The Mourning House

Ronald Malfi

First Edition

The Mourning House © 2014, 2012 by Ronald Malfi

All Rights Reserved.

A DarkFuse Release

www.darkfuse.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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1

Blessedly, the details of the accident were mostly lost to him now.

There was Geoffrey and Mary’s party—over a hundred people crammed into their two-bedroom brick-fronted townhouse in the Philadelphia suburb of Chestnut Hill. Garland had been strung up in loops from the high ceiling, there was spiced rum punch in a giant crystal bowl and, in the living room, a Christmas tree drooped under the weight of Mary’s hand-blown glass ornaments. Trays of food had been strategically placed along the kitchen table and counters, wedges of indistinct hors d’oeuvres speared with toothpicks that resembled tiny cavalry sabers. There was a conversation with some writers and musicians by the hearth; Sam grinned as Geoffrey (who fancied himself a musician) occasionally nodded in agreement with their stories of struggle and strife as if he understood their musical plight. Sam, a doctor in a roomful of artists, was amused.

Ghostlike, Annie floated by with the baby, smiling at Sam through the crowd, the air underscored by a Trans-Siberian Orchestra album on the stereo. She was light-skinned, beautiful. He returned each smile with the dry humility he always managed to summon when hanging out with Annie’s artistic friends. He didn’t mind her friends—they were good people, even if their liberalism tended to make them a bit wonky at times—and, for the most part, he enjoyed himself. It was a good party.

At one point in the evening, a young woman in a headscarf performed an impromptu séance, having all the willing participants gather around a small table in the middle of the living room on which she had arranged various candles and scented oils. The music was turned off and the lights were dimmed. Someone made a catcall from the back of the crowd but was immediately hushed by some of the more spiritual guests. Those at the table joined hands—Sam was not among them, though he watched from across the room, a glass of port wine to keep him company—and the woman began her sonorous monologue. Her face was pale, her cheeks sunken and her eyes recessed too far into her skull. Even with the headscarf on, he could tell she had no hair. Sam knew right away that this was not part of the act. He had been a general practitioner for seven years now and had little difficulty recognizing cancer in all its hideous forms.

Though much of the séance was underscored by laughter and good cheer, the woman in the headscarf did claim at one point to glimpse a deceased male form flickering in the periphery of her mind’s eye. “He died here, in this house, a horrible criminal’s death.”

From across the room, Geoffrey laughed and said, “A criminal? In my house?”

“He was a murderer and a rapist,” said the woman, “who was eventually put down by another murderer.”

Then someone shouted, “That’s Johnny!” and everyone laughed.

At midnight, they rang in the New Year with horns and streamers and thingamajigs that crooned loudly (and startled the baby) and, through the wall of windows that faced the beating heart of the city, they watched as fireworks lit up the night sky. He kissed Annie, kissed the baby, whispered, “Happy New Year” into the pink shells of their ears. The baby spit raspberries and drooled down the front of her bib. Annie laughed. She looked elegant in a slim-fitting black velvet dress, her long hair pulled back in a single braid that fell all the way to her buttocks. They had been married just a short time but they had wanted children right away. Besides, neither of them was getting any younger…and what if it took forever to get pregnant? Yet it didn’t—just a month after trying, which did not seem like trying at all, cells multiplied and divided and soon there was this microscopic little thing that would soon become their little Marley.

“You are a handsome man in that shirt and tie, Doc,” Annie said, leaning her head on his shoulder. In her arms, the baby fussed. “She’s getting tired.”

“It’s been a long night,” Sam agreed.

Gathering their coats from the master bedroom just before leaving, Sam heard someone clear their throat behind him. He turned to see Geoffrey standing there, his necktie undone, his shirt partially unbuttoned. His eyes looked like martini olives behind the thin lenses of his glasses.

“Please please please,” said Geoffrey, “don’t tell me you guys are leaving so early.”

“Baby’s getting fussy,” Sam said. It was after one in the morning. “And we’ve got a bit of a drive.”

Geoffrey slouched against the door frame. He had a glass in one hand, half-filled with amber fluid. “I remember when it used to snow on New Year’s.” There was more than a tinge of melancholia in his voice. Geoffrey’s lower lip stuck out in a pout that was nearly comical. “Did you have a nice time?”

With Annie’s coat draped over one arm, Sam continued searching for his own under the pile of leather jackets, sports coats, winter coats trimmed in imitation fur. “Of course, Geoffrey. We always have a ball at your parties.”

“They’re good people,” Geoffrey said from the doorway. It sounded strangely like an excuse. “Sure, they can get a bit outlandish, a bit garrulous, but I think that’s sometimes what makes them interesting. Part of the charm. Sometimes, it’s the only thing that makes them interesting.”

“They’re all very nice,” Sam said, still looking for his coat.

“Listen,” Geoffrey said, moving a few steps into the bedroom. The change of tone in the man’s voice was apparent. He paused just before Sam, drunkenly unbalanced, his limp-wristed hand threatening to drop his drink to the carpet. “I know I’ve said it before, Sam, but I just wanted to thank you again for the money. I feel like a regular heel. I feel horrible.”

“Nonsense. What’s to feel horrible about?”

“Christ. I’m a grown man. I shouldn’t be…I mean, borrowing money from an ex-girlfriend’s…well, you know. It’s unpalatable.”

Sam knew of Annie and Geoffrey’s history—their ancient history—and while it did not bother him, he felt uncomfortable now in hearing it come from Geoffrey’s mouth. Annie and Geoffrey had dated for just under a year, but that was long before he had met her. They were all married now and life had moved on, but Geoffrey sometimes said foolish things when he was drunk. And Geoffrey was drunk a lot.

“There’s nothing shameful in needing some help,” Sam said now, not wanting to get hung up talking about Geoffrey’s problems at the moment. “Anyway, it’s just a loan. It happens with people all the time.”

“Just till Mary and I are, you know, back on our feet.”

It crossed Sam’s mind to suggest that maybe he and Mary should have forgone their annual New Year’s celebration this year in light of money being so tight, but Sam did not say so. Geoffrey Fulton wasn’t a bad guy. Up until the close of summer, he’d owned and operated a bistro in downtown Philly that catered to the city’s small but dedicated bohemian crowd—painters, writers, musicians, and the occasional journalist looking to slum among the hipster crowd. Decreasing profits, dwindling clientele, and poor business decisions had forced the little bistro to fold. Mary, Geoffrey’s spunky, bright-eyed wife, worked at a crafts store, and her meager salary alone did not cover the high cost of city living. It wasn’t until the Fultons were faced with losing their townhouse that Geoffrey had come to Sam—come to Annie, in truth—and humbled himself by asking for a loan. Sam and Annie Hatch weren’t their closest friends, but they were certainly the most well off. When your circle of friends consisted of the similarly bankrupt, one had to reach beyond that circle when the cards were down.

“Forget about it, Geoffrey.” He finally spied his coat on the floor, draped over the baby’s car seat. “Have a happy New Year.”

He bent and scooped up his coat and was about to reach for the car seat when Geoffrey moved swiftly across the room and gripped him hard, high on the forearm. Sam spun around and faced the smaller man, and Geoffrey hugged him clumsily. Sam could smell the alcohol issuing off him like steam rising from desert blacktop. Sam hugged him back with one arm and couldn’t help but feel somewhat foolish standing there doing so.

“I love you guys, you know,” Geoffrey said. “The both of you.”

“You’re drunk,” Sam told him.

“Happy New Year, pal.”

Back in the living room, Sam wended through the diminishing crowd of people toward the kitchen where Annie stood talking with Mary, the baby bouncing on Annie’s thigh. He nodded at his wife and she saw him and winked in response—just a sec, love.

When he turned, the woman in the headscarf was standing directly before him. This close, he could see how the cancer had sunken her eyes and jaundiced her flesh, robbing her of life even though her heart still beat. The pores in her flesh looked overlarge, like strawberry seeds, and her thin, lipless mouth appeared as nothing more than a scalpel’s hasty incision in the taut putty of her face.

“Excuse me,” he said. Juggling the two coats and the car seat, he attempted to maneuver around the woman.

She reached out and, much like Geoffrey Fulton had done moments ago in the back bedroom, gripped him high up on the forearm.

Sam made a small, confused sound at the back of his throat.

“Wake up,” she said in a breathy whisper, her grip tightening on his arm. Sam felt her bony fingers digging into him like a bear trap. “They come out the way they go in.”

“What?” he uttered.

The woman leaned closer to him. He imagined he could smell the cancer coursing through her veins. “They come out the way—”

He tore his arm free of her grasp with enough force to elbow some guy walking past him. The guy mumbled something but Sam did not turn to look at him. His eyes were locked on the woman in the headscarf.

The woman blinked. Her eyes, which at first Sam had believed to be a cool light blue, were suddenly as gray and as dull as seawater. A nervous tic caused the corner of her lipless mouth to throb. “I’m sorry,” she said, folding her wrists across her chest. “Please excuse me.”

Sam watched her move quickly through the crowd of people until she disappeared down the hallway.

He jumped a second time when Annie came up behind him and touched his elbow. “Hey, jumpy. You ready to go?”

“Yeah,” he said, sweating.

Then they were in the car driving home, the baby asleep in the back in her car seat, Annie fooling with the car’s CD player. The city lights around them blurred as an icy rain began to fall.

“It was a nice party,” Annie said, selecting a John Coltrane CD and lowering the volume. She peered in the back at the baby, who was already asleep.

“Yes,” he said. “Geoffrey brought up the money again. He was drunk but sincere.”

“I know he feels bad about having to borrow it,” Annie said. “I feel bad for him, too. And Mary.”

“I just hope he makes use of it.”

“We’re good, right? It didn’t hurt us, lending them that money, did it?”

“No,” he said. “We’re better than good.”

She smiled and leaned her head on his shoulder. He could smell her eucalyptus shampoo and the floral perfume she wore. Her warmth spread from her into him, tracing through his whole body while, from the speakers, Coltrane blew in the New Year.

And the rain came down harder.

* * *

A group of motorists found Sam Hatch an hour later, soaking wet and wandering along the highway median, disoriented. What clothes he still wore were covered in blood.

2

Piloted by impulsiveness and—he would reflect on later—some separate, indescribable urge to pursue that, at least to him, was foreign and held no name, he found himself turning the battered old Volkswagen off the highway and down a rutted dirt access road for no apparent reason. Beneath a blazing summer sun and in the heat of a sweltering afternoon in late July, he drove along a swath of roadway flanked on both sides by tall grass the color of straw. The Volkswagen was a piece of shit, and the spoils of some previous impulsiveness, having purchased it from some sun-bleached farmer in his mid-twenties back in Mississippi for all of five hundred dollars. “For another five bucks, I’ll throw in the nudie magazines I keep in the glove box,” the farmer had offered with a lecherous wink that made Sam want to take a shower; suffice it to say, he didn’t give him the extra five bucks. Now, Sam doubted the car would make it much farther. There had been a close call with the car just outside Atlanta when a radiator hose split. Thankfully, one of the car’s previous owners had attempted to repair the splitting vinyl upholstery with great silvery slashes of electrical tape, so Sam was able to remove the tape and use it to bandage the hose. It was a quick fix, but he was able to make it to a garage before sundown.

The car rattled, it smelled bad, the AC didn’t work, and it belched bluish clouds of exhaust from the tailpipe. Nonetheless, it was better than the Oldsmobile he’d purchased back in Sacramento; that car had only gotten him as far as Reno before it seized up on the side of the highway like a stubborn mule, forcing him to hitchhike to the nearest town. He hated hitchhiking—not in theory, but in practicality. He hated the casual conversations with the succession of ageless, grizzled men who picked him up on the side of the road without compunction. He hated the way their cars always smelled, an amalgamation of sour perspiration, rotting vegetation, and bad breath. It was only a matter of time before their questions—harmless in their interrogation, sure, but painful nonetheless—caused something hard and warm to ball up in the center of his chest. Inevitably, they would ask about his past, his history. He had gotten good at lying, but even the lies were painful and dredging, for they were borne on the veiled thread of truth, as all good lies were.

Often, he wondered what these men thought of him. Longish hair, clothes in need of laundering, the unshaven jowls of a longshoreman, he looked like every other drifter. Yet he found that the gruffer and emptier he looked, the less apt these men were to ask about his past. And that was good. So he grew a beard and stopped washing his clothes at the coin-operated Laundromats he came across in each town, and soon he fell so strongly into the role that he actually began to be this lonesome traveler. And that, too, was good. Dr. Samuel John Hatch—the old Sam Hatch, the man and the history of the man—had already truly died over a year ago anyway. There was no need to hang onto him and pump him full of artificial life like air into a punctured tire. Sam—the new Sam—had no desire to cling to that old skin.

Sam continued now down the dirt road that cut through the tall grass that resembled straw, the Volkswagen’s windows down, the air smelling strongly of the nearby Chesapeake Bay. By his calculation, which was only somewhat reliable, he estimated that he was somewhere along Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He had no destination in mind…yet he was suddenly overcome by some sense of compulsion, of nonspecific drive, and so he kept his foot on the accelerator. It was nearly a tangible thing, and he felt like a bloodhound following a scent.

