Seldom Seen in August

CHAPTER FOUR

Phone in hand, Wade paced the landing. The sooner he was gone from this place the better, but every now and then he’d hear the distant squawk or the whoop-whoop of sirens as cruisers pulled to a halt, and it would remind him why he needed to be patient. Problem was, there was now a prankster running around out there covered in fake blood just dying to tell the cops about the guy he’d fooled. Oh, and Officer, did I mention he broke in and had a gun?

Wade cursed himself. What the hell was wrong with him? Had eleven years in the pen made him rusty or what? There was a time when he could have sniffed out a ruse without even being in the same building as the guy pulling it. But not only had he fallen for the kid’s prank, he hadn’t even realized the kid was in the house to begin with. He was getting old, that’s what it was. Old and rusty, kept going by his addiction to vices and the consequential need to compensate for them with cash he didn’t have. And that, he suspected, would never change.

“Hell with it,” he said, and scrolled through the names in his cell phone’s memory until he found one that read simply: “CUJ” which was an abbreviation for “Clean-Up Job”, itself a code name for a man named Alex Eye, which no doubt was an alias but it was better than a series of stupid letters. Alex had proven useful, if ridiculously expensive, in the past when things hadn’t exactly gone the way they’d been supposed to. Alex was six-foot six, black, and didn’t speak a word. He just showed up, did what he’d been hired to do, then charged you up the ass and back down again for it. But he could untie the knot in almost any situation, thinking up clever escape plans where there didn’t appear to be any. As a matter of pride, Wade had never used Alex’s services. But he needed them now.

He made the call. Listened to the dial tone buzzing in his ear.

Paced.

Stopped when a phone in one of the rooms he was facing began to ring. He frowned, hung up on his call and cocked his head slightly.

The house phone stopped ringing.

He waited, expecting to hear whoever had answered muttering urgently inside the room. Please help me there’s somebody in my house! But they were either being painfully quiet, or the person calling had given up. Wade waited a few more minutes. The doors to the rooms he had not yet investigated faced each other across the narrow landing. He hit the SEND button on Alex’s number, and walked slowly to the door on the left.

The call went through.

Inside the room on the right, the house phone began to ring again.

“What the hell is going on?” he mumbled, and took the phone from his ear to check the display. Alex’s name showed above the miniature icon of a phone ringing so violently the receiver was dancing. Frowning, Wade jabbed the END button, canceling the call, and immediately raised his eyes to the door from which the ringing sound had come.

It stopped.

He surprised himself by chuckling and shaking his head, as if he’d just been told a hoary old joke but owed it to the teller to laugh.

“I’ll be damned,” he said. “Now that’s clever.”

Just to be absolutely sure, he tried Alex’s number again.

The house phone rang.

Hung up.

The phone went quiet.

A single bark of laughter and he pocketed the phone, raised the gun. “Jesus, I never…” he said, wiping a tear from his eye. “But…how?”

A number of possible explanations came to him.

One: By some miracle or coincidence, he had broken into Alex’s home, which would explain why the house phone was ringing when he dialed the man’s number.

Wade groaned.

Two: Alex had some kind of weird but ingenious redirect function attached to his number that, rather than lead to an answering machine, led to the phone nearest the caller.

Wade closed his eyes.

Three: Someone was fucking with him.

Wade opened his eyes.

Enough.

In three short steps he was at the door on the right and throwing it wide. It thumped against the far wall and shuddered back toward him, giving him the deeply unpleasant sensation that the room was shrinking while he watched.

The sunlight stretched languidly into the room through net-curtained windows, spotlighting the fall of dust motes to the bare wood floor. An old vanity squatted in shadow in one corner. In another was a rocking chair. Atop it sat an old black rotary phone. In the center of the room was a bed with a single dirty white sheet, and beneath it lay a woman, her long silver-gray hair spread out around the stained pillow.

Wade put a hand out to stop the door from closing, and stepped into the room.

The old woman shifted, turned her head. “Billy?”

Her voice, like the room, was dusty.

“’Fraid not,” Wade said. “And who might you be?”

The old woman rose out of the bed like a specter. There was no series of movements, just one fluid one, as if she were attached to ropes threaded through hooks in the ceiling. One moment she was on her back, an ordinary old lady, the next she was floating toward him like something out of a horror movie, her feet tangling in the sheets, pulling them away, revealing the bloodstains on the mattress beneath.

Gooseflesh rippling all over him, Wade retreated from the room, his attempt to shut the door behind him so frantic he missed the knob on the first try and had to lean in to make a second one.

The lady, in no hurry at all, drifted toward him and now he could see that she was blind, that her teeth were gone, that her flimsy nightdress was spattered with blood both old and new.

