The Mourning House Read online

  He felt his bowels clench.

  Engraved on the underside of the coin was the name DUKE. Beneath that was the address of their old house in Philadelphia.

  The crowbar dropped from his hand and rang out when it struck the floor. Sam released the nameplate and staggered backward a few steps. He couldn’t be certain how long he stood there, unable to move, but by the time he had summoned enough courage to approach the nameplate hanging from the wall again, the sunlight coming in through the windows had repositioned itself. He knelt down before it, bringing the nameplate to eye-level. Yes, it was Duke’s nametag. He reached for it again, tugged at it. Bits of plaster flaked to the floor and perhaps an inch of the chain was fed out from the wall. This time he gave it a strong tug. The chain broke free, along with bits of plaster and a cloud of white powder, sending Sam tumbling backward onto his buttocks. He hit hard, the teeth gnashing in his skull. Facing him, the hole in the wall—no bigger than a silver dollar—glared at him. There was something else in there, Sam saw. He scrambled to his knees and leaned forward. A tuft of blue fabric poked out of the hole. Sam reached out and pinched it between two fingers but it was too stubborn to be pulled through the opening.

  He grabbed the crowbar, ratcheted it back over one shoulder like a baseball player, and swung at the wall. The resounding crack vibrated up his arms. A Texas-shaped section of the wall fell away. He swung again and again. Soon, the air in the room was a swirl of floating white powder; Sam’s forearms were dusted in the stuff and he could taste it at the back of his throat. Once the opening in the wall was large enough to accommodate both his hands, he reached in and gripped the band of blue fabric. It was a dog’s collar, was Duke’s collar. Sam yanked at the band of fabric again. Like a tooth coming loose in diseased gums, the band of fabric inched out of the wall, though it was still connected to something farther back. He thought he could see a pipe or pole back there, bent at an awkward angle and powdered in drywall debris. Placing one foot against the wall for greater leverage, he yanked at the collar again. The hole in the wall broke open even further as the band of blue fabric came through, and with it, tumbling to the floor like a jumble of coat hangers bound together by rubber bands, the undeniable skeleton of a good-sized dog.

  He sat for some time amidst the jumble of ancient bones on the floor of the upstairs bedroom. It wasn’t until the sunlight began to leak slowly from the sky did he get up, wander off to the bathroom, and throw up in the toilet. Afterwards, he washed his face and hands at the sink then returned to the bedroom. The dog bones were still there, the little bronze nameplate glinting in the waning daylight coming through the windows. He thought he could smell something burning in the air, though he couldn’t identify what it was.

  That isn’t Duke. How could it be? It’s the medication, that’s what it is. It’s driven me mad.

  Not for the first time, he wondered if he had died along with Annie and Marley, though because he had been the driver and had been at fault, he had been banished to some hellish purgatory. He would spend eternity haunted by the memories of the things he loved.

  Eventually he went to the wall, knelt down, and peered into the opening in the wall through which the dog’s skeleton had come.

  (“and you’ll be getting into trouble sticking your head into other people’s holes, Curious Bunny.”)

  He expected to see studded two-by-fours and the back-end of the opposite sheet of drywall. But that was not what he saw. Just as there had been a floor beneath a floor downstairs, here was a wall behind a wall. He reached into the hole and brushed away some of the drywall dust from the secondary wall, bringing into relief the faded yellow caricature of a yellow duckling in diapers. Sam’s heart clenched. The duckling was stamped on a background of faint pink wallpaper.

  “No.” The word trembled out of him, hardly a word at all.

  He broke away more of the drywall to expose the wall beneath. Another duckling appeared, a doppelganger to the original one. With the crowbar, Sam whacked a sizeable chunk out of the drywall to reveal an entire swarm of diapered ducklings marshaling across the faint pink background. Wallpaper from Marley’s nursery.

  He screamed until he thought his throat would rupture. Maniacally, he proceeded to smash the outer wall to powdered hunks. Dr. Samuel Hatch, the Human Wrecking Ball. It had been his intention to keep smashing until the house crumbled down on top of him and killed him, but that did not happen. The room filled with drywall dust. The more ducklings that were exposed to him, the more he shrieked and swung the crowbar.

