The Mourning House Read online

  “Jesus Christ, boy,” he breathed as he crouched down on the bottom step and reached out a hand to stroke the top of Duke’s head. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  He petted the dog. It was Duke, all right. Sam smiled. He stroked jowls, down his back, behind his ears. It wasn’t until Sam’s hand came away slick with blood did he begin to panic. He glanced at Duke’s rear flank and saw that the dog’s rear left foot was not fully on the floor, but pulled up at an awkward angle against the dog’s belly. The fur of the left hip was matted in congealed black blood. Upon closer inspection, Sam could see shards of broken bone protruding from torn flesh. Drops of black blood pattered to the tiles.

  “Duke,” he said, and thought he would be sick.

  The dog whimpered then turned around and limped across the parlor toward the kitchen. The poor creature couldn’t use his busted leg at all, it seemed. He left a trail of blood on the checkered tile floor.

  15

  Two days later, Sam Hatch appeared in the doorway of Mindy’s, the neighborhood diner. He requested to be seated in Karen Kilstow’s section, and he was. Karen came out from the back soon enough and hurried over to his table, though her pace slowed the nearer she got. A look of more than just concern came across her face. For some reason, that look reminded Sam of Geoffrey’s house after the funeral, and how he had opened his shirt up and had wanted Annie’s father to stab him with a carving knife from the buffet table. All those looks he had gotten.

  “Well,” Karen said, folding her arms, “I see you’ve finally taken me up on my offer.”

  “Is there a telephone I could use?”

  The request must have taken her by surprise, as she looked momentarily confused. “There’s a payphone in the back by the restrooms. I don’t think anyone’s used it in years.”

  Sam slid a twenty across the table to her. “Can I get quarters? It’s a long distance call.”

  “Sure. What about food?”

  “Scrambled eggs, toast, and a milkshake.” Though he wasn’t hungry at all.

  Karen winked. “Gotcha.” She took the twenty, went behind the counter, then returned with a plastic bag full of quarters. “If it doesn’t work, you can use my cellphone.”

  “Thanks.”

  When she left, he went to the payphone, which was nestled in a tiny niche between the restrooms. He dialed information and told the operator who he was looking for. The operator located the number and said she could connect him for no additional cost. “That would be lovely,” he said, and the call was connected. On the other end of the line, the phone rang and rang but no one answered. Sam hung up. He found a pen at the hostess podium, scrawled the phone number on the palm of his calloused left hand, then returned to his table to wait for his food.

  “Did you make your call?” Karen wanted to know as she returned with his food.

  “I did, but he wasn’t home. I’ll try again later. Could I get a cup of coffee, too?”

  “Certainly.”

  The food was tasty but he had to force it down. When the coffee arrived, the caffeine did little to quell his pounding headache. Once the food was finished and the table cleared, he asked for repeated cups of coffee so that his lingering in the diner wouldn’t seem too conspicuous.

  “There’s a double-feature playing at the Cinema House tonight,” Karen said as she refilled his coffee yet again. “A couple of cheesy horror movies, if you’re into that. Maybe you’d like to take me?”

  “That sounds like a good time,” he said, “but I’m a little busy at the house tonight.”

  “Can’t you give yourself the night off?”

  “Not just yet,” he said. He had a hard time looking at her.

  Forty minutes later, he was back at the payphone dialing the number. It rang and rang again, only this time a man’s voice answered.

  “Hello, Geoffrey. It’s Sam Hatch.”

  The silence on the other end of the line seemed to cast on for an eternity before Geoffrey said, in a sick little voice, “Sam?”

  “I need to ask you a question, Geoffrey.”

  “Wait, wait—you need to ask me a question? Sam, where the hell are you?”

  “I’ve been traveling.”

  “You disappeared! I thought the goddamn worst had happened, that you’d done something stupid…”

  “I’m okay. I’m sorry you’ve been worried. I didn’t mean to hurt you or Mary.”

  “Jesus Christ, Sam! Where are you? Are you in town? Let me come get you.”

  “No. I’m not in town.”

  “Tell me where you are, brother.”

  “I don’t want to do that, Geoffrey.”

  “I don’t understand.” Geoffrey’s voice cracked. “Goddamn it, I can’t believe…”

  “I need to ask you a question, Geoffrey.”

  “What, Sam? What?”

  “What happened to Duke?”

  Again: that prolonged silence. “Duke? Your…your dog?”

  “Did something happen to him?”

  “You’re calling to…to ask about…”

  “Geoffrey, I need to know if something happened to him.”

  Geoffrey sighed. It was a shuddery, unstable sound. Had Sam’s head been in a different place, he would have felt sorry for the man. “Yeah, Sam. Yeah, something happened. He was struck by a car.”

  “He was killed?”

  “His hip was shattered. He was in a lot of pain. Mary and I had to put him down.”

  Sam closed his eyes.

  “Explain this to me,” Geoffrey said. “I don’t understand any of it.”

  “One more thing,” Sam said. “There was a woman at your New Year’s Eve party that night, the night of the accident. She did a séance. She wore a headscarf and I think she had cancer. Do you know who I’m talking about?”

