Hopper House (The Jenkins Cycle Book 3) (7 page)

I
woke
up on my back in the middle of the kitchen with a pillow under my head. The lights were off and the house was quiet. My head hurt as if from a hangover. My shoulder hurt, too—from
falling
over.

The first thing I did was groan loudly. It seemed to help.

The purple Kool-Aid…

“She Jim Jonesed me,” I said in disbelief.

I flopped over on my side, weak as a drugged kitten, then got to my knees and balanced there to gather my strength. There wasn’t much to gather, and I ended up lying back down again. The clock on the wall put the time at 9 p.m.

At 9:20, I tried to get up again and succeeded.

There was something on the table. A note, handwritten.

Dear Dan,

Sorry for slipping you that Mickey.

Nothing about me matters, but if you still want to know how I died, I left my own story upstairs. What can I say? You inspired me. It isn’t nearly as long as yours, but I don’t agonize about my “rides” the way you do.

I left you the drugs from the donation box, which I emptied in secret while you waited outside that first day. Some of them are pretty strong, and they get stronger with age. I would have shared them, but you’re such a goody-goody I wasn’t sure if you’d take them from me.

I promised you the truth, but I couldn’t be here when you learned about the real me. You’re different than the others. I actually like you. I suppose that’s why we’re attuned to each other now. You’re the second person that ever happened with.

I called the landlord and told him we’d be leaving in a few days. If he tries to contact you, don’t trust him. He’s a bastard, and he uses people. He made me tell him about you. I had no choice.

I’m sorry.

The note was signed…

“Who the hell is Nancy?” I said, rereading the signature again.

This landlord fellow might be nosey, but at least he hadn’t drugged me with anything.

I lurched out of the room, heading for the stairs, then stopped halfway up for a brief rest. When I was ready, I entered Rose’s room and saw a trash bag on her bed. Inside the bag were a number of prescription pill bottles and little baggies of what looked like meth. That was some donation box.

Everything about the house was odd, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. Why would a rental that sometimes catered to extreme health clubs have a narcotics stash?

Also in the bag were three sheets of printed paper, folded in half. I sat down to look at them.

“Who the jumpin’ Jehoshaphat is
Nancy
?” I said.

N
ancy was
a mess of failure and sin. When she was ten years old, she went outside to play and saw her friend Mary’s new puppy, Cupcake, nosing around at the end of the driveway. Other than her and Cupcake, the yard was empty.

Nancy stooped down and patted her legs. “Come here Cupcake. Come on.”

Cupcake was a tiny little beagle, clumsy and cute. Nancy’s dad wouldn’t let her have a dog, even though her brother got a kitten for his birthday. And that’s why Nancy stood up and walked down the road with Cupcake following behind her.

Every once in a while, Cupcake would stop and look back curiously, as if sensing something wasn’t quite right about the excursion. Every time he stopped, Nancy would pat her knees and say, “Come on Cupcake, just a little farther.”

Cupcake made it about a mile before he sat down on the side of the road, too pooped to keep going.

Nancy didn’t want to touch the puppy, so she walked a little ways off the road to where Atherton Farm began and called him with more energy than she’d used all the other times: “Come on Cupcake! Come on boy! Let’s go Cupcake, come on!”

She patted her knees even harder.

Cupcake got up one last time and followed her to the fence, where she picked him up and carried him through the barbed wire. Nancy was able to coax him about five hundred feet through the cotton field before Cupcake lay down again.

There was a great big bunch of rocks out in the middle of Mr. Atherton’s field. Everybody said it was a graveyard, and Nancy had always been too afraid to go near it. That day, she conquered her fear and carried Cupcake deep into the rocks, then left him at the edge of an old sinkhole in the middle of it.

Satisfied they were far enough away, Nancy went home.

Though all the children were called together to search for the little beagle, Mary never found him. Everyone praised Nancy for yelling the loudest and searching the longest that day.

As time wore on, Nancy began to rethink what she’d done. She hoped with everything in her that Cupcake had found his way back to the road and gotten picked up by someone driving by. In her heart, though, she knew that hadn’t happened. He was just a little guy, alone next to a hole with predators and cold nights and no food. Still, she never went back to check on him. She knew it was hopeless, and she just wanted to forget.

