It was kind of disturbing the way real people crept into my made-up stories. In my dad’s version, the girl was named Debbie. But Claire, who’d be a senior at Ernie Pyle this year, just seemed to fit somehow.
“Paul fell for Claire,” I went on. “And Paul fell hard. He thought about Claire while he ate breakfast every morning. He thought about Claire while he was riding his tractor mower every afternoon. He thought about Claire when he was eating his dinner at night. He thought about Claire while he was lying in bed after a long day’s work. Paul Huck thought about Claire Lippman
all
the time.
“But.” I looked out at all the little faces turned toward me. “Claire Lippman didn’t think about Paul Huck at breakfast. She didn’t think about him while she was sunning herself on her porch roof every afternoon. She didn’t think about him while she ate her dinner, and she certainly never thought about him before she fell asleep at night. Claire Lippman never thought about Paul Huck at all, because she barely even knew Paul Huck existed. To Claire, Paul was just the handyman who knocked squirrels’ nests out of her chimney every spring, and who scooped the dead opossums out of this decorative little well she had in her backyard. And that was it.”
I could feel the crowd getting restless. It was time to start getting to the gore.
Eventually, I told them, Paul got desperate. He knew if he was ever going to win Claire’s heart, he had to act. So one spring day when he was cleaning out Claire’s gutters, he got an idea. He decided he was going to tell Claire how he felt.
“Just as this occurred to Paul, Claire appeared in the window right where he was cleaning out the gutter. This seemed to Paul like the perfect time to say what he was going to say. But just as he was about to tap on the window, Claire started taking her clothes off.” This caused some tittering that I ignored. “See, the room she was in was the bathroom, and she was getting ready to take a shower. She didn’t notice Paul there in the window … at first. And Paul, well, he didn’t know what to do. He had never seen a naked woman before, let alone the love of his life, Claire. So he just froze there on the ladder, totally incapable of moving.
“So when Claire happened to glance at the window, just as she was about to get in the shower, and saw Paul there, she was so startled, she let out a scream so loud, it almost made Paul fall off the ladder he was on.
“But Claire didn’t stop with one scream. She was so startled, she kept right on screaming. People outside heard the screaming, and they looked up, and they saw Paul Huck looking through Claire Lipp-man’s bathroom window, and, well, they didn’t know he was there to clean the gutters. He had always been a weird guy, who lived at home with his parents even though he was in his twenties, and who talked like a nine-year-old. Maybe he’d flipped out or something. So they started yelling, too, and Paul was so scared, with all the yelling and everything going on, he jumped down from the ladder and ran for all he was worth.
“Paul didn’t know what he’d done, but he figured it had to be pretty bad, if it had made so many people mad at him. All he knew was that, whatever it was he’d done, it was probably bad enough that someone had called the police, and if the police came, they’d put him in jail. So Paul didn’t go home, because he figured that’d be the first place people would look for him. Instead, he ran to the outskirts of town, where there was this cave. Everyone was scared to go into this cave, because bats and stuff lived in there. But Paul was more afraid of the police than he was of bats, so he ducked into that cave, and he stayed there, all the way until it got dark.
“Now, once Claire got over being startled, she realized what had happened, and she felt pretty bad about it. But she didn’t want to admit to anyone that it had been her mistake—that she’d asked Paul to clean her gutters, and that’s what he’d been doing on that ladder. Because then she’d look like a big idiot. So she kept that information to herself, and let everyone think Paul was a Peeping Tom.”
I went on to describe how Paul, scared for his life, stayed in that cave. He stayed there all night, and all the next day, and the next night, too. I explained how by then, Paul’s parents were really worried. They had called the police to help them look, but that just made things worse, because one time Paul came out of the cave, to see if people were still looking for him, and he saw a sheriff’s cruiser go by. That just drove him deeper back into the cave, where when he was thirsty, he drank cave water.
“But there was no food in the cave,” I said. “And Paul couldn’t come out to buy any, because he might get caught. Eventually, he got so hungry, well, he just lost his mind. He saw a bat, and he grabbed it, ripped its head off, and ate it raw.”
This elicited some groans of disgust.