  “She was Mary’s friend, Rebecca Suhl.”

  “Was?”

  “Yes. She passed away a few months ago, Sam. Goddamn it, man, tell me what the hell is going on. Let me help you. You helped me once, lending me that money, remember? Now let me help you.”

  “You’ve already helped. Thank you.”

  “Please, Sam…”

  “Goodbye, Geoffrey.”

  He hung up and returned to his table where he sipped his coffee. The next time Karen came over, he ordered some bacon and sausage to go. Karen asked no questions. Fifteen minutes later, she returned with a Styrofoam box packed with sausage links and strips of thick-cut bacon.

  “Thank you,” Sam said.

  “Anything else?”

  “Just the check, please.”

  Karen left to get the check. Sam did not want to wait for her to return, so he took out his wallet, left the money on the table, and exited the diner. From there, he drove to the nearest gas station where he purchased a gallon of antifreeze and a pack of cigarettes. Then he drove back to the house.

  Once again, it seemed that the house had slightly repositioned itself in his absence. The upstairs windows appeared to have lengthened. The doorway looked slightly out of shape, though he couldn’t identify exactly why. On the porch, he set down the Styrofoam container then liberally poured antifreeze over the meats. Propping open the front door with his foot, he called into the house, “Duke! C’mere, old boy! Daddy’s got a treat for you!”

  It took a while for the ruinous German shepherd to make his way out onto the porch. The wound at his side continued to fester and coagulated clumps of blood and tissue dropped periodically from its hindquarter. The look in the dog’s eyes when Sam had first seen him at the bottom of the stairs had been a look of agony. Sam recognized it now.

  Wake up, the woman in the headscarf had said to him that night as they bumped into each other at Geoffrey and Mary’s party. They come out the way they go in.

  In the house, Marley continued to cry. He still couldn’t find her, but her cries had slowly been getting louder and louder. Similarly, Annie’s presence was felt in every room of the house now. The more the house started to look like their old
home, the more she was drawn out.

  A puzzle, thought Sam. But it’s over now.

  He bent down and petted Duke while the poor old dog slopped up the sausage links and strips of bacon. Duke’s rough tongue lapped up the antifreeze.

  “Good boy,” Sam said. Then he stood and went into the house.

  Marley’s cries were audible yet still distant. The tinkling of the music box bear came slowly down the stairs. Behind one wall, he heard what sounded like fingernails scraping along concrete. There was that wet, dragging sound again. It turned his stomach.

  (Curious Bunny had never asked specifically what had happened to them. He did not want to know. The coffins had been closed and he was okay with that. He never spoke to the doctors about their final conditions and he never read any of the newspaper articles. He refused to read the report and look at the photos sent by the insurance company of what had happened to the car in the crash.)

  “They come out the way they went in,” Sam said to the empty parlor. It was now indistinguishable from the parlor back at their old house in Philly. He took the pack of cigarettes from his pocket, shook one out, stuck it into his mouth, and lit it. He inhaled deeply, coughed, inhaled again. Once the cigarette was finished, he crushed the butt out on one white tile, then remained standing, surveying the room. Upstairs, the music box stopped. Marley had quit crying.

  At last, he went to the hall closet and opened the door. The comic books were nothing but sheaves of blank, brittle paper. The tool bag had been reduced to some brownish dust. Only the tools withstood the passage of time. Sam removed all the items from the closet, setting them outside beside the porch—Duke was still slopping up the food, his ruined left leg still leaking blackish fluid onto the gravel—then went back inside.

  Upstairs, he wound the bear again, letting the music spill out of it. Then he kissed it and laid it back behind the wooden struts that so much resembled the bars of a crib.

  Curious Bunny closed his eyes.

  16

  Nearly a week later and at the behest of his sister, Jake Kilstow drove out to the house on Tar Road to check up on the man called Sam Hatch. His sister was in the passenger seat, chewing her nails to the quick. She had been worried about the man called Sam Hatch, her concern mounting with each passing day. Finally Jake agreed to go up there with her and put her mind at ease. Karen had always been more attuned to others than Jake, though he also knew she was more prone to flights of fancy than he was. Nonetheless, he didn’t think it would hurt anything to stop by the house and check things out.

  It was his day off, so he was in regular clothes and driving his refurbished 1967 Comet. When he turned onto the gravel driveway toward the house, the dust rose up and he quickly rolled up the driver’s side window. Gravel popped beneath the car’s tires. Ahead, Jake saw that Sam Hatch’s Volkswagen was parked out front. He noticed that the repair job on the roof had been completed, and although the house still looked like a piece of shit, he was mildly amused at Sam’s determination to fix the place up.

  “You know, I did a little fact-checking on your friend,” he said. He had been deliberating whether or not he should say anything to Karen about it, but thought now that she might as well know. “About a year and a half ago, he fell asleep behind the wheel of his car coming home from a party. He drove straight into an overpass abutment. His wife and baby were in the car. They died at the scene.”

  “I didn’t ask you to research the poor man, Jake.”

