No One's Home Read online

  He knocked his head against the wall stud. Thump. The wood board vibrated down the length of the house like a piano string. Trapped in a dream, his face contorted inside a terrible memory.

  “Are you worried about the papers, Father?”

  “The papers?” His father reached for his pipe, eluding the boy’s probing gaze by focusing on the tobacco. Pinching and folding it, then puffing out a cloud to sit behind. He’d just gotten off the phone with an angry creditor, and his face was still flushed with panic.

  “Mother seems very worried about the newspapers.”

  His father puffed on his pipe a moment to think, hoping the picture he drew was one of calm deliberation. Something to remember him by. “News is a bit like the weather, son. Some days it’s bad. Some days it’s good. You must weigh it with wisdom. As a man, you’ll learn in time how to do this. Bad news never lasts. You can’t let it slacken your nerve.”

  The boy contemplated this a moment. “So then . . . does good news ever last?”

  The sad lift of the boy’s brow sent a shot through his father’s heart. The man gazed up at his custom coffered ceiling and blinked the agony from his eyes. How many shady deals had it taken to afford such luxuries? How many little betrayals and indiscretions? He shook his head at the alien cleverness of his only child and cleared his throat again. “I wish it did, son. I truly wish it did. You just . . .”

  He sat up a little straighter and forced himself to face the boy. “You just have to make the best of the weather. And if you work hard, if you play your cards right, you sometimes get to make weather of your own. Understand?”

  The boy’s frown twisted to a scowl that in a second’s time melted into a hopeful smile. “You mean like a wizard?”

  A genuine laugh escaped the invisible noose tightening around his father’s throat. The force of it nearly broke the man. “Yes. Exactly like a wizard. Now, go find Ella. I have some work to do.”

  It was a longer private audience with his father than he had ever been privileged. He nodded without complaint and went skipping toward the door.

  “Walter?” his father called behind him.

  The boy turned expectantly, his smile falling at the corners. He’d done something wrong. “Yes, Father?”

  His father sat in his tufted leather chair, holding his pipe. The posture of the man looked as it always did—larger than life, commanding, demanding, unrelenting—but it also didn’t. His face, though cleanly shaven and matching the dimensions of the man he knew, wasn’t quite his father’s face. The skin was stretched too tight, as though the lips held back a scream. The eyeballs looked ready to burst open. Fear and doubt took root inside the boy as he waited for this imposter to speak.

  “Be good,” the man said with a smile that was not a smile at all.

  Gently, Ella shook his arm. “Wake up, shavo!”

  Still dead eyed, he muttered, “Be good. Be good. Be good. Be—”

  “Shh, shh. It is alright. Wake up, now. Walter, wake up!”

  He sprang awake, cracking his head against a rafter on his way to his feet. His eyes shot back into focus as the pain reverberated down his spine.

  “Oh, no. Oh, my sweet boy.” She folded him into her arms, pressing his wail into her breast. “Ssss. I know that hurts. I sorry I startle you.”

  He let her hold him there as he trembled and slowly regained himself. “Where are we?” he whispered, pulling away from her.

  “The attic. You were sleepwalking again, shavo,” she murmured, smoothing his hair. A hard lump was forming under his black curls. She held him by the shoulders and scanned his blue eyes for damage. If it weren’t for the blue, he could have been her own grandson with his dark hair and heavy brow. She made a mental note to speak to Mrs. Rawlings about locking his door as he slept. The lady of the house was right that it was a fire hazard, but this was worse. She patted his cheek. “You decided to take a nap.”

  “I didn’t decide to.” He looked at her with those eyes. Ella had once told the boy that you could see a person’s soul if you peered carefully enough through those windows. If that was true, Walter’s soul was an ocean.

  “It is no wonder,” she told him. “You have not been sleeping at night, have you?”

  Even from her new room over the garage, she could hear him wandering at all hours to and from his bookcase, his closet, the water closet, unable to settle down.

  “I . . .” He studied his hands, black with the grime of the crawl space. “I have bad dreams.”

