“No. Why?”
“There was a religious cult called the Shakers. They would like dance and twitch and speak in tongues and shit. Check it. The North Union Society of Believers had a commune there back in the 1800s.” Caleb paused to read a moment. “Jesus, these people were nutty. No sex. No breeding. No owning anything. They worshipped some dead British lady they called Mother Lee.”
Hunter googled the name of the group while Caleb rambled. Several articles popped up from local universities and historical societies. He opened the first and scanned it. Second Coming of Jesus. Quaker-like discipline. Handmade furniture. Trancelike dancing during prayers. Shaking . . .
“It gets better! They actually thought Jesus came to visit them in the 1840s. They even wrote like a whole new Bible. Then they just died out . . . I think they lived by you.”
Underground Railroad. Orphans. Hunter flipped through drawings and grainy photographs of the old mills along Doan Brook, which ran through the heart of Shaker Heights only a few blocks from his house, hardly listening to his friend anymore.
“Here, I’ll shoot you a map.”
A second later, Hunter’s computer dinged with the message. He pulled up a crudely hand-drawn diagram titled “Center Family.” He traced the road lines. “Center Lee Road.” “South Park.” “S. Woodland.” “Yeah. Our house is right there. Where the old church used to be.”
“No shit?” Caleb blinked at him from five hundred miles away. “You know what that means, right?”
Hunter scowled at the shrunken video image of his friend. “What?”
“You know what they always put near the church, don’t you?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“The graveyard, dude! What if your house was built on top of all those dead bodies? Think about it! You ever seen the movie Poltergeist?”
Hunter frowned at him. “No.”
“Shit, man. It’s a classic! You gotta watch it. This little girl gets sucked into her TV set. Like, her whole house is possessed by these ghosts because the place was built on top of an Indian burial ground! Dude.” Caleb gave him a deadpan stare. “You’re fucked.”
“Shut up.” Hunter tried to laugh, but it wasn’t funny.
“No, dude. You gotta get out of there. It’s only a matter of time before some clown doll comes to life and tries to eat your face.” Caleb let out a puff of vapor.
Hunter shook his head at his stoned friend. “You’re an idiot. That movie’s like forty years old—”
The sound of footsteps outside his door stopped him midsentence. Irrick. Irrick. Irrick.
“Who cares if it’s old?”
“Caleb. Shut up a minute.” Hunter stood up with forced bravado and stuck his head out into the hallway. It was empty. “Mom?”
There was no answer. Margot had nodded off in the den, happy to escape the day. A few steps down the hall, he noticed the attic door standing wide open.
“Dude? You there? If you can hear me, run!” Caleb called from the desktop.
Hunter walked back into his bedroom. “Yeah. Listen, I gotta go.”
“Okay. Just be careful, man. Don’t linger in front of TV sets. Alright? And watch that movie.” Caleb leaned in toward the computer screen until he was just a pair of bloodshot eyes. “It just might save your life.”
“Whatever. I’ll talk to you later.”
“We still gaming Saturday?”
“Like I got anything better to do. See ya.” Hunter gave a half-hearted salute and shut down the chat screen.
Back out in the hall, the open attic door beckoned him closer. He stopped at the foot of the narrow stairs and looked over his shoulder toward his parents’ empty bedroom. The five other bedroom doors stood like sentries, watching the hallway. Watching him. The silence pressed down on him, listening.
“Shit,” he whispered.
Muted sunlight poured down the steep stairs. The door had been shut earlier. He was certain of it. He remembered coming up the back stairwell from the kitchen and fixing his eyes on it, trying to drum up the courage to go back up there and get his comic books.
He clenched his hands into fists. They felt empty without the baseball bat. He stood there with nothing but the thudding of his heart, which seemed to rise higher in his chest with each second as though it might make a break for it. Hunter swallowed it back down and cleared his throat.
He’d never seen Poltergeist, but he’d seen enough horror movies to know better than to go up there alone. Nerdy guys like him either got the girl like a prize for bravery or got slaughtered in Act 1. From the look on his face, he didn’t have much doubt which sort of guy he’d be. He wasn’t a soft-spoken hero in disguise. He was the coward who ran away from the bullies while the real hero got stomped.
Thoughts of zombie Shaker women in pilgrim clothes wandered through his mind. They flitted from room to room in his head, twitching with their dances as though possessed by demons. Forget it. He closed the door to the attic with his foot and went back to his room, vowing to go back up there in a day or two when the heebie-jeebies had passed.
Hunter closed his bedroom door and wished for the key that would make it lock. Every door in the place still had its original lockset. A large keyhole had been cut into the brass plates, an open slot into his room wide enough to see through, but they couldn’t find the keys. His parents still hadn’t called the locksmith.
I’ll call the locksmith next week, his father had promised weeks ago. The only real reason to get a master key, as far as any of them knew, would be to open the one locked room in the attic, but it was a room the family didn’t really need or use.
We’ll get it open, Max the contractor had assured them. Of course, in the chaos of the renovation, he never had.
The air-conditioning kicked on, pouring freezing air down at him from the ceiling, the hidden machinery humming its maddening hum. Hunter shivered but not from the sudden cold. The gerbils fled through the tunnels back to the safety of their toilet paper rolls in the large aquarium. They felt it too.
“Screw this,” he whispered and stormed out of his bedroom and down the back stairs. “Mom? I’m going out for a while. I’ll be back for dinner.”
Margot didn’t answer. She flinched in her sleep when the back door slammed shut.
20
Later that afternoon, Margot slammed the door to the refrigerator and headed up the back stairs. “Hunter?”
She’d awoken on the couch around three, sticky with sweat. She shook her head at her rumpled clothes and puffy face in the hall mirror, disgusted at her own sloth. “Hunter, honey? Did you drink my protein shake? That wasn’t for you.”
There was no answer.
Hunter had left that morning in the direction of the bus stop, shoulders hunched, feet dragging. His lonely shape had disappeared past the intersection of Lee and Van Aken in the direction of the library.
She stopped at the entrance to his room, debating whether to knock. “Hunter?” she tried again. After a half second of silence, she peeked inside with a grimace. “You awake, baby?”
Once she found the bed empty and the office chair vacant, she flung the door wide and let out the breath she’d been holding.