Mystery Walk

8

The front room was huge, barely recognizable, because all the furniture had been hauled away. The Last Supper picture and the mounted fish were gone too, and yellowed newspaper pages covered the floor. Vines had crept through the cracks in the windows, snaking up toward the ceiling; Billy's gaze followed one of them, and stopped abruptly at a large mottled brown stain on the ceiling just above where he thought the sofa had been. The house was full of deep green, shadowy light, and seemed a secretive, terribly lonely place. Spider webs clung to the corners, and two wasps flew about seeking a secure place to start a nest. Nature was at work tearing the Booker house back to its basic elements.

When Billy crossed the room to the hallway, his shoes stirred up a few of the newspaper pages, exposing a horrible blotched brown patch on the floorboards. Billy carefully covered the stain back over again. When he walked into the hallway spider webs clutched at his hair, sending chills up his spine. What had been Mr. and Mrs. Booker's bedroom was bare but for a broken chair and more newspapers across the floor; in Will and Katy's room brown flecks and streaks marred the walls as if someone had fired paint from a shotgun. Billy got out of that room quickly, because his heart had suddenly given a violent kick and he'd had trouble getting his breath. The house was silent, but seemed alive with imagined noises: the creaks and sighs of a house continuing to settle into the earth. Billy heard the high whining of the saws at work, the barking of a dog in the distance, a screen door slam shut, sounds carried far on the warm spring air.

In the kitchen Billy found a garbage can filled with an odd assortment of items: hair curlers, ice trays, a reel of fishing line and a snapped pole, comic books and newspapers, brown-smeared rags, cracked cups and dishes, coat hangers, a pair of gray Keds that had belonged to Will, and a crumpled sack of Bama Dog Chow.

Sadness gripped his heart. This is all that's left of the Bookers, Billy thought, and placed his hand against the can's cool rim. Where was the life that had been here? he wondered desperately. He didn't understand Death, and felt a terrible sense of loneliness sweep over him like a January wind. The leaves of the snakelike vines that had found their way through the broken kitchen windows seemed to rattle a warning at him—Get out get out get out . . . before it's too late.

Billy turned and hurried along the hallway, glancing back over his shoulder to make sure the bloated corpse of Mr. Booker wasn't following, armed with a shotgun, grinning and wearing his yellow cap with the fishhooks in it.

Tears of fear burned his eyes. Spider webs caught at his face and hair, and as he passed the door that led down to the basement, something cracked sharply against the other side.

He yelped and flung himself backward, pressing against the opposite wall and staring at the doorknob, expecting it to . . . slowly . . . turn; but it never did. He looked toward the front door, getting ready to run before whatever haunted this murder house sprang up from the basement after him.

Then: bump! Silence. Billy's eyes widened, and he heard a low bubbling of fear deep in his throat.

Bump!

When it happened a third time, he realized what was causing the noise: someone was hitting the door with pebbles of coal from the large mound that lay down there, near the furnace.

There was a long silence. Billy said, 'Who's there?'

And then there was a hail of noise, as if a flurry of coal had been thrown in response to Billy's voice. It went on and on, until Billy clapped his hands to his ears; then it abruptly stopped. 'Whoever you are, you're not supposed to be in this house!' Billy called out. 'It's private property!' He tried to sound braver than he was.

Slowly, he placed his hand on the cold knob; something pulsed into him like a mild charge of electricity, enough to make his arm buzz. Then he shoved the door open and protectively pressed against the opposite wall again. The basement was as dark as a cave, oozing a cold and oily odor. 'I'll call Sheriff Bromley!' Billy warned. Nothing moved down there, and now he realized there were no pieces of coal littering the top few steps at all. Maybe they'd all fallen off, or bounced back down to the floor, he reasoned. But now he had the cold and certain feeling that the heart of the mystery—what had drawn him into this house, only a step or so a day for over three months—beat in the silence of the Bookers' basement. He gathered up his courage—Nothing in here that can hurt me!—and stepped into the darkness.

A few shards of muted gray light filtered through small, dirty panes of glass. The bulk of the furnace was like a scorched metal Halloween mask; and standing near it was a mountain of darkly glittering coal. Billy reached the bottom of the steps and stood on the red-clay floor A shovel was propped against the wall near him, its triangular head giving it the look of a snake about to strike. Billy avoided it, and as he walked closer to the coal pile, one tentative step at a time, he thought he could see the faint blue plume of his breath before him. It was much colder here than in the house. His arms were sprouting goose bumps, and the hair at the back of his neck was standing on end.

Billy stood a few feet away from the coal pile, which towered over him by several feet, as his eyes grew used to the dim light. He could see almost all the shadowed nooks and crannies of the basement now, and he was almost certain that he was alone. Still ... He called out in a shaky voice, 'Anybody here?'

No, he thought, nobody's here. Then who made that noise on the door? . . .

His brain froze in midthought. He was staring at the coal pile, and he'd seen it shudder.

Bits of coal, a tiny avalanche, streamed down the sides; it seemed to breathe like a laboring bellows. Run! he screamed inwardly. But his gaze was fixed on the coal pile and his feet were glued to the ground. Something was coming up out of the coal— perhaps the dark key to a mystery, or grinning Mr Booker in his yellow cap, or the very essence of Evil itself coming to carry him to Hell.

And suddenly a small white hand clawed itself free from the top of the coal pile, perhaps three feet above Billy's head. An arm and shoulder followed, slowly working out and writhing in the air. Rivulets of coal rolled down and over Billy's sneakers. A small head broke free, and the ghastly, tormented face of Will Booker turned toward his friend, the sightless white eyes peering down with desperate terror.

The gray-lipped mouth struggled to form words. 'Billy'—the voice was an awful, pleading whine—'tell them where I am, Billy . . . tell them where I am. . . .'

A wail ripped from Billy's throat, and he scrabbled up the basement stairs like a frantic crab. Behind him, he heard the coal pile shifting and groaning as if gathering itself to chase after him. He fell in the hallway, struggled wildly up, heard a scream like a neglected teakettle spouting hot steam filling the house as he burst onto the front porch and ran, ran, ran, forgetting his books on the porch steps, ran, forgetting everything but the horror that lay in the Bookers' basement, ran home screaming all the way.

9

John quietly opened the bedroom door and peered in. The boy was still lying huddled beneath the quilt, his face pressed against a pillow, but at least he wasn't making those awful whimpering sounds anymore. In a way, though, the silence was worse. Billy had sobbed himself sick for almost an hour, since coming home twenty minutes late from school. John thought he'd never forget the white expression of fear stamped on his son's face.

They'd put him in the bedroom, since it was much more comfortable than the cot and he could be quiet in here. As John watched, Billy shivered beneath the quilt and mumbled something that sounded like 'cold, in the cold.' John stepped inside, arranged the quilt a little more snugly because he thought Billy had felt a chill, and then realized his son's eyes were wide open, staring fixedly into a corner of the room.

John eased down on the side of the bed. 'How you feelin'?' he asked softly; he touched Billy's forehead, even though Ramona had told him Billy didn't have a fever and didn't seem physically ill. They'd taken off his clothes and checked him thoroughly the double punctures of a snakebite, knowing how he liked to ramble through dark corners of the forest, but they'd found nothing.

'Want to talk about it now?'

Billy shook his head.

'Your momma's about to put supper on the table. You feel like eatin'?'

The boy whispered something, and John thought it sounded like 'Butterfinger' 'Huh? What do you want, a candy bar? We're havin' sweet potatoes, will that do?' When Billy didn't reply, but stared straight ahead with such intensity that John was beginning to feel uneasy, John squeezed the boy's shoulder through the quilt and said,