House Haunted (2 page)

“I thought you said you've been there.”

“I haven't seen it in a while,” Rusty answered defensively. He stood up, started to walk in the direction of the thick woods. “Coming?”

Ray looked at Rusty's face, the daring on it burning into him, telling him,
Go ahead, defy her, she's not your mother anyway. She wants to be but she's not; she's only a woman named Anne who married your father and tried to take your mother's memory away from you. She's too nice, nobody's that nice. All she wants is to suck your mother out of you like a vampire and put herself inside. She's not your mother.

Go ahead.

And then he was up on his feet and following Rusty. Only Rusty had stopped at the edge of the thick woods. He stood still, his face red, staring past Ray, and Ray turned around and there was Anne, holding Tony in her arms, looking at the two of them, standing quietly on the path leading back to the house.

“Your mother called, Rusty,” she said. “She wants you home.”

They went back to the house, and Rusty went home, and Ray had a snack, and then he asked if he could go back to the sandpit and Anne said yes. She was doing the dishes; Tony, in the playpen next to the kitchen table, waving his hands in the air, making little sounds.

Anne was poised over the sink as he got up to leave. She was humming in a low voice to an old song by the Temptations playing on the radio she kept on the counter next to the sink.

“Wait a minute,” she said, stopping her humming as he walked behind her to get to the back door.

“Sorry.” He went back to the table and picked up his plate and glass and brought them to her. She put them in the sink and turned back to him,

“Was Rusty going to take you to that shack in the woods?” she asked.

“No,” he answered, too quickly.

“Are you sure?” she said. She was talking as if she were his mother, and part of him wanted to cry and tell the truth. But she wasn't his mother.

“We just played with soldiers.”

“All right.” She frowned. “But I don't want you back there. It's dangerous and it's not part of our property. You hear me?”

“Yes.”

Her eyes stayed on him, trying to be his mother, but then she turned back to her dishes and began to sing with the beginning of another song on the radio.

“Remember what I said, Ray,” she reminded him in her quiet voice.

He went out past the tree with the tree house in it, past the toolshed where, when his mother was still alive, they had once found a dead cat after coming back from vacation. He went into the stand of trees, threading his way expertly to the clearing with the sitting rock and sandpit. The afternoon was quiet. There were high trees around him, with the leaves on them that sounded as though they were whispering to one another when the wind blew. There was no wind, and no whispering. Ray looked into the sandpit, at the scattered toy soldiers. There were plastic dinosaurs buried there, and a lucky silver dollar he had hidden in a box and buried below the sand. He'd figured anyone looking for it would stop digging when they hit the bottom of the sandpit, so he'd gone down five inches farther into wet cold dirt.

He played with the soldiers awhile, having them line up on a lip of the rock and then charge down into the sand, throwing cloudfuls of sand up to simulate a sandstorm on Mars, making sand mountains to be ploughed by the superior artillery of GI Joe.

His eyes wandered to the thick trees leading to the Haunted Hut, to the mostly overgrown, thin path that marked the way.

Go ahead.

He stood, dropping the two soldiers he held into the pile of sand at his feet; a weak plume of sand dust rose; the end of the battle. He stood facing the path and the trees with his hands in his front pockets.

She's not my mother.

He started for the trees.

The way was easy when he got onto the path and away from the clearing. The trees weren't as thick as they looked; there was a lot of dead wood, big trunks split by lightning, trees growing too close together losing the fight for available sun. The path became wide enough for a small truck—and, indeed, he saw two faint ruts overgrown with weeds and grass where tire treads had once rolled, when the hobo's hut had been the one-room, Walden-like summer home of a reclusive writer in the twenties.

The trees thickened, then suddenly cleared out.

Go—

He stopped cold, suddenly standing before the Haunted Hut.

Something besides guilt (
She's not my mother!
) told him to turn back. A creeping spider of hair rose up his back at the sight of the place in the summer afternoon. A breeze had come up; the trees had started to whisper.

Afraid.

He stood still, hands in pockets, staring at the wood frame covered by a mass of weeds. It looked like a tiny, neglected house—like the witch's house in
Hansel and Gretel
ten neglected years after the witch had been baked in her oven. There was a white, chipped wooden bench in front. There were shutters on the windows, one of them hanging crookedly by its top hinge. They had once been painted a deep green, but now were flaking paint, revealing an earlier brown coat underneath.

Get out
, his guilt and that other thing, the whispering fear, told him.

She's not my mother.

There was a gaping hole where the front door had been. The corner to the left of the door was chaffed through, showing rough, singed timber and wallboard through the encroaching weeds.

Ray took his hands from his pockets and moved tentatively to the front entrance.

It was dark inside. There were four windows, glazed with dust; two were blocked from daylight by tall grass. He edged in closer, stepping so that he was neither in nor out of the house.

Go.

Stay.

He stepped in.

It was very dark. A wave of fear passed over him, taking the air from his lungs. His eye caught movement.

Someone was behind him, moving across the entrance. He turned, but the doorway was empty.

Panic filled him. He looked back in the Haunted Hut; in one corner, he imagined flames rolling off the kerosenesoaked rug, licking the walls, flat sheets of orange fire rising and joining, racing around the top of the shack to form a whirling tornado of heat. Then he saw the flames snuffed by an invisible hand. He saw the hobo beating at the air with his cane, then saw him suddenly swinging from the rotting overhead beam, legs kicking helplessly, seeking a chair that had been yanked aside.

Go. Run away.

