On Monday, Reggie went back to New York to visit some family, leaving us hopelessly friendless for a week. On Tuesday, Andy proposed that we finally make that trip to the abandoned house out in the far-off fields since Reggie had stressed that he wanted nothing to do with it. Something about a haunting or a curse or missing kids. The typical scary tales passed from child to child in a twisted game of telephone. We planned to set out early Wednesday morning with backpacks full of snacks and drinks and basic provisions, making a single stop at our patch to grab our good, heavy flashlights along the way.
We hadn't paid attention to how quiet our tree patch was. The typical sounds of nature in summer never permeated through our hideout. No birds, no bugs, no animals. Only the occasional rustling of a warm breeze through the leaves, the laughter of two children still innocent and ignorant of the danger that lurked in the darkest recesses of the patch, and their radio blaring staticy alternative rock from a station that was almost too far away for the antenna to pick up.
Our flashlights were left on the coffee table with a crack across the top. Instead of grabbing them, Andy stood at the mouth of the path and scanned the surrounding trees. "I'm getting that feeling again," he murmured.
"It's a squirrel," I scolded as I brushed past him, heading for the coffee table. "We're in the woods. Things live out here, you know."
"Have you ever seen a squirrel out here?" He glared at me before scanning the trees again. "Or anything else? Because I haven't. We haven't seen any animals since we started hanging out here."
"I'm not interested in rodents. I don't go looking for them."
"Well, something's out there, Amy. I can feel it watching me."
I shot him a smug grin and pointed the flashlights at him. "I learned a new word on my last day of school. It was paranoid. Do you know what paranoid means, Andy?"
Before he had a chance to answer, he was interrupted by a hollow thud from somewhere in the trees. "What was that?"
"Car door?" I suggested.
He pointed to a section of the patch behind me, behind the main cluster of tents and chairs. "It came from that way. There are no roads out that way. It's just fields for like three miles. Besides, it sounded woody."
"Maybe a tree limb fell, then," I sighed. "Can we go? I want to see inside that house before it collapses."
Andy hesitated, staring wide-eyed ahead of him. "Y-yeah, let's g-"
Another thud, louder than the one before, rang out from deep within the patch, causing us both to jump out of our skins.
"That wasn't a tree limb," he whispered. "That was a door."
"Maybe we're not alone," I replied. I set one of the Maglites back on the table and moved closer to the tree line. Between two old oaks, a freshly tamped path led deeper into the trees. The outline of a single work boot remained embedded in what was once a mud puddle. I turned on my flashlight and started walking down the path.
"Where are you going?" Andy cried.
"Gonna find out who's out here."
"No, don't do that! It could be dangerous!"
"It could be a little old witch in a house made of candy," I giggled as I left him behind.
If the outer layer of the patch was dark, the inner layer might as well have been perpetual night. I realized then just how dark the patch had been and how unnatural it was. The hairs on my arms bristled the deeper I went. The air grew colder, as if the season had instantly changed from mid-summer to mid-fall.
A few yards into the trees, I came upon a wooden shack that leaned slightly to one side. Behind me, I could hear Andy shambling through the overgrown path. He stopped just short of running into me and grabbed my arm. "Are you crazy, Amy?"
"Something's wrong," I said. Looking at the shack, something came over me. Maybe it was the same feeling of unease that Andy and the other kids felt the moment they entered the patch. Maybe I was too stubborn to feel it until it was right in front of me. Whatever it was, it tugged at my soul as if some psychic force was begging for my help.
"Yeah, no shit," Andy hissed. "I've been trying to tell you that for weeks! Let's go!"
I broke free from Andy's grasp and inched closer to the shack. It looked to be made of aged scraps of wood, probably found around town or salvaged from crumbling old houses. The roof was a patchwork of rusted metal sheets. It looked to be about ten feet long by eight feet wide, with a handmade door without a knob off to the left and a single square window with yellowed Plexiglass to the right.
I stood before the door and listened. The silence made my ears ring. Every so often, I thought I heard muffled crying, but I brushed it off as my mind playing tricks on me.
"Don't you fucking dare," Andy growled as I lifted my fist.
I dropped my backpack beside me and knocked three times. The door crept open a crack.
