The Amityville Horror (4 page)

She bent down and looked around the base to see if anything was leaking through to the inside of the bowl. Finally she turned to Danny. "Get the Clorox from my bathroom. It's in the little closet under the sink."

Missy started to go. "Missy! You stay here! Let Danny get it." The boy left the bathroom. "And bring the scrub brush, too!" Kathy called after him. Chris searched his mother's face, his eyes watering. "I didn't do it. Please don't hit me again."

Kathy looked at him, thinking of the terrible night before. "No, baby, it wasn't your fault. Something's happened to the water, I think. Maybe some oil backed up the line. Didn't you notice it before?"

"I had to go. I saw it first!" crowed Missy.

"Uh-huh. Well, let's see what the Clorox does before I call your father and he..."

"Mama! Mama!" The cry came from down the hall.

Kathy leaned out the bathroom doorway. "What is it, Danny? I said it's under the sink!"

"No, Mama! I found it! But the black's in your toilet, too! And it stinks in here!"

Kathy's bathroom door was at the far end of her bedroom. Danny was standing outside the bedroom, holding his nose, when Kathy and the other two children came running down.

As soon as Kathy stepped into the bedroom, the odor bit her-a sweetish perfume smell. She stopped, sniffed, and frowned. "What the hell is that? That isn't my cologne."

But when she entered her bathroom, she was struck by a completely different odor, an overpowering stench. Kathy gagged and started to cough, but before she ran, caught a glimpse of her toilet bowl. It was totally black inside!

The children scrambled out of her way as she headed down the stairs.

"George!"

"What do you want? I'm busy!"

Kathy burst into the livingroom and ran over to where George was crouched by the fireplace. "You'd better come and look! There's something in our bathroom that smells like a dead rat! And the toilet's all black!" She grabbed his hand and tugged him out of the room.

The other bathroom toilet bowl on the second floor was also black inside, as George discovered, but it had no smell. He sniffed the perfume in his room. "What the hell's that?"

He began to open the windows on the second floor. "First, let's get this smell out of here!" He lifted the windows in his and Kathy's bedroom, then ran across the hall to the other bedrooms. Then he heard Kathy's voice.

"George! Look at this!"

The fourth bedroom on the second floor-now Kathy's sewing room-has two windows. One, which looks out at the boathouse and the Amityville River, was the window George had opened that first night when he had awakened at 3:15. The other faces the neighboring house to the right of 112 Ocean Avenue. On this window, clinging to the inside of the panes, were literally hundreds of buzzing flies!

"Jesus, will you look at that! House flies, now?"

"Maybe they're attracted by the smell?" Kathy volunteered.

"Yeah, but not at this time of year. Flies don't live that long, and not in this weather. And why are they only on this window?" George looked around the room, trying to see where the insects had come from. There was a closet in one corner. He opened the door and peered in, looking for cracks; for anything that would make sense.

"If this closet wall was up against the bathroom, they might have lived in the warmth. But this wall's against the outside." George put his hand against the plaster. "It's cold in here. I don't see any way they could have survived."

After shooing his family out into the hall, George shut the door to the sewing room. He opened the other window overlooking the boathouse, then took some newspapers and chased out as many flies as he could. He killed those that remained, then he closed the window. By then, it was freezing on the second floor, but at least the sweet perfume odor was gone. The bathroom stench had also diminished.

This didn't help George in his efforts to warm his house. Though no one else was complaining, he checked the oil heating system in the basement. It was working fine. By four o'clock in the afternoon, the thermostat just off the livingroom read 80 degrees, but George couldn't feel the heat.

Kathy had scrubbed the toilet bowls again with Clorox, Fantastik, and Lysol. The cleaners helped somewhat, but a good deal of the black remained, stained deep into the porcelain. Worst of all was the toilet in the second bathroom next to the sewing room.

The outdoor temperature had risen to 20 degrees and the children were out of the house, playing with Harry. Kathy warned them to keep away from the boathouse and bulkhead area, saying it was too dangerous for them to play there without someone to watch them.

