Every House Is Haunted (7 page)

“Guy looks kind of weird. Says he hitched in with Eddie Ray.”

Reg dipped his head down so he could see through the partition in the wall. “He looks harmless enough. Although I don’t know many bums who ever used a newspaper for anything other than a blanket.”

“I don’t think he’s a bum,” Rachel said. “He seems kind of . . . strange.”

Reg shrugged. “Strange or not, he’s got an appetite.”

Ten minutes later, Rachel emerged from the back with Henry’s order on a large serving tray. As she dished it out, Henry moved each plate around like chips on an oversized bingo card. When he had everything where he wanted, he looked up at Rachel with that same beaming grin.

“This all looks great. Really great.”

Rachel smiled politely, tucked the empty tray under her arm, and returned to the kitchen.

Henry picked up his fork and knife and began to cut up the four sausages on one of the side plates. When he was done, he cut up his eggs, forked some hash browns on top of them, and began to eat.

Rachel watched him through the partition. Henry didn’t seem to be aware of her staring, and that was good because she couldn’t seem to make herself stop. She followed his fork as it scooped up eggs and sausage and hash browns and deposited them into his mouth. He chewed mechanically, as if he were a machine and the food was his fuel.

He seemed to relish the food, closing his eyes and letting out long, satisfied sighs of pleasure between bites. It was like sex. He wasn’t just eating the food; he was savouring it. Like he had never eaten before. Or might never eat again.

Like a death-row inmate
, she thought.

Henry took a big gulp of coffee, tilting his head back to get the last drop. Watching from the partition, Rachel noticed dark smudges under his eyes. At first glance Henry had seemed full of buoyant, invigorating energy, but upon closer examination she saw he was quite thin and pallid, almost sickly. The phrase
death-row inmate
clanged in her head, and Rachel reassessed her initial observation.

No, he looks like death. Or someone close to death.

Regardless, Henry continued to eat steadily throughout the day. After finishing his breakfast, he ordered a tuna-fish sandwich on rye and a glass of milk. Rachel topped up his coffee—almost filling it past the overflow point in her daze—and went back to Reg in the kitchen with his order.

“Maybe he’s one of those food critics,” Reg said, taking an enormous bottle of mayonnaise out of the big, steel-doored walk-in. “Sometimes they travel in disguise.”

“I don’t think so,” Rachel said.

By the time noon rolled around, Rachel had filled Henry’s coffee cup at least a dozen times. He had polished off the tuna-on-rye and ordered a side of French fries with gravy. He told Rachel that you could tell a lot about a restaurant by the quality of their gravy.

At three PM, Josie Sutton pulled up in her lime-green VW bug with the bumper sticker that said
TENNE-SEEIN’ IS TENNE-BELIEVIN’!
She was wearing her waitress uniform and the magenta hoop earrings that she had bought off eBay because they supposedly once belonged to Tammy Wynette.

She gave Henry a passing look as she strolled through the swing door. She was reaching for her time-card in the slot on the wall when Rachel stopped her.

“What’s wrong?” Josie asked.

“Do you mind if I take your shift today?”

“What? Why?”

Rachel told her about Henry. Josie raised one pencil-drawn eyebrow. “You got a crush or sumthin’?”

“No,” Rachel said, flushing slightly. “I just know that if I go home now I’ll be wondering about it for the rest of the week.”

Josie thought it over for a second—which was about as long as Josie ever thought about anything—and said: “Okay. Sure. Whatever. Matt Damon’s gonna be on Oprah today, anyway.” And she left.

An hour later, Rachel came out of the kitchen to wipe down the counter for about the forty-seventh time that day. Henry was reading his newspaper.

As she moved along the counter, Rachel turned her back to him. When he spoke she dropped her cloth and almost cried out in surprise.

“I’ve been in here for just over five hours and I haven’t seen a single person come in.”

Rachel let out a long, steadying breath as she crouched down and picked up the cloth. “Things fall off pretty quick after the morning crowd leaves,” she said. “You’re really making me earn my minimum wage today.”

“If you don’t have many customers, then why such a big menu?” he asked. “Not that I’m complaining.”