But she couldn’t.

With every year that passed, Nancy hated herself more and more for what she’d done. She began to eat and sleep and not much else, and she never left the house unless her dad threw her out. When she started high school, everyone called her fat and ugly and treated her the way she felt she deserved: as repulsive on the outside as she felt on the inside.

Bill was the worst of them. Always the first to start on her when the teacher wasn’t paying attention. Always keeping it interesting enough that the other kids joined in. And Nancy didn’t help matters by bottling it up and taking it, even laughing along with them sometimes when it got too vicious. Hoping for a little reprieve, even though she didn’t deserve it.

Three years later, after hitting her growth spurt and losing the weight, that same vicious Bill asked her out to the prom. She couldn’t believe it—he didn’t even recognize her! Had no idea who she was, just that she looked good enough for him to ask out.

Nancy said
yes
.

All night, through one dance after another, she kept waiting for that delicious moment when he learned she was the same little spud he’d spewed his venom on for a solid year, nearly bringing her to kill herself rather than face another day of it. But he hadn’t recognized her. That night at the prom he’d been very nice. Almost like a whole different Bill.

Not a week into their marriage, she learned the truth. Bill was still as vicious as ever, only now he liked to hit. And like that same ugly girl from freshman year, Nancy bottled it up and accepted it, her penance for a life of failure and sin.

One day, she told herself, she’d sneak back to that spot in the rocks where she left Cupcake all alone in the dark with the predators and the cold, and she’d never come back.

T
he night was
cloudy and moonless, the path invisible. Several times, I found myself walking off course into clumps of overgrowth, only to be forced to try another direction. It would have been easier with a flashlight, but all I had was a long barbecue lighter I found in a drawer. Absolutely useless for walking because it kept going out, and the light didn’t carry far enough to chart a trail.

The good news was, so long as I proceeded ever so slightly uphill, I was going in the right direction.

When I reached the top and could see the pond off to the right, I sighed with relief. To the left, the property was pitch black, but also more free of brush. Now all I had to do was keep from twisting my ankle on a rock or stepping in a hole.

With a growing feeling of hopeless anxiety, I plowed through to where I thought the rose bushes were, using my nose as much as my eyes. Unfortunately, there was a slight breeze, which carried away the delicate scent.

Just when I wondered if I’d ever find the damned rock pile, my foot clipped a stone bigger than any of the ones I’d been stumbling over. Cautiously, I flicked my Bic and peered into the gloom. The lighter had me squinting, and the breeze forced me to cup the flame so it wouldn’t blow out. Despite that, enough light spilled out so I could see the low mound ahead.

Careful not to fall or bang my shin, I edged forward.

“Rose?” I shouted, surprised by Andre’s voice after so long not speaking. “Nancy?”

No answer—from either of her.

Like last time, my first attempt to cross the prickly threshold was met with tangled thorns and jumbled rocks. Again, I found myself backtracking. Minutes later, I discovered a likely spot that seemed more trail-like and less bushwhacky. Even with the wind, the smell of roses was strong now. And something else—a rotten sourness in the air that would have raised my hackles if I’d had any.

Handy things, hackles.

There was definitely a pathway now. I followed it up, over, and between two large rocks, then down into a bowl-shaped area with a dark pit in the middle. The rose bushes acted as a barrier to the breeze, and the rotten smell grew stronger, causing me to pull my shirt up over my nose.

When I clicked the lighter again, I found Rose slumped on her knees next to a pit about ten feet in diameter, the bottom invisible in the dark. Her eyes were open, but lidded, staring at nothing. She wasn’t breathing, and her arm felt cold when I forced myself to touch it.

“Dammit,” I said, wrinkling my nose at the terrible stench. Something was definitely rotting nearby. Way too soon to be Rose.

I shifted my weight, then danced backward in fright at a hollow clacking sound from something underfoot.

What the hell?

I held the lighter down for a look.

“Eew!” I said, jumping back. Some sort of animal bone. Wait, no, not just any bone—a jawbone. And not just any jawbone. It was
human
.

