Black Creek Crossing

Chapter 21

HE NEXT DAY WAS EVEN WORSE THAN THE DAY before. Angel had barely slept, lying awake through the long night, terrified that at any moment she would hear the door to her room open and the floorboards begin to creak as her father slunk through the darkness toward her bed. It was worse when she slept, for with sleep came dreams, and in the dreams her father was always there, gazing at her with burning eyes, reaching out toward her, his fingers straining to touch her flesh.

When she turned away from her father, her mother was there, but her back was to Angel, and no matter how Angel begged, her mother wouldn’t even look at her.

When she turned away from her mother, she found herself facing Father Mike, who looked at her coldly, then spoke: “Go forth and sin no more.”

It was always his words that awakened her, leaving her alone in the darkness, too frightened to sleep and too tired to stay awake.

By the time she got to school, she wasn’t sure she could make it through the day at all.

Seth Baker had gotten no more sleep than Angel, the stinging welts from the lash of his father’s belt making it impossible for him to lie on his back, and even the weight of his sheet and blanket hurt enough to keep him awake until almost dawn. His father was already gone when he went downstairs, and when his mother asked him if he was going to practice playing golf again that afternoon, he shook his head.

“Do I really have to play in the tournament on Saturday?” he asked as he poured some cereal into a bowl.

“Well, of course you do,” Jane Baker told him. “Why would you even ask such a question?”

Because I’m no good at golf and Dad will just give me another beating when we get home. He knew better than to speak the thought out loud, though, and only shrugged in response to his mother’s question. And the worst part wouldn’t even be the beating. It would be the humiliation of having Zack Fletcher and Chad Jackson and Jared Woods and all the other jocks watch him as he flailed away at the ball. But he knew there was no point in trying to argue with his mother, since she wouldn’t argue with his dad any more than he would.

He ate his cereal in silence and left the house in silence, and somehow got through the day.

By the time he had to strip for gym, the welts on his buttocks had faded enough so no one noticed them.

Five minutes after the last bell, he met Angel Sullivan.

“You okay?” he asked as she fell in beside him.

“I guess,” she sighed. “What about you?”

Seth shrugged. “I’m used to it.” Today’s lunch had been an almost exact repeat of the one the day before, with Zack and Heather and their friends making the sucky-kissy noises, and the boys grinding their hips at both Angel and Seth.

Except they hadn’t called him Seth, and every time they’d used its rhyme, Angel had seen him cringe. “How come they call you that?” she asked as they began walking out Black Creek Road toward the house that stood at the Crossing.

“I don’t know,” Seth said. “The same reason they called you all those names in Eastbury, I guess.”

“At least they called me girls’ names.” For a second Seth looked as if she’d slapped him, but then he laughed.

“ ‘Beth’ isn’t a girl’s name?” he asked.

“That’s not what I meant,” Angel said. “I meant—”

“Oh, who cares, anyway?” Seth cut in as she began floundering for the right words. “It’s just names. Let’s talk about something else.”

But instead of talking, both of them lapsed into silence, and neither spoke until they were across the street from Angel’s house, where, as if by common consent, they both stopped, staring at the house.

It looked exactly as it had this morning, and yesterday, and the day before, and yet, as they gazed at it, neither Angel nor Seth could stop thinking about the strange images that Seth’s camera had caught in the window of Angel’s room, or the odd drawing that had appeared on the mirror in Angel’s room.

Nor could Seth forget what had happened when Angel’s father had found them in her bedroom. “Maybe I shouldn’t come in,” he said, his voice sounding hollow.

Angel looked at him uncertainly. “I thought you wanted to see if there was something under the stairs,” she said.

Seth bit his lower lip, then: “If your dad comes home—”

“He won’t,” Angel said. “And even if he does, we just won’t be in my room.”

Still Seth hesitated. “I don’t know… ”

“You were the one that said ‘it can’t hurt to look,’ ” she reminded him. But as her eyes shifted from Seth to the house, her voice reflected her own sudden nervousness. “Besides, if my mom’s not home either…” Now it was her voice that trailed off, and she knew Seth had heard the fear in it. “I mean it’s not like I’m scared to be by myself or anything—”

Seth cut her off. “Quit worrying. Let’s both go in and see if we can find anything.”

They went around to the back of the house, and Angel found the key her mother had hidden under the same pot that had been on the back porch in Eastbury. “If we’re supposed to be looking for something under the stairs, shouldn’t there be a loose board or something?” Angel asked as she opened a Coke and split it between two glasses.

“I guess,” Seth replied. But ten minutes later, after tugging at every stair in the case leading to the second floor, he shook his head. “Even the ones that squeak don’t come loose.” He looked at Angel. “What about from underneath? Maybe there’s some kind of hidden cupboard or something.”

