Don't Forget to Breathe (4 page)

I crawled over the windowsill and a shard of glass ripped my jeans at the knee, gouging my skin. “Oh, darn.” I examined a dribble of blood and swabbed the fluid with my jeans.

“You okay?”

“Fine, just a scratch.” I glanced around, and trilled, “Cr-r-eee-py.”

“Haven’t you ever been in this amazing place?” He wielded the flashlight beneath his chin knowing how sinister he’d appear and chortled like a hyena.

“Stop it, Henry. This place doesn’t need any encouragement.”

“So truth—you’ve never been in here?”

“Truth,”—I lied—“Never.”

“Our first adventure into creepsville. Cool.” Moving the light around the area, he sighed in disappointment. “Just looks like a typical home with lots of heaping crap.”

“What’d you expect?”

“I don’t know. Something out of a horror flick.”

“Looks pretty gross to me.” Stationed in the corner had been an elegant, grand piano. My fingers swept the dust and raised the piano’s lid. I pinged the out-of-tune keys, tinkling echoed throughout the room. Henry disrobed a piece of furniture, peeling off a sheet. Dusty particles soared into the air catching the beam of light.

“This couch looks ancient.” He ran his palm over the fabric raising tons of dust motes.

“No one has lived here since the 1980s. My mom once told me that whenever people moved in here something bad always happened within five years.”

“You’re kidding?” Henry’s indistinct face looked dark and elated. “You mean this mansion has been vacant that long?”

“It’s prime property,” I said. “Those two houses on either side of the estate were originally built as servant’s quarters in early 1896. Over the years gullible out-of-towners wanted to transform the mansion into all sorts of excellent ideas. Buyers have been weirded-out by the—”

Henry interrupted, “What idiots would actually believe that legend?” He spun around taking the light with him. I was swallowed in dark shadows. “This place is a goldmine. If I had the money I’d buy it.”

Whether it’d been rehashing Lucien’s tale or traversing back to the scene of Mom’s murder, I felt a boding presence and didn’t like it. “Henry, we should leave. There’s something off with this place. Can’t you feel it?”

“I love it!” Out of the blue he tore from of the room, taking my flashlight with him. Heavy thumping sounded as he herded up the winding staircase.

“Don’t leave me.” Scuttling after him my skin itched like worms squiggled beneath my skin. “Henry!”

“This way, Leo.” He streamed light onto the stairs.

My palm cleaned the banister, scooping mounds of dirt. Achieving the second floor landing, I brushed my hands over my jeans and glared at him. “You dirt bag, you left me in the dark.”

“I got excited. C’mere, let’s look around the old joint. Maybe we’ll see a headless body or something.”

“Hilarious.” My hand darted out stealing the flashlight from him. “It’s my flashlight.” I sounded rather surly.

“Damn, Leo. Don’t get so hot and bothered—unless—” Swiveling into me, Henry’s mouth engaged my lips in an off-centered kiss.

I forced him off. “I’m not hot and bothered for you, Henry James.” I wiped the back of my hand over my mouth and noted his wounded pride.

“Let’s start at the top of this shit heap.” He started a two-step lope up the second flight of stairs and was eaten by the gloom.

“Henry, I want to leave,” I whined after him. “Remember we’re supposed to be looking for my phone.”

A peculiar shushing fed through the walls; I didn’t like the sound of that. Alone and defenseless, I felt like a human bull’s eye. From somewhere deep within, I dredged up novel tenacity and sped up the stairs, stalling once to sneeze. My feet struck the third floor in hopes of finding Henry. “Come out come out wherever you are.” Fixed on the precipice of the landing, I listened for his footsteps. “
Henry
?”

I heard lightweight scuttling and aimed the light toward the baseboard. Scurrying mice, nasty. Flashing the beam into a slender hallway it parted into a T at the end. I’d seen a stirring shadow. “Is that you, Henry?” It had been years and years since I undertook such daring exploration and never in the dark.

I walked ever-so slow, depositing one trembling leg in front of the other. A clothesline of flimsy cobwebs adhered to my face and I swatted at them like a harebrained loon. I suppressed a cry. “Henry, I’m getting pissed. I want to leave.”

A faraway tone hailed—“Up he-e-r-e…” I witnessed a draft of white vapor being sucked up the fourth flight of stairs.
A ghost
? At this juncture it felt like icy fingernails clawed up and down my vertebrae like a sure fire tip off.

In the opposite direction came another voice, “Leo—Leo, this way.” Relieved at hearing Henry, I turned away from the fourth flight of stairs and the strange vapor. I walked into the hallway and stopped at the T. “Henry?” After an unwarranted decision, I banked to the right.