In mounting horror, I looked closer at the ground around me—there were bones everywhere, bleached white from weather and insects.

“Jesus.”

I stood in a more or less open circle with the pit in the middle. Around me, what I’d initially thought was scrub turned out to be far worse: piles of human remains in various stages of decay. Old clothing, grimy bones, and leathery skin, with fresher corpses the higher it went. There must have been hundreds of them, woven around me five feet high in a wide circle, with a little gap open where I’d come in. Across the bone-strewn ground, loose or sunk partway into the soil, were rusted guns and knives, and hundreds of pill bottles. Rose must have been killing her rides here for years—decades, even. That time I’d caught her out here, she was probably tidying the place, stacking her last ride with the others around the sinkhole in a sort of grotesque shrine.

To Cupcake.

Across from Rose, on the other side of the hole, was a cross made from human femurs tied together and stuck into the ground. Over the cross hung a neon-green dog collar with a dull brass name tag.

Hackles or no hackles, that hole made me nervous—even more than the dead bodies everywhere. They were dead, couldn’t hurt me. But the hole was darkness, the unknown, a sucking pit to nowhere, and it had gathered around it all this waste and hopelessness. Now it had me.

Invisible tendrils of fear coiled around my yellow spine, immobilizing me. All I could do was stare back and forth between Rose, the pit, and the gruesome grave marker.

The ground shifted underfoot, and the fence of corpses rustled briefly and then settled. Rose, despite being quite dead, tumbled toward the hole, one hand just over the edge.

With a terrified shriek, I scrambled backwards and fell, then crab walked until my back hit the wall of corpses. Too hard. The precariously balanced section on top came crashing down on me. Something moldy and foul like chewy dirt got in my mouth, causing me to gag and spit and lick my shoulder to get the icky out.

The barbecue lighter was gone—fallen and doused—and despite not being able to see, I got up and vaulted over the new break in the wall of corpses, then tore through the brambles. I didn’t feel a thing—only knew I was getting cut from the ripping sound of clothes and skin.

My ankle popped loudly, and that I
did
feel.

Screaming in pain and animal fear, I made a final lurching attempt to break free. A thick branch held onto me, lashed over my shoulder and down my arm. It sprang back and forth with me as I tried to jerk free, holding on like a gripping skeletal hand dragging me back to that awful pit.

Mindless with fright, I heaved forward with all my weight, staggered onto the field, and ran for my life.

T
he whole way
to the house I kept looking back, certain something hideous and evil was chasing me, about to pounce at any moment. My ankle flared painfully with every step, and I stung from where the stickers had torn at me.

When I got to the house, I went through each room flipping on every light there was. Then I turned on the TV and searched for a wacky comedy. An old rerun of
Three’s Company
would do nicely, thank you very much.

In time, the bright lights and hilarity ensuing not ten feet away had the desired effect, and I began to calm down.

“That was something, huh?” I said in an overly loud voice, filling the room so I wouldn’t feel so alone. “All those corpses. Straight out of an Ernest Prescott movie. And my imagination—ye gads! I’ll sure have nightmares tonight, by golly.”

It felt good to hear a human voice again. Helped banish the terrible
hunted
feeling that had followed me back to the house.

After the show ended hilariously, I got up to brush my teeth for the second time since my return. As I rounded the corner to head upstairs, a sudden ringing from the computer room startled me.

Who the hell would call here? At this hour?

With a feeling of foreboding, I limped quickly up the stairs and into the computer room, then answered the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Dan,” a man said.

Before I could reply, he rattled off an 800 phone number.

“Huh?” I said nervously. “What?”

“Rose said you were staying in my house. How do you like it?”

Aha! The mysterious landlord.

“Very nice,” I said. “I appreciate it.” Then, because I didn’t think that sounded grateful enough, I added, “A
lot
.”

“You’re very welcome. I have houses all over the country, you know. If you ever need to stay somewhere, give me a call at that number I told you. You can stay for free. Any friend of Rose is a friend of mine. The two of us go way,
way
back.”

Not creepy at all, nope.