They went around to the door of the closet that was built under the stairs, but again found nothing. The walls and the steeply slanted ceiling under the stairs were plastered and painted white, and in the glare of the naked bulb that illuminated the space, they could see that there weren’t even any cracks in the plaster, let alone places where it might come open to reveal a hidden space.

“So now what?” Seth asked. But before Angel could reply, they heard a muffled sound, and Seth’s eyes widened. “If that’s your dad—”

Angel shook her head and held up her hand to silence him.

The sound came again, still muffled, but this time Angel was sure she recognized it. “It’s Houdini — he’s come back!” Leaving the closet under the stairs, Angel hurried into the kitchen, certain she would find the cat waiting for her.

The kitchen was empty.

“Where is he?” Seth asked as he too entered the kitchen.

Angel shrugged. “I don’t know — maybe I was wrong.”

But then they heard the sound again, and this time there was no mistaking it. Both Angel and Seth turned to look at the closed door that led to the basement, and when Angel pulled it open, there was the cat. But instead of coming out into the kitchen, he turned and bounded down the steep flight of steps.

Angel and Seth stood at the top of the stairs that plunged down into the basement. For several long seconds they both gazed into the gloom, and as her eyes reached into the darkness, Angel began to feel something — a strange chill seemed to be emanating from the cellar.

Seth took her hand. “Do you feel that?” he asked.

Angel nodded. “It feels like a draft.”

“But heat rises,” Seth said. “And even when it’s the hottest day of the summer, you don’t feel any cooler till you go down into the basement. Just opening the door at the top of the stairs doesn’t do any good at all.”

“M-Maybe there’s a window open,” Angel said, not realizing that her voice had dropped to little more than a whisper. “That’s probably how Houdini got in.”

“Or maybe it’s something else,” Seth replied, his own voice dropping as low as Angel’s. “I read once where it gets real cold when…” His words died on his lips as the chill suddenly evaporated. When he looked at Angel, he could tell that she felt the sudden change too. “It’s gone,” he breathed.

Angel once again peered down into the darkness below. “Houdini?” she called. “Come on, Houdini! Come out of there!”

The cat appeared at the bottom of the stairs, its eyes glowing in the light spilling down from the kitchen, but it did not come up. Instead it meowed again.

“Come on!” Angel said. “You’ll get filthy down there.”

The cat meowed once more, then disappeared.

“Houdini!” Angel said. She groped for the cellar light switch, found it and turned it on. A bare bulb in the center of the cellar ceiling went on, but its dim glow revealed no sign of the cat.

Then it meowed again, louder.

“What’s going on with him?” Seth asked. “It’s like he wants us to come down—” He fell silent as he gazed at the cellar stairs. “What if we were looking under the wrong stairs?”

Angel stared at Seth. “He’s a cat, Seth! What—”

As quickly as it had vanished, the cat reappeared at the bottom of the steps, meowed loudly, then bounded up most of the stairs. But before it reached the top, it veered off to the right, bounding off the step and dropping to the floor below.

And meowed one more time.

“Let’s go down and see,” Seth said.

Angel said nothing, but when Seth took the first step down the steep flight of stairs, she hung back. “Maybe we shouldn’t go down there,” she said as Seth looked back at her.

“Or maybe we should,” Seth countered, putting just enough emphasis on the word so Angel knew exactly what he meant.

She felt the challenge hanging in the air, and gazed down into the shadows below. As she peered into the gloom, the memories of the last few nights flicked through her mind.

The girl in the closet, surrounded by flames.

The smell of smoke still lingering in the morning.

The presence in her room the night before last, when someone had loomed over her in the darkness, reaching out to her, wanting to touch her.

The sound of the piggy bank crashing to the floor.

And then, the scrawled image on the mirror that she had scrubbed away until there was no trace of it left at all.

A smudge like blood.

The blood of the girl who’d died in the room in which she now slept?

No! It wasn’t blood — it was only lipstick, and it had washed away. Everything she’d seen had only been dreams, and there weren’t any such things as ghosts.

“All right,” she said, trying not to let any of her fears creep into her voice. “Let’s go down and see.”

Without waiting for Angel to reply, Seth headed down the stairs, and a second or two later Angel followed.

“There’s another light at the bottom,” she whispered when they were halfway down. “You have to pull a string.”

As they came to the last step, Seth reached up, grabbed the string, and pulled. A dim light came on, washing most of the darkness away, but leaving the far recesses of the cellar lost in shadows. They found Houdini under the stairs, which were made of thick oak slabs about the size of the mantel upstairs, mounted on even bigger oak beams, laid in a steep slant with notches cut in them to support the steps. The upper surfaces of the steps were worn smooth — and somewhat concave — from the generations of feet that had tramped up and down them. But on the underside there were still the marks of the hand tools that had hewn and shaped them so long ago.