She was almost upon him, her withered arms outstretched toward him in a gesture of pleading or longing, her face twisted into an expression of such profound sadness it almost drained the energy from him.

“Jesus,” he said and pulled the door shut, but not before he heard her say, “You never come to see me anymore, Billy…”

He stood there, perplexed and unsettled. Just what in the blue hell was going on? Had he broken into a lunatic asylum masquerading as a suburban home?

As he stood there, his brain telling him that the best course of action, the only course of action now was to get moving, get as far away from this madhouse as possible, he heard a humming sound he at first assumed was his phone. Cartwright, he thought with a by now familiar flare of anger, but the cell’s display was dark, the phone quiet. The humming was coming from the walls.

“Okay,” he muttered. “Okay, we’re done.”

He turned, intending to head back across the landing, down the stairs, and out, when the door to his left, the only one he hadn’t yet opened, creaked and swung wide, exposing the room beyond.

Go, Wade told himself, absently slipping the cell phone back into his pocket. Don’t bother looking in there. Just go.

But without being fully aware that he was doing so, he moved slowly to the door and peeked inside.

The floors and walls were blackened, as if by fire. The air smelled like soot and charcoal, and burnt meat.

The windows were boarded over.

There was no furniture.

Staggering drunkenly toward him was a woman with a broken neck. She was naked, her heavily veined breasts like punctured balloons hanging down over ribs that poked through her mottled blue skin. One broken-fingered hand covered the dark thatch of her pubic hair in a gruesome parody of modesty. Her head had been twisted almost all the way around, the skin on her neck bunched into folds. He could see the ridge of one ear, the faintest curve of a bloody smile as she tottered like an infant toward where he stood, horrified. There were needle marks on her arms and legs and feet, and he could not stop looking at them.

The woman gargled, then flickered.

Wade blinked rapidly.

The woman flickered again, like a movie with gaps in the reel, like the yards seen through the fences as he’d fled, and then she changed, whined much like the boy in the bathroom had. Abruptly the film jumped and she became a terrible charred thing, patches of red visible through a veritable carapace of roasted flesh.

She stopped her tottering advance and screamed, and though it made little sense to him, it was that scream rather than the pantomime of broken-necked burning that made him remember who she was.

“Gail?” he said, and the door slammed shut so suddenly and so forcefully it cracked the wood and shattered the frame. Wade cried out in surprise, his attempt to back away foiled by something that had insinuated its way between his feet. The doll torso, he saw but was already falling, the notion of another cry dissuaded by the floor as his back thumped against it, winding him.

Though the instinct to flee was overwhelming, he stayed on the floor for a moment, eyes closed while he regulated his breathing.

So how do you explain this? he asked himself. Did I break into a haunted house or what?

No, he thought. I didn’t. It’s a trick, and a damn good one, but a trick just the same.

He slowly, painfully got to his feet.

Wade didn’t believe in ghosts. In his line of work, he couldn’t afford to. Bad enough that he spent his life looking over his shoulder looking for living enemies than have to consider the ones he’d already put in the ground. But it was that clear whoever had engineered this little theater production knew him, and had somehow managed to corral him here for a little show-and-tell. But to what end? And exactly how had they known he’d be here, in this particular house? Were all the others similarly booby-trapped? He might have thought that stoolie sonofabitch Cartwright had included Wade’s hiding place among the notes he’d sung to the police, but Cartwright didn’t know where he had gone after they’d split up.

That’s when he thought of the gate.

The only one without a sign. And while Wade had no particular feelings about dogs one way or another, common sense dictated that a man seeking a haven would choose the path of least resistance. No psychological profiling necessary to glean that particular nugget. But what if he hadn’t? What if, instead of choosing Seldom Seen as his hiding place, he’d run on and sought sanctuary elsewhere? He had chosen to come here, to this house in this neighborhood. Why then did he feel as if he’d been lured here?

No, it didn’t add up. Factor free will into the equation and nobody could have known he’d have chosen this house, dog sign or no.

And yet, here you are.

Because of a sign, or rather, the lack of one?

The sign, he realized, and the sirens. He now recalled that those wailing sirens had seemed to come from everywhere, from all around him until he hit Seldom Seen Drive. Then they’d only been behind him. Closer and closer all the time until he felt trapped, vulnerable, desperate…

“Jesus, this is ridiculous,” he said aloud and brushed himself off. He took a deep breath and slowly released it.

How are they doing this?

He didn’t know, nor did he care. It was time to go.

A kick sent the doll torso flying over the balcony and down the steps. Wade listened to it tumbling, waited until it stopped, then followed it down.