He came to a T in the road and brought the Volkswagen to a shuddering stop. This is a breathless town, he thought, not really knowing what the thought meant. There was an empty field off to his left and a rundown church whose foundation looked about as sturdy as a chair with three legs off to his right. The windows of the church were boarded up and the rickety bell tower was bristling with falcons’ nests. Overhead, seagulls wheeled across the sky.

With his foot still on the brake, Sam attempted to understand the peculiar sensation of compulsion that engulfed him. He recalled times in his youth where he’d woken late for an exam. This feeling was very similar. Yet as he sat there idling at the intersection, he felt the sensation release him, as if probing it had frightened it away. The feeling was strangely tactile—so much so that he actually imagined he felt fingers tracing down his back. The feeling had left him. Had it really been there to begin with? Or was he finally just losing his mind?

A breathless town, he thought again for no apparent reason. And then he caught his reflection in the car’s rearview mirror and the sight of himself sitting there, as lifeless a ventriloquist’s dummy propped up in the driver’s seat, caused an ice-cold spike to wedge itself at the base of his spine.

Instead of continuing in the direction he had been heading, he turned right and drove through the field along a corrugated service road. The Volkswagen’s undercarriage scraped the earth, barking over every undulation. Despite the heat, a sickly chill overtook him; by the time he came to the end of the road, where the roadway dispersed in a scatter of white stones before vanishing into the blonde grass altogether, he was actually shivering.

A small white house stood before him.

More appropriately, it was the vacant shell of a house, a weathered and ruined monstrosity. It peeled, sloughed, moldered, rotted. There were great mouthlike rents in the peaked roof and the windows were black portals into other dimensions. Half of a stone chimney bent crookedly away from the far side of the house. Loose roofing shingles lay about the bone-gray front porch, having been shed like reptilian scales.

He shut the car down and stepped out into the heat of midday. Despite the beads of sweat that dimpled his forehead and caused his shirt to cling wetly to his chest, he still felt cold. Tossing the car keys through the open window onto the driver’s seat, Sam approached the house, his scuffed boots crunching in the white gravel. The suggestion of a path, now long overgrown with weeds, was still faintly visible leading up to the front door of the house. Sam advanced through the grass and onto the path. Summer crickets rebounded off his shins.

Only half of a sign was posted crookedly across the front door—NO TRESPA. The door itself stood open just a few inches, a vertical strip of darkness and shadow running between the door and the frame. He could see the marks on the doorframe where someone had nailed boards over the entranceway, but those boards were no longer there.

No trespa indeed, Sam thought. Beneath his feet, busted bits of terracotta pottery crunched like seashells. When he reached out to push open on the front door the rest of the way, his hand was shaking worse than it had been earlier that day when the Xanax had worn off. The door squealed open. Instantly, the smell of ancient tombs and dry-rotted mummies infiltrated his nostrils. From where he stood, he could make out the slanted geometry of light within as daylight pressed against the otherwise opaque windowpanes.

The floorboards creaked like old bed springs as he stepped inside. The floor felt slanted and the walls reminded him, in both color and texture, of the cardboard backing of legal pads. They looked insubstantial enough for him to push a finger through the surface. There was no furniture to speak of, unless one considered old egg crates and upturned five-gallon paint buckets to be furniture. Detritus seemed placed almost strategically about the floor—crushed beer and soda cans, fast food wrappers, the spent shells of used fireworks. There was a stack of soggy comic books beneath one of the windows, a fuzzy brown mold spreading across the top book.

He walked around the place, peering into various rooms with inexplicable yet mounting curiosity. There were walls of chipped plaster and exposed beams. A collection of two-by-fours stood braced against another wall like a lean-to. Closets with missing doors. Extensive water damage. A singular gaping hole in the ceiling, beneath which the hardwood floor was spongy and black. The old stone hearth grinned, missing large chunks of itself like a mouth missing teeth. The kitchen counters were nothing more than unfinished planking. Rusted and flaking, the sink basin was shrine to tetanus, and a single spindly vine corkscrewed straight up out of the drain, as fine as a wisp of smoke. Sam cranked the faucet. Pipes bucked and whistled and moaned until a soupy brown sludge oozed from the spigot. Off to his left, fat black flies thumped lazily against the open doors of barren cupboards. Something pulpy and jam-like was smeared on the inside of one cupboard door. To Sam, it looked like blood spatter from a gunshot wound.

Back in the foyer, he followed a rickety stairwell to the second floor, the risers bowing beneath his feet as he climbed. The hallway at the top of the stairs was narrower than standard size. Rooms branched off from the hall, each one similarly claustrophobic in their smallness. Indecipherable graffiti had been sprayed on some of the walls. Someone had pressed a dull bronze coin into the plaster of another wall which glinted in the sunlight that came in through the grimy windows. Sam went to one of the windows and was able to look out in the direction he had come, and could see the dilapidated church far in the distance. From another room, he could see the expansive sea of golden scrubland that yawned out to a thin veil of trees and, beyond the trees, the expansive coal-colored water of the Chesapeake Bay.

It felt like the house could collapse in on him at any moment. Which was why it was strange when, the following day, Sam bought the dump.

3

County land records showed the property had been willed to a woman named Constance Ballantyne in 1992. Ballantyne was a buxom widow in her late sixties who apparently had no compunction about driving down from Baltimore on short notice to meet Sam at the Kent Island county clerk’s office. Presumably under the assumption that Sam was a prominent land developer, Ballantyne came dressed to impress, her neck adorned with large colored stones housed in silver links of chain, her knobby, arthritic fingers bejeweled. Heavy on the makeup, her face looked like something out of a child’s nightmare about cannibalistic clowns; the image was only underscored by her hair, which was dyed bronze and clung to her scalp in tight ringlets, resembling a motorcycle helmet. When Sam explained that he was not in fact a wealthy land developer, he could actually see the older woman deflate as she sat across from him at the tiny table in the county clerk’s office.

“Then why in the world would you want that property, Mr. Hatch?”

“To be honest, I’m not really sure. I guess it just called to me.”

She eyed him curiously from behind false eyelashes gummy with mascara. Then she slid the property deed over to him. “It’s six full acres, you know,” she said. “It runs from the main road—that would be Tar Road, the one that runs in front of the property—all the way back to the tree line at the end of the east field, just before you reach the water. The property has been in my family for years. When my mother died in ninety-two, God rest her soul, it fell into my lap.”

“Did you grow up in that house?”

“In the house?” She seemed insulted. “Lord, no. No one ever lived there, at least not all year round. My grandfather built it with his brothers when they were young men. They used to come down from Baltimore and work summers on the water, so they needed a place to stay. Back then, it was just the one floor. The second floor was added some years later, after hunters started renting it for weeks at a time. After my grandfather passed, the ownership of the house just got shuffled around through my family in a weighty sort of roulette. We’ve had the occasional renters—hunters, mostly—but they never stay more than a season, and even they don’t come around asking about the place anymore, probably because it’s gone to pot. I guess I would have sold it sooner but, to be honest, Mr. Hatch, I hadn’t thought about that property in nearly a decade. A few years ago my tax attorney asked why I hung onto it just to pay the property tax and, I swear it, Mr. Hatch, for a couple seconds I hadn’t the foggiest clue what he was talking about. It’s like it didn’t exist for all those years and it took my tax attorney, of all people, to summon it back into existence.”

“You have no problem getting rid of it now?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, it doesn’t hold any…sentimental value for you?”

“Oh, heavens.” She waved a well-manicured hand at him. “Sentimental? Lord! It’s better I get rid of it before some kid breaks his leg playing out there and I get slammed with a lawsuit.” She leaned closer to him, and for one bizarre moment he thought she might kiss him. “My cousin Howard made me an offer to buy it a few years ago, and I was more than happy to let it go to him. He packed up and went out to the property and, from what I understand, he stayed a few days at the house, most likely checking out the place to see what he could make of it—I have a vague recollection of his wanting to turn it into a bed and breakfast or some such nonsense—but by the end of the week, he fled. When I finally tracked him down and asked about the purchase, he said he’d changed his mind.”

“You say ‘fled’ as though someone or something chased him out.”

“I just assumed his financing or whatever had fallen through. If you knew my cousin Howard, you’d know what I mean. A dreamer, always with his head either in the clouds or buried in the sand.” Her eyes narrowed but she grinned like a Cheshire cat. “Since you’re not a developer, or so I take your word on that, can I ask what you plan to do with the house, Mr. Hatch?”

“I’m going to live in it,” he said.

“Ah. You can do well by tearing it down and building a palace on all that land. Six acres, remember. If you have the means, of course.”

“No, I’m not tearing it down. I’m going to live in it.”

“As it currently stands?”

Sam shrugged. “I’ll clean it up a bit, do some repair work. There’s a pretty big hole in the ceiling.”

“You understand that place should probably be condemned, correct? That it isn’t even wired for electricity? There are probably rats in there the size of small dogs.”

“And the plumbing spurts brown water,” he added. “Yes, I’m aware of its current state, shortcomings and all. Are you trying to talk me out of buying it?”

She offered him a timorous smile. There was lipstick on her teeth. “No, Mr. Hatch. Quite the opposite, though I want to make sure you don’t regret your decision and decide I…let’s say, swindled you on it.”

“Of course not.”

“In that case, to each his own.”

“Very good.”

“Well, then,” she said. “Good luck to you.”

And she signed the paperwork over to him.

4

There was a Walmart down by the highway where he found everything he needed to do repair work on the house. At the cash register, he paid for the supplies with what cash he had remaining in his wallet. Aside from some pickup jobs during his cross country jaunt, he hadn’t held a steady job in about eighteen months. The check he wrote to Constance Ballantyne took a sizable bite out of what savings he still had.

“Shit,” he said, pausing as he handed the young female cashier a wad of bills.

The cashier snapped her gum and looked instantly distrustful of this long-haired, bearded bum in filthy painter’s pants and a tattered T-shirt. “Is there a problem, sir?”

“My wedding ring. It’s gone.”

“Oh.”

“It must have happened here in the store.” Though he couldn’t actually remember the last time he’d noticed it. Since the wedding, it had become a part of him, and it wasn’t something he was constantly aware of, the way some men are. “Could I leave this stuff back—”

“Why don’t you—”

“—here while I—”

“—take a look around the store,” she finished for him.

“Yes,” he said. “I will. Thank you.”

He searched for over an hour, creeping up and down the aisles of the superstore, but could not find his wedding band. And the longer he searched, the more he started to wonder if he’d lost it in this store at all, that it was just as plausible that it had come loose and fallen off his finger in any of the myriad cities in which he’d stopped over the past year and a half, anywhere in the country. Or even on the floor of some stranger’s pickup truck while hitchhiking. He’d lost a lot of weight, and he had noticed that the ring had gotten looser and looser on his finger over the past several months.

“Can I help you, sir?” An overweight man in short sleeves and a necktie glared at him. He held a clipboard in one meaty hand.

“Goddamn it,” he muttered to himself then smiled weakly at the man who must have been the store manager. “I’m sorry. I lost my wedding ring.”

“We’ve got a lost and found. You can fill out a slip at the customer service desk and we’ll notify you if we find it.”

“Yeah, okay. Thank you.”

At the service desk, he filled out the form but did not have a phone number to leave in the appropriate box. Instead, he assured the woman behind the counter that he would check back in at a later date to see if they’d found the ring. The woman looked as though she couldn’t be more disinterested.

Hauling his purchases out into the parking lot to the rusted old Volkswagen, Sam Hatch felt sick to his stomach.

When he returned to the house, he was accosted by the unsettling notion that the house had changed in his absence. It was nothing specific he could put his finger on but rather an indefinable twinkle of certainty at the very cortex of his animal brain. He thought of optical illusions—pictures of birds that were simultaneously also of rabbits, of stairwells that spiraled in on themselves and led to nowhere and everywhere at once—and how sometimes the harder you stared at something the less you actually saw it. Yet the longer he stared at the house the more foolish he felt. It was not an impossible stairway. It was not a rabbit that was also a bird. It was just a house.

He spent the remainder of the afternoon loading his newly purchased items into the house. By the time night had darkened the sky, he was overcome by a fatigue so profound he nearly wept. Unrolling his sleeping bag on the floor in the main room, he planned to spend his first night in the new house. But as he lay there he found the room too stuffy and the air difficult to breathe. He attempted to open the windows but they were stubborn with age. He considered propping the front door open just for the breeze…but the thought of something creeping into the house while he slept—a wolf or wild dog or something similarly bold and hungry—troubled him. In the end, he opted to sleep in the one place to which he’d become accustomed: windows down, the summer gnats tickling his face, he slept in the car.

* * *

The following day, just as he finished repairing the holes in the roof, a police cruiser kicked up plumes of dust as it lumbered down the dirt road toward the house. Sam paused to watch it, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of one hand. The sky above was dark and threatening; Sam had been sensing the storm’s arrival for hours now, coming in off the Chesapeake Bay and charging the air with electricity. Out beyond the trees and from his rooftop vantage, he could see the sky had turned the color of wet newspaper, pressing down heavily on the origami shapes of sailboats dotting the gray waters of the bay. What remained of the sun was just a narrow sliver of blazing white light cleaving through the great roiling thunderclouds at the horizon.