A buzzing sensation washed over my body when I pushed the door open the rest of the way. Inside was a bed, a table, a single wooden chair, a wood stove, some shelves holding a few books and knickknacks, nonperishable food and liquor bottles, a pile of clothes on the floor, a pair of ragged boots, and a trapdoor to the far left of the shack. A smell hit me almost immediately. Mold, mildew, body odor, stale alcohol, and something else that I didn't immediately recognize.
"Get out of there!" Andy urged. "Just turn around! Just leave! We can tell Mom and Dad about this later. Let's just go home!"
His voice shook and cracked the way it did when he was on the verge of another attack. I turned my ear towards the trapdoor, still trying to draw a mental line between my imagination and reality. "Do you hear that?" I whispered.
"I don't hear anything! Get over here, Amy Rose West!"
Before I had the chance to mock him for sounding like mom, a noise like metal scraping against stone rose from the floorboards. The buzzing in my body intensified and my skin felt tight and electrified against my bones. In the back of my mind, I could hear voices whispering. Begging. For what, I couldn't tell.
I walked in and stood beside the trapdoor. Andy watched me from the threshold. He shook like a traumatized chihuahua and mouthed no over and over.
The strange smell wafted up from the cracks in the trapdoor. Suddenly, a memory came rushing back. It was two years prior, on a cross-country trip to visit family in Colorado. Mom's car started having trouble halfway there, so we stopped at a service station in the middle of nowhere to have it looked at. Mom, Andy, and I walked around the property behind the station while dad talked to the mechanic, taking in nature and picking wildflowers. A few yards down, something caught Andy's attention.
A broken mass of hair, bones, and rotting flesh lay a few feet from the road. Sometime the night before, a buck had an intimate rendezvous with a semi-truck, and the poor thing managed to drag itself off the road before it succumbed to its injuries and festered in the August heat. That was the first time I smelled death. And now, as I looked down at the sloppily constructed door at my feet, I knew that something was decaying under the shack.
Andy ran inside to stop me, but I threw the door open, convinced that someone or something needed help. And I was right.
A wall of stench hit us, sending us back a few steps. Andy retched and lost his breakfast in the corner of the room while I stared at the pitch-black pit below.
"Oh God, no!" he cried between spews.
From where I stood, the beam of my flashlight barely penetrated the darkness. The whispering in my head grew louder, the words somehow less intelligible. Without thinking, I climbed down the makeshift ladder and shined the light on something my ten-year-old mind struggled to comprehend.
The walls were made of rough, crumbling concrete. Iron shackles lined every side, some empty, some holding the moldering corpses of naked women and girls up by their wrists. There must have been a dozen, maybe more, each in a different state of decay. The oldest looking corpse was nearly a skeleton. The freshest... I tried not to look at her too hard.
When I realized what we had stumbled upon, I dropped my flashlight and scrambled up the ladder. Andy reached in to pull me up when suddenly I felt something grab my ankle. Andy shined his light down the ladder. The wrinkled face of a pasty, weathered old man peered up through the inky darkness. He pulled hard on my leg, making me lose my grip on the rung. Andy pulled me harder and nearly had me all the way out of the cellar when the old man used all his weight, what little there was, to pull us both down.
Andy landed on top of me, knocking the wind out of me. I gasped, trying not to breathe in the dust from the dirt floor. Toward the back of the cellar, an oil lamp lit up. Then another, and another. The old man lit six lamps along the walls, illuminating the corpses and his own naked form. "The toys are delivering themselves now," he mumbled. He let out a labored laugh followed by a dry cough. He flashed a twisted grin as he sized us up. Black, broken teeth poked out from infected gums. A white, dry tongue slithered out of his mouth and flicked across his cracked lips as he gazed from me to Andy. "Never had a boy before. Might be fun."
The old man shuffled towards us on long, bony legs. His toenails curled around the front of his toes, yellow, thick, and jagged. Andy lifted himself up and turned just in time to see the old man reach down for me.
Andy grabbed one of the flashlights and brought it down hard on the old man's arm. A shrill, almost inhuman scream echoed off the walls. The force had broken his arm, shattered bone pierced his thin, translucent skin.
Andy swung the flashlight at the old man's head, striking his jaw. He went down, and Andy followed him, swinging harder, hitting the left side of his head. A few swings more and the old man's skull broke with a loud, wet crack.
Andy stopped when the old man went limp. He dropped the dented flashlight and looked at his bloodstained hands.
"I killed him," Andy whimpered.
"You saved me," I assured him. "You saved both of us."
Andy nodded and looked around at the corpses on the walls. "What do we do?"