  When he opened his eyes again, it was dark. Somehow, at some point, he had passed out. He sat up stiffly, tasting the acrid drywall powder at the back of his throat. He was still in the room, surrounded by ghostly white sections of drywall stacked on each other like tectonic plates. His body was coated in white dust, as was the entire floor…with the exception of the Sam-shaped outline from where he’d been lying. On every wall, the diapered ducklings stared at him. He had done some damage and had unearthed unimaginable horrors.

  One of his hands brushed over something hard and stiff that rolled across the floor: one of Duke’s bones. A femur, Sam surmised. A chuckle shuddered up the raw stovepipe of his throat.

  There were plastic trash bags downstairs. He grabbed a handful and returned to the bedroom where he proceeded to fill the bags with the chunks of busted drywall. In his frenzy, he had busted up all four walls. The ducklings leered at Sam while he worked. They looked particularly unforgiving now. Sam set Duke’s bones in one corner of the room—in his head he had already begun to think of the room as the nursery—then picked up the smaller bits of drywall. There were other things hidden amongst the broken triangles of plaster—a windup dragonfly mobile, a pair of tiny shoes covered in white dust, several small picture books. He adroitly stacked the books in one corner of the nursery, blowing dust off each one as he set it down. The final book was called The Story of Curious Bunny. There was a cartoon rabbit with beseeching, overlarge eyes and drooping ears on the cover. Absently, Sam opened the book and flipped through some of the pages. Aloud, he read, “This is the story of Curious Bunny. The bunny was so curious and went hopping around in fields all day, sticking his little white—”

  The pages grew wet. His vision got smeary.

  He set the book on top of the stack.

  12

  It wasn’t until he found the bear that he understood what was going on and what else needed to be done. The tinkling of its music box drove him to seek it out; the more he heard the music, the more desperately he searched. The bear was ultimately discovered after much searching, hidden in the ceiling of the parlor room. Sam upended his cooler, stood on it, and smashed a hole in the plaster between two exposed joists with the crowbar. Yellowish powder and tufts of insulation rained down on him. Once again, he was the Curious Bunny, sticking his head into other people’s holes.

  No, he reminded himself. These are my holes now. You buy ’em and make ’em, you own ’em. It was true enough.

  He reached a hand into the hole in the ceiling and felt around. Exposed nails pricked his fingers and the soft yet crinkly cushion of old insulation tickled his sore palm. Eventually his hand fell on the little stuffed bear with the silver butterfly key at its back. He extracted it from the hole and examined it. It was gray with filth and reeked of mildew, but it otherwise looked exactly how it had back in Marley’s nursery. He turned the key and the tune of “Old MacDonald” jingled out of the bear. As it played, he brought it to his face and smelled it. Beneath the mildew smell he could identify the soft traces of baby powder. Sam climbed down from the cooler and carried the bear upstairs to Marley’s new nursery.

  The house, it seemed, was a puzzle. Sam understood that if he could figure out how to solve it, things in his life might change. Things might come back to him.

  13

  This is the story of Curious Bunny. The Bunny was so curious, he went hopping around a house all day, knocking down walls and tearing apart cabinetry, just so he could
see what was on the other side of things. Frequently, he would poke his head in holes he had made, sometimes expecting Angry Muskrat or Sleepy Owl or Timid Turtle to greet him, but these holes were empty and, anyway, they did not belong to anyone besides Curious Bunny, because it had been Curious Bunny who had bought them and made them and now he owned them.

  Curious Bunny chipped away the plaster in the kitchen to reveal a wall of red brick, just like the kitchen in the Bunny’s old house in Philadelphia, where he had lived happily with his bunny family. That family was gone now because Curious Bunny had one night been—

  (sleepy owl)

  —Carless Bunny, but he tried very hard and very desperately not to think about that. Instead, he ripped the cabinets off the kitchen walls and smashed the warped countertop to pieces. Beneath the old countertop was a granite one, heavy and solid and powdered with grit. He wiped it down with water from the tap. Even the tap water was clear now, with no rust left in the old pipes.