“Great,” I said. “That’s just super. Thank you very much. I’ll definitely do that someday.”

In a million years…

“Excellent,” he said. “Have a good night.”

He hung up.

A while later, I tried sleeping with the lights on, but the pain in my ankle kept me awake. Eventually, I broke down and took some Percocet from Rose’s drug stash, and that helped enough that sleep finally came.

Sometime in the middle of the night, around 4 a.m., I woke up screaming with a sensation of being punched in the nose, heralding my second kick.

I
n the first
light of the new day, the creepy ghouls-and-mummies vibe from last night fell away, replaced by a feeling of sadness for Rose and her troubled existence. One heartless act as a child had ruined her life and the countless lives of others. Likely most, if not all, were the same sorts of killers I’d been encountering since I’d taken my first portal. My worry was, if this need of hers to die there again and again was that strong, could she be trusted to do the right thing on those occasions when her ride was innocent? Could she even tell the difference?

Summoning the remainder of my courage, I went back to the sinkhole.

Resting on the ground next to her was a pill bottle. There were other such bottles scattered amidst knives and old pistols stuck in the soil surrounding the sinkhole, but this one looked clean, and the label hadn’t rotted away.

Except for the section of skele-wall I’d knocked down in my haste to escape, the withered heads and dirty skulls were all facing the pit, as if staring at where she’d killed herself. No doubt Rose had angled them this way on purpose as a witness to her childhood crime.

I couldn’t leave Rachael’s body out there to rot with all those others. She had a husband somewhere worried sick about her, and children who’d grow up never knowing if their mother was alive or dead. Friends, too.

Though sad and creepy, the corpse retrieval was as uneventful as someone could hope for. No spectral force seeped from the sandy hole in the ground to suck out my soul. The brambles didn’t lash out to rip me apart. The shaggy ghost of Cupcake didn’t come howling after me looking for a treat. The property felt so normal—by day—that if given time, I would have done something about those other bodies. But last night’s kick had come a bit sooner than I was used to, and I felt like I was running out of time.

Just outside of Richmond, Virginia, heading north on I-95, I nearly ran off the road when I felt my third kick. Based on the timing of the previous two, I had between eight and nine hours left. When the last one came, I wouldn’t feel it. I’d simply be gone.

“
L
arge Hi-C
, biggie fries, and thanks,” I said through the microphone at a place that sold just the kind of food I wanted after three weeks of too much catfish.

I’d had enough of death and hiding from the cops and had driven to New Jersey—the closest state I knew of with no death penalty.

Rachael’s body was wrapped in a blanket in the trunk.

Andre was a hitman, but he had a code. No women or children. He wouldn’t be able to account for his whereabouts, but perhaps that famous code of his would help when he inevitably went to trial for the murder of Rachael Anderson. Maybe it would lend him that extra smidgeon of credibility needed to convince a jury of his innocence. Soon it would be out of my hands. Ultimately, I cared more about Rachael’s family knowing her fate than I did about his freedom.

After paying, I found a shady spot in the lot and enjoyed my food. I thought about Rose and tried to separate my feelings for her from the attractive body she’d inhabited. She was right: I was a sucker for a pretty face. But did I really care for her, the person?

I did when we were skinny-dipping. The way she’d laugh… And those times we’d gone walking and her hand slipped into mine. That was real. I smiled at the memory of us under the peach trees, sitting there holding each other. That was real, too. I felt sure of it. But was it love or ordinary loneliness that held us together? And while I was asking interpersonal questions, was it even possible for me to fall for someone who’d lured a poor defenseless dog to its death?

“She was just a kid,” I said, feeling like a jerk for judging her. She’d read my story, knew what I’d done in my girlfriend’s dorm room. She hadn’t mentioned a word of it to me. Hadn’t asked any questions about my past, in fact. As if the mistakes I’d made no longer mattered.

Though my original plan was to travel to New York and shoot Lenny with Andre’s gun—as payback for the dead maid and Rachael—I was fresh out of kicks and no longer had time. Four hours later, shortly after dark, I parked in an empty lot a few blocks from the Jersey City Police Department. Across the street were residential houses. Lots of witnesses.