As the police car came to a stop in the gravel drive, Sam made his way to the edge of the roof then began slowly descending the ladder. With the exception of one very large hole, the roof itself was in better shape than he’d originally assessed; he easily patched the gaps with sheets of weatherproofing and panels of new shingles, then lathered the whole menagerie with hot tar. His muscles ached from the work.

“Officer,” Sam said, dropping down to the dirt. He wiped his hands on the thighs of his work pants.

The police officer was young and fresh-faced, in a pressed khaki uniform and gun belt that looked too big for him. His head was cleanly buzzed and Sam could see the nicks along the officer’s chin and neck where he’d cut himself shaving.

“Got a few calls about someone messing around back here,” said the officer. “You’re aware this is private property?”

“Yes,” Sam said. “It’s mine. I bought it.”

The officer stepped around the front of his cruiser and surveyed the house, pausing to look at a clump of dirt that clung to one of the ladder’s rungs. “Is that right?” He seemed unimpressed.

“I’ve got the deed, if you want to see it.”

“Might as well.”

Sam went to the Volkswagen, leaned in the open passenger window, and pulled the deed from the glove compartment. He handed it to the officer who glanced dispassionately down at it before handing it back.

“You doing construction? Got a permit?”

“No construction. I’m just repairing the roof before the storm hits. Fixing up some stuff inside, too.”

“Whatcha planning to do with the place? Fix it up and sell it?”

“No. I’m going to live in it.”

The look the officer gave him was no different than the one he’d received from Constance Ballantyne.

“This place used to give me the wet shits when I was a kid,” said the officer. His candor and vulgarity caught Sam off guard. “Used to think it was haunted.” The officer turned and grinned at him. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-two years old. “That’s kids for ya.”

“Sure.” Sam extended one hand. “I’m Sam Hatch.”

“Jake Kilstow.” The officer shook his hand. “Place needs a lot of work, that’s for sure. Where’re you staying in the meantime, Mr. Hatch?”

“Here.”

“In the place?”

“It’s not as bad as it looks.”

Kilstow shrugged. He peered into one of the murky windows. “You own any weapons? Handgun, maybe?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Old places like these, people think they’re vacant. They come out here to drink beer or fuck or smoke dope or whatever. You know how it is. A couple of fool kids break in one night and scare you outta your sleep, next thing I know I’m out here responding to a…well, a bad situation, let’s say.”

“I don’t own any weapons.”

“Used to get the occasional drifter who’d take refuge for the night, maybe stick around for a few days at most when the weather turned cold,” Kilstow said. “Down at the station we call ’em boogiemen. They don’t do no real harm and they pretty much keep to themselves. You’d think they’d stay longer, seein’ how it’s at least a roof over their heads, but they never do. It’s like they’re just passing through on their way to somewheres better.” Kilstow hocked a wad of phlegm onto the ground, just barely missing his shoe. “Or like something scares ’em off before they can get too comfortable.”

Sam merely nodded. He was reminded of the comment Constance Ballantyne had made about her flighty cousin Howard. By the end of the week, he fled.

“Last year, though, some wild-eyed bugger who’d been hitching his way up the coast plonked down for a few nights. Next thing you know we get a call from a motorist who happened to drive by, said there was some fool stripped down to his birthday suit standing in the front yard, trying to set fire to the foundation.” Kilstow shrugged disinterestedly, as if naked pyromaniacs were a common occurrence in his line of work. “I came out to the house with Johnny Dubay, another officer, and we found the fool trying to light a mound of dry twigs and dead leaves he’d piled on the front porch. He was all bent over, his nuts dangling between his thighs like a little pink punchin’ bag, and he didn’t even turn to face us when we called out to him.”

“Why was he trying to burn the place down?”

“Son of a bitch was stark raving mad, is my guess. He came with us willingly enough—in fact, seemed more than happy to go—but we had to promise him we’d come back and knock the place down to the ground for him.” Kilstow rubbed one slender finger down the side of his nose. “Would’ve probably set the whole place ablaze had the fool’s kindling not been soggy from the rainy season.”

“What was wrong with him?”

“Hell, who could tell? Most homeless are schizophrenic, did you know that? They eat their hair, talk to themselves, piss their pants…if, of course, they’re wearing any.”

“What happened to him?”

“He sobered up in the drunk tank overnight. Then we cut him loose.”

“So he was just drunk?”

Again, Kilstow shrugged. It seemed to be his signature move. “He was something.”

Sam felt his eyes return to the house, tracing its frame, its mere presence. From his youth, he recalled the story of Goldilocks and knew without hesitation that this was the type of house that would be home to a family of fairytale bears. How did that fairytale end? Did they eat the little girl? He couldn’t remember.

“Maybe you can put some lights out here at night, let folks know the place is occupied,” Kilstow went on. “Or at least keep the car visible in the driveway where it can be seen, and not around the back of the house or anything.”

“That’s a good idea. I will.”

“Where you from, anyway, Mr. Hatch?”

“Pennsylvania.”

“What brings you way out here to the Shore?”

“Impulse.”

Kilstow grunted what approximated a laugh. “Yeah,” he said, and glanced up at the turbulent sky. Thunder rumbled out over the water. When he turned back to Sam, that youthful smile was back on his face. “Well, then, I guess I’ll let you get back to it ’fore that storm hits.”

“Thank you.”

The rain came as Sam watched the cruiser glide back out toward the main road. Then he gathered up his tools from the yard, the cool rain feeling good on his tired, hot skin. Inside, he kicked off his muddy sneakers then toed open the cooler he’d shoved against one wall in the parlor, staring at the ceiling all the while. No time like the present to see if his repair job held. Anyway, there was nothing he could do about it now. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he twisted the cap off a Yuengling and waited for rainwater to come spilling through the cracks in the ceiling.

When he awoke, darkness had its face pressed against the windows. He sat up off the floor, his neck and back aching. In his head, echoing like a distant shout, were the last few bars of “Old MacDonald.” He hadn’t even realized he’d fallen asleep. How long had he been out?

Crawling to his feet, he winced at the tremor of pain in his back. His foot struck something in the darkness and his sock grew wet. He had dropped the half-finished beer bottle in his sleep.

Outside, the rain came down in sheets. Drops of water fell from various spots on the ceiling and plinked to the floor where they had already formed little puddles.

Sam trembled.

He stumbled across the room to his backpack. He unzipped one of the compartments and fished around inside until he located the little plastic bottle of Ativan. Still trembling, he dry-swallowed a pill.

What am I doing in this house?

He looked around at the darkness, which was thick and impenetrable. Invisible things swirled in it.

It was a different house at night. He had learned this last night, staring at it with eyes half-lidded while he reclined in the driver’s seat of the Volkswagen. Wholly unassuming in the daylight, the house had somehow become vast and rambling in the night. A shape-shifter. Again, he thought of optical illusions, of never-ending stairwells and the mathematically impossible prints of M.C. Escher. The longer he had stared at the house the more he swore the windows were repositioning themselves, the more he thought the roof bulged and humped on occasion as if something massive and oversized was walking around upstairs…

Now, inside the place, he could feel the walls breathing all around him while the ghosts of his nightmares dug their claws in deeper.

And then there it was: a soft musical tinkling emanating from somewhere in the room with him, a melody he had mistaken for a leftover part of his dream upon waking. It was a music box version of “Old MacDonald,” very faint but certainly real.

Fear tightened a cold hand around his heart. His mouth went instantly dry. When he called out a hello, his voice echoed off the chamber-like walls and reverberated back at him. Then the sound died, leaving a tremendous silence in its wake.

He spent the next twenty minutes searching the house, bottom to top and back down again. He could find no evidence of the source of the music, and began to convince himself that it had been a hallucination, that it had been nothing more than a side effect of the Ativan. In fact, he could suddenly feel the medication’s fuzzy calmness bleeding through him, fraying the sharpened tips of his nerves and milking the tense anxiety from his musculature. He closed his eyes and let his panic rise off him and dissipate like steam.

5

Eighteen months earlier, at the funeral, Paul and Katrina Shaw were ushered into the church and led directly down the aisle to the two caskets. The caskets were sleek white boxes wreathed in flowers. Both lids were closed. Paul Shaw touched the lid of each one while his wife, Katrina, wept audibly. Sam watched from the rear of the church. He hadn’t visited the coffins and he hadn’t spoken with the Shaws since the accident. Neither Paul nor Katrina looked at him as they left the church.

Afterwards, people congregated at Geoffrey and Mary’s place in Chestnut Hill. It was a crowded affair. Snow fell from heavy clouds that scudded across a bleak, tin-colored sky. There were still Christmas decorations up, including the tree that had begun to sag and turn brown. Through the web of Sam’s fuzzy, drug-addled brain—he’d given himself a tranquilizer just before the funeral service—he began to grow confused, thinking the post-funeral gathering was actually the Fultons’ New Year’s party. At one point, he found himself standing in Geoffrey and Mary’s bedroom, staring blankly down at their bed and wondering where his coat had gone to.

“Come back outside,” Geoffrey said, materializing beside him like a phantom. He put a hand on Sam’s back. “Do you want a drink or something?”

Sam did not respond though he allowed Geoffrey to escort him back out into the main room and into the swarm of people.

At some point, Paul and Katrina Shaw showed up. They looked quiet and dignified, their hair the color of the snowy midday sky, their faces ruddy and their eyes somber and reddened. Sam negotiated across the room and over to the lunchmeat buffet that clung to one wall, creating as much distance between him and the Shaws as the tiny townhouse would allow. He had never had a good relationship with Annie’s parents, particularly her father. (Paul Shaw vehemently disapproved of his only child running off to marry a man whom she had just recently met, who had no doubt amassed a large debt of medical school bills.) At one point, through the sea of people, Paul Shaw’s bleary eyes met Sam’s. As if watching a dream on playback, Sam saw the old man rise unsteadily from the folding chair where he’d been sitting, his necktie askew and the pleats in his suit pants ill-defined. Like the dorsal fin of a shark, Sam’s father-in-law cleaved through the crowd until he was breathing like a bull in Sam’s face. Sam could smell the man’s aftershave and, beneath that, the sour-sweet stench of sleepless nights. Sam found he could not recall who had made the phone call to the Shaws to tell them about the accident. It hadn’t been Sam.

“You,” Paul breathed, and Sam studied the man’s face. His skin was crosshatched like an Italian loafer, his forehead faintly freckled. His silvery hair looked as fine as cobwebs. When he spoke, Sam could see that Paul Shaw’s teeth looked like tiny yellow pickets driven into the purpling bands of his gums. Silver fillings winked at him. “You did this. You took them both from me, you bastard.”

Heads turned in their direction.

“Tell me,” Annie’s father said, his ruddy cheeks quivering and his picket-like teeth clenched. Sam could make out a patch of fine white hairs along his chin where he’d overlooked when shaving. “Were you drunk? I want to know.”

Sam just glared at him.

“Tell me, you son of a bitch.” Spittle flew from Paul Shaw’s lips. By the way the old man’s hands shook, Sam could tell his father-in-law wanted to hit him. “I want to hear you say it!”

Geoffrey hurried between them, saying, “Enough.”

“Tell me!” Paul shouted at him over Geoffrey’s shoulder.

“It’s already hard enough, Paul,” Geoffrey said quietly to Paul Shaw while the roomful of people looked on. Geoffrey put one hand on Paul’s shoulder. “Please.”

Sam felt as if his head had become detached from his neck, and that it was floating somewhere just above the room like a balloon. He could see everyone, even himself. Colors began to bleed from the people and from items around the room, pooling in vibrant colors on the floor. Paintings dripped from the walls like Salvador Dalí clocks.

“I want to hear you say it, you son of a bitch!” Paul shouted as Geoffrey attempted to maneuver the old man away from the buffet table. “Look what you did to my daughter! Look what you did to my baby granddaughter!”

Slowly, Sam undid two buttons of his dress shirt then slid a carving knife from one of the meat trays across the buffet table in his father-in-law’s direction. Paul’s eyes darted to the knife then jumped back up to stare at Sam. Sam opened the part in his shirt and revealed his chest to the old man.

“Please stop,” a woman whispered very close to Sam’s face. He thought that if he didn’t turn to look at the woman he could convince himself that she was Annie. Hi, Annie. He kept his eyes on Paul, who was being pushed back through the crowd by Geoffrey. “Please, Sam.”

It was Mary Fulton, Geoffrey’s wife. Sam could smell her perfume and see the outline of her frizzy hair in the periphery of his vision. How had he mistaken her for his dead wife?

“You’re making a spectacle,” she told him.

Sam’s balloon-head laughed. Then he collapsed to the floor and the world went black.

6

By the third day, Sam Hatch began to wonder if he was alone in the house. The proof was subtle—a shoe misplaced; his carpentry tools set up in a slightly different fashion than he had left them; a single bottle cap driven straight into one wall, glinting out at him like a sightless eye. One afternoon, upon opening the front door, he was startled when a wedge of two-by-fours clattered through the doorway and slammed down through the threshold. Someone had laid them against the front door when he wasn’t looking. He had gathered up the boards and tossed them into the high weeds behind the house, only to find them stacked against the front door sometime later. He eventually carried them inside and wound up using them as molding around the base of the parlor walls.

