The Voice of the Night

just sort of observing, just hiding in a comer, on that night, hiding and watching him do it, watching him do it to all of them and then to himself? Think of it! Blood everywhere. You’ve never seen so much goddamned blood in your life! Blood on the walls, soaked and clotted in the bedclothes, slick puddles of blood on the floor, blood on the stairs, and blood splashed over the furniture…. And those six heads on the mantel! Jesus, what a popper! What a terrific popper!”

“You’re being weird again,” Colin said.

“Would you like to have been there?”

“No thanks. And neither would you.”

“I sure as hell would!”

“If you saw all that blood, you’d puke.”

“Not me.”

“You’re just trying to gross me out.”

“Wrong again.”

Roy started toward the house.

“Wait a minute,” Colin said.

Roy didn’t turn back this time. He climbed the sagging steps and walked onto the porch.

Rather than stand alone, Colin joined him. “Tell me about the ghosts.”

“Some nights there are strange lights in the house. And people who live farther down the hill say that sometimes they hear the Kingman children screaming in terror and crying for help.”

“They hear the dead kids?”

“Moaning and carrying on something fierce.”

Colin suddenly realized he had his back to one of the broken first-floor windows. He shifted away from it.

Roy continued somberly: “Some people say they’ve seen spirits that glow in the dark, crazy things, headless children who come out on this porch and run back and forth as if they’re being chased by someone … or something.”

“Wow!”

Roy laughed. “What they’ve probably seen is a bunch of kids trying to hoax everybody.”

“Maybe not.”

“What else?”

“Maybe they’ve seen just what they say they have.”

“You really do believe in ghosts.”

“I keep an open mind,” Colin said.

“Yeah? Well, you better be more careful about what kind of junk falls into it, or you’ll wind up with an open sewer.”

“Aren’t you clever.”

“Everyone says so.”

“And modest.”

“Everyone says that, too.”

“Jeez.”

Roy went to the shattered window and peered inside.

“What do you see?” Colin asked.

“Come look.”

Colin moved beside him and stared into the house.

A stale, extremely unpleasant odor wafted through the broken window.

“It’s the drawing room,” Roy said.

“I can’t see anything.”

“It’s the room where he lined up their heads on the mantel.”

“What mantel? It’s pitch dark in there.”

“In a couple of minutes our eyes will adjust.”

In the drawing room something moved. There was a soft rustling, a sudden clatter, and the sound of something rushing toward the window.

Colin leaped back. He stumbled over his own feet and fell with a crash.

Roy looked at him and burst out laughing.

“Roy, there’s something in there!”

“Rats.”

“Huh?”

“Just rats.”

“The house has rats?”

“Of course it does, a rotten old place like this. Or maybe we heard a stray cat. Probably both-a cat chasing a rat. One thing I guarantee: It wasn’t any ghoul or ghost. Will you relax, for God’s sake?”

Roy faced the window again, leaned into it, head cocked, listening, watching.

Having sustained much greater injury to his pride than to his flesh, Colin got up quickly and nimbly, but he didn’t return to the window. He stood at the rickety railing and looked west toward town, then south along Hawk Drive.

After a while he said, “Why haven’t they torn this place down? Why haven’t they built new houses up here? This must be valuable land.”

Without looking away from the window, Roy said, “The entire Kingman fortune, including the land, went to the state.”

“Why?”

“There weren’t any living relatives on either side of the family, nobody to inherit.”

“What’s the state going to do with the place?”

“In twenty years they’ve managed to do absolutely zilch, nothing at all, big zero,” Roy said. “For a while there was talk of selling the land and the house at public auction. Then they said they were going to make a pocket park out of it. You still hear the park rumor every once in a while, but nothing ever gets done. Now will you please shut up for a minute? I think my eyes are finally beginning to adjust. I have to concentrate on this.”

“Why? What’s so important in there?”

“I’m trying to see the mantel.”

“You’ve been here before,” Colin said. “You’ve already seen it.”

“I’m trying to pretend it’s that night. The night Kingman went berserk. I’m trying to imagine what it must have been like. The sound of the ax… I can almost hear it… whooooosh-chunk, whooooosh- chunk … and maybe a couple of short screams… his footsteps coming down the stairs… heavy footsteps … the blood… all that blood …”

Roy’s voice gradually trailed away as if he had mesmerized himself.

Colin walked to the far end of the porch. The boards squeaked underfoot. He leaned against the shaky railing and craned his neck so that he could look around the side of the house. He could see only the overgrown garden in shades of gray and black and moonlight-silver: knee-high grass; shaggy hedges; orange and lemon trees pulled to the ground by the weight of their own untrimmed boughs; sprawling rose bushes, some with pale flowers, white or yellow, that looked like puffs of smoke in the darkness; and a hundred other plants that were woven into a single, tangled entity by the loom of the night.

He had the feeling something was watching him from the depths of the garden. Something less than human.

Don’t be childish, he thought. There’s nothing out there. This isn’t a horror movie. This is life.

He tried to stand his ground, but the possibility that he was being observed became a certainty, at least in his own mind. He knew that if he stood there much longer, he would surely be seized by a creature with huge claws and dragged into the dense shrubbery, there to be gnawed upon at the beast’s leisure. He turned away from the garden and went back to Roy.

“You ready to go?” Colin asked.