And that, I told the boys, was the beginning of Paul’s descent into madness. Very soon, he was living on nothing but cave water and bat meat. He lost all this weight, and started growing this long, matted beard. He couldn’t wash his hair because he didn’t have any shampoo, so it started getting all filled with twigs and dirt. His clothes became tattered and hung off him like rags. But still, he wouldn’t come out of the cave, because he couldn’t face the shame of whatever it was he’d done to Claire.
Time went by. Winter came. Soon Paul ran out of bats to eat. He had no choice but to leave the cave at night, and root through people’s garbage for old chicken bones and rotten milk, so he wouldn’t starve. Sometimes, little children would wake up in the night and see him, and they’d tell their parents the next morning about the strange, long-haired man they’d seen in the backyard, and their parents would say, “Stop telling lies.”
But the children knew what they’d seen.
More time went by. One night, Paul Huck was going through someone’s garbage when he came across a newspaper. Newspapers didn’t interest Paul much, on account of his not being able to read. But this one had a picture on it. He squinted at the picture in the moonlight and realized it was a picture of his old love, Claire Lippman. He didn’t need to know how to read in order to figure out why Claire’s picture was in the paper. In the photo, she was dressed in a wedding gown and veil. Claire Lippman had gotten married.
Paul, crazy as he was now, couldn’t think like a normal person—not that he’d ever been able to before. But after a steady diet of bats and garbage, which was all he’d had to eat for the past few years, he’d gotten much worse. So what seemed to Paul like a really good idea—he ought to give Claire a wedding present, to show there were no hard feelings—well, that just wouldn’t have occurred to a normal person.
“What was worse,” I said, “Paul’s idea of a wedding present was to go through all the yards in the town and pick every rose he could find. He did this, of course, in the middle of the night, and all over town children woke up and looked out the window and said, “There’s Paul Huck again,’ and they wondered what he was going to do with all the roses.
“What Paul did with all the roses was, he piled them up on Claire Lippman’s front porch, so she’d see them first thing when she came out of her house to go to work.”
And there, I told the kids, for the first time ever, an adult woke up and heard Paul Huck. It was Claire’s new husband, Simon, who was a stranger to the town. He didn’t know who Paul Huck was. All Simon knew was, when he came downstairs into the kitchen to get a glass of milk before going back to sleep, he saw this gigantic, shaggy-haired man, covered in dirt and blood—because the roses’ thorns had cut Paul everywhere he touched them—standing on his front porch. Simon didn’t even think about what he was doing. Since he was in the kitchen, he grabbed the first thing he saw that he could use as a weapon—a carving knife—and went to the front door, threw it open, and said, “Who the hell are you?”
“Paul was so surprised that someone was speaking to him—no one had said a word to him, not in five long years—that he spun around, just as he’d been about to leave the porch. Simon didn’t understand that Paul was just startled. He thought this giant, hairy, bloody guy was coming after him. So Simon swung the carving knife, and it caught Paul just beneath the chin, and
whoosh
… it cut off his head. Paul Huck,” I said, “was dead.”
Silence followed this.
I went on to describe how Claire’s husband, in a panic after seeing what he had done, ran inside the house to call the police. Hearing all the commotion, Claire woke up and came downstairs. She went out onto the porch. The first thing she saw was all the roses. The second thing she saw was this great big bloody body laying on top of them. The last thing she saw was a head, almost buried in the roses.
And even though the head had this long beard, and the eyes were all rolled back, Claire recognized Paul Huck. And she put together the roses and the fact that it was Paul and she knew that her husband had just killed the man that, because of her, had been living like an animal for five long years.
Claire wouldn’t let Simon call the police. He had killed, she insisted, an innocent man. Paul had never meant to hurt either of them. If word got out about this, Claire and her new husband—who was this very important surgeon—were going to be socially ruined in town, and she knew it. She explained all this to Simon. They had, she said, to hide the body, and pretend like nothing had happened.
Simon was disgusted, but like Claire, he enjoyed his status high at the top of the town’s social ladder. So he made a deal with her: he’d get rid of Paul’s body, if Claire got rid of the head.
