*****
Vicky rode back with one of our friends from the old neighborhood. I’m sure she was glad to get back to our kids, and to the comfort of her mother and father in that old house. I took John home that afternoon because he was happier by himself and because we just didn’t have the ability to care for him if something happened. He needed to be in his apartment with the assisted living nurses and staff only moments away. We didn’t speak much on the drive and once I had him inside and settled in his favorite chair, he turned on his television and stared at it blankly.
“If you need us, please call,” I said as I stood in the doorway, about to leave.
He waved me on without looking at me. And why shouldn’t he ignore me? His wife and children dropped like flies around him. I was all he had left.
That was my last thought as I drove back to my wife. Back to my children, forever reminders of Sean and of Robin…reminders of Matt and Danny. Reminders of that night in that old farm house in the plowed-under cornfield.
I barely remember walking into the Rutledge’s living room and kissing her. I barely remember hugging my boy or the baby. I barely remember telling her I was going back to the grave because I wanted to talk to Danny for a while and that I wanted to be alone but that’s exactly what I did.
I stopped at the drugstore and I bought a fifth bottle of Jack Daniels, just like that night back in high school, and I sat in the cemetery between my sister’s grave and my brother’s new grave and I drank. I drank like I remembered seeing John drink, tossing it back without a care. Swallowing huge gulps as if it was iced tea or lukewarm water.
“You two don’t know what it’s been like,” I said and I drank. “You, especially, Robin. You don’t have the nightmares or the stress. The wonder or the worry.”
They didn’t answer me. Of course they didn’t answer me. Why should they? Only nasty ghosts in old drafty farm houses and bloody corpses ever showed themselves to the living. Another swig. I figured if I consumed enough of that bottle, I’d see all kinds of shit.
“I wish I could take it back,” I said. “If I could, I would go back to that night and I would take it all back.”
I must’ve said that a hundred times as I found those tears I’d been missing and cried over their graves. I don’t know how much liquor it took before I finally heard those words and believed them.
I would go back to that night and I would take it all back.
I left the bottle, actually kicked it over on its side as I stood up. It was still half full and as I walked away from those graves, the liquid drained into the soft ground. At first I don’t think I knew where it was I was headed. I’m not even sure how many miles it was back to the old neighborhood from the cemetery, but I left the car parked along the winding path that ran through the graveyard. That might be the only smart thing I did that evening. As my feet found the hard pavement of old US 49 and I walked along the white line at its shoulder, my mind focused and my heart hardened. Not hatred anymore. I think it was fear, but fear of further loss was worse than anything that I might find when I got…wherever it was I was going.
I passed the home of my in-laws, the Chambers’ house where my family was staying, and I passed my old house. I passed the spot on the road where Robin went to meet the afterlife. Then, I came to the spot where we had all ducked through the hole in that old wire fence. The hole was gone, but so was the rest of the wire in that section. It had rusted to pieces and only the old wooden posts it was stapled to still stood.
The neighborhood that now filled the cornfield was new. Fresh cut roads and only the skeletons of houses yet to be skinned and lived in stood in neat rows. Stacks of pipes and marking flags littered the grassless lots. I passed several in my still inebriated state and for a moment, it was a cornfield again. The wind was beating against a thirteen-year-old me and my siblings and my friends and all we could see in the distance was the one house. The Russian House. I was as determined that evening as I had been that night some twenty-five years earlier. Then, it all faded into the present.
The house in front of me when I stopped walking wasn’t a broken down saltbox with loose boards and broken windows. It was a two story custom home freshly built and it looked like many of the other homes in the neighborhood. The house was nothing but two-by-fours and plywood with a roof overhead. The outside was wrapped but not finished, and the front door was open. A piece of 14-3 wire was tied through the hole in place of its yet-to-be-selected doorknob so the workers could get in and out easily.
I looked around the place for a while before walking inside. It sat in the same spot as the old ruins. In my head, their footprints matched. The alcohol still swirled and I felt its numbing effect on my extremities as I walked onto the concrete porch and tugged on the wire to open the front door. The foyer led past what might have been a formal living room or a dining room and into another large open area, there was plumbing there for a kitchen. The plywood floors were covered with paint splatters and drops of joint compound. The sheetrock that wasn’t already on the walls was stacked in one corner, protected from most of the elements. It was dark inside, even with the setting sun in the back windows.
That room felt right. Well…it actually felt wrong—felt sick—as if the house itself was infected, but that was what I was looking for. The same pit-of-my-stomach wrong I’d experienced the last time I stood in that place. The house had changed, but its presence was all too familiar. All too cold. I felt sorry for whoever was going to purchase and move into that place.
“I’m here,” I said, slurring slightly. “I said, ‘I’m here.’ You hear me, Nataliya?”
