Festival of Fear (27 page)

I reached the second story and looked up toward the third. Without warning the lights clicked off and left me in darkness, and it took me quite a few moments of fumbling before I found the time switch. When the lights came on again, there was a man standing at the top of the stairs. It was impossible to see his face, because there was a bare light bulb hanging right behind him, but I could see that he was bulky and bald and wearing a thick sweater.

‘Who are you?' he demanded.

‘Child cruelty prevention officer.'

‘That was you I was talking to before?'

‘That's right.'

‘Don't you hear good? There's no children live here. Now get out before I throw you out.'

‘You didn't hear any screaming? A little boy, screaming?'

He didn't answer.

‘Listen,' I insisted, ‘I'm going to call the police and if they find out you've been abusing some kid—'

‘Go,' he interrupted me. ‘Just turn around and go.'

‘I heard a boy screaming I swear to God.'

‘
Go
. There are some things in life you don't want to go looking for.'

‘If you think that I'm going to—'

‘Go, Jimmy. Let it lie.'

I shielded my eyes with my hand, trying to see the man's face, but I couldn't. How the hell did he know my name? What was he trying to say to me? Let it lie? Let
what
lie? But he stayed where he was, guarding the top of the third-story stairs, and I knew that I wasn't going to get past him and I wasn't sure that I really wanted to.

I lowered my hand and said, ‘OK, OK,' and backed off along the landing. Out in the street, I stood in the wind wondering what to do. A squad car drove slowly past me, but I didn't try to hail it. I realized by then that this wasn't a matter for the cops. This was a matter of madness, or metaphysics, or who the hell knew what.

‘What do you know about your neighbors?' I asked Cousin Frances, over breakfast.

‘Nothing. Why?'

‘Ever give you any trouble? You know – parties, noise, that kind of thing?'

She frowned at me as she nibbled the corner of her croissant. ‘Never. I mean like there's nobody there. Only the picture-framing store. I think they use the upstairs as a workshop.'

‘No, no. I mean your neighbors that way.'

‘That's right.'

Without a word I put down my cup of espresso, walked out of the apartment and pressed the button to summon the elevator. Cousin Frances called after me, ‘What? What did I say?' I didn't answer, couldn't, not until I saw for myself. But when I got out into the street I saw that she was right. The building next door housed a picture-framing gallery called A Sense of Gilt. No narrow house with a hooded porch; no peeling black door; no doorbells.

I came back to my coffee. ‘I'm sorry. I think I need to go back to Florida.'

There were thunderstorms all the way down the Atlantic coast from Norfolk to Savannah and my flight was delayed for over six hours. I tried to sleep on a bench next to the benign and watchful bust of Fiorello La Guardia but I couldn't get that screaming out of my mind, nor that narrow house with its damp-stained rendering.

What were the options? None, really, except that I was suffering from grief. Houses can't move from one city to another. My grandmother's death must have triggered some kind of breakdown which caused me to have hallucinations, or hyper-realistic dreams. But why was I hallucinating about a child screaming, and what significance did the house have? There was something faintly familiar about it, but nothing that I could put my finger on.

We were supposed to fly directly into Fort Lauderdale but the storms were so severe that we were diverted to Charleston. We didn't get there till one thirty-five a.m., and the weather was still rising, so United Airlines bussed us into the city to put us up for the night. The woman sitting next to me kept sniffing and wiping her eyes. ‘I was supposed to see my son today. I haven't seen my son in fifteen years.' Rain quivered on the windows, and turned the street lights to stars.

When we reached the Radisson Hotel on Lockwood Drive, I found over a hundred exhausted passengers crowded around the reception desk. I wearily joined the back of the line, nudging my battered old bag along with my foot. Jesus. It was nearly two thirty in the morning and there were still about seventy people in front of me.

It was then that a woman in a black dress came walking across the lobby. I don't know why I noticed her. She was, what, thirty-two or thirty-three. Her brunette hair was cut in a kind of dated Jackie Kennedy look, and her dress came just below her knee. She was wearing gloves, too, black gloves. She came right up to me and said, ‘You don't want to wait here. I'll show you where to stay.'

