The Night Visitors

Chapter Twenty-Three Alice

WALKING DOWN THESE dark stairs feels like the scariest thing I’ve ever had to do. Scarier than the time I ran away from my last foster home and had to sleep in a bus station two nights in a row. Scarier than the stint I did at Pine Crest JD, the nice JD, which wasn’t that bad but still felt like shit.

This is worse because I know Davis is here. I don’t care if Mattie thinks it’s her redneck Stewart’s guy; I know it’s Davis. I can feel him, like a cold draft rising up through the cracks in the floorboards, that prickle I get at the base of my skull when I’m around someone really bad. Cray-dar, one of the girls I met in lockdown called it: creep-radar.

When we go past the boarded-up door that Mattie said leads to her father’s study, I feel like there are a million bugs crawling over my body. It’s not Davis’s face I picture, though, it’s that smug sonofabitch judge from the newspaper story. Mattie’s father. What kind of an asshole sends his own daughter to lockdown? That’s what’s off about this house.

One of the things about my foster mom Lisa was that she was really sensitive. The least noise would make her jump. Do you have to walk so loud? Can you not make the whole house shake? Can you lower your voice? Can you only use the toilet before nine P.M. and after nine A.M.? Do you have to toss and turn and make the bed creak?

Tamara, a big girl from Yonkers, said, She’d like for us to crawl inside the walls and stay there.

The image of us all stuck behind the walls—literally stuck in the walls—haunted me, woke me up in the middle of the night because I’d dreamed I was smothering in plaster. And now it feels like we’re inside the walls of this old house, where the mice crawl and the ghosts dwell. That’s what Oren felt when he stopped on the path outside the house. He felt Caleb’s ghost.

Oren, who always knows things, like what town to buy the bus tickets for, and who can make things disappear, like the poltergeist. Oren’s been talking to dead Caleb and now he’s leading us down these dark stairs to the basement, where it’s cold and damp as a grave. I stumble at the thought, and when I reach out to steady myself I feel cold rough stone and something slithers over my hand. I bat it away and trip down the last few steps, banging off something soft and squishy and landing on my hands and knees on the floor—only it’s not even floor, it’s dirt. I can smell it. It smells like worms. It smells like a grave. Of course, that’s what the ghost wants, to drag us down into its grave. I can feel a scream clawing its way up my throat when a hand clamps over my mouth.

“Alice!” The voice is in my ear, hoarse and rough. It doesn’t sound like Mattie, but then her big capable hands are on my shoulders and she’s shushing me like a mother would hush a scared child, and I just collapse into her and cry as quietly as I can and Mattie sits by me in the dirt with her arms around me until I’m good and done.

“It’s just the basement,” she says, “see?” She turns on the flashlight and moves the light over the dirt floor, rough stone walls, and beams that look like they were hewn out of whole trees. Boxes are stacked in front of the stairs we just came down so that you wouldn’t even know the stairs were there. There’s another long flight that probably goes up to the kitchen and a shorter flight of stone steps leading to slanted doors that look like they came from a movie set in Kansas. Metal shelves with junk and cloudy-looking jars line the far side of the room, and a huge hulking furnace lurks in an alcove that looks like it was carved out of the rock face. I remember Mattie said she replaced the old one after it killed her family, but still, there’s something scary about it. As I stare at it something moves in the shadows behind it. Something boy shaped.

I get up and march over there, shining my flashlight into the alcove. It’s more like a cave than an alcove, and it goes farther back than my flashlight reaches.

“Oren?” I call. “Come out of there right now!”

“Did you see him in there?” Mattie asks, adding her flashlight beam to mine. “There’s a crawl space back there where Caleb got stuck once.”

The last thing I want to hear about right now is Mattie’s dead brother—or anything called a crawl space—but that would be mean to say. I can see Mattie measuring the distance between the wall and the furnace, but the truth is she’s too wide in the beam to clear the narrow space.

“I’ll go,” I say, pushing past her. I flatten myself against the stone wall, imagining centipedes and spiders crawling into my hair, and inch my way past the hulking machine. It’s not really that hot; it must have turned off when the electricity went out. Still, I find I don’t want to touch it. It’s greasy and dirty and somehow just . . . bad.