I waited to see if something would happen. A thump or a slamming door, maybe a breeze through the house even though the brand new windows and even the front door with its wire handle were shut. It was silent, but the pit-of-my-stomach knot was still there, weighing heavy on my guts.
“You took everything from me!” I shouted and stomped my foot.
The thud echoed through what must’ve been a basement. It wasn’t true. She hadn’t taken everything. I still had my family, but I wasn’t thinking with that much clarity. I spun looking for a door that might’ve led down to a lower level. I reasoned if there was a demon in that house, she’d be as close to hell as she could get.
The door was one of two in the kitchen area. The first one I checked was a pantry or maybe a coat closet. The one next to it opened to a set of steps going into the basement. I pulled the Zippo lighter from my pocket and clicked it open, snapping its flame to life. As I descended the steps, the concrete wall in front of me flickered like the background of an old zoetrope image. I half expected a massive shadow to grow in the Zippo’s pale light and swallow me up.
It eats.
At the bottom of the stairs, the knot in my stomach grew larger, heavier and I felt as if I might vomit. It didn’t matter to me. Once I was out of that house, if I made it out, I wouldn’t ever go back. If I didn’t make it out, it wouldn’t matter either. Nataliya’s deed would be done, her collection complete. I wondered if there were others in her menagerie, if she’d preyed on other children who’d dared play games and summon her, and if I might meet them all one day in hell. If I might then collect some unsuspecting souls of my own.
“You hear me, Nataliya Koslov?” I shouted. “I felt sorry for you once, but after what you did? Now…now, I hate you.”
Again, I waited for something to happen, for the concrete to crack so devils could ride out, saddled to the backs of hellhounds…ride out and capture me. Instead, it remained quiet and cool—the damp atmosphere only a concrete room could provide. It wasn’t a full basement, only about the size of a two-car garage, and it was completely unfinished. Instead of beams or walls, the main floor was held aloft by several screw-type floor jacks. There was nothing down there but me.
“I hate you!” I repeated and I followed with, “I can’t lose anything else. Just take me and be done.”
I just want to make sure you aren’t
going to do anything…anything stupid. There are lots of people counting on you.
“I’m sorry, Vicky,” I whispered.
Her words rang in my head again and I ignored them. I wasn’t going to kill myself but that didn’t mean Nataliya wouldn’t…and I didn’t think what I was asking for was stupid, not if it meant peace for my family.
I dropped to the floor and cried into my hands. It took ten or more huge sobbing gulps of air before I could speak again, but when I opened my eyes, the room was dark. The lighter had blown out, so after catching my breath, I flicked the wheel against the flint and lit it again. Then I set it carefully on the floor in front of me so it would balance on its flat bottom. It stayed lit and I stared at it. I watched it dance and straighten and dance and straighten.
Looking into that flame, I heard my sister’s voice, then Danny’s and Sean’s. Matt came next. We were discussing the Russian House. Everything vanished from my senses except the flame and the voices of my friends. They were hushing each other and giggling.
“You know what you’re doing now?” Robin asked.
“Smartass. I got it now,” Sean said. “You’re supposed to face west. I don’t know why.”
Then he said, “She looks ill.”
“She looks worse,” Matt said.
“I think she’s dying,” Danny said.
“I think she’s dead,” I said. I’m not sure if it was just in my memory, or if I actually said it aloud, but it didn’t matter. I continued to focus on the flame of the lighter, which substituted for the pack of Mrs. Chambers’ Christmas candles that we’d stolen that night so many years ago.
“Here lies the body of Robin McNeill. She passed away at the age of six,” Sean said.
We all repeated the phrase.
“A car took her life on the old mill road, and when they found her she was light as a feather and stiff as a board,” he said.
I closed my eyes and squeezed them tight.
“Light as a feather, stiff as a board,” Matt, Danny and I said in perfect unison.
“Light as a feather, stiff as a board,” Sean said and we repeated.
The room went cold, colder than it had been, and it was absolutely silent. I don’t know what I had heard before, whether it was the wind outside, or a chorus of crickets, or cars driving in the distance. All I know is the sound that was there before, was gone. Any warmth that was there before was gone, and when I opened my eyes, the flame was out again. There was some light in the basement, but it wasn’t coming from my Zippo. It was coming from behind me.
“Light as a feather and stiff as a board,” I said and turned around.
When I did, she was there. Nataliya Koslov stood behind me giving off a blue luminance that made me think of a child’s night light. She was smaller than I remembered from that night in 1981. Her ghost was still a child and I was an adult. That fact made me less scared…nothing like that night when I was thirteen, but I still felt uneasy.
She muttered something that sounded like preena-shoes-kri-me a iz-vee- my-knee-ya.
“What? What the hell did you just say?”
