“I’m an American,” Melissa said. “If you’re an Indian, how come you don’t wear war paint and moccasins?”
“’Cause I’m not on the warpath, that’s why. Anyway, my momma says the Choctaws were peaceful and didn’t like to fight.”
Melissa thought he was cute, but she’d heard strange things about the Creekmores from her parents: that the witch-woman kept jars of bats’ wings, lizard eyes, and graveyard dirt on shelves in her kitchen; that the needlepoint pictures she made were the most intricate anyone had ever seen because demons helped her do them in the dead of night; and that Billy, who looked so much like his mother and not at all like his father, must be tainted with sinful blood too, bubbling in his veins like the red morass in a hag’s stewpot. But whether all that was true or not, Melissa liked him; she wouldn’t let him walk her all the way home, though, for fear her parents might see them together.
They were nearing the place where Melissa turned off onto the path for home. “I’ve got to go now,” Melissa told him. “’Bye!” She cradled her books and walked off along the path, weeds catching at the hem of her dress.
“Good-bye!” Billy called after her. “Thanks for helpin’ with my books!” He thought for a moment that she wouldn’t turn, but then she did—with a sunny smile—and he felt himself melting into his shoes like a grape Popsicle. The sky seemed as big as the world, and as blue as the special plates Gram had made for his mother’s birthday last month. Billy turned in the opposite direction and walked across Kyle Field, heading homeward. He found a dime in his pocket, went into the Quik-Pik store, and bought a Butterfinger, eating it as he walked along the highway. Girlfriend, girlfriend, Billy’s got a girlfriend. Maybe Melissa was his girl friend, he thought suddenly. The heat of shame flamed his face as he thought of magazine covers he’d seen in the grocery store: True Love, Love Stories, and Young Romance. People were always kissing on those covers, getting his attention while he paged through the comic books.
A shadow fell across him. He looked up at the Booker house.
Billy froze. The green house was turning gray, the paint peeling in long strips; the dirty white shutters hung at broken angles around rock-shattered windows. The front door sagged on its binges, and across it was written in red paint, PRIVATE PROPERTY! KEEP OUT! Weeds and vines were creeping up the walls, green clinging vines of the forest reclaiming its territory. Billy thought he caught a soft, muffled sigh on the breeze, and he remembered that sad poem Mrs. Cullens had read to the class once, about the house that nobody lived in; he would have to get his feet moving now, he knew, or soon he’d feel the sadness in the air.
But he didn’t move. He’d promised his daddy, back in January after it had happened, that he wouldn’t go near this house, wouldn’t stop in front of it just as he was doing now. He’d kept that promise for over three months, but he passed the Booker house twice a day on the walk to and from school and he’d found himself being drawn closer and closer to it, only a step or so at a time. Standing right in front of it, its shadow cast over him like a cold sheet, was the closest he’d ever come. His curiosity was tempting him to climb those steps to the front porch. He was sure there were mysteries waiting to be solved in that house, that when he stepped inside and looked for himself all the puzzling things about why Mr. Booker had gone crazy and hurt his family would be revealed like a magician’s trick.
His mother had tried to explain to him about Death, that the Bookers had “passed away” to another place and that Will had probably “passed away” too, but no one knew exactly where his body lay sleeping. She said he was most likely asleep back in the forest somewhere, lying on a bed of dark green moss, his head cradled on a pillow of decaying leaves, white mushrooms sprouting around him like tiny candles to reassure him against the dark.
Billy climbed two of the steps and stood staring at the front door. He’d promised his daddy he wouldn’t go in! he agonized, but he didn’t step down. It seemed to him to be like the story of Adam and Eve his daddy had read to him several times; he wanted to be good and live in the Garden, but this house—the murder house, everybody called it—was the Forbidden Fruit of Knowledge about how and why Will Booker had been called away by the Lord, and where Will had “passed away” to. He shivered on the hard edge of a decision.
