The Revenant: A Horror in Dodsville Read online

  Mrs. Klaus was waiting for us in front of the gate to her home as we pulled onto Millwork Boulevard. Thoughts of her swimming pool, tennis court (although it would be a few days before my leg healed well enough to run down tennis balls), sauna, billiard room, and whatever other treasures held in store for us vanished from my thoughts as I saw that desperate look in her eyes. She stood in the shade of a towering elm, holding on to the hand of a little girl. The girl, her daughter, appeared to be about five years old. Cute, she was, with blond hair and big green eyes. Those eyes, however, held the same disconcerting look of her mother’s. She hid behind her mother’s skirt as we piled out of Julie’s car.

  My leg sent throbs of pain up my thigh, and I cursed under my breath as I thought again about all the fun I would be missing because of that pain. Because of Randy Beliwitz. Julie’s care and pampering back at her place left me able to walk without support--or I should say, limp without support. Tomorrow, I felt, the pain would be almost gone. No way was Julie going to haul me to a hospital. It was about time someone stood up to her anyway.

  “I was beginning to believe you might have changed your minds,” Mrs. Klaus said as she opened the gate and led the way up her driveway--all one hundred excruciating feet of it.

  “There’s probably more in this adventure for us,” I replied, as I tried to keep up to the group, holding my limping to a minimum so as to prove I was in little pain in front of Julie.

  Mrs. Klaus stopped and looked back at me. Again I noticed something not quite right with the look in her eyes, but as of yet I still couldn’t quite figure out what it was. I had seen that look in someone’s eyes before, though.

  “What happened to you?” she asked with a strange vacancy in her voice.

  “Fell down a flight of stairs,” I replied. “The Angel Flight to be exact. Nothing to worry about, though. Probably won’t even hurt tomorrow.” That last was for Julie’s benefit. I was beginning to realize that I was lying to myself as well on that point. My leg would be as stiff as a dead cat in the morning, and I knew it.

  “That’s good,” Mrs. Klaus replied, almost relieved.

  The mansion was built out of brown bricks of different shades. Four large white pillars rose from the front porch, rising forty feet to meet with the overhang above. Magnificent, I thought. Four gargoyles kneeled ominously on stoops just below the roof, glaring down at any would-be intruder that might venture on some given night through the front gate. I imagined that there would be four more of these eerie creatures likewise guarding the rear of the house.

  Mrs. Klaus stopped our procession on the front porch, just in front of those towering pillars. “These, of course, are the front grounds,” she began. “Nothing out here but open space and some old, grandeur trees.” Large oaks and maples, and that one elm tree that survived the Dutch Elm Disease run of a decade ago, practically shaded every square foot. Mrs. Klaus dug a set of keys out of her purse and opened the front door. “I’ll show you the house first,” she said as we all piled into her home. “You can find the courts and the pool by yourself later, if you want.”

  My leg seemed to hurt a little bit more at the mention of the tennis courts.

  We stood, agape, in what appeared to be the world’s largest foyer, probably meant to throw those high society-type parties that I could only imagine. Three closed doors and a darkened hallway led out of the room, and a spiral staircase spun to the floor above. I almost felt as if I were standing in a museum rather than in someone's residence.

  Our hostess took her time showing us her house, taking us through each of the rooms on the first floor. Her daughter, introduced to us earlier as Clair, continued with us, though never relenting her grip on her mother’s dress. I knew, as Mrs. Klaus proceeded upstairs to show off the second floor, that I would not be able to live here alone without being scared out of my mind half the time. This only reinforced my theory that Mrs. Klaus only imagined what she claimed to be happening here, and I breathed a little easier.

  Nightfall had arrived in Dodsville by the time we were shown her backyard. Mrs. Klaus, however, had but to turn on the yard lights, and the entire backyard lit up like an NFL Monday Night football game. Illuminated now were an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a tennis court (clay), and a small building just to the left of a racquet ball court. (This “small” building was about the size of an average home.) We didn’t proceed out into the yard, but Mrs. Klaus informed us that the building held a sauna, shower, a hot tub, and a weight room. The five of us just looked at each other in awe without uttering a word. Words weren’t necessary--we would be spending a week in paradise; if nothing came of Mrs. Klaus’s fears, that was. And we would be getting paid for it at the same time.