  “Hmm.” She nodded. “We go and wash up. I give you some cookies, and you tell Ella about these dreams.”

  Walter thought about this. She could see him calculating what he might tell her. He was just learning to lie, this boy. “Okay.”

  “Good.” She nodded. Let him lie, she decided, narrowing her eyes at him ever so slightly. Even liars told the truth; they just didn’t know it. It came out in their faces. It hid in the things they dared not say. These things often told more than the truth. But she said none of this. “I have chocolate.”

  He forced a smile for her, and she loved him for it. Brave boy, she thought. Brave boy without a father to be brave for him. She waited for him to crawl out before clicking off the light. As she reached for the chain, she surveyed the floor where he’d been sitting. A piece of dull metal sat on the loose boards next to the disturbed dust. She reached for it, then stopped herself as the shape registered.

  It was his father’s gun.

  Rolling her eyes to the rafters in a hundred unspoken curses, she squeezed her hands together, refusing to touch it. “Prikaza!” she hissed, and she whispered a series of chants under her breath. Where did he find it? She shoved it with her foot until it disappeared into the insulation between the rafters.

  A gun in the house was the worst kind of luck, but little Walter was waiting.

  19

  The Spielman Family

  July 30, 2018

  “What do you mean your house is ‘haunted’?” Caleb smirked at Hunter from the flat screen. The boy in Boston pulled out his vaporizer and took a long drag. “Like, full-on ghosts and shit?”

  “Not exactly.” Hunter took a sip of the whiskey he’d stolen from his dad’s cabinet and gazed longingly at the metal tube in his friend’s hand. “Just weird shit. Lights turning on by themselves. Weird sounds at night. That phone ringing. I’m telling you, man. It’s not normal. This place does not want us here.”

  “What’s the address again?” Caleb asked, holding another hit in his lungs.

  “14895 Lee Road, Shaker Heights.”

  “Right.” The muffled clicking of the keyboard in Boston filled the space between them for a while. Hunter took another sip and looked up at the ceiling vent over his head. The attic was quiet that afternoon, but then again, it was still early. He wanted to go back up there to get his comics, but he couldn’t quite muster the nerve. As if to prove something to himself, he stood up and peered out into the hallway. His parents’ room was empty as usual. His father had long left for work, and his mother was sitting in the den staring blankly at the television, debating what to do with herself for the day.

  “Hey! You still there?” Caleb called out from behind him.

  “Yeah.” Hunter slumped back in his chair and took another swig of liquor, trying not to grimace. It was more for his friend’s benefit than his own. He didn’t really like the taste. “Find something?”

  “That’s a big friggin’ house!”

  “Yep.” Hunter found the size of the house embarrassing, especially since there were only three of them living there. “And like a hundred years old. Jealous?”

  “Hell no. You’re in fucking Ohio.” Caleb leaned in toward the screen. “Dude. I wonder how many people died in that place.”

  Hunter drained his glass.

  “I mean, you figure that in a hundred years a bunch of people lived there, right? Some of ’em must’ve died inside. People die in their sleep and shit. Babies get that crib death, especially back then. L
ike, maybe one of ’em died in your bedroom!”

  “Shut the fuck up.” Hunter tried to sound cool, but the thought sent a wave of revulsion through him. His eyes involuntarily circled the room, stopping on the closet door that hid the writing inside. DeAD GiRl. DeAD. PRetty. DeAD. DeAD. His gerbils scurried through a plastic tube from one fish tank to a smaller one on the windowsill. Base Camp 1. They still hadn’t figured out how to navigate the full maze. Hunter shook his head at them. Idiots.

  “Hey, listen to this. Do you know why they call it Shaker Heights?” Caleb’s eyes scanned the screen in front of him.

  “No. Why?”

  “There was a religious cult called the Shakers. They would like dance and twitch and speak in tongues and shit. Check it. The North Union Society of Believers had a commune there back in the 1800s.” Caleb paused to read a moment. “Jesus, these people were nutty. No sex. No breeding. No owning anything. They worshipped some dead British lady they called Mother Lee.”

