I stepped onto the platform and was enveloped by the mild night air that blankets Chicago in springtime.
The doors sealed, and Max turned in his seat to wave as the train rolled away.
I watched him go, blissfully unaware of how soon his words would come true.
10
It's only later, after the fact, that you remember the mental and physical warning signs that twitch and quiver throughout your body and brain, trying to alert you that something is about to happen. It’s like when the flu is coming on and you remember the small, intense headache that you ignored, or the bout of shivers you ascribed to a chilly breeze, even though it’s eighty-five degrees outside.
Walking up Balmoral Avenue to my house, seeing all of the windows pitch black, a telltale quake ran up my spine. But I was thinking about Max, and didn’t pay it the attention it deserved.
I climbed the steps and saw that the screen door was swinging crookedly on one hinge. Behind it, the front door was wide open.
The interior of the house was dark brown with shadows.
Stepping forward, my foot crushed glass, the
The answer was nearby.
It was chatter-laughter, high-pitched and looping.
It shrieked, stopped, and shrieked again, punctuating the silent house.
I had been taught in self-defense class that when something feels dangerous or threatening to stop thinking and flee. But this was
It didn’t sound human, yet I heard human sounds in it, perverted by speed.
It should have been repelling, but instead drew me forward.
I turned the corner into the living room and the first thing I saw were piles of feathery guts that had been pulled out in chunks from the belly of the leather couch. Bookshelves were overturned, the books’ spines stomped flat, and chairs torn apart with legs missing or at odd angles. Our family portrait hung sideways over the mantle, slashed in half, with Lou sitting on my dad’s lap on one side and me standing with a hand on my mom’s shoulder on the other. Every drawer had been pulled and dumped, and the big Persian rug was yanked back and rolled over on itself, like a huge abandoned crepe. Anything with an interior or that covered something else-pillows, pictures, cabinets-had been flipped over or kicked in or slashed apart. Seeing the room like that was so unreal that all I could do was gape.
It was next to me, and I toed at the debris until a pair of piercing blue eyes stared up from a face that was cold and stone white.
I picked up the unbroken bust and looked into its face, watching the cornea of the left eye dilate-wide, narrow, wide, narrow.
I noticed for the first time a whisper-thin seam around its hairline and, holding the statue tightly, I unscrewed the head of Frank Sinatra.
Inside, a mini video camera focused and refocused its lens behind the left eye.
The tape was stuck, winding forward and backward, shrieking loudly.
I removed the camera, pressed the Stop button, and the chatter-laughter stopped.
I understood suddenly why my parents had kept the tacky gift from a long-dead nanny. It was Elzy’s parting gesture of protection, a nanny cam, hidden inside the head of the only man she had ever loved. The mini camera was charged, with a tape inside, so of course my parents knew about it and had used it. My hands were so clumsy with fear that I almost dropped the camera as I slid it back inside the skull and screwed it shut. And then I was standing in my borrowed disco-queen dress holding Frank Sinatra’s head, sweating and trembling at what might lie beyond the living room. If my mom and dad and Lou were in the house, surely they would’ve appeared by now. They would’ve heard me calling out to them, would’ve heard the chatter-laughter of the stuck tape, would’ve rushed into the room, turned on the lights, and explained it all as a freak occurrence, some kind of bizarre burglary. Or they had done the intelligent thing that I had not-walked in on the scene, followed their primal instincts, and fled.
Or they were still in the house.
They were here, somewhere, unable to come to me.
All of the possibilities contained in that word,
I thought of the layout of our house-front door to hallway, living room on the right, twisting staircase on the left that climbed to a second and third floor. The oak-paneled dining room lay straight ahead, the white-tiled kitchen behind it, and a hundred-year-old basement beneath it all. I would go room to room if I had to, despite who or what could be waiting behind a door, and I remembered Lou’s baseball bat in the closet. The idea of a weapon was reassuring but it meant that I’d have to put down Frank Sinatra. For some reason I felt safer holding him than a club.
I entered the dark hallway, trying a light switch that responded with no light. Our house was built in 1911 and sat among others just as old or older, all guarded by ancient oaks and giant elms. It was a “stained-glass and turrets” neighborhood, as my dad said, which was beautiful with brick, copper, and slate, but which could also be really creepy. In the daytime, when the sun shone through thick green branches and lawn mowers snored reassuringly, it was as idyllic as a movie set. But late at night, when the train did not rumble as often and shadows fell oddly from oversized trees, it became very real that many lives had passed through those old homes. Standing in the hallway, I recalled times when I had been in the house alone, overcome by the feeling of being watched or that someone had passed close by. I longed for that feeling now, hoping that if I turned around my family would be standing there.
When I did, I saw blood.
It was smeared on the wall.
On the floor were fat spattered droplets the size of fifty-cent pieces.
I followed them through the swinging door of the kitchen, where the drawers had been tossed, cabinets cleared, cutlery scattered, dishes and glassware busted and crushed. The refrigerator was tipped on its side, open and leaking, the oven door yawned, and the pantry door was splintered off its hinges. Through the middle of it all, the white tile floor was fouled by a long scarlet line, as if someone had been dragged or had drug himself.
The blood stopped abruptly at the basement door.
Something far below the floorboards rustled and moaned.
Unbidden, one of Doug’s many “rules of the movies” came to mind-never, ever,
Another moan sounded that was an expression of pure suffering. I hesitated, and then pulled open the basement door and stepped into blackness, the old steps creaking below my feet. I called out to my parents and Lou as I descended, but all I could hear was someone breathing heavily, lungs in crisis, and a sort of scratch- shuffling as if pulling himself across the gritty floor.
“Dad?” I said. “Mom?”
“Rooooo. .”
The nearness of it made me jump, and I squinted into a dark corner where Harry lay curled in a ball, the bloody trail ending beneath his panting mouth. There was something odd about his position; he seemed to be