‘Excuse me?'

She said, ‘Come on. You're tired, aren't you?'

I thought:
hallo – hooker
. But she didn't actually
look
like a hooker. She was dressed too plainly, and what hooker wears little pearl earrings and a little pearl brooch on her dress? She looked more like somebody's mother.

I picked up my bag and followed her out of the Radisson and on to Lockwood. Although it was stormy, the night was still warm, and I could smell the ocean and that distinctive subtropical aroma of moss and mold. In the distance, lightning was crackling like electric hair.

The woman led me quickly along the street, walking two or three steps in front of me.

‘I don't know what I owe the honor of this to,' I said.

She half turned her head. ‘It's easy to get lost. It's not so easy to find out where you're supposed to be going. Sometimes you need somebody to help you.'

‘OK,' I said. I was totally baffled, but I was too damned tired to argue.

After about five minutes' walking we reached the corner of Broad Street, in the city's historic district. She pointed across the street at a row of old terraced houses, their stucco painted in faded pinks and primrose yellows and powder-blues, with the shadows of yucca trees dancing across the front of them. ‘That one,' she said. ‘Mrs Woodward's house. She takes in guests.'

‘That's very nice of you, thank you.'

She hesitated, looking at me narrowly, as if she always wanted to remember me. Then she turned and started to walk away.

‘Hey!' I called. ‘What can I do to thank you?'

She didn't turn around. She walked into the shadows at the end of the next block and then she wasn't there at all.

Mrs Woodward answered the door in hairpins and no make up and a flowery robe and I could tell that she wasn't entirely thrilled about being woken up at nearly three a.m. by a tired and sweaty guy wanting a bed and a shower.

‘You were highly recommended,' I said, trying to make her feel better.

‘Oh, yes? Well, you'd better come in, I suppose. But I've only the attic room remaining.'

‘I need someplace comfortable to sleep, that's all.'

‘All right. You can sign the register in the morning.'

The house dated from the eighteenth century and was crowded with mahogany antiques and heavy, suffocating tapestries. In the hallway hung a gloomy oil portrait of a pointy-nosed man in a colonial navy uniform with a telescope under his arm. Mrs Woodward led me up three flights of tilting stairs and into a small bedroom with a sloping ceiling and a twinkling view of Charleston through the skylight.

I dropped my bag on the mat and sat down on the quilted bed. ‘This is great. I'd still be waiting to check into the Radisson if I hadn't found this place.'

‘You want a cup of hot chocolate?'

‘No, no thanks. Don't go to any trouble.'

‘Bathroom's on the floor below. I'd appreciate it if you'd wait until the morning before you took a shower. The plumbing's a little thunderous.'

I washed myself in the tiny basin under the eaves, and dried myself with a towel the size of a Kleenex while I looked out over the city. Although it was clear, the wind had risen almost to hurricane force and the draft seethed in through the crevices all around my window.

Eventually, ass-weary, I climbed into bed. There was a guide to the National Maritime Museum on the nightstand, and I tried to read it, but my left eye kept drooping. I switched off the light, bundled myself up in the quilt, and fell asleep.

‘Mommy, you can't! Mommy, you can't! Please, mommy, you can't! NO MOMMY YOU CAN'T!'

I jerked up in bed and I was slathered in sweat. For a second I couldn't think where I was, but then I heard the storm shuddering across the roof and the city lights of Charleston through the window. Jesus. Dreaming again. Dreaming about screaming. I eased myself out of bed and went to fill my toothbrush glass with water. Jesus.

I was filling up my glass a second time when I heard the child screaming again. ‘No, mommy, don't! No mommy you can't! PLEASE NO MOMMY PLEASE!'

I switched on the light. There was a small antique mirror on the bureau, so small that I could only see my eyes in it. The boy was screaming, I could hear him. This wasn't any dream. This wasn't any hallucination. I could hear him, and he was screaming from the house next door. Either this was real, or else I was suffering from schizophrenia, which is when you can genuinely hear people talking and screaming on the other side of walls. But when you're suffering from schizophrenia, you don't think, ‘I could be suffering from schizophrenia.' You believe it's real. And the difference was, I
knew
this was real.