George had brought in some more logs from the cord stacked in the garage and was sitting in the kitchen with Kathy. They began to argue violently about who should go out to buy the Christmas gifts. "Why can't you at least pick up the perfume for your mother?" asked George.

"I've got to get this place in order," Kathy erupted. "I don't see you doing anything but harping!"

After a few minutes, the squabble petered out. Kathy was about to mention the eerie thing that had happened to her in the nook that morning when the front doorbell rang.

A man, who looked to be anywhere from thirty-five to forty-five because of his receding hairline, was standiDg there with a hesitant smile on his face and a six-pack 44 of beer in his hands. His features were coarse and his nose was red from the cold. "Everybody wants to come over to welcome you to the neighborhood. You don't mind, do you?"

The fellow wore a three-quarter length wool car coat, corduroy pants, and construction boots. It struck George that he didn't look like a neighbor who would own one of the large homes in the area.

Before they even moved to Amityville, George and Kathy had considered the idea of having an open house, but once in the new house, they had never brought up the subject again. George nodded to the one-man welcoming committee. "No, we don't mind. If they don't mind sitting on cardboard boxes, bring them all."

George took him into the kitchen and introduced Kathy. The man stood there, and repeated his speech to her. Kathy nodded. He continued by telling the Lutzes that he kept his boat at another neighbor's boathouse, several doors down on Ocean Avenue.

The man held on to the six-pack and finally said, "I brought it, I'll take it with me," and left.

George and Kathy never found out his name. They never saw him again. That night when they went to bed, George made his usual check of all the doors and windows, latching and locking, inside and out. So, when he woke once more at 3:15 in the morning and gave in to the urge to look downstairs, he was stunned to find the two hundred and fifty pound wooden front door wrenched wide open, hanging from one hinge!

5 December 23 - Kathy awoke to the noise of George wrestling with the wrecked front door. When she felt the chill in the house, she threw on a robe and ran downstairs to see her husband trying to force the heavy wooden slab back into its frame.

"What happened?"

"I don't know," George answered, finally forcing the door closed. "This thing was wide open, hanging on one hinge. Here, look at this!" He pointed to the brass lock plate. The doorknob was twisted completely off-center. The metal facing was bent back as though someone had tried to pry it open with a tool, but from the inside! "Someone was trying to get out of the house, not in!"

"I don't understand what's going on around here," George muttered, more to himself than Kathy. "I know I locked this before I went upstairs. To open the door from in here, all you had to do was turn the lock."

"Is it the same way outside?" Kathy asked.

"No. There's nothing wrong with the knob or the outside plate. Somebody'd need an awful lot of strength to pull away a door this heavy and tear it off one of the hinges ..."

"Maybe it was the wind, George," Kathy offered hopefully. "It seems to get pretty strong out there, you know."

"There's no wind in here, much less a tornado. Somebody or something had to do this!"

The Lutzes looked at one another. Kathy was the first to react. "The kids!" She turned and ran up the stairs to the second floor and into Missy's bedroom.

A small light in the shape of Yogi Bear was plugged into the wall near the bottom of the little girl's bed. In its feeble glow, Kathy glimpsed the form of Missy lying on her stomach. "Missy?" Kathy whispered, leaning over the bed. Missy whimpered, then turned over onto her back. Kathy let out a sigh of relief and tucked the covers up under her daughter's chin. The cold air that had come in while the front door was open had made even this room very chilly. She kissed Missy on the forehead and silently slipped out of the room, heading for the third floor.

Danny and Chris were sleeping soundly. Both were on their stomachs. "Later, when I thought about it," Kathy says, "that was the first time I could ever remember the children sleeping in that position-particularly all three on their stomachs at the same time. I even remember I was almost going to say something to George, that it was kind of strange."

In the morning, the cold spell that gripped Amityville was still unbroken. It was cloudy, and the radio kept promising snow for Christmas. In the hallway of the Lutz home, the thermostat still read a steady 80 degrees, but George was back in the livingroom, stoking the fire to a roaring blaze. He told Kathy he just couldn't shake the chill from his bones, and he didn't understand why she and the children didn't feel that way too.

