Thirty Rooms To Hide In (19 page)

We used to play an incredibly scary version of hide-and-seek called “Beaster.” It was the last organized game any of us remember playing with Dad before he went over the edge.

It was always played at night. To begin a game of Beaster the six brothers would scatter through the four floors of the Millstone and extinguish every light. Wherever you were when the last light went out, the game began.

My father, armed with a rolled-up newspaper, was now waiting for you somewhere on one of the four floors of the huge house. His job was to whack you with the newspaper. Your job was to not make a high wailing girlie-scream when his form loomed out of the darkness and the whacking began.

So you crept through the Millstone looking for a hiding place. The Minnesota winter banished any thought of escaping the game by going outside. There were 30 rooms to hide in, but most were too scary to be in all alone.
After a half hour of hiding in a distant hallway closet, part of you wanted to give up and run screaming and public through the house and just get it over with. Eventually though you tiptoed past the dead-end of the music room to the relative safety of the living room.

It was in the living room where my last game of Beaster ended.

I’d made it to the red chairs near the fireplace and tucked myself into a small triangle of space behind the back of the chair and the corner of the room. It was a good place to hide but offered no escape if you were discovered. On the far side of the living room was the stereo amplifier (or the “Hi-Fi,” as we called it then). From where I hid in the corner I could see its little orange on-light, the only illumination in the room and a sort of lighthouse, a reminder that the room was the way I remembered it in sunshine.

As I looked at this light I listened, trying to hear Dad’s footsteps overhead; listening for the discovery of one of my brothers and the high girlie scream which would surely follow. I fixated on the little orange light and waited; listened.

That’s when I saw something begin to move
between
my hiding place and the Hi-Fi. The little orange light, my connection to the world, went out – was blocked out – and I began to scream like a teeny little girl.

* * *

At work, office employees get free coffee. Bone doctors – they get free skeletons.

“Roger is now lecturing down at the boys’ school on an appropriate Halloween subject, the skeleton,” wrote my mother in October, 1959. “He brought it from his office and it now stands in lonely dignity in the Music Parlor, lending a rare atmosphere of horror to the gleefully told ghost stories Kip and Jeff concoct.”

This skeleton was the real thing. It wasn’t made out of plastic; it was made out of a person. To preserve it for medical study, the bones had been dipped in shellac and they all bore tiny ink markings, as if the worms that had picked them clean left notes, like food critics.

During the day, we little ones had nervous fun with the skeleton, making it wave its hand at the passing dog (or perform some worse indignity). But at night, the skeleton exacted revenge simply by standing there in the moonlight, dangling from its support pole in all its clickety marionette horror, a scarecrow for boys – a scareboy.

What made the scareboy especially frightening wasn’t so much its toothy gravestone grin or the twin dark crypts of the eyes. It was the idea that this skeleton was once a living person; a man, with a name.

“It used to be … a reeeeallll guy,” Jeff told us, leaning in for effect.

“It’s Kevinnnnnnn ...”

One of our favorite ghost stories was W.W.Jacobs’s
The Monkey’s Paw
. But the ghost story Kip and Jeff told that night at the foot of the skeleton (the feet rather), this story used the great size of the surrounding Millstone and its 30 rooms to good effect.

“It happened one night in a house
just
like this one,” Jeff would say with a gesture to the rooms looming around us. He probably cribbed the plot from a
Twilight Zone
(none of us remember now), but he expertly adapted the story to happen in our own house and to a man who could’ve been our father: “… a famous photographer, who once lived all alone in a big house.”

* * *

And this photographer, he had a darkroom downstairs in the basement, just like Dad has here. So, one night he’s down in the darkroom developing pictures and he’s got the radio on listening to music when the announcer comes on: “We interrupt this program to bring you a news bulletin. A convicted murder has just escaped from the local mental hospital.”

This wasn’t just any murderer. No, this was “Ol’ One-Eye,” a psycho with a birth defect that left a huge black hole where his left eye should’ve been, … kinda like Kevin’s eye hole right here. Aaaanyway, the thing is, after Ol’ One-Eye murdered his victims, he GOUGED OUT their left eye and ATE IT, always hoping that it would help him grow a new eye.

Well, since the famous photographer guy is all alone in the big old house, the news is too scary, so he just turns the radio off. But now in the silence, somewhere overhead, he hears a footstep. Just one footstep. Someone’s in the house with him.

He realizes that to call for help, he’s gonna have to make his way up to the kitchen where the phone hangs on the wall. As he starts creeping out of the darkroom he hears the footsteps overhead again. But this time the steps seem to be coming from farther away, the sound quieter. The guy thinks, God, please let him be leaving the house.

He finally makes it up the stairs to the phone and just before he dials, he stops to listen. There’s no sound anymore and he notices the front door is standing wide open. He quickly dials the police department and next thing you know the whole driveway is just full of cop cars with lights flashing and police are everywhere with guns drawn. They go through the entire house … but find nothing.

