The Third Floor Part 8

"I've got one," Liz said, and pointed to the main room where she'd been using theirs to cut in along the ceiling.

"Oh, perfect, thanks," Carl said.

He carried it upstairs and Liz followed. He placed the ladder beneath the crawls.p.a.ce in the ceiling and climbed up. He lifted the panel out of the way, and got his flashlight from off his belt.

Liz glanced into the empty rooms. They all looked so bare.

Of course they do, she thought. They're empty.

But it was more than that. Obviously they were empty, but there's a difference between an empty room and a barren one and these rooms were absolute wastelands. She tried to imagine what they would have looked like furnished by people who'd lived here before.

"Well, the crawls.p.a.ce up here is too small to get into but from what I can see, there's nothing in the ceiling," Carl said. He stood near the top of the ladder, and his head was up in the ceiling.

"So no squirrels, then?"

"Well, I didn't say that. I just can't see everything up here." He went down a rung and pulled his head from the hole. "And they could get in, really, any number of ways. Through a crack in the dormers, maybe. They could still get into the walls and no holes show up in the crawls.p.a.ce. It could be mice."

"It could be anything," Liz said.

"It could, yes. I'll also take a look in the bas.e.m.e.nt and around the outside of the house. Where's your bas.e.m.e.nt door?"

"I'll show you."

But before they could move, something knocked above Carl's head. They both looked up.

The crawls.p.a.ce had two panels. One in the ceiling, and a cap over the top, outside, that had to be lifted and moved aside, which led to the roof. Whatever had made that noise, it was on the roof, not in the ceiling.

"What was that, now?" Carl asked.

"Don't know," Liz said.

It came again, something knocking on the roof.

Carl clicked his flashlight on again and shone it up at the cap.

Another knock and dust fell from the roof, sprinkling his gla.s.ses. He climbed higher on the ladder and was reaching up to the cover when a final series of knocks came. All timidity was lost and whatever was out there was pounding on the roof, beating at it with everything they had, shaking the top floor of the house and Carl lost his balance, grabbed the top of the ladder for support, but fell anyway, cras.h.i.+ng to the floor and kicking the ladder out from under him, across the room.

"Oohhhhh," he said, trying to sit up and rubbing his hip.

"Oh my G.o.d, I'm so sorry," Liz said, moving to try to help him up.

"No, that's alright," he said, climbing to his feet. "I'm fine. Just more surprised than anything."

"Really, I'm sorry."

"Don't be. Not your fault. I mean especially in this house, huh?"

"What do you mean?" she asked. "Especially in this house?"

Carl looked like he'd accidentally revealed the secret sauce while sitting in the compet.i.tion's kitchen.

"Oh, nothing," he said. "Just, you know, big old houses like this, they get reputations. Even when they don't deserve them. You know, people see big houses like this one, they hear a few weird noises, and they think the worst."

"Yeah," Liz said.

"But the truth is, it's just, like you said, squirrels in the walls, stuff like that."

That was no squirrel, Liz thought. Her second thought was And he's lying.

"So, let me just put that cover back and we can look in the bas.e.m.e.nt."

They both looked up, staring at the roof cover, waiting for the knock to come again. They watched it for a very long time, but nothing happened.

"That was very strange," Carl said, as if to himself. He stood for another second, looking up, before grabbing the ladder and replacing the crawls.p.a.ce cover.

Liz led him to the bas.e.m.e.nt, careful on the stairs to be quiet.

"My son's taking his nap," she told him. Carl took the hint and practically tiptoed down the stairs. Liz glanced back at him and Carl was lifting his feet way too high and setting them back down with the utmost caution. Liz thought he must have learned to tiptoe from watching Yosemite Sam or Daffy Duck.

She eased the door open and flipped on the light.

"Now, there are two levels down here," she explained. "You'll go down these few steps here, then turn. You can then either go straight, up a few steps to the laundry room, or turn again and go down to the bottom level, which is where the water heater and the furnace are."

"Gotcha," Carl said. As he stepped down, the phone rang.

"Excuse me," Liz said and tried to get down the hall quickly, but quietly. In the middle of the afternoon, while Joey slept and everything was turned off, the phone rang to shake the walls. She grabbed it before it could ring again. "h.e.l.lo?"

As soon as the greeting was out, a dread came over her, seeping through the phone lines and penetrating her, making her suddenly wish she'd let it ring.

"You're dead," a hoa.r.s.e whisper came over the line.