  Hunter googled the name of the group while Caleb rambled. Several articles popped up from local universities and historical societies. He opened the first and scanned it. Second Coming of Jesus. Quaker-like discipline. Handmade furniture. Trancelike dancing during prayers. Shaking . . .

  “It gets better! They actually thought Jesus came to visit them in the 1840s. They even wrote like a whole new Bible. Then they just died out . . . I think they lived by you.”

  Underground Railroad. Orphans. Hunter flipped through drawings and grainy photographs of the old mills along Doan Brook, which ran through the heart of Shaker Heights only a few blocks from his house, hardly listening to his friend anymore.

  “Here, I’ll shoot you a map.”

  A second later, Hunter’s computer dinged with the message. He pulled up a crudely hand-drawn diagram titled “Center Family.” He traced the road lines. “Center Lee Road.” “South Park.” “S. Woodland.” “Yeah. Our house is right there. Where the old church used to be.”

  “No shit?” Caleb blinked at him from five hundred miles away. “You know what that means, right?”

  Hunter scowled at the shrunken video image of his friend. “What?”

  “You know what they always put near the church, don’t you?”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “The graveyard, dude! What if your house was built on top of all those dead bodies? Think about it! You ever seen the movie Poltergeist?”

  Hunter frowned at him. “No.”

  “Shit, man. It’s a classic! You gotta watch it. This little girl gets sucked into her TV set. Like, her whole house is possessed by these ghosts because the place was built on top of an Indian burial ground! Dude.” Caleb gave him a deadpan stare. “You’re fucked.”

  “Shut up.” Hunter tried to laugh, but it wasn’t funny.

  “No, dude. You gotta get out of there. It’s only a matter of time before some clown doll comes to life and tries to eat your face.” Caleb let out a puff of vapor.

  Hunter shook his head at his stoned friend. “You’re an idiot. That movie’s like forty years old—”

  The sound of footsteps outside his door stopped him midsentence. Irrick. Irrick. Irrick.

  “Who cares if it’s old?”

  “Caleb. Shut up a minute.” Hunter stood up with forced bravado and stuck his head out into the hallway. It was empty. “Mom?”

  There was no answer. Margot had nodded off in the den, happy to escape the day. A few steps down the hall, he noticed the attic door standing wide open.

  “Dude? You there? If you can hear me, run!” Caleb called from the desktop.

  Hunter walked back into his bedroom. “Yeah. Listen, I gotta go.”

  “Okay. Just be careful, man. Don’t linger in front of TV sets. Alright? And watch that movie.” Caleb leaned in toward the computer screen until he was just a pair of bloodshot eyes. “It just might save your life.”

  “Whatever. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “We still gaming Saturday?”

  “Like I got anything better to do. See ya.” Hunter gave a half-hearted salute and shut down the chat screen.

  Back out in the hall, the open attic door beckoned him closer. He stopped at the foot of the narrow stairs and looked over his shoulder toward his parents’ empty bedroom. The five other bedroom doors stood like sentries, watching the hallway. Watching him. The silence pressed down on him, listening.

  “Shit,” he whispered.

  Muted sunlight poured down the steep stairs. The door had been shut earlier. He was certain of it. He remembered coming up the back stairwell from the kitchen and fixing his eyes on it, trying to drum up the courage to go back up there and get his comic books.

  He clenched his hands into fists. They felt empty without the baseball bat. He stood there with nothing but the thudding of his heart, which seemed to rise higher in his chest with each second as though it might make a break for it. Hunter swallowed it back down and cleared his throat.

  He’d never seen Poltergeist, but he’d seen enough horror movies to know better than to go up there alone. Nerdy guys like him either got the girl like a prize for bravery or got slaughtered in Act 1. From the look on his face, he didn’t have much doubt which sort of guy he’d be. He wasn’t a soft-spoken hero in disguise. He was the coward who ran away from the bullies while the real hero got stomped.

