The Third Floor Part 13

She picked him up. His head rested on her shoulder. The priest noticed the birthmark under his chin.

"That's a nasty scar he's got."

"No," she said. "It's just a birthmark, really."

"Oh? Well, it certainly is a strange one, then."

"Yes," she agreed. Then she noticed the priest trying not to look over Liz's shoulder and when she glanced back she saw the old naked woman duck behind her curtain again.

Liz laughed.

"Well, that's something you don't see every day, isn't it?" he said.

"You do around here," Liz said. "She's always standing there like that. I have no idea why."

They shared a chuckle and Liz carried Joey back to the house. She laid him on the couch, then turned to thank the priest. He said it was his pleasure. They talked another few minutes before he remembered another appointment.

"I hope you and your family have many good years here," he said, walking to the door.

"Me too," Liz said. "And thanks again. I'm sure we'll be very happy here."

"G.o.d bless," he said. He walked out.

"Goodbye."

She closed the door and turned around to look at her house. Was it over? Had the blessing worked? She went up to the second floor, stood in the middle of the main room, and waited.

Nothing. She went to the third floor, stood up there a few minutes. She had to make herself stand still. She would probably be nervous coming up here for awhile. But she did it and she heard nothing, felt nothing.

Am I alone? she wondered. She thought she just might be.

"Thank G.o.d," she said out loud.

She took another look at the empty third floor, wondering what they'd put up here once the house was done. They really had more room than they needed.

We'll think of something, she thought as she went back down to the first floor.

She got a washcloth from the bathroom and wet it to wipe Joey's face. He was deep in sleep on the couch. Would he even remember any of it when he woke up? She hoped not.

She put the b.l.o.o.d.y rag in the dirty clothes, then put those in the washer.

She sat on the couch at Joey's feet, leafing through one of her decorating books from the library, at ease for the first time in weeks. Jack would be home in a few hours. She decided to enjoy the peace and solitude for the first real time since they moved in.

Joey slept. Liz relaxed.

Chapter Nine.

In the two weeks that followed the blessing, Liz had finished three rooms on the second floor. Two actually, but she was nearly done with the dining room. She worked through the afternoons, setting up three fans on the second floor, while Joey played in the main room or took his nap.

The main room had gone quickly once she'd gone back to work on it. She wondered if Jack had even noticed she'd stopped. But it didn't matter now. The room was done, as was the bathroom, and now she was working on the dining room. Only the kitchen and study up here left to do, then it would be time to decide what to do with the third floor.

Jack had suggested closing off the first floor from the rest of the house, put a wall up down there and add a door to the end of the hall at the side of the house. They could rent it out and the Kitches could live on the top two floors.

"It's not like there's not plenty of room for us up there. There are four bedrooms on the third floor and only three of us. And you and I share a room. What do you say?"

Liz had nodded at his idea, said it was something to think about, but hadn't really considered it.

No matter how long she went without hearing a thump or seeing a blurry figure pa.s.s down the hallway, she didn't know if she could bring herself to sleep up there. A hundred psychics could come through, tell her the house was clean, and she wouldn't be able to do it. She knew it like she knew the sun would set at dusk.

But it really was an awful lot of room. More than they needed.

"Forget it, " she said, turning away from her thoughts, and back to the wallpaper.

This would be a beautiful room when it was finished. All they needed now were people to impress with it. All this time in Angel Hill and still they hadn't made any friends. There was the guy at work, Charley, Jack talked to. But as of yet, at work was the only time they talked.

Jack had mentioned going to Charley's house some time to play guitar, but mention it was all he'd done. When the second floor was done, they would have to invite Charley and his family, if he had any, over for dinner.

She looked back through the door connecting the dining room to the main room. Joey was lying on his back, Superman flying above him, cras.h.i.+ng down into the floor above Joey's head. Liz lost her concentration and the sheet of wallpaper she held fell back over her. She wrestled with it and climbed up a couple rungs on the ladder to reach the ceiling.

She was papering the last wall when she checked on Joey again and saw he was asleep in the middle of the floor. She'd trained one of the fans on him, but from here she could see he was still sweating.

Liz had taken a break from working and gone downstairs. Joey was asleep and would be, she figured, for a while longer. Joey woke up minutes after Liz was gone.

He climbed off the floor and looked around, wondering where everyone was, including himself. He wasn't used to waking up in the middle of the floor. After a few seconds, he realized where he was. They'd lived in the house over a month, but anything other than the first floor was still alien to him. He moved around the room, looking at Liz's decorations, not forming much of an opinion about them.

It looks a lot different, he thought.

A lot different than what?

He didn't know. He went into what would be the study. It was dark, the shadows keeping it cooler than the main room. This was their bedroom, he thought.

Whose?

The parents, the ones who had the house before us. Their bedroom was in here.

How did he know?

They'd told him, the voices. He hadn't heard them in a while, but they used to tell him things. And this was the parents' bedroom. The kids' rooms were upstairs. Up there was where all the bad stuff happened.

Joey went to the bottom of the stairs and stared up. He listened, but there was nothing. He wondered what had happened up there. And why didn't he hear them anymore? Not that he wanted to, but he had noticed, and was curious.

He took a step up and looked overhead to the high ceiling and then the top rail. Even though he didn't feel he was being watched anymore, he was still scared in the way children are of such places. Looming, dark, empty. He stepped back down and went downstairs, walking into the living room, rubbing his eyes.

"Did you just wake up?" Liz asked.

"Uh-huh," he said, nodding and climbing onto the couch beside her.

"Are you hungry?"

He shook his head and turned to the television. It wasn't cartoons, nor did it look like it was going to be. Liz was watching something Joey had no interest in. A few minutes pa.s.sed before he got off the couch and went into his room.