Four six-paneled doors lined the walls. I twisted the first ornate knob and showered light into a mishmash of clutter. I then travelled down the hall to the adjoining door. The musty stink engaged my sinuses in a most unsavory way. Snuffling, holding back another sneeze, an ambiguous scent itched my nostrils.
What was that smell
? A sound like water dripping and splashing into a pot, perhaps the roof leaked. At least that’s what I thought when I shouldered open the door.

Black, not even a hint of light. The revolting stench heated up the room; I thought an animal decided to die up here and rot. I plugged my nose to block the stink. Guiding my feet with the flashlight, my sneakers stepped into a gooey substance. I pried them up listening to the suctioning sound, the goo looked reddish-black. The source of the stench?

My paranoia maxed out. I was going to leave Henry. Let him find his own way out. While revolving back toward the hall, the beam sliced through the room. On the fringe of fleeing, I caught sight of something. For support, bearing down on the doorknob with my left hand, I cast the light upward, toward the high ceiling.

A bristly rope knotted around a chandelier. My light followed the line of rope and landed on a corpse. Not animal—
human
.

“
Henry
?”

Strangling on a scream, my bumbling legs didn’t register with my scattered brain. Sneakers swam in the goo and I fell on all fours. The rubber soles troughed to grip the floor, and when they did I zoomed like a missile. Superman had nothing on me as I flew faster than the speed of light. My feet surfed over three flights of stairs.

Throaty laughter ricocheted from wall to wall like a ping-pong ball. “Leo. Leo. LEO!”

Like hell—I wasn’t stopping. On autopilot my feet scrabbled to the main floor at warp speed. The front door had been bolted with chains so I hightailed it for the living room where we came in.

Snatched from behind.

Gurgles chased up my chest and I operated the flashlight like a battering ram.

“Leo, stop—!” He barred my attack and one-handedly filched the flashlight from my hands. “Get it together, girl.”

“I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!” Fuming hotter than hellfire, I sucked breath through my teeth. “Is this your idea of a practical joke? You sick bastard.”

“Calm down, Leo, please.” Henry barnacled my flaying arms to my sides. “I wanted you to see the ingenious of it all.”

“By scaring me into an early grave? You shithead. Let me go.” I jostled from his grip. “Did you plan this whole charade? What was that up there?”

“We can make money. You can buy that car you keep talking about.”

“What’d you mean, how?” I said, seething.

“I’ve been hanging out here. Coming up with bizarre ideas. I brought you here to show you what we could do with the place.”

My head swam. “Let’s get out of here. I can’t breathe.” Once outside I cracked my mouth, filling my lungs. Even the pressurized atmosphere was better than the congested air flow in the Lucien mansion. I sighted isolated heat lightning in the sky; the predictable storm would be upon Star Hallow soon. “Hurry, I want to check out the railroad tracks for my phone before we get soaked.” Prior to him answering and not caring if he followed, I began a high-speed hike through the maze of vegetation behind the estate.

I heard him hacking at imprisoning vines in the rear. “What about my idea?” he asked.

“You’re forgetting one thing. We don’t own the property.”

“We’ll do it on the sly. Exclusive invitations to select people.”

“The police will get drift of it.”

“You’re such a downer, Leo. This is an outstanding opportunity. A haunted mansion and a party combined. Can’t you imagine the possibilities—no limits. We can drink, smoke, do whatever.”

Trudging up the berm to the tracks, I turned and looked at him. “What was that scungy stuff on the floor and who or what was hanging from the noose?”

“It was a mannequin wearing my old clothes. I axed the face and body and added red food dye to watery paste to make it look like blood.” His tone exuberant as he described his ploy. “That was real blood on the floor. I got it from the butcher. I told him my mom was making czarnina. That’s Polish duck blood soup.”

“Yuck. You mean my sneakers are covered in real blood?” I scraped my soles on the train ties hoping to rid them of any blood residue. Then I wondered. “There were dozens of rooms, how did you know I would walk into that one?”

“Ah-hah—I locked the other doors beforehand, and left open only those two rooms.”

“You locked the doors?”

He held up a key with an impish smirk. “Skeleton key. Cool, huh?”

“Hmm…But how’d you know I’d even end up on the third floor?”

“You heard me calling you right? That’s how. I purposely led you up there.”

“When I reached the third floor I heard you say— ‘
Up here
.’ Leading me to the fourth floor attic. And then you called my name in the opposite direction. How’d you get that vapor to flow up the stairs?” Shedding the light beam at his neck, I glimpsed a cocktail of expressions on his face.

“You heard me say—Up here?”

“Yes, Henry,” I huffed, bothered by his outrageous games. “Just tell me the truth, how’d you do it.”