She flashed back to the day in middle school, this same phrase--for all Liz knew, it could be the same voice--scaring her so bad she'd had to hide in her parents' room until someone came home. She stood frozen, listening. It had only said it once, "You're dead," then fell silent and Liz listened to the silence, trying to pick up anything in the background, a voice, a television, traffic, anything that said this was real, that the caller was someone sitting bored at home. But the only noise coming over the line now was nothing. Not even white background noise. The line was just dead. Soon the dial tone started, but Liz hadn't heard a hang up click.

She listened to the tone for a second, then set the phone down She looked around the room, wondering who, what, if anything, was watching her.

She could hear Carl through the vents, moving around in the bas.e.m.e.nt.

She'd go down with him. She wasn't sure what to make of him, but he was company and Liz didn't want to be alone in the big empty house right now.

She got to the hall and turned toward the stairs, then stopped.

Standing on the bottom step was a man. Someone, anyway. The face was blank, blurred out, it looked from Liz's end of the hall. But the figure was facing her. It was still. Liz looked at it, but didn't move. The hall was dim, but light shone in through the front door at the top of the stairs, casting eerie light behind the figure, silhouetting it even more.

She knew there was no one in the house, except Carl, herself, and Joey. She attempted a step toward it. The figure stepped backwards up one step. Liz took another step, echoed again by the figure's backward step. Liz stopped. The blank face nodded once, then the arms raised as if to take its head in its hands. Instead, the entire torso began shaking violently, rapidly. The motion was blurred and Liz thought she heard a droning buzz coming from it. Then the body stopped shaking, suddenly, as if a b.u.t.ton had been pushed, or an outlet unplugged.

The body's head turned toward the open bas.e.m.e.nt door where Carl could be heard b.u.mping around in the laundry room. The figure turned and climbed the stairs, vanis.h.i.+ng around the landing.

Liz found movement, finally, and ran to the bottom of the stairs. Daylight gave her small courage. She wanted to go up, to see where it had gone, if it was still around, but she heard Joey, faintly, in his bedroom.

She peeked in and listened. He was lying down, curled up, crying.

She went in and asked, "What's wrong, Joe?" He ignored her and kept crying. She moved to the side of his bed and leaned down. "What's the matter? Did you have a bad dream?" He still ignored her and she wasn't sure whether to be annoyed or worried. Was it normal for kids to wake up crying and not know why?

She sat on the edge of the bed and put a hand on his shoulder. "Come on, Joe, tell me what's wrong. You sure were sleeping good. You have a dream about something?"

Joey just whined. He stayed curled up, crying. For all Liz knew, he didn't even know she was there. She pulled him into her arms and rocked him, trying to get him to stop crying and tell her what was wrong, but he wouldn't talk. And of course Carl chose then to come upstairs.

She put Joey down and walked into the hall to meet him.

"No signs down there of anything, either," he said. "Now we can set out a poison for the mice, if there are any--"

"No," Liz said. "I don't like poison. G.o.d forbid I come home one day to find dead mice in the middle of the floor. And if they crawl away somewhere, there'd be that dead mouse smell all over and I'd spend a month looking for it."

"Actually," Carl explained, "the poison doesn't work like that. It dehydrates them, so there's no smell when they die. They'll slink off someplace and rot away before you know it."

Liz grimaced. "Great," she said. "Tell you what, I'll talk it over with my husband and he'll give you a call, okay?"

"Sure thing," Carl agreed. "Ask him, also, what he wants me to do for squirrels."

"I thought you didn't find any."

"I didn't. I didn't find any mice either, but that doesn't mean they're not there. It could be they're in the walls themselves. I once had this call, this guy said he had rats in his garage. I went out there, didn't find a thing. No sign, no nothing. So I leave and I get a call again a week or two later. Same guy, he's still got rats in his garage. So I went out again. Still nothing. A few weeks later, I'm driving by on my way someplace, I don't remember where, and I see a big group of guys in this guy's yard, all of them with sledgehammers.

"I stopped to say hi and ask if he'd seen any more rats. Turns out, all those guys are out there, friends of his, to tear down the garage. Well they started bas.h.i.+ng away at that thing with the hammer and one of them gets through the wall. Mind you, this is a big cement garage, concrete walls. Well, he busts through and rats just poured out of the wall. There was near three, four hundred of them, living inside the walls. That's why I didn't see any signs. They lived inside the bricks. To this day, I don't have any idea how they got in or out, what they ate, nothing. But I know I saw them fall out of the hole when that guy went through it.

