31
In Witcham that night there were things that were simply unsettling and those that were disturbing. When Deke Ericksen finally made it home that night after haunting the flooded streets looking for Chrissy, he found the house quite empty. No mom, no dad. Even old Mr. Cheese, their tomcat, was gone.
And that was all very disturbing.
Mr. Cheese?a massive tiger-striped tom with huge paws and a head about the size of a football?had shown up on Halloween night five years previous, bedraggled and missing his left ear, and had been the family pet ever since. That old cat rarely went out even on warm, dry nights, let alone rainy ones.
Standing there in the living room, feeling that something had changed for the worse, Deke stripped out of his wet things, doing his best not to panic. Mom and dad must have gone somewhere, he figured. Maybe across the street to the Stern’s or the Green’s down the block. That had to be the answer to the whole thing. And if they had, there would be a note somewhere.
You know better, man. Much better. There’s no note, no nothing, and you know it. They never go out this late and if they did, they wouldn’t have taken Mr. Cheese with them.
He did not honestly know for sure that the cat was missing, yet he was nowhere to be seen. Mr. Cheese was awake at all hours, the first to greet anyone that came through the door, always scrounging for food. But tonight, when Deke stepped through the door, there was only that hushed sound like the house was holding its breath and the darkness, of course.
Power was out now. Using his flashlight, he got some candles going until the house looked a bit less threatening. But even with the light, it was just too silent. Unnaturally silent. Houses were like networks and when you’d lived in one long enough, you got to know every wire and every connection. How they buzzed when people were about and how they hummed with a dead silence when they were empty. And right now, it seemed, the house was humming with emptiness. It was a lonesome sound that Deke could only hear in his head, yet it was loud, very loud, so loud that it made him feel tense, uneasy. There was a quality to that humming that he had never heard before. There was a sharpness, a shrillness to it that made him feel very nervous. No, his mom and dad were not home. Their room was downstairs and he’d already checked it, just like he’d checked the kitchen and dining room and dad’s little den, traipsing water through the house as he did so.
They were gone.
Unless they were down in the basement or upstairs.
Starting to breathe heavily like the air was slowly being drawn from the house, Deke went to the basement door. Opened it, panned his flashlight around. That nervous feeling was settling into him now with teeth. Slowly then, he went down the stairs, wondering if maybe he’d find them down there, cold and hacked, their blood pooling around them. A year or so before Nicky’s death, dad had installed fluorescent lights down there. Deke was glad the power was out. Those fluorescents would have made all that blood look purple.
Deke found nothing. No bodies, no blood.
The junk room was empty. The workroom empty. The utility room, with the washer and dryer and the dusty bowed shelves where mom stored her canned pickles, was likewise empty. No sound down there but the water that was beginning to trickle in through cracks in the cement walls.
Deke went back upstairs.
Okay, they weren’t down in the basement and they weren’t up here. Neither was Mr. Cheese. That only left the upstairs. The only things up there were Deke’s room, the spare bedroom, the bathroom…and Nicky’s room. They wouldn’t be up there. No reason for them to be.
Still feeling nervous, but exhausted from fighting through the flooded streets for hours, Deke dropped into his dad’s recliner, watching the burning candles and the greasy, flickering shadows they threw against the walls. He was thinking about Chrissy, about mom and dad, but mostly about Mr. Cheese. Funny stupid old cat. Where the hell had he gotten off to? Deke could remember that Halloween night the cat had first shown up. Nicky and he had just gotten back from trick-or-treating and the cat had been on the porch. Nicky, being Nicky and a friend to all animals, had invited the cat in even though Deke told him not to. God, Mr. Cheese had been an ugly cat. Half a tail, one ear missing, patches of fur gone from territorial battles with other toms. Just a big, brutish, nasty looking animal with a set of balls so big he walked bowlegged. Deke didn’t like him and he figured mom and dad would like him even less. And that much was true. Mom thought he might have rabies and dad said he was just a dirty old alley cat, probably full of lice and mites and God only knew what.
But Nicky attached himself to the cat instantly.
He fell in love and the boy’s instincts had been right: despite Mr. Cheese’s appearance, he was friendly and mellow, a real big baby. After a visit to the vet’s and a couple good baths, he was actually presentable. Of course, there was no getting around his appearance which was like some ex-fighter that had spent simply too many years in the ring. Nicky named him Mr. Cheese and that old tom insinuated himself into their lives and their hearts.
They put an ad in the paper about the cat, but nobody ever called to claim him. The only identification he had was a very worn red collar with a silver tag that said “HOOTERS” on it. Dad had laughed about that and mom had only rolled her eyes. Deke hadn’t really got it at the time, not until later when he learned that Hooters was a bar waitressed by attractive young women with tight t-shirts and impressive bosoms. So the tag really was kind of funny. Mr. Cheese apparently had something of a seedy, unspoken past as a tough white trash sort of cat.
Nicky just loved Mr. Cheese.
And for weeks and weeks after Nicky’s death, Mr. Cheese would wait for hours in his perch at the living room window waiting for Nicky to come home as he always had. Mom shut Nicky’s door after the funeral and to this day, she was the only one who went in there. But Mr. Cheese did not forget Nicky. He would sit outside that door meowing to be let in until somebody chased him away.
Deke figured the only way to know for sure if Mr. Cheese was home was to open a can of tuna with the electric can opener. That always brought him running. Unfortunately, there was no electricity. So much for the acid test.
Thinking about Mr. Cheese made him think about Nicky, of course, and that brought him back to Lily Barron, Chrissy’s mom. Her and her stories of dead people living below. Even now, Deke could not be sure what he heard at the Barron house today. It had sounded almost like Lily had been talking to someone in the bathroom. That some gurgling voice had been answering her. But, Christ, that was ridiculous.
It was your imagination. Had to be. She got you all worked up with those crazy stories of dead people talking to her from drainpipes. Your mind did the rest. She was just talking to herself.
Imagination, then.
But what about that house and the phone ringing? That voice on the other end that sounded like Nicky? This was the one that shook him. By the light of day, such a thing was ludicrous…but now? Here in the candlelit darkness with the shadows crawling and the black water rising? What about now? Deke just wasn’t sure. It had to have been a hallucination or something. That made sense, didn’t it? Well, didn’t it? The power was out. No way that phone had been ringing. Christ, maybe he’d imagined the house, too. Maybe he had a fever or something.
Yeah, it sounded good. But he just couldn’t swallow it.
What then?
Was he ready to believe in things that Lily Barron believed in? That dead people had come back from the grave? Man, that was loony, that was damaged, that was seriously fucked-up. Deke was sixteen and, though he would never have admitted it openly, there was plenty in the world he did not know about. But one thing he knew is that the dead were dead. Them waking up and walking around was entertaining as all hell, made for fun movies and fun books, but there was no truth to it. Zombies were bullshit. Even he knew that. The dead did not come back. The idea of it was not only scary, but repulsive.
But what if they had come back?
What if Lily Barron wasn’t so crazy after all?
Deke did not like to be thinking these things as he sat there by the light of candles in the dead of night, but…what if? About all he knew about resurrection was shit from church about Jesus and Lazarus and all that and he had never paid much attention. Other than that, just movies and books.
Last year in Mr. Firringo’s class, American Lit, they’d all been given an American author to research. Deke got Poe. Poe had a thing about premature burials and people coming back from the dead. Poe’s stories “Morella” and “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” of course, all concerned themselves with women returning from the