  Watching Melissa, I could see by her expression that she didn’t want to miss out on this. Good, I thought. It would give me a chance to talk to her about Reed. There was a lot I wanted--no, needed--to know. After being around his family, on the other hand, I was almost fully assured that Reed had simply drowned. Yet, I was still curious about his life for the past ten years. I needed to get a feel for him before I left Dodsville. I owed him that much. I would probably leave for Milwaukee soon after the week was up here at the mansion. Anyway, it would be a nice vacation. If no problems arose, that was.

  “Any questions?” Mrs. Klaus asked as we stepped back inside. That disconcerting look of resignation that held her eyes captive when we first arrived was now replaced with air of superiority. Showing off her home had obviously brought out her sense of pride.

  “Yea,” Tabby replied. “How does one afford all this?”

  Julie gave Tabby a look of discontent, but Mrs. Klaus simply smiled and winked at her. “Inherited money,” she said, and laughed.

  We stood in silence for a minute, trying to absorb our new surroundings for the next week.

  Mrs. Klaus grabbed my hands, snapping me out of my brief reverie. Her touch was icy cold, almost clammy. “Thank you again,” she said, not meeting my eyes, but looking over the group behind me. “All of you.” She let go of my hand and reached into her pockets, bringing out a set of keys. “Here,” she said as she handed them to me. “I guess this place is all yours for a week, then. These keys will open all the outside doors to this place and the gate. Please feel free to use whatever you can find to have a good time.” Then she looked down at her shoes, and her tone changed again. “But at night, remember why I asked you here.” There was a moment’s hesitation. “If you cannot make it the entire week, I’ll, of course, understand.” Her eyes met mine. “But there’s that five thousand dollars waiting for you if you do.”

  I simply stared back in silence. The fear from her eyes crept into my soul, and, for a moment, I was held in a trance.

  “Is it all right if another person stays on?” Julie asked, breaking the ensuing silence.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Klaus replied, turning her attention from me and directed it toward Julie. “Who else will be staying?”

  “Melissa here,” I replied, nodding in her direction.

  “Not for sure yet,” Melissa said. But I could tell from the tone of her voice that she would be with us tomorrow.

  I turned to Julie. “Sure you can’t join us?” We could definitely use her to keep matters in order.

  “I’ll be around after work,” she replied. “You can count on that, at least. But, remember, I do have to spend a lot of time with Dad.”

  Her comment caused us all to examine our shoelaces for a minute, as it brought us back to the reality of the times. Reed was buried just this afternoon.

  Breaking the building awkwardness, Tabitha spoke: “We’ll try not to keep a pig pen.” She motioned with her head toward me. “But I can’t promise that for sure.”

  “Oh, don’t worry at all about that,” Mrs. Klaus replied. “Even though the maid quit working full time a couple of weeks ago, she does still come around twice a week to clean for me. You’ll see her on Tuesday and Thursday.” She met my eyes again. “If you’re still here, that is.”
/>   Mrs. Klaus gave me a phone number, a different one from before, on where she could be reached in case we needed to get a hold of her for any reason. “I’ll be residing temporarily at the boarding house downtown until I hear from you,” she said. Although she hoped not to hear from us until we had proved or disproved her theory of the haunted mansion on the Hill. She then said her goodbyes, leaving us to ourselves. Her daughter still clung to her skirt as they walked to the car, turning around to look at us briefly with cold, depressed--desperate?-- eyes.

  “Well,” Julie said after a moment of us standing around with our hands in our pockets on the front entrance way, looking after Mrs. Klaus’s taillights disappearing down the boulevard, “I’ll take everyone back, so you can retrieve whatever you need--for tonight, at least. You can pick up anything else as you go along. You’ll have to find your own way back, though, as I really do need to get back to Dad.”