Sometimes it seemed that when he’d tried to walk past this house without looking at it he could hear a soft, yearning sound through the trees that always made him look up; sometimes he imagined he heard his name whispered, and once he thought he’d seen a small figure standing behind one of the broken windows, waiting for him to pass. Know what I heard? Johnny Parker had asked him just a few days ago. The Booker house is full of ghosts! My daddy says for me not to play around there, ’cause at night people see funny lights and they hear screams! Old man Keller told my daddy Mr. Booker cut Katy’s head off and set it on a bedpost, and my daddy thinks Mr. Booker hacked Will up into little pieces and scattered him all over the woods!…
Will was my best friend, Billy thought; there’s nothing in that house that would hurt me… Just one look, his curiosity urged.
He gazed off along the highway, thinking about his father busy at work in the cornfield, tending the new spring shoots. Just one look. Billy laid his books down on the steps. He climbed up and stood before the sagging door, his heartbeat quickening; the door had never looked so massive before, the inside of the house never so dark and full of mysteries. The Adam and Eve story flashed through his mind, like one last chance at turning back; Once you sin, he thought, once you go where you’re not supposed to, you can never go back to the way it was before; once you step out of the Garden and into the Dark, it’s too late…
A bluejay shrieked, scaring him almost right out of his shoes. He thought he heard his name called in a hushed sigh of breath, and he listened hard but didn’t hear it again. Momma’s callin’ me from the house, he told himself, ’cause I’m already so late. I’m gonna get a whippin’! He glanced to his left, at the ragged hole where the troopers had searched for Will under the porch. Then he grasped the door’s edge and pulled it partway open. The bottom of the door scraped across the porch like a scream, and dry dusty air came roiling out of the house into his face.
Once you step out of the Garden, and into the Dark…
He took a deep breath of stale air and stepped across the threshold into the murder house.
8
THE FRONT ROOM WAS huge, barely recognizable, because all the furniture had been hauled away. The Last Supper picture and the mounted fish were gone too, and yellowed newspaper pages covered the floor. Vines had crept through the cracks in the windows, snaking up toward the ceiling; Billy’s gaze followed one of them, and stopped abruptly at a large mottled brown stain on the ceiling just above where he thought the sofa had been. The house was full of deep green, shadowy light, and seemed a secretive, terribly lonely place. Spider webs clung to the corners, and two wasps flew about seeking a secure place to start a nest. Nature was at work tearing the Booker house back to its basic elements.
When Billy crossed the room to the hallway, his shoes stirred up a few of the newspaper pages, exposing a horrible blotched brown patch on the floorboards. Billy carefully covered the stain back over again. When he walked into the hallway spider webs clutched at his hair, sending chills up his spine. What had been Mr. and Mrs. Booker’s bedroom was bare but for a broken chair and more newspapers across the floor; in Will and Katy’s room brown flecks and streaks marred the walls as if someone had fired paint from a shotgun. Billy got out of that room quickly, because his heart had suddenly given a violent kick and he’d had trouble getting his breath. The house was silent, but seemed alive with imagined noises: the creaks and sighs of a house continuing to settle into the earth. Billy heard the high whining of the saws at work, the barking of a dog in the distance, a screen door slam shut, sounds carried far on the warm spring air.
In the kitchen Billy found a garbage can filled with an odd assortment of items: hair curlers, ice trays, a
reel of fishing line and a snapped pole, comic books and newspapers, brown-smeared rags, cracked cups and dishes, coat hangers, a pair of gray Keds that had belonged to Will, and a crumpled sack of Bama Dog Chow.
Sadness gripped his heart. This is all that’s left of the Bookers, Billy thought, and placed his hand against the can’s cool rim. Where was the life that had been here? he wondered desperately. He didn’t understand Death, and felt a terrible sense of loneliness sweep over him like a January wind. The leaves of the snakelike vines that had found their way through the broken kitchen windows seemed to rattle a warning at him—Get out get out get out…before it’s too late.
Billy turned and hurried along the hallway, glancing back over his shoulder to make sure the bloated corpse of Mr. Booker wasn’t following, armed with a shotgun, grinning and wearing his yellow cap with the fishhooks in it.