“Thanks a lot, Oren,” I mutter. I hear a muffled sound that could be giggling—or sobbing. Damn. If Oren’s really gotten himself stuck in here he must be scared shitless. “It’s okay, sweetie,” I say, backtracking. “It’s just a smelly old basement. I’m coming to get you out.”

Once I’m past the furnace I can lift my arm and aim the flashlight into the back of the cave. Past the pipes and wires, toward the bottom of the wall, there’s an opening maybe two feet high. The crawl space Mattie mentioned, only you’d have to be a midget to crawl in there. I shine the flashlight into it and the beam catches the glint of eyes. Big, wide, scared little-boy eyes.

“Oh, baby,” I say, crouching down, “how’d you get yourself into such a mess? Here, give me your hand.”

He sobs. Shit. Oren never cries. I put down the flashlight and flatten myself on the cold, wet ground, reaching into the dark. “Take my hand, baby.”

His hand clasps mine. It’s so cold it scares me. How long has he been lying here?

“I’m so sorry, baby,” I say. “I’m sorry I yelled, I’m sorry I didn’t get you away sooner. I promise it will be better from now on. I’m gonna take care of you.”

He squeezes my hand and I feel something cold and hard press into my palm. And then his hand is gone. It’s not like he’s let go; it’s like his flesh just melted away.

“Oren?” I scrabble closer to the hole and sweep my hands inside. There’s nothing there. Could he have crawled in even deeper? I inch back, find the flashlight, and aim it into the hole. The light shines onto a stone wall two or three feet in. I crawl farther in, feeling every inch of the wall for an opening Oren could have slipped through, but there’s no way out of this hole.

In fact, I’m not 100 percent sure I can get out.

Fighting off rising panic, I push my way back. Then I search the rest of the alcove for Oren, but he’s not here.

Maybe I imagined him.

Or maybe that wasn’t Oren.

Suddenly I can’t stand another minute here. I squeeze myself past the furnace and into the basement.

“Did you find him?” Mattie asks. “Is he stuck back there?”

I don’t know what to tell her. Instead I hold out my hand and open it, palm up. Mattie shines her flashlight on my hand and plucks up the cold hard thing he—it?—pressed into my grasp. I had been holding it so tightly that it’s left a pattern imprinted on my flesh, some kind of complicated seal like you see on old buildings and stamped on official papers. It looks kind of familiar. It must be to Mattie too. She’s looking at it like it’s a puzzle piece.

“Where’d you get . . . ,” she begins, but her words are drowned out by a loud grating noise coming from the slanted doors on the other side of the basement. We both turn our flashlights on them in time to see the doors fly open. Snow comes pouring in, then a man’s booted legs appear.

Mattie grabs my hand, pushes me to the side of the stairs, and turns off her flashlight. I turn off mine too, but not before I see Mattie take a gun out of her sweater pocket. As the man comes down the stairs, shining his own flashlight in front of him, Mattie raises the gun over her head. She waits until he reaches the bottom step, then brings the gun down on his head with an audible crunch.

The man falls to his knees, arms flailing, flashlight flying. I hear a thump and a groan, and I thumb on my own flashlight to see Mattie sitting on top of the man, one knee pinning down his right shoulder while she struggles to pull his left arm behind his back.

“There’s a roll of electrical tape on that shelf over there,” she shouts at me.

I find the tape and try to unpeel it, but my hands are shaking too hard. The man is moaning and bucking under Mattie’s weight. Any second now he could get free and come at me. And then what? When Davis hit me I froze. I’d crawl into a ball and pray for it to be over. But here’s middle-aged soft-hearted Mattie fighting like a hellcat.

I force my hands to work and unpeel the dusty end and hand it to Mattie. She wrenches the intruder’s hand back and uses, like, half the roll of tape to wrap both wrists together, then pulls out a knife from her sweater pocket to cut off the tape.

“Do you have an Uzi in there too?” I ask like a smart-ass, trying to sound less scared than I really am.

She barks a laugh and then eases her weight off the man. “Help me roll him over.”

We shove him over like a sack of potatoes. His face is smeared with blood, but I see to my surprise that it’s not Davis. “I could’ve sworn it was Davis in the study,” I say.

“You weren’t wrong, darling.”

The voice—his voice—curdles my stomach. I look up and see Davis on the stairs at the other end of the basement. He’s got a flashlight in one hand, a gun in the other, and a smug, satisfied look on his face.