"Tell me about the lizards," Jack said.

Charley smiled and nodded. "I remember that one. I was here for it."

"So what happened?"

"Just what the book said. One morning, everyone woke up and found lizards. They were just wandering around, through peoples' yards, under cars. They filled the streets so badly, you couldn't drive anywhere without crus.h.i.+ng hundreds of them." He finished his TV dinner lunch, wiped his mouth with a paper towel.

"Where'd they come from?" Jack's lunch was only half-eaten. The Outsider's Guide to Angel Hill lay open in front of him. He was going through the chapters, picking them at random, and asking for more details.

"I don't know. We went to sleep one night with no lizards. We woke up the next day with them." Charley had gone over three Angel Hill stories with him and was beginning to regret telling him about the book.

"What kinds were they?"

"All different kinds. They counted about sixty different types, just from the corpses. I don't know the names of any of them, but I remember seeing Angel Hill covered in them. It was pretty freaky."

"I'd imagine so," Jack said. He took a bite and noticed it wasn't as warm as it should be.

"It's getting cold."

"Yeah, it is. But they never figured out where they came from?"

"Nope. But, h.e.l.l, they only spent about a week on it anyway. After that, they gave up, chalked it up to another Angel Hill Occurrence and forgot about it."

"See," Jack said, trying not to laugh, "this is why you're full of s.h.i.+t. I've been through this book and through it again--I haven't actually read all of it, but I've flipped through it--and I've found, maybe, two or three stories in here that are even remotely plausible. I can't believe thousands of lizards showed up in town one day and no one ever knew why."

"I can't help that. But I remember what I saw. If you're not gonna believe me, why do you keep asking me to tell you about them?"

Jack tossed his lunch, having decided it was too cold to eat and would be less trouble ditching instead of reheating it.

"Because I'm curious. I'll admit that. But I'm curious about details that might not be in the book. You were there for the lizards, you say. What else happened that day, or the day before, that's not in the book? Something else you remember in retrospect that might have possibly explained it."

"Nothing," Charley said. "The book's got all the details. He was very thorough. I can't tell you why, it just was."

"Nothing just is," Jack said. "Everything's got a logic behind it."

"Yeah, you'd think so, wouldn't you?" Charley said. "Forget it. Let's talk about something else. We've still got a few minutes left."

"Like what?"

"How about guitars?"

"That I can do."

They spent the next ten minutes doing just that.

Liz washed shampoo from Joey's hair while the boy squeezed his eyes shut, held his hands tight over them and kept asking, "How many more?" each time she dumped a cup of water over his head.

"Just one more." She wiped his face and told him to look up. She wiped off his neck, clearing shampoo bubbles away from his ragged pink birthmark. She got him out, dried him off, and sent him to bed.

"How about I take the day off working on the house tomorrow and we go have some fun?"

"Are we going to go see Uncle Allen?"

Liz laughed. "No, I don't think we will. He's all the way in Texas."

"So, how far is that?"

"Do you remember when we came to Angel Hill? When we were in the car all that time and driving all day and you ended up falling asleep?"

Joey nodded. "I like driving a lot. We can go see him."

"We might go down for Christmas, how's that? But not tomorrow. I was thinking maybe the park. Or maybe we could take Dad to work and keep the car and just go see what else we've got to do here."

"Yeah," Joey said. "Let's see if they've got horses."

"Horses, eh?" She covered him with a sheet and turned on his fan.

"They used to keep horses in the house a long time ago."

"They kept them in the barn."

"Not this house. They used to keep them inside."

"Okay, Joe," she said, kissing his forehead and turning out his light. "Good night. We'll think of something good to do. Sweet dreams."

She closed the door and went back to the living room, wondering what he meant by saying they kept horses in the house. First, what did it mean and second, where did he hear it? Did he make it up? Of course he did, he's only six.

She woke up later in the dark, nighttime heat just as stifling as afternoon heat. She thought, We've got to get an air conditioner if nothing else. This is insane, this heat. Then she heard footsteps in the hall. She froze, listening. Not again, please, she thought. Now what do I do? Dammit!

Jack came back to bed, climbed in next to her and went back to sleep. Now that she saw it was only Jack, she realized she could hear the toilet running down the hall. She'd heard it flush, had heard the bathroom door open. But with the heat and her exhaustion, she hadn't paid any attention. She let her body relax again and tried to get back to sleep through the sweltering c.r.a.p of Angel Hill summer. She drifted off finally, thinking, We've got to get an air conditioner. Jack's just gonna have to do some overtime or something to pay for it. How can he sleep in this? Then she, too, was gone.

When she woke up next, she was freezing.

The dark told her it was still the middle of the night, the sound of the fan told her it was still summer. She leaned her head up, peering at the foot of the bed. The fan was oscillating, but Liz felt as if ten of them were trained on her. She squeezed in closer to herself, then backed up to steal some of Jack's heat. She yawned and watched her breath vanish over her head. Why was it so cold? Why was it this cold? Even with half a dozen fans, it still had to be a good eighty-five degrees outside. She shouldn't be this cold.

A s.h.i.+ver ran through her. She shook it off. Her neck creaked and she stretched. She pulled the sheet tighter over her and tried to bury her head in the pillow.

The temperature suddenly dropped another five degrees and she opened her eyes again. She sat up, looked around. She and Jack were alone, but for some reason, the room seemed somehow too empty. Even with her husband asleep next to her, she felt alone. She shook him, but he was oblivious in sleep.

She got out of bed, walked into the hall. Her skin p.r.i.c.kled with chilly goose b.u.mps. Her breath evaporated before her. A cold hand brushed her face and she flinched back, gasping, turning away.