"So just 'cause I don't see them, doesn't mean they're not there."

"I'll be sure and mention that to my husband when he gets home," Liz said. She showed Carl out, then stood at the door a second, staring up, thinking about that roof cover again and wondering just what the h.e.l.l that was about. Then she went back down to take care of Joey.

Jack wasn't sure what made him turn off Tenth Street onto Dayan and stop at Arthur's Used Books. He'd made up his mind shortly after lunch to leave the book alone, especially after hearing Charley's story. But there he was, pulling the Jeep up to the store and getting out, walking in, closing the door behind him to the tinkle of the bell.

A man he a.s.sumed to be Arthur smiled up from his newspaper at the counter and Jack smiled back, offering him a, "h.e.l.lo."

"Hi there," Arthur replied. "How are you today?"

"Pretty good," Jack said, "pretty good." He wandered to the far end of the store, looking over the shelves, scanning t.i.tles and authors.

"Are you looking for something in particular?"

"Not really. Someone at work said you had a good selection here, I thought I'd stop by on the way home. Just taking a look, really."

"Well," Arthur said, turning back to his paper, "you think of something you'd like and you can't find it out here, I got a ton more upstairs and in the back."

"Thanks," Jack said, then turned back to his browsing.

He found a row of childrens' books and went looking through them for something Joey might like. He had no idea what first graders were reading these days. Harry Potter was probably too advanced.

Arthur broke out in a hacking cough, deep, bellowing retches from his chest and Jack turned to make sure he was okay. Arthur hawked something up from his lungs and spat into a paper bag at his side on the floor. Jack turned back to the books.

"You got kids?" Arthur asked.

"Yeah," Jack said. "One. A son."

"There's lots of good kids' book there. Got 'Magic Tree House'. 'Junie B. Jones'. A good stack of them 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books. Remember those?"

Jack did. He'd liked those. Maybe Joey would, too. He meant to ask where they were. Instead, he said, "You know, my wife likes ghost stories. Weird stuff. You got anything like that?"

"Yeah, sure," Arthur said. He came around the corner and headed for Jack.

"She likes the true stories. Small towns, freaky stuff."

Arthur stopped and turned back to his counter.

"Well, sir," he said, "I just happen to have something like that right here."

He picked a book off a stack next to the register and held it out, cover up, so Jack could see Arthur's name in big letters at the bottom.

"The Outsider's Guide to Angel Hill," Jack read, "by Arthur Miller." He looked up, confusion on his face. "Arthur Miller, the dance instructor?"

"No," Arthur chuckled. "Arthur Miller the used bookstore owner. But I get that a lot."

"Your book?" Jack said, taking the offered paperback. It was a trade, the size of a hardback, but soft cover. He turned it over, looking at the cover, then scanning the text on the back.

"Proud to say yes," Arthur said, smiling.

"About Angel Hill? Really?"

"Every story in there true to G.o.d," Arthur said. He raised his hand in oath.

"Wow," Jack said. "I bet my wife would love it. We just moved here almost a month ago. Is there really weirdo stuff in here? Like secret cults and local witch legends and stuff?"

"If that was the extent of Angel Hill," Arthur said, "I wouldn't have bothered writing that book. I don't think your wife will find exactly what she's expecting in there. But I'm very sure she won't be disappointed, either."

"In that case," Jack put the book on the counter and reached for his wallet, "I'll take it."

Arthur rang him up and told him to have a good day. Jack was at the door when he turned back and asked, "How did you find out about all this stuff? Just talk, urban legends and stuff?"

"No," Arthur said, "everything in there's been well doc.u.mented. I got a lot from the newspapers, some from old records, a few of them I got from living them myself."

"I see," Jack said. "Thanks again." He turned and left. Arthur waved and went back to his newspaper.

Jack climbed into the Cherokee and started the engine. He slid the book from its paper bag and looked again at the cover. The photo placed between the t.i.tle at the top and Arthur's name at the bottom was a black and white landscape, some random shot of Angel Hill, he guessed.

"The Outsider's Guide to Angel Hill," he read again.

He slid it back into the bag and pulled out, headed home.

By the time he got there, he'd tossed the sack out the window and had the book stuffed into the waistband of his pants. He couldn't say why anymore than he could say why he'd bought it in the first place. He grabbed the string off the seat and went in.