The Birthing House Page 11

  ‘How’s your pasta?’

  ‘It’s great.’ She picked up her fork for the first time.

  ‘Really? Because you’re not eating any.’

  She set her fork down. He saw that her hands were shaking.It made him nervous that she was nervous.

  ‘We don’t have to stay,’ he said. ‘We could pretend it never happened, go to a movie.’

  ‘What? No, Connie.’ She was the only one who ever called him that, before or since. ‘If someone comes home we can always say my mom sent us to house-sit.’

  ‘You think they’ll believe that?’ He had been listening for a garage door clunking to life or the rattle of keys and lock.

  Holly smiled. ‘So we went to the wrong house. What are they going to do? Arrest us?’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe worse.’

  ‘They’re sixty-five.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I checked them out. He’s a retired doctor. She’s a teacher, kindergarten. Half-days. The kids are out of college and out of state.’

  ‘You’re like a detective now.’

  She shrugged and sipped more wine.

  ‘What is it, then? My cooking?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m just . . . kinda freaking out,’ she said. ‘About what’s going to happen next year.’

  He suddenly saw the whole thing collapsing. Tonight was too much, they’d gone as far as they could go. She had decided to call the whole thing off before she went away to college, before it got too close and too bad.

  ‘Are you having doubts about me, about us?’

  ‘Connie! No. Don’t look at me that way.’ She ran around and wedged herself between the table and his lap. ‘We’re perfect,’ she said, kissing his neck. ‘I just want this to be special. So we never forget.’

  ‘Of course it’s special. It’s always special.’

  ‘But tonight is different. I want it to be just us.’

  ‘Who else is there?’

  ‘No one, silly. But later, I don’t want . . . you don’t have to, you know, use anything between us.’

  He thought about that. Since the beginning he had used condoms. They were smart enough to know that, as often as they ‘got beastly’ (her term), 97 per cent effective was 3 per cent very likely.

  ‘Really?’ he said, not really understanding.

  She put her mouth around his ear. ‘I want to feel everything. I want you to feel everything.’ She pulled her mouth off and smacked him loudly on the cheek. ‘It’s the natural way to fly, sweetie.’

  ‘Want me to clear the table? It’s a nice table.’

  ‘It’s not big enough.’ She was already walking away. ‘Finish your dinner and don’t come back here for at least twenty minutes.’

  ‘Where’s here again?’ he said.

  ‘The big room down the hall. Promise to wait?’

  ‘I promise.’

  She went down the long hall past the slate foyer and disappeared into the master suite.

  He had always been an imaginative son, and now he imagined all manner of sport and pastime awaiting him in this new space. But he could not see that by following his love into this house he had also set in motion its inevitable murder.

  16

  Untold hours after falling asleep on top of the covers with Luther and Alice curled at his feet, Match Point playing quietly on the bedroom DVD-TV rig, Conrad woke alone to the sound of a baby crying. It was the same choking, newborn ack-ack-ayyyych sound from weeks ago, and he knew it was not the movie he’d left on because now there was only the eerie blue screen with the DVD format logo.

  He turned on the lamp and looked to their crate beds on the floor, but the dogs weren’t there, either. The baby’s crying quieted to a tired, tapering sigh and then stopped. Or left. He did not think it was coming from the street or a house next door; it had trailed off the other way, toward the rear of the house.

  In its place he heard a scratching, the sound of a garden rake pulling on a thick lawn. There were three methodical scratches and then a pause, three or four more and another pause. The sounds were coming to him from the hall.

  If it’s another doll I’ll just stomp the fucker to pieces, he thought, walking out of the master bedroom. One of the dogs whined. He couldn’t tell which, but they usually roamed in tandem. The scratching came again, from the spare bedroom adjacent to the master, the one Nadia’d been in the day he toured the house.

  Feeling relieved but still on edge, Conrad shuffled down the dark hall, wishing he’d remembered to buy some nightlights at Wal-Mart.

  The door was closed. Conrad pictured his dogs in the room, doggishly wondering how the door had closed behind them. Or maybe they were standing at the window, tails erect, the fur on their napes stiff and bristling at something that had startled them from outside.