“I didn’t.”

“You didn’t what?”

“I didn’t say that,” he reinforced. “And I don’t know anything about this vapor thingy.” He shrugged throwing his arms in the air, a gesture of dismissal.

“Are you for
real
?” Not believing him.

“Just more reason why we have to have a cosmic party at the mansion. That sounds like a ripe trick. I’ll have to figure it out.
Or
the ghosts can do it for us.” His eyes gleamed at the thought. “By the way, you never finished telling me the tale of Lucien and Monique.”

In a zigzagging motion over the railroad tracks I shed the light combing the area for my phone. “Just help me find my cell.”

“You mean you’re not going to tell me the whole story?”

“I’m going to leave you hanging.”

He chuckled. “I get it.”

Disappointed after retracing my path to Tarpon Hill, no cell phone, I said, “Shoot. Now I’ll have to tell my dad.”

“Hey, maybe he’ll buy you a smart phone with a data package.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it, but that’d be nice.” A thunderous clap rocked my chest. “I wish it would rain already. My heads throbbing from the pressure.” My headache was more than likely due to Henry’s tricks.

“Love thunder and lightning storms. I once stood outside with a steel rod hoping to get hit.”

“You are one crazy dude, you know that?”

He snickered and pulled a joint out of his jacket pocket and lit up.

“Are you serious? Right here, in public?”

“No streetlights on Tarpon. If anybody drives by they’ll think it’s a cigarette.” He handed it off. “Here take a hit, it’ll relax you. Take away that headache. Then you can finish the tale of Lucien.”

If Nona found out I was smoking a joint she’d beat me, but she won’t, at least not by me. So fingering the joint, I managed a drawn-out drag. Following a slow exhale, I retold the tragic end of Lucien and Monique. “Lucien’s mind was crippled from booze and morphine. After he murdered her lover, he tied Monique’s arms and legs to their bed like a prisoner and tortured her for days.”

“What’d mean by tortured?” he interrupted. “What’d he do?”

“You really like this torture part, huh?”

“I want to know how he tortured her.”

Taking another hit, I wasn’t planning on getting into the nitty-gritty. I said, “He raped her.”

“You can’t rape your wife.”

“Certainly you can,” I said, eyeing him with cynicism.

“Okay, I get it. Are you making this up just for me?”

“I read it,”—vocalizing with a lungful of weed—“I don’t know if it’s all true or if the author took privileges. But it’s a good tale. Do you want to hear more or no?” A discharge of smoke slithered past my teeth.

He removed his glasses, shaking his head. “Hell yeah.” He scrubbed the lenses with the border of his jacket and put them back on.

I smiled, taking pleasure in taunting him, especially after he shocked me to death. “Lucien wasn’t done persecuting Monique. He carried her body up to the fourth floor attic while lugging his nifty sword.” An enthralled Henry looked at me with probing eyes. Hooked.

“Once in the attic, he dropped her to the floor and shattered the window overlooking the front yard. He ordered her to jump. Hysterically crying and screaming, she refused. Wielding the sword, he sliced off her arm.”

Henry coughed out, “Why didn’t the servants help the poor woman?”

“Really?” I continued with a smug grin. “Again he ordered her to jump. She tried running away and cut off one of her legs.” Reenacting the scene, I hewed the air with my arm. “Yelling obscenities, he promised to cut her into pieces if she didn’t jump. She managed to drag what was left of her bleeding body to the window.” Overplaying my role, I sagged and scuffed my left leg over the sidewalk, groping with my hands. Playing a drama queen, I whispered, “On the night of the blood moon you can still hear her dreadful screams as she fluttered to the ground below.” I smacked my hands together for effect, pleased when Henry’s shoulders twitched.

I adored retelling the tale to a newbie. “Lucien then reacted like the devil incarnate by rampaging through the mansion, slicing and dicing the servants. Only God knows what besieging maggot drilled into his brain. It was days later, and it’s written the house reeked when Lucien put a gun to his mouth and pulled the trigger.” Pantomiming, I lifted my hand to my mouth, pulling the trigger. My theatrical performance concluded.

“What a totally repulsive story,” Henry said. “I love it. How did anyone really know what happened?” We shared the joint until it sizzled to a microscopic butt. He let it sink to the sidewalk and ground it with his toe.

“That’s interesting.” I swatted at a bug buzzing around my face. “One of the servants had Lucien’s illegitimate baby. Unknown to Lucien, the servant eventually made her living quarters in the attic. They were secretively hidden in the tiny enclosed room when all hell broke loose. Supposedly, she bore witness to the entire thing.”

Henry’s mouth curled.

“Oh, there’s more, much more.”