The county turned the water on, and on the morning of his fourth day, while beneath the spray of warmish water, Sam thought he heard sounds coming from the showerhead. They were distant, high-pitched, and erratic. He shut the water and listened, chilly and dripping in the stall, but could hear nothing. It seemed the sounds would only come when the water was on. The sounds unnerved him. They sounded like a child’s nonsensical babbling coming from the pipes.

It occurred to him that he had been spending too much time in the house. Surely these strange occurrences were the products of his overwrought and stir-crazy mind. He decided to slip out for something to eat.

Mindy’s was a quaint diner with 1970s paneling on the walls and vinyl upholstered booths that looked gummy and worn. He waited to be seated despite the utter vacancy of the place—he wondered just how good the food was for the place to be virtually empty at lunchtime—then was shuttled without ceremony to a booth at the back by a woman in a pink outfit and apron whose hairdo recalled Elsa Lanchester in The Bride of Frankenstein. Around a mouthful of chewing gum, she told him his waitress would be over momentarily, then slid a laminated menu across the table to him. He stared at the menu absently for what felt like an eternity before he sensed someone approaching the table.

“Hi.” The waitress was young, tanned, pretty. The name tag above her left breast read KAREN. “What can I getcha?”

He was aware that his hands were shaking so he stuffed them beneath the table and into his lap. “What do you recommend?”

“Our milkshakes are the best in the county.”

“Interesting. How are your eggs?”

“Even better.”

“I’ll have a plate of scrambled eggs and some toast.” Though just saying it caused his stomach to fist. “And a milkshake,” he added, causing the waitress to smile.

She winked at him. “You got it.”

Ten minutes later, when she returned with his food, she propped her hands on her hips and smiled more widely at him. “So…is it presumptuous of me to assume you’re the guy who’s living in that creepy old house off Tar Road?”

“That’s me. Have you been spying?”

She laughed musically. She was attractive and had nice teeth. “Hardly. My brother said he met you a few days ago.”

“He did?”

“He’s a cop,” she said.

“Oh. Officer…Kilstow, was it?”

“To me, he’s just Jake. Though when we were growing up, I had more, uh, choice names for him.”

This made Sam return the woman’s smile. It felt like his face would crack.

“What in the world are you doing out there in that house?” Then, the second the words were out of her mouth, her smile faded. “I’m sorry. Am I being rude?”

“Not at all.” Beneath the table, his hands wouldn’t stop shaking. “Something about the house just called to me. I’ve got nothing but time on my hands so I figured I’d fix it up. A summer project.”

“A summer project,” she repeated. “Do you actually sleep there?”

“Sure.”

“And it doesn’t creep you out?”

“Why would it?”

“Are you kidding? That place looks like it grew up from the ground straight from Hell.”

“It’s just an old house. I guess I relate to it.”

“You’re not old.”

“Well, thanks.” He was forty-two but he wasn’t going to tell this woman that. If he had to guess, she was in her early twenties—no older than her police officer brother appeared to be. “Age is subjective, I guess.”

“I’m Karen,” she said.

“Sam Hatch.”

“Well, you be careful in that house, Sam. It bites.”

“Bites? As in it sucks, it’s a real bummer?”

She leaned over the table—he could smell a combination of floral perfume and maple syrup coming off her—and pointed to a vague horseshoe-shaped scar on her bare forearm. Indeed, he thought he could make out the divots in the flesh that resembled the indentations of tiny teeth.

“No,” she said. “Quite literally, it bites.”

* * *

It had been his intention to ask the waitress to clarify what she meant, but he found himself growing increasingly antsy in the booth waiting for her to return. Before she came back, he dumped a wad of cash on the table and hurried out into the daylight. He could feel something akin to nausea roiling around in his guts and hoped fresh air would do the trick. It didn’t. He trotted around to the back of the diner and vomited into the bushes. His skin was blistered with sweat and his heart was strumming like a banjo. Like a sudden panic attack, he felt the overwhelming urge to return back to the house.

7

He began to regain his composure the second he pulled the VW onto the gravel drive that led to the house. It was an eerie calm that overtook him, but he welcomed it, desperate for its soothing qualities. He’d popped a Xanax on the drive back, but it didn’t seem to be taking hold just yet.

He parked the VW out front, just like Officer Kilstow had recommended. Before going inside, he stood in the yard momentarily staring up at the house. He felt the Xanax begin to numb him.

Inside, he was aware that some of his tools and personal items had been slightly rearranged. His bedroll was positioned differently than he’d left it. Across the room, a hammer and a screwdriver were crossed in an X over each other on the first step of the staircase. He proceeded to go to the stairs but nearly sent himself sprawling across the floor as the toe of his boot snagged on a warped floorboard. He paused and examined the floor. One of the planks had risen about a half inch at one corner. He stepped down on it, pressing it back into place, and the wood groaned in protest. When he lifted his foot off, it sprung back up again.

This was a mistake. What the hell am I doing here?

It wasn’t just the question that bothered him, it was his lack of a suitable answer. The notion of fleeing the house and not looking back sent a tremor up his spine. His hands began to shake. His mouth went dry, his tongue nothing more than a dead fish. He dropped to his knees and pressed a finger against the upturned corner. It squealed and seesawed.

The sound of a distant dog barking caused him to spring upright, his heart slamming against the wall of his chest. He hadn’t realized just how on edge he’d been until that moment. The dog barked a second time—a dull, muted sound. Sam went to one of the grimy windows and looked out. In every direction he could see, the fields were empty. He could see the old church in the distance, and the falcons wheeling in the cloudless sky. He could see no dog.

Moving away from the window, he went to the stairs and grabbed the hammer. Back on the floor, he struck the upturned end of the warped floorboard with the hammer, which did nothing but cause the other end of the board to pop up. A single nail catapulted into the air and clattered to a distant corner of the room.

The invisible dog barked a third time, this time with an undoubted sense of urgency and what Sam surmised to be fear or pain or both. He dropped the hammer and went out through the front door where he could survey the front of the property. No dog anywhere. He moved quickly around the back of the house and could see nothing by the sea of white-gold grass yawning down to the trees and shielding his property from the foot of the bay. Sweat dimpled his brow and cascaded down his neck. When the dog barked again, he jerked his head back in the direction of the house. The dog sounded very close but also still muted. The damn thing sounded like it was inside his house.

He glanced up at some of the second story windows, black as busted headlamps. Sun reflected off the panes. They could have been windows into Hell.

What had that waitress said? This house looked like it had grown up from the ground straight from Hell.

She also said it bites, whispered Annie, causing him to shiver.

He hurried back inside and listened but could hear nothing but the house settling all around him. He went to the stairwell and took the stairs two at a time until he arrived on the second floor. Shafts of light slanted at odd angles all the way down the hall. He wended through the rooms, acknowledging that it was very possible a stray dog had managed to find its way inside, or perhaps had been hiding in here all along. He wondered if that could explain the items that seemed to rearrange themselves—the shoes disappearing then reappearing in different rooms, or the reorganization of his tools.

When he completed a search of the upstairs and found no dog, he dropped down on the first step at the top of the stairwell and felt his body begin to tremble. He was certain he was doomed to either bray laughter like a maniac or simply collapse into miserable hysterics. When the tears came, he was still unsure which way he’d gone.

Back downstairs, he dumped his collection of pill bottles out onto the floor and sifted through them until he decided on the appropriate cocktail. Without water, he swallowed three or four pills from different bottles, then stood there and watched the walls constrict and expand as if breathing.

(And he thought, This is the story of Curious Bunny. The bunny was so curious and went hopping around in fields all day, sticking his little white, furry head into all the holes in the ground. “Whose hole is this?” asked Curious Bunny. “This is Angry Muskrat’s hole, Bunny,” said Angry Muskrat, “and you’ll be getting into trouble sticking your head into other people’s holes, Curious Bunny.”)

“Fuck.” His voice trembled and sounded as if several people were speaking all at once.

Once his mind and his vision cleared, he dropped back down onto his knees and crawled along the floor to the warped floorboard. Slipping his fingers beneath the board, he managed to pry it up from the floor. Another nail sailed across the room and rebounded off a wall.

He held the warped plank up at eye-level. It was bent upwards at the ends like a smile. Or, turning it over, like a frown.

Setting the plank down, he leaned over and peered into the narrow slat of dark space left behind in its absence. It was a shallow drop, dust-filled and smelling of rot and mildew, and just a few inches deep. Something glinted and caught his eye. He reached down into the crevice—

(you’ll be getting into trouble sticking your head into other people’s holes)

—and scooped up the item, along with a handful of black dust.

There, kneeling on the floor, he stared down at the item he had retrieved, which now sat in the center of his palm. Briefly, his vision blurred. His mouth went dry and his tongue felt like a balled up gym sock stuffed into his mouth.

In the center of his hand was his missing wedding ring.

8

There was a floor under the floor. As Sam twisted the wedding ring back on his finger, he could see, in the gap where he had pried out the loose floorboard, that there was a single black ceramic tile down there. It was scuffed, old, and covered in dust, but he recognized it immediately for what it was. He reached back down into the hole and was able to slide the tips of his fingers beneath the surrounding floorboards; there was perhaps a half-inch of space between the floorboards and the tile. He tugged at the other boards but they were securely nailed down and wouldn’t budge.

Sam felt his left eyelid twitch. There was a crowbar in the hall closet; it would be easier to use the crowbar than to pry up the rest of the floorboards with the claw end of the hammer. He went to the closet, opened the door, and paused. The crowbar was there, leaning against the wall, just as Sam had left it. His other tools were in here as well, tucked into the pouches of a tan leather tool bag with large brass buckles that he had gotten on sale at the Walmart down by the highway. Staring at it now, he questioned whether or not it was the same bag. He had purchased it new, the leather slick, shiny, and stiff…yet this bag looked as beaten and frayed as an old baseball glove. The leather was as dull as parchment and veined with cracks. The stitching had pulled away at some of the seams and there were small holes, like the variety a family of mice might make, along the crinkled canvas.

Sam’s eyes shifted to the stack of comic books that stood beside the tool bag. They were the comics he had found the day he first arrived at the house; instead of throwing them away, he had tucked them in here in case they happened to belong to any neighborhood kids who had previously been using this place as a clubhouse. They were still piled together and tied with a length of packing twine but, much like the leather tool bag, they had changed. On the day of his arrival, he had noticed some superhero with a flapping cape on the cover of the top book, all vibrant blues and reds, carving a starry arc in the wake of a roundhouse punch. That image was still somewhat visible now, if just barely, yet all the color had been leeched from the artwork. The entire cover of the top book had faded to a monochromatic yellow. He reached out and set the palm of one hand atop the stack. The comic books had been soggy and spotted with mold when he’d put them in here. Now, the pages were dry and brittle, the mold itself having turned to a dry blue powder.

He untied the packing twine and thumbed through a number of the books. All the pages were bleached white, raped of the artwork and text, the pages themselves the texture of dried autumn leaves. Again, Sam felt his eyelid twitch.

He grabbed the crowbar and dragged it across the floor. The single missing floorboard gaped up at him. That dull black tile looked as harsh and as dense as slate. He proceeded to tear up the rest of the parlor floor.

9

Eighteen months ago, it was the old house—the one in Philadelphia—that had caused him trepidation.

“This house is haunted, Geoffrey. They’re both watching me from every corner.”

“Cut it out.”

“Sometimes I think they’re here because they need to be near me. Other times, I think they’re angry at me, that they’ve come back for me, to take me back with them.”

Sam was sitting on the floor in front of the sofa in the old house in Philly. Duke, his German shepherd, sat beside him while Sam absently petted his smooth coat. Geoffrey was crouched before them both, a terrified expression on his face. After repeated unanswered phone calls to the Hatch residence, Geoffrey Fulton had come over to check up on him. Concern was etched all over the man’s face.

“You know none of that’s true,” Geoffrey said, his voice low. “It’s your mind, Sam.”

“Are you so sure?”

“Why don’t you come and spend some time with Mary and me? It’ll do you good.”

Sam didn’t answer.

“You need to get out of this house, Sam. Just for a little while.”

Sam thought he could smell something burning on the stove, even though he hadn’t turned the stove on. He hadn’t even been in the kitchen in days. Not since before the funeral.

“Or if you don’t want to stay with us,” Geoffrey continued, “then check yourself into a hotel, clear your head. Or fuck, man, take a vacation. Anything.”

Sam thought he saw someone or something flit by over one of Geoffrey’s shoulders. He leaned forward and peered past Geoffrey down the hallway but the hallway was dark and empty. A nervous expression on his face, Geoffrey turned and looked behind him then turned back to Sam. He was frowning and had his eyebrows knitted together.

Finally, Geoffrey stood. Hands on his hips, he went over to the front windows and peered through a part in the curtains. A shaft of daylight spilled across the floor. Lazy snow fell beyond the windowpane. The burning smell intensified.

“I can take some time off the job search,” Geoffrey said. “We can go somewhere together for a little bit, if that’s what you want. I can do that.”

Sam did not answer; he continued staring down the empty hallway.