  Conrad opened the door and patted around for the light switch. He could see their outlines. They were hunched over the floor at the center of the room, backs arched, snouts pressed to the carpet, digging as if he were not even there.

  Whatever it was, it had been compelling enough for them to nose the futon aside to get to the floor - he could see its bulky frame in shadow off to one side.

  His hand found the switch plate and swept up. Golden light shot through the dusty glass bowl full of dead flies and other winged insects. The dogs looked up at him in surprise, their eyes dilated black orbs, then returned in unison to their buried treasure.

  Conrad squinted. The carpet and padding had been peeled back like the skin of an animal, exposing floorboards like ribs.

  ‘Luther! Alice, quit that!’ And they did, but they didn’t look happy about it.

  The hole was jagged from their labors - they had cleared a respectable three-foot circle before he had stopped them. The boards were not the same color as the rest of the floorboards in the library and the hall. These planks were an unnatural shade of chocolate, marbled like steaks. The plum color ran against the grain and was deeper in some places, lighter in others. Near the border of the hole he saw a patch of lighter wood, the natural color of pine.

  Then he understood. He wasn’t looking at painted wood.

  He was looking at a stain.

  It looked as though someone had spilled a bucket of brown paint and never bothered to clean it up. No, not paint either. Spilled paint dries in thick, opaque blotches. He could just make out the wood grain beneath the blotches.

  A delicate breeze passed through the window he’d opened days ago in a stubborn attempt to cool the house without turning on the a/c. The wind brought with it a smell he could not immediately place. It was musky, like blood only stronger - the scent of a woman’s menstruation.

  His mind leaped to a shameful memory, to a teen Conrad who had on a whim inspected his girlfriend’s panties while she, Holly, was in the shower. He had seen them lying next to her dresser, underneath the jeans she had been wearing less than twenty minutes before. Mistaking them for the same pair she’d been wearing when the rumpus began, he had picked them up and felt the stiffness of the fabric. Not really conscious of his need to know, he had pressed his nose to the brown stain in the crotch and sniffed, then cast them aside with a strange mixture of guilt, sympathy and revulsion. It had lasted less than a second, but the smell remained hidden in whatever part of the male brain that records such things, storing it for some potential future biological imperative. This scent filling the air now wasn’t Holly’s, but it was from the same place. The same essence.

  It felt like a warning.

  Or evidence.

  He knelt between the dogs and stopped his nose six inches from contact. It had not been such a bad smell then, in Holly’s bedroom; just another aspect of her he still found fascinating. But here, in such quantity, in his house, marking the floor like a long forgotten murder scene, the scent sparked in his imagination and

  (Greer Laski and her mutant children all of them deformed born here in the birthing house)

  made him gag.

  Conrad reeled to his feet and t
urned away. He coughed, putting a hand on the door to steady himself. When the worst had passed, he rubbed his tee shirt over his face. He was sweating and it suddenly felt twenty degrees hotter in here, even with the summer breeze.

  Wanting nothing more than to be out of the room and away from the stain, maybe as far as the couch downstairs for the rest of the night, Conrad opened his mouth to command the dogs out . . . but no words came. His throat locked up and held his breath hostage, silencing him while the baby cried out, louder than before, much too loud, and his chest suffered an invisible blow that sent shockwaves through his heart and lungs. He was sure the baby’s coughing panic was coming from his own mouth - it sounded that close.

  The dogs jumped back and began barking savagely up at the ceiling. Conrad’s spine tingled from his neck to his tailbone. His stomach somersaulted and he swayed on his feet. While the dogs continued gnashing at the air between the three of them, the room jumped another ten degrees in the span of perhaps three seconds and Conrad broke into a hot, slippery sweat. Red blotches in the corners of his eyes, pinholes of black dancing in the air, darkness closing in.

  The baby wailed and he was certain that if he did not leave this room, soon, he would die.