  Upstairs, Curious Bunny set Marley’s things up in the nursery. One day, he noticed a series of small pegs poking up from the floor in a rough circular formation. These pegs lengthened over the passage of a few more days until they became wooden slats. The construct made Curious Bunny think of Vietnamese POW cages made of bamboo stalks. This, in turn, made Curious Bunny laugh. It wasn’t a cage at all, he quickly realized. It was a crib. In it, Curious Bunny placed the stuffed music box bear. From one of the lengthened pegs, Curious Bunny affixed the mobile. He wound the bear and wound the mobile, and their songs complimented each other. This made Curious Bunny smile.

  Just as he had once heard old Duke whimpering and scrabbling behind the walls, he soon began to hear other sounds. One was a wet, dragging sound, like someone pulling a heavy sack of potatoes through a mud puddle. Another was a high-pitched, distant wail: a baby’s cry. He could not pinpoint the location of these sounds, though he knew they were close and in the walls all around him.

  I will have to make more holes and find them, thought Curious Bunny. After all, he already owned so many. This house is a puzzle and the holes are the clues to solving it.

  Yet he didn’t always have to make the holes. Once, when the showerhead refused to spit water, Curious Bunny unscrewed it and found articles of clothing stuffed into the pipe. Like a magician pulling silk scarves from his sleeve, Curious Bunny pulled Annie’s blouses, underwear, stockings, and a wristwatch from the spigot.

  Sometimes at night, Curious Bunny thought he had solved the puzzle, for he often heard—or imagined he heard—them coming to him in the dark. There would be the labored susurration of respiration, the deep wet gurgle, the sliding and dragging sounds. Sometimes Annie would hover in the periphery of his vision, cradling little Marley in her arms. When he turned to see her, she was not there.

  “I know,” Curious Bunny would tell the darkness. “I’m trying to find you. Once I finish the house, you can come out for good.”

  Curious Bunny loved his bunny family very much.

  Around him, the house continued to change.

  14

  Morning. His eyes unstuck. The ceiling swam into focus, all exposed joists and nail-heads. A gaping hole stared down at him from between two joists. Disoriented, he sat up to find he was in the parlor, sleeping on the black-and-white checkered floor. Vaguely he recalled falling asleep last night in his sleeping bag, but when he looked around the room, he could find no evidence of the bedroll. Similarly, the jumble of floorboards he’d ripped up were no longer shoved into the corners or stacked against the wall. It was as if someone had come in and cleaned up the place while he slept.

  The cooler with his food and water and beer was gone. His extra clothes were gone. His medication was gone, too. All of it. In the kitchen, he searched the cupboards and drawers for his pills. In the hall, he opened the closet door. There were still some tools in here, but his leather tool bag had been reduced to a few stitched seams, some tufts of fabric, and little else. Beside it, the stack of comic books was now a bundle of brittle yellow pages. The artwork had vanished completely. It was like the closet had suddenly grown huge all around me, Karen the waitress had told him that night at the Rude Rabbit. How long ago had that been, anyway? Sam couldn’t be certain. Time held no meaning for him.

  Outside, he searched the Volkswagen but his meds were not there, either. The sun was directly overhead. Sam wondered how long he had been asleep. At his back, a series of low, groaning creaks emanated from the house. Sam turned and stared up at the house. It seemed to tip forward toward him, though just the slightest bit. Vertigo shook him. When he looked at the ground, he could see the roof’s shadow sliding incrementally toward him across the gravel driveway and uncut blond grass.

  The sound of a vehicle motoring along Tar Road caused him to turn around again. A boxy maroon car turned off the road and bounded slowly down the gravel drive toward him. Sam did not recognize the car, but he was suddenly overcome by the premonition that Annie and Marley were in that car. It would pull up in front of him, one door would swing open, and a cloud of black smoke would unfurl from within. He would get in the car, the door would slam, and he would be chauffeured off into oblivion.