Eventually, Geoffrey went back out into the hall, grabbed his coat, and stood for a moment in the doorway, looking at Sam. He looked like he wanted to say a lot of things but was powerless to say anything. What could be said?

“If you’re going to leave,” Sam said while Geoffrey just stood there, “could you please take Duke with you?”

“Why?” Geoffrey’s tone suggested he didn’t trust Sam.

“I’m worried about him. I keep forgetting to feed him,” Sam lied. “Just for a little while.”

“Yeah. Okay. Just for a little while.” Geoffrey patted his thigh and said, “C’mere, Duke.”

Duke whimpered but did not go to him.

“Go on,” Sam whispered against the dog’s face. Duke rose and trotted obediently over to Geoffrey, his tail between his legs and his head pointing toward the floor.

Then Geoffrey and Duke left. Sam heard them going down the porch steps and, moments later, heard Geoffrey’s car start up and pull away from the curb. The car’s rough engine faded as it puttered down the street.

Later that evening, Sam took a hot bath. He contemplated opening up his wrists. Being a physician, he knew the best way to do it. There were pills in the medicine cabinet and plenty of tranquilizers in his medical bag, too. He could administer any of those to himself and it could be quick and painless and clean. There was the gas oven, too. He considered doing any of those things. Noises in the hallway either persuaded him not to or attempted to urge him on with it. In the end, he decided they were persuading him not to. After the bath, he threw some clothes in a duffle bag he found in the closet of the master bedroom. He emptied his medicine cabinet into the duffle bag as well. Invisible beings respired down the nape of his neck the entire time, causing his flesh to pimple. The whole house smelled like it was burning down around him, although nothing looked out of place and he could not locate the source of the fire, if there was even a fire in the first place. There was an old grandfather clock in the foyer, an antique from one of Annie’s distant relatives, and it chimed midnight. Once he finished packing, he took some lorazepam to calm his nerves then went through the house turning off all the lights. There were a surprising number of lights on in all the rooms; he couldn’t remember turning any of them on. The floor was black-and-white checkered tile, and his footfalls thudded coldly, hollowly. The Wally Lamb book Annie had been reading was still on the end table beside the couch, a Kermit the Frog bookmark poking out of it. Similarly, Annie’s clothes were piled up on the floor of the laundry room. Her smell still haunted them. He stood looking at them for a very long time, his senses dulled from medication but not completely obliterated. After a bit, his vision grew blurry. In the kitchen, the sink was still full of her dishes, the countertop littered with little Marley’s—

He looked away.

In the nursery, there were blankets in the crib. Ducklings in diapers gaped at him from the pink wallpaper. A stuffed music box bear stared at him from atop the changing table. Sam felt a numbness filter through his entire body. Something wet rasped each time he exhaled. He wondered if there was someone else currently occupying his body, orchestrating his movements and diluting his thoughts. He picked up the stuffed bear and turned the silver butterfly key at its back. Music chimed—“Old MacDonald.”

It was still snowing when he stepped outside. The sky was a sheet of tarpaper and the moon was masked by preternatural clouds that shimmered with a silvery nimbus. Thin bluish snow covered the ground and the streets were messy with slush. Pausing along the sidewalk, he looked up at the house and thought he saw movement in the front window, behind the part Geoffrey had made in the curtain.

Sam turned and walked down the street in the cold. He never looked back.

That was less than two years ago.

10

It was dusk by the time he finished ripping up the floor. Mounds of splintered floorboards were chocked around the perimeter of the room, and Sam had propped open the front door midway through the operation so he could chuck boards out into the yard. Sore and exhausted, he staggered backward now, the crowbar still clenched in two trembling hands, until his back struck the far wall. His palms were blistered and tender. His heart strummed feverishly. What medication he had taken earlier had completely worn off through his exertion, leaving him feeling like a system of hollowed-out tubes tied together by thin wires designed to resemble a human being. Even his movements felt false and unlike his own.

The floor beneath the floor was comprised of black and white ceramic tiles, alternating in a checkerboard fashion. They were dull beneath a carpet of dust. On some of the white tiles, tiny dots of dark red liquid shimmered in the fading evening light; it took Sam a moment to realize they were drops of blood from the weeping sores on the palms of his hands.

He dropped the crowbar, letting it clatter to the tiles. Outside in the nearby field, blackbirds burst from the overgrown grass into the deepening sky.

It was the same floor that had been in the front hallway and kitchen back in the house in Philly. Annie had called it a hideous floor when they first moved in, and it had been their intention to rip it up and replace it as soon as they saved up some more money…but that had never happened. Like ugly paintings that somehow become beautiful, both he and Annie grew to love the hideous checkerboard floor. The monster has a certain style, a certain class, Annie had said one evening. They had both laughed.

So the floor had stayed…and here it was again. Right here, under his feet. His legs weak, he descended to his knees. His hands still trembled and he was still breathing heavily from all the work. Glancing at his palms, he saw them splotchy with blood and undulating with large blisters.

(And he thought, This is the story of Curious Bunny. The bunny was so curious, he hopped over to a hole that he saw in the trunk of a tree. Curious Bunny peeked into the hole, his little nose twitching. “Whose hole is this?” asked Curious Bunny. “This is Sleepy Owl’s hole, Bunny,” said Sleepy Owl, poking his tired head out of the hole in the tree. “You should be careful poking your head into dark holes in trees, Curious Bunny.”)

As the tinkling of a distant music box began playing, Sam sprung to his feet and ran out of the house.

* * *

The smell of fried foods struck him like a punch to the stomach the moment he stepped inside Mindy’s. He realized he was simultaneously starving and nauseated. Around him, the mildly populated diner appeared to spin and slant sideways, like some amusement park ride. There was a counter that ran the length of the restaurant against the far wall, behind which waitresses bustled and men in white uniforms slaved in the kitchen beyond. Sam went to the counter and dropped himself down on one of the stools. When one of the waitresses appeared to take his order, he tried his damnedest to look sane.

“Just a coffee, please. Black.”

When the waitress returned with his coffee, he asked if another waitress named Karen Kilstow was working this evening.

“Yeah, I think she’s in the back. You a friend of hers?”

“I hardly know her. She served me breakfast a few days ago.”

The waitress frowned. Her name tag said TRACY and she had a chubby face with an upturned nose. She looked distrustfully at him.

“Tell her I’m the guy who bought the creepy house out on Tar Road,” he said.

“There’s a house on Tar Road?”

He smiled crookedly at her, not quite sure if she was being condescending or not, and opting not to ask her to explain. Once she left, he managed to bring his coffee cup to his lips and sip it without spilling any. After a minute or two, Karen Kilstow came through a swinging door behind the counter. Sam watched her scan the bar, her eyes passing right over him at first. When her eyes returned to him, she offered him a warm smile and cocked her head to one side. She approached, wiping her hands on her apron.

“Well hello,” she said.

“Hey.” He set his coffee cup down so he wouldn’t drop it. “Remember me? I’m the guy who—”

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t remember your name.”

“It’s Sam. Sam Hatch.”

“Tracy said you were asking for me?”

He ran one hand through his long hair, and thought he must look like a madman sitting here, summoning a woman he did not know. “I know this is probably a bit strange, but I had some questions about the house. I don’t know anyone around here and since you seemed to know about it, I figured I’d see if you could…I don’t know…maybe help me out…”

Her eyebrow came together. “Is something wrong? You seem upset.”

“I guess you could say I just got a little spooked.” Then he laughed nervously. He didn’t think it helped him look any less like a madman to this poor girl.

Karen glanced at her wristwatch then shot a look over her shoulder into the kitchen. “I’m still on the clock for another twenty minutes.”

“I can wait.”

“Not here. There’s a bar across the street called the Rude Rabbit. I’ll meet you there.”

“It’s no trouble, is it?”

She shrugged. “Buy me a drink and it won’t be no trouble at all. Besides, you look like you could use someone to talk to.”

* * *

The Rude Rabbit looked just like the type of joint he’d get his teeth punched in for saying the wrong word to someone. It was no different than the rustic little taverns all across the U.S., right down to the sticky vinyl barstool cushions and fingerprint-smeared mirrors behind the bar. Thankfully, the place was mostly empty, instilling in him a nonspecific anonymity through which he found some semblance of comfort. He went directly to the bar and ordered a Hendrick’s and tonic from a bored-looking female bartender with a hairy upper lip, then took his drink over to a small booth in one gloomy corner of the place. When he brought the drink to his lips, he found that his hand was shaking with such ferocity he feared he might chip a tooth on the glass. Quickly, he set it back down then wrestled both his hands into his lap. He had rushed out of the house on Tar Road so quickly he had forgotten to take any of his anti-anxiety meds with him. After he counted to one hundred silently in his head, he got up and returned to the bar where he asked the bartender with the hairy upper lip if she happened to have any aspirin or anything.

“I’ve got a raging headache,” he told her.

The bartender peered disinterestedly beneath the bar, but she was already shaking her head. “Ain’t nothin’ down here, hon.”

“Nothing at all?”

She had already relocated over to some highball glasses that were drip-drying on a rack. “Sorry, hon.”

Trembling, he returned to the booth and sat down like someone who’d just been reprimanded by a judge. With both hands, he gripped the rocks glass and managed to bring the gin and tonic to his mouth without busting any of his teeth, though some of it sloshed over the rim of the glass and formed a constellation of droplets on the tabletop curiously in the shape of the Big Dipper. The laugh that threatened his throat made him nervous.

Across the room, someone loaded up a jukebox with coins. Bruce Springsteen came on, singing “Atlantic City.” Sam stared at the doors across the barroom, as if to do so would will Karen Kilstow to come through them. One leg bounced restlessly beneath the table. Not for the first time in his life, Sam Hatch believed he was losing his mind.

“Hey.” The woman’s voice startled him. He looked up, expecting Karen Kilstow, but instead found himself staring at the hairy-lipped bartender. “Found these in my purse.” She set a bottle of Excedrin down on the table.

“Oh. Thanks.”

“Sure,” she said, and left him alone with the bottle.

He popped off the safety cap then shook three tablets out onto one blistered palm. In the poor lighting, the tablets looked overly white and hardly real at all, as if summoned into existence by special effects. He slammed all three tablets into his mouth then washed them down with a healthy swig of his Hendrick’s and tonic. The drink burned his throat. Before replacing the cap on the bottle, he stared down into it, holding his breath and thinking, This is the story of Curious Bunny.

Wearily, he blinked his eyes and thought he could imagine Annie sitting opposite him in the booth. “What?” he said. “What do you want?”

“That’s what I was going to ask you,” said a woman’s voice, causing his blood to turn to ice.

He turned and found Karen standing there, dressed now in blue jeans and a Baysox T-shirt, a sensible handbag slung over one shoulder. He almost didn’t recognize her out of her waitress uniform.

“Sorry,” he said. “I was talking to myself. Please, sit down…unless you’re sufficiently creeped out enough and changed your mind.”

She slid into the booth across from him, saying, “Oh, heck, I know plenty of creepy guys. You’re no exception.” Her eyes were large and beamed at him. “What did you say your name was again?”

“Sam Hatch.” He reached across the table and shook her hand, nearly knocking over his drink in the process. “Thanks for coming. Can I get you that drink?”

“I’ll have a beer.”

He was about to get up and go to the bar when Karen waved a hand at the bartender and held up one finger. Wordlessly, the bartender nodded then fished a bottle of Miller Lite out from beneath the bar. “How’s it goin’, Karen?” the bartender asked after she’d come over and set the beer down on the table.

“Doin’ okay, Mae. How’s Bobby?”

“Doctor’s got him wearing this harness thing, looks like straps from a backpack or something.”

“Poor kid. For how long?”

“Couple of weeks.”

“Well, that’s not too bad. Tell everyone I said hello.”

“Will do,” said Mae. She turned and disappeared back behind the bar.

“Harness?” Sam said.

“Her son Bobby broke his collarbone. Fell out of a tree.”

Sam nodded. “Clavicle fracture. It’s common in kids. He should be okay.”

Karen laughed. “You some kind of doctor?”

Sam ignored the question. “I wanted to talk to you about the house.”

“What about it?”

“You said you were surprised I was living there, and that the house…I think you said it creeped you out.”

“Actually, what I asked was if it creeped you out. What I said was that I thought the house looked like it grew up from the ground straight from Hell.”

“Yes, that’s it. I remember. Why do you think that?”

Karen knocked back a swig of her beer. “You mean, other than because it looks like something out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre?”

He pointed in the general vicinity of her left arm. “That mark on your arm. You said the house bit you. What did you mean?”

She glanced down at her arm while simultaneously rotating her wrist so that the horseshoe-shaped scar was clearly visible to both of them. She looked at it now, Sam thought, as if she’d just remembered it was there.

“I was being facetious,” she said. “Well, sort of.”

“So that didn’t happen to you in that house?”

“No, it did.”

“What exactly happened, Karen?”

She said, “I was just a stupid kid. My brother and I used to play in those fields and down by the water with friends when we were younger. It was inevitable we’d eventually end up exploring that old house. A group of us broke in, and we were playing hide and seek in all the rooms. There was a closet off the downstairs foyer, and I hid in there. It was small and pitch-black, and I was only in there for about five seconds before I was suddenly overcome by the sensation that someone else was in there with me.”