Later, out on the front steps as the squad packs up to leave, the photographer walks up to the lieutenant and apologizes for the false alarm. The lieutenant guy, he just brushes it off, says no big deal and then the photographer goes, “Hey, as a favor, what say I take a professional portrait of you and the squad? You know, to put up back at the precinct?”

The cop says sure why not and soon the whole squad is lined up on the front steps of the old house, posing with hands on gun belts. He takes a few pictures but they’re no good because none of the cops is smiling.

“Come on, you guys, smile.”

The cops finally all light up and he gets his picture. “I’ll develop it and bring it downtown first thing tomorrow, okay?” He waves. “Thanks again, everybody.”

The cops all drive away and the guy goes back inside. This time he locks the door.

Back down in the darkroom, he starts developing the pictures. He exposes the best negative, the one with all the smiles, and drops the photographic paper into the tray of developing chemicals. He watches the image slowly form.

Yep, there’s the lieutenant, standing in front with a big smile. And there are all the cops lined up by the front door. They’re all smiling too. Perfect. He got the shot.

And that’s when he notices it.

Up high in the dark, just beyond the lights of all the cop cars, looking down from the attic window is a white face. It has only one eye. The worst part is, the face is looking right at the camera. And it too is smiling.

* * *

At the Millstone, the food chain went like this: big brothers scared the bejesus out of little brothers and never the other way around.

Our father had set the bar quite high for scaring the family. So to truly horrify a little brother, you had to do something so frightful you could make his little bottom slam shut hard enough to snap a pencil.

At the top of the food chain was our oldest brother, Kip. He was an Eagle Scout. And given his proficiency at scaring the bejesus out of me, he must have had a merit badge somewhere, one embroidered with the icon of a fifth grader and Jesus bursting out of his chest.

Kip’s best early work was a minimalist piece, thrown together really, a forerunner of Christo, come to think of it. He draped himself in one of Mom’s dark tablecloths and stood outside in the night wind in the middle of the yard, motionless. He’d arranged for his co-conspirator Jeff to casually mention to me, “Go out and get Kip ‘cause
Bonanza’s
almost on.” A quick sprint around the Millstone brought me screeching to a cartoon halt in front of the dark ghost. That it didn’t move, rattle Marley’s chains, or say even “Boo” made the specter all the more horrifying. It just stood there. I did not.

Chris was the next to win a merit badge in scaring the bejesus out of a little brother.

It was a cloudless night in September of 1963. Mom and Dad were hosting a Mayo Clinic party and Chris and I were outside. The Millstone was lit like a ship on dark water and from an open window on the deck came Erroll Garner on piano and the sound of grown-ups laughing at grown-up things.

Eavesdropping, then losing interest, we wandered away from the house and decided to climb the crab apple tree at the far end of the driveway. Reaching the top we settled on branches to view the stars.

Chris began to talk quietly. Just some thoughtful big-brotherish musings about the heavens – how far away stars were, how unchanging the constellations. Then his talk drifted to some “recent scientific exploration.” For instance, this new thing scientists were studying. “Have you heard about The Horrid Light?” asked Chris.

“The Horrid what?”

“Nah, never mind.”

“No, tell me about this … this Horrid Light thing. Actually, I think I
did
hear about it.”

I shifted on my branch.

“Well, apparently…”

And it was the way he lilted the word “apparently” that did the trick. “Apparently” meant “Personally, I’m not sure about this, but scientists in white lab coats said it and who are we to question men with short haircuts?”

“Apparently” meant there were very likely remaining horrors out there, beyond drunken fathers yelling in the night; horrors undiscovered, even uncategorized. New nightmares to pile on top of all the other fully documented menaces to life and happiness at the Millstone.

“Apparently,” he went on, “there is a single star up there that once every, I don’t know, million years or so sends out a disintegrating ray that just
fries
you.”

“Disin… a what?”

“Well, and again, I’m only summing up what I’ve heard, but apparently, it’s like a bolt of lightning that’s … sort of straight, like a ray, that comes down from this one star. The good thing though is that it only happens about once every million years.”

The trick to achieving pencil-snapping horror in a fifth-grader was to raise the threat level, lower it ever so slightly, … and then strike without mercy. The timing must be perfect; his was.

Seconds after assuring me that people were turned into bacon only once every million years, he said,
“Oh, Jesus, that’s the star! Right there! I see the Horrid Light! It’s coming!”
He leapt out of his perch, dropped the story-and-a-half onto the soft lawn below and ran into the warmth of the safe and distant house – leaving me alone, stuck high in a tree like an hors d’oeuvre on a toothpick served up to an interstellar horror traveling towards me at 186,000 miles per second.

I jumped.

Falling, I felt a prickle between my shoulder blades where I was certain the Horrid Light would strike. The Horrid Light would then travel through my body exiting my anus to start a fire on the grass below where my body would land with whatever thump my 65 pounds might make.

Falling, I realized I would die
in the air
and not have even the final dignity of being able to brace my feet on ground for death’s impact and perhaps allow myself to collapse with some sort of plan. I would be simultaneously dead and in motion, with no say in the position they’d discover my body.