  I especially did not want to make that long trek down the driveway to Julie’s car resting by the curb. My leg wanted me to put it up for the night and rest. “Wait,” I said as the troops started down the front steps. “I’ll stay behind to keep an eye on the fort.” I didn’t want to bring up the subject of my leg in front of Julie. Maybe she would forget about it by morning. “Just do me a favor and grab my suitcase from Julie’s. Everything I need--well, actually, everything I own, is in there.”

  “You’re going to stay here by yourself?” Melissa asked.

  Thoughts of the reason why we were staying here in the first place entered my mind, but I shook them out immediately. “Yea,” I replied. “It’s a little cramped in that car.” I hesitated, pulling a key off the set Mrs. Klaus gave me and handing it to Sly. “You guys are coming back, though. Aren’t you? Tonight?”

  “Yes,” Tabitha replied with a chuckle. “We’ll be here, Oh Brave One. Meanwhile, don’t eat everything in the refrigerator.”

  “What’s this for?” Sly asked, turning the key I gave him over in this hand.

  “To open the outside door. When you all come back, you can let yourselves in.” I planned on having my leg up, but didn’t want Julie knowing that.

  I noticed Melissa looking down at my bad leg.

  “What about you, Melissa? Will you be joining us this evening?” I asked, without expression, trying to sound like I didn’t care one way or the other.

  Julie, however, replied before Melissa had the chance. “I’ll be here in the morning to pick you up and haul your ass to the hospital,” she said to me. She turned to Melissa. “I can pick you up at the same time and take you from here to work. Then you can ask your stuffy lawyer employers for the week off.”

  “Doesn’t seem like I have much of a choice, then,” Melissa said to me and smiled. This ordeal concerning the mansion was doing her a lot of good already.

  “If you see any ghosts,” Sly said as they walked down the driveway, “try not to crap your shorts and tell them to wait for us.”

  “Yea, yea.” I smiled, but I wished he hadn’t said that. “Get out of here already, will you?”

  I waited on the front porch as they drove off, and I watched until their taillights disappeared down the boulevard, just like I did a few minutes ago when Mrs. Klaus drove away. They would be gone only an hour or so, I thought to myself as I faced the front entrance and looked blankly into the foyer. What could go wrong in an hour? Nothing. Right?

  Right.

  I walked, or rather, I limped--severely now that I didn’t have to hide the pain from Julie--into the living room and plopped down on a white leather couch that faced a central fireplace in the room. I pulled my bad leg up and rested it on the cocktail table in front of me, and sighed. Touring the house did help to keep the leg limber, but the muscles were sure sore. Leaning my head back against the back cushion of the couch, I closed my eyes and relaxed. The only sounds that ensued from the mansion were the constant ticking of the clocks.

  And the ludicrousness of the situation began to seep into my thoughts. Mrs. Klaus was simply too trusting to let strangers ravage her home for a week, with her not even in the picture to keep a surreptitious eye on us. She was desperate, though; that was a given.

  Finally, it struck me what that look behind her eyes held. I could remember only one other time I had seen that quiet look of desperation behind a person’s eyes. It was the only time I had entered Mrs. Price’s room after she had become bedridden from the cancer. She was to die about two weeks after I saw her. The calendar said it was Mother’s Day, and, since Mrs. Price was almost as much a mom to me as my own, I felt I owed it to her to give her a self-made card, and to give it to her by hand. I don’t believe she even recognized who I was, but she grabbed my hand anyway when I reached out with the card to show it to her. She pulled herself up as far as her remaining strength would allow, and tried to speak. Only a snarl, however, issued forth from her mouth. And I felt that if I didn’t get out of that room immediately I would most definitely wet my drawers. Not because of the noises she made either, but because of the look behind her eyes. A combination of fear, senility, lost hope, and decay held my gaze on hers. I yanked away my hand from her grip, harder than I needed to, and sprinted out the door. Mrs. Price’s eyes, on the other hand, followed me wherever I went for those following two weeks, until she died. And, sadly, I remember breathing a deep sigh of relief when she was gone forever.