Sam’s leg stopped bouncing beneath the table.

“I began to panic and went to open the door, but my arm went straight out and I couldn’t feel the doorknob or the door or the wall or anything. It was like the closet had suddenly grown huge all around me. Then it got really hard to breathe, though that could have just been because I was starting to hyperventilate. I jumped forward, knowing the door had to be there. It was, of course, and I eventually found the doorknob and pushed my way out. But before I did, I felt something bite into my arm.”

“An actual bite?”

“I don’t know, but it’s the best way to describe it. At first I thought I caught my arm on an exposed nail or something—the pain was quick and hot—but later when my brother and I looked at it, we couldn’t deny that it looked like a bite mark.”

“Your brother Jake,” Sam said. “The cop, right?”

“Yes. He was worried it might have been an animal with rabies that had been hiding in the closet—a raccoon or a bat or something—so he went back to look, but there was nothing in there. The closet was completely empty.”

“Do you think it was an animal?”

“I guess I did back then. If Jake said so, then it was.”

“Is that what you believe now?”

“It was a long time ago.”

“But what do you believe?” he pushed.

She rolled her shoulders and looked suddenly bored. Running a finger down the neck of her beer bottle, she said, “What I think is that house didn’t want us there. It wanted us out. Besides,” she added, reaching up and running fingers through her hair, “no animal I’ve ever heard of could do something like this.” She twirled a sprig of hair out from behind her left ear, startlingly silver-gray against the mousy brown that was the rest of her hair. “It was instantaneous. It happened when I was in the closet. I cut it out a few times but it always grows back the same color. So I’ve just learned to live with it, keep it tucked away back there.” She groomed the silvery strands back beneath the tufts of her natural hair, hiding it.

“That’s unbelievable,” Sam said.

“Still freaks me out to think about it.” She hugged herself and smiled prettily at him.

“Do you know of other stories? Things that happened to other people? There must be other stories similar to yours.”

“You would think so, but if there are, I’ve never heard them. It’s funny, but a house like that, you’d think it’d be a beacon for every troublemaking kid in the neighborhood, right? You’d think a place like that would hold some sort of fascination over little kids. But it doesn’t. No one ever talks about it. At Halloween, no one throws eggs at its windows or dares other kids to go up and knock on the door, at least as far as I know. Everyone just steers clear of it, like it gives off some subliminal warning we’re not consciously aware of but we feel it nonetheless. Even when my brother and I went in there that day to play, it wasn’t as if we’d sought that house out. We were just playing in the field and then it was like it was just there, boom, right out of nowhere.”

“Straight up from Hell,” Sam said, giving her own words back to her.

“Yeah. And then…well…”

“What?”

“I had a boyfriend who once asked about the scar. I told him it happened when I was a kid, playing in that creepy old house on Tar Road. He looked at me all funny and said, ‘What house? There’s no house on Tar Road.’ I actually had to drive him past it and point it out to him. He was shocked when he saw it standing there. See, here’s a guy who lived his whole life here in town and he’d never noticed the house before. It was as though the house had hid itself from him, the way some animals use camouflage to blend in with their surroundings.”

The notion made Sam uneasy. He recalled what the other waitress had said to him earlier that evening, when he had gone into the diner searching for Karen—There’s a house on Tar Road? Now, he shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

“So what’s your deal, anyway, Sam? Why the big interest in what happened to me?”

Sam leaned across the table, his brow dimpled with sweat and something akin to a feverish chill racing through his system. “Strange things have been happening there,” he told her. “I don’t know how to explain it.”

“Are you saying it’s haunted? Because if there’s a haunted place on the planet, that house is as good a contender as any.”

He eased back in the booth. In front of him, the gin and tonic sweated condensation onto the tabletop. Ghosts. Yet a memory fluttered its mothy wings to the surface of his brain: Marley cooing and pointing to a darkened corner of the old townhouse, sometimes laughing, sometimes just staring, following something with her big eyes. Something that neither he nor Annie could ever see. Always the same dark corner…

He shook his head and cleared his mind of the memory. “I don’t know if that’s what I’m saying. It’s not like I’ve seen any ghosts or anything.” He told her about the floor beneath the floor, and about how random items tended to reposition themselves or simply disappear when he wasn’t looking.

“Poltergeists can move objects,” Karen suggested. “As for the floor…well, I don’t know what’s so supernatural about that…”

He wanted to tell her it was the same floor from the house in Philly, the house he had shared with Annie and Marley and their German shepherd Duke, but he couldn’t find the words. The thoughts got caught in the sticky web of his mind.

Karen frowned. “You okay?”

“I’m sorry.” He attempted a soft smile but it felt foolish and, he thought, almost hideous. “I must come across as a lunatic. You don’t even know me.”

“Do I look about ready to jump up and run screaming for the cops? You heard my story, didn’t you? Do you think I’m crazy?”

“Not at all.”

“Then there you go.” She was better at smiling than he was. “Anyway, what’s your wife think about all this?”

He felt something heavy lodge in his chest. “My wife’s dead,” he said flatly, and he saw the smile fade from Karen’s face. “We had a daughter and she’s dead, too.”

Karen set her beer bottle down. “Christ. I’m sorry.” She grew noticeably pale. “I feel sick.”

He looked down at his half-finished drink. He wondered now if it was just a coincidence that the checkerboard floor beneath the wooden one was the same as the floor in the house in Philly. He suddenly felt ridiculous asking this stranger out to talk with him about a rundown old house in the middle of nowhere.

Sam cleared his throat and stood up. His movements felt abrupt and awkward. “I’m sorry,” he stammered. He pulled some money from his pants and tossed a few bills onto the table. “Have another drink on me. I apologize. I shouldn’t have brought any of this up.”

“Sam, wait—”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and left.

11

A police car followed him home from the Rude Rabbit. The cruiser picked him up at one of the traffic lights in town and stayed with him until Sam turned onto Tar Road. When Sam turned onto the winding driveway and headed toward the house, the police car continued on Tar Road, its pace slow and deliberate.

The house loomed up out of the darkness to fill the VW’s windshield. The nervousness Sam had felt all evening seemed to subside as he drew the vehicle up the driveway and parked it directly in front of the house. He shut the car down but left the headlights on. Their sharp white light called into existence every nuance of the building’s façade—every crack in the plaster, chip of the paint, dry rot and mold and holes bored into the framework by carpenter bees. Hornets’ nests dangled from the eaves. Thick as a finger, a lone vine scaled one wall. The longer he stared at these things, the less real they became. Shapes moved within the flaking paint and dry rot; he recognized some of them the way summer clouds will suggest certain things. A face. A hawk-headed child. Steamboats chugging upriver. He was eleven years old and his stepfather was teaching him to shoot at tin cans with a bow and arrow. Then he was standing in the baby’s room, Marley’s room, staring into the crib. One minute she was there, the next minute she was gone. He would leave it behind when he left the house. He would leave all their stuff behind. It wasn’t his anymore, anyway.

Then he was back at the funeral, standing at the back of the church. There were people in the pews that flanked the carpeted aisle that ran the length of the nave up to the chancel where the two coffins sat on beds of flowers, but Sam could only see the backs of their heads. As he had not done in real life, he slowly walked down the aisle toward the coffins, his hollow footfalls the only sound. He mounted the two marble steps that carried him up onto the altar, a coffin on either side of him. He looked first at the large one and then at the small one. It occurred to him now that he should have had them buried together. One coffin, one grave. It occurred to him now that he should have—

He heard a creaking sound as one of the coffin lids started to open…

When he woke up hours later, it was daylight and he was sweating in a fetal position behind the steering wheel. He keyed the ignition but the engine refused to turn over, or even make a sound. Cursing to himself, he realized he’d left the headlights on all night.

Inside, the house appeared to have been holding its breath in anticipation of his return. From the doorway, he scrutinized the checkerboard floor and the piles of ripped up floorboards stacked in corners and along the baseboards like funeral cairns.

“Annie?” he called, his voice echoing through the chasm of the house. A shifting, scrabbling sound emanated from somewhere upstairs. Gooseflesh rose up on his arms. He snatched the crowbar off the floor and carried it up the stairs to the second floor. Here, daylight came in through the windows of the rooms and slashed across the hallway. Plaster had fallen from the walls and lay in dusty heaps on the warped floorboards.

The scrabbling sounds ceased. Clutching the crowbar in two hands, Sam moved slowly toward the first room. His shadow shifted ahead of him along the wall. Patchy daylight filtered in through a pair of mud-caked windows. Chunks of plaster were missing from the walls, and the graffiti had bled into vertical ribbons that soaked into the floor. The scrabbling sound came again—an agitated, frantic clatter—and Sam realized it was coming from the other side of the wall. He went back out into the hallway and into the adjacent room. But like the previous one, this room was empty. A muted shifting sound filtered into his ears. Then more of the scrabbling noise. It wasn’t coming from the other side of the wall, Sam realized. It was coming from within the wall.

As he stared at the wall, his eyes fell upon what he had seen on that first day when he went through the entire house: the dull bronze coin poking out from the plaster in the wall. Sam went to it. He picked away some of the plaster and managed to get one fingernail beneath it. The coin lifted out, but not all the way: a thin twist of chain still held it to the wall. Curious, Sam turned the little bronze medallion over in his hand. The underside was coated in plaster dust, but there were words beneath it. Sam thumbed the dust away so he could read the inscription.

He felt his bowels clench.

Engraved on the underside of the coin was the name DUKE. Beneath that was the address of their old house in Philadelphia.

The crowbar dropped from his hand and rang out when it struck the floor. Sam released the nameplate and staggered backward a few steps. He couldn’t be certain how long he stood there, unable to move, but by the time he had summoned enough courage to approach the nameplate hanging from the wall again, the sunlight coming in through the windows had repositioned itself. He knelt down before it, bringing the nameplate to eye-level. Yes, it was Duke’s nametag. He reached for it again, tugged at it. Bits of plaster flaked to the floor and perhaps an inch of the chain was fed out from the wall. This time he gave it a strong tug. The chain broke free, along with bits of plaster and a cloud of white powder, sending Sam tumbling backward onto his buttocks. He hit hard, the teeth gnashing in his skull. Facing him, the hole in the wall—no bigger than a silver dollar—glared at him. There was something else in there, Sam saw. He scrambled to his knees and leaned forward. A tuft of blue fabric poked out of the hole. Sam reached out and pinched it between two fingers but it was too stubborn to be pulled through the opening.

He grabbed the crowbar, ratcheted it back over one shoulder like a baseball player, and swung at the wall. The resounding crack vibrated up his arms. A Texas-shaped section of the wall fell away. He swung again and again. Soon, the air in the room was a swirl of floating white powder; Sam’s forearms were dusted in the stuff and he could taste it at the back of his throat. Once the opening in the wall was large enough to accommodate both his hands, he reached in and gripped the band of blue fabric. It was a dog’s collar, was Duke’s collar. Sam yanked at the band of fabric again. Like a tooth coming loose in diseased gums, the band of fabric inched out of the wall, though it was still connected to something farther back. He thought he could see a pipe or pole back there, bent at an awkward angle and powdered in drywall debris. Placing one foot against the wall for greater leverage, he yanked at the collar again. The hole in the wall broke open even further as the band of blue fabric came through, and with it, tumbling to the floor like a jumble of coat hangers bound together by rubber bands, the undeniable skeleton of a good-sized dog.

He sat for some time amidst the jumble of ancient bones on the floor of the upstairs bedroom. It wasn’t until the sunlight began to leak slowly from the sky did he get up, wander off to the bathroom, and throw up in the toilet. Afterwards, he washed his face and hands at the sink then returned to the bedroom. The dog bones were still there, the little bronze nameplate glinting in the waning daylight coming through the windows. He thought he could smell something burning in the air, though he couldn’t identify what it was.

That isn’t Duke. How could it be? It’s the medication, that’s what it is. It’s driven me mad.

Not for the first time, he wondered if he had died along with Annie and Marley, though because he had been the driver and had been at fault, he had been banished to some hellish purgatory. He would spend eternity haunted by the memories of the things he loved.

Eventually he went to the wall, knelt down, and peered into the opening in the wall through which the dog’s skeleton had come.

(“and you’ll be getting into trouble sticking your head into other people’s holes, Curious Bunny.”)

He expected to see studded two-by-fours and the back-end of the opposite sheet of drywall. But that was not what he saw. Just as there had been a floor beneath a floor downstairs, here was a wall behind a wall. He reached into the hole and brushed away some of the drywall dust from the secondary wall, bringing into relief the faded yellow caricature of a yellow duckling in diapers. Sam’s heart clenched. The duckling was stamped on a background of faint pink wallpaper.

“No.” The word trembled out of him, hardly a word at all.

He broke away more of the drywall to expose the wall beneath. Another duckling appeared, a doppelganger to the original one. With the crowbar, Sam whacked a sizeable chunk out of the drywall to reveal an entire swarm of diapered ducklings marshaling across the faint pink background. Wallpaper from Marley’s nursery.

