kids on bikes, but to some place where they lived together as adults. Maybe as husband and wife.
Val and Terry.
Crow turned back to the mirror, which stood beside the cop — the only part of the Croft house that still existed in this world. The cop — the older Crow — stood in the shadows under and elm tree and watched Val and Terry. Tears ran like lines of mercury down his cheeks. Snot glistened on his upper lip. He sank down against the trunk of the tree, toppling the last few inches as his balance collapsed. He didn’t even try to stop his fall, but instead lay with his cheek against the dirt. Some loose coins and a small stone fell out of the man’s pocket.
Crow patted his own pocket. The lucky stone was there.
Still there.
Still his.
The moment stretched into a minute and then longer as Crow watched the drunken man weep in wretched silence. He wanted to turn away, but he couldn’t. Not because the image was so compelling, but because when Crow actually tried to turn… he simply could not make his body move. He was frozen into that scene.
Locked.
Trapped.
The cop kept crying.
“Stop it,” said Crow. He meant to say it kindly, but the words banged out of him, as harsh as a pair of slaps.
The cop froze, lifting his head as if he’d heard the words.
His expression was alert but filled with panic, like a deer who had just heard the crunch of a heavy footfall in the woods. It didn’t last. The drunken glaze stole over it and the tense lips grew rubbery and slack. The cop hauled himself to a sitting position with his back to the tree, and the effort winded him so that he sat panting like a dog, his face greasy with sweat. Behind the alcohol haze, something dark and ugly and lost moved in his eyes.
Crow recognized it. The same shapeless thing moved behind his own eyes every time he looked in the mirror. Especially after a beating. But the shape in his eyes was smaller than this, less sharply defined. His usually held more panic, and there was none at all here. Panic, he would later understand, was a quality of hope, even of wounded hope. In the cop’s eyes, there was only fear. Not fear of death — Crow was experienced enough with fear to understand that much. No, this was the fear that, as terrible as this was, life was as good as it would ever be again. All that was left was the slide downhill.
“No…” murmured Crow, because he knew what was going to happen.
The cop’s fingers twitched like worms waiting for the hook. They crawled along his thigh, over his hip bone. They found the leather holster and the gnarled handle of the Smith and Wesson.
Crow could not bear to watch. He needed to not see this. A scream tried to break from him, and he wanted it to break. A scream could break chains. A scream could push the boogeyman away. A scream could shatter this mirror.
But Crow could not scream.
Instead he watched as those white, trembling fingers curled around the handle of the gun and pulled it slowly from the holster.
He still could not turn… but now his hands could move. A little and with a terrible sluggishness, but they moved. His own fingers crawled along his thigh, felt for his pocket, wormed their way inside.
The click of the hammer being pulled back was impossibly loud.
Crow’s fingers curled around the stone. It was cold and hard and so… real.
He watched the cylinder of the pistol rotate as the cop’s thumb pulled the hammer all the way back.
Tears burned like acid in Crow’s eyes and he summoned every ounce of will to pull the stone from his pocket. It came so slowly. It took a thousand years.