  Mrs. Klaus held the same look behind her eyes. Not right out in front for everyone to see clearly, like Mrs. Price did, but deep inside, festering, like a rabid dog that is just about to start foaming at the mouth. What I felt for certain was that no one in her right mind would be taking the course of action that Mrs. Klaus currently was. There were only two possibilities that warranted this situation: Mrs. Klaus truly was seeing weird occurrences here at the mansion, or she was as insane as Mrs. Price in her few remaining days. I was willing to bet heavy money on the latter.

  Fifteen minutes crawled by. The lonely ticking of the clocks made me feel, somehow, vulnerable. I opened my eyes. The shadowed hallway to my left caught my attention, and held it for a moment. “Why didn’t I turn a light on in there?” I said aloud to myself, just to hear a human voice. Darkness from the hallway glared back at me, and I snapped my attention away from it, to the empty fireplace in front of me. This silent waiting for the gang to return would soon begin to drive me nuts.

  As I stared into the fireplace, I began listening to the house, knowing full well that was about the worse thing to do under the circumstances, but being unable to stop myself anyway. I would soon begin to imagine noises that weren’t there, and to over exaggerate the ones that actually were. The wind picked up just a bit outside, and after a minute I started to hear someone whispering to me from the darkness in the hallway.

  I jumped to my feet to snap myself out that mode, and yelped from the pain in my leg and fell right back onto the couch. I pulled down my pants and unraveled the bandage Julie had patched me with. Practically the entire outer side of my thigh was a dull maroon color with streaks of bright red where fresh blood had appeared. I was sure I hadn’t done any damage to the bone, tendons, cartilage, or any other important part that might rest under the skin of a human leg, but the thigh muscle was going to cause me grief for a few days, and the skin contusions probably wouldn’t heal for a least a week or two.

  “Damn you, Beliwitz,” I said as I bandaged myself again. At the same time, I thought about how lucky I was. I wanted to believe that Randy knew there were no cars in the oncoming lane when he let go of me, but, somehow, I knew he wouldn’t have been that thoughtful. He, I began to believe with less and less doubt, probably only mistimed his release.

  The whispering started again from down the hallway.

  “Well, I can sit here,” I said aloud to drown out the wind, “feeling sorry for myself. Or I can claim dibs on the best available bedroom upstairs.”

  I hobbled to the first step of the staircase, and stopped to catch my breath before beginning the climb. Having my leg rest for so long h
ad made it stiff--as well as throbbing. I imagined myself making it to the summit only to misstep and plummet back to where I was now standing. “I think I can. I think I can,” I said, mimicking the infamous little train.

  My nerves were becoming a little bit more frayed, as the sound of my own voice began to frighten me. “Come on,” I said aloud, trying to show how brave I could be. “Are you a man or a mouse?”

  Placing my good leg on the first step, I began the climb. Sly had helped me up these stairs when Mrs. Klaus gave us the grand tour. Now I used the handrail, and, to my surprise and delight, it was almost as easy. I stepped up with my good leg first and pulled my bad leg up behind me, like an unwilling puppy on a leash. Just as I was beginning to think life wasn't such a bad thing after all, when I had reached about the middle stair of the climb, I heard voices coming from the first floor. And not whispers this time, though still inaudible. Halting right where I was, and not, at first, looking behind me, I said, “You guys back already? I didn’t expect you for at least another half hour or so.”

  I didn’t think I was going to get a reply, and I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t.

  I stood perfectly still for a minute, straining my ears down the stairs, without actually turning my head and looking behind me. After the second minute passed, without incident, I already began to doubt that I had heard any voices in the first place. Still not turning my head, but looking under my left armpit, I saw behind me new plush red carpeting and the quiet living room I had just left.

  “See?” I said, chastising myself, as well as breaking the silence again with my own voice. “Didn’t I warn you about listening to a quiet house while you’re alone? Fool.”

  I continued my slow journey to the second floor, forgetting my admonishment once again, and listened intently for any sound. The din of footsteps coming up behind me, I rationalized, would not be pleasant to my ears. And what was that Boy Scout motto from the days of my youth? When I reached the top of the staircase, I rested for a few minutes and took up whistling to break the silence. I knew it wasn’t much of an adult thing to do, but then who was around to make fun of me? And the whistling did stop me from listening to the silence.