He screamed until he thought his throat would rupture. Maniacally, he proceeded to smash the outer wall to powdered hunks. Dr. Samuel Hatch, the Human Wrecking Ball. It had been his intention to keep smashing until the house crumbled down on top of him and killed him, but that did not happen. The room filled with drywall dust. The more ducklings that were exposed to him, the more he shrieked and swung the crowbar.

When he opened his eyes again, it was dark. Somehow, at some point, he had passed out. He sat up stiffly, tasting the acrid drywall powder at the back of his throat. He was still in the room, surrounded by ghostly white sections of drywall stacked on each other like tectonic plates. His body was coated in white dust, as was the entire floor…with the exception of the Sam-shaped outline from where he’d been lying. On every wall, the diapered ducklings stared at him. He had done some damage and had unearthed unimaginable horrors.

One of his hands brushed over something hard and stiff that rolled across the floor: one of Duke’s bones. A femur, Sam surmised. A chuckle shuddered up the raw stovepipe of his throat.

There were plastic trash bags downstairs. He grabbed a handful and returned to the bedroom where he proceeded to fill the bags with the chunks of busted drywall. In his frenzy, he had busted up all four walls. The ducklings leered at Sam while he worked. They looked particularly unforgiving now. Sam set Duke’s bones in one corner of the room—in his head he had already begun to think of the room as the nursery—then picked up the smaller bits of drywall. There were other things hidden amongst the broken triangles of plaster—a windup dragonfly mobile, a pair of tiny shoes covered in white dust, several small picture books. He adroitly stacked the books in one corner of the nursery, blowing dust off each one as he set it down. The final book was called The Story of Curious Bunny. There was a cartoon rabbit with beseeching, overlarge eyes and drooping ears on the cover. Absently, Sam opened the book and flipped through some of the pages. Aloud, he read, “This is the story of Curious Bunny. The bunny was so curious and went hopping around in fields all day, sticking his little white—”

The pages grew wet. His vision got smeary.

He set the book on top of the stack.

12

It wasn’t until he found the bear that he understood what was going on and what else needed to be done. The tinkling of its music box drove him to seek it out; the more he heard the music, the more desperately he searched. The bear was ultimately discovered after much searching, hidden in the ceiling of the parlor room. Sam upended his cooler, stood on it, and smashed a hole in the plaster between two exposed joists with the crowbar. Yellowish powder and tufts of insulation rained down on him. Once again, he was the Curious Bunny, sticking his head into other people’s holes.

No, he reminded himself. These are my holes now. You buy ’em and make ’em, you own ’em. It was true enough.

He reached a hand into the hole in the ceiling and felt around. Exposed nails pricked his fingers and the soft yet crinkly cushion of old insulation tickled his sore palm. Eventually his hand fell on the little stuffed bear with the silver butterfly key at its back. He extracted it from the hole and examined it. It was gray with filth and reeked of mildew, but it otherwise looked exactly how it had back in Marley’s nursery. He turned the key and the tune of “Old MacDonald” jingled out of the bear. As it played, he brought it to his face and smelled it. Beneath the mildew smell he could identify the soft traces of baby powder. Sam climbed down from the cooler and carried the bear upstairs to Marley’s new nursery.

The house, it seemed, was a puzzle. Sam understood that if he could figure out how to solve it, things in his life might change. Things might come back to him.

13

This is the story of Curious Bunny. The Bunny was so curious, he went hopping around a house all day, knocking down walls and tearing apart cabinetry, just so he could see what was on the other side of things. Frequently, he would poke his head in holes he had made, sometimes expecting Angry Muskrat or Sleepy Owl or Timid Turtle to greet him, but these holes were empty and, anyway, they did not belong to anyone besides Curious Bunny, because it had been Curious Bunny who had bought them and made them and now he owned them.

Curious Bunny chipped away the plaster in the kitchen to reveal a wall of red brick, just like the kitchen in the Bunny’s old house in Philadelphia, where he had lived happily with his bunny family. That family was gone now because Curious Bunny had one night been—

(sleepy owl)

—Carless Bunny, but he tried very hard and very desperately not to think about that. Instead, he ripped the cabinets off the kitchen walls and smashed the warped countertop to pieces. Beneath the old countertop was a granite one, heavy and solid and powdered with grit. He wiped it down with water from the tap. Even the tap water was clear now, with no rust left in the old pipes.

Upstairs, Curious Bunny set Marley’s things up in the nursery. One day, he noticed a series of small pegs poking up from the floor in a rough circular formation. These pegs lengthened over the passage of a few more days until they became wooden slats. The construct made Curious Bunny think of Vietnamese POW cages made of bamboo stalks. This, in turn, made Curious Bunny laugh. It wasn’t a cage at all, he quickly realized. It was a crib. In it, Curious Bunny placed the stuffed music box bear. From one of the lengthened pegs, Curious Bunny affixed the mobile. He wound the bear and wound the mobile, and their songs complimented each other. This made Curious Bunny smile.

Just as he had once heard old Duke whimpering and scrabbling behind the walls, he soon began to hear other sounds. One was a wet, dragging sound, like someone pulling a heavy sack of potatoes through a mud puddle. Another was a high-pitched, distant wail: a baby’s cry. He could not pinpoint the location of these sounds, though he knew they were close and in the walls all around him.

I will have to make more holes and find them, thought Curious Bunny. After all, he already owned so many. This house is a puzzle and the holes are the clues to solving it.

Yet he didn’t always have to make the holes. Once, when the showerhead refused to spit water, Curious Bunny unscrewed it and found articles of clothing stuffed into the pipe. Like a magician pulling silk scarves from his sleeve, Curious Bunny pulled Annie’s blouses, underwear, stockings, and a wristwatch from the spigot.

Sometimes at night, Curious Bunny thought he had solved the puzzle, for he often heard—or imagined he heard—them coming to him in the dark. There would be the labored susurration of respiration, the deep wet gurgle, the sliding and dragging sounds. Sometimes Annie would hover in the periphery of his vision, cradling little Marley in her arms. When he turned to see her, she was not there.

“I know,” Curious Bunny would tell the darkness. “I’m trying to find you. Once I finish the house, you can come out for good.”

Curious Bunny loved his bunny family very much.

Around him, the house continued to change.

14

Morning. His eyes unstuck. The ceiling swam into focus, all exposed joists and nail-heads. A gaping hole stared down at him from between two joists. Disoriented, he sat up to find he was in the parlor, sleeping on the black-and-white checkered floor. Vaguely he recalled falling asleep last night in his sleeping bag, but when he looked around the room, he could find no evidence of the bedroll. Similarly, the jumble of floorboards he’d ripped up were no longer shoved into the corners or stacked against the wall. It was as if someone had come in and cleaned up the place while he slept.

The cooler with his food and water and beer was gone. His extra clothes were gone. His medication was gone, too. All of it. In the kitchen, he searched the cupboards and drawers for his pills. In the hall, he opened the closet door. There were still some tools in here, but his leather tool bag had been reduced to a few stitched seams, some tufts of fabric, and little else. Beside it, the stack of comic books was now a bundle of brittle yellow pages. The artwork had vanished completely. It was like the closet had suddenly grown huge all around me, Karen the waitress had told him that night at the Rude Rabbit. How long ago had that been, anyway? Sam couldn’t be certain. Time held no meaning for him.

Outside, he searched the Volkswagen but his meds were not there, either. The sun was directly overhead. Sam wondered how long he had been asleep. At his back, a series of low, groaning creaks emanated from the house. Sam turned and stared up at the house. It seemed to tip forward toward him, though just the slightest bit. Vertigo shook him. When he looked at the ground, he could see the roof’s shadow sliding incrementally toward him across the gravel driveway and uncut blond grass.

The sound of a vehicle motoring along Tar Road caused him to turn around again. A boxy maroon car turned off the road and bounded slowly down the gravel drive toward him. Sam did not recognize the car, but he was suddenly overcome by the premonition that Annie and Marley were in that car. It would pull up in front of him, one door would swing open, and a cloud of black smoke would unfurl from within. He would get in the car, the door would slam, and he would be chauffeured off into oblivion.

“That’s my hole, Curious Bunny, you nosy little fucker,” he muttered to himself as the car came to a stop directly behind the Volkswagen. The driver’s door popped open and a woman got out. It took him several heartbeats to realize it was Karen Kilstow. And even after he recognized her, he continued to question her authenticity.

“Hi.” Hers was a timid, uncertain voice. Timid Turtle.

Sam licked his lips. They were incredibly dry.

“I hope I’m not intruding,” she went on. She was dressed in a plaid button-down shirt with the sleeves cuffed nearly to her shoulders. Her arms looked very thin and very tan. “I kept thinking about our conversation at the Rude Rabbit the other night. You left me worried. I didn’t know what to do.” She smiled but looked sad. She dug one of her sneakers into the gravel. “Which is silly, I know, because I hardly even know you.”

“I didn’t mean to worry you,” he said, though he was thinking, Go home, Timid Turtle. You shouldn’t go slowpoking your head into other people’s business. “It was silly of me to even bring it up.”

Wincing against the sun, she looked up at the house. “It looks good. You fixed the roof.”

“Yes.”

“And the inside, too?”

He shivered. “Somewhat,” he said.

She walked slowly around the two cars, her shadow lengthening along the driveway until it fell across the toes of his shoes. “Sam,” she said, “if there was something else you wanted to talk to me about…I mean, I know I’m just a perfect stranger…and probably a perfect fool for even coming out here…”

“You’re not a fool. Don’t say that.”

She looked like she wanted to reach out and touch him. “Sam, are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“If there’s something going on…”

“I’m really fine. Thank you, though.”

“I’d love to see what you’ve been working on inside.”

Again, he felt a shudder rush through the core of his body. “Not quite yet. It’s still a mess.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, I thought you were afraid of this place.”

She laughed. “That was when I was just a little girl. I’m not scared of some house anymore.”

“That’s good,” he said.

“So maybe you’ll show me the inside when you’re ready,” she said. Wind rustled the strand of gray hair loose from behind Karen’s ear.

That closet makes things old, Sam suddenly realized. It does it very quickly. It’s one of the house’s many tricks.

“Maybe when it’s done,” he said, “or at least more presentable.”

“Okay. I’d like that.” Her eyes flitted over his shoulder. He held his gaze on her. “Oh…I didn’t know you had a dog.”

He turned and saw that he had left the front door partially open. Duke’s fuzzy head peered out, his big tongue lolling, his eyes like two silver buttons. Sam felt his feet go instantly numb in his shoes.

“He’s a sweetie,” Karen said. “What’s his name?”

“Duke.”

She crouched down and patted both knees. “Hi, Duke! Come on out.”

“No,” Sam said, perhaps a bit harshly. Karen froze and stared at him. “Get back inside, Duke. Go on, now! Go!”

The dog retreated into the darkness of the house.

“You’ve got to be stern if you want to train them,” Sam offered. He didn’t much care for the conciliatory quality of his tone. By the look on Karen’s face, he didn’t think she did, either.

Karen took a few steps back toward her car. As she opened the door, she said, “Hey, listen. Next time you’re hungry, come on down to the diner. It’ll be on the house.”

“That’s very kind of you.”

“Take care of yourself, Sam.”

“Goodbye,” Sam said.

Once the boxy maroon car was a twinkling bit of chrome at the far end of Tar Road, Sam went back in the house. The parlor was empty. He called, “Duke! Here, boy! Come!” Listened. He could hear no sounds, not even the distant crying behind the walls that had become almost constant. He searched the kitchen, the closet, underneath the stairs. Upstairs, he searched the bedroom and the nursery, but Duke was not there. Neither were his bones, which Sam had piled neatly at the end of the upstairs hallway several days ago.

Duke was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. Sam descended slowly, distrustful of the gleam in old Duke’s eyes. But as he grew nearer, he realized that it was just the same old Duke. It wasn’t aggression in Duke’s eyes. It was something else Sam couldn’t quite define.

“Jesus Christ, boy,” he breathed as he crouched down on the bottom step and reached out a hand to stroke the top of Duke’s head. “What the hell are you doing here?”

He petted the dog. It was Duke, all right. Sam smiled. He stroked jowls, down his back, behind his ears. It wasn’t until Sam’s hand came away slick with blood did he begin to panic. He glanced at Duke’s rear flank and saw that the dog’s rear left foot was not fully on the floor, but pulled up at an awkward angle against the dog’s belly. The fur of the left hip was matted in congealed black blood. Upon closer inspection, Sam could see shards of broken bone protruding from torn flesh. Drops of black blood pattered to the tiles.

“Duke,” he said, and thought he would be sick.

The dog whimpered then turned around and limped across the parlor toward the kitchen. The poor creature couldn’t use his busted leg at all, it seemed. He left a trail of blood on the checkered tile floor.

15

Two days later, Sam Hatch appeared in the doorway of Mindy’s, the neighborhood diner. He requested to be seated in Karen Kilstow’s section, and he was. Karen came out from the back soon enough and hurried over to his table, though her pace slowed the nearer she got. A look of more than just concern came across her face. For some reason, that look reminded Sam of Geoffrey’s house after the funeral, and how he had opened his shirt up and had wanted Annie’s father to stab him with a carving knife from the buffet table. All those looks he had gotten.

“Well,” Karen said, folding her arms, “I see you’ve finally taken me up on my offer.”

“Is there a telephone I could use?”

