“Hello?” he called out for the second time, forcing his voice above a whisper. He grimaced at the wimpy sound of it. I’m an idiot. Old houses creak. They settle. They groan. Right?
“Mom? Dad?” At the far end of the hall, the door to his parents’ suite stood open. The king-size bed was still made. The rest of the doors lining the hallway were shut.
A dull knocking sound snapped his head toward the back stairs. Then silence.
Hunter had half a mind to go back into his room and wedge a chair in front of the door. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d done it. The house had been giving him the willies ever since they’d moved in. His eyes darted from dark corner to dark corner. Something was watching him. Judging him. Hating him and his parents every time they hung a picture. He didn’t belong there in his sloppy T-shirt and boxers with his scrawny stork body and pimples. The house deserved better. It pined for an earlier time when servants had worn white gloves and lived in the attic.
Another footstep creaked somewhere up there, farther down the hall.
Back in his room, Hunter grabbed the souvenir Indians baseball bat his father had bought him as a bribe when they’d moved here. It had been autographed by the 1995 World Series runners-up, as if that would make him an instant Cleveland fan. Albert Belle. Sandy Alomar. Jim Thome. Kenny Lofton. Their sweeping pen strokes mocked him as he stood there in his underwear, scared of the dark.
The faint hint of a laugh came from somewhere above him. Hunter let out an involuntary hiss and backed away from the sound. One of the new air-conditioning vents his mother had installed hovered over his head. A scrawling white grate meant to look old fashioned covered the hole in his ceiling and, behind it, a menacing darkness.
“Hello?” he whispered at it, gripping the bat.
This is crazy, he told himself. I can either stand here like a pussy or go up there.
He marched back out into the hallway with the bat and rounded the corner to the servants’ stairs. Outside, a police siren went screaming down Lee Road toward the smaller houses on the other side of Chagrin.
With a slight wince he refused to acknowledge, he opened the attic door.
BeNNy KiLL. The words skittered across Hunter’s mind as he gazed up the attic stairs. A dim light filtered down the steep wooden stairs to where he stood. A bulb had been left burning somewhere in the attic again. Gripping the bat, Hunter climbed the creaking stairs.
“Hello?” he called into the stale air that grew warmer and heavier with each step. “Anybody there?”
The staircase led him up into the long cavern under the roof. The attic felt like a railway tunnel. The wood floorboards ran in crooked lines from the top of the stairs to the glowing white tiles of the bathroom, where a light had been left on.
Nothing moved.
Behind him, a window looked out into the darkness of the neighbor’s yard. Boxes had been stacked here and there, throwing long shadows on the walls. Sweat beaded up on his upper lip. It must have been ninety degrees up there. His mother hadn’t bothered piping the air-conditioning to the third floor. They certainly didn’t need the room.
Hunter took a tentative step toward the bathroom. The floorboards creaked under his feet. He scanned the boxes to his left. To his right, a bedroom door stood open and dark. A nagging sensation crept up his back. Who’s there?
He walked over to it and felt inside the wall until he found the light switch. His father had piled boxes of Christmas decorations into the corner. The one window was too small to even fit a box fan. A narrow door to a tiny closet stood open, showing two rusting metal hooks inside.
Someone was watching him.
He spun around to face the main room only to see the moving boxes and the half-size doors along the opposite wall. He’d never opened one to peer into the unfinished crawl space. He could imagine what was there—insulation, air handlers, ducts, spiders, bats, mice . . . ghosts. He shuddered, debating whether he had the guts to really find out.
Nope.
Instead, he focused on the boxes and flipped one open to find the comic books that had gone missing during the move. He rifled through his lost treasures. “Dammit, Mom!” he muttered. She’d probably been overjoyed when he couldn’t find them. Aren’t you getting a little old for those things, honey? The undertone of motherly concern and female revulsion in her voice said, You’re not going to be one of those sexually frustrated nerds that goes crazy one day and shoots up a school, are you?
Still gripping the bat, he turned back to the offending light in the bathroom. A tiny fly buzzed lazily past the open door. Hunter crept closer to it, his mother’s voice still ringing in his ears. Hunter! Did you leave the attic light on again? He frowned at the naked bulb protruding from the antique fixture over the sink.
He scanned the hexagonal floor tiles, the long crack running down the middle of the floor, the claw-foot tub, the porcelain sink with two water spouts. Tiny dead flies collected in piles inside the tub and around the rusted drain of the sink. They were shaped like little black hearts. One flitted under the hot light bulb. Another rested on the wall, watching.
A wooden medicine cabinet had been built into the wall over the sink. Hunter looked back at himself through its clouded silver mirror. His shaggy blond hair needed to be cut. Patches of facial hair along his jaw formed a broken attempt at a beard that wouldn’t fill in for years. His eyes sat a hair too close to his big, crooked nose. Acne medication had left his skin dry and scaly.
Hunter dropped his eyes from the mirror and studied the tiles under his bare feet with growing revulsion. Dead heart-shaped flies were scattered over the grimy floor, and the grout lines varied from dull gray to patches of sticky black. A film of dust blanketed the corners. A half-used roll of toilet paper perched on the windowsill. A shallow puddle of rusty water sat inside the stained porcelain toilet bowl.
Grimacing, he turned back to the medicine cabinet and reached for the handle, not sure he wanted to see what lay inside.
The faint ring of a telephone stopped him. The house phone? Hunter stepped back out into the main cavern and listened as the trilling sound came again from the floor below. His parents had insisted on installing a landline for “emergencies,” although Hunter couldn’t remember ever hearing the thing ring. He didn’t even know the number. Who calls a landline? he wondered. And at what, one thirty in the morning?
Maybe there was some sort of emergency. His cell phone ringer was off, and it was sitting on its charger in his room. What if his parents were trying to reach him? What if something had happened?
By the time he reached the antique rotary phone in his parents’ bedroom, he was running. He snatched it up on the sixth ring. “Hello?” he said urgently. “Hello? Anybody there?”
No one answered.
“Hello?” He stood there gaping at the handset a moment.
The air shifted somewhere behind him. Hunter spun around, brandishing the handset like a small club. The hallway stood empty from one end of the house all the way to the servants’ stairs at the other. Still, a shiver prickled up his arms.
He hung up the phone and realized he was still holding his bat. Ten steps down the hall, he stopped at the top of the monumental staircase and listened. The muffled sound of feet on carpet seemed to be coming up from somewhere below. The living room?
He had taken two timid steps down the stairs when the sudden whir of the garage door climbing up its track stopped him cold. Shit. The last thing he wanted was for his parents to catch him ghost hunting in the middle of the night with a baseball bat. He knew what they would think. He lit back up the stairs to his bedroom and snapped off his reading light.