  But he could not move. His legs and lower back cramped, hunching him into a ball. The futon in the corner snapped open and began to shake, a vague image of a table overlapping the futon and its frame. In flashes he saw the shadow of a long body, the raven-haired sepia woman who was but wasn’t Jo, stripped naked and bathed in sweat as he was. Her body shone in the light, and her mouth was open wide, her scar pinched in a crooked snarl as her head thrashed from side to side. Her teeth chopped at the air as if unseen hands were wrestling her down. Her belly was enormous, a shining white globe rivered with blue veins. Below the navel he glimpsed the glistening pelt of her mound and it was with another kind of shame he felt his arousal quicken. Her hips thrust and bucked but she could not escape the invisible hands that pinned her to the table. She slid around its black leather surface and he tried to scream.

  Pulses of light scorched his retinas and his jaw popped, trying to pull air into his burning lungs. He could not see the baby, but it was here, crying like it was being jabbed by cold hands and colder metal instruments. Invisible blades jabbed into his ribs, against his temples and shoulders as Conrad and the baby tried to survive some unknowable assault.

  The woman on the table howled in agony, sending a mist of spittle up at her invisible assailants before she was slammed down one final time. Having lost the battle for good, she faced him and that is when he realized she had no face. Above her lips peeled over her teeth there was only a formless white slate of flesh.

  The barking ack-ack-ACK ratcheted up into a primal howl and it hurt his ears, bored into his brains. Luther and Alice were full-on fighting now, gnashing at each other’s throats in anger and confusion.

  ‘Help! Help!’ Conrad choked, losing consciousness as one of the dogs turned on him. There was a dull moment when something punctured Conrad’s hand, and his mind’s eye saw a freshly sharpened pencil stabbing clean through the soft meat between his thumb and forefinger. Then the wound lit up his brain, sending a signal flare of white-hot pain that cleared his vision in an instant. Conrad jerked his hand but it was stuck in something wet, and for a horrible second he was sure the floor had opened up and bit him. He saw a drop of blood, fat and heavy as paraffin in a lava lamp, floating in the air. Luther shook his head from side to side and only then did Conrad realize his dog had bitten him, was still biting him, clamped down on his hand bones and did not want to let go.

  Conrad’s throat clicked loose and he yelled. Luther cowered on his hindquarters as if a bolt of lightning had just gone off in the front yard. Conrad’s hand slipped free and Jackson Pollacked the floor as he drew it back and wrapped it in his sweat-soaked tee shirt. And then the faceless thrashing woman was gone and the table was just a futon and he was here with the dogs, his knees buckling as he fell to the shredded carpet.

  ‘Out! Get out!’ This time they obeyed, bolting down the hall. He stood trembling with his hand curled inside the bloody shirt. The pungency that had been in his mouth and down his throat had been replaced by the sweet scent of fresh mowed grass.

  He elbowed the light off, pulled the door shut with his good hand and backed away, the sweat all over his body cooling rapidly. He was shivering and very thirsty. He nearly went to fetch his beloved iced tea, but the pain in his hand became real and he hurried to the bathroom before he could bleed to death, freeing the woman on the table to come back for him.

  17

  Black Earth counted fewer than twenty-eight hundred souls among its population, leaving approximately one tavern, bar, pub, supper club or other drinking establishment for every one hundred or so people. Take away the minors, the recovered, the immobile elders and the infirm, and it should not have been too difficult to find the red-faced Laski.

  Conrad started at the top of Main Street and hit them all, seeking the older crowds, the blue-collar guys who came in at five and left a stack of cash for the bartender to chip away at until it was gone.

  ‘You know Leon Laski?’ he would ask the bartenders. Most said yes, but he wasn’t a regular. ‘Tell him Conrad Harrison is looking for him.’

  ‘Whatever you say,’ they would say.

  Conrad moved on.

  On the second afternoon he was at the Decatur Room nursing his fourth Bud longneck, feeling the cool bottle against the hole in his hand - it wasn’t really a hole any more; it was, in fact, healing rather quickly - when the former owner of 818 Heritage Street walked in. Same work pants and long sleeves as before, plaster-white dust or paint speckles dotting his hands, neck and ears.