The job of replacing the doorknob and lock assembly on the front door was too complex for even a handy individual like George. The local locksmith arrived about twelve, as he'd promised. He made a long, slow survey of the damage inside the house and then gave George a peculiar look, but offered no explanation as to how something like this could have possibly happened. He finished the job quickly and quietly. Upon leaving, his one comment was that the DeFeos had called him a couple of years before: "They were having trouble with the lock on the boathouse door."

He had been called to change the lock assembly because once the door was closed from the inside, it would somehow jam, and whoever was in the boathouse couldn't get out. George wanted to say more about the boathouse, but when Kathy looked at him, he held back. They didn't want the news spreading around Amityville that again there was something funny going on at 112 Ocean Avenue.

By two in the afternoon, the weather had begun to warm. A slight drizzle was enough to keep the children in the house. George still hadn't gone to work and was in constant transit between the livingroom and the basement, adding logs and checking on the oil burner. Danny and Chris were up in their third floor playroom, noisily banging their toys around. Kathy was back at her cleaning chores, putting shelf paper in the closets. She had worked her way almost to her own bedroom on the second floor when she looked in Missy's room. The little girl was sitting in her diminutive rocking chair, humming to herself as she stared out the window that looked toward the boathouse.

Kathy was about to speak to her daughter when the phone rang. She picked up the extension in her own bedroom. It was her mother, saying that she would be over the next day--Christmas Eve-and that Kathy's brother Jimmy would bring them a Christmas tree as a housewarming gift.

Kathy said how relieved she was that at least the tree would be taken care of, since she and George had been unable to rouse themselves to do any shopping at all.

Then, out of the comer of her eye, Kathy saw Missy leave her room and enter the sewing room. Kathy was only half listening to what her mother was saying; what could Missy possibly want in there, where all the flies had been the day before? She could hear her five-year-old daughter humming, moving about some still unopened cardboard boxes.

Kathy was about to cut her mother short when she saw Missy come back out of the sewing room. When the child stepped into the hallway and returned to her own bedroom, she stopped her humming. Puzzled by her daughter's behavior, Kathy wound up her conversation with her mother, again thanking her for the tree. She hung up, walked silently toward Missy's room and stood in the doorway.

Missy was back in her rocking chair, staring out the same window and humming again, a tune that didn't sound quite familiar. Kathy was about to speak when Missy stopped humming, and without turning her head, said, "Mama? Do angels talk?"

Kathy stared at her daughter. The little girl had known she was there! But before Kathy could step into the room, she was startled by a loud crash from overhead. The boys were upstairs! Fearful, she raced up the steps to the playroom. Danny and Chris were rolling on the floor, locked in each other's arms, punching and kicking at each other.

"What's going on here?" Kathy screamed. "Danny! Chris! You stop this right now, you hear!" She tried to pull them apart, but each was still trying to get at the other, their eyes blazing with hate. Chris was crying in his anger. It was the first time, ever, that the two brothers had gotten into a fight.

She slapped each boy in the face-hard-and demanded to know what had started this nonsense. "Danny started it," Chris sniffed.

"Liar' Chris, you started it," Danny scowled.

"Started what? What are you fighting about?" Kathy demanded, her voice rising. There was no answer from either boy. Both suddenly withdrew from their mother. Whatever happened, Kathy sensed it was their affair not hers.

Then her patience snapped. "What is going on around here? First it's Missy with her angels, and now you two idiots trying to kill each other! Well, I've had it! We'll just see what your father has to say about all this. You're both going to get it later, but right now I don't want to hear another peep out of either of you! You hear me? Not another sound!"

Shaking, Kathy returned downstairs to her shelving. Cool down, she told herself. As she passed Missy's room again, the little girl was humming the same strange tune to herself. Kathy wanted to go in, but then thought better of it and continued on into her own bedroom. She'd talk to George later when she had a chance to be calmer about the whole affair.