Rachel turned around and leaned against one of the counter stools. “The owner, Reg, is also the cook. He says offering a wide variety of food puts a certain amount of creativity into an otherwise mundane job.”

“Seriously?”

“That’s what he says,” Rachel said, aware that Reg might be listening.

“Well,” Henry said, raising his voice slightly, “he’s an absolute artist in the kitchen.” He folded his newspaper and picked up the menu again.

“More?” Rachel couldn’t quite mask her surprise.

“Shocking, isn’t it?” Henry smiled again; this one was thinner, not as forced as the others.

“It’s just . . .” Rachel contemplated for a moment, then threw caution aside. “You’re eating like a condemned man.”

“Condemned,” Henry repeated, and looked away. “That’s funny.” But the look on his face said it wasn’t funny at all. “I’m not condemned. This is all voluntary. Very, very voluntary.” The look went away and the thousand-watt smile came back on again, like a switch in his head had been flipped. “Could I get the meatloaf? Mashed potatoes, roast carrots, and a tall glass of milk?”

As Reg went to work on Henry’s meatloaf, Rachel drifted back to the partition. Henry had taken a single piece of newspaper and was folding it carefully and methodically. Curiosity finally got the better of her and she went back to the booth, under the auspices of refilling Henry’s coffee cup. As she topped him up, he raised his head.

“Do you know what this is?”

On the palm of his hand was a folded-paper animal. A cow, she noticed, complete with tiny paper udders. Its head was lowered as if it were cropping.

“A cow?” Rachel guessed.

“That’s right.” Henry set it on the table. “Origami. The Japanese art of paper-folding.”

“Paper-folding, huh? I thought they just made electronics.”

“This is a much older craft.”

“Secret of the Orient?” Rachel asked.

“Something like that,” Henry conceded. “It can be traced back to the sixteenth century. Can you believe that knowledge of something like that could be kept for so long, passed down from one person to the next?”

“The only thing passed on in my family is insomnia and an old moth-eaten quilt that my great-grandmother made while she was snowed in one winter.”

Henry chuckled.

Rachel eyed him suspiciously. “I’m sorry, but I have to ask: have you been drinking or something?”

Henry chuckled again, louder this time, then stopped suddenly. “I thought about drinking today,” he said in a solemn, thoughtful tone. “I thought it might be for the best to, I don’t know,
sedate
myself, before the main event.” He shook his head ruefully. “But I decided not to. It seemed kind of . . . cowardly.”

He
is
sick
, Rachel thought.
I knew it. It’s cancer, or something like it.

“The way I see it, nobody dies with a clear conscience, but I plan to go out with a clear mind.” He looked down at the origami cow. “I’m afraid the only thing I planned to get drunk on today was cholesterol. And why not? Long-term health effects are not exactly my concern anymore. Hell, the long-term in general isn’t my concern.”

Rachel gave him a long, considering look. He didn’t sound self-pitying or self-deprecating. He was speaking lucidly, almost clinically, as if he were talking about something he had read in the newspaper spread out before him. He had taken his time eating the food she had served; he hadn’t wolfed it down. He had made it last. He acknowledged each forkful before putting it into his mouth. Like he was counting the bites. Like he knew there were only so many more he was ever going to take.

The sound of Reg dinging the order-up bell almost made Rachel jump. She went over to the partition and retrieved Henry’s meatloaf dinner, delivering it to him without comment. Henry didn’t say anything, either, just smiled that damn smile of his and started eating.

When he was finished it was almost eight o’clock. Like the rest of his meals at the Crescent Diner, Henry had made his dinner last.

After clearing his empty plate, Rachel came back and filled his coffee cup. “Dare I ask?” she said. “Dessert?”

Henry was breathing heavily now. Rachel thought it was a wonder his sides hadn’t split.

“What kind of pies do you have?”

“Apple, blueberry, strawberry-rhubarb, peach, and pumpkin.”

“One of each,” he said without smiling. “Please.”

Nothing surprises me at this point
, Rachel thought on her way back to the kitchen.

But she was wrong. After she brought out the pies, Henry surveyed each one, picked up his fork, and began to eat. Rachel couldn’t watch any longer. Henry was sick, this whole thing was sick, and she didn’t want to look at it anymore. She felt like she was participating in an execution. She wished she hadn’t taken Josie’s shift.