  Laski took a Miller from the bartender, an attractive skunk blonde who would not have been out of place at a Def Leppard concert circa 1988. He shared a laugh with a mechanical old man at the bar, then glanced over his shoulder and looked directly at Conrad.

  Conrad nodded without smiling.

  Laski sighed, wiped his brow with his forearm and ambled to the corner table like he’d rather not. When it was clear Conrad was not going to be the first to speak, Laski set his beer down, magically produced another broken toothpick from his ear and hooked his thumbs through his belt loops.

  ‘You look like a cowboy’s been line-dancing with the wrong heifers,’ Laski said, chinning at Conrad’s hand. ‘Trouble on the home front?’

  ‘I spoke to my lawyer today,’ Conrad lied.

  Laski’s smile faltered. ‘Oh, can’t be all that bad. Maybe we got off on the wrong foot. M’wife . . . she’s not been herself lately. Said you was real nice to her the other day over’ta Wally World.’

  Conrad smiled unkindly. ‘I met the kids. They seem nice.’

  Laski took a stool. ‘You just gonna sit dare with a red ass or tell me what’s on your mind?’

  ‘Take a wild guess.’

  Laski leaned in close. ‘Your wife pregnant yet?’

  Conrad tried not to give it away, but Laski saw what he needed to.

  ‘Probably, what, about six weeks? Right after you moved in it woulda happened, so yeah, about six, maybe eight weeks. Only she just told you, right?’ It was pretty goddamned specific to come out of the blue like that. But not impossible to guess. Young couple moves from the city into a four-bedroom house. ‘You’re trying to remember when was the last time you slipped her the Slim Jim. Because when it happens, it comes fast. All of the sudden you’re gonna be a daddy. It’s terrifying.’

  Conrad finished his beer. Laski sipped, pretending to watch the Brewers on the TV above the bar.

  ‘Okay, Laski. You want to play this game? Let’s play this game. I hear things. I see things. Crying sounds. Something is tearing the place apart, opening the floor. You sonofabitch - you bring me this album with a baby tree, a photo full of ugly women, spiders. You want to tell me something? Tell me what happened in my house. I hear there’s a lot of hiss-tow-wee.’

  He didn
’t remember seeing Laski order them, but two more beers arrived. Conrad swiped one from the table and guzzled.

  ‘Baby tree. That’s funny.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know, like the placenta tree. Baby tree. Funny way to put it.’

  ‘Placenta? What the fuck does that mean?’

  ‘Old wives’ superstition. Not important.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ Conrad thought about leaving then. He really didn’t want to know more. But he had to. ‘What happened in the house, Laski?’

  ‘You think it’s haunted?’ Laski’s eyes never left the TV.

  ‘Without question.’

  Laski nodded. ‘What else?’

  Don’t tell him about the doll. You want him to think you’re fucking nuts?

  ‘I woke up in the middle of the night and heard this clicking sound. Fuck, it was—’

  Laski cut him off, trying to make light. ‘Hey, you think your house is haunted. Wait till you got a family. That’s the real horror show.’

  ‘Fuck you, Laski.’

  ‘Aw, don’t be like that. You think your house is haunted? Why? Because it’s old? I got news for you, kid. A haunting is just history roused from her sleep. Any house can be haunted, even a new one. Know why? Because what makes ’em haunted ain’t just in the walls and the floors and the dark rooms at night. It’s in us. All the pity and rage and sadness and hot blood we carry around. The house might be where it lives, but the human heart is the key. We run the risk of letting the fair maiden out for one more dance every time we hang our hat.’

  ‘So it’s me? You think I’m nuts?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I said what makes ’em haunted ain’t just in the walls.’

  ‘You think I’m crazy? Bullshit - I wasn’t hallucinating the sound of a baby crying any more than I hallucinated my dogs finding a bloodstain under the carpet. We can go back right now—’ Conrad was off his stool.

  ‘Sit down.’

  ‘You lying old fuck.’ Conrad slapped the table. ‘You knew all about it.’