‘
Mommy no mommy no mommy you can't please don't please don't please
.'

I dressed, and he was still screaming and pleading while I laced up my shoes. Very carefully, I opened the door of my attic bedroom and started to creep downstairs. Those stairs sounded like the Hallelujah chorus, every one of them creaking and squeaking in harmony. At last I reached the hall, where a long-case clock was ticking our lives away beat by beat.

Outside, on Broad Street, the wind was buffeting and blustering and there was nobody around. I made my way to the house next door, and there it was, with its hooded porch and its damp-stained rendering, narrow and dark and telling me nothing.

I stood and stared at it, my hair lifted by the wind. This time I wasn't going to try ringing the doorbells, and I wasn't going to try to force my way inside. This house had a secret and the secret was meant especially for me, even if it didn't want me to know it.

I went back to Mrs Woodward's, locking the street door behind me. As quickly and as quietly as I could, I climbed the stairs to my attic bedroom. I thought at first that the boy might have stopped screaming, but as I went to the window I heard a piercing shriek.

The window frame was old and rotten and it was badly swollen with the rain and the subtropical humidity. I tried to push it open with my hand but in the end I had to take my shoulder to it, and two of the panes snapped. All the same I managed to swing it wide open and latch it, and then I climbed up on to the bureau and carefully maneuvered myself on to the roof. Christ, not as young as I used to be. The wind was so strong that I was almost swept off, especially since it came in violent, unexpected gusts. The chimney stacks were howling and the TV antenna was having an epileptic fit.

I edged my way along the parapet to the roof of the house next door. There was no doubt that it was the same house, the hooded-porch house, because it was covered with nineteenth-century slates and it didn't have a colonial-style parapet. I didn't even question the logic of how it had come to be here, in the center of historic Charleston. I was too concerned with not falling seventy-five feet into the garden. The noise of the storm was deafening, and lightning was still crackling in the distance, over toward Charles Towne Landing, but the boy kept on screaming and begging and now I knew that I was very close.

There was a skylight in the center of the next-door roof, and it was brightly lit. I wedged my right foot into the rain gutter, then my left, and crawled crabwise toward it, keeping myself pressed close to the slates in case a sudden whirlwind lifted me away.

‘Mommy you can't! Please mommy no! NO MOMMY YOU CAN'T YOU CAN'T!'

Grunting with effort, I reached the skylight. I wiped the rain away with my hand and peered down into the room below.

It was a kitchen, with a green linoleum floor and a cream-and-green painted hutch. On the right-hand side stood a heavy 1950s-style gas range, and just below me there were tables and chairs, also painted cream and green. Two of the chairs had been knocked over, as well as a child's high-chair.

At first there was nobody in sight, in spite of the screaming, but then a young boy suddenly appeared. He was about five or six years old, wearing faded blue pajamas, and his face was scarlet with crying and distress. A second later, a woman in a cheap pink dress came into view, her hair in wild disarray, carrying a struggling child in her arms. The child was no more than eighteen months old, a girl, and she was naked and bruised.

The woman was shouting something, very harshly. The boy in the blue pajamas danced around her, still screaming and catching at her dress.

‘
No, mommy
!
You can't
!
You can't
!
No mommy you can't
!'

His voice rose to a shriek, and he jumped up and tried to pull the little girl out of his mother's arms. But the woman swung her arm and slapped him so hard that he tumbled over one of the fallen chairs and knocked his head against the table.

Now the mother opened the oven door. Even from where I was clinging on to the roof I could see that the gas was lit. She knelt down in front of the oven and held the screaming, thrashing child toward it.

‘
No
!' I shouted, thumping on the skylight. ‘
No you can't do that
!
No
!'

The woman didn't hear me, or didn't want to hear me. She hesitated for a long moment, and then she forced the little girl into the oven. The little girl thrashed and screamed, but the woman crammed her arms and legs inside and slammed the door.