She was turning away when Henry said, “This is a good place.”

“What?”

“The Crescent Diner. This is a good place. Good food, good service. I like it.”

Rachel stared at him.

“I’m fit to burst,” he said. “There’s no way I’m going to be able to finish these.”

She looked down and saw that he had taken a single bite out of each piece of pie.

“There was a guy from around these parts, name of Mundy or Mindy, I can’t remember which. He wrote a book about bad places.”

“A food critic?” Rachel asked.

“Something like that,” Henry said dismissively. “He had a word for these bad places. He called them ‘pressure points.’ I knew a girl once who called them something else. A much more appropriate word, in my opinion.” He paused in remembrance, or maybe for effect. “She called them ‘tornadoes.’

“Do you read?” he asked suddenly.

Rachel shook her head. “Only the expiry dates on the milk cartons at the Food Mart,” she said, and Henry laughed.

“Can I get my bill?”

Rachel took her order pad out of the pouch on the front of her uniform. She flipped through the sheets on which she had scribbled Henry’s orders throughout the day. She couldn’t remember the last time she had to add so many numbers. Finally she scribbled a total at the bottom of the page and plunked it down on the table.

Henry reached into his houndstooth jacket and produced a thick wad of bills bound with a rubber band. He paid the bill and then placed the still-considerable stack of cash on the table. He smoothed it out and placed the origami cow on top of it.

“That’s for you,” he said.

And then without another word, he stood up, ignoring Rachel’s stunned expression, and left the diner.

Rachel turned around in time to see the door swing shut. She heard the sound of Henry’s shoes on the crushed gravel in the parking lot, and a second later she saw him pass in front of the side window on his way around to the back of the diner.

The next time she saw him he was on page four of the Sutter County
Register
.

There are haunted places in the world. Dark places. Shunned places. Forgotten places. All existing in reality and every bit as tangible and accessible as the house next door. Sometimes it
is
the house next door.

But hauntings aren’t restricted to houses. There are also haunted apartments and haunted trailers, haunted farms and haunted restaurants, haunted churches and haunted schools, and, on Lake Shore Boulevard in Toronto, there is even a haunted fish-processing plant.

In the unexpunged edition of
The North American Guide to Haunted Architectural Structures and Supernatural Pressure Points
(Horsehead Press, 1949), paranormal researcher Dale Mundy declared that the most haunted building south of the Mason-Dixon Line was not a house but a cabin. Cabin D, to be exact, at the Crescent Moon Motel in Tennessee.

According to Mundy, no one who stayed in Cabin D—the Crescent Moon’s honeymoon suite—lived to see morning. The cabin had been built away from the others in a clearing in the woods, the thought being that seclusion equalled romance. Mundy didn’t mention exactly how many newlyweds had died in Cabin D, but he soliloquized on vast numbers of young lovers who never even had the chance to consummate their wedding vows. Eventually the owner stopped renting it out, and then, in October of 1923, a hurricane dubbed “The Southern Banshee” tore through Sutter County and reduced every cabin at the Crescent Moon to splinters. Every one except Cabin D.

Some people in Sutter County said the destruction of the Crescent Moon cabins was a blessing; others went one further and called it “nature’s exorcism.” The following summer, the land was bought by a developer and a motel was put up in the cabins’ place—not directly on the site of the demolished cabins but closer to the highway. The new owner was never told about the existence of Cabin D because the old owner wasn’t around to tell them. The Southern Banshee had exorcised him, as well.

The new motel opened in the fall and Cabin D was left to rot quietly in the woods. It had always been a dark place, a shunned place, and now it became a forgotten place.

Occasionally it reminded the world of its existence. Hobos and transients in search of shelter from Tennessee’s brutal thunderstorms sometimes came upon the lone cabin in the woods. Most of them were struck dead before they could get within ten feet of the front door. A few made it inside, but as the saying goes at the roach motel,
They check in, but they don’t check out
.

Despite the lofty theories of pundits like Dale Mundy, Cabin D was not hungry for blood, or souls, or Hostess Twinkies. It simply didn’t like visitors. It had stood in the woods beyond the Crescent Moon Motel for over eighty years, and, like Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, it might stand for eighty more.