all of them. The woman was no older than thirty. She had the trim, short hair of a boy. Her sleeveless yellow dress was wrinkled and stained. Dirt streaked her white legs. Her feet were bare.
“You and you and you!” she screeched. “Ghouls! Grave sniffers! Vampires, all of you, sucking the blood of the dead!”
The ticket-booth door slammed open. A man ran out, his gaunt face scarlet. “Outta here, damn you!”
“Maggots!” she shouted. “All of you, maggots, paying to see such filth. Vultures! Cowards!”
The man jerked his wide leather belt free of its loops, and doubled it. “I’m warning you!”
“Corpse fuckers!”
“That about does it,” he muttered.
The woman scampered backward as the man rushed her, belt high and ready. Stumbling, she fell hard onto the pavement. “Go ahead, maggot! The ghouls love it! Look at ’em gawk. Give ’em blood! That’s what they’re here for!” Rising to her knees, she ripped open the front of her dress. Her breasts were huge for a woman so small. They swung over her belly like ripe sacks. “Give ’em a show! Give ’em blood! Tear my flesh! That’s what they love!”
He raised the belt overhead, ready to bring it down.
“Don’t.” The word shot out, quick and sharp.
The man looked around.
Turning, Donna saw the man from the cafe step out of the line. He walked forward.
“You just stay put, bud.”
He kept walking.
“We don’t have need of interference.”
He said nothing to the man with the belt, but walked past him to the woman. He helped her to her feet. He lifted the dress, covering her shoulders, and pulled it gently shut in front. With a shaking hand, the woman held the torn edges together.
He spoke quietly to her. She thrust herself against him, kissed him wildly on the mouth, and sprang away. “Run! Run for your lives!” she yelled. “Run for your souls!” And then she dashed away down the street.
A few people in the crowd laughed. Someone mumbled that the madwoman was part of the show. Others disagreed. The man from the cafe came back and stood silently beside his friend in the line.
“Okay, folks!” called the ticket man. He walked toward them, threading his belt through its loops. “We ’pologize for the delay, though I’m sure we can all appreciate the gal’s dilemma. Three weeks back, the beast took her husband and only child, tore ’em to ribbons. The experience unhinged the poor gal. She’s been hangin’ around here the past couple days, since we started doin’ the tours again. But now here’s another woman, a woman who passed through the purifyin’ fire of tragedy, and came out the better for it. This woman’s the owner of Beast House, and your personal guide for today’s tour.” With a grand, sweeping gesture, he led the eyes of the crowd toward the lawn of Beast House where a stooped, heavy woman hobbled toward them.
“Do you still want to do it?” Donna asked.
Sandy shrugged. Her face was pale. She had obviously been shocked by the hysterical woman. “Yeah,” she said, “I guess so.”
CHAPTER SIX 1.
They passed through the turnstile, and gathered on the lawn in front of the old woman. She waited, ebony cane planted close to the side of her right foot, her flowered dress blowing lightly against her legs. In spite of the day’s warmth, she wore a green silken scarf around her neck. She fingered the scarf briefly, then spoke.
“Welcome to Beast House.” She said it reverently, in a low, husky voice. “My name’s Maggie Kutch, and I own it. I began showing the house to visitors way back in ’31, shortly after tragedy took the lives of my husband and three children. You may be asking yourselves why a woman’d want to take people through her home that was a scene of such personal grief. The answer’s easy: m-o-n-e-y.”
Quiet laughter stirred through the group. She smiled pleasantly, turned, and limped up the walkway. At the foot of the porch stairs, she wrapped a spotted hand over the newel post and pointed upward with the tip of her cane.
“Here’s where they strung up poor Gus Goucher. He was eighteen at the time, and on his way to San Francisco to join his brother working at the Sutro Baths. He stopped here on the afternoon of August 2, 1903, and split firewood for Lilly Thorn, the original owner of the house. She fed him a meal in payment, and Gus was on his way. That very night, the beast struck for the first time. No one, but only Lilly, lived through the attack. She ran into the street screaming as if she’d met the devil himself.
“Right away, the town got up a posse. It searched the house from cellar to attic, but no living thing was found. Only the torn, chewed bodies of Lilly’s sister and two little boys. The posse tromped through the wooded hillside yonder and found young Gus Goucher fast asleep.
“Well, some of the townspeople recalled seeing him by the Thorn place that afternoon, and figured this was their man. They gave him a trial. Weren’t no witnesses with everybody dead but Lilly, and her raving. They judged him guilty quick enough, though. A mob broke him outta the old jail, that night. They dragged the poor lad to this very spot, whipped a rope over the balcony post up there, and hoisted him.
“Course, Gus Goucher didn’t kill no one. It was the beast done it. Let’s go in.”
They climbed six wooden stairs to the covered porch.
“You can see this is a new door, here. The original got shot up, three weeks back. You probably saw it on the news. One of our local police shotgunned the door to get inside. He’d of been better off, course, staying out.”
“Tell me,” asked the critical boy, “how did the Zieglers get inside?”
“They got in like thieves. They broke a window out back.”
“Thank you.” He cast a smile toward the rest of the group, apparently pleased with the service he’d performed.
“Our police,” Maggie Kutch continued, “spoiled an antique lock we had on the door here. But we did preserve the hinges and the knocker.” She tapped the brass knocker with her cane. “It’s supposed to be the paw of a monkey. Lilly Thorn stuck it here. She was partial to monkeys.”
Maggie opened the door. The group followed her inside. “One of you get the door, if you would. Don’t want the flies to get in.”
She pointed her cane. “Here’s another monkey for you.”
Donna heard her daughter groan, and didn’t blame the girl a bit. The stuffed monkey, standing by the wall with its arms out, seemed to be snarling, ready to bite.
“Umbrella stand,” Maggie said. She dropped her cane into the circle of the monkey’s arms, then snatched it up again.
“Now I’ll show you the scene of the first attack. Right this way, into the parlor.”
Sandy took Donna’s hand. Sandy looked up nervously at her mother as they entered a room to the left of the vestibule.
“When I came into this house, way back in ’31, it was just the same as Lilly Thorn left it the night of the beast attack twenty-eight years before. Nobody’d lived in the house since then. Nobody’d dared.”
“Why did
“My husband and I were duped, pure and simple. We were made to believe that poor Gus Goucher did the dirty work on the Thorn people. Nobody let on about no beast.”
Donna glanced at the man from the cafe. He was standing ahead of her, next to his white-haired friend. Donna lifted her hand. “Mrs. Kutch?”
“Yes?”
“Is it definitely known, now, that Gus Goucher was innocent?”
“I don’t know how
Some of the people laughed. The man looked around at her. She avoided his eyes.
“He might’ve been rowdy and a sneak and a nogood. He was surely a stupid man. But everyone in Malcasa Point knew, the minute they clapped eyes on the poor man, that he didn’t attack the Thorns.”