Houdini was standing on his hind legs, his forepaws propped against the fourth step, his head stretched high, but his nose still falling short of the fifth step.

As Angel and Seth crouched down to gaze at him, he looked at them, meowed, then stretched upward once again.

“What’s he doing?” Angel asked. “What’s he want?”

Angel and Seth moved around behind the stairs, then looked up at them from below. Except for a few places where light showed through the tiny gaps between the treads, they saw only darkness.

“Have you got a flashlight?” Seth asked.

“In the kitchen drawer,” Angel replied. She hurried up to the kitchen, and opened the top drawer at the end of the counter, where only two days ago she herself had put the contents from the catchall drawer in Eastbury. The flashlight was at the front, exactly where she’d put it.

Back in the cellar, she found Seth crouched down next to the cat, which was still standing on its hind legs, stretching toward the stair that was just out of reach while mewing insistently. As Angel crouched beside Seth and shined the light up at the underside of the stairs, Seth rapped sharply on the three steps nearest the cat.

Twice, they heard nothing but the faint thump of solid wood.

Then he rapped on the fifth step from the bottom.

As his knuckles came in contact with the wood, the sound was much louder, with a resonance to it that made Angel’s heart begin to pound.

It sounded hollow!

Seth looked at her, then knocked on the tread once more.

The same sound.

And the cat, apparently now satisfied, moved out from under the stairs, sat down, and began grooming itself.

Seth knocked on the tread above and the tread below, and each time they heard only the same solid sound they’d heard on the rest of the stairs.

Seth went back to the fifth one and began rapping along its entire length.

At each end, it sounded as solid as the adjoining treads. But for six or eight inches in both directions off the center, it had that hollow sound that told them that this tread, at least, was not solid all the way through.

Angel held the flashlight closer while Seth examined the step more carefully. At first he saw nothing, but then, as he looked closer, something didn’t look quite right at the point where the tread sat upon the supporting beams. Taking the flashlight from Angel, he held it even closer to the joint, then shifted it first to the one above, then the one below. Though the fits were almost perfect, he was sure he could make out a tiny horizontal gap between the treads and the beams, where the treads were sitting on the notches cut out of the beams to act as risers. But in the fifth step it looked as if the joint went up, as if somehow the tread were suspended between the main beams instead of being supported by the notches.

Moving out from under the steps, he examined the end of the fifth tread. From the outside it appeared to be seated atop the notches in the two slanting beams, exactly like all the rest. Frowning, he tapped on the surface of the riser.

It sounded like solid wood.

“What is it?” Angel asked. “Is it hollow or not?”

“It’s weird,” Seth told her. “It doesn’t sound the same from underneath, and it doesn’t look the same either.”

“Let me see.”

With both of them crouching under the stairs now, Seth showed Angel the strange joints. Reaching up, Angel gently rapped on the underside of the tread and heard the same hollow sound Seth had. She frowned, trying to figure out why the joints would look different from below than from the end, and a moment later the answer came to her. “Hold the flashlight,” she told Seth. He took it from her, and she pressed the palms of both her hands up onto the bottom of the fifth tread, then pulled them toward her. For a second she thought nothing was going to happen, but then — just as she was about to give up — she felt a slight movement. Pressing even harder, she pulled again, and for a moment it seemed as if the entire tread was moving toward her.

“Wow,” Seth breathed. “Look at that!”

Angel kept easing the wood forward, until Seth, who was crouched down low so he could peer up at the bottom of the tread, said, “Hold it — I see something!”

“What?” Angel asked.

“It’s like the whole back and bottom of the tread is fake,” he said, poking his fingers up into some kind of cavity that had appeared in the bottom of the tread. A second later, his voice trembling, he whispered, “There’s something in it. See if you can pull it a little farther.”

Angel reached back so her fingertips curled around the edge of the false bottom, and she pulled. The panel slid stiffly for a moment, then suddenly came loose, sliding entirely free of the tread.

Something dropped from the cavity that had been concealed above the sliding panel, falling into Seth’s hands.

Neither of them said a word, but simply stared at the object. It was a book, bound in leather that was embossed with faded gold lettering. The letters were so ornate that even if the gilt had not all but vanished, neither of them could have made out what they said. Though the leather of the cover looked almost new, there was still something about it that told them it was far older than it appeared.

And its color was exactly the same as the color of the lipstick Angel had found on the floor that morning, and on her fingers, and on the sheets.

Red.

Bloodred.