“Приношу искренние извинения.” She said it again.
“Shoes? Knees? I don’t understand you,” I said. “I felt sorry for you. I felt sorry and wanted to help you. I felt sorry because your father was abusive and my father was abusive and I thought maybe I could help, but you…you monster…you killed my sister. My brother. My friends.”
I trailed off as she watched me. The last words may not have even been intelligible but it didn’t matter. Her expression stayed morose and blank and I knew she didn’t understand.
I tried to regain calm, calm so she wouldn’t turn into that thing again. That horrible thing I’d seen at the first game. That horrible laughing thing I’d seen when Danny burned. I took a deep breath and stood up. She didn’t move, but just stood there.
“Приношу искренние извинения,” she said.
I shook my head.
“You killed my family, my friends. Killed them all. Do you understand what you did?”
She stared at me. Her eyes were mere hollows in a pale face. Her hair hung down in strands and she looked dirty even though she was glowing. Her clothes were patched. She didn’t float like I remembered, but simply stood there. She appeared almost solid, like I could touch her, but when my anger peaked and I lunged forward, my hands out to choke her…I went right through.
I could feel her around me, like I’d walked through a mist or a cobweb, and what went into my nose and mouth had the faint odor of death. Her form darted to another place a couple feet to my left and reintegrated. She still looked withdrawn, small and sad.
“Приношу искренние извинения.”
I felt my lower lip quiver, and a fluttering in my belly and I started to cry again. Nataliya watched.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying to me. I wish you spoke English.” I pleaded with my eyes, hoping something might trigger a response. “Do you speak English?”
It felt silly, the whole situation. Silly and pointless to be talking to a ghost, something only a handful of people had claimed to ever do in history, and we couldn’t communicate because we spoke different languages.
“Todd,” another voice said.
I thought it was Nataliya, somehow speaking to me. It wasn’t. I knew the voice, but I hadn’t heard it in decades. It was Robin.
“Todd, Nataliya didn’t kill me,” she said.
I shook my head as her spirit appeared next to the Russian girl’s. My sister, whole again…or almost. Her apparition had scars on its face, on her neck and her scalp, but she was whole, healed, and she smiled at me.
“My God, Robin?” I said.
“Todd. She didn’t kill me.”
“You’re not real,” I said. “She’s doing this. She killed you and Danny and Matt…maybe even Sean. She killed all of you and some day she’ll kill me, too.”
“That’s not true, bro,” Matt said and he appeared to the left of Nataliya’s ghost.
Matt was scarred as well, covered in grafted skin just like a burn victim. He was also smiling.
“She didn’t kill anyone,” he said.
Robin nodded.
“Lies!” I shouted. “Why are you all lying to me?”
Danny and Sean came next, and then I was surrounded. Danny was scarred just like Matt. Sean had a healed gash in his neck. They closed in on me like an intervention.
Something’s been bothering us Todd and we’re all here to talk to you about it.
“Lying,” I said, losing steam, my eyes darting from specter to specter.
“We’re not lying, Todd,” Danny said. “Let her show you. She showed us.”
“No,” I said.
“Let her show you, man,” Matt said.
“Todd, it’s not what you think…and it isn’t coincidence. We just had tragic lives, the five of us. Maybe that’s why we all became friends. Maybe that’s why we came together out here that night…but it wasn’t Nataliya. She just showed us our fates. She showed us because she was trying to be helpful. She’s just a child,” Danny said.
“What kind of help is that? Murder? Murder is help?”
“It wasn’t murder. It was just our time. We all died as we were meant to…and so will you when your time comes.”
I couldn’t comprehend what was happening.
“Let her show you,” Robin said.
I cried, looking at my little sister. I fell to my knees and I cried.
“Let her, Todd. It will be all right,” she said.
I looked at Nataliya and she was smiling. She nodded reassuringly. My eyes moved from hers to the others, one by one. Each of them did the same. After a deep breath, I blew out a lung full of air and shrugged.
Nataliya’s sunken eyes widened. She swirled into a misty form and flew at me. I shouted and tried to move, but it was too late, the stink of death was on me, and I felt her spider web p
resence on my skin, as if I’d been wrapped in her silk. The strangest sensation was in my head. There was a pressure there, like a headache, but it wasn’t painful, and for a moment, I felt as if I was fighting the puppeteer for control of my own body. I struggled, but then…
“Todd McNeill,” I heard.
A girl’s voice. A girl with a Russian accent. It was in my head and it was dreamlike.
“Close eyes, Todd. I show you what you want to know.”
They weren’t words exactly…more like concepts that I translated as I saw them in my head. The basement was gone from my vision, and instead was replaced with her house again. Not the one we entered for our little game in 1981, but when it was new, hand built by her father in the early 1800s and when Nataliya was still alive.