Claire agreed. So while Simon wrapped Paul’s body in sheets—so he wouldn’t bleed all over the back of his new car while Simon drove over to the lake, where he intended to dump the body—Claire lifted up the head and threw it in the first place she thought of: down the well in her backyard.
When Simon got back from the lake, the two of them cleaned up all the blood and roses. Then, exhausted, they went back to bed.
Everything seemed to go okay at first. Nobody except the children of the town had ever believed Paul Huck was still alive anyway, so nobody noticed that he was gone. Little by little, Claire and Simon were able to put from their minds what they had done. Their lives went back to normal.
Until the first full moon after Paul’s murder. That night, Claire and Simon were awakened from their sleep by a moaning they heard coming from the backyard. At first they thought it was the wind. But it seemed to be moaning words. And those words were, “Where’s … my … head?”
They thought they must have been hearing things. But then, sounding even closer than the first moan, they heard the words, “Down … in … the … well.”
Claire and Simon put on their bathrobes and hurried downstairs. Looking out into their backyard, they got the shock of their lives. For there, in the moonlight, they saw a horrifying sight: Paul Huck’s headless body, all covered with lake weeds and dripping wet, moaning, “Where’s … my … head?”
And, from deep inside the well, the echoing reply: “Down … in … the … well!”
Claire and her husband both went instantly insane. They ran from the house that night, and they never went back, not even to move out their stuff. They hired a moving company to do it for them. They put the house up for sale.
“But you know what?” I looked at all the faces gazing at me in the soft glow of my single flashlight. “No one ever bought the house. It was like everyone could sense that there was something wrong with it. No one ever bought it, and little by little, it began to fall apart. Vandals threw rocks through its windows, and rats moved in, and bats, just like the ones Paul used to eat, lived in the attic. It is still empty, to this day. And on nights when the moon is full, if you go into the backyard, you can still hear the wind moaning, just like Paul Huck: ‘Where’s … my … head?’”
From the dark kitchen came a deep, ghostly wail:
“Down … in … the … well!”
Several things happened at once. The boys all screamed. Scott, grinning, emerged from the kitchen. And the front door burst open, and Shane, panting and white-faced, cried, “Did you hear that? Did you hear that? It’s him, it’s Paul Huck! He’s coming to get us! Please don’t make me sleep outside, I promise I’ll be good from now on, I promise!”
And with that, I began to see a little—just a little—more clearly how it might be possible for a kid like Shane to make that beautiful music.
C H A P T E R
9
W
hen I woke up the next morning, I knew where Keely Herzberg was.
Not that there was much I could do with the information. I mean, it wasn’t like I was going to run over to Pamela’s office and tell her what I knew. Not yet, anyway. I needed to check the situation out, make sure Keely wanted to be found.
And, thanks to Paul Huck, I knew exactly how I was going to do it.
Well, not thanks to Paul Huck, exactly. But thanks to the fact that I’d had Scott and Dave and their kids over the night before, I was a lot more savvy to the whole phone situation than I’d been before. It turns out all the counselors have cell phones. Seriously. Everyone except Ruth and me … and Karen Sue Hanky, I suppose, since she’d never do anything that might be construed as breaking the rules.
I don’t know why Ruth and I are so out of it. We’re like the only two sixteen-year-old girls in Indiana without cell phones. What is wrong with our parents? You would think they would want us to have cell phones, so that we could call them when we’re going to be out late, or whatever.
But then, we’re never out late, because we never really get invited anywhere. That would be on account of our being orchestra nerds. Oh, and on account of my
issues
, too, I guess.
But everybody else on the camp counseling staff had cell phones. They’d been making and receiving calls all week, just keeping them on vibrate and picking up out of Pamela’s and Dr. Alistair’s sight.
So now, thanks to my scaring their charges so thoroughly the night before that they apparently did everything their counselors asked them to afterward—like go to sleep—both Scott and Dave were eager, when I asked them at breakfast, to lend me their phones.
I took Dave’s, since it had less buttons and looked less intimidating. Then I ducked out of the dining hall and went to the Pit, which was empty this time of day. I figured reception there was bound to be good… .