  Thoughts of zombie Shaker women in pilgrim clothes wandered through his mind. They flitted from room to room in his head, twitching with their dances as though possessed by demons. Forget it. He closed the door to the attic with his foot and went back to his room, vowing to go back up there in a day or two when the heebie-jeebies had passed.

  Hunter closed his bedroom door and wished for the key that would make it lock. Every door in the place still had its original lockset. A large keyhole had been cut into the brass plates, an open slot into his room wide enough to see through, but they couldn’t find the keys. His parents still hadn’t called the locksmith.

  I’ll call the locksmith next week, his father had promised weeks ago. The only real reason to get a master key, as far as any of them knew, would be to open the one locked room in the attic, but it was a room the family didn’t really need or use.

  We’ll get it open, Max the contractor had assured them. Of course, in the chaos of the renovation, he never had.

  The air-conditioning kicked on, pouring freezing air down at him from the ceiling, the hidden machinery humming its maddening hum. Hunter shivered but not from the sudden cold. The gerbils fled through the tunnels back to the safety of their toilet paper rolls in the large aquarium. They felt it too.

  “Screw this,” he whispered and stormed out of his bedroom and down the back stairs. “Mom? I’m going out for a while. I’ll be back for dinner.”

  Margot didn’t answer. She flinched in her sleep when the back door slammed shut.

  20

  Later that afternoon, Margot slammed the door to the refrigerator and headed up the back stairs. “Hunter?”

  She’d awoken on the couch around three, sticky with sweat. She shook her head at her rumpled clothes and puffy face in the hall mirror, disgusted at her own sloth. “Hunter, honey? Did you drink my protein shake? That wasn’t for you.”

  There was no answer.

  Hunter had left that morning in the direction of the bus stop, shoulders hunched, feet dragging. His lonely shape had disappeared past the intersection of Lee and Van Aken in the direction of the library.

  She stopped at the entrance to his room, debating whether to knock. “Hunter?” she tried again. After a half second of silence, she peeked inside with a grimace. “You awake, baby?”

  Once she found the bed empty and the office chair vacant, she flung the door wide and let out the breath she’d been holding.

  The smell of sweaty socks, armpit, and Hunter’s used tissues wafted up from the unmade bed and piles of laundry on the floor in a fog of captive testosterone. Margot grimaced as she furtively checked the overflowing
trashcan and scanned the floor for her missing breakfast.

  They’d made a deal when they moved in. You keep your room clean, and I’ll stay out of it. Laundry’s on Thursday. Got it? It was a Monday afternoon. Margot stood there for a moment taking in the dirty T-shirts and socks littering the floor. She pushed a worn pair of boxer briefs with her toe into the corner where the laundry basket stood empty and shook her head in disgust.

  With a glance over her shoulder into the hallway, she sat down at Hunter’s computer and moved the mouse until the screen flickered to life. “College Essay #1” read the heading of the open document. Hunter had written two paragraphs:

  What does privilege mean to me? I could give you pages of politically correct slogans about the unearned advantages I’ve enjoyed growing up as an upper-middle-class, cis, straight, white male, but it would be a lie to claim that I truly understand what it means. I don’t know what it really means to grow up poor. I don’t know what it really means to grow up black or Hispanic. I don’t even have close friends that aren’t privileged like me.

  I’ve spent my life living in my mother’s dollhouse, playing the part I was given. I pretend to be normal. I pretend that everything in this fabricated life is real. I pretend that living in a veritable palace while others go hungry is the natural order of things. I’ve spent years holed up in private schools, sheltered from reality, because while my parents theoretically support public education, they don’t trust it . . .

  Margot blinked at the screen. “‘My mother’s dollhouse’? You ungrateful little shit.”

  She highlighted the text with the mouse. Her finger hovered over the delete button as she debated with herself, her expression shifting from anger to doubt to resignation. Indecisive, she finally minimized the screen and checked the bottom toolbar for open windows. There were none. She opened a web browser to check what websites he’d been visiting and found none. Hunter was always careful to clear his browsing history of questionable websites. She let out a skeptical grunt and stepped away from the machine.