  Frowning at her quip, Jake added, “Wife was decapitated. Baby was crushed to death.”

  She turned away from him in disgust.

  Jake parked behind the Volkswagen and they got out. The world was silent. He peered into the VW but could see nothing out of the ordinary. He spotted the dog just as he crossed in front of the VW toward the house. He held up one hand to Karen. “Stay there.”

  “What is it?”

  “Just stay put for a second.”

  The dog was sprawled out near the front porch, obviously dead. Jake bent down to better examine the animal. The dog’s eyes were open but they had sunken into the skull. Pus ran from the open mouth and flies hummed around the head. The dog’s pale tongue was unfurled like a party streamer on the gravel. There was a puncture wound just above the withered rear leg, the fur matted in dried blood. Maggots squirmed in a ragged tear in the fur.

  “Oh,” said Karen in a small voice. She had snuck up behind him.

  “I thought I told you to stay put.”

  “Go to hell, Jake.”

  “That’s what I get for doin’ you a favor and comin’ out here on my day off?” He sighed, then mounted the porch. “Hello?” he called as he opened the front door. “Mr. Hatch? You home, sir?” He looked around the place as Karen came up behind him. “I thought you said he was doin’ some renovating in here?” If it were true, Jake could see no sign of it. It was the same rundown, decrepit shack that had scared the piss out of him when he had been a boy.

  “That’s what I thought,” Karen said, looking in quiet horror about the place.

  “Let’s have a look around,” Jake said. Together they searched the downstairs but found no evidence of anyone living here. Perhaps the man had left. Aside from Hatch’s Volkswagen, he had left no other personal belongings behind. Maybe the car didn’t start and he took off on foot. It would be easy for a drifter to hitch a ride once he got closer to the highway, Jake knew.

  Upstairs, they searched all the rooms. They were empty—almost. In one of the rooms, a small book sat in the middle of the floor. It looked old and was covered in grime, but Jake could make out a cartoon bunny with large eyes on the cover. He stared at it for some time, though he couldn’t tell why it was so interesting to him.

  Back downstairs, they were halfway to the front door again when Karen said, “Wait. What about there?”

  He paused and turned around. She was pointing to a closed closet door in the wall where the parlor emptied into the small hallway toward the kitchen. Jake moved past Karen and approached the door. “Are you in there, Mr. Hatch?” He said it to be funny, but the second the words were out of his mouth, they made him feel cold.

  He opened the closet door.

  Empty.

  Though not quite. On the floor was a small pile of gray granules that reminded him of cremains in an urn. He touched the mound with the toe of his boot and something shiny winked up at him. He bent down and picked it up. It was a simple gold wedding band. He held it up for Karen to see.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t understand any of this.”

  Jake shut the closet door and slipped the wedding band into the pocket of his jeans. Suddenly, he didn’t feel so well. His skin felt clammy and there was an angry rumbling in the pit of his stomach. The more time he spent in the house, the more it became harder to breathe. He chalked it up to the dead dog. He was allergic to dogs.

  “Come on,” he said, urging her toward the front door. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “It just doesn’t make any sense.”

  “What?”

  “That he would just pick up and leave, especially with his car still here. That he hasn’t done a single thing to fix this place up.” She surveyed the room again. “It’s like he never even existed. It’s like…” Her voice trailed off. She turned and looked toward the stairs.

  “What?” Jake said. “What is it?”

  “Do you hear it?”

  “Hear what?”

  She cocked her head, still listened. Then she frowned. “It’s gone now.”

  He urged, “What?”

  “It sounded like a baby crying.”

  Jake laughed. “Okay. If you’re trying to freak me out, mission accomplished. Now can we please get out of here? I don’t want to waste my entire day in this place.”

  Back in the car, Jake spun the wheel, turned around, and drove back up the driveway toward Tar Road. Karen’s eyes were locked on the rearview mirror the entire time, watching the house diminish in the glass.
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br />   “You okay?” he asked her as they pulled onto Tar Road and headed back toward town.

  Karen didn’t answer him. She turned around in her seat and looked out the Comet’s back windshield at the house. She didn’t turn back around again until Jake turned sharply at the first intersection, cutting the house from her view.

  About the Author

  Ronald Malfi is the award-winning author of the novels The Ascent, Snow, Passenger, Cradle Lake, and many others. In 2011, his novel Floating Staircase was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel. Most recognized for his haunting, literary style and memorable characters, Malfi’s dark fiction has gained acceptance among readers of all genres. He currently lives in Maryland, with his wife and daughter, where he is at work on his next book. He can be found online at www.ronmalfi.com.

  About the Publisher

  DarkFuse is a leading independent publisher of modern fiction in the horror, suspense and thriller genres. As an independent company, it is focused on bringing to the masses the highest quality dark fiction, published as collectible limited hardcover, paperback and eBook editions.

  To discover more titles published by DarkFuse, please visit its official site at www.darkfuse.com.

  Table of Contents

  The Mourning House

  Connect With Us

  Other Books by Author

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  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  Table of Contents

  The Mourning House

  Connect With Us

  Other Books by Author

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6