Tears of fear burned his eyes. Spider webs caught at his face and hair, and as he passed the door that led down to the basement, something cracked sharply against the other side.
He yelped and flung himself backward, pressing against the opposite wall and staring at the doorknob, expecting it to…slowly…turn; but it never did. He looked toward the front door, getting ready to run before whatever haunted this murder house sprang up from the basement after him.
Then: bump! Silence. Billy’s eyes widened, and he heard a low bubbling of fear deep in his throat.
Bump!
When it happened a third time, he realized what was causing the noise: someone was hitting the door with pebbles of coal from the large mound that lay down there, near the furnace.
There was a long silence. Billy said, “Who’s there?”
And then there was a hail of noise, as if a flurry of coal had been thrown in response to Billy’s voice. It went on and on, until Billy clapped his hands to his ears; then it abruptly stopped. “Whoever you are, you’re not supposed to be in this house!” Billy called out. “It’s private property!” He tried to sound braver than he was.
Slowly, he placed his hand on the cold knob; something pulsed into him like a mild charge of electricity, enough to make his arm buzz. Then he shoved the door open and protectively pressed against the opposite wall again. The basement was as dark as a cave, oozing a cold and oily odor. “I’ll call Sheriff Bromley!” Billy warned. Nothing moved down there, and now he realized there were no pieces of coal littering the top few steps at all. Maybe they’d all fallen off, or bounced back down to the floor, he reasoned. But now he had the cold and certain feeling that the heart of the mystery—what had drawn him into this house, only a step or so a day for over three months—beat in the silence of the Bookers’ basement. He garnered up his courage—Nothing in here that can hurt me!—and stepped into the darkness.
A few shards of muted gray light filtered through small, dirty panes of glass. The bulk of the furnace was like a scorched metal Halloween mask; and standing near it was a mountain of darkly glittering coal. Billy reached the bottom of the steps and stood on the red-clay floor. A shovel was propped against the wall near him, its triangular head giving it the look of a snake about to strike. Billy avoided it, and as he walked closer to the coal pile, one tentative step at a time, he thought he could see the faint blue plume of his breath before him. It was much colder here than in the house. His arms were sprouting goose bumps, and the hair at the back of his neck was standing on end.
Billy stood a few feet away from the coal pile, which towered over him by several feet, as his eyes grew used to the dim light. He could see almost all the shadowed nooks and crannies of the basement now, and he was almost certain that he was alone. Still… He called out in a shaky voice, “Anybody here?”
No, he thought, nobody’s here. Then who made that noise on the door?…
His brain froze in middthought. He was staring at the coal pile, and he’d seen it shudder.
Bits of coal, a tiny avalanche, streamed down the sides; it seemed to breathe like a laboring bellows. Run! he screamed inwardly. But his gaze was fixed on the coal pile and his feet were glued to the ground. Something was coming up out of the coal—perhaps the dark key to a mystery, or grinning Mr. Booker in his yellow cap, or the very essence of Evil itself coming to carry him to Hell.
And suddenly a small white hand clawed itself free from the top of the coal pile, perhaps three feet above Billy’s head. An arm and shoulder followed, slowly working out and writhing in the air. Rivulets of coal rolled down and over Billy’s sneakers. A small head broke free, and the ghastly, tormented face of Will Booker turned toward his friend, the sightless white eyes peering down with desperate terror.
The gray-lipped mouth straggled to form words. “Billy”—the voice was an awful, pleading whine—“tell them where I am, Billy…tell them where I am…”
A wail ripped from Billy’s throat, and he scrabbled up the basement stairs like a frantic crab. Behind him, he heard the coal pile shifting and groaning as if gathering itself to chase after him. He fell in the hallway, struggled wildly up, heard a scream like a neglected teakettle spouting hot steam filling the house as he burst onto the front porch and ran, ran, ran, forgetting his books on the porch steps, ran, forgetting everything but the horror that lay in the Bookers’ basement, ran home screaming all the way.
