All of the windows, over a dozen of them, were so dark they might have been coated with black paint. There were no vehicles parked in the circular end of the driveway.
Lightning pulsed in the sky above the mansion, threw the structure in stark relief against the churning clouds and encircling woods.
It resembled a haunted house straight out of a horror flick. He didn’t want to get any closer. He wanted nothing more than to run away, get to the road and flag someone down to get help. That was a more appealing alternative than going inside this house.
He looked behind him, at the weed-choked lane. It had taken him several minutes to get this far, and his dad needed an ambulance right away.
He attempted to use his cell phone. Still no service.
“Okay, don’t be stupid,” he said. “There’s no time to go back. It’s just a house, man. Go on up there and see if they have a phone.”
He approached the door.
On the veranda, a weathered, bench-style swing hung from rusty chains. It swung, as if it had been vacated only seconds ago.
It’s only the wind, he assured himself.
As though in response, a breeze whispered across the veranda, caressed him.
Except for the soughing wind and the water plinking from the eaves, the area was tomb silent.
The wide oak door looked solid enough to serve as a bank vault. The doorbell was broken, the button dangling from the casing like a ruptured eye.
He grasped the brass knocker, an object shaped like an angelic woman’s countenance. He knocked.
The sound was loud in the stillness.
“Hello!” he said. “Is anyone here? We’ve had an accident and need to use a phone!”
Silence. He watched the windows, to see if a curtain stirred, or a light flicked on. But the house remained dark and quiet.
He rapped again with the knocker, harder.
The door apparently was not shut tight. It creaked open, revealing a slice of darkness.
Someone had to be inside. It wouldn’t make sense for the door of a mansion to be loose if no one lived there.
He nudged the door open a few inches.
“I only need to use a phone,” he said.
Silence answered him.
After hesitating for a beat, he pushed the door open all the way.
Musty blackness greeted him. He held back a sneeze.
Shining the flashlight in front of him, he went inside.
The wide entry hall had a scarred hardwood floor. An enormous chandelier hung overhead, decorated with cobwebs. Pieces of antique furniture—chairs, tables, a mirror, vases—encased in webs and mantled with dust, lined the corridor. There were numerous rooms located off the main hallway, vast, dank chambers full of shadows.
He moved deeper inside. Paintings hung on the walls. Colorful scenes of sun-splashed meadows, long tables laden with sumptuous feasts, horses galloping through a pastoral countryside.
The paintings were skillfully done, but there were no people depicted in any of the pieces. It seemed weird to him.
“Hello,” he said. “Anyone here?”
Wind drifted down the corridor. Behind him, there was a bump.
He spun.
But it was only the door. Stirred by the breeze, it had drifted shut.
He laughed nervously.
Only a house, he reminded himself. He wasn’t in a horror movie.
Nevertheless, he had the sense that he was being watched. He felt a slight pressure on the back of his neck, the weight of someone’s gaze.
Wetness crept down the channel of his spine.
He panned the light all around him.
The house was vacant. If someone were in there, they would have come out by now. His imagination, fed by a steady diet of books and scary movies, was running away with him. No one was watching him. It was a stupid thought.
He was about to leave when he saw a telephone sitting on a table near the middle of the hallway, at the foot of a grand spiral staircase.
Maybe there was some hope after all.
It was a rotary phone. He’d last seen one of these years ago, when he’d visited his great-uncle in Mississippi. He picked up the handset.
The line was dead.
Just as he’d worried, he had wasted his time coming there. It was time for Plan B: flagging down someone on the road.
As he hung up the phone, something scurried through the darkness in a nearby room.
He tracked the movement with the flashlight.
A large cat had perched on the arm of an overstuffed chair. Fine-boned and muscular, the feline’s shorthaired coat was a lustrous bluish-gray. Crouched, it watched him. Its vivid green eyes appeared to possess unnatural intelligence.
His racing pulse slowed.
“What’re you doing in here, kitty?” he said. “You live here with someone?”
The cat only looked at him. It did not meow.
So much for the feeling that he was being watched. Nothing more frightening than a plain cat had been spying on him.
Creaking sounds reached him.
This time, the cat wasn’t the culprit. The noises came from somewhere above: the staircase.
The cat slipped away into the shadows.
Eyebrows knitted, he placed his hand on the dusty balustrade and shone the flashlight up the stairs.
“Is anyone there?” he asked.
A soft creak.
He imagined an old woman living there, kept company by the cat. Maybe she was upstairs, padding around slowly on a cane, planning to come downstairs to meet him.
But he wasn’t going up there to see. As much as he wanted to attribute his jitters to his lucid imagination, this house was honestly beginning to creep him out.
It was time to go.
He pushed away from the railing.
A cold gust blasted down the staircase, crashed into him like an invisible freight train. He gasped, stumbled.
The Arctic gale stung his eyes and squeezed tears out of them. He flailed his arms, temporarily blinded.
Coldness poured into his mouth, rushed down his throat and flooded his stomach. The invasive chill spread throughout his body.
What’s happening to me?
The freezing sensation numbed his muscles as effectively as a dose of Novocain. The flashlight slipped out of his fingers. Darkness dropped over him.
