The Loveliest Dead (8 page)

He was prepared. He reached beneath his pillow and removed a small Mag-Lite penlight. It had been in his Christmas stocking last year. He twisted the head to turn it on and trained it on the light switch beside the cracked-open door. He sat up on the edge of his bed and almost stood, but waited a moment. The digital clock on his bedstand, shaped like a flying saucer, read 3:04.
 

Had
he heard the voice? He waited several seconds but heard nothing. He looked over at the area by the shelf where he’d seen the fat man coming up through the floor once before, and he was tempted to follow with the powerful penlight. But he could not do it. He hadn’t heard anything, but that didn’t mean there was nothing there, and if there
was
, Miles wasn’t sure he wanted to see it.
 

He turned to the light switch again, focused all his attention on it. He stood and started walking toward it. He was so afraid, he had trouble moving his legs.
 

Miles wondered if the fat man could come up through the floor anywhere in the room. He wondered what it would be like if the man were suddenly to come up right under his feet, if his head were to rise beneath the oval rug on the hardwood floor beside his bed. Or would he come through the rug? Would he come straight up through the rug and into Miles? The thought only made him feel worse.
 

He was halfway to the light switch when the rough, whispered voice said, “Where you goin’? Get over here and be a good puppy, now.”
 

With his arm outstretched, hand reaching for the light switch, Miles turned his head toward the voice. He tripped over his own feet and fell flat on the floor. The penlight slipped from his hand and rolled away.
 

“C’mon, y’fuckin’ puppy,” the voice said.

Miles saw movement in the darkness to his right, over by the shelves. As he scrambled to his feet, he screamed. He didn’t want to, but could not help himself. His hand found the light switch and flipped it up.
 

The room filled with light as the floor creaked down the hall in his parents’ bedroom. They spoke to each other as their footsteps drew nearer.
 

Turning, Miles saw nothing by the shelves, not even a sign that anything had been there.

Whatever it is
, he thought,
it doesn’t like the light.

Mom and Dad came into the room and squinted against the light.

“What’s going on?” Dad said.

Miles was breathless when he said, “He was here again! That man!”

Mom sighed.

Dad said, “Miles, you can’t keep doing this. You’re just having bad dreams.”

“It’s not a dream. I heard his voice. He keeps calling me a puppy.”

“Two nights in a row from one stupid movie,” Mom said.

Miles looked up at them and pleaded, “Can I come sleep with you again?”

Dad shook his head. “No, I told you, that was a onetime deal. You’re a little old for this, aren’t you, Miles? Come on, now, Tiger, get back into bed.”
 

“But you can’t turn the light out,” Miles said.

“I got up earlier,” Mom said, “and his door was closed and the overhead light was on in here.”

“How about this.” Dad shuffled over to the desk and turned on the squat lamp that stood on its corner. “We’ll leave that one on, okay? Will that do for now?”
 

“Do I have to go back to bed?” Miles said.

Mom said, “It’s after three o’clock in the morning.”

“But it’s the weekend, there’s no school. Couldn’t I stay up and watch TV for a while?”

Dad’s voice was firm. “No. Now go back to bed. You can leave that lamp on, but—” He went to the door and turned off the overhead light. “Not that one. And leave the door all the way open, if you want. Okay?” Dad scooped Miles up in his arms and carried him to the bed. He spotted the penlight on the floor, put Miles down on the bed, and picked it up, handed it to him. Miles twisted the head of the penlight to turn it off, then slipped it under his pillow.
 

Dad frowned for a moment, turned to Mom, and said, “Go back to bed, honey, I’ll be there in a second.”

Mom kissed the top of Miles’s head. “Go back to sleep, sweetheart.” Then she turned and left the room.

Dad sat down on the edge of the bed. “You keep that light under your pillow?”

Miles nodded. “He only comes in the dark. He doesn’t like the light.”

“Come on, Tiger. It’s only a dream. There’s no man coming to your room. Okay?”

To say yes would be dishonest, but to disagree with Dad would only drag it out.

“You know that, right?” Dad said. “It’s just a bad dream.”

Finally, Miles nodded once. It was no dream, but there was no point arguing.

“Okay, big guy.” He kissed Miles’s cheek. “We’ve got work to do today, so we’re both going to need all the sleep we can get.” He stood and left the room, leaving the door wide open.
 

The lamp on the desk was not quite bright enough to illuminate that section of the room where the voice had come from, where Miles had seen the fat man. He lay awake, staring at the spot for a long time. He started nodding off now and then, but jerked awake each time, eyes suddenly wide, watching. Miles finally dozed off as the first light of dawn began to seep through the windows.
 

CHAPTER FIVE

Saturday, 9:17 a.m.

The next morning was gray and drizzly. Jenna made buttermilk pancakes for breakfast. David was relieved that he did not have to go out job-hunting again. There were probably plenty of garages open on Saturday, but he needed the break. He was discouraged by his failure to find work, and it nagged at him.
 

He was also bothered by the incident in the basement the previous evening. He had never seen jenna in such a state. She was usually so levelheaded, so unflaggingly reasonable about everything. But she had been convinced she’d seen Josh in the basement. It disturbed David. He was not a believer in things supernatural— but neither was Jenna, and the fact that she believed she was seeing Josh’s spirit, that he was somehow trying to contact her, was troubling.
 