9
JOHN QUIETLY OPENED THE bedroom door and peered in. The boy was still lying huddled beneath the quilt, his face pressed against a pillow, but at least he wasn’t making those awful whimpering sounds anymore. In a way, though, the silence was worse. Billy had sobbed himself sick for almost an hour, since coming home twenty minutes late from school. John thought he’d never forget the white expression of fear stamped on his son’s face.
They’d put him in the bedroom, since it was much more comfortable than the cot and he could be quiet in here. As John watched, Billy shivered beneath the quilt and mumbled something that sounded like “cold, in the cold.” John stepped inside, arranged the quilt a little more snugly because he thought Billy had felt a chill, and then realized his son’s eyes were wide open, staring fixedly into a corner of the room.
John eased down on the side of the bed. “How you feelin’?” he asked softly; he touched Billy’s forehead, even though Ramona had told him Billy didn’t have a fever and didn’t seem physically ill. They’d taken off his clothes and checked him thoroughly for the double punctures of a snakebite, knowing how he liked to ramble through dark corners of the forest, but they’d found nothing.
“Want to talk about it now?”
Billy shook his head.
“Your momma’s about to put supper on the table. You feel like eatin’?”
The boy whispered something, and John thought it sounded like “Butterfinger.” “Huh? What do you want, a candy bar? We’re havin’ sweet potatoes, will that do?” When Billy didn’t reply, but stared straight ahead with such intensity that John was beginning to feel uneasy, John squeezed the boy’s shoulder through the quilt and said, “When you feel like talkin’ about it, I’ll listen.” Then John rose from the bed, feeling sure Billy had just stumbled onto a snake up in the woods and he’d be more careful next time, and went to the kitchen, where Ramona was laboring over a woodburning stove. The kitchen was filled with late afternoon sunlight and smelled of fresh vegetables from several pots on the stove.
“Is he any better?” Ramona asked.
“He’s quieted down some. What did he say to you when he first came in?”
“Nothing. He couldn’t talk, he was sobbing so hard. I just picked him up and held him, and then you came in from the field.”
“Yeah,” John said grimly. “I saw his face. I’ve seen sun-bleached sheets that had more color in ’em. I can’t figure out what he might’ve gotten into.” He sighed and ran a hand through his hair.
“I think he’ll want to sleep for a while. When he wants to talk about it, he’ll let us know.”
“Yeah. Know what he said he wanted? A Butterfinger, of all crazy things!” He paused, watching his wife take plat
es out of the cupboard and set them on the small dinner table, and then jingled the few loose coins in his pocket. “Maybe I’ll drive down to the store to get him one before they close up. Might ease his mind. That suit you?”
She nodded. “I’ll have your supper on the table in ten minutes.”
John took the car keys from his pocket and left the house. Ramona stood over the stove until she heard the engine start and car pull away. Then she took the pots off their burners, checked the corn muffins, and hurried into the bedroom, wiping her callused hands on her apron. Her eyes were shining like polished amber stones as she stood over the bed, staring down at her son. Softly, she said, “Billy?”
He stirred but did not answer. She laid a hand on his cheek. “Billy? We’ve got to talk. Quickly, before your father comes back.”
“No…” he whimpered, his mouth pressed against the pillow.
“I want to know where you went. I want to know what happened. Billy, please look at me.”
After a few seconds he turned his head so he could see her from the corner of a swollen eye; he was still shaking with sobs he was too weak to let go of.
“I think you went someplace where your daddy didn’t want you to go. Didn’t you? I think you went to the Booker house.” The boy tensed. “If not inside it, then very close to it. Is that right?”
Billy shivered, his hands gripping at the covers. New tears broke over his cheeks, and like a dam bursting everything came flooding out of him at once. He cried forlornly, “I didn’t mean to go in there, I promise I didn’t! I wasn’t bad! But I heard… I heard… I heard it in the basement and I… I had to go see what it was and it was…it was…awful!” His face contorted with agony and Ramona reached for him, hugging him close. She could feel his heartbeat racing in his chest.