"We have to tell Mom and Dad," I replied, pulling myself up by the rungs of the ladder.
"No!" he snapped. "We can't do that! I killed him! I'll go to prison!"
"I don't think that's how that works, Andy."
"What if they think we killed these women?"
"Calm down, please."
"Calm down? How the fuck do I calm down, Amy? Look at this! I told you to leave, and you didn't listen to me! You never listen to me! I killed a man because you wouldn't listen!"
The old man twitched at Andy's feet. A gurgle escaped his lips and I noticed his right eye flutter.
"I don't think he's dead," I gasped.
"He will be soon," Andy growled. "Start climbing."
I clambered up the ladder without another word and sat at the edge of the trapdoor, waiting for my big brother. A few more gurgles arose from the pit, followed by a dozen sopping smacks of Maglite to open wound.
Andy came up covered in more blood than he had been before. The front of his shirt was drenched, leaving not an inch of unstained white fabric in sight. He slammed the door shut behind him and pulled me up by my wrist.
"The women!" I cried as he shoved me out the door.
"They're dead."
"They have families! Think of their mothers!"
"Think of Mom!" he shouted. He turned and shoved a bloodstained finger in my face. "Think of what this will do to her if she finds out!"
"Our backpacks," I whispered. "She'll notice if we don't come back with them."
Andy reluctantly let me get them before we left. He knew he already had a hell of a lie to concoct when we got home, and he didn't need anything else to give away our terrible secret.
The door to the shack was still open. The smell of death lingered at the threshold. The whispering, which never went away while we were in the cellar, felt like radio static in my head. Soft, low, almost nonexistent. I pulled the door closed as best as I could and slung the backpacks over my shoulders. The farther I walked away, the quieter the whispers got, until I couldn't hear them anymore.
I turned around and looked at the shack one last time, and there he was. Standing at the window, gray and naked and gaunt. The old man's chest heaved as if he was taking his last breath over and over. He stared at me with one bloodshot eye. The other hung from the damaged socket, just below where Andy had caved his skull in. His jaw hung slack to one side, broken at the joint where the flashlight got him.
It's just my imagination, I told myself.
Back at the main clearing, Andy peeled off his shirt and threw it into the brush. Blood had pooled under the folds, leaving red lines like veins across his chest.
There was a stream about half a mile north, so we stayed low to the ground, concealed by stalks, avoiding houses and tree patches along the way. Andy bathed himself in the murky water, using grit from the bank of the stream to scrub his skin raw. He cleaned his black shorts as best as he could using a rock to pound out the blood. It took ages for the water to run clear, and I wondered if anyone downstream would notice sanguine wisps in the passing current.
We stayed there for hours. Andy sat on a rock at the bottom of the stream, stone still, almost lifeless in water that came up to his bellybutton. Darning needles and damselflies landed on him in droves, unintimidated by the sullen boy who had intruded on their mating ground. I watched him from the shade of the stalks, shooing away flies and wishing he'd say something or at least move.
By noon, I waded into the water and sat beside my brother. His eyes were fixated on his reflection, now just a shadow in the midday sun. He held a smooth stone in his right hand and gently rubbed it with his thumb, the only movement he made besides blinking and breathing. At twelve years old he was traumatized and broken, and it was all my fault.
"Andy?" I whispered. He flinched at the sound of my voice. His eyes darted towards me, dry and distant. "We need to figure out what we're going to tell Mom and Dad."
"I don't care," he replied.
"You said we couldn't tell anyone what happened, so we need a story. They're going to notice that your shirt is gone."
Andy sat up. A loud series of pops shot down his back as his spine straightened out. "We'll tell them I fell in a mud puddle and took off my shirt and dropped it somewhere out in the field."
"It hasn't rained in two weeks. They'll know we're lying."
He sighed and threw the stone to the other side of the stream. "We went swimming. I took off my shirt. The shirt got taken by the current, and I couldn't find it."
"And if she asks about the house we were supposed to explore?"
"It was dangerous, so we decided to go swimming."
"Dangerous house. Swimming. Lost shirt," I said. I repeated it a few times, hoping I wouldn't forget the story. Dad was right. I was terrible at hiding things from him, but this time, I promised myself that I would never let him know, no matter how much it hurt us. "You should eat. Do you want something from my bag?"
"I'm not hungry."
After that day, I don't think either of us really ever felt hungry again.