New Jersey, in addition to its prohibition of the death penalty, also banned all fireworks. Even snakes and sparklers.

Carefully, I arranged the fireworks I’d bought at South of the Border just behind the car so my activities couldn’t be seen from the road or the houses. There were a lot of great fireworks, each decorated with supernovas or nuclear explosions or starbursts in every color—artillery shells, 12-shots-in-a-box that cost seventy dollars each, missile batteries, roman candles, and screamers the sales clerk said were loud enough to “wake the dead.” A fitting sendoff for Rachael.

Despite the absurdity, I left the trunk open so she could see the show.

“Okay, here goes,” I said, grinning from ear to ear at how pissed Mom would be if she saw me.

My initial impulse was to light the 12-shots, but forced myself to keep it for the grand finale. I started with the fountains, which I lit at the same time with the barbecue lighter I’d retrieved at the sinkhole. What a show! Very bright, with lots of crackling sounds at the end that snapped with little sparks of silver. The screamers were next, and boy were they loud. If the fountains hadn’t gotten me enough attention, every window and door across the street was now open with people watching me. A few even came outside.

Next up were the mortars, which I could load again and again in their reusable, yet perfectly safe, cardboard tubes. They shot flaming balls of sizzling fun into the air, each exploding with a different color. What a blast!

Despite having put on a pyrotechnic show for the last fifteen minutes, I became aware of a profound and heartening realization: the New Jerseyites hadn’t called the cops. A moment later, I realized why. In addition to the illegality of fireworks, this was the state where you couldn’t even pump your own gas. The poor citizens were so starved for dangerous entertainment they’d neglected to call the police.

That wouldn’t do at all.

I put the 12-shots-in-a-box on the hood of the car, but didn’t light it. Instead, I fired Andre’s pistol into the air—
bang bang bang!
It was a big gun, a .40 caliber, and the shots wouldn’t be confused with firecrackers. Afterward, I placed the gun safely on the hood of the car.

The people outside watching ran for cover, and those in the windows ducked back out of sight. I felt a bit guilty about that. Here they were having fun and I’d gone and ruined it.

The cops arrived five minutes later. They pulled up to the lot entrance and parked in a way that blocked me from exiting. With guns drawn, aiming my way, they shouted at me to get on the ground.

Ignoring that, I lit the grand finale.

One after another, the rockets flew into the air, screaming all the way, before exploding in a dazzling starburst that turned nighttime into day.
This
was what I’d missed my whole life, and I couldn’t stop grinning. Even the cops looked up and stared, witnessing the wondrous spectacle in person for the first time. The tales they’d tell their grandchildren…

When the final rocket exploded and the radiance faded, I raised my hands in the air. Then I came around the car, dropped to my knees, and lay down. I remember the cops coming forward, shouting for me to place my hands behind my head.

A minute after they clamped the cuffs on me, I was finally kicked out.

T
he next few
rides were pretty standard: victims, bad guys, television, fast food, two full confessions to the police about this or that, and a suicide for a serial killer who liked to keep locks of hair from his victims. He’d had a thick photo album full of the things, the sick bastard.

I could have called that 800 number to test the landlord’s promise of a place to stay, but didn’t. I guess the offer struck me as creepy. According to Rose, he knew who she was, what she was. And Rose said she’d told him about me. On the phone, he’d said: “Any friend of Rose is a friend of mine.” If he didn’t know I was like Rose, why extend the offer at all?

Another reason I didn’t call was Rose’s warning:
Don’t trust him. He uses people.

While on an east coast ride, I considered going to Georgia again to see if Rose was back in her house, but held off. Honestly, I needed time to think—to see how I really felt about her. Maybe she needed time, too. Also, what would happen if I stepped through the door and yelled, “Honey, I’m home,” and out stumped Rose on a wooden leg, smiling a toothless ninety-year-old grin? I’d have to reassess the bitter truth that beauty is only skin deep, and I
hate
bitter truths.

I planned to look her up again, the same way I planned to drop in on Lenny one day, to pay him back for Ricky. Just not right away.