David and his older brother, Jerry, and younger sister, Karen, had been raised in Redding, where their parents had found religion when David was eight. Life had changed suddenly after that. Their parents stopped letting them watch television and read Bible stories to them instead of fairy tales and adventure stories. They went to Sunday school and church every week and prayer meetings on Wednesday nights. Worst of all was the constant prayer. His parents seemed to pray at the drop of a hat—first thing in the morning, before bed at night, before they left the house for any reason, and before each meal—and David and Jerry and Karen were expected to bow their heads and close their eyes and be still. Suddenly, they had to memorize Bible verses and learn Bible trivia and color in Bible coloring books. Dad, a successful landscapes and Mom, an office manager at a veterinary clinic, even changed the way they talked—suddenly, their conversations were peppered with phrases like “God willing” and “Praise Jesus” and “I felt the Holy Spirit.” David didn’t like the sound of that—
Holy Spirit
. He was skeptical of its existence, doubted anyone who said they “felt” it, and he would believe people were “moved” by it when he saw it happen with his own eyes (he’d imagined the Holy Spirit “moving” people by picking them up off the floor and levitating them around the room). When David asked his mother why they were doing everything differently, she had said, “Because we live for Jesus now, honey. Only people who live for Jesus go to Heaven, and you want to go to Heaven, don’t you?” David did not want to go to Heaven if it was going to be filled with the kind of people his parents had become.
 

Jerry and Karen had grown into good churchgoing Christians, but David had fought it every step of the way, becoming the family’s sinful black sheep. He could not imagine that the creator of the universe, the creator of all living things, of life itself, required people to drop what they were doing and pray to Him every few hours, and to behave in a certain way so He wouldn’t throw them into a fiery pit, and to pass judgment on other people according to what
they
believed, or did not believe, about the creator. He came to the conclusion that there could not possibly be a God at all, because if there were and He saw what had been done on earth in His name, He would vaporize the planet in a heartbeat and start all over again.
 

David did not stay in touch with his family. He often missed having a family to stay in touch with—he knew they would not respond if he called or wrote. His brother and sister sent Christmas cards every year, but that was all. His dad had let him know he’d been written out of the will years ago. That meant very little, because Dad was leaving most of his money to the church, anyway.
 

After seeing what it had done to his family, David had spent his life steering clear of organized religion in any form. He saw no difference between people who believed in spirits and an afterlife and the religious fanatics who went door to door passing out their literature. They were all peddling the same thing—a better life after this one.
 

David believed this was the only life anybody ever got. The life he and Jenna had made for themselves had not gone very well the last few years, but they had clung to each other instead of a belief in some better life to come, or the idea that their suffering in this life would only enrich the next. They had found their strength in each other, and they had endured so far.
 

While he did not believe Jenna had seen anything like a ghost, he understood how she could think she’d seen Josh. The day before, while job-hunting in Arcata, David had to fight the urge to turn down a side street to follow a woman who’d been walking along the sidewalk with a little blond boy who looked, at first glance, exactly like Josh. It was not the first time something like that had happened since the move. He knew exactly how Jenna felt.
 

“Chatanooga Choo-Choo” played on Grandma’s radio on the sill of the breakfast nook’s greenhouse window. The four of them ate breakfast in silence. They all looked tired, but Grandma seemed to be especially sluggish.
 

“You feeling okay, Grandma?” David asked.

She shrugged. “Just tired. It’s hard, you know... getting used to sleeping in a new place.”

“Especially with our screamer, here,” Jenna said as she reached over and messed up Miles’s hair.

“I thought I heard something going on up there early this morning,” Grandma said.

David said, “Miles just had a bad dream. Happens to everybody.”

Miles did not look up from his pancakes as he ate.

After breakfast, David decided to change the lightbulbs over the basement stairway. As he picked up the long black Mag-Lite beside the back door and went into the laundry room, Miles joined him and asked, “Can I go down there with you, Dad?”
 

“No, not now. Not until we’ve got plenty of light down there, and even then, I don’t want you going down these steps unless it’s with me or your mom, understood?”
 

“‘Kay. Can I watch?”

“Sure. Hold the lightbulbs for me.” He handed Miles a box of two bulbs.

Miles stood in the basement doorway as David went down the stairs. He went down into the basement to find something he could stand on to reach the bulbs. It was damp and smelled of mildew and moist earth. He was surprised how cold it was. It wasn’t a large basement, and it was crammed full of junk.
 

“Another cleanup job,” David muttered as he passed the flashlight beam around, searching.

Against a wall, he found a narrow wooden crate that looked like it was just the right height and size. He tried to lift the lid to see what was inside, but it was nailed shut. It was not very heavy, though, and it was sturdy enough. He picked it up and carried it two-thirds of the way up the stairs, bent down, and placed it on one of the steps. It fit perfectly. Standing a step above the crate, he tested it with one foot, then gripped the railing with one hand and stepped up on it. On the crate, he was able to reach the first bulb. He replaced the burnt-out bulbs in minutes. When he was done, he climbed back up the stairs and flipped the light switch.
 

The lights came on for an instant, then sent two small explosions of sparks into the air with a pop and went out again.

“Son of a bitch!” David said. He looked down at Miles. “You didn’t hear me say that. It’s not nice to talk that way, you know.”

Miles laughed. “I know.”

David sighed. “I wonder if it’s a problem with the wiring.” He went down the stairs with the flashlight in hand, stepped over the crate, then picked it up and carried it back down to the basement. He noticed again the drastic difference in temperature from the top of the stairs to the bottom. He tossed the crate down where he’d found it. It slammed against a stack of boxes and knocked them over.
 

“Damn,” David muttered.

He started to turn and go back up when he heard music playing. He frowned. It was a slow, plinking, off-key rendition of Brahms’s “Lullaby.” He found the source of the music with the flashlight. A filthy old brown teddy bear with a dark ribbon around its neck lay on the floor near the fallen boxes. Stuffing dangled from a couple holes in the bear’s torso and only one round black button-eye remained on its face. As the tune slowed down, footsteps clattered rapidly down the stairs.