  “That’s my hole, Curious Bunny, you nosy little fucker,” he muttered to himself as the car came to a stop directly behind the Volkswagen. The driver’s door popped open and a woman got out. It took him several heartbeats to realize it was Karen Kilstow. And even after he recognized her, he continued to question her authenticity.

  “Hi.” Hers was a timid, uncertain voice. Timid Turtle.

  Sam licked his lips. They were incredibly dry.

  “I hope I’m not intruding,” she went on. She was dressed in a plaid button-down shirt with the sleeves cuffed nearly to her shoulders. Her arms looked very thin and very tan. “I kept thinking about our conversation at the Rude Rabbit the other night. You left me worried. I didn’t know what to do.” She smiled but looked sad. She dug one of her sneakers into the gravel. “Which is silly, I know, because I hardly even know you.”

  “I didn’t mean to worry you,” he said, though he was thinking, Go home, Timid Turtle. You shouldn’t go slowpoking your head into other people’s business. “It was silly of me to even bring it up.”

  Wincing against the sun, she looked up at the house. “It looks good. You fixed the roof.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the inside, too?”

  He shivered. “Somewhat,” he said.

  She walked slowly around the two cars, her shadow lengthening along the driveway until it fell across the toes of his shoes. “Sam,” she said, “if there was something else you wanted to talk to me about…I mean, I know I’m just a perfect stranger…and probably a perfect fool for even coming out here…”

  “You’re not a fool. Don’t say that.”

  She looked like she wanted to reach out and touch him. “Sam, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “If there’s something going on…”

  “I’m really fine. Thank you, though.”

  “I’d love to see what you’ve been working on inside.”

  Again, he felt a shudder rush through the core of his body. “Not quite yet. It’s still a mess.”

  “Oh.”

  “Anyway, I thought you were afraid of this place.”

  She laughed. “That was when I was just a little girl. I’m not scared of some house anymore.”

  “That’s good,” he said.

  “So maybe you’ll show me the inside when you’re ready,” she said. Wind rustled the strand of gray hair loose from behind Karen’s ear.

  That closet makes things old, Sam suddenly realized. It does it very quickly. It’s one of the house’s many tricks.

  “Maybe when it’s done,” he said, “or at least more presentable.”

  “Okay. I’d like that.” Her eyes flitted over his shoulder. He held his gaze on her. “Oh…I didn’t know you had a dog.”

  He turned and saw that he had left the front door par
tially open. Duke’s fuzzy head peered out, his big tongue lolling, his eyes like two silver buttons. Sam felt his feet go instantly numb in his shoes.

  “He’s a sweetie,” Karen said. “What’s his name?”

  “Duke.”

  She crouched down and patted both knees. “Hi, Duke! Come on out.”

  “No,” Sam said, perhaps a bit harshly. Karen froze and stared at him. “Get back inside, Duke. Go on, now! Go!”

  The dog retreated into the darkness of the house.

  “You’ve got to be stern if you want to train them,” Sam offered. He didn’t much care for the conciliatory quality of his tone. By the look on Karen’s face, he didn’t think she did, either.

  Karen took a few steps back toward her car. As she opened the door, she said, “Hey, listen. Next time you’re hungry, come on down to the diner. It’ll be on the house.”

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  “Take care of yourself, Sam.”

  “Goodbye,” Sam said.

  Once the boxy maroon car was a twinkling bit of chrome at the far end of Tar Road, Sam went back in the house. The parlor was empty. He called, “Duke! Here, boy! Come!” Listened. He could hear no sounds, not even the distant crying behind the walls that had become almost constant. He searched the kitchen, the closet, underneath the stairs. Upstairs, he searched the bedroom and the nursery, but Duke was not there. Neither were his bones, which Sam had piled neatly at the end of the upstairs hallway several days ago.

  Duke was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. Sam descended slowly, distrustful of the gleam in old Duke’s eyes. But as he grew nearer, he realized that it was just the same old Duke. It wasn’t aggression in Duke’s eyes. It was something else Sam couldn’t quite define.