His legs lost their strength. He fell to the floor, landed hard on his side, not even feeling the pain due to the coldness that had enveloped him.
Jesus, what’s happening?
Teeth chattering, he struggled to regain control of his body. He had to get the flashlight. He felt as if he were a child again, just awakened from a nightmare and terrified of the blackness in the bedroom. The darkness was too much to bear. It was like a living thing closing in on him, a monster that would consume him.
He stretched his trembling arm, extended his fingers to grasp the light.
Someone grabbed his hand.
He screamed.
A light shone in Andrew’s face.
“Relax, my friend,” a baritone voice said. “You are safe.”
Andrew’s scream died in his throat. He looked past the light and into the visage of an elderly black man.
The man’s big hand covered Andrew’s. He pulled Andrew upright; he was surprisingly strong considering that he looked to be at least eighty years old.
Andrew’s legs steadied. The coldness had drained out of his body.
What had caused the numbness in the first place? The wind? Or maybe he was still in mild shock from the accident.
“I’m sorry,” Andrew said. He bent to retrieve his flashlight. “You scared the daylights out of me. I thought I was alone in here.”
The man carried a kerosene lantern, the likes of which Andrew had not seen in ages. He set it on the table beside the telephone. Golden light filled the hallway.
Andrew got a good look at the guy. He stood at least a half foot taller than Andrew, and Andrew was nearly six feet. He was lean, straight-backed. He wore a somber black suit with a crisp white shirt and dull red tie.
His manner of dress reminded Andrew, uncomfortably, of an undertaker.
A virile shock of steel-gray hair flowed from the man’s oval-shaped head. He was clean shaven, his skin as smooth as a pecan.
In spite of his age, the man’s black eyes were hawk-sharp.
“What do you seek in here?” the man asked. He carefully enunciated each word and had only a faint trace of a Southern accent. He raised an eyebrow. “Are you ghost-hunting?”
“Huh? No, my dad and I were in a car accident on the road out front. I wanted to use the phone to call an ambulance.”
“Our phone service has been discontinued for some time.” He smiled. He had the whitest, straightest teeth that Andrew had ever seen, and they looked real, not at all like dentures.
“I figured out that the phone was off,” Andrew said.
“Indeed. My name is Walter.” He extended his hand. “I’ve served as the caretaker here for many, many years.”
Andrew shook his hand. The brief but firm shake reinforced his perception of this old man’s uncommon strength.
“I’m Andrew. Where can I find the nearest phone?”
“Perhaps in town. We have no need of telephones here.”
“So someone lives here? I thought I heard sounds upstairs.”
“Many live here.” Walter’s eyes sparkled mysteriously.
Andrew peered up the staircase. He didn’t see anything. He attributed the icy gust he’d felt to an open window up there, something like that.
Walter’s response puzzled him, but he didn’t bother to pursue the matter. He didn’t care who lived there. He cared only about getting an ambulance for his father.
“Sorry for snooping around in here, but I need to go now and get help for my dad.” Andrew headed for the door. “Nice meeting you.”
“Likewise,” Walter said. He flashed his perfect grin.
Outside on the veranda, Andrew tried his cell phone again.
It found a signal.
“Finally!” Running away from the house, he called 911.
He didn’t look back. He wanted to forget all about his odd experience at the mansion.
Standing in the doorway, lamp in hand, Walter watched Andrew leave.
He was no longer smiling.
A few minutes past eleven o’clock at night, Andrew was sitting beside his father’s bed at East Georgia Regional Medical Center in Statesboro, when his dad finally awoke.
Earlier, paramedics had safely removed his dad from the vehicle and transported him to the hospital. The physician diagnosed him as having suffered a concussion and bruised ribs; he’d received stitches for a laceration on his head, too. He had been unconscious since the accident.
Andrew had been treated for minor whiplash, and had been given medication to lessen the aches.
He’d called his dad’s wife in Atlanta. She was on her way and should arrive at any moment. For the time being, Andrew and his father were the only ones in the room.
When his father’s eyes opened, Andrew rose. “Dad, you’re up.”
“Hey,” Dad said in a scratchy voice. Blinking groggily, he licked his chapped lips. “How long I been sleeping?”
“Few hours.” Andrew grasped his father’s hand. “How’re you feeling?”
“Head hurts like hell.” A thick bandage encircled his father’s head. Dad touched it, gingerly. “Where are we?”
“At a hospital in Statesboro. We had an accident. The truck flipped over.”
“You doing okay?”
“I’m fine,” Andrew said.
Rubbing his head, Dad winced.
“I’ll get the nurse and ask her to give you a painkiller,” Andrew said.
“Thanks.”
Andrew started to press the call button near the bed, and paused.
“Dad, do you remember anything?”
“Remember . . . driving through a storm,” Dad said.
“Do you remember where we were going?”
He watched his father closely.
Dad frowned. “We were heading home, right?”
“Right.”
Clearly, his father did not recall taking the exit off the highway, speeding across the roads, and almost hitting the deer. Andrew had worried that the concussion would wipe away his dad’s memory of the minutes leading up to the accident. Memory loss after such an injury was commonplace, the doctor advised, but Andrew had vainly hoped that this situation would be different.