She's not my mo—

“Hello, Ray.”

He turned to see his mother standing in the doorway of the Haunted Hut. No—it wasn't his mother. But it was as if his mother's unknown double had been poured out of the invisible air before him. He felt a gasping sob of recognition and longing rise up his throat.

“You—”

“My name is Bridget,” she said. She smiled his mother's smile.

“You have hair like my mother's,” he said.

“I know.”

She held her hand out to him, and he took it. It was like his mother's hand. She led him to the white bench, guided him to sit in it. She sat beside him. There was an odor about her that he recalled. It was the way his mother smelled on nights she went to parties with his father. She kept a little vial of the perfume she used on the round tray on her dresser. One night after she had gone to a political dinner with his father, Ray went into her bedroom and took the vial down. He wanted to smell the odor again. The cap was a little glass one. When he pulled it, it came out too easily and he spilled the perfume all over the front of his pajamas. He looked for other pajamas, but they were all in the wash.

He stayed away from the babysitter and waited for his mother to come home. When she got back, he was almost asleep in a chair in his room. When she came in, he ran to her, crying, and told her what he'd done. He thought he had destroyed her smell; that she would never smell like that again. She laughed and held him and rubbed his back in a circle. She told him that she would get more of the perfume and would smell like that for him always. She told him that it smelled better on him than it did on her.

She changed him into a T-shirt and put him to bed. And as he fell asleep he heard through the long crack of hallway light that came in through the bedroom door, his mother telling his father outside in the living room how wonderful he was.

Bridget smelled like that, and she had red hair like his mother's. She put her soft hand on his and looked at him with her green eyes.

“I know how lonely you've been, Ray. You won't be lonely anymore. I've been lonely, too.”

“Anne isn't my mother.”

“Neither am I,” Bridget said, smiling down at him the way his mother used to. “But I want to be just like her.”

He looked at her, and he believed her. Anne was tall and dark blonde; she laughed loud and covered her mouth with her hand when she laughed; when she put her arm around him, she patted his back instead of rubbing it. Anne was nothing like his mother.

“You know, Ray,” Bridget said, in the kind of voice his mother used when she told him a story, “I've been waiting for someone like you for a long time.” She looked very happy.

He looked at her, and his life had changed. “How long have you been here?”

“Pretty long.”

“Did you know the man who lived here?” Ray asked. “The hobo?”

She smiled deeply and laughed. For a moment she pulled him close. “Yes, Ray, I knew him. He was a foolish man, not a nice man at all.”

“Did he really hang himself?”

She said, “Someday, I'll show you what happened to him.” Impulsively, she pulled him close to her again, giving him that wonderful party-perfume smell. “Oh, Ray, we're going to be such good friends!”

And then he was crying. He buried his face in her, clutching her as if she were his mother returned, a thing he was terrified to lose again. She was his mother. And he cried and cried, sobbing out his fear and loneliness, and he couldn't stop. “I don't love Anne!” he cried. He couldn't stop himself. She looked so much like his mother, with her red hair and her smell, and her pale soft white hands, he couldn't stop. “My dad married her after my mom died, and he didn't even wait a year, and he brought her home from Washington to live in my house and use my mother's things. She sat in the chair where my mother used to read me stories, and she watched my mom's TV, the same shows in the afternoon, and she used the same closets and put all her stuff in my mom's furniture and threw out all the stuff she found, put it all in boxes and left it out on the curb like garbage.
Like garbage!
” He looked at her, at her soft face, her red hair. He was still sobbing. He wanted to tell her all of it.

“I took it all back in,” he went on, “and put it in the back of my closet. She found it all one day, and she made me throw it all out.” He couldn't stop telling her everything. “I screamed at her, and she told my father, and he tried to talk to me in a low voice. I hit him. His eyes got hard, and he took all the stuff out in the backyard that night and burned it, like it was leaves or garbage, and he locked me in my room. I threw the chair from my desk through the window and tried to climb out and stop them.” He sobbed, and there were rivers of water flowing out of him, two years of pent-up bile and rage flowing hotly out of him. He clutched her the way a drowning man clutches the wet wood of a broken mast.

“But I couldn't stop him! I screamed and begged, but he burned it all. He said he understood, that he knew, but he didn't! He's hardly ever here anyway. He's always in Washington. And then she came into the room and tried to touch me! She tried to hold me!” He burrowed deep into Bridget. “So I hit her, Oh, God, oh, God!”

“There,” Bridget whispered. “Shhh.” She held him, and she drew all the bile and the fear and loneliness out of him.

“And then,” Ray sobbed, “they had Tony, and they brought him home, and it was like I wasn't even there. She gave everything to Tony, and she treated me like I was visiting the house.” He was whispering now, small broken sobs into her breasts. “Oh . . .”

The tears came from him again, a long anguish expunged, a burst dam draining bad water, and she held him and let him.

And then when he was finished, he sat up, shaking, and she still held him, putting her arm around him, rubbing his back in little circles, enfolding him, protecting him, letting him calm down.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

Her arm around him squeezed, let go. “Don't be.”

For a long while she said nothing. He leaned his head against her, hearing the birds in the woods, looking at the soft shade of tree light, the peak of afternoon sun through the leaves and branches, the gentle sway and buzz and hum and click of a summer afternoon.

“Do you like this?” she asked, finally. “Are you glad for this day?”

“Yes,” he said, holding her.

“I'm going to be with you, and you never have to worry again.” She looked down at him, smiled. “I'm going to take good care of you, Ray.”