The request must have taken her by surprise, as she looked momentarily confused. “There’s a payphone in the back by the restrooms. I don’t think anyone’s used it in years.”

Sam slid a twenty across the table to her. “Can I get quarters? It’s a long distance call.”

“Sure. What about food?”

“Scrambled eggs, toast, and a milkshake.” Though he wasn’t hungry at all.

Karen winked. “Gotcha.” She took the twenty, went behind the counter, then returned with a plastic bag full of quarters. “If it doesn’t work, you can use my cellphone.”

“Thanks.”

When she left, he went to the payphone, which was nestled in a tiny niche between the restrooms. He dialed information and told the operator who he was looking for. The operator located the number and said she could connect him for no additional cost. “That would be lovely,” he said, and the call was connected. On the other end of the line, the phone rang and rang but no one answered. Sam hung up. He found a pen at the hostess podium, scrawled the phone number on the palm of his calloused left hand, then returned to his table to wait for his food.

“Did you make your call?” Karen wanted to know as she returned with his food.

“I did, but he wasn’t home. I’ll try again later. Could I get a cup of coffee, too?”

“Certainly.”

The food was tasty but he had to force it down. When the coffee arrived, the caffeine did little to quell his pounding headache. Once the food was finished and the table cleared, he asked for repeated cups of coffee so that his lingering in the diner wouldn’t seem too conspicuous.

“There’s a double-feature playing at the Cinema House tonight,” Karen said as she refilled his coffee yet again. “A couple of cheesy horror movies, if you’re into that. Maybe you’d like to take me?”

“That sounds like a good time,” he said, “but I’m a little busy at the house tonight.”

“Can’t you give yourself the night off?”

“Not just yet,” he said. He had a hard time looking at her.

Forty minutes later, he was back at the payphone dialing the number. It rang and rang again, only this time a man’s voice answered.

“Hello, Geoffrey. It’s Sam Hatch.”

The silence on the other end of the line seemed to cast on for an eternity before Geoffrey said, in a sick little voice, “Sam?”

“I need to ask you a question, Geoffrey.”

“Wait, wait—you need to ask me a question? Sam, where the hell are you?”

“I’ve been traveling.”

“You disappeared! I thought the goddamn worst had happened, that you’d done something stupid…”

“I’m okay. I’m sorry you’ve been worried. I didn’t mean to hurt you or Mary.”

“Jesus Christ, Sam! Where are you? Are you in town? Let me come get you.”

“No. I’m not in town.”

“Tell me where you are, brother.”

“I don’t want to do that, Geoffrey.”

“I don’t understand.” Geoffrey’s voice cracked. “Goddamn it, I can’t believe…”

“I need to ask you a question, Geoffrey.”

“What, Sam? What?”

“What happened to Duke?”

Again: that prolonged silence. “Duke? Your…your dog?”

“Did something happen to him?”

“You’re calling to…to ask about…”

“Geoffrey, I need to know if something happened to him.”

Geoffrey sighed. It was a shuddery, unstable sound. Had Sam’s head been in a different place, he would have felt sorry for the man. “Yeah, Sam. Yeah, something happened. He was struck by a car.”

“He was killed?”

“His hip was shattered. He was in a lot of pain. Mary and I had to put him down.”

Sam closed his eyes.

“Explain this to me,” Geoffrey said. “I don’t understand any of it.”

“One more thing,” Sam said. “There was a woman at your New Year’s Eve party that night, the night of the accident. She did a séance. She wore a headscarf and I think she had cancer. Do you know who I’m talking about?”

“She was Mary’s friend, Rebecca Suhl.”

“Was?”

“Yes. She passed away a few months ago, Sam. Goddamn it, man, tell me what the hell is going on. Let me help you. You helped me once, lending me that money, remember? Now let me help you.”

“You’ve already helped. Thank you.”

“Please, Sam…”

“Goodbye, Geoffrey.”

He hung up and returned to his table where he sipped his coffee. The next time Karen came over, he ordered some bacon and sausage to go. Karen asked no questions. Fifteen minutes later, she returned with a Styrofoam box packed with sausage links and strips of thick-cut bacon.

“Thank you,” Sam said.

“Anything else?”

“Just the check, please.”

Karen left to get the check. Sam did not want to wait for her to return, so he took out his wallet, left the money on the table, and exited the diner. From there, he drove to the nearest gas station where he purchased a gallon of antifreeze and a pack of cigarettes. Then he drove back to the house.

Once again, it seemed that the house had slightly repositioned itself in his absence. The upstairs windows appeared to have lengthened. The doorway looked slightly out of shape, though he couldn’t identify exactly why. On the porch, he set down the Styrofoam container then liberally poured antifreeze over the meats. Propping open the front door with his foot, he called into the house, “Duke! C’mere, old boy! Daddy’s got a treat for you!”

It took a while for the ruinous German shepherd to make his way out onto the porch. The wound at his side continued to fester and coagulated clumps of blood and tissue dropped periodically from its hindquarter. The look in the dog’s eyes when Sam had first seen him at the bottom of the stairs had been a look of agony. Sam recognized it now.

Wake up, the woman in the headscarf had said to him that night as they bumped into each other at Geoffrey and Mary’s party. They come out the way they go in.

In the house, Marley continued to cry. He still couldn’t find her, but her cries had slowly been getting louder and louder. Similarly, Annie’s presence was felt in every room of the house now. The more the house started to look like their old home, the more she was drawn out.

A puzzle, thought Sam. But it’s over now.

He bent down and petted Duke while the poor old dog slopped up the sausage links and strips of bacon. Duke’s rough tongue lapped up the antifreeze.

“Good boy,” Sam said. Then he stood and went into the house.

Marley’s cries were audible yet still distant. The tinkling of the music box bear came slowly down the stairs. Behind one wall, he heard what sounded like fingernails scraping along concrete. There was that wet, dragging sound again. It turned his stomach.

(Curious Bunny had never asked specifically what had happened to them. He did not want to know. The coffins had been closed and he was okay with that. He never spoke to the doctors about their final conditions and he never read any of the newspaper articles. He refused to read the report and look at the photos sent by the insurance company of what had happened to the car in the crash.)

“They come out the way they went in,” Sam said to the empty parlor. It was now indistinguishable from the parlor back at their old house in Philly. He took the pack of cigarettes from his pocket, shook one out, stuck it into his mouth, and lit it. He inhaled deeply, coughed, inhaled again. Once the cigarette was finished, he crushed the butt out on one white tile, then remained standing, surveying the room. Upstairs, the music box stopped. Marley had quit crying.

At last, he went to the hall closet and opened the door. The comic books were nothing but sheaves of blank, brittle paper. The tool bag had been reduced to some brownish dust. Only the tools withstood the passage of time. Sam removed all the items from the closet, setting them outside beside the porch—Duke was still slopping up the food, his ruined left leg still leaking blackish fluid onto the gravel—then went back inside.

Upstairs, he wound the bear again, letting the music spill out of it. Then he kissed it and laid it back behind the wooden struts that so much resembled the bars of a crib.

Curious Bunny closed his eyes.

16

Nearly a week later and at the behest of his sister, Jake Kilstow drove out to the house on Tar Road to check up on the man called Sam Hatch. His sister was in the passenger seat, chewing her nails to the quick. She had been worried about the man called Sam Hatch, her concern mounting with each passing day. Finally Jake agreed to go up there with her and put her mind at ease. Karen had always been more attuned to others than Jake, though he also knew she was more prone to flights of fancy than he was. Nonetheless, he didn’t think it would hurt anything to stop by the house and check things out.

It was his day off, so he was in regular clothes and driving his refurbished 1967 Comet. When he turned onto the gravel driveway toward the house, the dust rose up and he quickly rolled up the driver’s side window. Gravel popped beneath the car’s tires. Ahead, Jake saw that Sam Hatch’s Volkswagen was parked out front. He noticed that the repair job on the roof had been completed, and although the house still looked like a piece of shit, he was mildly amused at Sam’s determination to fix the place up.

“You know, I did a little fact-checking on your friend,” he said. He had been deliberating whether or not he should say anything to Karen about it, but thought now that she might as well know. “About a year and a half ago, he fell asleep behind the wheel of his car coming home from a party. He drove straight into an overpass abutment. His wife and baby were in the car. They died at the scene.”

“I didn’t ask you to research the poor man, Jake.”

Frowning at her quip, Jake added, “Wife was decapitated. Baby was crushed to death.”

She turned away from him in disgust.

Jake parked behind the Volkswagen and they got out. The world was silent. He peered into the VW but could see nothing out of the ordinary. He spotted the dog just as he crossed in front of the VW toward the house. He held up one hand to Karen. “Stay there.”

“What is it?”

“Just stay put for a second.”

The dog was sprawled out near the front porch, obviously dead. Jake bent down to better examine the animal. The dog’s eyes were open but they had sunken into the skull. Pus ran from the open mouth and flies hummed around the head. The dog’s pale tongue was unfurled like a party streamer on the gravel. There was a puncture wound just above the withered rear leg, the fur matted in dried blood. Maggots squirmed in a ragged tear in the fur.

“Oh,” said Karen in a small voice. She had snuck up behind him.

“I thought I told you to stay put.”

“Go to hell, Jake.”

“That’s what I get for doin’ you a favor and comin’ out here on my day off?” He sighed, then mounted the porch. “Hello?” he called as he opened the front door. “Mr. Hatch? You home, sir?” He looked around the place as Karen came up behind him. “I thought you said he was doin’ some renovating in here?” If it were true, Jake could see no sign of it. It was the same rundown, decrepit shack that had scared the piss out of him when he had been a boy.

“That’s what I thought,” Karen said, looking in quiet horror about the place.

“Let’s have a look around,” Jake said. Together they searched the downstairs but found no evidence of anyone living here. Perhaps the man had left. Aside from Hatch’s Volkswagen, he had left no other personal belongings behind. Maybe the car didn’t start and he took off on foot. It would be easy for a drifter to hitch a ride once he got closer to the highway, Jake knew.

Upstairs, they searched all the rooms. They were empty—almost. In one of the rooms, a small book sat in the middle of the floor. It looked old and was covered in grime, but Jake could make out a cartoon bunny with large eyes on the cover. He stared at it for some time, though he couldn’t tell why it was so interesting to him.

Back downstairs, they were halfway to the front door again when Karen said, “Wait. What about there?”

He paused and turned around. She was pointing to a closed closet door in the wall where the parlor emptied into the small hallway toward the kitchen. Jake moved past Karen and approached the door. “Are you in there, Mr. Hatch?” He said it to be funny, but the second the words were out of his mouth, they made him feel cold.

He opened the closet door.

Empty.

Though not quite. On the floor was a small pile of gray granules that reminded him of cremains in an urn. He touched the mound with the toe of his boot and something shiny winked up at him. He bent down and picked it up. It was a simple gold wedding band. He held it up for Karen to see.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t understand any of this.”

Jake shut the closet door and slipped the wedding band into the pocket of his jeans. Suddenly, he didn’t feel so well. His skin felt clammy and there was an angry rumbling in the pit of his stomach. The more time he spent in the house, the more it became harder to breathe. He chalked it up to the dead dog. He was allergic to dogs.

“Come on,” he said, urging her toward the front door. “Let’s get out of here.”

“It just doesn’t make any sense.”

“What?”

“That he would just pick up and leave, especially with his car still here. That he hasn’t done a single thing to fix this place up.” She surveyed the room again. “It’s like he never even existed. It’s like…” Her voice trailed off. She turned and looked toward the stairs.

“What?” Jake said. “What is it?”

“Do you hear it?”

“Hear what?”

She cocked her head, still listened. Then she frowned. “It’s gone now.”

He urged, “What?”

“It sounded like a baby crying.”

Jake laughed. “Okay. If you’re trying to freak me out, mission accomplished. Now can we please get out of here? I don’t want to waste my entire day in this place.”

Back in the car, Jake spun the wheel, turned around, and drove back up the driveway toward Tar Road. Karen’s eyes were locked on the rearview mirror the entire time, watching the house diminish in the glass.

“You okay?” he asked her as they pulled onto Tar Road and headed back toward town.

Karen didn’t answer him. She turned around in her seat and looked out the Comet’s back windshield at the house. She didn’t turn back around again until Jake turned sharply at the first intersection, cutting the house from her view.

About the Author

Ronald Malfi is the award-winning author of the novels The Ascent, Snow, Passenger, Cradle Lake, and many others. In 2011, his novel Floating Staircase was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel. Most recognized for his haunting, literary style and memorable characters, Malfi’s dark fiction has gained acceptance among readers of all genres. He currently lives in Maryland, with his wife and daughter, where he is at work on his next book. He can be found online at www.ronmalfi.com.

About the Publisher

DarkFuse is a leading independent publisher of modern fiction in the horror, suspense and thriller genres. As an independent company, it is focused on bringing to the masses the highest quality dark fiction, published as collectible limited hardcover, paperback and eBook editions.

To discover more titles published by DarkFuse, please visit its official site at www.darkfuse.com.

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The Mourning House

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About the Author

About the Publisher

Table of Contents

The Mourning House

Connect With Us

Other Books by Author

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2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

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About the Author

About the Publisher